Peter Deriabin
Peter Sergeyevich Deriabin (Russian: Петр Сергеевич Дерябин; 1921 – 20 August 1992) was a KGB officer who defected to the United States in 1954. After his defection, he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, and wrote several books on the KGB. He died in 1992 at the age of 71. Pre-defection life and career. Deriabin was born in Siberia's Altai region. In his book "The Secret World", he gave his date of birth as 13 February 1921. The KGB Wanted List for 1979 gave his date of birth as 1919. Deriabin was a member of the Communist  Party. He went to Biysk Teachers College as well as the Institute for Marxism-Leninism. In World War II, he was wounded four times and was reassigned to the Soviet Navy's SMERSH (military counterintelligence group). He was later an investigator with the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), where he eventually moved up to the organization's headquarters and gained the rank of Colonel. Deriabin was Stalin's bodyguard for a short while, and accompanied him to the conferences at Yalta, Tehran and Potsdam. Defection and subsequent career. Defection. In 1953 following Stalin's death, Deriabin was stationed  in Vienna as Chief of Soviet Counterintelligence as well as Communist Party boss for the entire Austro-German section. In 1954, he defected to the United States "via a freight train ride through Soviet occupied territory near Vienna," and was the highest ranking Soviet intelligence officer to have done so at the time. In retaliation, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR sentenced him to death in absentia. He testified before the US Senate and the HUAC in 1959, and co-wrote a book about his time in the KGB. Work with the CIA. Deriabin went to  graduate school at the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia, and joined the CIA. A few days after the assassination of President Kennedy, Deriabin wrote a lengthy memorandum for the CIA, in which he theorized that Lee Harvey Oswald was a KGB agent who either was dispatched to kill Kennedy or was sent to the United States on a different mission and then committed the assassination on his own. Deriabin contended that the Soviets would have accomplished several objectives by eliminating Kennedy. Among them was removing the West's preeminent cold warrior from the scene, constraining US covert  actions against Cuba, which would be stigmatized as acts of vengeance, as well as divert the Soviet people's attention from their many domestic problems. He was also involved in the Yuri Nosenko case as an interrogator, a controversial Soviet defector who was treated harshly by the CIA (including solitary confinement) and presumed to be a KGB plant for at least a year before he was released. Deriabin was one of the CIA officials who believed he was a plant, claiming that the details of Nosenko's stories about his experiences in SMERSH and the KGB didn't match up  with Deriabin's own experience in those agencies. Deriabin was considered an asset when the NSA ramped up operations in the 1970s, and entered the agency's ranks during a visit to Fort Meade in 1973. A detailed report of his visit was declassified in 2012. Deriabin retired from the CIA in 1981. Death. Deriabin died following a stroke on 20 August 1992 in Northern Virginia. At the time of his death, he was survived by family members whose names were kept secret by the CIA. According to the CIA, Deriabin's knowledge and understanding of the KGB was "the  foundation for the West's knowledge of the agency." Books. He co-authored several books.