Aleksander Kopatzky

Aleksander Grigoryevich Kopatzky (Russian: Александр Григорьевич Копацкий; 1923-1982) was a Soviet double agent who was belatedly uncovered in 1965 by possible KGB "mole" Bruce Solie in CIA's mole-hunting Office of Security five years after he (Kopatzky / Orlov) had retired from the CIA. Kopatzky (or whatever his real name was) used the names Aleksandr Navratilov and Calvus, and, in the U.S., Igor Orlov. His Soviet codenames were Erwin, Herbert and Richard.

In 1941, after the start of the German-Soviet War, Kopazky (who, since his first name was Alexandr, was often referred to as "Sasha") attended a Soviet training school for agents of the NKVD. In October 1943 he was on a parachute jump, with a radio, over occupied Kresy, but the German Wehrmacht arrested him, and he was taken as a prisoner-of-war. From 1944, he ostensibly worked for the Germans as an agent of the Department of Foreign Armies against the Red Army in Vlasov’s Army. In 1945, he came into American captivity and came into contact with the Gehlen Organization into which he was recruited by 1948.

He married Eleanor Stirner, the daughter of a former SS functionary.

In 1949, Kopazky (whom CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton told the HSCA was always a Kremlin-loyal intelligence agent) was ostensibly re-recruited by the KGB and became one of its most important double agents. The CIA sent him to Berlin in 1951 under the name Franz Koischwitz. On 7 November 1951, he kidnapped the Estonian CIA agent Vlkadimir Kivi from West Berlin to East Berlin on behalf of the KGB. In 1954 the CIA, which was planning on bringing Koischwitz / Kopatzky to the U.S. for training, changed his name to Igor Orlov because he'd been imprisoned for drunk driving in Germany and the Agency didn't want this fact to come to the attention of U.S. immigration authorities. In 1957, Orlov attended agent training in the U.S. and was then reposted to Europe in 1958. In 1960, he was transferred back to the US where he was immediately laid off by the CIA.

When KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn defected to the U.S. in December of 1961, he told Bruce Solie in the CIA's mole-hunting Office of Security, and Solie's mole-hunting subordinate, James Angleton in Counterintelligence, that he had read a report ten years earlier which led him to believe that the CIA was penetrated by a KGB mole whose code name was "Sasha," who had served with the CIA in Germany, and whose name started with a "K" and ended with a "-ski" or "-sky". Angleton searched for "Sasha" for several years but never found him, possibly because Solie was, according to John M. Newman probably a KGB "mole," himself, and had deleted Orlov's former name, Alexandr ("Sasha") Kopatzky, from the list of suspected moles he showed to Golitsyn four days after he had arrived in the U.S. (Golitsyn chose the name of Serge Karlow from the list, instead, probably because he had been stationed in Germany, was already suspected of being a KGB agent in the Operation Easy Chair case, and his original name was Klibansky.

Solie, himself, "uncovered" Sasha in 1965, five years after Orlov had retired from the CIA.

After authorities searched his house in 1965, Orlov fled for a short time to the Soviet consulate. He refused a flight to the Soviet Union, however, and remained in the United States. Until his death in 1982, he lived with his wife in Alexandria, Virginia, where they owned an art gallery and frame shop.

See also

• List of Eastern Bloc defectors
• The Company (TV miniseries)

References

• Helmut Roewer, Stefan Schäfer, Matthias Uhl, Encyclopedia of intelligence in the 20th Century Herbig, München 2003, ISBN 3-7766-2317-9.
• David E. Murphy, Sergei A. Kondrashev, and George Bailey, Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997.
• Joseph J. Trento: The Secret History of the CIA. Carroll & Graf Publishers Inc., New York 2005, ISBN 0-7867-1500-6.
• David E. Murphy, "Sasha who?", Intelligence and National Security, 8(1), 1993, p. 102-07 Routledge.
• Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, Basic Books, New York, 1999 (published in United Kingdom as The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West, Allen Lane/Penguin Press, London, 1999), pp. 21, 148-149, 176-177
• David E. Murphy, "The Hunt for Sasha Is Over." CIRA Newsletter 25, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 11-15.