Oleg Nechiporenko

Oleg Nechiporenko (Олег Максимович Нечипоренко; born July 4, 1934) is a Soviet and Russian foreign intelligence and security operative, lobbyist and author.^[1] He is known for his covert operations in South America and Europe,^[2][3] as well as for his involvement in formulating Russian censorship policies and spying on Russian dissidents abroad. He is considered expert on counterintelligence, active measures and information warfare. Nechiporenko is the proponent of the Total Espionage doctrine.

Career

Oleg Nechiporenko was born in Moscow on July 4, 1934. His father, Maxim Nechiporenko, was a veteran bolshevick, who later became an NKVD agent. Maxim Nechiporenko worked in Argentina in the early 1930s^[4] and later was employed by the Soviet Bureau of Engraving and Printing (GOSZNAK).^[5] Oleg's brother Gleb was a KGB officer who worked in the 1960s in England as a consular official and trade representative. In 1958, while still a student at the Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages, Nechiporenko was recruited by the KGB. In 1960 he was assigned to the KGB's First Chief Directorate, responsible for espionage abroad. His main areas of expertise were North and South America and Europe.^[6]

In 1961 Nechiporenko served as a personal assistant to Ramon Mercader, assassin of Leon Trotsky, upon Mercader's release from Mexican jail and his arrival to Moscow.

In 1961-65 and 1967-71 Nechiporenko was stationed in Mexico under the cover of the Soviet consular office. In this capacity he claimed to meet Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963.^[7][8] This alleged encounter led to speculations that the KGB was behind the JFK assassination and later attempted to cover up its involvement through a systematic campaign of disinformation.^[9]

Between 1969 and 1970, while stationed in Mexico, Nechiporenko, with the help of North Korean agents, created an armed revolutionary group Movimiento de Accion Revolucionaria (MAR). Nechiporenko was personally responsible for running this rag-tag group of leftist activists. In early 1971 Mexican police dismantled MAR, Nechiporenko was accused of plotting a coup in Mexico and expelled from the country.^[10][11]

Upon returning to the Soviet Union, Nechiporenko worked for the KGB's external counter-intelligence department (Department K) where he was responsible for protecting Soviet trade and financial organizations abroad.^[12] His job was to watchdogging Soviet citizens travelling abroad and prevent their possible recruitment by Western intelligence agencies.^[13]

In 1973 Nechiporenko was appointed Deputy Head of Department K's First Section. This section was responsible for overseeing operations against the CIA.^[14] According to the KGB defector, general Oleg Kalugin, between 1973 and 1978 Nechiporenko travelled to Vietnam to interrogate US prisoners of war.^[15] Nechiporenko denied these allegations.

In 1979 Nechiporenko and another KGB operative, A. Itskov, worked with a CIA defector Philip Agee on his book Dirty Work II which was meant to tarnish the image of the CIA and the United States. Nechiporenko passed Agee a list of CIA officers working on the African continent and wanted, along with Pedro Pupo Perez, the head of the DGI (Cuban intelligence) to time the publication of Dirty Work II to coincide with the conference of non-aligned nations in Havana, presided over by Fidel Castro, in September 1979.^[16]

In 1980 Nechiporenko became Head of Department K's Fourth Section. The Fourth Section was responsible for spying on Russian émigré community in Europe and monitoring the so-called centers of anti-Soviet "ideological subversion."^[17]

Radio Liberty controversy

In the late 1970s and 80s, Oleg Nechiporenko was in charge of the KGB spying program against the Munich-based broadcaster Radio Liberty/Free Europe.^[18] As part of the program he supervised Oleg Tumanov, the KGB mole inside Radio Liberty/Free Europe who informed Nechiporenko on daily workings of the radio station as well as on Soviet dissidents, like Alexander Zinoviev and Julian Panich, residing abroad.^[19] On February 21, 1981, RFE/RL's headquarters in Munich was struck by a massive 40-pound bomb, causing $2 million in damage and injuring eight employees, one severely. The bombing was carried by a terrorist group "Armed Secret Army" with connections to East-German secret police Stasi on one hand and terrorist Carlos The Jackal on the other.^[20] According to the former head of the KGB Counterintelligence Department K, general Oleg Kalugin, the bombing operation was planned over two years by Department K with the active involvement of Oleg Tumanov. This revelation directly implicates Oleg Nechiporenko who recruited Tumanov in the early 1960s and was his Moscow curator.^[21][22] Nechiporenko has never denied his involvement. In an interview with Radio Liberty in 2003, he justified the bombing on the grounds that RFE/RL was an American propaganda tool against the Soviet Union.^[18] Tumanov was exfiltrated back to the USSR in 1986.^[23] Nechiporenko contacts with Carlos in the 1970s were confirmed by Oleg Tumanov, Nechiporenko himself in an article published by Andrei Soldatov in Segodnya in 2000,^[24] and in an article by Evgenui Krutikov published in Izvestia in 2001.^[25]

1980s and 1990s

Between 1985 and 1991 Nichiporenko worked for the Andropov Institute in Moscow, the KGB training school, where he was teaching the theory and practice of intelligence gathering. He also advised the government of Nicaragua.

In 1992 Nechiporenko became expert with the International Counter-terrorism Training Association in Moscow, set up by another KGB officer Iosif Linder.^[12]

In 1994 Nechiporenko began collaborating with the PIR Research Center. Priority areas of the Center's research studies are international security, terrorism, arms control and non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.^[26] In the 1990s Nechiporenko worked as a geopolitics expert with the State Duma. In this capacity he called for introducing censorship and self-censorship in the Russian press.^[3] Nechiporenko is also credited with co-authoring the Federal anti-terrorist law, adopted in 1998.^[27][28]

National Anti-Criminal and Anti-Terrorist Foundation (NAAF)

In 2002 Nechiporenko was appointed director of the National Anti-Criminal and Anti-Terrorist Foundation, or NAAF. NAAF was created by former Director of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) Colonel General Nikolai Kovalev, former Russian Minister of the Interior General Anatoly Kulikov and two other Interior Ministry generals. Its stated goal was to help fight terrorism and transnational crime, coordinate different security services on global scale and to inform Russian public about terrorism and organised crime threats.^[29][30] Despite its public statements, NAAF activities remain obscure. NAAF maintains a Russian doll-like structure with direct and indirect subsidiaries linked to intelligence and special operations services. In 2007 Russia Today (RT) network presented Necheporenko as a "retired KGB Colonel, presently running a private security business."^[31] In 1998, one of the NAAF founders, general Nikolai Kovalev, while heading the FSB, was publicly accused by his subordinates, notably by Alexander Litvinenko, to order the extrajudicial killing of Boris Berezovsky.^[32] Alexander Litvinenko later called another NAAF founder, Anatoly Kulikov, "a war criminal" and his foundation – a "counter-terrorist" mafia.^[33]

Leonid Rozhetskin controversy

In 2005 and 2006 Nechiporenko actively participated in public attacks on Leonid Rozhetskin, a Russian-born US-British media magnate, publisher of CityAM daily.^[34] and fierce critic of Vladimir Putin.^[35][36][37] Nechiporenko was part of the public commission lobbying for legal persecution of Rozhetskin on fraud charges.^[38] In 2008 Leonid Rozhetskin vanished from his villa in a feared KGB plot.^[39] In 2012 Rozhetskin's decomposed body was found in a remote part of Latvia.

JFK assassination controversy

In 1964 a KGB agent Yuri Nosenko defected to the West. Nosenko, in his CIA debriefings, insisted that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gunman. This thesis was later corroborated by Nechiporenko in a book on JFK assassination packaged for publication by American media executive Brian Litman who had made an agreement to represent several KGB operatives, including Nechiporenko, KGB Col. Valery V. Kostikov and KGB Col. Pavel A. Yatskov.^[40][41][42] In his 2007 book Tennent H. "Pete" Bagley, former chief of the CIA counterintelligence for the Soviet Russia ("SR") Division and Division Deputy Director accused Nechiporenko of deliberately planting a story to support Nosenko's account as part of the ongoing Russian intelligence disinformation campaign about its involvement in the JFK's assassination. According to Bagley:

Nechiporenko revealed that books like his own were actually parts of ongoing KGB operations. A West German editor complained to him, at about the time Nechiporenko's own book was appearing, that another author, Oleg Tumanov, was refusing to fill in the details in his manuscript recounting his twenty years as a KGB penetration agent inside Radio Liberty.

You are naïve, Nechiporenko replied, to expect details. Tumanov, he explained, was a link, a part of an operation. . . . And this operation isn't completed. If the author were to tell all, CIA would know what the KGB was doing today and tomorrow. The KGB is not dead.^[43]

Similar claim was made by Lt. General Ion Mihai Precepa, former head of the Rumanian foreign intelligence in his 2013 article: "In 1993, when the U.S. commemorated 30 years since Kennedy had been killed, Moscow definitively tried to wash its hands of the case. "Passport to Assassination: the Never-Before-Told Story of Lee Harvey Oswald by the KGB Colonel Who Knew Him," is a KGB book written for an American, not Russian, audience, by a "retired" KGB officer (Oleg Nechiporenko). It claims to present "definitive proof" that Kennedy was killed by the CIA."^[9] In his account of the JFK assassination, which Nechiporenko presents as "a conspiracy of right-wing extremists" with the involvement of the CIA. Nechoprenko uses the "Dear Mr. Hunt" note to boost his argument. This document, however, was proven to be a KGB forgery. After the publication of the Mitrokhin archive, it was dismissed by researches.^[44] Similar doubts on Nechiporenko's account of his encounter with Oswald and the JFK assassination were expressed by Robert Holmes, former First Secretary at the British Embassy in Moscow, in his 2012 book "Spy Like No Other", and by Yuri Komiagin, a Russian journalist who analyzed Nechiporenko's testimony in 2016.^[45][46]

Media activities

Oleg Nechiporenko has a reputation of a spin doctor and "public expert" working on behalf of Russian intelligence services.^[47][48] In the 1970s Nechiporenko started collaborating with the KGB Press Department (set up in 1969 by Yuri Andropov) on creating a positive image of the Soviet secret police.^[49] In 1987, during perestroika, Nechiporenko authored a book on the CIA which presented the agency as a terror organisation (ЦРУ – государственный терроризм США).^[50] He has also published a book on the assassination of J.F.Kennedy in both Russian and English and a book of memoirs in Russian, Living Undercover.^[51][52][53]

Views

Oleg Nechiporenko is known for his hard-line anti-American and anti-Western views. In his 2007 interview to El Mundo, Nechiporeno declared that he felt rejuvenated because the atmosphere of the Cold War has returned.^[63] In an interview published in 2008 by the Russian Defence Ministry daily Red Star Nechiporenko expressed outrage over the 2002 US Congressional Russian Democracy Act. He criticised American financial assistance to Russian NGO's and accused the United States of meddling in Russian domestic affaires.^[64] In his February 2016 interview Nechiporenko described himself as an "operative of the state security brotherhood" and a "KGB agent"(гебист). He also declared that being a state security agent is a "life-long commitment".^[13]

References