Feds Say Book Describes Spy

The recruitment of a German-born American military intelligence officer to work for the Soviet Union for most of the Cold War was outlined in a book by a former KGB official.

He said the man's reason for working as a spy "was strictly financial."

Oleg Kalugin, who was chief of counterintelligence for the former Soviet secret police and intelligence agency, doesn't mention George Trofimoff by name in The First Directorate," written in the early 1990s and published in 1994.

But Kalugin wrote about the recruitment of "a high-ranking officer stationed with American forces in West Germany" and gave some details about the information the man supplied to the East.

A federal law-enforcement officer in Washington who requested anonymity said that although neither Trofimoff nor the Russian Orthodox priest who allegedly recruited him as a spy is named by Kalugin, their case is recognizable.

The details are in chapter six of the book, which is subtitled My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West. The chapter is titled, "The Spy Game," and in it Kalugin writes of recruiting Americans and others as spies, and meeting them often in Austria.

"It was also in Vienna that I met another valuable American source—this one from U.S. Military Intelligence. The man was a high-ranking officer stationed with American forces in West Germany, and we successfully recruited him after one of our informers in Germany told us the officer might be open to a KGB approach.

"On several occasions I traveled to Vienna to meet the American, who handed us classified documents that contained, among other things, battle plans for NATO forces."

Trofimoff, who was born in Germany of Russian emigre parents, was chief of the United States Army Element at the Nuremberg Joint Interrogation Centers, which debriefed defectors from the Soviet Bloc, looking for military information. It was closed in 1995, after the Soviet Union crumbled and the Cold War ended.

Wednesday's federal indictment in Tampa said Trofimoff has access to and passed along "information relating to the national defense of the United States," such as documents produced by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and plans detailing what the West knew of Soviet and Warsaw pact military capabilities.

"His motivation was strictly financial," said Kalugin. He said the man was paid $5,000 each time he passed something along.

"As far as I know, the intelligence officer was never caught by the Americans," Kalugin wrote.

Another part of the chapter tells how the American's recruitment was initiated by a Russian priest who was a friend of the man.

The indictment said Trofimoff was recruited by a priest, Igor Vladimirovich Susemihl, who also was a German-born son of Russian parents, had grown up with Trofimoff and remained close to him as an adult.
After Trofimoff became chief of the American element at Nuremberg, "Susemihl recruited him into the service of the KGB," the indictment said. Susemihl died in 1999, after rising to become the highest church official in Vienna and Austria, the indictment said.

"The priest's help in spotting a potential recruit is precisely the reason we in the KGB wanted agents inside the church," wrote Kalugin, who still lives in Moscow.