Yuriy Krotkov

Yuri Vasilevich Krotkov (Юрий Васильевич Кротков, 11 November 1917 - 26 December 1981) was a Soviet dramatist. Working as a KGB agent, he (allegedly) defected to the West in 1963. Born in Kutaisi, Georgia, Krotkov received his BA in literature from the University of Moscow. He worked for TASS and Radio Moscow. After World War II, he was an information officer in Berlin, Germany as a KGB agent. By 1956, he was a screenwriter in Moscow and still a KGB agent. He was selected as one of the principal agents in the seduction/compromise operation against Maurice Dejean, the French ambassador to the USSR, and his wife. Krotkov was tasked with seducing the wife while various women agents seduced the husband.On 13 September 1963, feeling guilty for the suicide of French military attaché Louis Guibaud, which was driven by a similar seduction/compromise operation, he defected in London, England. In 1964, he vouched for Yuri Nosenko. His information led to the exposure of John Watkins. In 1969, he moved to the United States and became a novelist. He wrote I Am From Moscow (1967), The Red Monarch: Scenes From the Life of Stalin (1979), and The Nobel Prize (1980).

Nosenko's former CIA case officer, Tennent H. Bagley, who died in 2014, believed Nosenko and Krotkov were false defectors. Professor John M. Newman, author of the 1995/2008 book, "Oswald and the CIA," also believes Nosenko and Krotkov were false defectors, and that they cooperated with a KGB provocateur by the name of Alexandr Cherepanov to discredit true-defector Anatoliy Golitsyn and to prevent the CIA's uncovering a KGB "mole" by the name of Bruce Solie in CIA's mole-hunting Office of Security.