The FBI’s Fake Russian Agent Reveals His Secrets

In an exclusive interview, a retired FBI agent who posed as a KGB officer finally spills the beans about his greatest sting operations.

Dimitry Droujinsky is on his third cup of black coffee when he starts talking about his toughest case. “It was what we called in the bureau ‘an old dog case’”, he says. He smiles. “Twenty-eight years old.” But when it comes to tracking spies and discovering which secrets they have betrayed, counterintelligence never forgets.

We’re alone, sitting in the dimly lit back room of a restaurant in Northern Virginia. The case he’s talking about unfolded in the spring of 1993 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It involved a clerk who worked for the National Security Agency for three years in the mid-1960s, in a branch that gave him access to classified documents transmitted or received from NSA stations all over the world.

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The rest of the article The FBI’s Fake Russian Agent Reveals His Secrets by David Wise can be found in the Smithsonian Magazine.

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