Few spies were deeper in the shadows than Yuri Nosenko, who died last month as he had lived – in an obscure location, recognized by few and under an assumed name.
The 81-year-old former Soviet agent had good reason to disappear.
As a double agent for Moscow and Washington he passed crucial information to the CIA on Russian operations at the height of the Cold War. And a fierce controversy over his knowledge of president John F. Kennedy's assassination might have sparked a superpower standoff on the scale of the Cuban missile crisis.
Nosenko's life was one of dramatic reversals of fortune.
A successful mid-ranking Soviet spy, he defected to the United States in 1964, expecting a warm welcome from the CIA. Instead, he was penned in a bleak cell, experienced years of relentless interrogation, and endured conditions he likened to the Siberian gulags.
The CIA's attempt to implicate Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald as a KGB agent failed when Nosenko unwaveringly denied the Russian spy service's involvement.
Had he changed his story – exposing a Soviet plot to assassinate the American president – the world's survival would have hung in the balance in an era of nuclear confrontation. But Nosenko's denial was finally accepted, and he was released with an $80,000 payment and relocated to the southern United States under a new name.
A month before his Aug. 23 death, agency officials visited him in an undisclosed city in the southern U.S., with an American flag and a letter of apology for the ruthless treatment he received after his defection and official thanks for his service to the country.
Nosenko had begun in a very different world, as the son of a privileged Soviet shipping minister.
"He was a spoiled brat of Soviet communism in the 1950s," says Tim Weiner, author of Legacy of Ashes: the History of the CIA.
"He never had to worry where his next meal, or bottle of vodka was coming from."
But perhaps vodka was his undoing. After joining the KGB in his 20s, he rose to deputy chief of the bureau for surveillance of Western travellers, and in 1962 went to a disarmament conference in Geneva.
"He got very drunk, discovered that he was rolled by a prostitute, and lost several hundred Swiss francs," said Weiner. "The KGB was tough on mishandling of funds, so he looked up an American delegate whom he mis-identified as a CIA agent, and said he wanted to sell information for money."
Months of spying for Washington followed. Then in early 1964 Nosenko told his handlers he must defect immediately.
The timing was critical. Kennedy had been assassinated the previous November, and the Warren Commission set up to probe the killing was trying to discover whether Oswald had others backing him.
Nosenko had seen Oswald's KGB file. And under relentless questioning, he maintained the American had been rejected as too unstable for active duty. He also told his captors the Soviet leadership was terrified of blame for the Kennedy killing, and would never have risked such an action.
Solitary confinement, sleep deprivation and scanty meals failed to break Nosenko's story.
But doubts about Nosenko's rank in the KGB, and his motive for deserting his country, his wife and daughters, fuelled uncertainty, as did accusations by another Russian defector, Anatoly Golitsyn, who insisted Moscow had planted agents like Nosenko to deceive the CIA, and was bent on world domination.
After passing lie detector tests, Nosenko was released and hustled into obscurity. But his public image was revived by films including The Good Shepherd, made in 2006.
