Hello there!

Well, let me first begin by stating the obvious: movies are of course imaginations, and very dramatic ones. The world of espionage, for as far as we can tell, does not involve a lot of dramatic action.

However, movies can be a reflection of the world we live in, and the sort of plots that you describe and refer to are not entirely fantasies that are disconnected from reality, brewed in isolation by some writers who have never picked up a newspaper.

Before I proceed, I must warn that on this aspect of espionage history, we generally know very little. The files relating to assassinations and other special operations relating to the KGB, or any other secret service for that matter, remain behind the closed doors - if they haven't been destroyed and if they ever took the risk of developing a paper trail at all.

What we do know is largely from journalist reports on some high profile affairs and the disclosures of people that were involved.

We can say with relative certainty that assassinations formed a part of the Soviet Union's repertoire from the beginning of the creation of the Cheka, the KGB's ancestor. A special operations department existed to track down and eliminate political enemies abroad, the most notorious of which occurred under Stalin, who had Leon Trotsky assassinated. Your question is about defectors and double agents however.

These are two different things. A defector can be anyone who flees the Soviet Union (or the West) and offering his services to the enemy in return for protection and asylum. A double agent is a highly complex game in which Service A thinks it has recruited an agent (spy) within Service B, but Service B is aware and instructs their man to play along.

Before WWII, there were two known instances where the Russians had assassinated defectors. Ignace Reiss and Walter Krivitsky, both of them Soviet intelligence officers with a similar story. Krivitsky was under illegal cover stationed in The Hague in the Netherlands, overseeing the West-European operations of Soviet military intelligence. Frustrated with Stalin's unwillingness to take his warnings of Nazi-Japanese agression seriously, Krivitsky defected and fled to the US, where he published his story in 1939. In 1941 he was found murdered in his hotel.

Reiss was stationed in Belgium under illegal cover for the OGPU (KGB), and for similar reasons, defected in 1937. He did so publically in the press, calling Stalin a traitor. Within weeks he was gunned down in Switzerland.

In 1953, shortly after Stalin's death, the Soviet political leadership authorized a special division in the MVD (KGB - they loved renaming) to carry out "acts of sabotage", "acts of terrorism" and assassinations against (among other targets) "traitors to the Fatherland". This document, stolen from the archive of the Communist Party during the collapse of the USSR, confirms that it was official policy to assassinate defectors and political enemies abroad.

During the early Cold War years, mainly political enemies and dissidents living abroad were targeted. The assassination attempts went wrong however, and even one of the assassins defected and disclosed the existence of systematic murder. This forced the KGB to become more cautious and for a while - we assume - they refrained from killing people abroad.

In the 1970's murder seemed back on the menu, or rather poison, as the KGB aided the Bulgarian murder of a dissident in the UK, and the Soviet dissident Solzhenitsyn survived an attempted poisoning.

In one case, we know of the murder of a double agent. A Soviet naval officer from the Baltic fleet, Nikolai Artamonov, defected to Sweden in 1959. He was sentenced to death in absentia, thus marked for assassination. In the 1960's he was tracked down by the KGB in the US. He was approached and offered a way out if he would spy for the KGB. Artamonov warned the FBI, and they instructed him to play as double agent.

The KGB began to distrust him over the years as he never gave them anything too valuable, and they lured him to Vienna for a meeting. There he was drugged and abducted. They overdosed however, and he died across the Czech border.

Stories of highly dangerous escapes from Russia may be inspired also by more recent cases. Both cases involve the UK. In 1985, a British mole in the KGB was exposed by KGB moles inside the CIA. The mole, Oleg Gordievsky, had been a British spy since 1974. He was stationed in London when Moscow lured him back, but he sensed danger. They drugged and interrogated him in Moscow, but he did not give in. Because they lacked evidence, the KGB brought him back to his hotel, and he managed to arrange the British embassy to send a car. They put him in the trunk of the car and smuggled him across the Finnish border.

Another case was that of Alexander Litvinenko. Litvinenko had worked in the KGB and FSB's Protective sections - aka he was a bodyguard. Originally he came from the special forces division of the KGB. As Russia saw mafia violence spiral out of control in the 1990's, Litvinenko allegedly saved the life of oligarch Boris Berezovsky from an FSB plot to assassinate him for criminal motives. This put Litvinenko at odds with the FSB, and he was hired as bodyguard by Berezovsky.

By 1999, Litvinenko contacted journalists and began to publish the dirty secrets of the FSB, funded by Boris Berezovsky. He soon started to receive death threats from former colleagues and had to escape the country. Berezovsky, residing in France, helped him to escape to Georgia, where he reached the US embassy and requested aid from the CIA. The CIA found him uninteresting and refused. He drove with his family to Istanbul, from where they flew to London where he was reluctantly given asylum.

From there he continued to harshly criticize the Putin regime, especially since Berezovsky had a fallout with Putin in 2003. Litvinenko also became a source for MI6 - allegedly on Russian organized crime in Europe. His MI6 contacts caused a fallout between Berezovsky and Litvinenko, and his claims in 2006 that Putin was a pedophile made him a personal target of the Kremlin.

That autumn, two former KGB-FSB business men arrived in the UK for a business meeting with a firm involving Litvinenko, where they poisoned him with Polonium - a weapon that reveals Moscow had no intention of leaving any doubt as to who did this. They delivered him a painful, slow, agonizing death and sent a message to everyone planning to defect.

That person may well have been Yuri Skripal, who was caught around 2006 as a British mole inside Russian military intelligence. In 2010 an entire network of dozens of Russian spies was exposed and arrested in the US, including the now famous Anna Chapman. During a spy swap, Chapman returned to Russia and Skripal came over to the UK.

In 2018 he was tracked down by the GRU and poisoned with a chemical weapon, again so as not to leave any doubt to the world that Russia will kill its traitors.

So these stories have all seen media headlines over the course of the past 70 years, and elements are probably borrowed by screenwriters to develop spy thrillers and action movies. There is also a growing body of historiography that looks at how the movies and spy novels in their turn affect the behaviour of real secret services. These dramatic cases are however the extreme exception, and theyre often the outcome of complex political games of betrayal that have been developing over years and even decades.

If you like to know more:

Jonathan Haslam, "Near and Distant Neighbours: a new history of Soviet intelligence"

Amy Knight, "Orders to Kill: the Putin Regime and Political Murder"

Oleg Kalugin, "Spymaster: my 32-years in intelligence and espionage against the West"

David Gioe, Michael Goodman & David Frey, "Unforgiven: Russian intelligence vengeance as political theater and strategic messaging" in Intelligence and National Security, 2019, Vol. 34, No. 4

Christopher Andrew & Oleg Gordievsky, "KGB: the inside story"

Oleg Gordievsky, "Next stop execution"