Stanislav Levchenko

Stanislav Alexandrovich Levchenko (born 1941) is a former Russian KGB major who defected to the United States in 1979. He obtained U.S. citizenship in 1989.

Levchenko was born in Moscow, and obtained an education at Moscow's Institute of Oriental Studies. His first KGB work came in 1968, after he worked for the GRU for two years. He became fully employed by the agency in 1971. In 1975, he was sent undercover abroad, as journalist working for the Russian magazine New Times (Novoye Vremya) in Tokyo, Japan.

Levchenko defected to the United States in October 1979, and was instrumental in detailing the KGB's Japanese spy network to the U.S government, including Congressional testimony in the early 1980s.

After his defection, Levchenko supplied the names of about 200 Japanese agents who had been used by the KGB. Included in his list were a former labour minister for the Liberal Democratic Party, Hirohide Ishida (石田 博英), and Socialist Party leader Seiichi Katsumata (勝間田 清一). Takuji Yamane of the newspaper Sankei Shimbun was also mentioned.

A Soviet court condemned Levchenko to death in 1981. Svetlana and Nikolai Ogorodnikov tried to hunt him down in the United States, but they were exposed in the Richard Miller spy case.

Levchenko published his autobiography, On the Wrong Side: My Life in the KGB, in 1988.