Sheimov, Victor Ivanovich

Early years

Father is a colonel of the Soviet Army , mother is a dentist.

He studied at the Moscow 45th high school. After her graduation - at the Moscow Higher Technical School. Bauman , who graduated in 1971 with a degree in Space Engineering. After graduating from the Moscow Higher Technical School, he worked for some time in one of the closed Moscow research institutes, participating in the creation of missile guidance systems.

KGB Service

Since 1971, he was an employee of the 8th Main Directorate of the KGB of the USSR (the department in charge of communications, cryptography and encryption service). He was a specialist in the maintenance of technical information protection systems in Soviet embassies abroad and in foreign KGB residencies.

Betrayal

According to the data available in open publications, in 1979 in Warsaw he came into contact with US intelligence agents, received the pseudonym Sapphire, and on May 15-16, 1980, the CIA managed to safely remove V. I. Sheimov, his wife and five-year-old daughter straight from Moscow. The Sheimov family was secretly transported to the building of the US Embassy, ​​Sheimov was made up, changed into a pilot uniform and taken to the airfield as a crew member. A small ambassadorial container was brought here to the plane, which was not subject to inspection, and in which were Sheimov’s wife and daughter ^[1] .

The Americans took advantage of Sheimov's secrets in two weeks. A device was installed near Moscow to intercept classified information transmitted over a communication cable. For five years, correspondence with foreign KGB residents was in fact in plain text. Only in 1985, the device was discovered and rendered harmless ^[1] .

For a long time it was believed that the Sheimov family went missing, becoming a victim of an unsolved crime (see Murder on Zhdanovskaya ). The information that they could be in the United States was leaked to the KGB only in 1985, and Moscow received reliable confirmation of this fact only in 1988 thanks to information received from Robert Friedrich Hanssen , who collaborated with the KGB, ^[2] . Information about Sheimov in the US press began to appear only after 1990 . The operation to remove Sheimov and his family from the USSR was prepared by CIA officer David Rolph , who later led the CIA at the US Embassy in Moscow.

CIA lawsuit

In 2000, V.I. Sheimov filed an unprecedented lawsuit with the CIA due to the fact that the amount of his remuneration, promised to him during the recruitment in the amount of one million US dollars, was never paid to him. According to him, the remuneration was paid to him in installments and did not exceed 200 thousand in total. At the same time, for a long time he received a free house for his family, a car, and paid tuition for himself and his family. Sheimov won the lawsuit, the amount received by him as a result of the remuneration was not disclosed ^[3] .

Work at the NSA

For the next 15 years after the escape, V. I. Sheimov collaborated with the US National Security Agency. In 1999, together with former CIA Director James R. Woolsey and former CIA resident in Moscow David Rolfe, they organized a joint company Invicta Networks , specializing in technical issues of information security ^{[4] [5]} .

• Lemekhov O. I. , Prokhorov D. P. Defectors. In absentia shot. - M .: Veche; ARIA-AiF, 2001. - (Special Archive) - 464 p. - ISBN 5-7838-0838-5
• Victor Sheymov. Tower of secrets: A real life spy thriller. - Annapolis (Md.): Naval inst. press, Cop. 1993. - XIII, 420 p .; 24 cm .; ISBN 1-55750-764-3 (alk. Paper).

• Exfiltration of the cryptographer Andropov
• Former KGB Major and CIA Director Save the World from Hackers