Oleg Nechiporenko

Oleg Nechiporenko was born in Moscow on July 4, 1934. His father, Maxim Nechiporenko, was a veteran bolshevick, who later became an NKVD agent. Maxim Nechiporenko worked in Argentina in the early 1930s and later was employed by the Soviet Bureau of Engraving and Printing (GOSZNAK). Oleg's brother Gleb was a KGB officer who worked in the 1960s in England as a consular official and trade representative. In 1958, while still a student at the Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages, Nechiporenko was recruited by the KGB. In 1960 he was assigned to KGB's First Directorate, responsible for espionage abroad. His main areas of expertise were North and South America and Europe.

In 1961-65 and 1967-71 Nechiporenko was stationed in Mexico under the cover of the Soviet consular office. In this capacity he claimed to meet Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963. This alleged encounter led to speculations that the KGB was behind the JFK assassination and later attempted to cover up its involvement through a systematic campaign of disinformation.

Between 1969 and 1970, while stationed in Mexico, Nechiporenko, with the help of North Korean agents, created an armed revolutionary group Movimiento de Accion Revolucionaria (MAR). Nechiporenko was personally responsible for running this rag-tag group of leftist activists. In early 1971 Mexican police dismantled MAR, Nechiporenko was accused of plotting a coup in Mexico and expelled from the country.

Upon returning to the Soviet Union, Nechiporenko worked for the KGB's external counter-intelligence department (Department K) where he was responsible for protecting Soviet trade and financial organizations abroad. His job was to watchdogging Soviet citizens travelling abroad and prevent their possible recruitment by Western intelligence agencies.

In 1973 Nechiporenko was appointed Deputy Head of Department K‘s First Section. This section was responsible for overseeing operations against the CIA. According to the KGB defector, general Oleg Kalugin, between 1973 and 1978 Nechiporenko travelled to Vietnam to interrogate US prisoners of war. Nechiporenko denied these allegations.

In 1979 Nechiporenko and another KGB operative, A. Itskov, worked with a CIA defector Philip Agee on his book Dirty Work II which was meant to tarnish the image of the CIA and the United States. Nechiporenko passed Agee a list of CIA officers working on the African continent and wanted, along with Pedro Pupo Perez, the head of the DGI (Cuban intelligence) to time the publication of Dirty Work II to coincide with the conference of non-aligned nations in Havana, presided over by Fidel Castro, in September 1979.

In 1980 Nechiporenko became Head of Department K's Fourth Section. The Fourth Section was responsible for spying on Russian émigré community in Europe and monitoring centers of "ideological subversion."

In the late 1970s and 80s, Oleg Nechiporenko was in charge of the KGB spying program against the Munich-based broadcaster Radio Liberty/Free Europe. As part of the program he curated Oleg Tumanov, the KGB mole inside Radio Liberty/Free Europe who informed Nechiporenko on daily workings of the radio station as well as on Soviet dissidents, like Alexander Zinoviev and Julian Panich, residing abroad. On February 21, 1981, RFE/RL's headquarters in Munich was struck by a massive 40-pound bomb, causing $2 million in damage and injuring eight employees, one severely. The bombing was carried by a terrorist group "Armed Secret Army" with connections to East-German secret police Stasi on one hand and terrorist Carlos The Jackal on the other. According to the former head of the KGB Counterintelligence Department K, general Oleg Kalugin, the bombing operation was planned over two years by Department K with the active involvement of Oleg Tumanov. This revelation directly implicates Oleg Nechiporenko who recruited Tumanov in the early 1960s and was his Moscow curator. Nechiporenko has never denied his involvement. In an interview with Radio Liberty in 2003, he justified the bombing on the grounds that RFE/RL was an American propaganda tool against the Soviet Union. Tumanov was exfiltrated back to the USSR in 1986. Nechiporenko contacts with Carlos in the 1970s were confirmed by Nechiporenko himself in an article published by Andrei Soldatov in Segodnya in 2000 and in an article by Evgenui Krutikov published in Izvestia in 2001.

Between 1985 and 1991 Nichiporenko worked for the Andropov Institute in Moscow, the KGB training school, where he was teaching the theory and practice of intelligence gathering. He also advised the government of Nicaragua.

In 1992 Nechiporenko became expert with the International Counter-terrorism Training Association in Moscow, set up by another KGB officer Iosif Linder.

In 1994 Nechiporenko began collaborating with the PIR Research Center. Priority areas of the Center's research studies are international security, terrorism, arms control and non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

In the 1990s Nechiporenko worked as a geopolitics expert with the State Duma. In this capacity he called for introducing censorship and self-censorship in the Russian press. Nechiporenko is also credited with co-authoring the Federal anti-terrorist law, adopted in 1998.

In 2002 Nechiporenko was appointed director of the National Anti-Criminal and Anti-Terrorist Foundation, or NAAF. NAAF was created by former Director of the Federal Security Service (FSB) Colonel General Nikolai Kovalev and former Russian Minister of the Interior General Anatoly Kulikov in February 2002. Its stated goal was to help fight terrorism and transnational crime, coordinate different security services on global scale and to inform Russian public about terrorism and organised crime. Despite its public statements, NAAF activities remain obscure. NAAF maintains a Russian doll-like structure with direct and indirect subsidiaries linked to intelligence and special operations services. In 2007 Russia Today (RT) network presented Necheporenko as a "retired KGB Colonel, presently running a private security business." Interestingly enough, in 1998, one of the NAAF founders, general Nikolai Kovalev, while heading the FSB, was publicly accused by his subordinates, notably by Alexander Litvinenko, to order the extrajudicial killing of Boris Berezovsky. Alexander Litvinenko later called another NAAF founder, Anatoly Kulikov, "a war criminal" and his foundation – a "counter-terrorist" mafia.

In 2005 and 2006 Nechiporenko actively participated in public attacks on Leonid Rozhetskin, a Russian-born US-British media magnate, publisher of CityAM daily. and fierce critic of Vladimir Putin. Nechiporenko was part of the public commission lobbying for legal persecution of Rozhetskin on fraud charges. In 2008 Leonid Rozhetskin vanished from his villa in a feared KGB plot. In 2012 Rozhetskin's decomposed body was found in a remote part of Latvia.

In 1964 a KGB agent Yuri Nosenko defected to the West. Nosenko, in his CIA debriefings, insisted that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gunman. This thesis was later corroborated by Nechiporenko in his book on JFK assassination. In his 2007 book Tennent H. "Pete" Bagley, former chief of the CIA counterintelligence for the Soviet Russia ("SR") Division and Division Deputy Director accused Nechiporenko of deliberately planting a story to support Nosenko's account as part of the ongoing Russian intelligence disinformation campaign about its involvement in the JFK's assassination. According to Bagley: "Nechiporenko revealed that books like his own were actually parts of ongoing KGB operations. A West German editor complained to him, at about the time Nechiporenko's own book was appearing, that another author, Oleg Tumanov, was refusing to fill in the details in his manuscript recounting his twenty years as a KGB penetration agent inside Radio Liberty.

You are naïve, Nechiporenko replied, to expect details. Tumanov, he explained, ‘‘was a link, a part of an operation. . . . And this operation isn’t completed.’’ If the author were to tell all, ‘‘CIA would know what the KGB was doing today and tomorrow. The KGB is not dead.’’" Similar claim was made by Lt. General Ion Mihai Precepa, former head of the Rumanian foreign intelligence in his 2013 article: "In 1993, when the U.S. commemorated 30 years since Kennedy had been killed, Moscow definitively tried to wash its hands of the case. “Passport to Assassination: the Never-Before-Told Story of Lee Harvey Oswald by the KGB Colonel Who Knew Him,” is a KGB book written for an American, not Russian, audience, by a “retired” KGB officer (Oleg Nechiporenko). It claims to present “definitive proof” that Kennedy was killed by the CIA."Similar doubts on Nechiporenko's account of his encounter with Oswald and the JFK assassination were expressed by a Russian journalist Yuri Komiagin in 2016.

Oleg Nechiporenko has a reputation of a spin doctor and "public expert" working on behalf of Russian intelligence services. In the 1970s Nechiporenko started collaborating with the KGB Press Department (set up in 1969 by Yuri Andropov) on creating a positive image of the Soviet secret police. In 1987, during perestroika, Nechiporenko authored a book on the CIA which presented the agency as a terror organisation (ЦРУ – государственный терроризм США). He has also published a book on the assassination of J.F.Kennedy in both Russian and English and a book of memoirs in Russian, Living Undercover.

Traitors TV show

In 2014-16 Nechiporenko had taken part in a television series Traitors. The series was produced by the Russian Defense Ministry television network Star and hosted by Andrei Lugovoi, a KGB officer wanted by the British police on suspicion of murdering the Russian intelligence defector Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006. The program episodes covered twenty-four Russian foreign and military Intelligence defectors, including Yuri Nosenko, Anatoly Galitsyn and Viktor Rezun (Suvorov).According to the NewsBud senior analyst Filip Kovacevic, Nechiporenko statements made during the program amounted to "character assassination" and disinformation.

Lubianka

Oleg Nechiporenko is a member of the editorial board of Lubianka magazine, edited by the Russian State Security Veterans Club. Lubianka promotes rabid anti-Americanism and regularly challenges historical concepts critical of Soviet policies, like holodomor.Lubianka in Russian signifies historical headquarters of the Soviet State Security Services in Moscow.

Russian Roulette

In 2015 Oleg Nechiporenko became member of the editorial board of Russian Roulette, a Russian-language magazine published in London by OMB Publishing. The magazine targets wealthy Russians in Western Europe. The first issue of Russian Roulette featured, with minor modifications, an interview with Nechiporenko, previously published by the official Russian Foreign Intelligence Service website.

Federal Security Service (FSB) Prize

In 2016 Oleg Nechiporenko was awarded the Federal Security Service (FSB) Annual Prize for promoting the positive image of the Russian security and intelligence services.

Oleg Nechiporenko is known for his hard-line anti-American and anti-Western views.In his 2007 interview to El Mundo, Nechiporeno declared that he felt rejuvenated because the atmosphere of the Cold War has returned. In an interview published in 2008 by the Russian Defence Ministry daily Red Star Nechiporenko expressed outrage over the 2002 US Congressional Russian Democracy Act. He criticised American financial assistance to Russian NGO's and accused US of meddling in Russian domestic affaires. In his February 2016 interview Nechiporenko described himself as an "operative of the state security brotherhood" and a "KGB agent"(гебист). He also declared that being a state security agent is a "life-long commitment".