Donald E. Graves

Who was Donald E. Graves?

Donald Edward Graves was a State Department analyst who specialized in studying the government of the USSR. As a Kremlinologist, Donald Graves tracked the personal history of individual Soviet officials. These files, profiled in the 1982 Washington Post story, "The Secret Files of Mr. X" consisted of hard-copy database of over 1600 index cards that held all of the information the US Government had on prominent political figures of the Soviet Union. During the 1970s and 1980s, it was a critical source of information for U.S. officials tracking the political situation of their Cold War rivals. Graves died on July 2, 2008.