Mikhail Sagatelyan

Who is Mikhail Sagatelyan?

Mikhail R. Sagatelyan, a Russian journalist and graduate of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, was head of the TASS news agency's America bureau from 1959 into the early 1960s, making him an important conduit of information between the United States and the Soviet Union during that period of the Cold War. At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, he was ejected from a State Department press briefing. The Pentagon Papers indicate that in 1965 an attempt at informal discussions about the situation in Vietnam took place with Sagatelyan and former White House press secretary Pierre Salinger as go-betweens.

He subsequently worked for Izvestia, as a deputy editor and international correspondent, from 1968 to 1974. His work as a journalist provided Sagatelyan with a cover for his activities as a KGB reserve officer carrying out secret missions for KGB chairman Yuri Andropov.

His theory of the John F. Kennedy assassination as a right-wing plot to prolong the Cold War was published in English in the summer 1971 issue of Sputnik Monthly Digest under the title "Dallas: Who? How? Why?".