Peter Deriabin

Who is Peter Deriabin?

Peter Deriabin was a Russian Communist Party member, World War II veteran, SMERSH agent, and KGB agent who later defected to the United States. He started working for the Central Intelligence Agency, went to graduate school, and wrote several books on the KGB. He died in 1992 at age 71.

He was a member of the Communist Party. He went to Biysk Teachers College as well as the Institute for Marxism-Leninism. In World War II he was wounded four times and reassigned to the Soviet Navy's SMERSH. He was later an investigator in State Security. He eventually moved up to the KGB headquarters.

In 1953 he was stationed in Vienna, Austria as Chief of Soviet Counterintelligence as well as Communist Party boss for the entire Austro-German section. In 1954 he defected to the United States. In retaliation, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR gave him a death sentence. He testified before the Senate and the HUAC in 1959, and cowrote a book about his time in the KGB.

He also went to graduate school at the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia. He also joined the CIA.

He was involved in the Yuri Nosenko case, a controversial defector who was treated harshly by the CIA and presumed to be a KGB plant for at least a year before he was released. Deriabin was one of the CIA officials who believed he was a plant. He claimed that the details of Nosenko's stories about his experiences in SMERSH and the KGB didn't match up with Deriabin's own experience in those agencies.