Reino Gikman

Who is Reino Gikman?

Reino Gikman was the alias used by an undercover agent for the Soviet KGB who operated in Western Europe. Gikman used a Finnish passport and spent several years in Finland developing his illegal residence cover by posing as a Finn. The KGB was able to create fake Finnish citizenships by inserting fake births into the church records with the help of a priest of the Finnish Orthodox Church. Gikman's fake personality was however the result of the theft in 1952 of four registry books of church records from the Othodox repository in Kuopio. He received his first Finnish passport at a Finnish embassy, before ever entering Finland. He moved to Finland in 1966, and held various jobs in Helsinki in the 1960s, working among others in the Suomalainen Kirjakauppa bookstore. In 1968 he married a Martta Nieminen, a holder of a Finnish passport and also a suspected Soviet spy. Their son was born in Düsseldorf in 1969.

From 1979 until his disappearance in June 1989 he was living in Vienna, Austria, and reportedly working for the United Nations in Paris A wiretapped telephone conversation on April 27, 1989, between Gikman and Felix Bloch, a U.S. State Department official stationed in Vienna from 1980 to 1987, was the original cause of espionage suspicions on Bloch.