Anatoly Trofimov

Anatoly Vasilyevich Trofimov (Russian: Анато́лий Васи́льевич Трофи́мов, July 14, 1940 — April 10, 2005) was a head of the Soviet KGB investigation department. He personally supervised all Soviet dissident cases including Sergei Kovalyov, Gleb Yakunin, Alexei Smirnov, and Yuri Orlov. He was later a deputy director of the Russian Federal Security Service and became a mentor and supervisor of Alexander Litvinenko. He was assassinated in April 2005 by unidentified gunmen in Moscow.

Career

Soviet Union

As a deputy head of the investigation department of the Moscow branch of the Soviet KGB secret service, Trofimov supervised all cases of dissidents including Sergei Kovalyov, Gleb Yakunin, Alexei Smirnov, and Yuri Orlov.^[1]

Russia

Trofimov was regarded as an incorruptible serviceman loyal to Boris Yeltsin. He arrested several top politicians opposing Boris Yeltsin during the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis.^[2] Later he held offices of the Deputy Director of the Russian Counter-Intelligence cervice (FSK), and head of the FSB secret service for the Moscow region until February 1997 when he was fired.

His comments

• "A retired army general and a leader of Communist parliamentary opposition Lev Rokhlin was killed by the Russian secret services, and Putin will have to cover this up", according to Trofimov.
• According to Marina Litvinenko, he said to Alexander Litvinenko: "Don't you see? They killed Rokhlin; surely that was a Kontora job. Now the guy who came in [Putin] will have to cover that up. He cannot afford to solve the case. It is like an insurance policy".^[3]

Romano Prodi

In October 1999 a scandal broke out in Italy about the alleged KGB connection of Romano Prodi, the Italian centre-left leader, former Prime Minister of Italy and former President of the European Commission. The information about Prodi was provided by Soviet defector Vasili Mitrokhin. Litvinenko claims he was given this information by Trofimov, whom allegedly described Prodi as "our man in Italy". The EU Reporter, a Brussels-based organisation, on 3 April 2006, claimed that "another high-level source, a former KGB operative in London, has confirmed the story".^[4] A report by the Conflict Studies Research Centre of the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom from May 2007 noted that Trofimov was never the head of the FSB, which did not oversee intelligence operations, had never worked in the intelligence directorate of the KGB or its successor the SVR, nor had he worked in the counterintelligence department of the intelligence services, nor had he ever worked in Italy, making it difficult to understand how Trofimov would have had knowledge about such a recruitment. Henry Plater-Zyberk, the co-author of the report suggested that Trofimov was "conveniently dead", so "could neither confirm nor deny the story", and noted Litvinenko's history of making accusations without evidence to back them up.^[5]

Assassination

On April 10, 2005, Trofimov was gunned down in Moscow while driving a car, together with his wife.^[6] His four-year-old daughter survived the assassination.

Litvinenko, who knew Trofimov personally, told the media that he believed Trofimov's killing was a political assassination, and that Trofimov had opposed both the Second Chechen War and the earlier appointment of Vladimir Putin as FSB chief.

References

External links

• Slain Russian officer's wife dies - BBC News
• Alexander Stille, "The secret life of Mario Scaramella" - Slate.com, Dec. 11, 2006. Alexander Stille is the author of The Sack of Rome: How a Beautiful European Country with a Fabled History and a Storied Culture Was Taken Over by a Man Named Silvio Berlusconi, Penguin Books, 2006.