Book Review | The Imperfect Spy: The Inside Story of a Convicted Spy (George Trofimoff)

CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence
Studies in Intelligence, 2006

The Imperfect Spy: The Inside Story of a Convicted Spy (George Trofimoff)

Andy J. Byers. (St. Petersburg, FL: Vandamere Press, 2005), 256 pp., endnotes, appendices, photos, index.

Reviewed by Hayden B. Peake, curator of the CIA's Historical Intelligence Collection

Andy Byers tells an awful story well. George Trofimoff was born in 1928 of Russian parents in Berlin. After growing up in a foster home in Germany, he dodged the draft in 1944 and made his way to France and then America in 1947. He enlisted in the army in 1948, became a citizen in 1951, and was commissioned in the reserves in 1953, though on active duty he served only in enlisted status. His first overseas assignment was to Germany where he interrogated Soviet defectors. After tours in the Far East, he became a civil servant when he completed his obligation. With two marriages under his belt, he returned to Germany in 1961. While working in Frankfurt screening mail from behind the Iron Curtain, he was reunited with his foster brother, Igor, who had become a metropolitan in the Russian Orthodox Church. Trofimoff worked and lived very well in Germany for the next 30 years, eventually becoming a supervisor in the Joint Interrogation Center at Nuremburg and a colonel in the army reserve. He retired in August 1994 and made plans to settle in Florida with his fourth wife. On 14 December 1994, shortly before his departure date, Trofimoff and Igor were arrested by the German Criminal Police (BkA) for espionage against NATO and the Federal Republic of Germany. Two days later they were set free for lack of evidence. Trofimoff and his wife quickly left for Florida where they settled in a gated community, and George continued his habits of grand living, but this time with insufficient funds. He soon began bagging groceries in a supermarket.

By July 1997, when Trofimoff was deeply in debt, he received a ray of hope in the form of an unsigned letter from “Igor Galkin” implying a source of funds may have turned up. After three years of gentle persuasion, including face-to-face recorded meetings in a motel, where he finally discussed in detail his past services for the KGB and his hopes for future compensation, Trofimoff agreed to meet Igor in Tampa to receive $20,000. He was arrested for espionage by the FBI on arrival and has been in jail ever since.

The story of how the BkA and the FBI learned about Trofimoff in the first place and how the FBI made their arrest stick is told in The Imperfect Spy. Author Andy Byers, a retired army colonel and West Point graduate, was George’s friend and next door neighbor in Florida. He learned from interviews and court documents that Trofimoff’s days were numbered after Vasili Mitrokhin defected to MI6 in 1992. Mitrokhin’s debriefing provided sufficient evidence for suspicion, but not prosecution under German law. In the United States, there is no statute of limitation on espionage, and the FBI conducted a brilliant three-year sting operation to collect direct evidence from Trofimoff himself. Instead of negotiating a plea, he adopted the “Alger Hiss defense,” as former CIA operations officer, Fred Wettering described his defense in the preface. Retired KGB major general Oleg Kalugin, Trofimoff’s onetime handler, testified at the trial, sealing Trofimoff’s fate.

The story of why he did it; how he worked for his foster brother, a KGB agent; and the damage he inflicted makes exciting reading. The Imperfect Spy is a distressing story, but a worthy contribution to counterintelligence literature.