CI CENTRE STAFF: Valentin Aksilenko, Professor

CI Centre Professor Valentin Aksilenko is a retired Colonel in the Soviet KGB, First Chief Directorate. He was born in Moscow, Russia and graduated in 1960 from the International Economic Department, Moscow State Institute of International Relations. In 1959, Aksilenko was a member of the USSR Trade Mission assigned to Peking in the People's Republic of China, where he learned to speak Chinese. He then spent three years in Havana, Cuba from 1962 to 1966 with the Ministry of Foreign Trade.

Aksilenko joined the KGB in 1966 and was assigned to the USSR Embassy in Washington, DC from 1969 to 1973. He then worked for two years at the USSR State Committee for Science and Technology in Moscow. Aksilenko returned to the United States in 1976 as the First Secretary in the economic section of the USSR Embassy. It was during this time that he recruited an incredibly productive source codenamed, "TRASHMAN" whose story can be found in a book he helped contribute to (see below). Aksilenko recruited a janitor who worked at night in the offices of major US defense contractors in the Washington, DC area. The janitor's hobby was "garbology," and he collected documents from the trash on military and strategic issues, such as stealth technology, that "would have been designated top priority by any intelligence service." Aksilenko left the US in 1982 and was promoted to the military rank of full colonel and decorated with the Order of the Red Star.

Aksilenko's intelligence career culminated in 1982 when he was assigned to be the head of the Washington section of the North American Department in the KGB First Chief Directorate (foreign intelligence) at their headquarters in Moscow. This section managed all KGB intelligence operations that took place in Washington, DC.

From 1986 to 1988, Aksilenko worked in the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow managing official international exchanges for the Soviet academic community, and from 1988 to 1990, he was a senior staff member of the Foreign Economic Commission. This was the highest Soviet executive body dealing with a full range of international commercial and financial affairs of the USSR. Aksilenko wrote position papers on new forms of economic cooperation with the West.

For political and personal reasons, Aksilenko took an early retirement from the KGB in May 1991. He became a consultant for the private sector on the newly emerging Russian market economy on international trade, foreign investments and privatization. Aksilenko participated in the privatization and restructuring of several state enterprises and he established in Russia a range of joint ventures with companies from various countries.

At the beginning of 1994, the book, Washington Station: My Life as a KGB Spy in America by KGB Major Yuri B. Shvets was published in America. Aksilenko had been Shvets' supervisor, and the book was a collaborative effort between the two. Unfortunately, the release of the book was eclipsed by the arrest of CIA officer Rick Ames in February 1994, but the news program "60 Minutes" interviewed Aksilenko and Shvets about the book.

In May 1994, Aksilenko and his wife moved permanently to the United States. In addition to teaching regularly at the CI Centre, he has lectured for David Major in the course, Counterintelligence in a Democratic Society, at Institute for World Politics in Washington, DC. Aksilenko is also a consultant to business and brokerage services to US and Russian companies in East-West trade facilitation, market opportunity assessments and evaluations of new investment opportunities.