Aleksandr Stepanovich Kirsanov

In 1946, a Navy lieutenant stationed in Budapest, Hungary, made contact with U.S. representatives through his girlfriend, a local Hungarian, with the goal of emigrating to the United States. He was a Russian born in 1923 in Baku and he was drafted into the Army in 1942. By 1946, Kirsanov had become an officer and was working as a radioman in a special purpose radio detachment, which served as the GRU for the Red Banner Danube Flotilla Headquarters in Budapest.[i] Arnold Silver, who worked as an interrogator in the U.S. interrogation center at Oberursel, Germany, recalled that Kirsanov provided unique information about the GRU’s use of the Red Banner Danube Flotilla to support a commercial-cover network of agents in Western Europe. Kirsanov’s information indicated this was a model of long-range, meticulous operational GRU planning, which drew considerable attention from U.S. and Western intelligence and counterintelligence services.[ii]

Kirsanov met a Hungarian girl and through her made contact with U.S. forces with the goal of emigrating to the United States. He escaped from Soviet control in 1946. His entry in the “wanted list” does not specify whether he ever traveled to the United States, but it does list him as living in Montreal as of July 1958. The military tribunal of the Transcaucasus Military District sentenced him in absentia to a 25-year prison term. The KGB was apparently monitoring his movements, because it had a photograph of Kirsanov dated 1955.[iii]