Nikolay Ivanovich Marchenkov

Marchenkov was a GRU captain born in 1920 in Smolensk Oblast. He was a Communist Party member. He graduated from a series of military schools preparing him to be a GRU air intelligence officer, one of the only defectors who had that specialty. In 1939 he studied at an evening aviation technical school, and then in 1941 at the Kharkov Aviation Academy for Pilot-Observers. He graduated from the Military Institute of Foreign Languages in 1943, and in 1946, from the Air Force Higher Tactical Pilot School in Lipetsk.

In 1943, while Marchenkov was serving at the front, he learned that his sister had been arrested for the loss of 26,000 rubles from a post office where she was working. Investigators into the incident could not determine the perpetrator of the loss, so the entire office of ten people was arrested and imprisoned. In 1946, Marchenkov attempted to appeal for his sister to be freed, even offering to reimburse the lost money, all to no avail. He traveled to the prison camp where his sister was held and asked to see her. He found her ill and working in the office of the camp veterinarian, who was doing his best to help her. The veterinarian had himself been imprisoned in the 1930s during the collectivization period and was sympathetic to her cause. Marchenkov paid the veterinarian 1,500 rubles to write a letter appealing for her release on grounds of illness. The letter was successful, and his sister was released.[i]

He was serving in the Operational-Intelligence Section of a GRU unit in the Group of Soviet Occupation Forces in Germany in March 1950, when he fled to the U.S. Sector of Berlin with his girlfriend. From June to November 1950, he was residing at the U.S interrogation center at Camp King near Oberursel, Germany. He was interviewed for the Sponge program in about 1950. He was living in the United States as of 1978. A Soviet military tribunal sentenced him absentia to execution in 1951.[ii]