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Alexander Fomin

Aleksandr Feklisov (9 March 1914 – 26 October 2007), known by the alias "Alexander Fomin", was a KGB Colonel who was the top Soviet Union agent in the United States, gaining information about America's nuclear program and other secrets. In 1962 he was part of the back-channel diplomacy between John F. Kennedy of the USA and Nikita Krushchev of the USSR in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Biography[]

Feklisov was a former member of the engineers in 1941 alongside future Soviet premier Nikita Krushchev; although born in different hometowns and raised in different schools, the two became close friends after World War II. He worked in the Soviet Consulate in New York City from 1940 to 1946 under Anatoli Yatskov and recruited secret espionage agents from communist sympathizers in the United States. From 1943 to 1946 he met with Jewish-American spy Julius Rosenberg at least 50 times, ensuring that there was an espionage ring in the USA, but Rosenberg did not understand anything about the atom bomb. He viewed Rosenberg as a close friend, and in August 1946 he returned home after having found his connections to Rosenberg helpful with spying.

In the late 1940s he was transferred to the London Rezidentura, a KGB base. But he became chief Rezident (KGB Station Chief) in Washington, D.C. in 1960, under the cover name "Alexander Fomin", which he used as his main alias. During the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962), Krushchev, who had become the new Premier of the USSR in 1956, sent him to talk as an emissary to President John F. Kennedy about resolving the problem. Meeting with John A. Scali of ABC News, Fomin was able to agree that if the USA removed "obsolete" Jupiter missiles in Turkey and promised not to invade Cuba, the USSR would remove their missiles from Cuba and the United Nations would oversee the Russian withdrawal. The agreement prevented warfare between the Soviets and Americans.

Fomin died at the age of 93 in 2007 in Russia.

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