WASHINGTON – Sergei Tretyakov, a former top Russian spy who defected to the U.S. after running espionage operations from the United Nations, has died in Florida, his wife and a friend said Friday. He was 53.
News of his June 13 death came the same day the United States and Russia completed their largest spy swap since the Cold War.
Tretyakov’s defection in 2000 was one of the most prominent cases involving Russia’s intelligence agency in the past decade. Tretyakov later said his agents helped the Russian government steal nearly $500 million from the U.N.’s oil-for-food program in Iraq. He was 53 when he died, according to a Social Security death record.
WTOP Radio in Washington first reported his death Friday. His widow, Helen Tretyakov, told the station he died of natural causes. She said she announced his death Friday to prevent Russian intelligence from claiming responsibility or “flattering themselves that they punished Sergei.”
Helen Tretyakov said her husband warned U.S. authorities when he defected that Russia was expanding deep-cover operations.
“He was aware that the part of the SVR budget for supporting illegals increased dramatically in the 1990s,” she told WTOP. The SVR is the Russian intelligence agency that succeeded the KGB after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
However, she said there was no direct link between his information and the 10 people arrested last month as Russian spies near Boston, New York and Washington.
“It wasn’t him who disclosed the names of these people,” she said.
She asked friends not to make the death public until the cause was determined, according to author Pete Earley, who wrote a 2008 book about Tretyakov.
Earley said Friday that Helen Tretyakov told him her husband died of cardiac arrest at home.
“We did not supervise the autopsy,” said William Carter, a spokesman at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. “However, we were certainly interested in and have no reason to dispute the results.”
The medical examiner’s office in Sarasota County, Fla., said the autopsy report was pending. A woman who answered the phone at the office said it would be completed after July 26.
