Talk:Anatoliy Golitsyn

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Is he alive, dead, or missing?

This page has a lot of detail, but it's amazing that the most important fact about Golitsyn is not mentioned: is he alive or dead?

One of the following must be true:

Golitsyn is dead, and this fact is uncontested. If that's true, a death date and a source should be supplied.
Golitsyn is still alive, and his whereabouts are known. If that's true, the statement that "as late as 1984, [he] was an American citizen" should be fixed!
Golitsyn vanished, and his whereabouts are unknown. If that's true, it absolutely should be mentioned in the introduction to the article!
Some people claim Golitsyn is dead, and others claim he's alive. If this is true, we need to "document the controversy". However, I would tentatively suggest this: If there is truly a controversy about whether he's dead (as seems to be indicated in the section #BLP violation above), then it seems unlikely that he has made public appearances on a regular basis recently. In other words, if some people claim he's dead and others claim he's alive, then the ones who claim he's alive probably are claiming that he is missing, right? (Unless someone has been making public appearances claiming to be Golitsyn, and others deny that this is the same guy.)
Some people deny that Golitsyn ever existed.

Which of these is true? Does anyone have any sources on this? Or even an opinion without sources? — Lawrence King ^(talk) 17:54, 10 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Dead ?

Found in Gordon Corera's book The Art of Betrayal : ″Anatoly Golitsyn, the man who walked out of the KGB Residency that cold Friday night in Helsinki in 1961, died in the sweltering heat of the American South on 29 December 2008. Not a single obituary marked his passing. It was as if the pain of that chapter was so great that no one wanted to remember.″ That part, contrary to almost all in the book, is not sourced and I have not found any other source. Has anybody any information about that ? Rob1bureau (talk) 00:33, 27 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Good find. After viewing the previous thread, I came up blank looking for more information. I still do. The lack of information in the passage is a bit cryptic, but Gordon Corera does appear to be a reliable source. - Location (talk) 03:23, 27 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for posting this! Out of curiosity, in the passage you quoted from, what does the phrase "that chapter" refer to? Also, do you think that Corera literally means that no obituaries appeared anywhere, or does he merely mean that Golitsyn's death wasn't covered by the national media? Assuming (for the sake of argument) that Golitsyn died in the USA in 2008, I wouldn't expect that Time Magazine or CNN would cover his death -- he was never that famous! So it seems odd that Corera would claim that he received no obituaries because "no one [in the entire USA?] wanted to remember" him. On the other hand, if Corera literally means that no obituaries appeared anywhere, even in the local newspaper of the town in which he was living, then that's a claim we can verify (if Corera also specifies where Golitsyn was living). We could search all the local newspapers for the seven days after his death to see if indeed they ran any obituaries. — Lawrence King ^(talk) 01:08, 28 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, "that chapter" is the chapter of the book covering the paranoid-like mole-hunts that took place inside MI6, MI5 and the CIA because of Golitsyn's claims. Regarding obituaries, Washington Post (at least the online version) has obituaries on some Soviet/Russian defectors (e.g. Yuri Nosenko, Sergei Tretyakov). Corera doesn't says more about Golitsyn's death, unfortunately. Note that the obituaries above are from non-official sources, so if Golitsyn was living under an assumed name like Nosenko, an obituary would appear only if close family/friends or people from the intelligence agencies involved in defector resettlement talk to the press. So I guess Corera mean that no one from inside the intelligence world wanted to talk about Golitsyn's death. Rob1bureau (talk) 22:30, 28 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

In a July 30, 2010 Slate article, Fred Kaplan (journalist) wrote: "Nosenko was finally released in 1969, after higher authorities in the CIA and FBI concluded he was the real thing. (He was relocated under an assumed name and died in 2008; Golitsyn is still alive, so far as we know.)"[1] I assume that means Kaplan knows about as much on this as we do. It appears from the cover of New Lies For Old that he was living in the US under an assumed name. - Location (talk) 22:53, 28 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Fascinating. If we combine Corera ("G died 2008") with Kaplan ("G alive in 2010 as far as we know"), it seems that we can conclude with a high degree of certainty that Golitsyn was very much out of the public eye in the 21st century. If Kaplan is an efficient journalist, we can assume he searched for an obituary and didn't find one, which matches Corera's claim. What if we stated in the article that Golitsyn was "in hiding" in his later years? Based on these sources and the NLFO cover, that seems safe to me. We can also say that "according to one source" he died in 2008. What do you all think of that? — Lawrence King ^(talk) 18:45, 29 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds good. Regarding "in hiding": I found a 1995 interview of Christopher Story, editor for Golitsyn's The Perestroika Deception, in The New American (note connection to JBS) that refers to Golitsyn being "in hiding" for 35 years (i.e. 1961).[2]. There is probably enough to say that he lived in hiding (in the US?) under an assumed name since 1961 and that, according to Gordon Corera, he died in 2008. - Location (talk) 20:04, 29 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Sources

[[3]] "It is believed that Vladimirov was involved in a failed KGB operation to murder former KGB officer Anatoliy Golitsyn in Canada who had defected from Finland to the United States." Kartasto (talk) 08:24, 19 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]