But the museum is run by the CIA and housed at its headquarters in Langley, Virginia, eight miles outside Washington, D.C. The museum has an extraordinary collection of spy gadgets, weapons and espionage memorabilia from before World War II to the present-more than 28,000 items, of which 18,000 have been cataloged-and hundreds are on display. Today, the cuff links rest in one of the most compelling and least visited museums in the United States. He told biographer Clarence Ashley he doubted a rumor that Popov had been thrown alive into a furnace as a lesson to other GRU officers, who were required to watch. The Soviets expelled Winters from Moscow in 1960, the same year they executed Popov-by firing squad, Kisevalter believed. The KGB spotted him in the act and fished the letter out of the mailbox. However, in a series of interviews two decades ago, Kisevalter told me it was the result of a botched signal: He said George Payne Winters Jr., a State Department officer working for the CIA in Moscow, “got the instruction backward” and mistakenly mailed a letter addressed to Popov at his home. There are various theories on why he fell under suspicion. But after Popov was recalled to Moscow in 1958, he was arrested by the KGB. He fed Kisevalter information through the retired railroad worker for another two years. Popov renewed contact after he was assigned to Schwerin, East Germany, and the cuff links worked as intended. He gave them to Popov before Moscow recalled the GRU officer in 1955, along with instructions: If Popov ever made it out of the USSR again and renewed contact with the CIA, whoever the agency sent to meet him would wear a matching set to establish his bona fides. It was Kisevalter who had decided on the cuff links as a recognition signal. Popov became one of the CIA’s most important sources through the 1950s, turning over a trove of Soviet military secrets that included biographical details on 258 of his fellow GRU officers. I wish to meet with an American officer with the object of offering certain services.” He was the CIA’s first Soviet mole, and Kisevalter was his handler. Three years earlier, Popov had dropped a note into an American diplomat’s car in Vienna saying, “I am a Soviet officer. Pyotr Semyonovich Popov, an officer of the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency. The man who retreated back into the shadows was Lt. The courier smuggled them to the agency’s base in West Berlin-to George Kisevalter, who was on his way to becoming a legendary CIA case officer. The German caught a train for East Berlin, where he handed the package and the cuff links to a CIA courier. Wordlessly, he handed the German a package of documents and retreated back into the shadows. But when a second man appeared from the shadows, the elderly German revealed that he was wearing a pair of distinctive gold cuff links embossed with the helmet of the Greek goddess Athena and a small sword. He wore the drab clothes typical of East German residents. A chill wind whipped off the Warnow as a retired railroad worker shuffled through the streets of the port city of Rostock one winter night in 1956.
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