17 People of the KGB

This is a list of KGB officers and agents who have defected.

Aldrich Hazen "Rick" Ames is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer turned KGB double agent, who was convicted of espionage in 1994. He is serving a life sentence, without the possibility of parole, in the Federal Correctional Institution in Terre Haute, Indiana, United States. Ames was formerly a 31-year CIA counterintelligence officer who committed espionage against the U.S. by spying for the Soviet Union and Russia. At the time of his arrest, Ames had compromised more highly classified CIA assets than any other officer in history until Robert Hanssen's arrest seven years later in 2001.

Donatas Banionis was a Soviet and Lithuanian stage and film actor and theater director. He has more than 80 credited roles in cinema and is best known for his performance in the lead role of Tarkovsky's Solaris as Kris Kelvin. He was born in Kaunas, Lithuania.

Valery Dmitrievitch Bolotov was a Ukrainian militant leader known for his involvement in the Donbas War in eastern Ukraine, and as the leader of the unrecognized Luhansk People's Republic.

Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess was a British diplomat and Soviet agent, and a member of the Cambridge Five spy ring that operated from the mid-1930s to the early years of the Cold War era. His defection in 1951 to the Soviet Union, with his fellow spy Donald Maclean, led to a serious breach in Anglo-United States intelligence co-operation, and caused long-lasting disruption and demoralisation in Britain's foreign and diplomatic services.

John Cairncross was a British civil servant who became an intelligence officer and spy during the Second World War. As a Soviet double agent, he passed to the Soviet Union the raw Tunny decryptions that influenced the Battle of Kursk. He was alleged to be the fifth member of the Cambridge Five. He was also notable as a translator, literary scholar and writer of non-fiction.

Iosif Romualdovich Grigulevich was a Soviet secret police (NKVD) operative active between 1937 and 1953, when he took a leading role in assassinating Communist and Bolshevik individuals who were not loyal to Joseph Stalin.

Wadie Haddad, also known as Abu Hani, was a Palestinian leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine's armed wing. He was responsible for organizing several civilian airplane hijackings in support of the Palestinian cause in the 1960s and 1970s.

Sergei Nikolayevich Kourdakov was a former KGB agent and naval officer who from his late teen years carried out more than 150 raids in underground Christian communities in regions of the Soviet Union in the 1960s. At the age of twenty, he defected to Canada while a naval officer on a Soviet trawler in the Pacific and converted to Evangelical Christianity. He is known for having written The Persecutor, an autobiography that was written shortly before his death in 1973 and published posthumously. Since its publication, it has been the source of varied criticism. Caroline Walker, a US Christian journalist, attempted to document the story of Kourdakov, but her findings revealed that the story was largely a fake made up in order to earn political asylum in Canada. The documentary produced by Damian Wojciechowski about Walker's findings, Forgive Me, Sergei won numerous awards worldwide.

Andrey Konstantinovich Lugovoy, also spelled Lugovoi, is a Russian politician and businessman and deputy of the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, for the LDPR. He worked as a KGB bodyguard and as head of "Ninth Wave", a security firm. He is wanted by British police on suspicion of the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB and later FSB officer. Russia has rejected the request for his extradition.

Donald Duart Maclean was a British diplomat and member of the Cambridge Five spy ring which conveyed government secrets to the Soviet Union.

Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río, more commonly known as Ramón Mercader, was a Spanish communist and NKVD agent who assassinated Russian Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in August 1940 with an ice axe. He served 19 years and 8 months in Mexican prisons for the murder.

Melita Stedman Norwood was a British communist, civil servant, and KGB intelligence source.

Kazimira Danutė Prunskienė is a Lithuanian politician who was the first prime minister of Lithuania after the declaration of independence of 11 March 1990, and Minister of Agriculture in the government of Gediminas Kirkilas.

Yulian Semyonovich Semyonov, pen-name of Yulian Semyonovich Lyandres, was a Soviet and Russian writer of spy fiction and detective fiction, also scriptwriter and poet.

Igor Viktorovich Smirnov was a controversial Russian scientist best known for his role in Soviet-era mind control research as well as an obscure field of human behavior study he called "psychoecology". He was a son of Soviet Minister of State Security Viktor Abakumov, who was executed for his role in Josef Stalin's political repressions.

Paul Wiens was a German poet, translator and author of radio plays and screenplays in the German Democratic Republic.