Alexander Feklisov, 93; KGB spy was ‘man behind the Rosenbergs’

Alexander Feklisov, a KGB master agent who handled some of Moscow’s most damaging Cold War spies in the West -- Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenbergs -- has died. He was 93.

Feklisov, who also played a key role as a mediator during the Cuban missile crisis, died Friday, said a spokesman for Russia’s foreign intelligence service. A cause of death was not given. For years, Feklisov had kept an apartment in Moscow.

He arrived in New York in 1941 and within two years was overseeing Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a married couple who supplied the Soviet Union with top-secret information on the U.S. Manhattan project to develop the atomic bomb.

Feklisov called the Rosenberg network one of the greatest in the history of Soviet espionage and said Julius Rosenberg’s key contributions were the secrets he revealed about U.S. military electronics.

After the Rosenbergs, Feklisov worked with Fuchs, a German-born scientist who passed on secrets that helped speed Moscow’s race for the nuclear bomb by at least 18 months, intelligence officials said when the extent of Fuchs’ treachery was revealed.

Fuchs was considered the most important spy the Soviet Union had in its race for the bomb.

“Feklisov made an important contribution to the activity of Russia’s foreign intelligence network in New York on nuclear issues,” a spokesman for the foreign spy service told the Interfax news agency.

“He conducted serious missions related to the procurement of secret scientific and technical information, including in the area of electronics, radiolocation and jet aircraft technology,” the spokesman said.

Eventually, Feklisov headed the North American division of the KGB before retiring in 1986.

In 1997, Feklisov broke decades of silence when he spoke about dozens of furtive meetings with his “very true friend” Julius Rosenberg in the 1940s, including an exchange of wrapped gifts on Christmas Eve 1944.

Rosenberg’s gift turned out to be a radar-controlled proximity fuse, a secret World War II innovation that enabled an antiaircraft missile to bring down its target without hitting it. One such fuse was used to shoot down U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers in 1960 over the Soviet Union, Feklisov said.

Rosenberg also passed on a sketch of a so-called lens mold that was used in making the atom bomb, Feklisov said.

The Rosenbergs were executed in 1953. Feklisov contended that Ethel’s execution was particularly unfair because he said that she had not actively spied.

In his 2001 autobiography, “The Man Behind the Rosenbergs,” Feklisov said he had managed 17 foreign agents. Spying on behalf of the Soviet Union “was not something shameful or a crime that had to be hidden, but a heroic act,” he wrote.

After working with the Rosenbergs, Feklisov returned to Moscow as a silent hero. But he was quickly dispatched to London in 1947 as deputy chief of intelligence operations for science and technology.

He soon made contact in a London pub with Fuchs, who worked on the U.S. atom bomb project in Los Alamos and at Britain’s Harwell nuclear research laboratory. The information he passed reportedly included the structure of the hydrogen bomb.

The Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear bomb in 1949, surprising Western intelligence officers who believed the Soviets were at least five years away.

After admitting passing nuclear secrets to Moscow, Fuchs served a 14-year sentence for treason.

Feklisov returned to the United States to head Soviet intelligence operations in Washington from 1960 to 1964.

In 1962, he played a key role as a back-channel intermediary between the Kremlin and Washington in the Cuban missile crisis, helping relay communications between Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev and President Kennedy.

Born in 1914 to a working-class family, Feklisov trained as a radio technician and was recruited as a spy in 1939. His first foreign assignment was to New York, where he served in the Soviet consulate.