Last chief of Soviet foreign intelligence
On August 19, 1991, the day the GKChP coup began, Shebarshin 'demonstratively' played tennis all day.
The last chief of the KGB First Chief Directorate, a career officer who built decades of field experience in Pakistan, India, and Iran. He kept his distance from the August 1991 coup, served a single day as acting KGB chairman after its failure before Boris Yeltsin blocked him, and later chronicled Soviet foreign intelligence's final chapter in his memoirs.
Career Timeline
- 1958–1962Interpreter and Third Secretary, Soviet Embassy in Pakistan
- 1962Joined KGB First Chief Directorate, trained at School No. 101
- 1964–1968KGB intelligence officer under diplomatic cover, Pakistan
- 1971–1977Deputy rezident, then rezident, KGB India
- 1979–1983KGB rezident in Iran
- 1983–1987Deputy chief, then chief, Information-Analytical Directorate, PGU KGB
- 1987–1989Deputy chief of PGU KGB (Middle East and Africa)
- 1989–1991Deputy Chairman of the KGB and Chief of the First Chief Directorate
- 1991.8.22–23Acting Chairman of the KGB
Related historical events
Rezident in Tehran: The KGB Amid the Islamic Revolution
In May 1979, Shebarshin arrived in Tehran as KGB rezident. Two months earlier, the Pahlavi monarchy had collapsed and Ayatollah Khomeini had returned from exile; a referendum to declare an Islamic Republic was imminent. Before departure, Yuri Andropov briefed him personally, predicting that "leftist progressive forces have no chance of coming to power, and it will take many years before Iranians grow disillusioned with theocracy," a forecast that proved, if anything, too short.
The posting was tested immediately. In November 1979, Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy, taking 53 diplomats hostage. Intelligence suggested the Soviet embassy might be next. Shebarshin destroyed all classified documents in advance and, through back channels, conveyed to Iranian officials that the USSR would respond with "decisive and harsh measures": a warning that forestalled a similar assault. But the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 turned Iranian public opinion sharply hostile. In December 1980, a crowd of roughly three thousand stormed the Soviet embassy compound in Tehran, smashing windows and furniture in the historic building where Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill had met in 1943.
The gravest crisis came in June 1982, when Major Vladimir Kuzichkin, one of Shebarshin's own officers from KGB Directorate S, which ran illegal intelligence, defected to MI6. Kuzichkin had been handling clandestine contacts with the Iranian communist Tudeh Party. His betrayal enabled the Khomeini regime to arrest the entire Tudeh leadership; party general secretary Noureddin Kianouri and hundreds of others were forced to publicly confess to spying for the USSR. Shebarshin later described the damage as "only psychological — he knew very little," but never concealed that the defection nearly destroyed his career.
By the time he left Iran in February 1983, Shebarshin had run a residency under conditions of revolutionary upheaval, international isolation, and deep hostility driven by Soviet support for Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War. The experience shaped the Middle East instincts he carried into his later role as the last chief of Soviet foreign intelligence.