George Kisevalter was born on 4 April 1910, in St. Petersburg, Russian Empire, the son of an Imperial Russian Army munitions expert and his wife, and grandson of a Russian deputy finance minister. In 1915, Kisevalter's father, accompanied by his family, was sent to the United States in order to purchase weapons for the Russian military. They were still out of the Russian Empire on this extensive trip when the Bolshevik Revolution occurred two years later. The Kisevalters remained in the United States. There they eventually became naturalized and settled in New York City, where there developed a sizeable Russian emigre community. The young George attended Stuyvesant High School.
Kisevalter spent much of World War II as an army officer involved in supporting the Soviet war effort through the Lend-Lease program. His first experience with intelligence came in 1944 when, as a fluent Russian speaker, he was assigned to military intelligence in order to work on Soviet intelligence projects. Due to Kisevalter's growing expertise in Soviet matters, as well as his German language skill, he was one of the officers who interviewed Major General Reinhard Gehlen, after Gehlen had surrendered to the US military. Gehlen had been Nazi Germany's chief of intelligence for the Eastern Front, and was also well versed in Soviet military and political affairs.
Military Intelligence
Kisevalter had a brief civilian career before joining the CIA, which was the civilian foreign intelligence service of the United States federal government. By 1953, Kisevalter was a branch chief in the Soviet Division of the Directorate of Operations. That year Major Pyotr Semyonovich Popov of GRU, the foreign military intelligence agency of the Soviet Army, contacted American intelligence in Vienna, Austria, and offered to spy for the United States. Kisevalter was selected as Popov's handler, and spent the next five years in Vienna handling Popov, who provided the United States with detailed information on Soviet military plans and capabilities. During the period when he spied for the United States, Popov was considered to be "the CIA's most important agent." He was arrested by the Soviets and subsequently executed in 1959. In 1961, Kisevalter was assigned to handle another GRU member, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who had also volunteered to spy. For almost two years Kisevalter and the British Secret Intelligence Service jointly handled Penkovsky, who provided them with vital information on Soviet missile capabilities. Penkovsky's information was critical to the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In October 1962, Penkovsky and his British courier, Greville Wynne, were arrested by the Soviet KGB and convicted of espionage. Penkovsky was executed in 1963. Kisevalter continued to be involved in agent recruitment and handling, including the cases of KGB walk-ins Anatoliy Golitsyn and Yuri Nosenko. Golitsyn's information precipitated a mole hunt by the CIA's counterintelligence chief, James Jesus Angleton. Golitsyn claimed that Yuri Nosenko was a KGB plant, which led to Nosenko's incarceration in solitary confinement for several years. Kisevalter apparently "never accepted the case for a mole in the CIA or the argument that Nosenko was planted by the KGB". Kisevalter's final assignment before his retirement in 1970 was training new CIA operations officers. He received the CIA's highest award, the Distinguished Intelligence Medal. In 1997, when the CIA celebrated its 50th anniversary, Kisevalter was designated as one of its 50 Trailblazers.
