Reino Häyhänen
| Reino Häyhänen | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
May 14, 1920 Petrograd, Soviet Russia |
| Died | 1961 (aged 40–41) Pennsylvania Turnpike, United States |
| Allegiance |
 Soviet Union
|
| Rank | Lieutenant Colonel |
| Battles/wars | World War II |
| Other work | KGB Officer |
Reino Häyhänen (May 14, 1920 – 1961) was an Ingrian Finnish origin Soviet-born Lieutenant Colonel who defected to the United States.
Born into a peasant family near Petrograd, Häyhänen rose above his modest background to become an honor student and, in 1939, obtained the equivalent of a certificate to teach high school. In September 1939, Häyhänen was appointed to the primary school faculty in the village of Lipitzi. Two months later, however, he was conscripted by the Communists' secret police, the NKVD. Since he had studied the Finnish language and was very proficient in its use, Häyhänen was assigned as an interpreter to an NKVD group and sent to the combat zone to translate captured documents and interrogate prisoners during the Winter War. With the end of this war in 1940, Häyhänen was assigned to check the loyalty and reliability of Soviet workers in Finland and to develop informants and sources of information in their midst. His primary objective was to identify anti-Soviet elements among the intelligentsia.
Häyhänen became a respected expert in Finnish intelligence matters and in May 1943, was accepted into membership in the Soviet Communist Party. Following World War II, he rose to the rank of senior operative authorized representative of the Segozerski district section of the NKGB and, with headquarters in the village of Padani, set about the task of identifying dissident elements among the local citizens.
In the summer of 1948, Häyhänen was called to Moscow by the KGB where he met his wife, Akilina Pavolva. The Soviet intelligence service had a new assignment for Häyhänen - one which would require him to sever relations with his family, to study the English language, and to receive special training in photographing documents, as well as to encode and decode messages.
While his KGB training continued, Häyhänen worked as a mechanic in the city of Valga, Estonia. Then, in the summer of 1949, he entered to Finland by the Soviet naval base in Porkkala as Eugene Nicolai Mäki, an American-born laborer. He would later be stationed in the United States.
Häyhänen was being recalled to Moscow for good, and defected on the way back in Paris. In May 1957, Häyhänen telephoned the United States Embassy in Paris and arrived at the Embassy for an interview. He said: "I'm an officer in the Soviet intelligence service. For the past five years, I have been operating in the United States. Now I need your help." He had been ordered to return to Moscow, after five years in the United States, and now wanted to defect.
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