Victor Louis (journalist)
| Victor Yevgenyevich Louis | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
5 February 1928 Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union |
| Died | 18 July 1992 (aged 64) London, UK |
| Nationality | Soviet Union |
| Other names | Vitaly Lui |
| Occupation | Journalism |
| Known for | Disinformation operations |
Victor Louis (5 February 1928 – 18 July 1992) was a Soviet journalist who worked for Western media outlets in Moscow and had close work connections with the senior levels of the USSR KGB. He was used by the Soviet government as an informal channel of communication and for subtle disinformation operations in the Cold War. Viewed as agent provocateur of the secret police, he was hated and boycotted by the Moscow intelligentsia.
Born Vitaly Yevgenyevich Lui (Луи) in Moscow, he changed his name to Victor Louis in the 1950s, when he began writing for the Western press. His Russian mother died a week of his birth; his father came from a well-off (prior to the 1917 revolution) German (Prussian) family that lived in Moscow.
Starting from 1944, Lui managed to land a series of low-level support staff positions with foreign embassies in Moscow, which got him into trouble with the NKVD; he was arrested in Leningrad around 1946 and later tried and sentenced to 25 years of labour camps on espionage charges (Article 58). He did time in Inta.
He was released around 1956 and started co-operating closely with the KGB. His first official employment was with the CBS News Moscow bureau, where, as his own account has it, he gave his boss, Daniel Schorr, a tip, allegedly based on an article in Vechernyaya Moskva that reported the cancellation of a Hungarian ballet trip to Moscow, about the imminent Soviet invasion of Hungary in November 1956. His next job was as an assistant to Edmund Stevens of Look magazine.
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