Vladimir Pravdin

Vladimir Pravdin or Roland Lyudvigovich Abbiate codename LETCHIK ("Pilot") (August 15, 1905 – 1970) was a senior NKVD assassin working in Europe during the Great Terror. He later became a KGB agent, stationed in the United States.

Pravdin was born in London, and lived at one time in the United States during the early twenties. His wife, Olga Pravdin, also served in the KGB. During the 1930s, Pravdin had been involved in killings and kidnappings in Europe for the KGB, including the assassination of Ignace Reiss, a GRU officer who defected in 1937. Reiss was caught by the NKVD in Switzerland, where he was killed as an object lesson to potential defectors. Pravdin disappeared after the murder. Later, during World War II, he turned up again in the United States where he served as a Soviet diplomat, Vladimir Sergeyvich Pravdin.

Later, in the United States, Pravdin operated under cover as the head of TASS News Agency from 1944 to 1945. Among Pravdin's contacts while serving in the United States were Judith Coplon Josef Katz, Bernard Schuster, and Josef Berger.

In Washington, Pravdin, posing as a TASS reporter, made the acquaintance of such people as the famous correspondent Walter Lippmann and others. On one occasion, he met with a person with three children to offer money for certain unspecified information and who was code-named by the KGB as BLIN ("bliny" is Russian for "pancake"). In the plain language of the cable decrypt, BLIN was willing to provide information but declined to cooperate with the NKVD because the approach had been clumsy, but left open the possibility of future cooperation. From scraps of information about BLIN that arose from the brief breaking of the Russian code in the materials the U.S. known as the Venona project, the FBI concluded that BLIN “appears” to be I.F. Stone.

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