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The KGB's Man At State, Or A Double Agent?A Spy Mystery In A Smuggled Cold War Archive..In September 1955, Robert F.Kennedy arrived in Moscow as part of an unusual Cold War driving tour of the Soviet Union.The future US senator's traveling companion was a prominent judge on the US Supreme Court.Their interpreter during the two-month journey across the closed-off country was a Russian-speaking former US Army officer whose position at the US Embassy in Tehran provided cover for his identity as a CIA agent: Frederick Flott.Back home in the United States, the trip brought wide attention to Kennedy, whose political career was on the upswing along with that of his older brother John, the future president.The trip also brought attention to Flott -- from the KGB.The Soviet spy agency assigned him a code name, Douglas, and went on to track him for the next two decades, hoping to cultivate him as a spy.In the early 1970s, the agency may have succeeded.The details of Moscow's pursuit of Flott are tucked away in an unpublished Russian-language manuscript housed in a collection of KGB documents called the Mitrokhin Archive.The files are named after Vasily Mitrokhin, a senior KGB archivist who spent years compiling thousands of pages of notes, then smuggling them out when he defected to Britain in the early 1990s.Over several pages of the manuscript, KGB interactions with, and surveillance of, an American code-named "Douglas" are described in detail.The code name is used in many of the mentions, but the file also specifically mentions the name "Flott," with accompanying biographical details that match Flott's government career.Among the most intriguing statements: that the KGB in June 1974 paid for Flott to travel to Moscow from Jakarta, where he worked as an embassy political officer, along with a $10,000 payment authorized by KGB chief Yury Andropov; and that Flott provided KGB officials in Washington with more than 100 classified State Department cables in the mid-1970s."It's unusual because it is a case from the Cold War that no one has ever heard of before," said Kevin Riehle, a former US national security and counterintelligence analyst who first came across the description of Flott and shared the original file with RFE/RL.Who Was Vasily Mitrokhin?Vasily Mitrokhin worked in the KGB for decades, but he was unsuccessful as an agent posted abroad.When reassigned to Moscow, he was tasked with overseeing the archives of the KGB’s First Directorate, which ran the agency’s spy operations abroad.When the agency moved its archives from its infamous Lubyanka headquarters in Moscow to a suburb, he was tasked with cataloging and organizing the move.Disillusioned by Soviet rights abuses and inspired by dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Mitrokhin copied notes on the files, smuggling them out to his country dacha, then painstakingly typing them up and hiding the records in milk jugs stored in a dirt cellar.In 1992, Mitrokhin approached the US Embassy in Riga, offering himself and his voluminous files.US officials were dubious, so he went to the British in Vilnius, who realized the value of the trove.Mitrokhin defected to Britain in 1992, turning over his files to the British spy agency MI6, which analyzed and redacted them, and tipped off the CIA and other agencies about KGB informants.Two books were published about the files before Mitrokhin’s edited typewritten Russian-language notes were released to the public in 2014 by the University of Cambridge.He died in 2004."This is an unknown espionage case," said Riehle, now a researcher and lecturer on intelligence and international security at Brunel University of London.The Mitrokhin files were turned over to the British spy agency MI6, which scoured them, and redacted or withheld many of them.It's unclear why Flott's name was not redacted.Flott retired from US government service in 1978.He died in 2006.His relatives and friends say they have never heard any such allegations.They say it is absurd to think he might have been a Soviet spy or worked with the KGB in any clandestine capacity.His nephew, Robert Flott, said that if Uncle Fred had communicated with the KGB, it was most likely authorized by his government superiors -- perhaps even as part of a disinformation campaign."I find it hard to believe that he would pass on classified information that was legitimate," Flott said in an interview from his home in California."I would believe that he was passing misinformation or information that was not detrimental to the US military or the US government." "It would be totally in character for Fred to see himself as some sort of double agent," Flott said."Fred absolutely giving away secrets without a plan to do that?Not a snowball's chance in hell.But with malice aforethought, to screw up the enemy?Yeah," said Jim Mattix, who was a business partner of Flott's after he retired and a close friend in his final years."What I know of Fred was that he was an incredible patriot, and I'm sure he would've enjoyed being sneaky." 'Kennedy Does Not Know Flott's Associations' Born in March 1921, Flott grew up near Chicago, the eldest of three brothers.He graduated from Carleton College, a Minnesota liberal arts school with an outsized reputation as a training ground for foreign service officers.During World War II, he served in Italy and then France, where he spent time with the French underground in the war's final months, sabotaging German locations.Family records say he rose to the rank of major.After graduating from Washington's John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies -- renowned as a training ground for both diplomats and intelligence officers -- he was sent to Paris and Madrid.In interviews he gave years after retiring, Flott said in addition to French, he was trained in Russian.He was posted as a political officer to the US Embassy in Tehran, in the months after the 1953 US- and British-backed coup that deposed Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.In Iran, he said, Soviet agents were trying to stir up trouble around the time."I was sent there probably because I spoke Russian," he said."They figured they'll send a guy who, in case the Russians came in, could deal with them." He went on to learn German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian.According to Mitrokhin's files, Flott first came to the KGB's attention in Tehran, when a Georgian woman contacted him and asked for a job.Flott arranged for the woman to work for a CIA-sponsored radio station that broadcast Georgian-language information into the Soviet republic.He was given the code name "Douglas." It was unclear why he was given that name in particular.In August 1955, Flott was ordered by the US ambassador to accompany Kennedy and the Supreme Court Justice William Douglas on the driving trip around the Soviet Union.The trip was covered widely in US newspaper reports; Douglas penned a first-person travelogue for a magazine afterward.According to Mitrokhin, the KGB enlisted a Moscow university student to try to "get close" to Flott during the trip.He declined the overtures.Months after the trip, Kennedy was debriefed by the CIA, interviewed about things of interest to the spy agency: diameters of Soviet pipelines, the heights of oil derricks in Baku, Azerbaijan.The CIA interview was declassified last year, part of 64,000 CIA documents that were ordered released by President Donald Trump.In the CIA files, a memo among agency officials advises that Kennedy not be told of Flott's actual employer: "May we suggest that in the...briefing Flott's true position not be revealed." "Kennedy does not know Flott's associations," a handwritten margin note says.An Agent Named 'Dita' Flott was dispatched to US diplomatic posts in Geneva and Bonn in the late 1950s and early 1960s.He traveled again to the Soviet Union as an adviser to Louis Cabot, an industrialist."During that trip," according to Mitrokhin's file, Flott "avoided any critical remarks, asked many questions about life, but did not ask questi