Career
Gikman used a Finnish passport and spent several years in Finland developing his illegal residence cover by posing as a Finn. Gikman"s fake personality was however the result of the theft in 1952 of four registry books of church records from the Othodox repository in Kuopio. He received his first Finnish passport at a Finnish embassy, before ever entering Finland.
He moved to Finland in 1966, and held various jobs in Helsinki in the 1960s, working among others in the Suomalainen Kirjakauppa bookstore.
Their son was born in Düsseldorf in 1969. From 1979 until his disappearance in June 1989 he was living in Vienna, Austria, and reportedly working for the United Nations in Paris.
A wiretapped telephone conversation on April 27, 1989, between Gikman and Felix Bloch, a United States. State Department official stationed in Vienna from 1980 to 1987, was the original cause of espionage suspicions on Bloch. The choice of the surname Gikman in the planted fake birth certificate is peculiar.
He is the only Finn ever to have the surname Gikman, and maybe the only person in the world with the surname.
The web site ancestry.com reports one Gikman family living in the United States in 1920, in the state of Indiana.
