Career
Before he became head of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security) he had no experience in the field of intelligence and counter-intelligence. His mentor and predecessor was Alexander Shelepin. In October 1963, Semichastny sanctioned the arrest of Professor Frederick Barghoorn of Yale University when he was visiting Moscow.
Semichastny hoped that by charging Barghoorn as a spy he could induce the United States to release Igor Ivanov, arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that month for espionage.
The Soviets subsequently released Barghoorn. Ivanov was allowed to leave the United States in 1971.
Subsequently, Semichastny participated in the ouster of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in October 1964, an act that undoubtedly led to his being retained by the new Soviet leadership. There are some indications that Leonid Brezhnev, who led the coup against Khrushchev, wanted to assassinate him, but Semichastny refused to allow Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security) participation.
During his tenure Semichasnty attempted to create a new public image of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security), permitting an article to appear in the newspaper Izvestia that included an article with "a senior Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security) officer" (himself).
In the article he stated
More articles and books on the security organs appeared, and Soviet spies became heroes in print — Rudolf Abel, Gordon Lonsdale, Harold (Kim) Philby, and Richard Sorge. Brezhnev finally replaced Semichastny on 18 May 1967, as part of a Kremlin power shuffle while Yuri Andropov became the new chief of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security). Semichastny died of a stroke at the at age of 77 on January 12, 2001.
