Finish President Urho Kekkonen code name “TIMO” in KGB Archive (left) and KGB officer Viktor Vladimirov (right) fishing in the Soviet Union in November 1980.Viktor Vladimirov, a long-time official working at the Soviet Embassy in Helsinki, worked as the head of the KGB’s sabotage and assassination section in the late 1960s. One of Vladimirov’s projects was a plot in 1967 to murder former KGB officer Anatoly Golitsyn, who had defected to Canada from Finland where he worked in 1961. These are some of the juicier details contained in a newly-published history of the Finnish Security Police (SUPO) by historian Kimmo Rentola. Rentola says that the plot against Golitsyn failed, as did a similar attempt to kill another defector, which also took place in 1967. While working in Helsinki, Viktor Vladimirov became an “important source of information” for two Finnish presidents – Urho Kekkonen and Mauno Koivisto, with whom he became “quite close”. Both presidents knew that he held the rank of general in the KGB, but it is unlikely that they had any knowledge of his work in covert operations. There had been reports of Vladimirov’s career in the assassinations section in stories told by Soviet defectors to Western intelligence services, but it was not until the KGB’s organisation chart was published in a Russian reference book in 2004 that there was positive confirmation of the matter. Vladimirov served at the Soviet Embassy in Helsinki in the 1950s, 1970s, and 1980s. He died in 1995.
“Neverthless , by the 1970s the KGB had more people they regaded as agents and `cconfidencial contacts` in Finland than in all the other FCD Third Departmen countries combined(Britain,Ireland,Australasia and the rest of Scandinavia).Helsinky also provided hospitality for the leading Soviet front organization.”- “KGB THE INSIDE STORY” Chrritopher Andrew & Oleg Gordievsky p.359.
According to Ex. Intel. officials KGB agents in Helsinki were involved with pushing Finish volunteers to spy in Israel during the Vladimirov term.
Bernd Pulch 