Vitaly Sergeyevich Yurchenko is a former high-ranking KGB disinformation officer in the Soviet Union. After 25 years of service in the KGB, he defected to the United States during an assignment in Rome. After providing the names of two U.S. intelligence officers as KGB agents and claiming that Lee Harvey Oswald was never recruited by the KGB, Yurchenko slipped from the Americans and returned to the Soviets. It is clear that his initial defection was illegitimate, because Yurchenko was awarded the Order of the Red Star from the Soviet government for the successful "infiltration operation."

Ronald William Pelton was a National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence analyst who was convicted in 1986 of spying for and selling secrets to the Soviet Union. One such top secret operation he compromised was Operation Ivy Bells.