'CIA Agents Imprisoned in the Soviet Union': a retiring officer's memo on captured REDSOX agents (1978)

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CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room

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26 October 2026, from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine copy of the government page (copy)

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Public domain: a work of the US federal government (17 U.S.C. § 105).

This is a single page, three numbered paragraphs long, and it is one of the few places where the CIA's own files put a human cost on REDSOX, the early Cold War programme of sending émigré agents into the Soviet Union. It was written on 30 June 1978 by an officer of the Directorate of Operations' FR Division, whose name is withheld, and addressed to the Director of Central Intelligence through the chief of the Soviet Europe Division¹. The date on the memo is the writer's own retirement day, and he says so¹.

What the memo says

The first paragraph recalls that in September 1957 the Soviet government announced the capture of five REDSOX agents sent in under Project AECOB. The CIA, the writer says, had "dispatched" them "in the early 1950's illegally", meaning black, without legal cover. According to the Tass report as he summarises it, two had been killed or had poisoned themselves when they were taken; the other three had been sentenced to long prison terms. He names the three, all Latvians, and notes that two of them had held permanent resident alien status in the United States¹. This page does not repeat their names.

The second paragraph is the request. The men had "served willingly and loyally, although on an impossible mission", and the writer asks that the agency check its records for their current status and, if they were alive, consider them for an exchange with the Soviets. The third paragraph explains why the request came from him and why now: he was retiring that day¹.

Project AECOB

The memo names the project but does not describe it. The National Archives' lexicon of CIA cryptonyms, compiled for the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act releases, does: AECOB, approved in 1950, was a foreign-intelligence vehicle for operations "into and within Soviet Latvia", including the infiltration and exfiltration of black agents and the recruitment of legal residents. A companion project, ZRLYNCH, used the Latvian resistance movement; it became part of AECOB in 1952 and its political side ended in 1955. The intelligence side of AECOB was terminated in 1959². The State Department's historians, writing of REDSOX as a whole, say that given "stringent Soviet controls" these infiltrations "enjoyed very limited success", which was recognised by 1954³.

How to read it

The memo is a request, not a finding. It shows what one officer believed in 1978 and what the agency's records had to be searched to establish: in 1978 the CIA apparently did not know, or the writer did not know, whether its own agents were still alive two decades after their capture¹. It does not say whether anyone answered. No reply, and no record of an approach to the Soviets about these men, appears in the released material we have seen, and we have found no account of what became of them.

The page survives because of a later law. The CIA reviewed files on émigré programmes for the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998, and this memo was filed and released as part of the name file of one of the captured agents^1,4. Only the writer's name has been removed from the signature block. The phrase "an impossible mission" is his judgment, not an agency verdict, but it matches what the released files and the official historians say about the infiltration programmes generally^3,4. For the wider programme, its Ukrainian and Baltic strands, and the Soviet publicity that met it, see Operation Redsox.