Nikolai Khokhlov: 1922 - 2007

Khokhlov (right) and Okolovich

Nikolai Khokhlov, a KGB defector who survived the world's first known assassination attempt by a nuclear isotope, died last week. He was 85.

Khokhlov, who recounted his story in the classic memoir "In the Name of Conscience," first gained fame in 1954 when he defied a Kremlin order to organize the assassination of an anti-Soviet dissident named Georgi Okolovich. Heading a three-man unit operating in Frankfurt, Khokhlov walked up alone to Okolovich's apartment, and informed him just what he was sent to Germany to do. With that, the murder was sabotaged.

The heroic tenor of the event turned tragedy, however, when the CIA failed to rescue Khokhlov's wife, Yana, and son, Alek, in Moscow, as the agency had promised as part of his defection. The wife and son were arrested, and Khokhlov saw them again only 38 years later, in 1992, when Boris Yeltsin pardoned him. He and Yana had meanwhile divorced, and Khokhlov had remarried.

In 1957, Khokhlov again attracted international attention. While he was attending an anti-Communist conference in Frankfurt, someone slipped a dose of a radioactive isotope of thallium, a metal, into his coffee. Khokhlov's doctors were certain he was going to die -- his hair had fallen out, his skin was covered with bloody splotches, and his body seemed to be working against him. Instead, Khokhlov somehow came out of it.

In the 1960s, Khokhlov went on to begin an entirely new career as a tenured psychology professor at California State University at San Bernardino. He became known as an exceedingly articulate defender of parapsychology, and conversely a critic of Freud and Jung.

Interest in Khokhlov became renewed in November, when another defector from Moscow -- Alexander Litvinenko -- was poisoned by a nuclear isotope in London. Litvinenko displayed almost identical symptoms to those suffered by Khokhlov. It turned out that he was poisoned by polonium, another radioactive isotope. Litvinenko died in November. Khokhlov gave several interviews in which he pinned the blame on the Russian spy services.

Khokhlov leaves his wife, Tanja, a son, two daughters and five grandchildren.