Pyotr Popov | The Brutal End of the CIA's First Soviet Spy

Pyotr Popov was born in 1922 to a peasant family in a small village on the Volga.

He grew up in a one-room log hut and his family was dirt poor.

In 1930, a young commissar came knocking at the Popov household.

He was there to explain the terms of the new Soviet collective farming program.

Popov's older brother Alexander, then 18, hauled the commissar across the room and threw him out into the yard.

Three days later, GPU troops came for the family.

The Popovs were declared kulaks, the name given to the class of wealthy peasants.

They were then enemies of the revolution.

The family was held in custody while they awaited deportation to Siberia.

It was Alexander's strong-willed response that got them into that position and he was also the one to get them out again.

The only one able to read and write in the family, he wrote to Mikhail Kalinin, the Soviet head of state, and asked for a pardon.

Unusually, it was granted.

The Popovs became one of the few families ever to escape deportation after it had been ordered.

Alexander began work as a labourer, which allowed him to buy his younger brother his first pair of shoes at age 13.

Pyotr was able to attend school, but in 1940 as the Soviet Union prepared for all out war, the school in Tula was converted into a military academy and Popov was enrolled as a cadet.

He served through the second world war from 1941, being wounded twice as he hauled ammunition to the front with a quartermaster battalion for four years.

In 1943, he joined the Communist Party and after the war, the army moved him up rather than out.

He was enrolled in the Frunzeer Military Academy in 1945 where he took a three-year staff and command course.

He was then sponsored into the GRU's Intelligence School at the Military Diplomatic Academy where he graduated in June 1951.

As a newly qualified military intelligence officer, he was posted to Vienna.