An individual who purports to be a defector offering valuable information to an adversary while in fact retaining his or her original loyalty. This unusual concept was first promulgated by Anatoli Golitsyn, who warned that following his own defection to the Central Intelligence Agency in December 1961 attempts would be made to discredit him by the dispatch of other defectors from the KGB who would bear elaborately fabricated information. No such person was ever identified, although Yuri Nosenko underwent a lengthy interrogation when discrepancies were discovered in his declared background.
The only known example of the KGB deliberately dispatching an officer to the West posing as a defector was Oleg Tumanov, who does not appear to have been used as a conduit for disinformation but simply as a penetration agent; he succeeded in his low-level objective of being accepted as genuine and then gaining a job with Radio Free Europe in Munich before redefecting. However, according to Oleg Kalugin, Tumanov was never a false defector, but simply someone who changed his mind.