Dmitri Fyodorovich Polyakov (Russian: Дмитрий Фёдорович Поляков; 6 July 1921 – 15 March 1988)[1] was a Major General in the Soviet GRU during the Cold War.

"[6] Victor Cherkashin suggested that Polyakov was embittered because Soviet leadership denied him permission to take his seriously ill son, the eldest of three, to a hospital in New York where he could get adequate medical attention for polio.

[7] Former CIA counterintelligence officer Tennent H. Bagley argues—in his 2007 book Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries and Deadly Games and elsewhere—that Polyakov was a Kremlin-loyal triple agent when he contacted the FBI in late 1961.

Bagley further argues that Polyakov and another Soviet intelligence officer, Major Aleksei Kulak, who literally walked in to the Bureau's New York City field office a few weeks after Polyakov, provided U.S. intelligence agencies with KGB disinformation that sent the agencies on "wild goose chases" and deflected attention from KGB/GRU false-defectors and true "moles" in U.S.

[3] About a year after his initial contact with the FBI, Polyakov was posted back to Moscow where he was able to access GRU documents to identify double agents, exposing Frank Bossard, a guided-missile researcher in the British aviation ministry, and United States Army Sergeant Jack Dunlap, a courier at the National Security Agency.

Around this time he also passed on information about the (alleged) growing Sino-Soviet split, which would later be used by Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon in their opening of relations with China in 1972.

Some CIA and FBI officials, including Deputy Director William Sullivan, believed that, at some point, Polyakov was turned by the Soviets and made into a triple agent who deceived the West with disinformation.

[14][15][12] Others, like former Soviet Russia Division Counterintelligence Chief Tennent H. Bagley (mentioned above) later came to believe that Polyakov had been a KGB agent in the U.S. in 1962, and that he later "flipped" and became a spy for the CIA when he was posted abroad.