Vladimir Sergeevich Pravdin, or Roland Jacques Claude Abbiate, codename LETCHIK ["Pilot"], (July 1, 1905 – 1970) was a senior NKVD officer and assassin working in Europe during the Great Terror.
[1] His father, Louis Abbiate, was a musician from Monaco who had successful stints performing in london and La Scala in Milan.
[1] During the 1930s, Pravdin was involved in killings and kidnappings in Europe for the KGB, including the assassination of Ignace Reiss, a GRU officer who defected in 1937.
[citation needed] In Washington, Pravdin, posing as a TASS reporter, made the acquaintance of such people as the famous correspondent Walter Lippmann and others.
On one occasion, he met with a person with three children to offer money for certain unspecified information and who was code-named by the KGB as BLIN ("bliny" is Russian for "pancake").
[citation needed] Anatoliy Golitsyn, another Soviet defector in the 1960s, also claimed that Pravdin was active in Austria after World War II and often passed as a Frenchman.