Prominent DOGE Staffer Is Grandson Of Turncoat KGB Spy

Edward “Big Balls” Coristine happens to be the descendant of Valery Martynov, a KGB agent who spied for the US.

[A brief editorial note: About 10 years ago, I began researching the Year of the Spy and some famous Reagan-era espionage cases. This post draws from that research. See also my previously published article about the NSA traitor Ronald Pelton.]

Among the cadre of DOGE engineers now rooting through the guts of the administrative state, few have attracted more curiosity than Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, a 19-year-old coder who interned for three months for Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain implant company. Coristine has a brief but colorful history that includes being fired from Path Networks, a cybersecurity company, for giving company documents to a competitor. He apparently palled around with a criminal hacking group called The Com and, according to a Telegram account associated with him, had solicited hacking services online. In 2021, he founded a company called Tesla.Sexy LLC that, according to Wired, “controls dozens of web domains, including at least two Russian-registered domains. One of those domains, which is still active, offers a service called Helfie, which is an AI bot for Discord servers targeting the Russian market.”

A lot about DOGE remains unknown – like who’s officially in charge – but Coristine has email addresses at USAID and the Department of Homeland Security and was recently seen inside the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the State Department. Across the federal government, he seems to have the run of the place.

There’s one aspect of Coristine’s background that has escaped public notice: his grandfather, Valery Martynov, was a KGB spy who played an intriguing role in a sprawling 1980s espionage drama.

In 1980, KGB officer Valery Fedorovich Martynov was sent to the US to serve undercover at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC. He was a Line X officer, part of a technical espionage division. Martynov had a wife and two young children, and they enjoyed traveling to cities on the eastern seaboard and enjoying life in what was one of the KGB’s most desirable postings. While the Soviet Union may have been tottering economically, the spy war was in full swing, and the greater DC area was filled with undercover operatives and the counterintelligence officers hunting them. Both sides were trying to ferret out, recruit, or compromise the other’s officers, and sometimes they were devastatingly successful.

In April 1982, the FBI recruited Martynov as an agent. He stayed in place and began feeding Soviet secrets to his FBI handlers. The FBI also recruited another KGB agent stationed at the DC rezidentura, Sergei Motorin. But KGB counterintelligence officer Victor Cherkashin, who was stationed at the DC rezidentura, had found his own sources in US intelligence – incredibly good ones – in the form of CIA officer Aldrich Ames and FBI counterintelligence agent Robert Hanssen. Ames and Hanssen would help the KGB unmask a number of moles and traitors in its midst, leading to their executions. One of them was Valery Martynov.

As he recounted in his memoir Spy Handler, Victor Cherkashin was deeply upset when he learned that Martynov, who he liked and considered a decent man, had betrayed his people. The spy business had a desultory character, and a real human cost, that seemed to weigh on Cherkashin. He described the cat-and-mouse game between him and his American enemies as “thieves stealing from thieves.”

But Cherkashin was also a professional. He realized that he would have to find an excuse to have Martynov recalled back to Moscow without tipping him off. It would involve using Martynov to help solve an even bigger problem plaguing the DC rezidentura.

In August 1985, Vitaly Yurchenko, a KGB officer formerly stationed in Washington, DC, was on an operation in Rome when he slipped away to the American embassy and announced his intention to defect. Yurchenko was a major prize — the highest ranking defector in KGB history — and was soon spirited to the United States, where he was installed in a Virginia safe-house that, it was hoped, would be beyond the prying eyes of Soviet agents posted in the capital region.

Yurchenko fell under the joint management of the FBI and CIA – which meant that Aldrich Ames, who had already begun spying for Cherkashin, knew everything about Yurchenko’s defection. Apparently concerned that his own treachery might be exposed, Ames made a point of staying close to Yurchenko during his defection. But if Yurchenko recognized him as a Soviet agent, he would be immediately exposed. Taking a calculated risk, Ames gave Yurchenko just such an opportunity. Riding in a car together soon after Yurchenko's defection, Ames passed a note to the Soviet defector, asking if there was any sensitive information he wanted to reveal only to the CIA Director. Ames was giving Yurchenko an option to reveal, say, a mole at the heart of the CIA. But Yurchenko said he had no such message to pass along. Ames' secret appeared safe.

Yurchenko was a mercurial character, and his true ambitions were difficult to pin down. Although he rose to be a colonel, he had a checkered KGB career. Oleg Kalugin, former head of KGB counterintelligence, called Yurchenko "unqualified and unsuitable," a "sloppy, unreliable officer" with "empty, evasive, pale blue eyes" and a poor command of Russian. In the mid-seventies, one of Kalugin's superiors asked him to send Yurchenko to Washington DC. Yurchenko had somehow curried favor with a senior officer, and the officer was now leaning on Kalugin to give his friend Yurchenko a highly desired assignment. Kalugin reluctantly complied but he later considered Yurchenko to be "an unmitigated disaster."

As a KGB officer, Yurchenko spent about eight years in the US capital, and his time there was mostly distinguished by his shoddy professionalism. He slept around, including with the wife of a Soviet diplomat and with an American woman who may have been an FBI informant. In 1976, while Yurchenko was serving as head of security at the DC rezidentura, a former CIA officer named Edwin G. Moore threw a package over the wall of the Soviet embassy. Yurchenko and Dmitri Yakushin, the KGB rezident who Moore had already made several attempts to contact at his home, sent a cable to KGB Center in Moscow discussing the situation. Yuri Andropov, the KGB chairman, cabled back that the incident was likely an FBI provocation and that they shouldn't respond to the volunteer. Worried that the package might contain a bomb, Yurchenko handed it over to the DC police.

It turned out that Moore was a genuine traitor hoping to cash in on the 22 years he had spent in the CIA's research division. He was promptly arrested, and when the FBI searched his home, they found hundreds of pages of CIA-related documents and photographs, including a typewritten note that offered access to CIA secrets for $10 million. (The package that Moore tossed over the embassy wall had included a request for $200,000.) Moore, who had a heart attack while in custody, was found guilty, sentenced to 15 years in prison, and paroled three years later.

Yurchenko — and Yakushin — had whiffed on collecting a potential windfall of US secrets. For Yurchenko's KGB colleagues, Victor Cherkashin wrote, "the incident became notorious as a glaring example of unprofessionalism." Kalugin called it "an indescribably stupid error." It didn't much affect Yurchenko's career, as his connections helped him rise to senior intelligence posts, where he gained access to highly secret information about Soviet agents in North America and other clandestine operations abroad.

When Yurchenko decided to defect in 1985, it was for reasons beyond dissatisfaction with the sclerotic Soviet system. He was also an inveterate hypochondriac who was convinced that he was dying of stomach cancer. More than that, Yurchenko was lovesick. He pined not for his wife and family but for his former lover, Valentina Yereskovskaya, the wife of a Soviet intelligence officer who at the time was posted to Montreal. Yurchenko was determined to reunite with Yereskovskaya before he died. And though the erstwhile KGB-man had begun to talk, he was jittery and unsettled. Some of the US officials working with him worried that he might reconsider his defection, so in September 1985, they made an unorthodox decision: Yurchenko and a handful of minders would make a clandestine trip to Canada, where he would confront his former lover and ask her to join him in the United States.

The trip was risky and unnecessary. What if it was some kind of setup? What if Yurchenko bolted? What if one of Yurchenko's former KGB colleagues spotted him? These were well-founded fears, but the disaster arrived in another form entirely. When his romantic rival was out, Yurchenko, aided by his American handlers, knocked on his lover's door. Yurchenko explained his purpose for being there, but Yereskovskaya quickly rejected him. He was a traitor and why would she, a loyal Soviet citizen, betray her husband and her people to run off with him into the arms of the main enemy?

Yurchenko was devastated. His emotional state worsened when he learned that news of his defection had been reported in the American and Canadian press. It seemed that CIA Director William Casey's office, perhaps with the blessing of others in the Reagan administration, had made the decision to brag to the media about their important new catch. Growing depressed and suspicious, Yurchenko and his minders soon flew back to the US. Yurchenko slunk back to the safe-house in Oakton, Virginia, where his debriefings continued.

Yurchenko had already revealed some important tips, including that a former NSA employee had walked into the D.C. embassy and offered information. He remembered meeting the man and that he had red hair, but he couldn't remember his name. He might be named Mr. Long, Yurchenko said, but he wasn't sure.

In mid-October, when Yurchenko's mood seemed to be darkening in the wake of his failed romantic reunion, his handlers took him on a trip of the American southwest, including to the Grand Canyon. An FBI agent flew out to meet Yurchenko and his entourage, presenting the former Soviet colonel with a "mug book" of present and former NSA employees. This time, Yurchenko spotted the face of the man he remembered from five years earlier: it was Ronald Pelton. But as the CIA's Milt Bearden later wrote, it seemed that identifying Pelton did little to lift Yurchenko's mood. In fact, he may have been sent deeper into depression by the realization that he might have to testify against Pelton and others in court.

Yurchenko soon received another bit of disheartening news: he didn't have stomach cancer. Not only was he not going to die, Yurchenko would have to live with what he had done for a long time.

On November 2, 1985, two months after his disappointing trip to Canada, Yurchenko went to dinner in a Georgetown restaurant with a CIA handler. At one point, Yurchenko asked the agent what would happen if he tried to leave. "Will you shoot me?" The CIA officer said that that's not how his government treated defectors. Yurchenko rose from the table to go to the bathroom. "If I don't come back, it's not your fault," he said, puzzling the agent. And like that, the prized defector walked out and disappeared.

Yurchenko next appeared at the Soviet embassy, where, in a wild press conference, he claimed that he had been drugged and kidnapped by American agents. The United States had a policy of allowing defectors who changed their minds to return home, so during an uneasy meeting involving Yurchenko and a handful of Soviet and American officials, the former asylum-seeker affirmed his desire to return home.

In Victor Cherkashin's telling, Yurchenko's initial defection to the United States was legitimate and took the KGB by surprise. But when he decided to try to re-defect, the KGB leadership determined to make the most of the opportunity. They could have brought Yurchenko home and promptly executed him for treason, but the Soviets were already dealing with a number of recent defections; they didn't need to add another traitor to the list. Aldrich Ames was keeping his KGB handlers informed about everything Yurchenko was doing, so the KGB had a keen sense of who had and hadn't been compromised. (Because Cherkashin had strictly limited the number of people who knew about Ames, to the point of traveling to Moscow to update his superiors in person, his prized agent's identity was unknown to Yurchenko.)

KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov could see the advantage in playing up Yurchenko's story of being kidnapped and drugged and his subsequent escape — after all, such tales had played out before, on both sides. "Yurchenko's defection may not have been an elaborate operation to protect the KGB's top agent" — that is, Aldrich Ames — "but his redefection became exactly that," Cherkashin later wrote. "His arrest would have given the game away." And even if the story retained an air of unreality, the sense of confusion it engendered was to the KGB's benefit: "The [CIA] had either been completely taken in by a brilliant Soviet intelligence officer, or allowed one of its top Soviet defectors to slip out of its hands." Either way, the Americans were embarrassed, left wondering what might have been.

That’s why the KGB decided to welcome Vitaly Yurchenko back to the Soviet Union. And this was where Valery Martynov came in handy. Cherkashin told the unsuspecting Martynov that he would be a member of the KGB honor guard escorting Yurchenko back home to a hero's welcome. On November 6, Martynov boarded the plane to Moscow with Yurchenko — which confused FBI officials, who wondered why the agent they had given the cryptonym GENTILE was part of this mission. Then they wondered why he never came back. It would take the Americans a year to find out what had happened to him.

As soon as he disembarked in Moscow, Martynov was arrested. His wife, Natalya Martynova, later said that she was allowed to see him four times in prison. After eventually pleading guilty, Valery Martynov was executed on May 28, 1987. His widow was informed nine days later.

For Cherkashin, who testified at Martynov's trial, "it was one of the events in my career I most questioned." As he recounted in Spy Handler, Cherkashin was loyal to his country and to the KGB, but he didn't always approve of its methods and he clashed with KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov. "I was only doing my job, but the moral dilemma weighed heavily," Cherkashin later wrote. "As far as I was concerned, officers who turned traitor should be fired and deprived of their pensions. That's enough. There's no need for execution."

Aldrich Ames was eventually unmasked as a Soviet spy and sentenced to life in prison. Robert Hanssen died a convicted traitor in federal prison. Back in the Soviet Union, Yurchenko was awarded a medal, while the Soviet government touted the success of its supposed double-defector plot. Yurchenko, fifty years old at the time, served out the remainder of his KGB career and retired in Russia, where he remains today.

In 1994, Natalya Martynova, still mourning her husband, spoke bitterly of her family’s experience in an interview with the Washington Post. She said that, after Ames’ arrest earlier that year, she had contacted the U.S. embassy, requesting assistance. “If he was really working for them, I think some kind of help would be fair,” Martynova told the paper’s Fred Hiatt. “Of course, maybe it was all concocted here, and he was not working for the Americans. I am sure I will never know the truth... . The main thing is that I want my children to be somehow protected.”

On August 21, 1995, Natalya Martynova arrived with her two children in the United States, according to a Facebook post by her son Alexander, Coristine’s uncle. Natalya Martynova died in 2020 and is buried in New York. Alexander became a Virginia police officer who sometimes posts comments on blogs about his historically famous father. “Now he has to face my father along with other people he had betrayed,” Alexander wrote when Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who spied for the Soviets, died in 2023.

Martynova’s daughter Anna became a financial professional who married Charles Coristine, the proprietor of LesserEvil, a snack company. Among their children is a 19-year-old young man named Edward Coristine, who currently wields an unknown amount of power and authority over the inner-workings of our federal government.