Victor Louis
Victor Louis was a Russian journalist who for decades passed on information the KGB wanted to see in print outside the Soviet Union. Born Vitaly Yevgenyevich Lui, he spent his 20’s in a labor camp for black marketeering among foreigners. He changed his name when he began working for Western news agencies in the 1950’s. As a part-time correspondent for The Evening News and later the Sunday Express, Louis became known for providing news no foreign correspondent had a hope of getting access to. His work was cited by the New York Times and the Washington Post. Over the years, Louis also acquired expensive foreign cars, a luxurious Moscow apartment, and a country mansion complete with a swimming pool and tennis court. In “The Times of My Life and My Life with the Times,” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former executive editor of The New York Times, Max Frankel, writes that Louis was a “mysterious, charming, Gogolesque rascal whose career became a caricature of the opportunities and corruptions inherent in the Soviet system.”