Viktor Belenko
Soviet MiG-25 pilot who defected to the West
Viktor Ivanovich Belenko (Russian: Виктор Иванович Беленко; February 15, 1947 – September 24, 2023) was a Soviet-born American aerospace engineer and pilot who defected in 1976 to the West while flying his MiG-25 "Foxbat" jet interceptor and landed in Hakodate, Japan. George H. W. Bush, the Director of Central Intelligence at the time, called the opportunity to examine the plane up close an "intelligence bonanza" for the West. Belenko later became a U.S. aerospace engineer.
Early life and defection
Belenko was born in Nalchik, Russian SFSR, in a Russian family (his passport states his ethnicity as Russian). Lieutenant Belenko was a pilot with the 513th Fighter Regiment, 11th Air Army, Soviet Air Defence Forces based in Chuguyevka, Primorsky Krai. On September 6, 1976, he successfully defected to the West by flying his MiG-25 jet fighter to Hakodate Airport in Hokkaido, Japan. He was married to Lyudmila Petrovna and they had a son, Dmitry (born in January 1973), but at the time of his defection, he was going through a marital crisis, when his wife, hailing from a wealthy family and not liking being a military wife, had told him she was intending to file for divorce and move with their son to her parents' home in Magadan.
This was the first time that Western military intelligence were able to get a close look at the aircraft and its specifications, and many secrets and surprises were revealed. His defection caused significant damage to the Soviet Air Force. Belenko was granted asylum by U.S. President Gerald Ford, and a trust fund was set up for him, which granted him a very comfortable living in later years.
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This entry incorporates text from “Viktor Belenko” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.