The Early Cold War group of Soviet intelligence officer defectors consists of twenty-two individuals who defected from the beginning of 1947 to 1951. These defectors had many similarities with defectors in the World War II-era group and provided some of the same information. But the Early Cold War group benefited from a gradual shift in Allied policy away from repatriation and towards exploitation of defectors for intelligence purposes. The information they revealed shed light on the Soviet Union's transition from wartime to peacetime intelligence and counterintelligence, targeted predominantly at the ‘Anglo-American bloc’ and the Sovietisation of Eastern Europe.

Less is known about most of the individuals in this group than about defectors in other groups due to several factors. Fourteen of the defectors in this group have never appeared in any published literature, the names of eight of them are still not publicly available, and the existence of five of them is known only from the KGB Wanted List. Only three officers in this group published their stories, and all three used pseudonyms. One of them (Baklanov) waited twenty-five years to publish his book, and another (A. A. Petrov) published under a pseudonym and only in French. Only two were interviewed for the Harvard Program on the Soviet Social System, primarily because the HPSSS focused on wartime refugees. Instead, British and American intelligence services debriefed them, and their information went into intelligence and counterintelligence files that remained classified for over forty years.

This lack of publicly available information has led some writers to draw incorrect conclusions about intelligence officer defectors in the late 1940s. Brook-Shepherd, for example, wrote, ‘For nine years after these cases [Gouzenko, Volkov, and Skripkin] had occurred almost simultaneously, the roll call of defectors remains nearly blank. Only two Soviet intelligence officers are recorded as having reached the West from any jumping-off point during this period, and neither was of great significance.’ The two to which Brook-Shepherd referred were Granovskiy (see Chapter 3) and Baklanov. Prokhorov lists only Vadim Ivanovich Shelaputin during this period.