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Edward Coristine, a protege of Elon Musk’s at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), who has already gained notoriety for his checkered early tech career and for glorying in the nickname “Big Balls”, is the grandson of a KGB spy, according to a new report.
Coristine, 19, dropped out of Northeastern University to find work in Silicon Valley, only to be fired from a cybersecurity internship last year for allegedly leaking insider information to a rival company and accused of frequenting Telegram and Discord communities linked to cybercrime.
He nevertheless finds himself serving under the world’s richest man as a “senior adviser” to Donald Trump’s State Department and Department of Homeland Security, with access to highly sensitive information about working American diplomats and those involved in national security and counterterrorism operations.
Now, according to research by freelance journalist Jacob Silverman, it emerges that Coristine is also the grandson of KGB officer Valery Fedorovich Martynov, who was executed in the U.S.S.R. as a double agent in 1987.
Part of the organization’s technical espionage division, Martynov was sent to the U.S. in 1980 to work undercover at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., regarded as a highly desirable posting at the time.
As Silverman recounts the story, Martynov and his family enjoyed their taste of American prosperity before, in April 1982, he and another agent, Sergei Motorin, were flipped by the FBI and began feeding the bureau Soviet state secrets.
However, their Russian colleague Victor Cherkashin, a counterintelligence officer, had sources of his own within the Washington intelligence community whom he used to unmask KGB turncoats, traitors and moles.
Martynov’s double agent status was duly exposed – to Cherkashin’s personal chagrin and disappointment – forcing him to conceive a plan to have the former sent home to Moscow as an escort for a returning Soviet defector, Vitaly Yurchenko.
As soon as Marytnov stepped off the plane with Yurchenko, he was arrested, imprisoned and finally executed on May 28 1987.
Cherkashin later wrote of the guilt he felt over Marytnov’s fate in his memoir Spy Handler (2004), writing: “I was only doing my job, but the moral dilemma weighed heavily.
“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.”
Natalya Martynova, Martynov’s widow, gave a moving interview about her family’s ordeal to The Washington Post in 1994 and finally settled permanently in the U.S. with her children a year later.
Her daughter Anna is the mother of Edward Corsine, who, as Silverman puts it, “currently wields an unknown amount of power and authority over the inner-workings of our federal government.”
Current unease about DOGE hacking and slashing at the state bureaucracy in the interest of making efficiency savings has rarely been better expressed than by veteran Democratic strategist Paul Begala, who complained on CNN’s The Source earlier this month: “Who the hell voted for – excuse the phrase – a guy who calls himself ‘Big Balls’?
“A 19-year-old kid going in there and trying to fire cancer researchers and scientists and teachers and agricultural specialists? It’s appalling.”
