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‘He was fascinating’

Former CIA station chief Natirboff lived in Keystone Heights

By Nick Blank nick@claytodayonline.com
Posted 3/23/22

KEYSTONE HEIGHTS – Is 100 years enough? It’s a question worth asking after reviewing the life of Murat Natirboff, a former CIA station chief, World War II veteran and lecturer whose considerable …

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‘He was fascinating’

Former CIA station chief Natirboff lived in Keystone Heights


Posted

KEYSTONE HEIGHTS – Is 100 years enough? It’s a question worth asking after reviewing the life of Murat Natirboff, a former CIA station chief, World War II veteran and lecturer whose considerable accomplishments and major postings were driven by his sharpness, emotional intelligence and political will.

Natirboff died on Jan. 10 in Keystone Heights, about three weeks before his 101st birthday, where he lived the final three years of his life. He was an ethnic Circassian, but his family fled the country when the communist Bolsheviks drove out or killed millions loyal to the Russian royal family in a bloody civil war lasting five years.

Mark Natirboff, an attorney who lives in Keystone Heights, described his father as fascinating. The older Natirboff joined the Marines in World War II and was a chemical engineer, but Mark said Murat’s rise to prominence came from CIA postings in Soviet Union, Indonesia, Sudan, France, Egypt, Kenya, Pakistan recruiting people, also referred to as assets, to further U.S. interests.

“He was very good at what he did,” Mark Natirboff said. “He worked in the Soviet Union during the Cold War in Moscow and was the CIA station chief. That’s a very hard position to obtain.”

Murat Natirboff could have either been born on the Crimean Peninsula or Turkey, adding to the intrigue of his life. He spent his childhood in New York prior to World War II.

He loved individual Russians, but detested communism. Murat’s father was a colonel in the monarchist White Army that ultimately was defeated by the Bolsheviks.

“My goodness, he hated communism,” Mark Natirboff said. “He said it was the worst form of government. It was like a monstrosity to him.”

As for dangerous situations, Sudan is a strategic-located country in American energy interests, and in the early 1970s, it was where Natirboff was a CIA station chief.

He narrowly avoided the attack on the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Khartoum where the Black September Organization, responsible for the massacre at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, took ten hostages and killed three diplomats. It was a reception for the departing deputy chief of mission to Sudan and the insurgents were searching for U.S. intelligence officials like Natirboff, his son said.

“He was right in Sudan when it happened,” Mark Natirboff said. “He was blessed because he wasn’t at the reception. He was the real CIA guy.”

Natirboff later taught courses at the CIA for high-security clearance employees. They were so successful it became standing-room-only, but the speakers couldn’t be boring, his son said.

“If they were exciting, they got invited back. He didn’t care if they were from Harvard or Princeton,” Mark Natirboff said. “He was teaching these courses in his 90s.”

Far away from Natirboff’s foreign exploits, he enjoyed life in Washington D.C., splitting time between Wellsboro, Pennsylvania and the capital, a five-hour commute on a good day. Mark Natirboff warmly described his father’s driving style as menacing.

“His stack of speeding tickets got so big he had to hand in his keys,” Mark Natirboff added.

In D.C., Natirboff lived in the famous Westchester, an ornate 1930s-built apartment building adorned with gargoyles.

“It was very nice, really a beautiful place with gardens, a grocery store and barber shop at a subterranean level,” Mark Natirboff said. “You didn’t have to leave the place.”

Natirboff went to live with his son in 2019, he was 97. Secular for most of his life, he converted to Christianity in 2017 in D.C.

“Earlier in his life, I couldn’t read the Bible to him if I begged him to,” Mark Natirboff said. “He later believed that Jesus Christ was his Lord and savior.”

A quick Google search of Natirboff reveals news clippings from the Washington Post, New York Times and mention in numerous books. But through the eyes of his son, Murat Natirboff was approachable with an ability to interact with anybody. He described his father as a raconteur, interested in other cultures.

“He was very good at having two-way communication and making people at ease and that’s why he was so good at his job,” Mark Natirboff said. “He asked about people’s lives. He wanted to learn about other people, other cultures.”