Donald Edward Graves (April 10, 1929 – July 2, 2008) was a State Department analyst

Analyst

Analyst generally is a term for an individual of whom or which the primary function is a deep examination of a specific, limited area and may mean:* Accounting analyst, an accounting analyst evaluates and interprets public company financial statements...

 who specialized in studying the government of the USSR. As a Kremlinologist, Donald Graves tracked the personal history of individual Soviet officials. These files, profiled in the 1982 Washington Post story, "The Secret Files of Mr. X" consisted of hard-copy database of over 1600 index cards that held all of the information the US Government had on prominent political figures of the Soviet Union. During the 1970s and 1980s, it was a critical source of information for U.S. officials tracking the political situation of their Cold War rivals.

Education

Donald E. Graves graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dickinson College

Dickinson College

Dickinson College is a private, residential liberal arts college in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Originally established as a Grammar School in 1773, Dickinson was chartered September 9, 1783, five days after the signing of the Treaty of Paris, making it the first college to be founded in the newly...

 in Carlisle, PA in 1953. He was awarded a master's degree from Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 in 1955.

Career

Donald E. Graves also edited the "Survey of the Soviet Press", for a decade, at the Central Intelligence Agency

Central Intelligence Agency

The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, responsible for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers...

 before being transferred to the US Department of State. From 1974 to 1976, Graves was at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow as first secretary and head of the internal affairs branch of the political section. While there, Graves was one of the number of State Department officials to secretly assist Norton Dodge

Norton Dodge

Norton Townshend Dodge was an American economist who has amassed one of the largest collections of Soviet-era art outside the Soviet Union...

, a Maryland college professor, to collect 20,000 pieces of art by dissident Soviet artists and smuggle them out of the Soviet Union. The art, much of which is now on display at Rutgers University

Rutgers University

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...

, and its retrieval were the subject of author John McPhee's "The Ransom of Russian Art" (1994).

Birth and death

Born April 10, 1929, in Bennington, Vermont, Donald Graves grew up next door to poet Robert Frost

Robert Frost

Robert Lee Frost was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and...

. Graves died on July 2, 2008.