The Lost Russian Tsar, one of the CIA's greatest ass[ets]

"Colonel-General Michael Goleniewski is widely credited as being one of the most important Western agents ever to have operated within the Soviet KGB and its satellite agencies. He was the vice chairman of Communist Poland's military intelligence when he escaped to the West in 1960, bringing thousands of Top Secret Soviet documents as well as information identifying hundreds of highly placed Soviet agents in western governments and intelligence agencies. Among the important communist agents Goleniewski exposed were Kim Philby, George Blake, Gordon Lonsdale, Morris and Lona Cohen, Henry Houghton, Ethel Gee, and Stig Wennerström. So strategic, timely, and reliable were his revelations that the House of Representatives of the 88th Congress passed House Resolution 5507 to honor Goleniewski's exceptional contributions to American security."

"Goleniewski later made the claim that he was Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich, who, by most accounts, was killed with his family by Bolsheviks at Ekaterinburg, Russia on 17 July 1918. Goleniewski claimed that Yakov Yurovsky, one of the assassins, saved the family and helped them to escape. The whole family supposedly traveled to Poland via Turkey, Greece, and Austria. According to his story, the family lived in hiding in Poland. As author Guy Richards (one of Goleniewski's supporters) has pointed out, he was not the first Tsarevich Alexei cliamant to emerge from Poland; several decades earlier, in 1927, a pretender named Eugene Nicolaievich Ivanoff had appeared from the same part of that country and generated a brief flurry of publicity in Europe and North America.

Tsarevich Alexei, who was born in August 1904, was a haemophiliac. Goleniewski, whose identity card gave his date of birth as 1922, making him eighteen years younger than the Tsarevich, claimed that the haemophilia made him appear younger than he really was and he had been "twice a child." He claimed that his haemophilia had been confirmed by Dr. Alexander S. Wiener, who had co-discovered the Rh factor in human blood. This claim was never confirmed.

He met one of the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia claimants, Eugenia Smith, in 1963. The meeting was covered by Life magazine. Goleniewski claimed that Smith was his sister Anastasia. Smith also recognized Goleniewski as her brother Alexei, even though she had claimed in her book that she had been the sole survivor at Ekaterinburg.

Goleniewski's claim was an embarrassment to the CIA. He was put on a pension and his employment with the agency was ended in 1964.

In 1942 Wehrmacht soldiers transiting through Lemberg were told that near the town of Radom an old Polish landowner named Goleniewski lived on a large estate guarded by the SS and that he was in fact Tsar Nicholas II..."

sources: 1, 2.