SERGEI Tretyakov, a high-ranking Russian spy whose defection to the United States in 2000 was regarded as one of the most significant coups against the government in Moscow since the collapse of the Soviet Union, has died of apparent heart failure at his home in Florida. He was 53.

Tretyakov, called Comrade J. by US intelligence officers, defected with his wife and daughter while he was first secretary of the Russian mission in New York and senior aide to the Russian ambassador to the US, Sergey Lavrov. In fact, he was a colonel in the SVR, the Russian intelligence service that replaced the KGB.

From 1995 to 2000 (Tretyakov defected on October 11, 2000), he was responsible for all covert operations in New York City and at the United Nations, with more than 60 intelligence officers under his command.

The intelligence he handed over during his time as a double agent included more than 5000 top-secret SVR cables and scores of classified Russian intelligence reports. He wrote about 400 papers for the CIA, the FBI, the State Department and the White House. He also provided detailed information about Russian operations in New York, including the names of contacts.

Pete Earley, the author of a book about Tretyakov, Comrade J.: The Untold Secrets of Russia's Master Spy in America After the End of the Cold War (2008), said that Tretyakov's wife, Helen, had asked friends not to reveal his death until an autopsy could be performed under the supervision of the FBI.

''This man literally held the keys to a Russian intelligence goldmine,'' an FBI official was quoted as saying in Comrade J. ''He used those keys to unlock its doors and go into the mine every day to bring us nuggets.''

Earley, citing ''an informed source'', said Tretyakov did not know any of the 10 Russian agents arrested last month and had not been involved in their operations. Helen Tretyakov, too, denied rumours that her husband had tipped off American intelligence officials about the agents.

''It wasn't him who disclosed the names of these people,'' she said.

Although Tretyakov had refused to comment on whether he gave information to the US while he was a Russian agent, Earley wrote that he might have co-operated with American intelligence officers for three years before he defected.

''My defection was the major failure of the Russian intelligence, probably in its whole history,'' Tretyakov told NPR, the American public radio network, in 2008.

Tretyakov was born in Moscow. His grandmother was a typist and secretary in the forerunner of the KGB; his father worked for the Soviet nuclear weapons program and the Ministry of Foreign Trade; his mother worked in the financial office of the KGB and helped her son gain entry into the spy service.

His father was posted to Tehran, where the young Tretyakov spent his early childhood; he was recruited by the KGB while studying at the Institute for Foreign Languages in Moscow.

Tretyakov was born with a heart defect that would have denied him entry into the KGB, but his mother bribed a doctor to leave the condition out of his application to the agency.

Tretyakov spent his first five years in the KGB in Moscow, sifting through Western publications for information of use to the government. In 1990, he was sent to the Soviet mission in Ottawa, where he recruited Canadian informants with an animus towards the US.

After he defected, he lived in hiding with his wife and daughter, Ksenya. All three became American citizens.

When Comrade J. was published, Tretyakov began making public appearances. After that he lived more or less openly, under his own name and without protection, although when he travelled abroad he had an FBI escort.

Tretyakov said in the book he switched sides because he had lost faith in the leaders who succeeded Mikhail Gorbachev. ''I saw firsthand what kind of people were and are running the country,'' adding that he believed they and a handful of cronies had enriched themselves. ''I came to an ultimate conclusion that it became immoral to serve them.''

In a caustic aside, he noted that he had never met the former Russian president (now Prime Minister), Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, partly because they worked in different parts of the world, and partly because Putin was ''never successful in intelligence'' and therefore never worked at headquarters. ''He was always kept in a provincial KGB station in a low and unimportant position,'' he said.

Tretyakov also said that he defected so that his daughter might have a better life. ''No one recruited me,'' he said. ''No one pitched me. No one convinced me to do what I did.'' He theorised that US intelligence officials never approached him because he was seen as an old-style KGB officer.

Tretyakov emphasised that he had not defected for money and had never asked to be paid for his services. On the contrary, he said, his career in the SVR was flourishing, and by defecting he gave up substantial assets in cash and real estate in Russia.

Earley said he was told by the FBI that Tretyakov had received the largest money settlement ever given to a defecting Russian spy, more than $US2 million.

To Earley, Tretyakov described his work with several operatives he recruited or placed. The recruits included a former member of the Canadian parliament, a top-ranking verification expert at the International Atomic Energy Agency and a former UN official whom Tretyakov said he installed in the Oil for Food Program, created to allow Iraq to sell oil but not acquire weapons.

That former official, he said, diverted about $US500 million from the program to the governments of Boris Yeltsin and Putin.

Tretyakov is survived by his wife, Helen, and daughter, Ksenya.

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