David Chavchavadze

Prince David Chavchavadze (20 May 1924 – 5 October 2014) was an American author and a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer of Georgian-Russian origin.

Chavchavadze was born in London to Prince Paul Chavchavadze (1899–1971) and Princess Nina Georgievna of Russia (1901–1974), a descendant of a prominent Georgian noble family and the Imperial Russian dynasty.[1] His father, Prince Paul, was a fiction writer and translator of writings from Georgian into English, and an émigré in the United Kingdom, and then the United States.

Chavchavadze entered the United States Army in 1943 and served during World War II as liaison for the U.S. Army Air Force Lend-Lease supply operations to the Soviet Union. After the war, he entered Yale University where he was a member of The Society of Orpheus and Bacchus, the second longest running a cappella group in the United States. He spent more than two decades of his career as a CIA officer in the Soviet Union Division.

After his retirement, Chavchavadze specialized in tracing the nobility of Imperial Russia and authored The Grand Dukes (1989). He also published Crowns and Trenchcoats: A Russian Prince in the CIA (1989) based on his CIA experiences, and translated Stronger Than Power: A Collection of Stories by the Russian author Sandji B. Balykov. As a grandchild of a Russian Grand Duke, he was an Associate Member of the Romanov Family Association.

Through his mother, David Chavchavadze is great-great-grandson (through Grand Duke Mikhail Nicholaevich) and simultaneously great-great-great-grandson (through Queen of Greece, Olga Constantinovna) of Nicholas I.

David Chavchavadze died in his sleep on 5 October 2014, after a long illness.