Fred Kovaleski, whose international tennis-playing career became his cover in the 1950s while he was working as a spy for the C.I.A., died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 93.

Serge Kovaleski, his son, said the cause was prostate cancer that had spread.

Mr. Kovaleski was well into his career on the tennis circuit, having played at Wimbledon and in tournaments abroad and in the United States, when he joined the C.I.A. in 1951 and began training in spycraft at Camp Peary, near Williamsburg, Va.

Within three years, his ability to play tennis and his Russian-language training with the C.I.A. became essential when Yuri Rastvorov, a K.G.B. lieutenant colonel and avid tennis player, defected to the United States.

Mr. Rastvorov — a major espionage asset who revealed important information about the K.G.B. and the Soviet government — defected in Tokyo and was taken to a C.I.A. safe house in Potomac, Md., where agents interrogated him for hours every day for months. Mr. Kovaleski, his handler, did not participate in the interrogations; at night, they talked, and the information he gleaned went into his reports.