An official note about the no-bid contract posted on a United States government website says that American companies had been contacted about taking on the security job in Russia but that “no U.S. firm has been located with the requisite licensing or desire to operate in-country.” It added that, among Russian companies that could do such work, only Elite Security had established operations and licenses to operate in the four cities where American missions needed guards.

The note said that Russia’s decision to insist on personnel cuts at American diplomatic missions in Moscow and elsewhere had created a “compelling urgency” to find new guards, and that doing so through a commercial contract was “the only available option.”

“This is very good for us,” said Mikhail Lyubimov, a former K.G.B. spy who knew Mr. Budanov from their time together in the Soviet intelligence service. “If I were the chief there, I would never do this for a very clear reason,” he said, adding that the Russian Embassy in Washington would not put security in the hands of an American company known to have ties to the C.I.A.

Like many former Soviet security officers, Mr. Budanov went into the private sector after the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union in 1991. He formed a joint venture with Gerard P. Burke, who was once assistant director of the National Security Agency, and headed the Moscow office of Parvus International, a business intelligence firm in Silver Spring, Md., founded by Mr. Burke, that employed former C.I.A., K.G.B. and Soviet-bloc agents.

Mr. Budanov started out in Soviet intelligence in the 1960s as a lowly officer whose work included buying food and other provisions for Kim Philby, the notorious British double agent who defected to Moscow in 1963 and died there in 1988.

In the late 1960s, Mr. Budanov was posted by the K.G.B. to Britain, which expelled him in 1971 as part of a mass clean-out of those suspected of spying for the Soviet Union.

He then rose to head the K Directorate of the K.G.B., a sprawling division that hunted for double agents recruited by the West and sought to penetrate the C.I.A. and other hostile foreign agencies. Toward the end of his espionage career, he worked for the K.G.B. in East Germany, serving there during the same period as Mr. Putin, who was then a junior K.G.B. officer in Dresden.