The Compatriots

by Andrei Soldatov

  The only way to help Zarubin was to transfer him to another department, so his chief sent a telegram to Moscow. It was addressed to Mikhail Trilisser, head of the Soviet secret police’s foreign department (intelligence operations abroad). The son of a shoemaker from Astrakhan, Trilisser had been a Bolshevik since 1901, and during the civil war, he had served on the Russia-China border as an undercover Bolshevik operative, spying against the White Guard, the Chinese, and the Japanese. He had a soft spot for the operatives from the Far East.

  Trilisser agreed to give Zarubin a second chance.6 Zarubin was called back to Moscow for training. Anna, Zarubin’s lover, went with him. Zarubin’s wife, Olga—now also employed by the secret police—stayed in Harbin, along with their daughter.

  In Moscow, Trilisser decided Zarubin was worth keeping around. Even if his time in Harbin had been a disaster, he was stubborn, conventionally brave, and moderately ambitious. He was also Russian, and in the Soviet intelligence service, formed by and filled with Latvians, Jews, and Georgians, ethnic Russians were rare.

  At just that moment, Russians were in huge demand. Stalin, Lenin’s successor, had just officially proclaimed that “the building up of socialism in one country”7 was possible—thus signifying the abandonment of any immediate plans to start a worldwide revolution. Among other things, this proclamation was a message to the secret police: a directive to become more Russia-oriented, more “national.”

  So Zarubin was saved. He was soon assigned to the Soviet embassy in Finland, another place where the Russian émigré community had nested.

  In the end, he traveled to Finland alone. Anna was trapped in Moscow. She had made a mistake, falling for Zarubin, and for years to come, she desperately tried to find her way back to Harbin. There was no space for people like her in Russia—the Soviet authorities never trusted returned emigrants—and they didn’t make it easy for her to leave. She was caught trying to cross the border and spent five years in Stalin’s gulag.

  Without Zarubin, there was no one to deal with the Russian émigré organization in Harbin. That was unacceptable to the Soviet secret police, who saw Harbin’s émigré community as a crucial threat. Moscow urgently needed to send in another agent.

  Trilisser, the chief of the Soviet foreign intelligence, picked Nahum Eitingon. A tall, handsome operative with black hair and black eyes, Eitingon was strikingly different from Zarubin.

  Eitingon was young, just twenty-five years old, but already very sure of himself. A Jew born in a small town near Mogilev in the Pale of Settlement, he had witnessed the brutality of the tsarist regime firsthand: his native town fell victim to a pogrom when Eitingon was just six years old. This was followed by World War I and German occupation. He survived, becoming one of many Jews who developed their survival instincts at an extremely high, deeply personal price. People like him made for a generation of highly committed and professional Soviet operatives.

  In 1917, when Eitingon was eighteen years old, he joined the Socialist Revolutionaries. Essentially a party of terrorists, they were masters of konspiratsiya, a set of strict security procedures taken to ensure the integrity of a clandestine operation. They had killed a long list of tsarist officials. Soon, however, Eitingon switched sides. He joined the Bolsheviks and then the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police. He was given an order to persecute Socialist Revolutionaries, his old comrades. They were now branded “counterrevolutionaries” because they dared to question Bolshevik policies. Eitingon didn’t hesitate: he immediately carried out his new orders. Where Zarubin was prone to emotionality, Eitingon was ice cold and sharp as a knife.

  His commanders in the Cheka praised Eitingon for his effectiveness and “productiveness.”8 By early 1920, he was attached to the “Eastern” department of the secret police. There, his job was to supervise the fight against counterrevolutionaries across a very large region, stretching from the Caucasus to Siberia and to the Far East on the border with China. Next, he studied with the military academy’s Eastern faculty in Moscow.

  By 1925 Eitingon was better trained, better educated, and far more experienced than Zarubin, whose place he was about to take in Harbin.

  Before Eitingon left for China, Trilisser called him into Dzerzhinsky’s office. The founder of the Cheka was laconic. His only parting words were, “Do everything you can that is useful for the revolution.”9

  When he arrived in Harbin, Eitingon almost immediately started an affair with Zarubin’s abandoned wife. The two promptly began living together. As with his decision to persecute his former comrades, here again, in love, Eitingon never hesitated—it was in his nature to take action.

  Meanwhile, in a cheap hotel in Bucharest, a pretty, twenty-four-year-old, university-educated woman with black hair and piercing brown eyes committed murder. A fierce supporter of Romania’s Communist Party, she had spent the evening in her room awaiting a Communist courier. When she heard a knock at the door, she opened it. It was a fellow comrade, someone she knew. But the man aimed a pistol at her. Then he demanded she hand over a packet from Moscow containing instructions from the Comintern, the Moscow-based international organization whose proclaimed goal was to instigate a worldwide Communist revolution.

  She said she didn’t have the papers, and the man with the pistol told her to put on her coat. She knew what was coming—her brother, a leader of the militant wing of the Romanian Communist Party, had just been killed by Siguranza, the brutal Romanian secret police. While dressing, she found her pistol. She took one shot and didn’t miss.10 Like Eitingon, she never hesitated. She didn’t make mistakes either.

  Trilisser spotted her talent and called her to Moscow. During her long career in Soviet intelligence, she would have many names, but the one she would finally be known by was Liza Gorskaya.

  In the years to come, Zarubin, Eitingon, and Gorskaya—a disciplined Russian, a resourceful and ruthless Jew, and a well-educated, fierce, cosmopolitan woman—would all become successful Soviet operatives. All three would be instrumental in defining and executing the Kremlin’s strategy for dealing with the threat posed by Russians abroad.

  CHAPTER 2

  IDENTIFYING TARGETS

  The year 1929 began well for Eitingon, who was now heading the Soviet foreign intelligence’s rezidentura (station) in Harbin. He had attracted the notice of his superiors in Moscow during his four years in China, and his most recent operation was his most spectacular yet. Soviet intelligence had long suspected that the local Chinese warlord, an uncrowned king of northern China known as the Old Marshal, had close ties to the Japanese. Moscow didn’t like that. Japan had plans to turn this region of China into its military base, which threatened Russia.

  While the Old Marshal was traveling by train from Beijing to Harbin, a bomb went off just as his personal car passed the bridge. The Old Marshal was mortally wounded and died the same day. The Chinese blamed the Japanese military, but the operation had in fact been Eitingon’s. It propelled him into the elite of the Soviet foreign intelligence; afterward, the Soviet secret police awarded him the Red Banner Order, the greatest of the Soviet honors. Eitingon was not yet thirty years old.1

  Trilisser trusted him completely. For more than a year, Eitingon enjoyed a free hand in carrying out operations all over China. He ran several important agents in the Russian émigré community, and his spies gave him access to top-secret correspondence between Japan’s General Staff and its military missions in northern China. Here again, Eitingon proved himself brutally effective when dealing with his White Russian compatriots—the enemies of the revolution. He had one of his agents pass a tip to Japanese intelligence saying that twenty of their Russian émigré assets had switched sides and asked secretly for Soviet passports. The Japanese believed Eitingon’s disinformation and promptly killed all of them. In the foreign branch of the Soviet secret police, Eitingon was a rising star.

  On May 27, 1929, all this abruptly ended. At 2:00 p.m., dozens of Chinese policemen—some of them former White Guard servicemen now working for the Ch
inese—rushed the gate beneath the hammer and sickle on a globe, gained entry to the Harbin consulate’s mansion, and arrested thirty-nine people on the spot.

  Earlier that morning, the Chinese police had been warned by a Russian émigré that an important meeting was to take place around 2:00 p.m. in the mansion’s basement—probably a Comintern conference plotting to instigate Communist rebellion. Indeed, Harbin’s police were already on the alert—they had seen dozens of suspicious people entering the consulate all day. So the police commissar ordered a raid.2

  Eitingon was armed and did not want to be caught by the police with a pistol on his body. Once again, he didn’t hesitate. There was a good chance that the police would not search a little girl, so he quickly called for his now nine-year-old stepdaughter, Zoya Zarubina. He gave her his gun, and the child smuggled it out of the consulate. Eitingon then made sure that most of the rezidentura’s secret documents were burned before the Chinese got them.

  Still, the raid caused a scandal in Moscow. The rezidentura was compromised—there was no denying that.

  Trilisser summoned Eitingon back to Moscow. More than three thousand miles lie between Moscow and Harbin, and it took Eitingon more than a week by train to arrive in the capital.

  The June sun melted Moscow’s asphalt, and Muscovites were choked by heat and dust; the authorities had begun blowing up churches all over the city under the pretext of making way for new streets. The attack on the consulate in Harbin was in the news, but the newspapers were more focused on providing colorful descriptions of counterrevolutionary conspiracies and requests by workers to put an end to them. Tension filled the air, and the pace of the city changed. Passersby overtook Eitingon, and he saw the strain in their faces. But he also saw excitement: a carnival had just arrived in Moscow. It was a massive show that was overtaking the streets. No fewer than fifty-four trucks carrying gigantic papier-mâché figures—dwarfs in cylinders labeled “Capitalist France and countries of Small Entente,” a group of ugly puppets called “A wedding of the Pope and Mussolini,” a truck with an elephant’s trunk to symbolize colonial India—drove through the city, glorifying Soviet achievements and denouncing Western capitalists, before enthusiastically setting up camp on Red Square.3 At the same time, some of Moscow’s businesses had gone on strike because of low salaries, and long queues formed in front of shops. There were shortages of white bread.4

  Eitingon didn’t care much about the mood of Muscovites. Unlike Zarubin, Eitingon had little personal history there, and he was generally not a sentimental man: when he left his native town behind, he cut his ties to his past. For him, Moscow had always been Russia’s powerhouse—nothing more and nothing less. Now he walked briskly to the large, looming building on Lubyanka Square and prepared himself to meet the Old Man, as Trilisser—a bespectacled, forty-year-old man with the type of brush mustache that Hitler later made famous—was called by his subordinates. As he made his way up to the third floor, to Trilisser’s office, Eitingon ran into several colleagues he hadn’t seen for years. Their confused and frightened faces stunned him.

  For the past six months, the Soviet foreign intelligence department had been trembling with uncertainty as the chekists found themselves at the heart of Kremlin political intrigue. Ever since Lenin died, the two archrivals—Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky—had kept their factions in the party at each other’s throats, fighting for power. Trotsky’s supporters held mass demonstrations in Moscow, but Stalin, cunning and calculating, was gaining ground and tightening his grip on the flamboyant Trotsky. Stalin delivered the final blow in January 1929. Trotsky, already in exile in Soviet Central Asia, thousands of miles from Moscow, learned that the decision had been made to throw him out of the country permanently.

  Trotsky struck back at once. His supporters printed thousands of copies of a proclamation that included a transcript of a conversation between two high-ranking party officials, Bukharin and Kamenev. In the conversation, the officials weighed the opposition’s odds against Stalin. According to the transcript, Kamenev wanted to know who the anti-Stalin opposition could rely on within the Soviet secret police. “Yagoda and Trilisser are with us,” was Bukharin’s answer.5 The two were deputy heads of the Soviet secret police.6

  Within the week, the head of the service, along with Genrikh Yagoda and Trilisser, wrote to Stalin. They claimed, rather desperately, that Bukharin’s words had no grounds.7 Stalin appeared to believe them, but it didn’t calm the waters. Felix Dzerzhinsky had died two years earlier, and his successor was constantly ill and often absent from the office. Few believed he could protect his people, including his two most trusted deputies—Yagoda and Trilisser. Of the two, Yagoda was relatively safe—he had proven himself loyal to Stalin two years earlier when he crushed a pro-Trotsky manifestation in Moscow—but Trilisser was vulnerable.

  Months passed and nothing happened. Nervousness was palpable at the foreign intelligence offices on the third and fourth floors of Lubyanka. People there knew how patiently Stalin could wait to exact his revenge for someone’s mistake (indeed, both Yagoda and Trilisser would eventually be “purged” by Stalin, and Yagoda would fall and be executed first). Besides, foreign intelligence was a relatively small organization, with just over one hundred people, so there was no place to hide. If Trilisser were to fall, lots of people would fall along with him. The best way to avoid trouble was to go on assignment abroad as soon as possible—an idea that quickly became a truism among Soviet spies.

  Zarubin was already safely out. After Finland, he had been sent to Denmark, an assignment that put his life on a completely new track. He went to Copenhagen as an “illegal”: an agent with no diplomatic cover, who pretended he was not Russian. The illegals were the crème de la crème of the Soviet espionage world. Zarubin still had trouble mastering a foreign language, and he still lacked proper training in spy tradecraft, but he was considered a hardened Communist. Better yet, he was disciplined and understood the need for rules—a rare thing among the first generation of Soviet operatives. With his fair hair and blue eyes, he looked Northern European—at least in the eyes of his superiors. Thus, with Trilisser’s approval, Zarubin went to Copenhagen using the passport of a naturalized American of Finnish extraction. (The passport was bona fide—it belonged to a man who didn’t need it while he worked on a contract in the Soviet Union.) This infiltration strategy would be used more than once. Soviet intelligence loved to have its illegals in Europe pose as Americans. They believed that the bearer of an American passport was treated with more respect by the European police than people with European passports. It was also more difficult for European authorities to reach out to the US authorities for a background check. To bureaucrats in the “Old World,” the United States was still a remote land. Zarubin’s instructions were to sit tight in Copenhagen in the guise of a businessman. He was to keep a low profile.

  In Moscow, Eitingon continued waiting for an assignment. Finally, Trilisser made a decision: Eitingon would go to Turkey to run a legal rezidentura in the Soviet consulate in Constantinople (the city was renamed Istanbul the following year). One of his tasks was to keep an eye on local émigré communities—Ukrainian, Azerbaijani, and North Caucasian, in particular. He was also expected to spy on the White Guard organizations, just as he had in Harbin.

  Eitingon considered himself lucky. In August 1929, when the Central Committee of the Communist Party finally started the purge of Moscow’s Soviet foreign intelligence service, he was already in Constantinople.

  What he didn’t understand, though, was that of all the cities in the world, Constantinople had just become the most dangerous for Soviet operatives.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE COST OF LOVE

  The Bolshevik political regime in Moscow started off by killing its enemies. But when it came to fellow revolutionaries who had fallen out of step with the party, the Bolsheviks were more forgiving. These former comrades in arms were not murdered; rather, they were expelled from the ruling elite or forced from the country.
/>
  This changed when Stalin took power. Always paranoid, Stalin did not like the idea of his former comrades potentially competing for influence from abroad. So the new Soviet leader instructed his spies to hunt them down, wherever they were. Soviet spies abroad targeted the party leaders who had just yesterday been part of the political regime, many of whom were still held in high regard by the country’s elite—including the secret police. Stalin’s vindictive approach would change the nature of Soviet intelligence forever.

  A few months before Eitingon arrived in Constantinople, in February 1929, Leon Trotsky had been shipped by Soviet operatives to the Turkish capital from Odessa aboard the Soviet cruise liner Ilyich. This time, Ilyich had no other passengers apart from Trotsky, his family, and two of Stalin’s agents, so the secret police could keep Trotsky completely under control all the way from Central Asia to Turkey. They wanted to continue this around-the-clock monitoring in Constantinople.

  But the task was not simple. Only yesterday, Trotsky had been a powerful, high-ranking party official. A legend of the revolutionary days, he was still popular within the party, including within the very secret service now charged with spying on him.

  There were two foreign intelligence stations in Constantinople in 1929. The legal rezidentura existed within the consulate, and its agents were diplomats. That rezidentura was run by Eitingon. The illegal rezidentura had no diplomatic cover, and its chief was Yakov Blyumkin, a brisk thirty-one-year-old operative with five-o’clock shadow who always kept his hair trimmed short. Blyumkin ran the illegal rezidentura from a bookstore that specialized in the trade of antiquarian Jewish books.