The Compatriots

by Andrei Soldatov

  Eitingon’s new department immediately began carrying out assassinations. Victims included a prominent priest of the Ukrainian Church, a Polish engineer, and a Ukrainian activist. All were injected with a poison developed by the Soviet secret police’s laboratory.

  The list of victims also included an American, former Comintern agent Isaiah Oggins, who in 1939 had been sentenced to eight years in the gulag for supposed “anti-Soviet propaganda” (in reality, he was yet another victim of Stalin’s paranoia). Oggins had spent the war years freezing in Norilsk, imprisoned in a gulag camp. In the middle of the war his case became public, and for years the US authorities had demanded his release. In 1947, after the series of Soviet intelligence failures in the United States, the Kremlin feared that releasing Oggins would attract more unwanted public attention to their American operations. Stalin ordered Eitingon to get rid of the American instead. The orders were that Oggins’s death should appear to be due to natural causes. Eitingon promptly had Oggins transferred from Siberia to Moscow, where he was also poisoned.13

  In 1947, Eitingon’s department occupied the Comintern’s spectacular rectangular headquarters in the east of Moscow, the former assortment of European refugees having long since been expelled from the building. But he could not evade the changing political winds forever. In 1951, when the anti-Semitic campaign was in full swing in the Soviet Union, Eitingon was accused of being part of the Zionist plot against the Soviet government, along with other prominent Jews. He was sent to jail. That same year, his stepdaughter, Zarubina, left the service for good. Soviet intelligence was becoming a truly nationalist, purely Russian agency.

  In the meantime, Soviet intelligence unexpectedly scored a huge success. In 1943, George Koval had so pleased his officers in the US Army with his mathematical skills that he was sent to an Army Specialized Training Program at the College of New York. In August 1944, he was transferred to the Manhattan Engineers District at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Instead of an imaginary poisons program, Koval now had direct access to the atomic bomb project. He immediately began sending intelligence to Moscow (among other things, he got access to the neutron initiator, the trigger of the bomb).14 In this, he added to the efforts of the Rosenbergs, who had also been recruited by Golos, and other spies seeking atomic secrets. Despite the efforts of Moscow Center to dismantle Golos’s networks, the networks still delivered.

  This incredible development in Koval’s spy career came about not because of his efforts, nor the efforts of Soviet military intelligence. Rather, George Koval got lucky—not the least important factor in espionage. In Oak Ridge, Koval had access to information regarding the production of plutonium and polonium. In 1948, this most unconventional Soviet émigré spy, an American citizen who went back and forth between Russia and the United States for twenty years, left the United States for good. He was not compromised; rather, Soviet military intelligence had recalled him. The paranoid controllers in Moscow hadn’t liked it when Koval asked that they let his mother write to him—he was suspected of a lack of loyalty. Anti-Semitism played its part, too. When Koval got to Moscow, he was given the lowest military rank of a private and thrown out of military intelligence.15

  Sixty years later, when Russian president Vladimir Putin visited the new headquarters of the Russian military intelligence GRU, he described Koval as “the only Soviet intelligence officer” to penetrate the Manhattan Project.16

  Before and during World War II, Moscow’s spymasters outsmarted the Americans. They accomplished this despite several failures, caused largely by Stalin’s paranoia and the serious incompetence of individual Soviet operators. They also found a way to use Russian emigrants to penetrate areas vital to US interests.

  After the war, the Americans became more focused. They decided to change the game and fight back.

  CHAPTER 8

  WARRING NARRATIVES

  Six years after the Allies defeated Hitler’s Germany, the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West was in full swing. The US government believed a hot war was inevitable too and started looking for a politically minded group of Russian émigrés who would, when the time came, be able to replace the political regime in Russia.

  In summer 1951, America entered its second year of war in Korea. There, in the first direct military confrontation between the world’s two superpowers, US and Soviet pilots downed each other. Meanwhile, in Sing-Sing Prison on the Hudson River in Ossining, New York, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg awaited execution. They had been sentenced to death that April for passing atomic bomb secrets to the Soviets. The pair, once part of Jacob Golos’s wide network, had been convicted of spying, but they were also convicted of having caused the deaths of Americans in Korea. In pronouncing sentence—the death penalty—federal judge Irving Kaufman stated his opinion that the Rosenbergs’ “conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-Bomb years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb has already caused… the Communist aggression in Korea.” At the same time, the world was also trying to absorb the news that, on the Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, the United States had tested a hydrogen bomb (H-bomb)—a weapon approximately one thousand times more powerful than the atomic bombs that had devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  In July, The Catcher in the Rye hit New York’s bookstores, and the story of an alienated adolescent became an immediate bestseller. But a different book published that same month prompted heated discussions first in the offices of Kremlinologists in New York and then in the offices of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials in Washington. The book was a thin volume, just 103 pages long, with the unassuming title Russian Émigré Politics. It consisted of a preface, four chapters, an appendix, and an index, all compiled and edited by one George Fischer, a twenty-eight-year-old former US Army captain. Only two hundred copies had been printed.

  As it happened, Russian émigré politics was something the CIA had been trying to understand for years, with little success. Fischer’s book outlined the current situation better than any other sources had been able to.

  The CIA knew that Paris was no longer the capital of Russian emigration. Rather, the new wave of emigrants was centered in Germany—Munich, in particular. But mass Russian migration to New York City made it look as if it would soon take over Paris’s role as the center of anti-Soviet activity.1

  On July 2, 1951, William H. Jackson, deputy director of the CIA, wrote to George Kennan, Fischer’s boss and the most prominent US expert on Soviet affairs: “Dear George: thank you for sending us copies.… A hasty glance indicates it will make interesting reading and will be a valuable contribution to our library.”2 Kennan was the author of the famous “Long Telegram,” which he had sent to the secretary of state in 1946, while he was serving as chargé d’affairs in Moscow. In the Long Telegram, Kennan raised the alarm about Kremlin intentions, which led the United States to adopt a policy of containment. A few months later, President Harry S. Truman made him the US ambassador to Russia. When it came to Russia, Kennan’s opinion counted.

  On July 10, James M. Andrews, who ran the CIA’s Office of Collection and Dissemination, sent an internal note to the CIA’s general counsel: “Herewith the volume we spoke of over the phone. General Wyman feels that everyone in OSO [the CIA’s Office of Special Operations] should read it, and I believe it should be widely read in OPC [Office of Policy Coordination]. I should like to make 50 to 100 copies by photo offset. Will you advise me as to copyright etc?”3

  Major General Willard G. Wyman, the man mentioned in the letter, ran the OSO.4 The OPC was the US covert psychological/political warfare unit. These CIA departments were the most active in dealing with the Soviet Union. The next day, Andrews was duly advised on copyright issues. His department received fifty copies of the book.

  A week later, no less a personage than Director of Central Intelligence Walter B. Smith sent a personal note to the book’s author, George Fischer, saying in part, “I’m hoping… to see Mr. Kennan next time he is in Washington a
nd would be very glad to see you at the same time, if that is satisfactory to both of you.”

  Finally, it seemed, there was someone who could help the CIA navigate this mess.

  Fischer, a tall, bespectacled young man, fluent in both German and Russian, certainly knew a thing or two about Soviet Russia. His father was the prominent American journalist Louis Fischer, a longtime authority on Soviet affairs. In the 1920s and 1930s, Louis had sympathized with the Bolsheviks, and they had trusted him. That meant he had extraordinary access to the leaders of the Soviet state—a group photograph dated 1922 shows him standing next to Vladimir Lenin. Louis was married to Berta Mark, a Russian Jewish pianist who had worked as an interpreter for not one but two Soviet foreign ministers. They had met during World War I when Berta was living in New York.

  In the late 1920s, Louis moved from Germany to Moscow and brought Berta and their two sons with him. As a foreign correspondent for The Nation, Louis covered European affairs and reported from Spain as a member of the International Brigade. He mostly followed the Soviet line; Trotsky had called him a “Stalinist agent.”5

  By the early 1930s, harsh living conditions in Moscow prompted the Fischers to send their sons to Berlin to live with family friends—sociologist Paul Massing, of the famous Frankfurt School of Marxist theorists, and his wife, Hede. While Massing stayed largely in Berlin, Hede shuttled between Berlin and New York. A naturalized American citizen, Hede was also a Soviet agent, supervised by the resourceful Soviet spy Liza Gorskaya.

  When Hitler became chancellor and the Reichstag was burned down, Fischer was forced to bring his boys back to Moscow. This move came in the nick of time, as the Gestapo came after Massing just a few days later. They interned him at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he suffered five months of solitary confinement. After Massing was freed, he and Hede managed to escape Germany, and Moscow Center ultimately sent them both to the United States, to New York.

  In Moscow, George Fischer was placed at the prestigious school N32, along with the children of the party fat cats. The school, organized as a Communist commune with teachers chosen personally by Lenin’s wife, was just a stone’s throw from the famous House on the Embankment—an imposing, physically enormous, luxury apartment complex built along the river Moskva for the Soviet elite.6 George thrived there. He made friends. His two best buddies were Konrad and Markus Wolf, the sons of a famous German Communist writer.

  For almost seven years, George and his friends led the lives of the offspring of the Soviet elite. Summers were spent between Peredelkino, a village populated by Soviet writers, and a pioneer camp named after Ernst Thälmann, a leader of the German Communists. Autumns were devoted to preparation for the parade on Red Square, in which the children played a part. Surrounded by Comintern members and their children, George, an American/Soviet dual citizen, was duly indoctrinated. As a matter of course, he joined Komsomol, the Young Communists organization. All in all, he was well prepared to become a Soviet spy.

  And then Stalin started the Great Purge. Right away, some of Louis’s friends—and George’s friends’ fathers—were sent to the gulag. Louis Fischer didn’t like what he saw. While on assignment abroad, he decided not to return to the Soviet Union—even though his family was still in Moscow.7

  Louis also learned that Liza Gorskaya had lured his friends the Massings from New York to Moscow in 1937, as the purge was gaining momentum. Hede and Paul were placed in the Metropole Hotel and subjected to a series of exhausting questioning sessions: Gorskaya and Vasily Zarubin had been assigned to test their loyalty. Interrogations were mixed with parties, which were almost equally exhausting. On several of these occasions, with the alcohol flowing, Zarubin would sit in the center of the room playing the balalaika and singing Russian folk and Red army songs.8 This series of “conversations” lasted for months, and Zarubin told the Massings at one point that if they decided to give up their work for Soviet intelligence, it could end very badly for them.

  Now two American families—the Massings and the Fischers—felt trapped in Moscow, their futures uncertain. Finally, both leveraged their American citizenship: the Massings threatened to contact the American embassy, and Fischer asked First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to intervene on his family’s behalf. On the eve of World War II, the Soviet government let the two families leave for New York. They were now united by their fear and loathing of Stalin.

  Over the years, George remained close to Paul Massing, who he considered a mentor. George enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, but during World War II, he was drafted into the US Army and promptly sent back to Russia as a US liaison officer. George ended the war in Germany as an officer on General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s staff. By that time, he had become even more critical of Stalin’s regime.

  In Berlin, in May 1945, George met up again with friends from his Moscow days, Markus and Konrad Wolf, who were now Soviet officers in the occupation forces. George spent several days and nights with them arguing about the Soviet Union’s harsh approach to dealing with the Communist opposition in Berlin. Finally, they parted ways; the brothers stayed in Berlin while George returned to the United States to finish his education. (Konrad would become a prominent film director in East Germany, while Markus—known as Misha among his Soviet colleagues—would found the foreign intelligence branch of the Stasi, East Germany’s brutal secret service. Misha Wolf would lead the Stasi’s foreign intelligence branch for three decades.)

  Back in America, George Fischer didn’t break with Russia entirely; he decided to study Russian liberal movements in tsarist Russia. He was accepted to Harvard, where his classmates included Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger. Meanwhile, the book The God That Failed, an emotional denouncement of communism coauthored by George’s father, Louis Fischer, along with Andre Gide, Arthur Koestler, and other prominent writers—all former Communists—set the intellectual stage for the Cold War.

  As George began his research, he learned how Russia’s liberal movements had been routinely squeezed out of Russia by the tsar’s secret police. In exile, they flourished, founding networks, newspapers, and journals. Change in Russia had come about from the West, from the time of Alexander Herzen to that of Vladimir Lenin. An idealist, George believed he, too, could have a say about the future of Russia.

  Meanwhile, in Washington, DC, the US government tried to bring structure—or, at the very least, some modicum of order—to the Russian political émigré community. War with Stalin was inevitable, they thought, and coming soon. Desperate to find out more about this bellicose regime, the American government invited all kinds of people and entities, from American intelligence officers to private foundations to academic intellectuals, to contribute ideas and information.

  When the Soviet Union tested its first atom bomb in August 1949, Washington quickened the pace of war preparations, calculating that within a decade the United States would become vulnerable to a Soviet attack.9 Very few in the United States thought it would be a contained regional conflict—Washington planners imagined all-out war. And this conflict, they believed, would inevitably result in the collapse of the Soviet regime.

  The question, then, was, Who would govern a defeated Russia? Washington initially took the view formulated by George Kennan, then chief policy planner at the State Department, that the US government would help all émigré organizations return to Russia to try their luck. The American government didn’t want to take the responsibility of “sponsoring entirely” a specific group.10

  This plan sounded democratic, but it was not very practical. The United States could not win a war with Russia and then just trust its governance to chance; after all, Russia was the country with two hundred million people and atomic weapons. For a start, it made sense to study the list of probable leaders. Kennan then suggested that while the Americans waited for all-out war to break out, they could concurrently begin using political refugees, organized into “liberation committees,” to foment resistance behind the Iron Curtain.11

  Before
implementing this new strategy, the CIA prepared a report on existing Russian émigré organizations. It was dispiriting. The agency praised the ROVS, the military wing of the White emigration, as being—still—the most capable of the Russian organizations. CIA analysts admitted, however, that these Russian Civil War veterans were aging. After all, thirty years had passed since their exodus from Russia. It was unrealistic to think these elderly officers would be able to go back to Russia and lead the country when the time came.

  Next the CIA assessed a new generation of Soviet citizens living in the West for leadership potential. This group, located largely in Germany, had come to the West as displaced persons or prisoners of war during World War II and stayed. Nevertheless, the CIA concluded they were equally useless: this group “had even less capable and recognized leaders than its predecessor.”12

  The more they searched for future leaders in exile, the clearer it became to the US government that they knew almost nothing about the society of the country they were planning to fight and conquer. The Soviet borders were sealed, its national media printed and broadcast only propaganda, and Soviet citizens were discouraged from having any contact with foreigners. Some high-ranking American officials came to believe that only the behavioral sciences—a combination of sociology, social psychology, and cultural anthropology—could help the United States understand what made its enemy tick.

  But the United States couldn’t study its subject in Russia. The largest source of data that was readily available came from the Soviet citizens who had been captured by the German army and transported to the Reich to serve as forced labor in the factories and fields. There were also the Red army prisoners who found themselves in the American zone in Germany after the war ended. Now these men and women were living in displaced persons camps in Bavaria, near Munich. Many, fearing Stalin’s camps, didn’t want to return home.