The Man with the Poison Gun

by Serhii Plokhy

  “So we came to an agreement,” remembered Stashinsky, “and I warned her that everything we had discussed must be between ourselves. I told her she must not only say nothing in Moscow about what we had discussed but that for the present she mustn’t say anything to her parents—we must keep to the old ‘legend.’ She agreed to this.”7

  21

  INTRODUCING THE BRIDE

  On January 9, 1960, Stashinsky and Inge boarded a train to Moscow. In their pockets were Soviet passports provided by Sergei Damon. A few days earlier, Damon had asked Inge for a photo, and now she had in her purse a brand-new Soviet passport issued in the name of Inga Fedorovna Krylova. Stashinsky, as always, traveled on the passport of Aleksandr Antonovich Krylov. While Stashinsky and Inge were not yet married, the Krylovs were. In Moscow a KGB officer picked them up and took them to the Hotel Ukraine, where Stashinsky had stayed during his first visit to Moscow in April 1959. But he was not supposed to show familiarity with the hotel or the city. His KGB bosses wanted him to tell Inge that he was in Moscow for the first time and that the trip was a reward for his good work for East German intelligence.

  Stashinsky’s KGB bosses were working hard to assess his fiancée. Arkadii Fabrichnikov, the KGB officer who escorted the couple on their sightseeing and shopping tours in the city, wanted to know what she thought about Moscow and Soviet life in general. He asked her opinion about everything she saw. Inge was not supposed to know that he was a KGB man, although it was hard not to guess his identity, given his constant presence. She played the role of an excited tourist rather well, but privately she asked Stashinsky from time to time whether she was supposed to show familiarity with a particular detail or not. The KGB tried to keep tabs on the couple whenever their officially assigned escort was not around. Their belongings in the Hotel Ukraine were searched. Stashinsky also suspected that the room in the Hotel Moscow—to which they had moved from the Hotel Ukraine at the KGB’s insistence—had been bugged. In Stashinsky’s presence, Fabrichnikov had quarreled for a while with a hotel clerk who wanted to give the couple the “wrong” room.1

  Inge, who was reluctant to travel in the first place, was anything but impressed by the reception they received. In fact, she was terrified by what she saw around her. At the railway station in Warsaw, where the train stopped on the way to Moscow, she already felt trapped, betrayed, and all but sold into slavery. That feeling only grew stronger in Moscow. Stashinsky and his KGB handlers showed her masterpieces of tsarist architecture and marble decorations in the Soviet subway stations, but she was shocked by the contrast between the magnificent decor of the buildings and the poorly dressed people inside of them. Images of impoverished women wearing thick headscarves, calico coats, and felt boots, carrying bags full of bread on their backs, became forever engraved in her memory. Then there were the drunks, who seemed to be everywhere, often congregating in subway stations and taking refuge from the cold in the marble halls of the buildings. Those who did not make it there lay unattended in the snow in freezing temperatures.

  Inge found the sanitary conditions in the Soviet capital utterly appalling. The trash cans were full and always dirty, so one had to be careful not to brush against them. People would spit everywhere. She called the toilets a “public tragedy.” Some of them were nothing more than holes in the ground, surrounded by filth, emitting a terrible smell. “I cannot think about toilets. Terrible!” she would confide to a journalist a few years later. The KGB handlers’ efforts to charm her and make her appreciate Moscow and the Soviet way of life were futile. She found both Arkadii Fabrichnikov, whom she knew as “Alexander,” and his wife (or the woman who pretended to be his wife), whom she called a “German-hater,” pretentious. At an expensive restaurant dinner to which Stashinsky and Inge were invited, Mrs. Fabrichnikov seemed barely to touch a plate full of caviar and other delicacies, saying that people generally believed Russian women to be overweight because they ate too much. It seemed that nothing could please Inge. Even the local children looked unattractive to her. She was depressed and often cried.2

  Stashinsky and Inge spent two months in the USSR, mostly in Moscow, with a two-week trip to Leningrad, and had plenty of opportunities to compare the realities of Soviet life with the image presented by official propaganda. A few days after their arrival in Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev delivered a long address to the Soviet parliament in which he boasted about Soviet economic achievements compared to those of the United States. Between 1953 and 1959, he pointed out, Soviet production of pig iron and steel had grown by 57 percent, while American production had dropped by 16 percent. This “achievement” actually indicated that the Soviet Union was stuck in pre–World War II economic thinking. To Khrushchev, however, it was evidence of Soviet superiority.

  Sputnik and the other Soviet successes in outer space were regarded as further proof that the Soviets were winning the technological race with the United States. This was the point that Khrushchev tried to make in July 1959 in his “kitchen debate” with the American vice president, Richard Nixon, who visited Moscow to open an American exhibition there. The debate took place on the exhibition grounds in a kitchen fully equipped with new American appliances. Khrushchev told Nixon that the Soviet Union was more technologically advanced than the United States and that the US advantage in the production of consumer goods would be obliterated in seven years. The debate was shown on television more than once in the United States, but only once, very late at night, in the Soviet Union. The Soviet authorities did not want the viewers to see the head of their country admitting that it was behind the capitalist West in anything.3

  It is unlikely that Inge ever heard of the kitchen debate, which took place six months before her arrival in Moscow. There can be little doubt, however, that she took anything Khrushchev said on the subject with a hefty grain of salt. When she was alone with Stashinsky, she was not shy about noting the yawning gap between official pronouncements and the realities of Soviet life. Earlier in their relationship, Stashinsky had taken to defending the official Soviet line, but by now he was running out of arguments. “You will come to your senses,” she used to tell him. “It’s all quite different from what you have beaten into your head.” He knew that she was right.

  Before Stashinsky received final approval to speak with Inge about his involvement with the KGB, his bosses had made a last attempt to persuade him to drop her. The task was taken on by Colonel Georgii Ishchenko, the head of the émigré department of the KGB foreign intelligence directorate. Ishchenko asked Stashinsky whether he still wanted to marry Inge. Upon Stashinsky’s positive response, he told him, “Take care that in future you do not regret having made such a decision.” He then told Stashinsky that he could now talk to Inge about his involvement—and subsequently, hers—with the KGB. In Moscow, as previously in East Berlin, the KGB wanted to listen in on the conversation. Ishchenko asked Stashinsky to talk to Inge in the room in which they were conversing, where no one would eavesdrop. Stashinsky knew that the room was bugged. He later told his KGB handlers that he had been forced to have the conversation elsewhere. But Inge, he reported happily, had been informed about his involvement with the KGB and was ready to help him in his work.4

  Inge’s agreement to cooperate, which Stashinsky relayed to his bosses in late February, was supposed to clear the way for their return to East Berlin and eventual marriage. But there were nerve-wracking delays. The KGB ordered Stashinsky to return the tickets he had already bought for Berlin and extended the term of their exit visas. Stashinsky and Inge began to worry. Had the KGB figured out what they were up to? At Inge’s urging, Stashinsky finally decided that they would have to leave Moscow without KGB approval. But as soon as he began to inquire about air tickets to Berlin, permission to leave Moscow was granted. On the eve of March 8, International Women’s Day, which was widely and lavishly celebrated in the Soviet Union, Arkadii Fabrichnikov showed up in Stashinsky’s suite in the company of another senior officer, who handed Inge a box of sweets and greeted her on the
occasion of the holiday. The officer also told her they had been granted permission to marry. The ceremony would take place in East Germany. There was, however, one further condition: the couple would have to come back to Moscow for Stashinsky to undergo a year of further training. Inge wept.5

  The couple returned to Berlin on March 9, 1960, two months to the day after their arrival in the Soviet capital. They had played their parts admirably and achieved their goal. The wedding took place on April 23, 1960. They first registered their marriage at the East Berlin central records office, and then, against KGB advice and without the knowledge of Stashinsky’s Karlshorst handlers, had a religious wedding at the Golgotha Evangelical Church on Borsigstrasse—a late nineteenth-century red brick Gothic-style building that had miraculously survived the Allied bombing of Berlin. In Moscow, the KGB officials had told him to proceed with the religious ceremony only if a refusal would lead to a breach with his in-laws. But he never tried to dissuade Inge from a church wedding. “I wanted everything to be as it should be,” he remembered later. “I knew, too, that it would make my very religious parents happy.” Stashinsky was keeping a growing number of secrets from his KGB controllers.

  At the reception that followed, Inge wore a white dress and a wedding headpiece with a veil. Stashinsky was dressed in a black suit with a white shirt and white tie. In the photo taken at the wedding table, they both looked content, if less than exuberant. Inge had accidentally closed her eyes, as if recalling the stressful events of the last few months. Stashinsky looked straight at the camera, appearing more resolute and determined than happy. Inge’s grandmother had died on that day, but her relatives postponed sending a telegram. They wanted her to be happy on her wedding day.6

  22

  MONTH OF THE SPY

  Stashinsky and Inge left Berlin for Moscow on May 9, 1960, the fifteenth anniversary of the Nazi surrender at Karlshorst. Inge later recalled that instead of going on a honeymoon, they traveled to the Soviet Union—the greatest nightmare she could imagine. They made a stopover in Warsaw, where they had told Inge’s relatives they were going to live. An officer from the local KGB station supplied Stashinsky with Polish postcards and stamps, as well as with a price list of products and consumer goods. Inge’s thirteen-year-old brother, Fritz, had asked for the postcards and stamps. The prices were needed to convincingly lie to Inge’s relatives about everyday life in Warsaw. The couple would use a Warsaw address provided by the KGB—the letters were to be picked up there and delivered to Moscow. Inge and Stashinsky’s letters to Berlin would be sent in envelopes with Warsaw postmarks. They told her unsuspecting relatives that they would be back in a year.

  At the Warsaw railway station in Moscow, Stashinsky and Inge were met by the ever-present and polite Arkadii Fabrichnikov, who introduced them to their new case officer, Sergei Bogdanovich Sarkisov. The KGB was kind enough to provide them with an apartment, but Inge saw it as anything but a gift. The apartment was in a new construction complex with no paved road leading to it, or even a pathway. Whenever it rained, their shoes, socks, and clothes were covered with mud. The apartment was, at best, a work in progress. The parquet floor was installed in a way that made tar come up between the pieces of wood; traces of tar also covered the tiles in the washroom. The floors were uneven, making the table, chairs, and cabinets wiggle; the toilet pipe was not properly adjusted; the door to the kitchen would not move; and a window did not close properly, allowing water to seep over to the ceiling when it rained. Last but not least, Inge hated the wallpaper. “The wallpaper you see in Russia makes you dizzy,” she remembered later.

  What Inge saw when she left her apartment depressed her as much as the interior. In the hallways, she would try to avoid stepping on the fish and chicken heads scattered all over the place. Sunflower seeds were everywhere, and no one ever tried to sweep or mop the common areas. It seemed that everyone in the apartment building had a cat, and the cats would all be let out at night to start their wailing, which made it hard for Inge to sleep. If it wasn’t the cats, then it was the neighbors, who threw raucous parties late into the night, shaking the light fixtures in her apartment. Life became an endless nightmare, and Inge seemed to be reaching the end of her rope. She was not shy about making her displeasure known to Stashinsky and his KGB handlers alike. They tried to save the situation by moving the couple into a different apartment, this time in a well-established area close to the city center. It was a positive change but came too late to alter Inge’s overall attitude toward the Soviet way of life.1

  The Stashinskys’ new home was located in the northern subdivision of Ostankino, which was inhabited predominantly by blue-collar workers and their families. In the mid-1960s, a monument to the Conquerors of the Cosmos was erected in the area, and many of its streets were given cosmos-related names. One was renamed Star Avenue (Zvezdnyi bulvar), while another was named for Sergei Korolev, the chief designer of Sputnik and the first Soviet rockets, and yet another for Friedrich Zander, a pioneer of rocket science. By the end of the 1960s, the area was also home to the Ostankino Television Center and tower, which for some time was the tallest free-standing structure in the world.2

  Stashinsky and Inge could get home from downtown Moscow by taking the subway to the Exhibition of the Achievements of the Soviet Economy station. The nearby exhibition, with its fountain surrounded by statues of young women dressed in national costumes and representing the union of Soviet republics, was a showcase not only of the Soviet “friendship of peoples,” but also of Soviet technological progress. Soviet and foreign visitors alike could judge for themselves how accurately the innovations displayed at the exhibition represented the realities of everyday Soviet life. Inge had learned from her first visit to Moscow that the difference was enormous. The Russian dissident writer Aleksandr Zinoviev would later dwell on the gap between propaganda and reality in his novel The Yawning Heights, a satire on the “shining heights” of Soviet propaganda campaigns.

  Stashinsky’s days as an employee of the émigré department were over. He was now officially under the auspices of the illegals department. Inge found his new handler, Sergei Sarkisov, a KGB operative in his early thirties, much more affable than Fabrichnikov. Sarkisov also spoke better German, which he had allegedly picked up from talking to a West German capitalist friend. Sarkisov explained to Stashinsky that his training would include individual lessons with a tutor of German and English, going over the German school curriculum, and reading the latest Western literature so as to blend into his new environment successfully. He would also take radio and photography classes. The training of candidates for illegal work abroad was a task that the KGB took very seriously. “The Soviet investment in each illegal agent is immense,” wrote the onetime Munich CIA base chief William Hood. According to Hood, the KGB used illegals to “handle agents too sensitive to risk placing in contact with case officers under legal cover in an embassy. Other illegals serve[d] primarily as communications experts, conduits for information being funneled to Moscow from agents in place.”

  That was indeed one of the tasks that Stashinsky’s boss, General Aleksei Krokhin, had suggested that he would perform in the future. But he also told his star agent that he would continue to carry out assassinations. Stashinsky was learning to become an illegal of a sort unknown to Hood—an assassin in deep cover living in a Western country who could strike on relatively short notice whenever and wherever his KGB bosses and their Kremlin overlords deemed appropriate. It was decided that he would be trained as a barber so that the two of them, Stashinsky and Inge, could open a barbershop as a cover for their espionage activities. Stashinsky was offered a choice of two countries for his future work: Switzerland or England. He decided on Switzerland. Inge did not care where they went, as long as she could escape her virtual imprisonment in Moscow.3

  In May 1960, the month Stashinsky and Inge arrived in Moscow for their training, Soviet rocket scientists finally caught up with American technology. On May 1, International Workers’ Day, the Soviet high-alt
itude S-75 Dvina rocket, fired by a missile battery near the city of Sverdlovsk (Ekaterinburg) in the Ural Mountains, downed an American Lockheed U-2 high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft piloted by thirty-two-year-old Captain Francis Gary Powers of the CIA special air force unit. Powers survived the ordeal, but so did the parts of the plane that contained high-resolution cameras and the photos they had taken. The Soviets captured the downed pilot and collected what was left of the plane.

  The Americans had been caught red-handed spying on the Soviet Union, although they were not immediately aware of it. President Dwight Eisenhower initially believed that Powers had died in the incident; he authorized a statement denying Soviet accusations of espionage and claiming that the lost aircraft was a weather research plane. Khrushchev, under growing pressure at home for being soft on the Americans, felt that he had no choice but to cancel his participation in the forthcoming Paris summit on the status of Berlin. He also withdrew the invitation that he had earlier issued to Eisenhower to visit the USSR in June, causing an international scandal of unprecedented proportions.4

  In the aftermath of the canceled summit and the humiliating U-2 incident, the White House and the CIA launched a damage-control campaign, trying to prove to the world that spying was a normal aspect of international relations: the Soviet nuclear arsenal could not be left unassessed and unchecked. They also claimed that the Soviet Union was more guilty of spying than the United States was. Secretary of State Christian A. Herter told Congress that there were approximately 300,000 Soviet agents working in twenty-seven countries around the world. Between 10,000 and 12,000 of them were so-called “master agents.” The authorities in the Federal Republic of Germany provided their own statistics on the matter. In eight years they had made 18,300 arrests in connection with Soviet espionage activities, declared the West Germans in the wake of the U-2 scandal.5