The Soul of Viktor Tronko (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by David Quammen

  “Admirable. Very well. And here’s what I say to you: the who is General Akop Avvakian. The why?—that’s a very much more intricate question. But we’re getting there.”

  “Avvakian. He’s new.”

  “General Avvakian is decidedly not new. He has been with us unnoticed from the start. The man himself died in the late sixties, mind you, but his works and pomps, they abide.”

  “All right. Tell me about him.”

  “General Avvakian was an Armenian. A faithful Party member and an extremely capable officer. Not much else is known. Except that he became the Henry Ford of dezinformatsiya. He didn’t invent it. But he brought it forth upon the modern world.”

  “History is bunk.” Kessler is smiling and, unexpectedly, for the first time in their brief acquaintance, Claude Sparrow joins him.

  Back they go into the organizational chart of the KGB and the floor plan of the double building on Dzerzhinsky Square, where Sparrow seems to feel as comfortable as if he himself had spent years of his own working life there, which in one sense at least is certainly so. To him the Lubyanka is a very real place, all familiar and vivid and fully furnished in his mind. He gestures before Kessler with his long fluttery hands. He knows the style of the doorknobs. Disinformation campaigns were the province of a small but potent section referred to as Department D, under this fellow Avvakian, says Sparrow. Like Comrade Nechaev’s Special Service Two, it was part of the First Chief Directorate, that half of the KGB responsible for all snooping and meddling abroad. Also like Special Two, it had its office space on the third floor. Of course long before Avvakian there had always been efforts at elaborate disinformation; Lenin himself talked about using the tactic, says Sparrow; one could possibly even argue that it has some particular ineffable appeal to the Russian soul, though I won’t, says Sparrow. I despise that kind of loose thinking. Anyway Avvakian, as I say, was not Russian but Armenian. And it was by his influence that dezo began to be practiced systematically, strategically, and so very goddamn effectively. Only under Avvakian, finally, did the dezo function get status as a full department.

  That upgrading happened in ’58 or ’59, we think—just about coincident with the swastika operation. We think, Sparrow repeats. But we weren’t ever quite sure. Our information in the area was lamentably meager. Patchwork. Calculated guesses, extrapolations. Avvakian ran his shop quietly. And we were never so blessed as to have one of his people come strolling in our door. We never got hold of anyone from Department D. Not a single defector. Not a single significant arrest. Sparrow pauses a moment, lips pinched, shifting his rear on the bench. At least that’s the orthodox view, he adds. That’s the view that prevailed when I left the Agency. Never laid our fingers on a man from Department D, says Sparrow, his voice now full of dark irony. That’s the view of record.

  “What do you mean? It’s not your own view?”

  “Later,” says Sparrow. “We’re getting there.”

  Bogdan Kirilovich didn’t so much as mention General Avvakian. Not by name. In fact he never mentioned Department D, says Sparrow—responding presciently to Kessler’s next few questions before they can be asked. It is as if Sparrow anticipates a certain line of attack, perhaps having faced it before from the McAtee faction. No, Fedorenko’s hard knowledge in regard to Avvakian seemed to be even more meager than their own. But that wasn’t especially curious. Simply a measure of successful compartmentalization at the Lubyanka, says Sparrow, and of the general’s deftness of hand. No, these few facts they possessed about Avvakian did not come from Bogdan Kirilovich. These were scavenged and stitched together from the debriefings of several later, less significant defectors. In Fedorenko’s time, Sparrow and his colleagues had only the barest notions about KGB disinformation. Akop Avvakian was not a name they had ever heard. Department D was just a blank space and a question mark on their charts. What little they ever got, they got later. Not from Bogdan Kirilovich. He simply hadn’t had access. He’d had no opportunity to gather gossip about Avvakian. None. Evidently Sparrow feels some compulsion to stress this point redundantly.

  Kessler as discreetly as possible scratches a note: Fedorenko see-no hear-no Avvakian.

  “But he warned you, you say.”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “In general terms. General yet most insistent. He knew the standard methods—bloody hell yes he did, even if he didn’t know one particular man. This was an urgent concern for Bogdan Kirilovich. I had been hearing this from him forever, since those earliest days at the house with the garden. ‘They will send false defectors to discredit me,’ he said. He was haunted by that thought. ‘Others will come. Everything I have told you, they will deny it.’ He knew he had to persuade us, make us hear and believe, before that happened.”

  “Then Viktor Tronko arrived,” says Kessler.

  “Then Tronko arrived.”

  “And it was just as Fedorenko had predicted.”

  Claude Sparrow says nothing. He is breathing heavily through his nose.

  “Who was Viktor Tronko?” says Kessler.

  Sparrow gapes at him with the imploring eyes of an inpatient at a clinic for the bewildered.

  Kessler himself begins now to understand one or two small things, thank God. Or at least so he fancies. He is starting to have enough pieces in his grasp to play at the puzzle himself. Try this up here, hmm, no, but juxtapose with this bit over here, leave a little space, ellipsis, add this bit down here, and oh yes very interesting.

  Tronko’s first contact with the CIA, Kessler recalls from Pokorny’s account, was sometime a year or more prior to the actual defection. Rome, that’s right. Summer of 1962. That was also before Fedorenko. At which time Tronko had offered himself as an agent in place, Kessler recalls, for motives still unclear but claiming firmly that he had no interest in coming West. Career and family back in Moscow. Kessler wishes now that he’d taken a good set of notes on Mel’s every word but amid all that beer and flying bullshit it wasn’t hardly likely, and then in the immediate aftermath he lost presence of mind, damn. Year and a half later Tronko popped up again. This time it was in Vienna, and now his tune was drastically different: Take me I’m yours let’s go. Meanwhile there had been the defection of Fedorenko. Meanwhile also, of course, the events in Dallas. Tronko dropped the name “Lee Harvey Oswald,” and so Langley scooped the Russian in. How could they not? Debriefed him. Didn’t like or didn’t believe what they heard, or both. Debriefed him some more. Three years’ worth. What had they heard that was so dubious or so disagreeable? Pokorny made a big deal—Kessler remembers it now, aha—a big deal of the point that Viktor Tronko arrived saying there was not a high-level penetration. There was not any such creature as Dmitri. Did Mel utter the name “Dmitri”? No, that piece was only from Sparrow. Did Mel mention anything about Comrade Nechaev, or the mysterious 1958 visit? No. Why not? Because we ran out of beer and then he was too dead, is why. All of this crackles across Kessler’s brain like shorts on a circuit board while Claude Sparrow is hauling his mouth open to make a statement, a disclaimer, a hypothesis, Kessler can’t guess what. And then suddenly they are back at the Lubyanka. Sparrow leads the way, Kessler following as he can.

  It is late 1963. To be precise, it is the evening of November 23, Moscow time. Not the third floor now, not Special Two or General Avvakian’s domain or anywhere in the vicinity of the Chairman’s office; for a change they are in a more remote part of the building, far from the seat of power, at the end of a dreary corridor up on five in the newer half. A small office with one window looking down on an empty courtyard. In this office is Viktor Tronko, standing over a desk, along with an older man.

  Darkness and two feet of snow outside, already well into serious winter here, but instead of the usual ear-biting cold, Moscow has gotten a little warming spell, right up around freezing, with the double consequence of slush in the streets and a heavy lingering fog. A miserable, anxious day for
everyone in all ways. Most of the city’s residents, lacking decent boots again this year, have spent their day cursing the slush; Viktor Tronko has had more reason for cursing the fog. Planes out at Vnukovo Airport were landing after long delays, and with white-knuckled passengers, or else not at all. Since sundown most have simply been waved off. Tronko’s own flight circled for forty-five minutes, then was allowed down only after a threatening telephone call from the older man, waiting back here at the Lubyanka, who used his name and rank to convince the traffic controller that the more risky of two risky courses would be to say no. Impeding a mission of highest interest to the Central Committee itself, was one phrase that the traffic controller heard. The older man’s name is Rybakov, a major general. The plane in question was an Ilyushin-28, a military transport which had been commandeered that morning for a special service, a fast flight to Minsk and back, and this impressive anomaly also influenced the traffic controller. Viktor Tronko was the sole passenger. On the return trip, he was carrying a cardboard file.

  The file rests, now, on the desk before Tronko and his boss. It isn’t a thick packet of pages. Each sheet has been sewn into the binding with black thread, individually, according to standard procedure. Rybakov slowly turns those pages. Beside him, Viktor Tronko gawks helplessly, skimming some passages, reading others with great care, his eyes jumping all up and down every new page as it appears. The two men can hear each other breathe. They don’t talk. Excruciating nervous curiosity and mortal dread. They know roughly what they are looking for, and they hope desperately not to find it.

  Rybakov is the chief of a small department within the Second Chief Directorate, a unit that preys upon foreign visitors to the USSR, tourists, businessmen, scholars, attempting by various forms of suasion to recruit them for future KGB work. The file pertains to an American, Lee Oswald—an undesirable and, until yesterday, obscure young man—during the two and a half years he was tolerated as an expatriate in Minsk. Immediately upon hearing the news from Dallas, twenty hours earlier, Rybakov sent Tronko flying to Minsk. Get the file, don’t open it, bring it back. Good lord, Viktor Semyonovich. We must see how much, if at all, we have gotten ourselves implicated. Do you pray?

  “That’s what we were offered,” Sparrow says contemptuously. “A tableau. A little moment of high drama, quite vividly and convincingly rendered from Viktor Tronko’s point of view. There were others in similar vein. I call this one Two Russians Contemplating the File of Oswald. Complete with snow and fog and a low wooden desk in a dreary office. Everything but the smell of damp fur. Isn’t it marvelous?”

  “Which is the marvelous part?” says Kessler.

  “The sheer aesthetic fullness. The sense of form and irony. That ‘Do you pray?’ touch, for instance.”

  “Now you’re losing me.”

  “It’s all invented, Mr. Kessler. It never happened. Like so much that Tronko told us—not everything, mind you, but much—it was a lie. A methodically prefabricated lie.”

  “Dezo.”

  “Dezo, yes. Very good. That’s my point. That’s what Viktor Tronko was. Not a defector. Not a deputy in Rybakov’s department of the Second CD. Nothing like that. No. He was simply the most intricate dezo operation that General Avvakian ever launched.”

  “And the most successful?”

  “Yes. Certainly. And the most successful, God damn him.”

  “Do you have any proof?”

  “None at all. Not the kind you mean. No scraps of paper or incriminating photos, no. Only logic. Only the internal consistency of what I can tell you.”

  “All quite vividly rendered in its own right,” says Kessler.

  Tronko’s entire body of testimony over the space of years was nothing else than a great ragged quilt of contradictions and recantations and solecisms and admitted falsehoods, followed by newer falsehoods and then still newer recantations, to hear Claude Sparrow tell it. As a liar, Tronko was more persistent than deft, Sparrow claims. As a liar, he was shameless and indefatigable. An amazing feat of sheer endurance, in fact, that he had caused anyone at all eventually to believe him. But he certainly had. God knows he had. How to explain it? I don’t intend to explain it, Sparrow says. I’m not obliged to explain it, since I was not among the believers. Sheer endurance in his clumsy lies, a brute form of superior mental stamina—or who can say what other factors. A victory of endurance, Sparrow says slyly, is the most generous explanation.

  The damage had largely been done before we were ever allowed near him, Sparrow claims. November of 1964. Then finally, belatedly, we were given our inning. Kessler understands this new and more narrow use of the first person plural: meaning not Langley but just Sparrow’s own fiefdom, the Counterintelligence section, the forces of keen and skeptical vigilance. Maybe it was irreversible by then, Sparrow says. Maybe Viktor Tronko had made himself inevitable. So many lies had already been told, and ineptly challenged, and refined. Until they were acceptable. So many opportunities had been squandered. A pattern had been set. Mental habits had arisen. Commitments formed. Momentum. But I don’t think it was irreversible, Sparrow says. I tell you that quite frankly, to my own derogation, he says. I think there did still exist a real opportunity for us to undo what had been done, everything—commitments, momentum, everything. What had been done, and what was threatening. But we somehow missed it ourselves.

  “November of 1964,” Kessler says. He also writes the date on his pad. “You get your inning. This would be what Mel referred to as the second hostile interrogation?”

  “No. Wait. Not yet,” Sparrow says. “Another story first.”

  Viktor Tronko was thirty-four years old when the plane carrying him and McAtee landed in Washington, Sparrow says. He held the rank of colonel within the KGB and had been serving most recently as deputy chief of the Tourist Department, Second Chief Directorate. His immediate superior was Major General T. F. Rybakov, a conscientious man, unusually forthright and fair-minded for a high KGB officer, with whom Tronko worked on good terms. He liked Rybakov, who was a decent boss and who had also to some extent functioned as Tronko’s personal mentor. Brought the younger man into his department, under his wing. Trusted Viktor Semyonovich with large responsibilities. In fact Tronko was grieved to contemplate the colossal problems that his own defection was sure to cause Trofim Filippovich. Things always went hard for those left behind in such cases, both the family and the professional connections, and it was T. F. Rybakov who had signed an order approving Tronko as security man for that trade delegation to Vienna. If Rybakov were lucky, if he had enough powerful friends, his career was merely over. Less lucky and he would go to a camp.

  Tronko had been born in Moscow, a privileged son of the new Soviet elite, Sparrow says. His father held a comfortable position in the Central Council of Trade Unions, so called, as editor of the—

  “Moscow, you say,” Kessler interrupts. “But isn’t Tronko another Ukrainian name? Just like Fedorenko?”

  “The name, yes. Don’t make too much of that. Tronko’s father was probably half Ukrainian, or a quarter. But with nothing like Fedorenko’s sense of ethnic identity. By the time Viktor Semyonovich was born, the family were pure Muscovites.”

  “Fedorenko, Nosenko, Tronko, Shevchenko,” says Kessler. “What is it that turns these Ukrainians into defectors? Gouzenko. And wasn’t there also a Levchenko? Don’t the Armenians ever defect, or the Uzbekians, or the Russians themselves? Do the Ukrainian mothers put something special in their kids’ porridge? Or is it coincidence?”

  “Tronko was a Muscovite,” Sparrow repeats dryly. “Born there. Assimilated.”

  —whose father, Sparrow resumes, had a nice job as editor of the house organ of the Trade Unions Council, a newspaper known as Trud. Tronko’s mother was an anesthesiologist, and the daughter of a diplomat. Tronko himself was an only child, growing up pampered and preened in the Moscow equivalent of a Westchester County childhood. Private music lessons. Private instru
ction in conversational German, tennis, and gymnastics. His playmates carefully screened, according to their parents’ social standing within the great workers’ republic and whether recent political developments had left the father in or out of favor. Thanks to family pull and his own decent scores on the qualifying exams, Viktor Semyonovich was admitted to the Institute of International Relations, Moscow’s most prestigious university and a virtually failproof ticket to the good life. For six years he studied languages, history, diplomacy, foreign legal and economic systems, military strategy, and a smattering of philosophy and science. He submitted to having the surface of his intelligence buffed up with what was considered polish. He achieved adequate if not remarkable grades. He succeeded in staying out of exactly and only those forms of postadolescent trouble that were not winked at, sating himself with those that were. In other words he pickled his liver in vodka, he chased girls and caught quite a few, but he never was heard giving voice to a heretical or even mildly original thought. Notwithstanding its atmosphere of academic discipline—which was as intense but intermittent as the field of an electromagnet—the Institute of International Relations made a fine playground for young Viktor Semyonovich, future Soviet official, precocious sot and rake. The Institute, six years of it, was his own long Fort Lauderdale weekend. He lived at his parents’ high-toned apartment on Kutuzovsky Prospekt and commuted to school by taxi, spending more in a month on those cab fares than the Institute’s few poorer students received as their monthly stipend.

  He seems to have been quite the little dandy, says Sparrow. Yet throughout this period he also put in his time, prudently, grudgingly, with the school’s Komsomol organization, the youth branch of the Party. In another life he would have been president of the local JayCees, says Sparrow; but a cynical, smarmy JayCees president. Kessler doubts there can be any other kind but does not interrupt. The Komsomol meetings were a tedious and demeaning chore, a charade of Marxist-Leninist zeal, to which Tronko subjected himself only in the spirit of leaving nothing undone. If there had been a safe way to circumvent Komsomol, still taking credit for it later by means of a falsified recommendation or some such, he would have done that. He was lazy but ambitious. A pungent combination.