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

by David Quammen

  “Another of Mel’s coinage, as I recall. ‘The Archangel Jedediah.’”

  “Yes,” Sparrow says.

  Ivan, at this stage, seemed to be placed within the Scientific and Technical Department of the First Chief Directorate. That was merely an informed guess, since Ivan himself wouldn’t say. He was ready to be helpful, to perform treason against his country and espionage against his colleagues, but not ready yet to reveal much about himself. Neither his present position within the Organs, nor his motivation for this reckless leap toward McAtee. Based on the content of his first three or four messages, it could be deduced almost with certainty that he was somewhere within the First CD, and the Scientific and Technical Department seemed a likelihood, being one of several subjects about which his knowledge appeared to be rather full. He had described the leverage that department exercised over a certain state committee, the GNTK, responsible for allocating scientific resources and deciding which Soviet scientists would be allowed to attend international conferences. He had supplied a profile of the second deputy to the chief of that department, a pathetic little drunk with a harridan wife and an imperious mistress in the Bolshoi, who—this second deputy—might be ripe for some form or another of subornation. He had also told of an operation by which a Soviet agent under diplomatic status in Ottawa was harvesting valuable information about heavy-water reactor technology. Concerning this latter case, Eames and McAtee together determined that there should be no alert given, not yet, to the Canadian government; that it would be preferable for now to sit on that information, in the interest of safeguarding Ivan’s position. But what position? demanded Claude Sparrow. I thought we’ve already admitted we don’t know his position. For all we know he could be in the Department of Lutes and Balalaikas, merely gulling us into thinking he’s over in Scientific and Technical. It might be his own means of covering his tracks, Sparrow argued. And we can’t gauge how valuable his information is unless we use it, Sparrow said. Sparrow was heard and overruled. He had half a temptation to call up the Canadians and warn them himself, he tells Kessler. But he did not.

  Interestingly, Sparrow says, the diplomat in Ottawa went back to Moscow a couple of months later. The Canadians had expelled him on their own initiative.

  McAtee insisted, thereafter, that the Ottawa case went toward proving Ivan’s authenticity, by confirming that he was giving them valuable stuff. This logic left Sparrow short of wind. In his view, Ottawa suggested precisely the opposite. The Canadians had already been onto that man. Ivan had given away nothing.

  Meanwhile the period of Ivan’s supposedly selfless generosity came to an end. For the first year he had simply offered his messages without demand for pampering or payment, a virtually cost-free agent; no longer. During the spring and summer of 1968, Ivan began wheedling at McAtee for some form of help. He didn’t want money. Lumps of suspicious, extraneous cash would have been no good to him in Moscow anyway, says Sparrow. And he didn’t want to escape to the West. Not yet, at least. He wanted advancement. A little boost up the corporate ladder. His career rise at the Lubyanka had proceeded swiftly enough so far, he was recognized as a capable officer, but the next major promotion might take a long time unless he happened to be fortunate in scoring some sort of remarkable coup. He might waste years waiting. On the other hand, such a coup could be arranged rather easily. And my gain will be your gain, Ivan reminded McAtee. McAtee granted the point in principle: yes, they were willing to help Ivan’s career if they could. What did he want?

  What did he want? This, Sparrow declares bleakly, is how the case of Daniel Petrosian entered into it.

  “Petrosian the physicist?”

  “Yes. You’ve heard of him, then.”

  “Barely. I recall there was a little stink when he disappeared. Missing, under damning circumstances, and presumed to have gone back across to the Russians.”

  “Aagh. That’s totally false,” says Sparrow. “We never made any such presumption. We knew too well what had happened.”

  “Ivan had eaten him.”

  Sparrow flattens his hands together in prayerful fashion and presses the fingertips hard into his upper lip, just below the nasal septum. This is to indicate the great measures of patience and reserve with which he offers his answer to Kessler. It might also reflect a real depth of feeling.

  “What we did to Petrosian wasn’t funny. It was inexcusable.”

  Daniel Petrosian was a physicist, yes, that much Kessler has got right. A very brilliant physicist, one of the world’s leading experts on the quantum theory of metals. He was also a courageous, forthright man. I met him only one time, Sparrow says, but I was impressed by his personal force. “Rectitude” is an old-fashioned word, Sparrow says, possibly even obsolete; Daniel Petrosian possessed rectitude. There was an aura of moral authority to him that was quite strong. No blazing righteousness, no readiness to prescribe or to judge. He simply knew what he himself thought to be proper, and had all intention of acting on that. I liked the man very much, based on our single short acquaintance, says Sparrow. I was disgusted and shamed by what happened.

  He had defected to us in 1961, says Sparrow, during an international conference of scientists that was being held in Vermont. Before that he had been one of the show dogs of Soviet physics. He had won a Stalin Prize and a Vavilov Gold Medal, and was elected to full membership in the Soviet Academy of Sciences at age thirty-three, younger than anyone else had ever made it except Sakharov. Petrosian had been a junior colleague to Igor Tamm at the time Tamm did the work for which he later received his Nobel, and he was working again under Tamm, at the Physics Institute of the U.S.S.R., during the early 1950s when they produced the design for the first Soviet H-bomb. That was the little chore, of course, that earned Petrosian both his Stalin and his Vavilov. Afterward he was allowed to withdraw gradually from weapons work and devote himself to more theoretical problems. He remained at the Physics Institute. His chief interest was in the properties of electron emission among metals, I think it was, says Sparrow, but don’t ask me to explain what that means. The authorities humored him, within reason, because they owed him so much for having helped put that one gadget into their hands, and because he was famous in the West. Famous among scientists, anyway. He had published three or four landmark papers. He was permitted to go abroad for the first Pugwash Conference in 1959.

  It was probably Ivan’s own department (at least the department which Ivan would be working in, or pretending to work in, eight years later, says Sparrow) that made all the decisions, by way of their puppet committee, about which scientists would be allowed to attend these Pugwash things. They liked Petrosian for that sort of role: he was eminent, he was articulate in English, and he seemed still at the time to be such a true believer. He could be trusted to promote the correct line. Soviet weapons scientists urge their Western colleagues toward peace and disarmament. It made for good headlines in the European press, says Sparrow.

  That was the sole merit of the entire Pugwash movement, so far as the Soviet mandarins were concerned, Sparrow claims. To them, it was merely a fine forum from which to create misleading headlines. An opportunity to grease up their international image through the application of unctuous rhetoric. Notwithstanding the best intentions of Bertrand Russell and all his credulous friends, to the Soviet government the whole thing was just a charade. A ridiculous charade, but a potentially useful one. So the Soviets were happy to participate fully, send some of their top scientists, and try to give the impression that the real implacable warmongers were all in Washington.

  “How do you know?”

  “Petrosian,” says Claude Sparrow. “We have this from him.”

  In September of 1961 a Pugwash Conference was held for the first time within U.S. territory—at a resort lodge just outside of Stowe, Vermont. The declared theme of the conference this year was “International Cooperation in Pure and Applied Science,” or something to that effect, Sparrow says. The speech
es, the earnest expressions of fellowhood and resolve, were presumably interchangeable with those from all previous Pugwash gatherings. Daniel Petrosian was in attendance, one of a dozen delegates representing the Soviet scientific community. Also attending, on the U.S. delegation, was a woman named Martha Gillespie, a biochemist from Boston University. Halfway through the conference Petrosian and this Martha Gillespie suddenly went missing. They had each disappeared sometime between lunch and the afternoon session. By six o’clock that evening they were in an FBI office in downtown Boston, having arrived there together in the woman’s car. They had made good time down from Vermont because Dr. Gillespie, at the insistence of Petrosian, had driven like a maniac. Five days later the U.S. State Department granted political asylum to Daniel Petrosian.

  Contrary to the hysterical assertions that came immediately from Pravda and Izvestia, says Sparrow, Martha Gillespie was an authentic and somewhat dowdy scientist, not a paid seductress under CIA control. Actually we weren’t hiring seductresses that year, none at all, says Sparrow. And if we had been, we wouldn’t have picked a frump biochemist with Pugwash leanings. Petrosian seemed to care for her, though, and that was what counted. They had met two Pugwashes earlier, in Austria, and had renewed their mutual infatuation at the previous year’s conference in Moscow. Needless to say, in Moscow they were discreet. With the KGB watching everything, they must have confined themselves to professional dialogue and moony glances. Perhaps that restraint only helped their passion build steam, says Sparrow.

  But the romance with Martha Gillespie was not the main factor behind Petrosian’s defection, says Sparrow. The bolt down off that mountain and into Boston was not something done on an afternoon’s hot impulse. Petrosian had been waiting to make his break. He had long since wanted to get out. I couldn’t tell you whether this realization came before or after his first involvement with Pugwash, maybe Petrosian himself didn’t quite know, says Sparrow, but I can tell you that for some time, at least since the Moscow conference, he had only been waiting. Maintaining appearances, careful to keep himself in good smell with the security thugs, so that his chance to travel wouldn’t be jeopardized. Waiting for his moment to break. The choice of Stowe for the 1961 conference had come like a gift from heaven. This was not what you heard from the gossip columnists in Izvestia nor from the left-wing European press, of course, says Sparrow. From them you heard only about the tartish Miss Gillespie, the decadent Petrosian, and Petrosian’s poor wife back in Moscow.

  Admittedly, his situation was complicated. There was indeed a wife. But Petrosian was probably the least decadent, most conscience-ridden man any of us is ever likely to meet, says Sparrow. The first thing he did after the grant of asylum, even as he began submitting to all the various debriefings, was to file a formal divorce petition back through the Soviet courts. Of course the Soviet authorities laughed at him. His petition was not in order, they said; anyway, he had lost his citizenship and therefore had no standing to file; the marriage was indissoluble. If this seems faintly illogical to us, well, says Sparrow, the Soviet courts were in business to dispense revolutionary justice, not logic. The immediate reaction of Mrs. Petrosian was not reported.

  Petrosian anguished about this woman, the wife, with whom his relations had long ago deteriorated to the level of bitter mutual toleration. He was worried much less about how she might feel than about what might be done to her. It was four or five years since they had shared any real emotional bond. She had drifted through several casual affairs during that time and he had had one, previous to Dr. Gillespie, but the wife had consented to maintain their pretense of marriage because divorce proceedings would have hurt his career and, worst of all, destroyed any chance of his traveling out to international conferences. She had played on with the pantomime, as a grudging favor to him. Now it was she who would suffer the reprisals. He had used her badly and he knew it—though the reality was much different from the melodrama of caddish betrayal that ran in the Soviet press. He consoled his own conscience with one hope: that they wouldn’t kill her, because to do that would set him free of the marriage.

  The first official announcement described Mrs. Petrosian as hysterical with grief, and under hospital care. That might mean anything. It covered the fact of her disappearance from their Moscow apartment, but the true details of her absence were still unknowable. The second announcement was that she had attempted suicide and failed. This was more ominous. Attempted suicide was an entirely plausible prospect, unfortunately, since she would understand that her life of privilege was now over, and that the best she could expect was a future of ostracism from her class, a return to hard living, and tireless bureaucratic harassment. Equally possible was that she had been packed off to internal exile, or to a camp. She might also be dead. Even if it had truly been a suicide attempt, and she had succeeded, the authorities would not release that particular information because, again, it would set Petrosian free. Let the traitor dangle.

  Petrosian did dangle. His relations with Martha Gillespie were in abeyance while he wrote endless letters to Moscow, filed endless petitions through the U.S. Embassy, trying to learn the truth about his marital status and the fate of his wife. He wanted to proceed honorably. As honorably as possible, at least, given what he had already done to the woman. Dr. Gillespie waited in Boston, ready to marry Petrosian or at least set up housekeeping. Evidently the difficulty of obtaining a Soviet divorce decree came as some surprise to her; Petrosian, or maybe her own politics, may have led her to assume there would be no problem. Also unexpected was Petrosian’s stubborn reluctance to ignore the whole marriage question and move ahead with her as they had planned, getting himself up to Boston and finding a university position while she continued at BU. Martha Gillespie’s affectionate exasperation became less affectionate after six months had passed.

  Petrosian meanwhile was still down in Washington, living under protective guard and cooperating with every defense- and science-related agency that wanted a piece of his time. Another point of growing tension between him and Dr. Gillespie. Some of his new associations must not have seemed very Pugwashly. He was debriefed in succession by the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, two thermonuclear experts from the Atomic Energy Commission, the Institute for Defense Analyses, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the—

  “Also known as Darkest DARPA,” Kessler inserts.

  “Also known as DARPA,” Sparrow says blandly. “In those days it was just ARPA. The superfluous D for Defense was added later. To indicate, I suppose, that these were not advanced research projects in agronomy.”

  “Darkest ARPA, then. Not very Pugwashly, no. I’d say that’s a safe statement.”

  —and the National Security Agency, Sparrow finishes. He talked himself hoarse, Petrosian did. He knew a little something of potential interest to so many different folk in so many different areas, and his brain was so good, his memory so precise, that we gave him almost no rest for months. Everyone came away impressed, says Sparrow. He was an exemplary defector—not surprisingly, since he was in all ways an exemplary man. Around the time when the last of these sessions ended, the estimable Gillespie sent him a Dear John letter. She was marrying an osteopath from Framingham, she informed him. Petrosian took it rather well.

  “Did you get a crack at him yourself?”

  “You mean, did I debrief him?”

  “Yes.”

  “No. It was others. My one encounter with him was purely social.”

  After all the debriefings and the publicity, after the smoke had blown off and Gillespie was gone, he quietly went to work for ARPA. They invented a consultancy for him. Although he was touchingly grateful to this nation for taking him in, and eager to be cooperative, he had stipulated from the first interview that he would not work on nuclear explosives. No thermonuclear stuff, no fancy fission, no bombs or warheads period. Take him or leave him on that basis. Fine, this small precondition was entirely acceptable t
o ARPA. They had a basic research program in materials, especially strategic metals, which they thought might interest him; another, in those days just getting under way, to investigate the possibility of particle-beam technologies. He could spend a little time in each and then take his pick. In the meantime their personnel people would work up a contract wherein the description of services was left intentionally vague, a one-year agreement but indefinitely renewable, and Dr. Petrosian could begin being paid. Would $19,000 annually be agreeable at the start? That was enough to allow him a nice apartment in Alexandria or a small house farther out, as well as a car for commuting to the Pentagon, and of course it would be adjusted with later renewals of the contract. They knew his reputation and were delighted to have him. Petrosian for his part, I have been told, literally broke down and wept with gratitude, says Sparrow.

  So he was at ARPA, and happy to be, says Sparrow. Another year passed. I don’t know what his personal life was like during this interlude, or if he had one at all. An apartment in Alexandria, a car, a job. A new name, and a bushy new beard that altered his appearance substantially, but no permanent escort of guardian angels, and the KGB goons could have probably found him and hurt him if they had been determined to do so. Evidently they weren’t. This was the early sixties now, says Sparrow, not the thirties or the forties: Moscow probably understood that it wouldn’t be cost-effective in terms of international publicity, assassinating Petrosian for the sheer spite of it. His chosen pseudonym was Daniel Schultz; he had insisted on keeping the Daniel despite advice to the contrary, and he wanted a last name that sounded American. Schultz-Petrosian lived his quiet new routine without wasting a great deal of energy on worry. He was alone much. ARPA treated him well but his isolated role as it evolved there (as a high-level critic of other people’s ideas rather than a team member on one project) didn’t make him a lot of cronies. In the evenings he read. From an impulse of self-improvement, he was reading his way right through American history and literature—Francis Parkman, Henry Adams, Melville, Dreiser, Penn Warren—Christ he was even reading Scott Fitzgerald, says Sparrow—and taking solitary little excursions to places like Atlantic City or Gatlinburg when he got a three-day weekend. He played chess with an old man he had met in a Russian bakery, until the man’s daughter moved him out to join her in Phoenix. He continued sending those long letters and petitions for word of his wife. Such a patient and long-suffering man, says Claude Sparrow. Finally there was some news. Relatives wrote to notify him coldly that the wife had died, recently, at a hospital in the city of Gorky. That was all—no mention of the cause of death, how she had come to Gorky, nothing. It seemed to be authentic. If Petrosian shared the news that evening, we don’t know with whom, says Sparrow. I imagine he felt only more bitterly alone. Two months later he got married.