Kolchak's Gold
Page 14
“Well it’s exactly my business, but you’re right—you don’t have to answer the question. Suppose I give you some information, instead. This is off the record—I want that understood. We’re not supposed to go around giving out information to people who aren’t in the Firm. But you look like you’re on the way to Russia on this book of yours, and I’d better set you straight. This wasn’t the Agency’s idea, my boss doesn’t know anything about it. I’m talking to you on my own. That’s why it’s off the record. You understand?”
“I don’t understand at all. You haven’t said anything yet.”
“Well I assume at least you know she works for the Israeli government. Specifically, she works for an agency that gets Jews out of Russia.”
“I know all that.”
“Uh-huh, it wasn’t likely you didn’t, but when people are working her side of the street you never know how much they’re willing to spill to their lovers. For all I knew she told you she was a fund-raiser.”
“She does that sometimes.”
“It’s only a cover, Harry. On the surface it’s a legitimate agency—they do raise funds, they agitate for publicity and demonstrations wherever they think they can arouse public opinion against Soviet policy. That’s on the surface. They also grease the wheels inside Russia—they get out pamphlets that tell Russian Jews how to get through all the red tape they have to go through to get an exit visa.”
“You haven’t shocked me yet,” I said. “I don’t see what you’re leading up to.”
“It’s an underground railroad. They work with Jews who can’t get official permission to leave the country. They print up false documentation and they falsify records in some of the local OVIR offices. They’ve got a fair-sized fifth-column staff inside the Soviet Union. It’s very Jewish and very efficient—an organized operation. It’s an agency of the Mossad, out of Tel Aviv.”
I had half guessed that much months before. I still wasn’t stirred much by his revelations; only by his intense air of conspiracy, which seemed an unjustifiedly melodramatic pose.
The waiter brought the check face-down on a saucer. MacIver took out a credit card. I said, “Expense account?”
“Sure.”
“Then I won’t fight over it.”
“Anyway, I invited you.” He signed the check and put his credit card on top of it. The waiter took it away. MacIver said, “You’re not Jewish.”
“Riddle me no games, Evan.” I was angry with his pointlessly roundabout attack—like a dog that turned several full circles before lying down: a ritualistic habit, indulged in whether there was a need for it or not.
“They break their asses to recruit non-Jewish help. You’d be a perfect courier if you got your visa. They need couriers badly.”
“And?”
“I just want to warn you. It’s off the record, as I said. Screw her eyes out if you want to, Harry, but don’t let the little bitch con you into joining her pack of running dogs. The chances are you wouldn’t come back from Siberia before the year two thousand.”
Before continuing this account I must interpolate a few explanations.
First, in reconstructing conversations that took place a year and more ago I have used the device of placing dialogue within quotation marks. The need for accuracy compels me to explain that I do not have an absolute memory for exact words that may have been spoken months or years ago. I do, however, have a fair ear for speech patterns, and when important things are said I remember the substance and flavor, if not the exact words. The device of direct quotes is admittedly a contrivance but I find it both more readable and more writable; it saves time and avoids the need for awkward circumlocutions. And I believe it provides a fuller measure of the nuances of real exchanges.
Second, I am resuming the writing of this manuscript after an interruption of nearly two weeks during which I have been almost constantly on the run. Prior to that I was writing under circumstances far less pressing than those which obtain now. During the early part of April of this year* I went into hiding, in a manner of speaking, and I had no idea how long I might have to remain in that place. There was nothing to do but write. Under those conditions I felt an obligation not only to make a full account of these events but also to interpret them wherever I could, to provide background information and to explain all the circumstances as completely as possible.
That luxury is no longer available. I am hunted; I may have a very limited time in which to complete these pages. My present hiding place is not very secure. It is likely I will have to run again soon. The most important thing now is to complete this recitation of events.* If the remainder of this narrative appears disjointed and hasty it is for that reason; I shall have time to relate only the most important events.
* 1973.—Ed.
* At the end of this section of manuscript, Bristow wrote a twelve-page summary of the events covered in more detail by the remainder of this book. He then went back and fleshed out that account; it is the second version which we publish here. But his deciding to write the twelve-page outline first is an indication of his urgency and sense of peril.—Ed.
In February 1973 Evan MacIver telephoned to congratulate me on having won my fight with the Soviet bureaucracy. My visa and clearances had been granted by the Russian government.
It was the first I knew of it. I am morally certain that MacIver’s calling me with the news was his way of taking credit for the victory. He didn’t say so, but I had to assume he had been responsible, at least partly, for the breakthrough; otherwise how would he have known about it before I did?
I immediately called the Soviet Embassy to find out if it was true. They had nothing new to tell me on that day; but two days later they called me back and I went in to pick up the papers they had waiting for me. There was an absurdly thick sheaf of documents and I had to buy an oversized wallet to contain them.
I left Kennedy Airport in New York on February 9 aboard the Aeroflot flight to Moscow.
In the meantime I’d been at work. It had gone well except for one setback. Since November I had been making active efforts to locate Otto von Geyr, recipient of the Krausser letter and the former Waffen SS officer whom Haim Tippelskirch had indicated I should meet.
I had sent inquiries to three former German officers whom I had interviewed for earlier books. I was still ambivalent about the story of the gold, but less so than before; I was prepared to make a special trip to Germany to talk with von Geyr.
But von Geyr was dead. He had died within the past month. Arteriosclerosis, at age sixty-four. He was buried at Munich; he had been survived by a daughter and three grandchildren.
I learned this in January. It closed a door I had only just begun to try to open. I was depressed and angry: if I had gone directly to Germany after Haim’s death I’d have had the chance to talk with von Geyr.
But MacIver’s news pulled me out of my depression and very quickly I was inside the Soviet Union.
I had a limited volume of work to do in Moscow but it took more than a week. I spent much of the time in waiting rooms of the Arkhiv Dircksena and the A.M.O.S.S.S.R.—the Defense Ministry Archives. They didn’t admit me to the stacks or allow me to browse in any of the collections but they did give me access to a number of records which had never before been seen by an outsider—and for that matter probably had never been used by anyone other than the Soviet-controlled body of historians which compiled the Istoriya V.O.V.S.S.*
Some of my requests for specific records were denied; a surprising number were not. Mainly I wanted to see records of the southern campaigns of 1942–1944 and the siege at Sebastopol. At this point I still wasn’t primarily interested in the German attempt to unearth the hidden Czarist gold, and at any rate if there were to be more documents to shed light on that subject I wasn’t likely to find them in Moscow—partly because the Moscow archives didn’t include any captured German records, and partly because even if there had been such records in Moscow I wouldn’t have known which ones to ask for.
I established the habit of making all my notes on the triple-sets so that I could feel sure of having everything intact when I returned home to write the book; it wouldn’t be feasible to return to Russia again merely to double-check some obscure note I might have lost somewhere along the way.
It was my plan, even then, to include no significant notes on the gold in these shipments. I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to handle the situation if it did come up. (In Moscow it did not; I came across nothing pertaining to the gold there.) I felt highly secretive about that topic, for reasons which perhaps are obvious enough not to need explaining. I planned to keep any gold-related notes on my person until I was ready to leave Russia; then, on the eve of my departure, do a cram course, memorize the notes and destroy them; then, after leaving Russia, reconstruct them on paper as quickly as I could so that I wouldn’t forget anything. It was a melodramatic plan but these are melodramatic times.
I hadn’t meant to get into such detailed explanations of my working methods; I have mentioned this only because it has an important bearing on what was to happen within a matter of weeks.
The Soviets had assigned an Intourist guide to me in Moscow; this guide was relieved of my charge upon my departure for Kiev on February 19. Whether I was watched by agents aboard the internal flight I have no idea. I was picked up by a new Intourist guide in Kiev, a pleasant young man who spoke a fair grade of English. He insisted on practicing it although my Russian was considerably better than his English.
It was not a particularly severe winter in European Russia although I suppose out in Siberia it must have been as miserable as it always is there. A great deal of snow covered the city of Kiev—more than I’d seen in Moscow, oddly—but it wasn’t terribly cold and I had four or five sunny days in Kiev.
The War History Archives of the Federal Republic are housed in what used to be a large Byzantine church near the center of the city; I spent my days there and it must have bored my Intourist companion to tears. He never complained; he was well disciplined. As in Moscow, I arrived with several specific requests for documents and a study of these documents led me in turn to others. The people of Kiev are characteristically less formal and hidebound than those of the north and I found I had less difficulty and delay than I’d experienced in the Moscow archives. I was waited on with reasonable efficiency. A Communist Party functionary named Gorokov had to check each individual request of mine against a vast list of document numbers in a bound typed volume he had brought with him from Leningrad; evidently the State had gone to considerable expense in my case and I wasn’t sure whether I should be flattered by it or irritated by their caution. In several cases he refused to let me look at documents which could have been of no conceivable harm to Soviet prestige, reputation or security. But apparently the numbered documents listed in Gorokov’s book were coded according to their security classifications and Gorokov went religiously by his list.
I found quite a lot of good material in Kiev but very little of it is worth describing here; I have to repeat that my mission was Sebastopol, not gold.
Official policy was to guard Soviet records far more zealously than German ones. The Russians had captured trainloads of Nazi documents just as the Western Allies had; but the Soviets classified very few of their captured German documents—only those that had some bearing on the Hitler-Stalin pact, on political matters, and on events and people whose existence has been erased from the official version of history by the revisionists. Both in Kiev and in Sebastopol I actually saw far more German records than Russian ones. (Partly this was because their defensively brutal pride compelled the Germans to itemize their atrocities for posterity. The Nazi war records are a staggering exercise in self-incrimination. The Russians are not reluctant to expose this.)
I was given all but carte blanche with the Nazi documents. I suspect the same access would be available to any historian, whether Russian or Western, but I was the first Western one to get into those archives at all. My circumstances were unique; that is important.*
I won’t stop to specify the clues I found in Kiev. They were indirect in any case; they mainly told me what I should look for in Sebastopol. There were strong indications of what I might find there and it was exciting to anticipate but I did not hurry my other researches on that account. I stayed in Kiev until I had what I wanted—or as much of it as my apparatchik overseer, Gorokov, would permit me to see. It was February 26 before I departed by air for Sebastopol.
I am writing now of events that took place only six or seven weeks ago and they are fresh in my mind. The twenty-sixth was a Monday; I had spent the previous day in my Kiev hotel making separate envelopes for my triple-copy notes, mailing one set and preparing the second set for delivery to the American consulate (where I dropped them off Monday morning on my way to the airport). My young Intourist guide remained in Kiev. I didn’t see Gorokov at the airport or on the plane. I arrived in Sebastopol in midafternoon and was met at the OVIR turnstile by a stout man who greeted me with a grin that revealed a chrome-hued tooth, trilby hat lifted high above his head.
He was my new Intourist “assistant”; his name was Timoshenko and I was to get to know him rather well in the next few weeks. His mournful smile showed that he wanted to be liked; he had unkempt grey eyebrows and the distressed air of a shy nervous man who tended to see every little disturbance as a major calamity. He spoke Russian with a strong Georgian accent and his voice had the effect on my ears of a nasty child’s fingernails scraping a blackboard. From hairline to toes he was a peasant but he was conceited about his vocabulary; self-educated, I learned—a compulsive reader. He had ploughed his way stubbornly through whole libraries, often understanding only a fraction of what he read. He had the habit of ending every other sentence with “Da?” which, in a Russian, is the same as an American’s annoying tendency to sprinkle every clause with a “You know?”
When I first met Timoshenko I found him forbidding. He was a large man and he wore an ankle-length black-leather coat with vast lapels into which his round chin was sunk. (It was a dyed German officer’s greatcoat, lovingly preserved ever since the war.) In his coat and his round hat he looked like one of those Grade-B thugs in spy movies who devote their scenes to bouncing the Good Guys off walls. I soon learned better; he was anything but intimidating. There was an ingratiating likability to him, his eagerness to be friendly, his enthusiasms for scenery and history (his parochial version of it) and books. Of course he knew I was a writer; it made him both diffident and fawning at first. After only a few hours he had become confident of me and was not deterred from digging an elbow into my ribs to make a sly point about a passing girl.
On my own home ground I wouldn’t have given him a second glance; I’d have thought him a boor. But here, in spite of my international and somewhat cosmopolitan background, I felt isolated and faintly
fearful: I was in a place that was not only foreign but vaguely threatening. Timoshenko’s cheerful open offer of friendship—especially after the cool courtesy of my previous Intourist guides—was a welcome human contact. I clutched at it gratefully. In a very short time I became fond of Timoshenko. I hope my recent actions will not have discredited him with the organization in which he is an indentured servant; nothing that has happened was Timoshenko’s fault.
Sebastopol is a modern city, a phoenix upon the ashes of its total destruction in the war. It has a nearly Scandinavian flavor; it is no longer the city my mother lived in. I arrived in a grey drizzle but a warm breeze tousled the air, coming in off the Black Sea, and there were no traces of snow; the climate there is quite temperate. Timoshenko had a car assigned to him for use in chauffeuring me around—a squat ugly Volga sedan—and he drove me around the jaws of the harbor, pointing out sights. I made it clear I was more interested in what had stood there twenty-five years ago than in the modern egg-crate structures which stood there now; but Timoshenko wasn’t much help in that respect since he had not lived in Sebastopol before or during the war. His knowledge of local history was limited to gossip, salacious ribaldry and his memorized guidebook spiel. At one point he gave me a ten-minute lecture on the climactic battle at the Russian strong-point of the Grand Redan.*
My visa allowed me five weeks in Sebastopol. I had hoped for more time but I was fortunate to get that much. Timoshenko settled me in a small modern hostelry not far from the embankment. My room was on the ground floor and my door was within full view of the registry desk where a formidable woman—or several identically formidable women in shifts—kept a vigilant and rather forbidding watch on my comings and goings. Undoubtedly this particular room had been assigned to me for that reason. There was no way to leave it undetected; the window gave access to an air shaft. There was a view only of a cinderblock wall six feet away. It was a depressing habitation, too reminiscent of a prison; but I had very little time to brood about that and none to complain. The room itself was comfortable enough—square, stark, unrelieved by any decorations other than the colorful eiderdown on the bed; but they had provided me with a writing desk and lamp, a sufficient wardrobe and even an attached bathroom. By Crimean standards it was a luxury accommodation.