Spy Handler
Page 5
The real thing came two years later—with Hitler’s main southern flank, Army Group South, moving over the border north of us toward Kiev; orders were given to evacuate immediately. My father’s status as an NKVD officer ensured priority for my family, and we were among the first to be moved out. Assured we’d only be gone for a week or so, we took almost nothing with us. With my father still absent on assignment, my mother packed up my seven-year-old brother Petya, twelve-year-old sister Masha and me and hustled us to the boxcars of a waiting freight train. My elder brother Vasya was sick in a hospital in Crimea at the time. Climbing on the train with the other evacuees, we set off back to Krasnoe in Kursk, where I’d been born and our relatives still lived. We never returned to Kotovsk.
Krasnoe lay seven kilometers from the site of the famous Prokhorovka battle—better known to the world as the Battle of Kursk—that took place in July 1943. That battle, one of the largest tank engagements ever, was a major turning point in the war. Wiping out fifty German divisions, the Red Army put a final halt to Hitler’s eastern offensive. Only two hundred of our village’s roughly seven hundred houses were standing when it ended.
Long before that crucial battle, however, the German advance forced my family to flee again, only three months after our return to Krasnoe. This time, we were allotted a horse, a cart and a driver who was ordered to leave his own family behind. His dilemma left my mother at a loss until, on the day before our departure, my father surprised us. Happily but briefly reunited—he was given leave only to accompany us on the trip—we joined a column of civilians fleeing the fighting on foot, in horse-drawn carts and cars.
We headed due east toward Voronezh, around two hundred miles away. I wouldn’t wish that trip on anyone. Some workers from collective farms brought along flocks of sheep and cows. Not milked for days, they bellowed piteously as the ragtag stream of people and livestock inched eastward. Horses and cattle dropped dead by the wayside—and began to stink. We avoided open roads to escape bombardment, passing through fields and woods instead. The slog took eighteen days. German planes flew overhead, dropping anti-Soviet leaflets, while lines of gloomy soldiers passed us heading in the opposite direction.
When we finally arrived, exhausted, in Voronezh, my father deposited us on a train heading south to Kazakhstan. That journey too was painfully slow, with stops at almost every station as we yielded to numerous military trains heading toward the front. Our destination was an industrial city called Kyzylorda, just above the Syr Darya River in the dusty desert land of southern Kazakhstan. We were put up in a shed belonging to a family whose two-room house was already sheltering another evacuee family of five. The first days we were cold and desperately hungry. We built a makeshift bed, where all four of us slept together for warmth—even after Masha and Petya contracted typhus.
My mother spent weeks obtaining the documents necessary to prove our evacuee status and obtain some rationed food. To supplement that meager intake, she joined other evacuees walking through outlying suburban villages, begging for vegetables. For my part, I trailed behind carts trucking produce from local gardens to market—carrots, potatoes, beets—and dashed to snatch up any that fell out. As spring turned to summer, I’d often watch Kazakh children playing a game similar to marbles, using small pieces of meat bones. I couldn’t take part because it was a betting game and I had no money. But after I explained that to a well-dressed Kazakh boy, he reached into his pocket to give me a couple of precious kopeks. I was flabbergasted, but his kindness reflected the generally good treatment Kazakhs showed us evacuees.
As fall approached, there was no question of my going to school, even if we could have spared money for books and clothes. Meanwhile, the misery of the cold was made worse by our outdoor toilet, which I dreaded having to use at night. But we survived the winter. As spring approached and the Germans pulled back slightly, we received news that my father was still alive. He was stationed near Stalingrad, between the Volga and Don Rivers. My mother decided to take us there.
We succeeded in finding my father and spent three months in the town of Kotelnikovo—about a hundred miles southwest of Stalingrad and just east of the Don River. Then the Nazis started their 1942 offensive and we had to evacuate yet again. This time we fled to Kyrgyzstan, leaving my father behind to take part in the Battle of Stalingrad. Crossing the Volga, we had to wait a week for a ferry that only ran at night to minimize damage from German bombing. Famished, we ate algae-laden clay from the riverbank. It made us sick.
The fighting in Stalingrad ended in February 1943. We returned to the ruined city the following month. It was still very cold. Whole blocks of ghostly gutted buildings stood amid ruins covered in snow. Footpaths cut through the city’s mine-infested expanse. Frozen corpses lay scattered in the streets alongside ruined machinery, weapons and other debris. Many who survived the battle were still dying of famine, but my family’s dire food situation improved because we managed to obtain ration cards for bread, grain, salt and sugar. My father’s wages bought us vegetables and meat at the market, and I helped by taking cigarettes allotted to us by ration coupons to the railroad station and selling them. My parents turned a blind eye to the illegal private enterprise.
Later that year, trains passed through the city carrying evacuees from the Leningrad siege, mostly children. Guards at the train stations stopped locals from handing food to the survivors, who were so emaciated they would have died from eating too much too quickly. Many died anyway, and their corpses were piled on trains for burial in mass graves. Still, Stalingrad was a relatively happy place for me. I joined other boys clambering over junk heaps looking for shells to defuse, pouring out their gunpowder to make their own bombs. Shells with delicate silk bags holding gunpowder inside were especially prized. We opened them by hitting the casings at an angle with other metal objects. Some of my fellow scavengers were blown up in front of my eyes.
By 1944, the war was going decisively in our favor. My father was reassigned to Belorussia, to help secure the Red Army’s rear as Soviet forces pushed the retreating Wehrmacht west into Poland and on toward Berlin. We settled in Pinsk, a village one hundred miles east of the border city of Brest. My elder brother Vasya, who had been separated from us in Crimea, joined us there. Victory Day—May 8, 1945—was unforgettable. Villagers laughed, wept and hugged each other as soldiers fired rifles into the air. At thirteen, I returned to school in the fifth grade. As part of the celebrations, teenagers were encouraged to join the Komsomol, the Communist youth league. All my friends joined, so I signed up too, despite the fourteen-year-old minimum age. Even with my new credentials, however, I remained a troublemaker. My teachers finally persuaded me to quit school at the end of seventh grade, the legal minimum. Handed a graduation certificate, I left for nearby Brest to look for an institute that would accept me.
Impressively large Brest had a textile institute, a medical college and a railway engineering school. Since I’d always lived near railroads, I decided to try for the latter. Passing my entrance exams, I joined the department of railway construction and maintenance and did well in my studies. The following year, I found myself elected to one of four positions as Komsomol department secretary. (All four of us later ended up in the intelligence service.) Meanwhile, despite the misery of the war—or perhaps because of it—Brest was full of optimism. Locals felt they deserved better after their wartime sacrifices. I did too. I took up boxing, gymnastics, soccer and volleyball. On weekends, I went dancing and attended the theater. I also made friends with some of the many Poles in Brest—who had been displaced by the war—and learned to speak Polish.
After graduating in 1952, I was posted to the Arkhangelsk region in the far north to work as a railway engineer. But just before I was to depart, the local office of the Ministry of State Security (MGB, as the NKVD had been renamed) summoned me. There I was solemnly informed I’d been recommended as a candidate to join the service. Although I’d been looking forward to working as an engineer, I answered without hesitation. I
’d never asked my father what his work entailed—aside from fighting enemies of the people—but I was certain he was a decent person in all respects and that whatever he did was honorable. I respected the NKVD. Its work carrying out Stalin’s policies seemed highly important. I accepted the job on the spot.
I was selected for the secret service because of my exemplary record as Komsomol department secretary, but of course my father’s record helped. I’d be joining the local Brest directorate after two years of training at an MGB institute in the small industrial city of Mogilëv, east of the Belorussian capital, Minsk. I arrived at the end of the summer, only to be told to pack my bags again.
Miffed because I’d just unpacked, I complained to the administrator in his office. “You’ve been chosen to study foreign languages in Leningrad,” he told me. “You’ll be working with foreigners.”
That made me extremely skeptical. I’d studied German and English in school and did poorly in both. “I can’t speak any foreign languages,” I insisted.
“Nu koneshno [of course]. That’s the point, isn’t it? They’ll teach you up there.”
My further protest was equally in vain. Three other young hopefuls and I boarded a train that same day. We headed for the old imperial capital.
2
The new MGB Institute of Foreign Languages stood on Vasilievsky Island, across the broad Neva River from the Winter Palace. Close to the island’s main street, Bolshoi Prospekt, the institute also conducted a training program for SMERSH, the infamous—in the West—wartime counterintelligence service (derived from smert shpionam, or “death to spies”). The short-lived SMERSH, a feared military intelligence agency under Stalin’s direct control, was detached from the NKVD in 1943 to step up the hunt for Nazi collaborators and traitors, then reattached three years later. Former officers from the division were still studying German at the institute when I arrived.
Much of the great, ornately baroque former capital was under reconstruction after the siege of Leningrad, and life for its shellshocked residents was slowly improving. I found it all glorious. After checking into a two-story military barracks, I was scheduled to take an entrance exam I felt certain to fail. Still disoriented from my trip, I was asked whether I wanted to study English or German. Which was easier, I inquired. English was suggested. In the exam hall, a middle-aged woman watched as I translated five lines of text. I looked up each word in a dictionary but still failed to grasp the meaning of the phrases. Glancing over my paper, the examiner laughed and commanded me to start over. I looked up each word again and came no closer to the meaning. Dejectedly leaving the exam room, I saw myself on the next train back to Belorussia. But no order to pack up and leave came that day. When the names of those who’d passed their exams were posted several days later, I found mine among those assigned to the English study group. My surprise could hardly have been greater.
The institute’s language instructors were top-notch and I quickly lost my apprehension about studying foreign languages. I learned German as well as English. I also took courses in counterintelligence methods, learning about agent networks and surveillance and communications techniques. I studied the types of people and organizations we’d be working against, including anti-Soviet networks, émigrés and clergy. General subjects such as jurisprudence were in our curriculum too. Meanwhile, I was again elected department Komsomol secretary.
Aside from the older students—including intelligence personnel sent back for more study and others like me, who had quickly matured during the war—most of my classmates enrolled straight out of tenth grade. I soon fell in with a group of friends who would go out dancing and attend the theater—anything, anywhere to meet girls. Among my classmates was Yuri Gulin, son of a Siberian doctor and a huge music fan, an ex-sailor named Vladimir Korovin who found learning English exceedingly hard, and a Ukrainian called Boris Gechel, a devoted communist who was utterly earnest and remarkably decent. I met another student—one of the relatively sheltered boys—soon after my arrival in September. His name was Oleg Kalugin. An only child, Kalugin astounded me with his perfect English, an almost impossible achievement at the time. Later when Kalugin won a competition for best translation, I came in second. Kalugin was very sociable, and we became friends quickly. He married a local girl called Lyudmilla, and it seemed perfectly logical that after graduation, the gifted Kalugin would be assigned a job in the FCD, the KGB’s flagship department that ran foreign intelligence.
Stalin died during my second year of study, in March 1953. The announcement, made at an all-school meeting, was a deep shock. The certainties I’d grown up with—that society was on a path to postwar improvement, that we were indeed building communism—now seemed less certain. By smashing the Nazi war machine, the Soviet Union had become a great power with which the Western countries had to reckon. Stalin had led us to that victory. In the years that followed, he oversaw the rebuilding of the state, its infrastructure and industry. Food rationing ended in 1947. Inflation diminished. A general sense of dynamism reigned, and we owed it all to Stalin. I was far from the only one in the hall to shed tears that day.
Graduating three years later, in 1956, I resolved to prove myself by serving the Party and helping implement its policies. Under a new chairman, Ivan Serov, the MGB had recently been renamed the Committee for State Security (KGB). I was assigned to serve in its Second Chief Directorate (SCD), which was responsible for internal security and counterintelligence. I’d be working in the Second, or English, department, going head to head with British intelligence on Soviet soil. (The American department was the First and the German, the Third.) The Second department kept a close watch on all British citizens and, among other objectives, sought to recruit them as agents. I was assigned to help control the British embassy in Moscow. I couldn’t believe my luck. A fresh graduate could not expect such a plum job.
Early one morning two months later, I arrived at the capital’s ornately neo-Slavic Belorussky train station, from which many troops had departed to fight the Germans at the front. By now a welldisciplined young man, I followed orders by finding a public telephone first thing and dialing the number of the KGB personnel office. There was no answer. “Maybe work here starts later than usual,” I thought. I didn’t know a soul in the city. I had nowhere to go, and very little money. I’d been told only to phone immediately on my arrival to receive instructions—and that’s what I’d do.
I sat down on my suitcase and waited half an hour, then tried again. Still no answer. Nor two hours later.
I was still at the train station at five o’clock. At eleven, I started to think about where to sleep. Even if I had the money, it would be impossible to simply show up at a hotel without a reservation and authorization of some kind. I curled up on a bench.
I tried again in the morning. Still no answer. By noon, I was seriously worried. Approaching a policeman, I sheepishly asked the location of KGB headquarters. He eyed me suspiciously before replying curtly, “Dzerzhinsky Square, koneshno [of course]!”
“Uhh, would you please tell me how to get there?”
The officer took another long look at me. “You’d better go by metro!” he yelled as I started off toward Gorky Street, Moscow’s main avenue. Following his directions, I arrived opposite Lubyanka, an imposing, yellow neoclassical hulk of a building that housed KGB headquarters. It overlooked a large traffic circle called Dzerzhinsky Square, in the middle of which stood a tall, solemn-looking statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky. “Iron Felix” founded the Cheka, the KGB’s predecessor, in 1917. The impressive scene put me at a greater loss. One didn’t just blithely walk up and enter the main entrance of the central KGB building.
In any case, the massive doors were shut fast. A guard posted outside directed me to an information office a few blocks away on an old street called Kuznetsky Most (Kuznetsky Bridge). I found it and told my story to a clerk. Flipping through the directory he gave me, I saw the number for the personnel office had changed. I held my breath and dialed the new one.
Moscow was like nothing I’d experienced. Stalin had transformed the teeming city into a showcase of Soviet might, from its lavish metros to the seven wedding-cake skyscrapers. Grand boulevards lined with monumental hulks of buildings cut swaths through the prerevolutionary jumbles of narrow streets.
But I had little time for sightseeing. As I’d soon learn, the greatest KGB successes against British intelligence were already history. Two of the famous “Cambridge Five” spies—Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean—had recently defected to Russia. Meanwhile, our most important agent, Kim Philby, had been recalled from his post as the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) station commander in Washington, ending the hope he’d rise to the top of British intelligence. Foreign spies were becoming increasingly active, I was told. I had to begin operative work as soon as possible.
3
I was assigned a desk in a small, four-man office in Lubyanka. The huge building, with its long corridors lined by a strip of red carpeting, resembled a typical Soviet administrative office. I’d be in charge of three other men, who ran our agents monitoring the British embassy’s cipher officers, security guards and consular and administrative sections. Department head Ivan Markelov—to whom I took an immediate liking—briefed me on counterintelligence work against the embassy and introduced me to the agents I’d be controlling. Some were British embassy employees, such as drivers and secretaries. There were also writers, musicians and others who had personal contacts with the diplomats.