CIA Spymaster_George Kisevalter

by Clarence Ashley III

  By this time, George and I had become very good friends. Long gone were my misconceptions that he lacked compassion, industry, and intellect. But I had yet to learn just how wrong I had been on these matters, particularly the last one. He explained the origin of certain words. For instance, he pointed out that there were words in the Finnish language that were similar to some in the Hungarian language because Genghis Khan had brought them to both cultures. He explained that there are few universal-size railroad tracks in the world, that the gauges of almost all of them are different. He recited the gauges. He explained that most of the wheat in the former Soviet Union descended from a strain commonly grown in our own Midwest. This is because there once was blight on the Eastern Hemisphere wheat and the United States sent its best grain seed. He could recite the lineage of most European royalty: counts, viscounts, and discounts included. Eventually, I became as addicted to the stories as he had been to his card games.

  Finally, George moved into Vinson Hall, a retirement home mostly for former naval personnel. It is located in McLean and convenient to the office, so he continued to come in often to see me. He even expected to do some real estate through our office with his new associates; but as time went by he gathered some good card-playing buddies at the home and his real-estate interests faded. He was quite happy there, and I later learned that he had made many friends at his new home. Not surprisingly, he had done this in the same manner that he always had in the past: he helped people. He did their taxes, he made financial suggestions to some, and he taught many of them lessons at bridge. On occasion, I visited him at Vinson Hall. I was impressed with the warm, friendly atmosphere of the place and the pleasant surroundings. One of its aspects was quite familiar to me, as it must have been to George. The long, narrow halls of the place, all of which were painted battleship gray, reminded me of the CIA. It was an incredible likeness, except for one thing. At the CIA, the Fine Arts Committee had cleverly and mercifully decided to paint the interior doors in bright colors. If one were walking the long gray walls inside the building, he or she might see a red door, a green one, and a blue one. In addition to giving a bright atmosphere to what otherwise would have been a most drab environment, it provided a quick means of identifying an office.

  As the fall of 1997 approached, I became convinced that George's stories should be set to the printed word. I had thought about this for years but now I knew that it had to be done and soon. I could see George failing. I resolved then, somehow, to collect as many of the stories as I could. When I approached him on the subject, he demurred in his permission for me to proceed. A few weeks later, however, he called to tell me that he now agreed to go ahead. There was great excitement in his voice. He told me that his "secret cover" of over forty-five years had been lifted and that he could talk openly. In addition, he was soon to be awarded an unprecedented honor, the designation of one of only fifty unique people in the fifty-year history of the Agency. He was the only individual so honored for his work as a case officer. He was, for the first time I had ever observed, proud of himself. I was very happy for him. We agreed that we would begin to work on his life history shortly after the award was presented. I would start by letting him tell me again, as he had often done before, the stories as he remembered them. Of course, I did not then know that we had less than a month, but once more, I began to listen.

  CHAPTER 2

  Russian Legacy

  The afternoon of 1 October 1997 was a typical early autumn day for northern Virginia: warm, dry, and buggy. Summer had not yet yielded to the incipient fall; only the cherry and the dogwood had begun to surrender their leaves. The foliage of most trees was still quite green. As I meandered up the long walkway from the parking lot to the back entrance of Vinson Hall, I reflected on the well-kept grounds of the retirement home. The fall flowers were beginning to bloom and flying insects were nervously hovering over them, perhaps anticipating their own demise as the cool nights approached. Dozens of squirrels seemed keenly aware of the need to be packing away the acorns spread across the grounds. Some of them scurried across my path when I approached them.

  Upon entering the building, I began to contemplate how George and I might begin to retrace his life history. Finally, I decided to just let him talk in the way that he felt best in relating his stories. I could always construct the proper sequence of events later.

  I found George in a good state. He was still feeling the glow of satisfaction that had befallen him when he had received the Trailblazers Award. He said that today he would begin with his Russian heritage and background. Next, he would tell me how he got into intelligence work with the army before he joined the CIA, then how he and his buddies first became oriented to this new government agency. I would later augment what he said with other information and perspective from his colleagues.

  George's success in dealing with Popov, Penkovsky, Nosenko, and other Soviets clearly was directly related to his mastery of the Russian language as well as his innate ability to empathize with these people intimately and on their levels. His Russian heritage and family history had much to do with these talents as well as his fervid hate of Communism. George treasured the gift of his Russian background and relished expressing his memories of his family's past. His grandfather, Georgi Dmitrievich Kisevalter, was a deputy minister of finance in the governments of Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II. The family members were hereditary courtiers. They would be classified as intelligentsia, or educated professional people-dvorian in Russian, which means noblemen by virtue of social circumstances. Although his father's side of the family had a German genesis, by 1800 the family members had adopted numerous Russian first names in lieu of their Germanic ones.

  In about 1870, Grandfather Georgi married a Russian woman of St. Petersburg by the name of Yelizaveta Alexandrovna StepanovnaDomnina, whose mother's maiden name, Domnina, indicated that she was a person from Domnin. Domnin had been the hometown of Ivan Susanin, a man who had sacrificed his life for Tsar Mikhail. Mikhail, the first Romanov, became tsar in 1613. That year a Polish army invaded Russia and the new tsar went into hiding. Susanin met the invading Polish troops far outside of Moscow for a discussion. He told them that he knew where the newly crowned tsar was hiding and that he wished for them to defeat the tsar's troops. The Poles promised to give Susanin a great reward in return for his help and followed him toward a location where, he maintained, the tsar and the imperial military preparations lay. Such knowledge would make the Polish seizure of the city easily accomplished. He then proceeded to take them into the depths of an almost impenetrable forest. Farther and farther they ventured, as he continued to urge them deeper and deeper into the forest. He kept saying to them, "Come on; it's not much farther." Finally, they understood that this was a ruse. The Poles then killed him, but they also perished in the extreme cold and the deep snows of the Russian winter in a forest that had no roads.

  Susanin, of course, became a national hero for sacrificing his life for the tsar. A famous Russian composer, Mikhail Glinka, later wrote an opera based on the heroic tale called A Life for the Tsar.l It was so musically effective that even the Soviets liked it; however, because of the reference to the hated tsar, they changed its name, calling the opera simply by the man's name, Ivan Susanin.

  George's grandmother was the last survivor of Domnin and presumably a descendant of Susanin's. In 1913, the 300th anniversary of the House of Romanov, the Russian historians wanted to have some commemoration of that village and the event, so they brought this to the attention of the court. In response, Nicholas II invited George's grandfather Georgi for a small audience, in which he proposed to perpetuate the name of Domnin. If the family agreed, the grandfather and his sons were to change the name of Kisevalter to Domnin, thus Russifying it completely. The tsar indicated that he would be very happy and proud if they were to consent to this, and he gave Grandfather Georgi a little bag containing 300 gold rubles representing 300 years of Romanov rule. There were, presumably, twenty fifteen-ruble pieces, thus con
stituting 300 rubles. The grandfather divided them up amongst the family. George's mother had one or two, which were stolen from her New York apartment years later.

  The tsar's request was well received by the entire family. There were rumblings of war with Germany, however, so it was decided that "perhaps we should delay making the change until the conclusion of our victorious war against the Germans and their allies, which will transpire very shortly ... then in great triumph, we will do this." Unfortunately for them, instead of a successful performance by the Russian army against the German front, the Bolshevik Revolution took place. George often enjoyed telling this story of his family and how they almost changed their name to Domnin. In his book, Mole, a presumed fictional account of the Popov operation, author William Hood gave the name Gregory Domnin to the character that represents George.

  George's father, Georgi Georgievich Kisevalter, the youngest of four brothers, became an engineer. In 1905, war broke out between the Russians and Japanese, and he was appointed inspector of munitions at the Loebensdorf Munitions Factory (Buehle Stahl Werke) on the outskirts of Vienna. There, the Austrian government, under Franz Josef, was manufacturing ammunition for the Russian forces. In Vienna, Georgi met a young lady who taught high-school French. She was Rose, or Rosita, Grillet from the French village of Le Creusot, an industrial community near Dijon. After the termination of the war and a two-year courtship, the two of them were married in Irkutsk, Russia, in 1907. George was born on 4 April 1910, in St. Petersburg.

  George was an only child and had the advantages of a wealthy, educated, and influential family. The only home that he remembered in Russia was that of his grandparents in St. Petersburg. There, his grandparents, his parents, two of his father's brothers, his father's two younger sisters, their families, their servants, and George lived in a large, courtly apartment in an elegant neighborhood near the center of town. The apartment's location significantly colored George's life. It was immediately across the street from the zoo near Bolshaya Pushkarskaya Avenue. From his balcony he could view the bears since there was no high wall at the zoo. He became obsessed with these animals.

  He acknowledged that he was a real pain in the neck to his nurse because he always wanted to go out, no matter how the weather was, to see the bears. He constantly annoyed her until she took him walking to look at the bears, over and over again. He wanted to see what each bear was doing every day. He knew them all by name and every time he visited he would bring each one something to eat that he had swiped from the kitchen. Whenever they saw him they would perk up, knowing that he would bring a goody of some kind, and then come storming in his direction. This is how the fetish began.

  In 1914 Russia went to war against the German-led Central Powers. George's father, a reserve officer in the Corps of Engineers of the Tsar's Army, by dint of his previous munitions experience in processing shells during the Japanese War, was asked to lead a contingent to the United States to obtain weapons. All of the men who came with him were munitions experts. He went with a diplomatic passport, his wife, and George via Irkutsk, Harbin, Puson, Yokohama, Honolulu, and San Francisco to New York City, arriving in January of 1916.

  The commission established acceptance teams at facilities in Chester, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, to make sure that the munitions were correct and reliable. It was a culling process mostly, but the group also had inspectors who could design and fabricate various types of fuses and new types of armaments, in addition to performing as general inspectors. The munitions then were sent by rail to Seattle, where they were loaded onto ships bound for Vladivostock. Most of the artillery were 76-mm shells. Ultimately, some three million of these were delivered. The need for setting up a testing facility for the shells was immediately realized, so they looked across the Delaware River into New Jersey and found a swampy wasteland that they developed for that purpose. Part of this facility later became what we know of today as Fort Dix, New Jersey, and part of it was set aside for what later became McGuire Air Force Base.

  On 11 March 1917 there was a popular uprising in Russia against the imperial government. The next day, food riots evolved into revolt. Key regiments of the army mutinied, and Tsar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate. A provisional government was formed and headed by the Socialist leader, Alexander Kerensky, who, by overwhelming consent, became both prime minister and war minister of the new constitutional democracy.

  The United States declared war against the Central Powers on 6 April 1917. Also needing munitions, the U.S. requisitioned from the Russians the factories in Pennsylvania and the testing range in New Jersey. The Russians would now simply purchase the munitions from the U.S. There was a financial settlement made, an interesting ceremony and a parade were held, and George's father carried a Russian flag down Fifth Avenue in New York. That summer, a huge order came in from the provisional government for railroad cars. The senior Kisevalter then took the family to Middletown, Pennsylvania, not far from Harrisburg, where the Standard Steel Corporation had a plant for the manufacture of railroad cars. George's father's group now inspected railroad cars in addition to the munitions. The cars were, of course, made to fit the Russian tracks.

  In October of 1917 Lenin returned from exile to Petrograd, and his message of "Peace, Bread and Land" had far more resonance with the masses than did the Kerensky government's appeal to fight a war far away, for a freedom that they did not comprehend. On 7 November (25 October old style, Julian, calendar of Russia) the Bolshevik thugs struck. All armed, they appeared in parliament and forcefully and brutally seized power from the Kerensky administration, stealing the reins of the Russian people's government.

  On 3 March 1918, the Bolshevik government signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central Powers. This provided a momentary peace with the Central Powers but it required Russia to give up the Baltic States as well as parts of Poland, the Ukraine, and Finland. Loss of this dominion gave rise to great indignation throughout Russia, and this, coupled with other disenchantment with the Bolshevik Party, by then known as the Communist Party, gave rise to the ensuing Counter Revolution. Fighting erupted between the BolshevikCommunists, allied with much of the peasantry, and the White Russians, principally supporters of the provisional government and tsarist sympathizers. The fighting raged all over Russia. The Kisevalter contingent in the United States immediately determined that they would support the White Russians, led by Adm. Alexander Kolchak. They continued on as before, but now turning out munitions and railroad cars for the Whites. By then, the group was also procuring munitions from Remington Arms. There were carloads of rifles and ammunition going from Bridgeport, Connecticut, across the U.S. and Pacific and into Russia. Many more of the Russian railroad people came. There were still the two groups: the Munitions Commission and a Commission of Ways and Means of Communication, the formal name for the railroad shop.

  As a consequence of their loyalty to the White Army, when the fighting ended in 1921, the White Russian supporters in the United States were personae non gratae to the Reds, of course, and stranded in the United States. This ultimately caused the apparent annihilation or the disappearance of all but one member of George's great family in Russia, none of whom would become a faithful Communist. The only family member known by George to have survived the war, the revolution, and the political purges that followed was his first cousin, Alexander Alexandrovich Andreev, the son of his aunt Raisa, his father's older sister, and her husband, George's godfather, Gen. Alexander Alexandrovich Andreev. The general was executed. Aunt Raisa died months later and, presumably, eight of their children, all except for Alexander, were placed in orphanages.

  During the years that were to follow, any communication with the Kisevalters in the USSR was rare and guarded. There was no sanctity of mail in the new Red country; the Communists censored everything. One had to be careful in writing anything critical of the regime or the relatives would be punished. Eventually, all communications came to an end as all of the surviving aunts and uncles died off. They clearly we
re not happy under the Communist regime. The Reds apparently executed many of the family, but there are no official records. Ultimately, the American Kisevalters had no contact with any of them, save Alexander, who, by then, was an Estonian. During that period George made friendships with Russian refugees in the U.S. that he kept throughout his life.

  In 1923, George entered Stuyvesant High School, then the most challenging school in New York City. He completed high school in three and a half years. He doubled up twice in English and took extra courses. He received a first prize in mathematics; his score on the New York State Regional Tests, the competitive exams for seniors, was a record 97. He was first in his class in chemistry. He also learned how to use a lathe and to forge steel. He was a member of the chess team, which won the New York City championship. For this he received a medal that he proudly kept all of his life. At sixteen, he played a U.S. Master to a draw, although the man was playing six others at the same time, demonstrating simultaneous chess.

  In the fall of 1926, George went up to Dartmouth, where he had friends. They were the main reason he wanted to attend Dartmouth, but he later came to revere the institution. He also made close friendships with others and maintained these associations throughout his life. Some of these people became world famous. George was particularly fond of classmate Nelson Rockefeller, to whom George, on occasion, actually lent a dollar or two and provided transportation for in an old Studebaker car. The Rockefellers were very strict with their children, in their attempt to teach them the value of money as well as core values of life.

  George received an award from an alumnus of $100 a year to help with expenses and his father also helped him. In addition, George waited on tables at Dartmouth and had summer jobs in New York City. At the time, tuition was $300 a year.