CIA Spymaster_George Kisevalter

by Clarence Ashley III

  In October of 1926 the elder Kisevalter took a job with E. D. Ozmand Aircraft Corporation of College Point, Long Island, which manufactured special pontoons for seagoing aircraft. There he met Charles Lindbergh and assisted in the design of customized pontoons for Lindbergh's aircraft. He had patents in his own name for the design of the pontoons on Lindbergh's Lockheed-Vega, used on Far Eastern flights, and his Lockheed-Sirius plane used for European flights. With Lindbergh piloting the aircraft, they tested the pontoons in the East River just before Lindbergh and his bride, the former Anne Morrow, took the plane on a momentous trip to the Far East. Kisevalter also designed the floats for the twelve-passenger plane, the Condor, used by the polar explorer, Adm. Richard E. Byrd. During that period, George's family lived in upper Manhattan close to Riverside Drive and the Cloisters. George's father knew many people associated with the federal government, having been a representative of Imperial Russia. He was close to Robert Lansing, the secretary of state under President Wilson and the uncle of John and Allen Dulles. Finally, Lansing suggested to George's father that he become a U.S. citizen and signed his citizenship papers in June of 1931.

  Upon graduation from Dartmouth in 1931 George received a master of science degree in civil engineering. The difficulty that followed in obtaining employment during the depth of the depression had a lasting effect on George, but he persevered and always had some kind of work. In March of 1934, George became a naturalized U.S. citizen. Also, like many of his contemporaries, George joined the army reserve that year. He did so partly out of curiosity, partly for the benefit of added income, and partly out of patriotism. Two of his friends, a colonel in charge of one of the reserve units and a Dartmouth man in this unit, convinced George to join them. After passing the requisite examinations, George became a second lieutenant in the 302d Regiment of the Corps of Engineers and a part of the 77th Infantry Division, the Statue of Liberty Division.

  At that time, George obtained work with the Parks Commission in New York City. His boss was Robert Moses, commissioner of parks for the City of New York as well as for the State of New York. George would meet with Moses every Saturday morning at the Picture Book Zoo in Central Park and give the big man a status report on all of the many projects under his purview. After gathering data from all of the project supervisors, George would assemble a large map. Buttons, on which were painted the percentage complete of each project, were attached to pins and inserted in the map at their appropriate locations. This duly impressed Mr. Moses, who was to become head of the entire transportation system of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. The man was so powerful that he had everyone in New York afraid of him. But he always tried to do what was right for the region and usually he was correct. He would build expressways around and through parts of New York City, ripping up neighborhoods in a cavalier manner, becoming at the same time a pariah of planning and one of the most productive men in the annals of New York. George's connection with Moses was formative. And during these Saturday meetings George would routinely take the opportunity to visit with the bears. He knew every bear in the zoo by name.

  George was with the Parks Commission for almost two years. One evening in the spring of '36, at the Dartmouth Club, he met Evan Lyons, who was in charge of building the Taconic Parkway System that went from Poughkeepsie down to New York City. "I'm working for a very large, upcoming company," Lyons told George. "It's going to be the biggest consulting firm of engineers in the city of New York and we're working with Robert Moses. Currently, we're designing the beltway around New York."

  George looked at the man in awe. The first leg of the beltway was to be twenty-eight miles long. It would extend from Manhattan, across the Bronx, across the Whitestone Bridge, across Long Island Boulevard, and into Long Island around Queens and Brooklyn. It would extend all the way from Long Island Sound to the Atlantic Ocean, connecting one side of New York to the other. The Triborough Bridge and a few other projects would be involved.

  Lyons asked George if he were interested in a job. George's enthusiasm for the prospect of such employment was overwhelming. He started the very next day and savored every moment of the job. He was quite innovative, creating a very primitive computer system by connecting a series of electrically operated Monroe calculators in tandem. This assembly could be accurate up to seven decimal points and saved tremendous amounts of time. He could locate any spot on the map of the city of New York, no matter the quadrant, within one eighth of an inch. If he told the chief engineer in the field to go to a certain location, the man could be totally confident in his position.

  That year, through friends, George met Velma Sutton, a fledgling opera singer, a coloratura, and thirteen years his senior. She came from Nebraska and had been graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music. She had studied in France, Italy, and Germany; she had performed in Nebraska, New Orleans, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and even La Scala. They were married on 1 December 1936 in a very simple home wedding in the small town of McCook, Nebraska. His mother accompanied him and his best man was Sen. George Norris of Nebraska, who was a nextdoor neighbor to the Suttons.2 The couple then took a modest apartment in Manhattan on Thirty-sixth Street. George continued with Madigan-Hyland Consulting Engineers while Velma continued her work with the Sanitation Department of New York City.

  CHAPTER 3

  Olive Drab

  Quite suddenly, on 11 March 1941, George's father died. Two weeks later George was called to active duty with the mobilization of his reserve unit. Upon being activated, he was made a first lieutenant in the Regular Army, placed with the Corps of Engineers, and ordered to Camp Shelby in Mississippi. It was supposed to be only a six months' mobilization tour, followed by a short period for deactivation of the unit. Large-scale maneuvers were held in Louisiana involving a half a million troops. Three hundred thousand soldiers from the Second Army under General Lear and over two hundred thousand troops from the Third Army under General Krueger competed in war games. For weeks they wrestled back and forth among the bayous of Louisiana, hopping from one mudhole to another.

  George's organization, the Forty-second Engineering Regiment, was a general service unit, not a combat unit; it was assigned to the Third Army, a regional command under Gen. Walter Krueger. As the training became more complete, George's commander, Colonel Smith, made George his regimental adjutant, so George had to memorize all of the elaborate adjutant rituals. The other officers encouraged him in the task and some of them laughed at his ordeal, saying, "We went through that hell when we had to do it. You can do it now. Just remember, though, you're speaking for the colonel, you know, so you speak with authority. You are merely paraphrasing whatever orders the colonel issues."

  The worst thing about this exercise, from George's standpoint, was his responsibility to purify contaminated drinking water. It was August in the swamps of Louisiana, where one had to chlorinate as well as filter the drinking water in order to disinfect it. This had to be done no matter how distasteful the water became from the use of the purification chemicals. The temperatures were extremely high, with many 110-degree days. Often they had to burn freight cars loaded with red meat that had spoiled.

  It was at this juncture that George was called on the carpet for getting a little impertinent in the exercise of his responsibilities. He knew what things were vital to the men's needs, and he was insistent upon getting them. He wrote a letter to the Third Army Headquarters requiring that more supplies be sent to his regiment. They were needed to meet the high standards of water purification for nearly a quarter of a million men in the command. He was responsible, and he was concerned. In reply, he was told to report to the headquarters in New Orleans. He was met by the adjutant, a colonel, who said to George, "Look, as adjutant of your regiment, you naturally want all these things for the command, and you'll get them, but you're going about it in the wrong way. When you want something from me, lieutenant, you don't require me to do it. You request me to do it. I can require; you request. You got it?" George resp
ectfully replied, "Yes, sir." The colonel said, "Good. In the future, request, don't require. Now, it's a hot day. Let's have a coke, son. Do you have any change?" That was how George met Dwight David Eisenhower. George said that he sensed him to be "a very kind man, a true gentleman ... he couldn't have been more considerate, and I'll never forget the occasion."

  After the maneuvers, the regiment returned to Camp Shelby. Days later, Pearl Harbor was attacked. George sent Velma home to Nebraska to live with her folks for the duration of the war. His mother went up to Stamford, Connecticut, near where the family previously had lived.

  By February of 1942, the Forty-second Engineering Regiment was loaded onto several trains and sent by various routes to Fort Lewis, near Tacoma, Washington. George was assigned to Company B, which consisted of about two hundred men. Their destination was Alaska; they would build radar stations, strengthening the Aleutians where attacks by the Japanese were anticipated. The headquarters for B Company was to be at Dutch Harbor on Unalaska Island, primarily a naval base with submarines. With the ice thaws of early March it became possible to navigate in the water, so B Company set out to survey their first radar site, one that would be at 3,000 feet in elevation.

  In June of 1942 the Japanese attacked selected targets in the Aleutians with a branch of their naval flotilla while engaged with the U.S. Navy at Midway. Zero fighters as well as bombers were in evidence everywhere on Unalaska the morning that they first came. Various oil storage facilities as well as some submarines were destroyed. The Americans had a few fighters but they couldn't compete with Zeros. Many of the American aircraft were lost. George described them coming down in flames and burning on the ground with the oil facilities. "To see a whole bunch of Zeros flying in formation when you have so little to oppose them is an awesome and a sad sight. Their bombers never broke formation, thoroughly bombing everything for two days before pulling out." At the same time, Japanese troops attacked and then occupied Kiska and Attu at the very end of the Aleutian chain. From that day on, until the United States readied a complete naval task force, along with expeditionary troops to attack and recover them, the Japanese held Attu and Kiska. George and company continued on with their construction. "What else could we do? Thank God the Japanese took a hell of a beating at the battle of Midway."1

  When the series of radar stations in the Alaskan area was completed, all stations complemented one another. Each kept track of its assigned area, but it also transmitted data to the control center. When all of the station electronics were integrated, the ensemble was capable of reporting all activities in the region. The control center for all of this was back on the mainland, from where aircraft could be deployed.

  At Dutch Harbor, George knew a brave naval officer, Howard Gilmore, who came in on the submarine Growler that summer, flying a broom tied to the periscope. This meant that the boat had executed a "sweep," sinking ajapanese destroyer. Before the next winter was over, Gilmore was dead.2

  In February of 1943, George was given a one-month leave, during which time he went to Nebraska. On his way back to the Aleutians he unexpectedly received a change in assignment. He was told to proceed to Fort Richardson, in Anchorage, Alaska, to be the adjutant of a regiment. Along with the assignment came promotion to the rank of captain.

  Meanwhile, the fledgling lend-lease program, in which the United States gave the Soviet Union thousands of aircraft and great amounts of other equipment, was accelerated. As George told me, "Somebody then said, 'Hey, this guy Kisevalter speaks Russian.' You know, people don't look at records very often, but sometimes they do. I was an engineer, so they had previously placed me in the Corps of Engineers. Then, when somebody looked at the records and found out that I could speak Russian, they moved me to Intelligence." He pointed to a book resting on his coffee table, The Alaska-Siberia Connection, by Otis E. Hays, Jr., which chronicles the program. George's immediate boss at Fort Richardson was Lieutenant Colonel Hays, the author of the book. The commander of the Alaska Defense Command was Gen. Simon Buckner, Jr.3

  Buckner promptly asked George to tell him about his experience in the Aleutians. Since the general was responsible for getting the Japanese out of the islands and keeping them out of Alaska altogether, he had an interest in what a participant in the Japanese raid on Unalaska had to say. He, like George, appreciated a good drink, and he invited George to help him finish a bottle of Hennessy. He said to George, "Look, they made me a three-star general and chief of the Alaska Defense Command. They told me that I would have problems with this new upstart branch in our army called the Army Air Corps. They were right. The Army Air Corps thinks that they own the world, but they do not own Alaska or anyplace else. I'm the chief of the Alaska Defense Command, but I have to listen to this bull from old Hap Arnold and others about how they are running the show. I just wish that I could get out of here and have a combat command. I want to fight the Japanese." `t

  George was on Buckner's staff until June of 1943. Then the general sent him to Ladd Field at Fairbanks as the chief of a new organization, the I & I Detachment. This stood for interpreters and interrogators-interpreters of Russian and interrogators of ,Japanese prisoners of war. The mission would have two other officers and twenty-two enlisted men, all of whom were excellent in Russian. George would be in liaison with the Red Army, living with their regiment and delivering thousands of planes to the Soviets.

  Shortly after being given this new assignment, George explored the Northwest Lend-Lease Ferry Route between Edmonton, Canada, and Nome, Alaska. The U.S. Army Air Corps command post at Great Falls, Montana, received the aircraft from the manufacturers and flew them to the transfer point at Ladd Field, almost two thousand miles. George described this transfer at Ladd Field, where he was the Russian Section commander, as the simple action of someone scribbling on a piece of paper words to the effect that "this is now a Soviet airplane instead of an American one." The Soviets flew the aircraft from that point in groups of about twenty. A bomber would lead the way, with its crew doing all of the navigating, while the fighters would follow along visually. There were three additional operational bases in Alaska on the route to Siberia. From Ladd Field the planes flew to Galena, then Moses Point, and then Nome. From Nome they flew over the Bering Strait and across Siberia. There were five stops across Siberia to Krasnoyarsk. The planes then went into battle within a matter of days.

  Most of the aircraft delivered were fighters. The Soviets preferred the Air Cobras and an improved version, the King Cobras, made by Bell Aviation.5 But they mostly wanted to supplement their infantry with flying artillery. They didn't care that much about bombing; they wanted protection for their infantry. The planes were very good aircraft. The Soviets lost very few of them. According to George, the ones that they lost were not lost because of mechanical problems but because of weather, stupidity, or drunkenness. He estimated that, altogether, twelve thousand aircraft were delivered with a price of approximately eleven billion dollars.6

  George's response to the observation by many that the Soviets never fully paid the U.S. for these materials was: "And what could we say? If the subject were brought up, they could say, 'Well, we paid in blood while you made money on the war.' We did not want that kind of conversation. Their losses were terrific. Their success at Stalingrad, by rolling up a large part of the German Army, saved us countless lives. They lost tremendous manpower, not to mention cities, in the war. It would have been pretty hard to talk finances with them and say, 'Now, you owe us this and that.' We, as Americans, were fortunate that we were, relatively speaking, unscathed by the war."7

  When George was appointed chief of the I & I Detachment, he had to find Russian speakers in the American army. He remembered that a National Guard regiment from New York City, then stationed in the coastal defenses of Alaska, had a Russian battery and that the battery used to march down Fifth Avenue flying the old imperial flag. George scouted out this regiment and sure enough it was full of Russian speakers suitable for his mission. Lt. Michael Gavrisheff had been at
Fort Richardson as well as Ladd Field before George arrived and had spent several months there organizing the unit. Later, when George was transferred back home, Gavrisheff, by then a captain, took over the command. R

  David Chavchavadze had attended an intelligence school at Camp Ritchie in Maryland. There were Spanish-, French-, German-, and Russian-speaking classes in the school. Most graduates went to England and waited for D-Day. There was very little for the Russian linguists to do. One day, there was a requisition for seven Russianspeaking enlisted men. The requisition, of course, had originated with Captain Kisevalter. George hadn't asked for anybody in particular, just seven enlisted men with good knowledge of Russian. So, the seven men went up to Fort Richardson. After some confusion, they found the G-2 tent and there was George Kisevalter, wondering what had happened to the seven enlisted men that he had requisitioned. When Chavchavadze stated his name, George said, "Oh, I know your parents in New York City." This, of course, made David feel at home.

  George spoke fondly of his top sergeant, David Chavchavadze. "Chavchavadze was there; he was only twenty years old then. He was in charge of the Russian interpreters. It was their job to help the Russian mechanics get the planes ready for departure, to check them out and to make sure they were safe to fly. His mother was Grand Duchess Nina of Russia. Whenever he visited England he always slept at Buckingham Palace, because his aunt Xenia, the duchess of Kent, lived there. She was Russian. The Russians and the English were all intermarried, as you

  In December of 1943 George was officially appointed as the base foreign liaison officer. He then was similar to an ambassador. This status required that he be the principal individual coordinating between the chief of the Russian Ferry Pilot mission, the U.S. Ferry pilots, and the base commander at Ladd. This proved to he a politically sensitive position, since the Air Corps people thought I & I personnel should be reporting to their chain of command, not to that of the G-2, the Intelligence Branch. George could get along with the Soviet military personnel better than with the personnel of the U.S. Army Air Corps. He tried to impress his men with the importance of their job. He said to them, "You realize that you are in a job that expedites combat planes going to fight the Germans in three or four days from the time they are released." He also made it clear that their detachment was not part of the Air Corps. They were there because the commanding general of Alaska, who was in charge of security for the whole of Alaska, had to have his representatives there. Since so many of the Soviets were there, this also was a matter of security.