George's life with Popov was meticulously designed. For example, if Popov and he had a meeting, it would be in some safehouse, lived in by unwitting Americans. The pair used three or four different locations for these safehouses and everything was recorded. Popov never knew it. George had to set up the tapes before each meeting, but he had technicians arrange the equipment so that he could simply press a button and the tapes would roll.
They would always have available some sweetmeats, cakes, sandwiches, and a bottle of vodka to make things comfortable. Before each engagement, George personally went to Cafe Sacher in Vienna, selected certain special delicacies, and carried them up the three or more flights of stairs to that safehouse. George's great attention to detail helped to ensure the success of his many endeavors.
Popov and George would start by visiting socially. They might have a friendly drink for an icebreaker, but they never got drunk.5 At the end of the meeting, after Popov had left, George would collect all of the bottles and the rest of the garbage, put them in a special bag, and take them all to the city dump. This was done so that no one in the area would see any incriminating evidence, such as the foreign or exotic items, the vodka, or anything else. Doing these things was a part of George's life. When the meetings were over, he would pick up the tapes and garbage and get out of there.
In Mole, William Hood's version of the Popov affair, George is the case officer Gregory Domnin. I had read the book but I did not know much about George's personal involvement in the operation, so I asked him to recall those events. George began, "I can tell you all about the way of the man, which in itself is not a philosophy but a truism, that few people, who are not Russians, who are not Slavs, who are not peasants, could understand. I learned from him more about peasants than I could ever have known from any other source. Now I appreciate them more and respect them more as generous, hardworking creatures of God, who are earthy, who love the soil, who love to grow plants from the ground, who love to be diligent, and who love to work very hard. Of course, they are not well educated. Few of them reached any intellectual stature to speak of, either in literacy or any standard of education related to book learning of any kind. I don't think many of them went much beyond what we call elementary school, if that, in the old days. They would be illiterate and they would be ridiculed because of their lack of education. Consequently, they would be willing to say yes to anyone who had a social status higher than their own, which was about everybody. Humility, of course, was their long suit. Like anyone else who would drink too much, debauchery would victimize their behavior and make them look stupid. If they were drunk, they would do things that would be unacceptable, socially, like any other drunk, whether he was a millionaire or a pauper. Unfortunately for them, however, in order to seek escape from their circumstances, they too often were drunk. But to summarize: Popov's own one-sentence definition of a peasant was `someone to be starved, beaten, ridiculed, exploited, and then used as cannon fodder in war.'
"We gave him a salary. He received only a portion of it. That which we paid him was issued in Austrian shillings or in German marks. He received only as much as he could logically have on his person without attracting undue attention. The rest we kept for him in trust. Actually, there is an account still in existence for him. We owe him a small fortune. He never received 50 percent of his wages for a period of almost seven years. It is all put away, deposited in a fictitious name, in a Washington, D.C., bank. We owe him what is his. It is his money, a salary. It is not a gratuity. We are just custodians of the money he never received.6 More than that, whatever else he received, he got in kind: a few shirts; socks; soap with which to wash them; toiletries for use when he went out of town; boots, very nicely fur lined, etc. His mother-in-law had a shoe size the same as he, so he didn't even get to keep his. His wife got another pair. I think that he had a girlfriend for whom he bought a raincoat. He usually got things of value to wear. He was always giving things that he earned to somebody else. In short, he gave to anyone in this world whom he liked what he or she didn't have, and he kept nothing for himself. That is the kind of man he was. You cannot call him a mercenary. He was a wonderful man with a heart of gold. He treated me like a brother. I thank God that I knew the man.
"As an example of his orientation, let me tell you of the thing that captured his greatest interest regarding America or Americans. For propaganda purposes, it would be the general custom of Americans abroad in intelligence to have certain magazines or attractive advertisement brochures dealing with American life or American accomplishments lying about in the safehouses. Sometimes these would be the current issues of Life or Time or something of that sort. In our safehouses we had those, not in a prolific way, but say, numbering to maybe half a dozen. But he would make a beeline for one and one only, The American Farm Journal. He wanted to know if American rural people or American farmers really owned tractors. Could things really be like they were displayed in The American Farm Journal? What a civilization the Americans had created for themselves! Are there many Russian peasants who have immigrated to the United States? How are they doing? Do they have land? Do they have tractors? Are they prosperous? Are they diligent? Are they worthy of the success they experience? It was an attraction to him for those reasons. Nationalism, language, geography had nothing to do with this. It was only a human attitude, and this incessant curiosity about The American Farm Journal, derived from just browsing through it, indicates what kind of thinker he was. The hell with all others: Time, Life, and flashy cars, fancy advertising, etc.
"His generosity, as I mentioned before, was far reaching. Once, I smuggled out of Switzerland and gave to him some black-market rubles, what we in the trade refer to as `red roses.' He thus didn't have to make a money exchange, which could have been dangerous for him. He didn't even have to account for how he got the rubles; he could simply claim that he had sold some old heirloom of gold on the black market. He took the money, went to the home of his sister and his brother, a kolkhoz [collective farm], then bought a calf and gave it to them so that they could have milk. We laughingly claimed to have a CIA calf in the Soviet Union.
"His name was Pyotr Semyonovich Popov, that is: Peter, son of Simon, Popov in English. At that time he was a major in the GRU, as opposed to KGB, a military intelligence officer assigned to one of the GRU rezidenturas [cover office of an intelligence operation] in Vienna since November of 1951, a very fine, moral person in terms of what was right and what was wrong.?
"Popov told me how the peasants revolted and were severely punished before finally being forced, in a very recalcitrant manner and under bayonets, into a collective farm, a kolkhoz, formed during the 1930s under Stalin. The story was so simple. They said to the intruders, `Look, you're soldiers, you have bayonets. You're prodding us. You're also Russians, aren't you?'
"`Yes.'
"`You speak Russian, don't you?'
"`Yes.'
"`It says something on the corner of your rifle-RKKA. That means the red flag of workers and peasants. You are workers, we are peasants; we are the ones who put you in power. We are workers and peasants. Red Army, is that right?'
"`Yes.'
`Then why are your bayonets pushing us to force us to a concentration camp?'
"`Shut up. We are sick and tired of listening to your bleating. You peasants made your first mistake when you believed us.'
"That is Communism. So, with this philosophy, he knew which way was up and what was the truth. Moreover, when father repeats to son and mother repeats to daughter the memory, `We made our first mistake when we believed them,' I can assure you that for the 150 million peasants who lived in the Soviet Union, this small error would not occur again. So, those are the fundamental lessons he had learned.
"Well, enough of the idealism of the man. He was oriented to the rugged outdoors and able. He had native talent. When I say native, I mean like this: he was a crack shot with a rifle; he was a marksman who could compete for his unit and win prizes in all kinds of rivalry from amate
ur sports to military competition. He also was an avid fisherman, as many Russians are, particularly peasants. He was a very earthy man. For example, instead of going to a resort, to which an officer on leave would be entitled when coming back from rotation on a long tour on overseas assignments, he would make a beeline for his little peasant village kolkhoz. There he would shed his high-ranking uniform (being the only officer in the history of the little town) and walk around barefoot, eating cucumbers, fishing in the Volga River and talking to other peasants, as if they were brothers. Being one of them, he was just townfolk.
"Once, to try to make it up to me for having wasted all of his vacation time on these 'indulgences,' he said, 'When I was fishing up and down the Volga, I saw, across the river, an airfield. I made a sketch for you; here it is. So, I didn't waste my time.' Well, that was just fine. But of course, there were a few times over the period of more than six years when he did go to various resorts. After all, during that period he had at least six vacations of thirty days or so. In those places he had conversations with many of the officers of various parts of the USSR who came from many different types of military assignments to these vacations. We picked up a lot information from these conversations, including the location of many potential missile sites as well as assorted nuclear activity. Strange as it may seem, that kind of conversation gets bandied about in whispers much more often than it should be. Most people are blabbermouths by nature.
"His family came from a small peasant village by the name of Kineshma, near a larger town by the name of Ivanov, northeast of Moscow about 125 miles. In olden days the capital of the region was called Tver, which lies to the west of Ivanov. It's an old city, begun in 1180 A.n. as a fort in the western part of what was then called the Suzdal principality. For two centuries Tver was the capital and a longtime rival of Moscow for supremacy in Russia, but the regions were annexed in 1490 under Ivan III. It suffered a great massacre of its citizens in 1570 under Ivan the Terrible. In 1932 Tver was renamed Kalinin in honor of a Soviet hero. It was taken by the Germans in the autumn of 1941 and retaken by the Soviets in December of 1941. The district straddles the Volga River and is on the Moscow-to-Leningrad railroad.
"The story of Popov's older brother has a moral application that might be difficult for some to comprehend. It is a tremendously heartbreaking story with a great deal of significance. It involves the abuse of the uneducated peasants. His father's name, Simon, would never have come to anyone's attention were it not for a group of human circumstances. As a student of irony I know you will relish this. It is absolutely true.
"Theirs was a very submarginal but free peasant village. There were no collective farms at the time; this was after World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the Counterrevolution, just before Stalin's collectivization took place. Pyotr had two brothers and one sister. The sister's name was Lyuba and the oldest brother's name was Alexander. I cannot remember the other brother's name. He had a crippling physical problem, a bad heart; but he also had a little bit of influence in the local village. He was very smart but, like everyone else in the family, uneducated. He could read and write, which really was a big plus for a peasant; so, he was more or less the village bookkeeper, which was a low-paying and hard job. The bookkeeper is not the highest-paid professional in a farm community. The mother had died long before our story begins, but the father was highly respected in the community, even though he was ignorant and uneducated. He also was a popular person in that neighborhood. People would often come by in the evening and, to use an expression of Pyotr's, 'just sit around on the fence and jaw about events of the day.' This was a mark of a little bit of distinction for the father because there wasn't much else in the way of social interaction in the community. The father not only was respected for his earthy wisdom, even though illiterate, but he was highly regarded for his generosity. He often would glance at a neighbor and say, `Look at that poor man. He has three daughters and only one son. We have three boys; let's help him with his hay.' So, he would balance off mutually needed physical work in this very submarginal area. I know the area; I looked it up in the literature and read about it.
"Now, in those days the district designations were being changed to new names, in order to reflect the change in status from a Tsarist Russia to a Communist Soviet Union. It was originally Ivanovsky. Then, at the time that our story takes place, it was changed to the name of Kalinin District, or Oblast.
"Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin was the very unattractive, goat-shapefaced man who was, nominally, the leader of the USSR, its first president. His job was politically impotent. He was the titular head of the nation, serving only for ceremonial purposes. Still, his face and the name, Kalinin, were everywhere, even now. Kaliningrad, the new name of the old city of Konigsberg, was named for him. Kalinin was not politically or intellectually, or in any other way, a distinctive man or even important except for this story.
"This history is related to our story by the mere fact that the Popov family was living in a district using the new name Kalinin. The tale takes place during the height of collectivization. This is the period when the peasants were being prodded with bayonets to march off their small, submarginal farms, on which one could hardly eke out a living, and onto some collective farm. When the collective delegation came to the Popov farm, they so infuriated Alexander, the big brother, that a row ensued. Alexander was a giant of a man, very tall and strong. When the commissar leading this delegation began to coax the family to move on and get off the farm, their farm, Alexander became so infuriated that he grabbed the commissar and heaved the man right through their oaken front door. As a consequence, the whole family wound up in the local jug.
"So there they were, sitting on the straw-strewn or otherwise bare ground of a cell, commiserating with one another. Finally, one of them said, 'We have to do something. We are going to be forced to go anyway, and we'll probably be beaten and receive all kinds of other penalties.' So, they began, collectively, with the help of the one crippled son, to write a letter, each one suggesting what the next word of the letter should be. It was a joint effort by a bunch of dumbbells, only one of whom was literate enough to form words. The letter was addressed to Comrade Kalinin, president of the USSR, and sought, without specific remedy, some solution to their plight. Since Kalinin himself had once been a peasant and had advertised himself as a friend of the peasants, they believed that they had reason to hope for success in the endeavor. It read roughly as follows:
"We poor peasants, now living in the district of Kalinin Oblast, named in your honor, are being mercilessly, cruelly, unfairly, and unjustly pushed around. We don't think that you would like this if you knew about it, or permit this type of persecution in a place of your name; so, we are appealing collectively to you as diligent peasants for your help. They are forcing us into this situation. We are not kulaks [tight-fisted, rich peasants]. We are just poor peasants who simply want to work hard and survive. We don't think that you would have peasants treated this way, especially in the district named after you, because you too are an honorable man.
"Miraculously, the letter got to its destination. When Kalinin read it, he thought that he could see political advantage in making a little bit of noise and advertising his action. He ordered restitution made to the family, restitution of a strange nature. So, from Moscow, like lightning striking, in came orders to the local commissar to release the Popovs. That commissar came to the place of their incarceration and addressed the family.
"`We have orders from Moscow to get you out of the jug. Alexander, how would you like to be a commissar?'
"'I won't have anything to do with it.'
"'Well, look, we've got to do something. What do you want?'
"`I want to get out of here with my wife.'
"'Well, let's be practical. You can't just leave this circumstance and take her with you. You have to buy her way out.'
"`So what does it cost?'
"`Well, money is not worth much today-so many 100-kilogram bags of flour, th
is, that, and the other.'
"`Okay, I'll take it.'
"`You'll take what?'
"'I'll take the freedom for that price. just you watch.'
"So, he bundled up his sheets, clothing, and all the things that he owned, wrapped them up on his back, and left the area. Where did he go? He went into the woods. Where in the woods did he go? He went to the head of a small lumber plant that belonged to the Lumber Trust and he went to work. He could hew lumber faster and better than anyone else in the area could, being a strong, strong man. The people there instantly considered him to be a great person. They encouraged him:
"`Look, we'll help you throw together a log cabin.'
"`Fine.'
"'You can throw a few potatoes in the ground here. This is Lumber Trust land; it's all right.'
"`How about meat? Can I go out hunting?'
"`You can hunt, too.'
"`Fine, I'll go out hunting. I can hunt for money.'
"`How do you mean?'
"`Well, there are certain animals called martens. They are relatives of sable and similar to mink.'
"Thus, he became a super hunter, and the furs were worth quite a bit of money. Eventually, he began to accumulate some money. He went back with so many 100-kilogram bags of flour, ransomed his wife from the Soviet Union, and took her to the woods. (This was the first pioneer and entrepreneur I heard of in the Soviet Union.) That wasn't enough, however. That was just the beginning. He then came hack to the kolkhoz where his family lived and where his reputation was sky high among the locals. He got hold of our Pyotr, his brother, and said, `Petya (which is Russian for Pete), somebody in our family has to be educated. I have just elected you. I know that you are a dope, but you will learn. You never wear real shoes; you wear those soft handwoven things. I am going to buy you some good shoes. I know that they hurt your feet, but you are going to learn how to wear them and you will get used to them. Also, from now on, you are going to go to school, away from the kolkhoz.'
CIA Spymaster_George Kisevalter Page 9
