CIA Spymaster_George Kisevalter

by Clarence Ashley III

  My Dear Daughter and my dear Georgi,

  I received your letter which gave me great pleasure and especially the contents of 120 francs. I thank you with all my heart. I would like to know if you are in good health. Please write to me about this. For me, my health is well enough, but my legs give me trouble with walking. I don't go too far for fear that I won't be able to return. That's why I still go gently to St. Foi, a small village 3 kilometers away. I go and have a drink at St. Foi and I come back. It is always the same life, but here everything is out of price and I don't dare buy anything except a box of matches of 5 centimes that they sell for 40 centimes and all the merchandise is the same. Money brings practically nothing. Let's hope that changes. It has been a long time since I went to Marcigny, because of my legs. Let's hope that that will come back. I believe that my little Georgi is growing big now.

  All the best to you from your father who loves you with all his heart.

  Charles Ernest Grillet

  The one sent in December observes that no letters from George Sr. or Rosa have been received for a period of seven months. The death of Boris Andreev, son of Gen. Alexander Andreev and first cousin of George, is reported. He died in a lunatic asylum ... didn't recognize anyone. Oddly, there was never any previous indication that he was ill. Vasiliy writes Rosa about other Andreev children: "Lena left in September for Siberia, works there as teacher. Raya has entered the Geography department of the University; she lives in a hostel and receives a stipend. Misha studies at a vocational school in a metalworking plant; there the students study for four hours and work for four hours each day. Ksenia lives and studies in a boarding school. Julia works temporarily as a typist at my office. Natasha works at a plant too; but I haven't seen her since Boris's funeral." Vasily reflects on the news from America that Rosita works at a fashion store/boutique, as George Sr. s salary is not enough for the family, and George jr. tries to earn his own money, too, and he's doing very well. He also discusses the family's observation that Rosita has purchased a Ford automobile-"Oh, what a brave and energetic woman you are!" Poignantly, he notes, "Leningrad is decorated to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Revolution."

  Seven pieces of correspondence have a 1928 date. The last Domnins in Luga, Russia, acknowledge financial assistance from George Sr. In the letter ofJuly 8, Vasiliy congratulates George Sr. on an addition to his family: "Wish the newborn to get strong and make a nice career." The letter is recognizing, in its own personally coded way, that the family is aware that Alexander has arrived in the States and that George Sr. will look after his welfare. Another letter mentions the new living-accommodations norm in the USSR since October: ten square meters per person. Earlier, the norm had been fourteen square meters per person. Also Sergei spreads the news that Maria, his spouse, and two of their kids had visited Maria's sisters in Riga, Latvia, and Arosa, Switzerland.

  Three letters bear a 1929 date. They mention additional financial assistance to the Domnins from George Sr. They also tell of diseases that are prevalent in the new Communist nation and the introduction of a continuous working week for the USSR-without breaks on Sunday. There will be a total of five public holidays a year.

  Only two letters are from 1930. "Vasiliy has visited Sergei's family in Moscow. Again, no letters have been received from George Sr. for seven months. An economic `boom' in Russia: everyone gets a job very quickly."

  Three letters from 1931 are found: one from Frida Demikeli in Arosa, Switzerland, to George Sr.; another from Sergei to Elsa Philipp in Riga, Latvia; and the last from Elsa to George Sr. They discuss the world crisis, life in Moscow, Riga, Arosa, and Leningrad. "Problems are everywhere." Elsa exclaims: "This damn war made us all disperse and suffer!"

  Four letters were received in 1933. Evidently, there had been a two-year-long break in the communication. Two letters were from Vasiliy, one from Sergei, and one from Frida in Arosa, Switzerland. Frida: "Poor, poor guys in Russia-it's so hard for them to live there at old age!" The others report, "The powers in Leningrad and Moscow allow the West kin to provide help for the Russian part of the family. Vasiliy and Nikolai are seriously ill. Vasiliy lives in a communal apartment with seventeen other people, having one room for his family. Dmitry, Sergei's son, is still forbidden to enter the Institute of Geology, being a son of a civil servant and not a Komsomol member."

  Frida in Arosa sends a postcard in 1934. It reports the death of Vasiliy in Moscow. No other correspondence is evidenced that year.

  In 1935, one letter from Sergei to Elsa in Riga is forwarded to George Sr. It reports that Sergei is ill and that a new Soviet language is recognized, one mixing ostentatious praise to the new regime with Russian.

  A solo letter from Frida in Arosa is sent in 1936. Swiss life and the spouses' intent to visit the USSR in the summer are discussed.

  The farewell letter of Sergei comes in 1937. Foreseeing his own end in the near future, he passes the title of family elder to George Sr. The death of Elena, Vasiliy's widow, in 1936 is noted. The latest news from Moscow and Leningrad is also reported. "So far, everyone was doing well."

  Reflections on these letters give rise to several conclusions. It is obvious that the family was decidedly anti-Communist. Moreover, the hardships faced by those in the Soviet Union, and surreptitiously related to their American kindred, probably had an effect upon George. From my observation, George was as anti-Communist as any rational person could be. In addition, it is clear that the family was close, loving, and loyal to one another-traits that no doubt did a lot to facilitate their survival through wars, revolutions, anarchy, and the attendant deprivations of these scourges. George too had these same traits of devotion, love, and loyalty to his family. These tendencies perhaps troubled him in a way that is hauntingly ironic. Remembering his oft-stated reluctance to attempt to search for his Russian kin (What would I do, stare at tombstones?), I must conclude that George made a painful decision for their benefit. Because of his association with the Central Intelligence Agency, like his first cousin, Alexander A. Andreiev, George never sought contact with his Russian kin, in the belief that harm would come to them if he dideven after the fall of the Soviet Union.

  Notes

  Chapter 1

  1. In a 5 June 1999 letter to the author, John Lavine describes the actual events leading up to the gaffe. "The miniature radio transmitter that I planned to use operated on a very narrow band of the Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) range. As I recall, we were looking at something between ninety and ninety-five MHz for this particular transmitter. I could set it to transmit at any frequency within this band. We were not going to transmit very far in distance, so the wattage was set very low. I specifically recall asking the local technician, my counterpart, whether there was anyone occupying this band segment in the area: that is, the police, the transit authority, or anyone else eligible to use this frequency-public or private. He said no. He forgot that the public state TV was using this band portion for the transmission of the voice signal of their TV broadcast. The particular MHz that I selected ended right upon the center frequency of the public TV's sound channel."

  2. The term requirements refers to the set of intelligence information objectives agreed upon by analysts and other customers of the CIA, as well as other intelligence organizations, and requested of collectors. They can be very broad and ill defined or they can be precisely specified. The degree of specificity typically relates to how much is already known about a particular subject.

  Chapter 2

  1. A Life for the Tsar was first presented in St. Petersburg in 1836. Glinka was driven to compose something "that was genuinely Russian and that would be comprehensible to every Russian."

  2. George William Norris (1861-1944) served in the U.S. Senate from 1912 until 1942. The first dam of the TVA system was named Norris Dam in his honor. His autobiography, Fighting Liberal, was published posthumously in 1945.

  Chapter 3

  1. The Japanese captured Kiska and Attu in June of 1942 and held them until August of 194
3.

  2. Commissioned in the spring of 1942 under Lt. Comdr. Howard 1. Gilmore, the Growler made its first patrol in late June from Dutch Harbor. On July 5, she torpedoed three Japanese destroyers, sinking one and severely damaging the other two. During the period between the last week of August and the first week of September that year, the boat sank four freighters off Taiwan. She sank one ship in the Solomon Islands near Guadalcanal in January of 1943. In February, while making a surface attack on a Japanese gunboat, the gunboat turned to ram the Growler. Gilmore ordered his boat to "come about" in an effort to ram the gunboat; then, after receiving heavy machine-gun fire and sustaining bullet wounds, Gilmore ordered the boat submerged without delay, leaving himself in the conning tower. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for this brave, unselfish act. See Lincoln P. Paine, Ships of the World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997).

  3. After more than a year of active planning, the Alaska Siberian Route, ALSIB, struggled its way into existence on 6 October 1942, when ten A-20 bomber aircraft crossed the Bering Strait into Siberia. One of the planes returned to Nome because of a problem and one of the aircraft was forced to land in Siberia. Eight of the planes eventually reached Krasnoyarsk, the ALSIB terminus 3,500 miles over tundra, mountains, and virgin forest from Fairbanks. The flights of aircraft continued until 2 September 1945. See Otis E. Hays, Jr., The Alaska-Siberia Connection (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1996).

  4. In July of 1940 Brigadier General Buckner was appointed commander of U.S. troops in Alaska. He made major general in 1941 and was promoted to lieutenant general in 1943. Later in 1943, troops under his command drove off the Japanese forces that had gained a foothold in the Aleutians. At Attu, with no evacuation feasible or planned, the Japanese garrison of about 2,350 soldiers fought to the bitter end, as they would in every forthcoming Pacific encounter. In the end, only 29 of them survived. In June of 1944 General Buckner was given command of the Tenth Army in the South Pacific. In April of 1945, four army and four marine divisions under his command landed in Okinawa. Fighting continued until 21 June, at which time the Americans secured the island. Tragically, with victory at hand, Buckner had fallen on 18 June after having received a mortal wound from a piece of stray shrapnel.

  5. The Air Cobra (P-39) was replaced by the King Cobra (P-63) in February of 1944. Hays, The Alaska-Siberia Connection, 110.

  6. The actual number accepted by the Soviets in Fairbanks, Alaska, and delivered across the ALSIB route was 7,924. Within that number were 1 C-46 and 707 C-47 Transports, 1,363 A-20 Light Bombers, 733 B-25 Medium Bombers, 54 AT6-F Trainers, 2,618 P39 Fighters, 48 P-40 Fighters, 3 P-47 Fighters, and 2,397 P-63 Fighters. Hays, The Alaska-Siberia Connection. Others were also taken in over a more polar route into Murmansk and some through Iran. The aggregate number is on the order of 15,000.

  Later versions of the measure of the program and its effect on the Soviet war effort, published in Soviet Newspeak, present different impressions. The official Soviet Union assessment of the effect of lend-lease was that it amounted to about 4 percent of the materials that they themselves produced. Their propaganda maintained that this was hardly enough to play a decisive role in the outcome of the conflict. Their own report of the numbers involved, however, belies that assessment. They acknowledge the receipt of 18,000 aircraft, 11,000 tanks, and 400,000 cars and trucks. Moreover, they ignore the fact that the U.S. was engaged in a full-scale war with Japan, which the Soviets were not, when these shipments were accomplished. See William J. Spahr, Zhukov: The Rise and Fall of a Great Captain (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1993), 41.

  7. The Soviet Union lost 27 million dead and 25 million were left homeless. Destroyed were 1,710 cities, 70,000 villages, 32,000 factories, 98,000 collective farms, 1,878 state farms, and 2,890 agriculture equipment parks. World War II Through Russian Eyes: Time Line of the War on the Russian Front (Traveling Exhibit of the Central Military Museum and Archives in Moscow, 1998-99).

  8. Michael Gavrisheff, like George, also came from a distinguished Russian family. His great-grandfather, Login O. Gavrishev, was a rear admiral in the tsar's navy and the last Russian lieutenant governor of Alaska until it was sold to the U.S. in 1867. Boris Gavrisheff, Michael's father, also was a highly decorated tsarist naval officer until the Bolshevik revolution. Michael was born in St. Petersburg in 1917. The family left the Soviet Union in 1918 and eventually reached the U.S. in 1932. Michael grew up in Texas, attended Texas A & M, and learned surveying and related civil-engineering disciplines from his father. Also like George, Michael had fluency in more than one language. He could translate between Russian, Spanish, and English. Gavrisheff died on 18 May 1999. Michael Gavrisheff, interview by author, Silver Spring, Md., 16 April 1999.

  9. Chavchavadze denies this bit of hyperbole (or, perhaps, mass confusion) on the part of George. There are three people in question: (1) Grand Duchess Xenia, who was the sister of Tsar Nicholas II; (2) David's mother's sister, who also was named Xenia; and (3) the duchess of Kent, who was born Princess Marina of Greece and who actually lived in Kensington Palace. He explains that his mother was Princess Nina, born in St. Petersburg, the daughter of Grand Duke George Mikhailavich of Russia and Princess Marie of Greece, not the grand duchess; and that she was a favorite cousin of the duchess of Kent as well as a cousin of Tsar Nicholas II. However, neither his mother nor Grand Duchess Xenia, sister of Tsar Nicholas II, had ever set foot in Buckingham Palace or married an Englishman. Chavchavadze himself did visit the duchess of Kent in Kensington Palace, but he never spent the night there.

  10. David Chavchavadze, interview by author, Washington, D.C., 20 May 1998.

  11. Odessa was under occupation by German and Romanian troops for four years.

  12. Maj. Gen. Edwin Luther Sibert was a close associate of Allen Dulles, who then was the chief of the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.).

  13. The Germans had captured a number of Soviet military intelligence officers (GRU), whose mission was to traverse Germany and then penetrate the American and British lines in order to investigate the supposed plans of Eisenhower and Montgomery to prepare an attack on the USSR. Because of this, Gehlen was convinced that after the defeat of Germany there was to be a war between the U.S. and the USSR. As the war in Germany was coming to an end, he and two of his senior associates moved extensive files, records, and German plans to a remote location in the Bavarian Alps. There they dug deep holes into the mountainside to secure their cache and waited for the right opportunity to negotiate a defection to the U.S. rather than be taken captive by the Soviets. Gehlen and three of his chosen officers were flown out of Germany on 22 August 1945, all disguised as U.S. Army officers, and taken to Fort Hunt. See E. H. Cookridge, Gehlen: Spy of the Century (New York: Random House, 1972), 110, 115, 125.

  14. Bundesnachrichtendienst.

  Chapter 4

  1. Carotene is a yellow-orange- to red-colored hydrocarbon occurring in many plants that converts to vitamin A in the animal liver.

  2. Mrs. Wayne Allen, letter to author, 19 October 1999.

  3. See Peer de Silva, Sub Rosa: The CIA and the Uses of Intelligence (New York: New York Times Books, 1978), 57. Peer de Silva was the CIA mission chief in Saigon when the U.S. Embassy was bombed. He suffered considerably from wounds inflicted and eventually, according to George, succumbed to them.

  4. Lt. Comdr. Edward Dean Spruance was himself awarded the Silver Star during World War II. See Current Biography (Bronx, N.Y.: H. W. Wilson Co., 1944).

  5. Rositzke was a former English teacher and later an author of books on the CIA, the KGB, and the Soviet Union.

  6. See David Wise's book, Molehunt (New York: Random House, 1992), 220-24, for interesting accounts about Snow, his wife, Nata, and Nata's stepfather, Andy Yankovsky.

  7. "Pork Chop Hill" (so called for its shape) was officially named Hill 255, for its elevation in yards. It is located some forty-five miles to the north-northeast of Seoul. It lies within a region defined by the three legs of 'a triangle d
rawn between the locations of Pyongyang, Chorwon, and Kumhwa, where extensive fighting occurred at places named Pork Chop Hill, White Horse, T-Bone, Spud, Alligator Jaws, Old Baldy, Arsenal, and Erie. In November of 1952 Pork Chop Hill was held by the Thailand Battalion attached to the U.S. Army Second Infantry Division and came under heavy attack by Chinese Communist Forces. The hill was fought over many times up until the end of the war in July of 1953. Today, part of it lies in North Korea and part of it is in the Demilitarized Zone.

  Chapter 5

  1. Andrei A. Vlasov commanded the Thirty-seventh Army of the USSR during the defense of Kiev in 1941, the Twentieth Army in the defense of Moscow, and the Second Shock Army in 1942. At that time he was captured by the Germans and eventually turned against Stalin. He commanded the Russian Liberation Army, commonly know as the Vlasov Army under German command, in its futile attempt to combat Bolshevism in 1944 and 1945. Vlasov was captured by the Soviet Army in May of 1945 and hanged on 2 August 1946.

  2. George also played chess very well. In an 11 March 1998 interview in Great Falls, Va., with Joe Skura, Joe stated, "Everyone knew that George was a champion chess competitor and that he won prizes in New York at a young age. Bill Hood, who was the chief of operations in Vienna, thought of himself as being a good player, Bill continually challenged George to matches and George continually defeated him. George often joked, `Bill tried to get me drunk so that he could beat me; but I could beat him even though I was drunk.' George was a character."

  3. George received a per diem for more than the first six months of his stay in Vienna. This shocked headquarters management when they learned of it in late 1954.

  4. Under cover, using a fictitious name, identification, etc.

  5. Some publications have reported that George and Popov engaged in "drinking bouts" at these meetings. In an interview of 7 May 1999 in Great Falls, Va., Ted Poling confirmed to the author that this never happened. "The two of them did, however, have Russian capacities for drink," he said.