Last of the Cold War Spies

by Roland Perry

  Half of Trotsky’s prophecy was fulfilled when one of Stalin’s killers put an ice pick in his skull on August 20, 1940. Krivitsky heard the news while hiding out in Canada, where he had been since returning from England after his interrogations in January and February. He was shaken but determined to return to the United States to resume his drive for citizenship, which he did in late October. He felt certain that the information he gave MI5 would not be acted on. He told friends that there did not seem the will in British intelligence to follow up on his leads. Liddell’s reserve worried him.

  However, Krivitsky was not aware that MI5’s Jane Sissmore and others had been following up on his leads, such as those concerning one of his “serials” (agents) in Paris, von Petrov, who Krivitsky alleged had been an important agent for the GRU during the prewar period. This von Petrov (as explained earlier, really the Australian, Charles Ellis) had good sources in Britain as well as Germany, where he was operating as a double agent for the Germans and the Russians. MI5 now wanted to know more about him. It was also under pressure from the foreign office to obtain more intelligence on the alleged spies in its ranks. According to Peter Wright, MI5 had decided to send an officer to Washington to further debrief Krivitsky in late February or March 1941. Liddell favored Victor Rothschild, who was on good terms with the Americans following his commercial espionage in B Section when he recommended that all major German industrial organizations in the United Kingdom be sold off to U.S. companies. (Rothschild was later a key MI5 troubleshooter and interrogator, particularly of Nazi prisoners in Paris.)10

  The Russians’ worry would now be that Krivitsky might be prepared to divulge some of the “important” information he had so far withheld. This would have included new clues on the Cambridge ring, which in the months since his London debriefing and Liddell’s promotion had entrenched itself further into the British intelligence services and other vital areas.

  Stalin was receiving a whole raft of data that daily increased his strength in dealing with other governmental heads, and it was only the beginning. Even though by early 1941 the Russians were nervous about their pact with Hitler, the two nations were not yet at war. Stalin wished to remain well fed with intelligence. He insisted on seeing all the information coming in from the key spies, who were already becoming familiar to him and the Moscow Center by their code names . . . Johnson, Stanley, Madchen, Homer and others. Stalin demanded to see all messages as soon as they had been deciphered. It gave him great satisfaction to receive the truth from them about what his opposite numbers were actually thinking and doing, rather than what they were simply mouthing publicly or saying in communiqués to him.11

  If one code name were uncovered, then the lot might be caught in a disaster for the Moscow Center. If Blunt were ever interrogated, his connections to recruits such as Straight might emerge, especially as their links at Cambridge only a few years earlier would be recalled.

  Krivitsky, back in New York, was now a serious threat and would be in need of as much protection and help as possible. But he was at times doing little to help his cause. His prickly, difficult nature had seen him fall out with friends he needed, such as Isaac Don Levine. The journalist had wanted more details for their articles for the Saturday Evening Post. Krivitsky was torn between full disclosure and a desire to protect old comrades. He still believed in the 1917 Russian revolution and tried to make a distinction between its importance and Stalinism. Thus he held back “the most important” information.12

  Krivitsky avoided anyone who might be connected to his past life in the KGB, such as Paul Wohl, who had worked for him as a Soviet agent in France and Switzerland. They had been friends on the first stay in New York. Krivitsky owed Wohl $200, and Wohl was trying to trace him for it. There were still a few supporters. Whittaker Chambers was encouraging, as was Loy Henderson at State, whom he visited often at his office in November and December 1940. Henderson was helping with contacts and in pushing for the end of Krivitsky’s immigration problems.

  Just down the corridor from Henderson’s office at State was the office of the European Division, where Straight was pretending to lend a sympathetic ear to expatriates from France. He could not have been better placed to observe Krivitsky’s visits.

  Krivitsky’s main paranoia was that he was being watched, followed, eventually to be set up for a kill. He was trained in tradecraft and could slip away from the KGB watchers, as he had done on many occasions. But he feared most of all the friendly or anonymous face of someone such as Straight who could learn his movements on any given day and alert one of Stalin’s three-man hit squads. They in turn would isolate and trap him.

  He complained to friends about the constant feeling of being hunted. Yet he could live with this, just as long as he knew who the enemy was and where he was likely to be.

  On one occasion he escaped in the New York subway when three people, one of whom he thought he recognized as George Mink, tried to corner him. Mink was a former head of the U.S. Communist Party’s Seamen’s Union, who traveled freely in and out of the country on a false passport. The “undereducated, arrogant, ruthless, and boastful” Mink was an experienced Russian assassin who had carried out many assignments during the Spanish Civil War. His hits included members of the British Independent Labour Party and the American Socialist Party. He was a close relative of Solomon Lozovsky, the chief of the Soviet Profintern—the communist-led international trade union organization. This connection in the mid-1930s saw Mink bounce from being a taxi driver in Philadelphia to the chairmanship of the Marine Workers’ Industrial Union. He first came to the notice of authorities worldwide when he was arrested for raping a chambermaid in a Copenhagen hotel, where codes, addresses, and false passports were found in his possession. Mink spent eighteen months in jail and then returned to Washington, on another false passport.13 He was well known to Krivitsky, who may have even directed him on occasions in Europe.

  After spotting Mink, Krivitsky rang Henderson, who advised him to get in touch with the New York police. Krivitsky obeyed the directive, but the local precinct was not equipped or willing to give regular protection.

  In January 1941, he had his second chilling reminder that his days could be numbered when he was passed a letter from Paul Wohl. It was addressed to the writer Suzanne La Follette, the sister of Bob La Follette, the Wisconsin senator, whom Straight had gotten to know while researching his thesis on Nazi rearmament early in 1938. Suzanne, a Trotskyite and member of the American committee for the defense of Leon Trotsky, had befriended and helped the Krivitskys. She had urged her brother to give support in congress for their attempts to gain citizenship. Suzanne was well known as a conduit for messages to the Krivitskys.

  The KGB was aware of the La Follette-Krivitsky association for at least two reasons. Stalin had focused his secret police on any Trotskyites. Now the defector—its main assassination target—was associated with them. The La Follette link also provided a second avenue for Straight to explore if he had been ordered to help track Krivitsky. This may have been facilitated by his Trotskyite affiliations, which allegedly so worried his KGB masters when he first began operating in the United States.

  The January 7, 1941, letter from Wohl to Suzanne said:

  My dear Miss La Follette,

  Will you please inform your honorable friend K. that an ominous person is in New York: Hans. This letter is addressed to you since K. hides from me. Obviously, to escape the serving of a summons for the remaining $200 which he owes me in virtue of a formal arbitration award to which I submitted at his request.

  His devious practices hardly justify this warning. I hesitate to send it. It may be better to let the rats devour each other.

  Yours Truly,

  Paul Wohl14

  Wohl’s letter, however disgruntled, was a warning. “Hans” was Hans Bruesse, Krivitsky’s former chauffeur in Europe. His arrival in New York (Wohl had spotted him at a Manhattan bus stop) meant one thing to Krivitsky. Bruesse, who had made two earlier attempts in France
to eliminate him, would be teaming up with Mink and a third man for another attempt at his liquidation. Stalin had put a figure of $100,000 on Trotsky’s head. Mink, who had failed to deliver in Mexico, would be ambitious to cash in on this new target.

  Krivitsky now felt there was nowhere to turn in New York’s glass canyons. He wanted to escape. He told friends he was thinking about moving to the country and planned to visit his new acquaintances Eitel and Marguerite Dobert, who ran a 90-acre chicken farm in rural Virginia near Charlottesville, about 100 miles from Washington, D.C. Eitel was an ex-Nazi stormtrooper who in the early 1930s gave up his fascist affiliations and fled to the United States. In recent years he had associated with communists, which led to his friendship with Krivitsky when they met at a writers’ colony in upstate New York in November. Krivitsky rang Eitel and said he was coming to look at their chicken farm (although the Doberts later claimed they did not know when).

  On Monday, February 3, Krivitsky went to see Chambers in New York. “We spent hours together, tramping the streets,” Chambers recalled, “taking circuitous routes and watching, as in the underground old days, to see if we were followed.”15

  They talked about Krivitsky’s problems and his fears about assassination. He reminded Chambers that if “they” decided to kill him, it would be made to look like a suicide. Stalin was happy to have Trotsky openly murdered in Mexico and Ignaz Reiss filled with bullets and left on a lonely road in Switzerland, but he was unlikely to be so brazen inside the United States. A suicide would be neater and less antagonistic to U.S. Soviet relations. People like Bruesse and Mink were expert at setting up such a scene.

  Chambers and Krivitsky also spoke about religion.

  “Like me,” Chambers wrote, “Krivitsky had become convinced that religious faith is a human necessity. . . . He asked me if I would arrange for his instruction so that he could be baptized and confirmed in the Episcopal Church.”

  According to Chambers, Krivitsky also told him that a few days before, he had stopped carrying a revolver and had placed it in a bureau drawer. His 7-year-old son Alex watched him. The boy asked why he had put the gun away. Krivitsky told him that “nobody carried a revolver in America.”

  “Papa,” the child said, “carry the revolver.”16

  On Thursday, February 8, 1941, Krivitsky took the train alone south and once more visited the solicitous Henderson at State. (There, Straight was on good terms with those who could help him with his surveillance.) Krivitsky told Henderson of his plans for the weekend to visit his friends’ chicken farm. He would stay there Friday and Saturday nights and return Sunday when he would catch the train back to New York, in time for testimony there about communist infiltration into education. He was thinking about buying his own farm.

  Krivitsky told Henderson of his intention to purchase a gun in Virginia where, unlike New York and New Jersey, he did not need a permit.17 He mentioned the news that the assassin Hans Bruesse was in New York, and gave this as the reason that he needed a weapon for protection.

  After spending Thursday night in his Washington “safe house”—a hotel— he found his way to the Doberts’ remote farm at Barboursville, Virginia, either by taxi or via a ride with an unidentified American.18

  Barboursville, reached by taking Routes 66, 29, and 33 from Washington, D.C., even today is a small, isolated town. The area was not well marked. Finding the correct chicken farm was difficult.

  The Doberts did not know how Krivitsky arrived on Friday, February 7, 1941. They did not see a vehicle, only the uninvited guest.

  “There was a knock at the front door,” Mrs. Dobert recalled. “I opened the door and there was Walter. I never thought to ask how he got there. Perhaps a taxi.”19

  The Doberts and Krivitsky talked in German into the night. He asked countless questions about chicken farming and seemed obsessed about becoming a farmer. But the attraction of the area’s remoteness was uppermost in his mind.

  “It’s safe and peaceful here,” he told them. Krivitsky, if armed and vigilant, gave himself some chance of surviving in such isolation. The Doberts were dubious about his desire to work on the land. Mrs. Dobert couldn’t picture him doing it.20

  “He was a total intellectual,” she said. “Not the type!”

  The Doberts were tired after a day’s work, and they went to bed. Krivitsky woke them shortly afterward, complaining of a headache, which was keeping him awake. The genial Mrs. Dobert gave him some aspirin and writing paper.

  Krivitsky remained restless through the night. He wrote letters and then early in the morning went for a long walk in the woods. The Doberts had found him highly strung previously. That weekend, they thought his manner in keeping with what they knew of his character. In other words, Krivitsky did or said nothing to indicate that he was abnormally on edge.

  The next morning, Saturday, February 8, Mrs. Dobert drove him to a hardware store (the façade of which has been kept—it’s now a restaurant) in Charlottesville. He bought a .38-caliber automatic pistol for fifteen dollars and two boxes of mushroom bullets, which were more lethal than those normally sold at the store. Krivitsky was chatty and upbeat, telling the clerk who sold him the gun and the store manager, Charles Henshaw, that he would soon be moving into the area. Back at the farm, Krivitsky spent the afternoon at target practice.

  Late Sunday morning Mrs. Dobert drove Krivitsky to Washington. Along the way, they took a wrong turn, which saw them driving for some time on isolated back roads. Krivitsky was ever watchful, but no car followed them. They arrived at Union Station in the late afternoon.

  Mrs. Dobert recalled the final matters discussed. “Do you want me to post those letters?” she asked him, referring to those he had written.

  “I’ll look after them myself,” he replied.

  “Have you got your ‘artillery’?” she asked, referring to his pistol.

  Krivitsky answered by patting his only luggage, a canvas bag.

  “Do you think there is a place to have a bath here?” Krivitsky asked, glancing at the station entrance. “Most stations like this in Europe have one.”

  Mrs. Dobert didn’t know. She felt conscious of the fact that there had not been running water at the farm, hence Krivitsky’s concern about a bath. He had nearly an hour before the next New York train was due.

  His last words to her were a sad refrain heard by several people who knew him at the time: “If anything should happen to me, look after Tonya and Alex.”21 Mrs. Dobert wished him a safe journey and left him walking toward the station.

  Krivitsky’s next known move was to walk at a 45-degree angle away from the front entrance across North Capitol Street NW to East Street, and then 50 meters down on the right-hand side of the street (as it would be entered from Union Station) to the small Bellevue Hotel. It would have taken him less than three minutes. One simple explanation for this was his need for a bath before his train at 6:30 P.M.: the Bellevue was the nearest decent hotel in the vicinity. Perhaps he was directed there by a station worker, or perhaps he found it himself. If he had spotted Bruesse or Mink, he would not have strolled to the nearest hotel and casually checked in.

  The registry showed that he registered under the name of Walter Poref at 5:49 P.M. The staff did not notice anything unusual as he went up the elevator to the fifth floor, where he made two rights and found room 522 on the left of the corridor. The room (preserved until today by the management because of its “celebrity” status) he entered had an archway just beyond the door, a bathroom, and a bed. The room’s window had a ledgeless sill looking out to a brick wall across a five-yard divide and a straight drop to the ground five levels below. The only possible exit or entry was the room’s door.

  Thelma Jackson, a 21-year-old maid, knocked several times on the door to 522 the next morning, Monday, February 10, at 9:30 A.M. When there was no answer, she used her passkey to open the door, although from the outside there was no way of telling if it was locked from the inside. In other words, if Jackson had simply turned the handle, it
may have opened, although she assumed it was locked.22

  She entered the room. She was shocked to see a man lying face down on the bed, his head toward the foot of the bed. A pistol was on the floor. Jackson noticed the blood, then a wound in the right temple. A .130grain mushroom bullet had been fired into the temple. It had exploded out below the left ear, leaving a wound the size of a fist.

  The Washington metropolitan police and the coroner were notified. Finding three notes, their quick, joint conclusion by 11:30 A.M., just two hours after Jackson found the body, was suicide. The room was ordered scrubbed clean, a job that was completed in an hour. Soon after that, room 522 was back on the hotel’s inventory of available rooms.

  The suicide finding was soon disputed by Krivitsky’s lawyer, Paul Waldman, who arrived at 11:00 P.M. from New York. He viewed the body at the morgue and was suspicious about the head wounds. He noted that a self-inflicted wound would not have been made that way. The entry and exit holes of the mushroom bullet were consistent with a shot from the weapon held at least a yard from the head. To commit suicide this way would have meant Krivitsky’s holding the gun at full stretch with his right hand and well above his head, which would be awkward and less likely to succeed. A more certain way to commit suicide would be to hold the gun close to the temple. The recoil of the gun would have pushed it further to the right, but it was found to the left of the body. The lawyer was told that the ejected cartridge case, but not the bullet itself, was found.