Spymaster, page 2
My mother, a quiet, blue-eyed Russian named Klavdia, came from a line of skilled factory workers who had been in St. Petersburg for more than a century. She was working at a weaving factory when she met my father in 1932, and fell in love with the sharply dressed policeman with the slick black hair. I was born two years later and—in Soviet terms—definitely under a bad sign. Just three months after my birth, the renowned Leningrad Communist boss Sergei Kirov was gunned down at the city Party headquarters at Smolny. It was rumored that Stalin ordered Kirov’s assassination, but at the time the Soviet leader blamed the killing on a far-reaching plot and used it to usher in a wave of purges in which millions would die. My father took me, a three-month-old infant, to Kirov’s funeral at the Tavrichesky Palace. Though I know it must be impossible to remember, I feel I can vividly recall—no doubt from my parents’ later accounts—the scene that cold, overcast December day. A huge crowd of mourners dressed in black stood outside the palace, listening to a funeral march. Because of his NKVD connections, my father managed to get close to Kirov’s coffin, which rested on a bier strewn with flowers. These scenes took place, but I cannot explain how it is they seem vivid to me. Under such grim circumstances did my life begin, in the midst of a wave of terror that would ultimately claim the lives of 20 to 40 million of my countrymen.
I was seven when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, and to this day I recall my first glimpse of the war. On a sultry afternoon in late June, I was at a Young Pioneer camp on a lake near Leningrad, hunting maybugs with a pretty girl. The far side of the lake was rocked by explosions from Nazi bombers, and the flustered nurses caring for us shooed us back to our dormitories. A week later, my mother and I boarded a train for Yaroslavl, where we transferred to a ship that ferried us down the Volga River to Gorky. There, anchored in port, we came under heavy bombardment. Snuggling close to my mother, I looked through the porthole and followed the floodlights sliding across the dark sky as explosions rang in my ears. Our ship made a safe dash out of the harbor; later we were told that another vessel with hundreds of evacuees, most of them children, was sunk by a direct hit.
We traveled by train to the Siberian city of Omsk, where my mother and I—an only child—waited out the war. Because we were the family of an NKVD policeman, we lived in relative comfort and had enough to eat. In the winter, I would don skates and grab the bumpers of passing trucks, howling with delight as they pulled me through the icy streets of the village. In the spring, we floated down the Ishim River on ice floes. When summer came, we fished and picked berries and mushrooms in the forested taiga. And all the while, I followed the progress of the war with maniacal zeal, listening every night to the news crackling out of our black radio set and devouring the newspapers that would occasionally make it to our remote village. I marked on a map the cities that had been taken by the Red Army, and one of the first books I ever owned was entitled Behind Enemy Lines. With a picture of Stalin on the first page, the book told of the glorious exploits of Soviet guerrillas. I still have it in my library.
In the spring of 1944, with the nine-hundred-day Siege of Leningrad ended and Nazi troops in retreat, my mother and I began a two-week rail trip from Siberia back to our native city. We returned to find Leningrad in ruins and most of my mother’s family dead after the siege, which had killed an estimated 1 million people. The city seemed deserted, the streets littered with tank traps and populated by emaciated figures who moved slowly to and fro. Many buildings were in ruins—the golden spires of the Admiralty and the Mikhailovsky Castle were almost the sole reminders of the city’s past glory. Not far from our old apartment, a German bomb had taken off the facade of a six-story building, and on the top floor a grand piano stood in full view. My father survived the siege only because he had been guarding the Party elite at Smolny and had access to food. But virtually all of my mother’s family perished. Her mother, father, and youngest brother all died of starvation in 1942, and her three older brothers were killed at the front. Only her sister survived. Such devastating losses were common in a country in which 27 million people perished in the war.
After the war, Leningraders worked furiously to rebuild, but the reminders of the conflict were everywhere. One hot summer day outside the Leningrad Writers House, I saw a man on his hands and knees drinking from a puddle. Stunned, I approached the stranger—his face gaunt and covered in stubble, his clothes in tatters—and asked him if I could help. He raised his head and, tears streaming down his face, explained in broken Russian that he was a German prisoner of war trying to make his way home. I handed him an apple and rushed home in a state of confusion.
Mostly, however, I saw our victory in the Great Patriotic War—as Soviets called it—as the ultimate proof that our Communist system was the best in the world. Again and again, Stalin’s propagandists told us that only the Soviet Union was able to stop the Nazi menace, and such knowledge convinced me and my compatriots that our nation could never be vanquished. I would realize in later years that one of the pillars on which the Soviet Union rested was the myth that our country only prevailed in the war because of its Communist ardor and discipline. Party leaders wrapped themselves in the mantle of the war, and for decades—in a vain attempt to shore up the crumbling Communist edifice—they played on the enormous sacrifices the people made from 1941 to 1945.
Our old apartment had been destroyed, so we moved into a communal apartment in the palace that once belonged to the aristocratic Obolensky family. The cramped, cozy squalor of Soviet communal apartments barely diminished the grandeur of this historic building. A wide marble staircase, flanked by powerful statues of Atlas and a massive gilded mirror, led to our apartment on the third floor. Six families of the proletariat had moved into what used to be three large halls for receiving guests, sharing a kitchen and a bathroom. Our room had stucco oak leaves on its impossibly high ceilings, wood paneling, walls covered in scarlet silk, and a fireplace of hand-painted tiles. Each of the six families had its own table in the enormous communal kitchen; squabbles were inevitable, of course, and my mother tired of such close quarters. But this communal life had its pleasures. I fondly recall the father of the family who lived on the other side of a flimsy partition from us. He served in the Northern Fleet, and during his rare visits home he would grab his guitar and we would hear his deep, baritone voice late into the night. Another neighbor, a wounded war veteran, bought me books and fed my voracious appetite for literature. Yet another member of the communal apartment, who worked in a fish store, would occasionally bring us black caviar.
As I moved into my teenage years during the peak of the Stalin personality cult in the late 1940s, I became more and more indoctrinated into Communism. At fourteen, I joined the Young Communist League, the Komsomol, and eventually went on to become head of the organization at my school. Like most of my peers, I devoured the works of Arkady Gaidar, who produced a series of what might best be described as Communist Hardy Boys books. They were superpatriotic tales filled with young characters constantly doing courageous and noble deeds for the good of the Motherland. It was Gaidar’s books that first planted the seed in my mind of becoming a KGB officer. One work, The Military Secret, featured a boy who died protecting secret information from the enemies of Communism. Another, The Fate of the Drummer, recounted how a boy discovered a gang of spies and was shot by them. In a bizarre twist of history, it was Arkady Gaidar’s grandson—Yegor Gaidar—who a half century later would deliver the coup de grâce to Communism by masterminding Boris Yeltsin’s radical market reforms.
The following summer, I attended a camp for children of secret police. There, I met with university students attending the Security Ministry’s Higher School. They were confident and fun loving, and sang songs in English and Russian to the younger campers. I wanted to be like these dashing officer trainees, and a career in the Intelligence Service beckoned.
One incident, which took place during a summer visit to southern Ukraine, showed the zealousness of my belief in Communism. We were staying with friends in a village, enjoying the abundance of southern fruits and vegetables. Some of the village kids mentioned that the local doctor was taking money on the side from patients. I was outraged and considered it my duty to protect the people of the village against corruption, bribe taking, and this doctor’s instinct for private ownership.
“You hicks!” I told the village teenagers. “Don’t you know what the doctor is doing is against the law? It’s anti-Soviet!”
I marched to the doctor’s cottage and began shaking a pear tree in the front yard. A fat woman flew out the front door, cursing and trying to cuff me. I fled, thinking I had roused the doctor’s wife or sister. But the village kids told me the fat woman was the doctor, and I returned the next morning for a showdown. I began shaking the pear tree again, and when she emerged in a rage, I lectured her with all the righteous indignation of a true Komsomol leader. At first she refuted my allegations, but after a few minutes she relented and began to apologize for what she had done, blaming it on poverty and village tradition. I felt as if I had scored a victory for the Communist cause.
In my seventeenth year, two events occurred that were to shape my life: I fell in love with my future wife, Ludmilla, and I decided to join the secret police and become an intelligence agent. The KGB—then known as the Ministry of State Security—seemed like the logical place for a person with my academic abilities, language skills, and fervent desire to fight class enemies, capitalist parasites, and social injustice. My English, already proficient after years of reading English-language classics and listening to the BBC, was good enough to get me into the diplomatic service. But that seemed too tame, too civilian, and I chose instead to join the security forces.
My father strongly objected. By 1950, he knew only too well—from the screams he heard as a jail guard to the countless Communist Party bosses he saw disappear during his days at Smolny—what was really going on in our country. He told me furtively about what he had seen and heard in the security forces, but his stories made the life of a secret policeman seem even more intriguing. After all, wasn’t the KGB on the front line of the battle against capitalism and world imperialism? The thought of dying for one’s country and the socialist ideal stirred my blood. His talk of the screaming prisoners didn’t sound nice, but I asked myself, What else can you expect in a bitter struggle with our enemies?
After passing four entrance exams with high marks, I enrolled in the Security Ministry’s Institute of Foreign Languages in Leningrad—one of two schools in the country designed to train KGB officers. The other, the Higher KGB School, was in Moscow. In the spring of 1952, shortly before I entered the Institute of Foreign Languages, I spoke at my high school graduation, proudly proclaiming that I intended to undergo training for service in the Security Ministry—an admission that my father, sitting in the audience, thought foolish and dangerous.
“I am convinced that there will be enough work in my lifetime cleaning out the scum that poisons the existence of the world’s first socialist state,” I told the audience.
We had all been taught that true Communism was at hand, and that when the shining future was attained there would be no need for armies or security services or secret police.
“I may wind up ‘the Last of the Mohicans’ when the suppression apparatus becomes redundant along with other governmental structures,” I continued, “but I have resolved to embark upon this path and—once I do so—to follow it to the end.”
The audience applauded enthusiastically. And with the cheers of my classmates ringing in my ears, I marched—confidently and blindly—into the arms of the KGB.
CHAPTER 2
Initiation
WALKING FOR THE FIRST TIME INTO THE HIGH-WALLED COMPOUND OF the Institute of Foreign Languages, I was entering a mysterious world, off-limits to all but a few of my countrymen. For the next four years in Leningrad and for two more at the KGB’s Advanced School of intelligence in Moscow, I would undergo a course of study that was part boot camp, part university education, part spy school—all with the aim of turning myself into a first-rate intelligence agent. I would polish my English and German and tackle Arabic as well. I would be given my first code name. I would learn how to detect and evade surveillance, how to conceal a microdot of photographed documents, how to cultivate intelligence assets, how to use a gun. I would get a glimpse of the inner workings of the Communist state to which I had sworn allegiance. And for the first time, I would experience twinges of doubt about the system I worshiped.
It was a good thing I entered the institute brimming with Communist fervor and youthful vigor, for the first few months there were trying. The institute building, which before the Revolution had housed czarist military cadets, was located in the center of Leningrad. The inner courtyard was sealed off from the outside world by a high wall on one side and by buildings on the others. The spartan barracks afforded a view of streetcar tracks and little else. During my first year, the place was not so much a language institute as it was a military academy. We slept in large, open barracks, twenty to a room, and woke up at 7:00 A.M. to run and do calisthenics. Before breakfast, KGB officers inspected us and our uniforms for the slightest defect, and an unpolished buckle or unshaven chin could cost us our cherished Sunday leave. I was not yet engaged to Ludmilla, the trim, round-faced Russian beauty I had fallen in love with. I would sit in the barracks and torture myself by wondering if she would meet another boy or by remembering that time we sat in a park along the Neva River, when I discovered a small hole in her tight-fitting dress and stared, spellbound, at her stocking-covered thigh.
There were almost one hundred students in our class, and the largest group was studying German. Most of those graduates would work in East Germany, which at the time was swarming with KGB officers. Twenty of my classmates and I were in the English Department, and others were studying French, Japanese, Chinese, and Persian. Other disciplines included basics of Marxist-Leninist philosophy and political economy, area studies related to the chosen language, the history of the Soviet security organization, and its tradecraft of espionage and counterintelligence. I was apparently the only member of my class who had come to the institute straight from high school, the others having served in the army or worked at factories, in mines, or on collective farms. Many of my fellow students were none too bright; nearly three-fourths of the class would not make the grade into foreign intelligence and would wind up in the Soviet Union instead, vainly searching for spies. The institute even had a quota for representatives of the working class. One of them, a former Siberian miner named Nikolai Chaplygin, was a dim-witted man with a huge head, a flattened nose, and boorish manners. He would later inform on me when I went AWOL for a day to visit Ludmilla.
In March 1953, six months into my studies at the institute, Stalin died. The Soviet leader was paralyzed by a stroke on March 2, and over the next several days much of the country sat by the radio awaiting word on his condition. It is difficult for most people to imagine how a nation worshiped such a monster, but the truth is that most of us—those who had not felt the lash of his repression—did. We saw him as a man who led the country through the war, turned a backward nation into a superpower, built up our economy so that there was employment and housing and enough food for all. His propaganda machine was all-powerful. I still remember reading two books—Conspiracy Against Russia and Conspiracy Against Peace—which portrayed the brutal show trials of the 1930s as valiant efforts to root out anti-Soviet agents. I revered Stalin. And so for four days in March we waited anxiously for news of our leader. I slept next to the radio the night of March 5-6, and just before dawn an announcer reported that Stalin had died. I choked back tears, buried my head in the pillow, and lay awake until reveille.
The country came to a standstill. Classes were suspended at the institute, and when I called my mother, she said, “Our father is dead.” On the day before Stalin’s funeral she told me, “It’s not only our father who’s died, but also God, who kept us all under His wing.”
I kept a diary of those days, and it gives a sense of the blind devotion we had for the Soviet dictator. “Our loss is huge, of course, but sometimes it seems that it’s all nonsense,” I wrote on the day of Stalin’s funeral.
Stalin isn’t dead. He cannot die. His physical death is just a formality, but one that needn’t deprive people of their faith in the future. The fact that Stalin is still alive will be proven by our country’s every new success, both domestically and internationally. Any good initiative in our country should now be called a Stalinist one. The entire generation which was born in his era will live with his name. . . . Days like these make each person critically reassess the things he or she has been doing in life. I, for one, must work harder in all directions without wasting time on idle chatter.
A week after Stalin’s death, one of the institute’s administrators, a Lieutenant Sozinov, summoned me to his office. He was a kind, almost fatherly figure, and as I went to meet him I wracked my brain to figure out what I might have done wrong. As we made small talk at the beginning of our conversation, it hit me: somebody must have told the administration I was listening to the BBC and other shortwave radio broadcasts in English. Before he brought it up, I blurted out that I had been tuning into the stations to improve my vocabulary and accent.
“What else do you listen to besides the British broadcasts?” Sozinov asked, looking me straight in the eye.
“Well, I listen to music too,” I replied.
“What kind of music?”
“Western music,” I said.
“What kind?”
“Jazz,” I said. “Sometimes classical.”
“What do you read?”
“Textbooks,” I replied, growing increasingly uneasy. “Western fiction and books on intelligence.”
