Spymaster, page 5
When I returned to New York, I went to work as a host at the Soviet exhibit and plunged into the Cook affair, my first intelligence asset who provided me with classified information related to research and manufacture of solid fuel for missiles. Soon, however, it was time to return to the Soviet Union. Alexander Yakovlev, who had become our unofficial leader, had occasion to sum up our year abroad to the American press. He held a doctrinaire, deeply skeptical view of capitalism, and his war wounds made it impossible for him to bound around the city as I did, but clearly he too had been impressed by what he had seen. When a reporter asked him about our student exchange, Yakovlev responded like a diplomat: “This was a brilliant example of international cooperation. . . . I did not have sufficient time to appreciate the beauty of the local girls, because I spent all my time over my books, but one thing I can now say with certainty: the American and Soviet people can live in peace. Before coming here, I had my doubts about this.”
By September 1959, I was back in Russia, working for the KGB’s First Chief Directorate (Foreign Intelligence). My New York trip had been an undoubted success, particularly my work with Cook, and senior officers assured me my KGB career was off to a fine start. I was happy to be reunited with Ludmilla and my four-year-old daughter, and moved back into Lubyanka awaiting my next assignment. Almost immediately my superiors asked me to take a trip in connection with the Cook case. His sister, Louisa, lived in the southern Russian region of Krasnodar, and now that Cook was working with us, the KGB wanted to make sure she didn’t write him and arouse the suspicion of the FBI. I was dispatched to inform Cook’s sister that he was doing well in America and that any communication with him must go through us.
Early one morning I arrived in the sister’s village and quickly found her cottage. Introducing myself as a Soviet student just returned from America, I told her I had met Anatoly Cook in New York.
“You can be proud of him,” I said, referring to a brother she hadn’t seen in fifteen years. “He is a real Soviet patriot, but, as you can imagine, this makes life difficult for him in America. He has to conceal his political views in order to keep his job. So it would be better if you didn’t send any letters directly to him through the mail. I’ll give you an address you can use in Moscow, and your letters will be personally delivered to him.”
The middle-aged woman burst into tears.
“I thought at first you must be from the KGB,” she sobbed. “For the past fifteen years they have hounded us to death. They even phone at night, saying, ‘Why don’t you contact your brother and get information for us? Have you forgotten what you promised?’ They send anonymous, threatening letters. At work our family is branded as traitors—they claim Anatoly is a spy. It’s absolute hell!”
Anger welled up in me, and I felt ashamed to be a part of the agency that had harassed these people for years just because a family member had emigrated.
“These agents are from the Stalinist past,” I assured her. “Forget about them. I’ve got friends at the KGB. They’re completely different people and they’ll make sure this sort of thing stops.”
Louisa composed herself and promised to send all future correspondence to her brother through Moscow. I said good-bye and heard nothing from her for another twenty-four years, when Cook fell afoul of the KGB.
Not long after I returned to Moscow I was summoned by the Personnel Department with some great news: I was being sent back to New York as a correspondent for Radio Moscow and had to meet urgently with the chairman of the State Radio Broadcasting Committee. I was delighted to be heading back to America, and with an excellent cover. For the time being, I would be Radio Moscow’s sole representative in the United States, at the ripe age of twenty-five.
The following morning I met with Sergei Kaftanov, the state radio chairman, in what amounted to a mere formality. If the KGB wanted to use Radio Moscow to place an officer in America, he could do little to stop it.
“Do you know anything about journalism?” the portly, dour Kaftanov asked me.
I told him I had just graduated from Columbia Journalism School, and that my studies had given me a solid grounding in English, journalism, and American life. He nodded portentously and signed an order appointing me to his staff. I spent a half year in the State Radio Committee’s offices in Moscow, learning the operation and practicing my journalism skills. Among my young colleagues was Yevgeni Primakov, who years later—after the 1991 coup—would go on to become head of Russia’s new foreign intelligence agency and later Russia’s prime minister. In the winter of 1959-1960, however, my coworkers thought I was just another cub reporter. It wasn’t until six months later—when a rumor swept the huge, pink stone Radio Committee building that this rookie correspondent was being given the plum America assignment—that my colleagues realized I wasn’t what I seemed to be, and that another government agency was behind my appointment.
I took up my new posting in New York in June 1960, joining an already large group of Soviet KGB officers posing as correspondents in America. In the days of the cold war—indeed, up to the end of the Gorbachev era—about two-thirds of Soviet foreign correspondents were connected with the KGB. The TASS news agency, Radio Moscow, the Novosti Press Agency, and Izvestia were heavily staffed by KGB officers. In fact, the only publication the KGB couldn’t control was Pravda, the official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The correspondents from Pravda with the exception of a few were untouchable, and KGB officers could only get information from Pravda’s staffers if we asked tactfully; if we pushed Pravda’s people too hard, we could face a rebuke from the Party. But Pravda’s independence from the KGB was no great loss, for we had more than enough resources. Even Soviet journalists who were not officially part of the KGB could be counted on to help us at any time. Vladimir Kryuchkov, who went on to head the KGB under Gorbachev and then to mastermind the August 1991 coup, liked to refer to these non-KGB correspondents as “our assistants.” The FBI and CIA knew that most of the working Soviet journalists in America were spooks; I’m sure U.S. officials had few doubts about what I was doing in their country.
Another transparent ruse in the espionage game was our so-called U.N. mission in New York, which in fact was little more than a nest of KGB spies and intelligence officers. Originally located in a four-story brownstone building at 67 Park Avenue and later moved to a Third Avenue high-rise, the mission was headquarters to about three hundred Soviets, more than a third of whom were KGB officers. The remaining Soviets were diplomats and support personnel attached to the United Nations. The KGB contingent occupied an entire floor of the brownstone and a large staff of technical specialists ensured tight security. The room assigned to the KGB’s New York station chief (as well as others) was protected against electronic eavesdropping, and that was where we held top secret conversations. The technical staff had installed so many jamming devices that even if one of our officers had become a double agent and entered the brownstone with a hidden microphone, there was no way he could have transmitted to the outside. We assumed that all our apartments and telephones were bugged and acted accordingly.
When I first arrived in New York, the KGB station chief was a cultured and highly respected figure, Vladimir Barkovsky. Lean and athletic-looking, with piercing blue eyes and an energetic manner, Barkovsky inspired the New York staff with his boundless enthusiasm and shrewd assessment of our mission in America. Though he deserved to be made a general, he never rose to that rank because he didn’t kowtow to Moscow or color his reports to suit his superiors at Lubyanka. I worked only briefly with Barkovsky, but nevertheless regarded him with deep respect and affection. I remember sitting with him one day and discussing an intelligence matter, when he suddenly turned his head in the direction of a radio playing softly in the corner of his office.
“That’s from Blomdahl’s Aniara,” the KGB veteran said dreamily, leaning back in his chair. “Heavenly music.”
Though I went by my real name at Radio Moscow, I was given the KGB code name “Felix,” which the agency used in communications inside our New York station and in messages to Moscow. I was assigned to political intelligence—as opposed to scientific and technical intelligence or counterintelligence—since my job was to seek out promising American and foreign recruits who could supply the KGB with classified or unclassified information about American foreign and domestic policy. The main targets of KGB penetration in the United States were the White House, Congress, the State Department, the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, leading scientific research centers and think tanks, and major corporations. In New York, I was assigned to develop sources at the U.S. mission to the United Nations, the United States Information Agency (USIA), and the American and foreign press corps.
Cook had given me an exhilarating—and misleading—first impression of the nature of my work. I expected to be developing top-quality spies and sources at a steady clip, but in five years in New York City I never ran across an agent as good as Cook. I would develop lower-level agents and go to extraordinary lengths to cultivate sources and insert them into the American government, but neither I nor my colleagues had much luck. Indeed, the best agents the KGB ever had—and I saw this firsthand as deputy chief of station in Washington—were the volunteers who walked into our embassy and literally dumped material in our laps. Most of these spies, such as the legendary John Walker, were not motivated by ideological reasons but wanted money. In my thirty-two-year tenure with the KGB, the great spies who came to us because they believed in Communism, such as Kim Philby, dwindled steadily and finally disappeared altogether. At the same time, the number of KGB officers who grew disaffected with Soviet Communism and defected to the West rose sharply. The KGB was hit by a devastating double-whammy in which the number of good spies was shrinking while the number of defectors was soaring.
Though I was involved with some secret operations in New York in my early years—and was the target of several FBI setups—I mainly gathered political intelligence from public sources. We also engaged in numerous “active measures,” in which we spread disinformation and stirred up trouble in the black and Jewish communities, among others. And when Moscow wanted to hammer home its official line—as it did when accusations arose of Soviet involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy—we in political intelligence were called on to propagate the Soviet point of view.
At first, however, in that summer of 1960, I had to put on a convincing display as a Radio Moscow correspondent, and that meant working long hours as a journalist while also gathering intelligence. I worked out of a spacious apartment on Riverside Drive, where my wife doubled as bureau secretary. The KGB and Radio Moscow paid me a combined salary of $480 a month in the beginning, plus expenses. Inheriting a blue Chevrolet, an Ampex studio tape recorder, and a typewriter from the previous correspondent, I obtained accreditation from the United Nations and the New York City Police Department and began my work. I filed reports frequently from New York, usually by phone, and soon heard from the State Radio Committee that they liked my work. Of course I had to put a pro-Soviet slant on the news. On one occasion I received a written rebuke when a report on America’s reaction to the Franco dictatorship in Spain did not make the United States look sufficiently venal. In that same critique of my work, my superiors at Radio Moscow neatly summed up my job in New York.
“Our task is to expose the way of life in the capitalist world, and it is especially important to do so in relation to the United States,” my editors wrote.
Not all my work, however, had an ideological slant. I particularly enjoyed one thirty-minute report I prepared, “An Evening in New York,” in which I roamed the nightclubs, restaurants, and theaters on a Saturday night and put together a picture of how New Yorkers spent their free time. Soviet listeners liked the piece so much that Radio Moscow replayed it several times.
The biggest story I covered in my brief career as a journalist was Nikita Khrushchev’s arrival in New York in September 1960—a trip that would forever be remembered for the moment when the Ukrainian peasant yanked off his shoe and pounded it on his desk at the United Nations General Assembly. A new Radio Moscow bureau chief—sent to free me up to begin work in earnest for the KGB—arrived shortly before Khrushchev. And so, on a warm September morning, I stood on the dock at a dingy New York pier and watched as the Baltika slid into berth. As a Radio Moscow correspondent, I would have no trouble getting close to Khrushchev. In any case, my status as a KGB officer assured access. My superiors had told me to stay close to the Soviet leader just in case something happened.
As soon as he came down the gangplank, a group of Soviet and American correspondents stuck microphones in Khrushchev’s face and began firing questions at him. It was the first time I had seen a Soviet leader in the flesh and, standing just a few feet away, I took the measure of the man. He was not impressive. Short, fat, and cursed with a heavy, pig-like face spotted with warts, Khrushchev was a rude, rough-hewn figure. To add insult to injury, he spoke Russian like a peasant, stumbling over long words and stressing the wrong syllables. All in all, I found him repulsive. But as I stood listening to him issue a now-forgotten greeting to the American people, I realized that this was the man who had turned Soviet society around following the nightmarish Stalin years. He represented the new generation of Russian politicians and seemed committed to genuine change. Unlike his predecessor, he also seemed close to the people, displaying the unpretentious charm of a Slavic peasant. Gazing upon this stocky little Ukrainian holding forth on American soil, I soon felt a sense of pride.
Khrushchev came to know my face, and later in his visit—as a crowd of American reporters pushed me aside and surrounded the Soviet leader—he waved a hand in my direction and said, “You—come closer! Stand beside me at all times and record everything I say. Otherwise the Americans will distort my words. These sharks will write all sorts of rubbish!”
My affection for him grew after that scene; to this day I still have some of the tapes from Khrushchev’s New York visit.
On the day of his famous speech, I sat in the press balcony at the U.N. General Assembly and watched in shock as Khrushchev used his shoe as a debating prop. He was angry at an address delivered by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, and reacted the way he might have at a Communist Party meeting in Kiev. But this was New York, the whole world was watching, and I said to myself, “Jesus Christ, a man of his stature behaves like a peasant! This is not a bar somewhere in the Ukraine.” It was an embarrassment to the Soviet Union, and such erratic behavior would eventually lead—four years later—to his abrupt removal from power.
I attended several receptions for the Soviet leader, dutifully recording his toasts and speeches. They were so peppered with Russian profanities, however, that I couldn’t put them on the air. Khrushchev’s KGB bodyguards had told me that he could hold his liquor, and that proved to be true. I can still see the vaunted Soviet leader and his hangers-on knocking back vodka and laughing uproariously at off-color jokes.
After Khrushchev’s departure, it was time for me to step back from my radio work and get down to KGB business. I decided to contact several students I had known during my days at Columbia, two of whom were studying nuclear physics. We knew it was exceedingly difficult to develop senior, high-ranking officials or scientists as intelligence assets, so our plan was to attempt to recruit young Americans and plant them in government agencies or research institutes. Indeed, the famous Cambridge University spy ring involving Kim Philby had been just such an operation: drawing in potential spies early, then reaping the benefits as they moved up the government ladder into classified positions.
I got in touch with a physics graduate student at Columbia named Nicholas, who held extreme left-wing political views. He said he was happy to hear from me, and we agreed to meet near the campus. It turned out that he was working in a laboratory engaged in nuclear research, and I told Nicholas bluntly that the world’s first socialist state could not be allowed to lag behind the West in the race for scientific and military supremacy. It was his duty as a radical to help us out, I said, and he agreed. At our next meeting, he brought me some material about U.S. nuclear weapons research, but it turned out to be unclassified and of little value. When I expressed disappointment, he promised to bring me something more interesting and I anxiously awaited our next meeting. But Nicholas showed up empty-handed, saying that he had trouble smuggling out the material, and furthermore his parents—both of whom were Communists—had decided that what he was doing was too dangerous. Listening to his excuses, I grew increasingly exasperated and finally exploded.
“So this is what your radicalism is worth!” I told the twenty-five-year-old student. “You talk about peace and you really don’t do anything to forward the cause. When it comes to issues of war or peace, the triumph of socialism or capitalism, there can only be one choice. But you talk about things that are way over your head. You’re just a bullshit artist.”
He listened silently, a look of shame spreading across his face. But he held his ground, and as he walked away I figured that would be the last I heard of Nicholas.
Several days later, however, as I was walking near my office on the Upper West Side, an older man stopped me, introduced himself as Nicholas’s father, and asked to have a word with me. We drove to midtown Manhattan and had breakfast.
“I’m sorry about my son’s behavior,” he told me as we sat in a coffee shop. “But you have to understand his predicament. We had always believed in the emergence of a socialist America. But now, toward the end of our lives, we realize this is impossible. Let Nicholas carry on his work in peace and we’ll help you instead. I’ll do everything I can for you and your country.”
