And last (but by no means least), I express deep appreciation to my brother Vladimir, whose expert knowledge of computer hardware and software applications saved me during sporadic panic attacks when the data mined with tremendous expenditure of time and energy suddenly seemed to disappear before my eyes.
Reproduction of artwork and photographs from Bystro lyo tov’s personal archive, as well as permission to quote from his and Milashov’s writings are courtesy of Sergei Milashov (the copyright holder on all of Dmitri Bystrolyotov’s writings and custodian of his estate).
NOTES ON SOURCES, TRANSLITERATIONS, AND TRANSLATION
Although, to this day, only part of Bystrolyotov’s file in the KGB archives is officially declassified, most of its content is known from the writings of former KGB officers who had access to his file—Vassili Mitrokhin, Evgeni Primakov, and Oleg Tsarev. (I, too, was able to secure a copy of a substantial portion of this file.) I also consulted documents concerning Bystrolyotov’s life and activities held in the Russian, British, French, Czech, and American archives.
Additional sources come from notes that I took during my meeting with Bystrolyotov in 1973 and transcripts of a series of in-depth audio taped interviews with Bystrolyotov’s stepgrandson, Sergei Milashov, who maintained a close relationship with him for nearly twenty years, the last years of Bystrolyotov’s life. I was given unrestricted access to Bystrolyotov’s personal archive—his employment documents, letters to Soviet authorities, and personal correspondence.
I made judicial use of information contained in Bystrolyotov’s writings. In that respect, the reader should be aware that my subject’s thoughts and feelings at crucial moments in his life, including occasional dialogues, are reconstructed from the galleys of his unpublished memoirs in three volumes titled “Pir bessmertnykh” (“The Feast of the Immortals”). (This should not be confused with the excerpts from this work published in Moscow in one volume under the same name by Granitsa, 1993.) At the time of this writing, two copies of “Pir bessmertnykh” are available to the public, one at the U.S. Library of Congress and the other at the National Library of Russia (formerly “Saltykov-Shchedrin Library”) in St. Petersburg. The details of some of Bystrolyotov’s operations are culled from the typescript pages of his unpublished screenplay titled “Shchedrye serdtsem” (“Generous Hearts”), a copy of which is also held at the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg; his two published novels, Para Bellum (Prepare for War) and V staroi Afrike (In Old Africa); and other sources.
I transliterated Russian words according to the Library of Congress system for the Cyrillic alphabet. However, for some personal names and geographical locations, I retain their traditional rendering in British and American literature. All translations of excerpts from Bystrolyotov’s writings, as well as of other Russian and French texts, are my own.
ABBREVIATIONS AND TERMS
Abwehr
The military intelligence service of Nazi Germany
Center
The headquarters for the Soviet security apparatus located on Lubyanka Square in Moscow; also called the Lubyanka
Cheka
A vernacular version of VChK, an acronym for the All-Russia’s Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage (1917–22)
Comintern
Communist International (1919–43)
FSB
Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (1991– present), the KGB successor
Gestapo
Secret State Police of Nazi Germany
Gulag
Abbreviation for Chief Directorate of Labor Camps; also, the system of Soviet labor camps
INO
Foreign Intelligence Department of Soviet Security Services
KGB
Soviet Committee for State Security (1954–91)
MGB
Soviet Ministry of State Security (1946–53)
MI5
British Security Service responsible for security and counterintelligence on British territory, a counterpart to the American FBI
NKVD
People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (1922–23, 1934–43), the OGPU successor
OGPU
Joint State Political Directorate (1923–34), the Cheka successor
Politburo
Political Bureau, the inner ruling body of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Pravda
The Truth, the central newspaper of the Communist Party of the USSR
rezident
Soviet spymaster residing in a foreign country; a legal rezident operated under his own name and usually had a cover position with a Soviet institution abroad; an illegal rezident operated under an assumed identity
rezindentura
The spy station of the rezident; also, the area of his operation
Romeo spy
A spy who uses his sex appeal to recruit an agent through seduction
RSFSR
Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, became part of the USSR on Dec. 30, 1922 (renamed Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1937)
“source”
A person who is recruited to supply a spy with secret information
SS
Schutzstaffel, elite Nazi police force
SVR
Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, part of FSB (1991–present)
USSR
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Soviet Union (1922–91)
Wehrmacht
The armed forces of Nazi Germany
STALIN’S ROMEO SPY
PROLOGUE
Tea with a Master Spy
The most daring Russian spy ever to operate in the West . . . He stole British secrets for the Soviets years before Kim Philby . . . A doctor of medicine and doctor of law who learned from American gangsters how to shoot through his coat pocket . . . A “sexspionage” ace, an aristocrat by upbringing, an illegitimate offspring of Tolstoy’s line . . . The shining star of Soviet intelligence who eclipsed Richard Sorge and Rudolf Abel . . . A talented painter, novelist, screenwriter, and memoirist . . . A polyglot with twenty languages at his disposal, including Flemish, Turkish, Chinese, Japanese, and some African dialects . . . A victim of Stalin’s purges who served sixteen years in Siberian camps and lived to take revenge on his torturers.
I would read these sensational words about my protagonist in Russian papers three decades after I met him. But on that day, September 11, 1973, on my way to his tiny Moscow apartment on Vernadsky Prospect, I knew nothing about him. Not even his name . . .
A few days before, my father-in-law, a tailor working in a shop for the Ministry of Defense, called me with some news. One of his customers, while trying on his suit and talking about this and that, had learned about me and my profession. He took an interest and asked my father-in-law to give me his phone number.
I wasn’t surprised. It often happened that people hoping to win a fight with a Soviet bureaucrat would seek the help of the press. Under my pen name, Emil Abramov, I had published articles and stories in Izvestia (The News), Literaturnaya gazeta (Literary Gazette), Komsomol’skaya Pravda (Komsomol Truth), Trud (Labor), and other newspapers and journals, as well as in the satirical journal Krokodil (Crocodile), so all sorts of people contacted me from time to time.
I called. In a light baritone, my father-in-law’s customer asked me to come and see him at home. He gave me no reason. This, too, was not unusual in Moscow. I went to the meeting wondering what a man who had his suits made at the Ministry of Defense tailor’s shop could possibly want from me. After all, you couldn’t criticize that ministry in print.
A tall, broad-shouldered man in his early seventies, a bit stooped, with blue eyes, the well-groomed gray beard of an academician, and boyish dimples, greeted me at the door. I entered, and while helping me off with my raincoat he introduced himself: “Bystrolyotov. Dmitri Aleksandrovich.”
Bystrolyotov . . . What an unusual name! The son of a
fast flier—that’s what it meant in Russian. I looked at the old man again. Despite his age and the somewhat uncertain motion of his limbs, he was sprightly and had sparkling eyes. He might have been a fast-flying man in his younger years.
Meanwhile, trying not to offend his guest by showing mistrust, my host smiled pleasantly and asked, “I assume you have a press card on you?”
I showed him my membership card from the Union of Soviet Journalists. “Will this do?”
Still smiling, he nevertheless carefully examined it before nodding. “Good enough. Would you care for some tea?”
He sat me down at the table in his living room, which was no more than fifteen by fifteen feet. There was enough space for a cupboard of polished wood, a few bookshelves, and a table.
He resembled one of Moscow’s many cultured retirees who frequent libraries and concert halls. I couldn’t figure out anything more about him. Yet something about him was mysterious. Perhaps his dignified and pleasant demeanor struck me as unusual for an ordinary Soviet citizen.
We began drinking tea Moscow-style—the tea leaves brewed for a while in a small porcelain teapot and poured into glasses in tin holders, with small dishes of strawberry jam alongside. My host’s hands shook slightly when he raised his glass, but there were no other signs of aging. His mind was clear and agile. He told me the reason for his invitation. He was looking for someone to assist him in writing his life story.
The rest of the evening I spent listening to him.1
In a slightly rasping voice he recounted that back in 1919, during the Russian civil war when he was a sailor, he had been approached and recruited by the Cheka, the first incarnation of the Soviet Secret Police and a predecessor of the current FSB. At first he was sent to Europe as a sleeper with nothing more to do than familiarize himself with the territory. Then, in the mid-1920s, he was activated to do intelligence work. Like all beginners, he made mistakes but got better with time. He operated in many European countries: England, France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, and others.
His specialty was the recruitment of agents who had access to diplomatic codes and ciphers, and his modus operandi involved women. “I was young, good looking, knew several European languages. And I knew how to treat a lady,” he added with a smile. Once he recruited a French diplomat, once a German countess, another time a Gestapo officer—all women.
“Once I received an order that came straight from Stalin: find a short man with a red nose in Paris. A short man with a red nose . . . That’s all I knew about him. Nevertheless, I found him. By sheer logic.”
Later Bystrolyotov successfully carried out a similar task involving the British Foreign Office. At a time when Hitler was just beginning to build the Nazi war machine, my host stole many German military secrets for the Soviet state. In the course of his work, he crossed European borders hundreds of times. A British lord, a Hungarian count, a Greek merchant—these were a few of his many disguises. His assignments took him not only to European countries but also to Brazil and the United States.
On one of his missions, he told me, he twice crossed the “gray hell” of the Sahara and the jungles of the French and Belgian Congos. In 1935, he had been sent to Africa to see whether French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou, who sympathized with the Soviet Union, could deliver on his promise, in the event of a German invasion, to bring over several hundred thousand African mercenaries.
“It was dark in the forest,” he recalled, shaking his head. “Only here and there rays of sunlight would break through. Suddenly a vine would drop on your head, and you’d think it was a snake,” he laughed. “Little crocodiles the length of your arm in the grass. Leeches dropping on you from the trees and sucking into your flesh.”
Then he told me how his career ended. His successes in foreign intelligence didn’t save him from trouble. At the height of Stalin’s purges, when he returned to Moscow, he was arrested and accused of working for the enemy. In Soviet practice, the way to prove an accusation was to extract a confession, and the way to extract a confession, especially for crimes one hadn’t committed, was to apply torture. “Well, young man,” Bystrolyotov said, “take it from me. They make everybody talk. Some talk early, others later. But everybody eventually talks.”
He was sentenced to twenty-five years: twenty years of hard labor in Siberia and five years of exile inside Russia. Thus he entered the Gulag, the vast complex of Soviet prisons and labor camps, and he served nearly all of his term—sixteen years. His arrest and conviction ruined his family and his health.
By the time of our meeting, in the fall of 1973, I knew quite a bit about the Soviet camps. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich had been published in Moscow, and Radio Liberty had broadcast chapters of his Gulag Archipelago by shortwave into the Soviet Union. A few other stories by former camp prisoners had appeared in the state press and also in private editions, called samizdat (self-publishing). But all that had happened back in the liberal 1960s, and now in the reactionary 1970s such literature was forbidden. All the more exciting, therefore, was the fact that for the first time in my life I was sitting across the table from someone who had lived through the horrors of the Gulag.
Meanwhile, sipping his tea, my host turned his gaze to the present. Despite the tremendous injustice done to him by the KGB, he had managed to patch up the relationship to some degree. His small apartment was arranged for him after the agency intervened with the Moscow housing authorities on his behalf, and from time to time they invited him to come to the KGB school to pass on his experience to the cadets. He pointed to an honorary plaque on the wall, given to him on the occasion of the agency’s anniversary.
But there was disappointment, even resentment, in his voice when he mentioned all these ego-gratifying little things. “Why,” he asked several times in the course of the evening, “why did they give Manevich the award of Hero of the Soviet Union? He didn’t achieve too much. The only good thing he ever did was not give away our agents and network when they caught him in Spain and tortured him. That’s all.”2
Bystrolyotov was also upset about the way the profession of espionage was trivialized in the Soviet media. A month before our meeting, a TV miniseries titled Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny (Seventeen Moments of Spring) had begun running. It presented a fictional version of the Soviet intelligence effort behind the German lines during World War II. It was an instant hit, and its star, a handsome Russian actor named Vyacheslav Tikhonov, became a household name. He played the part of a Soviet spy disguised as a Wehrmacht officer.
My host had nothing but ridicule for the show. To him it was full of clichés and far-fetched assumptions about intelligence work. And it glossed over the harsh realities.
“In real life,” he said, “there’s no need to penetrate the upper echelons of the enemy structure to gather simple information. Butlers, secretaries, housekeepers know as much about certain things as their employers.” He took Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and the Gestapo, as an example. “To confirm a rumor that Himmler was planning to go to Zurich for some negotiations,” he said, “it would be enough to get to know his driver. You treat him to a fine cigarette. Ask him how things are going. People love to complain. Most likely the driver will tell you with a sigh that in a day or two he’ll have to get up early, at the crack of dawn, to take his boss somewhere. Where? To a remote Berlin airport. And we know that from that airdrome they usually fly to Switzerland.”
Bystrolyotov went on disparaging the TV serial. Referring to the romance between two Soviet intelligence officers working undercover deep in German territory, he sneered: “What nonsense! The radio operator gets pregnant and delivers a healthy baby! Such things couldn’t take place in real life. If an intelligence worker got pregnant, she had no option. They ordered her to get an abortion right away. End of discussion.”
Then he talked about his futile attempts to publish his memoirs, which were self-censored and watered-down, as I learned years later. He began to make fu
n of an editor of Oktiabr’ (October), a well-known literary quarterly, and I caught a glimpse of his superb acting skills and sense of humor.
“He says to me, ‘Here you write: I drew my pistol . . . You can’t write that. A Soviet intelligence officer acts only in a humane way . . . Then you write: I pulled out a roll of bills . . . Our intelligence officer doesn’t bribe anyone . . . I introduced the SS officer to a girl? How horrible! Our intelligence officer would never do that. He operates by Marxist-Leninist persuasion alone.”
When our meeting ended, I assumed that we would meet again. I went home and wrote down in my notebook as much as I could of our conversation. Considering the times—the Brezhnev regime was still going strong—I didn’t dare transcribe the most sensitive parts of Bystrolyotov’s story. In fact, I wrote his name down in pencil, in case I’d have to erase it . . .
I never heard from Bystrolyotov again. In October of the following year, I left Russia.
Since then, at various times over the years, I have recalled that unusual meeting. Bystrolyotov became fixed in my mind as the most remarkable man I had ever met. I thought of my notes and planned to do something, but my literary interests took me elsewhere. I wrote short stories and books on Russian folklore; I taught Russian literature and prepared a textbook of modern Russian poetry. Bystrolyotov’s story began to fade from my memory.
Stalin's Romeo Spy Page 2