Stalin's Romeo Spy

by Emil Draitser

  Most of his spy activities took place in Prague itself. But some of the Mission’s assignments took him out of town. Thus, as the Soviet shoe industry was beginning to develop, one of his orders was to obtain the technology for the leather varnish production of the famous Batia shoe factories. To fill this order, he traveled to the Moravian town of Zlín, where these factories were located.8

  Intelligence work made him happy. By his own admission, he “reveled in it, despite the danger; a new world opened for [him].” The apparent ease with which he operated within the Czech business community made it sensible for the OGPU operatives to invest in him. Now, as he socialized with many prominent businessmen, it was necessary to maintain his image with appropriate living arrangements. The OGPU rented a large and comfortable apartment for him with a balcony overlooking Rieger Gardens in the center of Vinogrady, the city’s bourgeois quarter, so he could invite his business associates to his home. To add to his respectability, a bona fide “prim” housemaid was hired.

  After a while, the same apartment was used for even more daring operations: capitalizing on his fluency in English, Dmitri began posing to Czechs as a visiting American businessman. This was risky: Prague wasn’t a large metropolis; there was always a danger that he could be identified as an employee of the Soviet Trade Mission. But, as he recalls, “I believed in myself, my intelligence, my cunning abilities, and my bravery.” He seemed happy. At night he would sit with his books, studying as the “days passed joyfully.”

  One hot summer evening in 1925, after dining alone in a good restaurant, he walked into the Rieger Gardens, the city’s central park. Here and there couples sat on the benches kissing. Glancing at the lovers, he recalls that “an unsettling feeling of chaos and dark desires” arose in him.

  He was moving along poorly lit alleys when suddenly he spotted a lesbian couple: a young woman sitting on another woman’s lap. In the semidarkness, he couldn’t see their faces, but the crocodile-skin purse on the bench was familiar. His throat dried up: the purse resembled the one that belonged to Isolde. As he moved closer, he recognized the voices. One of them, girlish, belonged to Mr. Fischer’s thirteen-year-old daughter Camilla and the other was . . . Isolde’s. First he felt like taking revenge on her for rejecting him. But, to his own surprise, he couldn’t help feeling joy at seeing her again. He felt “crazy tenderness” and something else that he couldn’t identify, something “bitter and sweet.”

  He couldn’t move as he tried in vain to decide upon some kind of action. Meanwhile the couple got up. He was about to follow them when, from the bushes in front of him, a man’s figure emerged. It was Camilla’s father, Mr. Fischer himself. When his daughter and Isolde left the park, he began stalking them along the streets. Dmitri tailed him all the way to the doors of Mr. Fischer’s villa. There the lovers embraced and parted. Seeing Isolde threw Dmitri into emotional turmoil, which kept him awake for the rest of the night. He wandered the streets till dawn.

  Now he decided to force her to see him by blackmailing her, taking advantage of her Achilles’ heel: child molestation. The next day he phoned Isolde. Without identifying himself, he asked her what kind of cocktail she preferred and invited her to meet him at the bar of the Steiner Hotel, located on Vaclav Street. She would recognize him by a Paul Verlaine volume in his hands. She was ready to hang up when he offered to read her one of Verlaine’s poems, “Pensionnaires,” from his famous Parallèlement cycle. Perhaps, he said, she might reconsider her refusal to meet him:

  The younger one is thirteen, the older is twice older,

  And both share the room where they repose.

  It happened in September, toward the evening time.

  Both fresh and rosy, as a little apple, sweet-scented, golden,

  Disposed from underwear, transparent, laced, restraining movement

  The underwear emitting fragrant odors,

  The young one twines in front of her older sister,

  Who kisses her breasts, her whole youthful body.

  Then she pressed herself to her partner’s hip and,

  Her arousal a par with her insanity,

  She pressed her lips, against her will,

  To the shadow under the light fleece.

  Then, in the measure of waltz, giving themselves up to the touch of little fingers,

  In a palpitating movement, they merged into one being.9

  To make it clear why he was reading this poem, he substituted the ages of the girls in Verlaine’s original text, who are fifteen and sixteen, with the ages of Camilla and Isolde. He finished reading the poem and asked politely, “What do you say to that?”

  After a short pause, Isolde replied, “I see that you’re an exceptional scoundrel.” She called his actions by their name, blackmail, and asked him what his demands were. He replied that he had only wanted to caution her that she was in trouble: her former employer had seen her in the company of his daughter Camilla the night before. “Oh God,” Isolde sighed. Now she agreed to meet Dmitri.

  He arrived at the café earlier, and to calm himself, he gulped down two shots of brandy. Deeply in love with Isolde, he brushed off the fact of her sexual liaison with Mr. Fischer’s daughter as a prank, a temporary indulgence in a “fashionable vice.” He believed that his passion for Isolde, the passion of a true man, would eventually prevail over her lust for young girls.

  Finally, she appeared in the café and joined him at his table. To cover up the awkwardness of the moment, she began smoking; she opened her cigarette case, plated with dark gold, and offered him a cigarette. As Dmitri took it, he let his eyes linger on the case. He spotted an inscription on the inside of the front cover: Am loving you only and all my other loves are but nothing. The inscription astounded him, and as he admits in his memoirs, it “later became the curse of [his] whole life.” Isolde, whom he had idealized as a “pure and untouched flower,” turned out not to be the Madonna. Was she in fact a “secondhand item”? He hoped he had just misread the inscription. To have a chance to read it again, he pretended to drop his cigarette and asked for another one.

  There was no more doubt now. His heart sank, and he asked Isolde about the inscription. She said that it had been made by an extraordinary person. Having already decided that he would fight for Isolde’s heart, he asked her whether that person was strong, and she replied that the opposite was true. She said that she preferred weak people. They can’t control themselves well, and therefore, they live more vibrantly than the strong, who are able to stifle their desires.

  “I’m weak myself,” she said, “therefore, my passions are strong.”

  “I wish I could meet that person,” he said.

  She laughed. “That’s quite simple. I exchanged identical cigarette cases with this person, and they both have the same inscription. If you ever come across another who owns such a cigarette case, look at that person, and you’ll know that I’m in front of you, in the body of that other person. We are inseparable.”

  The conversation went on. He was already no longer able to separate his private life from his professional one, and he talked to her not as if she were his love interest, but as another Czech business contact whose trust and confidence he had to gain. To win her over, he had to convince her that they had something in common. Without thinking it through, he told her that on the night he had seen her with Camilla in the park he was not alone but in the company of a young male friend. And he offered his help in fighting Mr. Fischer, because people like him and Isolde, that is, homosexuals, have to stick together and form a common line of defense. “Today I help you,” he explained, adding, “tomorrow you’ll help me.”

  The tactic seemed to be working: Isolde’s fingers squeezed his hands in appreciation. She reciprocated with a confession of her own: she had quit working for Mr. Fischer because he had pursued her sexually. Dmitri promised to think up a plan of action against their common enemy, and they parted.

  Dmitri did resent Mr. Fischer, but of course, it had nothing to do with the reason he g
ave Isolde. Although in his memoirs Dmitri states that he was glad he had been “free from the prejudices, passions, and extremes peculiar to the class-bound world of Russian society,” his caricatured portrayal of Mr. Fischer recalls Soviet propaganda posters directed at representatives of the bourgeois class. On that fateful day when he had met Isolde for the first time, walking away from Mr. Fischer’s apartment, he thought, “Somewhere far away a luxurious car quietly rolls along the beautiful Prague prospects. Returning home, a fat Mr. Fischer calculates in his head the profits of the day. He’s sure of himself. Business is good, and the firm of Fischer and Co. will stand forever like the Tower of Babel. He doesn’t know that, underneath it, a mole is digging; it will undermine his power. The tower will collapse and bury Mr. Fischer in the trash heap.”

  Of course, here Dmitri is just paraphrasing Marx’s prediction that capitalism was doomed to be buried in the dustbin of history. Thinking about what he had just witnessed through the lace curtains of Mr. Fischer’s children’s room, Dmitri gloated about the fact that the businessman’s daughters had been molested. For him, it was but more proof of the inevitable demise of the bourgeois class: “[Mr. Fischer’s] kin were already marked by doom: both his girls are poisoned with the sweetest poison; they’ll perish. Yes, that’s life’s wise revenge.”

  Yet, Dmitri sought approval from the very man he despised. He felt special satisfaction when, during one of the Soviet Trade Mission receptions for the Prague business community, Mr. Fischer approached him, just recently a nobody, a destitute young man, and asked him about the prospects of getting a contract for his firm with the Mission. Later on, the two men ran into each other at the city theater, and Dmitri enjoyed the fact that, noticing his well-crafted and fashionable suit, Mr. Fischer asked “obsequiously” for the name of his private tailor.

  Before getting down to the business of placing Mr. Fischer in a compromising position, Dmitri informed his spymaster (rezident) at the Soviet Trade Mission about his plans. He followed the ironclad rule imposed by his superiors—to report every new social contact—a rule he would always follow to the letter. The rule played a double role: it served as a means of enlarging the pool of potential recruits, and it kept Soviet intelligence operatives in check. The OGPU bosses never fully trusted their own employees. A failure to report any new contact raised the suspicion of double play.

  Dmitri’s spymaster at that time was “Comrade Golst,” second secretary of the Trade Mission, the position traditionally occupied by Soviet foreign intelligence officers. “Golst” had the code name SEMYON, but his real name was Nikolai Grigorievich Samsonov. Before his Prague assignment, he was a seasoned spymaster who had directed Soviet intelligence operations in Estonia, Latvia, Germany, and Turkey.10

  “Golst” gave Dmitri the go-ahead for his plans under the condition that the operation wouldn’t create too much noise and break into an open public scandal, which could jeopardize his subordinate’s reputation. When, as anticipated, Mr. Fischer phoned Isolde and demanded to see her on “very important business,” on Dmitri’s cue, she invited her former employer to her apartment.

  In staging the scene, Dmitri seemed to draw his inspiration from the silent film melodramas of the time: an old rich man and a young poor man were to vie with each other for the heart of a damsel in distress. To play the part of the young lover, Dmitri solicited the help of his friend, Georgy Georgiev, whom he had already recruited as a Soviet intelligence agent. At the time, Georgiev had completed Prague’s Commercial College and was working as a traveling salesman for a Czech firm.

  Dmitri and Georgiev arrived at Isolde’s apartment and planned their moves, step-by-step. As soon as Mr. Fischer knocked on the door, they hid in the bedroom. The first thing Mr. Fischer did as he entered the apartment was threaten to report Isolde to the police for child molestation, which he saw with his own eyes. “You’re a criminal!” he shouted. “But I, a father, am ready to forgive your defiling of my underage daughter . . . in exchange for your love for me.” He promised to protect Isolde from the law if she agreed to go away with him to any place of her choice—to Paris, to the Riviera, to Switzerland.

  He offered her first money, then friendship, and finally, marriage. He dropped to his knees in front of the young woman and sobbed. Since Isolde remained silent, unable to restrain his desire anymore, he grabbed her, crying, “Answer me! Yes or no?” Trying to escape his embraces, Isolde retreated and fell onto the couch. Her dress tore, leaving her shoulders bare, and Mr. Fischer began kissing them passionately. At that moment, at Dmitri’s prompting, Georgiev stepped out from the bedroom and exclaimed, “Well, you daughter trader, this time your tricks took you too far . . . [For] a husband you’re too old and for a lover too ugly . . . Leave my girl alone. I’ll be the one to kiss her. Not you!” That was too much for the businessman. He rammed Georgiev and pressed him against the wall. Then he grabbed the young man by his throat. They began to fight, overturning armchairs and smashing a porcelain vase.

  Georgiev pulled out a gun. Fischer reached for it and tried to turn the barrel toward the young man’s chest. A shot resounded, and Georgiev fell to the floor. The landlord, his wife, his guests, and their children ran over from an adjacent apartment to find out what was going on. Bursting in the door, they froze in horror. Dmitri’s description of the scene also reads like a silent film melodrama: “Oh, what a picture it was! Isolde reclining on a sofa unconscious . . . Her dress torn, bits of the vase and pillows from the couch scattered all over the floor . . . Lying on the carpet, his face and chest covered in blood, was Grishka [Georgiev] . . . Above him, a mountain of meat, a pistol in his hand, stood Mr. Fischer. After a short pause, women and children began screaming.”

  At that moment, Dmitri himself stepped into the room. When the landlord asked what was going on, he dramatically pronounced, “A man was murdered while defending his girl from rape!” Mr. Fischer ran out of the apartment in dismay. Dmitri and the landlord put Georgiev on the couch. As soon as the landlord stepped out of the room to get a basin with warm water to wash off Georgiev’s blood, Dmitri quickly disposed of the empty container of cherry syrup hidden in his friend’s chest pocket and replaced the gun clip containing blanks with one containing bullets, one of them missing. Dmitri handed the landlord the gun, along with the empty cartridge, and advised him to keep it for police inquiry.

  Then he went to Mr. Fischer’s office and offered him his services as a lawyer. Dmitri misrepresented himself, of course. At the time, he was only a student of law who, too busy with his intelligence work, was falling behind in his academic studies and on the verge of being expelled from the Russian Law Faculty. Whatever knowledge he obtained in that school was useless in Fischer’s case anyway: the school’s program was geared toward preparing lawyers for the now-defunct Russian Empire.11

  Evidently, Mr. Fischer was not aware of this. Believing he had committed murder, he was already dictating his last will to his secretary before planning to take his own life. Dmitri assured him he would see to it that the story was not publicized. In exchange for his assistance, Mr. Fischer wrote a letter of recommendation for Ms. Isolde Cameron, praising in particular her high moral qualities in bringing up his girls. Dmitri, Isolde, and Georgiev spent that evening in a restaurant celebrating their victory.

  Apparently, when he had asked permission from “Golst” for this operation, Dmitri spared him the details. Otherwise, it is doubtful that an experienced spymaster would have approved an action potentially fraught with trouble. It looks as if Dmitri’s emotional vulnerability impaired his judgment: his hatred for his father transferred onto Mr. Fischer, and his obsession with the young Englishwoman (a lesbian and a child molester to boot!) made him act irresponsibly. Indeed, this operation could easily have gone awry and done more harm than good. For one, Mr. Fischer could himself have had a gun, loaded with real, not empty, shots, which could have led to real, not fake, bloodletting. It is also not quite clear how Dmitri prevented an open scandal and avoided a police investigation,
which could easily have established his affiliation with the Soviet Trade Mission. It already had a poor reputation with the Czech government as an outpost of Communist propaganda. Dmitri’s involvement in a criminal case could have had grave political consequences. At the very least, it would have cost him his job.

  But it seemed he was lucky. Everything worked out as planned, and he had something to offer to his masters in return. While the ordeal brought him closer to Isolde, it also made it easier to recruit her. After Dmitri tipped off “Golst” to that effect, the elaborate process of clearance for a prospective agent began. First, through a Soviet spy master in London, they checked out her background. They found nothing suspicious. Then, Soviet agents like Dmitri who were part of the Prague White Guard student milieu tried to involve her in a bogus White Guard terrorist organization. When she didn’t take the bait, on orders from the Soviet Trade Mission, the Czech Communists posing as agents attempted to persuade her to work for French intelligence. She also turned down this offer. A “rich man” pretended to fall in love with her and offered to take her with him to America.

  When none of these traps worked, Dmitri tried to recruit her as a Soviet agent. But he also failed: Isolde wanted neither money nor adventure. When Dmitri appealed to her on idealistic grounds, she turned him down. “I don’t have political convictions,” she said. “I’m not quite sure of my own morality, but I want to keep my hands clean. I don’t want to smear them either with somebody else’s blood or with gold, and I don’t want to belong to anyone.” When Dmitri reported the results to “Golst,” he was instructed to remain in contact with Isolde. She gave English lessons to some prominent officials of the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs and directors of the country’s leading firms and banks, as well as their families. She might prove to be useful one day.