Stalin's Romeo Spy

by Emil Draitser

  Desperate to get his wife back, one day Dmitri came up with an idea to gain control over her. He decided to involve her in his espionage business, thus leaving her neither time nor energy for extramarital affairs. He made her privy to the true nature of his job at the Mission and revealed that his job as a translator at the Trade Mission was a cover (his code name was “Zh/32” at the time). He proposed that Iolanta join the ranks—it was the best way she could serve the Communist cause that she claimed to hold so dear.14

  Excited, Iolanta agreed immediately. The work promised danger, to which she seemed equally addicted. Dmitri set only one nonnegotiable condition: she had to end her relationship with Isolde once and for all. Iolanta swore she would. As a symbolic gesture of her resolve never to see Isolde again, he asked her to commit the damned cigarette case to the waters of the Vltava River, to throw it down from the Charles Bridge. She laughed, finding the gesture unnecessary. But since he insisted, she passed the cigarette case to him and let him do it himself. On Dmitri’s recommendation, Iolanta was employed as a secret agent under the code name MILENA. His gamble seemed to work. In time, the marital bliss of their first year together returned. He felt happy again.15

  But when he told Iolanta about his true occupation, he withheld an unpleasant detail: carrying out his assignments involved cheating on her regularly. For several months, he was sleeping in the beds of both his wife and the French Embassy secretary. He often came home late at night when Iolanta was already soundly asleep.

  Something else happened along the way that surprised him a great deal and complicated his life significantly. His professional interest in Marie-Eliane did not make him immune to developing genuinely warm feelings toward her. Seeing her often, he got to know her better and grew to respect and admire her. He found himself truly attracted to her in more ways than one. The premeditated duplicity of sexual espionage turned into true love. He not only writes about that development openly in his memoirs but also finds it necessary to add an artistic touch. While for security reasons he gives Marie-Eliane the name of “Countess Imperiali,” he makes it clear to the reader that in real life the woman did not resemble the vain and coldhearted Schiller character, “a mere piece of woman-flesh, wrapped up in a great-great patent of nobility,” as her own brother says to her face in the play. To underscore that difference, Bystrolyotov replaces the first name of Schiller’s countess (Julia) with a name that, in the context of his memoirs, sounds special and expresses his affection—Fiorella (“a little flower,” in Italian).16

  “Slowly, without rushing, I wove a web of the finest treachery around [her],” he writes with much anguish. The guilt of eventually breaking Marie-Eliane’s heart at the demand of his job tormented him for the rest of his life. “Even now, so many years later,” he recalls in his memoirs, “I’m ready to kneel before her and ask her forgiveness.”

  But back then, in Prague, the young Dmitri was apparently able to compartmentalize his passion for his new bride and his feelings for Marie-Eliane. Cheating on both of the women he loved, he consoled himself with the thought that, after all, he was doing it not for personal gratification but as part of his sacrifice to the higher cause he had embraced: “There’s no struggle without sacrifice, and all three of us were its victims.” In fact, he thought himself even more victimized than the women: he had to split his heart in two.

  But there was one more woman in his life at that time whom he truly adored. Thinking back on that period, he writes, “More than anything in the world I loved that gray and untidy woman in glasses with a thick volume of Das Kapital under her arm—the goddess of social revolution and class struggle.”

  Finally, the day came when he had to begin recruiting Marie-Eliane. They were already engaged, and following the “Golst” scenario, he had told her about his Moscow and Washington assignments to a diplomatic post. Now it was time to ask her for a minor favor. Would she be so kind as to bring him something from her office desk that would prove to the Soviet authorities that she had made her choice and could be fully trusted?

  Overcoming revulsion for her own actions—betrayal of her country—the next day she brought him some documents from her desk. He found them too innocent.

  “That’s not enough,” he said. “You have to burn your bridges.”

  “But I’m an honest person,” she said.

  Marie-Eliane struggled with herself. When Dmitri insisted that she pass him the French Embassy’s ciphers and codes, she cried and begged him to spare her this.

  “I love my country. Do you want to make me a spy and a traitor?”

  “No,” he said, although she was obviously correct regarding his intentions. As if to prove his negation, he added, “I want to make you a patriot of another country.”

  Much torn between her love for a man and her love for her country, Marie-Eliane finally delivered what he asked for—all of the French Embassy’s cipher books. “I remember that evening,” he writes. “She stood in pink rays of sun, and her distorted facial expression made me shudder.”

  “Please,” she begged him. “You can keep it for only an hour. One hour only!” An hour was plenty of time for Dmitri to photograph the documents.

  Cursing himself, he followed the OGPU scenario for a long time. What Marie-Eliane thought to be her one and only violation would be just the beginning. Dmitri kept coming up with stories of red tape that prevented them from getting married and leaving Prague. And he demanded more and more confidential material from the French diplomatic pouches, which Marie-Eliane provided him in the course of two years.

  When Dmitri could seemingly have taken pride in his achievement—he had enabled the Soviet government to read the contents of French diplomatic correspondence on a daily basis—he experienced a shocking disappointment. It was the first big hole in the romantic veil in which intelligence work had wrapped him. Combined with other setbacks and failures, it made him feel at that time that his days in the intelligence service would soon be over.

  But a day came when he realized that, on the contrary, his career as a spy was only beginning in earnest.

  PART II

  MASTER SPY AT WORK

  SIX

  Going Underground

  All countries of the world would open before me.

  —BYSTROLYOTOV, ON THE OFFER TO BECOME AN ILLEGAL OPERATIVE

  A new and sharp turn in Dmitri’s life came late at night at the end of January 1930, with a knock on the door of his luxurious apartment in the upscale Prague neighborhood of Vinogrady. Dmitri and Iolanta were packing their suitcases and burning papers in the fireplace. They were about to leave Prague forever. For successful work at the Trade Mission, Dmitri was recommended for postdoctoral studies at the Academy of Foreign Trade in Moscow.1

  But late on the eve of their departure for Moscow, “Golst” visited them and offered Dmitri a change of destination. Transferred to Berlin, “Golst” suggested that Dmitri follow him there. But in Berlin, he would have to become an “illegal” operative, that is, work underground, under an assumed name. Iolanta could join him later.

  “Golst” left. Dmitri and his wife didn’t sleep all night. She begged him to leave everything behind and go to Moscow. “I paced anxiously about my room from corner to corner, like a beast in a cage,” he recalls. He stepped into the wintry Prague night. Once outside, as was his habit over many years of his stormy life, he took stock of the events of his past two years in the Czechoslovakian capital.

  A few years earlier, at the end of 1927, things still seemed to be going well for him. He obtained a new spymaster. Instead of “Golst,” the OGPU cover position as the Mission’s second secretary was passed to another operative whose alias was “Dneprov” (code-named MAKAR). His real name was Pavel Matveevich Zhuravlyov. Born in 1898 to a well-to-do peasant family, he had studied at the Kazan Medical Institute, where he took part in the student radical movement. After the Bolshevik takeover in October 1917, he joined the Red Army and soon began his career in the Cheka ranks. When the civil w
ar ended, he worked first in Kazan, then in the Crimea. He arrived in Prague after a short stint at the central apparatus of the foreign intelligence in Moscow, where he wound up after being expelled from Lithuania for espionage activities.2

  At the time of his arrival in Prague, times were difficult for Soviet spies in Czechoslovakia. The country’s highly popular president, Tomáš Masaryk, took a strong anti-Soviet stand. Since for the Soviet Trade Mission trade was secondary to spreading Communist ideology and conducting a wide range of propaganda activities, the Mission was put under tight police surveillance. To keep it under its watchful eyes at all times, the police installed a tobacco booth next to the fence of Villa Teresa occupied by the Mission. Both Soviet and Czech citizens entering the Mission were often detained for questioning. With the exception of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party paper Rude Pravo, the pages of the Prague press bristled with such headlines as “Soviet Diplomat Spies,” “When Will Villa Teresa Be Clean?” and “Another Soviet Trade Mission Provocation.”3

  “Dneprov” suggested changing the course of Soviet intelligence work in Czechoslovakia. Because of the significant presence in the city of Russian émigrés who had fled from the Bolshevik troops at the end of the civil war, Prague was a breeding ground for various anti-Soviet groups. These émigrés from Russia still hoped to reverse the tide of historical change and bring back the old order in their homeland. Working toward that goal, these groups prepared secret agents for penetrating Soviet territory.

  Mingling in Prague high society, Dmitri established contact with the son of a privy councillor of the Czechoslovakian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This man not only provided him with the minutes of confidential sessions of the Ministry but also tipped him off about a school for spies operating in Prague. Russian émigré General Inostrantsev and his wife ran the Higher School of Russian Language as a private business and offered much more than linguistic drills. The school was a training ground for blending into Soviet society. Under the general’s guidance, by closely examining Soviet newspapers and newsreels, the students learned the everyday behavior and manners of Russians of different walks of life—Party functionaries, military officers, industrial managers, members of the intelligentsia, blue-collar workers, even members of the underworld.4

  Inostrantsev assessed his students’ physical and other personal characteristics and helped to cast them in the most appropriate cover roles. He supplied them with the corresponding clothing, including such accessories as an embroidered skullcap (tiubeteika) for a person intended to penetrate one of the Soviet central Asian republics or a thin leather waist belt for a future man of the Caucasus. The school had operated since 1919, and its first students were officers of the defeated White Army who wanted to contribute to the struggle against the Bolsheviks by means of covert operations. But, as Dmitri learned, recently the school was attracting professional intelligence officers from England, France, Italy, and Sweden.5

  Under an innocent pretext, Dmitri struck up a casual acquaintance with two of the school’s students—a senior lieutenant in the British Navy, Edgar Young, and his wife, Geraldine. The couple planned to infiltrate the Soviet Union together. To get a helping hand in cracking the school secrets, Dmitri recruited one Joseph Leppin (code-named PEEP), a law student from Prague University and a member of the Czechoslovakian Communist Youth League. Born in 1906 in Prague, he was fluent in English and French, tall and slender, had the demeanor of an intellectual, and was interested in art. He became Dmitri’s most reliable assistant in many operations. With him and his friend Georgiev, Dmitri placed the school under around-the-clock surveillance and photographed all students entering or exiting the premises. As Dmitri discloses it in his thinly disguised account of his spy work in the form of a film script, titled “Shchedrye serdtsem” (“Generous Hearts”), eventually he broke into the Inostrantsevs’ apartment and photographed the school documents, complete with addresses and fingerprints of both the current students and the school alumni.6

  Parallel to his intelligence work, Dmitri continued to pursue his education. Back in 1925, he had been forced to stop attending the Rus sian Law Faculty. Working at the Soviet Trade Mission full-time and heading the Union of Student Citizens of the USSR Living in Czechoslovakia were hardly compatible with attending classes that pre pared lawyers for the Russian Empire soon to be recovered from the hands of the Bolsheviks. As his student file shows, in the academic year 1924 to 1925, he took and passed only one exam. In October 1925, the school administration summoned him for questioning about the reasons for his lack of academic progress. He gave no explanation as to why he neglected his studies; he filed no petitions on his own behalf; and he was soon expelled from the school.7

  His further education during that period is not quite clear. His memoirs briefly mention a short period of medical studies at Prague University. Then, in the summer of 1927, he entered another émigré law school, the Ukrainian Free University (Ukrainskii Vil’nii Institut), the working language of which, apparently, was Russian. In 1928, he defended his thesis, titled “The Origin and Formation of Law in the Light of the Teachings of Marx, Lenin, and Engels.” As a result, Dmitri was promoted to the position of the Mission’s economics adviser. He wrote and published several articles in specialized journals and edited the Mission’s bulletin on economics. Knowledge of economics of Western states would benefit him greatly in his future intelligence work.8

  All his professional success notwithstanding, at that time, Dmitri was not yet aware of the unquestionable fact, of which he would be reminded quite painfully later in his life, that no one in the Soviet secret police was trusted fully; everyone was a subject of constant suspicion. As his KGB file reveals now, on March 5, 1926, the first signal of mistrust had come from his native turf, from the North-Caucasian Authorized OGPU representative. It took the form of a letter to the Foreign Intelligence Department of the OGPU in which the local representative called to the attention of his Moscow colleagues that Dmitri Bystrolyotov’s employment at a Soviet setting in Prague might be a mistake. The letter suggested a course of action to rectify it: “to allow Bystrolyotov to come to the Soviet Union, particularly to Anapa, where he will be arrested.”9

  Nevertheless, responding to this signal, the very same Artuzov who had seemingly checked Dmitri out and blessed his intelligence career, while asking that Dmitri not be arrested if he stepped on the Anapa soil, followed it up with another letter requesting that “in case of Bystrolyotov’s arrival, if possible, put him under surveillance and report the results.” Dmitri was also unaware that his letters to his mother were routinely opened. And on December 12, 1928, the North-Caucasian Authorized OGPU representative again reported to Moscow about Dmitri’s pending vacation in June of the next year and asked for instructions concerning whether “measures have to be taken toward his secret seizure.”10

  Although he had not been arrested, toward the end of 1929, Dmitri seemed to be running out of luck professionally. He went through a number of setbacks and failures in his spy work. First, he accidentally blew the cover of one of his Czech agents, a Škoda engineer, presumably the one through whom he had obtained the secrets of gun tube hardening, which Dmitri was credited for.11

  One day, Dmitri wrote him an innocent letter, a signal to meet at the usual place of contact, the café-bar of the Steiner Hotel. Overwhelmed with work that day, he instructed the Mission’s porter to take the letter to the city and drop it in one of the street mailboxes, the usual precautionary measure he employed himself. Busy with his other duties, the man put the envelope into the Mission’s outgoing mail pile. When the engineer appeared at the café-bar a few days later, Dmitri saw that something bad had happened. This usually obedient and submissive man could hardly hide his fury. Instead of saying hello and asking permission to join Dmitri at his table, he slammed the envelope down on the table and hissed, “Is this your letter, sir?”

  “Mine,” Dmitri replied.

  “Look at it again!”

  “Mine.”
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br />   “Well, then what’s that, may I ask you?” He flipped the envelope over. As on other pieces of Soviet Trade Mission mail, an advertising sticker with a red star read, “Drink Russian Tea!” With the Czechoslovakian government closely monitoring activities of the Soviet Mission, receiving a letter with that sticker compromised the engineer as a “source.” Most likely, he had already been under police surveillance.12

  Next came another failure, no less embarrassing. Although Soviet agents provided the Mission with a wide range of confidential information on Czechoslovakian economics and technical know-how, “Golst” directed Dmitri to enhance the quality of industrial espionage by recruiting the secretary of the influential Czech Union of Industrialists. Privy to the most sensitive information, the man (identified in Dmitri’s memoirs only as “polished Pan Doctor”) fit all the characteristics of a “soft” target for recruitment: he lived beyond his means and was heavily in debt. “Golst” instructed that he be cultivated immediately and, without much ado, offered him a substantial sum of money in exchange for his cooperation. Dmitri had a casual acquaintance with Pan Doctor in the course of a few years, meeting him at various Prague bars and theaters. He followed the instructions from “Golst” to the letter. He invited the man to his office, locked the door, and put a thick packet of money on the desk before Pan Doctor, who responded swiftly—and unexpectedly. He got up and spat in Dmitri’s face. Already a seasoned spy, Dmitri was able to separate his personal dignity from his professional work. “Out of agitation, he missed,” he remarks in his memo for the KGB nonchalantly. “But this didn’t change a thing: I became a finished man in Czechoslovakia.”13