The whole ploy was based on a psychological calculation. The unusual sight of the compartment and the exotic passenger were designed to distract customs attention from the patient’s belongings.
When the train stopped at Domodossola on the Italian side of the Swiss border, as soon as the Black Shirt Militia stepped into the railroad car, the conductor rushed to them with the passengers’ passports and begged them not to make much noise because of the unpredictable mental patient. Out of curiosity, the guards opened the door slightly, peeked inside, but did not dare to step in out of fear. When the train departed, everybody inside the railroad car sighed in relief.
The scene repeated itself with the Swiss gendarmes in Brig. During a stop in Zurich, a short and nimble doctor in a white robe with a young nurse on hand (Bazarov and “Greta”) appeared in the compartment. The doctor listened to the nun’s report about the condition of her patient, administered a shot to him, and left.
Then came the German border crossing at Basel. The SS border guards reacted the same as their Italian and Swiss counterparts. Nobody wanted to contend with a violent mental patient. “Death twice passed by me,” Dmitri wrote many years later, recalling this operation. “One attentive look, one touch of [the luggage] with a boot tip—and everything would have been discovered.”39
During the weapon-smuggling operation, while Dmitri was fully aware that he was in immediate danger, he didn’t have even an inkling that soon he would find himself on the brink of peril again. Now, mortal danger was to come to him from the hands of an enemy he had forgotten about.
ELEVEN
The “Vivaldi” Affair
Take my wife . . . please!
—HENNY YOUNGMAN, AMERICAN COMEDIAN
With many interwar KGB files destroyed, only skimpy information about Dmitri’s last operations could be culled from his writings, both published and (mostly) unpublished. All of them, in one way or another, had to do with prolonged secret negotiations between the Soviets and the French in the early 1930s.
Due to Hitler’s open defiance of the Versailles Treaty limitations on the German military, international tensions in all of Europe grew rapidly, and the long-standing animosity between Germany and France became especially palpable. The war of nerves in view of Hitler’s determination to rearm Germany caused France to frantically seek alliances with other countries. In the face of ominous developments in Germany, although the French governments were unstable and changed in rapid succession, all of them felt it necessary to make forays in the direction of Soviet Russia.
It was not easy to decide on rapprochement between France and the Soviet Union. Alternate French governments moved toward Russia with much reluctance and apprehension. On one hand, Russia had been an important French ally before World War I, and the Soviet Union represented a plausible Eastern counterweight against a resurgent Germany. On the other hand, after the 1917 Bolshevik takeover and its proclamation to export revolution to other countries, French right-wing politicians grew to hate the Soviet Union because of the danger it posed to social stability.
The German menace, however, was much more real and closer, just across the Rhine River. And so France gradually began to improve its relations with the despised Bolshevik Russia. In late 1932, the radical premier and foreign minister Édouard Herriot signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. In early 1934, his successor, the Socialist Joseph Paul-Boncour, concluded a trade agreement with Moscow. Conservative Louis Barthou continued the Herriot–Paul-Boncour line when he became foreign minister in February 1934. Barthou began discussing a Franco-Soviet defense pact with People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov. Whether France liked the Bolsheviks or not, she needed the Russian counterbalance.
Although the final text of the Franco-Soviet pact did not include a supporting military cooperation agreement, apparently, during the initial stages of rapprochement between France and the Soviet Union in contemplating a defense pact, there was some discussion of military provisions in case of a German attack. Such provisions remained behind-the-scenes activities on both sides. Back in September 1933, after French air minister Pierre Cot made a short visit to the USSR, he was convinced of the great opportunities an alliance with the Soviet Union could bring to French security. He reasoned that since the USSR had the largest army and air force in the world, it could present a sufficient deterrent to German expansionist ambitions. Soviet military intelligence used Cot’s pro-Soviet stand to its advantage: its agents penetrated the French Air Ministry.1
At some later date, Soviet foreign intelligence found an opportunity to obtain a list of Nazi sympathizers in France. Such information may have served as an enticing bargaining chip in its negotiations with France.
Since the operation required a thorough knowledge of Western banking and other financial activities, the Center called on Bystro lyotov’s expertise in economics and his experience in running Western agents to carry out the operation, directed by Theodor Mally, who met with Dmitri and explained the gist of the objective. Through its agents in Germany, Soviet foreign intelligence learned that French Nazi sympathizers were serving as informers of the German intelligence, the Abwehr. So far, doing it on a voluntary basis, they were not as reliable as those on the Abwehr payroll. To tie them down and increase their productivity and cooperation, they had to be bound by money received from Germany.2
According to Bystrolyotov, the rationale for the Abwehr actions was the following: because bringing a large sum of money directly into France and dispensing it there would be troublesome—French counterintelligence would easily get on the informers’ trail—the German plan was to find a way to send the money without leaving any traces of the transactions. What they came up with was quite similar to what, in today’s terms, is called a money-laundering operation. To hide the German origin of the money, they decided to work through an intermediary firm in neighboring Holland. To avoid any suspicion of a German connection, the intermediary firm should have an anti-Nazi reputation. By the time of the operation in summer 1935, the Nazis’ rampant anti-Semitic propaganda, boycott of Jewish stores, doctors, and lawyers, and banning of Jews from government service were public knowledge. It would thus be best to involve an unsuspecting Jewish financial firm in the transaction. A lump sum had to be delivered anonymously to this firm that would be entrusted with depositing the money in a Dutch Commercial Bank, which, acting in its own name, would transfer the money to France and dispense it according to the list of addresses supplied. The final goal of the Soviet operation was to obtain the list of the Nazi “fifth column” in France.
The operation was successfully carried out with the help of Baruch (Bernard) Dawidowicz, a Polish Jew who had assisted Dmitri in setting up the cover firm GADA in Holland. Because Bystrolyotov’s description of the operation appeared in the open Soviet press, his manuscript undoubtedly underwent scrutiny by the KGB censors. Although the final text preserved some aspects of the operation, these details were hardly sufficient to fully access the mechanics used in tricking the Germans to give away their secret list.3
It is also unclear whether the Soviet government ever used this list of the Nazi “fifth column” in France in diplomatic negotiations with the French. But Bystrolyotov took part in other France-related operations and left firsthand accounts of them. One of these operations aimed at stealing secrets from the French that they, in turn, had stolen from the Germans. Due to the complex Soviet–French relationship at the time—neither party fully trusted the other—it was no wonder that both French and Soviet foreign intelligence were averse to sharing their booty about the German war efforts. Who knew on which side each might wind up in a future conflict?
Dmitri designed and executed an operation that may well be considered one with no analogues in the history of world intelligence. He describes it with such frankness that one can only guess his motive (or motives) for making it public, despite having at its heart a highly private matter. It is possible that one impetus for his writing was a desire to
sort out all the motives of his past actions.
It all started one day when, chatting with him during one of their occasional meetings in Geneva, ROSSI tipped him off that a French intelligence officer was living at his luxurious villa in Locarno, Switzerland. (As he does elsewhere in his memoirs, Dmitri avoids revealing details of unacknowledged Soviet intelligence operations and nicknames the man in question “Vivaldi,” whom he presents as a retired colonel from Italian Army Headquarters.)4
At the time of this episode, the late fall of 1935, Germany was the chief threat to French security, so it was natural to expect a heavy concentration of French intelligence activity on that country.5 After Hitler’s accession to power, intelligence gathering revolved around obtaining information on the intentions and capabilities of the growing Nazi menace on the other side of the Rhine River. The reports of secret service attachés posted to Berlin were the most prolific source of sensitive information. A subsection responsible for French foreign intelligence, the Service de renseignements (SR), operated a growing agent network in Germany. The French intelligence aimed to assess Germany’s economic and political situation, an important element in the overall perception of a German threat. But efforts were no less intense in other countries through which German intelligence information traveled, and neighboring Switzerland was one of them. It was reasonable to assume that rich data about the German rearmament efforts passed through the hands of Colonel “Vivaldi.” Realizing that obtaining access to this information would give a significant advantage to Soviet intelligence, Dmitri came up with a plan to get hold of the cache of reports delivered to “Vivaldi” by his agents.
Learning that “Vivaldi” was an aging, “bored widower,” Dmitri calculated that the colonel would be susceptible to the charms of a young and attractive woman, a trap he had already successfully implemented in the operation to intercept the Hitler–Ciano Sr. correspondence. But a fleeting love affair would not be enough to provide more or less permanent access to French intelligence secrets. It could only work if the woman belonged to the aristocracy, making marriage the only way for the Frenchman to have her.
It is unclear whether Dmitri struggled with himself for long before deciding to cast his own wife, Iolanta, as bait for the Frenchman. The illegal Soviet foreign intelligence rezident in Paris, Theodor Mally, and Boris Bazarov (who was already running the OGPU illegal rezidentura in America) approved the plan. The first deputy of the Foreign Intelligence Department (since May 5, 1935), Boris Berman, authorized the operation.6
Apparently, Dmitri’s plan didn’t raise his bosses’ eyebrows. Although extraordinary, his readiness to place his own wife on the altar of revolution had roots in Russian cultural zeitgeist. In the famous nineteenth-century novel What Is to Be Done? by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, its hero, Rakhmetov, wholly dedicated to the revolution, sets an example of self-denial and ruthless self-discipline, to the point of sleeping on a bed of nails. According to him, jealousy was an unnatural feeling that should be suppressed. The novel served as an inspiration to many Russian revolutionaries who sought to emulate its hero.
In more recent times, in the 1920s, after the Bolsheviks came to power, Rakhmetov’s views were echoed in public debates held in Soviet Russia about the need to do away with the old, bourgeois morality in which a woman in marriage was seen as property. Sexual freedom was part of the Soviet experiment at large. In public statements, Alexandra Kollontai, a Russian Communist revolutionary and Soviet diplomat, expressed her belief that true Socialism could not be achieved without a radical change in attitudes toward sexuality. They had to be freed from the oppressive norms that she saw as a continuation of bourgeois acquisitiveness. In her “Theses on Communist Morality in the Sphere of Marital Relations,” echoing Chernyshevsky’s hero, she stated that sexuality is a human instinct as natural as hunger or thirst. Like the state, when communism becomes a reality, the family unit will wither away. Kollontai admonished men and women against their nostalgia for traditional family life. (Living abroad, Dmitri fell behind the times. In the early 1930s, with Stalin’s full accession to power, a period of sexual freedom deemed as the main cause of disintegration of the family had been winding down. Stalin saw to it that the institution of marriage and family was fully restored and strengthened.)7
Writing thirty years after that episode in his life, Dmitri does not recall hesitating for a minute before approaching his wife with this extraordinary proposition. A man of action, once he came up with a plan to subvert “Vivaldi,” he didn’t think twice about sacrificing his mate. He prefaces the chapter devoted to that operation with an epigraph, a line from John 15:13: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” But he titles the chapter “According to St. John? . . . Hmm . . . I don’t know.” Often ambivalent in his feelings at crucial moments in his life, with the passage of time, he was not sure that his decision to marry off Iolanta to a stranger for the sake of the greater cause was the right one. “Was marrying Iolanta off a mistake?” he asks himself. “Was it a crime or an act of heroism?” Pondering it, he finally decides that it was a sacrifice on his part, the “biggest sacrifice [he] had ever made, much bigger than if [he] were to sacrifice [his] own life.” At the time of the operation, he felt he had “given away the best of what he had, and nothing else was left.” He recalls no feeling of jealousy or other bad sentiments toward Colonel “Vivaldi.” In fact, he even liked this respectable and honest man and was consoled that his beloved wife was in the hands of a decent man.
Naturally, he knew it would be difficult to talk Iolanta into going along with his plan. “I had no experience in how one should marry off one’s beloved wife in order to reach socially useful goals,” he admits. To persuade her, he decided he would have to appeal to her Communist beliefs, as he puts it, “to raise the delicate subject at hand from the level of everyday humdrum existence, to elevate it to the height of a sacrificial and heroic deed.”
They sat on a park bench in Davos, now their place of permanent residence. To be exact, she lived there all the time, and he visited her as frequently as he could, whenever his job allowed. Sometimes months on end would pass before he saw her again, as had happened during his handling of Oldham in London. Talking to her now, first he pointed out that the enormous salary they received for their work demanded that they give more of themselves, that is, not just “playing around the fire but jumping into it.” Indeed, their monthly income was extraordinarily high. Dmitri received the highest Soviet monthly salary (sovmaksimum) of five hundred gold rubles, and Iolanta another three hundred. Combined with their travel and hotel expenses, Soviet Foreign Intelligence was paying them a salary more than a dozen times that of a Soviet blue-collar worker.
So, he argued, they were morally obliged to do much more than they had in the past so as to justify their high pay and to live up to the expectations of their time, a time of great moral enthusiasm. He reminded her of the time they had first met back in Prague and how they’d sworn allegiance to the high ideals they shared. Hadn’t they promised each other they would never become “heroes with a checkbook in their pockets”? That they would be totally devoted to the cause and fight unsparingly for the triumph of the most advanced ideas known to humanity? If so, didn’t such devotion justify “estrangement from all things personal and worldly”? With the war coming, now was no time for hesitation. They must act decisively and make the ultimate sacrifices they had sworn to make.
After saying all that, he explained her part of the important operation: after she married the Frenchman and things had settled down a bit, she would make impressions of the keys to his safe. Then Dmitri would be able to sneak into the man’s office and photograph the contents of the safe.
First, Iolanta thought Dmitri was acting under duress and his superior, Boris Berman, the very same man who had rejoiced when her tuberculosis provided a convenient cover for the Soviet spy network in Europe, was behind Dmitri’s calling on her to “jump into the fire.” But he assured her that t
he idea was his alone. He expressed surprise at her reluctance to do what was expected of her, reminding her that, after all, they had an open marriage. Back in the Prague days, they had foreseen that, while they would remain soul mates forever, the nature of their work with its frequent and prolonged absences would, realistically speaking, make it impossible for them to be physically faithful to each other. They tacitly agreed to this, living and acting accordingly. As an example of her de facto acceptance of these arrangements, he reminded her of an episode that had taken place back in Berlin in the early 1930s. Visiting her in the hospital after she had barely survived the dangerous operation of nerve ablation, seeing her helpless and unable even to lift her head from the pillow, he felt like crying. When he took a handkerchief from his pocket, she looked at him and, for the first time in many months, smiled “playfully, even joyfully.” Instead of his handkerchief, he had inadvertently pulled from his pocket . . . a pair of panties he had “removed from a pretty girl the night before.”
And hadn’t he returned the favor many times? Before visiting her in Davos, he always called from the road along the way to let her know he was coming, thus giving her time to remove all traces of her infidelities: another man’s ties, socks, or whatever.
“You haven’t been praying before my picture during all the years of intelligence work,” he summed it up. “What’s the difference, then?”
Iolanta froze for a long while, finally uttering, “Tell me, would Berman and your other bosses send their wives into somebody else’s bed?”
Dmitri dismissed her point right away. It didn’t matter: “Everyone’s responsible for his or her own soul.”
It was nighttime, and they went to bed without resolving the issue. But, in the middle of the night, Iolanta suddenly woke him up. Sobbing and getting dressed in a hurry, she swallowed her tears and said, “You want to make a whore out of me! How dare you! What did your phone calls from the road have to do with it? Those infidelities were out of necessity, out of loneliness. But what you’re talking about here is sheer prostitution!”
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