Stalin's Romeo Spy

by Emil Draitser

  His first thought was that, out of agitation, she might do something stupid and impulsive, which could become fatal to their under cover work. At the time she was safeguarding five passports for members of their spy network—who knew what she would do with them now?

  He tried to calm her down with whatever rationale came to his mind at the moment, such as “prostitution is also a social necessity.”

  “You’re sending me to [fuck] with some colonel!” Iolanta screeched. She threw her clothes from the wardrobe into a suitcase and before leaving said to him, this time, apparently for stronger effect, switching from Czech to English: “You’re a bastard, a lousy son of a bitch!”

  Realizing that the situation was going out of control, he briefly recounted the story of his affair with Marie-Eliane Aucouturier, the French Embassy typist in Prague. When he seduced her in order to recruit her as a Soviet agent, he pointed out, it was in service to the revolutionary cause, which he had placed above his personal wishes. It was a sacrifice to the revolution, being forced to cheat on his young wife. (In his memoirs, however, he admits that he hadn’t told Iolanta the whole truth. He omitted the end of that affair: the French spy line was closed on orders from the Center, that is, his sacrifice had borne zero results. He hadn’t told her that because “the end of that lousy story spoke against the despicable [spy] work, and it would be an argument that worked in Iolanta’s favor.”)

  Iolanta heard him out and quieted down. But her face made him freeze. It assumed the same empty expression, resembling a blind or clairvoyant woman, he had seen for the first time many years before when they first met: “Her eyes were again the color of ice and looked at the world without seeing anything, as if looking into another world.”

  Iolanta became very calm and now spoke only in English. She put all her clothes back into the wardrobe and, without looking at him, asked whether his making love to the Frenchwoman had happened for the first time on their wedding night and continued during their honeymoon.

  He confirmed it.

  She undressed, lay down in the bed, and said into the darkness, “You’re a hero. But I hope you understand that everything’s over between us. You got what you wanted. I’ll marry your Colonel ‘Vivaldi,’ but at the same time, I’m no longer your wife. You’re a horrible man. Don’t touch me. You’re a murderer.”

  “Whom have I killed, Iola?” he asked.

  She replied, “Me.”

  After that night, events ran their course without a hitch, according to Dmitri’s plan. The daughter of a blue-collar worker, Iolanta could become an aristocrat only if she was married to one. Dmitri contacted his friend (and Soviet foreign intelligence agent) Georgy Georgiev, who was acquainted with a genuine Hungarian count, whom he calls “Cesar Adolph August Esterhazy.” An aging homosexual, he had squandered his whole fortune and lived in Prague with his young lackey in a small house belonging to his former gardener: this was all that remained of his past luxurious way of life. For a substantial sum of money, he agreed to cooperate. They brought him to Nice, where Iolanta was already waiting for him. She was provided with a passport bought on the Prague black market in the name of “Rona Dubska.” According to it, she was the twenty-five-year-old daughter of a Czech official and divorced.

  Although the passport flattered Iolanta, making her nearly ten years younger, there was a snag. When they doctored the passport at the OGPU headquarters on Lubyanka, replacing the original picture with one of Iolanta, they overlooked an entry on the special features page that said the passport holder’s “left leg [was] absent.”

  There was no time to replace the passport, and Dmitri took the risk. Since the passport entries were written in Czech, there was a good chance that a French Catholic priest wouldn’t know the language.

  Dmitri spared no money in subsidizing the next important step: to make Iolanta look and act like an aristocrat. He sent her to Paris, where she bought a bundle of elegant clothes and learned her new biography by heart. Then, “Countess Rona Esterhazy” traveled to Locarno. It seems that Dmitri drew his inspiration for setting up the entrapment of “Vivaldi” from a literary source, the famous Chekhov short story “Lady with a Lapdog.” He planted “Rona” in a hotel in the resort town of Lugano and chose autumn as the time when the countess would appear on the embankment of the lake: the period between the summer and winter tourist seasons made the appearance of a smashingly beautiful and expensively dressed single woman (her divorce from “Count Esterhazy” had already been registered by then) more noticeable. As did the characters in Chekhov’s story, “Vivaldi” and “Rona” got acquainted thanks to a little white poodle that Dmitri had given his wife.

  The plan worked. “Vivaldi” couldn’t resist the charms of the young Hungarian aristocrat. He immediately began courting her. It turned out that the countess didn’t know Italian, which was used in this part of Switzerland, and “Vivaldi” was only too eager to help. They became friends first, and soon he proposed.

  Now it was only a matter of time before “Rona” would settle down in “Vivaldi’s” house and be ready to carry out her part of the operation. However, Dmitri was in for a big—and unpleasant—surprise. He had no inkling that in parting from his wife (in his mind, temporarily) he had brought back into his life a person with whom he would soon find himself in the grip of a mortal struggle—literally. Shortly after Dmitri stepped aside to let her marry “Vivaldi,” Iolanta renewed her liaison with Isolde. On Dmitri’s own admission, Isolde’s new invasion into his private life, this time so “impudent and triumphant,” inflicted tremendous pain on his ego.

  It all started when Isolde sent Iolanta a ring as a wedding present. Enraged by this gesture, Dmitri now realized that what he considered a heroic deed of self-denial for the sake of a higher cause, Isolde saw as his admission of failure due to Iolanta’s unwavering allegiance to her, her lesbian lover. He felt both defeated and fooled. The accompanying letter humiliated him. He read it over once, and quickly, but its words “burned him later like a slap in the face”:

  I’m glad that your former spouse made such a sensible decision: your divorce from him only externally legalized his inner insolvency. He was forced to admit defeat and pass you back to me. This is how I understand his act, in that sense, not devoid of certain nobility. As I’m returning to you my previous gifts, I assume, dear Signora, that we’re returning to the happy state of affairs that existed [between us] in the past.8

  And Isolde acted accordingly. Taking advantage of the ignorance of Iolanta’s new husband about the nature of his new wife’s relationship with her, Isolde moved into their house as her girlfriend and permanent companion.

  First, Dmitri tried to act from afar. Through some intermediaries, he attempted to remove Isolde from the “Vivaldi” residence but failed. He experienced a horrific and bitter sense of his impotence to change things. He couldn’t help but spy on the couple from behind the bushes of the Frenchman’s villa. One day, he saw his wife and Isolde making love. The scene had a devastating effect on him. “Simply and clearly, with my whole body and soul, I understood that this was the breaking point: from now on, I would live for one purpose only—to murder Isolde. Only her death could make my further existence possible.”

  In his mind, there was no longer a choice—only one of them, either he or she, would go on living. All his usual precautions in observing his stern superiors’ rules of conduct for illegal operatives—he still had to report his every move to them—left him. Writing about that moment in his life, he admits, “I lost my head, and I became more dangerous than any wild animal.”

  Though he knew that “to murder a human being in a civilized country isn’t easy,” he also knew that he could do it. After all, he was a man who had gone through tough times in his life, a pistol always weighing down his back pocket, and most important, he was an intelligence operative; at his disposal was a “group of desperate people.”

  What followed next is not quite clear. Dmitri calls his actions regarding Isolde a misdemean
or (prostupok). But, in his own judgment, it feels much more serious than that: “In Switzerland I was a nobody, a man with a false passport in his pocket, and my misdeed passed unnoticed and did no harm to [my Motherland]. Nothing of what I had done harmed the Soviet Foreign Intelligence either. But there’s no justification [for my deed] before my own conscience—at whose court, I admit ‘I’m guilty!’ ”9

  Once he decided to do away with Isolde, he spent a week devising a plan, thinking it through, and preparing its execution. Finally he felt ready to make the first move. First he thought of sending her a note with an invitation to see him. But he discarded the idea right away: a note would leave some trace of his actions. Instead, he followed Isolde to downtown Locarno, pretended to run into her by chance, and feigned surprise, even joy, at seeing her. He explained that he was in town finishing up some business before leaving Europe for good. To be more specific, he said he had decided to settle in Rio de Janeiro (indeed, one of his several passports was Brazilian). He also wanted to caution his former wife that she was in danger: Hitler’s spies in Switzerland were hunting for her. Some precautionary measures had to be taken at once to assure her future safety.

  To Isolde’s question about the essence of the threat, Dmitri replied that he didn’t know specifics and was just acting as a go-between for a former colleague of Iolanta from her Prague days. The details of what exactly had to be done to keep Iolanta out of trouble were in the hands of that man. Dmitri had arranged a meeting with him in a small restaurant in the mountains near Grindelwald.

  No matter how thin his story looked, Dmitri achieved his intention: he scared Isolde. He knew well by now that she wouldn’t hesitate to risk her own life to protect her beloved. His calculations proved right. Highly alarmed, without questioning Dmitri’s farfetched story, Isolde immediately agreed to do whatever it took to keep Iolanta safe. His plan was to lure Isolde into the mountains and push her off a cliff.

  They agreed to meet later in the day, at 5:00 P.M., near a small bridge in the valley near Grindelwald. The previous day he had traveled to Interlaken to check out the terrain of the planned action beforehand. First, he took care of an alibi for himself. One of his Swiss contacts, a man called “Olaf,” lived in the nearby town of Murren. After “doing it,” Dmitri planned to go there by way of mountain trails.

  From Interlaken, he went to Grindelwald on foot. Once in the mountains, he came up with a detailed plan of how he would get rid of Isolde from his life forever. To keep himself out of prison, he had to stage her death as the accident of an inexperienced hiker. He would lead her into the mountains, to a place convenient for his task. Near Upper Glacier, between Grindelwald and Scheidegg, he would stop at a tall rock as if to light a strike-anywhere match for his pipe. He marked the rock with a piece of chalk, which he had had the good sense to take along.

  As soon as Isolde wound up next to the precipice, he would distract her by pointing to the top of the glacier and saying something like, “Look! There are people over there.” Once he had diverted her attention, he would push her down. Her body would fall about forty yards before hitting the rocks. It would be impossible to survive such a fall, and her body would hardly show any signs of foul play.

  After this was done, he would hit the trail leading to Kleine Scheidegg, a high mountain pass, and be on his way to Murren. To avoid leaving his own tracks, he thought of a creek he knew. He would take off his shoes, step into the creek, and wade downstream until he reached a larger trail to Murren. There he would step out of the creek, put his shoes back on, and rub the soles with a piece of camphor he had put in his pocket beforehand. After a while, he would stop and change his shoes for another pair that didn’t smell of camphor, which he had already planted in the hollow of a marked tree.

  It seemed he had thought of everything. Though he had chosen a trail that was hardly ever used, he had two provisional plans in case someone did show up and saw him. One plan involved luring Isolde with the help of “Olaf” to Holland, to a tiny desolate island in the northern part of the country, near Ijmuiden, a place he had visited when setting up the import-export company, GADA. The other plan was to trick Isolde into going with him to Venice, take her out to the open sea in a gondola, and drown her. Both ideas look more like wishful thinking than workable plans. Clearly, he was unable to think straight at the time. As he recalls, one thing was crystal clear for him at that moment: “It was I or she. Whether it took a day or a year didn’t matter. I was sure she would perish by my hands.”

  First, everything seemed to be going according to his initial plan. Once Isolde had agreed to come to Grindelwald, he arrived there earlier and, to avoid being seen by anyone, bypassed the town and positioned himself in the bushes near the small bridge in the valley where they were to meet.

  With Isolde to appear any minute, he thought about gulping a shot of cognac from the bottle he had brought along but decided against it. Now, as in his youth, when, experimenting with his will power, he had attempted a robbery, he asked himself the same rhetorical question: “Am I a louse or Napoléon?” (It looks like, twenty years down the road, no longer a raw youth but a mature man, he still had profoundly ambivalent feelings about himself.) And carefully, so he wouldn’t be heard, he broke the bottle, knocking it against a rock.

  Isolde arrived on time. Dmitri’s attire made her wary: he had told her the walk would be short, but he was dressed in full hiking gear, as if prepared for a long haul in the mountains (as she put it, “as if about to scale Mt. Everest”). He anticipated the question and told her that, after their business was done, he was heading to visit his friend who lived on the other side of the mountain. As they walked in the gathering darkness, still wary of Dmitri’s behavior, Isolde asked him why such secrecy was needed. Did he have to keep playing a scene out of a trashy adventure novel? Wouldn’t it be better to invite the man they were going to see in Grindelwald to some hotel room and talk to him there? They had almost reached the marked place on the trail, when Isolde began to suspect Dmitri of foul play. She asked him where exactly he was taking her.

  He made an effort to answer her calmly, without insisting on anything. An experienced operative, he knew that if the other party has any doubts, pressure is counterproductive. Isolde hesitated for a moment; her fingers trembling, she lit a cigarette, and they moved on in silence.

  But soon she stopped, stating that she would go no farther. “You tricked me,” she said. “Well, go back down then,” Dmitri said in con tempt, “and pass Iolanta into more reliable hands. March!” They stood facing each other for a long while, piercing each other with their gazes. Her face grew chalk pale. His legs trembling, Dmitri reached for his pocket and released the safety catch on his handgun.

  Isolde grabbed the edge of his jacket and tried to say something but she couldn’t, only managing to twist her brightly painted lips.

  Suddenly, she changed her mind and continued ascending the trail.

  Soon they reached the rock he had marked as the place for his deadly maneuver, and he asked her to stop for a smoke.

  While Dmitri’s account of the events that brought him and Isolde into the mountains is more or less plausible up to this point, his description of the following chain of events is less trustworthy and, at times, resembles the action in an adventure comic, full of cliffhanging and last-moment survival tricks. As he narrates it in his memoir, as soon as he turned away from Isolde to light a match, some huge bird took wing nearby and rushed close to him. He turned toward it for a moment, and Isolde made a quick step behind him and pushed him down. He “widely waved [his] hands and flew down the abyss, [his] face forward.” He tumbled over and smashed his face against a boulder. For a moment, his hands and legs spread, he found himself glued to the rock. Then he began “sliding down, first slowly, then faster and faster.” His leather jacket and his shirt slipped up and blocked his vision. He shouted as if it were his last breath of air and closed his eyes.

  But he didn’t plummet down the precipice. His leather jacket an
d his clothes hooked onto a little pine trunk sticking out from a crack in the rock. When he managed to free his face from his clothes, he saw that he was clutching the cliff. He managed to free his clothes from the trunk, examined the cracks above him, contemplating his way up, and then slowly began climbing.

  It took him a long while to climb about fifteen feet before reaching the rim. Stopping, catching his breath, wiping the sweat from his eyes, he finally pulled his body back onto the trail from which he had been pushed. As soon as he felt the ground under his legs, he collapsed, losing consciousness.

  When he regained it, he jumped to his feet and ran down the trail nonstop until he reached the forest. There he fell onto the grass and, reliving the moment of mortal danger he had just survived, vomited. After this he felt better. He removed his shirt and freshened up his body in the creek water. But the thought of Isolde made his fatigue disappear without a trace.

  He thought that by now Isolde must have left the town by train or some other means. He wanted to grab a taxi and get to Interlaken. Once there, he would contact “Olaf,” and they would work out a plan of action. They would pin her down in Locarno. She would have to go there because of Iolanta. And there, in Locarno, she would breathe her last.

  He reached Grindelwald, and as he was passing through an alley behind one of the local boardinghouses, he spotted Isolde in the first-floor window. This changed things for the better! He hid in the bushes and calculated that from where he sat he could finish her off with one gunshot. His pistol had a silencer, the alley was deserted, and it had grown quite dark, so he would be able to escape before the police arrived. But now he felt that merely killing her wouldn’t satisfy him. Before, he had just wanted to get rid of her once and for all, but now, before she dies, she must see her killer. He craved vengeance.