Stalin's Romeo Spy

by Emil Draitser

  A knife was his weapon of choice. That was the only way he could express all the feelings boiling inside him at the moment. He decided exactly how he would finish Isolde off: it was important to him that she see his face before she died. With his left hand, he would grab her hair, lift her head, and before she was able to scream, stab her, keeping the blade horizontal, making it easier to drive between her ribs. He would keep her face in front of his until she took her last breath. The last thing she must see in her life was his triumphant face. Then he would make a swift escape to Murren.

  He waited in the bushes for a long time to be sure that Isolde was sound asleep. Before climbing through the window, he removed his shoes and rubbed his hands and the soles of his socks with camphor. Once in her room, he rushed to the bed and grabbed Isolde by the hair. But at the last moment before stabbing her, he realized she was dead!

  Three letters were on the nightstand. Besides one with money for the boardinghouse owner and another one addressed to some attorney in Edinburgh, Scotland, one was addressed to “Countess Rona Vivaldi” at the Villa Bella Vista in Locarno. Also on the nightstand was a cigarette case, the same one that had played such a sinister part in his life, the one inscribed Am loving you only and all my other loves are but nothing. He took the cigarette case and the letter and left, feeling that with Isolde gone, “she needed neither [his] belated admiration nor [his] earthly love.”

  He spent the rest of the night walking to Interlaken. On the way, he stopped at a mountain creek, kissed the cigarette case, and dropped it into the water. He opened Isolde’s farewell letter to Iolanta, which read:

  I’m leaving you forever: you’re too weak for the burden of my love, and I’m too strong to love contemplatively and incorporeally. I always wanted my love to be a daring challenge, a delight of movement and struggle, intoxication with the upsurge to the Unreachable, a victorious jump into an Abyss. But movement of the storm is impossible without broken tree branches and trampled down flowers, and if I can topple over a strong one, I shouldn’t harm a weak one. You need tranquility, and I extend it to you as my last gift. I’m proudly throwing poison into my wine, and raise this chalice high as a torch: for the last time, let it light up, explain, and extol my love to you and me.10

  Reading the letter made him feel as if Isolde was “whipping him with a lash.” He felt that the letter was her “triumphant cry of victory, the last thunder of the hymn of selfless love and human freedom, which are stronger than death.” He closed his eyes and clearly saw death “as one that flouted the bounds of narrow earthly existence and raised up the deceased to the expanse of immortality.”

  And he dropped the letter into the water as well. When he reached Interlaken, it was already early morning. He wanted to go straight to the railroad station but felt exhausted. He came to a big hotel and took a room there. He went up to his corridor, but to avoid a janitor on that floor who could see his face, he stepped into a restroom. There, he fell to his knees and cried; “first soundless,” his cry turned into “dull sobbing that resembled the howling of a dog.”

  Leaving aside the question of a slightly built young woman’s easily tumbling down a six-feet tall muscular man, a former sailor (when we met, already an old man in his early seventies and a Gulag survivor, Bystrolyotov still had a formidable physical presence), other actions that took place after that moment also lack verisimilitude. Thus, since he was in full mountaineer gear (let us recall Isolde’s comment that he was dressed as if he was “about to scale Mt. Everest”), he should have had on him, if not a sleeping bag, at least a backpack. That would make him finding himself “stuck” with his back to the surface of the cliffnext to impossible. His numbers don’t add up either: falling face forward, then tumbling over his head, he already covered at least double his height. Thus, him climbing back some sixteen feet total makes his statement of “sliding down, first slowly, then faster and faster” hard to accept at face value.

  What follows after he survived his fall also raises questions. Why would Isolde stay in town after pushing a man to his death? Wouldn’t she want to clear the vicinity as soon as possible? Not only the timing of her suicide but its very motive does not sound convincing. In the note, she says that she has to “go away” because she cannot accept loving Iolanta only “contemplatively and incorporeally.” But Iolanta had arranged to stay with her under the same roof, and, apparently, her new husband had no inkling about the sexual nature of their relationship. From Dmitri’s own account, we also know that Isolde was sure Iolanta’s new marriage was the end of Dmitri in her life. It begs the question then: since Isolde had just gotten rid of the only challenger for Iolanta’s heart, why would she commit suicide now, when Iolanta had again become hers alone? Did she realize that in a world that considered homosexual relationships illegitimate and scornful, her beloved would never be exclusively hers? She would have to steal moments of happiness and share her with men.

  A stylistic analysis of Dmitri’s writing leads us to believe that the suicide note was written by no one but Dmitri himself. As elsewhere, in telling the story of Isolde’s death, his writing style betrays his method. When he describes something he has experienced firsthand, his style is realistic and precise. When, for whatever reason, he wants to avoid telling the truth and substitutes it with fantasy, his writing is at its worst. The wording of Isolde’s suicide note is not only overly melodramatic—unbearably stilted, at times even saccharine—but also devoid of psychological truth. In fact, if we pick up Dmitri’s story after his disposal of the suicide note, his writing again regains stylistic simplicity and psychological verisimilitude. There is no doubt that his grief was genuine. Although he sought Isolde’s death for, as he admits, being the woman who “broke” him, it is also true that she was the only woman he truly loved.

  It looks as though, in reality, Isolde died not by her own hand and that Dmitri is responsible. Otherwise, why would he say that he feels guilty “before my own conscience”? He also hints at his wrongful actions when he reassures the reader that whatever he did to Isolde had not negatively affected the safety of the Soviet intelligence network in Switzerland. (Citing Bystrolyotov’s statement in his memoirs that his hands are in blood, Dmitri’s stepgrandson, who has nothing but admiration for him, also believes that Isolde’s suicide is invented, that he killed her.) Did he push her down the cliff, as he had planned to begin with, or did he dispose of her by other means, including the help of his cohorts? He acknowledges being dangerous in having at his disposal a group of “desperate men.” So, was someone like “Olaf” involved in Isolde’s death? In the absence of any tangible evidence, Isolde Cameron’s death will remain another unsolved mystery of Dmitri’s life.11

  The only part of his story that rings true regardless of the scenario that played out in real life are his feelings toward Isolde at the time of her death. As she came into his emotional life evoking the image of Madonna, the perfect mother, so she remained at the time of her demise. Looking at her dead face, still “dear and beloved,” in his description, it resembles that of his mother—“audacious, proud, and willful.” Even the handwriting, “confident and bold,” on Isolde’s farewell letter, which he most likely invented, gives the impression of having belonged to his mother.

  There was one more reason, besides the personal one, why Dmitri felt compelled to remove Isolde from the premises of Colonel “Vivaldi”: her presence there jeopardized the spy operation, for which the whole bogus marriage had been undertaken in the first place. And now it was time for direct action.

  TWELVE

  The Last Operations: Africa and Other Gray Areas

  Little children! For not a thing in the world,

  Do you ever go to Africa, to Africa for a stroll.

  —KORNEY CHUKOVSKY, RUSSIAN POET

  When “Colonel Vivaldi” was away on business, “Rona” always knew where he was going and how long he would be absent. She managed to make impressions of the keys to his safe successfully and learned how to open it. Most se
cret intelligence gathering was done by the big Service de renseignements (SR) posts in Lille, Metz, Marseilles, and Belfort. Each of these posts was responsible for operations within a given geographical area. Since the Belfort post was responsible for Rhineland and Switzerland, Dmitri assumed that “Vivaldi” frequently traveled there to deposit his next batch of information as he collected it through his network of agents. After picking up the documents and reports from them, before delivering it to the SR Belfort post, he would bring it all home and take a few days’ breather. This short sojourn at his villa was the time when Dmitri acted. At night before going to bed, “Rona” left one of the windows open facing the garden, and Dmitri pulled himself into the room next to the study, opened the safe, and photographed the new material.1

  To minimize his presence in Locarno, Dmitri avoided staying in local hotels. At nightfall, he came by car from Zurich, a three-hour drive. From time to time, he could rely on his former wife as a lookout while he photographed in the study. Understandably, she was often unavailable, and Dmitri would lock himself inside the room, leaving the window open in case he had to escape. He examined the area around the house to see whether he could shoot back if the colonel pursued him through the porch (Dmitri carried a pistol with a silencer for that eventuality).

  Once in the study, to avoid leaving fingerprints, he put on thin surgeon’s gloves, opened the safe, and spread the material of interest on the colonel’s desk to photograph it. To shut out the flash of light from his camera and muffle the sound of the shutter clicking, which, in the silence of the night, could be heard in the bedroom (Iolanta had once checked it out and concurred), Dmitri placed a thick piece of cloth over the camera with a cutout through which to focus the lens.

  Although he ran the risk of being detected every time, after a considerable stretch of successful sessions, he felt that the operation of penetrating French intelligence data could go on for a long time.

  But soon things changed. There was an ever-increasing threat of an outbreak of war in Europe. The rearmament of the Wehrmacht and German intelligence activity abroad rose dramatically. This impelled French intelligence headquarters to pressure “Vivaldi” to speed up delivery of the sensitive data he collected from his agents. Now he had to skip Locarno and bring his take directly to the SR Belfort post.

  That meant the end of Soviet intelligence efforts to intercept the French data. After just two of these direct deposits, the Center pressured Dmitri to do something about it. They told both their operatives, Dmitri and Iolanta, that they were “eating their bread free of charge,” as the Russian proverb goes, and even accused them of “extreme absentmindedness and negligence.” The Center demanded that they get the data at any cost. Dmitri was ordered to go to any risk to copy the contents of the safe in the “Vivaldi” study.

  On Dmitri’s cue, “Rona” made a fuss in front of her husband: after all, she had the right to have her husband home for at least one night. Yielding to her pressure, the colonel altered his route reports to cover up a lull along the way to the post so he could spend a night at home.

  In the middle of one of these stolen nights, when Dmitri had already made his way into the study, on some pretext, Iolanta got out of bed and joined him to stand guard until he had finished photographing.

  They heard quick steps beyond the door, but it was too late to escape. The door flung open. Seeing his wife and a man with a pistol aimed at him, a camera on his desk, and the vault of his safe opened, the colonel’s first thought was that his wife was being held hostage.

  But “Rona” asked Dmitri to let “Vivaldi” go. She didn’t want him to be hurt. Since “Vivaldi” also drew his pistol, Dmitri told him it would be useless to shoot, for he was already compromised. Dmitri spoke French trying to imitate a British accent. (Even under such dire circumstances, he attempted to mislead the man by throwing out a “false flag,” pretending that he was working not for Soviet, but for British, intelligence.)

  He offered “Vivaldi” a calm finish to the game—to step forward and lie face down on the carpet.

  There are at least two versions of what happened next. In his memoirs, Dmitri writes that “Vivaldi” admitted defeat. He couldn’t shoot both his wife and the intruder; that would make it clear that he had been duped by foreign intelligence. He told “Rona” that he would stage a car accident in the mountains and asked her to keep her mouth shut about what had happened that night. And the next day he did exactly that—he drove off a cliff, getting intoxicated beforehand and placing an open bottle of cognac next to him.

  However, Bystrolyotov’s stepgrandson, Sergei Milashov, who had served as his sounding board over several years of Dmitri’s writing of his memoirs, recalls that a different ending was conveyed to him. Bystrolyotov expressed his respect for the way the Frenchman had acted after his discovery that he had been fooled. His reputation irrevocably ruined, the proud officer dealt with his dishonor as a soldier—decisively. He stepped into the adjacent room and shot himself. When Dmitri and Iolanta rushed to him, they found him dead.2

  (Since Bystrolyotov usually chooses an alias for real people in his memoir based not on a whim but with some hidden meaning, it may be suggested that one reason for him to nickname the French intelligence officer “Vivaldi,” besides his stated reason of avoiding the disclosure of real names and moving the action from the allied country of France to the World War II enemy Italy, was a biographical reference. At the time when Bystrolyotov wrote his memoirs, in the early 1960s, back in the Soviet Union, he drew on his early knowledge of the life of composer Antonio Vivaldi, which for a long time had not been explored historically. In his 1949 review of Marc Pincherle’s book, Antonio Vivaldi et la musique instrumentale, music critic Paul Henry Lang wrote, “This curious artist arrived and departed wrapped in mystery; we do not know the exact dates of his birth and death and during his life he had no chroniclers.”)3

  After the death of “Vivaldi,” “Rona” made no attempts to escape: it would be dangerous for her to leave the town without alerting the Locarno police. The ensuing investigation found no evidence of foul play on her part. She attended the funeral wearing a widow’s black voile.

  Soon, Iolanta received permission from the NKVD bosses to take a vacation. She decided to go to the south of France. Before leaving Switzerland, she and Dmitri met in a café near the Zurich station. Waiting for their trains to arrive, his to Paris and hers to Nice, they talked. He told her that he felt badly about the part she had to play in the plot against the Frenchman. He justified it with the indisputable fact that, after all, spy work consists of “lousy episodes like that.”

  She told him that she was totally disgusted with such work and that she was leaving him. After her vacation, she planned to go to Mos cow to live and to do some “little accountant’s job.” She added that she was tired of living altogether.

  In her view, the times they lived in were not for her but for people like him, adding, “I repeat what I told you some time ago. You’re a murderer.”

  After a long silence, he asked her whose life he had taken. “You killed me, ‘Vivaldi,’ and Isolde,” she replied. “You pushed us against the wall. Isolde didn’t have a choice. You killed her, you . . .” (here, again, it seems that Dmitri is alluding to Isolde’s suicide).

  “I hate you,” Iolanta added. “For Isolde. For everyone. I’m going to Russia to die. I want to die, do you understand? To die!”

  They parted badly. He realized it was his fault that he had lost Iolanta. He had no one to blame for that: he himself had pushed her away and tore apart all the ties that bound them together, seemingly forever, just because he needed to please “his own evil god.” The context makes it unequivocally clear that he meant the evil god he served, the evil god of Soviet foreign intelligence.

  But Dmitri was destined to remain firmly in the hands of his “evil god” for a long time still. And that god pushed him in a totally new direction. In their book, Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World, except for the Comint
ern’s unsuccessful attempts to turn the South African Communist Party into an instrument for stirring revolution in the country, Andrew and Mitrokhin do not mention any Soviet foreign intelligence activities on the African continent in the 1930s. However, at least one Soviet operative, Dmitri Bystrolyotov, went to Africa on a spy mission at that time.4

  This omission in Mitrokhin Archive II is understandable. When Vasili Mitrokhin looked into Bystrolyotov’s file, documents related to his African trip, together with many others, had been destroyed following his arrest in 1938. That is why, in 1990, when Bystrolyotov’s name as an outstanding Soviet spy was made public in a three-part Pravda article, its author, V. Snegirev, who had been given access to the Lubyanka files, dismissed his African adventures as too exotic to believe.5 However, after Sergei Milashov, Bystrolyotov’s stepgrandson, contacted the journalist with overwhelming evidence from his private archive—manuscripts of Bystrolyotov’s memoirs, a series of African notes published in 1963 in the journal Azia i Afrika segodnia (Asia and Africa Today), as well as his numerous Africa-related photographs and ink sketches—when preparing his newspaper publication for inclusion in a book, Snegirev removed the dismissive passage. Since then, all official (and unofficial) accounts of Bystrolyotov’s life include his African experience. Moreover, they commonly acknowledge that he made not one but two trips to the continent, a fact he himself had underscored when we met.6

  According to both Milashov and Dmitri’s former Gulag inmates, he made his first trip to Africa to escape from the imminent danger of arrest in Germany after his agent “Greta” was captured by the Gestapo. No details of that mishap are to be found anywhere either in Bystrolyotov’s writings or the KGB files. However, when Soviet intelligence selected an operative to carry out the physically challenging African assignment, besides his stamina and strength as a seasoned sailor in the past, and his ability to take on the unforgiving impact of the continent’s harsh climatic and terrain conditions, Dmitri was chosen because he was already familiar with the territory, a fact disclosed in his “Generous Hearts.” During that first trip, fleeing imminent arrest by the Gestapo, he had been able to penetrate the milieu of the Tuaregs, the seminomadic inhabitants of the Sahara region. He earned their trust and befriended the chief of one of the tribes, with whom he lived for a few months. His minute descriptions of the everyday life and customs of these indigenous people, whom he admired for their dignity and wholesomeness, together with several surviving gouache sketches of them, leave no doubt about the veracity of his adventure.