Stalin's Romeo Spy

by Emil Draitser

  Bystrolyotov’s African Trip (1935–1936)

  Of course, in his published work, duly censored by the KGB, there is no direct indication of the purpose of his second African trip. Moreover, to avoid disclosure of that clandestine intelligence operation and Bystrolyotov’s part in it, the journal editors resorted to a rather clumsy cover-up. They prefaced the publication of his notes with the statement that, although the author made the trip himself and the material is nonfictional (aimed, in the spirit of the time, to “expose the imperialist exploitation of the indigenous African people”), the story is written from the point of view of a fictional Dutch artist, “van Egmont,” who came to Africa in search of exotic subjects for his drawings (on the reasons for Dmitri’s choice of the name later).

  In time, the journal notes and the drawings became part of Dmitri’s novel, V staroi Afrike (In Old Africa). In it, the author gives his fictional protagonist a more compelling reason to travel to the most remote and unexplored regions of Africa. He makes him a reporter for the European department of the International News and Photo Information Agency, “exploited by the bourgeois press thirsty for vulgar sensations.” (In his unpublished work, Bystrolyotov reveals that this was his true cover during the African mission.)7

  There are numerous other indications in both the journal notes and the novel that the traveler is, in fact, Dmitri himself. In both texts, he gives his protagonist traits of his own personality and emotional makeup, as well as his most important biographical highlights: the “always absent” father, the demanding mother obsessed with social justice, a youth full of hardships and perilous experiences, including a near drowning in the sea. In addition, sloppy editorial work sporadically reveals glimpses of the writer’s personality, not his protagonist’s. For example, in one place the narration suddenly shifts from third person singular to first person plural. In another, the Dutch protagonist suggests calling a dog Polkan or Zhuchka, actually Russian names for a dog. In yet another, forgetting that he is a photo correspondent with no military background, the man warns one of his fellow travelers who behaves aggressively toward him: “I shoot without missing while standing, lying down, or hanging upside down. I never go anywhere without my weapon and open fire without aiming.”8

  Thanks to all these and other editorial oversights, along with many keenly observed and minutely described scenes of overcoming the hard ships of crossing the difficult African terrain, both the travel notes and the novel read like Bystrolyotov’s African travelogue.

  Of course, neither Soviet publication mentions the true reason for Bystrolyotov’s travel to the continent. But his unpublished work does. In both manuscripts, part of his memoirs titled “Tsepi i niti” (“Chains and Threads”) and his rejected screenplay “Generous Hearts,” he does spell out the purpose of his African trip (which may well be one of the reasons his screenplay was turned down).

  Thus, from bits and pieces of information scattered throughout the pages of his published and unpublished work, the following picture emerges.

  Some time toward the end of 1935 (at least this is the year marked on the back of the photographs and sketches taken during his trip), Dmitri left Europe for an extended trip to Africa. This time, unlike his previous involvements as a recruiter and handler of foreign agents, his mission was strictly one of reconnaissance and information gathering. He was charged with his first and most urgent task: to establish the credibility of the French promise, in the event hostilities broke out in Europe, to mobilize and transport to the continent a half million black mercenaries from the French and Belgian colonies in Africa, one hundred thousand in the first echelon and the rest in four others that followed. In one part of his writing, Bystrolyotov identifies the source of this promise in general terms as the “French military”; in another, it is more concrete—French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou. It appears that Barthou had made such a promise in the course of preliminary negotiations of what later became the Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance, signed later, after his death in October 1934.

  Since Soviet military specialists had their doubts about the feasibility of drafting and arming such a huge number of troops in Africa, Dmitri had to check on the ground the validity of the promise. In conjunction with this part of his assignment, he had to inspect the mountains in the center of the Sahara and gauge the moods of the local population, mostly Tuaregs, determining whether there was any danger that with the outbreak of war the locals could rise up against the French and thus impede troop mobilization. Since the sea paths were expected to be cut off by the German fleet, it was assumed that transportation of the projected African troops to Europe would be done overland.9

  The other part of Dmitri’s assignment was to visit the industrial region of Katanga in the Belgian Congo. His task in the area, characterized as one that “supplied the capitalist world with copper,” was to gauge the political situation in the area in terms of stability of the Belgian administration. Although the initial Comintern hope for the African revolution was placed on South Africa as the most developed and industrialized country on the continent, there are indications that later the Comintern’s attention turned toward possibilities of appealing to the most oppressed people in other areas south of the Sahara and encouraging them toward revolution. However, Dmitri’s orders stipulated that his mission was strictly exploratory. He was specifically cautioned that he was going to Katanga not for “propaganda but for observation.” Therefore, he should be careful not to “spill the beans [and to] abstain from any sharp words of criticism, and even more so, from any action, always keeping himself in the shadow, on the second plane.”10

  The third component of his assignment was more obscure: he was to “inspect the so-called white spots on the map of the Belgian Congo and determine what was hidden behind this colonialist term.”11

  And thus he set out on his six-month-long African journey. Riding in a jeep with a trailer, which, besides supplies of fuel and water, carried luggage and mail, and in the company of a driver, a guard, and three other passengers, he traveled along a north–south caravan route from French Algiers across the Sahara Desert, through the Ahaggar Mountains, a highland region in the central Sahara near the Tropic of Cancer, which was largely a rocky desert.12

  He moved farther south, through Tanezrouft, the hottest and most arid and desolate part of the Sahara, in his description, “a desert within a desert, that is, an absolute desert within a relative desert, a dead zone five hundred kilometers long, where during fifteen days on a caravan, you not only won’t come upon a well or a puddle but not even any grass. Life in Tanezrouft is totally impossible for a human or for a camel; to lose your direction and prolong your travel for even a few hours spells inevitable death. It’s a dead tsardom of merciless heat and fruitless stone.”

  Naturally, when, in the vicinity of Lake Chad, he came out of Tanezrouft, he felt ecstatic. He then crossed the Sahel Belt, a semiarid tropical savanna region, and eventually, moving southward, he arrived at the banks of the Ubangi River, one of the major tributaries of the Congo River. There, he and his travel companions boarded a small and dilapidated steamboat, which took them downstream to Leopoldville (now Kinshasa), the capital of the Belgian Congo (now Democratic Republic of the Congo).

  After resting in Leopoldville, he traveled in a small truck across the country to Stanleyville (now Kisangani). There, he spent some time preparing himself for a long journey through the Ituri region of Congo. He studied geographical and aerographic maps of the region, bought supplies, and hired a team of twenty-three porters and guards. Along with them, he received training in rifle shooting at the local shooting gallery. He also prepared for health-threatening eventualities. At the local hospital, he procured sufficient antidotes for sleeping sickness, a disease endemic to the region and transmitted by the tsetse fly. Finally, when he felt ready, Dmitri and his party traveled through the northeastern part of the country, the Ituri Province. They followed in the steps of Henry Morton Stanley, a Anglo-American journalist and
adventurer, who, hired by Belgian king Leopold II, had explored the Congo basin and, at the end of the nineteenth century, had searched for David Livingstone, the British explorer of central Africa. First, they traveled in pirogues along the Ituri River. Then, they went on foot, walking through both the fabled Ituri tropical rain forest and the savanna. It was a hard undertaking. Often, they walked in a cloud of mosquitoes and butterflies; it was hard to breathe, with the humidity at times reaching 98 percent. In this fashion, making stops in the forest and protecting themselves during the night by keeping bonfires ablaze, they crossed more than three hundred miles of the Ituri region.

  While it is hard to imagine that the Soviet foreign intelligence bosses would have given him such considerable means and time (nearly six months) for a personal adventure in the jungle, Dmitri hints at a possible reason for Soviet interest in the region: after World War I, oil was found in the swamps of the Ituri rain forest. In his unpublished writings, he discloses that he had to walk through the Ituri forest, west to east on a certain route, and collect information on conditions on the ground regarding what to expect and how to prepare once the area was opened for industrial oil extraction. Two foreign companies, one Belgian and one American, had expressed interest in stepping into the area shortly. Belgians had the advantage of already having a line of trading posts in the forest. An area close to Belgian trading post 201, where samples of oil had been found, was occupied by the Mbuti (then known as the Pygmies). Dmitri visited them and became acquainted with their king, Bubu.

  The Ituri expedition ended back in Stanleyville. Shortly afterward, Dmitri moved on. His next destination was the southern Congolese province of Katanga, the eastern part of which was a mining region, rich in precious metals and minerals, such as copper, cobalt, tin, radium, uranium, and diamonds. Although there is no direct disclosure of it in his writings, judging by his Katanga itinerary, Dmitri’s assignment was to collect as much data as possible on the industrial capabilities of this important source of strategic materials in this part of the world. Among other places, he visited copper ore mines and ore-dressing plants in the towns of Kolwesi and Jadotville (now Likasi), sulfur mines and a sulfur-purifying plant in Elisabethville (now Lu bumbashi), coal mines along the Lukuga River and in Luena, a magnetic ore-developing factory in Kasenga, uranium ore mines in Shinkolobwe, tin ore in Lubudi, and cobalt in Ruash. He noted the number of trains per day loaded with purified zinc, cadmium, wolfram, and tantalum being exported from the region.13

  To avoid attracting attention to himself by photographing the plants, which at the time was difficult to do inconspicuously, Dmitri resorted to the sketch-artist cover he had used back in his Geneva days when hunting for ROSSI. He also made notes about the factories. After hours of observation, calculating how many railroad cars of raw material came out of the factories during three shifts around the clock, he penciled his estimates of yearly production numbers in the margins of his sketches.14

  On the question of the Belgian administration’s stability in Congo, along the way, Dmitri collected information on labor strikes and unrest at the mines and plants run by the Belgian mining company Union Minière du Haut Katanga. According to his account, such disturbances had taken place sporadically in 1921, 1926, 1927, 1931, and 1932. In his published work, he also gives an eyewitness report about a clash between workers and the police at a railroad repair plant in Upper Katanga at the time of his visit in 1935. At the same time, he also registers the relative prosperity of former tribesmen once they found employment in the Belgian-run industries.15

  He reached a negative conclusion about the ability of French and Belgian African colonies to supply the European theater with a half-million-strong army in the event of war with Germany. Observing the indigenous way of life firsthand and making indirect inquiries along the way, he became totally convinced that Africa did not have such resources. He also consulted some published sources, which confirmed the decline of the local population at a staggering pace. Thus, he cites a series of articles by Marcel Sauvage titled “The Secrets of French Equatorial Africa” in the Paris newspaper L’Intransigeant. According to the French journalist, in 1911, the population of Congo was twelve million; ten years later, it went down to seven and a half million; and in another ten years, to only about two and a half million. That is, over twenty years, 80 percent of the population had disappeared. This depopulation had taken place due to indiscriminate violence against indigenous people, starvation, birthrate decline, and rampant disease, especially tuberculosis and sleeping sickness.16

  While chatting with European officials based in Congo, Dmitri learned about the mechanics of a mobilization campaign in Africa. It was accomplished primarily by use of force. After nightfall, a village was surrounded by troops. After recruits were selected, during the day they were driven under convoy to an induction center. Sometimes, they had to be bound by rope and dragged there. At that point, the conscripts, Congolese tribesmen, considered themselves as good as dead. Their relatives even held funeral services for them, and for good reason: traumatized by fear, the drastic change of circumstances in their lives, and poor treatment, the recruits died in scores. One third of them had to be written off because of mass tuberculosis. Eventually, out of twenty recruits, only one would become a full-fledged soldier. Only a few made it to the end of their service stint. So, there was no way that the administration could possibly recruit a half million African troops. Dmitri concluded that the human resources for such an endeavor were lacking in all of Africa.17

  Boarding a ship in the port of Matadi, Dmitri returned to Europe. He was glad to leave the continent, not so much because physical exhaustion resulting from the trying conditions of his African trip had taken a toll on him, but because, all too often, he also suffered psychologically. What tortured him most was having to contain his moral indignation when he witnessed inhuman treatment of the native population at the hands of the colonizers. Once, a group of white men aboard the boat moving along the Congo River had entertained themselves by tricking an unarmed black tribesman into jumping into the muddy water of the river to wrestle a giant crocodile. In the Ituri rain forest, a team of Africans rolled huge tree trunks as a foreman prodded them by inflicting pain on their bodies with sticks. On yet another occasion, an indigenous pregnant woman was beaten for working too slowly in the fields.

  On several occasions, Dmitri was unable to control himself when he witnessed such scenes. Although he had clearly been instructed by his superiors to keep a low profile and not to interfere with any actions around him, so as to avoid blowing his cover as an impartial reporter on the African continent, he could not help protesting cruelty and correcting injustices. The urge to correct social injustice instilled by his mother in his early years became an uncontrollable reflex. At one point, he even wondered about his inability to restrain himself: “Why am I suffering?” he asked himself. “I’m not a colonizer.” Once, he found himself shouting at an abuser, “Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare!”—the very same words his mother had shouted to an officer who was mistreating his coachman back in the summer of 1915.

  The African trip produced many other indelible impressions on Dmitri that would later find their way into his book about Africa. In it, his descriptions of the inhuman treatment of indigenous people rival those of Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness, the action of which takes place in Congo as well. Dmitri’s book also records the author’s admiration and reverence for the culture of indigenous Africans—the Tuaregs and the Pygmies.

  Apparently, shortly after his African trip, Dmitri made another trip, about which his KGB file is equally silent. His Berlin spymaster, Boris Bazarov, called on him to come to the United States, where he had been appointed head of the illegal rezidentura. The move was unexpected because, under unclear circumstances, the body of Bazarov’s predecessor, Valentin Markin, had been found on a New York street. It was assumed at the Center that he had fallen victim to some gangster infighting. Bazarov’s group had been successful in recruiting
agents who had immediate access to State Department employees as well as a “source” with ties to those surrounding President Roosevelt who obtained “unique information about the American ruling circles in the period of ripening military conflict in Europe.”18

  Judging by brief references in his memoirs, Dmitri spent some time in New York. According to Milashov, Dmitri’s task was mostly technological intelligence and American know-how. He also gave a helping hand to Bazarov in weaving a new spy network in the United States. According to Hede Massing’s memoirs, about that time, Dmitri’s frequent assistant, Joseph Leppin, was in New York. However, there is no mention of Bystrolyotov (or anyone who resembled him) in her memoirs.19

  His last operation that has archival support is one he took part in sometime in midsummer 1936, after his travels outside the European continent. For this operation, he again had to brush up on his sex appeal. Now he had to put his male charms to use not for cultivation and eventual recruitment of a new agent but as bait for someone who was interested not so much in money as in love and thrills.