Stalin's Romeo Spy

by Emil Draitser

  But, when he told her how he had made a clean break with his German agent, Dorothea Müller, by staging his own death and how Doris had nearly died of grief, Iolanta reacted with sympathy for the deceived woman. Writing about that episode, Dmitri admits that Iolanta’s reaction made him blush in shame. She told him that although his revolutionary zeal allegedly justified cruelty, he would pay a dear price for his actions in the long run. She even went so far as to foretell his future: a time would come when he would discover that the “wonderful garden” he had been heading for by “swimming across a stormy river, risking his own life, and drowning those who happen to be in his way” had existed only in his imagination.9

  When Dmitri tried to defend himself, citing Don Quixote as an example of a hero, perhaps a comic hero, but still a hero, she replied that, unlike Don Quixote, he didn’t deserve sympathy. “You’re baser than him,” she said. “He attacked only windmills. And you are more contemptible, for he was Sancho Panza’s master, and you are his obedient servant.” Describing this scene, Dmitri admits that although his inner voice told him she was right, he replied, “You are wrong, and my future will show you.”10

  In addition to “sources” he had to keep in check, sometimes by threat of blackmail, on at least two occasions he found himself in unpredictable moral entanglements involving ordinary human nature that refused to conform to the highly controlled conditions of spy work. After his successful completion of the “Monaldi” entrapment, in which “Greta” was not revealed as complicit, when she asked Dmitri what she should do next, he suggested that she stay with the man who genuinely loved her. “Greta” burst into tears: “You’ve used me, and now you’re dumping me like a piece of rag. Shame! Not on me, on you!”11

  It was only natural for a young and gentle woman to fall for her handsome recruiter and want to be with him. After all, although he had no intimate designs on her for himself, when he recruited her, he could hardly be totally unaware that the young lady was greatly taken with his male charms.

  Another uninvited romantic entanglement involved his assistant Erica Weinstein, whose marriage to Leppin, as was indicated earlier, was most likely just a cover. Dmitri writes about an episode concerning Mally (his immediate supervisor in a number of operations), in whom, quite clearly, he saw a father figure. Mally admonished him for allowing personal feelings to develop between him and a member of his operative group.

  “There must be no amorous feelings of any kind in an intelligence group,” Mally said. “Think this way: if two female operatives fall in love with their male comrade-in-arms, right away a rivalry starts, then jealousy and discord. There will no longer be unity in the group! A crack forms, and sooner or later, we will all be exposed and perish. Or two men fall in love with the same woman. That’s even worse. Exposure follows even faster.”12

  (As is now known, Mally spoke from experience. He had himself fallen in love with one of the young female agents recruited by Soviet foreign intelligence. His feelings weren’t reciprocated, which drove him to excessive drinking. In order to keep him in check, the Center forced him to marry a woman he couldn’t stand but who kept him under control.)13

  Quite in the spirit of the revolutionary zeal of the 1920s in the Soviet Union, Mally warned Dmitri: “Chase away philistine love from your group! We’re not men and women, we’re fighters . . . You have no right to fall in love with one of your subordinates . . . Personal feelings . . . invite harm.”14

  Besides unwittingly hurting bystanders, Dmitri’s spy work often inflicted pain on his ego as well. Though the Communist ideology he had embraced in his youth called for subjugation of the individual for the sake of the higher cause, he resented the disregard of his personal feelings when it came to carrying out a spy operation. He was treated as a puppet in the hands of his superiors. When his affair with Marie-Eliane came to an end on his bosses’ orders, he was devastated. He had to suppress genuine feelings he developed for her and felt deep remorse for breaking the young woman’s heart. But a few years later, when he was in Berlin, he received an order to resume the relationship. Though he felt terrible about showing his face to her again after what had happened, he blindly followed the orders and approached her. To his relief, she didn’t believe a word of his pleadings. (Several years later, Marie-Eliane married, had children, and died at the ripe age of 103. Her misdeed was never discovered.)15

  What Frederick Hitz says about Marine Corps Sergeant Clayton J. Lonetree, an American who was sexually exploited for espionage purposes during the Cold War, could equally be applied to Bystrolyotov’s sexual exploitation: “He followed orders with tenacity and complete obedience . . . The loneliness and emptiness of his upbringing had left him with a low sense of self-worth and a profound feeling of insecurity. Despite his harsh life experiences he appears to have been quite naive and gullible.”16

  Then, there was also the problem of sheer fatigue, both mental and physical. Pretending to be someone else on a daily basis began taking its toll on Dmitri. With so many personalities to juggle, often in the course of a single day, he became downright tired. He often lost his sense of self:

  A Soviet intelligence operative has to change everything in himself, to root out everything: his habits, his tastes, his way of thinking, all but one thing—devotion and love for the Motherland. Psychologically, it’s hard to take. It is not the usual actor’s split personality, . . . You can master complex intelligence technique, you can get used to constant danger, but it’s impossible to get used to your own violence toward yourself.17

  For months he had to force himself to think in a foreign language, an exhausting task. Once when he was operating in England, one of the young ladies with whom he had spent a night mentioned casually that she had heard him murmuring something in his sleep. Naturally, this caused him great alarm. He made his comrades-in-arms listen to him after he inhaled anesthetic ether. He was relieved to learn that he did his muttering in English. (Of course, he was relieved only partially: there was no guarantee that he would mutter in the same language in regular, not drug-induced, sleep.)

  Another episode shows the mental stress and the strain on him of constantly having to be on guard. In the summer of 1934, after four years of intensive underground work in the West, he was given a short vacation to visit his mother in Anapa. At that time, for one of his operations, he was undercover as a prominent Brazilian merchant. When his mother complained about the hot weather in Crimea that summer, he suddenly cried out, “That’s what you call hot? Ah, Mama! If you were to live in my homeland of Brazil, you would know what truly hot weather is all about!” Only when he saw how perplexed and frightened his mother became on hearing this remark did he come to his senses and apologize for his “bad joke.”18

  “A soldier can retreat to the rear, but an intelligence officer doesn’t have this opportunity,” he observes in “Generous Hearts.” Having been a victim of his own delusion about the romantic nature of the spy profession, he warns readers of his memoirs not to fall into that trap themselves. As he wrote about his life, he was fully aware of the deceptive image of life as a spy created by popular culture—the image of a man of leisure and material abundance who carries out his assignments as if they were a game. Irked by the stark contrast between this idealistic image and the reality he knew too well, he directly addresses his readers: “Awareness of eternal danger poisons all of the quietest, most pleasant moments of an intelligence operative’s life. Dear readers! Don’t ever envy an intelligence officer when, in the morning, he puts on a silk robe, at noon sits down to a well-served table, and at night heads for an expensive restaurant with a beautiful woman on his arm. Remember: in the back pocket of his trousers he keeps his Browning, so that he can shoot himself in time.”19

  Once he was close to doing just that. Staying in a small hotel in Paris, where he arrived after his trip to the Balkans, he felt especially tense: there were some indications that French counterintelligence may have picked up his trail. He carried an important document, which he
protected day and night. High-strung and alert to any change in the surroundings, he kept the door of his hotel room locked at all times. And he watched the street very closely through his window. Suddenly, a police car packed with policemen came tearing along right in front of the hotel. A police officer jumped out of the car and rushed to the hotel entrance. Dmitri panicked as he heard the hurried tramping of the officer’s feet up the stairs. What should he do with the document? Throwing it into the toilet bowl wouldn’t do. If counterintelligence suspected that evidence was disposed of in this way, they would immediately block the building’s sewage system. There seemed only one way to get rid of the document—tear it up and swallow the pieces. But he ran out of time. The police officer was already knocking on his door. Dmitri froze. A key jangled in the lock, and the officer walked in carrying a bundle under his arm. He asked to be excused for the intrusion and introduced himself as the hotel owner’s son. His mother had asked him to change the linens in this guestroom, but he hadn’t managed to do it the night before. Relating this episode to a fellow Gulag prisoner years later, Dmitri laughed at himself, but at the time, it was hardly amusing.20

  During our meeting, Bystrolyotov told me about another incident when, out of the blue, he found himself on the brink of disaster:

  “I was posing as a Hungarian count and standing at the Aachen railroad station next to a German I had befriended. He happened to be the SS chief of the Ruhr region, and we were at the station to meet his wife arriving from Berlin. Everything’s going fine. It’s a sunny day. I’m in excellent mood, sure of myself. One after the other, the trains come in and stop for border control. The SS guards go in and out of the coaches checking the passengers’ documents. And then, five minutes before the express train from Berlin is due, a train marked “Paris–Negoreloe” comes in. Back then, Negoreloe was a Russian border town; all trains coming from the west stopped there, and passengers going farther east switched into trains fit for Russian tracks. I feel uneasy. I distract the SS man with small talk. But out of the corner of my eye, I see a window on the train open and a man’s face, unmistakably Russian and crude, pop out and look around.

  “ ‘Hey, Mitka!’ the man shouts. He’s calling me, Dmitri!

  “I don’t turn my head. Not a muscle moves on my face.

  “ ‘Mitka, damn it!’ The man persists in Russian. ‘Come on over! The train’s leaving in a few minutes!’

  “The SS chief says to me: ‘Count, I think that man is calling you.’

  “Without turning my head, I reply:

  “ ‘Herr Oberst, judge for yourself. Could an acquaintance of mine possibly have such a face?’

  “Although the train took off in five minutes, it felt like ages,” my host laughed. “But I got through it. Of course, I recognized the man on the train. He was a Soviet diplomatic courier I had known back in my Moscow days. He didn’t know about my secret work.”

  The constant stress of his lifestyle revealed the draining nature of spying: he compares the exhaustion of an intelligence operative with that of a long-distance truck driver. In time, a wrong move was inevitable. He may well have had in mind his own mistake, which he calls “sloppiness in his work” in the letter asking permission to return to Russia: around that time, he lost one of his numerous passports. Oleg Tsarev gives the following account of the circumstances surrounding the loss: Aboard a train heading for Paris, Dmitri gave his passport to the train conductor so that he could affix an entry stamp. The passport was presumably a false Austrian passport Series 500 issued to “Joseph Schwerma,” one of Dmitri’s frequently used aliases. As was customary at the time, Bystrolyotov asked the conductor to send his passport to the Paris hotel he would be staying in. For reasons that are not quite clear, the conductor sent it not to the hotel but to the Austrian Consulate in Paris. Since Bystrolyotov did not go to claim it from the consulate, the consulate authorities became suspicious and forwarded the passport to Vienna for inspection. When the Center learned about this, it immediately issued an order warning its network to stop using all Austrian passports Series 500. This act significantly impaired the illegal crossings of the European borders by several Soviet operatives.21

  (During my interview with him in July 2003, Sergei Milashov dismissed Tsarev’s scenario for the simple reason that the passport in the name of “Joseph Schwerma” wasn’t produced in Lubyanka; it was a genuine one, bought for Bystrolyotov on the black market at the beginning of his underground work. Moreover, none of Bystrolyotov’s passports abroad were false; all were either purchased on the black market or obtained legally, as in the case of his passport in the name of Lord Grenville. Milashov admitted that Bystrolyotov did lose one of his passports; it just slipped out of his pocket during a visit to Vienna. Whatever the circumstances of the passport loss, they were highly uncharacteristic of the master intelligence operative known for taking extra care with every move.)22

  Dmitri’s stress increased after Iolanta left him. A new onslaught of loneliness descended on him. He felt even more isolated than before. The rules of the spy game forbade socializing with members of the spy community. Their meetings had to be brief and related only to the business at hand. To protect the whole network, all other contacts were reduced to a strict minimum. Besides the normal human need for companionship, this lifestyle left Dmitri in the dark about current political developments in his homeland. An illegal operative received his orders specifying his target and his task, but he was never informed about the big picture; he was unable to feel the daily pulse of his home country. While other “illegals” received letters from their friends in Russia through official channels, at least until 1936, when this window of information was slammed shut, Dmitri did not have this luxury.23

  Since the summer of 1922, when he had returned to Russia for a few months in a fit of psychotic effort to save his Motherland from hunger epidemics, he had only fleeting impressions of the country’s affairs during brief visits when he was summoned to Lubyanka. Only once, back in 1929, when he was given permission for a short visit to his mother in Anapa, did he have some glimpses into Soviet reality at the time. On his way from the railroad station, passing through the large Cossack village of Nikolaevskaya, he found the whole settlement deserted, with only two watchmen on either side of the road running through it. With the collectivization campaign under way, most Cossacks had been deported to Siberia, and their houses stood there empty and boarded up. While staying with his mother, every morning Dmitri witnessed one and the same scene: the hungry—children, old people, and women—lined up on their knees at the window, waiting as his mother gave them each a slice of bread. She was not in need herself, because Dmitri regularly sent parcels and hard currency from abroad.24

  Since he had lived abroad his whole adult life, other than his mother, who sent occasional postcards, Dmitri had no one to keep him abreast of developments in Russia. He had to rely on information obtained in the Soviet press or the Western media, neither of which he fully trusted. This did not make his decision to return any easier.25

  But from what he did know he had more than enough cause for alarm. In the summer of 1936, the first tide of the new waves of repressions that later became known as the Great Terror hit the country. From August 19 to 24, 1936, the first of Stalin’s show trials of sixteen members of the so-called Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center took place in Moscow. The chief defendants, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, two of the most prominent former Party leaders, along with the rest of the group, were sentenced to death and executed on fabricated charges of having acted on Trotsky’s orders. The defendants were also accused of participating in a plot to murder the head of the Leningrad party organization, Sergei Kirov. Along with the other defendants, they were also implicated in a conspiracy to kill Stalin, Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Kaganovich, and other top Soviet leaders. In his closing arguments, the public procurator of the USSR, Andrei Vyshinsky, indicated that during interrogations of the accused, they had revealed the complicity of several other prominent Soviet lead
ers such as Bukharin, Rykov, Radek, and others, making it clear that more such trials would be initiated. Soon after, in late September 1936, Stalin replaced Genrikh Yagoda, whom he had proudly called “the sword of the Revolution,” with Nikolai Yezhov as People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs (NKVD). That could mean only one thing: a new approach to running the repressive mechanism of Soviet power.26

  Dmitri was not the only Soviet intelligence operative abroad who was at a loss about what to do with his life at this point. As Elsa Po retsky, the wife of another of the “Great Illegals,” Ignatii Poretsky (also known as “Ignace Reiss”), recalls in her memoirs, many of her and her husband’s friends and comrades-in-arms agonized over what to do next. They all suffered from the fear of emptiness, and they wavered at the tough choices they had to make. Quitting their spy work abroad also meant quitting their Party—the high cause to which they had pledged their allegiance and dedicated their lives.27

  In his memoirs, British spy Kim Philby also discusses the hard choices he had to make. He cites Graham Greene’s novel The Confidential Agent, in which the heroine asks the hero whether his leaders are any better than others. “No, of course, not,” he replies. “But I still prefer the people they lead—even if they lead them all wrong . . . You choose your side once and for all—of course, it may be the wrong side. Only history can tell that.”28