The Romanovs

by Robert K. Massie

  After the Second World War, a Tsarevich Alexis appeared in Ulm, Germany. This claimant had served as a major in the Red Air Force, biding his time, he said, to escape from the Soviet Union. Once in Ulm, he worked for many years as a plant technician, not revealing his true identity until his final years.

  Other tsareviches sprang up in North America. Mrs. Sandra Romanov of Vancouver, British Columbia, believes that her husband, Alexei Tammet-Romanov, who died of leukemia in 1977, was the son of the tsar. She is willing to have his body exhumed so that a DNA test can be performed.

  There was the robust Prince Alexis Romanov, who lived his last thirty years in Scottsdale, Arizona, and died in 1986. This entrepreneurial tsarevich operated a perfume and jewelry store and marketed a brand of vodka called Alexis. According to the label, it was “a special distillation to the specification of Prince Alexis Romanov, who is a direct descendant of Tsar Nicholas Romanov, Tsar of All the Russias.” Prince Alexis lived colorfully, dating movie stars, marrying five times, and earning a reputation as a polo player. Polo is a violent sport; he admitted that, over forty years, he had suffered eleven broken bones. His fifth and final wife fell in love with him when she first saw him on horseback. “He was the most elegant rider I have ever seen,” she said. “He looked like part of the horse. When he rode in the lot next to the Hilton, traffic would be tied up from people stopping to watch.”

  Recently, a son of another Tsarevich Alexis, who says that his father was assassinated in Chicago by the KGB, appeared in Washington, D.C. He says that he had secret meetings with Vice President Dan Quayle and Secretary of State James A. Baker III and that they told him, “We know who you are. Hold yourself in readiness.”

  In the early 1960s, two claimants appeared in the United States who managed to attract the attention of national newspapers and publishing houses. Ultimately, they met. One was an Alexis, the other an Anastasia.

  On April 1, 1958, the American ambassador in Bern, Switzerland, received an anonymous letter written in German, postmarked in Zurich. The author, describing himself as a senior official in a Soviet Bloc national intelligence service, offered his services to the U.S. government and asked that his letter be forwarded to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. For twenty-four months, this agent, using the code name Heckenschuetze (German for sharpshooter or sniper), passed more than two thousand microfilm documents to the Central Intelligence Agency. Unwilling to reveal his name or country of origin, this spy exposed a number of KGB moles planted inside Western governments and intelligence agencies; these agents included Stig Wennerström, George Blake, Gordon Lonsdale, Israel Beer, Heinz Felfe, and John Vassal.

  The mystery as to the agent’s identity seemed to have ended in December 1960, when a man speaking English telephoned the U.S. Consulate in West Berlin and announced that he was Heckenschuetze. Saying that his life was threatened, he declared that he was coming over. On Christmas Day, Heckenschuetze crossed into West Berlin. He turned out to be a husky, dark-haired man with blue eyes, a protruding lower lip, and a flourishing guardsman’s mustache. The defector presented his name and identity papers. He was, apparently, Lt. Col. Michael Goleniewski, a senior officer of Polish Army Military Intelligence. Later, Goleniewski elaborated: “From 1957 to 1960, I was the head of the Technical and Scientific Department of the Polish Secret Service. This function led me to foreign travel, which was very important for my clandestine activities. I had close ties with influential people in the KGB without ever having belonged to it.” An American intelligence official explained, “Goleniewski was in Polish Military Intelligence. But at the same time he was employed by the Russians to keep tabs on all Polish intelligence services and personalities in Poland and in the West.”

  Colonel Goleniewski was shocked and displeased by the reception party which greeted him. He had expected to be met by agents of the FBI. Through all his months of service, he had believed that he was dealing directly with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Although he knew that by law the CIA is responsible for espionage conducted by the United States outside American territory, Goleniewski had deliberately intended to bypass it in the belief that it had been infiltrated by Soviet agents. His mistake about the identity of his American handlers had been accepted and encouraged: all messages sent back to him had been signed “Hoover.” Nevertheless, the men waiting in Berlin to receive him were agents of the CIA. Colonel Goleniewski never met Hoover; the nearest he got was a tour of the FBI building in Washington, in which he was shown the Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde exhibits, a display on the crime laboratory and fingerprints, and a number of portraits and photographs of J. Edgar Hoover.

  On January 12, 1961, Goleniewski arrived in the United States from Germany on a U.S. military plane. Given an employment contract and a stipend from the U.S. government, he worked for almost three years with CIA debriefing officers, describing Soviet intelligence techniques and operations and pinpointing the names of Communist agents in various Western countries. On September 30, 1961, he had a one-hour meeting with CIA director Allen Dulles. The agency had not yet moved into its quarters in Langley, Virginia, and the only detail the visitor remembered was Dulles’s concern that his new office would lack sufficient wall space to mount his extensive collection of pipes. The conversation, according to Goleniewski, was vague and noncommittal.

  Because the Polish government, on learning of his defection, had sentenced him to death in absentia, the CIA placed him in a well-secured apartment in Kew Gardens, Queens. In order to give Goleniewski the protection of U.S. citizenship, the agency negotiated with the House and Senate committees on immigration and nationality. “The beneficiary, Michael Goleniewski, a native and citizen of Poland, was born August 16, 1922, in Nieswiez,” the CIA told the House Immigration Subcommittee. “He completed three years of law at the University of Poznan and, in 1956, received a master’s degree in political science from the University of Warsaw. He enlisted in the Polish Army in 1945 and was commissioned a lieutenant colonel in 1955.” On July 10, 1963, a private bill, H.R. 5507, was introduced. The bill declared, “The beneficiary is a 40-year-old native and citizen of Poland who has been admitted to the United States for permanent residence and is employed by the U.S. Government.… His services to the United States are rated as truly significant.” The bill passed both houses of Congress, and Michael Goleniewski became a citizen of the United States.

  This, however, was not the conclusion to the case. At some point during his months with the CIA, Goleniewski told his debriefing officers another tale. Goleniewski, the defector informed them, was a cover name he had used while living in Poland and working in Polish intelligence. His true identity, he said, was Grand Duke Alexei Nicholaevich Romanov; he was, he announced, the Russian tsarevich presumed to have been killed in Ekaterinburg.

  Instead of shooting the family in the cellar, according to Goleniewski, Yurovsky had helped them to escape. He shepherded them, disguised as poor refugees, out of Russia. After months of travel through Turkey, Greece, and Austria, they found their way to Warsaw. Why Warsaw? “My father thought it over very carefully,” Goleniewski said. “He chose Poland because there were a large number of Russians in the cities and on the farms. He thought we could blend into the background without attracting attention. He shaved off his beard and mustache, and nobody recognized him. In 1924, we moved from Warsaw to a country village near Poznan, close to the German border.”

  That same year, he said, his mother, Empress Alexandra, died, and the tsar sent Anastasia to America to withdraw funds from a bank in Detroit. She never returned to Poland. Subsequently, Olga and Tatiana moved to Germany. Nicholas, Alexis, and his sister Marie remained near Poznan through the Second World War, and for a time the tsar served in the Polish Underground. Goleniewski grew up in Poznan. In 1945, after the war, friends arranged his admission into the Polish Army, and he began his career in intelligence. In 1952, at the age of eighty-four, Nicholas II died. At the time of his own defection, Goleniewski said, all four of his sisters were alive, and he w
as in contact with them.

  Two questions arose: What was Goleniewski’s age? And what was the condition of his hemophilia? Goleniewski had told the CIA and the U.S. Congress that he was born in 1922, whereas the Tsarevich Alexis was born in 1904. A difference of eighteen years is difficult to hide, and Colonel Goleniewski’s age in 1961 appeared much closer to thirty-nine than to fifty-seven. Goleniewski explained. His hemophilia had been confirmed, he said, by Dr. Alexander S. Wiener of Brooklyn, a codiscoverer of the Rh factor in blood.* His youthful appearance he ascribed to a rare suspension of growth in childhood caused by his illness; hemophilia, he said, had meant that he was a child “twice over.”

  Having revealed his Imperial identity, Colonel Goleniewski was ready to collect his inheritance. “After the 1905 war with Japan,” he said, “my father started depositing money in Western countries.” In New York, he named the Chase Bank, Morgan Guaranty, J. P. Morgan & Co., Hanover, and Manufacturer’s Trust; in London, the Bank of England, Baring Brothers, Barclays Bank, and Lloyds Bank; in Paris, the Bank of France and Rothschild Bank; in Berlin, the Mendelssohn Bank. “The sum amounts to $400 million in the United States alone,” Goleniewski declared. “Up to twice that amount is deposited in other countries. I won’t demand every nickel, but I want a fair amount. If I can’t get it, I will go to court and a lot of important names will come out.”

  Goleniewski’s claim that he was the tsarevich embarrassed the CIA. He insisted on being addressed as a grand duke. He had a violent temper. Director Dulles quickly washed his hands of the former agent. Asked by a reporter about Goleniewski’s claim, Dulles replied, “The story may all be true or it may not be. I do not care to discuss the subject further.” Eventually, a decision was made: whatever the value of Goleniewski’s services to the agency, the CIA could not be put in the position of supporting his claim to the tsar’s fortune. Late in 1964, the agency put Goleniewski on a pension and severed all connections with its former spy.

  Looking back on the CIA’s relationship with Goleniewski, a former senior officer of the agency, now retired, remembered meeting the Polish agent twice. “I went up to see if I could pour oil on troubled waters. It was no use; he was around the bend. But I will say this: the material he provided us was very good indeed. There was no nonsense. It was not the product of a fevered imagination. It was the real stuff.” Was Goleniewski, as The New York Times had once described him, the most productive agent in the history of the CIA? “No, that’s terribly exaggerated. But he provided very clear, precise identification. It led to some serious arrests.”

  During Goleniewski’s final year at the CIA, the press became involved. For three years, his story had been kept out of the newspapers, but when his private citizenship bill went up to Capitol Hill, the responsible congressional subcommittee wanted the CIA to produce the defector for interrogation. “I want to see a live body,” said the subcommittee chairman. The agency refused to allow Goleniewski to appear before the committee. The former spy became enraged and went to the press. He gained a willing ear in New York Journal-American reporter Guy Richards. Richards found Goleniewski “striding energetically back and forth in his apartment” and described him as “41, a husky, handsome, Polish-born agent, who resembles the Hollywood prototype of the suave spy.”

  Meanwhile, Goleniewski was twice subpoenaed to appear before secret sessions of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. The appearances never took place. After several postponements, the subcommittee decided not to put Goleniewski in the witness chair. Instead, Jay Sourwine, the committee counsel, questioned witnesses from the State Department who testified to the invariable accuracy and importance of the intelligence information Goleniewski had supplied. Sourwine said that the reason Goleniewski had not been questioned directly was that he insisted on testifying first about his Romanov identity. The senators, he said, had decided that this would “not be appropriate.”

  Depressed by the Senate’s refusal to hear his testimony, Goleniewski quickly became the center of another storm. On September 30, 1964, a few hours before the birth of their daughter, Tatiana, he married thirty-five-year-old Irmgard Kampf, a German Protestant with whom he had been living. On his wedding license and in the church marriage register, Goleniewski signed his name as Alexis Nicholaevich Romanov, son of Nicholas Alexandrovich Romanov and Alexandra Feodorovna Romanov, née von Hesse. He listed his birthday as August 12, 1904, and his birthplace as Peterhof, Russia. Two middle-aged women, whom he described as his “sisters, Olga and Tatiana,” came from Germany for the wedding. The ceremony was performed in his apartment by the very reverend archpriest and protopresbyter of the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, Count George P. Grabbe, better known as Father George. (Father George was a nephew of Maj. Gen. Count Alexander Grabbe, commander of Tsar Nicholas II’s Cossack horse guards.) A photograph taken that day shows a bearded Grabbe seated next to the pregnant bride, the groom, and the two “sisters,” whose resemblance to the grand duchesses—even given the passage of many decades—is nonexistent.

  The storm raged not so much around Goleniewski—whose claim to be the tsarevich had long since been dismissed as “absurd,” “outrageous,” and “a stupid Soviet fabrication” by the Russian emigre community in America—as around Father George. The priest was ferociously attacked in the Russian-American press. Grabbe’s ecclesiastical superiors forbade him to baptize little Tatiana. He was obliged to repeat over and over that the name Romanov was as common in Russia as Smith in America, that as a priest he could not refuse to marry a couple who were otherwise qualified, that Goleniewski could not possibly be that Alexis Nicholaevich Romanov, and that his performance of the wedding in no way signified church recognition of the groom’s claim to identity.

  At the time, Father George’s explanations failed to convince his accusers, especially when it became known—by way of a three-column ad in the Journal-American, supposedly paid for by Colonel Goleniewski—that, before he agreed to perform the ceremony, he had visited Goleniewski five times in his Queens apartment. As a result of his action, Grabbe was asked to resign from all Russian emigre organizations; for a while, no one would speak to him.

  Thirty years later, Father George, now called Bishop Gregory and retired, explained why he had done what he did. On September 30, 1964, he received a call from Goleniewski at five o’clock in the morning, saying that his wife was about to give birth and that he possessed a marriage license. Father George went to Goleniewski’s apartment, where he found the expectant couple and a publisher named Robert Speller waiting. Goleniewski handed the priest a marriage license made out in the name of Alexis Nicholaevich Romanov and a court decree showing that he had changed his name from Michael Goleniewski to Alexis Romanov. “I could have walked out,” admitted Bishop Gregory. “Perhaps I should have. But, given the circumstances, I felt I had no choice. When a child is about to be born out of wedlock, a priest has a responsibility. The wife went directly to Manhasset Hospital and gave birth.” Many years later, the child born that day wrote to Bishop Gregory, asking the bishop to help her find her father. “I didn’t answer,” said Bishop Gregory. “I didn’t want to be mixed up with him anymore.”

  Goleniewski’s temper and mental stability worsened. He severed his relationships with every American he had known, declaring, “You are dismissed!” He accused Guy Richards of “criminal libel.” He continued to live in Queens on a U.S. government pension, which he complained was only five hundred dollars a month, the equivalent of a Polish colonel’s pension. In 1966, he began writing open letters to the director of the CIA, to Attorney General Ramsey Clark, to the U.S. Civil Liberties Union, and to the International Red Cross. “I am no longer able to pay the monthly rent for my apartment arranged by the CIA,” he complained. “I have been deprived of necessary and expensive medical help. I have been deprived of any possibilities to express my opinions through the free press.” He demanded fifty thousand dollars in arrears salary payment and one hundred thousand dollars in reimbursement
for loss of property in Poland.

  During the 1970s, Colonel Goleniewski published from his home a monthly bulletin titled Double Eagle, “dedicated to the national independence and security of the United States and the survival of Christian Civilization.” In it, he titled himself “His Imperial Highness, the Heir to the Ail-Russian Imperial Throne, Tsarevich and Grand Duke Alexis Nicholaevich Romanoff of Russia, the August Ataman and Head of the Russian Imperial House of Romanoff, etc., Knight of the OSA, OSG, OSJ, etc. and of SOS, FLH, etc.” The bulletin was a twenty-page, densely typed, unparagraphed cataract of abuse against “Jewish bankers from London,” “aristocratic thieves,” “embezzlers,” “ganglords and transcontinental racketeers,” and “cannibalistic usurers.” Colonel Goleniewski declared that the Rockefellers were the “biggest crooks who ever existed” and that on his list of Soviet agents passed to the CIA in 1961 had been a university professor named Henry Kissinger.

  In 1981, the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad canonized all the immediate members of the last Russian Imperial family, including the Tsarevich Alexis. This ceremony, possible only because the church considered all of the family to have been martyred in death, provoked an outburst from Colonel Goleniewski. He declared the Church Abroad—a fiercely anti-Communist institution—to have been “thoroughly penetrated by the KGB” in order to carry out this plot against his rightful inheritance. Thereafter, Goleniewski became less visible. In August 1993, a former Polish intelligence officer wrote in a Polish newspaper that his onetime colleague Michael Goleniewski had died in New York on July 12, 1993. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency does not know what became of its former agent Heckenschuetze.