The Soul of Viktor Tronko (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by David Quammen

  Viktor Semyonovich was therefore, under the new regime, and through no merit of his own, a young man in very good smell. The second important development for him that year, by contrast, derived from his own genuinely fervid efforts.

  In the course of a routine visa investigation for the Eleventh Department, for which he had flown up to Archangel and spent two miserable days in the freezing basement of a town registry, he uncovered a case of fraud.

  A certain professor of philology at Leningrad State University—Lavrushko, by name—who had applied to be allowed out on a one-week visit to East Berlin, for an academic symposium, turned out to be not quite the person he claimed to be. In fact he was not even Lavrushko; he was Giterman, a half-Jewish impostor. Years earlier, Giterman as a nineteen-year-old infantry private had traded papers with a dead body, a corpse named Lavrushko, during the early hours of the battle of Stalingrad. Apparently it was done to shed the political handicap of his Jewishness. He had been decorated for valor later the same month, for his own deeds, but under Lavrushko’s name; and in recognition of his heroic service he was permitted, after the war, to pursue his education in Leningrad, where he earned the philology doctorate, also under Lavrushko’s name. Tronko the eager sleuth unraveled this entire hoax. He established that Lavrushko-Giterman had never been anywhere near Archangel during his childhood, contrary to the adopted biography, having made only a short visit there in recent years to fortify his story; and that the man’s father had been neither a full-blood Russian nor a horse breeder employed at a collective farm, but rather a Jew who did carpentry in Tashkent. Unmasked, Giterman was denied his visa, while criminal proceedings began concerning his usurpation of Lavrushko’s identity and the innumerable false statements to which, over the years, he had sworn. Tronko received an official letter of commendation from the chief of his department, who in real truth was incensed by this kind of showy zeal but could do nothing else about it.

  Viktor Semyonovich had served notice of his drive and his wit. Besides which he was Komsomol. A rising star, says Sparrow. A rising little snot of a star.

  Upon formal request, in early summer of 1959, T. F. Rybakov was permitted to bring Tronko into the Tourist Department as his own chief deputy. Tourist Department is really a misnomer, it involved far more than that implies, says Sparrow. Rybakov’s group devoted itself, for instance, to surveillance and entrapment games against all visiting Americans—diplomats, businessmen, journalists, sightseers, expatriate misfits. The American Embassy itself was a leading target. So this was a delicate post for the bright young man, Viktor Semyonovich. Age twenty-eight now. Soon to be Major Tronko. We can well imagine that the Eleventh might have been glad to be rid of him, can’t we? says Sparrow with another ambiguous smirk.

  There is a pause for breath, a pause for shifting weight and allowing blood to flow back into buttocks, and Kessler in that moment makes a tactical decision. Purely intuitive. He decides that he will not again ask Sparrow, not one further time, to fill in the part about Rybakov’s daughter, dead and buried in Prague. Yes he is curious. Yes Sparrow wants him to be curious. But this is judo, wherein balance and leverage count for more than force. Kessler can wait.

  “I have a question,” he says. “An obvious one.”

  Sparrow nods demurely.

  “If Tronko made the leap to Rybakov’s department in ’59, and stayed there until his defection,” says Kessler, “why was he getting those trade-delegation junkets later? Rome in ’62. Vienna. Didn’t you just tell me that that sort of thing was a special perquisite of the Eleventh?”

  Sparrow displays a congratulatory smile, gleaming and tepid as the sunshine. “Because Viktor Tronko was a fake,” he says agreeably.

  Again Sparrow is not meeting Kessler’s eyes. He is gazing off past Kessler’s left ear, off toward the Saturday traffic on Old Dominion, and maybe beyond that. In this case, he doesn’t seem to be merely wandering blank-eyed and numbly through the charred wreckage of his own memory. He seems to be looking at something. Kessler turns.

  “Don’t,” Sparrow says with some vehemence, between the teeth of his sunshiny grin, and Kessler turns back obediently.

  He finds a hand clamped on his forearm, firmly, like the grip of a terrified baby chimp. The hand withdraws itself almost at once, disappearing into the pocket of Sparrow’s overcoat.

  “Is it kids with walkie-talkies? Or strange men in fedoras?” says Kessler.

  He saw nothing in his own brief glance except a restaurant on the far side of the road, a low building with smoked windows and a cedar roof, the type of place given to nationally franchised avocado sandwiches. Kessler hopes that Claude Sparrow, the famous pathological paranoid, will not begin to hallucinate menacing skulkers and elect to stop talking. Not yet, please. Leave him alone, you demons, you shadows, you threatening six-year-olds, he’s had a rough time and what he needs is to open up. If it weren’t for the sobering recollection of Pokorny, splayed and drained, Kessler would be fully confident that this over-the-shoulder vigilance was only a matter of abnormal psychology.

  “Neither,” says Sparrow. “Never mind. Yes, you’re quite right, of course.”

  “I am?” Right about what? Kessler isn’t sure he follows. Right about your mental condition, Mr. Sparrow?

  “Tronko could not have it both ways,” says Sparrow. “Either he was spying on Soviet travelers, in Europe, or on American travelers in Moscow. Either he was an officer of the Eleventh Department or of Rybakov’s. Either he had a routine and legitimate reason for those two later trips—the one to Rome, and then finally Vienna. Or he did not.”

  Either this or that. Choose one. It seems to echo back from something Pokorny said during their conversation that night. Either the biggest beluga ever, or the biggest hoax since Piltdown. Either Moby-Dick or The Confidence-Man. Uncomfortable as he is with such crisp binary thinking as applied to any mystery of human behavior, still Kessler has no grounds at this point for dismissing Sparrow’s view, or Pokorny’s.

  “And you are quite right when you say the question is obvious. We had fastened upon it ourselves, from the beginning.”

  “The first hostile interrogation?”

  “Oh, well before that, even. The beginning, I say. Tronko was barely off the plane. Still the honeymoon phase. We had him sequestered in a pleasant suburban house, secure but comfortable, as we had done with Fedorenko. The debriefing had only just started. There was still a presumption that he would have something to offer the Warren Commission. ‘Why were you in Rome?’ we asked. ‘Why Vienna?’ Naturally we did. ‘What business did Rybakov have for you out there?’ ”

  “And he answered . . . ?”

  “Nonsense. Just a load of nonsense,” says Sparrow, as though that were that and Kessler should accept it as an axiom. He spoke nonsense, next question. Restlessly Sparrow swings his little legs back and forth; they hang clear of the ground and move in brisk arcs, like the miniature pendulum of a mantel clock. But Kessler does not accept nonsense as axiomatic. Not even in this affair.

  “Specifically.”

  “Well. By his account, there was no discrepancy. That was the first version, anyway.”

  Tronko held firmly to the story of having joined Rybakov’s shop, Sparrow says. Yes in early summer of 1959. Yes the Tourist Department of the Second CD. Yes his own personal responsibilities included watching—and whenever possible entrapping—Americans. Most adamantly he stuck with that. Meanwhile he tried to persuade us, Sparrow says, that there was no discrepancy. No logical conflict between the Rybakov assignment and what we already knew. We knew he had gone to Rome, because that’s where he first approached us. We knew he had gotten out once more, to Vienna—obviously we did, because there he was. Nothing Tronko could do about either of those two facts, Sparrow says. They were there. Period. So he had to make them fit.

  “You didn’t care for the fit.”

  Sparrow sneers. “There was no fit.”<
br />
  “What did he say? What did he claim?”

  “That down is up. Black is white.”

  “More specifically.”

  “That it was common practice. A former officer of the Eleventh Department, now assigned elsewhere, is given one of those junkets. As a courtesy. Another little form of the Soviets’ incessant mutual bribery. Like the wristwatches and the jade bowls and the colored sweatshirts. They call it blat. Grease. That was Tronko’s explanation. The first version.”

  “What about Rybakov?”

  “Rybakov shows his man as being on loan to the Eleventh. Special duty. And he winks. Or else—if it’s a boss who is not so paternally indulgent as Rybakov—the junketeer takes vacation time. Common practice, said Tronko.”

  “But you didn’t find that plausible.”

  “It was directly in contradiction to other information we held,” says Sparrow. “Viktor Tronko was not the first or the last KGB man who ever talked to us, remember. We knew a thing or three about the Eleventh Department. Travel practices, exit permissions. We had help from some reliable sources.”

  “Like Bogdan Kirilovich Fedorenko.”

  “No.” Sparrow’s expression is transformed to a gloomy scowl, which quickly softens toward something else, and then the moment has gone. Hello, what was that? Was that sadness? wonders Kessler. “Not in this instance, no. Not Fedorenko. Other reliable sources.”

  These other little birds—whoever they were, and for some reason not including Claude Sparrow’s own favorite chicken—were quite unanimously emphatic, evidently, on the point: Tronko was talking nonsense. No officer from any part of the Second CD would be allowed to step on a flight for Rome without a very damn good reason. And the Eleventh Department was not likely to share out such precious privileges to colleagues up and down the corridor. Nonsense. Blat went only so far. There were also jealousy and rivalry and venality to be reckoned.

  And there was one other thing, too, to be reckoned, says Sparrow: Tronko’s own statements made in Rome, back in August of 1962, during the initial encounter.

  At first word that a Soviet officer wanted contact, Jed McAtee had scurried down from Bonn (where, in those days, he was still just a chief of station) and spent a total of five hours in conversation with Tronko, over the course of two separate clandestine meetings. All of it captured on tape. Tronko had described himself then as a senior lieutenant, serving routine duty within the Eleventh Department. He had talked of a wife and a little boy. He had talked of talent spotting for Africans at Moscow State University. He had even talked of a poor Jew who called himself Lavrushko, having tried to shed his identity. But no reference whatever was made, on the Rome tapes, to a person named T. F. Rybakov.

  “Mel told me that Tronko’s story was full of flaws,” Kessler volunteers. Sparrow’s body twists around and he is watching Kessler intently, waiting for more. The legs have stopped kicking. Kessler is about to add, “But Mel didn’t tell me what they were.” He catches himself. Better not to let Sparrow know anything about what Mel didn’t tell. He says instead: “Like the Rybakov business, I gather. First of the nagging inconsistencies.”

  “First of the lies,” says Sparrow, nodding.

  Comrade Rybakov only made his entrance into the story eighteen months later. Tronko never so much as mentioned him until the second set of tapes, the ones that came back up to Langley by car during the early weeks of debriefing, says Sparrow. February and March of 1964.

  And now it was Sol Lentzer in charge, yes, says Sparrow. Lentzer was given first turn on the hillside of fresh snow that was Tronko’s memory, Tronko’s testimony, Tronko’s self-conscious legend. For reasons of witless bureaucratic protocol the assignment was McAtee’s to give, and he gave it to Lentzer. The earliest debriefing. A period generally known to us, says Sparrow, as the honeymoon. Very crucial time. With any defector. Lentzer was chosen as the debriefing officer and he began traveling out each day (just as I had in the case of Fedorenko, says Sparrow) for these long intimate visits with Tronko. “Lentzer,” Sparrow repeats, with a mild huff of frustration. “Well, at least he was a damn sight better than Scott Wickes.” In Counterintelligence they had a joke about it at the time, Sparrow confesses. They would say, “The Mad Monk is on honeymoon with La Gioconda.”

  “La Gioconda?”

  “Tronko.”

  “And Lentzer? The Mad Monk was Lentzer?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Were these code names, now, or just nicknames?”

  “ ‘Gioconda’ was official. ‘The Mad Monk’ was just a silly nickname. A derivation. Originally, I believe, they had begun calling him ‘Rasputin.’ Because of his relation to McAtee, I suppose. And of course his Russian blood.”

  “They is who?”

  “Oh.” Shake of the head. “Some of my people.”

  “It sounds like vintage Pokorny,” says Kessler.

  Claude Sparrow surrenders to a little wince of a smile, as though perhaps capable, after all, of innocent human embarrassment. “Yes. I think it was Mel, in fact.”

  So Rybakov made his entrance into the story at this point, during the honeymoon, only then, when Gioconda began telling the Mad Monk of his work in the Tourist Department. His purported work. First anyone had heard about that. Lentzer reported immediately to McAtee, who conferred with Sparrow as well as with Herbert Eames. “Jed and I were still rather civil to each other in those days,” Sparrow inserts, almost wistfully. Rybakov’s sudden appearance in the tale was of course linked—linked inextricably, says Sparrow—with the noise about Lee Harvey Oswald. The same noise that had been just enough to get Tronko out of Vienna on a fast flight going west. We already knew of this Tourist Department, so called, says Sparrow. We knew it existed, though not its name or its number, nor that a fellow named Rybakov was its chief. But we knew enough about the distribution of chores within the Second Chief Directorate to realize that, if an Oswald file had indeed been opened (either for deeply sinister reasons or routine ones), it would have been there, in that department. Likewise if Tronko wanted to pass himself off as the top Russian authority on Oswald, then that’s where he had to be. In the Tourist Department. At Rybakov’s right hand.

  “And presto. He was,” says Sparrow. “Despite everything to the contrary we had heard in Rome.”

  “How did Tronko explain that?”

  “The easiest way possible. He said: ‘In Rome I am very drunk. Totally schnockered.’ An exact quote. That was merely his first version, however.”

  “And his second?”

  “ ‘In U.S., when I tell you of a man Rybakov, I am totally drunk. Schnockered,’ ” Sparrow quotes again. “That was true enough, unfortunately. McAtee was letting him run wild at that stage. Drinking his way across the state of Maryland.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. He needed Rybakov in the story, you said. For his access to Oswald’s file.”

  “No, of course not, no sense at all. But you see it didn’t matter. Next day he would recant. Again. ‘Definitely I am work under Trofim Filippovich Rybakov. Yes, yes. I am deputy, you bet. This good man. So dead now, I think.’ And the bugger would break into tears. Melodrama in the grand Russian tradition. Liquor in staggering quantity, then a piteous thumping of his breast. More liquor, then more thumping. He made no sense at all.” Sparrow’s slightly strained voice appeals, one sane man to another, for retroactive sympathy. Hands in the pockets of his coat, he flaps his elbows, an odd gesture that Kessler takes to represent hopeless barnyard confusion. “There were other versions as well.”

  “With or without Comrade Rybakov?”

  “Oh, with,” Sparrow says. “Yes. In all but the most sodden and implausible tellings, Rybakov did appear. Playing roughly the same quiet, crucial role. Patron and mentor. Immediate boss. Surrogate father, to some extent. No matter what variations Tronko put into the rest of it, Rybakov was indispensable, after all.”
r />   “Did you see Tronko yourself during this period?”

  Sparrow did not. Even McAtee did not. Only Lentzer, the anointed debriefing officer, had any direct contact with Tronko. But the tapes came back to Langley, and Sparrow saw the transcripts, and those transcripts were full of contradictions and falsehoods so glaring that not an ocean of vodka could explain them away. For instance, Tronko had been just a senior lieutenant when—

  “Where were they?” Kessler interrupts.

  “The transcripts? Why, they—”

  “No. I mean Tronko and Lentzer. Where was this honeymoon taking place? A suburban house, I think you said. But where?”

  Actually it was a rather elegant Italianate home, in an old neighborhood of Annapolis, Sparrow explains. A safe house, where Tronko was accommodated in lonely splendor, sharing the place with only a couple of men from the Office of Security, who were there to protect him physically and to help him amuse himself but who were under instructions not to discuss anything substantive with him. His past. The Soviet Union. Lee Harvey Oswald. No, absolutely taboo, they should leave the debriefing to Lentzer. Talk to him about baseball or chess or women or the weather or whatever they might like, whatever Tronko might like, except for God’s sake they were not to go stumbling into any subject that was remotely significant. There was also a housekeeper, another of the Agency’s trusted dowagers, who cooked the meals and was on hand to answer the door whenever a teenager came around selling magazines, and who herself virtually never laid eyes on the guest of honor. The Security men carried trays of her food to him, up on the second floor. They also did the cleaning up there. Not a difficult chore, the cleaning, since Tronko’s half of the house was quite sparsely furnished: a good firm bed in Tronko’s own little room, one other bed for whichever of the Security men wasn’t on watch, a few chairs and a metal desk in the large front room that looked down toward the street. Nothing else. No carpeting, even. Just great expanses of golden hardwood floor, especially in that front room. Upstairs the place was like a vacant house up for sale, all swept and polished and emptied of individuating artifacts, to be trod through only by realtors and whispering married couples from out of town. It was not dreary but it was also not what one would call homey, Sparrow says. It was meant to be functional. And temporary. Downstairs was entirely different, a buffer zone maintained by the dowager in horsehair and doilies. Lentzer drove his own car, customarily, and came and went through the garage.