But what could he be spying on us about? Hell, Oleg, just tell us. We’ll play a cat and mouse game, report to control, leave messages in a tree or behind a loose brick.
“Urgent dispatch … stop … from Comrade Kalugin … stop,” Mike Claffey used to intone in a beery attempt at a Russian accent. “Can report with certainty … stop … that the meatballs at the West End are 40 percent filler … stop.”
And then I had read, 40 years later, that he’d been recruited by the KGB six years before he came to Columbia. So what exactly would he tell them about us, or New York? Columbia J-School students are sloppy drunks? Cheating was rampant during the midterm exam on laws of libel?
Actually, what he was doing, or so he said, was not spying but “reconnaissance.” I read this in a January, 1998 interview from CNN Interactive’s Cold War production team.
“It was a reconnaissance trip,” he told them. “I was supposed to make as many friends as possible, to prepare fertile grounds for my future work, to familiarize myself with the United States and its way of life.”
Oh, he familiarized himself, all right. Too familiar. Especially with the all night movies on 42nd St. He fell in love with them, which was no great surprise to me, because, growing up in New York, I had fallen in love with them a long time ago. One night a bunch of us crammed in the subway and headed down to 42nd St. to show Oleg what the real New York was like. By 1958-59 it was no longer the real 42nd St. that once had captured my childhood, the 14, 15, 16 movie theaters … who could even count them all? … that occupied one long block between 7th and 8th Aves., the Lyric, the Gotham, the Apollo, Republic, New Amsterdam … how about one with that neon light circling around like he old camera? … and of course the Laffmovie with the hysterical laughter of the fat woman and the funny distorting mirrors in front. Oh my God, was it wonderful … Vincent’s, with its 10 cent malteds, Hubert’s Museum and Flea Circus, where my father once had taken me to see the legendary Jack Johnson. If there was real sleeze going on, prostitution and drugs and the like, it was pretty well under cover, even when we took Oleg there. All that came later.
So we took Oleg to Hubert’s, and that didn’t impress him much. They had those kinds of shows in Moscow, too. But then he got a look at that lineup of movie theaters and he flipped. A couple advertised triple features. There were old B films, and worse, from 20 years ago, a few current Westerns, plenty of low class horror films … Son of Kong would be back there every month or so … anything the theaters could latch onto cheaply. And some of the theaters were all nighters. People would sleep in them. I think that’s what got him most of all.
Maybe we had underestimated Oleg, completely pegged him wrong. Maybe underneath it all he was a Steppenwolf, a night person, Poe’s Man of the Crown. Sitting up there in the balcony that first night, listening to the snoring around him, hearing the occasional shout or growl from a demented 42nd St. regular, set off by the drone of the ice cream vendor working the aisle downstairs, well, maybe what just clicked with Oleg was something all his KGB training hadn’t prepared him for, the real voice of the people, or one unique segment of it, socialism in the raw, New York style.
As an undergrad at Columbia, I had known 42nd St. addicts. The night before an exam, they’d be sitting in the balcony of the Gotham, watching Claude Rains turn himself into the Invisible Man in 1933. Oleg had the look. I could tell. “Where you going tonight, Oleg?” “Oh, I think I’ll drop down to 42nd St.”
I just knew he was spending some nights there. His bright, boyish good looks were fading. He was becoming worn, turning into an old man before our eyes. Occasionally someone would drop a hint … “Say, Oleg, about Jersey City,” and he’d hold out a hand to stop the conversation. No kiss-and-tell guy was he.
Dean Barrett, the head of the J-School, was frankly worried. I mean, he couldn’t flunk a Russian, the first exchange student ever. But there was this matter of class attendance. I liked Dean Barrett. A good natured chap, very frank. Once he told me how I became a member of the class of ’59.
“One phone call from Lou Little,” he said. “Just one.”
Mr. Little was Columbia’s legendary coach who had beaten Stanford in the ’34 Rose Bowl, whose Columbia Lions had halted Army’s long winning streak in ’47. At Columbia he was God. He’d torture you on the field, but if you ever shed a drop of sweat for him, he’d help you any way he could, afterward.
“Mr. Little, I can’t take that Zimmerman kid, not with those grades,” Dean Barrett told me.
“Take him. He’s a good kid.” And the argument was over. That’s how I got to J-School. And now, six months later, Dean Barrett was flashing me a worried faculty look and wondering how he was going to handle the Oleg situation.
The folks back home handled it. Word must have reached the Politburo that their fair-haired boy was hitting a few highway dividers on his way down the road. Who arrived one day but Mrs. Oleg? His wife, whom I later learned was the daughter of a famous Russian general, a hero. Seemed like a very nice person but spoke no English. We’d have one of our usual parties in someone’s apartment, and Oleg would be there, of course … he tried not to miss any, even in his ragged period … and he’d be socializing all over the room, as usual, and there in a corner would be Mrs. Oleg, sitting there without benefit of conversation, arms crossed, her eyes staying on her husband. And his class attendance was just fine thereafter. And he graduated right along with the rest of us. The old cap and gown bit, hip hip hooray, and off to the KGB we go for some deep cover.
In reading about his career, his martyrdom at the hands of the Russian tyrants he fought against and then his valuable service to the USA, I’ve often been tempted to give him a call. There’s a phone number listed for the agency he heads in Washington, the Centre for Counter Intelligence and Security Studies, known as the CI Centre. Actually, I tried it a couple of times, left a message, got no response. Which figures, of course. He probably wouldn’t even remember me, and, even if he would, what would there be to talk about? Old times?
“Say, Oleg, Dean Barrett really was annoyed when he heard about that Bulgarian reporter and the umbrella bit. He said, ‘We didn’t teach him THAT at Columbia.’”
Nah, better leave it alone. But it is kind of an interesting story, is it not?
9. Olympics
Editor’s note: Paul Zimmerman covered five Olympic Games, starting in Tokyo in 1964. Three of them are included in this memoir.
Mexico City 1968
Mexico City in 1968 began with a massacre. There had been reports that some student activists had been shot in demonstrations 10 days before the Olympics began, but filtered through government agencies, the numbers, as usual, were seriously minimized. A few, a handful, no one knew for sure. When I got there, students I talked to told me as many as 300 had died and thousands were wounded. History has put an official number on it of 270 dead, 2,600 wounded, but we’ll never really know for sure.
People have wondered how the 2008 Olympics could have been awarded to China, given its record of human rights violations. There has been a list of pseudo-demands that these matters be addressed or … or what? The games would be withdrawn at the last moment? Nations would drop out? What a joke! The story of Olympic organizers and national directors turning a blind eye to political events, no matter how grisly, no matter how hideous, is an old one. The Games Must Go On. The slogan has been repeated proudly. It has been flown as a banner. It ignored Hitler’s rise to power and glorified the rule of Nazi Germany in the Berlin Olympics of ’36. It hardly blinked as the USSR crushed the Hungarian revolution when political divisions split China, Korea and Germany into hostile camps. It overlooked racism in South Africa, the growing poison of steroid and hormone abuse that, in its most repulsive phase, deliberately created a race of dwarfed female gymnasts; it overlooked murders outside the gates in Mexico City and inside the compound itself in Munich.
Amazingly, the impact of the killings
in Mexico City never really was felt in the outside world. Even today, when reference is made to the ’68 Games, the focus is the Tommie Smith-John Carlos black glove demonstration on the victory stand. But 270 people, students mostly, were murdered by government troops, shot down in a limited enclosure called the Plaza de las Tres Culturas basically because the games were to start in 10 days, and the president, Diaz Ordaz, didn’t want unsightly things such as proposed student demonstrators presenting a bad image of the country to the rest of the world. So he had them killed.
I didn’t realize the extent of what had happened when I arrived in Mexico City less than a week after the killings. No one did, or at least none of the sportswriters. Except for Chris Brasher. To this day he remains the finest journalist I’ve ever worked with. Bespectacled, studious looking, he’d hardly have been taken for the great athlete he once was — Olympic steeplechase champion, pace-setter for Dr. Roger Bannister in the greatest mile race ever run, when his Oxford teammate became the first man to break the four-minute barrier. He wrote a column for the New York Observer in those days. He was a digger, a fellow who couldn’t be intimidated by the power elite, and he was at his best at the Olympics, as I found out when we became friends in Tokyo.
A few days before the Opening Ceremony I got a call from Chris Brasher. “I’m going down to the Plaza of the Three Cultures to look around. Do you want to come?” So we took a walk around the plaza. There were bullet holes everywhere. And policemen, who seemed uneasy about our taking notes. Somehow Chris had rounded up a couple of university students who said they had been there during the killings.
“Bloodstains,” one of them said, pointing to a dark patch on the wall. “They couldn’t clean them all up. This was where many were shot. Mixed in the crowd were government provocateurs. We had been warned about them. They were identifiable by a white glove on one hand. They’d raise the glove, then move away, and then shots would follow.”
I tried calling a few members of the Mexico City Organizing Committee. Either unavailable, or they knew nothing about what I was referring to, or all of a sudden, my college Spanish was incomprehensible. I spoke to a few International Olympic Committee delegates. The basic sentiment was, “We’re not here to talk about politics. At every Olympic meeting, you hear all sorts of stories.” Foolishly, I tried to reach Avery Brundage, the IOC president. I had left a couple of messages. Older writers, especially nationally famous columnists, had quoted Brundage on occasion. They usually took care of him in print. The hardest adjective they used to describe him was “crusty,” or occasionally they’d refer to him in a favorite descriptive of doddering journalists, as a “curmudgeon.” Mention generally was made about his unyielding dedication to the spirit of amateurism.
It was Brundage, as head of the U.S. Olympic Committee, who had practically bludgeoned America into attending the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. There had been a protest movement growing about honoring a regime that was rumored to be waging wholesale persecution of Jews, including prospective members of its own Olympic team, but Brundage had gone to Germany on a two-week blitz tour to see for himself. “Are the Jews treated fairly?” He said when he returned. “Yes, they are.” History has exposed this awful lie, but Brundage’s influence and pervasive anti-Semitism even reached into the heart of the American team. Until the day he died, Marty Glickman, a Jewish sprinter from Syracuse, felt that Brundage had pressured the American track coach, Dean Cromwell, into scratching at the last minute Glickman and Sam Stoller, the only two Jewish athletes on the team, from the sprint relay, although they had qualified.
“It came from Brundage,” Glickman said. “He didn’t want to offend his German hosts.”
I had done a research project on Brundage, a proud member of an ultra right-wing group called the America First Committee, whose primary objective was to keep America out of a European war. In 1940 student members of this committee had circulated a petition that said, “We demand that Congress refrain from war, even if England is on the verge of defeat.” But even the America Firsters couldn’t put up with Brundage after he addressed a German Day rally in Madison Square Garden three weeks after the Berlin Games and told 20,000 sieg-heiling bundists and sympathizers, dressed in their brown shirts and swastikas, “We can learn much from Nazi Germany.” They severed relations with him.
“The Olympics must go on,” became the mantra of this blind demigod. Those with short memories praised him for it. World War II signaled the postponement of the 1940 Olympics, despite Brundage’s vehement protests. Japan had invaded Manchuria in 1937, the same year as the infamous “Rape of Nanking,” when the butchery of the emperor’s imperial troops resulted in the death of 100,000 to 200,000 civilians (estimate of Japanese researchers) or 150,000 to 300,000 (Chinese accounts). And where was the proposed site of this Olympiad that Brundage struggled so hard to maintain? Tokyo, of course.
I had written all this. I had written about his visit to the USSR when it was seeking re-admission to the games in 1952. It hadn’t taken part since Czarist times, preferring to hold its own competitions, called Spartakiads, and there was some opposition to a state-run system of rewarding its athletes, especially when the Olympic committee paid so much lip service to the principles of strict amateurism. The format was the same, the blitz tour by Brundage, the carefully orchestrated visits to see only what his hosts wanted him to see, gifts … this was a new thing … icons, elaborate examples of traditional Russian art … and how Brundage, an important collector of art objects, loved his trinkets.
When he returned he was glowing with praise. America certainly would do well to copy the enthusiasm and dedication of the Russian athletes. The state-run system? “That’s their way of life,” he said. Oh yes, politics and sport do not mix.
Would I get a response to the questions I wanted to put to Brundage, specifically about the massacre at the Plaza? Not likely. Which doesn’t mean I didn’t see the man himself. I saw him one day when I was driving on the Periferico, the highway ringing the city. I was in the right lane, minding my own business when all of a sudden there was a huge clamor of sirens and horns and flashing lights. Motorcycle cops came shooting by, cars with official Olympic markings, and in the middle of it all, a black limo with Brundage seated in the rear, back straight, eyes staring straight ahead, the perfect example of the Olympic ideal on its way to clear up some matter of utmost urgency. A few minutes later, I saw a similar entourage, this time in the lanes approaching. Same noise, lights, fanfare. Same limo containing Brundage, eyes still fixed on the near horizon, posture still erect. The motorcade had missed its exit, so now it was doubling back. I led my piece with the scene as a metaphor for the years of Olympic direction exerted by this man: Avery Brundage. Rushing to Nowhere.
I got that one transmitted, but when I tried to write about what I had seen and heard regarding the killings, there were problems. It was one of the early stories I filed from Mexico City. One or two previous ones had been sent. But all of a sudden, the transmission facilities were down when I tried to send this one. No one knew when they’d be restored. Again Chris Brasher came through for me.
“The government’s tampering with the transmission,” he said. And then he got me in touch with a Pan Am pilot he knew, who hand carried some of my pieces back to New York and turned them over to a messenger at the airport. And then the games began, and transmission was restored.
I had come from a 1964 Olympic world that had been daisyland, but now the real world was intruding. I was faced with the kind of dilemma every newspaper writer experiences, the matter of emphasis. To cover the world’s greatest sporting event and gloss over its terrible preamble, as some other writers had infuriatingly done, would be unthinkable. And yet, how long does one keep flogging it when it was obvious that the government was pretending that it never happened, and none of the Olympic delegates I had mentioned it to were inclined to take any kind of stand or even afford it more than passing recognition, if that?
; There comes a time when you can become a Johnny One Note to your readers. Yes, we agree with you. Yes, it’s deplorable. But please, not day after day of this. Cover the Olympics for a change. I had worked for a couple of years on the New York Post with Leonard Shecter, who did a magnificent job of co-authoring Jim Bouton’s hilarious baseball diary, Ball Four. But Shecter also wrote a lesser known work called The Jocks, the very title of which suggested his dislike of the sport itself. Almost every review I read of it used the buzzword “iconoclast” to describe Shecter, but I had a better descriptive for him. Bitter. Yes, he destroyed images, but he destroyed other things as well. Sports people didn’t like him. He didn’t like them. His life on the beat was not easy. The Jocks was his get-even work, and it made for uncomfortable reading. Yes, much of what he wrote was true, but it was so mean-spirited that the effect was like listening to a non-stop complainer. Is that what I wanted to be, a kind of spider, slinking around the periphery of the Olympics?
I had loved sports all my life. Sports got me to college, gave me an education, even an under-the-counter entry into journalism school, when Lou Little the football coach at Columbia, told Dean Barrett of the J-School, “I don’t care about his grades … take him; he’s a good kid.” But people such as Brundage were destroying sport at its highest level. Could I just suck it up and go back to the basketball arena and the track stadium? Well, yes. I was getting paid. And I loved the panorama of the sport itself. But what would happen as the games wound down would make the question academic and create one of the most memorable incidents in Olympic history and would turn the massacre into a footnote, in retrospect.
You remember brief snatches of exhilaration, brief bursts of emotion in the 1968 Olympics. I was sitting among the British track writers on the day that England’s Dave Hemery won the 400-meter hurdles, and when he crossed the finish line in a world record time of 48.12, they let out a roar that shook their one little area. British reserve? Not that day. The explosion that came from that collection of properly dressed journalists in their 40s and 50s was something I wish someone would have captured on film. Sometimes, in the bustle of too many events going off at once, you lose track of something, a high jump attempt while a race is in progress, a qualifier in the discus. But some instinct made me lock into Bob Beamon every time he ran down the long jump runway, and I saw his 29-2 ½, which remained the world record for 23 years, and it was as close to athletic perfection in both grace and explosive power as I’d ever seen. Only Jim Brown, on some of his more spectacular runs, could match it in my eyes.
Dr. Z Page 20