Although Khrushchev survived the crisis, the Cuban failure contributed to his fall from power in October 1964. But it was Kennedy who showed the most visible change in the immediate aftermath of the event. In June 1963, the U.S. president, speaking at American University, called on the Soviet Union to work with the United States to help reduce international tensions and combat the threat of nuclear war, partly through a nuclear test ban treaty. Placing missiles next door to the United States made Washington seriously reckon with Moscow.
Kennedy’s assassination shocked the Soviet leadership and put an end to optimism that relations between the superpowers would improve. The Kremlin was also wary about the Kennedy assassin’s brief residence in the Soviet Union. Moscow worried it would arouse suspicion, when in fact the KGB had assessed Lee Harvey Oswald as mentally disturbed. He tried to commit suicide shortly after his arrival in Moscow before moving to Minsk. Far from being a target for recruitment, Oswald was suspected as a possible CIA agent, since Langley was known to actively recruit former marines. Oswald was given a residency permit, but there was little interference with his departure when he decided to leave in 1962.
7
In early 1963, in the wake of the Penkovsky case, I was transferred to the First Chief Directorate (FCD), the foreign intelligence wing of the KGB. It was a significant promotion, since the FCD was the KGB’s crown jewel. I’d be working in the Fourteenth department, a small group that ran foreign counterintelligence. Later expanded and renamed Directorate K, the department would remain my professional home for twenty-four years. The directorate’s chief duties were providing security for Soviet citizens abroad—that is, fending off recruitment and defection attempts—and working against foreign intelligence agencies seeking to establish contacts and recruit Soviet diplomats, military officers and KGB and GRU intelligence personnel. A captain by then, I was assigned to London to keep tabs on Soviet citizens in England. My cover would be as a representative of Sovexportfilm, the trade organization that, as the name suggests, sold Soviet films abroad.
After six years conducting largely routine work for the SCD, I found the First Directorate a welcome change. I’d probably won the London assignment because of my work on the Penkovsky case; I’d also been to England before on an operation that proceeded without a hitch. Transfers between the FCD and the SCD took place frequently. Intelligence officers who were compromised—usually because they’d become known to foreign intelligence services—were routinely reassigned to work in counterintelligence at home. I’d be replacing someone sent back for that very reason. I was given the KGB files on our comrades living in England—including some KGB officers—to study closely. I had five months. I also researched SIS recruitment techniques. I knew something about British intelligence, of course, but had to learn precisely how Soviet institutions abroad had been targeted. I was also assigned the task of devising a plan for springing George Blake from prison. Once in Britain, I’d contact locals who’d pass the information to him.
Blake was the son of a Dutch mother and Sephardic Jewish father from Istanbul, both naturalized British citizens. He served in the Dutch resistance and the British Royal Navy before being recruited by the SIS in 1944. Posted to South Korea in 1949, he was captured by invading North Korean forces the following year. He volunteered to work for the KGB during his detention, and he was recruited as agent DIOMID. Back in England in 1953, he betrayed dozens of Western agents. He also exposed the Berlin tunnel, a five-hundred-meter underground passage from West to East Berlin used to eavesdrop on telephone lines running out of Soviet intelligence headquarters in nearby Karlshorst.5 Two years later, in 1955, he was posted to Berlin.
Blake was betrayed by a Polish defector in 1961 and sentenced to forty-two years in jail. He escaped in October 1966, aided by three Irish inmates he’d befriended in jail. Familiar with the intelligence Blake had provided us, I knew how seriously the KGB leadership took his case. In the end, a KGB plan accomplished his escape, although I don’t know how many of my ideas, if any, were included.
Three months into my preparation work, the head of my section, Ivan Grigoriev, called me to his office. “Victor Ivanovich,” he said, “I have some unpleasant news for you. The Central Committee has decided to reduce the number of our cover positions. Sovexportfilm is one of them.” Grigoriev explained that since Sovexportfilm was ostensibly a for-profit entity, the idea was to use it to actually earn some hard currency instead of chiefly providing cover for intelligence. So I wouldn’t be going to England after all.
Grigoriev gave me two options. I could return to the SCD or, if I agreed, he’d recommend me for a post in Australia, where a current officer had just been compromised by Australian intelligence. I should actually say the intelligence officer, because he was the only one posted there, apart from a cipher clerk. I agreed and then prepared for another assignment abroad. Again I had to familiarize myself with files about the Soviets living in the country in which I’d be posted. I also dug into the archives to study what we knew about the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS). Meanwhile, I began the paperwork process for the Party’s Central Committee to clear me for the job.
In October 1963, Elena and I packed our belongings, turned over our small two-room apartment to Elena’s mother and left Moscow with Alyosha, our four-year-old son.
8
We touched down in the Australian capital Canberra. My predecessor met us there and dropped us off in a hotel so we could relax after our long flight. But just when he should have been leaving, he made a proposal. “Victor Ivanovich, I think we should go fishing now.”
It was code for talking about business. I flashed a glance at Elena before answering, “You go on downstairs and I’ll meet you in a couple of minutes.”
Elena exploded the moment we were alone. “Who is this man to tell you to work immediately?” I remained silent. “You’re earnest and a hard driver,” Elena continued. “I know that. But you’re also a husband and father. How can you leave us now?!” she cried. “We’re exhausted. What right does he have to tell you to go at a time like this?! Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”
I was as calm as I could be. “Look,” I said slowly, “I came here to work. You know I have a difficult job. There’ll always be lots of work to do, and you simply have to put up with it. That’s all—there’s simply no other choice.”
Elena fought back tears. I washed up in the bathroom, took my coat and briefcase and left.
Making sacrifices for the KGB was difficult, but Elena and I had both agreed to do just that. Back in Moscow, she had to switch out of the SCD because husbands and wives were forbidden to work in the same directorates. She was assigned instead to be a translator in the KGB’s political publishing wing. In Australia, she would work as the ambassador’s translator and secretary. There was always a lot to do, which kept her mind off things. But she found it hard to adjust to life in a new country.
There was reason to be happy, however. Our living conditions were a marked improvement from Moscow. Leaving snowy Russia, we seemed to have touched down on another planet, amid desert flora and fauna, and with colorful parakeets and parrots flying around our lawns. We lived upstairs in a consulate building, fifteen kilometers from Lake George. I was also given a raise—enough to buy a second suit and pair of shoes in Sydney. Australians, like the English, lived better than we Russians, but the disparity didn’t give me much pause. Most Soviets at home didn’t think about living conditions abroad; there wasn’t much information about it, and in any case they got on with their lives as best they could. It was for their sake I was now adjusting to a completely different environment.
My cover—as it would be for many of my future postings—was as cultural attaché. I had no supervisors and did my work as I saw fit. I filed regular reports about the activities of the embassy staff—despite its tiny number—as well as members of the large Russian immigrant community, many of whom had fled after the 1905 Revolution and World War II. I had no instructions from the Ce
nter to establish contacts with foreigners, let alone recruit them.
One of my assignments was to travel with the Omsk Chorus, from the eponymous Siberian region. The group was popular, especially in Sydney, where many Russian émigrés lived. Touring with the singers provided cover for operations such as tracking Vladimir Petrov, a KGB cipher expert who defected in April 1954. Petrov had been posted to Australia by secret service chairman Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s feared henchman. After Stalin’s death and Beria’s arrest and execution in 1953, Petrov was accused—by the ambassador to Australia among others—of being close to Beria. Recalled to Moscow in April 1954, he made a lastminute decision to defect in order to avoid arrest and possible execution. Requesting asylum, he walked out of the embassy with whatever documents he could lug with him, leaving his wife, Evdokia, entirely in the dark. He later explained that he didn’t want to compromise her, allowing her to return to her family in the Soviet Union if she wanted.6
Once the KGB realized Petrov had defected, officers seized his wife. But word got out and an angry crowd of Australians gathered at the Sydney airport to protest when she was forced onto a flight home. As the plane stopped off in Darwin, police and the ASIS intercepted the KGB officers, allowing the frightened Petrova to speak to her husband by phone. He persuaded her to stay, and the two were given new identities and a house in the suburbs.
Petrov exposed a large number of KGB agents, including a network of spies seeking to penetrate Australia’s nuclear development program. He also described Soviet cipher techniques and gave details about how Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, two of the famous Cambridge Five group of British spies, defected to the Soviet Union. The Australian public was incensed over the KGB’s espionage, so the Soviet embassy packed up and left for several years.
Now, having obtained an address outside Sydney where Petrov was said to be living, I’d try to track him down. During a day off from escorting the Omsk Chorus, I drove out to the house and photographed it. But Petrov had since moved on.
My Australian tour was cut short in February 1964. Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer serving in the SCD, had defected during a trip to Geneva as part of a Soviet disarmament delegation. Nosenko had worked in the Sixth department—responsible for keeping tabs on American tourists—and sat near me in Lubyanka. Although I’d never worked with him, I’d often seen him in the hallways, so there was a chance he could expose me as a former SCD English department officer.
Continuing fallout from the Cuban missile crisis kept Moscow’s relations with Washington particularly tense. To avoid provocations by foreign intelligence services, KGB officers around the world were recalled. The cable ordering me home came just over a year into my tour. When my replacement arrived in November, Elena, Alyosha and I left for Moscow.
3
COLD WAR FRONT LINE: BEIRUT
1
The Aeroflot plane taxied down a snow-swept runway, past groves of dark spruce trees and rumbling Soviet airport trucks. I felt pleased to be back on familiar ground, but returning home from Australia would have felt better if it hadn’t been for a recent political thunderbolt. A month earlier, in October, a coterie of party functionaries had toppled Khrushchev and installed the uniquely uninspiring Leonid Brezhnev in his place.
Those stolid men represented the mass of Party cadres who were no longer able to countenance Khrushchev’s anti-Stalinism. Led by their chief ideologue, Mikhail Suslov, the Brezhnev group put an end to boat-rocking questions about the past, setting up a regime that provided for their mutual security. That arrangement would eventually lead to massive stagnation in the 1970s, when—unable to address the state’s inefficiencies—the Kremlin “reformed” by allowing corruption to spread throughout society.
In November 1964 it was already clear that the change in leadership wasn’t helping Soviet relations with the United States. Hostile conditions complicate intelligence work, and I worried that the current state of foreign affairs would affect my job reassignment.
Considerations about work evaporated as soon as we entered the airport. A fellow officer who had been waiting for me at the gate took me aside to inform me of a personal tragedy. My brother Pyotr had died of hemophilia. I couldn’t believe it. Pyotr was only thirty years old. He’d just sent a lighthearted letter to me in Australia saying he’d recently married. Everything seemed to be going well for him—he was even enjoying his job as an engineer in a factory in Belorussia.
I was granted leave the following day to fly to the funeral in the Belorussian city of Mogilëv. On my return, I was informed that I’d been posted to the Southeast Asia department. My next tour would be in Rangoon.
I knew the weather would be hot in Burma, but I was young and willing to go anywhere. In any case, such decisions were out of my control—I had to accept what I was given. I hoped advancement would come from my resolve to do as thorough a job as possible on each tour, something I also demanded from my subordinates. I’d also learned a key characteristic for remaining in the good graces of my superiors: modesty. Those who were too eager to please the service’s leadership often drew its ire instead.
Shortly before my departure, Southeast Asia department chief Anatoly Gusakov called me into his office to discuss a common Lubyanka theme: the KGB’s advantage over the CIA. “We recruited our first agent in America in 1923, and they didn’t even have an intelligence service before the war,” he said. “But they’re making up for lost time. They’ve been stepping up their activities targeting our officers in the past several years.” He paused and I nodded.
Indeed, the United States had reorganized its wartime Office of Strategic Services into the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947. By the 1960s, American officers still weren’t as experienced as we were in clandestine operations. They were less careful to cover their identities and didn’t have nearly as many good Russian speakers as we had English experts. But the CIA was learning, sending out officers increasingly better trained in languages and foreign affairs.
The KGB was adapting too. The FCD’s Fourteenth department was recently revamped and renamed the Second service and then Directorate K in quick succession. “We have to stay on top,” Gusakov continued. “So a decision has been made to regularize our countermeasures in a systemic approach. The Central Committee is concerned that we don’t have enough information on the CIA, particularly after the Berlin and Cuban crises. Chairman Semichastnyi has drawn up plans for a set of special groups to counteract CIA intelligence operations against Soviet citizens.”
I wondered how all that applied to me. Had something happened in Burma? Gusakov wouldn’t be telling me about the Americans if it didn’t concern an operation in which I was—or was to be—involved. “The first group is already being set up,” he continued. “It’s going to be in Lebanon. You’ve been picked to go to Beirut. Your main goal will be to penetrate the U.S. embassy and other American organizations and collect information on CIA activities.”
So again my plans were thrown to the winds, but this time the choice made sense. I’d be working in a Middle Eastern crossroads, a transportation nexus and financial center. Known to be socially liberal, the city was a playground for diplomatic, intelligence and business communities—the Paris of the Middle East. I didn’t know much about the region, but I’d have time to study our files. So much for Rangoon. This prospect was far more alluring.
We left in the fall of 1965. Since Aeroflot didn’t yet fly to Beirut, Elena, Alyosha and I took a plane to Damascus, where we were met by my superior officer, who was in charge of counterintelligence in Beirut. Rem Krassilnikov had served in the SCD English department, which he left the year before I joined it. He had then served a tour in Ottawa before becoming deputy rezident in Lebanon. In time, he would become a KGB superstar with international billing.
Krassilnikov was friendly, obviously intelligent and had a shy way of smiling. He seemed genuinely happy to see me. Depositing our few bags in the trunk of his car, we set off for Beirut, three hours away. The relatively plush U.S.
mission stood on the Mediterranean shore. In contrast, the tiny Soviet compound—where we were to be temporarily housed—was squeezed behind an imposing fence in the downtown area. But its two whitewashed, modern buildings were adequate and came with a children’s playground and a soccer field.
The city was fascinating. Much of the boxy new architecture invading the ancient sites was uninspired, but the Beirut peninsula itself, with an embankment stretching for miles along the Mediterranean Sea coast, was stunning. To the north rose Lebanon’s famous wooded hills, with their picturesque valleys and ski resorts.
After we dropped off our luggage, Krassilnikov invited us to his apartment in a standard residential building not far from the embassy. His wife, Nelly, to whom I took an instant liking, prepared lunch. (Ninel, her full name, was “Lenin” spelled backward. Krassilnikov’s own un-Russian first name, Rem, stood for revolutsion-nyi mir: “revolutionary world.” Many parents gave their children such names soon after the Revolution.)
Once we sat down, Krassilnikov poured me a glass of araq, an anise liqueur, and added ice cubes and water, which turned the liquid milky. I didn’t much like the sharp, sweet taste. The Hennessey cognac procured by our embassy in Australia was much better. “Get used to it, Victor,” Krassilnikov said. “It’s what everyone drinks.” Krassilnikov was right, and I had plenty of opportunities to acquire a taste for it. Lebanese food, however, required no such introduction. Restaurants often served twenty to thirty small plates of delicious hummus, baba ganouj, kebabs and other hors d’oeuvres of all kinds. But that would come later. As we sat talking around the Krassilnikov dining room table, my new boss raised his glass for a toast. “Nu, za vsyo khoroshoie,” he said (Well, to all things good). I felt certain we’d get on well.
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