by John Barron
“Yes, the gangsters of Chicago are very famous in my country.”
“Which country do you mean?”
Belenko grinned. “I understand your point.”
They landed at Dulles Airport around 4:00 A.M. in darkness and heavy rain and drove for about an hour along back roads until the car turned into a long driveway. The headlights illuminated an imposing southern mansion built of red brick with tall windows, a double door, and a two-story veranda buttressed by white porticoes. Jim pointed to a bedroom and told him to sleep as long as he could. On the ceiling above the large bed, he spotted a fixture, either an airconditioning outlet or a smoke detector. He was sure it was a concealed television camera continuously focused upon him, but he was too exhausted to care.
Belenko awakened at midmorning startled. What’s that nigger doing in my room? Although he had never seen a black person, the prejudices against blacks he had been taught and absorbed throughout his life were thoroughly ingrained. On a scale of ten, blacks ranked in bis eyes tenth, below Asian minorities of the Soviet population, below Jews. He warily eyed the middle-aged maid, who smiled at him, said something in English he did not understand, set down a tray bearing a pot of coffee and a pot of tea and a note scribbled in Russian: “Breakfast is ready whenever you are.” While drinking tea, Belenko noticed laid out on a chair a pair of slacks, a sports shirt, socks, T-shirts, and boxer shorts, but not having been expressly told they were his, he put on his hybrid Japanese suit and went to the dining room.
There Jim introduced him to Peter, one of the three Americans who were to affect his future most significantly. Peter looked the way Belenko thought an artist or composer should; in fact, his countenance, distinguished by a handsome head of dark, curly hair, a delicate face, and black, meditative eyes, reminded Belenko of a portrait of Beethoven he had seen as a boy.
Peter was a devout Catholic, the father of eight children, an accomplished linguist, and one of the best clandestine officers the United States had. Out of the Army and graduate school, he had come to the CIA in 1950, two years after its organization. For a quarter of a century he had fought around the world on some of the fiercest and most pitiless battlefields of the subterranean war that continued to rage without pause between the Soviet Union and the West. Through combat, he had acquired an intuitive feel, an uncommon understanding of Soviet society, culture, history, the language, mentality, and ethnic idiosyncrasies of Russians.
Probably Peter still would have been somewhere abroad had he not contracted on an Asian mission a rare disease for which no cure was known. He was brought home in hope that medical researchers might devise one. Unless they succeeded, he did not have many years to live. Because of disability provisions and tax benefits, he would have profited financially by retiring. He had resolved, however, to fight as long as his body allowed.
Peter amused and relaxed Belenko, bantering with him as if they were meeting for nothing more serious than a game of golf and telling Russian jokes.
“Did you hear about the very sincere Armenian students? They went to a learned professor and asked, ‘Is it truly possible to build communism in Armenia?’
“‘Yes,’ replied the professor, ‘but why not do it to the Georgians first?’”
“That’s funny; and true, too.”
Having changed into the slacks and shirt procurred for him before he awoke, Belenko met his “baby-sitter,” Nick, who was his age. Born of Russian parents, Nick was a Marine sergeant who had volunteered for two tours in Vietnam and, Belenko surmised, at one time or another had engaged in secret operations against the Russians. He, crewcut, bulging biceps, quick reflexes, unquestioning obedience, and all, was on loan to the CIA. Confident, trained for trouble, Nick could relate to Belenko as a peer and somewhat as a Russian as well as an American. He was to be in the next weeks companion, guide, friend, and, although it was not put that way, bodyguard.
The countryside of northern Virginia, wooded, rolling, and with the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains visible from far away on a clear day, is beautiful in all seasons. But it was the man-made order of the farmlands they passed that most struck Belenko: the symmetry of the fields; the perfection of their cultivation; the well-maintained fences; the fatness of the cattle grazing in lush meadows; the painted barns; the white farmhouses that to him seemed huge; the cars, trucks, and machinery parked nearby; the apparent paucity of people working the farms.
“Where are the outhouses?” he asked.
The Americans laughed, and Peter explained how septic tanks and automatic water pumps made possible indoor plumbing in virtually all American farmhouses. “Probably there still are outhouses in some rural or mountainous regions. I just don’t know where.”
They stopped at a shopping center on the outskirts of a small Virginia town and headed toward a clothing store, but Belenko insisted on inspecting a supermarket on the way. He noticed first the smell or rather the absence of smell; then he explored and stared in ever-widening wonder. Mountains of fruit and fresh vegetables; a long bin of sausages, frankfurters, wursts, salami, bologna, cold cuts; an equally long shelf of cheeses, thirty or forty different varieties; milk, butter, eggs, more than he had ever seen in any one place; the meat counter, at least twenty meters long, with virtually every land of meat in the world — wrapped so you could take it in your hands, examine, and choose or not; labeled and graded as to quality. A date stamped on the package to warn when it would begin to spoil! And hams and chickens and turkeys! Cans and packages of almost everything edible with pictures showing their contents and labels reciting their contents. Long aisles of frozen foods, again with pictures on the packages. And juices, every kind of juice. Soaps and paper products and toiletries and much else that he did not recognize. Beer! American, German, Dutch, Danish, Australian, Mexican, Canadian beer; all cold. (How many times had he thought and even urged during seminars with the political officers that people be offered low-alcohol beer instead of vodka?) Nobody doled any of this out. You picked it out for yourself and put it in fancy, clear little bags and then in a big, expensive cart. It was all just there for anybody to take.
Turning into an aisle lined on one side with candies, confections, and nuts and on the other with cookies, crackers, and cakes, he saw another “nigger,” who cheerfully bade him “Good morning.” (There was no gainsaying it; the “nigger” was a handsome fellow except for his color, he did not look like a slave, and he was dressed in the same clean light-blue uniforms the other store workers wore.)
Never had Belenko been in a closed market selling meat or produce that did not smell of spoilage, of unwashed bins and counters, of decaying, unswept remnants of food. Never had he been in a market offering anything desirable that was not crowded inside, with lines waiting outside. Always he had been told that the masses of exploited Americans lived in the shadow of hunger and that pockets of near starvation were widespread, and he had seen photographs that seemed to demonstrate that.
If this were a real store, a woman in less than an hour could buy enough food in just this one place to feed a whole family for two weeks. But where are the people, the crowds, the lines? Ah, that proves it. This is not a real store. The people can’t afford it. If they could, everybody would be here. It’s a showplace of the Dark Forces. But I what do they do with all the meat, fruit and vegetables, milk, and everything else that they can’t keep here all the time? They must take it away for themselves every few nights and replace it.
As Peter and Nick steered him back toward the clothing store, Belenko bolted into a shop offering televisions, stereos, radios, and calculators. Several color television sets were tuned to different channels, and the brilliance and clarity of the hues as well as the diversity of the programs amazed him. So did a hand-held calculator and the technology it implied. But he was not fooled. A color television set in the Soviet Union cost a worker approximately five months’ wages, and because of difficulties with transistors and solid-state circuitry, the quality was poor. Obviously this was another s
howplace of the Dark Forces packed with merchandise affordable only by the exceedingly rich.
He had to appraise the clothing store only a minute or so to realize that it also was a fake. Here were perhaps 300 suits, along with sports jackets, overcoats, raincoats hanging openly on racks, piles of trousers and shirts lying openly on counters, ties within the reach of anybody passing; even the shoes were out in the open — and all this was guarded by only a few clerks. Peter found a section containing perhaps twenty-five suits Belenko’s size and started taking them from the rack for him to examine. They know him here, and that’s why he can do that.
A toothy, glad-handing salesman approached and among other banalities remarked, “It always makes me glad to see a father buying suits for his sons.” Belenko thought that whether planned or spontaneous, the comment, which Nick translated in a whisper, was hilarious, and thereafter Peter was known as Father Peter.
The three-piece flannel suit he selected at the advice of Peter required slight alterations, and the salesman suggested they could be made within half an hour if they had other shopping. More evidence. Who else but the Dark Forces could command such service? They purchased shirts, ties, underwear, socks, a warm-up suit and tennis shoes for jogging, a blazer, a raincoat with zip-out lining, and the finest pair of shoes Belenko had ever seen.
All of Belenko’s suspicions about the true nature of the shopping center were fully and finally validated when he saw a service station on the corner. Three cars, all, as it happened, driven by women, were being fueled at the same time, a boy was cleaning the windshield of one car, and there were no lines. In Belenko’s past life, gasoline outlets were so scarce that a wait of four or five hours for fuel was ordinary.
“I congratulate you,” Belenko said en route back to the mansion. “That was a spectacular show you put on for me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that place; it’s like one of our show kolkhozes where we take foreigners.”
Nick laughed, but not Peter. “Viktor, I give you my word that what you’ve just seen is a common, typical shopping center. There are tens of thousands of them all over America. Anywhere you go in the United States, north, south, east, west, you will see pretty much the same. Many of the shopping centers in the suburbs of our cities are bigger and fancier and nicer.”
“Can the average American worker buy what we saw there? Can he buy a color television set?”
“Yes; if he’s willing to pay more than for a black-andwhite set, he can. I don’t know what the statistics are; I would guess more families have color sets than not. It’s nothing to own a color television. But look, don’t take my word. Wait until you travel around and see for yourself.”
Why argue with him? That’s his job.
The CIA had sent some thirty books and magazines in Russian to his room, and Peter urged him to read, relax, and sleep as much as he could. He showed him a well-stocked liquor cabinet, the kitchen and refrigerator crammed with food, including smoked salmon, herring, and cold borscht, and he pointed out the room where Nick always could be reached. “I almost forgot. Come on.”
From another bedroom Peter started pushing a portable color television set toward Belenko’s room, but after a few paces he stopped. “Nick, would you mind?” For the first tune Belenko discerned that there was something physically wrong with Peter. If he exerted himself even slightly, he could barely breathe.
That afternoon and evening Belenko experienced another transcendent spiritual upheaval as he read The Gulag Archipelago. In the blackness and iniquity of the concentration camps Solzhenitsyn depicts he saw the light and purity of truth, and he trembled again as he had in the Japanese prison. He finished about 10:00 P.M., took a beer from the refrigerator, and, attracted by the brightness of the moonlight and fragrance of the country ah-, decided to drink it on the veranda. As he opened the door, two men sprang up simultaneously, one with a pistol in hand. “Please excuse us,” he said in poor Russian. “We did not know it was you. Come out and make yourself at home.”
The Dark Forces, they are not stupid. They would not tell me I could see anywhere what I saw today unless that is true — or unless they intend to imprison me or kill me. But if they’re going to kill me or imprison me, what do they care what I think? I don’t know. It can’t be true. But if it is true, if what I saw is everywhere, then something is very right here.
Jogging around the grounds early in the morning, Belenko saw a little red convertible roar up the driveway at an imprudent speed and screech to a stop. That’s a crazy car. Whoever heard of a car without a top? The driver must be crazy, too. But what a girl!
Out stepped a voluptuous, lithe young woman, whose beguiling brown eyes and windblown auburn hair made her look wild and mischievous to him. Anna, as she called herself, spoke Russian melodiously and with the fluency of a native, but she was from the Midwest, having mastered the language in school and during travels in the Soviet Union. Her command of the contemporary vernacular, her seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of his homeland, and the skill with which she put him at ease, persuaded Belenko that she worked closely with the important Russians who had taken refuge in the United States.
Because she continuously studied the Soviet Union from perspectives denied him, Anna was able to fascinate and enlighten Belenko with facts and vistas he had not heard or seen before. Her revelations concerning the dissident movement and samizdat (underground) publishing in the Soviet Union as well as the number, diversity, and influence of Soviet nationals who had preceded him to the West surprised and heartened him. I am not alone then. Others have realized, too.
And her demonstrable understanding of the Soviet Union persuaded him that she might also understand him. She was the first person to whom he could release the accumulated and repressed thoughts, anger, hatred that had driven him away. Once the flow began, it swelled into a torrent, and Anna, who had indicated she would leave at noon, stayed the day to listen.
In listening to Belenko during these first days, the overriding purpose of Peter, Anna and other CIA officers was to assess bun as a human being and, accordingly, to propose any modifications in standard resettlement procedures likely to help him adjust and adapt Luckily for both Belenko and the United States, they did understand him well. And their analysis and recommendations were to permanently and felicitously shape the behavior of the government toward him. Despite the simultaneous clamor from various segments of the intelligence community for an opportunity to question bun, the CIA restricted his debriefings to an absolute limit of four hours a day. It allocated his first two working hours, when he would be freshest, to tutoring in English, the one tool most indispensable to his new life. Afternoons and evenings were reserved for reading, study, and excursions planned to show him American life. Save for a few installations, he would be shown anything in the country he asked to see, however inconvenient the showing. And on weekends he would fly, actually take the controls, soar, zoom, dive, roll.
The value of the MiG-25 alone was so immense as to defy calculation in monetary terms, and the CIA fully intended to guarantee Belenko a secure and affluent future. But pending his final resettlement, there would be no mention of money or compensation unless he broached the subject.
These decisions reflected several basic conclusions about Belenko. He craved freedom and independence, although his concept of freedom was far from crystallized in his mind. Presently, flying symbolized freedom to nun, and he had to fly. Otherwise, he would feel himself imprisoned, and the consequent frustrations might erupt in the form of aberrant behavior. While he unavoidably would be dependent during his work with the government and initial orientation to the United States, his social integration must begin at once so he could see that he was progressing toward ultimate independence and self-reliance. His motivation was purely ideological, and he would be affronted unless his contributions were accepted in the same spirit he offered them. Any suggestion that he had fled for materialistic reasons, that he had come to sell the MiG-25 and
his information, would cheapen Americans in his eyes and confirm the worst the Party said about them. He must be treated as neither merchant nor ward but as a teammate. Finally, he would believe nothing which he could not see, then comprehend through his own thought processes. One should and must tell him the truth, show him the truth. But in the end, he would have to discover the truth for himself.
Belenko was incredulous when Peter and Anna generally outlined the program charted for him without, of course, explaining much of the rationale behind it The stated willingness of the Americans to let him fly, much less so soon, impressed and touched him. It all sounded so logical, so sensible, so generous, so good. It is too good to be true. They are just being clever in ways t do not know. They will not let me see everything. I will test them and make them reveal themselves.
Sure that he was asking the impossible, Belenko said he most wanted to tour a U.S. Air Force fighter base and go aboard an aircraft carrier. Peter acted as if the requests were routine and reasonable. The visit to an air base posed no problem; the Air Force should be able to arrange it within a couple of weeks. As for the carrier, he would have to ascertain from the Navy when one would be close enough ashore for them to fly out. It would just be a question of when. Father Peter, he’s a good actor.
An emergency or problem of surpassing urgency delayed the beginning of the announced regimen. In the note Belenko drafted in English back in Chuguyevka after he decided to flee, he intended to say, “Contact a representative of the American intelligence service. Conceal and guard the aircraft. Do not allow anyone near it” What he actually wrote in the language he never had studied or heard spoken was: “Quickly call representative American intelligence service. Airplane camouflage. Nobody not allowed to approach.” When the Japanese translated the message from English into their own language, the meaning that emerged was: “…Aircraft booby-trapped. Do not touch it”
Gingerly peering into the cockpit, the Japanese were further alarmed by the red buttons labeled in Russian “Danger.” Apprehensions heightened when they and their American collaborators surmised that the safety catches which would prevent the buttons from doing whatever they were supposed to do were missing. If someone accidentally touched something, would the priceless MiG-25 blow up? Until definitive answers were forthcoming, examination of the plane could not begin, and only Belenko could supply the answers.