Kryuchkov really must have thought he was fooling everyone. There was no shame to his public relations schemes. A man of the old order, he was sure he could master the new. He had the arrogance of a man who watched television once and was convinced he understood it. By 1990, the KGB even opened a press office and put a general in charge of “facilitating press relations.” At one affair, Kryuchkov invited all the female correspondents in Moscow for an “interview,” where he treated them with all the courtliness a scoundrel can muster. Waiters in formal dress brought the ladies their parting gifts: bottles of sweet Soviet champagne and a red, ersatz-leather-bound two-volume history of the Soviet secret services, autographed by Kryuchkov himself. What did he want out of this? Did Kryuchkov expect the reporters to rush to their keyboards and tap out feature stories comparing the KGB to the League of Women Voters?
One morning, on Komsomolskaya Pravda’s front page, under the headline “MISS KGB,” there was a photograph of a pretty young woman named Katya Mayorova, the holder of the world’s only “security services beauty title.” It was a curious pose. She was making erotic work of strapping on a bulletproof vest. The article said that Comrade Mayorova would soon appear on the television program Good Evening Moscow to make “announcements” about KGB operations. It said that Katya wore her bulletproof vest with “an exquisite softness, like a Pierre Cardin model.” Beyond “mere beauty,” among her many charms was an ability to “deliver a karate kick to her enemy’s head.”
I called the press center and asked if I might interview Miss KGB. I thought everyone at the KGB’s Lubyanka headquarters would get a good laugh out of that. But ten minutes later a call came back, confirming an interview appointment at the headquarters of the KGB.
“May I bring a camera?” I said.
“We would expect you to,” came the answer.
At the appointed hour I parked in front of one of the auxiliary buildings just off Lubyanka Square. I gave my name to a receptionist and sat down to wait for my audience with the reigning queen. In the meantime, I noticed that every so often an ordinary person off the street would come in and shove an envelope or even a packet of documents into a large mailbox. This was where people came with their appeals and their complaints. It was a bitter reminder of what this place was—still was. I thought of Lydia Chukovskaya’s novel Sofia Petrovna, her fictionalized account of her days spent trying to get the secret police to tell her what had happened to her husband; I thought of Akhmatova’s days in line, waiting to know the fate of her son. And I imagined the scene downstairs at the end of the day, a few agents sitting around the furnace, laughing and emptying the mail into the fire.
“Mr. Remnick?”
It was Katya Mayorova, splendidly turned out in an angora sweater and a pair of tight Italian jeans.
In the presence of a KGB “press officer,” Katya answered my questions—or didn’t. She said the contest had taken place “in private” and even the number of contestants was a secret. That there obviously had never been any contest at all was, I supposed, a given and did not bear mentioning. But Katya, for someone trained in “kill methods” and marksmanship by the most feared organization in the world, was charming. She was making terrific work of this. With her combination of Miss America sweetness and a veiled sense of danger, she was satisfying some base fantasy that I could not quite identify. What? The Rosy Executioner? Mata Hari? No, she said she doesn’t “necessarily only date KGB men.” Yes, she had been getting quite a number of calls since the Komsomolskaya Pravda item appeared. “Men are the same everywhere,” she said, rolling her eyes like a true Valley Girl. When I asked her to pose for a picture, she sidled up to a statue of “Iron Feliks” Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the secret police, and cooed.
It was getting late, and I wanted to stop by Lubyanka Square outside. The city’s leading democrats were going to unveil the first major monument to the victims of the regime: a huge stone taken from Solovki, a labor camp established on a White Sea island by Lenin. I asked Katya if she would be going to the ceremony. She blushed, but then recovered with an answer that I imagined was highlighted in the daily briefing book of the KGB’s public relations campaign. “Tens of thousands of innocent KGB men were also killed,” she said. “And so I’ll go to the monument tonight. I think of it as my monument, too. All of ours.”
Outside it was snowing lightly and a small group of demonstrators had already begun to gather. They carried signs saying “The KGB Can Never Wash the Blood from Its Hands” and “Bring the KGB to Justice!” Slowly, several hundred people assembled around the stone as darkness fell. The ceremony began. Yuri Afanasyev, representing Memorial, took the microphone and in a voice that rang out across Lubyanka Square, he said, “Never before has a regime spent seventy years waging such a brutal war against its own people. Blessed are those who died in the camps and were hungry and cold.” Oleg Volkov, a former prisoner of Solovki, pointed across the traffic to the statue of Dzerzhinsky and declared that the time had come for “false idols to be toppled.” Priests in dark cassocks chanted prayers over the rock. People laid flowers on the stone and wept. Others carried candles and shielded the flames with their hands from the wind. The cars coming around the traffic circle slowed to catch a glimpse of this strange ceremony, and the snow fell harder, and then one of Sakharov’s closest friends, the human rights champion Sergei Kovalev, warned everyone. He said what everyone really needed to hear, that “nothing has changed yet, that we the people are still down here, and they, the KGB, are still over there.”
No lie was too big for Vladimir Aleksandrovich. When a New Times correspondent asked whether the KGB kept files on Soviet citizens, Kryuchkov was adamant: “Ask a KGB man that and he will laugh. You might find such things in other countries, but not here.”
The “new KGB” under Gorbachev fed the correspondents spy stories as if they were bird seed, and they were impossible to resist. Even before Kryuchkov’s arrival, they let a British journalist spend a few days debriefing the defector Kim Philby. Philby, a rat forever pretending to be a mouse, did his Honorable Englishman routine to perfection, waxing on about his service to ideals and complaining about the delay in getting copies of the Times and the Independent. Actually, Philby was a terrible drunk and the KGB treated him like a pathetic dependent whose bedpan needed constant changing. When Philby died in 1988, the KGB managed to leak very selectively the time and place of the funeral. Some of the British papers played the story as if it were the signal event of the century.
With Kryuchkov, the public relations campaign widened. An official in the Foreign Ministry press department—a KGB man himself, to be sure—let me know that if I wanted, I could have “a cup of tea and a chat” with Yevgeny Ivanov. In British tabloid language of the time, this was Yevgeny Ivanov, the “Slavic Mystery Man,” who slept with “Good Time Girl” Christine Keeler, who “Coaxed Valuable Secrets” from John Profumo, the minister of war, who “Toppled Tory Government.” In setting up the meeting with Ivanov, the KGB showed a New York publicity agent’s sense of timing. Scandal, a breezy reenactment of the 1963 Profumo affair, was, at that very moment, playing in theaters in Britain and the United States. The film had a lot of yuppie appeal, what with its orgies and Decline and Fall accents.
I sat waiting for Ivanov in the dim Foreign Ministry café, wondering what this spy-novel figure would look like, how he’d behave. He’d been the Red Rogue in a story hardly anyone remembered anymore. The year was 1963. Under the tutelage of the osteopath Stephen Ward, Christine Keeler and her friend Mandy Rice-Davies slept their way to greater glory. The war minister, Profumo, who was married to a movie actress named Valerie Hobson, had his affair with Keeler and fell into disgrace after he lied to Parliament. He fell lower still when Keeler claimed that she had also slept with Ivanov, a KGB agent working undercover in the London embassy as Soviet military attaché. Keeler later made money telling her story. Ward, her mentor, killed himself. And so on.
A rumpled older man approached my table. He moved wi
th a shy shuffle and seemed vaguely sad, as if he had gotten terribly lost and was too embarrassed to ask directions to the exit door.
“I am Yevgeny Ivanov,” he said. “Sit down? Yes?”
In the legend of the Profumo affair, Ivanov had fluent English and public-school manners. Lord Astor liked to have him around. The man at my table could barely speak English and was very grateful when we switched to Russian.
“Slava Bogu,” he sighed. Thank God.
I told him the critics in the West thought Scandal was a pretty good movie and had stirred interest once more in the Profumo affair and the name Yevgeny Ivanov. “Your name is in the papers. You’re famous again,” I said.
“Ach, ach, why is everyone so interested in this?” he said. “Why bring up this whole dirty story again? Our relations with the English are getting better. There was just a summit meeting with Thatcher and Gorbachev. We’re waiting for Queen Elizabeth, to see and listen to her. And against this background, to stir up mud from twenty-five years ago? What forces can gain from that?”
Ivanov said he had worked for the Defense Ministry “analyzing documents” until 1982 and then for Novosti, the press agency that was also a well-known center for the KGB. He was vague about what he had done at Novosti, yet everyone knew that it was a holding pen for agents. Despite Ivanov’s stagy lack of interest in the headiest days of his life, he said he was thinking of writing a memoir.
In that spirit, I asked him if he had ever slept with Keeler. And had he coaxed her to give up Profumo’s whispered confidences?
“Never, never, never,” Ivanov said. “My relationship? None at all. I never paid any attention to her. I say this honestly. Never. What kind of star was she? Okay, she had long legs, but that kind of girl exists even in Moscow.
“Some people say I gave her the task of pumping Profumo on where and what kind of nuclear weapons would be delivered to West Germany. That’s nonsense. I could have done that better myself, just asking. It wasn’t a secret that I, as a military man, as a Soviet man, am interested in those nuclear weapons and when they’ll be delivered to Germany. And they called me a spy!”
Ivanov said he thought that he’d been trapped in a conspiracy that had nothing whatever to do with him or the Soviet Union. When the news broke, he said, he quickly realized that all his “old friends” in the British Parliament and the dinner party circuit would no longer talk with him or be seen with him. It was time to close up shop.
“I left London and a week later Keeler’s ‘life story’ was in the press,” Ivanov said. “I don’t know if she ever went to college, but she could never have written that stuff herself. She could not even have imagined it by herself. It was all prepared beforehand. Some sort of group was interested in Profumo’s downfall. What group, I don’t know. He had enemies and they needed material to compromise him.”
Ivanov shrugged. His whole physical bearing was a shrug. He reminded me of a retired ballplayer who had ended his career on a missed shot, a dropped pass in the ultimate game. He was famous when he would have been happier in obscurity. He was there eating with me because someone told him he had to, because it would serve an interest. “I guess I may be able to travel now to Britain, but I don’t want to,” he said. “And why? Because there is so much press in England. And if I go to England, and if Christine Keeler hears I’m there, she’ll just call in the press and say, ‘I slept with him,’ once again. She needs more money and she’ll make it if I go to London. It’s just not worth it.”
And so I wrote my story. Months later, Ivanov got a fat advance from some foreign publishers. He was ready to tell all. Had he slept with Keeler? Had he pirated secrets from the War Department? Of course, Ivanov wrote. Of course!
A few months later, at an interminable press conference at the Foreign Ministry, I was tapped on the shoulder and told there was a very important phone call for me. It was General Karbainov, the KGB’s press officer, asking whether I would like to meet Edward Lee Howard.
Howard was the first CIA operative ever to defect to the Soviet Union and the KGB. He had been forced out of the CIA in 1983 as a bad security risk for failing a series of polygraph tests about his private conduct. The CIA was also convinced Howard had sold out a number of key “assets” in Moscow, including one aviation expert who was eventually executed for espionage. Howard defected in 1986, a “walk-in” at a Soviet embassy in Eastern Europe—probably Budapest.
Karbainov told me to go home and expect a phone call “confirming everything” at noon.
I was at the apartment in five minutes. The phone rang precisely at noon.
“You know the cuckoo clock at the ‘Mezh’?” the voice said, using the foreigners’ nickname for the Mezhdunarodnaya, the International Hotel. “I’ll meet you under the cuckoo clock tomorrow at ten-thirty in the morning.”
I said a quick okay and the line went dead. (As it always does in these stories.)
So once more, life would imitate trash fiction. Or the other way around. No doubt, by arranging a meeting with The Washington Post, Howard and probably the KGB itself were playing yet another clever game of “international intelligence.” And yet it all seemed so … dumb.
On Saturday morning, at the appointed hour exactly, under the monstrous cuckoo clock with a squawking copper rooster on top, a man neither short nor tall, neither skinny nor fat, neither handsome nor ugly, tapped me on the shoulder.
“Hi. I’m Ed Howard,” he said. “Good to meet you. Why don’t we go?”
The International Hotel was the one place in the entire Soviet Union in the glasnost era that resembled Business-Class America. There were upholstered “conversation areas,” an atrium with glass elevators, shops with goods in them, restaurants with food in them. Nothing like Russia.
“I like it ’cause it looks like one of those malls back home,” Howard said. “Sometimes I eat upstairs at the German beer place, and I like the ice cream parlor a lot.”
Howard headed toward the door, walking in that quick two-step that hit men use after they’ve finished a job. He seemed nervous, jumpy. But he never ran, never hid his face. The lobby was filled with Westerners, businessmen mainly, tired-looking men who roamed the lobby waiting for the next meeting, aimless as guppies in a bowl. Possibly one or more of them knew who Howard was, if only vaguely, as a distant scandal in a newspaper story, a man who humiliated the FBI and CIA when he slipped through their surveillance in New Mexico and left for Soviet sanctuary. Possibly—possibly not. No one seemed to be paying him special attention.
How was it that a defector—one suspected of selling secrets to the KGB—could roam around in public? I asked him. Wasn’t he afraid that someone from the CIA station at the U.S. embassy here might try to grab him? Wouldn’t he be recognized by some computer-chip salesman from Tacoma who all of a sudden would point and say, “Hey you, aren’t you …?”
“No way,” Howard said. “If you asked a thousand people on the streets in Washington, D.C., or in a normal American city, say Cleveland, Ohio, ‘Who is Ed Howard?’ nine hundred and ninety-nine would never know who I am, much less what I look like.”
And the CIA?
“They have better things to do with their time.”
Outside in the driveway, Howard opened the rear door of a black Volga, the preferred car of countless midranking Communist Party, military, and KGB officials.
“We’re going to the dacha,” Howard said in terrible Russian, and the KGB driver, whose English was undoubtedly fluent, headed out Kutuzovsky Prospekt toward the southwest outskirts of Moscow. After leaving the main road, the driver took a deliberately circuitous route toward Howard’s place. He took every curve at stomach-turning speed and kept glancing at us in the rearview mirror.
Howard rolled his eyes.
“On the way back, don’t bother going this way,” he told the driver. “After all, what’s the point?” The driver was clearly not just a driver, but he indulged Howard with a nod just the same.
Dachaland, at least Howard’s neck
of it in the town of Barvikha, was a mix of ordinary peasant huts and the soaring brick-and-glass cottages of the Soviet power elite. Not far away from Howard’s place, the notoriously anti-Semitic and unconscionably popular painter Ilya Glazunov lived in a multistory brick monstrosity; elsewhere there were KGB officials, Communist Party men, retired generals.
We pulled up to a smart, two-story brick house surrounded by a fence. There were two car sheds in the yard, one for the Volga, the other for Howard’s own Volvo. A retired couple lived in a small cottage on the grounds; the woman cooked and cleaned for Howard and the man tended the garden, growing apples, strawberries, roses, and potatoes. The couple called Howard “Ivan Ivanovich,” Mr. Nobody. In the backyard there was a guard booth where two young KGB men kept a round-the-clock watch on Howard. Inside the gate there were infrared devices to signal the presence of intruders. Howard, who also had a spacious apartment just off the Arbat in downtown Moscow, was quick to mock his landlords as poor, shiftless Russians. He pointed to the second-floor window. “They never finished the construction up there. Typical. They probably ran out of money three quarters of the way through.”
Inside, the house was set up with well-made, if wan, Soviet furniture and top-of-the-line Western video and audio equipment. There were two bedrooms, a large living room, a deck, and a study. The living-room ceiling was twenty-five feet high. Howard’s library was slim: Lenin: His Life and Work, the Bible, Russian for Everybody, and a Len Deighton thriller. He said he picked up USA Today and Newsweek on his trips downtown, and the KGB bought him subscriptions to National Geographic, Money, and Computer World. To pass the time, Howard played chess with his guards or watched one of his three hundred videocassettes. In his study, an aerie that overlooked the living room, Howard kept two computers. He used them for his “economic consulting work” at a Soviet bank, he said. He also loved to play computer games for hours: “My favorite is this one, SDI,” he said. “It’s American-made software. The premise is that the KGB has taken over the country and is going to attack the West. So you fight the KGB. I always win. But my friends always lose.”
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