Tool of the Trade Read online

So to a certain cast of mind, he was triply not to be trusted: an intellectual, a German, a Jew. Why would a German Jew, however lapsed in his religion, want to spy for Hitler? This was not the kind of question that much bothered that cast of mind. Ulinov and his wife were locked up pending transfer to Lubyanka, the forbidding prison in Moscow, but they never made the trip. Sometime during the siege, they either starved to death or were executed. The records claimed execution but, perversely, that status was sometimes conferred after the fact. An informal quota system.

  It would be many years before Nikola would know any of this. The authorities explained that his parents had been taken from him by the Nazis, and he had no reason to question that.

  Having missed the exodus, Nikola wound up living with Arkady Vavilov, who had been his father’s elderly boss, and the old man’s wife. He could hardly have found better surrogate parents than the Vavilovs. Missing their own grown children, they showered love and attention on him. What was more important to Nikola’s tortuous future, though, was the fact that Vavilov was a linguist and a language teacher. And both the Vavilovs spoke English-American English, having spent years in New York.

  Foreign languages were nothing new to the boy. Nikola’s parents had brought him up to be equally fluent in German and Russian, and found that he was a thirsty sponge for languages. Professor Ulinov had amused himself by teaching the boy basic vocabularies in French, Japanese, and Finnish. His surrogate father added a little to two of those, but concentrated on the language of those strange folks who would eventually bring the Soviet Union the Lend-Lease Act and other problems.

  Vavilov had lots of time, since his part of the university had been shut down. They made a game, if a rather grim one, out of the English lessons. When Arkady or his wife finally came home from the long ration line, they would take Nikola’s portion of the bread (and much of their own, which he would never know) and carefully divide it into sixteen equal portions. Each piece would be a reward for a lesson properly recited. Hunger turned out to be an effective aid to what would later be called “the acquisition of languages”—especially during the hardest times, when an individual’s bread ration was down to four ounces a day. When the siege lifted after nine hundred days, Nikola was not quite nine years old, but his English was better than that of most Americans a couple of years older. This did not escape the government’s attention for long.

  During the course of the war, for reasons that were important at the time, the NKVD that had presided over Nikola’s parents’ deaths changed its initials to NKGB. In March of 1946, it became the MGB, and it was the MGB who came looking for young citizens fluent in English. In 1949 it latched on to fourteen-year-old Nikola Ulinov, with his huge vocabulary, impeccable grammar, and pronounced Bronx accent.

  They would have to work on the accent, but otherwise he was perfect. A leader in the local Komsomol, he was an almost fanatic patriot. (In the jargon of his ultimate profession, you might say that he was fixated on Soviet Communism as an outlet for the militant enthusiasm that was the external manifestation of the tensions generated by his frustrated adolescent sexuality and ambiguous self-image.) Other factors: He didn’t look at all Russian, with his mother’s Aryan features and blond hair. He had no living relatives. He had been toughened by war and privation; like all Leningraders he had seen a thousand faces of death, and you either learned to live with that terrible knowledge or went mad. Nikola seemed to be bleakly sane.

  He would make a magnificent spy.

  The MGB had gone to a great deal of trouble and expense to build an ersatz American small town in the middle of an Azerbaijan wheat field. It was called Rivertown and was supposed to be in Kansas.

  The people who went there were only allowed to speak Russian once a week (a “self-criticism” session, but most of them looked forward to it). A few older ones ran shops or taught school or acted as policemen, firemen, and so forth. Seven of the school-teachers were transplanted Americans who had grown up in the Midwest. They taught English and history, but mainly they taught:

  How to sit in a public place

  When to defer to adults, and when to be rebellious

  How to use a knife and fork

  The various kissings and touchings appropriate for different stages of a relationship

  How to behave in a public bathroom or shower

  How to spend money

  What things a small-town boy or girl from Kansas would not know

  It was a stressful life, but had its advantages. Meat at least twice a day, when most Russians were lucky to see it once a week. American cars for learning how to drive. A library full of books, most of which were not available to the rest of the country’s school-children. Coke and coffee, imported at some expense.

  Nikola, who was now called Nicky or Nicholas, grew to dread seeing those seven hawk-eyed American mentors. When they weren’t around, he could play his part perfectly, but as soon as one of them looked at him, his accent would slip or he would stand too close to someone, talking; hold his coffee cup wrong; forget to cross his legs; cuss or not cuss in the wrong situation. All seven of these foreigners reported directly to the MGB, and Nicky had no illusions as to what the MGB could do to people who disappointed them. He didn’t know the seven considered him their star pupil.

  He had useful talents aside from playacting and academics. One that could have cut his espionage career short was marksmanship: he had uncanny ability with a pistol. He was almost drafted for the 1952 Olympics, but the MGB held on to him. Linguist, pistol shot, ballroom dancer—if he could only tell one wine from another, he could have been a regular James Bond.

  They couldn’t make a mathematician out of him, though, which frustrated the MGB’s plans. They had wanted to insert him into the United States after he’d finished Rivertown High, to excel in physics or engineering and eventually wind up in a sensitive research position. But calculus was a smooth unclimbable wall to him. Reluctantly they decided to let him follow his natural leanings.

  So as his eighteenth birthday approached, they assembled a dossier that gave Nicholas Foley a complete and tragic past. Found abandoned soon after birth, Nicky was raised in an orphanage in Lawrence, Kansas. The orphanage is one that actually did exist, but it burned to the ground, along with all records, in 1947. Nicky survived and was adopted by Neil and Pamela Foley, who died together in an automobile accident in 1952. (None of this tragedy was arranged by Soviet intelligence, who don’t make a practice of murdering innocent foreigners; they just studied a few Kansas newspapers.) The court appointed a guardian for Nicky, but he ran away.

  A few days before his eighteenth birthday, Nick got off an Aeroflot plane in Toronto, bluffed past customs, then wandered around the city for a couple of days making sure he wasn’t being followed. He took a bus to Ottawa and a train back. He crossed the border at Niagara in a Greyhound, got on the train in Buffalo, and in three days wound up in Lawrence, Kansas, where he walked to the Selective Service office and volunteered for the draft.

  Two years in the post-Korea American army did nothing to shake his faith in the Soviet system (a stint in the Soviet army might have); he was possibly the best Communist ever to earn the Good Conduct Medal and go to school on the GI Bill. And go to school he did, as prearranged: B.A., Psychology, University of Kansas, 1959; M.A. Linguistics, University of Iowa, 1961; Ph.D. Psychology, also Iowa, 1963. He settled in to teach in Iowa City and wait for his first assignment. It would be two years in coming.

  CHAPTER TWO: NICK

  I arrived in Cambridge more than twenty years ago, glad to be escaping the Iowa winters, looking forward to the intellectual stimulation and challenge I knew the MIT and Harvard communities would provide—and also looking forward to my first meeting with an actual American Office KGB agent. Though technically I was one myself, of course.

  I’d studied and taught at Iowa for almost six years without so much as a cryptic postcard. Then one night I was working late at the office grading finals, and a woman walked in, smiled, handed
me an envelope, and left without a word. In the envelope was a clipping from the Journal of Educational Psychology advertising an opening for an assistant professor at MIT. I applied and got the job right away.

  (That’s one problem with this kind of life. When things go well, you can never be sure whether it’s good luck and reward for ability, or strings being pulled on your behalf. Another problem, obviously, is paranoia, and I would soon have advice about that.)

  A small stack of mail was waiting for me at MIT, mostly journals and advertising circulars. There was also a note in an envelope with no return address: “We must talk. Let us have a picnic at Walden Pond on Thursday, September 9th. Meet me at noon by the ruins of the cabin. Bring a bottle of red wine.—VL”

  Over the past twenty years, most of my contacts with Vladimir Lubenov—or anybody else from the KGB—have been outdoors, even when it meant standing in ten-degree weather with the snow falling horizontally. This first meeting, though, was pleasant: a place of quiet beauty, leaves changing color, surprisingly few people. There was only one person at the rectangle of stones that marked the place where Thoreau had lived so economically, and he was holding a picnic basket. We shook hands American style and he introduced himself. I started to say something in Russian, but he cut me off with a sharp jerk of his head and then a self-effacing laugh. “Paranoia, Nicholas. Paranoia is its own reward.” He had a rather thick Russian accent, Moscow.

  We took basket and bottle up to the top of a small rise, where we could see for quite a distance in every direction—something we certainly wouldn’t do today. They could shine a laser on a nearby leaf and pick up our conversation from its vibrations. Or something.

  Over a weird lunch of Chinese-restaurant takeout food and French table wine, Vladimir gave me a broad outline of what I was to do and be for the next few years.

  “Of course you are aware,” he said, not looking at me, setting out white boxes on a small checkered cloth, “you are aware that our… Committee is very changed from the time when you and I went through our training.” We were about the same age. “Less use of force. Very little use of force.”

  “I know. But I didn’t miss the Stashinski trial. Nor Khokhlov.”

  “Khokhlov!” He said it like a curse. Khokhlov had been a senior KGB officer who, a few years before, was given an assassination job in West Berlin and, instead of carrying it out, turned himself over to the American authorities. He brought some interesting weapons with him, things you can’t buy in a sporting-goods store, not even today. Vladimir looked at me carefully. “Perhaps I can understand his being reluctant to murder a stranger in cold blood. But he could have refused the assignment. This is not 1948.”

  “Do you think it did much harm?”

  “To the KGB, you mean, or the Soviet Union?” I shrugged. “Perhaps it’s not a bad thing for our enemies to think us capable of…excess. I suppose in that ruthless sense it serves both the Committee and the Motherland. The other side of the coin, though, is that the CIA is of course capable of excess itself. Things like this make it easier for them to justify their actions.”

  “Did we actually try to kill him afterward? Thallium poisoning?”

  “I don’t know.” He grimaced. “The Thirteenth Department doesn’t confide in me. Thallium does seem unnecessarily exotic.

  “At any rate, your own assignment is straightforward enough and, for the time being, includes nothing illegal. No thallium assassinations. We want you to function as a ‘spotter.’ Simply keep your eyes open, looking for people who might be of use to the KGB, inside your part of the MIT academic community.”

  “People who express Communist sympathies?”

  “Yes, of course. Also first-generation Americans from the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe. People in financial trouble, especially. It’s easier to buy an American than to convince him ideologically.”

  “All right. But we didn’t go to all this trouble just to put a spotter in MIT’s psychology department”

  “No. But almost all of MIT is of potential importance. We can’t know yet what your ultimate assignment will be. Simply advance in your field and don’t do anything politically suspicious. There will come a time, maybe five years, maybe ten, when we will need a man with your credentials, and a spotless record.

  “Meanwhile, I will stay in contact with you. Of course it’s best that you know as little about me as possible, not even my real name.”

  “What if I need to get in touch with you?”

  “You won’t need to, not at this stage of your assignment. At any rate, I don’t live in Boston, nowhere near.”

  “But what if my true identity is discovered?”

  “You may go to jail,” he said softly, “or be deported. Nothing worse. I wouldn’t worry about violence from the CIA or any of the other intelligence agencies, not unless our silent war becomes much noisier.

  “Besides, the only law you’ve broken is that of illegal immigration, which you did ten years ago as a juvenile. And some small lies that might be considered misdemeanors, in connection with maintaining your identity. ‘Spotting’ isn’t high-level espionage; they don’t devote that much energy to countering it.”

  “I suppose. So how will I get the information to you? Meetings like this?”

  “Generally not. There are more secure ways. You’ll be instructed.” He got up suddenly and dusted off his trousers. “It was good meeting you.” We shook hands. He turned abruptly, took a couple of steps and turned back. “Oh. Do you still have the pistols from Iowa?” I had coached the ROTC pistol team.

  “Yes… I don’t know whether to—”

  “No, don’t register them. Better to take the small chance of exposure. We can’t afford to have any of our people on that particular list.”

  “I should keep them, then?”

  “In a safe place. One never knows.” He checked his watch and then hurried down the leaf-strewn path. I wouldn’t see him again for several years.

  I sat on the hill for a while thinking and, not having shed my starving-student ways, finished all the chow mein and sweet-and-sour pork, and washed it down with red wine. I still have the basket. It gives me heartburn to look at it.

  My instruction as a spotter began the next morning. There was a large MIT Interoffice Memo envelope on my desk; inside it was a pad of pale-blue notepaper, matching envelopes, and a long note, handwritten in Russian.

  The notepaper was “safe,” the note said, purchased in a New York dime store and devoid of fingerprints. Most of my spotting reports would be written on it and then dead-dropped-left in a public place for another agent to pick up, unless a curious child or streetcleaner got there first.

  I was to write each report with a different safe typewriter, a cheap one bought in a pawnshop and then disposed of. The respondent suggested that I wipe it clean of fingerprints and leave it inconspicuously in a public place, letting an American thief be my accomplice.

  At the time, I was extremely annoyed by the cloak-and-dagger caution of the arrangements. It probably wouldn’t be smart to write the reports on MIT letterheads and sign my name to them, but this seemed to be laughably excessive. Now, I’m not so sure. Both sides in this game can be thorough.

  So every few months for the next couple of years, I would write a list of a few people who might be useful, along with a paragraph or so of explanation for each. I would seal it in an envelope addressed to a nonexistent place and affix a stamp (many people who would open a plain envelope out of curiosity will virtuously drop a stamped one in the mailbox unopened), and then set it down at the place and time instructed. Usually the drop was in a quiet corner of a fairly busy public place—the back booth of a greasy spoon or an uninteresting exhibit in a museum. I never waited to watch the pickup, though of course I was always on the lookout for Lubinov.

  In American-spy parlance I was a “sleeper”—someone who leads a fairly normal life until the KGB orders him activated—as well as a spotter. Technically, I suppose I was also an agent vlyiyania, or
agent of influence; someone who attempts through friendly discussion to alter the opinions of those around him, to bring them more in line with Soviet principles. This being Cambridge in the sixties and seventies, though, even a doctrinaire Marxist would have looked relatively inconspicuous. And I always tried to be careful to temper my outlook with American conventional wisdom. I could deplore “my” country’s presence in Vietnam, for instance, yet proclaim my sympathy for the unfortunate lads who had been drafted to fight there.

  But by 1971 I had spent half my life—all of my adult life—in America, and a lot of my pro-American sympathies were not feigned. This is not to say I was no longer a good Communist. That the Revolution survived the enormity of Stalin’s crimes proved to me its durability, and its durability implied universality.

  But American democracy was also surviving Vietnam, Nixon, and the cultural schism of the sixties, and it seemed to me the system might emerge from these adversities tempered rather than weakened. Perhaps tempered in both senses of the word, amenable to detente and the evolution of a more humane economic system.

  (I was convinced that it would have to be evolution here, rather than revolution. If there was going to be another American Revolution, it would be to the right. That’s where most of the guns were. Not even the Russian Revolution was fought with ideas alone.)

  So by this trick of the mind I was working in the best interests of both my homeland and my adopted country. I suppose that’s not a rare accommodation for people in my shoes.

  In fact, though, matters of espionage and conflicting allegiances took up little of my time, while I was busy “creating background”—which is to say, pursuing the professional and personal interests of a normal American man. In 1971 I married Valerie, who had been one of my most talented students (she teaches Abnormal at Boston U. now), and although or because we have never had children, our marriage is a model of love and sharing. Of course I never shared with her the basic exotic details of my past and present. Perhaps I should have.