George F. Kennan: An American Life (78 page)

Managing Spaso was still an ordeal. Burobin, the Central Bureau for Services to the Diplomatic Corps, supplied a staff of twenty-two, all of whom presumably reported to the secret police. They were under orders not to do anything other than what they had been told to do, to remain on the premises for as short a time as possible, “and above all never to permit themselves to enjoy, or feel a part of, the family in which they are working.” It was like being served by “tight-lipped ghosts.” Determined to make a point, Kennan fired the night watchman, who was showing up only occasionally. But that left him alone every evening, wandering around like a ghost himself. Guards outside followed his movements from room to room by watching the lights go on and off: “Somehow or other, it doesn’t seem to get me down; but I really wonder whether we can or should be asked to live this way.” Spaso was safe enough: no one would dare break in. But the atmosphere—Annelise would not have missed the allusion to Bad Nauheim—“is more like a sort of a prison-hotel than like a home.”
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“Anneliesschen—sweetheart,” George wrote her early in June: “If there has been a gap in these letters, it has been because I did not send the one I wrote to you on Sunday.” It had seemed too depressing: “Letters are unsatisfactory things.” But there were less than three weeks left. “That’s not so terrible, though it seems a long time.” He would travel to Leningrad, he added a week later, and then “only five days will remain before this separation is over. Dreamed the other night that I saw Christopher, but he had grown quite big and didn’t recognize me.”
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The opportunity to see his wife, son, and new daughter in Bad Godesberg arose from an Acheson trip to London. Kennan would meet the secretary of state, update him on Soviet-American relations, and then bring all of the family—Grace and Joan would be out of school by then—back with him to Moscow along with their own small staff, a modest declaration of independence from Burobin. There was, however, a strangely sinister aspect to this visit. On June 25 Samuel Reber, the political adviser to the U.S. high commissioner in Bonn, John McCloy, passed the word to Frank Wisner, at the CIA in Washington, that Kennan could meet briefly in London the next day with the “Representatives.”
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There turned out to be only one, Peer de Silva of the CIA’s Clandestine Service, who had been sent to discuss assigning an undercover agent to work out of the Moscow embassy. Kennan opposed the idea, as had Bohlen when consulted on it earlier. De Silva noticed, though, that “the ambassador was very tense and nervous.” At the end of the meeting, he said he had something to ask of the agency. As de Silva remembered it, Kennan handed him an envelope, which he said contained a letter to Pope Pius XII. He wanted it passed to Allen Dulles, the deputy director of central intelligence, with the request that it reach the Vatican by secure means. There was “a good possibility that I will wind up someday before long on the Soviet radio,” Kennan explained. “I may be forced to make statements that would be damaging to American policy. This letter will show the world that I am under duress and am not making statements under my own free will.” Did the CIA not have “some sort of a pill that a person could use to kill himself instantly”?

De Silva acknowledged that it did: small glass vials containing cyanide, which, when bitten, would release the chemical with lethal results. “I think I must have two of these,” Kennan told him. De Silva promised to pass the request along—if Dulles approved, the pills could be sent by diplomatic pouch. There was a long puzzled silence when de Silva conveyed this to Dulles after flying back to Washington, but he finally decided that the agency could not deny Kennan the pills if he really wanted them.
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When asked about this in 1987, Kennan pointed out that the prospect of war was very real at the time. He had no confidence that the Soviets would observe “the amenities,” as the Germans had done in 1941–42, and that internment had been bad enough: “If they had decided to sacrifice their mission [in the United States], they wouldn’t have hesitated to arrest us and then to put me in solitary confinement.” Having held senior positions in the State Department, he had information his interrogators might try to extract by torture: “If that was what I had to face, I was quite prepared to—I asked for this.” But he had asked to be provided “with pills that you could easily conceal.... God knows what Stalin would have done.”
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Elbridge Durbrow, who read de Silva’s account shortly after it appeared in 1978, had a different explanation: “Something got to George. I don’t know what it was, [maybe] the KGB got to him and said: ‘We’ve got the goods on you.’ ” After all, “they tried to screw up every ambassador there the best they could one way or another.” Hugh Cumming was more specific. Kennan had gotten into trouble “with some ‘dame’ and thought the Russians might in some way publicize it.” They did not do this, “and he’s been grateful ever since.”
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Kennan was lonely during his first six weeks in Moscow, and there was an opportunity for romance. The American embassy still maintained a dacha outside of the city, but it had become so run-down that he was reluctant to use it. He preferred a smaller one rented by correspondents Harrison Salisbury, Thomas P. Whitney, and Whitney’s Russian wife, Juli Zapolskaya—soon he had his own key. “There is a sound of hammers, dogs barking, chickens, children’s cries, and distant trains,” George wrote Annelise from the front porch one afternoon at the end of May, “a relief from the old beat between Spaso and Mokhovaya.” The dacha was a refuge for a temporary bachelor: he could go on walks (accompanied by angels, to be sure, but they allowed him a sympathetic distance), indulge in long late conversations in rapid Russian with the Whitneys (Salisbury, still learning the language, struggled to keep up), and accompany songs that they all could sing (Russian and American) on his guitar. The atmosphere, Kennan recalled, was one of “health and simplicity and subdued hope which I drank in, on my brief visits there, as one drinks in fresh air after long detention in a stuffy room.”

He described Juli, in his memoirs, only as “a musician and
chanteuse
of talent.” Salisbury, in his, went further. She had, he was certain, fallen in love: “No one who saw Juli’s face light up and her eyes glow in George’s presence could mistake the feeling.” He was, to her, “a character out of not Chekhov but Turgenev, sophisticated, wise, urbane, gifted with a philosophy and emotion close to the Russian heart. He was Russian but not Russian, American but a special kind of American. She could talk to him all day and all night.” Only wife and country kept George from reciprocating: “He was an extraordinarily happily married man, and strongly as he was drawn to this most Russian of relationships, he was not prepared to venture on an excursion down that path.” He told Juli, according to Salisbury, that he had

Salisbury believed Juli did. “She smiled at him, she gave him her most tender looks, but she made no effort by the arts of her coquetry to woo him from his resolve.”
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To be sure, Salisbury—and Whitney, for that matter—may not always have been present. But angels were, and as George was well aware, they reported on his activities in the country as carefully as they tracked his movements within the gloomy precincts of Spaso House. “The great good earth of Mother Russia,” he wrote a friend later that summer,

It was hardly the setting for an affair, however lonely Kennan may have been. So what else could have caused him to request suicide pills in the same week that he rejoined his family and first met his new daughter?

Kennan kept no diary during this period, probably for fear that it might fall into the hands of the Soviet authorities. Major General Robert W. Grow, the Army attaché in Moscow while Kirk was ambassador, had suffered just that misfortune in 1951 and had been court-martialed as a result. Kirk’s wife, Lydia Chapin Kirk, had committed a less serious indiscretion by rushing a gossipy account of Spaso House life into print in the United States before her husband had formally resigned. George was not about to risk adding to “the follies of our predecessors,” he wrote to Annelise early in June 1952. Because of them, she should “not be surprised at the coolness of the reception that awaits you in Moscow . . . I am not.”
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Nonetheless he was surprised. Sir Alvary Gascoigne, the British ambassador, found Kennan unprepared for how differently foreign missions were treated from when he had last served in the U.S.S.R.: “This came as quite a shock to him.” Cumming remembered Kennan returning from a walk one day soon after his arrival, so subdued that he seemed ill. “Hugh, I am shocked to discover [that] the Soviets regard me as such a dangerous person.” I said: “What do you mean?” “Why, this outbreak of anti-American posters all over the town.” “George, those damn things have been there for months! I honestly don’t think that they have anything personally to do with you.” But Kennan wasn’t listening: he got “that rather distant, misty look in his eyes,” which showed that he was composing a dispatch. Calling in a secretary—not Hessman, who would only later join him in Moscow—he “lay down on the sofa to dictate, almost like a patient in a psychoanalyst’s office. I envied him the ability,” Cumming recalled, “to do that.”
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The result was a long letter to Doc Matthews, pouched to Washington to ensure security. There were, Kennan suggested, four possible reasons for the Kremlin’s propaganda offensive. The first was to boost sagging morale in the Soviet Union and the rest of the communist world, where there was “widespread political apathy and skepticism.” With the exception of the wartime years, however, that disillusionment had been present since the purges of the late 1930s—alone it could not account for what now was going on. A second explanation was mobilization for war: Kennan had never believed, though, that Stalin would deliberately unleash one. A third was some kind of leadership struggle, but there was no hard evidence for this. That left a fourth possibility, which was that the campaign “might have something to do with my own appointment and arrival.”

Kennan was known to Stalin and his associates, after all, as someone who was
not
“bloodthirsty and boorish, . . . lacking in good will, ignorant and contemptuous of Russian cultural values, [or] obtuse to developments in the world of the Russian spirit.” Because of his prior service in the country and his knowledge of the language, they might have interpreted his appointment as an indication that the U.S. government was ready for “real” discussions on significant issues. Why, then, the anti-American campaign? To the normal mind, it could hardly be a less fitting prelude for diplomacy. But Stalin’s mind was not normal:

It was also important to the Kremlin leaders, when on the verge of making even minor concessions, not to seem to have been pressured into doing so.

If Stalin did see any possibility of a Cold War settlement, then, he might think it useful “to remind a new and somewhat inscrutable American Ambassador . . . that if he is going to talk to anyone around here it is going to be to Papa—that the other members of the family know their places and are well in hand.”

But an invitation to talk with Papa would have thrilled Kennan, even though he had resolved—given his lack of instructions from Washington—not to ask for one: why did he still feel threatened? He now came up with a fifth explanation, which was that the Soviet authorities had developed a “reckless contempt for whatever values and safeguards might conceivably still lie in the maintenance of the normal diplomatic channel.” That had not happened during Kennan’s previous service in Moscow. Now, though, the restraint was gone. There was, in its place, “the excited, uncertain bravado of the parvenu who thinks that his fortunes have advanced to the point where he need no longer pretend to be a man of correct behavior or even a man of respect for correct behavior.” It was

If this was right, “then we have a bitter problem on our hands.” Restoring sobriety and decorum among such people would take “real thought and skillful action on our part, and probably luck as well.”
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