Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (8 page)

Early in 1996 matters got even worse. In January I was told by Ymy
Kobaladze that the Foreign Intelligence Service was ending its cooperation and that I would not be receiving new files. A few days later came an
incident that changed the life of my entire family. I was sitting in a big
room with some officers from the press bureau watching TV news. There
was a report about Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the Communist Party of
Russia and Boris Yeltsin's main challenger in the presidential elections to
be held in June 1996. Zyuganov was campaigning using nationalist and
anti-Western slogans, and many Russians, including me, were absolutely
sure he would win.

There was a Communist cell in the SVR that held meetings and collected dues. I wasn't sure if it was legal for SVR officers to be members
of any political party after President Yeltsin's decree of 1991 about depoliticizing all state organizations, but they never tried hard to cover their
activities. As we watched the TV news about Zyuganov, suddenly one of
the SVR officers known to be an active Communist turned to me and
said, "After the election we are going to deal with you. We'll see what
kind of a book you are writing there." I snorted and said nothing. But I
started thinking really fast.

As an ex-KGB officer, I had a pretty clear idea how the book project
could be spun. On the one hand, I had been invited by the Foreign Intelligence Service to take part in the project. On the other hand, I was
copying top secret KGB files in my notebooks and was going to pass my
material to Allen Weinstein, a suspected CIA agent. Could I prove that I
had not given him classified material? A lot depended on the political atmosphere in Russia. Relaxed rules under Boris Yeltsin made the book
project possible, but if Gennady Zyuganov won the 1996 election, his new
regime could easily turn me into a traitor. I didn't think Yevgeny Primakov
or Yury Kobaladze would be able to help because they themselves would
probably come under attack, especially the liberally minded Kobaladze.

I discussed all this with my wife Elena, and we decided to move to the
West. We chose Great Britain because I had been there twice before and
liked it. I had good connections in the press office of the British Embassy
in Moscow. Since my second trip to Britain in 1993 had been organized
by the British Foreign Office, I didn't expect problems with visas. I
arranged an assignment for myself in Britain as a correspondent for the Express Gazette, the first Russian tabloid, modeled on the British Sun
(the London job for the Komsomolskaya Pravda was already taken), and
we applied for visas. We received them in May and promptly left Russia.
To my surprise, Boris Yeltsin won the election, but we decided to stay in
London anyway. I have not returned to Russia since, because I am not
sure that my work on these files might not be used against me.

I decided not to take my notebooks with me because I was afraid I
would be searched at the Sheremetyevo Airport and the notebooks would
be seized. I left them with people I trusted. Before our departure I
copied all the draft chapters I had written for The Haunted Wood, including some that had not been submitted to or cleared by the Declassification Committee, onto floppy discs. I also copied some documents
containing the real names of Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg. That material and the material Allen Weinstein already had in the United States
served as a basis for The Haunted Wood.

The Haunted Wood doesn't contain the real names of two atomic
agents-"Persian" and "Eric"-although I knew them. It was my deliberate decision not to put the names of Russell McNutt ("Persian") and
Bertl Broda ("Eric") in the draft I gave to Allen Weinstein (I didn't know
the name of Melita Norwood at the time, though we have her in The
Haunted Wood as "Tina"). There were two reasons for this. First, my position in London was far from stable. I had to renew my journalistic visa
at the British Home Office every year, and to do so I needed a confirmation from the Express Gazette that I was still working for it. If someone
in Moscow decided to put pressure on the Gazette, I wouldn't receive
that confirmation. I came to London as a civilian journalist-which I was;
I wasn't a defector, didn't want to become one, and therefore couldn't
count on any "special attitude" from the British authorities. Second, the
future of The Haunted Wood didn't look totally certain, especially in view
of what had happened with Crown in 1995. People from Random House
weren't talking to me, they didn't know what I was going through, and I
didn't think they would care even if they did know. In such a situation I
didn't want to name names.

There was a moral dilemma too. The Haunted Wood didn't have new
names; it had new material about people who were already known, and
I thought all the characters mentioned under their real names were dead
except Michael Straight, who long ago had admitted his contact with Soviet operatives. Those people had become part of the history of the twentieth century, and their stories had to be told sooner or later by somebody.
I saw no reason why it shouldn't be me since I had something to tell. With Russell McNutt and Bertl Broda it was different. In 1996 I had no idea
what had happened to them, and I didn't want to do them harm. As far
as the history of Soviet espionage in America is concerned, it's important
to understand where I come from. I was born and bred in the Soviet
Union, and if to most Americans, individuals like Julius Rosenberg,
Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, and Theodore Hall are traitors, to me they
are still heroes. They helped my country in very difficult times, and I had
no reason to disrespect their memory or cause them any trouble if they
were alive. Ten years later, when John Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and I
started working on this book, I was sure no characters in my notebooks
remained alive: Michael Straight had died in 2004; Theodore Hall, perhaps the youngest agent, in 1999; and Alger Hiss, in 1996. Imagine my
surprise (and discomfort) when in the fall of 2007 John and Harvey discovered that Russell McNutt was alive and living in North Carolina, age
ninety-three, but refused to be interviewed on his activities. McNutt,
however, died in February 2008.

After The Haunted Wood was published, Allen Weinstein and I had
our portion of controversy, even without Russell McNutt and Bertl Broda.
The New Yorker published our piece on U.S. congressman Samuel Dickstein-in my opinion, one of the most exciting stories in the book. I expected people to talk about the love story of Elizabeth Bentley and Jacob
Golos, about the adventures of Boris Morros, or about the crisis in
Nathan Gregory Silvermaster's agent group. Instead they cared only
about Alger Hiss. I knew Hiss was important-Weinstein told me, but I
thought it was mostly Allen's personal interest since he had written a book
about Hiss before. Suddenly I found myself in the epicenter of a heated
discussion with people attacking my integrity.

Allen and l also had a personal falling out, prompted by my discovery
that he had used the Hiss material in a new edition of Perjury that appeared prior to the publication of our book. That discovery initiated a
brief correspondence with Victor Navasky, editor of The Nation and himself a fierce defender of Hiss. In May 2000 I received a letter from an
American writer named Susan Butler: "I have found many mistakes and
inconsistencies in Weinstein's Perjury. The fact that you, his co-author,
are highly critical of the finished product, The Haunted Wood, bears out
my instinctive negative reaction to Weinstein as reliable authority on anything. I would like to discuss both books with you." I answered by e-mail
on 8 May 2ooo: "Frankly speaking, I don't remember my being `highly
critical' of The Haunted Wood. How can I be critical of the book for which
I did research for 2 years and wrote a draft manuscript? In my opinion, it's an absolutely fantastic book which should be read (at least, bought) by
every American."

Butler and I met that same month at the Clifton Pub in St. John's
Wood in London. By that time I was well aware of the controversy surrounding Hiss and suspected Butler had an agenda. Yet I was prepared
to talk to everyone since I considered myself above the scuffle. Butler
probably felt she had started out on the wrong foot and changed her tune.
She lavished compliments on me and said everyone had liked The
Haunted Wood, including Michael Straight, who had a special chapter
devoted to him. I was mildly surprised since our story, based on Straight's
personal file from the KGB archives, differed from his account in After
Long Silence. Some time later Butler had a slip of the tongue: she said
Michael Straight had said or written something nasty about The Haunted
Wood. When I reminded her that she had said he liked the book, she
quickly explained that he just hated Weinstein! I let it go.

For the next two or three hours Susan Butler interviewed me about
my work on The Haunted Wood, recording the conversation. Many of her
questions dealt with the material we had on Alger Hiss. Later we exchanged several e-mails, and I was astonished by her attitude toward
Hiss. On 17 June zooo she wrote to me: "It is actually not that Hiss transmitted information to the Russians that bothers me and many others. If
he did that when U.S. and Soviet interests coincided it is perfectly understandable." That was exactly what I would have said as an ex-KGB officer and ex-Communist, but I didn't expect to hear it from the other side
of the Atlantic in zooo. In the same e-mail Butler added, "And things
were very different back then. It was President Roosevelt himself who
sprung Earl Browder from jail. But if Chambers' charges were true, then
Alger Hiss was guilty of lying through two trials, and putting his many
supporters through a meaningless charade."

It was time to give a political lecture. I wrote the following on 18 June
2000:

Now about Hiss' "lying through two trials." Frankly speaking, the fact that
some people can't accept this idea bewilders me enormously Hiss was an extremely valuable, experienced and trusted member of the most powerful espionage network in the world. He did what he was supposed to do-he denied
everything. The Rosenbergs did it, Colonel Rudolf Abel did it. People who
don't do that, people who confess and testify, are called defectors and traitors.
If Hiss had testified he would have exposed other American sources and Soviet operatives. He would have become another Chambers. Neither [he] nor
the Rosenbergs wanted to do that because they still believed in what they had been doing for many years. As to the fact that Hiss put "his many supporters
through a meaningless charade," he probably thought first of all about people
he worked with-Americans and Soviets. What he did was absolutely right,
and it worked (though it didn't in the case of the Rosenbergs). In my opinion
these people should be admired for their commitment to their ideals.

Butler replied:

You see, whether Hiss was or was not an agent, that does not change the fact
that he was an enormous help to your country and to mine. And particularly
when compared to a character like Chambers, who set things back in the
United States so that everyone was afraid to speak, many were put in jail, and
we lost the best and brightest who stayed away from government service. I
doubt if we would have gone into Vietnam if we had had knowledgeable people in key posts. But still, Hiss shines brighter if what he did he did not as an
agent.

The correspondence with Susan Butler certainly expanded my knowledge of political life in the United States. The account of her interview
with me that she published in The Nation on 15 October zoos enlightened me about the methods Alger Hiss's supporters used to make their
idol "shine brighter." Having promoted me from ex-captain to ex-colonel,
Butler wrote the following:

The Haunted Wood was formed under conditions that should be known: The
co-authors are not really co-authors. There was the researcher, Alexander Vassiliev, who spent two years in the KGB archives gathering the material, and the
editor, Allen Weinstein, who put the book together. Vassiliev had virtually no
say on what went into the book. It wasn't supposed to be that way. Vassiliev, an
ex-KGB colonel, seems to have been overwhelmed by Weinstein's reputation,
his rhetoric and by the prospect that Weinstein kept dangling in front of him
of making big bucks from the book.... The uneven collaboration unfortunately weakens the book in more ways than one. The heavy anti-Hiss slant is
pure Weinstein.

There was a lot in common between me and Alger Hiss's fanatical defenders: we were all saying good things about him. The difference was
that I had written an honest book and told people what I had seen in the
top secret KGB files; the fanatics didn't want to know, they didn't want
other people to know, and they were prepared to destroy everyone who
wanted to tell the story.

In February zoos I received from Butler an article, "Venona and
Alger Hiss," by John Lowenthal, published in the journal Intelligence and National Security in autumn 2000. I looked through it and found nasty
things about The Haunted Wood and me, as well as quotes from Boris
Labusov, who by that time had replaced Yury Kobaladze as the head of
the SVR press bureau-and I did not pay much attention. I had never
heard of John Lowenthal or Intelligence and National Security before.
So when Butler asked me whether I was going to respond to Lowenthal's
allegations, I wrote to her on 4 March 2001 as follows: "Thank you for the
article by Mr. Lowenthal. I don't think I will be answering it in any way.
I've got nothing to say to people who want to serve as a mouthpiece of the
Russian Intelligence Service. On the other hand, I must admit the things
he said about me and my work [are] the best advertisement for The
Haunted Wood I could imagine. I would be much more worried if the
Service said they liked the book."

A few months later I went to Amazon.com to see how The Haunted
Wood was doing and saw among readers' comments a review by the same
John Lowenthal; it began with the words "Unreliable and mostly unverifiable." He said that the book, "particularly in its use of KGB archival
files, is unreliable and, for the most part, unverifiable. Where it is verifiable at all, it turns out to be wrong." Lowenthal quoted Boris Labusov and
touted his own article in Intelligence and National Security.