Posted By Steve LeVine Thursday, July 1, 2010 - 2:29 PM
Nikolai was a Russian sleeper agent, an undercover spy of a type that is in the news again, thanks to the arrest of 10 of them in the United States this week. Many people are mystified as to just what these folks were doing here, if, as appears to be in the case in their indictments, they never carried out any actual espionage.
Illegals -- the term of art for the class of spies whom Moscow has trained and planted in western countries since at least the 1940s -- are among the elite of Russia’s intelligence corps, first in the KGB and today in its successor, the FSB. Aside from assassins, they have the hardest work, and are often the most valued. Here is how Nikolai's handler, Pavel Sudoplatov, described what an illegal does (from his book Special Tasks):
Illegals operate without diplomatic cover under false identity. There are two types of illegal operations. One is to live undercover in the West awaiting assignment from the Center (security service headquarters) and building a network of agents. This is a long-term assignment and can last from five to fifteen years. Another, more dangerous, illegal role is to penetrate hostile intelligence services, posing as a sympathizer coming from the Soviet Union.I met Nikolai in 2007 while researching a book on Russian spies and murder. In his 80s and living in retirement in San Bernardino, Ca., the KGB defector was happy to relate the old tales of tradecraft. He had landed in the West in the 1950s after refusing to carry out an assigned murder, and survived a subsequent assassination attempt by the KGB with radioactive thallium. Later, he wrote about his life in In the Name of Conscience.
Nikolai's German was near-native, a skill tested when he posed as a Nazi soldier in Moscow's wartime plot to assassinate SS officer Wilhelm Kube in Minsk. But in 1945, with World War II still not yet over, he was dispatched to Romania as an illegal. Because of his accent, and total absence of Romanian, Nikolai was to pose as a Polish émigré named Stanislaw Levandowski. As professional cover, Nikolai was provided cash to open a small electronic goods shop.
As instructed, Nikolai acted normally. He got a Romanian woman to marry him, explaining that it was necessary for him to get Romanian citizenship so as not to lose his store and perhaps his freedom if he had to go back to Poland. But there was no spycraft, no indication from Moscow of any coming mission. In a word, it was boring. Four years later, he insisted that he be brought home to Moscow.
After his defection to the West, Nikolai went on to study psychology, and became a professor at California State University in San Bernardino. He left a son behind in Moscow, marrying again in the United States and raising three more children with his wife Tatjana. Just a few months after we met, Nikolai died at the age of 84. I attended his funeral.
To the end, Nikolai insisted he was never an assassin, and he detested the mentality of the intelligence men who had once been his peers. But he remained proud of the one active illegal mission he did carry out: the Kube assassination. He never stopped talking about that.
