Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

In 1966 he went to New York on a tourist visa and visited the Manhattan showrooms of Steinway Sons on West 57th Street, who offered Rudenko a job with a salary of 80 dollars a week. With Steinway’s assistance, he gained a work permit and traveled to the United States on his German passport in July 1967. In New York Rudenko became piano tuner to a series of celebrities—among them Nelson Rockefeller, Governor of New York, unsuccessful candidate for the Republican nomination in 1964 and future vice-president of the United States. 25Rockefeller was regarded in Moscow as the “patron” of Henry Kissinger, who in January 1969 became President Nixon’s National Security Adviser (and later Secretary of State). 26While professor at Harvard during the 1960s, Kissinger had served as Nelson’s paid part-time adviser and speechwriter, receiving a severance pay gift of 50,000 dollars when he joined the Nixon administration. “He has a second-rate mind but a first-rate intuition about people,” Kissinger once said of Rockefeller. “I have a first-rate mind but a third-rate intuition about people.” 27

To the Centre it must have seemed that Rudenko had penetrated one of the innermost sanctums of the capitalist system, which the Rockefeller family had seemed to epitomize for three generations. Nelson’s second wife, “Happy,” said of him in the mid-1960s, “He believed he could have it all. He always had.” The six square miles of Nelson’s Westchester estate were one of the world’s most valuable properties and contained some of the most spectacular art treasures in any private collection. Theodore White once offered to exchange his Manhattan townhouse on East 64th Street for a single Tong Dynasty horse from the Westchester collection. 28Though Rudenko’s occasional visits to Westchester impressed the Centre, however, they achieved nothing of significance.

Penetrating the houses of the great and good appears to have become almost an end in itself for Rudenko, even though his access to some of new York’s most distinguished pianos failed to give him any intelligence access. Among the well-known musicians whose pianos he tuned was the world’s most famous pianist, the Russian-born Vladimir Horowitz, who for the past twenty years had lived on East 94th Street near Central Park. In 1965, after a twelve-year hiatus caused by a mixture of psychiatric problems and colitis attacks, Horowitz had returned to the concert platform at the age of sixty-two, becoming, with Luciano Pavarotti, one of the two most highly paid classical musicians in the world. The recital instrument which he chose for his comeback was the Steinway concert grand numbered CD 186, which had to be tuned to an exact 440-A with a key pressure of 45 grams instead of the usual 48 to 52. 29

Overimpressed by Rudenko’s access to the pianos of new York’s celebrities, the Centre made detailed plans for him to become head of a new illegal residency whose chief targets would be the US mission to the United Nations and a New York think tank, concentrating on relatively junior employees with access to classified information—in particular, single women whose loneliness made them sexually vulnerable and poorly paid employees with large families who were open to financial inducements. 30

Just as the new residency was about to be established in New York, however, the Centre noticed what Rudenko’s file refers to as “irregularities” and “suspicious behavior” and lured him back to Moscow in April 1970 for what he was probably told were final instructions before beginning work. Exactly what the Centre suspected is not known, but, since Rudenko was interrogated under torture, it may well have feared he was working as a double agent for the FBI. What he revealed was much less serious, but bad enough to end his career as an illegal. Soon after arriving in Hamburg in 1961, Rudenko had met BERTA, a 32-year-old ladies’ hairdresser, whom he had suggested recruiting as a Soviet agent. The Centre refused and ordered him to break off all relations with her. During his interrogation in 1970, Rudenko admitted that he had secretly defied his instructions, married BERTA and taken her with him to New York. Worse still, he had taken down radio messages from the Centre and decoded them in her presence. Her parents had discovered that he was a spy, but believed he was working for East Germany. Rudenko also admitted that he was having an affair with a female accountant (codenamed MIRA) in Pennsylvania. 31

As part of the Centre’s damage limitation exercise it instructed Rudenko to write to both BERTA and MIRA letters designed to convince both of them and, if necessary, the FBI that he had left the United States because of the breakdown of his marriage. He told BERTA that he had found it impossible to live with her any longer and urged her not to waste time trying to track him down since she would never find him. In the letter to MIRA, Rudenko was allowed to express his love for her and pain at their separation within what his file quaintly describes as “permissible bounds” and his pain at the separation from her. But, he explained somewhat unconvincingly, his sudden departure from the United States had been the only way to escape from his wife. Both letters were posted by the KGB in Austria, giving no other indication of where Rudenko was living. 32

THE SUCCESSIVE FAILURES of Makayev (HARRY), Brik (HART), Hayhanen (VIK), Grinchenko (KLOD), Bitnov (ALBERT), Blyablin (BOGUN) and Rudenko (RYBAKOV) underscored the Centre’s difficulty in finding illegals capable of fulfilling its expectations in North America. Fisher/“Abel” (MARK) was, in many ways, the exception who proved the rule. He was able to survive, if not actually succeed, as an illegal resident in the United States because of a long experience of the West which went back to his Tyneside childhood, an ideological commitment which probably predated even the Bolshevik Revolution and a thirty-year career as a foreign intelligence officer, most of it under Stalin, from which he had emerged scarred but battle-hardened. Other Cold War illegals in the United States were psychologically less well prepared for the stress of their double lives. All had to come to terms with a society which was strikingly different from the propaganda image of the Main Adversary with which they had been indoctrinated in Moscow. Unlike KGB officers stationed in legal residencies, illegals did not work in a Soviet embassy, where they were constantly subject to the ideological discipline imposed by the official hierarchy. They also had to cope with a much greater degree of personal isolation, which they could diminish only by friendships and sexual liaisons which were liable to undermine their professional discipline. No wonder that some illegals, like Rudenko, had affairs which they tried to conceal from the Centre; that others, like Hayhanen, took to drink and embezzlement; and that others, like Bitnov, found it difficult to survive in an alien market economy.

Illegals had also to face unreasonable, and ultimately impossible, expectations from the Centre. Until almost the end of the Cold War, no post-war Soviet leader, KGB chairman or foreign intelligence chief had either any personal experience of living in the West or any realistic understanding of it. Accustomed to strong central direction and a command economy, the Centre found it difficult to fathom how the United States could achieve such high levels of economic production and technological innovation with so little apparent regulation. The gap in its understanding of what made the United States tick tended to be filled by conspiracy theory. The diplomat, and later defector, Arkadi Shevchenko noted of his Soviet colleague:

Many are inclined to the fantastic notion that there must be a secret control center somewhere in the United States. They themselves, after all, are used to a system ruled by a small group working in secrecy in one place. Moreover, the Soviets continue to chew on Lenin’s dogma that bourgeois governments are just the “servants” of monopoly capital. “Is not that the secret command center?” they reason. 33