Marvin Kalb - The Year I Was Peter the Great - 1956 - Khrushchev, Stalin's Ghost, and a Young American in Russia

At the time we met very few Russians. They were not our friends. They lived in their world, we in ours. When we, who were associated with the American embassy, did talk with a Russian, it was generally in the context of an arranged meeting, a chance encounter in a marketplace, or an innocent exchange on a train or trolley. Rarely would we meet the same Russian twice, and if we did, we knew from experience that the encounter had to have official clearance. The few Russians we met with regularity at embassy parties or national day receptions, such as the July Fourth holiday party, were likely to be KGB officials in the guise of diplomats or journalists. They would shoulder up to foreigners, create artificial friendships, and pick up any fragments of information or intelligence that were considered interesting, possibly valuable. CIA officials did the same thing with Russians.

Buried in a long, tedious article about communist ideology might be the early signs of a power struggle, or in a difficult-to-digest discussion of Soviet agriculture the first indications of a new approach to solving the old problem of food shortages. Which articles, therefore, should be translated? Which editorials? Clearly these were political judgments, and Holdcroft, whose experience as a Russian-language translator for the British Foreign Office went all the way back to 1921, made these judgments every morning. Our job was to translate. I was told that the JPRS served America’s national interest by spotting, translating, and distributing the selected articles to as many foreign embassies as possible. In this way we were giving them our assessment of what was important in judging Soviet reality. It was not exactly casting a light on all of Soviet society—it wasn’t a form of translated transparency. But in a society where, in those days, weather forecasts were regarded as military secrets and telephone books were classified, the insights the JPRS provided on a daily basis were invaluable.

The last briefing of my Washington week concerned what was called “personal security.” It was my favorite. “Please don’t be late for this one,” my advisers stressed. “It’s really important.”

I was intrigued. I had not been late for any of my briefings. Why the warning? My imagination ran wildly from one possibility to another, from wiretaps to Mata Haris. At the scheduled time, not a minute too early or late, I entered a gloomy room on the second floor of the State Department. An official sat behind a cluttered desk. “Sit down, please,” he said, not lifting his head from a file he was reading. “You’re Kalb, right?” he asked, still not lifting his head.

“Yes, sir,” I answered.

“Good,” he said. “Let’s get on with this then, okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re single, aren’t you?” he asked, flipping through my file.

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you date?” Bob asked, still not looking up.

“Date?” I was puzzled.

“Yes. Do you date? Do you go out with girls?”

“Of course I go out with girls.” What was he getting at?

The official looked up at me. “This is important,” he said, a note of urgency in his voice. “In other words”—here each word left his mouth as if, strung together, they composed a phrase as meaningful as a declaration of war—“you are straight?” he asked, with a knowing nod. “You like girls?” he added.

I understood, finally. “Yes, of course,” I said, summoning every ounce of masculine self-confidence to ease his concern, “I like girls. I go out with girls. I am not a…” I paused.

“Okay,” he said, raising his hand. “I understand.” He took a deep breath. “This is always a difficult interview, but I have to ask these questions, you know.”

“Of course.” I tried to be reassuring.

“So, let’s see,” he continued. “You are single. Handsome, in a way, and you like girls.” He again looked down at my file, as though to avoid looking at me. “You can see where I’m going, can’t you? The Russians will spot you immediately. You’re a target, a potential target, someone they can compromise, get secrets from.”

“No, no,” I replied. “I’m no target. You don’t have to worry about me. I’m—”

“You’re wrong,” he said, trying to hide a trace of irritation in his voice. “Quite the contrary, you are the perfect target.” I shuffled from foot to foot.

“Do you like the ballet?” he asked.

“I love the ballet,” I answered, hoping we were going on to another subject. “Love it. I hope I can get to the Bolshoi as often as possible.”

Wrong answer. I could see a wrinkle of concern cross his face. “That’s what I was afraid of,” he said with a sigh. “They often use ballet dancers.”

“Use ballet dancers?”

“Yes, it’s happened before. They send ballet dancers to do the job.”

“The job?”

“Yes, the job. You know, seduction.”

My knees wobbled. Was he saying that the mighty, nuclear-armed Soviet Union might be concerned enough about me—totally unimportant know-nothing twenty-five-year-old me—to send a Bolshoi ballerina to seduce me? Crazy, I thought. Silliest thing I ever heard!

“One day,” he went on, looking out a State Department window that hadn’t been cleaned in months, “a Russian ballerina will knock on your door, and—who knows?—try to seduce you.” My throat felt very dry.

“You know the way it works. They get photos of the two of you in bed, and they use them to embarrass you and your country. Your family, too.” He was looking straight at me now. “They get state secrets. You get…”

I must admit, listening to him, that two thoughts from two different planets passed through my mind at the same time: One, I wouldn’t want to embarrass my country and certainly not my family—that was absolutely true. But two, a Russian ballerina sent on a secret diplomatic mission to seduce me? Oh, my God! Visions of a Bolshoi seduction danced before my eyes, visions I attempted immediately to block from anyone else’s view, especially Bob’s.

I reassured him that I would fend off any advances by a Soviet ballerina. “I completely understand your concerns,” I said, hopefully with conviction, “and please understand that I will never allow anything like that to happen to me. Never.”

The official rose from behind his desk. Shaking my hand, he said in conclusion. “Marvin, I trust you completely. It’s the Russians I’m worried about. Please be careful.”

“Yes, sir,” I replied, and left with a joyful bounce of anticipation in my step.

Bob was not being excessively cautious. The Russians did engage in seduction. One example—of many, no doubt—involved the columnist Joseph Alsop, who was photographed in early 1957 in a Moscow hotel room with a male KGB agent. Using these photos the Russians hoped to be able to embarrass Alsop and convert him into becoming a spy. He refused, and the Russians did not press the issue.

Dear reader, you are entitled at this point to hear my confession: Not once, over the next thirteen months of my first Moscow assignment, during which time I traveled through central Asia, the Caucasus, Ukraine, and large parts of Russia, attended scores of plays and ballets, studied at the Lenin Library and frolicked in Gorky Park, not once did a Russian girl, ballerina or not, approach me and suggest we spend a glorious night together reading Pushkin’s poetry, looking up at the Moscow stars, and promising to love each other forever. Not once.