to turn possible KGB defectors and convince them to cooperate. And it seems clear that’s what they did with Nikolai. He was deliberately misled into thinking he had a deal. The propaganda payoff for the United States was obvious: the saga of an idealistic young Russian agent seeking refuge in America after suffering a crisis of conscience.
But why did the CIA allow his version of events to stand unchallenged all these years? Was this mere humanism, empathy for a guy in the same business who had lost his family? Not likely. The greater probability was that the agency didn’t want to push Nikolai too far and risk losing his cooperation.
In an unpublished chapter of his memoir, Nikolai wrote that he was “often close to suicide” after his defection, enduring “endless hours of loneliness mixed with feelings of guilt and failure.” Two months after his Bonn press conference, word arrived from Moscow that his wife and son were missing. Nikolai feared the worst. (Much later he would learn that Yana had been arrested the day after the press conference and sentenced to five years of internal exile, in the Russian republic of Komi. She was able to take Alik with her, work, and receive visitors. Her punishment seemed relatively benign; Yana once observed that her interrogators had become “nauseatingly friendly.”)
But by late 1954, his spirits were lifting. Private committees were formed in the United States to support Yana’s immigration. While none succeeded, the effort comforted Nikolai. He became a sensation in America, telling eager audiences across the country what it was like to be a Russian secret agent: bombs concealed in soap, salt, and tea; offices hidden behind bookcases; shadowing a subject.
The remarkable detail of Nikolai’s revelations set him apart from other spies who were defecting from the Soviet bloc to the West (in such large numbers that the CIA had to establish a reception center in Frankfurt to process them). He was one of the first to publicly divulge the most intimate secrets of the Kremlin’s assassination program. The Russians reacted to his and a series of other security breaches by curtailing political killings.
With the CIA looking on approvingly, Nikolai became a favorite of Cold War propagandists, testifying on Soviet wrongs before the House Un-American Activities Committee and otherwise lending his voice to the anticommunist crusade in America. He made the rounds of network television talk shows such as
In fall 1957, he attended a Frankfurt conference of the anti-Soviet organization of Russian emigres led by Giorgy Okolovich, the man he was once ordered to assassinate. He remembered drinking a rancid cup of coffee and then dropping by an adjacent concert hall to hear a performance featuring opera singers. Suddenly his ears were ringing and his stomach was queasy. Around him “things began to whirl…[and] the electric bulbs were swaying,” he wrote.
Nikolai retreated to his room and began vomiting violently. Okolovich was summoned, and took him to a hospital, where he was treated for acute gastritis. The reddish-copper hue that appeared on his ordinarily pale skin would soon fade, doctors assured him.
But the morning of his sixth day of hospitalization, brown stripes and spots emerged on his face. His pillow was drenched in blood and his hair came out in clumps. After a battery of tests, the German doctors suspected poisoning by thallium. They administered a compound called Prussian blue, the recognized—and generally effective—treatment for exposure to the heavy metal. Nikolai’s body failed to respond, leaving his doctors baffled. The chief physician told Nikolai’s friends, “To be honest, it’s hopeless…. Wait with your questions until the autopsy.”
Twelve days into the crisis, Nikolai was moved to an American military hospital in Frankfurt. Under tight security, doctors administered continuous blood transfusions and injections of vitamins, steroids such as cortisone, and so on—anything that might fortify his immune system. On the eighteenth day, the symptoms finally receded. Gaunt and bald under a beret, appearing two decades older than his thirty-five years, Nikolai walked out of the hospital. He later told crusading Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya that it took a full year to recover; his legs in particular hurt.
What had nearly killed Nikolai? The commander of the U.S. hospital concluded that his suffering was “due to poisoning, probably by thallium and/or other chemical agents.” In his memoir, Nikolai says that a New York specialist later analyzed the evidence and confirmed the presence of radioactive thallium. The near-fatal dose had in all likelihood been dropped into his coffee at the conference. When I asked Nikolai the doctor’s name, he said he could no longer recall it, his typical reaction to a perceived challenge. I decided that, given the symptoms and the advice of chemists that thallium does have relatively stable nuclear isotopes, there was no reason to seriously question his assertion.
Nikolai had no doubts about what had happened. The poisoning was the handiwork of his former colleagues in Soviet intelligence, who had finally had enough of his public denunciations and wanted to “square accounts” with him. But why had this method been chosen? Was its aim not only to kill, but to kill cruelly? Nikolai thought Moscow’s intention was more prosaic—to avoid detection. His assassins never expected that anyone would discover the presence of radioactive thallium.
In the years that followed, Nikolai became “disgusted” with what he regarded as an ineffectual anticommunist movement and decided to move on. Now a U.S. citizen, it took him just three years to earn both master’s and doctoral degrees in psychology at Duke University. Then he began his teaching career, at California State University, San Bernardino. Two decades later, in Russia, Boris Yeltsin pardoned Nikolai for turning against the Soviet intelligence service. Nikolai attributed Yeltsin’s act to blind luck—he had asked for permission to visit Moscow at a moment when, for one reason or another, the Russian president saw political advantage in welcoming such a visitor.
Nikolai and Yana spoke frequently by telephone in the time leading up to the Moscow visit, his first since defecting. In the Russian capital, they spent an emotional evening together. He would not share the details of their visit, other than to say that she told him he had “done everything right.” They were divorced by now; he had since married Tatjana, who was a sister-in-law of Giorgy Okolovich’s chief lieutenant. He remained in contact with son Alik, now a biologist at Moscow State University.
Nikolai’s years as a spy never left his soul, and in a very real way he was still living them when I knew him. He thrived on the past. His voice turned childlike whenever our discussions turned to his World War II exploits, and the descriptions of those adventures are the best parts of his memoir. He remained bitter at the CIA’s failure to rescue Yana and Alik; it was a betrayal, proof that the agency cared nothing about human beings. His friend Nick Andonov told me Nikolai was desperate to find someone who would portray him in film or print as a man who was not a traitor. When he failed, he was certain that the CIA simply didn’t want his story to be told and had pressured media executives into shunning him. I chalked that up to paranoia.
Until the very end, Nikolai insisted he was never an assassin and spoke contemptuously of those who portrayed him as having been one. Everyone got him wrong. I thought it was an absurd position to take. Did he ever kill anyone with his bare hands? Not that I could find out. But he was obviously capable of directing murder plots when he so chose. He was making a distinction between assassinations that he thought were justified—during wartime as a Russian partisan—and those he found distasteful after the war. One type was patriotic, the other mechanical and ideological.
I came to believe that stagecraft was a large part of Nikolai’s psyche. The Okolovich affair seemed to be a prime example. If Nikolai had simply wanted to stop the murder of the emigre leader, he only had to warn Okolovich to get out of town and no one would have been the wiser. He extended what should have been a temporary intersection with Okolovich’s life into an elongated drama, quite possibly because of the very theater of it—he couldn’t help himself.
Now I wanted to understand something about the nature of the current regime in Moscow. I decided to take a look at the events of October 2002 in a popular theater in the Russian capital.
CHAPTER 5
