DOUBLE-OH
I was once recruited as an informant for the Soviet Union. Well, almost.
I was once recruited as an informant for the Soviet Union. Well, almost.
If you've ever read any John Le Carré’s celebrated cold-war
spy novels, you might have noticed his detailed descriptions of how
intelligence service operatives routinely maintained an army of “Joes”
–informants providing primarily low-level intelligence, either for pay or for
some sense of exotic excitement - sometimes for a disenchantment with their own
country’s policies or trajectories.
In or around 1989, shortly before the 1991 breakup of the
Soviet Union, I was living in Nicaragua, awaiting the birth of my son and
carrying out any number of translations, short-term consultancies and other odd
jobs in order to survive in what were the final years of the first phase of the
Sandinista revolutionary government (after being voted out in 1990 they
returned to power in 2007 and are still at the head of the government today.) Ten years of internal conflict, a U.S.
economic boycott and no small level of ill-founded and impractical national
economic policies had taken its toll on the country. Inflation was at the 2000% level (local
currency 50 córdoba bills had been printed over to increase their value to
50,000), shortages were commonplace (standing in line to buy toilet paper in
the markets) and the internal war, costing the lives of thousands of young men
and women who were routinely conscripted in to the ill-equipped armed-forces to
fight against the U.S. backed counter-revolutionaries, was dragging on into its
10th year.
I decided to enroll in a Spanish language class given at the
local Jesuit University in order to bolster my language capabilities, much of
which had been acquired through non-formal interaction with a community of
peasant farmers during a 1984 internship undertaken in the isolated
north-central mountains of Nicaragua.
The students in the class were an interesting mix of foreigners from
around the world – mainly family members of diplomatic, development or embassy
personnel. One of them was Vladimir (not his real name), a staff member
of the Soviet Embassy in Nicaragua.
During class breaks, Vlad and I would oftentimes sit and chat in a
mixture of English and Spanish. It was
interesting to have the opportunity to speak with someone from the USSR – not
an everyday interaction in the life of a struggling development worker. We would exchange stories about our lives in
our respective countries and a bit about what we were doing in Nicaragua. Vladimir told me his job at the Embassy was
ensuring that Embassy supplies being shipped from Russia got through the
bureaucracy of Nicaraguan customs.
After a few such chats, Vladimir suggested that we might
meet in the evenings for pizza and beer, say… on Thursdays every week at
such-and-such a time at a local pizza parlor.
It sounded good: a break from the
everyday routine and the sign of a growing friendship. We would meet, eat, and continue sharing stories
about our countries. The first glimmer
that something was slightly amiss was his insistence on asking me about my
other U.S. friends and contacts – something that I didn’t really have as I was
pretty much immersed in Nicaraguan life and culture. Once, when I had told him that I was
currently doing a Spanish-to-English translation for a U.S.- based development
agency, he surprised me by asking if he could see a copy of the document. I told him that it probably wouldn’t be a
problem, as the document was basically an analysis of the current conditions in
Nicaragua, but that I would of course have to get the permission of the agency
for which I was doing the translation.
He soon dropped his curiosity about the document. He would also occasionally ask me if I needed
anything – for example, auto-parts for the Russian-made Lada I was driving
(cars that had flooded the Nicaraguan market in the face of the U.S.
boycott.) Was my pregnant wife being
properly attended at the local hospital? There were very good Russian doctors
collaborating in the country…
So you can probably see where this was going, yes? (Oh, wait a minute, I gave that away at the
beginning of this story, didn't I?) I,
naively, continued to think of the interaction as an opportunity to broaden my
sphere of friendships to different cultures.
Any niggling of suspicion I had was tempered by the laughing thought
that I – a struggling worker trying to make it in the Nicaraguan economy with a
child on-the-way and little or no contact with anything remotely to do with
politics, the Nicaraguan government or even the U.S. government – could
possibly be of interest to an agent of the Soviet Union. I guess I should have read those Le Carré
novels earlier, because this was a classic example of low-level recruitment of
an informant: the Embassy worker, under
the cover of arranging supply logistics, actually a member of the intelligence
gathering service building a friendship with a citizen of a country of interest;
the conditioning of the “Joe” to meet at the same place at the same time on a
regular basis – determining reliability and consistency; the probing to see if
there was economic need that could be leveraged and whether the contact would
be willing to share seemingly innocuous documents from his/her work.
The climax came after about a month. He asked if I would be interested in coming
to his house to meet his wife and little daughter and have dinner. The strangeness of his not inviting my wife
to accompany me was not lost on me. He
gave me directions to his house in an upper class neighborhood on a hill
overlooking Managua that was home to many Embassies and a favorite of the many
foreign diplomats working in Nicaragua.
He said that he would have driven me or led me out to his home but, you
know, diplomatic plates and all…
I arrived at his house on the agreed night. I was introduced to his charming, diminutive
wife and cuteblond-haired daughter, who accompanied us for a meal of pretty bad
Russian cooking – I remember it being some casserole of canned corn and peas
and meat, probably more, but not something I can particularly point to as a
classic Russian meal. Then his wife and
child retired to some corner of the house and Vladimir invited me to the living
room to drink (Surprise!) some lemon-flavored vodka and to chat some more. The strangest part of the evening was when he
insisted on showing me a bit about his country and played a patriotic video of
some military parade in Red Square, complete with ranks of gray-clad
high-stepping soldiers and tanks and guns and…
Perhaps the continuing shots of vodka (vashee zda-ró-vye!!) helped to make
it more interesting.
AND THEN (of course):
“Comrade! You have
met my beautiful wife and child! I must
tell you something…in the Embassy, in my job at the Embassy, I must bring in a
certain level of information every month, or they will send me back to Russia,
and you know the economic situation in Russia is not so very good right now. Maybe you can help me out with this? It does not have to be much – a little
thing. Things you hear in your work,
maybe something your American friends say about, oh I don’t know – will the
United States invade Nicaragua if the Sandinistas win this election?” (it was
right before the 1990 internationally-pressured elections in Nicaragua during
which the Sandinistas did indeed get voted out of power).
I was PISSED! (well, a
bit DRUNK and PISSED!) I had been
developing this friendship in what I thought was good faith – a sincere effort
to know someone from a country that I would not normally have had the chance to
encounter. Okay, like I said before,
naïve perhaps. (Why hadn’t I become a Le Carre fan earlier?) But now I was pissed! I told him that I didn’t appreciate being put
in this position. That I felt betrayed and that I would never allow myself to
be in the position he was proposing. He
said, “But wait! Calm down! Okay, maybe not you. Maybe you could just introduce me to one of
your friends…” I had had enough, stood abruptly
and said goodnight and, as I walked out the door to the car, told him that he
could forget about contacting me again.
A few weeks later, I saw him once more as I went to buy a
pizza at what was basically the only place in Managua to get a pizza at that
time. He was sitting at a table, deep in
conversation with another person-this one Nicaraguan: Another “Joe” in the making?
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