DOUBLE-OH

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 10^th 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?