A Washington suicide?

Just after publication of his damning account of the sins of the Soviet regime in 1939, “In Stalin’s Secret Service,” defected Soviet intelligence officer Walter G. Krivitsky told the New York Times, “If they ever try to prove that I took my own life, don’t believe it.” The Times used that quotation in a story when Krivitsky was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head in a locked hotel room near Washington’s Union Station on Feb. 10, 1941. Washington police, after a cursory walk through, dismissed the death as a suicide. (OGPU is one of the many names for the agency that became KGB.)

Now we have “A Death in Washington,” what should be the definitive book on the Krivitsky Affair: GaryKern offers a multi-faceted examination of a case that intrigued intelligence officers and buffs for more than half a century — essentially, the spook world’s own “Who Killed Kennedy?” mystery. Did the Soviets murder Krivitsky, or did fears of harm to his family goad him into killing himself? Mr. Kern, a Soviet specialist who was an operations officer for the Central Intelligence Agency’s Clandestine Services for 34 years ,dispassionately lays out the murder versus suicide evidence, and I do not intend to spoil a whopper of a book by telling you his conclusion.

By all accounts, Krivitsky was one of the best officers Soviet intelligence produced in its early years, and recounting his career occupies the first third of the book. Much of his story was related in his 1939 book, written by Isaac Don Levine., which for the most part has proved credible. Mr. Kern adds fresh details, confirming parts of the account, questioning others. But he does not contest that Krivitsky was a very important figure in the espionage world.

Krivitsky’s origins were murky. The evidence is that he was born Samuel Ginsberg in 1899, in a drab Polish village in what is now Ukraine, smack against the border of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. (Oddly, this little hamlet produced no less than six able intelligence officers.) He joined the Bolsheviks in 1919 and soon became a razvedchik — an intelligence man, or spy in everyday language. He chose as his revolutionary cryptonym “Krivitsky,” from the Slavic root term kriv, meaning “crooked, twisted, awry.”

The size of the nascent Soviet intelligence services being what they were, a seemingly natural bent for the covert gave Krivitsky a fast rise; in short order he was the recognized expert on Poland, Germany, and other countries to a lesser extent.

His intelligence coups, in their totality, were awesome. Two of his officers in Germany obtained complete designs for a new aircraft engine. He counted among his agents Pierre Cot, the French minister for air (whose name would appear in Soviet intelligence cables in the famed VENONA intercepts made during the war years). There was even a fruitful contact with the mistress of King Carol II of Romania that led to a USSR alliance with that country. For a decade, Krivitsky was the ultimate super-spy, flitting from country to country, devoid of the diplomatic status that would save him from jail if caught, recruiting agents and gathering information. Such an agent walks the ultimate tight rope.

But his visits to the USSR showed Krivitsky the dark side of the revolution for which he toiled. One morning he left a comfortable rail coach in Moscow and strolled into the station. There he saw some 600 men, women and children, “some half-naked in the cold, some slumped over, others obviously dying of typhus.” OGPU guardstold Krivitsky these wretched souls were “kulaks,” which in Stalin-speak meant successful small farmers who opposed confiscation of their lands. These were the very people from whom Krivitsky had come. Now they were enroute to the Gulag. Shaken, nonetheless Krivitsky felt that given what was happening elsewhere in Europe, communism “still seemed the only hope of mankind.”

But other disillusions followed. As the 1930s rolled on, he saw trusted intelligence colleagues summoned to Moscow for summary execution by a crazed Stalin. Many of these men he knew to be innocent of outlandish charges brought against them. Krivitsky knew his days were numbered.

Here commences the second phase of Mr. Kern’s densely documented narrative: Krivitsky’s defection by stages, beginning with contacts with French intelligence in 1938. By one account, his hours of interrogation on Soviet espionage in Europe produced 80large volumes of material — “perhaps one volume per spy?” Mr. Kern asks. We’ll never know. The volumes vanished, accidentally dumped into the Seine (by French accounts) or pilfered by Soviet agents. He managed to get into the United States on a forged passport, but his location was surely soon known by Soviet agents.

A minor mystery at the time was why Rep. Samuel Dickstein, a New York Democrat, worked assiduously to have immigration authorities deport Krivitsky. The reason for Dickstein’s interest is nasty. Documents from the VENONA intercepts and elsewhere reveal that Dickstein was on Moscow’s payroll, and that he was ordered to force Krivitsky’s deportation so he could be snatched up in Europe. Sending Krivitsky to certain death surely was a chore worth a handful of Soviet gold, andthe whorish Dickstein succeeded in gettingKrivitsky out of the United States for a period that he spent in Canada. But Krivitsky had told the core of his story to Adolph Berle of the State Department and to author Levine, who put his revelations into print.

But to little practical avail. The Roosevelt Administration essentially ignored leads that could have outed Alger Hiss and others. The Federal Bureau of Investigation shunned Krivitsky because of J. Edgar Hoover’s rage about learning of a major Soviet defector through articles in the Saturday Evening Post serializing Krivitsky’s book.

Krivitsky bounced briefly to London where he gave interrogators material enough to identify about 100 spies and their control officers. He told of seeing documents sent by these agents to Moscow that revealed the extent of Soviet penetration of the British government. A handful of the spies were jailed; others were neutralized. But the Brits missed much more. For instance, during initial interviews at the British Embassy in Washington, Krivitsky spoke of a Foreign Office agent who was a “Scotsman” from “a very good family.”

Properly pursued, this could have led to exposure of Donald MacLean, who remained in Soviet service for more than a decade more. Krivitsky’s information concerning another of the Cambridge traitors, Kim Philby, was overly broad: He knew that “a young Englishman” had been sent to Spain under journalistic cover during the Civil War to assassinate Francisco Franco. Given the number of Fleet Street men in Spain, the lead was worthless.

The depth of Stalin’s rage over Krivitsky’s defection is shown by the ferocity of attacks on his book by the trained-seal leftist media. A glitch by ghostwriter Levine gave critics material, for he inaccurately identified Krivitsky as a “general” — he held equivalent rank of a colonel — and with some overstatement he claimed he ran all of Soviet intelligence in Europe. In an attack with vicious anti-Semitic overtones, the left made much of the fact that Krivitsky had been born under another name — surely no surprise in the case of a professional intelligence officer.

If the left is capable of embarrassment (I happen to think not) the reddest face in journalism should have been the Nation, which published an angry denunciation of Krivitsky (by a so-called ’Committee of 400”) for encouraging “the fantastic falsehood that the USSR and the totalitarian states are basically alike.” The Nation hit the newsstands the same week that Hitler and Stalin announced their infamous pact.

Krivitsky’s prediction of just such a deal gave him renewed credibility — and also gave renewed urgency to Stalin’s killers on the prowl. Krivitsky encountered three goons in a Times Square cafe. He confronted one of them, Sergei Basoff, an “illegal” longtime resident in the United States. (He was also known as Hans Brusse.) “Did you come to shoot me?” Krivitsky asked. No, no, Basoff protested, he wanted only a friendly chat. Krivitsky fled.

David Shub, a Russian-born journalist, sought to allay his fears. Given what you’ve said and written, Shub said, “nothing further can make a difference.” Krivitsky shook his head and said, “I haven’t told the most important.” He would not elaborate. And what was “most important” can now only be a matter of speculation.

With his wife Krivitsky arranged to buy a chicken farm near Charlottesville, Va., plans he discussed while visiting a refugee couple living nearby. He had changed his name once again and applied for citizenship. He was moody but during the visit he talked of a new life as an anonymous farmer.

The last week of his life, he went into town to buy a pistol. The friend’s wife drove him to Washington on Sunday, Feb. 9, 1941 and at 5:49 P. M. he checked into the Bellevue Hotel (now the George, in another incarnation) on E Street NW, a block or so from Union Station — a bustling place large enough to house 140 permanent residents and 260 daily guests. A maid found him the next morning behind a locked door, dead of a single gunshot wound to the head.

And here is where Gary Kern undertakes the most important part of his book, an analysis of the evidence of how Krivitsky came to die. For teasers, consider several items:Mr. Kern, himself a veteran field operative, notes that the supposedly locked door could be opened with a skeleton key sold at most hardware stories. The OGPU had samples in Krivitsky’s handwriting in several languages, so forging suicide notes would have been easy.

The single bullet that killed Krivitsky penetrated a tile wall, fragmented, and dropped into a hollow space; D. C. police could not fish out the pieces, and they decided against tearing up the wall to retrieve them.The death weapon was found to the left side of Krivitsky’s body, although he was right-handed. The DC cops quickly concluded suicide.

Krivitsky’s memoir ended with a poignant sentence, written after he described his encounter with the Stalin hit men on Times Square: “I got away safely once more.” Alas, not for long.

Arthur Koestler, himself a refugee from the communist system, spoke for many skeptics when he famously commented of the Krivitsky death, “There’s an old OGPU saying, ’Any fool can commit a murder, but it takes an artist to commit a natural death.’’”

So, suicide or death? Mr. Kern’s book is of enormous value in seeking the answer.

Joseph C. Goulden is working on a book on Cold War intelligence. His e-mail is JosephG894@AOL.COM.