Tool of the Trade (2 page)

“North. Up to Maine.”

“What part?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been there.”

“What about me?” the girl said. “Can I come along?”

I hesitated. It might be slightly safer for me that way, if not for her. Willing hostage. “If we left you here, could you get home all right?”

“Sure. My father’s the cook.”

“You go home with your father. Tell him—what's your name?”

“Richard.”

“Tell him Richard had to leave early, to pick up some medicine for a sick friend. He’ll be out of town for a few days. And you never saw me. Never at all.”

She looked vaguely through me, focusing on the TV set at the end of the bar. “Uh-huh. Bye, Rich.”

I left a couple of dollars on the table. Then we put on our coats and walked out into the swirling night.

The man who calls himself Nicholas Foley—Dr. Nicholas Foley, a full professor in MIT’s psychology department—was born Nikola Ulinov, in Leningrad, in 1935. It was not the best time to grow up there.

Leningrad is the most European of Soviet cities, partly from cultural tradition and partly from simple propinquity to Europe. Finland is not too long a drive away, and today, people who are allowed to can cross over into Helsinki and buy computers and jazz records and play roulette for Finnish charities. Finns seem to like Russians now, or at least tolerate them.

But they were not fond of the Russians after Stalin’s 1939 invasion, and so it was Finnish soldiers who reinforced Hitler’s battalions, converging on Leningrad on the eve of Nikola Ulinov’s sixth birthday. Leningrad was ready for them. There weren’t many Soviet soldiers there—Stalin, having no love for the European city, had drawn most of the troops toward
Moscow for the coming winter—but the civilians had been trained in street-fighting techniques. Molotov cocktails were mass-produced and distributed. Weapons oiled and ammunition portioned out. The people were ready to defend their city street by street against the implacable enemy. If the Nazis wanted Leningrad badly enough, they would no doubt have it. But they would first pay a terrible price.

Hitler, or his advisers, outmaneuvered the Soviets. They saw there was no need to go into the city and fight. All you had to do was cut off all avenues of supply, and let the natives try to live through a Russian winter without food or fuel. Throw in some artillery. At least a third of the city’s three million would die. And then when spring came, simply lift the siege, and push the survivors out to disrupt the rest of the Soviet Union.

The strategy did take Leningrad by surprise, but it didn’t work out quite as neatly as Hitler had hoped. More than a million did die, but the others didn’t cave in. They lived on moldy grain and shoe leather and hope and hate—until three Russian winters finally did to Hitler what one had done to Napoleon. Leningrad and Russia won, even if the price they paid would warp the city and the country with grief and fear for the rest of the century.

(Leningrad’s reward for heroism was to become a noncity populated by nonpersons. Malenkov and Beria implemented Stalin’s distaste for the Western city by destroying, or hiding in inaccessible archives, all written records of the Siege.)

Five-year-old Nikola knew there was a war going on, and like most boy children, he vaguely approved of the idea. Even when the artillery and bombs began dropping into the city, when sleep was pinched off by air-raid sirens—even then, it provoked excitement
more than fear. An interesting game with obscure rules.

Then one day at noon an artillery round or a bomb fell across the street, and Nikola ran outside breathless with excitement, and saw his best friend’s father stumbling bloodsoaked out of the wreckage of their flat, carrying cradled in his arms what was left of his son, blown to bloody rags and dying there in front of Nikola with a last bubbling moan. From then on he would remember the war as quite real, and terrible. And some parts would be too terrible to remember.

The Leningraders tried to get their children out of the city before the fighting started in earnest. Nikola loaded a suitcase almost as big as he was aboard a boxcar headed for the relative safety of Novgorod. They never made it. Nazi Messerschmitts, perhaps thinking it was a freight train, bombed and strafed the children unmercifully. Nikola’s suitcase may have saved him; at any rate, the clothes and foodstuffs inside absorbed two bullets while he cowered behind it in the screaming dark. (Forty years later Nick Foley would still have trouble facing a locker room, or any such crowded sweaty place. The source of the small anxiety attacks was a mystery to him, which he accepted along with other small mysteries.)

The Messerschmitts finally ran out of ammunition. A nearby farming community took care of Nikola and the other surviving children for a couple of weeks, and then a night convoy of blacked-out trucks and ambulances took them back to Leningrad. The children were to be rerouted east to Kirov and Sverdlovsk, and most of them did make it. Nikola didn’t. He found himself suddenly without a family, and while that problem was being straightened out, the last train left.

His mother and father might have been alive at that
time, but Nikola would never know. They had been arrested by the NKVD, imprisoned as spies for Nazi Germany.

It was not impossible. His father was a German citizen who had immigrated to Russia in the twenties, declaring great sympathy for the Revolution and even changing his name from Feldstein to Ulinov. He had been a philology professor at Heidelberg; in due course he joined the philology department at Leningrad State University.

So to a certain cast of mind, he was triply not to be trusted: an intellectual, a German, a Jew. Why would a German Jew, however lapsed in his religion, want to spy for Hitler? This was not the kind of question that much bothered that cast of mind. Ulinov and his wife were locked up pending transfer to Lubyanka, the forbidding prison in Moscow, but they never made the trip. Sometime during the siege, they either starved to death or were executed. The records claimed execution but, perversely, that status was sometimes conferred after the fact. An informal quota system.

It would be many years before Nikola would know any of this. The authorities explained that his parents had been taken from him by the Nazis, and he had no reason to question that.

Having missed the exodus, Nikola wound up living with Arkady Vavilov, who had been his father’s elderly boss, and the old man’s wife. He could hardly have found better surrogate parents than the Vavilovs. Missing their own grown children, they showered love and attention on him. What was more important to Nikola’s tortuous future, though, was the fact that Vavilov was a linguist and a language teacher. And both the Vavilovs spoke English-American English, having spent years in New York.

Foreign languages were nothing new to the boy. Nikola’s parents had brought him up to be equally fluent in German and Russian, and found that he was a thirsty sponge for languages. Professor Ulinov had amused himself by teaching the boy basic vocabularies in French, Japanese, and Finnish. His surrogate father added a little to two of those, but concentrated on the language of those strange folks who would eventually bring the Soviet Union the Lend-Lease Act and other problems.

Vavilov had lots of time, since his part of the university had been shut down. They made a game, if a rather grim one, out of the English lessons. When Arkady or his wife finally came home from the long ration line, they would take Nikola’s portion of the bread (and much of their own, which he would never know) and carefully divide it into sixteen equal portions. Each piece would be a reward for a lesson properly recited. Hunger turned out to be an effective aid to what would later be called “the acquisition of languages”—especially during the hardest times, when an individual’s bread ration was down to four ounces a day. When the siege lifted after nine hundred days, Nikola was not quite nine years old, but his English was better than that of most Americans a couple of years older. This did not escape the government’s attention for long.

During the course of the war, for reasons that were important at the time, the NKVD that had presided over Nikola’s parents’ deaths changed its initials to NKGB. In March of 1946, it became the MGB, and it was the MGB who came looking for young citizens fluent in English. In 1949 it latched on to fourteen-year-old Nikola Ulinov, with his huge vocabulary, impeccable grammar, and pronounced Bronx accent.

They would have to work on the accent, but otherwise
he was perfect. A leader in the local Komsomol, he was an almost fanatic patriot. (In the jargon of his ultimate profession, you might say that he was
fixated
on Soviet Communism as an
outlet
for the
militant enthusiasm
that was the
external manifestation
of the tensions generated by his
frustrated adolescent sexuality
and
ambiguous self-image.)
Other factors: He didn’t look at all Russian, with his mother’s Aryan features and blond hair. He had no living relatives. He had been toughened by war and privation; like all Leningraders he had seen a thousand faces of death, and you either learned to live with that terrible knowledge or went mad. Nikola seemed to be bleakly sane.

He would make a magnificent spy.

The MGB had gone to a great deal of trouble and expense to build an ersatz American small town in the middle of an Azerbaijan wheat field. It was called Rivertown and was supposed to be in Kansas.

The people who went there were only allowed to speak Russian once a week (a “self-criticism” session, but most of them looked forward to it). A few older ones ran shops or taught school or acted as policemen, firemen, and so forth. Seven of the school-teachers were transplanted Americans who had grown up in the Midwest. They taught English and history, but mainly they taught:

It was a stressful life, but had its advantages. Meat at least twice a day, when most Russians were lucky to see it once a week. American cars for learning how to drive. A library full of books, most of which were not available to the rest of the country’s school-children. Coke and coffee, imported at some expense.

Nikola, who was now called Nicky or Nicholas, grew to dread seeing those seven hawk-eyed American mentors. When they weren’t around, he could play his part perfectly, but as soon as one of them looked at him, his accent would slip or he would stand too close to someone, talking; hold his coffee cup wrong; forget to cross his legs; cuss or not cuss in the wrong situation. All seven of these foreigners reported directly to the MGB, and Nicky had no illusions as to what the MGB could do to people who disappointed them. He didn’t know the seven considered him their star pupil.

He had useful talents aside from playacting and academics. One that could have cut his espionage career short was marksmanship: he had uncanny ability with a pistol. He was almost drafted for the 1952 Olympics, but the MGB held on to him. Linguist, pistol shot, ballroom dancer—if he could only tell one wine from another, he could have been a regular James Bond.

They couldn’t make a mathematician out of him, though, which frustrated the MGB’s plans. They had wanted to insert him into the United States after he’d finished Rivertown High, to excel in physics or engineering and eventually wind up in a sensitive research position. But calculus was a smooth
unclimbable wall to him. Reluctantly they decided to let him follow his natural leanings.

So as his eighteenth birthday approached, they assembled a dossier that gave Nicholas Foley a complete and tragic past. Found abandoned soon after birth, Nicky was raised in an orphanage in Lawrence, Kansas. The orphanage is one that actually did exist, but it burned to the ground, along with all records, in 1947. Nicky survived and was adopted by Neil and Pamela Foley, who died together in an automobile accident in 1952. (None of this tragedy was arranged by Soviet intelligence, who don’t make a practice of murdering innocent foreigners; they just studied a few Kansas newspapers.) The court appointed a guardian for Nicky, but he ran away.

A few days before his eighteenth birthday, Nick got off an Aeroflot plane in Toronto, bluffed past customs, then wandered around the city for a couple of days making sure he wasn’t being followed. He took a bus to Ottawa and a train back. He crossed the border at Niagara in a Greyhound, got on the train in Buffalo, and in three days wound up in Lawrence, Kansas, where he walked to the Selective Service office and volunteered for the draft.

Two years in the post-Korea American army did nothing to shake his faith in the Soviet system (a stint in the Soviet army might have); he was possibly the best Communist ever to earn the Good Conduct Medal and go to school on the GI Bill. And go to school he did, as prearranged: B.A., Psychology, University of Kansas, 1959; M.A. Linguistics, University of Iowa, 1961; Ph.D. Psychology, also Iowa, 1963. He settled in to teach in Iowa City and wait for his first assignment. It would be two years in coming.

I arrived in Cambridge more than twenty years ago, glad to be escaping the Iowa winters, looking forward to the intellectual stimulation and challenge I knew the MIT and Harvard communities would provide—and also looking forward to my first meeting with an actual American Office KGB agent. Though technically I was one myself, of course.

I’d studied and taught at Iowa for almost six years without so much as a cryptic postcard. Then one night I was working late at the office grading finals, and a woman walked in, smiled, handed me an envelope, and left without a word. In the envelope was a clipping from the
Journal of Educational Psychology
advertising an opening for an assistant professor at MIT. I applied and got the job right away.