The Nazis Next Door (11 page)

He tried to reach his old friend John Grunz to get him to extricate him from the mess that the upcoming training mission and his fabricated resumé were creating for him. Unsuccessful, a panicked Soobzokov went to Fort Meade anyway as planned. It proved to be an anticlimactic time. He had worried himself for nothing; there were no confessions to make, no training sessions to lead, no life-or-death decisions to make by the light of an exploding grenade. In fact, his drill instructor at Fort Meade wrote afterward that the Hot War trainee impressed him as “intelligent, energetic and frank”; he was particularly struck by his “fanatic hate of communism.” That was a huge plus for any Hot War cadet.

Nonetheless, the episode proved a moment of sober realization for Soobzokov. Each encounter with the CIA was now bringing him closer to having to admit that his official biography—from his supposed military officer’s training in Russia to his wartime activities—was largely a sham. With his American citizenship application awaiting approval, his fabrications might even endanger his chances of staying in the United States permanently if they were to be exposed. Soobzokov had some cleaning up to do. So he went, again, to his confidant at the CIA.

“Dear John,” he began typing. His recent assignment at Fort Meade had gotten him thinking, Soobzokov wrote, and he had “decided to ask you a small favour.” He realized that there were some small inaccuracies in his official biography that perhaps he should now try to correct. “U.S. Congress passed a few months ago a law which allows immigrants to change some uncorrect dates when they were falsely writing them in order to come to the U.S.A.,” he wrote. His own case seemed tailor-made for the new law, allowing him to amend the small mistakes in his biography and “become clean forever,” he wrote. He was sorry to bother him with something so trivial, he wrote, but could John help him?

It was an audacious move: he was volunteering to fix the “small” misstatements in his history in order to continue hiding the big ones. Improbably, it worked—at least for a while.

On cue at his next debriefing, Soobzokov gave the CIA his “new” autobiography, with some of the smaller inconsistencies—when he was actually born, where he had lived, where he had gone to school—now effectively whited out and corrected. He explained to the CIA that these were minor misstatements that had helped him in Europe—making him seem older, better trained, and more experienced than he really was—and he kept repeating them even after the war for fear that admitting them might compromise his immigration to America. He always figured the lies would catch up with him, he admitted to the debriefer, but they never did, so he simply kept on telling them, again and again and again. “The Subject himself expressed astonishment at how simple it was to falsify to the American Intelligence incidents which in his opinion are very easily checked out and verified,” the examiner wrote. When America’s great spymasters failed to catch on to his bald fabrications, Soobzokov simply “continued to keep insisting [the misstatements] were true,” the report added. He’d even written up an outline of his supposed biography just to keep track in his own mind of all the lies he’d told the CIA over the years, he admitted with some small pride. Indeed, there were so many lies that it was difficult to remember everything he’d said.

It was now clear, the CIA concluded, that Soobzokov’s employment as an agent “was based on admitted lies and fabrications.” The agency had a problem. It began to distance itself from its Russian spy as the questions about him continued to mount. “Nostril file burned last fall,” read one cryptic memo at the CIA. The agency had no derogatory information on Soobzokov anyway, the memo lied, and his old CIA handlers were “not in contact with Soobzokov.”

Soobzokov had one last chance, one final opportunity to regain the agency’s trust, even after all the “admitted lies and fabrications,” all the bungled assignments, all the melodrama about exploding grenades and deflowered virgins. The week before Thanksgiving in 1959, with Washington fixated on the new Communist revolutionary Fidel Castro, Soobzokov made another trip from New Jersey to Washington. This was to be his moment of reckoning. The agency was finally ready to challenge him on every aspect of his life story—both the small details he had already tried to correct, and the big ones he continued to hide. For the first time, the CIA had even done some digging of its own on the background of its troubled spy, using newly available war records on the Nazi occupation of Russia. For two days, he would face a top-to-bottom grilling by a CIA examiner who came armed with a thick stack of all Soobzokov’s past debriefings and his spotty lie-detector tests—a record of everything he had told the CIA, everything he claimed to have done, everywhere he claimed to have been.

Less than four years earlier, interviewing for his big assignment with the Hot War team in that elegant hotel room at the Statler, he had answered the same basic questions about his life with no hint of skepticism from the CIA. This time, as he sat across from the CIA examiner at a much less decorous room at a covert outpost not far away, the mood was starkly different. Gone was the breezy, boys’ club atmosphere. This felt more like an inquisition. Again, he was strapped up to the polygraph machine. The examiner put him on notice from the start. “He was cautioned,” the examiner noted in his report, “that a repetition of his previous attempts at deception would not be beneficial to him or to his future.” Any more lies and he was gone.

Soobzokov nodded his head in understanding and adopted his most earnest demeanor, his usual bravado gone. “Not one single word of untruth will come from my lips,” he assured the examiner.

They began at the beginning.

So, what year were you really born? the examiner asked.

In 1924, Soobzokov answered.

Not 1918, as you’d told us before?

No, it was 1924.

How many times have you really married?

Twice.

You’d always told us once. Twice?

Yes, twice, Soobzokov repeated. There was a Circassian girl he’d wed named Khadizhet. It was 1942, if he remembered right. They weren’t married long, maybe a few months, he said. She died. No, he didn’t know how, Soobzokov said.

And what about the Russian military academy? Had he really graduated from the academy at a place called Ordzhonikidze as he had always claimed?

No, he admitted. He hadn’t even attended the military academy, much less graduated. The farthest he’d gone in school was the eighth grade.

The examiner led him through all the other inconsistencies in his past stories, asking him about his father’s farm, his relatives, his work record, a juvenile arrest, even a run-in with a girl from his childhood; all trivial in the scheme of things. But this was all just prelude, the CIA’s version of foreplay, as the examiner walked Soobzokov toward that critical, opaque period nearly two decades earlier, in Europe’s bleakest time.

Let’s talk about the war, the examiner began. Tell me again what you did.

Soobzokov gave his stock answer—the same one he’d given CIA officials for years whenever he was asked about it. He had rehearsed it many times, using that same outline he had written up long ago. He had deserted the Russian army early in the war, Soobzokov began. He hated Stalin for everything he had taken from him and his family—the rich farmland they had seized, the liberties they stole—and after the Germans invaded in 1942, he was a prisoner of war forced to serve with other Circassians under Hitler’s grip. It was one tyrant or the other; Hitler or Stalin. He did some farm work for the Germans, transporting hay. His main role, Soobzokov said, was protecting his fellow Circassians in his region from the ravages of the war, as their de facto leader. He’d worn a German uniform, but only as a formality. He’d never really served with the Germans.

Now it was the examiner’s turn. From the clutter of documents in front of him, the CIA examiner removed a tattered, typewritten form and held it silently in front of Soobzokov; close enough for him to get a glimpse of its authenticity, but not to read it. This was by design. He didn’t want Soobzokov to be able to see what it actually said. The examiner seemed to have been saving up the document for just this very moment. Just why, Soobzokov could not be certain.

The examiner began reading to Soobzokov: “Special order from German Field Command No. 548.” It was a Nazi permit, stamped and signed the day after Christmas in 1942 in accordance with orders “issued by the commanding officer of the SS and SD Bureau in Krasnodar.” In its cold, merciless Nazi bureaucratese, the permit gave legal authority to the only person named on it—Tscherim Soobzokov, born on January 1, 1918—to “search all villages” in his area. Search for what? The form did not say exactly, but it did not need to. The answer was clear to the CIA and to any student of the Nazis’ destructive path through western Russia. The order effectively authorized Soobzokov, as the CIA noted in his file, to “search the area of Toktamakai for Jews and Komsomol,” members of the Young Communist League. He was to be the Nazis’ man on the ground in rounding up Hitler’s enemies, going from one neighbor’s house to the next to look for Communists and Jews in the region where he grew up.

Nothing like this had ever been raised before in all of Soobzokov’s many debriefings. So, the examiner asked when he was done reading the document, how did he explain this?

Soobzokov was growing flustered, even desperate, the examiner wrote in his notes. This was hard evidence—typewritten by a Nazi regime meticulous in its barbaric record-keeping—that appeared to tie him directly to the roundup of innocent civilians in his own hometown. Where had the CIA gotten this document, and what else did they have on him?

It must be a mistake, Soobzokov insisted; a typo, a mixed-up name, maybe an out-and-out Russian forgery. He had handled only menial administrative tasks for the Germans, not the rousting of Jews and Communists from their homes, he insisted. And he wasn’t even in that part of Krasnodar at the time the document placed him there, he said. The Nazi permit was simply wrong, he insisted.

The examiner didn’t try to disguise his skepticism. It was obvious, he told Soobzokov, that he was lying. What was he supposed to tell his superiors at the CIA now? the examiner wanted to know. How was he going to explain to them all the different stories that he had given them over the years, one version contradicted by another and another?

Soobzokov was out of explanations. “Tell them that I’m lying,” he said finally, “and that I can’t logically explain these inconsistencies.” The examiner wrote it all down.

Soobzokov had reached a breaking point. Yes, he finally acknowledged to the examiner, he had been lying to him about many things, just as he had lied to many of the CIA debriefers before him. But he was ready to tell the truth, he promised. He asked just one favor first from the examiner. Put down your pen, he said.

As he began speaking, the words seemed to tumble out of a dark place inside him, a place Soobzokov had not revisited in many years. It had all started with a Nazi officer named Hans, he told the examiner. He came to know him so well that he called him by his first name. When the Nazis invaded the region in 1942 and Soobzokov deserted the Russian army, he eagerly became Hans’s eyes and ears on the ground in his hometown about a dozen miles from Krasnodar. His job was to keep security in town and help maintain the Nazis’ stronghold. Even as the Nazis slaughtered thousands in the region, gassing them in mobile death trucks, burning them alive in a farmhouse, hanging them from the majestic willows, Hans was worried about what he euphemistically called “morale” problems: the resisters—Jews and Communists—who might dare to fight the invading army.

The Nazi commander looked to Soobzokov, as a de facto security chief, to secretly gather intelligence among the locals and alert him to any dissidents. No, Soobzokov admitted to the examiner, he was not the wartime protector and savior of the Circassians that he had always made himself out to be in his CIA interviews. Just the opposite: he was the Nazis’ spy inside the gates.

It was an unofficial role at first, with Soobzokov playing the part of incognito informant for the Nazis. Then Hans came up with a more formal plan: Soobzokov was to join the Germans’ 835th Battalion, made up mostly of Circassian prisoners of war in the region, in a covert effort to learn about possible uprisings and to spy “on his own people.” He would report back to Hans on plots and any intelligence he picked up from the inside.

But the plan ran aground. As Soobzokov began surreptitiously asking so many odd questions about the other villagers and their true intentions, trying to root out the resisters, his neighbors came to suspect that he was secretly spying for the Nazis, Soobzokov explained. That was how the “special order”—the one that the CIA examiner was now holding in his hand—came to be. Hans issued it to Soobzokov. It bestowed on him the power to roam the town carte blanche and go through the houses—asking questions and searching for the Jews and the Communists seen as threats to Hitler’s murderous regime. If the villagers were making trouble for the Nazis, Soobzokov was to find them. Whatever his neighbors thought of him and his Nazi alliance, no one could challenge his authority now.

And these people who were rounded up—what happened to them? the examiner wanted to know. The Communist “resisters,” the Jews, the Nazi enemies—they were arrested? Jailed? Worse?

Soobzokov paused. Yes, there was one episode, Soobzokov said haltingly, still unsure exactly what else the examiner might already know. Some of the Russian townspeople and resisters were held in an encampment the Nazis had established in town, he explained. One man among the group was suspected of stirring trouble in the encampment, he said. The Nazis needed to deal with him. So, Soobzokov stated, he was put in charge of an execution squad meant to take care of the dissenter. He didn’t explain how he had risen from a lackey and informant for Hans to the top leader of a Nazi execution squad, and the examiner did not ask. But the Nazis brought the man out, and on Soobzokov’s orders, he was shot dead. Even as he told the grim story, Soobzokov seemed oddly insistent on one point: he himself never fired a shot. He simply gave the order to kill the man. This was important to know; in his own mind, it seemed to give him some absolution.