Two Russians in Canada

Here are two books with provenance issues—volumes whose very existence is surrounded by an aura of the unexpected, both with a whiff of unreality. One, The Soviet Ambassador: The Making of the Radical Behind Perestroika, is an account by Canadian journalist Christopher Shulgan of the life and times of a Soviet apparatchik who may or may not have been the invisible pilot of the good ship Gorbachev. Soviet apparatchiks, even ones of such legendary stature as Aleksandr Yakolev, are not natural subjects for biographies. They were quintessential grey men of the Soviet upper bureaucracy, usually with a penchant for career building, nest feathering, well-honed sloganeering and survival. The other, Comrade J: The Untold Secrets of Russia’s Master Spy in America after the Cold War, is an account by Pete Earley of the supposed triumphs of a former spy who began his career with the KGB, carried on with the KGB’s successor agency, the SVR, and ended up as a defector to the U.S., where he now pilots his luxury SUV around the CIA retiree-infested suburbs of Washington DC. Former Soviet/ Russian spies do not usually get to tell their stories, although there are notable exceptions from the days of Kim Philby on. When they do, as Colonel Sergei Tretyakov did to American author Earley, the manner of telling and who controls the tale, deserve careful scrutiny.

Here be books. The most interesting question is: should they be? In both cases, the veil is drawn back on how the books came into existence. For Shulgan’s study of Aleksandr Yakolev, the point of origin was an enterprising literary agent on the hunt for a book idea and willing, as Shulgan candidly admits, to invest in an untested writer. In Earley’s case, it was a phone call out of the blue from a lawyer claiming to represent an unnamed Russian intelligence defector. Earley had the initial good sense to hang up, but was later invited to a meeting with Tretyakov, in the company of CIA and FBI officials. The prospect of exploring the world of a post–Cold War spy who his American handlers claimed was the “real deal” was too good to resist.

Aleksandr Yakolev was the real deal as well, equally irresistible as a subject, not least because there were so many versions of the man. There was Yakolev the deeply loyal party official; Yakolev the communist ideologue with a genuine taste for Kant; Yakolev the convert who struggled mightily to frame his communist faith into a more humane, effective and progressive vision; Yakolev the ambassador to Canada who used his years in exile (for Ottawa was a wilderness light years from the centre of power in the Kremlin) to learn and hone his new faith; Yakolev as secret agent of perestroika and glasnost; and even Yakolev the traitor (to the diehards in the party who planned and executed the August 1991 coup). In bringing this kaleidoscopic character and career into focus, Christopher Shulgan faced one major obstacle absent from Pete Earley’s account. His subject was dead, and could only speak to him from beyond the grave.

The anatomy of glasnost and the subsequent rapid collapse of the Soviet Union remain one of the great mysteries of the final stages of Soviet history. It was a mystery that eluded the principal foreign student of all things Soviet in the 1980s, namely the Central Intelligence Agency. It also eluded many experts in academe, the noble cadre called sovietologists. Any light cast on how the Soviet system tried to break out of the coma of the Brezhnev years and embrace a program for change and reform would be welcome, and Yakolev is enough of an enigma to offer an intriguing angle to this story.

The Soviet Ambassador opens brilliantly, le Carré–like. It is 1991, the year of the coup, the end of history for Soviet Russia. On a Moscow side street two figures meet, and when they do their world quietly explodes with surveillance activity. The older man, dressed in the dreary uniform and with the physique of the Soviet official class, is Aleksandr Yakolev; the younger is Oleg Kalugin. Yakolev, a legendary figure in the democratic wing of the Communist party, now fears assassination plots at the hands of a reactionary and thuggish KGB. Kalugin, a celebrated KGB general, is a stripe changer who had resigned from Soviet intelligence the previous year, denounced the system and would eventually flee to the United States. They were old friends. Both men had been hand picked to take part in the first-ever education exchange between the Soviet Union and the U.S. and had been students at Columbia University in 1958. Yakolev was being groomed at the time as a Soviet official, Kalugin as a spy. Both men were headed, in ways they could never have imagined, toward a future appointment at Boris Yeltsin’s barricades. This was to be quite a trajectory.

The trajectory is the story. Shulgan plots its elements, but without ever managing to repeat the fizz of his opening scene. He tries, but fails, to move in closer to his subject. He cannot, or will not, identify the turning points in Yakolev’s tortuous journey from party hack to party dissident and outspoken reformer. When the time comes to bring the story to a head and pull all the threads of Yakolev’s life into some kind of intellectual order, Shulgan’s book goes missing. After spending ten long years in exile as Soviet ambassador to Canada (1973 to 1983), Yakolev was recalled to Moscow to head up a prestigious and powerful Soviet think tank, the Institute for World Economy and International Relations. He was perfectly placed to try to give intellectual and political substance to the Gorbachev reforms. It was Yakolev’s hour, yet Shulgan devotes only a meagre “afterword” chapter to the final 22 years of Yakolev’s life (he died in October 2005 of a stroke, no doubt a deeply disappointed homo Sovieticus).

Shulgan’s book is very light on Russian-language sources, and he may have been forced to rely over-much on research assistants and translators. For the Soviet media he relies on translations from the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service. Primary source documentation, except for Canadian records relating to Yakolev’s period as ambassador in Ottawa, is not exploited. Some of this could be excused in a book designed not as an academic treatise but as a popular and accessible study. Fair enough. Shulgan writes well and can bring a lively pen to his study when it suits him. The real problem is that he lacks a biographer’s instincts and insights and proves himself deeply dependent on Yakolev’s own memoirs, a reliance that is a little too reverential for its own good.

For example, Yakolev had metaphoric blood on his hands, not least for his role as chief propagandist for the Soviet repression of the Prague Spring uprising in 1968. What does Shulgan make of that? Nothing. It’s one of those moments, all too frequent in the book, when judgmental muscle is missing: “Did he look at himself and ask whether he was an egoist, a coward, a person ‘with bad conscience.’ His memoirs don’t say.”

If George Orwell had been a biographer, this would have been a book project for him. Shulgan is no Orwell, and Yakolev proves too big, too complex, too Russian, for his talents. The book becomes one extended tease, nudging on countless occasions its portrait of Yakolev close to the brink of revolt against Communist Party orthodoxy, but never able to make up its mind when to hustle its subject over the line or how to assess the hasty and calculated retreats that were endemic in Yakolev’s career. Shulgan fails that hard biographer’s task, to get truly into the mind of his subject. Nor does Shulgan seem to have grasped that all biographies come with some artistic licence, the need to fill in the gaps with imaginative assertion on what drives the human soul.

Yakolev and Sergei Tretyakov never met, so far as we know. They were of different generations and from different backgrounds, but their paths crossed, as Soviet paths tended to do, at one remove in the netherworld of espionage. During Yakolev’s time as Soviet ambassador to Canada, the Canadian government, in a moment of passion and frustration, moved to break up a Soviet spy ring and publicly expelled 13 Soviet embassy officials—the largest such expulsion in the history of Canada-Soviet relations. Yakolev protested his innocence (and ignorance) of the spying and went about trying to limit the damage.

The year of that great Soviet spy exodus from Ottawa was 1978, and young Sergei Tretyakov was an indifferent, if pampered, student at the Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages, one year away from his surprise (to him) induction into the ranks of the KGB. By 1990, at age 34, Tretyakov was a rising star in the KGB and enjoying his first foreign posting as a spy under official cover at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa. Yakolev, 33 years his senior, watched from his Moscow perch the antics of this aggressive young intelligence officer in an Ottawa that he had grown very fond of, and took the unprecedented step of writing two letters of protest to the Communist Party Central Committee about Tretyakov’s activities. The KGB had already decided that Yakolev was not of their ilk and ignored his protests.

Tretyakov’s three-year service in Ottawa made his reputation and also, according to Pete Earley, sowed the seeds of doubt in his mind (although it must be said that Earley is no better than Shulgan at a deep tracing of the roots of Tretyakov’s eventual loss of faith).

Much of Comrade J is the usual stuff of spy memoirs, details of youth, education, recruitment, training, life “at the office,” promotion (or lack of same), spy operations good, bad and indifferent. There are moments of real candour about the realities of life inside Soviet/Russian intelligence, rife as it was with nepotism, incompetence and stifling bureaucratic rules. When Tretyakov is shifted to New York City to conduct spy operations inside the United Nations, Earley reveals just how obsessed the Soviets were with infiltrating that body, an institution viewed with suspicion by the Soviets since the days of Joseph Stalin, who reluctantly agreed to join on the grounds that it would be better to be inside than left outside of what he feared was a gigantic anti-communist conspiracy.

For Canadian readers, the undoubted highlight of the book is Earley’s account of Tretyakov’s efforts in Ottawa. We have not seen a similar account of Soviet spy ops in this country since Igor Gouzenko skedaddled from the Soviet embassy with 109 documents tucked under his shirt in September 1945. Earley puts Tretyakov among 13 other Soviet intelligence officials at the embassy in Ottawa in the early 1990s—a number that is probably too low. He was determined to make his mark on his first foreign posting and saw his fellow Soviet officers as competitors, but slothful ones. He went hunting for sources drawing on what seems to have been a native charm, good English and a new spirit of western empathy toward the Soviet Union under a reformist premier. Tretyakov had a secret weapon as well—he looked for signs of strong anti-American sentiments that he could turn to his advantage among his more naive sources.

According to Comrade J, which is based exclusively on Earley’s interviews (126 hours of them) with Tretyakov, the young KGB go-getter recruited at least six Canadian sources who provided him with military and political information. Only one—a most unlikely candidate—is named. Tretyakov claims to have recruited Alex Kindy, a one-time right-wing member of Parliament from Calgary, a Ukrainian by birth, who was facing financial difficulties in mounting a re-election campaign. Tretyakov helped out, he claims, with a sizeable campaign donation and their relationship blossomed. His other sources are listed only under their operational codenames. Three of Tretyakov’s sources were employed at the Canadian Centre for Arms Control and Disarmament, a now defunct private think tank based in Ottawa whose researchers had no formal access to classified material (but then spies peddle all kinds of stuff, and not all secrets are secret). The identity of one of the trio has been widely speculated upon in the media, based on the details provided in Comrade J. The book’s trail leads to Tariq Rauf, currently a senior verification official with the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. The claim has been scoffed at by IAEA officials. The then director of the Canadian centre, John Lamb, who is now a deputy minister with the Nunavut government, has dismissed the Tretyakov account as baseless. The remaining two sources who Tretyakov claims were in his net worked respectively for the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs on Arctic issues and for the Canadian government (presumably the Department of National Defence) as an arms control specialist. The common denominator among them all, according to Tretyakov, was anti-Americanism.

No charges have ever been laid against Canadians in this matter and it is impossible to judge the veracity of Tretyakov’s account.

Indeed, the lack of details makes it difficult to judge how significant the spy operations in Ottawa really were, although some of the material that reached Tretyakov on Canadian military equipment purchases, submarine operations and undersea surveillance in northern waters may well have amounted to useful intelligence. Nothing is known about Canadian counterintelligence efforts beyond the assertion that Tretyakov’s activities were known to the authorities and were the subject of numerous informal protests to the Soviet ambassador.

The most intriguing aspect of the Tretyakov book has been its reception in Canada. A brief flurry of media interest when the U.S. edition slipped across the border earlier this year has been followed by dead silence. Perhaps the mysteriously delayed release of a Canadian edition (held up, it was rumoured, on legal grounds) may stir things a bit. But insofar as foreign espionage remains a problem in Canada to which we devote expensive resources (even if the Chinese seem to be outstripping the Russians these days), it would be worthwhile to know more about this case now that it is in the public domain, and in particular to know more about the Canadian government response. Did Tretyakov really roam as freely as this account suggests? Was the Canadian Security Intelligence Service counter-intelligence asleep at the switch? Did the Canadian government leave things at the level of ineffective protests, well short of another Yakolev-era expulsion order? Who were agents ARTHUR, ILYA, SEMION, LAZAR and KIRILL/KABAN? Is there any link between Tretyakov’s defection to the U.S. and the uncovering of three Russian agents in Canada over the past decade? Without access to documents, and reliant only on what Tretyakov or his handlers were prepared to divulge, Earley cannot tell us.

Comrade J is like a bright penny, suspended in mid air. Will it drop? Is it nothing more than a conjuror’s trick? Is it only, after all, a penny—a useless bit of coinage? We don’t yet know.