Nikolai Khokhlov, the illegal, Germany, 1954–57

Never speak to strangers.

On the evening of the eighteenth day of the winter month of Heshvan a man rang at the door of an apartment on Inheidener Strasse in Frankfurt am Main occupied by Georgy Sergeyevich Okolovich, one of the leaders of the anti-Soviet émigré organisation NTS (People’s Labour Union). The business at hand was murder. But things took a very different turn when Okolovich opened the door. The caller came straight out with it on the threshold: ‘I’m a captain in the Ministry of State Security (MGB) and I have been sent from Moscow to organise your assassination. I don’t want to carry the order out and I need your help.’¹

Until the ring of a telephone in my Vienna apartment a half-century later, all I knew about that encounter at the door was what anyone could read in the many books and articles that have reported it. But on Monday, 22 September 2003, my caller – the same who had called at Georgy Okolovich’s apartment a half-century earlier – identified himself as Nikolai Yevgenyevich Khokhlov, a retired professor of California State University and a former KGB captain in Pavel Sudoplatov’s special task force. Khokhlov’s voice sounded firm and there was no trace of age in spite of his venerable 81 years. He still remembered many details related to events as far back as 1943 as if it was yesterday, and he spoke clearly and consistently about what happened to him after he was sent on a special mission to Germany in February 1954. And during our many long conversations that followed, it became clear that Khokhlov had not changed much over those many decades.

Born on 7 June 1922 in the town of Nizhny Novgorod, Nikolai Khokhlov became a professional variety performer after moving to the capital. Leonid Finkelstein, formerly of the BBC Russian Service, still recalled the famous duet of whistlers, Khokhlov and Shur, when we discussed the story in 2007. As a young actor, Khokhlov was recruited by the Third Department of the Secret Political Directorate to inform on the Moscow intelligentsia. In the spring of 1941 he became a fully-fledged agent, signing his reports with the pseudonym WHISTLER.

In September, his wartime handler Mikhail Maklyarsky, the section chief and one of Sudoplatov’s men, laid before Nikolai his first operational assignment. From now on his whistling act was to be used as cover for an underground stay-behind role, which would begin for him when and if the Germans took Moscow.

A surprise came when Sudoplatov appeared in the safe house, where the Khokhlov group of two men and two women was quartered, to announce that he had personally selected Nikolai, who was good-looking and blond, for training as an illegal. The service had managed to find among the war prisoners a young German officer looking very much like Nikolai. The task was to go and join that German in the prisoner-of-war camp where he was kept, get in contact, study his life and habits, and then – with that officer’s papers – ‘secretly’ flee to Turkey and from there to Germany, where he would meet his Moscow contact in the Berlin Zoo. An almost impossible mission for those who know.

Fortunately for him, soon after his arrival in Georgia, where the camp was, Khokhlov came down with typhus and this crazy plan was not carried out.

Due to his blond looks, he was anyway destined for future operations in German-speaking countries. Khokhlov started to study German under the supervision of a professional instructor from the department and was sent to several PoW camps to mix with German prisoners. His acting experience proved as useful as his musical talent and his good ear for language and by April 1943 Khokhlov could quite successfully communicate in German. (Sixty years later I tested him; his German sounded perfect.)

Based on an agreement signed in Moscow in September 1941, the British wartime sabotage and subversion organisation, SOE, had pledged to train Russian secret agents in Britain and arrange their dispatch to targets in Western Europe. At least twenty-five such agents were successfully dropped by the RAF between 1942 and late August 1944.² Men destined for resistance, sabotage or intelligence-gathering operations consisted mainly of German and Austrian anti-fascists. About thirty Austrians resident in the USSR were trained as parachutists and sent by different Soviet services to target areas in Germany, Austria and the occupied territories. In the summer of 1942, Sudoplatov’s department was also given the order to prepare four agents to be dropped in German uniforms. Among the candidates three were native German speakers and the fourth was Nikolai. He decided to share a flat with one of the Germans to have more language practice. The name of his flatmate was Karl Kleinjung.

Nine years earlier, just after the Reichstag fire that signalled Hitler’s imminent attack on German communists, Kleinjung like many other party members fled the country. Soon he would start a career as a Soviet illegal in Holland and Belgium and then in November 1936 was among the first volunteers to arrive in Spain to fight on the side of the Republicans. Here he took some training in one of the NKVD special sabotage schools set up on the Republican territory. Among his instructors were Soviet specialists in terror and assassination like Naum Eitingon (‘Colonel Kotov’) and his assistant during Barcelona’s ‘May Days’ of 1937, a Latin American named José Ocampo, advisor and friend of the future Spanish communist party chief Santiago Carrillo, as well as the later renowned murderer Stanislav Vaupshasov (‘Comrade Alfred’ aka Soviet ‘diplomat’ ‘Stanislav Alexeyevich Dubovsky.’³

Prepared for the job by this extraordinary training, Karl became personal bodyguard for Eitingon who, after the desertion of his chief, Alexander Orlov, was put in charge of all NKVD operations in Spain.

In 1939, as the Republican cause failed, all these Soviet specialists, Kleinjung with them, retreated to Moscow.

When Hitler’s troops crossed the Soviet border on 22 June 1941, Karl was summoned from Nizhny Novgorod, where he had been working at an automobile plant, to continue his illegal training. By then he was 29 and well fitted for the special tasks that his Soviet bosses had in mind. His case officer was again Eitingon, who had become first deputy of Sudoplatov.

In February 1943 Karl was assigned a mission that he later described as ‘the most complicated, difficult and dangerous’ in his whole wartime career: he was to be sent to Minsk to assassinate Gauleiter Kube. The future General Kleinjung often talked about this episode but never mentioned that an accomplice named Nikolai assisted him. He only said that on 23 September the partisans were able to radio to Moscow about the success of the operation.⁴

On 2 September 1944 Kleinjung was the only German to be invited to the Moscow Kremlin to be awarded a high Soviet decoration for the assassination of Kube. The Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR personally presented him with an enamelled gilded star and shook his hand. Many years later he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for his achievements in Soviet Security, in addition to five of the highest decorations of the DDR.

If Khokhlov played any role at all in this wartime operation, it was a minor one.

Early in 1945 Maklyarsky summoned his secret agent to his office and gave him a new assignment: Romania. With a forged Polish passport in the name of ‘Stanislaw Lewandowski’, born in Lwów (now Lviv), Khokhlov was to go to Bucharest to live and get accustomed to life abroad. That was a standard path for every Soviet illegal.

Khokhlov was given enough cash to open a private radio shop at 11 B-dul Decebal, main street in the centre of the city, as a respectable front. Soviet intelligence has always had an understandable preference for ‘white goods’ as they are known in the trade. The then illegal Lev Nikolsky used the cover of an American refrigerator retailer in London; Rudolf Hermann, a Soviet illegal in the USA, used to sell cameras.

Khokhlov bought a car and established himself comfortably in ‘bourgeois-capitalist’ society. In 1946 he married Emilia, whom he remembered in his memoirs as ‘Valeria’, a 22-year-old girl from the household in which he had lived for a year. In 1949 Nikolai had his first breakdown. He panicked and wrote several letters to the headquarters asking to recall him to the USSR as soon as possible.

Illegals abroad are commonly victims of nervous failures. Under the tension of their lives abroad they may commit irrational acts. So when his controller met him on his return to Moscow in October, he greeted him with a friendly, understanding smile. Nikolai was given back his internal Soviet passport, cash for initial expenses and time to readjust to Soviet life. He was also provided with arrangements to meet his chiefs.⁵

According to Brook-Shepherd:

Khokhlov wound up his private affairs in brutal fashion. He admitted to the long-suffering Emilia that he had been unfaithful to her on several occasions, that he was trying to get to the West and did not propose to take her with him, and that he therefore suggested a divorce. A fortnight later, he was gone for good. The woman who was still his wife (there was indeed to be no record that the divorce ever took place) was left with the apartment and a pay-off of 100,000 lei from the NKVD’s Romanian cash-box.⁶

Back in Moscow, Nikolai, who could never last long without the solace of a woman’s arms, and who had an affair with a singer named Taissiya Ignatyeva throughout the war years, was probably unable to rekindle the flame, and in an impulse called at the apartment of Yanina Timashkevich, who had sat next to him for seven years at school. His schoolmate, now 27 and an orphan, happened to be at home and opened the door. That was in November 1949. By Christmas he had moved in with her.⁷

The main legacy of the cumbersome and short-lived intelligence structure in Moscow from the late 1940s to the early 1950s that was called the Committee of Information (KI) was a renewed emphasis on illegals. They were seen as establishing a more secure and better-concealed basis for foreign intelligence operations. In 1949 forty-nine illegals were in training. The chief of the 4th (illegals) Directorate of the KI set up departments specialising in the selection and training of candidates and the fabrication of documentation to support their legends. By 1952 the documentation department had forged or doctored 364 foreign identity documents, including seventy-eight passports.⁸ Moscow sent illegal support (Line N) officers to all major outpost stations operating under the cover of Soviet embassies.

But Sudoplatov’s service had its own mission for its illegals. Those were either ‘sleeping’ or active saboteurs, assassins and demolition men.

By the time the Allies had settled into post-war Austria, drinking coffee in the Vienna cafés and giving American cigarettes to their local girlfriends, the multiple Russian espionage agencies were busy filling the Austrian police and security service with their agents. Hundreds of them recruited from the former International Brigades in Spain arrived from Russia in 1945–6 and many took posts in the Staatspolizei (Federal Police) or Austria’s premier civilian intelligence agency, the Generaldirektion für die Öffentliche Sicherheit (General Directorate for Public Safety). The Interior Ministry itself was placed under Franz Horner, a leading Communist official who had fought in Spain, lived in Moscow during the war, and been parachuted into Yugoslavia by the GRU to help to organise an ‘Austrian Liberation Army’.

One Anton Dobritzhofer, the chief of the police in Vienna’s proletarian district of Floridsdorf, was instrumental in providing documentation for Soviet illegals. Dobritzhofer was a Schutzbund commander in Floridsdorf and after the defeat in 1934 of the Socialist revolt immigrated to the Soviet Union. In 1936 he, like Kleinjung and many others, was sent to Spain and returned to Moscow in 1939. Like almost every other former soldier of the international brigades who had retreated to the Soviet Union, he was recruited by the NKVD under the codename DUB (‘Oak’). Together with Kleinjung, Dobritzhofer took part in a major Soviet military deception operation called BEREZINA at the end of the war. Then he surfaced in Vienna and after a brief spell as the district police chief he rose in the ranks to end his career in the Vienna City Police Directorate.

In September 1950 Khokhlov was commissioned as an active duty officer of the Ministry for State Security (MGB). As he continued to be an illegal, he was allowed and even encouraged to live under cover as a student of Moscow University. Sudoplatov claimed in his memoirs that he even helped Nikolai to be admitted as a full time student without bothering to take any entrance exams.

In February 1951 Khokhlov was invited to a Moscow safe house where he met the deputy chief of the Austrian desk – the same female operative who had taught him German in 1943 – and given a new assignment. The deputy chief of the Operational Group Austria (OGA) in Baden near Vienna, who was also present at the meeting, placed on the table four cards with Austrian names for Nikolai to choose as his future alias. Quite at random he selected that of ‘Josef Hofbauer’.

Until I told him years later, Khokhlov had not realised how ill chosen was his cover. For another Josef Hofbauer, born in 1908 in Edelsberg, was a Gestapo officer in Upper Austria who had been accused of extreme brutality and sadism. His targets and victims were citizens of his own province, especially in Linz and Freistadt. His personal file in the Austrian archives contains fourteen thick folders. While Khokhlov was preparing for his first practice run under that name, the court in the American occupation zone in Salzburg was sentencing the other Hofbauer and his gang to various terms of imprisonment. By the time Khokhlov received his new Austrian passport with his own photo on the left side and the name ‘Josef Hofbauer’ on the opposite page, the former Nazi murderer was on probation.

Khokhlov was lucky that he was brought to Austria by a military aircraft that landed in Bad Voslau, near his department’s operational base, because such Soviet facilities were well guarded and no Austrian passport or customs officer was admitted. He was chauffeured to Wiener Neustadt and quartered in a safe house. In July he was cleared to proceed further.

This 1951 test run turned out to be harmless. From April until August ‘Josef Hofbauer’ travelled around Switzerland, France, Denmark, Belgium and Holland, collecting visas and border stamps and opening bank accounts. He became overconfident, though, and apparently forgot that he was on a serious mission of establishing cover as an innocent traveller. Nikolai bought a high-quality accordion and tried to smuggle it into Austria – a risky operation even today. The customs seized both the instrument and his bags and fined him heavily.

By early next year more serious work loomed – for a moment. Deadly secret at the time, it hit the public press a half century later. In May 2004, the Russian weekly Ogonyok published a photo of Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky, the moderate Socialist revolutionary who had served as head of the Russian provisional government from July to October 1917. It was accompanied by the text, ‘Khokhlov helped him and managed to save his life’. At a very late date Khokhlov seems to have given himself some credit he did not really deserve.

It began in early 1952 when Georgy Malenkov, a Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee who would briefly become leader of the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death, informed Sudoplatov that the party had a special task for him. The leadership was concerned about the imminent rise of Kerensky to head the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, and had decided the old foe must be ‘liquidated’.

In March Khokhlov was summoned to Sudoplatov’s office and informed that he was to go to Paris where a veteran agent, Prince Gagarin, would lead him to the target. Khokhlov, according to his own words, was then to murder his victim with a Parker fountain pen adapted as a small pistol. Gagarin was then also to be eliminated, Khokhlov wrote in his memoirs, because he knew too much and had outlived his usefulness.

However, about ten days after Sudoplatov received this order, he read a TASS report about fractional infighting in the organisation that had effectively blocked Kerensky’s election, and therefore he no longer presented any danger to the Soviet state. The next morning the operation was called off.

Instead of Paris, Khokhlov was sent to Karlshorst in East Berlin, then the largest operational base of the MGB in Europe, controlling KGB installations throughout East Germany – like Dresden where Putin was later stationed in 1985–90 – and operating into the West. In Karlshorst at that time Sudoplatov had thirteen officers from a so-called special illegal reserve, one of the most secret of the Soviet secret organisations. Heading the nearby Stasi directorate of East Berlin was Khokhlov’s one-time partner Karl Kleinjung, as deputy to the Stasi chief Wilhelm Zaisser, soon to be replaced by Ernst Wollweber, who in the early 1930s was called ‘the best saboteur in the world.’ In December of that year 1952, the young Markus Wolf was made chief of the foreign intelligence service of the German Democratic Republic.

Now the team that Khokhlov would command on his next murder operation began to assemble. One of its members had been recruited in France.

Before the war France had been a major base for Soviet foreign operations. The new chief there in 1938, Lev Vasilevsky, had recruited a man named Kurt Weber in Paris, and codenamed him FRANZ. Weber moved to the south of France, married and lived well on Moscow subsidies. When Hitler’s army occupied France, he joined the French resistance, and on one occasion, demonstrating great bravery and resourcefulness, Weber managed to get fellow maquisard Hans Kukowitsch out of a Nazi prison hours before the latter was doomed to die. They then became friends and after the war returned together to Germany and settled first in the American zone of occupation, and then in the Soviet zone. Weber found a job at a police station in Berlin-Köpenick. There this long-time agent was located and reactivated as agent FRANZ, under the special illegals unit, to be assigned to West Germany. He suggested finding his wartime friend, and soon Kukowitsch became agent FELIX.

Apart from Stalin’s death in March 1953 and the arrest of Lavrenty Beria and his family the following summer, nothing extraordinary happened in the life of Nikolai Khokhlov until one September evening when a friend, also an officer and an illegal, appeared in the Khokhlovs’ big Moscow flat. He was evidently drunk and announced that their chief Sudoplatov had just been arrested in his own office. That looked like the end of the legendary Bureau No. 1 of the MVD (successor of the MGB).

Perhaps the end of one designated unit, but not the end of the Soviet regime’s need to eliminate its opponents abroad. (And beyond the Soviet regime: Lenin and Dzierżyński’s legacy has survived to this day, almost twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.)

Despite officers’ worries, nothing changed. At the end of September, the new chief told Khokhlov that he had been selected for an important mission in West Germany – the murder of one of the NTS leaders in Frankfurt. Soon this ‘Operation RHEIN’ was approved by the Presidium of the Central Committee and the go-ahead signed personally by Khrushchev and Malenkov, the two most powerful men in the uneasy collective then ruling the country. The assassination project had thus become a top-level state priority.⁹ For this mission, Khokhlov was personally ‘handled’ by Alexander Semyonovich Panyushkin, who in 1953, after his sojourn as Soviet ambassador in Washington had been appointed head of the KGB First (Foreign Intelligence) Chief Directorate.

During our long discussions Khokhlov always insisted that he was not to do the dirty work himself. The two German agents FRANZ (Weber) and FELIX (Kukowitsch) were to take care of that. They were brought to Moscow and given a five-week intensive course by the most experienced action officers the KGB could come up with. They were given driving and shooting lessons and taught how to spot and elude surveillance and avoid an ambush, how to ‘dry-clean’ and pull off brush contacts – in short, the tradecraft needed for a successful ‘bang and burn’ operation. Finally, they deposited their East German passports as ‘Kurt Wetter’ and ‘Hans Schulze’ and thanks to the help of agents in the Austrian police were given new bona fide Austrian documents in the names of ‘Josef Leitner’ and ‘Hans Rotter’.

Vienna was to be the base. Khokhlov was there waiting for an order to move. Both agents arrived there by separate routes and were placed in a safe house in Baden. Later, a KGB arms expert delivered the specially designed weapons. The telegram came on 8 February 1954.

Khokhlov’s itinerary was complicated, in an effort to smother any clear trace of his movements. He travelled so widely that he must actually have wondered sometimes which country he was in. His meanderings included a brief affair in Italy with a good-looking female courier who brought him his Austrian passport in the name of Josef Hofbauer before he was to cross into Switzerland. He arrived in Zurich just in time for a pre-arranged meeting with Weber. Kukowitsch joined them there. On 15 February Weber took the train directly to Frankfurt whereas Khokhlov ordered Kukowitsch to wait and follow four days later. He himself left Zurich on the same day as Weber, stopping over in Lausanne, where his briefcase with secret notes was left for safe-keeping at a bank, and in Geneva where he deposited most of his operational funds. Then he proceded to Frankfurt, where he arrived on the evening of the 17th and was met by Weber, now Leitner, at the Hauptbahnhof. Khokhlov checked into the Pension Zeppelin as ‘Herr Hofbauer’, an Austrian businessman.¹⁰

Like practically all Russian émigré organisations, Narodno-Trudovoy Soyuz (NTS), that Okolovich represented, had to be heavily penetrated by Soviet intelligence. A US Staff Intelligence Report concluded that the NTS was ‘thoroughly penetrated by Russian agents, open to Soviet deception measures, unreliable and irresponsible’.¹¹ Khokhlov had studied four whole volumes of KGB files relating to the NTS. The KGB had collected so much inside information that no one should have any doubt or question about whom he was going to deal with in Frankfurt.

Noticeably, until only a few months before this, the files did not even show the target’s address and telephone number. In 1948 agents had been sent to Limburg an der Lahn, where the NTS had been located at the time, trying to collect some basic information evidently not obtainable by the Soviets’ penetrations of NTS headquarters. Those agents had failed to find Okolovich, but talked to his wife, who became very suspicious and told them that her husband rarely visited the place. The mission was abandoned.¹²

In 1951 the Soviets had tried to abduct Okolovich. A group of three German agents controlled by the Karlshorst base crossed the inter-sectional border and arrived in the small town of Runkel, less than four and a half miles away from Limburg. The group was equipped with ampoules of morphine, syringes and 15,000 German Marks in cash. Two of the agents immediately gave themselves up to the authorities. The leader managed to escape to the Soviet zone. All the spyware landed up with the police. A special bulletin of the NTS Executive Bureau, which reported about this failed operation and demanded vigilance from all members, was carefully filed among other documents in Moscow.

Khokhlov noticed that in those earlier years the files had only sparse information. After the NTS headquarters moved to Frankfurt all the KGB knew about Okolovich was that he often visited the Russian Information Agency, RIA, and that his wife worked at the Possev publishing house. It was not until mid-1953, after Moscow finally got a better source, that the necessary data had been acquired. Nikita Khorunzhy, ex-captain of the Red Army, who defected to the West in the spring of 1951, had been recruited to become agent WOLF. He lived in Germany under a cover identity as one ‘Georg Müller’ with a German woman. On 7 July 1953 WOLF reported that Okolovich lived at 3 Inheidener Strasse in Frankfurt-Bornheim, that he was officially employed by a news agency with an office at 42 Kronbergerstrasse, and that he was driving a black Mercedes with such and such licence plate. Also attached was a recent photo showing Okolovich and his wife at their flat in the company of Khorunzhy.

Now the KGB had enough information to launch Operation RHEIN.

It was very unprofessional for Okolovich to open the door to a total stranger that evening – surprisingly so, when one considers his past life and his current situation:

For a moment, the two looked at one another. They made an odd contrast. The intended victim was a shamble, slightly dishevelled figure in his fifties, with spectacles perched on his high-bridged nose, looking far more like an unworldly professor than a man who had dedicated most of his adult life to a relentless underground battle against the Soviet regime. His would-be murderer was twenty years younger and his blond hair, blue eyes and neat appearance perfectly fitted (as they were intended to) his bogus identity as an Austrian businessman. But, for all the difference, it was one Russian looking searchingly at another. The older man acted, as he usually did, on impulse. Slav instincts told him now that he was faced with a compatriot who had, in truth, just joined him as a renegade. His reply, when it came, was disarmingly simple. ‘Well, in that case,’ he said, ‘you had better come in and have a cup of tea.’ And, as a gesture of trust, he turned and walked ahead of his visitor, presenting his back to him as a target.¹³

Such was the end of the operation codenamed RHEIN but real adventures began for Khokhlov some time later – when he became the murder target, not the murderer.

The exact topic of the discussions between Okolovich and Khokhlov during that Thursday evening of 18 February will probably never be known. As may be judged from the following events, it concentrated mainly on the future fate of Khokhlov himself, his plans for his family, and, most important for Okolovich, the Soviet agents in and around the NTS.

The alternatives were the following: to forget about the family and continue with his mission; to try to bring the family to the West using NTS channels; to compromise the whole operation and return to the USSR as a victim of somebody’s negligence or failure, thus claiming innocence and maintaining the status quo. The life of Okolovich would be saved and hopefully nobody would be punished.

The experienced Okolovich quickly realised that the NTS had very limited ability for secretly exfiltrating Khokhlov’s wife and his 2-year-old boy without risking their lives, and that his return to the Soviet Union would not be to the benefit of Khokhlov, his family and the NTS. So he said exactly what he should have said: let me contact the Western authorities on your behalf and see what they can do.¹⁴

Late in the evening, having met Okolovich’s wife and telling her that he had come directly from Moscow to organise the murder of her husband, Khokhlov left the apartment and returned to his pension by tram. Soon he would dispatch his agents to Augsburg to collect the arms, which, according to the plan, were to be delivered to Germany by a courier. To be able to blow the operation, Khokhlov had first to mount one.

The next evening he was meeting FRANZ and FELIX in a restaurant on Friedrich-Ebert-Anlage, the site made famous by the international trade fairs that had been held here since 1240. They ordered a modest dinner.

During the meal, Khokhlov supplied the agents with cash and instructions to meet a courier in Augsburg on Tuesday, 23 February. Both Germans knew the courier’s identity and Weber had even seen him once in Vienna. After collecting ‘a parcel’ – a suitcase and a car battery, which contained cigarette case weapons, miniature handguns with silencers, and a variety of ammunition including poisoned lead pellets, they were to bring it to Frankfurt and deposit it in the left-luggage office of the main railway station that was not far from where they were sitting. Khokhlov ordered Weber and Kukowitsch to wait for him on February 24, 25 and 26 on the opposite side of the same street. Should he not appear, one had to rush to Berlin, and the other immediately retreat to Austria.

While the agents were travelling, the Americans detained Khokhlov suspecting him to be an NTS fake. They had good reason to think so.

First, he came virtually from the skies. No one knew about him and no detailed information was available to Western sources about the 9th Department (the former Bureau No. 1, Sudoplatov service) or the special tasks force. Second, the émigrés sometimes went to bizarre lengths to prove their worth to the West. One organisation, for example, went so far as to secretly blow up its own headquarters in order to justify its claim that it posed a real threat to the KGB.¹⁵ So it was quite logic that Khokhlov was considered to be an NTS plant especially devised to attract attention to the NTS and its leaders.

Khokhlov described to me one of his American interrogators, whom he called ‘Leonard’ in his book, as an evil, blunt and narrow-minded person, sent to destroy him and ruin his intricate plan. I believe ‘Leonard’ to be Nicholas Andrew Natsios, a distinguished US intelligence officer¹⁶ who, together with Robert N. Crowell, acting head of the Frankfurt counter-intelligence (CI) section, introduced to Khokhlov as ‘Paul’, had in front of them an absolutely genuine Austrian passport with Khokhlov’s photo, $20,000 in different European currencies, and a poor-sounding legend that seemed too far fetched to be true. Even with Khokhlov’s excellent command of Russian and his detailed knowledge of current events and life in the USSR, it was hard to believe he came straight from Moscow.

There was a chain of coincidences interwoven with bad luck which later made one of the participants in this operation say with bitterness, ‘We all had egg on our face.’

It was the car battery that settled the issue. At Thursday noon, on 25 February, Khokhlov persuaded a sceptical American officer to observe the meeting he had arranged with his agents. As he missed his first date, the meeting was at an alternative address, this time near the Old Opera. Both Germans were seized on the spot and taken to an American safe house, where they were searched and, in the words of one of the participants, ‘stubs from the baggage check facility’ found. Khokhlov joined them after some time, explained the position and urged that they too, being now hopelessly compromised, should elect to stay in the West. Both men agreed without much argument. Then the battery was dragged in and Khokhlov started chipping away, first at the ebonite cover and then at the lead plates. Glued to the wall inside were two plastic packages that were revealed once the sulphuric acid had been emptied out. The weapons they contained corresponded exactly with Khokhlov’s earlier description. The Americans were astounded, delighted and apologetic in equal proportions.¹⁷

Their apathy was now converted into an all-out effort to smash or, better still, to rope in the entire KGB operational network in Austria, so far as Khokhlov’s story had exposed it.¹⁸ Next thing David Murphy, who would later become chief of the CIA’s Soviet Russia Division, came storming to Frankfurt and said a mea culpa. By that time Deriabin’s information from Vienna had already reached the headquarters and that not only helped to establish Khokhlov’s bona fides but also added an entirely new dimension to the understanding of Soviet demolition and sabotage operations.

The start was promising. With FRANZ and FELIX already whisked off to an interrogation centre, Khokhlov was instructed to go on sending messages to his controller in Vienna explaining why the mission was being delayed. He received back replies that indicated that the Russians had no inkling that the whole assassination party had been in American hands¹⁹ and singing.

At the end of February, over a weekend, the Americans moved Khokhlov to a hunting lodge in Königstein not far away from Oberursel, where he spent an unpleasant night at the 7707th European Command Intelligence Centre, better known as Camp King. The British SIS took over, and Nick, as they started to call him, was very pleased with the way an officer who arrived from London handled things. At least he was very different from ‘Leonard’, who disappeared. (Natsios returned to Greece where he served as political adviser in the military secretariat of the US Military Mission in Athens.) French intelligence was also given a piece of the pie – they were busy checking the records of Weber and Kukowitsch. Khokhlov was taken to Lausanne where he retrieved his secret notes. Back in Frankfurt, he decoded them in the presence of Okolovich. That was a valuable take for both British and American counter-intelligence as well as for NTS internal security.

22 April was a Thursday, just a week after Easter. In Bonn it was sunny and very warm. Everybody was nervous. The High Commissioner began to speak. Within half an hour Khokhlov was called into the conference room. Flash of bulbs, click of cameras. He was placed in the middle between Charles Malamut of the European staff of the Voice of America (VOA) and a German interpreter. Nobody asked questions. At the same time, the VOA started broadcasting his appeal to the world’s public opinion. After some time, audience members were invited to submit questions. There were not many. Apparently, in 1954 it was not easy for the Western press to grasp the significance of the operation that had just rolled up. After the press conference was over, he was surrounded by guards and led through the back door to the waiting car.

What was the spark that set the forest on fire? What did he say? What secured Khokhlov a prominent place in the intelligence history? It was not what he actually pronounced, it was the fact of his physical existence. Since its first days the Cheka had been sending assassins abroad to murder enemies of the Kremlin. From Georges Agabekov in 1930 to Alexander Litvinenko seventy years later the Chekists who defected to the West told the world about those crimes. But before Khokhlov, there was not a single person who ever came to his victim with the words, ‘I have been sent to kill you, but I refuse to do it and I leave myself at your mercy’ Khokhlov’s statement had an enormous impact on Western governments and people.

After the press conference, Khokhlov was invited to London for a lecture tour, and gave an interview to the BBC. His story received the full blare of publicity. On 6 May 1954 he was flown to Washington DC on board an aircraft of the US Air Force.

After his arrival in the United States, Khokhlov became a persistent critic of Communist Russia, lecturing widely through Europe and the USA. After the four articles he published in the Saturday Evening Post under the guidance of Milton Lehman entitled ‘I Would Not Murder for the Soviets’, interviews with him appeared in major American newspapers and magazines. To enhance the effect of the Post articles, the evening before the first of them appeared Khokhlov was invited to CBS studios as a guest on ‘Meet the Press’.

In September 1957 he returned to Europe to take part in an important conference that had been planned long before and announced in advance.

The Botanical Garden of Frankfurt was the scene in the middle of that month of an assembly of several hundred anti-Communist activists from various lands. The place was the hall of the Palmengarten, set amidst palms and greenhouses, where conventions and concerts were held.²⁰

According to Khokhlov, with whom I discussed the episode in every detail, on Sunday, 15 September, the closing day of the conference, he addressed the audience briefly and then stepped out on the terrace and ordered a cup of coffee of which he drank less than a half. He went out to see off some delegates from London and then came back to attend the entertainment programme. From behind the closed doors leading to the concert hall he could hear the performers carrying on and the sounds of laughter and applause from the audience.

Nikolai suddenly felt very fatigued and thought that it was due to the three days of nervous tension, speeches and discussions. He ordered a glass of juice but immediately realised that he could not drink it as he suddenly felt a severe, persistent abdominal pain. When he heard the voice of Irene Salena of the Frankfurt Opera, he decided that in spite of the feeling of nausea, he should go and listen. Tomorrow he would sleep late, he thought.

Khokhlov returned to the concert hall and found a seat, feeling no better. He felt the need to go out, and the fresh, cool air slightly revived him. He got into the car and in a few minutes was at his bed-and-breakfast guest house. Then he fainted away.

When Khokhlov came round he felt feverish, his heart was beating rapidly and he was shivering. Picking up the keys, he dragged himself to the entrance feeling worse every minute. Somebody called a doctor and he himself managed to call Okolovich, though suffering from vomiting and diarrhoea. The paramedics transferred him to hospital.

By 00:30 a.m. that night a bed was found for him. The physicians diagnosed his sickness as acute gastritis. Nobody suspected poisoning and Khokhlov was pleased with the diagnosis of gastritis, as it meant that he would be leaving shortly.

For five days he was treated for acute gastritis and kept feeling worse. His fingernails showed strange horizontal lines as if colour was disappearing and he started feeling pain in his feet and hands.

Then there was hypovalemia or loss of fluids. Khokhlov’s hair suddenly started to fall out and his skin yellowed. The doctors ran a series of tests. The head physician brought in consultants. A skin specialist suspected thallium.

Khokhlov had no doubt as to the identity of those who planned and carried out the operation.

Subsequent developments proved that the biochemists in the secret laboratory in Moscow knew their profession. While the German specialists were pouring all kind of antidotes into him, Khokhlov’s system continued to disintegrate at a galloping rate.

As a professional from the department that was the customer of the Naumov’s lab product, Khokhlov knew better than anyone else that everything had been figured out in advance: the inexperience of Western physicians, the inertia of authorities, the scepticism of the public, as well as symptoms of gastritis to disguise the action of an obsolete poison transformed by modern science into a powerful radiological weapon.²¹

On Sunday afternoon, 22 September, nearly a week to the hour after his collapse, the doctors discovered that an incredibly rapid process of destruction was going on in Khokhlov’s bloodstream. The number of the white corpuscles was falling dangerously, and at one time a count showed a drop from the normal 6,000–7,000 to 700. A puncture into his chest bone produced a sample of the marrow, and a microscopic examination of it established that the blood-building cells in the bone marrow were dying off. The blood in his veins was gradually turning into useless plasma. The saliva glands in his mouth, throat and alimentary canal were drying up. It became difficult to eat, drink, and even speak. Khokhlov sank into apathy and was growing feeble. That Sunday evening, his friends later told him, he looked very much like a dying man.

They were waiting in the corridor. Professor Schrade, the head physician, told them: ‘It’s very bad. To be honest, it’s hopeless. It is hard for me to say it: we simply do not understand what is happening to him. His blood is turning into water. And we cannot do anything about it. Of course, we must resort to transfusions. We are looking for the right type of donor, and by morning we will locate one. But then what? None of us really knows. It looks as if your friend will soon be dead.’

‘But from what?’ Okolovich broke in. ‘What is the cause of this? Is it possible that medical science is unable to determine what is killing him, and attempt to fight it?’

‘Ah, medical science! All that we know is based on experience. How can one fight unknown poison?’²²

But the doctors of the Barnet Hospital in London, not to mention the UCLH that claims to ‘employ leading health care professionals in an extensive range of clinical services’, had this experience. It is always a matter of time. Practising physicians don’t have time to read books.

On Monday morning, 23 September, NTS held a press conference. Vladimir Poretsky, the chairman, recited Khokhlov’s history and stated that he was suffering from poisoning by a combination of drugs. Okolovich also spoke and explained the reason why the Soviet government wanted to get rid of the defector.

In the meantime, the patient, unable to take food, was being fed intravenously.

But unlike Sasha Litvinenko, Khokhlov was extremely lucky. On 27 September, the twelfth day of his illness, the Americans intervened. A group of American healthcare professionals arrived at the hospital and went into conference with the German colleagues in Khokhlov’s ward. On the same day he was moved from the Frankfurt University Hospital to the US Army facility where the doctors started to administer specialised treatment.

By the middle of October, Khokhlov was discharged from hospital fully recovered. That was quite a miracle.

The official Memorandum written by Colonel F.Y. Leaver, MC, Commanding Officer of the United States Army Hospital, Frankfurt, APO 757, US Army, stated:

Subject: Hospitalization of Mr. Khokhlov.

Mr. Khokhlov was admitted to the United States Army Hospital, Frankfurt, on September 27, 1957, as a transfer from a local German hospital.

He had been hospitalised there on the 16th of September with what appeared to be an acute gastroenteritis, however, several days after admission he developed a severe hemorrhagic skin eruption, ulceration of the mouth, some mental confusion, loss of body hair, and severe depression of the bone marrow with a total white blood count of 750 and virtual disappearance of granulocytes. It was the impression of the staff of the German hospital that this probably was caused by poisoning, very likely thallium.

On admission to this hospital on 27 September (11 days following the onset of his illness) he was acutely and critically ill with marked bone-marrow depression, high fever, and he was unable to eat because of the hemorrhagic skin eruption which involved not only the body surface but included the mouth, throat, and mucous membranes. There was marked epilation and loss of hair on all body surfaces including the scalp. He was emotionally disturbed and sometimes confused.

As his condition was critical, he was immediately placed on the seriously ill list. He received special nursing care in a private room. His treatment consisted of antibiotics, ACTH, steroids, as well as local treatment for his skin and mouth lesions. His condition gradually improved. He has been able to be up and about his room during the past few days. Temperature was normal, and skin lesions cleared. The blood picture returned to approximately normal. He lost most of his body hair. At the time of discharge from the hospital on Tuesday afternoon, October 8, 1957, he was weak, but was able to eat without difficulty and was gradually regaining his strength. He was considered essentially recovered.

Symptoms and clinical findings are believed to have been due to poisoning, probably by thallium and/or other chemical agents. Toxicological studies were performed on his hair, skin, and urine, which were negative, however, no specimens from the early period of his illness were available for study.

Back in America specialists explained to Khokhlov that he had been poisoned with radioactive thallium.

A week later he was invited to testify before the US Senate. It turned out to be a difficult session. Among other things, he said: ‘I gave everything I had to the United States. All the secrets that could help the United States.’²³

The US government helped him to settle in North Carolina. But before he changed professions, the Agency sent Khokhlov to Viet Nam. Here Nikolai met Nick Natsios again.²⁴

After Viet Nam they were both posted to Seoul, South Korea, Natsios as a senior political officer at the US Embassy, Khokhlov working in the Russian service of the American radio, which broadcast daily in the Russian language. From here Khokhlov, as he told me, sent an application to Duke University in North Carolina for admission as a post-graduate student to the Faculty of Psychology.

He remarried in the USA in 1963. Her name was Tatiana and she was a German-born daughter of one of the NTS activists.

After five years at Duke University, in 1967, Nikolai Khokhlov wrote a thesis and a year later defended his PhD in psychology. Immediately after that he left Duke University and settled in California joining the Department of Psychology at California State University in San Bernardino (CSUSB).

In 1992 Dr Khokhlov celebrated his seventieth birthday. For many years he had been living and teaching in the sunny and wealthy state, a dream of millions of Americans. He decided to retire, taking advantage of a golden handshake retirement incentive programme offered by the CSUSB system. Both senior members of the faculty, Khokhlov and Herold, who retired at the same time, were awarded the title of Emeritus Professor of Psychology by the university. A retirement party was held at Bill Cowan’s Ocean Grill Restaurant in Redlands to honour the two professors. According to the official report, both were presented with the traditional solid gold watch. ‘In December I was given a gold-plated pocket watch,’ Khokhov scornfully remarked in 2004 to a Moscow journalist. ‘A useful gift to a retiring professor.’

That year was indeed a memorable one. By Special Decree No. 308 of 27 March Russian President Boris Yeltsin granted him pardon for high treason. Now that the sentence was withdrawn, Khokhlov could visit Moscow. Before he stepped onto Russian soil, there was a long exchange of correspondence between him and the then KGB chief Vadim Bakatin.

Nicholas Bethell took care of him during the visit. He was commissioned by the Daily Telegraph to write about this visit, so they met in Frankfurt and together flew on to the Russian capital. Lord Bethell was not a reporter or correspondent, but an influential member of the European Parliament, to which he was first nominated in 1975. Having acted as a Lord-in-Waiting to the Queen between 1970 and 1971, Lord Bethell, author of several books on the history of intelligence, also worked as a consultant to the Police Federation of England and Wales. Now he acted as a ‘guardian angel’ for Khokhlov, using his great authority to insure that nothing unexpected happened.

At the end of the visit Bethell reported that they had been met at Sheremetievo airport by some of Khokhlov’s university buddies and his son Alexander. They visited a tiny one-room apartment that Yana had shared with her son and his baby child. There is every evidence that she refused to see Nikolai. ‘Sadly,’ as Lord Bethell wrote in his article, this was due to their ‘main concern of how their own lives may be disturbed by the return of this “legendary traitor to the Motherland”.’

At the KGB headquarters, the British lord and the Soviet defector were received by the ‘new KGB’. ‘But the people manning the new KGB, and most of the senior positions in the new Russia,’ wrote Lord Bethell two years later, ‘were the same one who had been there in the old Soviet Union … The doctor who had declared Vladimir Bukovsky insane on KGB orders carried on practising as a senior mental health specialist.’²⁵

After seeing the Lubyanka and its representatives, Lord Bethell met Pavel Sudoplatov, Khokhlov’s former chief, then 85. The old general who had served over fifteen years in Vladimir prison, didn’t want to see his former protégé. After the diplomat told Khokhlov about their meeting, the latter spat, ‘That nauseating mass-murderer!’

When my small monograph about Khokhlov was published in May 2005 as part of the Personal Files series, telephone calls from California stopped together with emails.

In late November 2006 we were having a drink with Ben Macintyre of The Times in the Connaught bar and I told him the thallium story. Ben promptly found Khokhlov and published a long article in his newspaper about the man whom KGB poisoned with radioactive substance but who lived to tell the tale. He even dug up a rare old photo of Khokhlov made in a London airport in 1954 from The Times archives.

Steve LeVine read the article and got his chance. In June 2007, after months of telephone and email exchanges, he went to San Bernardino to meet Khokhlov. A year later Steve published his book.

As expected, the KGB veteran turned professor of psychology told Steve a lot of tales that, alas, had nothing to do with what really happened. Old habits die hard.

But LeVine has a talent of understanding people, a rare gift. He quickly realised that the figure in front of him was extremely sensitive, complex, and difficult who felt misunderstood by almost everyone. Besides, LeVine found Khokhlov a deeply emotional and sometimes self-pitying man who didn’t always own up to his embellishments.²⁶

For the American, Khokhlov’s relationship with Tatiana was a bit of a mystery. The two of them had separated two decades before but still had obvious affection for each other. After his physical condition worsened, they spoke almost every day. She screened calls for him, cooked for him, and let him entertain guests at her home. But they did not attempt to hide their disagreements. He was rude and condescending towards her, extremely chauvinistic. When she attempted to speak, he simply talked over her or said, ‘May I have the floor?’ and then took it.²⁷

Steve, however, describes his new acquaintance as ‘most often being extremely polite and possessed of a self-effacing sense of humour. He had a coughing fit at one point and Tatiana asked if he needed anything. “Yes, a new throat,” he replied.’ (When I read those lines I immediately thought of Gordievsky with whom I was spending a great deal of time.)

Discussing the Litvinenko case with his guest, Khokhlov was certain that the successor agencies to his former service had carried out the notorious murder in London. For Steve LeVine, Nikolai and Sasha thus shared an unusual distinction. They were the only known victims of radioactive poisoning in the entire history of assassinations worldwide. But Steve was wrong.

‘He had the last laugh,’ observed his widow, Tatiana, as their four grandchildren scampered about and guests mingled in a tree-filled backyard on the day of Khokhlov’s September 2007 funeral.²⁸ She was certainly right.