21

Witch Hunt

For anyone who read Soviet newspapers or listened to Soviet radio in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there was little doubt that the Americans had become the main adversaries in the Kremlin’s undeclared war on the West.

Behind the scenes, impervious to media investigation, Stalin and the Central Committee demanded that the Ministry of State Security (MGB), the postwar incarnation of the People’s Commissariat of State Security, intensify its unmasking of Western, especially American, spies. The latter task fell to the Second Division of the Second Department of the ministry, charged with counterintelligence work against the Americans. The department had a difficult task: few Soviet citizens had ever encountered any Americans (as opposed, for example, to Germans) and could be plausibly accused of working on their behalf. In the republic of Lithuania, newly annexed to the Soviet Union, officers of the Second Department of the Ministry of State Security managed, in the first ten months of 1950, to arrest fifteen alleged agents of German (Nazi) intelligence and counterintelligence, seven British agents, yet only one accused of working for the Americans.¹

In the atmosphere of rising hostility to the United States and the attendant espionage mania, anything related to the American air bases at Poltava became prime terrain for Soviet counterintelligence, whose Ukrainian agents were in a privileged position compared to their Lithuanian counterparts. All three US air bases had been located within Poltava administrative region (oblast’) and thus were under the jurisdiction of the Poltava regional MGB headquarters and its American counterintelligence section.

In their search for American spies and their agents, the Poltava officers paid special attention to the local women who had dated US officers suspected of espionage. At the very top of the list of suspects was Lieutenant, later Captain, George Fischer. Number 7 on the same list was his friend, the flamboyant Russian-speaking Lieutenant Igor Reverditto, who as we have seen had been sent packing to Britain in September 1944 for a quarrel in a restaurant and verbal insults against Red Army officers and the Soviet regime in general. The list of US officers suspected of intelligence work, first compiled by the MGB in February 1947, listed not only Fischer and Reverditto but also the woman they had allegedly befriended in Poltava.

An attractive Poltava blond, Zinaida Belukha, who met both Fischer and Reverditto, became the prime target of a lengthy secret-police investigation. Belukha came from the Soviet elite. Born in 1922, she grew up in the family of a senior police officer who oversaw the Poltava regional penitentiary system. He was arrested and shot at the height of the Great Terror, his sentencing and execution taking place on the same day, October 17, 1938. Andrii Belukha left two daughters, Zinaida and Olena. Neither felt much loyalty toward the regime that had killed their father and had no qualms about dating first Germans and then Americans.

The MGB files contained the details of the first meeting between Reverditto and Belukha. Zinaida was bathing at the local beach when Igor approached her with a friend and asked whether they could take a picture of her. She agreed, and Reverditto’s friend photographed the two of them. That evening Igor and Zinaida, who came with her friend Hanna Manko, met in the local theater. They agreed to meet again on the evening of Saturday, July 15, 1944. Soviet attacks on local women dating Americans were then at their height, and the date did not go as planned.²

Igor came with his friend, US Air Force Lieutenant Aleksandr Bibenin, another Russian émigré to the United States, and Zinaida brought along a friend named Lida. No sooner had they met in a local park than a drunken Soviet approached the group and kicked Lida. Bibenin reacted immediately by punching the attacker in the face, drawing blood. A Red Army military patrol summoned to the scene told Reverditto and his friends that after sunset all Americans had to be in their camp. Reverditto later admitted to Zinaida that American relations with the Soviets were anything but good. Fights were taking place, mostly because of girls. Some Americans were being mugged. They would be asked for a cigarette and then threatened with a gun and robbed of flashlights and other valuables.³

The Soviet secret police opened an investigation of Belukha in November 1944, a few months after Reverditto’s departure from Ukraine. An agent code-named “Lily” reported that during the German occupation of Poltava, Belukha had dated German officers. That seemed to be of secondary importance, as the investigation had been opened on the suspicion that she was an American spy. More important was “Lily’s” assertion that Belukha not only had dated Reverditto in July and August 1944 but also had been introduced to Fischer, who had proposed an evening meeting. Belukha had never mentioned to “Lily” whether the meeting actually took place.⁴

At the time, the Poltava Pinkertons showed little interest in Belukha and her encounters with the Americans. Years passed without their paying attention to the matter. By 1950, however, with the renewed interest in Fischer and Reverditto, Belukha was again under suspicion. So was Hanna Manko, whom Belukha had brought with her on her first date with Reverditto at the Poltava drama theater in July 1944.⁵

Manko was born in 1924 into the family of a committed communist. Her father, Terentii Manko, was a poster child of the revolution—a former peasant boy whom the Communist Party appointed rector of the Poltava Institute of Agricultural Construction even before he had a chance to graduate from that institution. But what the party could give, it could also easily take away, and that is indeed what happened to Terentii Manko in the summer of 1938. “I was awakened by pounding on the door,” remembered Hanna, recounting the fateful day of June 22, when she was fourteen. “My father went to open the door; two uniformed men came into the room with him and our neighbor, who was summoned as a witness. A search began. They ransacked everything in the home, digging into books and my father’s papers. My mother and grandmother wept bitterly, and my father, looking as if he had been taken down from the cross, stood and protected them. It was already light outside when they took my father out of the house and led him away.”

In September 1938 they also arrested Hanna’s mother. A month later, Terentii Manko was sentenced to death for anti-Soviet activities. “Terrible black days followed,” recalled Hanna. “I graduated from the seven-year school in a state of fear. I decided to enroll in a medical college… which I completed in 1941. It was hard, very hard: I was regarded as the daughter of an ‘enemy of the people.’” Hanna’s graduation took place in the month that Hitler’s armies invaded Stalin’s Soviet Union—a year before he expected the attack. After all that Hanna had endured, she felt no attachment to the retreating Soviet forces. The agent code named “Dmitrieva” believed that Manko welcomed the arrival of the Germans. Later reports suggested that she dated German officers who visited her apartment. She was also friendly with Zinaida Belukha, also a daughter of a persecuted Soviet official who did not mind dating German officers, and later introduced her to Reverditto.⁶

The Poltava MGB officers first heard about Manko’s acquaintance with Reverditto in January 1951. Agent “Bocharova,” who was being investigated by the MGB for links with the Nazi police and thus eager to prove her usefulness to the MGB, reported that Hanna had confided to her that on one occasion in the summer of 1944, when she was walking with her friend Zinaida Belukha, they were approached by Americans and “spent a couple of hours in conversation.” Later Bocharova saw Manko together with Belukha and Reverditto at the theater performance. Bocharova witnessed Manko approaching Belukha and then chatting with her and Reverditto.⁷

The MGB officers, eager to make a case against Igor Reverditto, were interested in recruiting Manko as an agent, but some aspects of her behavior seemed suspicious. Could she have been recruited by the Americans to spy on her Soviet motherland? An MGB informer code-named “Tishchenko” who had studied in medical school with Hanna before the war and now worked with her in the city’s epidemiological department told the MGB that Manko had lived well under the Germans and after the war as well. “Manko still dresses stylishly now. As soon as a new fashion appears, she has everything,” reported Tishchenko. The sources of Manko’s perceived wealth remained a mystery. “She has no father, only her mother, and works at an unenviable job; I know that it’s impossible to dress like that on a medical assistant’s salary,” continued Tishchenko. In postwar Ukraine, it was indeed considered nothing short of a luxury to have more than one dress. MGB officers ordered their agent to continue observing Manko and her behavior.⁸

The MGB grew more suspicious as it learned that Manko had a boyfriend, Mykhailo, who was currently serving in the Soviet Army. One of the MGB female agents, “Kuznetsova,” asked Manko whether she was interested in marrying Mykhailo, but Hanna told her that there were many reasons why they could not marry. This raised new questions for the MGB, which were partially answered by agent “Bocharova.” In March 1951 she reported on a discussion with Manko about her fiancé. It turned out that Manko wanted to marry him but was afraid that he would turn her down once he learned that her father had been arrested and executed by the MGB.

She had reason to fear this. Right after the war she had fallen in love with a Soviet Army officer named Pavel. They were about to be married when Pavel asked about Hanna’s father. Once he learned that her father had been arrested and had never come back, and that her mother had also been imprisoned for half a year, he told Manko that as a counterintelligence officer he could not marry someone who had lived under the German occupation and whose father was in prison (Hanna did not know at the time that her father had been executed). She told “Bocharova” that recalling what had happened between her and Pavel often made her cry. She hoped it would be different with Mykhailo, who was an officer in the medical service and not, like Pavel, in counterintelligence.⁹

With the fiancé puzzle cracked, the MGB was ready to move ahead with recruiting Manko as a new informer. In the report asking permission to approach her, the MGB case officer stated as a fact that she and Belukha had dated Fisher and Reverditto. He pointed out Manko’s contacts with other women who had dated Americans were an asset. “She is politically aware, cultured, well-developed, good at making new acquaintances quickly, and well informed about the international situation,” read the MGB report. The plan was to summon Manko to the police station and interrogate her about her ties with the Americans. “If she frankly relates what she knows, she will be given a proposal to work with the organs of the MGB and an appropriate document to sign,” continued the report. The request was approved on September 7, 1951.¹⁰

We do not know whether Hanna Manko agreed to answer the MGB officers’ questions and convinced them of her sincerity, or, if so, whether she proposed that she work for the MGB. What we do know is that Manko worked her entire life at the same job in the same hospital where she had worked during the war. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, when local journalists investigating Stalinist purges turned to her in search of material on her father, Hanna told them of his arrest and her life as the daughter of an “enemy of the people,” a political and social outcast in postwar Soviet society. She also showed the journalists her father’s senior thesis, which he had been scheduled to defend on the day of his arrest. “Now I keep that file of his calculations and computations as my sacred and dearest relic.”¹¹

Whether or not the MGB officers succeeded in recruiting Manko, they managed to recruit Zinaida Belukha. They employed all agents who had access to her to collect information about her activities and attitudes, but that seemed insufficient. Eventually they recruited Belukha’s husband, Boris, who was forced to report on his wife under the code-name “Fedotov.” The information gathered by the MGB in the early 1950s suggested that despite Belukha’s extensive record of dating Germans and Americans, she was not working for US intelligence. They could go ahead with her recruitment.

In September 1952, after lengthy interrogation, Belukha agreed to work for the MGB. She admitted having dated German and Hungarian officers and soldiers during the war. “I must admit that during the German presence in the city of Poltava I did not conduct myself with the dignity befitting a Soviet citizen: in particular, I spent time with German officers, and parties repeatedly took place in our home with drinking, music and dancing. I was at the theater several times. … I was acquainted with a pilot named Hans who held the rank of noncommissioned officer, an officer named Richard who worked in food supply, a soldier named Hans, and Hungarian pilots.” Zinaida also admitted having dated Igor Reverditto in July and August 1944. The newly recruited MGB agent was given the code-name “Taiga.”¹²

Who was exploiting whom in that game of recruitment is not entirely clear, as Belukha turned out not to be the kind of agent the MGB had been hoping for. She volunteered little useful information, and in 1955, less than three years after recruitment, she was removed from the agent roster of the MGB, which by then was renamed the KGB. But in November 1958 her name popped up again in the KGB files. The reason was quite simple: George Fischer was visiting the Soviet Union and seemed likely to come to Poltava. The Poltava residents who had met him in 1944 and 1945 were regarded by the KGB as possible assets in spying on the American visitor. The local KGB officers were ready to contact her when a memo came from Moscow informing them that Fischer was not after all going to visit Poltava.¹³

Belukha again ceased to be an object of KGB surveillance, though, ironically, the United States never fully disappeared from her own horizon. She refused to give up on the hope of finding Igor Reverditto in faraway America and making contact with him. In the fall of 1959 she asked an acquaintance named Yevgenii Chuchko, a former prisoner of German concentration camps who had spent some time in Europe after the war and had relatives in the United States, to ask them to look for Reverditto. Chuchko duly wrote to his uncle Petro, who lived in Passaic, New Jersey. Belukha knew only that Reverditto was living in California, information that turned out to be insufficient. In late December 1959, Chuchko received a letter from New Jersey informing him that attempts to find Reverditto in California had failed. The uncle suggested that Reverditto might have changed his surname.¹⁴

The Poltava KGB renewed its interest in Belukha in May 1964: Fischer now code-named “Mustang” by the KGB, was about to revisit the Soviet Union. They expected him to visit Poltava, and the KGB looked into the possibility of using Belukha to contact him. KGB officers met with “Taiga” in late May 1964 to review—yet again—her wartime contacts with Reverditto and Fischer. With regard to Fischer, Belukha told the officers that she had met him just once—when Reverditto introduced him to her. She had more to say about Reverditto, claiming that she had dated him for two and a half months and that their “association” had been “of a purely intimate character.” Reverditto had told Zinaida that he was from California. They had not been in touch since he left Poltava in September 1944.

Belukha admitted that she had tried to find Reverditto through her acquaintance Chuchko. The KGB officers suggested that Belukha ask Chuchko once again to look for Reverditto through his relatives in the United States. Belukha did as ordered. The KGB files are silent on the outcome of that attempt. Most likely, Chuchko’s relatives proved to be of little help. Belukha was never able to get in touch with her wartime boyfriend.¹⁵

The Poltava KGB was clearly disappointed. Still, their belief that Reverditto was an American spy was far-fetched at best. So were Zinaida Belukha’s hopes for a future with Igor. From Poltava he had been sent back to England, where he joined the 13th Combat Wing of the Eighth Air Force. Before the war ended, Igor married Pauline Nan Millard, a sergeant at the Royal Air Force Academy in England. In 1946, with their son, they took a steamship to San Francisco. They had settled in Anaheim, in 1955, the year that Disneyland opened its gates there.

Three more sons were born to them in subsequent years. Reverditto worked as the manager of Boys Market, playing cards at night to earn extra money. In 1987 he and his son Tony, a theater director and later a food critic, founded the “Way off Broadway” playhouse in Santa Ana, California. The family tradition of devotion to theater and arts that had begun in the Russian Empire before 1917 survived in California. Reverditto lived a long life. He divorced his first wife after twenty-nine years of marriage and married again. He died in February 2015 in Fullerton, California, at the age of ninety-five.¹⁶

We do not know what became of Zinaida Belukha. In 1968 someone denounced her to the KGB for her wartime liaisons with Germans. She had given birth to her child in a German hospital, claimed the author of the denunciation, who was upset that at the time of writing Belukha was employed by the Poltava regional prosecutor’s office. The KGB investigated but apparently did nothing. They never gave up hope that she would help to lead them if not to Reverditto, then to George Fischer, who for his entire life remained at the very top of the KGB list of suspected American spies at Poltava.¹⁷