22
Washington Reunion
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, goes a proverb equally cherished by archeologists and spies. FBI agents going through the trash bins of the Soviet embassy in Washington in early January 1955 found many things that might well qualify as treasures by intelligence standards. With the start of the New Year, Soviet diplomats were discarding their old loose-leaf calendars. Either shredders were unknown to them at the time or the calendars were considered insignificant. In any case some of their leaves ended up in the trash.
One, dated August 7, 1954, had a name and address written on it that caught the attention of the FBI agents. “Professor and Mrs. George Fischer, Brandeis University, Waltham 54, Massachusetts.” The Washington FBI field office informed headquarters about their find. The news was passed on to Boston, where local agents visited Brandeis, a nonsectarian institution founded in 1948 by the Jewish community in the Boston suburb of Waltham. A woman from the university’s admissions office informed the FBI agents that there was indeed a Professor George Fischer on the faculty. He was thirty-one years old, born on May 5, 1923, and married to Katherine Hoag. The family resided not in Waltham but at 39 Walker Street in the nearby city of Cambridge.
Fischer’s identity was now established, yet the question of why his name had been written on a Soviet embassy calendar leaf remained unanswered. Was he a spy? Or was there an innocent explanation? The FBI agents were determined to uncover the truth. Times were uncertain. The French, defeated in Vietnam, were leaving Indochina, the Chinese communists were intent on taking over Taiwan, and Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin was claiming that communists had infiltrated the US nuclear industry, and even the CIA. It was not only Soviet counterintelligence officers who were falling prey to Cold War paranoia; Americans were also susceptible. Anyone who had been involved with the wartime allies turned enemies became subject to suspicion on both sides of the Iron Curtain.1
As noted, George Fischer’s name was at the very top of the Soviet list of Americans suspected of espionage activity and remained there from early 1947 all the way into the mid-1950s. Anyone who had had even a chance encounter with him became prime suspects in their own right and subjected to intense MGB investigation, as in the case of Zinaida Belukha.2
None of that was known to the FBI agents who looked into Fischer’s contacts with the Soviet embassy in the first months of 1955. Had they known what Soviet counterintelligence thought about Fischer, they would have been very surprised. Nothing they discovered about him supported the SMERSH and MGB theories. On the contrary, he seemed to be a perfect candidate for recruitment as a Soviet spy. Had the Soviets succeeded in turning him against the country he had served with honor during World War II? Perhaps he found the wartime alliance more compelling than the postwar enmity.
The investigators began by checking their old files and requesting Fischer’s service record from the US Air Force archives in Denver and found that he had been stationed overseas until April 29, 1946, holding the rank of captain at the time of his discharge. Further investigation showed that soon thereafter Fischer returned to the University of Wisconsin, which he had left in 1942 to join the US Army. On May 31, 1946 he had already resumed his studies at the university, from which he graduated in September 1947. With his bachelor’s degree in hand, Fischer went to Harvard to study for a master’s degree in Slavic Languages and Literatures. He graduated from the program in 1949 after taking a summer course in Prague in 1948, the last year before the complete communist takeover of the country.
In 1951 Professor Clyde Kluckhohn, the director of the newly opened Russian Research Center at Harvard, invited the young graduate to work on the Center’s joint initiative with the US Air Force, a project on the Soviet political and social systems. The research was based on interviews with former Soviet citizens, largely post–World War II refugees. These had to be conducted in Displaced Persons’ camps in Germany and required participants like Fischer to travel there. It also required security clearance. The Office of Special Investigations (OSI), the counterintelligence branch of the US Air Force, which was directed to provide the necessary clearance, had reservations about Fischer. It turned out that he had been brought up by Hede Massing, the wife of the known German communist Paul Massing, while his father was Louis Fischer, a “member and an affiliate of numerous communist front organizations” and the subject of an espionage investigation completed in 1943. George Fischer himself “was reported to have evidenced strong Communist beliefs,” read the OSI report. The reference was to views that Fischer had allegedly expressed in 1942, when he had tried to join US Navy intelligence.3
Not sure of what to make of their findings, the OSI asked the FBI to investigate. The FBI officers, in particular Special Agent Thomas F. Sullivan of the Boston FBI, smelled blood. In New York they found and interviewed Fischer’s one-time guardian, Hede Massing. Massing had actually previously cooperated with the FBI. In 1949, at the second trial of the alleged Soviet spy Alger Hiss, she testified against him, recalling an episode in the mid-1930s when, as a recruiter for the Soviet intelligence, she had argued with Hiss, who then worked, she said, for Soviet military intelligence, about the branch of the Soviet spy network to which Noel Field, a US State Department employee, should report. Massing claimed to have ceased working for the Soviets in the late 1930s. Asked by the FBI agents about Fischer, Massing recalled that when she was in Moscow between October 1937 and June 1938, “George Fischer was very pro-Soviet and vigorously defended the purge that was then in progress.” She told the agents that Fischer had changed his pro-Soviet views in 1938 “but had never been very outspoken in his criticism of the Soviet regime because of the many friends and acquaintances of his who still live in Russia.”
The FBI wondered whether Fischer had indeed abandoned his communist views or was simply hiding them so as not to betray clandestine work for the Soviets. FBI informers who had once been members of the Communist Party at the University of Wisconsin testified that he was actually anticommunist in his beliefs. His acquaintances at Harvard said the same. Dr. Demitri Shimkin, the associate director of the Russian Center at Harvard, believed that Fischer was a “left-of-center liberal.” Shimkin’s boss at the Center, Professor Kluckhohn, the one who had invited Fischer to join the Center’s refugee project, stated that in his opinion Fischer constituted no security risk. Kluckhohn pointed out that two high-profile American diplomats, Averell Harriman and Chip Bohlen, knew Fischer and had a high opinion of him. According to FBI files, Fischer was also trusted by another key figure at the US embassy in Moscow during the war, George Kennan, who had taken a post at Princeton. Kennan had invited Fischer to serve as director of the Free Russia Fund, whose goal was to help involve émigré Soviet intellectuals in launching Soviet studies in the United States.4
Finding no evidence that Fischer had pro-Soviet sympathies, Special Agent Sullivan of the Boston FBI decided to close the investigation in April 1952. He stated in his memo that the investigation had “established no evidence of Communist party affiliation or sympathy on the part of the subject.” Cleared for participation in the Harvard interview project, Fischer traveled to Europe. He played a significant role in carrying out the interviews with refugees on the Soviet political and social systems. That same year Fischer published his doctoral dissertation on the history of resistance to the Stalin regime as a monograph. His subject was General Andrei Vlasov’s Russian Volunteer Army, a fighting unit created by the Germans during World War II. The army, recruited largely from Soviet POWs in Nazi concentration camps, was motivated to fight against the Soviets by Russian nationalist and anticommunist ideals. His graduate studies completed, Fischer went on to teach at Brandeis University, the affiliation given on the loose leaf from the Soviet embassy found by the FBI in January 1955.5
The 1955 FBI investigation into George Fischer began with a review of their recent files about the Soviet embassy. There the Bureau’s agents noticed something they had previously overlooked. An FBI report, most probably based on an intercept of telephone conversations and filed on November 5, 1954, stated that a certain “George Yuri Fischer” had gotten in touch with the third secretary of the Soviet embassy, which happened to be the lowest diplomatic rank and equal to that of the assistant attaché, to inform him that he had arrived in Washington to attend the embassy reception scheduled for November 7, the anniversary of the Russian Revolution. According to the report, Fischer told the embassy official that he was ready to meet him on November 6. The official responded that he might give Fischer a call.6
The FBI did not know whether the meeting had actually taken place, but the Bureau’s officers learned that Fischer had attended the reception on November 7. There was little doubt that his name on the August 7 calendar leaf from the Soviet embassy and his visit there three months later were connected, though the nature of that connection was anyone’s guess. The plot seemed to thicken. Suspicion of Fischer increased when on March 18, 1955, FBI officers learned from “a highly confidential source, of known reliability, whose identity may not be disclosed,” that Fischer intended to visit the Soviet embassy again on March 20. He got in touch with the same third secretary of the Soviet Embassy and arranged to meet him at his apartment in the early evening of the day of his forthcoming arrival in Washington.7
The confidential source told the FBI that Fischer had previously submitted two applications to the Soviet embassy, one for a travel visa to the USSR, the other for a change of citizenship. The FBI officers sounded the alarm, suspecting that Fischer was getting ready to defect, acquire Soviet citizenship, and disappear behind the Iron Curtain. “Fischer is U.S. citizen and there would be propaganda value to USSR in renunciation of U.S. by son of Louis Fischer, a prominent and prolific anti-Communist writer,” read one of the FBI cables. Fischer seemed potentially valuable to the Soviets because he would be repudiating his father, who was no longer suspected of espionage against the United States or of continuing to hold procommunist views and indeed had become an anti-Soviet asset.8
The FBI Washington office got a surveillance team to follow Fischer’s moves in the nation’s capital once he arrived for his rendezvous with the Soviet official. At 6:41 on the evening of March 20, Fischer was spotted in northwestern Washington near the apartment building where his embassy contact resided. He stepped out of a green 1951 Ford convertible driven by a woman, whom the surveillance team described as “white, approximately 30 to 35 years old, brown hair, and wearing glasses.” After dropping Fischer off, she drove away. Fischer entered the building, where he stayed until almost midnight. At 11:50 p.m. he left the building in the company of a man. The two got into a blue 1954 Ford sedan and, according to the surveillance report, “proceeded to drive a circuitous route through the N.W. area of Washington.” The driver was probably checking for surveillance, and the FBI had to stop following the Ford at 12:21. At 12:55 they spotted Fischer and his companion at the building where Fischer was staying. The two stood talking on the sidewalk for about three minutes before parting. One of the FBI agents checked his watch. It was 12:58 a.m.9
The FBI now knew that Fischer’s acquaintance with the Soviet official was more than casual. They wanted to know more but had nothing to go on except the surveillance report and an English translation of the letter that Fischer had sent to the embassy. It read: “Up to this time I have had absolutely no word from the embassy about my two applications—change of citizenship, and visa for this summer. I will be very grateful to you if, when I call you, you will be able to suggest to me who at the embassy I can see personally during my visit.” Why Fischer wanted to change his citizenship—which, so far as the FBI knew, was American—before going to the Soviet Union remained a mystery.10
In late March, 1955, the FBI decided that the only way to figure out what was going on with George Fischer was to confront him. “The Bureau desires that an immediate effort be made to determine the present sympathies of Fischer, in view of the allegation that he may have applied for Soviet citizenship,” read the FBI Boston office cable to FBI headquarters. According to the proposed plan of the interview, the agents were to tell Fischer that they were interested in him because of his visit to the Soviet embassy on November 7, 1954, and wanted to know whether he “expects to have a continuing reason for developing of acquaintance with Soviet personnel and whether he would be willing to assist us furnishing his evaluation of such personnel.”
The ultimate goal of the interview was to find out whether Fischer had indeed applied for Soviet citizenship and the nature of his contacts with embassy officials. But the FBI officers were prohibited from asking those questions directly in order to avoid compromising FBI sources or reveal that Fischer had been under surveillance in Washington. “He should very tactfully be given an opportunity to volunteer information,” read the FBI memo on the proposed interview. In April 1955 the Boston FBI was authorized to interview him, but it was easier said than done. They could not find Fischer at his home address, 39 Walker Street in Cambridge.11
Fischer was going through a divorce from his wife, Katherine Van Alan Hoag, a native of Pennsylvania and a daughter of the dean of Haverford College, Gilbert Thomas Hoag. They had married in September 1948. Fischer had moved to a different location, renting an apartment on Charles Street in Boston. He was probably under considerable stress. A post office official interviewed by the FBI reported that Fischer had got into trouble with not one but two postmen and was generally considered a troublemaker. Going through divorce, behaving erratically, visiting the Soviet embassy and meeting with a Soviet official at his apartment while applying for a travel visa to the USSR and possibly for Soviet citizenship: Fischer matched the profile of a man preparing to betray his country.12
FBI agents finally got to interview Fischer on May 18, 1955, four days after the newspapers announced the creation of the Warsaw Pact—the Soviet-led military alliance that was to serve as a counterweight to NATO in Central Europe. Fischer was open and direct in answering the agents’ questions. As they wrote in their report, he furnished them with plenty of information about his visits to the Soviet embassy in November 1954 and March 1955. Yet he volunteered no information on the issue that was of greatest concern to the FBI but so sensitive that they had been instructed not to ask about it directly—the question of Soviet citizenship.
Fischer spoke in detail about his contact at the Soviet embassy, Third Secretary Anatolii Zorin, formerly of course the head of SMERSH at Poltava. The FBI already knew his name and address, 1451 Park Road, Washington, DC, where Fischer visited him in March 1955. However, they were surprised to learn about his connection with the Poltava air base, where Fischer had served during the war. Fischer told the FBI agents that Zorin had been an engineer before the war and served as a liaison with the Americans at the Poltava base. His role might have been equivalent to that of an officer of the American Counter Intelligence Corps.
Fischer told the FBI officers that he and Zorin had met by chance in October 1954, when Fischer was giving a lecture at the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) Center, headquartered at Fort Holabird, Maryland. After the lecture he went to Washington, and bumped into Zorin near the Statler Hotel on 16th Street, not far from the Soviet embassy. Decades later, in his memoir, Fischer wrote that the meeting had taken place after his visit to the Soviet embassy, after he had exited the building. It was Zorin who first recognized Fischer and shouted: “Yura! George!” Fischer apparently had difficulty in recognizing Zorin—he would later tell his wife that a few minutes passed before he actually remembered who Zorin was. In responding to the FBI agents’ questions, Fischer said that he knew approximately ten Soviet officers from his time at Poltava but could not remember any of them well. Eventually he recognized Zorin, whom he addressed by the diminutive form of his first name, “Tolia.”13
Since Fischer’s name appeared on the calendar leaf from the Soviet embassy dated August 7, Zorin evidently had plenty of time to prepare for what seemed to Fischer to be a chance meeting. The former SMERSH officer told Fischer that after the war he had joined the diplomatic service and was now approaching the end of his term in Washington. In fact, the diplomatic post was a cover for Zorin. As late as October 1950, Zorin, then a lieutenant colonel assigned to the headquarters of the Kyiv military district, was advising Poltava MGB officers on cases of Americans suspected of spying on the USSR. Fischer, naturally, was at the very top of that list. US State Department records show Zorin and his wife residing in Washington from 1952 to 1956; after that, references to the Zorins disappear from the diplomatic record. Zorin had not been lying when he told Fischer that his posting in the United States was nearing its end.14
Upon their “chance” meeting in October 1954, Fischer and Zorin went to a Greek restaurant for dinner. They recalled the good old days at Poltava. “We chatted amiably, were happy to meet,” remembered Fischer. Zorin complained that the Soviet embassy had very little contact with the Americans, as most people they approached would not even accept invitations to their receptions. “I hated the spy/loyalty craze. The witch hunt by the U.S. government as well as McCarthy and Co.,” wrote Fischer later. “I told Tolia I’d love to do my bit against it.” Fischer was promised an invitation to the Russian Revolution reception on November 7, 1954, which he subsequently attended.15
Recalling the reception, Fischer told the agents that while meeting with Soviet officials, whose names he did not remember, as the encounters were very short, he was not asked any suspicious questions, short of ones about US public opinion, information that was available in the daily newspapers. He did not plan to continue contacts with any of those officials—with the possible exception of Zorin, given their history together. Also, he was not sure whether he would actually go to the USSR, as his travel would have to be funded by a US institution. Finally, he did not mind providing the FBI with information on Soviet officials he might meet in the future but did not want to be under an obligation to do so. He offered to contact the FBI if anything of importance turned up at such meetings. That was the end of the interview.16
The FBI now knew about Zorin and his background but still had no idea about the validity of their suspicion that Fischer intended to acquire Soviet citizenship. They decided to interview Fischer’s estranged wife, Katherine Hoag, in the hope that she might clarify the issue and contacted her in September 1955. Hoag characterized her ex-husband as strongly anti-Soviet. It turned out that he had been quite open with her about his Soviet youth and his meeting with Zorin in Washington. She also knew that he had visited Zorin at his home in the American capital.
Most importantly, Hoag was able to shed light on the issue of Fischer’s planned travel to the USSR and his citizenship. She told the agents that George was indeed planning to visit the Soviet Union for research purposes but was concerned that the Soviets would consider him one of their own—he had left the USSR in 1938 on a Soviet passport—and prevent him from leaving the country. “I wanted to apply for a Soviet visa right away,” remembered Fischer later. “But father and mother worried about my old Soviet citizenship. It never lapsed, they said. Now it might be used by Moscow officials. They could give me grief, lock me up in the Old Country.” That was the reason Fischer had gone to the Soviet embassy in the first place, explained Hoag. He had even written in that regard to his old acquaintance and now US ambassador to Moscow, Charles “Chip” Bohlen, requesting his help.
As far as the FBI officers were concerned, the issue was finally resolved. They recommended no further investigation into the question of citizenship. George Fischer wanted to remain a US citizen and have the right to leave the USSR whenever he pleased. The case seemed closed.17
If George Fischer was no longer suspected of spying for the Soviets, he had not yet succeeded in ridding himself of his Soviet citizenship and thus, as he correctly surmised, risked arrest if he paid another visit to the USSR. Besides, after the May 1955 visit by FBI officers, Fischer was clearly concerned about the possibility that his contacts with Zorin might have been interpreted as something more than an innocent meeting with an old friend, and that his correspondence with and visits to the Soviet embassy might be perceived as something other than an attempt to renounce his Soviet citizenship.
Fischer decided to “come clean” and get official approval for further contacts with the Soviets. Nonetheless he apparently did not trust the FBI. Instead, in late August 1955, a few weeks before FBI agents interviewed Katherine Hoag, he wrote to the Passport Office of the State Department. “The double citizenship which arises out of my mother’s former Soviet citizenship is of particular concern to me,” wrote Fischer. He informed the State Department that he intended to contact the Soviet embassy again and asked “whether there are any objections on your part to me pursuing this matter further.” On October 22, 1955, the Passport Office responded to Fischer, approving his contacts with the Soviet embassy.18
On November 7 Fischer was back in Washington, once again attending the Russian Revolution reception at the Soviet embassy. As before, he met with Zorin prior to the reception and continued socializing with him and his colleagues at the embassy. It was then that Zorin shared with him the difficulties he had encountered while working on his new assignment—the collection of data on violations of the Soviet-American Agreement signed as part of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries back in 1933. Article 3 of the agreement prohibited the US government from sponsoring or supporting anti-Soviet activities. Zorin claimed that the US government was in fact funding private institutions engaged precisely in such activities, and he was working on a memorandum to the government asking it to stop them. Zorin was looking for people who could help him collect information on violations of the agreement, had a budget, and was prepared to pay for the information.
Fischer smelled a rat and did not react to Zorin’s indirect proposal to cooperate. That seemed to be the end of the conversation, but later in the evening, Zorin raised the question again, suggesting that Fischer was well acquainted with the subject of Zorin’s new inquiry. He then asked Fischer whether he could help with collecting the data. It all was very casual, and, given Fischer’s opposition to McCarthyism, which he did not hide from Zorin, sounded quite natural. But Fischer, well aware that “cooperation” with the Soviets smacked of espionage, did not take the bait. He told Zorin that he was not interested.
Zorin would not take no for an answer and made his offer again. He mentioned that he had thought about getting help from someone whom Fischer knew quite well, except that this person was getting old. Fischer suspected that Zorin was referring to his mother, Markusha, about whom he had inquired earlier. Fischer did not react. Zorin made one more attempt to persuade Fischer to help him with his project. Again Fischer demurred, and they parted on their “customary amicable footing.”19
Upon his return to Boston, Fischer decided to do something he could hardly have imagined himself ever doing—writing a letter to the FBI describing his recent visit to the Soviet embassy. It was dated November 8, 1955, the day of his return from Washington. The following day, November 9, he received a visit from the FBI and was interviewed about his conversations with Zorin. Fischer was clearly worried; the FBI officers commented in their report on his “nervous temperament.” This was one of the reasons, along with his stated reluctance to report to the FBI on a regular basis, that they had advised against developing him as a double agent. This time around, however, Fischer was prepared to cooperate. He suggested that he would get in touch with his mother and let the FBI know whether she had been approached by the Soviets. In December 1955, at another meeting with FBI agents, he told them that Markusha had received no communication from the Soviet embassy. Fischer himself had no desire to continue contact with Zorin or Soviet officials in general. Still, he had good news from the Soviet embassy: his Soviet citizenship had finally been revoked, so he was free to visit.20
With Zorin leaving Washington in 1956, it seemed that the Poltava page of Fischer’s biography had been turned. He would make numerous trips to the Soviet Union in the 1960s and meet many of his old Moscow friends there. Those trips bore no connection to his Poltava experiences, with the exception of one he took in the summer of 1963 to attend a meeting of the Dartmouth Conference of American and Soviet public figures that was held that year at Yalta. Not only was the place familiar to him from his days at the Yalta Conference of 1945, but also the head of the KGB department that oversaw the conference from his office in Kyiv was his old acquaintance, Major, not Colonel, of KGB, Anatoly Zorin. We do not know however whether the two happened upon one another on that occasion. Closer to the end of his life, Fischer gained possession of his FBI file and learned about the numerous investigations conducted into his allegedly pro-Soviet views.1 He never saw his SMERSH files or learned about the fate of his Soviet acquaintances—those who, like Zinaida Belukha, had been recruited by the KGB to spy on him. The Poltava KGB expected Fischer to return to Ukraine in the 1960s. He never did.