The Nazis Next Door (10 page)

For nearly fifteen years now, ever since the end of the war, he had worked with a craftsman’s zeal to create the façade that was to become his life story, caulking the cracks, buffing out the imperfections, adding a splash of paint to highlight the dramatic flairs. It was an immigrant’s success story: the story of a man in search of freedom, a man of conscience who fought Communism and persecution in his native Russia at every turn; who led a wayward band of refugees through war-ravaged Europe; who came to America, made a new life for himself in New Jersey, and, as an up-and-coming young CIA undercover agent, worked secretly to help reclaim his native land from the Reds.

It was an inspiring tale, and whenever the storyline had prompted doubts from fellow immigrants he encountered, from the New Jersey politicians he’d befriended, even from CIA officials for whom he’d spied, his sheer force of personality had overcome them. When inconsistencies surfaced, he had explained them away.

Indeed, in his four years living in the United States, he had earned one stealth assignment after another from American intelligence officials. The CIA’s suspicion that Soobzokov was guilty of minor war crimes had certainly done nothing to slow the work. In fact, the agency had sent him back to the Middle East in search of more intelligence on the Soviets and possible recruits among the Russian exiles there. He had trained with the U.S. Army in explosives and paramilitary operations as part of a secret anti-Communist operation. He’d even expanded his portfolio to include confidential work with the FBI. The CIA had suggested to their domestic intelligence partners at the bureau that Soobzokov could provide dirt not just on Communist sympathizers in the Middle East, but inside the United States as well; two New Jersey immigrants in particular had caught Soobzokov’s eye as suspicious. The FBI jumped at the chance to use him, with J. Edgar Hoover writing personally in June 1958 to Allen Dulles. Yes, Hoover wrote, the FBI would be quite interested in making use of this Soobzokov fellow; please let him know that his men from the FBI would be in touch soon to find out exactly what he knew about the Communists, the director wrote.

Those were heady times for Soobzokov, a newcomer to America who was working for its two most famous intelligence agencies. But as he sat in a CIA interview room one November morning in 1959, answering questions from a stone-faced examiner for what seemed like the hundredth time, his life story was starting to chip away like paint from rotted wood. The results had just come back on his latest polygraph test—his seventh in just the last few years. Again, it was clear to the examiner that Soobzokov was lying to them. Over and over again. Particularly about the war years. He’d been given every chance to show his trustworthiness, but even now, he remained a cipher to the CIA, a ghost from a war long over. He had many faces, but no clear core, as he faced a barrage of skeptical questions from the examiner. It came down to this: Has
anything
you’ve told us about yourself for nearly the last ten years of your service been true? the CIA examiner demanded to know. And the most vexing question of all: What did you really do for the Nazis during the war?

The CIA’s aim was not to determine whether Soobzokov might have been a Nazi war criminal; it had suspected as much almost from the beginning. No, what the CIA wanted to know was whether Soobzokov could be trusted or not. Being an ex-Nazi was acceptable so long as he could prove himself an honest and trustworthy one.

Soobzokov recognized the spot in which he found himself. This was his last chance to make things right with his bosses at the CIA if he ever wanted to work for the agency again.

How had the relationship come to this? Such skepticism, such distrust. Soobzokov was flummoxed. Hadn’t he always been there for his bosses at the CIA, and they for him? They could count on him. Just two years earlier, they wanted him to drop everything, leave his pregnant wife and three young children in Paterson and do six months of secret, paramilitary training. He didn’t ask why; he dutifully sent in his uniform measurements and shoe size as ordered, got on the train to Union Station in Washington on a scalding July day, and showed up for his assignment.

And when the CIA wanted him to take a leave from a new job he’d gotten with an insurance company and fly back to the Middle East for several more months on a risky undercover assignment? Again, Soobzokov was there for them.

Hadn’t he proven himself by now a devoted CIA employee, a loyal anti-Communist? Sure, he loved the thrill and bravado of the spy’s life, but he did it out of a sense of service to his new country, too. Whatever the CIA wanted, he did it.

The strange thing to Soobzokov was that his bosses at the CIA had always seemed so high on him. Soobzokov had become particularly close to John Grunz, the veteran CIA case officer who served as his handler, muse, confidant, and fellow Communist hunter. Soobzokov had reported to him during his time living in Jordan. After Soobzokov came to America, the two exchanged letters recalling their time serving together in the Middle East. Soobzokov would call Grunz collect to share Communist tidbits. He had Grunz’s private phone line at headquarters, with instructions to identify himself to Grunz’s secretary as “Mr. Tom.” Soobzokov had shared everything with Grunz—all his tips about suspected Commie sympathizers in New Jersey, photos from a Russian émigré who seemed suspiciously smitten with the Bolshoi Ballet, and various theories on ethnic and political divisions back in Russia and in the Middle East.

Occasionally, in darker moments, Soobzokov would even share with Grunz the ugly, deep-seated biases that he kept hidden away from most of the outside world. There was the time a few months earlier when Soobzokov, looking to make some extra money on top of his part-time work with the CIA, was mulling over a job offer in exports with a New York firm. He talked over the position with an executive there by the name of Lansberg. But something worried Soobzokov about this Mr. Lansberg. He called Grunz for advice. Soobzokov wanted “to find out if the firm is reliable and whether Jews are involved. He would be ashamed to work for a Jew,”
the CIA dutifully noted in his file. “He thinks Lansberg is a Jewish name but Lansberg talked more like a German or a Dutchman,” the file noted; those were “nationalities he wouldn’t mind working for.”

For a CIA officer like Grunz, each anti-Soviet spy he could count as part of his portfolio—even an inept one or an anti-Semitic one—was a prized commodity that would inevitably help to advance his own career. In that era at the CIA, you couldn’t have too many Russian spies on your team. Grunz was willing to fight for his friend. “We must get him employment!” the handler scrawled in a handwritten note to his bosses after Soobzokov passed on the job with Lansberg, the Jew, and was struggling with money. Soobzokov “is willing to go on any type of mission for us at any time,” Grunz wrote, “providing the objective is worth the risk in his opinion.”

But as close as he had once been with Grunz and his other CIA spy bosses, the easy rapport began to fray by the time he was called in for his latest interrogation. For months now, the CIA’s pesky internal security team had been asking him about unpleasant rumors that had surfaced during what proved a disastrous covert visit he took to the Middle East in the fall of 1957.

On the Middle East trip, he was supposed to spend three or four months secretly recruiting Russian exiles in the region as spies for the CIA. First he needed a cover story to explain his absence from home. Ironically enough, that cover came from his Nazi past. If fellow immigrants in New Jersey asked why he was going back to the Middle East for so long, he decided he would tell them that the German branch of NATO had sent him there, a story he figured would make perfect sense to those who knew his past. “I emphasized Germany because everybody knows I fought with the Germans during the war,” he told his CIA debriefer afterward.

In the Middle East, Soobzokov still had many contacts among fellow White Russian refugees from the North Caucasus, and he was assigned to scout out some of his old immigrant haunts. With his cover story in place, and $1,800 in CIA money in his pocket to buy a car in Beirut, he was supposed to travel the region and discreetly work the refugees who might be willing to return to Russia as CIA plants. He would also be sending agents into Syria from Jordan on clandestine operations. He might even venture there himself.

The plan ran off the rails from the start. Instead of receiving intelligence on the Commies, CIA headquarters was soon getting back all sorts of unnerving reports about Soobzokov himself, and the dust storm he was kicking up during his stay. Word came that the CIA’s $150-a-week covert agent had been openly flaunting his American spy credentials, insulting the locals with his arrogance, getting mixed up in Circassian politics, and offering to use his connections to help refugees emigrate to America. So disruptive was the trip that there was even talk among the locals that he might be a
Soviet
plant. Be careful of this man, Soobzokov’s old countrymen were saying of the interloper; he was not who he seemed to be. One American official in Jordan became so fed up with Soobzokov’s antics that he complained directly to Dulles, the CIA director. Within a week of the complaint, Soobzokov’s trip was cut short, and he was pulled out of the country.

This wasn’t the type of low profile the CIA expected from a covert agent. Indeed, the charges were serious enough that the CIA called in Soobzokov for a series of debriefings to explain how things had become so bungled on the trip. The situation might have worried another man. But Soobzokov, confident as always, believed he could explain it all away. Sure, he had heard the unpleasant gossip that followed him back from Beirut, but there was nothing to it, he assured the examiner at the outset of one CIA debriefing. These scurrilous charges were nothing more than “a small bothersome gnat buzzing around my head,” he scoffed; just lies and innuendo generated by a rival from the old country.

The reason for the bad blood? It was all so silly, Soobzokov explained with an air of bemusement; it was all over a woman’s virginity. After the war, he explained, when he was still living in Jordan among the Circassians, a friend had asked Soobzokov about a pretty young girl he’d noticed among the war refugees in town. As a self-styled leader of his refugee clan, Soobzokov liked playing the role of unofficial matchmaker. Yes, she was interested in marrying, and yes, she was a virgin, he told his friend after some inquiries. The two wed, but only then, Soobzokov explained matter-of-factly to the CIA examiner, did the groom discover his bride was no virgin. What’s more, the girl had blurted out to her new husband in a moment of anger that it was the matchmaker himself—none other than Soobzokov—who had defiled her.

Ugly as it was, the episode had led to an understandable bit of ill will between the two men that had lasted for years, he acknowledged with some chagrin. So, Soobzokov explained, when he returned to Jordan from America on his mysterious “business” trip, and his former rival realized he was back in town, the bitter man quickly used the occasion to spread these malicious and baseless rumors—that Soobzokov was a Communist agitator and an untrustworthy man who had done all sorts of suspicious things during his stay. Few charges were more salacious among the White Russian war immigrants than calling a man a Communist spy. But there was nothing to the accusations, he assured the CIA. He was no Communist; these were just the lies of a vengeful man still upset years later because Soobzokov had deflowered his wife.

Remarkably, the CIA seemed to be satisfied with the grandiose explanation. Soobzokov had been “substantially truthful” in his debriefing and a polygraph, the agency concluded after hearing his explanations. The slew of accusations grew out of “jealousy and envy [by] his personal enemies,” another analyst concluded. And the most damning accusation of all—the suggestion that Soobzokov was really a Soviet spy? It was “probably without foundation.”

Soobzokov had talked his way out of trouble again, at least for now. Questions about the ill-fated Middle East assignment were put to rest. But then, just a few months later, another awkward encounter placed Soobzokov smack up against his past again, with the potential for even more damage to his career. The CIA and the military had scheduled him for six months of paramilitary training in southern Maryland in early 1958, as a member of the covert Hot War team. In Maryland, Soobzokov wouldn’t just be focused on the softer side of spycraft, pedestrian stuff like recruiting Russian expatriates or spreading Soviet disinformation. No, at an army base at Fort Meade, Maryland, up the highway from Washington, D.C., he and other Russian-speaking members of the Hot War team would undergo training in the use of dynamite, grenades, weaponry, and a myriad of other tools of warfare to prepare for the possibility of being secretly dropped back into Russia at a moment’s notice to conduct paramilitary operations.   

Yet as titillating as the assignment might have sounded, the prospect terrified Soobzokov. He had always been able to use his powerful personality to wile his way through covert assignments, but dynamite and detonators? This was different. He wasn’t sure the CIA, despite its confidence in him, had the right man. One scenario in particular paralyzed him with fear as he ran it over and over in his mind before leaving for Maryland, he later confided to a CIA debriefer in a moment of raw candor. As he imagined it playing out, the platoon of Hot War soldiers would be standing in formation at the army base next to an intimidating assortment of live demolition charges. The drill instructor would address him personally. “Soobzokov, I see from your biography that you graduated from a Russian military academy and were an officer in the Red Army against the Nazis,” the platoon leader would say. “Why don’t you show us how the Russians would execute a detonation like this?” Soobzokov, sweating, would then step out of line with two choices laid starkly before him. He could lose face in front of his instructor and his entire Hot War team by admitting that, his official resumé notwithstanding, he had never actually trained in explosives, had never been a Russian officer, had never attended the military academy, and, in fact, had barely even served in the Red Army before deserting. Or he could fake it, go ahead with the demonstration out of a “false pride,” and risk “blowing himself up through ignorance,” as he told his CIA debriefer. Neither option seemed terribly appealing.