The following year, Stalin died, and a purge followed. Led by Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s heirs executed Lavrenty Beria, chief of the NKVD, the secret police agency that was a forerunner of the KGB. He possessed incriminating dossiers on virtually all of them; the fear was that he would use the documents to intimidate any opposition and become ruler of the Soviet Union. Then they went after those with real or imagined links to Beria, and Sudoplatov and scores of others were swept into prison. Nikolai was suddenly without a protector. In his memoir, he wrote that Sudoplatov was “the finest and most intelligent man I had known in the service. And now his turn had come to be sacrificed to the machine.” But when I questioned Nikolai in person about Sudoplatov, he said he “didn’t care” when he heard of the general’s arrest: “To him, I was his protégé. But to me he was my superior, not my mentor.” At the time, I thought that was Nikolai’s bravado speaking. And, indeed, a few months later, he revealed himself to be genuinely torn about the general. “I looked at him almost as my stepfather,” he said, “until the moment he told me to go to Paris to kill [Kerensky]. That was a surprise that he would do that. That’s when everything fell apart.”
The new boss was a “short-witted” colonel named Lev Studnikov, who soon had an assignment for Nikolai: the assassination, in West Germany, of an anti-Soviet Russian nationalist named Giorgy Okolovich. But an inspection of Okolovich’s file led Nikolai to conclude that the émigré leader, while clearly opposed to the Soviet leadership, was not “an enemy of the state” bent on destroying the Russian nation or people. Thus, he hardly seemed deserving of assassination.
According to Nikolai’s account, his doubts about the mission multiplied. He told his then-wife, Yana, that he was being asked to murder “apparently a very good man.” Yana, who had always been uncomfortable with her husband’s chosen occupation, issued an ultimatum. If he carried out this killing, she warned, their lives together would be over and he would never see their son, Alik, again. Nikolai, already troubled by the grim task that awaited him, was finally persuaded: He would not carry out the assassination.
He concocted an elaborate ruse to make it appear that he would proceed with the mission, in which he was to supervise the poisoning of the émigré leader by two German secret agents. The three of them trained together for months. They rehearsed how to approach Okolovich at his five-story Frankfurt apartment building, and how to use their weapons—two tiny pistols secreted inside metal cigarette cases that Nikolai bought at a West Berlin gift shop. A special weapons shop in Moscow adapted the gear so that the cases, if opened, would reveal nothing but the tips of unfiltered Chesterfields, and the pistols, from their hiding space, would almost soundlessly fire pellets filled with poison.
In January 1954, preparations were complete. Nikolai said his good-byes to Yana and Alik in Moscow, and promised that an intermediary would warn them if anything went wrong. As they parted, he could not help but feel uneasy. He was thirty-two years old, about to throw aside his life as he had known it for the past decade.
“Is it possible that this is really the last?” he thought.
In his memoir, Nikolai describes how he confronted Giorgy Okolovich at his Frankfurt apartment weeks later and told his would-be quarry, “I’ve come to you from Moscow. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ordered your liquidation. I can’t let this murder happen.”
So began what must be one of the most curious friendships of the Cold War. Eventually, the episode would gain him worldwide fame as a traitor to his homeland (the Russian view) or a principled man who could no longer stomach the brutality expected of him (the opinion held in much of the anticommunist West). But it required a bit of convincing to get there. Okolovich quickly led Nikolai to the émigré’s American “friends,” agents from the CIA whose immediate reaction was to suspect that this supposed Russian assassin was a fraud, perhaps a double agent.
They subjected Nikolai to “rigorous questioning,” before finally concluding that not only was he telling the truth, but he was a high-value catch: the first serving officer ever to defect from the Soviet terror unit known loosely as Special Tasks. He could provide detailed descriptions of its personnel, its missions, and so on.
His interrogation then took an unexpected turn. The CIA agents began pressuring Nikolai to go public with his story, intending it as “blow for blow” retaliation for the NKVD abduction of another Soviet émigré. Nikolai reacted with disbelief, fearful that exposing himself to the world press would put his wife and son in grave danger.
Here is Nikolai’s recollection of what happened next: Struggling to preserve their relationship with their prized defector, CIA agents came up with a compromise. He would tell his story to the press and make an impassioned appeal for the safety of Yana and Alik in Russia. At the moment he did so, either U.S. diplomats accompanied by Western reporters—or the reporters on their own—would go to Yana and the boy and offer them sanctuary in the American embassy. The CIA even produced a State Department man calling himself “Mr. X,” who offered assurances from President Eisenhower that the United States would “keep Yana in the embassy until victory.”
It was naïve to think that, in a police state, either diplomats from a Western embassy or foreign reporters could simply drive to the apartment of a turncoat Soviet intelligence agent, pick up his wife and child, and make it safely back to the embassy. It was a goofball plan, worse than a Hail Mary pass. It was a Hail Mary with the almost certain knowledge that there was no receiver in the end zone to catch the ball. Nikolai—who was no innocent, after all—should have known better. But events seemed to be spinning out of control. “I was desperate,” he told me.
On April 22, 1954, he unmasked himself before more than two hundred reporters in Bonn. A reporter described him as “a slight, scholarly-appearing blond young man…neatly dressed in a dark blue suit” and wearing glasses. Nearby was a table displaying weapons to be used in the assassination, conveniently placed there by the CIA. Nikolai posed for photographs with the émigré Okolovich and holding a portrait of Yana. His plea on behalf of her and Alik went out over Voice of America broadcasts, along with their Moscow address and telephone number.
A week passed without word from the Soviet capital. Then Mr. X called. “Nobody went to your family in Moscow,” he said. “…I don’t know why. It looks like at the last moment they got cold feet.” All Nikolai could think was that he had lost Yana and Alik.
Five decades later, in all of our conversations Nikolai never deviated from the above narrative. But I wondered, was it entirely credible?
Two retired CIA agents who were posted in Germany when Nikolai defected did their best to convince me that his story was fiction or at least greatly exaggerated.
Thomas Polgar, then intelligence adviser to the CIA station chief there, said that a CIA agent would have been willing to “say anything” to exploit the opportunity that Nikolai presented. But he said that he had never met Nikolai and knew of no ironclad promise that his wife and child would be rescued.
David E. Murphy, a principal agent on Soviet affairs at the time, was present during the interrogation of Nikolai. While the Russian might have thought he had a deal, “he was never told this would happen,” Murphy said. “The State Department had no interest at all in such a risky activity in Moscow. How would you have done it? I don’t think it would have worked.”