By the time he left the labor camp, the young man was ready to come out as a reformed character. At first, he thought of making a grand public gesture, renouncing his former comrades and their goals, and committing himself to communism. On reflection, he concluded, this would change few minds. Instead, he turned to the KGB to offer his services in the undercover struggle against the Lithuanian nationalist resistance.
Agent Ruta was that rare creature, a walk-in (volunteer). He expected the KGB to greet him with suspicion. Instead, they welcomed him with open arms. From the KGB standpoint the young man was an ideal recruit, being deeply embedded in the “hostile environment” of anti-Soviet nationalism from before and during his time in the labor camp.
Agent Ruta writes of his case officers in glowing terms. The first, named Vitas Domo, showed him only goodwill and sincerity. He describes the second, Julius Antano, as “calm, unhurried, an intelligent person, an experienced Chekist [secret policeman].” In their hands, Ruta experienced a rare moment of optimism and peace of mind.
The honeymoon did not last. Soon, Agent Ruta began to let Julius Antano down, missing meetings and failing assignments. This marked the onset of a personal crisis, the reasons for which Ruta kept to himself. The trigger for this crisis (he explains, looking back) was that in society he now found himself completely isolated. In his own mind, he had become proud of the Soviet Union’s achievements, and he wanted to work with others to help overcome its residual defects—which were exactly the issues that nationalists exploited to promote discontent. As a loyal citizen he hungered for the respect and trust of others who felt like him. But those other loyal citizens continued to avoid and despise him as the unreformed nationalist that he still appeared to be. His only friends were the old comrades of the resistance whom he had come to inwardly reject.[340]
The people Ruta hated most were the former resisters who had avoided prison and were now making their careers and had even joined the Communist Party, to which they professed loyalty out of self-interest rather than inner belief. As a former state criminal, by contrast, Ruta could not make a career; he could get only low-status work at a “miserly” wage. He turned in on himself and fell into a depression. He began to drink. Eventually he was hospitalized with pulmonary tuberculosis.
A visitor brought Ruta to a turning point. “When Julius Antano visited me in the clinic,” Ruta writes,
he showed himself to be so close to me, just like a father. I began more and more to feel a kind of inner love for the Chekists, and I began to follow them and imitate them. More and more often I repeated to myself the words of F. E. Dzerzhinskii [founder of the Soviet secret police]: “A Chek-ist can only be a person with a cool head, a warm heart, and clean hands.” It was more or less an exercise in self-hypnosis. Today I think that the key to prevailing over that old pessimism, that morbid nightmare, was my old acquaintance with Julius Antano. I am grateful to him for my whole life.
Over several years Ruta emerged from his depression. Helped by his KGB connections, he changed his residence, finished college, and gained employment in accordance with his profession (not specified, but involving conferences, lectures, and some branch of scholarship).
How else did the KGB help him, specifically? This was “hard to say. Maybe it was that I always felt goodwill and sincerity from their side, and trust in me, or maybe it was that I trusted them. Most likely, both at once.” Most important, Ruta was no longer lonely: “There are many good people around me. They trust me—which is most important.”
In the last pages of his memoir, Ruta recounts that he has successfully completed many important assignments to report on former nationalist resisters now released back into society. Sometimes he is invited to write about the evolving “forms, methods, and tactics” of nationalist groups. He concludes with advice for case officers on how to assign surveillance tasks without arousing suspicion and the importance of allowing agents to exercise a degree of initiative. Ruta, it seems, has become an elite collaborator, entrusted not only with low-level tasks but also with advice and analysis.
To summarize, the story of Ruta reveals the psychological stress of the undercover helper whose inner thoughts are known only to the KGB. Trust was the key that unlocked the informer’s ability to perform his role. At first the door was locked on both sides. The KGB turned the key from one side by showing trust in Ruta. But this was not enough: it did not save Ruta from despair. For that, Ruta had to turn the key from the other side by learning to trust the KGB with his darkest inner thoughts.
Trust—but Verify
For the KGB, things worked out best when the agent sought the case officer’s trust and offered trust in exchange. Agent Ruta longed to belong and be trusted, but he had to learn to trust his case officer with his deepest fear, which was of social isolation. Agent Rimkus accepted recruitment without much prompting, but he had to trust the KGB with his new identity. Agent Gobis had to trust the KGB with knowledge of his selfish urges. Agent Stanislav had to learn to trust the KGB more than he trusted his criminal colleagues.
One can doubt that our stories tell the whole truth. Walking into the KGB to offer his services after years in the nationalist underground, Agent Ruta felt trusted from the start. But for the KGB to have accepted such an offer at face value would have gone against all caution.[341] It seems certain that, while the officers handling Agent Ruta did not show him their doubts, their colleagues behind the scenes would have verified him in minute detail. Agent Rimkus appeared willing to serve, and explained his hesitation over recruitment by fear of exposure, as if it were a merely practical concern, but did he agree to serve only for fear that his bad record would be used against him, while retaining unspoken loyalties to his former comrades after? Agent Gobis felt entrusted with an important mission, but the reality is that the KGB kept him under remote surveillance: the trust they showed him was simulated. Agent Stanislav became more effective when kept on a shorter leash, but the KGB now had evidence that he had helped to conceal a crime, bringing him under a clear threat.
In the informer’s commitment to collaboration, the desire to win trust may have been a strong motivation, strongest among those with a compromised past, such as Agent Ruta. KGB case officers recognized this motivation, but they did not return it in full. While the KGB had to rely on its agents to some degree, good practice demanded that their work should be checked at every opportunity. To allow mistrust to dominate the relationship could spoil an agent, as in the case of Agent Gobis. But unconditional trust was not recommended: it was too much trust that put agent Stanislav at risk. Good practice demanded that every agent’s work should be checked, in the spirit of the Russian proverb: “Trust—but verify.”[342]
The principal’s problem is presented here as one of verifying an agent’s commitment to a vertical relationship based on trust. This problem is common to all large organizations where quality of performance matters, regardless of ownership or socioeconomic context. What made the case of
KGB officers and agents worthy of special attention? There are two distinctive features. One was the scope for coercion of the agent, made possible by KGB access to kompromat. The other was the ultimate purpose—to enable the KGB to penetrate private households, church congregations, and informal affinity networks in order to learn their secrets and, if necessary, frustrate their projects.
340
Ruta’s breakdown oddly resembled the crises experienced by the idealistic young Soviet people of thirty years previously, described by Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind, 106-12. They dreamed of solidarity and of serving the community. Involuntarily doubting the nature of their society and the wisdom of its leaders, they found themselves isolated and their dreams poisoned, as they confided in their diaries. More than one felt the urge to confide in the authorities: “The only thing that I would like to have ... is trust of the NKVD,” wrote Julia Piatnitskaia. I thank Claire Shaw for pointing me in this direction.
341
“Like most secret services, the Stasi had a pathological fear of walk-ins.” Schmeidel, Stasi: Shield and Sword, 37.
342
Gieseke, History of the Stasi, 80, quotes from the Stasi’s Dictionary of Political-Operational Work: the “trusting relationship” between case officers and informers should involve “full trust” on the informer’s part, whereas the case officer “must always bear in mind the security and control aspect.”