The official’s name was Robert, and he had a soft, cultivated voice suggestive of an upbringing in New England. He was all business. “When can you get to Washington?” he asked. “Monday,” I replied, and we arranged an 8:00 a.m. meeting at the State Department. I would be briefed in Washington for a week. I went to my room, packed, and headed for the train station. I had a job. I was going to Moscow, and I could not have been happier.
My week in Washington was intense, interesting, and even, in its way, amusing. I went from one briefing to another, most of them devoted to my new job as a translator, not literally for the American embassy in Moscow, as it turned out, but for an international organization called the Joint Press Reading Service (JPRS), which lived in Moscow under a separate diplomatic umbrella funded by the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and Canada. The JPRS, I was told, was run by Anna Holdcroft, a remarkable Englishwoman of exceptional charm and wisdom who knew more about Russia than an army of “Russia experts.” Staffed by a dozen or so translators and typists from the four sponsoring nations, it serviced many foreign embassies in Moscow—too strapped for cash to employ their own translators—by providing them every afternoon with translated articles or editorials from the Soviet press at the modest cost of roughly $140 a year. (A few years later the Russians took a page out of a lesson book on capitalism; they set up a similar operation but charged only $100 a year. They eventually put us out of business.) The United States, by supporting the JPRS, was not engaging in an exercise of mindless generosity; the JPRS was a small corner of the Cold War. Reading the Soviet press was a political necessity in those days. It was as close as many of us got to the reality of Soviet life.
At the time we met very few Russians. They were not our friends. They lived in their world, we in ours. When we, who were associated with the American embassy, did talk with a Russian, it was generally in the context of an arranged meeting, a chance encounter in a marketplace, or an innocent exchange on a train or trolley. Rarely would we meet the same Russian twice, and if we did, we knew from experience that the encounter had to have official clearance. The few Russians we met with regularity at embassy parties or national day receptions, such as the July Fourth holiday party, were likely to be KGB officials in the guise of diplomats or journalists. They would shoulder up to foreigners, create artificial friendships, and pick up any fragments of information or intelligence that were considered interesting, possibly valuable. CIA officials did the same thing with Russians.
Buried in a long, tedious article about communist ideology might be the early signs of a power struggle, or in a difficult-to-digest discussion of Soviet agriculture the first indications of a new approach to solving the old problem of food shortages. Which articles, therefore, should be translated? Which editorials? Clearly these were political judgments, and Holdcroft, whose experience as a Russian-language translator for the British Foreign Office went all the way back to 1921, made these judgments every morning. Our job was to translate. I was told that the JPRS served America’s national interest by spotting, translating, and distributing the selected articles to as many foreign embassies as possible. In this way we were giving them our assessment of what was important in judging Soviet reality. It was not exactly casting a light on all of Soviet society—it wasn’t a form of translated transparency. But in a society where, in those days, weather forecasts were regarded as military secrets and telephone books were classified, the insights the JPRS provided on a daily basis were invaluable.
The last briefing of my Washington week concerned what was called “personal security.” It was my favorite. “Please don’t be late for this one,” my advisers stressed. “It’s really important.”
I was intrigued. I had not been late for any of my briefings. Why the warning? My imagination ran wildly from one possibility to another, from wiretaps to Mata Haris. At the scheduled time, not a minute too early or late, I entered a gloomy room on the second floor of the State Department. An official sat behind a cluttered desk. “Sit down, please,” he said, not lifting his head from a file he was reading. “You’re Kalb, right?” he asked, still not lifting his head.
“Yes, sir,” I answered.
“Good,” he said. “Let’s get on with this then, okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re single, aren’t you?” he asked, flipping through my file.
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you date?” Bob asked, still not looking up.
“Date?” I was puzzled.
“Yes. Do you date? Do you go out with girls?”
“Of course I go out with girls.” What was he getting at?
The official looked up at me. “This is important,” he said, a note of urgency in his voice. “In other words”—here each word left his mouth as if, strung together, they composed a phrase as meaningful as a declaration of war—“you are straight?” he asked, with a knowing nod. “You like girls?” he added.
I understood, finally. “Yes, of course,” I said, summoning every ounce of masculine self-confidence to ease his concern, “I like girls. I go out with girls. I am not a…” I paused.
“Okay,” he said, raising his hand. “I understand.” He took a deep breath. “This is always a difficult interview, but I have to ask these questions, you know.”
“Of course.” I tried to be reassuring.
“So, let’s see,” he continued. “You are single. Handsome, in a way, and you like girls.” He again looked down at my file, as though to avoid looking at me. “You can see where I’m going, can’t you? The Russians will spot you immediately. You’re a target, a potential target, someone they can compromise, get secrets from.”
“No, no,” I replied. “I’m no target. You don’t have to worry about me. I’m—”
“You’re wrong,” he said, trying to hide a trace of irritation in his voice. “Quite the contrary, you are the perfect target.” I shuffled from foot to foot.
“Do you like the ballet?” he asked.
“I love the ballet,” I answered, hoping we were going on to another subject. “Love it. I hope I can get to the Bolshoi as often as possible.”
Wrong answer. I could see a wrinkle of concern cross his face. “That’s what I was afraid of,” he said with a sigh. “They often use ballet dancers.”
“Use ballet dancers?”
“Yes, it’s happened before. They send ballet dancers to do the job.”
“The job?”
“Yes, the job. You know, seduction.”
My knees wobbled. Was he saying that the mighty, nuclear-armed Soviet Union might be concerned enough about me—totally unimportant know-nothing twenty-five-year-old me—to send a Bolshoi ballerina to seduce me? Crazy, I thought. Silliest thing I ever heard!
“One day,” he went on, looking out a State Department window that hadn’t been cleaned in months, “a Russian ballerina will knock on your door, and—who knows?—try to seduce you.” My throat felt very dry.
“You know the way it works. They get photos of the two of you in bed, and they use them to embarrass you and your country. Your family, too.” He was looking straight at me now. “They get state secrets. You get…”
I must admit, listening to him, that two thoughts from two different planets passed through my mind at the same time: One, I wouldn’t want to embarrass my country and certainly not my family—that was absolutely true. But two, a Russian ballerina sent on a secret diplomatic mission to seduce me? Oh, my God! Visions of a Bolshoi seduction danced before my eyes, visions I attempted immediately to block from anyone else’s view, especially Bob’s.