DEATH IS ALWAYS A SAD EVENT, BUT ON THE DAY OF NIKOLAI Khokhlov’s funeral the mourning was tempered by a sense of triumph. In his lifetime, the old Russian spy had not only outlived the KGB agents who relentlessly pursued him, but had reinvented himself in America as a man of accomplishment.
A half century earlier, on a garden terrace in West Germany, a Soviet operative had slipped a nuclear isotope into his coffee. The deadly substance—a derivative of the heavy metal thallium—was intended to kill Nikolai, a KGB officer who had unforgivably gone over to the West. It turned his face into a mask of dark spots and brown stripes that oozed blood and a sticky secretion, and caused his hair to fall out in tufts. Below his neck, his “copper-colored skin was tattooed with blood swellings.” The attending physician said death was certain.
Instead, Nikolai survived. No one knew precisely why, except that perhaps his intended killers failed to dispense a sufficiently strong dose of the poison. Whatever the case, the KGB’s failed attempt on his life only burnished his already considerable celebrity as a Cold War refugee in America. He settled in the small California community of San Bernardino, where he taught college psychology classes for two decades. In retirement, he tended his fruit trees and maintained his scholarly interests.
“He had the last laugh,” observed his widow, Tatjana, as their four grandchildren scampered about and funeral guests mingled in a tree-filled backyard on the day of the September 2007 funeral.
Inside the house, photographs from a lifetime festooned walls, a piano, and a table—images of Nikolai’s daughters, his son, who died from kidney failure, the German-born Tatjana. But there were no images from the long-ago years when he was trained as an assassin for Stalin’s Kremlin, then defected to the West, and finally survived the first-known attempted murder by radioactive poison.
It would have been easy to dismiss Nikolai as a relic. But he seemed less a man past his time than a powerfully authoritative witness who could testify to the chilling practices of his native country’s spymasters. He was certain, for example, that successor agencies to the KGB had carried out the notorious 2006 assassination of Alexander Litvinenko, in London. Litvinenko, the former Russian intelligence officer who had defected six years earlier, was poisoned by another radioactive toxin, polonium-210. Nikolai and Litvinenko thus shared an unusual distinction: They were the only known victims of radioactive poisoning in the entire history of assassinations worldwide.
After months of telephone and e-mail exchanges, in June 2007 I went to San Bernardino to meet Nikolai, a man who was once a decorated agent of state-sponsored assassinations, in the service of the Soviet Union. In his old age, Nikolai had a cane always at his right hand, the blond hair of his youth now a silky mane of white, his accented voice soft with no hint of menace. We kept in regular contact until failing health took his life nine months later, at age eighty-five.
Nikolai was still a teenager when he enrolled in a Moscow school for vaudeville, hoping it would lead to an acting career. After six months of learning to be an “artistic whistler,” he was ready to join a traveling company. Then World War II intervened. Germany invaded the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, and Nikolai was drafted for a role in a military film. Soon Hitler’s troops were massed at Moscow’s door, and an evacuation of the city was imminent. Soviet intelligence officers hit on a scheme to leave behind a vaudeville troupe that would become part of the resistance; Nikolai and three other young actors were recruited to make up the troupe.
In the end, the Germans were beaten back and the services of the would-be partisans were not needed. But Nikolai had impressed his superiors, especially Major General Pavel Sudoplatov of the NKVD, as the KGB was then known. The general, overseer of Leon Trotsky’s slaying in Mexico, was one of the Soviet Union’s most accomplished assassins. In short order, Nikolai signed on with Sudoplatov and joined a squad assigned to kill Franz von Papen, a Nazi appeaser who was Germany’s ambassador to Turkey. But Nikolai contracted typhoid fever en route and was not there when the attempted assassination went awry.
His next mission sent him behind enemy lines. He was only twenty-one years old, but was about to become a Soviet hero.
Nikolai’s target was Wilhelm Kube, the Nazi leader of German-held Belorussia. Secreted into the Belorussian capital, Minsk, by the Soviet underground in August 1943, Nikolai tracked down a housekeeper who serviced Kube’s quarters. He showed the woman how she could place a bomb with a delayed fuse beneath the Nazi’s bed, and argued that the killing would be an act of patriotism. The housekeeper finally agreed to do her part. Less than a week later, a courier awakened Nikolai with urgent news: “Kube is killed…. The bed and Kube blown to bits!” The housekeeper escaped with a partisan unit.
The Nazi’s assassination was one of Nikolai’s proudest moments, perhaps the proudest. In his memoirs, he wrote that it had been a chance to “kill a man whose name to millions symbolized fear and terror!” Stalin ordered medals for all who had participated in Kube’s demise, and Sudoplatov himself pinned Nikolai’s on the young spy’s lapel.
As I researched the episode, a small detail seemed to reveal a side of Nikolai that surprised me. In his memoirs, published in 1959, he wrote that he had brought the bomb to the housekeeper, showed her how to attach it to a bed frame, and left it with her. But a retired CIA agent referred me to a book by the late British writer Gordon Brook-Shepherd that cast doubt on that account. When I put the question directly to Nikolai, he indeed backed away from the version in his memoirs. He said he had instructed the housekeeper how to use the bomb, but that the actual explosive was provided to her by Nadya Trayan, a partisan who later became one of the Soviet Union’s most famous war heroes. Five decades had passed between the time he published his memoirs and I interviewed him. But I had trouble believing the discrepancy was the product of an old man’s fading memory; Nikolai seemed to have excellent recall of past events. The more likely explanation was that his memoirs omitted Nadya Trayan’s participation simply because it was a better story, at least from his perspective. The fact that he immediately owned up to the inaccuracy persuaded me that there was nothing malign about it.
The more time we spent together, the more Nikolai displayed those self-serving and self-absorbed aspects of his personality—but with an infectious charm. Probably his closest friend in San Bernardino was Nick Andonov, an émigré from Macedonia who practiced psychology. He said Nikolai could be quite demanding, calling at any hour to insist that Andonov come over for a long talk on some arcane subject the professor had been ruminating on. Nick would comply; he felt he had to—he wanted to—out of friendship.
To Andonov, Nikolai was an extremely sensitive, complex, and difficult figure who felt misunderstood by almost everyone. To that, I would add deeply emotional and sometimes self-pitying. When an effort to republish his memoirs failed, Nikolai retreated into an “it doesn’t matter” mode, sullen and withdrawn—why would I want them published anyway; no one wants to read about such archaic matters.
Nikolai also didn’t always own up to his embellishments. During our conversations, he would feign puzzlement if I asked a question that he found insulting, especially one that challenged the veracity of one of his stories. He would say, “I don’t understand the question.”
But in all these cases—when he withdrew at perceived slights by publishers or by me—he would get over the offense in a couple of days and return for more. He loved the attention.
His relationship with Tatjana was a bit of a mystery. The two of them had separated two decades before. (Nikolai blamed it on their age difference—she was nineteen years his junior. Also, she was too practical, while he was “metaphysical.”)
They did not attempt to hide their disagreements. He was rude and condescending toward her, extremely chauvinistic. When she attempted to speak, he simply talked over her or said, “May I have the floor?” and then took it. He especially reacted that way when the talk turned to politics (his were decidedly right wing). She could be equally dismissive, responding to one of his tirades with, “Right, Nikolai, umm-hmmm,” while rolling her eyes.
And yet they still had obvious affection for each other. After his physical condition worsened, they spoke almost every day. She screened calls for him, cooked for him, and let him entertain guests at her home. (His apartment was a disaster, he explained.) How many estranged wives would do all that for their husbands?
Most often, Nikolai was extremely polite and possessed of a self-effacing sense of humor. He had a coughing fit at one point and Tatjana asked if he needed anything. “Yes, a new throat,” he replied.
He also was an articulate, intelligent, and erudite man who was utterly riveting when he discussed psychology and why he found parapsychology to be the discipline’s ultimate form.
Did I find him heroic? I would say I respected and admired him. He was a man of conscience, and I didn’t mind his affection for the spotlight.
In 1945, the war concluded, Sudoplatov dispatched Soviet operatives to Eastern European countries, as what were called “sleeper agents” in an earlier age. Nikolai ended up in Romania, where for four years he posed as a Polish immigrant and readied himself for undercover assignments. Then he was recalled to Moscow to engage in intelligence missions against Moscow’s new enemies, the United States and its allies.
Acquaintances thought Nikolai a ladies’ man, dapper and slim. Sudoplatov praised Nikolai’s “blond, blue-eyed good looks” and “suave ways” as valuable assets, especially if “turning” a woman was part of the assignment. The general treated his protégé with sometimes astonishing indulgence and seemed to see Nikolai as “a young Sudoplatov.” “I have big plans for you,” the general had promised when Nikolai left for Romania.
But now Nikolai was losing his zest for the spy game. The romance and patriotism that had motivated him as a wartime intelligence officer had not carried over to peacetime. He wanted to try his hand at film-making or the theater, and lobbied Sudoplatov to release him from duty. The general refused, and Nikolai thought he knew why. Sudoplatov could not go to Stalin and admit that he had so wrongly judged an agent and vouched for him in the past; such a lapse was inexcusable, and “if he admitted it, he could be liquidated, and if I did, I could be,” Nikolai said.
In 1952, Sudoplatov told Nikolai he had been chosen to assassinate Alexander Kerensky, who ruled the provisional government between the abdication of Czar Nicholas II and the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. Stalin wanted Kerensky killed because he seemed about to unite anti-Soviet émigrés in Europe. Nikolai tried to talk his way out of the assignment, but managed to avoid it only when Stalin decided that Kerensky was not a serious threat and called off the mission.
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.”
Nikolai, Murphy suggested, was clinging to what he had wanted to believe would happen. Moreover, the Russian’s version of events was convenient, considering that he had left his family behind in Moscow. “He has to justify having decided to defect. That’s why he insists on this portrayal,” Murphy said.
When I told Nikolai that I was in touch with Murphy and Polgar, he urged me to be skeptical since CIA people “are trained to lie.” (Well, I thought, so are KGB people.) He said Polgar, despite asserting that he had never met Nikolai, had attended at least one interrogation session. Murphy, he said, conceived the idea of the press conference and spiriting Yana and Alik to the American embassy—and assured Nikolai that Washington had approved the scheme.
In the end, there was little overlap between the competing firsthand versions of events. But I heard enough from these two CIA agents and others posted to Germany at the time to understand that honoring promises was less important than outwitting the Soviets in the Cold War. American interrogators did and said what was necessary to turn possible KGB defectors and convince them to cooperate. And it seems clear that’s what they did with Nikolai. He was deliberately misled into thinking he had a deal. The propaganda payoff for the United States was obvious: the saga of an idealistic young Russian agent seeking refuge in America after suffering a crisis of conscience.
But why did the CIA allow his version of events to stand unchallenged all these years? Was this mere humanism, empathy for a guy in the same business who had lost his family? Not likely. The greater probability was that the agency didn’t want to push Nikolai too far and risk losing his cooperation.
In an unpublished chapter of his memoir, Nikolai wrote that he was “often close to suicide” after his defection, enduring “endless hours of loneliness mixed with feelings of guilt and failure.” Two months after his Bonn press conference, word arrived from Moscow that his wife and son were missing. Nikolai feared the worst. (Much later he would learn that Yana had been arrested the day after the press conference and sentenced to five years of internal exile, in the Russian republic of Komi. She was able to take Alik with her, work, and receive visitors. Her punishment seemed relatively benign; Yana once observed that her interrogators had become “nauseatingly friendly.”)
But by late 1954, his spirits were lifting. Private committees were formed in the United States to support Yana’s immigration. While none succeeded, the effort comforted Nikolai. He became a sensation in America, telling eager audiences across the country what it was like to be a Russian secret agent: bombs concealed in soap, salt, and tea; offices hidden behind bookcases; shadowing a subject.
The remarkable detail of Nikolai’s revelations set him apart from other spies who were defecting from the Soviet bloc to the West (in such large numbers that the CIA had to establish a reception center in Frankfurt to process them). He was one of the first to publicly divulge the most intimate secrets of the Kremlin’s assassination program. The Russians reacted to his and a series of other security breaches by curtailing political killings.
With the CIA looking on approvingly, Nikolai became a favorite of Cold War propagandists, testifying on Soviet wrongs before the House Un-American Activities Committee and otherwise lending his voice to the anticommunist crusade in America. He made the rounds of network television talk shows such as Meet the Press and wrote a series of articles entitled “I Would Not Murder for the Soviets” in The Saturday Evening Post, then a dominant U.S. magazine. Nikolai told me the CIA arranged the articles.
In fall 1957, he attended a Frankfurt conference of the anti-Soviet organization of Russian émigrés led by Giorgy Okolovich, the man he was once ordered to assassinate. He remembered drinking a rancid cup of coffee and then dropping by an adjacent concert hall to hear a performance featuring opera singers. Suddenly his ears were ringing and his stomach was queasy. Around him “things began to whirl…[and] the electric bulbs were swaying,” he wrote.
Nikolai retreated to his room and began vomiting violently. Okolovich was summoned, and took him to a hospital, where he was treated for acute gastritis. The reddish-copper hue that appeared on his ordinarily pale skin would soon fade, doctors assured him.
But the morning of his sixth day of hospitalization, brown stripes and spots emerged on his face. His pillow was drenched in blood and his hair came out in clumps. After a battery of tests, the German doctors suspected poisoning by thallium. They administered a compound called Prussian blue, the recognized—and generally effective—treatment for exposure to the heavy metal. Nikolai’s body failed to respond, leaving his doctors baffled. The chief physician told Nikolai’s friends, “To be honest, it’s hopeless…. Wait with your questions until the autopsy.”
Twelve days into the crisis, Nikolai was moved to an American military hospital in Frankfurt. Under tight security, doctors administered continuous blood transfusions and injections of vitamins, steroids such as cortisone, and so on—anything that might fortify his immune system. On the eighteenth day, the symptoms finally receded. Gaunt and bald under a beret, appearing two decades older than his thirty-five years, Nikolai walked out of the hospital. He later told crusading Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya that it took a full year to recover; his legs in particular hurt.
What had nearly killed Nikolai? The commander of the U.S. hospital concluded that his suffering was “due to poisoning, probably by thallium and/or other chemical agents.” In his memoir, Nikolai says that a New York specialist later analyzed the evidence and confirmed the presence of radioactive thallium. The near-fatal dose had in all likelihood been dropped into his coffee at the conference. When I asked Nikolai the doctor’s name, he said he could no longer recall it, his typical reaction to a perceived challenge. I decided that, given the symptoms and the advice of chemists that thallium does have relatively stable nuclear isotopes, there was no reason to seriously question his assertion.
Nikolai had no doubts about what had happened. The poisoning was the handiwork of his former colleagues in Soviet intelligence, who had finally had enough of his public denunciations and wanted to “square accounts” with him. But why had this method been chosen? Was its aim not only to kill, but to kill cruelly? Nikolai thought Moscow’s intention was more prosaic—to avoid detection. His assassins never expected that anyone would discover the presence of radioactive thallium.
In the years that followed, Nikolai became “disgusted” with what he regarded as an ineffectual anticommunist movement and decided to move on. Now a U.S. citizen, it took him just three years to earn both master’s and doctoral degrees in psychology at Duke University. Then he began his teaching career, at California State University, San Bernardino. Two decades later, in Russia, Boris Yeltsin pardoned Nikolai for turning against the Soviet intelligence service. Nikolai attributed Yeltsin’s act to blind luck—he had asked for permission to visit Moscow at a moment when, for one reason or another, the Russian president saw political advantage in welcoming such a visitor.
Nikolai and Yana spoke frequently by telephone in the time leading up to the Moscow visit, his first since defecting. In the Russian capital, they spent an emotional evening together. He would not share the details of their visit, other than to say that she told him he had “done everything right.” They were divorced by now; he had since married Tatjana, who was a sister-in-law of Giorgy Okolovich’s chief lieutenant. He remained in contact with son Alik, now a biologist at Moscow State University.
Nikolai’s years as a spy never left his soul, and in a very real way he was still living them when I knew him. He thrived on the past. His voice turned childlike whenever our discussions turned to his World War II exploits, and the descriptions of those adventures are the best parts of his memoir. He remained bitter at the CIA’s failure to rescue Yana and Alik; it was a betrayal, proof that the agency cared nothing about human beings. His friend Nick Andonov told me Nikolai was desperate to find someone who would portray him in film or print as a man who was not a traitor. When he failed, he was certain that the CIA simply didn’t want his story to be told and had pressured media executives into shunning him. I chalked that up to paranoia.
Until the very end, Nikolai insisted he was never an assassin and spoke contemptuously of those who portrayed him as having been one. Everyone got him wrong. I thought it was an absurd position to take. Did he ever kill anyone with his bare hands? Not that I could find out. But he was obviously capable of directing murder plots when he so chose. He was making a distinction between assassinations that he thought were justified—during wartime as a Russian partisan—and those he found distasteful after the war. One type was patriotic, the other mechanical and ideological.
I came to believe that stagecraft was a large part of Nikolai’s psyche. The Okolovich affair seemed to be a prime example. If Nikolai had simply wanted to stop the murder of the émigré leader, he only had to warn Okolovich to get out of town and no one would have been the wiser. He extended what should have been a temporary intersection with Okolovich’s life into an elongated drama, quite possibly because of the very theater of it—he couldn’t help himself.
Now I wanted to understand something about the nature of the current regime in Moscow. I decided to take a look at the events of October 2002 in a popular theater in the Russian capital.