Spymaster who ran Soviet ‘sleepers’ in US
Yuri Drozdov, intelligence agent: b Minsk, September 19, 1925; m Lyudmila, 2s; d June 21, 2017, aged 91.
On a cold and snowy morning in 1962, a young KGB spy waited in the lobby of the Soviet embassy in East Berlin for a meeting that would decide the course of his life.
He was tall and powerfully built, with a long, narrow face. When a visitor walked in off Unter den Linden, the spy was introduced to him as ‘‘Cousin Drewes’’. His real name was Yuri Drozdov. He said nothing; merely stood there opening and closing his large hands. The visitor would later say that Drozdov reminded him, more than anyone, of the Hollywood serial killer Otto the Strangler.
Even in his eighties Drozdov remained a severe and intimidating presence. By that time he enjoyed a unique status in Moscow as a KGB veteran with a series of high-profile accomplishments to his name that made it impossible for his overlords to keep his identity secret. Trained as an undercover agent, he progressed to the handling of other deep-cover ‘‘illegals’’. Later the thrust of his work would switch from cloak to dagger.
In 1979 Drozdov was a commander of the KGB operation to oust Afghanistan’s president Hafizullah Amin, storming the Tajbeg palace in Kabul and leaving its carpets ‘‘steeped in blood’’. Soon afterwards, with the blessing of the KGB chief (and future Soviet leader) Yuri Andropov, Drozdov founded a special forces unit whose main purpose, as if taken from the pages of From Russia With Love, was to hunt down the enemies of the Soviet Union and kill them.
A gifted linguist with barely disguised scorn for his rivals in Western intelligence agencies, Drozdov was the embodiment of the spy cult fostered in the last two decades of his life by Vladimir Putin. He was, Putin said when he died, a hero who devoted his life ‘‘to serving the motherland and enhancing national security’’.
His first foreign assignment, like Putin’s, was to Germany. Posted to Leipzig in 1958, his orders were essentially to blend in. His German was already fluent, but that was the minimum required for an illegal to start creating a new personality. It was three years before the building of the Berlin Wall, so he was free to travel and did so. He would write that he ‘‘spent hours going round West Berlin, listening to the speech of Germans, and taking in its emotional colour’’.
Drozdov was bald by his thirties and worried that this might prove too conspicuous for his line of work. In the event it proved no bar to his selection for an important role in one of the defining spy dramas of the Cold War.
In 1957, in a low-rent hotel in Manhattan, Russia’s most senior undercover agent in the US had been arrested in his underpants. Rudolf Abel – real name, William Fisher, a Soviet citizen born in Britain – was convicted of espionage and handed a sentence of 30 years, to be served in a highsecurity federal prison in Texas. There he languished with little hope of seeing Russia again until, three years later, the U2 spyplane pilot Gary Powers was blown out of the sky over Sverdlovsk.
The CIA had been slow to see the opportunity for a swap, but Powers’ father, an irascible retired miner, was not. He started a correspondence with Abel in prison, offering to try to secure his release in exchange for the return of his son from Russia. This gave the Kremlin an opening, with one proviso – it insisted on maintaining the fiction that Abel was not actually Russian, but East German.
‘‘Cousin Drewes’’ was born. Drozdov was selected to draft Moscow’s replies to the older Powers’ letters, as if on behalf of Abel’s fictitious East German family. It was a long, peculiar flirtation during which Powers endured a show trial and imprisonment in Russia. The task of securing his release was eventually handed to Abel’s attorney, a New York lawyer with a wartime background in intelligence. His name was James Donovan.
By the time Donovan arrived in Berlin in February 1962, Drozdov had been playing the part of Drewes for nearly two years. Berlin had been divided by concrete and razor wire since the previous August. Drozdov had moved there from Leipzig and was living in the eastern suburb of Karlshorst with his wife, Lyudmila, and two sons, Yuri and Alexander.
It was an unusual privilege for a relatively inexperienced illegal to be allowed to live with his real wife rather than one chosen for him by Moscow, and he would later pay tribute to Lyudmila’s ability to cope with the strain of their double life. ‘‘She is able to keep silent and to wait and wait under great stress,’’ he wrote, ‘‘depriving herself of a great deal due to my work.’’
As the exchange approached his KGB superior was flown from Moscow to take charge, but it was Drozdov who was assigned to hold the unknown and unpredictable Donovan’s hand.
The American was freezing and on edge when he reached the Soviet embassy. Drozdov’s Otto the Strangler act only heightened the tension. His role-playing did not fool Donovan, who refused to go along with the charade of East German control of the operation. In the end, however, Donovan consented to being escorted by the mysterious ‘‘Drewes’’ across East Berlin to the office of a go-between, where a swap was arranged.
It took place on the Glienicke Bridge southwest of Berlin, later known as the Bridge of Spies, which became the title of the film of the events starring Tom Hanks. Drozdov nearly missed the exchange. Uncharacteristically, he overslept on the morning of February 10, arriving at the Soviet end of the bridge unshaven and out of breath. Powers was already there and had no idea who Drozdov was, let alone that he had posed as a relative of Abel’s in the correspondence with his father that had set the ball rolling.
A cordon had been thrown around the bridge, barring even diplomatic traffic from using it. The Americans had put gunmen in rowing boats on the River Havel underneath in case anyone tried jumping. Half a century later, Drozdov mocked the idea that such a carefully crafted plan could have gone wrong. ‘‘Why would we need such precautions?’’ he asked an interviewer. ‘‘We had the agreement of two presidents.’’
It was true that Khrushchev and Kennedy had signed off on the plan and were being kept informed of every development, but Powers had in fact resolved to jump rather than return to the Soviet side if the plan unravelled.
In the event it went without a hitch. Drozdov was a witness to history that day, but not quite as all-knowing as he liked to pretend. Even after his retirement he sought to perpetuate the idea that the Soviet side had got the better of the swap, winning back a superspy in return for a mere pilot. In fact there is no evidence that Abel stole any useful secrets or recruited useful informers in his decade in the US.
His ersatz cousin, the inscrutable Drozdov, was born in Minsk in 1925, the son of a typist and a tsarist army officer who switched to the Bolshevik side as revolution swept through Russia after World War 1. Drozdov, too, served in the Red Army, entering Berlin as an artilleryman in 1945. With the return of peace he won a place at Moscow’s Military Institute for Languages, a feeder institution for Soviet foreign intelligence. He joined the KGB in 1956.
Propelled by the Abel affair on to the intelligence fast track, Drozdov spent much of the rest of his life preserving the legend of Russia’s illegals. After stints under diplomatic cover at the UN and in Beijing, he returned to Moscow to run the infamous Directorate S, the illegals directorate within the KGB.
In principle his spies penetrated the institutions of western democracies under assumed identities, sometimes for decades at a time, to be activated like human timebombs when Moscow decided the time was right. In practice most of them simply enjoyed better lives than they could have dreamt of in the Soviet Union.
Drozdov was loyal to the last. As the Soviet system collapsed in 1989 he set about destroying KGB records of the last generation of communist sleepers, according to the defector Vasili Mitrokhin. In the early Yeltsin years the Soviet spy machine was left to atrophy.
Drozdov was past retirement age, but by no means ready to retire. Adapting to the spirit of the times he set up in business in Moscow offering security, logistics support and political analysis to foreign business people, most of them American. In the end his most lucrative work was background checks on Russians hoping to work for westerners.
He kept in contact with his successors at what became the FSB, and would tease Western reporters who beat a path to his door, offering tea and a poker face, but hardly a glimpse of the KGB’s Cold War reality.
The mask of the secret agent never slipped. As recently as 2008 he claimed agents recruited by Abel were still working in America. The genius of the claim was that it could not be disproved, and two years later 10 illegals were expelled by the FBI.
They inspired the series The Americans, but whether they sent a word of actionable intelligence to Moscow is doubtful and may, in any case, never be known. – The Times