THE DRY MOUTHED
“SPY”
Canal in downtown St. Petersburg, near the
Hermitage
The Day we took the head
photographer to Leningrad Moscow ,
nearly all from Soviet client states in Africa . In the days we were there, many were at Lumumba University ,
learning ways to stir up the populace back home in the Congo , or Zaïre, or Angola Uganda , Kenya
or Nigeria Sudan or Burkina Faso
We had an African-American Air Force
Sergeant in our embassy. He was a senior non-commissioned officer who handled
our photo lab. He had processed thousands of rolls of film for us back at our
Embassy, and we thought he would enjoy visiting Leningrad
But
when the KGB saw us with a black man in our car, they went nuts. They acted as if we had brought a
secret weapon to Leningrad
They normally would follow our car
with a car full of stolid, sullen, very husky young men. We called them goons. But this day, they had four cars, switching off amongst one
another. Loaded with goons. These
cars were all Soviet Zhigulis, the Russian version of the Fiat, made in a huge
factory built with the help of the Italian Fiat company in a city named
Tolyatti (after Italian Communist Togliatti) several hundred miles southeast of
Moscow.
Often I would make notes about what I
wanted to observe on our drive that day, and I would write these on
water-soluble rice paper, which I could easily pop in my mouth if we should be
apprehended. This special paper would dissolve at once.
When, with the four cars of goons
following us I thought we would get hauled out, I decided it was time to
swallow my notes. However,
when you are scared, which I was, your mouth dries up so much that you can’t
even dissolve the paper.
We were driving next to one of the
many canals that run through Leningrad Griboyedova Canal
Wrong! As I should have suspected in icy,
frozen Leningrad
I was lucky that the KGB didn’t find the rice
paper. At any rate, we never got apprehended. The Sergeant had a good ride around
town.
I would make a lousy spy.
Peter and
Paul Fortress, from across the Neva
Women’s
Day in Leningrad
We took the Midnight Red Arrow from Moscow to Leningrad
One of the things we did a lot was
"Order-of-Battle". We
had to report ships in port, including boats and ships that just moved around
the canals and rivers of the USSR USSR
One of our favorite walks was along the Neva River at Schmidt’s Bank, in Leningrad Russia Leningrad
Whenever we would take these walks, we
tried to take along our cameras and collect photos of interesting things. Photography in this area was
forbidden, however.
The KGB assigned an elderly “goon”
that attachés over the years had named “Fats.” He and some of his associates
generally were around to follow us wherever we walked, or drove, and to make
our job harder, or impossible. They
wore the red armbands of “Druzhniki,” or “concerned citizens.” Sort of like elderly volunteers who
operate as school crossing guards, except these were assigned to look after the
foreign “spies.” The
Soviets considered all foreign diplomats spies—they hadn’t changed their
attitude toward foreigners in centuries.
One day, March the 8th,
1983 to be exact, it was International Women’s Day. Now, in fact, the
Soviets didn’t give much of a hoot about women’s rights, except the right of
old women to stand in the street all day long in the winter, smashing ice with
a heavy iron rod.
But this day, as we arrived to do our
job of collecting intelligence in Leningrad
I was traveling with my assistant,
Pierce Crabtree, a big, burly former Navy football player. With no KGB to
bother us, we went wild photographing shipyards and ships and everything we
could see. We were driving
a Soviet version of a Land Rover, called a “Niva.” We thought this would be a great day
to check out some radar installations near the Czars’ summer palace at
Petrodvorets. However,
somewhere between Kipen’ and Ropsha, we got stuck in the snow.
If the KGB had been around, we would
not have been able to get that far. Now,
free to travel, we had gone and gotten ourselves in trouble. The snow was pretty deep.
Fortunately, along came a bus full of Russians. The driver and some of the passengers
got out and helped push us out of the snowbank.
It was just another example of how friendly the Russians
were, except for those whose job was to keep an eye on us.
Now for some
books and papers from The Personal Navigator:
The Locks – Charles River Dam, from Boston
Boston, Its
Byways & Highways, Being Twenty-five Drawings Reproduced in Photogravure by John Albert Seaford ca. 1916 Boston Boston
Roosevelt: State of New York in Memoriam
Theodore Roosevelt Born:
October 27, 1858 Died:
January 6, 1919 1919 Albany , NY : Legislature of the State of New York America Massachusetts
Soviet Theatre ca. 1950 Moscow , USSR
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