Russian spys I have known

I’ve just heard about the Russian spy ring that’s been busted in the last few days. I don’t think anyone knows much yet, but I’ll be following with interest.

The first question that occurs is, what the heck were they trying to get? I don’t think any of them had access to classified information. This should be interesting.

At any rate, it reminded me of my last contact with the world of Russian spys. Of course, my son’s godmother was the widow of a KGB agent from SMERSH.

When I was teaching English at the Warsaw Berlitz in the mid-90s there was a teacher from Africa. His story was that he’d been a student at a KGB academy in Sofia, Bulgaria. One day shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union he and the other students showed up – and nobody was there. The staff just walked away without notice.

I used to say, “Hey, wait a minute! I can tell you how to make it into a money-making operation. There are lots of Walter Mitty-type Americans, the kind who read Soldier of Fortune magazine who’d pay good money to go to training courses at a real KGB academy. You could advertise ‘Train with the best for an exciting career in international espionage!'”

Then in 1996 I was actually living in Bulgaria, teaching English at the Institute for Foreign Students in Sofia. One of my colleagues was a young Russian man named Boris, who spoke English with a perfect middle American accent.

At one point I asked him, “Boris, are you Russian-American?”

“No, I’m Russian,” he answered.

“So did you live in America? Are your parents diplomats?”

“No. I’ve only been there for a few weeks,” he said. “It was great!”

“So where’d you learn to speak English with a perfect accent?”

“Special schools since I was ten,” he said.

At this point I could sort of see where this was heading. I inquired further, “So why are you in Bulgaria?”

“My father’s a journalist,” he explained, and said he’d married a Bulgarian girl and was basically draft dodging. He didn’t want to get sent to Chechnya.

That also kind of confirmed it to me, and pretty much any Eastern European would say the same. Journalist (for Pravda or Isvestia) plus special schools to learn to speak English with no noticable accent, equals K-G-B.

I should have asked him about that school. But I don’t think he was planning to go into the family business anyway. Though if our intelligence wanted to, I believe they could have recruited him as a consultant by offering a visa for him and his family. (The intelligence officer at the embassy was a family friend. I should have brought it up…)

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