A Russian Spy at Arizona State University

Lee B. Croft

In the 1983-4 academic year a group of four Arizona State University (ASU) faculty (Stephen Batalden and Fred Giffin of Russian History, Bill Welsh of Political Science and I, Lee B. Croft, of the Department of Foreign Languages’ Russian section), formed the Russian and East European Studies Consortium (predecessor of the current Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies) under the directorship of Russian History Professor Stephen K. Batalden. One of our Consortium’s first collaborative projects, conceived by ASU Economics Prof. Marvin Jackson, was the harboring of Soviet diplomatic defectors under the protection of the CIA in our remote desert locale and training them to become effective news broadcast staff for the efforts of our Cold War surrogate radio stations, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.

In the fall semester of 1983 a woman defector from the Soviet Union’s diplomatic legation in Yugoslavia became our “guest” under an assumed name. As Coordinator of the Russian Language Program at ASU, I became one of her new compatriots and mentors. We found for her an apartment within walking distance to the Tempe campus, and she was enrolled in classes for non-English-language émigrés in ASU’s American Language and Culture Program, which she reportedly found rewarding. She was often a guest in my home, and I arranged for her to give Russian-language lectures to our students, to consortium members and to our Arizona State chapter of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages.

In early 1984, a Russian-speaking bearded man of forty arrived in Phoenix by air from Munich accompanying our guest’s youngest (eightyear-old) daughter on a visit to her mother. Our faculty group had not been informed of any such visit, and when I asked our guest about him, she told me he was Oleg Aleksandrovich Tumanov, a now thoroughly cleared, polygraph examined, and trusted Soviet defector himself from the sixties…a “former Soviet James Bond,” she said…who had defected by swimming ashore to Libya as a sailor on the Russian navy destroyer Spravedlivyj (“The Just”) in the Mediterranean in 1965, and that he was now a respected editor for Radio Liberty in Munich where she aspired to begin work to help him in “bringing down the Soviet Union.”

I found Oleg to be charming and took him for a ride in my white 1967 Jaguar XKE convertible sports car to Phoenix’s large Metrocenter shopping mall. I later made notes on the conversation, which took place in Russian. He told me that he was married and that his wife was, a “Latvian girl” he called “Sveta,” and that he and Sveta had a two-year-old daughter named Alexandra, whom they called “Sasha.” He asked me how much I had paid for the Jaguar and I told him that my wife had negotiated a price of $8,000 for it, a “real bargain for such a low-miles classic car.” He asked me how many other cars we owned and I answered “two.” He asked me how much money I made as an Associate Professor of Russian at Arizona State University and I told him “$22,000 a year.” He then commented that he made more than double that in German marks at Radio Liberty. Did I know any American professors of Russian who were pro-Soviet in their political stances, he asked. “No,” I told him. “The American professors of Russian, native Russian émigrés or not, are overwhelmingly unanimous in their anti-Soviet politics. They all want to see the Soviet Union changed into a democracy somehow…” He asked me to tell him about my other

Russian-teaching colleagues at ASU. He was impressed that one of our professors, Dr. Dora Burton, was a medical doctor and a survivor of the terrible 900-day siege of Leningrad during WWII. I told him how I admired her ability to recite Russian poetry, and he asked me who was my favorite Russian poet. I answered that I had two favorites: Alexander Pushkin and Anna Akhmatova. Oleg seemed most interested, however, in my colleague Professor Rolfs Ekmanis, who had been recording anti-Soviet broadcast content in Latvian for Radio Free Europe under the pseudonym of “Maris Rauda” for years. “I’d very much like to meet him,” he said. But that did not happen.

At the amusement park outside Metrocenter Mall, I paid to have Oleg attempt to hit baseballs in the amusement park’s batting cages… this after he told me that the American sport appeared to him to resemble the Russian children’s game called laptá, which involves hitting a hard leather ball with a stick called a bitá. But he was unable to hit any balls, swung the bat very awkwardly, and was clearly frightened and even fled the batting cage when one ball, pitched at little-league speed (55 mph), barely missed his nose and loudly smacked into the backstop.

In the mall’s Mexican buffet line, he was asked by a server if he wanted any guacamole on the tamales I had suggested for him. He asked me in Russian what guacamole was and I explained that it was a popular Mexican garnish. So, he said that he would like to try some and received a serious-sized dollop of it onto his tamale plate. He took a look and groaned, “Bleh! I can’t eat that goop…it’s green,” and pushed the whole tray away. In the mall itself, Oleg was most interested in looking at men’s suits and shoes. He admitted that he spent too much money on fashionable clothing, and told me that he also collected rare coins and stamps. But he did not want to purchase anything at the mall. “I’m traveling with only one small bag on this trip,” he said.

The next morning when I arrived at my ASU office I found Oleg unpinning and removing from our Russian-Section bulletin board a diagram I had drawn of a grant project I had submitted to the NSA’s National Cryptologic School that involved integrating the Soviet Union’s “Channel One” television broadcasts into ASU’s Russian Language instruction by intercepting and decoding the broadcasts which were transmitted via the polar-orbiting Molnija (“Lightning”) Soviet satellites. When he realized I was seeing him remove the diagram from the bulletin board, he asked me if he could have it, and I told him, “Sure… it’s not a secret. It’s even been in the newspaper.” We then discussed the project and my applications for funds to pay for it.

Lee B. Croft’s Diagram for a grant proposal to the National Security Agency in 1984. Published in both Lee B. Croft’s Russian in Arizona (IIHS, 2007, p. 46, see Bibliography) and in Kerry Pace Meyer’s “Russian Intelligence Activity in the Pre-perestroika Era: A Case Study,” ASU Barrett Honors College Honors Thesis, November 2003, Appendix, p. i).

I then accompanied Oleg to the small office of my close colleague, Stephen Batalden, the Director of the Consortium, in the neighboring Social Science Building’s History Department. When I introduced Oleg to Batalden, Steve immediately said to him, “I know you. We’ve already met.” But Oleg frowned and nodded his head negatively, saying “I don’t think so. I’m sure we’ve never met.” But Steve persisted, saying “Yes, we have met. It was last year in the office in London, England, of Alexander Piatigorsky, the renowned Soviet dissident buddhology scholar.”

Oleg squinted his eyes and then admitted, “Yes, you could be correct. I have also visited ‘Sasha’ there.” Steve asked, “How is Sasha?” and Oleg replied, “He is dead. He was run over by a hit-and-run driver on a London street just last month.” This answer stunned Steve and me. Dr. Piatigorsky, a prominent Russian and Jewish dissident emigre philosopher and Lecturer at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, had come to ASU as Steve’s guest a year or so before and regaled our university audience with the story of how Josef Stalin had maliciously loosed the Communist Youth Organization on the Buddhist Buryat minority north of Mongolia before and during World War II, killing or arresting large numbers of them and eradicating their temples…a “genocide” was Piatigorsky’s description of it. Steve was obviously upset by Oleg’s news of his friend and colleague’s death.

When Oleg and I left Steve and returned to my office, he told me that he would be departing Phoenix the next day to return to Radio Liberty in Munich. I asked him if he needed a ride to the airport and he said, “No thank you. I will use a taxi.” He then left my office and I never saw him again.

In less than an hour after Oleg Tumanov left my ASU office, I received a phone call from Batalden. He told me that he had just talked with Sasha Piatigorsky by phone in London, and that Piatigorsky told him that he was not, as Oleg Tumanov had informed us, dead, but that he had indeed been knocked down and injured by an unknown London driver on a street near his office. He had, he said, “luckily survived.” Steve then told me firmly, “Lee, that guy Oleg is a spy. We should have nothing further to do with him. Certainly, don’t bring him to my office again.”

Steve and I ruminated considerably after Oleg’s departure from us about what would cause him to announce to us that Sasha Piatigorsky had been struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver. Did Oleg, as a spy, know about the apparent attempt on Piatigorsky’s life in advance of it and just assumed it had taken place as planned? We were well aware of the dangers to the anti-Soviet personnel working in the U. S. cold-war surrogate radio stations. We knew, for example, of the 1978 assassina- tion of Radio Free Europe contributor Georgi Markov, who had been shot in the thigh by a ricin-contaminated poison pellet fired by an innocuous-appearing passerby from a micro-engineered umbrella while walking on a London street. And we were aware of the large bomb, later reported to have been the work of the famous terrorist “Carlos the Jackel” (aka Ilich Ramirez Sanchez) and his band of terrorists at the behest of the Soviet KGB-mentored Romanian secret police under Dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, that was exploded outside the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Building in Munich in February 1981, severely injuring several people and causing major structural damage to the building and the loss of important personnel records. It was a puzzle about the fellow, that was for sure. We resolved to inform someone appropriate in our government intelligence organs about this…CIA, NSA, FBI… but just whom?

Fortuitously, I was already scheduled that month to be interviewed by the then Director of Radio Liberty, George Bailey. He was coming through Phoenix to interview me for a position in the administration of Radio Liberty and also in the administration of Russian Language instruction at the United States Army Russian Institute in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria. I was planning to take a leave from ASU to start these positions and had gone so far as to get passports for my high-school-age sons so they could accompany my wife and me to work in Germany. So, I assured Steve Batalden that I would inform George Bailey, Oleg Tumanov’s boss as Director of Radio Liberty and with well-known contacts in our European intelligence community, of our recent unnerving experience with his Russian defector employee.

The meeting with George Bailey was in the lounge of the Phoenix Airport Hilton Hotel near Sky Harbor Airport. I certainly thought that the interview, which took about two hours, went well for me. Bailey told me that he knew and admired my uncle, Lt. Col. ret. Bliss H. Croft, a highly decorated three-war combat veteran and one of the eight “originals” who began the “Green Berets.” He related that he and Bliss had once played for rival high school football teams. We reminisced further about my uncle, but then when we got around to Oleg Tumanov’s visit to ASU and his informing us erroneously of Piatigorsky’s “accident,” he turned quite serious…it was clear that he knew Tumanov well… and he told me “I’ll take care of this, don’t worry.”

Unfortunately for me, by then, Bailey had been relieved of his directorship of Radio Liberty, allegedly for not cutting content that was “Russian nationalistic” and “antisemitic” …topics that he had discussed with me as problems he faced in the Radio Liberty administration. My possibility of a position with him in Germany disappeared with his replacement. His book, Armageddon in Prime Time (see Bibliography) is a prescient masterpiece and highly recommended for reading even, nay especially, now that a new “Cold War” with Russia is threatening world peace.

I did not just tell Bailey the story. I also told it to at least two U. S. State Department investigators who came to my ASU office, as they often did, to investigate program graduates for security clearances so they could fill positions in government security organizations. I did not follow up further with Bailey or with any of the State Department investigators about Oleg Tumanov, but expected that I would soon hear of his being subject to some investigation and likely arrest for espionage. Our program guest, the woman for whom he brought her daughter to ASU, left us before the end of the semester and returned to Munich. When I told her about Oleg’s Piatigorsky misinformation, she was dismissive of the suggestion that he was therefore a spy. “There’s no way he could be a spy,” she insisted. “He may have heard somehow about Piatigorsky’s accident and just misremembered the result of it.” After she left, she was apparently not regarded to be a security risk at Radio Liberty, where she began her employment as an editor’s aide. Later, in the summer of 1988, after I had written a letter to Arizona Senator John McCain supporting this woman’s case for U. S. citizenship, my wife and I and our eight- month-old son stayed with her and her three daughters in their Munich apartment while she tried to arrange a meeting for me with Eugene Pell, President and Chief Executive Officer of both Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. But I demurred, deciding that I would remain a Professor at ASU.

Two years went by after Oleg Tumanov’s visit to ASU, and we heard nothing more about him. During that time my grant project (the diagram of which was taken off my office bulletin board by Tumanov) to import and decode the Soviet “Channel One” television broadcasts with a tracking dish focusing on the polar-orbiting Molnija satellites was approved by the National Cryptologic School of the NSA in a preliminary amount to pay for the first stages of fabrication of the dish apparatus…with the rest to come later. But this did not happen. First, the government’s Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act to require more rigorous consideration of expenditures of this grant nature postponed the funding for a year. And then, during that year, the Soviet Union ceased using the Molnija satellites to broadcast their Channel One internationally, and transferred the broadcasts to their geosynchronous Raduga (“Rainbow”) satellites, which extended the earth footprint of their broadcasts far enough westward to include Cuba…but no further, thus eliminating the possibility of receiving the broadcasts in further-west Arizona. My project was made moot and its funding was cancelled. Of course, I asked myself, “Did the Soviets, under the ill and paranoid Konstantin Chernenko, who considered the broadcast media (radio and television) to be of paramount importance in the ideological struggle with the United States and other western powers, decide to change the broadcast technology of their Channel One television programs in response to Oleg Tumanov’s informing them about how one of the U.S.’s leading Russian language and culture programs, the one at ASU, was planning to use their own broadcasts against them?”

In April 1986, I happened to see a news item on television reporting that Oleg Tumanov, a Russian defector who had become an important figure in Radio Liberty, had been revealed as a Russian spy and that he had escaped CIA surveillance and returned to the Soviet Union. The Soviet news agency TASS reported on April 28th that “Oleg Tumanov, former Acting Editor-in-Chief of the Russian service of Radio Liberty, spoke at an international press conference at the Press Center of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID) of the USSR. He told newsmen how, after defecting to the west more than twenty years ago upon KGB in- structions, he had found himself in an anti-Soviet trap set up by the military intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States.” He had reportedly become spooked by the news that one of his KGB superiors, a Colonel Victor P. Gundarev, had turned himself in to the U.S. Embassy in Athens, Greece, and applied for asylum. Knowing that Gundarev would very soon be detailing his intelligence activity for the USSR at Radio Liberty, Tumanov requested that his handlers extricate him covertly from Germany and effect his return to Moscow.

For years I thought that Tumanov’s real exposure took place after my reports of his strange visit to ASU to George Bailey and to the U.S. State Department investigators in 1984. And that, after that, our intelligence agencies were surely monitoring his every action, his every association, hoping to reveal other espionage activities of the KGB at Radio Liberty and elsewhere. But as time passed, several involved people wrote and published books which mentioned Tumanov’s role as a spy. Arch Puddington, Deputy Director of the New York Bureau of RFE/RL from 1985 in his 2000 book, Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (see Bibliography), writes of the general workplace surprise when Tumanov was revealed as a spy. He relates: “When Yuri Handler, at the time Radio Liberty’s chief Russian editor in its New York bureau, visited Munich in 1986, he was told by several colleagues that Oleg Tumanov was a leading candidate for the Russian section’s chief editor position. One week later, Tumanov disappeared, only to turn up back in Moscow, where he revealed that he had been working for the KGB from the moment he began work in Munich in the late sixties.” And Richard H. Cummings, the very Director of Radio Liberty’s Security Section for most of Tumanov’s time working there, is the best example. In his 2009 book, Cold War Radio:

The Dangerous History of American Broadcasting in Europe, 1950-1989 (see Bibliography), Cummings clearly states that “We didn’t suspect that Tumanov was working for the KGB. If it weren’t for Gundarev and the fact that Tumanov fled to Moscow, likely he would have continued to work at RFE/RL until retirement. He was an excellent editor and an excellent co-worker and made some good programs. At that time, we had no basis to suspect that he was working with the KGB. We had others under suspicion—but not Tumanov.”

To me it certainly appears now that the security people protecting Radio Liberty then were not told about how we at ASU had concluded that Oleg Tumanov was a spy. This seems to fault Bailey in particular since he was the Director of Radio Liberty itself when Tumanov came to ASU. But he had already been involved in the internal politics that led to his termination as Director. His problems there, just as he was interviewing me for a job, are well described in Puddington’s chapter “The Reagan Years” (pp. 253-284). And it isn’t hard to notice that there was a kind of tension between Bailey and his Security Section, led by Richard Cummings. Cummings, for example, does not mention George Bailey in his book’s 219 pages of text, and Bailey’s name is not listed in the index. Yet in Cummings’s “Appendix K: Selected Summary of Threats, Intimidations, Contacts, Intelligence Cases, and Notes” (pp. 269-286…cf. 276,) in the entry for May 1985 he lists: “3. The Soviet media campaign against RFE/RL continued. One published article called ‘The Black Pearl’ dealt with an alleged battle between Radio Liberty division director George Bailey and the RFE/RL security office. The article demonstrated how the security office won the battle and the war, and George Bailey was forced out of RFE/RL.”

Oleg Tumanov himself, when living in Moscow, wrote a book in 1993, (TUMANOV: Confessions of a KGB Agent…see Bibliography) about his experiences as an agent of the KGB. In it, he does not mention his 1984 visit to ASU at all. In 1988 he had had the incredible temerity to sue Radio Liberty in a Munich court that he be provided a retirement pension. Richard Cummings is quoted in Russian in Dmitrii Treshchanin’s The Ideal Spy…, (see Bibliography…translation mine): “This was pure insolence. He thought, ‘Well, I worked 20 years there and I want my pension.’ He hired a lawyer. We refused him on several grounds, among which was the fact that he had kept his security pass. We maintained that this was our property, and that he should provide it back to us. But he did not receive a pension from us.”

So, Oleg Tumanov writes in 1993, when the Soviet Union was no more and Boris Yeltsin was leading a democratization of the Russian Federation, “These days I rarely leave my apartment. I don’t have a job and I live on the pension the state pays me. I spend my days reading books and papers. I go to bed early and rise late. I am forty-eight years old, but I sometimes feel like a very old man. I am alone among strangers, and among friends. Everything is mixed up; everything has changed. Émigrés who had been working against the Communist regime are now regarded not as enemies, but as national heroes.”

Bibliography

Bailey, George (1919-2001). Armageddon in Prime Time. Avon Books

(A division of the Hearst Corporation), New York City, New York, 1984. ISBN 0-380-89598-6. This book published by Tumanov’s immediate superior at Radio Liberty in the “Orwellian Year” of 1984 on the relationship of the United States and Russia during the Cold War is an insightful masterpiece, more germane to our current situation…a war of disinformation and propaganda… than ever. For issues of Bailey’s ouster as RL Director, see both Cummings and Puddington below.

Croft, Lee B., Boosman, Barry, Lutz, Katherine, Nielsen, James C. and Raymer, Aimee M. Russian in Arizona: A History of its Teaching. Institute for Issues in the History of Science (IIHS), Tempe, Arizona and Perm, Russian Federation, illustrated paperback ISBN is 978-1-4303-2355-6. Tumanov is mentioned on pp. 47, 138, and 180.

Cummings, Richard. Cold War Radio: The Dangerous History of American Broadcasting in Europe, 1950-1989. McFarland & Company, inc., Publishers, Jefferson, North Carolina and London, 2009. ISBN is 978-0-7864-4138-9. Cummings (1944- ) was Radio Liberty’s head of security during the time Tumanov worked there.

Easton, William J. “‘Double Defector’ Back in Moscow After Twenty Years, Denounces Radio Free Europe,” Los Angeles Times article from April 29, 1986…available at latimes.com. Eaton’s other “double defectors” are Svetlana Alliluyeva (Josef Stalin’s daughter, 1926-2011, who lived in Scottsdale, Arizona, from 1970 to 1973 and was briefly married to Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation architect Wesley Peters, but returned to the Soviet Union in 1984); Oleg Bitov, a journalist who defected to England in 1983 and returned to the USSR after a year; and Vitalii Yurchenko, an intelligence officer for the KGB who defected to the U.S. and returned to Moscow in 1985 after only months of telling stories to our CIA.

Fradis, Aleksandr Alekseevich. (in Russian,) “Mata Hari in the Mirror” about Oleg Tumanov’s wife, Svetlana (neé Yeta Drits), after his redefection, by a fellow RFE/RL editor, Alexander Fradis available at LitNet.com, 11/12/2006.

Kalugin, Oleg Danilovich (1934-) with Fen Montaigne. The First Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West. St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1994. This book was a bestseller worldwide and was republished by Blake Publications in 1995 with ISBN 978-1-8568-5101-5. This second edition has the cover blurb “The Highest Ranking KGB Officer Ever to Break His Silence.” In 2009 another version of the book under the title Spymaster that does not include Fen Montaigne’s name on the cover or title page was published by the Perseus Books Group. This is the preferred version as it includes Kalugin’s updates and yet further details on his operations in espionage and in postSoviet politics as well. The ISBN of it, available on amazon.com is 978-0-465-01445-3. His personal history in KGB espionage is very interesting as evidenced in his Wikipedia entry.

Krupskii, Vasilii. (in Russian,) “People of Lubyanka (Moscow’s KGB headquarters) at ‘Liberty’ (meaning “Radio Liberty). cf. Independent Military Overview article from October 28, 2005. cf. https://nvo. ng.ru. Provides details on Tumanov’s enlistment as a KGB spy and also his decision in 1986 to flee Europe after the defection to the west of one of his KGB “handlers,” Victor Gundarev.

Latysheva, Mariana. (in Russian,) “To Be the Wife of a Soviet Agent… the version of Svetlana Tumanova, wife of Oleg Tumanov, KGB agent at ‘Radio Liberty’) in agentura.ru. Cf. https://web.archive. org/web/20130622055520/http://agentura.ru/culture007/ tumanov.

Pace (now Meyer), Kerry. Russian Intelligence Activity in the Preperestroika Era: A Case Study. This is an ASU Barrett Honors College Honors Thesis which I supervised in November 2003. It’s an exemplary work in my opinion. Kerry had to avail herself of Freedom of Information act research on the advice of her committee member, ASU History Prof. (and former Ambassador to Colombia and Costa Rica) Lewis Tambs, to acquire data on Tumanov.

Puddington, Arch. Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. The University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, 2000. ISBN is 0-8131-9045-2. Puddington (1944-) served as the Deputy Director of the New York Bureau of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty from 1985 to 1993 and is Vice President for Research at Freedom House in New York. He has a chapter in this book entitled “Bombs, Spies, and Poisoned Umbrellas” (pp. 225-253) and he details the 1984 ouster of Radio Liberty Director George Bailey in the chapter called “The Reagan Years,” especially pp. 278-279.

Treshchanin, Dmitrii, et. al. (in Russian,) “The Ideal Spy. An agent of the KGB worked 20 years at ‘Radio Liberty” and left unrevealed.”

See: https://zona.media/article/2020/07/20/tumanov.

Tumanov, Oleg A. (1944-1997) TUMANOV: Confessions of a KGB Agent. Edition Q, inc. Chicago, Berlin, Tokyo, and Moscow. 1993. This illustrated hardback of the English translation by David Floyd has ISBN 0-86715-269-9. Also available are German and Russian versions. The three versions are quite the same, differing only in the language of publication. Tumanov was quite fluent in Russian, German, and English…in that order of facility.