In the Heat of the Cold War

Contents

The Good-Bye—Sofia, 1955

The Interrogation

My Employment

Dora’s Saga

With Burgas on My Mind

Last Days in Burgas

Letter from Lisbon

My Family History

Aunt Helena

Stoyan

Studio Politics

Driver for the British

Hopes for 1956

Revolt in the Film Club

The Ambassador’s Secretary

The Professor’s Daughter—Selena

The Parcel to Kate

The Ministry of Culture

The Varna Episode

The Passport

About to Leave

Departure to DDR

Stelios—Budapest

Budapest to Prague

Prague

The Spy Tunnel

Crossing the Line

The Little Red Tomatoes

Berlin-West, Grunewald

Entering the French Zone

Tempelhof

Strasbourg

Paris—The House in the Bois de Boulogne

Visit to Paris

Back to Germany

On the Train to Munich

Munich Central

Rasp Strasse

The Other Bulgarians

The Agrarian Party Club

At the Voice of America

The Hungarian Events

Letter from Kate

The Modern Couple

Walka

The Macedonians

Christmas with Kate

On the Way Back to Walka

Back to Munich

The Russian Poetry Lover

Dinner with Nebolieff

A Friend from Stockholm

Radio Free Europe

New Life in Munich

Julie

Poliakovs and the Mail

Thoughts for the Future

The Package at the Door

Summer 1957

The Italian Vacation

Rome

Destination: Capri

Capri

Fraeulein Graefin and the Old Maestro

The Ferment of the Jews

Christo

The Marshal Shukov Case

A New Car

The Driver’s License

Meeting Mike

International Refugee Committee

Other Disturbances

Travels with Mike

Destination : Spain

Barcelona

Majorca Adventures

The Swedish Girl

Trouble at the Brenner Pass

Meeting with Milio Milev

The Interview with Robert Siodmak

Kitzbuehel

The Missed Broadcast

The Offer

Marinopolski

Chris and the Film Club

The Family Destiny

The Nay-Sayers

The Party

The New Girl

The American Dream

Answering the Invitation to America

The Father´s Office

Visit to the Elbe

The Mother

Signing of Papers—The Wedding

Postscript:

Acknowledgements

Family Photos: George Kadiev

Cover Design: Philip Handley

Many thanks and appreciation to Susan Drake and Philip Handley

To my children

Anya and Dimitri

And to my wife, Eva-Maria, the love of my life

The personal recollections of a participant in the Cold War . . .

During the peak of the Cold War in Europe, a young Bulgarian graphic artist meets a British diplomatic secretary in Sofia, Bulgaria. From this accidental meeting develops a romantic relationship that draws the attention of the secret service on both sides: the British MI6 and the Bulgarian counter-intelligence under the direction of the KGB. It occurred in the period between spring 1955 and summer 1959.

The Good-Bye—Sofia, 1955

A S I STOOD UNDER THE arched passageway of the antiquated Sofia Central Railroad Station, oddly enough I was not thinking so much about the woman to whom I was here to say farewell this Sunday morning. Instead I was reflecting on the good old days at the end of the last century, when an aged, overzealous princess in Orleans was selling palaces and forests along France’s Loire River to finance her son’s and her own grand ambitions to turn Bulgaria, a neglected former Ottoman province, into a modern European country overnight.

She’d had this station built in the traditional French manner: zipper-like cornerstones, arched windows, and steel and glass overhangs so en vogue in prospering Europe in that golden epoch. On New Year’s Eve1900, she’d had electric lights turned on in the streets of Sofia to lighten up the new century; electric trolleys were rolling the next morning. That had been during the time when the local currency was worth almost as much as the Swiss franc and Bulgaria was considered the miracle of Europe.

Bulgaria’s past had been romantic, but its present was sobering and sad.

I stood on the station platform, looking up at the window of the sleeper of the Istanbul-Belgrade Express; a group of women had gathered nearby to say adieu to her. She waved at me from her open carriage window, but I did not respond and she knew why. She was going back to another world, a world of civilization, a world I knew from my early childhood but was never really able to appreciate then.

A few desperate travelers dragging stuffed, worn-out suitcases were rushing around, trying to catch the rare train to Provence. Bulgaria’s new Stalinist government had imposed unwritten travel restrictions on its citizens, damning the minute country to isolation from the rest of the world. Now people were too intimidated to travel, even to buy food or visit relatives in neighboring villages, too scared to meet a smile. And nobody in this stupid, crazy world could tell me why.

In the distance the stationmaster whistled, and I saw her well-wishers pull back from the carriage window. She waved to me again. She was a friendly, sociable person—character traits I had liked a lot in her—and so despite her short stay in Sofia, she had made friends with the other members of the British diplomatic colonynd a few other friendships outside work, as well.

I was just about to wave good-bye when I sensed somebody standing right behind me. When he moved even closer, I knew instantly that he was here for me. My heart started racing. I did not see when the train started moving; her window slid out of sight and was replaced by others, frames in a movie reel, as the man behind me hissed, Make no fuss! Just follow me!

I had always thought of myself as invisible—maybe naively so, like the people in sepia street scenes who exclaimed with wonder when they saw their own image on a photo plate.

Surprised and stunned in cold fear that they were already here for me, I turned obediently and followed the man. He had a square, well-nourished frame and a peasant-like swing to his gait. We walked along a couple of shabby streets behind the station, where a Russian-made four-door sedan—with the usual kitchen curtains to hide the passengers in the backseat—was waiting for us. Generally such cars were used by the government and party officials and for state security operations, which my case appeared to be.

Turning discreetly, the man took a furtive look around; he waited an instant before getting into the car after me. He sat down in the passenger seat next to the driver, a man with the powerful neck of an Olympic wrestler; perhaps he was earning some extra money by softening up stubborn suspects. I was not going to be a stubborn one, I promised myself. I was going to tell them everything I knew—that is, everything about Kate and me, but that was not much.

The driver knew the way to our destination. He didn’t even bother to throw a curious glance at his new passenger. For them, it was like taking a corpse to the morgue: no need to look at the goner.

I was shaking to the marrow of my bones. My body was going through convulsions of deadly fear until it was bathed in cold sweat. To calm down, exhausted by the tension, I hung onto a cliff of hope that it would not be as bad as before, since Stalin and Beria were gone. New times. No terror. No torture.

At that moment I wondered if the worlds of other species on this earth were different from ours. Possibly other creatures had their own kind of Communism and state security and the same fear of extinction as we did here. Oh, never mind all that nonsense! I was losing my grip on reality, and that was the truth. Things could not be as screwed up in nature as they were with man. In nature, everything was logical and functioned normally, but that was not true of our own logical world.

The driver passed the street that would have taken me to the Central Prison on the west end of the city, then crossed over the Lions Bridge and passed the imposing building of the prefect of police. Everybody knew the center of the state security was hidden there.

We had entered the city. I could see where we were going only by looking past the thick necks and cannonball heads of the driver and arresting agent and through the car’s windshield. Wild and disturbing thoughts bounced around inside my head as I wondered about our possible destination and what might be in store for me next—me, the fluttering chicken in a cage.

We went over the bumpy Tsar Shishman, a street the city never fully repaired after the Anglo-American air raids of 1944, and then we passed the Second Girls Gymnasium of Sofia, attended by the prettiest girls in the city. A memory came back to me, a great moment from the old days: Together with two other boys from my school—named after former British prime minister William Gladstone—I was sent here to deliver tickets for a benefit event at our school. It so happened that we arrived at recess time, and all the girls were at the open windows, screaming with excitement, as we entered the school. Once we were inside, there was a riot that the teachers could not control, and the girls almost ripped our school uniforms from our sixteen-year-old bodies.

The car approached a stylish building, gleaming in white stone: the interior ministry. As it was Sunday morning, only a few armed guards stood in the ministry parking lot. They opened the gates and gave a military salute as our car drove through. The atmosphere on the grounds was serene, but who could say with such secretive regimes what might be beneath the surface and behind those white walls. The car slid along the curb of the inner yard and stopped next to a metal service door set flush with the building wall.

The arresting agent exited the car and looked around us almost protectively before trying a key in the door. No need for words here: he pushed me ahead of him and we entered the fire escape inside the building.

The stairway was gloomy and desperate-looking. We climbed the stairs to the second floor, where he opened another door with his keys. Again he pushed me inside, and we stepped onto a freshly polished floor made of elegant imitation granite—a material that had been popular in European architecture during the period between the two wars.

I heard the echo of voices from the other end of the corridor, maybe the cleaning personnel whom other governmental offices could no longer afford to maintain. Along the corridor there was a row of solid wooden doors built by the previous regime when it could afford to spend money for prestige. (These were the silly observations that flashed through my mind.)

The Ministry of Interior was an elegant, modern building, designed and finished in 1939, just before the war broke out in Europe. With its clean lines and modern design obviously influenced by the German Bauhaus trend, it graced a neighborhood of shabby apartment buildings and houses built before the turn of the century. I didn’t even mind the building’s Nazi neoclassic touches; I’d always been proud of the edifice and enjoyed looking at the architecture when I passed by. But I had never been inside before, and now I felt the irony of my youthful admiration of a symbol of oppression.

Here! the man said, still looking around for possible spying eyes in dark corners. No one had ever dared to challenge their methods openly; their theatrics had become the new style of government.

I knew the Communists long before they came to power. In my school there were brave young Communist activists in the Esperanto Group and the Tolstoy Society. At that time they were considered suspect and had every reason to be conspiratorial, but by now they had been in control of our lives for so long that they looked rather pathetic. This spirit of conspiracy, a hangover from pre-revolutionary Russia, was still alive there, and here. They fed on it daily and seemed to thrive on it with pride.

A long, curved corridor opened up before us. Once architects had been free to incorporate such extraordinary design elements into public buildings; now they were constrained by the need for strict economy, and the resulting fast and cheap construction seemed to dilapidate before our eyes.

The man unlocked one of the large wooden doors. Sit here, he said simply, gesturing to a chair next to a vacant office desk. The desk itself had a padded chair over which an official black-and-white portrait of Comrade Stalin still hung on the wall. There was an empty coat tree next to the door. This was an office seemingly designed for high-ranking ministry bureaucrats, maybe a deputy minister or even the minister himself, who was absent or had preferred a more secretive office in some other governmental building. Across the room there was a second door leading to another office.

My escort sat heavily on the chair behind the desk and glanced questioningly at the other door, which was slightly ajar. I had the feeling he was expecting somebody else, but there was no sign of life from behind the door. He waited a bit and then got up.

You just stay here! he said, as if I were a dog, and left the room. I looked around, wondering what would happen next.

The man who brought me here was in his mid-forties; he had a rough, square face and square mind like a typical state security worker. Obviously he was handling my case for someone else. He was tough but too uninformed and uneducated for diplomatic cases or foreign intelligence work, I thought.

Leaving someone alone in a room to stew in his own juices was one of the psychological methods they used to intimidate suspected political enemies. Everybody in town knew that method, and now they were using it on me. To take my mind away from my fears, I started thinking about Kate and her destiny. I could imagine her in her comfortable sleeper compartment as her train crossed the border into Yugoslavia and then raced through Serbia toward Belgrade, toward civilization and freedom.

I’d never had the chance to cross any border of my tiny country. I had always dreamed of seeing the world on the other side of the fence. But even though my physical body was chained to Bulgaria, my vivid imagination took flight, allowing me to see the landscapes of other countries and hear the sounds of other languages and, especially, the music of other lands. The short-wave radio was a door to my escape from reality. I formed the rest of the world to my own liking; whether true or false, it was my real world, the one in which I wanted to exist.

Time passed. I did not know how long I had been sitting on that chair—afraid to move, suspicious of somebody watching me through a mouse hole in the ceiling or along the floor—but from where I sat I could see through the windows as the sun’s shadows moved and elongated.

I felt an urgent need to pee, and I did not know where to go to relieve myself. I tried to distract myself by returning my thoughts to Kate, but my kidneys were healthy and demanding and I was nailed to that stupid office chair. At a certain point I felt that I could not hold it any longer—that at any moment I might let go, let it run down my legs and onto the parquet floor, where it would form an embarrassing, nasty puddle, in the middle of which I would sit. When they returned, they would laugh at me:

Look at that bourgeois coward! We have not started with him yet, and he’s already peed his pants!

No way. Not me. I had my pride. So I unglued myself from the office chair, looked around for a WC, and, not seeing one, headed for the slightly ajar door. I knocked just in case but did not get an answer, so I pushed the door handle down. It appeared to be another office, probably for a secretary or deputy of the ministry bureaucrat, whoever he might be.

I quickly took a look around. The office was unoccupied at the moment but had signs of recent use. The desk was adorned with a miniature Soviet flag, a red telephone, and a variety of family photos and other mementos—some framed, others standing on their own. The usual official portrait of Joseph Stalin hung high behind the chair. Another symbol of the Soviet presence, a three-dimensional emblem of the KGB in painted plaster, hung on the wall facing the official, as if to remind him who he was and whom he served.

At once I got cold feet and quickly withdrew into the first office. Then I saw a door handle discreetly sticking out from an obscure door cut into the wood-paneled wall. I grabbed it and pressed it down. My salvation: a WC!

Finally the man returned to the room. I had no idea know how long I’d been waiting, because I did not own a wristwatch; our lives did not run according to minutes. I could only judge that it was late from the long shadows on the opposite buildings. He found me stoically sitting in my chair, waiting.

At that moment a new thought passed through my mind, the memory of Kate’s words to me on our last night in the Tirnovo hotel room:

Whatever happens after I leave Sofia, I’ll do everything within my power to get you out of here.

In my mind’s eye I could see her walking on the sunny side of a street in London, returning to work in the foreign office or wherever she had worked before she came to Sofia. She’d never told me where she would be window-shopping to see how fashions had changed while she was away, walking without fear that someone might be watching her every step. And all of a sudden I felt strong, a different person.

The Interrogation

W HEN THE MAN RETURNED TO the room, he was carrying a folder under his arm. I guessed it contained my life story, as seen by other people. I had never thought that anyone would waste so much time just to inform on me. Strange world we lived in.

In this phony society, nobody reported something good unless it was about a recognized party personality—and there as well, one had to be extremely careful: one day the person was beneficial to the party, and the next day he was an enemy of the people. Reality always differed according to the eyes and minds of others.

But this was my moment to face reality, and I swallowed hard. The man cleared his throat and then waited for a moment for somebody in the other office to give him the go-ahead. I smelled Russian tobacco smoke coming through the open door. The agent opened my folder.

Now, we want clear, loud, and definite answers to our questions. That is a yes or a no. Nothing in between. Is that clear?

Yes, comrade, I said.

You don’t call me comrade. You are not my comrade. Is that clear to you, Citizen Kadiev?

Very clear! I answered, like a soldier in the army

Browsing through the papers, he said, I see here you have been involved with some other foreign women before. You have a liking for foreign women, do you?

It happened, I said.

A married woman from the Federal Republic; then a French one, some Ivette Boduen…

Oh well, Ivette was actually a Bulgarian girl from Plovdiv. Her father was a French Catholic priest there who admitted publicly that he had a family with his housekeeper. He has been defrocked. That’s what I know about Ivette. She has a brother in France.

We are well-informed about the case, the man said authoritatively, meaning they knew everything under the sun in Bulgaria.

I see here that you regularly attend the English Language League in Sofia and you spent considerable time in the American Reading Room on Tsar Osvoboditel Boulevard before we shut it down. Did you?

I was trying to learn the language.

What do you need that language for? He looked up at me sharply, as if waiting for an answer but then returned back to his papers. Never mind about that now. We are interested in the story with that British woman, the secretary from the British embassy in Sofia. How did you meet her?

We met in the Rila Monastery. I was sent there to look into reshooting some frescoes for a historical film I was working on.

We know about that. Skip the details. Did you have a sexual relationship with that British woman?

Yes I did.

How many times in total?

Twice, maybe three times—

Three times is more than twice. So what is it? He cut me short. Did you take snapshots of her naked body as a souvenir to remember her by? Some people do it for fun.

She’s not a whore."

Just answer my question. Don’t try to get smart with me! Sparks flashed in his deep-set, dark eyes. I asked you: did you have direct body contact with her body? Fucking, that is? He was getting impatient with me, repeating his question clumsily.

Yes.

How many times? he asked again.

I think I just told you. Two or three times.

How many times again? Do you want to tell us? He wrote something in my dossier. Did she initiate that, or did you force yourself on her?

I would not say I imposed myself on her… I said with hurt pride.

Where did you do it—in your house, in the park, or in her hotel room?

Do I have to answer that question? Not in my house, that’s for sure, I said loudly.

Somebody in the other room chuckled, and I felt as if I had made indirect contact with the KGB. Whoever it was had a sense of humor.

Do you think she might be pregnant from you?

I don’t know. She never complained to me.

Did she ask you to meet some other people from the British legation, agents from the MI6?

What is MI6? I asked innocently.

Never mind that now. He looked down at his papers and rushed on. Was she interested in talking politics with you?

I think she was a secretary, a professional typist. One day she showed up with her arm in a sling and said it was an injury from working at the typewriter too long.

They exploit the workers over there, he said dismissively. Did she put you in touch with anyone else, either her people or locals, to carry on contact with you after she left Bulgaria?

No, was my flat answer.

Did you talk about marriage with her?

We did not reach that point, but she told me she is going to write a personal letter to Comrade Chervenkov asking him to let me go to her in England.

The man looked surprised. Ah, she did say that, did she? A thin smile crossed his lips.

The KGB guy coughed discreetly. I could smell his cigarettes again, their smoke now really penetrating the air from the other room.

My interrogator got up from his chair. Just a minute, he said, and he disappeared into the other room. When he came back he started in with a more conciliatory tone of voice. Who else do you know from the British embassy in Sofia?

Once when we were walking the street late at night, we briefly met one of her colleagues, an elderly Australian secretary. I forgot her name. Kate introduced me to her.

The man in the other room cleared his throat. My interrogator jumped up obediently and went to consult with him, leaving the portfolio open on his desk. Curious, I glanced at it and saw various-sized papers with different types of handwriting, presumably reports about my personal life.

I heard laughter and low talk; I recognized some Russian words. My man came back.

Did Miss Barry mention the name Anthony Brooks to you?

No! I replied.

You are quite sure now? he asked. When I didn’t respond, he continued, About the ambassador’s secretary—did your British girlfriend tell you that you should get instructions from her on how to conduct your operations from here?

No she did not.

Did Miss Barry tell you that she was going to write to you after she arrived in Great Britain?

Yes she did, I said, and he took some notes.

That’s good, he said, and he pulled out a paper covered with tightly printed text. Now, sign this here! he ordered, pushing it toward me.

What is it? I asked, alarmed.

Oh. There is a new law that individuals will not be physically abused or mistreated while being questioned by us. You will sign this declaration confirming that.

The tiny type would take me hours to read, and besides, technically they had not laid a hand on me so far. I had no choice.

I signed.

You realize that now you’re under the sanctions of state security and the Secrecy Act, which carries severe penalties for breaking the laws of the People’s Republic. Do you? I remained silent. He wrote down a telephone number on a new piece of paper and pushed that toward me.

Memorize this number by heart and destroy the paper afterwards. This is your contact number with us. We will call you and give you further instructions regarding our next move in this case. Is that clear? You will call us as soon as you get a message from the woman.

Yes, it is clear.

We left his office and he walked ahead of me, using the same conspiratorial theatrics to clear the way to the fire escape door, where he let me go down the stairs and go free.

Out on the street, I at first felt the joy of being free and unhurt. Then I was overcome by loneliness; I felt drained and depressed to my bones. For so long, my greatest point of pride was that I was not one of them, that I was still a free spirit in a damned world of Communist reality and intellectual oppression. But now all that was gone.

Blindly I had signed that document and become their agent. I had joined them against my own conscience and free will. A political prisoner or a forced laborer on the Danube’s mosquito-infested islands probably had a freer conscience than I had at that dark moment in my life. The regime had corrupted me, taken away the most precious thing I had: my dream of being a free man.

By now it was getting dark. I started walking home, but I did not have the heart to face my family, especially my father, in the state I was in. So I stopped in the park, found an isolated bench, and sat down, trying to calm my nerves. I was so low all of a sudden. The park was where we used to go as youngsters with the girls for moments of kissing and flirting in the darkness; now it looked like a cemetery.

I hated myself at that moment. I realized that everything that had happened was because of my childish ways, my habit of not considering the consequences of my actions.

My Employment

A T THAT TIME I WAS employed as a graphic artist by the Studio for Cultural and Scientific Films, which was comprised of a concoction of intellectual desperados, each claiming to have read at least one book on motion picture making. The studio was created as a part of a national film production effort. The other two government-run studios were Theatrical Films and the poor brother, Documentaries—mainly weekly news about achievements in agriculture and industry, for the consumption of the general public. The motion picture studio was created by decree of the central committee of the Communist Party, which was acting under the authority of Soviet advisers, carrying out orders from Moscow’s Ministry of Culture to the People’s Republic.

Ill-equipped with a few obsolete wartime movie news cameras made in Germany, along with some industrial light fixtures, we were trying to make something resembling motion pictures. I worked in the tricks laboratory, where—apart from talk of how the French did the first film tricks at the turn of the century—nothing else mattered. But there were dreams and expectations of exciting things to come.

Koki, the man who had helped me break out of unemployment and into that exciting business, was a bit older than I was, but full of dreams of better times. He would daydream aloud about how one day we would climb with a camera and a crew to the Nanga Parbat in the Himalayas. He did not live to see that snowy peak. He had the misfortune of having a perpetual, ironic smile that lingered at the corners of his mouth and made the Communists he met very uneasy. That was his problem.

We met when Koki was unemployed and miserable, stoically enduring his survival. He told me that there was a case against him: he was suspected of having spied for a foreign country, a member of NATO. There was no official accusation against him—he had never been arrested or interrogated—but despite the murky suspicions and lack of factual evidence he was fired from his job as director of agro films. Koki recounted his sad story to me:

His cameraman—a daredevil of a man whom I knew as well—had tied himself to the wings of a double-decker crop duster so he would have a free hand to get a panoramic view of some land they were filming. While they were still on location, the raw film was sent off and arrived in the studio cutting rooms, where the girls on the fifth floor began using scissors and acetylene glue to put it together. In the process, somebody from studio security control began to suspect that the Buchovo mining site, where the Soviets were digging for rich uranium ore, might have been caught on camera. That suspicion served somebody’s intentions well, and Koki was fired on the train coming home.

During that time I was working off and on as a freelance artist-illustrator, doing some commercial promotions for the Bulgarian airline, TABSO (the only one in the country at the time), even though I had never attended art school. My father had been a private businessman, the proprietor of a hotel in Sofia, when the nationalization of private businesses took place. As a result I could not obtain political clearance to enroll in the state university. The government considered me a politically unreliable element.

My friend Koki, a true film man, never looked for a job in a different field. Both of us were unemployed looking for any kind of job and we met in a new sports stadium where they had seeded grass, and we both hoped to get the job of watering the seeds during the night. Neither of us got the job, but we struck up a good, lasting friendship. He came often to see me.

One day, after a year and a half of his stubbornly knocking on politicians’ doors, the government dropped its spy charges against Koki (or whatever they were holding against him), and he was reinstated in his former job without apology or back pay. That was it. Before I had a chance to congratulate him, he came knocking on my door and asked me to go for a walk with him. He walked me to his studio and asked me to come with him upstairs to the studio director’s office.

This is the man I was telling you about, he said to the director, a short, energetic, cheerful man with a civilized face and intelligent eyes.

Very well, then! the director said to me. You go down to the tricks laboratory and tell Penchev that you are the new man and to get you started working right away.

I went to see Penchev, a practicing graphic artist himself and the boss of the tricks department. He asked me for my art academy credentials, and when I said I had none, he exploded in my face.

How dare he send me someone without an art degree to work in my department—and to top it off, without my consent! I’ll show him who the hell I am! He