PETROV’S QUEENSLAND ESCAPADE

by Harry Blutstein

During the 1956 Olympic Games, Australians went overboard to ensure they were a success.
Athletes were overwhelmed by Australian hospitality when they were invited into people’s houses
for a meal or stopped in the street for a friendly chat. At the MCG spectators generously applauded
the winners, regardless of which country they came from, and suburban housewives spruced up
their homes in case a visitor should drop by for an inspection. Everyone hoped the Melbourne
Olympics would be remembered as the ‘friendly’ Games.

Well before the Opening Ceremony, ASIO was not as confident that the Games would be all
that friendly. It expected the Soviet Union to sneak KGB agents into Australia as part of its country’s
Olympic team. ASIO’s priority was to identify those agents and keep them under surveillance, in
what it called Operation Robin Redbreast.

ASIO had an ace up its sleeve. Two years earlier, Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov had defected
to Australia. He was a KGB colonel, sent to Australia to penetrate local anti-Soviet organisations and
to recruit and run Australian agents. Evdokia was a KGB captain responsible for handling top-secret
cable traffic. Both had been involved in intelligence work since the 1930s and knew many Soviet
agents personally. The Petrovs handed names over to ASIO, and shared their extensive knowledge of
Soviet espionage operations around the world.

By 1956, the Petrovs were living in a safe house in the Melbourne suburb of Bentleigh under
the assumed names of Sven and Maria Anna Allyson. They welcomed the opportunity to show ASIO
that they were still of value, and were happy to participate in Operation Robin Redbreast.

Using photos of Soviet officials, athletes and journalists entering Australia for the Olympic
Games, the Petrovs identified 46 KGB agents, and there were another 30 visitors who they
suspected were also intelligence officers.

The expected influx of KGB agents into Melbourne worried Vladimir Petrov. He was
convinced that the Kremlin would avenge his betrayal. He particularly feared KGB’s 13th Department,
which was tasked with abductions and assassinations. His fear was well founded. According to a CIA
document describing 13th Department, ‘The Soviets have gone to great lengths in the past to silence
their intelligence officers who have defected.’

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 In Empire of Fear, written before the Olympic Games, Petrov alerted his readers to the
activities of the ‘assassination department,’ presumably referring to the 13th Department. He wrote
that should he or his wife die suddenly ‘the whole world will know that our death was deliberately
planned by a Government which regards political murder as a normal way of dealing with those who
differ from it.’

ASIO agreed with Petrov that he was a target, but its assessment did not see danger as
immediate. ‘An occasion like the Games would seem most unsuitable, from the point of view of the
Soviet Government, for an attempted assassination in view of the publicity it would arouse.’
However, ASIO believed ‘it was quite possible that a special appeal might be made to Mrs Petrov to
make contact with the Soviet authorities for news of her family.’ She was homesick and ASIO
worried that the KGB might try to entice or even blackmail her to return to Moscow.

Just as the defections of the Petrovs had been a major Cold War win for Australia’s fledgling
spy agency, Evdokia’s re-defection would be humiliating for ASIO. If she returned home, she would
undoubtedly spill what secrets she and her husband had divulged and allow the KGB to effectively
control the damage they had caused.

Deciding that the threat to the Petrovs was credible, ASIO whisked them away to a safe
house in Surfers’ Paradise, out of the reach of KGB agents in Melbourne. Their chaperones, guards
really, were ASIO operatives Joan and Douglas Dougherty.

What should have been a simple operation soon spun out of control.

At around 8 pm on 27 November, the Petrovs were in the kitchen arguing, after which
Vladimir stormed out of the apartment. The Doughertys did not hear him leave the apartment.

There are two versions of what happened next.

According to Vladimir, he went to a nearby pub, had a couple of beers and was attacked as
he returned home. He was then picked up by police and released at 5 am. This story was a
concoction, a habit that was second nature to the ex-KGB agent.

ASIO pieced together the true story from witnesses. After leaving the house, Petrov went to
the Surfers Paradise Hotel where he had quite a few more than a couple of drinks. Sometime after
9 pm, Petrov entered an upstairs apartment at Clifford Court where he heard music and possibly
assumed that a party was in progress; a party with free booze. The occupier of the apartment,
Sergeant Bill Thompson, an army man, told Petrov to leave. When he refused, Thompson tried to
force him out. Soon two neighbours joined the fray with Petrov putting up a game fight against the

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odds. After a wild swing Petrov fell on his face, after which the three men jumped on him and held
him down.

When the police arrived at 9.45 pm, they found a portly man, agitated, wearing just his
underpants and shirt. They handcuffed him and threw him into the back of the police van. At the
Southport police station, he was charged with being drunk and disorderly. In his statement he gave
his name as “Jack Olson” and told police that he believed he was entering his own apartment, but
refused to give them the address of where he lived. After spending the night in a cell to sober up,
the police released Petrov at 5 am after he posted 10 shillings for bail.

The only injuries Petrov sustained were a lacerated lip, abrasions to his ribs and back and a
bloody nose. Thankfully, by the morning he had been reunited with his trousers.

It did not take long for journalists to realise that “Jack Olson” was none other than Petrov
and the next morning newspapers reported that he had been arrested in Queensland.

ASIO immediately went into damage control. Its director-general, Colonel Spry, spent the
rest of the day trying to piece together what had happened to his prize defector. Once he had the
facts, he wrote a grovelling letter to Robert Menzies that started: ‘My dear Mr Prime Minister. No
doubt you have seen in the newspapers a report to the effect that a person, who gave his name as V.
PETROV, was charged with drunkenness in the Southport police court on 28 November, 1956. I
regret to say that the person concerned was our Vladimir PETROV.’ In his letter, Spry accused both
Petrovs of being ‘psychopathic,’ but he carefully stepped around taking responsibility for the fiasco.

Spry understood the politics and knew that the government would be most unhappy with
ASIO over this incident. In May 1954, the Menzies government had narrowly won the election off
the back of an anti-communist scare campaign it unleashed in the wake of the Petrovs’ very public
defection. Should this incident reveal Petrov was an alcoholic then his reliability might be
questioned.

On the same day, Spry wrote a searing letter to Vladimir Petrov. ‘I personally am fast
reaching the end of my tolerance and sympathy for your predicament. You have received a great
deal from our country; safety, protection, subsistence, and many kindnesses. Any further acts such
as this will utterly destroy my little remaining patience’ Spry ended his letter by warning that if there
was ‘another scandalous act, I intend to reconsider your position in relation to my Service.’ Petrov
was being threatened to be turned out into the cold, a possibility that terrified him. Without ASIO’s
protection, Petrov was convinced that sooner or later the KGB would find and kill him.

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 On 30 November the Petrovs and their minders were discreetly transferred to a new safe
house in Caloundra and there were no further incidents.

While the news of Petrov’s escapade was a disaster for ASIO, thankfully, no details of his
involvement in Operation Robin Redbreast leaked out. Instead, Australians were blissfully unaware
that parallel to the ‘friendly’ Games, the US and USSR were engaged in Cold War games. It is only
now that these secrets have surfaced in declassified ASIO files, of which Petrov’s escapade is just
one.

______________________________

This is an edited extract from Cold War Games by Harry Blutstein, released by Echo Publications, (rrp
$32.99).

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