Nikolay Dolgopolov’s text was published in the November 22, 2017 issue of the joint Russia-Belarus weekly newspaper Soyuz. Belarus-Rossiya. Below is my English translation available only on this website.
Nikolay Dolgopolov: The People With A Cover Story
Soyuz. Belarus-Rossiya November 22, 2017
On various assignments for 22 years, illegal intelligence officers [codenamed] “Elsa” and “Zephyr” have never been exposed
Illegal intelligence officers, the husband and wife Mikhail (1907-2008) and Elizabeth Mukasey (1912-2009) worked for 22 years in the “special conditions” in Western Europe. "Elsa” and “Zephyr" - their operational pseudonyms - lived a long, happy life together and were never exposed.
Now, after their deaths, it is possible to say more about the extraordinary lives of Colonel and Lieutenant Colonel Mukasey. But, then, are there any illegal intelligence officers whose life one can call ordinary? I would never have met them if it were not for their family members. The son, cameraman Anatoly Mukasey and his wife, film actress and director Svetlana Druzhinina, who were greatly proud of them, suggested that the leadership of the Foreign Intelligence Service [SVR] reveal their identities.
In Mikhail’s native village of Zamostye, there were 350 houses. He was the son, the nephew, and the grandson of blacksmiths and from the time he was 10 years old, he assisted his elders in the forge. Then he went to St. Petersburg [Leningrad]. He dreamed of studying at the university and was hoping he would get admitted. He cleaned steamboat boilers – a hellish occupation, but then he enrolled at the workers’ university and became an engineer. He was soon recruited by the state security [NKVD]. In the late 1930s, nobody could turn that down.
After the war, the Mukaseys became illegal intelligence officers. They worked under false names in different countries. How did they get into Western Europe? Mukasey invented, as intelligence officers say, a cover story himself.
“That cover story was really difficult,” Mikhail Isaakovich told me. – I don’t want to brag, but I’ll say that not even every experienced intelligence officer could live it. In my [assumed] family, more than 30 people were killed during the Nazi occupation. There were very few people who survived, you could count them on your fingers. I was in that village, I knew it, I saw it. And before I started using that cover story, I found a man [from there]. He really went through hell. With his permission, I used his biography as my own. And with my help and the assistance of the authorities, he left for Israel. His father went there, too. But that’s all I can say.
Under this cover story, Michael and Elizabeth Mukasey, now called Michael and Betsy, settled in one of the countries of the Socialist bloc. And from there, they moved into Western Europe. They went through a lot. But the resident “Zephyr” and the radio operator “Elsa” coped well. They looked for illegal intelligence officers who suddenly stopped contacting the Center. They transmitted the information about the secret plans of NATO. They had Western European passports and used them to travel to nearly one hundred countries. They very often visited the countries with which the USSR did not have diplomatic relations. Yes, this could have been deadly, but was often done time and again. In the event of exposure, Michael and Betsy could hardly count on any help from their own.
And I would like to describe one of the episodes, which, in the language of intelligence professionals, would be called operational. A comparatively young illegal intelligence officer K., who had established himself in Paris, stopped all contact. And the Center ordered the Mukaseys: find out what happened by any means necessary.
This was one of Mikhail’s first trips from a new country of residence [in the Socialist bloc] to another country. A rather risky trip from Bern to Paris, where the traces of an unmarried - according to the KGB cover story - illegal intelligence officer K. were lost. And the discovery of a tragic explanation for the absence. The owner of a small store [the officer K.] had died. It was later that Mukasey learned that when K. went on a [long-awaited] vacation to the USSR, he was recommended to undergo a surgery. But because he had so many things waiting for him to do [in France], he did not follow through. Not without difficulty, Michael found his apartment and learned that Mr. K. had become ill and was taken to the hospital where he died.
No one could have imagined such a premature departure. And here Mukasey showed not just official, but also humane interest and care. He found out all the circumstances of the death of the officer who was completely unknown to him. The nurse at the Catholic hospital said: “Your friend died completely alone and fully conscious. He called the priest, kissed the Catholic cross, and before he died, a pure, dew-like tear rolled down from his eye, and [then] he fell silent forever."
Mukasey felt grief for his colleague. Even on his deathbed, he did not betray himself, and took away the secrets of his homeland to the grave. Until his last breath, he held firm to his cover story. Well, whoever remains faithful to the state oath can never fail, even when he is dead. The Russian man was buried under a foreign [Catholic] rite, having done everything to depart with dignity. Mikhail Isaakovich found his grave. It was in the place where the homeless and the dogs were buried. And Mukasey got the body to be re-buried in a different place.
In Paris, K. lived as a lonely man, but, in his homeland, in Moscow, he had a wife and two daughters. Close relatives and friends remember him. But the simple Russian family name of this illegal intelligence officer as well as his accomplishments are still classified under the stamp “top secret.”
In the memory of his deceased colleague in illegal intelligence, Mukasey erected a marble headstone on his grave. And, for more than 20 years that he lived on the other side of the “curtain,” he has taken care of the grave. On the headstone, there was a portrait of K. with his year of birth, according to the cover story, and the real year of death.
However, even in death, K. was of service to the Motherland. His grave served as a secret meeting place of other intelligence officers, both legal and illegal, and as a dead drop for secret documents. Doesn’t this sound like a plot for a spy thriller? And for many years after the couple returned to their homeland, someone – it’s no secret who - brought flowers to the grave with a false name on the headstone. What is its condition now? Did the headstone remain in its place or, as is often the case in France, was it already turned into the grave of another person? I do not know...
What is the most important to an intelligence officer? Glory? But glory, if it comes, is a result of exposure. So maybe the best reward is obscurity?
