On September 4, 2020, the City of Moscow daily newspaper Moskovskaya Pravda published yet another chapter from the upcoming book on the Soviet intelligence officers by journalist Ilona Yegiazarova. This chapter is based on an interview of Yury Drozdov (1925-2017), the KGB station chief in China and the U.S. (based in New York City) and the head of KGB Illegal Intelligence Department “S” from 1979 until 1991. Below is my translation available only on this blog.
Ilona Yegiazarova: Yury Drozdov. A Life Story like A Fiction Novel in which ‘Invention is Excluded’ [The Title of Drozdov’s Memoir]
Moskovskaya Pravda September 4, 2020
On September 19, Yury Ivanovich Drozdov would have turned 95. He has left us three years ago, but people who knew him will certainly raise a glass in his memory, remembering his unique analytical abilities and rare human qualities. Let us also do the same.
He took part in the seizure of Berlin at the end of the Great Patriotic War. He participated in the operation to exchange the Soviet intelligence officer [Rudolf] Abel for the American pilot [Francis Gary] Powers. During the Cold War, he worked as a KGB station chief in New York and Beijing. For more than 10 years, he headed the Illegal Intelligence Department of the KGB’s First Main Directorate (PGU). He created the special forces unit “Vympel.” He planned and organized the covert operation to capture the presidential palace in Afghanistan...
I saw Yury Ivanovich only a couple of times in my life. When he entered the room, those who knew him would respectfully make space for him: Major General Drozdov was respected by everyone – his colleagues, his subordinates, [even] his opponents... Though already in his 90s, the legend of Russian foreign intelligence continued to work every day. He directed the Namakon analytical center and produced very accurate forecasts about the future of Russia and the world. Like many illegal intelligence officers, he did not like giving interviews, and yet one day he agreed to talk to me.
The Beginning
First of all, of course, I was interested in the story of his origins - where do people like him come from…
- The only memory I have of my father is that of a military man, always in uniform - said Drozdov. [My father] Ivan Dmitrievich came from a wealthy family. A combatant in the First World War, awarded the St. George Cross for bravery, he greeted the Bolshevik revolution with enthusiasm. In those days, even the members of the same family sometimes had different views on Russia’s political future. Our family was no exception: my father, a tsarist officer, took the side of the Bolsheviks and went to fight in [Vasily] Chapayev’s brigade, while his brother fought on the other side of the barricades – we had a civil war within the family! My father fought in different regions - in Siberia, in Belarus, and he ended up settling down in the region of Borisov [in Belarus]. My mother - Anastasia Kuzminichna - also had an interesting biography. She grew up in the family of a guard of the landowner’s estate. The landowner enrolled her in high school together with his daughter. Then he got her a job as a typist at an English-owned factory in Pereslavl-Zalessky [Yaroslav Region, Russia]. My mother returned to her father’s place with a great profession and got a job as a typist in the NKVD.
My first conscious memories come from the time when we moved to Minsk. My father worked in the personnel department at a local university and sometimes spoke on the radio. The military officers were encouraged to do so.
My parents did not employ any particular system in my upbringing. I grew up a sickly child and would easily catch all kinds of diseases. If it was out there, I had it. My father got tired of this, and he made a wise decision to send me to a military units’ camp near Minsk every year at the beginning of spring. I spent every summer in a tent and I got much stronger.
The father also influenced the young Yura’s choice of profession. From Minsk, Ivan Dmitrievich was transferred to Kharkov, to the central school of OSOAVIAKHIM [a voluntary defense organization which trained civilians for defense tasks] - to work in their personnel department. In the period from 1935 to 1937, the specialized artillery and aviation schools were created in several cities of the Soviet Union. They were the quasi-military types of institutions.
- Well, my father sent me, the fourteen-year-old boy, to one of these artillery schools. Both the teachers and the young boys wore military uniforms, and this, of course, created the atmosphere of military-type discipline. In this school, I had to learn Ukrainian language. In the first dictation exercise, I made 39 mistakes on a single page! This upset me so much that I began to study the subject very seriously. The knowledge that I gained turned out to be very useful to me in my future intelligence activities.
Yury Ivanovich’s talent for languages turned out to be exceptional. Years later, German language he learned to perfection enabled him to work in Germany as a local clerk! The Germans thought he was a resident of Leipzig.
But let’s go back to his youth.
- Is it true that you were almost expelled from the Komsomol?
- When the war began, I was 15 years old - recalled Yury Ivanovich. We were evacuated to Kazakhstan, to Aktyubinsk. We travelled by a steamer through Stalingrad, the Germans did not bomb it yet, but they were already conducting aerial reconnaissance. My comrades and I took the fascist attack on the city as a personal challenge: we had stayed there for two days, we got to know some people there and received letters from them. I persuaded two of my school friends to go with me to Stalingrad to fight the Germans. For this we were almost expelled from the Komsomol. The director gathered the class, everyone discussed our action and passed a unanimous verdict: we should finish our studies first... But soon the military situation worsened, the school was transferred to Tashkent, and in 1943, we entered the artillery school in the town of Engels.
I must say that the schools and colleges at that time still generally resembled the pre-revolutionary models, but the war made them introduce certain modifications. When we graduated, we already had knowledge of many modern artillery pieces invented by experienced military men.
Sometimes it is said that the government did not take care of people during the war, that they pushed them into fighting and treated them like cannon fodder... Well, my comrades and I stayed at the [artillery] school for a year and a half instead of nine months. They were in no hurry to send us to the front, they took care of us, taught us many different things... We had a teacher from the famous Benois family - a former colonel of the tsarist army. He dealt with equestrian training and vaulting.
War
It turned out that both Drozdov the father and Drozdov the son ended up at the front.
- My father went to the front at the age of 47 and became the head of the chemical service in an artillery regiment. In one of the battles near Staraya Russ, he was wounded - a sniper bullet tore out his right lung.
- Already the first letter from the front informed my mother and me that my father was in the hospital. It took him a long time to recover, the wound was serious, he had a big hole in his back... His recovery was, apparently, slowed down by his concern for his family. At that time, I was already a sergeant, I was eager to go to the front, but then the director of the school called me and said that he had received a letter from my father, who asked him to leave me in Engels as a platoon commander so that my mother would not be left alone. This made me very upset.
I entered the war in the last six months and did not accomplish any great deeds. My unit was a part of the 1st Belorussian Front. We were parachuted in the borderlands of Poland in early January 1945. The 3rd Shock Army, 57th Anti-Tank Brigade. I was the platoon commander of an artillery unit and had the command of ten men and two machine guns. My military experience began with the capture of Warsaw. When I told the Polish ambassador many years later in New York City that we took Warsaw not on January 17, as is commonly believed, but three days earlier, he was amazed. Indeed, the Soviet troops were in the city already on the 14th.
Then we entered Pomerania, merged with the 2nd Belorussian Front, and moved toward the Baltic Sea. From there we were quickly transferred to the area of the Seelower Heights, where we prepared for the crossing of the Oder.
“He didn’t accomplish any great deeds,” our hero regrets, forgetting about the enemy artillery destroyed by his unit in the battle of Berlin and the award he received for this - the Order of the Red Star. And Yury was only 20 years old at that time.
Love
While at the front, Drozdov met the love of his life.
- Lyudmila spent the whole war on the frontlines. We met in Poland, where I ended up in a hospital with eczema. My wife has had very difficult youth. She was not even 16 years old, when the Germans occupied her hometown of Nelidovo. She and her mother were able to get on an evacuation train and ended up in some remote village. Soon our sanitary units appeared there and set up a hospital where Lyudmila began to work as a nurse. She was a smart girl, and they began to use her as a special courier. She crossed the front line several times, and she never had any problems, although she was very cute. (Laughs.) So, she went all the way to Berlin with this military hospital and left the inscription “I was here!” on the wall of the Reichstag.
We got married in Berlin, she got married under her mother’s last name - Kachalovskaya, her father’s last name was Yudenich. And if someone found out that I had married a girl with such a last name [Yudenich was the last name of one of the commanders of the White Army], I’d never get a job in the state security service.
I have in my hands a photograph from 1946, taken in a German town, and I love looking at it: young Yury is smelling a small flower, held out by Lyudmila, and they both laugh. There is so much tenderness, lightness, and hope for a new, peaceful life in this photo...
While Yury Ivanovich and I are talking, he phones his wife several times and asks her how she is feeling: “I try to devote all my free time to her.”
Lyudmila Aleksandrovna shared the difficult life path of her husband - 35 years devoted to secret intelligence service, frequent separations, stress, moving from place to place... Yury Ivanovich said that his wife learned to recognize his mood by the sound of the engine of his car.
In 1966, in one of the countries where they were based, he couldn’t go to service the dead drop because of constant surveillance. His wife stepped in. When she returned, she gave him a container of photographic films with the words: “Now I know why you all get heart attacks.”
I ask Drozdov what he thinks the secret of family happiness is.
- Who knows? We quarreled and were sometimes bored with each other, but the family is important. When you have children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, you understand that you live for someone else.
Operational Assignments
- In 1945, we were all so carried away by our victorious advances. And not only us [the soldiers], but also our whole country was so inspired by the victory, and then by the reconstruction of the economy, that we missed to notice some very important things. Only years later, after reading the materials concerning the last months of the war and the U.S. reports from that time, I realized that our “allies” never stopped their activities against the USSR.
There are some very interesting documents from various time periods. For example, we got our hands on the correspondence of a British intelligence officer who helped the Americans create their National Security Agency. Churchill wrote to him in 1940: “We are going through a difficult time in Europe, could you ask Roosevelt to ask Hitler to suspend the advancement in the Balkans and speed up the events in Russia?” “Speed up!” This means that the decision to attack the USSR was made much earlier, and that our allies - the United States and Britain – not only knew about it, but were also vitally interested in it taking place... I’ll tell you even more: what we are experiencing right now was planned in the last months of the war.
All Drozdov’s post-war activities were aimed at ensuring the security of our country and opposing the plans of rival intelligence services.
In 1956, after graduating from the Military Institute of Foreign Languages, he began his operational career in the office of the KGB representative at the Ministry of State Security of the GDR in Berlin. From 1957 to 1962, he took part in the preparation of the operation to exchange the Soviet illegal intelligence officer Rudolf Abel for the American spy pilot [Francis Gary] Powers. He played the role of Abel’s German cousin, the clerk Jurgen Drews. He met Abel on that famous Berlin bridge and recalled that, unlike Powers, who was dressed in a coat and a fur hat given to him by our state security and looked very healthy, Abel looked emaciated and was released from American captivity in a prison robe.
I ask Yury Ivanovich whether he was good in his role as “a cousin.”
- Every intelligence officer should, undoubtedly, develop his acting talents. While studying at the artillery school in Kharkov, I also took part in the drama club, the head of which was Viktor Khokhryakov, who later left for Moscow and became a state-renowned actor. Under his leadership, we staged the play “The Little Muck,” and I must say that the skills I gained then turned out to be very useful to me later.
Once in order to complete the assignment of recruiting a West German intelligence officer, Drozdov had to play the role of ... a member of the neo-Nazi party, a former SS officer.
- Weren’t you uncomfortable or disgusted?
- In the role of this officer embedded in the neo-Nazi party, I even swore an oath of allegiance to the Fuhrer - laughs Yuri Ivanovich. - That was what the job required, one of the “lives” I invented. There were others. For example, when I recruited a female employee of the West German embassy in Vienna, I used both my artistic and psychological talents. There are no gray and faceless intelligence officers. Even if an officer seems like that, in fact he is simply putting on a “being invisible” disguise.
After Germany, Drozdov was sent to Beijing as a station chief of KGB foreign intelligence. The situation was far from simple - the peak of the Cultural Revolution, and on our border with China, there was a distinct “fog of war” ... On his return, Yury Ivanovich was personally received by Yury Andropov and the meeting lasted four hours.
I can’t help asking:
- Can the Chinese be regarded as reliable partners today? Aren’t we brought together by our “friendship against America”?
- This is something that people don’t talk about, Drozdov replies, but we have been living for almost 400 years without a peace treaty with China. And we’ll hardly ever sign it.
- Is it true that, while being a KGB station chief in the United States, you received a congratulatory letter from Mao Zedong on your birthday, in which your “personal, invaluable” contribution to the development of Soviet-Chinese relations was noted?
(Laughs.) - This was a prank performed by a wonderful intelligence officer, Genka Serebryakov. When he found out that my birthday was approaching, he concocted a teletype letter with congratulations from Mao Zedong and gave it to me. And for many years, people have been repeating this myth - everything was done so skillfully, so realistically.
Drozdov did not like to talk about the “American period” in his life. He worked in NYC under the cover of Soviet Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN (while in fact heading the KGB station) for more than four years. And it so happened that during this period, there was a big scandal: UN Deputy Secretary General for Political Affairs and for UN Security Council Affairs Arkady Shevchenko refused to return to the USSR from the U.S. He became the first Soviet defector-diplomat of such a high level. But Drozdov was suspicious of Shevchenko’s behavior even before that.
- We informed the foreign intelligence leadership of our suspicions and asked the Soviet Foreign Ministry to recall him to Moscow in order to avoid undesirable consequences.
However, Shevchenko was not recalled, which, according to Drozdov, was explained by the diplomat’s family ties with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrey Gromyko.
After this betrayal, it was very difficult to continue working in the United States, the FBI monitored his every step, and even resorted to light-sport airplanes.
Soon Drozdov returned home. And in November 1979, he was put in charge of the illegal intelligence department of the PGU (First Main Directorate, Directorate “S”), which he headed for 12 years. One of the most difficult challenges of his work was perhaps Afghanistan.
The Assault on [Hafizullah] Amin’s Presidential Palace
I interviewed several people who participated in this operation, and all of them spoke of Drozdov as a brilliant organizer: he was one of the planners of the storming of the presidential palace. According to my interlocutors, he deserved the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. They said that he gave it up in favor of the active participant in the operation, the future first commander of “Vympel,” Evald Grigorievich Kozlov. After all, the number of decorations was limited. For this unique operation, only four Hero’s titles were awarded...
But in addition to the presidential palace, our special forces took control of nine more objects in Kabul. This was preceded by many months of preparation: obtaining information, analyzing the situation, visual reconnaissance of objects, recruiting sources of information in the Tajbeg Palace itself, in the Afghan General Staff.
The veterans of the operation recall that before the assault, after the final briefing was over, there was a heavy silence in the room. The group understood that a battle would begin in a few minutes and that, perhaps, some of them would lose their lives. Drozdov broke the tension with one sentence: “Well, guys, now let’s fool around a bit!”
In general, everyone who knew him speaks of Yury Ivanovich’s human qualities in the same way: he was kind and fair. He visited the wounded and assisted the families of the dead. He lobbied for them to get decorations and awards. In particular, he lobbied for the legendary Gevork Andreyevich Vartanyan who was not even certified as an intelligence officer. Thanks to Drozdov, Vartanyan received the rank of colonel and the title of Hero of the Soviet Union for his work.
I cannot help asking Yury Ivanovich, was the Afghan adventure worth it?
- Yes, it was! The U.S. observation posts were already in northern Afghanistan, near our borders! The Americans conducted joint operations there with the Chinese, with whom we then also had tense relations. Pressured by the Americans, we missed the opportunity to monitor in depth what the Chinese were doing. In general, we had to keep being active in many directions at once.
Almost immediately after the Afghan operation, but long before the rise of international terrorism, Drozdov thought about creating a special unit capable of resisting the terrorist threat and able to perform top-secret and highly complex assignments abroad, near our borders. Yury Ivanovich was able to convince the chairman of the KGB Yury Andropov and, through him, the members of the Central Committee of the Politburo of the need to create a “sophisticated special force.” The group was supposed to be a kind of a mini-KGB, incorporating the skills of various units. The members had to have the skills of operational and illegal intelligence, which means that they had to be able to collect information while “remaining invisible,” or, conversely, to work undercover, carefully thinking over their cover stories, to know languages and be excellent psychologists while, at the same time, having airborne, underwater, mountain-climbing, radio communication and hand-to-hand combat skills and knowing how to use all types of weapons and explosives.
And so, on Drozdov’s initiative, the legendary “Vympel” was founded in 1981. The unit performed the most difficult military and intelligence assignments in Mozambique, Cuba, Vietnam, Angola, Nicaragua, Laos, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Jordan... However, it all ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1993, the unit refused to storm the Parliament building. President [Boris] Yeltsin did not forgive them this: by special decree, he put “Vympel” under the control of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Out of 660 “Vympel” members, only 49 agreed to the transfer.
At that time, Yury Drozdov had already been in retirement for two years.
Epilogue
He suffered greatly at the collapse of the once great country. I was told how hard he fought, how he prepared analytical reports - in particular, that there were nuclear plants on the territory of the USSR, including the Chernobyl nuclear plant, which operated the old-style nuclear reactors with a dangerous flaw in the reactor cooling system. The country’s leadership preferred to trust the estimates of scientists. And then, on April 26, 1986, the nuclear reaction in Chernobyl exploded.
Voluntarily leaving the post of the head of illegal intelligence, a month before the events of August 19, 1991, he proposed to the KGB chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, his plan to save the integrity of the Soviet state. But they did not listen to him again, and he could not do anything by himself.
- Were you not offended that the government ignored the information you obtained? - I ask Drozdov.
- I never allowed myself to be disappointed by the decisions of the leadership. That is how I was brought up. In general, I think that intelligence officers have the right to speak only about the enemy, and even that, only if allowed by the service. In all other cases, it is better to keep quiet.
Yury Ivanovich not only devoted his life to the interests of Homeland, but also he raised two sons to do the same:
- I didn’t have much time to spend with them because I was very busy, the hero of our story is being modest again, so I turned to the KGB leadership with a request to enroll my eldest son in the Higher School of the KGB. He studied Urdu and went to India for practical training. Later, he became a station chief in Pakistan. As for the younger one, he had his practical training in Afghanistan. He spent four years there during the most dangerous period of the war. He was in charge of the Pul-e-Charkhi prison in Kabul. After the KGB was broken up, he retired and got a job at a factory. And now he works in Bulgaria. Both of my sons are colonels. One of them is a great specialist for intelligence operations using modern technologies.
Finally, I asked him whether it was possible to educate such patriots in today’s Russia.
-My generation never had a desire to appropriate a single penny of government funds or get rich by stealing. We lived by our ideals. I really want to believe that the interests of our Homeland are important and meaningful for today’s generation. It is important to remember that Russia never had friends and probably never will. We are all responsible for our country.
