When the KGB Sends Its B Team.

• Author: Rickert, Jonathan

Title: When the KGB Sends Its B Team

Author: Jonathan Rickert

During my foreign service tour in Moscow 1966-1968, embassy security regulations prohibited employees from traveling alone within the Soviet Union. We were warned that we risked being targeted by the KGB, whose operatives might attempt to compromise us in any number of ways.

Among those often needing a travel companion to comply with this regulation were the embassy's Publications Procurement Officers (PPOs), who traveled extensively within the country buying all sorts of books and other publications for various U.S. government organizations. And that is how I came to be invited to join PPO Bill Pryce on a book-buying trip to Ufa and Kazan in early December 1966.

On December 6, Bill and I flew from Sheremetyevo Airport in an AN-10 to Ufa, the capital of the Bashkiri Republic, over 700 miles southeast of Moscow, on the western side of the Ural Mountains. It was a cold, dirty, ramshackle city, with lots of poorly built, new apartment buildings mingling with many old, freestanding wooden houses that seemed destined for early demolition. Although it seemed a rather out-of-the-way place to look for publications, apparently the goal was to sweep up as much printed material as possible, including phone books.

Our rounds of the local bookstores completed, we repaired to our rooms at the Hotel Bashkiri, the only semi-decent-looking hotel in town. After freshening up, I joined Bill for dinner in the hotel's spacious but nearly empty restaurant. A sad sounding combo played oldies but goodies across the room. We were well into our forgettable meal when two young men approached our table and asked, in Russian, if they could join us, a not uncommon occurrence in the USSR in those days. We agreed and soon were engaged in conversation with them. They said that they were engineering graduates from Moscow who had been dispatched to Ufa as a form of national service for two or three years. They considered Ufa to be a godforsaken place and were eager to return to Moscow as soon as possible.

When our new tablemates discovered that we were Americans, they peppered us with questions about the United States. The only specific topics that I recall were Vietnam and the assassination of President Kennedy. The two Russians were polite and non-polemical, although predictably critical of U.S. actions in Vietnam; they opined that Lyndon Johnson must have engineered the President's death, since he had the most...