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Friends United Meeting |
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May 1999
Adventures of an Innocent American Professor with the CIA and KGB
By William Edgerton
"Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely."
From a letter written in 1887 to Bishop Mandell Creighton by John Emerich Dalberg, Lord Acton (1834-1902)
The sociology and semantics of words is a strange thing. For example, in every well-ordered society it is taken for granted that some kind of ministry of security is indispensable. But how is it possible to determine when security becomes insecure? And when is it outright dangerous?
After the end of the Second World War, when Stalin had seized control of nine formerly independent countries in Central and Eastern Europe, the United States and the independent countries of Western Europe naturally reacted seriously. From the summer of 1944 until the summer of 1946 I personally witnessed the spread of Stalin's power. As a Quaker, with much the same kind of commitment to nonviolence that Russians were familiar with in the followers of Leo Tolstoy, I could not allow myself to join in the military effort against Nazi Germany, but at the same time I could not allow myself to sit at home and do nothing useful during that period of crisis. What I did was volunteer for two years of relief work organized by American and English Quakers among the victims of war. During my first year I worked on the Egyptian desert in a camp for thousands of Yugoslav refugees who had fled their homeland to escape the Nazi occupation. After the end of the war I spent the last six months of 1945 in occupied Germany, mainly searching and caring for foreign children whom the Nazis had taken out of the countries they had invaded and helping to restore the children to their families. I spent the first six months of 1946 in Poland, helping to organize Quaker relief work among the Polish war victims in two badly devastated parts of that country.
Soon after returning to the United States and resuming my work as a professor of French and Spanish at a Quaker college, I received an unexpected visit one day from a young man who identified himself as a representative of the United States Naval Intelligence, one of the ancestors of the CIA. He knew that I had just returned from Poland, and he said that if I had any maps or photographs of Polish docks and harbor installations, his organization would be grateful if I would let them make copies. He assured me that they would keep all this entirely confidential. In reply to him I said: "My fellow Quakers and I went to Poland not only to help relieve the sufferings of the victims of war but also to help create the mutual understanding and trust that are so greatly needed in order to create lasting peace. I am unwilling to cooperate with your organization in demonstrating that the Polish Communists were correct when they suspected us Quaker relief workers of being American spies." For the past fifty years the memory of that young man's response to my polite refusal has filled me with gratitude for our democratic freedoms, however imperfect they may still be. He appeared to understand my reasons for refusing his request, and he departed without making any attempt, either through arguments or threats, to change my mind.
A year later, in 1947, the threat of continued Stalinist expansion led the United States to organize the Central Intelligence Agency. It was empowered to gather information abroad about possible threats to the security of the United States and report to the President, while responsibility for gathering information about the nation's internal security was delegated to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Stalin's threat to world security was as real as Hitler's had been, even though it took somewhat different forms. In order to respond to that threat, the CIA was gradually given increasing freedom to spend the funds in its budget without accounting for them. At this point the CIA could not avoid illustrating the profundity of Lord Acton's observation: "Absolute power corrupts absolutely."
In the early l950s several of my colleagues specializing in Soviet studies began having mysterious difficulty with their subscriptions to Soviet periodicals which they needed in their research. We suspected that our government was interfering with our mail, but we had no way to prove it, and we were greatly irritated.
In 1955, when the entrance gates to the Soviet Union were opened a little wider, I was one of the first American scholars to get in. While I was there, I decided to make an experiment. I bought a dull textbook on Soviet economics and sent it by registered mail to my home address in the United States. Then at the end of my two months in Russia I deliberately returned home by way of Spain, where Franco was still in charge of his dictatorship, so as to compare conditions in the two countries. In Madrid I bought a Spanish book called Moscow Today. It was dedicated to the notorious American senator Joseph McCarthy, and in the first chapter I found a reference to The New York Times as "The central organ of Jewish cabalistic Masonic crypto-communism." I sent that book also to my home address by registered mail. The Spanish book arrived at my home in exactly one month-a normal period of time for shipments by surface mail-but the weeks passed with no sign of my dull Soviet economics book. Finally, after waiting in vain almost three months, I wrote a letter in Russian and addressed it to the post office on Gorky Street in Moscow, from which I had mailed the book, giving the number of my registration receipt and asking the postal authorities to begin a search for it. Three days after I sent off that letter, the book was delivered to my home. It happened so quickly that I assumed it was pure coincidence. I could not believe that my letter addressed to the Moscow post office could have played any role in this matter. What I did not know then, however, was that the CIA at that time was not only keeping track of printed matter coming from the Soviet Union to the United States; it was also opening private letters going in both directions. Opening or interfering with private letters had been strictly forbidden by United States law ever since 1878, and it carried a penalty of up to $2,000.00 in fines and imprisonment of up to five years. Evidently, some CIA bureaucrat in New York intercepted my letter addressed to the post office on Gorky Street, recognized that I was about to catch the CIA in this illegal action, and quickly dispatched my dull economics book to me.
Subsequent investigations by serious journalists, beginning in the 1970s, have led to dozens of books and thousands of pages of published government documents about the activities of the CIA, which are widely available at present in American libraries. We now know that between 1953 and 1973, in a secret operation with the code name BILINGUAL, the CIA opened, read, and copied more than 200,000 private letters sent by or received by American citizens and residents. When this scandal became known, the United States Congress passed the Freedom of Information and Privacy Act, which gave American citizens the right to obtain copies of their dossiers in the archives of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I requested copies of my dossiers and received more than 100 documents dating from 1950 to 1973. They included photocopies of my correspondence with Academician M. P. Alekseev; with I. S. Zilbershtein, the founder and editor-in-chief of the scholarly Literaturnoe nasledstvo [Literary heritage] series; with the literary scholar Boris Egorov and other Russian intellectuals; as well as my wife and children, my parents, and "a Philip Mosely," one of the most prominent American specialists on the Soviet Union--who was obviously unknown to the bureaucratic ignoramus in the CIA who intercepted the post card Professor Mosely had sent me in 1956 from Moscow on his first visit to Russia since the end of the war. Nowadays, when friends from Russia or other East European countries visit our home, I often take pleasure in showing them my dossiers from the CIA and FBI as evidence that it really is possible for an aroused public opinion in a democratic country to keep its government's secret police from sinking into "absolute corruption."
Now I shall tell about my adventures with the KGB. Unfortunately, I have never been able to write to the KGB, as I did to the CIA and the FBI, and demand that they send me a copy of all the documents they have in my dossier; and I have very little first-hand information to offer in this memoir. Indeed, in all my life I have never met a single Russian who admitted that he was a "KGBeatnik."
I first learned that the KGB considered me a dangerous man from the well-known Russian linguist Igor Aleksandrovich Melchuk. In 1978, not long after he emigrated and settled in Canada as a professor at the University of Montreal, he was invited to give a lecture at Indiana University. At the end of his lecture I went up and greeted him, giving him my name and reminding him that I had once met him at his institute in Moscow.
"Edgerton!" he exclaimed. "If you only knew what difficulties you had caused me!"
I expressed surprise and asked him how. In reply his story came pouring out. In the autumn of 1963, soon after he returned from the Sixth International Congress of Slavists, which had taken place in Bulgaria, he was summoned by a KGB man who identified himself as "Petr Andreevich Grinev" (a name all too obviously borrowed from a character in Pushkin's novel The Captain's Daughter), and was asked to name all the Americans he knew. He started with two of the most prominent, Roman Jakobson, Dean Worth....
"And William Edgerton?"'
He said that he knew Edgerton was the head of the American delegation at the Bulgarian congress but they had never met each other. The KGB man then pulled out a photograph showing Melchuk and me standing side by side. It had been clipped from a big group photograph of the hundreds of participants at the Bulgarian Congress of Slavists. Neither of us was aware of the other. After the Congress my wife and I had gone directly to Moscow, where I spent four months of research on the nineteenth-century writer Nikolai Leskov as a guest of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
The KGB man then told Melchuk: "He's a very dangerous man, that Edgerton is-a great enemy of our country. He's now in Moscow, doing some sort of work on Leskov. You must help us...."
Melchuk was embarrassed and apologetic as he related this whole story. "You may remember," he said, "that I invited you to visit me at my institute and all I asked you to do was take some of my linguistic publications to Professor Householder, at Indiana University, and ask him to put me on the list for publications from his linguistic group. I want you to know that I left Moscow after that, on a research trip to Novosibirsk, and stayed away for four months so that the KGB could not attempt to use me to report on you." I tried to reassure him, telling him that I understood the difficult position in which he found himself.
Melchok also told me that the KGB had made some sort of difficulties for another Russian scholarly acquaintance, who had been assigned by my sponsor, Academician V. V. Vinogradov, to assist me in making contacts with Soviet archives in connection with my research.
At the time I learned this from Melchuk, my other acquaintance had emigrated to Israel and I was already in correspondence with him. When I told him about my conversation with Melchuk, he wrote me a very interesting letter in reply:
"What Igor Melchuk told you--and in general, except for a few details, this whole story about the character from The Captain's Daughter-was already well known to me. It is true that I didn't know about the quarrel between Vinogradov and Anisimov; but when Vinogradov asked me to serve as your contact with the archives, he said to me: "Of course, Edgerton should have been assigned to the care of Anisimov's Institute of World Literature, but Anisimov refused. He thinks Edgerton is a spy. And so we will sponsor him in our institute." As for that Grinev, he had two or three conversations with me. I didn't want to disturb and upset you, and so I told you nothing about it. That Grinev (who, by the way, is now in the next world) was an ignorant fool. He kept trying to find out from me who this Leskov was, and kept asking why Edgerton was so interested in him, and wasn't he using Leskov as a cover for "his other interests." By the way, he knew that your wife had visited an English-language class in some school here. I explained to him that this was a purely professional interest. He was clearly dissatisfied with me, especially after I refused to invite you and your wife to our home or to the theater, so that they could get into your room at the hotel. For that reason I was obliged to forego the pleasure of having you as our guests. By the way, I understand that he made that same proposal to other people. When I asked him outright what grounds he had for distrusting you, he answered with just one sentence: "He comes to the Soviet Union too often." I had to explain to him that your scholarly work requires the use of Soviet archives, that you have no choice, no other possibility of getting acquainted with the materials you need.
"In general, all this is both sad and comical. But I think it is now merely history, and you have no need to feel anxious about coming back to Russia. I am confident that they have long ago lost interest in you in that regard."
A third Russian-one of my closest friends-gave me the most amusing account of all about the machinations of the man who called himself Grinev. Since this friend is now dead, I do not hesitate to repeat his account in some detail:
"We know that Edgerton is a spy," said the KGB man, "and we want you and your wife to invite him and his wife to the Praga Restaurant for a long, leisurely dinner so that we can get into their hotel room and find out what he is up to."
"The Praga Restaurant!" my friend exclaimed. "That's expensive-I couldn't afford that."
"Never mind," said the KGB man, "we'll pay the bill."
And so they continued their conversation. My friend said: "You tell me you know that Edgerton is a spy. How do I know somebody won't accuse me five years from now of having associated with an American spy? Then I'll be in real trouble!"
"Don't worry," said the KGB man. "We'll fix up the records so that everything will be perfectly clear."
After still further discussion my friend ended by saying: "I will have to talk this over with my wife."
"All right," said the KGB man. "You talk it over with her, and then come back and we'll work out the arrangements."
Then my friend said to me, "Now, Bill, you know my wife--she's a smart woman. I went home and told her the whole story and said: 'What shall we do?" She thought a few moments and then replied: 'I'll tell you what: go back and tell him you told your wife all about it--and she went into hysterics and you couldn't do a thing with her.' And Bill, you know, I did it--and it worked!"
Now we come to the most comical part of this whole account. Among the photocopies of papers in my dossier which Congress required the CIA and FBI to send to me upon my request, I have a message transmitted by a CIA agent to the FBI complaining that "Edgerton has been openly criticizing CIA efforts to contact students who may be traveling or studying in the Soviet Union. In this connection he has gone so far as to transmit letters to various professors throughout the country in which he attacks CIA!" Actually, I did not attack the CIA. During one year when I served as acting chairman of the Inter-University Committee on Travel Grants, which was in charge of scholarly exchanges with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, I merely wrote letters to my colleagues saying that CIA headquarters had promised the scholarly community that it would not try to make use of scholarly exchange programs with the Soviet Union for purposes of intelligence; and therefore, I said, if any student or professor should be contacted by any CIA agent, he should refuse to cooperate with the agent and should report this incident to the Inter- University Committee. Now here is the most ironical part of the incident. The CIA sent this message complaining about me to the FBI on November 14, 1963-at the very time when the KGB was so convinced that I myself was an American spy that it attempted to persuade at least three Russian acquaintances of mine to cooperate in an effort to find out what kind of espionage I was engaged in!
What conclusion can we draw from this morality tale in the genre of political literature? I began this memoir by quoting Lord Acton's famous statement: "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely." I end with another famous statement by a prominent Irish statesman, John Philpot Curran (1750-1817): "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." If every state feels itself obliged to have some kind of CIA or KGB, then its citizens must make sure that the power of their government's secret police is strictly limited by a system of laws that will protect all citizens against any abuses by that secret police.
William Edgerton is a member of Bloomington Friends, in Bloomington, Indiana. Identical versions of this article were published in Russian in Moscow in August 1998 and in English one month later in the U.S. journal Russian History, and is reproduced here, with minor typographical corrections, by permission.
Copyright (c) 1999 Friends United Meeting