Last of the Cold War Spies (20 page)

Thelma Jackson, a 21-year-old maid, knocked several times on the door to 522 the next morning, Monday, February 10, at 9:30 A.M. When there was no answer, she used her passkey to open the door, although from the outside there was no way of telling if it was locked from the inside. In
other words, if Jackson had simply turned the handle, it may have opened, although she assumed it was locked.
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She entered the room. She was shocked to see a man lying face down on the bed, his head toward the foot of the bed. A pistol was on the floor. Jackson noticed the blood, then a wound in the right temple. A .130grain mushroom bullet had been fired into the temple. It had exploded out below the left ear, leaving a wound the size of a fist.

The Washington metropolitan police and the coroner were notified. Finding three notes, their quick, joint conclusion by 11:30 A.M., just two hours after Jackson found the body, was suicide. The room was ordered scrubbed clean, a job that was completed in an hour. Soon after that, room 522 was back on the hotel’s inventory of available rooms.

The suicide finding was soon disputed by Krivitsky’s lawyer, Paul Waldman, who arrived at 11:00 P.M. from New York. He viewed the body at the morgue and was suspicious about the head wounds. He noted that a self-inflicted wound would not have been made that way. The entry and exit holes of the mushroom bullet were consistent with a shot from the weapon held at least a yard from the head. To commit suicide this way would have meant Krivitsky’s holding the gun at full stretch with his right hand and well above his head, which would be awkward and less likely to succeed. A more certain way to commit suicide would be to hold the gun close to the temple. The recoil of the gun would have pushed it further to the right, but it was found to the left of the body. The lawyer was told that the ejected cartridge case, but not the bullet itself, was found.

Waldman consulted police and held a press conference. He called for an FBI investigation. But J. Edgar Hoover made it plain that there would not be one. He resented Krivitsky for daring to suggest that the United States was riddled with Soviet agents. As director of the bureau, he was not about to support that statement by looking for a gang of Stalin’s killers.
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Krivitsky was as unwanted in death as he was in life. The press furor that followed saw the coroner retract his suicide finding. Journalists converged on the Doberts’s farm. Eitel was sure he had committed suicide because he had written notes on Friday night. Yet he had not seen them. Mrs. Dobert hesitated at first, then agreed with her husband about the thought that he must have been planning to kill himself. It was enough for the police and the vacillating coroner, who once more issued a suicide finding.

The original notes—on plain paper headed “Charlottesville, Virginia”—were never delivered to the three intended recipients: Tonya, Waldham, and writer and journalist Suzanne La Follette. Instead they received translations. Waldham challenged the translations and had them revised.

The longest letter was in Russian addressed to Tonya and Alex:

These lines were typical of forced false confessions by countless Russians during the purges. The secret police branded them enemies of the Soviet people.

The letter to Waldman, in English, was briefer but added a strange postscript explanation for his actions:

All three recipients said that the syntax, postscripts, and general tone did not seem at all like Krivitsky’s style.

In 1996, Yuri Modin suggested in our interviews what many had suspected since 1941: Krivitsky had been murdered. Modin’s remarks to me were the first by a senior KGB operative admitting as much. He was supported by another ex-Russian spy who did not wish to be named. This is backed up by hints in secret Russian cables from Washington, which show that the death of Krivitsky was used as a warning to a defector, Viktor Kravchenko, from the Soviet Government Purchasing Commission. A message from the KGB in New York to Moscow remarks: “KOMAR [Kravchenko’s code name] is well informed about KRIVITSKY case.”
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Philby also gave some indication of foul play in his interviews with Genrihk Borovik. An exchange in his 1994 book,
The Philby Files,
is revealing: “We can assume that the OGPU [absorbed into the NVKD— the KGB’s forerunner—in July 1934] finished him off,” Borovik remarked when comparing Krivitsky to another defector, Orlov, who “was not harmed.”

“Krivitsky, unlike Orlov, betrayed many people, including me,” Philby responded with indignation. “It did not have tragic consequences for me, since he did not know my name or the paper where I worked. But if he had he would have betrayed me totally.”
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A possible scenario of the events of the night of February 9 is this: Bruesse; Mink; and a third man, Jack Parilla, a known assassin with the nickname “the Hunchback,” came to Washington on Friday, February 7, after a tip-off from Straight of Krivitsky’s movements. They did not need to follow him to Barboursville. If they knew of his plans to catch the last train to New York at 6:30 p.m. on Sunday, they only needed to watch Union Station.

They tailed him to the Bellevue and entered his room in one of several possible ways. They could have used a passkey kept in a closet on each floor, or they could have forced their way in. Bruesse was an expert locksmith who could have picked the lock to room 522. The three killers, under orders to make an assassination look like suicide, forced Krivitsky to write suicide notes by saying that if he did not obey, Tonya and Alex
would be murdered too. (That seemed to fit the tone of the note to them, especially the contradictory comment: “I want very badly to live, but I must not live any longer.”)

No patrons or staff at the hotel heard a noise, but a weapon with a silencer could have been used. There was no solid proof (proper ballistics were not carried out, nor were fingerprints taken thoroughly) that the gun found by Krivitsky’s side had been the one fired at him. Whichever way it happened, no sound of a shot is further evidence that it was not suicide.

Although there were no reported sightings of Bruesse in Washington, an FBI report said Mink was involved in stalking and killing Krivitsky. In addition, Parilla was reported there (by a witness to the senate subcommittee on security a few years later) from February 7 and through the weekend.
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Parilla was back in New York by February 13, drinking with merchant seamen at National Maritime Union headquarters.

“He loafed around for quite a while,” the witness reported. “He got drunk, became very vicious, and dropped a hint of murder to several of the trusted seamen, who were comrades at the time.”
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Despite all the questions about the death, and the many incoming reports to the FBI from agents suggesting foul play and evidence of it, Hoover refused to investigate. He used his autocratic power to shut down any attempts to portray it as other than suicide. It suited his political purposes at that time to brook no suggestion that the U.S. public was other than well protected against infiltration by foreign assassins. Meanwhile, three killers were free to roam the United States and the world, committing more mayhem.

The death meant that the biggest threat to Straight and the fellow members of his spy ring had been eliminated. Straight gave the impression that the event preyed on his mind to the extent that when an intruder tried to break into his house, he thought that the KGB was after him. But this was misleading. He was a member of the Cambridge ring and had helped in the assassination of Krivitsky. The KGB would have been pleased with his work.

Straight made out in his autobiography that he was fearful of the KGB because of what happened to Krivitsky.
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This was part of a cover for any Straight connection to the death. At no time had he made a serious attempt to leave the KGB. At this point he was deeply involved; he had nothing to fear from the KGB if he did his job.

Once Krivitsky had been eliminated, the assignment was over. Straight wasted no time in leaving State; his job was done. Only three days after Krivitsky’s body was found—on February 13—he landed this time at
The
New Republic
, which was always going to be a safe haven. Not long after taking up his job as a journalist, a short article appeared in the February 24, 1941, edition of the magazine, two weeks after Krivitsky’s demise:

To that point the item would have suited the sentiments of Stalinist agents. The irresponsible and insane traitor to the cause betrayed his comrades. The article could even have been construed as a warning to all those agents working for the KGB not to consider leaving Stalin’s service. But the next paragraph was more definite. It warned not to become involved in the KGB’s secret world: “We are beginning to learn that anybody who enters the secret service of a totalitarian ruler has already in a sense committed suicide. He is a dead man from the moment he takes the oath.”