Stalin's Daughter (36 page)

She decided to take only her small suitcase, in which she packed a guesthouse towel, the soap dish, a pair of shoes, a summer coat, and the bag in which she had carried the urn of Brajesh Singh’s ashes. Into this she put her manuscript.
¹⁴
She unpacked her large suitcase, scattering its contents about, so that to anyone looking into her room, it would appear as if she were still in the process of packing. On the bed lay her presents for her children: a hookah from Benares and gold embroidered slippers for Joseph and his wife, bracelets from Lucknow for Katya. She doubted they would ever get those presents, and for a moment, her resolution faltered.
¹⁵

It was shortly after six p.m. She went to call the taxi. It was dark under the stairs. She fumbled at the numbers. The dispatcher asked where she was. The Russian Embassy? No, the Russian Guesthouse.

She waited at the gate. No taxi came. Embassy guests passed in cars. Her terror built; she was afraid that Preeti would arrive to pick her up for dinner, that she would be noticed loitering. Everything would fall apart. After twenty minutes, she phoned again. A cab appeared. She returned to the guesthouse
for her small suitcase and then climbed into the backseat. “Do you know the American Embassy?” she asked. “Why, yes,” the driver said, surprised, “it’s just nearby.” But as if he understood what she was up to, he first turned into a dark alley, passed the Soviet compound, and only then entered the long driveway of the US Embassy. She glanced at the beautiful pool. Suddenly she was standing at the bottom of the wide staircase. She climbed it on shaky legs. The young marine guard got up from his desk and unlocked the door. As he tried to explain that the embassy was closed at this hour, she showed him her Soviet passport. Without speaking he led her to a small room, sat her down, and told her to wait. Then he disappeared into the far reaches of the building.

PART THREE
Flight
to
America

Chapter 16
Italian Comic Opera

The CIA officer Robert Rayle, posted to the embassy in Delhi, was charged with spiriting Svetlana out of India before the Soviets discovered that she had defected.

T
he ten-hour time difference between Washington and New Delhi worked in Svetlana’s favor. She was already in the air on her way to Rome when the diplomatic machinery in Washington went into overdrive. Undersecretary of State Foy Kohler
was obviously angry at Ambassador Bowles’s precipitate decision to help the defector. He began damage control immediately.

On March 6, Secretary of State Dean Rusk sent a secret flash telegram to Llewellyn Thompson, the US ambassador to the Soviet Union, to inform him that Svetlana Iosifovna Stalin, daughter of Joseph Stalin, had requested asylum in the United States. She was traveling on an open ticket to Rome in the company of an embassy officer. She had no reservation beyond Rome. Rusk explained:

Ambassador Reinhardt [US ambassador to Italy] has been advised that we feel it would be undesirable for Svetlana to proceed to the US, both politically and from point of view of her own security. We consider it urgent that every effort be made arrange other safer asylum in Switzerland, Spain, or Italy and have asked Ambassador Reinhardt to make every effort to have her persuaded that such a course [is] in her best interest.
¹

Dean Rusk phoned President Lyndon Johnson at 4:30 p.m. that day to brief him on the situation.
²

On March 7, Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson sent a return telegram from Moscow to advise Dean Rusk: “The more we can disengage from this operation the better from point of view of our relations with Soviets. They will in any event blame U.S. for facilitating subject’s departure from India and possibly charge us with kidnapping.”
³

Svetlana’s timing was terrible. Though she may have been the most famous defector ever to denounce Communism and, under different circumstances, would have been an invaluable propaganda tool in the Cold War standoff between the United States and the USSR, she had chosen the wrong moment. The
Johnson administration was in the midst of ratifying a consular convention with the Soviets.
⁴

The convention was intended to establish consular functions in both countries. It would give full immunity from criminal prosecution to consular officers and staff, and ensure the protection of nationals. Each government would be notified of the arrest of one of its citizens within two or three days. At that time, a US citizen visiting the USSR could be held incommunicado for nine months or more awaiting charges. Approximately eighteen thousand Americans traveled on business or tourist visas to the USSR annually. But the ratification of the convention, first signed in 1964, had been rough. A bloc of senators had stalled it, citing the Red peril and suggesting it would open vast opportunities for Russian secret agents to operate in the United States. At that very moment, the treaty was being debated in the Senate, and the last thing Rusk and his staff wanted was a famous defector derailing the process.

How seriously both governments took the treaty is clear from the gestures of goodwill each offered. A few months earlier, a young Arkansan, Buel R. Wortham, had been sentenced to three years in a Russian labor camp on charges of “changing dollars into black market rubles, and stealing a cast-iron bear from a Leningrad hotel.” On March 11, five days after Svetlana’s defection, the Soviet Court of Appeal reversed the sentence, releasing Wortham with a fine of 5,000 rubles. On the American side, Igor Ivanov, a Soviet agent convicted of spying in 1964 and sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment, was currently on bail pending an appeal for executive clemency. The Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, had made it clear that because of the reversal on Wortham’s case, the Soviet Union expected a “certain amount of credit” toward clemency for Ivanov.
⁵

Aleksei Kosygin, chairman of the Council of Ministers, was set to arrive in the United States in late June for discussions on everything from the Mideast to the Vietnam War to arms control. Détente was in the air. Svetlana was not just an inconvenience; she was a threat. Harboring this high-profile defector might set things back irrevocably. The Johnson administration didn’t need her on its hands. She had to be contained.

Even as Bob Rayle and Svetlana were in midflight, the CIA station chief in Rome called the head of the Italian intelligence service, Admiral Eugenio Henke, to say that the CIA had a defector coming in and needed the Italians’ help. “You wake me up in the middle of the night to tell me that?” Henke had replied. “Yah, well, let me tell you who it is,” the CIA head replied. Henke was furious. “OK,” he said, “she can come in, but she’s got to leave tomorrow.”
⁶
He said he’d wait until the morning to tell the minister of foreign affairs, Amintore Fanfani, who would not be pleased. The Communists at that time had a strong delegation in the Italian parliament and, if urged on by the Soviets, could make a lot of trouble for the Christian coalition government in power.

As Bob Rayle and Svetlana stepped off the Qantas flight in Rome at six a.m. on March 7, Rayle was convinced that this was just a stopover and that they would proceed immediately to the United States. He was shocked, then, when the deputy chief of his office in Rome met them at the arrivals gate with the bad news.

Rayle was informed that the State Department was categorically refusing to allow Svetlana to proceed to the United States. Foy Kohler was claiming that relations with the USSR were warming up. There was even the possibility of a
thaw.
Rayle and many of his colleagues believed that this thaw was “wishful thinking and existed mostly in Kohler’s imagination.”
⁷
But Kohler’s decision meant that Svetlana was grounded. From the
airport, Rayle and Svetlana were conducted to a safe house, a small apartment in Rome, where they settled in to wait.

When Admiral Henke informed Fanfani that morning that Stalin’s daughter had landed in Italy, Fanfani exploded. “Get those people out of this country immediately and I don’t want there to be any evidence that they were actually in the country.” Admiral Henke replied, “OK, technically we’ll say that the International Transit at the airport in Rome is extended to include the international apartment where they are temporarily housed.”
⁸
By this ruse, Svetlana and Rayle would never
legally
be in Italy.

During the next few days, the State Department contacted the governments of Australia and New Zealand, but both refused Svetlana asylum. South Africa was willing to take her in, but given its history of apartheid, she refused to consider it.

As Svetlana and Rayle waited in their safe house guarded by Italian security officers, word came from the Swiss that they would consider accepting Svetlana for a short term. In keeping with their tradition of neutrality, they insisted that her visit remain private and that she make no political statements. This condition of silence was exactly what the State Department wanted. Walt Rostow, special assistant to the president, wrote to President Johnson: “About the lady, we can relax. Switzerland has agreed to take her.”
⁹

But the Swiss decision could not be confirmed until the Swiss Council (or cabinet) met, which took several days. The Italians were furious at the delay, but as Rayle put it, “Admiral Henke was unwilling to arrest us and deport us.”
¹⁰
The State Department promised the Italians that if the Swiss didn’t come through by Friday morning, the two fugitives would leave immediately for the United States.

Over the next few days, Rayle and Svetlana became friends. Their Italian flat had a small sitting room and one bedroom,
assigned to Svetlana, and the phone rang constantly. With each phone call, Rayle looked paler and more distraught, but he was pleasantly surprised by Svetlana’s tranquillity. She later said, “I had been trained not to make decisions for myself, to wait and to be patient, above all to remain well-mannered.”

Rayle was amused that every morning Stalin’s daughter made him breakfast, prepared meals from the groceries delivered by the security guard, and washed the dishes. When they had Chianti for dinner, she recalled that her father had loved good wines and knew all the best brands and years. He found her very intelligent. She was “not spoiled or demanding,” as one might expect of the princess in the Kremlin. Though the boredom in the apartment was excruciating, they had good laughs together.

She told Rayle that her defection had been an impulsive act taken in rage and frustration. Had she returned home, she was certain she would have been punished for her deliberate disobedience in extending her stay in India. Her passport would have been confiscated. With her defection, she had slapped the Soviet government in the face. She had fooled them all. But she now began to think of the revenge the Soviets might exact.

Rayle watched her fall into moments of deep sadness as she spoke of her son, Joseph, and her daughter, Katya, whom she had left behind. She had convinced herself they would be all right.

In a dark moment, she sat down and wrote them a six-page letter:

MARCH
9, 1967

My Dearest Children, Kate, Helen [Joe’s wife Elena], and Joe!

I am afraid that all sorts of lies will be told to you—and
to everybody—about me. Perhaps you will be told that I’d become mad, or that I’ve been kidnapped, or that I am no more. Do not believe anything. I want to explain myself how the decision not to return to Russia has come to me. I did never expect to do so when I was leaving Moscow in December. Then I have not even taken your photographs with me….

I could live in Russia—as many others are doing—being a hypocrite, hiding my true opinions. More than a half of our people live like that. We have no opportunity to criticize, we have no press, no freedoms, and also nobody wants to risk. Everyone has a family, children, a job, which is too dangerous to lose. I’ve lived like that for many years and could live still longer—but the fate has made me to do my resolute choice….

My husband’s death changed my nature. I feel it impossible to be silent and tolerant anymore. It is impossible to be always a slave…. My sweet darlings … please keep peace in your hearts. I am only doing what my conscience orders me to do.

Your mother
¹¹

When Svetlana asked the Americans to send her letter to her children, she was told it was too political. The letter was never delivered.