It was a bit of a charade; once one of them even smiled at me in a shrugging helpless way as if to say he knew it was silly but what could he do, he had his orders. I don’t imagine there was anything sinister in it; in a way it was a kind of courtesy they were doing me. I was a distinguished guest and it simply wouldn’t do to have some snarling KGB thug wrench the documents out of my hand and go riffling obviously through them to see what I had found. The effect was the same but they were trying to be polite about it. The result was a sort of comic pantomime in which we all knew what was going on but none of us said a word about it. Such are the devices of diplomacy.
I should have been more good-humored about it but I was engaged in what I thought of as a minor duplicity—I was still doing everything I could to mask my interest in Kolchak’s gold—and the surveillance meant I had to use even more caution in selecting the documents I wanted to see.
I did my best to deceive them while still managing to look at all the documents I thought might be relevant to the gold affair. I would sandwich a request for a potentially gold-related document into a multiple request for a whole group of documents, all very similar but the others being of no significance to me or to the gold. Thus if I wanted to look at one of von Geyr’s latest letters on the subject of the gold, I would request an entire folder of von Geyr’s reports. Twice I made a point of smudging thumbprints on documents that had nothing to do with gold.
Steadily I formed a picture of the events east of Kiev that had been precipitated by the Krausser dispatch in 1942. I put the new facts together with those from the American and British archives; together they confirmed and expanded what Haim Tippelskirch had told me in Tel Aviv. His aged ramblings had been vehemently querulous and I’d been tempted to discount much of what he’d said (partly because even Haim admitted a lot of it was hearsay); but everything I’d learned since then only added proof to his story.
Details were missing. Some of the evidences were mildly contradictory but that was only to be expected. There was still work to do; but by the end of my second week in Sebastopol I knew how and when the Germans had removed the gold from Kolchak’s iron mine and brought it west across southern Siberia into Russia; I had enough clues to make a shrewd guess at what had happened to it after that, and for the first time I saw that it might be possible to find out exactly how it had disappeared—and where.
* The Istoriya Velikoi Otechestvennoi Volny Sov. Soyuza is the Communist Party’s massive and monumental official history of the war. It was published during the Khrushchev regime and is characterized by a distressing number of bald-faced, self-serving lies and distortions. Still, it is the best basic source on World War II in Russia. Elsewhere in his notes, Bristow indicates he had studied the Istoriya at length, and that part of his purpose in Russia was to confirm from the primary field sources some of the statements he thought suspect in the Istoriya.—Ed.
* It is obvious that the Soviets regarded Bristow as a test case. This explains why he was kept under such close supervision and surveillance. Spy fiction to the contrary, most visitors to the USSR are not shadowed and tailed twenty-four hours a day. Not even the KGB has that much manpower.—Ed.
* A battle that took place in 1855 during the Crimean War. Mention “Sebastopol” today to a university history class and it is still that nineteenth-century siege that comes to mind, even though it was insignificant by comparison with that of World War II. It was partly to rectify this imbalance of geo-historical perspective that Bristow was writing his book on the 1942–1943 Crimean campaign and the siege which literally destroyed the city of Sebastopol.—Ed.
Timoshenko had very kindly offered to make regular visits to the offices of the two Sebastopol newspapers to see if my notices in them had brought in any responses. After my first ten days in the city I had accumulated a little stack of letters—seven or eight, of which about half had come from addresses in the city and the others from outlying villages.
On Friday evening* Timoshenko drove me to my first meeting and we talked for several hours with a sixty-eight-year-old retired Red Army major who had participated in the final weeks of the decisive Russian counteroffensive that had driven the Germans out of the Crimea. His anecdotes were useful, he had a good wry sense of humor, and he gave me the names and addresses of three fellow veterans in the Sebastopol area. I counted it a well spent evening.
Saturday we went quickly from one interview to a second to a third; and a telephone call at lunchtime established a fourth meeting for me, after dinner, with one of the retired captains whose name I had obtained only the previous day.
It was a full day and I gained a good deal of information, particularly from one factory foreman who had driven a tank in the war. He was one of those people who had a fascinating memory for the kind of detail a writer is avid to have.
I had arranged by telegraph two Sunday meetings with correspondents from nearby towns. Timoshenko collected me very early in the chill morning and we drove out of the city at an hour when it was still necessary to use headlights.
Timoshenko participated in all those interviews—mostly as a silent observer; now and then he would offer a question and sometimes it was a question that made sense. I’m sure he had orders not to let me out of his sight. But he was a genial companion. So far as I know, he wasn’t armed; and I’m quite certain his masters had not told him to eavesdrop on my interviews for purposes of censoring them. He didn’t have the sensitivity for that—although I suppose it is possible he had some sort of miniature transmitting device or recorder hidden away somewhere in his bulky clothing.
In any case I wasn’t inhibited by his presence. In those interviews I had no secrets; I’d resolved to play the game by the host country’s rules.
Anyhow I expected no information on the subject of the gold to come out of these interviews. These people were all Russians; presumably the Russians had known nothing at all about the gold episode or the German attempt to spirit the treasure out of the country.
My first Sunday interview was something of a washout. He was an old man who ran a dairy farm about fifteen miles from the edge of the city. He had served seven years in the army—most of them as a cook in a regimental field mess. He was proud to be a veteran and, although he didn’t seem overly indoctrinated with Communist notions, he was nevertheless a flag-waver at heart and his rambling reminiscences were all designed to laud the heroism of Russian soldiers and the glory of the motherland. He lacked the anecdotal spirit and a sense of detail; he told me far more than I wanted to know about the operation of a field kitchen; his recounting of his only real battle experiences—emergencies when every warm body available had been pressed into rifle service against German attacks—was so subjective it was useless, and had the unmistakable flavor of habitual repetition and embellishment.
Ordinarily I wouldn’t have been disappointed. You expect bad interviews and bad interview subjects. You listen to them, you thank them kindly and you go home. Maybe you use one or two lines of the material they gave you. It’s all part of the job and I’d been prepared for a much poorer average than I’d obtained thus far; one dud out of six is much better than usual. But I couldn’t help chafing because my time was so limited and I couldn’t afford to waste it on fruitless trips and courtesies.
We left as soon as possible but not before the old farmer had insisted on feeding us a hearty lunch heavily lubricated with dark ale. Timoshenko must have consumed at least half a gallon of it and his driving was noticeably less precise when we started down the road toward our second rendezvous. Once he almost ran into a farm cart that was wobbling down the road on enormous solid wooden wheels.