Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe

by Valentina Glajar, Alison Lewis, Corina L. Petrescu Narrated by James Anderson Foster, Christa Lewis

Overview

During the Cold War, stories of espionage became popular on both sides of the Iron Curtain, capturing the imagination of readers and filmgoers alike as secret police quietly engaged in surveillance under the shroud of impenetrable secrecy. And curiously, in the post-Cold War period there are no signs of this enthusiasm diminishing.



The opening of secret police archives in many Eastern European countries has provided the opportunity to excavate and narrate forgotten spy stories for the first time. Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe brings together a wide range of accounts compiled from the East German Stasi, the Romanian Securitate, and the Ukrainian KGB files. The stories are a complex amalgam of fact and fiction, history and imagination, past and present. These stories of collusion and complicity, betrayal and treason, right and wrong, and good and evil cast surprising new light on the question of Cold War certainties and divides.

Editorial Reviews

Sara Jones

“This is indispensable reading for anyone interested in representations of espionage in the Cold War and beyond.”—Sara Jones, author of The Media of Testimony: Remembering the East German Stasi in the Berlin Republic

Katherine Verdery

“In these fascinating papers we see some of the insights gained from new literary readings of those [secret police] files, and new artistic representations of those classic Cold War figures: spies, secret police officers, and informers. A revelatory collection!”—Katherine Verdery, Julien J. Studley Distinguished Professor, Graduate Center, City University of New York

Stephen Parker

“A great intervention by a team of experts equipped to deliver a much needed comparative perspective.”—Stephen Parker, author of Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life 

Lavinia Stan

“Presenting a gallery of well-chosen portraits of secret agents who worked for communist East German, Romanian, and Soviet surveillance agencies, this book illuminates the tenuous relationship between memory, discourse, and politics, mediated by the extant secret archives and movies. The chapters document Cold War spies whose complex lives and morally questionable choices enhance our understanding of life under communist dictatorship.”—Lavinia Stan, professor of political science at St. Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia

Susan Signe Morrison

“Using fascinating, specific examples that make observers and the observed come alive in the reader’s mind, Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe reveals the dynamic power play among multiple parties who constituted the oppressive political web throughout Eastern Europe and the USSR during the Cold War.”—Susan Signe Morrison, professor of English at Texas State University

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170954414
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	08/01/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The File Story of the Securitate Officer Samuel Feld

Valentina Glajar

On February 29, 1960, Major Samuel Feld, a Jewish-Romanian secret police officer, was discharged from MAI (Ministerul Afacerilor Interne [Ministry of Internal Affairs]) Region Stalin (Brasov). The decision number 1426 to release him cites the Statute of the Officers' and Generals' Corps, Article 52, paragraph d. Up until his discharge, he had been the chief of the counterespionage and interrogation services. A closer look at his file explains this dismissal and the reasons behind the official citation as "grave transgressions" that are now partly redacted in his file. His failure to denounce crimes, joining the Securitate under false pretexts, his disrespect for the workers' and peasants' classes, his Zionist ties, and his relatives abroad were among the main accusations that led to Feld's downfall. As was customary in such cases, Feld was also expelled from the Romanian Communist Party and had to return all the medals and honors he had received during his eleven-year career in the service of the Securitate. Finally, he also signed a statement that he would not divulge any professional secrets he had been privy to as an officer and interrogation expert of MAI Region Stalin.

Feld belonged to the first generation of Romanian secret service (Securitate) agents during the Stalinist years of the Cold War. The political changes in Romania at that time called for a restructuring of the intelligence organizations that would reflect the needs of the newly proclaimed People's Republic in 1947 and the demands of the Soviet military presence on its territory. Thus the Securitate had a particular type of spy in mind: young individuals (up to thirty years of age) with a "healthy" (nonbourgeois) social origin, who exhibited feelings of "devotion" to the Communist cause and "manifested love" and appreciation for the Soviet Union (Banu 2001, 89). These criteria are not surprising, as Soviet officers — also called counselors or advisers (consilieri) — closely supervised the selection and recruitment of this first generation of Securitate officers. These new agents came mainly from poor working-class families, and their education level was in many cases very low, at times just a handful of elementary classes. As a result obedient and uneducated individuals from a politically "healthy" social background joined the secret service and were later promoted less on the value of their achievements but rather on the desired characteristics and aforementioned credentials on their résumés. As historian Florian Banu shows, the above qualifications proved an ill-fated combination that, coupled with frequent moves and a sense of careerism, led in many cases to extraconjugal affairs (in the lingo of the Securitate: "deviation from the proletarian moral") and chronic alcoholism (2001, 90). This, as Banu further explains, led in turn to the violence and brutality that would come to characterize Securitate officers of the Romanian Stalinist era. As I will show in this chapter, Samuel Feld's background fitted the required profile only to some extent, as his own Securitate files reveal. While he could claim a healthy social background and an apparent devotion to the Communist Party, his education and superior intelligence, coupled with his Jewish origins, later proved to have fateful consequences for his career and, indeed, his life.

When read meticulously and against the grain, Feld's Securitate files reveal a multilayered story in the highly politicized context of Stalinist Romania. The reality of this story was shaped and re-created by various actors, not least by our protagonist, who tailored his biography in favorable ways to fit ideologies at certain times during his career. Denouncers or fellow Securitate officers contributed to this story and were instrumental in undoing our protagonist's version of events. The deictic presence of investigators exemplified through the red markings on the documents reveal a third dimension to the story, one that at times invoked their attitude toward the content or a general sense of urgency (see figs. 1.3–1.7). They all tell a story about Feld's opportunity to join the secret service, his rise to power, his false sense of invulnerability, pronounced hubris, and ultimately his retrospectively inevitable dismissal. His story, like other stories one can excavate from files, contains life segments, factual and skewed as viewed through the eyes of the secret police, which allow us rare insight into an officer's life — an officer who was both the subject and the object of surveillance and investigation. In John Frow's words, genres create the effects of reality and truth that are central to the different ways one understands the world in writing of history (2005, 19). Feld's story is neither entirely false nor true. It is simply a "file story" whose performative structure, as Frow reminds us, shapes the world and truth of an individual life. A "file story," as I define it, is a form of "remedial" life writing, one that unravels skewed life segments coded and recorded in secret police files and recovers them through a multilayered and polyphonic biographical act. In order to compose a file story, one needs to interpret not only the often-disjointed pieces afforded in a file (documents, informers' notes, officers' reports, denunciations, investigations, interrogations, phone tapping transcripts, etc.) but also the "omissions, distortions, and insinuations," as Igal Halfin points out in his study of red autobiographies and the Bolshevik self (2011, 44). Connecting the dots and fording the various gaps entails also interpreting parties' attitudes, veiled hostility, and purpose. The result is a precarious and capricious collage that represents a compelling life story, yet any overlooked or missing detail has the potential of disturbing or rearranging the life fragments of this volatile file story. In the same vein, the central character of such a file story cannot necessarily be equated with the historical person but must rather be regarded as the protagonist abstracted from his files and the lead performer in our file story.

Feld's records reveal a rather complicated file story, one that exposes, in part, the inner workings of the Securitate at its core, but also one that offers a slice of a Jewish-Romanian personal history that speaks of antisemitism, persecution, and ultimately false hopes, during a period the political scientist Vladimir Tismaneanu calls "Stalinism unbound" (2003, 107–35). While the material comprised in his files reflects a fragmented, often embellished, other times conflicting account of his activity, the Securitate investigations into Feld's activity allow us rare insights into the life of a disgraced officer. Similar to the incriminating cases in strictly victim files, the case against Major Feld was based on informers' reports, characterizations by his colleagues, anonymous denunciations, and interrogations that are only alluded to but most likely removed from or never included in this file. His cadre file story ends with an arrest, also absent from the files, and his discharge from MAI, in spite of several commendations and medals received for outstanding work in the service of MAI Timisoara and Orasul Stalin. At the core of this investigation lies also a pronounced antisemitism that, on the one hand, motivated young Feld to join the Communist Party in 1945 and then the Securitate in 1948 and, on the other, likely played a role in his eventual dismissal from the MAI and his exclusion from the party in 1960.

His cadre file, like a captivating detective novel, begins with the denouement and invites the intrigued reader to discover how the case against this officer had been built and how the story unfolded. The protagonist comes to life through the eyes of others but also through his own self-fashioning narratives, the intervallic "autobiographies" he had to compose for the purpose of record keeping. At times, depending on the political requirements of any given day, these bureaucratic "autobiographies" allowed new details to emerge, like short, precise brushstrokes refining a painter's self-portrait. If one understands autobiographical storytelling as "a recitation of a recitation" (Smith 1998, 111) and an autobiography as "a story of a story" (Eakin 1993, 120), then Feld was a master at telling and retelling his life story. He polished his memories to reflect his background in the most favorable light and to highlight each accomplishment to his utmost advantage. He knew how to adapt to the various political requirements of the changing times, and like a chess player, he anticipated his investigators' moves, always ready to provide them with elaborate explanations for his activities and often successfully outmaneuvering them. He created a self-censored, self-fashioned, and politically expedient personal history that allowed him to rise from wretched conditions and to remain in the elite service of the Securitate for eleven years.

Feld, who would become the "victim" in this case, unlike average citizens who were often unaware that they had become targets of the Securitate, knew how to skillfully influence the unfolding of his own story, at least up to the point when it inescapably slipped out of his hands and followed his investigators' desired trajectory. Not only was our protagonist informed about the various accusations brought against him at certain points in his career; he was also allowed to react to them by manipulating the information and choreographing a new advantageous version of events that, as I will show, often barely corresponded to or predictably contradicted the already-staged reality. He deftly and cunningly exploited his own investigative skills and experience, which, at least in his opinion, were superior in competence and aptitude to those of his colleagues and certainly to those of the lower-ranked officers, whom he apparently treated with conceit and disdain.

Filed Autobiographical Sketches

From the various mandatory "autobiographies" and "biographical questionnaires" Feld drafted or filled out over the years for the Securitate, a compelling story unfolds — one he sometimes specifically altered by adding or leaving out various details pertaining to him or his family. From an autobiography drafted in 1948, we learn that he was born in Uzhhorod, then in the Soviet Union, on April 30, 1927, but moved with his family to the city of Timisoara in western Romania at a very early age. About his parents, a mandatory topic in these autobiographies, we learn that his father, Jacob, had been deported to Buchenwald, and his mother, Ella, had been residing in a village in the then-newly founded state of Israel since 1946. Feld explained that he had attended the Israelite primary school in District 4 in Timisoara (interestingly, he wrote and crossed out the first three letters of Josefin, the original name of the neighborhood, and then added the new official name; D102, 86), where he did not have to pay school taxes and could also benefit from consistent warm meals. He went on to enroll in the "Israelite Lycée," a reputable high school in Timisoara, and graduated the first four years in 1942. During the summer of the same year, he found employment with two well-to-do Jewish families, Csendes and Fischoff, where he performed odd jobs such as splitting wood or peeling vegetables. In 1943, at the age of sixteen, he replaced his older brother Arthur, who along with other Jewish men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, had been enlisted in so-called work teams that were in reality forced labor squads. In spite of his age, Feld worked at the town's nursery in his brother's stead, while Arthur looked for black-market employment opportunities in order to support their family. After having established his "healthy" social background, as he came from a very poor rather than a bourgeois capitalist family, Feld highlighted his brief yet substantial activity within the Communist Party organizations up to 1948. His résumé included joining Uniunea Tineretului Comunist (UTC, Union of the Communist Youth) in January 1944, organizing the Jewish youth at the Israelite Lycée, and joining the Communist Party in 1945. The same year he began his career with the secret police as commissar aid at the Siguranta Timisoara. In 1946, he joined the Information Bureau at the Communist Party Committee Timisoara. A year later, he was in charge of propaganda at the Tineretul Progresist (Progressive Youth), which was dissolved a few months later. After passing the entrance examination at the law school in Cluj, he requested to be allowed to join the work force in order to save money for college. He was thus allowed to transfer to the Federation of Cooperatives Banat, where his financial situation apparently worsened due to a lower-than-expected salary, and where he faced antisemitic remarks from the president himself, who allegedly stated that "a Jew had no place at Federal?" (D102, 87). Evidently remaining determined to serve the Communist cause, the young Feld went on to organize the youth at the Federal? within Uniunea Tineretului Muncitoresc (UTM, Union of the Working Youth), where he rose through the ranks all the way to the regional UTM committee. His biography depicts a confusing and meandering path that reflects the rapid changes within and dissolutions of the Communist youth organizations but at times also his exuberant and vivacious view of the world. One sentence in particular strikes one as offbeat in this serious world of rapid life-altering transformations and allows us to see him as just a young man who saw girlfriends as a distraction from his important work in the service of the party: "I decided to abandon ... a bourgeois girl who took too much of my time" (D102, 88). While it seems odd that he, the party enthusiast, could become entangled with a "bourgeois girl," he knew to sacrifice this relationship for the sake of the party.

In another rendition of his past, an autobiography dated April 11, 1951, further details about his life and activity emerge in a comprehensive account that comprises more than six typed pages. For the most part, it reiterates the political engagement in the Communist organizations but offers more details about Feld's family and a list of most likely mandatory references for each segment of his life and each work place. While in his 1948 biographical story he indicated that his father had been killed in Buchenwald, he rectified this by merely alluding to his death, as he simply indicated that his father had been deported and never returned. We further learn that his father had worked for many years as a day laborer, but since he had a beautiful singing voice, he joined a church choir. There is no mention of a temple or synagogue, although Feld never actively denied his Jewish origins. Furthermore, he related that his father had abandoned the family — his mother and his other siblings — when Feld was eight. The father then moved from Romania to Northern Transylvania, which after 1940 became part of Hungary, remarried, and was deported with his new family to a Nazi extermination camp. Some details about the other members of Feld's family, including his mother, earned some red, blue, and pencil underlining, as they were apparently of interest to Feld's superiors who reviewed his autobiography: first, the fact that Feld, a Securitate officer, had been writing to his mother in Israel. Also significant to his future investigators was Feld's intention to marry a UTM member, whose background he intended to investigate prior to asking for the Securitate's approval (D102, 79). In a "Fisa individual?" (Individual chart, D102, 72–78) that Feld signed on May 28, 1952, we learn that he had married A.C. (D102, 76), the aforementioned UTM member, whose family strongly opposed the marriage. According to the information in this chart, A.C.'s family had in fact an undesirable social and political background that would prove to be consequential in Feld's investigation: they had been closely associated with the historical parties and owned various properties in Bucharest prior to August 23, 1944, when Romania joined the Allies and declared war on Nazi Germany.

In a biographical questionnaire (D102, 63–70) that Feld filled out and signed on November 16, 1955, new details surface, including his complete name, Samuel Iacob Feld. In addition to his baccalaureate obtained at the Israelite Lycée, he had also attended a Marxist-Leninist school at the University of Timi?oara from 1949 to 1951. We learn that he actually wanted to become a doctor but due to his active role in the party, he abandoned the idea of higher education, which contradicts his earlier statement that he abandoned his law studies in Cluj due to financial difficulties. By November 1955 he had been promoted to the rank of captain and transferred to Region Stalin (D102, 63b). As his résumé details (see fig. 1.1; D102, 63b), Feld had enrolled in the Securitate as sublocotenent (second lieutenant), at the recommendation of officer Martin Schnellbach, on February 14, 1949.

(Continues…)

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