Amerikai Magyar Értesítő, 1983 (19. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1983-03-01 / 3. szám

18.oldal

Amerikai Magyar Értesítő

dropov’s apartment appear to have sprouted and flourished in the press. Three years ago, Sakharov wrote his own autobiography, -"High Treason, ’ published by Putnam, in which he fails to mention either the "sexual orgy" or any other visit to the Andropov apartment. But he does provide an illuminating, if eerily reminiscent, description of his own home life.

Echoing his version of Andropov’s apartment, Sakharov writes that he himself lived in a “spacious" apartment with furniture from Eastern Europe, a TV, and a piano. He writes: "We always had a high-quality record player and plenty of American popular music recordings . . . with a leaning to jazz stylists, including records by Benny Goodman, Perry Como, and Frank Sinatra."

When he went to the homes of his teenage friends, he writes, ‘‘I always took recordings to parties — and usually I’d supply scotch or bourbon or rye as well.” (If so, he may well have supplied the jazz records and scotch he later reported he saw in Andropov’s home.)

He also recalls carrying around with him a copy of “How Green Was My Valley” — one of the books that, years later, he told the Times he had seen on Andropov’s shelf. (The other book he told the Times he saw in Andropov’s home in 1964, Jacqueline Susann’s “Valley of the Dolls,” was not published until 1966.)

Sakharov recounts that while still a teenager in Moscow, he was approached by a man from the CIA named “George,” who eventually succeeded in recruiting him as a CIA agent in Yemen in 1967. In 1968 he was offered a position in the KGB, but he was apprehensive that this would interfere with his work for the CIA, and he had his father, an influential diplomatic courier, intervene. His KGB application was then squelched. Later that year, SakharoV went off to Egypt as a junior diplomat. It was in Cairo that he defected. More than 10 years later, he re- ' emerged in Los Angeles as an expert on Andropov — and even sold an article on this subject to Penthouse. His expertise, however, was based, according to his own accounts, on little more than a teenage reverie.

The sources for other Andropov details turn out to be similarly elusive.

For example, the remarkable account of a fully “Westernized” Andropov sending his car to fetch dissidents to his home appeared originally in the Washington Post’s Sunday “Outlook” section on May 30, 1982. The author, Charles Fenyvesi, explained to me that he had heard the story secondhand from an emigree in Washington, and that he was told that the person who had been entertained by Andropov was a former Russian dissident now living in Israel. Fenyvesi, under deadline pressure, was able to reach the source in Israel only at the last minute, and the source then said that he had never met Andropov in his life and that his contact had been with another KGB officer. Confronted with the problem of having his source disclaim the story, Fenyvesi let the original account stand, adding that the witness “now denies having met with Andropov.”

Harrison Salisbury’s account of a visit to Andropov had so many fly-on-the-wall details about his dacha life that even an editor of the Times presumed it was based on firsthand experience. Later, Salisbury told me that his source was a “non-Soviet foreign visitor” whom he declined to identify.

Salisbury asserts that “Mr. Andropov is the first Russian leader since Czar Nicholas II who is comfortable in the English tongue” (which omits Lenin, who spoke both English and German).

Despite such flat assertions, Andropov’s grasp of English turns out to be questionable. No Western journalist has yet interviewed him. Malcolm Toon, the former U S. ambassador to Moscow, who has spoken with Andropov several times, did so in Russian, not English. Toon says he strongly doubts that Andropov has any noteworthy ability to speak English.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security adviser, shares Toon’s skepticism. The CIA’s national intelligence officer for the Soviet Union, who had helped prepare the classified CIA biography of Andropov, also denied to me that there had been “any evidence” that he had a “fluent command of English.” John F. Burns, the Moscow correspondent of the Times, reported on Nov. 20 that “Mr. Andropov’s English ... is open to doubt . .

The possibility remains, of course, that he is a closet Eng- lish-speaker.

But the columnist Joseph Kraft, who was in Moscow in January of this year for the New Yorker, came to the conclusion — after countless interviews with Soviet officials and Western diplomats — that Andropov’s comprehension of English, if it exists at all, has been ludicrously > exaggerated. If this is correct, the accounts of Andropov running an English-language salon in a home crammed with Americana are apocryphal.

In the hectic excitement following Andropov’s succession, newspapers dredged up eyewitness accounts containing flaws and implausibilities that, under different circumstances, might have disqualified them even as journalistic evidence.

For example, the Wall Street Journal, in a story headlined "Andropov’s Ways: Those Who Met Him Call Soviet Boss Charming But Ruthless,” featured the account of Nikolai Sharigan, a British citizen of Russian origin. Sharigan, who had been arrested for espionage in Moscow, claimed that he had been hauled before Andropov when the latter was “head of the KGB.” Sharigan was then packed off to a Soviet labor camp, where he says he spent 10 years before being released in 1976.

According to this chronology, however, Sharigan’s putative meeting with Andropov would have to have taken place in 1966 at the latest. Yet Andropov did not join

The Post, the Times and Time couldn't agree on his birthplace

the KGB until May 1967, which means that if Sharigan did meet the head of the KGB, he did not meet Andropov.

Another witness cited in the same “Those Who Met Him’ story is Boris Vinokur, a Russian emigre who published a Russian-language newspaper in Chicago. Vinokur is quoted as saying, “he could smile at you and still bite your arm off,” his speech is “articulate,” his dress "quite elegant.” But it turns out that he has never spoken to Andropov. Vinokur, who defected in 1976, claims only to have seen Andropov at a sanatorium for high-level officials in a forest outside Moscow. He didn’t speak with him or even shake hands with him, he says, and the best description he can give of his height is that it is the same •as Brezhnev’s — i.e., very short.

What emerges from these attempts to piece together a version of Andropov’s life is a portrait worthy of “Saturday Night Live”: the head of the KGB as one wild and crazy guy. After a hard day at the office repressing dissent, Brezhnev’s heir spends the evening at home, telling anti-regime jokes in fluent English and playing jazz for dissidents.

To be sure, not all the reporting joined this stampede from reality: There were a number of fine examples of more solid and careful reporting, notably the dispatches of John F. Burns and Hedrick Smith in the Times. But why the stampede in the first place?

Some commentators have made dark references to the Soviet disinformation apparatus. It is unnecessary, however, to plumb such murky depths for an explanation. The excesses that led to the invention of a media Andropov proceed directly from a common conceit of journalism that witnesses and “color” can be found for any great event. When it turned out that the CIA and the State Department had few details about Andropov — not even the name (or fate) of his wife (or mistress) — the press took whatever it could find in the goulash of defectors and emigres desirous of becoming Andropov experts.

For the press, the humbler — and more honest — alternative is to admit that virtually nothing is known about this man called Andropov: not the names of his parents, not his ethnic background, not his education, not his war service, not his preferences in music and literature, not his linguistic abilities, not his ideas. He stands at the head of Russia, but we don’t even know how tall.