by Judith Heimann
The Man from Paris
I enjoyed my consular work in Brussels chiefly for the way it parachuted me into the lives of strangers. But I had long given up hope of getting involved in anything as exciting as what I was reading those days in John Le Carre’s thrillers, when one afternoon my phone rang. My boss, the consul, was away, and I was asked to walk across the street to the office of the new deputy chief of mission. The new DCM struck me as a bit cold, compared to his warm predecessor, but capable. He introduced me to an American I had not met before, who (the DCM said) had come from Paris to see me.
The DCM left the room, and the man from Paris explained that he had a delicate problem that I would have to handle. He asked first if I had read recent stories in the local press about a sailor on a Soviet vessel who had jumped overboard in an attempt to defect while the ship was moored in a Belgian harbor. Unfortunately, the sailor had been recaptured by the Soviets before he could make good his escape.
I said I had read about it in the papers. The man from Paris said:” Good! Then you will understand that we don’t want to lose any more Russian defectors—and we have a pair of them now, with their daughter, who have turned up here in Brussels.” He explained that until given formal status as refugees by the Belgian office of the UN High Commissioner of Refugees (UNHCR), these defectors were in grave danger of being caught by the Soviets and sent back to Moscow to face who knew what retribution. Once they were formally UNHCR-vetted refugees, the Soviets were unlikely to risk the bad publicity that would come from bothering with them, unless the defectors knew very important secrets–which seemed unlikely in this case,
He said it did not really matter if the defectors knew anything that would interest our intelligence people–though that would be great. We simply did not want the word to get back to potential defectors behind the Iron Curtain–as in the case of that poor sailor–that it was not a good idea to try to defect because the Soviets would always catch you. “So that means,” he said, “that after I hand these folks over to you, I will leave you to it. Your job will be to keep them safe and hidden until the UNHCR does its job. Any questions?” I was too stunned to have any questions for this stranger except to ask how long I would be away from my office that day, because I was the only officer there. He said a couple of hours should do it, so I phoned my office and left word that I would be back before the end of the workday.
The Defectors
The man from Paris drove us in a car with French plates to an apartment building in a middle-class Brussels neighborhood I did not know. He rang the doorbell, and, after the peephole had been looked through from the other side, the door opened partway. There stood two adults about my age or a bit older, slim, trim, dressed as well as any of my Belgian friends and with very alert expressions. The man had a thin face, pale skin, and graying hair but was as lithe and fit as a Russian wolfhound; the woman had some red in her curly short hair and had fierce bright blue eyes that were sizing me up without any effort to hide what she was doing. I must have passed the test, because she opened the door wider and let me and my escort come in.
Standing in the front hall, the man from Paris spoke to the couple (let us call them Ivan and Natasha) in Russian and then, including me, in French. From what I gathered, he had met them once before and was telling them what he had told me—about the need for them to stay hidden until the UNHCR had made them officially UN-protected refugees. He then shook hands with them and asked me if I had enough cash to get back to the office, ideally catching a tram or bus or cab a few blocks away from where we now were. He then said, “Good luck,” shook my hand, and disappeared.
Ivan invited me into their living room, where their dark-haired daughter, just about my daughter’s age, was waiting with lowered eyes. I asked how long they had been in that apartment and what the arrangement there was. Were they safe to stay or should I find them other housing? They said they had been there overnight and thought it would be okay to stay there since only the man who brought them there—the same one who had brought me—knew where they were.
We talked—their French was better than mine-–and it turned out they were both mathematicians and teachers of math and had worked in Cambodia and other Third World countries as technical advisors, part of a Soviet AID program similar to ours. It had been while working in one of the least developed postcolonial countries in Africa that they had come to realize that what they had been told back in Moscow about how the world outside the Soviet bloc runs did not square with the facts as they encountered them abroad. One of them had been in the Party but no longer had faith in it. They said they did not want to raise their only child behind the Iron Curtain.
Keeping Them Safe
Excited though I was at being involved in such international intrigue, my stronger emotion was fear that somehow I would expose them to danger. I did not dare ask anyone for advice. Soon thereafter, I was notified that someone from the Tolstoy Foundation wanted to see them, and I was told by a reliable source that I could trust the Tolstoy Foundation, which was the best-known emigre group helping Soviet defectors settle abroad.
I took the Tolstoy representative to see “my” defectors, but I could tell right away that this meeting was a mistake. Natasha’s bright blue eyes shot rays of hatred at this older, overweight woman dressed in the typical Russian aristocratic emigre style of the 1930’s–what my husband would have called “a costume made up of old bathrobes, bell-pulls and doormats”. Natasha left me in no doubt about her views: “Get that creature out of here!” she said.
I am not sure so long after the fact, but I think I arranged for them to move again, not wishing anyone but me to know where they were. In any case, I clearly recall having phone conversations with Ivan to pass on where things stood on the efforts to get them UNHCR refugee status. By prearrangement, I would wait in a telephone booth some distance from my office for him to phone me. Once, when the phone was ten minutes late in ringing, I said when I finally picked up, “I now know what it must be like to be waiting for an extramarital lover to call.” He laughed as I hoped he would. There had not been much laughter in our exchanges thus far.
One day, the DCM summoned me again and introduced me to another stranger who said something along the lines of “The Belgians are uneasy about having these defectors here, so we want you to encourage them to move on to France, where they have the language and probably know people who can help them, don’t you think?”
A Moment of Truth
I stood there for a minute, in shock at what I had heard. These Russians were just barely beginning to trust me. They were still nervous as cats. Who knows what desperate thing they would do, if we–if I–abandoned them at this point? After pausing another few seconds to reflect that my brief Foreign Service career might now be approaching its end, I said: “You know what I think? I think that if the Belgians want them to leave, then the Belgians can tell them so.”
I walked out the door and back across the street to my office thinking that, like my bosses, the Belgians probably would not be able to tell Ivan and Natasha to leave because they didn’t know where they were located. In my anger, I was also thinking that if they wanted to discourage efforts by dissidents to escape to the West what they had asked me to do would be the perfect way to go about it.
I had not told my husband, a fellow diplomat, anything about “my” defectors. It was literally not my secret to tell, and I knew he would understand, as I had when he had not told me secrets he knew before I joined the diplomatic service. That evening, however, I did say to him that I might have just maneuvered myself out of my job. If so, we would probably know soon.
But nothing happened, except that the new DCM was much warmer to me than before. As my reviewing officer, he must have had something to say about my being promoted early, so that I became a consul, no longer a lowly vice consul. The Russians did get their UN refugee status and went on to lead happy and productive lives in Europe and became lifetime friends of my husband and me.
JUDITH M. HEIMANN was the accompanying spouse of her diplomat husband, John P. Heimann, from 1958 to 1972, at which time she became one of the first two spouses to enter the career Foreign Service via the first entry exam not closed to spouses. She, alongside her husband, served in Brussels and several other northern European posts, as well as in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Upon her husband’s retirement, she served as consul general in Bordeaux. She officially retired after running the refugee program in the Philippines for some 20,000 Vietnamese boat people bound for the US. Subsequent to her formal retirement in 1992, she was rehired for diplomatic assignments in Luxembourg, Poland, and many times in Belgium. In her “retirement”, she also authored her third solo book, Paying Calls in Shangri-La, Ohio University Press, 2016 (in the ADST-DACOR Diplomats and Diplomacy series) from which this story comes (https://www.ohioswallow.com/9780821422335/). Her first solo book, The Most Offending Soul Alive, also became a BBC documentary, The Barefoot Anthropologist, narrated by Sir David Attenborough). Her second solo book, The Airmen and the Headhunters, she helped turn into a television documentary, Headhunters of World War II, that won the PBS award in 2010 for the year’s best historical documentary.