ambassador rudolf v. perina - Association for Diplomatic Studies and ...
ambassador rudolf v. perina - Association for Diplomatic Studies and ...
ambassador rudolf v. perina - Association for Diplomatic Studies and ...
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One interesting thing at the time was the on-going Sino-Soviet split. The Chinese had an<br />
Embassy that was reputed to have the best food in Moscow <strong>for</strong> receptions <strong>and</strong> so on.<br />
Everybody in the U.S. Embassy wanted to go <strong>for</strong> the great food. The Chinese knew this<br />
<strong>and</strong> whenever they had an event they would invite virtually the entire U.S. Embassy. This<br />
was just to irritate the Soviets because they monitored this <strong>and</strong> they would see the entire<br />
U.S. Embassy going over to the Chinese Embassy. It actually got so bad <strong>and</strong> provocative<br />
that Ambassador Toon issued a directive that <strong>for</strong> any Chinese events he personally had to<br />
approve who would attend so that there would not be too large a crowd of Americans.<br />
The Chinese were very clever in things like this.<br />
Otherwise, I did do some travel in the Soviet Union but never found myself harassed in<br />
any serious way, although it was during trips outside of Moscow that I first detected<br />
surveillance. I am sure it happened in Moscow as well but I was just not aware of it. In<br />
the provinces the KGB was not as sophisticated, <strong>and</strong> the surveillance was really obvious<br />
<strong>and</strong> sometimes intense, particularly in the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union. Once on a<br />
trip with Steve Coffey, who was also in the Political Section, we went to Baku in the<br />
Azerbaijan Soviet Republic <strong>and</strong> detected probably about a dozen people taking turns<br />
following us, especially when we went to visit a mosque. The Soviets were very worried<br />
about their Muslim population <strong>and</strong> our interest in it.<br />
There were, of course, certain people in the Embassy who did get a lot of harassment<br />
from the Soviets. I was never among them. It was primarily the people who dealt with<br />
human rights, who met with the refuseniks, dissidents, human rights activists <strong>and</strong> so on.<br />
They were often harassed seriously. People at our consulate in Leningrad had a<br />
particularly difficult time because the city had a very hard-line mayor named Romanov at<br />
the time. Several of our officers there who dealt with dissidents were beaten up by KGB<br />
thugs. The people in our Embassy who dealt with dissidents were also harassed, though<br />
<strong>for</strong> the most part not violently. Things could happen to their property, apartments <strong>and</strong> so<br />
on. In one instance, the freezer of an officer who dealt with human rights issues was<br />
unplugged while the family was away on vacation. This was actually quite serious<br />
because most of our food was still imported from Helsinki, <strong>and</strong> a family could incur<br />
hundreds of dollars of damage when something like that happened.<br />
But what I found most interesting, from a psychological viewpoint, were the things the<br />
Soviets did just to remind Embassy officers of their vulnerability. This would often<br />
consist of totally innocuous things happening in one’s apartment like, <strong>for</strong> example,<br />
something that was always on one side of the room suddenly appearing on the other side.<br />
Things would be moved or changed in such a way as to leave no doubt that someone had<br />
been in the apartment, but no damage was done. This was very clever on the part of the<br />
KGB because they knew that people would not lodge official complaints or protests<br />
about such things. The Embassy would not protest to the Foreign Ministry that somebody<br />
had moved a lamp from one table to another or eaten something <strong>and</strong> left a dirty plate on<br />
the kitchen counter. Half the time people didn't even go to the RSO (Regional Security<br />
Officer) because it seemed so petty. Or sometimes you actually weren't even sure if<br />
maybe, in fact, you had put the thing on that table rather than on another. But the bottom<br />
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