THE ANDROPOV FILE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP85M00364R001001570066-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 5
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 26, 2007
• Sequence Number: 66
• Publication Date: February 7, 1983
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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STAT
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How a short, burly thug became a tall, dapper Chubby Checker fan.
THE ANDROPOV FILE
BY EDWARD JAY EPSTEIN
WHEN Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov was merely
head. of the K.G.B., his image was that of the
stereotypic hard-line "police boss." His major accom-
plishment, according to C. L. Sulzberger, writing in The
New York Times in 1974, was "a fairly successful cam-
paign to throttle the recent wave of liberal dissidence."
Nor was he viewed as much of an admirer of foreign
culture. In 1980 Harrison E. Salisbury wrote in the Times
that Andropov "has been working for three years on
schemes to minimize the mingling of foreigners and
natives.... Now Andropov's hands have been freed to
embark on all kinds of repressive measures designed to
enhance the 'purity' of Soviet society." Completing this
picture of a tough, xenophobic, wave-throttling cop,
Andropov was physically described, in another Times
story, as a "shock-haired, burly man."
..Andropov's accession to power last November was
accompanied by a corresponding ennoblement of his
image. Suddenly he became, in The Wall Street Journal,
"silver-haired and dapper." His stature, previously re-
ported in The Washington Post as an unimpressive "five
feet, eight inches," was abruptly elevated to "tall and
urbane." The Times noted that Andropov "stood con-
spicuously taller than most" Soviet leaders and that "his
spectacles, intense gaze and donnish demeanor gave
him the air of a scholar." U.S. News & World Report, on
the other hand, reported that "he has notoriously bad
eyesight and wears thick spectacles."
His linguistic abilities also came in for scrutiny. Har-
rison Salisbury wrote, "The first thing to know about
Mr. Andropov is that he speaks and reads English."
Another Times story took note of his "fluent English."
Newsweek reported that even though he had never met a
"senior" American official, "he spoke English and re-
laxed with American novels." Confirmation of his com-
mand of English appeared in Time, The Wall Street
Journal; The Christian Science Monitor, and The Washing-
ton Post. The Economist credited him with "a working
knowledge of German," and U.S. News & World Report
added Hungarian to the growing list. And this quadra-
lingual prodigy was skilled in the use of language, too:
Edward Jay Epstein is the author of The Rise and Fall of
Diamonds: The Shattering of a Brilliant Illusion (Simon
and Schuster), and is currently completing a 'book on
international deception.
Time described him as reportedly "a witty conversa-
tionalist," and "a bibliophile" and "connoisseur of mod-
em art" to boot. The Washington Post passed along a
rumor that he was partly Jewish. (Andropov was rapidly
becoming That Cosmopolitan Man.)
Soon there were reports that Andropov was a man of
extraordinary accomplishment, with some interests and
proclivities that are unusual in a former head of the
K.G.B. According to an article in The Washington Post,
Andropov "is fond of cynical political jokes with an anti-
regime twist.... collects abstract art, likes jazz and
Gypsy music," and "has a record of stepping out of his
high party official's cocoon to contact dissidents." Also,
he swims, "plays tennis," and wears clothes that are
"sharply tailored in a West European style." Besides the
Viennese waltz and the Hungarian czarda, he "dances
the tango gracefully." +;4t a press conference within
hours of Andropov's accession, President Reagan, asked
about the prospects for agreement with him, used the
unfortunate metaphor, "It takes two to tango.") The Wall
Street journal added that Andropov "likes Glenn Miller
records, good scotch whisky, Oriental rugs, and Ameri-
can books." To the list of his musical favorites,.Time
added "Chubby Checker, Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, and
Bob Eberly," and, asserting that he had once worked as a
Volga boatman, said that he enjoyed singing "hearty
renditions of Russian songs" at after-theater parties. The
Christian Science Monitor suggested that he has "tried his
hand at writing verse-in Russian, as it happens, and of
a comic variety."
The press was less successful in ferreting out more
mundane details of his life. Where, for example, was he
born? The Washington Post initially reported that he was
"a native of Karelia," a Soviet province on the Finnish
border. The New York Times gave his birthplace as the
"southern Ukraine," which is hundreds of miles to
the south. And Time said he had been born in "the
village of Nagutskoye in the northern Caucasus." His
birthplace was thus narrowed down to an area stretch-
ing from Finland to Iran. There was also some vagueness
with respect to his education. The Wall Street journal
reported that he had "graduated" from an unnamed
"technical college," but U.S. News & World Report had
him "drop out" of Petrozavodsk University, while
Newsweek awarded him a diploma from the Rybinsk
Water Transportation Technicum, a vocational school
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that teaches river navigation. Where had he learned
music, art, poetry, Hungarian, German-and English?
Harrison Salisbury suggested that he picked up English
as a "young man," but The Christian Science Monitor
contended that he learned it from a tutor, whom he saw
three times a week when he was well into his 40s. The
balance of his biography consists almost entirely of
official announcements of awards, promotions, and trips
as part of official Soviet delegations. Time reported him
to be a widower. There is no mention, however, of
whom or when he
married, or whether
his wife had shared
his interest in jazz,
American novels,
scotch, telling anti-
regime jokes, danc-
ing Viennese waltz-
es, and visiting lib-
eral dissidents.
The press does,
however, a furnish a
vivid description of
his home life at 26
Kutuzov Prospekt-
where, according to
Hedrick Smith's
book, The Russians,
Brezhnev himself
resided. The scene
there seems to have
been. quite lively,
a combination of
salon and recital
hall. According to
The Washington
Post, Yuri Andro-
pov is "a perfect
host." On some oc-
casions, he would
invite "leading
dissidents to his
home for well-lubri-
cated discussinnc
that sometimes ex-
tended to the wee hours of the morning," after
which he would send his guests home in his own
chauffeured car. Alternatively, according to Harrison
Salisbury in the Times, he invites foreign visitors to his
country home. Salisbury writes, "A casual visitor to
his country house ... found him listening to an English-
languagg,Voice of America broadcast. .. . It was a long-
standing habit." Andropov assiduously reads American
books, including, Salisbury notes with quiet pride, his
own novel, The Gates of Hell. Andropov's library, ac-
cording to an earlier Times story, also included Valley of
the Dolls, by Jacqueline Susann, and How Green Was My
Valley, by Richard T-leweljyn. Moreover, according to
Salisbury, Andropov regularly invited dissident musi-
cians to his apartment for "private recitals." His record
collection included the "Glenn Miller Orchestra and
other American bands," and his bar, "scotch and French
cognac." Time described his apartment, with the preci-
sion of a classified ad, as "51/z rooms," with such "out-
standing features" as "a stereo system" (for jazz), a
"sofa" (for dissidents), and "a cabinet of highly polished
wood" (for eyes only). These items, wrote Time, were
"gifts to Andropov from the late Yugoslav leader Josip
Broz Tito." The
Wall Street journal,
on the other hand,
reported just as
authoritatively that
Andropov's home
"was furnished with
Hungarian furni-
ture, the gift of Janos
Kadar, Hungary's
Moscow-backed
leader, as an ap-
parent gesture of
appreciation for
Mr. Andropov's role
in suppressing the
Hungarian Revolu-
tion."
The varied de-
scriptions of Andro-
pov's apartment and
his Renaissance
style of life come
principally from a
single source. His
name is Vladimir.
Sakharov, and he is
fully credited by The
Wall Street' Journal,
The New York Times,
Time, and others for
the descriptions of
Andropov's taste in
American jazz and
novels, his prefer-
ence for imported liquor and furniture, and his "strange
attraction for Western culture." (Sakharov, who is
usually described as a "K.G.B. defector," is not re-
lated to Andrei Sakharov, the physicist and human
rights activist.) There is, however, some question
about the provenance of Vladimir Sakharov as a
source. For example, The Wall Street journal not only
identified him as a "former K.G.B. agent," but also
said he had defected "this year' (1982) and stipu-
lated that Andropov was "his former boss." One
might reasonably conclude from this that Sakharov
had until recently been working in the K.G.B.'s office
in Moscow, and that he had defected with important
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information about Andropov. In fact, Sakharov did
not defect in 1982. He defected eleven years earlier,
on July 11, 1971. Sakharov was never actually in the
K.G.B., though he does recount two efforts to recruit
him; at the time of his defection, he was a 26-year-
old diplomat in the Foreign Ministry. And in his
own two lengthy accounts of his experiences, he
never claimed to know Yuri Andropov.
. The first such account appeared in John Barron's
KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents, published
by the Reader's Digest Press in 1974. Sakharov had
been put in touch with Barron on February 1, 1972.
Barron writes that in 1964, when Sakharov was 19
years old and a schoolmate of Andropov's son Igor, he
attended a "sexual orgy" at the Andropov apartment,
where he "wound up sleeping with a girl in the bed of
the man who now heads the K.G.B." Barron now says
that he still considers Sakharov's description of the
apartment to be "credible," although Sakharov, at the
time of his interviews with Barron, "appeared to have
a minor drinking problem." It is from this single, semi-
nal visit that the descriptions of Andropov's apartment
appear to have sprouted and flourished in the press.
Three years ago, Sakharov wrote his own autobiog-
raphy, 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, descrip-
tion of his own home life.
E CHOING his version of Andropov's apartment,
Sakharov writes that he himself lived in a "spa-
cious" 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, in-
cluding records by Benny Goodman, Perry Como, and
Frank Sinatra." He personally amassed a collection of
jazz and "swing music" that included Glenn Miller,
Dave Brubeck, Erroll Garner, Charlie Parker, and Duke
Ellington. When not listening to records on his stereo, he
often "poured a glass of Black & White;" "turned on [his]
Grundig solid state," and "turned it to the Voice of
America." He "religiously" listened to jazz. 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-an inter-
esting anachronism.)
Sakharov recounts that while still a teenager in Mos-
cow he was approached by a man from the C.I.A.,
named "George," who eventually succeeded, in recruit-
ing him as a C.I.A. agent in Yemen in 1967. In 1968 he
was offered a position in the K.G.B., but he was appre-
hensive that this would interfere with his work for the
C.I.A., and he had his father, an influential diplomatic
courier, intervene. His K.G.B. 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 ten years later, he re-emerged in Los Angeles as an
expert on Andropov-but his expertise was based, ac-
cording to his own accounts, on little more than a
teenage reverie.
T HE 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
emigres 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 K.G.B. officer. Con-
fronted with the problem of having his source disclaim
the story, Fenyvesi letthe original account stand, add-
ing 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 at the Times presumed it was based
on firsthand experience. Later, Salisbury told n that his
source was a "non-Soviet foreign visitor," and declined
to identify him further. (By publishing his story, though,
Salisbury has probably identified his source to Andro-
pov and the K.G.B., who presumably keep records of
foreign visitors to the dacha; it is only Times readers who
are kept in the dark.) Whoever the mystery visitor was,
his description of Andropov's voracious appetite for
American novels, American newsmagazines, and
English-language broadcasts on the Voice of America
presupposes that Andropov has some fluency in En-
glish. 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).
Yet despite such flat assertions, Andropov's grasp of
English turns out to be questionable. No Western jour-
nalist 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. Ambassador Toon says he strongly doubts that
Andropov has any noteworthy ability to speak English.
If it had been known in the diplomatic community in
Moscow, he says, he would have been briefed on it.
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Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national secu-
rity adviser, shares Toon's skepticism. The C.I.A.'s na-
' tional intelligence officer for the Soviet Union, who had
helped prepare the classified C.I.A. biography of Andro-
pov, also denied to me that there had been "any evi-
dence" that he had a "fluent command of English." John
F. Burns, the Moscow correspondent of the Times, re-
ported on November 20, "Mr. Andropov's English :.. is
open to doubt ... since he did not use it in his meetings
with Vice President Bush on Monday, and even had his
written documents in English read to him by an inter-
preter." The possibility remains, of course, that he is a
closet English-speaker. But the columnist Joseph Kraft,
who was in Moscow last month 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. Specifically, Kraft was told by
Giorgi Arbatov, the Soviet Union's most prestigious
"Americanologist" and an associate of Andropov's, that
Andropov, to his knowledge, does not speak English--
thougil he had taken English lessons at one time. If this
assessment is correct, the accounts of Andropov running
an English-language salon in a home crammed with
Americana are apocryphal.
I N THE hectic excitement following Andropov's suc-
cession, newspapers dredged up eyewitness ac-
counts containing flaws and implausibilities that, un-
der 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 Charm-
ing But Ruthless," featured the account of a British
citizen of Russian origin called Nikolai Sharigan.
Sharigan, who had been arrested for espionage in
Moscow, claimed that he had been hauled before
Andropov when the latter was "head of the K.G.B.,"
and that he heard Andropov.remark, "I think the En-
glish Queen won't declare war on us just for
Sharigan." Sharigan was then packed off to a Soviet
labor camp, where he says he spent ten 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 K.G.B. until May 1967,
which means that if Sharigan did meet the head of the
K.G.B., he did not meet Andropov..
Another witness cited in the same "Those Who Met
Him" story is Boris Vinokur, a Russian emigre who
publishes a Russian-language newspaper in Chicago.
Vinokur is quoted as saying, "he could smile at you and
still bite your arm off." Although Vinokur describes
Andropov's speech as "articulate," his dress as "quite
elegant," his manners as "polite," his home furnishings
as "Hungarian," his sports as "tennis and swimming,"
and his smile as "The Andropov smile ... faintly sinister
though outwardly friendly," it turns out that he has
never spoken to Andropov. Vinokur, who defected in
1976, claims only to have seen Andropov at a sanato-
rium for high-level officials in a forest outside Moscow.
Andropov was standing in a group of men some dis-
tance from him. 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. Yet he is also quoted-this
time by The Washington Post-as saying that Andropov
"has the highest I.Q. in the Politburo."
The remaining witnesses who surfaced were Hungar-
ians claiming to have had peripheral encounters with
Andropov at diplomatic functions more than a quarter of
a century ago. For example, Sandor Kopacsi, a former
Budapest police chief, recalls Andropov borrowing the
Police Department's gypsy band for a party (though it
is not clear why such arrangements would be made
personally by the Soviet Ambassador). In a book writ-
ten in 1979, Kopacsi said that he met Andropov once,
at a New Year's Eve party in Budapest in 1955, where
he watched Andropov dance with his wife for an hour,
and the next day questioned her about her conversa-
tion with him. The historical anecdote hunt flushed
out a dozen or so Hungarian emigres willing to
claim a brush with Andropov, but not a single con-
crete detail of his life-such as the name of his wife
and/or dancing partner.
w HAT EMERGES- fpm these attempts to piece
together a version of Andropov's life is a portrait
worthy of "Saturday Night Live": the head of the K.G.B.
as one wild and crazy guy. After a hard day at the office
repressing dissent, Brezhnev's heir spends the evening
at .home, telling antiregime 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
C.I.A. 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 noth-
ing 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.
FEBRUARY 7, 1983 2i
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