The Nazis Next Door by Eric Lichtblau Page B

was no Communist; these were just the lies of a vengeful man still upset years later because Soobzokov had deflowered his wife.
    Remarkably, the CIA seemed to be satisfied with the grandiose explanation. Soobzokov had been “substantially truthful” in his debriefing and a polygraph, the agency concluded after hearing his explanations. The slew of accusations grew out of “jealousy and envy [by] his personal enemies,” another analyst concluded. And the most damning accusation of all—the suggestion that Soobzokov was really a Soviet spy? It was “probably without foundation.”
    Soobzokov had talked his way out of trouble again, at least for now. Questions about the ill-fated Middle East assignment were put to rest. But then, just a few months later, another awkward encounter placed Soobzokov smack up against his past again, with the potential for even more damage to his career. The CIA and the military had scheduled him for six months of paramilitary training in southern Maryland in early 1958, as a member of the covert Hot War team. In Maryland, Soobzokov wouldn’t just be focused on the softer side of spycraft, pedestrian stuff like recruiting Russian expatriates or spreading Soviet disinformation. No, at an army base at Fort Meade, Maryland, up the highway from Washington, D.C., he and other Russian-speaking members of the Hot War team would undergo training in the use of dynamite, grenades, weaponry, and a myriad of other tools of warfare to prepare for the possibility of being secretly dropped back into Russia at a moment’s notice to conduct paramilitary operations.   
    Yet as titillating as the assignment might have sounded, the prospect terrified Soobzokov. He had always been able to use his powerful personality to wile his way through covert assignments, but dynamite and detonators? This was different. He wasn’t sure the CIA, despite its confidence in him, had the right man. One scenario in particular paralyzed him with fear as he ran it over and over in his mind before leaving for Maryland, he later confided to a CIA debriefer in a moment of raw candor. As he imagined it playing out, the platoon of Hot War soldiers would be standing in formation at the army base next to an intimidating assortment of live demolition charges. The drill instructor would address him personally. “Soobzokov, I see from your biography that you graduated from a Russian military academy and were an officer in the Red Army against the Nazis,” the platoon leader would say. “Why don’t you show us how the Russians would execute a detonation like this?” Soobzokov, sweating, would then step out of line with two choices laid starkly before him. He could lose face in front of his instructor and his entire Hot War team by admitting that, his official resumé notwithstanding, he had never actually trained in explosives, had never been a Russian officer, had never attended the military academy, and, in fact, had barely even served in the Red Army before deserting. Or he could fake it, go ahead with the demonstration out of a “false pride,” and risk “blowing himself up through ignorance,” as he told his CIA debriefer. Neither option seemed terribly appealing.
    He tried to reach his old friend John Grunz to get him to extricate him from the mess that the upcoming training mission and his fabricated resumé were creating for him. Unsuccessful, a panicked Soobzokov went to Fort Meade anyway as planned. It proved to be an anticlimactic time. He had worried himself for nothing; there were no confessions to make, no training sessions to lead, no life-or-death decisions to make by the light of an exploding grenade. In fact, his drill instructor at Fort Meade wrote afterward that the Hot War trainee impressed him as “intelligent, energetic and frank”; he was particularly struck by his “fanatic hate of communism.” That was a huge plus for any Hot War cadet.
    Nonetheless, the episode proved a moment of sober realization for