ambassador rudolf v. perina - Association for Diplomatic Studies and ...

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