HOWZAT

Dr Khokhlov won the Medal of the Motherland, First Class, for his work behind German lines. In 1943 he was parachuted into German-occupied Belarus disguised as a Nazi officer and played an important part in the assassination of Wilhelm Kube, a Nazi Gauleiter, who was blown up his bed.

Dr Khokhlov’s spymaster was Pavel Sudoplatov, head of the Administration for Special Tasks in the NKVD,charged with sabotage and assassinations. From the seventh floor of the KGB building in Lubyanka, Sudoplatov plotted the deaths of those perceived as enemies of the regime, including the murder of Trostky in 1940.

“I was one of the scouts used to get information for Sudoplatov to put together his diabolical plans,” Dr Khokhlov said.

His exploits won the praise of his superiors and provided the inspiration for the 1947 propaganda film Feat of a Scout. He was promoted to captain. But as Stalin’s purges and paranoia mounted, Dr Khokhlov began to have serious qualms. He asked to leave the MGB, the KGB’s predecessor, but Sudoplatov would not let him go. When his boss asked him to “liquidate” a Russian émigré in Paris, he refused. “I was never an assassin,” he insisted.

But in 1954, Sudoplatov made an offer that Dr Khokhlov dared not refuse. The Soviet Union had decided to eliminate Georgi Okolovich, an émigré living in West Germany who was chairman of the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS), a group that was dedicated to overthrowing the Soviet regime by revolution.

Two German hitmen were recruited to carry out the assassination, codenamed Operation Rhine, but Dr Khokhlov was sent to organise the operation. In a scene out of James Bond, he was issued with two guns that were disguised in metal cigarette cases and which could fire up to four hollow steel bullets. He was also given a miniature gun that fired poisoned bullets.

But Dr Khokhlov was already making other plans. He had decided that he could not arrange the murder of Okolovich, “a modest, honest man, living not for himself but for the sake of an idea”. His wife, Yana, agreed with his decision. “If this man is killed, you will be a murderer. I cannot be the wife of a murderer,” she told him.

The officer reached Frankfurt (on a false passport) before the two assassins, and went directly to Okolovich’s apartment. In his memoirs, In the Name of Conscience, published in English in 1959, Dr Khokhlov described the bizarre scene that ensued.

Perched on Okolovich’s sofa, Dr Khokhlov declared: “I’ve come to you from Moscow. The Central Committee of the Communist Party has ordered your liquidation. The murder is entrusted to my group . . . I can’t let this murder happen.”

Dr Khokhlov wrote that he had never intended to defect but wanted instead to join the anti-Soviet revolutionaries, who he believed would be able to smuggle his wife and child out of Moscow. Instead, through Okolovich, he was put into contact with the CIA, and soon Dr Khokholov found himself caught up in a deadly Cold War game of tit-for-tat. The CIA and MI6, after the kidnapping of another senior NTS official, demanded that he make a public defection. Dr Khokhlov initially refused, pointing out that his wife and son in Moscow would almost certainly be murdered in reprisal.

His MI6 handler offered little reassurance. “We cannot save them,” he said, adding that it was “necessary to justify their sacrifice”.

Under intense pressure Dr Khokhlov finally agreed, on condition that his family was given asylum in the US Embassy. On April 21, 1954, at the US High Commission in Bonn, Dr Khokholov stood up before the world’s press, announced his defection, and made a dramatic appeal for the safety of his family.

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