This story is from Michael Koffman, about the second of two very personal encounters he had with the Soviet secret police:
I had two major encounters with the Soviet secret police, the KGB. We all understood that every Soviet citizen was constantly being watched by Big Brother, but these two cases were different. They were extremely personal. They were also very frightening.
I have already described the first one. This is my second one, and I believe it was also the last.
It happened at the beginning of the 1980s, when I had to leave my first job because I had decided to emigrate. It took me several months to find another job. The only one I could get was a low-level position at Leningrad Electrical Public Utility. I was part of a team of technicians who maintained and replaced electrical meters.
At the same time, I started learning more about Jewish history, Jewish traditions, and things like that. One of my very good friends, Yosef, helped me.
His parents had taught him Hebrew when he was a child, and now he was a Hebrew teacher himself.
The Soviet Union did not have diplomatic relations, or any other relations, with Israel. Israel was considered the most aggressive fascist state in the world. Even its language was considered evil. Teaching Hebrew was treated as a state crime.
I helped Yosef a little. I kept some learning materials, books, and tapes for him, even though that was also illegal.
Now I understand how risky and even dangerous it was. But for some reason, when we are young and adventurous, we tend to look for extra excitement. I certainly was not a revolutionary. I was not somebody fighting to overthrow the regime and liberate poor Russian people. I just wanted to help my friend, and I liked reading forbidden books about the history and traditions of my ancestors.
One day at work, I got a phone call from Human Resources asking me to come at once to a certain room.
When I got there, I was met by a young man who introduced himself as an officer of the KGB.
Obviously, I was terrified. But he calmed me down and started asking about my work at Electrical Public Utility, my coworkers, and my family.
The whole meeting lasted about thirty or forty minutes. At the end, he warned me that nobody should know about our meeting and that he would contact me in the future.
The next call came about a week later, this time from him directly. He asked me to come to the same room.
This time he was much more serious, and I would say threatening. He requested that I report to him regularly and write reports about my coworkers, their attitudes toward the government, and so on.
Obviously, he knew a lot about me, my family, and my intention to emigrate. He even mentioned my communication with my best friend Anatol, who lived in the United States, and said they knew Anatol was involved in spying for the CIA.
When I asked him how they were so sure about that, he replied that after Anatol arrived in the United States, he had been hired by Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They were sure that only spies could get a job there immediately after arriving in the country.
I asked for some time to think it over.
After two or three meetings like that, I refused.
Then I did not hear from him for a couple of months, and I started thinking how shrewd I was to have fooled the invincible KGB.
Then he called again and asked me to come to a certain apartment after work.
Later I realized that they had this kind of apartment throughout the whole city.
That time there were two of them. I immediately understood that the second one was a higher-ranking officer.
He asked me about Torah, Talmud, Jewish holidays, and Israel. He was extremely relaxed, even friendly. Very quickly it became obvious to me that he knew much more about the subject than I did.
We had several similar meetings after that.
Then, suddenly, their behavior changed completely.
They mentioned my friend Yosef, the Hebrew teacher, by name. They requested that I "help them convince him to stop his illegal activity."
Then everything became clear to me.
They had wanted to get to me because of Yosef from the beginning.
Apparently, they already had somebody working for them, because they knew many peculiar details about my friend and his activities. But I guess in their business, more is always better.
That kind of recruiting attempt lasted for about a year. During that time, I read a lot of papers with titles like "How to Behave at a KGB Interrogation."
I was also able to find an engineering job in an office where most of the engineers were Jews who had already applied to emigrate and had been refused. In the Soviet Union, they were called refuseniks.
Somehow, my KGB curators realized that I was a waste of their time. The frequency of our meetings became more and more sparse, and finally they stopped.
Even though I still do not know the real reason, or combination of reasons, why they stopped bothering me, to this day I am trying to leave this scary story behind me.
There is only one thing I know for sure.
Somewhere in a deep KGB archive, which is stored forever, there is my name, with a detailed description of all these attempts to recruit me.
And there is a good chance those guys declared some success in it, and maybe even got a promotion for it.