Tbilisi’s Not-So-Secret Agents

In August of 1979, I accompanied my graduate-student spouse on the 1979-80 USSR academic exchange sponsored by IREX (International Research and Exchanges Board). After our August arrival in Moscow, we attended orientation meetings with the American Embassy Cultural Affairs staff. They emphasized that our rooms and phones were bugged on all floors of the dormitory at Moscow State University. We were also advised to be on alert as we traveled because the KGB (now known as the FSB) would monitor our activities. (In fact, the American Embassy hired Soviet citizens as drivers and household help, according to a policy which required every US embassy to hire locals to perform lower-level tasks. It was a foregone conclusion that these locals reported on the activities of Embassy personnel.)

Upon our arrival in Tbilisi, Georgia in September, the hospitable Sociology students at Tbilisi State University greeted us warmly. We were the only American exchange students in Tbilisi, so we were a novelty. They filled our dormitory room with flowers and fresh fruit. For the next month, they hosted bountiful gatherings in their homes and restaurants. They also served as proud tour guides who took us to museums with icons and artifacts as well as ancient fortresses amidst the mountains.

Nodar (pseudonym) served as our main companion/tour guide. We thoroughly enjoyed the temperate September weather and his charming and personal touch. However, we began to suspect that he was also controlling and reporting on our activities. My spouse became anxious to start researching information in Russian and Georgian newspapers in the local libraries for his dissertation, so we asked Nodar to stop planning sightseeing activities. Nodar was truly sad.

As my spouse and I took our own walks around Tbilisi, we spotted the KGB parking lot on a side street off of Ulitsa Rustaveli (the main street). Shortly after Nodar stopped accompanying us on our daily activities, the overt spying began. I wrote a letter to my family that I gave to a visiting American Embassy diplomat, who mailed it via diplomatic pouch so the Soviets could not read it:

“We are being followed by KGB agents quite consistently now. I started noticing it three weeks ago [early October 1979] when a man with sunglasses and wearing a suit (unheard of here) got on the same bus as we did and got off when we did. This same individual has been tailing us often since then. I’ve also noticed that others, usually middle-aged men smoking cigarettes and carrying a newspaper, will follow us on foot or on the bus. When we get off the bus at different stops, the poor guy has to choose which one to follow! Even in the library, these people will sit down behind us and look over our shoulders to see what we’re doing. (They pretend to flip through magazines.) One guy came into the reading room and started talking about us loudly!”

More overt spying took place after I picked up a large care package of paperbacks and other supplies from my mother at the post office. A couple of KGB agents sat directly across from me as I transferred from one city bus to another on my way back to the dormitory. I was unfazed and stuck my tongue out at them.

As I mentioned in previous stories, we befriended two IREX participants assigned to Toshkent, Uzbekistan. Sure enough, this couple received a travel visa to Tbilisi starting on Thanksgiving Day. What an unexpectedly eventful week!

My letter to my family (again mailed via the diplomatic pouch) described all of the action:

“What we’ve been through in the last week could qualify for a spy novel…Outside [a tea shop, a] man began talking to us, asking us where our ‘tail’ was. When we said we didn’t have anyone following us, he said we were very naïve. For the next five hours, this man walked around the city with us, telling us all sorts of stories about the KGB. At first, I thought he might be setting a trap for us, but we became convinced that he was a paranoid dissident. Among other things, he said that all the rooms in the dorm and the hotels are bugged, and the ground floor of each building contains many tape recorders. Also, all the ladies who hand you your key when you come in are agents, and the telephones are tapped…”

The next day a Georgian friend took the four of us [our Toshkent friends and us] to a [non-working] church [Svetitskhoveli Cathedral in ancient Mtskheta]. Inside the church it became obvious to us that a KGB agent posing as a tourist was trying to listen to our conversation. We changed positions many times, but the man actually stood right next to me and others. When we walked out of the church, he did, too. Our Toshkent friend made the mistake of taking a photo of the man. This made him angry, and he tried to take a photo of us, but we ran into the church to hide. The man reentered the church, and our Georgian friend had enough nerve to say that he was not very polite!

On our way home, our Georgian friend confirmed what the paranoid dissident told us…and since she worked for Intourist, she told us that all the museums, foreign-currency bars, etc. are full of agents, and that an agent in the museum in which she works (which we toured Saturday) had followed us in the museum! She said the museum had received a phone call that our Toshkent friend was in the museum and should be watched! We all became quite paranoid after that. When our Toshkent friend went… into a series of nearby [places of worship], he counted seven agents following him at various times.”

We found that overt spying on us decreased in January as more Americans arrived at Tbilisi State University for the spring term. The agents had to spread out to cover us all.
It was difficult for my spouse to obtain adequate information in Georgia to write his dissertation, so he made a request to spend the final month of our exchange in Moscow to gain access to the leading research libraries of the USSR. We arranged for housing by housesitting for American diplomats on 30-day home leave.

We made reservations for our flight to Moscow, but the day before our departure, the Georgia State University bureaucrats refused to give my spouse his final month’s stipend. I had had it with being controlled, so I chose to leave Tbilisi while my spouse remained behind to fight for his stipend. Our Georgian friends were appalled that I would abandon my spouse. However, my plan was to work with the American Embassy so they could negotiate with the Georgians to release that stipend.

What a wonderful feeling it was when the plane took off! I was not afraid of traveling alone, and it did not faze me when my checked trunk did not arrive with the rest of my luggage. I intuitively knew what happened. KGB agents went through that trunk at Tbilisi Airport to find out what I was taking home. I traveled to the diplomat’s apartment and then received word that the trunk arrived on a later flight. I had no issues traveling back to Domodedovo Airport for that trunk in the late evening hours. I was free!

The American Embassy Cultural Affairs staff member negotiated successfully with the Georgians for the release of the stipend, and my spouse flew up to Moscow a few days later. We spent the last month in Moscow seeing the sights, visiting with our fellow exchangees, and enjoying the safe and easy access to the American Embassy. The KGB had so many Americans to follow that we were no longer a threat.

Diane Henrikson Russell joined OLLI in 2014. She has taken over 70 OLLI courses on leadership, radio, life story writing, Tai Chi, healthy aging, literature, science, politics, sociology, and humanities. Diane volunteers as a proofreader for the OLLI catalog and for OLLI Connects. Diane was Co-chair of the Volunteer Management Committee from 2019 through early 2023.