"The Warrant Officer who debriefed me was a nice and

Another defector

intelligent man. And he was a good linguist," recalled an Eastern European defector. "The only problem was he kept on asking me questions appropriate for a company commander. And I was a General at the Defense Ministry." complained that he was debriefed in German, a language neither he nor those who interviewed him spoke well. Having lived through World War II, he felt uncomfortable about most things German even when he was calm and relaxed. Other defectors could not help feeling they were thought of as traitors by the debriefing party. "That hurt me," complained one several years later, "I thought the real traitors were those who stayed behind serving the system."

In all fairness, the interviews I have conducted with defectors from Soviet bloc countries 1 in no way indicate that the system which currently deals with new arrivals is fundamentally wrong. Obviously, every debriefing team is in a difficult situation. No matter how knowledgeable and sensitive, debriefing officers or agents usually have to work with

individuals who are culturally and linguistically alien. Many are quite emotional: even after a defector arrives in the United States he feels dangerously exposed to manipulation, or worse,

1The interviews were part of the Oral History Project. The program is headed by Professor Uri Ra'anan, Director of the International Security Studies Program, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University.

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by the security services of his former country.?

Under such

circumstances, a flawless debriefing system would be unrealistic to expect. The purpose of this statement is to identify areas in which improvement, particularly in the attitude toward

defectors, can be realistically expected.

A defector is someone who escapes to the West having worked in a relatively high position within his country's political, economic, military, or intelligence elite. He had access to high level classified material and he will share his understanding of the system he rejected with the U.S.

Government.

Derived from the Latin verb deficere, meaning to depart but also to fail, I suspect that our use of the term "defector" demonstrates our ambivalence about these people. While it is true that they must "depart" the country of their origin to acquire such status, it is ironic that we should be using the term defector when it is a label appropriately applied by the country and political system they left. They are not failures to In fact, their readiness to start a new existence in the West, under often complicated and adverse conditions,

us.

demonstrates the failure of the regimes in East Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Sofia, and Bucharest, the regimes they

2The authoritative Great Soviet Encyclopedia does not find enough space in its many volumes to explain the term defector. The Soviet state treats such people, called perebezhchiki, as traitors, sentences many to death, and puts them on the KGB Wanted List. For more information on this list, see Vladislav Krasnov, Soviet Defectors: The KGB Wanted List (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1986). This is a pioneering work.

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repudiated and left behind. Every genuine defector is of benefit

to the United States and a failure only for the Soviet bloc. What matters to us is their arrival and what they have

volunteered to bring to us.

What do we reveal about ourselves when we freely accept the language, and with it the perspective and concepts, of our adversary?

Since defectors are important personalities their arrival in the West is often publicized and sometimes much debated. What does he know? What is he going to reveal to the West? Does he know anything about some of the controversial cases, for instance, Nosenko, Hollis, Oswald? What impact is his defection having where he escaped from? And in Moscow? Most recently, the arrival in the West of Colonel Ryszard Jerzy Kuklinski caused a sensation. As an officer of the Polish Army, Kuklinski had worked on preparations for the imposition of martial law in Poland, but disappeared before the actual crackdown on 13 December 1981.

Equally famous were the defections of many other Eastern European notables. For instance, Jan Sejna, whose defection in February, 1968, anticipated the dramatic Prague Spring. Or Ladislav Bittman, whose escape from his post in Vienna was a response to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August, 1968. Reacting to another Warsaw Pact crisis, Ambassador Zdzislaw Rurarz left the Polish Embassy in Tokyo in protest against the martial law regime of General Wojciech Jaruzelski,

and Ambassador Romuald Spasowski did the same in Washington, D.C.

When such people vote with their feet and escape to the West it is often the result of a difficult, and perhaps even painful, decision. The action which follows the decision becomes particularly impressive when one considers that Eastern European defectors had often led quite comfortable lives at home. As members of the elite, they hardly ever knew the economic hardships and shortages for which centrally-planned economies

are notorious.

Undoubtedly, some defectors escape to the West to sidestep a personal problem. But many are driven by the desire to tell the truth. Several have brought with them classified material of significant value. Others come here seeking a refuge from the intermittent purges of the elites which characterize many Soviet-style political systems. Still others can no longer put up with the cynicism and lies which are the essence of the official life.

Without losing sight of the fact that each defector is unique and differs from others in many ways, I want to emphasize that they also agree on crucial points. For instance, all are very patriotic. "I am two hundred percent American," is how one puts it. While some of this may be an expression of their hitherto pent up resentment of their lives in the Soviet system, anyone who has spent time with Eastern European defectors will agree that their patriotic sentiment is genuine. This tends to be further strengthened by the fact that, for obvious security

reasons, defectors isolate themselves from emigre communities and try to live for the future rather than the past. Consequently, they think of themselves as Americans, they are Americans, and want to be treated acordingly.

Importantly, there is another point on which most Eastern European defectors I have spoken with concur: more could have been achieved with their knowledge of the systems they escaped from. The tactical and operational level information they provided was welcome by their debriefers. But virtually all agree that their efforts to elucidate the long term strategic planning, which they claim is characteristic of the Warsaw Pact countries, were unsuccessful. The debriefing teams, defectors argue, were very interested in names, addresses, types of weapons, details of personnel policy, and vignettes from the hidden private lives of Warsaw Pact politicians, intelligence officers, and military personnel. But the debriefers were markedly less enthusiastic or openly disbelieving when matters pertaining to ideology, the long term strategic plan, or global strategy were to be discussed.

In the defectors' opinion, such an approach was justified whenever time was of the essence. In the absence of any time pressure, the refusal seriously to examine Soviet ideology and long term planning, i.e., strategy, struck them as putting the cart before the horse.

Another observation often expressed during the Oral History Interviews conducted by the International Security Studies of the Fletcher School is that defectors ought to be worked with on