Communism: Big Brother Is Watching You

When I finished my graduate studies at the university, all men were still subject to the
military draft. Rather than being drafted into a combat unit, I enlisted for two years, nine months
and eleven days in the Army Security Agency, an intelligence unit. For the most part I felt that
the period spent in military service was a waste of time, but I have subsequently realized that it
was preparation for visiting and living in communist countries.
During the 1970s and 1980s, crossing the border into a communist country was an
unusual experience. In early summer of 1970 I had just finished teaching at the University of
Oulu in Finland, and Jytte and I, together with our good friends Dick and Bette Fleming, visited
Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) just a few miles from the border between Finland and Russia.
We were travelling on a tour bus with a dozen or more tourists, and when we reached the border,
we retrieved our bags from the luggage area and went through customs while the underside of
the bus was being searched. Of course, our bags were thoroughly examined. Bette had brought
along some tampons, which aroused the suspicion of the security guard. Perhaps they were
something designed to conceal coded messages. Fortunately, one of the custom officials was a
woman, and after a short discussion between them in Russian, Bette was allowed to pass without
being detained.
Of a more serious nature, however, was the fact that one of our fellow travelers was
Jewish and had two passports, one Israeli and one from a European country. He was not
detained at the border, but one of his passports was confiscated. Among our group was a Mr.
Maximillian, who claimed to be Swiss but who had a distinctively Russian square jaw. He

carried with him on board the bus an attach case, which I suspect carried a device for listening
in on our conversations. He was always careful not to be included in any photo of our travel
group.
While we were visiting the Summer Palace, we happened to be directly behind the Jew.
A young Russian man came up to him, and the Jew said in English, My eyes are hurting me and
I cannot see. In other words, he did not have the second passport with him. The young Russian
was so desperate that he tried to board our bus as we were about to return to the city, which he
was not allowed to do.
The next morning, as we were preparing to return to Finland, Mr. Maximillian was very
happy. Although he had previously refused to have anything to do with any of us, he vivaciously
shook hands with each one of us. He had no attach case with him on the return trip. It was
obvious to me that another Jew in Russia had been caught trying to escape from communism,
and those who had tried to assist him had probably been arrested.
We learned another lesson as well. At the hotel for foreigners there was a concierge on
every floor. While sitting in our room, I happened to mention to Jytte that it would be nice to
have a cup of tea. A few minutes later I went out into the corridor, only to find the concierge on
her way to our room, tea in hand. I was not surprised; of course every room in which foreigners
were lodged would be bugged.
In the early 1980s I returned to Leningrad, this time as a tour guide for an Elderhostel
group. Just before leaving for Russia I was faced with a crisis. One of the elderly men on the
tour insisted that there be a toilet on the bus if he was to make the trip to Leningrad. Elderhostel
had arranged for us to take an older bus, but we managed to obtain a new one at the last moment.

I can still see the bus driver cringing while we were at the border between Finland and Russia.
The customs guards were piercing the foam insulation in the ceiling of his new bus with thick
wires to see if anything was hidden there.
To digress for a moment, a bus with a toilet was in communist countries a luxury beyond
belief. In Lithuania I had the pleasure of leading a group of female English teachers from
Vytautas Magnus University to Sweden. It was for them an opportunity beyond comprehension.
They had been free from Russian dominance only a few months, and had never thought they
would enjoy such freedom to travel during their lifetime. We drove by bus to Poland in order to
get on the ferry to Sweden, and there were no rest stops on the way. But there were plenty of
forests, and from time to time the bus would pull off to the side of the road, and the women
would disappear into the woods. There were no complaints. Another thing we learned in
communist countries: you always had tissue paper with you wherever you went.
From 1986 to 1989 we lived in China, but there my intelligence skills were not very
helpful. The Chinese did not use bugs in foreigners apartments to listen in on conversations.
Their methods of control were quite different. To begin with we were assigned one of my
English students, Pan, as our interpreter. Chinese surveillance was cloaked as an attempt to be
helpful. But his real intention became obvious quite quickly, and we soon got rid of him. He
was friends with a local policewoman, who on several occasions looked in on us while I was
tutoring a student in order to improve her English.
My biggest problem was getting any of my students to say a word in our seminars. Of
course, Pan was one of the students. As long as he was present not a word was said. But there
were times when he was absent, and a heavy cloud of silence still surrounded us. Then one
glorious spring day both Pan and another female student were absent, and suddenly we had a
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wonderful time laughing and talking. The female student was the daughter of a prominent
Communist Party official in town. So there were not one, but two spies in the class.
On the other hand our apartment served as a safe haven for any person who came alone to
talk to us. Then we gained a great deal of information about what was going on under the
surface.
In fact, the college officials gave us total freedom to speak freelyon occasion much to
their chagrin. I was asked to give a series of public lectures, to which even young people outside
the college were invited. Nave as I was, I thought it my duty to explain the American way of
life to the Chinese, and my first lecture was on our system of government: the series of checks
and balances we had developed to contain an individuals misuse of power. My lectures were
never again open to the public.
I did not realize at the time the Chinese political system, indeed the whole society, is
fundamentally based upon the misuse of power. The Chinese were not interested in money, but in
power. If a parent wanted to get his child into a good school, he might go to the headmaster, who
would mention his nephew was anxious to get a new bicycleand a bicycle would be produced.
We gave to one of our students for his wedding present a carton of Marlboro cigarettes, highly
regarded at that time in China, not because he was a smoker, but because he needed a bribe in
order to get an apartment for himself and his new bride. He handed over the cigarettes; he did
not get the apartment.
I am certain the university officials were severely criticized regarding my lecture, but
they never reprimanded me. In fact, later on, we were invited to the home of the most powerful
figure on campus, the head of the Communist Party, whose wife happened to be an English

teacher. He was himself fluent in Russian, having studied in Russia for some years, but did not
know English. At the last minute our invitation was cancelled. Even a person with such power
did not dare to entertain us in his home; he was, after all, subject to Party discipline.
As for our contacts with the Western World they were of course monitored. The postal
service had to translate the English form of our address into Chinese characters in order for our
letters to be delivered. We arrived in China in August, just as the political season was heating up
in the United States. A letter was forwarded to us from the White House, with Ronald Reagan
urging us to vote for Pressley as senator for South Dakota. There was even a picture of them
together. A letter from the President of the United States! Of course that had to be opened. It
was in one of those envelopes with a window to show to whom the letter was addressed, but in
returning the letter to its envelope, they had put it in upside down.
Phone calls to us were simply out of the question. The school operator did not know a
word of English. When she received a call from abroad, she became flustered and simply hung
up the phone. As for calling the United States, that was prohibitively expensive. The academic
dean of the college had spent the previous year in the U.S. She made a call to her landlady in
the states simply to say that she had arrived home safely. It cost her half a months salary.
During our first year, as far as we knew, we were the only foreigners in the city of
Zhenjiang. Pearl Buck, the famous author, had once lived there, but there had been no foreign
presence since the communist revolution forty years earlier. The second year we discovered
there was another American couple who had been missionaries to China before the communist
takeover, as well as some teachers in a school some miles outside the city, but we seldom got
together.

In other words, opportunities for sharing intelligence were non-existent, and

contamination of the populace with our Western ideas was confined to the students at the school
who could understand English, with one exception.
At that time in many cities young people got together on Sunday mornings in a park to
practice speaking English. Once I became aware of The English Corner, I often attended their
meetings, and in that way met young people outside the university, some of whom became our
closest friends. They would visit us in our apartment, but not before signing in at the gate of our
walled compound. On one cold, December Sunday there was no one in the park to talk to.
There had been a student demonstration a few days earlier. A policewoman did finally arrive and
suggested I might want to return home.
The Chinese were much more refined in controlling foreigners than the Russians. They
did not need to spy on us, nor did we ever feel ourselves to be in danger, except at the very end
of our stay, during the Tiananmen massacre. But we were constantly concerned about our
Chinese friendswhat might happen to them if we said or did the wrong thing. Most of them
had recently been through the Cultural Revolution, when the universities were closed, and
intellectuals were sent out into the countryside to fend for themselves. Their horror stories were
enough to keep us in line.
After we returned home from China we read a book by Bill Holmes, Coming Home
Crazy. He had been teaching English in China at about the same time we were there. I was
shocked to read that he had actually visited the home of one of his students in a rural area.
Apparently he was oblivious to the danger he had presented to the student and his family. The
communist revolution had begun as an uprising among the peasantry. The Party was not about to
allow rural folk to come in contact with foreign ideas except under strict supervision. We were
ourselves invited by a student to visit his home in the countryside outside the city of Chongquing
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during our summer vacation. When we arrived, the student informed us the police would not
allow us to visit his home. There were military installations in the vicinity.
My intelligence skills came into play at the very end of our time in China. The Chinese
students had been peacefully demonstrating for months in Tiananmen Square, across the road
from the parliament building in Beijing. Their request was not for better living conditions, but
that the rule of law be instituted. On June 4, 1989 the tanks rolled in, and hundreds of students
were massacred, demonstrating the extent to which the Party would go in order to remain in
power. At that time we were in Guangzhou (Canton) in southern China, far from the bullets that
were fired at the American Embassy. But the students in Guangzhou were now blocking
roadways, and no one knew what would happen next. One of the English teachers informed me
a student of his, the son of an Army general, said that on Friday the soldiers were to be given the
order to use live ammunition. This was on Wednesday.
I immediately called the American consulate in Guangzhou, where Jytte was working as a
nurse, and told them I had important information to give. When I arrived at the consulate, I was
met by one of the intelligence officers, who escorted me outdoors and on to a pier extending over
the river. It was not safe to say anything in the building itself. I told him what I had heard, and
on Friday we were on our way out of the country, together with most of the other Americans in
Guangzhou.
On the plane home to America I was devastated, the tears flowing uncontrollably. How
could Chinese politicians massacre their own people? The students leaving our university every
night for the past two months had always acted peacefullyno rioting or destruction of property.
One of my graduate students had quoted to me: Give me liberty or give me death.

I had begun my first public lecture in China with a quotation from Lord Acton: Power
corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
When I was summoned to teach at Vytautas Magnus University in Lithuania in January of
1991, my intelligence training became immediately useful. We happened to arrive in Vilnius late
at night, the very night in which the Russian tanks rolled into Lithuania in an attempt to take over
their Parliament in the center of the city. In front of the building was the town square with a
number of narrow streets branching off in various directions. Lithuanians from all over the
country had congregated in the square, in the midst of a snowstorm, to blockade every street so
the tanks could not enter the square. They spent the night singing national songs and listening to
their only TV station over a loudspeaker. Rather than try to occupy the square against such
resistance, the tanks turned toward the TV station and took it over, mowing down several dozen
people standing guard outside in the process. The TV announcers described the actions of the
Russian soldiers until they were suddenly silenced.
Instead of remaining in Vilnius for the night, as had been our original intention, we were
driven through the blinding snowstorm directly to Kaunas, in the center of Lithuania. Of course,
at the time we had no idea what was going on. We could only sense the fear of the driver that he
might suddenly be confronting a Russian tank.
We were graciously received by our landlady, who was renting out the bottom floor of
her house to teachers at the university. She slept in a room at the back of the house and shared
the kitchen and toilet facilities with us. Her husband occupied the second floor of the house.
They were supposedly divorced. Because of my previous training, I was suspicious.

The next day, after our first visit to the university, we came home to find that the landlady
had graciously washed and ironed all of our clothes. My suspicions were confirmed. We were
under observation. The landlady was ostensibly a teacher, or so we were told, but she never had
any papers to correct or books to read. On one occasion a gradebook lay on the dining room
table with a book next to ittoo obviously placed there. I knew we had to be careful not to say
anything of importance while we were in that house.
We did have some fun. There was a lightbulb missing from the chandelier; I presumed
that was where the bug was hidden. Jytte and I would discuss all sorts of things, beginning a
sentence in English and ending it in Danish. Sometimes we threw in a Swedish phrase, or some
Chinese. I knew they would have to send the tapes of our conversation to Moscow; obviously
we were speaking in some kind of coded language. My intelligence unit in the American army
had been created to translate such conversations. Likewise, when I wanted to say something
important to the academic dean in her office, I did not speak it. I wrote it down.
When we first arrived at Vytautas Magnus, the academic dean was a hero all over
Lithuania. The university was founded in the 1920s during the period in which the country
enjoyed freedom from Russian domination, but it was soon closed under Russian occupation. It
had just recently been reopened and was in its second year of operation. There was no campus.
The classes were held in various building scattered throughout the city, and the administrative
offices and classroom were in the old Communist headquarters in the center of the city. It so
happened the building contained a small TV station of its own. Fifteen minutes after the
takeover of the TV station in Vilnius, the academic dean, a Lithuanian-American, was on the air
proclaiming the university was a spokesman for Free Lithuania. The academic deans face was
broadcast throughout the country.
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No indigenous Lithuanian would have dared to do such a thing. Exile to Siberia or death
might well have been the result, but she was an American citizen against whom the Russians did
not dare to take such action. The broadcasts continued every night for several months.
A few days after our arrival, some of us teachers from the English Department were
having lunch together. The head of the department was another Lithuanian-American who had
been helping to broadcast the nightly news. She was tired, and asked the teachers if one of them
would do the broadcast that evening. She had no clue as to what she was asking. I could see the
fear in their eyes as they remained quiet. Then an elderly member of the department spoke up.
Ill do it for you.
I recognized immediately who was the Communist agent in the department. I later
learned she lived in the apartment complex reserved for members of the KGB. After that, I was
kind and polite, but never turned my back on her.
The Communists were furious with the academic dean. The university had managed to
appropriate a luxurious house with sauna which they had used to entertain their girlfriends, and
it was now the home of the dean, her husband and their children. It was filled with listening
devices, most of which the family was able to find. So one evening, when the parents were out
and the maid was babysitting, she left the children alone in order to get some milk. Strangers
stormed into the house, ran up to the second floor and trashed everything they could while the
children huddled in fearrather petty, but effective enough.
I was able to gather some intelligence from my students, but there was no one to whom to
report until October of 1991, when the Lithuanians gained freedom from the Soviet Union. The
following month we Americans celebrated Thanksgiving in the American Embassy. The new
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ambassador had spent the night cooking turkeys and keeping them warm in the sauna. It was a
celebration of freedom, a meal not soon forgotten.
One piece of intelligence was from a student who had been forced to serve in the Soviet
Army. During the Cold War we had been taught to fear that army. In fact, it lacked cohesion and
discipline. Soldiers were drafted from various parts of the Soviet Union, belonging to different
nationalities and speaking different languages; so there was little allegiance to the Soviet Union.
After the officers left the barracks at night, all hell broke loose: fist-fights, even murder. When
soldiers in their second year of service were ordered to do something, they would simply point to
a new recruit and say, Let him do it.
Another bit was concerning the billions of dollars being lent to the Russian government
by the International Monetary Fund to help the Russian government get on its feet again.
Approximately the same amount of dollars was being stashed away in the Swiss bank accounts
of the Communist leaders. Such intelligence was not really actionable.
Nor was I able to gain any real information about several rooms in the administrative
building that were under lock and key at all times. They were being used by communist
sympathizers who had not vacated the building when it was taken over by the university.
However, I did have several of its inhabitants in my Business English class. Former Communists
were becoming entrepreneurs anxious to learn about Western business practicesso much for
communist ideology.
As in China, intelligence information became most important at the end of our stay in
Lithuania. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to take a group of eighteen English
teachers to Sweden for a week on one condition: that no one who had already been abroad could

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come on the trip. Anyone who had been given a passport to travel outside the iron curtain had
gotten it only on the condition she supply intelligence to the KGB.
What could I do about the elderly woman who was a KGB agent? Fortunately, she had
told me that she expected to visit Canada that summer; so when an administrator who was a
friend of hers asked me why she was not included, I could give an honest reply; she had already
made plans to go abroad. Had she gone on the trip to Sweden, it would have been ruined for all
the other teachers, for they feared her greatly.
Living in a Communist country one must always be looking back over ones shoulder to
see how Big Brother is watching you. We are not used to doing that in America. Being in Army
Intelligence taught me to be on guard, to look under the rug to see what is really going on. Two
years, nine months, eleven daysI guess it was worth it after all.

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