Spy Lost by Kaarlo Tuomi

Author:Kaarlo Tuomi [Tuomi, Kaarlo; Määttänen Sakari; Haynes, John Earl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781936274567
Publisher: Enigma Books

Then I lost my temper and said, “Comrade teacher, what makes you believe that your pronunciation of English is so excellent? I’m sure it would be quite fine for the United States.”

Filimonov, furious and red, sputtered, “We are not interested in how the North American imperialists maltreat the language. We teach the students to speak and pronounce pure English.”

I became a KGB spy and informer at that time and it happened as follows: I had gotten a fairly nice job felling logs at a tsaju or teahouse.

What could have been more convenient for an old lumberjack? It was only difficult to get horses and so they were stolen; the boss of the teahouse bought them illegally from the log load drivers but this was not enough and he made a contract with the administrator of the state wood-yard who delivered twenty log loads to my boss, naturally illegally. The administrator of the wood-yard pocketed the money.

I quickly realized that the spy system was unbeatable: everything was exposed, and I was also accused of thievery. The major who was looking into the case said to me frankly that the punishment was a few years in prison and, moreover, I would lose my status as a veteran of the military intelligence service. And worst of all, my candidate membership in the communist party would be canceled.

However, if I were to sign a paper in which I agreed to cooperate with the KGB in the future, then the matter would be glossed over.

What else could I do in such a situation? The major gave me a blank paper and pen and dictated the text to me, which essentially was that I would I promise to listen to the average citizen’s opinions of the system and report them regularly to the secret police. I was not very successful in this task: Soviets know their thoughts are being eavesdropped on and therefore do not readily express them.

I studied hard at the pedagogical institute four years and afterwards the KGB fixed me up with a job in the same institute, in spite of Filimonov’s angry protests. I taught in the correspondence department, and my task was to check the grammatical and translation abilities of the correspondence course participants. I was very successful. Although the pupils liked me and respected my knowledge, Filimonov was adamant about getting me fired from the institute. Since nothing else helped, he wrote a report to the director in which he complained that my poor knowledge of Russian had an adverse effect on the pupils’ ability to learn English.

His ultimatum was either he or Saastamoinen goes—I used the name Saastamoinen, which was my stepfather’s name. I had come as a minor with his passport to the Soviet Union.

The next day I was given two weeks’ wages and shown the front door. Filimonov had prevailed. My teaching career was not looking too good, but after just a few days I found a vacancy at an evening school and was chosen for the post.

The pupils were mainly young workers whose studies had been interrupted by the war.

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