God Bless you Daddy: Its been 11 years to the day that you passed: Yuri Aleskandrovich Rastvorov, AKA Martin F. Simons, Spy, died on January 19, 2004, at the age of 79 [or 82]. To his neighbors in McLean, Virginia, Potomac, Maryland, and Bethesda, Maryland, for the past five decades, he was known as Martin F. Simons. To his colleagues in the KGB, the Soviet espionage agency from which he defected as a lieutenant colonel in 1954, he always would be , a traitor to communism who had been sentenced to death in absentia soon after his defection. To neighbors, Simons was an avid tennis player, a founding member of Edgemoor Tennis Club in Bethesda and the father of two daughters who attended Holton-Arms School. Friends knew him as an ebullient, athletic and fun-loving man who dressed well, drove expensive cars and supported charitable causes. The CIA, in a declassified document, said that Rastvorov was a valuable espionage asset, providing background insights into the KGB and the Soviet government ... a mentor to very young CIA case officers, teaching them about the Russians and the KGB. To Paul Redmond, retired CIA counterintelligence chief, he was a wonderful, warm, energetic Russian [who] taught us that KGB officers were humans after all -- not stereotypical ogres. This helped us immensely as we worked against them as case officers. Simons, who gave his age as 79, and Rastvorov, 82, were the same man. That man died on Jan. 19 -- five days before the 50th anniversary of his defection to the United States, Jan. 24, 1954 -- at the Manor Care convalescent center in Potomac. He never recovered from a debilitating stroke he suffered in 2002, following knee replacement surgery. Prior to entering the center, he had lived in a condominium at the Rotunda in McLean for the past 20 years. A daughter, Jennifer Walther, said Simons was a generous, loving soul . . . the person who always supported me when I was growing up. He took her skiing in the winter, and he tried to teach her tennis. He liked to fix gourmet meals, beef stroganoff -- no mushrooms, please! -- and Russian rolled cabbages, stuffed with beef and pork. Not until Walther was 11 and her sister, Alexandra, 13, did they learn their fathers real identity -- and his real name. Their mother, Hope Macartney Simons, told them on a family outing in Minnesota. Your father has two birthdays, she began, as Walther and her sister exchanged incredulous looks. He is not who you think he is. He is a Soviet defector. The two birthdays were July 11, 1921, in Dimitriyevsk in the Kursk province of central Russia, where he was born Yuri A. Rastvorov, and Sept. 1, 1924, in Tehran, which was the CIA cover story of his birth as Martin F. Simons. Simons, Walther said, was angry with his wife -- they later divorced -- for telling the children about his past. With a price on his head in Moscow, he feared the knowledge might somehow put them in jeopardy. He was paranoid, Walther said, but he had good reasons. It was a matter of survival. After his defection, Simons settled in the Washington area and continued working for the CIA in a variety of consulting and advisory jobs and in various businesses, which Walther said probably were CIA fronts. He lived well. He was a wheeler-dealer, adept at finding bargains and good business deals, Walther said. For a period in the late 1950s, he managed an electronics business. He frequently boarded airplanes for long flights to undivulged destinations. But he shared no details with his family. The espionage side of his life, said his daughter, was a total mystery to me. He did not talk about what he did. In his previous identity as Lt. Col. Rastvorov of the Soviet KGB, he defected to the United States in Tokyo, where he had served since 1950, ostensibly as an official of the Soviet Foreign Ministry. For coming over to the U.S. side, he received a new persona from the CIA as Martin F. Simons, the son of a Dutch petroleum engineer who had worked in the Baku oil fields before the Communist revolution of 1917, and a Russian mother. The CIAs Simons grew up in Tehran and Iraq and came to the United States in 1953 after his parents had died. His Russian accent was easily explainable by the fact that he had a Russian mother. When friends suggested they heard no trace of a Dutch accent, Simons usually changed the subject of conversation. He received U.S. citizenship by a special act of Congress in 1959, a Social Security number and a U.S. passport, which later would enable him to travel to Europe on skiing trips. All these were in the name of Martin F. Simons. In exchange, the United States received from Rastvorov what the CIA would describe as considerable counterintelligence information on Soviet espionage and subversion activities in Japan and some of the earliest retrospective data on how the Soviet Union had actually planned the Korean War and how Stalin successfully pressured China to enter that conflict. CIA chief Allen Dulles wrote him a thank-you letter. According to CIA files, Rastvorovs father was an officer in the Red Army and his mother a physician. His paternal grandfather was accused in the 1930s of being a kulak -- a large landowner -- and he was dispossessed of his land. He died of starvation in the famine that followed the collectivization of Soviet farms, a fact that haunted Rastvorov and which, the CIA speculated, led to his disaffection with the Soviet Union. During World War II, Rastvorov was conscripted into the Red Army, assigned to a Japanese language training school and then to a foreign intelligence unit of the KGB. He married a ballerina named Galina Andreevna Godova, who in 1945 gave birth to a daughter, Tatyana. He was posted to Tokyo in 1946, then recalled for a security check, and in 1950 reassigned in Tokyo. His job was to recruit espionage agents at a Tokyo tennis club. He became an excellent tennis player. Four years later, he defected. He had been ordered back to Moscow, where he feared he would become a victim of the Kremlin purges that followed the arrest and downfall of Soviet secret police Chief Lavrenti Beria. He knew that if he went back, it would be the end, his American daughter said. His Russian daughter and wife, from whom he was later divorced, remained in the Soviet Union. In November and December of 1954, writing under his Soviet name, Rastvorov authored a three-part series in Life magazine in which he discussed the political machinations at the highest levels of the Kremlin in the struggle for power after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. The articles also discussed Soviet pressures on China to enter the Korean War and the details surrounding Rastvorovs defection. After the publication of the Life magazine series, Yuri A. Rastvorov all but vanished from public view. He testified before a Senate investigations subcommittee in 1956, but for the rest of his life he was Martin F. Simons. Walther said she never heard anyone call her father by his Russian name, and he was extremely guarded about telling anyone who he had been. She had to beg him for permission to tell her husband that he was really Yuri A. Rastvorov. Sometime after Simons moved into his condominium at the Rotunda, Walther noticed a picture on the wall of a little girl she had never seen before. Thats your half-sister, Tatyana, her father said. If shes still alive, Tatyana would be 58 years old now. Jennifer Walther said she will try to find her. Click here to Reply
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 06:23:32 +0000
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