“For years, I was angry at my father for what he had done to me. I thought he hadn’t given me a choice.”

Defector’s Daughter The story of a Latvian woman whose double-agent father defected to the United States, and of how she finally found her way back home.

By Benjamin Smith

On the morning the Iron Curtain rattled open for her, Ieva Lesinska was standing in a Marriott Hotel suite in Washington. 
        It was September 3, 1978, and Ms. Lesinska had just checked into adjoining rooms with her father, a Soviet translator at the United Nations in New York. She was 20 then, and still elated by her first taste of Western freedom. But in the bathroom she found something unsettling: a gold-framed card on the door listing the room rate as 350 dollars a night.
       How, she asked, could they afford that? 
       Her father would later tell her that he had been leaking Soviet secrets to the CIA. But at that moment, he said only that he was about to defect to the U.S. Then he gave his daughter a blunt choice: She could take a taxi to the Soviet Embassy and denounce him as a traitor—or she could stay with him and her stepmother, and never again see her mother or her homeland, Soviet-ruled Latvia. She chose to stay. She would not set foot in Latvia again for 13 years.

The Cold War has been over for a decade now, and its personal dramas are the quickest to be forgotten. But the war, in a sense, never ended for Ms. Lesinska and hundreds of people like her. Her struggle to reassemble an ordinary life offers a rare glimpse into their hidden world.
       The U.S. government’s record on handling defectors is “spotty,” says James Woolsey, the director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency from 1993 to 1995. “There are some great successes, but there are some cases that make you wince.” The risk is clear, he says: Defectors are “the principal Achilles’ heel of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes.” But when news of unhappy defectors trickles home, “it hurts your ability to get them in the future.”
       Now 43, Ms. Lesinska sits in Osiris, a Riga café, and reflects on her journey. Over the last decade, she has become a leading Latvian intellectual and translator, and has helped create the country’s signature cultural weekly, Rigas Laiks. Her hair is now short and frosted orange. A copy of the New Yorker lies on the marble tabletop next to her ashtray and glass of white wine. 
       “For years, I was angry at my father for what he had done to me,” she says. “I thought he hadn’t given me a choice.” It took years, she says, to overcome her “resentment at history.”
       Today, the CIA declines to confirm or deny that it had any relationship with Ms. Lesinska’s father, Imants Lesinskis, or his family. But soon after Mr. Lesinskis’ death in 1985, a CIA public-affairs officer named G. L. Lamborn acknowledged in a letter to the American Latvian Association that Mr. Lesinskis “after his defection made a significant contribution to the U.S. government and this agency.”
       Even then, though, the CIA declined to comment on the most intriguing element of the story that Mr. Lesinskis told in the 1980s: his claim that he had served as a double agent for two decades—working undercover for the KGB by day and slipping secrets to the CIA by night.
       There’s little doubt that Mr. Lesinskis worked for the KGB. The historian who watches over the closed archives of the Latvian KGB in Riga says Mr. Lesinskis’ name is listed on KGB rolls, along with his codename, IVARS. “He was an agent—that’s the truth,” says the historian, Indulis Zalite.
       Ms. Lesinska has some documentary evidence of her own. In her book-lined apartment in Riga stands a blue wooden crate in which she keeps some of her father’s old files along with a copy of the letter from the CIA’s Mr. Lamborn. As she sifts through the papers, she’s struck by a Cold War irony. “What seems more and more incredible is how there can be masses of people who participate in the (intelligence) game without knowing the rules,” she says. “You work around the rules, just as you did in the Soviet Union. There’s no difference.” 

On that American Labor-Day weekend in 1978, Ms. Lesinska was a university student with long brown hair and dreams of becoming a writer. She had just spent a heady month in New York with her father and stepmother, who both worked at the U.N. She wasn’t about to march into the Soviet Embassy in Washington and denounce her father. Minutes after Ms. Lesinska told her father she’d stay, the hotel suite filled with CIA and FBI agents in business suits, shaking hands and congratulating the family on their choice. The following Tuesday, the family went to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and became West German immigrants: Peter and Linda Dorn, and their daughter Evelyn—citizens of nowhere who carried re-entry permits but no passports.
       Once it became clear that Mr. Lesinskis had defected, a propaganda blitz erupted. On October 6, a Soviet newsletter aimed at Latvian emigrés, Dzimtenes Balss (Homeland Voice), devoted an entire page to Ieva Lesinska’s case. The article suggested that she had either betrayed her ailing mother or been kidnapped. “Will I have anybody to put flowers on my grave?” her mother, Marta Lesinska, pleaded in an open letter. But by then, Ieva Lesinska, her father and stepmother were living in a safe house in suburban Washington. They had entered the secretive world of the CIA’s resettlement program.
       At any one time, the CIA watches over some 400 defectors, says a U.S. intelligence officer familiar with the program. Today, these include aging Cold War defectors and more recent arrivals from places such as Iraq. Most seem to vanish into the American melting pot: Ms. Lesinska’s father, for example, died in the U.S., and her stepmother today lives outside Danbury, Connecticut, in a small house with a vast collection of mirrors. But the sudden step from spy drama to middle-American obscurity can be difficult, and the CIA has come under fire for not doing more to help defectors. “They want these guys to go away, move to Topeka, learn how to repair TV sets, and never see them again,” says William Geimer, of the Jamestown Foundation, which agitates for defectors’ rights.
       Testimony given during a 1987 U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing suggested that some defectors to the U.S. have wound up with dead-end jobs and a deep sense of alienation. Vladimir Sakharov, for example, testified that he was a 26-year-old specialist on Arab affairs for the KGB when the CIA airlifted him out of Kuwait in July 1971. Though he spoke no German, he became German immigrant William Stiller and was shipped off to Hollywood, California, for training at a motel school to become a clerk, he told the subcommittee. “I had absolutely no friends, no one to talk to, and no hope for the future,” he said.
       The CIA later added a layer of oversight to its resettlement program, and the U.S. intelligence officer calls today’s program compassionate. But complaints continue. Last year, for the first time, a U.S. court accepted a lawsuit from two defectors who claim the CIA reneged on a promise of 27,000 dollars in annual support after the husband lost his job at a bank. The CIA is trying to quash the case under an 1875 Supreme Court ruling that courts had no right to review contracts between the government and its spies.
       Mr. Lesinskis was more fortunate in his resettlement. With the CIA’s help, his daughter and widow say, he landed a job in 1980 at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. There, he worked as a researcher for a professor who specialized in Soviet history and was believed to have CIA connections.
       Ieva Lesinska would eventually ask the U.S. to grant her just one favor: to leave her alone. But to this day, she is struggling to piece together the chain of events that would take her to America. 

The story Mr. Lesinskis told his daughter and others began in 1960,when Ieva was just two. Mr. Lesinskis was in Rome that summer, ostensibly covering the Olympic Games for the Soviet newsletter, Homeland Voice. But he had a second mission, according to both of his former wives: He was a KGB agent sent to contact Australian athletes of Latvian descent. Unbeknownst to his Soviet handlers, Imants Lesinskis was ripe for picking: He hated Latvia’s Russian rulers. One day during the Games, he stepped into the U.S. Embassy in Rome and requested political asylum. U.S. agents instead convinced him that he could do more damage to the U.S.S.R. by spying for the CIA, he would tell his family; the 28-year-old Latvian left Rome as a double agent.
       By the spring of 1978, Mr. Lesinskis had been working at the U.N. in New York for two years. He was officially employed as a translator. Unofficially, he served as a KGB agent. The big Latvian, with his hawk-like nose and tinted spectacles, certainly looked the part.
       Then one night in April 1978, U.N. Undersecretary General Arkady Shevchenko defected, sending the Soviet mission into high alert. When Mr. and Mrs. Lesinskis were invited to return to the U.S.S.R. for an unexpected vacation, they feared that they would be arrested on arrival. With Ieva Lesinska safely in the U.S. at the time, the couple decided to stop testing their luck, his widow says.
       Their defection was followed by two nights in a Holiday Inn in Virginia. To break the tension one night, agents took Ieva Lesinska to a nightclub, where she remembers slow-dancing to Lionel Richie’s “Once, Twice, Three Times a Lady.”
       “They told us that usually defectors had this, that, and the other problem, but that we were great,” she says. “I was just numb.”
The tension would rise. Installed in a safe house—a first-floor apartment on Bushman Road in the Washington suburb of Oakton, Virginia—Mr. Lesinskis fidgeted, chain-smoked and drank heavily. He was being debriefed by the CIA, his daughter and widow say, and appeared to fear for his life. In restaurants, he insisted on sitting with his back to the wall, recalls Ingrida Meyerovica, a Latvian then living in Washington.
       Some Latvian emigrés suspected that he wasn’t a defector but a Soviet plant. To this day, Ms. Meyerovica says, “nobody knows whether he was a double agent or a triple agent.” Asked by the American Latvian Society “to set the record straight,” CIA spokesman Lamborn would only state in a 1986 letter that “Mr. Lesinskis’ courage, dedication, and true patriotism were well known to most of us here.”
       Mr. Lesinskis’ relationship with his keepers wasn’t always so harmonious. Like many defectors, he thought “he would make a big splash,” Ms. Lesinska says. But disillusionment soon set in. He discovered that the U.S. government wanted to keep him and his family out of the spotlight, apparently disapproving of articles about the KGB he wrote for the Latvian-American press. In 1979, Mr. Lesinskis vented his frustration in awkward English in a letter to a CIA handler named Peter Walker. “The continuous attempts by the headquarters to infringe on the rights of foreign travel by undue allegations of protecting (us) are offending our dignity,” he wrote according to a draft of the letter now in Ms. Lesinska’s possession.
       Young Ieva Lesinska had little choice at first but to toe the CIA’s line. But the CIA’s plans for her education—they first suggested that the Soviet English student enroll in a local high school, she says, then sent her to a Virginia community college—left her alternately stunned and amused. Finally, an agent arranged for her to be admitted to Ohio State University as a first-year student in the spring of 1979. 
       She did her best to fit into the American college scene—first at Ohio State and later, after her father and stepmother moved West, at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she eventually received a joint degree in French philosophy. Initially, she dyed her hair blonde and dated fraternity brothers. They treated her, she says, “like an exotic bird,” partly because her cover story said she had spent time in Russia. “Do Russian girls wear lipstick?” they asked. Finally, however, she found a home in the American counter-culture of marijuana and the Talking Heads.
       In Boulder, she fell in love with Jason Potter, a bearded philosophy student eight years her senior. Her father suspected that Mr. Potter’s politics weren’t anti-Soviet enough, and Mr. Potter recalls being grilled at parties by family friends with intelligence connections. That didn’t dissuade Ms. Dorn. On February 5, 1982, the couple married.
       Mr. Potter knew his wife had secrets, but he didn’t press her. And Eve Dorn began what seemed like normal American married life in a dingy two-room apartment in Denver. Slowly, her yearnings for her homeland faded. “It was a great temptation to just forget it—to be an American,” she recalls. Her mother had been sending her several letters a week, begging her to return and threatening suicide; she scanned the letters, but didn’t read them.
       Then, in the autumn of 1983, Eve Dorn began to fall apart. A series of fainting spells kept her away from work and university. As she sat in her apartment with nothing to do, memories of her childhood flooded back. She read through the stacks of letters from her mother. The entries in her diaries had been in English for years; now, she switched back to Latvian.
       On a cold Saturday in early 1984, Eve and Jason Potter slipped into a Latvian-language service at a Denver Lutheran church. She was stunned to hear a score of elderly émigrés singing Latvian hymns and thrilled to speak her language again. She introduced herself as “Ieva Potter.” At a dinner party later that week, one Latvian asked her maiden name, and Eve—too happy to be on guard—blurted out her Latvian surname. The other guests fell ominously silent; they knew of her father.
       The next morning, she and her husband drove to the home of each dinner guest, imploring them not to reveal her secret. But psychologically, there was no turning back. “It was as though somebody had breathed oxygen back into Ieva’s life,” Mr. Potter says. 

She began teaching Latvian and reclaiming her Latvian identity. On the apartment mailbox, she listed herself as Ieva and Eve Potter, Dorn and Lesinska—because, she explains, “American mailmen get confused sometimes.” 
       Finally, one tearful night, she told her husband the full story of her past.
       By 1986, history was moving in her favor. Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika were working deep changes in the U.S.S.R. Returning to Latvia was no longer unthinkable.
       In April 1987, the U.S. Department of Justice renewed her re-entry permit. It identified her—through an apparent bureaucratic error—as “Ieva Lesinskis” and she took that as a sign. On September 1, 1987, she walked into the city and county court building in downtown Denver and legally changed her name to Ieva Lesinskis. Then she made plans to leave for Stockholm, as close as she could get to Latvia.
       Ieva Lesinska’s final contact with her father’s secret world came just before she departed for Sweden. She was staying at her stepmother’s house in Virginia when she had a visit from a CIA handler wearing “the usual gray suit,” she recalls. “You do realize that in Europe we will not be able to protect you,” she remembers him saying. She was delighted.
       From Stockholm, she moved to Munich in 1990—and into the front lines of the Cold War in the Latvian service of the U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe. Finally, a few days after a failed coup attempt against Mr. Gorbachev in August 1991 signaled the fall of the Soviet Union, she set foot on Latvian soil for the first time in 13 years.
       Relief washed over her. “For the first time in I don’t know how long, I wasn’t afraid,” she says. For her mother, it was the end of the “living nightmare.” For the first time since her daughter’s defection, Marta Lesinska says, she was able to sleep through the night.
       The Latvian intelligentsia welcomed her, although she struck one new friend, philosopher Uldis Tirons, as louder and blunter than most women he knew. By 1994, she was working full time at a magazine started by Mr. Tirons and other friends, Rigas Laiks, or Riga Time. The magazine rapidly became a Latvian institution, and with it Ms. Lesinska had finally returned to the center of the Latvian world. Rigas Laiks is a blend of the New Yorker and Time, a liberal and sophisticated voice in the young Latvian media. At the magazine, she made a name for herself with interviews with everyone from the American linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky to the late blues musician John Lee Hooker. She has become one of Latvia’s best known translators of poetry. She has plans for two books of her own: one on her father, one on herself.
       Yet Ms. Lesinska has never entirely released her American life. On March 17, 2001, she sat beside Mr. Potter, still legally her husband, at a funeral in a Unitarian Church in Asheville, North Carolina. She had come more than 7,500 kilometers to say farewell to her mother-in-law and, in a sense, to her own American past.
       The couple tried to keep their marriage alive with phone calls, e-mails and trans-Atlantic visits. But something had to give. “We are married,” Ms. Lesinska explained before her departure. “I mean we are not married. Jason Potter is married to Evelyn Dorn.”
       When the funeral ended, the family filed first past the congregation and into the church social room. As they passed an exit, Ms. Lesinska’s fingers twined around her husband’s, and she dragged him out the door into the sun for a cigarette. Minutes later, they were in a reception line, where she explained that she was from Latvia, not Bosnia, and that her English was good because she had had a lot of practice.
       In the days after the funeral, she asked Mr. Potter for a divorce. He agreed. 


Photo Courtesy of Rigas Laiks.

Also see Spies. The website for Rigas Laiks is here. 

                                                   —CITY PAPER-The Baltic States