The Whistler

At dusk one day last February, a middleaged, professorial sort of man opened the door of his neat, middle-class Frankfurt apartment to a stranger. "Are you Herr Okolovich?" asked the caller, in perfectly accented German. "I am." "Then I must talk to you privately. It is most important." Herr Okolovich ushered the stranger in and offered him a cup of tea. It was brusquely declined. A moment later, switching from German to Russian, the stranger told Herr Okolovich his na.me and business: "I am Captain Khokhlov of the MVD, and I have been ordered to kill you."

Last week, before a battery of microphones, cameras and newsmen in a U.S. Government office at Bonn, Captain Khokhlov, 31, told why he had failed to MVD CAPTAIN KHOKHLOV (WITH FAMILY) With poison and conscience. carry out his murder assignment. The stated reason was simple enough: "A conflict between Soviet intelligence, which tried to force me to commit criminal acts, and my conscience"; but the facts leading up to it made a story that sounded like a collaboration of Graham Greene and E. Phillips Oppenheim.

As a young man in Moscow and a dutiful member of the Young Communist League Organization in the late '30s, Nikolai Khokhlov was only interested in becoming an actor and eventually a movie director. He played a few bits in Russian plays and movies, and even made himself a small reputation on the variety stage as an "artistic whistler." When the Nazis invaded Russia, he volunteered for frontline duty, but was rejected because of bad eyes. As the Nazis drew near to Moscow, however, Khokhlov was recruited, along with many other young actors and artists, by the NKVD (the MVD of the time) to fight a rear-guard guerrilla action in case the city fell. From then on, he was in the secret police to stay.

Dirty Missions. Under a host of different names and forged passports, he was sent from one European country to another and ordered to use his actor's skill to pass himself off as a native. In 1943, by his own account, he directed the assassination of German Gauleiter Wilhelm Kube in Minsk. After a hasty cram course in German, he was planted in a camp for German P.W.s. In 1947, he was granted Rumanian citizenship under the name Stanislaw Lewandowski. But for all his success and all his skill, Khokhlov was far from happy as an undercover agent. "I got into Soviet intelligence when my country was at war," he explained last week. "At that time, I considered it my patriotic duty . . . but the war ended, and I was used not only for matters of defense of my country but also for missions which had nothing to do with defense. They were dirty missions."

Once Khokhlov tried to quit the MVD but failed. Another time he refused to undertake a mission involving murder. His bulwark and supporter in such bold actions, according to Khokhlov, was his wife Yanina. She was a young construction engineer and a Roman Catholic. Tears formed in Khokhlov's eyes last week as he talked of her: "She helped me to understand that there exists in the world real decency, and that there is such a thing as purity of motive."

One day last October, Khokhlov was summoned to the headquarters of MVD's grim Ninth Otdel, the "terror and diversion" section now under the direct supervision of taciturn Alexander Panyushkin, onetime (1947-52) Soviet Ambassador to the U.S. He was told to proceed to Frankfurt, there to assassinate one Georgi Okolovich, a big shot in the right-wing Russian expatriate organization, NTS, whose Berlin director, Dr. Alexander Trushnovich, was brutally abducted from West Berlin by Communists a fortnight ago (TIME, April 26). Khokhlov said that he went home to talk the matter over with his wife, and both decided that a second refusal of an assignment would mean certain death for Khokhlov, for Yanina and for their year-old son.

Khokhlov suggested that he might go on the mission and let somebody else do the actual killing, but Yanina was adamant. "If this man is killed, you will be the assassin," she said. "I can't remain the wife of a husband who is an assassin." Together they decided that Khokhlov must go on the mission and then defect."! asked her," he said, "if she realized what awaited her if I 'went West.' She knew, and it in no way altered her decision."

After their momentous decision was made, Khokhlov's problem became simply one of following orders--up to the crucial point. With two East German Communists who were to serve as his assistants, Khokhlov went to work. The Germans went through refresher courses in judo, marksmanship and automobile driving. Khokhlov pored over maps of Frankfurt, studied brochures on the NTS and conferred with his boss Panyushkin over weapons and methods.

A Mere Squeeze. The weapons decided on for Khokhlov's mission were specially designed and built according to MVD specifications. As displayed for newsmen in Bonn last week, they were enough to send chills down the hardiest mystery-lover's spine. Two were tiny derringer-like pistols, small enough to fit in the palm of the hand. Two were machines of the same type concealed in leather cigarette cases. Fired by flashlight batteries and equipped with expansion chambers to absorb the shock wave, they were almost noiseless, and each was equipped to fire three kinds of bullets: small lead pellets for merely stunning victims, nickeled-steel bullets that proved capable of penetrating 2 1/4 in. of pine board at 24 ft., and dum-dum slugs smeared with a mixture of potassium cyanide and gum.

The cigarette cases were designed to fire when the lid was open, exposing what looked like a full pack of cigarettes. But the cigarettes were only butt-length tips; behind them was the mechanism designed to fire a charge of poison into a man's bloodstream by a mere squeeze of the finger at the point where the case was naturally held in proffering a smoke.

The mid-January preparations were all made, but Khokhlov was forced to cool his heels in Moscow for almost a month because the Berlin Conference was going on, and Moscow wanted no untoward" incidents. At last, however, the day was set, and Khokhlov set off for Frankfurt, not to kill his victim but to ask his help.

After telling his story to his intended victim, Khokhlov was persuaded to turn himself over to U.S. agents in Germany. His rendezvous with his East German accomplices was kept by U.S. agents instead, who found the two assistant assassins only too happy to defect themselves. This was in February. Ever since then, until Khokhlov's story was made public last week, American intelligence officers and their British counterparts had been cross-questioning him and cross-checking his story, until a 4 ft. dossier was assembled and they were satisfied that what the ex-MVDemon told them was the truth--as far as it went.

There were still, however, some blank spaces in the Khokhlov case. Few competent observers, for instance, could bring themselves to believe that a guilty conscience was his only reason for defecting. Presumably, his own boss in the MVD had been purged along with Beria, which might have provided a further reason. Then there was the still unanswered question of what would now happen--or had already happened --to his wife Yanina in Moscow. Khokhlov himself seemed to have a strange faith in what U.S. moral pressure might do to save her. "I came here," said Nikolai Khokhlov to the American reporters, "not merely to tell you of an assassination that didn't take place, but to appeal to the one remaining force capable of saving my wife--this woman who told me, 'Do not kill.' "

Could an agent of the Soviet MVD seriously believe that such force could be of help to her now? Whistler Khokhlov was whistling in the dark.

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