Take Her Along

Russia's secret-police agency, the KGB, is on a constant lookout for potentially useful Western visitors--and not above using sex to provide evidence for blackmail. With an increasing number of businessmen visiting Russia and other Communist countries, the British government has taken public account of this fact. In a pamphlet issued by the Board of Trade, it offers Britons the delicate warning that "a liaison between a visitor and a local girl will not long remain unknown to the local intelligence service. The girl may be acting for that service from the outset."

If any Britons doubted that understatement, they had only to consider the case of Michael Connock. A correspondent specializing in Eastern Europe for London's Financial Times, he met a married Polish woman on a trip in 1966, and on subsequent visits, in his words, "we became very fond of each other." Last month, when Connock returned to Poland, security agents picked him up, told him "you break up families," and warned that he might be permanently expelled from the country. They asked Connock to help identify British agents in Poland; he signed a statement of cooperation, then reported the whole affair to the British government, his wife, and his editor. Instead of being shifted to other work on the paper as he had expected, he was fired, and last week was still looking for a job.

One way of handling the KGB was related by British Agent Greville Wynne in his 1967 book Contact on Gorky Street. Returning to his hotel one night, Wynne recalled, he found a "dark, smiling girl" in his bed. Forewarned by British intelligence as to what to do in such circumstances, he left the door open, ran downstairs, and told the clerk that his room had been rented to someone else by mistake. Then he went for a walk.

Some other counter-sex methods were offered last week by London Columnist Angela Ince. Writing in the Evening News, she advised wives of Russia-bound businessmen to "1) Insist that he take an extra vest [undershirt] and his tummy pills with him; a man in a vest eating digestion tablets is as morally safe as a man can be. 2) See that he packs no fewer than four pictures of you, taken ten years ago in a bikini and a bad light. Write across them 'Counting the seconds till you get back, Darling' in purple ink. 3) Ask him to phone you every night at nine. The amount of trouble a man can get into is minimal when he spends his evenings trying to make a telephone link between Omsk and Bexleyheath. 4) Go with him. The Board of Trade should jolly well buy your ticket. You're traveling for your country, aren't you?"

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