The KGB’s Queer Honeypots and the Cold War

During the Lavender Scare, the US government fired hundreds (but possibly thousands) of civil servants for being gay or lesbian, ostensibly because of a Communist-panic in which Americans were convinced a homosexual could be blackmailed into giving up state secrets to those rascally Soviets. Turns out, though they weren’t particularly successful at it, the Soviets did try to use sex scandals of all kinds to cultivate spies from the “West” — including, but not limited to, queer Westerners traveling or working in the USSR. The “honeypot” entrapment was a coercive measure used on all sides of the Iron Curtain to try and get state secrets. And while there’s no morality in spy games, the true story of the men used by the KGB to try and tip the scales in the information race of the Cold War is pretty sad–but also a useful window onto the Soviet attitudes toward same-sex desire, the unique relationships of queer citizens to their respective countries, and the messed-up games that characterized the US-USSR struggle for world dominance.

Transcript for:

The KGB’s Queer Honeypots and the Cold War

Written and researched by Averill Earls, PhD

Recorded and produced by Averill Earls and Sarah Handley-Cousins, PhD

Averill: If you’re a regular listener of this show, you may remember a few years back when I wrote an episode about police use of “authorized crime”–namely, the entrapment of same-sex desiring men into illegal acts–across Britain, Ireland, and the US. Anna Lvovsky has a great book about this in the US called Vice Squad, and of course I talk about this at length in my own book, Love in the Lav, which is available on bookshop.org! (Sorry, shameless plug.) And early last year, just after the Supreme Cheeto retook office, we told you about the Lavender Scare, in which the US government fired hundreds (but possibly thousands) of civil servants for being gay or lesbian, ostensibly because of a Communist-panic in which Americans were convinced a homosexual could be blackmailed into giving up state secrets to those rascally Soviets. Turns out, though they weren’t particularly successful at it, the Soviets did try to use sex scandals of all kinds to cultivate spies from the “West” — including, but not limited to, queer Westerners traveling or working in the USSR. The “honeypot” entrapment scam was a coercive measure used on all sides of the Iron Curtain to try and get state secrets. And while there’s no morality in spy games, the true story of the men used by the KGB to try and tip the scales in the information race of the Cold War is pretty sad–but also a useful window onto the Soviet attitudes toward same-sex desire, the unique relationships of queer citizens to their respective countries, and the messed-up games that characterized the US-USSR struggle for world dominance.

I’m Averill Earls

And I’m Sarah Handley-Cousins

And we are your historians for this episode of Dig.

Sarah: We are so thankful for all of our Patreon supporters – especially our Auger and Excavator level patrons: Joey, Susan, Colin, Lauren, Edward, Denise, Maria, Megan, Jessy, Karen, Lisa, Alissa, and Ben! We can’t thank you enough. Listener, if you enjoy what we do here but aren’t yet a patron of this show, it’s easy: just go to patreon.com/digpodcast to learn more.

Averill: As always, we want to spend a little time acknowledging the scholars whose work make episodes like this one possible. The bibliography for this episode is pretty long, but the main story we’re telling today – about the Soviet program of trying to entrap and coerce queer American and British citizens into “spying” for the USSR – is based on a very recent article by Irina Roldugina for the Journal of Cold War Studies.^[1] My friend Katie Duda, who is a scholar of Russia and writes about prison narratives in the Soviet Union, sent this article to me thinking (rightly) that I would be interested, and when Marissa made us add a Cold War series to the calendar for this year, I grumbled and kicked rocks but then decided it would be a good excuse to read this article that I was interested in anyway. And hoooo-boy, did it tickle my fancy! And because it’s so fascinating, I’m going to stick pretty close to the story that Roldugina dug up from the American and British archives (an important caveat – more to come on that!) But of course we’ll need a bit of broader context, because even though Irina packed a whole second essay into her footnotes, there’s always still more that needs to be said. In particular I’m drawing here on the O.G. queer Russia historian Dan Healey, the more recent work of Rustam Alexander, and to a lesser extent the 2022 book on St. Petersburg by Olga Petri. There are a few other texts that you might find useful in the bibliography, which you’ll find at digpodcast.org. A huge thanks to these historians for their work in historicizing the on-going and devastating state-sponsored homophobia in Russia, and to you, dear scholar-listeners, for being perpetually curious and showing up to learn with us every episode.

Sarah: Roldugina’s article is based on sources that exist in archives outside of Russia: the UK National Archives and the US National Archives and Records Administrations. In 2022, the UK made the investigative files on John Vassall publicly available. Vassall was a British diplomat who fell victim to a KGB same-sex entrapment scheme, and was coerced into spying for the Soviets. He was eventually discovered, tried and convicted for espionage in the UK, and served 13 years in prison. And in the US National Archives, she used the case files relating to Soviet defector Yurii Nosenko. Nosenko gave the CIA valuable information on the KGB’s activities over a three-and-a-half year investigation. He was more harshly interrogated than most defectors, in part because another Soviet defector suggested that Nosenko was playing the double agent. But Nosenko’s information was verified and cross-referenced, and he proved himself a valuable font of information.^[2] Roldugina assigned pseudonyms to all the victims of these entrapment cases–both Soviet citizens and foreign targets–to keep the attention on the KGB.

Averill: Since we don’t have access to the original files because I didn’t have time to make a quick trip to NARA while writing this episode, we’ll also use those pseudonyms, even if doing so feels a bit like accepting that these men have something that they should hide or be ashamed of. But that’s an ethical question for another time. And actually it’s one I spend a good deal of time on in the intro to my book… another shameless plug!

—

Sarah: In 1957, sex between men was as illegal in the Soviet Union as it was in the United States, Britain, Canada, and elsewhere. On same-sex sexual politics, both sides of the “Cold War” were fairly united in their antagonism against and rejection of same-sex relationships. States on both sides of the “iron curtain” harassed and imprisoned men who had sex with men. (Side note: There was a period just after the Russian Revolution of 1917 in which the newly-formed state decriminalized homosexuality. From 1922 until 1934, sex between men was legal in the Soviet Union – which was pretty freaking revolutionary, considering the state of the rest of the world. Like, we’re talking about a moment when the biggest movement elsewhere on gay rights was Magnus Hirschfeld’s movement to decriminalize male sex work in Germany, which got really close in 1929, and then… Nazis. Of course, it didn’t take long for Stalin to roll that era of decriminalization back and reinstitute the same kind of draconian laws that the British, Germans, and Americans maintained. Just a whole bunch of stupid peas in a big homophobic pod. But we digress.) Anyway. In 1957, sex between men was illegal pretty much everywhere, “east”, “west”, you name it. Cue the KGB, who decided that the widespread anti-queer sentiment could be used in service to the Soviet agenda. Various officers became ‘experts’ in operations to entrap queer “Westerners” in compromising positions with queer Russian “agents.”

Averill: (A brief aside, because maybe your brain is already jumping to the same tangents that mine is: um, Black Widow? Um, that Jennifer Lawrence movie Red Sparrow that is basically Black Widow’s Red Room but no Cap or Thor? Because this sexual entrapment tactic is effectively what those (fictional) women were supposedly trained up into, right? So I did a little rabbithole on this, and from what I can find, there was no “Red Room” where they took orphan girls and made them pretty and taught them seduction and assassin skills and then sent them out to do KGB stuff like have affairs and gather pillow-talk secrets and kill people. BUT THERE WAS A SCHOOL FOR TRAINING GIRLS IN ESPIONAGE and it was in Kazan and almost certainly included seduction instruction. According to former CIA guy Matthews, “The Russians have for many, many years, used women to try and sexually entrap [high-ranking foreign officials] for blackmail purposes, to try and tell their secrets.” The Kazan “Sparrow School” has been closed down, but according to Matthews, those honeypot operations persist. Jonna Mendez told The New York Times “about a swallow-led security breach in the 1980s at the US Embassy in Moscow. Apparently a Marine who was stationed there was “compromised,” and let her and several other women into the embassy. He got in big trouble. I wanted to include this aside in part because WTF!!! But also because our focus today on the same-sex entrapment operations will make it seem like they were more susceptible, though they certainly weren’t, and as every country that uses these kinds of operatives knows, your security is only as strong as your weakest (or maybe horniest) link.)

Averill: (One more aside. THE AMERICANS is real too. Eleven Russian spies moved to the US in the 1990s pretending to be Americans to gather intelligence for Russia. AFTER THE COLD WAR. Let that sink in. Ok. Back to the story for real.)

Sarah: Igor Kon, the first scholar of same-sex desire in the Soviet Union, claimed that, after Stalin recriminalized homosexuality in 1934, the Soviet Union achieved a “complete and utter silence on the subject [homosexuality],” and that “homosexuality was simply never mentioned” because it had become an “unmentionable vice.”^[3] … So, obviously, that was not a hypothesis that held water for very long. Not long after Kon made that claim, a handful of other scholars published works that clearly and definitively challenged that notion. Masha Gessen and Laurie Essig showed that Soviet psychiatric facilities treated men and women for “homosexuality,” and that “treatment” in a facility could protect men from legal consequences, though Gessen in particular suggested that “Punitive psychiatry was employed against homosexuals and lesbians.”^[4] More recently, Francesa Stella argued that forcible hospitalization was not the “universally accepted practice among medical practitioners,” and might offer patients “heterosexual re-education” instead of medication.^[5] So certainly among medical professionals, “homosexuality” was a topic of discussion.

Averill: The “unmentionable” was also mentioned ad nauseum in the apparatuses of the state. Dan Healey demonstrated that the Soviet Gulag officials were concerned that the dismantlement of the forced labor prison system would lead to the spread of homosexuality from the prisons to the wider population.^[6] Rustav Alexander has shown that sexopathologists worked with the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs to produce manuals on how to treat “homosexuality”.^[7] And of course Irina Roldugina’s work on the Soviet gay entrapment schemes in the 1930s through the 1960s. In other words, the Soviets talked plenty about “homosexuality.” Government officials, doctors, judges, police (secret and regular), and all manner of people talked endlessly about same-sex sex. Some of those individuals were, of course, themselves gay or lesbian. According to Oleg Kalugin, a Soviet general working in Soviet military intelligence in a “major Far Eastern country was homosexual.” He was immediately removed from his position because he posed “a security risk.”^[8] From the state’s perspective, particularly those involved in the Gulag, they were worried about the “threat” of homosexuality and the impact it might have on Soviet society. But in the case of KGB operative Yurii Nosenko, he talked about it as a tool for winning in the information games.

Sarah: (As yet another aside, in truth we don’t even really know the full extent of these discussions, because the Russian archives are so restrictive, especially with regard to materials that are now ‘illegal’ under Russian laws against ‘non-traditional propaganda’. The Russian Federal Security Service archive, for example, is completely closed to researchers, though, as Dan Healey notes, sometimes a single researcher will get special access to a closed archive, and then the rest of the community has to rely on their testimony and interpretation.^[9] Healey’s 2001 book was based on research he did in Russian archives between 1995-1996. His more recent book, Russian Homophobia, is both more and less privileged. There has been a slow digitization of some Russian archives, which makes research a little easier in some ways, and some Soviet archives have been declassified in the normal march of archival time. A larger network of scholars of the Soviet Union means that Healey has colleagues who’ve shared things they stumbled upon in their own trawls of the archives. But as Roldungina has pointed out, Russian archivists are more likely to refuse a request for a record they deem “inappropriate” as they are to open a closed record for you, which makes the uncovering of queer and trans history in particular all the more difficult.)

Averill: Yurii Nosenko was a KGB operative who specialized in, among other things, setting up entrapment schemes for queer Western men. Nosenko was the son of Ivan Nosenko, the Soviet People’s Commissar for Shipbuilding, and began his career with the KGB in 1953 in the prestigious First Section of the First Department within the Second Main Directorate (counterintelligence), which monitored U.S. embassy personnel.^[10] According to the CIA’s analysis of Nosenko’s career, “There [was] a preponderance of homosexual recruitment operations in Nosenko’s account of his KGB career.”^[11] The year before Nosenko defected to the United States, Alexander Orlav wrote a tell-all book about Soviet counterintelligence. Orlav was a high-ranking NKVD officer before he defected to the US in 1938. The NKVD, as you’ll remember from Marissa’s episode a couple weeks ago, was the precursor to the KGB. Orlav wrote: “Considerable success was achieved by Soviet intelligence among foreign diplomats tinted with homosexual perversions. It is no secret that the biggest concentration of homosexuals can be found in the diplomatic services of Western countries.”^[12]

Averill: (It’s worth pointing out here that evidence of these entrapments didn’t come out until the 1960s–well after the Lavender Scare–and most importantly, the entrapments only took place in the Soviet Union, and more often than not failed because the victims went to their government and confessed their “crimes” before they could be taken advantage of. Just in case there was someone listening and thinking “well I guess the three stooges Styles Bridges, Clyde Hoey, and Kenneth Wherry were right to fire a bunch of gay and lesbian civil servants?” because no, Chad, they weren’t. LGBTQ+ people were no more or less likely to be susceptible to blackmail than a straight married person whom the KGB photographed cheating on his wife WHICH ALSO HAPPENED JUST AS FREQUENTLY so really the only option would have been to send eunuchs.)

Sarah: By 1955, Nosenko was responsible for surveilling US, British, and Canadian tourists. By 1962, he was deputy chief of his department. He was so well-known for his success in sexual entrapment that he was occasionally recruited to help other departments. Describing himself in the third person, he said, “He is a specialist in homosexuals and can arrange everything for you.”^[13]

Averill: Nosenko’s first successful entrapment target was a professor at Yale University in 1956. Roldugina calls him “Jay Andres,” so we will too. Jay was a promising target because of his position at a premiere US higher ed institution. In theory, if turned, he’d be building relationships with and have access to all kinds of individuals who would graduate and then enter politics, business, or even, more importantly, American intelligence agencies. (And as professors of Very Important People who are constantly coming to us for advice on how to deal with top secret government issues, we totally get the logic of this play.) (Kidding. That is mostly a joke.) According to Roldugina, when Nosenko learned that Jay had “encountered” a number of KGB operatives, and that Jay was a “homosexual,” he and his team devised a “recruitment strategy.”^[14]

Sarah: We have to pause here, because there is a lot about this whole scene that is terrible, but perhaps the worst is the use and abuse of Soviet citizens in the entrapment scenarios. If you’ve read Averill’s book or listened to the episode on authorized crime, you’ll recall that Irish, British, German, and American police entrapment operations were, typically, the cops using their own bodies as bait to try and catch same-sex desiring men in the act. Inevitably the others involved in the judicial process–the judges, juries, cops not on that assignment, the court of public opinion–decided that actually that wasn’t a good thing to be doing and actually felt quite wrong and illegal. Almost universally, that practice got dropped like the proverbial hot potato. Still 100% bad and unethical and creepy, but at least the cops were doing their own dirty work. That’s not how things went down in these espionage entrapment schemes. Instead, (and like the CIA) the KGB kept files on their own citizens – potential enemies of the revolution, people with secrets they didn’t want getting out, and, of course, queer people. They didn’t necessarily arrest those individuals until they needed to use them.

Averill: Which is what happened in the operation to try and turn “Jay”. “Ivan Petrov”, as Roldugina calls him, was a Soviet theater actor who’d been used by the KGB on previous operations (including John Vassall’s entrapment). “Ivan” and other “homosexual agents” were pressured or blackmailed into working for the KGB. They were never officers in the KGB, only temporary employees, instructed to seduce or even drug marks to create situations into which KGB agents could barge in, take photographs, and/or arrest the Western victim. At the time, “Ivan” wasn’t one of Nosenko’s agents–he didn’t have any of his own–so he had to “borrow” Ivan from a colleague.

Sarah: According to his own account, Nosenko instructed Ivan on how to approach Jay in the hotel dining room, and then to take Jay back to Ivan’s hotel room, which had been prepared ahead of time so that they could capture photographs of the two men in an intimate situation.^[15] It’s unclear from Roldungina’s account (and so presumably Nosenko’s account) if that meant they just had cameras in the room that were operated by a remote, or if there were actual operatives hidden in closets and vents taking photos. Nosenko was in an adjoining room, “directing the compromise.”^[16]

Averill: After his encounter with Ivan, Jay was scheduled to fly to Kyiv. From there out, Jay’s itinerary was manipulated by the KGB from the minute he stepped off the plane. He was picked up by a KGB agent, who informed him there were no hotels and that he would be staying in a private residence until something became available; he was met at the residence by Nosenko and another KGB agent; there Nosenko and the other agent confronted Jay with the evidence of his “illegal activity”. Nosenko recalled their conversation: “Then we slowly proceeded to say how unfortunate it was that information had been received about his conduct in Moscow. We told him that his homosexual activities were known, that this was punishable under Soviet law according to article so-and-so of the criminal code, etc., that he was not a diplomat, has no diplomatic immunity, that he could be taken to court according to the Soviet law. . . . Well, he was scared, confused, upset, and felt uncomfortable.”^[17]

Sarah: The KGB held Jay for five hours. They showed him the pictures, and “he was embarrassed, of course.” Nosenko – helpfully – explained that “helping Soviet Intelligence is a very broad term”; “you have a noble task. You teach, you have students; the students may become future specialists on Russia or may work as diplomats, etc., but many of these students can be used by intelligence. They may be sent somewhere with special tasks. Maybe you will tell us who among the students is preparing for government service, how they are distributed, etc.”^[18] In the end, Jay relented, and signed a document that said he was willing to assist Soviet intelligence.

Averill: The game didn’t end there. Nosenko shadowed Jay for the rest of his time in Kyiv. He stayed in the same hotel, one floor above. He took Jay to the “sights”–Saint Sophia Cathedral, a collective farm, Taras Shevchenko’s grave in Kaniv–as if he was really a representative of the Intourist department that he pretended to be. He tried to play nice, to build report and a relationship with Jay to ensure the operation was a long-term success.

Sarah: When Nosenko escorted Jay back to Moscow and put him on a plane home to the United States, he believed it was a successful mission. Then, in 1957, Jay turned himself over, and he was interviewed by the FBI. His testimony would later be essential to corroborating Nosenko’s defection information; for the time being, it was just the failure of another one of Nosenko’s attempted same-sex entrapment schemes.

Averill: Nosenko made quite a career out of same-sex entrapment operations. He cultivated his own “agents”–queer Russian men that he blackmailed or coerced into service–and worked with them between 1957 and 1963, until they were too well-known among American and British operatives. Roldugina calls them “Vilkin” and “Rushin”, and the CIA files just refer to them as “Soviet Homosexual agents.”^[19] Vilkin was caught by the KGB while cruising in a public lavatory. In his file, the KGB noted that, “Vilkin might be a homosexual and hence of some operational value.”^[20] He was inactive when Nosenko approached him. According to Roldugina, “Vilkin had little choice; otherwise, he faced imprisonment under Soviet law (Article 154-a of the Russian Republic’s Criminal Code) requiring prison terms of three to five years for men engaged in same-sex relations. Vilkin agreed.”^[21] Vilkin then helped Nosenko recruit Rushin, and Vilkin and Rushin were, according to Nosenko, a couple. “They are a couple,” he wrote, “that is, they love each other. They are able to do anything desired, either active or passive, anything.”^[22]

Sarah: Recent work from Olga Petri on police operations in early 20th-century St. Petersburg, Samuel Huneke on the Stasi in East Germany, and Lukasz Szulc on Operation Hyacinth in Poland suggests that the secret (or regular) police in Russia and the Soviet bloc kept lists of suspected “homosexuals.”^[23] Sometimes those lists were generated through covert surveillance, and sometimes through raids on known cruising sites. Curiously, it was also true that those lists weren’t always used to arrest, try, and convict men for same-sex sex crimes. Sometimes, as evidenced in Nosenko’s testimony, those lists were used to try and tip the scales in the Cold War.

Averill: By the 1970s, the KGB used accusations (and same-sex entrapment) as a tool for retaliation and character assassination. Nosenko’s operatives seduced and photographed “Evan Soonly,” a Baptist preacher visiting the USSR from California, after he wrote letters criticizing the Soviet Union. The KGB demanded he pledge never to speak against the Soviet Union again, which he agreed to – especially after seeing the photographs – but then he went to the FBI with his knickers in a twist as soon as he got home. The FBI basically told him he probably shouldn’t have been preaching while he was there. Of course, Evan denied the accusations of homosexuality.^[24]

Sarah: Despite defining most of his career in the KGB, of the stories that Nosenko told and that Irina Roldugina shares in her article, most were failures. He failed in his very first operation in 1954, when he tried to entrap an instructor Roldugina calls “Stephen Marker”, because in the hotel room with Ivan, Stephen wanted the lights off. According to Nosenko, the Soviets didn’t have good infrared photographic equipment at that time. When Stephen returned to Moscow in 1962, he was then a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, but no longer responded to attempted seductions from the KGB-puppeted civilians. Similarly an operation that took quite a long time–so much that the operatives assigned to surveil and photograph the seduction complained–did produced “high quality photos,” but when he tried to recruit “Bob Barrow,” Barrow promptly contacted the FBI upon his return to the US. Sometimes the same-sex entrapment was a failure because operations ran up against bans on messing with US citizens passed down from the Kremlin.^[25] Just as often they failed because the target went to their own authorities. Maybe there were some major successes that Nosenko was too afraid to give up to the US in his defection interviews. After almost four years of intense interviews in isolation, it seems unlikely, but not impossible.

Averill: The major “successful” same-sex entrapment operation in Roldugina’s article is the case of John Vassal, the British diplomat who did pass secrets to the Soviet Union for almost seven years, until he was caught. Nosenko was not directly involved in the entrapment of John Vassall. In fact, Vassall was already compromised by the time Nosenko started in the “Second Main Directorate” where he became the puppeteer of entrapments. But the same techniques that Nosenko employed were used to coerce Vassall’s cooperation.

Sarah: John Vassall was the son of a Church of England clergyman and a devout Catholic nurse. He’d volunteered for the RAF air crew in 1942, but wasn’t selected; he eventually served instead in the volunteer reserve, and trained as a photographer. He was 29 years old when he arrived in Moscow in 1954 to work as a clerical officer at the British embassy.^[26] He quickly made friends with a Polish worker at the embassy, who always had access to “caviar, theater tickets, and good dining spots.”^[27] No one warned him about Mikhailsky. “I did not realize,” he admitted later, “that such employees, although they came to the Embassy through the Russian Bureau, were probably planted by the Soviet authorities. I assumed that as they worked for the Embassy they had already been screened by the Head of Chancery in some way.”^[28] Mikhailsky would eventually be fired from the embassy for “attempts to embroil a junior member of the staff with the Soviet authorities.”^[29]

Averill: Mikhailsky was the agent who informed the KGB that Vassall was “homosexual,” and that he might be susceptible to entrapment. Through Mikhailsky, Vassall met a Soviet citizen who spoke “flawless English,” who then invited Vassall for dinner outside the Bolshoi Theater. That agent then passed Vassall off to a “friend”, whom Vassall described as ‘a fur-clad mystery man’ and who is referred to in official documents as “B”, who took him to the Savoy hotel for a lavish dinner party.

Sarah: Vassall described the encounter in his autobiography: “After dinner, everyone seemed to drift away, leaving three of us and the one who had brought me to the dinner party. One of them said I did not look well, and it might be better if I lay down on a large divan, which was appropriately placed in a recess. When I got to the bed, I could hardly stand up. I was asked to take off my clothes, including my underwear. It all seemed to be beyond my control. I did not know where I was or what was going on or why it was happening. I can recall having my underpants in my hands and holding them up at the request of others. Then I was lying on the bed naked, and there – and there were three other men on the bed with me. I cannot remember exactly what took place. I saw The Skier’s friends standing in the room taking photographs.”

Averill: Vassall was too intoxicated to leave on his own, so the entire party stayed in the room until he sobered up. Roldugina points out that it’s not clear how willing Vassall actually was in this situation, if he had enough faculties to consent to the group sex encounter.^[30] In his autobiography, Vassall wrote, “Not until 1963, nine years later, was it suggested to me that the wine I had been given must have been drugged.”

Sarah: Vassall never told anyone except Mikhailsky what happened. For several months more, he established a stronger relationship with the Soviet agent known in the documents as “the skier,” who’d initially introduced Vassall to “B.” In March 1955, the “skier” introduced Vassall to a Soviet military officer on leave. According to Roldugina: “After a few drinks, the “skier” told Vassall that the “military man” liked him—and wanted to kiss him. They went into another room: “I found a kind of sanctuary in his arms, as he held me, saying hardly a word.” Suddenly, Vassall heard the click of a lock and footsteps approaching. The light was switched on, and the naked officer quickly disappeared. Vassall never saw him again. Instead, KGB officers entered the room. Vassall was terrified.”^[31]

Averill: In his autobiography, he wrote: “‘At an appointed time, I was shown a box of photographs of myself at a party I could not believe I had been at. There I was, naked, grinning into the camera, naked, holding a pair of men’s briefs which must have been mine. After about three photographs, I could not stomach any more. They made me feel ill. There I was caught by the camera enjoying every possible sexual activity. If you were a man and saw photographs of yourself having oral, anal, and a complicated array of sexual activities with a number of different men, what would your feelings be, especially when these photographs were exposed to the Russian Secret Service?”

Sarah: Over the next several days, KGB officers detained Vassall, dragging him to apartment rooms and hotels, threatened him, humiliated him. They tried to extract information from him, but he knew nothing of value at the time. They told him he’d committed a grave crime, that if he didn’t cooperate, they would release the photos to the press, to the British embassy, and to his family. And Vassall, of course, believed them. “‘My world was shattered,” Vassall wrote. “At this time, the very last person I could have gone to was the ambassador. He was cold and aloof, and quite incapable of understanding me or what had happened.” So instead of going to the authorities of his own government like all those whom Nosenko had attempted to turn, Vassall capitulated.

Averill: “They said they would like to meet me occasionally for a chat,” he recalled. “They appeared to want me as a kind of friend, but finally they decided I should meet members of the Secret Service every three weeks at a pre-selected spot. If I did not comply with the condition, the ambassador and the press would be informed, and I would be exposed. I would be refused permission to leave the country and would be put on trial…I could not confide in anyone, but I felt very sad as I went about my work with this weight upon my shoulders. It was a pain I carried with me for the next seven years.” He was handsomely rewarded for his cooperation. Just before Christmas 1955, he was given a cigarette box full of rubles. He left Russia that December for the holidays, but even his trips to Rome and Frankfurt were haunted by his KGB handlers, who helped arrange his travels.

Sarah: His Moscow appointment came to an end in 1956, but his KGB affiliation did not. “My heart sank,” he wrote in his autobiography (and take this all with a grain of salt, because of course he couldn’t claim to be happy to be committing espionage, even if he was enjoying or benefiting from it). “I had imagined that on leaving Moscow, my troubles would all be over. The Russians even set the date and the venue for the meeting. Frognal Station in Finchley.” He took secret documents to show “Gregory,” his KGB contact, and followed all their codes and rules for when he was allowed to contact Gregory. He would go on to pass information to the KGB from London for almost five years. And then, in September 1961, he was caught, tried, and convicted to 18 years in prison for espionage.

Averill: According to Roldugina, the “Vassall case stands apart because it was an unquestionable success for the KGB. …Vassall supplied the USSR with classified information and documents. Were there other similar cases involving individuals who were never exposed? Without full access to archival sources in Moscow, it is nearly impossible to answer that question definitively.”^[32]

Sarah: As we mentioned at the top of this episode, the Soviet archives held in Russia are heavily restricted, so there is a paucity of sources on the subject of same-sex desire. Personal historical records have an automatic 75 year embargo. Some scholars of Russia have encountered Russian archival workers who simply denied them access to materials that the archivists considered ‘inappropriate.’^[33] But even in the places where historians have had access – like GULAG records – most historians of the Soviet era have neglected to discuss same-sex sex. Examples include Jeffrey Hardy and Miriam Dobson’s respective books on the Gulag; Rustam Alexander consulted many of the same records as Hardy and Dobson, and found ample evidence of Gulag managers and doctors’ efforts to control homosexuality in the prisons with disciplinary mechanisms.^[34] Perhaps these scholars were reluctant to engage the topics from their own personal biases; perhaps they were reluctant to promote “non-traditional sexual propaganda,” lest it limit their access to the Russian archives (if and when that’s even possible again, in this current moment of the Russian war on Ukraine.)

Averill: One of the most interesting aspects of this to me is the tolerance that it hints at. In contemporary Russia, LGBTQ people are in danger. Laws outlawing the “promotion” of “non-traditional sex” have affected a Florida (or Kafka?)-esque Don’t Say Gay environment. The Russian government did nothing in 2017 when journalists exposed a literal purge of LGBTQ+ people in Chechnya. Between February and April of that year, the Russian-language newspaper “Novaya Gazeta” became aware of mass detentions of residents of Chechnya suspected of being queer or trans. As reported by the paper, “Novaya Gazeta knows the names of the three dead, but our sources say that there are many more victims.”^[35] Russian authorities claimed they were investigating, but it is clear that they were not. By 2019, the Russian LGBT Network had assisted more than 140 Chechen gay people in emigrating to European nations and Canada. (To no one’s surprise regarding the 2016-2020 period, the United States did not accept any of the fleeing Chechens.)

Sarah: Homophobia is rampant in modern Russia. The sentiment was brewing in the early 2000s, though there was a brief period of decriminalization and relaxation following the fall of the Soviet Union. But following the rise of Vladimir Putin, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric increased, leading to the adoption of the 2013 law that banned propaganda of ‘non-traditional sexual relations.’^[36]

Averill: So the fact that these records actually reveal a Soviet state that was, at times, ambivalent about same-sex desire is fascinating–and potentially destabilizing to the kind of exclusionary state that Putin is attempting to cultivate. Like the works of J. Arch Getty, who dispelled the myth that the Soviet Union was a tightly-controlled totalitarian state under Stalin’s thrall, the slowly expanding histories of queer and trans Russia reveal a past that is not in line with the current party line. Persecution of queer men was not consistent. As evidenced by the same-sex entrapment tactics employed by the KGB, it was situational–the KGB only cared when they could use the violence of homophobia to exploit a potential resource. That might be their own citizens, whom they used as “agents provocateurs,” or foreigners whom they thought they could blackmail into espionage for the Soviet state. But if a gay man was invested in the Soviet mission, and willing or helpful, they were just as content to let him live and love unmolested.

Sarah: Though homosexuality remained illegal in the Soviet Union, even through Khruschev’s Thaw, agents like Vilkin and Rushin lived together without harassment, as long as they served the state. And British citizen Guy Burgess, who was one of the top Soviet foreign spies and who eventually defected to the Soviet Union, was both gay and a willing Soviet collaborator–no coercion or entrapment needed. He worked for the Soviets because he believed in Communism. And when he defected to the USSR, he lived with a young, attractive Russian man. “I continue to be very happy with Tolya,” Burgess wrote to his friend Tom Driberg.^[37] The exceptions are startling, fascinating, and revealing.

Averill: Their attitude toward Burgess may also reveal the extent of the same-sex entrapment program’s efficacy. Soviets were more likely to be successful when there was already sympathy there. Perhaps that was even the case for Vassall. With the evidence at hand, it appears that the attempted sexual entrapment actually backfired fairly regularly; despite the three stooges of the Lavender Scare’s insistence that homosexuals would sell state secrets, more often than not the targets of KGB entrapment cases told their governments about the encounters with the KGB.

Sarah: They chose loyalty to the United States or Britain over their own personal safety, even under threat of sexual blackmail. That was not universally true, of course, as evidenced by Vassall’s betrayal. But at least in the records we have access to, the trend pointed toward the ineffectiveness (long term) of attempted same-sex entrapment for cultivating spies.

Averill: In East Germany, Samuel Huneke has shown that the Stasi were particularly concerned with the rise of gay rights groups in the 1970s and 1980s. They set surveillance details on the organizations, which met in church basements and corresponded with gay rights groups in the United States and the United Kingdom. There’s no evidence to show that the KGB developed the same kind of concern for similar organizations in the USSR. Like the true effect of the sex entrapment schemes, we won’t know for sure until the Russian Federal Security Service opens its archives. In the current political climate of Russia, that will not happen in the near future. Certainly the Russian government is not going to make any special arrangements to expand the research into LGBTQ+ history.

Sarah: In his first book, Dan Healey showed that the Bolshevik decriminalization of homosexuality in 1922 led to a proliferation of Soviet sexological discussions of homosexuality, engaging the international medicalized discourse. Stalin’s recriminalization in 1934, however, imposed “compulsory heterosexuality” on Soviet citizens.^[38] Without a doubt, Putin’s 2013 law endeavors to do the same. But as Healey, Essig, Viola, Alexander, and Roldugina have demonstrated, Russia and the Soviet Union’s pasts are not so easily simplified. Certainly queer and trans people existed in Russia throughout the twentieth century, just as they do today. Their experiences were both more and less fraught than we can imagine–in part because we can’t know the full spectrum of experiences until we have a more complete archive to work from. What we do know is food for thought.

Averill: So unlike Ilya Rozanov, who knew that being exposed as a bisexual man would make his return to Russia impossible, in answer to Shane’s question: I do want to find out. (This is too obscure… I am definitely making a final connection to HR, because why else would I agree to this episode? But this may be too deep a cut.) Episode 5, after the All Stars, in Ilya’s hotel room.

And just one more pop culture throw away comment: the NBC show Ponies, which stars Emilia Clarke and Haley Lu Richardson and is effectively two American women who set honeypot traps for Soviets (though of course the Soviet men think they’re doing the same to these two women) after the American women’s husbands “die” on an “embassy” mission. I haven’t actually finished it but I wanted to end here with this show, because it’s a friendly reminder that 1) the honeypot traps were used on all sides of the Cold War as a serious (if not legitimate) tactic for trading in and stealing information, aka espionage, 2) people of all sexual persuasions can be and were targets of sexual entrapment, and 3) we should not forget that the Lavender Scare was intentionally discriminatory, and I don’t want this episode to distract from that fact. But also, check out PONIES, because it’s kind of funny and Emilia Clark is delightful and does some decent Russian (just like my favorite Connor Storrie does in Heated Rivalry). My friend Katie – who sent me the Roldugina article to read – says PONIES “fun idea but Budapest isn’t 1970s Moscow. And that irks me” and if that isn’t a plug for watching it, I don’t know what is.

Sarah: Thank you for joining us today. As always, we invite you to follow us on BlueSky and Instagram at dig_history. If you have a comment or question or want to share some kind words with us, you can always email us at hello@digpodcast.org – we love listener mail! If you’re an educator, we’ve got a compendium of episodes you can use in the classroom – and free teaching resources, including full lesson plans! – on our website, digpodcast.org. You’ll also find full bibliographies, the scripts for all of our episodes, resources, and a link to our swag store at digpodcast.org. Thanks for listening. Don’t get entrapped.

Bibliography

Laurie Essig, Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other (Duke University Press, 1999).

Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago, 2001)

Dan Healey, Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi (London 2017)

Dan Healey, “Comrades, Queers, and ‘Oddballs’: Sodomy, Masculinity, and Gendered Violence in Leningrad Province of the 1950s,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, Volume 21, Number 3, September 2012, pp. 496-522

Dan Healey, “Russian and Soviet forensic psychiatry: Troubled and troubling,” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 37 (2014) 71-81

Dan Healey, “Sexology and the National Other in the Soviet Union,” Twentieth-Century Communism, Issue 20

Dan Healey, “What Can We Learn From the History of Homosexuality in Russia?” History Compass 1 (2003) EU 047, 1–6

Ed. Lynne Viola, Contending with Stalinism: Soviet Power and Popular Resistance in the 1930s (Cornell University Press, 2002)

Samuel Huneke, States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany (2022)

Olga Petri, Places of Tenderness and Heat: The Queer Milieu of Fin-de-Siècle St. Petersburg (Cornell University Press, 2022)

Irina Roldugina, “The Cold War and the Soviet KGB’s Same-Sex Entrapment Operations in the 1950s and 1960s,” Journal of Cold War Studies 27:4, (2025), 106-135.

Rustam Alexander, Regulating homosexuality in Soviet Russia, 1956–91: A different history, (Manchester University Press, 2021)

^[1] Irina Roldugina, “The Cold War and the Soviet KGB’s Same-Sex Entrapment Operations in the 1950s and 1960s,” Journal of Cold War Studies 27:4, (2025), 106-135.

^[2] Roldugina, “The Cold War,” 111-112.

^[3] Igor Kon, The Sexual Revolution in Russia: From the Age of the Czas to Today, qtd. in Rustam Alexander, Regulating homosexuality in Soviet Russia, 1956–91: A different history, (Manchester University Press, 2021) 9.

^[4] Masha Gessen The Rights of Lesbians and Gay Men in the Russian Federation: An International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission Report (1994); Laurie Essig, Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other (Duke University Press, 1999).

^[5] Qtd. in Alexander, 13.

^[6] Dan Healey, Russian Homophobia, 27-50.

^[7] Alexander, Regulating homosexuality in Soviet Russia, 170-206.

^[8] Oleg Kalugin, Spymaster: My Thirty-Two Years in Intelligence and Espionage against the West (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 224, 227, 257, 348.

^[9] Healey, Russian Homophobia, 154-155.

^[10] Irina Roldugina, “The Cold War and the Soviet KGB’s Same-Sex Entrapment Operations in the 1950s and 1960s,” Journal of Cold War Studies 27:4, (2025), 106-135; 118

^[11] Irina Roldugina, “The Cold War and the Soviet KGB’s Same-Sex Entrapment Operations in the 1950s and 1960s,” Journal of Cold War Studies 27:4, (2025), 106-135; 118

^[12] Alexander Orlov, Handbook of Intelligence and Guerilla Warfare (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1963), 15–16.

^[13] Roldugina, “The Cold War and the Soviet KGB’s Same-Sex Entrapment Operations in the 1950s and 1960s,” 114.

^[14] Roldugina, “The Cold War and the Soviet KGB’s Same-Sex Entrapment Operations in the 1950s and 1960s,” 116.

^[15] Roldugina, “The Cold War and the Soviet KGB’s Same-Sex Entrapment Operations in the 1950s and 1960s,” 116.

^[16] Roldugina, “The Cold War and the Soviet KGB’s Same-Sex Entrapment Operations in the 1950s and 1960s,” 117.

^[17] Qtd. in Roldugina, “The Cold War and the Soviet KGB’s Same-Sex Entrapment Operations in the 1950s and 1960s,” 117.

^[18] Qtd. in Roldugina, “The Cold War and the Soviet KGB’s Same-Sex Entrapment Operations in the 1950s and 1960s,” 117.

^[19] Roldugina, “The Cold War and the Soviet KGB’s Same-Sex Entrapment Operations in the 1950s and 1960s,” 119.

^[20] Roldugina, 119.

^[21] Roldugina, 119.

^[22] Qtd. in Roldugina, “The Cold War and the Soviet KGB’s Same-Sex Entrapment Operations in the 1950s and 1960s,” 120.

^[23] Samuel Huneke, States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany (2022); Lukasz Szulc, Transnational Homosexuals in Communist Poland: Cross-Border Flows in Gay and LEsbian Magazines (Palgrave Macmillan: 2018) 106-110; Olga Petri, Places of Tenderness and Heat: The Queer Milieu of Fin-de-Siècle St. Petersburg (Cornell University Press, 2022)

^[24] Roldugina, 124.

^[25] Roldugina, “The Cold War and the Soviet KGB’s Same-Sex Entrapment Operations in the 1950s and 1960s,” 122.

^[26] Roldugina, 126.

^[27] Roldugina, 126.

^[28] Qtd in Roldugina, 126.

^[29] Qtd in Roldugina, 126.

^[30] Roldugina, 128.

^[31] Roldugina, 128-29.

^[32] Roldugina, 134.

^[33] Roldugina, qtd. in Alexander, Regulating homosexuality in Soviet Russia, 7

^[34] Alexander, Regulating homosexuality in Soviet Russia 7-8.

^[35] Original: https://web.archive.org/web/20170801154637/https://www.novayagazeta.ru/articles/2017/04/01/71983-ubiystvo-chesti