Youriko – a KGB agent and my girlfriend
I met Youriko in 1974, when I was 20. I had travelled to Leningrad in the USSR to study Russian language and Soviet history for six weeks. While there, I met a Kazakh woman from Alma-Ata. Although she was clearly Soviet, she and her three friends were pretending to be Japanese tourists.
We hit it off immediately and spent most of my stay together.
Two Generations Later…
Fifty years later, I wrote a novel inspired by that mysterious woman, who called herself “Youriko”. I doubt that it was her real name — she wasn’t Japanese, after all — and I now believe it was a cover identity used during her work as a KGB honeytrap agent. Some of this she told me directly; the rest I’ve pieced together over the years.
Why could she openly drink in Western bars and shop in state-run stores that only accepted foreign currency (valuta), when it was illegal for ordinary Soviets to even possess valuta? She knew which hotel rooms were bugged, pointed out the surveillance devices to me, and offered tips on avoiding them.
She was also unusually friendly with the staff in valuta bars — people widely believed to be minor KGB operatives themselves.
This novel, Andropov’s Cuckoo, is a fictionalised account of that unforgettable encounter, although most of the middle chapters of the novel are completely true.