Weekly magazine “Arguments and Facts” No. 03. Either a bus, or a vision. When will the modernization of public transport reach cities and towns? 19/01/2022
“The master of espionage” in the 1970s dubbed him the German magazine “Stern”. For any scout, this is a failure. ButAnatoly Baronin even after such fame did not go into the shadow.
He was born in 1932 in Moscow. My father served in the state security agencies, and little Tolik dreamed of becoming an intelligence officer. But after school he graduated from an economic university, started working in his specialty.
The offer to go to work in the authorities came unexpectedly. The training at the intelligence school was very thorough, the most experienced diplomats shared their skills. As Baronin himself recalled, one of the courses was taught by the famous Anatoly Dobrynin, who was the USSR ambassador to the USA for two decades: “All this allowed us to work under diplomatic cover at the level with pure diplomats, and sometimes it was better.” While studying, Anatoly Viktorovich was a resident of Soviet intelligence in Ghana, Nigeria, and Liberia for many years.
Bird flu and Bush legs
The operations in which Baronin participated are still classified as “secret”. But some things were still made public. It was said that the master of espionage had obtained an Ebola strain for the USSR, when few people knew about this virus yet. But this is not quite true. Ebola hemorrhagic fever is named after a river in the Congo, in the area of which an outbreak of the disease was first recorded in 1976, killing in a matter of daysa whole village of 280 people. The events in which Anatoly Baronin participated happened 6 years earlier in Nigeria in the village of Lassa. Its inhabitants died out in a couple of days from an unknown disease similar to typhus. And the first to die were doctors from the USA, who were doing something in the Nigerian wilderness. This has given rise to suspicions that the Americans are testing bacteriological weapons on Nigerians.
Baronin recalled that the Center’s task to get a deadly strain was met with grumbling, but successfully completed. Then a Soviet mission of doctors was working in the country, and he chose a partner among them. “The two of us went to look for this village, located 1200 km from the capital. They obtained permission to examine the bodies of the deceased. The results are zero. It turned out that blood samples taken from the patient before his death were needed, the scout told. – Had to bypassa lot of public and seedy places to find at least some clues… Finally, in one of the bars, we met Aboriginal doctors who told us over a glass that they had a lot of test tubes with blood, but for some reason they were not allowed to take them for tests. I pretended not to believe it, and began to make them laugh. It came to the conclusion of a bet. After another bottle at our expense, one of them ran to the hospital and triumphantly showed a test tube with a red liquid.
It was not the Ebola virus, but his younger brother arenavirus, which later became known as Lassa fever. When the case of Ebola in the Congo attracted the attention of the whole world, doctors qualified African tropical viruses as a deadly threat to all mankind. And in the USSR, thanks to the work of Colonel Baronin, a similar virus has been studied for 6 years.
Did he believe that the outbreak of the disease in Africa was the result of the Americans testing bacteriological weapons? “Probably not,” wrote Anatoly Viktorovich.They probably didn’t want to let the genie out of the bottle. Nevertheless, then the whole village died out. Why don’t I think it was a test? After all, the Americans themselves were the first to die from this disease.and two nurses». And here outbreaks of avian flu and cow rabies in Western Europe treated differently. “We are talking about the artificial origin of these diseases… «Bush legs» must be promoted, and someone is breeding chickens there. With mad cow disease, it’s the same. Europe refused to buy American meat – mad cow disease immediately appeared ».
Nurses at the bedside with a patient infected with the Ebola virus. Republic of Zaire, 1976 Photo: wikihmong.com
4 coups and 1 war
Baronin said that his work is very similar to the film “TASS is authorized to state”. However, in reality, the events unfolded not in Africa, as in the movie, but in another place. Although in the rest everything is built on specific events with a little speculation by Yulian Semenov. The director of the film was a friend of mine who knew what I was doing. As for the rest, I had to witness four coups d’etat and one civil war.
In a frame from the film, “TASS is authorized to declare “hellip;” a prison in one of the African republics. Vakhtang Kikabidze (left) as CIA officer Gleb and Yuri Solomin (right) as Soviet resident Colonel Slavin. Photo: YouTube.com
The first time it happened was in 1966 in Ghana. Then he walked through the streets under bullets to report the real picture. During another coup, in Nigeria, a Soviet resident was almost shot by a military patrol. “Fortunately, an officer drove up, quickly figured everything out, apologized for his subordinates, saying that you can’t take them, illiterate. Finally, I still had the strength to joke that I almost got a bullet from my own, Soviet,the vending machine. They laughed, hugged, and I, all in a cold sweat, offered to give them a ride to the post, and at the same time to stop by our house for a snack. Word for word – we talked… Of course, with our hospitality it was not without a hundred grams. As a result, we managed to learn a lot of interesting and useful things. That’s just his wife was almost scared to death by an unexpected visit of the military with machine guns, Baronin recalled with a smile many years later.
The Americans tried to eliminate him twice, having caused a car accident: “There was a device that damaged the tire of the front wheel, and then on the highway, after heating up, it burst. It was only by a happy accident that everything ended well. A my friend and colleague after a similar «sabotage » in a serious condition got to hospital ».
From Liberia to Ukraine
When in 1971 a Soviet defector and a traitor Oleg Lyalin He handed over our intelligence officers to the British all over the world, and Baronin was also on the declassified list. They studied together at the language courses at the forest school, they did not know each other’s real names, but Lyalin identified the resident by the photo. That’s when the publication appeared in a German magazine. Baronin was recalled to Moscow and kept in quarantine for a year and a half, but then he left again for a business trip as a resident in Liberia. His experience and knowledge of West Africa were too unique.
In the mid-1980s, he returned to the central office in Moscow and waited for his next assignment in Turkey. But his worldwide fame played a cruel joke on him. The Turks in 1986 refused Baronin entry: they say Ankara is not an African backwater, we will not allow Soviet intelligencehere to frolic. And it was at this time that PSU branches began to be created in the Soviet republics. He was offered the choice to head the newly minted intelligence services of Estonia or Tajikistan, or to become deputy head of the service in Ukraine. The Baronins’ spouses rented a Moscow apartment and left for Kiev.
After the collapse of the USSR, Anatoly Viktorovich retired at the age of 59. «At first I thought – who to be? I went to one desk – I feel that it smells of thieves. Went to another – the same impression. I also walked around a bit – decided: no, I won’t break away from the service», – confessed laterthe scout. As a result, he took up teaching, taught future Ukrainian spies the basics of mastery. Baronin died in Kiev on July 29, 2019, and now the legendary Soviet intelligence officer is not called anything but Ukrainian there.
