How I nearly became a KGB agent

Friday, 27 February 2026

Moscow, 1986: Snow, a queue, a banner of communist revolution hero Lenin hanging across the front of the GUM department store in Red Square.

Martin van Beynen is a Press journalist and regular opinion contributor.

OPINION: It was 1986 and winter in Moscow.

The Chernobyl meltdown in Ukraine was still months away and Mikhail Gorbachev, who had ascended to general secretary of the Communist Party the previous year, was tentatively introducing glasnost (transparency and openness) and perestroika (economic restructuring).

The Cold War was thawing but relations between the USSR and the West remained tense. The KGB, the fearsome Soviet spy agency dissolved in 1991 after its chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov led a coup d’etat against Gorbachev, remained unreformed.

The Kremlin Wall, the Spasskaya Tower, Red Square, the GUM department store, the St Basil's Cathedral and the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge over the Moscow River are decorated for the New Year and Christmas festivities in Moscow. This is not how Martin remembers it.

Between them, the USSR and the United States had 70,400 nuclear warheads at the ready. (Now it’s down to about 12,500 but this could change as limitation treaties expire and are not renewed.)

I can’t reveal exactly why I was in Moscow. Well OK, I was visiting my cousin who was a senior member of the New Zealand embassy staff. It was as innocent as that, although going behind the Iron Curtain still had its trepidations.

Thanks to the plethora of spy dramas and films, we have all become much more knowledgeable about spy craft. In fact, earnest students of these entertainments should be proficient in stealing and photographing documents, in kidnapping and assassinations, deciphering codes, drop-offs, secret signals, passwords, disguise, surveillance, seduction, blackmail, recruitment, acting as agents provocateurs and, yes, smoking.

The Moscow headquarters of the KGB in 1975, undergoing a repaint.

Back in 1986, we were still relative novices and while Western visitors to Moscow expected to be monitored, the darker arts of spycraft were still a mystery.

I boarded the Moscow-bound train in Amsterdam and didn’t leave my spartan, antiquated carriage for 50 hours as it travelled through West Germany, East Germany, and Poland to the Russian border. Although much of the travel was at night, the colour seemed to drain from the world as soon as we crossed into East Germany.

A queue outside a Moscow bakery in 1986. Once inside, shoppers could expect little variety in the bread on offer, Martin van Beynen recalls.

My fetid compartment had three bunks which converted into a seat during the day. The guard kept a samovar (tea kettle) at the end of the carriage and occasionally served tea and bread rolls. The bleak countryside, soldiers patrolling train stations and endless frozen forests were redolent of oppression and control. Any thought of the romance of rail travel went out the train window.

When we reached the Polish-Belorussian border we had a two-hour wait to change the undercarriages to accommodate the Russian gauge.

Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022) was hailed as the great reformer who lost control of the process.

My hospitable and attentive cousin and his wife lived in an apartment block mainly housing foreigners working in Moscow. It was surrounded by walls with the only entrance patrolled by guards. I nearly caused a NZ-USSR diplomatic incident by jumping a wall to take a shortcut.

With the aid of a CIA map, I trod the Moscow streets which were edged with dirty snow and hardly troubled by traffic. Babushkas (grandmothers) helped clear footpaths and in the vast Red Square, a long queue, mainly of locals, snaked around the block to see Lenin in his tomb. I couldn’t be bothered.

I enjoyed the beautiful Moscow metro and gazed at the towering walls of the Kremlin. Wanting to see how the ordinary people lived, I visited a bread shop which boasted dark shelves of long loaves but no variety. In a butcher’s shop, it was clear small goods and actual cuts were an unwelcome bourgeois luxury. If you wanted meat, staff simply hacked a lump off a joint. Department stores were a joke.

On one of these forays, I was approached by a youngish Russian woman wearing a fur hat, boots and a two piece outfit. She spoke perfect English and was obviously intelligent. We got talking and hit it off, at least I thought so anyway.

If my thesis is correct and she was sussing me out as a potential KGB recruit, she probably had me plugged as a naive, bookish and idealistic young man. In other words prime material for recruitment to the cause. Religious cults like the Moonies have often seen the same susceptibility in me.

She suggested a visit to a tea shop and over a hot beverage in a steamy workers’ cafe, the conversation turned quickly to politics with sparks flying. We were both determined to establish our political systems as superior to the other. For every negative I mentioned about the Soviet system, she replied with a matching flaw in the Western system. If I mentioned repression and censorship in the Soviet Bloc, she replied with the Western media being owned by profit hungry moguls. If I condemned the Soviet invasions of Afghanistan, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, she countered with Vietnam and regime changes in South America.

She suggested I had been brainwashed by propaganda about the Soviet Union while I said she lived in a country where facts were manipulated and hidden. She was fierce, persuasive and charming. I waited for more. Another meeting perhaps, maybe even a honey trap. We parted company the best of friends but I never saw her again. She probably concluded I was a hopeless cause, my views too contaminated by Western ideas. I clearly had no recruitment potential.

Or maybe she was just a friendly Russian keen for conversation with someone from the West. Maybe she was just after my jeans. But I doubt it. I was that close to working for the KGB.