Looks like Russians are white after all

Excerpt from Spymaster by Oleg Kalugin

In all my years in the KGB, the case of the Soviet wife and her big dog topped the list of bizarre sexual escapades.

The year was 1979. My office received a report from a placed source inside the Counterintelligence agency of a large Asian state. He informed us that we had an unusual problem on our hands. It seemed that the wife of the Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU) station chief in this Asian country was having s*x with the family's dog. Our Asian source said that his agency's surveillance officers had numerous times watched the large animal copulating with its Russian mistress. The real problem was that the Asian Intelligence agency was planning to use the woman's perversity to black mail the husband into spying for them and the West. As far as we knew, the husband—a well-respected GRU officer-had no of his wife's strange sexual predilections.

Normally in such a case we would immediately recall the officer who had been targeted. But this was no normal case. First, we didn't want to make a fuss over the situation, since it might compromise our Asian Intelligence asset. More importantly, this case would be so profoundly embarrassing to the GRU man that we had to handle it with extreme care so that neither he nor his colleagues would know about the woman's perverse behavior.

The problem was so sensitive that it was quickly kicked all the way up to Andropov. He, Kryuchkov, and I all gathered in Andropov's office to discuss the weighty issue of what to do with this oversexed dog and his crazed Russian partner. We briefly discussed the situation, then Andropov fell silent.

Suddenly, the solution came to him.

"Kill the dog!" the KGB chairman said, and we all concurred that this was, indeed, the Solomonic way out of the situation. The GRU officer was due home soon for his vacation, and when he came back to Moscow we would suggest that he not return because we had information that an undisclosed provocation was being planned against him.

My department talked with our technical specialists, the same ones who masterminded the poisoning of Markov. Oddly enough, they couldn't immediately decide which poison and what dose should be administered to the animal. Finally, they hit upon what they said was the right formula, and we sent the poison to one of our KGB officers in the Asian country. He knew the GRU station chief, and poison.

Unfortunately, our technical people screwed up: the amount on a visit to his home slipped the dog some meat laced with the of poison they prescribed didn't kill the dog, but only partially paralyzed him. Luckily, he was paralyzed from the waist down, and was rendered impotent.

Our Asian Counterintelligence source said their bugs in the GRU officer's house showed that the woman was inconsolable when the dog became ill. The GRU man and his spouse soon came back to the USSR, where his superiors told him that he couldn't return to his old posting for security reasons. The Asian Intelligence service didn't try to blackmail him, and he wasn't sent overseas again. Apparently, he never discovered that his wife had been intimate with the dog.

I never found out whether she replaced the family pet.