Word: thompson
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Toward Revenge. About ten days later, Thompson was walking at night near Tempelhof when a black DKW with three men inside pulled up. "They called out my name and told me to get in; one of them had a pistol," said Thompson. "They took me back to the same place I was before, only this time the atmosphere was different. They threatened to 'double-agent' me-meaning one of their agents would get word to my superiors that I was working for them. They interviewed me for nine hours that time, and I smoked a lot of cigars...
...January 1958, Thompson was ordered to report to the Air Force base in Great Falls, Mont. "When I told them, the Russians got shook up and excited," he recalled. "They gave me $1,000 and told me to buy a short-wave radio and tune in on a special part of the band and listen for the code words 'Amour Lenin.' " The Reds gave him a cigarette lighter decorated with four aces and told him a Soviet agent with an identical lighter would meet him in front of a movie theater in Smiths Falls, Ont., 1,650 miles...
...Thompson says that once back in the U.S. he reneged on the Russians and did no more spying while in service. He got an honorable discharge in December 1958 and went to Detroit. There he was approached by a Russian named Boris Karpovich, a Soviet embassy counselor in Washington who was kicked out of the U.S. in January. Boris told him to get a job with the FBI. Thompson, a high school dropout, said with rare perspicuity that he doubted the FBI would hire him. For nearly two years thereafter the Soviets left him alone...
...Even Gas Money." Then, in mid-1961, Fedor Kudashkin, former chief of Russian translators at the U.N., arrived in Detroit and put on the pressure. Frightened, Thompson moved to Long Island. Kudashkin tracked him down in November 1961, threatened to expose Thompson's sleazy spy work, and Thompson agreed to help out where he could. "He wanted me to supply information about water reservoirs on Long Island, on the gas lines between New York and Long Island, on the power plants in these areas...
Sometimes Kudashkin asked for "background investigations" on people living on Long Island, and Thompson would "pose as an insurance man and question a man's neighbors and credit agents and so forth." Thompson met Kudashkin dozens of times-sitting in Thompson's oil truck in parks, beneath water towers, in railroad parking lots. Whatever Thompson's information was worth to Kudashkin, it wasn't worth much to Thompson. "I never even made my gas money," said Thompson...