Excerpts, Assumptions and Misunderstandings: Unwitting Spy

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Excerpts from Assumptions and Misunderstandings, Memoir of an Unwitting Spy

It is November 1993 in Kolomiya, western Ukraine, two years after independence from the Soviet Union. Anne Bates Linden, Peace Corps volunteer, has been assigned to help the local authorities in planning privatization and business development. Our naive Anne, mature adult, had loaned the Mayor $78.00 for ulcer medicine. "By the time he finally asked to see me, he'd had the medicine for two months and I'd yet to see a penny ."

" 'There's something I'd like you to do,' the Mayor explained as soon as Lesya and I were seated. By then, I'd been living in Kolomiya for nine months and, so far, no one in the City Administration had managed to provide me with more than a few days work. .....he wanted me to interest foreign businessmen in visiting Kolomiya.

"For nine months I had been waiting to participate in the City's economic transition. I assumed bureaucracy and inertia accounted for some of the delay...... But it would be many years before I learned the real reason: I was considered a spy.

"But my deteriorating relationship with the City Administration was not the only problem I was facing.

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Anne Bates Linden

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" By early November, food had again become scarce. On the third, I made out a shopping list: baking soda, salt, butter, bread, cheese, honey and cabbage.

"My first stop was the State store's meat and dairy counter. It had neither butter or cheese. Nor did the dry goods counter have baking soda or salt. My next stop was the outdoor market for honey. There was none. The bread store had no loaves of bread, although I was able to buy three rolls. Cabbage was not a problem. There was plenty."

I asked Anne if she was scared during the time she had to live in the hotel in Kolomiya. "Yes, I was really scared." The husband and father of a Ukrainian family that had befriended her asked around. It was the Ukrainian equivalent of the KGB, very much in operation, that had been instructed to frighten her into leaving. She stuck.

Her story is compelling. The daughter of that family is now here in the United States with two degrees, physics and English, a business owner and certified to teach English in public schools. She and Anne are close friends.

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