http://www2.caller.com/ccct/politics/article/0,1641,CCCT_813_1323552,00.html Potential $1 million award to a former woman spy By BILL STRAUB August 13, 2002 It was June 1971. The war in Vietnam was raging and, as Bob Dylan noted, "there was revolution in the air." Barbara Makuch was just 18, the daughter of a Nazi concentration camp survivor devoted to the ideals of the United States. She was in northwest New York, riding in a car with "a crazy Maoist" who told her about his plans to bomb a local NBC-TV affiliate and the student union at the University of Buffalo. "Kids were going to die," recalled Makuch from the kitchen of her home in East Amherst, N.Y. She alerted the authorities, the bomb plot was thwarted and a career as a spook for the FBI was successfully launched. Over the next two decades, during the intense Cold War years, Makuch infiltrated several domestic operations fronting for the Russian government. Known only by her mother and husband, she was recruited by the KGB "who needed someone who looked regular" for their own clandestine efforts in the United States. She traveled regularly between Buffalo and Moscow as a double agent while consistently maintaining her allegiance to her adopted home in America. Information she obtained served as the basis for a meeting in October 1987 between then-Secretary of State George Shultz and then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The meeting led to the historic summit between Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan. By the mid-1980s, Makuch was the key to understanding the secret funding channels and methods used to funnel U.S. currency - more than $21 million in the 1980s alone - from the Soviet Union to communist front sources operating in America. "I became an agent of influence for the Soviets," she said. "I basically passed information between the KGB and front organizations here in this country." All, she stressed, under the direction of the FBI. It cost her a marriage and probably the health of her second husband, Eugene Makuch, who worked with her in the trenches of the American spy community. Since leaving the service in 1992, she has experienced problems finding work. She earned no more than $300 a week for her efforts and, despite promises from FBI officials, neither she nor her husband have been provided with disability, Social Security, health care or pension benefits. But that may be changing. The House has passed special legislation sponsored by Rep. Tom Reynolds, R-N.Y., which would award Makuch $1 million for her service as a foreign counterintelligence agent. Eugene Makuch, who has undergone two kidney transplants and a brain aneurysm that left him in a coma for two months, would also receive $1 million for his efforts under separate legislation. Both proposals are pending in the Senate. Assistant Attorney General Daniel Bryant said of Makuch, "With her husband, she provided critical information that allowed the FBI to offset espionage activities planned by the Soviet Union against the United States and our allies. Without doubt, their long-term assistance and service demonstrated an admirable commitment to safeguarding the security of our nation." Makuch, 49, said her family history and a well-defined sense of patriotism led her to become a spy. Her Polish father had been imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp and she was born in a refugee camp in post-war Germany. An uncle was shot by Russian communists for refusing to destroy a cross on the wall of his home in the Ukraine. A grandfather was "an active fighter against the Soviets." "The things you're told as a child stay with you," she said. "It sort of gives you intestinal fortitude. My life was formed by those events and this is a wonderful country." The family moved to Great Britain when Makuch was 8 but ended up in the United States, settling around Buffalo when she was 14. Just four years later she was an FBI "asset." "The fact that I am not dead today is by the grace of God and my own gut," she said. "I knew I could die. Yet - and believe me, this is not heroic talk - I think about what my family had gone through and I think about World War II." There were dangerous moments. She was "an undercover activist," involving herself in New Left organizations receiving surreptitious - and illegal - funding from the Soviet bloc and reporting the activities to the FBI. Her work as an activist was brought to the attention of the KGB, which recruited her to pass information to the front organizations and serve "as a cover for drops when they came to Niagara Falls." She recruited students, anti-war and peace activists "who didn't know what they were doing" for the KGB. At all times she kept the FBI fully informed. Had they know about her activities, Makuch quoted one agent as saying, "they would have rolled up off the sidewalk and put a bullet in your head." In her role as a double agent, Makuch traveled to the Soviet Union about a half-dozen times to meet with her KGB handlers - never knowing whether Soviet spies in the United States had passed on information that could betray her. She was friends with Yevgeni Primakov, the head of the notorious KGB, as well as Gennady Yaniev, vice president under Gorbachev, always making sure to bring him a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label Scotch when she visited. "It was probably the most dangerous around '85," she said. "We began the dance of death. I was being tested by the Soviets on a very regular basis. If I had been caught, I would have been shot. I had nowhere to turn when I was over there - no names of anyone. The testing was in order to instill fear in me. I was in situations where people told me they killed people with their bare hands. One time in Chautauqua (N.Y.) I didn't think I was going to get out of a room." In 1992, after years of "living on adrenaline most of the time," and with her husband in deteriorating health, Makuch told the FBI she wanted out. "It had become far more dangerous and far more frightening than I wanted to deal with," she said. But there was one final case involving the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, a Soviet front organization receiving funding from Moscow. Makuch had risen up the ranks to obtain an executive position in the group and on Feb. 6, 1987, met with Rev. Alan Thomson, the council's executive director in her room at the J.W. Marriott Hotel in Washington, D.C. There he handed her $17,000, obtained from the KGB, and explained how to deposit the money without attracting the attention of federal regulators. Unbeknownst to Thomson, the transaction was being recorded by the FBI in an adjacent room. Thomson subsequently was indicted on federal money laundering charges but it wasn't until May 21, 1992, that he pleaded guilty. For her work, Barbara Makuch won the Louis E. Peters Memorial Award, the highest civilian award presented by the FBI, in 1992. Now, with her husband in ill health and the bills mounting, Makuch is hoping for some assistance. And with Sept. 11 still clear in the nation's rear view mirror, she hopes her experiences will convince others to get involved. "At this horrible time in our country, I want people to come forward and serve their country," she said. "Yes, it was dangerous. Yes, death was just around the corner. But I would go back in a heartbeat." On the Net: www.members.aol.com/barbarajmakuch (Reach Bill Straub at straubb(at)shns.com) or jya cryptome.