Spy Eva Petrov dies a forgotten woman

EVDOKIA Petrov, the Russian spy who sparked an international incident when she defected to Australia, has died in secret in Melbourne.

For the past 48 years, Mrs Petrov was known to neighbours at her modest suburban Bentleigh home as Anna or Maria – a friendly but private woman.

The 86-year-old died on Friday after complications from a second operation on her back, it was revealed yesterday.

Her secret burial on Monday ends the Petrov Affair – a chapter that changed the course of Australian politics.

Her sensational defection in 1954 along with her KGB-trained husband Vladimir came at the height of the Cold War, amid allegations of Soviet spies and covert operations by the Communist Party.

Mrs Petrov was cremated at Springvale crematorium under the name of Maria Anna Allyson.

There was no funeral notice and just a handful of friends to mark her passing at the brief service without a minister.

Her husband, who died in 1991 aged 84 after a period in a geriatric home, lived under the assumed name Sven Allyson.

Their whereabouts was the subject of a D-notice, a voluntary commitment by newspapers not to publish their address or identities.

To neighbours, Evdokia Alexeyevna Petrova was a nice woman who lived in their street.

In 1954, images of Mrs Petrov became famous the world over after Soviet agents dragged her through a roaring crowd at Sydney airport.

She was being returned against her will to Moscow to face the repercussions of her husband's defection weeks earlier. But Northern Territory police dramatically snatched her during a fuel-stop at Darwin. She and her husband were granted asylum, Australian status and new identities in 1956.

Mrs Petrov steadfastly had refused lucrative offers to tell her story and remained hidden from the public eye.

It is believed that until recent times Mrs Petrov continued to be under the watchful eye of the Australia Security and Intelligence Organisation.

A spokeswoman for Attorney-General Daryl Williams said yesterday that Mrs Petrov's death was known to the Federal Government. But Mr Williams would make no further comment.

Vladimir Petrov was third secretary of the Russian Embassy in Canberra – and ranked Russia's top spy in Australia – when he defected.

But Mrs Petrov was considered by many intelligence analysts and researchers as possibly a more important catch than Vladimir.

She was in charge of cryptograms at the Soviet Embassy and was said to have monitored all coded transmissions between Canberra and Moscow.

She gave ASIO information on a nest of spies and pointed them to a master-spy known as KLOD (Claud in Russian).

The Petrov Affair sparked a royal commission into communist infiltration, Australia's version of McCarthyism, and decades of speculation about who was really working for whom.

In the years before the Petrov defection, sensitive information about Allied plans for operations in the Philippines and estimates of Japanese military strength, were passed from Canberra to Russia in the closing years of World War II.

The revelations brought the Cold War to Australia's door step, led to US intelligence agencies cutting ties with Australia for two years and spawned the creation of ASIO.

From the London Times

July 27, 2002

Evdokia Petrov
Glamorous Russian spy whose defection struggle with the KGB captured the imagination of the world

In one of the most dramatic — and public — spy dramas of the Cold War years, Evdokia Petrov became one of the very few Soviet agents to escape, literally, from the clutches of the KGB and gain asylum in the West. The year was 1954, and the Cold War was in one of its most chilling phases. In the wake of Stalin’s death an atmosphere of baneful uncertainty hung over the Soviet Communist Party leadership. In America the McCarthy witchhunt against “un-American activities” was in full cry.
Yet the scene of Petrov’s escape from the KGB’s tender mercies was not one of those darkened Iron Curtain border crossings so beloved of film-makers, but an airport in tropical Australia, a country to which she and her husband, Vladimir, had been posted, in 1951, nominally as embassy officials, in reality as secret agents.

The background to her seizure by the KGB was the sensational defection to the Australian authorities in April 1954 by her husband, who was nominally third secretary at the Soviet Embassy in Canberra, but held a commission as a colonel in the KGB. Vladimir had omitted to tell the Australians that his wife was also a KGB officer — and had apparently omitted to tell her that he intended to defect. As soon as he did so, she was placed under close guard at the Soviet Embassy before being driven to Sydney airport for the flight back to Moscow. But the Russians bungled both the security and secrecy aspects of the mission. Angry crowds surged round the car as it left Canberra. At Sydney Airport almost 1,000 onlookers jeered and screamed abuse as an apparently sedated Mrs Petrov was muscled across the tarmac by burly guards and forced on to the BOAC Constellation for the first stage of her journey back to what would undoubtedly have been an existence lived out in disgrace.

On the aircraft she managed to confess her fears for the future to an air stewardess with whom she managed to get a word when she left her seat to go to the lavatory. When the air hostess further learnt that Petrov wanted to be reunited with her husband and remain in Australia, she told the airline captain who alerted the authorities at the aircraft’s first stop, Darwin. When the aircraft rolled to a halt at the airport, Northern Territory police came aboard, disarmed the Soviet heavies who were guarding Mrs Petrov, and the former Soviet agent walked down the airline steps to freedom.

It was a story replete with romance and it provided the most satisfying evidence of the grisly methods of the Soviet security services. It was meat and drink to the West, and to the Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies, who brilliantly exploited it to confound the Labor Opposition and ensure his re-election. The Soviet Embassy in Canberra was closed and there were reciprocal expulsions from the Australian Embassy in Moscow. There was, however, a downside to all this euphoria. When it became clear how badly Australia had been leaking intelligence in the period before the Petrov defections, there was a period of marked cooling off in relations with the CIA.

Evdokia Alexneyeva Petrov was born in 1914, the daughter of an officer in the NKVD, a forerunner of the KGB. She was therefore brought up in a family atmosphere of unhesitating allegiance to the Communist regime. At ten she joined the pioneers, and in 1929 the youth organisation of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In her early twenties she was recruited into NKVD and later worked for the MVD, the Ministry for Internal Affairs, one half of the two organisations into which the NKVD was divided in the immediate postwar years. There she was known under her codename “Tamara”.

In the meantime, in 1936 she had contracted a form of marriage with a man named Krivosh, also an NKVD officer, and they had a child, who died. But Krivosh fell foul of the purges of 1937, was imprisoned and then banished to a penal settlement in the White Sea. In 1940 she married Vladimir Petrov (known at that time as Proletarsky until his bosses persuaded him to change his name), a rising star in the NKVD apparatus. Both developed a speciality as cipher experts, and in 1951 the pair were posted to the Soviet Embassy in Canberra.

An accomplished linguist, she spoke English, Swedish and Japanese. In Australia in the early 1950s she made a number of reports to Moscow on individuals who might be persuaded to turn spy. A stylish and attractive honey-blonde, whose dress sense was in marked contrast with that of most of the dowdy embassy wives, she was a conspicuously fun-loving figure at embassy parties, attracting a certain amount of jealousy from her compatriots at the same time.

Meanwhile, Petrov’s career began to run into trouble. In the intelligence and security community he had been very much in the ambit of Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s ruthless chief policeman. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Khrushchev, Malenkov and other members of the collective leadership ganged up on Beria and meted out on him the fate this appalling man so richly deserved. In far-off Canberra Petrov felt the shock waves and began to fear that if he returned to the Soviet Union he was likely to end his life in the gulag.

In a series of late-night meetings held in a car with a senior official in the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), he obtained assurances that he would be given asylum if he defected, and would receive compensation for the loss of his money and possessions. His great dream had always been to invest this money in a chicken farm. On April 2, 1954, with ASIO help, he turned his back on his life as a Soviet citizen and taking a few personal belongings, made his way to a safe house.

It was to be the beginning of a 17-day ordeal for his wife, who found herself a prisoner in the Soviet Embassy in Canberra. For a while there was silence. Then, on April 20, photographic images of her were suddenly splashed all over the world’s newspapers after she had been taken to Sydney airport and forced on to an aircraft. It was unprecedented press coverage of the instruments of Soviet state oppression in action, and the Australian public was outraged at the sight of her being dragged over the tarmac, minus a shoe and with rents in her stockings. By the time, of course, newspaper readers saw these pictures, Petrov, too, was at liberty, soon to be reunited with her husband. Both were debriefed, and her knowledge of Soviet codes proved highly important to future Australian and American intelligence operations.

Thereafter, like all too many agents who have defected, in whichever direction, the pair were to find the years that followed ones of featureless tedium. Petrov never achieved his chicken farm, working instead as a storeman. They were moved to Melbourne where, for many years, their whereabouts was the subject of a D-notice. For years in their quiet suburb their neighbours knew them under the names of Sven and Maria Anna Allyson. After a period in a geriatric home, Vladimir Petrov died in 1991 aged 84.

Evdokia Petrov, Russian spy and defector, was born in 1914. She died in Melbourne on July 19, 2002, aged 88.

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