Devil's Payoff

In Moscow last September West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer made a bargain. Longtime traffickers in human souls, the Communists offered to ship some 10,000 prisoners of war home to Germany, if Adenauer would accept one Russian. Like Faust's bargain with the devil, the deal was calculated to make

Germany only momentarily happy. Last week, as perhaps the last installment of prisoners came back from Soviet slave camps, Adenauer got his Russian: 53-year-old Valerian Aleksandrovich Zorin, first Soviet Ambassador to West Germany.

Softspoken, grey-haired Zorin has the diplomatic manner, often makes cracks about uncultured and unimportant comrades, deftly turns difficult conversation into innocuous channels when it suits him. Said a German diplomat who met him last week: "If you didn't know differently, you would think he was from Denmark or Sweden, or perhaps Canada. His face is animated and kind." In short, Zorin is one of the few Russian diplomats who is readily distinguishable from his bodyguard. But behind the kind, animated exterior of Valerian Zorin lies one of the deadliest minds in diplomacy.

He was born near Rostov in the Don Cossack country and he came up the hard way, through the Young Communist League to Moscow's Marx-Engels Institute and a Communist teaching job. In 1941 he was assigned to the Soviet Foreign Office, and two years later he was head of the division dealing with central Europe. His biggest coup took place in 1948, when he masterminded the Communist seizure of Czechoslovakia. While maintaining a smiling relationship with President Benes, Zorin gathered together a team of Moscow-trained Communists and helped to organize the "action committees" that bored into every section of Czech life. After the coup he returned to Moscow, but was back in Prague three years later to supervise the liquidation of Rudolf Slansky and a score of other top Czech Communists on Stalin's suspect list.

In 1952, when Zorin went to New York as chief Soviet delegate to the U.N., he wore plain grey business suits and horn-rimmed spectacles, and gold flashed in his smile. Said a newsman: "He could pass for a middle-aged banker at an executives' convention." Plain Mrs. Zorin wore mink. Despite such appearances, Zorin's attacks on the U.S. were ruthless and uncompromising.

In Bonn last week, Zorin moved into the Villa Hentzen, onetime home of a 19th century Cologne millionaire, on the west bank of the Rhine opposite Chancellor Adenauer's home. But a mile upstream he had carpenters working feverishly, repairing an old hotel for his staff of 45 Russians, who are also part of the devil's bargain.

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