"Prince David Chavchavadze, who has died aged 90, was descended from the royal families of both Russia and Georgia, and served as a cold war case officer with the CIA for 25 years; he later made his mark as a writer and historian. The CIA was created under President Harry Truman in 1947 to meet the intelligence challenges of a post-war world marked by growing geopolitical rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. Chavchavadze’s career saw him travel the globe under a number of aliases, recruiting and running agents; he was particularly involved in surveillance and clandestine communications (such as dead drops) in the Agency’s Soviet Operations division. He questioned and nursed defectors — usually military personnel — from the Soviet Union, and considered the work to be his duty to his adopted country, America, and to a homeland that had been lost to revolution. His first posting was to Berlin, where his boss was the celebrated “Wild” Bill Harvey, who rightly suspected that Kim Philby was a Soviet agent and in the 1950s supervised the construction of an underground tunnel from West Berlin to the Soviet sector, to spy on their communication channels. Chavchavadze later observed: “I would be the only Romanov relative actively working against the Bolshevik regime.” Because of the threat of abduction by the KGB, the CIA’s case officers in Berlin in the 1950s often carried guns; Chavchavadze never had occasion to use his. Notwithstanding his charm and good looks, Chavchavadze insisted that a good spy should be able to walk into a restaurant unnoticed, citing Alec Leamas, the MI6 officer in John le Carré’s novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, as an accurate depiction. Prince David Pavlovich Chavchavadze was born in London on May 20 1924, the son of Prince Paul Chavchavadze, a direct descendant of the last king of Georgia, George XII, and of Princess Nina of Russia, herself descended from Tsar Nicholas I, Christian IX of Denmark and George I of Greece. David’s maternal grandfather, the Grand Duke George Mikhailovich , had been executed by the Bolsheviks in St Petersburg in 1919, and his widow , in the safety of Britain, spent long periods living as a companion to her aunt, Queen Alexandra. When he was a year old, David’s parents hired a Russian NANNY, a tiny but powerful young woman called Vera Nagovsky, who had managed to escape the chaos of revolutionary Russia. She looked after him for the next 13 years, and through her he learnt to speak fluent Russian and to take pride in his Russian heritage; he also learnt about a rural Russia far removed from aristocratic circles. He would remain devoted to “Nyanyushka” and her memory for the rest of his life. In 1927, when David was four, his parents moved to America, where his father wrote books, but, TO MAKE EXTRA MONEY, also worked for the Cunard shipping line; his mother painted “portraits” of interiors. In New York, they socialised with the Astors and the Vanderbilts; after settling in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, they became part of an intellectual community that included the writers Edmund Wilson and John Dos Passos. David was educated at Phillips Andover Academy, Massachusetts (one of the most exclusive schools on the East Coast), from where he won a scholarship to Yale. But after completing his freshman year he volunteered for war service with the US army. An early IBM computer at the newly built Pentagon identified him as a Russian-speaker, and he was sent to Camp Ritchie, in Maryland, for induction into a military intelligence unit for linguists. In 1943 he was posted to Alaska, where he interpreted for Andrei Gromyko (then the Soviet ambassador to Washington, and later Soviet foreign minister) and for Russian pilots flying American Lend-Lease aircraft. (The Soviets addressed Chavchavadze as “comrade prince”, and he recalled in his memoirs: “We got along fine on the whole.”) The next year, aged 20, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant, and by the time of his discharge had been promoted to captain." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11219248/Prince-David-Chavchavadze-obituary.html
