300 • KUZICHKIN, VLADIMIR
After a lengthy investigation, Hickson traced Kurtz and persuaded
him to admit that he had fabricated a damaging account of an entirely
innocent meeting with Greene at which the latter, a deeply religious
Quaker and pacifist, had generously offered his family company’s
resources to help the refugee reestablish contact with relatives in
South America. When Kurtz had reported the episode to Knight, he
had put the most damaging construction on it, falsely claiming that
Greene had expressed a willingness to put the refugee in touch with
a Nazi spy ring in Brazil.
Once Greene’s solicitors had obtained a signed statement from
Kurtz, in which he admitted having framed Greene for a bonus pay-
ment from Knight, habeas corpus proceedings were initiated in the
High Court. At first the Home Office resisted the application, but
Greene was released when he sued for wrongful arrest and the matter
was raised in the House of Lords in January 1942, naming Kurtz as
the most mercenary ofagents provocateur. Perhaps not entirely by
coincidence, Graham Greene gave the name ‘‘Kurtz’’ to a villainous
character in his 1950 thriller,The Third Man.
Following his public humiliation, Kurtz was employed as an inter-
preter at the Nuremberg trials, and he later moved to Oxford, where
he eked out a living as an occasional contributor toHistory Today
and writing the biographiesWilhelm IIandThe Empress Eugeniein- A year later he translatedThe Unpublished Correspondence of
Madame de Stae ̈l and the Duke of Wellington, published by Cassell.
As a historian, he was highly regarded and countedHugh Trevor
Roper, then Regius professor of history at Oxford, among his friends
before he lapsed into alcoholism and experienced problems over alle-
gations that he had purloined documents. A homosexual, his career
as a teacher at a school in Kent ended abruptly, although he later was
employed to give weekly history lectures at Eton. Only a handful of
friends attended his funeral in Oxford in 1972, among them Lady
Pakenham, who admired his scholarship, but not his brother who had
disapproved of his decision to move to Britain.
KUZICHKIN, VLADIMIR.A member of theKGB’s elite Illegals
Directorate, Vladimir Kuzichkin spent five years at Moscow Univer-
sity studying Iran, followed by the usual two years at the First Chief
Directorate’s Red Banner Institute, before he was posted to the So-