Russian KGB confronts local missionaries teaching English

by T.L. Huffman

Imagine being some 5,000 miles away from home, in the great expanse of vast and bleak Russia, when suddenly you find yourself picked up and detained by none other than Russia’s secret police — the KGB.

Ten members from area churches were on a mission trip teaching English as a second language in Ivanovo, Russia. The two-week school was advertised to Russian citizens as an opportunity to practice and improve English with native speakers. It was a ‘conversational clinic’ and did not actually teach grammar or sentence structure or anything like that. All the members of the group held ‘religious worker’ visas.

It was the eighth day of the school. Everything was going fine, according to Gilman City graduates Bill and Carol Gutshall, who had visited the Russian speaking country of Belarus many times. Carol was in Belarus three times last year, but this was there first trip to Russia.

We came out of the hotel at 8:15 a.m. to go to the church, Carol recalls. Since it was minus 25 below zero, the others waited inside for their ride. Only Bill and I were outside the hotel. We saw a taxi drive by, but it didn’t come into the parking lot.

Suddenly a big black car met us at the steps of the hotel. Four men got out, two in uniform and two in suits, and walked toward us.

“Americans?” they said.

We said, “Yes.”

“Let us see your passports,” the man said.

We weren’t surprised by that and showed them our passports.

“Who is your chief?” the man wanted to know.

That was an unusual question. I was the team leader, so I said, “I am.”

“How many?” the man asked

I told him there were 10.

“We want to see all your passports,” the man said.

Carol and Bill went inside the hotel and explained the situation to the others. Among them were Ron and Iva Gail Ratliff (Ron is the former pastor at the Pattonsburg First Baptist Church); Tom and Martha Trail; (Tom was superintendent at the Hamilton school district for several years); and Sidney Johnson from Agency (Sidney is a former state senator.) Ron Ratliff was the Pastor Leader of the group.

They all got out their passports, Carol continues. The police looked at the pictures, then at the faces of each person.

“You must follow us,” the man said.

Carol said they knew it was the KGB (Organization of the Committee for State Security) because they had a KGB insignia on their hats.

A NINE HOUR WAIT

We walked about two blocks to a big building, says Carol. We followed them in and I realized it was a jail. There was a large, rusty cell inside the door and we all crowded into the hallway beside the cell. They wanted to see our passports again. They videotaped the passports. They brought the camera up close to the passport, then on each face.

Then they took us to a tiny little room, which looked like an interrogation room. There was one table, two chairs and a single light bulb. It was an 8×10 room and we all crowded in.

Though the KGB didn’t seem to notice it, there were actually 11 people present. Another lady, Lesa Hughes from Melbourne, had an English teaching visa and had been working with university teachers. She’d been helping the group coordinate the trip and just happened to be staying at the hotel with them.

She just fell in, continues Carol. It was very good she did since she had a cell phone. Nobody seemed to notice there was an extra one.

“Follow us,” the man said.

We were taken to the fourth floor, into a larger room, similar to a courtroom. Two guards were posted on the outside, two men on the inside. We were fingerprinted and they took a mug shot of all of us standing against a wall, one at a time. That was a new experience.

“You’ll wait here,” the man said.

We asked him why.

“You are being detained,” the man said.

All of their interrogators spoke Russian, but the KGB had hired an interpreter. That was the only way the members of the group knew what they were saying.

They said we had broken the law. We could not teach English because we didn’t have a visa from their educational department. We tried to explain to them that we weren’t teaching English. We were giving the people who came to the church an opportunity to talk and use the English they already knew. They said we were, but we weren’t. They were just reading that into it.

“Billy Frank Gutshall come with us,” the man said.

Bill was immediately taken away.

Lesa Hughes called our missionary, Mel Skinner. He told us to stay together and don’t say anything and don’t let them separate us. But they already had.

We were kept for nine hours in that room. It was very cold. They were doing construction on the building and there were cracks where the windows hadn’t been installed yet. We wore our gloves and scarves all day.

They wouldn’t tell us where Bill was.

Finally our missionary got there. He brought a lawyer for the church. He was Russian. The KGB looked at the lawyer’s documents.

“These are not in order,” the man said.

They put the lawyer in a jail cell.

Eventually after nine hours, after it had gotten dark, we were fined and released. They fined us $360 for all 10 of us.

The lawyer for the church wanted to defend us. He said we were innocent and things like this had been happening too many times. This was third time the KGB had arrested a church group. We paid the money which was to be held in escrow until they decided if we were guilty or not. They told us we wouldn’t have to pay if we were leaving in 30 days, which we were. But we said we were Christian and we’d pay. We didn’t think it would set a good example if we didn’t go ahead and pay the money.

A FOUR-HOUR INTERROGATION

As the 10 in the group waited, Bill was taken to another area of the building and grilled.

They kept asking me the same questions over and over, he says. Each time it was a different man. They showed me advertisements about the school that had been posted at the bus stops and in the papers and asked if I’d seen them and knew what they said.

(Carol had seen one of the advertisements and kept it as a souvenir. She knew the ad made no reference to the church group having a school.)

I was never really frightened, Bill says. I asked God to give me the words to say. I told the truth. The interpreter was very kind, very nice. He told me, ‘Bill, you’re doing okay, you’re doing fine. No problem.’

They kept asking me the same questions over and over. One of them would leave and another would come in. All together four came in.

They were immigration authorities. They had a job to do. The main thing they wanted to know was: what is your purpose here? Over and over. They wrote down everything I said.

I told them we were there to teach English and to tell people about our friend Jesus.

I think they may have been showing their authority. We weren’t doing anything wrong.

“You can go. Go back to the hotel and stay,” the man said, after about four hours.

I told them I’d do that if you show me how to get out of this place. We’d walked down stairs and through hallways. I really had no idea where to go.

The KGB took me outside and once I got outside I was okay.

Eventually all 10 members of the group would meet back together at the hotel. Except for their one experience with the KGB, both Bill and Carol said the missionary trip was successful.

“The clinic was absolutely wonderful,” said Carol. “They were responsive, they loved us. They said it was the biggest evangelistic effort in the last eight years and they begged us to come back. I’m not very excited about going back right now. But wherever God leads us is where we’ll go.”

Bill says they’ll be a little wiser the next time they visit Russia.

“We’ll know better next time, what to do, what to say,” he said. “The KGB are protecting their country. They have a job to do. We met a couple from England recently who told us they had a terrible time getting into the U.S. They were fingerprinted and an X-ray taken of the iris of their eyes. Everybody that comes in has to do that since 9-1-1.”

The members of the missionary group are going to tell their story at 1:45 on April 2 at the First Baptist Church at Trenton. Everyone is invited. The group’s close encounter with the Russian KGB turned out okay, but the notorious reputation of the Russian KGB for forcible confinement still lingers.

“They really caught us off guard,” said Bill. “I think if we had been antagonistic or dictatorial, it’s hard telling what would have happened.”