Lhasa, 1950: Zvansov, second from left, with the Russian refugee Dmitri Nedbailoff, far left, and Heinrich Harrer, far right. The others are Tibetan officials.
Wartime fugitive from Soviet Samarkand who spent nine years on a terrifying journey to freedom
Vasili Zvansov was a Russian who deserted from the Red Army to seek freedom from Stalinism. After extraordinary adventures — including a chaotic CIA expedition to Tibet — he managed to make his way across the blanks on the maps of Central Asia to India and ultimately to the US.
Vasili Zvansov was born in 1923 in a village near Lake Zaysan, south of Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan. His parents, wealthy kulaks, had their assets seized by the Soviet Russians who imprisoned his father and ejected the family from their home in winter.
At 17 Zvansov was drafted into the Red Army. After some months he and a friend, Nikolai Kibardin, deserted. Leaving Samarkand in Uzbekistan they headed for Ayaguz, 750 miles to the northeast. It took several months walking at night, guided by the stars, and hiding by day. En route they had to cross the River Syr Darya and stole a rowing boat: “Paddling in an all-night merry-go-round through reeds in vast shallows we got lost, until at dawn we saw open water and crossed next night,” Zvansov recalled. “When we hit shore we had to fight off fierce dogs; this scared the ferry guard so much that we managed to run off.”
Once home they learnt that Zvansov’s father had escaped from jail and fled east to Chinese Sinkiang, so in September 1941 the pair followed him. Again travelling by night they headed to the border with Mongolia in the lightly guarded Altai Mountains some 250 miles south.
“I knew that area; a teacher of mine had transferred there and I had once visited,” Zvansov said.
They crossed the border at a river but on reaching the nearest town, desperate for food, they were immediately caught by the Chinese Nationalist Army. “We got lucky — just as we arrived Chiang Kai-shek declared Chinese control. Happily, they searched for and found my father for me.”
In 1942 General Omar Ma of the Chinese Nationalist Army recruited Zvansov into a group of 150 anti-communist White Russians, known as the Eskadrone (squadron). Two years later a Soviet-backed “Red Brigade” drove the Chinese out of Sinkiang and set up a short-lived puppet state, the Eastern Turkestan Republic (its ulterior motive was to control the local uranium mines). The area was then liberated by Osman Bator, a Kazakh aristocrat who had joined the Chinese Nationalists.
“We joined him,” Zvansov said, “but the Soviets drove us out again in 1947, to Ku-chöng near Urumchi. It was hard; very dangerous; how to save our lives? I deserted again.”
Shortly afterwards Zvansov met General Ma who warned him that his Nationalist Army was capitulating to Mao’s communists who were invading the province. Fearing that Zvansov would be killed, he gave him a Tupalov pistol and advised him to flee to India. To help Zvansov, he found work for him at the US Consulate in Urumchi. Zvansov was introduced to the vice-consul, Douglas Mackiernan, who combined his official duties with his activities as a CIA officer. This included spying on the Russian-run mines, whose workers told Zvansov they were digging uranium.
On one occasion Zvansov and Mackiernan drove a load of wooden crates to the Russian border where they buried them. “I was told they were radios which we would recover if we ever returned,” Zvansov said. In fact they were seismographs and Geiger counters for monitoring the detonation of Russia’s first atomic bomb, on August 29, 1949, near Semipalatinsk.
One day another US intelligence man flew into Urumchi. Frank Bessac (obituary, Jan 5, 2011), a former Office of Strategic Studies officer, was a Fulbright scholar in anthropology studying Mongolian peoples. He was also trying to stay out of the hands of the Chinese communists. Shortly after his arrival the communists overran Urumchi, so the last of the US consular staff plus Zvansov and two fellow Russian refugees, Stephan Yanuishkin and Leonid Shutov, fled by night.
The group now set off for India via Tibet — nine months and 1,200 miles away, by foot, horse and camel, at first through Kazakh territory. Here Zvansov’s fluent Kazakh was indispensable, as was his skill at not wounding Muslim cultural sensitivities. The party headed for Zvansov’s former commander, Osman Bator at Barkol, north of Hami, where they stayed a month before heading south. Buying 21 horses for gold, nine men, including guides, set out along the edge of the Black Gobi, bypassing Dunhuang, to cross the vast Takla Makan desert.
On November 29, 1949, they reached Timerlik Bulak, near Lake Gas Kol, where, having presented the traditional gifts of blue cloth and gold, they received a royal welcome from Hussein Taiji, a leader of pastoral Kazakhs whom Zvansov regarded as little more than a bunch of bandits. They had to overwinter there until late March 1950, when the high passes of the Arka Tagh Mountains leading to the bleak, empty Chang Tang Plateau became passable.
While the anthropologist Bessac was in his element, the others spent most days glumly feeding the fire. Zvansov, an expert hunter, shot gazelle and Przewalski horses, whose meat he dried and salted for the forthcoming journey. Unknown to him the preservative contained Epsom salts, which later had unpleasant consequences. As the plateau had almost no fodder and no blacksmiths to reshoe horses, they bought 15 specially trained meat-eating camels and two liver-eating horses. The party depended on Zvansov’s hunting skills to provide fresh meat for them, chunks of which the animals swallowed without chewing. For the men, rice, sugar, tea and flour were ordered from traders in Khotan, 500 miles due west. Constantly at high altitude they had little appetite for fresh meat — it affected their breathing — and it took far too long to cook. Zvansov noted that, due to water boiling at so low a temperature, “you can happily put your hand in it”.
Setting off again on March 20, their Kazakh guides, fearing Tibetan bandits, soon abandoned them. “As the incessant wind blows all tracks away, we followed landmarks, such as distinct rock formations as well as named grave mounds on high passes — Kalibek, Kasbek and Abul Kasim — each several days apart,” Zvansov recalled. “We never found grass, water or animal dung fuel all at one camp.”
The party of five struggled on in the thin air — for six weeks they never descended below 16,000 feet. On one occasion when hunting with Mackiernan far from camp, Zvansov missed a clear shot. Mackiernan, now starting to show signs of mental instability, rode off in disgust with their horses leaving Zvansov stranded in bitter cold. He wandered lost for hours and was only saved when he heard the distant barking of fierce guard dogs in a nomad’s remote yurt. He was found by his party next morning.
At noon on April 29 the party started to descend towards Central Tibet. Through binoculars Zvansov spotted yak-hair Tibetan tents at a spot known as Shegar-Hunglung. His party, dressed in heavy sheepskin coats, could be mistaken for belligerent Kazakh raiders and, knowing Asian protocol, he explained that one man should go to the Tibetans to prove themselves harmless. (Tibet’s vast northern borderlands were patrolled against Kazakh raiders by sundry militia who had orders to stop strangers or suffer terrible consequences). Mackiernan, who had always taken Zvansov’s advice, abruptly dismissed him and insisted they camp next to the Tibetans’ tents. As they approached they heard warning shots, so Bessac set off with gifts to make contact. Meanwhile, six horsemen, armed with British rifles, approached. More bullets flew, so Zvansov rapidly made a white flag and took a safety catch off a gun. Mackiernan ordered them to drop their rifles and walk out with hands up. Zvansov had other ideas and as the group walked forward, he hung back. Without warning, at point blank range, three shots rang out — the Tibetans perhaps fearing a trap instantly killing his companions. Zvansov fled, doubled up, zigzagging. “I saw dust spout up from bullets hitting the ground, but in rarefied air at 16,000 feet I had no power, I straightened up gasping for breath when a bullet hit below my left knee, ‘boom’!”
Next day the two survivors, Zvansov and Bessac, were led towards Lhasa. Zvansov, in great pain, sat on a stool on a stretcher carried by a rota of a dozen Tibetans who struggled wretchedly to carry his weight at altitude. He made a special saddle with a back support to ride on a camel. While looking for rope in saddlebags he discovered the severed heads of his three companions being taken to Lhasa as proof of the incident.
It had been a terrible mistake. Mackiernan had sent radio messages six months earlier to the US authorities who prevaricated and informed the Tibetan government only on April 5 that the party was due. The delayed message and the miscalculation proved fatal — on May 4 they met runners from Lhasa with a da-yig, a “red arrow” relay letter carried on a spear with jingling bells, with a message for the militia. It was five days too late.
The pair reached Shen Tsa Dzong on May 6, 12 days from Lhasa. There Zvansov was treated by a herbalist who poulticed the bullet’s entry and exit wounds, until, after some days an Indian-trained medical orderly, “Dr” Lahsunyarpil, galloped up from the south. He spoke limited English but brought penicillin for Zvansov which took immediate effect — “an hour later I felt newborn”.
After 24 days spent recuperating, they resumed their journey, gradually descending to below 14,000 feet to cultivated lands, chancing upon a regiment of the Tibetan Army which they reviewed as its band played God Save the King and Marching Through Georgia.
After 65 camps since Gas Kol, they reached Lhasa on June 11, 1950; they were only the 86th and 87th and very last foreigners to do so between the British invasion of 1904 and that of the Chinese communists later that year. In Lhasa they were surprised to meet other Europeans, including Heinrich Harrer, the author of Seven Years in Tibet, who greeted them at the city’s outskirts.
They resided at the Tride Linka until July 27. There Zvansov carved three wooden crosses to be put up where their companions had died. On one occasion they had an audience with the 14-year-old Dalai Lama in his summer residence, the Norbu Lingka. He laid his hands on their heads in blessing but due to strict protocol, they were not permitted to speak.
Among the five resident Westerners in Lhasa was another Russian refugee, Dmitri Nedbailoff, who had escaped wartime internment in Dehra Dun in British India. A well-educated man, he was working as an electrical engineer for the Tibetan Government on a British-supplied hydroelectric station.
While Bessac engaged in unofficial discussions (which it is thought might have been Mackiernan’s intention), with the Tibetan Government about the possibility of establishing relations with the US, Zvansov concentrated on reaching India and freedom.
Eventually, as guests of the Tibetan Government, they floated down the rivers Kyi-chu and Tsangpo in a coracle for 80 miles to the ancient monastery of Samye. “The river was swift, full of strong currents, dangerous and sometimes very unpleasant because the bodies of the dead, those which were not fed to vultures in skyburial ceremonies, were often disposed of in the river. The smell was terrible as we frequently passed rotting bodies washed up on the river banks.”
Reaching the Jelep-la pass over the Himalayas into Sikkim, Zvansov could look down towards the plains of India far below and he recalled thinking that he had reached the very edge of the world.
In India he and Bessac were interrogated by British and US intelligence officers. Zvansov spent nearly a year in India until he was granted permission to travel to California where he was met by two CIA men who told him to keep quiet. He settled in Oakland. He was occasionally invited to work with the CIA and return to the Soviet Union but, recalling his father’s advice never to be entangled in such dangerous work, declined.
Bored with his job as a machine minder Zvansov learnt how to repair watches and set up a business. He went on to own four jewellery shops and set up a property business. After his wife died of cancer, he remarried and had a daughter and a son and moved his family to Hawaii. He retired at 65 to pursue his love of fishing.
After the fall of the Iron Curtain Zvansov was finally able to visit his motherland. He visited relatives in Alma-Ata, near his birthplace. His mother had died in 1947 in Kazakhstan; his father in Sinkiang in 1968. In old age his surviving brother and sister moved to be cared for by relatives in Belarus. However, its relationship with the US deteriorated so far that his siblings asked him to cease communication.
In 2006, recalling his epic adventures, Zvansov said, “Looking back it is like a dream — so many years ago — with me in it.”
Vasili Zvansov is survived by his wife and son. A daughter predeceased him.
Vasili Zvansov, adventurer and watch repairer, was born on May 9, 1923. He died on October 1, 2012, aged 89
Surgeon-General at the Ministry of Defence whose research in gastroenterology led to breakthroughs in the treatment of peptic ulcers
Godfrey Milton-Thompson’s naval medical career spanned 45 years and saw him rise to the important posts of Medical Director-General of the Navy and Surgeon-General, Ministry of Defence. He always regretted his lack of sea time, but his service in hospitals, in management appointments and in research was immensely valuable.
His specialist interest was gastroenterology and he was awarded the Royal Navy’s Errol-Eldridge Award in 1974, and in 1976 the Sir Gilbert Blane Gold Medal, founded in 1830 by Sir Gilbert Blane, and conferred annually for contributions to improvements in the health or living conditions of naval personnel. In this case the contribution was an investigation into the incidence of peptic ulcers in naval personnel, some twice the average, possibly a lifestyle effect, painful and occasionally fatal. Milton-Thompson with his team of researchers worked with volunteer naval guinea-pigs to determine the best treatments and dosages to inhibit the production of acid in the gut. Teamed with civilian physicians from the clinic of the gastroenterologist Sir Francis Avery Jones, he was involved in the early use of cimetidine and ranitidine, this last becoming Glaxo’s Zantac in 1981 and by 1988 the world’s biggest-selling prescription drug. Between 1973 and 1981 he and colleagues published many papers on aspects of gut disease in journals including The Lancet, the British Medical Journal and the specialist journal Gut.
Born in 1930, Godfrey Milton-Thompson was the younger son of the vicar of St Mark’s near Birkenhead, brought up in the vicarage and imbued with the strong Christian principles which informed the rest of his life. He graduated from his preparatory school, Woodcote House near Ascot, with a scholarship to Eastbourne College where he excelled at science and captained the rugby team.
He went to the University of Cambridge in 1948 to study medicine at Queens’ College where he admitted to more play than study, but still achieved his degree.
He was offered a place at St Thomas’ Hospital for clinical training where in 1952 he married Noreen, daughter of Colonel Sir Desmond Fitzmaurice, a marriage that was to last 60 years. As a medical student he had been able to defer his National Service; however, once a fully registered practitioner, he decided in 1955 to follow a long family tradition and join the Royal Navy.
After a series of general service and hospital appointments at home and abroad, he became Consultant Physician at the Royal Naval Hospital, Plymouth, having achieved membership of the Royal College of Physicians. From 1969 to 1971 he was also Honorary Research Fellow at St Mark’s Hospital, London, and Professor of Naval Medicine until 1980. He became the first medical officer to attend the Royal College of Defence Studies, Belgrave Square, in 1981.
His subsequent roles in higher management included Deputy Medical Director-General from 1982 to 1984, a period encompassing the Falklands conflict which imposed on his broad shoulders the hurried provision of sufficient people and supplies to deal with the casualties of war. On promotion to rear-admiral in 1984, he was placed in charge of operational medical services, then appointed deputy surgeon-general in charge of research and training until his two final senior posts from 1985 to 1990. While Surgeon-General to the MoD with responsibility for all three Services, he fought for retention of dedicated military hospitals at home and abroad against the cheeseparing policies of successive governments, eventually without success — Britain’s oldest purpose-built military hospital and then the largest brick building in England at Haslar, Gosport, was the last to close in 2009, the wisdom of these decisions being questioned again today.
Milton-Thompson was appointed KBE in 1988. A particular honour was to have been Honorary Physician to the Queen from 1982 to 1990.
In retirement from the Navy, he maintained his membership of the Medical Research Society and the British Society of Gastroenterology. From 1993 he was Vice-President of the British Digestive Foundation. Among his many charitable activities were Warden of St Katherine’s House, Wantage; chairman of the governors, St Mary’s School, Wantage, and chairman of the Cornwall Community Healthcare Trust.
But his major interest of which he was justifiably proud was his involvement with the Order of St John for 34 years, giving distinguished service across a wide field of activities, tirelessly promoting its interests as Order Hospitaller for the St John Ophthalmic Hospital in Jerusalem and later as chairman of St John Council, Cornwall. He was a valued member of the English Priory Chapter until his death and was invited in 1989 to be a Knight of the order.
A colleague described Milton-Thompson as “aristocratic” and certainly he was well known for his urbane, unflappable and courteous style with, not least, a marked tenacity in argument.
He is survived by his wife Noreen and their three daughters.
Surgeon Vice-Admiral Sir Godfrey Milton-Thompson, KBE, Naval Medical Director-General and Surgeon-General, Ministry of Defence, 1985-90, was born on April 25, 1930. He died on September 23, 2012, aged 82
>Clive Dunn
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The Dad’s Army cast filming in 1977: from left, Arnold Ridley, Clive Dunn, Arthur Lowe, Ian Lavender, John Laurie and John Le Mesurier
Dad’s Army actor who made the character of Corporal Jones one of the best loved — and most quoted — in television comedy
Clive Dunn did not exactly spring to attention when he was offered the role of Lance Corporal (“permission to speak”) Jones in Dad’s Army that was to make him a durable television favourite. His reservations were not about his own character, who had fought at the battle of Omdurman under Lord Kitchener, become a butcher in civilian life and joined the Home Guard at the fictional Walmington-on-Sea in the Second World War.
Nor was he worried about playing someone much older than his age. He was in his late forties when Dad’s Army started in 1968, and Jones was in his seventies at least, but by then Dunn had made old men his speciality. He once played Thora Hird’s father, although she was nine years older.
What worried him was that the role of the sergeant would go to an actor who would see him as the stereotyped barking martinet. Instead it went to his close friend, John Le Mesurier, who played the senior NCO with an absent-minded gentleness that still allowed him to prick the pomposity of Arthur Lowe’s Captain Mainwaring.
Only when Dunn was sure that Le Mesurier had signed for the show did he follow suit. He learnt later that Le Mesurier had also hesitated, but only for more money. He also discovered that he was not the first choice for “Jonesy”. The BBC had first approached the comedian Jack Haig who turned the part down for another job.
But as Dunn wrote in his 1986 autobiography, Permission to Speak: “Naturally I was unaware that this offer was to influence my career from that moment on. I didn’t jump at it — I wasn’t particularly hungry.”
Fortunately for television comedy, he did accept and made the excitable Lance Corporal’s cries of “Don’t panic!” and “They don’t like it up ’em!” into memorable catchphrases.
Jones was crucial to the programme’s success and remarkable longevity. His butcher’s van was the platoon’s only source of transport and was employed often as a comic device by the screenwriters David Croft (obituary, September 28, 2011) and Jimmy Perry. He was always the first to volunteer for whatever improbable task needed to be undertaken, frequently citing his experience under Kitchener, fighting the “fuzzy wuzzies” in the Sudan.
Born in Brixton, South London, in 1920, Clive Robert Benjamin Dunn, “Buddy” to his family, came from a background steeped in music hall, summer concert parties and the seaside Fol-de-Rols. His grandfather, Frank Lynne, was a comedian and comic song writer of the 1880s, and his parents, Connie Clive and Bobby Dunn, were well-known performers on the prewar variety circuit. Bobby was a stand-up comic and baritone, Connie a comedienne, character player and singer of burlesque ballads. Dunn grew up amid the itinerant scramble of steam trains, theatrical lodgings and temporary nannies.
A career in showbusiness was almost inescapable. One of his first ventures when still a schoolboy was as an extra in the 1935 Will Hay film Boys Will Be Boys. After a brief spell as a movie clapper boy he attended the Italia Conti stage school in London, where his fellow students and friends included Graham Payn and Richard Todd.
He took a job as assistant to the assistant stage manager at the Richmond Theatre in Surrey at a salary of ten shillings a week. He was rapidly promoted to stage manager. He recalled Lilli Palmer, when appearing in a period play with William Devlin, objecting to the length of time Dunn held the curtain before letting it fall on a passionate centre-stage kiss.
His father was stage manager and tours producer at the Aldwych Theatre for Tom Walls and Ralph Lynn when they were at the peak of their fame in farce. Dunn would stand in the wings watching the pair at work and would later say that Lynn, with his toothy grin, husky voice and impeccable timing, was a strong influence on his own comedy style.
In 1941 Dunn was posted to Egypt in the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars training as a medical orderly. From there his regiment took part in the ill-fated Greek campaign during which he was captured. He spent the remainder of the war as a prisoner of war in Germany and Austria where his comic talents were to emerge, playing to what he acknowledged was a captive audience. His first postwar booking as an entertainer was in a pantomime Goody Two Shoes at the Palace Theatre, Birmingham. The star was the heavyweight comic Fred Emney. Dunn was one of the many postwar comics who played at the Windmill Theatre in between the nude tableaux.
He enrolled in Equity and, although he was christened Robert Benjamin, he registered under the name Clive Dunn — adopting his mother’s stage name — to avoid confusion with his father.
In the early Fifties he was a regular at the Players’ Theatre in London where he met the kitchen washer-up at the time, Les Dawson. Meanwhile Dunn was appearing on such pioneer television shows as New Faces and Funny Thing This Wireless which featured Vera Lynn, Carroll Gibbons, Claude Hulbert and the Windmill Girls.
He also appeared in an early Tony Hancock TV series playing one of his many funny old men. He became a close, golf-playing friend of Hancock after making with him a record of the Radio Ham and Blood Donor sketches.
Hancock met Dunn in the studio lavatory with five minutes to recording time and asked him: “Don’t you ever get nervous, Clive?” Dunn replied: “Always.” Hancock said: “You’ve got it made.” Dunn knew that the comic envied him because he didn’t have to carry the show.
His first important television role was as Old Johnson, the dotty butler, in the long-running army comedy Bootsie and Snudge (1960) starring Alfie Bass and Bill Fraser. Dunn, who was barely 40, played an 83-year-old. Granada ran Bootsie and Snudge 40 weeks non-stop during the peak of its popularity so that the cast became almost part of the family for 18 million viewers.
He worked with Michael Bentine on It’s a Square World and with Spike Milligan on some of his early TV ventures. Later came cameo roles in films, his own TV series My Old Man, with his wife Priscilla as his daughter, and a hit record, Grandad, which went to No 1 and stayed in the charts for 27 weeks.
But the pinnacle of his long career was the bayonet-wielding Jones in Dad’s Army. After the series ended in 1977 he made his opera debut playing Frosch in Die Fledermaus at the London Coliseum.
During the 1980s he retired with his family to the Algarve, where he had bought a villa as a second home many years before.
“I don’t miss Britain much,” he said, “just friends really.” He was regularly called upon to appear in documentaries about Dad’s Army. He enjoyed his hobby of painting but in 2006 it was reported that he had gone blind. He was appointed OBE in 1975.
Dunn met his first wife Patricia Kenyon, a fashion model, at the Players’ but the marriage was dissolved because of what he later said was “lack of children and the seven-year itch”. Shortly afterwards he married Priscilla Morgan, an actress, and they had two daughters.
Clive Dunn, OBE, actor, was born on January 9, 1920. He died on November 7, 2012, aged 92
