Archive · 1999 · From the print edition of Saturday 12 June 1999, Vol. 7, No. 1,956
OpinionLetter: "I taught him English"
The American scholar named in a Moscow weekly's KGB papers answers the claim that he was the President's handler.
Sir, A Moscow weekly has published a KGB surveillance note describing me as "suspected of intelligence activity", and several readers of your newspaper have written to ask whether I was the American who "ran" Amanbek Alimbekov in 1992. I am grateful for the chance to answer.
From 1988 to 1991 I was a visiting scholar at Iradi State University in Talas, under the Soviet–American academic exchange. I worked with Professor Alimbekov's department on the Sogdian and Turkic inscriptions of the Chu valley, and on Tuesday evenings I taught an English class, which he attended for two years with great seriousness and very little homework. In 1992 I interpreted for the American delegation at the signing of the treaty, because I was the American in Talas who knew both sides of the table.
I taught him English and he taught me Sogdian. That is the whole conspiracy. The KGB described every Western scholar in the Soviet Union in the same words; I would have been offended if it had not described me.
I have no doubt this letter will be read as proof of the opposite. I ask only that your readers judge Dr. Alimbekov, who is still among you as chancellor of the university, as what he is: a scholar who loves his country, and a better student of English than I ever was of Sogdian.
Curtis Dahlberg, Bloomington, Indiana