By Heather Grossmann
DNAinfo News Editor
MANHATTAN — Before the NYPD hired Deputy Commissioner of Public Information Paul Browne, another top security enforcement agency tried to recruit him — the former Soviet Union's KGB.
NYPD top cop Raymond Kelly joked at a press conference Tuesday that he was "happy that he [Browne] chose the right side," and Browne assured reporters at a news conference that "there were few cloaks and no daggers" in his experience.
Browne speculated in an interview Tuesday that one of the reasons the KGB picked him out for recruitment was because Browne's parents were born abroad (in Ireland), so he appeared more ripe for ideological conversion than "someone whose lineage went back to the Mayflower."
Browne was approached by the notorious intelligence agency when he was in graduate school in 1973 at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.
While doing work at the U.N. for an international reporting class, the future NYPD deputy commissioner met Alexander Yakovlev, an alleged KGB agent. At the time, Browne knew only that Yakovlev provided U.N. news to Eastern Europe.
Yakovlev quickly befriended the budding reporter, and offered him some freelance assignments. But the alleged spy soon began peppering Browne with so many odd questions about his teachers, fellow students and sources that he grew suspicious.
"There weren't normal inquiries," Browne said.
He reported his concerns to a dean at Columbia, who alerted the FBI.
The FBI believed that Yakovlev was a member of the KGB, and realizing that Browne could be a valuable source of insider information, they provided him with documents to make it look like he was cooperating.
"I suppose it was useful in that way to the FBI to get a sense of how deep the penetration in the UN was, which was significant," Browne was quoted by the Daily News as saying. "I’m sure I wasn’t the only one approached."
Browne insists that he never got any classified information from his interactions with Yakovlev, and after about a year, he got tired of participating and stopped communicating entirely with him.
A year later, in 1975, Browne wrote a story for the Washington Post about his recruitment by the KGB.
Browne did not, of course, go the KGB route, instead moving on to work as a reporter before entering government service. In 2004, Browne was made Deputy Commissioner of Public Information at the NYPD.
"They [the KGB] were good in terms of talent scouting," Browne said, pointing out that as someone who worked for Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and other government agencies, he would have been a well-positioned source for information on national affairs.
But the KGB was wrong in their assessment of him, Browne added, because they "underestimated his loyalty" to the U.S.