To (and From) Russia, With Love

It sounds like the scenario for some half-forgotten Cold War spy thriller: Former FBI top gun found in suburban love nest with Russian engineer! Couple swapped inside information!

Joe McCarthy and Nikita Khrushchev would be spinning in their graves.

But this isn’t 1955. Nor would people be likely to peg this unusual L.A. power couple, Tom Parker and Marina Pisklakova, as transatlantic operatives in a field where both courage and risk are commonplace.

Scrunched together on a sofa in their comfy Agoura Hills home, Parker, 56, and Pisklakova, 39, seem like any other blissful newlyweds. He praises her; she blushes. He kisses the top of her head; she smiles. You’d guess this pair spent their days shuttling kids to soccer practice and prowling the aisles at Ralphs, not jetting off to Johannesburg and fielding urgent e-mail from Moscow.

So what was the first thing Parker noticed when he met Pisklakova three years ago at a private party following the annual Human Rights Watch “Voices of Justice” dinner at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel? When this steely but soft-spoken Soviet air force colonel’s daughter was honored by the New York-based humanitarian agency for setting up Russia’s first battered women’s hotline and organizing its first women’s crisis center?

Her tenacity? Her formidable intellect?

“The first impressions were that, obviously, she was a very sexy lady,” Parker begins earnestly. “Oh, c’mon!” Pisklakova protests, not totally displeased.

Truth is, Parker can’t help himself. When it comes to his new wife, this tough-minded career cop and former deputy chief of the FBI’s L.A. office is as proud and giddy as a high school senior squiring his date to the prom. He can’t hold back his admiration any more than Pisklakova at dinner that first night could help noticing the streak of closet liberalism lurking inside the conservatively dressed businessman across from her.

“Tom was giving me so much support,” Pisklakova recalls in her accented but emphatic English. “We gave each other a goodbye hug,” Parker remembers glowingly, “and you could feel the chemistry.”

Two years and several round-trip L.A.-Moscow plane tickets later, they were married. This week, they’ll be back in Russia, helping her homeland take a few more small steps in the difficult march toward equality for women. The couple will be giving speeches, meeting with women’s crisis center staffers--many of them originally recruited and trained by Pisklakova--and holding talks with Russian police about developing a domestic crisis intervention training program. Pisklakova says her husband’s law enforcement background has helped open doors in dealings with the former KGB agents now working with Russia’s national police.

It’s all in a typical week’s work for the couple, whom friends and Human Rights Watch colleagues describe as a tireless and dynamic tandem.

“There is a kind of gentleness and a fundamental decency about each of them,” says actor Mike Farrell of “MASH” fame, who has been friends with Parker for several years and helped inspire him to become a Human Rights Watch supporter. “I think they complement each other. Marina’s the grass-roots person and he’s the inside man.”

“The commonality for them is a shared set of values about the importance of making this world a better world,” echoes Victoria Riskin, who with her husband and fellow screenwriter David Rintels hosted Parker and Pisklakova’s wedding a year ago in their Brentwood garden.

Even so, the journey often has been a harrowing one, particularly for Pisklakova, whose efforts on behalf of women have been mocked by some Russian journalists and prompted death threats from irate husbands and boyfriends. Designated a “monitor” by Human Rights Watch, which investigates and exposes human rights violations around the world, Pisklakova says of her advocacy work that, “If I had known that path at the beginning, I don’t know if I would go there. I’ve been several times severely burned out.”

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Trained as an aeronautical engineer at the Moscow Aviation Institute, Pisklakova became interested in domestic violence issues while conducting economic research for the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the newly formed Center for Gender Studies in the late 1980s.

At the time, Russia was in the throes of glasnost, but domestic violence was still a taboo topic. When a few women wrote to Pisklakova describing their wretched home lives and abusive mates, she says, “I didn’t know what to do. They were asking for help and I didn’t know what to respond. But I felt that I should respond.”

She went to the center’s director, who told her that in the West these abuses were known as domestic violence. “That was the first time I’d heard the term,” says Pisklakova, who later coined the equivalent Russian phrase, domachnee nasilie.

Historically, the country had been lax in monitoring such abuses. But a 1997 Human Rights Watch report quoted Russia’s then-President Boris Yeltsin’s advisor on women’s issues estimating that each year 14,000 women in Russia are killed by husbands or family members.

Because Russian women have no recourse to civil protection from abusive men, Pisklakova says, they must appeal to local police, who often react skeptically to complaints and are reluctant to press charges. The situation is exacerbated by Russia’s chronic housing shortages--a battered woman usually has no place to go. Frequently, men who beat their wives or girlfriends spend, at most, a night or two in jail.

Spurred by these first pleas for help, Pisklakova set up Russia’s first telephone hotline for battered women in September 1993. Later that year she founded ANNA, a Moscow-based services and education organization helping domestic abuse victims.

Today, Pisklakova is president of the Russian Assn. of Crisis Centers for Women, which comprises approximately 40 centers throughout the country. All are nonprofit, non-governmentally operated and primarily privately funded, largely by Western foundations and religious charities.

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While Pisklakova’s crusade wasn’t always welcome in her homeland, others have taken notice. In 1998, Human Rights Watch named her one of the world’s eight most significant human rights activists of the decade. At the 1998 U.S.-Russian Presidential Summit in Moscow, she spoke on behalf of the plight of Russian women in the areas of domestic violence and workplace discrimination. Last September she was honored at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., along with the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, Holocaust chronicler Elie Wiesel and other human rights activists portrayed in the book “Speak Truth to Power” by Kerry Kennedy Cuomo. A play based on the book written by Ariel Dorfman (“Death and the Maiden”) and read by Alec Baldwin, John Malkovich, Sigourney Weaver, Alfre Woodard and others, was taped for PBS.

For two people raised on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, Parker and Pisklakova share strikingly similar worldviews. Growing up in the northern seaport of Murmansk and later in Moscow, Pisklakova spent her youth on military bases. She excelled in school and loved accompanying her father when he flew transport planes, which Russian military rules permitted. Her grandfather taught her German and she learned English so she could read Shakespeare and Hemingway. She also witnessed the casual brutality that afflicted isolated military families.

She has few explicit memories of Cold War indoctrination. Her image of the United States then was “cowboys and Indians” and rock ‘n’ roll. “You cannot hide Elvis Presley,” she says. “Even the Iron Curtain can’t hide it.”

When Pisklakova entered the Moscow Aviation Institute at age 17 to study design navigation systems, major cracks were showing in the Soviet social fabric. The economy was faltering; marriages were crumbling. Pisklakova’s own first union ended in divorce. Her second husband, with whom she had a son, died of a heart attack in 1995. Though the Soviet empire doggedly endured, Pisklakova says, she knew it was a world that was “artificially closed” and could not survive.

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Half a world away, Parker was undergoing his own consciousness-raising. Brought up in the Bay Area, the stepson of a Lockheed aerospace worker, he remembers once being thrown out of his best friend’s house because his nascent liberal opinions clashed with the John Birch Society leanings of his friend’s parents.

While attending San Jose State University, he enrolled in ROTC but also took part in “Ban the Bomb” demonstrations. Graduating with a degree in police administration, he took a job as a Santa Clara policeman for 4 1/2 years. After an additional year as a Yosemite National Park ranger, he began his 24-year FBI career. He was assigned to Los Angeles in 1989, and oversaw an aggressive undercover operation targeting Colombia’s Medellin drug cartel.

By the time he met Pisklakova, Parker already had left law enforcement and started his own company, the Emerald Group, an international security management and investigations firm. He has been married twice before and has two children from his first marriage.

Today, Parker and Pisklakova keep house with her 16-year-old son, Peter, a junior at Westlake High School. This year they expect to spend nearly half their time in Russia pursuing what has become their joint mission.

Parker says he misses the conveniences of American life when they are in Moscow, but he’s learning to speak Russian. Pisklakova is sometimes overwhelmed by America’s surfeit of choice (“It’s like, if you want to buy salt and there are 10 types of salt, which type do you get?”), but she’s learning to drive L.A.’s freeways.

The Cold War continues, in spots. But at least for one couple, it has a warming center.