The FBI’s recent arrest of several alleged deep-cover Russian intelligence officers, also known as “illegals”, has provoked astonishment in the media. As if U.S. intelligence agencies would ever dream of carrying out covert work in Russia! Since the memory span of reporters and pundits rarely extends beyond a few weeks, perhaps this is understandable. But it should come as no surprise that spying remains an important tool of statecraft. As exemplified by the illegals, the Russians are top players in the game of human intelligence.

Since the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia has been an espionage superpower. The reasons for Russian excellence at spying lie deep in the nation’s culture and history, factors which suited the eventual development of a world-class intelligence service. Centuries of dynastic rule, the Byzantine nature of the Russian state and attendant intrigue sharpened the skills of deception necessary in the struggle for power.

The mobilization political culture that led to the creation of the Russian secret services stretches back a thousand years. The feuding medieval principalities of Rus’ formed alliances and betrayed each other with regularity. To centralize his power Ivan IV, “The Dread”, formed a precursor to the secret police, the black-clad Oprichniki, to wipe out opposition and sow terror among enemies real and imagined. The Romanov Tsars, meanwhile, maintained all manner of secret chancelleries that culminated in the Third Section of Nicholas I[i]. Through the Third Section, Nicholas established a security service his successors presided over until the autocracy’s overthrow in the Russian Revolution.

Over the course of the 19^th century, political opposition was made to match wits with the Tsar’s gendarmes, and this circumstance laid the foundations for the more ruthless and sophisticated Soviet secret police. Marxist and anarchist radicals lived a twilight existence punctuated by flashes of revolutionary violence. The assumption of false identities, organization into cells, and covert means of communication became the means to survive and advance the cause against the Tsarist state. These tactics formed the tradecraft of secret operations, known as konspiratsia in Russian.

Police surveillance, informers and penetration agents heightened the need for ever greater vigilance and secrecy in the paranoid netherworld of konspiratsia. Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Josef Stalin were known in their pre-revolutionary lives respectively as Ulyanov, Bronstein and Dzhugashvili. The men who organized and wielded Soviet power had long years of underground experience, which shaped the formation of their secret service.

The founder of the Soviet secret police, the Cheka (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage) was far from a novice at underground revolutionary work. Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky was the son of a Polish noble family. As a youth he aspired to become a Catholic priest, but had from his student days converted to the Communist faith. Dzerzhinsky was thoroughly familiar with the police practices of the Tsar’s Okhrana, the successor to the Third Section. After several arrests, he became well-practiced at escaping government captivity.

As head of the Cheka, “Iron Feliks” was tasked with protecting the revolution from subversion, both internal and external, by any means. And so at Lenin’s behest, Dzerzhinsky, that “ascetic, monk-like, cold-blooded and incorruptible figure” created a merciless secret police force[ii]. The Cheka’s methods within Russia were far more brutal and murderous than any measures experienced under the Tsars, and they secured the Bolsheviks’ initially tenuous grip on power. Dzerzhinsky’s new headquarters, a cream-colored building on Lubyanka square, became a symbol of the repression and terror inaugurated by Lenin. The Soviet secret service was also deployed abroad, where its work was by necessity somewhat more discrete.

Bearing the standard of global revolution, Marxist Russia wasted no time in making enemies, ranging from the anti-Bolshevik White Russian movement to the states that “intervened” in Russia after its catastrophic plunge into Civil War in 1918. The fledgling Soviet government needed a way to monitor developments abroad and prevent any plots by White émigrés and their foreign supporters from reaching fruition. With this objective in mind, in December of 1920 Dzerzhinsky formed a fully-fledged intelligence service known as the Foreign Department (INO). The Cheka’s INO had by the end of the 1920s built up a formidable overseas espionage apparatus, with around 60 staff officers deployed in the capitals of Europe, Asia and North America[iii].

The intelligence INO officers gathered from agents and transmitted to Moscow inflicted serious damage on White émigré initiatives against the Soviet Union. INO operations also informed the Politburo on the intentions and capabilities of the states it faced in the international arena. The Soviet state from the beginning of its existence maintained a siege mentality in relation to the countries beyond its borders. The collection of secret information on foreign opponents was of the highest priority for the Soviet leadership and a pressing task for its spies. To obtain strategic intelligence or deal a crippling blow to anti-Soviet émigré groups, any and all methods could be applied.

Espionage is by its nature an ethically dubious enterprise. Yet Marxism-Leninism as a mindset also made the Soviet secret service more brutal, effective and innovative than its Tsarist predecessor. The Bolsheviks’ contempt for “bourgeois” moral strictures meant that any and all means were available for gaining political control of the country. Lenin’s political adaptation of Marxist philosophy emphasized expediency, deception and aggression in order to attain unlimited power. Konspiratsia was a principal method to subvert the societies of the West and usher in the global triumph of Communism.

The unprecedented power of the Soviet secret service can to some extent be attributed to the materialist philosophy of the Bolshevik revolutionaries. The great twentieth-century Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev remarked that, “the organization of the unity of spirit and worldview by state power leads in practice mainly to the strengthening of the state police organs and espionage”[iv].The founders of the Soviet state inhabited a moral universe centered on the proletariat, led, of course, by the Communist Party. Under the reasoning of Marxist-Leninist dialectical materialism, any action that advanced the revolution could be justified.   Thus the Soviet intelligence service obeyed only one ethic: to serve the Party in Moscow, the vanguard of world revolution. The covert war with the enemies of the revolution, within Russia and without, demanded utter ruthlessness.

Such a hardened, even callous mindset was deemed necessary to achieve the radiant future that Communist ideology promised. It was this promise that so attracted many impassioned Marxists and fellow-travelers in other countries to flock to the Soviet banner. The beckoning star of utopia burned bright in the minds of many Western intellectuals during the reigns of Lenin and Stalin. The Kremlin controlled the Third Communist International, known as the Comintern, and exercised significant influence over numerous associated political parties, labor unions and newspapers. Party members and sympathizers to the cause formed a support network that wittingly or unwittingly advanced Soviet foreign policy and propaganda.

A few of these individuals were noticed by INO “talent spotters” both for their convictions and potential access to government secrets. Among them was British intelligence officer Harold “Kim” Philby, who would for three decades betray Crown secrets to the Soviets. Philby had been committed to Communism since his days at Cambridge, and was recognized as a bright prospect in Vienna in 1934, where he began underground work with a Comintern front organization[v]. Arnold Deutsch, the deep-cover intelligence officer who recruited him, was an Austrian Jew and disciple of Wilhelm Reich, and equally drawn to Marxism’s “scientifically based” analysis and revolutionary vision. Communist solidarity proved to be a tremendous asset in the recruitment and running of agents in the West.

Ideological fervor was not the only advantage accrued to Soviet intelligence as it sought to ferret out secrets from the nations beyond its borders. The Bolsheviks were relentless modernizers and sought, in the words of Lenin, to fashion a new society through “Soviet power plus electrification”. To meet the leadership’s practically unlimited demands for security, the Cheka expanded and reorganized as the GPU, OGPU, and NKVD. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, the growth of the security apparatus was accompanied by increased specialization of functions, such as the formation of the foreign intelligence arm, the INO, and its components for political, economic and industrial espionage. At the same time, the secret police underwent a standardization of procedure that promoted uniformity in training and operations. Along with a military chain of command, these factors made the Soviet intelligence service into a formidable and effective espionage system.

The INO ran most of its agent networks out of Soviet embassies and consulates. Moscow’s intelligence officers could work under official cover, whether as diplomats, journalists, or trade representatives. In a world of mutual hostility between the two ideological “camps”, however, the Soviet state could not rely upon its embassies as the sole vehicles for intelligence collection. Instances such as Britain’s severance of diplomatic relations with the USSR in 1927 made this abundantly clear[vi]. How was an asset to receive regular instructions and deliver secrets if his controlling officer had been expelled as persona non grata? Counterintelligence pressure from the host nation could also freeze espionage work. In such cases, the Soviet secret service needed to maintain steady channels of contact in the target country to receive any potentially vital information.

Due to challenges in Moscow’s relations with many countries, the INO had throughout the twenties occasionally deployed officers abroad without diplomatic cover. Because of their lack of any official status or recognition by the Soviet government, these spies were known as illegals. By 1930, espionage conducted under a false identity and without accreditation took on new significance for Soviet intelligence. In that year, the service was restructured to reflect targeting priorities. One major innovation was the creation of an Illegals Section within the INO. Its deep-cover intelligence operatives were now formed into an elite force, the first of its kind in the world of espionage.

The Illegals Section was designed by the Soviet leadership as a strategic instrument[vii]. Stalin’s Politburo was at the time seized by the (unfounded) notion that the capitalist powers sought to initiate a war against the Soviet Union. The illegals would therefore deploy to target countries under deep cover (legends) and set up bases of operations, known as residencies. Illegal residencies could collect intelligence and run agents at less risk of detection than their embassy colleagues. By masquerading as citizens of the target (or a third) country, illegal officers were almost impossible for counterintelligence services to trace. If relations between the Soviet Union and another state were disrupted by crisis or war, INO illegal residencies would be expected to continue functioning and take control of agent networks previously run from the embassy. The timely transfer of crucial information to Moscow could assume strategic significance in the arena of war and diplomacy.

Along with deep-cover intelligence operations, the Politburo assigned one other major task to illegals: “wet affairs”, the liquidation of enemies of the Soviet state. Secret services around the world have carried out targeted killings, though the phenomenon is rarer than its representation in spy novels. Soviet intelligence, however, lent credence to such popular conceptions by its fearsome methods. The repression spawned by Stalin’s malignant paranoia was projected overseas, as well. Moscow was ruthless in its pursuit of defectors, anti-Soviet émigré leaders, and individuals deemed dangerous to its interests. Men such as the exiled Bolshevik Leon Trotsky, White Russian generals, and others would fall victim to a concerted effort aimed at their destruction.

Dispatching assassins abroad to hunt down their targets required a clandestine system of support and logistics to evade hostile security services. In the first decade of Soviet power, the Cheka and its successors enacted “special measures” beyond state borders, but there was no central department to direct this gruesome activity. Within the INO a separate “Special Group” was formed in 1929 to undertake missions to kill or kidnap those targeted by the Kremlin[viii]. Its founding heralded a decade of executions abroad as Soviet hit teams roamed Europe and took part in the bloody Spanish Civil War.

The Special Group was a parallel structure to the Illegals Section, and illegal officers served in its ranks. The unit was also equipped with a poisons laboratory and ran its own foreign residencies and agent networks[ix]. Like the rest of the Soviet security apparatus, the Special Group was purged, reorganized, and would eventually become the 4^th Directorate of the NKVD during the Second World War. Lubyanka’s special units would provide invaluable services to the Soviet Union in its mortal struggle with Nazi Germany. Soviet operatives waged a campaign of espionage, sabotage, and assassinations from South America to Wehrmacht-occupied territory on the Eastern Front. One of the most storied illegals from this era was NKVD special agent Nikolai Kuznetsov, who convincingly posed as Prussian Wehrmacht Lieutenant Paul Siebert in occupied Ukraine, running an intelligence network and killing several German high officials[x]. The film Podvig Razvedchika (Expolits of an Intelligence Officer) was loosely based on his record and influenced young men like Vladimir Putin to enter the KGB.

By the late 1940s, it should also be noted that the ethnic character of Soviet intelligence had been transformed. Gone were the days of the internationalist INO, in which the department’s leadership and many of its operatives were of Jewish descent or foreign Communists, including many Latvians, Poles and Hungarians. Men like Mikhail Trilisser, Sergei Shpigelglaz, Teodor Maly and Abram Slutsky had already met their fate in the pre-war meat grinder. With Stalin’s last major purge, this time unleashed in 1948 against “rootless cosmopolitanism”, the intelligence apparatus was being consolidated into a largely Slavic/Great Russian entity[xi]. As the Cold War progressed, illegals who were to be deployed abroad were much more likely to be Russians (as well as Armenians, Central Asians, etc.) who had lived their entire lives in the Soviet Union. Communist ideology was still the religion of the security organs and the rest of the state, but there was now a prominent accent on “socialist patriotism” that would remain throughout the Soviet-American competition for global dominance.

At the onset of the Cold War, the illegals were presented another complex challenge. Washington was no longer an ally; indeed it had become the “Main Adversary” in Soviet parlance. Confrontation with the United States made intelligence targeting into Western Europe and North America especially critical. The Kremlin needed the inside track on the US strategic posture and Western policy aims, but first and foremost the Kremlin leadership wanted early warning[xii]. Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa had forever seared into the minds of the Soviet policy elite the necessity of preventive intelligence (Although the strategic surprise the German general staff achieved was largely due to Stalin’s shoddy analysis of the situation). With the U.S. building a network of alliances and bases in Eurasia’s outer rim to contain Soviet power, Moscow moved its espionage campaign into high gear. With the creation of the KGB in 1954, illegal operations would be run from Directorate S, in turn part of Lubyanka’s First Chief Directorate (foreign intelligence)[xiii].

Illegal officers were highly prized assets in the struggle with the West because of their invisibility. “Legal” residencies run out of Soviet embassies and trade delegations were dutifully monitored by counterintelligence services like MI5, France’s DST and the FBI. Meanwhile illegals would assume foreign identities, cultivate their legends for years, and blend into their host society. Without intelligence acquired from a defector or a penetration, a Soviet illegal was just about impossible to track down. Moscow Center therefore ran some of its most valued agents through illegal networks to insulate them from detection. Through these operations, the Soviet secret service also looked to form ties with powerbrokers and policymakers in target nations. In one extraordinary instance, the illegal officer and Spanish Civil War veteran Josef Grigulevich was the Costa Rican embassy’s Chargé d‘Affaires for Italy, the Vatican and Yugoslavia from 1951 to 1953[xiv].

In addition to raising the bar for classical espionage, the Soviets never ceased their involvement in direct-action missions. Officially the KGB’s last killing was carried out in 1959 by the illegal Bogdan Stashinsky against the Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera. Yet Soviet intelligence continued to field an assassination capability for the remainder of its existence. This unit specializing in “wet affairs” underwent numerous reorganizations due to defections (such as Stashinsky’s) and scandals, starting off as the fittingly-named 13^th Department under Khrushchev until it finally became the Illegals Directorate’s 8^th Department[xv].

It made perfect sense for the KGB to house deep-cover intelligence officers and a special operations component under the same roof because of shared assignments. Directorate S was engaged in identifying and building comprehensive intelligence profiles on both foreign leaders and military commands and strategic infrastructure. In a time of war or crisis, commandos from its own Vympel group would infiltrate hostile nations, and with the assistance of Soviet illegal networks, neutralize their targets. In one such actual instance, chief of the Illegals Directorate General Yurii Drozdov directed the storm of Kabul’s Tazh-Bek Palace and the assassination of the troublesome Afghan president Hafizullah Amin in 1979[xvi]. At this crossroads of Russian history, the KGB’s illegals and special operators set the stage for Moscow’s disastrous occupation of Afghanistan and the long twilight of Soviet power.

With the fall of the Soviet Union and the liberalization, chaos and weakness of the 1990s, Russia experienced severe geopolitical and economic retrenchment. For the past decade, though, Moscow has worked to restore its regional and international position according to its national interests rather than Marxist-Leninist ideology. The former intelligence officer Vladimir Putin has been at the helm of this drive. Putin and his colleagues understand well the role of espionage as an instrument of policy. The Kremlin has put its spies from the GRU (military intelligence) and the SVR (the First Chief Directorate’s successor service) to good use. The SVR has been acquiring all manner of Western technologies, working in tandem with energy giants like Gazprom and Lukoil to advance Russian strategic objectives in Europe, and mounting influence operations against NATO expansion and the placement of U.S. missile defense systems on Russia’s frontiers.

The revelations from the June 29^th arrests in cities across America’s East Coast make it clear that Moscow Center still values its illegals for intelligence collection and other covert activities. The media has sensationalized the episode and lent it a comic atmosphere, largely drawn from the glamorous lifestyles of more peripheral players. But it would be a mistake to cast the captured officers as incompetents without significant details on their discovery by the FBI, or what the Russians knew, and when they knew it, from their own counterespionage work. Illegal intelligence officers are regarded as world-class both by the service that fields them, the SVR, and its foes.

Human intelligence is a rather murky business, and the public often only learns about the exploits of spies through their failures. In an analogous case four years ago in Canada, we were reminded by the talented Mr. Hampel that Russia continues to deploy deep-cover operatives to the West[xvii]. In 2008, it was revealed that an SVR illegal was the handler of Hermann Simm, the Estonian defense official who provided Moscow an insider’s view of NATO’s most guarded secrets[xviii].

While the SVR today plays a more limited role in special operations (the FSB is another matter entirely), its Directorate S is alive, kicking and operating throughout the world. The illegals represent the pinnacle of the Russian secret service tradition, a line of work with centuries of heritage, and one no less relevant in the contemporary Great Game.

[i] Makarevich, Eduard. Sekretnaya Agentura. Algoritm, 2007. Moskva. (p. 19)

[ii] Hingley, Ronald. The Russian Secret Police. Simon and Schuster, 1970. New York. (p. 119)

[iii] Prokhorov, Aleksandr, & Kolpakidi, Aleksandr. Vneshniaia Razvedka Rossii. Neva, 2001.St. Petersburg. (pp. 11-14)

[iv] Berdyaev, Nikolai. Opyt Eskhatologicheskoi Metaphiziki. Paris, 1946. (p. 187)

[v] Kolpakidi, Aleksandr & Prokhorov, Dimitry. Vneshniaia Razvedka Rossii. Neva, 2001. St. Petersburg. (p. 485)

[vi] Tsarev, Oleg, & West, Nigel. The Crown Jewels. Yale University Press, 1999. New Haven. (p. 44)

[vii] This is documented in a Politburo resolution from January 1930. Kolpakidi, Aleksandr & Prokhorov, Dimitry. Vneshniaia Razvedka Rossii. Neva, 2001. St. Petersburg. (p. 19-20)

[viii] Sever, Aleksandr. Istoria KGB. Algoritm, 2008. Moskva. (p. 48)

[ix] Kolpakidi, Aleksandr, & Prokhorov, Dimitry. KGB: Spetsoperatsii Sovetskoi Razvedki. Izdatelstvo AST, 2000. Moskva. (p. 489)

[x] Gladkov, Teodor. Legenda Sovetskoi Razvedki. Izdatelstvo Veche, 2001. Moskva.

[xi] Gladkov, Teodor. Lift v Razvedku. Olma-Press, 2002. Moskva. (p. 445)

[xii] Ibid. (p. 503)

[xiii] Kolpakidi, Aleksandr & Prokhorov, Dimitry. Vneshniaia Razvedka Rossii. Neva, 2001. St. Petersburg. (p. 72)

[xiv] Paporov, Yurii. Akademik Nelegalnykh Nauk. Izdatelskii Dom Neva, 2004. St. Petersburg. (p. 118)

[xv] Kolpakidi, Aleksandr, & Prokhorov, Dimitry. KGB: Spetsoperatsii Sovetskoi Razvedki. Izdatelstvo AST, 2000. Moskva. (p. 504)

[xvi] Drozdov, Yurii. Vymysl Iskliuchen. Almanakh Vympel, 1996. Moskva. (p. 187)

[xvii] http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/122209–russian-spy-had-all-tools-of-trade

[xviii] http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,691817,00.html

Vympel, the KGB’s spetsnaz group for overseas action, was a unit forged, in the words of its initiator KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov, “without equal.” The following text outlines Vympel’s founding, the unit’s training process, and its general operational history.

The idea for founding a commando unit for the KGB belongs to the chief of Directorate S (Illegals) Yuri Drozdov, one of the men who directed the storm of Afghan President Hafizullah Amin’s palace. Returning from Moscow, he went to KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov and presented him with a plan to create a special-purpose group for carrying out operations during the “special period” – in short, a commando unit.

On August 19th, 1981, at a closed joint session of the CPSU Central Committee’s Politburo and the USSR Council of Ministers, the decision on creating a top-secret special-purpose unit in the system of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate (FCD: Foreign Intelligence) was made. Thus came into the world the special-purpose group “Vympel” (Pennant). Structurally it was part of the Eighth Department of Directorate S, subordinated to the chief of the directorate, Maj. Gen. Yuri Drozdov, and the chief of the department, Maj. Gen. Nikolai Yefimov (subsequently Maj. Gen. V. Tolstikov). The decision for activating the group was made at the level of the Politburo, and it went into action only by the written orders of the KGB chairman. The official name of Vympel was the Separate Training Center (STC) of the USSR KGB FCD, and it was situated in Balashikha, just outside of Moscow. Commanders of the group were: Captain Evald Kozlov (1981-1984), Rear Admiral Vladimir Khmelev (1984-1990), and Colonel Boris Beskov (1990-1992).

For Vympel men were selected not only in the KGB, but also from the army and border forces. At first both officers and soldiers were taken, but then it was decided that the group should be made up exclusively of officers.

Vladimir Vasilchenko was at that time the chief of the combat operations department. He recalls:

For the first ‘draft’ into the unit, they gave us a very tough time period. That was dictated by the necessity of quick deployment of men to Afghanistan.

Approximately in February of 1982, 75 men came to us. It’s hard to remember now how many candidates we went through, but the selection turned out not bad.

They trained them for three months. There was no time for more than that. Already in April the first 123 men left for Afghanistan. And then we selected the second “assortment” longer and more scrupulously, essentially the whole remainder of 1982. Well, of course we trained them more substantively…

What should we understand under the word “substantive?” Operators were accepted into the unit accounting for their service of no less than 10 years – i.e. professionals were being trained. Consequently to make a new trainee a fully qualified special-purpose intelligence officer required five years. It took two years for a graduate of the Ryazan Higher Airborne School to be made into a Vympel operator.

“They taught them robustly in Vympel,” remembers General Drozdov.

General physical training, multi-kilometer marches along traversed areas, power exercises, jumping from heights from a half-meter to two-and-a-half meters, exercises for general development. Training in hand-to-hand combat not on soft mats, but asphalt. Shooting from everything that shoots: pistols, grenade launchers, machine guns of Soviet and foreign manufacture, special weapons, etc… Driving cars and armored vehicles. Explosives, including means of producing explosives from everyday chemicals. Training in radio work: free functioning on radio stations of any type both in closed text and with the help of Morse code. They studied cryptography, and they also mastered radio triangulation and eavesdropping devices.

…Aside from that, Vympel officers, as users, themselves participated in developing weapons and equipment and gave technical assignments to the constructors, who made special items according to their orders.

…Tactics for combat actions in small groups. Airborne, medical training, rappelling. Fundamentals of intelligence and counterintelligence activity. Analytical work. Surveillance.

The study of foreign languages and regional specialization. In “his” country, an officer of a special unit should not in any case be “unmasked.” And not only because of incorrect pronunciation… It was necessary to be freely oriented in everyday matters, not feel like a black sheep among the local population, know the history of the region, the national customs, national psychology.[i]“

However, it soon became clear that the idea of training supermen was a utopian one. Then a three-year course of instruction was developed, and operators of a more narrow specialization began to be trained. First there were snipers, intelligence officers, and sappers, and then there were added mountain scouts, hang-glider pilots, combat swimmers, and parachutists.

The basic purpose of Vympel was intelligence actions deep behind enemy lines, work with agents, raids on strategic objects, the seizure of ships and submarines, protection of Soviet facilities abroad, fighting terrorist organizations, etc. Operators underwent combat experience in the commando units of Cuba, Nicaragua, Vietnam, and other nations; in Angola and Mozambique, they acted under the cover of military advisors.

In October of 1985 in Lebanon, Vympel operators freed two KGB officers from the Beirut residency, Oleg Spirin and Valery Myrikov (diplomat Arkady Katkov was killed by the captors), who had been seized by a Palestinian group. But Vympel gained its main practice in Afghanistan.

The FCD’s spetsnaz operated in Afghanistan as part of the KGB’s special-purpose detachment Kaskad, created by resolution of the CPSU Central Committee and USSR Council of Ministers on June 18th, 1980. The detachment had a dual subordination – to Moscow Center and to the KGB representation in Afghanistan, which was headed by Gen. Viktor Spolnikov and then Gen. Boris Voskoboinikov. From July of 1980 up to April of 1983, four units of Kaskad served in Afghanistan. The commander of the first three Kaskads was Col. Aleksandr Lazarenko, and the fourth was led by Col. Evgeny Savintsev, both officers of the Eighth Department of Directorate S.

Kaskad’s mission was: rendering assistance to the security organs of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in detecting and interdicting subversive activity of the counterrevolutionary underground, bandit formations, and terrorist groups, i.e. carrying out in full measure intelligence activity, hunter-killer actions, and special operations. In April of 1983 Kaskad-4 was replaced by a different unit of Vympel – group Omega (commanded by Col. Valentin Kikot). Its assignments were human intelligence operations in Moscow Center’s interests, combat and special operations, and advisory-instructional work in units of Afghan state security. In April of 1984 Omega’s operators returned to Moscow. Until the year 1987, 94 officers of Vympel were in Afghanistan and 61 operators gained combat experience as part of their probationary period.

During the second half of the 1980s, spetsnaz group Vympel became “too big for its own britches.” “The Afghan experience,” it’s stated in a book dedicated to the 15th anniversary from the day of Vympel’s founding, “intensive training, a drive to find out contemporary achievements in the sphere of the operational art, and a politically motivated consciousness of internationalist duty pushed toward the expansion of foreign ties, whether in probationary form or in an advisory-instructional role.[ii]

First and foremost, Vympel officers who had passed through the harsh school of Afghanistan as part of the intelligence-commando detachments Kaskad and Omega were sent to Laos, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Angola, and Mozambique. In these countries Soviet advisors and instructors could transfer their combat experience to the local security organs and adopt the latter’s experience fighting armed opposition as well, with consideration of unique geographic and operational conditions.

The opinion exists that the Soviet Union imposed its advisors and instructors to developing countries, but this is far from the case. It is known, for example, that the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam, Comrade Le Zuan, being on a short-term visit to Moscow, had a conversation with Yuri Andropov about strengthening the Vietnamese state security organs. “Our men have no arms and no minds,” complained Le Zuan to the KGB chairman. It’s also well-known that Mozambique’s president Samora Machelle personally sent a telegram to Andropov with a request to “dispatch to the country advisors on fighting banditry and instructors who would train detachments for combat operations.[iii]”

From a publication of journalist and intelligence officer M. Ilyinsky (Vek, 7 August, 1998), we learn that in Vietnam in the residencies of the KGB FCD and GRU, there were around 10 specialists with knowledge of the local language.

A group of Vympel officers actively worked in Mozambique: N. Denisenko, Y. Kolesnikov, A. Suzdaltsev, V. Cheremisin, V. Finogenov, and others. In Angola, there served A. Mikhailenko, P. Suslov, V. Kikot, K. Sivov, V. Ukolov, and also instructors from the KGB’s Officer Corpus Qualification Course Y. Penkov, Y. Semenov, V. Smyslov, and A. Yevglevsky. 35 Vympel officers underwent probationary time in Vietnam. In Laos and Nicaragua several dozen men each fulfilled their probationary period.

Soviet officers’ advisory-instructional activity proved to be mutually beneficial. And so, for example, at the Vietnamese base of Dokong, Vympel operators taught the local special units the art of driving “Proteus” underwater vehicles, flying hang-gliders, and much else. The Vietnamese also taught Soviet officers Ho Chi Min-Do fighting techniques and methods of conducting guerrilla war in the specific conditions of Southeast Asia. In Nicaragua the Vympel operators learned the little-known but extremely effective art of “flash” shooting. From Laos, they received useful information on the peculiarities of operational-combat activity and matters of survival in the jungle.

Unfortunately, this experience helped the spetsnaz operators very little in matters of survival in a different jungle – that of politics.

[i] Болтунов М. “Вымпел” – диверсанты России. М, 2003. С. 19.

[ii] Вымпел. Группа специального назначения КГБ СССР. М, 1997. С. 126.

[iii] Там же. С. 129.

Work Translated: Колпакиди, Александр Иванович. Ликвидаторы КГБ. Спецоперации советских спецслужб 1941-2004. — М.: Яуза; Эксмо, 2004.

Translated by Mark Hackard.

On the drizzly autumn Friday of November 11^th, 1983, US President Ronald Reagan would have no time for his customary Oval Office nap. Besides delivering a speech that morning to the American Legion in honor of Veterans Day, Reagan then filled the rest of his schedule taking part in a NATO nuclear war exercise under the designation Able Archer. The president found the subject matter fascinating but frightening; despite his firebrand speeches, he also hoped the Soviets understood they had nothing to fear from America. His hope was in vain.

In Moscow, General Secretary Yuri Andropov saw Reagan’s role in Able Archer, underscored by America’s recent invasion of Grenada and a worldwide security alert of US forces, as the cover for a nuclear first strike. Escorted early after a freezing sunrise along with chief of the General Staff Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov to the Politburo’s subterranean command bunker by his elite KGB troops, with crushing sadness and dread Andropov transmitted his directive, a desperate attempt to minimize the looming devastation his country faced.

Later that evening, the NATO exercises having concluded, Reagan conferred with National Security Advisor Bud McFarlane, ate dinner, and set out with his wife Nancy for Andrews Air Force Base to begin his long trip to Japan. Marine One happened to pass over a wholly ordinary US Air Force Jeep on the highway below as the chopper made its approach to Andrews. Inside that Jeep were four airmen in the smart blue berets of the Air Force Security Police, the sergeant speaking with a southern Illinois accent, though he had grown up in Khabarovsk. The group had transited the Canadian border a week prior, having been directed to a safe house in a suburb of Washington, DC, to await orders. Their orders were in: under the guise of a Security Police patrol and with the right documents and no questions asked, they managed to enter Andrews, filter through layers of security and conceal a device the size of a large briefcase, to be activated by satellite signal, in some brush opposite the tarmac an hour before the president’s arrival.

Reagan, greeted at Air Force One for a short debriefing on Able Archer by Secretary of Defense Cap Weinberger and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs John Vessey, was looking forward to being the first American president to address Japan’s parliament, the Diet. Yet the day would never come – the pouring rain simply evaporated as a fireball of hellish intensity rose up to incinerate Andrews Air Force Base.

The four airmen in the Jeep, on their way southward into Virginia, witnessed the terrible flash illuminate the night sky behind them. Here and across the Atlantic, other groups, heretofore invisible, were descending like packs of wolves upon their targets. Speaking little amongst themselves while checking their weapons, they raced down I-95 toward their next objective in darkness: the power grid of the whole eastern seaboard had just gone dead.

Such a horrific turn of events was more likely than we would care to consider. Thankfully, Reagan decided not to participate in Able Archer and rather went straight to Japan to address the Diet. Andropov and the Soviet leadership, while on razor’s edge over what they viewed as provocative US-NATO moves, didn’t overreact. Instead of this nightmare scenario coming true, East and West would live to tell of another narrow escape from Armageddon during the dark days of the Cold War. Yet the armed services and spies of both sides would continue to stand at the ready for any eventuality – the following is the true story of the KGB’s special units.

The KGB – Instrument of Soviet Global Power

From the mid-1970s to the 1980s, the Soviet KGB created a fearsome capability for counter-terrorism and special operations, one that made Western strategists nervously re-evaluate their plans and projections. With the potential for conflict with the United States and NATO – from the risk of nuclear exchange to brushfire wars in the Third World – only growing, such dangerous circumstances required the creation of special units distinct from those of the General Staff’s GRU (Glavnoe Razvedyvatel’noe Upravlenie– Main Intelligence Directorate).

As the USSR’s premier secret service, the KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti – Committee for State Security) carried out intelligence and covert action worldwide. Soviet power was approaching its global zenith during the era of détente, and Lubyanka looked to field a more comprehensive special-forces capability then it had previously. The GRU, after all, was already focused on wiping out key military personnel and facilities of the “main adversary” shortly before war would break out. As chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov wanted to craft a similar instrument that the Kremlin could apply to the wider geopolitical spectrum. Andropov and his men were truly innovators in this regard, founding elite special-missions units that provided the Soviet leadership with options for discrete, direct action during crisis conditions with the West.

Alpha: The KGB’s Shield

Andropov first devoted a considerable amount of attention and effort to the formation of new spetsnaz (special purpose) groups because of their value in guarding the Soviet Union from potential blackmail by terrorists, which could produce a corrosive effect on political stability. The Politburo and KGB leadership were particularly concerned by the possibility of hijackings and terrorist acts by nationalist groups that called for independence from Moscow. An Armenian extremist cell, for example, committed three nearly simultaneous bombings in Moscow on the 8^th of January 1977 before they were apprehended by the KGB eight months later[i].

To answer the terrorist threat, Andropov decided to institute a brand-new commando force within the KGB. In 1974 Unit “A” was formed under the 7^th Directorate (Surveillance), but was subordinated directly to the chairman of the KGB[ii]. The team, now popularly known as “Alpha”, was trained for anti-terrorist functions on Soviet territory.  Alpha originally consisted of approximately 30 hand-picked men, but as its utility was recognized, the number of officers, as well as funds and special equipment, increased. Alpha also participated in the interdiction of hostile intelligence operations and the seizure of Western agents (“snatch-and-grabs”) within the Soviet Union[iii].

Alpha, however, was endowed with a strategic purpose apart from just combating terrorist phenomena or snatching spies. Andropov was well aware of the West’s development of elite special operations forces such as Delta, SAS, and GSG-9 and sought a counter to their likely infiltration into the USSR in the event of hostilities. US and NATO special-missions units would be tasked with the assassination of the Party leadership and Soviet high command and the sabotage of strategic objects. Alpha, therefore, was designed to protect the Politburo’s senior members and key facilities during war or periods of heightened tension.

The group’s strategic task is confirmed by another fact relating to the optimization of the KGB’s structure. In the same year of Alpha’s founding, 1974, the 15th Directorate, responsible for servicing the Kremlin leadership’s underground bunkers, was accorded the title of a chief directorate, a significant upgrade in status[iv]. Detachments from both Alpha and the 15th Chief Directorate conducted training exercises escorting Politburo and Central Committee officials into command-and-control nodes buried well below the famous Moscow Metro system. It is reported that Andropov viewed these rehearsals with utmost seriousness, despite his chronic physical ailments, after he assumed the General Secretary’s seat in the early 1980s[v]. By the time of the failure of détente and escalating tensions over US intermediate-range missile deployment in Europe, Andropov had reason to plan out contingencies.

Vympel: The KGB’s Sword

The KGB did not cease the development of special operations forces with Alpha; Andropov sought to create a special-missions unit that could infiltrate hostile territory and execute direct actions, such as assassinating the enemy high command and destroying strategic infrastructure. The First Chief Directorate, responsible for foreign intelligence, maintained within its apparatus the super-secret Directorate S (Illegal intelligence). This was the KGB’s arm responsible for highly covert intelligence work without the refuge of diplomatic status or any association with the Soviet government. Directorate S operations typically involved the penetration of an intelligence officer (often with a spouse) into a country as natives of that land or immigrants from a third country in order to gather intelligence and run agents. Henceforth, the illegals would also facilitate the missions of deep-cover commando teams.

There was certainly an organizational base for Andropov to draw on for his new project, and previous endeavors showed the need for a more systematized, permanent structure for special operations. Earlier a Department V for planning sabotage and assassinations, heir to the infamous 13^th Department of the 1950s, had been created within the First Chief Directorate in 1969. Concurrently there was established an Officer Corps Development Course (KUOS) in Balashikha, on the outskirts of Moscow, to prepare a “special reserve” of KGB operatives for crisis and war. Department V was disbanded, though, after one of its officers, Major Oleg Lyalin, had defected to the United Kingdom while there on assignment in 1971[vi].

Clearly the KGB needed a highly secret, cohesive combat unit in a constant state of readiness to be deployed abroad at a moment’s notice to protect Soviet interests. Such an elite commando group would be of inestimable value during a crisis situation or war, for it could potentially succeed in “decapitating” the enemy’s leadership, thereby forcing a more beneficial outcome to a conflict for the Soviet Union. In 1976, five years after Lyalin’s disastrous defection, Foreign Intelligence’s Directorate S, the Illegals, assumed control of KUOS and instituted the 8^th Department, henceforth responsible for assassinations and sabotage in foreign countries[vii]. The time was coming when such actions would be ordered by the Politburo.

KGB special groups- the temporarily formed Zenit from the First Chief Directorate and the Grom detachment from the 7^th Directorate’s Alpha – did indeed manage the textbook decapitation of a target state[viii]. Yet this operation did not take place in a NATO member state, but rather in crisis-ridden Afghanistan in late December 1979. The action could be seen as a dress-rehearsal, albeit under differing conditions, for the strategic paralysis of NATO governments if the Warsaw Pact were ever to launch its armored divisions into West Germany. The spetsnaz teams accomplished an operational success in assassinating Afghan President Hafizullah Amin at the behest of Leonid Brezhnev’s Politburo, yet the Soviet Union was dragged into a brutal, decade-long morass that was a strategic catastrophe. Nonetheless, the KGB’s special detachments continued to show their operational and tactical effectiveness throughout the Afghan war. Such activities included reconnaissance, intelligence and sabotage operations, as well as killing or seizing leading figures among the CIA-backed mujahedin[ix].

The KGB’s most elite special missions unit, Vympel (Pennant), was finally established in August of 1981 within the 8^th Department of Directorate S. Maj. Gen. Yuri Drozdov, a veteran of the Illegals Directorate and its chief from 1979 until the end of the Cold War, characterized Department 8 as “nothing less than an information and research intelligence structure, which followed by operational means everything concerning NATO special forces.” Drozdov says that his illegals even underwent special-forces training in NATO armies[x]. One can only wonder which Western nations unwittingly played host to Soviet deep-cover officers in their most sensitive commando outfits, but such first-hand knowledge would have been put to good use by the KGB in order to fashion Vympel a cut above its competitors.

Known officially as the Separate Training Center, Vympel was tasked with special operations abroad, including sabotage and direct-action missions against hostile states. The officers who composed the unit were selected not only from the KGB, but from all the Soviet armed services, and passed through an extremely rigorous regimen of all-conditions commando training, language instruction, intelligence work, and instruction in driving all manner of vehicles[xi].

Along with combat duty in Afghanistan, officers of the unit undertook “advisory” assignments in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique, and other locations of the Cold War’s proxy conflicts throughout the 1980s[xii]. Vympel operators also likely engaged in “force protection” for vital intelligence operations in dangerous conditions in addition to hunting down terrorists threatening Soviet interests. Drozdov tells of Vympel’s 1985 action against a Palestinian group that had kidnapped three Soviet diplomats in Lebanon:

In Lebanon citizens of the USSR were taken hostage. Negotiations with the terrorists weren’t producing any results. And suddenly, one after the other, the bandit leaders began dying under unclear circumstances. Those who were still alive received an ultimatum: if the hostages are not released, then they will have to choose among themselves who will be next. After two and a half months, they released our men[xiii].

The veteran spymaster then mentions an operation in which Vympel operators disembarked from a submarine onto the coastline of a foreign country during a midnight storm, penetrated deep inland, and snatched a person targeted by the KGB for their possession of crucial intelligence. Within hours the team was back on the submarine, along with a new passenger, and on its way to the Soviet Union[xiv].

On the Brink of Doomsday

Aside from counter-terror work and high-risk intelligence missions, Alpha and Vympel’s ultimate purpose was to short-circuit World War III, or at least provide the Soviet Union with an opportunity to win it. Andropov ordered the creation of Vympel in particular amidst Kremlin fears over what actions newly-elected US President Ronald Reagan might undertake vis-à-vis the USSR. The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and the deployment of intermediate-range SS-20s within striking distance of European cities were all within the context of increasing tensions with the West. Along with an arms buildup already ongoing since the late 1970s, under Reagan the US struck an offensive policy course of “containment” and covert warfare. Andropov, soon to be General Secretary, was among the first to realize that the Soviet economic engine was considerably weakening, and the shift in the balance of power was not in Moscow’s favor.

The systemic factor of long-term Soviet decline was accompanied by harsher rhetoric from Washington.  Reagan’s stance was not a matter of mere words; he sanctioned the placement of Pershing II and Cruise missiles in West Germany as well as the wide-scale renewal of US “ferret flights” to test Soviet radar and air defenses[xv]. To Soviet planners the juxtaposition of such data was alarming. With analysts believing that US Pershing-II missiles could reach Moscow within five minutes, the Kremlin leadership began to fear the possibility of a US first strike[xvi]. In May 1981, Andropov had initiated the joint KGB-GRU strategic monitoring program RYAN (Raketno-Iadernoe Napadenie– Nuclear Missile Attack) to monitor any preparations for any such US action[xvii].

In all of Cold War history, November of 1983 was perhaps the moment of greatest danger between the US and Soviet Union. On the heels of the White House’s spring initiation of the Strategic Defense Initiative and the tensions after the September 1^st Soviet downing of Korean Airlines Flight 007, NATO had scheduled nuclear command exercises, code-named Able Archer 83, to be held from the November 2^nd to the 11^th. Judging from October telegrams from Moscow Center to the KGB’s London residency, Soviet attention was trained – with grave intensity – on the exercises as a potential prelude to a Western surprise attack[xviii].

While Euro-Atlantic leaders were largely unaware of the extent of Andropov’s alarm at the NATO exercises, miscalculations mistaken as war indicators might have triggered Soviet preemption – spearheaded by spetsnaz. As intelligence scholar Benjamin Fischer bluntly states, “The war scare was for real” during the early 1980s[xix]. Far from a product of some clinical paranoia, Soviet strategic culture was forged by historical experience. Hitler’s ability to launch Operation Barbarossa – due to Stalin ignoring numerous intelligence reports that a German attack was imminent – resulted in a war of annihilation. The Kremlin could never permit such a disaster again, and now the margin of error was measured in minutes. Andropov’s creation of KGB special operations units was well-timed: Alpha was the Soviet leadership’s shield, and Vympel its sword.

At the critical juncture of a crisis like Able Archer, Vympel’s combat groups would have deployed and infiltrated into the US and allied countries to near-simultaneously assassinate the enemy’s leadership and destroy vital command and control facilities. Suppressing NATO military-political coordination and additionally disabling its nuclear launch assets in the European theatre, groups of spetsnaz operators from both the KGB and GRU would have cleared the way for the surge of Warsaw Pact armor across the Fulda Gap[xx]. And before such a notion is dismissed as idle speculation in the style of Tom Clancy yarns, in the early 1980s the communications of the entire US Navy, the most potent arm of Washington’s nuclear triad, were an open book to Moscow thanks to the Walker espionage ring[xxi].

The prospective operations of KGB spetsnaz, in conjunction with those of the GRU, were designed to induce strategic paralysis in a hostile state and enable the Soviet Union to carry off an advantageous preemptive nuclear strike if necessary. It is not publicly known whether any such visitors filtered into Western capitals during November 1983 or other periods, but the likelihood is high. Developing such an elite unit capable of unique assignments must be evaluated as strategic foresight on the part of Yuri Andropov. A consummate practitioner of statecraft in the shadows, this master of the KGB appreciated the value that could be brought to bear at pivotal moments by a handful of specially trained men.

Lessons Learned?

We should all be grateful that cooler heads and providential restraint prevailed in the dark days of 1983, and that the signal for Soviet spetsnaz to commence action never came. Yet a generation later, we again find ourselves in a similar crisis: after the Soviet collapse NATO has pushed deep eastward. A resurgent Russia sees not only its sphere of interests, but also its sovereignty and very survival under threat. The nation that defeated Napoleon’s Grande Armee and the once-invincible Wehrmacht is again developing contingency options, from nuclear forces to cyber-warfare and spetsnaz. None of this renewed bipolar confrontation, however, is inevitable. If mutual respect amongst peoples is more than just rhetoric, men of good will can step back from the brink and make peace possible.

Works Cited

Primary Sources/ Interviews

Andrew, Chistopher & Gordievsky, Oleg. Comrade Kryuchkov’s Instructions.  Stanford University Press, 1994.  Stanford.

Drozdov, Yuri.  Vymysel Iskliouchen.  Vympel-Almanakh, 1996.  Moscow.

Earley, Pete. “Interview with the Spymaster.” The Washington Post, April 23, 1995. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/695402/posts

Kryuchkov, Vladimir. Lichnoe Delo. Eksmo, 2003.  Moscow.

Kuznetsova, Tatyana. “Razvedchik Spetsnaznachenia.” Argumenty I Fakty, August 16, 2006. http://www.fsb.ru/fsb/smi/interview/single.htm!id%3D10342720@fsbSmi.html

Samodelova, Svetlana.  “Kogti Andropova.”  Moskovskii Komsomolets, June 19, 2004.  http://www.mk.ru/numbers/1136/article33242.htm

Secondary Works

Lubyanka 2: Iz Zhizni Otechestvennoi Kontrrazvedki. Mosgorarkhiv, 1999. Moscow.

Atamanenko, Igor. “Porkhaya kak Babochka, Zhalit kak Pchela.” Nezavisimoe Voennoe Obozrenie, July 31, 2009. http://nvo.ng.ru/spforces/2009-07-31/12_alpha.html

Boltunov, Mikhail.  Vympel: Diversanty Rossii.  Yauza/Eksmo, 2003.  Moscow.

Campbell, Capt. Erin E. “The Soviet Spetsnaz Threat to NATO.” Air Power Journal, Summer 1988. http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/apj/apj88/sum88/campbell.html

Fischer, Benjamin B. “A Cold War Conundrum.” Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1997. http://www.cia.gov/csi/monograph/coldwar/source.htm

Kokurin, A.I., & Petrov, N.V.  Lubyanka: Spravochnik.  Izdatel’stvo Materik, 2004. Moscow.

Medvedev, Roy. Neizvestnyi Andropov. Pheniks, 1999. Moscow.

Prokhorov, Aleksandr, & Kolpakidi, Aleksandr.  Vneshniaia Razvedka Rossii. Neva, 2001. St. Petersburg.

[i] Lubianka 2: Iz Zhizni Otechestvennoi Kontrrazvedki. (Mosgorarkhiv, 1999. Moscow), 304.

[ii] Medvedev, Roy. Neizvesntnyi Andropov. (Pheniks, 1999. Moscow), 188.

[iii] Atamanenko, Igor. “Porkhaya kak Babochka, Zhalit kak Pchela.” (Nezavisimoe Voennoe Obozrenie, July 31, 2009) http://nvo.ng.ru/spforces/2009-07-31/12_alpha.html

[iv] Kokurin & Petrov. Lubyanka: Spravochnik. (Izdatelstvo Materik, 2004. Moscow), 218.

[v] Samodelova, Svetlana. “Kogti Andropova.” (Moskovskii Komsomolets, June 19, 2004)  http://www.mk.ru/numbers/1136/article33242.htm

[vi] Prokhorov & Kolpakidi. Vneshnyaya Razvedka Rossii. (Neva, 2001. St. Petersburg), 74.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Ibid, 88.

[ix] Kryuchkov, Vladimir. Lichnoe Delo. (Eksmo, 2003. Moscow), 234.

[x] Drozdov, Yuri. Vymysel Isklyuchen. (Vympel-Almanakh, 1996. Moscow), 161.

[xi] Boltunov, Mikhail. Vympel: Diversanty Rossii. (Yauza/Eksmo, 2003. Moscow), 19-24.

[xii] Drozdov, Vymysel Isklyuchen, 170.

[xiii] Kuznetsova, Tatyana. “Razvedchik Spetsialnogo Naznachenia.” (Argumenty I Fakty, August 16, 2006) http://www.fsb.ru/fsb/smi/interview/single.htm!id%3D10342720@fsbSmi.html

[xiv] Ibid.

[xv] Fisher, Benjamin B. “A Cold War Conundrum.” (Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1997) http://www.fsb.ru/fsb/smi/interview/single.htm!id%3D10342720@fsbSmi.html

[xvi] Andrew & Gordievsky. Comrade Kryuchkov’s Instructions. (Stanford University Press, 1994. Stanford), 74.

[xvii] Ibid, 67.

[xviii] Ibid, 86.

[xix] Fisher, “A Cold War Conundrum.”

[xx] Campbell, “The Soviet Spetsnaz Threat to NATO.”

[xxi] Earley, Pete. “Interview with the Spymaster.” (The Washington Post, April 23, 1995) http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/695402/posts

Soviet intelligence experts Aleksandr Kolpakidi and Dmitry Prokhorov tell of the Soviet-Yugoslav split in 1948 and its fallout – Stalin’s plans to assassinate Yugoslavia’s Communist leader, Josip Broz Tito.

The establishment of Soviet control over the countries of Eastern Europe in the postwar years took place in a very tense environment. But if Communists of the Stalinist interpretation in Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Albania attained total victory, in Yugoslavia the triumphal march of Stalinism didn’t happen. As a result, at the end of the 1940s relations between the USSR and Yugoslavia were so poisoned that Soviet intelligence received the order from Stalin to liquidate Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito by any means.

The conflict between Stalin and Tito began in 1948, when the latter refused to support the idea of creating a Bulgarian-Yugoslav federation. Not used to meeting resistance, Stalin became enraged. Soviet military advisors were recalled from Yugoslavia, and at a session of the Cominform (successor to the Comintern that was dissolved in 1943) in June of 1948 in Bucharest, Andrei Zhdanov read out the report “On the position of the Yugoslav Communist Party,” in which it was personally written by Stalin:

Tito, Kardel, Djilas, and Rankovic bear full responsibility for the created situation. Their methods are from the arsenal of Trotskyism. Policy in the city and in the countryside is wrong. Within the Communist Party such a shameful, purely Turkish terrorist regime is shameful and intolerable. Such a regime should be brought to an end.

Later, already at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, Khrushchev said that Stalin, having lost his sense of reality, announced the following:

It’s enough for me to move my little finger, and Tito will be no more.

But time went by, and Tito continued to live and conduct his policies. By that fact many had the opportunity to be convinced that Stalin was far from all-powerful, which he could not in any way allow. Consequently, in the MGB the secret files “Vulture” and “Nero” were initiated, where materials compromising Tito were gathered.

Yet the execution of an operation to liquidate Tito was hampered by the circumstance that the counterintelligence department of the Yugoslav Directorate for State Security (UDB), headed by General E. Sasic, had practically eliminated Soviet intelligence’s agent networks across the entire territory of the country. And so were arrested the Yugoslav military attache in Moscow, B. Polyanets, and his men, UDB officers M. Perovic, S. Pavic, and S. Stojlkovic, all recruited by the MGB. Later, the overseer of the military department of the Croatian Communist Party’s Central Committee, General R. Zigic, as well as Deputy Minister of Heavy Industry M. Kalafatic; Yugoslav Army General Staff officers J. Korda and A. Zoric; Cominform employees N. Kovacevic, D. Ozren, and A. Stumpf; and an entire number of Yugoslav Communists who supported Moscow. In all from 1948 to 1953, there were 29 Soviet agents arrested in Yugoslavia.

But despite the complex operational environment in Yugoslavia, Stalin was unsatisfied that preparations for the operation to liquidate Tito weren’t moving forward. Sensing his annoyance, Beria and Sergei Ignatiev, who replaced Viktor Abakumov as Minister of State Security, began to feverishly search for a way to the quickly carry out the directive the leader of peoples had given.

As a result, by late autumn of 1952, several options for removing Tito had been developed, and all of them were connected with using agent “Max,” an MGB illegal who had in his time participated in the liquidations of Andres Nin in Spain and Leon Trotsky in Mexico. Soon Stalin was sent the following document, handwritten on a single copy:

The USSR MGB asks permission to prepare and organize a terrorist act against Tito with the use of illegal agent “Max” – Comrade Grigulevich I.R., citizen of the USSR, member of the CPSU from 1950 (form attached).

Max was sent by us to Italy on a Costa Rican passport, where he was able to win the trust and enter a circle of diplomats from South American countries and notable Costa Rican figures and businessmen who were visiting Italy.

Using these connections, on our assignment Max attained nomination to the post of Extraordinary and Authorized Emissary of Costa Rica in Italy and simultaneously in Yugoslavia. Carrying out his diplomatic duties, in the second half of 1952, he visited Yugoslavia twice, where he was well-received, had access to circles close to Tito’s clique, and received a promise of a personal audience with Tito. The position occupied by Max at the present time allows us to use his possibilities for the execution of active measures against Tito.

At the beginning of February of this year, we called Max to Vienna, where we organized a meeting with him in clandestine conditions. In the course of discussing his possibilities, we asked Max how he could be most useful, accounting for his position. Max proposed undertaking any kind of effective measure personally against Tito.

In connection with this proposal, there was a discussion with him on how he conceives this, as a result of which were uncovered the following possible options of executing a terrorist act against Tito:

1) Instruct Max to gain a personal audience with Tito, during which he should release a dose of pulmonary plague from a silently acting mechanism disguised in his clothing, which would guarantee Tito’s infection and death as well as those at the premises. Max himself will not know of the organism in the applied formula. To preserve Max’s life, he will be preliminarily inoculated with an anti-plague serum.

2) In connection with Tito’s expected trip to London, deploy Max there on the mission, using his official position and good personal relations with the Velebit, the Yugoslav ambassador in England. Max could get to the reception at the Yugoslav embassy, which, as should be expected, Velebit will hold in honor of Tito.

Carry out the terrorist attack by means of a silent shot from a mechanism masked by an everyday item, simultaneously releasing tear gas to cause panic among the guests in order to allow a favorable environment for Max’s retreat and the concealment of a trail.

3) Use one of the official receptions in Belgrade, to which are invited members of the diplomatic corpus. Carry out the terrorist attack in the same way as in the second option, assigning it to Max himself, who as a diplomat accredited by the Yugoslav government, will be invited to such a reception.

Aside from that, assign Max to develop an option and prepare the conditions of his assignment by using one of the Costa Rican representatives to present Tito a gift in the form of some valuables in a box, the opening of which would set into motion a mechanism that momentarily would emit an active toxic substance.

Max was offered again to think over and contribute suggestions as to how he could carry out the most effective measures against Tito. Conditions of communication were set with him, and it was agreed that he will be given additional orders.

We would consider it expedient to use Max’s possibilities for committing a terrorist act against Tito. By his personal qualities and work experience in intelligence, Max is suitable for carrying out such a mission.

Your agreement is requested. (15)

There is no resolution of Stalin’s on this document. But as Sudoplatov, at that time the chief of MGB Bureau No. 1 responsible for commando operations abroad, recalls, in February 1953 Stalin called him to the Kremlin to comment on this assassination plan against Tito. Here is what he writes about it:

Stalin handed me a handwritten document and requested me to comment on it. This was the plan for the assassination on Marshal Tito. I had never seen this document earlier, but Ignatiev clarified that the initiative came from Ryasnoi and Savchenko, deputy ministers of state security…

I told Stalin that naive methods of liquidation were proposed in the document, methods which reflect incompetence in preparation of the plan… I said that Max is not suitable for such an assignment, since he was never a fighter or terrorist. He had participated in the operation against Trotsky, against an agent of the Okhrana in Lithuania, and in the liquidation of Trotskyite leader Andres Nin in Spain, but only with the mission of securing combatants’ access to the object of attack. Aside from that, it didn’t follow from the document that direct access to Tito would be guaranteed. Whatever we thought of Tito, we should have approached him as a serious opponent who took part in combat operations during the war years, and who will undoubtedly keep presence of spirit and repulse the attack. I cited our agent “Val,” Momo Jurovic, a major-general in Tito’s guard. According to his reports, Tito was always on guard over the tense internal situation in Yugoslavia…

However, Stalin interrupted me, and turning to Ignatiev, said that the matter must be thought over again, taking into account internal “squabbles” in the Yugoslav leadership. Then he looked at me intently and said that since this mission is important for strengthening our positions in Eastern Europe and our influence in the Balkans, we must approach it with exceptional responsibility in order to avoid the failure that occurred in Turkey in 1942, when the assassination on German ambassador Von Papen was aborted. (16)

After the session at Stalin’s, there began preliminary study of the operation. Grigulevich, who received the order from Moscow to prepare for the terrorist act, was obliged to write a letter to his wife in case of failure, which would fall into the hands of Tito’s security service. In this letter, as in a similar one written by Mercader before the assassination of Trotsky, the version was expounded that this was the act of a loner who had committed the attack for political reasons. It is difficult to imagine what Grigulevich felt at that time, as he understood perfectly well that he had no chance of escaping unscathed. But here there intervened His Majesty chance. In March of 1953 Stalin died, and the operation to liquidate Tito was cancelled by Beria, who sought to establish friendly relations with Yugoslavia.

Work Translated: Колпакиди, А. И. и Прохоров, Д.П. КГБ: Спецоперации советской разведки. М: Издательство АСТ, 2001.

Works Cited (15, 16): Судоплатов, П.А. Разведка и Кремль. М., 1997.

Aleksandr Ogorodnik, known as “Trigon” by his CIA handlers, was a Soviet diplomat who was lured into spying for Washington through sexual compromise – a honey trap. Historian Aleksandr Sever provides the inside story of how the KGB Second Chief Directorate (Counterintelligence) tracked and captured Ogorodnik, as well as speculation on his mysterious demise. 

Among the CIA agents unmasked by the KGB, Aleksandr Ogorodnik occupies a special place. It was this man who became the main antagonist in a ten-part Soviet television series. The story of Aleksandr Ogorodnik, as shown on TV screens, was close to what happened in real life. The plot of the TV movie TASS is Authorized to Announce was written on the basis of investigation materials, and Chekists [KGB officers], active participants in the operation to expose the American spy, functioned as consultants. It’s understandable that in the picture the action occurred in a made-up foreign state and the traitor was a nondescript individual, while the basic attention of the viewers was focused on the main positive and negative personages – KGB and CIA officers. Behind the scenes, there remained a multitude of important details of this “noisy” affair.

We will tell of the genuine plot of this spy story. In Bogota, capital of Colombia, the CIA recruited the second secretary of the Soviet embassy – Aleksandr Ogorodnik. Ogorodnik was a doctoral candidate of economics, an athlete, erudite, etc. Here is how the personnel service of the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) characterized him:

During the years of his work in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he has shown himself as a disciplined, effective employee and an educated specialist who enjoys the trust and respect of the collective. He is politically literate, ideologically mature, and morally firm.

Alongside this the “exemplary” diplomat had three Achilles’ heels: an immoderate attraction to the weaker sex (he was simultaneously romantically involved with the wives of several colleagues, and one of those affairs received publicity and destroyed the family of an influential official at the MFA), suspicious financial operations (he obtained, for example, a foreign car at the beginning of his tour and then sold it in the USSR – the Foreign Ministry’s leadership found out, and our “businessman” had to return his profit of $800 to the state), and unsatisfied ambitions.

The Americans knew about these and other sins committed by the “Agronomist” (the nickname assigned him by KGB counterintelligence officers). They “matched him up” with a woman – Pilar Suarez Barcala, an employee of the Colombian Institute of Culture and US intelligence agent. Then they blackmailed him with photographs of the romantic romps – a classic honey trap.

Here’s what kind of note Aleksandr Ogorodnik made in his diary soon after his recruitment by the CIA:

I have the character of a fighter, a strong will, honesty, and devotion to the ideals of freedom. Finally, I have extraordinary professional training and a life rare in its wealth of the most complex events. I am a man who decided long ago that I won’t die decrepit in my bed…[i]

Returning to the Motherland, Ogorodnik began work as the second secretary in the American department of the MFA Directorate for Foreign Policy Planning. In this division were gathered the yearly reports of ambassadors and the conclusive analytical materials of MFA directorates and departments – generally everything that presented an interest to the leadership of the United States. And Ogorodnik was also planning on marrying the daughter of CPSU Central Committee Secretary Konstantin Rusakov.

According to one version, it was precisely during this period that he came under observation of Soviet counterintelligence. The fact of the matter is that the KGB possessed information that one of the employees of the Soviet embassy in Colombia had been recruited by US intelligence. During official business trips around the country Ogorodnik committed several mistakes. He had, for example, contacts with foreign delegations that went unsanctioned by the MFA leadership, he took notes on his notepad after meetings with high-level officials at the republican level, and he also traveled with several special self-defense weapons of West German manufacture (such as a pistol concealed in a pen).

Western experts claim that Ogorodnik was exposed by the Czech intelligence illegal Karl Koecher, who together with his wife Hanna was able to “break through the Iron Curtain” in 1965, ending up in the United States. Representing himself as a fervent anti-communist and fluent in Russian, French, English, and Czech, in 1973 Koecher was accepted for work in the CIA’s Soviet Division as a translator. The pair was only arrested in 1984 and then exchanged for Soviet dissident Anatoly Shcharansky.

But Ogorodnik made his main mistake in Moscow when he began to regularly visit Victory Park. During those journeys he always left his car in a visible place set along American diplomats’ traditional route of travel. At Lubyanka they justifiably assumed that the MFA official’s goal was to carry out sessions of impersonal communications. In other words, loading and unloading the contents of a dead drop.

The KGB established visual control over the apartment where “Agronomist” lived. The Chekists were able to record the fact that secret writing had been used on a piece of paper, and they also found out the location of the dead drop, within which were kept the CIA’s instructions to their agent.

Yet the opinions of KGB veterans diverge further in the story. Some asserted that the traitor was indeed a valued agent whose exposure was a success for the Second Chief Directorate (the leader of the operation received an Order of the Red Banner).[ii] Others, to the contrary, think that the Americans helped to “liquidate” their man according to three reasons: his connections with the family of a member of the Central Committee (the KGB regularly vetted the people surrounding high-level party functionaries); the low value of the information to which he had access in Moscow; and the CIA needed to divert the attention of Soviet counterintelligence away from more valuable sources in the “tower” at Smolensk Square (where Ministry of Foreign Affairs was located).[iii]

Independent of what point of view is correct, the finale of this story was Ogorodnik’s arrest on the evening of June 21st, 1977, by the door of his own apartment in Building No.2/1 on the Krasnopresnenskaya Embankment in Moscow. After that comes the screenplay scene from the film TASS is Authorized to Announce. Let’s “watch” it again, turning our attention to details.

We will begin from the fact that for some reason there was no prosecutor sanction for the arrest, while in those years the Chekists tried to observe the codex of criminal procedure. Moreover, they were taking down not a simple dissident, but someone with connections in the Communist Party Central Committee. Either this means that decision to interdict the espionage activity was taken unexpectedly, or that the outcome of the counterintelligence officers’ visit was determined in advance. Everyone who’s watched this film remembers well the scene when, after continual declarations of his non-complicity in the charges presented him, “Trianon” agreed to expound his confession on paper. Due to a lapse by the KGB during their frisk of Ogorodnik, he used his own Parker pen equipped with a special poison compartment, ending his life by suicide.

Participants in the events have attested that there was only one witness to what transpired – the interrogator who asked all the remaining members of the special group, of which a general from the KGB Seventh Directorate was part, no less, to excuse themselves from the room. Was bon vivant Aleksandr Ogorodnik prepared for such a step? Moreover, he still had the chance to save his own life if he was included in an operational game to expose his overseas controllers. Otherwise, why would the KGB subsequently need to search out a body double for Agronomist in order to catch CIA officer Martha Peterson red-handed?

The version exists that Ogorodnik was liquidated for the preservation of Yuri Andropov’s stable position as chairman of the KGB.[iv] Let every reader independently determine the degree of Chekist participation in this procedure. There can be variants ranging from professional error (when counterintelligence officers didn’t frisk the detainee) to the forcible ingestion of poison in imitation of suicide.

What’s important is another factor: everyone was interested in Agronomist’s death except KGB counterintelligence officers themselves. After all, they still had to undertake an operational game with the CIA, and to realize that with a dead agent would be significantly more complicated than with a live one. The chief of the KGB Second Chief Directorate, General Grigory Grigoriev, who carried out many similar measures during the Second World War when serving in Smersh’s Third Department, understood that perfectly well.

If Aleksandr Ogorodnik was alive, there would doubtless have to have been an “open” trial. And his ties to the daughter of a Central Committee secretary would surface there. Politburo members who treated the KGB chairman so coldly would obtain an excellent excuse to bring their wrath upon him. Such a trial would also ruinously reflect on Andropov’s relationship with top Soviet diplomat Andrei Gromyko. The process would be a most powerful blow to the pride and reputation of the latter. The foreign minister always claimed that he had no spies. And then it would be suddenly discovered that an official in the MFA central apparatus was working for the CIA.

In KGB Maj. Gen. Vyacheslav Kevorkov’s opinion, here’s the kind of discussion that might have taken place between these major state figures:

Andropov would most likely call first. Of course, he couldn’t begin immediately with the death of the traitor:

– Good morning, Andrei. Tell me, have you read the report by the International Department regarding the Liberation Army?

– I read it. And honestly, Yura, I was surprised how the International Department set the question. Naturally, these guys are waging a noble struggle for their liberation, but they’re using methods of terror. I think we need to distance themselves from them. In any case, no help with weapons.

– There can be no question of it.

Then they’d go over one or two routine subjects. And only at the very end of the conversation:

– Yes, Andrei, do you remember how I told you about our diplomat who was working for the Americans?

At this point Andropov would have paused to turn up the heat in their dialogue and let Gromyko worry a bit with regard to the unpleasant matter that was unexpectedly raised. Gromyko was silent – that meant he understood.

– So then, late tonight (Andropov continued, in no rush) my guys came to arrest him. And what do you know…

Gromyko didn’t know, but he waited for what kind of denouement would follow. Finally, after another pause, Andropov took pity on him and continued.

– Well, out of fear the spy took the poison capsule the Americans had sent him.

Now Gromyko needed a pause to not betray the gladness and relief in his voice and to think up a suitable answer.

– Well, then, Yura, traitors have their logic and their inglorious end as always.

Again silence. Then Andropov heartily concluded:

– So, Andrei, we can say that we’re of one opinion on the International Department’s note.

Gromyko readily confirmed:

– Naturally, it couldn’t be any other way.

We can confidently say that both men stayed satisfied with the outcome of the conversation, and what’s more important, the outcome of the affair.[v]

[i] Уваров О. «Тринон оказался огородником.» Российские вести, 2003 год, 26 февраля.

[ii] Кеворков, В.Е. Генерал Бояров. М.: 2003. С. 59.

[iii] Котов, О. О чем не был уполномочен заявить ТАСС. Независимое военное обозрение, 2003 года, 5 марта.

[iv] Там же.

[v]  Кеворков, В.Е. Генерал Бояров. М.: 2003. С. 77-78.

Work Translated: Север А. История КГБ. Москва: Алгоритм, 2008. – Щит и меч. К 90-летию ВЧК.

Translated by Mark Hackard

While it is known that German intelligence targeted Soviet leader Josef Stalin during World War II, how close did they come to succeeding? The following tells the story of SS Operation Zeppelin and the brilliant counter-moves, known as Operation Fog, undertaken by Soviet military counterintelligence (SMERSH) officer Grigorii Grigorenko, who would go on to head the KGB Second Chief Directorate during the Cold War. 

Much has been said and written about the attempt to liquidate Stalin during the Second World War—at the same time, nothing specific, but rather things at the level of speculation or fiction.

The failed assassination of the Supreme Commander of the Soviet Union, planned by German saboteurs, is a thrilling subject, after all. And they indeed planned to kill him. However, the story of capturing terrorist saboteurs turned into the prequel to one of the most successful operations by Soviet counter-intelligence, codenamed Fog and carried out by Major Grigorii Fedorovich Grigorenko, a resident of Poltava, today’s Ukraine. Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) recently declassified this operation.

Why Was Zeppelin Launched?

The Wehrmacht’s winter failure outside Moscow and its Blitzkrieg’s lack of success forced German intelligence services to seek new opportunities. In this regard, in March of 1942, the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) developed a specific plan codenamed Unternehmen Zeppelin. Four frontline Sonderkommandos linked to police operational groups and security forces in the occupied territories of the USSR were assigned to its immediate implementation as part of the 6th Department. This also included several reconnaissance and sabotage schools for training agents to operate in the Soviet rear.

At the same time, Zeppelin Sonderkommandos were also meant to cooperate with the frontline Abwehrkommandos and Abwehrgruppen. In essence, operation Zeppelin presupposed the mass-scale deployment of agents with intelligence, sabotage, propaganda, and guerilla-organizational tasks for inspiring armed anti-Soviet uprisings. RSHA plans directly stated:

We cannot be limited to dozens of groups with disparate activities; for the Soviet colossus, they are just pinpricks. We need to implement thousands.

Hitler’s counterintelligence chief Walter Schellenberg wondered— in his memoirs called The Labyrinth—how global this operation was, and how much importance was placed upon it.

POWs and Soviet soldiers who changed sides voluntarily were chosen for this operation. After giving consent to work for German intelligence and consequent verification, they were in the same boat as the soldiers of the Wehrmacht, including the provision of excellent food and living conditions. They were even allowed to travel to Germany.

An Important Mission

Following a number of serious setbacks in the spring of 1944, the Nazis began to consider another possibility for liquidating Stalin. Let us recall that Operation Cicero—the goal of which was to assassinate the three leaders of the anti-Hitler coalition during the Tehran conference—failed. Walter Schellenberg recalled that in the summer of 1944, he was summoned to the Fuschl castle by Joachim von Ribbentrop. When they met, their conversation turned to the necessity of eliminating Stalin and the work of the technical department of the RSHA and Security Service (SD). Then came a conversation with Heinrich Himmler, who approved the operation.

According to the new plan, two agents were sent to Moscow. They were to plant a bomb into the car used by the “leader of the peoples.” The justification for this project was as follows: the saboteur had a long-standing acquaintance with one of the drivers of the Kremlin special garage. However, at the height of preparing this mission, that agent “disappeared somewhere.”

As a result, the operation to eliminate the Soviet leader was entrusted to Petr Tavrin—a repeat Ukrainian offender, whose real name was Shilo. Petro Shilo was one of “those cadres.” Several times he escaped from the camps and not only changed appearances, but also his last name. Shilo-Tavrin was quite the find for intelligence services, since he had vast experience: a long-time criminal, he managed to insert himself into law-enforcement agencies, and, before the war, he even worked as an investigator at a regional prosecutor’s office in Voronezh.

In 1941, Tavrin was drafted into the army, but only four months later, he voluntarily surrendered. The Abwehr and SD took note of him in the camp where he was being held. After analyzing his capabilities, Tavrin was delivered to Heinz Gräfe, who was in charge of several programs of the Zeppelin operation. His training took place as part of a separate program in the Zeppelin-Nord intelligence branch. At first the branch was stationed in Pskov. Then it was transferred to Riga. When Tavrin had achieved certain successes, he was shown to Otto Skorzeny, Germany’s superspy. The latter rated his capabilities highly.

Shortly afterward, Tavrin was already living at a safe house in Pskov, where he met his future wife, Lydia Shilova. She was not just his wife, according to the cover story, and, in addition to spousal duties, she also had to work as a radio operator for Tavrin’s mission.

These saboteurs received excellent false documents: Tavrin was made to be a Hero of the USSR, Major General, and the Deputy for the Division of Counterintelligence of SMERSH (an abbreviation of “death to spies”) in the 39th Army of the First Baltic Front. His wife, radio operator Shilova, “became” a second lieutenant in SMERSH.

The operation was so significant and unique that its organizers used a special aircraft, the Arado-232. The plane was ready to fly at night, in any weather, and to land and release any reconnaissance and sabotage groups on almost any surface, excluding the mountains. Under the fuselage in case of landing in a swamp, the aircraft had 12 pairs of rubber-coated caterpillar tracks. This air machine was well equipped, whereas its crew undertook special training.

Tavrin was to assassinate Stalin by using a special device, the Panzerknacker, loaded with nine rounds. In essence, this was a miniature grenade launcher— the Faustpatrone. It consisted of a short barrel mounted on a leather cuff of the terrorist’s arm and was easily concealed under a wide-sleeved coat.

The Panzerknacker could easily shoot through an armored plate thicker than 30 mm at a distance of 300 meters. In addition, Tavrin was supplied with a magnetic mine that had a radio-controlled fuse along with different kinds of hand guns, including a Webley & Scott eight-round revolver with 15 explosive bullets loaded with poison.

SD Proposes, But SMERSH Disposes

The transfer of terrorists took place on September 5, 1944 in Karmansovskii district of Smolensk region. However, the ever-praised Arado aircraft did not handle the Russian weather. The pilots got stuck in a night storm and poorly chose the landing site. As a result, the plane crashed and could not return. After disembarking from the aircraft, the Tavrins rolled out a motorcycle and headed east.

German pilots decided to blow up the plane—to avoid declassifying the assignment—then, to cross the frontline and come back themselves. But things turned out the opposite: the explosion drew the attention of patrols and Soviet counterintelligence. A search began, and the pilots were rounded up. They chose to return fire. As a result, one of them was shot dead, and two were captured.

The NKVD managed to obtain testimony: this is the way the Soviet side learned about the plane’s passengers. The Tavrins were caught outside Smolensk and taken to their final destination—Moscow. Stalin was personally informed about the incident. He listened to the opinion of counterintelligence that suggested using the captured agents. Following their interrogation, the Soviet side decided to engage in a radio game with the Germans. This task was assigned to Captain Grigorii Grigorenko with the overall command in the hands of Major-General G. Utekhin, Major-General V. Baryshnikov, and Colonel-General V. Abakumov.

Captain Grigorenko versus Reichsführer Himmler

Gregorii Federovich Grigorenko was born on August 18, 1918 in the town of Zenkov, Poltava region, today’s Ukraine, in the family of state workers. After high school, he was planning to work in agriculture, but went on to study at the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of the Poltava Pedagogical Institute. Graduating in 1939, Grigorenko was invited to work in the “organs.” He began his service as an Operations Assistant Commissioner of the so-called Special Department in Konotop. In 1940, Grigorenko was called up for military service. That same year, he became an Assistant Security Officer of the Special Department in the NKVD’s 151st Infantry Division of the Kharkov Military District.

From the beginning of the war, Grigorii Grigorenko participated in battles as a security officer of the Special Department in the NKVD’s 4th Air Brigade of the Kharkov Military District. By August, however, he was already seriously wounded. After being released from hospital, he was sent to the Special Department of the De-mining Brigade at the Stalingrad Front.

In 1942, he finished coursework at the Higher School of the NKVD on leadership training and was sent to Counterintelligence at the NKVD, a department responsible for countering intelligence and subversive activities of the Germans. He joined a group of operatives in the Central Office tasked with organizing radio games against the German intelligence by using captured agents. Their goals included infiltrating Hitler’s secret services, obtaining information about the upcoming subversive actions against the Soviet Union, and adopting measures for their localization, as well as misleading the German High Command by disseminating misinformation about the intentions of the Soviet side.

In 1943, Captain Grigorenko was transferred to the 3rd Department of the Main Counterintelligence, SMERSH, in the People’s Commissariat of Defense (NKO), specializing in radio games with the enemy. Before the incident with Tavrin, Grigorenko had already gained experience from his participation in the operation Enigma (Zagadka). Therefore, it was he, who was entrusted to lead Tavrin’s radio game.

Fog Envelops the Zeppelin

On September 27, 1944 under Grigorenko’s supervision, Tavrin engaged in his first broadcast. He sent a message to the German Center about his arrival. Days went on, but Berlin was silent. A month later, the Germans responded by acknowledging telegram receipt and asked what happened to the plane and the Arado crew. The following message was sent back to Germany:

I am in the suburbs of Moscow, Lenino village, Kirpichnaia Street, 26. Let me know whether you have received my additional message about the landing. Once again, I ask for an experienced radio operator. Pass on the messages slowly. Say ‘hello’ to everybody. L.I .

After that, the answer came almost immediately: “Your mission is to firmly root yourself in Moscow and prepare to carry out your assignment. In addition, you must report on the situation in Moscow and the Kremlin.” Grigorenko informed the higher-ups that the Germans swallowed the hook. Thus began the operation code-named Fog (Tuman).

Initiating mutual contacts did not guarantee absolute success. Abwehr and SD were far from being stupid, and Tavrin could and should have been checked. Grigorenko decided that the main goal was to imitate Tavrin’s successful work in order to persuade the Germans to abandon their attempts to create, train, and send a duplicate terrorist group with a similar mission, of which the Soviet side may not be aware. In addition, Grigorenko suggested convincing Berlin to subordinate other agents to Tavrin.

German intelligence received this radiogram: “Working in Moscow turned out to be more difficult than anticipated. Searching for people. Want to find work. Please answer what happened to Lydia’s family.” The following answer came: “There are friends working nearby. Would you like to meet them for mutual support?”

This proposal raised concerns that the Germans were preparing to test whether Tavrin is operating under NKVD surveillance. Tavrin was made to respond cunningly: “You know better. If this helps to accelerate my mission, then I agree.”

For several months, Grigorenko and SMERSH outsmarted the German intelligence services. This was 1945, and the Germans began to cling to the slightest opportunity and hope, one of which was the death of Stalin. The Center urged Tavrin to speed things up, whereas he sent telegrams that things were moving along: “In this trying time, I assure you of my dedication. I will pursue the set objectives, living in hope of victory.” In January of 1945, the Tavrins received a radiogram that read:

Petr and Lydia…We shall win. Perhaps victory might be closer than we think. Help us and do not forget our oath. Kraus.

The Fog radio game went on until Germany’s surrender. One of the senior officials in the Reich Main Security Office mentioned that in the Zeppelin circles, Tavrin was talked about often. He was considered important, and was supposed to provide Zeppelin with honors, distinctions, and significant power in intelligence operations.

After Fog was completed, all the participants received state awards, whereas Grigorenko was now considered a real pro of radio games. Gregorii Fedorovich himself viewed this operation as an example of the confrontation between the intellects of the two most powerful secret services—the Soviet Union and Germany. And it was the USSR that demonstrated its total superiority. Overall, this counterintelligence agent carried out 183 radio games.

Epilogue: The Fog Clears

After the war, Grigorenko worked in military intelligence for some time, then became the head of the 14th Department in the First Chief Directorate of the KGB (foreign intelligence). In 1962, on the basis of his Department, the 2nd Service of the KGB (foreign counterintelligence) was established. He ran it successfully from 1962 to 1969. From 1969 to 1983, Gregorii Federovich headed counterintelligence of the USSR – the KGB 2nd Chief Directorate. He developed and implemented a complex system of interrelated operational measures in order to manage all the elements of the counterintelligence process. In fact, it is because of his system that we talk about the “golden age” of counterintelligence. At this time, several agents of foreign-intelligence services were exposed each year under Grigorenko’s leadership.

Among the CIA agents caught red-handed were the Second Secretary of the Foreign Ministry A. Ogorodnik (in the famous movie TASS is Authorized to Announce…. Grigorenko was portrayed as the General played by M. Gluzskii); A. Nilov, V. Kalinin, GRU staff members Filatov and Ivanov, aviation employee Petrov, KGB officer Armen Grigorian, Aeroflot staff member Kanoian, representative of the Ministry of Chemical Industry Moskovtsev, scientist Bumeister, Vneshtorgbank staff member Kriuchkov, and many others. Under Grigorenko’s leadership, CIA staff officers Vincent Crockett, Martha Peterson, Richard Osborne, and a number of other spies who worked in Moscow under diplomatic cover, were caught red-handed and expelled from the USSR. It is no wonder that Grigorenko wrote a book called Only Rats Can be Found in the Underground that became a bestseller in the late 1970s.

In his final years working for the KGB, he was one of the Deputies for General Secretary Yuri Andropov. In 1983, the brilliant Colonel General Grigorenko, who became a threat for the CIA, was transferred to the Ministry of General Machine-Building as the Deputy Minister. Apparently, following Andropov’s death, someone did not want for Grigorenko to continue heading the KGB.

His personal qualities were fully manifested in honorable acts as the President of Vetkon, the Association for Veterans of Counterespionage, created upon his own initiative. He died on May 19th, 2007 at the age of 88.

Article Source

Translation and editing by Nina Kouprianova.

Turkish warlord Enver Pasha (1881-1922) was not only the architect of the Armenian genocide, but also a key player in the early twentieth-century Great Game. A consummate intriguer, Enver attempted forging a Pan-Turkic empire in Central Asia, where he would meet his death at the hands of the Red Army.

The assassination of Enver Pasha cannot be called a special operation in the full sense of the word. It was sooner a special military operation carried out by the forces of the army and special services. But we can form a conception of how Soviet power was established in Central Asia, and by what methods, on its example.

The biography of Enver Pasha, an international adventurer and leader of the Basmachi, merits detailed description. He was born on November 23rd, 1881, in Istanbul in the family of Ahmed-Bey, a minor official from the Ministry of Social Work. Choosing for himself a military career, he began his service as a junior officer in a small provincial garrison in Macedonia. The situation in Turkey’s hinterlands during that period was complex. Albanians, Bulgarians, Greeks, and Macedonians no longer wished to be under Turkish power and waged guerrilla war against the Sultan’s forces. Captain Enver-Bey distinguished himself in battles against partisan units, for which he was rose early to the rank of major.

But in the summer of 1908, when Enver’s fellow officer Lieutenant Niyazi-Bey initiated a rebellion against the Sultan, Enver joined in. Consequently the Sultan capitulated, and members of the party Unity and Progress, later receiving the sobriquet of the Young Turks, came to power. Enver’s participation in the revolt changed his fate radically. After the Young Turks’ ascent to power, he was appointed the military attaché in Berlin, where he acquired wide-ranging ties in German military circles and even became a personal friend of Kaiser Wilhelm. In 1911 Enver Pasha returned to Istanbul and almost immediately left for North Africa, where the Turkish-Italian war had begun. And although Turkey suffered defeat in this war, this didn’t reflect on Enver Pasha’s career: he received the rank of general and continued to remain one of the leaders of the Young Turks.

Enver Pasha’s moment of glory came after Turkey’s defeat in the First Balkan War. On January 23rd, 1913, at the head of a detachment of officers, he burst in upon a session of the government and made the grand vizier request the dismissal of the entire cabinet to the Sultan. Consequently, already a year later he became the leader of the triumvirate that had seized power in the country (Enver Pasha, Talaat Pasha, and Jemal Pasha), the head of the Young Turks Party, war minister, and simultaneously chief of the general staff. It was then that Enver was able to successfully resolve personal matters, becoming husband to the Sultan’s niece. Yet his triumph was short-lived. Having drawn Turkey into the First World War on Germany’s side, the Enver and the Young Turks miscalculated. The nations of the Quadruple Alliance suffered defeat in the war, and after Turkey’s capitulation in Moudros Harbor on the island of Lemnos on October 30, 1918, Enver Pasha and the two other members of the triumvirate were forced to flee to Germany.

Turning up in a Germany seized by revolution, Enver Pasha soon understood that his old friends now had no time for him. And when a Turkish tribunal delivered a death sentence to the members of the triumvirate in absentia in June of 1919, he decided on an unexpected move – he proposed his services to Moscow. Having established contact with Karl Radek, who was in Berlin at the time, Enver expressed the wish to take part in the liberation of the peoples of the East from the colonizers’ yoke, first and foremost that of the British. The proposals made by Enver Pasha, who had great authority among Muslims of the East, evoked no small amount of interest in Moscow, and soon an agreement on cooperation was concluded. Jemal Pasha went to Soviet Russia first, while Enver Pasha, remaining in Germany, declared himself a supporter of the ideas of the Comintern and at the beginning of 1920 published a number of articles calling for struggle against the colonizers.

At that time Enver Pasha undertook several attempts to travel to Soviet Russia, but he was twice unlucky. The first time the airplane on which he was flying made a forced landing in Lithuania, and Enver, taken as a spy, ended up in a Vilnius prison, whence he was deported to Germany after two months upon the insistent requests of General Von Seeckt. The second attempt was also non-successful – he was arrested in Latvia and spent three months in jail. And only in August of 1920 did he finally reach Moscow through Belostok, where the so-called Polish Revolutionary Committee was located. That Enver Pasha’s telegrams presented enormous interest to the Bolshevik leadership is demonstrated by Dzerzhinsky’s August 11th, 1920 telegrams to Lenin and Revolutionary Military Council member for the western front I. Smiegel. Dzerzhinsky reported to Lenin the following:

Enver Pasha arrived from Turkey tonight with two Turks and a pilot, Leo, who has been here…I am directing them to Smiegel today.

Smiegel was sent a telegram of the following content:

Tonight Enver Pasha arrived from Turkey with two Turks…We are sending them to you through Grodno. Lenin has been informed.[i]

In Moscow Enver Pasha and his “staff” were provided a mansion of the Golitsyn princes for living, while his so-called “Ali-Bey Mission” received diplomatic status, though it didn’t represent any government. Moreover, he was periodically issued loans of 500 thousands marks, which were used to maintain the staff and also support the political organization “Karakol,” active in Istanbul and under Enver’s influence. At that very time, with Radek’s help, Enver Pasha established contacts with a number of individuals in the Soviet leadership and was received by Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Chicherin, Sklyansky, and Karakhan.

It must be noted that the East occupied an important place in the plans of the Bolsheviks and Comintern. They intended to unite the efforts of the proletarian communist movement in developed capitalist countries with the national liberation movements in the East. In connection with that, contacts were slated to be established with the Kemalists in Turkey and Amanullah-Khan in Afghanistan, who were in conflict with the English, for use of Kabul and Turkestan (then an autonomous republic part of the RSFSR) as a platform to advance on India.

For the execution of this design, it was first of all necessary to reorganize the Afghan army. With this objective in mind, Enver’s colleague Jemal Pasha was sent to Kabul already in 1919, and his activity received a high evaluation among the military leadership. And so, in the Turkestan Front intelligence department’s summary for 1922, it was stated that his “influence was felt in each of the organization’s measures and met hospitable ground for his work, but the basic elements of army reorganization, undertaken with regard to reforming the country’s entire political structure, have not been ultimately enacted.” Jemal Pasha was in Afghanistan right until 1922, when he traveled to Tiflis for a time. There he was killed by an Armenian nationalist.

Concerning Enver Pasha, in September of 1920 he went to Baku, where the First Congress of Oppressed Peoples of the East took place. At the Congress Enver spoke in the name of a certain “Union of Revolutionary Organizations of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, Arabia, and Indonesia,” and in his speech he expressed sympathy with Soviet Russia, announcing his readiness to wage struggle against a common enemy – world imperialism.

After the completion of the Congress, Enver Pasha settled in Batumi, most likely intending to return to Turkey and squeeze its new leader, Kemal Ataturk, out of power. But such a development of events obviously didn’t suit Kemal, and he addressed the Soviet leadership with a demand to remove Enver from Batumi. The Kremlin, not wishing to quarrel with Kemal, applied maximum efforts to send Enver to Bukhara, where he was to render assistance to Jemal Pasha, who was temporarily in Moscow.

On October 4th, 1921, Enver Pasha arrived in Bukhara. Taking stock of the situation, he began to search out ways that would give him the possibility of standing at the apex of power. He finally decided to break with the Bolsheviks and join the Basmachi movement in Turkenstan. To that end he made contact with Turkish officers with whom he was familiar from his time as Turkey’s war minister. At the beginning of November 1921, with their help and under the cover of a hunting party, he set out for eastern Bukhara, where in January of 1921 he met with the Emir of Bukhara and concluded an agreement with him on joint action against the Bolsheviks. Initially Enver had only a small unit of about 30 men, but already after their first skirmishes with units of the Red Army, the detachment grew to 300 well-armed and trained combatants. Enver released proclamations signed, “Deputy Emir of Bukhara, Son-in-Law of the Caliph, Sayid Enver.” And when in March of 1922, by order of the Emir of Bukhara he was declared Supreme Commander of Muslim Forces and Deputy Emir, he ordered himself a seal with the title “Supreme Commander of All Armies of Islam, Son-in-Law of the Caliph and Prophet Muhammad.” Then he sent Moscow a letter demanding the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Turkestan.

Enver Pasha’s defection to the Basmachi side gave another impulse to anti-Soviet actions in Central Asia. In his report to Moscow, deputy general consul in Dushanbe Nasyrbaev wrote:

In all the areas not occupied by the Red Army the authority of the begs, the field staff has begun military training, new weapons workshops have opened, and regular communications have been reestablished with the Emir of Bukhara and Afghanistan, whence they receive material supplies and manpower. Communications have been established with the Basmachi in Ferghana. At the present moment Enver has ten thousand soldiers along with 16 machine guns. The field staff is located in the village of Kasrerun…12 miles from Baisun…With every day Enver grows stronger, and it is necessary to liquidate this adventure as quickly as possible, for in the not-far-off future it could assume an extremely serious character.[ii]

While at the end of May 1922, the Soviet Turkestan Front intelligence department reported:

The ever-growing organized character of Enver Pasha’s detachments has been noted by our agent networks. Enver Pasha is not only the factual commander of all rebel armed forces, but also the ideological leader of a pan-Islamic organization for all Turkestan. Our agent networks have noted the arrival to Enver’s group of detachments of Ferghana and Samarkand Basmachis and the maintenance of uninterrupted communications with the Emir of Bukhara. Enver receives Afghanistan’s moral and material assistance. The rebel movement goes under the slogan of liberation from the Russians.[iii]

In all, according to the information of the All-Russian Main Staff, in January of 1922, 97 bands composing 20,342 men all together were active against units of the Turkestan Front, while by May their number grew to 116, within which there were around 25,000 men.

Because of the escalation of the situation in Bukhara, tough measures were decided upon in Moscow. The Bukhara Group of Forces, composed of two infantry regiments, two special cavalry regiments and a cavalry brigade, was again created. At the beginning of June 1922, the Group went on the offensive and smashed Enver Pasha’s main force at Baisun. Suffering defeat, Enver Pasha withdrew into the interior of eastern Bukhara, but sometime later was overtaken near Baldzhuan, where his detachments were ultimately scattered on August 1st. How the operation to liquidate Enver Pasha was completed was described in detail by Y. Melkunov, who at that time commanded the First Turkestan Special Cavalry Brigade:

Brigade Commander (of the Eighth Turkestan Special Cavalry Brigade that defeated Enver near Baldzhuan – authors) Bogdanov sent the 16th Cavalry Brigade to Khalaving with the mission to destroy Chara-Yesaul’s band. Simultaneously there was formed a joint squadron, into which were taken the most experienced soldiers and best horses from both regiments. Bogdanov set experienced commander Ivan Savko at the head of the squadron. They were tasked with finding and killing Enver Pasha. The 15th Cavalry Regiment, drained of blood from the battle for Baldzha, as well as mountain-horse battery along with the brigade staff, stayed in Baldzhuan.

Savko’s squadron left Baldzhuan from the north, conducting thorough intelligence, and on August 3rd set up camp near a small settlement. A neighboring farmer’s family was picking apricots in their garden, and several Red Army men went to help them.

Soon one of them returned, called the squadron commander aside, and informed him that according to the farmer, Enver Pasha and Dovlyatman-Bey were in the Chagan village. Savko himself spoke with the farmer, who said that his brother had returned from Chagan and saw Enver there with his own eyes.

In the large and wealthy village of Chagan, set 25 kilometers northeast of Baldzhuan, there was a mosque visited by all the surrounding population for prayers. And Enver Pasha, staying in Chagan, still held out the hope of manipulating the religions feelings of the farmers to fill his ragged bands and again lead them in the fight against Soviet power. The village lay away from major roads, and Enver felt completely safe here.

In order not to frighten Enver off, Savko maintained camp until evening, and only with the onset of darkness did the squadron move forward. At dawn they approached Chagan. Concealing the horses in surrounding orchards, the soldiers literally crawled on their bellies to the village. The muezzin called the believers to morning prayers.

The armed dzhigit raiders from Enver’s personal bodyguard, set out on their horses by the mosque, drew into their robes from the shivering morning wind coming down from the mountains. Savko ordered for the machine guns to be trained on the square in front of the mosque, but not to open fire.

But then the morning prayers had finished, and the raiders began coming out of the mosque. Pushing aside local residents, they formed a living corridor. At the threshold of the mosque appeared Enver Pasha, accompanied by Dovlyatman-Bey and other commanders. Unhurriedly they went to their horses. And here Savko ordered his machine-gunners to open fire on this group.

Panic ensued. The cavalrymen quickly spurred their horses, and the squadron attacked. In a few minutes the square in front of the mosque had emptied. Local residents identified Enver Pasha and Dovlyatman-Bey among those killed. Both of them had been cut down by machine-gun fire.[iv]

After Enver Pasha’s death, however, anti-communist actions under the flag of Islam in Central Asia didn’t cease – only their form changed. And the reason for that was an incautious and adventurist Soviet foreign policy in the East (Enver’s invitation alone was of great cost), resulting in eastern Bukhara remaining the arena of a guerrilla war for a long time to come.

[i] Гиленсен В. Энвер Паша и его «бросок на юг» Служба безопасности. 1996, No. 1-2. С. 70.

[ii] Там же. С. 71.

[iii] Там же.

[iv] Агабеков Г. Секретный террор. М., 1996. С. 392-393.

Work Translated: Колпакиди, А. И. и Прохоров, Д.П. КГБ: Спецоперации советской разведки. М: Издательство АСТ, 2001.

Translated by Mark Hackard.

Before the murder of John F. Kennedy on November 22nd, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald – or even possibly a double – visited the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. Retired KGB Lt. Gen. Nikolai Leonov, then on assignment in Mexico’s capital as an intelligence officer, met Oswald that day, and he has little doubt the young American was just a pawn in a much wider plot. 

An intelligence officer’s workdays were full of work with active agent networks, with those who had been brought into partnership with Soviet intelligence by previous shifts of our colleagues, and with agents arriving from other countries, etc.

Most simply, that’s if the environment in a country allows you to meet personally with an agent somewhere in a cafe or restaurant. There one could unhurriedly discuss all accumulated issues, take verbal, and sometimes written, information, transfer money for operational expenditures, and set the conditions for future meetings. Though if the local counterintelligence service is well equipped technologically, then you had to be extremely attentive. When working with Americans, we had to almost immediately refuse such comfortable conditions of communication and cross over to the use of dead drops or a system of momentary meetings.

Only to the deeply profane would it seem that US intelligence doesn’t keep its citizens under control. FBI representatives recruited agents among Americans and made all their officials report in obligatory order on every contact with Soviet citizens and conducted regular interviews. Frequent and continuous meetings with Americans were dangerous.

It was much more dependable to train an agent to work through dead drops that excluded any personal contact and brought risk to a minimum. But it was even better to supply an agent with special sheets of writing paper, which were soaked in a special compound and could be used as carbon paper for taking down invisible text. These very simple forms of impersonal communication were quite reliable in practical work, although there are many others, about which it’s still too early to speak.

Working the American line in Mexico was always active and lively. Well-wishers among US citizens would often drop in to us on their own initiative with proposals for secret cooperation. A few months before my arrival in the country, two Americans came to our embassy, both of them employees of the super-secret organization known as the National Security Agency (NSA). This agency was engaged in the development of codes and decryption. With genuinely American scope and industry, tens of thousands of people systematically dissected the codes and ciphers of all the world’s states. As was usual, at that time the socialist countries occupied a priority spot in this work. Both visitors expressed a resolute desire to leave for the USSR for political and moral-ethical reasons. Our friends were covertly extracted to the Soviet Union, where they reported very valuable information on the NSA’s work, and for many years they worked together with Soviet specialists on similar problems. Such “disappearances,” of course, raised the alarm in the US intelligence system. Sooner or later they were groping for the channel by which their secrets were departing.

From the beginning of the 1960s, US intelligence began to actively send fake well-wishers – provocateurs – to our embassy. On the one hand, they wanted to load us down with unnecessary and useless work, and on the other, they were counting on compromising true friends and sowing distrust towards everyone.

One must admit that the Americans sometimes succeeded. To this day I acutely relive the tragedy of one of the soldiers from an American missile base in the south of the United States who came with an offer for partnership. Either our colleague didn’t have the sensitivity, or his interlocutor couldn’t convince us of his honesty, but we made the decision to decline the proposal and say farewell. What regret we had when several days later this serviceman was arrested as a deserter by the Americans in Panama and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

In the vast majority of cases, we managed – if not immediately – to separate the wheat from the chaff, those who wished to work with Soviet intelligence from the decoys. We even developed a type of technological instruction memo for work with such people. In the most complex cases, when our human possibilities didn’t allow us to bring forth a final judgment on who was in front of us – an ally or a provocateur – we resorted to the lie detector. More accurately, not to the detector itself, but we announced the possibility of its application. Just the mention of this device turned out to be sufficient for provocateurs to immediately flare up in indignation and anger and refuse from any further contacts. American propaganda had convinced its citizens of the total power of this technical adaptation to such a degree that they were not in a condition to withstand it. Those who weren’t lying calmly agreed to any vetting.

Among the many visitors to the embassy from among Americans, there were also people who would later become widely well-known. Once on a Sunday in the autumn of 1963, several weeks before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, I was playing volleyball with my colleagues at the embassy’s athletic field. Suddenly a somewhat agitated duty officer appeared and began to ask me to receive an American visitor and speak with him. Swearing under my breath, I ran over in my track suit, hoping that I could get off with a request for him to come on a workday. Entering the reception room for foreigners, I saw a young man with an unusually pale face. A revolver lay on the table, its cylinder loaded with bullets. I say nearby and asked him how I could be of assistance. The young man said his name was Lee Oswald, that he was an American, and that he was currently under constant surveillance and wanted to return immediately to the USSR, where he had earlier lived and worked in Minsk, and be delivered from the constant fear for his life and for the fate of his family.

The question of restoring citizenship was extremely complicated. One had to write a well-founded request to the USSR Supreme Council Presidium and then wait without any great hope for a long time. And if a positive decision came, then bureaucratic red tape would a lot of time. With the softest, most calming tone I could use, I informed our unusual visitor of this. He began to write a request, but his hands were trembling strongly. Suddenly he set the pen aside and firmly stated:

I’ll shoot them all today. In the hotel everyone is following me: the manager, the maid, the doorman…

His eyes shone feverishly, and his voice became unsteady. Images and scenes unknown to me had obviously set upon him. It was clear that behind the table sat a man with an overstimulated nervous system that was on the verge of breakdown. There was no purpose to speaking with a person who was in such a state. We had only to calm Lee Oswald down as much as possible, try to convince him not to do anything that could hinder a positive resolution to his question of restoring USSR citizenship, and accompany him out of the embassy. I let the embassy consular department know of what had occurred.

When some time later I learned that namely Lee Oswald was accused of assassinating US President John Kennedy, I saw on television the moment of his murder in a Dallas jail. It was a murder camouflaged as a random assassination, and it became clear to me that he was an obvious scapegoat. Never could a man with such a shaken nervous system, whose fingers couldn’t steadily hold a pen, calculatingly and in cold blood produce the fatal shots accurately from long distance. I say this firmly and with conviction, because in my youth, as a student at MGIMO, I was involved in sport shooting and steadily passed the requirements for a marksman – I was even a member of the Moscow shooting team. Many times I had to shoot from a combat rifle in competitions, and I know that the foundation of success lies most of all in a trained and forged nervous system. And I recall that in his conversation with me, Oswald not once spoke negatively of the president or US government. All his fears were tied to someone from nearby, although he couldn’t definitively explain who was after him and why. It’s a pity for such people – hounded through life and made the victims of a greater political game.

Work Translated: Леонов, Н.С. Лихолетье: Записки главного аналитика Лубянки. М: Эксмо, 2005.

Translated by Mark Hackard.

The FBI’s recent arrest of several alleged deep-cover Russian intelligence officers, also known as “illegals”, has provoked astonishment in the media. As if U.S. intelligence agencies would ever dream of carrying out covert work in Russia! Since the memory span of reporters and pundits rarely extends beyond a few weeks, perhaps this is understandable. But it should come as no surprise that spying remains an important tool of statecraft. As exemplified by the illegals, the Russians are top players in the game of human intelligence.

Since the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia has been an espionage superpower. The reasons for Russian excellence at spying lie deep in the nation’s culture and history, factors which suited the eventual development of a world-class intelligence service. Centuries of dynastic rule, the Byzantine nature of the Russian state and attendant intrigue sharpened the skills of deception necessary in the struggle for power.

The mobilization political culture that led to the creation of the Russian secret services stretches back a thousand years. The feuding medieval principalities of Rus’ formed alliances and betrayed each other with regularity. To centralize his power Ivan IV, “The Dread”, formed a precursor to the secret police, the black-clad Oprichniki, to wipe out opposition and sow terror among enemies real and imagined. The Romanov Tsars, meanwhile, maintained all manner of secret chancelleries that culminated in the Third Section of Nicholas I[i]. Through the Third Section, Nicholas established a security service his successors presided over until the autocracy’s overthrow in the Russian Revolution.

Over the course of the 19^th century, political opposition was made to match wits with the Tsar’s gendarmes, and this circumstance laid the foundations for the more ruthless and sophisticated Soviet secret police. Marxist and anarchist radicals lived a twilight existence punctuated by flashes of revolutionary violence. The assumption of false identities, organization into cells, and covert means of communication became the means to survive and advance the cause against the Tsarist state. These tactics formed the tradecraft of secret operations, known as konspiratsia in Russian.

Police surveillance, informers and penetration agents heightened the need for ever greater vigilance and secrecy in the paranoid netherworld of konspiratsia. Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Josef Stalin were known in their pre-revolutionary lives respectively as Ulyanov, Bronstein and Dzhugashvili. The men who organized and wielded Soviet power had long years of underground experience, which shaped the formation of their secret service.

The founder of the Soviet secret police, the Cheka (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage) was far from a novice at underground revolutionary work. Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky was the son of a Polish noble family. As a youth he aspired to become a Catholic priest, but had from his student days converted to the Communist faith. Dzerzhinsky was thoroughly familiar with the police practices of the Tsar’s Okhrana, the successor to the Third Section. After several arrests, he became well-practiced at escaping government captivity.

As head of the Cheka, “Iron Feliks” was tasked with protecting the revolution from subversion, both internal and external, by any means. And so at Lenin’s behest, Dzerzhinsky, that “ascetic, monk-like, cold-blooded and incorruptible figure” created a merciless secret police force[ii]. The Cheka’s methods within Russia were far more brutal and murderous than any measures experienced under the Tsars, and they secured the Bolsheviks’ initially tenuous grip on power. Dzerzhinsky’s new headquarters, a cream-colored building on Lubyanka square, became a symbol of the repression and terror inaugurated by Lenin. The Soviet secret service was also deployed abroad, where its work was by necessity somewhat more discrete.

Bearing the standard of global revolution, Marxist Russia wasted no time in making enemies, ranging from the anti-Bolshevik White Russian movement to the states that “intervened” in Russia after its catastrophic plunge into Civil War in 1918. The fledgling Soviet government needed a way to monitor developments abroad and prevent any plots by White émigrés and their foreign supporters from reaching fruition. With this objective in mind, in December of 1920 Dzerzhinsky formed a fully-fledged intelligence service known as the Foreign Department (INO). The Cheka’s INO had by the end of the 1920s built up a formidable overseas espionage apparatus, with around 60 staff officers deployed in the capitals of Europe, Asia and North America[iii].

The intelligence INO officers gathered from agents and transmitted to Moscow inflicted serious damage on White émigré initiatives against the Soviet Union. INO operations also informed the Politburo on the intentions and capabilities of the states it faced in the international arena. The Soviet state from the beginning of its existence maintained a siege mentality in relation to the countries beyond its borders. The collection of secret information on foreign opponents was of the highest priority for the Soviet leadership and a pressing task for its spies. To obtain strategic intelligence or deal a crippling blow to anti-Soviet émigré groups, any and all methods could be applied.

Espionage is by its nature an ethically dubious enterprise. Yet Marxism-Leninism as a mindset also made the Soviet secret service more brutal, effective and innovative than its Tsarist predecessor. The Bolsheviks’ contempt for “bourgeois” moral strictures meant that any and all means were available for gaining political control of the country. Lenin’s political adaptation of Marxist philosophy emphasized expediency, deception and aggression in order to attain unlimited power. Konspiratsia was a principal method to subvert the societies of the West and usher in the global triumph of Communism.

The unprecedented power of the Soviet secret service can to some extent be attributed to the materialist philosophy of the Bolshevik revolutionaries. The great twentieth-century Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev remarked that, “the organization of the unity of spirit and worldview by state power leads in practice mainly to the strengthening of the state police organs and espionage”[iv].The founders of the Soviet state inhabited a moral universe centered on the proletariat, led, of course, by the Communist Party. Under the reasoning of Marxist-Leninist dialectical materialism, any action that advanced the revolution could be justified.   Thus the Soviet intelligence service obeyed only one ethic: to serve the Party in Moscow, the vanguard of world revolution. The covert war with the enemies of the revolution, within Russia and without, demanded utter ruthlessness.

Such a hardened, even callous mindset was deemed necessary to achieve the radiant future that Communist ideology promised. It was this promise that so attracted many impassioned Marxists and fellow-travelers in other countries to flock to the Soviet banner. The beckoning star of utopia burned bright in the minds of many Western intellectuals during the reigns of Lenin and Stalin. The Kremlin controlled the Third Communist International, known as the Comintern, and exercised significant influence over numerous associated political parties, labor unions and newspapers. Party members and sympathizers to the cause formed a support network that wittingly or unwittingly advanced Soviet foreign policy and propaganda.

A few of these individuals were noticed by INO “talent spotters” both for their convictions and potential access to government secrets. Among them was British intelligence officer Harold “Kim” Philby, who would for three decades betray Crown secrets to the Soviets. Philby had been committed to Communism since his days at Cambridge, and was recognized as a bright prospect in Vienna in 1934, where he began underground work with a Comintern front organization[v]. Arnold Deutsch, the deep-cover intelligence officer who recruited him, was an Austrian Jew and disciple of Wilhelm Reich, and equally drawn to Marxism’s “scientifically based” analysis and revolutionary vision. Communist solidarity proved to be a tremendous asset in the recruitment and running of agents in the West.

Ideological fervor was not the only advantage accrued to Soviet intelligence as it sought to ferret out secrets from the nations beyond its borders. The Bolsheviks were relentless modernizers and sought, in the words of Lenin, to fashion a new society through “Soviet power plus electrification”. To meet the leadership’s practically unlimited demands for security, the Cheka expanded and reorganized as the GPU, OGPU, and NKVD. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, the growth of the security apparatus was accompanied by increased specialization of functions, such as the formation of the foreign intelligence arm, the INO, and its components for political, economic and industrial espionage. At the same time, the secret police underwent a standardization of procedure that promoted uniformity in training and operations. Along with a military chain of command, these factors made the Soviet intelligence service into a formidable and effective espionage system.

The INO ran most of its agent networks out of Soviet embassies and consulates. Moscow’s intelligence officers could work under official cover, whether as diplomats, journalists, or trade representatives. In a world of mutual hostility between the two ideological “camps”, however, the Soviet state could not rely upon its embassies as the sole vehicles for intelligence collection. Instances such as Britain’s severance of diplomatic relations with the USSR in 1927 made this abundantly clear[vi]. How was an asset to receive regular instructions and deliver secrets if his controlling officer had been expelled as persona non grata? Counterintelligence pressure from the host nation could also freeze espionage work. In such cases, the Soviet secret service needed to maintain steady channels of contact in the target country to receive any potentially vital information.

Due to challenges in Moscow’s relations with many countries, the INO had throughout the twenties occasionally deployed officers abroad without diplomatic cover. Because of their lack of any official status or recognition by the Soviet government, these spies were known as illegals. By 1930, espionage conducted under a false identity and without accreditation took on new significance for Soviet intelligence. In that year, the service was restructured to reflect targeting priorities. One major innovation was the creation of an Illegals Section within the INO. Its deep-cover intelligence operatives were now formed into an elite force, the first of its kind in the world of espionage.

The Illegals Section was designed by the Soviet leadership as a strategic instrument[vii]. Stalin’s Politburo was at the time seized by the (unfounded) notion that the capitalist powers sought to initiate a war against the Soviet Union. The illegals would therefore deploy to target countries under deep cover (legends) and set up bases of operations, known as residencies. Illegal residencies could collect intelligence and run agents at less risk of detection than their embassy colleagues. By masquerading as citizens of the target (or a third) country, illegal officers were almost impossible for counterintelligence services to trace. If relations between the Soviet Union and another state were disrupted by crisis or war, INO illegal residencies would be expected to continue functioning and take control of agent networks previously run from the embassy. The timely transfer of crucial information to Moscow could assume strategic significance in the arena of war and diplomacy.

Along with deep-cover intelligence operations, the Politburo assigned one other major task to illegals: “wet affairs”, the liquidation of enemies of the Soviet state. Secret services around the world have carried out targeted killings, though the phenomenon is rarer than its representation in spy novels. Soviet intelligence, however, lent credence to such popular conceptions by its fearsome methods. The repression spawned by Stalin’s malignant paranoia was projected overseas, as well. Moscow was ruthless in its pursuit of defectors, anti-Soviet émigré leaders, and individuals deemed dangerous to its interests. Men such as the exiled Bolshevik Leon Trotsky, White Russian generals, and others would fall victim to a concerted effort aimed at their destruction.

Dispatching assassins abroad to hunt down their targets required a clandestine system of support and logistics to evade hostile security services. In the first decade of Soviet power, the Cheka and its successors enacted “special measures” beyond state borders, but there was no central department to direct this gruesome activity. Within the INO a separate “Special Group” was formed in 1929 to undertake missions to kill or kidnap those targeted by the Kremlin[viii]. Its founding heralded a decade of executions abroad as Soviet hit teams roamed Europe and took part in the bloody Spanish Civil War.

The Special Group was a parallel structure to the Illegals Section, and illegal officers served in its ranks. The unit was also equipped with a poisons laboratory and ran its own foreign residencies and agent networks[ix]. Like the rest of the Soviet security apparatus, the Special Group was purged, reorganized, and would eventually become the 4^th Directorate of the NKVD during the Second World War. Lubyanka’s special units would provide invaluable services to the Soviet Union in its mortal struggle with Nazi Germany. Soviet operatives waged a campaign of espionage, sabotage, and assassinations from South America to Wehrmacht-occupied territory on the Eastern Front. One of the most storied illegals from this era was NKVD special agent Nikolai Kuznetsov, who convincingly posed as Prussian Wehrmacht Lieutenant Paul Siebert in occupied Ukraine, running an intelligence network and killing several German high officials[x]. The film Podvig Razvedchika (Expolits of an Intelligence Officer) was loosely based on his record and influenced young men like Vladimir Putin to enter the KGB.

By the late 1940s, it should also be noted that the ethnic character of Soviet intelligence had been transformed. Gone were the days of the internationalist INO, in which the department’s leadership and many of its operatives were of Jewish descent or foreign Communists, including many Latvians, Poles and Hungarians. Men like Mikhail Trilisser, Sergei Shpigelglaz, Teodor Maly and Abram Slutsky had already met their fate in the pre-war meat grinder. With Stalin’s last major purge, this time unleashed in 1948 against “rootless cosmopolitanism”, the intelligence apparatus was being consolidated into a largely Slavic/Great Russian entity[xi]. As the Cold War progressed, illegals who were to be deployed abroad were much more likely to be Russians (as well as Armenians, Central Asians, etc.) who had lived their entire lives in the Soviet Union. Communist ideology was still the religion of the security organs and the rest of the state, but there was now a prominent accent on “socialist patriotism” that would remain throughout the Soviet-American competition for global dominance.

At the onset of the Cold War, the illegals were presented another complex challenge. Washington was no longer an ally; indeed it had become the “Main Adversary” in Soviet parlance. Confrontation with the United States made intelligence targeting into Western Europe and North America especially critical. The Kremlin needed the inside track on the US strategic posture and Western policy aims, but first and foremost the Kremlin leadership wanted early warning[xii]. Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa had forever seared into the minds of the Soviet policy elite the necessity of preventive intelligence (Although the strategic surprise the German general staff achieved was largely due to Stalin’s shoddy analysis of the situation). With the U.S. building a network of alliances and bases in Eurasia’s outer rim to contain Soviet power, Moscow moved its espionage campaign into high gear. With the creation of the KGB in 1954, illegal operations would be run from Directorate S, in turn part of Lubyanka’s First Chief Directorate (foreign intelligence)[xiii].

Illegal officers were highly prized assets in the struggle with the West because of their invisibility. “Legal” residencies run out of Soviet embassies and trade delegations were dutifully monitored by counterintelligence services like MI5, France’s DST and the FBI. Meanwhile illegals would assume foreign identities, cultivate their legends for years, and blend into their host society. Without intelligence acquired from a defector or a penetration, a Soviet illegal was just about impossible to track down. Moscow Center therefore ran some of its most valued agents through illegal networks to insulate them from detection. Through these operations, the Soviet secret service also looked to form ties with powerbrokers and policymakers in target nations. In one extraordinary instance, the illegal officer and Spanish Civil War veteran Josef Grigulevich was the Costa Rican embassy’s Chargé d‘Affaires for Italy, the Vatican and Yugoslavia from 1951 to 1953[xiv].

In addition to raising the bar for classical espionage, the Soviets never ceased their involvement in direct-action missions. Officially the KGB’s last killing was carried out in 1959 by the illegal Bogdan Stashinsky against the Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera. Yet Soviet intelligence continued to field an assassination capability for the remainder of its existence. This unit specializing in “wet affairs” underwent numerous reorganizations due to defections (such as Stashinsky’s) and scandals, starting off as the fittingly-named 13^th Department under Khrushchev until it finally became the Illegals Directorate’s 8^th Department[xv].

It made perfect sense for the KGB to house deep-cover intelligence officers and a special operations component under the same roof because of shared assignments. Directorate S was engaged in identifying and building comprehensive intelligence profiles on both foreign leaders and military commands and strategic infrastructure. In a time of war or crisis, commandos from its own Vympel group would infiltrate hostile nations, and with the assistance of Soviet illegal networks, neutralize their targets. In one such actual instance, chief of the Illegals Directorate General Yurii Drozdov directed the storm of Kabul’s Tazh-Bek Palace and the assassination of the troublesome Afghan president Hafizullah Amin in 1979[xvi]. At this crossroads of Russian history, the KGB’s illegals and special operators set the stage for Moscow’s disastrous occupation of Afghanistan and the long twilight of Soviet power.

With the fall of the Soviet Union and the liberalization, chaos and weakness of the 1990s, Russia experienced severe geopolitical and economic retrenchment. For the past decade, though, Moscow has worked to restore its regional and international position according to its national interests rather than Marxist-Leninist ideology. The former intelligence officer Vladimir Putin has been at the helm of this drive. Putin and his colleagues understand well the role of espionage as an instrument of policy. The Kremlin has put its spies from the GRU (military intelligence) and the SVR (the First Chief Directorate’s successor service) to good use. The SVR has been acquiring all manner of Western technologies, working in tandem with energy giants like Gazprom and Lukoil to advance Russian strategic objectives in Europe, and mounting influence operations against NATO expansion and the placement of U.S. missile defense systems on Russia’s frontiers.

The revelations from the June 29^th arrests in cities across America’s East Coast make it clear that Moscow Center still values its illegals for intelligence collection and other covert activities. The media has sensationalized the episode and lent it a comic atmosphere, largely drawn from the glamorous lifestyles of more peripheral players. But it would be a mistake to cast the captured officers as incompetents without significant details on their discovery by the FBI, or what the Russians knew, and when they knew it, from their own counterespionage work. Illegal intelligence officers are regarded as world-class both by the service that fields them, the SVR, and its foes.

Human intelligence is a rather murky business, and the public often only learns about the exploits of spies through their failures. In an analogous case four years ago in Canada, we were reminded by the talented Mr. Hampel that Russia continues to deploy deep-cover operatives to the West[xvii]. In 2008, it was revealed that an SVR illegal was the handler of Hermann Simm, the Estonian defense official who provided Moscow an insider’s view of NATO’s most guarded secrets[xviii].

While the SVR today plays a more limited role in special operations (the FSB is another matter entirely), its Directorate S is alive, kicking and operating throughout the world. The illegals represent the pinnacle of the Russian secret service tradition, a line of work with centuries of heritage, and one no less relevant in the contemporary Great Game.

[i] Makarevich, Eduard. Sekretnaya Agentura. Algoritm, 2007. Moskva. (p. 19)

[ii] Hingley, Ronald. The Russian Secret Police. Simon and Schuster, 1970. New York. (p. 119)

[iii] Prokhorov, Aleksandr, & Kolpakidi, Aleksandr. Vneshniaia Razvedka Rossii. Neva, 2001.St. Petersburg. (pp. 11-14)

[iv] Berdyaev, Nikolai. Opyt Eskhatologicheskoi Metaphiziki. Paris, 1946. (p. 187)

[v] Kolpakidi, Aleksandr & Prokhorov, Dimitry. Vneshniaia Razvedka Rossii. Neva, 2001. St. Petersburg. (p. 485)

[vi] Tsarev, Oleg, & West, Nigel. The Crown Jewels. Yale University Press, 1999. New Haven. (p. 44)

[vii] This is documented in a Politburo resolution from January 1930. Kolpakidi, Aleksandr & Prokhorov, Dimitry. Vneshniaia Razvedka Rossii. Neva, 2001. St. Petersburg. (p. 19-20)

[viii] Sever, Aleksandr. Istoria KGB. Algoritm, 2008. Moskva. (p. 48)

[ix] Kolpakidi, Aleksandr, & Prokhorov, Dimitry. KGB: Spetsoperatsii Sovetskoi Razvedki. Izdatelstvo AST, 2000. Moskva. (p. 489)

[x] Gladkov, Teodor. Legenda Sovetskoi Razvedki. Izdatelstvo Veche, 2001. Moskva.

[xi] Gladkov, Teodor. Lift v Razvedku. Olma-Press, 2002. Moskva. (p. 445)

[xii] Ibid. (p. 503)

[xiii] Kolpakidi, Aleksandr & Prokhorov, Dimitry. Vneshniaia Razvedka Rossii. Neva, 2001. St. Petersburg. (p. 72)

[xiv] Paporov, Yurii. Akademik Nelegalnykh Nauk. Izdatelskii Dom Neva, 2004. St. Petersburg. (p. 118)

[xv] Kolpakidi, Aleksandr, & Prokhorov, Dimitry. KGB: Spetsoperatsii Sovetskoi Razvedki. Izdatelstvo AST, 2000. Moskva. (p. 504)

[xvi] Drozdov, Yurii. Vymysl Iskliuchen. Almanakh Vympel, 1996. Moskva. (p. 187)

[xvii] http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/122209–russian-spy-had-all-tools-of-trade

[xviii] http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,691817,00.html

The Soviet KGB’s elite Ninth Directorate was responsible for leadership protection and well as guarding the Kremlin, Communist Party headquarters and other special sites. Learn how the KGB created not only the world’s top intelligence and counterintelligence services, but also a first-class bodyguard unit. 

A study of the history of personal protection in the USSR shows a clear tendency: if a good relationship developed between the principal and the chief of a detail, then the latter stayed loyal to him to the end, even after his death. And the other way around: arrogance, fault-finding, and ingratitude in communication with officers of the security detail could, at a tough moment, leave the leader of a vast country alone with his problems and his enemies.

The Era of Fancy Funerals

On November 15th, 1982, in the Column Hall of the USSR House of Unions, the ceremony for Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev’s final farewell took place. On that day was established a tradition significant for all present in the country’s main hall of mourning. First out of the “special zone” and to the coffin of the departed CPSU General Secretary would come his successor. Without exception all those present awaited this moment with the greatest trepidation, including leaders of top world powers who considered it necessary to personally come to the funeral of the Soviet head of state.

Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov’s funeral took place on February 14th, 1984. George Bush Sr., still US Vice President at that time, came, as did British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Both were present that day in the Column Hall. Now-president of NAST Russia (National Bodyguard Association) Dmitry Fonarev was responsible for meeting high-level guests at a special entrance at the House of Unions and their accompaniment to the place of farewell in the Column Hall. In his words, Margaret Thatcher, having seen that Konstantin Chernenko (chief of security Viktor Ladygin) appeared first out of the open door in a corner of the hall opposite her, said to those escorting her, “I’ll be back here again in a year.”

And so it happened. Thatcher kept her promise on March 13th, 1985, and this time saw that the first to walk out – namely walk out and not appear – of the “sacral” room to Konstantin Chernenko’s coffin was Mikhail Gorbachev (chief of security Nikolai Zemlyansky).

To give the reader an opportunity to better sense the scale of such mourning events, it is sufficient to tell what sort of workload was placed on the KGB’s Ninth Directorate during these four unhappy days for the nation.

And so by invitation of the CPSU Central Committee, there arrived the leaders of 35 countries. The number of delegations represented by other individuals composed up to 170. In obligatory fashion every head of a foreign state was provided a detail of officers from the 18th Section and a basic GON (Garazh Osobogo Naznachenia – Special Purpose Garage) automobile. Higher-level delegations from socialist countries were secured with living quarters in state mansions, and the rest were placed in their embassies and representations.

According to the plans of the protective service, which were composed back for Josef Stalin’s funeral, the rest of the mourning ceremonies also went in just the same manner.

Structure & Personnel

By 1985 the Ninth Directorate of the USSR KGB represented a magnificently tuned system that wholly corresponded to the requirements of the time. In a rough outline its basic structure can be described as follows:

First Department: Personal Protection

18th Section: Reserve Section for every principal under guard

Second Department: Counterintelligence (internal security service)

Fourth Department: Construction & Engineering

The Fifth Department unified three sections:

• First Section: Protection of the Kremlin and Red Square
• Second Section: Protection of Routes of Travel
• Third Section: Protection of Principals’ City Homes

Sixth Department: Special Kitchen

The Seventh Department brought together two sections:

• First Section: Protection of Country Dachas
• Second Section: Protection of State Mansions in Lenin Hills

Eight Department: Economic

Commandant’s Office of the Moscow Kremlin:

• Protection of the 14th Kremlin Corpus
• Kremlin Regiment

Protection of CPSU Central Committee Buildings on Staraya Square

Commandant’s Office for Protection of the Council of Ministers

Special-Purpose Garage (GON)

Cadres Department

Department of Service & Combat Training (Directorate Headquarters)

The personnel of the Ninth Directorate composed slightly more than 5,000 men, including officers, warrant officers, and civilians. Candidates for an officer position in the directorate underwent standard half-year personnel vetting by the KGB and then the “Young Combatant’s Course” at the Kupavna special training center. According to the established order, with little exceptions, officers who had worked in exemplary fashion in the directorate for no less than three years were permitted into the First Department. Chiefs of detail [American terminology: Agent-In-Charge, AIC] as a rule were appointed from officers of the 18th Section who had a minimum work experience of ten years.

The First Department was headed by a veteran of the Great Fatherland War, Maj. Gen. Nikolai Pavlovich Rogov, whom officers with love and respect called “the White General” for his noble gray streak. Nikolai Rogov was replaced by the legendary Mikhail Vladimirovich Titkov, who undertook his entire professional path, from warrant officer to general, in the Ninth Directorate.

By the middle of the 1980’s, the KGB Ninth Directorate essentially presented a powerful and rigidly centralized system, the leader of which had direct access to the head of the state. Alongside that at his “disposal” was all the might of both the Soviet KGB and MVD. Concerning the army, by his position the minister of defense was also a member of the Politburo, and therefore he was also protected by officers of the KGB Ninth Directorate. Moreover, officers on the USSR minister of defense’s detail worked in military uniforms as majors – corresponding to their KGB rank – and one could imagine how many curious situations arose in their work when they put multi-starred army generals in their proper place…

Original Article: Моисеев, Александр. “Охрана генсеку не указ.” Военное обозрение, 19 декабря 2015-го года. 

Translated by Mark Hackard. 

In late 1943 SS commando Otto Skorzeny, known as “the most dangerous man in Europe,” was tasked by Hitler with a daunting mission: kill Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill, the Big Three, in Tehran, Iran. The bold plan, code-named Unternehmen Weitsprung (Operation Long Jump), might even have succeeded but for the efforts of Allied intelligence services. Below is the story of Ivan Agayants, Soviet NKVD resident in Tehran, who played a key role in foiling Berlin’s assassination plot. 

In the old Soviet action film Tehran-43, the fearless and sexy intelligence officer sent from Moscow to Iran’s capital with a special mission dashingly neutralized Hitler’s terrorists, who were preparing the assassination of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill. In that film there are three truths. The first: At the end of 1943 in Tehran, the Big Three Conference took place. The second truth: the fascists were preparing an assassination attempt on the leaders of the USSR, USA, and Great Britain. And the third: Soviet intelligence liquidated the terrorists.

But there’s one untruth in the film: this antiterrorist operation, which became a classic one, was executed not by a Fatherland-style James Bond, but by our intelligence resident in Tehran, Ivan Ivanovich Agayants. A man who by his outer appearance in no way looked like a super-spy: thin, tall, worn out by tuberculosis, with a quiet voice and hurried gait, he sooner looked the part of a professor, musician, or lawyer. He had a Walther with his name engraved on it, and also shot excellently at the range, but not once in life did he use his pistol for “business.” His weapon was a thorough knowledge of the art of intelligence, the ability to orient oneself at a moment’s notice in any circumstances, and to profoundly analyze them from all angles, evaluate, and make the most rational decision. And his achievements aren’t limited to his Tehran period.

***

On an August day in 1943, Soviet intelligence resident in Tehran Ivan Agayants received an order from Moscow to immediately fly out to Algiers under the passport of a USSR representative on the Repatriation Commission with the name Ivan Avalov and participate in organizing USSR representations attached to the French National Committee (Comité national français – CNF).

This was the official version of the trip, or, as they say in intelligence, the legend. In reality the Soviet intelligence officer was given the assignment to figure out what the FNC under de Gaulle represented, what real powers stood behind it, and what were the chances of de Gaulle becoming France’s national leader. It was also necessary to clarify the general’s views on the postwar arrangement of Europe and the character of his relations with the Americans and British. And also, of course, to take interest as to what US and British intelligence were doing in Algiers and what were there positions in the CNF.

Who are You, General de Gaulle? 

The immediacy of the assignment, just as its importance, were explained sufficiently simply. In another month the Big Three Conference would open in Tehran – with Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill. And one of its key issues was considered the postwar ordering of Europe.

Stalin possessed reliable intelligence information on how postwar France would be envisioned in Washington and London. He also knew that the Americans were placing their bets on General Giraud, and with his help they were attempting to gain control of the French Resistance and establish military and political control over North Africa – Algeria, Tunis, and Morocco, French colonies. The Americans considered the main obstacle on the path to reaching these objectives to be General de Gaulle. And therefore, with the English, they did everything possible and impossible, as Anthony Eden expressed, to “not give de Gaulle the slightest chance of creating a unified French government before the Allied landing in France, moreover to form a government, since by that time he’d be unable to remove from power.”

Stalin knew all of this. But he had hazy representations about General de Gaulle himself, his real possibilities, and his attitude toward the Soviet Union, the United States, and Great Britain. It behooved Agayants to fill in this essential blank spot.

On September 3rd, 1943, I visited General de Gaulle upon his invitation. At the beginning of the conversation he took interest in the situation on the Soviet-German front, and attentively hearing me out, noted that the Germans still possess sufficiently large reserves. And right then he emphasized that he was sure of the Red Army’s victory, since it had many advantages.

In relation to the landing of Allied forces in Calabria, de Gaulle noted, not without irony, that military action there was conducted in a fashion not shabby or shoddy, since there were ‘very high mountains.’ And already in full seriousness he continued that allied forces for the first time had to clash with German divisions. And although those divisions had recently been subjected to powerful blows in Sicily, they were obviously still strong enough to oppose Anglo-American forces.

Concerning the CNF, de Gaulle quite optimistically evaluated its current position and near-term prospects. Along with that, he added that the opening of a Soviet representation attached to the Committee bore witness to the genuinely friendly intentions of the Soviet government with respect to France, facilitated the strengthening of French unity, and provided the Committee and opportunity to decisively oppose American interference in its affairs. Frankly recognizing the presence of serious disagreements with Giraud, the general expressed firm resolution to remove all his political opponents from their posts, including Giraud. In his words, just today a Committee session had taken place, and the decision had been taken to hand over Petain and his supporters to justice at the first opportunity. ‘Let’s see now if the Americans and Giraud would dare do bring the Vichy men to Algeria,’ de Gaulle concluded.

Then he crossed over to the matter of principals of Europe’s political organization after the war. He thought that Europe should be based on friendship between the USSR, France, and Britain. But the primary role should have been played only by the USSR and France. But Britain, as a great power, had its interests mainly outside of Europe. Therefore, it should be engaged first and foremost in non-European problems. Concerning the United States, in the general’s words, they also could not stand aside from the resolution of international issues. ‘Nonetheless, Europe’ – as if he were summing it up – ‘should define itself. We should also organize organize postwar Europe. Jointly, it will be easier for us to decide Germany’s fate.’

Already bidding farewell, de Gaulle acquainted me with one of his relatives, a young French intelligence officer who had recently arrived from Germany, where he met with an officer who had been in the German concentration camp in Lubeck. In his words, Josef Stalin’s son is confined in this camp. He was holding up well, although he has been subjected to mockery and torture. According to de Gaulle, there is the possibility of setting up correspondence with Stalin’s son through his people. I thanked de Gaulle for this message.

Avalov

Two days later a second information report from “Avalov” arrived in Moscow. Then a third, a fourth, a fifth… And each of them were accounted for not only in the position of the Soviet delegation at the Tehran Conference, but also, what is much more important, during the identification and development of Soviet-French relations after the war.

Returning to Tehran from Algiers, as the head of the residency, Ivan Agayants had already been included into preparations for the meeting of the Big Three, first and foremost for ensuring its security.

Preparing to Jump

Long Jump. Such was the code name of the commando-terrorist operation that was developed in the strictest secrecy at a top-secret SS base in the Danish capital of Copenhagen.

“We’ll repeat the jump in Abruzzo. Only this will be a long jump! We’ll liquidate the Big Three and turn the course of the war. We’ll kidnap Roosevelt so that it will be easier for the Führer to reach terms with America,” boastingly announced one of the designers of the operation, SS Sturmbannführer Hans Ulrich Von Ortel. The designation of this difficult-to-reach place in the Italian Alps circulated the entire world press after Mussolini, overthrown by the Italians, was whisked away and brought to Germany in a special Fieseler Storch airplane in July of 1943.This operation, unique in its own way, was brilliantly executed by SS Sturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny, whom Nazi propaganda called an idol of the Germanic race. When the idea for “Long Jump” was born in Berlin, the choice naturally fell upon Otto Skorzeny. But here the idol of the Germanic race didn’t get lucky. He was outplayed by Ivan Agayants.

“On November 20th, 1941, packing all our things into our suitcases, we got onto an old bomber that was to bring us to Tehran,” Elena Ilyinichna, Agayants’ spouse and partner in battle.

However, sitting down in the plane was an elastic conception. Since I was expecting a child, I situated myself on that the accommodating pilots had set in the bomb compartment. Ivan say Turkish-style over the bomb bay, which caused no small number of jokes and enlivened the flight. Over the Caucasus our plane was shot at, but everything came out safely.”

The first month we lived in the house of Andrei Andreevich Smirnov, the Soviet ambassador in Tehran. We were placed in a somewhat dark entryway where an old couch stood. On it was born our daughter, Acha. Ivan Ivanovich and Kolya, my son from my first marriage, slept on the floor. The ambassador invited Ivan Ivanovich to his quarters, but he didn’t want to leave me alone. Finally we were allotted two rooms and everything shook itself out.

Agayants began his activity as Soviet intelligence resident in Tehran with the detailed study of the local situation, and he went to the intelligence leadership with a proposal to fundamentally reevaluate all of the residency’s work. “Our apparatus,” he wrote in his report to the Center, “is loaded down with work with materials and agents that nevertheless don’t shed light on issues of political intelligence and don’t answer to the everyday needs of our diplomatic and political work in the country. Neither political information on phenomena of the country’s internal and external life nor work on these materials are the main content of the “office’s” activity… Here we are occupied primarily with matters of security and counterintelligence, which bring our agent-operational work closer to the tasks of our internal organs.”

The critical analysis of the residency’s activity was reinforced in the report by an extensive plan for its reorganization and shift toward offensive intelligence work. The resident’s initiative caused an ambiguous reaction in the Center. After all, in Tehran residency alone there were several dozen operations officers, and just as many in the eight sub-residencies active in other Iranian cities. And Agayants was proposing re-making this machine all over again. Was Agayants, who had barely just turned 32, up for it? Nonetheless, although with some qualifications, the resident’s proposals were approved.

Receiving the “go” from the Center, Agayants undertook a stringent “revision” of the agent apparatus he inherited. Due to a lack of need, many agents were excluded from the network. However, a decision on each of them was taken after a thorough weighing of all pros and cons. For example, Vera, recruited in Stockholm and the wife of a high-level official at the Iranian embassy there, was part of the agent apparatus. At that time in Sweden, she rendered Soviet intelligence tangible assistance. When she returned to Tehran, she confirmed her readiness to continue the partnership. Her intelligence possibilities, however, were seen as extremely insignificant by the residency. By the time of Ivan Ivanovich’s arrival, the time had come for a decision to refuse Vera’s services. In particular, the intelligence officer who handled her case insisted upon this during the “revision.” Agayants spent several evenings with him before convincing him to use Vera’s proximity to the Shah’s family, especially to the older princess, in the interests of Soviet intelligence, as well as the official position of her husband, who occupied a rather high post in the Iranian foreign ministry and was under his wife’s thumb. His urging, as it turned out, wasn’t in vain. Soon important information on the Shah’s foreign policy plans began flowing from Vera, as well as operational intelligence that facilitated the acquisition of agents in the leaderships of the leading political parties, the state bureaucracy, and even in the Shah’s inner circle.

Agayants dedicated special attention to the creation of dependable agent positions in the higher echelons of Iran’s army. “We cannot and must not limit ourselves only to sources of information. It is important to access development targets, who, aside from information we need, would also possess significant influence in the army and officer corps and would be courageous and decisive in practical action,” he instructed the residency’s staff. And soon “their people” appeared next to the war minister, in the leadership of army intelligence and other special services, and among the Shah’s advisors. Henceforth reliable information not only on the plans and intentions of the Iranian government went to Iran, but also information on the measures planned by the residency to ensure the security and integrity of strategic shipments (tin, rubber, etc.) flowing to the Soviet Union from the Persian Gulf region through the ports of Dampertshah, Bushehr, and Qar. Reliable agent control was established over all key points on Iran’s borders with the Soviet Union, Turkey, and Afghanistan.

The British intelligence station was also taken under firm control; as was ascertained, it was engaged in activity far from friendly in relation to the Soviet Union. It was headed at that time by Oliver Baldwin, the son of Great Britain’s former prime minister. The British demonstrated an enviable activism in building bridges with anti-Soviet nationalist organizations active in the deep underground on the territory of Soviet Armenia. With that objective they sent the experienced intelligence officer Phillip Thornton across the Turkish-Soviet frontier into Armenia. He was ordered to make contact with the leadership of the Dashnaktsutyun and make an agreement on cooperation. The British didn’t suspect that this visit allowed the Tehran residency to discover the chieftains of the Dashnaktsutyun, establish their places of residence, and get a clear idea of this organization’s structure, the principles of joint action among its branches, and its communications channels. The rest, as it’s said, was a technical matter for the USSR state security organs’ internal units.

Jump, Interrupted

Agayants was dealt a special headache, of course, by Germany’s intelligence services, which had firmly entrenched themselves in Iran largely thanks to the elderly Shah’s sympathies for Hitler.

In the Tabriz region, in particular, Berthold Schultze-Holtus’ group was active. This Abwehr station chief at first acted as the German consul in Tabriz in a fully official capacity. But then he went underground, transforming into a mullah with a beard red from henna. In the summer of 1943, not long before the meeting of the Big Three, from Berlin he received the order to settle in with the Qashqai tribes around Isfahan. Soon paratroopers from Otto Skorzeny’s team were dropped there, and they were equipped with a radio transmitter, explosives, and an entire arsenal of all possible weaponry.

Almost simultaneously with Schultze-Holtus, Gestapo station chief Franz Meyer, who group was active in direct proximity to Iran’s capital. Meyer himself turned from a German businessman into an Iranian farmhand working as a gravedigger at an Armenian cemetery. On the eve of the Tehran Conference, he was also sent six of Skorzeny’s SS paratroopers.

Schultze-Holtus and Meyer maintained constant communications with Berlin and between each other, while they coordinated their everyday work with Müller, the Abwehr’s main station chief in Tehran.

Such were the main links of the mechanism intended to ensure the successful execution of Operation Long Jump. Otto Skorzeny, of course, didn’t suspect that his every move was tightly monitored by Ivan Agayants, and that with the coming of “Day X,” Schultze-Holtus and Meyer’s groups would be taken out of the game at lightning speed. And there wouldn’t be any jump.

With Müller such a story came to be: Possessing information that this Abwehr ace had long been studied by Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), Agayants offered the British to combine their efforts. From a mutual consensus it was decided to not touch Müller a while longer in order to discover his agent network and all his connections in the Iranian establishment. This gentlemen’s agreement, however, was violated by the British, who, not even informing their Soviet colleagues, seized Müller literally a day before the Tehran Conference began its work.

Information on Long Jump was brought by Vyacheslav Molotov to Averell Harriman, then-US ambassador in Moscow, who was part of the American delegation in Tehran. Simultaneously Stalin’s offer for Roosevelt to stay in the Soviet embassy – for security considerations – was relayed. The American president accepted the proposal, to Churchill’s obvious dissatisfaction. Roosevelt, after all, had been offered to stay in the British embassy, the territory of which adjoined the Soviet one. But the British proposal remained without an answer.

In the course of one night several rooms were furnished for Roosevelt and his service personnel in the Soviet embassy’s main building, to where he immediately moved. “During the Tehran Conference,” recalls Elena Ilyinichna, “Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, and Mikoyan were situated in our rooms and the ambassador’s apartment. A special facility was prepared for Roosevelt. Our family moved over to the apartments where the Shah’s harem was at one time. It was around 500 meters to the house in which the sessions were underway. I worked at the conference as a stenographer…”

On one of the days we were brought to our feet. During the negotiations in the conference hall, Roosevelt wrote something on a sheet of paper and through his assistant passed it to Churchill. Churchill read it, wrote an answer, and then passed the note to Roosevelt. Stalin didn’t show dissatisfaction, but immediately after the negotiations, he called in Ivan Ivanovich and ordered him to move heaven and earth to get a hold of the accursed note in order to uncover the ‘secret correspondence.’ They found the paper and reported immediately. ‘Sir! Your fly is unzipped,’ was written in Roosevelt’s handwriting. Churchill answered: ‘The old eagle won’t fall out of the nest.’ Stalin was very pleased that the Anglo-American collusion was limited to such an innocent subject. Roosevelt, by the way, didn’t once go to Churchill’s residence. The entire time he stayed on the territory of the Soviet embassy.

From November 28th to December 2nd, the Tehran residency was working 24 hours a day. The entire agent network was activated. All information meriting attention Ivan Ivanovich expeditiously reported to “Uncle Joe” himself.  Soviet intelligence officers solved their professional problems themselves. “Even I had to participate in dramatic measures to liquidate enemy agents,” admitted Elena Ilyinichna. Elena was not just the wife of the resident, but also an operations officer who completed her 20 years of service in foreign intelligence at the rank of colonel.

One such operation was carried out jointly with our military. I remember how one of the most malignant foreign agents who was acting against us in Tehran suddenly began enthusiastically courting me. Our military intelligence received the assignment to take him out of the game. We jointly developed a plan for my ‘date’ with him, during which I was supposed to throw a specially sewn bag over my admirer and tie him up. Then I was to deliver him where he needed to be by automobile, which was also done.

Ivan Agayants worked in Iran until the spring of 1946. Periodically he would travel to Algeria for meetings with General de Gaulle and his closest fellow officers. He also carried out Moscow’s other assignments, including rather delicate ones. In particular, he had the occasion to visit Kurdish-populated regions of Iran several times incognito. The Kurds had raised a rebellion against the Shah’s regime, and at the same time had declared Moscow their enemy, as the USSR was friends with the Shah. As a result of substantive and skillfully executed discussions with influential elders and religious leaders from the Kurdish tribes, Agayants completely cured an unnecessary “headache” for Moscow.

Work Translated: Жемчугов, Аркадий. Шпион в окружении Андропова: Разведка в лицах и событиях. М: Вече, 2004.

Translated by Mark Hackard.