The Sword and the Shield

^SIX WAR

During the later months of 1940, with Trotsky dead and the worst of the blood-letting inside INO at an end, the Centre sought to rebuild its foreign intelligence network. Until the Great Terror, all new recruits to INO had been trained individually at secret apartments in Moscow and kept strictly apart from other trainees. By 1938, however, so many INO officers had been unmasked as (imaginary) enemies of the people that the Centre decided group training was required to increase the flow of new recruits. NKVD order no. 00648 of October 3 set up the Soviet Union’s first foreign intelligence training school, hidden from public view in the middle of a wood at Balashikha, fifteen miles east of the Moscow ringroad. Given the official title Shkola Osobogo Naznacheniya (Special Purpose School), but better known by the acronym SHON, it drew its recruits either from Party and Komsomol members with higher education or from new university graduates in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and elsewhere.¹

Since most of the new recruits had experienced only the cramped, squalid living conditions of crowded city apartment blocks, collective farms and army barracks, an attempt was made to introduce them to gracious living so that they would feel at ease in Western “high society.” Their rooms were furnished with what an official history solemnly describes as “rugs, comfortable and beautiful furniture, and tastefully chosen pictures on the walls, with excellent bed linens and expensive bedspreads.”² With no experience of personal privacy, the trainees would have been disoriented by being accommodated separately even if space had allowed, and so were housed two to a room. The curriculum included four hours’ teaching a day on foreign languages, two hours on intelligence tradecraft, and lectures on the CPSU, history, diplomacy, philosophy, religion and painting—an eclectic mix designed both to reinforce their ideological orthodoxy and to acquaint them with Western bourgeois culture.³ There were also regular musical evenings. Instructors with experience living in the West gave the trainees crash courses in bourgeois manners, diplomatic etiquette, fashionable dressing and “good taste.”⁴ During its first three years, SHON taught annual intakes totalling about 120 trainees—all but four of them male.⁵

The most successful of SHON’s first intake of students was Pavel Mikhailovich Fitin, whose early career had been spent in an agricultural publishing house. In February 1938 he had been recruited by the NKVD’s internal training school to fill one of the many vacancies caused by the liquidation of “enemies of the people” within its ranks. In October he was transferred to SHON, where, according to an official hagiography, his “high intellect and outstanding organizational ability” made an immediate impression. After only a few months, with his training still incomplete, he was drafted into foreign intelligence. In May 1939 he was appointed head of INO. At age thirty-one, Fitin was both the youngest and most inexperienced foreign intelligence chief in Soviet history. At the time of his sudden promotion his prospects must have seemed poor. During the chaotic previous fifteen months three of his predecessors had been liquidated and a fourth transferred.⁶ Fitin, however, proved remarkably tenacious. He remained head of INO for seven years, the longest period anyone had held that office since the 1920s, before losing favor and returning to provincial obscurity.⁷

Towards the end of 1940, four INO officers were despatched to London on Fitin’s orders to reopen the legal residency. The new resident was Anatoli Veniaminovich Gorsky (codenamed VADIM), the last intelligence officer to be withdrawn from London before the residency had closed that February.⁸ Gorsky was a grimly efficient, humorless, orthodox Stalinist, a far cry from the Great Illegals of the mid-1930s. Blunt found him “flat-footed” and unsympathetic.⁹ Another of his wartime agents described him as “a short, fattish man in his mid-thirties, with blond hair pushed straight back and glasses that failed to mask a pair of shrewd, cold eyes.”¹⁰ Like Fitin, Gorsky owed his rapid promotion to the recent liquidation of most of his colleagues.

Gorsky returned to London, however, far better briefed than during his previous tour of duty, when he had been forced to ask the Centre for background material on Kim Philby.¹¹ On Christmas Eve 1940 he reported that he had renewed contact with SÖHNCHEN. The Centre appeared jubilant at Gorsky’s report. In the summer of 1940 Burgess had succeeded in recruiting Philby to Section D of SIS, which soon afterwards was merged into a new organization, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), instructed by Churchill to “set Europe ablaze” through subversive warfare behind enemy lines. Following the six-week defeat of France and the Low Countries, the Prime Minister’s orders proved wildly optimistic. The Centre, however, warmly welcomed Gorsky’s report that Philby “was working as a political instructor at the training center of the British Intelligence Service preparing sabotage agents to be sent to Europe.” There was, however, one major surprise in Philby’s early reports. “According to SÖHNCHEN’s date,” Gorsky informed the Centre, “[SOE] has not sent its agents to the USSR yet and is not even training them yet. The USSR is tenth on the list of countries to which agents are to be sent.” Wrongly convinced that the Soviet Union remained a priority target, a skeptical desk officer in the Centre underlined this passage and placed two large red question marks in the margin.¹²

Early in 1941, the London residency renewed contact with the other members of the Five. Maclean continued to provide large numbers of Foreign Office documents. Unlike Philby, Burgess had failed to secure a transfer from Section D of SIS to SOE and had returned to the BBC. Blunt, however, had succeeded in entering the Security Service, MI5, in the summer of 1940. As well as providing large amounts of material from MI5 files, Blunt also ran as a sub-agent one of his former Cambridge pupils, Leo Long (codenamed ELLI), who worked in military intelligence.¹³ Among the early intelligence provided by Blunt from MI5 files was evidence that during the two years before the outbreak of the Second World War the NKVD had abandoned one of its best-placed British agents. In the summer of 1937, at the height of the paranoia generated by the Great Terror, the Centre had jumped to the absurd conclusion that Captain King, the Foreign Office cipher clerk recruited three years earlier, had been betrayed to British intelligence by Teodor Maly, the illegal resident in London. Blunt revealed that King had gone undetected until his identification by a Soviet defector at the outbreak of war.¹⁴

Cairncross too had succeeded in occupying what the Centre considered a prime position in Whitehall. In September 1940 he left the Treasury to become private secretary to one of Churchill’s ministers, Lord Hankey, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Though not a member of the War Cabinet (initially composed of only five senior ministers), Hankey received all cabinet papers, chaired many secret committees and was responsible for overseeing the work of the intelligence services.¹⁵ By the end of the year Cairncross was providing so many classified documents—among them War Cabinet minutes, SIS reports, Foreign Office telegrams and General Staff assessments—that Gorsky complained there was far too much to transmit in cipher.¹⁶

During 1941 London was easily the NKVD’s most productive legal residency. According to the Centre’s secret statistics, the residency forwarded to Moscow 7,867 classified political and diplomatic documents, 715 on military matters, 127 on economic affairs and 51 on British intelligence.¹⁷ In addition it provided many other reports based on verbal information from the Five and other agents. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, until the Soviet Union entered the war, most of this treasure trove of high-grade intelligence was simply wasted. Stalin’s understanding of British policy was so distorted by conspiracy theory that no amount of good intelligence was likely to enlighten him. Despite the fact that Britain and Germany were at war, he continued to believe—as he had done since the mid-1930s—that the British were plotting to embroil him with Hitler. His belief in a non-existent British conspiracy helped to blind him to the existence of a real German plot to invade the Soviet Union.

THE LEGAL RESIDENCY in the Berlin embassy resumed work in 1940 at about the same time as that in London. The NKVD had lost touch with its most important German agent, Arvid Harnack (codenamed CORSICAN), an official in the Economics Ministry, in June 1938. Early on the morning of September 17,1940 contact was resumed by the newly arrived deputy Berlin resident, Aleksandr Mikhailovich Korotkov (alias “Erdberg,” codenamed SASHA and DLINNY). The fact that Korotkov simply knocked on Harnack’s door and arranged their next meeting in the Soviet embassy is evidence both of the decline in tradecraft caused by the liquidation of most experienced INO officers and of the fact that the Gestapo was at this stage of the war far less omnipresent than was widely supposed.

A fellow member of the German Communist underground, Reinhold Schönbrunn, later recalled:

Like Burgess and Philby, Harnack was so highly motivated that he had carried on recruiting intelligence sources even during the two and a quarter years that he was out of contact with the Centre. Korotkov reported that Harnack was in touch with a loose network of about sixty people, although he could not “personally vouch for every person”:

The most important of the sources cultivated by Harnack was a lieutenant in the Luftwaffe intelligence service, Harro Schulze-Boysen, codenamed STARSHINA (“Senior”), whose dynamic personality provided a striking contrast with that of the dour Harnack. Leopold Trepper, who knew them both, found Schulze-Boysen “as passionate and hot-headed as Arvid Harnack was calm and reflective.” His tall, athletic frame, fair hair, blue eyes and Aryan features were far removed from the Gestapo stereotype of the Communist subversive. On March 15, 1941 the Centre ordered Korotkov to make direct contact with Schulze-Boysen and persuade him to form his own network of informants independent of Harnack. Schulze-Boysen needed little persuasion.¹⁹

Even a more experienced intelligence officer than Korotkov would have found Harnack, Schulze-Boysen and their groups of agents difficult to run. Both networks put themselves at increased risk by combining covert opposition to the Nazi regime with espionage for the Soviet Union. Schulze-Boysen and his glamorous wife, Libertas, held evening discussion groups for members of, and potential recruits to, an anti-Hitler underground. Libertas’s many lovers added to the danger of discovery. As young resisters pasted anti-Nazi posters on Berlin walls, Schulze-Boysen stood guard over them dressed in his Luftwaffe uniform, with his pistol at the ready and the safety catch off.²⁰

The most important intelligence provided by the Harnack and Schulze-Boysen networks in the first half of 1941 concerned Hitler’s preparations for operation BARBAROSSA, the invasion of Russia. On June 16 Korotkov cabled the Centre that intelligence from the two networks indicated that “[a]ll of the military training by Germany in preparation for its attack on the Soviet Union is complete, and the strike may be expected at any time.”²¹ Similar intelligence arrived from NKVD sources as far afield as China and Japan. Later KGB historians counted “over a hundred” intelligence warnings of preparations for the German attack forwarded to Stalin by Fitin between January 1 and June 21.²² Others came from military intelligence. All were wasted. Stalin was as resistant to good intelligence from Germany as he was to good intelligence from Britain.

The Great Terror had institutionalized the paranoid strain in Soviet intelligence assessment. Many NKVD officers shared, if usually to a less grotesque degree, Stalin’s addiction to conspiracy theory. None the less, the main blame for the catastrophic failure to foresee the surprise attack on June 22 belongs to Stalin himself, who continued to act as his own chief intelligence analyst. Stalin did not merely ignore a series of wholly accurate warnings. He denounced many of those who provided them. His response to an NKVD report from Schulze-Boysen on June 16 was the obscene minute: “You can send your ‘source’ from the German air force to his whore of a mother! This is not a ‘source’ but a disinformer. J. Stalin.”²³ Stalin also heaped abuse on the great GRU illegal Richard Sorge, who sent similar warnings from Tokyo, where he had penetrated the German embassy and seduced the ambassador’s wife. Sorge’s warnings of operation BARBAROSSA were dismissed by Stalin as disinformation from a lying “shit who has set himself up with some small factories and brothels in Japan.”²⁴

Stalin was much less suspicious of Adolf Hitler than of Winston Churchill, the evil genius who had preached an anti-Bolshevik crusade in the civil war twenty years earlier and had been plotting against the Soviet Union ever since. Behind many of the reports of impending German attack Stalin claimed to detect a disinformation campaign by Churchill designed to continue the long-standing British plot to embroil him with Hitler. Churchill’s personal warnings to Stalin of preparations for BARBAROSSA only heightened his suspicions. From the intelligence reports sent by the London residency, Stalin almost certainly knew that until June 1941 the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), the body responsible for the main British intelligence assessments, did not believe that Hitler was preparing an invasion. It reported to Churchill as late as May 23 that “the advantages… to Germany of concluding an agreement with the USSR are overwhelming.”²⁵ The JIC assessments were probably regarded by Stalin as further proof that Churchill’s warnings were intended to deceive him. Stalin’s deep suspicions of Churchill and of British policy in general were cleverly exploited by the Germans. As part of the deception operation which preceded BARBAROSSA, the Abwehr, German military intelligence, spread reports that rumors of an impending German attack were part of a British disinformation campaign.

By early June, reports of German troop movements toward the Soviet frontier were too numerous to be explained, even by Stalin, simply as British disinformation. At a private lunch in the German embassy in Moscow, the ambassador, Count von der Schulenberg, revealed that Hitler had definitely decided on invasion. “You will ask me why I am doing this,” he said to the astonished Soviet ambassador to Germany, Vladimir Georgyevich Dekanozov. “I was raised in the spirit of Bismarck, who was always an opponent of war with Russia.” Stalin’s response was to tell the Politburo, “Disinformation has now reached ambassadorial level!”²⁶ On June 9, or soon afterwards, however, Stalin received a report that the German embassy had been sent orders by telegram to prepare for evacuation within a week and had begun burning documents in the basement.²⁷

Though Stalin remained preoccupied by a non-existent British conspiracy, he increasingly began to suspect a German plot as well—though not one which aimed at surprise attack. As it became ever more difficult to conceal German troop movements, the Abwehr spread rumors that Hitler was preparing to issue an ultimatum, backed by some display of military might, demanding new concessions from the Soviet Union. It was this illusory threat of an ultimatum, rather than the real threat of German invasion, which increasingly worried Stalin during the few weeks and days before BARBAROSSA. He was not alone. A succession of foreign statesmen and journalists were also taken in by the planted rumors of a German ultimatum.²⁸

Beria sought to protect his position as head of the NKVD by expressing mounting indignation at those inside and outside the NKVD who dared to send reports of preparations for a German invasion. On June 21, 1941 he ordered four NKVD officers who persisted in sending such reports to be “ground into labor camp dust.” He wrote to Stalin on the same day with his characteristic mix of brutality and sycophancy:

Also in jeopardy for providing intelligence on the forthcoming German invasion was the senior INO officer Vasili Mikhailovich Zarubin, later chief resident in the United States.³⁰ Early in 1941 Zarubin was sent to China to meet Walter Stennes, German adviser to the Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. Stennes had once been deputy head of Hitler’s stormtroopers, the Sturmabteilung, but developed a grudge against him after being sacked in 1931. In 1939 Stennes was approached by the NKVD Chungking residency and agreed to supply intelligence on Hitler. In February 1941 Zarubin reported to the Centre that a visitor from Berlin had secretly assured Stennes that “an attack against the USSR by the Germans… was being planned for the end of May this year” (the original date set by Hitler but later postponed). ³¹ Zarubin cabled on June 20: “The FRIEND [Stennes] repeats and confirms categorically—based on absolutely reliable information—that Hitler has completed preparations for war against the USSR.”³² Fitin outraged Beria by taking these and similar warnings seriously. An SVR official history concludes, probably correctly, “Only the outbreak of war saved P. M. Fitin from the firing squad.”³³

The devastating surprise achieved by the German invasion in the early hours of June 22 was made possible both by the nature of the Soviet intelligence system at the time and by the personal failings of the dictator who presided over it. In Whitehall the patient, if uninspired, examination of intelligence reports through the committee system eventually turned the belief that Germany saw the “overwhelming” advantages of a negotiated settlement with Russia into recognition that Hitler had decided to attack. In Moscow the whole system of intelligence assessment was dominated by the fearful sycophancy encapsulated in the formula “sniff out, suck up, survive,” and by a culture of conspiracy theory.

Stalin had institutionalized both a paranoid strain and a servile political correctness which continued to distort in greater or lesser degree all intelligence assessment even after the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War in 1941. From 1942 to 1944 the Cambridge Five, probably the ablest group of Soviet wartime agents, were to be seriously suspected by the Centre of being double agents controlled by British intelligence simply because their voluminous and highly classified intelligence sometimes failed to conform to Stalin’s conspiracy theories.³⁴ The responsibility, however, did not rest with Stalin alone. Some degree of distortion in intelligence assessment remained inherent in the autocratic nature of the Soviet system throughout the Cold War. The Centre always shrank from telling the Kremlin what it did not want to hear. The last head of KGB foreign intelligence, Leonid Shebarshin, confessed in 1992 that until Gorbachev introduced a measure of glasnost, the KGB “had to present its reports in a falsely positive light” which pandered to the predilections of the political leadership.³⁵

IN THE EARLY months of the Great Patriotic War, while the German forces advancing into Russia were sweeping all before them, Stalin faced the even more terrifying prospect of a two-front war. Ribbentrop instructed the German embassy in Japan, “Do everything to rouse the Japanese to begin war against Russia… Our goal remains to shake hands with the Japanese on the Trans-Siberian Railway before the beginning of winter.” Opinion in Tokyo was initially divided between those who favored the “northern solution” (war with the Soviet Union) and the supporters of the “southern solution” (war with Britain and the United States). Sorge, deeply distrusted by Stalin, sought to provide reassurance from Tokyo that the advocates of the “southern solution” were gaining the upper hand. But on October 18 Sorge was arrested and his spy ring rapidly rounded up.

SIGINT was more influential than Sorge in persuading Stalin that there would be no Japanese attack. Late in 1938 the combined NKVD/Fourth Department SIGINT unit had been broken up. The NKVD section moved into the former Hotel Select on Dzerzhinsky Street, where it concentrated on diplomatic traffic; most, but not all, military communications were the responsibility of the cryptanalysts of the GRU (successor to the Fourth Department). In February 1941 the NKVD cryptanalysts had been integrated into a new and enlarged Fifth (Cipher) Directorate, with, at its heart, a research section responsible for the attack on foreign codes and ciphers. The chief Japanese specialist in the section, Sergei Tolstoy, went on to become the most decorated Soviet cryptanalyst of the war, winning two Orders of Lenin. In the autumn of 1941, a group led by him replicated the success of American codebreakers a year earlier in breaking the main Japanese diplomatic cipher, codenamed by the Americans and since known to Western historians as PURPLE. The teetotal American codebreakers had celebrated their success by sending out for a case of Coca-Cola. Tolstoy is unlikely to have had time to celebrate at all. The Japanese diplomatic decrypts which he provided, however, were of enormous importance. Japan, they made clear, would not attack the Soviet Union.³⁶

The reassurance about Japanese intentions provided by SIGINT enabled Stalin to shift to the west half the divisional strength of the Far Eastern Command. During October and November 1941, between eight and ten rifle divisions, together with about a thousand tanks and a thousand aircraft, were flung into the fight against Germany. These forces, together with other Red Army divisions which had been held in reserve, may well have saved the Soviet Union from defeat. As Professor Richard Overy concludes in his study of the eastern front, “It was not the tough winter conditions that halted the German army [in December 1941] but the remarkable revival of Soviet military manpower after the terrible maulings of the summer and autumn.”³⁷

As well as providing reassurance that Japan did not propose to attack the Soviet Union, SIGINT also gave indications of its move towards war with Britain and the United States, though the diplomatic decrypts contained no mention of plans for a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. A decrypted telegram from Tokyo to its Berlin embassy (probably copied to the Moscow embassy) on November 27, 1941, ten days before Pearl Harbor, instructed the ambassador:

Soviet cryptanalysts, however, were unable to match the success of the British wartime SIGINT agency at Bletchley Park in breaking the main high-grade ciphers used by the German armed forces. They failed to do so partly for technological reasons. Soviet intelligence was unable to construct the powerful electronic “bombs,” first constructed at Bletchley Park in 1940 to break the daily settings of the German Enigma machine cipher. It was even further from being able to replicate COLOSSUS, the world’s first electronic computer used by Bletchley from 1943 to decrypt the Geheimschreiber messages (radio signals based on teleprinter impulses enciphered and deciphered automatically) which for the last two years of the war yielded more operational intelligence than the Enigma traffic. But there was a human as well as a technological explanation for the inferiority of Soviet to British SIGINT. The Soviet system would never have tolerated the remarkable infusion of unconventional youthful talent on which much of Bletchley’s success was built. Alan Turing—the brilliant eccentric who buried his life savings (converted into silver ingots) in the Bletchley Woods, forgot where he had hidden them, but went on to be chiefly responsible for the invention of COLOSSUS—was one of many British cryptanalysts who would surely have been incapable of conforming to the political correctness demanded by the Stalinist system.³⁹ Some British ULTRA—the SIGINT derived from decrypting high-grade enemy traffic—was, however, passed officially to Moscow in a disguised form, and in an undisguised form by several Soviet agents.⁴⁰

JUST AS THE KGB later sought to take refuge from the horrors of its Stalinist past by constructing a Leninist golden age of revolutionary purity, so it also sought to reinvent its record during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-5 as one of selfless heroism—best exemplified by its role in special operations and partisan warfare behind enemy lines. According to Pavel Anatolyevich Sudoplatov, head of the wartime NKVD Directorate for Special Tasks and Guerrilla Warfare, “This chapter in NKVD history is the only one that was not officially rewritten, since its accomplishments stood on their own merit and did not contain Stalinist crimes that had to be covered up.”⁴¹ In reality, the NKVD’s wartime record, like the rest of its history, was extensively doctored.

Among the best-publicized examples of the NKVD’s bravery behind enemy lines were the heroic deeds of its detachment in the Ukrainian Black Sea port of Odessa during the 907-day occupation by German and Romanian forces. The detachment based itself in the catacombs there, a maze of underground tunnels used to excavate sandstone for the construction of the elegant nineteenth-century buildings which still line many of Odessa’s streets and boulevards. With over a thousand kilometers of unmapped tunnels as well as numerous entrances and exits, the catacombs made an almost ideal base for partisan warfare. In 1969, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of VE Day, a section of the catacombs on the outskirts of Odessa was opened as the Museum of Partisan Glory, which throughout the remainder of the Soviet era received over a million visitors a year.⁴²

After the Second World War, however, the sometimes heroic story of the struggle to liberate Odessa from enemy occupation was hijacked by the KGB to refurbish its dubious wartime record. Pride of place in the Museum of Partisan Glory is given to the exploits of the NKVD detachment headed by Captain Vladimir Aleksandrovich Molodtsov, who was posthumously made a Hero of the Soviet Union and suffered the indignity of having his whole life transformed into that of a Stalinist plaster saint. The origins of Molodtsov’s heroism were officially traced back to selfless devotion in overfulfilling his norms as a miner during the first Five Year Plan. “What a wonderful thing it is,” he was said to have declared in 1930, “not to notice or watch the time during the working day, not to wait for the end of the shift but to seek to prolong it, to run behind the [coal] trolley, to be bathed in sweat and at the end of the shift to emerge victorious in fulfilling the plan!”⁴³

The Museum of Partisan Glory contains a “reconstruction” of the NKVD detachment’s underground headquarters, complete with dormitories, ammunition depot, workshops, fuel store, kitchen and meeting room with—inevitably—a portrait of Lenin (but not of Stalin) on the wall.⁴⁴ Nearby is a vertical shaft 17 meters long linking the headquarters to the surface, through which it received messages and food from its agents in Odessa. During the Soviet era numerous films, books, magazine and newspaper articles, many promoted by the KGB, celebrated the heroic feats of the NKVD detachment in holding at bay thousands of German and Romanian troops in Odessa before giving their lives in defense of the fatherland.

Mitrokhin owed his discovery of the true story of the catacombs to a colleague in the FCD Illegals Directorate S, who borrowed the multi-volume Odessa file and, when he returned it, told Mitrokhin he might find it interesting. The file began by recording the despatch of Molodtsov’s detachment of six NKVD officers to Odessa shortly before it fell to the Germans in October 1941, with orders to establish an underground residency which would organize reconnaissance, sabotage and special operations behind the German lines. In Odessa they were joined by thirteen members of the local NKVD Special Department, commanded by Lieutenant V. A. Kuznetsov. According to the official version of events, the two groups held a Party/Komsomol meeting on the evening of October 15 immediately before going down into the catacombs to set up their base. What actually took place, according to the KGB file, was a raucous dinner party and heavy drinking which ended in a fight between the Moscow and Odessa NKVD detachments. The next day the two groups entered the catacombs still at daggers drawn, with Molodtsov and Kuznetsov each claiming overall command. Over the next nine months Muscovites and Odessans combined operations against the Germans and Romanians with internecine warfare among themselves.⁴⁵

Molodtsov’s end may well have been genuinely heroic. According to the official Soviet version, he was captured by the enemy in July 1942 but refused to beg for his life, courageously telling his captors, “We are in our own country and will not ask the enemy for mercy.”⁴⁶ The rest of the history of the Odessa catacombs, however, was an NKVD horror story. After Molodtsov’s execution, Kuznetsov disarmed his detachment and put them under guard inside the catacombs. All but one, N. F. Abramov, were executed on Kuznetsov’s orders on charges of plotting against him. As conditions in the catacombs deteriorated, the Odessans then proceeded to fall out among themselves. The dwindling food supply became moldy; and, with their kerosene almost exhausted, the detachment was forced to live in semidarkness. On August 28 Kuznetsov shot one of his men, Molochny, for the theft of a piece of bread. On September 27 two others, Polschikov and Kovalchuk, were executed for stealing food and “lack of sexual discipline.” Fearing that he might be shot next, Abramov killed Kuznetsov a month later. In his notebook, later discovered in the catacombs and preserved in the KGB Odessa file, Abramov wrote:

By this time, following several other deaths at the hands of the enemy, only three NKVD officers remained alive in the catacombs: Abramov, Glushchenko and Litvinov. Abramov and Glushchenko together killed Litvinov, then began to eye each other suspiciously in the semi-darkness.

Glushchenko wrote in his diary that Abramov wanted to surrender: “We are beaten. There is no victory to wait for. He told me not to be frightened of committing treason or being shot as he has friends in German intelligence.” On February 18, 1943, apparently suffering from hallucinations, Glushchenko wrote, “[Abramov] was bending over, attending to his papers. I took my pistol from my belt and shot him in the back of the head.” Over the next few months Glushchenko spent much of his time outside the catacombs in his wife’s Odessa flat, finally abandoning the underground base on November 10, 1943. After the liberation of Odessa by the Red Army in April 1945 Glushchenko returned with members of the Ukrainian NKVD to collect equipment and compromising papers from the catacombs, but was fatally wounded when a grenade he picked up exploded in his hands.⁴⁷

For almost twenty years, the Centre believed that no survivor of the Odessa catacombs remained to cast doubt on the heroic myth it had constructed. In 1963, however, the KGB was disconcerted to discover that Abramov had not been killed by Glushchenko after all, but had escaped and was living in France. His father, who may also have known the true story of the Odessa catacombs, was reported to have emigrated to the United States. Abramov’s supposed widow, Nina Abramova, who had been working in the KGB First Chief Directorate, was quietly transferred to another job. The myth of the NKVD heroes of the Odessa catacombs was left undisturbed.⁴⁸

According to statistics in KGB files, the NKVD ran a total of 2,222 “operational combat groups” behind enemy lines during the Great Patriotic War.⁴⁹ Mitrokhin found no realistic appraisal, however, of the effectiveness of partisan warfare. Contrary to the claims of post-war Soviet hagiographers, the combat groups seem only rarely to have tied down German forces larger than themselves.⁵⁰ Because about half of all partisans were NKVD personnel or Party officials, they were frequently regarded with acute suspicion by the peasant population on whom they depended for local support. The virtual collapse of partisan warfare in the western Ukraine, for example, was due largely to the hostility of the inhabitants to the Party and the NKVD. Though partisan warfare became more effective after Stalingrad, there were important areas—notably Crimea and the steppes—where it never became a significant factor in the fighting on the eastern front.⁵¹

OUTSIDE EUROPE, THE NKVD’s most successful attacks on German targets were mounted by an illegal residency in Argentina,⁵² headed by Iosif Romualdovich Grigulevich (codenamed ARTUR), a veteran both of sabotage operations in the Spanish Civil War and of the first attempt to assassinate Trotsky in Mexico City.⁵³ In September 1941 an official Argentinian inquiry reached the hysterical conclusion, endorsed by the Chamber of Deputies but rejected by the government, that the German ambassador was the head of over half a million Nazi stormtroopers operating under cover in Latin America.⁵⁴ During the months after Pearl Harbor, Argentina and Chile were the only Latin American states not to break off diplomatic relations with Germany and Japan. The rumors of Nazi plots among Argentina’s quarter of a million German speakers, pro-German sympathies in its officer corps, and the presence of an Argentinian military purchasing mission in Berlin until 1944, helped to persuade the Centre that Argentina was a major Nazi base. Though this belief was greatly exaggerated, it was shared by OSS, the US wartime foreign intelligence agency, which reported that Dr. Ramón Castillo, president of Argentina from 1941 to 1943, was in the pay of Hitler.⁵⁵ Such reports, passed on to the Centre by its agents in OSS and the State Department,⁵⁶ doubtless reinforced Moscow’s suspicions of Nazi plots in Argentina.

After the outbreak of war the German merchant navy was unable to run the gauntlet of the Royal Navy and enter Argentinian ports. Grigulevich’s residency, however, reported in 1941 that copper, saltpetre, cotton and other strategic raw materials were being exported from Argentina in neutral vessels to Spain, whence they were being secretly transported overland through France to Germany. To disrupt this export trade, Grigulevich recruited a sabotage team of eight Communist dockyard workers and seamen, headed by a Polish immigrant, Feliks Klementyevich Verzhbitsky (codenamed BESSER), who in December 1941 obtained a job as a blacksmith in the port of Buenos Aires. The first major exploit of Verzhbitsky’s group was to burn down the German bookshop in Buenos Aires, which Grigulevich regarded as the main center of Nazi propaganda. Thereafter it concentrated on planting delayed-action incendiary devices on ships and in warehouses containing goods bound for Germany.⁵⁷ Grigulevich also ran smaller sabotage and intelligence networks in Chile and Uruguay. The approximately seventy agents in his far-flung illegal residency were to remain the basis of Soviet intelligence operations in Argentina, Uruguay and—to a lesser extent—Chile during the early years of the Cold War as well as the Second World War.⁵⁸

Between the beginning of 1942 and the summer of 1944, according to statistics in KGB files, over 150 successful incendiary attacks were mounted by Grigulevich’s agents against German cargoes, and an unspecified number of Spanish, Portuguese and Swedish vessels sunk. One, probably exaggerated, assessment by the Centre claims that the attacks succeeded early in 1944 in halting German exports from Buenos Aires.⁵⁹ A more serious problem for Germany than Soviet sabotage, however, was the change of government in Argentina. A military coup in the summer of 1943, followed by the uncovering of a Nazi espionage network, led Argentina to sever diplomatic relations with Germany in January 1944.⁶⁰

For most of the war communications between Grigulevich’s residency and the Centre were slow and spasmodic, depending on occasional couriers between Buenos Aires and the New York residency.⁶¹ In the summer of 1944, shortly after the NKGB had established a legal residency in Uruguay, Grigulevich was summoned to Montevideo to give a detailed report on his intelligence operations, finances and agent networks since the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. The Centre had become alarmed at the scale of his incendiary attacks on neutral shipping and feared that his cover might be blown. In September it ordered him to suspend sabotage operations and limit himself to intelligence collection in Argentina, Brazil and Chile.⁶² Once instructed to stop work by Grigulevich, Verzhbitsky began making grenades for the underground Argentinian Communist Party but was seriously injured in October by an explosion in his workshop which cost him his left arm and the sight in one eye. Grigulevich reported that he behaved with great bravery during police investigation, sticking to a prepared cover story that a personal enemy had planted explosives on him, hidden in a packet of dried milk. In 1945 Verzhbitsky was smuggled out of prison and exfiltrated by the Argentinian Communist Party across the border into Uruguay, where he lived on a Party pension.⁶³

Remarkable though they were, the sabotage operations run from Buenos Aires had no perceptible influence on the course of the Great Patriotic War. Once the alarmism of the summer of 1944 had died down, however, they greatly enhanced Grigulevich’s reputation in the Centre as saboteur and assassin. His successes in wartime Argentina help to explain his later selection for the most important assassination mission of the Cold War.⁶⁴ By contrast, Grigulevich’s chief saboteur, Verzhbitsky, was regarded as an embarrassment because of his disablement. His request to emigrate to the Soviet Union in 1946 was brusquely turned down. In 1955, however, when Verzhbitsky, by then completely blind, applied again, his application was accepted—possibly for fear that he might otherwise reveal his wartime role.⁶⁵ On arrival in the Soviet Union, Verzhbitsky was awarded an invalidity pension of 100 roubles a month, but his application for membership of the Soviet Communist Party was turned down.⁶⁶

DESPITE INDIVIDUAL ACTS of heroism, the NKVD and NKGB (as its security and intelligence components were renamed in 1943) deserve to be remembered less for their bravery during the Second World War than for their brutality. After the forcible incorporation into the Soviet Union of eastern Poland in September 1939, followed by the Baltic states and Moldavia in the summer of 1940, the NKVD quickly moved in to liquidate “class enemies” and cow the populations into submission.⁶⁷ On June 25, 1941, three days after the beginning of Hitler’s invasion, the NKVD was ordered to secure the rear of the Red Army by arresting deserters and enemy agents, protecting communications and liquidating isolated pockets of German troops. In August 1941 Soviet parachutists disguised as Germans landed among the villages of the Volga German Autonomous Region and asked to be hidden until the arrival of the Wehrmacht. When they were given shelter, the whole village was exterminated by the NKVD. All other Volga Germans, however loyal, were deported by the NKVD to Siberia and northern Kazakhstan, with enormous loss of life.⁶⁸

When the Red Army took the offensive in 1943, the NKVD followed in its wake to mop up resistance and subversion. Beria reported proudly to Stalin at the end of the year:

Of those arrested, 80,296 were “unmasked,” in many cases wrongly, as spies, traitors, deserters, bandits and “criminal elements.”

Stalin used the NKVD to punish and deport entire nations within the Soviet Union whom he accused of treachery: among them Chechens, Ingushi, Balkars, Karachai, Crimean Tartars, Kalmyks and Meskhetian Turks. In response to Stalin’s instructions to reward “those who have carried out the deportation order in an exemplary manner,” Beria replied:

As on this occasion, many of the NKVD and NKGB personnel decorated during the war received their medals not for valor against the enemy but for crimes against humanity.⁶⁹

THE WARTIME RECORD of Soviet intelligence on the eastern front was patchy. Up to the end of 1942 the main espionage system providing intelligence from Nazi Germany and occupied Europe was a loosely coordinated GRU illegal network linked to the NKVD Harnack and Schulze-Boysen groups, codenamed the Rote Kappelle (“Red Orchestra”) by the Abwehr. The “musicians” were the radio operators who sent coded messages to Moscow; the “conductor” was the Polish Jew Leopold Trepper, alias Jean Gilbert, known within the network as le grand chef. The Rote Kappelle had 117 agents: 48 in Germany, 35 in France, 17 in Belgium and 17 in Switzerland.⁷⁰ The network was gradually wound up during the later months of 1942 as German radio direction-finding tracked down the “musicians.” Trepper himself was captured as he sat in a dentist’s chair in occupied Paris on December 5. According to the Abwehr officer who arrested him, “For a second he was disturbed; then he said in perfect German, ‘You did a fine job.’” Only Rado’s GRU illegal residency in Switzerland, known as the Rote Drei after its three main radio transmitters, which was out of reach of German intelligence, continued work for another year until it was shut down by the Swiss.⁷¹

Though both Trepper and Rado were sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment in Moscow after the war, it was later alleged by Soviet historians that intelligence from the Rote Kappelle had been of enormous assistance to the Red Army. In reality, intelligence did not begin to have a significant influence on Soviet military operations until after Trepper was arrested and most of his network wound up. Military intelligence failed to detect the sudden German turn south which captured Kiev in September 1941, and was taken aback by the intensity of the October assault on Moscow. The loss of Kharkov in May 1942 was due partly to the fact that the Stavka (a wartime combination of GHQ and high command) was expecting another attack on the capital. The Wehrmacht’s move south in the summer again took the Stavka by surprise. Throughout the German advance to Stalingrad and the Caucasus, Soviet forces were constantly confused about where the next blow would fall. When the Red Army encircled Axis forces at Stalingrad in November 1942, it believed it had trapped 85,000 to 90,000 troops; in reality it had surrounded three times as many.⁷²

The NKVD’s main role at Stalingrad was less in providing good intelligence than in enforcing a ferocious discipline within the Red Army. About 13,500 Soviet soldiers were executed for “defeatism” and other breaches of military discipline in the course of the battle, usually by a squad from the NKVD Special Detachment. Before execution, most were ordered to strip so that their uniform and boots could be reused. The NKVD postal censorship seized on any unorthodox or politically incorrect comment in soldiers’ letters to their families as evidence of treachery. A lieutenant who wrote “German aircraft are very good… Our anti-aircraft people shoot down only very few of them” was, inevitably, condemned as a traitor. In the 62nd Army alone, in the first half of October 1942, the NKVD claimed that “military secrets were divulged in 12,747 letters.”⁷³ The great victory at Stalingrad, sealed by the surrender of the German Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, twenty-two generals and 91,000 troops early in 1943, was achieved in spite of, rather than because of, the contribution of the NKVD.

Stalingrad was followed by a major improvement in the quality of Soviet military intelligence on the eastern front, made possible in part by massive supplies of radio equipment from the Americans and the British.⁷⁴ At the end of 1942 the Stavka established special-purpose radio battalions, each equipped with eighteen to twenty radio-intercept receivers and four direction-finding sets. The result, according to a Soviet historian given access to the battalions’ records, was “a qualitative jump in the development of radio-electronic combat in the Soviet army.” Though Soviet cryptanalysts lacked the state-of-the-art technology which enabled Bletchley Park to decrypt high-grade Enigma and Geheimschreiber messages, they made major advances during 1943—reluctantly assisted by German cipher personnel captured at Stalingrad—in direction-finding, traffic analysis and the breaking of lower-grade hand ciphers. In 1942-3 they also had the benefit of Luftwaffe Enigma decrypts supplied by an agent inside Bletchley Park.

All these improvements were evident during the battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943 when the Red Army defeated the last great German offensive on the eastern front. Intelligence reports captured by the Wehrmacht from the Red Army during the battle revealed that Soviet SIGINT had located the positions and headquarters of the 6th, 7th and 11th Panzer Divisions, II and XIII Panzer Corps, and Second Army HQ. Aerial reconnaissance before and during Kursk was also on a larger scale and more successful than ever before.⁷⁵

Victory at Kursk opened the way to an almost continuous advance by the Red Army on the eastern front which was to end with Marshal Zhukov accepting the surrender of Berlin in May 1945. With a four-to-one superiority in men over the Wehrmacht, large amounts of military equipment from its Western allies and growing dominance in the air, the Red Army, though suffering enormous losses, proved unstoppable. In the course of its advance, the Red Army sometimes captured lists of the daily settings for periods of up to a month of the Wehrmacht’s Enigma machines, as well as some of the machines and their operators. During the final stages of the war these captures sometimes enabled Soviet cryptanalysts to decrypt spasmodically a still unknown number of Enigma messages.⁷⁶

Despite the improvements after Stalingrad, however, the quality of Soviet intelligence on the eastern front—in particular the SIGINT—never compared with the intelligence on Germany available to their Western allies. The ULTRA intelligence provided to British and American commanders was, quite simply, the best in the history of warfare. The Soviet Union’s most striking intelligence successes during the Great Patriotic War, by contrast, were achieved not against its enemies but against its allies in the wartime Grand Alliance: Britain and the United States.