The Sword and the Shield

^TWO FROM LENIN’S CHEKA TO STALIN’S OGPU

For most of Mitrokhin’s career in the KGB, the history of its domestic operations was something of an embarrassment even to its own historians. During the late 1930s the KGB (then known as the NKVD) had been the chief instrument of Stalin’s Great Terror, the greatest peacetime persecution in European history. The KGB officers club in the Lubyanka, its Moscow headquarters, lacked even the usual boardroom photographs of past chairmen; most were more suited to a chamber of horrors than to a hall of fame. Three had been shot after being found guilty of horrific crimes (some real, others imaginary): Genrikh Yagoda in 1938, Nikolai Yezhov in 1940 and Lavrenti Beria in 1953. A fourth—Ivan Serov—blew his brains out in 1963. KGB historians in the post-Stalin era tended to take refuge from the blood-stained reality of their Stalinist past and homicidal former chairmen by returning to an earlier, mostly mythical, Leninist golden age of revolutionary purity.

The KGB traced its origins to the foundation on December 20, 1917, six weeks after the Bolshevik Revolution, of the Cheka, the first Soviet security and intelligence agency. Throughout Mitrokhin’s career, KGB officers styled themselves Chekists (Chekisty) and were paid their salaries not on the first but on the twentieth of each month (“Chekists’ Day”) in honor of the Cheka’s birthday. The KGB also adopted the Cheka symbols of the sword and the shield: the shield to defend the revolution, the sword to smite its foes. Outside the Lubyanka, the KGB’s Moscow headquarters, stood a huge statue of the Polish-born head of the Cheka, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, venerated in countless official hagiographies as the selfless, incorruptible “Knight of the Revolution” who slew the dragon of counter-revolution which threatened the young Soviet state. He had been a professional revolutionary for over twenty years before the Revolution, spending eleven of those years in Tsarist prisons, penal servitude or exile. KGB training manuals quoted his description of the Chekist as a man with “a warm heart, a cool head and clean hands.” Like Lenin, he was an incorruptible workaholic, prepared to sacrifice both himself and others in the defense of the Revolution.¹ In the headquarters of the KGB First Chief (Foreign Intelligence) Directorate at Yasenevo, the main object of veneration was a large bust of Dzerzhinsky on a marble pedestal constantly surrounded by fresh flowers.

The KGB’s effusive public tributes to its saintly founding father concealed the degree to which Dzerzhinsky derived his intelligence tradecraft from the Cheka’s much smaller Tsarist predecessor, the Okhrana. The Bolsheviks had extensive first-hand experience of the Okhrana’s expertise in the use of penetration agents and agents provocateurs. In July 1913 Lenin had discussed the difficult problem of Okhrana penetration with two of his chief lieutenants, Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinovyev, and the leader of the Bolshevik deputies in the Duma, Roman Malinovsky. All were agreed that there must be an unidentified Okhrana agent in close contact with the Bolshevik deputies. The agent was in even closer contact than Lenin realized. It was Roman Malinovsky. After Okhrana files later revealed his identity, he was shot in the Kremlin gardens on the first anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.²

The Cheka’s success in penetrating its opponents derived in large part from its imitation of the techniques employed by Malinovsky and other Tsarist agents. Dmitri Gavrilovich Yevseyev, the author of two of the Cheka’s earliest operational manuals, Basic Tenets of Intelligence and Brief Instructions for the Cheka on How to Conduct Intelligence, based his writings on detailed study of Okhrana tradecraft. Though the Cheka was “an organ for building the dictatorship of the proletariat,” Yevseyev insisted—like Dzerzhinsky—that it must not hesitate to learn from the experience of “bourgeois” intelligence agencies.³

The Cheka’s early priorities were overwhelmingly domestic. Dzerzhinsky described it as “an organ for the revolutionary settlement of accounts with counterrevolutionaries,” ⁴ a label increasingly applied to all the Bolsheviks’ opponents and “class enemies.” Within days of its foundation, however, the Cheka had also taken its first tentative steps in foreign intelligence collection. The career of the first agent sent on a mission abroad, Aleksei Frolovich Filippov, was sadly at variance with the heroic image which KGB historians struggled to maintain in their descriptions of the Leninist era. Born in 1870 and trained as a lawyer, Filippov had made a career before the Revolution as a newspaper publisher. At the end of 1917 he was recruited by Dzerzhinsky to go on intelligence assignments to Finland under cover as a journalist and businessman. Before departing on his first mission in January 1918, Filippov gave a written undertaking “on a voluntary basis, without receiving payment, to pass on all the information which I hear in industrial, banking and particularly in conservative [nationalist] circles.”⁵

On January 4 Lenin publicly recognized the independence of Finland, formerly part of the Tsarist Empire, then immediately set about trying to subvert it. A putsch at the end of the month by Finnish Communists, supported by the Russian military and naval garrison in Helsinki, seized control of the capital and much of southern Finland. The Communists were quickly challenged by a defense corps of Finnish nationalists led by the former Tsarist officer General Karl Mannerheim.⁶ Filippov’s main Cheka assignment was to report on Mannerheim, his dealings with the Germans, and the mood of the sailors who had supported the putsch. Early in April 1918, however, German forces intervened in Finland, and by the end of the month both the Communist putsch and Filippov’s brief career as the first Soviet foreign agent were at an end.⁷

DURING THE CIVIL war, which began in May 1918 and continued for two and a half years, the Bolshevik regime had to fight for its survival against powerful but divided White Russian armies. Behind all the forces arraigned against them, the Bolshevik leaders saw a vast conspiracy orchestrated by Western capitalism. “What we are facing,” declared Lenin in July, “is a systematic, methodical and evidently long-planned military and financial counter-revolutionary campaign against the Soviet Republic, which all the representatives of Anglo-French imperialism have been preparing for months.”⁸ In reality, though the young Soviet regime had many enemies both at home and abroad, there was no carefully planned, well coordinated imperialist plot to bring it down. The illusion that such a plot existed, however, helped to shape the Cheka’s early operations against its imperialist foes.

In the course of the civil war, the Cheka claimed to have uncovered and defeated a series of major conspiracies by Western governments and their intelligence agencies to overthrow the Bolshevik regime. The first such conspiracy in the summer of 1918 was the “envoys’ plot,” also known as the “Lockhart plot” (after its instigator, Robert Bruce Lockhart, a junior British diplomat). According to a KGB history published in 1979, “One could say without exaggeration that the shattering blow dealt by the Chekists to the conspirators was equivalent to victory in a major military battle.”⁹ That is what the Cheka had claimed in 1918 and what most of Mitrokhin’s colleagues continued to believe over half a century later. In reality, however, the “envoys’ plot” was mounted not by a coalition of capitalist governments but by a group of politically naive Western diplomats and adventurous secret agents who were left largely to their own devices during the chaotic early months of the Bolshevik regime and became involved in farcically inept attempts to overthrow it. The best-known of the secret agents was Sidney Reilly of the British Secret Intelligence Service (then known as MI1c), whose exploits oscillated between high adventure and low farce, and whose increasing tendency to fantasy later led to his exclusion from SIS. Reilly announced his arrival in Moscow on May 7, 1918 in bizarre but characteristic fashion by marching up to the Kremlin gates, announcing that he was an emissary from the British prime minister, Lloyd George (who had probably never heard of him), and unsuccessfully demanding to see Lenin.

By far the most sophisticated part of the “envoys’ plot” was devised not by the envoys themselves or their secret agents but by the Cheka, possibly at Lenin’s suggestion, as a trap for Western conspirators. In August 1918 the Cheka officer Yan Buikis, posing as an anti-Bolshevik conspirator named Shmidkhen, succeeded in persuading Lockhart, Reilly and the French consul-general that Colonel Eduard Berzin, commander of a Latvian regiment in the Kremlin (in reality a Cheka agent provocateur), was ready to lead an anti-Bolshevik rising. To finance Berzin’s proposed coup, Reilly gave him 1,200,000 roubles which Berzin promptly passed on to the Cheka.¹⁰ Reilly’s schemes for the coup varied. At one point he imagined himself leading a detachment of Latvian troops on to the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre during the Congress of Soviets, seizing Lenin, Trotsky and other Bolshevik leaders, and shooting them on the spot.¹¹ However, Reilly was also attracted by an alternative scheme not to execute Lenin and Trotsky, but instead to remove their trousers, parade them in their underpants through the streets of Moscow, and so “hold them up to ridicule before the world.”¹²

Reilly’s fantasies however were overtaken by events. On August 30 the head of the Petrograd Cheka, Moisei Solomonovich Uritsky, was assassinated by a former member of the moderate Workers’ Popular Socialist Party, Leonid Kannegiser.¹³ In an unrelated attack on the same day, Lenin was shot and seriously wounded by the Socialist Revolutionary, Fanya (Dora) Kaplan. “I shot Lenin because I believe him to be a traitor [to Socialism],” Kaplan told her Cheka interrogators.¹⁴ In the aftermath of both shootings, Dzerzhinsky decided to wind up the “envoys’ plot,” which the Cheka itself had been largely responsible for orchestrating. On September 2 it was announced that the Cheka had “liquidated… the conspiracy organized by Anglo-French diplomats… to organize the capture of the Council of People’s Commissars and the proclamation of military dictatorship in Moscow; this was to be done by bribing Soviet troops.” Predictably, the statement made no mention of the fact that the plan to bribe Soviet troops and stage a military coup had been devised by the Cheka itself and that the diplomats had been drawn into the conspiracy by agents provocateurs relying on Okhrana tradecraft. On September 5 Dzerzhinsky and Zinovyev, the Petrograd Party boss, issued a further statement declaring that the Anglo-French conspirators had been the “organizers” of the attempt on Lenin’s life and the “real murderers” of Uritsky. Dzerzhinsky did not, however, reveal Reilly’s plan to remove Lenin’s and Trotsky’s trousers. Though happy to publicize, or invent, Western involvement in assassination plots against Lenin, the Cheka dared not disclose a plot to hold him up to ridicule.¹⁵

The attempt on Lenin’s life, the killing of Uritsky and the announcement of the “liquidation” of “the envoys’ plot” were quickly followed by the declaration of the Red Terror. With the Bolsheviks engaged in a bitter civil war against their White enemies, the Cheka set out to terrorize the regime’s opponents. Lenin himself, only three weeks before the attempt on his own life, had written to the Bolsheviks in Penza, and probably elsewhere, urging them to organize public executions to make the people “tremble” “for hundreds of kilometers around.” While still recovering from his wounds, he instructed, “It is necessary secretly—and urgently—to prepare the terror.” ¹⁶ On October 15 Uritsky’s successor in Petrograd, Gleb Ivanovich Boky, proudly reported to Moscow that 800 alleged counterrevolutionaries had been shot and another 6,229 imprisoned. Among those arrested, and probably executed, in Petrograd was the Cheka’s first foreign agent, Alexei Filippov. His liquidation was due, in all probability, not to the failure of his Finnish missions but to his “bourgeois” origins, which marked him down as an enemy of the people in the paranoid atmosphere of the Red Terror.¹⁷ Twenty years later Boky was himself to fall victim to the even greater paranoia of Stalin’s Terror.¹⁸

Berzin and Buikis, the Cheka agents provocateurs who had helped orchestrate the “envoys’ plot,” subsequently became victims of their own deception. Berzin’s career initially prospered. He was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for his role as agent provocateur, joined the Cheka and later became head of a forced labor camp in the Kolyma goldfields which had one of the highest death rates in Stalin’s gulag. In 1937, however, he was arrested and shot as an enemy of the people.¹⁹ The exact charges leveled against Berzin are not known, but it is likely that they included accusations that he had actually collaborated with Western plotters in 1918. In the somewhat paranoid Stalinist interpretation of the “envoys’ plot,” his collaborator Buikis (alias “Shmidkhen”) was portrayed as a covert counter-revolutionary rather than a Cheka officer carrying out his orders. That remained the accepted interpretation even in classified KGB histories during Mitrokhin’s early career. Buikis survived the Terror only by concealing his identity. Not until the mid-1960s did research in the KGB archives reestablish “Shmidkhen’s” true identity and his real role in 1918.²⁰

Throughout Mitrokhin’s career, KGB historians continued to interpret all plots and attacks against the young Soviet regime as “manifestations of a unified conspiracy” by its class enemies at home and the “imperialist powers” abroad.²¹ The reality was very different. Had there been “a unified conspiracy,” the regime would surely have lost the civil war. If two or three divisions of Western troops had landed in the Gulf of Finland in 1919, they could probably have forced their way to Moscow and overthrown the Bolsheviks. But in the aftermath of the First World War not even two or three divisions could be found. Those American, British, French and Japanese troops who intervened against the Red Army served mainly to discredit the White cause and thus actually to assist the Bolsheviks. They were too few to affect the military outcome of the civil war but quite sufficient to allow the Bolsheviks to brand their opponents as the tools of Western imperialism. Most Bolsheviks were, in any case, sincerely convinced that during the civil war they had faced a determined onslaught from the full might of Western capitalism. That illusion continued to color Soviet attitudes to the West throughout, and even beyond, the Stalin era.

THE CHEKA’S INTELLIGENCE operations both at home and abroad were profoundly influenced not merely by the legacy of the Okhrana but also by the Bolsheviks’ own pre-Revolutionary experience as a largely illegal clandestine underground. Many of the Bolshevik leadership had become so used to living under false identities before 1917 that they retained their aliases even after the Revolution: among them the Russian nobleman Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov,²² who kept the pseudonym Lenin, and the Georgian Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, who continued to be known as Stalin. Both Lenin and Stalin retained many of the habits of mind developed during their underground existence. On highly sensitive matters Lenin would insist no copy be made of his instructions and that the original either be returned to him for destruction or destroyed by the recipient. Happily for the historian, his instructions were not always carried out.²³

Stalin continued to doctor his own pre-Revolutionary record during the 1920s, changing even the day and year of his birth; the correct date (December 6, 1878) was not made public until 1996.²⁴ During a visit to the secret section of the Moscow Main Archives Directorate (Glavarkhiv), Mitrokhin was once shown an Okhrana file on Dzhugashvili. The file cover and title followed standard Okhrana format, but, on looking inside, Mitrokhin discovered that the contents had been entirely removed. The probability is that the Okhrana had compromising materials on the young Dzhugashvili, and that at the first opportunity Stalin arranged for the file to be gutted. In typical Soviet bureaucratic fashion, however, the cover was preserved since the existence of the file was indelibly recorded in the secret registers. Mitrokhin suspects that whoever emptied the file, presumably on Stalin’s instructions, was later eliminated to preserve the dark secret of its missing contents.²⁵ What Stalin was most anxious to destroy may well have been evidence that he had been an Okhrana informer. Though it falls well short of conclusive proof, a possible trace of that evidence still survives. According to reports from an Okhrana agent discovered in the State Archive of the Russian Federation, Baku Bolsheviks before the First World War “confronted Dzhugashvili-Stalin with the accusation that he was a provocateur and an agent of the Security Police. And that he had embezzled Party funds.”²⁶

From almost the beginning of the civil war in 1918, in keeping with the Bolshevik tradition of operating under false identities, the Cheka began sending officers and agents under various disguises and pseudonyms behind enemy lines to gather intelligence. By June 1919 the number of these “illegals” was sufficiently large to require the foundation of an illegals operations department (later to become Directorate S of the KGB First Chief Directorate).²⁷ KGB classified histories note that henceforth “illegal” operations became “an inseparable part of foreign intelligence.” On December 20, 1920, the third anniversary of the Cheka’s foundation, a new foreign department (Innostranyi Otdel or INO) was set up to direct all operations beyond Soviet borders. During the early years of Soviet Russia, when the Communist regime remained an international pariah, it had few official missions abroad capable of providing official cover for “legal” intelligence stations (“residencies” in Cheka jargon) and thus relied chiefly on illegals. As diplomatic and trade missions were established in foreign capitals, each was given a “legal residency” headed by a “resident” whose identity was officially communicated only to the ambassador or head of the mission. Illegals, sometimes grouped in “illegal residencies,” operated without the benefit of diplomatic or official cover and reported directly to INO in Moscow.²⁸

During the civil war of 1918-20, foreign intelligence collection was of minor importance by comparison with the Cheka’s role in assisting the victory of the Red Army over its White enemies. Like the KGB later, the Cheka liked to quantify its successes. In the autumn of 1919, probably the turning point in the civil war, it proudly claimed that during the first nineteen months of its existence it had discovered and neutralized “412 underground anti-Soviet organizations.”²⁹ The Cheka’s most effective method of dealing with opposition was terror. Though its liking of quantification did not extend to calculating the number of its victims, it is clear that the Cheka enormously outstripped the Okhrana in both the scale and the ferocity of its onslaught on political opposition. In 1901, 4,113 Russians were in internal exile for political crimes, of whom only 180 were on hard labor. Executions for political crimes were limited to those involved in actual or attempted assassinations. During the civil war, by contrast, Cheka executions probably numbered as many as 250,000, and may well have exceeded the number of deaths in battle.³⁰

At the time of the October Revolution, it had never occurred to Lenin that he and the Bolshevik leadership would be responsible for the rebirth of the Okhrana in a new and far more terrible form. In The State and Revolution, which he had almost completed in the summer of 1917, he had claimed that there would be no need for a police force, let alone a political police, after the Revolution. Though it would be necessary to arrange for “the suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of wage slaves of yesterday,” such suppression would be “comparatively easy.” The “proletarian dictatorship” which would preside over the rapid destruction of the bourgeois order would require a minimum of rules, regulation and bureaucracy. Lenin had never foreseen the possibility of mass opposition to a revolution carried out in the name of the people.³¹ But, once in power, he used whatever methods were necessary to retain it, claiming always that the Bolsheviks were defending “the people’s power” and refusing to accept the reality that he had made himself the infallible leader (Vozhd) of the world’s first one-party state.

APPROPRIATELY, THE MEMORIAL erected next to the Lubyanka in the closing years of the Soviet era to commemorate “the victims of totalitarian repression” consists of a large block of granite taken not from Stalin’s gulag but from a concentration camp established by Lenin on the shores of the White Sea in the autumn of 1918. Many Chekists regarded brutality against their class enemies as a revolutionary virtue. According to a report from the Cheka in Morshansk:

Even at a time when the Soviet regime was fighting for its survival during the civil war, many of its own supporters were sickened by the scale of the Cheka’s brutality. A number of Cheka interrogators, some only in their teens,³³ employed tortures of scarcely believable barbarity. In Kharkhov the skin was peeled off victims’ hands to produce “gloves” of human skin; in Voronezh naked prisoners were rolled around in barrels studded with nails; in Poltava priests were impaled; in Odessa, captured White officers were tied to planks and fed slowly into furnaces; in Kiev cages of rats were fixed to prisoners’ bodies and heated until the rats gnawed their way into the victims’ intestines.³⁴

Though Lenin did not approve of such sadism, he was content to leave “excesses” to be corrected by Dzerzhinsky. Brushing aside complaints of Cheka brutality, he paid fulsome tribute to its role in helping to win the civil war. The Cheka, he claimed, had proved a “devastating weapon against countless conspiracies and countless attempts against Soviet power by people who are infinitely stronger than us”:

Some of the most secret documents in Dzerzhinsky’s archive carry a note that only ten copies were to be made: one for Lenin, the rest for Cheka department chiefs.³⁶ Lenin’s absorption in the affairs of the Cheka extended even to operational detail. He sent Dzerzhinsky advice on how to carry out searches and conduct surveillance, and instructed him that arrests were best carried out at night.³⁷ Lenin also took a somewhat naive interest in the application of new technology to the hunt for counterrevolutionaries, telling Dzerzhinsky to construct a large electromagnet capable of detecting hidden weapons in house-to-house searches. Though the experiment was tried and failed, Dzerzhinsky had some difficulty in persuading Lenin that, “Magnets are not much use in searches.”³⁸

Far more important than Lenin’s sometimes eccentric interest in intelligence techniques and technology was his belief in the central importance of the Cheka to the defense of the Bolshevik one-party state against imperialism and counter-revolution. The extent of Lenin’s and Dzerzhinsky’s fear of imperialist subversion is well illustrated by their deep suspicion of the aid which they felt forced to accept in August 1921 from the American Relief Association (ARA) to feed millions of starving Soviet citizens. Lenin was convinced that the ARA was a front for United States intelligence, and ordered the closest surveillance of all its members. Once the ARA began work, he was equally convinced that it was using food as an instrument of subversion. He complained to Dzerzhinsky’s deputy, Iosif Stanislavovich Unshlikht, that foreign agents were “engaged in massive bribery of hungry and tattered Chekists [Lenin’s emphasis]. The danger here is extremely great.” Lenin insisted that urgent steps be taken to “feed and clothe the Chekists” in order to remove them from imperialist temptation.³⁹

Though the United States still had no peacetime espionage agency, the Cheka reported that over 200 of the 300 ARA staff, who were devoting all their energies to dealing with one of the most terrible famines in modern European history, were in reality undercover intelligence officers who “could become first-class instructors for a counter-revolutionary uprising.” The Cheka also alleged that the ARA was building up a large food supply in Vienna so that “in the event of a coup [it] could provide immediate support to the White government.”⁴⁰ Lenin was far more exercised by the ARA’s non-existent intelligence operations than by the approximately five million Russians and Ukrainians who starved to death. Without the massive aid program of the ARA, which in 1922 was feeding up to eleven million people a day, the famine would have been far worse. Even after the ARA had departed, however, Soviet intelligence remained convinced that it had been, first and foremost, an espionage rather than a humanitarian agency. A quarter of a century later, all surviving Russian employees of ARA were made to sign confessions that they had been American spies.⁴¹

The priorities of Soviet intelligence under Lenin, and still more under Stalin, continued to be shaped by greatly exaggerated beliefs in an unrelenting conspiracy by Western governments and their intelligence agencies. To understand Soviet intelligence operations between the wars, it is frequently necessary to enter a world of smoke and mirrors where the target is as much the product of Bolshevik delusions as of real counter-revolutionary conspiracy. The Soviet propensity to conspiracy theory derived both from the nature of the one-party state and from its Marxist-Leninist ideology. All authoritarian regimes, since they regard opposition as fundamentally illegitimate, tend to see their opponents as engaged in subversive conspiracy. Bolshevik ideology further dictated that capitalist regimes could not fail to be plotting the overthrow of the world’s first and only worker-peasant state. If they were not visibly preparing an armed invasion, then their intelligence agencies must necessarily be secretly conspiring to subvert Soviet Russia from within.

INO’S FIRST TWO heads served between them for a total of barely eighteen months. The first foreign intelligence chief to make his mark was Mikhail Abramovich Trilisser, appointed as head of INO in 1922—undoubtedly with Lenin’s personal approval. Trilisser was a Russian Jew who had become a professional revolutionary in 1901 at the age of only eighteen. Like Dzerzhinsky, he had spent much of his early career in exile or in Tsarist prisons. Before the First World War, he had specialized in tracking down police spies among Bolshevik émigrés. While serving with the Cheka in 1918, he was reputed to have been caught by “bandits” and hung from a tree, but to have been cut down just in time by Red forces who successfully revived him. Unlike any of his successors, Trilisser sometimes traveled abroad to meet INO agents.⁴² At least until Lenin was incapacitated by his third stroke in March 1923, he continued to take an active, though sometimes ill-informed, interest, in INO reports. He noted, for example, that somewhat inaccurate information received in 1922 from one of the Cheka’s few early British sources, the journalist Arthur Ransome (later famous as a children’s novelist), was “very important and, probably, fundamentally true.”⁴³

The early priorities of INO foreign operations, approved by Lenin, were:

The “counter-revolutionary groups” which were of most immediate concern to Lenin and the Cheka after the civil war were the remnants of the defeated White armies and the Ukrainian nationalists. After the last White forces left Russian soil late in 1920, they stood no realistic chance of mounting another serious challenge to Bolshevik rule. That, however, was not Lenin’s view. “A beaten army,” he declared, “learns much.” He estimated that there were one and a half to two million anti-Bolshevik Russian émigrés:

In the early and mid-1920s INO’s chief target thus became the émigré White Guards, based mainly in Berlin, Paris and Warsaw, who continued to plot—far less effectively than Lenin supposed—the overthrow of the Bolshevik regime.

The other “counter-revolutionary” threat which most concerned Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership came from Ukrainian nationalists, who had fought both Red and White forces in an attempt to win their independence. In the winter of 1920 and the spring of 1921 the entire Ukrainian countryside was in revolt against Bolshevik rule. Even after the brutal “pacification” of Ukraine by the Red Army and the Cheka, partisan groups who had taken refuge in Poland and Romania continued to make cross-border raids.⁴⁶ In the spring of 1922 the Ukrainian GPU received intelligence reports that Simon Petlyura’s Ukrainian government-in-exile had established a “partisan headquarters” under General Yurko Tutyunnik which was sending secret emissaries to the Ukraine to establish a nationalist underground.⁴⁷

The GPU was ordered not merely to collect intelligence on the émigré White Guards and Ukrainian nationalists but also to penetrate and destabilize them.⁴⁸ Its strategy was the same against both opponents—to establish bogus anti-Bolshevik undergrounds under GPU control which could be used to lure General Tutyunnik and the leading White generals back across the frontier.

The first step in enticing Tutyunnik back to Ukraine (an operation codenamed CASE 39) was the capture of Zayarny, one of his “special duties” officers, who was caught crossing the frontier in 1922. Zayarny was successfully turned back by the GPU and sent to Tutyunnik’s headquarters with bogus reports that an underground Supreme Military Council (Vysshaya Voyskovaya Rada or VVR) had been established in Ukraine and was anxious to set up an operational headquarters under Tutyunnik’s leadership to wage war against the Bolsheviks. Tutyunnik was too cautious to return immediately but sent several emissaries who attended stage-managed meetings of the VVR, at which GPU officers disguised as Ukrainian nationalists reported the rapid growth of underground opposition to Bolshevik rule and agreed on the urgent need for Tutyunnik’s leadership. Like Zayarny, one of the emissaries, Pyotr Stakhov, a close associate of Tutyunnik, was recruited by the GPU and used as a double agent.

Attempts to persuade Tutyunnik himself to return to Ukraine finally succeeded on June 26, 1923.⁴⁹ Tutyunnik, with his bodyguard and aides, arrived at a remote hamlet on the Romanian bank of the river Dniester, where Zayarny met him with the news that the VVR and Pyotr Stakhov were waiting on the other side. At 11 p.m. a light from the Ukrainian bank signaled that it was safe for Tutyunnik and his entourage to cross the river. Still cautious, Tutyunnik sent his bodyguard to make sure that no trap had been laid for him. Stakhov returned with the bodyguard to reassure him. According to an OGPU report, Tutyunnik told him, “Pyotr, I know you and you know me. We won’t fool each other. The VVR is a fiction, isn’t it?” “That is impossible,” Stakhov replied. “I know them all, particularly those who are with me [today]. You know you can rely on me…” Tutyunnik got into the boat with Stakhov and crossed the Dniester. Once he was in the hands of the OGPU, letters written by Tutyunnik or in his name were sent to prominent Ukrainian nationalists abroad saying that their struggle was hopeless and that he had aligned himself irrevocably with the Soviet cause. He was executed six years later.⁵⁰

OPERATIONS AGAINST THE White Guards resembled those against Ukrainian nationalists. In 1922 the Berlin residency recruited the former Tsarist General Zelenin as a penetration agent within the émigré community. A later OGPU report claimed, possibly with some exaggeration, that Zelenin had engineered “a huge schism within the ranks of the Whites” and had caused a large number of officers to break away from Baron Peter Wrangel, the last of the White generals to be defeated in the civil war. Other OGPU moles praised for their work in disrupting the White Guards included General Zaitsev, former chief of staff to the Cossack Ataman A. I. Dutov, and the ex-Tsarist General Yakhontov, who emigrated to the United States.⁵¹

The OGPU’s greatest successes against the White Guards, however, were two elaborate deception operations, codenamed SINDIKAT (“Syndicate”) and TREST (“Trust”), both of which made imaginative use of agents provocateurs.⁵² SINDIKAT was targeted against the man believed to be the most dangerous of all the White Guards: Boris Savinkov, a former Socialist Revolutionary terrorist who had served as deputy minister of war in the provisional government overthrown in the Bolshevik Revolution. Winston Churchill, among others, was captivated by his anti-Bolshevik fervor. “When all is said and done,” Churchill wrote later, “and with all the stains and tarnishes there be, few men tried more, gave more, dared more and suffered more for the Russian people.” During the Russo-Polish War of 1920, Savinkov was largely responsible for recruiting the Russian People’s Army which fought under Polish command against the Red Army. Early in 1921 he founded a new organization in Warsaw dedicated to the overthrow of the Bolshevik regime: the People’s Union for Defence of Country and Freedom (NSZRiS), which ran an agent network inside Soviet Russia to collect intelligence on the Bolsheviks and plan uprisings against the regime.

The first stage of the operation against Savinkov, SINDIKAT-1, successfully neutralized the NSZRiS agent network with the help of a Cheka mole within his organization. Forty-four leading members of the NSZRiS were paraded at a show trial in Moscow in August 1921.⁵³ SINDIKAT-2 was aimed at luring Savinkov back to Russia to star in a further show trial and complete the demoralization of his émigré supporters. Classified KGB histories give the main credit for the operation to the head of the OGPU counter-intelligence department, Artur Khristyanovich Artuzov (later head of INO), the Russian son of an immigrant Swiss-Italian cheesemaker, assisted by Andrei Pavlovich Fyodorov and Grigori Sergeyevich Syroyezhkin.⁵⁴ Though SINDIKAT-2 made skillful use of agents provocateurs, however, KGB records fail to acknowledge how much they were assisted by Savinkov’s own increasing tendency to fantasize. During a visit to London late in 1921 he claimed improbably that the head of the Russian trade delegation had suggested that he join the Soviet government. Savinkov also alleged that Lloyd George and his family had welcomed him at Chequers by singing “God Save the Tsar”; in reality, the song was a hymn sung in Welsh by a Welsh choir at a pre-Christmas celebration. In July 1923 Fedorov, posing as a member of an anti-Bolshevik underground, visited Savinkov in Paris, where he had installed his headquarters after the collapse of the NSZRiS, and persuaded him to send his aide, Colonel Sergei Pavlovsky, back to Russia with Fedorov for secret talks with the non-existent underground. Once in Moscow, Pavlovsky was turned in by the OGPU and used to lure Savinkov himself to Russia for further talks. On August 15 Savinkov crossed the Russian border with some of his supporters and walked straight into an OGPU trap. Under OGPU interrogation Savinkov’s resistance swiftly collapsed. At a show trial on August 27 Savinkov made an abject confession of his counter-revolutionary sins:

The deception of Savinkov continued even after he was sentenced to fifteen years in jail. He failed to realize that his cellmate, V. I. Speransky, was an OGPU officer, later promoted for his success in gaining Savinkov’s confidence and surreptitiously debriefing him over a period of eight months.⁵⁶ Savinkov did not long survive Speransky’s final report on him. KGB files appear to contain no contemporary record of how he met his death. According to the SVR’s implausible current version of events, Savinkov fell or jumped from an upper-story window after a congenial “drinking bout with a group of Chekists”—despite a heroic attempt to save him by Grigori Syroyezhkin.⁵⁷ It seems more likely that Syroyezhkin pushed him to his death.⁵⁸

Even more successful than SINDIKAT was operation TREST, the cover name given to a fictitious monarchist underground, the Monarchist Association of Central Russia (MOR), first invented by Artuzov in 1921 and used as the basis of a six-year deception.⁵⁹ By 1923 the OGPU officer Aleksandr Yakushev, posing as a secret MOR member able to travel abroad in his official capacity as a Soviet foreign trade representative, had won the confidence during visits to Paris of both Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich, cousin of the late Tsar Nicholas II, and General Aleksandr Kutepov of the [White] Russian Combined Services Union (ROVS). The leading victim of the deception, however, was the former SIS agent Sidney Reilly, an even greater fantasist than Savinkov. Reilly had become a tragicomic figure whose hold on reality was increasingly uncertain. According to one of his secretaries, Eleanor Toye, “Reilly used to suffer from severe mental crises amounting to delusion. Once he thought he was Jesus Christ.” The OGPU, however, failed to grasp that Reilly was now of little significance, regarding him instead as a British masterspy and one of its most dangerous opponents. On September 26, 1925 it succeeded in luring him, like Savinkov a year before, across the Russian frontier to a meeting with bogus MOR conspirators.⁶⁰

Reilly’s resistance after his arrest did not last much longer than Savinkov’s. His KGB file contains a letter, probably authentic, to Dzerzhinsky dated October 30, 1925, in which he promised to reveal all he knew about British and American intelligence as well as Russian émigrés in the West. Six days later Reilly was taken for a walk in the woods near Moscow and, without warning, shot from behind. According to an OGPU report, he “let out a deep breath and fell without a cry.” Among those who accompanied him on his final walk in the woods was Grigori Syroyezhkin, the probable assassin of Savinkov a year earlier. Reilly’s corpse was put on private display in the Lubyanka sickbay to allow OGPU officers to celebrate their triumph.⁶¹ Appropriately for a career in which myth and reality had become inextricably confused, rumors circulated for many years in the West that Reilly had escaped execution and adopted a new identity. The TREST deception was finally exposed in 1927, to the embarrassment of the intelligence services of Britain, France, Poland, Finland and the Baltic states who had all, in varying degrees, been taken in by it.⁶²

AS WELL AS engaging in permanent conflict with counter-revolution, both real and imagined, Soviet intelligence between the wars also became increasingly successful in penetrating the main imperialist powers. It had two major operational advantages over Western intelligence agencies. First, while security in Moscow became obsessional, much Western security remained feeble. Secondly, the Communist parties and their “fellow travelers” in the West gave Soviet intelligence a major source of ideological recruits of which it took increasing advantage.

While operation TREST was at its height, INO, the OGPU’s foreign intelligence service, succeeded in making its first major penetration of the British foreign service. The penetration agent was an Italian messenger in the British embassy in Rome, Francesco Constantini (codenamed DUNCAN), who was recruited in 1924 by the OGPU residency with the help of an Italian Communist, Alfredo Allegretti, who had worked as a Russian embassy clerk before the Revolution. Despite his lowly status, Constantini had access to a remarkable range of diplomatic secrets.⁶³ Until the Second World War, the Foreign Office did not possess a single security officer, let alone a security department. Security in many British embassies was remarkably lax. In Rome, according to Sir Andrew Noble, who was stationed at the embassy in the mid-1930s, it was “virtually non-existent.” Embassy servants had access to the keys to red boxes and filing cabinets containing classified documents, as well as—probably—the number of the combination lock on the embassy safe. Even when two copies of a diplomatic cipher were missing in 1925, it did not occur to British diplomats that they might have been removed by Constantini—as they almost certainly were.⁶⁴

For more than a decade Francesco Constantini handed over a great variety of diplomatic documents and cipher material. Probably from an early stage he also involved his brother, Secondo, who worked as an embassy servant, in the theft of documents. In addition to despatches on Anglo-Italian relations exchanged between London and the Rome embassy, Constantini was often able to supply the “confidential print” of selected documents from the Foreign Office and major British missions designed to give ambassadors an overview of current foreign policy.⁶⁵ By January 1925 he was providing, on average, 150 pages of classified material a week. Constantini made no secret of his motives. The Rome residency reported to the Centre, “He collaborates with us exclusively for money, and does not conceal the fact. He has set himself the goal of becoming a rich man, and that is what he strives for.” In 1925 the Centre pronounced Constantini its most valuable agent. Convinced of a vast, nonexistent British plot to destroy the Soviet state, it counted on agent DUNCAN to provide early warning of a British attack, and instructed the Rome residency:

The Rome residency’s pride in running the OGPU’s leading agent is reflected in its flattering descriptions of him. Constantini was said to have the face of “an ancient Roman,” and to be known to his many female admirers as “the handsome one.”⁶⁶ By 1928 the OGPU suspected him—accurately—of also supplying documents to Italian intelligence. Despite suspicions about Constantini’s honesty, however, there was no mistaking the importance of the material he supplied. Maksim Litvinov, who by the late 1920s was the dominating figure in the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, pronounced it “of great use to me.”⁶⁷

THE OGPU’S FIRST successful penetration of the British foreign service was overshadowed in 1927 by an embarrassing series of well-publicized intelligence failures. The security of the rapidly expanding foreign network of OGPU and Fourth Department (Military Intelligence) residencies was threatened by the vulnerability of early Soviet cipher systems to Western cryptanalysts, by the inexperience of some of the first generation of INO officers, and by errors in the selection and training of foreign Communists as agents. The International Liaison Department (OMS) of the Communist International provided a ready pool of enthusiastic volunteers for Soviet intelligence operations. Some, such as the German Richard Sorge, were to be numbered among the greatest spies of the century. Others ignored orthodox tradecraft and neglected standard security procedures.

In the spring of 1927 there were dramatic revelations of Soviet espionage in eight different countries. In March a major OGPU spy ring was uncovered in Poland; a Soviet trade official was arrested for espionage in Turkey; and the Swiss police announced the arrest of two Russian spies. In April a police raid on the Soviet consulate in Beijing uncovered a mass of incriminating intelligence documents; and the French Sûreté, arrested members of a Soviet spy ring in Paris run by Jean Crémet, a leading French Communist. In May Austrian foreign ministry officials were found passing classified information to the OGPU residency, and the British Home Secretary indignantly announced to the House of Commons the discovery of “one of the most complete and one of the most nefarious spy systems that it has ever been my lot to meet.”⁶⁸

Following this last discovery, Britain—still regarded in the Soviet Union as the leading world power and its most dangerous enemy—formally broke off diplomatic relations, and senior ministers read out to the Commons decrypted extracts from intercepted Soviet telegrams. To tighten the security of Soviet diplomatic and OGPU communications after the dramatic revelation of British codebreaking successes, the laborious but virtually unbreakable “one-time pad” cipher system was introduced. As a result, Western cryptanalysts were able to decrypt almost no further high-grade Soviet communications until after the Second World War.⁶⁹

THE MOST WORRYSOME as well as the most plentiful foreign intelligence in 1927 concerned Japan. Since 1925 INO had been able to intercept the secret communications of both Japan’s military mission and its consulate-general in the northeast Chinese city of Harbin. Remarkably, instead of using diplomatic bags and their own couriers, Japanese official representatives in Harbin corresponded with Tokyo via the Chinese postal service. The OGPU recruited the Chinese employees who were used to take Japanese official despatches to the Harbin post office, and sent expert teams of letter-openers to examine and photograph the despatches, before sending them on their way in new envelopes with copies of Japanese seals. Professor Matsokin, a Japanese specialist from Moscow,⁷⁰ was employed by INO in Harbin to peruse the despatches and send translations of the most important promptly to the Centre. There was ample evidence in the intercepts forwarded to Moscow of designs by the Japanese military on China and the Soviet Far East. But the most troubling document, intercepted in July 1927, was a secret memorandum written by Baron Gi-ishi Tanaka, the Japanese prime minister and foreign minister, which advocated the conquest of Manchuria and Mongolia as a prelude to Japanese domination over the whole of China, and predicted that Japan “would once again have to cross swords with Russia.”⁷¹

A second copy of the memorandum was obtained in Japanese-occupied Korea by the residency at Seoul, headed by Ivan Andreevich Chichayev (later wartime resident in London). A Japanese interpreter, codenamed ANO, recruited by the INO residency, succeeded in extracting the document, along with other secret material, from the safe of the Japanese police chief in Seoul.⁷² A copy of the Tanaka memorandum was later leaked by INO to the American press to give the impression that it had been obtained by an agent working for the United States.⁷³ As recently as 1997 an SVR official history continued to celebrate the simultaneous acquisition of the memorandum in Harbin and Seoul as “an absolutely unique occurrence in intelligence operations.”⁷⁴ Though somewhat exaggerated, this judgment accurately reflects the enormous importance attached at the time to the discovery of Tanaka’s prediction of war with Russia.

The acute anxiety in Moscow caused by the breach of diplomatic relations with Britain and the apparent threat from Japan was clearly reflected in an alarmist article by Stalin, published a few days after he received the Tanaka memorandum:

The fact that Constantini had failed to provide anything remotely resembling a British version of the Tanaka memorandum did not lead either Stalin or the conspiracy theorists of the Centre to conclude that Britain had no plans to attack the Soviet Union. They believed instead that greater efforts were required to penetrate the secret councils of the Western warmongers. Stalin, who had emerged as the clear victor in the three-year power struggle which followed Lenin’s death, demanded more intelligence on the (mostly imaginary) Western plots against the Soviet Union which he was sure existed.

In an effort to make Soviet espionage less detectable and more deniable, the main responsibility for intelligence collection was shifted from “legal” to “illegal” residencies, which operated independently of Soviet diplomatic and trade missions. In later years the establishment of a new illegal residency became an immensely timeconsuming operation which involved years of detailed training and the painstaking construction of “legends” to give the illegals false identities. The largely improvised attempt to expand the illegal network rapidly in the late 1920s and early 1930s, without the detailed preparation which later became mandatory, brought into OGPU foreign operations both unconventional talent and a number of confidence tricksters. Among the secret scandals discovered by Mitrokhin in KGB files was that of the illegal residency established in Berlin in 1927 with the Austrian Bertold Karl Ilk as resident and Moritz Weinstein as his deputy. A later investigation concluded that the Centre should have noted the “suspicious speed” with which the Ilk-Weinstein residency claimed to be expanding its agent network. Within two months it was reporting operations in Britain, France and Poland as well as in Germany. Ilk refused to provide more than sketchy information on his agents’ identity on security grounds. His failure to supply detailed biographies was reluctantly accepted by the Centre, which was still reeling from the widespread unmasking of OGPU networks in the spring of 1927. It gradually became clear, however, that the core of the Ilk-Weinstein illegal network consisted of their own relatives and that some elements of it were pure invention. Its agent operations in Britain and France were discovered to be “plain bluff,” though an effective way of obtaining funds from the Centre for Ilk and Weinstein. The network in Germany and Poland, while not wholly fictitious, was under surveillance by the local police and security services. The Centre closed down the entire residency in 1933, though without attracting the publicity occasioned by the intelligence failures of 1927.⁷⁶

THE MAIN INFLUENCE on the evolution of the OGPU and its successors during the Stalinist era was the change in the nature of the Soviet state. Much of what was later called “Stalinism” was in reality the creation of Lenin: the cult of the infallible leader, the one-party state and a huge security service with a ubiquitous system of surveillance and a network of concentration camps to terrorize the regime’s opponents. But while Lenin’s one-party state left room for comradely debate within the ruling party, Stalin used the OGPU to stifle that debate, enforce his own narrow orthodoxy and pursue vendettas against opponents both real and imagined. The most vicious and long-lasting of those vendettas was against Leon Trotsky, Lenin’s former Commissar for War.

In its early stages at least, the OGPU’s campaign against Trotsky and his supporters was characterized by a bizarre combination of brutality and farce. When Trotsky refused to recant and admit his “crimes against the Party,” he was sent into internal exile at Alma-Ata, a town in a remote corner of Kazakhstan on the Chinese border. The OGPU detachment which came to his Moscow flat on the morning of January 17, 1928 to take him into exile found Trotsky still in his pajamas. When he refused to come out, the OGPU broke down the door. Trotsky was surprised to recognize the officer leading the detachment as one of his former bodyguards from the civil war. Overcome with emotion at the sight of the ex-Commissar for War, the officer broke down and sobbed, “Shoot me, Comrade Trotsky, shoot me.” Trotsky calmed him down, told him it was his duty to obey orders however reprehensible, and adopted a posture of passive resistance while the OGPU removed his pajamas, put on his clothes and carried him to a car waiting to transport him to the Trans-Siberian Express.⁷⁷

Save for a few hunting trips, Trotsky spent most of his time in Alma-Ata at his desk. Between April and October 1928 he sent his supporters about 550 telegrams and 800 “political letters,” some of them lengthy polemical tracts. During the same period he received 700 telegrams and 1,000 letters from various parts of the Soviet Union, but believed that at least as many more had been confiscated en route.⁷⁸ Every item in Trotsky’s intercepted correspondence was carefully noted by the OGPU, and monthly digests of them were sent both to Vyacheslav Rudolfovich Menzhinsky (Dzerzhinsky’s successor) and to Stalin.⁷⁹ Stalin, who never failed to overreact to opposition, cannot but have been unfavorably impressed by letters which regularly described him and his supporters as “degenerates.”

OGPU reports on Trotsky and his followers were written in a tone of selfrighteous outrage. No counter-revolutionary group since the October Revolution, it declared, had dared to behave “as insolently, boldly and defiantly” as the Trotskyists. Even when brought in for interrogation, Trotsky’s supporters refused to be intimidated by their interrogators. Most declined to reply to questions. Instead they submitted impudent written protests, such as: “I consider the struggle I am engaged in to be a Party matter. I shall explain myself to the Central Control Commission, not to the OGPU.” Early in 1928 the OGPU carried out its first mass arrests of Trotskyists, incarcerating several hundred of them in Moscow’s Butyrka prison. The Butyrka, however, had not yet descended into the brutal squalor for which it became infamous during the Great Terror a decade later, nor had the spirit of Trotsky’s followers been broken. On their first night in prison the Trotskyists staged a riot, kicking down doors, breaking windows and chanting politically incorrect slogans. “Such,” reported the OGPU indignantly, “was the behavior of the embittered enemies of the Party and Soviet power.”⁸⁰

The liquidation of the Trotskyist heresy and the maintenance of ideological orthodoxy within the Communist one-party state required, in Stalin’s view, Trotsky’s removal from the Soviet Union. In February 1929 the great heretic was deported to Turkey and given 1,500 dollars by an OGPU escort to enable him to “settle abroad.”⁸¹ With Trotsky out of the country, the tone of OGPU reports on the destabilization and liquidation of his rapidly dwindling band of increasingly demoralized followers became more confident. According to one report, “a massive retreat from Trotskyism began in the second half of 1929.” Some of those who recanted were turned into OGPU agents to inform on their friends.The same report boasts of the subtlety of the methods used to undermine the credibility of the “counter-revolutionary” hard core. Individual Trotskyists were summoned to OGPU offices from their workplaces, left standing around in the corridors for several hours, then released without explanation. On returning to work they could give no credible account of what had happened. When the process was repeated their workmates became increasingly suspicious and tended to believe rumors planted by the OGPU that they were employed by them as informers. Once the “counter-revolutionaries” were discredited, they were then arrested for their political crimes.⁸²

Stalin, however, was far from reassured. He increasingly regretted the decision to send Trotsky abroad rather than keep him in the Soviet Union, where he could have been put under constant surveillance. One episode only six months after Trotsky was sent into exile seems to have made a particular impression on Stalin. In the summer of 1929 Trotsky received a secret visit from a sympathizer within the OGPU, Yakov Blyumkin. As a young and impetuous Socialist Revolutionary in the Cheka in 1918, Blyumkin had assassinated the German ambassador in defiance of orders from Dzerzhinsky. With Trotsky’s help, however, he had been rehabilitated and had risen to become chief illegal resident in the Middle East. Blyumkin agreed to transmit a message from Trotsky to Karl Radek, one of his most important former supporters, and to try to set up lines of communication with what Trotsky termed his “cothinkers” in the Soviet Union.⁸³ Trilisser, the head of foreign intelligence, was probably alerted to Blyumkin’s visit by an OGPU agent in Trotsky’s entourage. He did not, however, order Blyumkin’s immediate arrest. Instead he arranged an early version of what later became known as a “honey trap.” Trilisser instructed an attractive OGPU agent, Yelizaveta Yulyevna Gorskaya (better known as “Lisa,” or “Vixen”),⁸⁴ to “abandon bourgeois prejudices,” seduce Blyumkin, discover the full extent of his collaboration with Trotsky, and ensure his return to the Soviet Union. Once lured back to Moscow, Blyumkin was interrogated, tried in secret and shot. According to the later OGPU defector Aleksandr Mikhailovich Orlov, Blyumkin’s last words before his execution were, “Long live Trotsky!” Soon afterwards “Lisa” Gorskaya married the OGPU resident in Berlin (and later in New York), Vasili Mikhailovich Zarubin.⁸⁵

As Stalin became increasingly preoccupied during the early 1930s with the opposition to him within the Communist Party, he began to fear that there were other, undiscovered Blyumkins within INO. But Trotsky himself had not yet been targeted for assassination. The main “enemies of the people” outside the Soviet Union were still considered to be the White Guards. General Kutepov, the head of the ROVS in Paris, was brave, upright, teetotal, politically naive and an easy target for the OGPU. His entourage was skillfully penetrated by Soviet agents, and agents provocateurs brought him optimistic news of a nonexistent anti-Bolshevik underground. “Great movements are spreading across Russia!” Kutepov declared in November 1929. “Never have so many people come from ‘over there’ to see me and ask me to collaborate with their clandestine organizations.” Unlike Savinkov and Reilly, however, Kutepov resisted attempts to lure him back to Russia for meetings with the bogus anti-Communist conspirators. With Stalin’s approval, the OGPU thus decided to kidnap him instead and bring him back for interrogation and execution in Moscow.⁸⁶

Overall planning of the Kutepov operation was given to Yakov Isaakovich (“Yasha”) Serebryansky, head of the euphemistically titled “Administration for Special Tasks.”⁸⁷ Before the Second World War, the administration functioned as a parallel foreign intelligence service, reporting directly to the Centre with special responsibility for sabotage, abduction and assassination operations on foreign soil.⁸⁸ Serebryansky later became a severe embarrassment to official historians anxious to distance Soviet foreign intelligence from the blood-letting of the late 1930s and portray it as a victim rather than a perpetrator of the Great Terror. An SVR-sponsored history published in 1993 claimed that Serebryansky was “not a regular member of State Security,” but “only brought in for special jobs.”⁸⁹ KGB files show that, on the contrary, he was a senior OGPU officer whose Administration for Special Tasks grew into an élite service, more than 200-strong, dedicated to hunting down “enemies of the people” on both sides of the Atlantic.⁹⁰

Detailed preparations for the kidnaping of Kutepov were entrusted by Serebryansky to his illegal Paris resident, V. I. Speransky, who had taken part in the deception of Savinkov six years earlier.⁹¹ On the morning of Sunday, January 26, 1930 Kutepov was bundled into a taxi in the middle of a street in Paris’s fashionable seventh arrondissement. Standing nearby was a Communist Paris policeman who had been asked to assist by Speransky so that any bystander who saw the kidnaping (one did) would mistake it for a police arrest. Though the Centre commended the kidnaping as “a brilliant operation,” the chloroform used to overpower Kutepov proved too much for the general’s weak heart. He died aboard a Soviet steamer while being taken back to Russia.⁹²

The Kutepov operation was to set an important precedent. In the early and mid-1930s the chief Soviet foreign intelligence priority remained intelligence collection. During the later years of the decade, however, all other operations were to be subordinated to “special tasks.”