On February 6, 2016, the liberal Russian radio station Ekho Moskvy invited intelligence historian Colonel Alexander Bondarenko to talk about his biography of Pavel Fitin, the WWII Soviet intelligence chief, and the WWII Soviet intelligence operations in general. The interview was conducted by Vladimir Ryzhkov. This is the second part of the interview. Below is my translation available only on this blog.
Intelligence Historian
Alexander Bondarenko: Soviet Intelligence During WWII (Part 2)
Ekho Moskvy February 6, 2016
The Part 1 of the interview is available here.
Part 2
V. Ryzhkov - Good evening. Once again hello to the audience of the Ekho Moskvy radio station, I am Vladimir Ryzhkov and the program “The Price of Victory” is on the air. Today we are revealing an absolutely amazing story. Pavel Mikhailovich Fitin, a completely unknown name, unfortunately, the head of Soviet foreign intelligence from 1939 to 1946, a person who made a significant contribution to our Victory. And before we took the news break, we talked about one of the most important topics - whether Stalin knew or not, that on June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany would attack the Soviet Union.
And before the news break, my guest Alexander Bondarenko, a historian, author of a book about Pavel Fitin, the head of Soviet intelligence during the war years, said that in June 1941, on June 17, a report was prepared based on the reports from the Red Orchestra [spy network] from Berlin and also other intelligence reports, and that Fitin brought this report to Stalin. And then what happened?
This was 5 days before the war.
A. Bondarenko - The report was sent earlier with the set of messages from the Berlin station, which clearly stated when the attack would begin, what was being done, how Germany was getting ready, and so on. And then Fitin was summoned ...
V. Ryzhkov - Was he with Stalin by himself or was someone else there?
A. Bondarenko - No, Fitin was summoned together with [Vsevolod] Merkulov, the People’s Commissar for State Security.
V. Ryzhkov - That is, they came in together?
A. Bondarenko - They came in together. Stalin asked for the report on the situation and Fitin did the talking. Merkulov was mostly silent, or completely silent.
V. Ryzhkov - How do we know about this conversation?
A. Bondarenko - First of all, Fitin himself wrote about this conversation in his semi-classified notes. Secondly, others wrote about it somewhat inaccurately based on the words of Fitin. Why somewhat inaccurately - I will say a little bit later. Many memoirs of the period mentioned it.
After Fitin spoke, Stalin took the report which was in a bound folder and asked who the source was. Fitin said that this was a reliable source because he himself was in Germany a year before, and he personally knew the people who were based there. Interestingly, I came to the conclusion that, while in Germany, Fitin came under the surveillance of the Gestapo.
V. Ryzhkov - I don’t even doubt it.
A. Bondarenko - But what could they do? They couldn’t arrest him, couldn’t they?
V. Ryzhkov – They monitored and followed him.
A. Bondarenko – Everything turned out to be fine. And he described the source as very reliable. Stalin replied: this was disinformation. Check it out properly. And he returned the folder to Fitin. And then the myths began.
The first myth is that Stalin wrote an obscenity on this report. First, that this is not a source, but disinformation, and then even worse - send him to hell, pardon me. It is officially believed that this was so, but it seems to me that this was a falsification done in the 1990s, when we were proving that everything Soviet was absolutely bad.
V. Ryzhkov - Is the original of this report preserved?
A. Bondarenko - Yes, the report has survived, it is in the archives, and there is this resolution, but it is clearly falsified. In my book, I asked an elementary question: when could Stalin write this resolution? Before Fitin’s talk? Then, why did he listen? After the talk? Did he say something like - Wait, guys, I’ll write something down for you. It’s really funny. [In my opinion] he simply gave this document back to Fitin.
V. Ryzhkov - Or could it be that he read it, was angry, and wrote this down? Then, still harboring some doubts, he invited Fitin to present his case. Could this be?
A. Bondarenko – Stalin was always in control of himself. Would he write down something like this? Well, there are no other resolutions of Stalin that contain obscenities. Immediately Fitin gave this report to Zoya Ivanovna Rybkina, later the famous writer Zoya Ivanovna Voskresenskaya, saying (already somewhat softening what he heard) that Stalin said that they needed to do more work on it. Zoya Ivanovna writes about this and how Fitin returned upset, but she does not mention any of Stalin’s written statements.
V. Ryzhkov – So, Fitin was convinced that the information was reliable, that is, he had no doubts?
A. Bondarenko – That’s correct. Fitin had no doubts.
V. Ryzhkov - Was he sure that the war would begin?
A. Bondarenko - Vladimir, it is clear that Stalin also had no doubts. But there was general Yelisey Sinitsyn, Fitin’s friend from the Central School [of the NKVD] and from the intelligence service. Fitin told him in July, when Sinitsyn returned from Finland, that Stalin said: check it more carefully. Why did Fitin say this to Sinitsyn? Because to say that Stalin said that this was disinformation when the war had already started was not appropriate. Therefore, he decided to smooth it out.
But, as I understand, there were also some secret agreements between Stalin and Hitler, which we still do not know about. In the same way, we do not know about the agreements that [Rudolf] Hess brought to England. They are still classified. Therefore, we do not know what was really going on. Stalin treated Fitin with great respect.
V. Ryzhkov – But this episode with the report was on Stalin’s mind later when Fitin was fired?
A. Bondarenko - Wait, wait, he hardly remembered, there was no point in saying: well, sorry, my dear ...
V. Ryzhkov - Well, yes.
A. Bondarenko - And, all the same, these (in my opinion) heavily redacted Stalin’s visitors’ logs still revealed a secret. On that very day, only in the evening, Stalin (and this is written down) was again visited by the People’s Commissar Merkulov, one of his deputies, and the head of the Personnel Department of the Ministry of State Security. But this time without Fitin. And here I concluded that they planned to transfer him to some other position. The personnel officer was not a part of Stalin’s chain of command; he had no reason to meet with Stalin.
V. Ryzhkov – Why would that be? Stalin did not believe Fitin?
A. Bondarenko - No, on the contrary. There were secret agreements [with Hitler]. And there was this honest guy who unambiguously reported: there will be a war.
V. Ryzhkov - He did his job.
A. Bondarenko - Yes. Military intelligence was doing the same thing but a bit more delicately. They provided [Stalin] with original documents, all with their own “innocuous” observations: perhaps this is disinformation by the English or the Germans...
V. Ryzhkov – And the foreign intelligence service reported everything as it was.
A. Bondarenko – Yes, they did. Fitin reported everything very directly. And [Stalin] probably said that he was a good guy, but that he did not understand. Find him another position. Because if they wanted to get him arrested, then they did not need the personnel officer at the meeting. And, if they wanted to exile him somewhere, he was also not needed. Stalin could have said to Merkulov: well, send him to some district to be an operative. But what they wanted to do is to find him a good position, to let him gain experience, because he was so young and inexperienced, and to remove him in this way.
V. Ryzhkov – He was only 33 then?
A. Bondarenko - Yes, he was 33 years old. He was born on December 28, 1907, that is, at the very end of the year.
V. Ryzhkov - Ok, let’s move on. He warned Stalin, the agent network was doing a great job, he raised the status of the foreign intelligence service. How about the situation with the Battle of Kursk - I read that it seems like they got the information from the British. We know that the British were already able to decipher the secret German codes, and this was their famous Enigma machine. Here I have a question - it seems to me that the British sometimes distorted the information on purpose, so as not to expose their decryption machine, but they still wanted to let the allies know what was going on. This was something like…
A. Bondarenko – something like a game.
V. Ryzhkov – No, not a game. Here the “game” may not be a right word, because we were allies after all. How were these interactions worked out?
A. Bondarenko - Again, this was definitely a kind of game, because even if we were allies… [for example] if I have an agent, it does not mean that I will pass him on to you.
V. Ryzhkov - Well, yes. But, on the other hand, the British, of course, gave us some information, they leaked.
A. Bondarenko - Naturally.
V. Ryzhkov - Whenever they understood that the victory hung in the balance.
A. Bondarenko - They had to pass on secret information, there was an agreement among the allies.
V. Ryzhkov - Was there really?
A. Bondarenko - Of course.
V. Ryzhkov - And so, Fitin worked with the British and he worked with the Americans, right?
A. Bondarenko - Under Fitin, the contacts between the intelligence services were first established.
V. Ryzhkov – That’s what I wanted to ask. Did they have official contacts?
A. Bondarenko – Yes, Fitin even met with them. I think [William J.] Donovan flew to Moscow, they met in various safe houses. And the Americans especially loved it because they were welcomed in the Russian manner.
V. Ryzhkov - Well, of course - with pancakes ...
A. Bondarenko - … with cognac, caviar and so on.
V. Ryzhkov – As one would expect.
A. Bondarenko― Previously, under Yezhov, for contacts and communication with enemy intelligence services, one could get arrested and shot. It is [under Fitin] that these contacts began.
V. Ryzhkov - How effective was this interaction? Did the British help in the Battle of Kursk?
A. Bondarenko - The “Cambridge Five” helped much more.
V. Ryzhkov - That is, our own agents, after all.
A. Bondarenko - Our agents participated in those decryption efforts. That is, our people knew.
V. Ryzhkov - We recently had another guest on the air, who said that Churchill had guessed that our people knew but he did not really want to interfere with it - after all, we were allies. Have you come across this point of view?
A. Bondarenko – I don’t know, I never spoke to Churchill and he never spoke to me.
V. Ryzhkov - I also haven’t seen him for a long time either [laughter].
A. Bondarenko - Well, yes, the old man died, by the way.
V. Ryzhkov - If anyone did not know.
A. Bondarenko - Yes. And the situation was such that whatever they wanted to give us, they did.
V. Ryzhkov – That’s what I wanted to know.
A. Bondarenko - Yes, yes.
V. Ryzhkov - This was significant help in the period of the Battle of Kursk, as I understand it, right? In 1943.
A. Bondarenko - Again, intelligence services are not limited to just one source of information.
V. Ryzhkov - Naturally.
A. Bondarenko - Therefore, what the “Cambridge Five” sent, those decrypted materials, that was one thing. They sent the performance characteristics of German tanks.
V. Ryzhkov - This is when the new “Tigers” appeared for the first time, right?
A. Bondarenko - Yes. But, at the same time, our military intelligence was also doing a good job, and the Germans made us a wonderful gift - they took the “Tiger,” this heavy think, and sent it to the wooded and swampy regions of the Leningrad front.
V. Ryzhkov – It got stuck.
A. Bondarenko – It got swallowed up by the swamp.
V. Ryzhkov - And we pulled it out.
A. Bondarenko - Naturally. And we processed it as best we could. In addition, the partisans were also doing a great job.
V. Ryzhkov – And here’s my question, Alexander: how were the relations among our various intelligence services organized during the war years? How did you call them - the neighbors - did they help each other out? Did jealousy get in the way? Did the military intelligence help out? Did the information converge to some center, was it processed by Fitin or by Merkulov, or by some else?
A. Bondarenko - The information was exchanged, but there were also some clear boundaries.
V. Ryzhkov – The boundaries which established who was responsible for what?
A. Bondarenko - Yes. Because in this kind of situation, one could easily begin to work at cross-purposes. For instance, those well-known radio espionage “games.” In the end, they were handed over to the SMERSH, which was headed by [Viktor] Abakumov. That is described in detail in my book Military Counterintelligence, 1918-2010. And there I dispute to some extent the words of [Pavel] Sudoplatov, who wrote that Abakumov took over the control of the “games” and that this was not appropriate. No, [I say] it was necessary that only one service be in charge. Well, a couple of radio “games” did remain under the purview of the foreign intelligence service...
V. Ryzhkov - Did they work together on deciding which political objectives disinformation they provided was supposed to achieve?
A. Bondarenko – No, not in terms of political objectives. That was the responsibility of the military leadership. And this made it much easier on the military counterintelligence service [SMERSH] because of the clear chain of command. So, everything was thought out very clearly.
V. Ryzhkov – You mean, everything necessary for the disinformation of the enemy?
A. Bondarenko - Yes. And this information was collected and checked. Military intelligence provided some of it, foreign intelligence some as well, but unfortunately, there were also failures to connect all the pieces, for instance, the failure of the Red Orchestra…
V. Ryzhkov - Did our people actually set them up for failure?
A. Bondarenko - Yes. They lost operative contact with the group. The foreign intelligence service weakened [by the purges] and the inexperience of Fitin led to the fact that at the start of the war we lost all contact with our agents [in Germany]. It was believed that because we have radio transmitters in the Minsk region, everything was going to be fine. And then, a week later, the Germans were in Minsk, the transmitters went dead… After that, the foreign intelligence service tried to communicate with these agents from England, through Scandinavia. That is to say, had Fitin become the head of intelligence several years earlier, I think there would have been no such failures, and the successes and, perhaps, the victory itself, would have come sooner. At first, however, he had to learn a lot and gain trust. But our people kept working. Still, these contacts with the allies [the British] cannot really be said to have been very fruitful, on the one hand. On the other hand, when they ask me who our best intelligence officer was, I honestly say: I don’t know.
V. Ryzhkov – What do you mean by “our”?
A. Bondarenko – I mean, in the Soviet Union.
V. Ryzhkov - Why? Because everyone was so good, or because everyone was so bad? Or because nothing can be known for certain?
A. Bondarenko - Yes, let’s say the person completed his assignment, he had some contacts, he went to some place and did something there, and so on. Then he returned, and maybe was even awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, like [Gevork] Vartanyan – we were lucky that they were declassified, this wonderful couple [Gevork and Goar Vartanyan]. But, generally speaking, the intelligence officer returned and then disappeared. Some letters might still come to his address, but no one would be able to guess that he worked in the foreign intelligence service, that he had important contact abroad…
V. Ryzhkov - Do you mean that this is because the secrecy regime is very strict?
A. Bondarenko - Absolutely. Because otherwise...
V. Ryzhkov - Nobody knows anything. And we are not telling anything we shouldn’t right now, correct? I’m kidding, of course. These things about Fitin… they are no longer secret?
A. Bondarenko (laughter) - I don’t know how Walter Schellenberg will react to this, but as far as I know, the old man died a long time ago.
V. Ryzhkov – A bit earlier, you said a very interesting thing that at the beginning of the war we lost contact with our key intelligence agents in Europe. Here I have a question: did Fitin and Soviet intelligence work with somebody in Berlin during the war? Was there a conditional Shtierlits [the fictional hero of a popular spy TV series], who drove a horch [a German car brand] and wore the uniform of a German colonel. Did we work with Paris occupied by the Germans? Did we have our people in Bucharest, in Budapest and so on? Or, throughout the entire war, we can say that these places were like a black hole, that nothing was coming through? What was really going on?
A. Bondarenko - It is officially known that our only agent in the Gestapo had a codename Breitenbach and his real name was Willy Lehmann. He was exposed and later executed precisely because of the problems in the relations between our two intelligence services. We sent our people to Germany, to Berlin, and we also worked with the British, but all that was not very effective. That is, our agents were working. Volunteers would pop up here and there.
V. Ryzhkov - That is, we had people in Paris, in Bucharest, in Belgrade, even in Warsaw?
A. Bondarenko― Yes, yes.
V. Ryzhkov - They were in those places, right?
A. Bondarenko - Yes. But it’s difficult to say how much they helped. I will repeat what I said before: intelligence is perhaps the only sphere of human activity where they do not boast of their successes. If in other areas of political life, they say: wow, we did this and that, in intelligence, everything is kept secret. That is, things are done quietly, behind the scenes, and that’s it. Nothing to talk about.
Therefore, as one intelligence officer once said to me: look, even if we had someone in the leadership of Hitler’s Reich, we would never admit it, because then it would be necessary to share some of the responsibility for the crimes of the Reich. Therefore, people had their assignments, they completed them, then disappeared or perished or whatever, but we can’t reveal everything, because it could harm our reputation.
V. Ryzhkov - But there is a disadvantage to that. Because, on the one hand, if the intelligence service does not boast of its successes, that may be great and praiseworthy, but on the other hand, it leads to the creation of a heroic myth, a kind of a halo. Because, if we do not know what they really did, we can attribute all kinds of accomplishments to them, which in fact never took place. These are the two sides of the same coin.
A. Bondarenko - Well, that’s how it should be. They should work without attracting attention.
V. Ryzhkov – And they do.
A. Bondarenko – And let others say whatever they want ...
V. Ryzhkov – Ok, then. Here’s another question about Fitin. When I was preparing for this program, I read his biography. It struck me how badly everything turned out for him after the war. He lost one position after another and fell lower and lower in the political and military hierarchy...
A. Bondarenko - Yes.
V. Ryzhkov - Well, why? After all…
A. Bondarenko - Vladimir, that’s not true, that’s a legend.
V. Ryzhkov - Well, look, he was the head of the foreign intelligence service of the Soviet Union. And then he was sent to Sverdlovsk, and then to Kazakhstan, then somewhere else. Why didn’t he become a minister in the government, for instance? Why didn’t he advance?
A. Bondarenko - He became a minister.
V. Ryzhkov - In Kazakhstan?
A. Bondarenko - Yes.
V. Ryzhkov - But not at the level of the Soviet Union.
A. Bondarenko - Sorry, Kazakhstan was the largest republic of the Union [after Russia].
V. Ryzhkov - So, you don’t think that his postwar fate was tragic? Tell us why.
A. Bondarenko - We are very fond of legends. Our history is falsified with great pleasure both from below and from above. Especially from above. And Khrushchev’s point of view that Beria was a scoundrel who hasn’t done anything good prevailed. However, in the Urals - I have flown there three times while working on my book - Beria is remembered very fondly due to his involvement in the atomic project. People there have a very high opinion of him. And when we talk about Beria, let’s also consider who was best organized when the war started. The border guards, the border troops of the NKVD. That is, Beria was not at all such a bad person as some like to claim. But a legend has been created in the Khrushchev period that Beria demoted Fitin because Fitin informed Stalin about the beginning of the war, and that’s what Stalin did not want to hear. But, as I said, first Beria and then Merkulov signed all these documents submitted by Fitin. Another later version, the post-Khrushchev version is that Khrushchev demoted him. But in fact, well, our system, we all know, was good that way [Bondarenko is being sarcastic]. Now, it’s even better. Everything is being decided by the very few and their friends.
V. Ryzhkov – And so…
A. Bondarenko: The real story is that in 1946, the People’s Commissar of State Security Merkulov was replaced by the tough [leader of the SMERSH] Abakumov. Comrade Stalin did that. The Doctors’ plot was “uncovered” and then the plot of the Leningrad party leadership, and so on and on.
V. Ryzhkov - Well, what about Fitin? He was working in foreign intelligence.
A. Bondarenko - But Fitin was a member of Merkulov’s clan. In reality, he was in Beria’s clan. Beria was engaged exclusively in the atomic project, and, moreover, received a lot of assistance from Fitin, which we can talk about later. But Beria was no longer the chief. The chief was Merkulov, and when he was replaced, his entire clan was replaced, too. Abakumov brought his own people. The foreign intelligence service began to drift.
V. Ryzhkov – So, it was not a fall from grace, it was simply the change of the leader who was in charge?
A. Bondarenko – Yes, that’s right. Well, all the time this is described as a fall from grace, but for some reason, I don’t know why, people don’t have enough patience to read the fourth volume of Essays on the History of Foreign Intelligence, written mostly by intelligence officers in the 1990s, of whom I know a few, and republished in 2015. And there are some of Fitin’s notes - they are not all declassified - and they end like this: I was engaged in the atomic project for another 5 years after I left the foreign intelligence service.
V. Ryzhkov - That is, until 1951.
A. Bondarenko - Yes. Here it’s important to take a pause and try to understand what he meant by being engaged and analyze what he did. First, for a short period of time in 1946, he was our deputy representative in Germany. What was Germany at that time? First of all, the uranium mining, the uranium mines, the famous Bismuth Joint Stock Company. After that, he was transferred to Sverdlovsk as the deputy head of the state security department for the Urals.
V. Ryzhkov – Yes, and then to Kazakhstan.
A. Bondarenko – Wait a moment. When I came to the Urals for the first time and was doing the research for my book on Fitin, they gave me some documents about what he was doing there, and when I later said to them that he was also involved in the atomic project, they said “Ok, we’ll look for that, too.” And now they want me to publish the third edition of my book with all the newly uncovered documents on how the atomic project was implemented and Fitin’s role in it.
And after he served as the deputy head of state security in the Urals until 1949, he was then appointed to the position of the People’s Commissar of State Security in Kazakhstan. The second largest Soviet republic.
V. Ryzhkov - And, by the way, that’s the place with all the uranium mines and other rare metals.
A. Bondarenko - And the site for nuclear testing.
V. Ryzhkov - Yes, that’s right, in Semipalatinsk. This is also not a coincidence, right?
A. Bondarenko – Of course not. He was transferred there and was elected a delegate to the 19th Communist Party Congress. And that was then the highest party authority. In other words, his career was going well. After Stalin’s death, the People’s Commissariat for State Security ceased to exit. But then Beria, who they say hated him, appointed him to what position? The Head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Department for the Sverdlovsk Region. Again, the Urals being the stronghold of the Soviet state, he did a very important work there. But then after the arrest of Beria, he was removed from this office. That is, everything had been going well for him, and he could have gone up even higher. He was only 45 years old and already a lieutenant general. But he was fired without a right to a pension because he had only 15 years of service! So, it was the change of the person in command [from Beria to Khrushchev] that knocked him down ...
V. Ryzhkov - And after that – we only have very little time left - as I understand it, he only worked in the economic sphere.
A. Bondarenko - Then he successfully defended himself from the charge that he was an enemy of the people, and they could not pin it on him. After that, he worked for the Department of Economic Planning, and then he was in charge of the factory run by the Society for the Friendship of the Peoples of the USSR and Foreign Countries. There is also information that he kept his contacts with intelligence officers. Unfortunately, after the book was already published in the book series Lives of Remarkable People and followed by the second edition after only 3 months, which does not happen so often, a lot of new materials came my way. For instance, about his meetings with [Rudolf] Abel, who returned from abroad [after the famous spy exchange], and about the atomic project and much, much more. So, God willing, I may be able to do another edition of the book and include all that.
V. Ryzhkov - Thank you very much. It seems to me that this was a very interesting story about a very interesting person named Pavel Fitin, the head of Soviet intelligence during the World War II. My guest today was Alexander Bondarenko, a historian. You can read about Fitin in his book published in the Lives of Remarkable People series.
And to you, Alexander, I wish you the very best in your upcoming investigations. Please bring out from obscurity more important figures from our history. Thank you very much!
A. Bondarenko - Thank you, I will try.
V. Ryzhkov - Thank you!
A. Bondarenko - Goodbye.
