On March 8, 2019, the state-owned news agency RIA Novosti
published an interview of a journalist and intelligence historian, colonel
Alexander Bondarenko. Bondarenko is the author of two books on Soviet military
intelligence, including Heroes of SMERSH (2019) and the biography of Pavel Fitin, the WWII Soviet intelligence chief. He is currently working
on the biography of Yury Drozdov, a long-time chief of the KGB Illegal
Intelligence Department S. Below is my
English translation available only on this blog.
Intelligence Historian Alexander Bondarenko: The Girl and the SMERSH - How Female Beauty Helped Catch Spies During the War
RIA Novosti March 8, 2019
The fairer half of humanity and intelligence services, the combination of mystery and secrecy with feminine charms thanks to which women can often do more than men – that is a topic that will never be boring. Many stories about the women who worked in the intelligence field have already been told - to the extent possible, of course. But very little is known about the women from the “opposite” service – the counterintelligence. No doubt remarkable people worked there, too. One of them was the military counterintelligence officer Anna Kuzminichna Ziberova.
This year, in the Molodaya Gvardiya book series “Lives of Remarkable People,” the book entitled Heroes of SMERSH was published, dedicated to the outstanding officers of the military counterintelligence service during the Great Patriotic War. Among the 21 heroes described in the book, there is only one woman - Anna Ziberova. In an interview with RIA Novosti, the author of the book, intelligence historian Alexander Bondarenko says that “this book is a memorial to all military counterintelligence officers, including Anna Kuzminichna whom I remember as a very soft-spoken, delicate, and sincere person.”
Trust through Charm
“In counterintelligence, including military counterintelligence, women were mainly employed in the staff positions - in office work, personnel department, etc. A female operative is a rarity in counterintelligence, especially in military counterintelligence, because the army is considered men’s business” - notes Bondarenko.
A graduate of a pedagogical university who had just received her diploma, and not just a pretty girl, but a real beauty, Anna could have taught literature in some high school, instilled a love of poetry and prose in her students, but ...
“But the war began. And many people who never even considered working for state security and intelligence services, but instead wanted to teach children, [or] build houses, factories, and cities, had to put on a uniform,” says Bondarenko. Anna was recruited into the Office of the Special Departments of the NKVD within which military counterintelligence operated at that time. She was assigned to do “investigations” – which meant finding out the identities of people who, for whatever reason, attracted the attention of the state security institutions. So, instead of checking school essays, she was checking people.
“And here Anna Kuzminichna turned out to be very useful,” Bondarenko notes. “Counterintelligence is generally built on trust and doing ‘investigations’ even more so. And trust arises from sympathy for a person. If someone with a heavy jaw and a narrow forehead approached you, and, in addition, couldn’t clearly explain what he wanted, you would quickly try to get away. But if, instead, a beautiful, intelligent woman approached you with a book in her hands and asked for something, any normal person would help her right away,” Bondarenko adds.
The Deadly Risk
The military counterintelligence service regime was harsh with no days off and no holidays. The discipline was very strict. The officers worked hard from morning till evening and did not spare themselves. In the morning they received their assignments and dispersed throughout Moscow. They returned late in the evening and reported what they had accomplished during the day.
In addition, doing “investigations” was fraught with mortal danger, although it does not seem like that. You walk around, meet the people of interest, talk to them while drinking tea (if you can obtain it despite war shortages), and write the reports later.
[And yet] here are two episodes. In the summer of 1943 (at that time, the Special Departments were already replaced by the SMERSH – The Main Counterintelligence Directorate of the Soviet People’s Commissariat of Defense. SMERSH meant “Death to spies!”). Military counterintelligence officers had to neutralize a German agent who came on a business trip from the front and lived in his sister’s empty apartment in the center of Moscow on Rozhdestvenka Street, very close to the Lubyanka. Anna Kuzminichna had the apartment under surveillance. Suddenly, at some point, this officer transmitted a message by radio that on a certain day and a certain hour, he would leave the house to cross the front line and go over to the Germans. It was decided to arrest the spy on the street when he left the house.
Anna was supposed to be at the entrance and, seeing that the agent left the apartment, wave a white handkerchief through the window on the floor above. Preparing for this, counterintelligence officers had already taken the glass out of the window frame. Everything seemed pretty simple. Far away from the front, the center of Moscow, and somewhere on the street, one’s own colleagues from the arrest unit – what could go wrong?
She arrived at the place ahead of time, entered through the main entrance and suddenly saw that the agent was already going down the stairs: he left the apartment earlier than was supposed. Seeing the girl, the spy stopped and let her in. “With peripheral vision, I notice that he is looking after me. I go up the first floor, then the second, the third, but he is still standing there!” - Ziberova recalled in her memoir.
What to do now? When she reached the top floor, she knocked on the door of an apartment. Luckily, somebody lived there. An old woman opened the door. Anna asked her for a glass of water, and when the old woman went back into the apartment, she took off her shoes, silently ran to the window, broke the glass (after all, the “prepared” window was on a floor below), cut her hand in the process, and waved with a blood-stained handkerchief …
When Anna saw that counterintelligence officers noticed her signal and were approaching the main entrance from all directions, she sat down on the stairs and began to cry – the stress was so great. In the meantime, the agent exited the building and was immediately captured.
But was this so serious? Well, she cut her hand. It hurt, of course, but did this cause her stress? “Such a reaction is understandable. The risk was actually great - after all, if the German agent had figured out who the girl was, he could have hit her on the head – he had nothing to lose - and then thrown her down the stairwell. Counterintelligence officers waiting in ambush wouldn’t know about it and the spy could calmly go out into the street and sneak away,” says Bondarenko.
A more serious case occurred during the same year [1943]. In the area of the Taganskaya Square, a sleazy-looking colonel, a German agent who had also come from the front, had an apartment and, like the spy from the Rozhdestvenka Street, lived by himself. Likewise, counterintelligence officers knew that the colonel was about to return back to his paymasters across the front line.
The counterintelligence unit went to his apartment. Anna went first to find out if this person was at home. “I knock on the door, no one opens it. I turned my back to the door and began to kick it with my feet so that they could hear me. Suddenly the door opens, and I literally fall into the corridor. I feel that someone grabbed me by my collar and threw me into a small room, having locked the door on the latch from the inside. I realized that I was in the toilet,” she recalled.
“I hear someone running around the apartment. There is a strong knock on the door, someone runs to the back door, but our guys are already there waiting. They entered the apartment, one grabbed the colonel, the other ran to the front door, where they were still knocking” - wrote Ziberova. Anna’s commanding officer, who ran into the apartment, immediately asked the detainee: “Where is our girl?” “Had I known she was yours, I would have killed her!” the colonel shot back. “Therefore, on the ‘secret front’ there were just as many dangers as on the real front,” Bondarenko notes.
Anna worked successfully, delicately, trying not to arouse any suspicions of those whom she talked to, whom she interviewed. She knew Moscow extremely well and was familiar with all the courtyards and the back entrances. And, after a certain time, she began to receive the most difficult assignments.
Once she was even mistaken for a spy herself. When the Soviet atomic project began during the war, the organization with the provisional name the Laboratory No. 2 of the Soviet Academy of Sciences became its “center” - this is now the world-famous Kurchatov Institute. Its location was in a district on the then outskirts of Moscow on the territory of the Shchukinsky military town. And many of the residents of the town began to get jobs in the Laboratory No. 2. Anna was instructed to make “investigations” of those wishing to work at this facility. In order to do this, she took on a cover job as a maid on the territory of the military town.
And it so happened that one of the women, with whom she talked, suspected Ziberova of espionage and reported her suspicions to the criminal investigation department. The policemen detained Anna and brought her to the police station, where she refused to reveal her identity. At some point, Anna’s boss, Colonel Zbrailov, found out what was going on and personally came to rescue the “spy.” The police chief praised Anna to Zbrailov, saying that she stood firm no matter what they tried. “I wish I had staff like that” – he exclaimed wistfully.
The life of Anna Ziberova was no different from the lives of millions of Soviet people who lost their family members and close friends in the war. In 1944, Anna’s beloved husband, a military pilot, got killed. After that, she became so ill that she began to hallucinate. “I see a pilot on the street, I run after him, I grab his hand, he looks around, I see that this is a stranger, I turn away and run [in tears],” she recalled. In addition, Anna’s brother and two brothers of her husband also got killed in the war, and her father died. “So, the war affected Anna Kuzminichna in a horrible way,” says Bondarenko.
The Fearless SMERSH
Ziberova worked in the military counterintelligence service for about forty years. In 1996, for the first time after the war, Anna Kuzminichna visited her high school No. 464 on the 60th anniversary of its opening. There was a special program in the assembly hall. Ziberova was the only one left from her entire class. The portraits of her classmates who got killed in the war looked at her from the walls.
As the oldest graduate, Anna Kuzminichna was given the floor and asked to tell about her studies and the course of her later life. After talking about the school and her time as a student, she said – “And then I worked in the SMERSH...” After these words, as she recalled later, deadly silence enveloped the hall. Those who were looking at her with attention and interest [suddenly] dropped their eyes, as if she had said something shameful. Anna Kuzminichna said that at first she thought something was wrong with her clothes. And then, from the depths of the hall, somebody who, apparently, thought that he knew what he was talking about yelled out: “SMERSH is terrible [in a moral sense]!”
“This is not surprising. After all, at that time the history of our state security and intelligence services was portrayed in the darkest colors. One scary myth was followed by another, even scarier. SMERSH was generally presented exclusively as a punitive organization,” says Bondarenko. According to him, this happened because the history of military counterintelligence was kept classified. “Do you know where all this nonsense about SMERSH came from? From the Western spy fiction. Few people remember that the SMERSH was described for the first time by the British writer Ian Fleming in one of his James Bond novels, From Russia with Love. In the novel, Fleming presented it as a bunch of blockheads engaged in the liquidation of people. And his head of SMERSH was a general with a "bright" Russian family Grubozaboyshchikov [lit. brutal killer]” Bondarenko says.
Let’s go back to that school hall where the SMERSH was given such a “high rating.” In all likelihood, Ziberova should have been offended. But she laughed merrily in response. “Am I really that terrible?” - asked the short, still beautiful and very charming woman. Everyone in the hall was embarrassed.
And she began to tell in detail what her work consisted of and why it was so necessary for our country. The audience held their breath. And when the story ended, everyone stood up and applauded for a long time. There were flowers next to the stage to be given to all the visiting graduates. The director of the school, in a fit of emotion, grabbed all of them, and gave Anna Kuzminichna that huge bouquet.
