Filip Kovacevic: Richard Sorge and KGB General Kondrashev’s Mystification

   Introduction

To date, the most revealing account of the origins and functioning of the Department D [disinformation] of the First Chief Directorate [foreign intelligence] of the KGB is provided in Tennent ‘Pete’ Bagley’s book Spymaster: Startling Cold War Revelations of a Soviet KGB Chief.[1] Bagley’s book came to be thanks to his post-Cold War friendship with KGB General Sergey Kondrashev, a veteran of Soviet intelligence whose career spanned from the late 1940s to the early 1990s. It is essentially Kondrashev’s autobiography which his former employer, now called the SVR [Russia’s foreign intelligence service], forbade him to publish in Russia due to its alleged exposure of KGB secrets. Bagley waited until after Kondrashev’s death to publish it in the United States, sparing Kondrashev from getting into trouble with the Putin regime. He also added his commentary in those places where his own intelligence expertise and experiences as a CIA veteran could provide further clarification and insight, or throw a shadow of doubt on Kondrashev’s claims. Since there were many occasions where he had done so, the book represents a quite remarkable and probably unrepeatable contribution to the understanding of Cold War intelligence history.

Department D

In Chapters 12 and 13, Bagley presented the operational history and major operations of the KGB First Chief Directorate’s Department D (later expanded and renamed the Service A) as related to him by Kondrashev who was the Department’s principal deputy chief from 1962 to 1964 and then its head from 1966 to 1967.[2] Bagley prefaced this important segment of the book with a very short chapter (only 11 pages long) on the involvement of the Department D in resurrecting the public memory of Richard Sorge, the head of a Soviet military intelligence (GRU) agent network in China and Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s. In this brief chapter, Bagley reported Kondrashev’s claims of playing a crucial role in rehabilitating Sorge. However, neither Kondrashev nor Bagley offered any documentary evidence to back up Kondrashev’s account.

Given that the Central Archive of the FSB in Moscow, which holds the files of the Department D, has remained forever closed to the non-FSB affiliated researchers, many independent scholars have despaired of ever being able to document any of Kondrashev’s claims regarding Sorge. However, I have discovered a way of doing so.

While researching the papers of Soviet/Russian General Dmitry Volkogonov, originally deposited in the Library of Congress in Washington DC but accessible on microfilm in the Hoover Institution (my place of research), I came across a thin folder titled “Sorge, Richard (Zorge, Richard (“Ramzai”) and Ekaterina Aleksandrovna Maksimova.”[3] In this folder, I found copies of several original KGB documents signed by Sergey Kondrashev, which dispel any doubts that he was lying to Bagley about his involvement with Sorge’s rehabilitation. However, when I read the documents, it turned out that there were certain interesting differences with what Kondrashev had told Bagley.

Kondrashev’s Mystification

            The most significant document included in the Sorge folder of the Volkogonov Collection is the Department D file titled “Operational Correspondence ‘Asakhi’ on Sorge Ika Richardovich.” The cover page of the file reveals that the file had 388 pages and that it was started on September 24, 1964 and closed on March 2, 1965. In other words, the rehabilitation of Sorge did not take a lot of time. Perhaps one of the reasons for that is that, as some statements in the file indicate, the Soviet Ministry of Defense (most likely, at the initiative of the GRU) had begun looking into the Sorge case already in the mid-1950s and therefore a lot of groundwork investigation had already been completed. Kondrashev told Bagley that during his work on the Sorge case, he had a counterpart from the GRU whom he named Igor Chistyakov.[4] However, as I discovered, there is a reason to suspect that Kondrashev provided a false (invented) name to Bagley and that there was no GRU officer named Colonel Igor Chistyakov, but that the real name of the person involved was Colonel E. Dryakhlov.

            Unfortunately, for some reason, perhaps due to Volkogonov’s lack of interest or loss of access, the Sorge folder contains no more than 35 pages from the original Department D file (less than 10 percent). The most significant document among those included is a 16-page report titled “The Conclusion Regarding the Archival Materials on Richard Sorge.” The report is dated November 2, 1964 and signed by Sergey Kondrashev (his rank at the time was that of a Lieutenant Colonel) and Colonel E. Dryakhlov.[5] Their signatures are followed by the approval of the deputy head of the KGB, Lieutenant General Nikolay Zakharov. The analysis of this report and its comparison with the report described to Bagley by Kondrashev shows that they are one and the same.

In his conversations with Bagley, Kondrashev claimed that the report had 20 pages, was co-signed by GRU Colonel Chistyakov, and then approved by “their chiefs [the heads of the KGB and the GRU]” who sent it on to the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Politburo for final approval.[6] What I found tells a different story, however. The only co-signatory of the report is Dryakhlov, not Chistyakov, and there were no approvals by the KGB chairman Vladimir Semichastny or the GRU chief Pyotr Ivashutin, just the approval of Semichastny’s deputy, Zakharov. In other words, it seems that Kondrashev crafted his account to Bagley to exaggerate his importance in Bagley’s eyes and the eyes of Bagley’s future readers. Though at the time when Kondrashev co-wrote the report, he was just a lowly Lieutenant Colonel, a mid-level employee in the vast KGB hierarchy, he wanted to impress Bagley that his work influenced the decision-making of top Soviet state security leadership (who supposedly signed his report) and even the Politburo. This, as Kondrashev’s report itself shows, was a fiction, although it is true that Sorge was fully rehabilitated by the Soviet Communist Party in late 1964 just as Kondrashev’s report advocated. After his rehabilitation, Sorge was turned into a heroic Soviet intelligence celebrity and a recruiting tool by KGB public relations branch, which formed the basis for the KGB Press Bureau established in the late 1960s under Yuri Andropov, and its affiliated writers and journalists.      

            This proven instance of Kondrashev’s fudging the truth makes it imperative to be careful when assessing the rest of his “revelations” to Bagley. Former spies like to aggrandize themselves but sometimes, as in this case, their ego-boosting myths get busted by archival records.

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NOTES

^[1] Tennent H. Bagley. Spymaster: Startling Cold War Revelations of a Soviet KGB Chief. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2015.

^[2] Ibid., pp. 165-193. Chapter 12 is titled “Organizing to Disinform” and Chapter 13, “Active Measures.”

^[3] The Volkogonov Collection (Central Archive of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation), Box 4, Folder 9. I gratefully acknowledge the Hoover Institution Library & Archives as an essential resource in the development of these materials. The views expressed in this publication are entirely my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the fellows, staff, or Board of Overseers of the Hoover Institution.

^[4] Bagley. Spymaster, pp. 155, 160-161.

^[5] “The Conclusion Regarding the Archival Materials on Richard Sorge,” The Volkogonov Collection, Box 4, Folder 9, p. 16.

^[6]  Bagley. Spymaster, p. 161.

 

Filip Kovacevic: Riddle of the Crimean Bridge: Ex CIA Officer Edward Ellis Smith’s Never Completed Movie Script

This is the first of two short articles based on the papers of a former CIA officer Edward Ellis Smith (1921-1982) deposited in the Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford University.[1] The aim of each article is to document an obscure or previously unknown aspect of Smith’s enigmatic life trajectory and, in this way, shed more light on the murky world of Cold War secret intelligence. Taken together, the articles will provide a more complete biographical portrait of Smith than previously available in print.[2]

Introduction

In the late 1950s, Edward Ellis Smith, a former CIA officer who served in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, moved from Washington, DC to San Francisco, California. At the time of his move, Smith was employed as an “analyst and contract employee on Soviet affairs” by the CIA-funded Joint Publication Research Service operating out of the U.S. Department of Commerce.[3]

Soon afterwards, while residing at 753 Bush Street, just two blocks away from San Francisco’s famed Union Square, Smith wrote an outline for an espionage movie script which was never completed.[4] In the section below, I provide a detailed discussion and analysis of Smith’s outline, linking it to the documented events in the history of CIA operations. This is the first time Smith’s movie script is discussed in a public forum.

The Spy Movie That Never Was

There are two main protagonists in Smith’s spy movie script and, just like him, they were both World War Two veterans and U.S. intelligence officers. However, while Smith served as an infantry officer in Europe in 1944 and 1945, the two fictional veterans were Navy PT boat officers in the Pacific. At the beginning of the plot, Lieutenant Sherman [no first name given] is a 30-year old student of diplomacy at Georgetown, while Lieutenant Commander Terrence Riddle is a 35-year old professor of Russian history at the University of Virginia. Given Smith’s biography, it seems evident that Sherman rather than Riddle was much closer to being the representation of his alter ego. It is also likely that Riddle had a real life equivalent, perhaps an older colleague of Smith’s from the CIA.

The film’s opening is set in the early 1950s during the Korean war. Sherman and Riddle are recalled to active duty in the Special Operations unit of the U.S. Pacific Fleet stationed in Yokosuka, Japan. Their task is to transport trained South Korean volunteers to North Korea for infiltration and sabotage. One night their PT boat is attacked and capsized. Riddle is wounded but somehow reaches the shore where he is arrested by Chinese soldiers. Sherman, on the other hand, is successfully rescued.

Riddle is interrogated by Chinese counterintelligence and when his captors learn of his Russian language skills and expertise [Smith does not explain how], he is surrendered to Soviet intelligence. The Soviets transport him to the state security headquarters at Lubyanka in Moscow where he is subjected to further and, apparently, more brutal interrogation. He eventually breaks down - in Smith’s words, “interrogated, beaten, half dead, [Riddle] finally confesses to espionage” - and is sentenced to 25 years of hard labor in Siberia.

However, the year is 1953 and Stalin’s death in March leads to radical changes in the Gulag labor camp system. Thousands of camp inmates are released and there are massive riots among those who remain behind the barbed wire. Riddle uses the chaotic situation to escape.

In the style of Alexander Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo, Smith had an elderly prisoner give Riddle some gold coins before dying in the camp. Now on the run from Beria’s counterintelligence, these coins make it possible for Riddle to acquire the identification papers of a deceased person of Jewish ethnicity who was registered as a manual laborer in Moscow.

Riddle then moves to Moscow but is unable to approach any U.S. diplomats, or even the building of the U.S. Embassy, in fear of being caught by Soviet state security and sent back to Siberia or worse. Incredibly, Smith wrote that this state of affairs lasted for several years. Riddle resigns himself to his fate (and manual labor, which must have been especially difficult for a former professor), but resolves to attend the opening night of the Red Army Choir at the Moscow Conservatory every year hoping to encounter somebody from the U.S. Embassy.

In 1959, this finally happened. And it’s not just anybody that Riddle saw at the Conservatory but his old comrade-in-arms Sherman. After the end of the Korean war, Sherman had returned to the U.S. and, for some reason, perhaps to make the plot more melodramatic, Smith had him marry Riddle’s “widow.” Sherman then left the Navy, joined the State Department, and was sent to a diplomatic post in Moscow, bringing his wife with him. Though they were both together that night at the Conservatory, Smith only had Sherman notice and later communicate with Riddle. In fact, the wife never learned that Riddle was still alive.

It is at this point that the plot of the movie seems to come closest to reflecting real life events. According to the accounts of several CIA veterans,[5] Smith was sent to Moscow by the CIA in 1954 to provide the conditions necessary for the uninterrupted clandestine communication with the CIA’s first agent-in-place, GRU Lieutenant Colonel Pyotr Popov.[6] The consensus of the CIA memoirists is that Smith was not up to the task. Smith’s CIA colleagues Peer de Silva and Tennent ‘Pete’ Bagley wrote that Smith was compromised by the KGB in a sex trap. They claimed that he had an extra-marital affair with his Russian maid, was secretly photographed in corpus delicti, and blackmailed by the KGB.

Bagley even believed that the KGB’s blackmail operation was successful and that Smith betrayed CIA’s secrets. However, he provided no evidence for his claim, basing it on the enigmatic posting of two high-level KGB counterintelligence officers to the U.S. in the late 1950s (reported to the CIA by the KGB defector Anatoly Golitsyn) and his post-Cold War conversations with KGB General Sergei Kondrashev, a former top official of Soviet intelligence.[7]

On the other hand, as expected, Smith vehemently rejected the claim that he was ever recruited by the KGB and was particularly incensed at the way his work for the CIA was portrayed in de Silva’s posthumous memoir published in 1978. In a letter to his friend and confidant Joseph D. Douglas, Jr., a specialist on Soviet military strategy who later authored Red Cocaine: The Drugging of America and the West (1999) and Betrayed (2002), Smith wrote that de Silva’s memoir was “garbage [that] among other things serves to obfuscate the truth, of which we have so little.”[8] He also stated his suspicions that de Silva was assisted by other unnamed CIA officers in putting the memoir together. Referring to the CIA as “the Pickle Factory,” Smith told Douglas that he believed that “the Pickle Factory censors did their ‘thing’ on the books [sic] before publication.” He also seemed to threaten to file a lawsuit against the CIA: “What ‘they’ and Peer did in ‘blowing’ me (assuming, weakly, that the KGB did not already know my real status), is unconscionable and borders on the criminal - something, I will explore, of course, in due course.”[9]

And yet, notwithstanding Smith’s angered protests, his movie script contained a subplot involving Sherman’s sexual affair with his maid described as a KGB agent. While Smith described the maid’s motivation (she was blackmailed by the KGB due to her father’s involvement in anti-Soviet politics in the U.S.), he remained strangely silent on Sherman’s own motives. He did not explain what led Sherman to violate the terms of his employment, trample upon the loyalty to his country, and cheat on his wife. Even if Sherman ultimately remained firm in the face of the KGB blackmail attempt, why did he let himself end up in this situation in the first place? Was it sexual passion, stupidity, or self-destructiveness? Smith seems unwilling to delve into these issues in the script, which makes him not only an inept writer of fiction (and is perhaps one of the reasons the script was never completed), but might also indicate the existence of a repressed guilty feeling about what happened in Moscow.

In addition, just as Smith may have endangered Popov with his incompetent tradecraft, Sherman bungled the operation to rescue Riddle in the script. The exfiltration plan, approved by the national security leadership in Washington, DC, involved covertly passing to Riddle the money necessary to bribe his exit out of the Soviet Union. The money transfer was supposed to take place on a bus going over the Crimean Bridge in Moscow (hence the title). However, due to Sherman’s inattention to the presence of undercover KGB counterintelligence officers on the bus, both he and Riddle got arrested. Because Sherman had diplomatic immunity, he was soon released but was expelled from the Soviet Union as a persona non grata. Riddle was not so lucky. He was dispatched to the Gulag for (another) 25 years. 

It is evident that the bus scene repeats almost exactly the arrest of Pyotr Popov and Russell Langelle, Smith’s CIA successor in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Popov’s and Langelle’s arrest took place in October 1959, and Smith dated his script “Winter, 1959” which indicates that it was written shortly after the real life events. It is likely that by having this scene in the film, Smith wanted to signal his own connection to Popov. In any case, at the time he completed the script, Smith could not have known about the ultimate fate of Popov who was put on trial and, according to the official account, executed in 1960.

There was a lot of self-scrutiny and introspection in the CIA after the loss of Popov. However, Smith seemed not to be overly concerned about that in the script. He appeared to care more about exacting his revenge on the maid. The final scene had her sentenced to a prison camp in Siberia for failing to recruit Sherman. He obviously wanted the script to vindicate his version of the events. However, there is nothing in his papers to suggest that he wrote anything beyond the outline. It appears that he decided that writing spy film scripts (and spy fiction in general) was not for him. In 1960, he enrolled as a graduate student in the Political Science Department at Stanford and began researching the files of the Tsarist secret police [Okhrana] at the Hoover Library and Archives. But that’s another story.

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NOTES

^[1] See “Inventory of the Edward Ellis Smith Papers,” Hoover Institution Library and Archives, https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt8p303667/entire_text/ (12 manuscript boxes). Accessed on May 10, 2024.

^[2] For the most detailed published presentation of Smith’s biography, see Richard Harris Smith, “The First Moscow Station: An Espionage Footnote to Cold War History,” International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence 3:3 (1989), 333-346. However, due to the opposition from the State Department, the first official CIA Station in Moscow was not set up by Edward Ellis Smith in 1954 but by Paul Garbler in 1961.

^[3] “List of Employment, 1950-1962,” The Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folder 24, Box 7, Hoover Institution Library and Archives. I gratefully acknowledge the Hoover Institution Library & Archives as an essential resource in the development of these materials. The views expressed in this publication are entirely my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the fellows, staff, or Board of Overseers of the Hoover Institution.

^[4] “Riddle of the Crimean Bridge,” The Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folder 14, Box 11, Hoover Institution Library and Archives.

^[5] See, for instance, Peer de Silva. Sub Rosa: The CIA and the Uses of Intelligence (1978); William Hood, Mole: The True Story of the First Russian Intelligence Officer Recruited by the CIA (1982, 1993); Tennent H. Bagley, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games (2007); David E. Murphy, Sergei A. Kondrashev, and George Bailey, Battleground Berlin: CIA v. KGB in the Cold War (1997); John Limond Hart, The CIA’s Russians (2003); and Clarence Ashley, CIA Spymaster: George Kisevalter, the Agency’s Top Case Officer Who Handled Penkovsky and Popov (2004).

^[6] I have already written on the Popov case from another angle. See Filip Kovacevic,  “A New Twist in the Old Case: A Document from the Lithuanian KGB Archive and the Cold War Espionage of GRU Officer  Pyotr Popov,” Sources & Methods: A Blog of the Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program, April 28, 2022, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/new-twist-old-case-document-lithuanian-kgb-archive-and-cold-war-espionage-gru-officer. Accessed on May 14, 2024.

^[7] Tennent H. Bagley. Spymaster: Startling Cold War Revelations of a Soviet KGB Chief. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2015, 208-209. Bagley also provided a reference to a Russian language publication on the history of Soviet Intelligence. However, the publication in question - Aleksandr Kolpakidi and Dmitry Prokhorov. Внешняя разведка России [Russian Foreign Intelligence]. Moscow: Olma Press, 2001 - selectively restated the information taken from U.S. sources. It added nothing new to the understanding of the case. See also Aleksandr Kolpakidi and Dmitry Prokhorov. Дело Ханссена. “Кроты” в США [The Hanssen Case. “Moles” in the U.S.]. Moscow: Olma Media, 2002, 129-131 (in the e-book). 

^[8] “A Letter to Joseph D. Douglas, Jr.,” January 13, 1982, The Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folder 18, Box 7, Hoover Institution Library and Archives.

^[9] Ibid.

Filip Kovacevic: Agent GRANITE: A KGB Fake Defector in Early Cold War Germany

 At an unspecified date in the early 1960s, the First Department of the Lithuanian Republican branch of the Soviet Committee for State Security (KGB) responsible for foreign intelligence operations produced a 6-page summary of what it considered to have been a successful case of infiltrating the Lithuanian emigre and U.S. intelligence circles in West Germany.[1] Analyzing this original KGB document offers valuable insights on how Soviet intelligence ran fake defector operations during the first decade of the Cold War.

The main protagonist in this particular operation was an individual codenamed GRANITE (in Lithuanian, GRANITAS). According to the document, GRANITE was born in 1922 and joined the armed anti-Soviet Lithuanian resistance during World War Two. He was arrested by Soviet state security in 1948 and recruited to work against his former comrades in the resistance. The details of his activities during this period were not described in the document, but it was stated that GRANITE proved to be “capable, courageous, decisive, honest, and loyal,” which recommended him for more “complex” assignments beyond the Soviet borders.

With the approval of Moscow Center, GRANITE was trained for a foreign intelligence mission in West Germany. In addition to practical operational training (presumably, foreign intelligence tradecraft, such as communicating via secret writing, receiving instruction via radio, and servicing dead drops), he also received advanced German language lessons.

The task given to GRANITE was to cross into West Germany illegally and report to the nearest West German police station or U.S. military post that he was an agent of Soviet intelligence who wanted to defect. He was to reveal that he was sent to infiltrate the Lithuanian emigre circles, more specifically the ranks of the Lithuanian emigre organization named the Supreme Committee for the Liberation of Lithuania (VLIK) based in Reutlingen. The cover story he was supposed to share with the VLIK was that he was a member of the Lithuanian resistance movement sent to arrange the shipments of Western aid and provide secure site locations for aid air drops.

In addition, GRANITE was to set up a one-on-one meeting with Martynas Gelžinis, described as the head of the VLIK’s Press Department.[2] He was to “remind” Gelžinis of his obligations before Soviet intelligence whose agent Gelžinis had agreed to become in 1941 in exchange for release from the NKVD prison and safe transit to Germany. GRANITE was to tell Gelžinis that his Soviet handler expected to see him in Berlin and to give him 200 West German marks for the trip expenses. To convince Gelžinis that he knew of his hidden past, GRANITE was to show him a photocopy of his 1941 agreement to collaborate. Since Soviet intelligence was convinced that Gelžinis would never actually spy for them, it used this maneuver to compromise Gelžinis in the eyes of his German and American allies and cast suspicion on his anti-Soviet activities and statements.

According to the document, GRANITE’s illegal crossing into West Germany took place on October 26, 1956, in the region of the East German town of Sonneberg.[3] After crossing, GRANITE showed up at the U.S. military headquarters in the West German town of Coburg about 12 miles southwest from Sonneberg. He was put under arrest and transported to the U.S. military prison in the town of Kronberg near Frankfurt where he was held in solitary confinement until January 11, 1957.[4]

In a later testimony to his Soviet handlers, GRANITE claimed that after being arrested, he was stripped naked and all his personal items, including money, were taken from him. He was interrogated daily by U.S. intelligence officers and was sometimes woken up in the middle of the night and taken to interrogation. He alleged that there were cases of his interrogators showing up drunk and verbally insulting and threatening him, but there was no physical contact or abuse. He reported that his interrogators were convinced that he was a fake detector sent by Soviet intelligence to deceive them [and they were correct], but he held firm and stuck to his story.

According to GRANITE, during the interrogations, U.S. intelligence officers used the so-called lie detector tests. However, it turned out that answering some simple, elementary questions led to GRANITE’s strong and unexpected physiological reactions and the use of the lie detector had to be abandoned as ineffective. The document did not state whether GRANITE was trained by Soviet intelligence to react in this way, but there was a strong hint in that direction. The possibility that already in the mid-1950s the KGB knew how to crack the lie detector is troubling.

On January 11, 1957, GRANITE was taken to Reutlingen to meet with the representatives of the VLIK. He was soon transferred to Frankfurt, given a spacious apartment (4 rooms plus kitchen), and assigned a monthly stipend of 400 West German marks. However, he was kept under U.S. intelligence surveillance and prohibited to contact anybody from the Lithuanian emigre circles on his own. He was also prohibited from contacting his sister who allegedly lived in the U.S.

Several months later, GRANITE was taken by U.S. intelligence officers to meet with Gelžinis and confront him with the ‘evidence’ that he had agreed to collaborate with the NKVD in 1941. According to the document, Gelžinis panicked, having realized that the U.S. military discovered his deeply held ‘secret.’ The goal of Soviet intelligence thus appeared to have been accomplished. Gelžinis was compromised and, according to the document, subsequently had many “unpleasant” interactions with the anti-Soviet diaspora.[5]

At the same time, the ‘generous’ treatment of GRANITE by U.S. intelligence also had a clear goal. According to the document, U.S. intelligence officers wanted to persuade GRANITE to return to Lithuania and work for them as an agent in place. They promised him that he would be remunerated via packages sent from the UK to one of his acquaintances there.[6] Thus, ironically, a Soviet intelligence fake defector was now being asked by U.S. intelligence to fake defect back. And, as if to underscore the Cold War’s “wilderness of mirrors,” GRANITE agreed. Well, fakely.

Under U.S. intelligence instruction, GRANITE contacted his Soviet intelligence handler and arranged a face-to-face meeting. He was to ask the handler to assist him in his return to Lithuania. However, the handler convinced GRANITE that returning to Lithuania and pretending to work for U.S. intelligence would not justify the time and investment that Soviet intelligence had already put into his training. Instead, he was to try to stay in West Germany at any cost. He was to return to Frankfurt and tell his U.S. handlers that the Soviets did not want him back [which was true].

To address the ever-present Soviet intelligence suspicion that their agent might have actually begun working for the adversary, GRANITE seemed to have been asked to confirm his full allegiance to the Soviet Union. The document had him quoted as saying: “In Lithuania, I was one of the best Soviet intelligence agents, and now, working abroad, I will not push my face into the dirt.”

Needless to say, U.S. intelligence personnel in Frankfurt were hardly happy to hear about GRANITE’s lack of success in returning to Lithuania and they continued to keep him under surveillance. They asked him to write and publish anti-Soviet articles and take part in anti-Soviet radio programs. However, GRANITE rejected this using the excuse that he feared his family living in Lithuania would suffer as a result. 

According to the document, in February 1957,[7] a Lithuanian emigre newspaper in Brazil published an article about GRANITE as a Soviet intelligence agent who defected in West Germany. Soviet intelligence took the publication of this article as a sign that U.S. intelligence accepted GRANITE’s defection as genuine. By publicly acknowledging his identity, U.S. intelligence could no longer use him as a clandestine agent in Lithuania.

Indeed, GRANITE seemed to have been given more free reign in how he conducted his daily life in the months following the publication of the article. He was able to get employment as a member of the Lithuanian brigade engaged in unloading U.S. weapons and ammunition in a suburb of Kaiserslautern, a regional center about 60 miles southwest of Frankfurt. According to the document, GRANITE’s job enabled Soviet intelligence to gain valuable information about U.S. military capabilities in West Germany.

Soviet intelligence communication with GRANITE involved the use of several different techniques, including face-to-face meetings with handlers and couriers, secret writing correspondence using safe house addresses in Berlin and Lithuania, dead drops, and coded radio instructions.

In the early 1960s, GRANITE seemed to have requested to return to Lithuania ostensibly to reunite with his family and was successfully repatriated via “a neutral country” in May 1962.

Several recently released documents indicate that GRANITE’s work for the Lithuanian KGB may have continued into the 1970s and even the 1980s, but the specific details of these operations require more research.

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NOTES

^[1] “Вывод на длительное время агента ‘Гранитаса’ за кордон” [Sending Agent GRANITE Abroad for an Extended Period of Time], Undated, Lithuanian Special Archives, F. K-35, ap. 2, b. 1, l. 26-31, first published by The Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, https://www.kgbveikla.lt/docs/show/5278/from:538. Accessed on May 9, 2024.

^[2] For a biography of Martynas Gelžinis (1907-1990), see “A Biography [in Lithuanian],” Mažosios Lietuvos enciklopedija, https://www.mle.lt/straipsniai/martynas-gelzinis. Accessed on May 9, 2024.

^[3] The document mistakenly provided the name of the town as Sonnenberg. However, the town in question was Sonneberg located in Thuringia rather than Sonnenberg, a suburb of Wiesbaden.

^[4] Another typo in the document. The year was 1957, not 1956.

^[5] Interestingly, according to Gelžinis’s publicly available biography, during the same year in which his meeting with GRANITE took place, he left West Germany and immigrated to the U.S. He continued being involved in the VLIK’s activities, but perhaps with less intensity. His book on the relations between the Lithuanians and the Germans in the Klaipeda region was published posthumously in 1996.

^[6] The full name of this person was included in the document, but there were no details on her subsequent fate.

^[7] This date seems unreliable in the context of the narrative. It seems more likely that the article was published at a later date.