Filip Kovacevic: TOP SECRET: Traces from KGB Files 1-4

Traces from KGB Files 1 (Alfred Svenson)

The story of Captain Alfred Svenson, the only commissioned U.S. Army officer to defect to the Soviet bloc during the Cold War, is well-known.

What is not well-known, if at all, is that there is a report about him in the Lithuanian KGB Files (Fond K-1, Op. 45, File 376, pp. 106-107, Lietuvos TSR Valstybės Saugumo Komitetas [Lithuanian KGB] Selected Records, Hoover Institution).

The report is hand-written and was produced at the request of the 2nd Directorate of the Lithuanian KGB (counterintelligence) in connection to a surveillance operation run by the KGB branch in Kaunas. The surveillance operation involved the clandestine opening of a letter sent from the U.S. to Kaunas. The letter was a private communication between two sisters and made a reference to "Nina's son" who fled from "our side" to "your side."

Upon further inquiry, the Lithuanian KGB discovered that "Nina's son" was none other than Alfred Svenson, born in Kaunas to Russian parents in 1932. His mother Nina married a Swedish citizen Svenson upon the death of her husband Serdiukov and together with her son left Lithuania for Germany. She immigrated from Germany to the U.S. in 1949 and the two sisters must have known her personally when she lived in Kaunas.

The report on Svenson gave a short presentation of his anti-American propaganda activities in East Germany, repeating his claim from the press conference on September 30, 1963, that he left the U.S. for political reasons and did not plan to return. In reality, however, he was expelled by East Germany less than a year later and was then court-marshalled and sentenced to seven years of prison. There was insufficient evidence to convict him of espionage, however.

The previously unknown information that emerges from the report is that the Lithuanian KGB sent an agent under journalistic cover to interview Svenson in East Berlin. The agent reported that Svenson expressed an interest in visiting Lithuania and was awaiting an official invitation from the Lithuanian authorities.

The invitation never came which indicates that, notwithstanding his defection and public declarations of anti-Americanism, Svenson was never trusted by the KGB. This perhaps also explains his rather rapid and unceremonious expulsion from East Germany.

Traces from KGB Files 2 (Harold Gibson)

Harold Gibson (1897-1960) was a long-time British intelligence officer whose career spanned from the late 1910s to the late 1950s and was rooted primarily in Eastern Europe. Gibson's career is discussed in Nigel West's book The Friends, Keith Jeffrey's official history of the MI6, as well as by several other scholars more recently. The enduring question is whether Gibson recruited a high-ranking agent in the Kremlin in the 1930s and if so, who this person was.

There is a mention of another alleged Gibson's agent in the Lithuanian KGB files (Fond K-1, Op. 45, File 376, pp. 102-104, Lietuvos TSR Valstybės Saugumo Komitetas [Lithuanian KGB] Selected Records, Hoover Institution). This agent was not based in the Soviet Union but in Czechoslovakia.

The story begins in Kaunas where the former general of the Lithuanian Air Force Iozas Kraucevičius was living under the KGB surveillance after his release from the GULAG following Stalin's death. Born in 1879, Kraucevičius started out his military career in the Russian Tsarist Army and fought against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War. After Lithuania's independence, he quickly rose in the ranks but, in the late 1920s, due to the allegations of mismanagement, left the military to become the main Lithuanian contact for the Czechoslovak military-industrial giant Škoda. It was in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s that, according to the KGB, Kraucevičius befriended a person who was an alleged agent of Harold Gibson.

The Lithuanian KGB report dated April 14, 1964, identified Gibson's Czech agent as Yaroslav Kraichi, a former Škoda engineer born in 1891 and employed in the Prague export company "Investa." The report stated that, in the 1950s, Kraichi was monitored by Czechoslovak state security as a suspected British intelligence agent and was known to use secret writing in his correspondence with other suspected agents.

The Lithuanian KGB claimed to have evidence that Kraichi kept in contact with Kraucevičius until 1956. For instance, in 1955, Kraichi sent two packages addressed to Kraucevičius's wife and the Lithuanian KGB alleged that she had corresponded with him using a fictitious address.

In February 1957, a Lithuanian KGB agent codenamed BALT obtained an introduction letter from Kraucevičius and traveled to Czechoslovakia under the cover of a tourist to meet with Kraichi. During this meeting, Kraichi told BALT that Kraucevičius had two active bank accounts, one in Prague and another in London. In Prague, he had 90,000 korunas ($160,000 today) and in London, 500 pounds ($23,000 today). One can imagine the surprise of BALT's KGB handlers when they heard about the existence of this money. The report, however, remained silent on the fate of the money. It just noted that, on parting, Kraichi gave BALT a golden cigarette case and a golden ring as gifts for Kraucevičius.

Though Kraichi was described as Gibson's agent, the Lithuanian KGB report did not make a similar allegation about Kraucevičius. Was he also a member of the Gibson network? Having money in a foreign bank account and a suspected foreign agent acting as an accountant would definitely raise a lot of red flags. And yet, the Lithuanian KGB said nothing.

Typically, the Lithuanian KGB would be not so circumspect in declaring somebody a foreign agent. The fact that by April 1964, Kraucevičius was already dead could hardly be an explanation. There must have been other reasons for their reticence, perhaps too compartmented to be revealed in this particular report.

Traces from KGB Files 3 (Henrik Birnbaum)

On February 19, 1965, Major Udodov, deputy head of the 6th Department of the Second Chief Directorate (KGB counterintelligence), sent a classified letter to Colonel Obukauskas, head of the Second Directorate of the Lithuanian KGB, in Vilnius. The 6th Department of the SCD was tasked with counterintelligence measures targeting short-term foreign visitors to the Soviet Union. In the early 1960s, a well-known KGB defector Yuri Nosenko was employed there. 

Udodov’s letter concerned the January 1965 visit by a UCLA professor Henrik Birnbaum (1925-2002), a distinguished scholar of Slavic languages, who had arrived in the Soviet Union from Sweden. Udodov described Birnbaum as an instructor in the UCLA “so-called Slavic School” which, according to him, was “used by U.S. intelligence to train its personnel.” 

Udodov informed Obukauskas that after what must have been a clandestine search of Birnbaum’s effects, a note containing the name and street address of a Lithuanian woman was found. She was Veronika Alsenkiene residing in Kaunas. Udodov wanted Obukauskas to send him information on Alsenkiene and explain the nature of her relations with Birnbaum.

Obukauskas passed on the letter to his subordinate Lieutenant Colonel Naras, the head of the 1st Department of the Second Directorate of the Lithuanian KGB. On March 5, 1965, Naras wrote back to Udodov, correcting him in that the last name of the woman in question was Alseikene, and not Alsenkiene, and informing him that she was a retired medical doctor who had a private practice in Kaunas. What was significant from the counterintelligence point of view was that her daughter Marija Gimbut [Gimbutas] (1921-1994) left Lithuania in 1944 and, after studying at the Universities of Vienna, Innsbruck, and Tubingen, immigrated to the U.S. in 1949. She worked as an archeologist at UCLA, the same university as Birnbaum. 

Naras added that Gimbut’s relations with Birnbaum were known to the Lithuanian counterintelligence implying that both were the persons of interest but did not elaborate further. This reply must have satisfied Udodov because there was no more correspondence on this matter at this particular time. 

The existence of this correspondence indicates that Lithuanian KGB counterintelligence maintained files on both Birnbaum and Gimbutas and that, in general, U.S. academics visiting the Soviet Union were subjected to clandestine but intrusive counterintelligence measures. 

Reference: Fond K-1, Op. 45, File 376, pp. 113-117, Lietuvos TSR Valstybės Saugumo Komitetas [Lithuanian KGB] Selected Records, Hoover Institution. 

Traces from KGB Files 4 (John Massey Stewart)

Documents from the Lithuanian KGB reveal that KGB counterintelligence suspected a well-known British author and Russia specialist John Massey Stewart (1932-2023) of working for British intelligence. 

In 1969, Massey Stewart published a popular travelogue about his 1961 trip across the Soviet Union, from Leningrad to Vladivostok, in a Mini Minor from the British Motor Corporation. His car drew large crowds of curious Soviet citizens and no doubt infuriated the KGB. As a result, all his contacts in the Soviet Union were perceived as security threats to the Soviet state and subjected to an intrusive surveillance regime. A young Jewish girl from Kaunas named Yarieta Krakinovskite appears to have been one of them.

On March 3, 1965, a top ranking Soviet counterintelligence officer, Colonel Sergei Fedoseev, deputy head of the Second Chief Directorate’s Service No. 2, the newly established analytical branch of KGB counterintelligence, sent a top secret letter to Colonel Yuozas Obukauskas, the head of the Second Directorate of the Lithuanian KGB in Vilnius. In the early 1960s, Fedoseev had directed a large-scale KGB operation against the illegal currency trade in Moscow, which resulted in the notorious Currency Dealers Case.   

In his letter, Fedoseev informed Obukauskas that the 6th Department of the Operational-Technical Directorate (OTD), tasked with the interception and inspection of Soviet citizens’ mail, established the fact of correspondence between a British citizen John Massey Stewart, described as suspected of working for British intelligence, and Yarita Krakinovskaya [sic] in Kaunas. Fedoseev asked Obukauskas to initiate the assessment of Krakinovskaya and report on the character of her relations with Massey Stewart.

There is no doubt that Fedoseyev was unpleasantly surprised when he learned from Obukauskas that Yarieta (not Yarita) was no well-connected state employee with access to official secrets but an 18-year-old girl who recently graduated from high school. 

However, the Lithuanian KGB still suspected that there was more to this correspondence than met the eye. After receiving a detailed report from Major Henrikas Vaigauskas, a top ranking officer in the Kaunas branch of the KGB, Obukauskas informed Fedoseev that Yarieta’s parents had a relative living in New York City named Yevgeniya Cherkasskaya who worked as a manager of theatrical performances. 

According to the information the Kaunas KGB branch received from the KGB branch in the town of Yalta, Cherkasskaya spent almost three weeks in the Crimea in August 1963. She invited her relatives, Yarieta’s parents, to come from Kaunas and meet with her in Yalta. The KGB suspected Cherkasskaya of links to (unnamed) intelligence agencies and alleged that she was given an assignment by Massey Stewart to assess two individuals he had gotten to know on his 1961 trip. These two individuals had been planted in Massey Stewart’s company as KGB agents/informers codenamed KOMAROV and VALENTINA. 

Cherkasskaya met with KOMAROV and VALENTINA several times while she was in Yalta. However, even though the Yalta KGB branch placed Cherkasskaya under both physical and technical surveillance, they could find nothing to link her to any illegal or anti-Soviet activities.

In a move that appeared to baffle the Yalta KGB branch, Cherkasskaya not only did not hide her acquaintance with the KGB agents, but she even introduced them to her relatives from Kaunas and invited them to have dinner together. Moreover, the letters exchanged between Cherkasskaya and her relatives upon her return to New York City, intercepted and thoroughly inspected by the Lithuanian KGB, contained nothing except trivial everyday matters. 

After receiving Obukauskas’s reply, Fedoseev must have realized that there was nothing in Lithuania to compromise Massey Stewart. He did not write to Obukauskas about this matter again.  

Reference: Fond K-1, Op. 45, File 376, pp. 193-199, Lietuvos TSR Valstybės Saugumo Komitetas [Lithuanian KGB] Selected Records, Hoover Institution.       

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.