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.
