Filip Kovacevic: How Two Former CIA Officers Partnered to Translate a Soviet Military Novel in 1962

This is the second of my 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 First Attempt 

In 1954, Roderic L. O’Connor, then a special assistant to the Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, assembled the representatives of top U.S. national security agencies and departments in Dulles’s private conference room for “a special seminar” on a 1939 military fiction novel by Soviet writer Nikolai Shpanov (1896-1961).[2] The idea for the seminar came from Captain Dwight M. Bradford Williams.

Williams was a long-time Navy officer, a World War Two veteran, who also worked for the CIA (where, incidentally, he got acquainted with O’Connor).[3] As a practitioner in the CIA and a student and friend of Paul Linebarger, a professor at John Hopkins University’s Advanced International Studies and a leading expert on psychological operations, Williams was strongly interested in the psychological warfare aspect of the emerging Cold War. His main concern was how to inspire and amplify American anti-Communist patriotism, the subject of his 1955 essay “Patriotism Through Knowledge” for which he won honorable mention in the U.S. Naval Institute’s annual essay contest.[4] 

Williams believed that Shpanov’s novel The First Blow [Первый удар] provided a quintessential example of Communist mass-level propaganda designed to glorify the achievements of Soviet state and its security and military apparatus. According to Williams, novels like Shpanov were “sharp weapons in the psychological battle for control of men’s minds… Their psychological motivation sustained the Communist man’s faith in the 1920s and 1930s [and during World War Two].”[5] In contrast to Western literature which emphasized individual freedom of choice and critical independence of the mind, Soviet literature, Williams argued, was intentionally designed to “increase [the Soviet reader’s] faith in Communism by presenting him with an utterly distorted image of the outside world.”[6] As a result, Williams claimed that The First Blow held “a significant educational value” for the American reading public because it could enable ordinary Americans to understand “what makes the Communist man run.”[7]

Williams also thought that Shpanov’s plot, fictionalizing the German attack on the Soviet Union, would by itself be of interest to the American readers, especially because, in Shpanov’s novel, the Soviet air force successfully repelled the German planes and even went into a rapid counter-offensive. The fact that the novel was published more than two years before the actual German attack on June 22, 1941, which, in stark contrast to Shpanov’s plot, catastrophically devastated the Soviet military forces, was a part of its subsequent notoriety. In this context, Williams claimed that he had learned from a member of Hitler’s staff, recruited by the CIA after WWII, that Hitler knew about the novel and was angered by its content.[8] Williams speculated that the novel might have strengthened Hitler’s determination to attack the Soviet Union. While his speculation has never been substantiated with documents, recent Russian researchers have confirmed that Shpanov’s novel disappeared from open access in the Soviet Union after the signing of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in August 1939 and that Shpanov himself was heavily criticized by his peers for his exaggerations of the Soviet air force potential.[9]

However, even though the influential figures at the State Department, such as O’Connor, supported Williams’s translation project, he was unable to find a major U.S. publisher willing to offer him a contract. In an effort to help his project along, O’Connor introduced Williams to C.D. Jackson, another significant figure in the field of U.S. psychological warfare who had strong connections in the print media business. O’Connor wrote to Jackson: “I would appreciate anything you can do for Brad, for whom I have a great liking and respect and who has been a tireless worker in this cause.”[10] Yet, it turned out that even Jackson could not do much. Williams’s project went nowhere. 

As the last resort, Williams contacted Isaac Don Levine, a highly influential journalist known for his anti-Communist writings and close cooperation with the U.S. intelligence community. Levine sympathized with Williams’s efforts but advised him that the timing might not be right. “A turn in the American-Soviet relations away from the present appeasement trend may very well give your Shpanov opus an opportunity in the future,” he told Williams.[11] As to when this “turn” might take place, Levine predicted: “in the next 10-12 years.”

And so, it seemed to Williams that he had no choice but to shelve his translation for a decade. Not surprisingly, he soon lost enthusiasm for doing it and stopped after translating about a half of the book. 

The Second Attempt

However, Levine’s prediction turned out to be accurate. The early 1960s brought a sharp escalation in the tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and a Soviet novel which, at its core, had an exercise of Communist duplicity appeared very likely to get a second look from U.S. publishers. Williams decided to bring the yellowed papers out of his garage in Miami Shores, Florida.

Unfortunately, by this time, he began to be plagued by another set of problems. His wartime injuries were causing him serious health problems. He vividly described his daily difficulties: “Just try to imagine yourself imprisoned in a small room wherein you hear nothing but a sharp, piercing sound of approximately 1800 cycles per second… You wear a hearing aid in order to raise the volume of one’s speech above the piercing ringing. It helps a bit but the ringing never ceases.”[12] He knew that he was no longer able to complete the translation without assistance. But who could he turn to? Who could he trust to do a quality job just like he himself would have done? A sudden insight must have flashed through his mind, and he suddenly remembered his old friend from the “conspiratorial days,” a well-versed Russian speaker and an expert on Soviet economy and culture, Edward Ellis Smith.

Through a mutual friend, Williams learned that Smith left the East Coast to make his home in San Francisco. He appeared to have known nothing of the scandal that made Smith leave government service, which of course was not surprising considering that it concerned an internal CIA and State Department matter. Williams’s first letter to Smith was dated February 10, 1962.

In this letter, Williams proposed to Smith to join him in completing the translation of Shpanov’s novel.[13] “Ed, how would you like to make a bit of cash on the side?” he asked Smith. He then provided the background on the novel and chronicled his earlier efforts.

Smith responded with a very cordial letter on February 18, 1962.[14] He updated Williams on what occurred in his life since their joint work at the CIA, which Smith metaphorically referred to as “the pickle factory,” while Williams - for an unknown reason - called it “the condom combine.” However, he did not say why he was no longer employed by the government. Williams had not really cared to ask, especially since Smith enthusiastically accepted his proposal. He wrote to Williams: “The proposition which you suggest interests me greatly. First, I am in agreement that with the partial, albeit continuing, awakening of the country to the duplicity of the Soviets, a book such as the one you describe could very well become widely read. Secondly, the entire history of that period in the Soviet-German relations has always titillated me and I think that insufficient attention had been given the phenomena around Hitler’s and Stalin’s attempts to screw each other."[15]

Soon afterwards, Smith began his translation work in earnest and was able to complete the entire untranslated portion of the novel by the end of August 1962.[16] In the meantime, he and Williams exchanged about a dozen letters, addressing various aspects of the translation process and encouraging each other to complete the project as soon as possible. Williams took upon himself to edit and type the handwritten portions of the translated novel sent to him by Smith on a bi-monthly basis. 

During the summer of 1962, Smith fell a bit behind the agreed schedule because he got married. His wife, Olga Bayne, the daughter of Olga Roosevelt and Dr. Joseph Breckinridge Bayne, was a member of the politically highly connected and wealthy Roosevelt clan. As Smith confessed to Williams, revealing his conservative political allegiances (also shared by Williams): “My Olga is a Roosevelt from the Teddy side, thank God.”[17]

Significantly, Smith’s marriage to Olga also led to his change of residence. Smith left behind his shabby, bachelor’s apartment on San Francisco’s Bush Street, a few blocks from the Union Square, to move to a 4-bedroom, 6-bathroom mansion in Palo Alto, today worth close to $12 million.[18] Presumably, he no longer needed to make “a bit of cash on the side” translating Shpanov. And yet, he did not quit but kept going until he finished the translation. On a lighter note, he joked to Williams that after getting married, he also acquired a dog named Parky who distracted him from work so much that he called him “Parky the Basset hound of the Lubianka Baskervilles [referring to the KGB HQ in Moscow].[19]

With the translation fully completed in September 1962, Williams and Smith thought that the hardest part was behind them and that their valiant efforts to make ordinary Americans aware of the Soviet threat via a work of military fiction would soon be handsomely rewarded.

In June 1962, Williams had contacted Howard Cady, General Manager and Editor-in-Chief at Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, one of the most distinguished U.S. publishing companies at the time.[20] Williams appeared to have counted on the sponsorship of Steve Rinehart whom he knew personally, but it turned out that Cady was much more interested in the commercial value of the project. And, as he stated in his letter to Williams in October 1962 after he had read the translation, from that perspective, Shpanov’s novel was a non-starter.[21] According to Cady, “Book reviewers are cynical people, and book sellers are more so… I doubt many people will have the patience to wade through a semi-literate bit of claptrap of this sort. It seems so bad it seems incredible that anyone would take it seriously.”[22] He recommended that Williams and Smith document the purported historical significance of the book and use that as the main selling point. “How can we prove that dr. Goebbels forbade anyone to mention The First Blow to Hitler? Where can we obtain [the] documentation of Hitler’s reaction to the book when he finally learned about it? Did Hitler ever refer to the book, or was it mentioned in any official papers during the year or so of preparation of [the] attack on Russia?” he asked.[23]

Unfortunately, neither Williams nor Smith could answer these and similar questions with any level of certainty. Williams thought that he could sell the book by relying on the so-called negative advertising. In his draft preface, he claimed that both he and Smith were well aware that the novel was badly written. “Albeit Communist man’s motivating literature is ‘simply dreadful’ by our literary judgment, it is extremely necessary and urgent for us to examine it.”[24] The reason for this “necessity and urgency” was, according to Williams, the palpable perception that the U.S. was losing a psychological war against the Soviet Union and that the only way to turn defeats into victories was by understanding and acting upon the key formative factor of the Soviet worldview. And that, Williams claimed, was “the steady diet of Communist literature - mostly novels similar to The First Blow - which [the Soviet reader] avidly devours.”[25]

However, neither this impassioned argument nor anything else that Williams and Smith tried to do seemed to have carried any significant weight with the “cynical” U.S publishers, and they reluctantly but inevitably abandoned the whole thing. Their translation of Shpanov’s novel can be found among Smith’s papers at Hoover.[26] It just lies there unpublished even 60 years later.

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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 July 10, 2024.

^[2] “A Letter of D.M. Bradford Williams to Edward Ellis Smith,” October 29, 1962,  The Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folder 19, 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.

^[3] “A Letter of Williams to Smith,” October 29, 1962. It is unclear whether Williams still worked for the CIA when the meeting took place. My educated guess is that he had already retired. See also Williams’s obituary in the South Florida’s Sun Sentinel. “Dwight Williams, Hero from WWII,” The Sun Sentinel, August 29, 1989, https://www.sun-sentinel.com/1989/08/29/dwight-williams-hero-from-wwii/. Accessed on July 10, 2024.

^[4] In the essay, Williams advocated setting up a voluntary, nation-wide TV lecture course on all aspects of the Soviet system in order to increase and augment U.S. national preparedness. His basic assumption was that “peaceful coexistence” with the Soviet regime was not possible and that therefore the U.S. needed to be prepared for an imminent Soviet attack. See Captain Dwight M. Bradford Williams, U.S. Naval Reserve (Retired), “Patriotism Through Knowledge,” Proceedings, Vol. 81/7/629, July 1955, https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1955/july/patriotism-through-knowledge. Accessed on July 10, 2024.

^[5] “Draft Preface,” p. 4, The Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folder 19, Box 7, Hoover Institution Library and Archives.

^[6] Ibid., p. 5.

^[7] Ibid.

^[8] “A Letter of Williams to Smith,” October 29, 1962, The Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folder 19, Box 7, Hoover Institution Library and Archives.

^[9] Dmitry Nikolaev, “Первый удар [The First Blow],” Совершенно Секретно [Magazine Top Secret], June 18, 2015, https://www.sovsekretno.ru/articles/istoriya/pervyy-udar/. Accessed on July 11, 2024.

^[10] “A Letter of Roderic L. O’Connor to C.D. Jackson,” August 20, 1954, The Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folder 19, Box 7, Hoover Institution Library and Archives.

^[11] “A Letter of Isaac Don Levine to Brad Williams,” December 26, 1954, The Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folder 19, Box 7, Hoover Institution Library and Archives.

^[12] “A Letter of Williams to Smith,” March 10, 1963, The Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folder 19, Box 7, Hoover Institution Library and Archives.

^[13] “A Letter of Williams to Smith,” February 10, 1962,  The Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folder 19, Box 7, Hoover Institution Library and Archives.

^[14] “A Letter of Smith to Williams,” February 18, 1962, The Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folder 19, Box 7, Hoover Institution Library and Archives.

^[15] Ibid.

^[16] “A Letter of Smith to Williams,” August 24, 1962, The Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folder 19, Box 7, Hoover Institution Library and Archives.

^[17] “A Letter of Smith to Williams,” June 30, 1962,  The Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folder 19, Box 7, Hoover Institution Library and Archives.

^[18] Ibid.

^[19] “A Letter of Smith to Williams,” August 10, 1962, The Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folder 19, Box 7, Hoover Institution Library and Archives.

^[20] “A Letter of Cady to Williams,” June 25, 1962, The Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folder 19, Box 7, Hoover Institution Library and Archives.

^[21]  “A Letter of Cady to Williams,” October 25, 1962, The Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folder 19, Box 7, Hoover Institution Library and Archives.

^[22] Ibid.

^[23] Ibid.

^[24] “Draft Preface,” p. 6, The Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folder 19, Box 7, Hoover Institution Library and Archives.

^[25] Ibid.

^[26] “Shpanov, Nikolai, First Blow, Completed Translation, Part 1 of 2, 1939” and “Shpanov, Nikolai, First Blow, Completed Translation, Part 2 of 2, 1958,” The Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folders 2-3, Box 1, Hoover Institution Library and Archives.

 

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: KGB on Israeli Intelligence Activities in 1959

In my research of the Lithuanian KGB files at the Hoover Institution, I have paid particular attention to KGB archival documents on foreign intelligence agencies perceived by the KGB as adversarial. This is complicated by the fact that the files at Hoover do not contain the records of the First Department of the Lithuanian KGB, the branch of the Lithuanian KGB directly in charge of operations outside of the Soviet Union. However, Hoover has the files of the Second Department/Directorate of the Lithuanian KGB tasked with counterintelligence, which also participated in the operations beyond Soviet borders. For example, I have documented a foreign-oriented counterintelligence operation codenamed Operation HORIZON in an article I wrote for the Wilson Center’s Source and Methods blog.[1]

In this article, I want to address my findings concerning KGB reports on Israeli intelligence activities in the late 1950s. While examining the files of the Second Directorate of the Lithuanian KGB for the years 1959 and 1960, I came across a document marked top secret [совершенно секретно] titled “Information Summary [справка] on the Subversive Activities of Foreign Zionist Organizations against the USSR."[2]

This 16-page document was accompanied by a cover letter from General Yevgeny Pitovranov (1915-1999). Pitovranov, who under Stalin briefly headed the Soviet foreign intelligence service and was also imprisoned for a short time, remains one of the most enigmatic figures in the history of the KGB.[3] At the time of the document’s creation, on December 12, 1959, Pitovranov was the head of the Fourth Department of the KGB, the KGB version of the Chekist Secret-Political Department. The main task of the Fourth Department was to monitor and intercept the activities of individuals and groups perceived to be critical or, in the terminology preferred by the KGB, “subversive” of the Soviet regime. The so-called “Zionist” organizations were high on the Fourth Department’s list of priorities as reflected by this document (and numerous others still held indefinitely under the lock and key at the Central Archive of the FSB in Moscow).

Pitovranov’s cover letter was addressed to the chairmen of the KGBs of the Soviet Republics as well as to the heads of the regional KGB branches within Russia. Pitovranov recommended that the contents of the attached 16-page document be shared with those KGB operational officers who were tasked with targeting “Jewish bourgeois nationalists and clergy” in order to use them in their “practical work.”

While most of the document dealt with what KGB counterintelligence claimed to know about the meetings and activities of the Jewish international organizations, such as the World Zionist Organization and the World Jewish Congress, which it considered the enemies of the Soviet Union, there is a short section of the document that mentioned the Israeli foreign intelligence service.[4] That section will be the focus of my analysis here.

The section dealt with the allegations of Israeli intelligence activities in Vienna. Based on what it called “agent information” without, however, naming any agents or offering any documentary evidence, KGB claimed that Israeli intelligence had established a “special intelligence center” in Vienna directed against the Soviet Union and other Socialist countries in Eastern Europe. According to the KGB, the head of this center was a certain Karmil [Кармиль] described as the “former head of Israeli intelligence.” Furthermore, KGB alleged that Karmil’s first name was Moshe. It is unclear whether this was a reference to an Israeli politician and military commander Moshe Carmel (1911-2003).[5] There is nothing in Carmel’s publicly available biography to suggest that he was active as a coordinator of Israeli intelligence in Vienna at this time. Therefore, this is either a hitherto unknown fact from his life, or the person in question was another individual with the same name. Or it could be a case of mistaken identity by a KGB agent on the ground in Vienna.

KGB further claimed that in January 1959 “under the leadership of Shaika Dan [Шайка Дан] who came for this reason from Tel Aviv,” there had been a major meeting of Israeli intelligence officers held in Vienna. The focus of this meeting was the question of “legal and illegal” Jewish immigration from the Socialist Bloc countries to Israel. Those present at the meeting included two unnamed Israeli intelligence officers based in Hungary and Czechoslovakia as well as the alleged station chief [резидент] of Israeli intelligence in Warsaw named Netser [Нецер].[6] According to the KGB, Netser operated under the cover of a cultural and information officer at the Israeli diplomatic mission in Poland.

Netser was also mentioned in connection with his meetings with Soviet citizens acting as agents of the KGB during their visits to Poland.[7] As an illustration, the document provided the details of his meeting with a Soviet citizen who was an agent of the KGB branch in the Mogilev Region [today’s Belarus]. According to the document, Netser’s questions ranged from the living conditions of the Jews in the Soviet Union and their participation in the leadership of the Communist party and the industrial enterprises to the existence of Jewish theaters in Bobruisk [Belarus] and the attitudes of Soviet Jewish youth toward the state of Israel. The document also noted that Netser often met with other agents of the KGB visiting Poland. Presumably, Netser was unaware of their clandestine affiliation, but no evidence of that was provided.

Lastly, the document listed several locations in Vienna as allegedly frequented by Israeli intelligence officers and used for meetings with their sources.[8] The first on the list was the Hotel de France located at Schottenring 3. The hotel was described as a preferred place for debriefing Soviet and Eastern European citizens wanting to immigrate to Israel.[9] The second on the list, evidently a much smaller facility, was the Pension Cosmopolite located at 23 Alser Street. According to the document, the Pension was owned by a Jewish woman who knew several languages and was on the building’s second floor.[10]

Another hotel mentioned was the Hotel Pension Atlanta located in the Währing District of Vienna near the Vienna Woods. This hotel was described as the place of choice for the visiting Israeli diplomats and diplomatic couriers from other parts of Europe as well as for the officials of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs visiting Austria. According to the document, when Israeli diplomats and intelligence officers wanted to relax outside of Vienna, their preferred location was the old-fashioned aristocratic style hotel Grand Panhans, Semmering located in the mountains about 100 kilometers south of Vienna.[11]

The last but probably not the least important place on the list was Kazakov’s Cabaret, apparently a night club frequently visited by “Moshe Karmil and other intelligence officers.”[12] The repertoire of the Cabaret was unfortunately not included.

Postscript

After I published the article above, I was contacted by the intelligence historian Nati Cantorovich who provided me with additional biographical information regarding some individuals mentioned in the KGB document, for which I am very grateful. Cantorovich wrote: “This report deals with Nativ/Lishkat ha-Kesher (The Path, or The Liaison Bureau in Hebrew), a special Israeli governmental agency which managed and led the struggle for the Jews behind the Iron Curtain. Moshe Karmil (previously, Chervinskii) in 1958-1961 was indeed the head of Nativ front office in Viena responsible for communication with the East European Jews. Yeshaayahu Shayke Dan (previously, Trachtenberg), Karmil’s predecessor in Vienna, since 1958 was the director of operations in the Nativ’s Headquarters in Tel Aviv. Zvi Netzer (previously, Melnitzer) in 1957-1961 was Nativ’s envoy in Warsaw. Since the mid-1960s, he became the head of ‘Bar,’ Nativ’s division responsible for communication with the Western Jewish communities.”

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NOTES

^[1] See Filip Kovacevic, “Operation HORIZON: A KGB Counterintelligence Operation against the West,” Sources & Methods, June 30, 2021, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/operation-horizon-kgb-counterintelligence-operation-against-west. Accessed on April 27, 2024. I have recently obtained more archival materials dealing with this operation and plan to revisit it in one of my future articles.

^[2] Fond K-1, Inv. 3, File 569, pp. 20-36. Lietuvos TSR Valstybės Saugumo Komitetas [Lithuanian KGB] Selected Records, Hoover Institution. 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.

^[3] There are, for instance, allegations from well-informed sources that, after his official retirement from the KGB, Pitovranov ran a clandestine Soviet intelligence branch within the Soviet Chamber of Commerce under the KGB chairman Yuri Andropov’s direct supervision. See, for instance, a recent book by a former KGB officer Vladimir Popov who immigrated to Canada in the 1990s and has become a vocal critic of the Putin regime. Vladimir Popov. Заговор негодяев: записки бывшего подполковника КГБ [Conspiracy of Scoundrels: Notes of a Former KGB Lieutenant Colonel]. Kyiv: Gordonua.com, 2020.

^[4] Fond K-1, Inv. 3, File 569, pp. 28-29.

^[5] See Lawrence Joffe, “Moshe Carmel,” The Guardian, October 16, 2003, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/oct/17/guardianobituaries.israel. Accessed on April 27, 2024.

^[6] An Internet search in English and Russian language did not uncover any publicly available information about the individuals named Dan Shaika and Netser.

^[7] Fond K-1, Inv. 3, File 569, pp. 31-32.

^[8] Fond K-1, Inv. 3, File 569, pp. 28-29.

^[9] Hotel de France is still in business and the average room cost is about 200 dollars per night. See “Hotel de France Wien,” https://de-france-hotel-vienna.hotel-ds.com/en/. Accessed on April 27, 2024.

^[10] While the Pension Cosmopolite appears to have shut its doors forever, today the same building houses the University of Vienna’s Department of Nursing Science, Department of Philosophy, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, and Institute Vienna Circle. See “University of Vienna Locations,” https://www.univie.ac.at/en/about-us/locations-maps/university-of-vienna-locations/. Accessed on April 27, 2024.

^[11] See “Hotel Grand Panhans Semmering,” https://book.austria.info/en/a-panhans. Accessed on April 27, 2024.

^[12] Fond K-1, Inv. 3, File 569, p. 29. I could find no publicly available information on Kazakov’s Cabaret, but it must have been a very interesting place to spend an evening, perhaps a bit like Rick’s Cafe Americain from the classic film Casablanca.