Filip Kovacevic: How Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Framed Its Centenary Celebration

 This short article is included in the Fall 2020 Newsletter of the North American Society for Intelligence History (NASIH).        

 

The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) is celebrating its 100^th anniversary this year. The counting goes back to December 20, 1920 and the establishment of the International Department (INO) of the VChK-a. Interestingly, it does not take into account the fact that the Russian tsarist regime had a well-established network of foreign intelligence agents decades earlier. It is a clear demonstration of the Soviet-oriented mindset still prevailing within the service.

This mindset, however, has little to do with the Soviet communist ideology. Instead, it is grounded in the desire to emphasize the Soviet Union’s Cold War geopolitical position as one of the two global superpowers. Accordingly, the SVR has framed its centenary as the occasion to play out the self-proclaimed Soviet intelligence successes in front of the domestic and international audiences. It has narrated the history of the Soviet Union in the manner that greatly magnifies the contributions of Soviet foreign intelligence to attaining and maintaining Soviet superpower status. This strategy has met relatively little opposition from the Russian mainstream academic historians because the SVR director Sergey Naryshkin is also the president of the Russian Historical Society, the major provider of the state funds and academic privileges in contemporary Russia.

The key historical event that seems to have been chosen for extensive media promotion by the SVR is the first summit of the Big Three (Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin) held in Tehran in late November 1943. According to the SVR interpretation, this summit was a big victory for Stalin because he convinced Roosevelt and Churchill to open the second front in Europe and acquiesce in the Soviet Union’s playing the kingmaker role in post-war Eastern European affairs. Importantly, the SVR seeks to present this outcome as the result of the hard work of Soviet intelligence operatives, especially those operating under no official cover, the so-called illegals. In this respect, the pride of place is assigned to two Soviet illegal operatives, ethnic Armenians, husband and wife Gevork and Goar Vartanyan (1924-2012; 1926-2019). Their claim to fame is that they took part in the Soviet intelligence operation that allegedly saved the lives of the Big Three.  

The Vartanyan couple first became known to the Russian public in 2000 in an article by Nikolay Dolgopolov, a long-time Soviet and Russian journalist. Dolgopolov has since become one of the most popular Soviet intelligence historians whose books are published in thousands of copies and going through several editions. In 2013, Dolgopolov published a book-length biography of Gevork Vartanyan. It is a slim volume as most operations in which Vartanyan and his wife took part remain classified. The only thing known is that they spent almost thirty years as Soviet illegals in several dozen countries around the world, mostly in Europe and the Middle East. Vartanyan was the recipient of the Hero of the Soviet Union medal in 1984 as one of the very few Soviet intelligence operatives to be awarded the highest Soviet decoration. Another recipient, for instance, was Ramon Mercader, the assassin of Leon Trotsky. Vartanyan famously claimed that only one point of the five-pointed gold star medal was earned by him, the other one by the Moscow Center, and the remaining three by his wife, Goar. A hotbed of machismo, the KGB had a different view and Goar Vartanyan had to settle for a less prestigious decoration, the Order of the Red Banner. After retirement, in the early 1990s, the Vartanyans were hired as consultants by the newly-established SVR to teach new generations of Russian intelligence officers the basics of illegals’ spycraft.  

In order to rekindle the spirit of Teheran-43 as the key aspect of its centenary celebration, the SVR decided to introduce the exploits of the Vartanyans into Russian popular culture. The SVR Press Bureau director, Sergey Ivanov, contracted an Armenian-Russian detective stories writer Khachik Khutlubyan to write a documentary spy fiction (“faction”) novel about the events in Tehran. In addition to having been given access to the SVR archives, Khutlubyan knew Vartanyan personally. His novel The Agent who Outplayed the Abwehr was published by Eksmo, one of the largest Russian publishing companies, which controls close to 40 percent of the Russian book market and annually publishes 120 million books. The plot depicts the 17-year-old Vartanyan and his associates in the main role of derailing the alleged German plans to sabotage Churchill’s birthday celebration at the British diplomatic compound in Tehran on November 30, 1943. Curiously, the title refers to the Abwehr, even though the main spymaster of German intelligence in Iran at the time was Franz Mayer, an SS/SD man, a fact acknowledged by the novel’s blurb as well as by Dolgopolov’s biography of Vartanyan which Khutlubyan extensively relied on. One can only speculate why the SVR preferred to have the Abwehr rather than the SS in the title.

The SVR made the presentation of the novel in February 2020 into the kick-off event for the start of its centenary media campaign. One of the speakers was Yury Shevchenko*, another highly-decorated Soviet illegal whose name was declassified in January 2020 and who never appeared in public before. Shevchenko knew Vartanyan personally and claimed that he  successfully completed  an intelligence mission considered impossible and unlikely to be declassified for another 50 years. Nothing is known about this operation except that it involved Soviet illegals, but chances are that it took place much later than the 1940s. Perhaps bringing up the name of Vartanyan in public is meant to be a signal to those in the adversary camp who might know the secret details of the operation that something along similar lines could happen again. In any case, there is no doubt that the SVR will continue to glorify the Soviet successes in inserting illegal intelligence officers in the countries of importance to Russia's current foreign policy agenda. This is the aspect of Soviet intelligence inheritance that it is the most proud of. And the one that, according to Naryshkin's recent public proclamations, it continues to find very effective. 

 

* Yury Shevchenko passed away on November 6, 2020 at the age of 81.

 

Rossiyskaya Gazeta: Interview of a 100-year-old NKVD Officer Boris Gudz Who Knew the 'Iron Felix'

On February 5, 2020, the Russian state-owned newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta published an article by a well-known journalist and intelligence historian Nikolay Dolgopolov in which Dolgopolov described his meetings with Boris Gudz (1902-2006), the oldest living Chekist at the time. Gudz told Dolgopolov several anecdotes about the early activities of the OGPU/NKVD in which he took part personally, including the famous Operation Trust. Below is my translation available only on this blog.

Nikolay Dolgopolov: Boris Gudz – The Oldest of the Mohicans

Rossiyskaya Gazeta February 5, 2020

We met two days before he turned 100. He entered the Cheka [OGPU] in 1923. He participated in the famous Operation Trust in which the Chekists set up a non-existent underground organization of monarchists and deceived their fierce enemies from the Russian emigration for seven years, effectively paralyzing all sabotage work against the USSR.

Under the last name Gintse, Gudz headed the legal intelligence station in Tokyo. After his return home, he coordinated the work of [Richard] Sorge-Ramsay’s network in Japan. He was fired from the Cheka [NKVD] in 1938 for having ties with the “enemies of the state,” and it was a miracle that he was not arrested. He got a job as an ordinary bus driver. He was not spared, he was simply forgotten. Only at the end of 1970 was he remembered and his nonexistent sins were forgiven. To begin with, he was hired as a consultant for the very popular film Operation Trust in which he also played a small role - the young Chekist Boris Gudz [himself]. Then he began to be invited to the Lubyanka frequently. Foreign intelligence service [PGU] even gave him an assistant, and he became the final arbiter of internal disputes over the historical events of long ago, the  participants of which were almost all executed by Yezhov or died without a trace. 

When he was over 100 years old, he got married for the third time. At 103, he went skiing and asked me whether to take his own, high-speed skis to the sanatorium or rent the ones they had there.

I worked with him - he preferred to meet in late evenings - for four years. We did a lot, but plenty of things remained unfinished. We began a book about [Vyacheslav] Menzhinsky, Dzerzhinsky’s successor, but…

Only ten people attended his funeral at the very end of December 2006. But we all heard the farewell salvo by the military guards in honor of this former brigade commissar.

Without changing the manner in which Gudz narrated the events of his life, I will present a few events he openly talked out, which I deciphered from my notes in January 2020.

How the Famous Terrorist Boris Savinkov Died

We lured Boris Savinkov to the Soviet Union in August 1924 and arrested him in Minsk. The Supreme Court sentenced him to death, but the sentence was later commuted to ten years in prison. And then Savinkov committed suicide. It all happened on the fifth floor, in the office of the deputy chief of the counterintelligence department, [Roman] Pilyar. My room on the third floor overlooked the Lubyanka Square, and Pilyar’s office looked into the courtyard, into the interior. At an earlier time, the office had a door to the balcony. Later, the door was closed up and replaced with a low windowsill. I’d say it was about eighty centimeters above the ground.

I know what actually took place. Grisha [Grigory Syroezhkin] and I shared an office, our tables were next to one another, and the next day, twisting his face, he told me how it all happened. Savinkov kept walking up and down the office in a nervous state. He went to the window, looked down, and climbed up. Grisha was sitting in a chair next to him. He immediately jumped to stop him. Syroezhkin was a former professional wrestler and one of his arms was weak because he got hurt in a fight. He should have grabbed Savinkov with his good arm. But it didn’t work out that way. They shouted to him: “Grishka, you yourself will go down with him.” However, he held on to Savinkov, but Savinkov slipped out. Syroezhkin couldn’t hold him anymore. Otherwise, he would have fallen to his death as well.

However, there were two death certificates. In the first, the detection of alcohol in Savinkov’s blood was mentioned. And in the second, there was nothing about alcohol. The first death certificate was kept under the wraps. Of course, Savinkov was a bit tipsy. During the autopsy, they found almost a liter of alcohol in his body. Before the tragic event, they took him – and this was not the first time - to a restaurant, where they all ate and drank. All officers immediately learned about Savinkov’s suicide. It could not have been covered up.

Under [Nikolay] Yezhov, Syroezhkin was imprisoned and a testimony was forced out of him that he had pushed Savinkov out of the window into the courtyard. That’s not credible! And he signed that he deliberately threw Savinkov out. I read his statement and grabbed my head in my hands. That was horrific! Syroezhkin was executed. And he fought in Spain and received a medal for it.

... and the Famous Spy Sydney Reilly

Sydney Reilly was deceived by the head of the fictitious organization “Trust” Alexander Alexandrovich Yakushev. Reilly was an experienced intelligence officer, a genuine fox, and the former state councilor Yakushev was just a beginner in the spying game. But he got an important assignment: to lure Reilly to the USSR.

Reilly was in Vyborg [the territory of Finland at the time]. And exactly at the same time, Yakushev arrived in Vyborg and arranged the meeting with Reilly on September 25 [1925]. Reilly was pleased: the head of a large underground anti-Soviet organization came to meet him. He was very much flattered. Certain issues of extreme importance were discussed. Reilly offered some suggestions which were taken very seriously. But Yakushev at times delicately made it clear that not all of them, though coming from a professional of Reilly’s stature, were applicable on the Bolshevik soil because Russia had changed considerably since Reilly was there last time. And he invited Reilly to meet with the people who were fighting the Bolsheviks under very difficult conditions. Sydney Reilly honestly admitted that he would very much like to do so, but that he must go to America.

Then Yakushev pulled out his trump card: “Tell me, Mr. Reilly, how much time do you have?” Reilly was frank: on September 30, just a few days later, his ship was leaving the French port of Cherbourg. Alexander Alexandrovich paused, reflected a bit, as if he had remembered something: “You can be back in four days: from here, from Vyborg, through our “open window” at the border, you could get to St. Petersburg, and then to Moscow, and come back the same way. And everything will work out. Here’s what we can do: today is the 25^th, on the 26^th, we can cross the border, on the 27^th, we’ll be in St. Petersburg and on the 28^th, in Moscow. You’ll be back in Vyborg on the 29^th. Considering the guarantees we can provide you with, why miss the opportunity to take a look at everything we have done with your own eyes? The subtext was clear: “What, are you afraid?” And Reilly fell for it: “Agreed, he said, I’ll go with you.” A great job was done by Yakushev! He lured him in, put ideas into his head, made him believe in them, and that was it – the job was done. That’s how well the former state councilor learned to play the game.

Reilly was arrested at a private apartment in Moscow. Before that they went to a dacha, which was fully equipped as a safe house. They met with the members of the “Trust.” There was Yakushev, our associate, who played the host at the dacha, and two to four other officers. Genuine counterrevolutionaries were not invited. Everybody there was on the same side.

They had a banquet. And then when he relaxed a bit, the “guest” presented his terrorist program. He claimed that using acts of terrorism was the only remaining option for fighting the Bolsheviks: “We must be like People’s Will, only in the opposite direction [anti-socialist]. They also killed the governors to attract the oppressed and raise their spirits. They wanted to bring the situation to the boiling point. And we must do the same. We will strike Russia from the inside, and Europe will then treat us differently. Let the degree of security and stability in Russia come down to zero.”

They returned from the dacha to Moscow. Reilly had to leave by express train for St. Petersburg at about midnight. He was completely calm, he trusted his hosts. In the Soviet Union, hardly anyone knew how he looked like: he was not back since 1918. On the way from the dacha, he even wrote a postcard and threw it into the mailbox: “I’m in Moscow. Sydney.”

They arrived at an apartment on Maroseyka Street to rest a bit and have a snack before going to the train station. And then the spy was told: “You are under arrest.” Reilly had no weapons. This was taken care of earlier. After the arrest, Reilly made threats: “The high circles in England will find out about my arrest. Better not to fool around with me.” He had no idea that our service already planted the story of a shootout at the border to hide what was really going on. They showed him the newspaper: “Look here - you are already dead. Read - ‘Sydney Reilly was identified and killed while crossing the border illegally.’ You don’t exist anymore.”

Already in 1918, Reilly was sentenced to death by the [Bolshevik] court. But he escaped. And when he turned up on our territory, the sentence had to be carried out. The court decision had to be enforced, meaning he had to be shot. Several times he was taken out to the forest in Sokolniki for walks. And he was shot there. I know who carried out the sentence. Grigory Syroezhkin [Gudz’s friend] was in this group. Reilly didn’t expect to be shot. The final verdict was not read to him, they tried not to frighten him, or to drag him somewhere, it seemed more humane that way. He was shot in the back suddenly.

His body was buried in the courtyard of the Lubyanka. I don’t know where his remains ended up. During the perestroika, a lot of construction was going on there, almost everything has been rebuilt.

Now about Reilly’s nationality. Many believe that he was a Jew from Odessa. Though I believe that he was, very possibly, a Jew, he was not from Odessa. There are many tall tales about this, they even claim that his real last name was Rosenblum. During the interrogation, he claimed that his father was an Englishman and that his mother was Russian.

Reilly’s wife made a real scandal. She wrote a letter to the British Prime Minister in very harsh tones. She accused him of sending her husband to the Soviet Union and she demanded an apology from the British government. And she got a response. On behalf of the prime minister, signed by his secretary, the response stated that they had not sent anyone anywhere, that Mr. Reilly went to a foreign country voluntarily, and that therefore they were not obliged to render any assistance to his family.

Lenin’s Embarrassment and how Dzerzhinsky Kissed a Lady’s Hand

I was not Dzerzhinsky’s assistant. But I saw him at party meetings and met him many times when entering or exiting the building, because we all entered through the same entrance. Once I rode with him in the elevator – his office was on the third floor, and mine was on the fifth [Earlier Gudz stated that his office was on the third floor]. His demeanor was modest. I greeted him, and, he responded as usual, looking directly into my eyes.

Here’s one situation I remember well. I went up to the third floor where his office was located. And a very dignified-looking lady who was in the elevator with me was also getting off. From her appearance, I could see that she came from abroad. And he went out to meet her by the elevator. He bent over, took her hand, lifted it slightly, and kissed it. Then he accompanied the lady down the hall. She was a representative of the Polish Red Cross, Madame Simpalowska, who, under [Józef] Pilsudski, helped to take care of the Communists arrested in Poland. And we had Yekaterina Pavlovna Peshkova. She oversaw the cases of the Poles arrested in the Soviet Union. She had an official certificate, which gave her the right to visit prisoners at any time and provide them with material assistance, if needed. The principle of reciprocity. And Dzerzhinsky talked to [Simpalowska]: she provided the assistance to the Communists.

I also saw Lenin in person. He spoke at the First All-Russian Congress on Extracurricular Education. This Congress was organized by [Nadezhda] Krupskaya, and, in fact, by my father, who was Nadezhda Konstantinovna’s assistant and consultant on extracurricular affairs. His job was to eliminate illiteracy in Russia. And my father told me the day before the Congress: “Boris, come with me. Vladimir Ilyich will give a speech.” I went to the Unions’ House, took a seat in the 5^th or 6^th row, and waited. Many Congresses took place there. The doors to the foyer, which runs parallel to the hall, were open. To enter the hall, one had to climb the stairs and go further along the foyer, past the doors at the main entrance. One could enter the stage, where the speakers sat, through a small room.

Lunacharsky spoke first. He was a great speaker. Suddenly I could hear the clapping that did not have anything to do with the speech of the People’s Commissar of Education [Lunacharsky]. It turned out that the people in the hall saw that Lenin had come in through the open door. They started to get up and applaud. Lunacharsky widened his eyes and asked: “What’s the matter?” They told him: “Anatoly Vasilyevich, Ilyich has arrived.” Lunacharsky turned around, and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin entered from the other side, his cap in hand, and stepped on the stage. I was sitting in the 5^th row and I could see Lenin, who seemed not to understand who the applause was for - Lunacharsky or him. So, he didn’t sit behind the table on the stage, but on the steps. Lunacharsky understood what was going on, quickly went up to Lenin, helped him get up, and invited him on the podium. And Lenin had such an embarrassed expression on his face because he interrupted Lunacharsky’s speech. Then there was more applause, everyone stood up, and Lenin began his speech. Lenin spoke well. But Lunacharsky was a real performer. Lenin’s speech was simple, coming from the heart. He needed no papers to rely on.

Not An Informer on [Varlam] Shalamov

A painful question for me. The writer Varlam Shalamov was convinced and even wrote down that I “reported him to the Chekists.” But how could I have done that? My sister was married to him. And in those days, if your close or even distant relatives got arrested, you were in trouble. Well, would I want my own sister to be arrested? When they arrested Shalamov, Galya [Gudz’s sister] was also arrested and exiled to Chardzhou [Turkmenabad], where she, poor woman, led a miserable life until 1946. And shortly after my brother-in-law’s arrest, I was expelled from the Communist party and expelled from the Cheka [NKVD]. Well, think, would I really want to ruin my own life and that of my siblings? The only truth is that I never had or could have any special affection for Shalamov.

 

The longest living Chekists:

I will note only the best known:

Boris Ignatievich Gudz - 104 years (died in 2006).

Alexey Nikolaevich Botyan - Hero of Russia – 103 years (died in 2020).

Mikhail Isaakovich Mukasey – illegal intelligence officer - 101 years (died in 2008).

Ivan Georgiyevich Starinov – Hitler’s personal enemy - 100 years (died 2000).

 

Gudz’s Advice on How to Live Long

This advice was written down when Gudz was 102.

- I didn’t drink and didn’t smoke. Only a glass of red wine on the New Year’s Eve and on the Day of the Chekist [December 20]. What I ate was simple: oatmeal, rolled oats. I rode my bike until I was 80, and I drove until 90. I’m now over a hundred, but I still go skiing. [Advice] Do not get mad for nothing and destroy your own mental balance by yourself.