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: Who Shot Lieutenant Podrezov?

“Remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale.” --- Vladimir Nabokov

                                                  

It was mid-February 1945 in northwestern Lithuania. World War Two had entered its final phase. The Soviet Red Army was fighting the retreating German forces. The dense forest areas between the towns of Šiauliai and Telšiai were patrolled by the military units of the Second Baltic Front. The Front's headquarters of the Soviet military counterintelligence directorate known as the SMERSH (Russian acronym for “Death to Spies”) reported the capture of a group of suspected German spies.

One of the unnamed captives carried the identification documents of a Soviet infantry officer, Lieutenant Aleksey G. Podrezov.[1] Podrezov had been missing since November 1944. He had left his unit on a 10-day leave and never returned. What happened to him? The Soviet military prosecutors of the 3rd Air Army opened an investigation.

The basic biographical details on Podrezov were easily obtained. He was born in Ukraine, in the Dnipro (Dnepropetrovsk) region in 1919.[2]. He had general education (seven grades) and was recruited into the Red Army in 1939. In uniform from the first day of the war, Podrezov became a candidate for membership in the Komsomol in 1942. He then completed an officers’ course which led to his promotion to lieutenant in 1944. He seemed a promising young man rising up the ladder of Soviet military hierarchy in wartime conditions. 

Another document offered a more detailed account of the last year in Podrezov’s life.[3] On April 2, 1944, Podrezov reported for service in the 47th Infantry Division and was named the head of a mortar battalion in the Division's 148th Regiment on the same day. About three months later, on June 27, 1944, he was wounded in battle and then dispatched to a hospital in the rear for recovery and recuperation.[4] The wound must have been serious considering that Podrezov returned to his regiment only a couple months later. It seems that his troubles began after his return. Had his attitude toward the military service and the war in general undergone a dramatic change?

The first indication that something was amiss was the fact that he was not re-appointed to his previous position as the head of a mortar battalion. Instead, he was put in charge of the burial unit, a much lower and generally disliked post. Angered, or perhaps suffering from some kind of physical anguish, Podrezov apparently did not do a good job even at this lowly post and was relieved of command on October 10.[5]

Obviously wanting to get out of the unpleasant situation, Podrezov requested a 10-day leave from the regiment commander, Major Vasily Marushkov. He reportedly told Marushkov that he was going to visit his uncle who served as a colonel in the headquarters of the First Baltic Front. Marushkov approved the request but the documents certifying his decision appeared to have been lost or destroyed.  

Given that the identity of Podrezov’s uncle was never established, it is possible that he was invented by Podrezov as an excuse to leave his unit. Evidently, military investigators also had their suspicions and required Marushkov to report all he knew about Podrezov’s request. In order to assess potential favoritism or corruption, they also obtained Marushkov’s personal information.[6] Nothing improper was found.           

In his hand-written report, Marushkov stated that he reported Podrezov’s absence to his superiors at the end of November but was told that Podrezov had probably stayed with his uncle at the headquarters.[7] Nobody seemed overly concerned that Podrezov was missing. It is likely that they did not want him back anyway. But would they go so far as to plan, execute, and cover up his death? They had the know-how, they had the means, but did they really do it? 

The account of the last hours of Podrezov’s life was provided by a Lithuanian villager Simonas Skotis. According to Skotis, on January 28, 1945 (more than two months after leaving his unit), Podrezov appeared at his farm in the woods near the small village of Luoke (Lukniki) in the company of two “unidentified” individuals dressed as soldiers of the Red Army.[8] The three said they were members of the Luoke NKVD (state security) unit. While at Skotis’s house, they began to drink heavily and, according to Skotis, Podrezov used his gun to force a female inhabitant (referred to in the report as an “unidentified female citizen”) to drink with them. Skotis was silent as to whether this aggressive action led to any subsequent sexual violence. He only stated that after their bout of drinking was over, Podrezov and one of the soldiers left for another farm in search of a certain sergeant Shvetsov who supposedly lived there.

This was when things took a strange turn. According to Skotis, soon after Podrezov and the soldier left, the remaining soldier exited the house and began waiting for the two to come back in a sort of ambush. When he saw them returning, he fired on Podrezov, killing him at the spot. The soldiers then took Podrezov’s gun and field bag, ripped off his shoulder straps, and vanished. 

To what extent was Skotis’s testimony reliable? Major Levin, a Soviet military prosecutor reviewing the case, must have had his doubts, given that he expressed his surprise that no additional witnesses were interrogated.[9] Skotis could have easily been suspected to have been an accomplice to the murder of a Soviet officer. Yet, he was let go without any sanctions. It looked as if he had been protected by local authorities who first reported Podrezov’s death to the Soviets. He was likely an informer who was still needed for future covert work.

Interestingly, in his account, Skotis mentioned that only Podrezov took an aggressive action against a woman in his house and said nothing about his two companions. Were they just passive observers, or was he trying to make Podrezov - who, being dead, could offer no rebuttal - look as bad as possible, almost deserving of his tragic fate? Perhaps Skotis was afraid that those two “soldiers” would come back and take their revenge on him if he revealed too much to the investigators.

But who were these “soldiers”? Their identity was never discovered. Major Levin closed the case without having the answer. He only recommended that those in Podrezov’s regiment who had failed to report his absence to the headquarters be reprimanded.[10] He did not say a word about continuing the search for the killers.

Were they really NKVD, or were they in fact Lithuanian anti-Soviet resistance fighters dressed up as NKVD to fool a Soviet deserter roaming the woods, who was as afraid of his own as of the enemy? Most likely, they were the resistance fighters. Still, after having reviewed the case, I can’t shake off the impression that Podrezov was an inconvenient witness to both sides.

     

---

NOTES

^[1] “Спецсообщение начальнику Управления контрразведки ‘СМЕРШ’ 2-го Прибалтийского фронта [Special Report to the Head of the Directorate of Counterintelligence ‘SMERSH’ of the 2^nd Baltic Front,” February 21, 1945. Fond K-1, Op. 45, File 1832, p.109. 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.

^[2] “Справка на б/служащего проходившего службу в 148 стрельковом полку лейтенента Подрезова Алексея Георгиевича [Information on the former service member serving in the 148^th Rifle Regiment Lieutenant Podrezov Aleksey Goergiyevich], February 17, 1945. Fond K-1, Op. 45, File 1832, p.119. Lietuvos TSR Valstybės Saugumo Komitetas [Lithuanian KGB] Selected Records, Hoover Institution. Another document stated that he was born in 1917. See “Справка [Information], February 17, 1945. Fond K-1, Op. 45, File 1832, p.118. Lietuvos TSR Valstybės Saugumo Komitetas [Lithuanian KGB] Selected Records, Hoover Institution.

^[3] “Справка [Information], February 16, 1945. Fond K-1, Op. 45, File 1832, p.117. Lietuvos TSR Valstybės Saugumo Komitetas [Lithuanian KGB] Selected Records, Hoover Institution.

^[4] “Справка на б/служащего проходившего службу в 148 стрельковом полку лейтенента Подрезова Алексея Георгиевича [Information on the former service member serving in the 148^th Rifle Regiment Lieutenant Podrezov Aleksey Goergiyevich], p.119.

^[5] “Спецсообщение начальнику Управления контрразведки ‘СМЕРШ’ 2-го Прибалтийского фронта [Special Report to the Head of the Directorate of Counterintelligence ‘SMERSH’ of the 2^nd Baltic Front,” p.109.

^[6] “Справка на начальника штаба 148 СП майора Маружкова Василия Михайловича [Information on the chief of the stuff of the 148^th Rifle Regiment Major Maryshkov Vasily Mikhailovich],” February 17, 1945. Fond K-1, Op. 45, File 1832, p.111. Lietuvos TSR Valstybės Saugumo Komitetas [Lithuanian KGB] Selected Records, Hoover Institution.   

[7] “Сообщение начальнику УК ‘СМЕРШ’ 47 СД [Report to the head of the Directorate of Counterintelligence ‘SMERSH’ of the 47^th Rifle Division],” February 17, 1945. Fond K-1, Op. 45, File 1832, pp.110, 110 reverse. Lietuvos TSR Valstybės Saugumo Komitetas [Lithuanian KGB] Selected Records, Hoover Institution. 

[8] “Спецсообщение начальнику Управления контрразведки ‘СМЕРШ’ 2-го Прибалтийского фронта [Special Report to the Head of the Directorate of Counterintelligence ‘SMERSH’ of the 2^nd Baltic Front,” p.109 reverse.

[9] “Военному прокурору 6-й гвардейской армии – гвардии подполковнику июстиции тов. Нельсону [To the Military Prosecutor of the 6^th Guard Army – Guard Lieutenant Colonel of Justice Comrade Nelson], undated. Fond K-1, Op. 45, File 1832, p. 121. Lietuvos TSR Valstybės Saugumo Komitetas [Lithuanian KGB] Selected Records, Hoover Institution.

[10] “Военному прокурору 6-й гвардейской армии – гвардии подполковнику июстиции тов. Нельсону [To the Military Prosecutor of the 6^th Guard Army – Guard Lieutenant Colonel of Justice Comrade Nelson], undated. Fond K-1, Op. 45, File 1832, p. 123. Lietuvos TSR Valstybės Saugumo Komitetas [Lithuanian KGB] Selected Records, Hoover Institution.

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.