Filip Kovacevic: The Uralov Report - A Literary Reconstruction of a Top Secret KGB File

This article was originally published in the Winter 2022 Newsletter of the North American Society for Intelligence History (NASIH).

 

 

 

Filip Kovacevic: KGB Agent ASTA and Two American Tourists in Vilnius in 1984

American tourists visiting the Soviet Union attracted a great deal of attention from KGB counterintelligence. When they ventured beyond Moscow, the Second Directorates of the regional KGBs mobilized all the resources they had at their disposal to keep track of them. This included the work of KGB undercover agents and trusted contacts who interacted with tourists and worked as informers. A typical professional cover for such an agent was that of a tourist guide.   

A document recently digitized by the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania contains a revealing report by a KGB agent who worked as a tourist guide in Vilnius and was deployed to inform on two visiting American tourists.[1] The document includes both the general tasks given to the agent and the specific activities that the agent performed.

 

The codename of the Vilnius tourist guide KGB agent was ASTA. Her real identity remains unknown but she must have been an important undercover agent because her handler, Lt. Colonel A. Pozemkauskas, was the head of the Second Department of the Second Directorate of the Lithuanian KGB. This was the main KGB department in charge of keeping an eye on Western visitors in Lithuania. The report is dated November 13, 1984. The place of the meeting is left blank, though it is likely that the meeting took place in one of the safehouses owned by the Lithuanian KGB in Vilnius.

 

The document follows the regular structure of any 1980s KGB report detailing the meeting between the agent and his or her handler. It begins with the general summary of the agent’s tasks. In this case, Pozemkauskas tasked ASTA to collect information concerning the reasons of the tourists’ visit to Lithuania, their interests and status in the country of residence, and any other valuable information for the ongoing and future KGB operations. Though left unstated, this also included assessing their potential for being recruited.

 

The general summary of tasks was followed by another section called activities or action items. In this case, the action items included sending the copy of the document to another KGB officer named Kushner and to the First Department of the Lithuanian KGB, which was in charge of foreign intelligence and ran the networks of Lithuanian KGB spies outside the Soviet Union. As for the future tasks, typically spelled out in the next section following the action items, nothing was added. Evidently, ASTA’s work as an agent was assessed as satisfactory.

 

ASTA reported that two American tourists whose last names were given as Signorelli and Dickenson visited Vilnius from November 11 to November 13, 1984. She said that she accompanied them on a day-long city tour on November 12. They told her that they lived in a city near Los Angeles, California, and came to Vilnius to visit Signorelli’s relatives. Signorelli’s grandfather and grandmother were Lithuanian. He was born in Chicago in the Lithuanian immigrant community but did not speak the Lithuanian language. According to ASTA, Signorelli had some limited Russian proficiency. He met with his relatives in Vilnius and received a gift from them. ASTA meticulously reported that the gift was a handmade coverlet and that Signorelli would be required to provide the photograph of the gift to the Soviet Customs in order to take it out of the country.

 

Dickenson said that he had no family in Lithuania and was invited on this trip by his friend Signorelli. ASTA reported that they were both employed as engineers by a space research company in California. This is probably why they attracted so much interest from the KGB. However, neither Signorelli nor Dickenson would reveal to her the name of the company they worked for. Signorelli apparently tried to distract her by saying that there were many such companies in California. ASTA noted that Signorelli was more politically oriented in his questions. For instance, he asked why the Vilnius Cathedral was closed and what language is used in the Lithuanian educational system. According to ASTA, Dickenson was only interested in how restaurants were functioning in a socialist system.

 

ASTA stated that she inquired about the tourists’ political views. They told her that they voted in the 1984 U.S. presidential elections before leaving for the Soviet Union. Dickenson admitted that he voted for Ronald Reagan. Signorelli avoided answering ASTA’s question but claimed that his choice was neither Ronald Reagan nor Walter Mondale. ASTA tried to ascertain how Signorelli and Dickenson felt about the potential improvements in the U.S-Soviet relations. She repeated the official Soviet line that it was necessary for the U.S. side to accept the Soviet offer to sit down at the negotiating table. Neither Signorelli nor Dickenson seemed to have been swayed by her arguments. ASTA noted that Signorelli replied “with a sneer” that positive relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union were the stuff of the 1940s.

 

ASTA concluded her report by stating that the Vilnius visit was just one out of several destinations that Signorelli and Dickenson had visited in the Soviet Union. They also spent time in Tashkent, Uzbekistan and in Moscow. No doubt the Second Directorates of the KGB in those two cities also positioned their agents on the Americans' path, but the records of their visits remain under the lock and key of the present-day Uzbek and Russian state security services. According to ASTA, Signorelli and Dickenson liked Vilnius more than Moscow because the people in Vilnius were more “polite” and the buildings more pleasant and less austere. This no doubt flattered Lithuanian pride and made ASTA’s KGB handler, Lt. Col Pozemkauskas, very happy.

 

But that was all the Lithuanian KGB counterintelligence got from the two visiting Americans. They provided no valuable information whatsoever and ASTA’s attempts at “ideological persuasion” led nowhere. Signorelli and Dickenson left Vilnius with their belief systems intact. And with a handmade Lithuanian coverlet for Signorelli’s California home.

    

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[1] “LSSR KGB agento ‘Asta’ pranešimas [The Report of LSSR KGB Agent ASTA],” Lithuanian Special Archives (LYA), Fond K-35, ap. 2, b. 302, l. 65-67,  http://www.kgbveikla.lt/docs/show/2405/from:538.

Filip Kovacevic: Red Army Chemical Weapons in Lithuanian Countryside

Did the Soviet Red Army store chemical weapons in Lithuania prior to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941? The document found in the Lithuanian KGB archive offers some circumstantial evidence that this was the case. It also tells a story of how a group of Lithuanian villagers almost lost their lives because they were unaware that there were chemical weapons in their vicinity.

What is known about the case comes from a top secret report by Soviet Lithuania’s Minister of Internal Affairs Juozas Bartašiunas to Lithuania’s Communist leaders Antanas Sniečkus and Mečislovas Gedvilas on June 11, 1949. The report was recently digitized by the Genocide and Resistance Centre of Lithuania and posted on the Internet.[1] It is still considered a state secret in Putin’s Russia.

Bartašiunas reports that on June 2, 1949, three villagers from the village of Rasskazy near the capital Vilnius went to the local cemetery to fix the crosses of their recently deceased family members. They stopped by a house near the cemetery to ask for a shovel. The owner of the house, whose name is redacted from the report, in addition to the shovel, also offered them a bucket of dark brown liquid which he poured from a bigger 20-pound container. He told them that he used the liquid against various types of pests around his house and that it proved very effective. The villagers covered the bases of the wooden crosses with the liquid and left the cemetery.

However, during the following day, they all developed red marks on their bodies, primarily on their arms and legs, and, also, in one case, on genital organs, which soon turned into blisters. One of the villagers was admitted into the hospital on the next day, and the others, including the villager who owned the liquid, on June 6. They were later transported to a specialized hospital in Vilnius.

According to Bartašiunas, in the meantime, the unknown liquid was seized by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and transported to the laboratory of the Ministry of Health. After running several tests, it was determined that the liquid was the mustard gas (also known as sulfur mustard), a deadly chemical weapon massively used during World War One.

How did a Lithuanian villager come into the possession of a chemical weapon? It did not take long to solve the mystery. During the interrogation, he stated that in 1941, before the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, he was employed at the Red Army warehouse No. 988 on Algerdo Street in Vilnius. In the chaotic days of the Red Army withdrawal, he simply took two containers of liquid home to use against pests. 

The fate of the rest of chemical weapons stored at the same facility is not mentioned in the report. Whether they were evacuated by the Red Army, seized by the advancing Nazis, or taken by other Lithuanian warehouse employees remains unknown.

There is also a bigger question as to why the Red Army would store chemical weapons in Vilnius in 1941. But tackling that question goes well beyond the scope of this blog post.

 

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[1] “LSSR VRM ministro J. Bartašiūno spec. pranešimas LKP CK sekretoriui A. Sniečkui apie valstiečių apsinuodijimą nuodingosiomis karinėmis medžiagomis [Special Report by J. Bartasiūnas, Minister of Internal Affairs of the LSSR, to A. Sniečkas, Secretary of the CC of the LKP, on the Poisoning of Peasants with Toxic Military Substances],” F. V-141, ap. 2, b. 41, 1. 153-154. Top Secret. Digitized on August 29, 2018, http://www.kgbveikla.lt/docs/show/5913/from:538.   

 

Filip Kovacevic: How KGB Spied on Foreign Journalists and Diplomats in the 1960s Lithuania

In the late 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev’s policies opened the Soviet Union to foreign visitors. The large influx of Western journalists, students, and tourists necessitated changes in the KGB standard operating procedures. More sophisticated methods of surveillance and counterintelligence collection were required. Special units were created to study how the KGBs of the Soviet Republics coped with the emerging challenges.

One of these units was set up at the headquarters of the KGB of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic in Vilnius. On September 27, 1960, the unit's high-ranking member, Lt. Colonel Tumantsev, filed a report on the surveillance and other covert measures which the KGB operatives employed during the visits of foreign diplomats and journalists. His top secret report was digitized by the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania in 2012 and is discussed here in English for the first time.[1]

In the report, Tumantsev described the details of two separate operations involving the search of the hotel rooms of the visiting foreigners known in the KGB technical jargon as the Measure “E.” Both operations took place at the Hotel Vilnius in Vilnius. The target of the first operation was the room of Italian journalist Wanda Grawonska[2] who came to Vilnius accompanied by the first secretary of the Italian Embassy in Moscow, Enrico Carrara. The visit in question took place in February 1960.

According to Tumantsev, Carrara was known to the KGB as an officer of the Italian foreign intelligence service and had a “weakness for alcoholic beverages and women,” which the KGB tried to leverage against him. Grawonska was suspected of ties with Stasys Lozoraitis, the former foreign minister of pre-WWII independent Lithuania, who was the head of the anti-Soviet Lithuanian diplomatic service based in Rome. It is clear from the report that Grawonska was perceived by the KGB as more threatening and dangerous than Carrara.

Grawonska’s conduct in Vilnius is described by Tumantsev as highly provocative. According to him, in her conversations with the locals, she made many “libelous” comments about the Soviet government and the socialist system, while at the same time praising the benefits of the bourgeois capitalism. When she met with a Lithuanian Catholic priest, she gave him several copies of the booklet titled “Lithuania and Lithuanians in the Free World,” which Tumantsev condemned for its “anti-Soviet” orientation. Grawonska also irritated the KGB by demonstratively pointing to their external surveillance operatives and trying to escape them by taking a taxi to the suburbs. Most damningly from Tumantsev’s point of view, Grawonska took hundreds of photographs of the daily life in Vilnius. The KGB feared that she would use the photos to give an unflattering portrayal of the Soviet life in her subsequent articles in Western journals and newspapers. To prevent Grawonska from carrying out her ‘nefarious’ design, the decision was made to enter her hotel room and expose (destroy) her film rolls. The question that the KGB needed to work out was how to keep Grawonska away from her room long enough to do so.   

For the task of distracting Grawonska, the KGB engaged their agent and informer codenamed NEMAN [the name of the major river]. There is no indication in the report as to who NEMAN was, but it is likely that he was either a journalist or an art critic, somebody with a prominent role in the Vilnius cultural circles. According to Tumantsev, NEMAN was planted to Grawonska during her first visit to Vilnius in January 1960 and managed to gain her trust. He apparently impressed her so much that when she came to Vilnius again in February, she asked to see NEMAN and then introduced him to Carrara. Coached by the KGB, NEMAN invited both Grawonska and Carrara for dinner at the Vilnius Airport restaurant, quite a distance away from the hotel. Familiar with Carrera’s “weakness,” he also invited a well-known theater actress [or ballerina] to accompany them.

Tumantsev reported that the KGB team waited to receive a phone confirmation from their source at the airport that Grawonska and her companions made their dinner orders at the restaurant before two experienced operatives sprang into action. One operative was from the OTO [technical service] and the other from the 2^nd Directorate [counterintelligence]. Having obtained the key of Grawonska’s room from a trusted contact at the hotel, they entered the room and methodically exposed all the film rolls they could see lying around. They also discovered that one of Grawonska’s leather bags was tightly packed with about 100 film rolls. They took the bag to another hotel room where they had already brought a portable x-ray machine. When they exposed all the rolls, they returned the bag to the same place in Grawonska’s room. According to Tumantsev, the whole operation took about 2 hours. He noted that the agent NEMAN proved to be a real expert in keeping both Grawonska and Carrara entertained during the dinner, while adding that the warning system had been put in place in case they suddenly decided to return to the hotel.

There is nothing in the report regarding the epilogue of the operation. There is no mention of whether Grawonska noticed that her film rolls were damaged and, if so, how she reacted. For Tumantsev and his KGB unit, the operation was marked down as an unmitigated success.

The second operation Tumantsev described in his report involved the visit to Vilnius of two Japanese diplomats, the first secretary of the Japanese Embassy in Moscow, Hirooka, and the attaché at the Embassy, Tanaka [only their last names are included in the report]. This visit took place in June 1960. Tumantsev noted that before the visit, the Lithuanian KGB was informed by the Second Chief Directorate of the KGB [counterintelligence] that Hirooka was an experienced foreign intelligence officer fluent in Russian language and skilled in using various technical equipment for collecting information about the objects of interest to the Japanese government.

After Hirooka and Tanaka arrived in Vilnius, they were put under around-the-clock surveillance by the KGB. Tumantsev indicated that it was observed that Hirooka spent a lot of time at the hotel writing something in a thick notebook which he later deposited in his bag. The decision was made to gain access to the notebook. Once again, the question was how to keep Hirooka away from his room long enough to do so.

According to Tumantsev, in contrast to the case of Grawonska and Carrera, a different tactic was used this time. Instead of dining and wining the Japanese diplomats, the KGB engaged their agent TSAREV who was introduced to them as a translator and a tourist guide. Using his encyclopedic knowledge of history, TSAREV convinced the diplomats that the town of Trakai would be a great place to visit. Trakai is about 30 kilometers from Vilnius and has been a popular tourist destination for decades due to its medieval architecture. When the diplomats left for Trakai with TSAREV and the taxi driver, who was selected because he was also a trusted KGB contact, the KGB operative team entered Hirooka’s room. They quickly found the notebook and photographed its content which was in Japanese language. In total, there were 92 pages filled with writing, which, according to Tumantsev, were promptly dispatched to the Second Chief Directorate in Moscow. It is also noteworthy that during the drive to Trakai, the taxi driver took the longest possible route, not only to allow more time for the hotel room search, but also to avoid passing near any Soviet military installations.

In conclusion, Tumantsev’s report is just one of many archival testimonies of the methodical nature and thoroughness of the spying on foreign visitors by the regional KGBs of the Soviet republics. As can be seen from the report, external surveillance and hotel room searches were quite common and most local individuals who foreign journalists and diplomats interacted with during their visits were planted by the KGB. Not only was the KGB ready and willing to violate the visitors’ right to privacy but was also on occasion engaged in damaging and destroying their property and equipment. Conveniently for the KGB leadership which wanted to hear only the good news, it seems that the reactions of the affected journalists and diplomats were rarely reported.

 

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[1] “Valstybės saugumo organų operatyvinio darbo patirties tyrimo ir apibendrinimo grupės prie LSSR KGB pirmininko vyr. referento N. Tumancevo pažyma apie asmenų sekimą [The Statement of N. Tumantsev, High-Ranking Officer of the LSSR KGB Operational Work Experience Research Unit, on the Surveillance of Individuals],” F. K-l, ap. 10, b. 275, 1. 73–77. Top Secret. Digitized on February 7, 2012, http://www.kgbveikla.lt/docs/show/261/from:665.

[2] Wanda Grawonska is a well-known Italian journalist. At this time, she is in her 90s and lives in Rome. Her father was a pre-WWII Polish diplomat Jan Grawonski and her maternal grandfather Alfredo Frassati was the founder of the Italian newspaper La Stampa.