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.