Moskovskaya Pravda: Interview of Yury Drozdov, Legendary Chief of KGB Illegals Program

On September 4, 2020, the City of Moscow daily newspaper Moskovskaya Pravda published yet another chapter from the upcoming book on the Soviet intelligence officers by journalist Ilona Yegiazarova. This chapter is based on an interview of Yury Drozdov (1925-2017), the KGB station chief in China and the U.S. (based in New York City) and the head of KGB Illegal Intelligence Department “S” from 1979 until 1991. Below is my translation available only on this blog.

Ilona Yegiazarova: Yury Drozdov. A Life Story like A Fiction Novel in which ‘Invention is Excluded’ [The Title of Drozdov’s Memoir]

Moskovskaya Pravda September 4, 2020

On September 19, Yury Ivanovich Drozdov would have turned 95. He has left us three years ago, but people who knew him will certainly raise a glass in his memory, remembering his unique analytical abilities and rare human qualities. Let us also do the same.

He took part in the seizure of Berlin at the end of the Great Patriotic War. He participated in the operation to exchange the Soviet intelligence officer [Rudolf] Abel for the American pilot [Francis Gary] Powers. During the Cold War, he worked as a KGB station chief in New York and Beijing. For more than 10 years, he headed the Illegal Intelligence Department of the KGB’s First Main Directorate (PGU). He created the special forces unit “Vympel.” He planned and organized the covert operation to capture the presidential palace in Afghanistan...

I saw Yury Ivanovich only a couple of times in my life. When he entered the room, those who knew him would respectfully make space for him: Major General Drozdov was respected by everyone – his colleagues, his subordinates, [even] his opponents... Though already in his 90s, the legend of Russian foreign intelligence continued to work every day. He directed the Namakon analytical center and produced very accurate forecasts about the future of Russia and the world. Like many illegal intelligence officers, he did not like giving interviews, and yet one day he agreed to talk to me.

The Beginning

First of all, of course, I was interested in the story of his origins - where do people like him come from…

- The only memory I have of my father is that of a military man, always in uniform - said Drozdov. [My father] Ivan Dmitrievich came from a wealthy family. A combatant in the First World War, awarded the St. George Cross for bravery, he greeted the Bolshevik revolution with enthusiasm. In those days, even the members of the same family sometimes had different views on Russia’s political future. Our family was no exception: my father, a tsarist officer, took the side of the Bolsheviks and went to fight in [Vasily] Chapayev’s brigade, while his brother fought on the other side of the barricades – we had a civil war within the family! My father fought in different regions - in Siberia, in Belarus, and he ended up settling down in the region of Borisov [in Belarus]. My mother - Anastasia Kuzminichna - also had an interesting biography. She grew up in the family of a guard of the landowner’s estate. The landowner enrolled her in high school together with his daughter. Then he got her a job as a typist at an English-owned factory in Pereslavl-Zalessky [Yaroslav Region, Russia]. My mother returned to her father’s place with a great profession and got a job as a typist in the NKVD.

My first conscious memories come from the time when we moved to Minsk. My father worked in the personnel department at a local university and sometimes spoke on the radio. The military officers were encouraged to do so.

My parents did not employ any particular system in my upbringing. I grew up a sickly child and would easily catch all kinds of diseases. If it was out there, I had it.  My father got tired of this, and he made a wise decision to send me to a military units’ camp near Minsk every year at the beginning of spring. I spent every summer in a tent and I got much stronger.

The father also influenced the young Yura’s choice of profession. From Minsk, Ivan Dmitrievich was transferred to Kharkov, to the central school of OSOAVIAKHIM [a voluntary defense organization which trained civilians for defense tasks] - to work in their personnel department. In the period from 1935 to 1937, the specialized artillery and aviation schools were created in several cities of the Soviet Union. They were the quasi-military types of institutions.

- Well, my father sent me, the fourteen-year-old boy, to one of these artillery schools. Both the teachers and the young boys wore military uniforms, and this, of course, created the atmosphere of military-type discipline. In this school, I had to learn Ukrainian language. In the first dictation exercise, I made 39 mistakes on a single page! This upset me so much that I began to study the subject very seriously. The knowledge that I gained turned out to be very useful to me in my future intelligence activities.

Yury Ivanovich’s talent for languages ​​turned out to be exceptional. Years later, German language he learned to perfection enabled him to work in Germany as a local clerk! The Germans thought he was a resident of Leipzig.

But let’s go back to his youth.

- Is it true that you were almost expelled from the Komsomol?

- When the war began, I was 15 years old - recalled Yury Ivanovich. We were evacuated to Kazakhstan, to Aktyubinsk. We travelled by a steamer through Stalingrad, the Germans did not bomb it yet, but they were already conducting aerial reconnaissance. My comrades and I took the fascist attack on the city as a personal challenge: we had stayed there for two days, we got to know some people there and received letters from them. I persuaded two of my school friends to go with me to Stalingrad to fight the Germans. For this we were almost expelled from the Komsomol. The director gathered the class, everyone discussed our action and passed a unanimous verdict: we should finish our studies first... But soon the military situation worsened, the school was transferred to Tashkent, and in 1943, we entered the artillery school in the town of Engels.

I must say that the schools and colleges at that time still generally resembled the pre-revolutionary models, but the war made them introduce certain modifications. When we graduated, we already had knowledge of many modern artillery pieces invented by experienced military men.

Sometimes it is said that the government did not take care of people during the war, that they pushed them into fighting and treated them like cannon fodder... Well, my comrades and I stayed at the [artillery] school for a year and a half instead of nine months. They were in no hurry to send us to the front, they took care of us, taught us many different things... We had a teacher from the famous Benois family - a former colonel of the tsarist army. He dealt with equestrian training and vaulting.

War

It turned out that both Drozdov the father and Drozdov the son ended up at the front.

- My father went to the front at the age of 47 and became the head of the chemical service in an artillery regiment. In one of the battles near Staraya Russ, he was wounded - a sniper bullet tore out his right lung.

 - Already the first letter from the front informed my mother and me that my father was in the hospital. It took him a long time to recover, the wound was serious, he had a big hole in his back... His recovery was, apparently, slowed down by his concern for his family. At that time, I was already a sergeant, I was eager to go to the front, but then the director of the school called me and said that he had received a letter from my father, who asked him to leave me in Engels as a platoon commander so that my mother would not be left alone. This made me very upset.

I entered the war in the last six months and did not accomplish any great deeds. My unit was a part of the 1^st Belorussian Front. We were parachuted in the borderlands of Poland in early January 1945. The 3^rd Shock Army, 57^th Anti-Tank Brigade. I was the platoon commander of an artillery unit and had the command of ten men and two machine guns. My military experience began with the capture of Warsaw. When I told the Polish ambassador many years later in New York City that we took Warsaw not on January 17, as is commonly believed, but three days earlier, he was amazed. Indeed, the Soviet troops were in the city already on the 14^th.

Then we entered Pomerania, merged with the 2^nd Belorussian Front, and moved toward the Baltic Sea. From there we were quickly transferred to the area of ​​the Seelower Heights, where we prepared for the crossing of the Oder.

“He didn’t accomplish any great deeds,” our hero regrets, forgetting about the enemy artillery destroyed by his unit in the battle of Berlin and the award he received for this - the Order of the Red Star. And Yury was only 20 years old at that time.

Love

While at the front, Drozdov met the love of his life.

- Lyudmila spent the whole war on the frontlines. We met in Poland, where I ended up in a hospital with eczema. My wife has had very difficult youth. She was not even 16 years old, when the Germans occupied her hometown of Nelidovo. She and her mother were able to get on an evacuation train and ended up in some remote village. Soon our sanitary units appeared there and set up a hospital where Lyudmila began to work as a nurse. She was a smart girl, and they began to use her as a special courier. She crossed the front line several times, and she never had any problems, although she was very cute. (Laughs.) So, she went all the way to Berlin with this military hospital and left the inscription “I was here!” on the wall of the Reichstag.

We got married in Berlin, she got married under her mother’s last name - Kachalovskaya, her father’s last name was Yudenich. And if someone found out that I had married a girl with such a last name [Yudenich was the last name of one of the commanders of the White Army], I’d never get a job in the state security service.

I have in my hands a photograph from 1946, taken in a German town, and I love looking at it: young Yury is smelling a small flower, held out by Lyudmila, and they both laugh. There is so much tenderness, lightness, and hope for a new, peaceful life in this photo...

While Yury Ivanovich and I are talking, he phones his wife several times and asks her how she is feeling: “I try to devote all my free time to her.”

Lyudmila Aleksandrovna shared the difficult life path of her husband - 35 years devoted to secret intelligence service, frequent separations, stress, moving from place to place... Yury Ivanovich said that his wife learned to recognize his mood by the sound of the engine of his car.

In 1966, in one of the countries where they were based, he couldn’t go to service the dead drop because of constant surveillance. His wife stepped in. When she returned, she gave him a container of photographic films with the words: “Now I know why you all get heart attacks.”

I ask Drozdov what he thinks the secret of family happiness is.

- Who knows? We quarreled and were sometimes bored with each other, but the family is important. When you have children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, you understand that you live for someone else.

Operational Assignments

- In 1945, we were all so carried away by our victorious advances. And not only us [the soldiers], but also our whole country was so inspired by the victory, and then by the reconstruction of the economy, that we missed to notice some very important things. Only years later, after reading the materials concerning the last months of the war and the U.S. reports from that time, I realized that our “allies” never stopped their activities against the USSR.

There are some very interesting documents from various time periods. For example, we got our hands on the correspondence of a British intelligence officer who helped the Americans create their National Security Agency. Churchill wrote to him in 1940: “We are going through a difficult time in Europe, could you ask Roosevelt to ask Hitler to suspend the advancement in the Balkans and speed up the events in Russia?” “Speed ​​up!” This means that the decision to attack the USSR was made much earlier, and that our allies - the United States and Britain – not only knew about it, but were also vitally interested in it taking place... I’ll tell you even more: what we are experiencing right now was planned in the last months of the war.

All Drozdov’s post-war activities were aimed at ensuring the security of our country and opposing the plans of rival intelligence services.

In 1956, after graduating from the Military Institute of Foreign Languages, he began his operational career in the office of the KGB representative at the Ministry of State Security of the GDR in Berlin. From 1957 to 1962, he took part in the preparation of the operation to exchange the Soviet illegal intelligence officer Rudolf Abel for the American spy pilot [Francis Gary] Powers. He played the role of Abel’s German cousin, the clerk Jurgen Drews. He met Abel on that famous Berlin bridge and recalled that, unlike Powers, who was dressed in a coat and a fur hat given to him by our state security and looked very healthy, Abel looked emaciated and was released from American captivity in a prison robe.

I ask Yury Ivanovich whether he was good in his role as “a cousin.”

- Every intelligence officer should, undoubtedly, develop his acting talents. While studying at the artillery school in Kharkov, I also took part in the drama club, the head of which was Viktor Khokhryakov, who later left for Moscow and became a state-renowned actor. Under his leadership, we staged the play “The Little Muck,” and I must say that the skills I gained then turned out to be very useful to me later.

Once in order to complete the assignment of recruiting a West German intelligence officer, Drozdov had to play the role of ... a member of the neo-Nazi party, a former SS officer.

  - Weren’t you uncomfortable or disgusted?

- In the role of this officer embedded in the neo-Nazi party, I even swore an oath of allegiance to the Fuhrer - laughs Yuri Ivanovich. - That was what the job required, one of the “lives” I invented. There were others. For example, when I recruited a female employee of the West German embassy in Vienna, I used both my artistic and psychological talents. There are no gray and faceless intelligence officers. Even if an officer seems like that, in fact he is simply putting on a “being invisible” disguise.

After Germany, Drozdov was sent to Beijing as a station chief of KGB foreign intelligence. The situation was far from simple - the peak of the Cultural Revolution, and on our border with China, there was a distinct “fog of war” ... On his return, Yury Ivanovich was personally received by Yury Andropov and the meeting lasted four hours.

I can’t help asking:

- Can the Chinese be regarded as reliable partners today? Aren’t we brought together by our “friendship against America”?

- This is something that people don’t talk about, Drozdov replies, but we have been living for almost 400 years without a peace treaty with China. And we’ll hardly ever sign it.

 - Is it true that, while being a KGB station chief in the United States, you received a congratulatory letter from Mao Zedong on your birthday, in which your “personal, invaluable” contribution to the development of Soviet-Chinese relations was noted?

(Laughs.) - This was a prank performed by a wonderful intelligence officer, Genka Serebryakov. When he found out that my birthday was approaching, he concocted a teletype letter with congratulations from Mao Zedong and gave it to me. And for many years, people have been repeating this myth - everything was done so skillfully, so realistically.

Drozdov did not like to talk about the “American period” in his life. He worked in NYC under the cover of Soviet Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN (while in fact heading the KGB station) for more than four years. And it so happened that during this period, there was a big scandal: UN Deputy Secretary General for Political Affairs and for UN Security Council Affairs Arkady Shevchenko refused to return to the USSR from the U.S. He became the first Soviet defector-diplomat of such a high level. But Drozdov was suspicious of Shevchenko’s behavior even before that.

- We informed the foreign intelligence leadership of our suspicions and asked the Soviet Foreign Ministry to recall him to Moscow in order to avoid undesirable consequences.

However, Shevchenko was not recalled, which, according to Drozdov, was explained by the diplomat’s family ties with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrey Gromyko.

After this betrayal, it was very difficult to continue working in the United States, the FBI monitored his every step, and even resorted to light-sport airplanes.

Soon Drozdov returned home. And in November 1979, he was put in charge of the illegal intelligence department of the PGU (First Main Directorate, Directorate “S”), which he headed for 12 years. One of the most difficult challenges of his work was perhaps Afghanistan.

The Assault on [Hafizullah] Amin’s Presidential Palace

I interviewed several people who participated in this operation, and all of them spoke of Drozdov as a brilliant organizer: he was one of the planners of the storming of the presidential palace. According to my interlocutors, he deserved the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. They said that he gave it up in favor of the active participant in the operation, the future first commander of “Vympel,” Evald Grigorievich Kozlov. After all, the number of decorations was limited. For this unique operation, only four Hero’s titles were awarded...

But in addition to the presidential palace, our special forces took control of nine more objects in Kabul. This was preceded by many months of preparation: obtaining information, analyzing the situation, visual reconnaissance of objects, recruiting sources of information in the Tajbeg Palace itself, in the Afghan General Staff.

The veterans of the operation recall that before the assault, after the final briefing was over, there was a heavy silence in the room. The group understood that a battle would begin in a few minutes and that, perhaps, some of them would lose their lives. Drozdov broke the tension with one sentence: “Well, guys, now let’s fool around a bit!”

In general, everyone who knew him speaks of Yury Ivanovich’s human qualities in the same way: he was kind and fair. He visited the wounded and assisted the families of the dead. He lobbied for them to get decorations and awards. In particular, he lobbied for the legendary Gevork Andreyevich Vartanyan who was not even certified as an intelligence officer. Thanks to Drozdov, Vartanyan received the rank of colonel and the title of Hero of the Soviet Union for his work.

I cannot help asking Yury Ivanovich, was the Afghan adventure worth it?

- Yes, it was! The U.S. observation posts were already in northern Afghanistan, near our borders! The Americans conducted joint operations there with the Chinese, with whom we then also had tense relations. Pressured by the Americans, we missed the opportunity to monitor in depth what the Chinese were doing. In general, we had to keep being active in many directions at once.

Almost immediately after the Afghan operation, but long before the rise of international terrorism, Drozdov thought about creating a special unit capable of resisting the terrorist threat and able to perform top-secret and highly complex assignments abroad, near our borders. Yury Ivanovich was able to convince the chairman of the KGB Yury Andropov and, through him, the members of the Central Committee of the Politburo of the need to create a “sophisticated special force.” The group was supposed to be a kind of a mini-KGB, incorporating the skills of various units. The members had to have the skills of operational and illegal intelligence, which means that they had to be able to collect information while “remaining invisible,” or, conversely, to work undercover, carefully thinking over their cover stories, to know languages and be excellent psychologists while, at the same time, having airborne, underwater, mountain-climbing, radio communication and hand-to-hand combat skills and knowing how to use all types of weapons and explosives.

And so, on Drozdov’s initiative, the legendary “Vympel” was founded in 1981. The unit performed the most difficult military and intelligence assignments in Mozambique, Cuba, Vietnam, Angola, Nicaragua, Laos, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Jordan... However, it all ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1993, the unit refused to storm the Parliament building. President [Boris] Yeltsin did not forgive them this: by special decree, he put “Vympel” under the control of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Out of 660 “Vympel” members, only 49 agreed to the transfer.

At that time, Yury Drozdov had already been in retirement for two years.

Epilogue

He suffered greatly at the collapse of the once great country. I was told how hard he fought, how he prepared analytical reports - in particular, that there were nuclear plants on the territory of the USSR, including the Chernobyl nuclear plant, which operated the old-style nuclear reactors with a dangerous flaw in the reactor cooling system. The country’s leadership preferred to trust the estimates of scientists. And then, on April 26, 1986, the nuclear reaction in Chernobyl exploded.

Voluntarily leaving the post of the head of illegal intelligence, a month before the events of August 19, 1991, he proposed to the KGB chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, his plan to save the integrity of the Soviet state. But they did not listen to him again, and he could not do anything by himself.

- Were you not offended that the government ignored the information you obtained? - I ask Drozdov.

 - I never allowed myself to be disappointed by the decisions of the leadership. That is how I was brought up. In general, I think that intelligence officers have the right to speak only about the enemy, and even that, only if allowed by the service. In all other cases, it is better to keep quiet.

Yury Ivanovich not only devoted his life to the interests of Homeland, but also he raised two sons to do the same:

- I didn’t have much time to spend with them because I was very busy, the hero of our story is being modest again, so I turned to the KGB leadership with a request to enroll my eldest son in the Higher School of the KGB. He studied Urdu and went to India for practical training. Later, he became a station chief in Pakistan. As for the younger one, he had his practical training in Afghanistan. He spent four years there during the most dangerous period of the war. He was in charge of the Pul-e-Charkhi prison in Kabul. After the KGB was broken up, he retired and got a job at a factory. And now he works in Bulgaria. Both of my sons are colonels. One of them is a great specialist for intelligence operations using modern technologies.

Finally, I asked him whether it was possible to educate such patriots in today’s Russia.

-My generation never had a desire to appropriate a single penny of government funds or get rich by stealing. We lived by our ideals. I really want to believe that the interests of our Homeland are important and meaningful for today’s generation. It is important to remember that Russia never had friends and probably never will. We are all responsible for our country.

 

 

Rossiyskaya Gazeta: Interview of Mikhail Vasenkov aka Juan Lazaro, Veteran KGB/SVR Illegal Intelligence Officer

On March 29, 2020, the Russian state-owned newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta published an interview with Mikhail Vasenkov (aka Juan Lazaro), a KGB/SVR illegal intelligence officer arrested in the FBI counterintelligence operation codenamed Ghost Stories in June 2010 and later exchanged. The interview was conducted by Nikolay Dolgopolov, a well-known journalist and intelligence history author whom I called “the storyteller of Soviet intelligence history” in my recently published article in Intelligence and National Security. Below is my translation of the interview available only on this blog.

Nikolay Dolgopolov: Interview of Mikhail Vasenkov

Rossiyskaya Gazeta March 29, 2020

Introducing My Interviewee

Mikhail Anatolyevich Vasenkov was born in 1942. He began working as an illegal intelligence officer in the second half of the 1970s. According to his cover story, Juan Jose Lazaro Fuentes was a citizen of one of the countries in Latin America. Then he received the citizenship of Peru and married the local journalist Vicky Pelaez. He also adopted her son from her first marriage. Then the couple had another son, and the whole family moved to New York in the mid-1980s. He worked as a photographer and made extensive connections. Then he taught at a university [Baruch College in NYC]. His work in the field was so successful that he was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union for courage and heroism displayed in the line of duty by a secret decree dated January 12, 1990.

Having been betrayed [to the FBI] by Colonel [Alexander] Poteyev, Vasenkov was arrested at his home in NYC in 2010. Together with a group of our other illegal intelligence officers [arrested at the same time], he was exchanged for American spies arrested in Moscow and taken by plane to Russia.

Clarification

In some publications, Colonel Vasenkov is described as a major general. However, the authorities confirmed to me: Mikhail Vasenkov is a retired colonel.

The Real Latino from Kuntsevo

He is of medium height. Lean. Of athletic build. It was not for nothing that our mutual friend Valery told me that, while studying at the intelligence school, Mikhail was a champion both in long-distance running and in swimming. When he was sent abroad, he became interested in martial arts and attained a great deal of success.

The decades of living in foreign lands did their part. Vasenkov does not look like a Russian boy born in the Moscow district of Kuntsevo. He looks Spanish or Hispanic. In other words, a typical Latino.

He limps. He apologizes right away: doctors forbade him to stand on his feet for any extended period of time: “Let’s sit down. It’ll be okay soon. I will soon get this over with and walk again without limping.”

- Mikhail Anatolyevich, what’s wrong with your leg?

- Nothing. It’s a trifle. I had a surgery and now I have to walk with a crutch. Don’t think that the Americans broke my leg in 2010! They are not stupid. They immediately saw that I was a professional of the old school. The interrogation was relatively correct. They did not try to recruit me.

- But what really happened in 2010?

- We were betrayed. If it were not for that, I would not have been arrested. Nobody knew who I was. Like Kozlov (Alexey Mikhailovich Kozlov, Hero of Russia, was arrested after being betrayed by the traitor [Oleg] Gordievsky and spent two years on death row in South Africa in the 1980s. South Africa and the USSR had no diplomatic relations at the time. - ND), I communicated with no other operative. I worked on my own all the time.

[Vladimir] Kryuchkov sent me. (During that period, Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kryuchkov was the head of the First Main Directorate of the KGB – the Soviet foreign intelligence. - ND) Do you know how it was at that time? They would send officers for a very long time, sometimes forever, for life. And Kryuchkov told me: “Keep in mind that perhaps you will never come back home.” And I knew that. And it seemed that this would be the case with me. Yes, I was not supposed to come back.

I have never seen, or heard of, any of those people arrested in the United States with whom I sat on the court bench. And they didn’t know me - they never saw me. I was the tenth person and completely unknown to them. But the Americans knew who I was.

- How come?

- In 1991, a lot of outsiders infiltrated all areas of our life [in Russia], they infiltrated everything. They pushed, they imposed their agenda, they took up places [in the government]. Some of them are still there. And these outsiders betrayed us.

- Such as [Oleg] Kalugin?

- No, I’m not really talking about people like him. These moles, these traitors were sitting right here [in Moscow]. And, I think, they were in the intelligence service, too. If it hadn’t been for [Yevgeny] Primakov (the first director of the SVR. - ND), our intelligence service would have been destroyed, many wanted to be in charge of it. But Primakov saved it. And yet, some traitors stayed on, too. They betrayed us. One of these people betrayed me. I figured it out in the jail cell. A man came to my cell and ask me to confess that I was a spy. He showed me a file folder with my name on it. And in addition to that, he told me his real name, but said that he did not intend to say anything else. When you are shown your photograph taken in Moscow, everything becomes clear. I didn’t want to speak to that person. It was disgusting. I admitted: yes, that was me. And that was the end of it.

- How did you manage to settle down abroad?

- It took a long time and it would take a long time to describe it. I had great identity papers. My Spanish was good. I lived in Latin America. I was constantly learning something new. Both in my youth and when I became a university professor which was relatively recently. By the way, I taught at a very prestigious school.

- But you were also a photographer?

- Yes, I was a photographer as well. And I was close to the president of the country in which I was based. I traveled around the world. And I was suspected by no one.

- How did you send information to the Center? And how did you recruit?

- Now, that’s something different. Over the years, recruitment became less and less relevant. I knew a lot myself and did not need sources. That was how far I was able to get. Still, that wasn’t the top. I kept moving and climbed even higher. I was well known even beyond Latin America.

- Did your wife assist you?

- I tell you firmly: my wife did not know anything about it. And yet she was accused of [being an accomplice]. They wanted to imprison her. But she didn’t do anything. She is a good journalist and writes articles even at this time which expose all their deals over there. You know, it’s not easy for me to answer your questions.

- I heard that one of your sons is a musician?

- Yes. A great one, he graduated from the Juilliard School. But I am not his real father. That made no difference to me and I adopted him when I got married. He was very young, and I consider him my son. And my younger son is in Moscow and works as an architect.

The Spanish Sadness

Mikhail Anatolyevich speaks Russian with a Spanish accent. It seems as if he thinks in Spanish and then translates it into Russian. From several Spanish synonyms, he chooses one necessary Russian word with some difficulty. Sometimes he switches to English. His French is also not bad.

Sometimes I noticed this loss of our native tongue among his other comrades in this rarest branch of the intelligence profession [i.e. illegal officers]. It does not seem surprising for somebody like Vasenkov who lived outside Russia for decades.

His conversation includes a lot of references to the Spanish classics, which he knows perfectly and constantly quotes. I am not a specialist in Spanish literature, and I told him that right away. He almost seemed offended:

- Why not?

- Well, it so happened.

He has an affinity for philosophy. I noticed this in many people in his unique profession. Probably in one’s isolation that is the only way out: to think. Because thinking will definitely not give you away. According to Vasenkov, the essence of his profession is loyalty to one’s Homeland. It doesn’t matter where you live. Homeland is still the same. It’s yours. And it is for its sake that you chose this kind of life path.

He addresses me in an informal manner - you, Nikolay. He is not being rude. It is easier for him to use informal address because he does not make so many mistakes. It was the same with the American, later decorated as Hero of Russia, Morris Cohen (aka Peter Kroger), whom I also met.

Vasenkov told me: “You wrote well about [Rudolf] Abel, I read it. You did it with a lot of respect. But I didn’t like your book on [Gevork] Vartanyan.” This was so because I wrote in detail about his final days and his death. According to Mikhail Anatolyevich, to discuss such matters in print is to cross the line.

Then we remembered our mutual friend Valera K. He had told me about the early years of his friend Mikhail. They graduated from the intelligence school together. He had told me that Mikhail was an athletic guy and that he was a runner and a swimmer. And when he realized that some other guys were faster than him, he trained so hard and with such a determination that soon nobody could keep up with him, either in cross-country running or in the pool.

 

Ekho Moskvy: Interview of Alexander Bondarenko, Soviet Intelligence Historian (Part 2)

On February 6, 2016, the liberal Russian radio station Ekho Moskvy invited intelligence historian Colonel Alexander Bondarenko to talk about his biography of Pavel Fitin, the WWII Soviet intelligence chief, and the WWII Soviet intelligence operations in general. The interview was conducted by Vladimir Ryzhkov. This is the second part of the interview. Below is my translation available only on this blog.

Intelligence Historian Alexander Bondarenko: Soviet Intelligence During WWII (Part 2)

Ekho Moskvy February 6, 2016

The Part 1 of the interview is available here.

Part 2

V. Ryzhkov - Good evening. Once again hello to the audience of the Ekho Moskvy radio station, I am Vladimir Ryzhkov and the program “The Price of Victory” is on the air. Today we are revealing an absolutely amazing story. Pavel Mikhailovich Fitin, a completely unknown name, unfortunately, the head of Soviet foreign intelligence from 1939 to 1946, a person who made a significant contribution to our Victory. And before we took the news break, we talked about one of the most important topics - whether Stalin knew or not, that on June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany would attack the Soviet Union.

And before the news break, my guest Alexander Bondarenko, a historian, author of a book about Pavel Fitin, the head of Soviet intelligence during the war years, said that in June 1941, on June 17, a report was prepared based on the reports from the Red Orchestra [spy network] from Berlin and also other intelligence reports, and that Fitin brought this report to Stalin. And then what happened?

This was 5 days before the war.

A. Bondarenko - The report was sent earlier with the set of messages from the Berlin station, which clearly stated when the attack would begin, what was being done, how Germany was getting ready, and so on. And then Fitin was summoned ...

V. Ryzhkov - Was he with Stalin by himself or was someone else there?

A. Bondarenko - No, Fitin was summoned together with [Vsevolod] Merkulov, the People’s Commissar for State Security.

V. Ryzhkov - That is, they came in together?

A. Bondarenko - They came in together. Stalin asked for the report on the situation and Fitin did the talking. Merkulov was mostly silent, or completely silent.

V. Ryzhkov - How do we know about this conversation?

A. Bondarenko - First of all, Fitin himself wrote about this conversation in his semi-classified notes. Secondly, others wrote about it somewhat inaccurately based on the words of Fitin. Why somewhat inaccurately - I will say a little bit later. Many memoirs of the period mentioned it.

After Fitin spoke, Stalin took the report which was in a bound folder and asked who the source was. Fitin said that this was a reliable source because he himself was in Germany a year before, and he personally knew the people who were based there. Interestingly, I came to the conclusion that, while in Germany, Fitin came under the surveillance of the Gestapo.

V. Ryzhkov - I don’t even doubt it.

A. Bondarenko - But what could they do? They couldn’t arrest him, couldn’t they?

V. Ryzhkov – They monitored and followed him.

A. Bondarenko – Everything turned out to be fine. And he described the source as very reliable. Stalin replied: this was disinformation. Check it out properly. And he returned the folder to Fitin. And then the myths began.

The first myth is that Stalin wrote an obscenity on this report. First, that this is not a source, but disinformation, and then even worse - send him to hell, pardon me. It is officially believed that this was so, but it seems to me that this was a falsification done in the 1990s, when we were proving that everything Soviet was absolutely bad.

V. Ryzhkov - Is the original of this report preserved?

A. Bondarenko - Yes, the report has survived, it is in the archives, and there is this resolution, but it is clearly falsified. In my book, I asked an elementary question: when could Stalin write this resolution? Before Fitin’s talk? Then, why did he listen? After the talk? Did he say something like - Wait, guys, I’ll write something down for you. It’s really funny. [In my opinion] he simply gave this document back to Fitin.

V. Ryzhkov - Or could it be that he read it, was angry, and wrote this down? Then, still harboring some doubts, he invited Fitin to present his case. Could this be?

A. Bondarenko – Stalin was always in control of himself. Would he write down something like this? Well, there are no other resolutions of Stalin that contain obscenities. Immediately Fitin gave this report to Zoya Ivanovna Rybkina, later the famous writer Zoya Ivanovna Voskresenskaya, saying (already somewhat softening what he heard) that Stalin said that they needed to do more work on it. Zoya Ivanovna writes about this and how Fitin returned upset, but she does not mention any of Stalin’s written statements.

V. Ryzhkov – So, Fitin was convinced that the information was reliable, that is, he had no doubts?

A. Bondarenko – That’s correct. Fitin had no doubts.

V. Ryzhkov - Was he sure that the war would begin?

A. Bondarenko - Vladimir, it is clear that Stalin also had no doubts. But there was general Yelisey Sinitsyn, Fitin’s friend from the Central School [of the NKVD] and from the intelligence service. Fitin told him in July, when Sinitsyn returned from Finland, that Stalin said: check it more carefully. Why did Fitin say this to Sinitsyn? Because to say that Stalin said that this was disinformation when the war had already started was not appropriate. Therefore, he decided to smooth it out.

But, as I understand, there were also some secret agreements between Stalin and Hitler, which we still do not know about. In the same way, we do not know about the agreements that [Rudolf] Hess brought to England. They are still classified. Therefore, we do not know what was really going on. Stalin treated Fitin with great respect.

V. Ryzhkov – But this episode with the report was on Stalin’s mind later when Fitin was fired?

A. Bondarenko - Wait, wait, he hardly remembered, there was no point in saying: well, sorry, my dear ...

V. Ryzhkov - Well, yes.

A. Bondarenko - And, all the same, these (in my opinion) heavily redacted Stalin’s visitors’ logs still revealed a secret. On that very day, only in the evening, Stalin (and this is written down) was again visited by the People’s Commissar Merkulov, one of his deputies, and the head of the Personnel Department of the Ministry of State Security. But this time without Fitin. And here I concluded that they planned to transfer him to some other position. The personnel officer was not a part of Stalin’s chain of command; he had no reason to meet with Stalin.

V. Ryzhkov – Why would that be? Stalin did not believe Fitin?

A. Bondarenko - No, on the contrary. There were secret agreements [with Hitler]. And there was this honest guy who unambiguously reported: there will be a war.

V. Ryzhkov - He did his job.

A. Bondarenko - Yes. Military intelligence was doing the same thing but a bit more delicately. They provided [Stalin] with original documents, all with their own “innocuous” observations: perhaps this is disinformation by the English or the Germans...

V. Ryzhkov – And the foreign intelligence service reported everything as it was.

A. Bondarenko – Yes, they did. Fitin reported everything very directly. And [Stalin] probably said that he was a good guy, but that he did not understand. Find him another position. Because if they wanted to get him arrested, then they did not need the personnel officer at the meeting. And, if they wanted to exile him somewhere, he was also not needed. Stalin could have said to Merkulov: well, send him to some district to be an operative. But what they wanted to do is to find him a good position, to let him gain experience, because he was so young and inexperienced, and to remove him in this way.

V. Ryzhkov – He was only 33 then?

A. Bondarenko - Yes, he was 33 years old. He was born on December 28, 1907, that is, at the very end of the year.

V. Ryzhkov - Ok, let’s move on. He warned Stalin, the agent network was doing a great job, he raised the status of the foreign intelligence service. How about the situation with the Battle of Kursk - I read that it seems like they got the information from the British. We know that the British were already able to decipher the secret German codes, and this was their famous Enigma machine. Here I have a question - it seems to me that the British sometimes distorted the information on purpose, so as not to expose their decryption machine, but they still wanted to let the allies know what was going on. This was something like…

A. Bondarenko – something like a game.

V. Ryzhkov – No, not a game. Here the “game” may not be a right word, because we were allies after all. How were these interactions worked out?

A. Bondarenko - Again, this was definitely a kind of game, because even if we were allies… [for example] if I have an agent, it does not mean that I will pass him on to you.

V. Ryzhkov - Well, yes. But, on the other hand, the British, of course, gave us some information, they leaked.

A. Bondarenko - Naturally.

V. Ryzhkov - Whenever they understood that the victory hung in the balance.

A. Bondarenko - They had to pass on secret information, there was an agreement among the allies.

V. Ryzhkov - Was there really?

A. Bondarenko - Of course.

V. Ryzhkov - And so, Fitin worked with the British and he worked with the Americans, right?

A. Bondarenko - Under Fitin, the contacts between the intelligence services were first established.

V. Ryzhkov – That’s what I wanted to ask. Did they have official contacts?

A. Bondarenko – Yes, Fitin even met with them. I think [William J.] Donovan flew to Moscow, they met in various safe houses. And the Americans especially loved it because they were welcomed in the Russian manner.

V. Ryzhkov - Well, of course - with pancakes ...

A. Bondarenko - … with cognac, caviar and so on.

V. Ryzhkov – As one would expect.

A. Bondarenko― Previously, under Yezhov, for contacts and communication with enemy intelligence services, one could get arrested and shot. It is [under Fitin] that these contacts began.

V. Ryzhkov - How effective was this interaction? Did the British help in the Battle of Kursk?

A. Bondarenko - The “Cambridge Five” helped much more.

V. Ryzhkov - That is, our own agents, after all.

A. Bondarenko - Our agents participated in those decryption efforts. That is, our people knew.

V. Ryzhkov - We recently had another guest on the air, who said that Churchill had guessed that our people knew but he did not really want to interfere with it - after all, we were allies. Have you come across this point of view?

A. Bondarenko – I don’t know, I never spoke to Churchill and he never spoke to me.

V. Ryzhkov - I also haven’t seen him for a long time either [laughter].

A. Bondarenko - Well, yes, the old man died, by the way.

V. Ryzhkov - If anyone did not know.

A. Bondarenko - Yes. And the situation was such that whatever they wanted to give us, they did.

V. Ryzhkov – That’s what I wanted to know.

A. Bondarenko - Yes, yes.

V. Ryzhkov - This was significant help in the period of the Battle of Kursk, as I understand it, right? In 1943.

A. Bondarenko - Again, intelligence services are not limited to just one source of information.

V. Ryzhkov - Naturally.

A. Bondarenko - Therefore, what the “Cambridge Five” sent, those decrypted materials, that was one thing. They sent the performance characteristics of German tanks.

V. Ryzhkov - This is when the new “Tigers” appeared for the first time, right?

A. Bondarenko - Yes. But, at the same time, our military intelligence was also doing a good job, and the Germans made us a wonderful gift - they took the “Tiger,” this heavy think, and sent it to the wooded and swampy regions of the Leningrad front.

V. Ryzhkov – It got stuck.

A. Bondarenko – It got swallowed up by the swamp.

V. Ryzhkov - And we pulled it out.

A. Bondarenko - Naturally. And we processed it as best we could. In addition, the partisans were also doing a great job.

V. Ryzhkov – And here’s my question, Alexander: how were the relations among our various intelligence services organized during the war years? How did you call them - the neighbors - did they help each other out? Did jealousy get in the way? Did the military intelligence help out? Did the information converge to some center, was it processed by Fitin or by Merkulov, or by some else?

A. Bondarenko - The information was exchanged, but there were also some clear boundaries.

V. Ryzhkov – The boundaries which established who was responsible for what?

A. Bondarenko - Yes. Because in this kind of situation, one could easily begin to work at cross-purposes. For instance, those well-known radio espionage “games.” In the end, they were handed over to the SMERSH, which was headed by [Viktor] Abakumov. That is described in detail in my book Military Counterintelligence, 1918-2010. And there I dispute to some extent the words of [Pavel] Sudoplatov, who wrote that Abakumov took over the control of the “games” and that this was not appropriate. No, [I say] it was necessary that only one service be in charge. Well, a couple of radio “games” did remain under the purview of the foreign intelligence service...

V. Ryzhkov - Did they work together on deciding which political objectives disinformation they provided was supposed to achieve?

A. Bondarenko – No, not in terms of political objectives. That was the responsibility of the military leadership. And this made it much easier on the military counterintelligence service [SMERSH] because of the clear chain of command. So, everything was thought out very clearly.

V. Ryzhkov – You mean, everything necessary for the disinformation of the enemy?

A. Bondarenko - Yes. And this information was collected and checked. Military intelligence provided some of it, foreign intelligence some as well, but unfortunately, there were also failures to connect all the pieces, for instance, the failure of the Red Orchestra…

V. Ryzhkov - Did our people actually set them up for failure?

A. Bondarenko - Yes. They lost operative contact with the group. The foreign intelligence service weakened [by the purges] and the inexperience of Fitin led to the fact that at the start of the war we lost all contact with our agents [in Germany]. It was believed that because we have radio transmitters in the Minsk region, everything was going to be fine. And then, a week later, the Germans were in Minsk, the transmitters went dead… After that, the foreign intelligence service tried to communicate with these agents from England, through Scandinavia. That is to say, had Fitin become the head of intelligence several years earlier, I think there would have been no such failures, and the successes and, perhaps, the victory itself, would have come sooner. At first, however, he had to learn a lot and gain trust. But our people kept working. Still, these contacts with the allies [the British] cannot really be said to have been very fruitful, on the one hand. On the other hand, when they ask me who our best intelligence officer was, I honestly say: I don’t know.

V. Ryzhkov – What do you mean by “our”?

A. Bondarenko – I mean, in the Soviet Union.

V. Ryzhkov - Why? Because everyone was so good, or because everyone was so bad? Or because nothing can be known for certain?

A. Bondarenko - Yes, let’s say the person completed his assignment, he had some contacts, he went to some place and did something there, and so on. Then he returned, and maybe was even awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, like [Gevork] Vartanyan – we were lucky that they were declassified, this wonderful couple [Gevork and Goar Vartanyan]. But, generally speaking, the intelligence officer returned and then disappeared. Some letters might still come to his address, but no one would be able to guess that he worked in the foreign intelligence service, that he had important contact abroad…

V. Ryzhkov - Do you mean that this is because the secrecy regime is very strict?

A. Bondarenko - Absolutely. Because otherwise...

V. Ryzhkov - Nobody knows anything. And we are not telling anything we shouldn’t right now, correct? I’m kidding, of course. These things about Fitin… they are no longer secret?

A. Bondarenko (laughter) - I don’t know how Walter Schellenberg will react to this, but as far as I know, the old man died a long time ago.

V. Ryzhkov – A bit earlier, you said a very interesting thing that at the beginning of the war we lost contact with our key intelligence agents in Europe. Here I have a question: did Fitin and Soviet intelligence work with somebody in Berlin during the war? Was there a conditional Shtierlits [the fictional hero of a popular spy TV series], who drove a horch [a German car brand] and wore the uniform of a German colonel. Did we work with Paris occupied by the Germans? Did we have our people in Bucharest, in Budapest and so on? Or, throughout the entire war, we can say that these places were like a black hole, that nothing was coming through? What was really going on?

A. Bondarenko - It is officially known that our only agent in the Gestapo had a codename Breitenbach and his real name was Willy Lehmann. He was exposed and later executed precisely because of the problems in the relations between our two intelligence services. We sent our people to Germany, to Berlin, and we also worked with the British, but all that was not very effective. That is, our agents were working. Volunteers would pop up here and there.

V. Ryzhkov - That is, we had people in Paris, in Bucharest, in Belgrade, even in Warsaw?

A. Bondarenko― Yes, yes.

V. Ryzhkov - They were in those places, right?

A. Bondarenko - Yes. But it’s difficult to say how much they helped. I will repeat what I said before: intelligence is perhaps the only sphere of human activity where they do not boast of their successes. If in other areas of political life, they say: wow, we did this and that, in intelligence, everything is kept secret. That is, things are done quietly, behind the scenes, and that’s it. Nothing to talk about.

Therefore, as one intelligence officer once said to me: look, even if we had someone in the leadership of Hitler’s Reich, we would never admit it, because then it would be necessary to share some of the responsibility for the crimes of the Reich. Therefore, people had their assignments, they completed them, then disappeared or perished or whatever, but we can’t reveal everything, because it could harm our reputation.

V. Ryzhkov - But there is a disadvantage to that. Because, on the one hand, if the intelligence service does not boast of its successes, that may be great and praiseworthy, but on the other hand, it leads to the creation of a heroic myth, a kind of a halo. Because, if we do not know what they really did, we can attribute all kinds of accomplishments to them, which in fact never took place. These are the two sides of the same coin.

A. Bondarenko - Well, that’s how it should be. They should work without attracting attention.

V. Ryzhkov – And they do.

A. Bondarenko – And let others say whatever they want ...

V. Ryzhkov – Ok, then. Here’s another question about Fitin. When I was preparing for this program, I read his biography. It struck me how badly everything turned out for him after the war. He lost one position after another and fell lower and lower in the political and military hierarchy...

A. Bondarenko - Yes.

V. Ryzhkov - Well, why? After all…

A. Bondarenko - Vladimir, that’s not true, that’s a legend.

V. Ryzhkov - Well, look, he was the head of the foreign intelligence service of the Soviet Union. And then he was sent to Sverdlovsk, and then to Kazakhstan, then somewhere else. Why didn’t he become a minister in the government, for instance? Why didn’t he advance?

A. Bondarenko - He became a minister.

V. Ryzhkov - In Kazakhstan?

A. Bondarenko - Yes.

V. Ryzhkov - But not at the level of the Soviet Union.

A. Bondarenko - Sorry, Kazakhstan was the largest republic of the Union [after Russia].

V. Ryzhkov - So, you don’t think that his postwar fate was tragic? Tell us why.

A. Bondarenko - We are very fond of legends. Our history is falsified with great pleasure both from below and from above. Especially from above. And Khrushchev’s point of view that Beria was a scoundrel who hasn’t done anything good prevailed. However, in the Urals - I have flown there three times while working on my book - Beria is remembered very fondly due to his involvement in the atomic project. People there have a very high opinion of him. And when we talk about Beria, let’s also consider who was best organized when the war started. The border guards, the border troops of the NKVD. That is, Beria was not at all such a bad person as some like to claim. But a legend has been created in the Khrushchev period that Beria demoted Fitin because Fitin informed Stalin about the beginning of the war, and that’s what Stalin did not want to hear. But, as I said, first Beria and then Merkulov signed all these documents submitted by Fitin. Another later version, the post-Khrushchev version is that Khrushchev demoted him. But in fact, well, our system, we all know, was good that way [Bondarenko is being sarcastic]. Now, it’s even better. Everything is being decided by the very few and their friends.

V. Ryzhkov – And so…

A. Bondarenko: The real story is that in 1946, the People’s Commissar of State Security Merkulov was replaced by the tough [leader of the SMERSH] Abakumov. Comrade Stalin did that. The Doctors’ plot was “uncovered” and then the plot of the Leningrad party leadership, and so on and on.

V. Ryzhkov - Well, what about Fitin? He was working in foreign intelligence.

A. Bondarenko - But Fitin was a member of Merkulov’s clan. In reality, he was in Beria’s clan. Beria was engaged exclusively in the atomic project, and, moreover, received a lot of assistance from Fitin, which we can talk about later. But Beria was no longer the chief. The chief was Merkulov, and when he was replaced, his entire clan was replaced, too. Abakumov brought his own people. The foreign intelligence service began to drift.

V. Ryzhkov – So, it was not a fall from grace, it was simply the change of the leader who was in charge?

A. Bondarenko – Yes, that’s right. Well, all the time this is described as a fall from grace, but for some reason, I don’t know why, people don’t have enough patience to read the fourth volume of Essays on the History of Foreign Intelligence, written mostly by intelligence officers in the 1990s, of whom I know a few, and republished in 2015. And there are some of Fitin’s notes - they are not all declassified - and they end like this: I was engaged in the atomic project for another 5 years after I left the foreign intelligence service.

V. Ryzhkov - That is, until 1951.

A. Bondarenko - Yes. Here it’s important to take a pause and try to understand what he meant by being engaged and analyze what he did. First, for a short period of time in 1946, he was our deputy representative in Germany. What was Germany at that time? First of all, the uranium mining, the uranium mines, the famous Bismuth Joint Stock Company. After that, he was transferred to Sverdlovsk as the deputy head of the state security department for the Urals.

V. Ryzhkov – Yes, and then to Kazakhstan.

A. Bondarenko – Wait a moment. When I came to the Urals for the first time and was doing the research for my book on Fitin, they gave me some documents about what he was doing there, and when I later said to them that he was also involved in the atomic project, they said “Ok, we’ll look for that, too.” And now they want me to publish the third edition of my book with all the newly uncovered documents on how the atomic project was implemented and Fitin’s role in it.

And after he served as the deputy head of state security in the Urals until 1949, he was then appointed to the position of the People’s Commissar of State Security in Kazakhstan. The second largest Soviet republic.

V. Ryzhkov - And, by the way, that’s the place with all the uranium mines and other rare metals.

A. Bondarenko - And the site for nuclear testing.

V. Ryzhkov - Yes, that’s right, in Semipalatinsk. This is also not a coincidence, right?

A. Bondarenko – Of course not. He was transferred there and was elected a delegate to the 19^th Communist Party Congress. And that was then the highest party authority. In other words, his career was going well. After Stalin’s death, the People’s Commissariat for State Security ceased to exit. But then Beria, who they say hated him, appointed him to what position? The Head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Department for the Sverdlovsk Region. Again, the Urals being the stronghold of the Soviet state, he did a very important work there. But then after the arrest of Beria, he was removed from this office. That is, everything had been going well for him, and he could have gone up even higher. He was only 45 years old and already a lieutenant general. But he was fired without a right to a pension because he had only 15 years of service! So, it was the change of the person in command [from Beria to Khrushchev] that knocked him down ...

V. Ryzhkov - And after that – we only have very little time left - as I understand it, he only worked in the economic sphere.

A. Bondarenko - Then he successfully defended himself from the charge that he was an enemy of the people, and they could not pin it on him. After that, he worked for the Department of Economic Planning, and then he was in charge of the factory run by the Society for the Friendship of the Peoples of the USSR and Foreign Countries. There is also information that he kept his contacts with intelligence officers. Unfortunately, after the book was already published in the book series Lives of Remarkable People and followed by the second edition after only 3 months, which does not happen so often, a lot of new materials came my way. For instance, about his meetings with [Rudolf] Abel, who returned from abroad [after the famous spy exchange], and about the atomic project and much, much more. So, God willing, I may be able to do another edition of the book and include all that.

V. Ryzhkov - Thank you very much. It seems to me that this was a very interesting story about a very interesting person named Pavel Fitin, the head of Soviet intelligence during the World War II. My guest today was Alexander Bondarenko, a historian. You can read about Fitin in his book published in the Lives of Remarkable People series.

And to you, Alexander, I wish you the very best in your upcoming investigations. Please bring out from obscurity more important figures from our history. Thank you very much!

A. Bondarenko - Thank you, I will try.

V. Ryzhkov - Thank you!

A. Bondarenko - Goodbye.