The Mystery of Olga Chekhova

by Antony Beevor

  Lev Knipper’s love for the mountains of the Caucasus had drawn him into a relationship that could have been even more dangerous. At the end of the 1930s, he had begun on an increasingly frequent basis to leave Lyuba and Andrei in Moscow with Aunt Olya in order to spend more time with Marina Garikovna Melikova, a striking young woman, half-Armenian, half-Ukrainian. Her father, Garik Melikov, had been a senior Tsarist prosecutor in Tiflis whom Beria had pardoned after the revolution in return for his cooperation.

  Beria, before he took over the NKVD, had started to create his own network of spies and informers. Mariya Garikovna (as she was always known) became one of his unofficial agents, either through gratitude or obligation. To a certain degree she also became Beria’s protégée. She was a tall, loose-limbed woman of great intelligence, dark good looks and an astonishing elegance for Soviet Russia.

  In 1932, at the age oftwenty-two, she had come to Moscow, where she was given a clerical job with the OGPU. She then attracted the attention of an outstanding foreign service officer, General Nikolai Baldanov, a Buryat from the borders of Siberia and Outer Mongolia. They soon began to live together and she travelled with him on his missions abroad to Paris and even to China.

  Mariya Garikovna was related through her Ukrainian mother to a prominent White émigré, Prince Kochubei, then living in Brussels. As a result, she was associated with Soviet operations against émigrés in the mid-1930s, and proved herself to be a most effective agent. But, in 1937, Baldanov was arrested and executed, another victim of service abroad at a time of paranoid xenophobia. Mariya Garikovna was perhaps fortunate to escape with nothing worse than the confiscation of Baldanov’s apartment and belongings. But with the progressive downfall of Yezhov in the second half of 1938, Beria was able to reinstate her.

  To have foreign connections as a citizen of the Soviet Union was tantamount during the ‘Yezhovschina’ to ’organized treachery in our rear‘. Lev’s great friend Paul Armand, despite his gold star of Hero of the Soviet Union, was arrested not long after his return to Russia, like many veterans of the Spanish Civil War. Armand, however, was unusually fortunate. He was suddenly released, which may well have been Lev’s doing. In any case, Lev’s son, Andrei, remembers Paul Armand turning up at Aunt Olya’s apartment. ’Lyovka, you son of a bitch!‘ he yelled. ’Why aren’t you in jail? All the honest people are.‘

  Soon after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, Lev was recalled to active duty by the NKVD. He was sent to the south-eastern parts of Poland, now renamed ‘the Western Ukraine’ by its new Soviet occupiers. Lev Knipper, according to the son of his subsequent controller, ’became the key figure in unmasking German espionage in these most risky operations‘, for which he was issued with a Walther pistol. He was also responsible for the Bukovina and the region of Bessarabia seized from Romania.

  Lev had gone with a group of Red Army dancers as a cover, but his real mission was to interrogate and filter Germans picked up by the NKVD under General Serov, who was carrying out mass deportations and executions of Poles. Lev was apparently responsible for identifying an Abwehr agent with the codename of Alma. The weasel-faced Serov intended to enjoy life during his appalling repression of the Poles. He apparently acquired, whether by force or not, the famous Polish singer Bandrowska-Turskaya as a mistress.

  Although Stalin did not want to upset his new allies, Soviet intelligence was certain that the Germans had infiltrated many agents in the region to spy out the land. The Stalinist regime was already trapped in the curious imagination-lock of knowing that Hitler intended to attack the Soviet Union after the defeat of France, yet refusing to believe it.

  16. Enemy Aliens

  As the fragile peace in Europe came to a close, the most important of Olga Chekhova’s pre-war movies, Bel Ami, was released. A sophisticated, slightly decadent film based on a Maupassant story, it belonged more to the Weimar era than to the uncompromising age of National Socialism. Once war was declared, however, Babelsberg was mobilized. Movies became more nationalistic and stars were expected to volunteer for their own form of duty - helping to publicize the war effort and entertaining the troops. In a phrase that only a Nazi bureaucrat could have invented, the programme was known as ‘Edification and Cheerfulness in Hard Times’.

  In September 1940, during the Battle of Britain, Olga Chekhova visited a Luftwaffe fighter wing based near the Château de Beauregard in Normandy. There was a parade in her honour with a band, she signed autographs for the men and she was photographed by the yellow nose spinners of Messerschmitt 109 fighter aircraft. In Paris in October, where she was playing at the Theatre des Champs-Elysées, she was shown surrounded by soldiers on the front cover of Das Illustrierte Blatt. She also visited German forces in Brussels and Lille.

  It was in Lille, in a restaurant where she had been invited for a drink by the boring town commandant, that she met the new love of her life. This young Luftwaffe captain was, according to her, ‘tall and sure of himself, but without a trace of arrogance’. She was fascinated by his eyes as he gazed at her from the door and then laughed. He walked up to her and said: ‘I knew that I would meet you.’ They began to talk like old friends. He turned out to be called Jep and was a squadron commander in General Adolf Galland’s fighter group.

  After her dismal marriage to Marcel Robyns, Olga Chekhova, now forty-three, had acquired a taste for much younger and livelier men. Carl Raddatz had been fifteen years younger than her and there was a similar age gap with Jep. But for Olga, her meeting with Jep was clearly a question of fate. However, while her affair with Raddatz had been easy to maintain, with her waterside dacha at Gross Glienecke so close to the Raddatz house, Jep’s posting to northern France meant that the lovers had to rely mainly on letters and the occasional telephone call. He wrote to her about aerial dog-fights over the Channel and southern England, while she entertained him with studio gossip.

  Olga was preparing a new film, Der Fuchs von Glenarvon, a piece of anti-British propaganda set in Ireland. She played Gloria Grandison, an Irish patriot staunchly supporting freedom fighters at a time when the Wehrmacht was shooting them on the spot, along with hostages, in occupied Europe. It was to be followed a year later by Menschen im Sturm, which supposedly justified the German invasion of Yugoslavia on the grounds of a persecuted family of German origin. The fact that there was no German minority in the country to speak of did not of course get in the way of a good nationalistic melodrama. It ended with Olga Chekhova being shot by Yugoslav soldiers during an escape in a horse-drawn carriage towards the German frontier. She dies a martyr, with her last words: ‘Wir fahren in die Heimat’—’We are going home.‘ But how Olga Chekhova would have defined her own homeland at this time is not easy to tell.

  On 13 November 1940, soon after a grey, wet dawn, a train with two luxurious saloon carriages reached Berlin. It pulled into the Anhalter Bahnhof just a few hundred yards south of the Reichschancellery. As well as a guard of honour from the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, Joachim von Ribbentrop and General Wilhelm Keitel stood by the red carpet. The station itself was decorated with flags—the Nazi red banner and swastika paired incongruously with the yellow hammer and sickle on the Soviet red flag.

  The band struck up as the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, stepped down from the carriage on to the platform. Ribbentrop and Keitel gave the Nazi salute. Molotov’s interpreter, Valentin Berezhkov, thought that this must be the first time the Internationale had been played in Berlin since Hitler crushed the German Communists seven and a half years before. ‘For singing that song of the proletariat, people had been thrown into death camps by the Gestapo, and now here in the Anhalter Bahnhof, German generals and high-ranking officials of the Nazi Reich had to stand to attention while the Communist anthem was played.’

  A motorcade of huge, six-wheeled black Mercedes with SS motorcycle outriders swept them northwards to Schloss Bellevue, where they were staying. Berezhkov claims to have seen workers secretly waving red handkerchiefs from the windows of a n
earby factory, but this is more likely to have been the product of an optimistic imagination.

  After a sumptuous breakfast, they were driven back across the centre of Berlin to the Reichschancellery. Berezhkov describes how Molotov and his party were taken through ‘tall bronze-clad doors’ and ’an enfilade of dimly lit rooms and windowless hallways’ lined by sentries who clicked their heels and raised their arms in the Nazi salute. The entry to Hitler’s huge study ‘was invested with the theatricality that only the Nazis were capable of. Two tall blond SS men in black, tightly belted uniforms clicked their heels and threw open the tall, almost ceiling-high doors with a single, well-practised gesture.’ Hitler, wearing his usual mouse-grey tunic, with Iron Cross, was dwarfed by the huge size of his own room.

  German intelligence appears to have been unaware of the real identity of Molotov’s two most important companions. His deputy, Vladimir Dekanozov, a diminutive, balding Georgian associate of Beria, was the first head of the NKVD’s Foreign Intelligence Department to be posted as an ambassador abroad. His appointment to the Berlin embassy was announced during the visit. But Dekanozov, despite all his experience, was to follow Stalin’s wilful blindness about the growing threat from Germany. Over the coming months, he convinced himself, like Stalin, that every warning of Operation Barbarossa was a provocation from British intelligence. It was all part of a plot by Churchill to trick the Soviet Union into war with Germany.

  Molotov’s other chief companion, Vsevolod Nikolayevich Merkulov, was even less of a diplomat. It emerged many years later that he was responsible, on Beria’s orders, for the massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn forest. This visit was Merkulov’s very convenient cover ‘to assess personally the operational situation in Germany’. The purges had caused chaos in the Foreign Intelligence Department, and, to make things worse, Stalin had imposed restrictions on spying in Germany to avoid antagonizing Hitler any further. The only worthwhile agent networks were linked to Soviet military intelligence, the GRU. Just about the only agent the NKVD had on its files in Berlin was Olga Chekhova, even though she was just a ‘sleeper’. The purge of foreign intelligence officers during the Great Terror had proved disastrous.

  That day’s meeting with Hitler was extremely frustrating, if not alarming, for the Soviet delegation. Hitler wanted to talk about his imminent victory over Britain and his plans for the dismemberment of its empire. The implication was that he was prepared to share the spoils with the Soviet Union. Despite Molotov returning again and again to the main Soviet concern, the increase of German troops in Finland and Romania, Hitler refused to provide satisfactory answers. He even tried to claim that his forces in Finland were on their way to Norway, which seemed rather a roundabout route. While Hitler talked, Ribbentrop sat with his arms folded, staring at him. The Nazi foreign minister was nothing but a vain and empty poseur. ‘Occasionally,’ noted Berezhkov, ‘he would put both his hands on the table and tap it lightly with his fingers, and, after looking round the table at each of those present in a manner that gave none of his thoughts away, would resume his former position.’

  That evening, Molotov held a reception for his Nazi hosts at the massive Soviet embassy on Unter den Linden. In the marble hall, a buffet for 500 people had been prepared on tables covered in white cloths, with displays of carnations and antique silver confiscated after the revolution. Hitler did not attend, leaving this duty to other Nazi leaders, including Ribbentrop, Rudolf Hess and Reichsmarshal Goring, who appeared in the sky-blue and silver uniform which he had designed himself. The Soviet officials were fascinated by his huge rings, and the stories they had heard of him dressing in a Roman toga and sandals studded with diamonds when relaxing at home.

  Photographers and newsreel cameras recorded the arrival of the guests and their reception by Molotov. At some stage, Olga Chekhova was drawn aside, perhaps by a junior member of the embassy staff, to be introduced to Merkulov. This was not dangerous, even if a Gestapo agent had been watching. In German eyes, it would have been perfectly normal for a Russian to want to meet a member of the Chekhov family. And it presumably became much easier for them to talk undisturbed, since just after glasses were raised for the first toast, air-raid sirens warned of another bombing raid by the Royal Air Force.

  According to Berezhkov, the Nazi leaders made straight for the door to be driven to their air-raid shelters round the corner in the Wilhelm Strasse. The Soviet embassy had its own torture chamber for interrogating suspect members of the staff and the Soviet community in Berlin, yet it lacked an air-raid shelter, even though Britain and Germany had been at war for over a year. It was almost as if Stalinist conspiracy theories did not allow them to believe that the perfidious British were dropping real bombs.

  Although the idea ‘was not to use [Olga Chekhova] as a rank and file informer’, she certainly appeared to be in a good position to assist the two main priorities for Soviet intelligence. The first was Stalin’s insistence that they must discover ‘Hitler’s source of strength’ within his own country. How had he managed to achieve such a following and such power? The other, as already mentioned, was to identify influential people in Germany who opposed the idea of an attack on the Soviet Union. Certain members of the old school, such as the German ambassador in Moscow, Count von der Schulenberg, strongly believed in Bismarck’s dictum that Germany should never attack Russia. It was hoped that Olga Chekhova, like Prince Janusz Radziwill, could help in this way. What they could have achieved in practical terms is hard to imagine, and in any case Soviet intelligence had almost certainly over-estimated the effectiveness of Olga Chekhova’s contacts, probably as a result of seeing the photograph of her seated next to Hitler. Rumours had circulated in limited circles in Moscow that she virtually acted as Hitler’s hostess on occasion.

  For Olga Chekhova at least, the meeting with Merkulov offered reassurance that her family was safe in the Soviet Union. It is said that Merkulov almost certainly brought a message from Lev to reassure her that her family was protected.

  Olga Chekhova returned to France the following month to see Jep again. In Paris on 23 December, she received a large Christmas parcel from Hitler, passed on to her via the German embassy there. It contained a card showing the Führer’s portrait and signed by him with a dedication, together with cakes, chocolate, nuts and gingerbread, as if she were a soldier at the front. As she was about to return to Germany and hoped to smuggle large supplies of expensive scent and other presents back, she threw out all the little delicacies and refilled the package with her forbidden luxuries. At the frontier, the customs officer and frontier guard insisted on searching the large, heavy package. But when they came across Hitler’s Christmas card, with the handwritten dedication, ‘Frau Olga Tschechowa in sincere admiration and veneration, Adolf Hitler’, they leaped to attention with their right arms thrust out in the Nazi salute and cried, ‘Heil Hitler!’

  For the Knippers left in Moscow, this was a time of great anxiety. If war broke out with Germany while the other half of the family in Berlin was associating with the Nazi elite, they would be in a very dangerous position. By the time the rumours of Olga in Berlin reached her Uncle Vladimir, the story went that Hitler had actually introduced her to Molotov as his hostess. Soon after, a small truck with an antenna revolving on top was spotted driving slowly along Gogolevsky bulvar. The Knippers immediately thought that it was spying on them.

  ‘We’ve got to look after ourselves,’ Vladimir Knipper explained, more to himself than to his son, Vova. ‘They were sweet girls [Olga and Ada], but we had to stop corresponding. It’s crazy, but that’s what one has to do nowadays.’

  Only Lev seemed unaffected by these fears. If anything, he seems to have rediscovered his confidence on his return from the mission in Poland in the spring of 1941. Much of this may of course have been due to his relationship with Mariya Garikovna, whose extrovert nature complemented his character and if anything encouraged him to relax.

  Sources disagree on when they met. Some people do not think that the
ir relationship began until 1941. Former Lieutenant Colonel of State Security Shchors, who was later the liaison officer between Lev and General Kobulov, even believes that Mariya Garikovna was selected as Lev’s fellow agent and that they were ordered to marry. This was apparently a common practice at the time and few objected. ‘Well,’ said Shchors, ‘I have heard about a man who, on a similar occasion, demanded a medical certificate proving that his bride was a virgin. But usually everything was all right.’ Shchors himself never set eyes on his wife before she turned up at his apartment with a new passport in the name of Natalya Shchors. Now they have been together for sixty years. So he does not imagine that Lev would have objected.

  Vova Knipper, then just about to finish high school, remembered the telephone ringing in their apartment. He answered it and recognized Lev’s voice.

  ‘Who’s that? Is that young Knipper? Is your father at home?’

  Half an hour later Lev appeared. Vova admired his much older first cousin enormously. ‘I tried to learn to walk like he did with springy steps like tennis masters should,’ he wrote later. ‘He had played for the main Red Army team and was champion in the Crimea, but Lyova’s chief passion was for mountains. At this time he was an instructor for the Red Army in mountain warfare.’

  Vova was at a very impressionable age, as he admitted. He had naively refused to believe that prostitutes existed under Soviet society, so schoolfriends dragged him off to watch them hanging around the square in front of the Bolshoi Theatre, just a few hundred yards from the Kremlin. But he was not blinded by his hero-worship for Lev. He sensed that there was something deeply unsettling about him.