by Max Hastings
The Soviet intelligence services were a strange combination of brutish incompetence, exemplified by their 1939–42 mismanagement of the Red Orchestra in Berlin, contrasted with superb sophistication, of which Operation ‘Monastery’ was perhaps the masterstroke. Only in Stalin’s dreadful world could 70,000 lives have been sacrificed, without sentiment or scruple, to serve the higher purposes of the state. The betrayal of ‘Mars’ to the Germans may help to explain why, until the last years of the twentieth century, the Rzhev battle received so little attention in Soviet histories. Alexander Demyanov’s double career continued until the end of the war – later Soviet deception operations through Agent ‘Max’ will be described below. He received the Order of the Red Banner from the NKVD for his services – and the Iron Cross from Reinhard Gehlen. His wife and father-in-law also received medals, in appreciation of their supporting roles in the web of deceit woven around the family.
It should not be supposed, however, that the triumphant management of Demyanov sufficed to win bouquets all round in Moscow. Viktor Ilyin, his personal handler in the Lubyanka, suffered a dreadful fate in one of the endemic power struggles within Soviet intelligence. It suited Stalin to sustain Viktor Abakumov as a counterweight and rival to Beria. In 1943, he made Abakumov head of SMERSh, charged with the detection and liquidation of traitors, and deputy to himself as minister of defence. In an early exercise of power in this role, Abakumov trumped up charges against Ilyin, director of the NKVD’s Secret Political Department. Ilyin had run ‘Heine’ for five years, and was regarded by the likes of Pavel Sudoplatov as one of the few honest men in the upper reaches of Soviet intelligence. He was a friend of Maj. Gen. Boris Teplinsky, designated to become chief of the headquarters department of the Red Air Force. Abakumov denounced Teplinsky as an enemy of the people, and asserted that Ilyin had conspired to prevent his exposure. Stalin authorised the arrest of both men. Abakumov personally conducted Teplinsky’s interrogation, breaking two of his front teeth on the first night. Battered into a wreck, the wretched man confessed that he had told Ilyin years before of his sympathy for men executed in the Purges, and that Ilyin had coached him about how to escape exposure.
When the general was confronted with Ilyin in the basement of the Lubyanka and repeated his farrago of nonsense, the NKVD man slapped him and told him to behave like a man. Ilyin resolutely refused to confess to anything. Defiance did not save him, however. He was held in solitary confinement, repeatedly interrogated and beaten for four years, between 1943 and 1947. Through it all he retained a gallows humour, once demanding of one of his torturers the nature of the ribbon on his chest. When the man answered ‘the Order of Lenin’, Ilyin said that he was glad his own case was deemed so important. Even when the interrogations were abandoned in 1947 he was held in jail for a further five years, until – in the demented fashion of higher Soviet affairs – he was suddenly brought forth to testify against Abakumov, now himself disgraced and imprisoned. Teplinsky remained a prisoner until 1955.
Pavel Sudoplatov is too modest to mention several Soviet deception operations that failed to fool the Germans – for instance, when the Red Army launched attacks in the Donbas in July 1943, and in the Chernyov–Pripyat region during August and September. Poor Russian radio security enabled German eavesdroppers correctly to predict the Soviet axis of attack. In general, however, the Stavka’s strategic deceptions in the second half of the war were notably successful. A second major operation, ‘Couriers’, also required Stalin’s endorsement, to protect its participants from firing squads: no man dared create even a fictional anti-Soviet movement without his personal authority.
Fifty-four-year-old Bishop Vasily Ratmirov of the Russian Orthodox Church worked in Kalinin under the control of the NKVD’s Zoya Rybkina when it was occupied by the Germans. Having thus established his patriotic Soviet credentials, Moscow Centre turned to him to provide cover for ‘Couriers’. As the Germans were pushed westwards in 1943, the bishop was installed in Samara, in the Volga region. He dispatched two clerical novices to Pskov monastery, south-west of Leningrad, in German-controlled territory, supposedly bearing information for its chief, who was collaborating with the enemy. These men were in reality NKVD agents, one of them, Vasily Ivanov, trained by Emma Sudoplatov. The mission’s planning was not without difficulties. The bishop asked for an assurance that the men would not ‘commit the sacrilege of bloodshed in God’s sanctuary’. In the course of training the agents to pass as priests, he lost patience with a coarse, brash ex-Komsomol wireless-operator who mocked the sacrament, saying, ‘Oh Father, butter the pancakes in heaven. Bring the pancakes to the table!’ This man was replaced by twenty-two-year-old Sergeant Ivan Kulikov, who was baffled to be quizzed in advance by an NKVD officer about his own history of church attendance, and only accepted when he displayed an appropriate respect for the vestments he was required to wear.
They set forth in August, first for Kalinin and thereafter for Pskov, appropriately heavily bearded, supposedly as representatives of a Church-based anti-Soviet Resistance group, and presented themselves to the Germans in this role. The Abwehr provided them with wireless-operators, Soviet PoWs, who proved readily convinced in private conversation with the two ‘novices’ that it was in their best interests to follow Centre’s orders, rather than Canaris’s. Thereafter, the Germans complacently supposed that they were in regular communication with a clerical network far behind the Red Army’s lines, which was in reality controlled by the NKVD. When the Russians at last overran their location, Bishop Ratmirov and his two novices were denounced by local people as German collaborators; they were threatened with execution by SMERSh until the NKVD intervened, to garland them as heroes.
One consequence of the mission’s success was to persuade Stalin that the Orthodox Church was loyal; he amazed his subordinates when he rewarded the priesthood by allowing its members once more to elect a patriarch in 1943, a ceremony attended by Pavel and Emma Sudoplatov. After the war, Ratmirov became an archbishop and was awarded a gold watch and a medal in recognition of his contribution. Ivan Kulikov, promoted to captain, married a girl he had met in his congregation in Kalinin.
Beyond ‘Monastery’ and ‘Couriers’, Sudoplatov testifies that the Russians ran a further forty wartime radio deception operations, which were controlled by SMERSh rather than the NKVD. Russian wireless security, and tactical penetration of German communications, were improved dramatically following the capture of Paulus’s Sixth Army headquarters at Stalingrad on 2 February 1943, despite its staff’s attempts to destroy secret documents and cipher material. Maskirovka achieved its greatest triumph in the summer of 1944, when the Russians successfully persuaded the Wehrmacht to expect their main assault in south-east Poland rather than Belorussia, then having smashed three German armies switched axis to Poland in the autumn. Though Reinhard Gehlen kept his job as Germany’s Eastern chief of intelligence until the last days of the war, the modern evidence suggests that he was bear-led by the Stavka in Moscow even more effectively than were OKW’s Western intelligence officers by the British and Americans in 1944. Whatever the limitations of Soviet wartime intelligence, its deception operations were masterpieces of conspiracy.
9
The Orchestra’s Last Concert
From the autumn of 1941, all the Russians’ European spy networks operated on the brink of a precipice, rendered mortally vulnerable by the exposure of the identities of the main players in both the NKVD’s ‘Lucy’ Ring and the Red Orchestra to Leopold Trepper and Anatoli Gourevitch, together with the reckless conduct of Moscow Centre and of the German dissidents themselves. Too many people all over Europe now knew too many names, so that a single initial arrest precipitated a vast and terrible unravelling. The Orchestra’s doom was sealed by the Germans’ capture through direction-finding of the wireless-operator Mikhail Makarov – ‘Carlos Alamo’ or ‘Chemnitz’ – in the Rue des Atrebates, Brussels, in the early hours of 13 December 1941.
On the previous day Trepper made a sudden, unheral
ded reappearance in Brussels. Relations between himself and Gourevitch, already shadowed by mutual suspicion and jealousy, thereafter deteriorated rapidly. Two days after ‘Otto’s’ arrival, Gourevitch was at Simexco’s offices, dealing with the astonishingly profitable business issues entwined with its chiefs’ espionage activities, when he was summoned by phone to an urgent meeting with Trepper at his apartment. When he arrived there, he found his visitor in a state of alarm. Trepper said that he had just been questioned by the Germans, and proposed to return to France by the first train. Gourevitch was appalled that the chief should have called at his home when already under suspicion. He ran a mental eye over the entire network for weak links and fixed his attention on ‘Chemnitz’, who embraced louche tastes and an extravagant lifestyle, though Gourevitch himself scarcely practised austerity. The wireless-operator knew Margaret Barcza, Gourevitch’s lover, and many of the group’s other contacts. Suddenly the doorbell rang, and the Russian was disconcerted to open it to a Belgian acquaintance who worked for the German Kommandatur. This man invited himself in, and asked for a loan. Gourevitch handed over some cash to get rid of him, then accompanied Trepper to the station to catch a Paris train. Gourevitch now told Barcza that Brussels was becoming too warm for comfort. He himself proposed to decamp to France, and he urged her to try to reach her parents, refugees in the United States. She promptly burst into tears and insisted on accompanying him wherever he went, with her young son René. Gourevitch acceded, though he knew that Centre was bound to be enraged by their relationship, which was no less dangerous to his duties than Trepper’s liaison with Georgie de Winter.
They quit their flat immediately, and took temporary shelter in a big house occupied by the ‘front’ director of Simexco, which he rented from the nephew of Belgium’s foreign minister. Gourevitch gave his servants several months’ wages – the young GRU agent had certainly risen in the world – to support the pretence that he would be coming back. He occupied the next few days ‘putting to sleep’ the agents of his network. Then he boarded a train to Paris, followed two days later by Margaret and René. They took up quarters in a house near the Bois de Boulogne which Gourevitch had used on previous visits to the French capital. As soon as he met Trepper, it was ‘le Grand Chef’s’ turn to vent violent dismay. Gourevitch’s arrival, he said, could compromise his French cover company, as well as the intelligence network. He insisted that his deputy should leave, fast. They decided he should head for Marseilles in unoccupied Vichy France, where Simex had a branch office. Margaret and René Barcza left first, travelling south without difficulty, using the Trepper group’s contacts and taking up lodgings in Marseilles with a Czech family.
Meanwhile, Gourevitch met Hersch and Myra Sokol, two young Polish communists who acted as Trepper’s Paris wireless-operators. The fugitive afterwards claimed that he used the Sokols to send a message to Centre to report the threatened collapse of his network, and his own flight from Brussels. But his warnings, he said, were transmitted at a moment in December when the GRU had evacuated its headquarters in the face of the German assault on Moscow, and lacked his code. Thus his employers learned of the Brussels crisis only much later, in February 1942, a delay which, he believed, contributed to his 1945 indictment for treason. Gourevitch reached Marseilles in January 1942, after a journey without incident. He remained there in not uncomfortable hiding for the ensuing ten months, making no pretence of conducting any espionage, and chiefly amusing himself with Margaret. Thanks to Centre’s remittances and Simexco’s handsome profits, they had ample money. This idyll – as Margaret afterwards recalled it – continued until 9 November; on that day, Gourevitch, his lover and an impressive cache of cigars and silk stockings were abruptly seized in their flat by French police. The two prisoners were handed over to the Germans, then sweeping across the Vichy zone to complete their occupation of France. The Germans had at last broken into the Red Orchestra, and each successive revelation from a captured agent produced reverberations throughout Europe.
Moscow’s contribution to what became a dreadful débâcle dated back to the spring of 1942, when the fortunes of the NKVD’s Alexander Korotkov were once more ascendant within the Lubyanka. He took a gamble. Given the difficulties and upsets in Belgium and France, he sought to re-establish direct contact between Berlin and Centre, by providing the Orchestra with new codes and crystals, and thereafter with more powerful transmitters. Zoya Rybkina describes in her memoirs how she and her husband ‘Kin’, who now ran the NKVD station in Stockholm, were instructed to identify a courier who could make a delivery to Schulze-Boysen in Berlin. After considerable difficulties, they found a Swedish businessman who was persuaded to do the job. She sewed the codes and instructions into a tie, and put the crystals into a cufflink box, to be left in a cemetery for the Luftwaffe officer. The Swede returned from his next visit to Germany to confess failure: he had been too terrified to fulfil the mission, he said – everyone on the Berlin plane seemed to be staring at his tie. After a second trip the following week, however, he reported success; he claimed – truthfully or otherwise – that he had left the codes and crystals at the designated ‘dead drop’.
Meanwhile Korotkov in Moscow selected two agents to travel to Germany, carrying new wireless sets to the Rote Kapelle, and with further orders to contact ‘Breitenbach’, the Gestapo officer whose existence was unknown to the Orchestra. The messengers were veteran German communists, Albert Hessler and Robert Bart, both in their early thirties. Hessler had commanded a company of the International Brigade in Spain, where he was badly wounded. He had since married a Russian girl, and after volunteering for the Red Army was trained as a wireless-operator. Bart was a printer by trade, who served a spell in Plötzensee jail during the early Nazi years before being conscripted into the Wehrmacht, with which he earned an Iron Cross during the 1940 French campaign. Soon after being posted to the Eastern Front, he defected to the Russians.
Both men took a fantastic risk by agreeing now to travel to Berlin, allegedly willingly, though this deserves to be doubted. They were provided with false identities, respectively as a lieutenant and sergeant-major on leave, then dispatched aboard a C-47 of No. 1 Long-Range Aviation Division from Podlipki near Moscow, and parachuted to a partisan reception committee between Bryansk and Gomel in occupied Belorussia during the night of 5 August 1942. Guides led them to a rail station from which, after a week-long journey via Bialystok, Warsaw and Poznan, they reached Berlin with their two radio sets, in itself a considerable achievement.
They went initially to the apartment of a Rote Kapelle contact, Kurt Schumacher, who received them, then separated the visitors to take refuge in the homes of sympathisers. Hessler initially transmitted from the studio of an exotic dancer named Oda Schotmüller, afterwards from the apartment of Countess Erika von Brokdorf. In mid-August he told Moscow: ‘everything is going well. The group has expanded considerably thanks to the strength of the anti-fascist movement, and is working actively. I will send additional information from Harnack and Schulze-Boysen when I receive an acknowledgement of this message. Am presently busy finding lodgings.’ From an early stage, both NKVD men appear to have been under Gestapo surveillance. Leopold Trepper’s Brussels wireless-operator, a German named Johann Wenzel, had been seized on 30 June 1942, again after his transmissions were tracked by direction-finders. Though the truth will never be conclusively established about who gave away whom and when, under interrogation both Makarov and Wenzel seem to have told all they knew, which was a great deal. Rippling waves of arrests followed across Europe. The Gestapo formed a special Sonderkommando, headed by Haupsturmführer Horst Kopkow, to investigate the Soviet ring. Its officers were appalled by what they discovered: penetration of some of the highest headquarters of the Third Reich; systematic betrayal of Germany by hundreds of Germans. In August, the Gestapo net began to close on Harnack and Schulze-Boysen and their groups. The NKVD’s Albert Hessler was arrested in mid-September, along with those who had sheltered him. He made his last apparently genu
ine transmission on 3 September; although he messaged again on the 21st, by then he was almost certainly acting under Gestapo control.
Moscow was slow to realise what had happened. Centre’s first detailed account of the disaster was delayed until April 1943, and then arrived by a tortuous route: Wolfgang Havemann, a nephew of Harnack, was interrogated by the Gestapo, then released for lack of evidence. He was sent to the Eastern Front, where at the first opportunity he gave himself up to the Red Army. He confirmed to the NKVD the total destruction of the Berlin ring, accompanied by forty-eight executions. Among those seized were a married couple, Hans and Hilda Coppi. He, a radio-operator, was killed almost immediately. She, however, heavily pregnant, was kept alive until her son had been born and attained the age of eight months. She was then decapitated in August 1943, and her child handed over to his grandparents, with whom he survived to pursue a career as a historian of German Resistance.