The Sword and the Shield

by Christopher Andrew

  Mitrokhin owed his discovery of the true story of the catacombs to a colleague in the FCD Illegals Directorate S, who borrowed the multi-volume Odessa file and, when he returned it, told Mitrokhin he might find it interesting. The file began by recording the despatch of Molodtsov’s detachment of six NKVD officers to Odessa shortly before it fell to the Germans in October 1941, with orders to establish an underground residency which would organize reconnaissance, sabotage and special operations behind the German lines. In Odessa they were joined by thirteen members of the local NKVD Special Department, commanded by Lieutenant V. A. Kuznetsov. According to the official version of events, the two groups held a Party/Komsomol meeting on the evening of October 15 immediately before going down into the catacombs to set up their base. What actually took place, according to the KGB file, was a raucous dinner party and heavy drinking which ended in a fight between the Moscow and Odessa NKVD detachments. The next day the two groups entered the catacombs still at daggers drawn, with Molodtsov and Kuznetsov each claiming overall command. Over the next nine months Muscovites and Odessans combined operations against the Germans and Romanians with internecine warfare among themselves.45

  Molodtsov’s end may well have been genuinely heroic. According to the official Soviet version, he was captured by the enemy in July 1942 but refused to beg for his life, courageously telling his captors, “We are in our own country and will not ask the enemy for mercy.”46 The rest of the history of the Odessa catacombs, however, was an NKVD horror story. After Molodtsov’s execution, Kuznetsov disarmed his detachment and put them under guard inside the catacombs. All but one, N. F. Abramov, were executed on Kuznetsov’s orders on charges of plotting against him. As conditions in the catacombs deteriorated, the Odessans then proceeded to fall out among themselves. The dwindling food supply became moldy; and, with their kerosene almost exhausted, the detachment was forced to live in semidarkness. On August 28 Kuznetsov shot one of his men, Molochny, for the theft of a piece of bread. On September 27 two others, Polschikov and Kovalchuk, were executed for stealing food and “lack of sexual discipline.” Fearing that he might be shot next, Abramov killed Kuznetsov a month later. In his notebook, later discovered in the catacombs and preserved in the KGB Odessa file, Abramov wrote:

  The former head of the Third Special Department of the Odessa district of the NKVD, State Security Lieutenant V. A. Kuznetsov, was shot by me with two bullets in the temple in the underground “Mirror Factory” [the base in the catacombs] on October 21, 1942.

  By this time, following several other deaths at the hands of the enemy, only three NKVD officers remained alive in the catacombs: Abramov, Glushchenko and Litvinov. Abramov and Glushchenko together killed Litvinov, then began to eye each other suspiciously in the semi-darkness.

  Glushchenko wrote in his diary that Abramov wanted to surrender: “We are beaten. There is no victory to wait for. He told me not to be frightened of committing treason or being shot as he has friends in German intelligence.” On February 18, 1943, apparently suffering from hallucinations, Glushchenko wrote, “[Abramov] was bending over, attending to his papers. I took my pistol from my belt and shot him in the back of the head.” Over the next few months Glushchenko spent much of his time outside the catacombs in his wife’s Odessa flat, finally abandoning the underground base on November 10, 1943. After the liberation of Odessa by the Red Army in April 1945 Glushchenko returned with members of the Ukrainian NKVD to collect equipment and compromising papers from the catacombs, but was fatally wounded when a grenade he picked up exploded in his hands.47

  For almost twenty years, the Centre believed that no survivor of the Odessa catacombs remained to cast doubt on the heroic myth it had constructed. In 1963, however, the KGB was disconcerted to discover that Abramov had not been killed by Glushchenko after all, but had escaped and was living in France. His father, who may also have known the true story of the Odessa catacombs, was reported to have emigrated to the United States. Abramov’s supposed widow, Nina Abramova, who had been working in the KGB First Chief Directorate, was quietly transferred to another job. The myth of the NKVD heroes of the Odessa catacombs was left undisturbed.48

  According to statistics in KGB files, the NKVD ran a total of 2,222 “operational combat groups” behind enemy lines during the Great Patriotic War.49 Mitrokhin found no realistic appraisal, however, of the effectiveness of partisan warfare. Contrary to the claims of post-war Soviet hagiographers, the combat groups seem only rarely to have tied down German forces larger than themselves.50 Because about half of all partisans were NKVD personnel or Party officials, they were frequently regarded with acute suspicion by the peasant population on whom they depended for local support. The virtual collapse of partisan warfare in the western Ukraine, for example, was due largely to the hostility of the inhabitants to the Party and the NKVD. Though partisan warfare became more effective after Stalingrad, there were important areas—notably Crimea and the steppes—where it never became a significant factor in the fighting on the eastern front.51

  OUTSIDE EUROPE, THE NKVD’s most successful attacks on German targets were mounted by an illegal residency in Argentina,52 headed by Iosif Romualdovich Grigulevich (codenamed ARTUR), a veteran both of sabotage operations in the Spanish Civil War and of the first attempt to assassinate Trotsky in Mexico City.53 In September 1941 an official Argentinian inquiry reached the hysterical conclusion, endorsed by the Chamber of Deputies but rejected by the government, that the German ambassador was the head of over half a million Nazi stormtroopers operating under cover in Latin America.54 During the months after Pearl Harbor, Argentina and Chile were the only Latin American states not to break off diplomatic relations with Germany and Japan. The rumors of Nazi plots among Argentina’s quarter of a million German speakers, pro-German sympathies in its officer corps, and the presence of an Argentinian military purchasing mission in Berlin until 1944, helped to persuade the Centre that Argentina was a major Nazi base. Though this belief was greatly exaggerated, it was shared by OSS, the US wartime foreign intelligence agency, which reported that Dr. Ramón Castillo, president of Argentina from 1941 to 1943, was in the pay of Hitler.55 Such reports, passed on to the Centre by its agents in OSS and the State Department,56 doubtless reinforced Moscow’s suspicions of Nazi plots in Argentina.

  After the outbreak of war the German merchant navy was unable to run the gauntlet of the Royal Navy and enter Argentinian ports. Grigulevich’s residency, however, reported in 1941 that copper, saltpetre, cotton and other strategic raw materials were being exported from Argentina in neutral vessels to Spain, whence they were being secretly transported overland through France to Germany. To disrupt this export trade, Grigulevich recruited a sabotage team of eight Communist dockyard workers and seamen, headed by a Polish immigrant, Feliks Klementyevich Verzhbitsky (codenamed BESSER), who in December 1941 obtained a job as a blacksmith in the port of Buenos Aires. The first major exploit of Verzhbitsky’s group was to burn down the German bookshop in Buenos Aires, which Grigulevich regarded as the main center of Nazi propaganda. Thereafter it concentrated on planting delayed-action incendiary devices on ships and in warehouses containing goods bound for Germany.57 Grigulevich also ran smaller sabotage and intelligence networks in Chile and Uruguay. The approximately seventy agents in his far-flung illegal residency were to remain the basis of Soviet intelligence operations in Argentina, Uruguay and—to a lesser extent—Chile during the early years of the Cold War as well as the Second World War.58

  Between the beginning of 1942 and the summer of 1944, according to statistics in KGB files, over 150 successful incendiary attacks were mounted by Grigulevich’s agents against German cargoes, and an unspecified number of Spanish, Portuguese and Swedish vessels sunk. One, probably exaggerated, assessment by the Centre claims that the attacks succeeded early in 1944 in halting German exports from Buenos Aires.59 A more serious problem for Germany than Soviet sabotage, however, was the change of government in Argentina. A military coup in the summer of 1943, follo
wed by the uncovering of a Nazi espionage network, led Argentina to sever diplomatic relations with Germany in January 1944.60

  For most of the war communications between Grigulevich’s residency and the Centre were slow and spasmodic, depending on occasional couriers between Buenos Aires and the New York residency.61 In the summer of 1944, shortly after the NKGB had established a legal residency in Uruguay, Grigulevich was summoned to Montevideo to give a detailed report on his intelligence operations, finances and agent networks since the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. The Centre had become alarmed at the scale of his incendiary attacks on neutral shipping and feared that his cover might be blown. In September it ordered him to suspend sabotage operations and limit himself to intelligence collection in Argentina, Brazil and Chile.62 Once instructed to stop work by Grigulevich, Verzhbitsky began making grenades for the underground Argentinian Communist Party but was seriously injured in October by an explosion in his workshop which cost him his left arm and the sight in one eye. Grigulevich reported that he behaved with great bravery during police investigation, sticking to a prepared cover story that a personal enemy had planted explosives on him, hidden in a packet of dried milk. In 1945 Verzhbitsky was smuggled out of prison and exfiltrated by the Argentinian Communist Party across the border into Uruguay, where he lived on a Party pension.63

  Remarkable though they were, the sabotage operations run from Buenos Aires had no perceptible influence on the course of the Great Patriotic War. Once the alarmism of the summer of 1944 had died down, however, they greatly enhanced Grigulevich’s reputation in the Centre as saboteur and assassin. His successes in wartime Argentina help to explain his later selection for the most important assassination mission of the Cold War.64 By contrast, Grigulevich’s chief saboteur, Verzhbitsky, was regarded as an embarrassment because of his disablement. His request to emigrate to the Soviet Union in 1946 was brusquely turned down. In 1955, however, when Verzhbitsky, by then completely blind, applied again, his application was accepted—possibly for fear that he might otherwise reveal his wartime role.65 On arrival in the Soviet Union, Verzhbitsky was awarded an invalidity pension of 100 roubles a month, but his application for membership of the Soviet Communist Party was turned down.66

  DESPITE INDIVIDUAL ACTS of heroism, the NKVD and NKGB (as its security and intelligence components were renamed in 1943) deserve to be remembered less for their bravery during the Second World War than for their brutality. After the forcible incorporation into the Soviet Union of eastern Poland in September 1939, followed by the Baltic states and Moldavia in the summer of 1940, the NKVD quickly moved in to liquidate “class enemies” and cow the populations into submission.67 On June 25, 1941, three days after the beginning of Hitler’s invasion, the NKVD was ordered to secure the rear of the Red Army by arresting deserters and enemy agents, protecting communications and liquidating isolated pockets of German troops. In August 1941 Soviet parachutists disguised as Germans landed among the villages of the Volga German Autonomous Region and asked to be hidden until the arrival of the Wehrmacht. When they were given shelter, the whole village was exterminated by the NKVD. All other Volga Germans, however loyal, were deported by the NKVD to Siberia and northern Kazakhstan, with enormous loss of life.68

  When the Red Army took the offensive in 1943, the NKVD followed in its wake to mop up resistance and subversion. Beria reported proudly to Stalin at the end of the year:

  In 1943, the troops of the NKVD, who are responsible for security in the rear of the Active Red Army, in the process of cleaning up the territory liberated from the enemy, arrested 931,549 people for investigation. Of these, 582,515 were servicemen and 394,034 were civilians.

  Of those arrested, 80,296 were “unmasked,” in many cases wrongly, as spies, traitors, deserters, bandits and “criminal elements.”

  Stalin used the NKVD to punish and deport entire nations within the Soviet Union whom he accused of treachery: among them Chechens, Ingushi, Balkars, Karachai, Crimean Tartars, Kalmyks and Meskhetian Turks. In response to Stalin’s instructions to reward “those who have carried out the deportation order in an exemplary manner,” Beria replied:

  In accordance with your instructions, I submit a draft decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on decorations and medals for the most outstanding participants in the operation involving the deportation of the Chechens and Ingushes. 19,000 members of the NKVD, NKGB and Smersh took part, plus up to 100,000 officers of the NKVD forces…

  As on this occasion, many of the NKVD and NKGB personnel decorated during the war received their medals not for valor against the enemy but for crimes against humanity.69

  THE WARTIME RECORD of Soviet intelligence on the eastern front was patchy. Up to the end of 1942 the main espionage system providing intelligence from Nazi Germany and occupied Europe was a loosely coordinated GRU illegal network linked to the NKVD Harnack and Schulze-Boysen groups, codenamed the Rote Kappelle (“Red Orchestra”) by the Abwehr. The “musicians” were the radio operators who sent coded messages to Moscow; the “conductor” was the Polish Jew Leopold Trepper, alias Jean Gilbert, known within the network as le grand chef. The Rote Kappelle had 117 agents: 48 in Germany, 35 in France, 17 in Belgium and 17 in Switzerland.70 The network was gradually wound up during the later months of 1942 as German radio direction-finding tracked down the “musicians.” Trepper himself was captured as he sat in a dentist’s chair in occupied Paris on December 5. According to the Abwehr officer who arrested him, “For a second he was disturbed; then he said in perfect German, ‘You did a fine job.’” Only Rado’s GRU illegal residency in Switzerland, known as the Rote Drei after its three main radio transmitters, which was out of reach of German intelligence, continued work for another year until it was shut down by the Swiss.71

  Though both Trepper and Rado were sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment in Moscow after the war, it was later alleged by Soviet historians that intelligence from the Rote Kappelle had been of enormous assistance to the Red Army. In reality, intelligence did not begin to have a significant influence on Soviet military operations until after Trepper was arrested and most of his network wound up. Military intelligence failed to detect the sudden German turn south which captured Kiev in September 1941, and was taken aback by the intensity of the October assault on Moscow. The loss of Kharkov in May 1942 was due partly to the fact that the Stavka (a wartime combination of GHQ and high command) was expecting another attack on the capital. The Wehrmacht’s move south in the summer again took the Stavka by surprise. Throughout the German advance to Stalingrad and the Caucasus, Soviet forces were constantly confused about where the next blow would fall. When the Red Army encircled Axis forces at Stalingrad in November 1942, it believed it had trapped 85,000 to 90,000 troops; in reality it had surrounded three times as many.72

  The NKVD’s main role at Stalingrad was less in providing good intelligence than in enforcing a ferocious discipline within the Red Army. About 13,500 Soviet soldiers were executed for “defeatism” and other breaches of military discipline in the course of the battle, usually by a squad from the NKVD Special Detachment. Before execution, most were ordered to strip so that their uniform and boots could be reused. The NKVD postal censorship seized on any unorthodox or politically incorrect comment in soldiers’ letters to their families as evidence of treachery. A lieutenant who wrote “German aircraft are very good… Our anti-aircraft people shoot down only very few of them” was, inevitably, condemned as a traitor. In the 62nd Army alone, in the first half of October 1942, the NKVD claimed that “military secrets were divulged in 12,747 letters.”73 The great victory at Stalingrad, sealed by the surrender of the German Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, twenty-two generals and 91,000 troops early in 1943, was achieved in spite of, rather than because of, the contribution of the NKVD.

  Stalingrad was followed by a major improvement in the quality of Soviet military intelligence on the eastern front, made possible in part by massive supplies of radio equipment from the Americans
and the British.74 At the end of 1942 the Stavka established special-purpose radio battalions, each equipped with eighteen to twenty radio-intercept receivers and four direction-finding sets. The result, according to a Soviet historian given access to the battalions’ records, was “a qualitative jump in the development of radio-electronic combat in the Soviet army.” Though Soviet cryptanalysts lacked the state-of-the-art technology which enabled Bletchley Park to decrypt high-grade Enigma and Geheimschreiber messages, they made major advances during 1943—reluctantly assisted by German cipher personnel captured at Stalingrad—in direction-finding, traffic analysis and the breaking of lower-grade hand ciphers. In 1942-3 they also had the benefit of Luftwaffe Enigma decrypts supplied by an agent inside Bletchley Park.

  All these improvements were evident during the battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943 when the Red Army defeated the last great German offensive on the eastern front. Intelligence reports captured by the Wehrmacht from the Red Army during the battle revealed that Soviet SIGINT had located the positions and headquarters of the 6th, 7th and 11th Panzer Divisions, II and XIII Panzer Corps, and Second Army HQ. Aerial reconnaissance before and during Kursk was also on a larger scale and more successful than ever before.75

  Victory at Kursk opened the way to an almost continuous advance by the Red Army on the eastern front which was to end with Marshal Zhukov accepting the surrender of Berlin in May 1945. With a four-to-one superiority in men over the Wehrmacht, large amounts of military equipment from its Western allies and growing dominance in the air, the Red Army, though suffering enormous losses, proved unstoppable. In the course of its advance, the Red Army sometimes captured lists of the daily settings for periods of up to a month of the Wehrmacht’s Enigma machines, as well as some of the machines and their operators. During the final stages of the war these captures sometimes enabled Soviet cryptanalysts to decrypt spasmodically a still unknown number of Enigma messages.76