Smersh: Stalin's Secret Weapon: Soviet Military Counterintelligence in WWII

by Vadim Birstein

  Ponomarenko reacted swiftly and sternly, writing:

  Believing that it is expedient to continue transferring to you captured enemy agents and materials in which your Directorate might be interested, we are extremely surprised by your claims… A question arises: Why, since the time ‘SMERSH’ was formed, has no worker from this Directorate told us what measures they were planning against enemy agents?… Why are no workers from your agency present in partisan detachments?22

  Abakumov and Ponomarenko did not reach an agreement, and SMERSH did not take control of the partisan OOs. This question soon became unimportant when the Red Army began advancing to the West and liberating Soviet territory from the Germans. On January 13, 1944, seven months after SMERSH was created, the TsShPD was disbanded. Local headquarters, not Moscow, were now responsible for partisan detachments. Ponomarenko returned to Belorussia to supervise partisan activity there.

  Ponomarenko never forgot his skirmish with Abakumov. After Abakumov was arrested in July 1951, Ponomarenko, then a Central Committee secretary, used to boast to his Party colleagues that he had helped to get rid of Abakumov.23 He was probably among those who made sure that Stalin received the report denouncing Abakumov, who was subsequently dismissed and arrested on Stalin’s orders.

  Abakumov had much more success in taking control of the radio games from Beria’s subordinates.

  The ‘Radio Games’ Rivalry

  In addition to counterintelligence work in the rear of the Soviet troops, the 3rd Department of GUKR in Moscow was also in charge of radio games—also known as playbacks—which were intended to deceive the enemy.24 As already mentioned, German intelligence also widely used radio games against the Soviets. For instance, two arrested leaders of the famous Soviet spy network ‘Red Orchestra’, Leopold Trepper (alias ‘Director’) and Anatolii Gurevich (alias ‘Kent’, ‘Sukolov’, and ‘Barcza’), agreed to send radio messages for the Gestapo hoping that Moscow would think that they were working under Nazi control. Soviet radio games operated by using German agents captured from various German intelligence services.

  Soviet radio operations started in 1942 in two NKVD directorates, the 2nd (counterintelligence) headed by Pyotr Fedotov (like Abakumov, he was Yakov Deich’s protégé), and the 4th (terrorism) headed by Pavel Sudoplatov.25 As the UOO head, Abakumov also personally controlled some of the radio games, especially in the Moscow Province. He presented written scenarios of the planned games to Stalin, who made editorial notes in blue pencil.26 Within the 2nd NKVD Directorate, a section headed by Vladimir Baryshnikov in the 1st (German) Department (headed by Pyotr Timofeev) was responsible for the games. In April 1943, this section was transferred to SMESRH, and Dmitrii Tarasov, head of the radio operations team, recalled the transfer in his memoirs: ‘V. Ya. Baryshnikov was appointed head of the [3rd] Department of the GUKR SMERSH, while the radio operations group became a separate section within this department… Its staff reached eight members, and I was promoted to the head of the [2nd] section.’27

  In July 1943, before the Kursk Battle, Abakumov issued UKRs with the secret Instruction on the Organization and Conduction of Radio Games with the Enemy.28 It stated the goal of the games: ‘To paralyze the activity of the enemy’s intelligence services.’ Each radio game was carefully prepared. At first Baryshnikov, after interrogating and recruiting captured German agents, sent Abakumov a proposal for a game. For instance, on June 25, 1943 Baryshnikov wrote:

  The [captured German] group [of two agents, one of whom was a Soviet double agent] has a very interesting task [i.e., recruiting an agent inside the Soviet Union for the assassination of Lazar Kaganovich, a GKO member and Commissar for Transportation]. That could allow us to conduct a serious counterintelligence action (for example, to call for the arrival of qualified [German] specialists in recruiting agents). Therefore, this group should be engaged in a radio game. The first radio communication should be transmitted on June 26 [1943].29

  Abakumov wrote on the report: ‘I agree.’

  In Tarasov’s section, Majors Sergei Yelin and Vladimir Frolov, and Captains Grigorii Grigorenko and Ivan Lebedev (Tarasov’s deputy) were the main developers and conductors of the games.30 Tarasov describes the preparation of messages: ‘The counterintelligence members wrote texts of radiograms that contained military disinformation for a transmission to the enemy based on the General Staff’s recommendations. The style of writing by a particular operator and a legend [story] given to him were also taken into consideration. In the most important cases consultants from the General Staff participated in this work.’31

  Tarasov details the contacts with the General Staff and military intelligence (RU):

  [We] were in constant contact with A. I. Antonov, deputy head of the General Staff, and S. M. Shtemenko, head of the Operational Directorate of the General Staff, as well as with F. F. Kuznetsov, deputy head of the General Staff and, simultaneously, head of the RU. Meetings with the first two took place in the General Staff’s building or the Stavka mansion at Kirov Street [not far from the Kremlin], while we met with Comrade F. F. Kuznetsov in the USSR Defense [Commissariat] at Frunzenskaya Embankment.32

  Usually the former German radio operators—Germans or Russians who had graduated from German intelligence schools and agreed to work for Baryshnikov’s section—were placed in Lubyanka Prison and brought to SMERSH’s headquarters (another part of the same huge building) when there was a need for them or for radio transmission sessions. If radio sessions were conducted from a particular territory where the controlling German intelligence supervisors expected the agents to be located at the time, Tarasov’s men brought the operators to this area.

  During the reorganization of security services in April 1943, Sudoplatov’s 4th NKVD Directorate was transferred to the NKGB and became its 4th Directorate. This directorate continued to control some important radio games. According to Sudoplatov’s memoirs, the NKGB’s success with radio game Operation Monastyr’ (Monastery) sparked Abakumov’s jealousy. This was the game in which Aleksandr Demiyanov, or ‘Max’—wrongly identified in Sudoplatov’s memoirs as Abwehr’s ‘Max’ from the ‘Max and Moritz’ operation—participated. Allegedly, when Abakumov came to Sudoplatov’s office demanding the transfer of all radio games to GUKR, Sudoplatov agreed to do so if ordered. The order came within one day, but it excluded Monastery and Couriers, another deception game. Abakumov was displeased, knowing that the results of these two operations were reported directly to Stalin.’33

  Sudoplatov’s interpretation makes little sense—the results of all important radio games were reported directly to the Stavka, which meant that Stalin was already supervising all the most significant ones. For example, in September 1943, on Meshik’s report about one of the games, Abakumov wrote: ‘Such disinformation materials must not be sent without Com. [rade] Stalin’s approval.’34 However, the mere fact that information about two of the supposedly most successful games had been held back was apparently enough to anger Abakumov.35 The clash surrounding the radio games illustrates the tension and developing rivalry between Abakumov and the Beria–Merkulov duo after the creation of SMERSH.

  Despite Abakumov’s opposition, the operations Monastyr’ and Berezino (which followed in 1944) remained in Sudoplatov’s hands. During the latter, twenty-two German intelligence men sent by the famous Otto Skorzeny into Soviet territory in response to false radio messages were caught, and thirteen radio transmitters and 225 packages of equipment and weapons were seized.36 Later Skorzeny wrote: ‘None of…my own men ever got back. I wondered whether the Russians were having a game with us all the time.’37 Apparently, Sudoplatov hoped to lure Skorzeny himself with this game, but this did not happen.

  As of spring 1943, SMERSH was responsible for most of the other radio games. Scores of deceptive operations were organized, and through them SMERSH collected a great deal of military information, especially about the transportation of German troops, terrorist acts in the rear of the Soviet troops and on German-occupied Soviet territory, and so
forth. Operation Ariitsy (Aryans), a particularly successful joint SMERSH–NKGB–NKVD game, demonstrated that the Germans had very inadequate intelligence about the Soviet situation.

  In May 1944, the Walli I (Abwehr’s center for Russia) flew twenty-four agents, under the command of Captain Eberhard von Scheller (alias ‘Quast’) into Kalmykia—an autonomous republic on the shore of the Caspian Sea in southern Russia.38 Von Scheller, a WWI hero who was awarded two Iron Crosses for bravery during that war, had worked in the Abwehr since 1938. Being sent to Kalmykia was punishment for a crime that he did not describe to SMERSH officers. Kalmykia was populated by the small nation of Kalmyks, a nomadic group professing Lamaism that settled in the lower reaches of the Volga River at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Incidentally, Vladimir Lenin’s father was a Kalmyk who had risen to the status of a minor nobleman.

  Von Scheller’s group was supposed to prepare a base for the future arrival of the so-called ‘Kalmyk Corps of Dr. Otto Doll’ (many heads of Abwehr groups had aliases with the title of ‘doctor’), consisting of 3,458 horsemen (36 squadrons), that the Abwehr Group 103 organized during 1942–43. Dr. Doll’s real name was Sonderführer Otmar Rudolph Werva, and he was a German academic and Abwehr officer.39 During the Russian Civil War, he served in the Ukrainian nationalistic troops that fought for the independence of Ukraine. The German plan was for this corps to initiate an uprising against the Soviet regime, among the Kalmyks. Amazingly, German intelligence was apparently unaware that by then there were no Kalmyks left in Kalmykia.

  In December 1943, the Politburo ordered the liquidation of the Kalmyk ASSR and renamed it the Astrakhan Region within the Russian Federation.40 This was Stalin’s retaliation for Kalmyk collaboration with the Germans during the occupation of a part of Kalmykia near its capital, Elista, from August 1942 to mid-1943. The Germans wooed the Kalmyks with the promise of an independent Great Kalmyk State with territory from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea. During the occupation, a Kalmyk Cavalry Corps was formed, consisting of four divisions with five squadrons each, to fight against the Red Army.41

  Following the Politburo decision, the NKVD executed an operation under the code name ‘Ulusy’ (ulus means region in the Kalmyk language), for which Beria and his deputy Vasilii Chernyshev were responsible. The NKVD troops rounded up the Kalmyks in Kalmykia (more than 93,000), put them on 46 trains, and deported them to the Altai, Novosibirsk, and Omsk provinces in Siberia. Sixteen thousand Kalmyks died during this operation.42 In March and June 1944, the remaining Kalmyks were deported from the Rostov and Stalingrad provinces; thus, no Kalmyks remained by the time German agents landed in Kalmykia.

  During a clash between the NKVD and NKGB operational groups of the Astrakhan region and the German agents who were parachuted in, twelve German agents, including von Scheller, were taken prisoner, and the rest were either killed or managed to escape. SMERSH and the NKVD quickly developed a joint plan for a new radio game, Aryans, with the involvement of captured agents. On May 26, 1944, Abakumov and Aleksandr Leontiev, head of the NKVD Department for Combating Bandits, signed the plan, which Beria approved the next day. In the GUKR, Abakumov’s deputy Meshik and Baryshnikov, head of the 3rd Department, were responsible for implementing the plan.

  Von Scheller volunteered for Soviet counterintelligence, and Hans Hansen, the radio operator of the downed German plane, agreed to work with von Scheller. The two were given the aliases ‘Boroda’ (Beard) and ‘Kolonist’ (Colonizer). In response to the disinformation transmitted, another German plane loaded with supplies for von Scheller’s agents landed in Kalmykia, where it was destroyed and five newly arrived agents were captured. After this von Scheller wrote to Abakumov:

  Sir General!

  I’ve volunteered for the Russian counterintelligence and I have worked honestly and hard for the implementation of a secret task. Our joint efforts succeeded in shooting down a gigantic German U-290 transport airplane and its passengers, including four German agents, were captured by the Russian counterintelligence service. Therefore, I ask for your approval to include me into the Soviet counterintelligence network. I pledge to keep secrets of the service for which I, probably, will end up working, even if I’d be working against German intelligence. In this case I ask for your approval of giving me the alias ‘Lor’.

  E. von Scheller.43

  Although further details of the ongoing operation are unknown, SMERSH sent a total of forty-two radio messages to the Germans and received twenty-three responses. In August 1944, the 3rd GUKR Department decided to end the game, and the last cable was sent to Germany, claiming that everyone in the second group had been killed and that the Kalmyks had refused to help von Scheller’s group. Von Scheller was supposedly going to the Western Caucasus, and would move from there to Romania. As a result of the game two planes were destroyed, twelve agents and members of German air crews were killed, and twenty-one German saboteurs were taken prisoner.

  Baryshnikov’s team did not trust von Scheller. During detailed interrogations it appeared that von Scheller had tried to force Hansen to send a coded message to their German handlers that would reveal that they were operating under SMERSH’s control. Hansen refused and made a statement to SMERSH officers: ‘I’ve become acquainted with the honest and just people [meaning Baryshnikov’s men] who had been described to us [by Nazi propaganda] in a completely different way… If I’m impressed by the country in general as much as the officers and soldiers impressed me, I’ll conclude that any nation would be honored to be a friend of the Soviet Union.’44 Because of this, von Scheller and Hansen were dealt with differently by SMERSH. On October 20, 1945, the OSO sentenced von Scheller to death and two weeks later he was executed, while Hansen was sentenced to imprisonment in labor camps. He survived and was repatriated to Germany after Stalin’s death.

  On April 21, 1945, at the end of the war, Abakumov received one of the highest military awards, the Kutuzov Order of the 1st Class, for the successful conclusion of a radio game code named ‘Tuman’ (Fog).45 It remains a mystery why only Abakumov was awarded for this effort because many participants, including Merkulov, were involved in it. The game concerned a German agent, a Russian named Pyotr Tavrin, who was sent by German intelligence to Soviet territory, and his wife. There are two main versions about how and when this happened.

  The first is based on the documents of Gehlen’s FHO, studied by E. H. Cookridge, the author of a book about Gehlen and his German intelligence men. He wrote that Pyotr Ivanovich Tavrin ‘had been captured [by the Soviets] on May 30, 1942, in the Rzhev area. He informed his captors that he had been awarded the Orders of the Red Banner and of Alexander Nevsky…and displayed these medals with pride; but after the usual indoctrination he was prepared to go back as a spy’.46

  However, Tavrin could not have had the Aleksandr Nevsky Order because this award was established on July 29, 1942, after Tavrin had been captured. The first Aleksandr Nevsky Order was bestowed in November 1942, after (according to Cookridge) Tavrin was smuggled back through the front line in September 1942. Even more questionable is the claim that Tavrin ‘was given a succession of important appointments, first at the ministry of defense, then on the staff of the supreme headquarters and eventually, with the rank of colonel, at the headquarters of Marshal Ivan Chernyakhovsky’, as well as the claim that on October 17, 1943 he was awarded ‘the gold badge of a Hero of the Soviet Union’.47 In August 1944, ‘Tavrin sent a signal saying that he had fallen under suspicion. Gehlen decided to withdraw him and asked Zeppelin [the SD spy organization] to collect him in a Messerschmitt’. At the end, Cookridge cites the supposedly Soviet information that on September 5, 1944 Tavrin, a German spy in the uniform of a Soviet colonel, and his wife were arrested near Smolensk and later executed.

  The KGB/FSB version begins from the arrest on September 5, 1944 of a Zeppelin agent with false documents in the name of Pyotr Ivanovich Tavrin (his real last name was Shilo), and a woman, his wife, with false documents for Lidia Shilova (her real last name
was Bobrik).48 Surprisingly, in his memoirs Tarasov, who participated in Operation Fog, refers to the couple as the Pokrovskys [sic] and not the Tavrins.49 Over the years the FSB has changed its version of the circumstances of their arrest four or five times, so I will only address the published documents.50

  On September 30, 1945 Merkulov reported to the GKO that on May 30, 1942, Tavrin-Pokrovsky crossed the front line and went to the Germans after the OO officer of his unit questioned him about his past. Tavrin had something to hide because from 1931 to 1938, he was arrested three times for embezzlement, and each time he managed to escape. Then he received a new passport under the name Tavrin instead of Shilo. While being held prisoner in German POW camps, in July 1943 he volunteered for German intelligence. Merkulov wrote:

  From September 1943 till August 1944, [Tavrin] was personally trained as a terrorist for committing terrorist acts against the USSR leaders. [Heinz] Gräfe, head of the SD Eastern Department, [Otto] Skorzeny, SD member who took part in kidnapping [Benito] Mussolini [in September 1943], and SS Major [Otto] Kraus of the SD post [Russland-Nord] in Riga supervised the training. Additionally, G. N. Zhilenkov, former [Party] secretary of the Rostokinsky Regional Committee in Moscow, who has betrayed the Motherland and currently lives in Germany, guided Tavrin for a long time.