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

by Vadim Birstein

  On the night of September 4 to 5 [1944] [Tavrin] was sent over the front line by a four-motor German plane from Riga Airport… The German intelligence organ, the Riga SD branch known as Zeppelin, organized his transportation.

  The goal of sending [Tavrin] is to organize and conduct a terrorist act against C.[omrade] Stalin, as well as, if possible, acts against the other members of the government: Beria, [Commissar for Railroad Transportation Lazar] Kaganovich and Molotov… For discovering further intentions of German intelligence, a radio game has been started… Tavrin’s wife, Shilova Lidia Yakovlevna (arrested), who graduated from German courses for radio operators and was sent together with Tavrin, is used as an operator [in the game].51

  The details Merkulov described became known from the interrogation of Tavrin conducted in Lubyanka, where the Tavrins were brought after their arrest near Smolensk, by Baryshnikov, head of the 3rd GUKR Department; Aleksandr Leontiev, head of the NKVD Department for Combating Bandits; and Leonid Raikhman, deputy head of the 2nd NKGB Directorate (interior counterintelligence).52 Interestingly, Merkulov stressed Tavrin’s connection to Georgii Zhilenkov, the highest Party official captured by the Germans, who became one of the leaders of the anti-Soviet movement and the Vlasov Army. Before the war, Zhilenkov was a secretary of Moscow’s Rostokinsky Regional Party Committee and a member of the Moscow City Party Committee. After the end of the war Zhilenkov surrendered to the Americans, but on May 1, 1946 they handed him over to the Soviets. On August 1, 1946 the Military Collegium sentenced Zhilenkov, along with General Vlasov and his other close collaborators, to death and they were executed.53

  Tavrin-Pokrovsky’s testimony corroborated the words of a captured high-level RSHA officer whom Tarasov identified as ‘John’:

  In Zeppelin circles, Pokrovsky [Tavrin] was discussed a lot. He was considered a ‘big bird’ that would bring Zeppelin glory, awards and more power in intelligence activity. In their conversations Hauptsturmführer [Alfred] Backhaus [of the Zeppelin headquarters in Berlin], [Otto] Kraus, and Untersturmführer [Heinz] Gräfe used to repeat: ‘Imagine the consequences if Pokrovsky succeeds in fulfilling his assignment.’54

  If this testimony is true, it shows that Walter Schellenberg’s men in the Zeppelin branch had no idea about real life in the Soviet Union and the impossibility of Tavrin’s task.

  Tavrin described how after leaving the plane, which had crashed while landing, the couple started out for Moscow by motorcycle. Tavrin was dressed in the uniform of a Soviet Major and Shilova, in that of a Junior Lieutenant. Tavrin had false documents of a deputy head of the OKR SMERSH of the 39th Army of the 1st Baltic Front and a fake typewritten order to come to the GUKR in Moscow.

  Soon a group of NKVD operatives stopped them to check their papers. One of the officers noticed that the high military awards on Tavrin’s chest were attached incorrectly. The awards included the Gold Star of a Hero and the Aleksandr Nevsky Order that have already been mentioned, citing Cookridge’s story. Tavrin even had a fake newspaper clipping saying that he received the Gold Star on October 9, 1943. In fact, the star apparently belonged to Major General Ivan Shepetov, who was captured by the Germans on May 26, 1942 and executed in the Flossenberg Camp on May 21, 1943 after he tried to escape from the camp.

  Interestingly, Tavrin did not try to fight or escape. A head of the local NKVD unit quickly established that there had never been a Major Tavrin in the 39th Army. The NKVD officers also found Tavrin’s sophisticated diversion equipment hidden in the motorcycle. Tavrin and Shilova were sent to the GUKR in Moscow. Three NKVD and one huge SMERSH search groups also arrested the pilot, navigator, radio operator, and two gunners of the German plane. All of them were sent to Moscow.

  The Tavrins agreed to participate in a SMERSH radio game called first ‘A Couple’, then ‘Fog’. Most probably, SMERSH officers promised the couple that their lives would be spared if they collaborated. SMERSH’s task was to persuade the Zeppelin agents to come to Soviet territory, where they would be caught. Baryshnikov supervised the writing of false radio messages by Majors Frolov and Grigorenko (the future KGB colonel general), and then Abakumov or his deputy Isai Babich approved the texts. Pavel Fedotov, head of the 2nd NKGB Directorate, and Leontiev, head of the NKVD Department for Combating Bandits, were informed about each message because they supervised the investigation of the Tavrin case. Tavrin and his wife were kept in Lubyanka Prison as prisoners 35 and 22 (corresponding, apparently, to the numbers of their cells), and were taken to a secret dacha outside Moscow for radio transmission sessions.

  Tarasov mentions that ‘the contact with the enemy was made with a delay because Pokrovsky [Tavrin] was not honest during the investigation and it took a long time for the Soviet counterintelligence to find out all the necessary details. To explain the long delay in communication, it was decided to create the impression that Pokrovskaya [Shilova] had tried to establish contact but was unable to do so due to her poor training’.55 Finally, in September 1944, Shilova sent her first message to Zeppelin under SMERSH’s control: ‘We have arrived successfully, and started the work.’56

  The Germans were completely fooled. Later ‘John’ testified to SMERSH that ‘the radio contacts [with Shilova] were conducted with difficulty because Pokrovsky’s wife was poorly trained’.57 According to the messages, Tavrin was trying to penetrate the Kremlin circle. Strangely, some messages were addressed to Gräfe, although Tavrin was aware of Gräfe’s death on January 1, 1944. On April 9, 1945, Shilova sent the last message, to which Berlin did not respond.

  Soon after the war, in August 1945, the OSO sentenced members of the plane crew to death and they were executed. For some time SMERSH and, later, the MGB, hoped that German agents might visit the Tavrins, and the couple was kept alive. On February 1, 1952, the Military Collegium sentenced them to death. Tavrin admitted that he was guilty of treason, but rejected the accusation of being a terrorist: ‘I have never been determined to follow the German order to conduct a terrorist act in the center [Moscow].’58 His wife stated the same: ‘I was dreaming about the Motherland and my people. I do not regret that I flew back. If it is necessary, I’ll die…I ask for one thing: I’d like to share my fate with my husband… I believe that from the moment he stepped on our native ground he would not do anything against the Motherland.’59 Tavrin was executed on March 28, 1952, and his wife, four days later. In May 2002 the Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office refused to rehabilitate them.

  It remains unclear why Cookridge gave an erroneous account of the Tavrin story. It’s possible that the documents he used were a red herring to conceal the fact that for two years Tavrin was being trained for a special assignment and was not successfully serving in the Red Army. Unfortunately, in his recent book about Nazi espionage Christer Jörgensen repeated Cookridge’s version of Tavrin’s story without any changes.60

  However, not everything is clear in Tavrin’s ‘true’ story, which is now known due to the publications of FSB historians who had access to three volumes of the Tavrin investigation file. For instance, Aleksandr Mikhailov, FSB Major General, describes how in the 1930s, Tavrin successfully escaped from arrest three times, managed to attend law school, and even worked as a senior investigator at a Prosecutor’s Office in Voronezh.61 It would have been almost impossible to do this in the 1930s, when people’s backgrounds were constantly checked. The first escape, when some arrested criminals supposedly dismantled a wall and fled together with Shilo, is especially suspicious. This is one of the typical methods that the NKVD used for legalizing their secret informers.62

  During interrogations in Moscow, Zhilenkov stated that in the German camp Tavrin told him that before the war he ‘lived in Voronezh and worked in the local NKVD directorate as head of the personal guards of the first secretary of the Voronezh Province Party Committee’, Iosif Vareikis.63 Zhilenkov added that he did not believe Tavrin’s stories, especially because ‘soon after Tavrin arrived in the camp, he was accused of stealing 130 rubles, and then prisoners beat him up for
cheating while playing cards’. Anyway, it is possible that Shilo-Tavrin was recruited as an OGPU-NKVD agent after his first arrest and then luckily managed to ‘escape’. If so, most probably he went to the Germans as an NKVD (i.e., Sudoplatov’s) agent. This explains why he surrendered to the NKVD operatives practically voluntarily. If this scenario is accurate, it is a mystery why he was finally shot.

  But perhaps the most complicated and least-known radio game was organized in December 1944 in collaboration with the General Staff’s Intelligence Directorate (RU).64 A month earlier, Soviet agents had reported from Germany that the Nazis were preparing an attack against American and British troops in the Ardennes. To get the Germans to move some of their troops from the Eastern Front to the Ardennes, Stalin ordered that a deception game be devised to persuade the Germans that the Red Army was exhausted and would temporarily discontinue its offensive.

  Tarasov and Fyodor Kuznetsov, head of the RU, were responsible for the operation. They devised a very complicated radio game involving twenty-four transmitters located in a number of Soviet cities, from Kuibyshev to Leningrad. They transmitted reports, supposedly from various sources, but all containing the same basic information: part of the Soviet troops had been called back from the fronts for reorganization and training. RU agents disseminated similar disinformation among the population in the war zone.

  The operation worked perfectly. The German command completely trusted the false information, and, on December 16, 1944, the Germans began their attack in the Ardennes, which involved not only the last reserves of the German army but also several tank divisions transferred from the Eastern Front. While the Western Allies were fighting in the Ardennes, the Soviet troops were preparing a new assault. On January 12, 1945, at the request of the Allies, the 1st Ukrainian Front and then the 1st Belorussian Front began their attack on Poland, and on January 13 and 14, the 2nd and 3rd Belorussian fronts attacked Eastern Prussia. The German defense in these areas was weakened because of radio game disinformation.

  From 1943 to 1945, SMERSH and the NKGB conducted 183 radio games, some of which continued for years.65 Local SMERSH departments also organized radio games. Overall, approximately 400 German intelligence officers and agents were arrested and participated in the games. When the games ended, most of them were shot. For example, in March 1944 SD officer Alois Galfe, who had specialized in training the Russian POWs recruited for Operation Zeppelin, was captured by SMERSH operatives not far from Moscow as part of the ‘Zagadka’ (Puzzle) game.66 This game was jointly conducted by the 3rd and 4th GUKR SMERSH departments and continued after the arrest of Galfe. Galfe was taken to Lubyanka Prison, where Abakumov interrogated him for six hours. On January 27, 1945, the OSO sentenced Galfe to death as a German spy and he was executed.

  Kirill Stolyarov, a Russian historian, concluded: ‘SMERSH outfoxed the Abwehr… Stalin, who made replacements in the cadres quickly at the slightest indication of incompetence, kept Abakumov in his position during the whole war.’67 However, success was incomplete. Until the end of the war, 389 unidentified German agents continued to send radio messages from the territory liberated by the Red Army.68

  Although the details remain unknown, radio games continued long after the war, apparently, with British and American intelligence. On November 15, 1952, MGB Minister Semyon Ignatiev reported to Stalin: ‘A plan of the cancellation of radio games advantageous for us and conducted from the territories of the Baltic Soviet Republics, will be presented to you on November 20.’69

  In the Abwehr Schools

  From the UOO, SMERSH inherited the practice of sending agents to the enemy’s rear. Some of these military counterintelligence officers successfully joined German intelligence organizations and also schools, where they collected information on the schools, their staffs, and students. On the Eastern Front there were more than 130 intelligence and counterintelligence SD and Abwehr organizations and 60 schools.70 Information gathered by Soviet agents allowed SMERSH operatives to arrest German agents when they entered Soviet territory.

  Frequently, SMERSH agents had already attended the Abwehr schools. While many civilians and Soviet POWs volunteered for these schools ostensibly as German agents, they really intended to use the opportunity to return to Soviet territory and join the Red Army. After graduation, when Abwehr centers sent them to Soviet territory to work as German spies, these individuals found SMERSH units and gave them detailed information about the Abwehr schools and the tasks assigned to them by the German intelligence. In Chekist jargon, this was a situation in which a person ‘has admitted his/her guilt and testified about himself/herself’. These people were, of course, highly valuable to SMERSH, and when they were sent back as double agents, their special knowledge yielded much greater success at collecting intelligence than the results attained by other SMERSH agents.

  In Moscow, the 4th GUKR Department controlled the sending of agents and double agents to the enemy. In the UKRs at the fronts, the 2nd departments handled these operations. From April 1943 to February 1944, 75 SMERSH officers were introduced into German intelligence organs and schools, and 38 of them managed to return.71 SMERSH agents collected information on 359 Abwehr officers and 978 intelligence school graduates; as a result, SMERSH operatives arrested 176 saboteurs operating in the Red Army’s rear. From September 1943 to October 1944, SMERSH sent ten groups of parachutists (78 officers) into the enemy’s rear at various fronts.72 Of these, six groups managed to join German intelligence as Soviet spies, recruiting 142 Soviet agents and unmasking 15 enemy agents.

  On June 24, 1944, Maj. Gen. Pyotr Ivashutin, head of the UKR of the 3rd Ukrainian Front, sent a report to Abakumov describing the UKR’s success:

  To: Head of the Main Counterintelligence Directorate

  SMERSH, Security Commissar of the 2nd Rank V. Abakumov

  June 24, 1944

  Report

  On the work of the Directorate of Counterintelligence SMERSH of the 3rd Ukrainian Front in the enemy’s rear from October 1, 1943 to June 15, 1944

  During this period, the work in the enemy’s rear included the penetration of our agents into the intelligence and counterintelligence organs of the enemy that were acting against our front. Until the end of 1943, Abwehrgroups 103, 203, and 303 were active against us. To penetrate these organs, the following agents were sent to the enemy’s rear [the names are omitted in the published document]. At the time, three of our agents—Rastorguev, Mikhail Aleksandrovich; Turusin, Georgii Dmitrievich; and Robak, Nadezhda Petrovna—had already joined Abwehrgroup-203.

  Turusin, after being sent by the enemy to our rear, came to us to acknowledge his guilt and gave detailed testimony about himself and the other agents. Then, following our order, he recruited three agents of Abwehrgroup-203 to work for us. Later, when they were sent to our territory, they voluntarily gave themselves up to us. He helped us to arrest three more saboteurs who were parachuted in with him, and gathered valuable information about the staff and agents of the Abwehrgroup.

  Rastorguev, another former agent of the Abwehrgroup-203, came to us to acknowledge his guilt. With Turusin and with GUKR SMERSH’s sanction, in September of last year he was sent to the enemy’s rear with the task of recruiting a member of the German intelligence staff. He fulfilled our task and recruited this officer and three more agents. After he was sent to the enemy for the second time, he personally brought three agent-members of his intelligence team back to us. Based on his information, the SMERSH Directorate of the 2nd Ukrainian Front arrested two agents of Abwehrgroup-204. He also collected full information on fourteen agents and ten staff members of Abwehrgroups 203 and 204.

  Robak, Nadezhda Petrovna, an agent of Abwehrgroup-203, along with two other women agents, was parachuted into the rear of our front at the end of July 1943. She voluntarily came to us to acknowledge her guilt and gave detailed information about her connections with the German intelligence and about other agents. In 1943, based on her information, we arrested four women agents of Abwehrgroup-203, who were l
eft in the Donbass [the coal mining area between Russia and Ukraine] to collect intelligence and to penetrate the Red Army. Like Rastorguev, with the sanction of the GUKR SMERSH, on September 22, 1943, she was sent to the enemy’s rear with the task of recruiting a staff member of the German intelligence. She fulfilled the task, and the recruited intelligence officer has already sent agents of Abwehrgroup-203 into the hands of Soviet counterintelligence.

  Head of the SMERSH Directorate of the 3rd Ukrainian Front,

  Major General IVASHUTIN.73

  For some reason, Ivashutin’s report did not mention the name of Afanasii Polozov, the German intelligence officer recruited by Nadezhda Robak. As was common among Russian teachers in the Abwehr schools, he worked under the alias of ‘Vladimir Krakov’ or ‘Dontsov’.74 A young Cossack, he served as a veterinarian in the 38th Cavalry Division of the Red Army, and on May 12, 1942, he was taken prisoner by the Germans. After training in German intelligence schools, in April 1943 Krakov was appointed head of the Abwehrgroup-203 school for saboteurs attached to the 1st German Tank Army then stationed in the Ukraine. Soon he started searching for contact with Soviet military counterintelligence and sent some of his agents, including Nadezhda Robak, to find SMERSH officials.

  Although it doesn’t mention Polozov by name, Ivashutin’s report presents the recruiting of Polozov and his work for SMERSH as a success. However, Polozov’s work for Ivashutin ended tragically. Later he testified: ‘When it became impossible [i.e., too dangerous] to continue my work [for SMERSH], in March 1944, I crossed the front line near the town of Yampol, and came to the head of counterintelligence of the Soviet Tank Army [of the 2nd Ukrainian Front] Shevchenko, who knew about my work.’75 To Polozov’s complete surprise, Shevchenko said that he had never known Polozov and that Polozov had never worked for Soviet counterintelligence.