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

by Vadim Birstein

  A number of events preceded the uprising. At the end of 1943, General Čatloš ordered two strong divisions to be stationed in the area where he expected the Red Army would enter Slovakia. His plan was to help the Red Army, but he wanted to maintain Slovakian independence. At the beginning of August 1944, Čatloš sent a courier, Karol Šmidke (pronounced Shmidke), a pro-Communist leader who was well known in Moscow, to inform the Red Army high command of his plan.60 But Šmidke also brought plans of other Slovak political factions, and Moscow refused to deal with Čatloš. Possibly, the Soviets considered him a German collaborator because during the first two weeks of the German invasion in June 1941, Čatloš commanded the Slovak Expeditionary Army Group within the German troops. After the uprising started, Stalin refused to permit the British and Americans to significantly assist the insurgents.61

  Due to bad coordination of efforts and failures of the troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front at the Polish–Slovak border, by October 27 the German troops and the Slovak units that remained loyal to the pro-German Slovak fascist President Jozef Tiso had defeated the insurgents. Generals Viest and Golian were captured by the Germans and were later executed in the Flossenbürg concentration camp, while General Čatloš, who deserted to the partisans on September 2, ended up in SMERSH’s hands together with General Jozef Turanec (pronounced Turanets), who succeeded Čatloš as Slovak Defense Minister after the escape of the latter. Both generals were brought to Moscow and, apparently, were kept in secrecy because SMERSH investigators ordered Jan Loyda, a German POW who was put with Čatloš (and later with Raoul Wallenberg and his cell mate Willy Roedel) obviously as a cell spy, not to tell anybody that he had been his cell mate.62

  In January 1947, Čatloš and Turanec were brought back to Prague to testify during the trial of Jozef Tiso, who was sentenced to death on April 15, 1947.63 In December of the same year, Čatloš was tried and sentenced to five years in prison, but the next year he was released. Turanec, who in 1941–42 commanded the Slovak Motorized Division in Soviet territory, was sentenced to death. His death sentence was commuted to a 30-year imprisonment, and in 1957 he died in Leopoldov Prison, where convicted functionaries of the Tiso regime were incarcerated.64

  One more Slovak officer, Captain František Urban (who during the uprising fought in the Aleksandr Nevsky partisan detachment under the command of a Red Army officer, V. A. Stepanov), was ordered to come to Moscow and join the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps formed in the Soviet Union and commanded by General Ludvik Svoboda, a personal friend of Marshal Ivan Konev.65 On September 25, 1944, Captain Urban arrived in Moscow and was immediately arrested. In Lubyanka Prison he shared a cell with the Finn Unto Parvilahti.66 After a two-year SMERSH investigation, the OSO sentenced him to five years in labor camps, allegedly for treason and collaboration with the Germans. In 1951, he was released to the Czechoslovak military authorities and returned to Slovakia.

  Yugoslavia

  By October 20, 1944, the troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front, assisted by partisans of the Yugoslavian Communist leader, Josip Broz Tito, had liberated a considerable part of Yugoslavia, including its capital Belgrade. With the assistance of Yugoslav Communists, SMERSH operatives began making arrests.

  In early October, Yugoslav partisans arrested the Russian émigré Mikhail Georgievsky and handed him over to SMERSH. Georgievsky, a professor of ancient languages, was the main ideologist and general secretary of the emigrant anti-Soviet organization, the National Alliance of the New Generation (NSNP) established in 1930 and known since 1936 as the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS).67 The goal of the NSNP/NTS was to organize a revolution in Russia, and for years the NTS sent its agents into the Soviet Union to establish contacts and collect information on the political situation inside the country.

  In 1941, Georgievsky’s plans to move to England were thwarted by the rapid German occupation of Yugoslavia. He refused to serve the Germans, and the Gestapo arrested him in the summer of 1944 along with a great many other NTS members. In Moscow, Georgievsky, after being held in investigation prisons until the autumn of 1950, was finally sentenced to death and executed on September 12, 1950.68

  On December 24, 1944, in the town of Novi Sad, UKR operatives of the 3rd Ukrainian Front arrested another influential emigrant, 66-year-old Vasilii Shulgin. Shulgin was a Russian monarchist leader who had been a well-known political figure before the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.69 On March 2, 1917, he accepted the abdication of Nicholas II. During the Civil War, Shulgin actively participated in the White Russian movement, escaping to Romania in 1920, and later living in Bulgaria, Germany, France, and Yugoslavia. In 1925–26, Shulgin secretly visited the Soviet Union, later describing the trip in his 1927 book, Three Capitals, published in Berlin. He wrote sympathetically about Soviet Russia. In fact, the ‘secret’ trip was organized by the OGPU, using the old enemy for propaganda purposes. However, during his time in Yugoslavia Shulgin did not participate in politics. A group of SMERSH arrestees that included Shulgin was sent to Moscow by plane. This was the first flight in Shulgin’s life. On January 30, 1945 Shulgin was brought to Lubyanka Prison.70

  A nineteen-year-old officer, Pavel Kutepov, was arrested in Panchevo, a town near Belgrade. His father, Major General Aleksandr Kutepov, head of ROVS from 1928 to 1930, was kidnapped on January 26, 1930, by an OGPU terrorist group in Paris headed by Yakov Serebryansky.71 General Kutepov died after his kidnappers injected him with morphine. In the eyes of the Soviet secret services Pavel Kutepov was guilty merely for having such a father. The SMERSH interrogators decided that Pavel intended to kill Stalin. In June 1945, Abakumov reported to Stalin:

  KUTEPOV testified that having been born in emigration, he was raised in an atmosphere of hatred of the Soviet Union and, being on good terms with the terrorist [Boris] KOVERDA, a murderer of the Soviet Envoy [Pyotr] VOIKOV [in Warsaw in 1927], he decided to follow [Koverda’s] example and to commit a terrorist act against Comrade Stalin [Stalin’s name was inserted in handwriting in the original].72

  To do this, beginning in 1941 KUTEPOV sought a way to enter the USSR. For this purpose, he tried to join the German intelligence in order to be sent to the Soviet Union. When this failed, he decided to change sides and go to the Red Army to obtain the trust of the organs [i.e., secret services] and thus get to Moscow.

  Following this plan, KUTEPOV stayed near Belgrade after the Germans were pushed out of Yugoslavia. Here he was arrested. The interrogation of Kutepov continues.

  ABAKUMOV.73

  In fact, Pavel Kutepov, a cadet at the Russian Military Cadet Corps in the town of Belaya Tserkov, was a member of a pro-Soviet underground organization in this émigré corps.74 Oddly, he was convinced that his father had not been kidnapped, but had secretly gone to the Soviet Union on Stalin’s invitation. After the Soviet troops took over Yugoslavia, and before his arrest, Kutepov Jr. worked as a translator for the Red Army. This work was no doubt what Abakumov meant by ‘he decided to change sides and go to the Red Army to obtain the trust of the organs’.

  Apparently, SMERSH/MGB investigators failed to prove Kutepov’s alleged intention to kill Stalin, because in 1947 he was sentenced to 20 and not 25 years in prison (that year, the death sentence was replaced by a 25-year imprisonment). After conviction, as of July 25, 1947, Shulgin and Pavel Kutepov were being held in Vladimir Prison, and both survived the imprisonment.75

  Back in March of 1945, Abakumov had reported to Beria that in all, SMERSH operatives had arrested 169 leaders and active members of anti-Soviet emigrant organizations in Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia.76

  Hungary

  After Yugoslavia, the troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front marched into Hungary, where the 2nd Ukrainian Front had already begun encircling Budapest. Although the details are unknown, at the time Abakumov was already involved in Hungarian affairs. On September 23, 1944, a Hungarian delegation headed by Baron Ede Atzel crossed the front line and was captured by SMERSH operatives of the 4th Ukrainian Front.77 The delegation represented the undergro
und Hungarian Independent Movement and included Joseph Dudas, one of the Hungarian Communist leaders. The Hungarians wanted to discuss the possibility of an armistice.78

  The delegation was sent to the military intelligence (RU) HQ in Moscow, where it met with General Fyodor Kuznetsov, head of the RU. Then, on Abakumov’s demand, the Hungarians were moved to the GUKR SMERSH and, apparently, interrogations followed. On September 29, the Hungarians were sent back to the 4th Ukrainian Front, and two of them were wounded while crossing the front line. It remains unclear why Abakumov wanted to control the Hungarian negotiators.

  Abakumov’s personal representative also tried to take control of the second (now official) delegation of the Hungarian government, headed by General Gabor Faragho, which crossed the front line on September 28 at the location of the 1st Ukrainian Front. Kuznetsov, acting on Stalin’s order, took control of the delegates and brought them to Moscow.

  On December 8, 1944, SMERSH operatives of the 2nd Ukrainian Front arrested Gerrit van der Waals (a Dutch lieutenant, who, after having been taken prisoner by the Germans, escaped and worked for British Intelligence SOE in Budapest), and Karl (Karoly) Schandl, a young Hungarian lawyer and a member of an underground resistance organization who accompanied van der Waals.79 Van der Waals had important military information for British Intelligence SOE and planned to cross the Soviet front line in order to reach his intelligence contact. On December 6, van der Waals and Schandl naively reported to the Soviet troops who had just arrived, and they were taken into custody. As Schandl stated later, on December 12 they were interrogated separately and the interrogator ‘asked why they had helped the British and the Americans in Budapest and not the Russians’.80 On January 2, 1945, van der Waals and Schandl were taken to Bucharest, and two weeks later they arrived in Moscow by way of Kiev. They were put under the jurisdiction of the 2nd GUKR SMERSH Department.

  Van der Waals and Schandl became victims of the Allies’ general misunderstanding of the Soviet attitude toward agents of the Allies. Nicola Sinevirsky described what a SMERSH officer told him in Prague in May 1945: ‘It is quite evident that British Intelligence is slipping,’ he said. ‘I am really amazed at the British… They instruct their agents very badly. Any agent, regardless of whom he works for, must remember, and remember well all his life, that he dare not, at any time or anywhere, disclose the fact that he is an agent… The answer is obvious. Death to Spies.’81 In other words, SMERSH arrested everyone who declared himself to be a British agent.

  On December 24, 1944, fighting began inside Budapest while SMERSH operatives continued making arrests. On January 23, 1945, a UKR official of the 2nd Ukrainian Front reported on the arrests between January 1 and January 20, 1945:

  On the whole, 48 [agents] were arrested. Of them:

  Agents of German intelligence 39

  Agents of Hungarian intelligence 7

  Agents of German Counterintel.[ligence]organs 2

  […]

  In addition, during this period five officials of the Hungarian intelligence service and three representatives of the diplomatic corps were detained. This number includes:

  Employees of the Swedish Embassy in Budapest 2

  Employees of the Hungarian Consulate in Romania 1

  According to their nationalities, they are:

  Hungarians 6

  Swedes 1

  Slovak 1.82

  The Swede was the well-known Raoul Wallenberg, while the Slovak was the diplomat Jan Spišjak (pronounced Spishak).

  Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish businessman trained as an architect, arrived in Budapest on July 9, 1944 as Secretary to the Swedish Legation.83 In this capacity he represented the Utrikesdepartementet (UD), the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, as well as the War Refugee Board, an American governmental organization established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in January 1944. That board was a U.S. executive agency created to aid civilian victims of the Nazi and Axis powers, especially the European Jews.84 Hungary was the last country in Europe where a considerable population of approximately 250,000 Jews still existed, mostly in Budapest. Although on July 6 Admiral Miklos Horthy, the Hungarian regent (really a dictator), ordered the suspension of deportations of the Jews under German supervision to extermination camps in Poland, it was only a matter of time until the deportations resumed. During a short period Wallenberg organized measures that eventually saved the lives of thousands of Budapest Jews, including the printing and distribution of Schutzpasses, protective passports recognized by both the Hungarians and the Germans.

  Wallenberg’s work was facilitated by the fact that he belonged to an extremely powerful family in Sweden. His elder second cousins, the brothers Jacob and Marcus Wallenberg, owned an enormous financial and industrial empire, and were also on familiar terms with the Swedish government. While staying in Budapest, Raoul used the brothers’ Stockholms Enskilda Bank as a conduit for funding for his humanitarian work.

  However, there was also a negative aspect of this blood relationship. During the whole war, the Svenska Kullagerfabriken AB, a ball-bearing factory that was the main enterprise of the Wallenberg brothers, supplied mostly Germany, but also England and the Soviet Union, with ball bearings that were crucial for the military industry. Because of their continuing supplying of Germany, the relationship of the brothers with the U.S. and England became extremely tense in 1943–44, and this had consequences for the brothers after the war.

  As for Jan Spišjak, no doubt he was unpleasantly surprised by the detention. Although he represented the government of the Axis country, before the war, from 1940 to 1941, he had provided Soviet diplomats in Budapest with important intelligence information, and could expect better treatment at the hands of Soviet counterintelligence.85

  At first Wallenberg and Spišjak were ‘detained and guarded’, but not arrested.86 A Soviet military report stated that on January 13, 1945, Wallenberg, along with Vilmos Langfelder, an engineer who was Wallenberg’s driver, approached the soldiers of the 7th Guard Army of the 2nd Ukrainian Front fighting in Pest. Wallenberg ‘refused to go to the rear because, as he said, he was responsible for about 7,000 Jewish citizens in the eastern part [Budapest consists of the western part Buda and eastern part Pest divided by the Danube River] of the city’.87 Wallenberg asked to meet with high-level Soviet commanders and to send a telegram to Stockholm to inform the Foreign Office of his whereabouts. The head of the Political Department of the 151st Rifle Division reported Wallenberg’s detention to his superior, and the head of the Political Department of the 7th Guard Army issued an order ‘to forbid Raoul Wallenberg to have contacts with the outside world’.88 Later Langfelder told his cell mate in Lubyanka Prison in Moscow that Wallenberg had never reached Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, commander of the 2nd Ukrainian Front, with whom he intended to discuss the 7,000 Jewish survivors in Budapest he was responsible for.

  Colonel General Matvei Zakharov, head of HQ of the 2nd Ukrainian Front, reported Wallenberg’s detention to Nikolai Bulganin, Stalin’s new deputy.89 From the end of 1944, military commanders reported to Stalin through Bulganin. However, Abakumov still reported directly to Stalin and SMERSH issues, such as the question of Wallenberg’s arrest, were decided by Stalin himself.

  On January 17, 1945, Bulganin answered Zakharov: ‘Raoul Wallenberg should be arrested and brought to Moscow. The necessary orders have been given to counterintelligence “SMERSH.”’90 On January 19, Wallenberg and Langfelder were arrested.91 Persons like Wallenberg and Langfelder, arrested without arrest warrants and detained, were called the spetskontingent or special contingent.

  On January 22, Nikolai Korolev, head of the UKR of the 2nd Ukrainian Front, sent a list of addresses of embassies in Budapest to the head of the SMERSH operational group with a footnote stating that the list was ‘based on data in the Reference Book received by the Political Directorate of the front from Ambassador of Slovakia SPASHEK [Spišjak], as well as on the basis of [blank, where a word was erased—possibly “interrogations”] of the detained [si
c!—not arrested] Secretary of the Swedish Legation in Budapest, Wallenberg.’92 Most probably, Wallenberg was interrogated at the OKR of the 18th Rifle Corps. On January 25, Wallenberg and Langfelder were put on a train, under guard.93 After arriving in Moscow on February 6, they were taken to Lubyanka Prison. The events that followed will be described elsewhere.

  Interestingly, witnesses in Budapest reported to Stockholm the actual true date of Wallenberg’s arrest:

  Mr. Raoul Wallenberg, attaché of the Swedish legation in Hungary, was arrested on January 17th by Russian military authorities. Some letters written in prison have been received from him, but he has now disappeared. In Stockholm it is believed that he has been killed, because he was fearless and would never have refrained from speaking the truth.94

  On January 27, 1945, Bulganin ordered Spišjak and two Swiss diplomats, Max Meier and Harald Feller, to be arrested and sent back to Moscow.95 They were transported there as SMERSH prisoners guarded by NKVD convoy troops. Two years later, on January 8, 1947, after interrogations in Moscow, Spišjak was handed over to the Czechoslovak security service, to stand trial in Prague.96 Meier and Feller were luckier, eventually being exchanged for Soviet citizens arrested in Switzerland.