New Light on Old Spies: Soviet Intel Revelations #1
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Today we begin a series on the Soviet Intelligence agencies. We will post other Cold War secrets as well including China’s role in Korea and the Soviet role in Vietnam but this series will continue for a while. It will also include an episode of THE SWORD AND THE SHIELD and other documentaries not shown in the U.S. with each post. Today’s post is direct from the CIA. This information has been available for decades, yet U.S. academia, historians and Hollywood continue the myth that the Soviets did not infiltrate nations and spy. Please show your support by becoming a paid subscriber. Thanks.
Richard Sorge
When surfacing the GRU, the Soviet authorities chose to highlight Richard Sorge, the German citizen whose exploits for Soviet military intelligence in China and Japan before the second world war, although never revealed in the Soviet Union, have been known in the West for almost two decades. Sorge's career in espionage, and especially his penetration of the Japanese government and the German embassy in Tokyo, had been earlier examined in detail by General Charles Willoughby, Hans Otto Meissner, and Chalmers Johnson.1 Their works, although differing in detail and interpretation of events, are largely based on reports of the Japanese investigation of the Sorge network and certain memoirs and secondary publications. All are inaccurate in varying degrees. The Japanese investigation, the principal non-Communist source on the case, was inadequately handled and left many unanswered questions but did supply the broad outlines of the affair. David Dallin, it should be noted, has barely mentioned the case.2 As of 1965, little had been added to our knowledge of the operation.
Richard Sorge has been surfaced in the Soviet Union by means of a series of newspaper articles and popular books. His glorification was begun in late 1964 with an article by Viktor Mayevskiy in Pravda.3 Written after a visit to Sorge's grave in Tokyo, this article is an unrelieved panegyric on its subject. Other articles on Sorge in the Soviet central and provincial press quickly followed. Ya. Gorev, who is said to have served in the GRU with Sorge in Berlin, presented what seems to be an official account of Sorge's career.4 Gorev claims to have helped prepare Sorge for his Far East assignment and to have operated near him there. His use of Sorge's letters and messages indicates that he had access to official files, but he has furnished little new data on the case. Sorge is presented as a paragon of virtue; his weakness for alcohol and women is ignored. Gorev's version of the Sorge operation generally corresponds to that presented by Meissner and Willoughby. In all probability he drew heavily on these sources.
Although Moscow has for some reason suppressed Gorev's account, the glorification campaign has continued unabated since late 1964. Persons who knew Sorge even slightly have given interviews for publication. On occasion, these individuals have admitted they did not know Sorge was engaged in intelligence work. Gerhardt Eisler has contributed a short memoir.5 V. Kudryavtsev, a Tass correspondent in Tokyo during 1931-1937, told of meeting Sorge and Branko Vukelic in Japan.6 He had no knowledge of their intelligence work at the time. Gerhard Stuchlik and Horst Pehnert, East German journalists, wrote a series of articles drawing on those by Mayevskiy and Gorev, interviews with Max Klausen, Sorge's radio operator, and with Gerhardt Eisler, and such Western sources as Meissner and Willoughby.7 Except for certain details on Sorge's early life, these add relatively little.
Several people living outside the Soviet Union have recently contributed reminiscences of Sorge. Kai Moltke and Richard Jensen, former Communists, have written of Sorge's stay in Denmark during 1928.8 Sorge's wife Christine has published a short and uninformative memoir in a Swiss periodical.9 None of these accounts makes any significant contribution to an understanding of the Sorge operation.
A popular, semi-fictional version of Sorge's career was carried by the Soviet periodical Ogonek, beginning on 28 February 1965. Its authors, Sergey Golyakov and Vladimir Ponosovskiy, fail to throw new light on the case. They present Sorge as declaring himself a Soviet citizen to his Japanese jailers. A sizable paperback edition of this series (300,000 copies) was published early in 1965.10
It is clear that the Soviet authorities wish to present Sorge as a popular hero but have no desire at this time to publish an accurate history of his intelligence operation. By decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, on 5 November 1964 he was posthumously awarded the title, Hero of the Soviet Union. In January 1965, Max Klausen was awarded the Order of the Red Banner and his wife Anna received the Order of the Red Star. Branko Vukelic was posthumously awarded the Order of the Patriotic War (First Degree). The East German Government has conferred on Max and Anna Klausen the Gold Medal of Merit of the National People's Army. But perhaps the most significant honor bestowed on Sorge was the issuance, early in 1965, of a Soviet stamp bearing his portrait. He thus joins Nathan Hale as an intelligence agent who has been paid philatelic honors by his government. No further proof is required of the intention of the Soviet authorities to add Sorge to the Soviet pantheon.
Colonel Lev Yefimovich Manevich
Soviet authorities have also seen fit to give publicity to an obscure officer of the GRU surfaced under the name of Colonel Lev Yefimovich Manevich. This man was made posthumously a Hero of the Soviet Union in early 1965,12 presumably for wartime services. He is credited in the Soviet press with service in an unidentified foreign country, possibly Germany or German-occupied Europe. According to the Soviet accounts he was betrayed through the cowardice of an assistant and imprisoned in German concentration camps, where he was known under the name Ya. N. Starostin. Before his death from tuberculosis at the Ebensee camp in Austria on 12 May 1945, he is said to have confided to a fellow inmate, one Grant Gregoryevich Ayrapetov, that his cryptonym was Etienne and to have asked that the Soviet authorities be notified.
Manevich is portrayed as a devoted intelligence agent who continued his work despite serious illness. According to Ayrapetov, Manevich compiled files on Soviets in Vlassov's unit, on followers of Bandera, the Ukrainian nationalist leader, and on other collaborators, all of which he turned over to one F. N. Dontsov for transmittal to the Soviet authorities. Interviews with Manevich's sister and Ayrapetov have appeared in the Soviet provincial press.13 The reason for surfacing Manevich in particular is unclear, unless the script called for an intelligence agent whose activities could be related to the second world war. This criterion could also be applied to Sorge.
One former chief of Soviet military intelligence, a victim of the great purge, has recently been rehabilitated, apparently as part of this publicity campaign. Yu. Geller has written a brief account of the career of Semen Petrovich Uritskiy, chief of the GRU between 1935 and 1937 until he was purged and executed by Stalin. Only the most general information on Uritskiy's career is given. His intelligence work is passed over with the excuse that it cannot yet be made public, but he is credited with having directed officers of the caliber of Sorge and Manevich.14
The German portion of the loosely connected Soviet wartime espionage operation now known as Rote Kapelle has been surfaced in the guise of a German resistance movement. Through the device of an interview with Greta (Margareta) Kuckhoff, a member of the group and presently a banking official in East Germany, the Soviet authorities have lifted a corner of the veil that still covers their wartime military intelligence operations in Europe.15 Rote Kapelle (the Nazi origin of this name is admitted by the Soviets) is portrayed as an antifascist group that began to take shape before the Hitler dictatorship was established. Although the upper-class origin of its leaders, Arvid Harnack and Harro Schulze-Boysen, and of other members is admitted, a determined effort is made to show that it also contained many persons of working-class origin. The espionage role of the group is presented in rather incidental fashion, without emphasis. No mention is made of the GRU networks that existed in France, Belgium, Holland and Switzerland. Greta Kuckhoff presents East Germany as the heir to the cause for which the Rote Kapelle fought.
Col. Rudolf Abel
The admission to the Soviet people that the state security service, long portrayed as a defensive, counterintelligence arm of the state, does in fact engage in peacetime espionage abroad is equally dramatic. By virtue of its internal, repressive activity, the security service is only too well known to the Soviet population. Few Soviet citizens can have avoided some brush with the heavy hand of the security component, but equally few of them have known until recently what every literate Westerner has long known, that the state security service is also a principal arm of Soviet espionage abroad. In keeping with the dogma that only aggressive imperialist states engage in espionage, the existence of the First Chief Directorate of the security service, the foreign arm, was never admitted. The surfacing of its espionage in foreign countries, therefore, represents a major shift in Soviet intelligence policy.
This policy shift was signaled by an article on the career of Col. Rudolf Abel that appeared in Nedelya (The Week) during May 1965.16
According to its author, Abel was born in a city near the Volga, entered the state security service about 1927, and worked before and during World War II as an intelligence agent against Germany, being covered as a member of the German minority in Latvia. It is significant that Abel's espionage activity after the war is shown as motivated by a personal desire to neutralize the activity of "fascist criminals" who had taken refuge in the West. The theme of working against Nazi criminals presumably would be popular with the Soviet people and fits the time-honored portrayal of state security as a defensive organization.
Colonel Abel is also the hero of a novel by Vadim Kozhevnikov now being serialized in Znamya, the organ of the Union of Writers.17 Kozhevnikov's novel has not yet appeared in book form in the USSR. It is also being serialized in the Yugoslav newspaper Borba.
According to the author, Abel's true name is Aleksandr Ivanovich Belov. Since the work is frankly fiction, however, none of the data it contains can be accepted without verification. The significant fact is that the Soviet government has thus belatedly chosen to portray Abel as a hero Chekist employed in espionage abroad.
The theme of work against postwar Nazis, it is interesting to note, also appears in the purported memoirs of Gordon Lonsdale (Conon Molody), the state security officer who was convicted of espionage in the United Kingdom and later exchanged for Greville Wynne, a British subject involved in the Penkovskiy trial. Lonsdale claims that he wished to operate against former Nazis who were employed in the United Kingdom. The Lonsdale "memoirs," which have been serialized in the British press18 but not published in the USSR are clearly designed as a deception operation. Their accounts of his Canadian birth, a childhood spent in Poland, and intelligence work with Colonel Abel in the United States before going to the United Kingdom are, from evidence on hand, complete fabrications. They are designed to confuse Western intelligence services, sow dissension between the British and American governments, and denigrate both British security and British justice. Any truth they may contain is merely incidental to these purposes.
To understand why the Soviets began admitting to their citizens the role of their Intelligence agencies here is the full CIA study with footnotes:
Why the Soviets admitted their role in espionage
Behind the paywall: István Rév: The Hungarian Revolution and Its Discontents
The Hungarian Revolution and Its Discontents The 1956 Hungarian Revolution and its revolutionary bodies have been desecrated, buried, and reburied countless times. Even today, they are not allowed to rest. Istvan Rev, Istvan Rev, Professor of History and Political Science at the Central European University and Director of the Open Society Archives, will present the different perceptions, receptions, and interpretations of the 1956 Revolution in Hungary in a conversation with Ivan Krastev (IWM)—an entry point for understanding the contemporary politics in the country.
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