7

Death to Spies

One man who desperately wanted to get on an American plane and leave for Italy with the returning Flying Fortresses was Maurice Reymond. A captain in the French Army before the war, he had been brought to central Ukraine under uncertain circumstances by the Germans and remained there when Soviet forces recaptured the region in the fall of 1943. Reymond made contact with the American commanders in late May 1944. With the second front opened in France on June 6, he hoped that the Americans would fly him to Italy or North Africa, where he could join his compatriots. But the Red Army counterintelligence officers who monitored Reymond’s visits to the Poltava base were determined to prevent that by all means possible. They trusted neither Reymond, whom they suspected of being a spy for the Germans, nor the Americans. Reymond would stay in Poltava under secret-police surveillance.¹

“Allies are allies, but it must not be forgotten that the USA is an imperialist country, and there will probably be spies and saboteurs in the contingent,” wrote Vladlen Gribov, recalling the indoctrination he and his colleagues had received before the arrival of the first Americans at the Myrhorod base. They were also told to be careful when talking to one another, as they could be overheard: “among the Americans there will be those who conceal their knowledge of Russian.” Finally, they were ordered to “count legs,” meaning the number of crew members who arrived with each Flying Fortress. Upon landing, the Americans left the plane through an open hatch in the floor of the aircraft, legs first. The number of crew members was supposed to be ten, therefore the number of legs twenty. Should there be more, the Soviet mechanics were instructed to write down, unobtrusively, the number of the plane with extra passengers and report it to the counterintelligence officials.²

Reports filed by Red Army officers and soldiers would eventually reach the desks of the officers of the Soviet military counterintelligence service known as SMERSH (Smert’ shpionam), which stood for “Death to Spies.” The formation of SMERSH was part of a major reorganization of the security services by Joseph Stalin after the Battle of Stalingrad. As the Red Army began to drive out the German occupiers, Stalin decided to improve the counterintelligence work supervised by his security tsar, People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs Lavrentii Beria. The dictator apparently feared a drastic increase in the number of spies not only from behind the German lines but also among the population of the newly recaptured territories. A special Commissariat of State Security was formed under the command of Beria’s former deputy, Vsevolod Merkulov, and charged with civil counterintelligence. Another part of Beria’s counterintelligence empire was subordinated to his other deputy, Viktor Abakumov, and incorporated into the People’s Commissariat of Defense. Stalin personally named it SMERSH. Two smaller SMERSH outfits were created within the People’s Commissariat of the Navy, and under Beria’s command in the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, but Abakumov’s SMERSH maintained its status as the country’s main counterintelligence agency, with its boss reporting directly to Stalin.

The American air bases in Ukraine became the responsibility of Commissar of State Security Second Class Abakumov and his SMERSH outfit, whose main task was combating German spies. The powerful apparatus of SMERSH officers and informers was now turned against the Americans. Whatever the state of Soviet-American relations at the highest level, Abakumov and his men were to act on the assumption that the Americans had come to Ukraine not so much to fight the Germans as to spy on the Soviets.

They built up a huge network of informers, reminding Red Army personnel that their American allies were “capitalists” hostile to the Soviet regime. Ironically, those American officers friendliest toward the Soviets were considered the main threat, as they could not only spy more effectively but disseminate politically harmful views. SMERSH sought to keep the allies separate, trying to disrupt any unauthorized contact between the American airmen, their Red Army counterparts, and the local population. No similar arrangements were ever put in place or even contemplated in the United States with regard to the Soviet officials or the hundreds and thousands of Soviet sailors who visited the American mainland to pick up supplies under the terms of the Lend-Lease program. Soviet suspicion of and spying on the Americans was a peculiar feature of the Grand Alliance.

Given the political importance of the Poltava-area air bases, Abakumov decided to send an officer of the central SMERSH apparatus there. Lieutenant Colonel Konstantin Sveshnikov was the deputy head of the SMERSH department overseeing counterintelligence activities among the Red Army airborne troops. Given the location of the bases, Sveshnikov seemed a natural choice. Now in his mid-thirties, a native of central Russia, he had been recruited into military intelligence in 1932 while serving with the Red Army in Ukraine. He spent the rest of the decade there, rising through the ranks of the military intelligence apparatus. At the time of the German invasion in June 1941, he was in charge of the counterintelligence department of an Air Force division stationed in the city of Uman, on the other side of the Dnieper from Poltava, Myrhorod, and Pyriatyn. He was therefore well prepared for the Poltava appointment and quite conversant with local conditions.³

Sveshnikov came to Poltava in the second half of April 1944. On April 30, in his first direct report to Abakumov, Sveshnikov informed his boss of the German bomb uncovered in the basement of the only surviving building at the Poltava airfield. The matter attracted the attention of Stalin himself and Sveshnikov used that to raise matters that required the approval of his superiors. In particular, he wanted to replace the commanding officers of the SMERSH department of the Sixty-Eighth Air Base Region—the entity created by the Red Army Air Force to service the Poltava bases. He also asked for more officers and undercover agents to be posted at each of the three bases. Sveshnikov soon received reinforcements. The new commander of the regional SMERSH department became Major Anatolii Zorin, a counterintelligence officer who had joined the Red Army in 1939 after graduating from an engineering school. By late May 1944, Sveshnikov and Zorin were working as a team, running the SMERSH networks at the Poltava air bases and co-signing the more important reports to Abakumov.⁴

Their first joint report was filed on May 25, a week before the arrival of the Flying Fortresses. They reported on their first successes in carrying out the tasks assigned them by SMERSH headquarters, which included “preventing the penetration of our territory by Allied agents,” “uncovering German intelligence agents,” and “timely uncovering of subversive activity by anti-Soviet elements.” The last two tasks were standard wartime functions of SMERSH units, but the first was unusual. The main foreign power against which Sveshnikov and Zorin were now supposed to work was not Germany but the United States, a partner in the Grand Alliance. Of the 1,090 Americans posted at the Poltava-area bases, 30 had knowledge of Russian and were considered to be potential spies. Four American officers were soon suspected of conducting espionage or anti-Soviet propaganda, simply because of their efforts to establish close contacts with Soviet citizens or sharing American publications with them.⁵

Believing that the best defense was offense, Sveshnikov and Zorin asked permission to employ both experienced and freshly recruited agents to act against these Americans. They were eager to use Red Army officers and technicians in that effort. Sveshnikov and Zorin already had eight agents among the eighty-six Red Army staff officers posted at the three bases and planned to recruit four or five new ones, which would give them roughly one agent for every six officers. Their plans for recruitment among the technicians were even more ambitious. They knew that American planes, as noted earlier, were serviced by four-man crews—a senior American technician and three Soviets—and they wanted one Soviet on every crew to be an agent. The extended network of agents required additional officers to run it, as well as money to pay the agents. Zorin requested an additional 20,000 rubles in a memo that he sent to Moscow on May 24.

Air base security was another SMERSH concern. They planned to recruit agents among the guards securing the bases, soldiers guarding the bomb depots, and local residents. The latter were supposed to be on the lookout for strangers, possible German spies, and any sign of hostile activities. Sveshnikov and Zorin also took measures to deal with unreliable elements among Red Army units serving at the bases and among the general population. They asked for the removal and reassignment of 120 soldiers who had either been in German captivity or lived under German occupation. Local Security Commissariat officers removed any suspicious elements from the entire region of the bases, resettling them to the Stalingrad or Donets industrial basins, where they worked on reconstructing the damaged industrial enterprises and coal mines.

Sveshnikov and Zorin knew that Americans would seek female companionship, and saw this as an opportunity. According to their report, on the weekend of May 20 and 21 more than one hundred Americans had a day’s leave in Poltava, where many of them tried to become friendly with local women. “We consider it expedient to lead them [the Americans] into the circle of our female civilian secret service, through whom we would investigate them and their contacts,” reported Sveshnikov and Zorin, who were already working with officers of the local branch of the Commissariat of Internal Affairs to recruit women among the local population.⁶

Commissar Abakumov responded to the queries from Sveshnikov and Zorin on June 1, a week after they filed their report. He ordered them to be cautious: “Agents should not be put into contact with the Americans deliberately, but if the Americans become acquainted with our female agents, that should be exploited. In order to take better care of the matter, recruitment of agents among the locals (women) should be intensified.” With regard to the other issues raised by the Poltava officers, from finding the best way of registering American crews arriving on shuttle missions to the recruitment of new agents among Red Army personnel and locals, Abakumov advised his subordinates to work with Red Army commanders and the local counterintelligence branch of the Commissariat of Internal Affairs.⁷

The first new agent recruited to work with and against the Americans was the twenty-three-year-old Captain Viktor Maksimov. Maksimov knew some English and had been sent to Poltava from Red Air Force headquarters in Moscow to serve as a key liaison between General Perminov and his American counterpart Colonel Kessler, as well as other US commanders. Maksimov was marked for recruitment as early as April 12, the day SMERSH received its first report on the Poltava-area bases. Maksimov, recruited under the code name “Markov,” was handled personally by Sveshnikov and Zorin. He filed numerous reports on his contacts with the Americans that SMERSH officers used as a basis for compiling their profiles.⁸

Sveshnikov and Zorin also activated existing agents, asking their superiors to send their files to Poltava. Agents “Avtomat,” “Radiator,” “Botkin,” and “Konstantinov” were now reporting on their contacts with the Americans and, more important, on the behavior of their comrades. Agent “Botkin,” who spoke some English, reported to his SMERSH handlers that on June 13 he had had a conversation with Sergeant Boris Sledin, who suggested that with his knowledge of English “Botkin” could become an interpreter and fly with one of the American crews to the United States, where he would do well for himself. It turned out that Sledin was a SMERSH agent himself, recruited back in 1941 under the code name “Shturman.” Agents were now reporting on agents, which seems to have made the SMERSH officers more confident that they were actually in control of what was going on at the bases.⁹

The main targets of the extensive network of agents created by Sveshnikov and Zorin were the Americans, of course. According to Sveshnikov’s report filed on June 14, three days after the return of General Ira Eaker and his Flying Fortresses and Mustangs to Italy, there had been 2,703 Americans at the Poltava-area air bases during the first 10 days of June. Of these, 1,236 were permanent personnel—only 36 more than originally agreed in Moscow. Those who had come on Flying Fortresses and Mustangs as part of Frantic Joe numbered 1,477.

Sveshnikov paid special attention to American ground personnel permanently stationed at the bases. In that category he singled out those who spoke Russian or Ukrainian and were therefore, in Sveshnikov’s opinion, capable of espionage or at least dissemination of anti-Soviet propaganda. He counted eleven officers born in the former Russian Empire and twenty-seven whose families came from its territory. Those who came to Ukraine to help overcome the language barrier between the Soviets and the Americans were vetted by the US Air Force command to exclude individuals hostile to the Bolshevik regime for ideological, personal, or family reasons. The Americans were not interested in spying of any sort: the only intelligence officers in their ranks were Air Force personnel whose job was to debrief pilots about their targets and the German defenses encountered on their missions. The Americans were in fact engaged in a charm offensive, seeking to persuade the Soviets that they could do business together and open new air bases, particularly in the Soviet Far East. But the SMERSH officers were unaware of that and would not have believed it even if they had been told about it—or perhaps especially if they had been so informed.¹⁰

Between May 25 and June 14, 1944, Sveshnikov and Zorin identified close to a dozen Americans in the Poltava-area bases whom they suspected of espionage. Close to the top of the SMERSH list of suspects was one of the original planners of Frantic and the veteran of the Poltava base Major Albert Lepawsky. As we have seen, Lepawsky had originally called the operation Baseball. Born in Chicago in 1907 to a family of Jewish emigrants from the Russian Empire, Lepawsky had had an impressive academic career at the University of Chicago. A student of Charles Edward Merriam, the founder of the behavioral approach to political science, Lepawsky got his PhD at the age of twenty-three and went on to write a number of influential monographs, essays, and reports on city government and management of natural resources. In the 1930s he divided his time between the university and city government, where he held a number of positions. In early 1942, when Lepawsky joined the Air Force in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, he vacated a number of positions. His former employers in the Chicago city government had to look for a new research director of the Law Department, a new assistant director of the Public Administration Clearing House, and a new director of the Federation of Tax Administrators. The university had to search for a new director of the Institute of Public Service.¹¹

A strong proponent of the New Deal, Lepawsky not only believed that he had to serve his country in military uniform in wartime but also welcomed the alliance with his ancestral homeland. The 1917 Revolution had turned the Russian Empire into the Soviet Union, the birthplace of the socialist experiment, with which Lepawsky sympathized without ever endorsing it. For all that he thought his baseball analogy—with home field and visitors and base paths—was useful and effective, Lepawsky was fully aware of the differences between the American and Soviet “teams.” He wrote: “The other Ball team is a unique ally with a state of mind and system of politics few of us understand.”¹²

Lepawsky probably never imagined how right he was with regard to the Soviet officials’ state of mind. As early as May 25, Colonel Sveshnikov put him on the list of suspects for showing too much interest in establishing contacts with Red Air Force officers and local inhabitants. He reported to Moscow what he had learned about Lepawsky so far: that he had studied in Chicago, London, and Berlin, and was currently serving as adjutant to the US commanding officer of the Poltava base. Sveshnikov asked Moscow whether SMERSH officers there knew anything else about Lepawsky. They responded that since Lepawsky’s arrival in Moscow with part of the “first echelon” of US Air Force officers to prepare Frantic in February 1944, they had kept him and other American officers under surveillance until his departure for Poltava in mid-April.

At 10:20 p.m. on April 14, the day before Lepawsky left Moscow for Poltava, the Soviet surveillance team spotted him leaving the Hotel Nationale, where he had a meeting with an unidentified man. After exiting the hotel, the two walked for a while, speaking what the agents identified as a foreign language. Lepawsky then returned to his hotel, while the unidentified man entered a house on Petrovka Street in downtown Moscow. He was soon identified as Isaak Zvavich, a professor of history at Moscow University. Born to a Jewish family in Odesa in 1906, Zvavich had graduated from the University of London and served as a consultant to the Soviet embassy in Britain in the mid-1920s. Since 1928 he had taught at Moscow colleges, researching nineteenth-century Russian diplomatic history and becoming one of the leading Soviet experts on Britain and British history. According to the secret-police report, Zvavich was married, well off, and occupied a large well-furnished room in a communal apartment in downtown Moscow.¹³

That was all that Moscow counterintelligence could offer on Lepawsky. Sveshnikov and Zorin were determined to follow their instincts. Lepawsky’s background made him a natural suspect, as did his knowledge of Russian, which, according to the SMERSH officers, he was hiding from them. They received reports that Lepawsky was getting letters from his family in the United States written in Russian, while telling the Soviets that he did not know or understand the language. They also suspected him of using his position as adjutant as a cover for his intelligence work. “He systematically visits our headquarters under the pretext of carrying out certain insignificant assignments,” reported Sveshnikov to Moscow. He continued: “Lepawsky carefully studies our officer and civilian staff, taking an interest in those of his military personnel who have any dealings with Russians.” For a person of Lepawsky’s origins, background, and rank it was virtually impossible to perform any function at the bases without arousing suspicion. He remained on Sveshnikov and Zorin’s list of suspects, although they had no hard evidence that he was spying.¹⁴

A special category of suspects consisted of American officers who had no ancestral ties with the former Russian Empire and did not speak the local languages yet nonetheless, at least in the opinion of SMERSH, held anti-Soviet views and were engaged in spreading anti-Soviet propaganda. The chief surgeon at the US air bases, Lieutenant Colonel William Jackson, a native of Tennessee, was at the very top of that list. Apart from holding and sharing what were considered to be anticommunist views, Jackson showed interest in establishing contacts with locals, especially women. He had arrived in Moscow on March 21 with the “second echelon” of US officers who came to make preparations for the opening of the Poltava-area bases. He made exceptionally productive use of his time in Moscow, visiting hospitals and writing a detailed report on the state of the Soviet health care system and medical profession, which he estimated to be some fifty years behind that of the United States.

Jackson left for Poltava on April 14. Together with his subordinates, he proceeded to set up medical facilities at each of the three bases and provide appropriate sanitary conditions for the resident Americans. He often had to deal with delicate issues, such as persuading Soviet officers to improve the latrines and bathing facilities. But those were not the issues that got Jackson into trouble with the Soviet authorities. On May 25, Colonel Sveshnikov added Jackson to the list of US officers about whom he requested additional information from Moscow, alleging that the American officer was actively seeking contacts with the Soviets. On the same day, Sveshnikov filed another report that named Jackson as one of two US Air Force officers who were purportedly distributing English-language literature deemed to be of anti-Soviet orientation to Red Air Force personnel.¹⁵

SMERSH headquarters in Moscow had more information on Jackson’s stay in Moscow than they had had on Lepawsky. Secret-police surveillance of Jackson’s suite in the Hotel Nationale in Moscow, where he stayed in March and April 1944, revealed that he was actively seeking contacts with local women. On March 27, less than a week after Jackson’s arrival, the secret police intercepted his telephone call to a Moscow apartment. Jackson had called a young woman named Zoia, who did not speak English very well. On April 3, close to 11:00 p.m., a secret-police surveillance team spotted two young women leaving the Hotel Nationale after visiting Jackson’s suite and that of another US officer. One of them was later identified as the twenty-one-year-old Zoia Guseva. At 10:30 p.m. on April 13, Jackson’s last day in Moscow, the surveillance team followed to their homes five young women who had visited Jackson and another officer at the hotel. One of them, Zinaida Pashinina, was eighteen years old.¹⁶

Lieutenant Colonel Jackson’s interest in younger women continued in Poltava. In June, according to later SMERSH reports, he struck up an acquaintance with a local girl, Zinaida Blazhkova, whom he had met through another young woman. Jackson visited Blazhkova on a regular basis and was very generous, according to one of Blazhkova’s acquaintances, bringing her a gift every time: “stockings, candy, new pairs of boots, men’s and women’s shoes, and a military jacket.” Women were not the only SMERSH agents to report on Jackson. Information about him was also provided by Jackson’s Soviet counterpart, Ivan Lebedev, the chief Soviet medical doctor at the Poltava-area bases. He was recruited by SMERSH under the female code-name “Roza.” The Soviet interpreter at the bases, code-named “Soiuznik,” also reported on Jackson’s contacts with the locals.¹⁷

The dissemination of anti-Soviet propaganda was at the very center of SMERSH concerns. On June 14, Sveshnikov and Zorin reported to Moscow that after they had warned the American commanders about the inadmissibility of distributing American publications, such incidents came to a halt. But cases in which Americans, while fixing an aircraft engine or being off duty, shared views deemed to be anti-Soviet with their Soviet counterparts continued. Expatriate GIs who spoke Russian or Ukrainian were deemed the main perpetrators in that regard.

These were often ordinary conversations or comments. “Russia is lagging behind: I traveled 200 miles without seeing any factories or plants, while in America there’s a plant every 15 miles,” said US Air Force Sergeant Michael Lazarchuk to one of his Soviet acquaintances. Lazarchuk confided to the same person, who turned out to be a SMERSH informer, that he was not sure whether he would come back from Ukraine alive, as Stalin might very well order a bombing run on the American bases and blame it on the Germans. In one exchange Odesa-born USAF airmen Peter Nikolaev, all of twenty, told an acquaintance that he was not pleased with the Soviet political order. “Only a small group of communists rule here in Russia and do as they please, but in America it’s the other way around; the people have broader electoral rights.” He considered the US-Soviet alliance fragile. As he told a SMERSH agent, “It’s hard to have faith in Russia. You are now at war with Germany, but at the slightest opportunity you’ll make a treaty with it, and there will be another war.” The officers of the local NKGB, the civil security service, reported that Nikolaev was also displeased with President Roosevelt. He told one of their agents: “I don’t like Roosevelt’s foreign policy, and at the next election I’ll vote against Roosevelt.”¹⁸

SMERSH also reported on instances when the Americans made highly positive remarks about the Soviets—their memo on American reaction to the opening of the second front on June 6, 1944, was full of those. But the main task of SMERSH was to uncover spies and curb treason and anti-Soviet propaganda. The reports filed by mid-June indicated that with their agent network fully set up and regular information on the activities of American personnel beginning to flow in, SMERSH operatives were ready to go full force after their American guests. For the time being, however, the “Death to Spies” squad was merely watching.