20

Poltava Suspects

For many American veterans of the Poltava bases, postwar Berlin brought a sense of déjà vu. It was induced not so much by the bombed-out streets of the two cities as by familiar faces among their counterparts on the other side of the Soviet-American divide and, more importantly, by familiar thoughts, attitudes, and patterns of behavior. The Soviets were not the only ones who relied on their Poltava air base officers to staff their administration of occupied Germany. The Americans were there as well, placing their own “Poltava experts” in the heart of Europe.

Soviet-American encounters that had begun in Poltava continued in Berlin, a city divided into four occupation zones but dominated by representatives of the two postwar superpowers. Americans and Soviets who had met in Poltava found themselves dealing with one another again, ostensibly as allies but more and more as adversaries. The Americans showed little trust in Soviet intentions. The Soviets, for their part, distrusted both the Americans and their own Poltava veterans, investigating all those who had been in contact with the Americans at Poltava or in Berlin. Even Soviet officers who had spied for SMERSH at Poltava now fell under suspicion. The Cold War, a conflict of spies par excellence, was heating up. In Berlin the wartime allies were slowly but surely turning into rivals.

The former commanding officer of the Poltava-based Eastern Command, Major General Robert L. Walsh, who had left Moscow for Washington in November 1944, was back in Europe by the fall of 1946, two years later. Walsh took over the Twelfth Tactical Air Command, stationed in the West German town of Bad Kissingen, and moved to Berlin in April 1947 to become director of intelligence of the European Command under General Lucius D. Clay, the new military governor of Germany. Walsh would remain at that post until his return to the United States in October 1948. As a key advisor to Clay, he played an important role in shaping American policies toward the Soviet Union in the first months of the Cold War.¹

As Walsh assumed his post in Berlin, US-Soviet relations were going from bad to worse. Earlier in the year President Truman had announced a shift in foreign policy that became known as the Truman Doctrine—Western containment of Soviet geostrategic aspirations. He promised money and military assistance to Turkey and Greece, then under pressure from Moscow and its communist satellites. The United States thus took over a role in the Mediterranean that the rapidly imploding British Empire could no longer sustain. In the same year, in a commencement speech at Harvard, Secretary of State George Marshall announced a program of economic assistance to war-torn Europe that came to be known as the Marshall Plan. In Germany, the United States sought to create a West German state by fusing the American, British, and French zones of occupation. The Soviets opposed that policy.²

In Stalin’s view, the Marshall Plan meant the consolidation of American economic, political, and military power in Western Europe and an attempt to lure his new East European dependencies away from the USSR. Well aware that he could not compete with the world’s largest economy, Stalin had little to offer Eastern Europe besides propaganda and coercion. The Kremlin launched military maneuvers in its occupation zone of Germany, provoking rumors that the Allies would have little choice but to leave Berlin. The Soviets soon began to interfere with Allied trains bound for Berlin. The writing seemed to be on the wall: sooner or later the Americans and their allies would have to leave their sectors of Berlin, a city completely surrounded by the Soviet zone of occupation.³

General Clay first began to notice the changes in Soviet behavior in August 1947, when Marshal Vasilii Sokolovsky, Zhukov’s replacement as Supreme Soviet Military Commander in Germany, rejected a proposed American monetary reform that would have affected occupied Germany as a whole and helped it overcome rampaging inflation. Clay did not think that Sokolovsky wanted a military confrontation in Germany but feared that he might be overruled by his superiors. For some time Clay kept his thoughts to himself. In March 1948, however, he spelled out in writing his concerns about a possible military conflict in Berlin. He did so under General Walsh’s pressure and with his assistance.⁴ “Lucius, if you feel there is a good chance of war, we had better get the word to Washington,” said Walsh, a seasoned Soviet hand, to Clay, who had no wartime experience of dealing with the Soviets.

To show that he meant business, Walsh sat down with pen and paper, ready to record Clay’s thoughts. “For many months, based on logical analysis, I have felt and held that war was unlikely for at least ten years,” read the final version of Clay’s memo, cabled to Washington, coincidentally, on Stalin’s birthday, March 5, 1948. “Within the last few weeks, I have felt a subtle change in Soviet attitude which I cannot define but which now gives me a feeling that it may come with dramatic suddenness. I cannot support this change in my own thinking with any data or outward evidence in relationships other than to describe it as a feeling of a new tenseness in every Soviet individual with whom we have official relations.”⁵

Clay’s telegram was forwarded to Secretary of Defense James Forrestal and helped launch an investigation into the possibility of a military confrontation with the Soviets. Most intelligence officials, with the exception of General Walsh, believed that war was unlikely because the Soviets were not ready for a major confrontation. Nonetheless, their political challenge to the Western presence in Berlin was quite apparent. Soon Clay and Walsh got the proof they had lacked in order to make their case about the coming confrontation with the Soviets stronger. On June 24, 1948, in response to the Allies’ announcement of their plans to create a West German state, the Soviets imposed a ground blockade of West Berlin, arguing that given that the country was no longer to be jointly occupied but partitioned, Berlin, located in the Soviet sphere of occupation, would have to be placed under sole Soviet control.

Some in Washington agreed with that logic. Not GeneralWalsh, however, who argued along with Clay against abandoning Berlin. On June 26, two days after the start of the blockade, the US government ordered its Air Force to start providing supplies to besieged West Berlin, using the air corridors negotiated back in 1945 with the help of General Kovalev. The logic of the decision was explained in Walsh’s telegram on the eve of the blockade: “There is no practicability in maintaining our position in Berlin and it must not be evaluated on that basis. … We are convinced that our remaining in Berlin is essential to our prestige in Germany and in Europe. Whether for good or bad, it has become a symbol of the American intent.” Two days after the start of the airlift, which produced the first indications that it might work, President Truman gave it his official blessing.⁶

In October 1948, three months after the airlift started, Walsh was recalled to Washington to become the US Air Force representative to the joint boards of defense for the United States and Canada and the United States and Mexico. The airlift continued, lasting in all for 321 days, with 272,000 flights carried out by American and British cargo planes, mainly C-47 Skytrains and C-54 Skymasters, landing at Tempelhof Airport every 45 seconds. The Soviets retreated in the face of American resolve, superior air power, and sheer economic strength demonstrated by the capacity to supply the besieged city with food, fuel, medicine, clothing and other necessities for almost a year. On May 11, 1949, Moscow announced the end of the blockade, and West Berlin remained under joint American, British, and French control.⁷

General Walsh was not the only US officer with Poltava experience to find himself in Berlin at the start of the Cold War. Another was the former adjutant to the commander of the Poltava air base, Captain George Fischer. He had joined General Clay’s staff in the summer of 1945, when Clay was a deputy to General Eisenhower serving as US military governor of Germany. Fischer’s immediate superior in Berlin was General Clay’s chief of staff, Colonel William Whipple, a graduate of West Point and Princeton and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford who would end his military career with the rank of brigadier general. Whipple’s true passion was civil engineering. His main achievement in Germany was helping Clay to scrap the Morgenthau Plan, once backed by FDR and named for Henry Morgenthau, his Secretary of the Treasury, and which envisioned the deindustrialization of Germany. Rebuilding Germany instead of punishing its civil population was also Fischer’s approach, and he received high praise from Colonel Whipple when George’s journalist father, Louis Fischer, came to Germany to interview American military commanders there. “When I was about to go, Whipple delivered a speech about you. He said you are a wonderful fellow, full of enthusiasm,” wrote Louis to his son after his visit to Berlin.⁸

Fischer’s approach readily found allies among Americans as well as among those Germans who had belonged to the left wing of the German Social Democratic Party, many of them former prisoners of Nazi concentration camps, whose basic beliefs were unshaken by imprisonment. Upon their release by the Allies, they resumed their prewar activities and sought to organize German workers in order to oppose both American capitalism and Soviet communism. Fischer helped the Social Democrats in every possible way, such as by arranging to sell cigarettes and other goods he could acquire at the American headquarters on the black market and then turning over the proceeds to them. Eventually he got into trouble with some of his fellow officers, who suspected him of profiteering. Even his mother stopped sending him American-made watches, which he would sell to the Soviets in order to help fund his cause.⁹

In Berlin Fischer reconnected with two old acquaintances from Moscow. They were friends of his younger brother, Victor: Konrad Wolf, known to his friends as “Koni,” and Lothar Wloch, the son of a German communist who resided in Moscow. Koni and Lothar had fought on opposite sides in the war, Koni with the Soviet forces and Lothar with the Nazis. In 1943, at the age of seventeen, Koni had enlisted in the Red Army, becoming an officer in the foreign propaganda unit of the political directorate of one of the Soviet armies. After the fighting was over, Koni’s close friend, a fellow German interpreter named Vladimir Gall, invited him to join the Culture Department of the Soviet military administration in the city of Halle. Lothar, for his part, returned to his native Germany after his communist father was executed in Stalin’s 1937 purge. He became a Luftwaffe pilot, fighting on the Eastern Front against his former communist friends.¹⁰

As noted, George Fischer’s experiences at Poltava helped change his worldview, leading him to abandon the communist beliefs of his youth. Nothing demonstrated that better than his meeting in Berlin with Koni’s elder brother, Markus “Mischa” Wolf. “He’d been my close chum in 30s Moscow, my best friend among the Red German exiles,” recalled Fischer. They met in 1945 for the first time since George, his brother Victor, and their mother had left the Soviet Union in 1939. Wolf came to Berlin to work for the Free Germany Radio service and write for the Berliner Zeitung, a pro-Soviet German newspaper whose first issue appeared in the Soviet zone of Berlin on May 21, 1945. He would become the newspaper’s reporter at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals. George and Mischa met often in Berlin, but their former cordiality was gone. “He and I talked of nothing personal, only high-up politics,” remembered Fischer. “For Germany, the birth land we had in common, Mischa urged what he called limited democracy. I disagreed, held out at least for a capitalist democracy.”¹¹

Wolf later wrote that he and Fischer were “delighted to see each other again, but it was hard to ignore the prickle of distrust that had entered the relationship.” Wolf criticized his old friend for his contacts with anti-Soviet and anticommunist “schismatics” in the workers’ movement and for the fact that he felt at home among the old social-democratic rebels. Years later, Wolf came to believe that Fischer had ties with American intelligence. In 1949 Mischa Wolf would join the East German diplomatic service, and in 1952 he would become one of the founders of the Stasi foreign intelligence directorate. As noted earlier, he became one of the Cold War’s most cunning and successful spymasters, known in the West as the man with no face, as Western intelligence services struggled to find recent photos of him.¹²

Even without Wolf, Fischer’s presence in Berlin was noted by the Soviet intelligence services, which left no stone unturned in their search for American spies once the Cold War set in. They knew that after leaving the Poltava air base in early May 1945, Fischer had gone to Cairo. In July of that year they spotted him in Berlin, where a former Soviet interpreter at the Poltava base, Second Lieutenant Andrei Sachkov, had visited him in his apartment in the American sector of the city. According to Soviet agents, after his return from Poltava, Fischer bragged “in a circle of American Trotskyists that he had made friends with a Soviet general while he was in the Soviet Union.” Soviet spies failed to establish the identity of this general, who had allegedly spent time in London and then taken Fischer with him to the Yalta Conference.¹³

Red Army military counterintelligence investigated Sachkov in 1953, after his return from Germany to the USSR. Officers at Sachkov’s new place of service, the city of Voroshylovhrad (present-day Luhansk) in eastern Ukraine, wanted to check Sachkov’s bona fides and were especially interested in his relations with George Fischer. They do not appear to have gotten very far in their investigation, and Sachkov survived the ordeal. An alumnus of a prestigious Institute of Military Interpreters (Voennyi institut inostrannykh iazykov), he eventually landed a job in the Foreign Policy Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow. Sachkov’s career rise notwithstanding, Fischer would remain at the top of the Soviet list of American Poltava suspects for years to come.¹⁴

The hunt for American spies associated with the Poltava bases began with the first signs of cooling relations between the USSR and the Western Allies. The first orders to focus on Americans who had served at Poltava were issued by the leadership of the Soviet Ministry of State Security in February 1947. It was then that former SMERSH officers working at the ministry compiled a list of American officers and Soviet citizens suspected of espionage on behalf of the United States. In addition to George Fischer, it included Albert Jaroff, William Kaluta, Peter Nicolaeff, Philip Tandet, Igor Reverditto, and Alex Bebenin. Prominently featured in the list was Samuel Chavkin.¹⁵

With Fischer and other American officers now beyond their reach, Soviet counterintelligence turned its attention to Red Army officers who had been in touch with the Americans and thus might have been recruited as spies. The first to be suspected of spying for the West was an acquaintance of Lieutenant Kaluta’s named Daniil Babich (a Ukrainian, Danylo Babych), the deputy chief navigator of the Soviet 4th Air Force Army. Kaluta was listed in American records at Poltava as a construction engineer, though SMERSH officers considered that he had scarcely been involved in any engineering work, while his fluency in Russian and Ukrainian, along with his outgoing personality, had allowed him to establish numerous contacts with Russian-speaking Red Army officers and local Ukrainians, making him a prime suspect for espionage activities.

In August 1944, SMERSH had gained access to Kaluta’s notebook. There they found the address and office telephone number of Babich, whom Kaluta had first met in Britain. According to SMERSH records, Babich had been there on a “special mission,” inspecting and taking possession of American-built airplanes supplied to the USSR under the Lend-Lease agreement. After his return from Britain, military counterintelligence agents noticed a change in Babich’s attitude toward the Soviet regime. It appeared to them that he had been unduly impressed by the quality of life in wartime Britain, which he compared unfavorably to what he had seen at home. “Babich has expressed dissatisfaction with service, discipline, and the living conditions and provisioning of the officer staff of the Red Army, casting aspersions on the Soviet people and the officer staff of the Red Army. At the same time Babich is praising the living conditions of the English people and their officer staff in particular, asserting that the English officer is a highly cultured, competent individual.”¹⁶

This information was passed on to the counterintelligence officers of the 4th Air Force Army, an Air Force division stationed in Poland and with which Babich had served in 1944, but caused no particular alarm at the time—the Americans and British were still Soviet allies. The situation had changed quite dramatically by the summer of 1947. In June, those counterintelligence officers wrote to their counterparts in the Kyiv Military District asking for information on Babich’s contacts among the Americans.¹⁷

The Kyiv Military District officers were happy to help. They soon reported to the headquarters of the 4th Air Force Army that according to their records William Kaluta had indeed recorded Babich’s address and telephone number in his notebook. Moreover, Kaluta, serving at Poltava, had passed on greetings to Babich, who was then apparently in Moscow. The Kyiv officers supplied a photo of Kaluta with his future wife, Clotilde Govoni, taken at Poltava during Christmas celebrations in 1944. They could not figure out the exact nature of relations between Babich and Kaluta, but Babich’s stay in Britain and what he had said about it to his colleagues made him a prime suspect as a spy for the British. We do not know how the investigation turned out. However, it must have caused Babich a great deal of anxiety and did not help his military career. His name is nowhere to be found among the luminaries of the postwar Soviet Air Force despite his outstanding war record.¹⁸

With the Cold War picking up speed, Soviet military counterintelligence investigated scores of Air Force pilots and technical officers who had served at Poltava. As a rule, such investigations began upon their return to postings in the USSR after having served in Germany. Even those who had been SMERSH informers at Poltava were not above suspicion in the eyes of investigators eager to prove themselves.

One of the suspects was SMERSH’s most active agent at Poltava (indeed the first to be recruited into the SMERSH informant network in April 1944 because of his daily transactions with the Americans)—Captain Viktor Maksimov, an officer in the operations department of the Poltava air base. Maksimov was handled personally by the heads of the SMERSH department at Poltava, Lieutenant Colonel Sveshnikov and Major Zorin. After the war Maksimov was transferred to Berlin, where he worked under General Kovalev in the Air Force department of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAG) and often represented the Soviet side in negotiations with the Western Allies concerning air traffic and air corridors.¹⁹

Maksimov’s subordinates in Germany remembered him as a competent officer, with a good knowledge of English, who was tough on his Russian-speaking American liaisons, whose emigrant families had a Russian background. He also had important connections, including an elder brother, who was thought to be an Air Force attaché in the Soviet embassy in Washington and who held the rank of colonel. None of that seemed to matter to the Army Counterintelligence Department in the city of Kazan, where Maksimov was posted after his return from Germany in January 1953. They were especially interested in his contacts with Fischer, Mishchenko, and Alexander Bebenin. The latter, a captain in the US Air Force and a Poltava veteran, had taken part in the same negotiations in Berlin as General Kovalev and then Major Maksimov.²⁰

Maksimov tried to prove his innocence as best he could, pointing out that he had worked for SMERSH throughout his service at Poltava. His main task, he told the investigators, was collecting information on Americans with whom he came in contact. The Poltava SMERSH opened special files on all of Maksimov’s contacts, which included their profiles. They were updated monthly, and Maksimov claimed to have taken an active part in preparing and updating the profiles. That assertion, checked against the existing Poltava files, appears to have cleared him of suspicion. He retired from the Soviet Army in 1963 with the rank of lieutenant colonel after twenty-five years of service. His postmilitary career was dedicated to teaching the basics of civil defense, an important subject during the Cold War. For almost twenty years he taught civil defense to students of the Kazan Institute of Architecture and Construction before taking full retirement in 1993 at the age of seventy-two.²¹

Military counterintelligence combed the SMERSH Poltava files mainly for evidence of espionage by male officers and civilian personnel employed at or visiting the American bases. Women, however, were not excluded from the hunt for spies. In October 1948, counterintelligence officers of the 12th Air Force Army requested information on Lidia Romashevskaia, who worked as a waitress at the Red Army canteen on the Poltava air base and was suspected of ties with American intelligence because of her contacts with US airmen in 1944–1945.²²

Wives of Red Army Air Force officers also came under suspicion. Counterintelligence officers dug up whatever they could from the SMERSH files on a former nurse at the Poltava base, Maria Solodovnik, a young woman who was married to a senior officer at the base, Lieutenant Colonel Arsenii Bondarenko, and allegedly showed undue interest in the official documents and affairs of his fellow officers. By 1950 Bondarenko, who served with the Soviet Air Force in the Arkhangelsk military district, was under investigation.

At the same time, military counterintelligence began to look into allegations that Natalia Lavlinskaia, who had been only fifteen years old in 1944, was allegedly detained by the Poltava SMERSH for dating an American serviceman. The counterintelligence officers were particularly interested in Lavlinskaia because after the war she married a star pilot and Hero of the Soviet Union, Major Yefim Parakhin. The investigation turned up nothing but probably did not help Parakhin’s career. He retired in 1957 without having been promoted from major and settled in Poltava, where he died in 1997.²³

Maksimov, First Lieutenant Sachkov, and scores of other officers investigated because of their own or their wives’ contacts with Americans at the Poltava-area bases were all exonerated of espionage by secret-police investigations. Still, there is no doubt that their service at Poltava, which brought them face to face with their American counterparts and seemed so promising for their further military careers, turned from an advantage into an impediment as the Cold War began. As many of them were deployed to Berlin in the summer of 1945, their skills were in demand in the new world that the United States and the Soviet Union were supposedly committed to building as allies. As hopes of cooperation dwindled, so did expectations that the diplomatic skills acquired by Soviet officers and interpreters with such effort at Poltava would serve them and their country well in the future. Instead of trusted commanders and experts, the Poltava men became suspects—and remained so for years to come.

The same was true for local Ukrainians who came into contact with Americans in and around the Poltava-area bases. The most difficult fate was the one awaiting women who had dated Americans. The secret police continued to be interested in the love affairs of Stalin’s subjects, nominally entitled to be treated as citizens, long, long after the American pilots had left the bases.