Ivan Serov
In 1965, Serov was expelled from the Communist Party for ‘violations of socialist legality’ during his time as Deputy Commissar of the NKVD under Beria. Given the long list of Serov’s Stalinist atrocities, the vagueness of this charge and the lapse of time since these ‘violations’ had taken place, the charge appears weak and arbitrary, probably intentionally so. In any case, on Khrushchev’s orders following Beria’s death, Serov had destroyed all of the records of the outrages perpetrated by Khrushchev and Serov during Stalin’s reign of terror, so there would have been little or no original evidence to support the charge.
As there is no record of Serov’s whereabouts or activities in 1965, it is not clear whether he was personally informed of his expulsion from the party or whether it was served in absentia (or even posthumously).
I have no particular information that suggests Serov took a personal initiative to plot the assassination of President Kennedy, nor have I read or heard of this possibility elsewhere. Such an act would, however, have been in keeping with Serov’s life history and personality. He was dedicated – in Stalinist style – to the elimination of all ‘enemies of the people’. President John F. Kennedy, the bragging, brash and (to Serov) militant representative of the United States and capitalism, was public enemy number one.
He would undoubtedly have had support from his hard-liner friends Vladimir Kryuchkov and Yuri Andropov (see separate notes on each of them, below), both of whom were in a position to call upon the services of assassination expert Valery Kostikov in Mexico City and other members of the KGB.
What strikes me as odd, however, is the manner in which the Soviet leadership manipulated news of Serov’s disgrace and disappearance after Penkovsky’s trial, and inspired the most unlikely propaganda about what they portrayed as his appalling leadership of the GRU. Virtually all references state that the GRU became an incredibly corrupt and inefficient organisation during Serov’s tenure as its leader.
It was normal in those days for the propaganda machine to distort the truth or tell outright lies, and it was common practice to destroy documents that did not fit in with the wishes of the leadership.
What, exactly, was the Soviet propaganda machine trying to hide?
Victor Suvorov wrote:*
Under Serov’s leadership, corruption in the GRU attained unbelievable proportions. In 1962 he was dismissed and quietly liquidated.
Serov’s was the dirtiest career in the history of the GRU. He displayed a high degree of personal sadism. The years when Serov was chief of the GRU were also the most unproductive in its history. It was the only period when GRU officers voluntarily made contact with Western services and gave them much more valuable information than they took from them.
Ilya Dzhirkvelov wrote:†
They say that every malicious act is ultimately avenged. So it was with Serov, the head of the KGB, whose hands were red with the blood of Soviet people. A specialist in the business of mass deportations, a man without honour or conscience, sadistic and unprincipled, he was himself thrown out of the GRU following the exposure of Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, a British agent with whom Serov had been on friendly terms. Shortly afterwards, after a heavy drinking bout, he shot himself and was found dead in the doorway of a greengrocer’s shop on the Arbat.
Jerrold L. Schecter and Peter S. Deriabin wrote:‡
[After Penkovsky’s exposure] General Ivan Serov was demoted to major general and fired as head of the GRU in March 1963. He was supposed to become assistant chief of staff of the Volga Military District, but never assumed his new post. Serov began drinking heavily and is reported to have committed suicide by shooting himself in an alley in the Arbat after he was expelled from the Communist Party in 1965, following Khrushchev’s ouster.
The website ‘GuideToRussia.com’ (based in the United States) records that Serov committed suicide in 1963.
Most important of all, perhaps, is the bald statement in The Mitrokhin Archive that ‘Ivan Serov blew his brains out in 1963’.§ The Mitrokhin Archive is based on copious notes taken over a number of years from the KGB’s secret intelligence archives by Vasili Mitrokhin, the KGB defector who was brought out of Russia by MI6 in 1992. Did the KGB try to take Serov off the radar in 1963, the year of Kennedy’s assassination?
I have found no evidence to support the contention that the GRU became an incredibly corrupt and inefficient organisation during Serov’s leadership. A study of Soviet intelligence operations during the Cuban Missile Crisis found that neither the KGB nor GRU had sources close enough to the Kennedy administration to accumulate effective intelligence reports on its thinking. However, it was the KGB rather than the GRU that came in for serious criticism of its working methods and discipline:¶
… the KGB appears to have performed extremely poorly in this episode. Fursenko and Naftali describe an organisation obsessed with espionage, unable to integrate secret and open sources, either unable or unwilling to synthesize and interpret, ill-informed about Soviet policy, lacking well-placed informants, reduced to the ignominy of hanging around a parking lot at the crack of dawn to keep a journalist under observation, and – if one of the more plausible versions of the Scali-Fomin story is correct – undisciplined to boot.
Serov was in his mid-fifties during the time he was in charge of the GRU. Although one may not agree with his methods or objectives, he had an excellent record of working hard and well, and of getting results. He had taken the initiative – possibly even taking it away from Khrushchev – in Budapest (when he was fifty) and swiftly turned around a difficult situation for the Soviet Union.
Serov was resurrected – if the rumours of his death had been true – in 1971, by none other than Yuri Andropov who was by then the chairman of the KGB. On 12 February 1971, Andropov reported to the party’s Central Committee that Serov was working on his memoirs.|| He was under KGB surveillance and his dacha was bugged.
What had he been doing during the eight years from 1963 to 1971? Was there a very sound reason why he should be kept – or why he would keep himself – out of the limelight?
Serov eventually died of natural causes on 1 July 1990 at the age of eighty-four. Had he been clinically depressed, or had he taken to excessive drinking, in 1963, it is unlikely he would have lived for another twenty-seven years.
Serov was an excellent drafter of official documents, whether they were reports, proposals or detailed instructions. He could describe incidents, report – or intentionally omit – facts, incorporate innuendos and make coherent proposals; all finely tuned to the requirements of the party or of the specific recipient. This was in large part the reason for his survival throughout Stalin’s purges and the vicissitudes of Khrushchev’s leadership.
His memoirs – if indeed he had been writing them – would have been a masterpiece. Were they suppressed or destroyed because of their content? There is speculation that they were passed to a member of his family.
The demise of the Soviet Union enabled the publication of some KGB records and led to happy meetings and reunions between former American and Soviet Union intelligence officers.** Strangely, none of this refreshing freedom of information appears to have shed any light on the secret life of Serov from 1963 onwards.
The United States Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that there was a ‘high probability’ that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy, but that he was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald’s fatal third shot. The committee believed that Kennedy was ‘probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy’, but that they were ‘unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy’. They did not believe that either the Soviet government or the Cuban government were involved in the assassination; neither did they believe that ‘anti-Castro Cuban groups, as groups, were involved’, but that the evidence ‘does not preclude the possibility that individual members may have been involved’. They believed that ‘the national syndicate of organized crime, as a group, was not involved in the assassination’ but did ‘not preclude the possibility that individual members may have been involved’. The Secret Service, FBI and CIA ‘were not involved in the assassination’.
The committee criticised agencies and departments of the US government for inadequate investigation. The FBI ‘performed with varying degrees of competency’ but ‘failed to investigate adequately the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President’. The FBI ‘was deficient in its sharing of information with other agencies and departments’, and the CIA ‘was deficient in its collection and sharing of information both prior to and subsequent to the assassination’. The Warren Commission – which had carried out an earlier investigation into the assassination – failed to investigate adequately the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President. This deficiency was attributable in part to the limited cooperation of numerous government agencies, and their failure to forward relevant documentation to the commission.
Neither the Warren Commission nor the Select Committee on Assassinations appear to have considered the possibility of a conspiracy by a rogue element in the Soviet Union.
Vladimir Kryuchkov
(KGB officer who assisted with Serov’s suppression of the Hungarian uprising.)
Kryuchkov was a hard-liner who supported Yuri Andropov, his Ambassador during the Hungarian uprising. When Andropov rose to power (he was appointed chairman of the KGB before becoming the leader of the Soviet Union from 1982 until his death in 1984) he brought Kryuchkov along with him. Kryuchkov led the KGB from 1988 to 1991. At this time he was strongly against Soviet leader Gorbachev’s proposed reforms and tried to discredit him. On 19 August 1991, when it became clear that Gorbachev was about to take radical reformist action, Kryuchkov led a coup with, he thought, the full power and might of the KGB. The coup was initially successful but the KGB’s support was far from comprehensive and it all fizzled out in three days. Kryuchkov was arrested, found guilty of treason and sentenced to imprisonment. He was released three years later under an amnesty. He died in 2007, aged eighty-three.
Yuri Andropov
(As Soviet Ambassador in Hungary in 1956, he gave strong support to Serov in suppressing the Hungarian uprising.)
After events in Hungary, Andropov was convinced that armed force should always be used when there were signs of collapse of central Soviet Communist Party control over individual Soviet republics, and over the governments of the satellite countries. Just as Serov had been largely responsible for stamping out the Hungarian uprising, so Andropov played a leading role in persuading Soviet leader Brezhnev to send in tanks to stamp out the liberalising influences of the Dubþek government in Czechoslovakia to end the ‘Prague Spring’ in 1968. Andropov created false intelligence to bolster the case against the Dubþek government.
He returned to Moscow from Budapest in 1957 to head the Department for Liaison with Communist and Workers’ Parties in Socialist Countries. In that capacity he would have had close connections with the Communist Party in Cuba. In 1961 he was (in addition) elected a member of the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee, which controlled the activities of the KGB through the Politburo.
He was appointed head of the KGB in 1967, a post he held until 1982 when he became the Soviet leader on the death of Leonid Brezhnev.
It was largely upon Andropov’s insistence that the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979.
Andropov’s health started to fail in 1983. On 31 December 1983 he celebrated the New Year for the last time. Vladimir Kryuchkov (see notes, above) together with other friends visited him and they had a drink of champagne. After the others left, Kryuchkov remained alone with him. Andropov raised his glass and told Kryuchkov he wished health and success to all the friends. (One of his closest friends, Ivan Serov, was of course still alive at that time.)
Andropov died on 9 February 1984.
Sergei Kondrashev
(KGB officer who was Blake’s spymaster.)
After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kondrashev’s career continued its ascendency. He became Deputy Head of Foreign Intelligence in 1968. Highly decorated, he reached the rank of Lieutenant-General of the KGB before retiring in 1992. He died in 2007.
Colonel Oleg Penkovsky
(GRU officer who spied for the West.)
Neither of the two versions of Penkovsky’s execution has been indisputably substantiated. Is it possible he is still alive (born 23 April 1919), hoping to outlive both Fidel Castro and George Blake?
Greville Wynne
(International sales representative for several British companies and part-time MI6 agent. He was Penkovsky’s first proper contact with the West and regularly thereafter acted as a courier for Penkovsky’s material.)
In 1963, after serving less than two years of his eight-year sentence, he was exchanged for Konon Molody (alias Gordon Lonsdale) who, in London in 1961, had been sentenced to twenty-five years for spying, including running the Portland spy ring. Wynne died of throat cancer in London in 1990.
Roderick (Ruari) Chisholm
(MI6 officer in Berlin at the time of the spy tunnel and later in Moscow where he was Penkovsky’s spymaster.)
Ruari Chisholm left South Africa (his final posting before taking early retirement) in 1979. He told a number of people he intended to write a book about his espionage exploits. He apparently caught malaria in Tanzania while on his way home and died in Scotland shortly thereafter.
His death certificate records the cause of death as ‘Malaria (type not identified)’. It seems strange that a fit 54-year-old man who had all the benefits, advice and care of a government medical team should die of malaria. His death was exactly one year after Bulgarian-born BBC World Service broadcaster Georgi Markov died as a result of a poison pellet delivered through the point of an umbrella.
Janet Chisholm (née Deane)
(Wife of Ruari Chisholm; she was the main contact with Penkovsky in Moscow.)
Janet Chisholm died in 2004 at the age of seventy-five. In spite of many offers for her to talk or write about the role she played in the Penkovsky case, she took her own personal knowledge of these events to the grave.
Sir Howard Smith
(Head of Chancery at the British Embassy, Moscow when Penkovsky was passing secrets to the West.)
I was working at the British Embassy in Moscow in 1961–2, at the same time as the Chisholms and Howard Smith. I have no information to suggest that Smith was working under deep cover for MI6 at that time. It seems to me, however, that there ought to have been someone senior to Ruari Chisholm, particularly as Blake had already informed the KGB of Chisholm’s identity as an MI6 officer. In 1978, after thirty-two years as a diplomat, Smith was appointed the 9th Director-General of the British Security Service (MI5), a post he held until 1981. He died on 7 May 1996.
George Blake
(MI6 officer who spied for the Soviet Union.)
Five years after the start of his record 42-year sentence Blake escaped from Britain’s famous Wormwood Scrubs prison and managed to reach Moscow where he still lives (August 2012). He continued to help the Soviet/Russian security services on a consultancy and training basis and, during a gala celebration of Blake’s eighty-fifth birthday on 11 November 2007, Vladimir Putin honoured him with the Russian Order of Friendship.
William King (Bill) Harvey
(CIA officer involved with the Berlin spy tunnel and later with various CIA activities to oust Fidel Castro and his regime.)
Harvey died as a result of complications from heart surgery in June 1976.
Santo Trafficante
(Mafia godfather who had large-scale gambling interests in Cuba before Castro came to power. He was later involved with fellow godfathers Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli in attempting to kill Castro on behalf of the CIA. I have used the widely held theory that Trafficante spied for Castro.)
Giancana was killed (shot) in July 1975 just before he was scheduled to testify to the Senate Intelligence Committee on the CIA’s alliance with the Mafia to try to kill Castro. A year later Roselli’s dismembered body was found in a steel drum in Dumfounding Bay, Florida. He was scheduled for a second appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Many claim that their deaths had been arranged by Trafficante because they had been talking about the Castro and Kennedy plots. Trafficante died of complications following heart surgery on 17 March 1987.
* See Viktor Suvorov, ‘Appendix A’, Inside Soviet Military Intelligence (New York: Macmillan, 1984). Suvorov (real Russian name was Vladimir Rezun) served for many years in the GRU and defected to the West (the United Kingdom) in 1978.
† See Ilya Dzhirkvelov, ‘Chapter 6’, Secret Servant (New York: Harper & Row, 1987).
‡ See Jerrold Schecter and Peter S. Deriabin, ‘Chapter 17’, The Spy Who Saved The World (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992).
§ See Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitkrokhin, ‘Chapter 2’, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West (London: Allen Lane, 2000) p. 30.
¶ See Alexsandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, ‘Chapter 7’ in James G. Blight and David A. Welch (eds), Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis (London: Frank Cass, 1998).
|| Nikita Petro, First Chairman of the KGB: Ivan Serov (Moscow: Materik, 2005).
** British MI6 officers, on the whole, maintained their strict code of practice and did not participate in these meetings, which could leave an unbalanced picture. This was particularly so in relation to the 1999 Teufelsberg (Berlin) Conference which brought together many ex-CIA and ex-KGB operational managers and agents to reminisce about Cold War intelligence operations. The conclusions failed to incorporate the full weight of the role played by MI6 in, for example, the Berlin tunnel operation.