Most readers with even a passing interest in Cold War-era espionage will recall the names of some of the more celebrated spies implicated in passing Western secrets to the Soviet Union during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. The inglorious list would include such names as Klaus Fuchs, the executed nuclear whistle-blowers Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the ‘Cambridge Five’ (Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross), the Portland spy ring (Ethel Gee, Harry Houghton, Konon Molody (a.k.a. Gordon Lonsdale), Lona and Morris Cohen (a.k.a. the Krogers)), and George Blake, the KGB’s mole inside the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).

The actions of these people impacted on the Cold War, at times ‘heating’ or speeding it, at others ‘slowing’ or cooling the global stand-off, depending on one’s perspective. Few would claim, however, that any of these individuals ultimately changed the course of history. This book is not about the aforementioned traitors and double agents, though George Blake did play a part in certain key events described in it. It concerns, instead, some of the spies and senior members of the security services of the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union whose personal decisions and actions did change the course of history during the 1950s and early 1960s. People such as Ivan Serov, who throughout this period was, first, the head of the KGB and then the GRU (the Soviet military intelligence organisation); Oleg Penkovsky, the GRU officer who passed invaluable military secrets to the West; Bill Harvey, the larger-than-life, gun-toting CIA officer who played a part in most of the major CIA Cold War operations throughout the period.

The story records how this exotic but, to most Westerners, obscure cast of characters, and others in their orbit, influenced events leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy just over a year later.

Given the limited period of time covered by the book it might be useful for the reader to have some background information about one particular – and particularly elusive – character: Ivan Serov.

One has to look closely at the canvas of history to spot Ivan Serov. He deserves a more prominent position in accounts of the Cold War, for he left his indelible mark on many important events in his thirty-year career as a senior Soviet intelligence officer. One of the twentieth century’s great unsung anti-heroes, Serov played an essential part in establishing and consolidating Stalinist totalitarianism in the USSR and beyond.

Born of peasant stock in the Russian village of Afimskoe in 1905, General Ivan Aleksandrovich Serov joined the Red Army in 1923 and the Communist Party in 1926. For the next fifteen years, his military training and experience were varied and testing, but his native talents and instincts saw him perform with sufficient distinction to rise through the ranks of both the army and party. His knack for being close to the right people at the right time, a crucial skill for successful espionage officers serving at the whim of dictatorial regimes, came to the fore during Stalin’s Great Purge of 1936–8, which saw more than 1.5 million people arrested and 700,000 of them executed. Serov not only survived the purge but played a part in implementing it: he was responsible for the execution of Marshal Tukhachevski and other leading figures of the Red Army.

His success in the army won him a place at the prestigious Frunze Military Academy. Serov graduated in 1939 and within a few months was appointed the Ukrainian Commissar of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), which brought him into close contact with the Head of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev.* Khrushchev became known as 'the butcher of the Ukraine’, for his enthusiastic policy of ‘annihilating all agents of fascism, Trotskyites, Bukharinies and all other despicable bourgeois nationalists in Ukraine’ in 1938. Yet this title was soon forgotten when he rose to be First Secretary of the Communist Party (1953–64) and Soviet Premier (1958–64).

In 1941 Serov was promoted to Deputy Commissar of the NKVD, working directly under the notorious Lavrentiy Beria. He wrote the Procedure for carrying out the Deportation of Anti-Soviet Elements from Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, also known simply as ‘the Serov instructions’. These specified, in chilling detail, the procedure to be followed in executing Stalin’s programme of mass deportations from the Baltic and Caucasian states to Siberia during the Soviet occupation of the Baltics in the early years of the Second World War.

Historians record that Serov and Khrushchev were responsible for the deaths of perhaps 500,000 ‘enemies of the people’ in the Ukraine and the Baltic and Caucasian states, and for the deportation of multitudes more to the freezing wastelands of Siberia, where many soon died from lack of shelter, food and adequate clothing.†

Joseph Stalin (effectively leader of the Soviet Union 1922–53) created a new security organisation – the Main Counterintelligence Directorate – in 1943 and personally nicknamed it ‘SMERSH’, which is an acronym of the Russian for ‘Death to Spies’. Serov was head of the SMERSH operational group that entered Poland with the advancing Red Army in 1944. He stayed there until May 1945 weeding out and punishing – often with the death penalty – everyone suspected of involvement with counterintelligence activities. He also established the Polish secret police organisation – the Ministry of Public Security or MBP (Ministerstwo Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego) – with operational rules based tightly on Stalinist principles.

A report by a United States Central Intelligence Agency source in Poland in 1944–5 describes Serov as hard-working, strict, determined to get results by any means, and a good staff manager:

He was exceedingly active in all security matters. He personally planned, directed, and was informed of all security cases of significance. No operations were run, or prominent individuals arrested, without his knowledge or approval and all security actions were under his personal supervision and personal care. He saw all interesting documents and reports and attended portions of the most interesting interrogations. He had his hand in almost every case and knew most details of everything that was being done in counterespionage in Poland. He personally recruited many agents.

An insight into Serov’s operational mentality can be had from the following incident. Serov was asked for his views regarding the future of a certain case. The case was that of the Warsaw district leader of the anti-Communist underground Home Army, Colonel ‘Aleksander’, who had been arrested by the MO (Citizens Militia). The MO’s leader wanted to liquidate him on the spot. Serov rejected this proposal and ordered the case to be taken over by the Soviets, pointing out that ‘Aleksander’ could and should be made to talk, thereby being much more useful in the investigation than if he were dead.

The source has very great respect for Serov, considering him extremely intelligent, a very hard worker, with great experience and knowledge in the field of intelligence work, capable of making decisions whenever necessary and not afraid to accept responsibility. Serov was not only highly respected by his subordinates for his ability, but was very well liked for his human treatment of subordinates – knowing, for example, when they had earned a rest from the intense pace of operations at that time, and showing appreciation when work was well done.

The source believes that Serov must have had a high protector in Moscow because of his complete self-confidence and willingness to assume responsibility in the direction of these operations.

When the war ended the Soviet military headquarters moved from Poland to Berlin and Serov’s SMERSH group went with them, staying until 1947. Berlin was in a mess. It had been split into four sectors, each of which was controlled by one of the Allied countries (France, United States, United Kingdom and Soviet Union). Serov thrived in these conditions, which required the imposition of discipline and organisation.

One of his first duties in Berlin was to manage the search for Adolf Hitler’s remains; but there was never any definitive proof that the bodies he produced were those of Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun. In February 1946 Serov ordered the remains to be buried in the grounds of a Soviet military site near Magdeburg, East Germany. That sufficed in 1946, but as time passed and the science of postmortem examinations improved, there was a growing risk that the bodies might be exhumed and proven not to be those of Hitler and Braun. It was not surprising, therefore, that in 1970 Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB, ordered that the remains be exhumed and destroyed.‡ They were burned, ground to powder and thrown in a river.

Another incident involving Serov in Berlin was an investigation into the death of Stalin’s son, Yakov, who had been shot and killed in 1943 by a German guard while a prisoner of war in Sachsenhausen SS camp. Serov personally carried out the investigation and, in a typically thorough manner, wrote a six-page report for the personal attention of his boss Sergei Kruglov, head of the NKVD. The report stated that he had interrogated the two German officers in charge of Sachsenhausen at the time of Yakov’s death:

There are two interesting points in this excerpt. First, Serov would have tortured the Germans to extract the truth had he not been forced to hand them over to US forces. Second, this may be the earliest example of the use of the word ‘mole’ in the context of having a spy inside the enemy camp. It was normal NKVD practice to have a ‘stukach’ (an informer) in prison cells.

Serov’s other activities in Berlin followed much the same course as in Poland, which included establishing the dreaded East German Ministry for State Security (the secret police force known as the Stasi).

With the establishment of the Ministry of Public Security in Poland and the Stasi in East Germany – both of them following the practices and procedures of Beria’s NKVD – Serov had introduced the most feared elements of Stalinism into the two most populated East European countries.

But unlike his master, Stalin, Serov was not a mirthless, merciless killer and sadist. Indeed, he enjoyed a happy family life with his wife Valya and his daughter Svetlana. Furthermore, he could be personable and had a sense of humour. Sergo Mikoyan (historian, writer and son of senior statesman Anastas Mikoyan) described Serov as ‘short, balding, always joking … a nice man’.||

Ilya Dzhirkvelov, on the other hand, despised him:

The man appointed to be Chairman of the KGB was Army General Ivan Serov, notorious for having carried out the deportation of whole peoples (the Ingushi and Chechens and other peoples of the North Caucasus) and other large-scale military operations. He was short in stature and limited in outlook, a cruel man with little education, with little understanding of the finer points of operational and intelligence work, which is why he did not enjoy the authority he should have had among us operatives. We knew all about his ruthless character and his fondness for bossing people about and punishing them.**

This, then, was the complex man who became deputy to Lavrentiy Beria. Beria, as head of the NKVD/NKGB and Stalin’s first lieutenant, was the personification of all the evils of Stalinism, terrorising the citizens of the Soviet Union and haunting public imagination in the West.

After leaving Berlin in 1947, Serov was shunted sideways into the GRU. Perhaps it was because his experience with SMERSH made him better qualified for service with the GRU than with the MGB, but it is more likely to have been the result of a serious ongoing feud between Serov and the brutal Viktor Abakumov, head of SMERSH from 1943 until 1946 and subsequently appointed as Minister of the MGB. Abakumov, who was Serov’s boss in SMERSH, was either afraid or jealous of Serov’s ability. He informed Stalin that Serov had been involved in embezzlement in Berlin in the context of his (Serov’s) responsibility for finding and making proper arrangements for the disposition of wartime ‘trophies’. One particular accusation was that Serov had stolen the crown of the King of the Belgians.

Being appointed to the GRU rather than the MGB was bad enough, but Serov must have been hurt even more when the shadowy General Mikhail Shalin was appointed chief of the GRU in 1953, rather than himself.

Serov’s exploits from 1953 onwards, when he became first chairman of the KGB and later chief of the GRU, are an integral part of the events recorded in this book.

Why has the world in general heard so little about one of the most important people in the history of the Soviet Union?

In 1963 he was disgraced, removed from his position as head of the GRU, and later expelled from the Communist Party. It was Soviet practice in those days to conceal and cover up the records of such ‘apostates’, even to expunge them from the history books and destroy all official records of their service. That distinctly non-dialectical, but undeniably material, approach to sanitising official history accounts for some but not all of Serov’s obscurity.

Mystery surrounds Serov’s life from 1963 onwards. He simply disappeared and many people assumed he had committed suicide or drank himself to death. However, he lived on for another twenty-seven years, dying of natural causes on 1 July 1990 at the age of eighty-four.

His paymasters may well have had their reasons for generating the rumours of his early demise.

* The NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) was reorganised and renamed several times during the 1940s. See ‘NKVD’ and ‘KGB History’ in the glossary.

† Khrushchev’s participation was in the Ukraine only.

‡ Andropov and Serov were close colleagues and friends for many years, as will be seen in the body of this book.

§ Paul R. Gregory, Lenin’s Brain and Other Tales from the Secret Soviet Archives (Hoover Institution Press Publication No. 555).

The author John le Carré popularised the word in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and other novels.

|| William Taubman, ‘Chapter 14’, Khrushchev: The Man – His Era (London: Free Press, 2003)

** Ilya Dzhirkvelov spent thirty-seven years in the KGB and its predecessors before defecting to the United Kingdom in 1980; Ilya Dzhirkvelov, ‘Chapter 6’, Secret Servant (New York: Harper & Row, 1987).