The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

Overall planning of the Kutepov operation was given to Yakov Isaakovich (“Yasha”) Serebryansky, head of the euphemistically titled “Administration for Special Tasks.”⁸⁷ Before the Second World War, the administration functioned as a parallel foreign intelligence service, reporting directly to the Centre with special responsibility for sabotage, abduction and assassination operations on foreign soil.⁸⁸ Serebryansky later became a severe embarrassment to official historians anxious to distance Soviet foreign intelligence from the blood-letting of the late 1930s and portray it as a victim rather than a perpetrator of the Great Terror. An SVR-sponsored history published in 1993 claimed that Serebryansky was “not a regular member of State Security,” but “only brought in for special jobs.”⁸⁹ KGB files show that, on the contrary, he was a senior OGPU officer whose Administration for Special Tasks grew into an élite service, more than 200-strong, dedicated to hunting down “enemies of the people” on both sides of the Atlantic.⁹⁰

Detailed preparations for the kidnaping of Kutepov were entrusted by Serebryansky to his illegal Paris resident, V. I. Speransky, who had taken part in the deception of Savinkov six years earlier.⁹¹ On the morning of Sunday, January 26, 1930 Kutepov was bundled into a taxi in the middle of a street in Paris’s fashionable seventh arrondissement. Standing nearby was a Communist Paris policeman who had been asked to assist by Speransky so that any bystander who saw the kidnaping (one did) would mistake it for a police arrest. Though the Centre commended the kidnaping as “a brilliant operation,” the chloroform used to overpower Kutepov proved too much for the general’s weak heart. He died aboard a Soviet steamer while being taken back to Russia.⁹²

The Kutepov operation was to set an important precedent. In the early and mid-1930s the chief Soviet foreign intelligence priority remained intelligence collection. During the later years of the decade, however, all other operations were to be subordinated to “special tasks.”

THREE THE GREAT ILLEGALS

On January 30, 1930 the Politburo (effectively the ruling body of both the Party and the Soviet Union) met to review INO operations and ordered it to increase intelligence collection in three target areas: Britain, France and Germany (the leading European powers); the Soviet Union’s western neighbors, Poland, Romania, Finland and the Baltic states; and Japan, its main Asian rival.¹ The United States, which established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union only in 1933, was not mentioned. Though the first Soviet illegal had been sent across the Atlantic as early as 1921,² the USA’s relative isolation from world affairs made American intelligence collection still a secondary priority.³

On Politburo instructions, the main expansion of INO operations was achieved through increasing the number of illegal residencies, each with up to seven (in a few cases as many as nine) illegal officers. By contrast, even in Britain and France legal residencies operating under diplomatic cover in Soviet embassies had three officers at most and sometimes only one. Their main function was to provide channels of communications with the Centre and other technical support for the more highly regarded illegals.⁴ During the 1920s both legal and illegal residencies had had the right to decide what agents to recruit and how to recruit them. On succeeding Trilisser as head of INO in 1930, however, Artur Artuzov, the hero of the SINDIKAT and TREST operations, complained that the existing agent network contained “undesirable elements.” He decreed that future agent recruitment required the authorization of the Centre. Partly because of problems of communication, his instructions were not always carried out.⁵

The early and mid-1930s were to be remembered in the history of Soviet foreign intelligence as the era of the “Great Illegals,” a diverse group of remarkably talented individuals who collectively transformed OGPU agent recruitment and intelligence collection. Post-war illegals had to endure long training periods designed to establish their bogus identities, protect their cover and prepare them for operations in the West. Their pre-war predecessors were successful partly because they had greater freedom from bureaucratic routine and more opportunity to use their own initiative. But they also had to contend with far softer targets than their successors. By the standards of the Cold War, most inter-war Western security systems were primitive. The individual flair of the Great Illegals combined with the relative vulnerability of their targets to give some of their operations a much more unorthodox, at times even eccentric, character than those of the Cold War.