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

“Crippling blows” against both real and imaginary Trotskyist “rabble” were struck outside as well as inside the Soviet Union. The beginning of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 opened up a major new field of operations for Serebryansky’s Administration for Special Tasks and for INO as a whole. The struggle of the Spanish republican government to defend itself against the nationalist rebellion led by General Francisco Franco fired the imagination of the whole of the European left as a crusade against international fascism: 35,000 foreign volunteers, most of them Communist, set out for Spain to join the International Brigades in defense of the republic. In October 1936 Stalin declared in an open letter to Spanish Communists: “Liberation of Spain from the yoke of the Spanish reactionaries is not the private concern of Spaniards alone, but the common cause of all progressive humanity.” From the outset, however, the NKVD was engaged in Spain in a war on two fronts: against Trotskyists within the republicans and the International Brigades, as well as against Franco and the nationalist forces. The former illegal resident in London, Aleksandr Orlov, sent to Spain as legal resident after the outbreak of the Civil War, confidently assured the Centre in October, “The Trotskyist organization POUM [Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista] can be easily liquidated.”²⁶

WHILE ORLOV COORDINATED the NKVD’s secret two-front war within Spain, Serebryansky conducted operations from abroad. Serebryansky organized training courses in Paris for saboteurs from the International Brigades, run by GIGI, a French Communist mechanic who usually worked without pay, FRANYA, a female Polish student paid 1,500 francs a month, and LEGRAND, on whom no further details are available. The greatest sabotage success reported by Serebryansky was the claim by the ERNST TOLSTY group of illegals, based in the Baltic and Scandinavia, to have sunk seventeen ships carrying arms to Franco.²⁷ One of the leading saboteurs was a young German Communist, Ernst Wollweber, who twenty years later was to become head of the Stasi in East Germany.²⁸ An NKVD inquiry after the Civil War concluded, however, that some of the reports of sinkings were fabrications.²⁹

The main NKVD training grounds for guerrillas and saboteurs were within Spain itself at training camps supervised by Orlov at Valencia, Barcelona, Bilbao and Argen. Orlov later boasted of how his guerrilla platoons succeeded in blowing up power lines and bridges and in attacking enemy convoys far behind the nationalist lines. As an SVR-sponsored biography of Orlov acknowledges, his larger purpose was “to build up a secret police force under NKVD control to effect a Stalinization of Spain.” The chief Soviet military adviser in republican Spain, General Jan Berzin, formerly head of Red Army intelligence, complained that Orlov and the NKVD were treating republican Spain as a colony rather than an ally.³⁰

In the spring of 1937 Orlov and Serebryansky were ordered to move from the surveillance and destabilization of Trotskyist groups to the liquidation of their leaders. While Serebryansky began preparing the abduction of Sedov,³¹ Orlov supplied the republican government with forged documents designed to discredit POUM as “a German-Francoist spy organization.” On June 16 the head of POUM, Andreu Nin, and forty leading members were arrested, its headquarters closed and its militia battalions disbanded. Less than a week later Nin disappeared from prison. An official investigation announced that he had escaped. In reality, he was abducted and murdered by a “mobile squad” of NKVD assassins, supervised by Orlov. Nin was one of many Trotskyists in Spain, both real and imagined, who met such fates. Until Orlov defected to the United States in 1938, fearing that he too had been placed on an NKVD death list, he lived in some luxury while organizing the liquidation of enemies of the people. A young volunteer in the International Brigades summoned to his presence was struck by how strongly he reeked of eau de cologne, and watched enviously as he consumed a large cooked breakfast wheeled in on a trolley by a whitecoated servant. Orlov offered none of it to the famished volunteer, who had not eaten for twenty-four hours.³²