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

Though unusually forthcoming about Orlov, who, because of his defection, never qualified for the KGB Valhalla, the SVR has been much more reluctant to release material on the Spanish Civil War which might damage the reputation of the traditional heroes of Soviet foreign intelligence: among them Hero of the Soviet Union Stanislav Alekseyevich Vaupshasov, long celebrated for his daring exploits behind enemy lines during the Second World War. With four Orders of Lenin, two Orders of the Great Patriotic War and a chestful of other medals, Vaupshasov was probably the Soviet Union’s most profusely decorated intelligence hero. As recently as 1990 he was honored by a commemorative postage stamp. Vaupshasov’s murderous pre-war record, however, is still kept from public view by the SVR. In the mid-1920s he led a secret OGPU unit in numerous raids on Polish and Lithuanian border villages, dressed in Polish and Lithuanian army uniforms. In 1929 Vaupshasov was sentenced to death for murdering a colleague, but managed to have the sentence commuted to ten years in the gulag. He was quickly released and resumed his career as one of the NKVD’s leading experts in assassination. Among Vaupshasov’s duties in Spain was the construction and guarding of a secret crematorium which enabled the NKVD to dispose of its victims without leaving any trace of their remains. Many of those selected for liquidation were lured into the building containing the crematorium and killed on the spot.³³

The NKVD agent in charge of the crematorium was José Castelo Pacheco (codenamed JOSE, PANSO and TEODOR),³⁴ a Spanish Communist born in Salamanca in 1910, who was recruited by Orlov’s deputy resident, Leonid Aleksandrovich Eitingon, in 1936.³⁵ In 1982, some years after Castelo’s death, the KGB received a letter from a female relative appealing for a pension and claiming that he had told her before his death, “If you have any problems and there is no other way out, I mean only in extreme circumstances, then contact my Soviet comrades.” Though Castelo’s file showed that he had promised never to reveal any details of his work as a Soviet agent, there was an obvious risk that his relative had discovered his work in the NKVD crematorium. The Centre therefore concluded that to refuse her request might have “undesirable consequences.” In January 1983 she was summoned to the consular department of the Soviet embassy in Madrid by the resident and told that, though she had no legal right to a pension, it had been decided to make her an ex gratia payment of 5,000 convertible roubles, then the equivalent of 6,680 US dollars. No reference was made to Castelo’s work for the NKVD.³⁶

REMARKABLY, MANY OTHERWISE admirable studies of the Stalin era fail to mention the relentless secret pursuit of “enemies of the people” in western Europe. The result, all too frequently, is a sanitized, curiously bloodless interpretation of Soviet foreign policy on the eve of the Second World War which fails to recognize the priority given to assassination. Outside Spain, the main theater of operations for the NKVD’s assassins was France, where their chief targets were Lev Sedov and General Yevgeni Karlovich Miller, Kutepov’s successor as head of the White Guard ROVS. In the summer of 1937 Serebryansky devised similar plans to liquidate both. Sedov and Miller were each to be kidnapped in Paris, smuggled on board a boat waiting off the Channel coast, then brought to the Soviet Union for interrogation and retribution. The first stage in the abduction operations was the penetration of their entourages.