KINGS OF SPYING. (thievery is always part of socialism)

Of course, it takes talent to make a professional spy work for new bosses. And the instinct to ensure that the recruited agent becomes a reliable double agent, passing on disinformation to his former masters. In the history of espionage, there was one such master who made double agents. Every spy in the world dreamed of working for him. For the simple reason that, in addition to a decent salary, he guaranteed the spy life in any country after retirement. And his guarantees included benefits that no one could resist. You can read more about him and his methods in the chapters of my book “Hidden Traces of the Grey Wolf”.
For a highly trained spy, patriotism is contraindicated. Showing patriotism can expose and destroy him. That’s why the most successful spy is always a cosmopolitan. One who has no homeland is deeply indifferent to the problems of the country in which he is temporarily stationed. And it is no coincidence that the world of espionage has always been, and still is, dominated by cosmopolitans.

I was once struck by the statement of one such cosmopolitan, born and raised in the USSR, who later moved to Western countries and acquired numerous citizenships. He said cynically into a journalist’s camera: “Patriotism is the fate of slaves”. No one knows how many passports he has in his safe, but he has many, like any person with his morals. For such people, the only survival guide is the Talmud.
The Talmud dictates that a captive must reveal all secrets to the enemy if his life is in danger. This is why they are always in the “fifth column”, no matter how much chocolate you feed them.
To justify their treachery, they are also the most inventive mythmakers. All the official biographies of spies, presented by decorated historians, are nothing but fiction, myth, dust in the eyes. My stories are about adventurers on a global scale. I’ll tell you what historians are ashamed to write. Or are forbidden to write.

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1. SYDNEY REILLY.

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RUSSIA IN 1917.

Until the First World War, Sidney Reilly lived as an antique dealer in St Petersburg, spying for the British naval attaché. With the outbreak of war, Reilly used his connections in Russia to arrange the supply of arms from the US to the Russian Tsarist army, from which he made a fortune. You can change your name, but you can’t change your genes.

In 1917, after seizing power in Russia, Lenin signed the Brest Peace with the Germans. The leader of the proletariat worked for the Reichsmarks he received. He was called a German spy. The all-powerful British Masonic “Round Table Society”, which was the architect of the bloodless revolution of 1916, did not like Lenin and Russia’s withdrawal from the war. The spy Reilly, along with the British ambassador Bruce Lockhart, was ordered to organize a plot to overthrow the Bolshevik government. The plan was to bribe influential Red Army commanders and organize an armed coup to liquidate Lenin and replace him with the Freemason Trotsky. This plan went down in history as the “Ambassadors’ Plot”. Three ambassadors were involved in the plot, aided by the “expert on Russia” Sidney Reilly.

Bērziņ handed over all the money and addresses to Dzerzhinsky. The Bolsheviks shot the conspirators, and the money Reilly had received was used to set up a club for Latvian marksmen. Cheka documents show that it was Reilly who gave money to the conspirators – over a million pounds sterling was spent on bribing the leadership of the ‘Latvian Riflemen’ and the Kremlin command. The money didn’t work.
Bērziņ himself made a career, became a big shot, and later ran the Kremlin’s spy network in Spain. But during Stalin’s purges, he disappeared into the Lubyanka.
The Chekists hunted for Sidney Reilly, but he was elusive, he had the legal documents and even had a pass to the Kremlin. However, almost all of Reilly’s plans failed: the SR uprising failed, as did the organization of a mutiny in the Petrograd garrison. The only success was the assassination of the German ambassador, Mirbach, by the SR Blumkin, which the Trotskyists hoped would provoke German intervention. After the attempt on Lenin’s life on 30 August 1918, the Bolsheviks responded with the “Red Terror”. They shot everyone in the streets, except the Jews.
In November 1918, Reilly was sentenced to death in absentia in Russia. The network of agents he had set up for the British had set up was destroyed, and Reilly himself fled to Europe.

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TO RUSSIA – WITH LOVE! AND FOREVER…

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2. A SPY WHO WANTED TO BE LOVED BY EVERYONE.

He was a man of many facets, both professionally and personally. He was married, he had children, but he was also a passive homo. His career came first, and just as the biblical David rose to power through his anus by pleasing the Egyptian Pharaoh, so he rose to political Olympus. If you wanted to fuck him, you had to pay. He refused no one, was vain, and dreamed of world fame and recognition.
He worked for the British against the Germans, for the Americans against the British and the Germans, for the Russians against the Germans, the British and the Americans. And for the Germans against all of them together.

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Harold Adrian Russell was born in India in 1912, he was the son of a spy. His father, John Philby, despite his English name, was a Muslim, a political adviser to the Saudi royal family. And he fully shared Hitler’s philosophy.
Young Harold studied at Cambridge, where he became involved with the Communists. He took the acronym of the Communist Youth International (CYI or KIM in Russian) as his name. He travelled to Germany where he made contact with the Nazis.
In 1934 Kim was recruited by the Soviet intelligence officer Arnold Deitch. This pseudonym concealed a trusted agent of Stalin, Leiba Feldbin (the couple appears in my story of how Stalin stole all the gold from Spain in 1936). Formally, Philby positioned himself as anti-Soviet, but in reality, he regularly supplied Moscow with secret documents. He handed over to Lubyanka all the British agents working in Soviet Russia.
He seemed to enjoy politics. By making connections and offering his services here and there, he mastered the method of the political prostitute who smiles at everyone, is always desirable to everyone, and is paid for it from all sides. In 1940, Philby was almost burned, and arrested by the British authorities on suspicion of spying for Germany. But he got out.

The decorations found their hero. In 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, Philby was a war correspondent for the British newspaper The London Times. He was personally decorated by General Franco. In 1946, the spy was awarded the Order of the British Empire for services to His Majesty. From the Soviet masters, he received the Order of Lenin and another order, the Order of the Red Banner, which agent Philby received later, in the 60’s.
In 1950, he was sent to Washington as a representative of British intelligence to establish contacts with the CIA. They did not suspect that Philby, who had absolute access to top-secret documents, supplied them and Moscow. He was an informant for four intelligence agencies.
In America, Philby again fell into the clutches of the Gestapo! In Washington, he met his old master. Heinrich Müller, former head of the Third Reich’s secret police, who after the war became secret adviser to the US President. Muller, worked closely with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and top intelligence officials in his new homeland. Muller quickly recognized in the visitor his long-time agent and wanted to meet him. On assignment from his Kremlin masters, Philby was interested in American nuclear projects. Mueller set the bait on the hook and sent his assistant to fish.

At an embassy party, an assistant to his boss seduced a tipsy spy. After striking up a conversation on a subject of interest to Philby, he suggested they continue the conversation at the hotel. There, General Mueller was waiting for one, and the spy was shocked by the encounter. Anticipating such a reaction, the General immediately turned to family matters and offered a swollen envelope of dollars as a reward for past cases. This was certainly a present to Philby, for whom monetary compensation for his services was more important than decorations, award watches, and the like.
In a conversation lasting several hours, Philby gave Mueller the names of all the Stalinist spies in the Soviet embassy. The best of them would later be given to the CIA, who would make them double agents. Philby, who was awarded the Order of the British Empire for his loyal service, also gave Mueller the entire network of British spies in the United States. Mueller would trade their names to the CIA for the information he needed. Cooperation was restored to the mutual satisfaction of both parties. It’s not people at war, it’s money at war. And people just pull the trigger.

But greed ruined Philby. A year later he was sacked from British intelligence on suspicion of links with the Russians. His services were rewarded with a one-off payment of £4,000, the equivalent of a prostitute’s annual income. The money barely lasted a year, so he begged the Russians for more. The Russians helped the spy survive for a few more years by employing him as a correspondent for English newspapers in Beirut.

In 1963, Philby was quietly sent to the USSR, where he was showered with awards, and given an apartment and a pension. But he was cruelly disappointed by the dictatorship of Soviet power. It was a far cry from the socialist paradise to which he had been seduced by NKVD recruiters.
From the memoirs of his last Russian wife, Rufina Pukhova: “Kim was disappointed by much of what he saw here. He was shocked by the sight of poor people in bad clothes. He realized that all the promises of building communism had not been fulfilled. Eventually, he realized that he had been mistaken, that he had been cheated. If he had seen today’s Russia, he would have been even more upset. Today there is a huge gap between the rich oligarchs and the poor…”.

Philby was sidelined because the KGB was afraid to let him in on their secrets, knowing that he would betray them in a heartbeat. Philby turned himself into a heavy drinker and died alone, completely forgetful.
“God must love idiots. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have made so many of them,” the former head of the Gestapo once wrote in his diary, reflecting on the strangeness of human behavior.

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3. AN AGENT NAMED “FLUFF”.

According to official Soviet sources, Nikolai Ivanovich Kuznetsov was a heroic scout awarded two Orders of Lenin, Hero of the Soviet Union. During the war, he infiltrated the Germans and extracted valuable information for the Soviet command. He destroyed several prominent Hitlerites. He is an underground hero, a brave partisan, a cadre Chekist, and an employee of the central apparatus of foreign intelligence.
But as I said in the preface to this series of stories – everything written about Soviet intelligence officers is fiction, bullshit. Proof of this is that the chronicle of their deeds is forever classified, and it is impossible to obtain documentary confirmation of what is described in the propaganda literature of Lubyanka.
Kuznetsov was never a staff officer of the state security services or the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff. He was an employee of the NKVD, but a freelancer. His covert cooperation with the Main Directorate of State Security of the NKVD of the USSR began before the war.
According to Agent Kuznetsov’s operational legends, he was an engineer in a defense plant. However, information about his work as an engineer in the Sverdlovsk and Moscow plants does not correspond to reality. Another legend is that he was a lieutenant in the Air Force. He never served a day in the army and gave himself a military rank.

The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, the Encyclopaedia of the Great Patriotic War, and the reference book “Heroes of the Soviet Union” – present Nikolai Kuznetsov as a member of the Communist Party. However, the application to award him the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, signed by Lev Stashko, Deputy Head of the 4th Department, states that Kuznetsov was not a member of the Party.
Excluded from the Komsomol because of a criminal record, he could not be a party member. In the years of Gorbachev’s ‘glasnost’, when the archives were briefly opened, some things leaked out and found their way onto the pages of the free press.

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Nicanor Kuznetsov was born into a peasant family in a Siberian village. In 1926, after seven years of education, he entered the Tyumen Agricultural Technical School but was expelled from the Komsomol youth and college charges of kulacism. He realised that it was necessary to make friends with the authorities. While working in the Komi-Permyak Land Department, he denounced his colleagues who were engaged in fraudulent reporting. The court sent the guilty to prison, and Kuznetsov was sentenced to a year of hard labour as an accomplice. He was sent to the woodshed.
After serving his sentence, Kuznetsov worked in the Permian Komi Industrial Union, participated in collectivisation and raids on villages. He was attacked by peasants and showed his bruises to his superiors as proof of his loyalty to Soviet power. The executive patriot was noticed by the state security agencies and in 1931 he was recruited. He took part in actions of district OGPU on liquidation of bandit groups in forests. After that Kuznetsov changed his name to Nikolai and received the code name “Kulik”.
Two years later he was sent to Sverdlovsk as a draftsman at the Verkhne-Isetsky plant, where he had to get close to those suspected of espionage and sabotage. Kuznetsov justified his pseudonym; he was a plant duck.

In May 1935, the informer was transferred to the ‘Uralmash’ factory as an inspector in the design bureau with the same task. There he was given a new nickname, “Colonist”.
This nickname later gave rise to the fantasies of historians who imagined that Kuznetsov came from the family of a German colonist, hence, they said, his excellent knowledge of the German language. The guy just showed an ability, the German language came easily to him, but nothing connected him to the colonists.
Perhaps the permissiveness and impunity of his superiors in the organs was a bad example for him to follow; the informer had already counted himself among them and thought that the authorities would not touch their own. In February 1936 he was dismissed from the factory for absenteeism. In 1938 Kuznetsov was arrested by the Sverdlovsk NKVD and spent several months in prison. In those years, absenteeism and petty theft were punished by Stalin with 10 years imprisonment, known to the people as “Stalin’s Ten”.

In prison, Kuznetsov did not spend much time. In the same year, 1938, he appeared in the apparatus of the commissar of the NKVD of the Komi ASSR, Zhuravlev, as a specialist in forestry. Kuznetsov likely found a way to the chief, because he recommended Kuznetsov to the head of the counterintelligence department of the GUGB NKVD USSR Leonid Raikhmanu, describing the clever specialist as a particularly gifted agent. For Kuznetsov, it was a dizzying leap from the backwoods to Moscow. This was the year that Stalin befriended Hitler and made full use of German military specialists in his factories in his plans to take over Europe. So our hero’s passion for the German language came in handy.

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Leonid Raikhman was a nomenclature of the power apparatus. He was a member of a special group that specialized in liquidations, political assassinations, and forged documents. After the war, this group presented the forgeries to a Soviet group of lawyers for the Nuremberg trials.
In 1939, with the occupation of western Ukraine, Reichman worked in the NKVD directorate in Transcarpathia, where there was plenty of work for the firing squads. Reichman liked the businesslike nature of the ‘forestry specialist’ and, despite the tainted questionnaire, Kuznetsov was given a special status in the state security services. He was now a secret special agent, with a salary equal to that of a personnel officer in the central apparatus. And he was given a new code name, “Puh”.

The USSR was preparing for war with its ally, Germany. In Moscow, the agent “Puh” was introduced as “German” Rudolf Schmidt, carrying out special missions, and infiltrating the diplomatic environment. He attended social events where he met foreign diplomats. He chose mistresses among the ballerinas of the Bolshoi Theatre, shared them with diplomats for whom he was a welcome guest in their villas, and extracted the information he needed at dinner parties. With his help, the safe in the Moscow apartment of the German naval attaché, Baumbach, was opened and secret documents were copied. It was a loud scandal, but it was hushed up.

Agent “Puh” gained the trust of the German military attaché in Moscow Ernst Köstring, and helped the NKVD special services to install a listening device in the diplomat’s apartment and participated in the interception of diplomatic mail.
With the outbreak of war with Germany, a “special group” under the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR was set up on 5 July 1941 to organize sabotage work in the rear of the German army. The group was headed by senior GB Major Pavel Sudoplatov.
In January 1942 this group became the 4th Directorate of the NKVD and Nikolai Kuznetsov was assigned to it. In the department of Reichman, his immediate superior, Kuznetsov received special training as a spy and liquidator behind enemy lines. All the partisan commanders were NKVD officers, and the main target of their sabotage was the civilian population in the occupied territories.
Since Hitler claimed to be fighting Bolshevism, and since more than three million Soviet people surrendered in the first months after the German invasion because they did not want to defend the Stalinist regime, Kremlin propaganda had to portray the German invasion not as a war against the Bolshevik regime, but as a war against the entire nation. This was the main task of the 4th NKVD Directorate, which ran the partisan detachments. When they destroyed their people, they blamed the Germans for it. Stalin’s propaganda then portrayed them as fascist atrocities, feeding the people’s patriotism and hatred of the conquerors.

Agent “Puh” was transferred to the Germans in Rivne under the name of Lieutenant Paul Siebert. There he communicated with officers of the Wehrmacht and special services, with the highest ranks of the occupation authorities, and from there he passed information to the partisan detachment. But he was not a spy, he was a saboteur, and his task was to organize and carry out sabotage and assassinations of occupation officials.
Soon, by his actions, Kuznetsov alerted the Germans. In the spring of 1944, all German patrols in the cities of Western Ukraine were hunting for a “German officer”. Ukrainian nationalists were also looking for him. But why nationalists?
The fact is that the NKVD partisans were destroying underground members of the OUN also because Ukrainian nationalists hated the Soviet occupation. Kuznetsov was given the task of making the Germans and the OUN destroy each other. For this, while killing Germans, the saboteur left documents at the sites of terrorist attacks, the contents of which indicated the involvement of the OUN in terrorist acts. This provoked the Germans to attack the Ukrainian nationalists. This was the tactic of his teacher and boss Reichmann, a professional forger. The Gestapo called him the dirtiest murderer in the NKVD.

In early March 1944, Kuznetsov and several fighters with him were trying to make their escape to the front line. Near the village of Boratin, near Lviv, the group was attacked by Banderites. According to the Soviet version, Kuznetsov died by blowing himself up with a grenade. According to other sources, he pretended to be a German officer who had been captured and dragged behind the front line to captivity. To make it convincing, he immediately shot two of his comrades. The Banderites still did not believe him.

Kuznetsov’s remains were found 15 years later and buried on 27 July 1960 in Lviv, in the military cemetery “Hill of Glory”. In his presentation to the Hero of the Soviet Union, some sources say that Kuznetsov liquidated eight high-ranking German military officials and organized an underground residence. Other sources count eleven generals killed by him, including Deputy Reichskommissar Erich Koch, General Dargel, Generals Knuth and von Ilgen, Imperial Counsellor Gehl, Chairman of the Supreme Court in Ukraine Funk.

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COMMENT.

Many years have passed since then, and just as moss covered any stone, the layer of fiction has covered the truth about Kuznetsov. With the advent of ‘perestroika’ and the mirage of freedom, Kuznetsov’s monuments in western Ukraine became the object of nationalist aggression. His grave on the Hill of Glory in Lviv was desecrated several times, the tombstone broken and his portrait burned. With the collapse of the USSR, the monuments to the saboteur in Lviv and Rivne were dismantled. Why does Lubyanka keep secret the deeds of the agent “Puh”? His case is kept in the archives of the Russian FSB, and during ‘Glasnost’, it was promised that it would not be released until 2025 at the earliest. But Glasnost has already been canceled, and with it, all promises are gone. If “Puh” is a hero, why keep his deeds secret? After all, they can be used to train new patriotic fanatics!
Everything can be explained if you know why Stalin and his diplomats did not sign the Geneva Convention on the Rules of War and the Detention of Prisoners of War. This is a separate issue revealed in another publication.

Kuznetsov killed representatives of the occupation administration in western Ukraine. Not in his homeland, but on the territory occupied by his homeland, Russia. These were the actions of a bandit; they did not affect the course of the war. Kuznetsov killed policemen. According to the laws of all countries, killing a policeman is punishable by death. Every regime responds to such actions with repression. The same is true of Lenin’s “Red Terror of 1918”, when, in response to the murder of the head of the Petrograd Cheka, Moisha Uritsky, mass executions were carried out on tens of thousands of hostages – women, children, the elderly. Lenin was the first dictator in history to order the killing of children.

After the assassinations organized by ‘Puh’, the Germans responded with repression. For the murder of Otto Bauer, deputy governor of Galicia, they executed two thousand hostages and hanged several hundred peasants. For the death of Councillor Gehl, they shot all the prisoners in the Rivne prison.
By murdering several officials of the occupation regime, Kuznetsov stirred up hatred among the Ukrainians, whose families were executed in retaliation for his attacks. He added fuel to the fire of resistance to the occupation regime, and Ukrainians fought the Soviet occupiers for 10 years after that war, until 1956. The bandit Kuznetsov made friendly nations hate each other.
Today they say: “Who asked to get us rid of the Germans? The Chervona army kicked the Germans out and took their place. For Lviv, Kuznetsov is forgotten. He is a stranger here..”.
A monument to a warrior should be erected not where he hated and killed, but where he loved and was loved. The best place for a monument to Kuznetsov would be near the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. The hero, cast in metal, would admire the feet of passing ballerinas to be sure that his memory would not be forgotten. But that is my personal opinion. Which may not coincide with that of the Mayor of Moscow.

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4.BREITENBACH

This is the story of how a Gestapo man, a traitor to his people, was made a hero to the Soviet people by Soviet writers and filmmakers. They changed his name, wrote books about him, made a TV series about him, and the Kremlin songwriters sang about his exploits. And people made up anecdotes about him. Anecdote is, so to speak, a kitchen genre for internal use.
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In 1934, Willy Lehman, a senior Gestapo official, was recruited by Soviet intelligence. His old friend, the Social Democrat Otto Strobel, was involved, and it was he who put Lehman in touch with Stalin’s recruiters. They tried the usual methods – bribery and blackmail. But the rising Gestapo officer had a decent salary and an impeccable reputation as a family man. His family also owned a hotel and restaurant, which provided a steady income. He couldn’t be bribed, he wasn’t interested in money. But as the French say in such cases – “Cherchez la femme! Lehman did have a mistress, Florentine Leversky. And maybe the NKVD got him on this one.

In any case, Lehman became a traitor and an enemy of his people. The Gestapo employed people who were triple-checked. If Lehman, who had passed such a test, had been a German patriot, he could have worked in the police, security service, or anywhere else. And would no longer be of interest to NKVD recruiters. But he was recruited and wanted to stay where he had access to valuable information. So he was an ideological spy, a doubly dangerous enemy, and a traitor to his people and his country. Or maybe he liked spy games, but that’s psychiatry.
The new Stalinist spy was given the nickname “Breitenbach” and put in contact with Vasily Zarubin. This is where you can start laughing. Gestapo officer Willy Lehman’s duties included uncovering “communist espionage” in German companies. Having become a spy, Lehman now had to catch… himself.
“Breitenbach” began supplying its new bosses with valuable information. Among them were data on the construction of submarines, and armored cars, and information on the production of synthetic petrol. One of the most important pieces of information passed on by the spy was a secret document about a new missile weapon being developed by scientists in Wernher von Braun’s laboratory. This was the ‘Nebelwerfer’ rocket launcher, which the Russians renamed ‘Katjuscha’.

He also gave information about the laying of a new generation of submarines in the shipyards, the production of all-metal fighter planes, the construction of a new factory for the production of chemical nerve agents, and a copy of a secret manual for 14 types of the latest German weapons.
Lehman received and gave to his NKVD bosses descriptions of new types of self-propelled artillery guns, armored vehicles, flame-throwing tanks, and mortars, including long-range mortars, armor-piercing bullets, special grenades, and solid-fuel rockets for gas attacks. Lehmann was the first to inform Moscow of the start of work on the development of long-range liquid-fuelled rockets under the direction of Wernher von Braun and gave the exact location of five secret test sites where the new weapons were being tested.
Lehman also provided information on the development and strengthening of the Nazi regime, the structure of the German secret services, their personnel, and working methods. Of particular value to Moscow was a copy of a top-secret report entitled ‘On the Organisation of German National Defence’. From this source, Moscow soon learned the entire structure and personnel of the Gestapo, SD, and Abwehr. Lehman was warning the Soviet residents of planned actions, inspections, and arrests.

Lehman didn’t just betray military and industrial secrets. He handed over to Moscow all the Gestapo agents about whom he had received information. Based on revelations made by Pavel Sudoplatov, an important member of Stalin’s secret services, Lehman passed on to the Soviet side information about the infiltration of Gestapo agents into the Communist underground and into Russian white emigrant circles (P. A. Sudoplatov, “Intelligence and the Kremlin”, M. “Gay”, 1996, p. 166).
In general, he should have had at least two orders of Lenin and the star of Hero of the USSR for his betrayal. But he got a hole from the Kremlin masters. And he will get another hole in his head from his own. Soon.

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In 1937, at the height of Stalin’s repressions, many Soviet residents were recalled to Moscow and disappeared into the cellars of the Lubyanka. The head of the residence, Vasily Zarubin, was also recalled, accused of treason, and suspended. All the spies working for Zarubin were deemed unreliable and communication with them was cut off.

By this time, Lehman had been promoted to head of security for all industries in the Third Reich. He would have been happy, living a quiet life. But Lehman had already fallen ill with espionage, and mental illness was eating away at him. Breaking all the rules of conspiracy and disregarding caution, he passed a letter to the Soviet Embassy asking for communication with him to be re-established. He was given a new contact and continued his double life.

By 1940 the war was spreading across Europe. Poland had already been occupied and partitioned, and Wehrmacht armies were invading Belgium, France, and Norway. Hitler was preparing for war with Stalin, and all Soviet institutions in Germany were under increased intelligence surveillance.

In June 1941, three days before the German attack on the Soviet Union, Lehman again broke all the rules of conspiracy. He phoned the Soviet Embassy and summoned a liaison officer for an emergency meeting. His actions were those of a madman, arousing mistrust and suspicion. It was as if he was acting under the dictates of the Gestapo.

The super-suspicious Stalin did not believe such messages, fearing provocation. He ordered such warnings to be blacklisted. Communication with Lehman was again cut off. After this second time, Lehman was no longer trusted in Moscow, where he was considered a double agent. So they decided to get rid of him in the same way they had once gotten rid of Richard Sorge, who had become redundant, by handing him over to Japanese counterintelligence.

In mid-1942, two radio operators were thrown into Berlin and Müller’s service quickly identified them. One of the radio operators was a German Communist, Robert Barth, known as ‘Beck’, who had voluntarily surrendered to Soviet captivity. Unable to withstand the torture of interrogation, Beck agreed to take part in a radio game with Moscow. However, he managed to send a conditional signal, which meant that he was under control. When Moscow received the signal, to ensure that their radio operators were already working for the Gestapo, they sent them the contact details of the now redundant Breitenbach. In Berlin, it was left to the Gestapo to lure Lehman out for a staged meeting with a contact.
On a Christmas evening in 1942, SS Hauptsturmfuehrer Willy Lehman was summoned urgently to work. He was shot in the cellar minutes after his arrest.

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EPILOGUE.

After the end of the war, the former Soviet radio operator “Beck”, who had been released by the Gestapo (!), voluntarily surrendered to Red Army representatives and reported that he had signaled to Moscow about his controlled work during a radio game and disinformation in messages.
The naïve idiot had asked for it. He was accused of treason and shot by his masters. Official information about the Soviet agent “Breitenbach”, who for 12 years passed crucial information from the center of German counter-intelligence, remained secret for many years. Lehman’s story was told by writer and special services historian Fyodor Gladkov in the documentary “Modern History. Seventeen Moments of Spring 25 Years Later”.
Another fifteen years later, the writer Yulian Semyonov received permission from the Lubyanka to work in the KGB archives. He was offered the case of “Breitenbach”. The result of the writer’s work was his novel, which formed the basis of the screenplay for the film “Seventeen Moments of Spring”. Another mythmaker, he created the myth of the Soviet spy Stirlitz – the most successful myth of the Soviet propaganda machine in the second half of the twentieth century.
In his memoirs, Boris Eskin, a writer, friend, and interlocutor of Julian Semyonov, another mythmaker, testified that information about Lehman’s activities was the most valuable for Julian Semyonov in creating the image of Stirlitz.

In 2011, the first Russian television channel showed a documentary and mythical film about Lehman. The film’s synopsis on the channel’s website claimed: “Stirlitz, the hero of Julian Semyonov, had a real-life prototype: SS Hauptsturmfuehrer Willy Lehman, head of the Gestapo’s General Counterintelligence Department”.

The spy’s merits were not recognized by Soviet awards. Twenty years later, Lehmann’s wife was invited to the Soviet Embassy in East Germany and presented with a gold watch engraved with the inscription: “In memory of Soviet friends”.

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5. RED KAPELLA.

Preface.

Before the outbreak of the Second World War, a spy network was operating in Europe, gathering information and sending it to Moscow. The network’s radio operators were in Belgium, Holland, Germany and France. In the history of clandestine warfare, their interception was one of the most successful examples of the creation of an extensive network of spies operating on enemy territory. It was an orchestra of spies. The German word for orchestra is ‘kapella’.
In December 1942, the conductor of this ‘orchestra’, Leopold Trepper, was arrested by the Gestapo, the organization crushed and many of its members executed. Trepper himself survived and returned to Moscow. Stalin’s investigators were unable to prove that he was a traitor or a double agent, but no one in the intelligence services believed that the resident of the Soviet spy network who came out of the Gestapo prison had not been turned back. For their own Trepper was “worked material”, completely “flashed out”, such people were liquidated as unnecessary.

Trepper was sentenced to 15 years in prison, 10 of which he served, and was pardoned after Stalin’s death. In 1957 he was allowed to leave for his native Poland. From there he went to Switzerland and then to Israel. All these years he remained silent.
The work of the French historian Gilles Perrault, who made Trepper a hero, inspired him to write his memoirs. In 1975, he published his book “The Great Game. Memoirs of a Soviet Intelligence Officer“. It was published in many countries, but not in the Soviet Union. Perhaps his book was not published in the USSR because the truth about the death of the “Red Kapella” remained unsolved. Perhaps it was because he described the harsh conditions of imprisonment in Soviet cells, the mistreatment of prisoners, and the arbitrariness of the guards. Or perhaps Trepper’s book was not published in the USSR because he was politically illiterate in his assessment of Soviet life and the events of those years. He says, for example, that “…Stalin’s regime perverted socialism to the point of complete unrecognizability…”. But there was no socialism in Russia before Stalin. Stalin could not have perverted something that did not exist. Or did Stalin pervert Lenin’s idea of what socialism should be? Lenin himself had no idea what socialism could be, and he admitted this in all his works. Because there was no socialism in the world, there was no country to copy it from.

Stalin perverted the Zionist idea, expressed by Trotsky in Petrograd in 1918, of turning Russia into a desert inhabited by white Negroes. Stalin expelled Trotsky, which saddened all those who dreamed of a promised land in the lands of the Russian Empire. Stalin, a former criminal, accustomed to life in prisons and penal servitude, could think of no other model of socialism than socialism behind barbed wire. That’s how he built it.

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On 23 August 1939, representatives of the governments of Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact in the Kremlin. As the Soviet spy Trepper wrote in his book, “…In honor of such an event, champagne was served, and Stalin, raising his glass, made an unforgettable toast: I know how much the German people love their Führer, so I will drink to his health…!”

A month later, after the mutual invasion of Poland, the Soviet Union and Germany concluded a treaty of friendship and a joint border. And champagne was served again. After the official part, Molotov raised his glass: “We have always believed that a strong Germany is a necessary condition for lasting peace in Europe!”.
It is strange why these champagne drinkers were not hanged in Nuremberg next to their comrades.

=== === ===

WHO ORDERED MUSIC.
Books have been written about the “Red Kapella” in the West. And in Russia, they even filmed fifteen episodes of “TV Balanda”, as nonsensical as the series about Stirlitz.
But in this series directed by Lioznova, Soviet filmmakers trained in Hollywood were already copying the techniques of Western producers. For example, they decided to attract viewers, not with spy chases and shootouts, but with “strawberries”. However, by telling about the love affairs of ordinary assistants, they touchingly interpret the moral character of the main hero Trepper, modestly omitting his mistress, a lady named Georgie de Winter.
In the series, the scene of the Brussels group’s arrest was also given a Hollywood fantasy. But Trepper’s assistant Anatoly Gurevich, nicknamed “Kent”, who escaped from a Gestapo prison and was living out his life in St Petersburg after watching the series, told how it was:
“…On the occasion of his arrival from Paris Trepper gathered a party, on which, contrary to the laws of conspiracy, were invited liaisons, radio operators, and cipher operators. In one room they were carousing with prostitutes, while in another room the radio transmission was on. The Germans searched for the transmitter by switching off the electricity to the houses in the targeted area. They switched off one house and listened if the transmitter was working, then switched off the second house. After they switched off the third house – the transmitter was silent, so the broadcasts were coming from there. That’s how they captured them all, drunk. Trepper himself managed to get away that time…”.

*****

At the end of the 1920s, in response to the threat of the ‘Comintern’ to start a new war in Europe and fan the flames of the world revolution, all European countries signed the Anti-Comintern Pact. Fascism arose in Italy and Nazism in Germany in opposition to the spread of Marxism. Stalin saw the Trotskyist Comintern as a threat to himself, and it is understandable that after Hitler came to power in Germany, Stalin’s NKVD and Hitler’s Gestapo began to work together. They shared a common goal – the destruction of the Comintern.
As early as 1934, the meat grinder of repression began to work in Soviet Russia. Its first victims were Comintern members (the text of the cooperation agreement between the Gestapo and the NKVD is given in the first chapter of my book “In the Trail of the Grey Wolf”).
And in Europe, the transmitters began to work. The German secret services began to track the espionage activities of the Red Kapella’s radio operators by intercepting coded messages. In the intelligence services, these radio operators were called “pianists”. According to their repertoire, the “pianists” were transmitting to Moscow. That is why they were called the Red Kapella. The network was organized and directed by the Soviet spy Leopold Trepper.

*****

Trepper was born in 1904 into a large Jewish family in a town on the outskirts of Austria-Hungary. After the First World War ended in 1918, the town became part of Poland. In 1921, after his father’s death, the family moved to Upper Silesia, where Trepper worked as a mechanic in a factory and speculated in vodka in Krakow.
Two years later he was arrested for taking part in a workers’ uprising and blacklisted. He joined the Zionist organization ‘Gehalutz’, funded by American Jews, and moved to Palestine. There he worked draining swamps and lived on a kibbutz. Eventually, he found himself with the Communists, joined the Comintern, was arrested, imprisoned in the strictest regime prison in the city of Haifa, and then exiled to Cyprus.
The Communists helped Trepper to escape to France and found him a correspondent for the Communist press. These correspondents had the right to enter various institutions under the pretext of describing the lives and problems of the workers in France. They were all informers and spies who provided the French Communist Party with information.

Trepper was soon hunted by the French secret police and in 1932 he fled to Moscow, where he became a student at the Military Academy, where General Orlov (aka Leiba Feldman) gave a special course for aspiring spies. Next came “practice” in the Red Army Intelligence Directorate and the meeting that began Trepper’s spy career.
In the autumn of 1937, a general was recalled from Spain to Moscow. His surname was Berzin and he was there as a military adviser to the Republican Army, heading Stalin’s spy network. The same Berzin who once took a bribe from Sidney Reilly, who was preparing a mutiny against the Bolsheviks. Then Berzin took the money and immediately handed the conspirators over to Felix Dzerzhinsky. Later he became an important figure and offered Trepper, who spoke several languages, the chance to set up an intelligence network in Western Europe.
Trepper liked the idea and came up with a way to legalize the activities of the network’s resident, himself, under the umbrella of an export-import company based in Belgium with branches in several countries. They agreed on everything but never saw each other again. Berzin disappeared into the cellars of the Lubyanka. Stalin was eliminating all witnesses to his past.

Trepper was sent to Belgium under the name of Canadian industrialist Adam Mickler. There he was reunited with his old Palestinian friends Leo Grossfogel and Hillel Katz. The former lived in Brussels, the latter in Paris. Both became assistants to Trepper, who would later hand them over to the Gestapo when he was facing death. Grossfogel headed the company “King Rubber”, which dealt in ‘Mackintosh’ clothes firm. This company became the commercial “roof” of the spy organization.
Soon “staff” arrived from Moscow: radio operator Makarov with documents aka Uruguayan citizen Carlos Alamo, another “Uruguayan” Sukulov, and with him the spy Gurevich. Trepper’s wife, Lyubov Broyde, helped her husband gather information and taught the scouts sent from Moscow the peculiarities of behavior abroad and the French language. In short, this family business united proletarians from all over the world.
The European network of the ‘Red Kapella’ was structured as follows: at the head of the espionage structure was the Big Boss, under whom was a team of regional chiefs. Each of these chiefs had his network of spies and informers. The Big Boss knew everyone, but the regional chiefs did not know their counterparts and their associates. This meant that if the enemy counter-intelligence made a hole in the network, they could not destroy the whole network. To do that, the counter-intelligence had to get to the Big Boss.

Trepper had infiltrated the Belgian business world, appearing to the authorities as a wealthy businessman and inspiring confidence. The most important secret reports he was passing on through the head of the French Communist Party, Jacques Duclos, who had channels of communication with Moscow.
During the years of his close friendship with Hitler, Stalin ordered to NKVD to stop intelligence activities against the Third Reich and to freeze the activities of the spy network in Europe. Trepper was repeatedly summoned to Moscow, but it was a time of repressions, and, remembering the unknown end of General Berzin, he avoided returning under various pretexts. He left Brussels for Paris, leaving Anatoly Gurevich, nicknamed “Kent”, in the Belgian capital as his assistant.

On 10 May 1940, the Germans launched an offensive on the Western Front. France, Belgium, and Holland were occupied. Trepper decided to prove his loyalty to Stalin. In a secret eighty-page report, he described in detail the methodology of the Luftwaffe’s bombers and the Wehrmacht’s tactics for destroying enemy anti-tank installations.
His report, sent to Moscow, was essentially a description of Hitler’s new, developed, and tested strategy of lightning warfare, ‘the Blitzkrieg’. Later, in Russia, this strategy would be thwarted by distance, terrain, and Russian frost. And America’s entry into the war would put an end to ‘blitzkrieg’ altogether.

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In August 1940, the Germans were preparing for ‘Operation Sea Lion’ – an air and sea invasion of Britain. By this time, Hitler’s military intelligence and diplomats had informed him that Stalin was moving his divisions to the border: of the Red Army’s total of 151 infantry divisions, 96 were already on the German border. Another 23 cavalry divisions and 28 mechanized brigades were hiding in the forests. New troops were being added all the time.
The decisive argument for the Reich’s military leadership in the question of whether Stalin was preparing an attack on Germany was the accumulation of Soviet offensive artillery units on the borders, which were not needed for defense. The Germans had no such forces.
Hitler realized that his “friend” in the Kremlin was planning to take advantage of the situation and invade Europe in the days when the main German forces would be on the other side of the Channel. The Führer called off ‘Operation Sea Lion’, moved Wehrmacht divisions to Poland, and ordered the General Staff to draw up a ‘Barbarossa’ plan.

***

EDEM DAS SEINE.

When Stalin learned of Hitler’s new plans, there was an urgent need to activate the intelligence network. In 1940, the Kremlin appointed Leopold Trepper to head the spy network in Western Europe. An extensive network was set up in France, Belgium, Holland and Switzerland. Trepper managed to recruit several Germans who had held high positions in the Third Reich. They were employees of secret companies who were close to the highest echelons of the Reich.
1) Harro Schulze-Boysen was born in Kiel in 1909, the son of Erich Schulze and Maria-Louise Boysen. His father was a career naval officer with the rank of frigate captain (Captain 2nd class). Harro was the grandnephew of Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, a personal friend of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the creator of German naval doctrine. Schulze-Boysen married the granddaughter of Prince von Oylenburg, whose family lived next door to Marshal Göring, who was invited to the wedding. This acquaintance brought Harro to the institute where the most important research in military technology was being carried out.
From December 1940, Schulze-Boysen passed secret military information to Soviet intelligence, including data on Germany’s preparations for an attack on the Soviet Union.
On 16 June 1941, a telegram was sent from Berlin to Moscow: “German aggression may begin at any moment. A source in the Ministry reports that the appointment of the heads of the military and economic departments of the future districts of the occupied territory of the USSR has been made…”.
This information was immediately passed on to Stalin and Molotov. Stalin attached the following resolution to the report: “To Comrade Merkulov. You can send your ‘source’ from the headquarters of the German Air Force to fuck… mother. He is not a source, but a disinformer. I.St.”

In July 1942, the Germans managed to decode a radio message from the Soviet military intelligence service GRU from Moscow to Brussels, which contained Schulze-Boysen’s name and address. On 19 December 1942, the Reich Military Court sentenced Harro Schulze-Boysen, his wife Libertas, and his spy partner Arvid Harnack to death. Schulze-Boysen was hanged in Berlin’s Plötzensee prison, and his wife was beheaded.

2) Arvid Harnack was born in Darmstadt in 1901 into the family of the famous German historian Otto Harnack. He studied law at the universities of Vienna and Hamburg. He also holds a doctorate in philosophy and studied economics in the United States. After the Nazis came to power, Harnack was appointed scientific adviser to the Reich Ministry of Economics, with access to the most secret plans for the production of military products.
In 1935, Harnack was recruited by Soviet intelligence and given the operational code name ‘Corsican’. In 1937 he joined the NSDAP purposely for reputation. He made contact with Schulze-Boysen and worked with the Soviet Residency.

Arvid Harnack and his wife Mildred were arrested by the Gestapo at the same time as the Schulze-Boysens. Arvid was hanged in Plötzensee prison, next to Harro. His wife Mildred was initially sentenced to six years in prison, but on Hitler’s orders this was commuted to death and Mildred was beheaded.

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In December 1941, the Abwehr managed to capture one of the stations operating in Brussels. The whole group was arrested. None of the group knew any of the collaborators, only the name of their boss. One of the prisoners couldn’t stand the torture and gave up Trepper. The spy boss was taken at the dentist’s chair on Christmas Eve 1942. He planned to disappear the next day and hoped to have time to have his teeth fixed.
During the first interrogations, it became clear that Trepper was well-informed; his impeccable knowledge baffled the Gestapo. So he was sent to Berlin, to the head of the Gestapo, General Muller. Years later, in his book, Trepper recalled the interrogation, which he said was more like a friendly conversation of mutual interest.

Müller was a clever psychologist. He did not chisel out the teeth of his interrogators, nor did he cut out their insides, as was done in the Lubyanka. Trustworthiness and kindness were his main techniques, which he applied to his interlocutor, sometimes treating him to an excellent cognac and a cigar. In the course of the conversation, Muller made such arguments that the spy became his agent. Voluntarily and forever.
Müller did not kill clever spies. After all, they were his resources, his material, his tool in the game with the enemy. The secret police general was weaving his spy network, in which every recruited spy was a valuable knot. And what fisherman would cut his own net?
The Gestapo did not kill Trepper. After a conversation of mutual interest between Mueller and Trepper, mass arrests began in the ‘Red Kapella’ spy network. All those arrested were taken to a concentration camp between Brussels and Antwerp for interrogation, torture, and execution. Most of the members of the spy network disappeared in this camp. By October 1943, more than 30 men had been hanged and shot, and 18 women beheaded. Seven men committed suicide and dozens more were sent to concentration camps, forced labor, or the front.

Decades after the war, the Israeli literary and journalistic magazine LEHAIM wrote movingly about how the arrested Trepper was tried by the Gestapo to induce cooperation by organizing a radio game with Moscow to disinform the Soviet leadership and command, but the brave spy allegedly managed to fool the Gestapo, escaped from prison, reported to Moscow on the failure of the network, continued his intelligence activities and provided the Centre with crucial information.
Israeli, Russian, and other sources fail to mention a very important deal between Trepper and the head of the Gestapo. This deal was mentioned by former Gestapo chief Muller himself in 1948 during recruitment talks with the American intelligence officer in Switzerland.
The Gestapo chief kept all his department’s documents on microfilm, which he gradually sold to the Americans after the war. Muller knew that the CIA needed his information on spy networks worldwide, and he was the only one who had it. That’s why he was made a general in the American army and became President Truman’s secret adviser on Stalinism. Mueller assisted FBI Director Hoover and Senator McCarthy in fighting against Communists and Stalinist spies in the US government.

Gestapo chief Müller forced Trepper to play a radio game with Moscow. But Trepper was caught in a double game trying to message Moscow that he was working for the Germans. Müller bluntly told the cunning man that his life was no longer of any value to the Reich and that the consequences would be “consequential”, literally. The Gestapo man made it clear to Trepper that their cooperation was over.
To save his life, Trepper offered Mueller the Kremlin’s most valuable agent, Henry Robinson, based in the spy network in France, Switzerland, and England.
There are Gestapo documents in the German Central Archive confirming this fact, and Mueller himself wrote about it in his diaries. Well, Trepper, of course, hides this fact of his betrayal in the book, and the film directors keep silent about it. After all, if they had told it, there would have been no one to make a film about.

*****
The son of Polish-Russian Jews, Henry Robinson (Arnold Schnee as a child) was born in Belgium in 1897. As a young man, he became a French citizen. During the First World War, he studied in Switzerland and became involved with the Communists. During a trip to Moscow, he joined the ‘Comintern’ and worked under Osip Pyatnitsky in the International Relations Department, the center of espionage. He was ordered to carry out underground anti-war work in Germany, opposing the occupation of the Ruhr by the French army. In 1923, a French court sentenced him in absentia to ten years in prison.
But Robinson got out. From 1929 he headed a spy network in France, while also serving as an officer in the 4th Division of Soviet Military Counterintelligence (sabotage and sabotage), working with similar structures in Switzerland and England. He rose through the ranks and by 1936 was a member of the Soviet military attaché group in Paris, controlling spy branches in France, Switzerland, and England under cover of a diplomatic passport.

Robinson was arrested in Paris on 24 December 1942 and interrogated by Mueller in Berlin after the Christmas holidays. The Gestapo chief was brief. After listing everyone who had already been arrested by the Gestapo, Müller suggested that Robinson confess or be shot the same day. He added that Clara Schabbel, the mother of his son, had already been arrested with her son Leo and that the same fate awaited them.
In exchange for his life and the lives of his family, Robinson agreed to cooperate. He confessed that lists of spies and recruited informants from France, Switzerland, and England were kept in a cache in his Paris flat.
Gestapo agents took his Paris flat apart and found what they were looking for. When Muller began to look through Robinson’s papers, he realized what a big fish he had hooked. This spy was such an important source that he was not worth executing, but to the entire spy world, he had to disappear.
On paper, he was “executed.” His wife Clara Schabbel was executed as an unnecessary witness. No one ever discovered where the most important Moscow spy Henry Robinson had gone. Only Müller and Robinson, who had already changed his name, knew.

There are several versions of what happened to him:
1) Robinson was sentenced to death and executed.
2) He was killed by a member of the ‘Red Kapella’ for treason in 1944.
3) He was killed by someone on the orders of Moscow.
4) He survived and continued to work for Soviet intelligence.
There was no version of him working for the Gestapo under a new name. It was not considered.

*****

In gratitude for such an agent, Müller gave Trepper life. But by releasing the traitor from the Gestapo, he would have been condemned to death by his masters from the Lubyanka. So Trepper “escaped.” Here’s how it was done. He was placed in a separate cell. A certain Berg was appointed as Trepper’s guard, who was allowed to visit the prisoner at any time. Berg was responsible for feeding Trepper, took him for walks in the yard, and even drove him to town in his car. He also took Trepper to the pharmacy where he bought his medication. There was an exit from the pharmacy to another street.
In September 1943, they went to the pharmacy, Berg asked Trepper to buy him some medicine. Trepper went in through one door of the pharmacy and out through another. He wandered around Paris until he found his friends who were in hiding. He informed Moscow of his escape and his desire to continue his work.
In August 1944, after the liberation of Paris, Trepper received a radiogram from the Centre congratulating him and asking him to arrive in Moscow on the plane of the Soviet military mission. He was met at the airport, taken to a flat, assigned a guard, and isolated from the outside world. He was then transferred to Lubyanka prison. No charges were brought, he was not tortured or beaten, just asked to write a report.
For lack of evidence of treason, Trepper was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. After Stalin died in 1953, he was released and rehabilitated after serving 10 years. He was granted a pension and the time served was credited to his labor record. After serving his sentence, Trepper left the USSR and tried to settle in Europe, but eventually went to Israel.

And here is a brief history of his partner, a member of the Belgian spy group Gurevich, nicknamed ‘Kent’. He was also arrested but escaped execution. In prison, his warden was SS Panwitz, and a relationship of trust developed between them.
Towards the end of the war, as Germany’s defeat became a reality, “Kent” persuaded Panwitz to escape to Moscow, where the SS man would be credited with saving the Soviet spy. He added that with the British or the Americans the SS man would face the gallows
Panwitz agreed with his prisoner’s arguments and arranged for them to escape to Moscow, where they were taken to the Lubyanka. The German was “credited” with ten years in the Gulag; Gurevich himself was given even more. He was released under an amnesty in 1955. Three years later he was arrested again, but released after two years. He was rehabilitated in 1991.

*****

COMMENTS.
Among the many nations inhabiting our planet, there is one that settles in a particular country and immediately begins to stir up the mood in society. The newcomers do not like local customs and traditions, and they ridicule them. They do not like local laws and do not observe them. They organize conspiracies, provoke riots and strikes, and call for the overthrow of the government. There are not many of them, but they are organized, their strength lies in supporting and helping each other. And they create a network all over the world, in all countries. They are an invisible army whose legionnaires follow the orders of the main headquarters. Their main weapon is gold and all their financial adventures are financed by the worldwide network of their bankers. They are invisible because they look no different from the people they live among.
One of these people was Leopold Trepper. He had not yet grown stubble on his cheeks when he started holding meetings and taking part in strikes. He didn’t like the order in the country where he was born and educated and was blacklisted. He moved to Palestine, but even among his people, he did not like it and he joined the Communist Party and the “Comintern”, he wanted to make a world revolution. He called Jews and Arabs to strike, for which he was imprisoned and finally deported.

The next stop was France, where Trepper also disliked the order and began spying for the ‘Comintern’. He escaped from the French secret police to the USSR, where he learned the art of espionage returned to Europe under a false name, and began many clandestine activities.
During the war, he was arrested by the Gestapo, to whom he revealed the entire Soviet spy network of his colleagues to save his life. He returned to the USSR and spent time in prison. Disliking the Soviet socialism he had spent years spying for, he returned to his native Poland.
But even there he felt uncomfortable because the head of the Polish government spoke the truth by calling the Jewish community a fifth column of imperialism. Trepper went to Switzerland, but he did not like it there either. That’s why he went to Israel. He would have gone much further, but his life was over.
And he was no patriot for any of the people he lived among. So where did the cosmopolitan like it? Well, he liked living with the people he was spying against. He enjoyed the social amenities of Belgium, he was educated in France. He wore good French suits, shaved with the best German razors, lounged in the perfumed sheets of compartment carriages, and ate excellent food in Italian restaurants, washing it down with vintage wines. And spying, reporting, spying everywhere.

What is the logic or the paradox of his action? Did Trepper, who enjoyed all the advantages and achievements of the society in which he liked to live, want these advantages would be destroyed?
I think not. There can only be one answer: he loved himself and money and sold himself for money here and there. For some people, he remained a traitor and they tried to forget him forever, others called him a hero, and others called him nothing at all. What would you call him?
© Copyright: Walter Maria, 2020
Certificate of Publication No. 22012280135

*****

6. FISHER – ABEL.

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William Fisher was born in Britain in 1903 to a family of Marxist émigrés who had been exiled from Russia in 1901 for revolutionary activities. In 1920 the ‘Communist International’ was founded by the Trotskyists in Moscow to fan the flames of the world revolution. The Trotskyists recruited Marxists from all over the world. The Fishers decided to join, returned to Russia, and, having been granted new citizenship, settled with the families of other revolutionaries in the apartment allocated to them in the Kremlin. Young William joined the ‘Executive Committee of the Comintern’ as a translator. In 1925 he was drafted into the army in the 1st Radio Telegraph Regiment of the Moscow Military District, where he specialized as a radio operator. This came in handy later.
In 1927 he was recruited into the Foreign Intelligence Service of the OGPU. He spent three years mastering the science of espionage in a special facility, and in 1930 the Soviet masters ordered him to move to England. Fisher applied to the British Embassy for permission to return and was granted a British passport. He worked for the Lubyanka as a radio operator in Norway and Britain.
In 1937, following the escape to the West of Spain-based Soviet secret agent Alexander Orlov (alias Leiba Feldman), Fischer was urgently recalled from England when Feldman began handing over all of Stalin’s agents to Western secret services.

Fischer did not fall under Stalin’s axe of repression. At the end of 1938, he was simply dismissed from the NKVD. With the outbreak of war with Germany in 1941, he returned to the NKVD and was promoted to lieutenant of the GB. Fischer trained radio operators for partisan detachments and reconnaissance groups sent to German-occupied countries. It was at this time that he met Rudolf Abel, whose name and biography he later used.
After the war, Soviet intelligence began an active hunt for American nuclear secrets. In 1948, Fischer was sent to work illegally in the United States to gather information from sources working at nuclear facilities. He had the documents of Andrew Kajotis, a U.S. citizen of Lithuanian descent (who died or was killed in Lithuania that same year, 1948). Fischer settled in New York, ran a network of Soviet agents, and, for cover, owned a photography studio in Brooklyn under the name of artist Emil Goldfuss.
He was given the nickname “Mark” and was to obtain information from the Cohen family about American and British nuclear technology. Fisher’s work was appreciated by the owners, and in 1949 he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner.

This went on for several years. A radio operator nicknamed “Vic”, a Finn by nationality was sent to help Fischer. Like all Finns, Vic was a desperate drunkard, and eventually, they decided to recall him. But, suspecting something amiss, the Finn surrendered to American authorities and turned “Mark” over. In 1957, Fisher was arrested by FBI agents. During the arrest, Fischer gave the name of his deceased friend Rudolf Abel. Throughout the investigation, he categorically denied his connection to the Soviet secret service, refused to testify in court, and rejected attempts by U.S. intelligence officials to induce him to cooperate. He was sentenced to 32 years in prison.
Fischer realized that if he confessed, he would have to turn over his accomplices and the Lubyanka assassin would find him in an American prison. So he switched his name to Abel. In 1962 he was exchanged for Francis Powers, an American U-2 spy plane pilot who was shot down near Sverdlovsk on 1 May 1960 and sentenced by a Soviet court to 10 years in prison for espionage.
After extensive treatment, Fisher returned to work in intelligence, helping to train young spies. He died on 15 November 1971 at the age of 69. He is buried next to his father at the Novo-Donskoye Cemetery in Moscow.

For some strange reason, all spies are sentimental: some play the violin, others snort cocaine or drink heavily. Are they trying to escape their past? This one painted watercolors of landscapes because his health didn’t allow him to snort or drink.

***
Soon after Fisher’s arrest, the Cohens were in jail too. Fisher had told the Americans something, for sure. But the Cohens were luckier than the Rosenbergs, who were sent to the electric chair for giving atomic secrets to Moscow. Those Cohens were exchanged in 1969, honored, and pampered in the Kremlin. They lived in a KGB complex near Moscow but refused to learn Russian and did not want to communicate with their relatives in the United States. They lived in depression, having traded freedom for Brezhnev’s totalitarian regime. So they did not come out of their depression and died.

Gordon Lonsdale was involved in Fisher’s espionage. He was arrested and exchanged. Living in Russia, Lonsdale fell into a morbid state, drinking. In October 1970 he went into the woods to pick up some mushrooms and died suddenly there. He was 48 years old.

Another German Jew and physicist, Klaus Fuchs, became a Marxist and joined the Communist Party at the age of 22. This was a risk in Germany in 1931 when communists were rounded up and imprisoned. Fuchs fled to Britain, in Germany he had already been sentenced to death in absentia. He obtained a doctorate in physics from the University of Bristol. From 1941, under the direction of Professor Born, Fuchs worked with a team of nuclear scientists on the Manhattan Project. This was the most secret project of the American scientists who created the atomic bomb. Fuchs sold his share of the research to the USSR. Although Soviet historians write that he did so unselfishly, out of political conviction and love for the sickle and hammer. They say that he found a Soviet resident and gave him the information for free. It is hard to believe in the disinterestedness of this nation.
As a result, the USSR was able to create nuclear weapons amazingly fast, in just 3 years. This aroused the suspicion of the British secret services, which discovered the “mole” during their inspection.
Fuchs provided the USSR with information about the hydrogen bomb as well, allowing them to begin work on it even earlier than the United States. Fuchs was arrested and sentenced to only 14 years in prison, as technically England and the USSR were still considered allies. Fuchs was released in 1959 and spent the rest of his life in East Germany.

***

And if Jews are offended that the world doesn’t love them – don’t believe it! During the years of Brezhnev’s stagnation, all Soviet Jews suddenly wanted to reunite with their relatives in Israel and were released from their unfinished country of communism. But for some reason, instead of the native sands of Palestine, they all ended up in America. And in the years of Gorbachev’s confusion, all the other Soviet Jews fled to Germany for a nourishing and lazy life.

*****

7. SERIAL KILLER