56. Politburo decision P59/200, dated September 10, 1947. Politburo TsK RKP(b), 489; Nikita Petrov, ‘Prestupnyi kharakter stalinskogo regima: yuridicheskie osnovaniya,’ Polit.ru, November 19, 2009 (in Russian), http://www.polit.ru/lectures/2009/11/19/stalin.html#pin16, retrieved September 8, 2011.
57. Report of N. Rychkov, K. Gorshenin and S. Kruglov to Molotov and Stalin, dated November 4, 1947. GARF, Fond R-9401, Opis’ 2 (Molotov’s NKVD/MVD Special Folder), Delo 174, Ll. 234–7.
Part VII. Toward Berlin
CHAPTER 21
Crossing the Border
In late March 1944, troops of the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian fronts crossed the border with Romania. On May 1, 1944, Stalin explained the Soviet move to the West: ‘Our tasks cannot be restricted by pushing the enemy troops out of our Motherland… We must free our brothers from German enslavement—the Poles, Czechoslovaks, and our allied nations of Western Europe who have been conquered by Hitler’s Germany.’1
During May 1944, new commanders of the 1st–3rd Ukrainian fronts were appointed and the main members of the Stavka, along with the commanders of every front, were given aliases to use in communications between Moscow and the fronts. Stalin’s alias was ‘Semenov’, Nikolai Bulganin became ‘Balashov’, while Georgii Zhukov was called ‘Zharov’ (Table 21-1). Evidently military leaders became more careful in messages that could potentially be intercepted by the enemy.
The work of SMERSH UKRs of the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian fronts and of the 2nd (foreign POWs and Soviet servicemen who had been POWs) and 6th (investigation) GUKR departments significantly increased. SMERSH operatives in the field were searching for members of General Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army (ROA), as well as for any local politicians, activists, and White Russian émigrés who could potentially create problems for the Soviet-controlled regimes Stalin planned to set up. Nicola Sinevirsky, who worked for SMERSH, wrote later that SMERSH’s ‘mission was to wipe out the segment of Europe that still thought differently and did not accept the Soviet system’.2
Romania
On August 30, 1944, troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front took over Ploesti (the oil-rich region of Romania, which was of utmost importance for the Nazi war machine), and then reached Bucharest the next day. The front included a Romanian division formed in the Soviet Union.
A week earlier, on August 23, Romania’s 23-year-old King Mihai I had ordered his guards to arrest the dictator Marshal Ion Antonescu and other leaders of the Romanian fascist regime.3 King Mihai was a great-greatgrandson of the British Queen Victoria by both of his parents; he was also a third cousin of the future Queen Elizabeth II as well. The king’s action was preceded by lengthy secret negotiations with the Western Allies and the Soviets.
On August 17, the Romanian opposition to Ion Antonescu had signed an armistice, which the King announced to his people on the radio. On August 26, in response to the Romanian ‘betrayal’, the Germans, under Lieutenant General Reiner Stahel’s command, attacked Bucharest. Stahel was one of the Führer’s most loyal and ruthless generals, and on July 27, 1944 Hitler personally awarded him the Iron Cross for successfully bringing out a group of German troops encircled by the Red Army near Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. After this, Hitler appointed Stahel Military Commander of Warsaw and then ordered Stahel’s transfer to Romania during the German suppression of the Warsaw Uprising, which took place between August 1 and October 2, 1944.4
The German efforts failed. On September 2, 1944, Minister Manfred von Killinger shot his secretary and himself, just after the Romanians burst into the German Legation.5 Colonel Traian Borcescu, former deputy head of the Romanian Special Intelligence Service, recalled in 1994: ‘I ran to stop [Killinger], and I saw him fall right next to his secretary. “Don’t panic,” said Karl Clodius, Germany’s representative for economic affairs in Bucharest, “the captain of a ship never leaves it when it’s sinking.”’6 As Time wrote, ‘Fat, scarfaced Dr. Karl Clodius has long been Adolf Hitler’s successful advance man in the Balkans.’7 All other members of the legation and most of the German colony (about 350 people) were detained by the Romanian security service in a concentration camp.
During these dramatic events, on September 29, a 21-man team from the Office of Strategic Service (OSS, the American intelligence service during World War II and the CIA’s predecessor), headed by Lieutenant Commander Frank Wisner, was dropped into Bucharest.8 Wisner’s code-name was ‘Typhoid’, while the operation was called ‘Bughouse’. Before this, Wisner was stationed at the OSS office in Istanbul and then in Cairo.9 With King Mihai’s permission the team immediately organized an evacuation of 1,888 Allied flyers captured by the Germans in Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia.
The team sent a huge number of Romanian diplomatic documents to the State Department in Washington.10 It also acquired about ten thousand dossiers in the buildings of the former Gestapo and German Legation. The reports and letters by SS-Hauptsturmführer Gustav Richter, ‘adviser on the Jewish question’ at the legation, were among the most valuable.11 From 1941–1943, Richter was Eichmann’s representative in Romania, and after that, he served as police attaché at the German Legation—i.e., the SD chief in Romania.
After analyzing all these materials, the OSS counterintelligence branch X-2 identified over 4,000 Axis intelligence officials and agents, over a hundred subversive organizations, and about two hundred commercial firms used as cover for espionage activity.12 A two-hundred-page file of this data was forwarded to Soviet foreign intelligence. The NKGB handed the American file over to the GRU (military intelligence), but it is unknown whether SMERSH received this information.
Until November, Wisner and his team were the only Americans in Bucharest, and Wisner established contacts with both the Romanian General Staff and Soviet military authorities. The team exchanged some information with the Soviets and even obtained the right to interrogate German military prisoners in Soviet custody. Wisner was on such good terms with the HQ of the 2nd Ukrainian Front that he was offered assistance in setting up an OSS outpost in Budapest.13 However, Wisner obviously remembered Bill Donovan’s (OSS head’s) oral instruction ‘to change [the German] targets to Russian intelligence targets in the Balkans’.14
There were also teams of British intelligence (SOE) agents in Romania.15 The cooperation of British intelligence and Soviet foreign intelligence began in Moscow in September 1941, when Lieutenant Colonel Robert Guinness signed the first agreement with the Soviet representative, ‘General Nikolaev’ (who was actually the prominent intelligence operative Colonel Vasilii Zarubin).16 However, from the beginning the Soviets suspected the British of spying and in October 1945, British specialists discovered Soviet secret listening devices throughout the British Intelligence Mission’s building in Moscow.17 On December 10, 1944, the Soviet Foreign Commissariat sent a diplomatic note to the British Embassy in Moscow that stated: ‘The presence of the other intelligence groups in addition to those [of SMERSH] that are already in existence does not seem expedient.’18 From this time onwards, the Soviets pushed all the British and, eventually, the American intelligence teams out of Romania and Bulgaria.