S. S. Biryuzov was considerably younger than Oxley, Crane, and Robertson. However, his official position was much higher than that of these generals and he was much more mature. At first General Crane tried to stress his own ‘importance.’ Biryuzov, on the other hand, behaved with natural dignity. This forced the Anglo-American representatives to admit that Biryuzov was the de facto ACC head.
After work, the Soviet and western ACC members used to meet unofficially. S. S. Biryuzov liked to invite everybody to the concerts of our military ensemble of dancers and singers. Also, we used to watch together documentary films and movies sent from the Soviet Union, United States, and England.69
The American ACC members remembered Soviet receptions differently: ‘Efforts were made to get an American drunk in order to pump him. The most familiar tactic was to have a Russian group at a reception insist that the American drink separately with each, or at a table a Russian might be served water in a liquor glass while the American got vodka.’70 Undoubtedly, SMERSH officers, whom the Americans could not identify since they wore no special insignias, attended the receptions.
William Donovan, OSS Director, and other American officials conducted long negotiations with Pavel Fitin, head of the NKGB’s Foreign Intelligence, on the possibility of attaching OSS teams in Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary to the American ACC delegations.71 Biryuzov was against the presence of the American and especially British intelligence groups in Bulgaria, and in December 1944 a small new OSS team that arrived along with the ACC section a month earlier was forced to leave Sofia.
Stalin used Biryuzov and his ACC as a tool for reducing the involvement of the former Allies in Bulgarian politics, which were completely controlled by the Soviet Politburo through Bulgarian Communists.72 In November 1944, Biryuzov wrote to the Bulgarian prime minister: ‘From now on, any contact between the Allied countries and the Bulgarian government… will go only through the… [Soviet] heads of the Allied Control Commission… Any other appeal [to the Bulgarian government]… including the appeals from the other members of the Allied countries, is not allowed [to proceed].’73 A few years later, from 1953–54, Biryuzov was appointed commander and chief Commissar of Austria.
Lieutenant General Vladislav Vinogradov, ACC deputy chair, chaired the ACC in Bucharest. Pyotr Timofeev, one of Abakumov’s assistants, headed the Inspectorate of this ACC (Table 27-1). Vinogradov’s deputy, Colonel General Ivan Susaikin, used to tell his Red Army subordinates about the task of the ACC: ‘The world revolution is moving to the west. Our [Soviet] troops are here to help the Romanian people to follow the Socialist way of developing their country.’74
Unusually for a Red Army general, Vinogradov was well educated and knew several languages—German, English, French, Romanian, and even Latin and Greek—and, therefore, could easily converse with the Allied members of the ACC. Also, he was an accomplished chess master and had authored articles about the game of chess. However, like Biryuzov, Vinogradov had no problem giving orders to the local government. In December 1944, following the GKO order, he handed a draft of the decision written in the name of the Romanian government, to the Romanian prime minister.75 In fact, this was an order to intern the whole adult population of German civilians in Romania in preparation for sending them to the Soviet Union for forced labor.
The American ACC section in Bucharest was formed in early November 1944. After the arrival on November 23 of its head, Brigade General Courtland Van Rensselaer Schuyler, the OSS team that had arrived there in September became its sub-section.76 As in the Baltics in 1940, in 1944 American witnesses were horrified by the deportation ordered now by the intellectual Vinogradov. Many years later the widow of Frank Wisner, head of the OSS group in Bucharest, told an interviewer: ‘My husband was brutally, brutally shocked. It was what probably affected his life more than any other single thing. The herding-up of those people and putting them in open boxcars to die on their way as they were going into concentration camps. While they were being hauled off as laborers by the carload in the middle of winter.’77 Robert Bishop, a member of Wisner’s OSS group, recalled in his memoirs that trains ‘loaded full of human freight—thirty to a box car—[were] carrying them to slavery and death.’78
On the whole, 69,332 German civilians were deported from Romania, and 73 were deported from Bulgaria (the German population in Bulgaria was very small).79 Similar deportations were conducted throughout Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, with a total number of 112,480 German men and women deported to the Soviet Union. One hundred and six specially created SMERSH operational groups assisted the NKVD troops in conducting the deportation.
Before Wisner left Bucharest in January 1945, he and Robert Bishop had for months been reading cables from Moscow to the Romanian Communist Party, which they obtained with the assistance of the Romanian Security Service, the Sigurantza.80 Additionally, through Theodore Mannicatide (a veteran of the Romanian General Staff whom Wisner provided with the alias ‘Tonsillitis’), the OSS team received copies of Soviet military orders. Robert Bishop also reported on the NKGB’s and NKVD’s activities in Romania, as well as on SMERSH teams in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Italy, and Greece—all the countries where the ACCs or Soviet military missions were established.81 Strangely, he called SMERSH ‘GUGBZ’ (Glavnoe Upravlenie Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti or Main State Security Directorate) and mistakenly thought that it was a sub-section of the NKVD.
Apparently, Bishop’s activity was noticed by the Soviet Inspectorate and in retaliation, in September 1945 the OSS sub-section of the US/ACC was closed. Additionally, the whole previous cooperation between the OSS and NKGB came to an end.82 After this, General Van Schuyler supervised cover operations.
UKR Directorates in Action
The UKR of each of the military groups consisted of four departments.83 The 1st was in charge of controlling the headquarters; the 2nd was in charge of finding foreign agents among the troops of the military group and checking former POWs; the 3rd was tasked with fighting against foreign agents and terrorists, as well as finding anti-Soviet elements and traitors; and the 4th was an investigation department. Romanov, who worked in the SMERSH/TsGV headquarters in Baden and Budapest, described the main goal of his directorate: spying on the secret services, military, and Western members of the ACC:
In its internal operations Smersh took advantage of the services of Austrian civilians working for our allies… A particularly popular ‘key’ [for recruitment] was to promise an individual that any of his relatives who were prisoners in the USSR would be found and released as quickly as possible… Another way was to obtain work with the western allies for persons who were known to have pro-communist views… We even recruited allied personnel themselves. Smersh took into account the strong pro-Soviet feelings which were then current among citizens of the western democracies.84
Romanov continued: ‘For external surveillance, or spying, Smersh used… members of the Austrian Communist Party… We would provide them with documents, which would guarantee that they were left alone by both the Soviet occupation authorities and the Austrian police.’ In 1945, a special political police was even formed in Austria, consisting mostly of local Communists, to help the Soviet occupational authorities.85 However, the former Nazis were as useful as the Communists: