SMERSH: Stalin's Secret Weapon: Soviet Military Counterintelligence in WWII

Garbo was the British codename of Juan Pujol García, perhaps the most influential spy of the Second World War. By feeding false information to the Germans on the eve of the D-Day landings he ensured Hitler held troops back that might otherwise have defeated the Normandy landings. Amazingly, Garbo’s cover was never broken and he remains the only person ever to have been awarded both the British MBE and the German Iron Cross. After the war Garbo faked his own death and fled to Venezuela. Ironically, his family in Spain only found out he was still alive when this book was published, Garbo having failed to realise it would also be translated into Spanish.

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LITTLE CYCLONE

^{THE GIRL WHO STARTED THE COMET LINE}

AIREY NEAVE

Andrée De Jongh—the Little Cyclone—set up the Comet Line to smuggle trapped soldiers and airmen through France and across the Pyrenees into Spain. When the first group never made it, the Little Cyclone did the job herself: she marched up to the British consulate in Bilbao in August 1941 with a Scottish soldier—and insisted she could bring many more. MI6 was convinced she was a German spy, but the Little Cyclone got her way and her escape route saved the lives of more than 800 Allied servicemen.

Little Cyclone is a tale of tragedy and triumph, a remarkably human and inspiring story that rivals the most dramatic of thrillers.

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PLATES

^{The famous poster ‘Don’t Chatter’ created during the first days of the Great Patriotic War. By Nina Vatolina (the author’s aunt). © ANNA BIRSTEIN, MOSCOW}

^{NKVD Commissar Lavrentii Beria. © MEMORIAL ARCHIVE, MOSCO}

^{NKGB Commissar and Beria’s close associate Vsevolod Merkulov. © MEMORIAL ARCHIVE, MOSCOW}

^{General Heinz Guderian (centre) and Kombrig Semyon Krivoshein (right) at joint Nazi-Soviet parade in Brest, September 1939. © BUNDESARCHIV}

^{Hitler and Mussolini visiting the Russian front near the town of Uman (with Field Marshal Karl von Rundstedt, commander of Army Group South), August 1941. © BUNDESARCHIV}

^{Moscow, September 1941. Building barricades in the streets. © RUSSIAN STATE DOCUMENTARY FILM & PHOTO ARCHIVE (RGAKFD/ROSINFORM), KRASNOGORSK}

^{Josef Stalin giving a speech at a Communist Party meeting in the Mayakovskaya metro station in November 1941. Behind Stalin, in front row: Georgii Malenkov (left) and Semyon Budennyi (right). © RGAKFD/ROSINFORM, KRASNOGORSK}

^{The area of the Front, summer 1941. Villages were destroyed by both the Germans and the Red Army. © RGAKFD/ROSINFORM, KRASNOGORSK}

^{Head of the Partisan movement Panteleimon Ponomarenko (seated centre) instructing Partisans. © RGAKFD/ROSINFORM, KRASNOGORSK}

^{Aerial view of Stalingrad from a German bomber, September 1942. © BUNDESARCHIV}

^{Kiev is recaptured, November 1943. The centre of the city was destroyed by fighting and bombs left by the NKVD sabotage groups. © RGAKFD/ROSINFORM, KRASNOGORSK}

^{Stalingrad, February 1943. German prisoners of war. © RGAKFD/ROSINFORM, KRASNOGORSK}

^{Viktor Abakumov, head of SMERSH, at the Front, March 1945. © PHOTO ITAR-TASS, MOSCOW}

^{Vienna is taken, April 1945. It will soon become a centre of SMERSH activity in Europe. © RGAKFD/ROSINFORM, KRASNOGORSK}

^{Stalin and the GKO members at the Trophy German Equipment Exhibition in Gorky Park, Moscow, 1944 © RGAKFD/ROSINFORM, KRASNOGORSK}

^{A SMERSH Arrest Order. Text says: ‘Order No. 786, July 31, 1944. To Deputy Head of the 4th Section of the SMERSH Counterintelligence Department (OKR) of the 7th Army, Captain Com.[rade] [name blanked out] for the arrest and search of Abudikhin Nikolai Semenovich. Head of the Special Department Colonel [signature; name blanked out]. Head of the Operational Registration Section [signature]. Arrest was sanctioned by the Military Prosecutor of the 7th Army [the name is blanked out].’ Although the name of the SMERSH Department’s head was blanked out, according to the signature, this was, in fact, A. A. Isakov, who headed the OKR SMERSH of the 7th Army from April 1944 to January 1945. Note that an old NKVD form was used instead of an NKO form.}

^{General Helmuth Weidling and other German officers captured by SMERSH. In front of the German Chancellery, May 2, 1945. © RGAKFD/ROSINFORM, KRASNOGORSK}

^{Other prisoners of war taken in Berlin, May 1945. © RGAKFD/ROSINFORM, KRASNOGORSK}

^{Russian women working as forced labourers in Germany waiting to be sent home, May 1945. They are unaware they will be vetted by SMERSH and the NKVD on their return. © RGAKFD/ROSINFORM, KRASNOGORSK}

^{Nuremberg, Soviet prosecutor Yurii Pokrovsky. Boris Solovov, a member of the SMERSH team, sits to the left. © RGAKFD/ROSINFORM, KRASNOGORSK}

^{Soviet prosecutor Nikolai Zorya addressing the Nuremberg tribunal (he would soon die of a gunshot wound to the head under mysterious circumstances). © RGAKFD/ROSINFORM, KRASNOGORSK}

^{Nuremberg. Defendant Hans Fritzsche (he was brought from Moscow by a SMERSH team). © OFFICE OF THE US CHIEF OF COUNSEL/HARRY S. TRUMAN LIBRARY}

^{Victors in the Kremlin, 1945. Stalin is in the front; behind him, left to the right: Anastas Mikoyan, Nikita Khrushchev, Georgii Malenkov, Lavrentii Beria, and Vyacheslav Molotov. © RGAKFD/ROSINFORM, KRASNOGORSK}

^{SMERSH ID card of Major Anatolii Nikolaevich Fetisov. © MUSEUM OF WWII, NATICK, MA}

Extra web content located on http://www.smershbook.com :

Appendix I. Red Army and Navy Officers Arrested During WWII

Appendix II. Foreign Diplomats Arrested by SMERSH from 1944 to 1945

Appendix III. Finnish Persons Arrested by SMERSH in April, 1945

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

The Perversion of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science

Copyright

This edition published in Great Britain in 2013 by

Biteback Publishing Ltd

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