The Russian security services never mentioned what happened to Kauder’s arrested co-workers and Klausnitzer. Usually such prisoners were sentenced to long imprisonment in labor camps, while Klausnitzer might have received a death sentence as an SD officer. As for Otto Hatz, his investigation was concluded at the end of 1951 and on January 29, 1952, a session of the Military Tribunal of the Moscow Military District sentenced him to fifteen years’ imprisonment in labor camps as a Hungarian spy. This was a ‘lenient’ conviction for a spy because usually spies received the death sentence or 25 years of imprisonment; the tribunal took into consideration that Hatz voluntarily joined the Soviets and worked for them in 1944–45. Hatz’s verdict mentioned Ast Vienna and Kauder:
During his spy activity Hatz was connected with military attaches of other countries, in particular, of Finland and Japan, as well as with the German intelligence men from the German intelligence offices ‘Abwehrstelle Sofia’, ‘Abwehrstelle Vienna’, and ‘Klatt Bureau’. From them, he received intelligence information about the Soviet armed forces and sent it to the [Hungarian] Intelligence Directorate in Budapest.
Additionally, in 1943 Hatz Otto established contact with the representatives of American intelligence and participated in the secret political negotiations of the Americans with the [Hungarian] government of [Miklós] Horthy about a possibility of Hungary quitting the war.48
In July 1952, Hatz was sent to the Ozernyi Special Camp for political prisoners in the Krasnoyarsk Province. Four years later he was released and returned to Hungary. He became a trainer of the Hungarian and East German fencing teams and in 1977, 75-year-old Hatz died in Budapest.49 In mid-1947, the Americans released Kauder, Longin, and General Turkul, coincidently at the same time as the MGB sent its report on Klatt to Stalin. Arnold Silver saw Kauder for the last time in Salzburg in 1952, while in 1964 he heard from his colleagues that Kauder tried to approach the CIA to offer his assistance.
If only eight percent of the ‘Max’ information was real, as Soviet investigators concluded, Admiral Canaris, the FHO, and Gehlen, as well as Fremde Luftwaffe Ost, look bad for relying upon this source. The two other main Abwehr sources of information on the Soviet Union that the FHO relied on, ‘Stex’ in Stockholm and German journalist Ivar Lissner in Harbin (China), also worked under Soviet intelligence control.50
Successful Operations
The German intelligence failures are unexpected because in general, as Gehlen described to the Americans in June 1945, the FHO had good knowledge of Soviet intelligence and its methods:
The Russians repeatedly attempted to deceive their enemies by planting specially prepared reports in the international press… ANKARA and STOCKHOLM played an important role in this respect… Sometimes the Russians even succeeded in giving their ‘news items’ the appearance of coming from different sources and of corroborating one another. Especially numerous were reports planted by the Russians concerning exhaustion within the ranks of Russian troops, low morale, food troubles in the interior, and counter revolutionary trends in the Soviet Union…
Besides these general methods of deception, certain deceptive ‘news’ might also be spread by agents…
Neutral and friendly foreign correspondents were also used by the Russians to deceive the enemy.51
Some intelligence information the Germans received supposedly from Moscow was surprisingly correct. For instance, the story and activity of Vladimir Minishkiy or Agent 438, as E. H. Cookridge (a pen name of Edward Spiro, the British journalist and intelligence officer), Gehlen’s biographer, calls him, remains a mystery. The name ‘Minishkiy’ makes no sense in Russian.
Cookridge writes that according to Minishkiy’s statements, before the war he was a high-level Comminist Party functionary in Moscow.52 However, the Russian historian Boris Sokolov could not find the names Minishkiy or Mishinsky as other sources called him on the lists of staff of the Party’s Central Committee, or the Moscow City and Province committees.53 In October 1941 a Walli I group captured Minishkiy, a political Commissar, near the city of Vyazma. After Hermann Baun, head of Walli I, interrogated him, Minishkiy was transferred to Gehlen’s headquarters. Gehlen personally recruited Minishkiy and in May 1942, after training, Minishkiy was smuggled through the front line. The operation was called ‘Flamingo’.
According to ‘Flamingo’ messages from Moscow, Soviet officials believed in Minishkiy’s cover story of escaping from the Germans written by Baun’s men, and as a reward he was supposedly appointed to a politicalmilitary desk at the GKO office. In reality, it was impossible for a Soviet officer who had been in German captivity to be accepted into the GKO staff because he would be vetted in an NKVD filtration camp and, most probably, sent to a shtrafnoi battalion. However, judging from Minishkiy’s messages to Gehlen, he might have had access to high-level military information. Here is an example.
On July 14, 1942, Gehlen and Heinz Herre, head of the FHO’s Gruppe II, presented General Hadler, Chief of the General Staff, with a report based on the message they had just received from Minishkiy.54 It stated that during the previous night a meeting of ‘the war council’ took place in Moscow. Marshals Boris Shaposhnikov and Kliment Voroshilov, Commissar for Foreign Affairs Molotov, and ‘heads of the British, American, and Chinese military missions’ were present. Boris Shaposhnikov reported on future military plans, including preparations for the Stalingrad Battle. The problem of Soviet reserves of manpower, and a redirection—to support British troops in Egypt—of armaments destined for the Soviet Union as part of the lend-lease were also discussed.
Most of the circumstances he mentioned were wrong. This could not be a GKO meeting because the message did not mention Stalin and other GKO members. Most probably, it was a meeting of the representatives of the Red Army (Shaposhnikov and Voroshilov) and Foreign Affairs Commissariat (Molotov) with the Allied military attachés who came to Moscow from Kuibyshev, where foreign embassies moved in June 1941. Heads of military missions could not have attended this meeting because the British and American military missions were organized in Moscow later, in 1943.
But surprisingly, the main details of the message were correct.55 As it stated, later in July 1942 the Red Army began its retreat to the Volga River, at the same time defending Stalingrad and the Northern Caucasus, and it was on the offensive near Orel and Voronezh. Also, the Soviet government admitted that it had a problem with recruiting new men because of the enormous losses during the first year of the war. And the same July Stalin agreed to redirect a part of the lend-lease military equipment to Egypt to reinforce British troops fighting with Erwin Rommel’s Panzer Army Africa.
It remains unknown how Minishkiy acquired information about the agenda of the meeting. Also, he supposedly sent this and other messages through a radio operator ‘Aleksander’, another Baun agent in Moscow. It is questionable if ‘Aleksander’ could operate from Moscow, totally controlled by the NKVD counterintelligence. Therefore, the whole of Operation Flamingo looks suspicious, like a Soviet deception. However, there was no sense in Soviet intelligence releasing real information on a number of military plans, a lack of Soviet servicemen in mid-1942, and the help to British troops in Africa.