Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

…Even a secret typist [i.e., cleared for secret work] was not allowed to know all secret words. Therefore, the author [of the document] must leave an empty space for these words when he gave the document to a typist. And the typist needed to leave an empty space for a particular number of letters [for each one in the word] (the author was allowed to write by pencil the number of letters, for instance, 5 or 12). Then the author filled the space [on a typed version] with the word, also using a pencil… 331

There is a pattern in these words filled out by hand: American, USA, State Department, Oggins. Two-thirds of the second page of the letter was whited out, evidently before the Xeroxing. The most important part of the letter was also written in by hand (shown in italics):

A Copy No. 4

Strictly Secret

The USSR Council of Ministers

May 21, 1947

No. 2773/A

To Comrade I. V. Stalin

To Comrade V. M. Molotov

I report to you the following:

In April 1942 the American Embassy in the USSR informed the USSR Foreign Ministry by a [diplomatic] note that it had information that an American citizen Isai Oggins was imprisoned in the [labor] camp in [the city of] Norilsk . On behalf of the State Department , the Embassy asked for information on the reason of his arrest, the length of the imprisonment term to which Oggins was convicted, and about his health.

Because of the insistence of the American Embassy, on the order of Comrade MOLOTOV two meetings, on December 8, 1942 and January 9, 1943, between the representatives of the Embassy with the convict Oggins were allowed. During these meetings Oggins [blank] informed the representatives of the American Embassy that he had been arrested as a Trotskyist who had illegally arrived in the USSR, using someone else’s passport, for a contact with the Trotskyist underground in the USSR.

Despite this declaration, the American Embassy asked MID [i.e., the Foreign Ministry] of the USSR to reconsider his case and to release Oggins ahead of schedule. It sent Oggins ’ letters and telegrams to his wife, who is living in the USA , as well as informed MID of the USSR that it considered Oggins to be an American citizen and was ready to repatriate him to his Motherland.

On May 9, 1943 the American Embassy was informed that “the proper Soviet organs” [i.e., the MGB] consider it impossible to reconsider the Oggins case. On February 20, 1939 Oggins [blank] was in fact arrested on the charge of spying and treason.

[A paragraph whited out.]

In the course of the investigation these allegations were not supported and Oggins refused to consider himself guilty. However, the Special Meeting [i.e., OSO] under the NKVD of the USSR condemned Oggins to 8 years of ITL [i.e., labor camps]. His term started on February 20, 1939.

[Almost a half of the page whited out]

[Blank] the appearance of Oggins in the USA could be used by persons hostile to the Soviet Union for active propaganda against the USSR.

Based on the given above, the MGB of the USSR considers it necessary to liquidate [i.e., to execute] Isaiya Oggins, to report to the Americans that after the meeting of Oggins with the representatives of the American Embassy in June of 1943, he was returned to the place of confinement in Norilsk and he died there in 1946 in a hospital as a result of an attack of tuberculosis of the spine .

We will reflect [i.e. falsify] the process of Oggins’ illness in the archives of the Norilsk camp, as well as the medical and other help given to him. Oggins’ death will be registered officially in his medical records by an autopsy record and a burial certificate.

Taking into consideration that Oggins ’ wife [blank] is located in New York and appealed to our Consulate about her husband many times, as well as that she knows that he had been arrested [blank], we consider it useful [blank] to ask her to come to the Consulate and tell her about the death of her husband [blank].

I’m asking for your instructions.

Evidently, Stalin and Molotov approved Abakumov’s plan because Oggins was killed and his records were falsified. Some documents about Oggins seem to have been kept in Mairanovsky’s file: Bobryonev and Ryazentsev wrote that Eitingon brought Mairanovsky to Oggins supposedly for a medical checkup and Mairanovsky killed Oggins by an injection of curare. 332

However, Oggins’s death certificate stated a false date, a false cause, and a false place of death. For some unknown reason, it was dated January 20, 1948, and stated that Oggins died not in Norilsk (as Abakumov proposed) but in Penza in central Russia. It said: “Oggins Isai Saimonovich, 49 years old, died in the town of Penza on January 13, 1947. The death was caused by a heart paralysis aggravated by angiospasm and papillar cancer of the urinary bladder. The death was registered on January 30, 1947.” 333

In 1992, deputy minister of state security V. Frolov wrote to General Dmitrii Volkogonov: “As a result of the investigation it was found that the USA citizen Oggins, who had been groundlessly repressed, was buried at the Jewish cemetery in the town of Penza.” 334But there is no real proof that Oggins was in fact buried in Penza: As of June 2001, the Memorial has still been unable find his grave.

The dates of events mentioned above are significant: on May 21, 1947, Abakumov offered to kill Oggins (who was evidently still alive) and falsify his death date as 1946; the date of Oggins’s death on the death certificate was given as January 30, 1947, that is, five months before Abakumov’s report; the death certificate date was January 20, 1948. Therefore, the real date of Oggins’s death at the hands of Mairanovsky and Eitingon, as well as the real place of his death, cannot be ascertained from these records. The dates of two documents mentioned in the article written by V. Pozniakov on the activity of the Soviet secret services in the United States during the Cold War give some more information. 335On January 31, 1947 (a day after the official date of Oggins’s death), V. Bazykin, a member of the Soviet Foreign Ministry Department in charge of the United States, wrote a memo to Deputy Minister Dekanozov regarding Oggins. Also, on July 10, 1947, Bazykin prepared a document entitled “Questions that could be raised by the US Ambassador [Walter Bedell] Smith in a conversation with Comrade Molotov.” Possibly, the Soviets planned to say that Oggins had died. If so, Oggins seems to have been killed between May 21 (Abakumov’s report) and July 10, 1947 (before the meeting between Molotov and Smith). It was not mentioned by Sudoplatov, Bobryonev and Ryazentsev, or Deputy Minister Frolov why Penza was supposedly chosen by the MGB (or Stalin and Molotov) for Oggins’s burial. Oggins’s real story remains a mystery.

Bobryonev and Ryazentsev suspect that the death of at least two high-ranking Japanese prisoners was a result of the treatment “according to the method of Doctor of Medicine G. M. Mairanovsky.” 336A former head of the Japanese Military Mission in Harbin (in fact, the Harbin Secret Service) and a founder of the Japanese army’s spy school, Major General Akikusa Shun, died on March 22, 1949, 337from general weakness and a heart attack. Akikusa was also commander of the “Scientific Research Division” of the Japanese Secret Service where Soviet POWs and spies were held. Those individuals who did not give information about the Soviet Union to the Japanese (usually under torture) or who tried to escape were sent by the commandant or his deputy to Unit 731, which conducted experiments on humans. 338The former Japanese general consul in Harbin, Mikayava Funao, died on March 29, 1950, from the same cause. At the time of death, both were in the MGB’s Lefortovo Prison. In both cases, the infamous forensic medical expert of Moscow, Dr. P. Semenovsky, signed the autopsy report. The NKVD-MGB often used this doctor to cover up their crimes. He was a member of the Soviet commission that had falsified autopsy reports of Polish officers killed in the Katyn Massacre. Aleksandr Larin, a lawyer who personally knew Semenovsky, characterized him the following way: “Doctor Semenovsky produced his judgment on the merits of the case without an examination of the body… Semenovsky had managed to produce purely legal conclusions even in the report of the expert examination: like stating premeditation, ulterior motives and so on and so forth.” 339