Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

WHILE ORLOV COORDINATED the NKVD’s secret two-front war within Spain, Serebryansky conducted operations from abroad. Serebryansky organized training courses in Paris for saboteurs from the International Brigades, run by GIGI, a French Communist mechanic who usually worked without pay, FRANYA, a female Polish student paid 1,500 francs a month, and LEGRAND, on whom no further details are available. The greatest sabotage success reported by Serebryansky was the claim by the ERNST TOLSTY group of illegals, based in the Baltic and Scandinavia, to have sunk seventeen ships carrying arms to Franco. 27One of the leading saboteurs was a young German Communist, Ernst Wollweber, who twenty years later was to become head of the Stasi in East Germany. 28An NKVD inquiry after the Civil War concluded, however, that some of the reports of sinkings were fabrications. 29

The main NKVD training grounds for guerrillas and saboteurs were within Spain itself at training camps supervised by Orlov at Valencia, Barcelona, Bilbao and Argen. Orlov later boasted of how his guerrilla platoons succeeded in blowing up power lines and bridges and in attacking enemy convoys far behind the nationalist lines. As an SVR-sponsored biography of Orlov acknowledges, his larger purpose was “to build up a secret police force under NKVD control to effect a Stalinization of Spain.” The chief Soviet military adviser in republican Spain, General Jan Berzin, formerly head of Red Army intelligence, complained that Orlov and the NKVD were treating republican Spain as a colony rather than an ally. 30

In the spring of 1937 Orlov and Serebryansky were ordered to move from the surveillance and destabilization of Trotskyist groups to the liquidation of their leaders. While Serebryansky began preparing the abduction of Sedov, 31Orlov supplied the republican government with forged documents designed to discredit POUM as “a German-Francoist spy organization.” On June 16 the head of POUM, Andreu Nin, and forty leading members were arrested, its headquarters closed and its militia battalions disbanded. Less than a week later Nin disappeared from prison. An official investigation announced that he had escaped. In reality, he was abducted and murdered by a “mobile squad” of NKVD assassins, supervised by Orlov. Nin was one of many Trotskyists in Spain, both real and imagined, who met such fates. Until Orlov defected to the United States in 1938, fearing that he too had been placed on an NKVD death list, he lived in some luxury while organizing the liquidation of enemies of the people. A young volunteer in the International Brigades summoned to his presence was struck by how strongly he reeked of eau de cologne, and watched enviously as he consumed a large cooked breakfast wheeled in on a trolley by a whitecoated servant. Orlov offered none of it to the famished volunteer, who had not eaten for twenty-four hours. 32

Though unusually forthcoming about Orlov, who, because of his defection, never qualified for the KGB Valhalla, the SVR has been much more reluctant to release material on the Spanish Civil War which might damage the reputation of the traditional heroes of Soviet foreign intelligence: among them Hero of the Soviet Union Stanislav Alekseyevich Vaupshasov, long celebrated for his daring exploits behind enemy lines during the Second World War. With four Orders of Lenin, two Orders of the Great Patriotic War and a chestful of other medals, Vaupshasov was probably the Soviet Union’s most profusely decorated intelligence hero. As recently as 1990 he was honored by a commemorative postage stamp. Vaupshasov’s murderous pre-war record, however, is still kept from public view by the SVR. In the mid-1920s he led a secret OGPU unit in numerous raids on Polish and Lithuanian border villages, dressed in Polish and Lithuanian army uniforms. In 1929 Vaupshasov was sentenced to death for murdering a colleague, but managed to have the sentence commuted to ten years in the gulag. He was quickly released and resumed his career as one of the NKVD’s leading experts in assassination. Among Vaupshasov’s duties in Spain was the construction and guarding of a secret crematorium which enabled the NKVD to dispose of its victims without leaving any trace of their remains. Many of those selected for liquidation were lured into the building containing the crematorium and killed on the spot. 33

The NKVD agent in charge of the crematorium was José Castelo Pacheco (codenamed JOSE, PANSO and TEODOR), 34a Spanish Communist born in Salamanca in 1910, who was recruited by Orlov’s deputy resident, Leonid Aleksandrovich Eitingon, in 1936. 35In 1982, some years after Castelo’s death, the KGB received a letter from a female relative appealing for a pension and claiming that he had told her before his death, “If you have any problems and there is no other way out, I mean only in extreme circumstances, then contact my Soviet comrades.” Though Castelo’s file showed that he had promised never to reveal any details of his work as a Soviet agent, there was an obvious risk that his relative had discovered his work in the NKVD crematorium. The Centre therefore concluded that to refuse her request might have “undesirable consequences.” In January 1983 she was summoned to the consular department of the Soviet embassy in Madrid by the resident and told that, though she had no legal right to a pension, it had been decided to make her an ex gratia payment of 5,000 convertible roubles, then the equivalent of 6,680 US dollars. No reference was made to Castelo’s work for the NKVD. 36

REMARKABLY, MANY OTHERWISE admirable studies of the Stalin era fail to mention the relentless secret pursuit of “enemies of the people” in western Europe. The result, all too frequently, is a sanitized, curiously bloodless interpretation of Soviet foreign policy on the eve of the Second World War which fails to recognize the priority given to assassination. Outside Spain, the main theater of operations for the NKVD’s assassins was France, where their chief targets were Lev Sedov and General Yevgeni Karlovich Miller, Kutepov’s successor as head of the White Guard ROVS. In the summer of 1937 Serebryansky devised similar plans to liquidate both. Sedov and Miller were each to be kidnapped in Paris, smuggled on board a boat waiting off the Channel coast, then brought to the Soviet Union for interrogation and retribution. The first stage in the abduction operations was the penetration of their entourages.

Like Sedov’s assistant “Étienne” Zborowski, Miller’s deputy, General Nikolai Skoblin, was an NKVD agent. Probably unknown to Skoblin, Serebryansky also used an illegal, Mireille Lyudvigovna Abbiate (codenamed AVIATORSHA, “aviator’s wife”), to keep Miller under surveillance. Abbiate was the daughter of a French music teacher in St. Petersburg, born and brought up in Russia. When her family returned to France in 1920, she had stayed in Russia and married the aviator Vasili Ivanovich Yermolov (hence her later codename). In 1931, when she traveled to France to visit her parents, she was recruited by the NKVD. During her visit she recruited her brother, Roland Lyudvigovich Abbiate, who also became an illegal with the codename LETCHIK (“pilot”). AVIATORSHA rented a flat next to General Miller, secretly forced an entry, stole some of his papers and installed a hidden microphone which enabled her to bug his apartment. 37On September 22, 1937, like Kutepov seven years earlier, Miller disappeared in broad daylight on a Paris street. The Sûreté later concluded that Miller had been taken to the Soviet embassy, killed and his body placed in a large trunk which was then taken by a Ford truck to be loaded on a Soviet freighter waiting at Le Havre. Several witnesses reported seeing the trunk being loaded on board. Miller, however, was still alive inside the trunk, heavily drugged. Unlike Kutepov in 1930, he survived the voyage to Moscow, where he was interrogated and shot. Skoblin, who fell under immediate suspicion by Miller’s supporters, fled to Spain. 38Mireille Abbiate, whose role went undetected, was awarded the Order of the Red Star, then reassigned to the operation against Sedov. 39