Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

The former head of the Third Special Department of the Odessa district of the NKVD, State Security Lieutenant V. A. Kuznetsov, was shot by me with two bullets in the temple in the underground “Mirror Factory” [the base in the catacombs] on October 21, 1942.

By this time, following several other deaths at the hands of the enemy, only three NKVD officers remained alive in the catacombs: Abramov, Glushchenko and Litvinov. Abramov and Glushchenko together killed Litvinov, then began to eye each other suspiciously in the semi-darkness.

Glushchenko wrote in his diary that Abramov wanted to surrender: “We are beaten. There is no victory to wait for. He told me not to be frightened of committing treason or being shot as he has friends in German intelligence.” On February 18, 1943, apparently suffering from hallucinations, Glushchenko wrote, “[Abramov] was bending over, attending to his papers. I took my pistol from my belt and shot him in the back of the head.” Over the next few months Glushchenko spent much of his time outside the catacombs in his wife’s Odessa flat, finally abandoning the underground base on November 10, 1943. After the liberation of Odessa by the Red Army in April 1945 Glushchenko returned with members of the Ukrainian NKVD to collect equipment and compromising papers from the catacombs, but was fatally wounded when a grenade he picked up exploded in his hands. 47

For almost twenty years, the Centre believed that no survivor of the Odessa catacombs remained to cast doubt on the heroic myth it had constructed. In 1963, however, the KGB was disconcerted to discover that Abramov had not been killed by Glushchenko after all, but had escaped and was living in France. His father, who may also have known the true story of the Odessa catacombs, was reported to have emigrated to the United States. Abramov’s supposed widow, Nina Abramova, who had been working in the KGB First Chief Directorate, was quietly transferred to another job. The myth of the NKVD heroes of the Odessa catacombs was left undisturbed. 48

According to statistics in KGB files, the NKVD ran a total of 2,222 “operational combat groups” behind enemy lines during the Great Patriotic War. 49Mitrokhin found no realistic appraisal, however, of the effectiveness of partisan warfare. Contrary to the claims of post-war Soviet hagiographers, the combat groups seem only rarely to have tied down German forces larger than themselves. 50Because about half of all partisans were NKVD personnel or Party officials, they were frequently regarded with acute suspicion by the peasant population on whom they depended for local support. The virtual collapse of partisan warfare in the western Ukraine, for example, was due largely to the hostility of the inhabitants to the Party and the NKVD. Though partisan warfare became more effective after Stalingrad, there were important areas—notably Crimea and the steppes—where it never became a significant factor in the fighting on the eastern front. 51

OUTSIDE EUROPE, THE NKVD’s most successful attacks on German targets were mounted by an illegal residency in Argentina, 52headed by Iosif Romualdovich Grigulevich (codenamed ARTUR), a veteran both of sabotage operations in the Spanish Civil War and of the first attempt to assassinate Trotsky in Mexico City. 53In September 1941 an official Argentinian inquiry reached the hysterical conclusion, endorsed by the Chamber of Deputies but rejected by the government, that the German ambassador was the head of over half a million Nazi stormtroopers operating under cover in Latin America. 54During the months after Pearl Harbor, Argentina and Chile were the only Latin American states not to break off diplomatic relations with Germany and Japan. The rumors of Nazi plots among Argentina’s quarter of a million German speakers, pro-German sympathies in its officer corps, and the presence of an Argentinian military purchasing mission in Berlin until 1944, helped to persuade the Centre that Argentina was a major Nazi base. Though this belief was greatly exaggerated, it was shared by OSS, the US wartime foreign intelligence agency, which reported that Dr. Ramón Castillo, president of Argentina from 1941 to 1943, was in the pay of Hitler. 55Such reports, passed on to the Centre by its agents in OSS and the State Department, 56doubtless reinforced Moscow’s suspicions of Nazi plots in Argentina.

After the outbreak of war the German merchant navy was unable to run the gauntlet of the Royal Navy and enter Argentinian ports. Grigulevich’s residency, however, reported in 1941 that copper, saltpetre, cotton and other strategic raw materials were being exported from Argentina in neutral vessels to Spain, whence they were being secretly transported overland through France to Germany. To disrupt this export trade, Grigulevich recruited a sabotage team of eight Communist dockyard workers and seamen, headed by a Polish immigrant, Feliks Klementyevich Verzhbitsky (codenamed BESSER), who in December 1941 obtained a job as a blacksmith in the port of Buenos Aires. The first major exploit of Verzhbitsky’s group was to burn down the German bookshop in Buenos Aires, which Grigulevich regarded as the main center of Nazi propaganda. Thereafter it concentrated on planting delayed-action incendiary devices on ships and in warehouses containing goods bound for Germany. 57Grigulevich also ran smaller sabotage and intelligence networks in Chile and Uruguay. The approximately seventy agents in his far-flung illegal residency were to remain the basis of Soviet intelligence operations in Argentina, Uruguay and—to a lesser extent—Chile during the early years of the Cold War as well as the Second World War. 58

Between the beginning of 1942 and the summer of 1944, according to statistics in KGB files, over 150 successful incendiary attacks were mounted by Grigulevich’s agents against German cargoes, and an unspecified number of Spanish, Portuguese and Swedish vessels sunk. One, probably exaggerated, assessment by the Centre claims that the attacks succeeded early in 1944 in halting German exports from Buenos Aires. 59A more serious problem for Germany than Soviet sabotage, however, was the change of government in Argentina. A military coup in the summer of 1943, followed by the uncovering of a Nazi espionage network, led Argentina to sever diplomatic relations with Germany in January 1944. 60

For most of the war communications between Grigulevich’s residency and the Centre were slow and spasmodic, depending on occasional couriers between Buenos Aires and the New York residency. 61In the summer of 1944, shortly after the NKGB had established a legal residency in Uruguay, Grigulevich was summoned to Montevideo to give a detailed report on his intelligence operations, finances and agent networks since the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. The Centre had become alarmed at the scale of his incendiary attacks on neutral shipping and feared that his cover might be blown. In September it ordered him to suspend sabotage operations and limit himself to intelligence collection in Argentina, Brazil and Chile. 62Once instructed to stop work by Grigulevich, Verzhbitsky began making grenades for the underground Argentinian Communist Party but was seriously injured in October by an explosion in his workshop which cost him his left arm and the sight in one eye. Grigulevich reported that he behaved with great bravery during police investigation, sticking to a prepared cover story that a personal enemy had planted explosives on him, hidden in a packet of dried milk. In 1945 Verzhbitsky was smuggled out of prison and exfiltrated by the Argentinian Communist Party across the border into Uruguay, where he lived on a Party pension. 63

Remarkable though they were, the sabotage operations run from Buenos Aires had no perceptible influence on the course of the Great Patriotic War. Once the alarmism of the summer of 1944 had died down, however, they greatly enhanced Grigulevich’s reputation in the Centre as saboteur and assassin. His successes in wartime Argentina help to explain his later selection for the most important assassination mission of the Cold War. 64By contrast, Grigulevich’s chief saboteur, Verzhbitsky, was regarded as an embarrassment because of his disablement. His request to emigrate to the Soviet Union in 1946 was brusquely turned down. In 1955, however, when Verzhbitsky, by then completely blind, applied again, his application was accepted—possibly for fear that he might otherwise reveal his wartime role. 65On arrival in the Soviet Union, Verzhbitsky was awarded an invalidity pension of 100 roubles a month, but his application for membership of the Soviet Communist Party was turned down. 66