Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Among the “old émigrés” were a group of White generals—chief among them Pyotr Krasnov, Andrei Shkuro and Sultan Kelech Ghirey 85—whom the NKGB and its predecessors had been pursuing for a quarter of a century. A Smersh detachment was sent to Austria with orders to track them down. Its initial inquiries to the British about their whereabouts met with no response other than the claim that no information was available. After heavy drinking at a dinner for Anglo-Russian troops, however, a British soldier blurted out that, until recently, the generals had been at a camp in the village of Gleisdorf. 86A group of Smersh officers drove immediately to Gleisdorf where they discovered that, though the generals had left, Shkuro’s mistress Yelena (surname unknown) was still there. Yelena was lured out of the camp on the pretense that she had a visitor. As she approached the Smersh car, she suddenly saw the Russian officers inside and froze with fear. She was quickly bundled into the car and revealed, under no doubt brutal interrogation, that the White generals had appealed for the Supreme Allied Commander, Field Marshal Alexander, for protection. Yelena also disclosed that the generals had with them fourteen kilograms of gold. 87What happened next is of such importance that Mitrokhin’s note on it deserves to be quoted as fully as possible:

The Chekists [Smersh officers] raised the matter of the generals again at a meeting with… [a British] lieutenant-colonel. They mentioned where the generals were. The Chekists proposed that they should approach the question of the generals’ fate in a business-like way. “What do you mean by that?” asked the Englishman. They explained to him. If the British would hand them over quietly at the same time as the Cossacks were repatriated, they could keep the generals’ gold. “If the old men remain with you, you and your colleagues will get no benefit at all. If you accept our alternative, you will get the gold.” The lieutenant-colonel thought a while and then agreed. He talked with two of his colleagues about the details of the operation. On the pretext that they were being taken to Alexander’s headquarters for talks, the generals were put into cars without any of their belongings and driven to Odenburg [Judenburg] where they were handed over to the Chekists. From the hands of Smersh they were transferred to Moscow, to the Calvary of the Lubyanka. 88

No corroboration is available from any other source for the claim in a KGB file that a British army officer (and perhaps two of his colleagues) had been bribed into handing over the White generals. Given the failure on the ground to distinguish the minority of non-Soviet Cossacks from the rest, they might well have been surrendered to Smersh in any case. The generals would probably have survived, however, if their petitions had reached Field Marshal Alexander, who might well have granted them. But the petitions mysteriously disappeared en route. 89

The speed and injustice of the “repatriation” derived chiefly from the desire of military commanders on the spot to be rid of an unwelcome problem as soon as possible, combined with the belief that individual screening to determine which Cossacks were not of Soviet nationality would be a complex, long drawn out, and in some cases impossible task. On May 21 Brigadier Toby Low of 5 Corps, which was in charge of the “repatriation,” issued an order defining who were to be regarded as Soviet citizens. The one White Russian group which could be collectively identified as non-Soviet, the Schutzkorps, commanded by Colonel Anatol Rogozhin, was, he instructed, not to be repatriated. But those to be “treated as Soviet Nationals” included the “Ataman Group” (of which General Krasnov was a leading member) and the “Units of Lt.-Gen. Shkuro.” Low added that “[i]ndividual cases [appeals] will NOT be considered unless particularly pressed,” and that “[i]n all cases of doubt, the individual will be treated as a Soviet National.” 90

When all allowance is made for the difficulties of combining loyalty to allies with respect for the human rights of the Cossacks, the brutality with which the repatriation was conducted remains perhaps the most ignominious episode in twentieth-century British military history. “I reproach myself for just one thing,” the 76-year-old White general Krasnov later told the NKGB. “Why did I trust the British?” On May 27, just before 3 A.M., a time of day much favored by Soviet Security, General Shkuro was awakened by an unidentified British officer, who told him he was under arrest and took him to be held under close guard well away from the Cossack camp. Another, or perhaps the same, British officer later delivered an “urgent,” though bogus, invitation to General Krasnov to a conference with Field Marshal Alexander, his former comrade-in-arms during the Russian civil war. Smersh photographers were waiting to record the historic moment when the NKGB’s oldest enemies were turned over to it. 91For the British army it was a shameful moment. For Stalin, Smersh and the NKGB, it was a famous victory.

At the end of the Second World War, the Centre faced what it feared was impending disaster in intelligence operations against its wartime allies. The first major alarm occurred in Ottawa, where relations among NKGB and GRU personnel working under “legal” cover in the Soviet embassy were as fraught as in New York. The situation was worst in the GRU residency. 1On the evening of September 5, 1945 Igor Gouzenko, a GRU cipher clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, secretly stuffed more than a hundred classified documents under his shirt and attempted to defect. He tried hard to hold his stomach in as he walked out of the embassy. “Otherwise,” his wife said later, “he would have looked pregnant.”

Defection turned out to be more difficult than Gouzenko had imagined. When he sought help at the offices of the Ministry of Justice and the Ottawa Journal, he was told to come back the next day. But on September 6 both the Ministry of Justice and the Ottawa Journal, which failed to realize it was being offered the spy story of the decade, showed no more interest than on the previous evening. By the night of September 6 the Soviet embassy realized that both Gouzenko and classified documents were missing. While Gouzenko hid with his wife and child in a neighbor’s flat, NKGB men broke down his door and searched his apartment. It was almost midnight before the local police came to his rescue and the Gouzenko family at last found sanctuary. 2

As well as identifying a major GRU spy ring, Gouzenko also provided fragmentary intelligence on NKGB operations. Some months later Lavrenti Beria, the Soviet security supremo, circulated to residencies a stinging indictment of the incompetence of the GRU and, he implied, the NKGB in Ottawa:

The most elementary principles of security were ignored, complacency and self-satisfaction went unchecked. All this was the result of a decline in political vigilance and sense of responsibility for work entrusted by the Party and the government. G[ouzenko]’s defection has caused great damage to our country and has, in particular, very greatly complicated our work in the American countries. 3

The fear of being accused of further breaches of security made the Ottawa residency unwilling to take any initiative in recruiting new agents. According to a later damage assessment, Gouzenko’s defection “paralyzed intelligence work [in Canada] for several years and continued to have a most negative effect on the work of the residency right up to 1960.” In the summer of 1949 the acting resident in Ottawa, Vladimir Trofimovich Burdin (also known as Borodin), newly arrived from Moscow, wrote to the Centre to complain about his colleagues’ inertia: