The Kremlin’s long reach

Ian Fleming did not create Smersh out of his imagination. While he was gathering material for his fifth 007 novel, From Russia With Love, which was released in March 1957, the author attended a classified briefing in Whitehall where one of the lectures was given by Colonel Grigori Tokaev, a senior Red Army military intelligence (GRU) officer who had defected to London in November 1947. Codenamed STORK, Tokaev was the first Soviet to reveal the existence of an organised “liquidation” programme intended to eliminate Stalin’s opponents and eradicate those suspected of having collaborated with the Nazis in the German-occupied territories. According to Tokaev, Smersh had been conceived in April 1943 to combat counter-revolutionaries,

News of Smersh’s murderous activities was received with some scepticism by the western media until a series of defections in 1954, following Stalin’s death. In particular, Nikolai Khokhlov described how he had been employed to kill Ukrainian nationalists and betrayed two fellow-assassins deployed by the KGB whom he persuaded to seek political asylum. Thus the west learned of the existence of the Thirteenth Department and was able to inspect some ingenious equipment designed to make the art of what was termed “west affairs” more efficient.

Embarrassed by Khokhlov’s disclosures, the KGB pretended to disband Department 13, but in 1961 one of his former subordinates, Bogdan Stashinsky, defected to the CIA and confirmed that the Kremlin, prompted by unwelcome publicity, had reorganised the KGB, but instead of abolishing Smersh, had simply given it a new innocuous designation, Department V, headed by Nikolai Rodin. Alias Korovin, Rodin had been the KGB rezident in London, and had gathered a staff of about sixty specialists, some of them deployed to the Soviet zones in Germany and Austria.

One failed attempt was on the life of Lisa Stein, a radio broadcaster in West Germany who in March 1955 only narrowly survived a dose of the lethal toxin scopolamine concealed in a box of chocolates. In June 1962, a defector from the Hungarian AVH, Lieutenant Bela Lapusnyik, died from a mysterious bacteriological infection while in protective custody in the maximum security wing of Rossauerlande prison. Four years later another AVH defector, Laszlo Szabo, who applied for political asylum in London, revealed that an Austrian official had been bribed to gain access to the victim. Similarly, in April 1982, a Bulgarian DIE illegal, Matei Haiducu, defected and claimed that he was assigned to murder two expatriate writers, Paul Goma and Virgil Tanase.

The origins of the Thirteenth Department lay in the creation in 1936 of the Department for Special Tasks, headed by Pavel Sudoplatov, which had been responsible for the assassination of the NKVD illegal Ignace Reiss, who was shot in Lausanne in September 1937, and the death of Leon Trotsky in Mexico in August 1940. Reiss’s widow, Elizabeth Poretsky, was also a target, but was saved when her intended assassin, Gertrude Schildbach, at the last moment lost her nerve and snatched back a box of chocolates laced with strychnine.

Several of Trotsky’s supporters met mysterious deaths, including his son Leon Sedov who died in February 1938 in a Paris clinic run by White Russians. One of Sedov’s assistants, Rudolf Klement, was a young German who disappeared while en route to Brussels carrying important papers, and his headless body was found in the Seine. When Trotsky had taken refuge in Prinkipo, in Turkey, he had been visited by Jacob Blumkin, a veteran revolutionary who had been implicated in the murder in 1918 of Count Mirbach, the German ambassador to Moscow, and later had joined the OGPU. When Stalin was informed that Blumkin was in touch with Trotsky, he was sentenced to death, and he was lured back over the Soviet border by his former lover, Lisa Zarubin, and shot.

The KGB was also implicated in the murder in Paris in 1960 of the Polish illegal Wladyslaw Mroz who had defected to the DST and was shot dead in Paris. The full details only emerged following the defection of the UB officer Janusz Kochanski, to the CIA in February 1967. However, although the KGB learned the resettlement details of the defectors Igor Gouzenko in Canada and Vladimir Petrov in Australia, no action was taken against either.

Department V adopted a wider role encompassing sabotage, and was placed within Directorate S under the personal authority of the KGB chairman, Yuri Andropov. Its principal function was to plan disruption in target countries so that in the event of hostilities a fifth column of agents could be mobilised by radio to strike at the heart of government and create chaos.

The west’s knowledge of Department V was to be enhanced in 1972 by a Canadian-born Czech, Anton Sabotka, who had been placed under surveillance by the RCMP several years earlier, and the defector Oleg Lyalin, the Department V representative in the London rezidentura. His defection in August 1971 in London embarrassed the Kremlin, and as part of a programme of counter-measures to mitigate the damage, all Department V personnel were withdrawn from the field. Created in its place was the Eighth Department of Directorate S, which was henceforth restricted to a planning and training role, with the officers with operational experience dispersed between the Directorate’s four geographical departments.

According to Lyalin, the KGB had closed down the Thirteenth Department after Stashinsky’s unwelcome revelations, but had retained a combined sabotage and assassination capability. He also revealed a wartime contingency plan prepared by his rezidentura to infiltrate agents disguised as official messengers into Whitehall’s system of underground tunnels to distribute poison gas capsules.

In the modern era, marked by the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London in November 2006, the Kremlin appears to have abandoned any concerns about western public opinion and exploited a law passed by the Duma four months earlier which authorised the extra-territorial execution of “terrorists” (a category defined so widely as to include critics of the regime). The target had been administered a dose of radio-active polonium-210, an exceptionally rare toxin associated with Russian nuclear reactors, by a pair of ex-KGB colleagues, and had died soon afterwards.

Unquestionably Litvinenko, a former FSB officer who had been granted asylum in England, was a victim of state-sponsored murder, and a public inquiry conducted by a High Court judge, Sir Robert Owen, in 2014, directly implicated Vladimir Putin and his ministers. The attempt on the life of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in March 2018 also bore the hallmarks of an operation conducted by his former GRU brother officers. Three of those directly involved and implicated were serving GRU personnel, and their weapon of choice, Novochok, is a nerve agent developed during the Soviet era. Though not strictly a defector, Skripal had been released prematurely from his prison sentence, having been convicted of espionage. His freedom had been negotiated by the CIA in July 2010, in a spy-swap involving ten confessed Russian spies in American jails.

But do these two acts of retribution, reprehensible though they are, amount to a change in Putin’s policy, an escalation in the east-west conflict, or even a return to the Cold War? Some would have us believe that Moscow has reacted recklessly to the economic sanctions imposed after the invasion of Crimea in 2014 by these murderous interventions. Others suggest that these events are manifestations of a chronically dysfunctional administration seeking to preserve an almost ungovernable country that boasts a GDP comparable to that of Spain.

Those who interpret Putin’s behaviour as evidence that his government is controlled by a dangerous clique of cronies, who exercise power by killing journalists and other dissidents, cite numerous examples of what they term “mysterious deaths” that, for reasons of political expediency, have been deliberately overlooked by the British authorities. In 2017, the academic Amy Knight took this viewpoint in Orders to Kill, and last year the journalist Heidi Blake published From Russia With Blood, in which she claims to have uncovered fifteen examples of suspected assassinations.

In her list are some familiar cases, such as Sergei Skripal (who actually survived his attack) the controversial émigré businessman Boris Berezovsky, and a flamboyant lawyer described as having been Berezovsky’s bagman, Scot Young. Other suspicious deaths include Gareth Williams, the GCHQ cryptanalyst found asphyxiated in a locked holdall in his Pimlico flat in August 2010; the Georgian politician Badri Patarkatsishvili, who died at his home in Surrey in February 2008; and Alexander Perepilichnny, a Russian financier who died while exercising near his Surrey home in November 2012.

However, upon closer examination the catalogue of supposed mystery deaths is not quite what it seems. Skripal’s wife Ludmilla died, not unexpectedly, but following a lengthy battle with uterine cancer in November 2012, and her son Sasha succumbed to liver failure in July 2016 after years of alcoholism. Berezovsky, recently bankrupted, was found hanged in his own locked bathroom after he had threatened suicide. His lawyer, Stephen Moss, dropped dead from a heart attack. Young fell from his London flat, having threatened minutes earlier to take his own life. The former Aeroflot executive Nikolai Glushkov was found dead at his home in New Malden in “unexplained circumstances”, and may have been strangled. An oligarch’s lawyer, Stephen Curtis, was killed when his helicopter crashed near Bournemouth airport. Russia’s representative on the International Maritime Organisation, Igor Ponomarev, aged forty-one, had died suddenly while on a visit to London. A Times journalist, Daniel McGrory, died unexpectedly (of a brain haemorrhage) after he had remarked about Litvinenko’s assassination.

For good measure, Blake has added two American cases, those of Paul Joyal, a self-styled security consultant who was wounded, having been shot twice outside his home in Adelphi, Maryland, in March 2007 by unknown assailants; and that of Mikhail Lesin, the founder of the Russia Today TV network, whose battered corpse was discovered in his hotel suite in Washington DC, in November 2015 after days of binge drinking.

Whether the incident outside Joyal’s house was a car-jacking or robbery that went wrong, or a bungled attempt on his life remains moot, but the Lesin case illustrates the way reporting can be skewed and even deliberately manipulated by ostensibly credible individuals. An investigation lasting eleven months by the police and FBI agreed the media mogul and chronic alcoholic had died accidentally, having blundered drunkenly into furniture “after days of excessive alcohol consumption”.

Blake’s version of Lesin’s demise, that he was bludgeoned to death by over-zealous thugs who had been hired to give him a beating, but not kill him, apparently originated from Christopher Steele, the former MI6 officer who would achieve notoriety in 2016 with his now-discredited dossier on Donald Trump’s supposed links to the Kremlin. A detailed analysis of Steele’s controversial document, released in December 2019 by the FBI Inspector-General Michael Horowitz, dismissed the central charges as worthless. Horowitz had traced Steele’s purported informants, described by Blake as a “network of high-level Russian sources” and found them to have been largely invented. Indeed, the person Steele acknowledged as having been his principal (but unwitting) source he condemned as an exaggerating boaster who subsequently denounced Steele for misrepresenting his remarks which were intended to be taken with “a grain of salt”. Furthermore, Horowitz revealed that Steele had been terminated as a confidential FBI source in September 2016 ‘for cause”. He had been caught red-handed trying to dupe his Bureau contacts while simultaneously giving detailed off-the-record to newspaper reporters. 

According to BuzzFeed News, Steele’s report on Lesin was drawn from “intelligence gathered from high-level sources in Moscow”, yet Horowitz disclosed that Steele’s principal source was Sergei Millian, who was not even Russian, but was a self-aggrandising real-estate broker from Atlanta.

Is Blake’s series of deaths linked by a common denominator, perhaps all victims of Putin’s assassination squads? Or were they in stressful, high-risk occupations where middle-age mortality is not especially unusual? In assessing the reliability of the list one should weed out the declared natural deaths (Ponomarev, McGrory, the Skripals, Moss, Perepilichnny and Patarkatsishvili), the likely suicides (Berezovsky and Young), and the explainable accidents. The Air Accidents Investigation Board examined the crash in which Curtis died and, having excluded sabotage and mechanical failure, concluded that his pilot had become disorientated and flown into the ground. Similarly, the inconclusive inquest into the bizarre circumstances of Williams’ death had led to a further police investigation which found Williams had probably died alone, having locked himself inside the bag. A weird death, but the coroner sought to protect the Williams family from some of the more strange aspects of his bondage-obsessed life.

Undoubtedly, the Russian state sponsored and participated in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, and attempted to kill Sergei Skripal, and has been caught red-handed in other similar incidents, such as in February 2004 when the former Chechen president Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev was killed with his two bodyguards by a bomb which detonated under his SUV in Doha as they drove home from a local mosque. On that occasion both his killers, serving GRU officers, were caught and convicted of the crime. Similarly, an FSB gun-for-hire, Oleg Smorodinov was arrested in Kiev in September 2016, having undertaken a mission to kill six names on a Kremlin hit-list.

Paradoxically, it is the fabricators and their eager consumers at the sensationalist end of the media spectrum that unwittingly have served the Kremlin’s purpose by attributing to Putin’s puppet-masters a Macchiavellian role that is far beyond their rather simple brief, of regime survival. To over-analyse the jockeying for position in the emperor’s court, or the sheer opportunism of Moscow’s uncoordinated foreign policy, is to reinvent Fleming’s Smersh.