Preliminary interrogations of Czaplinski suggest that he might have been a German intelligence agent sent to the Donukalov partisan detachment with the task of getting to the rear of Soviet troops. He may also have worked in various countries as a longtime German intelligence agent. Czaplinski has already been transferred to the Main Directorate of SMERSH to Comrade Abakumov.20
Unfortunately, I have no information about what happened to Czaplinski at the hands of Abakumov’s subordinates.
In the autumn of 1943, Ponomarenko and Tsanava, and not GUKR SMERSH, still controlled the OOs in partisan detachments. On August 20, 1943, Abakumov sent a strong missive to Ponomarenko:
The organs of counterintelligence (‘SMERSH’) are charged with fighting against enemy agents penetrating headquarters and detachments of partisans. However, in many cases the unmasked spies, saboteurs, terrorists, members of the so-called Russian Liberation Army and other detachments created by the Germans, who have given themselves up to partisan detachments, are transferred to our [Soviet] territory, but the organs of counterintelligence ‘SMERSH’ are not informed. They are interrogated by members of the headquarters of the partisan movement who are incapable of investigating such cases. Documents brought from the partisan detachments and protocols of interrogations of the unmasked spies are copied and sent to various addresses. As a result, a wide circle of persons has knowledge of serious [secret] operational measures.21
Ponomarenko reacted swiftly and sternly, writing:
Believing that it is expedient to continue transferring to you captured enemy agents and materials in which your Directorate might be interested, we are extremely surprised by your claims… A question arises: Why, since the time ‘SMERSH’ was formed, has no worker from this Directorate told us what measures they were planning against enemy agents?… Why are no workers from your agency present in partisan detachments?22
Abakumov and Ponomarenko did not reach an agreement, and SMERSH did not take control of the partisan OOs. This question soon became unimportant when the Red Army began advancing to the West and liberating Soviet territory from the Germans. On January 13, 1944, seven months after SMERSH was created, the TsShPD was disbanded. Local headquarters, not Moscow, were now responsible for partisan detachments. Ponomarenko returned to Belorussia to supervise partisan activity there.
Ponomarenko never forgot his skirmish with Abakumov. After Abakumov was arrested in July 1951, Ponomarenko, then a Central Committee secretary, used to boast to his Party colleagues that he had helped to get rid of Abakumov.23 He was probably among those who made sure that Stalin received the report denouncing Abakumov, who was subsequently dismissed and arrested on Stalin’s orders.
Abakumov had much more success in taking control of the radio games from Beria’s subordinates.
The ‘Radio Games’ Rivalry
In addition to counterintelligence work in the rear of the Soviet troops, the 3rd Department of GUKR in Moscow was also in charge of radio games—also known as playbacks—which were intended to deceive the enemy.24 As already mentioned, German intelligence also widely used radio games against the Soviets. For instance, two arrested leaders of the famous Soviet spy network ‘Red Orchestra’, Leopold Trepper (alias ‘Director’) and Anatolii Gurevich (alias ‘Kent’, ‘Sukolov’, and ‘Barcza’), agreed to send radio messages for the Gestapo hoping that Moscow would think that they were working under Nazi control. Soviet radio games operated by using German agents captured from various German intelligence services.
Soviet radio operations started in 1942 in two NKVD directorates, the 2nd (counterintelligence) headed by Pyotr Fedotov (like Abakumov, he was Yakov Deich’s protégé), and the 4th (terrorism) headed by Pavel Sudoplatov.25 As the UOO head, Abakumov also personally controlled some of the radio games, especially in the Moscow Province. He presented written scenarios of the planned games to Stalin, who made editorial notes in blue pencil.26 Within the 2nd NKVD Directorate, a section headed by Vladimir Baryshnikov in the 1st (German) Department (headed by Pyotr Timofeev) was responsible for the games. In April 1943, this section was transferred to SMESRH, and Dmitrii Tarasov, head of the radio operations team, recalled the transfer in his memoirs: ‘V. Ya. Baryshnikov was appointed head of the [3rd] Department of the GUKR SMERSH, while the radio operations group became a separate section within this department… Its staff reached eight members, and I was promoted to the head of the [2nd] section.’27
In July 1943, before the Kursk Battle, Abakumov issued UKRs with the secret Instruction on the Organization and Conduction of Radio Games with the Enemy.28 It stated the goal of the games: ‘To paralyze the activity of the enemy’s intelligence services.’ Each radio game was carefully prepared. At first Baryshnikov, after interrogating and recruiting captured German agents, sent Abakumov a proposal for a game. For instance, on June 25, 1943 Baryshnikov wrote:
The [captured German] group [of two agents, one of whom was a Soviet double agent] has a very interesting task [i.e., recruiting an agent inside the Soviet Union for the assassination of Lazar Kaganovich, a GKO member and Commissar for Transportation]. That could allow us to conduct a serious counterintelligence action (for example, to call for the arrival of qualified [German] specialists in recruiting agents). Therefore, this group should be engaged in a radio game. The first radio communication should be transmitted on June 26 [1943].29
Abakumov wrote on the report: ‘I agree.’
In Tarasov’s section, Majors Sergei Yelin and Vladimir Frolov, and Captains Grigorii Grigorenko and Ivan Lebedev (Tarasov’s deputy) were the main developers and conductors of the games.30 Tarasov describes the preparation of messages: ‘The counterintelligence members wrote texts of radiograms that contained military disinformation for a transmission to the enemy based on the General Staff’s recommendations. The style of writing by a particular operator and a legend [story] given to him were also taken into consideration. In the most important cases consultants from the General Staff participated in this work.’31
Tarasov details the contacts with the General Staff and military intelligence (RU):
[We] were in constant contact with A. I. Antonov, deputy head of the General Staff, and S. M. Shtemenko, head of the Operational Directorate of the General Staff, as well as with F. F. Kuznetsov, deputy head of the General Staff and, simultaneously, head of the RU. Meetings with the first two took place in the General Staff’s building or the Stavka mansion at Kirov Street [not far from the Kremlin], while we met with Comrade F. F. Kuznetsov in the USSR Defense [Commissariat] at Frunzenskaya Embankment.32
Usually the former German radio operators—Germans or Russians who had graduated from German intelligence schools and agreed to work for Baryshnikov’s section—were placed in Lubyanka Prison and brought to SMERSH’s headquarters (another part of the same huge building) when there was a need for them or for radio transmission sessions. If radio sessions were conducted from a particular territory where the controlling German intelligence supervisors expected the agents to be located at the time, Tarasov’s men brought the operators to this area.