During the reorganization of security services in April 1943, Sudoplatov’s 4th NKVD Directorate was transferred to the NKGB and became its 4th Directorate. This directorate continued to control some important radio games. According to Sudoplatov’s memoirs, the NKGB’s success with radio game Operation Monastyr’ (Monastery) sparked Abakumov’s jealousy. This was the game in which Aleksandr Demiyanov, or ‘Max’—wrongly identified in Sudoplatov’s memoirs as Abwehr’s ‘Max’ from the ‘Max and Moritz’ operation—participated. Allegedly, when Abakumov came to Sudoplatov’s office demanding the transfer of all radio games to GUKR, Sudoplatov agreed to do so if ordered. The order came within one day, but it excluded Monastery and Couriers, another deception game. Abakumov was displeased, ‘knowing that the results of these two operations were reported directly to Stalin.’33
Sudoplatov’s interpretation makes little sense—the results of all important radio games were reported directly to the Stavka, which meant that Stalin was already supervising all the most significant ones. For example, in September 1943, on Meshik’s report about one of the games, Abakumov wrote: ‘Such disinformation materials must not be sent without Com.[rade] Stalin’s approval.’34 However, the mere fact that information about two of the supposedly most successful games had been held back was apparently enough to anger Abakumov.35 The clash surrounding the radio games illustrates the tension and developing rivalry between Abakumov and the Beria–Merkulov duo after the creation of SMERSH.
Despite Abakumov’s opposition, the operations Monastyr’ and Berezino (which followed in 1944) remained in Sudoplatov’s hands. During the latter, twenty-two German intelligence men sent by the famous Otto Skorzeny into Soviet territory in response to false radio messages were caught, and thirteen radio transmitters and 225 packages of equipment and weapons were seized.36 Later Skorzeny wrote: ‘None of… my own men ever got back. I wondered whether the Russians were having a game with us all the time.’37 Apparently, Sudoplatov hoped to lure Skorzeny himself with this game, but this did not happen.
As of spring 1943, SMERSH was responsible for most of the other radio games. Scores of deceptive operations were organized, and through them SMERSH collected a great deal of military information, especially about the transportation of German troops, terrorist acts in the rear of the Soviet troops and on German-occupied Soviet territory, and so forth. Operation Ariitsy (Aryans), a particularly successful joint SMERSH–NKGB–NKVD game, demonstrated that the Germans had very inadequate intelligence about the Soviet situation.
In May 1944, the Walli I (Abwehr’s center for Russia) flew twenty-four agents, under the command of Captain Eberhard von Scheller (alias ‘Quast’) into Kalmykia—an autonomous republic on the shore of the Caspian Sea in southern Russia.38 Von Scheller, a WWI hero who was awarded two Iron Crosses for bravery during that war, had worked in the Abwehr since 1938. Being sent to Kalmykia was punishment for a crime that he did not describe to SMERSH officers. Kalmykia was populated by the small nation of Kalmyks, a nomadic group professing Lamaism that settled in the lower reaches of the Volga River at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Incidentally, Vladimir Lenin’s father was a Kalmyk who had risen to the status of a minor nobleman.
Von Scheller’s group was supposed to prepare a base for the future arrival of the so-called ‘Kalmyk Corps of Dr. Otto Doll’ (many heads of Abwehr groups had aliases with the title of ‘doctor’), consisting of 3,458 horsemen (36 squadrons), that the Abwehr Group 103 organized during 1942–43. Dr. Doll’s real name was Sonderführer Otmar Rudolph Werva, and he was a German academic and Abwehr officer.39 During the Russian Civil War, he served in the Ukrainian nationalistic troops that fought for the independence of Ukraine. The German plan was for this corps to initiate an uprising against the Soviet regime, among the Kalmyks. Amazingly, German intelligence was apparently unaware that by then there were no Kalmyks left in Kalmykia.
In December 1943, the Politburo ordered the liquidation of the Kalmyk ASSR and renamed it the Astrakhan Region within the Russian Federation.40 This was Stalin’s retaliation for Kalmyk collaboration with the Germans during the occupation of a part of Kalmykia near its capital, Elista, from August 1942 to mid-1943. The Germans wooed the Kalmyks with the promise of an independent Great Kalmyk State with territory from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea. During the occupation, a Kalmyk Cavalry Corps was formed, consisting of four divisions with five squadrons each, to fight against the Red Army.41
Following the Politburo decision, the NKVD executed an operation under the code name ‘Ulusy’ (ulus means region in the Kalmyk language), for which Beria and his deputy Vasilii Chernyshev were responsible. The NKVD troops rounded up the Kalmyks in Kalmykia (more than 93,000), put them on 46 trains, and deported them to the Altai, Novosibirsk, and Omsk provinces in Siberia. Sixteen thousand Kalmyks died during this operation.42 In March and June 1944, the remaining Kalmyks were deported from the Rostov and Stalingrad provinces; thus, no Kalmyks remained by the time German agents landed in Kalmykia.
During a clash between the NKVD and NKGB operational groups of the Astrakhan region and the German agents who were parachuted in, twelve German agents, including von Scheller, were taken prisoner, and the rest were either killed or managed to escape. SMERSH and the NKVD quickly developed a joint plan for a new radio game, Aryans, with the involvement of captured agents. On May 26, 1944, Abakumov and Aleksandr Leontiev, head of the NKVD Department for Combating Bandits, signed the plan, which Beria approved the next day. In the GUKR, Abakumov’s deputy Meshik and Baryshnikov, head of the 3rd Department, were responsible for implementing the plan.
Von Scheller volunteered for Soviet counterintelligence, and Hans Hansen, the radio operator of the downed German plane, agreed to work with von Scheller. The two were given the aliases ‘Boroda’ (Beard) and ‘Kolonist’ (Colonizer). In response to the disinformation transmitted, another German plane loaded with supplies for von Scheller’s agents landed in Kalmykia, where it was destroyed and five newly arrived agents were captured. After this von Scheller wrote to Abakumov:
Sir General!
I’ve volunteered for the Russian counterintelligence and I have worked honestly and hard for the implementation of a secret task. Our joint efforts succeeded in shooting down a gigantic German U-290 transport airplane and its passengers, including four German agents, were captured by the Russian counterintelligence service. Therefore, I ask for your approval to include me into the Soviet counterintelligence network. I pledge to keep secrets of the service for which I, probably, will end up working, even if I’d be working against German intelligence. In this case I ask for your approval of giving me the alias ‘Lor’.
Although further details of the ongoing operation are unknown, SMERSH sent a total of forty-two radio messages to the Germans and received twenty-three responses. In August 1944, the 3rd GUKR Department decided to end the game, and the last cable was sent to Germany, claiming that everyone in the second group had been killed and that the Kalmyks had refused to help von Scheller’s group. Von Scheller was supposedly going to the Western Caucasus, and would move from there to Romania. As a result of the game two planes were destroyed, twelve agents and members of German air crews were killed, and twenty-one German saboteurs were taken prisoner.