Georgi Malenkov's Spy Stories:
ADAMS, ARTHUR E.
Georgi Malenkov's Spy Stories By Arthur E. Adams Russian History Department, Michigan State College ON JUNE 13, 1954, Pravda and Izvestia published a spy story. Boiled down, the story claimed...
...And, of course, X/9592 was "directed and financed by the American intelligence service...
...People thus terrified are more easily managed...
...Those two men whose heavy load of equipment was listed above were equally weighted down with missions...
...During the past year, the latter were told that American spies had been captured and tried in several areas of the Soviet Union, in Poland, East Germany, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, Albania, China and North Korea...
...A finishing touch is overwhelming...
...A combined Stale Department and CIA team staged the recent Guatemala rebellion, and, in Germany, the historical department of the U. S. Air Force collects data on the location of Soviet industries...
...by means of anonymous letters to discredit well-known people in the country, Party and public officials, and Soviet workers...
...When machines, administrators and workers don't perform properly, the papers cry that American-inspired agents are sabotaging...
...and U. S. "timber specialists" are "doing topographical work in areas bordering the Soviet Union, and making a study of roads, bridges and passes...
...By arguing that Russia is surrounded by hostile "capitalists" who lust for the conquest of her riches, Lenin, Stalin and Malenkov have each managed to persuade many Russians that armed invaders may strike at any moment...
...Krutiy asserted that the Ukrainian leaders "do not represent any political force...
...Far more damning is the allegation that the intelligence agency of the Japanese Government, theoretically under the jurisdiction of the Japanese Cabinet, "is directly controlled by this Kennan organization...
...Just to make sure its readers comprehend the significance of this information, Pravda adds: "Such facts can be endlessly multiplied, but those given are sufficient to show the true nature of the activity of the numerous American specialists who are in Iran to give 'aid.'" According to Soviet papers, our CIC (Army Counterintelligence Corps) operates a base in the town of Sapporo...
...To mask its activities, this "Kennan organization" is said to own and operate "more than 30 fishing and trading companies...
...And now the Mormons have "69,000 rolls of microfilm, each of then 100 feet long...
...Soviet writers claim that American intelligence opera-tions in West Germany are extensive and influential...
...Japan, from which it sneaks spies into Russia: and...
...they will more readily accept dictatorship as a necessary consequence of the external danger...
...Boiled down, the story claimed that, early this year, two American intelligence agents flew from Wiesbaden, Germany to Oslo, Norway, transferred to a single-engined Norwegian seaplane and flew to the Soviet frontier, which they crossed with the aid of Norwegian border authorities...
...There is a terrible significance in this, Izvestia pointed out, for "the appetites of the FBI and its chief, Edgar Hoover, are becoming truly insatiable...
...Each published account is crammed with names and specific details that give it plausibility, and always it is charged that the American intelligence service is busy putting more and more agents into the field...
...to recruit agents for espionage and subversion...
...The announcement that those two agents who hauled so many supplies and missions into the Soviet had voluntarily surrendered also explained that, because of their repentance, these men had been freed and were living happily in the Soviet Union...
...Further, an American, Colonel Schwartzkopf, once adviser to the Iranian gendarmerie, is identified as the director of the Zahedi coup d'etat in August 1953...
...with the aid of the radio beacon to assist American planes in dropping other spies...
...As they tell the story, the newly-trained agent is sent into an Iron Curtain land with a ten-gallon hatful of nefarious missions to accomplish...
...The Fascist information bureau, Pravda assured its readers, "is in close touch with the American spy service and with the not-unknown Senator McCarthy, on whose instructions it operates...
...Furthermore: "The American authorities are buying up all this fascist filth very cheaply...
...The Russians howl that our intelligence service spends "many hundreds of millions of dollars in organizing provocations and sabotage...
...According to Izvestia, the two men who voluntarily surrendered had parachuted from an American four-engined bomber over Soviet soil...
...Another Pravda article, published in April, comes under the heading, "Intelligence Maneuver to Obtain Information and Anticipate Enemy Action...
...We are engaged in a struggle for survival with a tenacious and deadly enemy, and success depends in large measure upon our possession of accurate information about the capabilities and intentions of that enemy...
...In other countries, it numbers among its duties the "recruiting of foreign agents for the American intelligence service...
...And one of the most heinous of our methods, Pravda tirelessly insinuates, is secret conquest--conquest by the establishment of spider-like controls over the intelligence services of other states...
...This "Center" allegedly supports the old British Fascist, Oswald Mosley, and its information bureau is "directing the compilation of 'blacklists' of people with anti-American sentiments, the dissemination of provocative rumors, and, naturally, the collection of espionage information...
...Such accusations against U. S. intelligence agencies make many people, in large and small nations, in Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa, wary of Americans and American-sponsored undertakings...
...We may quite safely insist that the FBI does not operate a Mormon spy service...
...The Russians were fishing for some hint that would confirm the Times article...
...Tried by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, Galay and Khramtsov were each sentenced to 25 years in labor camps...
...And, out on the Pacific island of Sakhalin, according to report, one American spy was killed during a gun fight with Soviet police and his buddy was captured and condemned to 25 years' hard labor...
...Another Pravda article insists that we rely on "all kinds of scum, on traitors and betrayers of their motherland, on former fascist toadies coming over 'by inheritance' from the Gestapo to the American intelligence...
...The United States Information Service allegedly functions in Thailand "to coordinate and gather secret information...
...In fact, the Ukrainian organizations receive "categorical orders from Washington signed by Admiral [Leslie] Stevens...
...By publishing a spy story, Malenkov hopes to influence the thinking of an enemy agency or the action of an enemy agent...
...Trying to prove that our intelligence service is worse than Hitler's, Pravda recently "discovered" a new organization--the so-called "Fascist International Center," modeled by Soviet writers on the image of the Come-form...
...Sinister doings...
...Simple calculations in dollars and cents prove that, if our intelligence service were as huge, its activities and agents as numerous as the Russians would have the world believe, an impossibly large share of the national budget would be required to support it...
...And, just in case their worst fears should come true, they repudiated in advance any "publication in the American press of lies fabricated by the American intelligence service and issued as Rastvorov's 'testimony.'" Finally, in considering the Kremlin's reasons for fulminating about spies, we cannot but face the fact that the United States does operate an intelligence service...
...or he may hope to secure information by provoking detailed repudiation of fantastic charges...
...According to his statement, Krutiy had played an active part in the outspoken and virulent Ukrainian independence movement...
...And when countless anonymous letters descend on Soviet editors, "discrediting well-known people in the country, Party and public officials," etc., the shadowy agent of the American intelligence service--always a ready scapegoat--is smothered with maledictions...
...Other spies were allegedly unearthed in almost every corner of the globe...
...On the other hand, the many announcements describing ruthless executions of American spies are designed to make the agent think twice before boarding his four-engined bomber for Moscow...
...But in recent years he learned that the leaders of the Ukrainians have "sold themselves to foreign intelligence services, on whose orders they try to organize espionage, terrorism and sabotage in the Ukraine...
...Since it embarrasses the Soviet Union to have millions of its ex-citizens publicly and bitterly particularizing its shortcomings, Malenkov uses intelligence maneuvers to dampen the ardor of these refugee groups...
...This article was concerned with the highly-placed MVD man Yuri Rastvorov, who long operated from the Soviet Embassy in Tokyo...
...It is supposed to have a fleet of "more than 100 fishing boats," and to employ Japanese "Government officials, correspondents, industrialists, engineers and gangsters...
...We may doubt that American planes penetrate deeply into Soviet territory at will and without discovery...
...In November 1953, both Pravda...
...They charge us with bribery, blackmail and brutality, with driving homeless refugees to despair by allowing them to be used as slaves in Morocco and by plying the weak with drink until they are broken and ready to serve us...
...its 4,200 active agents were all ex-fascists--SS, SA, SD and Gestapo men...
...and--in the event of war--to help enemy planes bomb Soviet objectives...
...American missionaries throng the northern borders, mapping out the terrain...
...According to Pravda, this center X/9592--was headed by a former Hitlerite, General Gehlen...
...The question is: What part of Malenkov's accusations is true...
...In April, Pravda trumpeted that "after Franco received arms from the United States, the fascist dregs that had been in the Hitlerite intelligence swarmed to the surface in other Western European countries, hastening to offer their services...
...These visiting "Mormons" took "four whole years to photograph these church books...
...Among the millions of refugees from Russia who left during and immediately after the Second World War, there are many anti-Communist organizations...
...This scheme "was conceived not in the state of Utah, but in the dark offices of the American secret police--the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in Washington...
...to obtain documents by killing Soviet people...
...The answer is a little more complicated than that...
...they are merely cadres for American and other imperialist intelligence services...
...Because they're true...
...The promise is clear: If you are a refugee compelled by the vile Americans to spy on your motherland, turn yourself in, be repatriated and forgiven...
...They had jumped carrying "short-wave transmitters and receivers, a radio beacon for leading airplanes to landing strips, weapons (including silent ones), ciphers, codes, maps, compasses, materials for cryptography, blank forms from various Soviet institutions, passports and military cards forged by American intelligence, Soviet paper money, gold coin," and poison sewn into their shirt collars...
...in India...
...and Izvestia announced the defection to East Germany of a man named Geier, alias Grell, whom the press called "the former deputy chief of one West German espionage center...
...Pravda and Izvestia--sent by airmail all over the world --strive to convince friends and fellow-travelers that the United States is the home of all evil...
...They escaped the death penalty, the story concluded, by readily admitting their guilt...
...But to say that we engage in intelligence work is in no way to admit that we carry on the barbarous activities for which we are so reviled...
...Why do Malenkov's newspapers publish these reports and give them such elaborate detail...
...He "is now collecting a list of every Western European inhabitant for his card file...
...Late in 1953, Izvestia proclaimed: "Several years ago, Norwegian authorities gave a group of Americans permission to travel about the country to make microfilms of church books, in which Norway's population is registered...
...The agents, Vladimir Galay and Yuri Khramtsov, both emigre Russians, had been carefully trained, at an American intelligence school in West Germany, in the use of weapons, in techniques of forging documents, printing, photography, radio and cryptography...
...Malenkov has many irons in this fire...
...In Iran, American "military missions and advisers have taken over the second section of the Iranian General Staff" (military espionage and counter-espionage...
...Hardly...
...It is general knowledge now that Rastvorov came over to our side after Beria was exposed, but in April he was a big secret and the Russians were frantically trying to find him...
...Within this frightening array of tasks, several demonstrate a subsidiary aspect of the domestic usefulness of spy stories...
...During these riots,this Soviet story adds, one of Dulles's"agents," Trumball, saw to it that RIAS, the free radio station in West Berlin, "continuously broadcast instructions and announced meeting places for agents and provocateurs and also gave false information in order to extend the provocation that had been prepared...
...Pravda complained that American authorities feigned complete ignorance about "the Soviet Embassy official who 'disappeared,'" but it pointed out angrily that the New York Times was hinting that Rastvorov might be in the United States...
...Sooner or later, almost every American Government agency is fitted with the cloak and dagger of "the secret service...
...Malenkov's second main objective is international...
...The CIA, or perhaps some branch of the Soviet MVD, could give us something like a reliable estimate...
...Hoover is not satisfied with having a "dossier on every American...
...Such reports are steadily hammered into the minds of Soviet readers...
...In May 1954, for example, Pravda published an article about Josip Krutiy, a Ukrainian refugee who returned after nine years in the West...
...During the same week of June, Izvestia announced that two other American intelligence agents had voluntarily surrendered themselves to Soviet security officers near Moscow...
...First, spy stories help him rule Russia because they bolster the "encirclement theory"--a mainstay of Soviet policy...
...They claim that we herd this rabble off to one of our many intelligence schools--at Munich, Rottach, Bad Homburg or Limburg--where American officials teach what Pravda calls the "basic tenets" of American intelligence: "to hate and destroy everything Soviet, to blow up and kill...
...We are said to devote special attention to the tragic inmates of DP camps, and delighted Soviet writers multiply revolting descriptions of our recruiting methods...
...Allen Dulles, chief of the Central Intelligence Agency, was reportedly on the scene in West Berlin to stage the East German workers' revolts of June 1953...
...Pravda reports: "They were to begin the collection and transmission by radio of espionage information about industrial and military objectives...
...Even the FBI is implicated...
...But, even without their evidence, it is obvious that many of the charges are either sheer nonsense or barefaced lies, effective only because some people passionately desire to believe the worst of us...
...McCarthy is not alone...
...They also made good use of their opportunity to accuse us of "kidnaping" Rastvorov...
...to communicate to the American intelligence center about Soviet documents that should be furnished other agents sent into the USSR...
...It is charged that "the American espionage center in Japan is under the direct control of the Central Intelligence Agency" and is headed by a Lieutenant Colonel Kennan...
...Izvestia explained that the Mormons were working for American intelligence, which is "trying to get its hands on complete lists of the Western European countries' inhabitants...
...Their mission was to collect "information about industrial and military objectives and airfields, to photograph these objectives, determine their exact coordinates," and transmit this information by radio to Viktor Dalchau, 32 Obentraustrasse, Berlin, NE-61, or to Richard Gauler, 9 Motzstrasse, Berlin, 30...
...A third reason for the American spy article may be called "the intelligence maneuver...
Vol. 37 • November 1954 • No. 45
