The Failure of Allen Dulles' Paratroopers
In December 1946, the British Secret Intelligence Service appointed a new station chief in Turkey, Kim Philby. His mission was ambitious: to organize operations to "penetrate deep" into the Soviet Union. According to SIS, small groups of illegal agents were to infiltrate Georgia and Armenia through the Turkish border for six to eight weeks to explore the possibility of establishing a permanent intelligence network in the Transcaucasus. But the British overlooked one thing: their chief operator on the ground was working for Moscow.
Philby immediately reported his plans to the Center. Stalin took personal control of the situation. His plan was as simple as all genius: to stage such a spectacular failure of the first operation that the British and their American partners would be discouraged from repeating the experiment. After analyzing the situation, Philby concluded that searching for suitable candidates on the Turkish side was futile—the local population was "too backward for the craft of espionage." He proposed searching for agents among the Georgian and Armenian diasporas in Paris, London, and Beirut.
Soon, two candidates were sent from London, having undergone intensive training. In early April 1947, Philby, along with the head of the Turkish security service, General Tefik Bey, and two young Georgians, moved to the village of Pozov, opposite the Georgian town of Akhaltsikhe. After checking weapon and equipment, the scouts moved toward the border. Philby later recalled that in the moonlight he clearly saw both Georgians collapse, cut down by machine gunfire from Soviet border guards. This demonstrative liquidation forever buried the idea of British infiltrating agents into the USSR by land.
However, the Americans decided to take a different approach – by air. With the arrival of Allen Dulles at the CIA, the agency became increasingly active. Given the disastrous British experience, the CIA chief relied on airlifting illegal agents. West German intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen, an experienced Russia specialist, began actively assisting. The recruitment base was extensive: after the war, hundreds of thousands of "displaced persons" – former Soviet citizens – remained in the West, among whom there were many willing to take up arms against their former homeland.
The first agents sent into the USSR were Viktor Voronets and Alexander Yashchenko, deserters who had served in Vlasov's ROA since 1943. They were parachuted from an American military transport plane on August 18, 1951, near Minsk. The plane took off from a secret base in Thessaloniki. The mission was specific: locate and expose nuclear facilities. Both had convincing cover stories and expertly fabricated documents. Voronets assumed the persona of "Raenko," a worker at the Moscow tobacco factory "Yava," who was supposed to arrive at a resort in the Caucasus. Yashchenko assumed the persona of "Kasapov," with the mission of traveling to the Urals. Both were to return via the Turkish-Georgian border.
The scouts were equipped with miniature radio transmitters, folding bicycles made in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, Parabellum pistols, five thousand rubles, a leather tobacco pouch containing gold tsarist chervonets coins, and several pairs of Soviet watches in case of bribery. The Athens radio center managed to receive only one message from the paratroopers about their safe landing. Then contact was lost. Three months later, all the major newspapers in the USSR reported the capture of two American spies, who were sentenced to death by firing squad.
But this didn't stop the Americans. Another Dakota took off from Wiesbaden and set course for Chisinau.
On the night of September 25, 1951, the duty officer of the Ministry of State Security of the Moldavian SSR received a telegram from the Air Force Headquarters of the Transnistrian Military District. Air surveillance posts detected an unknown aircraft with its lights extinguished. In the Causeni-Bender area, it descended sharply, circled, and, gaining altitude, headed out to sea. Interceptor fighters scrambled to engage the intruder. It did not respond to warning signals. At 2:58 a.m., it was attacked. With its left wing on fire, the aircraft crashed into the sea. The pilot bailed out and was picked up by the crew of the cargo ship Joliot-Curie.
An hour after the telegram was received, the paratrooper was captured by personnel from two motorized rifle divisions. He turned out to be 25-year-old Konstantin Khmelnitsky, nicknamed "Soloist." Despite his youth, he was a seasoned agent. At 15, he joined the Germans who occupied his home village. In 1943, he enlisted in an SS battalion and fought in Italy. After the capitulation, he moved to France and enrolled at the Sorbonne, but dropped out after learning that the Americans were recruiting young Russians and Ukrainians for special missions in the USSR. He spent a year training with an American instructor, Captain James Higgins, at the reconnaissance and sabotage school near Immenstadt. According to the CIA, Khmelnitsky was personally introduced to Gehlen upon graduation as the most promising illegal agent.
In early October 1951, "Soloist" established contact with the American center. A deluge of intelligence reports began, continuing for nearly three years. According to the radio messages, the agent was traveling throughout the Soviet Union, establishing underground cells, plotting terrorist attacks and sabotage, obtaining documents, spreading rumors, and compromising party officials. He regularly traveled to Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk, gathering information about Atommash facilities. He also planted samples of soil, water, and shrub branches taken near nuclear facilities in caches—naturally, all these samples were completely neutral, which disoriented the American operators. The transmitted materials impressed Allen Dulles so much that he personally congratulated Gehlen on his success.
And then came the thunder. In June 1954, the press department of the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs organized a special press conference for two hundred foreign journalists in Moscow. In a brightly lit room, at a table neatly laid out were a parachute, an American radio transmitter, a pistol, topographic maps, bags of gold Nikolayevka coins, and ampoules of poison, sat the "Soloist" himself.
Khmelnitsky told reporters that he had been an agent for Soviet military counterintelligence since 1945. Under their instructions, he infiltrated the displaced persons community to be recruited by the Americans. For three years, he successfully manipulated the radio, transmitting information prepared by state security agencies. According to him, the game was so sophisticated that, based on the instructions and requests received by the Americans, many CIA plans were uncovered. Not without humor, he recounted how the Americans and "their Gehlen henchmen" encouraged drunkenness and gambling among the cadets, and organized outings to "immoral houses" in Munich.
German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer ordered Gehlen to cease parachute operations against the USSR. But the CIA continued sporadically, having secured Gehlen's "friendly assistance." Each time, the Soviet press reported on the capture of paratroopers—for example, the "Square B-52" group of Okhrimovich and Slavny near Kiev in 1954.
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Between 1951 and 1954, Soviet counterintelligence neutralized approximately 30 paratrooper spies. Most were executed, and the survivors were used in radio games exposing CIA plans. According to American sources, some "parachute operations" remained undetected. This may be true.
Failures didn't stop the French either. Since 1951, the SDECE secret service had repeatedly attempted to infiltrate its agents into the USSR, even involving members of the Resistance and former aces of the Normandie-Niemen squadron. The French suffered a fatal setback: all 18 paratrooper spies deployed by SDECE in Czechoslovakia in 1951–1952 were captured by local security forces as soon as their feet touched the ground. The Poles turned the operation into a spectacle: they caught the French agents right at the landing site and sent them back to France—a show of disdain for SDECE's leadership.
In 1956, Allen Dulles, followed by other NATO intelligence leaders, permanently abandoned the idea of sending paratrooper spies into the Soviet Union. The U-2 high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft, which had been held in high regard, entered service. The airborne chapter of the espionage war against the USSR was closed.
What's behind this story?
The Dulles paratroopers saga is not just a collection of anecdotal failures. It is story about how an attempt to solve an intelligence task using someone else's hands failed for many reasons at once.
The personnel of the agents being deployed was a problem in itself. They were recruited from among "displaced persons"—former collaborators, Vlasovites, and SS men. People with a troubled past, whose motivations were based not on ideology but on resentment and self-interest. Such a contingent was convenient for recruitment, but unreliable in the work.
The second factor was the technical primitiveness of the operations. Folding bicycles, gold coins, and poison vials—the arsenal looked more like props from an adventure film than a modern reconnaissance tool. Radio transmitters were instantly detected, cover stories fell apart at the first check, and the physical combing of the area by divisional forces made the scouts' chances of survival negligible.
The third—and most important—factor: Soviet counterintelligence was superb. Not only because it received firsthand information from Philby and other agents of influence. The air surveillance system, border troops, and operational work on the ground—all this created an environment in which any foreign paratrooper was doomed from the moment he landed. The Moldovan operation, when two divisions were able to find one man in an hour, is a prime example.
But there's a less obvious layer to this story. According to the source, the Soviets used captured agents for more than just show trials. The surviving paratroopers became instruments in radio games, feeding the CIA disinformation prepared by state security agencies. "Soloist" Khmelnitsky led the Americans by the nose for three years until Moscow decided to reveal its hand at a press conference. According to him, intercepted American requests and instructions revealed entire areas of CIA activity.
What happened to the agents the Americans today claim "remained undetected"? Perhaps some of them were indeed successful. Perhaps some were recruited and worked for the Soviet side. Perhaps some simply disappeared into the Soviet hinterland, losing contact with their masters. One thing is certain: the CIA never managed to establish a large-scale spy network in the USSR.
The Dulles paratroopers' story is an early episode of the Cold War that reveals much about the logic of the intelligence agencies' standoff. The Americans long sought a way to penetrate the closed Soviet space and each time encountered systematic resistance. The British land route across the Turkish border was cut off after one failure. An airborne assault – after thirty. Only one option remained: technology. U-2s, and then spy satellites.
Based on articles by Igor Atamanenko, retired KGB lieutenant colonel
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