Allen Dulles paratroopers: the collapse of a spy project
The confusion was so great that they forever refused to send parachutist spies to the territory of the Soviet Union.
In December 1946, Kim Philby was appointed head of the UIC residency in Turkey with its center in Istanbul, from where the main espionage actions were held against the USSR and the socialist countries of Eastern Europe.
The new resident had to prepare the ground for the implementation of operations to "penetrate deep." With this term, the leadership of the ICU outlined a plan for sending spies to Georgia and Armenia across the Turkish border.
By sending small groups of illegal immigrants for a short time - 6-8 weeks - UIC was going to explore the possibility of a long illegal stay of its personnel intelligence officers in Yerevan and Tbilisi. If trial trips went smoothly, then over time the British intended to create a permanent spy ring in the South Caucasus.
Philby immediately informed the Moscow Center about these long-term goals of British intelligence, as well as about the test sending of scouts.
Stalin reacted with interest to the information, took under his personal control the conduct of activities that prevent the infiltration of enemy agents into the southern regions of the USSR.
According to his plan, the loud failure of the very first operation of throwing militants would have forced not only the British, but also
their American partners abandon their further plans to send illegal immigrants to us for a long dive.
... Having familiarized himself with the situation, Philby concluded that it makes no sense to look for spy candidates on the spot. The population on the Turkish side was too backward for the spy craft. In a ciphered telegram to his English superiors, he suggested giving the task to the residencies of UCI in Paris, London and Beirut to begin the search for suitable candidates in the Georgian and Armenian diasporas.
Soon, from London it was reported that two candidates had been found and are undergoing intensive training in London.
... In the first decade of April 1947, Philbi, head of the Turkish security service, General Tefik Bey, and two young Georgians moved to the area of the Turkish village of Pozov, which is opposite the Georgian city of Akhaltsikhe. After checking weapons and the equipment with which they were supplied in London, the Georgians moved towards the border. By the light of the moon, Philby clearly saw how both Georgians fell, slain by gunfire of frontier guards ...
... The demonstrative liquidation of spies forced the leadership of the ICU to forever bury the idea of transferring their agents to the territory of the USSR. What, however, could not be said about their American partners. But they decided, as they say, “to go the other way” —air.
NOT EARTH - SO BY AIR
At the beginning of 1950, the political leadership of the United States experienced a severe shortage of information about the state of affairs in the economic and military sectors of the USSR. To fill this gap - and no one on Capitol Hill had any doubts about it - it was possible only with the help of espionage actions. With the arrival of Allen Dulles at the Central Intelligence Agency, the activities of this department sharply intensified. Considering the failure of British colleagues, the CIA chief relied on the transfer of illegal immigrants not by land, but by air. An experienced specialist in Russia, espionage specialists, the chief of West German intelligence, Reinhard Gehlen, began to actively assist in this.
Moreover, there were no problems with recruiting agents. After the war, hundreds of thousands of “displaced persons” remained in the West — former Soviet citizens who, for one reason or another, did not wish to return to the USSR. It’s no secret that there were many among them who were ready to take up arms against their former homeland. It was from them that candidates for illegal agents were selected, which they then trained in special schools.
The first agents sent to the USSR were Viktor Voronets and Alexander Yashchenko, deserters who served in Vlasov ROA since 1943. Their destination was Minsk, where 18 August 1951, they were thrown out by parachute from an American military transport aircraft, taking off from a secret base in Thessaloniki (Greece).
Voronets and Yashchenko were focused on the search and detection of nuclear facilities. Both had a convincing legend and well-fabricated documents. Voronets became, according to Raenko’s documents, a worker at the Moscow tobacco factory Java, who allegedly was on vacation at the Caucasian resort where he was supposed to arrive after landing. A month after the landing, he had to cross the Turkish border (by the way, close to all the same Akhaltsikhe). Yashchenko, who became Kasapov, had the task to ride to the Urals and to return also across the Turkish-Georgian border.
The scouts were equipped with miniature radio transmitters, folding bicycles produced by Czechoslovakia (they were sold in the USSR), Parabellum pistols, and also received 5 thousand rubles, a leather pouch with gold tsar's chervonets and several pairs of Soviet watches in case of bribing. But ... not for long the music played! The Athens Radio Center received from the parachutists only a message about a safe landing, then the connection was interrupted. Three months later, all our central newspapers reported on the capture of two American spies who were shot by court.
Meanwhile, another American Dakota military transport aircraft took off from the airfield in Wiesbaden (Germany) and headed for Chisinau ...
IN SPYONIC PERFORMANCE SOLID “SOLIST”
25 September 1951 operational duty officer of the Ministry of State Security of the Moldavian SSR received a telephone message from the headquarters of the Air Force of the Transdniestrian Military District:
“In the 2 hour of 24 minutes, the fixed positions of VNOS (aerial surveillance, warning and communication) recorded the appearance of an aircraft of unknown origin with extinguished on-board signal lights. At high altitude it moved in the direction of Chisinau. In the area of Kaushany-Bender the plane dropped sharply, made a circle and, having gained altitude, withdrew towards the Black Sea coast.
Alarm fighters-interceptors overtook the offender. He did not react to the warning signals and in 2 hours 58 minutes was attacked. Having sharply decreased, with the burning left wing the plane fell in the sea. Kept on the south. The pilot jumped with a parachute into the sea and was picked up by the crew of the cargo ship Joliot Curie. During the interrogation of the pilot (conducted with the assistance of a translator from the German language) it was established that one parachutist was dropped in the aforementioned aircraft descent area. ”
... An hour after the telephone message was received at the MGB of Moldova, the parachutist was taken prisoner during the physical combing of the terrain by the personnel of two motorized rifle divisions (!). It turned out to be 25-year-old Konstantin Khmelnitsky.
Despite his youth, he was a seasoned beast. At the age of 15, he entered the service of the Germans who occupied his native village of Vilyuyki, near Minsk. In 1943, he was enlisted in the SS battalion, in which he fought against the Anglo-American troops in Italy, for services to the Fatherland. After the capitulation of Hitler's Germany, he moved to France, where he entered the Sorbonne to study. There he learned that in their occupation zone in West Germany, Americans recruit young Russians and Ukrainians to perform special missions in the USSR. Without regret, he left his studies at the university and entered the reconnaissance and sabotage school in the town of Immenstadt. During the year, an American instructor, Captain James Higgins, conducted individual lessons with him under the strictest conspiracy. Studying topography on the maps of the Soviet Union alternated with departure to the terrain in order to be able to move in azimuth with a compass; the theory of explosives - with the acquisition of practical skills to destroy the railways and set fire to industrial facilities. In the process of training, Khmelnitsky (now a cadet named “Soloist”) gradually mastered his new legendary biography, which, in particular, obliged him to know the names of all the officials of the Viluy district party committee and the district executive committee.
With the release of "Soloist" was personally introduced to Gelena as the most promising illegal agent ...
In early October, Khmelnitsky established contact with the American center in the territory of the Federal Republic of Germany and said that he had begun the task. Following this, his host collapsed waterfall intelligence, which did not dry out for about three years. According to radiograms, the Soloist traveled around the entire Soviet Union, creating underground cells for subsequent terrorist and sabotage actions, stealing documents from Soviet institutions, spreading rumors, and compromising Soviet and party officials.
In addition, regularly traveling to Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk, the agent collected information about Atommash industrial sites. Then, in the conditioned caches, carefully placed the samples of land, water and bushes taken near the nuclear enterprises (of course, all these “bookmarks” were absolutely neutral, which disoriented and confused the American operators). Nevertheless, the materials transmitted by Soloist impressed Allen Dulles so much that he personally congratulated Gehlen on success ...
And suddenly - like a bolt from the blue - in June 1954, the press department of the USSR Foreign Ministry organized a special press conference for two hundred foreign journalists accredited in Moscow.
In the hall, brightly lit by Jupiter, at the table, on which spyware was neatly laid out: a parachute, an American radio transmitter, a pistol, topographic maps, bags of golden Nikolayevka, ampoules with poison personally sat "Soloist" - Khmelnitsky.
Responding to questions from reporters, he said that since 1945, he was an agent of the Soviet military counterintelligence, on her instructions, joined the displaced people to be recruited by American "bounty hunters" and later be trained in an intelligence school.
Khmelnitsky said, not without humor, that during the whole study in the special school “Americans and their Gelenovsky henchmen encouraged us, cadets, drunkenness, gambling and even organized trips to amoral houses, for which they took us to Munich.”
After that, the double agent made his most sensational statement: for three years he successfully conducted a radio game with the Americans, conveying information prepared by the USSR state security agencies. According to him, the game was played with such sophistication that, based on the instructions and requests received, many CIA plans were revealed.
The confusion was so great that German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer ordered Gehlen to cease parachute operations against the USSR. However, the CIA sporadically continued throwing agents, enlisting the "friendly help" of Gehlen. Following this - which eventually became the rule - in our press it was reported about the capture of paratroopers. For example, the American group codenamed "Square B-52" by Okhrimovich and Glorious near Kiev in 1954 ...
FALSE EXAMPLE IS INFECTIVE
... In total, 1951-54 was disarmed by Soviet counterintelligence around 30 paratrooper spies, most of whom were executed by a court sentence. The surviving agents were used in radio games that exposed the plans and intentions of the CIA. However, today the Americans claim that some “parachute operations” in the territory of the USSR remained undisclosed and the United States became owners of very valuable information. Well, it may well be ...
In spite of the execution finale (which has become traditional!) Of operations to drop American spies, as the Soviet newspapers wrote in detail, the French special service HERE, with 1951, repeatedly tried to abandon its agents on the territory of the USSR. Unfortunately, many members of the resistance movement and even former aces of the Normandie-Niemen squadron were involved in the espionage industry, as happened to captain Gabriel Mertizan.
It must be said that the French - and this became the talk of the town among the Anglo-American intelligence community - were initially plagued by fatal bad luck. Suffice it to say that all 18 parachutist spies landed by HERE in Czechoslovakia in 1951-52 were seized by local security agencies as soon as their feet touched the ground.
And the Poles have turned the operation of the French secret service into a performance. French paratroopers landed near Warsaw were captured by Polish counterintelligence on the landing site and ... sent back to France, thereby demonstrating disregard for the leaders of the CASE!
... In the 1956 year, Allen Dulles and, after him, other leaders of the special services of the NATO countries, forever refused to send paratrooper spies to the territory of the Soviet Union. All the more so since the high-altitude reconnaissance U-2 has been commissioned on which much hope has been placed.
In December 1946, Kim Philby was appointed head of the UIC residency in Turkey with its center in Istanbul, from where the main espionage actions were held against the USSR and the socialist countries of Eastern Europe. The new resident had to prepare the ground for the implementation of operations to "penetrate deep." With this term, the leadership of the ICU outlined a plan for sending spies to Georgia and Armenia across the Turkish border.
By sending small groups of illegal immigrants for a short time - 6-8 weeks - UIC was going to explore the possibility of a long illegal stay of its personnel intelligence officers in Yerevan and Tbilisi. If trial trips went smoothly, then over time the British intended to create a permanent spy ring in the South Caucasus.
Philby immediately informed the Moscow Center about these long-term goals of British intelligence, as well as about the test sending of scouts.
Stalin reacted with interest to the information, took under his personal control the conduct of activities that prevent the infiltration of enemy agents into the southern regions of the USSR.
According to his plan, the loud failure of the very first operation of throwing militants would have forced not only the British, but also
their American partners abandon their further plans to send illegal immigrants to us for a long dive.
... Having familiarized himself with the situation, Philby concluded that it makes no sense to look for spy candidates on the spot. The population on the Turkish side was too backward for the spy craft. In a ciphered telegram to his English superiors, he suggested giving the task to the residencies of UCI in Paris, London and Beirut to begin the search for suitable candidates in the Georgian and Armenian diasporas.
Soon, from London it was reported that two candidates had been found and are undergoing intensive training in London.
... In the first decade of April 1947, Philbi, head of the Turkish security service, General Tefik Bey, and two young Georgians moved to the area of the Turkish village of Pozov, which is opposite the Georgian city of Akhaltsikhe. After checking weapons and the equipment with which they were supplied in London, the Georgians moved towards the border. By the light of the moon, Philby clearly saw how both Georgians fell, slain by gunfire of frontier guards ...
... The demonstrative liquidation of spies forced the leadership of the ICU to forever bury the idea of transferring their agents to the territory of the USSR. What, however, could not be said about their American partners. But they decided, as they say, “to go the other way” —air.
NOT EARTH - SO BY AIR
At the beginning of 1950, the political leadership of the United States experienced a severe shortage of information about the state of affairs in the economic and military sectors of the USSR. To fill this gap - and no one on Capitol Hill had any doubts about it - it was possible only with the help of espionage actions. With the arrival of Allen Dulles at the Central Intelligence Agency, the activities of this department sharply intensified. Considering the failure of British colleagues, the CIA chief relied on the transfer of illegal immigrants not by land, but by air. An experienced specialist in Russia, espionage specialists, the chief of West German intelligence, Reinhard Gehlen, began to actively assist in this.
Moreover, there were no problems with recruiting agents. After the war, hundreds of thousands of “displaced persons” remained in the West — former Soviet citizens who, for one reason or another, did not wish to return to the USSR. It’s no secret that there were many among them who were ready to take up arms against their former homeland. It was from them that candidates for illegal agents were selected, which they then trained in special schools.
The first agents sent to the USSR were Viktor Voronets and Alexander Yashchenko, deserters who served in Vlasov ROA since 1943. Their destination was Minsk, where 18 August 1951, they were thrown out by parachute from an American military transport aircraft, taking off from a secret base in Thessaloniki (Greece).
Voronets and Yashchenko were focused on the search and detection of nuclear facilities. Both had a convincing legend and well-fabricated documents. Voronets became, according to Raenko’s documents, a worker at the Moscow tobacco factory Java, who allegedly was on vacation at the Caucasian resort where he was supposed to arrive after landing. A month after the landing, he had to cross the Turkish border (by the way, close to all the same Akhaltsikhe). Yashchenko, who became Kasapov, had the task to ride to the Urals and to return also across the Turkish-Georgian border.
The scouts were equipped with miniature radio transmitters, folding bicycles produced by Czechoslovakia (they were sold in the USSR), Parabellum pistols, and also received 5 thousand rubles, a leather pouch with gold tsar's chervonets and several pairs of Soviet watches in case of bribing. But ... not for long the music played! The Athens Radio Center received from the parachutists only a message about a safe landing, then the connection was interrupted. Three months later, all our central newspapers reported on the capture of two American spies who were shot by court.
Meanwhile, another American Dakota military transport aircraft took off from the airfield in Wiesbaden (Germany) and headed for Chisinau ...
IN SPYONIC PERFORMANCE SOLID “SOLIST”
25 September 1951 operational duty officer of the Ministry of State Security of the Moldavian SSR received a telephone message from the headquarters of the Air Force of the Transdniestrian Military District:
“In the 2 hour of 24 minutes, the fixed positions of VNOS (aerial surveillance, warning and communication) recorded the appearance of an aircraft of unknown origin with extinguished on-board signal lights. At high altitude it moved in the direction of Chisinau. In the area of Kaushany-Bender the plane dropped sharply, made a circle and, having gained altitude, withdrew towards the Black Sea coast.
Alarm fighters-interceptors overtook the offender. He did not react to the warning signals and in 2 hours 58 minutes was attacked. Having sharply decreased, with the burning left wing the plane fell in the sea. Kept on the south. The pilot jumped with a parachute into the sea and was picked up by the crew of the cargo ship Joliot Curie. During the interrogation of the pilot (conducted with the assistance of a translator from the German language) it was established that one parachutist was dropped in the aforementioned aircraft descent area. ”
... An hour after the telephone message was received at the MGB of Moldova, the parachutist was taken prisoner during the physical combing of the terrain by the personnel of two motorized rifle divisions (!). It turned out to be 25-year-old Konstantin Khmelnitsky.
Despite his youth, he was a seasoned beast. At the age of 15, he entered the service of the Germans who occupied his native village of Vilyuyki, near Minsk. In 1943, he was enlisted in the SS battalion, in which he fought against the Anglo-American troops in Italy, for services to the Fatherland. After the capitulation of Hitler's Germany, he moved to France, where he entered the Sorbonne to study. There he learned that in their occupation zone in West Germany, Americans recruit young Russians and Ukrainians to perform special missions in the USSR. Without regret, he left his studies at the university and entered the reconnaissance and sabotage school in the town of Immenstadt. During the year, an American instructor, Captain James Higgins, conducted individual lessons with him under the strictest conspiracy. Studying topography on the maps of the Soviet Union alternated with departure to the terrain in order to be able to move in azimuth with a compass; the theory of explosives - with the acquisition of practical skills to destroy the railways and set fire to industrial facilities. In the process of training, Khmelnitsky (now a cadet named “Soloist”) gradually mastered his new legendary biography, which, in particular, obliged him to know the names of all the officials of the Viluy district party committee and the district executive committee.
With the release of "Soloist" was personally introduced to Gelena as the most promising illegal agent ...
In early October, Khmelnitsky established contact with the American center in the territory of the Federal Republic of Germany and said that he had begun the task. Following this, his host collapsed waterfall intelligence, which did not dry out for about three years. According to radiograms, the Soloist traveled around the entire Soviet Union, creating underground cells for subsequent terrorist and sabotage actions, stealing documents from Soviet institutions, spreading rumors, and compromising Soviet and party officials.
In addition, regularly traveling to Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk, the agent collected information about Atommash industrial sites. Then, in the conditioned caches, carefully placed the samples of land, water and bushes taken near the nuclear enterprises (of course, all these “bookmarks” were absolutely neutral, which disoriented and confused the American operators). Nevertheless, the materials transmitted by Soloist impressed Allen Dulles so much that he personally congratulated Gehlen on success ...
And suddenly - like a bolt from the blue - in June 1954, the press department of the USSR Foreign Ministry organized a special press conference for two hundred foreign journalists accredited in Moscow.
In the hall, brightly lit by Jupiter, at the table, on which spyware was neatly laid out: a parachute, an American radio transmitter, a pistol, topographic maps, bags of golden Nikolayevka, ampoules with poison personally sat "Soloist" - Khmelnitsky.
Responding to questions from reporters, he said that since 1945, he was an agent of the Soviet military counterintelligence, on her instructions, joined the displaced people to be recruited by American "bounty hunters" and later be trained in an intelligence school.
Khmelnitsky said, not without humor, that during the whole study in the special school “Americans and their Gelenovsky henchmen encouraged us, cadets, drunkenness, gambling and even organized trips to amoral houses, for which they took us to Munich.”
After that, the double agent made his most sensational statement: for three years he successfully conducted a radio game with the Americans, conveying information prepared by the USSR state security agencies. According to him, the game was played with such sophistication that, based on the instructions and requests received, many CIA plans were revealed.
The confusion was so great that German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer ordered Gehlen to cease parachute operations against the USSR. However, the CIA sporadically continued throwing agents, enlisting the "friendly help" of Gehlen. Following this - which eventually became the rule - in our press it was reported about the capture of paratroopers. For example, the American group codenamed "Square B-52" by Okhrimovich and Glorious near Kiev in 1954 ...
FALSE EXAMPLE IS INFECTIVE
... In total, 1951-54 was disarmed by Soviet counterintelligence around 30 paratrooper spies, most of whom were executed by a court sentence. The surviving agents were used in radio games that exposed the plans and intentions of the CIA. However, today the Americans claim that some “parachute operations” in the territory of the USSR remained undisclosed and the United States became owners of very valuable information. Well, it may well be ...
In spite of the execution finale (which has become traditional!) Of operations to drop American spies, as the Soviet newspapers wrote in detail, the French special service HERE, with 1951, repeatedly tried to abandon its agents on the territory of the USSR. Unfortunately, many members of the resistance movement and even former aces of the Normandie-Niemen squadron were involved in the espionage industry, as happened to captain Gabriel Mertizan.
It must be said that the French - and this became the talk of the town among the Anglo-American intelligence community - were initially plagued by fatal bad luck. Suffice it to say that all 18 parachutist spies landed by HERE in Czechoslovakia in 1951-52 were seized by local security agencies as soon as their feet touched the ground.
And the Poles have turned the operation of the French secret service into a performance. French paratroopers landed near Warsaw were captured by Polish counterintelligence on the landing site and ... sent back to France, thereby demonstrating disregard for the leaders of the CASE!
... In the 1956 year, Allen Dulles and, after him, other leaders of the special services of the NATO countries, forever refused to send paratrooper spies to the territory of the Soviet Union. All the more so since the high-altitude reconnaissance U-2 has been commissioned on which much hope has been placed.
Information