by Max Hastings
In defence of Dulles, he got no more wrong than did most intelligence officers of all nationalities. He provided a useful conduit for anti-Nazi Germans to communicate with Washington, even if the exchanges did them no practical good. Perhaps the most significant consequence of his contacts with the Resistance was to fuel Soviet paranoia about the possibility that the Western Allies would make a secret peace with Germany. The Russians’ American agents in high places kept them apprised of Dulles’ contacts with Germans – and of some meetings that were products of the traitors’ over-fertile imaginations. On 14 June 1944, for instance, the Washington NKVD station reported to Moscow that Dulles had told the State Department of a personal visit to himself in Bern by Gen. Walter von Brauchitsch of the German general staff, offering peace terms on behalf of the Wehrmacht on condition that no Soviet troops should enter German territory. Cordell Hull, the US secretary of state, had responded to Dulles that ‘the Americans are not going to conduct any negotiations with the Germans without other allies’. The same signal also described Dulles receiving overtures from prominent Germans who offered to evacuate Western Allied-occupied territories, if they were left free to continue the war against the USSR.
The record suggests that Dulles’ emergence from the war as a supposed prince among spies was undeserved. He got some things right, because informed Germans approached him, as a prominent and accessible American, rather than because he performed any notable feat of agent recruitment, or displayed notable judgement as an analyst. Good diplomatic reporting often achieved as much as, or more than, spies in the enemy’s camp. Pavel Sudoplatov wrote: ‘Some 80 per cent of intelligence information on political matters comes not from agents but from confidential contacts.’ These are more likely to be made in embassies or chancelleries than at secret rendezvous on street corners, and it is interesting to compare the tone of Dulles’ reporting with some of the dispatches from Allied ambassadors in neutral capitals. On 30 November 1942, for instance, the British ambassador in Stockholm wrote to London, reporting a conversation with a well-connected Swede who had just returned from Berlin. One of Moscow’s men in Whitehall, probably Donald Maclean, obligingly passed this to the NKVD, so that it was also read by Beria.
Sir Victor Mallet, the ambassador, asserted that all important German strategic decisions were now being made by Hitler, often against the strong opinion of the army’s general staff. Opponents of the regime within the army ‘could under certain circumstances become leader of an uprising’, but Himmler and the SS were immensely strong and ‘very dangerous’. In the view of Mallet’s informant, a long series of major military defeats would be required before the Nazi regime became vulnerable. Intelligent Germans were thoroughly aware that the Wehrmacht faced a crisis on the Eastern Front (at Stalingrad): ‘Civilians in Berlin can imagine the horrors of the Russian massacres in Germany if Germany loses the war. It is these fears more than anything else that restrain opposition to the Nazis from active demarches … Military and civilian leaders of the opposition fully realize that any truce between the Allies and Hitler or anyone from his clique is impossible.’
This was a sound assessment of the mood inside Germany, written by an accredited diplomat, and it is hard to imagine how any secret agent or signal decrypt could have improved upon it. Mallet’s remarks closely matched those of the OSS from Bern. Allen Dulles could have functioned just as effectively had he been US ambassador – his principal source on Hungary, for instance, was no spy but instead the local Hungarian minister, Baron Bakách-Bessenyey. The OSS station chief was a clever New York lawyer with less understanding of international affairs, intelligence, war-making or Europe than he supposed. It was fortunate that the administration in Washington ignored his pleas that it should negotiate with the German opposition: there was pathetically little of this, and its political expectations were entirely at odds with reality. If the Americans had opened bilateral talks with Germans of any hue, the Russians would have become even more impossible to deal with than they were already. As it was, they whipped up a storm when without Soviet consent Dulles arranged terms for the surrender of German troops in Italy with Lt. Gen. Karl Wolff on 2 May 1945, three days before the general capitulation. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of those negotiations was that Dulles was able to place an uncommonly courageous OSS wireless-operator – a Czech named Václav Hradecký, ‘Little Wally’ – in Wolff’s north Italian headquarters, from which he transmitted to Bern for several weeks, and lived to tell the tale.
After completing an exhaustive study of the OSS wartime reports from Bern, Neal Petersen wrote: ‘One is hard-pressed to identify a single example of a Dulles report of itself having direct impact on a top-level policy decision.’ Like so much other OSS material, most of Dulles’ dispatches disappeared into the maw of wartime Washington bureaucracy, without changing hearts and minds either among the US chiefs of staff or at the White House – which were, like Winston Churchill, much more receptive to their daily dose of Ultra.
12
Russia’s Partisans: Terrorising Both Sides
On 3 July 1941, Stalin’s first broadcast appeal to the Soviet peoples echoed Churchill’s earlier clarion calls to the occupied nations of Europe: ‘Conditions must be made unbearable for the enemy and his collaborators; they must be pursued and annihilated wherever they are.’ What followed across vast tracts of the Soviet empire in the next three years became part of the heroic legend of Russia’s war, a tale of its peoples united in resisting the barbarous invader. Contemporary evidence now available, however, tells a more complicated story. From 1943 onwards, guerrilla operations influenced the struggle on the Eastern Front more significantly than any other theatre of war. Partisans could operate more readily in Russia’s forests, mountains and such wildernesses as the Pripyat marshes, than across most of Western Europe. Stalin suffered no bourgeois squeamishness about casualties, nor about collateral damage to civilians. The testimony of many wartime partisans shows that they conducted dual campaigns of terror: against the Axis, and also against millions of their own people who felt neither loyalty to Stalin’s polity, nor willingness to risk all to restore it. In this, as in so much else, the struggle in the East attained an extraordinary ferocity, and the participants suffered experiences far bloodier than those of Western Europe.
In the early war years, Stalin’s partisans faced the same difficulties as their counterparts elsewhere: they lacked organisation, arms, supply aircraft and wirelesses. Pavel Sudoplatov claimed in his memoirs that the NKVD had made elaborate preparations for stay-behind operations in the wake of German advances. This is false. In the 1930s, Stalin had dismantled the entire existing network of partisan bases and cadres across the country, as a threat to his own authority. Many veteran guerrilla leaders of the civil war were shot in the Purges. Throughout the later months of 1941 Sudoplatov and his comrades were obliged to strive and scrabble to improvise intelligence-gathering and partisan groups. Their early operations were shambolic, costly, futile. Almost all the men conscripted were untrained, and many were also unwilling. They were often deployed in regions – notably Ukraine – whose inhabitants had celebrated liberation by the Germans from Stalin’s hated tyranny. Partisans were regarded by local people as Moscow’s creatures rather than as patriots, as threats to their homes and competitors for desperately scarce food. Moreover, until Stalingrad the Germans were seen as winners, the Soviets as losers. In the Baltic states, during the months before ‘Barbarossa’ Beria had conducted purges in which tens of thousands of people were executed or shipped to the gulag, which explains why so many Lithuanians, Estonians and Letts garlanded the men of the Wehrmacht. While Britain’s SOE made no attempt to stimulate full-scale revolt in occupied Europe between 1940 and 1944, in the desperate circumstances of embattled Russia thousands of men were thrust into operations in the immediate wake of ‘Barbarossa’. Russia was paying so dreadful a forfeit that the partisans’ murderous losses vanished unnoticed into the great cauldron of blood set bubbling by Hitler an
d Stalin.
Guerrillas can only swim in a sea of local sympathisers, to paraphrase Mao Zhedong. In Ukraine, focus of Moscow’s first clumsy efforts to promote guerrilla war, there were few such people. The local Communist Party’s secretary received a report from Commissar Vasily Sergienko, detailing partisan operations in the first year of war on Soviet soil. The NKVD, this stated, claimed to have established 1,874 groups, with a total strength of 29,307; it had dispatched 776 agents and couriers to work with these bands. Yet on 1 May 1942 Moscow Centre acknowledged just thirty-seven groups as operational in Ukraine, with a combined strength of 1,918 men. What had happened to the rest? Some surrendered to the Germans at the first opportunity, while others were captured or killed. Many simply faded back into local communities, abandoning their missions. There was no coordination between rival Party bodies and intelligence organisations, each of which created its own local forces. Sergienko complained in his 1942 report: ‘Responsibility for infiltrating partisan groups through the enemy’s front is often entrusted to people who have absolutely no experience … Partisan groups are given contradictory instructions and tasks.’
The NKVD and GRU struggled to gain access to scarce aircraft. Matters began to improve only in May 1942, when a central staff for all partisan operations was created, followed soon afterwards by a partisan air-transport organisation, both under direct Party control. NKVD cells were attached to all the groups, most of which numbered between fifty and a hundred men. Arms and supplies remained chronically short. The worst that Gen. Franz Halder, Hitler’s commander in the East, could say about partisans in 1942 was that they constituted ‘rather a nuisance’. Only in two areas of north-eastern Ukraine were guerrillas then operating effectively, and even later in the war the survival of such bands demanded forest bases, where the Germans struggled to locate and destroy them.
The leader of one group, a comrade named Kovpak, dispatched to Ukrainian commissar Nikita Khrushchev on 5 May 1942 a report, countersigned by his own band’s commissar, which asserted baldly that civilians ‘were demoralized by the retreat of the Red Army and the German reign of terror, while certain strata of the population and a number of Ukrainian villages were happy about the arrival of occupation troops and hostile towards partisans and the Soviet regime’. On 21 August 1941 Mikhailov Kartashev, an NKVD agent in Kiev, wrote to Sudoplatov in Moscow, painting a bleak picture of the chaos of partisan operations: ‘Dear Pavel Anatolievich! This letter is a private one since the issues below are not within my direct competence. I don’t take part in the operation of our organs in Kiev … All the information below has been obtained without reference to officials of the People’s Commissariat, and is thus strictly truthful … It is hard to say who is performing worst, but it is clear that the work of our organisations is less than brilliant.’ Kartashev went on to describe the fate of one 150-strong group established in Kharkov, which was ordered to cross the front in Bessarabia. Its men set forth without guides or maps, dressed in civilian city clothes, carrying only pistols or rifles, and enough of those to arm just half the band. They had no orders, no radios, no passwords by which to re-enter Soviet-held territory. Like most such parties, they were never heard from again. Kartashev continued: ‘information about the fate of partisan groups only becomes available if survivors make it back through the lines’. They lacked briefings about enemy deployments: ‘You have probably read reports about instances where partisans attempting to cross the line were “driven back”. This phrase is inherently false because there is no continuous front, only German concentrations, and of course line-crossers bump into them if they have no idea where they are.’
There was a black-comic episode of this sort when a certain Sergeant Bondarenko was guiding a party in trucks to a rendezvous where its men were to dismount and cross the enemy lines on foot. A Red Army sentry waved down the convoy to warn that only Germans lay in front – and was ignored. The partisans drove blithely on until they met a hail of fire, which killed their commander and most of the party. Thirty survivors fled back to the Soviet lines, without their weapons or vehicles. Another party walked into a German mortar barrage which accounted for several men; the survivors spent five days hiding in a swamp before trickling back to the Soviet lines.
The NKVD’s Kartashev catalogued the partisans’ deficiencies of arms and equipment: they had rifles for only 50 per cent of their strength, and forty rounds a man, which they were obliged to carry in their pockets or boots for lack of bandoliers and packs. Some had no ammunition at all. One group arrived from Kharkov, composed of highly-motivated and well-armed Party cadres, who were promptly deployed to guard the local NKVD headquarters rather than to fight. Kartashev observed witheringly that official reports to Moscow not merely failed to admit these fiascos, but pretended that partisan operations were being successfully carried out. The institutionalised mendacity of the Soviet system was unshakeable.
A few official reports did tell the truth, however, such as one dated 21 November 1941, addressed to Nikita Khrushchev. This recorded the experiences of a battalion of the NKVD’s 1st Partisan Regiment in August, when it was surprised by the Germans while resting in the village of Osintsy, near Zhitomit. A two-hour battle took place in which the battalion commander, his chief of staff and commissar were killed. Just two men survived out of a hundred, to return to the Soviet lines with the sorry tale. The report to Moscow concluded: ‘We may assume that the 1st Battalion’s failure was caused by the following: an unsuitable spot chosen for a halt; lack of necessary reconnaissance and poor security which allowed the Germans to approach unnoticed to within 50 metres; and, finally, possible betrayal of the unit by two partisans who had deserted on the evening before the battle (Levkovets does not know their names). Deputy People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of UkrSSR, Savchenko. 21 November 1941.’
Yet another report to Khrushchev, dated 24 November 1941 and marked ‘TOP SECRET’, detailed the fate of a group commanded by one Khalyava, who returned from a mission. He had set forth with twenty-four men, hand-picked as supposed keen Party activists, albeit lacking military experience. Most of them, he said, surrendered to the local German Kommandatur in Krasnoarmeisk within hours of that town’s occupation, and became drivers for the Wehrmacht. He himself returned alone to the Russian lines on 18 November. A group of forty-seven men sent to Kiev, then still in Russian hands, was ordered to cross the front and make for Vinnitsa and Berichev, headed by a commander named Rudchenko, who – unusually – was given a wireless transmitter. Within days, Kiev was overrun by the Germans. The next the NKVD heard of Rudchenko, he had been spotted surrendering to the occupiers, along with most of his men. The eyewitness, a young lieutenant who later reached Red Army positions further east, said that he warned the supposed partisan leader that he was committing treason, but was ignored. The report concluded darkly: ‘Measures have been taken to verify this information. Deputy People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of UkrSSR, Savchenko. 24 November 1941.’
In the aftermath of the war, the Soviet Union identified for glorification several groups which survived for months in the catacombs beneath the Black Sea city of Odessa, which was occupied by Axis forces for 907 days: in 1969 the tunnels were opened as a museum dubbed ‘The Memorial to Partisan Glory’. The official narrative described how, before Odessa fell in October 1941, local Komsomol meetings were held to plan stay-behind Resistance. Later veterans’ testimony, however, told instead of an orgy of despairing drunkenness, followed by fist-fights between Moscow and Odessa NKVD men. In the long months that followed, competing secret service groups fought each other much more energetically than they engaged the Germans. One Moscow officer, Captain Vladimir Molodstov, a former miner captured and executed by the Germans in July 1942, was later made a Hero of the Soviet Union. Following his capture, however, a rival named Lt. Kuznetsov, a member of the Odessa NKVD, disarmed and then killed all but one of Molodstov’s men, claiming that they had been plotting against him.
On 28 August Kuznetsov shot anot
her man for stealing a piece of bread. A month later, he killed two more for taking food and ‘lack of sexual discipline’, whatever that meant. A month later, Kuznetsov himself – who, if not unhinged, was obviously a brute – was shot by one of his own men in an underground refuge known as ‘the Mirror Factory’. Only three NKVD officers thereafter survived, and their mental condition must have been dire. Abramov, the man who had killed Kuznetsov, urged surrender. Another officer chose instead to leave the catacombs, and spent the remaining months of Odessa’s occupation hiding in his wife’s apartment. After the city’s liberation he claimed to have killed Abramov, but that officer somehow survived. The last of the three, named Glushenko, also lived to see Odessa overrun by the Red Army, but then returned to the catacombs for some ill-defined purpose, and perished when a grenade exploded in his hands. This account is riddled with inconsistencies and unconvincing testimony. The only certainty is that the ‘partisan group’ accomplished nothing save to endure a subterranean ordeal that killed most of them.
The same fate befell another similar party, whose story is known only through an intelligence report to the prime minister of Romania, Hitler’s ally Ion Antonescu, compiled on 18 April 1942. It was based on interrogations of captured survivors from the catacombs, and has a ring of authenticity. This Russian group, forty men nominated by the local Party hierarchy, was commanded by two captains, Frolov and Lemichik. On 10 September 1941 they were ordered to penetrate the Romanian sector of the Axis front, but were spotted and returned in disarray to Odessa, reduced to a strength of eighteen. As the enemy swept towards the city, twelve took refuge in its catacombs, which were hastily provisioned, where they were supposedly to await opportunities to carry out espionage and sabotage operations. One day in October this group, which now included two wives and was commanded by Aleksandr Soldatenko, descended into their secret refuge through an entrance at 47 Dalnitskaya Street.
