The embarrassment was so great that they forever refused to send spy parachutists to the territory of the Soviet Union.
In December 1946, Kim Philby was appointed head of the ICU residency in Turkey with its center in Istanbul, from where the main espionage actions were carried out against the USSR and the socialist countries of Eastern Europe.
The newly minted resident had to prepare the ground for the implementation of operations to "penetrate deep". With this term, the leadership of the ICU designated a plan to send spies to Georgia and Armenia through the Turkish border.
Sending small groups of illegal agents for short periods - 6-8 weeks - the ICU was going to study the possibility of a long illegal stay of its regular intelligence officers in Yerevan and Tbilisi. If the trial sorties had gone smoothly, then over time the British intended to create a permanent agent network in the Transcaucasus.
Philby immediately informed the Moscow Center about these long-term goals of British intelligence, as well as about the trial dispatch of infiltrators.
Stalin was interested in the information, took under his personal control the implementation of measures to 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 to send militants would have forced not only the British, but also
their American partners to abandon their further plans to send illegal immigrants to us for a long settling.
… After reviewing the situation, Philby came to the conclusion that it makes no sense to look for candidates for spies on the spot. The population on the Turkish side was too backward for the espionage trade. In a cipher telegram to his British superiors, he suggested giving an assignment to the ICU residencies in Paris, London and Beirut to start looking for suitable candidates in the Georgian and Armenian diasporas.
Soon it was reported from London that two candidates had been found and were undergoing intensive training in London.
… In the first decade of April 1947, Philby, the 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 the weapons and equipment they were supplied with in London, the Georgians moved towards the border. By the light of the moon, Philby clearly saw how both Georgians fell, struck by the gunfire of the border guards …
… The demonstrative liquidation of the scouts forced the ICU leadership to bury the idea of sending its agents to the territory of the USSR forever. Which, however, could not be said about their American partners. But they decided, as they say, "to go the other way" - by air.
NOT ON THE GROUND - SO ON THE AIR
In the early 1950s, the US political leadership experienced a severe shortage of information on 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 this - it was possible only with the help of espionage actions. With the arrival of Allen Dulles in the Central Intelligence Agency, the activities of this department have sharply intensified. Considering the failed experience of his British colleagues, the CIA chief made a bet on the transfer of illegal agents not by land, but by air. An experienced specialist in Russia, an expert in espionage, chief of West German intelligence, Reinhard Gehlen, began to provide active assistance 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 want to return to the USSR. What a sin to conceal - among them there were many who were ready to oppose their former homeland with arms in hand. It was from them that candidates for illegal agents were selected, who were then trained in special schools.
The first agents sent to the territory of the USSR were Viktor Voronets and Alexander Yashchenko, deserters who had served in the Vlasov ROA since 1943. Their destination was Minsk, where on August 18, 1951, they were parachuted from an American military transport aircraft that took off from a secret base in Thessaloniki (Greece).
Voronets and Yashchenko were aimed at finding and detecting nuclear enterprises. Both had a compelling legend and excellently fabricated documents. Voronets became, according to Raenko's documents, a worker of the Moscow tobacco factory "Java", who allegedly spends his vacation at a Caucasian resort, where he was supposed to arrive after landing. A month after the landing, he was supposed to cross the Turkish border (by the way, near all the same Akhaltsikhe). Yashchenko, who became "Kasapov", had the task to ride to the Urals and return also through the Turkish-Georgian border.
The scouts were equipped with miniature radio transmitters, folding bicycles made in Czechoslovakia (they were sold in the USSR), Parabellum pistols, and also received 5 thousand rubles each, a leather pouch with Tsarist gold pieces and several pairs of Soviet watches in case of bribery. But … the music did not last long! The Athens radio center received from the paratroopers 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 a court verdict.
Meanwhile, another US Air Force Dakota military transport aircraft took off from the airfield in Wiesbaden (FRG) and headed for Chisinau …
IN THE SPY PERFORMANCE, SOLOISTS
On September 25, 1951, the operational duty officer of the Ministry of State Security of the Moldavian SSR received a telephone message from the Air Force headquarters of the Transnistrian Military District:
“At 2 hours 24 minutes, stationary VNOS posts (aerial observation, warning and communication) recorded the appearance of an aircraft of unknown affiliation with extinguished side signal lights. At a high altitude, it moved in the direction of Chisinau. In the area of Kaushany-Bender, the plane dropped sharply, made a circle and, gaining altitude, withdrew towards the Black Sea coast.
The interceptor fighters raised on alert overtook the intruder. He did not react to warning signals and was attacked at 2 hours 58 minutes. Having dropped sharply, the plane fell into the sea with a burning left wing. Heading south. The pilot jumped out into the sea with a parachute and was picked up by the crew of the Joliot Curie bulk carrier. During the interrogation of the pilot (carried out with the assistance of an interpreter from the German language), it was established that one paratrooper was dropped in the above-mentioned area of the plane's descent."
… An hour after the receipt of the telephone message in the MGB of Moldova, the paratrooper was captured during the physical combing of the terrain by the forces of the personnel of two motorized rifle divisions (!). It turned out to be 25-year-old Konstantin Khmelnitsky.
Despite his youth, it was a hardened beast. At the age of 15, he entered the service of the Germans who occupied his native village Vilyuyki, near Minsk. In 1943, for services to the "Fatherland" he was enlisted in the SS battalion, in which he fought against the Anglo-American troops in Italy. After the surrender of Nazi Germany, he moved to France, where he entered to study at the Sorbonne. There he learned that in their occupation zone in West Germany, the Americans were recruiting young Russians and Ukrainians to carry out special assignments 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, under the conditions of the strictest secrecy, an American instructor, Captain James Higgins, conducted individual lessons with him. Topography training on maps of the Soviet Union alternated with field trips to be able to move in azimuth with a compass; explosive theory - with the acquisition of practical skills to destroy railways and set fire to industrial facilities. In the process of training, Khmelnitsky (now a cadet nicknamed "Solist") gradually mastered his new legendary biography, which, in particular, obliged him to know by heart the names of all officials of the Vilyui district party committee and the district executive committee.
At the release, "Soloist" was personally introduced to Gelen as the most promising illegal agent …
In early October, Khmelnitsky established contact with the American center on the territory of the Federal Republic of Germany and said that he had begun to carry out the assignment. Following this, a waterfall of intelligence reports fell upon its owners, which did not dry out for about three years. According to radiograms, "Solist" traveled throughout the Soviet Union, creating underground cells for the subsequent conduct of 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 the industrial facilities of Atommash. Then he carefully placed samples of land, water and bush branches taken near nuclear plants in the designated hiding places (of course, all these "tabs" were absolutely neutral, which disorientated and confused American operators). Nevertheless, the materials transmitted by the "Soloist" impressed Allen Dulles so much that he personally congratulated Gehlen on his success …
And suddenly - like a bolt from the blue - in June 1954, the press department of the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs organized a special press conference for two hundred foreign journalists accredited in Moscow.
In the hall, brightly lit by Jupiters, at a table on which espionage equipment was neatly laid out: a parachute, an American radio transmitter, a pistol, topographic maps, bags of gold "Nikolaevka", ampoules with poison sat personally "Soloist" - Khmelnitsky.
Answering reporters' questions, he said that since 1945 he had been an agent of the Soviet military counterintelligence, on her instructions he joined the environment of displaced people to be recruited by American "bounty hunters" and then undergo training in an intelligence school.
Not without humor, Khmelnitsky said that throughout his studies at the special school, "The Americans and their Gelen's henchmen encouraged drunkenness, gambling among us, cadets, and even organized trips to immoral homes, for which they took us to Munich."
After that, the double agent made his most sensational statement: for three years he successfully played a radio game with the Americans, transmitting information prepared by the USSR state security agencies. According to him, the game was played so sophisticated that, based on the instructions and requests received, many of the CIA's plans were revealed.
The embarrassment was so great that German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer ordered Gehlen to stop parachute operations against the USSR. However, the CIA sporadically continued to deploy agents, enlisting Gehlen's "friendly help". Following this - which eventually became a rule - our press reported on the capture of parachutists. For example, the American group codenamed "Square B-52" by Okhrimovich and Slavny near Kiev in 1954 …
BAD EXAMPLE IS INVOLVED
… In total, in 1951-54, Soviet counterintelligence neutralized about 30 spy paratroopers, most of whom were shot by a court verdict. The surviving agents were used in radio games that exposed the plans and intentions of the CIA. However, today the Americans argue that some "parachute operations" on the territory of the USSR remained undisclosed and the United States became the owners of very valuable information. Well, it may well be …
Despite the firing ending (which has become traditional!) Of operations to drop American spies, as described in detail by Soviet newspapers, the French special service SDESE has repeatedly tried to send its agents into the territory of the USSR since 1951. Unfortunately, many members of the Resistance movement and even former aces of the Normandie-Niemen squadron, as happened with Captain Gabriel Mertizan, were involved in the espionage trade.
I must say that the French - and this became the talk of the town among the Anglo-American intelligence community - was initially pursued by fatal bad luck. Suffice it to say that all 18 spy paratroopers landed by SDESE in Czechoslovakia in 1951-52 were seized by the local security forces as soon as their feet touched the ground.
And the Poles have turned the operation of the French secret service into a spectacle. The French agents-paratroopers landed near Warsaw were captured by the Polish counterintelligence officers at the landing site and … sent back to France, thereby demonstrating disdain for the leaders of the SDESE!
… In 1956, Allen Dulles and other heads of the secret services of NATO countries after him, forever refused to send spy parachutists to the territory of the Soviet Union. Moreover, the U-2 high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft entered service, on which much high hopes were pinned.
