Having gone on a well-deserved rest, he liked to stroll in the evenings along his beloved Mira Avenue. Passers-by rarely paid attention to a short, elegantly dressed elderly man with a cane in his hands. And this interest was purely contemplative. Who among them would have thought that they had met with a prominent Soviet intelligence officer, master of recruiting, educator of several generations of fighters of the "invisible front"? This is exactly what this man, Nikolai Mikhailovich Gorshkov, remained in the memory of his fellow security officers.
THE WAY TO THE INTELLIGENCE
Nikolai Gorshkov was born on May 3, 1912 in the village of Voskresenskoye, Nizhny Novgorod province, into a poor peasant family.
After graduating from a rural school in 1929, he actively participated in the elimination of illiteracy in the countryside. In 1930 he entered a worker at a radiotelephone plant in Nizhny Novgorod. As a youth activist, he was elected a member of the factory committee of the Komsomol.
In March 1932, on a Komsomol ticket, Gorshkov was sent to study at the Kazan Aviation Institute, which he successfully graduated in 1938 with a degree in mechanical engineer for aircraft construction. In his student years, he was elected secretary of the Komsomol committee of the institute, a member of the Komsomol district committee.
After graduation, Gorshkov, by decision of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, was sent to study at the Central School of the NKVD, and from there to the Special Purpose School of the GUGB NKVD, which trained personnel for foreign intelligence. Since the spring of 1939, he has been an employee of the 5th department of the GUGB of the NKVD of the USSR (foreign intelligence).
In 1939, a young intelligence officer is sent under diplomatic cover to operational work in Italy. During his work in this country, he managed to attract a number of valuable sources of information to cooperation with Soviet intelligence.
In September 1939, Italy sided with Germany in World War II. In this regard, the information received by the intelligence officer on political and military issues became especially relevant.
In connection with the attack of Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union, Italy broke off diplomatic relations with our country, and Gorshkov was forced to return to Moscow.
IN THE YEARS OF WAR
During the Great Patriotic War, Gorshkov worked in the central office of foreign intelligence, training illegal scouts who, with the help of British intelligence, were transported abroad (to Germany and the territories of the countries it occupied).
It is well known from the history of the Great Patriotic War that the German attack on the Soviet Union put the question of creating an anti-Hitler coalition on the agenda.
It should be emphasized that the anti-Hitler coalition, which included the communist Soviet Union and Western countries - the United States and England, was a unique military-political phenomenon. The need to eliminate the threat that came from German Nazism and its military machine united states with diametrically opposed ideological and political systems during the Second World War.
On July 12, 1941, in Moscow, as a result of negotiations between the government delegations of the USSR and Great Britain, an agreement was signed on joint actions in the war against Nazi Germany, which provided for the provision of mutual assistance. In development of this agreement, at the end of July of the same year, the British government made an offer to the Soviet government to establish cooperation between the intelligence services of the two countries in the fight against the Nazi special services. On August 13, a special representative of British intelligence arrived in Moscow for negotiations on this issue. The very next day, August 14, negotiations began on cooperation between the intelligence services of the two countries. The negotiations were conducted in confidence, without the involvement of translators and a secretary. Apart from the direct participants, only Stalin, Molotov and Beria knew about their true content.
On September 29, 1941, a joint agreement was signed concerning the interaction of Soviet and British foreign intelligence services. At the same time, the head of the British side reported to London: "Both me and the Russian representatives regard the agreement not as a political treaty, but as a basis for practical work."
The main provisions of the agreed documents were promising from an operational point of view. The parties pledged to assist each other in exchanging intelligence information on Nazi Germany and its satellites, in organizing and conducting sabotage, in sending agents into the European countries occupied by Germany and organizing communications with it.
In the initial period of cooperation, the main attention was paid to the work of dropping Soviet intelligence agents from the territory of England into Germany and the countries occupied by it.
At the beginning of 1942, our agents-saboteurs, trained by the Center for deployment to the German rear, began to arrive in England. They were delivered by planes and ships in groups of 2-4 people. The British placed them in safe houses, took them to full board. In England, they underwent additional training: they trained in parachute jumping, learned to navigate using German maps. The British took care of the appropriate equipment of the agents, supplying them with food, German ration cards, and sabotage equipment.
In total, from the date of the agreement to March 1944, 36 agents were sent to England, 29 of whom were parachuted by British intelligence to Germany, Austria, France, Holland, Belgium and Italy. Three were killed during the flight and four were returned to the USSR.
FRENCH FILBIE
In 1943, Gorshkov was appointed a resident of the NKVD in Algeria. During this trip, he personally involved in cooperation with Soviet intelligence a prominent official from the entourage of General de Gaulle, the Frenchman Georges Pak, from whom, over the next 20 years, the Center received extremely important political information on France, and then on NATO.
For any foreign intelligence officer, this episode alone would have been enough to proudly say that his operational life was a success. And Nikolai Mikhailovich had many such episodes. Let us briefly recall who Georges Pak was and how valuable he was for our intelligence.
Georges Jean-Louis Pak was born on January 29, 1914 in the small French provincial town of Chalon-sur-Saune (Saone-et-Loire department) in the family of a hairdresser.
After successfully graduating from college in his native Chalon and the Lyceum in Lyon in 1935, Georges became a student of the Ecole Normal (Higher School) literary faculty - a prestigious educational institution in the country, which was graduated in different years by French President Georges Pompidou, Prime Minister Pierre Mendes- France, ministers Louis Jokes, Peyrefit and many others.
The deep and extensive knowledge acquired by Georges Pac during his studies at the Ecole Normal allowed him to receive diplomas from the Sorbonne in higher education in Italian philology, as well as in practical Italian language and Italian literature. Pak taught for some time in educational institutions in Nice, and then in 1941 left France and went with his wife to Morocco, where he was given a job as a teacher of literature in one of the lyceums in Rabat.
The events of the end of 1942 abruptly changed the calm course of life of the young Pak family. After the landing of Anglo-American troops in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942, one of Pak's comrades in the Ecole Normal suggested that he urgently leave for Algeria and join the Free France movement. He became the head of the political department of the radio station of the Provisional French Government, headed by General Charles de Gaulle.
It was during this period that Pak, through one of his friends, met the head of the Soviet foreign intelligence station in Algeria, Nikolai Gorshkov. Gradually, they struck up a personal friendship, which turned into a strong cooperation of like-minded people, which lasted almost 20 years.
To understand why Georges Pak took the path of secret cooperation with Soviet foreign intelligence, it is necessary to recall the previous political events associated with his homeland, France.
On June 22, 1940, the French government of Marshal Petain signed an act of surrender. Hitler divided France into two unequal zones. Two-thirds of the country's territory, including all of Northern France with Paris, as well as the coast of the English Channel and the Atlantic, were occupied by the German army. The southern zone of France, centered in the small resort town of Vichy, was under the jurisdiction of the Petain government, which actively pursued a policy of collaboration with Nazi Germany.
It should be emphasized that not all Frenchmen resigned themselves to defeat and recognized the "Vichy regime". For example, the former Deputy Minister of National Defense of France, General de Gaulle, made an appeal "to all French and French women", urging them to launch a fight against Nazi Germany. "Whatever happens," he stressed in his address, "the flame of the French Resistance must not go out and not go out."
This appeal was the beginning of the Free France movement, and then - the creation of the National Committee of a Free France (NKSF), headed by General de Gaulle.
Immediately after the creation of the NKSF, the Soviet government recognized de Gaulle as the leader of "all free French people, wherever they may be" and expressed its determination to contribute to "the complete restoration of the independence and greatness of France."
On June 3, 1943, the NKSF was transformed into the French Committee for National Liberation (FKLO), headquartered in Algeria. The Soviet government established a plenipotentiary representation at the FKNO, headed by a prominent Soviet diplomat, Alexander Bogomolov.
Against the background of the consistent political course of the Soviet Union towards a struggling France, the ambiguous policy of Great Britain and the United States looked in sharp contrast. The leaderships of these countries in every possible way hampered the process of recognizing de Gaulle as the head of the interim government of France. And the United States, even until November 1942, maintained official diplomatic relations with the Vichy government. It was only in August 1943 that the United States and England recognized the French Committee for National Liberation, accompanying this recognition with a number of serious reservations.
Georges Pak was personally able to see the ambiguity of the policy of the United States and England in relation to his country. He involuntarily compared the actions of the representatives of the West and the Russians and began to sympathize with the latter, believing that he was "in the same ranks with the Russians." Pak himself spoke about this later in his memoirs, which were published in 1971.
Georges Pak. 1963 year. Photo courtesy of the author
After the liberation of France, Georges Pak returned to Paris and in October 1944 restored operational contact with the Parisian station.
For some time, Pak worked as chief of the office of the Minister of the Navy of France. In June 1948, he became Assistant Chief of the Office of the Minister of Urban Development and Reconstruction, and at the end of 1949 was transferred to work in the Secretariat of the French Prime Minister Georges Bidault.
Since 1953, Georges Pak has held a number of important posts in the governments of the IV Republic. It should be emphasized that wherever he worked, he always remained an important source of valuable political and operational information for Soviet intelligence.
In October 1958, Georges Pak was appointed to the post of head of the inquiry service of the General Staff of the French army, and from 1961 he was the head of the chancellery of the Institute of National Defense. In October 1962, a new appointment followed - he became deputy head of the press and information department of the North Atlantic Alliance (NATO).
New broad information capabilities of Georges Pak allowed Soviet intelligence to obtain documentary intelligence information during this period on many political and military-strategic problems of both individual Western powers and NATO as a whole. During his cooperation with Soviet intelligence, he gave us a large number of valuable materials, including a plan for the defense of the North Atlantic bloc for Western Europe, a defense concept and military plans of Western countries in relation to the USSR, NATO intelligence bulletins containing information from Western intelligence services about socialist countries, and other important intelligence.
Georges Pak was recognized by the Western and above all by the French press as "the largest Soviet source who ever worked for Moscow in France", "French Philby." In his book of memoirs, Georges Pak later emphasized that by his activities "he sought to promote the parity of forces between the United States and the USSR in order to prevent a global world catastrophe."
On August 16, 1963, according to the information of the defector Anatoly Golitsyn, Georges Pak was arrested and convicted of espionage. After his release from prison in 1970, he lived in France, visited the Soviet Union, and studied Russian. Died in Paris on December 19, 1993.
ITALY AGAIN
After the liberation of Italy from the Nazis in 1944, Nikolai Gorshkov (operational pseudonym - Martyn) was sent to this country as a resident under the guise of an employee of a diplomatic mission. He quickly organized the work of the residency, established assistance to Soviet prisoners of war, and renewed contact with the leadership of the Italian Communist Party.
Nikolai Mikhailovich was not only a good organizer, but also served as a wonderful example for his subordinates. The residency under his leadership has achieved great results in all types of intelligence activities.
The center set the task of obtaining intelligence information on the strategic plans of the United States, Britain and the alliances led by them for the confrontation with the USSR and the countries of the socialist camp before the Roman station. Moscow paid special attention to the issues of obtaining documentary materials on the developed and sold new types of weapons, primarily nuclear and missile, as well as electronic equipment for military use.
Gorshkov personally acquired a number of sources from which important political and scientific and technical information was received, which was of significant defense and national economic importance: aircraft building documentation, samples of radio-controlled projectiles, materials on nuclear reactors.
So, at the beginning of 1947, an orientation-task was received from Moscow to the Roman residency regarding a novelty of military equipment created by British specialists - an electronic artillery anti-aircraft projectile, which had a very high degree of destruction of moving targets at that time.
The station was tasked with obtaining technical information about this projectile, code-named "Boy", and, if possible, its samples.
At first glance, the task of finding a novelty in Italy, developed by the British and applied in practice in defending the territory of England, seemed almost hopeless. However, the residency under the leadership of Gorshkov developed and successfully implemented Operation Fight.
Already in September 1947, the resident reported on the completion of the assignment and sent to the Center drawings and relevant technical documentation, as well as samples of shells.
The Foreign Intelligence History Hall has at its disposal the opinion of the chief designer of the leading Soviet defense research institute of that period, in which, in particular, it is emphasized that "the receipt of a complete sample … greatly contributed to the reduction of the development time of a similar model and the cost of its production."
The Roman residency also did not stand aside from the work on the use of nuclear materials in the military and civilian fields, which became extremely important in the post-war and subsequent years. As it became known later, the technical information received from the residency from one of the nuclear scientists involved in cooperation was of great importance and made a significant contribution to strengthening the economic and defense potential of the USSR.
It should also be emphasized that on the instructions of the Center, the Roman residency, with the direct participation of Gorshkov, obtained and sent to Moscow a complete set of blueprints for the American B-29 bomber, which significantly contributed to the creation in the Soviet Union in the shortest possible time of means of delivering nuclear weapons.
Naturally, the activities of the scouts of the Roman residency during the period of Gorshkov's work in it were not limited to the episodes described above. In the "Essays on the history of Russian foreign intelligence" on this occasion, in particular, says:
“The behind-the-scenes actions of the former USSR allies in the anti-Hitler coalition in Italy in the post-war period forced to shift the emphasis of the intelligence priorities of the Roman station from collecting information about the situation in the Mediterranean zone to obtaining information about the activities of the countries leading the opposition to the Soviet Union - the United States and England. With the creation of the Alliance in 1949, the work of our intelligence officers in Italy was reoriented to information coverage of the activities of the NATO military-political bloc openly hostile to the Soviet Union. The Cold War exacerbated the confrontation and hostility between the former allies. The development of events in this direction led to the concentration of efforts of foreign intelligence stations in European countries on the so-called NATO direction.
Largely thanks to the operational work carried out in the first post-war years by the Roman station and subsequently, it was able to adequately solve the tasks set by the leadership of the Soviet Union for foreign intelligence."
In 1950, Gorshkov returned to Moscow and received a responsible post in the central apparatus of foreign intelligence.
It should be mentioned here that on May 30, 1947, the Council of Ministers of the USSR adopted a resolution on the creation of the Committee of Information (CI) under the Council of Ministers of the USSR, which was entrusted with the tasks of political, military, scientific and technical intelligence. The unified intelligence agency was headed by V. M. Molotov, who was at that time the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and at the same time the Minister of Foreign Affairs. His deputies were in charge of the foreign intelligence sectors of the state security and military intelligence.
However, time has shown that the unification of military and foreign policy intelligence services, which are so specific in their methods of activity, within one body, with all the advantages, made it difficult to manage their work. Already in January 1949, the government decided to withdraw military intelligence information from the Committee and return it to the Ministry of Defense.
In February 1949, the Information Committee was transferred under the auspices of the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The new Minister of Foreign Affairs, Andrei Vyshinsky, became the head of the Information Committee, and later - Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Valerian Zorin.
In November 1951, a new reorganization followed. The government decided to unite foreign intelligence and foreign counterintelligence under the leadership of the USSR Ministry of State Security (MGB) and to create unified residencies abroad. The Information Committee under the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs ceased to exist. Foreign Intelligence became the First Main Directorate of the USSR Ministry of State Security.
After completing his business trip, Gorshkov was appointed head of a department in the Information Committee under the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1952 he became Deputy Head of the Illegal Intelligence Directorate of the First Main Directorate of the USSR Ministry of State Security.
This was followed by new business trips abroad. Since 1954, Gorshkov has successfully worked as a KGB resident in the Swiss Confederation. In 1957-1959, he was in a leading position in the KGB Representation at the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the GDR in Berlin. Since the end of 1959 - in the central office of the PGU KGB under the Council of Ministers of the USSR.
EDUCATOR OF YOUTH
In 1964, Nikolai Mikhailovich went to work at the Higher Intelligence School (better known as School No. 101), which was transformed in 1969 into the KGB Red Banner Institute. Until 1970, he headed the department of special disciplines at this educational institution.
Once Winston Churchill figuratively noted that "the difference between a statesman and a politician is that a politician is guided by the next election, and a statesman is oriented toward the next generation." Based on this statement, we can say with confidence that the hero of our essay on the state related to his work on educating the young generation of intelligence officers.
The SVR employees of the first issues of the KGB Institute, created in 1969 on the basis of the Higher Intelligence School of the Red Banner Institute, were always proud that fate brought them together during their studies with this wonderful person, a brilliant operative, thoughtful and skillful educator.
From 1970 to 1973, Gorshkov worked in Prague, in the Representation of the KGB under the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Returning to the USSR, he again taught at the Red Banner Institute of Foreign Intelligence. He was the author of a number of textbooks, monographs, articles, and other scientific research on intelligence issues.
In 1980, Nikolai Mikhailovich retired, but continued to actively engage in research activities, willingly and generously shared his rich operational experience with young employees, participated in the KGB-patriotic education of young people. For many years he headed the Council of Veterans of the Red Banner Institute.
Colonel Gorshkov's successful intelligence activity was marked by the Orders of the Red Banner and the Red Banner of Labor, two Orders of the Red Star, many medals, and the badge "Honorary State Security Officer". For his great contribution to ensuring state security, his name was entered on the memorial plaque of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.
Nikolai Mikhailovich died on February 1, 1995.
