On February 9, 1995, the Golden Star was brought to the hospital by two generals. Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces General of the Army Mikhail Kolesnikov and Chief of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff Colonel General Fyodor Lodygin. Kolesnikov read out the presidential decree and handed Chernyak a scarlet box with the country's highest award.
Chernyak's wife took out a star and put it in her husband's lifeless hand. Yan Petrovich woke up for a moment from oblivion and whispered with chilling lips: "It's good that it's not posthumous …"
Ten days later he was gone.
Then the Chief of the General Staff, General of the Army Mikhail Kolesnikov, will talk about him. "This old man was a real Stirlitz." From 1930 to 1945 he "worked in the same place as Maxim Isaev."
HIS AGENTS WERE OLGA CHEKHOVA AND MARIKA RÖKK - FUHRER'S FAVORITE ACTRESSES
But Yan Petrovich Chernyak was never Stirlitz, whose literary image was created by the writer Julian Semenov. He did not serve in the German army for a single day, and because of his non-Aryan origin, he could not even dream of making a career there and joining the leadership of the Hitlerite Wehrmacht. But nevertheless, he had his informants there. And not only there. The famous Soviet rocket designer Sergo Gegechkori, in his book "My Father - Lavrenty Beria", published after Chernyak's death, claimed that even Marika Rökk, Hitler's favorite actress, was his agent.
The unique document only reveals the secret of the life of the scout Chernyak.
And, of course, Chernyak did immeasurably more for our country than the literary and cinematic character of Yulian Semyonov's story "Seventeen Moments of Spring". Moreover, voluntarily or not, he also made his own personal contribution to the creation of this book and film. At a time when his name and intelligence past were a state secret, and an extremely limited circle of people knew about his extraordinary biography, and even his wife and colleagues in the translation department of the TASS Foreign Information Main Office were not aware of his extraordinary biography, he consulted the writer on many episodes of the future popular publication.
The author of this material is in luck. For my first publication about Chernyak in the Izvestia newspaper, when it became known that he had been awarded the title of Hero of the Russian Federation, I managed to get a photograph of a spy, which the GRU refused to provide the newspaper. And even the departmental military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda, where an obituary for Chernyak was published, came out without his photograph. And he appeared in Izvestia. The TASS news agency helped, where he worked as a translator for the last nineteen years before retiring.
And recently I got in my hands the personal file of Yan Petrovich, number 8174, registered for him in the personnel department of the news agency. And also the autobiography of a spy, in which he did not mention a word about his illegal past. Although he said that during the war he carried out special assignments of the Soviet command behind enemy lines. But the rear was then very large - from the walls of Stalingrad to the Atlantic Ocean. And guess where exactly the civilian soldier of the Red Army performed special tasks. Moreover, in his personal file, he did not write anything about it. True, in recent years, quite a few publications have appeared about his intelligence activities. How reliable they are is difficult to judge. Legends accompany scouts, especially illegal immigrants, both during life and after death. It is almost impossible for an ordinary person, and even a journalist, to determine where is the truth and where is fiction. Moreover, with the question of whether this should be done, not everything is clear either.
But still. If you briefly list everything that is written about Chernyak in various publications, and what he has done over the years of illegal work abroad, then there will be at least a dozen more stories no less popular than the work of Yulian Semenov about Maxim Isaev. Only during the pre-war period, from 1936 to 1939, according to writers and journalists, during short visits to Germany Chernyak created a powerful intelligence network there, codenamed "Krona". He managed to recruit over 20 agents, whose work he supervised from abroad through liaisons. At the same time, not a single agent of his was ever exposed by the Gestapo, even today nothing is known specifically about the absolute majority of them. Although among his informants were a major banker, the secretary of the minister, the head of the research department of the aviation design bureau, the daughter of the head of the tank design bureau, and high-ranking military personnel. And one of the agents, in addition to Marika Rökk, is supposed to have been another favorite actress of the Fuhrer - Olga Chekhova.
In 1941 Chernyak's agents managed to obtain a copy of the Barbarossa plan, and in 1943 - an operational plan for the German offensive near Kursk. And if in the first case in Moscow they did not attach due importance to the unique documents sent by illegal immigrants, then in 1943 his multi-page reports served as a good help for preparing the defeat of the fascist hordes near Belgorod and Kursk and for creating a decisive turning point in the Great Patriotic War. But, in addition to this, Chernyak transmitted to the USSR valuable technical information about tanks, including about "Tigers" and "Panthers", artillery guns, on jet weapons, on missiles "V-1" and "V-2" weapons, electronic systems. An outstanding Soviet scientist and design engineer, academician and admiral Axel Berg said that in the creation of a domestic radar system that contributed to the protection of Moscow's skies from Nazi bombers, he was greatly helped by materials about the most advanced Western developments obtained before the war by Soviet intelligence officers. The admiral did not know that one of them was the civilian GRU, Yan Chernyak. In 1944 alone, this illegal sent to the country over 12.5 thousand sheets of technical documentation and 60 samples of radio equipment. Veterans of the Main Intelligence Directorate argue that the intelligence network created by Chernyak was one of the best in the history of intelligence - there was not a single failure in it during the fifteen years of his work abroad.
Chernyak also made a great contribution to the creation of Soviet atomic weapons. He obtained information about these works in Great Britain, and then, having moved on the instructions of his leadership to Canada and the United States, sent to the Union thousands of sheets of materials about American nuclear weapons and even several milligrams of uranium-235, which is used to make an atomic bomb. How he did it, we will talk a little later. We also discuss why Hitler's counterintelligence, not without difficulty, not without mistakes on our part, was able to detect, expose and completely arrest all members of the Soviet intelligence network, which the Gestapo called the "Red Chapel" and which was led by Leopold Trepper and Anatoly Gurevich. The agents of another intelligence network, the Red Troika, headed by the Hungarian geographer and cartographer Sandor Rado, were liquidated. But she could not get out to the informants of "Krona". I could not identify its leader Yan Chernyak, who was called "a man without a shadow." He never left a trace anywhere. In the meantime, a few words about how Yan Chernyak became an illegal intelligence officer and a citizen of the USSR, whose passport he received only at the age of 37.
GAPS AND CONFUSIONS IN LEGENDED BIOGRAPHY
Yan Chernyak was born in Chernivtsi in 1909, in the family of a small Jewish merchant, married to a Magyark. Jan's parents disappeared in the depths of the First World War. And the orphan at the age of six was assigned to an orphanage in Kosice. And in the native places of Chernyak, in Northern Bukovina, which was then part of Austria-Hungary, there were a lot of representatives of various nationalities - Ukrainians, Hungarians, Romanians, Jews, Czechs, Slovaks, Rusyns, Germans, who were called "Swabians" here, Serbs and even the Austrians … A mess of peoples - a jumble of languages allowed a small and very smart, one might even say, talented boy to absorb them into himself, like into a sponge. At the age of sixteen, he already spoke six languages - his native German and Yiddish, Czech, Magyar, Romanian and Ukrainian, and when he entered the Prague Higher Technical School, he began to intensively study, as he would later write in his autobiography, English.
Photo of Yan Chernyak from TASS personal file. Photo courtesy of the author
In the same autobiography, which is at the disposal of the author, he wrote that after graduating from the Prague School, from 1931 to 1933, he worked as an engineer-economist at the small plant "Prager Electromotorenwerke". And then, when the plant closed due to the global economic crisis, he was unemployed for two years and earned his living by private English lessons. True, various sources, including publications in some books, claim that from the beginning of the 30s of the last century he studied at the Polytechnic Institute in Berlin, where he joined the Communist Party of Germany and, after a meeting with a representative of Soviet military intelligence, signed an agreement to work at her. In addition, in 1931-1933, he allegedly served in the Romanian army, in the headquarters of a cavalry regiment with the rank of sergeant, had access to secret documents and transferred their contents to the Soviet Union.
According to the same sources, after leaving the army, Chernyak lived in Germany, where he created a reconnaissance group, the prototype of the future "Krona", and in 1935-1936 he studied at an intelligence school in the USSR under the leadership of Artur Artuzov, the former head of the Foreign Department of the OGPU-NKVD, and while the deputy chief of the Fourth (intelligence) directorate of the General Staff of the Red Army, he met with the chief of intelligence of the Red Army, Army Commissar 2nd Rank Yan Berzin. And then he left for Switzerland under the guise of a TASS correspondent with the operational pseudonym "Jen". And since 1938, after the Munich Agreement, he lived in Paris, and since 1940 - in London.
Chernyak himself writes about this period of his life in his autobiography that from February 1935 to November 1938 he worked as an assistant-translator in the library of higher technical institutions in Prague, and then left for Paris, where, before his occupation by German troops, he also worked as an assistant-translator … And then he moved to Zurich, where he again gave private lessons in English. With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War and “the attack of German troops on the USSR, he began active work behind enemy lines, where he carried out special assignments of the Soviet command (July 1941 - December 1945). In December 1945 he arrived in Moscow and in May 1946 received Soviet citizenship. From May 1946 to February 1950 he worked as an assistant in the department of the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the USSR."
Where is the truth here, and where is the legend that all illegal scouts had and have, one can only guess. In the publications about Chernyak that were published after his death, there are many contradictions with his own biography, which he wrote with his own hand when he joined the TASS news agency, and the questionnaire that he filled out for the agency's personnel department. For example, in various Russian-language materials, especially those published in the West and in Israel, he is called Yankel Pinkhusovich Chernyak. And he called himself Yan Petrovich, although he did not hide that he was Jewish by nationality. On his tombstone at the Preobrazhensky cemetery in Moscow is also engraved "Hero of the Russian Federation Yan Petrovich Chernyak", the year of birth and the year of death.
In the questionnaire of the personnel department it is written that he never changed his last name. At the same time, the authors of essays about him unanimously insist that he had several passports of different countries for different surnames of people with different biographies and kept these biographies in his head so reliably that when someone would wake him up somewhere in Switzerland or England in the middle of the night, he in the purest French, which he also studied in the 30s, or in English without hesitation would tell his fictitious biography, never getting lost and not confusing the dates, cities and streets, which once were somewhere - then he lived.
And yet, as they say, he possessed a truly bestial intuition, never spent the night in the same place for more than a week, constantly moved from place to place to different parts of the city or to other countries. One could envy his hypnotic abilities. He knew how to convince and find a common language with any person, which manifested itself in him when recruiting informants. And the explanation for this, probably, can be found in orphaned childhood, when a small boy, who did not have great physical strength, managed to easily negotiate with orphanages much older than him and more nervously, or even with street hooligans.
His memory was phenomenal, say researchers of Chernyak's legendary or true biography. He could run his eyes through ten pages in any language of small, close-fitting text and retell it word for word, as they say, one to one with the written. He also remembered 70 objects in the room where he was, and then he could put them in place after someone completely changed them. His future wife, a medical student Tamara Ivanovna Petrova, as one of the authors of the essay about the intelligence officer says, he was amazed by the fact that, having played chess with her in the Moscow Hermitage Park, the next day he brought her a recording of these two games, which he easily remembered.
The authors of essays about Chernyak, some of them (this is not a reproach, but a guess that they wrote from one source provided to him by someone), unanimously claim that he did not have any awards, and the Tassov questionnaire indicates that he was awarded the medal "For Victory over Germany" and the Order of the Red Banner of Labor. True, the order was already in 1958. For what - a question of filling. It is known that from time to time, when he worked at the TASS news agency from 1950 to 1957 as a freelance translator, and then until 1969 in the state as a translator as well, then as a senior translator from English and German at the TASS Foreign Information Department, he went abroad … But where and why is also a secret. It is possible to visit your informants or those who replaced them then. Or maybe for other particularly delicate tasks.
And one more inconsistency that catches the eye. The authors of essays about Chernyak claim that he and Tamara Ivanovna had no children. And the questionnaire contains a son - Vladimir Yanovich, born in 1955 - and the address of residence in Moscow is indicated - Rusakovskaya Street. Now there is a library and cultural center named after Antoine Saint-Exupéry and the Moscow Drama Theater of Publicism. But, however, there is still no memorial plaque or plaque that the legendary illegal intelligence agent Hero of Russia Yan Chernyak lived here. There is no such board on the TASS building, where Chernyak worked for almost twenty years.
Marika Rökk is believed to have been one of the agents of the Soviet intelligence. Photo from the Federal Archives of Germany. 1940
RISE AND FINAL CAREER ILLEGAL
An interesting detail. Many illegal Soviet intelligence officers who returned to Moscow after the end of the Great Patriotic War ended up behind bars. Among them were the leaders of the "Red Chapel" Leopold Trepper and Anatoly Gurevich, who had previously been in the dungeons of the Gestapo, as well as Sandor Rado, who managed to deceive the Nazis and hide in Egypt; his NKVD officers were taken out of Cairo. He also did not manage to avoid the colony. All illegal immigrants were charged with treason, but in fact, they were blamed for the failures of the initial period of the Patriotic War. And Yan Chernyak happily escaped both accusations and the "cellars of the Lubyanka". Lucky? No. It was just that he was still in demand.
In 1942, while in London, Chernyak recruited English physicist Allan Nunn May to work for Soviet intelligence, who participated in the "Tube Eloyes" ("Pipe Alloys") nuclear weapons programs in Great Britain and in the Manhattan Project in the United States. For six months of close cooperation, May gave Chernyak documentary information about the main directions of research work on the uranium problem in Cambridge, a description of the production of plutonium, drawings of the "uranium boiler" and told in detail about the principle of its operation. And when May was invited to continue nuclear research in Montreal, Canada, Chernyak, at the direction of his leadership, followed him. The British scientist visited his Canadian colleagues at a heavy water plant in the town of Chalk River on the banks of the Ottawa River and his American colleagues at the Aragonese Laboratory at the University of Chicago, who, among many others, worked on the creation of the American atomic bomb. It was May who handed over uranium samples and detailed materials related to the development of US nuclear weapons to Soviet military intelligence officers. He was betrayed by a defector, a cipher officer of the USSR military attaché in Canada, Igor Guzenko.
Since September 1945, May has lived and worked in England and taught at King's College, University of London. But British counterintelligence officers set up surveillance on him and in February 1946 he was interrogated and arrested. The scientist was not ready for such a turn in his fate and, as they say, split. The threat of exposure also hung over his curator.
And he, during his stay in Canada, managed to establish the work of an illegal residency there too. Obtained information on the atomic bomb, which became his main task, but not only. A large number of agents were in touch with him, including a world-renowned scientist (now deceased, but not declassified). Chernyak's agent network worked in many other areas of scientific and technical intelligence. By the way, the materials for which Berg thanked the GRU so much were sent at that time. In total, in 1944, the Center, as already mentioned, received from Chernyak 12.5 thousand sheets of technical documentation relating to radar, electrical industry, ship armament, aircraft construction, metallurgy and 60 samples of equipment. The volume of information received from Chernyak did not decrease in the next year either. The work was in full swing, and, in all likelihood, would have gone on for many more years, if not for the very betrayal of the cipher Guzenko.
But the topic of this material is not the crime of the cryptor. We will not talk about him anymore. Only Jan Chernyak had to leave the pursuit of the Canadian counterintelligence. How he did it is another story. The illegal was taken out by our sailors, the military or the merchant fleet - in different publications the information is completely different. I like the dress-up plot.
Legend has it that a group of our sailors settled in one of the seaside hotels, invited the girls, and then one of them, half-naked, in a vest and an unbuttoned jacket, was carried to the ship by friends. He himself, having gone through the whiskey, could no longer walk. And the policeman on duty at the gangway of the Soviet dry cargo ship did not even ask him for his documents. What documents can a sailor have who does not knit a bast ?! Let his own captain deal with him.
The "drunken sailor", as they say, was then handed over from hand to hand to the big boss, who arrived at the ship docked in Sevastopol on a captured "Opel-Admiral". And they took a signature from the crew that no one or anyone else on board had ever seen anything. If you want to go to a "foreign country" - you will sign and not like that.
Yan Chernyak continued to serve in the GRU. Freelancers. He did not receive any awards for the materials on the nuclear project delivered from the United States. Not punished - and it was a great joy. Because they could. The illegal defender defended the military intelligence resident in Ottawa, the military attaché, Colonel Nikolai Zabotin, who, while serving in Canada, patronized his cipher clerk, a defector and traitor Guzenko. And this is not forgiven. Zabotin was imprisoned. Chernyak was pushed aside from operational work. Then they slowly found another use for it. Moreover, by that time he had brilliantly learned another language - Russian. His autobiography in the TASS personal file was written without a single mistake.
Yan Petrovich Chernyak worked at TASS for almost 19 years and retired when he turned 60. True, he received a personal pension. But, I think, not the union, but the republican. In 1969 it was equal to 150 rubles. Salary for a leading engineer at a defense enterprise. And for those unique documents and materials that he handed over to the country during his unknown residence abroad and which helped the Soviet state, its scientists and designers to create a weapon that reliably protected its national interests - the Order of the Red Banner of Labor. The reward is high, but I think it is hardly sufficient.
The feat accomplished by an illegal scout was truly appreciated only at the end of his life, already in the new Russia.
