On February 3, 1903, the first domestic counter-espionage service was created - the Intelligence Department of the General Staff
Employees of the Russian military counterintelligence agencies celebrate their professional holiday on December 19 - on this day in 1918, a resolution was adopted to create a Special Department of the Cheka, which was entrusted with this difficult work. But in fairness, it should be noted that the exact birthday of the domestic military counterintelligence should be considered February 3 (January 20, old style), 1903. It was on this day that the Minister of War, Adjutant General Alexei Kuropatkin, submitted to Emperor Nicholas II a memorandum "On the creation of the Intelligence Department of the General Staff."
Alexey Kuropatkin. Photo: Historical War Museum
Here is how the minister substantiated the need for a new structure: “Until now, the detection of state crimes of a military nature in our country has been a matter of pure chance, the result of the special energy of individuals or a coincidence of happy circumstances, which makes it possible to assume that most of these crimes remain unsolved and their totality threatens the state with substantial danger in the event of war. It would not seem appropriate for the Police Department to entrust the adoption of measures to the detection of persons engaged in this criminal activity, firstly, because the named institution has its own tasks and cannot devote either sufficient forces or funds to this, and secondly, because in this case, which concerns exclusively the military department, full and versatile competence in military matters is required from the executors. Therefore, it would seem desirable to establish a special military body in charge of the search for these crimes, with the aim of protecting military secrets. The activities of this body should consist in establishing covert supervision over the usual secret military intelligence routes, which have the starting point of foreign military agents, the end points - persons in our public service and engaged in criminal activities, and the connecting links between them - sometimes a number of agents, intermediaries in the transfer of information.
This approach to military counterintelligence was not demonstrated by any of Kuropatkin's predecessors as Minister of War. Even the legendary Barclay de Tolly, through whose efforts in 1812 the "superior military police" appeared in the Russian army - the predecessor of both intelligence and counterintelligence, focused it mainly on reconnaissance activities. On January 27, 1812, Emperor Alexander I signed documents on the creation of a higher military police, but the only direct instruction regarding counter-espionage is contained in only one of them - in the "Additional Rules and Notes" to the "Instruction to the Chief of the General Staff for the Management of the Higher Military Police". And it sounds like this: “About enemy spies. § 23. Hostile spies must certainly be punished with death in public in front of the army and with all possible publicity. § 24. Their pardon is allowed only in the case when, being caught, they themselves give important news, which will subsequently be confirmed by incidents. § 25. Until this verification of the information provided by them, they must be kept under the strictest guard. "So in 1903, military counterintelligence as a service focused on solving specific tasks was created in Russia for the first time.
At first, the scope of activity of the Intelligence Department extended exclusively to St. Petersburg and its environs: the main objects of attention were "military agents", as military attachés were called at that time, and they worked at the embassies located in the capital. Accordingly, the staff of the new special service was also small. The memorandum of Kuropatkin says: “Under the General Staff it would be necessary to establish a special Intelligence Department, putting the head of the department, a staff officer, at the head of it, and adding a chief officer and a clerk to it. For the direct detective work of this department, it would be necessary to use the services of private individuals - detectives on free hiring, the constant number of whom, until his experience was clarified, would seem possible to be limited to six people.
The new special service was located in St. Petersburg on Tavricheskaya Street, at number 17. During the first year, the staff of the Intelligence Department was exactly what the Minister of War described it. The head of the department was the former head of the Tiflis security department, the captain of the Separate Corps of Gendarmes, Vladimir Lavrov, and his former colleague, retired provincial secretary Vladimir Pereshivkin, became the senior observer. From the Tiflis security department, the first two "observation agents" - the gendarme super-urgent non-commissioned officers Anisim Isaenko and Alexander Zatsarinsky - went to the service of the ex-chief. The rest of the agents were recruited in the process, at first without devoting them to all the subtleties and secrets of the department's work: as Lavrov himself wrote about this, "some of them, upon closer examination, will turn out to be inappropriate and will have to be removed." The stake on maintaining maximum secrecy was completely justified and was made from the first days of the department's existence. Even in the memorandum it was said especially about this: “The official establishment of this department would seem inconvenient in the sense that it loses the main chance for the success of its activities, namely the secret of its existence. Therefore, it would be desirable to create a projected department without resorting to its official establishment."
Already the first year of the existence of the Intelligence Department, according to the report of Vladimir Lavrov for 1903, gave significant results. The surveillance established for the military agents of the major powers - Austria-Hungary, Germany and Japan, revealed not only their own intelligence efforts, but also agents from among Russian subjects, primarily officials and officers. It was on the basis of the information received in 1903 that at the end of February 1904, the headquarters officer for special assignments under the chief intendant, captain Ivkov, who was the source of information for the Japanese military attaché, was arrested.
Alas, the first successes of the new service almost became the last. In July 1904, under the Police Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, an international espionage investigation department was created, a year later it was renamed the IV (secret) diplomatic department of the Special Division of the Police Department. It lasted until the summer of 1906, but even during these two years it managed to seriously ruin the lives of colleagues from the Intelligence Department. As Vladimir Lavrov wrote about this, “relying on the exclusive rights of the Police Department and having funds many times superior to those of the Intelligence Department, the aforementioned organization began to take under its supervision those monitored by the Intelligence Department, not excluding ground military agents, and outbid persons who worked for the Intelligence Department. divisions, or simply forbid them to serve the division and generally interfere with it in every possible way, and then began to invade the Main Directorate of the General Staff: to monitor the officers' correspondence and establish external surveillance over them."
After the elimination of competitors, the Intelligence Department existed for another four years, until the end of 1910. By this time, Captain Lavrov managed to receive the rank of colonel and the Order of St. Vladimir: the Russian throne highly appreciated his services in the field of counterintelligence. In August 1910, Lavrov was replaced by Gendarme colonel Vasily Erandakov in the chair of the head of the department, who served in this post for less than a year. On June 8, 1911, Minister of War Vladimir Sukhomlinov approved the "Regulations on counterintelligence departments", which introduced such in all military districts of Russia and separately in St. Petersburg. The first Russian counterintelligence department, the Intelligence Department at the General Staff, was transformed into the St. Petersburg counterintelligence department.
And the first head of the Intelligence Department, Colonel Vladimir Lavrov, retired with the rank of Major General. In 1911, he moved to live in France, where he took up the exact opposite of his previous work: the creation of the first Russian intelligence service in Western Europe - "Organization No. 30", which operated against Germany. How successful this work was, and what the further fate of Lavrov was, is unknown: information about this was forever lost in the fire of the First World War that engulfed Europe.
