Alexander Orlov
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Alexander Mikhailovich Orlov (Александр Михайлович Орлов)(Leiba Lazarevich Felbing, Лейба Лазаревич Фельбинг) (21 August 1895–25 March 1973) was a Soviet espionage administrator. He defected to the U.S. in 1938. He warned Leon Trotsky of his impending assassination. His expertise made him an obvious candidate for the OGPU, the political police that preceded the NKVD.
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[edit] Early life
He was born Leiba Lazarevich Feldbin in Byelorussian town of Bobruysk on August 21, 1895 to a Jewish family. He attended the Lazarevsky Institute in Moscow, but left it after two semesters to enroll at Moscow University to study law. His study, however, was cut short when he was drafted into the Tsarist army.
When the Civil War erupted in 1918, Orlov joined the Red Army and became a junior counterintelligence officer on the Polish front in the vicinity of Kiev. He personally led and directed sabotage missions into enemy territory. He later served with the OGPU Border Guards in Arkhangelsk. In 1921 he retired from the Red Army and returned to Moscow to resumed his study of law at the Law School at Moscow University. Orlov worked for several years at the Bolshevik High Tribunal under the tutelage of Nikolai Krylenko. In May 1924 his cousin, Zinoviy Katznelson, who was chief of the OGPU Economic Department (EKU), invited Lev Nikolsky (his official name since 1920) to join the secret police as an officer of Financial Section 6.
[edit] Career in Russian spy agencies
When his cousin was moved to supervise the Transcaucasian Border Troops of the OGPU, he offered to Nikolsky and his wife the opportunity to move to Tiflis as chief of the Border Guard unit there, which he accepted. There their daughter contracted a rheumatic fever infection and Orlov asked his friend and former colleague Artur Artuzov to give him an assignment abroad so that Orlov could have European doctors treat his daughter. Therefore, in 1926 Nikolsky was transferred to the INO, the branch of the NKVD responsible for overseas operations, now headed by Artuzov, and sent to Paris under a legal cover of a Soviet Trade Delegation official.
After one year in France, Nikolsky, who operated on a fraudulent Soviet passport in the name of Léon Nikolaeff, was transferred to a similar position to Berlin. He returned to Moscow in late 1930. Two years later he was sent to the USA to establish relations with his relatives there and obtain a genuine American passport that would allow free travel in Europe. "Leon L. Nikolaev" (Nikolsky-Orlov) arrived in the USA aboard the SS Europe on 22 September 1932, sailing from Bremen. After obtaining a passport in the name of William Goldin, he departed on 30 November 1932 on the SS Bremen back to Germany. In Moscow Nikolsky again asked for a foreign assignment, as he wanted his sick daughter treated by Dr. Karl Noorden in Vienna. This was granted and together with his wife and daughter he arrived in Vienna in May 1933 (as Nikolaev) and settled in Hinterbrühl a few kilometres away from the capital. After three months he went to Prague, changed his Soviet passport to the American and left for Geneva. Nikolsky's group, which operated against the French Deuxieme Bureau, included Alexander Korotkov, a young illegal, Korotkov's wife Maria, and a courier, Arnold Finkelberg. Their operation, codenamed EXPRESS, was unsuccessful and in May 1934 Nikolsky joined his family in Vienna. From here he was ordered to go to Copenhagen to serve as assistant to rezidents Theodor Maly (Paris) and Ignace Reif (Copenhagen). In June 1935 Nikolsky (William Goldin) himself became a rezident in London. He had nothing to do with the recruitment of Kim Philby or any other member of the Cambridge Five, and deserted his post in October 1935, coming back to Moscow. Here he was dismissed from the Foreign Service and put into a lowly position of deputy chief of the Transport Department (TO) of the NKVD, successor of the OGPU.
[edit] Work during the Spanish Civil War
In July 1936 Orlov was appointed NKVD liaison to the Spanish Republican Ministry of Interior. It is said Orlov was sent to Spain after a young secretary, with whom he had been carrying on an affair, shot herself in front of Lubyanka because he refused to leave his wife. Orlov arrived in Madrid on 15 September 1936. Contrary to the common knowledge he had never supervised guerrilla activity behind nationalist lines that was organized by his senior NKVD colleague Grigory Syroezhkin.
In October 1936 Orlov was placed in command of the operation which moved the Spanish treasury from Madrid to Moscow. The Republican government had agreed to use this horde of bullion as an advance payment for Soviet military supplies. Orlov did a commendable job of managing the logistics of this transfer. It took four nights for truck convoys, driven by Soviet tankmen, to bring the 510 tons of gold from its hiding place in the mountains to the port of Cartagena. There, under threat of German bombing raids, it was loaded on four different Russian steamers bound for Odessa. The gold was conveyed to Moscow by special armored train and once it was safely locked away Stalin threw a party and remarked, "The Spaniards will never see their gold again, just as they don't see their own ears." Orlov was awarded the "Order of Lenin."
However, Orlov's main task in Spain remained fighting the Trotskyites and other opponents of the Moscow-backed Spanish Republican government. Documents released from the NKVD archives reveal the long list of Orlov's crimes in Spain. He was responsible for fabricating the evidence which led to the arrest and purge of the leaders of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), many of whom vanished. The evidence also suggests he directed the kidnapping and execution of the POUM leader Andres Nin. In a report to his superiors in Moscow, dated August 1937, Orlov outlined his plan for the capture and liquidation of the Austrian Socialist Kurt Landau. His deputy, Stanislav Vaupshasov, managed the construction of a crematorium for the untraceble disposal of enemies. Erwin Wolf, Trotsky's former secretary, and Mark Rein, son of a Menshevik leader, disappeared in Spain, the victims of Orlov's terror. He also had a hand in the disappearance of the White Russian officer and NKVD double-agent, Nikolai Skoblin (codename FARMER). Though he was the leading NKVD officer in Spain, Orlov would later deny involvement in these and many other assassinations carried out by his NKVD officers and their agents.
[edit] Defection
In 1938, the Great Purge was in full swing back in the Soviet Union as Stalin sought to clear away the last vestiges of the old guard who had survived the 1917 revolution. Orlov watched from afar as close associates and friends were rounded up and shot one by one. He decided that his turn came when he was invited to meet an unnamed NKVD chief on board a Soviet vessel in Antwerp. Instead of going to this meeting, Orlov stole $60,000 in operational funds from the NKVD safe and fled with his wife and daughter to Canada. It is possible that he took direct part, again acting as a diplomatic cover, in the assassination of Rudolf Klement, a former secretary of Leon Trotsky, in Paris on 13 July 1938 - the day he left Paris for Quebec.
While in Canada, Orlov composed a blackmail letter which he sent to the NKVD chief Yezhov. He told his boss he would reveal everything he knew about Soviet intelligence operations if agents are sent to kill him or a member of his family. As a two-page attachment, Orlov listed the codenames of several illegals and moles operating in the West. He also sent a letter to Trotsky alerting him to the presence of the NKVD agent Mark Zborowski (codename TULIP) in the entourage of his son Lev Sedov. Trotsky dismissed this letter as a provocation. Then Orlov traveled with his family to the United States and went underground. The NKVD, presumably on orders from Stalin, did not try to locate him until 1969.
[edit] The Secret History
Shortly after the death of Stalin in March 1953, and exactly fifteen years after his own defection, Orlov resurfaced and published The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes. This work, like its similarly titled precursor by Procopius, presents a number of previously unpublished anecdotes about the murderous underside of life in Lubyanka during the terror. It is an unofficial history, written without reference to primary sources or documents, sometimes based upon gossip heard at the NKVD water-cooler or at a French cafe, and frequently quoting dialogue. At the time of its publication most of the tales were unverifiable because nearly all the witnesses had been purged. The problem, of course, is that the era it depicts is one of such thuggish criminality and duplicity, of such unparalleled despotism, that even the most precarious whispers can be true while nearly all the sworn confessions are abjectly false.
A textual comparison of the Secret History with Walter Krivitsky's In Stalin's Secret Service reveals that, for both books, the authors' secret informant on the history of the Moscow Trials was Abram Slutsky, head of the NKVD Foreign Section. Many historians believe there is the ring of truth to Orlov's tales, though the reader should remember that they are told second-hand, that Orlov himself was deliberately dishonest about his own complicity in Stalin's crimes, and that money was the principle reason Orlov wrote the Secret History. Still Orlov had an eye for idiosyncratic detail and an ear for character dialogue which lends the anecdotes a certain poignancy.
[edit] Man without a country
After the publication of The Secret History, Orlov was forced to come in from the cold. Both the CIA and FBI were embarrassed by the revelation that a high ranking NKVD officer (Orlov was a Major of State Security, equal to an army colonel) had been living underground in the United States for fifteen years without their knowledge. Orlov was interrogated by the FBI and twice appeared before Senate Sub-Committees, but he always diminished his role in events and continued to conceal the names of Soviet agents in the West. In 1956 he wrote an article for LIFE Magazine entitled, The Sensational Secret Behind the Damnation of Stalin. This fantastic story held that NKVD agents had discovered papers in the Tsarist archives which proved Stalin had once been an Okhrana agent and on the basis of this knowledge the NKVD had planned a coup d'tat with the leaders of the Red Army. Recently, some Russian authors, based on archival documents, began corroborating Orolov's main assertion that Stalin was, indeed, an Okhrana agent. Stalin uncovered the plot and this was his motive behind the secret trial and execution of Soviet Marshal Tukhachevsky and the purge of the Red Army.
Orlov and his wife continued to live secretly and modestly in the United States. In 1963 the CIA helped him publish another book, The Handbook of Counter-Intelligence and Guerilla Warfare, and helped him obtain a job as a researcher at the Law School of the University of Michigan. He moved to Cleveland where first his wife died and then he followed her on 25 March 1973. In the end, this lonely man never waivered in his contempt for Stalin. Orlov's last book, The March of Time, was published in the USA in 2004 by his loyal follower, former FBI Special Agent, Ed Gazur. It is another anecdotal history, a period piece unearthed from the "cold war" era.
[edit] Sources
- "The Retiring Spy" Times Literary Supplement, September 28, 2001.
- "Alexander Orlov" on Spartacus International
- Alexander Orlov, The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes. Random House, 1953.
- John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, Deadly Illusions: The KGB Orlov Dossier. Crown, 1993. ISBN 0-517-58850-1
- Alexander Orlov, The Handbook of Intelligence and Guerrilla Warfare, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1963.
- Edward Gazur, Secret Assignment: the FBI's KGB General, St Ermin's Press, 2002 ISBN 0-9536151-7-0
- Alexander Orlov, The March of Time, St Ermin's Press, 2004 ISBN 1-903608-05-8
- Boris Volodarsky with Oleg Gordievsky, Alexander Orlov: Exegi Monumentum (in preparation), 2006. [1]
[edit] External link
- John Howard Wilhelm, Review of The Orlov File, Johnson's Russia List, 17 January 2003:
