Alexander Mikhailovich Orlov

Alexander Mikhailovich Orlov (1930)

Aleksandr Mikhailovich Orlov ( Russian Александр Михайлович Орлов ., Scientific transliteration Aleksandr Michajlovič Orlov , actually Leiba Lazarevich field leg , Russian Лев (Лейб) Лазаревич Фельдбин , * 21st August 1895 in Bobruisk ; † 25. March 1973 in Cleveland ), a leading scientist was the Soviet NKVD . He defected to the United States in 1938 and warned Leon Trotsky of an impending assassination attempt.

Life

Feldbein, who was born in Belarus , attended the Lasarewsky Institute in Moscow and after two semesters switched to Lomonosov University . He broke off his law studies when he was drafted into the Russian Imperial Army during the First World War .

At the beginning of the Russian Civil War he joined the Red Army and carried out sabotage acts as a chekist on the Polish Front near Kiev . Later he served the GPU in Arkhangelsk . In 1921 he left the Red Army to continue studying. For several years he worked for Krylenko in the Ministry of Justice. In 1924 he moved to his cousin Sinowi Katznelson, who was the head of the economic department of the OGPU, the EKU. Under his name, Lev Nikolski, which he had been using since 1920, he joined Finance Department 6 of the secret police as an officer.

When Katznelson was appointed head of the Transcaucasian OGPU troops, Nikolski and his wife accepted his offer to move to Tbilisi . He commanded a border unit. His daughter fell ill with rheumatic fever . Nikolsky asked his friend and former colleague Artur Artusow to work where European doctors could treat them. In 1926 he therefore switched to the international intelligence service INO , in which Artusow held a leading position. This sent him with the pseudonym Léon Nikolaeff as a member of a Soviet trade delegation to Paris.

A year later he moved to Berlin and returned to Moscow at the end of 1930. He was sent to the USA with the task of establishing contact with his relatives and obtaining an American passport so that he could travel freely in Europe. With the passenger ship Europa he reached the destination country from Bremen as "Leon L. Nikolajew" on September 22, 1932. After receiving a passport on "William Goldin", he traveled on November 30th. J. back with the Bremen . In Moscow he asked again for an assignment abroad to treat his daughter, this time by Dr. Karl Noorden in Vienna. As "Nikolajew" he reached Vienna in May 1933 and settled in Hinterbrühl . Three months later he went to Prague , changed from his Soviet to American passport and went on to Geneva.

Nikolski operated under the code name EXPRESS against the French Deuxième Bureau , but unsuccessfully. His group consisted of the illegal Alexander Korotkow, his wife and the courier Arnold Finkelberg. In May 1934 he was back in Vienna with his family. He was instructed to go to Copenhagen to assist Ignaz Reif and the Hungarian Theodor Maly, who lived in Paris.

In June 1935, Nikolski was active as William Goldin as a resident in London, but independent of Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five group of the NKVD . In October 1935 he returned to Moscow, was dismissed from foreign service and received a low-ranking position as deputy head of the transport department (TO) of the NKVD.

Spanish Civil War

In July 1936 he was posted to the Interior Ministry of the Second Spanish Republic in Madrid as an NKVD liaison officer , where he arrived on September 15, 1936. In contrast to his NKVD colleague Grigori Syrojeschkin, Orlov did not lead any guerrilla operations in the Falange area. He commanded the operation to transfer the Spanish gold to Moscow, with which arms deliveries were to be paid for. It took columns of trucks four days to bring a load of 510 tons of gold from a mountain hideout to the port of Cartagena . The gold was brought to Odessa on four ships . Orlov received the Order of Lenin for this action .

Orlow's main task in Spain, however, was the fight against Trotskyists and anarchists who opposed a Soviet model of society. He fabricated the "evidence" needed to arrest and disappear left Communist POUM leaders. NKVD archives suggest that he planned and carried out the kidnapping and murder of POUM leader Andrés Nin .

In a report to his superiors in August 1937, he laid out a plan for how the Austrian socialist Kurt Landau was to be captured and murdered. His deputy, Stanislaw Vaupschasow, designed and built a crematorium for the destruction of human remains without a trace. Orlov's former secretary Erwin Wolf, as well as Mark Rein, son of the Menshevik leader Abramovich , are also to be regarded as victims , both of whom disappeared in Spain. He was also involved in the disappearance of the Belarusian officer and NKVD double agent Skoblin (code name Farmer ).

Although Orlov was the leading NKVD officer in Spain, he later denied involvement in these and many other criminal acts carried out by his NKVD officers and their agents.

Escape

In 1938 Orlov saw from a distance how, in the course of the Great Terror, his friends and liaisons were arrested and shot. The point of his decision came when he was called to a Soviet ship in Antwerp to meet an unknown NKVD officer . Instead of showing up for the agreed meeting, Orlov stole US $ 60,000 in operating funds from the NKVD vault and fled to Canada with his wife and daughter. It is also possible that, disguised as a diplomat, he was involved in the murder of Trotsky secretary Rudolf Klement on July 13, 1938 - the day he left Paris.

Orlov wrote a letter from Canada to the NKVD chief Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov that he would betray Soviet intelligence operations if he tried to kill him or his family members. In a two-page appendix, Orlow listed the code names of spies operating in the west and " moles ". At the same time he sent a letter to Trotsky in which he warned him about the NKVD agent Mark Zborowski (code name TULIP) in the vicinity of his son Lev Sedov . Trotsky viewed the letter as a provocation. Orlov then traveled to the United States and lived there illegally. Presumably on instructions from Stalin , the NKVD and its successor authorities did not try to find him until 1969.

Kremlin secrets

Shortly after Stalin's death in March 1953 and 15 years after his escape, Orlow published The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes , which was also published in German as Kremlin-Secrets in 1956 . The work, which in some ways resembles the secret story of Prokopios of Caesarea , contains a number of hitherto unknown anecdotes about the events in the Lubyanka during the time of terror. There are no references to sources or documents, sometimes it is based on gossip, and occasionally it is written in dialogue form. At the time of first publication, the stories were not verifiable as almost all witnesses had been eliminated.

A text comparison with Walter Krivitsky's book In Stalin's Secret Service shows for both books that the informant on the history of the Moscow trials was Abram Slutsky , head of the NKVD foreign section. Many historians assume that Orlov's stories, if retold, are partly true, but not as to his personal involvement in the crimes. Orlow nevertheless has an eye for idiosyncratic details, and his feeling for the characters of the dialogues gives the anecdotes a certain authenticity.

In his “Kremlin Secrets” (1953) Orlov also reports on incidents that are said to have occurred on German soil shortly before and after the National Socialist seizure of power and on orders from Stalin. These include u. a. the extorted statements of FS Holtzmann during the first Moscow show trial from August 19 to 24, 1936. Said Holtzmann came to Berlin on an official mission in November 1932 and allegedly met Trotsky's son Sedov there with conspiratorial intent. At one of the following conferences Sedov allegedly suggested to Holtzmann that he go to Copenhagen with him to meet Trotsky, who had been in exile since 1929, at the Hotel Bristol. According to Orlow, these details of the interrogation, which can be found in the show trial reports, lack any authenticity because there was no Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen in November 1932. On the other hand, the son was able to produce Trotsky's certificates proving that he had passed exams at the Technical University in Berlin on the days when his father was in Copenhagen.

Another detail shows where the expectations of the interrogators were going: The former agent of the NKVD's foreign department, Valentin Olberg, had been a secret reporter in Berlin to monitor the German Trotskyists on behalf of Stalin. In 1930, on the orders of the resident of the OGPU in Germany, he had tried to obtain the position of secretary to Trotsky. Trotsky lived in exile in Turkey during these years. But Olberg's plan failed because, according to Orlow, Olberg failed to “win the trust of the Trotsky people,” including the life guards under JG Bljumkin .

In the show trials, Olberg also testified about another person, Zoroch Friedmann, that he, like him, was a member of the Berlin Trotsky conspiracy (against Stalin). The Berlin Trotsky Section is mentioned repeatedly in the show trials. She is said to have pursued the plan until the later days of National Socialist Germany to "bring together the Germans who are going to war against the Soviet Union" and "to help the supporters of Trotsky to power". As a price for this, Trotsky had "promised the cession of Ukraine" to the German government under Hitler, in addition to the granting of a number of economic concessions.

For another defendant, Pyatakov , Tempelhof Airport becomes the crime scene of the show trial. For Orlow, Berlin was, besides Oslo and Copenhagen, just one of the various Western European crime scenes of a Trotskyist conspiracy from abroad to murder Stalin. In addition, he tries in many places to show that Stalin needed these scenes to take revenge on Trotsky and his supporters. One of the most impressive passages in the book is the description of his encounters with Pavel Alliluyev, Stalin's brother-in-law at the time. He met him in Berlin in 1929, when hardly anyone from the Soviet colony in the Berlin trade mission knew that he was Stalin's brother-in-law.

Man without a home

After the Kremlin secrets were published in 1953, Orlov was questioned by the FBI and twice by a subcommittee of the Senate . Orlov put his secret service activities into perspective and continued to conceal the names of Soviet agents in the country. The CIA and FBI were embarrassed to discover that a Russian secret service officer (Orlov was a major ) had been able to live in the United States undetected for such a long period of time .

1956 Orlov wrote in Life Magazine article The Sensational Secret Behind the Damnation of Stalin ( The sensational mystery behind the condemnation of Stalin ). The story goes that NKVD agents found documents in the tsarist archives that proved that Stalin was once an agent of the Okhrana . On the basis of this knowledge, the NKVD would have planned the overthrow of Stalin with the help of leaders of the Red Army. Stalin's discovery of this plan would have led to the secret trial of Tukhachevsky and the liquidation of many Red Army officers shortly before the start of World War II.

Orlov and his wife continued to live in seclusion in the USA. In 1963 the CIA helped him publish another book ( The Handbook of Counter-Intelligence and Guerrilla Warfare ) and got him a position as a researcher at the University of Michigan Law Institute . He moved to Cleveland , where first his wife and soon himself died. His Russian name Alexander Michailowitsch Orlow he had borrowed from Alexander Michailowitsch Golitsyn (1718–1783), a Russian diplomat and general field marshal. Orlow's last book ( The March of Time ) was published in 2004 by his supporter, former FBI agent Ed Gazur.

Publications

• Alexander Orlov: The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes . Random House, 1953. (German edition: Kremlin secrets . Marienburg-Verlag, Würzburg 1956)
• Alexander Orlov: The Handbook of Intelligence and Guerrilla Warfare . Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1963.
• Alexander Orlov: The March of Time . St Ermin's Press, 2004, ISBN 1-903608-05-8 .

literature

• The Retiring Spy . Times Literary Supplement, September 28, 2001.
• Alexander Orlov on Spartacus International
• John Costello and Oleg Tsarev: Deadly Illusions: The KGB Orlov Dossier . Crown, 1993, ISBN 0-517-58850-1 (German edition: Oleg Zarew / John Costello: The super agent. The man who blackmailed Stalin . Zsolnay, Vienna 1993, ISBN 3-552-04423-X .)
• Edward Gazur: Secret Assignment: the FBI's KGB General . St Ermin's Press, 2002 ISBN 0-9536151-7-0 .
• Boris Volodarsky: Stalin's Agent: The Life and Death of Alexander Orlov . Oxford University Press, London, 2014, ISBN 978-0-19-965658-5 .
• Christopher M. Andrew, Vasili Mitrokhin: The Black Book of KGB, Moscow's battle against the West . Propylaeen, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-549-05588-9 , pp. 111-112.

Web links

• Literature by and about Alexander Michailowitsch Orlow in the catalog of the German National Library
• Edward Gazur: Alexander Orlov: The FBI's KGB General. New York. Carroll & Graf Publishers. 2002. Book Review , Johnson's Russia List, January 17, 2003
• WOZ : This is how the Soviet secret service murdered in Barcelona

Individual evidence

1. ^ Kremlin Secrets, pp. 77–80
2. ^ Kremlin Secrets, p. 220
3. ^ Kremlin Secrets, p. 373