SMERSH

Soviet Assassination Division
of KGB (1917 - )

Ever since the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, a division of Soviet intelligence has been responsible for seeking out and blackmailing, kidnapping, or killing anyone who opposed the Communist regime, especially defecting Russians or Russians opposing the regime who live abroad. Non-Russians who have proved to be particularly antagonistic to the Soviets have also been selected for action by SMERSH, a phrase meaning "Death to Spies!" (Smert Shpionam.) This slogan is said to have been coined by Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin and certainly reflected his own murderous character.
SMERSH is actually the Ninth Division of the KGB, which is dedicated to Terror and Diversion, led and staffed by the most fanatical Communist killers. Its sophisticated murder techniques were found in the novels of Ian Fleming and others but they grimly existed in reality. Though the title SMERSH ceased to be used by the KGB after 1948, the organization continues to exist. SMERSH was originally created into five separate sections.
The first section works inside the Red Army, ferreting out dissident soldiers and summarily executing them. The second section of SMERSH collects information and, during wartime, is responsible for dropping agents behind enemy lines. The third section is responsible for collating and disseminating information and issuing orders. The fourth section investigates suspects and has the authority to make arrests. The fifth section is made up of three-man tribunals of high-ranking soviet officers who hear cases and pass judgment. All sentences by the tribunals are final and, if execution is ordered, it is carried out immediately.
SMERSH (now called Department V of the First Chief Directorate, which is hidden inside the internal security department of the Army, also called CUKR) is responsible for ruthlessly murdering tens of thousands of people in the last eight decades. Many world leaders, who were guarded at the Teheran Conference by SMERSH agents, knew of its existence but the agency was not made public until the defection of KGB Captain Nicolia Khokhlov in West Germany in 1954. Khokhlov himself was a SMERSH agent sent to murder Igor Georgi Okolovich on orders from Premier Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. Okolovich was a staunch opponent to the Communists, a leader in NTS, an anit-Soviet émigré organization headquartered in Frankfurt.
Khokhlov, an experienced killer, had received special training for his mission; he was to murder Okolovich with a miniature poison pellet gun. The assassin suddenly changed his mind and then defected to the CIA, exposing SMERSH operations as well as identifying two other SMERSH killers in Western Europe, who were promptly arrested.
After Khokhlov's defection, two other SMERSH agents, Peter Deriabin and Bogdan Stashinsky, also defected. Both one-time assassins detailed the workings of SMERSH. All of these assassins were equipped with sophisticated murder weapons. Stashinsky was equipped with a small tube that sprayed prussic acid.
One of the most active early-day SMERSH agents in the West was American-born George Mink. A native of Philadelphia, where he drove a taxi in the early 1920's, Mink joined the Communist Party in 1926, becoming a trade-union organizer for the Marine Workers Union, which reportedly had a direct link to Joseph Stalin. By 1927, Mink was sending reports directly to Moscow. He was summoned to Moscow in 1928, where he underwent is SMERSH training and in the following year he undertook his first assassination assignment throughout Europe.
In 1931, he was in Berlin, where he met a journalist who was to later describe him as "a short, strongly-built, dapper young man, with a small cruel mouth, greenish-brown eyes and irregular teeth." Mink was then stalking Hans Wissenger, a spy who had been controlling three GPU couriers working on the Hamburg-America line and who had exposed them to German authorities. Wissenger had been ordered back to Moscow and had refused. Mink was then assigned to kill him.
On May 22, 1932, Mink--along with Hugo Marx, another SMERSH assassin--located Wissenger and shot him to death in his apartment in the Muehlenstrasse. The murder is listed in Berlin's police files to this day as unsolved. Mink got away completely and reportedly killed at least another half dozen people by 1935 when his luck ran out. He and another American KGB assassin, Nicholas Sherman, were arrested in Copenhagen and charged with espionage. They were both sent to prison for eighteen months, reportedly for stalking a Russian businessman who had fled the Soviet Union.
Released in 1936, Mink returned to Moscow, where he was reportedly seen in the company of Juliet Stuart Poyntz, one of the leading American Communists who vanished the following year. According to Carlo Tresca, a rabid anti-Communist and anti-fascist editor in New York, Poyntz was ordered killed after she openly denounced Stalin and communism. George Mink, Tresca told friends, was the man who was her contact and KGB control and he arranged for a hurried meeting with her. At that time, Mink lured her into a car in Central Park. He drove north and stopped alongside a lonely road where he strangled Poyntz to death, burying her body in a woodland near the estate of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Dutchess County. (Informant Tresca was himself murdered in 1943 as he strolled down a New York street. His assassin was later identified as Mafia boss Carmine The "Cigar" Galante, who had accepted a SMERSH assignment to murder Tresca for a one-time fee of $50,000.)
Next, Mink went to Barcelona, where, using the alias of Alfred Herz, he joined the anarchist brigade so that he could get close to Professor Camillo Berneri, an anti-Stalinist who had so angered Stalin by his virulent statements about the Soviet leader that the Russian dictator was seized by a screaming fit of rage, calling in his KGB chief to order Berneri's execution. So beside himself was the distempered Stalin that he could barely manage the assassination order--he was reportedly foaming at the mouth at the time. Berneri and an aide were found shot to death and the bodies were mutilated. Mink, alias Herz, vanished from the rolls of the anarchist brigade a few hours later.
Throughout the 1930's, SMERSH agents roamed throughout Western Europe, seeking out fallen-away Communists. They tracked down and shot Ignace Reiss, who had been the resident director of the KGB in France and who had denounced Stalin for his blood bath purges in Russia. Reiss' close friend, Walter G. Krivitsky, the first ranking GRU officer to defect, testified as to the ruthlessness of SMERSH and was himself tracked down to a Washington hotel room and murdered.
The most celebrated SMERSH assassination was that of Leon Trotsky, who had led the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917 in Russia with Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov Lenin. He had been exiled from Russia in 1929 by his nemesis, Joseph Stalin, but had conducted an intense propaganda campaign against the Russian dictator. Stalin had ordered Trotsky murdered.
Trotsky had moved to Mexico in 1937 and by 1940 he was living with his wife, Natalya, in Coyoacan, a suburb of Mexico City. He resided in a fortified bastion with the walls around his small villa and the entrance gate guarded around the clock by ten heavily armed Mexican policemen. A squad of Trotskyites supplemented his personal bodyguard. Also, armed guards in a watchtower scanned the surrounding property through binoculars. Trotsky felt that it was only a matter of time before SMERSH agents caught up with him. A short time earlier, his personal representative, Rudolf Klement, had been tracked down in Paris and murdered by Soviet killers.
On May 24, 1940, twenty heavily armed led by David Alfaro Siqueiros, a Mexican painter and ardent Communist who had accepted the SMERSH assignment to murder Trotsky, attacked the exile's compound with machine guns and bombs but Trotsky and his family survived. Siqueiros went into hiding and was allowed to leave Mexico in 1942, becoming a resident of Chile, where he lived out his life, described by a local official as "an uncontrolled element considered half mad."
Jaime Mercarder, on the other hand, was a SMERSH agent who embodied cold, calculating reason. For almost a year, Jaime Ramón Mercarder del Rio Hernandez, using the alias of Frank Jacson, has been stalking Trotsky, worming his way into the confidences of the exile's friends. He was the son of a Spanish businessman and a Cuban Communist mother. Mercarder had fought in the Republican Army during the Spanish Civil War and had been recruited into SMERSH by Leonid Eitigon, a KGB/SMERSH handler and one of his mother's many lovers. He had posed as a French journalist, using the cover name of Jacques Mornard, and attended the Fourth International conference of Communists in Paris, a largely Trotsky-inspired group.
In Paris, Mercarder seduced Sylvia Agelof, an American social worker whose sister had once been Trotsky's secretary. When Agelof returned to the U.S. she took Mercarder with her. At that time he traveled on a Canadian passport under the name of Frank Jacson, the same passport he used to enter Mexico where, through Agelof, he was introduced to Trotsky.
He stayed in contact with Trotsky, paying several social calls to the Coyoacan bastion. At one point, he told Trotsky that he had written a white paper based on Trotsky's political philosophies and asked the exile if he would be so kind as to read it. Trotsky agreed, fixing an appointment for August 20, 1940. Mercarder arrived at Trotsky's complex that day with the manuscript. He was also carrying a thirteen-inch dagger, a pistol, and an Alpine ice ax, which he concealed under a topcoat draped over his arm.
Trotsky warmly greeted Mercarder, took his manuscript, an sat down at his desk to read it. Trotsky, after turning a few pages, realized that the manuscript was gibberish, He looked up quizzically at his guest. Mercarder leaped from his chair and swiftly brought the ice ax crashing down onto Trotsky's head, splitting his skull. It was, however, not a killing blow.
Falling to the floor, Trotsky cried out in pain, which immediately brought Joseph Hansen and Jake Cooper, his two American body guards, into the room. Hansen and Cooper dove at Mercarder, knocking him to the floor, where they began beating him into unconsciousness. Bleeding from the gash in his head, Trotsky asked them not to kill Mercarder, croaking: "He has a story to tell."
Rushed to a hospital, Trotsky lived for another twenty-four hours. Mercarder was by then imprisoned, claiming that he had killed Trotsky to defend the honor of his mistress, Sylvia Agelof, whom Trotsky, he claimed, had seduced. Agelof strongly denied having had any sexual contact with the Communist leader and condemned Mercarder as a SMERSH assassin. There was much confusion as to exactly who Mercarder was. He insisted that he was Jacques Mornard and, as such, he was finally tried on April 17, 1943, and found guilty of assassinating Leon Trotsky. He was sent to prison for life in the Juarez Penitentiary in Mexico City.
After seventeen years as a model prisoner, Mercarder was released on May 6, 1960. He went to Prague, where he worked as a journalist, then moved on to Moscow, where he received the "Order of the Soviet Union," a tacit admission by the Kremlin that he had performed a great political service for the Soviet Union by assassinating Trotsky. Some time later, Mercarder moved to Cuba, where he died in 1978, still using the alias Jacques Mornard.
Often in foreign countries, SMERSH will use professional criminals and killers to perform its abductions and assassinations, paying them enormous sums of money for their services. By employing professional criminals, kidnappings and liquidations appear to be criminal acts and not political coups, thus clouding the motives and redirecting suspicion from the Soviets to lawbreakers. This was the case of Carlo Tresca, where an American gangster, Carmine Galante, was handsomely paid to kill a SMERSH victim.
The same was blatantly evident in the case of Dr. Walter Linse, a prominent West German lawyer and acting president of the Association of Free German Jurists. Under Linse's direction, the Association exposed the outrageous crimes committed by the Soviets under the guise of Communist law, and sought to offer victims aid against arbitrary KGB arrest, secret trials, and false imprisonment or confinement in labor camps. Linse's reputation as a staunch anti-communist was such that SMERSH received orders to have him kidnapped in West Berlin and removed to East Berlin, where he could be held in permanent custody and cause no more political damage.
To that end, SMERSH used four infamous criminals who were all serving long prison sentences in East Germany: Harry Liedtke, 22, who had bee imprisoned for robbery and assault; Herbert Novak, 27, imprisoned for life for murder; Joseph Dehnert, 22, a burglar; and Erwin Knispel, 27, who had been imprisoned for no less than eighteen separate serious crimes.
On July 7, 1952, Liedtke went from East to West Berlin, where he got into a taxi driven by Wilhelm Woiziske. He told Woiziske to drive to the Senefelderplatz in East Berlin. Knowing West Berlin cab drivers were reluctant to go into the soviet sector, Liedtke offered Woiziske a twenty-mark tip. A few moments after passing the checkpoint, Liedtke leaned forward and placed a carton of American cigarettes next to Woiziske and the grateful Woiziske murmured his thanks for the tip. When the taxi reached the Senefelderplatz, however, several German policemen rushed to the taxi, yanking Woiziske and Liedtke from the car, one of the officers shouting: "So you're the smugglers of American cigarettes."
Taken to East German police headquarters, Woiziske was locked up in a basement cell but he was not interrogated. It became obvious later that Liedtke's use of the taxi had only one purpose, to borrow the cab's West Berlin license plates. Those plates were affixed to another car that had no difficulty in passing the checkpoint into West Berlin early the following morning, July 8, 1952. The car contained Liedtke, Novak, Knispel, and Dehnert. The four men drove to the residence of Dr. Linse, who lived in the American sector of West Berlin at 12a Gerichstrasse in the suburb of Lichterfelde.
Linse, a prompt person, stepped as usual from his apartment house at precisely 7:30 A.M. and began walking toward his office, puffing on his pipe. As he came abreast of the car in which the four men sat, Liedtke and Dehnert got out and Dehnert went up to Linse holding an un-lighted cigarette. He asked the doctor for a match. Linse fumbled in his pockets and, as he did so. Liedtke slipped behind him and struck him a heavy blow on the head with a blackjack.
Dr. Linse, however, was tougher than expected and stood his ground, pushing the kidnappers away. Liedtke then grabbed the doctor around the waist and Dehnert clasped the victim's legs together, and they carried him to the car, attempting to toss Linse into the back seat. The doctor put up a fierce struggle until Novak pulled a pistol and shot Linse in the leg. He collapsed into the back seat, Liedtke and Dehnert falling on top of him.
Knispel. who was at the wheel, drove off at such a terrific speed that he ignored the fact that Dr. Linse's legs were protruding from the open rear door of the car. The car raced down the Drakenstrasse with a van in hot pursuit. The driver of the van had witnessed the abduction and was pursuing the kidnappers, a wild chase that soon included a West German police car.
Seeing that they were being pursued, the kidnappers leaned from the windows of their car and tossed tetrahedral nails to the cobblestones, believing that these would puncture the tires of the pursuing vehicles and bring them to a halt. The pursuers, however, managed to avoid the nails and began gaining on the kidnap car. Morning rush-hour crowds then provided an avenue of escape for the East Germans. Maneuvering the car between clusters of pedestrians, Knipsel managed to turn down a sidestreet and escape pursuit. The car then disappeared into East Berlin.
Woiziske, the cab driver, was taken form his cell a few hours later. An East German official apologized to him, saying that it had all been a mistake. The license plates had been reattached to his taxi, which was returned to Woiziske, who then drove back to West Berlin to tell authorities of his strange experience. The CIA and Reinhard Gehlen of West German intelligence soon pieced together the method by which SMERSH had abducted Dr. Linse.
The Western press soon trumpeted the bold kidnapping and American officials lodged a formal protest with the Soviets. The Russians said they knew nothing about Dr. Linse or his disappearance. Western officials kept up demands for the return of Linse for eight years. Then, in June 1960, the Russian Red Cross perfunctorily informed the West German Red Cross that "Walter Linse died in a Russian prison camp on December 14. 1953."
In the case of Vladimir Poremsky, a leader of NTS and an ardent Soviet opponent, a real cigarette smuggler in East Berlin, Wolfgang Wildprett, was used for a SMERSH assassination assignment. On Christmas day, 1954, Wildprett appeared at Poremsky's door in Frankfurt. He held a newspaper photo of his victim in one hand and in the other a Walther P38 aimed at the startled Poremsky.
The SMERSH assassin did not fire. Pocketing the weapon, he said: "I'm here to kill you, but I don't trust them [his SMERSH handlers.] If I kill you, then they will tell me to murder somebody else. Then one day the police will arrest me, and put me in prison with a big pile of deutsche marks I can't spend." Poremsky arranged for his reluctant killer to defect to the West, where he settled down under an alias. "So he didn't kill me," Poremsky later said. "I like Wildprett, and I still see him sometimes. In fact, I went to his wedding."
SMERSH remained undaunted. Despite defecting killers in their ranks, the agency developed a number of particularly vicious methods of murder, undoubtedly to allow their assassins less chance of being identified and apprehended. One victim of these new murder weapons was Horst Schwirkmann, a skilled West German technician working in the West German Embassy in Moscow. Schwirkmann was a debugging expert who "swept" his embassy clean of KGB listening devices. When unearthing a listening device he fed into its microphone a high voltage that undoubtedly sent a terrific Shock into the ears of KGB listeners.
More frustrating for Soviet bugging experts, no doubt, was Schwirkmann's discovery and dismantling of a sophisticated electronic device which had been secreted in the embassy's decoding room, one which immediately broadcast to the KGB all messages being typed before they were automatically ciphered. The newly developed device allowed the Soviets to break West German diplomatic codes by comparing ciphered messages with those picked up in the clear.
So irritated with Schwirkmann were KGB officials that they ordered SMERSH to kill him. The West German was stuck in the buttocks by an agent as he moved through a crowd of tourists at the Zagorsk monastery outside Moscow in 1964. The stricken technician was rushed to the U.S. Embassy, where a full-scale medical clinic was maintained. Here, doctors learned that Schwirkmann had been injected with nitrogen mustard gas. He was treated and, after a painful recuperation period, the SMERSH victim survived.
Georgi Markov, who received the same treatment, was not as fortunate. A brilliant Bulgarian journalist who lived in exile, Markov detested the Soviets and said so in broadcasts over the BBC and Radio Free Europe. He described in detail how the Communist regimes in Bulgaria and elsewhere practiced terror and murder. The Bulgarian block nation had become the most oppressive of all the Soviet-dominated countries. It lashed out viciously at anyone opposing the regime, using SMERSH agents out of Moscow for their purposes.
At the request of the Bulgarian KGB, SMERSH unsuccessfully attempted to murder Boris Korczak, a suspected Polish double agent living in Virginia and reportedly working for the CIA. Vladimir Kostov, a Bulgarian living in exile in Paris, was also attacked by SMERSH agents but he, too, survived. Two other Bulgarians who had defected, a rocket technician living in Vienna and a newspaperman, had been liquidated by SMERSH operatives.
Korczak had been jabbed in the back by a sharp instrument wielded by an unidentified passerby. He developed a high fever and was delirious for three days until he recovered. In September 1978, Georgi Markov stood waiting for a bus on Waterloo Bridge. A man in the crowd jabbed his thigh with the pointed end of an umbrella. He apologized for what seemed to be an accident and scurried away. Hours later Markov lay dying. The umbrella had actually fired a pinhead platinum pellet containing ricin--a poison made from castor oil plants--into Markov's leg. Within hours Markov developed a high fever and then died of heart failure.
SMERSH believed it had developed the ultimate murder weapon with the use of ricin. The poison in almost undetectable and invariably leads to cardiovascular collapse, a condition that any unsuspecting doctor would simply attribute to a common heart attack. Although it is claimed that SMERSH went out of existence with the collapse of Communism in Russia, the agency still exits.