World War II-Era Defectors, 1941–1946

The third group broke with the Soviet system during World War II and immediately thereafter. In the months after Operation Barbarossa began on 22 June 1941, German forces penetrated deep into Soviet territory, and it is likely that thousands of Soviet intelligence and state security personnel fell into German captivity during that time. Consequently, Germany was the clear intelligence priority early in the war. Of the 32 officers in this group, 18 were captured on the battlefield between 1941 and 1943, most of which defected once they were in captivity. However, Soviet intelligence widened its targeting beyond Germany to its wartime allies even before the war ended. A few others were abroad under diplomatic cover and approached a foreign power requesting asylum. This group extends beyond the formal end of World War II into 1946, because the environment for defectors did not change immediately after the war.

Post-Stalin Purge Defectors, 1953–1954

The flow of defectors waned in the early 1950s as the Soviet Union began again to enforce 1930s rules against defection. However, the death of Stalin in 1953, and equally importantly, the arrest and execution of Soviet state security director Lavrentiy Beriya later that year, prompted a brief new wave of defections—ten officers in a thirteen-month period. They defected for similar reasons as their predecessors in the Yezhovshchina period—out of fear that they were in danger from a purge. With Beriya’s downfall came the inevitable purge that followed the arrest of a state security leader during the Stalin era. Any officer who had connected his or her career with Beriya’s was at risk of going down with him. These officers revealed a growing perception of threat from the United States as the leader of the Western alliance, and targeting of U.S. and NATO information dominated their collection requirements.

Yezhovshchina-Era Defectors, 1937–1940

The second group includes eight officers who were the first to violate the new rules regarding defection. Their revelations identify Soviet political intelligence priorities directed toward Great Britain, followed by Germany, while foreign science and technology collection cast a wider net, to include the United States. Most of the officers in this group had joined a Soviet intelligence or state security service at about the same time as the defectors in Chapter 1, but they persevered through most of the 1930s, sometimes participating in the very actions that led earlier officers to defect. The Great Purge, or what came to be known as the Yezhovshchina, prompted these officers and their families to defect. They left because they saw their own colleagues being arrested and executed, and they felt the need to save their own skins.

Early Cold War Defectors, 1947–1951

The fourth group includes the first Soviet intelligence and state security officers that the Western Allies accepted, albeit cautiously, after the wartime policy of alliance with the Soviet Union began to change. These defectors revealed that Soviet intelligence and state security services’ priorities were focused on Nazi hunting and counterintelligence, which in the Soviet services’ definition included preventing Soviet citizens returning from POW and refugee camps from becoming conduits for foreign infiltration. This group includes twenty-two officers, of which the names are unknown for ten and details are scanty for most. The lack of publicly available information reflects the tentative Western handling of Soviet defectors in the early post-war period. Germany and Austria, where the Western Allies’ occupation zones bordered directly on Soviet occupation zones, were the most prominent locations for defections. Most were handled quietly, and some were settled in out of the way places like South America and told to restart their life there.

Conclusion

Several lessons emerge from these defectors’ revelations. First, the motivations of defectors changed based on the circumstances around them, which reflected Soviet policy changes. Those policy changes, such as purges and increased domestic repression, were often at the foundation of defector’s motivations. Second, vetting standards for Soviet personnel assigned to sensitive national security positions fluctuated, depending on the stability in the Soviet government and the level of urgency for hiring new personnel. When the Soviet Union was stable, it had the luxury of enforcing strict standards. When the Soviet Union needed a lot of people fast—such as during purges or wartime—it did not vet them as thoroughly. Finally, the Soviet perception of threat evolved, beginning with Great Britain as the primary threat in the early Soviet era, and joined by Germany after 1933, although Stalin never abandoned hope for an accommodation with Hitler. However, even before Germany was defeated in 1945, Soviet intelligence began targeting its wartime allies. By the late 1940s, when the United States assumed the role of the leader of the democratic world, the label “main enemy” was coined and applied to the United States, which stuck for the rest of the Soviet era.

Early Defectors, 1924–1930

This chapter identifies sixteen intelligence and state security officers who defected from the Soviet Union from 1924 to 1930. Their revelations show that Soviet intelligence targets focused initially internally, but gradually turned outward as the Soviet government sought to identify external support to internal threats. Most of the defectors in the first group began their careers as enthusiastic Bolshevik adherents, while others cooperated out a sense of personal survival. Regardless of their backgrounds, each of the officers in this group lost their faith in the system, and even more so, lost their faith in the people around them. Several individuals in this group complained about the low moral standard of the early Bolsheviks, their lust for blood, and their intolerance for anyone not fully in agreement with them. This chapter further explains the longest period in Soviet history without any intelligence officer defectors: 1931 to 1936, caused by new Soviet government measures to stem the flow of Soviet officials who were choosing to leave the system in the 1920s.

Introduction

The introduction defines the parameters for choosing the study population and the types of information that are used to analyse them. It identifies the screening questions used to sort defectors’ information and draw out the priorities in the Soviet national security system, including what information the officers were tasked with collecting; what types of people they were tasked with recruiting, harassing, or in some cases, assassinating; how the defector’s service was organized and where it allocated its resources; and what liaison relationships the service established. In addition to this information received directly from defectors, the book also analyses the circumstances surrounding the defector’s choice to leave, including the location and timing of defection and defector’s personal background, which reflect the situation inside the Soviet Union at the time of their defection and their elite access to Russian national security threat information.