The ultimate dream of any intelligence in the world
December 28 marked the 110th anniversary of the birth of the head of the USSR foreign intelligence service, Pavel Fitin, the man who emerged victorious from the confrontation with the strongest intelligence services in the world.
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In March 1938, a new employee appeared at the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the USSR. Pavel Mikhailovich Fitin, sent among 800 fellow communists to serve in these bodies as part of party mobilization. The dark streak in the history of the Foreign Department of the Cheka - OGPU - NKVD was ending. The criminal repressions unleashed by Yagoda and Yezhov in their own ranks caused irreparable damage to Soviet foreign intelligence.
Of the 450 INO employees, 275 were subjected to repression. If anyone managed to survive, it was only thanks to the selfless efforts of the Center, where they realized that it takes at least ten years to raise and introduce a foreign “illegal immigrant.” And the following fact: in 1938, the Kremlin received 127 intelligence reports, of which not a single one was from the Foreign Ministry. And this is on the eve of the impending war.
...Pavel Fitin was born in the village of Ozhogino, Shatrovsky district, Kurgan region, into a poor peasant family. He graduated from the All-Union Agricultural Academy named after K.A. Timiryazev with the most peaceful specialty - mechanical engineer of electrification and mechanization of agriculture. Previous place of work: Deputy Director of a publishing house.
There was not a simple change of security personnel, but their renewal by specialists with higher education, which until recently no more than 5% of the People's Commissariat employees had. Six-month study at the Central School of the NKVD and the position of trainee of the 5th department of the Main Directorate of State Security. Already in May of the following year, on the initiative of the new People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, Beria, Fitin was appointed head of the foreign intelligence department. He managed to return previously dismissed experienced illegal employees to the service and strengthen it with talented newcomers.
The outbreak of the Second World War posed new challenges for reconnaissance. After the crushing defeat of Poland, France and England on the European continent, Soviet foreign intelligence had to give the country's leadership a clear answer: “When and where exactly will Germany attack the Soviet Union?” In the first half of 1941 alone, Fitin presented the Kremlin with more than 120 intelligence reports, saying: we are only a few months away from the war.
On the night of June 17-18, Fitin reported to Stalin that Germany had completed its final preparations. An attack on the western borders should be expected any day now (this topic is covered in more detail by the author in the study “Victory: truth against falsehood"). Together with the Wehrmacht, OUN militants will also go on the offensive.
From the first days of the war, the difference between days and nights lost its meaning for the 5th Department. The first to enter the unequal battle were intelligence officers operating under the cover of diplomats from the Soviet Embassy in Berlin. Deputy Resident Alexander Korotkov managed to overcome the tight ring of SS guards twice and supply the remaining agents in the city with the necessary currency and a radio transmitter. No matter how hard the Gestapo broke into the doors of the embassy and trade mission in order to seize code books and codes, they managed to destroy them. During the war, German intelligence services never managed to obtain the keys to the encryption codes used by Soviet intelligence centers and their stations in Western Europe.
Fitin's people managed to promptly inform the Center about the plans of the most important operations of the Nazi command on the Eastern Front. They received information about the negotiations that began in Bern between the United States and Germany on concluding a separate peace. The main characters of the Soviet cult film “Seventeen Moments of Spring”, who found themselves at the center of those events, were real people. It was they who helped the Soviet leadership disrupt the implementation of this cynical project of the Anglo-American allies and successfully complete the Second World War.
Now let's go back. At the beginning of 1942, technical lieutenant Georgy Flerov, who was serving at the Air Force Academy evacuated to Yoshkar-Ola, addressed J.V. Stalin with a letter in which he drew attention to the fact that publications on the uranium problem had disappeared in the Western open press. It should be assumed, in his opinion, that they are very close to creating atomic weapons.
The young physicist could not have known, soon returned to the disposal of the USSR Academy of Sciences, that in the fall of 1941 the London residency informed Fitin: “In England they have begun to develop an atomic bomb.” Thus began the unique operation of Soviet foreign intelligence “Enomoroz”. Its goal was to determine the circle of countries involved in the creation of atomic weapons, inform the Center about the content of this work, and, with the help of foreign agents, acquire scientific and technical information that could speed up the creation of such weapons.
British physical science turned out to be closest to solving this problem; the research carried out allowed it to translate them into a practical plane. At the next meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt, the latter convinced his colleague to transfer all the developments of the United States and the scientific personnel of the British so as not to expose the created experimental base to the danger of German air raids. They became part of the so-called Manhattan Project.
It was carried out in the strictest secrecy. It is difficult to say how events would have developed further if it had not been for the help of Soviet intelligence from the talented German communist physicist Klaus Fuchs, who received British citizenship after fleeing Germany and was involved in the creation of the first American bomb.
Establishing a communication channel with him for Soviet residents was a matter of technique. For nine years, we note, on a gratuitous basis, the cooperation between Soviet foreign intelligence and Fuchs and other American scientists lasted. British diplomat Donald MacLean, who worked in the United States and donated a lot of “atomic materials,” also provided invaluable assistance to the Center.
It would seem that the Soviet Union had no time for creating weapons of enormous destructive power when it was a question of “to be or not to be” the Soviet state,” when the fate of the main battles was being decided on the Eastern Front, and the Kremlin was thinking about how to deal with the huge amount of intelligence information. To study it, “Physical Laboratory No. 2 of the USSR Academy of Sciences” was created, headed by the brilliant scientist Igor Kurchatov, who in the early 30s was studying the problems of fission of the atomic nucleus.
Then the laboratory was transformed into the Institute of Atomic Energy, its first director and until the last days of his life was a renowned academician. On May 20, 1944, the Uranium Council was approved under the State Defense Committee (chaired by L.P. Beria).
It would be completely wrong to assume that all that remained for Soviet scientists was to skillfully manage the information obtained, including the drawings of the American atomic bomb. As well as the fact that Stalin either did not attach importance to Truman’s message on the sidelines of the Potsdam Conference about the successful testing of the first nuclear charge, or did not understand what it was about. But in fact, two weeks earlier, Fitin’s report had landed on Joseph Vissarionovich’s desk: the final preparations for testing an atomic bomb had been completed at the Alamogordo test site in New Mexico. Let us add that Klaus Fuchs also observed these tests.
The creation of the nuclear industry required enormous financial and human costs for the Soviet country, which had just emerged from a brutal war and had lost a third of its domestic economy. Along with the construction of powerful plants and factories, nuclear reactors, experimental bases in the Gorky, Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk regions and other regions, an unprecedented amount of uranium ore and technologies for its enrichment were required, the necessary reserves of which the USSR did not have, with the exception of Tajikistan. Soviet intelligence launched a large-scale search for uranium deposits in Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria, and involved in research work those German scientists who were not reached by the “long arms” of the American intelligence services.
On August 29, 1949, at 7 o’clock in the morning, an unprecedented flash illuminated the Kazakh feather grass steppes for hundreds of kilometers around. The test of the first Soviet atomic bomb, as it was called in documents and reports, the RDS-1 product, was successful. The US and the complacent British hoped that the USSR would get closer to creating its own bomb sometime between 1952 and 1956.
Assessing the battle of Soviet foreign intelligence in the secret war for the possession of extremely classified projects and technologies for the production of atomic weapons, one of the organizers of the “cold” and potential “hot war” against the USSR, CIA Director Allen Dulles was extremely laconic: “This is the ultimate dream of any intelligence service in the world.” " But Soviet illegal intelligence officers and their volunteer assistants abroad least of all needed such assessments of their main enemy; they were guided by their own convictions, honor and duty to the Motherland, which had to be protected from the most inhumane weapons in the world.
...A sunny October day in 2017. At the press center of the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation, Lieutenant General Pavel Mikhailovich Fitin, whose name remained unknown for many decades, returned to his eternal post, but only in bronze.
The solemn opening ceremony of the monument to the head of Soviet foreign intelligence was attended by the heads of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, his comrades, relatives and friends. The memory of their legendary fellow countryman is worthily honored in his native village and school, in the Sverdlovsk FSB department.
How can one not recall in this regard the words of the “legend of Soviet intelligence”, which he often liked to repeat to his grandson, retired captain of the second rank Andrei Fitin: “The truth will still make its way.”
Lieutenant General P.M. FITIN with a smile on his charming Russian face; in a peaceful career as director of the photo factory of the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries.
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