"Viktor Suvorov. Inside soviet military intelligence (англ) " - читать интересную книгу автора

of the war it was practically unharmed. Gradually a tendency became
noticeable in the operations of military district intelligence services to
limit the use of Soviet officers even for short trips abroad. Faced with
wartime conditions the military district intelligence services began to
recruit and run their agents only from Soviet territory. The recruitment of
new agents was carried out either on Soviet territory or on the territory of
neighbouring countries by means of agents who had been recruited earlier.
There is an interesting story to be told about the recruitment of
agents at this time, whose moral holds as true today. In the pre-war period,
recruitment took up little time. The Comintern simply made a decision and
immediately scores, sometimes hundreds of communists became Soviet secret
agents. In the interests of successful agent work, the GRU always demanded
from them that they should publicly resign from the communist party. The
vast majority accepted this without demur. After all, it was only a
camouflage, a Bolshevik manoeuvre to help defeat the lass enemy. Sometimes
however, there were communists who were unwilling. In Germany, one group
agreed to the GRU's demands only on condition that it was accepted into the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The demand was a simple one, for it is
not difficult for the GRU to write out a dozen new party cards, and as the
new agent group was working so successfully, the GRU did not want to refuse.
At a routine meeting the GRU case officer, an employee of the Soviet embassy
in Berlin, informed the group's leader that their demands had been met. He
congratulated the group on becoming members of the CPSU and informed them,
in conclusion, that the General Secretary of the Party himself, comrade
Stalin, had written out the party cards. As an exceptional case, the German
communists had been accepted without going through the candidacy stage.
Their party cards were naturally to be kept in the Central Committee.
At this news the group's productivity redoubled. It was supposed to
receive a certain sum of money for its work, but the group members refused
to accept the money. More than that, they began to hand over to their case
officers sums of their own money, in order to pay their membership fees to
the Soviet communist party. Punctually they handed over to their case
officers all documents and payslips concerning their earnings together with
their party subscriptions. This took up a great deal of time during the
agent meetings, but the Germans were working very productively and nobody
wanted to offend them.
Some time later, the Gestapo got on their trail, but all the members of
the group managed to escape into Austria, then to Switzerland and finally
through France to Spain where the civil war was going on. From Spain they
were brought to Moscow, Terrible disappointments awaited them in the capital
of the Proletariat of all the world, the chief of which was that nobody into
at any time written out their party cards, or accepted them into the Soviet
communist party. The GRU officials had of course assumed that the agents
would never set foot in the Soviet Union on that therefore it would be very
easy to dupe them. However, on their arrival in Moscow, the first thing the
agents did was to declare a hunger strike and demand a meeting with the
higher leadership of the GRU. The meeting took place and the GRU leadership
did all in its power to help the Germans join the party, after going through
the candidate stage, naturally. But foreigners can only be accepted in the
CPSU through the Central Committee, and the natural questions arose: 'Were