Александр Орлов: резидент НКВД в Испании и его секретная история

Soviet secret police and NKVD Rezident in the Second Spanish Republic

Alexander Mikhailovich Orlov (Lang ru, born Leiba Leyzerovich Feldbin, later Lev Lazarevich Nikolsky, and in the US assuming the name of Igor Konstantinovich Berg; 21 August 1895 – 25 March 1973), was a colonel in the Soviet secret police and NKVD Rezident in the Second Spanish Republic. In 1938, Orlov refused to return to the Soviet Union due to fears of execution, and instead fled with his family to the United States. He is mostly known for secretly transporting the entire Spanish gold reserves to the USSR in exchange for military aid for Spanish Republic and for his book, The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes.

Throughout his career, Orlov was also known under the names of Lev Lazarevich Nikolsky, Lev Leonidovich Nikolaev, SCHWED (his OGPU/NKVD code name), Leo Feldbiene (as in his Austrian passport), William Goldin (as in his US passport), Koornick (the name of his Jewish relatives living in the US). Travelling in the United States, he often registered under the names of Alexander L. Berg and Igor Berg.

He was born Lev Lazarevich Feldbin in the Belarusian town of Babruysk on August 21, 1895, to an Orthodox Jewish family. He attended the Lazarevsky Institute in Moscow but left it after two semesters to enroll at Moscow University to study law. His study, however, was cut short when he was drafted into the Imperial Russian Army. When the Russian Civil War erupted in 1918, Orlov joined the Red Army and became a GRU officer assigned to the region around Kyiv, Ukraine. Orlov personally led and directed sabotage missions into territory controlled by the anti communist White Movement. He later served with the OGPU Border Guards in Arkhangelsk. In 1921, he retired from the Red Army and returned to Moscow to resume his study of law at the Law School at Moscow University. Orlov worked for several years at the Bolshevik High Tribunal under the tutelage of Nikolai Krylenko. In May 1924, his cousin, Zinoviy Katznelson, who was chief of the OGPU Economic Department (EKU), invited Lev Nikolsky (his official name since 1920) to join the Soviet secret police as an officer of Financial Section 6.

When his cousin was moved to supervise the Transcaucasian Border Troops of the OGPU, he offered to Nikolsky and his wife the opportunity to move to Tiflis (now Tbilisi, Georgia) as chief of the Border Guard unit there, which he accepted. There, their daughter contracted a rheumatic fever infection, and Orlov asked his friend and former colleague, Artur Artuzov, to give him an assignment abroad so that Orlov could have European doctors treat his daughter.

Therefore, in 1926, he was transferred to the Inostranny Otdel (Foreign Department), the branch of the OGPU responsible for overseas intelligence operations, now headed by Artuzov. He was sent to Paris under a legal cover of a Soviet Trade Delegation official. After one year in France, Nikolsky, who operated on a fraudulent Soviet passport in the name of Léon Nikolaeff, was transferred to a similar position to Berlin. He returned to Moscow in late 1930.

Two years later, he was sent to the United States to establish relations with his relatives there and to obtain a genuine American passport that would allow free travel in Europe. "Leon L. Nikolaev" (Nikolsky Orlov) after arriving in the US aboard the SS Europa on 22 September 1932 sailing from Bremen. After being identified as a spy by the US Office of Naval Intelligence, Orlov obtained a passport in the name of William Goldin and departed on 30 November 1932 on the SS Bremen back to Weimar Germany.

In Moscow, he successfully again asked for a foreign assignment, as he wanted his sick daughter to be treated by Dr. Karl Noorden in Vienna. With his wife and daughter, he arrived in Vienna in May 1933 (as Nikolaev) and settled in Hinterbrühl only 30 km away from the capital. After three months, he went to Prague, changed his Soviet passport for the American one, and left for Geneva. Nikolsky's group, which operated against the French Deuxième Bureau, included Aleksandr Korotkov, a young Illegal Rezident (spy without official cover); Korotkov's wife, Maria Korotkova; and a courier, Arnold Finkelberg. Their operation, codenamed EXPRESS, was unsuccessful, and in May 1934, he joined his family in Vienna and was ordered to go to Copenhagen to serve as assistant to rezidents Theodore Maly (Paris) and Ignace Reiss (Copenhagen).

In June 1935, under the name William Goldin, he himself became a rezident in London. His cover in London, as Goldin, was as a director of an American refrigerator company. Despite Orlov's later claims, he had nothing to do with recruitment of Kim Philby or any other member of the Cambridge Five and deserted his post in October 1935, coming back to Moscow. Here he was dismissed from the Foreign Service and put into the lowly position of a deputy chief of the Transport Department (TO) of the NKVD, the successor secret service organization to the OGPU.

After the publication of The Secret History, Orlov was forced to come in from the cold. Both the US Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation were embarrassed by the revelation that a high ranking NKVD officer (Orlov was a Major of State Security, equal to an army brigadier general.) had been living underground in the United States for 15 years without their knowledge. Until he resurfaced in the US with his revelations in the Life Magazine, Orlov had lived in the US under the name Alexander L. Berg. As the FBI was searching in vain for him and his wife, "two unidentified Russian aliens", he was studying business administration at
Dyke College, Cleveland, Ohio. The College and the local FBI division were located in the same Standard Building on 1370 Ontario Street and St Clair Avenue, occupying the third and the ninth floors, respectively. Ironically, the FBI officers "never paid any attention to the mature student who had long figured on the FBI’s most wanted list and who rode the elevators with them every day." Stalin, Orlov continued, uncovered the plot and this was his motive behind the secret trial and execution of Soviet Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and the purge of the Red Army. The Life article cites the Eremin letter as evidence that Stalin was a member of the Okhrana, but most historians today agree it is a forgery. The research of Simon Sebag Montefiore contradicts Orlov's theory, too. Orlov and his wife continued to live secretly and modestly in the United States. In 1963, the CIA helped him publish another book, The Handbook of Counter Intelligence and Guerilla Warfare and helped him obtain a job as a researcher at the Law School of the University of Michigan. He moved to Cleveland, Ohio. His wife died there. He died on 25 March 1973. Orlov never wavered in his contempt for Stalin. His last book, The March of Time, was published in the US in 2004 by the former FBI Special Agent Ed Gazur.

Orlov was shown to have produced a number of false claims to support his story and elevate his status in the eyes of his debriefing officials and the wider Western public. For instance, his rank was not general, as he had claimed, but merely a major. He also falsely claimed to play the leading role in recruiting the Cambridge Five spy ring, while in fact Orlov/Nikolsky "had nothing to do with the first three Cambridge University agents when they were successfully recruited. And he certainly knew nothing about those who joined the list after he had left London and was dismissed from the foreign intelligence department." Orlov, in discussing the origins of the Moscow Trials, was not aware that Trotsky and his supporters had organized a short lived oppositional bloc in the Soviet Union, public knowledge of which first emerged in 1980 after Orlov's death. Robert W. Thurston argues that, "These discoveries of clandestine activities undoubtedly induced Stalin to pressure the party and police for the arrest of opposition members," contradicting accounts like Orlov's which "argued that Stalin fabricated the show trials from nothing." In the words of researcher Boris Volodarsky:<blockquote> most of what Orlov said, even under oath, or during his debriefing by the US intelligence officials, or in private discussions with his friend Gazur, has by now been established as outright invention.