KGB Veteran Offers New Details on Three Fateful Stalin-Era Special Operations

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 8 – Anatoly Maksimov, a retired KGB officer who began his career in counter-intelligence and now works as an historian, told Igor Latunsky of Versiya details about three Stalin-era special operations that played a fateful role in the future history of the world (versia.ru/napadenie-yaponii-na-ssha-sprovocirovala-sekretnaya-operaciya-sovetskoj-razvedki).

                First, the KGB veteran says, “not many know that already in 1923 by a decision of the Politburo was established a special organ, the Dezinformburo, which was run by Stalin personally and prepared and then distributed false stories to the Soviet Union’s enemies abroad. (For more on it, see russian7.ru/post/dezinformbyuro-zachem-v-sssr-sozdavali/.)

                Second, through double agents inserted into Japan and via agents of influence in the US, the Soviet intelligence services put Japan and the US on a collision course which ultimately led to Pearl Harbor. On the one hand, the false Soviet defectors convinced the Japanese that they couldn’t defeat the USSR and thus shouldn’t invade as they had promised Hitler to do.

            On the other, via Harry Dexter White, they convinced US President Franklin Roosevelt that Japan was a threat to the US, prompting Washington to demand that Japan pull back from southeast Asia, something Tokyo was unprepared to do and was offended by the American insistence. As a result, the two powers were fated to fight one another.

            And third, the Soviet intelligence services had the chance to kill Hitler but didn’t because Stalin vetoed the idea. The services introduced actress Olga Chekhov into the German dictator’s entourage where she became his favorite actor. She could easily have killed Hitler. But Stalin intervened to save him.

            Stalin’s calculation, Maksimov says, is that the Soviet leader “not without cause was afraid that after the murder of Hitler, the German generals would have found a common language with Great Britan and then the war would have gone in an entirely different direction.” Stalin needed eastern Europe, and Hitler’s early exit would have made Stalin’s acquisition of it harder.