KGB of the USSR and the MGB of the GDR

[konstant]

Germany from time to time publish documents from the archives of the MGB of the GDR.
Recently I came across a curious document - an informative letter from the head of the State Security of the GDR Milke
To the Chairman of the KGB of the USSR Chebrikov dated 2.04.1985
[DLMURL="https://www.radikal.ru"]

[/ DLMURL]
[DLMURL="https://www.radikal.ru"]

[/ DLMURL]
Information about the failure of Soviet military intelligence.
On October 1, 1984, a citizen of the German Democratic Republic was arrested at the New York Airport (the name is shaded), an anti-fascist who was previously persecuted by the Nazis, then emigrated and interned in England. The arrest ensued as a result of the betrayal of the recruited Soviet military intelligence in Potsdam, and who was in contact with her employee in Mexico City, a double agent of the United States.
The traitor insisted on a meeting in the United States. For this, the Soviet military intelligence attracted (Frau X), who for a long time collaborated with her and had close family and friendly relations with progressive US citizens, including and with members of the Communist Party.
At the time of her arrest, numerous evidence was discovered.

The woman arrested at New York Airport, whom Eric Milke wrote about, is Alice Michelson. A citizen of the GDR, born in 1916 in Berlin, from 1933 in the anti-fascist underground, in 1935 she was sentenced to 3.5 years in prison for "betrayal of state interests", in 1939 after her release she managed to move to the UK, in 1940-41, as a German citizen, was interned on the Isle of Man. After her release, she worked as a welder in Glasgow shipyards, participated in the work of the Free Germany committee. In 1957 she returned to the GDR. In 1984, she was sent as a GRU courier to the United States to meet with a US Army sergeant recruited by the GRU in Potsdam. The sergeant turned out to be a double agent, and Alice Mikhelson was arrested at the New York airport just before flying to Prague. When she discovered a mini-tape recorder with supposedly classified information. A US court sentenced her to 10 years in prison.
In June 1985, Alice Mikhelson, together with her fellow countryman professor of physics Alfred Tse, Polish intelligence officer Marian Zakharsky and Bulgarian Penya Kostadinov, was exchanged for 23 Western spies, mainly CIA and BND agents from among the citizens of the GDR. Nothing is known about the future fate of Alice Michelson.
It is unlikely that Milke was bluffing in his letter; most likely Alice Mikhelson was really a long-time agent of the GRU. It does not seem that this business trip to meet with the agent was the first operational task for a 68-year-old woman. Another thing is surprising - was there really no age limit for its agents in the GRU? Judging by her biography, she has long earned the right to a quiet life.

 

[Симферополь]

Thank! Interesting stuff! And what will the BBC tell us about “Frau Alice”?
[DLMURL="https://www.bbc.co.uk/russian/international/2010/07/100710_kozlovsky_history_of_swaps.shtml"] https://www.bbc.co.uk/russian/internatio ... waps.shtml [/ DLMURL]

Spy Swap: Who Benefited from Pre-Haste
Vladimir Kozlovsky

Vladimir Kozlovsky

BBC Russian Service, New York

The latest espionage exchange continues the practice of the Cold War era and is not the most massive or hasty in history.

The most massive one occurred in June 1985, when 25 people convicted of espionage in East Germany were released in exchange for four spies from the Warsaw Pact who were serving sentences in US prisons. The Pole Marian Zakharsky, the East Germans Alfred Zee and Alisa Mikhelson and the Pene Penyu Baichev Kostadinov crossed the Glienicki bridge across the Havel River connecting Berlin and Potsdam.

Zakharsky was called the largest Polish intelligence officer in history. He lived in the United States since 1977, worked for the Illinois machine tool company Polish American Machinery Company and managed to recruit Holden Bell, who was in charge of the radar department at the California-based Hughes Aircraft Corporation.

In exchange for $ 110,000 in cash and gold coins, Bell provided Zakharsky with secret documents regarding F-15 fighters, TOW anti-tank missiles, Phoenix air-to-air missiles, Patriot anti-aircraft systems and other weapons.

Freed up too fast

Bell was first arrested and helped the FBI expose Zakharsky. In 1981, the Pole was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment. Bell got off for 8 years.

Due to the fact that the US authorities sent 10 agents of the Foreign Intelligence Service to Russia just a few days after the arrest, there were complaints in the American press that they had been released too quickly without trying to get additional information from them about their secret activities. Critics said all spies exchanged in the past were convicted and sentenced to imprisonment.

See, for example, got eight years, and Michelson - 10.

Critics, however, forget the case of Gennady Zakharov, an employee of the Soviet mission to the UN, who was arrested in 1986 on charges of espionage. Three days later, in Moscow, US News and World Report correspondent was arrested by Nicholas Daniloff, who was also accused of espionage. The Reagan administration said it was KGB revenge for the arrest of Zakharov. Three weeks later, Daniloff was allowed to leave the USSR, and Zakharov was allowed to leave the United States.

In addition, Soviet dissident Yuri Orlov was released to the West, and Kremlin’s longtime friend, American billionaire Armand Hammer, took the sick Moscow microbiologist David Goldfarb to the United States on his plane, whom the KGB had been harassing about his friend Daniloff.

Radio equipment and hollow cufflinks

Exchanges of that era are inextricably linked with the name of East German lawyer Wolfgang Vogel, who served as an intermediary in organizing several. For example, he participated in the exchange of 25 prisoners in the GDR for four spies led by Zakharsky and had a hand in the release of the Soviet dissident Anatoly Sharansky in February 1986.

Sharansky, who would later take the name Nathan and become a prominent political figure in Israel, had by then spent 9 years in the USSR for espionage. In the same transaction, five people accused of spying for the Eastern Bloc countries, including the Soviet spies Karl and Khan Kehera, were exchanged by the West for three Westerners arrested in communist countries. Sharansky, too, was released on the snowy Gliniksky bridge.

Almost a quarter century before, in 1962, Vogel mediated with the sensational exchange that took place on the same bridge. The American pilot Francis Gary Powers, whose U-2 reconnaissance aircraft was shot down over Sverdlovsk, was exchanged for William Genrikhovich Fisher, better known as Colonel Rudol Abel. Before Anna Chapman (Kushchenko), he was the most famous Moscow illegal agent, exposed in the United States.

Abel lived in America for about ten years, posing as an artist. In fact, he transmitted to Moscow the secrets of the American atomic bomb received from a group of Soviet spies. In 1957, Abel was arrested and found with his fake American birth certificate, codes, radio equipment and hollow cufflinks.

Humane act

As the New York Times notes, having released Powers, the Soviet authorities at first were silent about the exchange, saying only that this step was taken in the interest of improving relations with the United States.

Only two weeks later, when Moscow decided that the news of the exchange could leak from the West through the Iron Curtain, Izvestia posted a letter to Abel’s wife and daughter expressing gratitude to the Soviet government for the humane act of promoting the release of a man who, according to them, was falsely accused of espionage.

In 1964, a British businessman Greville Maynard Wynne was released through the West Berlin checkpoint of Geerstrasse, convicted of Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who was considered the most productive Western agent in the Soviet Union, executed in Moscow for spying for MI6. For him, the KGB received such a major scout as Konon Trofimovich Molodoy, who worked in the UK under the name Gordon Lonsdale. He led a spy group collected information about the British submarine fleet.

A blatantly inadequate exchange

Few remember that in October 1969, many years of negotiations between Moscow and London culminated in an agreement to exchange British student Gerald Brook, who received five years for importing “anti-Soviet literature”, to Peter and Helen Kroger, prominent Soviet intelligence agents in the UK, who were arrested in 1960 year. During a search in the chimney, they discovered a masked radio antenna.

The American communists Morris and Lona Cohen called themselves kroger, working for Soviet intelligence by couriers and communicating with spies who participated in the Manhattan project to create the first atomic bomb. After the arrest of the espionage group, the Coens fled the United States and settled in the UK under the name Kroger. They were taken for recruiting agents at the Portland Naval Base, where British nuclear submarines were converted.

As journalist Owen Matthews writes in Newsweek weekly, since exchanging a student for two seasoned spies was blatantly inadequate, in addition, Moscow allowed three Soviet citizens to marry the British.

For six years, the author’s mother, Lyudmila Bibikova, fought to be allowed to marry a scientist from Wales named Mervyn Owens. When the plane with the Kroemers on board left British airspace, an employee of the Soviet Consulate General in London handed Mervyn an entry visa. The Briton flew to Moscow and finally married Bibikova. Two years later, the author of the article was born in London.

Unprecedented haste

Spy exchanges of that era did not cause such heated debate in the USA as the current one. Partly, perhaps because none of them were so publicly furnished. But it's not only that.

The Washington Post intelligence officer, Jeff Stein, quotes in his column John Martin, who, while serving in the US Department of Justice, led the production of 76 espionage cases. According to Martin, the exchange of spies who have not been convicted and sentenced to prison is "almost unprecedented."

He did not recall the case of Gennady Zakharov, but he mentioned the above Alice Mikhelson, who was arrested in the United States for espionage in 1984 and the next year was exchanged for trial by 25 Western agents in the GDR.

“In the case of earlier exchanges,” he says, “we tried on for years, until we settled on the final number of people whom we agreed to free. Both sides did this. We will arrest someone, they will arrest someone. As far as as we arrested more and more people, negotiations intensified. "

In this light, the haste of the last exchange seems to Martin to be "absolutely unprecedented."

"In the espionage deal raped us"

Stein's article is accompanied by a stream of comments, the authors of which are sometimes indignant that the American side, to their taste, has now lost much. "As I understand it, we gave Russia 10 spies, and they gave us 4," says one. "And why not 10 for 10? Is that just another Obama’s attempt to make our enemies love us? Someday it will come to us that will they never love us? "

"President Obama is simply throwing cat's tail all his work and the whole FBI’s long investigation in order to get immediate political favors from Putin," says another. "Bush would never have been so naive."

The author of the third comment, on the contrary, supports the deal for humane reasons. “Otherwise, these four would rot in a Russian prison until the end of the century,” he writes.

"We got raped in an espionage deal," reads a pledge on the Daily Beast website. The Russians agreed to "a good old-fashioned espionage exchange so quickly that inevitably comes the thought, but should the United States still have to bargain?" - writes liberal commentator Reikhan Salam.

“Ten Russian agents spent 11 days in jail,” writes security expert Charles Pink on Fox News. “Four Russian prisoners spent a total of 32 years in prison.”

Most commentators, however, believe that the exchange was more beneficial to the western side, which received in this four of its two most valuable agents in Russia - Alexander Zaporizhsky and Sergey Skripal. According to the Russian press, cited by the US media, these two issued a huge number of Russian agents in the West.

In exchange, Russia received a group of decrypted scouts with extremely low efficiency.

 

[Патрушев Михаил Владимирович]

Thank! Interesting!

 

[konstant]

Here is a video of the exchange process on June 10, 1985. Alice Mikhelson often gets into the frame, probably because she was the only female subject of exchange. More often her only lawyer Wolfgang Vogel. It really looks cheerful, at least younger than its 68th.

 

[Симферополь]

Thank! Interesting documentary shots!

 

[konstant]

But it seems that Alice Michelson is still alive and lives in Berlin, in the Karlhorst area. In the newspaper of the Berlin Union of Anti-Fascists for December 2011, I found her congratulations on her 95th birthday with wishes for continued health.

 

[Частный детектив. Владивосток.]

Leave a rarity alone ...: mrgreen:

 

[konstant]

Leave a rarity alone ...

Of course, looking at this lady is much nicer

[DLMURL="https://www.radikal.ru"]

[/ DLMURL]

Just try to compare their merits. Between the first and last arrest of Alice Michelson is almost 50 years old. Between them are imprisonment in both Nazi and American prisons. And if at the age of 68 she was an active worker, then this also says something. Although she would probably not be her first operational task for our intelligence. And, proposing to leave the "rarity" alone, you offer to leave it in obscurity. Doesn't it seem like we're picking a few of the wrong heroes?

 

[Частный детектив. Владивосток.]

Leave a rarity alone ...

Of course, looking at this lady is much nicer

Redheads are not my type ...

Leave a rarity alone ...

Just try to compare their merits. Between the first and last arrest of Alice Michelson is almost 50 years old. Between them are imprisonment in both Nazi and American prisons. And if at the age of 68 she was an active worker, then this also says something. Although she would probably not be her first operational task for our intelligence. And, proposing to leave the "rarity" alone, you offer to leave it in obscurity.

Alice's merits are worthy of respect. But...
Put yourself in her place - you are 95 years old, you want peace and silence, and fame can crash so that it just ends in a heart attack!

Leave a rarity alone ...

Doesn't it seem like we're picking a few of the wrong heroes?

Everyone chooses their own heroes, by virtue of upbringing, education, lifestyle, depravity, etc. With that, he lives later ...
Someone chooses to show off redhead boobs, you pay tribute to Alice Michelson, I respect Mata Hari ...

 

[konstant]

Alice's merits are worthy of respect. But...
Put yourself in her place - you are 95 years old, you want peace and silence, and fame can crash so that it just ends in a heart attack!

A person at any age wants his merits to be appreciated. Perhaps fame does not threaten her - even if it becomes more known about her activities, this will not be a world sensation. But to know that they remember and feel gratitude and respect for the fact that you risked freedom and life, and judging by the biography, not for money, but for beliefs, that would be fair.