by ARCHIE JOHNSTONE

, MOSCOW
Mo Russian “displaced per-
nS) who had been drifting
“aa Y for about 10 years,

themselves drifting down

to Sovi <
€t soil, 2
chutes, attached to para

ai

Wh ,
- “a8 they picked themselves
_ &y started taking stock of

elr :
Possess: m
Physical essions, mental and

The} :

es Physical possessions were

; a cloak-and-dagger ones of
Most modern make; their

Ihe
ae Possessions were some-
NS different.

a first “duty” should have
and Set up their transmitter
came a back to where they
ik Ss instead they reported
i fe authorities — and

a eg and later facts are
atom Tom the long, detailed

ents they made.

Th :
€ two men, N. Yakuta and

N,
heen tvavisey, had long before
ie teamed together at an Am-

a a school in West Ger-

RS n ut they still cannot be

eich Bernt was going on in

of ace head. They could

a tst, confide in each other

to cay Confidence might be fatal
of the two. :

*

tin they could not entirely
“ane the Tepeated warnings
tican pecelved from their Am-
to et White Russian instruc-
‘ity, 2% if they were caught or
Se Save themselves up,’ not
em U1 confession would save
Tom the death penalty.
ng gtithtmare days of wander-
Vhie Indecision passed, days in
i ‘ each concealed his wrack-
Oxiety from his mate. Then
' Beg thet there was never
Wh jection from the other
P del, excuse was put forward
baghe» aying the first “reporting
the , 2dio message. That broke
tain Mutual confidence was
é ed; the rest was, if not
"at least possible . . .

LY,
tag uta, the older of the two,
¥ at in the Soviet army and
Ry qpuured by the Germans.
haq i €n on, he said, his life
hej €n' one of “drifting about
Soyjge @, Pushed about.” As the
Shift; “Mies advanced he was
amp ees one German POW
Uitte © another, until, when
foung » 8S finally defeated, he
deny ce Mmself on the western bor-
the i Germany — this time in
Nds of the Americans.

The off

rt 5 ane Made to Yakuta was

The “sy as a laborer in Munich.
ork” proved to be forced

Ms, ey White Russian contract-
th 4, /Sevev, Somov and others,

n

Man © reconstruction of a Ger-_

Cans. Mrodrome for the Ameri-
de bee hd, from prisoner of war
fithout: a a “displaced person”

Mteguangtvithout any rights or

. Th
oe Very profitable “organiz-
rs ass labor, so far as Yakuta
ely “Cetned, seemed to be
tissig in the hands of White
‘oldies’ and another emigre,
‘unl? ,who had control of the
Amenies® to Africa and South
4 sent Yakuta-to Morocco.

aaa

. for him.”

country and, as he was .

,-

Se

For months the two
were given lesson
they were droppe
Weeks passed, but the
ed? Read the story on

“You can’t pelieve,” said Ya-
kuta in his statement, “what all
this pushing about does to a man

when he has no country, nobody; -

behind him, nobody to stick up

In Morocco, too, he found, it
was mainly White Russians who
were the “eontractors.” The head
of a big enterprise there was
Prince Beloselsky, who ran away
from Russia to Paris in 1917, and
his chief assistants were other
White Russians named Fedchen-

ko and Bruno.

It was in Morocco that the
anti-Soviet conditioning process
began. More and more overtly,
it was suggested to Yakuta that
his one way of escape from hard-
ships which -were | killing off
many of the DPs was to “take up
active work and ‘become a some-
body.’ ”

The chief of a White Russian
organization, Baidalakov, appear-
od oa the scene and talked to the
Russian DPs. He spoke as a lover
of his native country who was
“deeply saddened by the suffer-
ings of his poor fellow-country-
men.” He referred to certain
schools for “active workers” that
had been set up i
ast and persuasively appealed
for recruits. ;
hom
dalakov and others W
later glossed over
between these

Bai
Yakuta ee
the connection 1
schools and the American eS

: saat 40
ionage service, and tri
Deane “Russian” character.
Later the connection could not
be concealed.

Yakuta admitted quite frankly
that he had 2 craving for drink
and that the drink with which
he was plied by Baidalakov help-

t rsuade him to become a
pan to a school which Baid-
run by his or-

alakov said was
ganization.

back to Germany
ken to Paris where
liminary: indoctri-
f Piotr Stoly-
“hangman

In his way
Yakuta was ta
he received pre
nation from a son 0

pin, the notorious

Premier” of Tsarist days.
Yakuta said that his first spy

school was at Bad-Homburg, 4

resort about 20 kilometres from

Me

s in parachute jumping, , ‘
d from a plane without identification marks into
U.S. espionage service failed to make contact with them. What had happen-

this page for the answer.

n Western Ger: |

Frankfort - on - Maine — in the
building 57-59, Kaiserfriedrichs
Promenad which bears a plaque
‘Institute for the Study of USSR
Affairs.”

The director of the school,
Boris Borisovich Martino, he said,
was the son of a tsarist officer,
and other White Russians on the
staff were Baidalakov, Paremsky,
Redlikh, Utekhin and Okolovich.

When the course there was fin-
ished Yakuta and other “stu-
dents” were taken to an isolated
villa on the shore of the Starnber-
gersee near Munich. There they
were met by three Americans,
one of them a Captain Holliday,
he said, sometimes referred to as
Bill, sometimes as Igor Sergeye-
vich, On an American army
shooting-range nearby he was
given lessons in parachute jump-
ing and in marksmanship. ‘

From there he was taken to a
house in another resort on the
Tegernsee also near Munich
where he met his future partner,
Kudryavtsev.

Kudryavtsev was only 14 when
the Germans invaded his part of
the Soviet Union. Like Yakuta,
he had his spell in a labor gang
in Morocco and went through the
same spy schoools. Only rarely
did he hear scraps of real facts
about conditions in the Soviet
Union — from camp-mates, who
had received letters from friends

espionage service ..- - ,
won't like the facts revealed in

this story.

“displaced persons” were trained by American espionage experts. They
marksmanship, map reading, radio-telegraphy, coding. Then
their homeland, the Soviet Union.

at home or had managed to hear
broadeasts in their native tongue
from their native land.

“The Americans,” he _ said,
“kept telling the DPs about the
‘awful things’ that would happen
to them if they returned to the
USSR. Many people would have
gone home if it had not been for
this continual terrorizing.”

*

The training the two received
included map-reading, radio-tele-
graphy, coding, invisible writing
in various media and identifica-
tion of Soviet aircraft and other
armament. Their first duty was
to establish radio contact with
the spy centre near Munich. Then
they had to mix with the popula-
tion and gradually head for the
Moscow district, where they had
to make their home. They had
to report (in some cases by radio,
and in other cases by mail) all
they could gather about military
and _ industrial installations.
Where possible they had to sow
discord and discontent; one of
the methods recommended was
“poison pen” letters accusing
prominent persons of various of-
fences. Various methods of sabot-
age were suggested.’

Their radio apparatus could
emit “beam” or directional notes
for aircraft. The “beam” would
be used to direct later planes
when they were dropping new
spies; if war broke out it would
be used for directing bombers
to their targets. :

They were expected to replace
their American-made documents
as early as possible with genuine
documents — procured by mur-
dering the possessors of the docu-

ments.
*

It was repeatedly impressed
upon “students” that if they were
captured they must insist that
their training had been entirely
in the hands of a White Russian
organization and that they had
had no connection with the Am-
erican spy system.

Each of the students had to
have his “morse - handwriting”
sound-recorded, so that the re-
ceivers of the messsages they
sent from the Soviet Union could

recognize the messages as having ©

a came || 4 1TH |

The parachutists went home

actually been tapped out by a
“genuine” spy.

After their training was com-
pleted Captain Holliday took the
recruits to Munich, where, in the
stores of an Ameriean barracks,
they were fitted out with their
equipment — parachute “har-
ness,” clothes which bore no
marks of their origin, false docu-
ments, maps, code keys, radio
set, wads of Soviet currency, geld
coins, arms fitted with silencers
and so on. :

Holliday, who "according to
both men, had a bluff, hearty
manner, explained cheerfully to
them that into the points of their
shirt collars had been sewn little
ampoules of poison. If the worst
came to the worst, he said, al!
they had to do was to bite that
corner of cloth and death would
be instantaneous.

*

From Munich -they were taken
by plane to Salonika in the com-
pany of an American (known as
“Voloyda”’) and another Ameri-
can major. In Greece they were
transferred to a four-engined
bomber without identification
marks.

When the time came — after
a long flight without navigation
lights and at a high altitude —
Kudryartsv jumped as ordered.
Yakuta stood vacillating in the
doorway for a time, and one of
the Americans gave him a push
that sent him out. Once again
he had been “pushed around”!

' Then came the nightmare. They
started wandering from.place to
place, bitterly conscious of their
isolation from the people they
saw. They gradually exchanged
confidences. Both wanted to re-
turn to their native parts; both
came to realize that they had
been cruelly duped, though they
did not conceal from themselves

‘how much of the fault was their.

own.

But, before they came to any
real mutual understanding, each
in his own way found excuses for
not sending back the important
first message about their “safe
arrival.” Eventually they agreed
to bury their equipment, try te
set work somewhere and to mix
with their fellow - countrymen
not as enemies but as friends.

*

Even that decision did n
take the burden of guilt off ese
minds; they realized that they
could never be able to look
straight into the eyes of anyone
they met. They found temporary
refuge in a town, and eventually
braced themselves to “make a .
clean breast of it.” Together they
went to the town’s headquarters
of the State Security department,
told all they had done and show-
ed where they had buried their
equipment. ba

- They handed over a list of ad-
dresses to which they had been
instructed to mail espionage re-
ports — Jules Boussard, 11, Rue
Adrienne de Witte, Liege, Belg-
ium; P. Kastorny, F. M. B., Alvik
Gardanger, Norway; “Kohn and

. Shurmann, 0. H. G.” Wolzogen-

strasse, Zellendorf, Berlin.

Instead of being “liquidated”—
as their American teachers had
prophesied and as they them-
selves were inclined to fear —
Yakuta and Kudryavtsev have
been allowed to live and work
freely in the Soviet Union. They
have, _in short, been accepted
back into the Soviet family as
returned prodigal sons.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — AUGUST 27, 1954 — PAGE 9