Soon, the Soviet diplomatic couriers who had returned to Moscow in the same train with Smirnov’s wife returned to Paris. They confirmed the news of Smirnov’s arrest: the train had just stopped at the Belarus station in Moscow when a plainclothesman from the NKVD appeared in the compartment and asked Smirnova to come with him.
“Where is my husband?” She was surprised, because there was no her husband on the platform.
“He is waiting for you in the car,” replied the plainclothesman.
She had to get out of the car with him, full of doubts. After walking out of the station, they came to a dilapidated open gasser. The plainclothesman pushed her into the car, but there was no Smirnov in it. The poor woman fell to the ground. The messenger, who had been following along, rushed forward and helped the plainclothesman to help Smirnov into the car. After that, never heard from her again.
Seeing that the news of Smirnov’s arrest had reached Paris, Yezhov hastened to send out a circular announcing that Smirnov was a double agent for France and Poland. He was said to be a French spy because he had worked in France; he was designated as a Polish agent because he was born in Poland.
The NKVD staff in Paris did not believe Yerev’s nonsense at all; they were convinced that their top lieutenant was absolutely loyal to the Soviet motherland. If he was really a spy for the French counterintelligence service, it would mean that all the secrets he held, including the codes used by the intelligence station in France to communicate with Moscow, would no longer be secret to the French. Therefore, if Yezhov really believed that Smirnov was a double agent, the first thing he should have done would have been to immediately change the code and break all contact with the secret agent who had provided French secrets to the Soviet Union while Smirnov was in France. But Yerev did not do this, and the station continued to use the same codes and to obtain information from past informants.
In the summer of 1937, some forty Cheka agents abroad received recall orders from Moscow for a variety of reasons. All but five, who refused to return and insisted on staying abroad, fell into Yerev’s trap. Of those who refused to return, I knew of four: Ignatius Rice, a scout who was extremely deep undercover, Walter Krivitsky, head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs intelligence station in the Netherlands, and two other agents, whom I knew only by the aliases Paul and Bruno.
The first to recognize the trap was Ignatius Rice. In mid-July 1937, he sent a letter to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party to the Soviet Embassy in France, declaring his break with Stalin’s counter-revolutionary line and his decision to “return to freedom”. From this letter we can conclude that by returning to freedom he meant “returning to Leninism, Lenin’s doctrine and cause”.
Les broke with the Ministry of the Interior and the Party, which was an extremely dangerous precedent that could be followed by other personnel abroad. In that case, the crimes of the NKVD and the secrets of the Kremlin would be exposed one after another.
When Stalin learned of Les’s “defection,” he immediately ordered that the traitor, his wife and children be hunted down and killed. He wanted to make an example of them and warn all those who tried not to return to the country.
A team from the Special Operations Bureau immediately set out from Moscow to Switzerland, where Les was hiding. These assassins of Yezhov soon bribed a woman named Gertruda Hildebach. This woman was a trusted friend of the Les Family, but she betrayed the whereabouts of the “traitor” to Yerev’s assassins. In the early hours of September 4, Les’s body appeared on the road outside Lausanne, riddled with bullet holes.
The assassins fled in fear with Gertruda Hildebach, but left his luggage in the hotel. The Swiss police found a box of highly poisoned chocolate candies in Hildebach’s luggage. Apparently, the candies were intended for Les’s children. The reason why Hildebach did not use these candies to treat her children, who loved her very much, was probably that there was no Time to do so, and, of course, probably because of a reproachful conscience.
The assassination of Ignatius Les came rather quickly, so that he did not have time to reveal Stalin’s crimes to the outside world, although he wanted to do so very much.
Although Les was eliminated, within two months another head of an NKVD intelligence station abroad announced his break with the Soviet Union. This was Walter Krivitsky, who until 1935 had worked for the Red Army Reconnaissance Bureau. He abandoned his post in The Hague and came to Paris with his wife and young son.
Yerev sent an action team to Paris at once. Had the French government not acted decisively – sending armed police to keep him under protection and giving a strong warning to the Kremlin – Krivitsky would not have survived even a month. The French Foreign Ministry summoned the Soviet chargé d’affaires Gilchfield and asked him to convey to the Soviet government that the French public was overwhelmed by the recent kidnapping of the former Tsarist General Miller and that in this atmosphere the French government would be obliged to break off diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union if Soviet agents carried out similar kidnappings or assassinations on French soil of people who were not welcome in the Soviet Union.
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