Разведка и Кремль : записки нежелательного свидетеля

Memoirs of a high-ranking officer of the NKVD-KGB, who from the 1930s until 1953 headed the KGB department responsible for Soviet subversive operations abroad. Ch. 10 (pp. 336-365), "Kaliforniya v Krymu", deals with the wartime and postwar abortive attempt to establish a Jewish autonomous region in Crimea, as well as with the antisemitic campaign in the USSR in 1946-53. States that this campaign began in 1946, long before the establishment of the State of Israel. It was provoked by conflicts related to the property left behind by Jews evacuated in 1941 and seized by non-Jews, and with the fact that the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee acted to represent Jews in this issue. Presents his own version of the beginning of the "Doctors' Plot" affair. This affair triggered not only an outburst of antisemitism in the USSR, but also a purge of all Jewish officers from the central apparatus of the KGB (N. Eitingon, L. Kheifets, etc.); part of them were arrested as participants in a "Zionist plot". Describes the murder of Shlomo Mikhoels. In the following chapters, describes, inter alia, the case of Eitingon's arrest and execution in 1953. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism) According to KGB archives, Pavel Sudoplatov directed the secretive Administration for Special Tasks. This department was responsible for kidnapping, assassination, sabotage, and guerrilla warfare during World War II; it also set up illegal networks in the United States and Western Europe, and, most crucially, carried out atomic espionage in the United States, great Britain, and Canada. Sudoplatov served the KGB for over fifty years, at one point controlling more than twenty thousand guerrillas, moles, and spies. But his involvement with the most nefarious Soviet activities - and the rulers who ordered them - made Sudoplatov an unwanted witness, and he was arrested in 1953 after Beria's fall. Despite torture and solitary confinement he refused to "confess," disavowing any criminal actions. He spent fifteen years in prison, then struggled two decades more for rehabilitation.