Iosif Stanislavovich Unshlikht

Upon becoming deputy chairman of the Cheka in 1921, Unshlikht went beyond traditional counterintelligence and argued for offensive information warfare that could disorient adversary camps. On his initiative the Cheka created a 'Special Bureau for Active Reconnaissance and Disinformation,' the first institutional unit in Soviet intelligence history dedicated to systematic deception (dezinformatsiya) operations. Early campaigns, aimed above all at Poland and Romania, sought to split White remnants and émigré organizations abroad. After moving to the Revolutionary Military Council, Unshlikht continued this line by supervising military intelligence (the Fourth Directorate) and the Special Technical Bureau, and as a member of the Comintern's standing military commission he helped build underground networks and provide intelligence and weapons support for the abortive German armed uprising of 1923 (the so-called 'German October'). His initiative is regarded as one of the cornerstones of the offensive intelligence and psychological-warfare tradition that Soviet state-security organs later institutionalized as 'active measures' (aktivnyye meropriyatiya).

On 11 June 1937 Unshlikht was arrested at his Kremlin flat in Moscow and his party membership and candidate membership of the party Central Committee were revoked in connection with the arrest. Sources frame the charge differently. The Openlist/Memorial record states he was charged with creating a counterrevolutionary organization, espionage and preparation of terrorist acts, in the case of the 'anti-Soviet Trotskyist military organization in the Red Army'; since the arrest date coincides with the opening of the Tukhachevsky trial, the arrest cannot be reduced to the Polish Operation alone. English Wikipedia, by contrast, reports that about two weeks after the arrest NKVD head Nikolay Yezhov told a Central Committee plenum that the police had uncovered a 'Polish Military Organisation' (POV) of spies who had infiltrated the USSR posing as political émigrés, and named Unshlikht as its leader. The name was taken from a real organization (founded 1914, disbanded 1921). He confessed under interrogation and named most leading members of the exiled Polish Communist Party as his 'accomplices'. On 28 July 1938 the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court sentenced him to death. In court he retracted his confession, saying he had never belonged to the 'Polish Military Organisation' and had made those statements solely because he could not endure prolonged interrogations; he had not retracted them before the USSR Procurator because several NKVD commissioners were present at that interrogation and he feared to renounce his earlier testimony. The hearing lasted about twenty minutes. English Wikipedia infers from the recantation that interrogators used sleep deprivation to break him, but that is the contributor's inference rather than a documentary quote. Despite the absurdity of the charges and his categorical retraction of testimony obtained by beating, the Military Collegium imposed the highest measure of punishment, and he was executed at the Kommunarka shooting ground in Moscow oblast on 29 July 1938. The exact day is disputed: some accounts give 28 July and add 'according to other data, 29 July'. The death year 1938 is undisputed. He was posthumously rehabilitated and restored to the party in 1956; Openlist records the rehabilitation date as 10 March 1956, by the same Military Collegium and for absence of corpus delicti.