Stalin’s spymaster who eliminated Trotsky, then spent fifteen years in Stalin’s prisons
Beria was not in the least interested in whether the people we recommended were guilty or innocent. He asked one single question: 'Are you sure we need them?' — Special Tasks
Born the son of a miller in Melitopol, he joined the Red Army at twelve and survived the lawless chaos of the Civil War before rising through the GPU as a covert operative. In 1938 he assassinated OUN leader Yevhen Konovalets in Rotterdam on Stalin's personal order, and in 1940 he and Naum Eitingon ran Operation Duck, eliminating Leon Trotsky. During the German-Soviet war, as head of the 4th Directorate he directed partisan and sabotage warfare behind enemy lines and oversaw atomic espionage (Group S). Arrested in 1953 as Beria's 'accomplice,' he served fifteen years in prison, then wrote historical novels under a pseudonym and was fully rehabilitated in 1992 after the USSR collapsed. His memoir Special Tasks is the first insider account of the Soviet intelligence services' most secret operations.
Career Timeline
- 1919–1921Red Army boy soldier; captured, escaped, homeless in Odessa
- 1921–1932GPU and OGPU intelligence officer in Ukraine
- 1933–1938INO OGPU/NKVD — infiltrated OUN in Berlin, covert operations abroad
- 1938Assassinated Konovalets in Rotterdam; acting head of NKVD foreign intelligence (Nov–Dec)
- 1939–1941Deputy head of foreign intelligence; Operation Duck — Trotsky assassination
- 1941–1946Head of 4th NKVD Directorate — partisan/sabotage warfare; atomic intelligence Group S
- 1946–1953Post-war sabotage ops against NATO; deputy head of MVD First Chief Directorate (1953)
- 1953–1968Arrested as Beria accomplice; 15-year sentence served in Vladimir Prison
- 1968–1996Released, wrote novels under pseudonym; fully rehabilitated 1992, published Special Tasks
Related historical events
May 23, 1938: a Box of Chocolates in Rotterdam
Pavel Sudoplatov was born in Melitopol, joined the Red Army as a boy in the midst of the civil war, and began working in the Cheka apparatus while still in his teens. In the 1930s he infiltrated the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) abroad in the guise of a courier. The OUN's leader, Yevhen Konovalets, was working with German intelligence and preparing operations aimed at the Soviet Union. On May 23, 1938, in a Rotterdam cafe, Sudoplatov handed Konovalets a box of chocolates rigged with a bomb and left. Minutes later the explosion killed Konovalets instantly, and Sudoplatov made his way safely back across Europe.
In 1939 Stalin summoned him personally and put him in charge of the operation against Trotsky, code-named "Utka" (Duck). Together with Eitingon he built the network in Mexico, and in August 1940 Ramón Mercader killed Trotsky. When the war began, Sudoplatov headed the NKVD's Administration for Special Tasks (later the Fourth Directorate), directing partisan warfare and sabotage behind enemy lines and the radio deception games against the Abwehr known as "Monastyr" and "Berezino".
From the end of the war he led Department S, the coordinating desk that collated atomic intelligence arriving from Klaus Fuchs and other foreign sources and channeled it into Kurchatov's bomb program. His career ran for nearly twenty years through the most secret domains of Soviet intelligence, special operations and deception, and the weight of that career would later decide his fate.
August 1953, the Road to Vladimir Prison
When Beria fell in June 1953, a purge of the officers who had worked in his apparatus followed. Sudoplatov was arrested in his own office that August. He refused to admit the charges, and as the investigation dragged on he feigned insanity, holding out for years in prison psychiatric hospitals. In 1958 he was finally sentenced to fifteen years, which he served in Vladimir Central Prison until August 1968. He left prison half-blind after a stroke, fought for rehabilitation for a quarter of a century, and was rehabilitated only in January 1992.
His memoir Special Tasks, published in the United States in 1994, caused a sensation as first-hand testimony from inside Soviet intelligence history, but it also ignited a fierce controversy over its reliability. In particular, its claims that Western scientists such as Oppenheimer, Fermi, and Bohr knowingly cooperated with Soviet intelligence were examined by historians of the atomic project, David Holloway among them, and by the physics community, and found to lack documentary support. Scholarship today uses the memoir selectively, checking it against archival records.
Sudoplatov died in Moscow in 1996. His life displays at once the reality of the special operations the Soviet state ran in its most dangerous years, and the price paid by the instruments of those operations when the political wind changed. The executor of the Konovalets and Trotsky operations and the coordinator of partisan warfare and atomic intelligence spent the last forty years of his life fighting for his good name against the state he had served.