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Central Intelligence Agency
The Work of a Nation. The Center of Intelligence
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CSI
- Info
German fabrications/provocations in 1945-48, detection by US,
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| Early in 1947. MI6, which had a profound interest in determining whether the Klatt operation had been under Soviet control for deception purposes, obtained G-2's permission to send an officer to Oberursel to question Klatt. They had no interest in interrogating Turkul or Longin. The officer they sent was Klop Ustinov (the father of Peter Ustinov, the actor), who had had some experience with the Cheka in Moscow in 1917 and during the Second World War was considered to be one of MI5's top operators against the Germans. | | | Klatt related further that in late 1945 he had had an unexpected visit to Salzburg from Schultz, who had proposed that Klatt join him in Vienna to establish an export-import business. Suspecting that Schultz was trying to lure him into Soviet hands, Klatt declined. In any case, by that time he had established contact with SSU in Salzburg and foresaw a rosy future for himself -as a fabricator, but this point was of course not made to the SSU people, who had so neglected to question Klatt in any detail that he was convinced he could outwit them to his own advantage. Space does not permit recounting here all the details provided by Klatt about his wartime activities and methods of survival. Suffice it to say that he was a maneuverer par excellence. |
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| Ustinov and I interrogated Klatt for several hours, during which it was evident that he was resolved not to admit any suspicion of Soviet control of his wartime network. By prearrangement with me Ustinov abruptly dismissed Klatt, who was then taken, also by prearrangement, to a cell in the stockade rather than to the house he had been occupying with his mistress. About an hour later the stockade guard summoned me urgently to inform me that Klatt had hanged himself but had been cut down in time. After the post doctor had exanuned him thoroughly and found that he was in no physical danger, I began questioning him and found that he no longer had the will to resist. | | |
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| | About mid-1947 Klatt, Turkul, and Longin were released. Klatt returned to Salzburg, but that was not the end of my contact with him. In 1952 I bumped into him in a street in Salzburg, whereupon he launched into an attempt to sell me a network that he now "really" had in the Soviet Union. I brushed him off in a few minutes, hoping I would neither see nor hear of him again. Another vain hope! In 1964 a CIA officer in Austria told me that he had established initial contact in Salzburg with a man named Richard Kauder, who appeared to have a network of sources in the USSR. In response to his request for traces from CIA's headquarters files, the officer had been informed that Kauder, alias Klatt, was "suspected" of having fronted for a Soviet-controlled operation against the Germans during the war, but, despite this, information on his current alleged network should be developed without making any commitments. I enlightened the CIA officer, but what SSU, which had received all my interrogation reports on Klatt, had done with them remained another bureaucratic enigma. |
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| Klatt admitted that he had suspected as early as 1941 that he was being used by the Soviets through Schultz to pass deception to the Abwehr but for his own purpose of self-protection had refrained from questioning Schultz. As long as the Abwehr was satisfied, Klatt was happy. He admitted that toward the end of the war, just before fleeing from Vienna to Salzburg to avoid falling into Soviet hands, Schultz had "disappointed" him by telling him that he, Schultz, was a Soviet agent, had been one since 1939, and had conspired with the Soviets to build the "network" for which Klatt was the front man to the Abwehr. Turkul and Longin, according to Schultz, had been mere figureheads to help add an air of authenticity to the network, because, as Russian emigres, they could plausibly have acquaintances in the USSR who could be developed into sources. Schultz, according to Klatt, told him further that neither Turkul nor Longin knew that the entire operation was Soviet controlled. Whatever they might have suspected, they were survivors who had learned years before that survival often depends on keeping one's suspicions to himself. | | |
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| | | As defectors from Soviet intelligence and agents arrested by CIC were sent to Oberursel for interrogation, we were able to form a picture of some activities of the Serov Group. This was the large Soviet state security group (MGB at the time) stationed in East Germany and headed by Col. Gen. Ivan A. Serov, who in 1954 became chief of the KGB for over four years. It emerged from these interrogations that one of the Serov Group's primary objectives, if not the primary objective, was the long-range mass |
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Posted: May 08, 2007 08:56 AM
Last Updated: May 08, 2007 08:56 AM
Last Reviewed: May 08, 2007 08:56 AM
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