1970s: Chinese Infiltrators and Counterintelligence in the Soviet Far East

This chapter thirteen from Yuri Ufimtsev’s book Сквозь бамбуковой занавес. КГБ в Китае [The KGB in the PRC. Through the Bamboo Curtain] from Soviet counter-intelligence aimed at suspected Chinese infiltrators in the Soviet Far East from the 1960s to the 1990s and especially during the Cultural Revolution.

I found this book excerpt online and translated it using the DeepL extension on my Chrome browser. I’ve forgotten all the Russian I learned 20 years ago so I have not been able to do much to revise this translation except for several places where I compared the DeepL machine translation with Google Translate.

In this article like 2012: Chinese Military Espionage Against Russia I reflects Russian concerns that China plans to settle the Russian Far East which has much lower population than the neighboring Chinese provinces of Heilongjiang and Jilin which have over 20 million people each. Two years ago some articles circulating online in China suggested that China should retake portions of the now Russian Far East that the Qing Dynasty lost in the mid nineteenth century. See 2022: Weibo: We Got Hong Kong Back, Why Not Vladivostok?

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Yuri Ufimtsev: Spies and Defectors

Юрий Уфимцев: Шпионы и перебежчики

News of Russian Spain October 12, 2016

Wikitravel map: Primorky.Krai To the north are Khabarovsk Krai and the Jewish Autonomous Region

With the start of the cultural revolution along the world’s longest land border of 4100 km, a so-called “Chinese syndrome” began, mass migration of people from China. Some for political reasons, others for a better life. For example, on 100 km of the southernmost part of the eastern border, up to 47 defectors came in per month. Throughout the border, this translated into solid figures. The KGB had reliable information that this channel was widely used by Chinese intelligence services to plant their agents. “The Chinese intelligence services actively used any channels and means,” recalled the head of the KGB in the Primorsky Krai, Lieutenant General Grigorev. To penetrate our territory and gather information: the direction of spy agents under the guise of Chinese and Korean defectors, total surveillance along the border, processing of border populations.

Careful filtration was needed. But, not having its own investigative isolator, the KGB faced great organizational problems and information leakage. Therefore, it was decided to build such a detention center under the KGB. The justification was sent to the Center. At 11 p.m., Andropov called to the apartment of the head of KGB:

– You are doing a lot of good in Primorye,” he said, “and the Committee supports you, but I must say that your proposal to build a detention center is a political miscommunication. People may think the committee is building new prisons, but it’s hard to explain to everyone what it is all about. You are the head of a political body – you have to think deeper. Look for another option – on the basis of the detention center of the Department of Internal Affairs. Maybe there is an opportunity to reconstruct it? We will allocate funds to you.

Funds were allocated and the isolation center was reconstructed.

The filtering of defectors was carried out on various grounds. If a defector was not very bright or a defector in pursuit of money, they were immediately disposed of by handing them over to the Chinese side. If the defector was politically motivated, he was treated heartily, not handed over to the Chinese, and also illegally sent back without being involved in work.

We worked with the others. We immediately tried to single out the secret service officers – it was usually not difficult – they behaved quite impudently, talked through their lips, smoked with their feet up? They were also handed over at once. Chinese secret service officers who had escaped the regime and possessed valuable secret information also came to our side. The Center continued to work with these people. As for those who were not suitable for further agent development, they were settled in isolated villages – mainly in the state farm “Pobeda” in Khabarovsk Krai, making informants in their own environment. The latter procured old military caps somewhere, put them on and walked around the homes of compatriots, charging everyone 10 rubles in exchange for a promise to report only good things about them to the KGB.

Here’s how Nezavisimaya Gazeta journalist Timchenko, who had the opportunity to visit one of these settlements in the late 1980s, describes it.

“In the godforsaken Kolyma village of Elgen in the Magadan Region, not far from the border with Yakutia and near the Oymyakon cold pole, journalistic fate led me to “China-town. This was the name given by the locals to the settlement, where the Chinese defectors lived for many years under strict police and KGB surveillance. On the eve of the warming of relations between China and the USSR, the colony was living its last days, so I was given the opportunity to talk to its inhabitants and to the guards.

My first interlocutor, Li Xincheng, told me that he fled China in 1971 to escape the repression of the “Cultural Revolution. He himself surrendered to our border guards. Then there were filtration camps and resettlement camps, the last of which was Elgen. Did the other settlers have other legends or stories? Medvedev, an employee of the counterintelligence service of the Russian Ministry of Security (by then no longer KGB, but still not yet the Federal Security Service FSB) in the Magadan region, told me the prehistory of the establishment of such special settlements in the Far North. It is known that in the 60-80’s the USSR and China were in a relationship close to war. Therefore, our security services saw potential enemy agents in every defector, hence the filtration zones and camps.

We could not simply deport these people back to China, because we were in full diplomatic confrontation with them. There were several attempts to hand over to Chinese border guards their fellow citizens, but they were immediately shot in front of our parliamentarians. According to Medvedev, people were then sent from China and forced to go to the Soviet Union “to settle”. Their task was to study the terrain and economy of the area well, get used to their specific environment, and wait for the “X” hour. They were also given recommendations on how to get a foothold in Russia. First of all, to try to marry a Russian woman, to obtain Soviet citizenship, and thus freedom of movement. Another option: to commit a minor criminal offense, to serve some time, to be released from prison with a certificate of freedom, and to obtain a passport on the basis of this certificate.

That is why Chinese citizens were locked up in Kolyma, there was no way out. Obviously, it was not in the settlers’ plans to be locked up, and they were constantly making attempts to escape inside Russia. But all escape attempts also failed because the Chinese settlement was stuffed with snitches and re-turned-agents. In short, the State Security Service was on guard.

The situation in the camp was tense. Although they lived according to the principle of free settlement, the regime was very strict: don’t take a step beyond the village, at 10 o’clock – lights out, constant checks and “thorough search”, for every offence – a punishment cell, three times caught drinking – a year of compulsory treatment in a Correctional Medical and Labor Prophylactic Institution. And yet, even in captivity, they managed to put down roots in Russia.

Asked Lee Hsingche if he had a fiancée, or a wife? “I have five children in Russia by different women – in Vladivostok, Khabarovsk – everywhere. I have been in settlements, and all in all I have lived in your country under supervision for 20 years.”

And then everything was turned upside down. Gorbachev, who came to power, fraternized with China and took the country to the other extreme: he opened the borders wide, and our neighbors rushed to us in an avalanche. Yesterday’s prisoners of all the resettlements, of which there were many in the Far East and Far North-East, were finally set free and also rushed deep into Russia. By that time they all knew the Russian language, traditions, and Russian mentality and were ready to “settle down” in Russia in a very profound way.

And here’s how one of the KGB officers, who had passed through more than a hundred Chinese defectors, commented on this material.

I did not see any cases of execution on the spot. But practically every Chinaman we handed over was immediately put a stick between his hands behind his back. He would be tied to it. Two of them would carry it, and the third one would immediately start beating the dangler with his boots without pity. We kept asking the border guards not to do that or at least not in front of us. One day a captain of the Chinese state security service came over to us. He was carrying secret documents of interest. While we were chatting with him, he told us literally the following: – You have yet to confront China. They simply have nowhere else to to go. Or they will take you “velvet”-wedding and settle down. The Chinese are good family men. We got the captain involved in our work. Was that conversation back in the year 1961?

An interesting case of such a “velvet” marriage of one of his “charges” was described by Colonel Anatoly Smirnov, an honorary officer of the State Security Service, in his book Dossier of a Border Interrogator.

There were two Chinese people living in Primorye who were some kind of consultants for us. And one of them had an urge to get married. Somehow he found out that in a small village on the Kolyma lived a family of Tazy, there is such a nationality among the northern peoples. The younger brother of the two decided to unite his fate with them. His name was Petya in Russian, and the older one, the one with an eyesore, was called Vasya. The three of us came to the village. A district policeman was assigned to help me. One hour before the departure of the steamship – the groom lies in bed with his bride, half an hour – we are freezing with the policeman under the window – the groom is having sex. There are no curtains, the house is in the ground, through the window you can see through the house? On the steamer the brothers were put in a cabin for two. The women were returning from the pollack fishery on this ship. Folks up and down the coast called it a “drunken steamer” – most of the women were so drunk that their faces with glazed eyes looked blind. But they clung to the men.

At the first inspection of my Chinese, I did not find the groom in the cabin. Brother Vasya explained nothing, only stared at the one eye he saw. I went around the steamer. There’s no sign of him anywhere. Those ladies could push a Chinaman overboard. At that time, right after Damansky, they weren’t treated well. The Chinaman didn’t speak a word of Russian.

I knock on the passenger assistant. He is very unhappy. He stands at the door of the cabin without any intention of helping. Then some completely naked woman pushes him away and says: “Is this the Chinese guy? He’s in cabin 21!” So we go there with the assistant. We rescue the bridegroom from the drunk woman, who yells after us: “Then come yourself!”

And that’s how we got to Vladivostok, promising the bridegroom to take something away and the one-eyed brother – to put something on his eye. After that they settled down.

Those on whom, so to speak, “the eye was put” were first introduced to social reality, and then to special disciplines. Social reality was expressed in the fact that they were fed well, taken to shops, where they admired their eyes and mouths and talked – this was propaganda! But this was not propaganda. Propaganda was on the other side, where they said that Russians are dying of hunger: in the shops there was oil and sausage and bread and rice and cigarettes that the Chinese loved so much.

That is how, so to speak, those people who “laid eyes on” things were first introduced to social reality, and then to special disciplines. Social reality was expressed in the fact that they were fed well, taken to the stores – where they admired with their eyes and mouths off and said – “This is propaganda!” But it wasn’t propaganda. The propaganda was on the other side of the border where they were saying that the Russians were starving: there was butter and sausage and bread and rice and cigarettes, which the Chinese loved so much?

After that, the work began directly and later we made a return trip.

But we had reliable information,” Grigoryev said, “that this channel was widely used by the Chinese secret services for the infiltration of their agents as well. Therefore, the development of the defectors was done well. Every detail, down to intuition, was taken into account.

For example, a couple with a child entered the territory of Primorsky Krai. They began to work with them. But soon the operatives noticed one small peculiarity. The husband and wife did not sleep together. Stronger psychological treatment forced the outcasts to confess that they were not a family, but artificially created by Chinese intelligence to infiltrate Russia. They were handed back to China.

Soon another pair came out. It presented itself as an interesting material to develop. They began to work with her. We put them up in a safe house. But the situation repeated itself – the husband and wife did not sleep. She on the bed and he on the floor. Soon the couple disappeared. She was put on a nationwide wanted list and detained already in Kazakhstan. On their way there, the “family” managed to rob a Russian on the train of a rather large sum of money. The couple was taken to Moscow to be exchanged for ours if necessary.

On the basis of their vast experience, the Primorsky Krai Administration of the State Security Committee even wrote a note on how to identify all categories of defectors, which later became a training manual for the entire KGB apparatus. It was even possible to identify them by their clothes, which the Celestial Empire residents were given fabric once a year by ration cards. “By the clothes of the offenders,” recalled one of the interrogators. – I knew in what year, in what commune what material was issued. The Chinese were careful about their clothes. That’s why pants were worn for a long time, but the patch on the patch was just to show what and when the material was issued. Especially since the patches were most often of different colors.

At the behest of the KGB, a manual entitled An Inquiry into Border Violators was published. In 1982 I was on a training course in Moscow,” recalls one of the authors of the manual. – That’s where I was assigned to write the work. I did not know that this was a directive from the KGB of the USSR, and so, for fun, allowed some hilarious things. For example, I included a phrase I liked in the sample medical examination certificate for a border violator: “I am stable in the Romberg pose“. That’s how all the jokes and gags got into a book issued with the serious instructions of the KGB Chairman. If I had known, I would not have joked like that. And now in the textbooks of the Border Service of the Russian Federation (FPS) interrogators are some samples of the material I drafted back then.

The Chekists knew firsthand that framing is one of the methods of eastern intelligence work. Before the war, for example, a large group of Koreans appeared in Primorye under the guise of partisan renegades who had allegedly escaped from Manchuria from the Japanese. The Primorye special services already knew that these were Japanese agents and began their game: they introduced Chekist Major Song into the group. The Koreans were given to understand that they were believed, lodged outside the city, taken to the theaters and given special training sessions. Son to pass information from the group began to constantly go illegally to the other side? The game went on big, but on the eve of the war was it decided to eliminate them all?

One day a defector, Yu Gui, defected to the USSR. The KGB, assuming it was a set-up, decided to start a game. They staged an atmosphere of total trust in Gui and began to prepare him for a shuttle operation in the PRC. He made his first trip, during which, as it later became known, the Chinese gave him the task of gathering information on the disposition of military units, commanding officers, and types of weapons. Upon his return, Yu began to make a noticeable fuss, looking for surveillance and eavesdropping equipment. Once he had made sure that everything was clear, he began to violate the terms of his residence regime, going into the woods more and more often and appear in the vicinity of military facilities. To his neighbors, he explained his trips by his love for gathering berries, mushrooms, and catching river fish.

He started to get acquainted with local Koreans and often left home at night. This began to piss off the local police, who were constantly on the alert. One night, when Yu Gui once again left the house at night, the “sevens” (members of the 7th surveillance division) piled on him and, pretending to be drunkards, beat him up badly. After that, Gui stopped spying at night. But only at night. The Chinese was soon sent on a second trip from which he brought certain information and received a reward. He bought binoculars and a camera with the money he received from the KGB. The task force caught him red-handed, photographing the military airfield’s facilities and equipment. At the investigation he confessed to espionage and was convicted.

Sometimes such events ended tragically.

Three KGB officers together with a Chinese agent, nicknamed “Mongol”, left for the latter to go to the neighboring territory in the area of the village of Pogranichny. On the way, one of the officers felt ill on the way and was left behind. On arrival, the second security officer went to check the border, while the third – a young operative, remained in the car with the Chinese. While waiting for his comrade, the operative fell asleep, the Chinaman took out his pistol, shot him first in the heart and then in the head and decided to go abroad himself. Probably he did not want to go back, but seeing the inevitability of the moment, decided that it would be better to return with some solid luggage – like a gun and the murder of a Soviet Chekist. Then, if he had been captured by his own people, the latter might have counted for something positive. When the killer crossed the line of control on the state border, the system kicked in and a squad of border guards arrived at the scene. They began to chase him. The Chinaman, who had taken refuge in the bushes, killed the border dog that had caught him with the first bullet and himself with the second.

The Chinese corpse was sent to Vladivostok. There, two KGB officers were instructed to bury him in the cemetery, they gave a bottle to the gravediggers, but they did not check the corpse themselves and the gravediggers inadvertently buried a Soviet Korean instead of the Chinaman. When relatives of the latter came to receive their body, they were shocked to see a Chinese man. They had to conduct a reburial.

Russians also fled to the other side. To hold them, the Chinese set up a prison in the city of Fushun, where the former Kuomintang were held until the 1972 amnesty. The Russians were housed in several isolated units and used a library that still had tsarist books. The Chinese gave away Soviet defectors and infiltrators until 1977, and then began to return them in droves. They were mostly soldiers, fleeing hazing, criminals or just drunkards who had lost their bearings. For example, in 1967 in Kazakhstan a Kunzhibayev, who was not sober, went to China on a horse. Eleven years later, the Chinese returned him along with the horse, which had been in an unknown place for the whole decade.

The first defector, whom the Chinese turned over to the Soviets in 1977 as an act of goodwill, was the state farm worker Bondar, who had been held there for seven years. This was even reported to Andropov himself. Bondar got to China in 1970 together with his dog – he got lost because of a drunkenness and surrendered to the Chinese. The border guards followed Bondar’s trail and found a tiger’s footprint on it. Then they found a lying animal and a bone. They decided that Bondar had been eaten by a tiger and closed the case with the bone as a proof. They brought Bondar to the city of Dunnin, where he became famous as a man who eats a lot. Because of his heroic build, he ate as much at a time as an entire Chinese family would eat in a day.

The Chinese treated the intruder normally and began to work on him, periodically inquiring about his views on becoming a minister in a state that could be formed from the Urals to Vladivostok if the power in the USSR changed. He looked at him positively. He was “forced” to write proclamations, programs, appeals and leaflets in Russian. But on the October Revolution holiday Bondar got drunk and beat up the Chinese. The Chinese transferred him to prison, but did not stop working on him. They took him to the theater and to the Changchun machinery plant, built back in the ’50s by the Soviets. At the factory, they showed him a place for a machine tool, which was supposed to come under contract from the Soviet Union. There was no machine itself, but there was a sign in its place – “This is how the USSR fulfills its obligations.

Together with Bondar, the Chinese returned the dog. Where it had been all these seven years, Bondar did not know. The dog could hardly walk anymore, his eyes were watery, but he recognized his owner at once. Bondar refused to give up the doggie.

Lieutenant Mironov and Private Starikov, who were brought here from the Mongolian border region, were also held in Fushun prison. While hunting roe deer, they, from the territory of Mongolia, entered China. Mironov left the soldier in the car and went up the hill to look around. At this time, Chinese border guards detained Starikov, shooting him in the leg and shooting off a phalanx of his thumb. The lieutenant, hearing the shots, rushed to the rescue, but was also arrested. Twice during his imprisonment, Starikov tried to flee to Russia. On trains, buried under cargo, there was no water or food. Twice he made it to the border, but twice was caught both while crossing the border by Chinese border guards.

Private Avetisyan went missing in a border fortification. Two of his comrades-in-arms were arrested on suspicion of hazing. Under pressure from the investigation, after lengthy interrogations, they confessed that they had killed Avetisyan by drowning him in the city’s public toilet. After pumping out the toilet, the operatives really found a skeleton. The investigation lasted a year and a half and was finally sent to court. Suddenly, the Chinese handed over a live Avetisyan to the border guards. It turned out that he was offended at his comrades-in-arms, because they went out to the bank of the Ussuri River, called the Chinese fishermen, who were fishing there, and they swam up, took him away and handed him over to their border guards. The Chinese kept him for a year and a half and finally decided to return him as he was no longer needed.

In 1970, Valentin Derbenev, an officer of the GRU radio-electronic reconnaissance station in the Far East, went to China. The Chinese kept him in prison for nine years and then deported him back as well.

That same year in the Amur region they handed over to the Russians an Ossetian named Britaev, who had worked on the Baikal–Amur Mainline railroad line and had fled to China by crossing the Amur River on a homemade basket of twigs wrapped in cellophane! The Chinese put him in a separate guarded room and began working with him, offering him almost the position of Caucasian governor if the situation in the USSR changed. Britaev was supposed to settle near Moscow, where he would buy a dacha and create a deep conspiracy party based on the cell system, where only four people know each other. Party cells were to be set up in the Transcaucasus, Central Asia, the Baltics and Ukraine, which the Chinese believed would become the most unstable regions for Russia.

For about a year they worked out the routes to get into the Soviet Union through the border of Khabarovsk Krai and as a backup in the Amur Oblast. Just before the transfer, Britaev, a former supplier for a military trading company, got a commercial hunch: he claimed that the Chinese were not aware of the real prices and that the money they were offering for the dacha was insufficient. The Chinese, on the other hand, thought there was enough money. Then Brietaev’s hot Caucasian blood boiled over and everything ended in a drunken brawl.

For three months the Chinese intelligence services severed all contact with him and finally decided to hand him over to the Russians. They did it quite artistically. On the eve of his extradition, without saying anything to Britaev, they gave him a banquet in the border town of Suifenhe where they thoroughly got him drunk. And then they brought him in a car with closed curtains to the border crossing point. Unsuspecting Britaev got out of the car and, as a KGB officer who received him recalled, “for the first time I saw a man’s pupils go white with fear. Britaev was taken to Moscow, where the investigation began and lasted a year. The defector, who had spent a total of about two years in Chinese and Soviet prison cells, as they say, “went crazy” and was placed in a psychiatric hospital.

Sokolov, a resident of Irkutsk, was also placed in a psychiatric hospital, trying to cross over to China in order, he said, to marry a Chinese woman. But he decided not to go to China empty-handed. Sokolov began collecting information about military units and military factories in Siberia. He himself made his way to factories and aviation units, where he photographed or sketched what he saw, possessing unquestionable artistic ability. When engineers were shown his sketches of aircraft engine parts at one of the plants, they literally grabbed their heads?

Having a phenomenal memory, Sokolov could easily quote any statement by Mao Zedong from a five-volume set of his Collected Works published in the USSR, unmistakably indicating the chapter, page and lines. On top of everything else, Sokolov was a candidate master of sports and a first-rate boxer. He could walk 60 kilometers with a 50 kg rucksack. Such ideas and phenomenal abilities could not appear in a normal person and during examination Sokolov was diagnosed as schizophrenic.

The Transport Department of the KGB also investigated cases of civil aviation aircraft hijacking in China. According to the decree of the Supreme Soviet Presidium, since January 1973 aircraft hijacking has been considered an independent crime and an armed police officer had to be present in every major passenger aircraft to prevent possible excesses. Thus, on May 17, 1973 a citizen Rzaev attempted to hijack the Tu-104 liner that was flying between Moscow and Chita.

At an altitude of six and a half thousand kilometers, the hijacker threatened to blow up the plane and demanded that it change course to fly to China. A policeman accompanying the plane shot Rzayev in the back, after which an improvised explosive device went off. The plane disintegrated in midair and all 81 people were killed.

December 19, 1985, 33-year-old co-pilot Lezgin Alimuradov directed his piloted An-24, en route Yakutsk-Irkutsk, in China and landed near Hailar.

The Harbin court sentenced the hijacker to eight years in prison. Four years later, the Chinese returned Alimuradov, and in the summer of 1990, the Supreme Court of the Yakut ASSR sentenced the hijacker to an additional five years.

Once a Soviet helicopter accidentally veered off course and was forced to land on Chinese territory. Soon the Chinese recovered both the car and the crew. Our helicopter pilots, in turn, helped evacuate Chinese border guards who had been cut off from their base in the mountains by a snowstorm. As English counterintelligence officer Peter Wright wrote, “espionage is a crime almost devoid of evidence; therefore intuition, good or bad, always plays a major role in its successful exposure.

On May 9, 1978, a man jumped off a train running along the border in the Dalnerechensky district of Primorsky Krai, crossed the border control lines, crossed the Ussuri River, and reached the opposite Chinese shore near Yueyaphao town. The border patrol found on our shore still warm clothes, a pack of cigarettes, and a door key. The outpost and patrol ships went on alert. The head of the Dalnerechensk border guard detachment reported what had happened to the district staff on duty in Khabarovsk and asked what to do. But the head of the district troops had a bad “hangover” and did not answer the VCh. Then the Chief of Staff gave the order to act according to the situation and by all means prevent the breakthrough. In accordance with the spirit of the order, the border guard detachment commander decided to rush to the Chinese shore and capture the intruder.

Twenty paratroopers in two “Stork” boats with the brigade commander in the lead landed on the Chinese shore, fired several bursts into the air and rushed after the intruder, who by that time had managed to go two kilometers deep into the Chinese territory and went into a wooden gatehouse. When the guards rushed into the gatehouse – nobody was there. The intruder, as it was found out later, hid in the swamp and was breathing there through a reed reed, like a real spy, waiting for everything to happen. Then the senior lieutenant decided to take some peasants for a later exchange. The peasants and the lieutenant did not want to leave and began to lie down on the ground. The lieutenant fired another round from his submachine gun to get rid of them and they started getting up. According to a 1993 Harbin official publication on international relations in the province, two Chinese men were wounded as a result of the shooting.

No one knows how it would have ended if the paratroopers had not received an order to return via field communication. The order came from Moscow, from the Main Directorate of the Interior Ministry, which by then had been informed of what had happened.

The very next day the Chinese protested against the actions of the Russian side. It’s because of such stupid decisions,” remarked the First Secretary of the Krai Committee of the CPSU at the time, “that military conflicts arise. Andropov took over the investigation of the incident and punished many officers. But the soldiers who honestly followed the brigade commander’s orders were rewarded with medals.

The case went around the world – the Chinese made a statement to the UN Security Council and attached the shell casings left by the Russians on the Chinese side for the sake of clarity. The Russian side apologized, reasoning that an armed criminal escaped and asked for his return. But who really escaped was not yet known. And here the same intuition that Peter Wright spoke of helped.

“Often my dreams performed, if I may say so, official functions, helping to find non-standard solutions in current practical cases,” said Grigoryev, head of the KGB Primorsky Krai Department. This time in his dream he visibly imagined a report from a subordinate that a tenant had mysteriously disappeared from the East Port dormitory. “Following this, I had a vague image of a man with a door key in his hands in my imagination.” In the morning Grigoriev gave the order to test the key found on the bank of the Ussuri River in the keyhole of the Eastern Port. It turned out that the renegade and the missing worker Starchenko were one and the same person. Later, through its own channels, the KGB received confirmation that it was he who left for the PRC and later moved to the United States – from there he called his roommate in Krasnodar, which was recorded by the security authorities.

… Somehow in the taiga they had already been searching for a Chinese intruder for a long time, to no avail. Even curators from Moscow arrived on this occasion. ? And then a local man comes up to me. – one of the participants in the search, Captain Smirnov, recalled. – Excuse me – he says – maybe you don’t believe in it, maybe you will think it’s funny, but my mother-in-law is a famous fortune-teller in the village, a sort of clairvoyant. So, she has been searching for the second day in her own way, but she says you have to look in such a district? I listened. Nodded. My supervisor from Lubyanka really liked it: “What an active help! Even fortune-tellers working for you!? The detainee was found not far from the place indicated by fortune-teller. Although I do not believe in fortune-telling, but the fact? So intuition, good or bad, always plays a big role?

The question of defectors came up for the last time just before the KGB was liquidated.

In September 1991, at 8:10 a.m., the phone with the inscription “Chairman” (Bakatin) rang in the office of the head of intelligence Shebarshin:

• A Japanese newspaper reports that thousands of party functionaries are fleeing the Soviet Union to China via Xinjiang. Check immediately.
• I think it’s misinformation. Is it flowing now?
• Check it immediately!

Ten minutes after the order, telegrams were already sent to the Beijing and Tokyo residences, demanding that they check and report back to the center immediately.

“A mission is a mission,” Shebarshin recalled. – During my long service, I had to perform so many ridiculous assignments that it made no difference whether one was more or less.

We asked the border guards and KGB of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan. It turned out that, on the contrary, two Chinese intruders were detained, who had already been sent back.

Soon the phone rang again:

• What do you have on defectors?
• Border guards say all is quiet?
• I know what the border guards are saying without you! What does intelligence know?
• Nothing yet. As soon as I get the answers from the residences, I’ll let you know. I’m sure we’re dealing with misinformation.

Shortly thereafter, the agent spoke with the author of the article in Tokyo. The Japanese referred to vague rumors. The Beijing resident categorically denied China’s acceptance of any defectors. Shebarshin went to Bakatin: – Quite obvious misinformation. The authors take into account the unstable psychological state of the new government, and instigate it on the Communists. It does not matter that the fiction will be exposed – doubts will remain, and the next time the poisoned seeds will be thrown on the prepared ground from somewhere else. The methodology is well known to us.”

It was decided to ignore the Japanese information. – Disinformation makes less of an impression if it is simply ignored,” Shebarshin commented.

How the great neighbors went to visit. Spies and defectors

Yuri Ufimtsev

Chapter 13 from the book “The KGB in the PRC. Through the Bamboo Curtain

The sources of this chapter:

• Grigoriev K. Rolls of fate. Vladivostok. “Ussuri”,1996.
• Smirnov A. Dossier of a border interrogator. Vladivostok. “Russian Island”,2001.
• Shebarshin L. From the Life of a Chief of Intelligence. Moscow International Relations, 1994
• Escape from the Empire ? h ttp://www.hijacking.far.ru/
• Timtchenko S. Will there be a “Chinatown” in St. Petersburg? – Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 7.06.2001.
• Oral recollections of Chekists
• Proceedings of Heilongjiang Province. Issue N 69. Foreign Affairs. Harbin. “Heilongjiang People’s Publishing House, 1993 (in Chinese).
• Prokhorov D., Lemekhov O. Perebezhchiki. Executed in absentia. M. Veche, ARIA-AiF 2001.