Ivan Matveyevich Grachev

Ivan Matveyevich Grachev was born in March 1912 in the Chelyabinsk region. Little is known about his early years. His career was mostly as a regular army officer, and the amount of time he spent in an intelligence command was brief; he served in tactical intelligence staff positions for less than a year before he was captured as a POW. Consequently, his knowledge of strategic intelligence priorities may have been limited. However, the Germans recognized his ability to lead intelligence and diversionary units and teach at intelligence schools, possibly indicating that he had experience in clandestine operations during his military career.

Although Grachev directly supported German military intelligence during WWII, he claims that he used his Abwehr positions to help Russians endure German occupation. Grachev explained his cooperation with Germany thus: “Once having fallen into German hands, my career as a Soviet colonel (sic) was over. Either I could perish in the PW camp, or else I could be of some use at least…But I cannot say that I “consciously” went over to the Germans in order to fight Bolshevism.”[i]

Grachev entered the Soviet Army in September 1929 as a cadet in the Higher School of the All Russian Central Executive Committee, which was located in the Kremlin and manned the honor guard at Lenin’s Tomb. A posting at such a prestigious school implied a trusted background and promising future. Grachev’s Army career developed through increasingly responsible command and staff positions in the Siberian Military District over the next nine years. In September 1938 he was accepted into the Frunze Military Academy, graduating in June 1941 with the rank of major. His first intelligence position came after graduation when he was assigned to the Intelligence Department of the Siberian Military District. In September 1941 he was transferred to the same position in the Leningrad Front.[ii]

Grachev’s date of capture is unclear. According to Aleksandrov, Grachev was declared missing in action in September 1941, soon after arriving on Leningrad Front. Grachev himself claimed to have been captured by Germans in June 1942.[iii] Neither Aleksandrov nor Grachev provide clues about what occurred during the intervening nine months, although he likely spent much of that time in a German POW camp.

Grachev was interviewed for the Harvard interview project in Germany in January 1951, during which he mostly discussed his activities during WWII in support of Germany. He was initially held at the Orsha POW camp, in the northeastern portion of modern-day Belarus west of Smolensk, Russia, near where he was captured. Soon after arriving at the POW camp he joined the German-sponsored Русская Национальная Народная Армия (Russian National People’s Army; RNNA), also known as the Osintorf Brigade. Senior Russian émigrés had created the RNNA in March-April 1942, and by fall 1942 the unit had reached 3,300 members. The Soviet POWs that participated in the RNNA envisioned it as becoming the core of a future anti-Stalinist Russian army, but the Germans viewed it as a pool from which to select soldiers to infiltrate behind the Soviet lines.[iv]

In fall 1942, the RNNA took part in several battles against pro-Soviet partisans who were conducting sabotage and harassing operations against German occupation forces on Russian territory. Grachev recounted an instance when he was commanding an RNNA battalion in combat against pro-Soviet partisans and his unit captured five female partisans. He turned four of them over to the Germans but kept one on his staff as a switchboard operator. He indicated that he trusted her, but his trust was misplaced because she re-contacted the partisans, recruited other members of Grachev’s unit and led them back to the Soviet side. The Germans reacted strongly to the re-defection, disarmed the unit, and interrogated Grachev. He stated during his Harvard interview, “I thought that I would be hanged.”[v]

The unit Grachev commanded was Abwehrgruppe-211, a German unit designated to conduct sabotage and diversionary operations against Soviet forces in the area around Pskov, Russia, and to combat pro-Soviet partisans. The unit recruited agents and trained them to penetrate Soviet lines and to develop and disseminate anti-Soviet propaganda.[vi] Chuev indicates that Grachev worked at an Abwehr intelligence/sabotage school near Vöru, Estonia, west of Pskov during his time with Abwehrgruppe-211.[vii]

Re-defections like those experienced in Grachev’s unit increased when the Germans began exercising tighter control over RNNA troops in 1943, replacing Russian commanders with German officers and transitioning the soldiers to wearing German uniforms. Grachev claimed that RNNA soldiers resisted this increasing German supervision, because most of the Russians soldiers were motivated by Russian nationalism, not affinity to Germany. Grachev noted that one of the Russian commanders in the RNNA, former Soviet Army colonel Vladimir Gelyarovich Bayerskiy (pseudonym Boyarskiy), was openly anti-German, and other Russian officers tried to persuade him to be more discrete.[viii] Growing anti-German feelings resulted in RNNA units defecting back to the Soviet Union, eventually leading to the disestablishment the RNNA altogether in spring 1943.[ix]

Grachev survived German interrogations and in 1943-1944 continued his service in the Abwehr. Using the pseudonym Vladimir Alekseyevich Kopylov, he became a member of Abwehrgruppe-103, an element that operated under Operation Zeppelin to train and dispatch POWs into Soviet territory for intelligence and sabotage missions.[x] Aleksandrov indicates that he taught at the Abwehr school near Tiraspol, Moldavia, during this time, although Aleksandrov places him at the Abwehr school in Estonia subsequent to this assignment.[xi]

The sequence of Grachev’s positions in German forces is not clear. He claimed to have served as the chief of police in Mogilev, Belarus, in 1943 under German control, where he helped Russian residents avoid the worst of the German occupation. He later said, “I pride myself on having helped a great many people in Mogilev.”[xii] Before Grachev went to Mogilev, the former chief of staff of the RNNA, Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf Fridrikhovich Riehl, invited him to come to Berlin to meet Vlasov. Grachev declined the invitation, preferring to remain on Russian soil. But later, Vlasov himself traveled to Mogilev and met Grachev and persuaded him to accept the offer to come to Berlin. Grachev, along with number of the RNNA officers later joined the KONR, including Grachev’s RNNA colleague, another former Soviet intelligence officer, Petr Vasilyevich Kashtanov.[xiii]

As a KONR lieutenant colonel using the pseudonym V. M. Tarasov, Grachev was a founding member the KONR intelligence department in the fall of 1944. Grachev, former Soviet intelligence officer Nikolay Fedorovich Lapin, and another former Soviet officer, A. F. Vronskiy, set up the KONR intelligence department, with Grachev at its head. The department consisted of eight officers by the end 1944, and grew to 29 officers by April 1945.[xiv] These included other Soviet intelligence officers who had defected to Germany: Boris Alekseyevich Morozov, Vadim Andreyevich Denisov, Aleksandr Fedorovich Chikalov.[xv]

Grachev avoided forced repatriation after the war and began cooperating with U.S. military intelligence. In 1948, Grachev flew to Athens, Greece, to assist in an investigation of Chikalov, whom the U.S. Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) suspected of being a Soviet agent. Grachev did not catch Chikalov in Greece and assumed he had slipped away from the investigation and disappeared, although it is more likely that CIC’s reports placing Chikalov in Greece were inaccurate and that Chikalov had never traveled there in the first place.[xvi]

After Grachev’s January 1951 Harvard interviews, he continued to work for U.S. intelligence, teaching at the U.S. intelligence school at Alatsee in Bavaria in 1953-1954, and designated to participate in a penetration operation into the Soviet Union in the 1950s. Aleksandrov indicates that he died in Frankfurt-am-Main, but his date of death is not established.[xvii]