Unidentified NKVD lieutenant (Germany, 1945)

In November 1945, Richard Cutler, a U.S. officer in the Office of Strategic Services during WWII, transported an NKVD lieutenant from Berlin to Frankfurt, Germany, where the OSS's successor, the Strategic Services Unit was headquartered. The NKVD lieutenant was a drug addict whom the CIC found in a stupor on a sidewalk outside a nightclub in Berlin. Cutler gave him the false name "Vladimir." When CIC took "Vladimir" to the hospital, he announced that he wanted to defect.

SSU was initially unsure whether "Vladimir" was a legitimate defector or a Soviet plant. He gave initial biographical information indicating that his father had been a Soviet diplomat in Stockholm and Copenhagen, and he provided addresses in those cities where he had lived with his family. Upon checking the addresses, the SSU found that they were not residences. SSU still continued cautiously to handle him because it had little information about the NKVD in Berlin and had never had a Soviet intelligence defector before.

"Vladimir" spoke both Russian and German flawlessly. The SSU was concerned that he might actually be a German whom the Soviets had recruited to penetrate American intelligence. However, an SSU interrogator assessed that he was in fact a Russian, whose German language proficiency was likely the reason he was hired into the NKVD.

The SSU hoped that “Vladimir” would prove to be a treasure trove of information about Soviet intelligence. The SSU interrogated “Vladimir” for about three weeks while also treating his drug addiction. His interrogations came to a halt, however, when he disappeared from Frankfurt and was never heard from again.[i]

[i] Richard W. Cutler, Counterspy: Memoirs of a Counterintelligence Officer in World War II and the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 2004), pp.xv-xxi, 100-103.