Unidentified OGPU officer (Germany, 1929)

On 13 February 1930, a few weeks after the kidnapping in Paris of Tsarist General Aleksandr Pavlovich Kutepov, the Paris magazine Détective published a story about the French investigation into the incident. The article provided the account of an individual named Vasiliy Petrovich, who claimed to have defected from the OGPU rezidentura in Berlin at an unspecified time previously. A man identified in the article as Mr. B. introduced Vasiliy Petrovich, whose real name is also not given, to a French detective so that Vasiliy Petrovich could describe a previous OGPU kidnapping that was similar to Kutepov’s.[i]

Vasiliy Petrovich told of an OGPU officer named Yuriy Alekseyevich Prasolov, who was operating in Paris as an illegal using the name Viktor Kepp. The OGPU had sent Prasolov/Kepp to Paris with money, which Vasiliy Petrovich stated was intended for OGPU propaganda operations, but Prasolov/Kepp gambled it all away and the OGPU decided to return him to Moscow to account for his losses. Vasiliy Petrovich was posted to Berlin OGPU rezidentura at the time and he, along with two other Berlin-based OGPU officers traveled to Paris as a “flying team” to locate and “arrest” Prasolov/Kepp. They found him in a casino and lured him outside by telling him that his son was seriously ill and he needed to return to Paris at once. The “flying team” dragged him into a car, rendered him unconscious with chloroform, and drove him to Hamburg, where they loaded him onto a ship bound for the Soviet Union. The same story also ran in the Paris-based émigré newspaper Russia Illustrated on 22 February 1930.[ii]

The Mr. B… mentioned in the article is almost certainly Grigoriy Besedovskiy, who had defected from the Soviet Embassy in Paris in October 1929. Besedovsky published an article in the 15 February 1930 issue of Russia Illustrated that described Prasolov/Kepp’s kidnapping, giving the additional detail that Prasolov/Kepp had been sent to Paris with seed money to establish a cover business, the Société Extérieure, for OGPU operations. Prasolov/Kepp’s lack of business acumen resulted in little success and he began to gamble the money to try to make up for business losses and his own profligate lifestyle. But his gambling was no more successful than his business and he lost over 9 million francs. By 1928, Prasolov/Kepp decided that it would be safer to defect than return to Moscow, and he tried to blackmail his OGPU masters by threatening to reveal sensitive OGPU information. However, the OGPU initiated a plan to forcibly return him to the USSR.[iii] There is little doubt that Besedovsky’s story was based on information from Vasiliy Petrovich, whose story was published in the following week in Russia Illustrated specifically to “corroborate” Besedovskiy’s story.

Vasiliy Petrovich’s date of defection is never given. He stated only that as of February 1930 he had broken with the OGPU “a few months ago.” Based on the events he describes, his date of defection was probably in late 1929, about the same time as Besedovsky’s, but definitely sometime between September 1928 and February 1930. The date and the location where he served do not match any other Soviet intelligence officer defector.

No further information is available about Vasiliy Petrovich, and the possibility exists Besedovsky fabricated his existence to draw an OGPU link to Kutepov’s disappearance. However, Lev Nikolayevich Feldbin/Aleksandr Mikhailovich Orlov noted the story of Prasolov/Kepp in his U.S. debriefings, claiming to have been in charge of investigating Prasolov/Kepp’s failures and to have directly confronted him. Feldbin/Orlov left Paris in February 1928, so his presence in Paris did overlap Prasolov/Kepp’s. However, Feldin/Orlov’s material did not mention the kidnapping and forced repatriation, and he said nothing about Vasiliy Petrovich.[iv]

[i] “Les Conjurés du Destin” (“The Conspirators of Destiny“), Détective, 14 February 1930, pp. 4-5.
[ii] P. R. (full name not provided), “По Следам Похитителей ген. А. Р. Кутепова” (“On the Trail of the Gen. A. P. Kutepov’s Kidnappers”), Иллюстрированная Россия (Russia Illustrated), 22 February 1930, pp. 11-13.
[iii] Grigoriy Z. Besedovskiy, “Гепеу за Границей” (“GPU Abroad”), Иллюстрированная Россия (Russia Illustrated), 15 February 1930, pp. 1-2. Prasolov/Kepp’s kidnapping was also briefly mentioned in N. Alekseyev, “Темные Дельцы на Службе СССР” (“Dark Dealers in the Service of the USSR”), Vozrozhdenie, 14 May 1931, pp. 2, 5.
[iv] Tsarev and Costello, Deadly Illusions: The KGB’s Orlov Dossier Reveals Stalin’s Master Spy (New York: Crown, 1993), pp. 52-53.