Karpov, Petr Mikhailovich
On 24 August 1924, Petr Mikhailovich Karpov, using a passport in the name Mikhail Georgiyevich Sumarokov, knocked on the door of a former White Army colonel, Dmitriy Vasilyev, in Berlin and identified himself as an OGPU officer. He had been scheduled to return from a 2-month leave of absence to his job at the Soviet diplomatic representation in Berlin on 1 August, but instead hid at the house of his mistress, Miss Dümmler, until he approached Vasilyev. With this approach, he became the first confirmed Soviet intelligence officer defector.
Stories differ about Karpov’s background prior to his assignment in Berlin, depending on the political orientation of the teller. He was born in the late 1880s or early 1890s. By his own account he was involved in Socialist Revolutionary (SR) activities prior to the Bolshevik revolution. He claimed to have worked in the security organization of the Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky regime after the February 1917 revolution, which gave him experience that led to later employment in the ChK in Petrograd, Moscow, and Kharkov between 1917 and 1923. Using the name Yakshin, he claimed to have led the 5th (Foreign) Department of the Ukraine SSR ChK in 1921, running operations against anti-Bolshevik forces in Ukraine, including dislodging remaining elements of White General Petr Nikolayevich Wrangel’s army from Crimea.[i] He continued to work during the early 1920s for the foreign element of the ChK/GPU/OGPU as it evolved through name changes, ultimately being called the Foreign Department of the OGPU, known by its Russian acronym INO (Иностранный Отдел). Karpov wrote that, although the name of this organization changed over the period from 1920 to 1923, the name changes were superficial only and his responsibilities in it remained consistent.[ii] In January 1923, he was assigned to the Ukrainian diplomatic mission in Berlin as an OGPU officer under diplomatic cover.
A historical review of Karpov’s background, published in 2002 by Lieutenant General Aleksandr Zdanovich, former Director of Public Relations for the Russian Federal Security Service, contradicts elements of Karpov’s story. Citing data from Russian and Soviet state security archives, Zdanovich asserts that there is no documentable evidence of any of Karpov’s activities prior to his 1923 assignment to Germany.[iii] Zdanovich’s views represent a Soviet perspective, which typically portrays defectors in a negative light. While he claims to have located no evidence to corroborate Karpov’s account, he presents no refuting evidence either.
Karpov’s motivation for defecting is also a matter of debate, his own story conflicting with that told by later pro-Soviet sources. He claimed to have held anti-Bolshevik views throughout his ChK/GPU/OGPU career, possibly based on his SR background, and that he had briefly been arrested in 1918 for anti-Bolshevik activities, but released because of favorable connections. He stated during his July 1929 trial in Berlin that he had been considering defecting for several years and that he had arranged for an assignment abroad specifically to position himself for a break from the Soviet Union. He had accumulated a cache of incriminating documents with the intention of taking them with him.[iv] His final decision to defect was prompted by what he described as a “web of intrigue, denunciations, slander and lies [within the diplomatic mission], first, because I had the opportunity to live abroad, and second, because I had at my disposal large amounts of money and valuables….”[v]
The Interregional Public Assistance Foundation of Strategic Security, a Russian social organization founded by former Soviet intelligence officers, asserts that Karpov’s profligate lifestyle in Germany, made possible by 50,000 dollars he brought to Berlin with him for OGPU expenses, prompted his defection.[vi] Following the same line of reasoning, Zdanovich interpreted Karpov’s decision to remain in Berlin as being based on rumors about his illegal activities circulating within the diplomatic mission, leading to his recall to the Soviet Union for punishment; he defected to avoid the recall.[vii] German police may have facilitated his defection, making contact with him through his girlfriend Miss Dümmler, who, according to retired KGB officer Igor Anatolyevich Damaskin, was a German intelligence agent.[viii]
From the materials Karpov brought with him when he defected, as well as from his post-defection writings, he appears to have been very familiar with the financial affairs of the GPU. In an unpublished typescript titled Организация ГПУ (The Organization of the GPU), Karpov wrote in great detail about GPU financial affairs, stating that GPU internal security expenses reached 4 million gold rubles in 1923, of which only 3 million came from the government budget. The rest was made up from OGPU-run businesses, through the sale of private property requisitioned from Soviet citizens, and from OGPU-authorized contraband trafficking. Expenditures on external intelligence operations cost over 1 million gold rubles for the same year, of which 950 thousand came from government budgets. Karpov provided details of the costs involved with dispatching and maintaining an intelligence officer in Berlin and other similar topics regarding operational expenditures drawn from the INO budget.[ix] The focus on budgeting and finances in his writings, as well as the 50,000 dollars he allegedly carried with him when he traveled to Berlin, indicate that he was likely a OGPU financial specialist.[x]
He also described a lack of financial accountability within the OGPU, which led to substantial financial irregularities among intelligence officers. The lack of accountability originated when the Bolshevik regime authorized the Red Army to “requisition” private property for Army use due to a scarcity of funds available to pay troops during the Civil War. The Red Army turned the stolen property into cash by selling it abroad, creating a thriving, but illegal business. The OPGU was eventually forced to confront this problem, causing significant discontent among the troops who benefitted from it.[xi] As noted earlier, Karpov himself was accused of mishandling OGPU funds, precipitating the “web of intrigue, denunciations, slander and lies” that prompted his defection.
According to Karpov’s writings, OGPU intelligence priorities were directed at several main targets. Foremost among them was the mission to penetrate, discredit, and ultimately destroy the anti-Bolshevik White emigration. At the time of Karpov’s defection, the OGPU believed that the masses of the Russian population had little faith in the durability of the Bolshevik regime, expecting it to be a temporary “insurrection,” and awaiting the return of the Tsar. Whether this was true or not is immaterial; the OGPU believed it and organized itself to combat counterrevolutionary activities that it perceived to be permeating the society, organized primarily by émigrés in Western Europe.[xii] He described OGPU disinformation operations in the early 1920s designed to create the public image of anti-Bolshevik émigrés as anti-Semitic, blaming monarchist and White Army forces for pogroms in Russia that were in reality perpetrated by Red Army soldiers and Bolsheviks.[xiii] His choice of whom to approach to declare his defection—a White Army officer in Berlin—also reflected a view that the White emigration was most likely to use his information to do the greatest harm to his former employer. He sold his information to and assisted a well-known anti-Bolshevik activist, Vladimir Grigoryevich Orlov, which eventually landed him in jail. Orlov’s autobiography indicates anti-Bolshevik émigrés in Germany debriefed Karpov for several months, during which he provided “everything that he knew about Bolshevist activities.”[xiv]
Karpov also provided a detailed list of Soviet military, diplomatic, and economic intelligence collection priorities showing that, as of 1924, Soviet intelligence resources were concentrated heavily on what he called the “Big and Little Ententes.”[xv] The Big Entente, known in English as the Triple Entente, consisting of Great Britain, France, and pre-revolutionary Russia, was formed prior to World War I as a counterweight to the triple alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. The Little Entente, consisting of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania, was founded through a series of interlocking treaties in 1921 and 1922 designed to counter a resurgence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The OGPU rezidentura in Berlin was the center of Soviet operations in Europe directed against these alliances, which all opposed a Bolshevik regime in Russia.
The Berlin OGPU and Razvedupr rezidenturas were tasked with collecting all aspects the “Big and Little Entente” countries’ military readiness. Priorities included recruiting, mobilization, and training for ground and naval forces. They were to collect information about the locations of military and naval facilities along with their fortifications and security measures. Also on the list was the production of military weapons, ammunition, vehicles, and equipment, as well as the means of transporting and warehousing those items. Of note, the OGPU and Razvedupr were instructed specifically to report on military aeronautics, including information about the production of dirigibles and aircraft.
Diplomatic and economic topics focused on the same countries, but added Bulgaria as a target as well. The OGPU and Razvedupr were to collect information about Bulgarian relations with the Little Entente and any indications that Bulgaria was aligning its foreign policy with them.
In addition to intelligence collection tasks, Karpov indicated that the OGPU and Razvedupr were tasked with planning and conducting clandestine sabotage, disruption, and deception operations, ranging from propaganda and agitation to discredit and cause confusion and tension between the members of foreign alliances, to arson and bombings to disrupt and destroy military and economic objectives. Deception operations extended to the United States, where Karpov reported that the OGPU used a paid access agent, Herman Bernstein, a well-known American journalist, who supposedly accepted articles from the OGPU and placed them in U.S. newspapers to influence U.S. public and government attitudes toward the USSR.[xvi] The veracity of this claim is unknown. Karpov further claimed that the Soviet government, via OGPU clandestine operations, attempted to disrupt foreign economies by disseminating counterfeit foreign currency.[xvii]
These allegations made their way into the hands of White émigré community and foreign intelligence services, and provided exploitable information about Soviet intelligence activities.[xviii] But they are not what made Karpov famous, and Karpov’s defection was not widely known until 1929.
When Karpov approached Dmitriy Vasilyev in August 1924, Vasilyev recognized his value and introduced him to Harald Siewert, an information broker in Berlin who had built a business around providing sensational information to newspapers.[xix] Karpov’s appearance and offer to sell documents revealing Soviet intelligence operations directed against the anti-Bolshevik emigration was exactly the type of story Siewert was seeking. Siewert was also a German police informant, and he introduced Karpov to the police, who issued him false identity papers under the name Petr Mikhailovich Pavlunovskiy. [xx] His association with his mistress Miss Dümmler, a German intelligence agent, likely tipped the German police to his presence even before Siewert’s introduction.
Siewert further introduced Karpov to Vladimir Grigoryevich Orlov, a former Imperial Russian intelligence operative who ran a document forgery operation in Berlin, specializing in documents that supported anti-Bolshevik narratives. As an OGPU officer, Karpov had access to sensitive correspondence between Berlin and Moscow, including decrypted dispatches, blank forms, stamps, and original signatures—the raw materials that Orlov needed to make his forgeries appear realistic. Orlov denied knowingly falsifying the substance of documents, but claimed that he simply transcribed genuine documents, retaining the original content. Karpov consulted with Orlov on Soviet intelligence and Communist Party terminology and organization, providing both form and substance to create persuasive documents that cast the Bolshevik regime in a negative light.[xxi]
Among the documents that Orlov and Karpov created was a set claiming to show that two American senators, William Borah and George Norris, had each received $100,000 from the Soviet regime for their advocacy of pro-Moscow policies in Washington, including actively supporting U.S. diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union.[xxii] By 1924, when Karpov defected, most major Western European countries had established diplomatic relations with the Bolshevik regime. Within the United States, however, the question of diplomatic recognition was a topic of heated debate, and the United States ultimately withheld recognition until November 1933. However, Borah and Norris were both vocal supporters of opening diplomatic and commercials relations with Moscow; Borah introduced the first resolution toward that end in the U.S. Senate in 1922.[xxiii]
Karpov offered the documents to a pro-Soviet American journalist in Berlin, Hubert Knickerbocker, hoping he would publish them and expose Soviet intrigue in U.S. politics. Knickerbocker, however, approached the Soviet embassy asking for confirmation of their authenticity, and the embassy recommended that Knickerbocker investigate the documents further before publishing them.[xxiv] Knockerbocker dug deeper, uncovering Orlov’s and Karpov’s forgery operation and reporting them to the German police. By January 1929, the documents were determined to be forgeries,[xxv] and Orlov and Karpov were both arrested in March, leading to their conviction in July for fraud. They were sentenced to 4 months in a German prison, and were released for time served. The prosector of the case appealed the light sentence and an appeals hearing was held in May 1930. Orlov continued to maintin that he had never falsified any documents, and that Karpov’s role was to provide information for payment. The original sentence was upheld,[xxvi] and nothing more is known of Karpov’s whereabout after he was released.
Dmitriy Prokhrov, a Russian historian who writes on Soviet intelligence history, claims that the documents were actually part of an elaborate and risky deception operation run by the OGPU station in Berlin, codenamed “Falsifier” (“Фальсификатор”), to discredit Orlov, whose “anti-Soviet activities had caused headaches in Moscow,” while simultaneously insulating Borah and Norris from accusations of Soviet influence and manipulation, and neutralizing Karpov himself. According to Prokhorov’s version of events, Karpov’s funds had run dry, and he re-approached the Soviet embassy offering to sell his services. The embassy used him as an unwitting conduit for fabricated documents that, thanks to Knickerbocker, who was a friend of the Soviet embassy, would assuredly be judged as fakes, thereby publicly disproving the allegations contained in them.[xxvii] Regardless of whether the affair was of OGPU making, Karpov’s and Orlov’s convictions in a German court did represent a multi-pronged victory for the Soviet Union, especially discrediting Borah’s and Norris’s detractors. While American Historian Richard Spence provides some reason to suspect that Borah’s pro-Soviet positions were at least inspired by Soviet influence agents, the court case deflated forever accusations that he had taken money to advocate for diplomatic recognition.[xxviii]
[i] Aleskandr Aleskandrovich Zdanovich, Свои и чужие: интриги разведки (Ours and Theirs: The Intrigues of Intelligence) (Moscow: OLMA Media Group, 2002), pp. 195-202.
[ii] Biography of Peter Pavlonovsky (Sumarokov), submitted as a statement in his trial in July 1929. Hoover Institution Archive, Boris Nicolaevsky Collection, Box 217, Folder 6 (Microfilm 187). Hereafter, Pavlonovsky biography.
[iii] Zdanovich, Ours and Theirs, p. 202.
[iv] Partial transcript of the trial of Vladimir Orlov and Peter Pawlonowski, 3 July 1929, p. 6. The transcript attached to U.S. Embassy Berlin dispatch number 4736, dated 19 July 1929, which reported the results of the trial; NARA, RG 59, Central Decimal Files, 1910-1949, 811.44, Borah, William E.
[v] Pavlonovsky biography.
[vi] Interregional Public Assistance Foundation of Strategic Security (IPAFSS), “Сумароков Михаил Георгиевич” (“Sumarokov, Mikhail Georgiyevich”) in the series Изменники и Предатели (Turncoats and Traitors), 5 January 2013, http://www.fssb.su/history-state-security/history-state-security-traitors/41-1924-sumarokov-mihail-georgievich.html
[vii] Zdanovich, Ours and Theirs, pp. 195-202.
[viii] Igor Anatolyevich Damaskin, 100 великих разведчиков (100 Great Intelligence Officers). (Moscow: Veche, 2001), https://royallib.com/book/damaskin_igor/100_velikih_razvedchikov.html
[ix] Организация ГПУ (The Organization of the GPU), undated typescript, pp. 4-5; Hoover Institution Archives, Boris Nicolaevsky Collection, Box 217, Folder 6 (Microfilm reel 187). Also see undated dispatch titled “Осведомление о Совдепии помощью отправки отдельных лиц на короткие сроки и на долговременное пребывание там в целях работы в советских центрах” (“Informing the Soviet Government by Sending Individuals for Short-term and Long-term Residence Abroad for Work in Soviet Centers”), in the same folder in the Boris Nicolaevsky Collection.
[x] IPAFSS, "Sumarokov, Mikhail Georgiyevich."
[xi] The Organization of the GPU, pp. 6-8.
[xii] The Organization of the GPU, p. 7.
[xiii] Pavlonovsky biography.
[xiv] Vladimir Orloff, Underworld and Soviet (New York: Dial Press, 1931), p. 266. This is an English translation of Orlov’s autobiography, Im Kampf Mit Mördern und Betrügern (In the Fight with Murderers and Swindlers) (Berlin: Brücken-Verlag, 1929). The German version was also serialized in Beiblatt des 8 Uhr-Abendblatt der National-Zeitung (Berlin), 7-30 November 1929.
[xv] The Organization of the GPU, pp. 16-18.
[xvi] Pavlonovsky biography.
[xvii] The Organization of the GPU, pp. 16-18.
[xviii] IPAFSS claims that Karpov’s information was exploited by German, French, and British intelligence. IPAFSS, “Sumarokov, Mikhail Georgiyevich”
[xix] Orloff, Underworld and Soviet, p. 264.
[xx] IPAFSS, “Sumarokov, Mikhail Georgiyevich”; Damaskin, 100 Great Intelligence Officers.
[xxi] Damaskin, 100 Great Intelligence Officers.
[xxii] Richard B. Spence, “Senator William E. Borah: Target of Soviet and Anti-Soviet Intrigue, 1922–1929,” International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Vol. 19 (2006), No. 1, p. 134.
[xxiii] Spence, “Senator William E. Borah,” p. 139.
[xxiv] Spence, “Senator William E. Borah,” p. 143.
[xxv] “Seek Higher-Ups in Borah-Norris Letter Forgery,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 23 March 1929, p. 23.
[xxvi] Vl. Despotuli, “The Orlov Case: Sentence in the First Instance is Upheld.” Vozrozhdenie, 11 May 1930, p. 1.
[xxvii] Dmitriy Prokhorov, Сколько стоит продать Родину? (What is the Cost of Betraying One's Homeland?) (Moscow: OLMA-Press, 2005), p. 28.
[xxviii] Spence, “Senator William E. Borah,” p. 135.