Alexander Orlov (Soviet defector)

He was born Lev Lazarevich Feldbin[2] in the Belarusian town of Babruysk on August 21, 1895, to an Orthodox Jewish family. He attended the Lazarevsky Institute in Moscow but left it after two semesters to enroll at Moscow University to study law. His study, however, was cut short when he was drafted into the Imperial Russian Army.

When the Russian Civil War erupted in 1918, Orlov joined the Red Army and became a GRU officer assigned to the region around Kiev, Ukraine. Orlov personally led and directed sabotage missions into territory controlled by the anti-communist White Movement. He later served with the OGPU Border Guards in Arkhangelsk.

In 1921, he retired from the Red Army and returned to Moscow to resume his study of law at the Law School at Moscow University. Orlov worked for several years at the Bolshevik High Tribunal under the tutelage of Nikolai Krylenko. In May 1924, his cousin, Zinoviy Katznelson, who was chief of the OGPU Economic Department (EKU), invited Lev Nikolsky (his official name since 1920) to join the Soviet secret police as an officer of Financial Section 6.

When his cousin was moved to supervise the Transcaucasian Border Troops of the OGPU, he offered to Nikolsky and his wife the opportunity to move to Tiflis (now Tbilisi, Georgia) as chief of the Border Guard unit there, which he accepted. There, their daughter contracted a rheumatic fever infection, and Orlov asked his friend and former colleague, Artur Artuzov, to give him an assignment abroad so that Orlov could have European doctors treat his daughter.

Meanwhile, the Great Purge continued as Stalin and his inner circle sought to exterminate all suspected enemies of the people. Orlov was alerted as close associates and friends were arrested, tortured and shot, one by one. In 1938, Orlov realised that he would soon be next. When he received orders from Moscow to report to a Soviet ship in Antwerp, Orlov was certain that he was about to be arrested. Instead of obeying, Orlov fled with his wife and daughter to Canada.

Before leaving Paris, Orlov left two letters for the Soviet Ambassador, one for Stalin and one for NKVD chief Yezhov. He told them that he would reveal everything he knew about NKVD operations if any action was taken against him or his family. In a two-page attachment, Orlov listed the codenames of numerous illegals and moles operating in the West.

Orlov also sent a letter to Trotsky alerting him to the presence of the NKVD agent Mark Zborowski (codename TULIP) in the entourage of his son, Lev Sedov. Trotsky dismissed this letter as a provocation. Then, Orlov traveled with his family to the United States and went underground. The NKVD, presumably on orders from Stalin, did not try to locate him until 1969.[6][8][9]

After his defection in 1938, he was afraid of being killed like other NKVD defectors such as Ignace Reiss. Therefore, he wrote a letter to Stalin promising to keep all secrets he knew if Stalin spared him and his family.[10] Orlov kept his word and published his memoir The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes only after the death of Stalin in March 1953, fifteen years after his own flight.[11][6][8]

To announce publication of his memoir, he published four excerpts in LIFE magazine in April 1953:

• "Ghastly Secrets of Stalin's Power" (April 6, 1953)[12]
• "Inside Story of How Trials Were Rigged" (April 13, 1953)[13]
• "Treachery to His Friends, Cruelty to Their Children" (April 20, 1953)[14]
• "The Man Himself" (April 27, 1953)[15]

After the publication of The Secret History, Orlov was forced to come in from the cold. Both the US Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation were embarrassed by the revelation that a high-ranking NKVD officer (Orlov was a Major of State Security, equal to an army colonel) had been living underground in the United States for 15 years without their knowledge. Until he resurfaced in the US with his revelations in the Life Magazine, Orlov had lived in the US under the name Alexander L. Berg. As the FBI was searching in vain for him and his wife, "two unidentified Russian aliens", he was studying business administration at Dyke College, Cleveland, Ohio. The College and the local FBI division were located in the same Standard Building on 1370 Ontario Street and St Clair Avenue, occupying the third and the ninth floors, respectively. Ironically, the FBI officers "never paid any attention to the mature student who had long figured on the FBI’s most wanted list and who rode the elevators with them every day."[1]

Orlov was interrogated by the FBI and twice appeared before Senate Sub-Committees, but he always downplayed his role in events and continued to conceal the names of Soviet agents in the West.[6][9]

In 1956, he wrote an article for Life Magazine, "The Sensational Secret Behind the Damnation of Stalin". This story held that NKVD agents had discovered papers in the tsarist archives which proved Stalin had once been an Okhrana agent and on the basis of this knowledge, the NKVD agents had planned a coup d'état with the leaders of the Red Army.[16] Stalin, Orlov continued, uncovered the plot and this was his motive behind the secret trial and execution of Soviet Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and the purge of the Red Army.[17] The Life article cites the Eremin letter as evidence that Stalin was a member of the Okhrana, but most historians today agree it is a forgery.[18] The research of Simon Sebag Montefiore contradicts Orlov's theory, too.

Orlov and his wife continued to live secretly and modestly in the United States. In 1963, the CIA helped him publish another book, The Handbook of Counter-Intelligence and Guerilla Warfare and helped him obtain a job as a researcher at the Law School of the University of Michigan. He moved to Cleveland, Ohio. His wife died there. He died on 25 March 1973. Orlov never wavered in his contempt for Stalin. His last book, The March of Time, was published in the US in 2004 by former FBI Special Agent Ed Gazur.

Orlov was shown to have produced a number of false claims to support his story and elevate his status in the eyes of his debriefing officials and the wider Western public. For instance, his rank was not general, as he had claimed, but merely a major. He also falsely claimed to play the leading role in recruiting the Cambridge Five spy ring, while in fact Orlov/Nikolsky "had nothing to do with the first three Cambridge University agents when they were successfully recruited. And he certainly knew nothing about those who joined the list after he had left London and was dismissed from the foreign intelligence department." [7]

Robert W. Thurston noted that Orlov's claims on the Moscow Trials did not mention very important information, that Trotsky and his supporters had indeed organized an Oppositional bloc in the Soviet Union with Zinoviev and Kamenev. This further indicated that Orlov's account was untrustworthy.[19]

In the words of researcher Boris Volodarsky:

... most of what Orlov said, even under oath, or during his debriefing by the US intelligence officials, or in private discussions with his friend Gazur, has by now been established as outright invention.[7]

• List of Eastern Bloc defectors
• List of KGB defectors

• "The Retiring Spy" Times Literary Supplement, September 28, 2001.
• "Alexander Orlov" on Spartacus International
• Alexander Orlov, The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes. Random House, 1953.
• John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, Deadly Illusions: The KGB Orlov Dossier. Crown, 1993. ISBN 0-517-58850-1
• Alexander Orlov, The Handbook of Intelligence and Guerrilla Warfare, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1963.
• Edward Gazur, Secret Assignment: the FBI's KGB General, St Ermin's Press, 2002 ISBN 0-9536151-7-0
• Alexander Orlov, The March of Time, St Ermin's Press, 2004 ISBN 1-903608-05-8
• Boris Volodarsky, Stalin's Agent: The Life and Death of Alexander Orlov (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) ISBN 978-0-19-965658-5
• Edward Gazur, Alexander Orlov: The FBI's KGB General, Carroll & Graf, New York, ISBN 0-7867-0971-5

• John Howard Wilhelm, Review of The Orlov File, Johnson's Russia List, 17 January 2003: