Alexander Orlov
Encyclopedia
- See disambiguation for other individuals called Aleksandr OrlovAleksandr OrlovAleksandr Orlov or Alexander Orlov may refer to:* Aleksandr Ivanovich Orlov , Russian opera conductor* Alexander Konstantinovich Orlov , Russian artist...
, in particular Alexander Grigorievich Orlov (spy) (1898-1940) chief of the GRU.
Alexander Mikhailovich Orlov , born Lev Feldbin, 21 August 1895–25 March 1973), was a General in the Soviet secret police and NKVD
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
Rezident in the Second Spanish Republic
Second Spanish Republic
The Second Spanish Republic was the government of Spain between April 14 1931, and its destruction by a military rebellion, led by General Francisco Franco....
. In 1938, Orlov refused to return to the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
because he realized that he would be executed, and fled with his family to the U.S.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. He is known mostly for secretly transporting the entire gold reserve of Spanish Republic to the USSR and for his book, "The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes."
Early life
He was born Leiba Lazarevich Feldbin in the ByelorussianBelarus
Belarus , officially the Republic of Belarus, is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered clockwise by Russia to the northeast, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest. Its capital is Minsk; other major cities include Brest, Grodno , Gomel ,...
town of Babruysk
Babruysk
Babruysk or Bobruysk is a city in the Mahilyow Voblast of Belarus on the Berezina river. It is a large city in Belarus with a population of approximately 227,000 people . The name Babruysk probably originates from the Belarusian word babyor , many of which used to inhabit the Berezina...
on August 21, 1895 to an Orthodox Jewish
Orthodox Judaism
Orthodox Judaism , is the approach to Judaism which adheres to the traditional interpretation and application of the laws and ethics of the Torah as legislated in the Talmudic texts by the Sanhedrin and subsequently developed and applied by the later authorities known as the Gaonim, Rishonim, and...
family. He attended the Lazarevsky Institute in Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
, 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
Imperial Russian Army
The Imperial Russian Army was the land armed force of the Russian Empire, active from around 1721 to the Russian Revolution of 1917. In the early 1850s, the Russian army consisted of around 938,731 regular soldiers and 245,850 irregulars . Until the time of military reform of Dmitry Milyutin in...
.
When the Russian Civil War
Russian Civil War
The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed to the Soviets, under the domination of the Bolshevik party. Soviet forces first assumed power in Petrograd The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a...
erupted in 1918, Orlov joined the Red Army
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
and became a GRU
GRU
GRU or Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye is the foreign military intelligence directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation...
officer assigned to the region around Kiev
Kiev
Kiev or Kyiv is the capital and the largest city of Ukraine, located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River. The population as of the 2001 census was 2,611,300. However, higher numbers have been cited in the press....
, Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
. Orlov personally led and directed sabotage missions into territory controlled by the anti-communist White Movement
White movement
The White movement and its military arm the White Army - known as the White Guard or the Whites - was a loose confederation of Anti-Communist forces.The movement comprised one of the politico-military Russian forces who fought...
. He later served with the OGPU Border Guards in Arkhangelsk
Arkhangelsk
Arkhangelsk , formerly known as Archangel in English, is a city and the administrative center of Arkhangelsk Oblast, Russia. It lies on both banks of the Northern Dvina River near its exit into the White Sea in the north of European Russia. The city spreads for over along the banks of the river...
. 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
Nikolai Krylenko
Nikolai Vasilyevich Krylenko was a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet politician. Krylenko served in a variety of posts in the Soviet legal system, rising to become People's Commissar for Justice and Prosecutor General of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic.Krylenko was an...
. 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.
Career as a Chekist
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 TbilisiTbilisi
Tbilisi is the capital and the largest city of Georgia, lying on the banks of the Mt'k'vari River. The name is derived from an early Georgian form T'pilisi and it was officially known as Tiflis until 1936...
, 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
Artur Artuzov
Artur Khristyanovich Artuzov Артур Христианович Артузов , headed the Soviet foreign intelligence service INO, part of OGPU, later the NKVD, from August 1931 to May 1935...
to give him an assignment abroad so that Orlov could have European doctors treat his daughter.
Posted to Paris, Berlin
Therefore, in 1926 Nikolsky was transferred to the INO, the branch of the NKVD responsible for overseas operations, now headed by Artuzov, and sent to ParisParis
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
under a legal cover of a Soviet Trade Delegation official. After one year in France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, Nikolsky, who operated on a fraudulent Soviet passport in the name of Léon Nikolaeff, was transferred to a similar position to Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
. He returned to Moscow in late 1930.
Posted to USA
Two years later he was sent to the USA to establish relations with his relatives there, and to obtain a genuine American passport that would allow free travel in Europe. "Leon L. Nikolaev" (Nikolsky-Orlov) arrived in the USA aboard the SS Europe on 22 September 1932, sailing from BremenBremen
The City Municipality of Bremen is a Hanseatic city in northwestern Germany. A commercial and industrial city with a major port on the river Weser, Bremen is part of the Bremen-Oldenburg metropolitan area . Bremen is the second most populous city in North Germany and tenth in Germany.Bremen is...
. After being identified as a spy by U.S. Naval Intelligence, Orlov obtained a passport in the name of William Goldin and departed on 30 November 1932 on the SS Bremen back to Weimar Germany.
Posted to Austria
In Moscow, Nikolsky again asked for a foreign assignment, as he wanted his sick daughter to be treated by Dr. Karl Noorden in ViennaVienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
. This was granted, and together with his wife and daughter, he arrived in Vienna in May 1933 (as Nikolaev) and settled in Hinterbrühl a few kilometres away from the capital. After three months, he went to Prague
Prague
Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...
, changed his Soviet passport for the American one, and left for Geneva
Geneva
Geneva In the national languages of Switzerland the city is known as Genf , Ginevra and Genevra is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandie, the French-speaking part of Switzerland...
. Nikolsky's group, which operated against the French Deuxième Bureau
Deuxième Bureau
The Deuxième Bureau de l'État-major général was France's external military intelligence agency from 1871 to 1940. It was dissolved together with the Third Republic upon the armistice with Germany...
, included Alexander Korotkov, a young Illegal Rezident, Korotkov's wife Maria, and a courier, Arnold Finkelberg. Their operation, codenamed EXPRESS, was unsuccessful and in May 1934 Nikolsky joined his family in Vienna. From here he was ordered to go to Copenhagen
Copenhagen
Copenhagen is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban population of 1,199,224 and a metropolitan population of 1,930,260 . With the completion of the transnational Øresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region...
to serve as assistant to rezidents Theodore Maly
Theodore Maly
Theodore Maly was an undercover Soviet intelligence officer who recruited and controlled spies in the 1930s. He lived illegally in the countries where he worked and was one of Russia’s most effective illegal recruiters and controllers...
(Paris) and Ignace Reif (Copenhagen).
Posted to England
In June 1935, Nikolsky (William Goldin) himself became a rezident in LondonLondon
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
. His cover in London, as Goldin, was as a director of an American refrigerator company. He had nothing to do with the recruitment of Kim Philby
Kim Philby
Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby was a high-ranking member of British intelligence who worked as a spy for and later defected to the Soviet Union...
or any other member of the Cambridge Five
Cambridge Five
The Cambridge Five was a ring of spies, recruited in part by Russian talent spotter Arnold Deutsch in the United Kingdom, who passed information to the Soviet Union during World War II and at least into the early 1950s...
, and deserted his post in October 1935, coming back to Moscow. Here he was dismissed from the Foreign Service and put into a lowly position of deputy chief of the Transport Department (TO) of the NKVD
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
, the successor secret service organization of the OGPU.
Work during the Spanish Civil War
In early September 1936 Orlov was appointed NKVD liaisonLiaison officer
A liaison officer or LNO is a person that liaises between two organizations to communicate and coordinate their activities. Generally, they are used to achieve the best utilization of resources or employment of services of one organization by another. In the military, liaison officers may...
to the Spanish Republican
Second Spanish Republic
The Second Spanish Republic was the government of Spain between April 14 1931, and its destruction by a military rebellion, led by General Francisco Franco....
Ministry of Interior arriving in Madrid on September 16. According to author Donald Rayfield
Donald Rayfield
Donald Rayfield is professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary, University of London. He is an author of books about Russian and Georgian literature, and about Joseph Stalin and his secret police...
,
"Stalin, YezhovNikolai YezhovNikolai Ivanovich Yezhov or Ezhov was a senior figure in the NKVD under Joseph Stalin during the period of the Great Purge. His reign is sometimes known as the "Yezhovshchina" , "the Yezhov era", a term that began to be used during the de-Stalinization campaign of the 1950s...
, and BeriaLavrentiy BeriaLavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was a Georgian Soviet politician and state security administrator, chief of the Soviet security and secret police apparatus under Joseph Stalin during World War II, and Deputy Premier in the postwar years ....
distrusted Soviet participants in the Spanish war. Military advisors like Vladimir Antonov-OvseenkoVladimir Antonov-OvseenkoVladimir Alexandrovich Antonov-Ovseyenko , real surname Ovseyenko, party aliases the 'Bayonet' and 'Nikita' , a literary pseudonym A. Gal , was a prominent Soviet Bolshevik leader and diplomat. He was born in Chernigov into an officer's family.In 1903, Antonov-Ovseyenko joined the Menshevik party...
, journalists like KoltsovMikhail KoltsovMikhail Efimovich Koltsov , born Mikhail Efimovich Fridlyand , was a Soviet journalist.-Biography:...
were open to infection by the heresies, especially TrotskyLeon TrotskyLeon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
's, prevalent among the Republic's supporters. NKVD agents sent to Spain were therefore keener on abducting and murdering anti-Stalinists among Republican leaders and International Brigade commanders than on fighting FrancoFrancisco FrancoFrancisco Franco y Bahamonde was a Spanish general, dictator and head of state of Spain from October 1936 , and de facto regent of the nominally restored Kingdom of Spain from 1947 until his death in November, 1975...
. The defeat of the Republic, in Stalin's eyes, was caused not by the NKVD's diversionary efforts, but by the treachery of the heretics."
It is said Orlov was sent to Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
after a young secretary, with whom he had been carrying on an affair, shot herself in front of Lubyanka
Lubyanka (KGB)
The Lubyanka is the popular name for the headquarters of the KGB and affiliated prison on Lubyanka Square in Moscow. It is a large building with a facade of yellow brick, designed by Alexander V...
because he refused to leave his wife. Orlov arrived in Madrid
Madrid
Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
on 15 September 1936. Orlov organized guerrilla warfare
Guerrilla warfare
Guerrilla warfare is a form of irregular warfare and refers to conflicts in which a small group of combatants including, but not limited to, armed civilians use military tactics, such as ambushes, sabotage, raids, the element of surprise, and extraordinary mobility to harass a larger and...
behind Nationalist lines as he had in Ukraine during the Civil War, but the work was later credited to his deputy Grigory Syroezhkin to avoid mention of the defected General.
In October 1936 Orlov was placed in command of the operation which moved the Spanish treasury from Madrid to Moscow. The Republican government had agreed to use this hoard of bullion as an advance payment for Soviet military supplies. Orlov did a commendable job of managing the logistics of this transfer. It took four nights for truck convoys, driven by Soviet tankmen, to bring the 510 tons of gold from its hiding place in the mountains to the port of Cartagena. There, under threat of German bombing raids, it was loaded on four different Russian steamers bound for Odessa
Odessa
Odessa or Odesa is the administrative center of the Odessa Oblast located in southern Ukraine. The city is a major seaport located on the northwest shore of the Black Sea and the fourth largest city in Ukraine with a population of 1,029,000 .The predecessor of Odessa, a small Tatar settlement,...
. The gold was conveyed to Moscow by special armored train. Once it was safely locked away Stalin threw a party and remarked, "The Spaniards will never see their gold again, just as cannot see one's own ears." For his service, Orlov received the "Order of Lenin
Order of Lenin
The Order of Lenin , named after the leader of the Russian October Revolution, was the highest decoration bestowed by the Soviet Union...
."
However, Orlov's main task in Spain remained arresting and executing Trotskyites, Anarchists, Roman Catholics supportive of Francisco Franco
Francisco Franco
Francisco Franco y Bahamonde was a Spanish general, dictator and head of state of Spain from October 1936 , and de facto regent of the nominally restored Kingdom of Spain from 1947 until his death in November, 1975...
's forces
National Faction (Spanish Civil War)
The National faction also known as Nationalists or Nationals , was a major faction in the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939. It was composed of a variety of political groups opposed to the Second Spanish Republic, including the Falange, the CEDA, and two rival monarchist claimants: the Alfonsists...
, and other suspected foes of the Second Spanish Republic
Second Spanish Republic
The Second Spanish Republic was the government of Spain between April 14 1931, and its destruction by a military rebellion, led by General Francisco Franco....
. Documents released from the NKVD archives claim to detail a massive number of Orlov's crimes in Spain. He was accused of being responsible for fabricating the evidence which led to the arrest and summary execution
Summary execution
A summary execution is a variety of execution in which a person is killed on the spot without trial or after a show trial. Summary executions have been practiced by the police, military, and paramilitary organizations and are associated with guerrilla warfare, counter-insurgency, terrorism, and...
of members of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification
Workers' Party of Marxist Unification
The Workers' Party of Marxist Unification was a Spanish communist political party formed during the Second Republic and mainly active around the Spanish Civil War...
(POUM). Other fabricated evidence claims he directed the kidnapping and execution of the POUM leader Andreu Nin. Facts easily refuted by exiled and returned Republican officials.
Defection
Meanwhile, the Great PurgeGreat Purge
The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...
continued as Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
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
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
. Following his refusal to return to the Soviet Union when "invited" in 1969 the KGB made efforts to discredit Orlov. He was accused of stealing $60,000 in operational funds from the embassy safe before fleeing Spain and of taking part in the assassination of Rudolf Klement, a former secretary of Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
, in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
on 13 July 1938 - the day he left Paris for Quebec
Quebec
Quebec or is a province in east-central Canada. It is the only Canadian province with a predominantly French-speaking population and the only one whose sole official language is French at the provincial level....
. The accusations, like so many other "revelations" from KGB files during and after the Cold War regarding General Orlov and other defectors, were full of easily spotted errors.
Before leaving Paris, Orlov left 2 letters for the Soviet Ambassador, one for Stalin and one for his henchman Yezhov. He told the dictator and the chief of the NKVD 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
Mark Zborowski
Mark Zborowski was an anthropologist and an NKVD agent...
(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
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and went underground. The NKVD, presumably on orders from Stalin, did not try to locate him until 1969.
The Secret History
After his defection in 1938, he was afraid of being killed like other NKVD traitors, Walter KrivitskyWalter Krivitsky
Walter Germanovich Krivitsky was a Soviet intelligence officer who revealed plans of signing Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact before defecting weeks before the outbreak of World War II....
and Ignace Reiss. Therefore, he wrote a letter to Stalin promising to keep all secrets he knew if Stalin spares him and his family. Orlov kept his word and published his memories, The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes. only after the death of Stalin in March 1953, and exactly fifteen years after his own flight.
A textual comparison of the Secret History with Walter Krivitsky's In Stalin's Secret Service reveals that, for both books, the authors' secret informant on the history of the Moscow Trials
Moscow Trials
The Moscow Trials were a series of show trials conducted in the Soviet Union and orchestrated by Joseph Stalin during the Great Purge of the 1930s. The victims included most of the surviving Old Bolsheviks, as well as the leadership of the Soviet secret police...
was Abram Slutsky
Abram Slutsky
Abram Aronovich Slutsky headed the Soviet foreign intelligence service , then part of the NKVD, from May 1935 to February 1938.-Biography:...
, head of NKVD Foreign Intelligence. Many historians believe there is the ring of truth to Orlov's tales, though the reader should remember that some of the stories were told second-hand, that Orlov himself was deliberately dishonest about his own complicity in these affairs.
After The Secret History
After the publication of The Secret History, Orlov was forced to come in from the cold. Both the U.S. Central Intelligence AgencyCentral Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, responsible for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers...
and Federal Bureau of Investigation
Federal Bureau of Investigation
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is an agency of the United States Department of Justice that serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency . The FBI has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crime...
were embarrassed by the revelation that a high ranking NKVD officer (Orlov was a Major of State Security, equal to an army colonel
Colonel
Colonel , abbreviated Col or COL, is a military rank of a senior commissioned officer. It or a corresponding rank exists in most armies and in many air forces; the naval equivalent rank is generally "Captain". It is also used in some police forces and other paramilitary rank structures...
) had been living underground in the United States for fifteen years without their knowledge. 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. In 1956 he wrote an article for Life Magazine entitled, 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. Stalin, Orlov continued, uncovered the plot and this was his motive behind the secret trial and execution of Soviet Marshal Tukhachevsky
Mikhail Tukhachevsky
Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky was a Marshal of the Soviet Union, commander in chief of the Red Army , and one of the most prominent victims of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge.-Early life:...
and the purge of the Red Army. The research of Simon Sebag Montefiore
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Simon Jonathan Sebag Montefiore is a British historian and writer.-Family history:Simon's father, a doctor, is descended from a famous line of wealthy Sephardic Jews who became diplomats and bankers all over Europe...
contradicts this theory, however.
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
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
. He moved to Cleveland, Ohio
Cleveland, Ohio
Cleveland is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and is the county seat of Cuyahoga County, the most populous county in the state. The city is located in northeastern Ohio on the southern shore of Lake Erie, approximately west of the Pennsylvania border...
. His wife died there, and then 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 USA in 2004 by former FBI Special Agent Ed Gazur.
Sources
- "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, The KGB Orlov File: The Greatest Deception of All Time (New York, NY: Enigma Books, 2009)
External links
- John Howard Wilhelm, Review of The Orlov File, Johnson's Russia List, 17 January 2003: