Early Cold War Swedish Agent Infiltrations into the Baltics, Part Two: The Tilestone Project ©

The end of the 1940s witnessed the completion of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, the Berlin airlift, the Marshall Plan, and the Iron Curtain. Eastern, Central, and Western Europe were physically divided by barbed wire, armed patrols, land mines, and guard towers. The Communist Party's monopoly and censorship of the domestic media effectively cut off and prevented the free flow of information to the peoples of Eastern Europe and the USSR. There was also a widespread fear of war between the two blocs. America's CIA was tasked with intelligence gathering to learn when the Soviet Union was about to attack the West. 

There was a significant problem: the CIA had no intelligence agents behind the Iron Curtain in a position to fulfill the CIA's tasks. But there were thousands of men who had escaped from the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, at the end of World War Two and who might be willing to work for the CIA and the British. The British Intelligence Service (SIS) started Operation "Jungle," and the CIA began Operation "Tilestone," both using recruited agents in Sweden.

CIA and SIS found an unlikely ally in this quest for intelligence: historically neutral Sweden (CIA cryptonym CF-Land). For example, the Swedish Defense Staff (CIA cryptonym TIEBARS) allowed the boat traffic between Sweden and the Baltics from Löfthammar and Bornholm island. Sweden also maintained a radio listening post in Gotland to send and receive wireless traffic between agents in the Baltics and Sweden. Additionally, prospective agents were trained for the infiltration operations in Sweden. 

In the early Cold War, British, the US, and Swedish agencies infiltrated at least forty-two Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians into their homelands. Here is one example of the planned use of an agent infiltration into Lithuania: The Tilestone Project. Here are excerpts from a declassified CIA file.

 

DATE: 19 January 1948 

SUBJECT: Tilestone Project

 

Tilestone will leave Stockholm on 19 or 20 January for the south of Sweden. He will be accompanied by (redacted) or one of his assistants. He has been furnished the papers of a Swedish seaman and will board a Swedish vessel at some Southern port. He will be taken to Gdynia where he expects to be able to land without difficulty. He plans to travel to Warsaw and from there to the neighborhood of the Lithuanian frontier. He expects to meet several members of the Lithuanian resistance who have been awaiting his arrival on the Polish side of the border for some two weeks. He hopes to be able to return to Sweden within a month, coming back on another Swedish vessel. 

 

The primary purpose of Tilestone's trip is to set up radio communication with the Lithuanian underground. He is carrying 16 American radio crystals and an elaborate cipher code furnished by the Swedes. 

 

The code is a numerical cipher similar to that used by the Russians in broadcasts from Lithuania to Moscow. It is based on a Lithuanian book, a copy of which Tilestone had in Stockholm. Tilestone has spent the last two weeks working with Swedish cryptographic experts setting up the code and arranging a series of questions in which his group and the Swedes are interested. Transmissions will be made from Sweden once a week, and it is expected that answers will be received twice a month from Lithuania. 

 

The agent was not dispatched at this time but at a later date in 1949. There is evidence, however, that he then became a Soviet double agent codenamed Petrauskas" until 1970.

Early Cold War Swedish Agent Infiltrations into the Baltics, Part One: Historical Background

It now appears certain that Sweden and Finland will join NATO. Below is a look at early Cold War agent infiltrations into the Soviet Union--in particular the Baltics:

By the middle of July 1945, 21,300 Estonian, 3,400 Latvian, and 300 Lithuanian refugees were in Sweden. Another 6,500 Swedish-speaking Estonians had been evacuated in different waves during the war.

Most of the refugees arrived in small boats that on a more or less commercial basis were trafficking the war-ridden sea, with peaks in August-October 1944 (Estonia and Latvia except Kurzeme) and February-May 1945 (Kurzeme). Some of them, probably about 1100-1500, came with boats that were financed by the Swedish Defence Command for intelligence tasks 

The Swedish Defense Command has largely burnt the archives that could have given a precise account of this, but from what we know of the intelligence traffic that between 1947-1957 was pursued for intelligence reasons by British, American, and Swedish authorities we can establish that both convinced Nazis and ardent democrats were among the Baltic volunteers.

In order to prepare their own program of infiltration into the Soviet Union, the intelligence corps of the Swedish Army renewed its contacts among the Balts in Sweden already in 1947. Seen from a national security perspective, the Soviet Baltic republics remained an area of specific interest especially for the military leadership in Sweden, as they hosted a large concentration of heavily armed Red Army units in considerable proximity to Swedish territorial waters. 

Thus, a secret training program was set up, whose aim it was to organise the selection, education and smuggling of potential infiltrators recruited among the Balts in Sweden. Inside the Soviet Union, they were supposed to establish a network of informants, who would organise the transmission of relevant information of particular political and military interest to Sweden via radio communication. These activities were conducted in close consultation with the British SIS, which was closely involved in the infiltration of Soviet territories by émigré spies.

The key figure among the Estonians in Sweden was the former officer Arkadi Valdin, who, as his Latvian and Lithuanian counterparts, was a direct subordinate of Thede Palm, the head of the secret intelligence unit of the Swedish military. Valdin had his own contacts among the agents of the SIS and, most probably, also the CIA, and was responsible for the educational training of the selected candidates in a Stockholm suburb as well as the coordination of their clandestine passage to Soviet Estonia.

The Baltic operatives that managed to land on the Soviet coastline were either immediately killed or imprisoned, while others were turned into double agents, who after their conversion actively engaged in the KGB’s misinforming operations.  After a failed evacuation effort, which resulted in the death of all involved agents that were supposed to leave Soviet Estonia for Sweden in September 1951, the Swedish intelligence service completely withdrew from the infiltration operations.

Text Source; Lars Fredrik Stöcker, Bridging the Baltic Sea. Networks of Resistance and Opposition during the Cold War Era. The Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series, ed. Mark Kramer. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2018.

Map Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/92/Baltic_Sea_map.png/800px-Baltic_Sea_map.png

May 3, 1952, First Radio Free Europe Program from Munich to Poland

Radio Free Euope's experimental radio broadcasting began on July 14, 1950, to Romania; to Hungary and Poland on August 4, 1950; and to Bulgaria on August 11, 1950. RFE also broadcast to Albania from late 1950 to September 30, 1953. Full-schedule broadcasts to Romania began on May 1, 1951, and to Hungary in October 1951. On May 1, 1951, Radio Free Europe began broadcasting on medium-wave frequencies from the newly constructed transmitter station, nicknamed “Carola,” at Holzkirchen, south of Munich. The new transmitter, with antenna towers four hundred feet high, was at that time three times more powerful than any medium-wave transmitter in the United States.

 

The first Polish-language program broadcast from Holzkirchen was on May 3, 1952, at 11:00 a.m.:

Music: Bells, interrupted by fanfares.

Announcer: Radio Free Europe calling—Voice of Free Poland.

Music: Fanfares.

Announcer : Attention! Attention! On our National Day, on the anniversary of the third May Constitution, you will listen to the inaugurating program of our radio station, which will be broadcast daily to our countrymen in Poland. A solemn dedication to this new radio station will take place in a few moments.

Attention! Attention! Our voice will reach you from today on new and more powerful antennae.

Attention! Attention! Poles speak to Poles.

We speak to our brothers in Poland thanks to the American National Committee for a Free Europe.

 

Harold Miller, president of the National Committee for a Free Europe, in a prepared speech translated into Polish, then gave the ideological foundation of RFE broadcasts to Poland, which was to last until the collapse of Communism in 1989:

This superb instrument is to carry the new Voice of Free Poland. Over its pulsing waves, the free Poles hope to make this echo audible to the dauntless people of their enslaved homeland, that you may share with us the knowledge that the people of Poland are not forgotten and that we in America and in the West have faith in Poland and in the certainty of her ultimate victory.

The Polish Station of Radio Free Europe, organized by the National Committee for a Free Europe, is a station run by Poles for their countrymen. It aims at piercing the Iron Curtain with words of truth. It does not propose to tell the people of Poland what to think or what to do. When they know what goes on in the Free World, when they know that their brothers in exile and their friends in the West have not forgotten them, they will be able to draw their own conclusion and form their own ideas.

 

For more information, see

New Book of Interest: Covet Legions: U.S. Army Intelligence in Germany, 1944-1949

 

COVERT LEGIONS: U.S. Army Intelligence in Germany, 1944-1949 

Published by Center of Military History United States Army Washington, D.C., 2022

by Thomas Boghardt 

Germany was ground zero of the early Cold War. From 1944 to 1949, the U.S. Army, along with America’s allies, occupied the defeated nation, and the Army’s intelligence services guided and executed U.S. policy in central Europe. Covert Legions tells the dramatic story of America’s secret soldiers as they battled Nazi resistance, built democracy, and monitored the Soviet threat. Covert Legions is based on official intelligence records, including many documents declassified especially for this volume

Thomas Boghardt was born in the Rhineland and grew up in Hamburg, Germany, and Venice, Florida. From 1990 to 1991, he served with the 183d Panzerbataillon of the German army. He received his master’s degree in history from the University of Freiburg in 1996, and his Ph.D. in modern European history from the University of Oxford in 2002. Dr. Boghardt taught history at the University of Management Sciences in Lahore, Pakistan, in 2002 before joining Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service as the Fritz Thyssen Fellow from 2002 to 2004. For the next six years, he worked as a historian at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. In 2010, he joined the U.S. Army Center of Military History as a senior historian. 

Dr. Boghardt has published numerous articles and books on intelligence in the twentieth century, and he lectures frequently on this subject. 

From the Introduction:

This volume provides a comprehensive organizational and operational history of Army Intelligence in Germany from the time U.S. forces entered the country in September 1944 to the end of the military occupation five years later. Although it seeks to address all facets of this subject, it does so through the prism of the changing relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. The U.S.-Soviet rivalry turned Germany into the principal battleground of the early Cold War. As such, it became the dominating factor of the American occupation and affected virtually every aspect of U.S. intelligence operations in central Europe.

The book is can be downloaded as a .pdf file at

https://history.army.mil/html/books/045/45-5/index.html

CIA Cold War Project AEROOT Extracts ©

AEROOT was the cryptonym for an early CIA Cold War Foreign Intelligence (FI) project involving Estonia and Estonian nationals of the USSR.  Below is a look at the 1957 project renewal request:

28 June 1957

The attached project, originating in the Soviet/Russia Division, provided for the utilization of all practicable channels of communication with the Estonian SSR to develop, recruit, establish and direct legal resident agents to collect operational and positive intelligence information.

The original AEROOT Project was approved on 13 May 1953 under Basic Plan AEBASIN and continued using renewals and extensions until 31 October 1956. The renewal request for 1 November 1956 through 31 March 1958 included the following Summary of accomplishments from 5 April 1955 to 1 November 1956: 

·      Recruited two Soviet Estonian residents as informers. 

·      Detected and followed up three Russian Intelligence Service (RIS) agents from Estonian SSR in cooperation with Swedish and British intelligence services. 

·      Interrogated and caused confessions of two RIS agents from Estonian SSR. 

·      Spotted one Principal/Agent candidate for work in cooperation with Finnish Intelligence Service. 

·      Recruited one agent for a repatriation mission to Estonian SSR. 

·      Recruited a merchant seaman qualified to visit Soviet ports. 

·      Recruited two mail drops for Secret/Writing correspondence with the Estonian SSR. 

·      Detected RIS control of a Swedish IS agent in Estonian SSR, with whom we also were in 

unilateral communication. 

The objectives of the AEROOT project were:

1.     Establish several legal resident agents in Estonian SSR. 

2.     Utilize all practicable channels of communication between Estonian SSR and the Western World to develop, recruit and direct legal resident agents.

3.     Spot, recruit, brief, and, when practicable, train legal travelers between Estonian SSR and the West. 

4.     Extract operational and positive intelligence information from visitors to and from Estonian SSE, one-time Estonian-resident Volks-Deutsche Prisoners of War clean and unclean escapees from Estonian SSR. 

The following agent personnel, carried in Project AEROOT in the past, were terminated: 

a. Hanks Augusti Toomla, was dispatched to Estonia in the spring of 1954. He lost his life apparently while in Soviet hands. Payment of death benefits to his heirs, provided in his contract with the Agency, is pending settlement of his estate. 

b. Kalja Nikolai Kukk was dispatched into Estonia with Toomla. It was reported he was captured by HIS forces in the spring of 1954. According to a Soviet announcement, he was tried by a Soviet military tribunal in 1955. He is now presumed to be dead. His contract with the Agency provides for payment of death benefits to his designated heirs upon settlement of his estate

They Speak for Freedom: Closed-circuit Television Broadcast for Radio Free Europe ©

 

A closed-circuit half-hour television program "They Speak for Freedom" took place on Tuesday, March 29, 1960, in New York City to "commemorate the tenth anniversary of Radio Free Europe." It was intended for radio and television broadcasters around the United States. 

Those participating included 

• Donald H. McGannon, of Chairman of Broadcasters for Free Europe, president of Westinghouse Broadcasting Company, and host of the program; 
• W.B. Murphy, Crusade for Freedom chairman; 
• Joseph Koevago, former Mayor of Budapest; 
• Leonard Goldenson, chairman of ABC network; 
• Robert Sarnoff, chairman, NBC; 
• Frank Stanton, president, CBS; 
• Martin Block, ABC disk jockey; 
• Arlene Francis, radio and television actress; and 
• Howard K. Smith, CBS Washington news correspondent. 

            

After being introduced by McGannon, Crusade for Freedom chairman Murphy said, 

Last January, I was privileged to visit Radio Free Europe headquarters in Munich and Lisbon. After a day or two there, a kind of cold shiver goes down one's back. You know there's a vicious cold war going on. You come away with a tremendous feeling of respect for the job Radio Free Europe is doing.

A short but detailed film about Radio Free Europe was then shown. Murphy continued, "All of this costs money. It must be private money. Radio Free Europe is not a government operation. It's a private, non-profit organization supported by American citizens and corporations." 

 

Robert Sarnoff was introduced, and he said, "We broadcasters are called upon day-in-and-day-out to serve many good causes, and I think we do a pretty good job of it...Of all the public service efforts that claim our support, Radio Free Europe is the only one that itself is an arm of broadcasting. Now let's show what kind of a job broadcasting can do in this country to raise funds that make this extraordinary service possible."

            

Frank Stanton then added, "The strength of Radio Free Europe derives from its expression of a free people's concern for entrapped fellow human beings across the seas...Nothing is more important about Radio Free Europe than that it reflects the convictions of as many American people as they hear about it...I hope that all of us will take the opportunity seriously to do all that we can to inform our listeners and viewers about Radio Free Europe."

            

McGannon then explained the upcoming Crusade campaign, including the Radio Free Europe kits, a "do it yourself campaign kit specially prepared for broadcasters. You'll find spot announcements, live tapes, films, telops, scripts, discs, the whole works in it." 

 

McGannon then introduced famed news commentator Howard K. Smith, who said: 

 

I've been privileged to be able to report on that story over the years and I hope I will be able to continue to report it in the future. Every mention of RFE's activities is a contribution to the world we want and the kind of world I am persuaded most other people want. As newscasters, we want to do all we can to support Radio Free Europe.

 

McGannon concluded the show with, 

 

Well, that is the story. We've talked about Radio Free Europe and what it does, how it does it, and what we can do to help it. Now it is time for everyone here, every broadcaster in the business, to speak up...We want you to use the radio and television material on your stations, which will be sent to you very shortly. We want you to put on a saturation campaign during the period of our special drive – April 24 through May 8. Speak up, America! Let's show the people behind the Iron Curtain how we feel about freedom of speech, free journalism, free radio, and free television.

 

At a meeting of the directors of the Crusade for Freedom in May 1960, the Broadcasters for Radio Free Europe campaign was declared a disappointment because of the low financial returns but "it was the consensus that the educational value had been stupendous and the fringe benefits probably far larger than can be counted in terms of money received."

For more information, see 

 

Did Communist China broadcast anti-Soviet Propaganda to Ukraine in the Cold War? ©

One of the intriguing twists in Cold War propaganda history is the possibility that Communist China broadcast anti-Soviet radio programs to Ukraine in the 1960s. The sources of the information were Ukrainian anti-Soviet but were consistent from 1963 to 1965. The following is taken from a declassified  CIA document dated December 17, 1965, “CHICOM Overtures to Ukrainian Nationalists”:

In the late summer of 1963, Peking began ordering English language publications on Ukrainian affairs through a London-based British agency. Shortly after that, it was learned that similar orders were being received from the Red Chinese in Bern, Switzerland. There was a short news item in the October 6, 1963, SHLIAKH PEREMOHY  that Mao had purchased books about Khrushchev's crimes in Ukraine. The article was signed with the initials I.K. (probably Ivan KRUSHELNYTSKYY, a BBC monitor in Reading, Berkshire, and a one-time leading member of the Zch/OUN in England). The article confirmed that the Red Chinese in Peking had ordered books published by the Ukrainian Publishing Union in London. Among the books ordered were the following: 

·      KHRUSHCHEV'S CRIMES IN THE UKRAINE; 

·      PETLIURA (Simon) 

·      KONOVALETS (Yevhen),

·      BARDERA MURDERED BY MOSCOW; 

·      CONCENTRATION CAMPS IN THE USSR; 

·      THE SHAME OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY; 

·      RUSSIAN OPPRESSION IN THE UKRAINE. 

The October 25, 1964 issue of SHLIAKH PEREMOHY carried an article entitled RED CHINA HITS MOSCOW WITH NATIONALITIES QUESTION, relating information taken from DIE POMMERISCHE ZEITUNG about letters sent (latter part of September 1964) by Red Chinese to individual Ukrainians living in Poland. According to the report, most of the Ukrainians who sent the letters were members of the USKT (Ukrainian Social-Cultural Society) in Poland. The letters signed by "The Communist League for Human and National Rights" condemned deportations of Ukrainians and promised China's support in Ukrainian anti-Russification measures. Similar letters were received in Pinsk (source assumes recipients were Byelorussians). According to the same article, letters also were received from the Chinese Communists by Polish citizens living in Western Ukraine stating that all the people should have the right to determine whether they want their land returned to Poland or to remain a territory of the Soviet Union. 

SHLIAKH PEREMOHY of January 24, 1965, in an article UKRAINIAN BROADCASTS FROM RED CHINA, enumerated the previous efforts by the Red Chinese to take advantage of the nationalities question in its anti-Moscow propaganda. It stated that Peking is using yet another method: Ukrainian language broadcasts to Ukrainians, who were sent by Moscow to the Far East, to Kazakhstan, and other Asian areas. The newspaper KHLIBOROB carried confirmation of this from one of its readers who personally had heard several such broadcasts. China reminds our brothers in Asia that Moscow sent them there by force. Ukraine is a rich country, Peking states in its radio commentary, a beautiful country, and Ukrainians do not need to leave it and go to distant, poor lands. Of those Ukrainians serving in the army in Asia, the Chinese ask: 

Why are you standing on the Amur, on the banks of the Pacific? What could interest you there? Why aren't you on the banks of the Dnieper, on the Black Sea? Why do Russian guards stand in those areas? Moscow does all this to destroy everything Ukrainian, to Russify all that which never was Russian . . .'." 

The Chinese Communists are smuggling anti-Russian propaganda into the Soviet Union aimed at inflaming internal discontent against the Moscow regime, according to a July 5 United Press International dispatch from Washington. It also mentioned that "according to UPI, large Ukrainian and Byelorussian settlements in the Amur River region in southeastern Siberia - another touchy area in the Red Chinese-Soviet border dispute - have also been targets of Peiping's propaganda." 

And this document from April 1966:

Evidence has been received that within the past year or so Red China has been carrying on propaganda and perhaps political action operations aimed at creating dissension between the Moscow regime and the Soviet Ukraine. Emigre contacts by the Red Chinese have allegedly been attempted in London and Vienna. There have also been reports of Ukrainian language broadcasts and literature distribution by the Chinese to Soviet Ukrainians. 

Simon Petlura (Symon Petruila) was a Ukrainian politician and journalist. He became the Supreme Commander of the Ukrainian Army and the President of the Ukrainian People's Republic during Ukraine's short-lived sovereignty in 1918–1921. Yevhen Konvolets was the leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) from 1929-to 1938. Shliakh Poremohy (Path to Victory) was a weekly newspaper founded in 1954 and printed in Munich by the anti-Soviet exile group OUN/B.