with Jonas Chartagaro
Psychiatrist
A Lies & Detection Episode
Jonas interviews Soviet Spy Master, Leopold Trepper
“By 1941, Soviet spies had penetrated the German military intelligence service (Abwehr), the German Ministry of Labor, the Ministry of Propaganda, the Foreign Office, and the administration of important German cities, including Cologne and Berlin. In other countries which the Nazis then controlled, Soviet spies had penetrated both the national and the city police, the local transportation authorities, the local telephone systems, and he local banking systems.
There was a long-standing joke in Moscow that Joe Stalin knew what was happening in Hitler’s upper circles before the Wehrmacht High Command did.
This was a joke with considerable truth.
However, it is a mistake to believe that the Soviet Military Intelligence Service brilliantly planned such a successful operation. Actually, it happened almost by accident. A single agent was sent to Belgium in 1939 and told to “get something going.” Unfortunately, the agent’s superiors in Moscow were victims of Stalin’s purges. So, the agent was left alone without support (or interference) from the Moscow Center.
Leopold Trepper was the so-called “Big Chief” of the extremely successful ‘Red Orchestra” network of Soviet spies which operated in Nazi occupied countries during World War II. At its height, Trepper’s “Red Orchestra” group of spy networks operated in Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, England, and the Netherlands.
Hitler regarded the “Red Orchestra” as his principal clandestine threat and assigned an elite group of senior counter-espionage agents (the Special Detachment for Red Orchestra) to track down and eradicate it.
The” Red Orchestra” network was only broken by turncoats from within. Of the nearly 300 agents that Leopold Trepper controlled, only 63 survived the War. The others were captured, tortured, and murdered. Nonetheless, the “Red Orchestra “conducted many of the boldest clandestine missions of the War.
Trepper reported that the “Red Orchestra” was able to complete nearly 3,000 coded radio transmissions to Moscow, of which only about 250 were ever decoded by the German code-breaking teams.
The name “Red Orchestra” was a name applied to the spy networks by German counter-espionage agents. They chose the name because they learned that Trepper’s spies called their radio operators “pianists.”
I have been reading Leopold Trepper’s memoirs, The Great Game and I intend to create a mini-podcast series based on his memoirs.
In this episode, I want to focus our discussion on a small story withing a much larger one. It is nonetheless an important story that needs to be re-told.
~ Listen ~
Psychiatrist
