SMERSH: Stalin's Secret Weapon: Soviet Military Counterintelligence in WWII

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Ian Fleming purported in his first James Bond book, Casino Royale, published in April 1953, to report factually about SMERSH, described as part of the ‘MWD’, the successor to the NKVD, and headed by Lavrenti Beria. This particular passage is a curious overlap of error and accuracy, a confusion of the MGB, the Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, being the Ministry of State Security, and the MVD, the Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del, which was the Soviet Ministry of Interior Affairs that had emerged from the old NKVD prior to the establishment of the KGB in 1954, following the death of Stalin the previous March, the same year that Casino Royale was published.

Fleming’s dossier, supposedly prepared by Section S to brief Bond’s Chief M, gives an account of SMERSH, an organization concerned, as he correctly mentioned, with counter intelligence and executions which really had existed between April 1943 and March 1946. Although SMERSH had been disbanded and absorbed in the MGB’s Third Main Directorate by the time Fleming wrote about it, very few outside of the international intelligence community had any knowledge of the agency which had been created by Stalin to liquidate counter revolutionaries and those suspected of collaboration with the Nazis.

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