Smersh vs Smersh
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
‘Smersh.’ The word just sounds sinister. It instantly conjures up an image of the Soviet Union, the Cold War and, of course, James Bond.
Many presume that the organisation was invented by Ian Fleming, but Smersh really existed—albeit in a somewhat different form than that described in his novels. Fleming never revealed precisely where he learned about Smersh, although according to John Pearson’s biography, he first came across it in ‘a magazine article soon after the war, and he embroidered on what little information he had about the organization and introduced it melodramatically into Casino Royale.’1
If so, this would probably have been in connection with Smersh by Nicola Sinevirsky, which was published in English in 1950. It was at around this time that Fleming was trying to introduce himself into literary circles more prominently, meeting Jonathan Cape, Edith Sitwell and William Plomer, and keeping up with all the latest literary magazines.2 So one candidate for the book coming to his attention is The Saturday Review of Literature, which ran a review of it by its Eastern European expert Hal Lehrman in its issue of November 25 1950. The same issue had Winston Churchill on the cover in connection with the latest installment of his autobiography, and included reviews of Vladimir ‘Popski’ Peniakoff’s memoirs and Ludwig Moyzisch’s Operation Cicero. Fleming was fascinated by all three of those subjects. Churchill’s obituary of his father was on display wherever he lived in his later years; he had met Popski at the Savoy Hotel in London to discuss his book at the request of Jonathan Cape; and Operation Cicero was mentioned in Moonraker, while the attempted assassination of Van Papen in Ankara a year before the affair would inspire the ‘men in straw hats’ incident in Casino Royale.
Smersh was the first book to name the organisation. Sinevirsky was a pseudonym for Mikhail Mondich, a Ruthenian member of an anti-communist group called the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists, or NTS. He claimed to have infiltrated Smersh and worked undercover in the organization for seven months before escaping to West Germany where, in 1948, the NTS newspaper Possev published his diary. The 1950 English translation of Smersh published by Henry Holt & Company was an edited version of Mondich’s diary that had been put together by two American journalist brothers, Kermit and Milt Hill. Lehrman’s review of the book was dismissive:
‘Dragooned into the Soviet Army, [Mondich] is accidentally drafted as interpreter for—guess what—the secret police. Sinevirsky, his editors, and publishers think it is something new and special called SMERSH… but it is really just an NKVD counter-espionage branch.’3
Despite this, it appears Fleming was intrigued enough to seek out the book himself, because when he started writing Casino Royale 14 months later,4 he drew much of his material for Smersh directly from it. Mondich’s book had been published in the United States at the height of McCarthyism and fears of Communism. As a result, the emphasis was very much on the propaganda benefits of a first-hand account of Soviet brutality. The back cover hailed the book as being ‘of vital significance to an America that is already engaged in a political struggle against Bolshevik aggression’, while the flyleaf proclaimed:
‘This book reveals for the first time the intimate details of Stalin’s secret weapon—Smersh. What is it? What does it mean? It means ”Death to Spies” and is a contraction of the Russian words, Smert Shpionam… It is the new supersecret counter-espionage elite whose creed is “Let thousands of innocents die lest one guilty go free!” Its weapons are terror and fear and unbelievable brutality. It is the absolute of depravity, degeneration, and the power-corruption which is Russia today…’
It’s not hard to see why this would have appealed to Ian Fleming—for an aspiring thriller-writer, a ‘new supersecret counter-espionage elite’ must have been like manna from heaven. As an experienced journalist, Fleming was constantly scouring the world around him for tidbits of information he could process and transform into gold. In his 1963 article ‘How to Write a Thriller’, he revealed a little of his methodology:
‘You must know thrilling things before you can write about them. Imagination alone isn’t enough, but stories you hear from friends or read in the papers can be built up by a fertile imagination and a certain amount of research and documentation into incidents that will also ring true in fiction.’5
Pearson noted that experts on Soviet affairs were quick to point out that ‘Smersh was really a body which worked very largely with the Red Army during the war, rounding up German spies and saboteurs and Russian traitors, that it was a mistake to think that it had operated outside the borders of the U.S.S.R., that it was never a counter-intelligence unit in the sense that it worked against enemy secret services, and that in any case it had changed its name at the end of the war. Fleming, who always knew a good thing when he met one, took no notice and continued to base himself on his outdated conception of Smersh.’
When Fleming started writing Casino Royale in early 1952, Mondich’s book was the only account of Smersh’s activities to have been published anywhere in the world. However, he might also have had his own sources for information on the organisation: as the assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence during the Second World War, he was well-placed to hear of counter-intelligence activities. Fleming also established 30 Assault Unit, an intelligence-gathering commando group that followed the Allied troops into Germany, Austria and elsewhere searching for documents and equipment left behind by the Nazis late in the war.6 Smersh were active in the same area at the same time, hunting down suspected traitors to the Soviet Union—members of the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists, for instance, as well as Latvian and Ukrainian nationalists who had joined the Waffen SS and the Nazis’ mobile killing squads.7
But even with Fleming’s war work, it seems highly unlikely that he would have had the level of detailed knowledge about Smersh’s structure that is depicted in Mondich’s book—especially as a study of it reveals that Fleming seems to have drawn his material in Casino Royale directly from it. Mondich omitted the fact that Smersh was no longer operating under that name by 1950—it was disbanded and all its duties handed over to the Main Administration of Counter-Intelligence (GUKR) of the MGB in 19468—presumably because any mention of this would have greatly lessened his book’s impact. Casino Royale also features a still-active Smersh, albeit with the proviso that it has been reduced in size. Mondich provided the basic background material on the organization, but Fleming made sure he adapted it to make it more thrilling.
In Chapter 6 of his book, Mondich gave a complete rundown of the organization’s structure:
‘Smersh counter-intelligence, I learned, was divided into five departments.’9
When it came to writing MI6’s dossier on Smersh in Casino Royale, Fleming followed these pages very closely:
‘The organization itself was thoroughly purged after the war and is now believed to consist of only a few hundred operatives of very high quality divided into five sections.’
According to Mondich, the First Department was attached directly to the front, where it monitored political trends inside the Red Army. Fleming rendered this as:
‘Department I: In charge of counter intelligence among Soviet organizations at home and abroad.’
This is both broader and vaguer in scope. Perhaps the idea of a super-secret elite working in ordinary uniforms as informers at the front didn’t seem as thrilling.
Fleming adapted the other departments’ roles into similarly concise and exciting prose. The Second Department, according to Mondich, was Operations, which was responsible for seeking out ‘organised enemies of the system’. Anyone suspected of committing a crime against the Soviet Union ‘must die’. Fleming neatly summarised this as:
‘Department II: Operations, including executions.’ 10
Mondich claimed that the Third Department was Administrative, but that he knew little about it, that the Fourth was the Investigation Department, and that the Fifth was the Prosecuting Department. Confusingly, he then mentioned two further departments, the Personnel Department and the Finance Department, which makes seven, not five. Fleming got round this by adding Finance to Department Three and Personnel to Department Four:
‘Department III: Administration and Finance.
Department IV: Investigations and legal work. Personnel.
Department V: Prosecutions: the section which passes final judgement on all victims.’
Mondich also claimed that Smersh’s headquarters were in Moscow. Perhaps this seemed too predictable, because Fleming placed them in Leningrad instead, with a sub-station in Moscow (although he would change this in From Russia, With Love). He also attributed Trotsky’s assassination to the organisation, even though it took place a year before it was formed (a mistake many subsequent writers have repeated). And instead of being ‘Stalin’s secret weapon’, Fleming wrote that it was ‘believed to come under the personal direction of Beria’.11
One thing Fleming did not alter from Mondich’s book was its trumpeted information about the meaning of the organization’s name:
‘Smersh is a conjunction of two Russian words: ‘Smyert Shpionam’, meaning roughly: “Death to Spies”.’
As John Pearson noted, Ian Fleming knew a good thing when he met one.
Fleming’s use of Smersh in Casino Royale was a master-stroke: right at the start of the Cold War, he stole a march on the legions of thriller-writers who would follow him, almost all of whom would use branches of the MVD or the KGB as the enemy. By settling on a little-known Soviet intelligence group instead, Fleming invested his work with an aura of originality and inside knowledge that would ‘ring true in fiction’. At the same time, he put his own stamp on the genre—nobody else could use Smersh after him without seeming unoriginal.
Fleming also cleverly—and unusually for a thriller-writer of his era—ignored the crude propagandistic elements of his source material. In Chapter Nine of Casino Royale, we learn that in order to join the prestigious Double O Section of the British Secret Service James Bond assassinated two men, one of whom was a double agent. The elimination of treachery, then, is something that MI6’s Double O Section has in common with Smersh’s Department II, which seeks out ‘organised enemies of the system’ and kills them.12
But Fleming didn’t stop there: although Bond casually tells Vesper Lynd over caviar and hot toast that he has killed in cold blood, after he is tortured by the villain, Le Chiffre, he reappraises the situation, admitting to Mathis that the Norwegian traitor he killed ‘just didn’t die very quickly’, and agonising over ‘the nature of evil’, as the chapter title puts it:
‘Take our friend Le Chiffre. It’s easy enough to say he’s an evil man, at least it’s simple enough for me because he did evil things to me. If he was here now, I wouldn’t hesitate to kill him, but out of personal revenge and not, I’m afraid, for some high moral reason or for the sake of my country.’
Bond’s anxieties here—and the confusion of hero and villain and patriotism and personal motive—may have been influenced by Geoffrey Household’s classic 1939 thriller Rogue Male, in which the narrator, trapped in an underground burrow, is forced to face the fact that he is not morally superior to his tormentor, a tall, fair-haired Nazi officer who has taken on the cover role of an English gentleman, ‘Major Quive-Smith’, and repeatedly calls him ‘my dear fellow’. In the first chapter of Rogue Male, the narrator tries to assassinate Hitler, but the shot misses due to a sudden change in the wind: later, as he is questioned by ‘Quive-Smith’ on his motivation for the assassination attempt, we learn that it was not out of a sense of patriotism or some high moral reason, but the fact that the Germans had shot his lover:
‘I declared war upon the men who could commit such sacrilege, and above all upon the man who has given them their creed. How ridiculous that one person should declare war upon a nation! That was another reason I hid from myself what I was doing. My war was a futile cause to me, to be smiled at sympathetically just as I used to smile at her enthusiasms. Yet in fact my war is anything but futile. Its cost in lives and human suffering is low. Seek out and destroy the main body of the enemy—and I should have destroyed it but for a change of wind.’13
This theme is echoed in the final chapter of Casino Royale, in which James Bond vows to go after the men who engineered the death of his lover, Vesper Lynd:
‘Smersh was the spur. Be faithful, spy well, or you die. Inevitably and without question, you will be hunted down and killed.
It was the same with the whole Russian machine. Fear was the impulse. For them it was always safer to advance than retreat. Advance against the enemy and the bullet might miss you. Retreat, evade, betray, and the bullet would never miss.
But now he would attack the arm that held the whip and the gun. The business of espionage could be left to the white-collar boys. They could spy, and catch the spies. He would go after the threat behind the spies, the threat that made them spy.’
Such nuanced delineations are rare in espionage thrillers written so soon after the Second World War, and the popular perception of Fleming as a gung-ho patriot often fails to address these moments in Casino Royale. This is partly of Fleming’s own doing, though, because in his second novel, Live And Let Die, he discarded the hard-earned lessons Bond had learned in the first book. And just as the scar on Bond’s hand is erased, so too is the research of the first novel: Smersh did not employ foreign gangsters. In Live And Let Die, Fleming moved his depiction of the organization from broadly reflecting the role it played in reality—the hunter of enemies of the Soviet state—to a more amorphous, if still gloriously sinister-sounding, ‘red menace’.
Smersh is only tangential to the plot of Live And Let Die, but for its next appearance in a Bond novel it took centre-stage. In From Russia, With Love, Fleming brought all his skills to bear to create perhaps the most famous depiction of a villainous organisation in fiction. 14 Fleming now used the Russian word ‘Otdely’ instead of Department, and heading up Otdely II—memorably described by Tatania Romanova as ‘the very whisper of death’—he introduced the fearsome Rosa Klebb.
Fleming’s interest in Smersh had been reignited by the case of the Russian cipher expert Vladimir Petrov, who had defected to Australia in 1954. Writing about the case in his Sunday Times column ‘Atticus’, Fleming brought in his knowledge of Beria’s ‘messengers of death’ and also mentioned a mysterious ‘Madame Rybkin’, who he thought might be the most powerful woman in espionage.
Colonel Zoya Rybkina, alias ‘Madam Yartseva’, was the head of the NKVD’s German section throughout World War Two.15 She discovered the Nazis’ plan to attack the Soviet Union in June 1941 and told Stalin about it five days before the invasion—he didn’t believe her.16 Under the name Zoya Voskresenskaya, Rybkina later became famous in Russia as a children’s writer with a series of stories following the adventures of Lenin as a boy, two of which were made into successful films. Fleming may also have been inspired by a description Rachel Terry had given him of Emma Wolff, a hideous NKVD agent based in Vienna, adding some of her physical attributes to Klebb.17
One final inspiration for Klebb may have been Major Tamara Nicolayeva Ivanova, one of Russian intelligence’s ‘few female high officials’ and ‘an over-worked nervous spinster’, according to Soviet Spy Net by E.H. Cookridge.18 Cookridge was a pseudonym for former British agent Edward Spiro, and this book, published in Britain in 1955, was a highly coloured account of the activities of Russian intelligence agencies around the world—according to Henry Chancellor, Fleming used it as the background source for most of his Cold War novels.19
Although it only mentions Smersh once, and that’s on the first page of its introduction to state that it no longer exists, this book contains the germs of many of Fleming’s greatest ideas. Ivanova is also only mentioned once, but Spiro claimed she was an instructor of Captain Nicolai Evgenyevich Khokhlov, the MVD agent who defected to the Americans in Germany in 1954, claiming to have been sent to assassinate Georgi Okolovich, chairman of the NTS in Frankfurt. Khokhlov is mentioned several times in From Russia, With Love, and is central to Fleming’s construction of the book. In Chapter Three, the entirely fictional General Grubozaboyschikov tells the real Serov “We don’t want another Khokhlov affair”, while in Chapter 26, Bond is told that his current predicament will ‘knock spots’ off the Khokhlov case.20
Spiro claimed that Khokhlov was a member of the MVD’s ‘Otydel for Terror and Diversion’, and gave a graphic account of this division’s activities, most of which has never appeared in any creditable non-fiction work about Soviet intelligence. Chapter Eight of the book is dedicated to training, and reveals the general syllabus taught to MVD agents between 1948 and 1953, including the principles of Marxism, the history of other systems of government, ‘the Problems of Negroes and other Colonial Peoples’, codes and ciphers, and physical training:
‘Lt. Colonel Nicolai Godlovsky, director of the Cheka small arms section, is the Soviet rifle marksmanship champion… The training for the budding “executioners” is carried out in a barrack-like building on the corner of Metrostroveskaya Sreet and Turnaninsky Pereulok in Moscow. The director of this training establishment is Colonel of the M.V.D., Arkady Foyotev. The syllabus includes rifle and pistol shooting, driving (motor-cars and motor-cycles), judo, boxing, photography and elementary courses in radio technique. This course is only for beginners. Graduates of the “Section for Terror and Diversion” are trained at special establishment at Kuchino, a large country house outside Moscow, where they are prepared for their “special tasks”, and for which the syllabus includes the use of special weapons and poisons.’21
Fleming used this chapter as the basis for Donovan ‘Red’ Grant’s training, attributing the MVD’s methods to his imaginary version of a still-active Smersh:
‘The next year was spent, with only two other foreign students among several hundred Russians, at the School for Terror and Diversion at Kuchino, outside Moscow. Here Grant went triumphantly through courses in judo, boxing, athletics, photography and radio under the general supervision of the famous Colonel Arkady Fotoyev, father of the modern Soviet spy, and completed his small-arms instruction at the hands of Lieutenant-Colonel Nikolai Godlovsky, the Soviet Rifle Champion.’
Quite apart from switching all this to Smersh, Fleming adapted Spiro’s text in such a way that even if it had been true, it could no longer be. Spiro listed judo, boxing and so on as being taught to beginners, with only graduates moving on to Kuchino. Perhaps because the details of the beginners’ course were more compelling and more concrete than the much vaguer description of the graduate course, Fleming listed the beginners’ activities as being taught at the graduates’ school. In doing so, he got all the authentic-sounding material in—all the activities taught, the names of both instructors, the menacing name of the school and the place-name—even though it meant contradicting his source.
Fleming’s aim was not to describe the inner workings of Soviet espionage accurately, but convincingly. He was writing novels, not non-fiction, and he used artistic licence as and when he saw fit. The details he used sound authoritative, and lure us into believing we are in the hands of a true espionage insider.
Fleming also built cleverly on the true circumstances. Khokhlov was a genuine agent, but he had defected before completing his assassination mission. In Red Grant, Fleming created a rather less squeamish opponent for Bond:
‘Smersh has made one or two mistakes lately. That Khokhlov business for one. Remember the explosive cigarette case and all that? Gave it to the wrong man. Should have given it to me. I wouldn’t have gone over to the Yanks.’2
Khokhlov did not work for Smersh, of course, but when he defected he brought with him an array of weapons, including a cigarette case that fired dum-dum bullets through the tips and an electrically fired miniature revolver that could be hidden in the palm of a hand: it was a propaganda coup the Americans fully exploited, showing off both the would-be assassin and his paraphernalia at a packed press conference at the American High Commission in Bonn on April 22, 1954.
Spiro commented on the case as follows:
‘It was said that if a popular writer of thrillers had invented a tale of disguised secret agents carrying such weapons to kill their victim in the centre of a European city, even ardent readers would say the story was incredible. But, in fact, these things have been done, and done successfully, by Cheka agents before.’22
Such a sentiment must have been almost a provocation to Ian Fleming! Not only did he give Red Grant an even more fanciful weapon, hidden inside a copy of War and Peace, he took Spiro’s line and ran with it. In How to Write a Thriller, he wrote that his plots were ‘fantastic, while being based upon truth’:
‘They go wildly beyond the probable but not beyond the possible. Every now and then there will be a story in the newspapers that lifts a corner of the veil from Secret Service work. A tunnel from West to East Berlin so that our Secret Service can tap the Russian telephone system: the Russian spy Khokhlov with his cigarette case that fired dum-dum bullets; “The Man Who Never Was”—the corpse with the false invasion plans that we left for the Gestapo to find. This is all true Secret Service history that is yet in the higher realm of fantasy, and James Bond’s ventures into this realm are perfectly legitimate.’
The idea of using a tunnel to listen in on the Russians also made its way into From Russia, With Love, incidentally, albeit on a much smaller scale than the technical feat that was Operation GOLD: Darko Kerim and James Bond eavesdrop on a Soviet meeting with a submarine periscope while standing in Istanbul’s sewers. Kerim mentions that Q Branch are trying to find a way to wire the periscope for sound.
Fleming’s insistence that his work was ‘based upon truth’ and ‘not beyond the possible’ is nevertheless intriguing. Firstly, Spiro’s book was not the truth, and Fleming, an experienced journalist, must have suspected that. Even if he took it all to be true, Spiro only mentioned Smersh once in his book, where he said it no longer exists. Fleming either didn’t read Spiro’s introduction or disregarded it, feeling that the defunct Smersh sounded more exciting than the real MVD—and as he had already used it in Casino Royale, it was his organization, in a way.
A more ingenious example of the way Fleming used research is evident from Grant’s cover identity, Captain Norman Nash. Grant posing as an English gentleman and repeatedly calling Bond ‘old man’ appears to be a further reference to Rogue Male and ‘Major Quive-Smith’. And, as Henry Chancellor has pointed out, Fleming took his surname from the glossary of terms in Spiro’s book:
‘“Nash”: “Ours”, Cheka description for a sympathiser or potential informant.’23
Fleming has Tania tell Bond this, presaging the revelation that ‘Nash’ is not all he seems:
‘“What did you say his name is?”
“Nash. Norman Nash.”
She spelled it out. “N.A.S.H.? Like that?”
“Yes.”
The girl’s eyes were puzzled. “I suppose you know what that means in Russian. Nash means ‘ours’. In our Services, a man is nash when he is one of ‘our’ men. He is svoi when he is one of ‘theirs’—when he belongs to the enemy. And this man calls himself Nash. That is not pleasant.”’
Tatiana Romanova doesn’t appear to have any direct historical counterpart, but much of her background is also taken from Spiro’s book; it contains a chapter on the Central Index, where Tania works, which we are told mostly employs women. This is also where Fleming found the information about the Russians’ files, zapiski, the Russian for ‘top secret’, and many other details. But while most thriller-writers research to make their fiction as realistic as possible, Fleming was concerned if it was interesting first, and plausible second. He also used his research material as a jumping-off point for ideas. As well as providing Fleming with a lot of authoritative-sounding jargon, Spiro’s book seems to have triggered plot ideas. In a passage about the use of mercenary spies, Spiro wrote:
‘The conflict of the hot and cold war ideologies since 1939 has resulted in the eclipse of the professional “free lance” spy, beloved of the pre-war thriller writers—the Mata Haris and the glamorous blondes of the Orient Express.’24
There were indeed many thrillers predating the 1950s that featured beautiful female agents and the most famous train in the world—but perhaps this was the trigger for Fleming to write his own variation of the form.
A few lines later, Spiro discussed the exploits of the Switz Gang, a syndicate of spies who trapped leading French officials into revealing defence secrets, which they then sold to both the Nazis and the Soviets:
‘It was as romantic as any thriller lover could desire. A few blonde hairs adhering to a roll of camera film, which fell into the hands of the Deuxième Bureau, was the clue that led counter-espionage agents, with the help of Scotland Yard, to Mrs. Marjorie Switz.’25
As well as the echoes of the photo blackmail plot in From Russia, With Love, the Switz Gang sounds like it might also have been an inspiration for S.P.E.C.T.R.E. in Thunderball.
Fleming cheekily prefaced From Russia, With Love with a note insisting on the accuracy of the information about Smersh contained within the novel. Apart from sheer bravado—the organization had been disbanded over a decade earlier—this may have been because he was helped with his research by the Russian rocket scientist Grigori Tokaev, who had defected to Britain in 1947.26 Tokaev—who later took the name Tokaty—was the only Soviet official to defect to Britain between 1945 and 1963. But while he had some knowledge of Russia’s intelligence structure, he had never been a member of Smersh; he also spent much of his time in Britain assisting the Information Research Department, a secret group within the Foreign Office that created anti-Communist propaganda.27
Fleming was happy to chop and change information as it suited him. The truth was a starting point, and it was always more important that it sounded like it could be true than whether it was. And a little note at the start would be enough to convince most people that it was the truth, and that they had been given an insider’s glimpse into the espionage world. As we can see, that was hardly the case. Far from being an accurate description of the workings of Smersh, the ‘most secret department of the Soviet government’, as Fleming claimed in his author’s note, From Russia, With Love in fact gives an exciting but rather inaccurate representation of the workings of another Soviet organization entirely, the MVD, based on a publicly available account that itself was dubious, even before he attributed its methods to the long-defunct Smersh.
Regardless of historical accuracy, From Russia, With Love established Smersh as spy fiction’s greatest villains to date. Considering the wealth of projects that exploited the success of Bond in the ‘60s, it seems surprising that there weren’t more books about Smersh during this period. One reason, of course, was the difficulty in getting hold of first-hand information.
One book claiming to offer this is Nights Are Longest There: Smersh From The Inside by A.I. Romanov, which was published in English in 1972. ‘Romanov’—a fitting pseudonym—writes that he was recruited into Department I during the war, meaning that we get lots of insight into life on the front-lines, as well as a thorough history of the organisation. It’s a world away from Fleming: Romanov spent most of his time questioning people about garrisons and troop movements in hutments, occasionally being dragged out to a forest with his comrades to witness an execution. And where Mikhail Mondich verged on the hysterical, Romanov takes understatement to excess:
‘In Poland... I witnessed the execution of one of our officers, who had raped a young Polish girl in her parents’ home. The order of sentence in this case was widely publicised, both to our forces and the local population. Later, in Budapest, I was present when a group of leaders of the Hungarian pro-fascist party ‘Crossed Arrows’ was hanged. All these scenes left me with an impression that can in no way be described as pleasant.’28
Ian Fleming only used Smersh once again: Auric Goldfinger is its treasurer. But here, as in Live And Let Die, this was more a convenient prop to explain Bond’s interest in the mission than anything else. And in his next novel, Thunderball, Fleming finally did away with Smersh altogether, replacing it with the wholly fictional S.P.E.C.T.R.E. In an interview given to Playboy shortly before his death, Fleming gave his reasons:
‘I closed down Smersh, although I was devoted to the good old apparat, because, first of all, Khrushchev did in fact disband Smersh himself, although its operations are still carried out by a subsection of the K.G.B., the Russian secret service. But in that book—I think it was Thunderball that I was writing at the time of the proposed summit meeting—I thought well, it’s no good going on if we’re going to make friends with the Russians. I know them, I like them personally, as anyone would, as anyone would like the Chinese if he knew them. I thought, I don’t want to go on ragging them like this. So I invented S.P.E.C.T.R.E. as an international crime organisation which contained elements of Smersh and the Gestapo and the Mafia—the cosy old Cosa Nostra—which, of course, is a much more elastic fictional device than Smersh, which was no fictional device, but the real thing.’29
The makers of the Bond films felt the same, preferring to use the elastic S.P.E.C.T.R.E. than the real-life Smersh (and SPECTRE is the title of the next film, due out in 2015). But the idea that a ‘subsection of the KGB’ might still be carrying out Smersh’s duties (which, in fact, it had been before Fleming started writing about it) found favour with John Gardner when he came to write his James Bond novels. In Icebreaker, Smersh was transformed into ‘Department V’. This was a real subsection of the KGB, although it was in fact descended from the Special Administration of Special Tasks, a sabotage and assassination division during the Second World War often confused with Smersh, rather than from Smersh itself. However, as with Fleming, historical accuracy was not the name of the game, and Gardner took his readers back to Fleming’s original fascination with this strange, sinister Soviet group:
‘“Smersh has what I understand is called, in criminal parlance, a hit list. That list includes a number of names—people who are wanted, not dead but alive. Can you imagine whose name is number one on the chart, James Bond?”’30
If such hit lists seem ‘beyond the possible’, one only has to consider the fate of Nicolai Khokhlov, whose case so inspired Fleming when writing From Russia, With Love. That novel ends with James Bond being poisoned by a kick from Rosa Klebb. Five months after it was published, in September 1957, Khokhlov himself was poisoned with the metal thallium, which had been inserted into a cup of coffee. He eventually recovered, but not before he had gone bald, blood had seeped through his pores and his entire body had become disfigured with black-and-blue swellings. The obvious similarities to the cases of both Viktor Yushchenko and Alexander Litvinenko suggest that Ian Fleming’s conception of the Russian secret services may not have been so wide of the mark after all.