Operation Rod of Iron: AU fic

[Nictionary]

Nope, it ain't over yet.

[TimM]

Good.

[Nictionary]

July 14, 1925
   On September 1, 1924, the Russian All-Military Union (Russky Obshche-Voynsky Soyuz, ROVS) was established by General Pyotr Wrangel in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.  Its purpose was to maintain a standing White Russian army in exile, capable of combatting the Soviets.  The ROVS included a secret Intelligence Service, and among the top officials in the new spy agency was none other than Adrian Bylinkin.  Soon after its establishment, senior Intelligence Service agents decided it was time to resume the hunt for the regicides.  The surviving members of the Imperial Family were still struggling to rebuild their lives, and the memory of the murders of the tsar and his family was still an open wound in the White psyche.  While it was quite low on their list of priorities, ROVS officials still desperately wanted to avenge the dead.  They were further inspired by Operation Nemesis, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation’s covert campaign to track down and kill Ottoman officials responsible for the Armenian Massacres.  “Look at them,” one Intelligence Service official had argued in a meeting.  “They have not allowed defeat and dispersal to hinder their pursuit of justice.”
   When the list of those targeted for assassination was reconsidered, the “dark man” again came out on top.  Even in the immediate wake of the Gus-Khrustalny disaster, the intelligence gathering in the hunt for Yurovsky never stopped.  Every relevant detail gleaned from the raw data was checked, analyzed, and filed.
   Thousands of hours of manpower, in field and office, were devoted to the hunt for Yurovsky.  Human intelligence sources were asked time and again about the man, their ability to get close to him, his schedule, his habits, and his plans.  The ears of ROVS Military Intelligence, Unit 4100, were instructed to intercept his calls or pick up any mention of his name.
   After Shimmering Light, Yurovsky had grown cautious about his personal safety, hiring dozens of armed security guards.  Yurovsky tried to remain unpredictable in his habits. He kept loaded Mosin-Nagants in every room in his apartment.
   Once Wrangel reissued the old authorization first given by Admiral Kolchak to assassinate Yakov Yurovsky, Bylinkin was again given responsibility for the dark man’s termination.  Once again, Bylinkin began recruiting a team of agents. This time the Whites could not afford a mistake. Only veteran undercover and covert operators with experience in the Civil War were included in the mission.
   By the first half of 1925, the noose around Yurovsky began to tighten.  Intelligence Service surveillance experts had arrived in Moscow to begin monitoring Yurovsky and immediately discovered that his security precautions had grown lax in the five years since the Rod of Iron team had roamed Russia.  Years had passed after the execution of the Romanovs, and he was growing careless; Yurovsky was no longer a virtually untouchable Chekist.  Now working as deputy head of the Economic Section of the Moscow Committee of Rabkrin, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate, he had turned into a fat apparatchik.
   Intelligence Service agents began watching Yurovsky closely again in early 1925, following him from a distance during his visits to Moscow.  Over at least six weeks they studied his movements and watched several patterns slowly emerge.
   A careful analysis of the abundant intelligence pouring in isolated a few weak points that could, with proper planning, be made into a weak point that would give Yurovsky away.  When not at work, Yurovsky spent most afternoons with his wife, Mania, and their youngest child, Zhenya, in their apartment in the once-fashionable area of Arbat.  He was also making regular visits to a local banya.  Soon, Intelligence Service staff officers crafted a plan to plant a bomb under a banya bench as he sweated.  The plan was discarded. There was no way to ensure that others would not join him at the last instant, or that the building wouldn’t be severely damaged, perhaps putting more lives at risk.  Instead the Whites chose to launch a less subtle attack on the dark gentleman.
   Yurovsky was good about going to visit his sister.  The Intelligence Service surveillance teams who had been monitoring Yurovsky recognized that in order to reach the building where she lived he had to pass along the east-west route of Vozdvizhenka Street.  This was his weak point.

[JamesAPrattIII]

One way the team could have identified Yurosky is by his accent. It varied depending on where you are from in Russia. Yurosky would have spoken Russian with a Siberian accent like Rasputin. This makes you stand out in St Petersburg/Petrograd. I understand Lenin according to one account I read sounded like a drawing room fop. Stalin spoke Russian with a heavy Georgian accent. His voice was also squeaky and one source I have read said he sounded almost comical.

Mossad also made a mistake and killed the wrong man in one of their hits.

If the reds found out the Whites were trying to kill their leaders they would have had hundreds of hostages shot and would have jailed thousands more people. This is one of the reasons the Whites would not have done any sort of assassination program. They also thought until November 1919 they were going to win the Russian Civil war. The Whites were also not into assassinations. George Hill in  "Go Spy The Land " points this out.

Yes TimM
The Soviets went to some lengths to keep guns out of the hands of their people

The Cheka would sometimes surround a city block and search it

The Cheka and Red army would take hostages from a village and if the villagers did not turn in their quota of firearms the hostages would be shot.

In WW II/GPW I understand in any areas captured by the Red Army orders were given that all firearms, ect were to be turned in or people found with them would be shot

In spite of all these "Common sense gun safety measures" I have read that in the mid 1970s that there were well over 10 million illegal firearms in the USSR and there was a big black market trade in illegal firearms and ammo.

[Nictionary]

Mossad also made a mistake and killed the wrong man in one of their hits.

This chapter is based on that incident

If the reds found out the Whites were trying to kill their leaders they would have had hundreds of hostages shot and would have jailed thousands more people. This is one of the reasons the Whites would not have done any sort of assassination program.

Previous chapters include mentions of such retaliations.  Was the White leadership really paralyzed by such moral restraints?

The Whites were also not into assassinations. George Hill in  "Go Spy The Land " points this out.

If I'd known about that book before I started writing this perhaps the story would be quite different.  On the other hand, there were some of the younger generation of emigres, viz. Conradi, Kowerda, and Shabelsky-Bork, who clearly did not share the hesitancy that Hill talks about.  Perhaps Bylinkin was of a similar mindset and simply managed to convince successive superiors.  Similarly, it was with ambivalence and  reluctance that Golda Meir initially approved the plan to assassinate Palestinian terrorist suspects after Munich, after being pressured by top intelligence officials.  She had previously resisted such proposals, citing the risk of mistakes, agents getting caught, and the damage to Israel's image.

[Nictionary]

Also, would the monitoring of building residents you mentioned earlier have been relaxed slightly following the end of the Civil War?

[Nictionary]

The White operation began in May 1925, when a female Intelligence Service agent, claiming to be a Swiss bohemian called Pia Merz, arrived in Moscow on a Swiss passport issued on November 21, 1921, number 37059, to begin working for an orphanage.  She, like Ruslana Havrysh, worked for the Intelligence Service part-time, only when asked. 
   The White surveillance teams who had been monitoring Yurovsky for weeks knew he often drove down a narrow road called Sayan Street on his way to and from his apartment and his workplace in the city.  Intelligence Service headquarters in Sremski Karlovci, Yugoslavia, decided that the combatant, who had been trained well for her position, would take up residence in a flat in Moscow that overlooked Vozdvizhenka Street and collect information about Yakov Yurovsky.  So on July 2, 1925, Pia Merz rented an apartment on the seventh floor of what had been a luxury building.  From her apartment in the Ilarion Yerokhin building she could see Sayan street.  Merz rented the place for three months, paying 150 rubles up front.  Posing as a middle-aged eccentric spinster, Merz made sure that her neighbors took note of her harmless idiosyncrasies.  She spent most of her time feeding unwanted neighborhood cats, sitting in her window wildly painting the streets below, and helping to control a vast surveillance operation against Yurovsky.
   Other White agents then began arriving in the city. According to Cheka investigators, an Intelligence Service agent using the name Oskar Dusl, and traveling on a fake Austrian passport (no. 215388) arrived in Moscow a week after Merz had rented the apartment. He rented a small room at the Melody Hotel, bought a used car, and started badgering local shopkeepers, offering to sell them a variety of Austrian kitchen utensils.  The Intelligence Service certainly went to enormous lengths to ensure their agents had excellent covers; Dusl eagerly distributed leaflets for his range of exciting products around Moscow.
   Elias Schiegg, the cover name for a third White arrived a day later on a forged Swiss passport (no. 371977, dated April 5, 1919) and rented a room at the Tiflis Hotel.
   By early July 1925, the Whites were ready to launch their attack against the dark gentleman.  At dusk one evening two army engineer divers left an ROVS-owned ship anchored off the Gulf of Finland and slipped ashore at a deserted beach carrying a heavy package containing explosives and detonators.  Waiting for them nearby were two White agents; on receiving a predetermined code from the diver’s flashlight, they left the motor of their Peugeot and went to collect the pack.
   As the two divers slipped back into the water and rowed their small boat quietly back to their ship, the other two agents returned to their safe house. They took twelve funts (11 lbs) of TNT back to Moscow with them.
   Several days later, several agents, disguised as workmen, closed off a section of Sayan Street, putting up a construction sign saying utility repairs were in progress.  The “repairs” consisted of planting the TNT beneath a manhole, on a metal base that directed most of the blast upwards. A red mark that served as a guide was painted on the wall of a building across the street precisely in line with the center of the manhole.  The command-wire, a hair-thin, bare copper strand that only the sharpest eye could see, snaked out of the small hole in the top of the manhole, underneath the Peugeot, which was carefully double-parked to force Yurovsky to drive directly over the charge.
   The following day the street was opened again, but men were seen stringing wire at the end of the street.  In response to inquiries they explained they were from the state electric power company.  What they were actually doing was to string the command-wire from underneath the Peugeot, into the gutter and up a telephone pole on the sidewalk, where, forming an electric cable, it was stretched the length of Sayan Street alongside the telephone wires.  Then, the cable dropped to street level.  At the appropriate time, the split cable would be attached to an electric box hidden in a briefcase.  The agents settled down to wait for Yurovsky to appear.
   At 1636 hours on July 14, 1925, Yakov Mikhailovich Yurovsky bade farewell to his wife and jumped into his battered, tan Benz sedan that waited for him with its motor running.  He was accompanied, as ever, by two heavily armed bodyguards who rode with him in the Benz and at least three more guards climbed into a Lorraine-Dietrich that followed them.    Yurovsky was on the way to his sister’s house for a birthday party for his niece, his sister’s daughter, who turned fifteen that day.  A camera had been purchased for the occasion.  An Intelligence Service agent was watching from nearby as the small convoy left, and he alerted the remaining members of the team that Yurovsky was on the move.   From her corner apartment, Pia Merz watched and waited for Yurovsky to appear.  Dusl and Schiegg, in electricians’ uniforms, waited around the corner.  Dusl was up on a ladder, briefcase in hand.

[TimM]

Ah, good to see this story still going.

[Nictionary]

Yurovsky’s two-car convoy sped through the streets of Moscow, hooting other cars out of the way, and slowly turned right onto the narrow Sayan Street.  This time the Whites were making no mistakes.  From her balcony, Merz signaled the convoy’s approach to Schiegg, standing forty sazhens away.  Schiegg watched as the double-parked Peugeot forced the Benz to swerve.  When it was over the mine, Schiegg looked at Dusl and scratched his jaw.  At that precise moment, 1646 hours, Dusl switched on the current and threw the municipal circuit, and the second power failure tripped the battery and detonator under the street. The explosion rocked the whole block.  An eyewitness described seeing a ball of fire and then hearing a deafening explosion, which was audible from several versts away. Cars lit up in flames and several bodies were strewn on the street, burned by the flames.  Instantly the ground opened up under the Benz, and it was lifted up nine sazhens in a great cloud of fire, dust and smoke.  In the middle of all the confusion, Schiegg and Dusl yelled out "Gas! Gas!" and started running toward nearby Znamenka Street.  Waiting for them inside a vehicle, on the corner of Starovagankovsky lane, was a fourth Intelligence Service agent.  The car headed for the Arbatskaya intersection and took Malyy Kislovsky Pereulok, where the killers stopped in front of the Moscow Conservatory and switched vehicles before heading for their hideout on Skhodenenskaya Street in the nearby town of Putilkovo.
   Meanwhile, confusion reigned on and around Sayan Street.  When the smoke cleared, Yurovsky’s car had been blown in two.  Of the two guards in the car with him, one’s body had been thrown into a tree.  The legs of the other were tangled in the electrical wires overhead, while his hands landed across the street.  There was an enormous hole in the middle of Sayan Street, filled with water from ruptured mains.  Yurovsky’s escort car was a ruin, its three occupants killed outright.  Three other people also died in the explosion.  First responders found Yurovsky lying slumped against the side of a building seven sazhens from the blast crater.  He was still alive but unconscious, blood streaming from his nose and mouth.  He was rushed to the Kremlin Hospital, where he died on the operating table at 1725 hours.
   In the midst of the chaos, Pia Merz quietly slipped out of her apartment.  She soon made her way to the apartment in Putilkovo, where she and the other three agents stayed holed up until the end of the month, when they were spirited away by another agent.  A truck drove them north to Kulisko, a border town.  From there, they crossed into Estonia over the Kulje Lat river.
   Yurovsky’s death was officially announced by the government.
   Bylinkin had finally completed the mission Admiral Kolchak had set him six years previously.  The Romanovs had been avenged.

[TimM]

Nice to see the Romanovs get some kind of justice here.

[Nictionary]

January 17, 1926

   Pyotr Wrangel was pleased with the execution and results of the Yurovsky assassination, and authorized yet another elimination, one that Intelligence Service members somewhat arrogantly referred to as “something we just picked up…”
   The target was Jan Tsel’ms, now working in the Leningrad OGPU.  His assassination, in the winter of 1926, was not particularly complicated, and didn’t require extensive intelligence gathering.  Tsel’ms, who did not take even minimal safety precautions, was shot on January 17, 1926 by two assassins from the Intelligence Service in the hallway of his apartment building in Leningrad.  Fatally injured, he died the next day at the Mariinskaya Hospital.

[Nictionary]

June 4, 1926

   After the fall of Yekaterinburg to the Whites, Serge Lyukhanov, the man who had driven the bodies from the Ipatieve house to the Koptyaki forest, had fled to the town of Osa, near Perm.  He had worked as chief of the electrical station until earlier this year, when he had quit and moved to Nizhny Tagil.  There he had run into a companion from the night of the Romanovs’ murders, Vladimir Sunegin, who was working as a shift supervisor at a steel factory.  Sunegin helped his old comrade get a job as a mechanic at the factory.  The two men became fast friends, and spent many evening chatting and reminiscing peacefully about the old days.
   On June 4, 1926, the men left work together in Lyukhanov’s car.  At 1730 hours they pulled up to the building where Lyukhanov was living, on Ulitsa Pervomayskaya, off Ulitsa Serova.  Lyukhanov’s wife, Galina Karlovna, a German, was just leaving the house when she saw a tall and heavily built gunman approach her husband, who had opened the door of his car and was unlocking the rear door of the Stoewer for Sunegin, and shoot him from an arshin away with a silenced weapon, before shooting Sunegin as well.  The gunman then ran to a small white car parked nearby where another man was waiting and they drove off.

[TimM]

Two short chapters today, I see.

[Nictionary]

The remainder of the story will be shorts like this, except for the last chapter which will be a little longer.

[Nictionary]

December 6, 1928

   Two other regicides who had crossed paths once again since the Civil War were Boris Didkovsky and Yevgeny Preobrazhensky.  Expelled from the party in 1927, Preobrazhensky had been sent back to the Urals and was now working at the Urals planning bureau as the deputy of Didkovsky, who held a senior position in the bureau.
   Shortly after midnight on December 6, 1928, Didkovsky was driving home to his apartment in Verkh-Isetsk, which he shared with his brother and their respective wives.  He had just parked his car in a garage near his apartment and was walking to his home when three or four gunmen in two automobiles drew alongside him.  Didkovsky started to run away, but the gunmen fired eight shots from a .38-caliber semi-automatic pistol into his head and body.  Didkovsky died on the spot.  The gunmen escaped.  Didkovsky’s deputy Preobrazhensky visited his late superior’s home later that night to assist the militsiya in their investigation and give them information about Didkovsky.  Less than 7 hours later, Preobrazhensky drove out of a public garage on Ulitsa Shevchenko.  He had only driven nine sazhens when an extremely powerful, sophisticated time bomb containing shrapnel, which had been planted under the hood of his car and connected to the ignition system, was triggered by a mercury fuse.  Preobrazhensky was killed instantly.  A woman walking by on a nearby sidewalk was slightly injured by fragments of the shattered body of the car.  She was taken to a hospital in stable condition.