'The Trust': the CIA's unpublished study of the OGPU's great deception (c. 1969)

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The file

PDF

trust-cia-study.pdf · 86 pages · 3.6 MB

Extract

Pages 11,19-103 of the 109-page original: the 1988 memorandum and the study with its notes, bibliography and appendices; the file's other papers, including withheld-page sheets, a 1987 Naval Postgraduate School thesis and private correspondence, are left out. The full release is at the link below.

Full text

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Original

CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room

Copied

26 October 2026, from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine copy of the government page (copy)

SHA-256

105fd31543dc9ecae7200cb3e9648095fd0458f50c2e234055f502211cbc0f2e

Licence

Public domain: a work of the US federal government (17 U.S.C. § 105).

Someone in the CIA wrote this account of the Trust in the late 1960s, and someone else later wrote across its first page, by hand: "Internal CIA study, completed ca. March 1969, never published." It has no author's name, no classification marking and no footnotes to agency files; its sources, listed at the end, are published Soviet and émigré books¹. It survives because of a 1988 request from outside, explained in the covering memorandum that opens this extract¹.

How it got out

On 15 January 1988 the curator of the CIA's Historical Intelligence Collection wrote to the Deputy Director. The writer Arnold Beichman had asked for "The Trust" after seeing it quoted in a book by Anthony Cave Brown. The curator explained that he had sent Cave Brown the whole study some months earlier; that it was and always had been unclassified and had circulated outside the agency; and that he had checked this with Walter Pforzheimer, who had been curator when the collection acquired the study, among others. He recommended sending Beichman a copy, and noted that public affairs, administration and the general counsel had been consulted¹. His own name and those of two people he consulted are blacked out.

What the study says

The narrative follows the operation in order. It sets the scene with Lenin's December 1921 call for vigilance and the Cheka's earlier penetrations of émigré groups, then turns to A. A. Yakushev, a senior official of the waterways administration, arrested after an indiscreet visit to an émigré in Tallinn and turned by Artur Artuzov and Roman Pillar. The study weighs Opperput's later version of the recruitment against the Soviet writer Lev Nikulin's¹. It explains the cover: a monarchist organization, MOTsR, posing abroad as a "Trust" and using business language as code¹.

Then come the operations the Trust made possible: Yakushev's trips to Berlin and Paris and his meeting with Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich; the separate, parallel deception that lured Boris Savinkov across the Polish border in August 1924 (Operation Sindikat-2); the Estonian channel and the strange case of the Estonian minister Ado Birk; and the capture of Sidney Reilly in September 1925 after a meeting in Moscow, covered by a staged shooting on the Finnish border¹. The end comes with Eduard Opperput's flight to Finland in April 1927 with Maria Schultz, his newspaper revelations, and their fatal return to Moscow as saboteurs that June¹.

Appendices give notes on the people involved, sorted into genuine anti-Bolsheviks, GPU officers and agents, and foreign officials, and assess the published literature¹.

How to read it

This is not an operational history drawn from secret files. It is an analyst's synthesis of published sources, several of them Soviet works written to glorify the security services, and it says so, repeatedly weighing Nikulin against Opperput, Richard Wraga and others and calling some stories implausible¹. Its verdict is that the Trust worked less because of its own brilliance than because the émigrés and the small Baltic and Polish services believed what they wanted to believe; and it leaves Opperput's motives open¹.

The CIA's journal Studies in Intelligence reviewed a book covering the same ground, Paul Blackstock's The Secret Road to World War Two, in its 1970 volume, soon after this study was finished².