Maki Mirage
Operation Maki Mirage or Maki-Mirage was a Soviet intelligence operation that involved 1200 plus Soviet intelligence agent-officers, that is, spies of East Asian descent being sent to China, Korea, Manchukuo and Mongolia to perform intelligence gathering, "special tasks," and disinformation. The operation occurred primarily during the Interwar period, starting in the 1920s and continued into World War II. According to Soviet literature, the NKVD placed moles inside Japanese anti-Soviet operations. The Soviet moles supposedly uncovered an active network of 200 Japanese agents in the Soviet Far East during the 1930s. This network was never verified by reliable sources including Japanese. Soviet intelligence recruited over 1,200 East Asian agents—mostly Soviet Koreans and Soviet Chinese—for espionage against Japan in Manchuria/Manchukuo, China, Korea, and Mongolia. This figure corrects Jon Chang's earlier estimate of "over 600," after evidence showed recruitment came not only from the Chinese Lenin School, but also from Moscow's KUTV and KUTK universities. There were 200 EASI recruited from the Red Army, Red Guards and the general population in the USSR from 1920 to 1945. Of the three universities, it is estimated that CLS produced 400 EASI, while the KUTK and the KUTV each produced approximately 300 EASI from 1920 to 1945. Leopold Trepper, a Soviet military intelligence agent, confirmed that the KUTV and the KUTK were utilized to recruit East Asians into Soviet intelligence in his biography, The Great Game: The Story of the Red Orchestra. Operation Maki Mirage can be placed in the context of the Soviet Union utilizing their diaspora nationalities, otherwise treated as "last among socialist equals" and subject to forced deportations. However, in Russian historiography and documentary portrayals, the participation of over one thousand East Asian agents was almost completely omitted and even when confirmed, this evidence was disregarded.
Summary
Background
The Soviet Union operated a vast human-intelligence/espionage program and a succession of secret-police agencies. Operation Maki-Mirage existed in a background of false flag or "deception operations" primarily aimed at convincing anti-Soviet, "revolutionary" groups and conspirators outside of the USSR to return and link up with other, established, anti-Soviet, underground revolutionaries. Once they returned, however, they were immediately arrested, as the aforementioned anti-Bolshevik, fifth columnists were completely fictional. Similar operations included Operation Trust, Operation Syndicate-2, and the Tagantsev conspiracy. The Soviet intelligence operations Shogun and Dreamers also operated in the Russian Far East during the same period as Maki-Mirage. Chang has named them all simply "Maki-Mirage." Maki-Mirage, however, was not a false flag operation. It was for the most part an aggressive forward operation in intelligence to disrupt and instill fear that the existing regimes in China and the Japanese empire could not rule and protect their citizens.The Chinese-Lenin School of Vladivostok was established for the official purpose of educating students and turning them into socialist comrades and acolytes to spread socialism throughout East Asia. It was one of the major espionage training centers of the Soviet Union, opened in late 1924 and ran until early 1938. Its students included Red Army veterans, generally Soviet Koreans and Soviet Chinese born or raised in the USSR, and Chinese students from China recruited in the USSR.
The Soviet Union saw its diaspora peoples as allegedly disloyal leading to numerous deportations, including the Soviet deportation of Koreans and Soviet deportations of Chinese. Nonetheless, the Soviet secret police employed many of its diaspora peoples in their espionage operations, with major examples including the Soviet-German spy Rudolf Abel and the Ingrian Finnish-Soviet spy Reino Häyhänen. The revelations made by this "Maki Mirage" page are not limited to just East Asians in Soviet intelligence. It extends to many other Soviet nationalities who were deported as "spies for foreign, capitalist-imperialist governments " and yet, a significant part of their national-minority communities served Soviet intelligence for over twenty years total. Making an extrapolation from Sudoplatov's "order of battle" for the INO, NKVD, the largest contingents of INO, NKVD would likely have been composed of Soviet Poles, Germans and possibly Turks. These groups only appear in single digits because no historian or researcher went into their communities to conduct interviews and collect photos.
Moreover, this was not the first Maki Mirage-like operation for William Fisher. Sometime shortly after Aug. 1939 and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Fisher and Adamovich were sent to Ukraine to meet ethnic Germans, Poles and Ukrainians to stir up anti-Nazi sentiment in the nearby areas and countries. They proclaimed to be refugees from communism during the invasion of Poland, using a provision that Nazi Germany and the USSR had agreed upon for the migration of Soviet Germans.
In January 1943, Konon Molody was parachuted into western Byelorussia. In this account, he was Fisher's partner. Molody's legend and documents stated that he was a Byelorussian Volksdeutsche. Germany occupied western Byelorussia. German soldiers found "problems" with his documents and he was arrested and held in a prison. Soon a German Abwehr intelligence officer came to interrogate Molody. This officer's name was Alec. Alec, in the course of the interrogation, offered Molody service in the Abwehr as an agent behind Soviet lines. But first there would have to be a medical examination. Molody was found to have a medical defect, failed and did not receive work in the Abwehr. However, he was now free. Molody then began working as Alec's radioman encoding and sending his messages back to Moscow. Both men terminated this mission sometime in early 1944. Fisher was transferred by the Abwehr to Berlin around March, 1944 while Molody began a new assignment also in Berlin at around the same time. Note that Fisher had probably arrived in Byelorussia by the middle of 1942. When examining Viliam Genrikh Fisher and comparing him to Sorge, Fisher's strength was to move from one operation to the next seamlessly while producing excellent results and few problems for his superiors. He produced major intelligence accomplishments as a mole in one after another assignment "machine-like." Sorge on the other hand was absolutely profligate.
Jerzy Niezbrzycki mentioned the capture of a Soviet Pole working under the administration of the INO, NKVD. This man was from Ukraine and spoke Polish with a slight accent. He was captured in Poland, agreed to work as a double agent, but then reneged and agreed to a jail term in Poland rather than a return to Russia. The Soviet Pole and Häyhänen went to great lengths to build their "legends," that is, backstory as locals. The Pole spent lavishly on his girlfriend taking trips to Warsaw with fine dining, cabarets and other assorted nightlife that were part of courtship and "good living." The intent was to marry a local in order to obtain citizenship, the right residency and work permits and have a layer of protection from suspicion. Häyhänen padded his "legend" by going to extreme lengths, even though he had one significant advantage over the Pole as Soviet agents. Reino spoke Finnish as a native speaker. First, Reino along with a Soviet agent headed north to the Arctic Circle. There, they found Sámi who were willing to corroborate his residence and work in Lapland from 1943 to 1949. Heading south to Tampere, he then courted and married a local Finnish girl, Hanna Kurikka.
The diaspora peoples were utilized by Soviet intelligence because they possessed cultural and linguistic knowledge. These are knowledge, abilities and nuances that one cannot simply learn in a controlled, artificial environment like a classroom nor in a lockstep manner. Finally, they possessed the right phenotype to play their roles. Truthfully, they had played these "ethnic" roles from the beginning of their Soviet education and their first Soviet passports and documents listed ethnicity called natsional'nost.
Methodologies: Why Not Oral History, Fieldwork ''in situ'' and Digitization
A major weakness of how history is being presently written is based on methodologies. The word "methodologies" presents the question, "What sources will the historian, political scientist, anthropologist or academic use while researching a social science such as X, Y or Z studies, history, anthropology or political science?" The majority of those researchers writing academic history, political science and other fields tends to use almost exclusively state archives. Then, the same professors, researchers or academics claim to have written the "definitive history of X, Y or Z in the USSR."This is simply not possible especially when a percentage of all the Soviet archives are off limits and another percentage were destroyed or deleted during periodical "archival cleaning" cycles. The absolute best evidence of the GULAG archive instructions for purging/deleting/burning files is from Khlevniuk's The History of the Gulag. High level government instructions, orders and policy papers were to be held permanently. However, prisoner complaints, official meetings between local NKVD to solve camp problems and other archival files/documents chronicling a social or individual history of camp guards and prisoners were periodically burned. Khlevniuk noted an unspoken code among Soviet cadres in the Stalinist regime which included those in the Politburo and the Central Committee. Robert Conquest paraphrasing Khlevniuk in the foreword to The History of the Gulag explained, "For the most secret information the rule was 'word of mouth only.' The deepest secrets thus remain untraceable, except by deduction."
Nikita Khrushchev culled the Soviet archives of his involvement in various purges. He even appointed Ivan Serov, the head of the KGB to do this delicate task for him during the mid-to-late 1950s. There are more examples of Khrushchev and Stalin culling the Soviet archives. Regarding Stalin, take for example his correspondence with Vycheslav Molotov, the 2nd in command of the USSR during the 1930s. The vast majority of the letters were culled, that is destroyed and removed, leaving only innocuous letters which contained little to no political activity, decrees nor activities. Robert Tucker wrote, "The contents of these letters suggest that only the most 'harmless' documents, those that in no way touched upon Stalin's and Molotov's darkest and most criminal activities, were selected for the archive." These notes and those demonstrate how serious the USSR was about information control and the control of history through "culling" the Soviet archives.
Thus, those researchers and academics relying almost exclusively on the Soviet state archives and yet proposing to shed new light or make radical advances about Soviet/Russian history, Stalinism, Soviet Korean or other minority people's deportation or "secret" histories are simply reusing the archival well for the thousandth or millionth time. The phrase, "there's nothing new under the sun," is quite fitting if one replaces the word "sun" with "archives.". This Maki Mirage page is an example of what scholars can find, collect and produce by going into a particular ethnic, religious, or place of origin/shared identity community, conducting interviews and collecting photos from personal albums. These two methodologies provide the means by which a historical event can almost always be examined more deeply or from a radically different perspective. State archives provided secondary supplementation. The core contribution of the Maki Mirage case to social-science methodology is its demonstration that breakthrough discoveries arise from broad, primary-source bases rather than iterative theorizing atop prior theories. Methodological richness and source diversity remain the decisive factors in rigorous social-science research, yet they are rarely adopted.