On an October evening in 1942, a special flight from the front-line landed at an airfield near Moscow. He delivered the body of a man whose head was wrapped in a leather jacket.
The two officers of the military counterintelligence who accompanied the mournful "cargo" took the murdered man to a certain institution, where the pathologist and the commissioner of state security were already waiting. Counterintelligence officers were ordered to wait in an adjacent room.
Soon measured steps were heard in the corridor. Through a slightly ajar door, one of the officers saw a man who appeared for identification (or farewell to the murdered?). A mistake was ruled out: Stalin walked past the door. The officer also knew the one whose corpse was now lying on the cold marble table. It was Jacob Peters, one of the founders of the Cheka, the head of intelligence, who stood at the origins of many covert operations. The mystery was that he was shot back in April 1938.
Misunderstanding in Hamburg
The fate of Peters, who was born in 1886 in the Courland province of Tsarist Russia, into the family of a farm laborer, was amazing! As a boy, he grazed sheep, then worked as a farm laborer, worked at an oil mill, where he joined the Latvian section of the RSDLP. According to one of the versions, from a young age he became a member of a militant group, which "expropriated" funds for the party. After the defeat of the revolution of 1905-1907. Jacob fled abroad. He got to London through Hamburg, where he was assigned a conspiratorial vetch in the port hairdresser, but he got the address wrong. And so he was asked to pay for a haircut, and his pockets were empty. Peters invited the hairdresser to go with him to a nearby shooting gallery. There the young fighter hit all the targets and received a prize for accuracy, after which he paid the master.
ACCIDENT ON SYDNEY STREET
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Peters' cousin was in London, the anarchist Fritz Dumniek, who made a living by robbery. In December 1910, in an unsuccessful attempt to break into a jewelry store, his men shot five constables. The case was taken under his personal control by the Minister of the Interior, W. Churchill. On January 3, 1911, 750 police and Scottish riflemen surrounded 100 Sydney Street, where Fritz and his accomplice were hiding. Churchill personally supervised the operation.
An intense firefight continued until evening, when both anarchists were killed. As soon as the investigation established the identity of the raiders, Churchill ordered the arrest of all suspicious persons from among the Latvian emigrants. For the show trial, four were selected, including Yakov Peters.
USEFUL KNOWLEDGE
However, the court acquitted all four for lack of evidence. A young, smiling woman came to congratulate Peters on his release. It was Claire Sheridan, Sir Churchill's cousin. She studied sculpture at the London Academy of Arts. Soon Yakov became a regular at bohemian salons, where aspiring politicians, artists, and writers gathered. But Claire, who had certain looks for a handsome Latvian, miscalculated by introducing him to her friend May Freeman, the daughter of an influential London banker. Young people fell in love with each other at first sight and soon got married. Two years later, they had a daughter, who was named May after her mother.
But the venerable London banker from Peters never came out. The news of the February Revolution in Russia called him on the road.
ASSOCIATE OF "IRON FELIX"
At the Second Congress of Soviets, held in Petrograd on October 25-27, 1917, Peters was elected a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, then introduced to the Military Revolutionary Committee.
Already at the beginning of December, with the creation of the Cheka, Petere became the first and only deputy of its chairman - "Iron Felix".
From the very first steps Peters treated the enemies of the new regime with extreme ruthlessness, advocated that the Chekists had the right to uncontrollably carry out searches, arrests and executions, reporting only to the Council of People's Commissars and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.
He actively participated in the operation to defeat the armed anarchist detachments in Moscow, led the liquidation of Boris Savinkov's "Union for the Defense of the Motherland and Freedom" in Moscow and Kazan, played an almost decisive role in suppressing the revolt of the Left Social Revolutionaries on July 6-7, 1918, which, by the way speaking, supported by some employees of the Cheka. On July 8, Dzerzhinsky resigned, and Peters became the temporary chairman of the Cheka.
This period is known for the so-called conspiracy of ambassadors, which was only partly dictated by the desire of Western diplomats to influence events in Russia, but to a large extent was an operation conceived by Peters.
He instructed one of the Latvian commanders, E. Berzin, to meet with the head of the British mission in Moscow, Robert Bruce Lockhart, and inform that the Latvian riflemen were allegedly ready to oppose the Soviet regime. However, the engine of the adventure was not Lockhart, but the British agent Sidney Reilly. It was he who involved a wide range of people in the "conspiracy" which was completely controlled by Peters.
But then events flowed in an unpredictable course. On August 22, Dzerzhinsky returned to the Cheka. On August 30, the chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, Uritsky, was killed.
Lenin was shot on the same day. Trying to link the attempt on the leader with the "conspiracy of ambassadors", the Chekists carried out mass arrests.
Ultimately, Lockhart and other Western diplomats still had to be released from Russia, exchanged for the Soviet envoy Litvinov, who was arrested in London. Later, the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal declared Lockhart and his colleagues outlawed. This meant that if they appeared on the territory of the RSFSR, these persons would be shot.
It is significant, however, that until the end of his days (he died in 1970), Lockhart maintained a respectful attitude towards Peters. The Englishman said that if the Soviet and British intelligence cooperated, then London analysts should be sent to practice with Peters.
Describing in his memoirs meetings with the owners of the Lubyanka, Lockhart admitted:
"Under the yoke of their charm, I myself almost stayed in Moscow to start the life of an ideological fighter against world capitalism."
AUTHORIZED REPRESENTATIVE
From May 1919, Peters personally, using the methods of the "Red Terror", established revolutionary order in Petrograd, Kiev and Tula.
In doing so, he risked his own life. In the Western press, he was declared killed several times. In July 1920, the Chekist arrived in Turkestan, where the Basmach movement developed. The military chieftain, Lieutenant-General Dutov, who settled in the Chinese city of Suidin, near the Soviet border, also brought a lot of trouble to the Bolsheviks. From there, the ataman led the White Guard underground, maintained contacts with Wrangel, Basmachi, residents of foreign intelligence services, and organized riots.
Only in vain did Dutov consider himself invulnerable. Peters prepared a group of scouts who, on March 7, 1921, despite numerous Cossack guards, entered the chieftain's house and shot him in his office.
RECRUITING CLAIR
Meanwhile, Claire Sheridan appeared in Moscow. Not finding Peters here, for some time she sculpted busts of Bolshevik leaders - Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Dzerzhinsky …
Finally, she could not stand it and went to distant Tashkent, where his romance with Peters received a stormy continuation.
From the documents declassified in 2002 by the British intelligence service, it follows that Claire Sheridan, since the 1920s, worked for Soviet intelligence.
This means that she was recruited by none other than her romantic friend Jacob Peters, and that it happened in Tashkent.
AUTHOR OF SECRET OPERATIONS
In 1922, Peters was recalled to Moscow and appointed head of the OGPU Eastern Department.
It was he who was involved in the creation of a Soviet spy network in Western Europe, the effectiveness of which was later noted by foreign special services. In 1928, his wife and daughter, whom he had not seen for many years, visited him. 15-year-old May stayed in Moscow with her father and later worked at the British embassy.
In 1930, Peters switched to party work, but a number of experts believe that he continued to develop secret operations, which, besides him, only Stalin knew about and, perhaps, several other people. It would seem that Stalin's friendly disposition towards him, who called Peters "the last romantic of revolutionary battles," is a reliable defense against a wave of repression. However, at the end of 1937, Peters was arrested, and on April 25, 1938, was sentenced to capital punishment and, according to the certificate, was shot on the same day.
Nevertheless, in August 1941, his daughter May told Antonina Zakharovna Peters, his second wife, that a certain man had conveyed to her through the wife of an embassy employee the following phrase: "Your father is alive and continues to work." And 15 years later, when Peters was rehabilitated, Antonina Zakharovna received an official certificate, where the date of her husband's death was 1942.
In the light of these facts, the story of the counterintelligence officer, no matter how fantastic it may seem, deserves attention. Perhaps in 1938, Peters was only declared executed, but in reality he still controlled those invisible threads “that protect the country no worse than armies and fortified borders”. In the history of intelligence, something else has happened.
