Leopold Trepper

Leopold Trepper (February 23, 1904 – January 19, 1982) was a Polish Communist, agent of the Red Army Intelligence, with the code name of Otto and had been working with them since 1930. He was the technical director of intelligence agency in western Europe and was responsible for recruiting agents and creating espionage networks. He was also a resistance fighter and journalist of Jewish descent. Trepper was an experienced intelligence officer, an extremely resourceful and capable man who was completely at home in the west, a man who could not be drawn in conversation, who lived a concealed life and whose special talent was a keen judge of people that enabled him to penetrate significant groups with ease. By the start of World War II, Trepper controlled a large espionage network in Belgium and seven espionage networks in France.

On February 23, 1904, Leopold Trepper was born to a large Jewish family of 10 children in Nowy Targ, Poland that was part of Austria-Hungary in that time. His father was a travelling farm machinery and seed merchant, who died when Trepper was almost twelve. His parents sent him to school in Lviv in Ukraine to escape the strong militant and anti-Semitic tradition in Poland. Trepper met Sarah Orschitzer in Lviv, who was working in a chocolate factory and taking evening classes to train as a teacher. She was either the mistress or wife of Trepper and was also a Jewish communist who travelled under the alias Luba Brekson. After school, Trepper moved to Kraków to study history and literature at the Jagiellonian University. His lack of money lead him to political artisans and left wing student groups. After the October Revolution he joined the Bolsheviks and became a communist.

After the Polish war with the Soviet Union, Poland suffered an economic crisis and Trepper had to leave university for lack of funds. He found work first as a workshop locksmith, mason and later worked in the mines in Katowice. Two years later in 1926 he moved to Dąbrowa to work as a labourer in a foundry. In 1927, due to the extreme poverty and lack of food, he agitated the workers to strike. As one of the ringleaders he was caught and imprisoned for eight months. Finding it impossible to get work after the uprising, Trepper applied for a visa for France but was refused. In the same year, Trepper then joined the Zionist socialist movement Hashomer Hatzair, members of whom helped him to emigrate from Poland to Haifa, Palestinevia Brindisi to work on the roads, later in a Kibbutz Sarah Orschitzer followed Trepper to Palestine. She was involved in an illegal communist demonstration, was arrested and jailed. She would have been deported had she not married a Palestinian citizen.

In 1929 after moving to Tel Aviv, Trepper became a member of the central committee of the Palestine Communist Party. Between 1928 and 1930 Trepper was the organiser of the Eḥud or Unity faction, a Jewish-Arab communist labour organisation within Histadrut trade union body. Most of its members came from the Kerem HaTeimanim area and worked against the British forces in Palestine. In 1929 he attended a meeting of the International Red Aid, when he was identified as an agitator and militant communist by the British, who subsequently arrested and interned him for 15 days at the citadel's prison in Acre, Israel. Trepper organised a hunger strike after learning that the communist prisoners were to be deported. He was released after news of the hunger strike reached London and the British newspapers. Trepper and the hunger strikers were placed on stretchers outside the prison, as by that time they were too weak to walk with lack of food. In March 1930 after given the choice of leaving Palestine or face being forcefully deported to Cyprus. Trepper travelled via Syria to Marseille, France and worked as a dishwasher. Trepper then travelled to Paris where he found work as a decorator living a poor existence. He came into contact with numerous left wing intellectuals and communist workers that eventually led him to become a member of the Rabcors, an illegal political organisation that was dominated by communists who sent both men and intelligence to Moscow. He continued to work for the organisation until French intelligence broke it up in 1932. Trepper escaped by train to Berlin, where he contacted the Soviet embassy. After several days he was ordered to report to Moscow in the spring of 1932. Trepper left Paris on a Polish passport.

Between 1932 and 1935, Trepper worked to become a GRU agent by learning his trade. He initially attended the Kumns University where he obtained a diploma. Later he studied history at Pokrowski University and awarded a degree, enabling him to work as a teacher. During that period in Moscow, Trepper was in constant touch with the Russian intelligence instructors who taught him the practical skills of an espionage agent. At the same time, Trepper's wife also attended Kumns University for a year. By the winter of 1935 and after spending several months teaching history at a school in Moscow, his training was completed. In 1935, Trepper submitted a column he wrote on the arts to the newspaper for Russian Jews called Truth.

In 1935 or 1936, Trepper was given the post of technical director of Soviet intelligence in Western Europe and was now known as the Big Chief and subsequently returned to Paris, France on a passport under the name Sommer. On his return to Paris he spent five months investigating the extant network and accidentally exposed a double agent, a Dutch Jew who was the former head of the Soviet espionage network in the United States and who was turned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He returned to the Soviet Union under the passport Majeris to inform Soviet intelligence of his findings and returned five months later. In 1936 Trepper visited Scandinavia on short-term technical mission. In December 1936, he returned to Paris which remained his base until the end of 1938. For most of 1937, Trepper was concerned with extensive planning and re-organisation of Soviet intelligence operations in Western Europe. During that year he visited Switzerland, the British Isles and Scandinavia.

In the autumn of 1938, Trepper made contact with the Jewish businessman Leon Grossvogel, who he had known in Palestine. Grossvogel ran a small business called Le Roi du Caoutchouc or The Raincoat King on behalf of its owners. Trepper had a plan to use money that had been provided to him to create an business that would be the export division of The Raincoat King. Trepper financed Grossvogel to the sum of $8000 to create the new business, that was given an unidiomatic name of The Foreign Excellent Raincoat Company. The new business would deal in the export of raincoats and was considered by Trepper to be the ideal cover for the groups espionage network. As the business had to operate with the full knowledge of the state, shares had to be issued. Among the shareholders was former official of the Belgian Foreign Office Jules Jasper Jasper's brother, Henri Jaspar was the former prime minister of Belgium, so Jules Jasper was seen as the ideal person to direct the company, providing it with a veneer of respectability. The company was created in December 1938.

At the same time in 1939, Grossvogel spent most of the year travelling around seven major sea ports that were trading with the United Kingdom to establish branches of The Foreign Excellent Raincoat Company and putting in agents to run them. The ports were at Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Wilhelmshaven, Ostend and Boulogne.Owing to local regulations it was difficult to create the type of branch office that was required. In fact, only one branch was created in Stockholm.

On 6 March 1939, Trepper, now using the alias Adam Mikler, a wealthy Canadian businessman, travelling from Quebec, accompanied with his wife Sarah Orschitzer who was travelling as Anna Mikler moved to Belgium to make it his new base and settled at their apartment located at 198 Avenue Richard Neybergh, Brussels. After the company was created, Trepper instituted the circulation of gossip and rumours by his group, to spread the word that a wealthy Canadian had funded the business, so it became as no surprise to the Belgium business community when Trepper arrived in Brussels and became associated with the company.In 25 March 1939, Trepper met the GRU intelligence agent Mikhail Makarov in a cafe. Makarov, a wireless telegraphy (WT) operator and forger had been sent from Moscow via Stockholm and Copenhagen to Paris whilst travelling on a Uruguayan passport, under the alias Carlos Alamo. Makarov's was an expert in secret inks and forgery. His original remit was to provide Trepper with forged documentation, however Grossvogel had introduced Abraham Rajchmann, an criminal forger to the group, and henceforth had become the group's forger. Instead, Makarov started to work as a WT operator for the group and was posted to Ostend to work at a branch of the Raincoat Company. To increase his cover, the branch was sold to him. Makarov immediately start to train other operators in WT procedure.On July 1939 Anatoly Gurevichposing as the wealthy Vincente Sierra, arrived in Brussels while travelling on a Uruguayan passport.On 17 July 1939 Gurevich made contact withTrepper in Ghent It was arranged that Trepper would teach the operation of the Raincoat Company to Gurevich. To make contacts in different strata of society, Gurevich started to familiarise himself with Belgium society and studied the country to enable the collection of economic knowledge. Gurevich took part in ballroom dancing and riding lessons and as he travelled between luxury hotels, mail bearing the stamps of Uruguay awaited his arrival. To improve his language skills in French, English and German, Gurevich enrolled at the Free University of Brussels. In the months leading up to the war Trepper's plans changed with Sukolov having to be introduced into the Belgian network gradually, eventually ending up working as an assistant to Trepper and performing the normal bureaucratic operations in an espionage network including, as a cipher clerk, deciphering instructions from Soviet intelligence, preparing reports from information forwarded from a contact in the Soviet Trade Representation of Belgium. In the same year, Trepper met the American classical dancer Georgie De Winter in Brussels as she dropped her gloves while paying a bill in bakers shop. De Winter would go on to become the mistress of Trepper and had a child, Patrick De Winter. Historians are unsure if the child was Trepper's.

World War II

In 1938, Trepper was sent to organize and coordinate an intelligence network in Nazi-occupied Europe, based in Belgium. The Gestapo named it the Red Orchestra (Die Rote Kapelle). Prior to the German attack on the Soviet Union, he sent information about German troop transfers from other fronts for Operation Barbarossa through a Soviet military attaché in Vichy France. Eventually, the Gestapo uncovered the network and Trepper fled to France.

In France, Trepper established another network, but eventually the Abwehr tracked him down.

Arrest

The premises of Simex were searched in November 1942 and all known associates of the company were arrested. However no espionage material was found and the interrogation of prisoners failed to determine the whereabouts of Monsieur Gilbert, the alias that Trepper was using in his dealings with the firm. The French commercial director of the firm Alfed Corbin informed the Gestapo of the address of Trepper's dentist. Trepper was subsequently arrested on 24 November 1942 while he was sitting in a dentist's chair.

The Gestapo treated Trepper leniently in the expectation that he would serve as a double agent in Paris. It is disputed as to how helpful he was to the Nazis.In 2002 author Patrick Marnham suggested Trepper not only exposed the Soviet agent Henri Robinson but may have been the source that betrayed French resistance leader Jean Moulin.

Playback

In 1943 Trepper escaped German custody and went underground. He emerged with the French Resistance after the liberation of Paris. He later claimed that he had contacted the French communist resistance during his imprisonment by Germans.

Postwar period

The Soviets took Trepper to Russia but instead of rewarding him, they interned him in the Lubyanka prison. He vigorously defended his position and avoided execution for unknown reasons, but remained in prison until 1955. Before that, he was personally interrogated by SMERSH chief Viktor Abakumov. After his release, he returned to Poland to his wife and three sons. He became a head of the Sociocultural Association of Jews in Poland.

After the Six-Day War and the subsequent antisemitic campaign in Poland, Trepper wanted to emigrate to Israel. While the Polish communist government promoted and encouraged the emigration of thousands of Jews at that time, in the case of Trepper, who wrote a letter protesting the treatment of the Jews, permission was refused until international pressure forced the authorities to allow him and a number of other Jews in a similar situation to leave. He settled in Jerusalem in 1974.

In 1975, he published his autobiography, The Great Game. A few years before, a book about the Red Orchestra containing interviews with both Soviets and Nazis had appeared, written by Gilles Perrault.

Leopold Trepper died in Jerusalem in 1982. His funeral was attended by the highest echelons of the Israeli army, including Defence Minister Ariel Sharon.

In the epilogue to The Great Game, Trepper wrote,

I do not regret the commitment of my youth, I do not regret the paths I have taken. In Denmark, in the fall of 1973, a young man asked me in a public meeting, "Haven't you sacrificed your life for nothing?" I replied, "No." "No" on one condition: that people understand the lesson of my life as a communist and a revolutionary, and do not turn themselves over to a deified party. I know that youth will succeed where we have failed, that socialism will triumph and that it will not have the colour of the Russian tanks that crushed Prague."