DZHIRKVELOV, ILYA• 163tion of the Communications Branch of Canada’s National Research
Council, a clandestine cryptographic organization closely allied to
GCHQ.
In 1952 Dwyer joined the Privy Council Office to supervise Cana-
da’s security and intelligence apparatus, and six years later was ap-
pointed to the Canada Council, where he eventually became director.
He died at the end of December 1971.DZHIRKVELOV, ILYA.In 1943, while still a teenager, Ilya Dzhirk-
velov joined theNKVD, having played a role in the resistance to the
German invasion of his native Georgia. Both his parents had been
active Bolsheviks and he was also a committed member of the Com-
munist party. By April 1944, when the Nazis retreated from Sevasto-
pol, he had been appointed a cadet officer in a small commando unit
assigned to clear up what was left of the Waffen SS in the newly
liberated areas. He also participated in the ruthless deportation of the
Crimean Tartars who had fought alongside the Germans. During the
Yalta Conference in February 1945, Dzhirkvelov was one of the
guard detachment that maintained security for the visitors, and later
in the war he operated against nationalist guerrillas in Latvia.
By the end of the war Dzhirkvelov was back in Tbilisi, only to be
selected in September for a course at the NKVD’s training school in
Moscow. After two years he and his wife were sent on a short assign-
ment to Romania, which lasted six weeks. He was then posted to the
Iranian section of the FCD’s Middle East department, and in 1949,
having learned Farsi, he was transferred to Tehran. One of his first
missions was to assist in the abduction of a Soviet diplomat named
Orlov who was believed to be about todefectto the Americans.
Orlov was seized on the street, apparently on his way to the U.S. em-
bassy, and taken to the Soviet embassy where he was interrogated
and killed, bludgeoned to death with the leg of a piano. ‘‘Even
today,’’ observes Dzhirkvelov, ‘‘an official who defects to the West
is signing his own death sentence; and it is only a question of when
he will be discovered and when the possibility will arise of carrying
out the sentence. Exactly how it is done is of no significance—
whether it is with an axe, a gun, a dose of poison, a poisoned um-
brella or a car accident.’’
Upon his return to Moscow, Dzhirkvelov worked in theKGB ar-