Scherhorn. Adolf Hitler maintained a personnel interest in the fate of
Scherhorn, who was promoted and decorated by Berlin in the last
days of the Third Reich. The deception lasted to the very end of the
war. Soviet participants were decorated; Scherhorn was released
from captivity in 1949 and returned to Germany.
The MGBran similar radio games with Western intelligence ser-
vices and émigrémovements following the war. In Poland the MGB
and its Polish colleagues took control of a resistance movement and
enticed Western governments to provide it with financial support.
The deception continued until a senior Polish intelligence officer de-
fected to the West. As was the case with the radio games in World
War II, the Soviet services showed great sophistication in their un-
derstanding of their adversaries. See alsoMASKIROVKA.RADO, SANDOR (1899–1981). Born Alexander Radolfi into a
wealthy Hungarian Jewish family, Rado joined the Hungarian Com-
munist Party in 1921 in time to take part in a bloody and unsuccess-
ful insurrection. Living as an émigré, he joined Soviet intelligence in
the early 1930s and was sent to Berlin to report on the Nazi move-
ment. By 1933, with the Nazi victory, he was a wanted man again and
was sent to Paris by the GRU to create an illegalrezidentura. Rado
operated a left-wing publishing house and book service as a cover,
which employed six other GRU illegals.
Following the purge of GRU officers and illegals, Rado was sent
to Switzerland by military intelligence as the illegal rezidentto de-
velop German sources. He was a successful spy chief, developing
contacts with access to priceless information. He used a number of il-
legals, including Ruth Werner, Rachel Duebendorfer, and Alexan-
der Foote. His most important contact came through Duebendorfer:
Rudolf Roessler, the most productive source for the Rado organiza-
tion, provided thousands of accurate reports of German forces on the
Eastern Front. Rado also passed on—apparently without knowing
it—information from London that was fed to Alexander Foote. This
information, reportedly drawn from Ultrareporting, complemented
raw information from Roessler’s sources inside Germany.
Rado, whose code name “Dora” was a simple anagram of his
name, had an impressive record. Between August 1941 and May
1944, he sent more than 5,500 messages to Moscow, an average of214 •RADO, SANDOR (1899–1981)06-313 P-Z.qxd 7/27/06 7:57 AM Page 214