Orchestra. Using as a cover the director of a raincoat company,
Trepper oversaw the work of dedicated communists and anti-Fascists
from Paris to Berlin. His network provided Joseph Stalinwith thou-
sands of pieces of intelligence over the next four years, much of
which was ignored prior to OperationBarbarossa. In 1941 and 1942,
however, the Red Orchestra provided thousands of accurate reports
on German military operations and German industrial production.
Trepper was an imaginative and brave operations officer. He once
chose an office for his cover company in the same building as the
Brussels headquarters of German military counterintelligence(Ab-
wehr), and he traveled throughout Nazi-occupied Europe to meet
with his principal agents and radio operators. Trepper had only con-
tempt for Soviet officers provided by Moscow to help his apparatus.
In his memoirs, Trepper noted that there was no way to teach a man
or women to be an effective spy. One either had imagination and
courage, he argued, or one did not.
When Trepper was arrested by German counterintelligence in
Paris in 1942, he pretended to cooperate with them to save his life.
He later escaped and, after years of hiding, was repatriated to the So-
viet Union, where he was almost immediately sent to prison. He was
released following Stalin’s death and later moved to Poland. Due to
anti-Semitic campaigns in Poland in the late 1960s, he moved to Is-
rael, where he died in 1982.TRILISSER, MIKHAIL ABRAMOVICH (1883–1938).Born into a
Jewish family in Astrakhan, Trilisser joined the Bolshevik Partyin
1901 and led the life of a professional revolutionary for the next 17
years. He took part in the Revolution of 1905and served six years in
tsarist jails and Siberian exile. After the civil war, he transferred to
the security service, becoming head of Foreign Intelligence in 1926.
His initial responsibility was to target émigré groups and disrupt
their operations against the infant Bolshevik state, as was done suc-
cessfully through the Trustoperation. Trilisser’s agents were also
successful in penetrating exile groups and their foreign sponsors in
France, Germany, Poland, and Great Britain. Trilisser traveled to
Germany to meet with his intelligence officers and important agents.
In 1935 Trilisser transferred to the Cominternand headed its se-
cret apparatus under the name “Moskvin.” He was tasked to serve266 •TRILISSER, MIKHAIL ABRAMOVICH (1883–1938)06-313 P-Z.qxd 7/27/06 7:57 AM Page 266