Anatoli Granovsky

Anatoli Mikhailovich Granovsky (Russian: Анатолий Михайлович Грановский, 25 January 1922 – 4 September 1974) was a NKVD agent who defected to the West in 1946 and authored an autobiographical book about his career in Soviet intelligence. Granovsky was the son of a high-ranking Soviet bureaucrat, Mikhail Granovsky, who was a victim of the Stalinist Purges of the late 1930s. To find his father in the Soviet Gulag system, Granovsky allowed himself to be arrested by the NKVD on false charges and interned in the same penal system. As a result of his past friendships with the children of his father's high-ranking former colleagues, Granovsky was recruited as an NKVD agent to spy on those same acquaintances in July 1939. After defecting to Sweden in autumn 1946, Granovsky wrote the book I Was an NKVD Agent.

Early life Granovsky was born in Ukraine in January 1922. In his youth, his family lived in the House on the Embankment; his best friend was Djelal ed-Din Korkmasov's son Erik. In May, however, he was repeatedly questioned by the NKVD about his supervisor. The NKVD apparently wondered why the supervisor would give a job to the son of a man accused of crimes against the State. As a result of the interrogations Granovsky was fired, and in October 1938, his family moved from the apartment building to a room in a ramshackle house.

Joining the NKVD On January 27, 1939, Anatoli Granovsky loitered slowly around Lenin's Mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square and told a plainclothes NKVD officer that he wished to be taken to the local GUGB chief. Placed in Butyrka prison under deplorable conditions, Granovsky was interrogated repeatedly, often being beaten. He was forced to sign his name on blank sheets of paper, later to find his "confession" typed above it. On the night of April 20, 1939, Granovsky was transferred to a comfortable cell in Lubianka Prison in Moscow. After indirectly denouncing his father, Granovsky was recruited into the NKVD on July 20, 1939, to spy on and provoke his acquaintances among his father's former colleagues. According to his memoirs, he justified this by the conclusion that, being shunned since his father's arrest, he "had no friends. I owed loyalty to none but those who could exact it from me - and to myself." ) from the Gestapo and other German agencies and sites, including the Reich Chancellery, transferring such resources back to Moscow and Kiev. Granovsky was appalled at the conditions he saw upon Germany's defeat, especially the treatment of both Germans and captured Russians and eastern Europeans at the hands of the triumphant Soviet military: Germans were beaten and raped and Soviet POWs were often tyrannized and sent to labour camps for surrendering during the course of the war.

Post-World War II Granovsky was reassigned to appear as a sympathetic Soviet war veteran "fighter-poet" on tour in London, getting acquainted with the West and spreading pro-Soviet propaganda.

Later, working in Prague, Granovsky was charged with helping ensure de-Nazification and the reliability of the local Communist Party and police apparatus.

Defection Granovsky, after working in eastern Europe, was reassigned a new cover as a member of the Merchant Navy in summer 1946. In Odessa Granovsky had been approached by the MGB, successor to the NKVD, and asked to be their spy aboard the ship Petrodvorets, with which he would rendezvous in Stockholm after traveling aboard another ship. On July 10, 1946, Granovsky arrived in Stockholm. On July 21, he slipped away from his colleagues in a crowd and went to see the assistant U.S. Military Attache. Because he could not speak English and the American could not speak Russian, they went to the supervisory Military Attache, a colonel who spoke German (in which Granovsky was experienced).

The Americans didn't believe Granovsky's story and refused to grant him asylum, and he was arrested by Swedish authorities.

After moving to the United States, he died in Washington, D.C., in September 1974 at the age of 52.