Smersh: Stalin's Secret Weapon, Soviet Military Counterintelligence in WWII

SMERSH, acronym of the Russian phrase ‘Death to Spies’, is primarily known to readers as James Bond’s sinister opponent in Ian Fleming’s novels. Yet SMERSH was a real organization and just as diabolical as its fictional counterpart. No information was available on this organization until the fall of the Soviet Union, and its importance to WWII history is almost completely unknown to scholars and history readers alike. Ostensibly a military counterintelligence organization dedicated to fighting Nazis, SMERSH spent considerable time and effort terrifying its own, including writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was arrested for writing to a fellow officer. Its activities often strayed into the political sphere, exemplified by the arrests of many political leaders and foreign diplomats in Eastern Europe, including the famous rescuer of Hungarian Jews, Raoul Wallenberg, at the end of WWII.