Soviet spying at Big Three WW11 conferences

[orieleye]

This is from a 1996 interview with Sergo Beria, son of Lavrenty Beria, chief of the NKVD.

On the Tehran Conference:

When they chose the place where the Tehran Conference would be held, first of all they wanted to hold this conference in Casablanca. Our specialists went there, but it was known that in comparison with Iran, the Soviet side had no spies there, no network of spies in Africa. Whereas in Tehran we had a lot of agents and a wide network of spies.

[At the conference] Stalin's assistant came and took us to him, one at a time. Stalin told me that the task he was putting to our group, and particularly to me, was ethically very unattractive but the position of the U.S.S.R. was so serious that he had to know what [the other Allies] were thinking. ... My personal obligation was to listen to and record everything connected with Roosevelt and those close to him, to decode the recordings, and to report all this information direct to Stalin personally.

After that, every day in the morning at about 8 a.m., I had to come to Stalin with all the information written in English and in Russian too, and he asked me very detailed questions about Roosevelt's conversations, sometimes for as long as an hour or two. Sometimes he was interested in how Roosevelt said something -- even what his intonation was, what the concealed meaning was, things like that.

When I finished reporting, I saw a great amount of paperwork on his desk which was connected to the questions he was dealing with. That is, he prepared for each conversation like a lecturer prepares for a lecture: with archive documents, intelligence reports, army reports, etc., and with a complete list of the conversations held around the conference. Of course, he was far better prepared ... than the Allies, because he knew in advance, for instance, all the things that Churchill wanted to do to spite the Americans -- a whole lot of interesting things.

On Soviet eavesdropping at Yalta:

I used to see Roosevelt and Churchill during their walks. ... When the weather was bad Roosevelt was wheeled in his chair and Churchill walked next to him, usually, and they always talked very intensively. And as we already had a system for directing the microphones to a distance of 50 to 100 meters to listen, as there was no background noise, everything was quiet, all these conversations recorded very well, and later on were translated and processed.

And then we wrote up all this information and reported [it]. Only later on did I come to know that some people in the American delegation were working for the Soviet Government. For example, [one of our spies] was not only accompanying Roosevelt, he was a member of the delegation; that was very important, and he gave his information to us, too. And we got some people among the English delegation also. But here, during the Yalta Conference, Roosevelt spoke against the English state directly, openly.

CNN Cold War - Interview: Sergo Beria