New Moscow exhibit honours 60 years of soviet-era intelligence agency SMERSH

04-Jun-2003 • Event

The New Zealand Herald have reported that James Bond`s deadliest enemy has just turned 60 and, if the British superspy was so inclined, he could finally meet his cruel adversary.

In their latest display of openness, Russian secret services are displaying mementos from SMERSH, short for "Death to Spies", the Soviet counter-intelligence group founded in 1943.

The FSB, the main successor of the KGB, has partly opened its archives to rights groups and its museum to reporters and guests.

But Bond fans looking for insight into Smersh`s tussles with Western spies after World War II, or its suppression of dissent in the Army which occupied Eastern Europe and invaded Afghanistan, will be disappointed.

Academic Sergei Kozhin, of the Central Army Museum, said the objects on show were only from SMERSH`s most heroic period - the fight against Fascism.

Visitors see first a poster of a plump young soldier, pulling a wolf`s corpse emblazoned with a Nazi swastika out of its hiding place in a sheepskin.

There are letters treated to reveal secret writing, miniature cameras, foreign weapons seized from spy rings and souvenirs of SMERSH`s greatest operation, when its agents found Adolf Hitler`s body in the chaos of 1945 Berlin. Hitler`s jacket, cap and shoes are on show in a glass case.

Sadly for Bond fans, SMERSH was renamed in 1946, long before its fictional counterpart enforced Moscow`s will across the world. It became the department of military counter-intelligence, its name still.

Kozhin sneered at any mention of Bond, and at his creator Ian Fleming`s stories about SMERSH`s tricks.

Fleming... "made things up. Smersh didn`t bother with things like that, they had scarier things to do".

Thanks to TheScurra and Archivo 007 for the alert.