Operation Maki Mirage or Maki-Mirage () was a Soviet intelligence operation that involved 1200 plus Soviet intelligence agent-officers, that is, spies of East Asian descent being sent to China, Korea, Manchukuo (existing and under Japanese rule to 1945) and Mongolia (through Kiakhta) to perform intelligence gathering, "special tasks," and disinformation. The operation occurred primarily during the Interwar period, starting in the 1920s and continued into World War II. According to Soviet literature, the NKVD placed moles inside Japanese anti-Soviet operations (agentura). The Soviet moles supposedly uncovered an active network of 200 Japanese agents in the Soviet Far East during the 1930s. This network was never verified by reliable sources including Japanese (i.e. the 200 on Soviet territory were never proven to exist). Soviet intelligence (GRU and NKVD/INO) recruited over 1,200 East Asian agents—mostly Soviet Koreans and Soviet Chinese—for espionage against Japan in Manchuria/Manchukuo, China, Korea, and Mongolia. This figure corrects Jon Chang's first estimate of "over 600," after evidence showed recruitment came not only from the Chinese Lenin School (CLS), but also from Moscow's KUTV and KUTK universities (confirmed by Ancha, Tepliakov, Wilson Center documents, and Russian biographical articles on Lenintsev alumni). Two hundred of the twelve hundred plus EASI (EASI refers to East Asians in Soviet Intelligence) were recruited from the Red Army, the GRU, the Red Guards and the general population in the USSR from 1920 to 1945. Of the three universities, it is estimated that CLS produced 400 EASI, while the KUTK and the KUTV each produced approximately 300 EASI from 1920 to 1945. Leopold Trepper, a Soviet military intelligence (GRU) agent, confirmed that the KUTV and the KUTK were utilized to recruit East Asians into Soviet intelligence in his biography, The Great Game: The Story of the Red Orchestra. Operation Maki Mirage can be placed in the context of the Soviet Union utilizing their diaspora nationalities (i.e. non-Eastern Slav peoples or narody such as Greeks, Finns, Germans, Poles, Chinese, Turks, Koreans, Iranians and many others), otherwise treated as "last among socialist equals" and subject to forced deportations. However, in Russian historiography and documentary portrayals, the participation of over one thousand East Asian agents (who were Soviet citizens and foreigners, the latter were Chinese students studying in the USSR) was almost completely omitted and even when confirmed, this evidence was disregarded (see the picture of the eight NKVD officers, three of whom were Chinese).
Summary
Background The Soviet Union operated a vast human-intelligence/espionage program and a succession of secret-police agencies. Operation Maki-Mirage existed in a background of false flag or "deception operations" primarily aimed at convincing anti-Soviet, "revolutionary" groups and conspirators outside of the USSR to return and link up with other, established, anti-Soviet, underground revolutionaries. Once they returned, however, they were immediately arrested, as the aforementioned anti-Bolshevik, fifth columnists were completely fictional. Similar operations included Operation Trust, Operation Syndicate-2, and the Tagantsev conspiracy. The Soviet intelligence operations Shogun and Dreamers also operated in the Russian Far East during the same period as Maki-Mirage. Chang has named them all simply "Maki-Mirage." Maki-Mirage, however, was not a false flag operation. It was for the most part an aggressive forward operation in intelligence (undertaking assassination, recruitment, reconnaissance, destruction of socio-political personages, targets and other measures) to disrupt and instill fear that the existing regimes in China and the Japanese empire could not rule and protect their citizens.
The Chinese-Lenin School of Vladivostok was established for the official purpose of educating students and turning them into socialist comrades and acolytes to spread socialism throughout East Asia. It was one of the major espionage training centers of the Soviet Union, opened in late 1924 and ran until early 1938. Its students included Red Army veterans, generally Soviet Koreans and Soviet Chinese born or raised in the USSR (the Soviet Chinese were typically born in China and came to the USSR as children or adolescents in the period of the 1920s-1930s), and Chinese students from China recruited in the USSR.
The Soviet Union saw its diaspora peoples as allegedly disloyal leading to numerous deportations, including the Soviet deportation of Koreans and Soviet deportations of Chinese. Nonetheless, the Soviet secret police employed many of its diaspora peoples in their espionage operations, with major examples including the Soviet-German spy Rudolf Abel (originally William Fisher, of Russian and German descent) and the Ingrian Finnish-Soviet spy Reino Häyhänen. The revelations made by this "Maki Mirage" page are not limited to just East Asians in Soviet intelligence. It extends to many other Soviet nationalities who were deported as "spies for foreign, capitalist-imperialist governments [Poland, Germany, Finland, Iran, Turkey, German, etc.]" and yet, a significant part of their national-minority communities served Soviet intelligence for over twenty years total (fifteen years before the Great Terror when the "accusations of being traitors" began and seven-to-eight years afterwards). Making an extrapolation from Sudoplatov's "order of battle" for the INO, NKVD (that there were 16 INO, NKVD sections with 20,000 administrative staff and agent-officers all to handle intelligence matters abroad; with only two of the sixteen sections handling the RFE, China, Korea—simply named "the Far East"), the largest contingents of INO, NKVD would likely have been composed of Soviet Poles, Germans and possibly Turks. These groups only appear in single digits (Hayhanen and Fisher) because no historian or researcher went into their communities (after 1991) to conduct interviews and collect photos.
Moreover, this was not the first Maki Mirage-like operation (using Soviet ) for William Fisher. Sometime shortly after Aug. 1939 and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Fisher (a Baltic German) and Adamovich (a Soviet Pole) were sent to Ukraine to meet ethnic Germans, Poles and Ukrainians to stir up anti-Nazi sentiment in the nearby areas and countries. They proclaimed to be refugees from communism during the invasion of Poland, using a provision that Nazi Germany and the USSR had agreed upon for the migration of Soviet Germans.
In January 1943, Konon Molody (also a Soviet INO, NKVD agent) was parachuted into western Byelorussia. In this account (told by Molody himself), he was Fisher's partner. Molody's legend and documents stated that he was a Byelorussian Volksdeutsche (a German in diaspora, from outside of Germany). Germany occupied western Byelorussia. German soldiers found "problems" with his documents and he was arrested and held in a prison. Soon a German Abwehr intelligence officer came to interrogate Molody. This officer's name was Alec (who in reality was Willie Fisher, a Soviet INO agent also with Volksdeutsche papers who in real life was fluent in German). Alec, in the course of the interrogation, offered Molody service in the Abwehr as an agent behind Soviet lines. But first there would have to be a medical examination. Molody was found to have a medical defect, failed and did not receive work in the Abwehr. However, he was now free. Molody then began working (surreptitiously) as Alec's (that is Fisher's) radioman encoding and sending his messages back to Moscow. Both men terminated this mission sometime in early 1944. Fisher was transferred by the Abwehr to Berlin around March, 1944 while Molody began a new assignment also in Berlin at around the same time. Note that Fisher had probably arrived in Byelorussia by the middle of 1942. When examining Viliam Genrikh Fisher (Willie Fisher) and comparing him to Sorge, Fisher's strength was to move from one operation to the next seamlessly while producing excellent results and few problems for his superiors. He produced major intelligence accomplishments as a mole in one after another assignment "machine-like." Sorge on the other hand was absolutely profligate.
Jerzy Niezbrzycki (who worked in Polish intelligence as Niezbrzycki, while using the pseudonym Ryszard Wraga when working for U.S. academia) mentioned the capture of a Soviet Pole working under the administration of the INO, NKVD. This man was from Ukraine and spoke Polish with a slight accent (assumed Ukrainian or Russian). He was captured in Poland, agreed to work as a double agent, but then reneged and agreed to a jail term in Poland rather than a return to Russia. The Soviet Pole (Niezbrzycki's) and Häyhänen went to great lengths to build their "legends," that is, backstory as locals. The Pole spent lavishly on his girlfriend taking trips to Warsaw with fine dining, cabarets and other assorted nightlife that were part of courtship and "good living." The intent was to marry a local in order to obtain citizenship, the right residency and work permits and have a layer of protection from suspicion. Häyhänen padded his "legend" by going to extreme lengths, even though he had one significant advantage over the Pole as Soviet agents. Reino spoke Finnish as a native speaker. First, Reino along with a Soviet agent (from Lapland) headed north to the Arctic Circle. There, they found Sámi who were willing to corroborate (for a fee) his residence and work in Lapland from 1943 to 1949. Heading south to Tampere, he then courted and married a local Finnish girl, Hanna Kurikka.
The diaspora peoples were utilized by Soviet intelligence because they possessed cultural and linguistic knowledge (and for some, the knowledge of many different registers within a particular language or culture). These are knowledge, abilities and nuances that one cannot simply learn in a controlled, artificial environment like a classroom nor in a lockstep manner. Finally, they possessed the right phenotype to play their roles. Truthfully, they had played these "ethnic" roles from the beginning of their Soviet education (detskii sad-preschool) and their first Soviet passports and documents (the Soviet passport, their military ID's and even housing documents- the propiska) listed ethnicity called natsional'nost.
Methodologies: Why Not Oral History, Fieldwork in situ and Digitization A major weakness of how history is being presently written is based on methodologies. The word "methodologies" presents the question, "What sources will the historian, political scientist, anthropologist or academic use while researching a social science such as X, Y or Z studies, history, anthropology or political science?" The majority of those researchers writing academic history, political science and other fields tends to use almost exclusively state archives. Then, the same professors, researchers or academics claim to have written the "definitive history of X, Y or Z in the USSR."