SUPO - world’s best genealogists?

Finnish Security Police had great success in digging up Soviet spies

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By Tuomo Pietiläinen
     
      In the early 1970s Olavi Pihlman, a high official at the Finnish Board of Customs, got a strange request. His contact in the Soviet foreign intelligence service, the KGB, asked him to find out what parts of the body Finnish newborn babies were vaccinated.
      The KGB officer had heard that a good friend of Pihlman’s wife happened to be a midwife.
      Pihlman spied on behalf of the Soviet Union for money, and had become used to being given strange missions, so he did as he was asked.
      Some time later, in 1976, the KGB man asked Pihlman for a Finnish card to a baby clinic. However, only a short time after the request, the Security Police (SUPO) arrested Pihlman, and the KGB was left without the information that it wanted about Finnish infant care.
     
Why in the world would the Soviet intelligence service suddenly have such an interest in midwifery and infant care. Wouldn’t it have been possible to exchange such information openly, in the spirit of the Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance?
      In reality, the KGB officer’s request was by no means benign, even though some kind of a birth process was involved. The KGB man wanted information to help in creating illegals - extremely secret deep-cover spies.
      In Ratakatu 12, the book on the 60-year history of SUPO, it comes out that Finland’s minuscule Security Police enjoyed considerable respect around the world in the unmasking of illegals. SUPO’s work was “internationally hot and appreciated”.
     
For SUPO this meant, naturally, that the information could be exchanged with the CIA for surveillance information that was important from Finland’s point of view. This was also done, and SUPO’s reputation grew in the eyes of the world’s biggest espionage and counterespionage organisation.
      The head of SUPO would always meet with the director of the CIA when he visited the United States, and the counterespionage skills of the Finns are still held in high regard by the CIA and FBI.
     
But who were these artificial people living in the deepest archives?
      Illegals are, and were, people who exist on paper, for whom a perfect personal history of a nationality - that of a Finn, for instance - has been created.
      Genuine birth records and identity documents are not enough in espionage. To enhance credibility, the marks on a person’s body had to be just right. When a KGB employee took on the identity of a Finnish paper person, he or she would get vaccination scars in exactly the right places. It is this kind of information that the spies of the KGB’s illegals department would glean from helpers such as Pihlman.
      The KGB were also careful with other nationalities. KGB illegals sent to Israel had to sacrifice their foreskins for their country.
     
Finland’s Security Police got wind of what the KGB was doing in 1970, when it was noticed that a spy working in the illegals department would often meet with Orthodox priest Vladimir Chvetkov. It turned out that paper identities had appeared in Finnish church records since the 1950s.
      Previously, false identities had been established by stealing the identities of soldiers who had been killed or were missing in the Winter War, but the creation of completely new identities was something new.
     
Catching an Orthodox priest working with the KGB started a flurry of genealogical study in SUPO.
      As a result, SUPO learned that there were about 20 KGB spies around the world who had infallible Finnish identities. The news came as a shock to SUPO, as a Finnish passport was highly regarded around the world, allowing the holder to enter almost any country.
      Thanks to the Chvetkov case, SUPO got wind of the most secret methods of the KGB before the counterespionage bodies of other countries could.
      Finland has been a lucrative target for identity forgers, as they were able to work with the church records of parishes that were left behind in the parts of Karelia that were ceded to the Soviet Union. There were also many Finnish emigrants living both in the Soviet Union and in North America.
      Thanks to SUPO’s genealogical work, the identities of the church books lent by Pastor Chvetkov would pop up in different parts of the world all the way to the late 1980s.
     
The most famous false identity was that of Reino Gikman and his wife Martta Nieminen, who were unmasked in Paris in May 1989. Gikman was secretly meeting US diplomat Felix Bloch.
      One of the most important tasks of the illegals was that of meeting with the most secret of all sources of information. The stamp-collecting hobby shared by a Finnish businessman and an American diplomat appeared to be quite innocent on the outside.
      Veikko and Sirkka Pöllänen spent a long time in Helsinki establishing a legend. However, they left the city in a panic in 1985. The apparent reason for their disappearance was the defection of KGB officer Oleg Gordievski. When he was younger, Gordievski had served in the KGB’s illegals department, and it was feared that he would reveal the identities of his former colleagues.
      Their departure was a setback for SUPO counterespionage, which had been keeping an eye on the two. SUPO would have been interested in knowing what kinds of tasks the Pöllänens were going to.
     
In addition to Finns, other small nationalities were interested in the KGB and its followers.
      A year ago something was learned about the illegals on the other side of the Gulf of Finland, when Herman Simm, the head of the security department of Estonia’s ministry of Defence, was caught leaking NATO secrets.
      For years, Simm had been meeting with a dark-haired man, whose papers identified him as a Portuguese citizen, Antonio de Jesus Amuret Graf. In reality he was Sergei Jakovlev, an officer in the SVR, the heir to the Soviet KGB, whom Simm was able to meet with in peace, without worrying about catching the attention of Estonian counterintelligence.
     
But what is going on with the illegals nowadays who are moving around with Finnish identity papers?
      The Security Police believe that most of them have been tracked down, although still in 1995 there were about 20 spies moving around in the world under a Finnish cover.
      Now, 14 years later, they would be of retirement age, so their use in actual espionage is quite difficult.
      SUPO nevertheless cannot completely sigh with relief, as the number of illegals is increasing - at least on paper. In its investigations, SUPO noticed in 1986 that Olavi Toivonen, who had been involved in the Prague Spring of 1968, got a son on October 5th, 1964 - Tarmo Harald Toivonen.
      Tarmo Toivonen’s age group is now of the optimum age for espionage, and there could be others still hiding in the archives.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 31.8.2009


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Security Police history: President decided whom to prosecute for espionage (28.8.2009)
  Security Police evaluated Finns’ intelligence and sex habits (3.1.2009)
  Helsinki was buzzing with spies during Cold War decades (22.11.2005)

TUOMO PIETILÄINEN / Helsingin Sanomat
tuomo.pietilainen@hs.fi