Aleksandr Mikhailovich Orlov - After The Secret History

After The Secret History

After the publication of The Secret History, Orlov was forced to come in from the cold. Both the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation were embarrassed by the revelation that a high ranking NKVD officer (Orlov was a Major of State Security, equal to an army colonel) had been living underground in the United States for fifteen years without their knowledge. Orlov was interrogated by the FBI and twice appeared before Senate Sub-Committees, but he always downplayed his role in events and continued to conceal the names of Soviet agents in the West. In 1956 he wrote an article for Life Magazine entitled, The Sensational Secret Behind the Damnation of Stalin. This story held that NKVD agents had discovered papers in the Tsarist archives which proved Stalin had once been an Okhrana agent and, on the basis of this knowledge, the NKVD agents had planned a coup d'état with the leaders of the Red Army. Stalin, Orlov continued, uncovered the plot and this was his motive behind the secret trial and execution of Soviet Marshal Tukhachevsky and the purge of the Red Army. The research of Simon Sebag Montefiore contradicts this theory, however.

Orlov and his wife continued to live secretly and modestly in the United States. In 1963, the CIA helped him publish another book, The Handbook of Counter-Intelligence and Guerilla Warfare, and helped him obtain a job as a researcher at the Law School of the University of Michigan. He moved to Cleveland, Ohio. His wife died there, and then he died on 25 March 1973. Orlov never wavered in his contempt for Stalin. His last book, The March of Time, was published in the USA in 2004 by former FBI Special Agent Ed Gazur.