Konstatin Zinchenko
Konstantin Emelyanovich Zinchenko (1909–?) was a diplomat, international journalist. Born in Yeysk into a family of a clerk. Graduated from the Moscow Oil Institute (1931). In 1931–1934 he was an engineer at the Neftegaz plant and a research fellow at the Oil Research Institute. In 1934–1938 he was a research fellow, graduate student, and senior research fellow at the Institute of Fossil Fuels of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1938–1940 he was a member of the Presidium and academic secretary of the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences of the BSSR (Minsk). Member of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) since 1939. In 1940–1942 he was the 2nd and 1st secretary of the USSR Embassy in England. In 1942–1944 he was an adviser to the USSR Embassy in England. In 1944–1945 he was deputy head, and in 1945–1947 he was head of the department. Head of the Printing Department of the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs—Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR. In 1947–1948 Head of the Department of Latin American Countries of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR. In 1948 Head of the Second European Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR. In 1948–1949 Senior Advisor to the USSR Mission to the UN. In 1949–1952 Assistant Secretary-General and Head of the Department for Security Council Affairs of the UN. Imprisoned from 1952 to 1954, he was later rehabilitated.
Konstantin Zinchenko took over as one of nine UN undersecretaries-general in 1949 and, after the outbreak of war in 1950, became the UN's minister of war, as well as minister of communications and information, taking responsibility for all legislative, military, and judicial activities related to subsequent UN operations in Korea. This important post was handed over to the Russians at the 1945 San Francisco Conference where the UN Charter was signed, after Molotov threatened to withdraw from the world body. Molotov then nominated Sobolev for the post. In the early weeks of the Korean War, there was understandable confusion in the reports coming from the front. The Security Council, which had been forced to authorize the introduction of a UN force to prevent aggression by communist North Korea, was demanding reports from field commanders. These reports were sent to Zinchenko.
Over time, it became clear that by accepting such information, Zinchenko was receiving information about American and UN forces directly from the theater of military operations, where the enemy side was effectively commanded by his immediate leader, Stalin. Even before Secretary General Lie had any inkling of what was going on in his own Secretariat, field commander General Douglas MacArthur, who led the U.S. and other forces under the U.N. flag on the Korean front, had begun to suspect what was going on. North Korea seemed to have an unerring ability to anticipate MacArthur's war plans.
The general decided to move to a new strategy – not on the battlefield, but in UN reports, limiting himself to general information of a non-military nature and reducing frontline and rear issues to a minimum that did not allow him to obtain a complete picture. MacArthur had another, less important reason for this: he had repeatedly found that the Security Council was censoring his reports. For a time, this put him in conflict with Lie.
The general stood firm. He no longer sent detailed reports to the UN, knowing that the information would pass through Zinchenko and end up in the hands of the Chinese and North Korean communists. He also vowed not to do so because he was suspicious of the entire UN system. Soon, MacArthur was in trouble. Zinchenko was forced to warn the general that he was not fulfilling his duties to the UN. The remark was certainly justified, but since it came from Zinchenko, who, because of MacArthur, was deprived of the opportunity to transmit accurate information to the Kremlin about the state of affairs at the front, the question of the general's actions became purely rhetorical.
The feud in absentia intensified as messages passed between them: Zinchenko demanded full reports, MacArthur refused to comply. Finally, enraged by Zinchenko's abuses, MacArthur sent a sharp complaint to Secretary General Lie. The general did not accuse Zinchenko of espionage, but merely pointed out that the Security Council was censoring his reports.
Zinchenko seized the opportunity to counterattack. The Soviet representative called a press conference and angrily declared that MacArthur was “withholding” military information. The attack was seen as an attempt to pressure the general on behalf of the United Nations. But MacArthur was not pressured. Instead, Lie soon began holding Security Council meetings behind closed doors—without Zinchenko. Lie was found to be aware of the true purpose of Zinchenko’s demands for full theater information. Within weeks, the secretary general ordered that MacArthur’s reports not be given to Zinchenko; they began to go directly to Lie.
Lie went further by creating a monitoring committee—in effect, another step toward preventing Russian access to information about the Korean war effort. Only this committee was allowed to work with reports from Korea. Zinchenko was not on it. As a result, Zinchenko was effectively reduced to the level of a liaison or courier between the Secretariat and the Soviet mission to the UN. In the following months, he was increasingly seen in the company of Nikolai Skvortsov, his assistant, which aroused a certain amount of interest.
The UN always considered Skvortsov a mysterious person. Skvortsov, young, with a chiseled face, was the greatest mystery for all the correspondents working at the UN. He loved to chat, demonstrating an excellent knowledge of English, he sprinkled jokes, was friendly, but in conversations with correspondents he often became stern, arrogant and extremely cautious. A curious feature of his behavior was his frequent comings and goings from the UN building. His job description required him to be present at his desk all day, but he seemed to have a lot of work to do elsewhere. People asked him where he had been and what he was doing, but never got a clear answer.
Finally, a UN official learned of Skvortsov's mysterious expeditions, which he was now making with his boss, Zinchenko. Secretary-General Lie received a message from the State Department about Skvortsov's attempts to persuade several Americans to obtain secret information about American defenses on the East Coast. Lie was informed that Zinchenko, his first deputy, was behind it all. Lie was shocked. He had already known about Zinchenko's unsavory role in the Korean military reports affair, but he had never suspected a secret plan to steal military secrets from a UN host country, especially with the participation of such a worthy delegate of the Soviet mission as Zinchenko.
The first spy exposed at the UN was Valentin Gubichev. But he did not have a high diplomatic status and, in fact, did not have diplomatic immunity, being a simple employee. Zinchenko was a high-ranking representative of the Soviet government, as well as a high-ranking official in the United Nations. Lie was informed about Zinchenko and Skvortsov just a week after the secretary-general questioned Arkady Sobolev about his missing deputy. And Lie understood why Zinchenko and Skvortsov had suddenly gone on leave and were delaying their return to the UN.
The Soviet Union, of course, knew about the investigation of the forty Americans suspected of communist sympathies and espionage. If the Kremlin allowed Zinchenko or Skvortsov to return to the UN, the Russians could well count on being involved; the Senate Homeland Security Committee had already been told in private hearings that two Russian emissaries were behind the whole affair. Zinchenko and Skvortsov tried to recruit some of the Americans from among the forty. However, the matter did not progress much. The FBI, wary of Zinchenko and Skvortsov's frequent comings and goings from the UN building, organized surveillance of them. It turned out that Skvortsov had previously held a post in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa - at the time when the notorious Sergei Kudryavtsev, the head of the spy network that stole US atomic secrets, was operating in Canada. The question arose: did Skvortsov have experience in espionage, was he an intelligence officer, was he not the one who ensured the transfer of nuclear information from Kudryavtsev to the Kremlin?
Evelyn Thaler was a secretary to Konstantin Zinchenko, head of the UN Security Council Department. Thaler said she had once been a Communist but had "gotten tired of it." The committee thanked Ms. Thaler for her help in identifying twenty-nine disloyal American U.N. employees and for her cooperation with the committee and the FBI. Observers could only wonder whether she had more important information to offer in closed sessions. Evelyn Thaler's testimony helped draw attention to the strange incident of the empty chair at the August UN meetings. Her boss suddenly disappeared. Everyone noticed that he was gone. The empty seat at the table had also caught the eye a few months earlier, which had unpleasantly puzzled Secretary-General Trygve Lie.
Of great significance was Lie's action against Zinchenko in early 1952, when the Secretary-General refused to allow him access to any communications from the Korean front: Zinchenko was caught taking without permission some documents that dealt with strategy, troop movements, and other military matters related to the UN military contingent in Korea. There was no doubt that Zinchenko was sending information to Moscow, which had sent its troops to fight UN units on the front lines.
As a result of the "quarantine", Zinchenko was reduced to the position of a courier. At the same time, the activities of Skvortsov, Zinchenko's assistant, were curtailed. Now he had limited access to papers and documents concerning Korea. The assumption of all this with the departure of Zinchenko and Skvortsov seemed to be true.
But all this remained just a suspicion. However, it did not take long to wait – the FBI’s assumptions were confirmed. The agents who were following Skvortsov witnessed his secret meetings with some American UN employees. When Zinchenko began to participate in such meetings, the FBI began to act. The Americans were taken one by one, interrogated and found out what the Russians were hunting for.
The FBI established that Zinchenko and Skvortsov were trying to obtain information about military and port facilities on the Atlantic coast. They were interested in the throughput capacity of the naval shipyards in Brooklyn, Norfolk, and Portsmouth; data on the warehouses of the Electric Boat Company in Groton, Connecticut, where the United States was preparing to begin a program to create auxiliary nuclear installations; statistical information about the landing strips at Mitchell Field on Long Island, Andover, Massachusetts, Maguire Air Force Base in New Jersey, and other top-secret, carefully guarded information.
The FBI was one step ahead of Skvortsov and Zinchenko. As soon as the Russians selected an American for a spy mission, agents would step in. They would intercept the employees, interrogate them, find out what they were being asked to do, and recruit them for discreet counterintelligence operations. Certainly some secrets were passed to the Russians, for when Congress finally began its investigation, it demanded the dismissal of twenty-nine disloyal Americans and the suspension of eleven more. Yet the evidence was insufficient to identify spies who could be prosecuted. The Americans were dismissed or suspended on the basis of their acquaintance or brief association with Russian emissaries, which certainly cast doubt on their loyalty. Although there was no actual confirmation that any of these Americans had passed secrets, the FBI suspected some of them but could prove nothing. Most of the witnesses invoked the Fifth Amendment , which in itself was cause for concern.
Only when the FBI acquired evidence of Skvortsov and Zinchenko's attempts to recruit Americans did FBI Director Hoover notify the State Department, which in turn warned Lie, who had to stop a spy scandal in his own circle. Of course, there was little Lie could do about Skvortsov and Zinchenko at the time: They were in Moscow. It suited the FBI's wishes that Skvortsov and Zinchenko notified the Secretary General of their intention to return immediately after their "recovery." The United States was waiting for them to return so it could follow the threads of the spy network. Lie's behavior was consistent with this plan.
As September turned into October, and Skvortsov and Zinchenko continued to postpone their return, Lie became convinced that the Soviet government had learned of the suspicions against the two diplomats, although their names were never mentioned at the parliamentary hearings. Finally, in early November, Lie sent Skvortsov in Moscow a note informing him of his dismissal. No notice was sent to Zinchenko. Lie wanted to avoid a scandal. It was becoming increasingly clear that Zinchenko would never return, since there had been no news from him for several months.
The public announcement of the spy scandal at the UN was not made until December 13. It occurred at a press conference convened by the US delegation to the UN, where it announced the news with the following statement: "The United States Government has notified the United Nations that Mr. Nikolai Skvortsov attempted to engage in espionage activities. The United States has also indicated to the United Nations that such conduct, in its view, constitutes an open abuse of his status as an international civil servant. Pending the UN's response, the US Government has taken steps to revoke the visa of Mr. Skvortsov, who is currently on leave in his home country."
Zinchenko was not mentioned in the statement, but it came just hours after a three-member judicial advisory committee completed its investigation into disloyal U.N. employees. In essence, the lawyers recommended disciplinary action against foreign nationals accused of subversion and the firing of disloyal U.S. U.N. employees.
The story of Konstantin Zinchenko would be incomplete without a brief account of his subsequent fate. He fell out of favor with the Soviet authorities and was sent to a camp shortly before Stalin's death. After Stalin's death, he was rehabilitated.
Zinchenko reappeared on the public stage in June 1955. He began working for the Russian- and English-language magazine Novosti as a commentator on international affairs. His first article was a tirade against the United States, which he accused of constantly mocking the United Nations. Among other things, he accused the United States of violating UN resolutions against militaristic propaganda, obstructing Soviet disarmament proposals, disregarding Security Council decisions, and turning the UN into a “cold war battlefield.”
Zinchenko claimed that the Soviet Union, on the contrary, always strictly adhered to the UN Charter. He forgot to mention his old friend and chief assistant Nikolai Skvortsov, with whom he had failed as a spy. And he did not even comment in passing on Soviet intelligence activities in the UN. Two years later, Zinchenko advanced in his career, receiving the position of head of the press service at the newly created State Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries.
He was luckier than Nikolai Skvortsov. Skvortsov has not been heard from since early 1952, when he left the United States with the hot breath of the FBI at his back.
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