Trepper, Leopold

(1904–1982)

   A Polish Jewish communist, Trepper served successfully as a GRU illegal for two decades. In the 1920s and 1930s he operated in British-occupied Palestine and France. Beginning in 1938, Trepper built and managed a network of agents in Western Europe, which the Nazis referred to as the Red Orchestra. Using as a cover the director of a raincoat company, Trepper oversaw the work of dedicated communists and anti-Fascists from Paris to Berlin. His network provided Joseph Stalin with thousands of pieces of intelligence over the next four years, much of which was ignored prior to Operation Barbarossa. In 1941 and 1942, however, the Red Orchestra provided thousands of accurate reports on German military operations and German industrial production. Trepper was an imaginative and brave operations officer. He once chose an office for his cover company in the same building as the Brussels headquarters of German military counterintelligence (Abwehr), and he traveled throughout Nazi-occupied Europe to meet with his principal agents and radio operators. Trepper had only contempt for Soviet officers provided by Moscow to help his apparatus. In his memoirs, Trepper noted that there was no way to teach a man or women to be an effective spy. One either had imagination and courage, he argued, or one did not.

   When Trepper was arrested by German counterintelligence in Paris in 1942, he pretended to cooperate with them to save his life. He later escaped and, after years of hiding, was repatriated to the Soviet Union, where he was almost immediately sent to prison. He was released following Stalin’s death and later moved to Poland. Due to anti-Semitic campaigns in Poland in the late 1960s, he moved to Israel, where he died in 1982.