The Third Man

Never far from the side of Bulganin and Khrushchev in Asia was a shadowy Third Man. He had a thin, sharp face with fine lines around pale grey-blue eyes, a firm mouth and straight nose, a high forehead, thinning brown hair and sandy eyebrows. He was broad and short, and it was noted that his shoes had extra-thick soles. His hands were large and hairless with thick, short fingers. He wore only grey-blue suits. Correspondents took him for a plain-clothes cop on a tour of VIP duty, but they soon learned that this was no ordinary MVD gorilla.

Everywhere, the Communists demanded stringent security measures, forced the Indian authorities to keep newsmen a safe distance from the Marshal and the Commissar. But when these measures broke down in Calcutta, the shadowy Third Man suddenly materialized. His pale cod eyes like ice, his big hands gripped into fists, he shouted harsh orders that made lesser goons leap. A snap of his fingers brought Soviet ambassadors running to his side.

He was seen whispering what seemed to be instructions into Khrushchev's jug ears.

Then, in Burma, as newsmen pressed close for photographs and interviews with Khrushchev, he got really mad. Who was the Third Man? He was General Ivan Alexandrovich Serov, Cabinet-ranking boss of Soviet secret police.

The Dirty Business. Except for a few fleeting glimpses (at a Moscow garden party last August, he laughed and chatted with U.S. Ambassador Bohlen's 15-year-old daughter Avis), it was the outside world's first hard look at Serov. But his career, pieced together from the reports of hundreds of Soviet refugees, had long been studied by Western intelligence agencies. In the words of refugee Lieut. Colonel Grigory Burlitsky, a former coworker, Serov at 50 is "one of the most ruthless and opportunistic swine in the whole dirty business." The "dirty business": the liquidation of opposition.

A Komsomol (Young Communist) at the age of 17, he rose to be a regimental commander in the Red army, but in the early '30s transferred to the Osoby Otdel (Special Department) of the NKVD. Sent to the Ukraine, he worked with Stalin's Ukrainian troubleshooter, Nikita Khrushchev. Together they supervised the deportation and liquidation of hundreds of thousands of peasants who resisted collectivization. After the conquest and partition of Poland, Serov was assigned to the job of eliminating "anti-Soviet elements" in the newly annexed territories. Infamous secret order No. 001223, outlining procedures to be adopted for executions and deportations in the Baltic states (an estimated 1,142,000 people), was signed by Serov. His reward: an Order of Lenin.

The German drive into southern Russia the following year touched off rebellions against Soviet authority in several small autonomous regions. As the Red army rolled back the Wehrmacht, Serov followed behind, liquidating "collaborationists." He deported to Siberia the entire Chechen-Ingush Republic, the Crimean Tartars, more Ukrainians. For this work he got a second Order of Lenin and a combat commander's Order of Suvorov. By war's end, his work had carried him all the way to Berlin, where he became Stalin's private eye in the Soviet Military Administration. He rounded up German atomic and rocket scientists, watched over Stalin's disgruntled airman son Vasily (who disappeared in 1953), trailed Zhukov to Odessa after his demotion.

By 1946 the NKVD had become such a huge, unwieldy organization that Stalin split it into two parts: the MGB (Security, under Abakumov) and the MVD (Slave Labor, under Kruglov). Having swelled the ranks of slave labor by several millions, Serov was a natural for the MVD. He was made Kruglov's deputy, got a third Order of Lenin for whipping his slaves into completing the Volga-Don canal. But after Stalin's death, his membership in MVD and not in MGB probably saved his life. The Beria liquidation process carried off the entire top level of the security forces. No one (outside the Kremlin) knows who actually carried out this liquidation, but two days after Aba-kumov's execution, Serov got the Red Banner of Labor, and in a few months moved into the top security job. Nearly two years later, he gives, say observers, "a nervous but energetic impression." He should; all five previous holders of the Soviet Union's top security job have died with their thick-soled shoes on.

Incident in Mandalay. Last week in Burma, Serov's nerves seemed to be getting the better of him. London Observer Correspondent Philip Deane photographed a Burmese soldier demonstrating a mine detector at Mandalay airport, just before the arrival of Khrushchev and Bulganin. A 6-ft. MVD plainclothesman rushed the Burmese soldier to try to stop the picture. The incident, recorded on TV film, made Serov blaze with anger. "Who took that lying photograph?" he demanded later. When other Western newsmen refused to tell him, he got madder. "In Russia," he said, "a man who took that picture would be beaten up." When finally a trembling Soviet newsman identified Deane, he cried: "Are you the man who stage-managed the lie?" Added the Soviet newsman: "What you did was disgusting." Deane (who spent 33 harrowing months in a Communist prison camp in Korea) calmly answered that there was nothing disgusting about taking a picture, though there might be something disgusting about a Russian striking a Burmese soldier. Serov had enough. He signaled to one of his men to photograph every Western newsman present. But as Deane in turn tried to photograph Serov, the Third Man knocked the camera aside. "Do not," he said, "take a picture of me!"

The next day Burmese newspapers ironically recalled Khrushchev's crack about the "British calling the Burmese barbarians." Said Serov to a Burmese newsman: "I don't understand." The Third Man was a long way from home.

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