Winter of 1954. The Cold War is in full swing. Intelligence agencies around the world are building spy networks to monitor not only their enemies but also their own populations. In the post-war years, there is no shortage of spies. The problem lies in recruiting the best agents before the opposing side, from the East or the West, gets to them.
These spies are such valuable commodities that their pasts do not matter. Their pasts are sanitized – even documentary evidence of mass murders disappears at the behest of the intelligence services, which send killers to work for allies and friends around the world.
In Melbourne, Brigadier General Charles Spry, a mustached front-line graduate of the Royal Military College Duntroon, who is just over forty, carefully reviews the personal file sent to him by an immigration officer in British-occupied Cologne.
A repeatedly decorated veteran, Spry is the Director-General of the recently established Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO).
He evidently wants to know everything possible about the Melbourne resident he has plans for. Spry has contacted allied intelligence services and requested an “urgent check of their materials” on a man he considers a promising candidate for Australia’s internal spy network.
The man who so interests the intelligence chief is named Nikolai Vladimir Alferchik. He was born in Russia and works at the State Electricity Commission in Melbourne. Alferchik is about thirty, a father of twin daughters, and lives on Wolverhampton Street in Footscray. But no one in the Footscray area, or at his workplace, knows this man as Alferchik.
Smolensk Order of the Fighters - OD
The super-secret dossier of the Australian intelligence on Alferchik came into the hands of author and television presenter Mark Aarons seven years after he requested it under the “Archives Act.” The dossier reveals the data collected by General Spry and the intelligence services on the Melbourne resident, and how, at Spry’s initiative, the intelligence “took extraordinary measures to create the appropriate conditions” for “recruiting Alferchik.” The papers describe secret meetings between Alferchik and his handlers.
Better known as Nikolai Pavlov, Alferchik was a man with a dark past, and one of the hundreds from the post-war allied “blacklist” who found refuge in Australia, despite the rules of the International Refugee Organization (IRO).
In Spry’s report submitted in May 1954, it is mentioned that Alferchik held a leadership position in Nazi security, was arrested by the Americans, but was soon released in December 1945, despite the Soviet demand for his extradition and accusations of war crimes committed by him.
But Spry needs spies. Besides, who would find out that ASIO knowingly accepted an alleged murderer into paid service?
Fifty years later, Alferchik’s recruitment was detailed in “War Criminals Welcome”, a book by Mark Aarons. In his book, Mark Aarons claims that Australia knowingly hired murderers and Nazi war criminals. This primarily occurred due to Spry’s initiative, who sought to recruit anti-communists from immigrant communities. Aarons notes that there is strong suspicion that Alferchik provided information regarding pro-communist activities in Melbourne’s migrant circles as early as 1953. This happened three years before his formal recruitment.
Knowing that Nikolai Alferchik headed the equivalent of the German Gestapo in Weissruthenia, now part of Belarus, Spry was evidently so interested in Alferchik that Aarons dedicated a chapter of the book to the relationship.
Nikolai Alferchik in Smolensk
Aarons states that his book provides “the first conclusive evidence” of the recruitment of Nazis by Australian intelligence services, which had long been suspected. He indicates that he means not only the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation but also Spry himself.
This statement contradicts some recollections about Spry, who died in 1994. Author and lecturer Robert Man, whose books include “The Petrov Affair: Politics & Espionage,” stated yesterday that he could not comment on specific allegations as he had not yet read Aarons’ book, but noted: “It should be remembered that unlike many of his critics, Spry risked his life fighting the Nazis in a very dangerous Greek campaign.” It was “one of the wildest and most terrifying military episodes in which the Australian army participated, and I know that Spry was a resolute anti-Nazi,” summarized Professor Man.
Aarons also claims that a special investigative group established by the Bob Hawke government found that Alferchik was one of the main participants in the murder of hundreds of Jews.
Born in the industrial city of Gomel in southeastern Belarus, Alferchik allegedly held leadership positions in the Nazi “death conveyor” in Smolensk and Minsk.
Aarons writes that the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in Smolensk’s Sadki “was likely the most massive murder in which Alferchik played a leading role.”
According to the author, in February 1954, Spry directed his inquiry regarding Nikolai Alferchik’s past to Ernest “Wiggie” Wiggins in British-occupied Cologne, who informed the Australian embassy in The Hague that Alferchik was the head of the Nazi security organization in Ukraine in 1941.
Decades later, Alferchik remains in the shadows. His name is mentioned in late 1953 in the context of a spy scandal that would soon become known as the “Petrov Affair.” According to Aarons, “in one form or another, he provided security with information about known communist agents involved in the Petrov spy affair.”
Alferchik, paralyzed after a stroke in the early 1990s, became “one of the most important suspects” monitored by “Nazi hunters” of the special investigation bureau in the late 1980s. He was never prosecuted under Australian war crimes law “largely due to the death of most witnesses.”
“Nevertheless, Australian investigators were convinced that Nikolai Vladimir Alferchik was involved in several mass murders under German command,” writes Aarons.
It was Aarons’ documentary radio program “Nazis in Australia,” which aired on ABC in 1986, that prompted the Hawke government to investigate the case of war criminals.
“War Criminals Welcome” narrates the ongoing silence regarding the fact that the documents of some migrants entering Australia since 1947 were deliberately “cleaned” by the CIA and MI5 as a reward for espionage.
“Western Nazi agents,” Aarons writes, “had every reason to be confident about their future, disembarking from the ships that brought them to Australia. Their bloody past as mass murderers was hastily forgotten, as the agenda was the collection of information on the communist threat… All that was required of them was to seek the right connections. Officers of the new Australian intelligence organization, ASIO, awaited them with open arms…”
Aarons believes that Alferchik may have been recruited by British intelligence as early as May 1945. He apparently came to the attention of the US Army Counterintelligence Corps in Salzburg in 1948 after another investigation into the activities of Russian émigré circles – an unusually complex anti-communist operation.
Alferchik was officially recommended in August 1948 to the head of the corps. He became a chief agent in the intelligence spy network in the Soviet-occupied territory of Austria.
By the end of 1948, Nikolai Alferchik was gathering various data: from the production of chemicals, drugs, and ammunition to the Black Sea Fleet and the training of submarine crews. Strangely detailed reports abruptly ceased in mid-1949. The NTS (anti-communist émigré group working for British and American intelligence) was later deemed ineffective. “Despite the complete failure of NTS intelligence operations in favor of Western intelligence, its agents, such as Nikolai Alferchik, were rewarded by their American and British handlers,” writes Aarons. “When it came time for Alferchik to find a new home, American intelligence allowed him to take on the false name Nikolai Pavlov… and he was ‘cleansed’ to immigrate to Australia, which evidently contradicted the statute of the International Refugee Organization.
“The indifference of ASIO to his Nazi past allowed Nikolai Alferchik to live a carefree life in Australia. His case, however, cannot be called unique. A family member confirmed yesterday that Alferchik died six years ago. ‘We are confident that there is no truth to these allegations,’ he said.