This is a letter of reference issued by the chief of the 4th department of state security, Pavel Sudoplatov, in 1980 to submit for processing of pension documents.
Archives of KGB office, Ukr. SSR
Comrade Ushakov Y.V.
Kiev, 8 Bogomoletz Street
This is to confirm that comrade Sirota S.V. was an active participant of the Great Patriotic War. She worked as a radio operator in the 4th department of the people's commissariat of state security of the USSR in Moscow and Kiev and maintained communications with partisan units, operational groups of NKGB USSR and individual employees in the rear of German fascist troops that performed the tasks issued by the Party and Government, destroying infrastructure lines of the enemy, industrial and military facilities of the enemy and performed special intelligence tasks.
Chief of 4th department of NKGB USSR
1941-1945
'27' October 1980 P.A. Sudoplatov
Pavel Anatolievich Sudoplatov
103515 Moscow, Academic Korolyov Str., 9, Apt. 239
Tel.: 283-65-52
During the war I went to a partisan school. It was a big school for radio operators, field engineers, intelligence and other partisan experts. Our big boss was Sudoplatov Pavel Anatolyevich. During the war he was chief of the 4th partisan department of the NKVD of the USSR chief of intelligence service.
We were taught to act in the German rear. We studied German very thoroughly. Later I got to know that our teacher, Emma Kaganova, was a Jew and the wife of Sudoplatov. Later we were accommodated in conspiratorial apartments. We were to learn to not get lost in a strange town, escape from shadowing, establish radio operations unnoticed and come to our apartment and leave unnoticed. It was as enthralling as a game, but when they began to teach us how to have a smoke or spend a night with an officer we got scared. I said, ‘I shall not go to the rear. I shall work in a partisan unit, but not in the rear.’
We cried all night through and in the morning we went to refuse. Only volunteers could do this work and we stayed in a partisan unit as radio operators. There was a group of eight of us and we agreed that wherever we went our common signal would be one eighth. We were sent to partisan units to establish communications or replace a radio operator. I went only once. They protected me fearing that the fascists would recognize a Jew in me.
I performed some tasks for Sudoplatov and stayed to work for him as senior radio operator. I was a radio operator of the highest category. By that time I became a candidate to the Party. This was the only way we knew we had to go: become pioneers, then Komsomol and finally party members.
