Anatoly Gurevich

The passport gave the holders date and place of birth as 3 July 1911 in Montevideo and his permanent address was Calle Colon 9, Montevideo.

Anatoly Markovich Gurevich (Анатолий Маркович Гуревич; 7 November 1913 – 2 January 2009) was a Soviet intelligence officer.

He was an officer in the GRU operating as "разведчик-нелегал" (razvedchik-nelegal, illegal resident spy) in Soviet intelligence parlance.

Gurevich was a central figure in the anti-Nazi Red Orchestra in France and Belgium during World War II.

Gurevich had a number of aliases that he used to disguise his identity, including Vincente Sierra, Victor Sukolov, Arthus Barcza and Simon Urwith. He also used a number of code names for radio communications, including Kent, Fritz, Manolo, Dupuis and Lebrun.

Gurevich ran one of the seven groups of networks, located in Belgium that were controlled by Leopold Trepper in France.

He was the second leading Soviet agent in Europe during the war years.

From 1929 to 1933, he was a member of the paramilitary sports organisation called OSOAVIAKHIM.

After that, he was a part of the air defence and later took a communication operator course.

In 1933, he enrolled at the Leningrad Institute of Railway Transport where he displayed proficiency for learning languages and translation.

He learnt German, French, and English there.

On 1 September 1935, he was appointed to a course for training people at the Intourist travel agency.

When the Spanish Civil War began, Gurevich volunteered to help.

In July 1939, Gurevich, posing as the wealthy Vincente Sierra, arrived in Brussels while travelling on a Uruguayan passport that had been issued in New York City on 17 April 1936.

Along with a large group he travelled to Spain and arrived at Cartagena on 30 December 1937.

He was appointed as an adjunct translator on submarine C-4 of the Second Spanish Republic, Spanish Republican Navy.

In Autumn 1938, Gurevich returned to Moscow.

On 15 April 1938, Gurevich was ordered by the Soviet Main Intelligence Directorate to travel to France to commence his work as an agent.

Disguised as a Mexican tourist, he travelled through Finland, Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands, before finally arriving in France.

In Paris, Gurevich changed his passport from a Mexican tourist into a Uruguayan passport.

In the same month, he carried out his first operation when he was instructed to travel to Berlin to contact the Luftwaffe officer Harro Schulze-Boysen.

Gurevich was ordered to re-establish Shulze-Boysen as an intelligence source and arrange a courier service.

Sukolov was given the telephone number of Schulze-Boysen and been ordered to phone him and arrange a meeting somewhere in the city.

He was not to meet him at his home, however.

When Gurevich phoned, Libertas Schulze-Boysen, the wife of Harro Schulze-Boysen answered.

They met on the platform of an underground station, later moving to a cafe where Schulze-Boysen joined them later.

In 1939, he underwent training in the intelligence school of the Main Intelligence Directorate in Moscow.

On 17 July 1939, Sukolov made contact with Leopold Trepper in Ghent, who at the time was head of the Soviet intelligence network in Belgium.

Trepper planned to teach the operation of the Foreign Excellent Raincoat Company to Gurevich.

To make contacts in different strata of society, Gurevich started to familiarize himself with Belgium society and studied the country to enable the collection of economic knowledge.

Gurevich took part in ballroom dancing and riding lessons and as he travelled between luxury hotels, mail bearing the stamps of Uruguay awaited his arrival.

To improve his language skills in French, English and German, Gurevich enrolled at the Free University of Brussels.

Gurevich's cryptonym or code name was Kent.

His colleagues in Brussels had no idea where the code name has come from, in fact it was the name of fictional British agent character in a book that Gurevich had read when he was a boy called Diary of a spy by N G Smirnov.

Although he was industrious, he was generally disliked for a number of reasons, which included being arrogant, and was considered a bit of a bluffer who was known for his socialising and profligate spending which included owning 40 luxury suits in his large apartment in Avenue AJ Sleggers.

Trepper viewed both Gurevich and Mikhail Makarov as the Young Guard and considered both himself and his immediate colleagues including Hillel Katz, the Old Guard Sukolov had never been tested in battle.

Gurevich's original instructions were to establish an espionage network in Copenhagen, but in the months leading up to the war, Trepper's plans changed with Sukolov having to be introduced into the Belgian network gradually.

Upon his return to the Soviet Union in 1945, Gurevich was sentenced for treason and spent 15 years in detention and was rehabilitated in 1990.

Gurevich was born into a Jewish family in Kharkov.

Both his father and his mother were pharmacists.