Lapstone Part 3: IMPORTANT UPDATE 2: Photographs, The Delegates and a Download..

THE OFFICIAL LIST OF RUSSIAN DELEGATES 

TO LAPSTONE

Not as straightforward as it would appear...

Foreword

This series of recent posts has broken new ground. By trawling through the helpful information received courtesy of PeteDavo regarding the operations of MI5 in Australia during 1948, we were able to uncover other documents including the Delegates list for the Lapstone conference.

Within the Somerton Man webspace, the Lapstone conference has been discussed many times. The discussions revolved around the mysterious Sherbakov and a Miss Bogotyreva, a secretary and assistant to Novikov the leader of the Soviet delegation. It was often said that the two had disappeared together and defected to Australia, there was never any evidence to that effect but in this space, there are those who tend to wax romantic at times. In this post, you will read evidence of Sherbakov being on the list of delegates right up until the 25th of November a day or so before the departure of the flight to Darwin. There is no evidence of his landing here but the same can be said of all those on the list. There is no evidence of his attending any sessions of the conference.

We are left with the thought that Sherbakov could well have arrived in Darwin and instead of heading to Lapstone he headed elsewhere. Checking the aircraft flight times into Australia and then schedules for aircraft leaving Darwin for Adelaide, it is possible that Sherbakov could have boarded a plane and arrived in Adelaide early on the evening of 30th November 1948.

We also found that Miss Bogotyreva attended the sessions and left Lapstone along with the rest of the delegation on 13th December 1948.

Finally, as a result of this research, we now find that Nosov, the head of the KGB in Australia, also attended the full conference at Lapstone.

The count says 13 Delegates which includes Sherbakov.

Yet in this document, marked unofficial, from within the file we get a total of 15 in this party plus a driver and two couriers, note that Sherbakov makes the 15th delegate:

We are now at 24th November just 2 days prior to the scheduled departure from the UK and in this list, without names, we see that the Australian Embassy states there are 15 members of the party:

So Far so good? Well, no actually. You see there is yet another list that turns up within this file. This one is handwritten with no date, page 27 of the file, and it contains the names of 21 persons with no sign of Sherbakov:

This last document shows an 'in' and an 'out' date column. Miss Bogotyreva is shown 'in' on 30th November and 'out' on 12th December, no sign of Sherbakov though. Also noteworthy is that 5 are shown as arriving on the 1st December and one on the 11th December who departs on the 13th December, one day after the rest of the party. The question is, is this the list of attendees who flew in that included delegates and staff and others or is it a list of all Russians who arrived at Lapstone and then departed on the dates shown? There is a question mark on the last name in this list, VYSELSKI, he apparently arrived on 11th December and departed on 13th December.

Important Update

Sharpened image of written list: 

Checking and comparing the published versus written lists, the following names were found in the handwritten version which do not appear on the published list with the exception of the two couriers:

• Pavlov arrived on 30th November and left on 1st December
• Pachinko arrived on 30th November and left on 2nd December
• Tazov arrived on 30th November left on 1st December(marked down as a courier)
• Kustashenko arrived on 30th November left 1st December (marked down as a courier)
• Miss Karpova shown on the written list as arriving on 30th November and departing 13th December. ( Note that Miss Grisnova from the published list does not appear therefore possibly a substitute)
• Vyselski arrived on 11th December and departed on 13th December
• Sherbakov does not appear on the written list although MI5 files suggest that he did arrive.

Important: One name written on this list could be significant. NOSOV, many would know that Feodor Nosov was the head of the KGB in Sydney and lead a team of spies including Zaitsev, Mikheev and the Australian Wally Clayton known to be a communist sympathiser and agent. Very significantly, Nosov had a working relationship with Dalziel from Evatt's office. There's a long story here on Dalziel, suffice to say his association with Nosov started when he was introduced by Evatt to Mikheev in 1942/43, it is widely believed that Dalziel was the original source of the leak of secret documents to the Russians in early 1948.

The link from Nosov to Moran and the Eureka Youth League who were staying less than an hour away from Lapstone, is an obvious thought.

The fact that Miss Bogotyreva now shows as being at the conference and leaving on the same date as the rest of the team strongly suggests that she returned to Russia. This conflicts with commonly held thoughts that she and Sherbakov disappeared together. Not so.

Summation

The differences between the published and written lists are significant, we have names appearing of people who were not down for the flight but could have been passengers. The following remarks are made on the assumption that this was the case.

We seem to start with a party of 15 and end up with a total of 21 on the last list but if we include Sherbakov that would make 22 people in total.

If 22 people flew in via the Silvwright charter aircraft, where did they sit? What I mean is that if there were 22 people + 7 crew that makes 29. The aircraft had only seats for 26 passengers. The answer is that we can deduct 4 of the total, the Pilot, Co-pilot, radio operator and navigator were seated up front in the cockpit. That gives us 25 passengers and just 1 spare seat.

So it is conceivable that 22 people flew in with the Russian delegation comprised of 15 delegates and staff and 7 others. The handwritten list needs to be transcribed, a little scrawly I'm afraid. We would then have a list of 22 names that we can check off against passenger lists to Adelaide on Tuesday morning 30th November 1948.

Obviously, there is more to do, we need to clarify the additional names and carry out research on the full list. In that process, we need to be conscious of the fact that some of these names may be alternative identities. For serious researchers, this is a complex task as you can see, I will be sharing whatever is found.

The next post in this series will happen once we have received the results of passenger lists research. Hopefully that will occur within the next 2 weeks.

PHOTOGRAPHS
The photo below right shows Novikov and Miss Bogatyreva as they arrive at Mascot on 30th November 1948. The man you see just behind the lady is also a member of the delegation for whom we don't have a name but he does bear a resemblance to the Boxer, Sergei Sherbakov, below left. The boxer photo was taken 5 years later. There is insufficient detail in the group photo to say any more than a 'resemblance'.

SCHERBAKOV (SHCHERBAKOV)

These two clips are from Voumes 1 and 2 of the current download files.

DOWNLOAD

You can download the relevant PDF document here..