THE ADELAIDE SPIES PART2. UPDATED WITH VIDEO

WOOMERA

In the first post on this topic, we discussed the issue of how NOSOV the Soviet NKVD resident, had travelled to Adelaide June/July 1947 to meet with four new agents. Two of these men were Russians,  and, two more were Australian born of Russian descent.

Their role was to gather intelligence on the newly established rocket range at Woomera and at the labs in Salisbury, just North of Adelaide, the center for the Long Range Weapons Establishment.

It seems likely that those who were tasked with the Woomera aspect of the work would have been employed there whilst those at Salisbury would have perhaps used another kind of approach as in cultivating agents within the establishment. If this assumption is correct, then it would be reasonable to place the senior man in Salisbury to coordinate the intelligence operation, he would, I think, be a Russian as opposed to one of the Australian born men.

My best guess would be that the two in Woomera would have been employed there possibly on construction or maintenance work.

Captured V2 Rocket at Salisbury 1948.
It was destined for Woomera but instead went on public display.

NAMES & CODENAMES

Finding names for these agents is difficult, we have spoken about a man named Vlasov but additional research has discounted that name. It transpired that Nosov was accompanied on the trip from Sydney to Melbourne by a man named SERGEI SHIBAEV, this man was purportedly a commercial attache at the Canberra Embassy. It is now thought that this was our man destined to run the operation in Adelaide and quite likely under an assumed name. So, now we have a name but, at this stage at least, we don't have a photograph for SERGEI. We may, however, be able to find a codename for him.

Going through the second volume of information on NOSOV, a number of code names have been found, we need to do further research to append these names to real names, here is a first cut of codenames from the documents:

There are others of course and this post will be updated. We do know that Nossov used the code name TECHNICIAN and was in the habit of signing off with just the  'T'. Apparently, that was par for the course for all Soviet operatives in Australia.

CLANDESTINE COMMUNICATIONS

For the 4 men in the field, they would need a relatively secure form of communication between Woomera and Salisbury, telephone would be insecure as would normal written communication by letter as security at Woomera would, one would imagine, be tight and letters would be scanned/viewed by censors.

It does seem that we may just have come full circle the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam with its code being transferred between Woomera and Salisbury/ Adelaide being a real possibility. More to follow on that.

DOWNLOAD

Link to download for NOSOV, Volume 2, references to Adelaide occur from page 213 onwards of this document. There is much in the way of interesting information to be found  the rest of the document and well worth reading. It deals mostly with investigations surrounding the Royal Commission into Espionage in Australia, the Petrov affair.