Colonel Yuri’s Murder Squad: Russian Intelligence Conspired to Finance Terrorism and Commit Murder for Hire in the U.S.

By Paul Davis
Back in 2019 the Washington Times ran my review of Heidi Black’s “From Russia With Blood.”
I opened the review by quoting Ben Macintyre, a columnist for the London Times and the author of “The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War,” “A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal,” and more recently, “Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy.”
Macintyre wrote about a Russian GRU (military intelligence) assassination group operating in Europe that is the descendant of the Soviet assassination organization SMERSH, (Smertʹ Shpionam, or “Death To Spies.”).
“If the idea of a ruthless spy-killing unit sounds like the stuff of fiction, that’s because it became precisely that,” Ben Macintyre wrote in his London Times column. “In the James Bond novels, Ian Fleming portrayed SMERSH as a massive counterintelligence network that more closely resembled the KGB.”
In Ian Fleming’s classic 1957 thriller “From Russia With Love,” James Bond was the target of a SMERSH plot to assassinate him and discredit British intelligence in a sex scandal. SMERSH sent out from Russia a psychopath assassin named Red Grant to kill Bond and used a beautiful Russian girl as bait to lure 007 to Istanbul.
Ben Macintyre wrote in his London Times column that the real SMERSH was effective in not only murdering Soviet traitors (some of whom were undoubtedly innocent, he noted), but SMERSH also instilled terror among potential enemies and enfo...