Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Yakushev was a former tsarist official who became the public face of the Trust (Trest), the deception operation run by the Soviet secret police (the Cheka and then the OGPU) in the early and mid-1920s. After his arrest in 1921 he was recruited by Soviet counterintelligence and presented to Russian emigres abroad as a leader of the Monarchist Organization of Central Russia (MOCR), a supposedly powerful anti-Bolshevik underground that was in fact created and controlled by the OGPU.

Traveling to Western Europe as the MOCR’s emissary, Yakushev persuaded White emigre leaders and several Western intelligence services that a serious opposition existed inside Soviet Russia and that they should coordinate with it rather than act on their own. The Trust fed disinformation to foreign services, penetrated emigre organizations, and helped lure opponents into Soviet territory, most famously the British agent Sidney Reilly in 1925 and, in a parallel operation, Boris Savinkov in 1924. The Trust is widely studied as a model for later Soviet and Russian deception operations, in which a fabricated opposition is used to control and neutralize real ones.

Sources

• Andrew, Christopher, and Vasili Mitrokhin. The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB. Basic Books, 1999.
• Andrew, Christopher, and Oleg Gordievsky. KGB: The Inside Story. HarperCollins, 1990.

Summary entry. A fuller, document-based profile is in preparation.