TO: LT COL OLSEN, OSS/ DET 66

FROM: FLLT THOMAS ZORMENY, MI5-20

DATE: 21 JAN 1945

RE: PARANORMAL AGENCIES/USSR

The following briefing has been distilled from twenty hours of interviews with Junior Lieutenant Ruslan Nikolaev, the NKVD-PM officer who served as MI5-20 Liaison during operation EARRING last year. Much of this information has been confirmed by second parties and intelligence assets in the USSR. I pass it along, per your request, with the Director's compliments.

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The Soviet Union maintains two separate and competing agencies tasked with addressing paranormal threats. This is the result of schizophrenic foreign and domestic policies, as well as varying interpretations of the nature and scope of the paranormal. The military establishment (supported by Zhukov) clearly views all extraordinary events and individuals as a counterrevolutionary menace, while the political intelligence apparatus (supported by Stalin) seeks to use certain elements for its own ends.

The first agency is code-named BROOMSTICK (Myetlovyshay). This unit operates at home and abroad under the aegis of the Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye (Chief Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff), or GRU. The official designation is Information Directorate Twelve, or I-12.

The GRU's mandate is to prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union from an external blow, and I-12 interprets this broadly. The GRU is a military intelligence organization, but is authorized to operate within the USSR (although with less authority than the political Narodny Komisariat Vnutrennikh Del -- People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or NKVD). BROOMSTICK is a seize-and-hold assault unit created at the behest of Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgi Zhukov. The battalion-sized unit is air-mobile and well equipped. It is said to have standing orders to completely sanitize mission sites, not discriminating between paranormal threats and the unlucky souls who encounter them.

PROVARKA-MOHLB (Loosely, Tracking Moths; also known as NKVD-PM) operated as part of the NKVD as an elite unit charged with hunting down foreign agents and saboteurs on both sides of the front lines. However, after a major action in Karelia that is still shrouded in secrecy, the unit was sent to the rear in 1943 to refit and replace casualties. It can be assumed that at this time the unit's focus was changed to handling paranormal threats. PROVARKA-MOHLB is said to report directly to Stalin on the matters it investigates. MI5-20 analysts believe that PROVARKA-MOHLB is specifically tasked with utilizing paranormal assets to further Soviet political and military goals.

It has the full resources of the NKVD to support it, and the blessing of Stalin. PROVARKA-MOHLB apparently maintains an extensive training and research facility in Tula, near Moscow, and a camp (possibly a prison) in Chelyabinsk.

PROVARKA-MOHLB supervises a network of informers within the Red Army, Navy and Air Force, and even the GRU, and still occasionally directs partisan operations behind German lines. PROVARKA-MOHLB has also followed the advancing Red Army west to seek out and detain AsA scientists and officials. It is known that I-12 has recovered at least one AsA researcher, Dr. Erwin Peis, one of the top men in the Z-gas "Resuscitated Casualties" project.