Under the cover as a vice consul, Mikhail was fishing for information with Elizaveta’s help. They had wide connections and many of their acquaintances were sharing important information with them. No one was the least suspicious that the husband and wife were spies.
The spy pair confirmed Richard Zorge’s famous intelligence that Japan would not to enter the war against the Soviet Union. This allowed Stalin to divert 40 Far Eastern divisions to the West to drive the Germans out of Russia and the Ukraine.
Many Hollywood stars and artists were close associates of theirs, says
argumenti.ru, such as Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Theodore Dreiser and Walt Disney.
Despite being very young at the time, their son Anatoly remembered “Uncle” Charlie Chaplin.
“My father taught Chaplin to drink Russian vodka,” Anatoly Mukasey said in an interview with Izvestia newspaper.
“And I will never forget I was playing with drunk Uncle Theodore under the table covered with large cloth after supper. With Theodore Dreiser, I mean.”
To neighbors and the local intelligence services, though, Elizaveta was just a common housewife.
“They saw I was hoovering carpets, and the vacuum cleaner’s cable was 12 meters long. In reality this cable was also our aerial wire, and it was connecting us with Moscow,” Elizaveta Mukasey once said, as quoted by the Russian Vesti TV channel.
In 1943 the couple returned to the Soviet Union, where Mikhail was preparing personnel in a special intelligence school in Moscow and Elizaveta worked as a secretary at one of the capital’s major theaters.
There she studied the Stanislavsky method and then started learning the German and Polish languages. She also learned to use a portable radio transmitter, which was necessary for her future work.
From 1955 to 1977 the couple again worked abroad, with Elizaveta serving as radio operator for the spy network and maintaining two-way radio contact with headquarters in the Soviet Union.
During those 22 years, Mikhail and Elizaveta aka “Zefir” and “Elza,” fulfilled missions in many European countries and never failed. Afterward they returned home and devoted themselves to training young undercover agents.
Lieutenant Colonel Elizaveta Mukasey was the author of many manuals and exercise books for intelligence schools, and earned many awards for her remarkable contribution to the safeguarding of the security of Russia.
Her husband Mikhail died last year at the age of 101.
After the mandatory stature of limitations expired on revealing their activities, some details about the couple’s works were publicized in a book titled “Zefir and Elza: Undercover Agents". Much about their life, however, remains a secret.
