Clancey's excellant novel- "The Sum of all Fears"- about Islamic terrorists detonating a low yield nuke in America was transformed by Hollyweird types into the bad guys being "Neo Nazis" with German accents. How pathetic! This is an old Hollywood tradition. In the same way, all the James Bond movies changed the original villains from Ian Fleming's KGB and USSR to SMERSH, whatever the hell that is. They just couldn't STAND the idea of portraying those nice folks in the KGB as villains.
SMERSH was actually a real group. It was the Russian abbreviation of "Death to Spies". It was set up during WWII and though De jure under Red Army Control was a De Facto creature of Beria and the KGB. These were the bastards who machine gunned their own troops if they turned back on human wave assaults against German postions that could never be taken by just infantry. SMERSH were the "blocking" units in that they killed all Russians who retreated after futile attacks. They also were the ones who tortured all German POWS before executing them out right.
It doesn't surprise me that Hollywood would make this change and blame it all on "SMERSH" as if they actually existed outside of the KGB or operated as an independant force that their "leader" didn't know about. What a joke- Stalin and Beria and the KGB had complete control over SMERSH.