The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939–1945. Max Hastings

Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay, soon to become Churchill’s chief of staff, and in some degree that of the prime minister himself. But ‘C’ knew little of the wider world he aspired to spy upon, and tolerated in Broadway a bevy of even less inspired subordinates.

      Decisions were powerfully influenced by his two joint deputies, Valentine Vivian and Claude Dansey, who hated each other. Vivian was a former Indian policeman who was credited with a major role in frustrating the machinations of the Comintern – the Communist International – in South America and the Far East; he was also an office intriguer of energy and skill. Meanwhile Dansey went briefly to Bern in September 1939, to try to organise intelligence links from neutral Switzerland to Germany. A plentiful supply of fraudulent informants emerged, of whom by no means the most imaginative was a German refugee in Switzerland who used his nation’s Army List to fabricate a mobilisation programme which he attempted to sell. One of the few useful sources Dansey identified was an Austrian Pole, Count Horodyski. He, in turn, introduced the British to Halina Szymańska, wife of the former Polish military attaché in Berlin, now an exile in Switzerland. She became one of MI6’s most useful conduits, with connections in the Abwehr. Dansey thereafter returned to London, where he exercised a powerful influence on the wartime fortunes of MI6, mostly to its detriment.

      During the years that followed, Britain’s secret service recruited numbers of outstanding officers and agents, who did some useful and a few important things for the Allied cause, but its chieftains inspired only limited respect. The stimulus of war would generate an intelligence revolution, and give birth to one of Britain’s most dazzling achievements. However, this did not take place in Broadway Buildings, but instead outside a dreary suburban town in Buckinghamshire.

3 THE RUSSIANS: TEMPLES OF ESPIONAGE

Just before noon on 23 May 1938, Pavel Sudoplatov of the NKVD strolled into the Atlanta restaurant in Rotterdam and greeted a Ukrainian nationalist leader whom he had come to know well, in the guise of being a sympathiser with the man’s cause. Sudoplatov, newly arrived on a merchant ship from Murmansk, presented the man with a handsome box of chocolates adorned with the Ukrainian crest. The two chatted for a few moments to arrange a further rendezvous, then Moscow’s agent bade his companion farewell and moved on. He was a safe distance down the street by the time he heard a sharp explosion. A timing device had detonated a bomb inside the box, killing the nationalist. This was a typical Moscow Centre* operation of the period, one thrust in the relentless campaign to liquidate state enemies, real or supposed traitors. Sudoplatov’s success earned him a four-hour meeting with Stalin’s foremost secret policeman, Lavrenti Beria, who marked him for bigger things, such as managing the assassination of Leon Trotsky.

      The Soviet Union owned the most active and best-resourced intelligence organisations in the world – the Red Army’s GRU and the NKVD, the latter controlled by Beria from December 1938. The foremost purposes of Joseph Stalin, master of the Kremlin, were the promotion of socialism abroad through the Comintern and the maintenance of his own power against domestic and foreign enemies. Both required spies in profusion. Throughout the 1930s, Russia pursued a strategy more far-reaching in its means – the plantation of deep-penetration agents – and its ends – the worldwide triumph of communism – than those of any other nation. How far the funds and energy lavished on its secret war profited the Soviet Union will be considered below. Here, it suffices to say that the espionage networks it established in the US, Britain, Japan and Europe were on a scale far beyond those of any other nation, and manifested in big things and small. When Japanese police arrested a Soviet agent carrying a Leica camera, Tokyo’s intelligence officers were pathetically envious: they could not afford to equip their own spies with technology remotely so sophisticated. This was a time when tens of millions of Russians were starving, yet Stalin’s agents spent whatever seemed necessary to purchase information and the deaths of enemies. From Switzerland to Mexico they left roadsides studded with corpses, and created some of the most remarkable agent networks in the history of intelligence.

      The Russian addiction to espionage and conspiracy was as old as time. In 1912, when according to official figures Germany spent £80,387 on its secret service, France £40,000 and Britain £50,000, the Russians avowed a budget of £380,000, plus a further £335,000 for the tsar’s secret police. Tsarist codebreakers achieved some notable coups, and their successors sustained the tradition. In the 1930s the NKVD’s Fourth Department, the world’s most lavishly-funded signals intelligence unit, was based in the Foreign Affairs building on Moscow’s Kuznetsky bridge. Its chief, Gleb Ivanovitch Bokii, achieved a reputation as a killer and sexual predator matching that of Beria. Though Bokii’s team never broke wartime German Enigma messages, it enjoyed useful earlier and lesser successes, such as securing the secret protocol to the 1936 Anti-Comintern Pact between Germany and Japan, before its chief faced a firing squad the following year. Stalin personally read many decrypts; like Churchill later, he trusted the codebreakers’ product as he never did humint. The Kremlin displayed as brutal a carelessness about casualties among its spies as it did towards the fate of its soldiers. In 1936 František Moravec of Czech intelligence received a Soviet proposal that his service should provide crash espionage training for a hundred Russians, who would then be dispatched into Germany. Moravec expostulated that such novices would face wholesale extinction. His Moscow contact shrugged: ‘In that case, we shall send another hundred.’

      The Soviet Union enjoyed a critical advantage in building its empire of espionage. While fascism gained millions of supporters in Germany, Italy and Spain, it never matched the appeal of worldwide communism during the decades before the latter’s bloodstained reality was laid bare. In every nation, men and women of brains and education, lofty ideals and unbounded naïveté queued to betray their own societies’ secrets for what they deemed a higher cause. From Moscow, hundreds of men and women were sent forth to direct networks in Japan and the United States, Germany, France and other European nations. The NKVD achieved excellent penetration of the French Foreign Office, and frequently quoted its ambassadors’ dispatches. Many of its informants deluded themselves that they were passing secrets not to the Soviets, but instead to the Comintern – which was in truth merely a postbox for the Kremlin.

      Pavel Sudoplatov became one of the principal puppeteers of the Kremlin’s danses macabres. He was a Ukrainian miller’s son, born in 1907, who served as a cipher clerk with the Red Army before joining the Bolshevik security service. As a teenager, Sudoplatov ran a network of informers in his home town of Melitopol. Secret police work became a family affair when he married in 1928, since his Jewish wife Emma was a more senior officer than himself in the OGPU, forerunner of the NKVD. He was trained by its foreign department before being posted to Germany as an ‘illegal’, posing as a Ukrainian nationalist. He led a roving life in the years that followed, travelling across Europe and spending a month in a Helsinki jail. He saw his wife just once, when she turned up in Paris as a courier. In 1938 he visited Spain, describing its civil war as ‘a kindergarten for our future operations’. At an early stage of his relationship with Beria, Sudoplatov noted a curiosity: this most terrible of Soviet secret policemen displayed meticulous civility to little people – junior staff – while treating big ones – his rivals in the Kremlin hierarchy – with lacerating rudeness. ‘Beria had the singular ability to inspire both fear and enthusiasm,’ he wrote.

      Sudoplatov became one of the spy chief’s most devoted servants, graduating from field work to senior desk roles, assisted by the demise of rivals. Between 1937 and 1939, thousands of intelligence officers of all ranks died before firing squads or were dispatched to the gulag. Stalin lashed out at the intelligence services during a meeting of the Soviet Military Council in language that defied parody: ‘We have defeated the bourgeoisie on all fronts. It is only on the intelligence front that they beat us like small boys. This is our chief weakness … Our military intelligence service … has been polluted by spies. [Its chiefs] were working for Germany, for Japan, Poland, for anyone but us … Our task is to restore the intelligence service. It is our eyes and ears.’ In his madness, Stalin insisted upon not merely the execution of scores of senior officers of the GRU and NKVD, but also on the severance of Moscow Centre’s relations with their informants in the field, thousands of whom were branded as fascist stool-pigeons. The chaos