by Vikas Khatri
Erickson began his tour, but was quickly aware, despite Himmler’s words, that the Gestapo were tailing him. It was important to let them do so. As a businessman, he was not supposed to know about espionage techniques, but it meant adapting rendezvous tactics. Information had to be left in the form of seemingly innocent notes on restaurant tables, slipped to contacts at fleeting meetings on street corners, whispered in the darkened corridors of bordellos. Finally, in Leipzig, Erickson’s luck ran out. He was recognised by Franz Schroeder, an ardent Nazi who remembered the Swede’s
pre-war, pro Jewish attitude. Erickson took him for beers at a tavern to try to explain his change of heart, but he could see Schroeder was unimpressed. When they parted, Erickson knew the German would alert the Gestapo. He had to be silenced. But first, the spy had to shake off his SS shadow.
Darting through a nearby hotel, he leapt into a taxi, flashed his authority from the Gestapo chief, and ordered the driver to take the road down which Schroeder had walked. He soon spotted his quarry, and paid off the taxi to follow on foot. Schroeder went into a telephone box, and Erickson crept closer. Sure enough, the German was phoning an SS friend about his suspicions. Before he could go into details, Erickson pounced, driving his pocket knife into the back of the man’s head, and wresting the phone from him. Memories of Marianne’s death flashed through his mind, strengthening his resolve, somehow hardening his heart against natural repugnance at killing for the first time. As the body slumped to the floor of the kiosk, Erickson vanished into the shadows.
Convinced that it would not take his Gestapo shadow long to make a connection between the body and the man Erickson had met, the Swede cabled Prince Carl, using the code which signified an emergency. By return came a telegram saying Erickson’s wife was seriously ill, and he should come to Stockholm immediately. Sending his apologies to Himmler, who was due to meet him again, Erickson took the first available flight out of Germany. His American controllers agreed he could risk no more trips. But already he had done enough.
Bombing raids continued to sap the strength of Hitler’s forces. Now the chemical plants Erickson reconnoitred were targets. The Nazis retreated through Europe, abandoning tanks, trucks and jeeps to conserve fuel. The Luftwaffe cut back on training time for pilots and tests on aircraft engines for the same reason, with catastrophic results. And munitions factories using the by-products of the synthetic fuel process ran short of raw material for shells and bombs.
In Stockholm, Erickson and Ingrid devoured every report of Allied advances, and rejoiced on 7 May, 1945 at the German surrender. But they remained outcasts for another month. Then the cream of Swedish society were invited to a party at the American embassy. As they sipped their cocktails, the guests of honour were announced – and in walked the Ericksons and Prince Carl. Gasps of shocked disgust soon turned to humble apologies as the truth behind their pro-Nazi stance was at last revealed. And within days, newspapers throughout the world were hailing the secret heroes who had done so much to crush Hitler.
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The Scandal of Larkins Brothers
If Coomar Narain gang carried on its spying activities with the help of government servants, this was a spying scandal of greater magnitude as high ranking armed forces officers were its main characters. Who could imagine that a retired Air Vice Marshal of the Indian Air Force and another retired Major General of the army were carrying on the business of selling defence secret? To top it all they were brothers. They got easy access to every place and could garner information with ease because of the high positions they held in the armed forces. There seemed no way to stop them, but then like most spying scandals, it ended in their exposure and conviction.
The orderly picked up the phone at the residence of Group Captain Jasjit Singh and enquired, “Who is it, Sir.”
He stiffened and stood at attention as the caller identified himself. Group captain who happened to pass that way, took over the phone. It was Air Vice Marshall K.H. Larkins who had called. After the initial
greetings and pleasantries, Larkins said, “It is well nigh impossible to meet you. I had been to the Air Headquarters to see you. Singh, why don’t you lunch with me at the Ashoka Hotel today.”
Group Captain Singh somehow wanted to avoid him. He replied, “Not today Sir, I would be awfully busy today.” But, Larkins was not a man who could take ‘no’ as an answer. “You must be free tomorrow. We can keep the appointment for tomorrow. I hope it suits you,” pleaded the man on the other side.
Group Captain Singh had to say ‘yes’. He had lived in the disciplined atmosphere of the army for long. There, a senior is a senior and his desires are looked upon as commands. Singh had served under Larkins as a Squadron Leader in 1968. Next day, Singh reached Ashoka Hotel to keep his lunch appointment. The date was March 23, 1983.
This lunch proved expensive for Air Vice Marshal Larkins. It led to exposure of his spying activities as Group Captain Singh did not bite the bait. After drinks and lunch, Larkins broached the subject. He handed over a list to Group Captain Singh and told him that if he could get him those documents he would be paid Rs.20,000 per The next morning, Group Captain Singh made it a point to inform Air Vice Marshal S. Raghvendra at the earliest opportunity regarding his lunch meeting with Larkings. The Air Vice Marshal was stunned. He could not imagine that an officer who had held such a high rank in the Air Force and was known for his valour had sunk so low.
The matter was discussed amongst top officers. Officers from the intelligence branch were also consulted. Eventually, it was decided to hand over a document to Larkins. The idea was to find out his contacts and nab them in one sweep. Hence, a Manual listed in the paper, which contained details regarding oxygen tanks in the planes, directions and charts was handed over to Larkins. On April 4, Air Vice Marshal Larkins drove to the residence of Group Captain Singh and returned the Manual with Rs.10,000 in fifty rupee notes. He informed Singh that if he did his bidding, he could earn a lot of money.
Larkins was totally unaware that officers of Intelligence Bureau and Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) were keeping an eye on his movements. He proceeded to his elder brother’s house. His brother F.D. Larkins was seen going to a branch of Syndicate Bank situated at Shakuntala Apartments. The same day, at 4.45 p.m., Larkins was observed going towards Palam airport on Gurgaon Road with a brief case by members of Military Intelligence and detectives of RAW. The
Major-General stopped his car near some vacant plots at Subroto Park. He got down from the car and seemed to be waiting for someone. Soon a car approached him from the opposite direction and a foreigner got down. Major General Larkins handed him a packet. At 7.25 p.m., Major General Larkins met the same foreigner. This time the foreigner gave a packet to F.D. Larkins. In this way, the detectives kept an eye on these spies for nearly nine months. The phones of both the brothers were tapped. Details regarding persons whom they met were meticulously maintained. These people were also photographed with the help of infra-red cameras capable of taking photographs from long distances and even in dark.
In the mean time, the Larkins brothers got the wind of what was happening or somebody alerted them that soon they were going to be arrested. The two officers of the American Embassy, whom they met frequently were sent out of India. These officers were — Albert A. Thibault and Paul Kinley Pittman alias Bud. The brothers decided to emigrate to Australia to escape the noose tightening round their necks. But, they were put under arrest on September 10, when they were both celebrating the birthday of their wives.
A lot of secret documents were seized from the house of Major General Larkins together with an unlicensed gun and bottles of foreign liquor. A case under the Official Secrets Act and Arms Act was filed against him. He was also charged under Excise Act. After some time, he expressed a desire to become an approver in the case and gave a confessional statement. He told the court that he was passing defence secrets to four American agents with his brother K.H. Larkins. Another accomplice was Lt. Col. Jasbir Singh Gill. He disclo
sed the names of the four American agents as Jockey, John, Ben and Bud. He testified that America wanted the information regarding the next Army Chief. They wanted to know if Srinagar-Leh road was patrolled at night. America also required the names of officers who were being trained outside India in the use of arms and equipment being supplied by foreign countries. They also required information about Russian instructors training Indian officers and where they were posted. He was offered Rs.30,000 for all this information, by agent Jockey.
The packet given to the foreigner on April 4 by Larkins contained instructions, technical details and diagrams of spare parts of the Russian plane MIG-21. He was returned the original documents with a payment of Rs.20,000. For getting the required information asked for by the Americans, Air Vice Marshal Larkins visited Air Headquarters at least 90 times, as was evident from the entry register of that place.
Lt. Col. Jasbir Singh was working with these brothers and was getting only Rs. 1,000 for a document. He had started work in 1980 and gathered information on Russian equipment, T-72 Russian tanks and other sensitive matters. He got help from many officers. After his retirement from the army, Jasbir Singh was in the employ of one Jaspal Singh Gill. Gill was also an American spy. A large amount of confidential and important documents were recovered from his place.
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Deadly Deceptions of a Double Agent
The British public was stunned in May, 1961 when it was announced that a spy called George Blake had been jailed for 42 years. It was an astonishing long sentence compared to those imposed on Nunn May, Fuchs and the Portland spy ring. What had Blake done? The trial had been held in secret, in the interests of ‘national security’, and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan refused to divulge the facts of the case despite repeated attempts by the Labour opposition to raise the matter in Parliament. Eventually, he agreed to a confidential briefing for three Labour Privy Councillors so that minds could be put at rest. But what he told them had the opposite effect.
Blake was born in Rotterdam in 1922, the son of Albert
William Behar, an Egyptian Jew who held a British passport, and his Dutch wife. The teenager George Behar joined the Dutch Resistance to Nazi occupation, but was eventually forced to flee to Britain, where he enrolled in secret organisations to carry on the war against Germany, finally changing his name to Blake, and working as an intelligence officer with the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve.
After the war he was transferred to the Foreign Office, where his brilliance as a linguist was quickly recognised. The Fuchs case brought in new rules, insisting that all civil servants should be British born, but by then Blake was already in the fold, working as a vice consul – and MI6 agent – in Korea. He was captured by the Communists and held in a North Korean interrogation camp for some months. Later suggestions that he was brainwashed at this stage were contradicted by fellow prisoners, who said Blake stood up bravely to his jailers.
By 1953, he was in Berlin for MI6, with instructions to infiltrate the Soviet spy set-up in the city that was, throughout the 1950s, the frontline flashpoint of the cold war between East and West. For more than four years, London was satisfied with his work in the complex, confused, murky waters of double agent espionage. Naturally, to win the trust of the Russians, he had to provide certain secrets, but MI6 remained confident that they were getting more than they were giving. In fact, they were being duped.
In 1961, the arrest of a German spy and the defection of a Pole both provided evidence, too late, that Blake had turned triple agent. The spy was then based in Beirut. Interception of his message to Moscow, warning that Gordon Lonsdale was about to be arrested, was the final proof MI6 needed. An agent was sent to Lebanon to discuss a new job for Blake in London. It was the technique used with Kim Philby two years later. Philby fled to Russia. Blake, presumably unaware that he had been unmasked, returned to England – and was arrested.
The Macmillan government tried to justify the secret trial on the grounds that agents betrayed by Blake were still being withdrawn from behind the Iron Curtain. In fact, by then, they had all been rounded up and either shot or imprisoned. More than 40 anti-Communist agents around the world had been compromised. There were more secret shocks in store for the Labour Privy Councillors – leader Hugh Gaitskell, deputy leader George Brown and ex-minister Emanuel ‘Manny’ Shinwell – as they were briefed by Mr Macmillan and his Cabinet Secretary Norman Brook.
In Berlin, Blake had photographed almost every secret document that crossed his desk and handed the snaps to the KGB. He had hidden in the office when it was locked by a security man for the lunch hour, and worked undisturbed. He had informed the Russians of the whereabouts of prominent East Germans who had defected to the West, allowing the KGB to kidnap them and whisk them back behind the Iron Curtain. And he had betrayed one of the West’s most expensive and ambitious projects, Operation Gold.
This was a joint project between the CIA and MI6 to build a tunnel to tap East German and Russian messages in East Berlin. It was conceived in December, 1953 and took three months to dig. It began on the site of a new radar station near a cemetery at Rudow, in the Western sector of Berlin, and stretched nearly 0.8 km (1/2 mile) under the barbed wire of the border, 7.3 m (24ft) below street level.
Huge iron pipes, 2.1 m (7 ft) in diameter, linked large chambers containing monitoring equipment, a telephone exchange switchboard and an air-conditioning plant. Highly sophisticated microphones, amplifiers, tape-recorders, teleprinters and transformers made it possible for the American, British and German eavesdroppers to listen to 400 conversations at any one time. Lines were tapped from East German government offices, the KGB HQ in Karlshorst and the Soviet Army command post, with links to Moscow and other Warsaw Pact capitals.
During the first winter, heat rising from the tunnel began to melt snow on the ground above. A refrigeration system was quickly installed along the ceiling, and work on de-coding messages carried on inside the electrically-sealed security doors of the clandestine chambers.
Then, on 22 April 1956, East German border guards and Soviet intelligence staff began digging above the eastern end of the tunnel. Alarms gave the eavesdroppers time to escape, but the Western secret services had to watch mortified as the Russians milked every ounce of propaganda out of their ‘discovery’, giving guided tours to an estimated 40,000 people.
In fact, the CIA had suspected for some months that the tunnel had been detected. Telecommunications traffic from the tapped offices had dropped dramatically. Their suspicions were confirmed after Blake’s arrest. He later claimed that he told Moscow about the project as soon as it was given the go-ahead. Had the West been deliberately misled for nearly three years?
Blake’s treason continued in the Middle East. In 1958, the Egyptians exposed the entire British spy network in the area. Some agents were arrested. Others under diplomatic cover in embassies had to be hurriedly withdrawn, and President Nasser threatened to name every spy over Cairo Radio. He never did, but it took years for a replacement network to be set up.
Nasser had no reason to love the British. Two years earlier, Prime Minister Anthony Eden had sent troops ashore in the Suez crisis, and there are suspicions that MI6 was involved at the time in a plot by Egyptian rebels to assassinate their leader – a plot that was never put into action. But the reason for the 1958 clear-out was not primarily revenge. The Kremlin was about to supply Nasser with arms, and did not want British spies around to report the fact. Thanks to Blake, they were not.
Were Blake’s superiors at fault, allowing him to know too much? Critics of MI6, while acknowledging that a double agent has to sacrifice some secrets, say that to feed him too many vital ones makes him vulnerable to blackmail or torture if captured – and the spymasters culpable if he proves a traitor. Colonel Charles Gilson, head of the Russian section of MI6 on the Continent until about 1958, shot himself in Rome after retiring. Money problems were the official reason.
Blake, who was second only to Kim Philby as M16’s most damaging tra
itor, served just a fraction of his 42 year sentence. On 22 October 1967, he kicked out a weakly-cemented window bar at Wornwood Scrubs Prison, London, and vanished, resurfacing soon afterwards in Moscow. Once again, the KGB had looked after one of their own – and he had had time to write an ironic farewell. It was Blake’s job to look after administration in the prison canteen. One the day of his escape, he had entered all the expenses and income in the accounts ledger, then added a note of apology – he had not had time to add up the totals.
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Lonley Hearts and Ruthless Ravens
A flock of ravens proved in March, 1979, that beautiful female swallows are not the only agents to come from Russia with love. Ravens was the nickname given to handsome, smooth-talking Casanova comrades who moved into Western Europe’s administrative capitals in force to seduce lonely secretaries. Once the love-hungry girls were
hooked, NATO’s most sensitive secrets were Moscow’s for the taking. And they were taken in their hundreds. Only when four secretaries fled to East Germany in one week was the scope of the problem realised. Yet the espionage exploits of reds in the beds were no new phenomenon.
It was the summer of 1960 when Leonore Heinz cautiously opened the front door of her Bonn apartment. There stood Heinz Suetterlin, nervously fiddling with a bunch of red roses. He explained that he had been given the address after answering an advertisement in a newspaper ‘lonely hearts’ column, but now he could see there had been some terrible mistake. Leonore, 35 and frightened of being left on the marital shelf, was intrigued by the flattery, and invited the charming caller in for coffee. In fact there had been no mistake. Lonely Leonore was the carefully-selected target for a ruthless romantic assault.