World Famous Spy Scandals

by Vikas Khatri

  When the El AI plane was ready to leave, Eichmann was drugged, and his guards, posing as nurses and relatives, drove him to Buenos Aires airport with forged papers allowing him to be a car crash victim with head injuries who was just fit enough to travel, but could not be disturbed. The cover worked perfectly. Within 24 hours, the man whom the Jews hated most was in Tel Aviv.

  Israel was scrupulous in ensuring that the full procedure of the law was carried through, but the result of the trial, which began on 12 December 1961, was never in doubt. Eichmann was convicted of 15 charges of deporting and causing the death of millions of Jews, and being a party to the murder of thousands of gipsies and 91 children. He was hanged on

  31 May, 1962.

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  The Traitors

  The messenger who stood in front of Ivan the Terrible was trembling so much that Ivan raised his iron-pointed staff, and pinned his foot to the floor. Then he ordered him to read aloud the letter he was carrying. It was from Prince Andrei Kurbski, Ivan’s greatest general. Kurbski had fled to Poland, and offered his services to Ivan’s enemy, King Sigismund. In his letter, he accused the Csar of cruelty and tyranny. Ivan’s response was to have Kurbski’s wife and child seized and murdered. For the rest of his life “the traitor Kurbski” remained his pet hate; if he could have laid hands on him, he would have devised the lengthiest and cruellest torture he could imagine. In a famous sixty-page letter, Ivan accused Kurbski of damning his soul before God by committing treason to his sovereign.

  No historian has ever blamed Kurbski. He had lost an important battle in Livonia. Ivan had accused him of cowardice and treachery before; if he had remained, he would probably have been executed. If it was treason from I van’s point of view, it was common sense from Kurbski’s.

  This same ambiguity hangs over the whole question of treason. “Treason” implies that a man has deliberately and coldly turned traitor to someone to whom he owes allegiance. The “traitor” seldom sees it that way. Sir Thomas More disapproved of Henry the Eighth’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon; the king had him executed for treason, but history has decided he is a saint. Anne Boleyn was also executed on a charge of treason—it was actually a trumped up charge of adultery, the king having got sick of her bad manners. Henry’s daughter Bloody Mary (who came to the throne on the death of her half brother, Edward VI) had Lady Jane Grey, Archbishop Cranmer and Sir Thomas Wyatt executed for treason, although Wyatt was the only one who actually took part in a rebellion. Queen Elizabeth, who came near to being another of Bloody Mary’s victims, had her cousin Mary Queen of Scots executed for treason. Elizabeth’s successor, James I, had Sir Walter Raleigh beheaded in 1618; the evidence against him was particularly flimsy.

  In short, treason has usually been a ruler’s excuse for having somebody murdered. Sometimes there was a semblance of an excuse, as in the massacres that followed Bonnie Prince Charlie’s attempt to seize the throne of England, or the judicial slaughters presided over by Judge Jeffreys after Monmouth’s unsuccessful rebellion. But in many cases, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica admits, “the law was considerably strained in order to ensure a conviction”.

  In modern times, there has been an interesting change. Treason has ceased to be merely political; it has become ideological. Sir Roger Casement did not regard himself as an Englishman; he regarded himself as an enemy of England. But the English still hanged him as a traitor. Bernard Shaw had the sense to advise Casement to make a great speech of defiance, instead of trying to defend himself. Casement rejected the advice, and he died. But when Adolf Hitler tried to overthrow the German government in his putsch of 1923, and stood trial for treason, he instinctively knew that the best method of defence was attack; he hurled a magnificent speech of defiance at the court, and as a consequence, spent only thirteen months in prison. In effect, he was arguing that treason is not treason when it is motivated by political idealism.

  Almost without exception, all the “great traitors” of the twentieth century fall within this category. The major exception is Colonel Alfred Redl, whose treason probably cost his country a quarter of a million lives. But then, Redl’s country was the Austria of Franz Ferdinand, a monarch who determinedly refused to allow his nation to enter the twentieth century. It is therefore appropriate that Redl should be the last important representative of the old type of traitor.

  Redl was a highly intelligent man who came from a poor family; he was also a homosexual. In the Austria of the nineteenth century, the army offered a certain mode of advancement to one of Redl’s intelligence. In the early years of the century, his rise was rapid. His imagination brought him to the attention of Baron von Giesl, head of the

  Austro-Hungarian intelligence service; he placed the young officer in charge of espionage—hardly an important activity in that rather old-fashioned, militaristic nation. But Redl proved to be brilliant. He had the kind of imagination that would have taken him far in the C.I.A. He learned to use hidden cameras to photograph unsuspecting visitors; he coated objects with a fine dust, to get their fingerprints; he recorded their conversations (on old Edison cylinders). For the first decade of the 20th century, he was a high-powered spy.

  Unfortunately, he lived in a country where homosexuality was regarded as pure, deliberate wickedness. In the

  drawing-rooms where the elegant and witty Colonel Redl was a welcome guest, any suspicion of his sexual tastes would have been enough to ruin him. It was necessary for him to be discreet. And, since his sexual appetite was strong, this meant that, like Oscar Wilde, he had to be prepared to pay male prostitutes. It was an expensive business.

  A Russian secret agent got wind of Redl’s secret. And sometime around the year 1903, he informed Redl that if he wanted to avoid scandal, it would be necessary to aid the Russian secret service in certain minor matters. No one knows the details. All that is certain is that a combination of blackmail and bribery turned Redl into a traitor.

  Von Giesl moved to Prague, and Redl went with him. His place in Vienna was taken by an adoring disciple, Captain Maximilian Ronge. Ronge was not a brilliant innovator, like Redl, but he was painstaking and precise. One of Redl’s ideas was the institution of strict postal censorship; Ronge made sure it was carried out thoroughly. And in 1913, in the course of routine inspection, one of his agents came across two poste restante letters, addressed simply to “Opera Ball 13”. Both envelopes contained fairly large sums of money. Ronge ordered his agents to watch the post office and see who came for the envelopes. They waited for weeks in the police station next door, waiting for the ringing of a bell that would tell them that the letters were being collected. One day, it rang. They rushed next door—in time to see a taxi vanishing. They managed to trace the cab to a hotel; there they were told their quarry had taken a cab to another hotel, the Klomser. And on the cab seat, one of the agents picked up a small suede sheath, of the sort that contained nail clippers. He asked the clerk at the Klomser if he knew the owner of the sheath. The clerk took it, and approached a good looking man of military bearing. The man nodded and slipped the sheath into his pocket. It was Colonel Redl.

  One agent shadowed Redl; the other telephoned Rouge. Ronge was shattered. It was impossible that the ex-head of the Secret Service could be a traitor. He got hold of the receipts that Redl had signed to get the letters, and compared them with some of Redl’s own handwriting in the files. They were identical. By this time, Redl had noticed that he was being followed. He did a stupid thing. He had some incriminating receipts in his pocket—for money from Russia. He tore these into small pieces, and cautiously scattered them as he walked. But Rouge’s agents had been trained in Redl’s own counterespionage methods; they collected every tiny fragment, and took them to Rouge.

  Ronge went to the Commander-in-Chief of the army. He was stunned by the possibility that Redl might have been an enemy agent for years. For Austria had plans for attacking Russia and the Balkans—particularly Serbia. Redl had access to these papers—known collectively as Plan Three.

/>   The Austrians behaved like gentlemen—which was their mistake. They called Redl at his hotel, and laid the facts before him. Redl looked pale and composed. He told them that they would find all the evidence they needed at his flat in Prague, and asked to be excused a moment. There was a shot from the next room; he had done what was expected of an officer and gentleman. Probably he didn’t think too badly of himself in his last moments. He had no way of knowing that an Austrian archduke was about to be assassinated in Serbia, and that Europe would soon be at war. And it was only when that war began that the Austrian general staff found out just how far Redl had betrayed his country, and that the Serbians and Russians knew every detail of Austria’s plans in advance. Redl was more than a traitor; he was the executioner of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

  At the time of Redl’s death, a 15-year old German boy named Ernst Wollweber, son of a Ruhr miner, was beginning to read Communist revolutionary pamphlets. Wollweber later became perhaps the greatest saboteur of all time, but he is of interest here because he was also the first of the “ideological traitors”. Wollweber was a German; yet he spent his life working against Germany, for the Soviet Union. It might be objected that Wollweber was no true traitor because, like many other Germans, he fought against Hitler. But Hitler did not come to power until 1933; Wollweber was working against Germany as early as World War I, when he led a naval mutiny. Wollweber was a Communist first, a German later.

  In retrospect, it seems strange that it took the western powers so long to recognise that most Communists regarded Russia as their mother country, and were therefore capable of treason. In 1941, the British Security Services committed an almost unpardonable error when they allowed a German scientist named Klaus Fuchs to sign the Official Secrets Act and gain access to secret information. Fuchs had left Germany in 1933, at the age of 22; he was not a Jew, but a Quaker—another minority persecuted by the Nazis. He was allowed to become a British citizen and work on the atomic bomb because British Security reasoned that he was more likely to give information to Russia than Germany, and in 1941 Russia was an ally anyway. From the beginning, Fuchs had no intention of observing his pledge of secrecy. He promptly contacted the Russian military attache in London and offered to pass on nuclear secrets to Moscow—for Stalin had authorised full-scale research on the atomic bomb. He collaborated closely with Russian spies in England until 1943; then he was sent to America, to work on the bomb project at Los Alamos, New Mexico. For a while, he failed to contact the American branch of the Russian espionage network, and there was a frantic effort to find him. Fuchs was enjoying the sunshine of New Mexico, and a temporary sense of freedom from anxiety. Then the Russians located him when he called on his sister in Cambridge, Mass., and once again he began passing the secrets of the atomic bomb to Russia. By this time, the English and Americans had recognised that Russia would be a rival for world power after the war, and took the most elaborate precautions to prevent Soviet scientists finding out about progress on the bomb. One single man, Klaus Fuchs, completely negated the immense security precautions of the Allies. The odd thing is that he was beginning to have pangs of conscience. Perhaps he was beginning to grow up politically. He declined to meet his contact for six months, but it made no difference; the Russians kept up a firm and gentle pressure, and eventually, Fuchs handed them the secret of the enormous advances that were being made on the atomic bomb.

  In 1946, he returned to England, as the head of the theoretical division of the Atomic Energy Centre at Harwell. The Russians wanted to know about the secrets of the hydrogen bomb now, but Fuchs was unable to help. He seems to have been sick of being a spy, but there was now nothing much he could do. He went on handing over information—less valuable now—until the arrest of other spies—notably Nunn May—brought him under suspicion, and a British security agent set about the task of talking him into confessing. By this time, Fuchs was no longer at Harwell—the appointment of his father as a professor in East Germany provided an excuse for removing him. And on January 30, 1950, over a quiet lunch with the British agent, William Skardon, at an Abingdon hotel, Fuchs suddenly poured out the story of his years as a Russian catspaw. He had had enough of being a traitor. Without this confession, it is almost certain that he would never have been charged with spying. The technical charge of his trial was not treason, but spying; it lasted only ninety minutes, and Fuchs went to jail for nine years. Released in 1959, he went to West Germany and became head of the Nuclear Research Institute at Karlsruhe.

  And how did Fuchs come to be suspected? Ironically, through the revelations of another traitor, this time a Russian. Igor Gouzenko was not a spy; in 1945, he was simply a clerk at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa. Gouzenko had been brought up as a good Communist—that is, to believe that the capitalist countries enslaved their people, and hated all members of the “free” Communist world. In Canada, he was amazed to discover that the workers fared better under capitalism than he had been led to expect, and that Canadians were friendly and open. Gouzenko shrank from the prospect of a return to Moscow. He decided to defect. So, he opened the safe of the Soviet Military Attache and removed a large file. Then began a comedy of errors.

  The Canadians didn’t seem to want a Soviet defector. An Ottawa newspaper declined to accept the secret documents, and the Canadian police also felt this was none of their business. The Canadian Prime Minister was contacted, and told the police to hand Gouzenko back to the Russian Embassy. Gouzenko fled back to his flat. The Russians now made their mistake—they broke his door down and tried to drag him away. In a democratic society, that is strictly against the rules; so Gouzenko was once again taken into police custody—and the Canadians slowly began to realise that they were holding the key to Russian spy rings all over the world. And spies and traitors suddenly began to pop up like worms after a shower.

  There was Alan Nunn May, a British physicist who was also a Communist; he had worked in nuclear research in Ottawa, and given the Russian samples of uranium isotopes (in exchange for which he was given $200 and two bottles of whiskey). The Gouzenko papers included notes about contacting May on his return to England in 1945. And when May was arrested in 1946, the prosecution had no difficulty in proving that he had spied for the Russians; he was sentenced to ten years. His defence was that he felt it was his job as a scientist to make sure that the nuclear discoveries went to the world, not just to America—a plausible argument, and one that convinced many liberal intellectuals. No one seemed to question whether Stalin would have taken the same generous attitude if Russian scientists had been the first to discover the bomb. May was basically guilty of political naivety. The American authorities, however, took a sterner view of the matter. Gouzenko’s revelations led them to Klaus Fuch’s American contact, Harry Gold, who was sentenced to thirty years in jail without a trial. Gold led them to David Greenglass, an American soldier who worked at Los Alamos and who had also spied for the Russians. Greenglass saved his neck by claiming that he had been dragged into spying by pressure from his sister, Ethel Rosenberg, who, together with her husband Julius, was a devoted Communist. The Rosenbergs were sentenced to death, and in spite of a violent campaign for clemency—or perhaps because of it—the Rosenbergs went to the electric chair on June 19, 1953.

  But even the atom spies were amateurs compared to the British super-traitor who is regarded as “the most important spy the Russians ever had in the West”—Kim Philby. Philby’s name first came to the notice of the British public soon after the defection of the spies Burgess and Maclean in 1951. A British Member of Parliament asserted that Burgess and Maclean had been alerted a few hours before their imminent arrest by a “third man”, and had made their escape to Moscow. He named this third man later—Harold Philby, known as Kim, son of the respected Arab scholar, St. John Philby, and friend of many literary men, including poet W.H. Auden, critic Cyril Connolly, and historian Philip Toynbee.

  The prime minister, Harold Macmillan, defended Philby’s character. The M.P. withdrew his allegation. But Philb
y left his job in the Foreign Office, and became Middle East correspondent for The Observer and The Economist. Then, in January 1963, Philby vanished—and turned up again a few weeks later in Moscow, where his American-born wife later joined him. There was frantic investigation into his career. And it soon became evident that the British diplomat—and member of the British Secret Service—had been a Russian agent since the early 1930’s.

  Philby became a Communist at Cambridge, when he was a young man, and it was the fashionable thing to do. In Berlin and Vienna in the early 1930’s, he saw Nazism at first hand, and began actively working for Communism. As a cover, Philby apparently became a Fascist sympathiser, working for an “Anglo-German Friendship” group, and later going to Spain as a journalist during the Civil War and working at Franco’s headquarters. The disguise was perfect. When the Hitler war came, Philby had little trouble becoming a member of the British Secret Service. Starting in a very minor capacity, he soon demonstrated his value by putting British Intelligence in touch with a Russian spy network in Switzerland which had infiltrated the German High Command. From then on, Philby’s rise was steady, until he ended as MI5’s chief liaison officer with the C.I.A., with access to just about every military secret possessed by the British and Americans.

  No one will ever know for certain how many secrets—atomic and otherwise Philby passed to the Russians. But the number was certainly enormous. With his old Cambridge friend, the homosexual Guy Burgess, Philby blackmailed another Foreign Office man, Donald Maclean, to join their spy network. But by 1950, both Burgess and Maclean were beginning to crack under the strain of being Russian spies, and were drinking too much and causing public scenes. MI5 became suspicious; Philby warned them, and Burgess and Maclean vanished to Moscow.

  Oddly enough, this was not the end of Philby’s career as a spy, even though he had been publicly named as a suspect. He went back to the Middle East as a newspaperman, and worked there for another 12 years, until 1963, before he also felt that the hounds were getting too close, and he slipped away on a Russian ship. The British Secret Service will remember him—ruefully—as one of the great arch-traitors of all time.