World Famous Spy Scandals

by Vikas Khatri

  “I should be very surprised if they did.” “Apart from your surprise, would a difference of opinion be possible?” “Naturally it would be.” “Doctors have been known to disagree frequently on diagnosis?” “Frequently.” “And some doctors have been known to be wrong on diagnosis?” “Frequently.” “Have you ever been wrong?” Mr. Murphy asked bluntly.

  “Certainly,” Dr. Binger confessed.

  The final speech for the defence began on January 19 when the trial was in its tenth drawn-out week. Cross’s basic case was that Chambers was a chronic liar, and that the alleged corroboration was “pure fabrication”. He emphasised the case of Baltimore No. 10, the document which the F.B.I. expert established had not been typed on Mrs. Hiss’s Woodstock typewriter.

  “Chambers had taken his oath here that all the documents came from Alger Hiss alone, and then, under cross-examination, when I took out Baltimore 10 and laid it on the jury rail, he swore with equal solemnity that it might have come from another man.”

  Chambers and his wife—who had also given evidence—had been unable to agree on the precise facts about any of the supposed visits between the two families. Mr. Cross also tried to show that only three of the microfilm documents had even been in Hiss’s hands. Subsequently, he claimed, Wadleigh had stolen the documents and passed them on to Chambers. All the typewritten documents had been stolen by an unknown confederate of Chambers in the Far Eastern Division of the State Department.

  And where did the Woodstock typewriter come in?

  Mr. Cross stuck to his claim that it had not been in Mrs. Hiss’s possession during the critical period. He suggested that an accomplice, perhaps posing as a Woodstock repair man, might have been able to purloin it for a time from the Catlett household and make use of it.

  When he had his last say for the prosecution, Mr. Murphy dismissed this final suggestion with one word: “Pah!” He also jeered at the defence’s introduction of the fact that Hiss had campaigned hard at the State Department in 1939 to get the Neutrality Act amended in favour of the Allies.

  “Why did he do that?” asked Mr. Murphy. “Why, he did it because, when Chambers quit the Party, Hiss became the hottest thing in Washington. He had to take the opposite position. He had to be a good boy from then on.”

  He then returned to the subject of the typewriter. “You heard Perry Catlett say he took it to a typewriter repair shop as soon as he got it,” Mr. Murphy pointed out. “We show him that that shop did not open until September 1938. All right, we say, maybe another place. Yes, he thinks it is. We then prove that that one didn’t open until May, 1938.

  “Isn’t it the truth that the Catletts got that typewriter when Chambers quit the Communist Party – in April 1938?”

  The prosecutor also drew the jury’s attention to typing errors—as opposed to flaws in the type faces—that were common both to Mrs. Hiss’s private letters and memos, and the copied State Department documents. He advised them when they got into the jury room to “look for an R done for an I, a 0 for a I, a F for a G and an F for a D”.

  He pointed to the typewriter and the documents on the table before the jury. “The documents are the golden calf,” he said. “Each of them has a message. What is it? Alger Hiss was a traitor.”

  It was the typewriter that proved to be the deciding factor. After an absence of two-and-a-half hours, the jury returned to ask if they could have read to them the evidence about when the Catletts got the machine, when Mrs. Hiss said she had disposed of it, and also the evidence about the typewritten documents.

  Then, after being out for nearly 24 hours, they found the accused guilty on both counts. Hiss paled, swallowed slightly, but still held his head high as the verdict was announced and he heard the sentence: five years’ imprisonment.

  Mr. Murphy asked for Hiss to be committed to jail “as all convicted defendants ought to be”. Judge Goddard looked up. “I think not, Mr. Murphy,” he said mildly. Hiss, who had behaved honourably while awaiting both his first and second trials, was released on $5000 bail pending appeal.

  But first Judge Goddard allowed him to make a statement to the court. “I would like to thank your Honour for the Opportunity again to deny the charges that have been made against me. I want only to add that I am confident that, in the future, the full facts of how Whittaker Chambers was able to carry out forgery by typewriter will be disclosed.”

  Hiss went to jail in 1951. He went on to serve 44 months of his five year sentence, and ever since his release has continued to protest his innocence. In 1983, the Supreme Court refused a third formal request to set aside the 1950 perjury conviction. Alger Hiss argues that recent documentary evidence shows misconduct by the government prosecutors. His lawyer stated at the most recent Supreme Court appearance, “The case is still an unhealed wound in the nation’s body politic.”

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  The Spy Masters

  The corpse that was dragged out of the icy waters of the Baltic Sea was still clutching two hefty books in its arms. The Russian captain of the vessel which found him was puzzled; why on earth should a sailor want to leap into the sea holding heavy books—and why hadn’t he let go of them when he was drowning? The Russian was a novice in modern warfare; it was only September, 1914, and most naval and military men were still naive enough to believe that wars were fought only with soldiers. They knew little about spies and secret codes.

  The captain’s superiors in the Russian Admiralty were not much wiser. They recognised that they had captured German code books—handed by the captain of the sinking Magdeburg to one of his men, with orders to drop them into the sea. But it did not strike them as a particularly exciting discovery. A few days later, the Russian attache in London called on Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, and told him that they had found the German naval code books. If the English would care to send a ship, they were welcome to them.

  Churchill immediately appreciated their value. He sent the ship, and rushed the books to Admiral Oliver, head of Intelligence. Oliver handed them to one of his best men, an ex-teacher named Alfred Ewing. Ewing knew all about codes: he had been trying to crack the German naval code for months.

  He grabbed the latest batch of coded messages, picked up from radio signals sent out from the German naval base at Wilhelmshaven. Within a few minutes, he knew that fortune had presented him with a prize. It was possible for him to read the secret orders of Grand Admiral Tirpitz and other senior commanders.

  Two months later, in November 1914, Ewing was given a new boss – Captain William Reginald Hall, known as “Blinker” (because of a twitching eyelid). The new head of Naval Intelligence did not look in the least like a spy; he was short, rotund, and cheerful. In fact, he was one of the most brilliant spymasters in the history of espionage.

  The first thing Hall wanted to know was whether the codes could tell them something useful. On December 14, 1914, Ewing decoded a report that announced that the German fleet intended to sail. Quietly, Hall moved his own ships into position in the North Sea. Two days later, Britain suffered its first naval bombardment, as ships of the German navy pounded the north-east coastal towns of Scarborough and Hartlepool with their heavy guns. Hall signalled his own battle cruisers, lying nearby, and told them to move in for the kill.

  All day, Churchill and Hall waited tensely for news. When it came, it was disappointing. Fog and rain had swept down over the North Sea as the British navy moved in. There had been a few shots exchanged, and the Germans had vanished into the mist. Churchill was disappointed; but to his surprise, Hall was looking jubilant. “There’ll be a next time!” he cried. But that stoical reaction hardly explained his delight. He had been struck by a kind of vision. Modern warfare depended on surprise. The Germans had gained the element of surprise when they invaded Belgium. But ever since Marconi’s discovery of radio in the 1890s, the surprise depended on a man with a transmitter and a code book. If he could find all the code books, it would be possible to anticipate every important move of the enemy. But how was
he to do this? The two he had were important, but they were not the only ones.

  For example, there were the strange signals coming from a transmitter in Brussels. Ewing had been working on the code for months, without success; Hall had a feeling, it concealed important secrets. He ordered his spies to find out everything they could about the Brussels transmitter. This was not difficult; it had been there, in an office in the Rue de Loi, before the war. More inquiries revealed that it was operated by a young man called Alexander Szek. “That name doesn’t sound German,” said Hall thoughtfully.

  He made more inquiries—and suddenly knew that he was close to a solution. Alexander Szek, he discovered, was an Austro-Hungarian subject who had been born in Croydon, in south London. Members of his family were still living in England. Hall persuaded Szek’s father to write Alexander a letter, begging him to work for the British. A British agent in Holland smuggled it to Brussels and soon discovered that Szek was not particularly pro-German. The Germans had persuaded him to work for them because he was a good radio engineer. But neither was he a born spy; the idea of stealing the German secret code terrified him. The British hinted that his family in England might be put in prison if he refused; so, finally, Szek agreed.

  Szek was not himself in possession of the code; a German Intelligence officer worked with him, and showed it to him when he needed it. But he could memorise it—a few figures at a time—and write it out.

  In the early months of 1915, Szek began stealing the code. Every time he completed a page, he handed it over to the British agent. His nerve, however, was beginning to crack. He told the agent that he wanted to be smuggled to England as soon as he had finished copying the code. The agent pointed out that if he did that, the Germans would immediately change the cipher. But Szek was insistent.

  Then, a short while afterwards, Szek was found dead in his room in Brussels. He appeared to have been killed by a burglar. The British later said he was a victim of the Germans. The truth, almost certainly, is that he was murdered by the British. Next, to their horror, the Germans suddenly discovered that their “surprise” moves were no longer surprises. Their European armies found they were being outgeneralled because the enemy was able to anticipate their moves. The day of modern espionage, the espionage of the “cold war”, had arrived.

  During the American War of Independence, there were some notable espionage exploits. Nathan Hale, spying for the Americans, was captured and executed in the first year of the hostilities. He died saying, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country”—the kind of sentiment that would make a modern spy snort cynically. Hale became a martyr; so did the British spy, Major John Andre, who liaised with the infamous traitor Benedict Arnold. Women spies also came into their own during the war—since no one could tell which side a woman belonged to, and the officers of both nations were far too gallant to search one of the “gentle sex”.

  Belle Boyd, a “rebel” spy, had Northern officers quartered in her house in Martinsburg, Virginia. She was thus able to gather all kinds of information about troop movements, which she promptly relayed to General Stonewall Jackson. (On one famous occasion, she got through the Northern lines and delivered a message that enabled Jackson to win a battle.)

  The most amusing thing about her career is that the Northern officers were soon convinced she was a spy, but were forbidden by chivalry to take any action. She was finally arrested, when one of her dispatches fell into the hands of a Union agent— but she was exchanged for a Northern prisoner, and became a heroine in the South. The careers of “Rebel Rose” Greenhow and Pauline Cushman (a spy for the North) were equally remarkable, and now belong to American folklore.

  But it was under the Soviet regime that spying became the major industry we know today. The Russians always had their tradition of secret police; under the last of the Czars, it was called the Ochrana, and its chief business was to root out revolutionary activity. Trotsky’s secret police, the “Cheka”, soon became the dreaded G.P.U. But after Lenin’s death, the congenitally suspicious Stalin felt uneasy about the increasing power of the secret police. Its head, Yagoda, was executed in the purges of 1937. It was fortunate for the Russian Intelligence Service that two of its greatest spies, Ernst Wollweber and Richard Sorge were working abroad, out of Stalin’s reach.

  It is generally agreed by experts that Sorge was probably the greatest spy of all time. Born in Russia in 1895, his family moved to Germany when he was a child. As a student he became passionately left wing; he joined the German Communist Party, and eventually became its intelligence chief. He trained in Russia, then moved around Europe, building up spy rings in Scandinavia and Britain. (The British Secret Service spotted him fairly quickly; after that Sorge always maintained that it was one of the best in the world.)

  In Russia in the late twenties, he was involved in clashes between the Army Secret Service and the Secret Police (G.B.), and his fate might well have been the same as that of Yagoda. Fortunately for him, the Communists decided that he would be useful in the far East, specifically Japan. His instructions were simple, the Soviets were firmly convinced that the great threats of the future would come from Germany and Japan.

  He was well qualified for the job. A highly intelligent man, who spoke several languages, he also had the perfect cover. He was an ardent womaniser. With so many shreds of scandal attached to his name, and a reputation for being an incorrigible philanderer, who could believe that he was also a spy and a top level Communist official? He didn’t seem to be serious enough.

  Nevertheless, in Japan, Sorge began to recruit agents. These included Agnes Smedley, a well-known author of books on China, and a friend of Mao Tse-Tung; Ozaki, a Japanese correspondent; a Yugoslav pressman, Voukelitch. Methodically, Sorge also built up an intelligence network in China. Then, when Hitler came to power in 1933, he was given another task: to spy on the Germans Japan. There was one important preliminary—he had to apply for membership of the newly-formed Nazi Party. Hitler’s Intelligence system was so inadequate that Sorge was given a party card. Back in Tokyo, he then completed his own Japanese spy network with the addition of an American-Japanese. Miyagi Yotuka. Miyagi and Ozaki were ordered to form their own sub-network of Japanese spies.

  Sorge’s charm—and his cover as a correspondent for the Frankfurt Times—soon made him friends at the German embassy, among them a military attaché, Lieut-Colonel Eugen Ott. Meanwhile Ozaki became a leading member of a “breakfast club” of Japanese intellectuals, with close connections with the cabinet. It was he who told Sorge in advance of Japan’s projected attack on China: information which delighted the Kremlin, because while Japan was fighting China; it was unlikely to invade Russia.

  Later, when Colonel Ott was appointed German ambassador, Sorge had sources of information about German and

  Japanese policies which made him the most important secret agent in the world. Sorge knew about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour—in December 1941—weeks before it happened. He knew the exact date when the Germans intended to invade Russia, and if it had not been for Stalin’s complacency in ignoring his information, “Operation Barbarossa” would have been defeated within days.

  The head of Japanese Intelligence, Colonel Osaki (not to be confused with the agent, Ozaki), knew there was a major spy network in Japan; his radio receivers picked up their coded messages, but he could not read them. Finally, he became convinced that Sorge was his man. He asked a German attache to arrange a meeting with Sorge at a nightclub. Over a bottle of sake, he told Sorge about a beautiful girl who danced in the cabaret—about how many men were in love with her. Sorge was curious and his curiosity was increased by the mask the girl wore. He began to spend every evening at the club, until finally the girl became his mistress. But she was an agent of Colonel Osaki’s—an aristocratic Japanese girl who had been asked to sacrifice her self-respect for her country.

  One night while driving her home, Sorge stopped his car, and started to make love to the girl. Then he asked her
to come back and spend the night with him. Before deciding the dancer asked him for a cigarette. Sorge took out his case—and a tiny roll of paper fell from it. He carefully tore the paper up, and threw the pieces out of the window. The girl made an excuse to get to a telephone, and rang Japanese Intelligence. Almost as soon as the car had driven away, Japanese agents were collecting the torn fragments of paper. The next morning, as Sorge lay asleep beside the girl, Colonel Osaki walked into the bedroom. He handed Sorge a section of the message he thought he had destroyed. The spy stood up and bowed. He knew he was defeated.

  According to one account, Sorge faced his executioners—in November 1944—with complete nonchalance, smoking a cigarette. But there is no definite evidence that Sorge was executed. It is known that he claimed a reprieve on the grounds that he was a Soviet citizen, and that Russia was not at war with Japan. A British diplomat who knew Sorge claimed that he saw him in Shanghai in 1947. And it was at about this time that the girl who had betrayed Sorge was murdered. So it seems possible that he ended his days behind a desk in the G.P.U. headquarters in Moscow.

  After the war, Soviet Intelligence suffered a heavy blow when the attache Gouzenko defected to the West, and took with him a complete list of Russian spies and their contacts. The result was that Russia decided to reorganise her spy system in the United States. The man who was chosen for the job was Colonel Rudolph Abel.

  Abel was, in fact, already in New York when Gouzenko’s defection led to the arrest of the Rosenbergs and the rest of their network. He had been a veteran of the secret service ever since Trotsky had founded it after the 1917 Revolution. Now, in 1948, on the collapse of the Soviet spy network in America, Abel patiently set about rebuilding it.

  The master spy established himself in an artist’s studio in Fulton Street, Brooklyn. On the door was a notice: Emil Goldfus, Photographer. As well as film and cameras, the place was also full of radio equipment—Abel explained that he was a radio enthusiast, and supplemented his income repairing sets, which was true. His cover, like Sorge’s, was almost perfect. A good-looking, intelligent, middle-aged man, he liked girls, played the guitar well, and was a more than passable painter. The artists who attended parties in his studio regarded him as a typical Bohemian with typical artistic activities.