by Nick Barratt
Eventually, Krivitsky agreed to visit the UK in January 1940, travelling under the pseudonym ‘Walter Thomas’. Arrangements were made for him to be interviewed by Vivian, Harker (on the verge of taking over from Kell as Head of MI5) and Jane Sissmore, now Mrs Archer following her marriage the previous autumn. Archer conducted an extensive series of interviews, compiling an 85-page report that became the bedrock of British understanding of the Soviet intelligence network. She expected to be told about the activities of King, but throughout the evening of 23 January and throughout the following morning, Archer was startled by revelations about an earlier Soviet mole, none other than Ernest Oldham.
Full transcripts of Krivitsky’s testimony were noted at the time and then written up over the next few weeks and added to Oldham’s file, in line with standard practice to cross-reference information on named individuals. For the first time, the full extent of Oldham’s treachery was revealed to the British security services, although it is not clear whether the significance was realised at the time. Krivitsky’s account was somewhat confused, mixing up dates and important details while switching from vagueness to precision within moments. For example, he claimed not to know Bystrolyotov’s real identity but then described in great detail his earlier career. He also stated that Orlov was originally assigned to Oldham. The final report compiled by Archer is worth noting in full, as it shows just how much information the security services had at their disposal by February 1940.
At some date which Kritivsky cannot remember but believes was about 1930 or 1931, a man called Oldham, employed in the cipher department of the British Foreign Office, called at the Soviet embassy in Paris offering to sell British diplomatic ciphers and other secret material to which he had access.
At that time Valovitch, Deputy Chief of the Operod [Operations Department] of the GUGB [Headquarters Staff of the OGPU] was in Paris working at the embassy under the name of Yanovitch. Yanovitch at first refused to see Oldham believing him to be an agent provocateur. A month later Oldham called again, bringing specimens of material to which he had access. On this, though still suspicious of Oldham, Yanovitch arranged with him for further supplies of Foreign Office material in return for substantial money payments. He gave Oldham the ‘service’ name of ARNO.
For some time Oldham was allowed no contact with OGPU agents in London and was obliged to take his material to Paris himself, although Yanovitch realised the importance of his information. As soon as the OGPU were satisfied that Oldham was not a British double-cross agent it was arranged that a man should be sent to London specially to handle this material and obviate the risk and delays caused by frequent journeys to Paris. Oldham was of a highly nervous disposition and a heavy drinker. Yanovitch accordingly decided that the agent despatched to London to handle his material should have the close supervision of Oldham as his sole responsibility.
Oldham’s OGPU guardian arrived in London on a Greek passport. Krivitsky cannot remember his name but recollects certain details of his earlier career. He was at one time an intelligence officer in General Wrangel’s army. As a Soviet secret agent he did important work in Bulgaria in 1920 when a White Russian force was in process of formation there. During the Stamboullist period he managed to steal three ships lying at Varna and despatch them to Odessa, thereby causing considerable trouble as the ships happened to be French owned.372
There is a note made at this point to explain that Stamboullist referred to Aleksandr Stamboliski, who was prime minister of Bulgaria from 28 March 1920 until he was assassinated on 8 September 1923.
During the period of this man’s role as ‘guardian’, Oldham was dismissed from the Foreign Office for drink. Completely in the hands of the OGPU and in dire straits for money, he continued to obtain Foreign Office material by making use of his previous position there. Krivitsky described how immense was his own astonishment when he heard that in spite of his dismissal Oldham was still allowed free access to the Foreign Office to visit his friends. During one of these visits Oldham took an impression of one of the important keys and thereafter was able to bring away material from time to time. The key in question was made from the impression by the Fourth Department and that is how Krivitsky first came to hear the story.373
The ‘Fourth Department’ was responsible for military intelligence and was run by General Yan Berzin. He too fell victim to Stalin’s purge and was shot in the cellars of the OGPU headquarters on Lubyanka Square, Moscow, on 28 July 1938.
About this time Oldham’s ‘guardian’ was relieved by a second OGPU agent also the holder of a Greek passport. This man’s service name was ‘HANS’. He was here as a representative of the Amsterdam firm of GADA, which firm was specially created by the OGPU to give him the necessary business cover. The surname adopted by ‘HANS’ is believed to have been Galleni or Galeni. Galleni was a cultured and good-looking man. On one occasion, while travelling from London to the continent, he was in the same carriage with a British King’s Messenger, who actually asked him to look after his bags while he left the carriage. Galleni did not try to take the opportunity of tampering with the bags as he could not believe that a diplomatic courier would make such a request to a stranger in good faith!374
Further evidence, if any was needed, of the careless attitude to security demonstrated by members of the Communications Department. It is interesting that Krivitsky mixed up Pieck and Bystrolyotov, though Oldham did travel to Amsterdam on occasion and may have been involved with developing the cover that was used to great effect with Oake and King.
Galleni had a very difficult time. Oldham had become a confirmed drunkard and drug addict. He was so nervous that only by threats of exposure and the cutting-off of financial supplies could he be persuaded to continue his visits to the Foreign Office. Galleni was constantly at his side. He took him abroad for a holiday and in London stayed with him either in hotels or in his own home. His nerves were in such a condition that on one occasion he created a scene in a cinema because Galleni momentarily forgot to rise for ‘God Save the King’. About this time also Galleni was considerably worried as he had some reason to think that a British Secret Service agent had got into touch with Oldham who had somehow aroused suspicion.375
This last claim was marked in the file and a question mark added. Though it is certainly true that Oldham had aroused plenty of suspicion, claims made by Donald McCormick, aka Richard Deacon, in his book With My Little Eye, that ‘it was [Guy] Liddell who used to meet the mysterious Foreign Office cipher clerk, EH Oldham, in a west London public house and who seems to have managed to cover up the involvement of Oldham with the Soviet intelligence service’ can be dismissed on the grounds that there is no supporting evidence.376
As it appeared that Oldham would shortly break down completely, Galleni concentrated his efforts in trying to obtain from him sufficient details of the private lives of his colleagues to guide the OGPU in their attempts to obtain a future source for the same material. Oldham at first refused to supply the requisite information but after considerable pressure had been brought to bear on him and his wife, he gave Galleni five or six names. One of these names was that of JH King, also employed in the Foreign Office Cipher Department.377
A direct link between King and Oldham was thus established.
Shortly afterwards Oldham committed suicide and Galleni left the country. Later, during November and December 1936, Galleni is known to have been living at a hotel in the Rue Cambon, Paris. There are only one or two hotels in the Rue Cambon, which is a very short street.378
The fallout from the King case and Krivitsky’s revelations was meant to lead to the wholesale removal of existing members of the Communications Department to other jobs, to be replaced by new untainted staff. It seems this was not entirely followed to the letter. According to Antrobus, writing a few months later in 1940:
Shortly after the outbreak of war, the Communications Department as I knew it came to an end. Its typists and duplicator operators remained but most of the male members of its
staff became King’s Messengers pure and simple, without the ciphering and coding duties… the new King’s Messengerships were naturally offered to those who had long been cipher officers and an entirely new staff had to be engaged for the coding and ciphering.379
At least security was tightened up considerably:
If you want to get into the Foreign Office today you will have to run the gauntlet of a small army of policemen, doorkeepers and chuckers-out; in fact you will not get in at all unless you make it clear that you have a good reason for doing so and when you are in, you will be shadowed everywhere by a polite and courtly gentleman of unmistakable muscular development.380
Yet despite the thoroughness of Archer’s interview and report, chances were still missed to identify the ‘second source’, or indeed clues that might have revealed the identities of Maclean and Philby, who were obliquely referred to by Krivitsky. Furthermore, MI5 failed to seize upon some of the suggestions thrown up by Krivitsky’s testimony around Oldham, possibly because it was seen as a cold case rather the cornerstone of the ‘cipher boys’ spy ring. In his original interviews, Krivitsky had provided two pieces of information that seemed to directly implicate Lucy in Oldham’s activities:
She was aware of the USSR people who worked with Oldham, but did not know the names of the British who supplied him with information.
If Mrs Oldham is still alive, she will know a great deal about the Greek. He thinks that if we fail to trace her, we could still find it out because the Greek stayed at a hotel in the Rue Cambon between November and December 1936.381
No attempts to trace her whereabouts were made at the time. The only additions to Oldham’s file came in 1946 and 1947, when a decision was taken to tie up one loose end that had puzzled the British since 1929 – the claims made by Bessedovsky that British ciphers had been offered to the Soviets in Paris by Mr Scott. An opportunity presented itself with the defection of Leon Helfand to the USA in July 1940 whilst working at the Soviet embassy in Rome. A file had been kept on him by MI5 since the late 1920s and his defection generated some interest within British SIS, as a leak from the British embassy in Rome had long been suspected. Interestingly, one of the men involved in reopening inquiries was none other than Kim Philby, who pressed for a further interview with Helfand. Almost as an afterthought, a set of questions relating to the identity of Mr Scott was requested on 14 December 1946 by MI5 officer Michael Serpell:
In addition we would like Helfand to be interrogated about the Englishman who, according to Bessedovsky, was interviewed by Helfand at the Soviet embassy in Paris [with a reference to SIS correspondence dated 6 December 1929] and suggest that the questions might take the following form: ‘We understand that Helfand was in Paris from 19 March 1926 to 28 January 1930. Did he, during that time, interview an Englishman at the Soviet embassy who offered to sell a British cipher? If so, what was the name of this Englishman and can Helfand give us a description of him? Show Helfand photographs of Ernest Holloway Oldham and William Arthur Scott. Does Helfand recognise either of these photographs as being the Englishman in question?’382
When interviewed by SIS on 28 February 1947, Helfand provided a fairly inaccurate version of events, failed to name the man who approached him and could not recognise either photograph. Nevertheless, two months later, a note was placed on Oldham’s file that linked Bessedovsky’s account to Krivitsky’s, and in October Serpell forwarded another report from Oldham’s file to Roger Hollis, the future Head of MI5 after 1956 and at the time involved with Counter-Subversion activities. However, there the matter was left for a further three years, until Henri Pieck surfaced after World War II and agreed to be interviewed by MI5 in the spring of 1950. It is clear that the main area of interest was finding out more information about King, though the Oldham case was mentioned in the same context in a briefing note prepared on 6 April 1950:
It was evident that he had a fair knowledge of the King case which he said he had picked up from gossip. It was agreed that he need not be told about Oldham and that our policy in regard to the information he should be given must be determined by the information which Pieck gives us.383
It is clear that the nature of the inquiry was highly sensitive, and confirmed that deliberate steps had been taken to cover up the Foreign Office leaks in the 1930s.
Moreover, as government policy in the King case had been to keep the whole thing quiet, no gratuitous information should be given to [REDACTED] in this connection.384
The interview with Pieck took place between 12 and 16 April and proved very revealing, as he named several key people that he tried to snare as well as those with whom he had some success:
Before leaving for Geneva, Pieck was instructed to make contact first with Mr O’Donnell of the British consulate and it was intended that through him he should meet other employees of the Foreign Office. He therefore took an apartment above that of Mr O’Donnell and he still remembers trying to provide himself with an excuse for meeting O’Donnell by dropping a pen from his window which he hoped would land somewhere inside O’Donnell’s property. Unfortunately the pen landed in the street.385
Pieck was more successful mingling with British folk at the clubs in Geneva, such as The Bavarian and the International Club where associates such as Alec Russell, interpreter for the League of Nations, and Challoner James, correspondent for the Daily Mail, facilitated his introduction to British officials. One of the officials was clearly still well connected in high circles, as his name was redacted from Pieck’s interview. Pieck also provided more detail about Harvey and Oake, confirming that Oake had undertaken some work on his behalf, as well as the indiscretion of Harvey that made the whole operation possible.
It was through Harvey and his daughter Enid that Pieck got to know Raymond Oake and other Foreign Office employees. Pieck remembers with amusement how one day Harvey forgot his keys and allowed him to fetch them from the office. At that time Pieck thought his reliability was being tested so [he did not make] use of this opportunity.
Pieck’s first candidate for recruitment was Raymond Oake [who] lived considerably above his income. Pieck was continually [lending him] money and did not rate him very highly. After leaving Geneva [he visited] Oake in England. He went to stay with him in Herne Bay and Oake visited him in Holland. Pieck told Oake the same story he told King about the possibility of his earning money through a banker at The Hague in exchange for confidential information from the Foreign Office. Oake, however, did not respond… Pieck met Oake for the last time at his wedding in London. Oake, Pieck admits, was ‘a very bad mistake’.386
However, Pieck was able to provide more information on ‘Hans’, whom the intelligence services had gradually connected to Joe Perelly and Galleni. Given his artistic talents, he sketched him as well.
Description: height, about 6 feet 1 inch; black hair; dark eyes, wore spectacles; childish face; always appeared to be smiling; Soviet national; appeared to come from the Caucasus or Kirghizstan [sic], as he was slightly Asiatic in appearance; had engineering experience; spoke English with an American accent. Hans knew America and England very well and had a good knowledge of English life and customs.
Hans first met Pieck in 1933 in Amsterdam and remained as his controller until early in 1936. He relinquished control of Pieck after JH King.
Hans had a very good knowledge of the British Foreign Office for Pieck considers he was briefed very well while he was running JH King.387
Given the additional information that Pieck was able to provide and finally recalling Krivitsky’s advice from 1940, Oldham’s case file was reviewed once more in the hunt for Hans/Perelly/Galleni. A note in Oldham’s file, made on 26 May 1950 by Ann Glass, records her recollections of a meeting she’d had two days previously with Oldham’s former friend and associate Thomas Kemp, who had somehow managed to not only remain in post at the Foreign Office, despite his role in the Oldham scandal and the purge of the Communications Department in 1939, but indeed rise further through the ranks. In 1940, Georg
e Antrobus painted a glowing picture of Thomas Kemp’s role in organising the work of the King’s Messengers:
The man who has had the charge of these things for many years is an encyclopaedia of unique knowledge… he is in touch with all the travel agencies, railway companies, and steamship lines to every part of the world. His name is Mr Thomas Kemp and he is, I think, the calmest and most self-possessed person I have ever met.388
At the time of Glass’s interview, Kemp been granted a certificate for the Executive Class of the civil service two years previously, having been appointed a Higher Executive Officer on 1 April 1946. Rather undermining Antrobus’s testimony, Kemp was only able to shed a little light on a possible way that Oldham was able to smuggle information out of the Foreign Office, even when he was on site.
It was difficult to sort out the scraps of information which Mr Kemp was able to recall, but in referring to the generally lax state of things existing at that time in regard to King’s Messengers, he said that Oldham had, without authority, made out several courier’s passes.389
This enabled him to despatch material to a chosen destination, but still required someone to take them. Clearly no-one was working with Oldham so he needed an unwitting accomplice. Once again, Kemp put forward a possible candidate:
Mr Kemp also told me that a colleague of Oldham’s in the cipher department was a certain Commander Acland, who had a crippled son who was wounded in the 1914 – 1918 war. This man was anxious to get a job in the Foreign Office but was not successful; Oldham used quite frequently to give him the bag to take to Rome and it was Mr Kemp’s impression that Oldham was using young Acland as an unconscious courier and it was also Mr Kemp’s impression that Rome was in some way connected with Oldham’s espionage activities.390