The day after Chambers met Berle, on 3 September, Victor Mallet, Counsellor at the Washington embassy, wrote to Gladwyn Jebb, who was then private secretary to Sir Alexander Cadogan (Vansittart’s successor as PUS at the Foreign Office). Mallet noted that Krivitsky had foretold the Russo-German pact: ‘he is clearly not bogus as many people tried to make out’. Mallet reported Levine’s information that Krivitsky knew of two Soviet agents working in Whitehall: one was King in the Office cipher-room, who ‘has for several years been passing on everything to Moscow for mercenary motives’; the other man was said to be in the ‘Political Committee Cabinet Office’. (Levine was to recall in 1956 that when he told the British Ambassador in Washington, Lord Lothian, about two Foreign Office spies, Lothian smiled in superior disbelief.) Mallet warned Jebb, ‘Levine is of course a Jew and his previous history does not predispose one in his favour, as he was [newspaper owner William Randolph] Hearst’s bear-leader to a ridiculous mission of Senators to Palestine in 1936 and a violent critic of our policy. But … he seems quite genuine in his desire to see us lick Hitler.’34
Cadogan asked Harker of MI5 and Vivian of SIS to investigate the Communications Department. Vivian, with SIS’s patriotic mistrust of foreigners, thought Krivitsky sounded ‘at the best a person of very doubtful genuineness’. King stymied his questioners during his first interrogation on 25 September, without convincing Vivian, who ended by telling him, in the rational bromide style of such interviews, ‘We had hoped that you might be able to clear up what looks like a very unfortunate affair, and if you can at this eleventh hour tell us anything, it will, I think, be to everybody’s advantage. I don’t think you will find us unreasonable, but it is depressing to find that you have been unable to tell us anything, except the specific things we have asked you about.’ They detained King overnight in ‘jug’, to use the slang word of Cadogan, who noted on 26 September: ‘I have no doubt he is guilty – curse him – but there is absolutely no proof.’35
Spurred by the emphasis on national security that had followed the declaration of war on 3 September, and independently of the information received in Whitehall from Krivitsky, Parlanti approached the authorities of his own volition and volunteered his strange story of the Herne Bay train and the Buckingham Gate lease. Hooper’s denunciation of Pieck was resuscitated from a moribund SIS file. Decisively ‘Tar’ Robertson got King drunk in the Bunch of Grapes pub at 80 Jermyn Street, rather as he had done six years earlier with Oldham at the Chequers pub a few yards away. Robertson got temporary possession of King’s key-ring, which enabled MI5 colleagues to visit King’s flat in Chelsea and find incriminating material. King was arrested next day. On 28 September, under what Cadogan called ‘Third Degree’ questioning in Wandsworth prison, he gave a full confession. MI5 witnesses at his secret trial in October were driven to the Old Bailey in cars with curtained windows to hide their identity. There were no press reports of the trial, which was kept secret for twenty years. King was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment.36
Harker and Vivian suspected several of King’s colleagues, but had no evidence for prosecutions. The ‘awful revelations of leakage’ appalled Cadogan and his Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax: in December 1939 they swept all the existing staff out of the Communications Department, although most remained as King’s Messengers, and installed a clean new team. Dorothy Denny and other women were appointed to the department to dilute its masculinity, and thus to moderate its office culture, although the top departmental jobs remained in male hands.
Then on 26 January 1940 SIS informed Cadogan that there had been leakages from the FO’s Central Department to Germany during the preceding July and August. On 8 February Cadogan persuaded William Codrington (chairman of Nyasaland Railways and of the London-registered company that held the Buenos Aires gas supply monopoly) to accept appointment as Chief Security Officer at the Foreign Office, with the rank of Acting Assistant Under Secretary of State and direct access to the PUS. One of Will Codrington’s brothers travelled across Europe for Claude Dansey’s Z Organization under cover of being a film company executive.37
Codrington was unpaid. He had no staff until in 1944 he enlisted Sir John Dashwood, Assistant Marshal of the Diplomatic Corps, ‘the most good-natured, jolly man imaginable’ in James Lees-Milne’s description. Dashwood handled the security crisis at the embassy in Ankara, where the Ambassador’s Albanian valet Elyesa Bazna, codenamed CICERO, filched secrets and passed them to the German High Command. Codrington retired in August 1945, resumed his City directorships and accepted the congenial responsibilities of Lord Lieutenant of the tiny county of Rutland. It is hard to imagine that he and Dashwood scared anyone who mattered.38
Meanwhile Krivitsky had been summoned by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), then better known as the Dies Committee (named after its chairman, the Texan congressman Martin Dies). When he testified on 11 October 1939, naive and rude questions were pelted at him. One senator decried him as ‘a phony’, who ought to be deported. Krivitsky afterwards called HUAC ‘ignorant cowboys’ and Dies a ‘shithead’.39
There was a different assessment of Krivitsky in London. The star among Harker’s officers was MI5’s first woman officer Jane Sissmore: she had taken the surname of Archer after her recent marriage and was so precious to the Service that she had been kept in her job at a time when women civil servants were required to resign if they married so that they neither neglected their husbands nor continued to take a man’s place and salary. In November 1939 Archer convinced Harker that Krivitsky should be invited to London for debriefing. Krivitsky reached Southampton in January 1940, and was installed at the Langham Hotel in Portland Place under the alias ‘Mr Thomas’. Krivitsky’s four weeks of debriefing was MI5’s first experience of interrogating a former Soviet illegal about tradecraft, networks and names. As Brian Quinlan explains in Secret War, ‘The seamless nature of the debriefing’s planning and execution, the expertise and diligence of the officers who conducted it, and the quality and quantity of the information it produced have led some MI5 insiders to regard this case as the moment when MI5 came of age.’40
Krivitsky’s trans-Atlantic journey and accommodation in the Langham Hotel were tightly managed by his English hosts, who knew that a controlled but not oppressive environment improves the prospects of counter-intelligence interrogations. The FBI had waited nine months before interviewing Krivitsky and gave little forethought to the meeting. MI5 and SIS made meticulous preparations for his arrival at the Langham Hotel. They compiled preliminary character assessments of a kind that has since evolved and become standard operating procedure for defectors, foreign agents and foreign leaders. They exerted themselves to help Krivitsky’s wife and children, who were living in Canada while US immigration issues were resolved. Archer and her colleagues sought to impress Krivitsky with their understanding, competence and judgement. As Quinlan recounts, ‘their motivation was not simply pride; they understood that Krivitsky was a professional, and they hoped to gain his respect and cooperation by showing their own professionalism’.41
The debriefing was conducted by Archer, who was well informed about Stalin’s Russia and about Soviet espionage and approached Krivitsky from an international perspective. Her first task, which took several interviews, was to reassure him that he would not be arrested if he made admissions about spying on the British Empire. She then won his respect by her expertise in his field, and encouraged his explanatory candour by listening appreciatively to his account of all that he knew or had done. During debriefing, Krivitsky described the organization, tradecraft, tactics and personalities of the Fourth Department, the NKVD and the system of legal and illegal residents in the European capitals. He spoke of forged passports, secret inks, agent-training, penetration, counter-espionage and subversion in the British Empire. He predicted that in the event of an Anglo-Russian war the CPGB would mobilize a fifth column of saboteurs. Krivitsky made clear that the Stalinist aim was to support and fund colonial liberation movements, wh
ich would bring revolutionary change in territories under imperial rule and thus accelerate revolution in the west. He expressed ‘passionate hatred of Stalin’, Archer reported. It was his ‘burning conviction that if any freedom is to continue to exist in Europe, and the Russian people freed from endless tyranny, Stalin must be overthrown’.42
Krivitsky supplied new material on Oldham, Bystrolyotov, King, Pieck, Goold-Verschoyle and others. There were clues to the activities of both Maclean and Philby in his account. Krivitsky felt sure that the source of Foreign Office leaks was ‘a young man, probably under thirty, an agent of Theodore MALY @ Paul HARDT, that he was recruited as a Soviet agent purely on ideological grounds, and that he took no money for the information he obtained. He was almost certainly educated at Eton and Oxford. KRIVITSKY cannot get it out of his head that the source is a “young aristocrat”, but agrees that he may have arrived at this conclusion because he thought it was only young men of the nobility who were educated at Eton.’ Krivitsky imagined that since the announcement of the Nazi–Soviet pact in August 1939, ‘the young man will have tried “to stop work” for he was an idealist and recruited on the basis that the only man who would fight Hitler was Stalin: that his feelings had been worked on to such an extent that he believed that in helping Russia he would be helping this country and the cause of democracy generally. Whether if he has wanted to “stop work” he is a type with sufficient moral courage to withstand the inevitable OGPU blackmail and threats of exposure KRIVITSKY cannot say.’ No one connected the supposed Eton and Oxford aristocrat to Maclean, the non-Etonian, non-Oxford politician’s son.43
Krivitsky repeatedly alluded to a young ‘University man’ of ‘titled family’, with ‘plenty of money’, whose surname began with P. He was ‘pretty certain’ that this individual was in the same milieu as the Foreign Office source. In Archer’s summary of Krivitsky’s remarks, Yezhov had ordered Maly to ask this young Englishman – ‘a journalist of good family, an idealist and a fanatical anti-Nazi’ – to murder Franco in Spain. No one had the time to connect this information to Philby, who met many of the criteria but had no titles or fortunes in his background. It is usually forgotten that at the time of the Krivitsky interrogations Philby was working as a war correspondent in France and six months away from his recruitment to SIS.44
Doubtless at Vivian’s request, Archer omitted from her summary of Krivitsky’s debriefing all reference to Hooper, who had been rewarded for informing on Pieck by being re-engaged in October 1939 by SIS. Both Vivian and his SIS colleague Felix Cowgill trusted Hooper, and did not want him incriminated. Vivian insisted that Hooper was ‘a loyal Britisher’. Cowgill concurred that he was ‘above everything … absolutely loyal’. In fact Hooper was the only man in history to work for SIS, MI5, the Abwehr and the NKVD. He was sacked from SIS in September 1945, after post-war interrogations of Abwehr officers revealed that he had worked for them until the autumn of 1939.45
The earliest MI5 material supplied by Blunt to Moscow in January 1941 included a full copy of Archer’s account of debriefing Krivitsky. A month later Krivitsky was found dead, with his right temple shot away and a revolver beside him, in a hotel bedroom in Washington, where he was due to testify to a congressional committee. Moscow’s desire for revenge must have intensified after reading all that he had said in his debriefing, but suicide is equally probable. MI5 felt a moral responsibility to give financial help to his widow. Ignace Reiss had already been ambushed near Lausanne and raked with machine-gun fire in 1937. Joseph Leppin, Bystrolyotov’s courier for Oldham’s material, disappeared in Switzerland in the same year. The courier Brian Goold-Verschoyle was summoned to Moscow from the Spanish civil war and never seen again. Liddell’s informant Georges Agabekov vanished in 1938 – perhaps stabbed in Paris and his corpse put in a trunk that was dumped at sea, perhaps executed after interrogation in Barcelona, perhaps butchered in the Pyrenees with his remains thrown in a ravine. Theodore Maly, with his hands tied behind his back, dressed in white underclothes, kneeling on a tarpaulin, was shot in the back of the neck in a cellar at the Lubianka in 1938. Bazarov, who had been transferred from Berlin to serve as OGPU’s illegal rezident in the USA, was recalled in the purge of 1937 and shot in 1939. Bystrolyotov was luckier than these colleagues: recalled in 1937, he was tortured and survived twenty years’ hard labour in the camps (although his destitute wife and mother killed themselves). After Krivitsky’s death his refugee literary agent Paul Wohl told Malcolm Cowley: ‘We are broken men; the best of our generation are dead. Nous sommes des survivants.’46
George Antrobus was at home with his parents in Leamington Spa, celebrating his father’s eightieth birthday on 14 November 1940, when a bomb fell on their house – dropped by a German aircraft during the night of the great aerial blitz on Coventry. Antrobus and his father were killed. In the same week Jane Archer was sacked from MI5 for insubordination. Earlier that year, at MI5’s instigation, Vernon Bartlett, a diplomatic correspondent who had been elected as a Popular Front MP, tried without avail to inveigle Pieck into visiting London, where he would have been interrogated. Instead, in May 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands, Pieck was taken into Nazi captivity and incarcerated in Buchenwald. Somehow he survived the barbarities of camp life, and resumed his design business in peacetime. In April 1950 he was induced to visit London for interview by MI5 about King. His clarifications may have contributed to a final death.
Armed with Pieck’s information, MI5 reinterviewed Oldham’s ex-colleague Thomas Kemp. Kemp, whose account of his contacts with Pieck was disingenuous, had been Lucy Oldham’s confidant and may have kept in touch with her. She had sunk towards destitution in the 1930s and spent the war years in the grime of Belfast, but in 1950 (aged sixty-seven) was living in a drab Ealing lodging-house. Perhaps because she was in desperate straits for money, perhaps after a tip-off from Kemp that MI5 were reinvestigating her complicity in the old treason, probably because both converging crises were intolerable, she drowned herself in the River Thames at Richmond in June 1950 before MI5 resumed contact.
Despite the determination of Antrobus, Cotesworth, Eastwood and Hay to coast through life with jokes, there was no laughter at the end.
CHAPTER 6
The Blueprint Spies
Industrial mobilization and espionage
The design of new weapons, the quantities produced, their export to foreign powers and the capacity of munitions works to expand production were subjects for the War Office’s nineteenth-century Intelligence Division and for its counterparts across Europe. As early as 1865 two young men were dismissed from Armstrong’s naval shipyard and armaments factory in Newcastle for copying secret plans: ‘for some time past much annoyance has been felt from similar malpractices’, complained a director of Armstrong’s. Forty years later, when the naval shipyards at Kiel were ice-bound, Sir Trevor Dawson, the Edwardian naval ordnance director of the armaments company Vickers, skated round the docks, like a pleasure-seeker on a spree, making mental notes of what was visible. Arthur Conan Doyle’s story ‘The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans’ (1908), about secret submarine designs missing from Woolwich Arsenal, showed the increasing awareness of industrial espionage in a mechanized age. The earliest known intelligence report from SIS, issued in January 1910, concerned Vickers’s German counterpart, Krupp.1
The crisis over the shortage of artillery shells in 1915, and general battle experiences during 1914–18, demonstrated that armaments manufacturing capacity was as important to victory as fighting manpower. ‘National armies cannot even be collected without the assistance of the whole modern machinery of national industry, still less equipped,’ wrote the first communist MP, Cecil L’Estrange Malone, after returning from his visit in 1919 to the Soviet Union. Russian revolutionaries knew they had to match the industrial potential of the British Empire, the USA, France and Germany, for ‘without equipment on the modern scale great armies are sheep for the slaughter’, Malone explained. ‘The next war will be won in the workshop,’ G
eneral Sir Noel (‘Curly’) Birch, Master General of Ordnance at the War Office turned director in charge of land armaments at Vickers, told Lord Milne, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, in 1929. ‘If we are honest as a nation we must pay just as much attention to the industrial mobilisation for war as we do to our armed forces.’ If the productive capacity of British armaments companies continued to be depleted, as it had been for the ten years of attempted world disarmament, Birch asked, ‘where will be the force behind diplomacy?’2
Intelligence services exist to monitor risks. They amass, collate and analyse information covering the fluctuations of public opinion and national sentiments, they collect diplomatic and strategic secrets, they foster subversion and they practise counter-espionage; and more than ever after 1918, they have supplied industrial intelligence. The remit of British military attachés in Prague included the monitoring of the Škoda munitions works at Pilsen. In 1928 and 1929 James Marshall-Cornwall, then Military Attaché in Berlin, visited Sweden to inspect and report on the Bofors works, which had a working arrangement with Krupp as regards munitions and ordnance. Edwin (‘Eddy’) Boxshall, who was both SIS and Vickers representative in Bucharest, was a director with inside information on the privately owned Copa-Mic & Cugir arsenal and the Reia company, in both of which Vickers had invested. Noel Mason-MacFarlane, Military Attaché at Vienna, Budapest and Berne in 1930–4, recalled his office being besieged by inventors of warlike devices. A few were technically well versed with sound ideas: ‘the vast majority of my visitors were either ignorant optimists, charlatans, or even rogues, while some gave every indication of being borderline mental cases’. He became accustomed to mysterious rendezvous with strangers wearing odd adornments – in one case being instructed to meet an intermediary at Zurich station who signalled his identity by sporting a carnation the size of a cabbage.3
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