A Brief History of the Spy

by Paul Simpson

  The first political police force in the country, the Oprichnina, was founded by Ivan the Terrible in 1565 and was responsible for the massacre of whole cities before it was abolished seven years later. Then Peter the Great created the Preobrazhensky Prikaz so secretively that even the KGB’s own histories are unsure of the exact date of its institution in the late seventeenth century. It too did not last long, but the Third Section of Tsar Nicholas I’s Imperial Chancellery, founded in 1826, was to survive for over fifty years, serving as the Imperial regime’s secret police. Although eventually discredited following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, the Third Section’s work against revolutionaries was carried on from 1880 by the Okhrana, the nickname for the Department of State Police and its regional security sections.

  The Okhrana did operate outside the confines of Russia. Its Foreign Agency set up a centre to keep an eye on Russian emigrés in Paris — and was welcomed by the French police, the Sûreté, who went so far as to note in a report shortly before the First World War that ‘It is impossible, on any objective assessment, to deny the usefulness of having a Russian police operating in Paris, whether officially or not.’ When the centre was forced to close (at least publicly), the Sûreté were quick to complain that ‘The French government will no longer be able to know as precisely as in the past what dangerous foreign refugees in France are doing.’

  The leaders of the eventual Russian Revolution were understandably concerned about the Okhrana and its reach. The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, which would split into the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903, was riddled with Okhrana agents. Four of the five members of the Bolshevik Party’s St Petersburg Committee in 1908–9 worked for the security service. Roman Malinovsky, one of the Central Committee, was an Okhrana agent — and was shot as such when he foolhardily returned to Russia in 1918, a year after the Revolution.

  The Soviet State Security organization would go through many name changes in the period leading up to the Cold War. The Cheka (The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage) operated from December 1917 to February 1922, when it was incorporated into the NKVD (the People’s Commissariat of State Security) as the GPU (the State Political Directorate). From July 1923 to July 1934 it was known as the OGPU (the Unified State Political Directorate) before reincorporating into the NKVD, this time as the GUGB (Main Administration of Soviet Security). For five months in 1941 it was referred to as the NKGB (the People’s Commissariat of State Security) before returning to the NKVD. However, unlike in MI6, where agents who served in the First World War might still be around at the start of the Second, it was highly unlikely that anyone would survive through all of these name changes. Various errors by Soviet agents during this period — not warning of the armed uprisings in China, MI5’s discovery of the Soviet spy ring in the UK — led to regular reorganizations of the State Security Service. Purges of those whom the paranoid leader Josef Stalin mistrusted meant that many NKVD officers fell victim to their own organization — particularly once it was under the control of its most feared chief, Lavrenti Beria, who rose to power as the head of the NKVD Nicolai Yezkov’s deputy from 1936 before taking over on 25 November 1938, getting rid of his former boss on charges of espionage, treason and homosexuality.

  Under Beria, the NKVD operated abroad extensively, with one of its agents, Ramón Mercader killing Stalin’s great rival Leon Trotsky in Mexico in August 1940. The scale of their operations against their wartime allies would only become apparent in the aftermath of the Second World War. Various agents were uncovered or betrayed, and they had numerous agents in place reporting the movements of the Axis powers. One of their greatest agents, Richard Sorge, eventually became press attaché to the German embassy in Japan, and sent details of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa — the invasion of Russia — to Moscow, complete with its starting date of 22 June 1941. To Sorge’s amazement, Stalin ignored the reports, until the invasion actually began, at which point the leader started to place more credence in Sorge’s information. When Sorge learned that the Japanese did not intend to attack Siberia, Stalin moved his troops under Marshal Zukhov from there to the front line, which by this stage was almost within sight of the Kremlin. They were in time to rout the invading Germans. (Sorge was arrested shortly after this, and was hanged in 1944.)

  Sorge wasn’t the only Russian agent to warn about Barbarossa: according to KGB records, there were eighty-four separate attempts to persuade Stalin to take action. German journalist Rudolf Rössler, code-named Lucy, had a source apparently deep within the German supreme command. Werther, as this source was known, gave the start date for Barbarossa, and then, once the operation was under way, supplied details of where the German army was at its weakest — leading to the siege of Stalingrad. He also forewarned Stalin about the German invasion code-named Operation Citadel in 1943, allowing the Russian army to prepare the territory at Kursk and launch a pre-emptive attack on the Germans. Although Rössler never revealed who Werther was, some believe it might have been Hitler’s deputy, Martin Bormann, who was last officially sighted in Berlin in May 1945, or possibly Admiral Canaris, who was shot following the abortive assassination attempt on Hitler by Colonel von Stauffenberg on 20 July 1944.

  The Second World War also saw the creation of the NKVD’s counter-intelligence section, known as SMERSH, an abbreviation of the Russian title Smert’ Shpionam — Death to Spies. SMERSH, of course, became famous in the post-war years thanks to its prominent role in Ian Fleming’s early James Bond novels, even though it had in fact been disbanded long before 007 was given his licence to kill. (When the stories were transferred to the screen in 1962, SMERSH was replaced as the villains by SPECTRE, a terrorist organization created for the first proposed film, James Bond of the Secret Service, and subsequently used in the novels.) Officially founded in April 1943, SMERSH operated for three years, both infiltrating the German secret services, and maintaining order within the Red Army: troops retreating in the face of enemy advances would be shot by their own side, and it was treason to be captured. They used any means necessary — informants, radio games, disinformation — to ensure the loyalty of both military and civilian personnel, and were highly regarded by Stalin, to whom they reported directly. They were tasked with finding Hitler’s body at the end of the war, and, some sources claim, even removing it to Russia (leading to the inevitable claims that SMERSH agents recovered Hitler alive, and took him back to Moscow for interrogation and execution).

  There was another Moscow Centre operation that began running before the Second World War, would continue through the war, and still be effective during the critical first few years of the Cold War. Hailed by the KGB as the ablest group of foreign agents it ever recruited, the quintet of spies became nicknamed ‘The Magnificent Five’. The spy ring comprising Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, provided invaluable information during the war and in its immediate aftermath.

  Some agents are motivated by greed, others by ideology. The Magnificent Five were all recruited during the thirties when, as Anthony Blunt explained after his treachery was made public in 1979, ‘It seemed to me and many of my contemporaries that the Communist Party and Russia constituted the only firm bulwark against fascism, since the Western democracies were taking an uncertain and compromising attitude towards Germany.’ British Labour Party leader Ramsay MacDonald’s agreement to head a National Government in 1931 was seen as a sell-out by the Magnificent Five and the Russian model seemed the only way forward.

  The prime mover initially was Guy Burgess, a flamboyant Old Etonian whose Communist leanings were inflamed further by the book Hitler over Europe? by Ernst Henri, which proselytized the use of cells containing five members (Fünfergruppen, as they were named in Germany) to help foment anti-fascism. Henri was in fact OGPU agent Semyon Nikolayevich Rostovsky, who was a major recruiter for Moscow Centre, talent-spotting in Cambridge during the thirties. Burgess set out to create his own ‘light-blue ring
of five’.

  Around the same time, one of his friends, former Cambridge man Harold ‘Kim’ Philby was signing up for Soviet Intelligence. Philby graduated in 1933 with ‘the conviction that my life must be devoted to Communism’. He travelled in Europe, and in Vienna met and married Litzi Friedmann, who was a Comintern agent, and attracted the attention of the OGPU for his work on behalf of the party. He was recruited by Teodor Maly, and according to Philby, at that stage ‘given the job of penetrating British intelligence… it did not matter how long it took to do the job’. He was sent back to England in May 1934 with a new controller, Arnold Deutsch, code name Otto.

  Deutsch was instructed to work with both Philby and Burgess, but when Philby unsuccessfully tried to join the civil service (he was passed over because his referees had doubts about his ‘sense of political injustice’), Deutsch ordered him to be patient. Philby therefore publicly claimed to have changed his political orientation, and started to become a member of the establishment, working for the liberal monthly Review of Reviews.

  Burgess had been busy, gathering his ring of five. They included mathematician Anthony Blunt, and language scholar Donald Maclean, both of whom were Burgess’ lovers at different times. He also recruited another modern languages student, John Cairncross, into his Comintern cell.

  When Burgess was formally recruited by Deutsch, the controller suggested that the idea of a group was perhaps not the best way forward. Burgess, though, maintained the links of friendship between the five men throughout the next few years — which would almost prove catastrophic for Kim Philby when he was tarred by association with Maclean and Burgess when they were forced to defect to Russia in 1951.

  On Deutsch’s instructions, Maclean and Cairncross both broke off their contact with the Communist party, and applied to join the civil service. Burgess became personal assistant to MP Jack Macnamara; Maclean was accepted into the Foreign Office in October 1935, with Cairncross joining him there a year later. While the personable Maclean made friends and started to gain access to useful material, Cairncross was less successful, and eventually Deutsch suggested that he apply to work at the Treasury. Burgess became a popular producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation, making contacts across the spectrum — including MI6 deputy department head David Footman, who would recommend Burgess for a job in the secret service in 1938, working for MI6’s new Section D, broadcasting propaganda to Nazi Germany. Blunt remained in Cambridge, sourcing new recruits for the NKVD, including Leo Long, who would be an important asset during the Second World War.

  Philby, meanwhile, was becoming involved in the sort of assignment more usually to be found in the contemporary thrillers of Helen MacInnes or Leslie Charteris than the more mundane copying of secrets and passing of information carried out by the other Cambridge Spies. The Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, and early the next year, Philby was sent under journalistic cover to penetrate General Franco’s entourage and help organize his assassination. That particular mission was abandoned that summer in favour of gaining information about the other intelligence services operating in Spain. The following spring, Philby became a local hero when the car he was travelling in was hit by a shell and he was the sole survivor; the medal he received was pinned on by Franco himself!

  The Magnificent Five, though, were shortly to find themselves without a controller. Following the great purges of the NKVD in 1937, both Maly, who had been working with Philby, and Deutsch were recalled to Moscow. Maly faced execution, while Deutsch survived into the war years before being executed by the SS as part of the anti-Nazi resistance in Vienna.

  When war broke out, the Magnificent Five ensured that they were in prime positions to assist their Soviet paymasters. Cairncross became private secretary to Lord Hankey, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, who chaired many secret committees and was even overseeing the intelligence services. This meant that Cairncross could pass across ‘literally tons of documents’, according to the NKVD, including warnings about Operation Barbarossa, and the findings of the Scientific Advisory and Maud Committees regarding the prospect of creating a weapon using Uranium-235 — making him one of the Soviet Union’s first atomic spies. When Hankey was sacked from the Government in 1942, Cairncross turned his attentions to Bletchley Park, home of the Engima codebreakers.

  Burgess was already ensconced in MI6 at the outbreak of war, and he assisted Kim Philby’s smooth entry to the organization. Philby and Burgess would work together as instructors at a training school for the sabotage division Section IX (known as Section D, for ‘Destruction’) before that was folded into the new SOE. Burgess was let go while Philby remained with SOE until he moved across to Section V, the Counter-Intelligence section of MI6. (Moscow had other agents in SOE, including Donald Maclean’s schoolfriend James Klugmann.)

  While at Section V, Philby was able to pass on information on pre-war MI6 agents operating against the Soviets from the Registry, and, by volunteering for night duty at service headquarters at 54 Broadway, near St James’ Park in central London, he could keep Moscow informed of all current developments. He liaised with MI5 when Section V moved into central London in 1943, and when a new Section IX was established in 1944, specifically to deal with the Soviet threat past and present, Moscow Centre insisted that he ‘must do everything, but everything, to ensure that [he] became head of Section IX’. Philby manoeuvred the main contender — a staunch anti-Communist — out of the running, and as his colleague Robert Cecil wrote, thereby ‘had ensured that the whole post-war effort to counter Communist espionage would become known in the Kremlin. The history of espionage records few, if any, comparable masterstrokes.’

  Although Philby undoubtedly made the greatest contribution overall to Soviet intelligence, during the war it was Cairncross and Blunt who attracted the most plaudits from Moscow Centre. Blunt would eventually work himself into a nervous breakdown, and effectively become little more than a courier after the war. He was recruited into MI5 in the summer of 1940, and was soon in charge of surveillance of neutral embassies, as well as gaining surreptitious access to the various diplomatic bags of their couriers — which he would photograph and pass over to the Five’s new London contact, Anatoly Gorsky. He also ran Leo Long as a sub-agent, gaining material courtesy of Long’s access to ULTRA material from Bletchley Park as a member of MI14.

  Cairncross was also at Bletchley at this point early in the Second World War, passing on information about German troop movements, and contributing to the Soviet victory at the Battle of Kursk. In 1944, he then moved across to MI6, working on the German desk at Section V, before moving to the Political Intelligence section, where he didn’t prosper so well, lacking Burgess’ or Maclean’s innate talents for getting along with people easily.

  Guy Burgess’ contributions to the Soviet war effort were in a different field, following his dismissal from SOE. He ended up working once more as a talks producer for the BBC, and even managed to get the author of his own inspiration, Ernst Henri, on the air, proclaiming how great the Soviet Union’s intelligence network was!

  Maclean was the only one of the Five not to have a distinguished war career — at least at first. He didn’t handle the strain of his double life well, and although he was part of the General Department of the Foreign Office, he seemed to lack energy, not helped by problems with his domestic life. However in Spring 1944, he was posted to Washington DC, and seemed to regain his previous enthusiasm. He had access to information about the Allies’ plans after the war ended, and also became involved with liaison with the atomic-bomb project. His wife was in New York, and he travelled there from Washington regularly to see her — and pass on information to Gorsky, who had crossed to the United States to handle Centre agents there. Of course, this meant that there was signals traffic between the various Soviet missions on the East Coast regarding his movements — something that would come back to haunt Maclean a few years later, and eventually cause the downfall of the entire Cambridge Magnificent Five.

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  Compared with their British or Russian allies, the Americans were latecomers to the espionage field — partly, of course, because as of the start of the Second World War, the United States as an entity had only existed for just over 150 years.

  During the First World War, which America only entered in 1917, the Army’s G-2 section along with the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) had operated against pro-German groups, and American cryptologist Herbert O. Yardley helped to organize the US Army’s Cipher Bureau, known as MI-8. This had some notable successes against German agents operating in the US, but its peacetime operations were brought to a close in 1928 when incoming president Herbert Hoover’s new secretary of state Henry L. Stimson shut it down, stating that ‘Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail’.

  G-2 and the ONI continued to function between the wars, working in tandem with the newly created Federal Bureau of Intelligence (formerly the Department of Justice Bureau of Investigation) to keep an eye on actual and potential subversive elements, including the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). It seems they didn’t realize the scale of Soviet infiltration: the daughter of the American ambassador to Germany was an early recruit, while Congressman Samuel Dickstein, a key member of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, which was seeking to eradicate Nazism in the States, was on the NKVD books during the late thirties, and earned the nickname Crook for his financial demands.

  Inevitably there were overlapping operations between the various groups, but it was only after the outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939 that President Roosevelt decided to regularize the situation. In June 1940, internal security was divided between the various parties: the FBI remained in charge of civilian investigations, while G-2 and the ONI dealt with those involving the military (including defence plants that had major Army or Navy contracts). They would also be responsible for the Panama Canal Zone, the Philippines and major Army reservations.