Comrade Haldane Is Too Busy to Go on Holiday

by Gavan Tredoux

  For most of its existence, the Allies treated VENONA as highly confidential, so much so that the CIA only heard about it in 1952, and Truman was kept in the dark for three years. This secrecy was not irrational, given that the highest levels of government had been compromised. As it turned out, Stalin knew about the program long before Truman, since the intelligence services of both the United States and the UK had been penetrated, too—by William Weisband (1908–1967) in the United States and Kim Philby in MI5. Regardless, the program was only publically disclosed in 1995, and was never used in the trials of the handful of those who were charged with crimes. Documents released from it have become one of the most important resources for historians of communism, along with the Soviet archives that briefly opened up to foreigners in the 1990s.

  Messages from the London Embassy took much longer to crack than the Washington traffic. Intercepts had only been recorded up until April 1942, apparently owing to transfer of resources and attention elsewhere. It was as late as June 1945 before interceptions began again. The first messages to yield information were from September 1945; these showed that MI5 had been compromised, without fingering precisely how. The Washington traffic and other intelligence eventually disclosed the Cambridge Five—Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Donald Maclean, and John Cairncross—as well as a host of others. Nevertheless GCHQ kept working on the London messages. In the early 1960s, Swedish intelligence shared their own rich store of intercepts from the transmissions between the Stockholm Embassy and Soviet Military Intelligence, covering March 1940 to April 1942, and September 1945 to March 1947. Duplicate sheets from the one-time pads had been used, and suddenly some of the London messages from 1940 onward began to yield. They revealed “Gruppa Iks,” the X Group.

  Peter Wright’s revelations resurfaced in 1999 with the publication of Venona by “Nigel West,” the pen name of Rupert Allason.4 This was the first full treatment of the British VENONA intercepts, complementing the landmark study of the American intercepts by John Haynes and Harvey Klehr.5 But the London Venona intercepts then available were redacted—as we will see in detail below—and West was forced to do some guessing, bolstered by other sources of information, to try to penetrate the numerous cover names used in the messages. Two of the people cover-named were evidently members of an espionage cell referred to as the X Group. The first, called INTELLIGENTSIA, seemed to be the chief liaison between the group and the illegal resident in the Soviet Embassy; the second, NOBILITY, was a senior member of the group superior to INTELLIGENTSIA. It seems that West followed Peter Wright’s lead given in Spycatcher, along with other circumstantial information—possibly including inside information from contacts in MI5—and identified these two as J. B. S. Haldane and Ivor Montagu, respectively. It was a shrewd guess, but it was not quite accurate. INTELLIGENTSIA was Montagu, not Haldane, and, though it is still uncertain who NOBILITY was, Haldane was certainly a member of the X Group and is known to have passed classified information through it to the Soviets.

  West’s identification of Haldane as INTELLIGENTSIA proved to be influential, most likely because of the authority lent by the use of the VENONA intercepts, which had swept away decades of obfuscation about the instrumental role of Western Communist parties in the global Soviet spying operation. In 2005, Andrew Brown repeated West’s claims in his notable biography of J. D. Bernal, the communist crystallographer and contemporary of Haldane.6 Others followed suit.7 It is even possible that this confusion will always live on somewhere, forever finding new habitats, since Haldane is a much more interesting and consequential figure for playing INTELLIGENTSIA than Montagu, who is now remembered mostly for his table-tennis exploits. But with the release of the unredacted VENONA intercepts to the National Archives of the UK, the facts are available.

  Eighteen VENONA messages mention either INTELLIGENTSIA, the X Group, or its other members, NOBILITY, BARON, and RESERVIST. Complete unredacted transcripts of the most important messages can be found in Appendix 4. The first mention is dated July 25, 1940, and introduces the X Group to GRU in Moscow. The illegal GRU resident at the London Embassy, code-named BARCh in the messages and identified by MI5 as Simon Davidovich Kremer,8 acted as the coordinator of the group’s activities. Kremer, the secretary to the military attaché in the embassy, liaised regularly with Moscow for advice on the most promising lines of enquiry to follow. On this occasion he reported new activities initiated by an organization he called the X Group.

  I have met representatives of the X GROUP [GRUPPA IKS]. This is IVOR MONTAGU [MONTEGYu] (brother of Lord MONTAGU), the well-known local communist, journalist and lecturer. He has [1 group unidentified9] contacts through his influential relatives. He reported that he had been detailed to organise work with me, but that he had not yet obtained a single contact. I came to an agreement with him about the work and pointed out the importance of speed.

  Since the messages were thought to be fully secure, Kremer felt free to introduce real names and other identifying information. Although cover names were routinely used for contacts, agents, and other persons of interest, they were not used as a security measure per se, and in early practice they even conveyed meaningful information, modulated by the Russian sense of humor, which offers a sporting chance for identification from the cover names alone. Kremer at once introduced a cover name for Montagu: “He (INTELLIGENTSIA [INTELLIGENTsIYa]) reported the following . . .”—going on to repeat a long list of gossip peddled to him by Montagu. This settles the identification of INTELLIGENTSIA as Montagu rather than Haldane, which is recorded in the annotations made to the messages by either GCHQ or MI5.

  Montagu’s gossip included attitudes and alliances in the Cabinet and British political parties, and their mood regarding Hitler and Germans in general, who are cover-named SAUSAGE-DEALERS by Kremer. Although INTELLIGENTSIA was able to pass on some information about some reshuffling of military brass from a parliamentary secret session, Kremer was not satisfied, and the remark “he had not yet obtained a single contact” shows this. Subsequent messages showed mounting frustration on Kremer’s part about Montagu, who took some time to get into his stride as a GRU agent. Kremer took this frustration up with the X Group itself.

  From Kremer’s description, Montagu had been put in touch with him by the X Group—“he had been detailed to organise work with me”—and later messages show Kremer complaining to other members of the group about Montagu. It is still not clear exactly who the members of this group were or where they were insinuated. As we shall see, they probably constituted an underground cell within the Communist Party of Great Britain, but MI5 never made any definite identification. They could not have been Montagu’s own creation, since they preceded him and could have replaced him. This distinction is made clear in the next message, from August 16, 1940, which shows that Montagu was trying but still failing to impress his handler—despite promising classified information from none other than his old friend from Cambridge, J. B. S. Haldane.

  INTELLIGENTSIA [INTELLIGENTsIYa] has not yet found the people in the military [C% finance department] [VOENNYJ FINANSOVYJ OTDEL]. He has been given the address of one officer but he has not found him yet. He has promised to deliver documentary material [MATERIAL] from Professor HALDANE who is working on an Admiralty [MORSKOE MINISTERSTVO] assignment concerned with submarines and their operation. I have taken the opportunity of pointing out to the X GROUP [GRUPPA IKS] that we need a man of a different calibre and one who is bolder than INTELLIGENTSIA.

  It took Montagu a few weeks to get this report from Haldane, and it was September 6, 1940, before Kremer was able to report back to Moscow that “INTELLIGENTSIA [INTELLIGENTsIYa] has handed over a copy of Professor HALDANE’s report to the Admiralty on his experience relating to the length of time a man can stay underwater.” Still, Kremer was not satisfied that he had been given the right man by the X Group, since Montagu had not taken up leads that he was given for a new contact, who would later be cover-named RESIDENT.

  However he does not den
y the main point that for a month he has not been in touch with the British Army colonel picked out [VYDELENNYJ] for work with us although the latter does come to LONDON. I have told X GROUP [GRUPPA IKS] via NOBILITY [ZNAT’] to give us someone else because of this. INTELLIGENTSIA lives in the provinces and it is difficult to contact him.10

  Who was NOBILITY, evidently a senior member of the X Group? It is tempting to assign this name to Haldane himself—he was not really nobility, but the Russians could easily have taken him to be such, given his uncle’s career—but this suggestion is made improbable, though not impossible, by the construction of this report. Haldane figures in it explicitly under his own name, and is not linked in the text to NOBILITY, who seems to be a separate individual. Certainly, MI5 never made an identification of NOBILITY in their annotations.11

  Haldane’s research into midget submarines and the physiological challenges posed to a crew by the need to breathe oxygen under pressure was considered important by the Admiralty, which sponsored it, and the specific findings were considered secret and classified—though Haldane was publically known to have worked on the broader problem. At the time, the Soviet Union was an ally of Nazi Germany, but even after they joined the Allies when the Germans invaded them in 1941, the work remained classified. We can be sure that Haldane was conscious of this, since MI5 had queried him about the spread of information from this research in the past, when he employed communist volunteers from Spain for some experiments. Moreover, in 1946 the British physicist Alan Nunn May was revealed to have been passing information to the Soviets about atomic research. Haldane covered the case in the Daily Worker and, employing a characteristic inversion, promptly blamed the UK government for not sharing such secrets with the Soviets in the first place. “I can speak from personal experience. I was engaged in research on underwater operations. The work in progress was shown to naval officers of several navies, including American and Dutch, but not to Soviet naval representatives, though it would probably have saved the lives of Soviet sailors.”12 Except that it was, by Haldane himself.

  Montagu was eventually able to allay Kremer’s fears that the X Group had sent the wrong man. On October 2, 1940, Kremer reported that he had obtained information from the (apparently broadly connected) X Group about the breaking of a Soviet code.

  INTELLIGENTSIA [INTELLIGENTsIYa] has reported that the X GROUP [GRUPPA IKS] has reported to him that a girl working in a government establishment noticed in one document that the British had broken [RASKRYLY] some Soviet code or other and apparently she noticed in a/the document the following [words:] “Soviet Embassy in Germany”. I stated that this was a matter of exceptional importance and he should put to the group the question of developing this report [further].

  This was most likely a mistake on the part of the “girl working in a government establishment” for early results from the Ultra project, which worked on decryption of German Enigma messages. The British were not focused on Soviet codes at the time (unless this early success has remained concealed). The X Group seems to have straightened this out soon enough. By December 20, 1940, NOBILITY had “passed material [12 groups unrecovered] [which has been] received from a member of the CORPORATION [KORPORATsIYa] working on technical work in intelligence departments [ORGAN].” Here the “CORPORATION” was the Communist Party of Great Britain. A fragmentary message from April 3, 1941, demonstrates that Ultra had been compromised by another X Group member, BARON.

  This information originates solely from BARON. [Its provenance is] well . . . known to you, the intercept [B% bearing] the designation ENIGMA [ZAGADKA] . . . The information about . . . the intention of the SAUSAGE-DEALERS [KOLBASNIKI] . . . on our part. What . . . It is well known that . . . but . . . the government of the COLONY13 [KOLONIYa] . . . and this delicate sources’s possible connection with Military Intelligence and one can [B. take it] that his information is [B. fully deserving of attention] and therefore I consider that it would be a profound error to take his . . . BARON’s facts prove that . . . the COLONISTS’14 [KOLONISTSKIJ] . . . that . . .

  Judging from the other information that he supplied, BARON appears to have been connected with Czech military intelligence, but he has never been positively identified. Montagu had extensive contacts with the Czech exiles in London during the war, as we will later see in connection with the show trial and execution of Otto Katz. The leaking of Ultra secrets to a country allied to Germany at the time was a critical security compromise. The intelligence services of the Pact countries are known to have cooperated. In that respect, the X Group was of considerable use, supplying ready intelligence of British military countermeasures to German weapons. On October 11, 1940, Kremer informed Moscow that “INTELLIGENTSIA [INTELLIGENTsIYa] confirms that the British really do render delayed-action bombs safe by freezing the bombs’ exploder mechanism.” Better still, Montagu reported by October 15, 1940, “as a result of a conversation with an officer of the Air Ministry,” that the British believed that the German bombing raids had a new method for accurate targeting: “the SAUSAGE-DEALERS proceed towards the target along a radio beam.” This was the Knickebein “bent-leg” system, which identified bombing targets by the spot at which two radio beams, transmitted from the Continent, intersected over the UK. There was a frenzied search by the British government for effective countermeasures at the time.

  Even though only a modest number of the VENONA communications from London to Moscow were successfully decoded, and many were lost forever simply because the government had stopped recording them at the time, it is obvious that the X Group had a wide reach and developed important contacts, especially regarding the application of science to military problems. Here Haldane was an invaluable asset; he worked on a number of government projects and enjoyed the sort of trust that a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Weldon Professor of Biometry at University College London could expect to get. Haldane considered himself primarily a scientific link-man, or “cooperator,” as he put it, using his broad reach across disciplines to make connections others might not see. It was this sort of influence that had helped to get Hans Kahle back into the UK from internment in Canada.

  After they had met in Spain, Haldane stayed in touch with Hans Kahle and other veterans of the International Brigade. After representations by the MP “Red Ellen” Wilkinson and Clement Attlee, Kahle arrived in the UK in February 1939, supposedly to write a book about the war and then go on to the United States or Cuba. He came via Paris, which he had reached by December 1938, and where he had met up with the versatile Soviet agent Otto Katz. While he was in England, Kahle remained in touch with Katz via Tom Driberg (who was later a Labour MP and a double agent, of uncertain loyalty, for MI5 and the KGB). Colonel Hans offered to teach British soldiers about modern warfare later that year, but was turned down when MI5 was informed he was organizing an OGPU spy ring, along with Jürgen Kuczynski (who was interned in February 1940). The French complained that Kahle was sending money to communists there, and an MI5 source reported that he kept company with John Heartfield (Helmut Franz Josef Herzfeld) and Kuczynski. The Soviet defector General Walter Krivitsky had identified Heartfield as an OGPU agent. Other sources reported that Kahle was involved in underground propaganda activities with the CPGB. Charlotte Haldane put him up for a while in her house, describing him as “a typical German,” a type she generally found it difficult to like, but he was “tall well-built, with an ugly face, but great charm of manner.” Later she claimed that he had become a communist only when Hitler came to power, a story which he may have told her.15

  According to Haldane, he approached Kahle in the spring of 1940 to see if the German would like to be a “rabbit” for his dangerous physiological experiments related to submarine decompression.16 Kahle had agreed, no doubt attracted by the chance to observe British military preparations up close. He was taking part in experiments conducted at the Siebe Gorman works (then in Lambeth17) when one day that summer he disappeared. After inquiries were made, it turned out he had been arrested as
a foreign national of an enemy country and was to be deported. Haldane’s interventions on his behalf failed, even after Wilkinson was pulled in to help. Kahle was deported to Canada in the summer of 1940 and held in Internment Operations Camp L near Quebec City.18 There he organized a communist cell, recruiting the physicist Klaus Fuchs and the economist H. W. Arndt, among others. Correspondence from Hemingway to Kahle during this internment survives and shows that Hemingway idolized him. Hemingway wished, in a letter to his old friend, that Kahle was “commanding the 45th Division and that I had a small job on your staff,” recalling “when we were walking through the shelling as happy as children because we were the same age and re-living our boyhood in that great state of invulnerability that all we old soldiers have instead of the state of grace.”19

  Haldane had intermittently, over many years, worked on the physiological problems posed by high pressure and decompression after diving. His father, John Scott Haldane, had pioneered the field in 1908, inventing the staged method of achieving decompression. JBS had helped him with these experiments when still a boy. Prior to the current war, JBS had also assisted in the official inquiry into the HMS Thetis submarine disaster of 1939, conducting experiments with the help of human “rabbits.” In that regard he had started a curious practice that persisted throughout the war. He wanted exclusively communist volunteers. For the Thetis inquiry, he used only himself and returned International Brigade members—Bill Alexander, Patrick Duff, George Ives, and Donald Renton. Ives had been trained as a radio operator in Moscow in January 1936. Renton and Alexander had been political commissars in the brigades, and were thus hardened Comintern men.20