In the early and mid-1920s INO’s chief target thus became the émigré White Guards, based mainly in Berlin, Paris and Warsaw, who continued to plot—far less effectively than Lenin supposed—the overthrow of the Bolshevik regime.
The other “counter-revolutionary” threat which most concerned Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership came from Ukrainian nationalists, who had fought both Red and White forces in an attempt to win their independence. In the winter of 1920 and the spring of 1921 the entire Ukrainian countryside was in revolt against Bolshevik rule. Even after the brutal “pacification” of Ukraine by the Red Army and the Cheka, partisan groups who had taken refuge in Poland and Romania continued to make cross-border raids.46 In the spring of 1922 the Ukrainian GPU received intelligence reports that Simon Petlyura’s Ukrainian government-in-exile had established a “partisan headquarters” under General Yurko Tutyunnik which was sending secret emissaries to the Ukraine to establish a nationalist underground.47
The GPU was ordered not merely to collect intelligence on the émigré White Guards and Ukrainian nationalists but also to penetrate and destabilize them.48 Its strategy was the same against both opponents—to establish bogus anti-Bolshevik undergrounds under GPU control which could be used to lure General Tutyunnik and the leading White generals back across the frontier.
The first step in enticing Tutyunnik back to Ukraine (an operation codenamed CASE 39) was the capture of Zayarny, one of his “special duties” officers, who was caught crossing the frontier in 1922. Zayarny was successfully turned back by the GPU and sent to Tutyunnik’s headquarters with bogus reports that an underground Supreme Military Council (Vysshaya Voyskovaya Rada or VVR) had been established in Ukraine and was anxious to set up an operational headquarters under Tutyunnik’s leadership to wage war against the Bolsheviks. Tutyunnik was too cautious to return immediately but sent several emissaries who attended stage-managed meetings of the VVR, at which GPU officers disguised as Ukrainian nationalists reported the rapid growth of underground opposition to Bolshevik rule and agreed on the urgent need for Tutyunnik’s leadership. Like Zayarny, one of the emissaries, Pyotr Stakhov, a close associate of Tutyunnik, was recruited by the GPU and used as a double agent.
Attempts to persuade Tutyunnik himself to return to Ukraine finally succeeded on June 26, 1923.49 Tutyunnik, with his bodyguard and aides, arrived at a remote hamlet on the Romanian bank of the river Dniester, where Zayarny met him with the news that the VVR and Pyotr Stakhov were waiting on the other side. At 11 p.m. a light from the Ukrainian bank signaled that it was safe for Tutyunnik and his entourage to cross the river. Still cautious, Tutyunnik sent his bodyguard to make sure that no trap had been laid for him. Stakhov returned with the bodyguard to reassure him. According to an OGPU report, Tutyunnik told him, “Pyotr, I know you and you know me. We won’t fool each other. The VVR is a fiction, isn’t it?” “That is impossible,” Stakhov replied. “I know them all, particularly those who are with me [today]. You know you can rely on me…” Tutyunnik got into the boat with Stakhov and crossed the Dniester. Once he was in the hands of the OGPU, letters written by Tutyunnik or in his name were sent to prominent Ukrainian nationalists abroad saying that their struggle was hopeless and that he had aligned himself irrevocably with the Soviet cause. He was executed six years later.50
OPERATIONS AGAINST THE White Guards resembled those against Ukrainian nationalists. In 1922 the Berlin residency recruited the former Tsarist General Zelenin as a penetration agent within the émigré community. A later OGPU report claimed, possibly with some exaggeration, that Zelenin had engineered “a huge schism within the ranks of the Whites” and had caused a large number of officers to break away from Baron Peter Wrangel, the last of the White generals to be defeated in the civil war. Other OGPU moles praised for their work in disrupting the White Guards included General Zaitsev, former chief of staff to the Cossack Ataman A. I. Dutov, and the ex-Tsarist General Yakhontov, who emigrated to the United States.51
The OGPU’s greatest successes against the White Guards, however, were two elaborate deception operations, codenamed SINDIKAT (“Syndicate”) and TREST (“Trust”), both of which made imaginative use of agents provocateurs.52 SINDIKAT was targeted against the man believed to be the most dangerous of all the White Guards: Boris Savinkov, a former Socialist Revolutionary terrorist who had served as deputy minister of war in the provisional government overthrown in the Bolshevik Revolution. Winston Churchill, among others, was captivated by his anti-Bolshevik fervor. “When all is said and done,” Churchill wrote later, “and with all the stains and tarnishes there be, few men tried more, gave more, dared more and suffered more for the Russian people.” During the Russo-Polish War of 1920, Savinkov was largely responsible for recruiting the Russian People’s Army which fought under Polish command against the Red Army. Early in 1921 he founded a new organization in Warsaw dedicated to the overthrow of the Bolshevik regime: the People’s Union for Defence of Country and Freedom (NSZRiS), which ran an agent network inside Soviet Russia to collect intelligence on the Bolsheviks and plan uprisings against the regime.
The first stage of the operation against Savinkov, SINDIKAT-1, successfully neutralized the NSZRiS agent network with the help of a Cheka mole within his organization. Forty-four leading members of the NSZRiS were paraded at a show trial in Moscow in August 1921.53 SINDIKAT-2 was aimed at luring Savinkov back to Russia to star in a further show trial and complete the demoralization of his émigré supporters. Classified KGB histories give the main credit for the operation to the head of the OGPU counter-intelligence department, Artur Khristyanovich Artuzov (later head of INO), the Russian son of an immigrant Swiss-Italian cheesemaker, assisted by Andrei Pavlovich Fyodorov and Grigori Sergeyevich Syroyezhkin.54 Though SINDIKAT-2 made skillful use of agents provocateurs, however, KGB records fail to acknowledge how much they were assisted by Savinkov’s own increasing tendency to fantasize. During a visit to London late in 1921 he claimed improbably that the head of the Russian trade delegation had suggested that he join the Soviet government. Savinkov also alleged that Lloyd George and his family had welcomed him at Chequers by singing “God Save the Tsar”; in reality, the song was a hymn sung in Welsh by a Welsh choir at a pre-Christmas celebration. In July 1923 Fedorov, posing as a member of an anti-Bolshevik underground, visited Savinkov in Paris, where he had installed his headquarters after the collapse of the NSZRiS, and persuaded him to send his aide, Colonel Sergei Pavlovsky, back to Russia with Fedorov for secret talks with the non-existent underground. Once in Moscow, Pavlovsky was turned in by the OGPU and used to lure Savinkov himself to Russia for further talks. On August 15 Savinkov crossed the Russian border with some of his supporters and walked straight into an OGPU trap. Under OGPU interrogation Savinkov’s resistance swiftly collapsed. At a show trial on August 27 Savinkov made an abject confession of his counter-revolutionary sins:
I unconditionally recognize Soviet power and no other. To every Russian who loves his country I, who have traversed the entire road of this bloody, heavy struggle against you, I who refuted you as no one else did, I tell you that if you are a Russian, if you love your people, you will bow down to worker-peasant power and recognize it without any reservations.55
The deception of Savinkov continued even after he was sentenced to fifteen years in jail. He failed to realize that his cellmate, V. I. Speransky, was an OGPU officer, later promoted for his success in gaining Savinkov’s confidence and surreptitiously debriefing him over a period of eight months.56 Savinkov did not long survive Speransky’s final report on him. KGB files appear to contain no contemporary record of how he met his death. According to the SVR’s implausible current version of events, Savinkov fell or jumped from an upper-story window after a congenial “drinking bout with a group of Chekists”—despite a heroic attempt to save him by Grigori Syroyezhkin.57 It seems more likely that Syroyezhkin pushed him to his death.58
Even more successful than SINDIKAT was operation TREST, the cover name given to a fictitious
monarchist underground, the Monarchist Association of Central Russia (MOR), first invented by Artuzov in 1921 and used as the basis of a six-year deception.59 By 1923 the OGPU officer Aleksandr Yakushev, posing as a secret MOR member able to travel abroad in his official capacity as a Soviet foreign trade representative, had won the confidence during visits to Paris of both Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich, cousin of the late Tsar Nicholas II, and General Aleksandr Kutepov of the [White] Russian Combined Services Union (ROVS). The leading victim of the deception, however, was the former SIS agent Sidney Reilly, an even greater fantasist than Savinkov. Reilly had become a tragicomic figure whose hold on reality was increasingly uncertain. According to one of his secretaries, Eleanor Toye, “Reilly used to suffer from severe mental crises amounting to delusion. Once he thought he was Jesus Christ.” The OGPU, however, failed to grasp that Reilly was now of little significance, regarding him instead as a British masterspy and one of its most dangerous opponents. On September 26, 1925 it succeeded in luring him, like Savinkov a year before, across the Russian frontier to a meeting with bogus MOR conspirators.60
Reilly’s resistance after his arrest did not last much longer than Savinkov’s. His KGB file contains a letter, probably authentic, to Dzerzhinsky dated October 30, 1925, in which he promised to reveal all he knew about British and American intelligence as well as Russian émigrés in the West. Six days later Reilly was taken for a walk in the woods near Moscow and, without warning, shot from behind. According to an OGPU report, he “let out a deep breath and fell without a cry.” Among those who accompanied him on his final walk in the woods was Grigori Syroyezhkin, the probable assassin of Savinkov a year earlier. Reilly’s corpse was put on private display in the Lubyanka sickbay to allow OGPU officers to celebrate their triumph.61 Appropriately for a career in which myth and reality had become inextricably confused, rumors circulated for many years in the West that Reilly had escaped execution and adopted a new identity. The TREST deception was finally exposed in 1927, to the embarrassment of the intelligence services of Britain, France, Poland, Finland and the Baltic states who had all, in varying degrees, been taken in by it.62
AS WELL AS engaging in permanent conflict with counter-revolution, both real and imagined, Soviet intelligence between the wars also became increasingly successful in penetrating the main imperialist powers. It had two major operational advantages over Western intelligence agencies. First, while security in Moscow became obsessional, much Western security remained feeble. Secondly, the Communist parties and their “fellow travelers” in the West gave Soviet intelligence a major source of ideological recruits of which it took increasing advantage.
While operation TREST was at its height, INO, the OGPU’s foreign intelligence service, succeeded in making its first major penetration of the British foreign service. The penetration agent was an Italian messenger in the British embassy in Rome, Francesco Constantini (codenamed DUNCAN), who was recruited in 1924 by the OGPU residency with the help of an Italian Communist, Alfredo Allegretti, who had worked as a Russian embassy clerk before the Revolution. Despite his lowly status, Constantini had access to a remarkable range of diplomatic secrets.63 Until the Second World War, the Foreign Office did not possess a single security officer, let alone a security department. Security in many British embassies was remarkably lax. In Rome, according to Sir Andrew Noble, who was stationed at the embassy in the mid-1930s, it was “virtually non-existent.” Embassy servants had access to the keys to red boxes and filing cabinets containing classified documents, as well as—probably—the number of the combination lock on the embassy safe. Even when two copies of a diplomatic cipher were missing in 1925, it did not occur to British diplomats that they might have been removed by Constantini—as they almost certainly were.64
For more than a decade Francesco Constantini handed over a great variety of diplomatic documents and cipher material. Probably from an early stage he also involved his brother, Secondo, who worked as an embassy servant, in the theft of documents. In addition to despatches on Anglo-Italian relations exchanged between London and the Rome embassy, Constantini was often able to supply the “confidential print” of selected documents from the Foreign Office and major British missions designed to give ambassadors an overview of current foreign policy.65 By January 1925 he was providing, on average, 150 pages of classified material a week. Constantini made no secret of his motives. The Rome residency reported to the Centre, “He collaborates with us exclusively for money, and does not conceal the fact. He has set himself the goal of becoming a rich man, and that is what he strives for.” In 1925 the Centre pronounced Constantini its most valuable agent. Convinced of a vast, nonexistent British plot to destroy the Soviet state, it counted on agent DUNCAN to provide early warning of a British attack, and instructed the Rome residency:
England is now the organizing force behind a probable attack on the USSR in the near future. A continuous hostile cordon [of states] is being formed against us in the West. In the East, in Persia, Afghanistan and China we observe a similar picture… Your task (and consider it a priority) is to provide documentary and agent materials which reveal the details of the English plan.
The Rome residency’s pride in running the OGPU’s leading agent is reflected in its flattering descriptions of him. Constantini was said to have the face of “an ancient Roman,” and to be known to his many female admirers as “the handsome one.”66 By 1928 the OGPU suspected him—accurately—of also supplying documents to Italian intelligence. Despite suspicions about Constantini’s honesty, however, there was no mistaking the importance of the material he supplied. Maksim Litvinov, who by the late 1920s was the dominating figure in the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, pronounced it “of great use to me.”67
THE OGPU’S FIRST successful penetration of the British foreign service was overshadowed in 1927 by an embarrassing series of well-publicized intelligence failures. The security of the rapidly expanding foreign network of OGPU and Fourth Department (Military Intelligence) residencies was threatened by the vulnerability of early Soviet cipher systems to Western cryptanalysts, by the inexperience of some of the first generation of INO officers, and by errors in the selection and training of foreign Communists as agents. The International Liaison Department (OMS) of the Communist International provided a ready pool of enthusiastic volunteers for Soviet intelligence operations. Some, such as the German Richard Sorge, were to be numbered among the greatest spies of the century. Others ignored orthodox tradecraft and neglected standard security procedures.
In the spring of 1927 there were dramatic revelations of Soviet espionage in eight different countries. In March a major OGPU spy ring was uncovered in Poland; a Soviet trade official was arrested for espionage in Turkey; and the Swiss police announced the arrest of two Russian spies. In April a police raid on the Soviet consulate in Beijing uncovered a mass of incriminating intelligence documents; and the French Sûreté, arrested members of a Soviet spy ring in Paris run by Jean Crémet, a leading French Communist. In May Austrian foreign ministry officials were found passing classified information to the OGPU residency, and the British Home Secretary indignantly announced to the House of Commons the discovery of “one of the most complete and one of the most nefarious spy systems that it has ever been my lot to meet.”68
Following this last discovery, Britain—still regarded in the Soviet Union as the leading world power and its most dangerous enemy—formally broke off diplomatic relations, and senior ministers read out to the Commons decrypted extracts from intercepted Soviet telegrams. To tighten the security of Soviet diplomatic and OGPU communications after the dramatic revelation of British codebreaking successes, the laborious but virtually unbreakable “one-time pad” cipher system was introduced. As a result, Western cryptanalysts were able to decrypt almost no further high-grade Soviet communications until after the Second World War.69
THE MOST WORRYSOME as well as the most plentiful foreign intelligence in 1927 concerned Japan. Since 1925 INO had been
able to intercept the secret communications of both Japan’s military mission and its consulate-general in the northeast Chinese city of Harbin. Remarkably, instead of using diplomatic bags and their own couriers, Japanese official representatives in Harbin corresponded with Tokyo via the Chinese postal service. The OGPU recruited the Chinese employees who were used to take Japanese official despatches to the Harbin post office, and sent expert teams of letter-openers to examine and photograph the despatches, before sending them on their way in new envelopes with copies of Japanese seals. Professor Matsokin, a Japanese specialist from Moscow,70 was employed by INO in Harbin to peruse the despatches and send translations of the most important promptly to the Centre. There was ample evidence in the intercepts forwarded to Moscow of designs by the Japanese military on China and the Soviet Far East. But the most troubling document, intercepted in July 1927, was a secret memorandum written by Baron Gi-ishi Tanaka, the Japanese prime minister and foreign minister, which advocated the conquest of Manchuria and Mongolia as a prelude to Japanese domination over the whole of China, and predicted that Japan “would once again have to cross swords with Russia.”71
A second copy of the memorandum was obtained in Japanese-occupied Korea by the residency at Seoul, headed by Ivan Andreevich Chichayev (later wartime resident in London). A Japanese interpreter, codenamed ANO, recruited by the INO residency, succeeded in extracting the document, along with other secret material, from the safe of the Japanese police chief in Seoul.72 A copy of the Tanaka memorandum was later leaked by INO to the American press to give the impression that it had been obtained by an agent working for the United States.73 As recently as 1997 an SVR official history continued to celebrate the simultaneous acquisition of the memorandum in Harbin and Seoul as “an absolutely unique occurrence in intelligence operations.”74 Though somewhat exaggerated, this judgment accurately reflects the enormous importance attached at the time to the discovery of Tanaka’s prediction of war with Russia.
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