by Edward Lucas
But Ransome was in tune with the spirit of the times. The anti-Soviet cause was in trouble, doomed from the outset by the Whites’ disorganisation and brutality, which alienated even those Russians who disliked the Bolsheviks. By 1919 the British government under David Lloyd George was rapidly losing interest (not least because of a series of naval and military mutinies among war-weary British sailors and soldiers). ‘I would rather leave Russia Bolshevik until she sees her way out of it than see Britain bankrupt,’ he told the House of Commons in April.29 The allied intervention wound up in 1920. But as in future years, the instincts of Western spies dealing with Russia were at odds with their political masters’ instructions. In the summer of 192030 Cumming sent Reilly, Dukes and a former Tsarist secret policeman Vladimir Orlov (known as Orbanski) to establish an ‘international anti-Bolshevik intelligence service’ in Eastern Europe.31 They recruited five agents in Warsaw, eleven in Riga, four in Tallinn, two in Kaunas, as well as fourteen in Berlin. The initiative was stillborn. The British government was negotiating the normalisation of relations with the Bolshevik regime, starting with a trade agreement in March 1921. In July, the Warsaw station chief Malcolm Maclaren, a piratical figure who wore gold ear-rings, was instructed to close down the expensively created network; all that remained was a few contacts in the Baltic. Reilly’s swashbuckling bunch continued their work, without him or official backing from SIS. But that was enough for the Soviet spymasters to bait their next hook.
In November 1921 an official of the Russian waterways authority, A. A. Yakushev, made contact with an old friend in Tallinn, a former officer in the White forces. Both men were sincere anti-Bolsheviks. The visitor was a member of a genuine if flimsy monarchist organisation in Moscow. His host circulated émigré outposts with an enthusiastic account of what he had heard. Having intercepted one of these letters, the Cheka arrested Yakushev on his return to Moscow. After some persuasion in the Lubyanka he agreed in early 1922 to cooperate with the Soviet authorities. With Yakushev’s help, the Cheka steadily began persuading the émigré leadership in the West that a powerful and promising underground movement was developing inside the Soviet Union. The SIS station chief in Helsinki, Harry Carr, a fluent Russian-speaker and fervent anti-communist who was to feature in the even greater debacles of later years, was only too eager to hear this, particularly as the new organisation seemed to have support from the Finnish, Estonian and Polish spy services.32 He was troubled by its failure to produce any usable intelligence, but accepted that its main purpose was insurrectionary and that espionage activity at this stage would be too risky. That mistake was also to be repeated almost exactly in years to come.
A parallel part of the operation was the infiltration of a band of real anti-communist partisansav in Belarus by a talented Cheka officer called George ‘Grisha’ Syroyezhkin. Helped by two genuine gunshot wounds from Russian border guards, he succeeded in convincing the guerrillas and their foreign backers of his bona fides. He became firm friends with the émigré leader Boris Savinkov (one of Reilly’s co-conspirators) in the movement’s increasingly miserable Warsaw headquarters. (Poland had signed a peace treaty with Soviet Russia in March 1921, ending Polish support for a planned anti-Soviet uprising in the autumn). In July 1921 the Soviet secret police had rounded up much of Savinkov’s network inside Russia, using details provided by ‘Grisha’.
Dzerzhinsky was careful not to overplay his hand. He left enough embers of the anti-Bolshevik cause smouldering to allow him to play the next round in the game. Savinkov’s cause was doomed; it was now time to destroy him personally. Again a purported anti-communist organisation made contact, this time called the Trust. It purported to be democratic, not monarchist, in outlook: this was far more appealing to Savinkov, a radical liberal who detested Tsarist autocracy and communist totalitarianism in equal measure. After some elaborate bits of play-acting involving his emissaries, and the use of a femme fatale with whom Savinkov had begun an affair, the inspirational anti-communist leader was tempted across the Soviet border, arrested, and brought to Moscow. Skilful interrogation by Dzerzhinsky (who regarded physical torture as a crude and unworthy short-cut), eventually brought Savinkov’s cooperation in a show trial, after which he was given a light sentence and died in a mysterious fall from a window, possibly in suicidal despair, possibly murdered on Stalin’s orders.
The next victim was Reilly. He was no longer formally on the books of British intelligence: SIS records show a series of exasperated telegrams between London and its stations complaining of the masterspy’s adventurism. But Reilly retained friends in the service, including Ernest Boyce, his former boss from Moscow days and now the Tallinn station chief. In 1925, Boyce wrote to Reilly asking for his help in investigating what appeared to be a serious underground operation inside Russia. Again a Russian female agent played a central role: this time an attractive woman called Maria Zakharchenko-Shults, who was both sexually voracious and embittered by ill-treatment from her previous lovers. It is not clear whether Reilly became intimate with her, but she certainly exerted a strong influence on him after he arrived in Helsinki to make contact with the Trust’s leaders. The deception soon deepened, with plenty of supporting evidence of the underground movement’s capabilities. The brother of a local SIS agent, trapped in Russia, was smuggled out. He was a violinist, and needed his precious instrument to earn a livelihood. Obligingly, the Trust arranged that too. Carr was a little dubious: it all seemed too slick for a real bunch of plotters to manage under the noses of the increasingly all-powerful Russian secret police. Unfortunately, he stifled his doubts.33
The plan was for Reilly to meet Trust leaders in Finland in September 1925. But at the last minute he was persuaded to come to Moscow for a meeting of the anti-communist ‘government-in-waiting’. As bait Maria also presented a newspaper cutting with a photo purportedly showing an emissary of the Trust, Terenty Deribas, whom Reilly had already met in Helsinki, standing next to Lenin.34 What better proof could there be of the organisation’s clout, if it had on board a former lieutenant of the Bolshevik leader? Unfortunately, the photo was a forgery. As a final incentive, Deribas mentioned the lucrative business deals Reilly would be able to do in Russia once the communists were out of the way. The mixture of sex, greed, ambition and adrenalin was irresistible. Reilly swallowed the bait, penned a hasty letter to one of his wives, and crossed the border.
His hosts did not arrest their quarry immediately. Instead, they pumped him for information in the guise of allies. Reilly duly revealed his cupidity, suggesting that the new government could be financed by selling treasures from Russia’s museums and art galleries: he even offered his own services as a broker in this sordid deal. At this point the deception ran into political trouble. Those running the operation thought it would be better to let Reilly return to the West. This was standard practice with other unsuspecting émigré supporters. Reilly’s account of a successful mission would boost the Trust’s credibility, allowing its puppet-masters to play still more games with the Western spy chiefs. But Stalin, by now the Soviet leader, wanted none of it. Even a phoney underground organisation was one too many. The British spy was arrested but gave little away. He probably did not have much to give: he was not on official SIS business, had never worked at its headquarters and his memories of service were several years out of date. He was shot on 5 November.
The ill-fated expedition was just a blip in the British intelligence build-up in the Baltic. As Russia became more isolated, the hunger for information about it grew. Money and men came piling in, with a resulting blizzard of unsatisfactory, confusing and ill-sourced information.35 Specialisations developed: military intelligence in Tallinn, naval in Helsinki, and political and economic in Riga. Kaunas was said to be rather dull in comparison. Yet enthusiasm was not matched by judgement. The British intelligence officers tended to be Anglo-Russians whose lives had been blighted by the revolution. They found Russian émigrés congenial company and recruited them as sources. This mirrors the same mist
akes made by SIS in the years immediately after the war, when again under great pressure to produce results, and facing an all but impenetrable target, it relied on anti-communist refugees and insurgents. They too were ardent allies and willing risk-takers; but die-hard opponents of a regime are unlikely to know its secrets. Hatred uninformed by knowledge and fuelled by wishful thinking is about the worst possible basis for successful espionage. It was not until the late 1950s that SIS was to realise this and concentrate on meticulous recruitment and agent running inside the communist establishment.
Émigré and dissident groups always find it hard to vet new recruits effectively. Any publicly identifiable member becomes an easy target for bullying, blackmail or bribery. Once penetrated, such groups become an asset to their foes, not a threat. Only outfits with small memberships based on close personal friendships have a chance of escaping this fate. That was not the hallmark of the amateurish and feuding Russian diaspora in the 1920s and 1930s, or of the Baltic émigrés in the 1940s and 1950s. Add the extra unreliability caused by affiliation, real or imagined, with the secret world, and it is easy to see how Western intelligence services were ensnared in Bolshevik plots. As the official historian of SIS writes, ‘1920s Europe was full of dubious White Russian characters representing themselves as secret agents.’36 They produced little intelligence of any significance37 but sometimes did real damage: asserting, for example, that the Soviet Union was fomenting insurrection in Ireland and India. Britain issued a thunderous protest, only to be embarrassed when a Soviet response proved that the intelligence, far from being drawn straight from the Politburo (as claimed) was entirely fabricated. SIS bosses complained, and vainly introduced new rules designed to prevent the service paying good money for forged documents. As the British purse strings tightened in the 1930s, many agents began diversifying their sources of income, particularly by offering their services to the Abwehr (German military intelligence).
Phoney intelligence particularly affected Riga, the most productive of SIS’s stations in the region. Its best agent was a local Russian journalist who supposedly ran a network of eleven sub-sources. An investigation in 1928 concluded that many if not most were bogus: producing entirely imaginary information, for example, about a Russian ‘death ray’.aw Reporting from Riga also led to one of the greatest howlers in the history of SIS. Published in the Daily Mail on 24 October 1924, it purported to be a letter from Grigori Zinoviev, president of the Comintern – the organisation through which the Bolshevik leadership coordinated its activities with foreign communist parties – urging the British Communist Party to lead an insurrection. The story came in the run-up to a general election in which Britain’s Labour Party, in office for the first time, in a minority government, was hoping to hold on to power. The letter was not decisive: though the Conservative party won the election, Labour’s vote went up. But many suspect that right-wing elements in SIS cooked up the ‘leaked’ letter, supposedly provided by a sub-agent called FR/3/Moscow, employed in the secretariat of the Comintern (the office which linked the Soviet leadership with foreign communist parties). Riga had filed it to London with a covering note38 flagging the ‘strong incitement to armed revolution’ and a ‘flagrant violation’ of the newly signed Anglo-Russian agreement. SIS also asserted that ‘the authenticity of the document is undoubted’. Worse, when the Foreign Office tried to verify the letter SIS claimed (probably falsely) that another agent had corroborated the content. The most elementary checks were missing. Had SIS obtained the letter in English or in Russian? Who exactly was the sub-agent? SIS was unable or unwilling to give firm clear answers and came close to outright lies.39
The exceptions to this rather unimpressive performance came from British intelligence links with their local counterparts, especially in Estonia (history may not repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes). An agent called ‘Baron’, run by Carr, reported the start of secret Nazi–Soviet negotiations in the spring of 1939, and confirmed in June that they were making good progress. But the desk officer at SIS headquarters in London refused to circulate this intelligence further, believing that the agent could not possibly have had the access necessary.40 It contradicted the Foreign Office line, that its envoy to Moscow Sir William Strang was making progress on an Anglo-Soviet agreement. The same fate befell another scoop a year later. Although SIS closed its Baltic stations in September 1940 following the Soviet annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, many of the agent networks remained, mostly run from Helsinki. A British agent codenamed ‘Outcast’, formerly run from Tallinn, presented himself to the Helsinki station in September 1940.41 A Russian émigré living in Berlin (but with no love for the Nazis), he had escaped from Tallinn with German help, in return for agreeing to work for the Abwehr against Russia. Now he wanted to spy against them, for the British. In November 1940 he reported to his British case officer: ‘German command preparing (June) campaign against USSR.’ Sadly, Carr dismissed this as ‘incredible’ and probably mere propaganda.
Had politicians in London heeded the SIS sources and gained advance warning of the Hitler–Stalin pact, what could they have done? The deal was the culmination of a long period of diplomatic and political failure, in which Britain and France had been outmanoeuvred and Hitler had seen obstacles to his expansion plans melt one by one. It is hard to imagine even the most piercing intelligence insight reversing that. Nor is it easy to see what Britain would have done with the warning of Hitler’s assault on the Soviet Union. Stalin had plenty of warnings from other sources: he usually responded by punishing the messenger. Exercises in speculative history are as unrewarding as they are tempting. Yet it is hard not to feel frustration that such accurate intelligence went unnoticed. The wider lesson, if any, is that espionage is valuable only when decision-makers let the results change their thinking. Spies may provide confirmation only that the currents in the depths and shallows are similar. If they offer a different version of events, or prediction of them, officials and politicians must be willing to act on what they are told.
That is one weakness of Western intelligence even in the present day. Readers trying to understand why Russian spymasters so frequently run rings round their Western counterparts will also find it striking that so many other mistakes of the past are replicated so frequently. The tendency to pay good money for bad intelligence is deeply ingrained. Even after the fiascos of the early years, most intelligence from the interwar Baltic was barrel-scrapings, as this downbeat vignette illustrates.
Baltic agent ‘BP/24’ who was resident in Moscow and had ‘connections in Soviet institutions’, agreed for a retainer of £50 a month to ‘send information three times monthly’ about political matters and ‘on subject of propaganda’. After his own involvement with OGPU (who blackmailed him over gambling debts) was discovered, he was charged with treason but escaped to Austria, where he continued to peddle intelligence on Russia until the early 1930s. There he was reported to be employed by the Nazi Intelligence Office in Berlin and was offering reports to SIS though a mutual contact in Finland. By 1934 (as SIS discovered in 1946 from captured German documents) he had graduated to the Abwehr, was reporting to them on Russia and into the bargain had passed them an SIS questionnaire on Russia received from his Finnish contact.42
If the later history of Western intelligence battles with Russia in the Baltic was ill-starred, one can at least say that it was part of a consistent pattern.
9
Between the Hammer and the Anvil
Carelessness, naiveté and wishful thinking were again on ample (and humiliating) display only twenty years later. The episode centred on the doomed underground struggle against communist rule in the Baltic states – one of the least-known chapters in modern European history.1 The names of the heroes and villains are unfamiliar; so too are the organisations they belonged to and the cause they espoused. But their death and destruction, the moral ambiguity and dilemmas that beset them, and the lethally unhelpful involvement of Western intelligence all deserve recognition. The cent
ral paradox was this: the goals of those resisting Soviet rule in the Baltic did not include gathering intelligence for Western spymasters, nor did their aims or origins make them ideal allies. But it was the spy agencies that offered them their only hope of outside support; and for all their faults, they were, at the start of the Cold War, a large part of the slender hand of cards that American and British intelligence could muster.
Intelligence links across the Baltic sea had reconnected during the war, in early 1943. The cooperation was controversial for both sides. The Soviet Union was still officially Britain’s ally and many of the Baltic agents were outspokenly anti-communist. Opinion on their side was divided. Many believed that the only hope of staving off another Soviet occupation was to intensify cooperation with the Germans. Others hoped that Britain would ditch its alliance with Stalin and rescue them as it had done in 1920. The first fruits of the connection were bitter. Evald Aruvald, then in the Estonian resistance, recalled: ‘We passed to the British . . . details of our strengths and positions at the front, hoping for assistance. The British, in turn, passed on this information to the Soviets.’2 Colonel Alfons Rebane, a legendary Estonian officer who later worked for SIS, complained: ‘This damaged the Estonian people’s fight against our slave-masters the communists.’3
The story starts with Alexander ‘Sandy’ McKibbin, born in pre-revolutionary Russia, and then a timber-merchant in pre-war Estonia (and probably on the books of British intelligence)4. During the war, he worked for the SIS station in Stockholm: in those days one of the great spy nests of Europe. His main job was spying on the Nazis, who had occupied the Baltic states in 1941 and were now fighting a losing defensive battle against the advancing Soviet forces. Meanwhile the Lithuanian underground, hoping against hope to re-establish the country’s independence, was eager to make contact with Western powers. One of its representatives was a regular visitor to Sweden and made contact with McKibbin, who signed him up.5 (The British spy also contacted an Estonian underground leader, until his capture and torture by the Gestapo in 1944 led to the destruction of his network.)6