by Edward Lucas
From the Baltic point of view, the Nazis and Soviets were not hugely different. This perspective will be startling to those who see Hitler’s Germany as the fount of all evil and the Soviet Union as a valiant (if ill-led) ally against it. But in the Baltic as in much of Europe the war was a three-way fight. In one corner were the Nazis, with an imperial doctrine based on racial supremacy, in the other the Soviets, who mixed Russian imperialism with the ideology of class warfare. In the middle, bearing the brunt of the bloodshed, were the peoples whose countries the Nazi–Soviet pact had obliterated. As the Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova notes, the war years offered the Baltics a choice between Hitler, Stalin and death, with one choice not necessarily precluding the others.7
By the time of the first tentative contacts between the resistance and foreign intelligence, the damage inflicted by both fighting and invasion was severe. The forcible annexation and Sovietisation of the three Baltic countries in 1940 was followed in June 1941 by the deportation of much of the pre-war elite,8 typically in the middle of the night, with an hour’s notice. The class enemies, loaded on to cattle trucks to freeze, starve and suffer in distant labour camps, included: members of ‘anti-Soviet’ political parties (whether of left or right), police, prison officers, military officers, political émigrés and ‘unstable elements’, foreign citizens, ‘individuals with foreign connections’ such as stamp collectors, senior civil servants, Red Cross officials, clergy, noblemen, industrialists and merchants. These comprised 10,000 people from Estonia, 15,000 from Latvia and 34,000 from Lithuania. They included much of the middle-class Jewish population of all three countries. As the Yale historian Timothy Snyder has pointed out, it would have been little comfort to those Jews to know that they were being persecuted for their class, not their race.
When the Soviet forces returned in 1944, those who had failed to flee and showed any sign of resistance or independent thought were repressed as ‘bourgeois nationalists’.9 This traumatic history is the emotional and strategic backdrop for the espionage debacles of the following years, for the independence struggle of the 1980s, and for the headlong embraces between Western spy services and their Baltic counterparts in the 1990s. Juozas Lukša, a CIA-trained Lithuanian resistance fighter, later wrote:
In 1940, the Russians had come marching into our land to ‘liberate’ us from ‘capitalist and Fascist exploiters.’ In 1941, the Germans had marched in after them and thereby ‘liberated’ us from ‘Bolshevik bondage.’ And now, the Russians were back again – this time to ‘liberate’ us from ‘the tyranny of Nazi hangmen.’ But since we still recalled how they had gone about ‘liberating’ us the last time, we didn’t think we had any cause to rejoice.10
Helping the Soviets beat the Nazis made sense from a Western point of view (and was a question of life and death for the region’s surviving Jews) but the bungling that followed was inexcusable. British intelligence was keen to find out what was happening in the occupied Baltic states, chiefly to know if the Soviet Union was planning a further push westwards. On 15 October 1945 it sent a boat with four agents from Sweden to Latvia on a reconnaissance mission. Unfortunately, it capsized and the men were caught and tortured to the point of insanity. Their ciphers and radio transmitters fell into the hands of Jānis Lukaševičs, a brainy officer of the Latvian KGB. Here was proof that SIS operations against the Soviet Union had restarted – but how to respond? Waiting for more spies to come and trying to hunt them down was clumsy and risky: far better to lure future British agents into a trap. The operation was labelled Lursen-S11 though it is usually called ‘Red Web’ – the name of a book in 1989 by the British author Tom Bower, who first unveiled its dark secrets.
In March 1946 Lukaševičs forced a Latvianax who had operated a radio for the British during the war to start sending messages again, claiming that the agents had given him their codes and radio before capture. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the British eventually responded. A second SIS mission to Latvia in 1946 landed two agentsay tasked with finding out what had happened to the previous mission. But the new arrivals’ transmitter proved faulty. In an even graver breach of tradecraft, SIS instructed them to make contact with the existing – KGB-controlled – radio operator. That forged a fatal link between the new British operations and the compromised network now controlled by the KGB. With one thread in the web spun, Lukaševičs did not order the men’s arrest. He wanted a bigger haul. SIS instructed its agents (now under KGB surveillance) to meet other British agents on the ground. That provided the Soviets with more leads and clues. Other efforts were equally farcical. Two more agents ended up stranded in Latvia and were arrested, along with their networks. Another émigré, Feliks Rumnieks, was instructed to return to Latvia and make contact with the KGB in order to work as a double agent. He was arrested and confessed everything.
Meanwhile the Lithuanian KGB was playing a similar game. It sponsored a rival resistance movement to the main partisan outfit.12 The bogus organisation’s underground leader was a distinguished American-born Lithuanian, Juozas Albinas Markulis, seemingly stalwart, but in fact a traitor since 1944. Such ruses not only divided and distracted the anti-communist cause abroad. They also helped uproot real resistance at home. On 18 January 1947 Markulis summoned a meeting of all the partisan leaders in Lithuania. Though Lukša – a genuine anti-communist of remarkable brains, courage and eloquence – was sceptical, others were trusting: after all, Markulis was in contact with the revered British intelligence service. The Lithuanians walked straight into a KGB ambush. In a similar ruse in Latvia, Lukaševičs arranged for fourteen senior partisan leaders to be summoned for a meeting in Riga with representatives of the ‘Latvian government-in-exile’ and a representative of the ‘British secret service’. To allay their suspicions, each leader was told to provide a photo, and in return received a valid Soviet ID card – supposedly proof of British prowess in forgery. On 13 October the unsuspecting men briefed the ‘British’ visitor on every detail of their operations. They were then arrested and never seen again.
Behind the Iron Curtain, trust in the West was still profound. An underground newspaper in Lithuania proclaimed in June 1947:
The world’s greatest scholars and most famous strategists – Eisenhower, Montgomery, Adm. Nimitz and scores of others – are gathering weapons and plans from all countries to collectively eliminate criminal-infected Moscow as the sole hindrance of freedom.13
That was an overstatement. Britain was ruined by the cost of the war. America was unwilling to face up to the new challenge in Europe. The mood began to change only after the Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948. On 18 June of that year President Harry Truman signed a fateful order in the National Security Council, tasking the newly created CIA with:
propaganda, economic warfare, preventative direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures, subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in the threatened countries of the free world.14
The first Soviet atom bomb test in August 1949 and the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 stoked interest further. In the days before spy satellites (or even spy planes, which started in 1952) and with Western diplomats in Moscow effectively imprisoned in their embassies, the outside world was acutely short of information about Soviet intentions and capabilities. Panicky politicians put huge pressure on the spymasters to do something. This was something that could be done. So they did it.
Superficially the Baltic states seemed an ideal base for anti-communist activities. The populations were solidly anti-communist. Partisan forces in the forests supposedly numbered many tens of thousands. The region was accessible by boat and plane. It was a forward bastion of Soviet military strength: if an attack on the West were pending, the signs in the Baltic would be unmistakable. The human means were plentiful: émigrés in western Germany, Britain and the United States provided a highly motivated and pl
entiful source of agents. In short, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania looked like places where it was possible both to fight communism and spy on it. The disastrous results of this wishful thinking were the SIS Operation Jungle and its CIA counterpart, initially called Operation Tilestone.15 Failure is an orphan, and nowhere more so than in espionage. When something works, it looks like an act of genius. Had Stalin died earlier and the collapse of the Soviet Union ensued, the operations could have gone down in history as prescient and brave endeavours, worthy successors to the work of SOE in occupied Europe. In fact the disaster that followed was hushed up for thirty years. Secrecy has its uses.
The CIA developed a big training facility for émigrés in Kaufbeuren in Germany. In place of makeshift camps in neutral Sweden SIS set up a spy school for its Baltic recruits at 110 Old Church St, Chelsea (now a luxury townhouse). Among those in charge was Alfons Rebane, who had led a fierce but doomed resistance to the Red Army’s re-conquest of Estonia in 1944.az Firearms practice took place in a quarry some twenty miles from London, while parachute training was based at an airport near Abingdon. The trainees practised landing from small boats on the Isle of Wight, learned unarmed combat at Fort Monckton and honed survival techniques at a commando-training base in Scotland near Ben Nevis. The training, ranging from memorisation to Morse code, secret writing, woodcraft and close combat, was excellent. The agents’ abilities in communications, tactics, weapons-handling, evasion and escape techniques and other elements of covert operations and spycraft were incomparably higher than their counterparts back home. After the first few years of fighting had thinned the ranks of the veterans, the partisans were mainly farm boys, wise in the ways of the countryside, but no match for the battle-hardened counter-insurgency troops of the KGB. Other bits of the Baltic operations were sloppier. Anthony Cavendish, a former SIS dispatch officer in Germany, recalls:
We took the agents down to the Reeperbahn, the red-light district of Hamburg, to a little bar we had selected beforehand . . . We were soon joined by heavily made-up girls and, as the serious drinking began, I headed back. About 3 am, there was violent banging on my front door . . . Two of our agents had returned but Peter [an SIS officer] and the other agent had got into a fight . . . It was only because of . . . long-standing contacts with the police that we were able to get Peter and the Latvian released into our custody.16
SIS seems not to have pondered the lessons of this incident for its selection procedures and security routines. It should also have questioned the flawed assumptions behind the whole operation.
The first of these was that the Soviet Union was indeed planning a military assault on the West, rather than struggling to deal with its colossal internal problems. Another was that the existing networks were sound. In fact they were a trap. The idea that outside agents would gain useful information about Soviet military activities in the region, let alone any insights into the authorities’ decision-making, was far-fetched. That they could engage in combat operations inside the Soviet Union was even more dubious. Were the trainees spies or commandos? Was their job to monitor Soviet troop movements or to sabotage them? From 1949 onwards, SIS tried to downplay the trainees’ role in resistance operations and stressed the importance of espionage, but this risked denting their motivation. Going home to fight the occupiers and free the homeland was a powerful incentive, but risking torture and death to snoop around for a foreign power was less compelling.
A second element of treachery was in play too. Until 1947 Kim Philby, the most senior KGB spy in the West, was the head of SIS’s Section 9, in charge of all British operations against the Soviet Union. At that point he moved to Washington, DC, to an even more sensitive role: as liaison officer between SIS and the newly formed CIA. As he later wrote:
In order to avoid the dangers of overlapping and duplication, the British and Americans exchanged precise information about the timing and geographical coordinates of their operations. I do not know what happened to the parties concerned. But I can make an informed guess.17
As Britain and America marched deeper into the bog, the KGB became bolder. In October 1948 Lukaševičs organised the bogus ‘escape’ of a seasoned agent called Vidvuds Šveics, who claimed to be a representative of the Latvian resistance. In retrospect, that seems an obvious dangle and a leading Latvian activist in Stockholm working with SIS was immediately suspicious.18 But in another grotesque breach of tradecraft, Šveics was put in charge of a six-strong group (two from each of the three countries) trained by SIS. Worse, he was given a list of local sympathisers – just the people that the KGB most wished to catch. When his team landed near the Lithuanian resort of Palanga on 1 May Šveics separated from the others and alerted the border guards, who killed both Estonians and one of the Latvians. The others fled. Šveics sent a cipher message telling SIS that he had made a miraculous escape. By the year-end the entire network was under KGB control, though still, in the eyes of the British spymasters, operating and intact. The next expedition of the beefed-up operation was in October 1949, when a group of the elaborately trained recruits landed in Latvia to be met by KGB agents posing as resistance fighters. In London, SIS celebrated a successful landing.
The Americans were making mistakes too. They were starting from ‘virtually empty’ files: little more than whatever pre-war reference books and press cuttings could be found in the Library of Congress. Harry Rositzke, a senior CIA officer, noted: ‘Even the most elementary facts were unavailable – on roads and bridges, on the location and production of factories, on city plans and airfields.’19 Incoming intelligence was little help. ‘Most of it was trivial, much of it spotty, garbled or out of date.’ Amid the ignorance grew panic. Western military planners believed, wrongly, that Soviet forces were capable of reaching the English Channel in a matter of weeks. By late 1949, they reckoned that Soviet bombers could drop nuclear weapons on America. Rositzke recalls a military officer banging the table in the Pentagon and shouting: ‘I want an agent with a radio on every goddamn airfield between Berlin and the Urals!’ Faced with utterly impractical demands, America’s spy chiefs too threw caution (and ethics) to the winds,20 recruiting hundreds of émigrés for parachute drops into communist-ruled Europe, from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Among them were some notorious Nazi war criminals, including senior Nazis such as Otto von Bolschwing, a close associate of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust.21 This was not an oversight: German wartime intelligence had been excellent, and retained useful assets and insights in the East. The price was American moral credibility. It became a lot easier for Soviet propagandists to say that the West was crawling with fascists when Nazi collaborators were facing promotion, not punishment.
In the Baltics American efforts centred on the charismatic (and entirely honourable) Lukša, who had returned from Lithuania deeply worried about KGB penetration of the resistance. In January 1949 America flew Lithuanian émigré leaders to Washington, DC, to sign a formal agreement with the CIA, backed by an annual grant of $40,000. Meanwhile the SIS-backed Lithuanians were falling deeper into the KGB’s grasp. From being unwittingly under Soviet control, they were now working hand-in-hand with the country’s occupiers. Despite warning signals – a failure to answer a trick question and a failed assassination attempt on SIS’s top Lithuanian in Stockholm – Britain failed to notice anything amiss. The CIA was misreading the signs too: Lukša’s final mission to Lithuania was unsuccessful, because the partisans were by now so weak that collecting intelligence, let alone fighting the Soviets, was difficult. Quite unfairly, the Americans worried that Lukša’s lacklustre reporting showed that he had been turned or betrayed. The British-backed agents seemed to be doing so much better. The outcome could hardly have been better for the KGB: the British suspected that the American operation was leaky; the Americans suspected the British. Carr flew to Washington to have it out with Rositzke. The exchange between the two Harrys ran as follows:
R: Do we know which of these operations is already under Russian control?
&nbs
p; C: Ours isn’t.
R: How can you be so sure that your agent isn’t under control?
C: We’re sure.
R: But how can you be?
C: Because we’ve made our checks. Our group is watertight.
R: So’s ours, but one group is penetrated.
C: Harry, I think we know our business on this one.22
Carr could hardly have been more wrong. Britain was making the biggest bungles imaginable, with a flawed concept, weak operational planning, poor assessment and sloppy compartmentalisation. Worse, the notetaker at this meeting was none other than Kim Philby.ba The reaction that his account of this top-secret meeting aroused among his controllers in Moscow can only be imagined.
By 1949, the Baltic resistance was effectively over. Collectivisation of agriculture and the accompanying mass deportations had all but destroyed the partisans’ food supplies and support networks. Cruelty against those who continued to resist was extreme:
Extreme forms of torture, quartering, tongue-cutting, eye-gouging, burying heads down in ant hills, etc., were employed to break the fighters. Mutilated corpses were dumped in town squares – and reactions of passers-by were surreptitiously observed in an attempt to identify relatives and friends.23