Deception

by Edward Lucas

  Western spymasters seemed quite unaware of the disaster. In the spring of 1951, SIS, with Swedish help, sent four new agents to the Latvian coast. Unbeknown to the spymasters in London, one was a traitor planted earlier by the KGB. SIS had prudently ordered the Estonian agent to head straight for his own country rather than make contact with the Latvian group. But nobody in the Estonian KGB was prepared to take the risk of allowing the SIS man to complete even the semblance of his mission there. Instead, they arrested him. He swallowed a cyanide capsule. His code name was ‘Gustav’ but his real name is unknown. In 1952 more SIS-trained agents came ashore, including one with some excellent forgeries of Soviet passports, which were of great interest to the KGB. With a proper crop of such documents to examine, they could see what errors or omissions to look for. At least according to the KGB museum in Moscow, one such telltale was the high quality of staples used to hold the documents together. In the Soviet Union, these were made of cheap iron which left traces of rust. Western forgeries used staples made with stainless steel. Even if the paper, cover, ink and stamps were perfect, the lack of rust and shiny steel fasteners were a lethal giveaway.

  Undeterred, Rebane recruited more agents, speaking of the ‘holy duty’ of resistance to the occupiers. One such recruit was a hapless young man called Mart Männik. He had been working in a cotton mill in Preston in the north of England – one of the many displaced Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians starting new lives in the West. Rebane told him:

  A resistance organisation has been activated and is operating now, principally on the basis of the forest brothers who conduct an underground struggle against the Russian occupiers with the aim of restoring the Estonian Republic. For us, foreign Estonians, it is a holy duty to support this struggle in every way possible. Unfortunately, we do not have a link with the motherland so that at any price we need to create this . . . Therefore, we are forced to work together with the English, who on certain conditions set by themselves are ready to assist us materially.

  The conditions are: obtaining every type of intelligence information concerning the Soviet Union. We must of course agree with these conditions, all the more so since this does not damage our endeavours, but on the contrary, it will be useful for us. So, the English have now created within their intelligence services a so-called Baltic Group. . .we are totally under their management. . . our only resource [is] brave and enterprising Estonian men who would be ready to carry out this difficult mission.24

  Männik agreed readily. Rebane explained that he would be posted to Estonia for a year to eighteen months. Equipped with four radios, codebooks, forged Soviet documents, weapons, 2,000 cartridges and 150,000 Soviet roubles, his group successfully landed in Latvia in late September 1951. By now the Estonian KGB was following the example of its Latvian counterparts. It housed the arrivals in an elaborate network of bunkers and safe houses, complete with ‘colleagues’ from the supposed resistance movement, including an old friend of Rebane’s who had been turned by the KGB. On 3 February Männik and his colleague were invited to a party in a Tallinn suburb where he was given drugged vodka and captured.

  Despite the brilliance of Lukaševičs and his colleagues, the deception operation was endangered by the feebleness of the intelligence being gathered. Lukša had provided Sweden with extensive information about political and economic conditions25 and gave the CIA an excellent report about a secret radio installation.26 To keep the operation credible, Lukaševičs urgently needed to provide more real secrets. But in the paranoid world of Soviet intelligence nobody was willing to take that risk. For example when SIS wanted details of ships docking at the Latvian port of Ventspils, the Soviet defence ministry insisted that the data be deliberately understated. Lukaševičs protested: foreign vessels used the port too so the information could be cross-checked. If the estimates were too low, they would dent the operation’s credibility. But Moscow was adamant. Unsurprisingly, SIS analysts in London did notice problems with the data and sent a stern message along with some more demanding tasks.

  Compounding the growing unease in some quarters was the absence of trouble. Some seasoned SIS officers had noted that American and British efforts in Ukraine, Albania and Romania had ended in dismal failure. Why was the Baltic operation so curiously successful? An SIS officer of Lithuanian extraction, John Ludzius, was one of those sounding the alarm. But the obsessively secretive Harry Carr, smugly over-confident despite his lamentable failures in the interwar years, enjoyed the personal backing of the then SIS chief, John ‘Sinbad’ Sinclair. Ludzius was posted to the Far East.

  Yet the worries were growing anew. In any clandestine operation, snags signal health and their absence should be profoundly troubling. The new CIA director, General Walter Bedell ‘Beetle’ Smith became convinced in 1951 that the lavishly financed covert operations against the communist bloc were in urgent need of scrutiny. He charged an old friend, General Lucian Truscott, to re-examine the whole programme.27 In early 1952, having inspected the training facilities, Truscott was horrified, particularly at the links to the heavily penetrated émigré organisations. An assistant, Tom Polgar, noted that Hitler’s 270 divisions had failed to topple Soviet power. How were a ragtag army of lightly armed guerrillas supposed to do any better? All their missions were proving, he scoffed, was the law of gravity. Drop agents out of aeroplanes and they would fall to the ground.

  The American spymasters were unmoved. Rositzke thought that the scale of the operation must be causing nightmares in the Soviet leadership: even if they mopped up most of the agents, in a totalitarian system countering the slightest risk of subversion would consume huge resources. ‘Those in the Kremlin must be scared shitless,’ he said.bb Caution was out of fashion and money was plentiful.bc The Baltic operations seemed at least in terms of volume to be the most promising. General Eisenhower himself visited the Baltic agents to assure them of his support. The operation continued, with parachute drops supplementing the midnight naval excursions favoured by SIS. A new American case officer, Paul Hartman, took charge, telling his trainees to ignore ‘nationalist rubbish’ and concentrate on real spying. Three of his agents parachuted into Latvia on 30 August 1952, with the promise of a $15,000 bonus if they returned safely. Two were caught; one committed suicide, the second surrendered. The thirdbd could have reported the truth: the partisans were defeated and the KGB in full control. Unfortunately, he proved to be an inadequate spy. He tracked down an old girlfriend and spent his operational funds on entertaining her. When he was picked up during a routine document check, the KGB determined that he had not transmitted any substantial intelligence. Armed with his codes and radio, it was able to spin the Red Web to include the Americans too.

  Increasing political pressure heightened the chances of failure. John Foster Dulles, soon to become secretary of state, had denounced mere containment of communism as ‘negative, futile and immoral’; it consigned ‘countless human beings to despotism and godless terrorism’ and enabled the Soviets to ‘forge their captives into a weapon of our destruction’. Over at the CIA his brother Allen called for a ‘spiritual crusade’ for the liberation of Eastern Europe. As Tom Bower notes in Red Web:

  At the very moment when the overwhelming majority of the CIA’s and SIS’s covert operations in Russia and the satellite countries was proving disastrous, the politicians were clamouring for more.28

  The efforts were producing no usable intelligence and showed no sign of destabilising Soviet rule. The best agents were dead, such as Lukša, betrayed and killed in 1951.be Soviet propagandists were regularly publishing gleeful exposés of captured agents, with details of their training and missions. Meanwhile SIS was reeling from the news that two British diplomats, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, had been unmasked as Soviet spies. The case against Philby was unproven, but the CIA had demanded his recall from Washington. It would have been a good time to pull back and submit all operations involving the Soviet Union, émigrés and partisans to cold, clear-headed scrutiny. But Carr and his colle
agues pressed on.

  betray his leader, whose grave has never been found. Soviet propagandists were regularly publishing gleeful exposés of captured agents, with details of their training and missions. Meanwhile SIS was reeling from the news that two British diplomats, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, had been unmasked as Soviet spies. The case against Philby was unproven, but the CIA had demanded his recall from Washington. It would have been a good time to pull back and submit all operations involving the Soviet Union, émigrés and partisans to cold, clear-headed scrutiny. But Carr and his colleagues pressed on.

  It also would have been tempting for the KGB to use the bogus networks to plant disinformation – perhaps to scare the West into wasting resources, or even to give phoney reassurance about the benign intentions of the Soviet leadership. But the KGB aim was narrower and deeper: first to distract and then to penetrate SIS and the CIA. The next stage was to send a seasoned KGB officer to the West. The choice was a man named Jānis Ērglis who had long fought the partisans in the forests of Latvia, and was now tasked with impersonating one. He ‘escaped’ to Sweden, convinced the intelligence service there of his bona fides, and then moved to Germany where, after feigning reluctance, he was recruited by SIS. After training he returned to Latvia, this time as leader of a group of four agents. Thus the KGB not only controlled the activities of the British agents; it was able to stage-manage them too. Flickers of discontent among the unfortunate genuine agents sent to Latvia had no chance of reaching London.

  Lukaševičs next arranged for misfortunes to befall two of the genuine London-trained agents. Instead of smelling a rat, SIS decided to send replacements, receiving another phoney partisan, a radio operator called ‘Edmundas’, as well as a fiery and effective fighterbf, whose desire to kill communists had strained the patience of his hosts. The KGB then sent a heavyweight ‘ambassador’ from the phoney partisans to London, who solemnly negotiated a deal with SIS and the émigré authorities, dividing ministerial portfolios in a putative independent Latvia. He returned home with a colossal cache of money – around a million roubles. Lukaševičs was later to boast that a total of 3.5m roubles from the British taxpayer had financed his entire deception operation. Real agents, such as a brave young Latvian CIA man called Leonids Zariņš, paid the biggest price of these games. He was parachuted into Latvia alone on 14 May 1953. But the CIA shared details with SIS, which took no precautions to keep the information secret from others in the operation. Zariņš walked straight into a trap and perished in a Siberian prison camp. His family, who believed their son was working for Bell Telephone, was told that he had died in an air crash in Austria.

  But the KGB was becoming a victim of its own success. London requested a sample of water from the Tobol River, near the site of the reactor that produced the Soviet Union’s plutonium. The idea that a partisan, with forged papers or none at all, could emerge from a forest bunker and cross and recross the Soviet Union successfully, via a tightly guarded nuclear installation, was so bizarre that only a spy chief could have conceived it. But the Soviet response was equally incompetent. Told to provide some radioactive water, KGB technicians (presumably poorly briefed) decided to show off. They produced ‘river water’ of such lethal radioactivity that it could only have been created actually inside the core of a reactor. Once that was analysed in London, it was finally clear that something was seriously amiss. America commissioned an independent investigation and ended its operation in 1954. Operation Jungle limped on for two more years. A final message to the partisans in 1956 read:

  We can no longer help you. Will be sending no further physical or material help. All safe houses are blown . . .This is our last message until better times. We will listen to you until 30 June. Thereafter God help you.

  By this stage the real partisan forces numbered only a few thousand. Exhausted and demoralised, with their national identity being eradicated by the occupation29 and with no sign of the hoped-for Third World War in sight, their mood was bitter. The failure of the West to support the Hungarian uprising in 1956 was the last straw: in the words of the Estonian historian Mart Laar, ‘they finally realised that the white ships were not coming’. Elena Jučiūtė, a Lithuanian dissident deported for fifteen years for her ‘anti-Soviet’ activities, wrote in her diary that:

  the Western states, which speak so many beautiful words about human rights, the right of national self-determination, freedom, humanitarianism. . .were unwilling to support with a firm word a small nation, heroically fighting for its freedom. None of us had expected such turpitude from the free world; we had a better opinion of them, and for this reason, the disappointment was devastating.30

  By the end it was only the brutality of the Soviet authorities that kept the spark of resistance alive: if death in battle was bad, capture was far worse. A dry medical account of the wounds on the body of the American-born last leader of the Lithuanian partisan movement Adolfas Ramanauskas, codenamed Vanagas (Hawk), finally captured with his wife in October 1956 and tortured for a year before his execution on 9 November 1957, gives an indication of the horrors that awaited the inmates of the KGB’s dungeons:

  The right eye is covered with haematomas, on the eyelid there are six stab wounds made, judging by their diameter, by a thin wire or nail going deep into the eyeball. Multiple haematomas in the area of the stomach, a cut wound on a finger of the right hand. The genitalia reveal the following: a large tear wound on the right side of the scrotum and a wound on the left side, both testicles and spermatic ducts are missing.31

  Probably the last active partisans, the Lithuanians Antanas Kraujelis and Pranas Končius, were hunted down in 1965; a few others continued living illegally in the forests or concealed in family members’ houses for years after that. Jānis Pīnups, a Latvian, lived underground during the entire fifty-year period of Soviet occupation, emerging from his ‘illegal’ existence only after the last Russian troops withdrew from the Baltic in 1994.32

  In all, Operation Jungle sent at least forty-two Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians back to their homelands, usually in the small hours of moonless summer nights. Not only was their own fate tragic: their presence was toxic to their cause. If they made contact with genuine partisans, the result was disaster. It stoked Soviet paranoia and discredited the West. The bravery of the resistance proved less inspiring to later dissidents than the legacy of failure. The demoralisation in SIS, and corrosion of trust with the CIA, was lasting. For those inside the Soviet empire, the idea that the West was a reliable ally in the struggle against communism – and even that the struggle was worth waging – had taken a beating. In the West, the knowledge that the Soviet side had so easily penetrated the anti-Soviet operation, probably right from the beginning, was a huge hurdle for anyone suggesting anything bold in the coming years. That glum mood was compounded when news broke of the treachery of Kim Philby. It was easy to think that Western spies, particularly British ones, were worse than useless.

  The great puzzle of Operation Jungle, and of its American and Swedish counterparts, is who at what stage on the Western side realised that the operations were blown, and how they reacted. The conventional account, as outlined by Tom Bower in Red Web, suggests all-encompassing naivety and incompetence. But it does not quite fit all the facts. One fragment of possible evidence for an alternative version of events comes from Mart Männik’s memoirs. Confronted by his captors with every detail of his mission, the resourceful SIS man soon realised that the entire operation had been a sinister farce from the moment he set foot in Estonia. Yet he did not despair, instead working out if by any means he could warn Rebane, thus at least sparing the lives of other Estonians in London. In mid 1953, having spent the intervening months in a prison cell teaching himself Russian from Soviet propaganda books, Männik was instructed to send some messages back to London. After sending seven flawless ones, he claims he carefully inserted a secret code (using the three-dot ‘S’ in Morse code rather than the four-dot ‘H’). This was a signal agreed with Rebane in case h
e found himself having to make a forced transmission.

  He sent a second signal during a meeting with ‘Albert’, an Estonian partisan unaware of the KGB deception operation who was being sent back to Britain. Männik’s job was to reassure him. Instead, risking torture and death, he did the opposite, snatching a chance to whisper: ‘Tell Robert (Rebane’s code name), and only him, that “H” has been “S” from the very beginning.’ It is not clear if the message was understood or got through. In interviews with Estonian officials after 1991 ‘Albert’ maintained that he had not heard any such words from Männik.bg But other warnings did get through. Several other SIS men had on their return to London expressed suspicions about their ‘partisan’ hosts. Ludis Upāns, the real partisan returned to London in 1952 by his KGB hosts because of his excessive zeal, later claimed that he had told SIS that the resistance was bogus.33 A KGB man sent to London in 1954 posing as a partisan leader was confronted with the puzzle of the radioactive water and suggested that perhaps one group of partisans had been penetrated, while his own was sound. In 1955 Rebane was alerted personally by a former wartime comrade, turned by the KGB and sent to lure him back to Estonia for a show trial, who confessed his mission during a drunken evening. At least two phoney partisans brought to London had been spotted by chance as communist collaborators by other émigrés.

  It is quite possible, as Bower argues, that SIS simply ignored such warnings because self-deception and self-interest overlapped. But continuing with Operation Jungle may have also been a master-stroke of reverse deception. If the KGB could be made to believe it had fooled the British completely, it would greatly increase the chance of running real operations. One piece of evidence comes from Captain Bernhard Nelberg, an Estonian refugee in London, who in August 1950 wrote to his country’s ambassador, August Torma (himself on SIS’s books) to say that he was going on a dangerous mission during which he might be captured or killed by the Soviets. In that event, he said, he bequeathed his property to the Estonian embassy in London. (This was maintaining a precarious existence on the fringes of official diplomacy. It still had staff and a building, and plenty of work. But the country it represented had been wiped from the map.)34 Although I can find no trace of Captain Nelberg’s mission, it was not part of Operation Jungle.