Deception

by Edward Lucas

  18 Memoirs of a British Agent by Robert Bruce Lockhart (Putnam, 1932), p. 314. In accounts at the time his surname (depending on who is writing it) was given variously as Šmithens (in Latvian); Shmegkhen or Shmidkhen (in Russian transliteration, the former probably garbled) or ‘Smidchen’. Had he written it in Latvian, his real name was probably Jānis Buikis. At any rate, he was to play a vital role in the first big British intelligence fiasco of post-imperial Russia. Lockhart was a notorious frequenter of nightclubs. During a later stint in Prague, he even had a cocktail named after him, involving hefty slugs of brandy and champagne. Sadly, by the time I moved to Prague in 1989, all memory of this heroic drink had been lost.

  19 Bennett, p. 48.

  20 The March of Time, p. 129. Orlov notes: ‘Reilly fell into two major errors, ignorance and wishful thinking, which if combined with reckless courage, spell tragedy.’

  21 Brook-Shepherd, p.107.

  22 Judd, p. 426.

  23 Red Dusk and the Morrow. Adventures and Investigations in Red Russia, by Sir Paul Dukes KBE (Doubleday, 1922). Downloadable at http://www.archive.org/stream/redduskandmorro1dukegoog#page/n8/mode/2up, p. 7.

  24 Jeffery, p. 175.

  25 Brook-Shepherd, p. 133.

  26 A lively account of Dukes’s mission can be found in Operation Kronstadt (Arrow, 2010) by the pseudonymous former SIS officer Harry Ferguson.

  27 Brook-Shepherd, p. 135.

  28 The Last Englishman by Roland Chambers (paperback edn, Faber & Faber, 2010), p. 287. Shortly after Ransome returned, the Red Army defeated the ‘White’ forces under General Nikolai Yudenich. British destroyers evacuated them to a life in exile; Estonia and Soviet Russia opened talks on a peace treaty, signed in Tartu in 1920. Admiral Cowan’s squadron went home, basking in Estonian gratitude that was still heartfelt seventy years later. Ransome noted that this result represented a rare instance of being thanked for meddling in other countries’ affairs. He left with thirty-five diamonds and three strings of pearls of questionable provenance.

  29 Bennett, p. 46.

  30 Jeffery, p. 181.

  31 Bennett, p. 51.

  32 Brook-Shepherd, p. 255.

  33 Ibid, p. 288.

  34 Ibid, p. 291; the author spells his name Deribass.

  35 Bennett, pp. 43–4.

  36 Jeffery, p. 186.

  37 Ibid, p. 185.

  38 Ibid, p. 218.

  39 For a thorough treatment of this remarkable and still puzzling affair, I recommend Gill Bennett’s monograph, ‘A most extraordinary and mysterious business: The Zinoviev Letter of 1924’ http://www.fco.gov.uk/resources/en/pdf/pdf5/fco_pdf_zinovievletter1 It draws heavily on the unpublished work of Millicent Bagot, the MI5 expert on communism who was the real-life model for Connie Sachs in le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2006/jun/17/guardianobituaries.mainsection

  40 Jeffery, p. 312. In fact, the agent had the information from close friends in the East Prussian aristocracy, who had met the German negotiators on a social visit, during which they had spoken freely.

  41 Jeffery, pp. 372–3.

  42 Jeffery, pp. 192–3.

  9 BETWEEN THE HAMMER AND THE ANVIL

  1 It involved tens of thousands of fighters, pitched battles, networks of underground bunkers, elaborate command structures, education and welfare systems, propaganda newspapers and a parallel justice system. The historian Joseph Pajaujis-Javis lists the Lithuanian partisans’ goals as: (1) To prevent Sovietisation of the country by annihilating communist activists and the KGB forces in the countryside; (2) to safeguard the public order, to protect the population from robberies, either by civilians, or by Red soldiers; (3) to free political prisoners from detention wherever circumstances allowed it; (4) to enforce the boycott of the ‘elections’ to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR or to the leadership of the puppet state, and thus to prevent the falsification of the will of the Lithuanian nation and the creation of a false base for the legality of the Soviet-imposed regime; (5) to disrupt the draft of Lithuanian youth into the Red Army; (6) to obstruct the nationalisation of landed property and collectivisation of agriculture; (7) to prevent the settling of Russian colonists on the land and in the homesteads of the Lithuanian farmers deported to Siberia. From Soviet Genocide in Lithuania (Manyland Books, New York, 1980), p. 95, quoted (p. 24) in ‘Forest Brothers from the West’ by Darius Razgaitis (Boston University thesis 2002) available at http://www.mrdarius.com/fb/wfd.pdf

  2 A Tangled Web: The memoirs of an Estonian who fell into the clutches of MI6 and the KGB by Mart Männik, translated and introduced by the Earl of Carlisle (Greif Grenader Publishing, Tallinn, 2008) p. 50. http://www.scribd.com/doc/50728582/Mart-Mannik-A-Tangled-Web

  3 Quoted in The Last Ambassador by Tina Tamman (Rodopi, 2011), p. 176.

  4 See The War in the Woods by Mart Laar (Compass Press, 1992), p. 207.

  5 The partisan leader was Algirdas Vokietaitis; the intermediary was the Lithuanian diplomat and later SIS agent Vladas ‘Walter’ Žilinskas. See Pavargęs herojus, Jonas Deksnys trijų žvalgybų tarnyboje ( The Weary Hero: Jonas Deksnys in the Service of Three Intelligence Agencies) by Liūtas Mockūnas (Baltos Lankos, Vilnius, 1997), p. 138. See also Razgaitis, p. 17. This is earlier than the 1947 date given by Jeffery. Mart Laar’s book states (p. 208) that contact was re-established between SIS and the Lithuanian partisan movement in the ‘spring of 1945’. A lengthy KGB history written by Lukaševičs in 1986 gives the date as March 1943.

  6 See Toomas Hellat ja KGB ( Toomas Hellat and the KGB) by Tõnis Ritson http://riigi.arhiiv.ee/public/TUNA/Artiklid_Biblio/RitsonTonis_Toomas_Hellat_1_TUNA1998_1.pdf

  7 Having originally felt themselves buttressed by a British naval presence in the Baltic Sea and by the League of Nations’ pledge to protect small countries, the Baltic states found they had to look out for themselves. France and America were far away; Britain, having pulled out of the Baltic under a deal with Germany in 1935, was no longer to be trusted. The three small countries tried permutations of friendship with Poland, Sweden, Germany and the Soviet Union, as well as an abortive Baltic entente. None of it worked.

  8 Timothy Snyder’s book Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books/Bodley Head, 2010) is an incomparable account of the wider picture of mass murder: www.bloodlandsbook.com

  9 A shortlived Estonian government under the lawyer Otto Tief, for example, took power as the Nazis withdrew in 1944. Those of its members who could not escape were jailed. One, Arnold Susi, befriended Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in a prison camp. In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn wrote:

  [Susi] breathed a completely different sort of air. And he would tell me passionately about his own interests, and these were Estonia and democracy. And although I had never expected to become interested in Estonia, much less bourgeois democracy, I nevertheless kept listening to his loving stories of twenty free years in that modest, work-loving, small nation of big men whose ways were slow and set. I listened to the principles of the Estonian constitution, which had been borrowed from the best of European experience, and to how their hundred-member, one-house parliament had worked. And, though the ‘why’ of it wasn’t clear, I began to like it all and store it all away in my experience.

  I listened willingly to their fatal history: the tiny Estonian anvil had, from way, way back, been caught between two hammers, the Teutons and the Slavs. Blows showered on it from East and West in turn; there was no end to it, and there still isn’t. (Harper & Row edition, 1974, p. 242.)

  10 Laiškai Mylimosioms (Letters to Loved Ones) (American Foundation for Lithuanian Research, 1993), p. 10; quoted in Razgaitis, p. 20. Some had until recently been in German uniform: many Estonians and Latvians had joined (or were conscripted into) the Third Reich’s military. In a perverse bit of branding (non-Germans were not allowed to join the ‘real’ German army, the Wehrmacht), these were enlisted under the Waffen-SS logo. Though some had previously been in police and other units involved in the Holocaust, others were gui
lty only of being on the wrong side of history. The units have been confused with Hitler’s gruesome Schutzstaffel, originally the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party. The US Displaced Persons Commission in September 1950 declared that ‘The Baltic Waffen SS Units (Baltic Legions) are to be considered as separate and distinct in purpose, ideology, activities, and qualifications for membership from the German SS, and therefore the Commission holds them not to be a movement hostile to the Government of the United States.’

  As the post-war Stalinist terror intensified, the regime’s tactics became ever more cynical and brutal. The authorities repeatedly offered amnesties, but those who tried to take advantage of them were imprisoned, tortured, deported or forced to fight on the other side. Staying on the sidelines was all but impossible. Those who refused to inform on their colleagues, families and friends were themselves suspect. Taking up arms offered at least the chance of a more glorious death.

  11 Bower, p. 59–60. The later cover for the operation was the British Baltic Fishery Protection Service, based in Kiel in the British zone of Germany, and using two souped-up German Lursen E-Boats. The crew were German; the captain, Hans Helmut Klose, later became the commander-in-chief of the West German navy.

  12 The genuine movement was called VLIK – Vyriausiasis Lietuvos išlaisvinimo komitetas (Supreme Committee for the Liberation of Lithuania). The Soviet-sponsored one was VLAK – Vyriausiasis Lietuvos atstatymo komitetas (Supreme Committee for the Restoration of Lithuania). Many working for VLAK initially did not realise that it was bogus. The KGB provided flawless forged papers for its unwitting emissaries when they visited the West. Genuine partisans later made three attempts to kill the VLAK leader Markulis, until the KGB took him to a safe house in Leningrad.

  13 Partizanai Apie Pasaulį, Politiką ir Save (Partisans on the World, Politics and Themselves), ed. Nijolė Gaškaitė-Žemaitienė (Genocide and Resistance Studies Center, Vilnius, 1998), p. 95, quoted in Razgaitis, p. 30. The men and women involved in the struggle displayed a determination and optimism that can seem almost delusional to the outsider. Perhaps naively, few in the region imagined the West and the Kremlin would let the countries snuffed out by the dictators’ pact of 1939 be the biggest losers of the post-war settlement. They took at face value the words of the Atlantic Charter: self-determination for all, and that ‘territorial adjustments must be in accord with the wishes of the peoples concerned’ http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/fdr-churchill/images/atlantic-charter.gif

  14 ‘Management of Covert Actions in the Truman Presidency’ http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/ops/covert-action-truman.htm

  15 According to a fragment of declassified material, CIA operations in the region included:

  • AEBALCONY (1960–62) was designed to use US citizens with Baltic language fluency in ‘mounted’ and ‘piggy-back’ legal traveller operations into Soviet-occupied Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

  • AECOB, approved in 1950, was a vehicle for foreign intelligence operations into and within Soviet Latvia and involved infiltration and exfiltration of black agents and the recruitment of legally resident agents in the USSR, especially Latvia.

  • AEASTER was a program in near east areas to spot, recruit, and train Circassians and other Russian émigrés and send them back into the USSR.

  • AEFREEMAN (1953–64), which included AEBASIN/AEROOT (1953–60), AEFLAG (1955–62), and AEPOLE (formerly AECHAMP) (1949–59), was designed to strengthen resistance to communism and harass the Soviet regime in the Baltic countries.

  • AEBASIN/AEROOT supported Estonian émigrés and émigré activities against the Estonian SSR.

  • AEFLAG was aimed at people of the Latvian SSR.

  • AEMARSH (1953–9) involved collecting foreign intelligence on the Soviet regime in Latvia through sources residing in the Latvian SSR, legal travellers, and all possible legal means.

  • The Institute for Latvian Culture (AEMINX) was established as a cover facility engaged in the preservation and development of Latvian national culture, collection of information on Latvian national life, and the safeguarding and preserving of physical, spiritual, and moral conditions of Latvians who were separated from their homeland.

  • AEPOLE (formerly AECHAMP, formerly BGLAPIN) targeted the Lithuanian SSR. These projects provided intelligence and operational data from Baltic countries through radio broadcasts, mailing operations, liaison with émigré organizations, political and psychological briefings for legal travellers and exploitation of other media such as demonstrations.

  • AEGEAN (formerly CAPSTAN) provided FI (foreign intelligence) from the Baltic States and USSR using support bases developed in the Lithuanian SSR as transit points.

  • AEGEAN/CAPSTAN work continued under Project AECHAMP. AEMANNER (1955–8) was an operation to collect intelligence on the Lithuanian SSR by spotting, recruiting, and training Lithuanians who planned to return to Lithuania; spotting, recruiting, and training Lithuanian merchant seamen who would be on vessels calling at Lithuanian SSR ports; exploiting existing postal channels between Lithuanian SSR and the West; and interrogating persons coming out of the Lithuanian SSR.

  • ZRLYNCH was approved in 1950 for use of the Latvian Resistance Movement, which had been formed in 1944, as a vehicle for clandestine activities within the USSR. ZRLYNCH was renewed in 1952 as a part of AECOB, which then provided both FI and political and psychological activities.

  See http://www.archives.gov/iwg/declassified-records/rg-263-cia-records/second-release-lexicon.pdf and http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/ops/ussr-redsox.htm (both accessed July 2011).

  16 ‘How to be a spy’ by Anthony Cavendish, Sydney Morning Herald, 17 December 1988. A broadly similar account appears in a book by the same author, Inside Intelligence, published amidst intense official disapproval by Palu in 1987.

  17 My Silent War by Kim Philby (Panther, 1969), p. 146.

  18 Freds Launags, in the film Red Web.

  19 The CIA’s Secret Operations by Harry Rositzke (Reader’s Digest Press, 1977), p. 20.

  20 Ibid, p.17.

  21 Recruited in Operation Bloodstone. For details see Blowback by Christopher Simpson (Collier Books/Macmillan, August 1989).

  22 Bower, p. 153.

  23 Lithuania: The Outposts of Freedom by Constantine Jurgela (The National Guard of Lithuania in Exile and Valkyrie Press, 1976), p. 232. Quoted in Razgaitis, p. 40.

  24 Männik, p. 57.

  25 ‘A Review of Western Intelligence Reports Regarding The Lithuanian Resistance’, by Jonas Öhman, published as an afterword (p. 393) in a revised and updated edition of Forest Brothers, an Account of an Anti-Soviet Freedom Fighter by Juozas Lukša (Central European University Press, Budapest, 2009). ‘Swedish espionage in the Baltics 1943–1957: A study of a fiasco?’ by Peteris Ininbergs http://kau.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:5494/FULLTEXT1 (accessed July 2011). It includes an abstract in English; the rest is in Swedish.

  26 Linksmakalnis was the last Russian military installation to be decommissioned in Lithuania. Construction started in 1946, with, according to Lukša’s report, the use of Italian or Hungarian POWs (he noted that they spoke a ‘language that the local visitors did not understand’.) It included deep bunkers and a huge array of antennae, with a colossal satellite dish towering over the village. Access to outsiders was strictly forbidden. Staff there joked to locals, in its dying days, that they could connect a telephone to Fidel Castro’s private line. Pictures of the ruins can be found here http://www.urbanexploration.lt/irasai/KGB-radiozvalgybos-kompleksas-linksmakalnyje/

  27 I draw heavily here on Bower, pp. 158ff., who gives an excellent account of this.

  28 Bower, p. 164.

  29 Readers may wish to seek out a copy of the haunting and neglected Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis (Hutchinson, 1980) for an idea of what Britain would be like after decades of Soviet occupation and ‘denationing’. Pages 49–53 in the Penguin edition are strongly recommended. I am indebted to my friend Peter Hitchens for this suggestion
. An excellent fictional treatment of the psychological torment caused by the failure of the resistance can be found in Purge, a novel by the Finnish–Estonian writer Sofi Oksanen (Atlantic Books, 2011).

  30 Remeikis, p. 278.

  31 The Unknown War: Armed Anti-Soviet Resistance in Lithuania in 1944 –1953 by Dalia Kuodytė and Rokas Tracevskis, (Genocide and Resistance Museum, Lithuania, 2004).

  32 He died in 2002. ‘ Pēdējā pasaules kara pēdējais mežabrā lis’ (Last Forest Brother of the Last World War) by Māra Grīnberga, published in Diena (Riga, Latvia) 18 May 1995.

  33 I am indebted to Ritvars Jansons of the Occupation Museum in Riga for this information, based on Latvian émigrés’ unpublished correspondence.

  34 Tamman, p. 182. I would be delighted to hear from any of Capt. Nelberg’s surviving relatives.

  35 Hans Toomla and Kaljo Kukk were parachuted into Estonia on 7 May 1954. They carried, according to a KGB report:

  a machine gun with ammunition, four revolvers, two portable transmitters, ciphers and codes . . . topographical maps, cameras, blank Soviet passports, military identity cards and certificates, counterfeit seals of Soviet institutions, Swedish and Norwegian crowns and 80,00 roubles.

  A KGB statement reported in the Soviet media gives details of their capture and can be accessed in English (for a fee) here http://dlib.eastview.com/browse/doc/13847060

  36 A Secret Life by Benjamin Weiser (Public Affairs, 2004). See also www.kuklinski.us