Art of Betrayal

by Gordon Corera

  It did not take long before the search for Nazi scientists who could help in the future superseded the desire to deliver justice for the past.82 There were few rules as each of the four occupying powers raced to grab the individuals behind Germany’s industrial and scientific advances, many of whom had become members of the SS. Their secrets would be shared openly with commercial companies back home.83 The top targets were experts on biological and chemical warfare, electronics, guided weapons, aerodynamics and underwater warfare.84

  Daphne Park had two half-colonels and a major who were specialists in rockets working for her along with a sergeant major and twenty drivers, as well as a terrifying woman from the Auxiliary Territorial Service who bullied Park mercilessly but licked her into shape.85 Park’s lack of German led to a few problems. She was told of one professor who had worked on guided missiles and was now living in the depths of a forest in a Hansel-and-Gretel-type cottage. When she arrived, he proved very excited to see her and enthusiastically started drawing diagrams and talking about flights. Park picked up the word ‘Blumen’ which she thought meant flowers. So she woke up her dozing sergeant and told him to listen properly and translate. He explained that unfortunately the professor was studying the flight path of the bumble-bee rather than the V2 rocket.86

  In Germany, where the battle for scientific secrets was fiercest, everyone played dirty. German industrialists were ‘invited’ to Britain and then interned and not allowed out until they had spilled commercial secrets to their British rivals.87 The Americans were more than happy to take on for their own rocket programme men who had developed the V2 rockets that had bombed London. In Austria, there were desperate attempts to get rocket scientists and research chemists out of the Russian zone before the Russians got their hands on them. ‘It was quite important to get there fast because if the Russians got there first they simply kidnapped them and took them away and they were never seen again,’ recalled Park.88

  Vienna was a lawless city in which the police could not always be trusted and in which the rules of the Cold War espionage game had yet to be codified. As a result, the city was known to spies as ‘the shooting gallery’ – a body found in a park or floating in the Danube was an everyday occurrence. Amid the darkened alleys of Vienna, one fear in particular haunted not just those involved in the secret world but ordinary citizens. And that was kidnap. It had begun immediately after the war when people suspected of being involved in certain German units or helping the Nazis disappeared (one woman who had allegedly been a Gestapo informer was kidnapped from her apartment rolled in a rug). As the Soviets lost control of the Viennese police, the trend intensified for targeted kidnapping.89 By 1948 the spate of kidnappings had become a hot political issue with up to three people a day disappearing.90 Increasingly the victims were those suspected of being spies for the West. One Austrian public official was forced into a waiting car on his way home in December 1947 and never seen again. An English university student was kidnapped after a spurned lover told the Soviets she was the mastermind of an alleged ring of British intelligence agents.91 In all, 400 people were kidnapped in three years, most by the Soviets, although the Americans were not averse to kidnapping people in the Soviet zone and taking them west.92

  The US and UK were particularly worried about the pattern of kidnapping, which suggested that Moscow was looking for help in building an atomic bomb.93 America’s bomb was its only counter to the perceived conventional strength of the Red Army. Intelligence officers were sent out with the specific remit of finding out what scientists the Soviets were after as a clue to understanding their progress. MI6 had found intelligence that the Soviets were mining uranium near the Czech border with Germany and there were reports of further deposits sought in Bulgaria, leading to urgent intelligence-gathering operations to investigate further. One of the more popular of the multitude of swindles employed by those on the make in Vienna were those of the ‘uranium salesmen’ who swamped Britain and America with ‘samples’ wrapped up in cotton stuffed into pill bottles and the promise of more.94 The failure to predict the Soviet atomic test of 1949 only increased paranoia about what else lay unknown. What London and Washington would only slowly realise was that the Soviets had help from inside the West’s own atomic programme, thanks to Klaus Fuchs and Bruno Pontecorvo, whose Communist pasts had been overlooked or ignored.95

  Daphne Park watched the Russians’ ruthlessness with horror but also with growing fascination. ‘Many of the scientists were being kidnapped by the Russians. It was this that made me want to learn Russian and serve in the Soviet Union, and see what it was really like there,’ she later recalled. ‘I watched them swallow up Czechs, Poles – people I had known. I wanted to meet and understand the people who lived under such a regime.’96 She would get her chance. Daphne Park’s stint in Vienna was short-lived. One day a woman turned up and explained that her friend, who happened to be a Russian major, was being sent home but he was reluctant to return. Would Daphne Park see him? She went to pay a visit to the members of the MI6 station with whom she occasionally worked. They were extremely interested. But they had some trouble finding an escape route fast enough. Daphne used her military contacts to get the Russian out. That got her noticed. George Kennedy Young decided she had what it took. In 1948, in a brief nod to the modern world which would not be repeated for another two decades, she became one of the only women to be allowed to join MI6. She was made the stay-behind officer for Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In a small office, under particularly tight security, she acted as the point of contact for the stations, including the work of Anthony Cavendish, who respected her as capable, if a touch ‘unfeminine’. Her year and a half in Vienna was formative for a woman who would eventually rise to become a controller at MI6. Decades later when she was asked where her deep-seated and vociferous hatred of Communism and the Soviet regime – which she always called simply ‘the enemy’ – came from, she would answer, ‘I had seen them on the streets of Vienna and how they behaved and I felt anger.’97

  As the Red Army had driven west at the end of the war, a vast tide of refugees had been pushed before it. And then as the Iron Curtain began to fall, thousands more came. Across Austria at least a million Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, Yugoslavs, Cossacks and White Russians had settled into huge Displaced Persons camps. Thousands had been collaborators with the Nazi regime, including war criminals who had been part of SS units drawn from anti-Communist elements in local populations. Others were deserters from the Red Army. Others simply did not want to live under Communism. Some, like the White Russians, had been fleeing and fighting the Communists since the Revolution of 1917. The Soviets wanted them all back and, to their later shame, initially the Allies agreed, shoving many of them into boxcars for transportation to the Russians.98 Some Cossacks killed themselves and their children rather than return. The Soviet Union also sent out their feared SMERSH (the name meaning ‘death to spies’) counter-intelligence teams to hunt for collaborators and enemies of the state. In one case it even appears that a British officer sold out a group of White Russian generals in Austria to SMERSH in exchange for fourteen kilos of gold.99

  Vienna’s role as a refuge, albeit an insecure one, for those fleeing Communism made it home to a bewildering series of front organisations representing the differing émigré groups. MI6 and the CIA would work closely with these as they scoured the camps in search of agents and intelligence from the East. One of these groups was based at an MI6 safe house at Weyringergasse, not far from the border with the Russian zone. It had the feel of a busy railway station with a constant bustle of young, idealistic Hungarians heading back and forth over the border. Some acted as couriers, others were gathering information and contacting friends, others organising resistance groups. At the centre of the web was Béla Bajomi, a Hungarian who had fled by clinging to the underside of a railway carriage after the Second World War to begin working with MI6.100 As with other émigré groups, they ran their own intelligence-gathering networks and had knocked at the
door of the CIA and MI6 asking for help and offering assistance, promising that the local population was ready to rise up. The Soviets were obsessed with these émigré groups and expended enormous amounts of effort in targeting them. Occasionally, they succeeded. In autumn 1947, a whole MI6-sponsored network in Hungary was rolled up and a hundred people arrested after an ‘unfortunate mishap’.101

  One evening Bajomi received an urgent message from a Hungarian colleague who said he was heading for a safe house. Next morning there was no sign of him. An elderly Austrian taxi-driver said he had seen someone being shoved into a car with Russian number plates. An unknown voice telephoned and asked for Bajomi two days later. The caller said the Russians had been unable to get his friend to their zone and offered information to help organise a rescue. He told Bajomi to meet him one block from the Russian zone. Bajomi took a loaded revolver. He arrived just before 11. In the silence and gloom, he walked past bomb-damaged, baroque flats to a drab grey building. All the windows were dark except two on the top floor. He went through heavy oak double doors into a corridor, lit dimly by a yellowish light, up the staircase to the top floor where the lights were on, drawing his revolver. As he approached the door, he heard Russian voices and began to move backwards to make a run for it. The door crashed open and uniformed Russians ran towards him. Others approached from the other end of the corridor. Two men grabbed him and hit him in the face. A hand was placed over his mouth. A voice said in Hungarian, ‘Now we have got you as well. You are the real prize.’

  He was bundled into a car and taken back to Hungary. Later, in a Budapest prison, he recounted the story of his capture to members of the resistance network he had helped organise. Many of them were barely out of their teens — his son was one of them. They had been providing the bread-and-butter, low-grade intelligence that MI6 was so eager to consume. But their letters – written with secret ink and posted to the safe house in Vienna – had been intercepted. They had risked their lives to establish the position of a bus terminal, the registration of a Soviet vehicle or the production figures for milk and butter and they were now in jail. Paul Gorka had been passing on details of heavy industry. He had recruited colleagues, friends, relatives and his own girlfriend. In jail, some said they had been ambushed as they crossed the Iron Curtain. One spoke of a British Field Security officer in a small village restaurant giving him a map and telling him to take a particular route. He found the Hungarian Secret Police waiting for him. One day Gorka saw Béla Bajomi through the small inspection hole of his cell. ‘We and all of us, here and abroad, have been betrayed by members of the British Intelligence Service at a very high level,’ the frail man with blond-white hair and a blue-and-white-striped prisoner’s uniform told him. In April 1951, Bajomi was executed, a prison guard gloating about it to his son. The CIA also found that most of its agents were rounded up within a few hundred feet of the barbed wire in Hungary. The remaining few who made it over provided almost no intelligence.102

  The Americans were newcomers in the intelligence game. But their rising influence, compared to a weary, near-bankrupt Britain, was quickly evident in Vienna, whether in small ways like the ready supplies of chocolate and cigarettes provided to agents or the much more significant largesse of the Marshall Plan, which provided billions of dollars to help reconstruct Europe. MI6 officers noted that in the competition for agents the Americans were ‘paying enormous sums as retainers’.103 Occupation had brought competition for information, and competition drove the market. One Viennese hotel porter worked simultaneously for money for the American, British, Soviet and French services while also working on the side for free for his own country.104

  The CIA was young but persistent and determined. Even if it was initially naive, it learnt fast. Like the British, it was also desperate. ‘What you have to remember is that in the beginning, we knew nothing,’ Richard Helms, the official responsible for the region and a future head of the CIA, remembered later. ‘Our knowledge of what the other side was up to, their intentions, their capabilities, was nil, or next to it.’ Helms later reckoned that at least half the information on the USSR and Eastern Europe in the CIA’s files was fabricated and that the Berlin and Vienna stations had become ‘factories of fake intelligence’.105 Until 1952 the CIA did not have a single Russian-speaking case officer in town.106 ‘The Austrian station has one real mission and a bucket of marginal responsibilities, many of them bilge,’ Helms told one officer on his way to Vienna. ‘Your job is to recruit Russians. Until we’ve done that, we’ve failed. I don’t care how many reports the station sends in on the Czech Communist Party or Hungarian order of battle. Our basic job is to penetrate the Soviet establishment – that’s the only way we’ll get the answers the White House is screaming for.’107

  It was in Vienna that the CIA finally managed their first serious penetration into Russian intelligence anywhere in the world, their first chance to run an agent who was willing to remain in place and provide information rather than just defect. On New Year’s Day 1953, a tense man approached a car carrying the American Vice-Consul in the international sector and asked for directions. He dropped a note before leaving. It read: ‘I am a Soviet officer. I wish to meet with an American officer with the object of offering certain services.’108 It offered a location for a meeting and a fall-back if that failed. CIA surveillance teams staked out the location for a blind date and found a stocky officer from a peasant background called Pyotr Popov who worked for Russian military intelligence, the GRU. His motivations were hardly high-minded – he was lonely and out of place, conscious of his illiterate background. He also liked to drink. A Serbian woman from the refugee camps who had been his agent had become his mistress and needed an abortion (the CIA would eventually pay for three terminations). A CIA psychologist would later describe him as a ‘delayed adolescent’ who had found the opportunity to pursue his impulses amid the relative freedoms of Vienna and its exposure to the West.109

  The CIA sent out George Kisevalter to handle him, a bear of a man whose fondness for a drink would later get him into trouble. He had been born in Russia but his family had never returned after the Revolution. He was despatched to Vienna where, after a nervous first meeting, he quickly built on a natural empathy with Popov. ‘The only thing is treat me like a human being,’ Popov told Kisevalter.110 The two would meet a hundred times in the next six years. Popov had little information on the Soviet leadership or its intentions but did pass on voluminous details of Soviet operations in Vienna including the names of many of the seventy KGB officers stationed there, allowing a huge chart to be drawn up. Photographs were added to the wall (in their absence many sources when asked what someone looked like would normally reply ‘like a Russian’).111 CIA headquarters at one point asked the team to have Popov organise a resistance group among fellow Soviets. It was an absurd idea that would have risked exposing his work and underscored the still amateurish approach to running agents adopted by Western intelligence agencies. Popov refused angrily, and for years the phrase ‘a small, tightly knit resistance group’ became code in the CIA office in Vienna for ‘another wildly unrealistic idea from headquarters’.112

  Vienna was so much smaller than Berlin that rival intelligence teams would often come to know each other by sight, literally bumping into each other in the alleys. Sometimes British Field Security teams would stop at traffic lights and see next to them a team of Russian footsloggers (as their surveillance men were known). There would be a nod of the head between the driver of a smart, new Soviet BMW and that of a clapped-out British Austin. It was only a short walk around the Innere Stadt’s Ring Road from the British base at the Sacher to the less cosy and more imposing Imperial Hotel which, along with the Grand Hotel opposite, was the base for the Soviets and the KGB.

  Everything was done by the British to get a sense of what was going on beyond the marble and chandeliered reception of the Imperial. At one point, two Austrian cleaners were bribed to bring out all the rubbish, but the Russians soon spotted the dange
r. A photo-observation point was set up in an office opposite to snap anyone emerging and add them to a bulging file that an intelligence officer would frequently thumb through. One New Year’s Eve, some of the junior British Field Security team thought they would share a bit of the festive joy with their Soviet counterparts. They broke protocol and called the Soviet High Command in the Imperial to wish them a happy new year. Their jollity was met with a short reply in a thick Russian accent: ‘Don’t provoke.’ And the line went dead.

  One of those KGB officers, an opposite number to Cavendish at the time he was in Vienna, would play the starring role in one of the most tortuous chapters in the history of the British Secret Service. For those coming from the West, Vienna was drab and dreary, but as Anatoly Golitsyn arrived by train, all he could see were well-dressed, happy-looking people and shops – with no queues outside – filled with goods.113 Golitsyn, possessed of a powerful belief in his own abilities, had been born in August 1926 in a small town in the Ukraine. He had grown up with pigs and chickens roaming around the quiet dusty streets. But when he was four the great famine, heightened by Stalin’s collectivisation of farms, left corpses rotting amid the cherry trees and led his family to Moscow.