The Soviet Union’s earliest spies inside the Foreign Office are the subject of this chapter, which is avowedly revisionist. The security failings of the Office and of the intelligence services have been treated in the terminology of class for over sixty years. Public schoolboys supposedly protected one another in obtuse, complacent and snobbish collusion. The secrets of Whitehall were lost on the playing-fields of Eton, so the caricature runs. This, however, is an unreal presentation. The first Foreign Office men to spy for Moscow – in the years immediately after the disintegration of the Ewer–Hayes network – were members of its Communications Department. That department was an amalgam of Etonians, cousins of earls, half-pay officers, the sons of clergymen and of administrators in government agencies, youths from Lower Edmonton and Finchley, lower-middle-class men with a knack for foreign languages. Their common ingredient was masculinity. The predominant influence on the institutional character of the department, its management and group loyalty, its fortitude and vulnerability, all derived from its maleness. As in the Foreign Office generally, it was not class bias but gender exclusivity that created the enabling conditions for espionage. The Communications Department spies Ernest Oldham and John King, and the later spy-diplomatists Burgess, Cairncross and Maclean, had colleagues and chiefs who trusted and protected them, because that was how – under the parliamentary democracy that was settled in 1929 – public servants in a department of state prided themselves on behaving to their fellow men.
Reader Bullard reflected while Consul General in Leningrad in 1934: ‘Schools are not meant to give boys a good time, but to teach them to be happy together even when they are not having a good time.’ The office culture of the Communications Department was an extension of school: the staff there tried to be cheery in a hard place, valued camaraderie and professed individual self-respect as their creed; its vulnerabilities were easy for Oldham and King to exploit. Their male colleagues swapped banter and chaff, forgave and covered each other’s mistakes. They aspired to be tolerant, unflappable and conscientious. The departmental spirit precluded grudges and doubts among colleagues. They were not social equals, but they found their common ground as men. As a nationality, the English had too high and yet too juvenile a reckoning of themselves. ‘The strength of the British lies in never quite growing up,’ Vansittart, PUS of the Foreign Office, said with satisfaction: ‘the cause of our mercifully arrested development is that we have not been liable to introspection.’1
Boyish ideas about good sports were ubiquitous. The deputy governor of Parkhurst prison during the detention there of the spy Wilfred Macartney was nicknamed ‘Jumbo’ and was popular with most inmates. In 1930, on Jumbo’s last Sunday at Parkhurst, after his promotion to be governor elsewhere, the prisoners held a farewell concert to honour him. ‘I’ve found you fellows a jolly fine set of sports in playing the game,’ he told them after the concert in his pronounced Oxford accent. ‘Cheer up, and don’t forget that the game is not over till the stumps are drawn or the final whistle blown.’ Although these virile sentiments may seem laughable in the twenty-first century, in the early 1930s they meant the world for many men: Jumbo was cheered for a full five minutes by the Parkhurst prisoners.2
The office culture of the Communications Department is richly evoked in the memoirs of George Antrobus. ‘Bozo’ Antrobus was born in 1892, the only child of an official in the Crown Agents for the Colonies. He was educated at Westminster School before reading history at Oxford. He lived as a bachelor with his parents a short walk from Leamington Spa station, and commuted daily by train. He appeared punctually at the Foreign Office in suits shiny with age, with a tattered umbrella and greasy bowler hat. He liked musty smells: wet straw, tar, coal-dust, oil, dead rats, fried fish, sweat and spilt beer are all praised in his memoirs. He was an obsessive compiler of railway statistics whose tabular reports on the punctuality of trains are still used by train-spotters today.
Antrobus joined the Foreign Office in 1915 as a temporary clerk in the Parliamentary Department. This designation was a classic of misdirection, because the department had sole charge of the urgent, heavy wartime traffic in ciphered messages. He soon learnt the skills necessary for decoding or encrypting messages at top speed. By 1917 he had some forty temporary wartime colleagues, including ‘gentlemen of leisure’, the filmstar Athole Stewart and the portrait-painter John Collier. Antrobus was one of the minority who stayed in government service when, in 1919, a new Communications Department to handle coded messages was organized. He was at the same time appointed a King’s Messenger.
King’s Messengers were the men – often ex-officers – who carried confidential material to and fro between the Foreign Office and its embassies and legations in Europe. They travelled by train and steamer, bearing a red passport marked courier du Roi, transporting versions of Post Office bags, which were known as ‘crossed bags’ because their labels bore a conspicuous black cross. Under the 1919 arrangement of the Communications Department, these couriers spent the intervals between their European journeys working on encoding and deciphering in the Office. This was craft work, for which they were adequately but not lavishly paid. Members of the department were ranked with diplomatic staff, but unlike other officials they were not pensionable, and received on retirement lump sums computed on the length of their service. Their status in the building was ambiguous, their financial position felt precarious and these anomalies intensified their esprit de corps.
Outgoing Office telegrams were enciphered and incoming messages were deciphered in Room 22. It was a gaunt and lofty space lit by two vast, rattling windows looking northwards. The furniture was hard and plain: half a dozen tables, a dozen chairs, two ranges of cupboards 9 feet high. All was fuggy and frenetic. The clerks were ‘a hard-bitten lot’, recalled Patrick Reilly. They chain-smoked pipes and cigarettes, working in pairs, one calling aloud from the codebook and the other transcribing the message, at a speed of thirty codewords per minute when encoding and fifty words per minute when decoding – all this hour after hour. The pressure left them, said Antrobus, ‘sweating like pigs, with hair awry and shirt-sleeves rolled up, cheeks aflame and collars pulp’. Their finished work was taken to a cacophonous adjoining room, where it was typed on noisy machines using wax stencils rather than paper to enable mass duplication. A careworn official checked every document for its sense: ‘Take this back to Room 22, and ask them what the hell they mean by this tripe,’ he would shout when he found errors, shouting because behind him dispatch boxes were being slammed shut, before being taken by special messenger to the King, to every Cabinet minister, to departmental heads.3
Because of the incoming and outgoing coded messages, Room 22 had as clear a sense of international events as any other section in the Foreign Office. The latest news of treaty negotiations, conference adjournments, troop movements, armaments contracts, political chicanery, financial hanky-panky, sudden deaths, reprisal raids, incendiary speeches and ultimatums were decoded in that austere, noisy department.
Before the European war the Office had resembled ‘a small family party’, recalled Don Gregory, who joined the Diplomatic Service in 1902 and resigned in 1928. But the European war and subsequent worldwide dislocation required huge expansion of Office responsibilities, activities and personnel. ‘Nowadays,’ Gregory lamented in 1929, ‘with its multifarious new activities, its ramifications, divisions and sub-divisions, its clerks and short-hand typists running here, there and everywhere, its constant meetings and interdepartmental conferences, its innumerable visitors, it is tending to resemble a large insurance office or, in times of stress, a central railway station on a bank holiday.’ With the exception of Lord Curzon, foreign secretaries and junior ministers in the Office were notably honeyed in their dealings with officials before 1929. Increasingly thereafter, complained Vansittart, diplomats encountered political chiefs ‘seemingly fresh from elevenses of vinegar’.4
In reaction to this hectic and unmanageable environment, some officials tried to rehabilitate the pace and temper of Edwardian England in the Office. ‘Its keynote was Harmony rather than Hustle,’ said Antrobus. Efforts to revive pre-war poise were personified by the Foreign Secretary, Sir Austen Chamberlain, whom Lord Crawford described in 1927 as ‘urbane, a little more mysterious and stand-offish than most Foreign Secretaries, and moreover getting into the bad habit of making French gestures with very English-shaped hands’. George Slocombe, who met Chamberlain in Geneva and Locarno, likened him to Talleyrand striving to restore ‘the old douceur de vivre’ to a continent rent by war and revolution: ‘from his early readings in European history, Austen Chamberlain had formed, entirely in the tradition of Talleyrand, his own highly personal conception of diplomacy as the guardian of the necessary amenities of life, the custodian of the gracious conventions, the urbanities’.5
The chief of the Communications Department from 1925 until 1940 was Harold Eastwood, a product of Eton and Trinity, Cambridge, and brother of a Conservative MP. Eastwood believed that his staff would work best if he trusted them to do their jobs without his fretful interference: ‘Everyone was treated as a man of honour; he had his work to do, and if he did it well and quickly, it mattered not the least how he did it or, within limits, when he did it.’ There was less change of staff in Communications than in any other Foreign Office department: they knew every speck of one another’s capacity and temperament.6
Eastwood’s deputy Ralph Cotesworth was the son of an Anglican chaplain in Switzerland. His health had collapsed in 1915 while he was a commander in the Royal Navy, and when, after twenty years of encroaching illness, he died in 1937 aged forty-nine, his lungs were found to be rotted away. Cotesworth became a King’s Messenger in 1920, grew expert in the use of ciphers, and was in 1925 chosen as Eastwood’s deputy. Antrobus noted his ‘naval ideas of discipline and duty, large heart and quick sympathy’. Another colleague said with an affectionate tease that Cotesworth’s conscientiousness was ‘appalling’: ‘his quasi-boyish gaiety and his shrewdly humorous outlook’ contributed to the mood of Room 22.7
Algernon Hay, head of the cipher-room from 1919 until 1934, believed in ‘the tonic effect of crusted jokes’. He tried to unify his socially variegated staff by managing them in a ‘gentlemanly’ way. His successor as cipher-room chief was Antrobus, who averred: ‘Clever men, strong men, brave men, even good men, are all more readily come by than your man of the world with a conscience.’ This was all of a piece with a phrase of T. E. Lawrence’s to describe the British Empire: ‘the Power which had thrown a girdle of humour and strong dealing around the world’.8
Men found different ways to slacken the tension of a strenuous day in the Office. Curzon, as Foreign Secretary, prepared for his working day by going to Christie’s auction house and appraising the exhibited artworks that were going under the hammer. Vansittart spent the hour after work every evening playing fierce bridge at the St James’s Club. In the Underground railway carriage taking him home, Sir Owen O’Malley sat knitting woollen socks with purled ribs and basket-stitched heels. Sir Archie Clark Kerr liked talking and thinking about sex. Sir Maurice Peterson never stopped puffing his pipe, and enjoyed living in a converted pub in Belgravia called the Triumphal Chariot. (Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff in 1941–5, liked to start his long days with an action-packed Daily Mirror strip cartoon about a private investigator, Buck Ryan.) The encryption and decryption clerks, who worked long hours without break, unwound by chain-smoking and hard drinking. They resorted to the Mine, a drinking-hole in the basement of the Foreign Office run by the head office-keeper and his wife. The bar resembled a shabby French estaminet with just a pair of broad planks resting on upturned barrels. The tolerance of alcoholism in the Office went to the top: it was said in 1929 that Tyrrell, recently retired as PUS, ‘has not done a stroke of work for years, and has sometimes been so drunk that J. D. Gregory had to smuggle him out of the office’.9
One of the leading figures in Room 22 and the Mine was Ernest Oldham. Born in 1894 in Lower Edmonton, he was the son of schoolteachers. Most of his education was at Tottenham County School, although he spent some months at an obscure sixth-form boarding school near Staines in Middlesex. In 1914, aged nineteen, he joined the Chief Clerk’s Department at the Foreign Office. As a junior officer on the Western Front in 1917–18 he endured bombardment and poison-gas attacks amid the trenches, dug-outs, shell-holes and mine-craters. He was never one of those Englishmen who were reconciled to the carnage of the Western Front by leaving wreaths of Haig poppies at the base of war memorials.
In his determination to rise from the ranks, Oldham made himself into a proficient French-speaker. His bilingualism resulted in his appointment in 1919 as a clerk at the Paris Peace Conference. During his six months in the French capital he mastered its streets and by-ways, which was to prove helpful when years later he needed to escape surveillance. After returning from Paris, Oldham applied for admission into the Consular Service. There seemed a chance of his appointment as Third Consul at Rio de Janeiro, for in addition to good French he had reasonable knowledge of Spanish, Italian and German. After some hesitation, he was rejected by the promotion board in 1920, but offered a post in the Communications Department. This was insufficient salve, for Oldham aspired to the social cachet of the Consular Service.
Like other men in the department, Oldham doubled as a King’s Messenger. He visited Constantinople and other Balkan capitals as well as closer destinations. In May 1922 he was sent by air – travelling in a fragile single-engine biplane – to deliver a document intended for King George V, who was visiting war cemeteries in Belgium. These travels made him adept at buying and selling foreign currencies at good rates. The offices of every embassy or legation in a foreign capital were alike, with similar stationery, filing cabinets, pencils, punches and calendars and the same red copies of the Foreign Office List and Who’s Who, as Owen O’Malley recounted. ‘In the residential part of the house too, though the servants may be white or black or yellow, there will be the same kindly discipline, the same Lux [soap], Ronuk [floor-polish], chintz, pot-plants, water-colours, large bath towels and Bromo [a patent cure for hangovers and upset stomachs], which the Englishman carries round the world like a snail its shell: which form indeed the temple and fortress of his soul.’ To these familiar surroundings King’s Messengers brought office talk from Whitehall and from other European capitals, and exchanged it for local gossip. All the staff, from the Ambassador downwards, pumped Oldham about diplomatic trends, promotions, political currents and whatever was afoot in London.10
Oldham was given charge of managing the routes for King’s Messengers across Europe. The location of the League of Nations in Geneva required his frequent visits to Switzerland, either as a courier of documents or as an encrypter and decrypter. For ten years meetings of the League there were held in the Hôtel Victoria. ‘By day the hotel was a babel of strange sounds,’ as Slocombe remembered: ‘conversations in many languages, the machine-gun rattle of typewriters, the shrilling of telephone bells, and the whine of the mimeograph machines multiplying copies of speeches just made in the drab hall beyond the faded plush of those Victorian sitting-rooms’. At night there was heavy drinking and poker. It was into this mêlée that the boy from Tottenham County School was pitched.11
A change in Oldham’s circumstances came in 1927 when, falsely describing his father as a gentleman and giving the Foreign Office as his home address, he married a prosperous Australian widow twelve years his senior. With his wife’s money, they bought 31 Pembroke Gardens (near Kensington High Street) and employed two housemaids and a chauffeur for their Sunbeam coupé. Oldham filled his wardrobe with monogrammed clothes, and could afford to drink spirits more deeply than ever. ‘He arrayed himself, if not in purple, at least in fine linen, and fared sumptuously,’ said Antrobus. ‘So sumptuously … that he contracted delirium tremens.’ As an auspicious sequel to this marriage, Oldham was promoted to be Staff Officer of the Communications Department in 1928.12
In October 1929 Gregori Bessedovsky, the Soviet Chargé d’Affaires in Paris, who had been ordered back to Moscow for punishment after being denounced for criticizing Stalin’s maltreatment of the peasantry, fled over the embassy wall and was granted asylum by the French government. Maurice Oldfield, a future head of SIS, used to say that ‘defectors are like grapes; the first pressings are always the best’. Wilfred (‘Biffy’) Dunderdale, SIS’s station head in Paris, who had spent his boyhood in Odessa and spoke Russian fluently, interviewed Bessedovsky three days after his defection, but did not press him well. Dunderdale discounted Bessedovsky’s material because he found him sharp, ‘but neither frank nor principled’. Although Dunderdale had a reputation for shrewdness, he was prone to SIS’s cultural contempt for foreigners. ‘British intelligence’, recalled Elizabeth Poretsky, ‘appeared to consider the Soviets mere rabble.’13
Early reports of Bessedovsky’s revelations were garbled, but indicated that some months earlier an Englishman had called at the Russian embassy offering secret cipher books of the British government. The ‘walk-in’, as such unheralded visitors were called, was seen by the OGPU Director Vladimir Ianovich (born Wilenski), a coarse man who had previously been a dock-worker. Ianovich’s wife managed OGPU finances in Paris (she received large dollar bills in the diplomatic mail, and exchanged them for francs). Her impersonations of a Hungarian countess in Berlin, of a Persian diplomat’s wife in Vienna and of a diamond merchant’s widow in Prague were admired by the illegals, although her husband was not. Ianovich took away the codebooks, saying that he had to show them to the Ambassador, but gave them instead to his wife, who had a brightly lit room for taking photographs and a well-equipped darkroom for developing them. After she had copied the codebooks, Ianovich – either suspecting an agent provocateur’s trap or wishing to save OGPU money – threw them back at the walk-in Englishman and ejected him from the embassy in an insulting fashion.
SIS continued to assess Bessedovsky as shifty, talkative and imprudent. This was not far wrong: years later he tried to make money by forging the journals of Maxim Litvinov, the former Foreign Affairs Commissar of the Soviet Union. Accordingly, in 1929, Special Branch did not investigate his tale of purloined codebooks. Norman Ewer’s Daily Herald on 29 October pooh-poohed Bessedovsky’s information in a manner that suited Russian interests: it depicted the fugitive diplomat as an opportunist whose stories were derided in Whitehall. If leakages had occurred, the Communications Department was a likely source, and its Staff Officer, Oldham, should have led an investigation. He was however both the walk-in with the codebooks and absent undergoing treatment for alcoholism from mid-October until March 1930. It can be surmised that his collapse began with a panicky binge after Bessedovsky’s story appeared in London newspapers.
Bessedovsky’s warning was duplicated in 1930 by Georges Agabekov, then the most senior OGPU officer to have defected. The English parents of his young girlfriend complained to the French authorities that he was a seducer who had alienated her loyalty to them: he was deported to Belgium (more on grounds of public morality than national security) in July 1930. After his deportation, Jasper Harker, head of MI5’s B Division (investigations and inquiries), Guy Liddell of Special Branch and Jane Sissmore, who was MI5’s specialist in Russian community activity, agreed that Agabekov and his correspondence should be put under surveillance. Liddell was sent to interview him in Brussels, and maintained telephonic contact with Sissmore while in the Belgian capital. Agabekov was pressed about the Soviet agent who was obtaining Foreign Office secrets (now known to be the Rome embassy servant, Francesco Constantini). He described OGPU’s network of agents and their operations to Liddell. He also reported that Moscow received copies of the secret exchanges between the Foreign Office and the High Commissioner in Egypt, Lord Lloyd. This renewed confirmation of a breach in coded traffic was reported to the Foreign Office. It is known that the Communications Department led an internal investigation, but the identity and report of the investigators are unknown. Agabekov made similar revelations in newspaper articles and in two essays which were published together in a garbled, facetious English edition in 1931.
The truth behind the tales of Bessedovsky and Agabekov was that in July 1929 Oldham had gone to the Russian embassy in Paris with two books bound in red buckram containing Foreign Office, Colonial Office and Dominions Office ciphers (in some accounts the codebooks were those of the FO and of the India Office). He presented himself as a typesetter called ‘Charlie Scott’, disguising his status by speaking bad French, and demanding first £50,000 and then £10,000 for his material. ‘Charlie Scott’ was paid $11,000 in two instalments, and thereafter $1,000 a month. Oldham averted insolvency, and maintained his pretensions in Kensington, by making renewed visits to Paris in order to deliver secret material, which the Russians found patchy and low-grade. They did not trust him enough to risk giving him a handler in London who might be trapped. Oldham protected his true identity from his Paris handler, Dimitri Bystrolyotov.
After the ARCOS raid in 1927 London had severed official relations with Moscow, and ordered all diplomats and trade representatives to leave the country within ten days. OGPU thereupon ordained that only illegals could be used in Britain, but that there was to be no illegal residency there. All activities had to be run from the European mainland, usually from Amsterdam or Paris, but under the control of the Berlin rezidentura. Although Anglo-Soviet diplomatic relations were restored by the incoming Labour government in 1929, Moscow remained doubtful about sending permanent illegals to London, and continued running operations there from other European capitals.
Bystrolyotov was born in Crimea in 1901, the son of a village schoolmistress: he knew nothing of his paternity. In 1919 he smuggled himself into Turkey in the coal-hole of a ship, worked as a stoker, and got some education at the American College for Christian Youth. He had a nervous breakdown after witnessing massacres of Armenians, worked for the Red Cross in Prague and then as a cemetery worker. Around 1925 he was recruited to OGPU with the cover of a post in the Soviet trade mission in Prague and the task of collecting secret material on armaments production at the Franco-Czech Škoda factory in Pilsen. He was a clever linguist and perceptive student of character: his black eyes and dashing masculinity brought him success as a vorón (a ‘raven’, or male seducer of women with access to confidential material). In 1930 he was transferred to the illegal rezidentura in Berlin headed by Basil Bazarov (born Shpak), whose OGPU codename was KIN. The Greek Consul in Danzig, an Odessa-born swindler and drugs-smuggler, provided Bystrolyotov with a Greek passport and the false identity of a Salonika businessman, Alexander Gallas.
Bystrolyotov was instructed to elicit the identity of ‘Charlie Scott’, who was being run under the codename of ARNO. To this end, he adopted the alias of a Hungarian count, Lajos József Perelly, and went to Budapest to learn his part. He introduced himself to ‘Scott’ in a Paris restaurant as a nobleman who had been ruined by the war and who performed services for OGPU in return for an income that enabled him to keep caste. He felt that he was more acceptable to ‘Scott’ posing as a Hungarian hireling than he would have been as a Russian or Ukrainian communist. After months of patience, ‘Perelly’ discovered that ‘Scott’ was staying in a particular Paris hotel, where his luggage was stamped with the monogram ‘EHO’.
The scene shifted from Paris to Geneva. When Slocombe depicted Geneva as Europe’s ‘most secretive city’, he was indulging in an old spy’s misdirection. It was hard to keep secrets there. The lifeless official verbiage and stiff protocol surrounding League of Nations sessions there encouraged men to unbend with confidential admissions and gossipy indiscretions when they went off duty in bars and brasseries. ‘A vast concourse of politicians … is bound to bring all the ragtag and bobtail of the earth sniffing at their heels,’ as Antrobus recorded. ‘All the paraphernalia of leakage on a grand scale there assembled … the place swarmed with spies and secret agents who, I imagine, got what they wanted handed to them on a plate.’14
Bystrolyotov @ Gallas @ Perelly arrived in Geneva for a League meeting in, it seems, July 1931. He deduced that ‘EHO’ would attend the League sessions, found that a man with those initials was staying at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage, spotted ‘Scott’ in the hotel bar and sat next to him there in silence. ‘Scott’ looked aghast on catching sight of ‘Perelly’ and realized that OGPU had broken his anonymity. Bystrolyotov intended to consolidate his advantage by visiting Oldham at home and asserting OGPU control over him, but when he called at Pembroke Gardens in September with false credentials identifying him as a Dresden banker, Lucy Oldham, looking tense, explained that her husband was away from home. The courteous foreigner invited her for lunch at the Ritz. Amid the restaurant’s gilt and mirrors she revealed that Oldham was undergoing an expensive cure for alcoholism in a sanatorium in Suffolk called Rendlesham Hall.
She besought ‘Count Perelly’ to visit Oldham at Rendlesham, and insisted that he take the spare bedroom in Pembroke Gardens. On the night before Oldham’s return home in October, Lucy Oldham rolled up the hem of her dress, spread her legs and begged the Count not to waste time. He obliged, and reported his performance to Moscow, where the codename of MADAM was bestowed on her. Bystrolyotov came to suspect that she had instigated her husband’s approach to the Russian embassy in Paris in 1929, and that she had encouraged the subsequent espionage as a way of perpetuating their Kensington prosperity.
OGPU in Moscow and the rezidentura in Berlin continued to assess Oldham as too dicey to risk agents receiving material direct from him in London. Instead, he was required to travel to Bonn, Ostend, Paris, Calais, Trouville, Madrid, Amsterdam and Switzerland for handovers of purloined documents. Throughout he insisted that he was only an intermediary, acting on behalf of the material’s true source. Oldham became such a valued source that Bystrolyotov was joined in London in 1932 by two well-tried agents. Joseph Leppin @ PEEP @ PEPIKA, a young Prague journalist who was then working under Boris Bazarov in the Berlin rezidentura, was fluent in French, English and German, had intellectual and artistic interests and was used by Bystrolyotov as the courier carrying Oldham’s product out of England on its journey to Moscow. Leppin was married for ‘operational purposes’ to a fellow Czech agent, Erica Weinstein (ERIKA), who collaborated with him on operations for Bystrolyotov. Bazarov (presenting himself as an Italian communist called da Vinci) and Theodore Maly also came to London to help in running Oldham.15
Theodore Stephanovich Maly @ Theodore Mally @ Tivadar Mály @ Willy Broschart @ Paul Hardt @ Peters @ der Lange @ Mann is the most famous of the illegals. Born in 1894, the son of a provincial official in the Hungarian Ministry of Finance, he trained for priesthood in a seminary before his military mobilization at the age of twenty-one. He was an ensign-cadet by the time of his capture by tsarist forces in 1916. After gruelling train journeys, he was held in a prisoner-of-war camp at Astrakhan by the Caspian Sea, and later was transferred to the frontier town of Orenburg at the southern end of the Ural Mountains. ‘I lost my faith in God,’ he later said of his incarceration, ‘and when the revolution broke out I joined the Bolsheviks. I broke with my past completely. I was no longer a Hungarian, a priest, a Christian, even anyone’s son … I became a communist.’ Maly was a Chekist for ten years before joining INO in about 1931. He could pass as Austrian, Hungarian, German or Swiss. As described by his biographer William Duff, a special agent of the FBI who specialized in Soviet bloc espionage, Maly had ‘a tanned and strangely aesthetic face highlighted by deep-set but sad, almost childlike eyes’. For Elizabeth Poretsky, ‘“Teddy” … combined extreme sweetness with a great deal of determination, so that one felt at ease and protected in his company.’ OGPU admired Maly’s abilities, but felt perturbed by his outbursts of drunken and indiscreet remorse. They forced him to marry a woman whom he disliked because she kept him under watchful guard and kept him from binge-drinking.16
During the Lausanne Conference of June–July 1932, at which the British, French and German governments discussed the suspension of German reparation payments, Oldham provided Bystrolyotov with coded messages, dispatches and even a British passport bearing the invented name of ‘Sir Robert Grenville’. The strain of duplicity drove Oldham into dipsomania. His department began investigating the disappearance of a codebook from a basement safe, in a part of the building where Oldham had been seen when he was on sick-leave. He was reported for using the Office’s ambassadorial side-entrance so as to avoid the doorkeepers who maintained security at the main doors. Other reports had him in a drunken stupor. On 30 September 1932 he was summoned to a disciplinary meeting, confronted with a list of transgressions, including unexplained visits to the cipher-room and losing confidential material which he claimed to have taken home. He was asked to resign without any gratuity. Like other members of his department, he had no pension rights.
Oldham did not admit to the illegals that he had been sacked. On 18 October, avid for more OGPU money, he flew with his wife from Croydon aerodrome to Berlin for a rendezvous with ‘Perelly’. During their meeting he was so helplessly drunk that he could hardly move or speak, and vomited. MADAM subsequently revealed to her partner in adultery, ‘Perelly’, that Oldham had been fired from his job. She added that she was leaving him, would sell the house and go to work in a French resort either as a lady companion or, if that failed, as a prostitute. Just before Christmas 1932 Oldham tried to strangle her when she refused to give him brandy. He was sent for another cure at Rendlesham.
After drying out, Oldham revisited his old department to jaw with friends there, notably Thomas Kemp, who was in charge of the King’s Messengers’ itineraries, and a clerk named Raymond Oake. He had a further excuse for visits, because he had been allowed, incomprehensibly to modern thinking, to keep a safety-deposit box in the building after his dismissal. He used the pretext of examining personal papers in the box as the justification for two or three further visits. One evening in May 1933, he arrived at 6 p.m., loitered around Room 22, his speech slurred with drink, waiting for other clerks to go home. He asked for the combination number of the safe where keys were kept at night and briefly got custody of the keys to the cupboards known as ‘presses’ containing confidential material. Those ex-colleagues who saw him felt a mixture of pity, embarrassment, annoyance and suspicion at his conduct, but the blokey ‘good form’ of the department meant that his manoeuvres were watched but not challenged. During one of these forays he obtained documents which he sold in Paris to the Soviets in May 1933. He and his wife commuted by air between London and Paris during May and June to see Bystrolyotov. OGPU became so alarmed by the likelihood of Oldham’s exposure that all illegal operatives, including Bazarov and Maly, were withdrawn from England.
On 13 July 1933, desperate for OGPU money and under incitement from Bystrolyotov, Oldham returned to the Office in an attempt to lay hands on the cipher codes for the following year. He arrived just before 6 p.m., ostensibly to see Kemp who had already gone home, got hold of a set of keys left momentarily in the door, rushed to the lavatory and there took wax impressions of them. When he reappeared with the keys, he was sweating and his hands shook. Wax was found on the wards of the keys. Eastwood reported the incident next day to Sir Vernon Kell of MI5, who set Harker on the case. Oldham’s correspondence was intercepted, his telephone was tapped and he was put under John Ottaway’s surveillance. Bystrolyotov met Oldham on a bench in Hyde Park, and urged him to try again to get into the safes to obtain up-to-date codes. At lunchtime on Sunday 16 July Oldham was refused admittance when he called again at the Office.
Some days later he was heard in a bugged telephone call to say that he was going to Vienna. He evaded his watchers by instead flying from Croydon to Geneva. From there he hastened to Interlaken, where he met Bystrolyotov calling himself ‘Perelly’ and Bazarov calling himself ‘da Vinci’. After returning from Basel to Croydon on 4 August, Oldham was traced by Ottaway to the Jules Hotel at 85–86 Jermyn Street, St James’s, and tracked to a nearby pub, the Chequers, off a narrow alley joining Duke Street, St James’s to Mason’s Yard. At the poky bar in the Chequers, two MI5 operatives, Herbert (‘Con’) Boddington, a bookie’s son who had been Chief of Dublin Special Branch targeting the IRA in the early 1920s, and Thomas (‘Tar’) Robertson, set to work on Oldham. Robertson (born in Sumatra in 1909) had only recently joined MI5 after working in the City, and was known to his new colleagues as ‘Passion Pants’ because he wore Seaforth tartan trews at headquarters. ‘Con’ and ‘Passion Pants’ got Oldham hopelessly drunk in the Chequers, put him to bed in the Jules Hotel and searched his belongings while he was comatose.17
Oldham was not questioned or detained, although it was obvious to his watchers that he was falling apart. MI5 wished to learn from watching his activities and contacts. Probably the Foreign Office shrank from discovering the extent to which diplomatic secrets had been broached. Still striving to earn OGPU money, dosing himself with paraldehyde (a foul-smelling, addictive sedative taken by alcoholics and insomniacs), Oldham finally broke. He went to his former marital home at 31 Pembroke Gardens, now vacant and unfurnished, and gassed himself in the kitchen. The suspicions of some of his Room 22 colleagues and Russian handlers that he had been killed by MI5 seem unwarranted. In retrospect Antrobus despised his department’s first traitor. ‘A clever little upstart,’ he called him, ‘with a face like a rat and a conscience utterly devoid of scruples.’18
Until Oldham’s attempted break-in, members of the Foreign Office were often visited at work by friends. After 1933, however, visitors were filtered by policemen and doorkeepers: once admitted, they were escorted everywhere by hardy factotums. The locks and keys of the ‘presses’ were changed. Algernon Hay was retired from overseeing Room 22 in 1934. His replacement Antrobus thought of his staff as a ‘little brotherhood’ of ‘learned friends’. He explained: ‘everybody gave of his best, although (very properly) he got no credit for it beyond his own satisfaction’. He believed that ‘in all classes of life and among all sorts and conditions of men’, especially ‘in teams, regiments, and ships’, the best-performing organizations had consciously developed ‘the Spirit of the Old School Tie’. This Spirit motivated and unified men without appealing to class bias: public schools did not hold ‘a monopoly of true fellowship and devotion to an ideal’, insisted Antrobus. A minority of his staff had attended public schools.19
The Foreign Office conducted an internal, amateurish and self-protective investigation of the Oldham case without MI5 or Special Branch assistance. There was little investigation of Oldham’s overseas air journeys, or of his ultimate destinations and contacts, which might have given leads to Bystrolyotov and Bazarov. In gathering clues from outsiders, such as Oldham’s solicitor, it was represented that he was suspected of drugs-smuggling. No hint was permissible that he had been betraying official secrets to a hostile power. There were few leads, as ‘Count Perelly’ and ‘da Vinci’ had vanished and reverted to their true identities as Bystrolyotov and Bazarov. ‘I could have ended up in the Tower, but only if Vansittart had been willing to wash his dirty linen in public,’ Bystrolyotov judged; but the Foreign Office saw no benefit in publicizing the lax security. As to Moscow, OGPU had been exasperated by Oldham’s alcoholic volatility. At times the risks for his handlers seemed nightmarish. His low status in the Office hierarchy had moreover limited his access to secret material. OGPU’s frustrations with him perhaps contributed to the strategy of placing more reliable penetration agents in the Diplomatic Service through the device of recruiting young Cambridge high-fliers.20
Oldham had supplied personal assessments of his colleagues. One of these was Raymond Oake, born in 1894 in Finchley and the son of a railway clerk. After wartime naval service, Oake joined the Communications Department as a clerk in 1920. He was used as an occasional King’s Messenger without being promoted above the level of clerk, amassed debts and borrowed money from colleagues. His bank manager told MI5, when it was investigating Oake’s finances in 1939, that his customer was ‘a weak, foolish man, whose vanity leads him to live above his income, which is about £600 per annum. On one occasion when he was warned as to his account, he created a wild scene and ended by bursting into tears.’21
Bystrolyotov delegated the task of cultivating Oake to Hans Pieck, a Dutchman codenamed COOPER. Pieck, who was the son of a naval officer, had joined his country’s communist party in 1920 under the alias of Donat. He had visited Moscow on party business in 1929. He spoke German, English, French, Danish and perhaps Italian. He was a man of culture and charm, well reputed as a decorative artist, architectural designer and cartoonist, who lived with his wife in The Hague in style (subsidized by OGPU money). ‘He is a good actor who plays his role naturally, sometimes masterfully, finds his bearings quickly in conversation, manoeuvres well and is already ready for initiative,’ Bystrolyotov declared. Pieck was not a staid communist: rather he was ‘Bohemian, disorderly, untidy, inaccurate, incoherent and undisciplined’. Although effective as a talent-spotter and recruiter, he was too fastidious to coerce targets, to kidnap them, to apply blackmail or to threaten lives. Bystrolyotov attributed to Pieck ‘Love for intelligence work bordering on a passion, a romantic attitude to his role close to that of an actor’s enjoyment’.22
Pieck installed himself at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage in Geneva, befriended Communications Department men and consular officials in bars and brasseries, spent a fortune on hospitality and gave handsome presents. In the summary of Valentine Vivian of SIS, Pieck ‘allayed suspicion by posing as the prince of good fellows, habitué of the International Club, always “good” for a drink, a motor expedition, or a free meal – a histrionic effort worthy of a better cause’. Pieck moved deftly towards his target of Oake, who was given the codename SHELLEY. On Christmas Day of 1933 Pieck visited him in Room 22. They had festive drinks together in a nearby pub, where Pieck learnt that Oake had already spent his December wages and loaned him money to cover some cheques. Six years later, under interrogation by MI5, Oake described Pieck as ‘absolutely a white man’, whose lavish generosity had sometimes embarrassed him. Pieck posed as the representative of a Dutch bank interested in collecting economic and political intelligence, but although Oake agreed to supply him with material, it was always meagre pickings. Security had been tightened after Oldham’s disgrace. Sitting at a table in Room 22 with four other men, Oake found no opportunities for clandestine work. He was so chary of being caught that he was dropped by OGPU in December 1934.23
Three months earlier, in Geneva, Oake had however introduced Pieck to another clerk in the Communications Department, John King. King had joined the Rhineland High Commission, a supra-national body based in Coblenz and supervising the Anglo-French occupation of the Rhineland, as a cipher officer in 1923. He was promoted to be personal clerk to the High Commissioner, the Earl of Erroll, in 1925. After Erroll’s death in 1928, he had a posting in China. ‘He is about fifty years of age, an Irishman who lived in Germany for about ten years and speaks German perfectly,’ reported Bystrolyotov. ‘A lively and inquisitive person … he draws a sharp distinction between himself with his cultured ways and the “pompous fools” of Englishmen.’ He was keen on the theatre and liked magic tricks. His salary was too small for his needs, he cadged drinks and tried to touch people for loans.24
After dropping Oake, Pieck approached King to provide political information and weekly summaries for use by a Dutch bank. King agreed, and a secret bank account was opened for his remuneration. He received the codename MAG. King’s first delivery of secret material included an account of Hitler’s conversations with the Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, in March 1935. ‘His conviction that he is destined to bring about the moral rehabilitation of the German people after being crushed and humiliated by the treaty of Versailles’, Simon noted,
is very dangerous to peace in Europe, and it is all the more dangerous for being very sincere. And he is adored by those who follow him as no German Emperor has ever been adored. Hitler made it perfectly plain that he would never agree to enter into a pact of ‘mutual assistance’ with Russia. Communism, he declared, is the plague: unlike National Socialism, which he claims seeks only to embrace Germans, it is a contagious infection which might spread over all Europe and all Asia. He has stamped it out of Germany, and Germany is the barrier to prevent the pestilence coming westward.25
King, like Oake, found it hard to obtain the Foreign Office daily bulletins which Oldham had been able to supply. Files, registers, the flimsy papers on which decrypts were scrawled – all were now guarded by the men who had responsibility for them. Any official found in a part of the department where he had no business was challenged. In order to justify his frequent visits to London, Pieck started a flimsy cover business called the Universal Barter Company. He then devised a better front after Oake had introduced him to Conrad Parlanti, with whom Oake often commuted by train from Herne Bay to Victoria station. Pieck suggested that he and Parlanti should go into business together as shopfitters. Among other commissions, Pieck and Parlanti revamped the shop-window displays at Marshall & Snelgrove’s department store in Oxford Street. At Pieck’s insistence Parlanti rented offices at 34a Buckingham Gate, close to Victoria station but also a few minutes’ stroll across St James’s Park from the Foreign Office. Parlanti was puzzled by Pieck’s insistence on leasing these offices, which were a secret amenity for spying rather than for the shop-window design business. Pieck kept a floor there for his own use, with one room which was always locked. King could walk over from Room 22, let himself in with a key and draw the curtains to indicate that he had left papers to be photographed in the locked room. Buckingham Gate was only a small deviation from King’s homeward route to Flat 9, St Leonard’s Mansions, Smith Street, Chelsea. Copies or originals of the documents were collected from Buckingham Gate by Brian Goold-Verschoyle, a communist electrical engineer and Comintern courier. The more important material was telegraphed to Moscow from the Soviet embassy.
Parlanti eventually picked the door lock when Pieck was away. Inside the mystery room he found a Leica camera fixed to photograph articles on a table. When he confronted Pieck, he was told that the Leica was for photographing ‘dirty pictures’. On another occasion Parlanti saw Pieck receive documents typed in red from a man in the lounge of the Victoria Hotel in Northumberland Avenue, off Whitehall. Pieck invited him to visit The Hague, but then made a show of being suddenly called to Germany. As Parlanti told MI5 in September 1939, ‘Mrs Pieck began very soon to make love to him, in order, as he is now convinced, to get him to entangle himself. He resisted her wiles, and finally lost patience with her.’ Mrs Pieck then wept, and told him that she and her husband were engaged in financial manipulations, ‘with big people and for big money’, and received official secrets from a man in the Foreign Office’s code section.26
At a party in London in January 1936 Pieck was approached by William John (‘Jack’) Hooper, a British-Dutch dual national whom he believed to be the British Commercial Attaché at The Hague but who in fact worked for SIS there. In a quiet corner at the party Hooper referred to Pieck’s Comintern activities in the 1920s: ‘We know about your past and keep a constant watch on you. I want to know if you are still in the same business.’ Pieck insisted that he had abandoned his youthful political enthusiasms, but was sufficiently rattled to stop using the Buckingham Gate office as King’s drop-off because Hooper knew of its existence. Possibly Hooper was exploring Pieck’s availability to inform on his old communist friends without knowing that Pieck was an important communist agent.27
In September 1936 Hooper was dismissed by SIS after the head of station in The Hague, Major Ernest Dalton, shot himself. As Passport Control Officer, Dalton had been selling visas to Jewish fugitives from Hitler who wanted to reach Palestine. When Hooper had spotted the racket, he was given a cut by Dalton, whose corruption was discovered during a routine audit. After being discarded by SIS, Hooper enlisted as an NKVD agent and went to work in Pieck’s Dutch office, where he watched his employer, asked questions and amassed material which he gave piecemeal to SIS as a way of vindicating himself after the Dalton scandal and regaining official British employment. SIS ignored his information and did not rehire him, because of his complicity with Dalton. The NKVD decided that Hooper was untrustworthy or compromised, and dropped him later in 1937. Rejected by both London and Moscow, Hooper turned to Berlin. In 1938–9 he worked for the Abwehr, to which he divulged that the Soviets had a source in the Communications Department.
For two years, as the head of SIS’s counter-espionage section Valentine Vivian noted in a retrospective of the King case, SIS had known Hooper’s information about Pieck’s clandestine activities in London, which ‘could have been acted upon then had it been credited. It was, however, treated with coldness and even derision, largely as a result of the prejudice against X [Hooper] himself.’ Vivian was impressed that Pieck had ‘included in his confidences one conscious and artistic lie – for the purpose undoubtedly of discrediting “X’s” story in the unlikely event of his passing it to the British authorities – i.e. he gave the name of his “inside agent” in the Foreign Office as Sir Robert Vansittart’. Pieck embroidered this critical misdirection with other absurdities, including an imaginary mistress of Vansittart’s who acted as a cut-out in transmitting betrayed secrets.28
Hooper’s activities resulted in Pieck being withdrawn from handling King. The Dutchman was next sent by Moscow to Athens, where he tried to induce the Minister of War to order forty fighter planes, ostensibly for the Greek government, which were to be shipped to Republican forces in Spain with the Minister’s connivance. This intrigue failed, and Pieck had to leave Athens in a hurry, according to an SIS source; but he proceeded to Paris, where he found a South American legation ready to help.
The eminent illegal Walter Krivitsky, codenamed GROLL, was briefly charged with delivering the photographic film for use on King’s material in London. Theodore Maly, who succeeded Krivitsky in London, reported to Moscow Centre that King wished to ‘rid the world of poverty, hunger, war and prison’, but was not left-wing. Socialism meant ‘the terrors of Bolshevism, it is chaos, the power of the mob, Jews and endless bloodshed’, he told Maly. ‘I am against Fascism but if here, in this country, I had to choose between Sir Oswald Mosley and British Labourites, I would choose the former, for the latter logically lead to Bolshevism.’ He assessed Hitler as ‘a maniac but an honest person’ who had saved Germany from the Reds. The English aristocracy was ‘good for nothing, in the first place because it was English, and in the second because it is mixed with Jews and other lower classes’. The Irish and Scottish nobility was however ‘clear of foreign taint, and it has preserved its race’. King, like Oldham, was a mercenary who needed money, and had no interest in communism. He was conceited like Oldham too, but had stronger nerves: he enjoyed the sense of superior but secret privileges that accompanied his hidden life; he did not get rattled by the dangers of discovery and launch himself into panicky binges.29
King’s influence may have been world-changing. Donald Cameron Watt believed that the material supplied by King in July and August 1939 to his Soviet controller, reporting on the Anglo-French tripartite negotiations with Russia for a pact against Germany, was leaked by Moscow in a selective fashion to Berlin. The intelligence gobbets given to Germany were among the enticements that led Berlin into the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact of August 1939.30
Krivitsky was the link joining Oldham and King to Maclean and Philby. His original name was Samuel Ginsburg. He was Jewish and Russian-born, with a Polish father, a Slav mother and a Latvian wife who was a dedicated Bolshevik. In youth he was an active Vienna socialist while training as an engineer. After the launch of the illegal system in 1925, he became illegal rezident in The Hague, under the alias of Martin Lessner, an Austrian dealer in art and rare books. His house was furnished with stark minimalist modernity as visible support for his cover. He had enough culture to sustain the mask of connoisseurship. From the Netherlands Krivitsky directed much of the espionage in Britain. He became convinced of the insanity of Nikolai Yezhov, whom Stalin appointed chief of the NKVD in 1936 with the remit to purge the party. In 1937 Ignace Reiss @ Poretsky, the Paris-based illegal who was Krivitsky’s boon comrade, protested against the Great Terror and denounced Stalin. As a test of Krivitsky’s fealty, Moscow ordered him to liquidate Reiss. He refused, was summoned to Moscow for retribution and fled for his life to the USA.
It was at this time that a Cambridge luminary, the novelist E. M. Forster, wrote a credo that has been lampooned, truncated in quotation and traduced by subsequent writers. His remarks in their entirety carry a message of individualism, conscientious judgement and anti-totalitarianism that might have been a text for Whitehall values in the 1930s. ‘One must be fond of people,’ said Forster, ‘and trust them if one is not to make a mess of one’s life, and it is therefore essential that they should not let one down. They often do.’ Writing in 1939, when totalitarian nationalism was rampant, Forster continued: ‘Personal relations are despised today. They are regarded as bourgeois luxuries, as products of a time of fair weather which is now past, and we are urged to get rid of them, and to dedicate ourselves to some movement or cause instead. I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’ Krivitsky had the guts.31
The Americans were more obtuse about Krivitsky’s defection even than Dunderdale had been with Bessedovsky’s. He reached New York with his wife and children on the liner Normandie on 10 November 1938 (travelling under his real name of Ginsburg). Immigration officials rejected the family’s entry on grounds of insufficient funds. He was eventually released on bail provided by his future writing collaborator Isaac Don Levine, who had been born in Belarus, finished high school in Missouri and worked as a radical journalist but had become hostile to communist chicanery. Krivitsky funded his American life by producing articles and an autobiography which were ghosted by Levine and sold by Paul Wohl, a German-Jewish refugee who had worked for the League of Nations and was trying to scratch a living as a New York literary agent and book reviewer. In an article of February 1939 Krivitsky predicted the Nazi–Soviet pact seven months before it was agreed.
Roosevelt’s Secretary of State Cordell Hull had relinquished his department’s responsibility for monitoring communists and fascists to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1936: ‘go ahead and investigate the hell out of those cocksuckers’, he had told its chief J. Edgar Hoover. This decision left the FBI with the incompatible tasks of policing crimes that had already been committed and of amassing secret intelligence about future intentions and possible risks to come. In practice, the Bureau concentrated on law enforcement and criminal investigation rather than intelligence-gathering and analysis. This bias and Hoover’s insularity meant that there was more interest in pursuing Krivitsky for passport fraud than in extracting intelligence from him.32
After a nine-month delay, on 27 July 1939 a special agent of the FBI questioned Krivitsky for the first time in Levine’s office in downtown New York. Their exchanges were too crude to be called a debriefing. The debriefing of defectors is slow-moving at the start: character must be assessed, trust must be gained, affinities must be recognized and motivations must be plumbed. Only then, when the participants are speaking rationally and with the semblance of mutual respect, can reliability be gauged and evasions be addressed. Perception, patience and tact are needed to overcome psychological resistance and to elicit information that can be acted on. But the FBI agent did not engage in preliminary civilities to reach some affinity with his subject. Instead he fired narrowly focused questions about Moishe Stern @ Emile Kléber @ Mark Zilbert, who was believed to have run a spy ring in the USA. Krivitsky was diverted from volunteering information on other matters. When his replies contradicted the conclusions drawn in previous FBI investigations, or expressed his certainty that Stern had been purged, the special agent concluded that he was ill-informed, wrong-headed and obstinate. The FBI agent did not listen with an open mind; he would not revise his own presuppositions. Hoover dismissed Krivitsky as a liar.
Krivitsky’s memoirs In Stalin’s Secret Service had an ungrateful reception from reviewers: ‘his words are those of a renegade and his mentality that of a master-spy’, Foreign Affairs warned in response to his indictment of Stalinism. Communist sympathizers were especially hostile: Malcolm Cowley in New Republic decried the fugitive from Stalin’s hit-squad as ‘a coward … a gangster and a traitor’ to his friends, and elsewhere labelled him ‘a rat’. Edmund Wilson called Cowley’s review ‘Stalinist character assassination’; and certainly such tendentious pieces harmed Krivitsky’s credibility. The book was nevertheless read by Whittaker Chambers, a former courier for a communist spy ring in Washington who had turned against the Stalinist system of deceit, paranoia and executions, and had gone into hiding after being summoned to Moscow for purging. Later he was to write his own memoir, Witness, in which he presented the object of a secret agent’s life as humdrum duplicity. ‘Thrills mean that something has gone wrong,’ he wrote. ‘I have never known a good conspirator who enjoyed conspiracy.’ Chambers contacted Levine, who introduced him to Krivitsky. After the shock of the non-aggression pact signed by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia on 23 August, Levine asked Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle to meet Chambers and hear his information.33
War in Europe began on 1 September: next day Chambers visited Berle and named eighteen New Deal officials as communists, including a Far Eastern expert at the State Department, Alger Hiss @ LAWYER @ALES, and Laurence Duggan @ 19 @ FRANK @ PRINCE, chief of the American Republics Division of the State Department. It is likely, but not certain, that the senior Treasury official Harry Dexter White was another of the communists denounced by Chambers. Berle reported the denunciation to President Roosevelt, who took no action, and waited seven months before alerting the FBI, which also took little action. In consequence of Berle’s inattention and the FBI’s laxity, Russian communist spies riddled the Roosevelt administration until the Cold War, damaged US interests and contributed to the post-war paranoia about communist penetration agents. Washington officials had an antithetical group mentality from their counterparts in Whitehall: most were political appointees; many were career lawyers; they lacked the procedures, continuities and group loyalties that were the pride of English civil servants; they had no administrative tradition of minuting inter-departmental meetings, and often avoided recording decisions on paper. Although more diverse in their backgrounds and less hidebound in their management, in handling Russian communist penetration of central government Washington’s oversights were as grievous as London’s.
The day after Chambers met Berle, on 3 September, Victor Mallet, Counsellor at the Washington embassy, wrote to Gladwyn Jebb, who was then private secretary to Sir Alexander Cadogan (Vansittart’s successor as PUS at the Foreign Office). Mallet noted that Krivitsky had foretold the Russo-German pact: ‘he is clearly not bogus as many people tried to make out’. Mallet reported Levine’s information that Krivitsky knew of two Soviet agents working in Whitehall: one was King in the Office cipher-room, who ‘has for several years been passing on everything to Moscow for mercenary motives’; the other man was said to be in the ‘Political Committee Cabinet Office’. (Levine was to recall in 1956 that when he told the British Ambassador in Washington, Lord Lothian, about two Foreign Office spies, Lothian smiled in superior disbelief.) Mallet warned Jebb, ‘Levine is of course a Jew and his previous history does not predispose one in his favour, as he was [newspaper owner William Randolph] Hearst’s bear-leader to a ridiculous mission of Senators to Palestine in 1936 and a violent critic of our policy. But … he seems quite genuine in his desire to see us lick Hitler.’34
Cadogan asked Harker of MI5 and Vivian of SIS to investigate the Communications Department. Vivian, with SIS’s patriotic mistrust of foreigners, thought Krivitsky sounded ‘at the best a person of very doubtful genuineness’. King stymied his questioners during his first interrogation on 25 September, without convincing Vivian, who ended by telling him, in the rational bromide style of such interviews, ‘We had hoped that you might be able to clear up what looks like a very unfortunate affair, and if you can at this eleventh hour tell us anything, it will, I think, be to everybody’s advantage. I don’t think you will find us unreasonable, but it is depressing to find that you have been unable to tell us anything, except the specific things we have asked you about.’ They detained King overnight in ‘jug’, to use the slang word of Cadogan, who noted on 26 September: ‘I have no doubt he is guilty – curse him – but there is absolutely no proof.’35
Spurred by the emphasis on national security that had followed the declaration of war on 3 September, and independently of the information received in Whitehall from Krivitsky, Parlanti approached the authorities of his own volition and volunteered his strange story of the Herne Bay train and the Buckingham Gate lease. Hooper’s denunciation of Pieck was resuscitated from a moribund SIS file. Decisively ‘Tar’ Robertson got King drunk in the Bunch of Grapes pub at 80 Jermyn Street, rather as he had done six years earlier with Oldham at the Chequers pub a few yards away. Robertson got temporary possession of King’s key-ring, which enabled MI5 colleagues to visit King’s flat in Chelsea and find incriminating material. King was arrested next day. On 28 September, under what Cadogan called ‘Third Degree’ questioning in Wandsworth prison, he gave a full confession. MI5 witnesses at his secret trial in October were driven to the Old Bailey in cars with curtained windows to hide their identity. There were no press reports of the trial, which was kept secret for twenty years. King was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment.36
Harker and Vivian suspected several of King’s colleagues, but had no evidence for prosecutions. The ‘awful revelations of leakage’ appalled Cadogan and his Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax: in December 1939 they swept all the existing staff out of the Communications Department, although most remained as King’s Messengers, and installed a clean new team. Dorothy Denny and other women were appointed to the department to dilute its masculinity, and thus to moderate its office culture, although the top departmental jobs remained in male hands.
Then on 26 January 1940 SIS informed Cadogan that there had been leakages from the FO’s Central Department to Germany during the preceding July and August. On 8 February Cadogan persuaded William Codrington (chairman of Nyasaland Railways and of the London-registered company that held the Buenos Aires gas supply monopoly) to accept appointment as Chief Security Officer at the Foreign Office, with the rank of Acting Assistant Under Secretary of State and direct access to the PUS. One of Will Codrington’s brothers travelled across Europe for Claude Dansey’s Z Organization under cover of being a film company executive.37
Codrington was unpaid. He had no staff until in 1944 he enlisted Sir John Dashwood, Assistant Marshal of the Diplomatic Corps, ‘the most good-natured, jolly man imaginable’ in James Lees-Milne’s description. Dashwood handled the security crisis at the embassy in Ankara, where the Ambassador’s Albanian valet Elyesa Bazna, codenamed CICERO, filched secrets and passed them to the German High Command. Codrington retired in August 1945, resumed his City directorships and accepted the congenial responsibilities of Lord Lieutenant of the tiny county of Rutland. It is hard to imagine that he and Dashwood scared anyone who mattered.38
Meanwhile Krivitsky had been summoned by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), then better known as the Dies Committee (named after its chairman, the Texan congressman Martin Dies). When he testified on 11 October 1939, naive and rude questions were pelted at him. One senator decried him as ‘a phony’, who ought to be deported. Krivitsky afterwards called HUAC ‘ignorant cowboys’ and Dies a ‘shithead’.39
There was a different assessment of Krivitsky in London. The star among Harker’s officers was MI5’s first woman officer Jane Sissmore: she had taken the surname of Archer after her recent marriage and was so precious to the Service that she had been kept in her job at a time when women civil servants were required to resign if they married so that they neither neglected their husbands nor continued to take a man’s place and salary. In November 1939 Archer convinced Harker that Krivitsky should be invited to London for debriefing. Krivitsky reached Southampton in January 1940, and was installed at the Langham Hotel in Portland Place under the alias ‘Mr Thomas’. Krivitsky’s four weeks of debriefing was MI5’s first experience of interrogating a former Soviet illegal about tradecraft, networks and names. As Brian Quinlan explains in Secret War, ‘The seamless nature of the debriefing’s planning and execution, the expertise and diligence of the officers who conducted it, and the quality and quantity of the information it produced have led some MI5 insiders to regard this case as the moment when MI5 came of age.’40
Krivitsky’s trans-Atlantic journey and accommodation in the Langham Hotel were tightly managed by his English hosts, who knew that a controlled but not oppressive environment improves the prospects of counter-intelligence interrogations. The FBI had waited nine months before interviewing Krivitsky and gave little forethought to the meeting. MI5 and SIS made meticulous preparations for his arrival at the Langham Hotel. They compiled preliminary character assessments of a kind that has since evolved and become standard operating procedure for defectors, foreign agents and foreign leaders. They exerted themselves to help Krivitsky’s wife and children, who were living in Canada while US immigration issues were resolved. Archer and her colleagues sought to impress Krivitsky with their understanding, competence and judgement. As Quinlan recounts, ‘their motivation was not simply pride; they understood that Krivitsky was a professional, and they hoped to gain his respect and cooperation by showing their own professionalism’.41
The debriefing was conducted by Archer, who was well informed about Stalin’s Russia and about Soviet espionage and approached Krivitsky from an international perspective. Her first task, which took several interviews, was to reassure him that he would not be arrested if he made admissions about spying on the British Empire. She then won his respect by her expertise in his field, and encouraged his explanatory candour by listening appreciatively to his account of all that he knew or had done. During debriefing, Krivitsky described the organization, tradecraft, tactics and personalities of the Fourth Department, the NKVD and the system of legal and illegal residents in the European capitals. He spoke of forged passports, secret inks, agent-training, penetration, counter-espionage and subversion in the British Empire. He predicted that in the event of an Anglo-Russian war the CPGB would mobilize a fifth column of saboteurs. Krivitsky made clear that the Stalinist aim was to support and fund colonial liberation movements, which would bring revolutionary change in territories under imperial rule and thus accelerate revolution in the west. He expressed ‘passionate hatred of Stalin’, Archer reported. It was his ‘burning conviction that if any freedom is to continue to exist in Europe, and the Russian people freed from endless tyranny, Stalin must be overthrown’.42
Krivitsky supplied new material on Oldham, Bystrolyotov, King, Pieck, Goold-Verschoyle and others. There were clues to the activities of both Maclean and Philby in his account. Krivitsky felt sure that the source of Foreign Office leaks was ‘a young man, probably under thirty, an agent of Theodore MALY @ Paul HARDT, that he was recruited as a Soviet agent purely on ideological grounds, and that he took no money for the information he obtained. He was almost certainly educated at Eton and Oxford. KRIVITSKY cannot get it out of his head that the source is a “young aristocrat”, but agrees that he may have arrived at this conclusion because he thought it was only young men of the nobility who were educated at Eton.’ Krivitsky imagined that since the announcement of the Nazi–Soviet pact in August 1939, ‘the young man will have tried “to stop work” for he was an idealist and recruited on the basis that the only man who would fight Hitler was Stalin: that his feelings had been worked on to such an extent that he believed that in helping Russia he would be helping this country and the cause of democracy generally. Whether if he has wanted to “stop work” he is a type with sufficient moral courage to withstand the inevitable OGPU blackmail and threats of exposure KRIVITSKY cannot say.’ No one connected the supposed Eton and Oxford aristocrat to Maclean, the non-Etonian, non-Oxford politician’s son.43
Krivitsky repeatedly alluded to a young ‘University man’ of ‘titled family’, with ‘plenty of money’, whose surname began with P. He was ‘pretty certain’ that this individual was in the same milieu as the Foreign Office source. In Archer’s summary of Krivitsky’s remarks, Yezhov had ordered Maly to ask this young Englishman – ‘a journalist of good family, an idealist and a fanatical anti-Nazi’ – to murder Franco in Spain. No one had the time to connect this information to Philby, who met many of the criteria but had no titles or fortunes in his background. It is usually forgotten that at the time of the Krivitsky interrogations Philby was working as a war correspondent in France and six months away from his recruitment to SIS.44
Doubtless at Vivian’s request, Archer omitted from her summary of Krivitsky’s debriefing all reference to Hooper, who had been rewarded for informing on Pieck by being re-engaged in October 1939 by SIS. Both Vivian and his SIS colleague Felix Cowgill trusted Hooper, and did not want him incriminated. Vivian insisted that Hooper was ‘a loyal Britisher’. Cowgill concurred that he was ‘above everything … absolutely loyal’. In fact Hooper was the only man in history to work for SIS, MI5, the Abwehr and the NKVD. He was sacked from SIS in September 1945, after post-war interrogations of Abwehr officers revealed that he had worked for them until the autumn of 1939.45
The earliest MI5 material supplied by Blunt to Moscow in January 1941 included a full copy of Archer’s account of debriefing Krivitsky. A month later Krivitsky was found dead, with his right temple shot away and a revolver beside him, in a hotel bedroom in Washington, where he was due to testify to a congressional committee. Moscow’s desire for revenge must have intensified after reading all that he had said in his debriefing, but suicide is equally probable. MI5 felt a moral responsibility to give financial help to his widow. Ignace Reiss had already been ambushed near Lausanne and raked with machine-gun fire in 1937. Joseph Leppin, Bystrolyotov’s courier for Oldham’s material, disappeared in Switzerland in the same year. The courier Brian Goold-Verschoyle was summoned to Moscow from the Spanish civil war and never seen again. Liddell’s informant Georges Agabekov vanished in 1938 – perhaps stabbed in Paris and his corpse put in a trunk that was dumped at sea, perhaps executed after interrogation in Barcelona, perhaps butchered in the Pyrenees with his remains thrown in a ravine. Theodore Maly, with his hands tied behind his back, dressed in white underclothes, kneeling on a tarpaulin, was shot in the back of the neck in a cellar at the Lubianka in 1938. Bazarov, who had been transferred from Berlin to serve as OGPU’s illegal rezident in the USA, was recalled in the purge of 1937 and shot in 1939. Bystrolyotov was luckier than these colleagues: recalled in 1937, he was tortured and survived twenty years’ hard labour in the camps (although his destitute wife and mother killed themselves). After Krivitsky’s death his refugee literary agent Paul Wohl told Malcolm Cowley: ‘We are broken men; the best of our generation are dead. Nous sommes des survivants.’46
George Antrobus was at home with his parents in Leamington Spa, celebrating his father’s eightieth birthday on 14 November 1940, when a bomb fell on their house – dropped by a German aircraft during the night of the great aerial blitz on Coventry. Antrobus and his father were killed. In the same week Jane Archer was sacked from MI5 for insubordination. Earlier that year, at MI5’s instigation, Vernon Bartlett, a diplomatic correspondent who had been elected as a Popular Front MP, tried without avail to inveigle Pieck into visiting London, where he would have been interrogated. Instead, in May 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands, Pieck was taken into Nazi captivity and incarcerated in Buchenwald. Somehow he survived the barbarities of camp life, and resumed his design business in peacetime. In April 1950 he was induced to visit London for interview by MI5 about King. His clarifications may have contributed to a final death.
Armed with Pieck’s information, MI5 reinterviewed Oldham’s ex-colleague Thomas Kemp. Kemp, whose account of his contacts with Pieck was disingenuous, had been Lucy Oldham’s confidant and may have kept in touch with her. She had sunk towards destitution in the 1930s and spent the war years in the grime of Belfast, but in 1950 (aged sixty-seven) was living in a drab Ealing lodging-house. Perhaps because she was in desperate straits for money, perhaps after a tip-off from Kemp that MI5 were reinvestigating her complicity in the old treason, probably because both converging crises were intolerable, she drowned herself in the River Thames at Richmond in June 1950 before MI5 resumed contact.
Despite the determination of Antrobus, Cotesworth, Eastwood and Hay to coast through life with jokes, there was no laughter at the end.