Deception

⁹ Between the Hammer and the Anvil

Carelessness, naiveté and wishful thinking were again on ample (and humiliating) display only twenty years later. The episode centred on the doomed underground struggle against communist rule in the Baltic states – one of the least-known chapters in modern European history.¹ The names of the heroes and villains are unfamiliar; so too are the organisations they belonged to and the cause they espoused. But their death and destruction, the moral ambiguity and dilemmas that beset them, and the lethally unhelpful involvement of Western intelligence all deserve recognition. The central paradox was this: the goals of those resisting Soviet rule in the Baltic did not include gathering intelligence for Western spymasters, nor did their aims or origins make them ideal allies. But it was the spy agencies that offered them their only hope of outside support; and for all their faults, they were, at the start of the Cold War, a large part of the slender hand of cards that American and British intelligence could muster.

Intelligence links across the Baltic sea had reconnected during the war, in early 1943. The cooperation was controversial for both sides. The Soviet Union was still officially Britain’s ally and many of the Baltic agents were outspokenly anti-communist. Opinion on their side was divided. Many believed that the only hope of staving off another Soviet occupation was to intensify cooperation with the Germans. Others hoped that Britain would ditch its alliance with Stalin and rescue them as it had done in 1920. The first fruits of the connection were bitter. Evald Aruvald, then in the Estonian resistance, recalled: ‘We passed to the British… details of our strengths and positions at the front, hoping for assistance. The British, in turn, passed on this information to the Soviets.’² Colonel Alfons Rebane, a legendary Estonian officer who later worked for SIS, complained: ‘This damaged the Estonian people’s fight against our slave-masters the communists.’³

The story starts with Alexander ‘Sandy’ McKibbin, born in pre-revolutionary Russia, and then a timber-merchant in pre-war Estonia (and probably on the books of British intelligence)⁴. During the war, he worked for the SIS station in Stockholm: in those days one of the great spy nests of Europe. His main job was spying on the Nazis, who had occupied the Baltic states in 1941 and were now fighting a losing defensive battle against the advancing Soviet forces. Meanwhile the Lithuanian underground, hoping against hope to re-establish the country’s independence, was eager to make contact with Western powers. One of its representatives was a regular visitor to Sweden and made contact with McKibbin, who signed him up.⁵ (The British spy also contacted an Estonian underground leader, until his capture and torture by the Gestapo in 1944 led to the destruction of his network.)⁶

From the Baltic point of view, the Nazis and Soviets were not hugely different. This perspective will be startling to those who see Hitler’s Germany as the fount of all evil and the Soviet Union as a valiant (if ill-led) ally against it. But in the Baltic as in much of Europe the war was a three-way fight. In one corner were the Nazis, with an imperial doctrine based on racial supremacy, in the other the Soviets, who mixed Russian imperialism with the ideology of class warfare. In the middle, bearing the brunt of the bloodshed, were the peoples whose countries the Nazi–Soviet pact had obliterated. As the Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova notes, the war years offered the Baltics a choice between Hitler, Stalin and death, with one choice not necessarily precluding the others.⁷

By the time of the first tentative contacts between the resistance and foreign intelligence, the damage inflicted by both fighting and invasion was severe. The forcible annexation and Sovietisation of the three Baltic countries in 1940 was followed in June 1941 by the deportation of much of the pre-war elite,⁸ typically in the middle of the night, with an hour’s notice. The class enemies, loaded on to cattle trucks to freeze, starve and suffer in distant labour camps, included: members of ‘anti-Soviet’ political parties (whether of left or right), police, prison officers, military officers, political émigrés and ‘unstable elements’, foreign citizens, ‘individuals with foreign connections’ such as stamp collectors, senior civil servants, Red Cross officials, clergy, noblemen, industrialists and merchants. These comprised 10,000 people from Estonia, 15,000 from Latvia and 34,000 from Lithuania. They included much of the middle-class Jewish population of all three countries. As the Yale historian Timothy Snyder has pointed out, it would have been little comfort to those Jews to know that they were being persecuted for their class, not their race.

When the Soviet forces returned in 1944, those who had failed to flee and showed any sign of resistance or independent thought were repressed as ‘bourgeois nationalists’.⁹ This traumatic history is the emotional and strategic backdrop for the espionage debacles of the following years, for the independence struggle of the 1980s, and for the headlong embraces between Western spy services and their Baltic counterparts in the 1990s. Juozas Lukša, a CIA-trained Lithuanian resistance fighter, later wrote:

Helping the Soviets beat the Nazis made sense from a Western point of view (and was a question of life and death for the region’s surviving Jews) but the bungling that followed was inexcusable. British intelligence was keen to find out what was happening in the occupied Baltic states, chiefly to know if the Soviet Union was planning a further push westwards. On 15 October 1945 it sent a boat with four agents from Sweden to Latvia on a reconnaissance mission. Unfortunately, it capsized and the men were caught and tortured to the point of insanity. Their ciphers and radio transmitters fell into the hands of Jānis Lukaševičs, a brainy officer of the Latvian KGB. Here was proof that SIS operations against the Soviet Union had restarted – but how to respond? Waiting for more spies to come and trying to hunt them down was clumsy and risky: far better to lure future British agents into a trap. The operation was labelled Lursen-S¹¹ though it is usually called ‘Red Web’ – the name of a book in 1989 by the British author Tom Bower, who first unveiled its dark secrets.

In March 1946 Lukaševičs forced a Latvian[50] who had operated a radio for the British during the war to start sending messages again, claiming that the agents had given him their codes and radio before capture. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the British eventually responded. A second SIS mission to Latvia in 1946 landed two agents[51] tasked with finding out what had happened to the previous mission. But the new arrivals’ transmitter proved faulty. In an even graver breach of tradecraft, SIS instructed them to make contact with the existing – KGB-controlled – radio operator. That forged a fatal link between the new British operations and the compromised network now controlled by the KGB. With one thread in the web spun, Lukaševičs did not order the men’s arrest. He wanted a bigger haul. SIS instructed its agents (now under KGB surveillance) to meet other British agents on the ground. That provided the Soviets with more leads and clues. Other efforts were equally farcical. Two more agents ended up stranded in Latvia and were arrested, along with their networks. Another émigré, Feliks Rumnieks, was instructed to return to Latvia and make contact with the KGB in order to work as a double agent. He was arrested and confessed everything.

Meanwhile the Lithuanian KGB was playing a similar game. It sponsored a rival resistance movement to the main partisan outfit.¹² The bogus organisation’s underground leader was a distinguished American-born Lithuanian, Juozas Albinas Markulis, seemingly stalwart, but in fact a traitor since 1944. Such ruses not only divided and distracted the anti-communist cause abroad. They also helped uproot real resistance at home. On 18 January 1947 Markulis summoned a meeting of all the partisan leaders in Lithuania. Though Lukša – a genuine anti-communist of remarkable brains, courage and eloquence – was sceptical, others were trusting: after all, Markulis was in contact with the revered British intelligence service. The Lithuanians walked straight into a KGB ambush. In a similar ruse in Latvia, Lukaševičs arranged for fourteen senior partisan leaders to be summoned for a meeting in Riga with representatives of the ‘Latvian government-in-exile’ and a representative of the ‘British secret service’. To allay their suspicions, each leader was told to provide a photo, and in return received a valid Soviet ID card – supposedly proof of British prowess in forgery. On 13 October the unsuspecting men briefed the ‘British’ visitor on every detail of their operations. They were then arrested and never seen again.

Behind the Iron Curtain, trust in the West was still profound. An underground newspaper in Lithuania proclaimed in June 1947:

That was an overstatement. Britain was ruined by the cost of the war. America was unwilling to face up to the new challenge in Europe. The mood began to change only after the Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948. On 18 June of that year President Harry Truman signed a fateful order in the National Security Council, tasking the newly created CIA with:

The first Soviet atom bomb test in August 1949 and the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 stoked interest further. In the days before spy satellites (or even spy planes, which started in 1952) and with Western diplomats in Moscow effectively imprisoned in their embassies, the outside world was acutely short of information about Soviet intentions and capabilities. Panicky politicians put huge pressure on the spymasters to do something. This was something that could be done. So they did it.

Superficially the Baltic states seemed an ideal base for anti-communist activities. The populations were solidly anti-communist. Partisan forces in the forests supposedly numbered many tens of thousands. The region was accessible by boat and plane. It was a forward bastion of Soviet military strength: if an attack on the West were pending, the signs in the Baltic would be unmistakable. The human means were plentiful: émigrés in western Germany, Britain and the United States provided a highly motivated and plentiful source of agents. In short, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania looked like places where it was possible both to fight communism and spy on it. The disastrous results of this wishful thinking were the SIS Operation Jungle and its CIA counterpart, initially called Operation Tilestone.¹⁵ Failure is an orphan, and nowhere more so than in espionage. When something works, it looks like an act of genius. Had Stalin died earlier and the collapse of the Soviet Union ensued, the operations could have gone down in history as prescient and brave endeavours, worthy successors to the work of SOE in occupied Europe. In fact the disaster that followed was hushed up for thirty years. Secrecy has its uses.

The CIA developed a big training facility for émigrés in Kaufbeuren in Germany. In place of makeshift camps in neutral Sweden SIS set up a spy school for its Baltic recruits at 110 Old Church St, Chelsea (now a luxury townhouse). Among those in charge was Alfons Rebane, who had led a fierce but doomed resistance to the Red Army’s re-conquest of Estonia in 1944.[52] Firearms practice took place in a quarry some twenty miles from London, while parachute training was based at an airport near Abingdon. The trainees practised landing from small boats on the Isle of Wight, learned unarmed combat at Fort Monckton and honed survival techniques at a commando-training base in Scotland near Ben Nevis. The training, ranging from memorisation to Morse code, secret writing, woodcraft and close combat, was excellent. The agents’ abilities in communications, tactics, weapons-handling, evasion and escape techniques and other elements of covert operations and spycraft were incomparably higher than their counterparts back home. After the first few years of fighting had thinned the ranks of the veterans, the partisans were mainly farm boys, wise in the ways of the countryside, but no match for the battle-hardened counter-insurgency troops of the KGB. Other bits of the Baltic operations were sloppier. Anthony Cavendish, a former SIS dispatch officer in Germany, recalls:

SIS seems not to have pondered the lessons of this incident for its selection procedures and security routines. It should also have questioned the flawed assumptions behind the whole operation.

The first of these was that the Soviet Union was indeed planning a military assault on the West, rather than struggling to deal with its colossal internal problems. Another was that the existing networks were sound. In fact they were a trap. The idea that outside agents would gain useful information about Soviet military activities in the region, let alone any insights into the authorities’ decision-making, was far-fetched. That they could engage in combat operations inside the Soviet Union was even more dubious. Were the trainees spies or commandos? Was their job to monitor Soviet troop movements or to sabotage them? From 1949 onwards, SIS tried to downplay the trainees’ role in resistance operations and stressed the importance of espionage, but this risked denting their motivation. Going home to fight the occupiers and free the homeland was a powerful incentive, but risking torture and death to snoop around for a foreign power was less compelling.

A second element of treachery was in play too. Until 1947 Kim Philby, the most senior KGB spy in the West, was the head of SIS’s Section 9, in charge of all British operations against the Soviet Union. At that point he moved to Washington, DC, to an even more sensitive role: as liaison officer between SIS and the newly formed CIA. As he later wrote:

As Britain and America marched deeper into the bog, the KGB became bolder. In October 1948 Lukaševičs organised the bogus ‘escape’ of a seasoned agent called Vidvuds Šveics, who claimed to be a representative of the Latvian resistance. In retrospect, that seems an obvious dangle and a leading Latvian activist in Stockholm working with SIS was immediately suspicious.¹⁸ But in another grotesque breach of tradecraft, Šveics was put in charge of a six-strong group (two from each of the three countries) trained by SIS. Worse, he was given a list of local sympathisers – just the people that the KGB most wished to catch. When his team landed near the Lithuanian resort of Palanga on 1 May Šveics separated from the others and alerted the border guards, who killed both Estonians and one of the Latvians. The others fled. Šveics sent a cipher message telling SIS that he had made a miraculous escape. By the year-end the entire network was under KGB control, though still, in the eyes of the British spymasters, operating and intact. The next expedition of the beefed-up operation was in October 1949, when a group of the elaborately trained recruits landed in Latvia to be met by KGB agents posing as resistance fighters. In London, SIS celebrated a successful landing.

The Americans were making mistakes too. They were starting from ‘virtually empty’ files: little more than whatever pre-war reference books and press cuttings could be found in the Library of Congress. Harry Rositzke, a senior CIA officer, noted: ‘Even the most elementary facts were unavailable – on roads and bridges, on the location and production of factories, on city plans and airfields.’¹⁹ Incoming intelligence was little help. ‘Most of it was trivial, much of it spotty, garbled or out of date.’ Amid the ignorance grew panic. Western military planners believed, wrongly, that Soviet forces were capable of reaching the English Channel in a matter of weeks. By late 1949, they reckoned that Soviet bombers could drop nuclear weapons on America. Rositzke recalls a military officer banging the table in the Pentagon and shouting: ‘I want an agent with a radio on every goddamn airfield between Berlin and the Urals!’ Faced with utterly impractical demands, America’s spy chiefs too threw caution (and ethics) to the winds,²⁰ recruiting hundreds of émigrés for parachute drops into communist-ruled Europe, from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Among them were some notorious Nazi war criminals, including senior Nazis such as Otto von Bolschwing, a close associate of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust.²¹ This was not an oversight: German wartime intelligence had been excellent, and retained useful assets and insights in the East. The price was American moral credibility. It became a lot easier for Soviet propagandists to say that the West was crawling with fascists when Nazi collaborators were facing promotion, not punishment.

In the Baltics American efforts centred on the charismatic (and entirely honourable) Lukša, who had returned from Lithuania deeply worried about KGB penetration of the resistance. In January 1949 America flew Lithuanian émigré leaders to Washington, DC, to sign a formal agreement with the CIA, backed by an annual grant of $40,000. Meanwhile the SIS-backed Lithuanians were falling deeper into the KGB’s grasp. From being unwittingly under Soviet control, they were now working hand-in-hand with the country’s occupiers. Despite warning signals – a failure to answer a trick question and a failed assassination attempt on SIS’s top Lithuanian in Stockholm – Britain failed to notice anything amiss. The CIA was misreading the signs too: Lukša’s final mission to Lithuania was unsuccessful, because the partisans were by now so weak that collecting intelligence, let alone fighting the Soviets, was difficult. Quite unfairly, the Americans worried that Lukša’s lacklustre reporting showed that he had been turned or betrayed. The British-backed agents seemed to be doing so much better. The outcome could hardly have been better for the KGB: the British suspected that the American operation was leaky; the Americans suspected the British. Carr flew to Washington to have it out with Rositzke. The exchange between the two Harrys ran as follows:

Carr could hardly have been more wrong. Britain was making the biggest bungles imaginable, with a flawed concept, weak operational planning, poor assessment and sloppy compartmentalisation. Worse, the notetaker at this meeting was none other than Kim Philby.[53] The reaction that his account of this top-secret meeting aroused among his controllers in Moscow can only be imagined.

By 1949, the Baltic resistance was effectively over. Collectivisation of agriculture and the accompanying mass deportations had all but destroyed the partisans’ food supplies and support networks. Cruelty against those who continued to resist was extreme:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The American spymasters were unmoved. Rositzke thought that the scale of the operation must be causing nightmares in the Soviet leadership: even if they mopped up most of the agents, in a totalitarian system countering the slightest risk of subversion would consume huge resources. ‘Those in the Kremlin must be scared shitless,’ he said.[54] Caution was out of fashion and money was plentiful.[55] The Baltic operations seemed at least in terms of volume to be the most promising. General Eisenhower himself visited the Baltic agents to assure them of his support. The operation continued, with parachute drops supplementing the midnight naval excursions favoured by SIS. A new American case officer, Paul Hartman, took charge, telling his trainees to ignore ‘nationalist rubbish’ and concentrate on real spying. Three of his agents parachuted into Latvia on 30 August 1952, with the promise of a $15,000 bonus if they returned safely. Two were caught; one committed suicide, the second surrendered. The third[56] could have reported the truth: the partisans were defeated and the KGB in full control. Unfortunately, he proved to be an inadequate spy. He tracked down an old girlfriend and spent his operational funds on entertaining her. When he was picked up during a routine document check, the KGB determined that he had not transmitted any substantial intelligence. Armed with his codes and radio, it was able to spin the Red Web to include the Americans too.

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

The efforts were producing no usable intelligence and showed no sign of destabilising Soviet rule. The best agents were dead, such as Lukša, betrayed and killed in 1951.[57] Soviet propagandists were regularly publishing gleeful exposés of captured agents, with details of their training and missions. Meanwhile SIS was reeling from the news that two British diplomats, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, had been unmasked as Soviet spies. The case against Philby was unproven, but the CIA had demanded his recall from Washington. It would have been a good time to pull back and submit all operations involving the Soviet Union, émigrés and partisans to cold, clear-headed scrutiny. But Carr and his colleagues pressed on.

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

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

Lukaševičs next arranged for misfortunes to befall two of the genuine London-trained agents. Instead of smelling a rat, SIS decided to send replacements, receiving another phoney partisan, a radio operator called ‘Edmundas’, as well as a fiery and effective fighter,[58] whose desire to kill communists had strained the patience of his hosts. The KGB then sent a heavyweight ‘ambassador’ from the phoney partisans to London, who solemnly negotiated a deal with SIS and the émigré authorities, dividing ministerial portfolios in a putative independent Latvia. He returned home with a colossal cache of money – around a million roubles. Lukaševičs was later to boast that a total of 3.5m roubles from the British taxpayer had financed his entire deception operation. Real agents, such as a brave young Latvian CIA man called Leonids Zariņš, paid the biggest price of these games. He was parachuted into Latvia alone on 14 May 1953. But the CIA shared details with SIS, which took no precautions to keep the information secret from others in the operation. Zariņš walked straight into a trap and perished in a Siberian prison camp. His family, who believed their son was working for Bell Telephone, was told that he had died in an air crash in Austria.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He sent a second signal during a meeting with ‘Albert’, an Estonian partisan unaware of the KGB deception operation who was being sent back to Britain. Männik’s job was to reassure him. Instead, risking torture and death, he did the opposite, snatching a chance to whisper: ‘Tell Robert (Rebane’s code name), and only him, that “H” has been “S” from the very beginning.’ It is not clear if the message was understood or got through. In interviews with Estonian officials after 1991 ‘Albert’ maintained that he had not heard any such words from Männik.[59] But other warnings did get through. Several other SIS men had on their return to London expressed suspicions about their ‘partisan’ hosts. Ludis Upāns, the real partisan returned to London in 1952 by his KGB hosts because of his excessive zeal, later claimed that he had told SIS that the resistance was bogus.³³ A KGB man sent to London in 1954 posing as a partisan leader was confronted with the puzzle of the radioactive water and suggested that perhaps one group of partisans had been penetrated, while his own was sound. In 1955 Rebane was alerted personally by a former wartime comrade, turned by the KGB and sent to lure him back to Estonia for a show trial, who confessed his mission during a drunken evening. At least two phoney partisans brought to London had been spotted by chance as communist collaborators by other émigrés.

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

Harder evidence comes from an operation involving the Estonian Voldemar Kiik, one of the most successful British agents of the post-war era. His story is almost entirely unknown outside Estonia, where he was buried with military honours in the national cemetery, next to Rebane, after his death in 2002. His mission was to reconnoitre the airfield at Tartu, Estonia’s second city. Details of his mission remain classified to this day, but it would have been of huge interest to British and American intelligence to know about any hardened hangars, the quality and quantity of air defences, and signs of nuclear weapons storage and transport. Kiik was a medical student in London when Rebane approached him, probably in 1950. He was the ideal recruit – brainy, determined and a cut above the other Estonian young men in London, whose patriotism often outweighed their other talents (they, in turn, found his successful womanising tiresome). He was already battle-hardened. Mobilised by the Red Army in 1940, he jumped off a troop train and hid in a forest before being conscripted by the Germans. Wounded in the head in the battle of Velikaya Luka near Leningrad, he was left for dead during a German retreat, only to be rescued during a counterattack. He detested both occupying powers equally. Rather than exchange the mandatory ‘Heil Hitler!’ greeting, he and the other Estonians in his unit would shout ‘Ei Ütle!’ (Don’t Say!). The pronunciation was close enough to fool the Germans, and gave a pleasant tingle of resistance.

As well as the usual tradecraft, he was schooled intensively in Russian (which he did not speak) and in Pelmanism – the knack of remembering large quantities of data. But in a notable difference from the carelessness that surrounded Operation Jungle, he does not seem to have been trained with the other Estonians. With a cyanide pill sewn into his lip he parachuted into Estonia in the summer of 1952. Though tempted to visit his mother – it would have been his only chance to see her before she died – he concentrated on his mission, perhaps using the remnants of a pre-war British network for support. His route back involved a perilous crossing of the Norwegian–Soviet frontier where disaster nearly struck. Another British agent making the same crossing shortly beforehand had come across some border guards asleep at their post and had shot them, perhaps unaware that he was complicating things for anyone else. The result was a frenzy of border-guard activity. Starving, sodden and fearing capture, Kiik waited in a swamp for two weeks, living off berries. He then took a Benzedrine pill he had been saving for emergencies and crossed the border where his reception party was still waiting, as this previously unpublished picture depicts (Kiik is on the right).[60] His name did not appear on a list of Estonians wanted by the KGB, and his family was not harassed, showing that the Soviet authorities never got wind of his mission (they believed he had emigrated to Canada). Prematurely grey after his ordeal, he then worked for the British government as an instructor in covert operations (among his pupils, he once said, was the future King of Norway).[61]

Kiik’s successful mission, the mysterious agent who crossed the border before him, Captain Nelberg’s letter and some other evidence of separate, successful missions all support the theory that SIS, perhaps as early as 1950 and certainly by 1952, had reason to continue Operation Jungle as a bluff. If so, the human calculations are chilling. Were the agents still inside the Soviet Union counted as good as dead? What of the men being sent to join them? The verdict of sheer incompetence might be moderated by the steel nerves and stunning cynicism that such decisions would involve.

Meanwhile a conflict between intelligence and political objectives was plaguing the other side too. The Soviet authorities wanted to lure a senior Estonian émigré figure – ideally Rebane – across the border for a humiliating show trial. The KGB was more interested in further penetration of SIS and the CIA. But with Rebane belatedly aware of the deception, the hunters had become the hunted. It is unclear how far Rebane and SIS were at cross-purposes in the final years of the operation. The wily Estonian claimed later that even after the closure of the Latvian and Lithuanian operations, he fought to maintain the radio games with the KGB-controlled partisans, in the hope of getting his own agents back. He succeeded in at least one instance, but his career with SIS was over. The once-dashing officer ended up working as a night watchman before moving to Germany and a job in that country’s intelligence service. Having dodged repeated attempts by the KGB to entrap him, he died in 1976, having burned his papers; his devoted secretary Liis Dillie Lindre lived to see her country regain independence in 1991, yet continued to sleep with a loaded revolver by her bed (in a suburb of Brussels) even after the Soviet Union collapsed. Rebane’s Latvian and Lithuanian colleagues moved to the United States. Carr was shunted first sideways and then out of the service; until his death in 1988 he blamed Philby, not his own incompetence, for the fiasco. Viktor van Jung, a cerebral and charismatic Estonian émigré who had trained two CIA agents³⁵ who went on a doomed mission in 1954, went on to a high-flying career in the agency. Strong indications are that he was the CIA officer who ran Ryszard Kukilński, a senior Polish officer who passed on invaluable Warsaw Pact secrets to NATO.³⁶

According to Rositzke, none of the CIA operatives returned from their missions.³⁷ But a sprinkling of former agents who survived inside the Soviet Union did crop up after 1991, with embarrassing consequences for their spymasters. One of the most conspicuous cases involved Sweden, a country that had maintained a stony silence over its espionage efforts in the Baltics, which seem to have been every bit as disastrous as those of SIS and the CIA.³⁸ The activities of the C-byrån (C-Agency), renamed in 1946 as T-kontoret (T-Office), began during the war and were stepped up in 1948 when a Soviet attack on Sweden seemed all too likely. Using Baltic émigrés and run in close cooperation with SIS, they finished in 1957, after the humiliating public exposure of a Swedish spy ring and a formal Soviet diplomatic protest.³⁹

One of the Swedish agents was a young émigré called Ewald Hallisk. His story mirrored many of his generation: conscripted into the German army at the age of sixteen, he had fled to Sweden to escape the Soviet advance. Spurred by a mixture of adventure and patriotism, he volunteered to join the Swedish secret service in 1948 and was sent on a mission two years later. He left behind a fiancée, Margaret, and a toddler son, Peter. For forty-two years after he went missing, his family assumed he was dead. Nobody else wanted to admit that he had existed at all. Swedish authorities covered up the fiasco, citing official secrecy and claiming falsely that even if some such operation had existed all the documents involved had been burned in the 1960s.

On 29 June 1992, Peter Kadhammar, a journalist on the Swedish newspaper Expressen, produced a sensational scoop.⁴⁰ Far from being dead, Hallisk was living in a modest cottage in Estonia. The ‘spy who never was’ proved only too happy to talk about his training in firearms, shortwave radio, and invisible ink. He also wanted money: he had, he insisted, been betrayed by the same incompetence that had marred the SIS and CIA operations. The KGB had picked him up within two days of arriving in Estonia. He had spent two months on death row and then fifteen years in a labour camp in Magadan, one of the harshest parts of the Soviet penal system, and remained under close KGB scrutiny after his release. Swedish officials initially argued that he had been a volunteer and knew what he was getting into. Then they offered him 500,000 kronor (about $80,000 in the money of 2011). He sued, and won a modest top-up of 120,000 kronor. But it was all too late: Margaret had died, and he found little common ground with Peter.⁴¹ After an unhappy stay in Sweden he returned to his humble life in Estonia.

Other survivors were even unluckier. In 1991 I tracked down Klemensas Širvys, parachuted into Lithuania in October 1950 together with Lukša. When I asked him about his mission, he burst into tears. A widower, crippled by a stroke, he lived in dismally poor conditions in a remote part of Lithuania. The botched operation had ruined his life. I was expecting a tirade. But he bore no bitterness towards the Americans or the British: indeed he spoke broken English proudly from his time spent in a British labour battalion in post-war Germany. His one regret was that the Western allies had sent so few people, so late, to fight the communists. It was hard to imagine that this lame, tearful old man had four decades ago come ashore with a Schmeisser MP-32 sub-machine gun, grenades, radios and cyanide tablets. After a year in a bunker he was captured, tortured and sent to Siberia for a twenty-five-year sentence with five further years in exile.⁴² Neither the CIA nor SIS appears to have made provision for him after 1991.[62] A similarly poignant story concerns Zigmas Kudirka, a bright young Lithuanian émigré recruited by SIS in post-war London and sent in autumn 1952 as a radio operator. In 1956 he appealed to SIS to get him out, and was told (in his words) ‘chin up’ and to try to make his own way to Sweden. Speaking in 1989, in fluent English, Kudirka showed unconcealed rage:

He found the news that he had been a pawn in the KGB’s game shattering:

A galling footnote came when Kudirka turned up in London in 1990 in the vain hope of retrieving his belongings, including irreplaceable family photographs, which he had left with SIS for safekeeping. His former case officer, John Ludzius, met him in a pub with the bracing greeting: ‘I thought you were all dead.’⁴⁴ In the 1990s another Lithuanian SIS man, Anicetas Dukavičius, also tried (apparently unsuccessfully) to gain some compensation from the British authorities. After some lobbying and the publication of Mart Männik’s posthumous memoirs, the Männik family on 4 June 2003 received €10,000 from the British government.

Such stingy, tardy or outright hostile treatment contrasts sharply with the efforts made by SIS (and the CIA) to find dependants of dead agents from the more recent era. In one creditable and poignant episode in 1990, a young woman received a startling and mysterious invitation, summoning her to a meeting in the presidential offices in Prague Castle where senior SIS officers and their local counterparts explained what until then had been an inexplicable misfortune in her life. Her father Miloslav Kroča, the head of the British section of the communist secret police, the StB, had died (naturally) of a heart attack in 1976; her mother had some time later became ill after mistakenly taking one of his invisible-ink pills, kept in an aspirin bottle. Puzzled, she took the pills to a pharmacist; an investigation eventually alerted the authorities that the dead man must in fact have been a Western spy. Forced to live in miserable conditions in a remote part of the country, the family was blighted. The mother died, while the daughter was barred from higher education or a proper career. The visitors then handed over a large sum of money, explaining that though her father had spied for the West solely on ideological grounds he had asked that if anything were to befall him his family should be taken care of.⁴⁵ Mr Kroča, one of the most important British spies behind the Iron Curtain, was recruited by Richard Dearlove, then a ‘First Secretary’ (but actually SIS officer) at the British embassy in Prague and later Chief of MI6.

Perhaps the most tantalising loose end comes from Alexander Koppel, who is almost certainly the last surviving agent from Operation Jungle. Tracking him down was rather like finding a pterodactyl alive and well in a bungalow near London (in Mr Koppel’s case, Wokingham). A glass-fronted bookcase containing medals and memorabilia is the only sign of his extraordinary past. A sprightly 85 (when I interviewed him in early 2011), he described in matter-of-fact terms his recruitment, training, life in the ‘underground’, capture, interrogation and eventual release. He came to Britain in 1947, and worked in Dunstable in a cement works, along with many other Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian young men keen to leave the displaced person camps of post-war Germany. It was a hard, dull life. News from home was scant: even discovering which family members were alive and which had perished was hard.

In 1952 Mr Koppel was approached by Rebane and asked if he would be willing to go on a mission as a radio operator. He initially declined: his parents were still in Estonia, and would suffer horribly if he were caught. He recalls that Rebane tried to reassure him, in words that seem bizarrely complacent in retrospect: ‘Don’t worry – it’s quite safe, quite nice.’ Getting there, he said, was ‘as simple as a bus ride’. Mr Koppel moved to Old Church St, and started training. His task was simply to operate a radio, so he received what he describes as ‘negligible’ instruction in spycraft or combat.[63] The trainees were taken sightseeing to Stonehenge, and for a boat trip on the Thames. A Lithuanian taught them Russian, which they barely spoke. The evening before his departure, Rebane took him aside to give him a final briefing. ‘Take no initiative. You are only the radio operator. Take orders from “Karl” (the partisan commander). Don’t drink. Know your place.’

The first hint of trouble came when Mr Koppel arrived in Saaremaa, an island off Estonia’s coast that had once been a hotbed of anti-communist resistance. He was met by partisans who – had he known it – were all seasoned KGB officers. They took his carefully packed suitcase, which contained money, arms and other material for the resistance, and returned it with the contents jumbled, claiming that it had been dropped and burst open. His enquiries about the situation in the country got cursory answers. Hidden in an attic in a farm near Viljandi in southern Estonia, Mr Koppel got on with encoding and sending messages to London.

His KGB colleagues made life seem realistic, at one point staging a hurried forced march into the forests to avoid a house search. Mysterious lorries came and went in the night – in fact collecting and delivering teams of KGB watchers, but straining his nerves. In the winter of 1954–5, the partisans said it was time to move to a new location in northern Estonia. The group broke its journey at a villa in Nõmme, a plush suburb of Tallinn. Food and drink were offered to celebrate – according to ‘Karl’, the supposed leader of the group – a Soviet ID document that the partisans had obtained for their guest.

The KGB was convinced that Mr Koppel would have a cyanide pill and had stripped him naked while looking for it. But this standard procedure had been overlooked during his trip – perhaps, he says, because he had been so seasick. His main worry was his parents. Unwisely, he had confided to his partisan ‘colleagues’ in the bunker that his relatives were alive and in Estonia. He played for time, but soon realised that every detail of his mission was already known. ‘Every cloud has a silver lining,’ he recalls thinking. ‘I can’t give away anything because they know it all already.’ It was Mr Koppel’s good fortune, perhaps, that his capture came after Stalin’s death, and when the focus of KGB efforts was far more on counter-espionage than counter-insurgency. His captors decided to try and use him for their own purposes. With the threat of sanctions against his relatives always in the background, they moved him to a new location and told him to keep sending regular messages to the British, just as before. This continued for more than a year. Then followed the great puzzle of the story.

In 1956 Mr Koppel was suddenly taken to Moscow, where he was held in the Lubyanka – the infamous headquarters of the KGB. No explanation was given, and the treatment was good – at one point his hosts even took him to the Bolshoi Ballet. ‘I am not pointing fingers,’ he says. ‘They were nice and polite’ (this may well be the only time that an imprisoned SIS agent has applied this particular set of adjectives to his KGB captors). References to Mr Koppel in KGB files make it clear that his captors believed they had secured his agreement to work in the West. In the small hours of a summer morning, they took him to the coast of northern Estonia, and to his huge surprise gave back his gun, and provided him with a boat, a compass bearing to a lighthouse, and a phone number in Finland.

Mr Koppel was convinced that this was merely a prelude to his murder (it is easy to imagine the KGB-sponsored news story about a ‘fascist bandit’ being foiled in the act of escape). His captors’ parting words were to remind him that his family remained in Estonia. As his boat chugged through the twilight, the truth dawned. He was indeed being released. As he approached Finnish territorial waters, a speedboat neared. Fearing that it was the Finnish coastguard, Mr Koppel hurriedly dropped his gun over the side of the boat. But the crew of the boat simply waved and passed by. He had returned to the free world. He found a house and made his phone call: Rebane answered. He had clearly been expecting Mr Koppel’s return. Initially, the new arrival was uncertain what account to give. ‘I wasn’t sure what to tell them – I was in this labyrinth of doubts,’ he says. He was also worried that the KGB had a mole in SIS: ‘anything I tell them, he will tell the Russians’.

After a cursory debriefing by SIS, who appeared distrustful of him, he then told Rebane the full story – or at least his side of it. But what was the whole truth? Why had the KGB released someone who would, if he spoke candidly, blow away the cobwebs of deception? One possibility (and to my mind the most likely) is that his release was part of a straight spy swap – the first of the Cold War. Rebane had known for some time that Operation Jungle was blown, and had been in regular radio contact with the bogus partisans. When each side realised that the other no longer believed in the fiction of a serious resistance organisation inside Estonia, it would have been time for straight talking. It may well be that Rebane offered to send back one of the KGB plants in London, in exchange for Mr Koppel.

Another possibility is that the KGB had tried to recruit Mr Koppel. That would explain the hotel-style treatment at the Lubyanka. But he would have been an unlikely plant: with Operation Jungle being wound up, anyone connected with it would be coming under great scrutiny. SIS would be well aware that ‘Karl’ and his partisans had been phoneys all along. Even if he went along with the KGB plan, the likelihood of anyone trusting Mr Koppel with any more secrets was minimal. Indeed, SIS treated him and the other returning agents with suspicion: some of them complained about regular and intrusive surveillance from counter-intelligence officers. Mr Koppel insists, moreover, that the KGB gave him no instructions or contact in London. His name later appeared on a list of fugitives wanted by the Soviet authorities, which suggests that he failed to follow any instructions the KGB had given him.

Until I outlined them to him, Mr Koppel was apparently unaware of the full extent and nature of the deception surrounding his mission. He had not read Red Web. But his faith in Rebane remains undimmed to this day (indeed the legendary Estonian commander was a guest of honour at his wedding in 1960). ‘You told me “take no initiative”,’ he said to his boss wryly. Rebane responded coolly: ‘I am a soldier, not a trained intelligence officer.’ In any case, espionage was the last thing on Mr Koppel’s much-burdened mind. He moved to the countryside, becoming a British citizen, recovering from a near-breakdown and putting all thoughts of Estonia aside. Only in the 1990s did that change. The three surviving Estonians of SIS – Kiik, Koppel and Urm – made themselves known to the newly established Estonian embassy in London. An official there at the time recalls receiving a phone call, in which an anonymous voice asked: ‘How does my Estonian sound? You see I haven’t spoken it for thirty years.’ Along with other veterans of the partisan war, they received military decorations from their reborn country.⁴⁶

After intense persuasion SIS also acknowledged its historical debt, inviting the three men to a champagne reception in 3, Carlton Gardens, where the service entertains foreign guests and the eternal ‘Major Halliday’ interviews graduate recruits.[64] It is just a stone’s throw from the Ryder St office where their controllers had botched and bungled their mission. In the presence of senior British and Estonian officials, they were given replica statues of the commando memorial at Auchtermuchty on the slopes of Ben Nevis, where the agents of Operation Jungle had trained forty years previously. The figurine shows three men in pre-war battledress, bunched together, alert and watching, over an inscription reading ‘United We Conquer’.[65] SIS added ‘Never Forgotten’. After Britain’s amnesia towards its debts in the Baltic, that could seem like wishful thinking. It is all the more poignant given the efforts that the authorities in Estonia were making to help British intelligence, for the third time in ninety years.