The Sword and the Shield

^NINE FROM WAR TO COLD WAR

At the end of the Second World War, the Centre faced what it feared was impending disaster in intelligence operations against its wartime allies. The first major alarm occurred in Ottawa, where relations among NKGB and GRU personnel working under “legal” cover in the Soviet embassy were as fraught as in New York. The situation was worst in the GRU residency.¹ On the evening of September 5, 1945 Igor Gouzenko, a GRU cipher clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, secretly stuffed more than a hundred classified documents under his shirt and attempted to defect. He tried hard to hold his stomach in as he walked out of the embassy. “Otherwise,” his wife said later, “he would have looked pregnant.”

Defection turned out to be more difficult than Gouzenko had imagined. When he sought help at the offices of the Ministry of Justice and the Ottawa Journal, he was told to come back the next day. But on September 6 both the Ministry of Justice and the Ottawa Journal, which failed to realize it was being offered the spy story of the decade, showed no more interest than on the previous evening. By the night of September 6 the Soviet embassy realized that both Gouzenko and classified documents were missing. While Gouzenko hid with his wife and child in a neighbor’s flat, NKGB men broke down his door and searched his apartment. It was almost midnight before the local police came to his rescue and the Gouzenko family at last found sanctuary.²

As well as identifying a major GRU spy ring, Gouzenko also provided fragmentary intelligence on NKGB operations. Some months later Lavrenti Beria, the Soviet security supremo, circulated to residencies a stinging indictment of the incompetence of the GRU and, he implied, the NKGB in Ottawa:

The fear of being accused of further breaches of security made the Ottawa residency unwilling to take any initiative in recruiting new agents. According to a later damage assessment, Gouzenko’s defection “paralyzed intelligence work [in Canada] for several years and continued to have a most negative effect on the work of the residency right up to 1960.” In the summer of 1949 the acting resident in Ottawa, Vladimir Trofimovich Burdin (also known as Borodin), newly arrived from Moscow, wrote to the Centre to complain about his colleagues’ inertia:

The Centre agreed. The residency, it concluded, had “got stuck in a rut.”⁴

For the rest of Gouzenko’s life the KGB tried intermittently and unsuccessfully to track him down. In 1975, after a Progressive Conservative MP, Thomas Cossit, requested a review of Gouzenko’s pension, the Ottawa residency deduced that Gouzenko lived in his constituency. The residency also reported that Cossit and Gouzenko had been seen together at an ice hockey match during a visit to Canada by the Soviet national team. A KGB officer stationed in Ottawa, Mikhail Nikolayevich Khvatov, sought to cultivate Cossit in the hope of discovering Gouzenko’s whereabouts. He had no success and the residency subsequently reported that parliamentary questions by Cossit were “clearly anti-Soviet in tone.” Some years later the KGB began to search for compromising material on Cossit’s private life and prepare active measures to discredit him. He died in 1982 before the campaign against him had begun.⁵

Gouzenko’s defection in September 1945 also caused alarm at NKGB residencies in Britain and the United States. As head of SIS Section IX (Soviet Counter-intelligence) Philby was kept well informed of the debriefing of Gouzenko and reported “an intensification of counter-measures” against Soviet espionage in London. The Centre responded with instructions for tight security procedures to ensure that “the valuable agent network is protected from compromise.” Boris Krötenschield (aka “Krotov”), the controller of the residency’s most important agents, was told to hand over all but Philby to other case officers and to reduce the frequency of meetings to once a month: “Warn all our comrades to make a thorough check when going out to a meeting and, if surveillance is observed, not to attempt under any circumstances to evade the surveillance and meet the agent…” If necessary, contact with British agents was to be temporarily broken off.⁶

Even greater alarm was caused by the attempted defection of an NKGB officer in Turkey, Konstantin Dmitryevich Volkov. On August 27, 1945 Volkov wrote to the British vice-consul in Istanbul, C. H. Page, requesting an urgent appointment. When Page failed to reply, Volkov turned up in person on September 4 and asked for political asylum for himself and his wife. In return for asylum and the sum of 50,000 pounds (about a million pounds at today’s values), he offered important files and information obtained while working on the British desk in the Centre. Among the most highly rated Soviet agents, he revealed, were two in the Foreign Office (doubtless Burgess and Maclean) and seven “inside the British intelligence system,” including one “fulfilling the function of head of a section of British counter-espionage in London” (almost certainly Philby).⁷

On September 19 Philby was startled to receive a report of Volkov’s meeting with Page by diplomatic bag from the Istanbul consulate.⁸ He quickly warned Krötenschield. ⁹ On September 21 the Turkish consulate in Moscow issued visas for two NKGB hatchet men posing as diplomatic couriers. The next day Philby succeeded in gaining authorization from the chief of SIS, Sir Stewart Menzies, to fly to Turkey to deal personally with the Volkov case. Due to various travel delays he did not arrive in Istanbul until September 26. Two days earlier Volkov and his wife, both on stretchers and heavily sedated, had been carried on board a Soviet aircraft bound for Moscow.¹⁰ During the flight back to London Philby drafted a cynical report to Menzies on the possible reasons for Volkov’s detection by the NKGB. As he wrote later,

Under interrogation in Moscow before his execution, Volkov admitted that he had asked the British for political asylum and 50,000 pounds, and confessed that he had planned to reveal the names of no fewer than 314 Soviet agents.¹² Philby had had the narrowest of escapes. With slightly less luck in Ottawa a few weeks earlier, Gouzenko would not have been able to defect. With slightly more luck in Istanbul, Volkov would have succeeded in unmasking Philby and disrupting the MGB’s British operations.

The Gouzenko and Volkov alarms occurred at a remarkably busy period for the London residency, headed until 1947 by Konstantin Kukin (codenamed IGOR). From September 11 to October 2, 1945 the Council of Foreign Ministers of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the United States, Soviet Union, Britain, France and China) held its first meeting in London to discuss peace treaties with defeated enemy states and other post-war problems.The residency’s penetration of the Foreign Office gave it an unusually important role. Throughout the meeting, according to KGB files, the Soviet ambassador, Ivan Maisky, placed greater reliance on residency staff than on his own diplomats, forcing them to extend each working day into the early hours of the following morning.¹³ The Security Council meeting, however, was a failure, publicly exposing for the first time the deep East-West divisions which by 1947 were to engender the Cold War.

At this and subsequent meetings of the Security Council, Stalin’s foreign minister, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, depended heavily on the intelligence supplied by the MGB’s Western agents. Indeed, he tended to take it for granted. “Why,” he roared on one occasion, “are there no documents?” At the London conference which opened in November 1947, he appears to have received some Foreign Office documents even before they reached the British delegation.¹⁴

The MGB’s most important sources during the meetings of the Council of Foreign Ministers from 1945 to 1949 were British. Thanks to the kidnapping of Volkov, four of the wartime Magnificent Five were able to carry on work as full-time Soviet agents after the war. The exception was Anthony Blunt, who was under such visible strain that the Centre did not object to his decision to leave MI5. Shortly before he returned to the art world in November 1945 as Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, Blunt made one extraordinary outburst which at the time was not taken seriously. “Well,” he told his MI5 colleague Colonel “Tar” Robertson, “it’s given me great pleasure to pass on the names of every MI5 officer to the Russians!” The Centre may well have hoped that Leo Long (codenamed ELLI), whom Blunt had run as a sub-agent in military intelligence during the war, would succeed him in the Security Service. Blunt recommended Long for a senior post in MI5 but the selection board passed him over, allegedly by a narrow margin, in favor of another candidate. Long moved instead to the British Control Commission in Germany, where he eventually became Deputy Director of Intelligence. There he resisted attempts to put him in regular contact with a case officer—a recalcitrance which the Centre attributed in part to the fact that Blunt had ceased to be his controller. Among the occasional services which Blunt continued to perform for the Centre were two or three visits to Germany to seek intelligence from Long.¹⁵

Unlike Blunt, three of the Magnificent Five—Philby, Burgess and Maclean—were all at their peak as Soviet agents, and Cairncross still close to his, when the Cold War began. Philby remained head of SIS Section IX until 1947, when he was appointed head of station in Turkey, a position which enabled him to betray agents who crossed the Russian border as well as their families and contacts inside the Soviet Union. Maclean established a reputation as a high-flying young diplomat in the Washington embassy, where he remained until 1947. In 1946 Burgess, who had joined the Foreign Office in 1944, became personal assistant to Hector McNeil, Minister of State to Ernest Bevin in the post-war Labor government.¹⁶ After the war John Cairncross returned to the Treasury, where the London residency renewed contact with him in 1948.¹⁷ Cairncross’s main job at the Treasury over the next few years was to authorize expenditure on defense research. According to his Treasury colleague G. A. Robinson:

Cairncross’s controller, Yuri Modin, was, unsurprisingly, “overjoyed by the quality of [his] information.”¹⁹

The new security procedures introduced in the wake of the Gouzenko and Volkov alarms made controlling the London residency’s agents far more laborious and timeconsuming than during or before the war. On average, before every meeting with an agent, each case officer spent five hours moving on foot or by public transport (especially the London Underground) between locations he had studied previously in order to engage in repeated checks that he was not under surveillance. Once at the meeting place, both the case officer and the agent were required to establish visual contact and to satisfy themselves that the other was not being watched before they approached each other. If either had any doubts, they would fall back on one of three previously agreed alternative rendezvous. The system pioneered in London was later introduced into other residencies.²⁰

The London residency also pioneered the use of radio intercept units to identify and monitor surveillance of its operations by the police and MI5. In addition to the main interception unit in the residency, mobile units were established in embassy cars to check the areas in which meetings took place with agents.²¹ However, the Centre’s experiment with the eight-man surveillance team sent to London during the Second World War to carry out checks on agents and visitors to the Soviet embassy, as well as to discover the surveillance methods used by British intelligence, was discontinued. A report in KGB archives records that, handicapped by its lack of fluency in English, the team had “no major successes.”²² The experiment was probably a total failure.

The London residency’s attempts to enforce the strictest standards of secrecy and security had only a limited effect on Guy Burgess. On one occasion, while coming out of a pub where he had established visual contact with his case officer, he dropped his briefcase and scattered secret Foreign Office papers over the floor. There were frequent complaints that he turned up for meetings the worse for drink and with his clothing in disarray.²³ When George Carey-Foster, head of the embryonic security branch in the Foreign Office, first encountered Burgess in 1947, he was struck by his “disheveled and unshaven appearance. He also smelt so strongly of drink that I enquired who he was and what his job was.” Yet Burgess could still display fragments of the charm and brilliance of his Cambridge years. Late in 1947, probably to get rid of him, Hector McNeil recommended Burgess to the parliamentary under-secretary at the Foreign Office, Christopher Mayhew, who was then organizing the Information Research Department (IRD) to counter Soviet “psychological warfare.” Mayhew made what he later described as “an extraordinary mistake:” “I interviewed Burgess. He certainly showed a dazzling insight into Communist methods of subversion and I readily took him on.” Burgess went the rounds of British embassies selling IRD’s wares while simultaneously compromising the new department by reporting all its plans to Yuri Ivanovich Modin, who became his case officer in 1947 and acquired a reputation as one of the ablest agent controllers in Soviet intelligence. The chorus of protests at Burgess’s undiplomatic behavior led to his removal from the IRD and transfer to the Foreign Office Far Eastern Department in the autumn of 1948.²⁴ Though it disturbed the Centre, Burgess’s frequently outrageous conduct paradoxically strengthened his cover. Even to most of those whom he outraged he seemed as unlike a Soviet spy as it was possible to imagine.

Modin was also concerned about Nikolai Borisovich Rodin (alias “Korovin”), who succeeded Kukin as London resident in 1947. Rodin considered himself above the tight security regulations on which he insisted for the other members of the residency. According to Modin, who loathed him personally, Rodin was “known to go to clandestine meetings in one of the embassy cars, and sometimes was foolhardy enough to place direct calls to agents in their offices.” But, in the rigidly hierarchical world of Soviet intelligence, Modin felt that “there was nothing I could do about it. It was hardly my place to denounce my superior in the service.” As head of Faculty Number One (Political Intelligence) in the FCD Andropov Institute in the early 1980s, Modin was less inhibited. He dismissed Rodin as an arrogant, pretentious nonentity.²⁵

THOUGH THE MGB’S most important British agents were still undetected at the end of the 1940s, many of their American counterparts had been compromised. The Centre had complained as early as March 1945 that the membership of the Silvermaster spy ring was an open secret among “many” Washington Communists and that Harry Dexter White’s Soviet “connection” had also become known. It denounced “not only the falling off in the [New York] Residency’s work of controlling and educating probationers [agents], but also the lack of understanding by our operational workers of the most elementary rules in our work.”²⁶

The defections later in 1945 of Igor Gouzenko and Elizabeth Bentley confirmed the Centre’s worst fears. In September J. Edgar Hoover reported to the White House and the State Department that Gouzenko had provided information on the activities of a number of Soviet spies in the United States, one of whom was “an assistant to the Secretary of State” (almost certainly Alger Hiss). On November 7 Bentley, who had first contacted the FBI six weeks earlier, began revealing what she knew of Soviet espionage to its New York field office. Next day Hoover sent President Truman’s military aide a first list of fourteen of those identified by Bentley as supplying information to “the Soviet espionage system:” among them Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, OSS executive assistant Duncan C. Lee and Roosevelt’s former aide Lauchlin Currie.²⁷ Bentley’s defection, in turn, revived FBI interest in Whittaker Chambers’ earlier evidence of pre-war Soviet espionage by Hiss, White and others.²⁸

On November 20 Gorsky, the Washington resident whom Bentley knew as “A1,” met her for the last time in front of Bickford’s cafeteria on 23rd Street and Sixth Avenue in New York. Unaware that they were under surveillance by the FBI, Gorsky arranged their next meeting for January 20. According to Bentley, he told her that she might soon be needed “back in undercover work.” By the time the date for their next rendezvous had arrived, however, Gorsky was back in Moscow.²⁹ His hasty departure was probably due to the discovery of Bentley’s defection.³⁰ A few months later the resident in New York, Roland Abbiate (alias “Pravdin”), whose wife was known to Bentley, was also withdrawn.³¹ A damage assessment in the Centre concluded that Bentley did not know the real name, address or telephone number of her previous controller, Iskhak Akhmerov, the illegal resident in the United States. As a precaution, however, he and his wife were recalled to Moscow.³²

The almost simultaneous recall of Gorsky, Abbiate and Akhmerov left the MGB without experienced leadership in the United States. There were few senior officers at the Centre with first-hand knowledge of North America capable of succeeding them. In any case, as Yuri Modin later acknowledged, “We were leery of sending people out of the Soviet Union for fear of defections. Most of our officers worked in Moscow, with the result that the few men posted in foreign countries had a workload so crushing that many of them cracked under the pressure.”³³ Akhmerov was not replaced as illegal resident until 1948.³⁴ Gorsky’s two successors as chief legal resident in the United States both became bywords for incompetence in the Centre. Grigori Grigoryevich Dolbin, who arrived to replace Gorsky in 1946, had to be replaced in 1948 after showing signs of insanity (due, it was rumored in Moscow, to the onset of hereditary syphilis). His successor, Georgi Aleksandrovich Sokolov, was reprimanded by the Centre before being recalled in 1949.³⁵

The most effective damage limitation measure taken by the MGB after Bentley’s defection was to break off contact with most of the wartime American agents whose identities were known to her. As a result, Bentley’s many leads resulted in not a single prosecution. The FBI began its investigations too late to catch any of the spies named by Bentley in the act of passing on classified information, and it was unable to use evidence from wiretaps in court. The Centre, however, failed to grasp the extent of the legal obstacles which confronted the FBI and continued to fear for several years that it would succeed in mounting a major spy trial.

The Centre’s fears were strengthened by a major American codebreaking success, later codenamed VENONA. For its high-grade diplomatic and intelligence communications the Soviet Union had used since 1927 a virtually unbreakable cipher system known in the West as the “one-time pad.”³⁶ During and immediately after the Second World War, however, some of the one-time pads were reissued, thus becoming vulnerable—though it took several years for American and British codebreakers to exploit the difficult opportunity offered to them by Soviet cryptographic carelessness. Late in 1946 Meredith Gardner, a brilliant cryptanalyst in the US Army Security [SIGINT] Agency, began decrypting some of the wartime messages exchanged between the Centre and its American residencies. By the summer of 1947 he had accumulated evidence from the decrypts of massive Soviet espionage in the wartime United States. In 1948 ASA called in the FBI. From October special agent Robert Lamphere began full-time work on VENONA, seeking to identify the agents (some still active) whose codenames appeared in the VENONA decrypts.³⁷ Remarkably, however, the Central Intelligence Agency was not informed of VENONA until late in 1952.³⁸ Even more remarkably, President Truman appears not to have been told of the decrypts, perhaps for fear that he might mention them to the Director of Central Intelligence, head of the CIA, at one of his weekly meetings with him. VENONA showed in graphic detail how OSS, the CIA’s wartime predecessor, had been heavily penetrated by Soviet agents. Both Hoover and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Omar N. Bradley, seem to have suspected—wrongly—that the same was true of the Agency.³⁹

The Centre learned the VENONA secret in 1947—five years earlier than the CIA—from an agent in ASA, William Weisband (codenamed ZHORA).⁴⁰ The son of Russian immigrants to the United States, Weisband was employed as a Russian linguist and roamed around ASA on the pretext of looking for projects where his linguistic skills could be of assistance. Meredith Gardner recalls Weisband looking over his shoulder at a critical moment in the project late in 1946, just as he was producing one of the first important decrypts—an NKGB telegram of December 2, 1944 which revealed Soviet penetration of Los Alamos.⁴¹

For the Centre, VENONA represented a series of unpredictable timebombs which threatened to explode over the next few years. It had no means of knowing precisely what NKGB telegrams would be decrypted in whole or part, or which Soviet agents would be compromised by them. Moscow’s anxieties were heightened by the public controversy which broke out in the United States in the summer of 1948 over Soviet espionage. In July 1948 Elizabeth Bentley gave evidence in public for the first time to the House Committee on Un-American Activities and achieved instant media celebrity as the “Red Spy Queen.” In evidence to the committee in early August, Whittaker Chambers identified Hiss, White and others as members of a secret pre-war Communist underground. The Centre wrongly feared that the committee hearings would be the prelude to a series of show trials which would expose its wartime espionage network.

DURING THE LATE 1940s Soviet foreign intelligence operations were further confused by a major reorganization in Moscow, prompted by the American National Security Act of July 1947 which established a Central Intelligence Agency “for the purpose of coordinating the intelligence activities of the several government departments and agencies in the interest of national security.” Though that coordination was never fully achieved, Molotov argued that the unified foreign intelligence apparatus envisaged by the National Security Act would give the United States a clear advantage over the fragmented Soviet system. The solution, he argued, was to combine the foreign intelligence directorates of both the MGB and the GRU under a single roof. Molotov’s proposal had the further advantage, from Stalin’s viewpoint, of weakening the power of Beria, whose protégé, Viktor Semyonovich Abakumov, headed the MGB.⁴² In October 1947 the foreign intelligence directorates of the MGB and GRU were combined to form a new unified foreign intelligence agency, the Committee of Information (Komitet Informatsii or KI).⁴³ Under the new, highly centralized system, even the operational plans for arranging meetings with, and investigating the reliability of, important agents required the prior approval of the KI.⁴⁴

The appointment of Molotov as first chairman of the Committee of Information gave the Foreign Ministry greater influence on foreign intelligence operations than ever before. The first deputy chairman, responsible to Molotov for day-to-day operations, was the relatively pliant Pyotr Vasilyevich Fedotov, who had become the MGB foreign intelligence chief in the previous year.⁴⁵ Like most of the Centre management, Fedotov had almost no experience of the West. Roland Abbiate, the former resident in New York and probably the senior intelligence officer best acquainted with the West, was sacked on the formation of the KI. His file records that he was given no explanation for his dismissal and that “it was a terrible blow for him.” Though the reason for the sacking is not recorded, it may well have been related to his foreign Jewish ancestry, which is duly noted in his file. Abbiate was briefly reinstated after Stalin’s death, then sacked again and later committed suicide.⁴⁶

Molotov sought to strengthen Foreign Ministry control of KI operations by appointing Soviet ambassadors in major capitals as “chief legal residents” with authority over both civilian (ex-MGB) and military (ex-GRU) residents. In the jaundiced view of the later KGB defector Ilya Dzhirkvelov:

Some diplomats, however, became directly involved in intelligence operations. After the troubles in the Washington residency which led to the recall of two successive residents in 1948-9, the Soviet ambassador, Aleksandr Semyonovich Panyushkin, took personal charge for a year. He acquired such a taste for intelligence that he later became head of the KGB First (foreign intelligence) Chief Directorate.⁴⁸

In 1949 Molotov, now out of favor with Stalin, was succeeded as both Foreign Minister and chairman of the KI by his former deputy, Andrei Vyshinsky, who had made his reputation as the brutal prosecutor in the prewar show trials. Vyshinsky retained a sycophantic devotion to Beria which showed itself even on the telephone. According to one of his successors, Andrei Gromyko, “As soon as he heard Beria’s voice Vyshinsky leapt respectfully out of his chair. The conversation itself also presented an unusual picture: Vyshinsky cringed like a servant before his master.”⁴⁹ Unlike Molotov, Vyshinsky had little interest in KI affairs, handing over the chairmanship after a few months to Deputy Foreign Minister Valerian Zorin. Fedotov was succeeded as first deputy chairman in charge of day-to-day operations by the more brutal and decisive Sergei Romanovich Savchenko, like Vyshinsky a protégé of Beria. Savchenko seems to have answered to Beria rather than the Foreign Ministry. ⁵⁰

By the time Vyshinsky succeeded Molotov, much of the Committee of Information had unraveled. In the summer of 1948, after a prolonged dispute with Molotov, Marshal Nikolai Aleksandrovich Bulganin, Minister for the Armed Forces, began withdrawing military intelligence personnel from KI control and returning them to the GRU. Probably with the support of Beria, Abakumov then embarked on a long drawn out struggle to recover control of the remnants of the KI. At the end of 1948 all residency officers in the EM (Russian émigré) and SK (Soviet colonies abroad) Lines returned to the MGB. The KI was finally wound up and the rest of its foreign intelligence responsibilities returned to the MGB late in 1951.⁵¹

THE MAIN LEGACY of the KI period to the subsequent development of Soviet intelligence was a renewed emphasis on illegals who, it was believed, would eventually establish a more secure and better-concealed foundation for foreign intelligence operations than the legal residencies, particularly in the United States. The Fourth (Illegals) Directorate of the KI, formed by combining the illegals sections of the MGB and the GRU, had a total staff of eighty-seven, headed by Aleksandr Mikhailovich Korotkov, who had made his reputation during pre-war missions to assassinate “enemies of the people” on foreign soil. In 1949, by which time military personnel in the directorate had returned to the GRU, forty-nine illegals were in training.⁵² Korotkov set up departments specializing in the selection of illegals, their training and the fabrication of documentation to support their legends. By 1952 the documentation department had forged or doctored 364 foreign identity documents, including seventy-eight passports. Illegal support (Line N) officers were sent by the Centre to all major legal residencies.⁵³

The first priority of the Fourth Directorate was the creation of a new illegal residency in New York to rebuild its American intelligence operations. The man selected as illegal resident, the first since Akhmerov’s departure from the United States at the beginning of 1946, was Vilyam (“Willie”) Genrikhovich Fisher, codenamed MARK, probably the only English-born Soviet intelligence officer.⁵⁴ Fisher’s parents were Russian revolutionaries of the Tsarist era who had emigrated in 1901 to Newcastleon-Tyne, where Vilyam had been born in 1903.⁵⁵ In 1921 the family returned to Moscow, where Fisher became a Comintern translator. During military service in 1925-6, he was trained as a radio operator and, after a brief period in the Fourth Department (Military Intelligence), was recruited by INO (OGPU foreign intelligence) in 1927. He served as a radio operator in residencies in Norway, Turkey, Britain and France until 1936, when he was appointed head of a training school for radio operators in illegal residencies.⁵⁶

Fisher was fortunate not to be shot during the Great Terror. His file records that, as well as being automatically suspect because of his English background, he had been “referred to in positive terms” by a series of “enemies of the people,” and his wife’s brother was accused of being a Trotskyite. Though dismissed by the NKVD at the end of 1938, he survived to be reemployed during the Great Patriotic War in a unit training radio operators for guerrilla and intelligence operations behind German lines.⁵⁷

Fisher’s training as an illegal began in 1946 under the personal supervision of Korotkov, the head of the MGB Illegals Department. His legend was unusually complicated. Fisher assumed one identity during his journey to the United States in 1948 and another shortly after his arrival. The first identity was that of Andrei Yurgesovich Kayotis, a Lithuanian born in 1895 who had emigrated to the United States and become an American citizen. In November 1947 Kayotis crossed the Atlantic to visit relatives in Europe. While he was in Denmark, the Soviet embassy issued a travel document enabling him to visit Russia and retained his passport for use by Fisher. In October 1948 Fisher traveled to Warsaw on a Soviet passport, then traveled on Kayotis’s passport via Czechoslovakia and Switzerland to Paris, where he purchased a transatlantic ticket on the SS Scythia. On November 6 he set sail from Le Havre to Quebec, traveled on to Montreal and—still using Kayotis’s passport—crossed into the United States on November 17.⁵⁸

On November 26 Fisher had a secret meeting in New York with the celebrated Soviet illegal I. R. Grigulevich (codenamed MAKS), who had taken part in the first attempt to assassinate Trotsky in Mexico City and had led a Latin American sabotage group during the war attacking ships and cargoes bound for Germany.⁵⁹ Grigulevich gave Fisher 1,000 dollars and three documents in the name of Emil Robert Goldfus: a genuine birth certificate, a draft card forged by the Centre and a tax certificate (also forged). Fisher handed back Kayotis’s documents and became Goldfus. The real Goldfus, born in New York on August 2, 1902, had died at the age of only fourteen months. Fisher’s file records that his birth certificate had been obtained by the NKVD in Spain at the end of the Spanish Civil War, at a time when it was collecting identity documents from members of the International Brigades for use in illegal operations, but gives no other details of its provenance. According to the legend constructed by the Centre, Goldfus was the son of a German house painter in New York, had spent his childhood at 120 East 87th Street, left school in 1916 and worked in Detroit until 1926. After further periods in Grand Rapids, Detroit and Chicago, the legendary Goldfus had returned to New York in 1947. The legend, however, was far from perfect. The Centre instructed Fisher not to seek employment for fear that his employer would make inquiries which would blow his cover. Instead, he was told to open an artist’s studio and claim to be self-employed.⁶⁰ As Fisher mingled with other New York artists, his technique gradually improved and he became a competent, if rather conventional, painter. He surprised friends in the artistic community with his admiration for the late nineteenth-century Russian painter Levitan, of whom they had never heard, but made no mention of Stalinist “socialist realism,” with which he was probably also in sympathy. Fisher made no secret of his dislike for abstract painting. “You know,” he told another artist, “I think most contemporary art is headed down a blind alley.”⁶¹

In 1949, as the basis of his illegal residency, Fisher was given control of a group of agents headed by Morris Cohen (codenamed LUIS and VOLUNTEER), which included his wife Lona (LESLE).⁶² Following Elizabeth Bentley’s defection, the Centre had temporarily broken contact with the Cohens early in 1946, but renewed contact with them in Paris a year later and reactivated them in the United States in 1948.⁶³ The most important agent in the VOLUNTEER network was the physicist Ted Hall (MLAD), for whom Lona Cohen had acted as courier in 1945 when he was passing atomic intelligence from Los Alamos.⁶⁴ Early in 1948, Hall, then working for his PhD at Chicago University, had joined the Communist Party together with his wife Joan, apparently with the intention of abandoning work as a Soviet agent and working for the campaign of the Progressive candidate, the naively pro-Soviet Henry Wallace, in the presidential election.⁶⁵ Morris Cohen, however, persuaded Hall to return to espionage. On August 2, 1948 the Washington residency telegraphed the Centre:

The VOLUNTEER network expanded to include, in addition to MLAD, three other agents: ADEN, SERB and SILVER.⁶⁷ Two of these were undoubtedly the two nuclear physicists contacted by Hall. Though their identities remain unknown, the Centre clearly regarded their intelligence as of the first importance. According to an SVR history, “the Volunteer group… were able to guarantee the transmittal to the Centre of supersecret information concerning the development of the American atomic bomb.”⁶⁸

In recognition of the VOLUNTEER group’s success, Fisher was awarded the Order of Red Banner in August 1949.⁶⁹ A year later, however, his illegal residency was disrupted by the arrest of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, for whom Lona Cohen had acted as courier. Both the Cohens were quickly withdrawn to Mexico, where they were sheltered for several months by the Soviet agents OREL (“Eagle”) and FISH—both members of the Spanish Communist Party in exile⁷⁰—before moving on to Moscow. The Cohens were to resurface a few years later, under the names Peter and Helen Kroger, as members of a new illegal residency in Britain.⁷¹ Hall’s career as a Soviet spy was also interrupted. In March 1951 he was questioned by an FBI team which was convinced that he was guilty of espionage but lacked the evidence for a prosecution. ⁷²

Under his later alias “Rudolf Abel,” Fisher was to become one of the best-known of all Soviet illegals, whose career was publicized by the KGB as a prime example of the success and sophistication of its operations in the West during the Cold War. In reality, Fisher never came close to rivaling the achievements of his wartime predecessor, Iskhak Akhmerov. During eight years as illegal resident, he appears never to have identified, let alone recruited, a single promising potential agent to replace the VOLUNTEER network.⁷³ Unlike Akhmerov, however, he did not have the active and enthusiastic assistance of a well-organized American Communist Party (CPUSA) to act as talent-spotters and assistants. Part of the reason for Fisher’s lack of success was the post-war decline and persecution of the CPUSA.⁷⁴

THE MOST IMPORTANT American agent recruited during the early Cold War, Aleksandr (“Sasha”) Grigoryevich Kopatzky, was a walk-in. Kopatzky had been born in the city of Surozh in Bryansk Oblast in 1923,⁷⁵ and had served as a lieutenant in Soviet intelligence from August 1941 until he was wounded and captured by the Germans in December 1943. While in a German hospital he agreed to work for German intelligence. During the last two months of the war he served as an intelligence officer in General Andrei Vlasov’s anti-Soviet Russian Army of Liberation which fought the Red Army in alliance with the Wehrmacht. At the end of the war, Kopatzky was briefly imprisoned by the American authorities in the former concentration camp at Dachau.⁷⁶

Despite his service in the NKVD, Kopatzky’s anti-Soviet credentials seemed so well established that he was invited to join the American-supervised German intelligence service established in 1946 at Pullach, near Munich, by General Reinhard Gehlen, the former Wehrmacht intelligence chief on the eastern front.⁷⁷ In 1948 Kopatzky further distanced himself from his Soviet past by marrying the daughter of a former SS officer, Eleonore Stirner, who had been briefly imprisoned for her activities in the Hitler Youth. Eleonore later recalled that her husband “drank a lot of vodka. He kissed ladies’ hands… He was very punctual, shined his shoes, did his gymnastics in the morning, had a neat haircut, short hair all his life. And he was a very good shot. Sasha liked to hunt and talked of hunting tigers in Siberia with his father.” Many years later, after Sasha’s death, it suddenly occurred to Eleonore, while watching a televised adaptation of a John Le Carré novel, that her husband might have married her to improve his cover. That realization, she says, “came like a mountain of bricks on me.”⁷⁸ By their wedding day Kopatzky was probably already planning to renew contact with Soviet intelligence.

The SVR still regards the Kopatzky case as extremely sensitive. It insisted as recently as 1997 that no file exists which suggests that Kopatzky, under any of his aliases, ever engaged in “collaboration… with Soviet intelligence.”⁷⁹ Mitrokhin, however, was able to take detailed notes from the bulky file which the SVR claims does not exist. The file reveals that in 1949 Kopatzky visited the Soviet military mission in Baden-Baden, and was secretly transported to East Berlin where he agreed to become a Soviet agent.⁸⁰ Soon afterwards, he infiltrated the anti-Soviet émigré organization Union of the Struggle for Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (SBONR), based in Munich, which had close links with the CIA. In 1951, doubtless to his Soviet controllers’ delight, he was recruited by the CIA station in West Berlin as “principal agent.”⁸¹ Successively codenamed ERWIN, HERBERT and RICHARD by the Centre, Kopatzky received a monthly salary of 500 marks in addition to his income from the CIA. Among his earliest successes was, on November 5, 1951, to get one of his fellow CIA agents, the Estonian Vladimir Kivi (wrongly described in Kopatzky’s file as an “American intelligence chief”), drunk, transport him to East Berlin and hand him over to Soviet intelligence.⁸² Though Kopatzky was not a CIA staff officer and never worked at Agency headquarters, he did enormous damage to Agency operations in Germany for more than a decade.⁸³ According to his file, no fewer than twenty-three KGB legal operational officers and one illegal “met and worked with him”—a certain indication of how highly the Centre rated him.⁸⁴

THROUGHOUT THE COLD WAR, Soviet intelligence regarded the United States as its “main adversary.” In second place at the beginning of the Cold War was the United States’s closest ally, the United Kingdom. In third position came France.⁸⁵ Before the Second World War, France had been a major base for NKVD foreign operations. Her crushing defeat in June 1940, however, followed by the German occupation of northern France, the establishment of the collaborationist Vichy regime in the south (later also occupied by the Germans) and Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 drastically reduced the scope for Soviet penetration. The NKGB did, however, establish a strong presence within Communist sections of the French Resistance.

There were two main groups of Soviet agents in wartime France: one in Paris of about fifty Communists and fellow travelers headed by LEMOINE (transliterated into the Cyrillic alphabet as LEMONYE), and another of over twenty-five headed by HENRI, based on Toulouse, with, from 1941, a subgroup in Paris. According to KGB records, the LEMOINE group, most of whom believed they were working for the Communist Party rather than the NKGB, “was disbanded because of treachery.” Though six members of the HENRI group (KLOD, LUCIEN, MORIS, ROBERT and ZHANETTA) were caught and shot by the Germans, the core of the group survived. ⁸⁶

At the end of the war Soviet intelligence had much greater freedom of action in France than in either the United States or Britain. The Parti Communiste Français (PCF) publicly congratulated itself on its undeniably heroic role in the wartime Resistance, proudly termed itself le parti des fusillés (“the party of the shot”), and greatly inflated the numbers of its fallen heroes. From August 1944, when General de Gaulle invited the PCF to join the Provisional Government, there were Communist ministers for the first time in French history. According to an opinion poll in May 1945, 57 percent of the population thought that the defeat of Germany was due principally to the Soviet Union (20 percent gave the most credit to the United States, 12 percent to Britain). In the elections of October 1945 the PCF, with 26 percent of the vote, emerged as the largest party in France. By the end of the year it had almost 800,000 members. Though support for the PCF had almost peaked, there were many who hoped—or feared, particularly after de Gaulle’s resignation early in 1946—that France was on the road to becoming a Communist-controlled “people’s democracy.” One socialist minister privately complained, “How many senior civil servants, even at the very top, are backing Communism to win!”⁸⁷

The Centre’s first instructions to the newly re-established Paris residency after the Liberation, dated November 18, 1944, instructed it to profit from the “current favorable situation” to renew contact with the pre-war agent network and recruit new agents in the foreign and interior ministries, intelligence agencies and political parties and organizations. Inspired by the success of scientific and technological intelligence-gathering in Britain and the United States, the Centre sent further instructions on February 20, 1945, ordering the residency to extend its recruitment to the Pasteur and Curie Institutes and other leading research bodies.⁸⁸ The appointment of the ardent Communist and Nobel Laureate Frédéric Joliot-Curie as the French government’s Director of Scientific Research doubtless delighted the Centre. Joliot-Curie assured Moscow that “French scientists… will always be at your disposal without asking for any information in return.”⁸⁹

During 1945 the Paris residency sent 1,123 reports to Moscow, based on intelligence from seventy sources. Its operational problems derived not from any lack of agents but from a shortage of controllers. Up to February 1945 the residency had only three operational officers.⁹⁰ In May MARCEL of the wartime HENRI group was instructed to set up a new group to assist in the penetration of the post-war foreign and domestic intelligence agencies, the foreign ministry and the political parties, and in re-establishing control over agents in the provinces.⁹¹ By November the number of operational officers in the Paris residency had increased to seven, supported by six technical staff, but there was to be no further increase for several years. In addition to recruiting new agents, the residency was ordered to check individually every agent recruited before the war. Unsurprisingly, its 1945 reports were criticized for lack of depth and insufficient attention to the most valuable agents.⁹²

The next available statistics on the intelligence supplied by the Paris residency cover the period from July 1, 1946 to June 30, 1947, when it supplied 2,627 reports and documents, well over double the total for 1945. It also had some major recruiting successes. In 1944 WEST, recruited by HENRI from the Resistance in the previous year, joined the newly founded foreign intelligence agency the DGER (from January 1946 the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre Espionnage (SDECE)), working first on the British, then the Italian, desk. His file records that he provided “valuable information on the French, Italian and British intelligence services.” Though WEST (later renamed RANOL) was dismissed in 1945 and moved to a career in publishing, he retained contact with some of his former colleagues. RATYEN, the first of his recruits to be identified in the files noted by Mitrokhin, was dismissed from SDECE in 1946. In 1947 WEST recruited two, more important SDECE officers, codenamed CHOUAN (or TORMA) and NOR (or NORMAN).⁹³

Soviet penetration was assisted by the chronic infighting within SDECE. In May 1946 André Dewavrin (alias “Passy”), de Gaulle’s wartime intelligence chief and the first head of SDECE, was arrested on a charge of embezzlement of which he was later found innocent.⁹⁴ For the next few years Dewavrin’s successor, Henri Ribière, and his deputy, Pierre Fourcaud, were engaged in such bitter feuding that Fourcaud was forced to deny accusations that he had sabotaged the brakes of Ribière’s car and caused a near fatal accident. On one occasion, during the fractious daily meeting of SDECE division heads, Ribière drove his deputy out of the room with his walking stick. As one SDECE officer complained, “[D]ivision heads, finding themselves with conflicting orders from their director and his deputy, did not know what to do.”⁹⁵

In the year up to June 30, 1947, the Paris residency forwarded to the Centre 1,147 documents on the French intelligence services, 92 on French intelligence operations against the Soviet Union and 50 on other intelligence agencies.⁹⁶ The files noted by Mitrokhin record that both CHOUAN and NOR worked on political intelligence (SDECE Section d’études politiques). CHOUAN was employed for a time in the American department of SDECE, but by 1949 was working on Soviet Bloc affairs. NOR specialized in intelligence on Italy.⁹⁷ WEST was paid 30,000 francs a month by the Paris residency, and in 1957 was given 360,000 francs to buy a flat.⁹⁸ Ivan Ivanovich Agayants, the Paris resident from 1946 to 1948, was fond of boasting of his success in penetrating SDECE. In a lecture at the Centre in 1952 he sneeringly described French intelligence as “that prostitute I put in my pocket.”⁹⁹

Penetration of the Foreign Ministry at the Quai d’Orsay proved more difficult. During a visit to Moscow in June 1946, the Communist trade union leader Benoît Frachon reported pessimistically:

The Communist embassy secretary was almost certainly Étienne Manac’h, who went on to become French ambassador in Beijing (1969-75).¹⁰⁰ Manac’h, codenamed TAKSIM, had first made contact with Soviet intelligence while stationed in Turkey in 1942. His KGB file describes him as a confidential contact rather than an agent, who provided information from time to time “on an ideological-political basis” until 1971. His information was clearly valued by the Centre. During his twenty-nine years’ contact with the KGB he had six case officers, the last of whom—M. S. Tsimbal—was head of the FCD Fifth Department, whose responsibilities included operations in France.¹⁰¹

The KGB’s most important Cold War agents in the Foreign Ministry were cipher personnel rather than diplomats. Ultimately the most valuable and longest-serving agent recruited by the Paris embassy at the end of the war was probably a 23-year-old cipher officer in the Quai d’Orsay codenamed JOUR (transliterated into the Cyrillic alphabet as ZHUR). The large amount of Foreign Ministry documents and cipher materials provided by JOUR were despatched from Paris to Moscow in what his file describes as “a special container,” and enabled much of the cipher traffic between the Quai d’Orsay and French embassies abroad to be decrypted. In 1957 he was secretly awarded the Order of the Red Star. JOUR was still active a quarter of a century later, and in 1982 was awarded the Order of the Friendship of Peoples for his “long and fruitful co-operation.”¹⁰²

The dismissal of Communist ministers from the French government in May 1947 made further Soviet penetration of the official bureaucracy more difficult. The Centre complained in April 1948 that: the residency had no agents close to the leadership of the Gaullist Rassemblement du Peuple Français, the Christian Democrat MRP and other “reactionary” political parties; it had failed to penetrate the Soviet section of SDECE; intelligence on the British and American embassies was poor; and inadequate progress had been made in penetrating the Commissariat on Atomic Energy and other major targets for scientific and technological intelligence. ¹⁰³

A plan was drawn up to remedy these failings and to promote active measures “to compromise people hostile to the USSR and the French Communist Party.” Once again, Moscow was not fully satisfied with the results achieved. In the five-month period from September 1 to February 1, 1949, the Paris residency submitted 923 reports, of which 20 percent were judged sufficiently important to pass on to the Central Committee. The Centre noted, however, that “the requirement set by the leadership with regard to political intelligence had still not been adequately met.” During the eleven months from February 1 to December 31 the residency supplied 1,567 reports. Though 21 percent were passed to the Central Committee, the reports were criticized for failing to “reveal the innermost aspects of events” and for “not making it possible to identify the plans of ruling circles in their struggle with democratic [pro-Soviet] forces.”¹⁰⁴

The decline in the number of reports to the Centre during 1949—about forty a month fewer than during the latter months of 1948—was due chiefly to what the files describe as a “deterioration in the operational situation” at the beginning of the year, caused by heightened surveillance by the internal security service, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), and the Sûreté. On March 12, 1949 the Centre warned the Paris residency of the danger of continuing to meet agents on the street or in cafés and restaurants and advised it to make much greater use of dead letter-boxes, messages in invisible ink and radio communication. The residency was also instructed to train its agents to recognize and evade surveillance, and to instruct them on how to behave if questioned or arrested. A month later the residency reported to the Centre that, though it was impracticable to abandon completely street meetings with agents, security had been much improved. Case officers were now forbidden to go directly from the embassy or any other Soviet premises to meet an agent. Before each meeting the officer was picked up by a residency driver at a pre-arranged location and driven to the area of the rendezvous, after elaborate security checks designed to detect surveillance. Following the meeting the case officer would pass on any materials supplied by the agent to another residency officer in a “brush contact” as they walked past each other. Both times and places of meetings with agents were regularly changed, and more rendezvous were arranged in churches, theaters, exhibitions and locations outside Paris.¹⁰⁵

As a further security precaution, the frequency of meetings with agents was also reduced. The six most valuable were seen twice a month, ten other agents were met once a month and another seven once every two months. Less important agents were either put on ice or contacted by pre-arranged signals only as the need arose. After a year operating the new security procedures, the Paris residency reported that operating conditions had improved. On April 22, 1950 it informed the Centre that it was in contact with almost fifty agents—twice as many as a year before.¹⁰⁶ For most of the next decade the residency was to provide better intelligence than its counterparts in Britain and the United States.¹⁰⁷

THE ORGANIZATIONAL CONFUSION of Soviet foreign intelligence in the late 1940s was reflected in the running of its three most productive British agents. Remarkably, even Kim Philby had no regular controller during his term as head of station in Turkey from 1947 to 1949. Except during visits to London, he communicated with Soviet intelligence via Guy Burgess. Burgess’s behavior, however, was becoming increasingly erratic. To his controller, Yuri Modin, it seemed “that his nerve was going, and that he could no longer take the strain of his double life.”¹⁰⁸ A trip by Burgess to Gibraltar and Tangier in the autumn of 1949 turned into what Goronwy Rees called a “wild odyssey of indiscretions”: among them failing to pay his hotel bills, publicly identifying British intelligence officers and drunkenly singing in local bars, “Little boys are cheap today, cheaper than yesterday.” Burgess was surprised not to be sacked on his return to London.¹⁰⁹ Once back in the Foreign Office, however, he resumed his career as a dedicated Soviet agent, supplying large quantities of classified papers. On December 7, 1949, for example, he handed Modin 168 documents, totaling 660 pages. KGB files also credit Burgess with using Anglo-American policy differences over the People’s Republic of China, established in October 1949, to cause friction in the “Special Relationship.”¹¹⁰

Donald Maclean was under even greater strain than Burgess. His posting to Cairo in October 1948 as counselor and head of chancery at the age of only thirty-five seemed to set him on a path which would lead him to the top of the diplomatic service, or a position close to it. But Maclean became deeply depressed at his insensitive handling by the Cairo residency. The documents he supplied were accepted without comment and no indication was given by the Centre of what was expected of him. In December 1949 Maclean attached to a bundle of classified diplomatic documents a note asking to be allowed to give up his work for Soviet intelligence. The Cairo residency gave so little thought to running Maclean that it forwarded his note unread to Moscow. Incredibly, the Centre also ignored it. Not till Maclean sent another appeal in April 1950, asking to be released from the intolerable strain of his double life, did he attract the Centre’s attention. It then read for the first time the letter he had sent four months earlier.¹¹¹

While the Centre was deliberating, Maclean went berserk. One evening in May, while in a drunken rage, he and his drinking companion Philip Toynbee broke into the flat of two female members of the US embassy, ransacked their bedroom, ripped apart their underclothes, then moved on to destroy the bathroom. There, Toynbee later recalled, “Donald raises a large mirror above his head and crashes it into the bath, when to my amazement and delight, alas, the bath breaks in two while the mirror remains intact.” A few days later Maclean was sent back to London where the Foreign Office gave him the summer off and paid for treatment by a psychiatrist who diagnosed overwork, marital problems and repressed homosexuality. In the autumn, apparently back in control of himself, at least in office hours, he was made head of the American desk in the Foreign Office.¹¹²

The impact of Burgess’s and Maclean’s intelligence in Moscow was heightened by the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. Maclean’s deputy on the American desk, Robert Cecil, later concluded that the Kremlin must have found the documents provided by Maclean “of inestimable value in advising the Chinese and the North Koreans on strategy and negotiating positions.”¹¹³ In addition to supplying classified documents, Maclean and Burgess also put their own anti-American gloss on them and thus strengthened Soviet fears that the United States might escalate the Korean conflict into world war. For perhaps the first time in his diplomatic career, Maclean showed open sympathy in a Foreign Office minute with the crude Stalinist analysis of the inherently aggressive designs of American finance capital. There was, he said, “some point” to the argument that the American economy was now so geared to the military machine that all-out war might seem preferable to a recession produced by demobilization.¹¹⁴

The Centre’s most prized British agent, however, remained Kim Philby, who, it was hoped, would one day rise to become Chief of the Secret Service. In the autumn of 1949 he was appointed SIS station commander in Washington. Philby was exultant. His new posting, he later wrote, brought him “right back into the middle of intelligence policy-making” and gave him “a close-up view of the American intelligence organizations.”¹¹⁵

Before his departure for the United States, Philby was “indoctrinated” into the VENONA secret. Though aware of the possibility that one of the decrypts might identify him as a Soviet agent, he was doubtless reassured to discover that VENONA provided comparatively little information on NKGB activities in Britain.¹¹⁶ The bulk of the Soviet intelligence decrypts concerned operations in the United States. In late September 1949, immediately after the successful test of the first Soviet atomic bomb, Philby discovered during his VENONA briefing that the atom spy CHARLES in Los Alamos had been identified as Klaus Fuchs. The Centre promptly warned those of its American agents who had been in contact with Fuchs that they might have to escape through Mexico.¹¹⁷ It did not, however, succeed in warning Fuchs, who in April 1950 was sentenced to fourteen years’ imprisonment.¹¹⁸

On his arrival in Washington in October 1949, Philby quickly succeeded in gaining regular access to VENONA decrypts. That access became particularly important after the arrest and imprisonment in the following year of William Weisband, the American agent who had first revealed the VENONA secret to the Centre.¹¹⁹ Philby’s liaison duties with the CIA allowed him to warn the Centre of American as well as British operations against the Soviet Bloc, even enabling him to provide the geographical coordinates of parachute drops by British and American agents.¹²⁰ When writing his memoirs later, Philby was sometimes unable to resist gloating over the fate of the hundreds of agents he betrayed. Referring to those who parachuted into the arms of the MGB, he wrote with macabre irony, “I do not know what happened to the parties concerned. But I can make an informed guess.”¹²¹

Philby’s success in Washington was achieved despite, rather than because of, the assistance given him by the KI/MGB in Washington. The chaotic state of the Washington residency, which led to the recall of two successive residents in 1948-9,¹²² made Philby refuse to have any contact with any legal Soviet intelligence officers in the United States.¹²³ For almost a year Philby’s sole contact with the Centre was via messages sent to Burgess in London.¹²⁴

In the summer of 1950 Philby received an unexpected letter from Burgess. “I have a shock for you,” Burgess began. “I have just been posted to Washington.” Philby later claimed in his memoirs that he had agreed to put Burgess up in his large neoclassical house at 4100 Nebraska Avenue during his tour of duty at the Washington embassy to try to keep him out of the spectacular “scrapes” for which he was now notorious.¹²⁵ The “scrapes,” however, continued. In January 1951 Burgess burst in on a dinner party given by the Philbys and drew an insulting (and allegedly obscene) caricature of Libby Harvey, wife of a CIA officer. The Harveys stormed out, Aileen Philby retired to the kitchen and Kim sat with his head in his hands, repeatedly asking Burgess, “How could you? How could you?”¹²⁶

Despite Burgess’s scrapes in the United States, he fulfilled an important role as courier between Philby and his newly appointed case officer, a Russian illegal codenamed HARRY (GARRI in Cyrillic transliteration), who had arrived in New York a few months before Burgess began his posting at the Washington embassy. HARRY had been born Valeri Mikhaylovich Makayev in 1918. In May 1947 he had been sent to Warsaw to establish his legend as a US citizen who had lived for some years in Poland. As evidence of his bogus identity the Centre gave him an out-of-date US passport issued in 1930 to Ivan (“John”) Mikhailovich Kovalik, born in Chicago to Ukrainian parents in 1917.¹²⁷ The real Kovalik, whose identity Makayev assumed, had been taken to Poland as a child by his parents in 1930, later settling in the Soviet Union; he died in 1957 in Chelyabinskaya Oblast.

After two years in Warsaw, Makayev was able to obtain a new US passport in the name of Kovalik with the help of a female clerk at the American embassy. The MGB discovered that in November 1948, without informing the embassy, the clerk had married a Polish citizen with whom she planned to return to the United States after her tour of duty. Anxious to keep her marriage secret, she was pressured by the MGB into swearing under oath that she was personally acquainted with Kovalik and his parents and could vouch for his good character. According to Makayev’s file, his application for a new US passport was “processed in an expeditious manner and with significant deviations from the rules.” The corrupt embassy clerk received a reward of 750 dollars.¹²⁸

On March 5, 1950 Makayev left Gdynia for the United States on board the ship Batory.¹²⁹ The Centre concluded that his cover, like Fisher’s, could best be preserved within New York’s cosmopolitan artistic community. Soon after his arrival, he began an affair with a Polish-born ballerina, codenamed ALICE, who owned a ballet studio in Manhattan. Makayev’s gifts as a musician probably exceeded Fisher’s as a painter. After a brief period working as a furrier, he succeeded in obtaining a job teaching musical composition at New York University.¹³⁰

The Centre had high hopes of Makayev. He was given 25,000 dollars to establish a new illegal American residency to run parallel with Fisher’s. Two other Soviet illegals were selected to work under him: Reino Hayhanen (codenamed VIK), who had assumed a bogus Finnish identity, and Vitali Ivanovich Lyampin (DIM or DIMA), who had an Austrian legend. Two dedicated communications channels were prepared for the new residency: a postal route between agents MAY in New York and GERY in London, and a courier route using ASKO, a Finnish seaman on a ship which traveled between Finland and New York. Makayev impressed the Centre by getting to know the family of the Republican senator for Vermont, Ralph E. Flanders. His main mission, however, was to act as controller of Moscow’s most important British agent, Kim Philby.¹³¹

Burgess’s first journey as a courier between Philby in Washington and Makayev in New York took place in November 1950.¹³² The main pretext for his journeys to New York was to visit his friend Alan Maclean (younger brother of Donald), private secretary to the British representative at the United Nations, Gladwyn Jebb.¹³³ Once the liaison established by Burgess was working smoothly, Philby agreed to meet Makayev himself. Burgess, however, continued to act as the usual method of communication between Philby and his case officer.¹³⁴ His visits to Alan Maclean became so frequent that Jebb formed the mistaken impression that the two men “shared a flat.” Conversations with Alan doubtless also helped Burgess keep track of Donald Maclean’s unstable mental state.¹³⁵

Some of the most important intelligence which Philby supplied to Makayev directly concerned Maclean. The VENONA decrypts to which he had access contained a number of references to an agent codenamed HOMER operating in Washington at the end of the war, but initially only vague clues to his identity. Philby quickly realized that HOMER was Maclean, but was informed by the Centre that “Maclean should stay in his post as long as possible” and that plans would be made to rescue him “before the net closed in.”¹³⁶ The net did not begin to close until the winter of 1950-1. By the end of 1950 the list of suspects had narrowed to thirty-five. By the beginning of April 1951 it had shrunk to nine.¹³⁷ A few days later a telegram decrypted by Meredith Gardner finally identified HOMER as Maclean. It revealed that in June 1944 HOMER’s wife was expecting a baby and living with her mother in New York¹³⁸—information which fitted Melinda Maclean but not the wife of any other suspect.

There still remained a breathing space of at least a few weeks in which to arrange Maclean’s escape. The search for the evidence necessary to convict him of espionage, complicated by the decision not to use VENONA in any prosecution, made necessary a period of surveillance by MI5 before any arrest. The plan to warn Maclean that he had been identified as a Soviet agent was worked out not by the Centre but by Philby and Burgess.¹³⁹ In April 1951 Burgess was ordered home in disgrace after a series of escapades had aroused the collective wrath of the Virginia State Police, the State Department and the British ambassador. On the eve of Burgess’s departure from New York aboard the Queen Mary, he and Philby dined together in a Chinese restaurant where the piped music inhibited eavesdropping and agreed that Burgess would convey a warning to both Maclean and the London residency as soon as he reached Britain.¹⁴⁰

Philby was even more concerned with his own survival than with Maclean’s. If Maclean cracked under interrogation, as seemed possible in view of his overwrought condition, Philby and the rest of the Five would also be at risk. Mitrokhin’s notes on the KGB file record: “STANLEY [Philby] demanded HOMER’s immediate exfiltration to the USSR, so that he himself would not be compromised.”¹⁴¹ He also extracted an assurance from Burgess that he would not accompany Maclean to Moscow, for that too would compromise him. Immediately after his return to England on May 7, Burgess called on Blunt and asked him to deliver a message to Modin, whom Blunt knew as “Peter.” According to Modin, Blunt’s anxious appearance, even before he spoke, indicated that something was desperately wrong. “Peter,” he said, “there’s serious trouble. Guy Burgess has just arrived back in London. HOMER’s about to be arrested… Donald’s now in such a state that I’m convinced he’ll break down the moment they question him.” Two days later the Centre agreed to Maclean’s exfiltration.¹⁴²

Meanwhile Burgess had seen Maclean and was worried that, despite (or because of) his nervous exhaustion, he might refuse to defect. He reported to Modin and the London resident, Nikolai Rodin, that Maclean could not bring himself to leave his wife Melinda, who was expecting their third child in a few weeks’ time. When Rodin reported Maclean’s hesitations to Moscow, the Centre telegraphed, “HOMER must agree to defect.” Melinda Maclean, who had been aware that her husband was a Soviet spy ever since he had asked her to marry him, agreed that, for his own safety, he should leave for Moscow without delay.¹⁴³ It was clear, however, that Maclean would need an escort. On May 17 the Centre instructed the London residency that Burgess was to accompany him to Moscow. Burgess initially refused to go, recalling his promise to Philby not to defect, and seemed to Modin “close to hysteria.” Rodin, however, seems to have persuaded Burgess to go by giving the impression that he would not need to accompany Maclean all the way, and would in any case be free to return to London. In reality, the Centre believed that Burgess had become a liability and was determined to get him to Moscow—by deception, if necessary—and keep him there. “As long as he agreed to go with Maclean,” wrote Modin later, “the rest mattered precious little. Cynically enough, the Centre had… concluded that we had not one but two burnt-out agents on our hands.”¹⁴⁴

Though the Foreign Secretary, Herbert Morrison, had secretly authorized the interrogation of Maclean, no date had been decided for it to begin.¹⁴⁵ The London residency, however, mistakenly believed that Maclean was to be arrested on Monday, May 28, and made plans for his exfiltration with Burgess during the previous weekend. It reported to the Centre that surveillance of Maclean by MI5 and Special Branch ceased at 8 p.m. each day and at weekends. (It may not have realized that there was no surveillance at all of Maclean at his home at Tatsfield on the Kent-Surrey border.) The residency also discovered that the pleasure boat Falaise made weekend round-trip cruises from Southampton, calling in at French ports, which did not require passports. Burgess was instructed to buy tickets for himself and Maclean under assumed names for the cruise leaving at midnight on Friday, May 25. That evening Burgess arrived at Tatsfield in a hired car, had dinner with the Macleans, then drove off with Donald to Southampton where they were just in time to board the Falaise before it set sail. The next morning they left the boat at St. Malo, made their way to Rennes and caught the train to Paris. From Paris they took another train to Switzerland, where they were issued false passports by the Soviet embassy in Berne. In Zurich they bought air tickets to Stockholm via Prague, but left the plane at Prague, where they were met by Soviet intelligence officers.¹⁴⁶ By the time Melinda Maclean had reported that her husband had not returned home after the weekend, Burgess and Maclean were behind the Iron Curtain.¹⁴⁷

Once in the Soviet Union, Burgess was told that he would not be allowed back to Britain but would receive an annual pension of 2,000 roubles.¹⁴⁸ Modin later complained that his talents were wasted by the Centre: “He read a lot, walked and occasionally picked up another man for sex… He might have been very useful to [the KGB]; but instead he did nothing because nothing was asked of him, and it was not in his nature to solicit work.”¹⁴⁹ Maclean was rather better treated than Burgess. He settled in Kuibyshev, took Soviet citizenship under the name Mark Petrovich Fraser, was awarded an annual pension twice that of Burgess and taught for the next two years at the Kuibyshev Pedagogical Institute. In September 1953, in an operation codenamed SIRA, his wife and three children were exfiltrated from Britain to join him in Kuibyshev.¹⁵⁰

THE CENTRE CONGRATULATED itself that the successful exfiltration of Burgess and Maclean had “raised the authority of the Soviet intelligence service in the eyes of Soviet agents.”¹⁵¹ That, however, was not Philby’s view. At a meeting on May 24, Makayev had found him “alarmed and concerned for his own security” and insistent that he would be put “in jeopardy” if Burgess as well as Maclean fled to Moscow.¹⁵² The first that Philby learned of Burgess’s defection with Maclean was during a briefing about five days later by the MI5 liaison officer in Washington. “My consternation [at the news],” wrote Philby later, “was no pretense.” Later that day he drove into the Virginia countryside and buried the photographic equipment with which he had copied documents for Soviet intelligence in a forest—an action he had mentally rehearsed many times since arriving in Washington two years earlier.¹⁵³ Just when Philby most needed his controller’s assistance, however, Makayev let him down. The New York legal residency left a message and 2,000 dollars in a dead letter-box for HARRY to deliver to Philby. Makayev failed to find them and Philby never received them.¹⁵⁴

An inquiry by the Centre into Makayev’s conduct in New York, prompted by his failure to help Philby, was highly critical. It found him guilty of “lack of discipline,” “violations of the Centre’s orders” and “crude manners”—a defect blamed on his neglected childhood. Plans for Makayev to found a new illegal residency in the United States were canceled and he was transferred to Fisher’s residency so that he could receive expert supervision. His performance, however, failed to improve. While returning to New York from leave in Moscow, he lost a hollow imitation Swiss coin which contained secret operational instructions on microfilm. After a further inquiry at the Centre, Makayev was recalled and his career as an illegal terminated. Attempts to recover 9,000 dollars allotted to him in New York (2,000 dollars in bank accounts and 7,000 dollars in stocks) were unsuccessful and the whole sum had to be written off.¹⁵⁵

The Centre calculated that since their recruitment in 1934-5, Philby, Burgess and Maclean had supplied more than 20,000 pages of “valuable” classified documents and agent reports.¹⁵⁶ As Philby had feared, however, the defection of Burgess and Maclean did severe, though not quite terminal, damage to the careers in Soviet intelligence of the other members of the Magnificent Five. Immediately after the defection, Blunt went through Burgess’s flat, searching for and destroying incriminating documents. He failed, however, to notice a series of unsigned notes describing confidential discussions in Whitehall in 1939. In the course of a lengthy MI5 investigation, Sir John Colville, one of those mentioned in the notes, was able to identify the author as Cairncross. MI5 began surveillance of Cairncross and followed him to a hurriedly arranged meeting with his controller, Modin. Just in time, Modin noticed the surveillance and returned home without meeting Cairncross. At a subsequent interrogation by MI5, Cairncross admitted passing information to the Russians but denied being a spy. Shortly afterwards he received “a large sum of money” at a farewell meeting with Modin, resigned from the Treasury and went to live abroad.¹⁵⁷

Immediately after the defection of Burgess and Maclean, the Centre instructed Modin to press Blunt to follow them to Moscow. Unwilling to exchange the prestigious, congenial surroundings of the Courtauld Institute for the bleak socialist realism of Stalin’s Russia, Blunt refused. “I know perfectly well how your people live,” Blunt told his controller, “and I can assure you it would be very hard, almost unbearable, for me to do likewise.” Modin, by his own account, was left speechless. Blunt was rightly confident that MI5 would have no hard evidence against him. Soviet intelligence had few further dealings with him.¹⁵⁸

As Philby had feared, the defection of his friend and former lodger, Burgess, placed him under immediate suspicion. The Director of Central Intelligence, General Walter Bedell Smith, promptly informed SIS that he was no longer acceptable as its liaison officer in Washington. On his return to London, Philby was officially retired from SIS. In December 1951 he was summoned to a “judicial inquiry” at MI5 headquarters—in effect an informal trial, of which he later gave a misleading account in his memoirs. According to one of those present, “There was not a single officer who sat through the proceedings who came away not totally convinced of Philby’s guilt.” Contrary to the impression Philby sought to create in Moscow after his defection twelve years later, many of his own former colleagues in SIS shared the opinion of MI5. But the “judicial inquiry” concluded that it would probably never be possible to find the evidence for a successful prosecution. Within SIS Philby retained the support of a loyal group of friends to whom he cleverly presented himself as the innocent victim of a McCarthyite witch-hunt. Soviet intelligence had no further contact with him until 1954.¹⁵⁹

Philby seems never to have realized that Burgess’s sudden defection was the result not of his own loss of nerve but of a cynical deception by the Centre, and never forgave Burgess for putting him in jeopardy. By the time Philby himself finally defected to Moscow in 1963, Burgess was on his death bed. He asked his old friend to visit him at the KGB hospital in Pekhotnaya Street. Philby refused to go.¹⁶⁰ His sense of grievance was increased by his own reception in Moscow. Philby had long believed that he was an officer in the Soviet foreign intelligence service and was shocked to discover that, as a foreign agent, he would never be awarded officer rank. Worse still, he was not fully trusted by the leadership either of the KGB or its First Chief (Foreign Intelligence) Directorate. Not until the sixtieth anniversary celebrations of the October Revolution, fourteen years after his arrival in Moscow, was the KGB’s most celebrated Western agent at last allowed to enter its headquarters.¹⁶¹