The Sword and the Shield

^THREE THE GREAT ILLEGALS

On January 30, 1930 the Politburo (effectively the ruling body of both the Party and the Soviet Union) met to review INO operations and ordered it to increase intelligence collection in three target areas: Britain, France and Germany (the leading European powers); the Soviet Union’s western neighbors, Poland, Romania, Finland and the Baltic states; and Japan, its main Asian rival.¹ The United States, which established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union only in 1933, was not mentioned. Though the first Soviet illegal had been sent across the Atlantic as early as 1921,² the USA’s relative isolation from world affairs made American intelligence collection still a secondary priority.³

On Politburo instructions, the main expansion of INO operations was achieved through increasing the number of illegal residencies, each with up to seven (in a few cases as many as nine) illegal officers. By contrast, even in Britain and France legal residencies operating under diplomatic cover in Soviet embassies had three officers at most and sometimes only one. Their main function was to provide channels of communications with the Centre and other technical support for the more highly regarded illegals.⁴ During the 1920s both legal and illegal residencies had had the right to decide what agents to recruit and how to recruit them. On succeeding Trilisser as head of INO in 1930, however, Artur Artuzov, the hero of the SINDIKAT and TREST operations, complained that the existing agent network contained “undesirable elements.” He decreed that future agent recruitment required the authorization of the Centre. Partly because of problems of communication, his instructions were not always carried out.⁵

The early and mid-1930s were to be remembered in the history of Soviet foreign intelligence as the era of the “Great Illegals,” a diverse group of remarkably talented individuals who collectively transformed OGPU agent recruitment and intelligence collection. Post-war illegals had to endure long training periods designed to establish their bogus identities, protect their cover and prepare them for operations in the West. Their pre-war predecessors were successful partly because they had greater freedom from bureaucratic routine and more opportunity to use their own initiative. But they also had to contend with far softer targets than their successors. By the standards of the Cold War, most inter-war Western security systems were primitive. The individual flair of the Great Illegals combined with the relative vulnerability of their targets to give some of their operations a much more unorthodox, at times even eccentric, character than those of the Cold War.

Some of the ablest of the Great Illegals were not Russians at all, but cosmopolitan, multilingual Central Europeans who had worked in the Comintern underground before joining the OGPU and shared a visionary faith in the Communist millennium.⁶ Arnold Deutsch, the chief recruiter of students and young graduates at Cambridge University (discussed in chapter 4), was an Austrian Jew. The most successful of the Fourth Department (Military Intelligence) illegals was the German Richard Sorge, later described by one of his Comintern admirers as a “startlingly good-looking… romantic, idealistic scholar,” who exuded charm.⁷ While Sorge’s main successes were achieved posing as a Nazi journalist in Japan, those of the OGPU/NKVD illegals mostly took place in Europe.

Though the Great Illegals are nowadays best remembered, particularly in Britain, for their recruitment of young, talented, ideological agents, their first major successes were the less glamorous but scarcely less important acquisition of diplomatic ciphers and documents from agents motivated by money and sex rather than ideology. Codebreaking is often supposed to depend on little more than the cryptanalytic genius of brilliant mathematicians, nowadays assisted by huge networks of computers. In reality, most major twentieth-century codebreaking coups on which information is available have been assisted—sometimes crucially—by agent intelligence on code and cipher systems. Tsarist codebreakers had led the world chiefly because of their skill in stealing or purchasing the codes and ciphers of foreign powers. Ten years before the First World War the British ambassador in St. Petersburg, Sir Charles Hardinge, discovered that his head Chancery servant had been offered the then enormous sum of 1,000 pounds to steal the embassy’s main cipher. Though the Okhrana failed on this occasion, it succeeded on many others. Hardinge was disconcerted to be told by a Russian statesman that he “did not mind how much I reported in writing what he had told me in conversation, but he begged me on no account to telegraph as all our [ciphered] telegrams are known!” The Okhrana became the first modern intelligence service to make one of its major priorities the theft of foreign ciphers to assist its codebreakers. In so doing it set an important precedent for its Soviet successors.⁸

Research on the making of Stalin’s foreign policy has, as yet, barely begun to take account of the large volume of Western diplomatic traffic which the Great Illegals and the codebreakers were instrumental in providing.

THE DOCUMENTS OBTAINED from Francesco Constantini in the British embassy in Rome from 1924 onwards included important cipher material.⁹ KGB records, however, give the main credit for the OGPU’s early successes in obtaining foreign diplomatic ciphers to the most flamboyant of the Great Illegals, Dmitri Aleksandrovich Bystroletov, codenamed HANS or ANDREI, who operated abroad under a series of aliases, including several bogus titles of nobility. His was one of the portraits of the leading heroes of foreign intelligence later chosen to hang on the walls of the secret “memory room” at the KGB First Chief (Foreign Intelligence) Directorate in Yasenevo (now the headquarters of the SVR). Bystroletov was a strikingly handsome, multilingual extrovert, born in 1901, the illegitimate son of a Kuban Cossack mother and—Bystroletov later persuaded himself—the celebrated novelist Aleksei Tolstoy.¹⁰

A hagiography of Bystroletov’s career published by the SVR in 1995 unsurprisingly fails to mention either his fantasy about the identity of his father or the fact that one of his first claims to fame within the OGPU was the seduction of female staff with access to classified documents in foreign embassies and ministries:¹¹ a technique later employed on a larger scale by Soviet Bloc intelligence agencies in operations such as the “secretaries offensive” in West Germany. A report noted by Mitrokhin quaintly records that Bystroletov “quickly became on close terms with women and shared their beds.” His first major conquest for the OGPU occurred in Prague, where in 1927 he seduced a 29-year-old woman in the French embassy whom the OGPU codenamed LAROCHE.¹² Over the next two years LAROCHE gave Bystroletov copies of both French diplomatic ciphers and classified communications.¹³

Bystroletov’s unconventional flamboyance may help to explain why he never achieved officer rank in Soviet intelligence and remained simply an illegal agent,¹⁴ attached in the early 1920s and late 1930s to the illegal Berlin residency of Boris Bazarov (codenamed KIN).¹⁵ Unlike Bystroletov, more conventional OGPU officers missed a number of opportunities to recruit agents with access to diplomatic ciphers. One such opportunity, which later led to a personal rebuke by Stalin to the OGPU personnel responsible, occurred in Paris in August 1928. A stranger, later identified as the Swiss businessman and adventurer Giovanni de Ry (codenamed ROSSI), presented himself at the Soviet embassy and asked to see the military attaché, or the first secretary.¹⁶ According to a later account by Bystroletov based on an embassy report, de Ry was a short man whose red nose contrasted colorfully with his yellow briefcase. ¹⁷ He allegedly told the OGPU resident, Vladimir Voynovich:¹⁸

De Ry also offered to provide future Italian diplomatic ciphers for a similar sum. Voynovich took the ciphers into a back room, where they were photographed by his wife. He then returned the originals to de Ry, denounced them as forgeries, ordered him out of the embassy and threatened to call the police. Though the Centre later changed its mind, at the time it commended Voynovich for his astuteness in obtaining Italian ciphers at no cost to the OGPU.¹⁹

Exactly a year later, in August 1929, there was another, similar walk-in at the Paris embassy. On this occasion the visitor was a cipher clerk from the Foreign Office Communications Department, Ernest Holloway Oldham, then accompanying a British trade delegation in Paris. Voynovich seems to have tried to repeat the deception practiced on de Ry a year earlier. Oldham, however, was more cautious than de Ry, brought no cipher material with him, tried to prevent his identity being discovered and sought to limit his contact with the OGPU to a single transaction. He identified himself only as “Charlie,” misled Voynovich by claiming to work in the Foreign Office printing department, and announced that he could obtain a copy of the British diplomatic cipher. Oldham asked for 50,000 pounds, Voynovich beat him down to 10,000 pounds and they agreed on a meeting in Berlin early the following year.²⁰

Before that meeting took place, the work of the Paris embassy and OGPU residency was disrupted by the defection of the Soviet chargé d’affaires, Grigori Besedovsky, in October 1929. Accused of counter-revolutionary “plotting,” Besedovsky made a dramatic escape over the embassy wall, pursued by OGPU guards who had orders to return him to Moscow for interrogation and, almost certainly, execution. Besedovsky’s memoirs, published in 1930, caused outrage in the Centre. They denounced Stalin as “the embodiment of the most senseless type of oriental despotism,” and revealed a number of OGPU secrets: among them the offers of Italian and British ciphers to the Paris residency by unidentified walk-ins.²¹

These revelations led to Bystroletov’s urgent recall to Moscow. At the Lubyanka, Abram Aronovich Slutsky (later head of foreign intelligence) showed him a copy of Besedovsky’s memoirs. Opposite the reference to the deception of de Ry, the unidentified walk-in who had provided Italian ciphers in 1928, the instruction “Reopen!” had been penciled in the margin by Stalin himself. Slutsky instructed Bystroletov to return to Paris at once, discover the identity of the walk-in swindled two years earlier, renew contact and obtain further ciphers from him. “Where can I find him?” Bystroletov asked. “That’s your business,” Slutsky replied. “You have six months to track him down.”²²

Bystroletov ran de Ry to ground in a Geneva bar. Believing that, after the fraud practiced on him in Paris two years earlier, de Ry might reject an approach from the OGPU, Bystroletov decided to use what later became known as the “false flag” technique and pretended to be working for the Japanese intelligence service. Though de Ry was not deceived for long by the “false flag,” he agreed to sell further Italian ciphers which he claimed to be able to obtain from a corrupt Italian diplomat. Future meetings with de Ry usually took place in Berlin, where the diplomat was allegedly stationed. KGB records, possibly incomplete, show that de Ry was paid at least 200,000 French francs.²³

Bystroletov was also given the task of tracing the unidentified British walk-in (Ernest Oldham) who had offered to sell Foreign Office ciphers to the Paris residency. In April 1930, at the meeting arranged in the previous year, Oldham (codenamed ARNO by the OGPU) handed over only part of a diplomatic cipher, probably as a precaution against being double-crossed, and demanded a 6,000-dollar down-payment before providing the rest. The OGPU tried to locate him after the meeting but discovered that he had given a false address.²⁴

Probably soon after his first meeting with de Ry, Bystroletov succeeded in tracking down Oldham in a Paris bar, struck up a conversation with him, won his confidence and booked into the hotel where he was staying. There Bystroletov revealed himself to Oldham and his wife Lucy as an impoverished Hungarian aristocrat who had fallen, like Oldham, into the clutches of Soviet intelligence. With his wife’s approval, Oldham agreed to provide Foreign Office ciphers and other classified documents to Bystroletov to pass on to the OGPU. Oldham was given a first payment of 6,000 dollars, a second of 5,000 dollars, then 1,000 dollars a month. Bystroletov portrayed himself throughout as a sympathetic friend, visiting the Oldhams on several occasions at their London home in Pembroke Gardens, Kensington. Oldham’s documents, however, were handed over at meetings in France and Germany.

Having originally tried to hold the OGPU at arm’s length, Oldham became increasingly nervous about the risks of working as a Soviet agent. In order to put pressure on him, Bystroletov was accompanied to several of their meetings by the head of the illegal residency in Berlin, Boris Bazarov (codenamed KIN), who posed as a rather menacing Italian Communist named da Vinci. With Bazarov and Bystroletov playing the hard man/soft man routine, Oldham agreed to continue but took increasingly to drink. Bystroletov strengthened his hold over Lucy Oldham (henceforth codenamed MADAM) by putting his relationship with her on what an OGPU report coyly describes as “an intimate footing.”²⁵

Though Bystroletov successfully deceived the Oldhams, he seems to have been unaware that the Oldhams were also deceiving him. At their first meeting, Oldham explained that he was “a lord, who worked out ciphers for the Foreign Office and was a very influential person,” rather than, in reality, a minor functionary. At later meetings Oldham claimed that he traveled abroad on a diplomatic passport illegally provided for him by a Foreign Office friend named Kemp whom he alleged, almost certainly falsely, was in the Secret Intelligence Service. Having helped Bystroletov to acquire a British passport in the name of Robert Grenville, Oldham told him that the passport had been personally issued by the Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, who believed it to be for a minor British aristocrat of his acquaintance, Lord Robert Grenville, then resident in Canada. “I didn’t know Lord Robert was here in Britain,” Simon was alleged to have remarked to Oldham. Mrs. Oldham also specialized in tall stories. She told Bystroletov that she was the sister of an army officer named Montgomery who, she claimed, held the (non-existent) post of head of the intelligence service at the Foreign Office;²⁶ a later note on the KGB file, probably dating from the 1940s, identified the mysterious and possibly mythical Montgomery as Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein! Expert though Bystroletov proved as an agent controller, his ignorance of the ways of the Foreign Office and the British establishment made him curiously gullible—though perhaps no more so than the Centre, which was also taken in.²⁷

De Ry, meanwhile, was providing Bystroletov at meetings in Berlin with a mixture of genuine diplomatic documents (Italian ciphers probably chief among them) and colorful inventions. According to Bystroletov, when asked whether some of his material was genuine, he replied indignantly, “What kind of question is that? Of course they are… Your Japanese are idiots. Write and tell them to start printing American dollars. Instead of paying me 200,000 genuine francs, give me a million forged dollars and we’ll be quits.” The Centre was taken in by at least some of de Ry’s inventions. Possibly to disguise the fact that he was also trying to sell Italian ciphers to the French and other purchasers, he claimed that Mussolini’s son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano di Cortellazzo (later Italian foreign minister), had organized “an extensive trade in ciphers” and, when a cipher was missing from the Berlin embassy, had ordered the liquidation of an innocent scapegoat to divert attention from himself. Since the OGPU believed that Western intelligence agencies, like itself, organized secret assassinations, it had surprisingly little difficulty in crediting de Ry’s improbable tale.²⁸ De Ry appears to have tried to deceive the OGPU on two other occasions by putting it in contact with bogus officials who claimed to have German and British diplomatic ciphers for sale. ²⁹

The Centre attached great importance, however, to an introduction provided by de Ry to his friend the Paris businessman Rodolphe Lemoine, an agent and recruiter of the French foreign intelligence service, the military Deuxième Bureau.³⁰ Born Rudolf Stallmann, the son of a wealthy Berlin jeweler, Lemoine had begun working for the Deuxième Bureau in 1918 and acquired French citizenship. Intelligence for Lemoine was a passion as well as a second career. According to one of his chiefs in the Deuxième Bureau, “He was as hooked on espionage as a drunk is on alcohol.” Lemoine’s greatest coup was the recruitment in 1931 of a German cipher and SIGINT clerk, Hans-Thilo Schmidt, whose compulsive womanizing had run him into debt. For the next decade Schmidt (codenamed HE and ASCHE by the French) was the Deuxième Bureau’s most important foreign agent.³¹ Some of the intelligence he provided laid the foundations for the breaking of the German Enigma machine cipher by British cryptanalysts in the Second World War.³²

After Bystroletov had made the initial contact with Lemoine (codenamed REX by the Deuxième Bureau and JOSEPH by the OGPU), he was instructed to hand the case over to another, less flamboyant Soviet illegal, Ignace Reiss (alias “Ignace Poretsky,” codenamed RAYMOND) so that he could concentrate on running Oldham. At meetings with Lemoine, Reiss posed initially as an American military intelligence officer. Lemoine appeared anxious to set up an exchange of intelligence on Germany and foreign cipher systems, and supplied a curious mixture of good and bad intelligence as evidence of the Deuxième Bureau’s willingness to cooperate. An Italian cipher which he provided in May 1931 seems to have been genuine. In February 1932, however, Lemoine reported the sensationally inaccurate news that Hitler (who became German chancellor less than a year later) had made two secret visits to Paris and was in the pay of the Deuxième Bureau. “We French,” he claimed, “are doing everything to hasten his rise to power.” The Centre dismissed the report as disinformation, but ordered meetings with Lemoine to continue and for him to be paid, probably with the intention of laying a trap which would end in his recruitment.³³

In November 1933 Lemoine brought with him to meet Reiss the head of the SIGINT section of the Deuxième Bureau, Gustave Bertrand, codenamed OREL (“Eagle”) by the Centre. To try to convince Bertrand that he was an American intelligence officer willing to exchange cipher material, Reiss offered him Latin American diplomatic ciphers. Bertrand, predictably, was more interested in European ciphers.³⁴ Soon after his first meeting with Bertrand, Reiss informed Lemoine that he worked not for American intelligence but for the OGPU. The Centre probably calculated that it had caught Lemoine in a trap, forcing him either to admit to his superiors that he had been both paid and deceived by the OGPU or to conceal that information and risk being blackmailed into working for the Soviet Union. The blackmail failed.³⁵ Lemoine had probably realized for some time that Reiss, whom he knew as “Walter Scott,” worked for Soviet intelligence. Reiss had several further meetings with Lemoine and Bertrand, at which they exchanged intelligence on Italian, Czechoslovak and Hungarian ciphers.³⁶

WHILE REISS WAS maintaining contact with Lemoine, Bystroletov was finding Oldham increasingly desperate to extricate himself from the OGPU. By the summer of 1932 Bystroletov feared that Oldham’s worsening alcoholism and carelessness at work would attract the attention of MI5. The Centre concluded that Oldham’s increasingly erratic behavior also risked exposing Bystroletov to a terrible revenge from the supposedly ruthless British intelligence services. On September 17, in recognition of his bravery in the face of nonexistent British assassination squads, it presented him with a rifle carrying the inscription “For unstinting struggle against Counter-Revolution, from your colleagues in the OGPU.”³⁷

On September 30, 1932, less than a fortnight after Bystroletov received his rifle, Oldham resigned from the Foreign Office, unable to stand the pressures of his double life.³⁸ To his despair, the OGPU still refused to leave him in peace. Over the next year Bystroletov extracted from him details of all his former colleagues in the Communications Department, hoping to recruit at least one of them as Oldham’s successor. As his drinking got further out of control, Oldham became convinced that his arrest was only a matter of time. His wife told Bystroletov that her husband believed that the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Robert Vansittart, had personally put him under observation and that British intelligence was also on the trail of Bystroletov.³⁹ Though there was probably no substance to these fears, the Centre took them seriously. The OGPU trouble-shooter and “flying illegal” Teodor Maly reported to the Centre from London on July 6 that Bystroletov was in great danger:

The Centre replied on August 10:

Bystroletov continued to receive high praise for his skill in outwitting a British version of the Serebryansky Service which existed only in the conspiratorial imagination of the OGPU.

On September 29, 1933, almost a year to the day after his resignation from the Foreign Office, Oldham was found unconscious in the gas-filled kitchen of his house in Pembroke Gardens, rushed to the hospital and pronounced dead on arrival. An inquest found that he had taken his life by “coal gas suffocation” while of “unsound mind.”⁴² The Centre had no doubt that Oldham had been murdered. Its report on his death concluded: “In order to avoid a scandal the [British] intelligence service had ARNO physically eliminated, making his death appear to be suicide.” It believed, however, that Bystroletov had disguised his identity so successfully that the Foreign Office believed Oldham had been working for French rather than Soviet intelligence.⁴³

Oldham’s suicide did little if anything to alert the Foreign Office to the chronic problems of its own security and that of British embassies abroad.⁴⁴ Still concerned by fears that he was being pursued by a secret British assassination squad, however, Bystroletov failed to grasp how relatively unprotected a target the Foreign Office remained. He concluded that a safer recruiting ground was Geneva, where several of Oldham’s former colleagues were working as cipher clerks with the British delegation to the League of Nations. In December 1933 he made contact there with Raymond Oake (codenamed SHELLEY), one of the most promising potential recruits in the communications department identified by Oldham.⁴⁵ Oake had good reason to resent his underprivileged status. Since joining the Foreign Office in 1920 he had remained in the lowly rank of “temporary clerk” without pension rights.⁴⁶ Bystroletov handed over the cultivation of Oake to the Dutch artist Henri Christian (“Han”) Pieck, who operated as an OGPU illegal codenamed COOPER.⁴⁷

Pieck was almost as flamboyant an extrovert as Bystroletov, with a convivial manner which won him a wide circle of friends and acquaintances among British officials and journalists in Geneva. He invited Oake and other cipher clerks to stay at his house in The Hague where he lavished charm and hospitality on them while assessing them as possible recruits. Oake’s main service to Soviet intelligence was to provide an introduction to Captain John H. King, who joined the Foreign Office communications department as a “temporary clerk” in 1934⁴⁸ and subsequently became a far more important agent than Oake himself. Pieck reported that King had been born in Ireland, considered himself Irish rather than British and, though anti-Soviet, also “hated the English.” Estranged from his wife and with an American mistress to support, he found it difficult to live on his modest Foreign Office salary. Pieck cultivated King with patience and skill. On one occasion he and his wife took King and his lover for an expensive touring holiday in Spain, staying at the best hotels. Mrs. Pieck complained that the whole holiday had been “a real ordeal” and that King and his mistress were “incredibly boring.”⁴⁹ The Piecks’ hospitality, however, paid off handsomely. Seven months after his first meeting with Pieck, King (henceforth codenamed MAG) began to hand over large amounts of classified material, including Foreign Office telegrams, ciphers and secret daily and weekly summaries of diplomatic correspondence.⁵⁰

AN ANALYSIS BY the Centre concluded that about 30 percent of King’s material was the same as that provided by Francesco Constantini (DUNCAN), the long-serving OGPU agent in the British embassy at Rome.⁵¹ The overlap was, almost certainly, regarded as useful for checking the authenticity of the documents received from both agents. It was a sign of the importance attached to Constantini’s intelligence that Abram Aronovich Slutsky, who succeeded Artuzov as head of INO in 1934, decided to transfer him from the legal residency in Rome to another of the Great Illegals, Moisei Markovich Akselrod (codenamed OST or OSTO), one of the leading Soviet agent controllers. Born into a Jewish family in Smolensk in 1898, Akselrod had been a member of the Russian branch of the Zionist socialist organization Poale Zion, until its dissolution in 1922. He then joined the Bolsheviks and in 1925 began a career in INO.⁵² Like most of the Great Illegals, Akselrod was a remarkable linguist—fluent in Arabic, English, French, German and Italian—and, according to a fellow illegal, a man of “extraordinary culture” with “a fine indifference to risk.”⁵³ In 1934 he traveled to Rome on an Austrian passport to establish a new illegal residency and act as Constantini’s controller. He had his first meeting with Constantini in January 1935.⁵⁴

Few—if any—Soviet controllers ever met an agent as frequently as Akselrod saw Constantini. At times they had almost daily meetings. On October 27, 1935 the Centre cabled Akselrod: “Between September 24 and October 14 you met [Constantini] 16 times. There must be no more than two or three meetings a week.” It is not difficult to understand Akselrod’s enthusiasm for agent DUNCAN. Constantini supplied him with a remarkable range of documents and cipher material from embassy red boxes, diplomatic bags, filing cabinets and—probably—the embassy safe. Far from consisting simply of material on British-Italian relations, the documents included Foreign Office reports and British ambassadors’ despatches on a great variety of major international issues, which were sent for information to the Rome embassy. A Centre report noted on November 15, 1935 that no fewer than 101 of the British documents obtained from Constantini since the beginning of the year had been judged sufficiently important to be “sent to Comrade Stalin”: among them the Foreign Office records of talks between Sir John Simon, the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, junior Foreign Office minister (who became Foreign Secretary at the end of the year), and Hitler in Berlin; between Eden and Litvinov, the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, in Moscow; between Eden and Joseph Beck, the Polish foreign minister, in Warsaw; between Eden and Edvard Beneš, the Czechoslovak foreign minister, in Prague; and between Eden and Mussolini in Rome.⁵⁵

A striking omission from the Centre’s list of the most important Foreign Office documents supplied to Stalin was Eden’s account of his talks with him during his visit to Moscow in March 1935—despite the fact that this document was sent to the Rome embassy and was probably among those obtained by Constantini.⁵⁶ Since this was Stalin’s first meeting with a minister from a Western government, their talks were of unusual significance. The most likely explanation for the Centre’s failure to send the British record of the meeting to the Kremlin is that Slutsky feared to pass on to Stalin some of Eden’s comments about him. INO would have been unembarrassed to report the fact that Eden was impressed by Stalin’s “remarkable knowledge and understanding of international affairs.” But it doubtless lacked the nerve to repeat Eden’s conclusion that Stalin was “a man of strong oriental traits of character with unshakeable assurance and control whose courtesy in no way hid from us an implacable ruthlessness.” The Centre was probably also nervous about reporting some of the opinions attributed by Eden to Stalin—for example, that he was “perhaps more appreciative of [the] German point of view than Monsieur Litvino[v].”⁵⁷ There was no more dangerous activity in Moscow than repeating criticisms of Stalin or attributing heretical opinions to him.

The British ambassador in Moscow, Viscount Chilston, optimistically reported that, as a result of Eden’s visit, “the Soviet Government appears to have got rid of the bogey in their minds, that we were encouraging Germany against Soviet plans for Eastern security.”⁵⁸ Stalin, however, rarely—if ever—abandoned a conspiracy theory and remained deeply suspicious of British policy. In a communiqué at the end of his talks in Moscow, Eden had welcomed the Soviet Union’s support for the principle of collective security, following its entry the previous year into the League of Nations (hitherto denounced by Moscow as the “League of Burglars”). But Stalin must have learned from Foreign Office documents that Eden was disinclined to involve the Soviet Union in any collective security arrangements designed to contain Nazi Germany. ⁵⁹ To Stalin’s deeply suspicious mind, this reluctance was further evidence of a British plot to focus German aggression in the east.⁶⁰ Though he was content to entrust most day-to-day diplomacy to the efficient and far more pragmatic Litvinov, it was Stalin who determined the strategic thrust of Soviet foreign policy.

The Centre had suspected for some time that its principal source of British diplomatic documents over the last decade, the mercenary agent Francesco Constantini (DUNCAN), had been selling some material to Italian intelligence as well as to the NKVD. It had dramatic confirmation of these suspicions in February 1936, when a British assessment of the Italo-Ethiopian war—purloined by Constantini from the British embassy—was published on the front page of the Giornale d’Italia.⁶¹ On being challenged by Akselrod, Constantini was forced to admit that he had supplied some documents to the Italians, but concealed the large scale on which he had done so. Constantini also admitted in 1936 that he had lost his job in the British embassy, though he apparently omitted that he had been sacked for dishonesty. He tried to reassure Akselrod by telling him that he had a former colleague in the embassy who would continue to supply him with classified documents. The colleague was later identified as Constantini’s brother Secondo (codenamed DUDLEY), who had worked as a servant in the embassy Chancery for the previous twenty years. ⁶²

Secondo Constantini, however, took fewer precautions than his brother Francesco. In January he stole a diamond necklace belonging to the ambassador’s wife from a locked red box (normally used for diplomatic documents rather than jewelery) which was kept in the ambassador’s apartment next to the Chancery. The ambassador, Sir Eric Drummond (soon to become Lord Perth), who had previously dismissed the idea that the British diplomatic documents appearing in the Italian press might have been purloined from his embassy, now began to grasp that embassy security might, after all, require serious attention. Since the Foreign Office had no security officer, it was forced to seek the help of Major Valentine Vivian, the head of SIS counter-intelligence. Vivian modestly disclaimed significant expertise in embassy security but, in view of the even greater lack of expertise in the Foreign Office, agreed to carry out an investigation.⁶³ Once in Rome, he quickly discovered an appalling series of basic lapses. The embassy files, safe and red boxes were all insecure and “it would not be impossible or even difficult for unauthorized persons to spend long periods in the Chancery or Registry rooms.”

Vivian quickly identified Secondo Constantini as the man probably responsible for the theft both of the diamond necklace and of at least some of the documents supplied to Italian intelligence:

Though Sir Eric Drummond politely welcomed Vivian’s recommendations for improvements in the security of his embassy, he took little action.⁶⁵ In particular, neither he nor most of his staff could credit the charges against Secondo Constantini, whom they regarded as “a sort of friend of the family.”⁶⁶ Instead of being dismissed, agent DUDLEY and his wife were—amazingly—invited to London in May 1937 as the guests of His Majesty’s Government at the coronation of King George VI, as a reward for his long and supposedly faithful service. ⁶⁷

When Secondo Constantini returned from his expense-paid junket in London, he was able to resume supplying classified British documents to his brother Francesco, who passed them on for copying by both Akselrod’s illegal residency and Italian intelligence before returning them to embassy files. The Centre regarded the whole improbable story of Constantini’s continued access to embassy files after Vivian’s investigation as deeply suspicious. Unable to comprehend the naivety of the British foreign service in matters of embassy security, it suspected instead some deep-laid plot by British and/or Italian intelligence. Regular meetings with Francesco Constantini were suspended in August 1937.⁶⁸

THE CIPHER MATERIAL obtained from the Constantini brothers, Captain King and other agents in Western embassies and foreign ministries was passed to the most secret section of Soviet intelligence, a joint OGPU/Fourth Department SIGINT unit housed not in the Lubyanka but in the Foreign Affairs building on Kuznetsky Bridge. According to Evdokia Kartseva (later Petrova), who joined the unit in 1933, its personnel were forbidden to reveal even the location of their office to their closest relatives.⁶⁹ Like most young women in the unit, Kartseva was terrified of its head, Gleb Ivanovich Boky, who had made his reputation first in conducting the “Red Terror” in Petrograd in 1918, then in terrorizing Turkestan later in the civil war.⁷⁰ Though in his mid-fifties, Boky still prided himself on his sexual athleticism and arranged group sex weekends at his dacha. Kartseva lived in fear of being invited to the orgies. During the night shift, when she felt most vulnerable, she wore her “plainest and dullest clothes for fear of attracting [Boky’s] unwelcome attention.”⁷¹

Despite the personal depravity of its chief, the combined OGPU/Fourth Department unit was the world’s largest and best-resourced SIGINT agency. In particular, thanks to Bystroletov and others, it received more assistance from espionage than any similar agency in the West. The records seen by Mitrokhin show that Boky’s unit was able to decrypt at least some of the diplomatic traffic of Britain, Austria, Germany and Italy.⁷² Other evidence shows that Boky’s unit was also able to decrypt some Japanese, Turkish⁷³ and—almost certainly—American⁷⁴ and French⁷⁵ cables. No Western SIGINT agency during the 1930s seems to have collected so much political and diplomatic intelligence.

The unavailability of most of the decrypts produced by Boky’s unit makes detailed analysis of their influence on Soviet foreign policy impossible. Soviet SIGINT successes, however, included important Japanese decrypts on the negotiation of the Anti-Comintern Pact between Germany and Japan. The published version of the Pact, concluded in November 1936, merely provided for an exchange of information on Comintern activities and cooperation on preventive measures against them. A secret protocol, however, added that if either of the signatories became the victim of “an unprovoked [Soviet] attack or threat of attack,” both would immediately consult together on the action to take and do “nothing to ease the situation of the USSR.” Moscow, unsurprisingly, read sinister intentions into this tortuous formula, though Japan was, in reality, still anxious not to be drawn into a European war and had no intention of concluding a military alliance. Three days after the signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact, Litvinov publicly announced in a speech to a Congress of Soviets that Moscow knew its secret protocol. His speech also contained a curious veiled allusion to codebreaking:

The success of Boky’s unit in decrypting Italian diplomatic traffic probably provided intelligence on Italy’s decision to join the Anti-Comintern Pact in the following year.

THANKS TO ITS penetration agents and codebreakers, as well as to primitive Foreign Office security, Soviet intelligence was able to gather vastly more intelligence on the foreign policy of its main Western target, Great Britain, than the much smaller British intelligence community was able to obtain on Soviet policy. Since 1927 British codebreakers had been unable to decrypt any high-level Soviet communications (though they had some success with the less sophisticated Comintern ciphers). SIS did not even possess a Moscow station. In 1936 the British ambassador, Viscount Chilston, vetoed a proposal to establish one on the grounds that it would be “liable to cause severe embarrassment.” But without an SIS presence he despaired of discovering anything of importance about Soviet policy-making.⁷⁷

The Soviet capacity to understand the political and diplomatic intelligence it collected, however, never approached its ability to collect that intelligence in the first place. Its natural tendency to substitute conspiracy theory for pragmatic analysis when assessing the intentions of the encircling imperialist powers was made worse during the 1930s by Stalin’s increasing tendency to act as his own intelligence analyst. Stalin, indeed, actively discouraged intelligence analysis by others, which he condemned as “dangerous guesswork.” “Don’t tell me what you think,” he is reported to have said. “Give me the facts and the source!” As a result, INO had no analytical department. Intelligence reports throughout and even beyond the Stalin era characteristically consisted of compilations of relevant information on particular topics with little argument or analysis.⁷⁸ Those who compiled them increasingly feared for their life expectancy if they failed to tell Stalin what he expected to hear. Their main priority as they trawled through the Centre’s treasure trove of British diplomatic documents and decrypts was to discover the anti-Soviet conspiracies which Comrade Stalin, “Lenin’s outstanding pupil, the best son of the Bolshevik Party, the worthy successor and great continuer of Lenin’s cause,” knew were there. The main function of Soviet foreign intelligence was thus to reinforce rather than to challenge Stalin’s misunderstanding of the West.

A characteristic example of the Centre’s distorted but politically correct presentation of important intelligence was its treatment of the Foreign Office record of the meeting in March 1935 between Sir John Simon, Anthony Eden and Adolf Hitler in Berlin. Copies of the minutes were supplied both by Captain King in the Foreign Office and by Francesco Constantini in the Rome embassy.⁷⁹ Nine days before the meeting, in defiance of the post-First World War Treaty of Versailles, Hitler had announced the introduction of conscription. The fact that the meeting—the first between Hitler and a British foreign secretary—went ahead at all was, in itself, cause for suspicion in Moscow. On the British side the talks were mainly exploratory—to discover what the extent of Hitler’s demands for the revision of the Treaty of Versailles really was, and what prospect there was of accommodating them. Moscow, however, saw grounds for deep suspicion. While disclaiming any intention of attacking the Soviet Union, Hitler claimed that there was a distinct danger of Russia starting a war, and declared himself “firmly convinced that one day cooperation and solidarity would be urgently necessary to defend Europe against the… Bolshevik menace.” Simon and Eden showed not the slightest interest in an anti-Bolshevik agreement, but their fairly conventional exchange of diplomatic pleasantries had sinister overtones in Moscow. According to the Foreign Office record, “The British Ministers were sincerely thankful for the way in which they had been received in Berlin, and would take away very pleasant memories of the kindness and hospitality shown them.”⁸⁰

The British record of the talks ran to over 23,000 words. The Russian translation circulated by the Centre to Stalin and others in the Soviet leadership came to fewer than 4,000. Instead of producing a conventional précis the Centre selected a series of statements by Simon, Eden, Hitler and other participants in the talks, and assembled them into what appeared as a continuous conversation. The significance of some individual statements was thus distorted by removing them from their detailed context. Probably at the time, certainly subsequently, one of Simon’s comments was misconstrued as giving Germany carte blanche to take over Austria.⁸¹

Doubtless in line with Stalin’s own conspiracy theories, the Centre interpreted the visit by Simon and Eden to Berlin as the first in a series of meetings at which British statesmen not only sought to appease Hitler but gave him encouragement to attack Russia.⁸² In reality, though some British diplomats would have been content to see the two dictators come to blows of their own accord, no British foreign secretary and no British government would have contemplated orchestrating such a conflict. The conspiracy theories which were born in Stalin’s Moscow in the 1930s, however, have—remarkably—survived the end of the Soviet era. An SVR official history published in 1997 insists that the many volumes of published Foreign Office documents as well as the even more voluminous unpublished files in the Public Record Office cannot be relied upon. The British government, it maintains, is still engaged in a conspiracy to conceal the existence of documents which reveal the terrible truth about British foreign policy before the Second World War: