“Keep calm and disciplined,” Rudi told himself. “Watch your tongue. You live in the land of unlimited dictatorship. Keep silent.” The boredom and hunger gnawed him to the soul: “Lying on the bare plank bed, you are like a tortured animal who dully awaits his bitter fate.” He tried to forget his former existence and the things he had once loved. “It must be possible to renounce the luxury of feelings, not to remember aesthetic beauty which, embodied in art, architecture, music, was part of my life….If you want to survive in the camp, you must not allow yourself to think.”
A team of American military engineers visited Saratova to supervise the building of a chemicals factory as part of a wartime relief program. A kindly secretary offered Rudi an illustrated American magazine. “Finally, in a language familiar to me, I can read something to distract me from my desperate thoughts.” A few weeks later the magazine was confiscated and he was accused of bringing anti-Soviet propaganda into the camp. A second trial began. “The judge has the sharp, cutting tone that I knew from my Prussian fatherland. His task is to inspire fear, to force the accused into the position of a guilty criminal from the outset, and stifle any attempt at resistance.” Rudi’s sentence was extended to eight more years and he was thrown into solitary confinement. “In the darkness of the cell, there is little difference between day and night. I am vegetating, a breeding ground for lice….I use my wooden spoon to scratch floor-plans of buildings into the ice layer on the wall, of a house somewhere in dreamland. Mostly I lie in perfect lethargy.”
News of the fall of Berlin reached the Gulag, and Rudi recorded the moment: “ ‘The war is over—the fascists are destroyed,’ says a guard, laughing, and he throws his arms in the air with joy. A flush of happiness comes over me. The genocide is over, Hitler-fascism is defeated. Peace. Suddenly my own destiny seems small beside this tremendous event.”
Rudi had lost everything, except his obstinacy. Starving, freezing, lice-infested, worked to the bone, falsely condemned by a callous communist regime, he clung to the ideology he had adopted at Ursula’s urging. “The decade-long revolutionary shocks and the war have produced a generation of heroic men and women who are building a new society,” he wrote. “The gulag cannot block the view of the stars with barbed wire.”
In 1945, he was transferred to Karaganda to work on the design and construction of new barracks. “Despite life in the desolate steppe, this camp is easier to bear,” he wrote. At least he could exercise his architectural skills, though building rows of identical wooden huts was a far cry from the Art Deco edifices he had crafted in Shanghai. He thought often of Ursula, and of Michael, the son he feared he would never see again. “Here, in a barren land devoid of life, the prospect of eight years of barbed wire crushes me to the ground. If I have not died by then, where will I go?”
MI5 was perplexed, and somewhat nettled, by the FBI’s renewed interest in Ursula Beurton and her ex-husband, the Soviet spy who had been handed back to Moscow before vanishing. “The FBI are being singularly persistent about this case and I suspect they have some more recent information about Hamburger than we have,” wrote John Marriott of MI5. The Americans had already been told, a year earlier, that Mrs. Beurton was above suspicion since she “appears to devote her time to her children and domestic affairs.” But now Cimperman was back, demanding MI5 interview her and find out where her ex-husband was. “There seems no good reason for supposing the lady can answer his question,” wrote Marriott. He told Cimperman: “This lady is known to be of communist sympathies and I should hesitate to interview her on a matter of this sort. Although our investigations into her present husband yielded no evidence to substantiate the suspicions which we entertained about him, nonetheless these suspicions still prevail and we are by no means satisfied that he is not a Soviet agent.” Interviewing Ursula Beurton might tip off her husband, newly demobilized and now working in a plastics factory, that MI5 was suspicious of him. Once again, the exclusive focus on the man obscured the woman, and the more important spy.
Even so, Marriott dropped a note to Kim Philby at MI6. “You will recall that Rudolf Hamburger was a Soviet Agent who was detained in Iran in May 1943, first by the Americans and then by the British, and by the latter subsequently handed back to the Soviet authorities. The FBI have now asked us to question Ursula Beurton (who, as you will recall, was formerly the wife of Hamburger). For a variety of reasons I do not feel able to comply with this request. I am wondering whether you could let me have any information as to the present whereabouts of Rudolf Hamburger?”
Philby, the KGB’s top spy in the United Kingdom, was fully apprised of the Ursula Beurton case. Whether he also knew she was a fellow spy for the Soviets, and deliberately shielded her, is unknown. Philby’s response was exquisitely civil, and entirely obstructive. “With regret,” he told MI5, MI6 had “no knowledge of the present whereabouts of Hamburger.”
* * *
—
ON AUGUST 2, 1947, an Englishman walked into the legation in the British sector of Berlin and explained to the startled receptionist that he was a Soviet spy and wished to defect.
Alexander Foote had lived at least four different lives, under as many different names, since bidding farewell to Ursula in Switzerland in December 1940. A lynchpin of Sandor Radó’s Rote Drei network, for two years he passed on a mass of military information to the Center, sometimes coding and decoding for twenty hours a day and living, as he put it, the “life of a monk.” The Swiss authorities knew an illegal radio transmitter was being used somewhere in Lausanne. So did the German Abwehr. One or the other was bound to catch him eventually. Foote was taking down a message from Moscow at 1:15 A.M. on November 20, 1942, when he heard a “splintering crash” as an axe smashed through the front door of his apartment. He just had time to demolish his radio and burn his notes using lighter fuel and a brass ashtray kept on hand for that purpose, before the room filled with armed Swiss police. “I had been expecting some sort of action for weeks, and had destroyed all my records, cash accounts etc., and as a result there was nothing for the police save a heap of charred ashes and a damaged transmitter.” Foote was arrested and taken to Bois-Mermet Prison. His interrogation was remarkably civilized. “It is useless for you to deny your activities, Foote,” Inspector Pasche of the Swiss security service explained, as they shared a bottle of Scotch in Foote’s cell. “There is no suggestion that you have acted against Swiss interests, and I am personally inclined in your favour as you have been working against Germany, the only country in the world which threatens Swiss independence. It is now only necessary for you to make a complete confession and you will be released immediately.” Foote, equally well-mannered, said he would not confess to anything, and that if Pasche was correct and he was released, the Soviets would assume he had betrayed them and kill him. “I demanded that I remained locked up.” Foote enjoyed being in prison. “For the first time in years I was able to relax completely, and I was left in peace to work my way gradually through the prison library.”
On his release in September 1944, Foote made his way to Paris, contacted the Soviet military mission, and sent a message to the Center. A few weeks later, he was issued with a false Soviet passport under the name Alfred Fedorovich Lapidus and ordered to board the first Soviet plane leaving liberated Paris, bound for Moscow. One of his fellow passengers was Sandor Radó, the rotund mastermind of the Rote Drei who had escaped capture in Switzerland and made his way to Paris. Another was Gavril Ilyich Myasnikov, a veteran Bolshevik who had taken part in the murder of Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich of Russia, the first of the Romanovs to be assassinated. After falling afoul of Lenin, Myasnikov had gone into exile in France, but was now returning at the invitation of the Soviet embassy. Foote found him “a likeable old ruffian” and was impressed by his claim to be “going to Russia to put Stalin in his place.”
As the plane took off at 9:00 A.M. on January 6, 1945, Foote was reflective and apprehensive. His commitment to
communism had never been more than skin-deep. “For a long time I had been disillusioned and unhappy about the attitude of the Centre,” but he still felt a residual duty. “Deliberately to desert the work would have been in my eyes equivalent to desertion in the face of the enemy.” Besides, his spymasters owed him a debt for all his hard work. If they believed him.
During a stopover in Cairo, Foote and Radó shared a room at the Luna Park Hotel. The Hungarian cartographer seemed more than usually gloomy. “The first night he hardly said a word and declined to come out with me into Cairo for a last fling.” During the night Radó vanished, leaving behind his hat, coat, and luggage: “Mute evidence,” Foote remarked, “of a spy who had lost his nerve.” One of the greatest wartime communist spies did not trust Stalin to reciprocate his loyalty, and with good reason.
The plane landed in Moscow on January 14. Myasnikov boasted that Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, would send an official limousine to collect him. Sure enough, a car was waiting, but “the grim faces of the escort” suggested to Foote that the welcome was not going to be quite as warm as the old Bolshevik was expecting. Myasnikov was arrested on the spot. Eight months later, he was murdered.
Foote’s reception committee was much more attractive: Major Vera Poliakova of the Red Army, the English-speaking officer who had run the Swiss networks from Moscow throughout the war. With her dark hair and slim figure, Poliakova was “quite a beauty,” Foote reflected. He was taken to a modern block of flats, shown into a two-room apartment, and introduced to a burly man named Ivan: “Interpreter, escort, guard, all in one.” The questioning started next morning, and it was not friendly. “It was obvious from the tone of the questions that the Centre regarded me as an agent provocateur planted on them by the British.” For days, and then weeks, Poliakova peppered him with questions, sometimes in person, sometimes written, detailed and overlapping, a mesh of confusing and contradictory interrogation designed to trip him up. Sandor Radó, she told him, was “a criminal who had embezzled funds in Switzerland.” The GRU would bring him back. Sure enough, after being refused political asylum by the British embassy in Cairo, Radó tried and failed to commit suicide. In August 1945 he was extradited to Russia and sentenced to ten years in prison for espionage.
“It will not be long before Russia can collect people from anywhere in the world if they are wanted,” Poliakova told Foote, a warning of “the fate I might expect if I deserted.” So, far from flirting with him, Poliakova was offering to drag Foote back and kill him if he tried to defect.
Foote was given a new alias as Alexander Alexandrovitch Dimoff and told he could explore the city, so long as Ivan accompanied him. On one of these excursions they were stopped by a militiaman and told to produce papers. Ivan told the man to contact his superior. Moments later a KGB officer, five feet tall and sporting a livid black eye, arrived and began shouting. Poliakova had told them not to answer questions, so when the little man angrily demanded that he identify himself, Foote looked down on the ranting blob of officialdom and told him, slowly and precisely, to “Fuck off.” The little KGB man scribbled in his notebook. The contretemps was sorted out by means of a single phone call and Foote and his minder returned to the flat, but the incident left a permanent misunderstanding: whenever Foote went out for a walk the militiamen cordially greeted him as “Comrade Fuckof.”
After six weeks of daily interrogations, Major Poliakova appeared once more, now accompanied by a senior officer who spoke perfect English and sported an incongruously gaudy tie. “In his early forties, he was intelligent and intellectual, and a first class interrogator.” This was none other than the director of the GRU himself, come to grill Foote in person. The interrogation lasted until the small hours, and started again the next day. “I felt I was on trial for my life,” wrote Foote. Finally, the general rose and slapped Foote on the back. “He stated there was nothing with which I could be reproached and I was entirely exonerated and he thanked me for my efforts in Switzerland.” When, Foote asked, could he go back to work for the greater glory of the Soviet Union? The director was cagey. “It would be necessary to let things calm down for a period before I could be used abroad again.” The ordeal had been shattering, but Foote felt the danger had lifted. “We parted, with him convinced, I think, of my flaming enthusiasm for the cause in general and Soviet espionage in particular. That was the impression I wished to convey.”
That impression was false. What little zeal Foote once had for communism was evaporating amid the harsh realities of life in Soviet Russia. “I was determined to get out and return to a world where freedom was more than a propaganda phrase. The only way that I could get out alive was to feign enthusiasm for any espionage plan put up, and then get out of the clutches of the Centre as fast as possible.” It would be another year before the opportunity arose. In the spring of 1947, the GRU ordered Foote to travel to Berlin posing as “Albert Müller,” a German soldier with an English mother (hence his accent) who had been captured by the Russians near Stalingrad and now sought repatriation to Germany. Once he had obtained German identity papers, he was to travel to Argentina. There, posing as an unreconstructed fascist, he should infiltrate the circle of high-ranking escaped Nazis and then use South America as a springboard to establish a new spy network inside the United States. “The Centre’s network in the States was in a bad way” after the exposure of several agents, Major Poliakova explained, and the Red Army was “determined to build it up again from the bottom.” Foote would be the architect.
In late February, traveling under the alias “Granatoff,” Foote flew to Berlin. “Unless I bungled things at the last moment,” he wrote, “there seemed every chance that shortly I would be able to cut myself loose from the Centre forever.” On a sunny summer afternoon in 1947, Albert Müller showed his papers to the guards at the crossing between the Soviet and British zones of Berlin, and walked straight into the arms of British intelligence. Two days later, with an MI6 escort, he was back in London.
Alexander Foote told MI6 almost everything. He described how, as a young fighter returning from Spain, he had been recruited in London and sent to Switzerland; he explained how Ursula Kuczynski, Agent Sonya, had trained him and Len Beurton in wireless operations and bomb making; he revealed their aborted plots to kill Hitler and blow up the Graf Zeppelin, and described how Ursula’s nanny had almost destroyed the network. He detailed the workings of Sandor Radó’s network, his own arrest and release by the Swiss authorities, and the events that had led him from Lausanne to Paris to Moscow to Berlin, and finally to London. Holed up in a safe house at 19 Rugby Mansions, the spy offered up chapter and verse, furnishing MI6 with its first detailed description of wartime Soviet intelligence in Switzerland. Foote displayed a “complete lack of nerves” and boundless self-confidence. “He considers himself to be a first class operative,” MI6 noted. When asked why he had switched sides, Foote explained that he was disillusioned by the “lack of freedom” in Russia and had turned against his former masters “because he felt they were going to make war.” The interrogator was dubious: “I doubt whether Foote has any real political principles whatever.” Foote hinted that he would like a job in British intelligence, perhaps as a double agent. “The Russians have every confidence in me, they know I can do almost anything, and so I can.” MI6 was impressed. “Foote has not lost his nerve and is certainly not on the run,” but he was too unpredictable to use as a double agent. “There is a possibility that a man of Foote’s character and position might turn to crime…it might be best to leave him to his own devices.”
Alexander Foote had told MI6 the truth, but not all of it. Ursula Kuczynski, he insisted, had retired from the spy business long ago.
He described how upset Ursula had been by the Nazi-Soviet pact and Stalin’s invasion of Finland, which was true, and claimed that as a result she had severed all links with Moscow, which was false. Her departure for England, he said, had brought her espionage career to an end. H
e spoke vaguely of some “continuing connections with Russia,” but insisted that from 1941 onward she had been inactive. “She was thankful to sink back into respectable obscurity,” Foote claimed. “Moscow was equally thankful to let her go. I do not think since that time she has had any connection with a Russian spy net.” Foote knew this was a flat-out lie. He was willing to tell MI6 all about Soviet espionage, but he was not prepared to betray his old friend. And his efforts to protect her did not end there.
The German communist Fred Uhlman had played a role in Foote’s recruitment back in 1938, when he put Ursula in touch with his former comrades in arms from the Spanish Civil War. Nine years later, he answered the door of his Hampstead home. “In front of him stood an agitated individual he did not immediately recognize and took for a beggar or a sick man.” It was his old comrade, Footie. “He refused to come in, trembled and stammered incoherently: ‘Len and Sonya, great danger, not to work, destroy everything.’ Then he ran away.” Uhlman passed an urgent message to Ursula describing this strange visit.
Foote’s frantic words meant little to Uhlman, but to Ursula they spelled calamity. Her former collaborator must have gone over to the other side. Doubtless he had spilled the beans about their work in Switzerland, but out of residual loyalty and a “British sense of fair play” he had “risked a secret warning before the security officials could visit our house.” He had not betrayed her. Ursula’s agents never did. But he had brought the British spy hunters almost to her door.
Agent Sonya Page 33
