by Robert Moss
Like many of the most valuable agents, Johnny was a “walk-in.” He volunteered his services to the British intelligence chief in Berlin in 1933 out of bitter disillusionment with Soviet policy. He had had first-hand experience of how Stalin had helped to destroy the anti-Nazi forces in Germany and was secretly collaborating with Hitler many years before the signing of the infamous Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact that ushered in World War II. He had come to regard communism and fascism as twin evils and spent the rest of his life fighting both, often at great personal risk.
He loved two sisters, both Soviet intelligence operatives, although in real life, only one of them actually went to Brazil.
Johnny had a happier fate than many of his comrades. In 1940, when Hitler and Stalin were openly allied, the Soviet secret police herded 530 German Communists, including some of his former friends, over the bridge at Brest Litovsk in Poland and into the hands of the Gestapo. Readers who are curious to know more about the love affair between Stalin and Hitler and what it meant to Johnny’s generation will find fascinating material in the memoirs of a number of Soviet intelligence operatives and Communist organizers who ended up sharing his disenchantment. These memoirs include Walter Krivitsky’s In Stalin’s Secret Service, Alexander Orlov’s The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes, Ruth Fischer’s Stalin and German Communism, Eudocio Ravines’ The Yenan Way and Jan Valtin’s Out of the Night, all of which provided valuable background for my novel.
On the recorded events of 1935-36 in Brazil, an indispensable source is the magisterial series by Professor John W. F. Dulles, the doyen of Western scholars in this area. His books include Vargas of Brazil, Anarchists and Communists in Brazil and Brazilian Communism, 1935-1945, all published by the University of Texas. Among the Brazilian works I found helpful were Helio Silva’s 1935: A Revolta Vermelha, Graciliano Ramos, Memorfas do Ctircere, a marvellous guide to the personalities involved in the Communist revolt, and the recent sympathetic biography of Prestes’ companion, Olga, by Fernando Morais. Ivan Pedro de Martins, who was in 1935 the youngest member of the Central Committee of the Brazilian Communist Party, was generous enough to share with me some of the vivid recollections that will be published in his forthcoming autobiography.
For the record, Rudyard Kipling did visit Brazil (in the late 1920s) and immediately fell in love with the country, like many visitors before him and since. His charming travelogues were published by Doubleday in New York in 1940 in a slim volume entitled Brazilian Sketches that is not included in the major editions of his collected works.
Unhappily, Johnny did not write his memoirs. But I have been privileged to talk with people who remember him and with others who played a role in the events described in the novel. In the course of several trips to Brazil I have interviewed some of the survivors of the 1935 revolt and examined the police archives from that time, which contain hundreds of Communist documents from the safes — booby-trapped by Johnny — that failed to blow up when they were forced open.
But Carnival of Spies is, of course, a novel, not a historical dissertation. For dramatic purposes I have taken a few liberties; for example, the Fascist coup attempt in Brazil actually post-dated the Communist rising by about three years. Many of the characters are fictional. They rub shoulders with various historical figures. Among the latter are:
Stalin
Dimitrov, Comintern leader
Manuilsky, Stalin’s hatchetman in the Comintern
Piatnitsky, head of the Orgbureau of the Comintern
Berzin, chief of Soviet Military Intelligence
Yezhov, OGPU chief and organizer of the Great Purge
Harry Pollitt, British Communist leader
Getulio Vargas, president of Brazil
Luis Carlos Prestes, Brazilian Communist leader
Olga Benario, his companion
Lampião, Brazilian bandit chief
Ernst Wollweber, German Communist leader active in Copenhagen
Otto Braun, Comintern adviser in China
Von Seeckt, head of Hitler’s military mission to Chiang Kai-shek
Tu Yu-seng, criminal overlord of Shanghai
Willi Affinzenberg, the brilliant Comintern propagandist who pioneered the art of using “peace” slogans and “solidarity” campaigns to recruit liberals for Communist causes. Münzenberg eventually broke with Stalin over his policy of collaboration with Hitler. He was found dead with a wire garrotte around his neck in the woods of Cagnet in southwestern France in 1940 — a victim of Stalin’s secret police or the Gestapo, or both.
Three Soviet agencies involved in covert operations abroad are described in the novel. A word on each:
The Comintern
The Communist International, or Comintern, was founded in Moscow in March 1919. According to its program, “It is the aim of the Communist International to fight by all available means, including armed struggle, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transitional stage to the complete abolition of the State...The Communist International must, in fact and in deed, be a single Communist Party of the entire world. The parties working in the various countries are but its separate sections.”
Comintern advisers had extraordinary powers over local Communist parties, and in the course of the twenties they organized a wave of armed insurrections around the world, including the Hamburg revolt recounted in this book. All these military adventures failed; some brought the deaths of many thousands of party members. The Comintern ran training courses for foreign revolutionaries, notably at the Lenin School, just outside Moscow, which had 500 students in 1935, and in the M-schools, like the one at Bakovka mentioned in this novel, where Red Army instructors taught bomb making and assassination techniques.
In Stalin’s time the Comintern purged of its early, internationalist leaders — became simply an arm of the Soviet state, ruthlessly subjected to every cynical shift in Moscow’s policy by the secret police and Stalin’s trusted hatchetman, Dmitri Zacharovich Manuilsky, the son of a Greek Orthodox priest, who turned up at the United Nations after the war in the guise of a delegate from the Ukraine.
The “heart of the Comintern,” according to Walter Krivitsky, was the OMS — the Otdel Meshdunarodnoi Svyasi, or International Relations Department. This was the most secret section of the Orgbureau, headed by Osip Piatnitsky, the remarkable “Old Bolshevik” described in the book who perished in the Stalin purges. The OMS arranged covert funding, transport and fake documentation and was charged with the security of Comintern operatives abroad.
The Comintern’s regional directorates included the powerful Westbureau, which functioned from behind the cover of a publishing house on the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin — as described in this book — until Hitler took power, when its staffers scattered and regrouped in Paris and Copenhagen.
The South American bureau, based in Buenos Aires until 1928 and afterwards in Montevideo, was the command centre for the Rio plot. For many years its dominating figure was August Guralski, a supple, sophisticated Lithuanian Jew who played a key part in recruiting Luis Carlos Prestes to the Communist cause. In Rio in 1935 the South American bureau was headed by a triumvirate that used the amusing acronym GIN. The “G” was for “Garoto” (or “Kid”), one of the code names for Prestes, who returned to Brazil on a fake Portuguese passport. The “I” was for “Indio,” a party name for Rodolfo Ghioldi, a leading Argentine Communist. The “N” was for “Negro,” a nom de guerre for Arthur Ewert (who often called himself Harry Berger), who had headed Comintern operations in Shanghai in 1932-34 and, like the fictional Emil, was not the least tragic figure in the Brazilian episode.
The attempted coup in Brazil was the Comintern’s last ambitious experiment in overthrowing a target government by force of arms. For a few years afterwards, Stalin’s reluctant decision to endorse Popular Front tactics — made public in the summer of 1935 by the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in Moscow — brought political and propaganda succ
ess, especially in France. But at the same time, the Comintem’s most courageous and committed agents were falling victim to the purges in Moscow, and the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact threw the worldwide Communist movement into utter disarray. After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, forcing Stalin to align himself with the West, the Comintern became an embarrassment; it had been involved in too many plots against the Western allies. It was officially disbanded in 1943.
However, the Comintern is very much alive to this day in the guise of the International Department (ID) of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which seeks to manipulate foreign political parties — not only Communist parties — for Soviet ends and has its own operatives posted at important embassies.
Soviet State Security
The Soviet secret police was formally organized in December 1917 as the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, or Cheka for short. The word “chekist” (or “honourable chekist,” in Soviet publications) is still used to describe members of the KGB. The first Soviet intelligence chief, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, described the role of his agency in the following terms in 1918: “We stand for organized terror...The Cheka is obliged to defend the revolution and conquer the enemy even if its sword does by chance sometimes fall upon the heads of the innocent.”
Since the abolition of the Cheka in 1922, the Soviet secret police has been known by a bewildering chain of initials: GPU, OGPU, NKVD, MVD and KGB. To avoid confusion, Max Fabrikant’s organization is referred to throughout this novel as the OGPU. The initials stand for “Obiedinyonnoye Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravleniye,” or Unified State Political Administration. This was the title used by Soviet state security between November 1923 and 1934.
Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov, who is seen visiting Stalin and. interrogating Johnny in the book, is, of course, a historical figure. He became chief of Soviet state security in September 1936 and presided over the bloody purges that claimed the lives of veteran Comintern organizers, Red Army generals and countless thousands of party faithful.
Max Fabrikant is a fictional character, but some of his European exploits are loosely modelled on the career of a Soviet master spy of Latvian origin who used the alias Michel Avatin and personally executed a number of alleged “traitors.” For the record, a senior member of Avatin’s service was dispatched to Rio in the fall of 1935 to ferret out spies within the Comintern team, and recommended the murder of the mistress of “Miranda,” the secretary-general of the Brazilian Communist Party.
Soviet Military Intelligence
Again, for the sake of simplicity, Soviet military intelligence (today known as the GRU) is described as the Fourth Department (of the General Staff). It was this organization, rather than the forerunner of the KGB, that was responsible for most of the Soviet espionage coups between the two world wars. It produced spies of the calibre of Richard Sorge. It forewarned Stalin of Hitler’s impending attack. However, Stalin preferred not to believe its reports; as Johnny reflects in the novel, Hitler was perhaps the only man the Soviet dictator was willing to trust
General Jan Berzin, the Latvian head of the Fourth Department in this book, is another historical figure. He died in the purges, along with nearly all of his headquarters staff. According to the account of one Soviet intelligence defector, Berzin’s death was a slow one; in the cells of the Lubyanka, his testicles were nailed to a block of wood.
If you enjoyed Carnival of Spies you might be intererested in Moscow Rules by Robert Moss, also published by Endeavour Press.
Extract from Moscow Rules by Robert Moss
Prologue: Gogol Boulevard
‘Insurrection is a machine that makes no noise.’
Trotsky
He looked crowded behind his desk, like a racehorse confined in a narrow stall. He was very tall, and powerfully built, and his eyes were the gray of Baltic waters, surrendering nothing of their depths. He seemed young to be wearing the shoulder boards of a Soviet major-general with his khaki uniform. Those who were close to him — and there were not many — called him Sasha. Others called him Alexander Sergeyovich or, more formally, General Preobrazhensky.
He had reached the bottom of the stack of papers on his desk, going through them with the clipped exactitude of an automatic sheet-feeder. He initialed the last report, on army discipline in the Leningrad military district, and stared up at the pale yellow wall across the room. That was where the portrait of the last General Secretary had hung. It was taken down when he died, and the painters were sent round to touch up the faded oblong that was left underneath, so that no trace of the past remained. The authorities were meticulous about things like that.
There was no portrait of the current General Secretary in Preobrazhensky’s office. To judge from the reports leaking out from Kuntsevo, where the best cardiac specialists available to the Kremlin clinic were gathered around his bedside, this was a sensible economy; it wouldn’t have hung for long. In its place was the standard icon of Lenin and an old photograph of the Defense Minister, thick and jowly even when it was taken.
There were no books, no mementoes, not even a plaque from one of the Warsaw Pact divisions. You could have scoured that office for clues to the character of the man who occupied it, and learned solely that he was important enough to have a window overlooking Frunze Street, a direct line to the Chief of Staff, a small room at the back with a shower, a bed, and a row of hangers for his dress uniforms. There was only one oddity: among the uniforms was a civilian suit, a neat gray wool-and-polyester blend made in Canada for Brooks Brothers of New York.
Sasha’s secretary, an army major, came in with a fresh stack of reports and requisitions, mostly addressed to the Chief of Staff, Marshal Zotov. The Marshal was not overly fond of paperwork. It fell to Preobrazhensky, as his personal assistant, to relieve Zotov of the tedium. Sasha drafted most of the orders that were issued over the Marshal’s signature. Sometimes, to spare his boss the burden of handling the documents, Sasha would sign them himself and scrawl p/p where Zotov’s autograph was supposed to appear. In Russian, these initials signified that the Chief of Staff had signed the original, which was assumed to be locked away in a safe somewhere.
Preobrazhensky swore softly under his breath as he leafed through one of the new reports. It contained a psychiatric evaluation of an army commander he had come to know well when they served together against the Afghan guerrillas. The general had been relieved of his duties and hauled off to the notorious Serbsky psychiatric institute, where dissidents were passed off as lunatics or actually driven insane. The evidence of the general’s psychosis was that he had failed to accept the necessity of ordering his troops to fire on unarmed strikers during the labor troubles at the giant auto factory in Togliatti.
The report recommended intensified medication. Treatments were scheduled to begin in two days’ time. One of the drugs specified was aminazin. Sasha was familiar with its effects. It replaced memory with a yawning black hole and eroded all the cognitive functions. After being treated with aminazin, even a Nobel laureate for literature would have trouble scanning the headlines of his hometown paper. The treatment prescribed for General Pavel Leybutin would transform him into a grinning vegetable. Then the people who had authorized it would be able to show him to the world to demonstrate that he had disobeyed not because of principle, but because he was off his head.
Sasha scribbled a request to delay the new treatment for a period of one week so that the high command could pursue a further investigation of the general’s ‘anti-Soviet activities’ in his former military district. At the bottom, he put the letters p/p and his own signature. It was irregular, of course, for the General Staff to try to interfere in this way. Leybutin was now the property of the Committee for State Security. But all he needed was to hold things up for a while.
A week will be plenty of time, Sasha told himself. If the bitches agree. His long surname sprawled across the paper like an arctic horizon. He called in his sec
retary and handed him the memo.
‘Ilya, give me a cigarette.’
The major raised his eyebrows. In the months he had worked for General Preobrazhensky, he had never seen him smoke. He fished out a pack of coarse Russian cigarettes, and started making apologies for the brand.
‘Just give me a light.’ Impatient, Sasha got up from the desk and stood next to his secretary, towering over him.
The major was nervous, and his first match sputtered out. Sasha took the box from him and lit the cigarette himself.
‘See that report gets processed immediately,’ he instructed his aide.
Sasha started to prowl between desk and window. Seven floors below him, along the narrow strip of Frunze Street, a line of black staff cars snaked in front of the main entrance to the General Staff building, with its massive Grecian portico. Over to the right, the solid concrete bulk of the building that housed the stacks of the Lenin Library blocked out the domes of the Kremlin. To the left, Sasha could make out the star-shaped Arbat Skaya metro Station, constructed from polished red stone, and, beyond it, the surge of traffic and the double row of ugly tower blocks — the Dentures of Moscow, some wit had called them — along Kalinin Prospekt. Out of sight, under the leafless maples of Gogol Boulevard, pensioners were sitting in twos and threes on the benches, playing chess for a rouble in the thin light of autumn, watching the cars whizz by on either side, toward Kalinin Prospekt or the river.
Preobrazhensky kept circling back to the lone black telephone on his desk, an old-fashioned rotary model with a row of buttons underneath.
There should be word, he told himself. He pictured the General Secretary under the scalpel in the bright modern clinic hidden away in the birch woods behind what had once been Stalin’s hunting lodge. The man hadn’t made a public appearance in weeks. That had at least spared the people the embarrassment of listening to him wheezing his way through a speech, losing his place, garbling and jumbling the text until any sense was lost. Moscow was buzzing with rumors. In the beer-bars, you could hear people whispering that the General Secretary was already dead. ‘They’ were keeping the body on ice until they agreed on who was going to take over. Sasha knew better. It was actually the other way around. This time the men who were bent on sharing the succession weren’t waiting for the doctors to pronounce the General Secretary dead before they started dividing up the spoils.
