The Secret War

by Max Hastings

  How much damage did the traitors do to British interests? Until the late wartime years, the likely answer is: not much. For long periods Moscow refused to believe that the British were so stupid as to allow avowed communists – albeit supposed apostates – access to their deepest secrets. Probably the most significant contribution of the Cambridge Five, and explicitly of Donald Maclean, was to keep Stalin informed about British political and diplomatic intentions; an immense volume of cable traffic concerning – for instance – Anglo-American weapons and supply deliveries to the USSR was also passed to Moscow. The Russians’ default diplomatic posture towards the Western Allies of stone-faced indignation successfully concealed from Washington and London the fact that, at summit meetings, the Soviet delegation was fully informed in advance of intended British and American positions. Churchill especially, who often awaited apprehensively Stalin’s response to unwelcome surprises, especially about delays to D-Day, might have spared himself discomfort. The ‘surprises’ were nothing of the sort: the Soviet dictator merely brilliantly simulated amazement, then unleashed anger to order. It was impossible for Churchill and Roosevelt to play poker with the Kremlin, because Stalin knew their hands. Meanwhile, it is known that Anthony Blunt at MI5 handled many Japanese Purple decrypts, and it is likely that he gave some to the Russians, even if Izumi Kozo’s material did not enable them to break the cipher on their own account.

  Apologists for the Cambridge spies cite some of the above in defence of their men. Philby and the rest, they argue, gave aid not to Britain’s enemies, but to its foremost ally in the struggle against Nazism. Was it not shameful – a cause for righteous anger to people of conscience, today as in the 1940s – that Britain did so little to aid Russia in its desperate hour, and even denied Moscow access to Ultra, the foremost weapon in Churchill’s hands? The first answer to such a defence is that the traitors provided information to Moscow long before Russia became an ally, indeed while the Soviet Union was coupled to Nazi Germany, from August 1939 to June 1941, a period that embraced such triumphs for Moscow Centre as the Katyn massacres. Even after ‘Barbarossa’, when Britain, Russia and later the US were joined in the struggle against Hitler, Stalin never wavered in his perception of the Western Allies as ultimate foes. The treachery of Philby and his friends later cost the lives of many good men and women, executed for the mere crime of resisting tyranny.

  Meanwhile, Bletchley Park was the most secret organ of British war-making. The danger was enormous that once its doings were known in Moscow, a leak – perhaps through a compromised Russian code – would alert the Germans to Enigma’s vulnerability. The fact that this did not happen in no way excuses the conduct of those who revealed the Ultra secret to the Kremlin. The Russians were careless, or worse, with the secrets of others; it should be remembered that, while Stalin was still Hitler’s friend, the Soviet ambassador in Washington told his German counterpart that the Japanese Purple cipher was broken. The most that can be said about Philby and his kin is that it was fortunate all of Britain’s significant wartime traitors gave their allegiance to the Soviet Union, the looming menace to freedom and democracy, rather than to Nazi Germany, its present danger.

  2 AMERICAN TRAITORS

  The United States is a temple of freedom, and thus also of indiscretion. Even after Pearl Harbor, Americans found it hard to adjust to the imperatives of security, to shake off habits acquired over centuries. Operational pilots gossiped over voice links; politicians and service officers discussed plans over cocktails; newspapermen and broadcasters chafed against censorship, and published information of value to the enemy – most notoriously the Chicago Tribune’s 1942 revelation, reprised by Walter Winchell, that US triumph at Midway had been gained by breaking Japanese codes – whenever they thought they could get away with it. The eastern seaboard’s blazing illuminations, which persisted for weeks after the ‘Day of Infamy’, much to the advantage of U-boat captains who sank scores of merchantmen silhouetted against their glare, were symbolic of much else that might be magnificent, but was also perilous, in a nation at war.

  Fortunately for the Allied struggle against the Axis, German spies who landed on US soil were rounded up with little difficulty by police and the FBI. The Japanese enjoyed as little success intelligence-gathering in America as they did nearer home. The Soviet Union, however, exploited the open society to sponsor espionage inside the United States on a scale unmatched by any other nation. The 1950s allegations of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who promoted a witch-hunt in a climate of hysteria and paranoia, were unfounded against many individuals, but had substance in the generality. Hundreds of Americans of left-wing sympathies, and a smaller number who worked for cash, systematically betrayed their country’s secrets to Moscow. The atomic traitors, to be discussed later, have been the focus of much historical attention, while the Russians’ host of other wartime informants have received less notice than they deserve. NKVD and GRU sources in Washington were privy to some of the nation’s most sensitive policy debates.

  Until the post-war era, the FBI had negligible success in identifying American traitors, and the guilt or innocence of some high-profile suspects remains unproven to this day. As early as 15 July 1941 a State Department official wrote: ‘Ample evidence exists that American communists are taking advantage of the present situation to attempt to ingratiate themselves in high government circles as advocates of democracy under the guise of advocating all-out aid to the Soviet Union.’ FBI attention, however, focused more closely on the US Communist Party than on Soviet agent-runners. There are sheaves of reports in the Washington archives concerning American communist sympathisers, but until the later 1940s the FBI’s surveillance targets were almost all people at the lower end of society – dock workers, trades union activists and suchlike. The FBI breathed heavily upon such bodies as the National Council of Soviet–American Friendship and East European expatriate and nationalist groups. It held a bulging file on the National Maritime Union’s alleged subversive activities. It had one success against the Soviet Union in April 1941, when it secured the recall of the NKVD’s New York station chief after FBI agents arrested him at a meeting with an informant, but this was the tip of a huge iceberg, invisible to J. Edgar Hoover.

  The wartime FBI claimed knowledge of just five American citizens spying for Russia, while subsequent revelations and confessions identified at least another eighty. The 1948 Venona decrypts provided codenames for two hundred Russian sources in the US, of whom half remain unidentified in the twenty-first century. Since the Venona material covered only a part of Moscow’s operations, it is reasonable to assume that in the 1930s and 1940s there were many more American traitors, a view supported by the memoirs of contemporary NKVD and GRU officers who served in the US.

  In the FBI’s defence, Hoover could plead that the nation’s declared enemies – Germany, Italy and Japan – enjoyed no significant espionage success within the continental United States. After June 1941 the Russians were America’s professed allies rather than foes, and President Roosevelt himself treated them with trust and respect. Apologists for the Bureau’s failure against the NKVD might say that this merely reflected a wider naïveté, extending to the summit of US government, about the scale of the menace posed by the Soviet Union. The FBI also faced some of the same problems as did Abwehr and Gestapo men hunting the Red Orchestra: most of the significant players inhabited upper-middle-class social and professional circles, where law enforcement agencies were unaccustomed to tread.

  As elsewhere in the world, the NKVD’s American operations became almost moribund between 1939 and 1941, and most of its US sources became perforce sleepers. The first attempt to reactivate networks failed when Arnold Deutsch, rehabilitated and dispatched to become US station chief, appears to have drowned when his ship was sunk in mid-Atlantic. In December 1941, Itzhak Akhmerov was appointed in his stead. He had served in the US since arriving there in 1934 under cover as a student, and as he told an audience of KGB trainees twenty years later, ‘switching fr
om the status of a foreign student to the status of an American in such a large city as New York was not difficult’. After a time he moved to Baltimore, which was handier for managing his Washington sources. He and another NKVD officer settled down to run a furrier’s shop, which proved successful in its own right, turning a good profit as well as providing cover; but he had indifferent success recruiting new informants, a role that others filled better.

  The NKVD’s three acknowledged stations – at the Soviets’ AMTORG trade organisation in New York, the Washington embassy and the San Francisco consulate – were each manned by thirteen intelligence officers, supported by others at sub-stations in Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle and elsewhere. Scores more agents worked under cover of Soviet front organisations – the TASS news agency, Sovfilmexport, the Russian Red Cross and suchlike; some American material was also channelled through the NKVD’s Mexico City station. It might be supposed that Soviet spies, arriving from the most repressive and austere society on earth at their usual first port of call, New York City’s Taft hotel, would be dazzled by American wealth, glitz, glamour, inexhaustible energy. Yet remarkably few ‘went private’ – defected – and even those who wrote memoirs long after the Terror ended say little or nothing in praise of the US. Most seem to have lived and worked in a grey cocoon of Russianness and socialist rectitude.

  Soviet espionage was often a family business. When Alexander Feklisov left Moscow for an NKVD posting in New York, he had the customary farewell meeting with foreign minister Molotov, who expressed dismay that he was a bachelor: ‘We don’t send single men abroad, especially to the USA. They will immediately foist a beautiful blonde or brunette on you, and a honeytrap will be ready.’ Feklisov’s boss reassured Molotov that there were some good Russian girls serving at Soviet institutions in New York, and a bride could be found among them for the novice agent. In 1944 the dutiful Feklisov indeed married a Russian student sent to study at Columbia.

  Itzhak Akhmerov did wed an American – but she was Helen Lowry, niece of US Communist Party leader Earl Browder. When Vasily Zarubin, fresh from participation in the Katyn massacres of 25,000 Poles, left Moscow to become Washington station chief in December 1941, he took with him his wife Elizabeth, herself an NKVD captain, who played an important role as recruiter for her husband’s network, and who often travelled to California to meet Robert Oppenheimer and other useful contacts. She passed easily as a sophisticated, cosmopolitan European woman, equally fluent in English, German, French and Hebrew. She came from a family of revolutionaries, and was one of Centre’s most ruthless operatives. Having cut her teeth working as a case officer for the terrible Felix Dzerzhinsky after the Revolution, she was posted to Turkey. There she gave impressive proof of loyalty to Bolshevism by betraying her then husband, Yakov Blumkin, another Soviet agent. He had been entrusted with the sale of Moscow’s Hasidic Library, and rashly gave some of the proceeds to Trotsky, who was then exiled in Turkey. Almost before the echo of the shots from Blumkin’s firing squad had died away, his widow married Zarubin. For thirteen years thereafter the two travelled and spied together across Europe. In America, Elizabeth played her role so skilfully that the FBI identified her as a career intelligence officer only in 1946, after her return to Moscow. She and her husband meanwhile played a pivotal role in Centre’s global espionage programme. Before October 1941, Stalin had taken little personal interest in the US – though always eager to steal its technology – because there was no direct clash between Soviet and American interests. Now, however, its policies became a top priority: Stalin met personally with Zarubin before he departed for his American posting, to urge its importance.

  The new NKVD resident was forty-seven when he arrived in New York. His subordinate Alexander Feklisov, who idolised Zarubin as a giant among Soviet spies, described him thus: ‘He was of medium height, slightly overweight, with thin fair hair which he brushed back. He wore glasses in a white metal frame, and his eyes were forever inflamed from overwork. He was immensely strong, very good at tennis, full of life and an obvious leader in any company. He loved singing and played several musical instruments … He spoke quickly and his voice was somehow trumpet-like, though he was also a good listener, easy and friendly with subordinates. He demanded they should show initiative, boldness, even recklessness. He derived his strength from his immense experience and professionalism, though he could sometimes be indiscreet. He had all kind of connections among foreigners, and was a great recruiter. He handled our most important agents personally.’ Feklisov omitted to mention that Zarubin, a secret servant of the Soviet state since 1925, was also a ruthless killer, though this did not spare him from himself once feeling the warmth of the executioner’s breath. At a meeting Beria invited him to stand, then said, ‘Tell us about your links to the Fascist intelligence services.’ Zarubin sternly rejected the slander – and suffered no consequences. But those who witnessed the scene left the room trembling. Zarubin dominated Soviet espionage in the United States until his expulsion in 1944.

  In the US as in Britain, the Comintern provided a figleaf to spare informants from the discomfort of acknowledging that they were giving secrets to a foreign power. Those involved, said the Iowan-born Marxist writer Josephine Herbst, ‘took great pride in their sense of conspiracy’. Among early recruits was Harold Ware, a radical New Dealer in the Agriculture Department, killed in a 1935 car crash. At the State Department the GRU secured the services of Alger Hiss, while the NKVD from the mid-1930s received a steady stream of information from Noel Field and Laurence Duggan. The latter was a political romantic, much influenced by his formidable wife Helen Boyd, whom a Russian described as ‘an extraordinarily beautiful woman: a typical American, tall, blonde, reserved, well-read, goes in for sports, independent’. Hedda Gumpertz, a German exile and passionate anti-Nazi working for the NKVD, had cultivated Duggan as a friend of Field. Duggan was once handed a birthday present by his Soviet handler: a monogrammed crocodile toiletries case. He rejected it in the same spirit that some of the British traitors declined money, ‘stating that he was working for our common ideas and making it understood that he was not helping us for any material interest’.

  The Russians profited from thinking long. Since the Soviet Union saw itself in a historic adversarial relationship to the Western Powers, its rulers were content for agents to spend years in training and orientation for their roles. Semyon Semyonov, for instance, was a short, stocky figure with a duck nose and big eyes, who rubbed along easily with people and could pass for a middle-rank corporate executive. In January 1938, aged twenty-six, he was sent at Moscow’s expense to do advanced studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – the NKVD intended him to become a scientific-technological intelligence officer. At MIT there were complaints that Semyonov was lazy and conceited, but he proved an adept when he started his career as an agent. By 1943 he was running twenty-eight American sources, eleven of whom provided material on chemistry and bacteriology, six on radio, five on aviation. Among the more notable was thirty-three-year-old Harry Gold, born in Switzerland to Russian refugee parents. Gold came to America as an infant, and started spying for the Soviets in his first job, where he stole a dry-ice process that stopped ice cream melting. In 1942 he abandoned his day job as a chemist to manage his own agent-running operation, meeting Semyonov once a week to arrange assignments.

  Centre was uneasy that so many of its key Washington sources knew each other, mostly through links to left-wing groups, but could do little about it. One man who might have exposed the extent of its penetration in the US was Ignatz Reiss, an NKVD officer who quit and fled for his life during the Purges. His employers caught up with him, however, in a Lausanne restaurant on 4 September 1937. He was shot nearby, his body dumped by the roadside. This proved a useful execution, for other spies who considered withdrawing their services tended to drop the idea when they remembered Reiss’s well-publicised fate. Maybe they also knew about Juliet Poyntz, an American informant who decided to leave the Soviets’ employ, b
ut instead vanished from the New York Women’s Club on 3 June 1937 and also appears to have been liquidated.

  Though some American leftists’ faith in the socialist dream was shaken by the Nazi–Soviet Pact, it was renewed in full measure by ‘Barbarossa’, which threw upon Russia the chief burden of defeating Hitler. When Alfred Slack, an informant working at Eastman Kodak, was offered a $150 bonus for an unusually useful piece of information, he told his handler to send the money to Moscow for the ‘Joseph Stalin tank column’, a popular fund of the time. Semyon Semyonov, the agent in question, solemnly gave Slack a receipt, to keep alive the flame of his illusions.

  Others, however, shamelessly sold secrets for the money. Semyonov liked to tell the story of an American chemist at DuPont who passed the Russians material on nylon and explosives, without any pretence of ideological motive. ‘Democrats, Republicans, fascists, communists, they are all the same to me,’ the man said. ‘I meet you because I need cash. I need to build a house, educate my daughter, dress her nicely and make sure she marries well.’ At every rendezvous there was protracted haggling between the Russian and the American about the value of his wares, which customarily started with the seller demanding $1,000, then taking home two or three hundred, together with a burning indignation. Semyonov told his colleague Alexander Feklisov that he always felt exhausted after meeting ‘Hustler’, as the DuPont man was codenamed. It took the Russian hours to recover his sangfroid, as he debated whether the angry American would see him again. Feklisov asked, ‘Why not pay the guy more?’ Semyonov answered, ‘Because if he buys his house and saves enough money, he will stop working for us.’ As it was, their exchanges continued for years.