The Secret War

by Max Hastings

  Just as at home in Russia, within the extended Soviet secret family in America denunciations were a way of life, and of death. In August 1944 the NKVD’s new resident in San Francisco, Grigori Kasparov, signalled to Moscow a blistering critique of his counterpart in Mexico City. Kasparov accused him of bungling efforts to liberate Trotsky’s assassin, Ramón Mercader, and of adopting a ‘grand lifestyle’, which included breeding poultry and parrots. Similarly, the New York deputy chief claimed that his own boss, twenty-eight-year-old Stepan Apresyan, was ‘utterly without the knack of dealing with people, frequently showing himself excessively abrupt and inclined to nag … A worker who has no experience of work abroad and cannot cope on his own.’ Apresyan was demoted to the San Francisco residence in March 1945.

  The Zarubins were undone not by the artifice of the FBI, but by a disgruntled subordinate colonel named Vasilii Mironov. Mironov’s first shot at his chief was to write to Stalin, asserting that Zarubin was doubling for the Axis. When this got him nowhere, he dispatched an anonymous letter to J. Edgar Hoover’s office, fingering Zarubin as a Soviet spy, and also naming ten other agents, including Hollywood producer Boris Morros. During the war years the British were too fearful of straining their difficult relationship with the Soviets to expel even identified Soviet ‘illegals’, but in 1944 the Americans insisted on the Zarubins’ departure; both they and their accuser went home. The husband-and-wife team received a heroes’ welcome in Moscow; he was loaded with medals, and ended his career as deputy chief of foreign intelligence. Meanwhile Mironov, surprisingly, was allowed to live – for a time. Back in Moscow, he was diagnosed as schizophrenic and dispatched to an asylum. While such Soviet institutions were scarcely havens of compassion, given the damage the errant colonel had inflicted, it is astonishing he was not shot. He was less fortunate in 1945, however, when he attempted to inform the US embassy about Soviet massacres in Poland; this time he was silenced by a firing squad.

  In the spring of 1942, as a known communist Nathan Silvermaster was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee. This proved nothing against him, though in June the US Navy’s intelligence department insisted on his dismissal from the Treasury. Further inquiries into his political activities were quashed – it is thought that Harry Dexter White and another friend, Lauchlin Currie, a Canadian-born senior economic adviser to the White House, intervened on his behalf. Although nothing was ever proved against Currie, it seems almost certain that he too was a Soviet informant. Silvermaster stayed in Washington, with a new job in the Farm Security Administration. Though this had no access to sensitive defence information, he promptly became a member of the War Production Board, which did.

  Moscow’s American sources were not highly trained intelligence professionals, but instead enthusiastic amateurs. Over half of the hundreds of US government documents photographed by William Ullmann in 1944, for instance, proved unreadable when Centre’s men pored over his films, forwarded by Elizabeth Bentley. What could be deciphered was impressive, however; Ullmann was a former Treasury man drafted to the Pentagon, who supplied a mass of technical data on US combat aircraft and industrial production. In March 1945 the important nuclear spy Ted Hall passed information out of Santa Fe on the design of America’s atomic bomb which he had copied onto a newspaper, using milk as ink. The Russians fumed at such hamfistedness.

  Much material reached Moscow out of real time. An exasperated memo from Fitin to Merkulov in July 1944 complained that documents such as a copy of an Anglo-American Lend-Lease agreement arrived months late, as did a forty-one-page Treasury memorandum on post-war trade relations between Washington and Moscow, and a draft by Harry Dexter White of a new US-USSR Lend-Lease deal. Fitin sought authority to shift a man from Los Angeles to New York to handle the groaning caseload. The Soviets were even more exasperated by emotional complications: William Ullmann started an affair with Nathan Silvermaster’s wife. Akhmerov complained to Moscow: ‘Surely these unhealthy relations between them cannot help but influence their behaviour and work for us negatively.’ He also reported that Silvermaster bullied his sources. Vladimir Pravdin, now the NKVD’s New York station chief, urged Akhmerov to rein in the wayward spy. Akhmerov responded bluntly: ‘The main thing is to get results. For twenty-five years, we couldn’t get information about the politics of this country. Now [Silvermaster] is doing a tremendous job and giving our government a complete picture of [US] politics on all questions.’ In August 1944, Fitin at Centre recorded that since January the Washington network had handed over 386 important US government documents. He was sufficiently impressed by the Silvermasters’ work to contribute a $6,000 down-payment on a farm the couple wanted to buy. Nathan was awarded a Soviet decoration, which he was permitted to glimpse before his handler returned it to secret safekeeping. The volume of information passed to Moscow by all its American networks rose spectacularly in the course of the war, from fifty-nine reels of microfilm in 1942, to 211 in 1943, six hundred in 1944 and 1,896 in 1945, with the Silvermasters among the major contributors.

  How did the Russians get away with so much for so long? Most citizens of democracies accept that part of the tariff imposed for freedom is that their defences against subversion and treachery are less comprehensive and effective than those of a totalitarian state, and such a price usually seems worth paying. Yet the FBI’s incompetence was astonishing. Its agents charged with monitoring Soviet activities showed themselves less than astute. Alexander Feklisov wrote in his memoirs: ‘There were many green young men in the [FBI’s] foot surveillance teams … and our officers exposed them by using simple tricks. Tails were probably selected from young men reared in small towns, who would start working against us after two or three months’ training. One could see straight away that they were provincials – by their clothes, the guilty, larcenous look in their eyes; their clumsiness. They felt lost when they realised that they had been spotted, and didn’t know what to do. They would turn away, or walk quickly into the first building they saw.’

  Feklisov sometimes walked straight towards his tail, for the fun of seeing the man flee before him in embarrassment. Surveillance is highly labour-intensive, requiring back-up cars in case a suspect grabs a bus or taxi. ‘I often spotted followers when getting into the subway or standing on the platform. They were so scared they would lose me when I boarded a train that they almost ran down the stairs. Once on the platform, I normally chose a spot where it was hard to see me: behind a pillar, by the wall, in the crowd. There were occasions when the only people in a quiet subway station were myself and the tail. In such cases I normally tried to think about something nice, smiled and hummed a popular American tune while pacing along the platform with a carefree look, to show that I paid no attention to the surveillance. The tails dressed modestly, mostly in dark dull suits and overcoats. In summer they mostly wore their shirts hanging out, with no tie. On one occasion I was watched by a team of four. One of them wore army uniform for half the day. I saw him on the escalator in the metro, then he followed me into the Cunard White Star office where I booked steamship tickets for Soviet citizens travelling to London. I saw this “soldier” yet again when lunching at a cafeteria.’ Hoover could fire only one counter-charge against his more skilful and subtle British counterparts: his own Bureau was never infiltrated by a Soviet agent, as was MI5.

  The Roosevelt administration apparently agreed about the FBI’s limitations. In July 1941 the Soviets’ Washington ambassador, Konstantin Umansky, reported to Moscow an emotional appeal by Henry Morgenthau. The treasury secretary said that he was asking ‘not on behalf of the American government, but on my personal behalf’ that if the Russians knew the identities of key German agents in the US, they should provide them to himself and the president, ‘since the FBI works poorly today … leaving the core of Nazi leaders free and still carrying on their undermining work’. A Moscow Centre hand scrawled exclamation and question marks on this cable. Morgenthau repeated the same demand to Umansky’s successor, Maxim Litvinov. Early i
n March 1942 Moscow ordered the ambassador to reject any requests for intelligence cooperation: ‘The NKVD of the USSR is not interested in establishing this liaison.’ In the summer of 1944, and partly in response to concern about the security of the Manhattan Project, the FBI planted wiretaps in all known Soviet headquarters buildings, through which they learned a good many codenames, together with indisputable evidence of Itzhak Akhmerov’s intelligence role. He was declared persona non grata, and went home to receive a hero’s welcome in Moscow. He was presented with the Order of the Red Banner, and his wife Helen with the Red Star.

  By the end of the war Centre was convinced that Elizabeth Bentley was chronically unstable and a menace to their US operations, especially after she formed a friendship with a man who was plainly an agent of either ‘the Hut’ – the FBI – or ‘the Arsenal’ – the US War Department; in reality, it was the former. Centre decided upon her kidnapping and extraction to Moscow for liquidation. It was too late: she was already singing a long aria to Hoover’s men, news that was conveyed to her employers by Kim Philby. In a post-mortem on the Golos–Bentley saga, Centre concluded that it was a serious mistake to have allowed its agent to forge links with members of the American Communist Party, and to become ‘the main pillar of our intelligence work in the US’. It was extraordinary that a spy so careless as to meet informants in their own apartments – as did Bentley – escaped exposure for so long.

  The same arguments are advanced to excuse America’s communist traitors as their British counterparts: that it is scarcely surprising so many liberals sought to assist the Soviet Union, when the institutional barbarity of Stalin’s regime was inadequately understood, and Russians bore the overwhelming burden of the struggle to defeat fascism. As the East German spy chief Markus Wolf later put it, Moscow’s informants considered themselves members of an elite secret club, fighting for a noble ideal. Pierre Cot, a former minister in several French governments living in exile in the US, undertook a long 1944 mission to Moscow for de Gaulle. He concluded his subsequent report: ‘Liberty declines unceasingly under capitalism and rises unceasingly under socialism.’ A remarkable number of American and British intellectuals likewise embraced this idiot judgement. From 1941 to 1945, Russians were the allies of the United States in the greatest conflict in history.

  In response, however, it may be argued that few informed people – which included almost all the American spies – could have failed to be aware of the horrors of the Soviet system, had they chosen to make themselves so. Apologists also argue that the traitors’ actions had no adverse impact upon the Allied cause in the Second World War. That is only narrowly true: recall the Soviet leak to the Germans about the American penetration of Purple. Those were still the days of the Nazi–Soviet Pact: Hitler’s emissary passed on this momentous warning to the Japanese. Baron Ōshima messaged Japan’s foreign minister from Berlin on 3 May 1941 – a dispatch subsequently broken by the Americans – saying that ‘it is quite reliably established [by the Germans] that the U.S. government is reading Ambassador Nomura’s code messages [from Washington] … drastic steps should be taken regarding this matter’. The fact that Tokyo was foolish enough to take no heed does not alter the gravity of the threat to US interests. It is also virtually certain that the Russians acquired this vital secret from one of their American informants in the upper reaches of the administration. This man may have supposed that by briefing Moscow he was merely aiding the international socialist cause. It was only by a miracle, however, that his action did not cause the US to lose its access to Purple.

  Arthur Schlesinger wrote in his memoirs: ‘There is no evidence that the information OSS moles gave the Kremlin did much damage to the United States. The discovery that OSS was not planning subversive operations against the Soviet Union may well have soothed Stalin and reduced any chance of his making a separate peace with Hitler.’ Here, the historian makes a valid point: Soviet penetration of the organisation would have inflicted serious damage at the time only if Moscow’s agents had been passing intelligence that showed the United States double-crossing its supposed ally – which was not the case. Yet at no time during the Second World War did Stalin entertain any notion of sustaining peaceful co-existence with the Western Powers once it was ended. The American and British traitors did substantial harm to their own nations’ interests, by ensuring that Washington bargained with Moscow – for instance at Yalta and at the United Nations’ founding conference in San Francisco – at a serious disadvantage: Soviet delegations knew precisely where American and British final positions lay.

  The Americans who gave technological and scientific data to the Soviets, of whom more below, did greater harm to their own nation’s interests than those who merely peddled political, diplomatic and strategic information during the war years. Most of the Russians’ immense investment in espionage in the US achieved little. The best that can be said of the Americans who served their cause is that they were monumentally naïve – the Russians certainly thought so. The US informants who worked so enthusiastically with Vasily and Elizabeth Zarubin might have supped less eagerly had they seen the bloodstained footprints that marked every step of their paths from Moscow to Washington DC.

  15

  The Knowledge Factories

  1 AGENTS

  Britain’s intelligence services employed hundreds of impressively determined and courageous young field agents, of whom the Norwegian Oluf Reed-Olsen may stand as an exemplar. In September 1940, aged twenty-two, he escaped to Britain from his own occupied country by crossing the North Sea in an eighteen-foot boat, surviving extraordinary hazards and tempests during the two-week passage. Thereafter he spent two years as a pilot trainee in Canada, and flew several operations for RAF Coastal Command before accepting a transfer to agent training, in the course of which he broke both legs parachuting. In April 1943 the plane carrying him to Norway twice turned back, because wind speeds were deemed too high for a jump. The third time, he insisted on making the descent, landed in a treetop and badly dislocated his knee. This caused him to spend a month in a Norwegian hospital, constantly exposed to betrayal, having fluid drained from the injury. On belatedly starting intelligence work, he brushed disaster at every turn. Carelessness prompted him to use English phrases in public places. His British briefers had known nothing about new regulations which required him to carry a travel permit. He found it hard to create a network from scratch: ‘Most of the people who at that time were capable of doing a job efficiently were already up to their necks in illegal activity elsewhere … I would not let any man work for me and in other organizations at the same time. This was a mistake to which far too many fell victims.’

  He wasted a month bivouacked in a wilderness with two companions, wirelessing his AKY callsign into nothingness, before his signals to Whaddon Hall received an acknowledgement: ‘PBO … PBO.’ He then spent thirty minutes transmitting a situation report: ‘The difference it made to our spirits – after our weeks of toil and increasing setbacks – cannot be described. It was like a breeze of encouragement blowing through all the blackness.’ Olsen and his companions lived for some time on semi-starvation rations – three boiled potatoes a day with a little bread, mackerel or herring. Poor diet goes far to explain how injured men in the field often proved vulnerable to septicaemia. Only after many months did Olsen’s team receive their first parachute drop, of which the most valued ingredients were not weapons or explosives, but 270 pounds of chocolate, 5,000 cigarettes, dried plums, apricots, apples. Although temporarily driven from the area by a German sweep, they were fortunate enough to return later to find the supply cache undisturbed, in a cave amid thick woodland.

  Secret warriors spent much of their time preoccupied with humdrum subsistence activities, rather than with collecting intelligence or blowing up bridges. Reed-Olsen sometimes found himself toiling across a mountainside carrying an eighty-pound load – an MI6 transmitter weighed almost half of that, with its batteries. For agents obliged to live in rural areas, it he
lped to be countrywise: the young Norwegian was often alerted to interlopers by the cross call of a stonechat or blackbird. His main job was to monitor and report shipping movements and German troop deployments. In October 1943, after weeks of playing catch-as-catch-can with Abwehr director-finders monitoring his wireless transmissions, he was obliged to flee to neighbouring Sweden. Flown to London in January 1944, he took two months’ leave in Canada to get married, before being parachuted back into Norway in May. Thereafter he transmitted local weather reports several times a day, and answered such questionnaires as this late July example from Broadway:

  1. Is there a divisional staff in Arendal? Give number, HQ and name of CO.

  2. Is there a Grenadier regiment’s HQ in Kristiansand South and/or Lyngdal? Give number, location of HQ and name of CO.

  3. Are the army troops in Mandal subordinated to Lyngdal or Kristiansand?

  This continued through six more questions with multiple sub-headings.

  In the last months of the war Reed-Olsen was able to recruit two German deserters, abandoning the sinking Reich, to assist in addressing such requests from London. He was latterly successful in evading German DF units, though these often taunted him across the ether to repeat code groups, and finally sent ‘HEIL HITLER!’ in plain language.

  Reed-Olsen, like hundreds of his comrades around the world, lived for years in peril of capture and a ghastly death. Attrition was especially high in the Low Countries, where the terrain was ill-suited to covert activity, informers were many and the Abwehr’s counter-intelligence branch notably efficient. Of eighty-nine MI6 agents dispatched to occupied Belgium and Holland during the war years, thirty-nine were captured, of whom just eleven survived the war. By 1945, only thirteen MI6 wirelesses remained operational in the region.