The Secret War

by Max Hastings

  At the beginning of 1944 San Francisco station chief Gregory Kheifetz returned to Moscow, if not in disgrace for his own failure to break into Los Alamos, at least in hopes that a successor might prove able to do so. Centre thereafter focused extraordinary effort on the US atomic programme – more, indeed, than upon espionage in Germany. The struggle against Hitler might be the present, reasoned the Kremlin, but the confrontation with the bourgeois capitalist democracies would be the future. The chief clearing-house for information dispatched from the western USA was a drugstore in Santa Fe. Moscow mobilised West Coast sleepers, some of them inactive for a decade, including a Polish Jewish dentist codenamed ‘Chess-Player’, who had been subsidised by the old OGPU to secure a French medical degree, and whose wife now befriended the Oppenheimers. Sudoplatov claims that beyond orally delivered progress reports, ‘Chess-Player’ passed on five classified documents acquired from Oppenheimer and his friends. It seems rash to credit these assertions unsceptically. It is possible to acknowledge that many scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project held left-wing convictions, and were especially sympathetic to the Soviet Union in the circumstances of its death struggle against Hitler, without accepting that they were committed NKVD sources.

  Even inside America, terror could occasionally play as useful a recruitment role as ideology. George Gamow was a Russian-born physicist who had defected to the US back in 1933. Elizabeth Zarubin approached Gamow’s wife Rho, also a physicist, and warned her that the safety of their relatives still in the Soviet Union depended on the couple providing assistance to Moscow. There was a carrot as well as a knout: spy well, said Mrs Zarubin encouragingly, and your family will eat better; refuse, and there is the gulag. Gamow acceded, and was able to exploit a wide network of sources in the scientific community. Trickles of material arrived from unexpected people: in the summer of 1944 an unknown stranger delivered a package of top secret material to the Soviet consulate in New York. Its technical content fascinated Moscow’s analysts, making them all the more furious that the supplier left the building without revealing his identity – and was never heard of again.

  Meanwhile, a young US Communist Party member named Fogel was working for Kellogg Construction on the Manhattan Project, though to Moscow’s frustration he declined the company’s offer of a transfer to Los Alamos early in 1945, and stopped providing information. When Ted Hall decided that he wanted to tell everything he knew to the Russians, he had trouble finding an appropriate conduit. In the end a journalist for the propaganda newspaper Russian Voice, Sergei Kurnakov, who was also on Centre’s payroll, became his courier. Kurnakov sent Moscow a description of Hall: ‘rather tall, slender, brown-haired and a bit pimply-faced, dressed carelessly, shoes appear not cleaned for a long time, fallen-down socks … He is witty and somewhat sarcastic … comes from a Jewish family, though doesn’t look like a Jew.’ Hall later became the first American informant to reveal the implosion method of detonation, backed up by a more detailed report from Fuchs on 6 April 1945. Yet another atomic spy, David Greenglass, an army sergeant working as a mechanic at Los Alamos, was able to pass out information from autumn of 1944 when he received visits from his wife Ruth. She later told Julius Rosenberg that ‘socialism was the sole hope of the world and the Soviet Union commanded her deepest admiration’. Moscow Centre was dismissive about the quality of Greenglass’s material, but every little helped.

  Like all Soviet operations, Enormoz was fortified by an impregnable self-righteousness. In 1944 the Russians professed to be affronted when the most prominent scientists of Britain and America declined en masse – at their governments’ insistence – invitations to attend a Moscow conference to celebrate the 220th anniversary of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Yet this was planned explicitly as a festival of secrets-gathering and informant recruitment. The Soviet Union was now conducting technological intelligence operations in the US on an industrial scale. The output of the illegal residency in Washington increased from 211 rolls of film of classified documents in 1943 to six hundred in the following year, and 1,896 in 1945. The information related to much else beyond nuclear research: stolen American secrets made a large contribution to advances in Russian radar, wireless technology, jet propulsion and synthetic rubber. There were those who argued that an ally deserved no less, but this was the same ally who had declined to admit to the British in 1941 that the Red Army used 57mm anti-tank guns, and who refused to give London and Washington technical details of the Katyusha rocket-launcher, among its few relatively sophisticated weapons systems.

  A.E. Ioffe, director of the Soviet Union’s Academy of Sciences and Physics, offered warm praise for the contribution of the atomic informants: ‘The information always turns out to be accurate and for the most part very complete … I have not encountered a single false finding.’ Yet some recipients in Moscow were troubled by the very ease with which America’s most sensitive secrets had begun to flow onto their desks. Beria questioned the authenticity of the flood of material from the atomic spies. Anatoly Iatskov, one of his aides, said later that the intelligence chief thought the Western Allies ‘were trying to draw us into huge expenditure of resources and effort on work which had no future’. Beria persisted in this belief even after the Soviet Union had started its own atomic programme, and changed his mind only after the destruction of Hiroshima. Even during the period of his scepticism, however, he did not dare to allow his conspiracy mania to shut off the long, rich intelligence pipeline running to Moscow from the US and Britain.

  In November 1944 Department 5 learned that Klaus Fuchs was back in the US – better still, working in New Mexico. Centre urged New York to identify a woman courier who could travel there under cover as his lover, but this idea got nowhere. Instead, in February 1945 Harry Gold met Fuchs in Cambridge, Mass., and was briefed by him about the huge expansion of Los Alamos. Gold asked this priceless source if he would like some cash. No, said Fuchs; all he wanted was that when the Red Army occupied Kiel and Berlin, they should locate and destroy the files the Gestapo held on him.

  By the spring of 1945, from both the US and Britain Moscow was receiving a steady flow of atomic intelligence, which enabled Soviet scientists to monitor the progress of the Manhattan Project. Slowly and belatedly, however, American security was improving; it became more difficult for NKVD handlers to meet agents. Julius Rosenberg was sacked from the plant where he was working on the nuclear programme because of his Communist Party membership, though had the US Army G-2 branch that handled internal security but known it, he was among the less dangerous Soviet agents. His sub-sources were transferred to other handlers.

  The NKVD’s officers were acutely conscious of the importance of the atomic spies to their own country. Lev Vasilevsky, Centre’s resident in Mexico City, became uneasy about allegedly careless security at the Soviet embassy in Washington, and began himself to wireless New Mexico material to Moscow. By August 1944, MI5 in London was aware of communist penetration of the Manhattan Project. Guy Liddell noted that ‘details … are almost certain to be known to the Russians’. Neither the British nor the Americans, however, recognised the scale of Soviet nuclear espionage until after the end of the war. Anatoli Yatkov, the Russians’ science and technology specialist in New York, said later that the FBI uncovered ‘perhaps less than half’ of his own network.

  In January 1945, Moscow claimed a triumph – the acquisition of details of the design of the first atomic bomb. But its American agents were far from perfectly informed: they reported that, while a test explosion was expected within a few months, it would take at least one year and possibly as long as five to produce a usable weapon. Inside the Soviet Union, a frantic search began for supplies of uranium. That which was available within its own borders was of low quality, but in February captured German documents revealed that the mineral was to be found at Bukovo, in the Rodopi mountains of Bulgaria, forty miles from Sofia. This site had now been overrun by the Red Army, and mining began there immediately. Meanwhile there was a big intelli
gence sweep of Czechoslovakia for possible uranium sources, though only low-grade material was found.

  Probably the most important atomic secret had been the 1940 establishment of the proposition hitherto deemed untenable: that a man-made nuclear explosion was feasible. Once this great leap of faith was made, Stalin’s scientists were almost assured of success in building a Bomb within a few years, though their American and British informants significantly accelerated the process. Twelve days before the first atomic bomb was assembled at Los Alamos, the NKVD secured descriptions of the Bomb via both their New York and Washington stations, from Fuchs and Pontecorvo respectively. Four years of frenzied striving lay ahead before Stalin’s scientists produced their own weapon, but the Russians had triumphed in the intelligence war; not against the fascist enemy, whose defeat was supposedly the common objective of the Second World War, but against their supposed ally, the United States. Some of the tales told in this book about the secret war seem comic or grotesque. Here was one, however, that was deadly earnest, and in which the stakes were as high as the world has ever known.

  21

  Decoding Victory

  When the war ended, most of the West’s temporary intelligence officers abandoned secret service and returned to their civilian lives, as did many of their former spies. SOE’s Ronald Seth applied for a passport, in order to take up a British Council post in Istanbul. This prompted an explosion at MI5, which observed that although there had been insufficient evidence to try Seth for treason, he certainly could not be considered a loyal British subject. In the end the Foreign Office conceded a passport to the ex-agent, but the British Council job failed to materialise. The last document in ‘Blunderhead’s’ security service file is a copy of a 1946 application that he made, apparently in earnest though without success, to become chief constable of Wiltshire. Seth spent his later life writing books, a mixture of sex manuals and espionage stories; he once attempted to patent a penis enlarger. His own 1950 account of his wartime role was entitled A Spy Has No Friends, and bears little relationship to the facts of the case as determined by MI5. He died in 1985, a symbol of the ceaseless tension between comedy and tragedy, absurdity and deadly earnest, which characterised the secret war. Nigel Clive served for a further decade as an MI6 agent abroad, then in retirement published a vivid reminiscence of his service in Greece. Oluf Reed-Olsen worked as a pilot for some years before turning businessman. His memoir Two Eggs on My Plate is regarded as a minor classic. He died in 2002.

  Some OSS officers in the field cherished into 1945 delusions about communist goodwill towards the United States, and were thus shocked when, for instance, Tito’s partisans expelled Americans from Belgrade alongside the British, while the Red Army was welcomed. In the winter of 1944, OSS’s Frank Wisner acted as impromptu US ambassador in Bucharest, where he was once seen scurrying around a dance floor attempting to persuade Romanian socialites to dance with Red Army officers; the ungrateful Russians deported him anyway. ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, now a major-general, still did not despair of a working partnership with his NKVD companions in arms: on 23 July 1945 he made an offer to turn over to Centre an entire German intelligence unit commanded by the deputy foreign chief of the Gestapo, Dr William Höttl. Höttl had volunteered his services to the Americans, but Donovan suggested share-and-share-alike. His office wrote to Pavel Fitin: ‘General Donovan not only feels that you should have this information but that it would be most desirable for American and Soviet representatives on the spot [in Germany] to discuss ways and means of eliminating Höttl’s entire organization.’

  Marshall and Eisenhower fumed when they heard about this unilateral gesture, having themselves despaired of cooperation with Moscow. Meanwhile Donovan’s men in Manchuria were seized by the NKVD as they photographed Russian engineers dismantling and removing Japanese industrial plant. In the autumn of 1945 the first revelations became public about Soviet intelligence penetration of the United States. Arrests and trials followed, although years elapsed before the FBI and the American people became aware of the scale of treason within their own camp.

  In 1943 Sir William Stephenson observed to Lt. Col. Gerald Wilkinson: ‘MI6 is old and rather obsolete compared with SOE [which] … is likely to survive after the war because of its younger and abler organisation; it may in fact alternatively take over MI6.’ Following victory, however, in both Britain and the US the old guard prevailed in intelligence power struggles. Though Bill Bentinck, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, was a critic of MI6, he strongly opposed a continuing division of responsibilities for espionage and sabotage. He concluded a 1945 official report on Britain’s wartime intelligence experience: ‘Despite the real contribution that SOE has made, we cannot believe that the experiment of running special operations as a separate military function outside the direct control of the chiefs of staff and under the direction of a non-Service minister, will be repeated.’ In 1946 the Foreign Office, War Office and Broadway between them secured the extinction of SOE, though it had recruited abler people, and could identify more achievements in the field. MI6’s influence and prestige had soared through its feudal suzerainty over Bletchley Park, and the upstart sabotage organisation was wound up. Menzies kept his job as ‘C’ until 1952, despite the betrayal to Moscow by Kim Philby of MI6’s most sensitive early Cold War operations and informants, with the loss of many lives, and lived in retirement until his death in 1968.

  In the US, J. Edgar Hoover’s voice proved decisive in securing the demise of OSS, assisted by the fact that the armed forces chiefs of staff had never liked Donovan, and thought nothing of his costly operation’s contribution to the war effort. Late in 1945 Lt. Col. Richard Parke, the US Army representative in the White House map room, compiled an unsolicited indictment of OSS for President Harry Truman. It is tempting to conclude from the organisation’s excesses that the critics were right – that Donovan and his organisation merely squandered a not insignificant portion of America’s vast wealth. But OSS’s excesses were not much worse than those of SOE, and its Research & Analysis division was superior to any other such body in the world. In 1947 the rising menace from the Soviet Union persuaded Truman to authorise the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, employing many ex-OSS personnel such as Richard Helms, William Colby, William Casey and Frank Wisner, by then an ardent Cold Warrior, of whom Arthur Schlesinger said wryly: ‘He had seen the Communist future at first hand and not liked it at all.’

  In 1944 Sterling Hayden parachuted into Croatia on a mission for which he was awarded the Silver Star, saw a little shooting and ended his service seconded to the US First Army in north-west Europe. He enjoyed his part in the secret war, which suited his character and talents, but cherished a suspicion that the sceptical army intelligence officer’s verdict cited above – that OSS had contributed little to defeating Germany – held more than a grain of truth. Madeleine Carroll and Hayden were divorced, and he became briefly a communist. He returned reluctantly to Hollywood for the money, but finished his career where he had started it, sailing boats to the far shores of the world.

  The NKVD’s Pavel Sudoplatov wrote: ‘The end of the war is still vivid in my memory as a glorious event that washed away all my doubts about the wisdom of Stalin’s leadership. All heroic and tragic events, losses and even purges, seemed to be justified by the triumph over Hitler.’ Christopher Andrew has observed that many of the Soviet secret service personnel decorated by Moscow for their wartime services received medals not for valour, but for crimes against humanity: at Stalingrad, for instance, the NKVD had executed in cold blood some 13,500 alleged deserters and ‘defeatists’. The most conspicuous consequence of peace was to unleash a new wave of Kremlin paranoia, which extended to the intelligence community. Many Soviet agents who flew home in 1945 were shot or sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. By 1953 the roll-call of those who had faced firing squads included Lavrenti Beria and Vsevolod Merkulov, while Sudoplatov spent fifteen years behind bars as an ‘enemy of the people’.

/>   In embittered old age, the former Special Tasks chief raged against this injustice at the hands of the Soviet Union, ‘to which I devoted every fibre of my being and for which I was willing to die; for which I averted my eyes from every brutality, finding justification in its transformation from a backward nation into a superpower’. Yet Sudoplatov’s loyalty to Stalin and Beria caused him to become the instrument of many dreadful deeds. His only defence might have been that such ruthless men as himself played a larger part in the destruction of Nazism than did the more squeamish Western Allies. Vladimir Putin assuredly acknowledges such a figure as a hero.

  Ursula Hamburger retired to East Germany in 1950, and spent her later years writing modestly successful stories for children, together with suitably sanitised spy books, some of them about herself. She went to her grave in 2000 an impenitent Stalinist. Leopold Trepper informed Moscow Centre that his network had been betrayed to the Germans by ‘Monsieur Kent’, Anatoli Gourevitch, but this did not save him from a subsequent decade of imprisonment for his own collaboration with the Nazis. Gourevitch reached Paris from Germany in May 1945 with a train of followers that included the senior officer Heinz Pannwitz, together with the latter’s secretary-mistress Henne Kempe. On 7 June they flew together to Moscow, where all were immediately shown into cells. Pannwitz spent the next nine years assisting Centre with identification of Gestapo informants, real and imagined, before being allowed to leave for the West in 1955. He died in 1975, aged sixty-four. Gourevitch faced treason charges; he was damned by SMERSh’s discovery of a document dated 1 February 1944, in which Gestapo chief Heinrich Muller told Pannwitz that the Soviet agent must be brought to Germany with his wife and son, and looked after: ‘It goes without saying that I regard it as my duty to defend and protect “Kent” following the fulfilment of the tasks which had been assigned to him.’ In January 1947 the Special Council of the Ministry of State Security sentenced ‘Kent’ to fifteen years’ imprisonment. ‘Prisons are the same everywhere,’ Gourevitch wrote morosely, after experiencing those of both Hitler and Stalin. He was released on parole in 1960, but secured formal rehabilitation and a tiny pension only in 1991, when a post-Soviet examination of wartime GRU documents showed that his first 1943 radio messages to Moscow included the agreed warning that he was transmitting under enemy control. He died in 2009.