The truth behind the tales of Bessedovsky and Agabekov was that in July 1929 Oldham had gone to the Russian embassy in Paris with two books bound in red buckram containing Foreign Office, Colonial Office and Dominions Office ciphers (in some accounts the codebooks were those of the FO and of the India Office). He presented himself as a typesetter called ‘Charlie Scott’, disguising his status by speaking bad French, and demanding first £50,000 and then £10,000 for his material. ‘Charlie Scott’ was paid $11,000 in two instalments, and thereafter $1,000 a month. Oldham averted insolvency, and maintained his pretensions in Kensington, by making renewed visits to Paris in order to deliver secret material, which the Russians found patchy and low-grade. They did not trust him enough to risk giving him a handler in London who might be trapped. Oldham protected his true identity from his Paris handler, Dimitri Bystrolyotov.
After the ARCOS raid in 1927 London had severed official relations with Moscow, and ordered all diplomats and trade representatives to leave the country within ten days. OGPU thereupon ordained that only illegals could be used in Britain, but that there was to be no illegal residency there. All activities had to be run from the European mainland, usually from Amsterdam or Paris, but under the control of the Berlin rezidentura. Although Anglo-Soviet diplomatic relations were restored by the incoming Labour government in 1929, Moscow remained doubtful about sending permanent illegals to London, and continued running operations there from other European capitals.
Bystrolyotov was born in Crimea in 1901, the son of a village schoolmistress: he knew nothing of his paternity. In 1919 he smuggled himself into Turkey in the coal-hole of a ship, worked as a stoker, and got some education at the American College for Christian Youth. He had a nervous breakdown after witnessing massacres of Armenians, worked for the Red Cross in Prague and then as a cemetery worker. Around 1925 he was recruited to OGPU with the cover of a post in the Soviet trade mission in Prague and the task of collecting secret material on armaments production at the Franco-Czech Škoda factory in Pilsen. He was a clever linguist and perceptive student of character: his black eyes and dashing masculinity brought him success as a vorón (a ‘raven’, or male seducer of women with access to confidential material). In 1930 he was transferred to the illegal rezidentura in Berlin headed by Basil Bazarov (born Shpak), whose OGPU codename was KIN. The Greek Consul in Danzig, an Odessa-born swindler and drugs-smuggler, provided Bystrolyotov with a Greek passport and the false identity of a Salonika businessman, Alexander Gallas.
Bystrolyotov was instructed to elicit the identity of ‘Charlie Scott’, who was being run under the codename of ARNO. To this end, he adopted the alias of a Hungarian count, Lajos József Perelly, and went to Budapest to learn his part. He introduced himself to ‘Scott’ in a Paris restaurant as a nobleman who had been ruined by the war and who performed services for OGPU in return for an income that enabled him to keep caste. He felt that he was more acceptable to ‘Scott’ posing as a Hungarian hireling than he would have been as a Russian or Ukrainian communist. After months of patience, ‘Perelly’ discovered that ‘Scott’ was staying in a particular Paris hotel, where his luggage was stamped with the monogram ‘EHO’.
The scene shifted from Paris to Geneva. When Slocombe depicted Geneva as Europe’s ‘most secretive city’, he was indulging in an old spy’s misdirection. It was hard to keep secrets there. The lifeless official verbiage and stiff protocol surrounding League of Nations sessions there encouraged men to unbend with confidential admissions and gossipy indiscretions when they went off duty in bars and brasseries. ‘A vast concourse of politicians … is bound to bring all the ragtag and bobtail of the earth sniffing at their heels,’ as Antrobus recorded. ‘All the paraphernalia of leakage on a grand scale there assembled … the place swarmed with spies and secret agents who, I imagine, got what they wanted handed to them on a plate.’14
Bystrolyotov @ Gallas @ Perelly arrived in Geneva for a League meeting in, it seems, July 1931. He deduced that ‘EHO’ would attend the League sessions, found that a man with those initials was staying at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage, spotted ‘Scott’ in the hotel bar and sat next to him there in silence. ‘Scott’ looked aghast on catching sight of ‘Perelly’ and realized that OGPU had broken his anonymity. Bystrolyotov intended to consolidate his advantage by visiting Oldham at home and asserting OGPU control over him, but when he called at Pembroke Gardens in September with false credentials identifying him as a Dresden banker, Lucy Oldham, looking tense, explained that her husband was away from home. The courteous foreigner invited her for lunch at the Ritz. Amid the restaurant’s gilt and mirrors she revealed that Oldham was undergoing an expensive cure for alcoholism in a sanatorium in Suffolk called Rendlesham Hall.
She besought ‘Count Perelly’ to visit Oldham at Rendlesham, and insisted that he take the spare bedroom in Pembroke Gardens. On the night before Oldham’s return home in October, Lucy Oldham rolled up the hem of her dress, spread her legs and begged the Count not to waste time. He obliged, and reported his performance to Moscow, where the codename of MADAM was bestowed on her. Bystrolyotov came to suspect that she had instigated her husband’s approach to the Russian embassy in Paris in 1929, and that she had encouraged the subsequent espionage as a way of perpetuating their Kensington prosperity.
OGPU in Moscow and the rezidentura in Berlin continued to assess Oldham as too dicey to risk agents receiving material direct from him in London. Instead, he was required to travel to Bonn, Ostend, Paris, Calais, Trouville, Madrid, Amsterdam and Switzerland for handovers of purloined documents. Throughout he insisted that he was only an intermediary, acting on behalf of the material’s true source. Oldham became such a valued source that Bystrolyotov was joined in London in 1932 by two well-tried agents. Joseph Leppin @ PEEP @ PEPIKA, a young Prague journalist who was then working under Boris Bazarov in the Berlin rezidentura, was fluent in French, English and German, had intellectual and artistic interests and was used by Bystrolyotov as the courier carrying Oldham’s product out of England on its journey to Moscow. Leppin was married for ‘operational purposes’ to a fellow Czech agent, Erica Weinstein (ERIKA), who collaborated with him on operations for Bystrolyotov. Bazarov (presenting himself as an Italian communist called da Vinci) and Theodore Maly also came to London to help in running Oldham.15
Theodore Stephanovich Maly @ Theodore Mally @ Tivadar Mály @ Willy Broschart @ Paul Hardt @ Peters @ der Lange @ Mann is the most famous of the illegals. Born in 1894, the son of a provincial official in the Hungarian Ministry of Finance, he trained for priesthood in a seminary before his military mobilization at the age of twenty-one. He was an ensign-cadet by the time of his capture by tsarist forces in 1916. After gruelling train journeys, he was held in a prisoner-of-war camp at Astrakhan by the Caspian Sea, and later was transferred to the frontier town of Orenburg at the southern end of the Ural Mountains. ‘I lost my faith in God,’ he later said of his incarceration, ‘and when the revolution broke out I joined the Bolsheviks. I broke with my past completely. I was no longer a Hungarian, a priest, a Christian, even anyone’s son … I became a communist.’ Maly was a Chekist for ten years before joining INO in about 1931. He could pass as Austrian, Hungarian, German or Swiss. As described by his biographer William Duff, a special agent of the FBI who specialized in Soviet bloc espionage, Maly had ‘a tanned and strangely aesthetic face highlighted by deep-set but sad, almost childlike eyes’. For Elizabeth Poretsky, ‘“Teddy” … combined extreme sweetness with a great deal of determination, so that one felt at ease and protected in his company.’ OGPU admired Maly’s abilities, but felt perturbed by his outbursts of drunken and indiscreet remorse. They forced him to marry a woman whom he disliked because she kept him under watchful guard and kept him from binge-drinking.16
During the Lausanne Conference of June–July 1932, at which the British, French and German governments discussed the suspension of German reparation payments, Oldham provided Bystrolyotov with coded messages, dispatches and even a British passport beari
ng the invented name of ‘Sir Robert Grenville’. The strain of duplicity drove Oldham into dipsomania. His department began investigating the disappearance of a codebook from a basement safe, in a part of the building where Oldham had been seen when he was on sick-leave. He was reported for using the Office’s ambassadorial side-entrance so as to avoid the doorkeepers who maintained security at the main doors. Other reports had him in a drunken stupor. On 30 September 1932 he was summoned to a disciplinary meeting, confronted with a list of transgressions, including unexplained visits to the cipher-room and losing confidential material which he claimed to have taken home. He was asked to resign without any gratuity. Like other members of his department, he had no pension rights.
Oldham did not admit to the illegals that he had been sacked. On 18 October, avid for more OGPU money, he flew with his wife from Croydon aerodrome to Berlin for a rendezvous with ‘Perelly’. During their meeting he was so helplessly drunk that he could hardly move or speak, and vomited. MADAM subsequently revealed to her partner in adultery, ‘Perelly’, that Oldham had been fired from his job. She added that she was leaving him, would sell the house and go to work in a French resort either as a lady companion or, if that failed, as a prostitute. Just before Christmas 1932 Oldham tried to strangle her when she refused to give him brandy. He was sent for another cure at Rendlesham.
After drying out, Oldham revisited his old department to jaw with friends there, notably Thomas Kemp, who was in charge of the King’s Messengers’ itineraries, and a clerk named Raymond Oake. He had a further excuse for visits, because he had been allowed, incomprehensibly to modern thinking, to keep a safety-deposit box in the building after his dismissal. He used the pretext of examining personal papers in the box as the justification for two or three further visits. One evening in May 1933, he arrived at 6 p.m., loitered around Room 22, his speech slurred with drink, waiting for other clerks to go home. He asked for the combination number of the safe where keys were kept at night and briefly got custody of the keys to the cupboards known as ‘presses’ containing confidential material. Those ex-colleagues who saw him felt a mixture of pity, embarrassment, annoyance and suspicion at his conduct, but the blokey ‘good form’ of the department meant that his manoeuvres were watched but not challenged. During one of these forays he obtained documents which he sold in Paris to the Soviets in May 1933. He and his wife commuted by air between London and Paris during May and June to see Bystrolyotov. OGPU became so alarmed by the likelihood of Oldham’s exposure that all illegal operatives, including Bazarov and Maly, were withdrawn from England.
On 13 July 1933, desperate for OGPU money and under incitement from Bystrolyotov, Oldham returned to the Office in an attempt to lay hands on the cipher codes for the following year. He arrived just before 6 p.m., ostensibly to see Kemp who had already gone home, got hold of a set of keys left momentarily in the door, rushed to the lavatory and there took wax impressions of them. When he reappeared with the keys, he was sweating and his hands shook. Wax was found on the wards of the keys. Eastwood reported the incident next day to Sir Vernon Kell of MI5, who set Harker on the case. Oldham’s correspondence was intercepted, his telephone was tapped and he was put under John Ottaway’s surveillance. Bystrolyotov met Oldham on a bench in Hyde Park, and urged him to try again to get into the safes to obtain up-to-date codes. At lunchtime on Sunday 16 July Oldham was refused admittance when he called again at the Office.
Some days later he was heard in a bugged telephone call to say that he was going to Vienna. He evaded his watchers by instead flying from Croydon to Geneva. From there he hastened to Interlaken, where he met Bystrolyotov calling himself ‘Perelly’ and Bazarov calling himself ‘da Vinci’. After returning from Basel to Croydon on 4 August, Oldham was traced by Ottaway to the Jules Hotel at 85–86 Jermyn Street, St James’s, and tracked to a nearby pub, the Chequers, off a narrow alley joining Duke Street, St James’s to Mason’s Yard. At the poky bar in the Chequers, two MI5 operatives, Herbert (‘Con’) Boddington, a bookie’s son who had been Chief of Dublin Special Branch targeting the IRA in the early 1920s, and Thomas (‘Tar’) Robertson, set to work on Oldham. Robertson (born in Sumatra in 1909) had only recently joined MI5 after working in the City, and was known to his new colleagues as ‘Passion Pants’ because he wore Seaforth tartan trews at headquarters. ‘Con’ and ‘Passion Pants’ got Oldham hopelessly drunk in the Chequers, put him to bed in the Jules Hotel and searched his belongings while he was comatose.17
Oldham was not questioned or detained, although it was obvious to his watchers that he was falling apart. MI5 wished to learn from watching his activities and contacts. Probably the Foreign Office shrank from discovering the extent to which diplomatic secrets had been broached. Still striving to earn OGPU money, dosing himself with paraldehyde (a foul-smelling, addictive sedative taken by alcoholics and insomniacs), Oldham finally broke. He went to his former marital home at 31 Pembroke Gardens, now vacant and unfurnished, and gassed himself in the kitchen. The suspicions of some of his Room 22 colleagues and Russian handlers that he had been killed by MI5 seem unwarranted. In retrospect Antrobus despised his department’s first traitor. ‘A clever little upstart,’ he called him, ‘with a face like a rat and a conscience utterly devoid of scruples.’18
Until Oldham’s attempted break-in, members of the Foreign Office were often visited at work by friends. After 1933, however, visitors were filtered by policemen and doorkeepers: once admitted, they were escorted everywhere by hardy factotums. The locks and keys of the ‘presses’ were changed. Algernon Hay was retired from overseeing Room 22 in 1934. His replacement Antrobus thought of his staff as a ‘little brotherhood’ of ‘learned friends’. He explained: ‘everybody gave of his best, although (very properly) he got no credit for it beyond his own satisfaction’. He believed that ‘in all classes of life and among all sorts and conditions of men’, especially ‘in teams, regiments, and ships’, the best-performing organizations had consciously developed ‘the Spirit of the Old School Tie’. This Spirit motivated and unified men without appealing to class bias: public schools did not hold ‘a monopoly of true fellowship and devotion to an ideal’, insisted Antrobus. A minority of his staff had attended public schools.19
The Foreign Office conducted an internal, amateurish and self-protective investigation of the Oldham case without MI5 or Special Branch assistance. There was little investigation of Oldham’s overseas air journeys, or of his ultimate destinations and contacts, which might have given leads to Bystrolyotov and Bazarov. In gathering clues from outsiders, such as Oldham’s solicitor, it was represented that he was suspected of drugs-smuggling. No hint was permissible that he had been betraying official secrets to a hostile power. There were few leads, as ‘Count Perelly’ and ‘da Vinci’ had vanished and reverted to their true identities as Bystrolyotov and Bazarov. ‘I could have ended up in the Tower, but only if Vansittart had been willing to wash his dirty linen in public,’ Bystrolyotov judged; but the Foreign Office saw no benefit in publicizing the lax security. As to Moscow, OGPU had been exasperated by Oldham’s alcoholic volatility. At times the risks for his handlers seemed nightmarish. His low status in the Office hierarchy had moreover limited his access to secret material. OGPU’s frustrations with him perhaps contributed to the strategy of placing more reliable penetration agents in the Diplomatic Service through the device of recruiting young Cambridge high-fliers.20
Hans Pieck and John King
Oldham had supplied personal assessments of his colleagues. One of these was Raymond Oake, born in 1894 in Finchley and the son of a railway clerk. After wartime naval service, Oake joined the Communications Department as a clerk in 1920. He was used as an occasional King’s Messenger without being promoted above the level of clerk, amassed debts and borrowed money from colleagues. His bank manager told MI5, when it was investigating Oake’s finances in 1939, that his customer was ‘a weak, foolish man, whose vanity leads him to live above his income, which is about £600 per annum. On one occasion
when he was warned as to his account, he created a wild scene and ended by bursting into tears.’21
Bystrolyotov delegated the task of cultivating Oake to Hans Pieck, a Dutchman codenamed COOPER. Pieck, who was the son of a naval officer, had joined his country’s communist party in 1920 under the alias of Donat. He had visited Moscow on party business in 1929. He spoke German, English, French, Danish and perhaps Italian. He was a man of culture and charm, well reputed as a decorative artist, architectural designer and cartoonist, who lived with his wife in The Hague in style (subsidized by OGPU money). ‘He is a good actor who plays his role naturally, sometimes masterfully, finds his bearings quickly in conversation, manoeuvres well and is already ready for initiative,’ Bystrolyotov declared. Pieck was not a staid communist: rather he was ‘Bohemian, disorderly, untidy, inaccurate, incoherent and undisciplined’. Although effective as a talent-spotter and recruiter, he was too fastidious to coerce targets, to kidnap them, to apply blackmail or to threaten lives. Bystrolyotov attributed to Pieck ‘Love for intelligence work bordering on a passion, a romantic attitude to his role close to that of an actor’s enjoyment’.22
Enemies Within Page 18
