Pieck installed himself at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage in Geneva, befriended Communications Department men and consular officials in bars and brasseries, spent a fortune on hospitality and gave handsome presents. In the summary of Valentine Vivian of SIS, Pieck ‘allayed suspicion by posing as the prince of good fellows, habitué of the International Club, always “good” for a drink, a motor expedition, or a free meal – a histrionic effort worthy of a better cause’. Pieck moved deftly towards his target of Oake, who was given the codename SHELLEY. On Christmas Day of 1933 Pieck visited him in Room 22. They had festive drinks together in a nearby pub, where Pieck learnt that Oake had already spent his December wages and loaned him money to cover some cheques. Six years later, under interrogation by MI5, Oake described Pieck as ‘absolutely a white man’, whose lavish generosity had sometimes embarrassed him. Pieck posed as the representative of a Dutch bank interested in collecting economic and political intelligence, but although Oake agreed to supply him with material, it was always meagre pickings. Security had been tightened after Oldham’s disgrace. Sitting at a table in Room 22 with four other men, Oake found no opportunities for clandestine work. He was so chary of being caught that he was dropped by OGPU in December 1934.23
Three months earlier, in Geneva, Oake had however introduced Pieck to another clerk in the Communications Department, John King. King had joined the Rhineland High Commission, a supra-national body based in Coblenz and supervising the Anglo-French occupation of the Rhineland, as a cipher officer in 1923. He was promoted to be personal clerk to the High Commissioner, the Earl of Erroll, in 1925. After Erroll’s death in 1928, he had a posting in China. ‘He is about fifty years of age, an Irishman who lived in Germany for about ten years and speaks German perfectly,’ reported Bystrolyotov. ‘A lively and inquisitive person … he draws a sharp distinction between himself with his cultured ways and the “pompous fools” of Englishmen.’ He was keen on the theatre and liked magic tricks. His salary was too small for his needs, he cadged drinks and tried to touch people for loans.24
After dropping Oake, Pieck approached King to provide political information and weekly summaries for use by a Dutch bank. King agreed, and a secret bank account was opened for his remuneration. He received the codename MAG. King’s first delivery of secret material included an account of Hitler’s conversations with the Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, in March 1935. ‘His conviction that he is destined to bring about the moral rehabilitation of the German people after being crushed and humiliated by the treaty of Versailles’, Simon noted,
is very dangerous to peace in Europe, and it is all the more dangerous for being very sincere. And he is adored by those who follow him as no German Emperor has ever been adored. Hitler made it perfectly plain that he would never agree to enter into a pact of ‘mutual assistance’ with Russia. Communism, he declared, is the plague: unlike National Socialism, which he claims seeks only to embrace Germans, it is a contagious infection which might spread over all Europe and all Asia. He has stamped it out of Germany, and Germany is the barrier to prevent the pestilence coming westward.25
King, like Oake, found it hard to obtain the Foreign Office daily bulletins which Oldham had been able to supply. Files, registers, the flimsy papers on which decrypts were scrawled – all were now guarded by the men who had responsibility for them. Any official found in a part of the department where he had no business was challenged. In order to justify his frequent visits to London, Pieck started a flimsy cover business called the Universal Barter Company. He then devised a better front after Oake had introduced him to Conrad Parlanti, with whom Oake often commuted by train from Herne Bay to Victoria station. Pieck suggested that he and Parlanti should go into business together as shopfitters. Among other commissions, Pieck and Parlanti revamped the shop-window displays at Marshall & Snelgrove’s department store in Oxford Street. At Pieck’s insistence Parlanti rented offices at 34a Buckingham Gate, close to Victoria station but also a few minutes’ stroll across St James’s Park from the Foreign Office. Parlanti was puzzled by Pieck’s insistence on leasing these offices, which were a secret amenity for spying rather than for the shop-window design business. Pieck kept a floor there for his own use, with one room which was always locked. King could walk over from Room 22, let himself in with a key and draw the curtains to indicate that he had left papers to be photographed in the locked room. Buckingham Gate was only a small deviation from King’s homeward route to Flat 9, St Leonard’s Mansions, Smith Street, Chelsea. Copies or originals of the documents were collected from Buckingham Gate by Brian Goold-Verschoyle, a communist electrical engineer and Comintern courier. The more important material was telegraphed to Moscow from the Soviet embassy.
Parlanti eventually picked the door lock when Pieck was away. Inside the mystery room he found a Leica camera fixed to photograph articles on a table. When he confronted Pieck, he was told that the Leica was for photographing ‘dirty pictures’. On another occasion Parlanti saw Pieck receive documents typed in red from a man in the lounge of the Victoria Hotel in Northumberland Avenue, off Whitehall. Pieck invited him to visit The Hague, but then made a show of being suddenly called to Germany. As Parlanti told MI5 in September 1939, ‘Mrs Pieck began very soon to make love to him, in order, as he is now convinced, to get him to entangle himself. He resisted her wiles, and finally lost patience with her.’ Mrs Pieck then wept, and told him that she and her husband were engaged in financial manipulations, ‘with big people and for big money’, and received official secrets from a man in the Foreign Office’s code section.26
At a party in London in January 1936 Pieck was approached by William John (‘Jack’) Hooper, a British-Dutch dual national whom he believed to be the British Commercial Attaché at The Hague but who in fact worked for SIS there. In a quiet corner at the party Hooper referred to Pieck’s Comintern activities in the 1920s: ‘We know about your past and keep a constant watch on you. I want to know if you are still in the same business.’ Pieck insisted that he had abandoned his youthful political enthusiasms, but was sufficiently rattled to stop using the Buckingham Gate office as King’s drop-off because Hooper knew of its existence. Possibly Hooper was exploring Pieck’s availability to inform on his old communist friends without knowing that Pieck was an important communist agent.27
In September 1936 Hooper was dismissed by SIS after the head of station in The Hague, Major Ernest Dalton, shot himself. As Passport Control Officer, Dalton had been selling visas to Jewish fugitives from Hitler who wanted to reach Palestine. When Hooper had spotted the racket, he was given a cut by Dalton, whose corruption was discovered during a routine audit. After being discarded by SIS, Hooper enlisted as an NKVD agent and went to work in Pieck’s Dutch office, where he watched his employer, asked questions and amassed material which he gave piecemeal to SIS as a way of vindicating himself after the Dalton scandal and regaining official British employment. SIS ignored his information and did not rehire him, because of his complicity with Dalton. The NKVD decided that Hooper was untrustworthy or compromised, and dropped him later in 1937. Rejected by both London and Moscow, Hooper turned to Berlin. In 1938–9 he worked for the Abwehr, to which he divulged that the Soviets had a source in the Communications Department.
For two years, as the head of SIS’s counter-espionage section Valentine Vivian noted in a retrospective of the King case, SIS had known Hooper’s information about Pieck’s clandestine activities in London, which ‘could have been acted upon then had it been credited. It was, however, treated with coldness and even derision, largely as a result of the prejudice against X [Hooper] himself.’ Vivian was impressed that Pieck had ‘included in his confidences one conscious and artistic lie – for the purpose undoubtedly of discrediting “X’s” story in the unlikely event of his passing it to the British authorities – i.e. he gave the name of his “inside agent” in the Foreign Office as Sir Robert Vansittart’. Pieck embroidered this critical misdirection with other absurdities, including an imaginary mistress of Vansitt
art’s who acted as a cut-out in transmitting betrayed secrets.28
Hooper’s activities resulted in Pieck being withdrawn from handling King. The Dutchman was next sent by Moscow to Athens, where he tried to induce the Minister of War to order forty fighter planes, ostensibly for the Greek government, which were to be shipped to Republican forces in Spain with the Minister’s connivance. This intrigue failed, and Pieck had to leave Athens in a hurry, according to an SIS source; but he proceeded to Paris, where he found a South American legation ready to help.
The eminent illegal Walter Krivitsky, codenamed GROLL, was briefly charged with delivering the photographic film for use on King’s material in London. Theodore Maly, who succeeded Krivitsky in London, reported to Moscow Centre that King wished to ‘rid the world of poverty, hunger, war and prison’, but was not left-wing. Socialism meant ‘the terrors of Bolshevism, it is chaos, the power of the mob, Jews and endless bloodshed’, he told Maly. ‘I am against Fascism but if here, in this country, I had to choose between Sir Oswald Mosley and British Labourites, I would choose the former, for the latter logically lead to Bolshevism.’ He assessed Hitler as ‘a maniac but an honest person’ who had saved Germany from the Reds. The English aristocracy was ‘good for nothing, in the first place because it was English, and in the second because it is mixed with Jews and other lower classes’. The Irish and Scottish nobility was however ‘clear of foreign taint, and it has preserved its race’. King, like Oldham, was a mercenary who needed money, and had no interest in communism. He was conceited like Oldham too, but had stronger nerves: he enjoyed the sense of superior but secret privileges that accompanied his hidden life; he did not get rattled by the dangers of discovery and launch himself into panicky binges.29
King’s influence may have been world-changing. Donald Cameron Watt believed that the material supplied by King in July and August 1939 to his Soviet controller, reporting on the Anglo-French tripartite negotiations with Russia for a pact against Germany, was leaked by Moscow in a selective fashion to Berlin. The intelligence gobbets given to Germany were among the enticements that led Berlin into the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact of August 1939.30
Walter Krivitsky
Krivitsky was the link joining Oldham and King to Maclean and Philby. His original name was Samuel Ginsburg. He was Jewish and Russian-born, with a Polish father, a Slav mother and a Latvian wife who was a dedicated Bolshevik. In youth he was an active Vienna socialist while training as an engineer. After the launch of the illegal system in 1925, he became illegal rezident in The Hague, under the alias of Martin Lessner, an Austrian dealer in art and rare books. His house was furnished with stark minimalist modernity as visible support for his cover. He had enough culture to sustain the mask of connoisseurship. From the Netherlands Krivitsky directed much of the espionage in Britain. He became convinced of the insanity of Nikolai Yezhov, whom Stalin appointed chief of the NKVD in 1936 with the remit to purge the party. In 1937 Ignace Reiss @ Poretsky, the Paris-based illegal who was Krivitsky’s boon comrade, protested against the Great Terror and denounced Stalin. As a test of Krivitsky’s fealty, Moscow ordered him to liquidate Reiss. He refused, was summoned to Moscow for retribution and fled for his life to the USA.
It was at this time that a Cambridge luminary, the novelist E. M. Forster, wrote a credo that has been lampooned, truncated in quotation and traduced by subsequent writers. His remarks in their entirety carry a message of individualism, conscientious judgement and anti-totalitarianism that might have been a text for Whitehall values in the 1930s. ‘One must be fond of people,’ said Forster, ‘and trust them if one is not to make a mess of one’s life, and it is therefore essential that they should not let one down. They often do.’ Writing in 1939, when totalitarian nationalism was rampant, Forster continued: ‘Personal relations are despised today. They are regarded as bourgeois luxuries, as products of a time of fair weather which is now past, and we are urged to get rid of them, and to dedicate ourselves to some movement or cause instead. I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’ Krivitsky had the guts.31
The Americans were more obtuse about Krivitsky’s defection even than Dunderdale had been with Bessedovsky’s. He reached New York with his wife and children on the liner Normandie on 10 November 1938 (travelling under his real name of Ginsburg). Immigration officials rejected the family’s entry on grounds of insufficient funds. He was eventually released on bail provided by his future writing collaborator Isaac Don Levine, who had been born in Belarus, finished high school in Missouri and worked as a radical journalist but had become hostile to communist chicanery. Krivitsky funded his American life by producing articles and an autobiography which were ghosted by Levine and sold by Paul Wohl, a German-Jewish refugee who had worked for the League of Nations and was trying to scratch a living as a New York literary agent and book reviewer. In an article of February 1939 Krivitsky predicted the Nazi–Soviet pact seven months before it was agreed.
Roosevelt’s Secretary of State Cordell Hull had relinquished his department’s responsibility for monitoring communists and fascists to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1936: ‘go ahead and investigate the hell out of those cocksuckers’, he had told its chief J. Edgar Hoover. This decision left the FBI with the incompatible tasks of policing crimes that had already been committed and of amassing secret intelligence about future intentions and possible risks to come. In practice, the Bureau concentrated on law enforcement and criminal investigation rather than intelligence-gathering and analysis. This bias and Hoover’s insularity meant that there was more interest in pursuing Krivitsky for passport fraud than in extracting intelligence from him.32
After a nine-month delay, on 27 July 1939 a special agent of the FBI questioned Krivitsky for the first time in Levine’s office in downtown New York. Their exchanges were too crude to be called a debriefing. The debriefing of defectors is slow-moving at the start: character must be assessed, trust must be gained, affinities must be recognized and motivations must be plumbed. Only then, when the participants are speaking rationally and with the semblance of mutual respect, can reliability be gauged and evasions be addressed. Perception, patience and tact are needed to overcome psychological resistance and to elicit information that can be acted on. But the FBI agent did not engage in preliminary civilities to reach some affinity with his subject. Instead he fired narrowly focused questions about Moishe Stern @ Emile Kléber @ Mark Zilbert, who was believed to have run a spy ring in the USA. Krivitsky was diverted from volunteering information on other matters. When his replies contradicted the conclusions drawn in previous FBI investigations, or expressed his certainty that Stern had been purged, the special agent concluded that he was ill-informed, wrong-headed and obstinate. The FBI agent did not listen with an open mind; he would not revise his own presuppositions. Hoover dismissed Krivitsky as a liar.
Krivitsky’s memoirs In Stalin’s Secret Service had an ungrateful reception from reviewers: ‘his words are those of a renegade and his mentality that of a master-spy’, Foreign Affairs warned in response to his indictment of Stalinism. Communist sympathizers were especially hostile: Malcolm Cowley in New Republic decried the fugitive from Stalin’s hit-squad as ‘a coward … a gangster and a traitor’ to his friends, and elsewhere labelled him ‘a rat’. Edmund Wilson called Cowley’s review ‘Stalinist character assassination’; and certainly such tendentious pieces harmed Krivitsky’s credibility. The book was nevertheless read by Whittaker Chambers, a former courier for a communist spy ring in Washington who had turned against the Stalinist system of deceit, paranoia and executions, and had gone into hiding after being summoned to Moscow for purging. Later he was to write his own memoir, Witness, in which he presented the object of a secret agent’s life as humdrum duplicity. ‘Thrills mean that something has gone wrong,’ he wrote. ‘I have never known a good conspirator who enjoyed conspiracy.’ Chambers contacted Levine, who int
roduced him to Krivitsky. After the shock of the non-aggression pact signed by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia on 23 August, Levine asked Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle to meet Chambers and hear his information.33
War in Europe began on 1 September: next day Chambers visited Berle and named eighteen New Deal officials as communists, including a Far Eastern expert at the State Department, Alger Hiss @ LAWYER @ALES, and Laurence Duggan @ 19 @ FRANK @ PRINCE, chief of the American Republics Division of the State Department. It is likely, but not certain, that the senior Treasury official Harry Dexter White was another of the communists denounced by Chambers. Berle reported the denunciation to President Roosevelt, who took no action, and waited seven months before alerting the FBI, which also took little action. In consequence of Berle’s inattention and the FBI’s laxity, Russian communist spies riddled the Roosevelt administration until the Cold War, damaged US interests and contributed to the post-war paranoia about communist penetration agents. Washington officials had an antithetical group mentality from their counterparts in Whitehall: most were political appointees; many were career lawyers; they lacked the procedures, continuities and group loyalties that were the pride of English civil servants; they had no administrative tradition of minuting inter-departmental meetings, and often avoided recording decisions on paper. Although more diverse in their backgrounds and less hidebound in their management, in handling Russian communist penetration of central government Washington’s oversights were as grievous as London’s.
Enemies Within Page 19
