by Douglas Boyd
Handsome spies, beautiful mistresses who had access to secret plans and rich rewards for success … Reality in the period between the two world wars puts James Bond to shame. Jerzy Sosnowski – who used many aliases at various times – was a Polish master spy born in Łwów in 1896. At the time, this was Austro-Hungarian territory administered from Vienna, so he grew up speaking perfect German. Aged 18, he was called up for service in an Austrian infantry regiment, was posted to a cavalry training school and fought against the tsarist forces on what was loosely called ‘the eastern front’.3 Following Russia’s withdrawal from the war in 1917, he received flying training, making him an all-round soldier by the standards of the time.
After his country gained independence from Austro-Hungary in 1918, Sosnowski joined the new Polish Army and commanded a squadron of cavalry against Trotsky’s Red Army, which was trying to repossess Poland’s newly acquired eastern provinces. In 1926 he joined the Dwójka, or deuxième bureau of the Polish General Staff, and set himself up in Weimar Berlin in the guise of an anti-communist baron, using the Austrian title Ritter von Nalesc. A horseman of international standard, he was popular with German officers, whom he cultivated as part of his plan to obtain documents relating to the Wehrmacht’s plans for an invasion of Poland. One method he used to build the network code-named In-3 was the discreet lending of money to officers with gambling debts who could be useful, so it was probably an unrepayable loan that brought Lieutenant Colonel Günther Rudloff into the ranks of his sources. Sosnowski’s other favourite method was to seduce well-connected women into becoming his accomplices. One of his first conquests was Benita von Falkenhayn, the wife of a retired officer, distantly related to First World War Chief of Staff General Erich von Falkenhayn. By the end of the year, she was actively collaborating with Sosnowski, despite knowing that he was a Polish spy.
His increasing flow of material, passed through the Polish embassy in Berlin, seemed to Sosnowski’s masters in Warsaw too good to be true. They suspected him of feeding them German disinformation, especially after he seduced four more women, all of whom had connections with the Reichswehrministerium, or War Ministry, where the most secret war plans were prepared. Showing that he had nothing to learn from later practices of the KGB or CIA, Sosnowski flew a false flag to get one of them into bed. Knowing Irene von Jena hated Poles, he pretended to be a British journalist, revealing his true identity only after she had fallen in love with him. All these women supplied top-grade intelligence. In 1929, after one of them handed him a copy of the invasion plans, Sosnowski demanded a bonus of 40,000 Reichsmarks from his masters in Warsaw for handing these over, despite his network already being the major item in the budget of the Dwójka. By this time, Warsaw trusted neither him nor the plans. In the end, Sosnowski passed the plans to Warsaw without payment, but they were regarded as German disinformation and not acted upon.
In autumn 1933, hell had no fury… Whether the Abwehr started unravelling Sosnowski’s network thanks to actress Maria Kruse, another mistress of whom he had grown tired, or whether he was betrayed to it by his jealous predecessor in Berlin, a Polish officer who had had no remotely similar success either in espionage or in bed, is impossible to know. But certainly both were somehow involved. A few days after Sosnowski was arrested, most of his network fell into the net. The notable exception was Rudloff, who managed to talk his way out by claiming that his liaison with Sosnowski enabled him to get useful information about Polish plans. He, however, committed suicide in 1941.
The espionage trials in the Nazi Volksgericht during February 1935 led inevitably to sentences of death for treason for von Falkenhayn and another of the women. Benita’s second husband pleaded for clemency for her, although she was at the time desperately trying to divorce her third husband and marry Sosnowski in order to get a Polish passport and thus escape the penalty for the crime of treason committed by a German citizen. The two women were beheaded by axe at Plötzensee prison two days after the verdict. Sosnowski and Irene von Jena were sentenced to life imprisonment.
In April 1936, after fourteen months’ total isolation in prison – not even allowed to see his guards – Sosnowski was released in a spy swap for three German agents who had been caught in Poland. He recounted how he had been appalled at the deaths of Benita and Irene, but was himself accused of treason for a second time by his own superiors in the Dwójka. On 17 June 1939, as the world headed into war, he was judged guilty of treason in the service of Germany and sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment. Was he evacuated eastwards by his captors during the German invasion of September 1939? It would seem logical, but nothing certain is known about the remaining lifetime of Jerzy Sosnowski. He may have been shot by his guards when about to be overtaken by the rapid German advance, although some sources aver that he was handed over to the NKVD and worked for them in the Armia Ludowa in Warsaw until being killed during the uprising of summer 1944. It is somehow fitting that the later life of the great horizontal spy should be shrouded in mystery.
Kazimierz Leski became a respected naval architect in Holland by his mid-twenties, designing two Polish submarines – Orzeł and Sep – for the Nederlandsche Vereenigde Scheepsbouw Bureaux in the Hague before returning to Poland, where he learned to fly and joined the Polish Air Force just before the German invasion of 1939. Shot down a few days later, he was taken prisoner by Soviet troops, but managed to escape although wounded in the crash and made his way across the new Soviet–German demarcation line to reach Warsaw. After joining the Home Army, he was still unfit for guerrilla warfare in the forests and founded instead an intelligence-gathering network, spying on the German troops and forging links with expatriate Poles in Western Europe, through which he made contact with the Polish government-in-exile in London.
In 1941 Leski made his first, highly risky journey to France, disguised as a Wehrmacht lieutenant. Fluent in several languages including German and still suffering from his wounds, he decided to travel more comfortably in future – in first class accommodation as a major general, using the alias Julius von Halmann to collect intelligence on German operations and fortifications. He also found time to smuggle some detainees out of German prisons such as the infamous Pawiak in Warsaw, where 100,000 Poles were held, 40 per cent of them executed there and the others sent to extermination camps. In the Warsaw uprising of August 1944, Leski fought as an infantry commander, although holding no formal commission. When the survivors of the uprising surrendered, he escaped again and became commander of the clandestine Wolnosc I Niezawisłosc – Freedom and Independence – anti-communist partisans in Gdansk.
His pre-war experience of shipbuilding saw him entrusted with the reconstruction of the shipyard there, which had been extensively demolished by the retreating Germans, and his work was recognised in August 1945 by the provisional government’s highest award. Later the same day, Leski was charged by the secret police with attempting to overthrow the regime and sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment. Although this was reduced to six years, in 1951 he was charged with having collaborated with the Germans during the occupation. Placed in solitary confinement, he was brutally tortured. In 1956, with Bierut replaced by Gomułka, Leski was freed, aged 44, but was still under suspicion and, although elected to the Polish Academy of Science and holding patents on several inventions, denied an academic chair for his work in computer analysis. Not until the fall of the Communist regime in 1989 did this incredibly brave and resourceful man publish his memoirs, which deservedly became a bestseller in Poland.
Michal Goleniewski was in every way the equal of his illustrious predecessors. Born in 1922 in an area of eastern Poland that is now in Belarus, he held the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Polish army in 1955. After receiving a doctorate in political science at the University of Warsaw in 1956, he was appointed head of the Technical and Scientific Department of MBP from 1957 to 1960. In this position he was also reporting to the KGB and in 1959 he became a triple agent, feeding both Polish and Soviet material to the CIA under t
he code-name ‘Sniper’ without revealing his true identity, using anonymous notes left in dead letter boxes. In April 1959 the CIA informed British counter-espionage agency MI5 that ‘Sniper’ had revealed the existence of a SB informant in the Royal Navy, with a name that he had overheard just once. It sounded to him like ‘Huiton’. ‘Sniper’ also passed over some documents coming from ‘Huiton’ which made it possible to narrow down his place of work. In addition, ‘Sniper’ reported a top-level Soviet penetration of MI6 – which turned out to be the mole George Blake. Fortunately, ‘Sniper’s rank was so high that he learned just in time when the KGB first heard of a mysterious CIA source inside SB, and was able to make his, obviously well-prepared, escape with his mistress to West Berlin at the end of 1960. Once in the West, they were immediately flown to Ashford Farm in Maryland for debriefing, in which he revealed a number of other SB or KGB sources inside NATO forces and intelligence agencies. After his defection, Goleniewski was sentenced by a Polish court to death in absentia.
‘Sniper’ brought no documents with him, but had already established his bona fides with the stream of leaks while he was still in place, and also revealed the whereabouts of several caches of photographic and other material for eventual retrieval by CIA agents. Given US citizenship, he was placed in a witness protection programme and could have gently faded away from risk. Unfortunately, like many multiple agents, Goleniewski also lived a fantasy life, claiming that he was really the tsarevich Crown Prince Alexei, who had miraculously survived the massacre of Tsar Nicholas II and the rest of the Russian royal family. Eventually, he embarrassed his employers too much with this play-acting and he was put out to grass in 1964.
Against this, it has to be remembered that his information led to the unmasking of two important spies in Britain. In 1951 a former Royal Navy master-at-arms named Harry Houghton was posted as a civilian assistant to the office of the naval attaché in the British embassy in Warsaw. It apparently passed unnoticed by the embassy security staff that Houghton was an alcoholic and was financing an extravagant lifestyle by selling on the black market both Western goods and medical supplies, which made him vulnerable to blackmail by the SB. When Houghton’s wife complained to his superiors about domestic abuse, he was posted back to Britain in 1952 and sent to the top secret research facility at the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment in Portland. Warnings by his wife that he had brought restricted documents home for an unknown purpose were treated as the bitter allegations of an abused wife, although it should have been obvious Houghton was again living well beyond his means. After, or maybe before, his divorce in 1956 Houghton seduced a filing clerk at the base named Ethel Gee and used her to access files, photocopies of which were passed by him to Polish agents working for the KGB. At the beginning of each month Houghton travelled to London, handed over his material to a contact and received payment in cash.
Examination by MI5 of the naval documents ‘Sniper’ had passed revealed that they came from the Underwater Weapons Establishment at Portland. Houghton was an immediate suspect because of his excessive drinking and expensive lifestyle. Placed under surveillance at work and on his trips to London, he enabled his followers to identify contacts afterwards referred to as ‘the Portland Spy Ring’. On 7 January 1961 Scotland Yard Special Branch officers arrested Houghton, Gee and a man purporting to be a Canadian businessman with the name Gordon Lonsdale – who was actually a KGB deep-penetration agent named Konon Molody – to whom Houghton was handing material in a brush pass on Waterloo Bridge. At the same time US citizen Morris Cohen and his wife, Leontina, who ran an antiquarian bookselling business, using the names Peter and Helen Kroger, were also arrested. At their modest suburban bungalow in Ruislip, searchers found a burst transmitter whose extremely brief transmissions were difficult to detect, plus much other espionage equipment used to process and send back to Warsaw and Moscow the material from Houghton.
His defence in court was that he had been having an affair with a woman involved in his black market operation during his time in Warsaw. Told by SB officers that she would go to jail if he did not cooperate, he started handing over material, but claimed that he only gave them what was already in the public domain. Unimpressed, on 22 March 1961 the court sentenced both Houghton and Gee to fifteen years in prison. With remission, they were released on 12 May 1970 and married the following year. Also in March 1961 Molody, refusing to reveal his real identity, was sentenced to twenty-five years in jail. However, three years later, on 22 April 1964, he walked across the Glienicke Bridge to Potsdam while British businessman Greville Wynne walked the other way in one of the many spy swaps carried out at the bridge. Leontina Cohen received a sentence of twenty years and her husband, Morris, got twenty-five years. In 1969 they too were released early, in exchange for a British teacher of Russian named Gerald Brooke, who had served four years in a hard-regime labour camp for unwisely smuggling anti-Soviet material into the USSR.
Although the officers of KGB, the Stasi and other communist security organisations were supposed to lead morally blameless lives, sexual blackmail was so common that it had its own jargon: the entrapment of a man in this way by a glamorous woman was called a honey-trap. Irving Scarbeck was a popular 38-year-old clerical officer in the US embassy in Warsaw with an impeccable service record. In 1959 he rented an apartment in which to meet his 22-year-old mistress Urszula Dische, who may, or may not, have been working for SB. A few months later, Scarbeck was confronted with photographs of them in bed and threatened that they would be shown to his wife and children, who were also in Warsaw. To save Urszula from arrest by the SB, he handed over an unknown number of classified documents and also arranged her escape to Western Germany, where he continued to send her money. Arrested by the FBI when on home leave in summer 1961, Scarbeck confessed all and was sentenced to three consecutive terms of six years in jail, which was later softened by making the sentences concurrent. One of the luckier exposed spies, Scarbeck had a wife who forgave his infidelity. He was paroled in 1966.
An important Polish agent exchanged across the Glienicke Bridge was Marian Zacharski. Between 1977 and 1981 the cover of this Polish agent, who brought his wife and daughter with him to the United States, was his job as president of the Polish–American Machinery Company. A former student of business studies, he revelled in making profitable contracts for the sale of his machines. Although various FBI sources considered that Polish spies were after technical and commercial intelligence, rather than military secrets, Zacharski was caught when buying, allegedly for $200,000 classified documents relating to the Patriot, Phoenix and Hawk missiles; radar installed in the F-15 fighter; stealth radar; US Navy sonar equipment and the M1 Abrams tank – all from a single debt-ridden employee of the Hughes Aircraft company in California.
Zacharski and other Polish spies in the US were ‘blown’ by diplomat Jerzy Korycinski, defecting from the Polish delegation at the United Nations, as a quid pro quo when he requested political asylum in the US. Probably his most valuable tip-off was of cipher clerk Waldemar Mazurkiewicz. Mazurkiewicz, also working in the delegation, had both family troubles and a real drink problem. Eager to start a new life, he was given a new identity and placed under a witness protection programme after betraying the Polish and other Soviet bloc codes.
Zacharski was entrapped when FBI officers placed a wire on his carefully cultivated source inside Hughes Aircraft, and he received a life sentence on the day after Poland’s then-Communist government imposed martial law, which can hardly have helped his case. In 1985 he and three other Eastern-bloc agents were traded for twenty-five low-grade Western spies.4
As reward for his services in America, Zacharski was made head of the consumer electronics division of Pewex, a hard-currency chain of stores selling luxury goods to Western diplomats and businessmen – and Poles who had dollars to spend. Although few ‘blown’ intelligence operatives make a success of subsequent careers, Zacharski was an exception, due – so he said – to his business studies in Poland and lea
rning all the lessons of Big Business during his time in the US. Indeed, after becoming president of Pewex, which was privatised at the end of the Communist regime, he lived like an American tycoon: well groomed, smartly suited, with a chauffeur-driven car and a luxurious office in the Warsaw Marriott Hotel. He did however manage to cause more problems in disclosing that the Cold War links between high Polish officials and intelligence officers and the KGB had survived his country’s new identity under President Lech Wałesa. Threatened with prosecution for having spied for Russia over the previous ten years, Prime Minister Jósef Oleksy in turn accused President Aleksander Kwasniewski with corruption, but was forced to resign in 1996 after admitting that his habit of passing restricted Polish government documents to Soviet diplomat Georgi Yakimishin and KGB officer Vladimir Alganov was inappropriate, to say the least.5 Until 1989 this would have been normal; after that date it was effectively treason.
That there was plenty of dirt to dig up was shown by the case of Peter Vogel. Convicted in 1971 for murder, he was sentenced to twenty-five years’ imprisonment, but was released in 1983 during the period of martial law in Poland. Given a passport and allowed to leave the country, he turned up in Switzerland with considerable funds at his disposal. In 1987 there was a warrant for his arrest which was not executed while he was in Poland, but after his return to Switzerland. Extradited to Warsaw, he was granted amnesty and later pardoned by President Aleksander Kwasniewski. Vogel had had dealings with KGB officer Alganov as well as former SB officers who appear to be linked to polo-playing Polish oligarch Marek Dochnal, whose clients have bank accounts operated by Peter Vogel. Deals involved range from a Russian takeover of a refinery in Gdansk to a Polish consortium buying a Siberian coal mine for over $100 million.
