Last of the Cold War Spies

by Roland Perry

  Krivitsky was very nervous in the initial discussions; he talked at length. Liddell listened and only prodded him now and again in order to see the broad dimensions of what he had to offer.20 The defector calmed down with the softer approach of the British, although he would always have qualms. He knew of the penetration in the United Kingdom; it was a permanent psychological threat.

  Liddell assigned the “tough-minded and rough-tongued” Jane Sissmore, a former barrister, to debrief him over three weeks.21 She demonstrated skill, patience, and sensitivity in extracting information from Krivitsky, who was not an easy subject. He seemed hesitant over names and reluctant to divulge everything. He wanted something in reserve to ensure continued protection. He feared that if he told all he knew, he might be considered expendable. There was also the strong possibility that if he named names, particularly of Stalin’s top agents in the Cambridge ring, or if he could give enough clues to expose them, he would invite certain death from the KGB hit squads. He more than once told his interrogator: “If you find that I have committed suicide, do not believe it.”

  Under guidance from Sissmore, who restrained herself and remained sympathetic, Krivitsky listed ninety-three agents working in the British Commonwealth, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere. Sixty-one were named as operating in the United Kingdom or against British interests abroad. In total, six of these were “legal” spymasters either working at embassies or at Soviet trading organizations. Another twenty were named as “illegals.” Krivitsky was able to detail their nationalities, including three Americans, three Germans, three Austrians, two Dutch, one Pole, and eight Russians. Nine had covers as businessmen and three as artists. Others varied in alleged occupations. There was a journalist, a secretary, a student, and even an ice-skater. The defector was vague about the work of the other four.

  He divulged the names of leading illegals who had operated in London, including Arnold Deutsch, Max Petrovsky, and Theodore Maly and his subagent Gadar. Significantly, these had been senior Comintern figures who were now dead or departed from the United Kingdom. Krivitsky was playing it safe by naming them, as he had been in exposing King and Tyler Kent, an American cipher clerk in the U.S. embassy in London. These two agents were low-level, expendable, and replaceable.

  He gave bigger clues on a more important agent when he told Sissmore about a White Russian called Vladimir von Petrov, who had been an important Soviet military intelligence (GRU) agent with valuable sources of secret data in Britain. One source had even supplied details about the British Secret Intelligence Services itself.

  Some action seems to have been taken here by Sissmore, as the expanded file on von Petrov demonstrates, but it led nowhere, and no arrests were made. (Later, after Philby’s defection in 1963, MI5 officer Peter Wright went through the file on von Petrov. He found that, according to a German intelligence officer interrogated after the Nazi defeat, the Paris-based von Petrov had also been a source about Britain for the Germans. A German naval officer went further and named von Petrov as a “Captain Charles Howard Ellis.” Ellis was Australian and had a White Russian wife. When Kim Philby became head of Section 1X, the counterintelligence section of MI6, he reviewed the file and scribbled in the margin: “Who is this man Ellis? NFA,” for “No Further Action.” It would be one of many bits of intelligence supplied by Krivitsky that would haunt Philby for some time.)22

  More pertinent to MI5’s interests was Krivitsky’s exposé of the thirty-five local agents run by the twenty-six legal and illegal spymasters. There were sixteen British nationals. Eight were active in left-wing politics and the trade union movement; six were civil servants, and two were journalists.

  Half of these names were new to MI5. Steps were taken to make sure their activities were not a threat to British interests, but none was prosecuted, nor were their identities revealed. Liddell argued that to expose them would dilute the effectiveness of Krivitsky’s information.

  “The Russians would only replace them with others,” he told colleagues. “Better to ‘neutralize’ them.”23

  Sissmore tried to extract more about the two higher-ranking foreign office spies, whom the defector claimed he did not know by name. Siss more showed him papers from the Imperial Defense Council’s report of 1937, which he had read in Moscow before his defection. Krivitsky spoke about the agent involved as having a Scottish name and something Bohemian in his background. He was considered “artistic” and “sometimes wore a cape.”

  “He is of a good family and his father is prominent,” Krivitsky recalled. “He [the agent] had been at Eton and Oxford.”

  “When was he recruited?” Sissmore asked.

  “In the mid-1930s. He is an idealist working without payment.”24

  These clues were too broad, Liddell suggested. Some none-too-intensive inquiries were ordered to be carried out discreetly but led nowhere.25 There were countless employees with Scottish names, and many had an Eton/Oxford background. All were found to be “clean.” The Bohemian clue was ignored except that it fitted just one character, the bisexual, bagpipe playing ambassador, Lord Inverchapel. He had developed a deep admiration for the Soviet Union when posted to Stockholm in 1934. He was investigated, and nothing out of the ordinary was discovered, apart from his eccentricities and sexual proclivities.

  The real spy to whom Krivitsky referred was the Cambridge network’s Donald Maclean, who had not been at Eton or Oxford. Nearly a decade later, the defector’s information would match that picked up by deciphering the cables sent from Washington to Moscow (known as the Venona decrypts), and Maclean would be forced to flee to Russia. But in February 1940 the data was sparse and not strong enough, unless a serious investigation was ordered. Liddell had neither the will nor the inclination to probe further.

  A more potent clue pointing to another key spy in the Cambridge ring came when Krivitsky told Sissmore that “Soviet intelligence had sent a young English journalist to Spain during the Spanish civil war.”26 According to MI5 documents released late in 2001 by England’s Public Record Office, Krivitsky said that Soviet intelligence directed another agent, Paul Hardt, to order the journalist to kill Franco.

  Sissmore asked Krivitsky to put his memories on paper. The Russian wrote:

  [Soviet intelligence] received orders from Stalin to arrange the murder of General Franco. Hardt was instructed by [intelligence] chief Yezhov to recruit an Englishman for the purpose. He did in fact contact and send to Spain a young Englishman, a journalist of good family, an idealist and fanatical anti-Nazi. Before the plan matured, Hardt himself was recalled to Moscow [during Stalin’s purges] in 1937 and disappeared [i.e., was liquidated].

  Amazingly, one officer wrote in the margin of Krivitsky’s report, “prob. [probably] PHILBY.”

  Once more, Liddell did nothing to encourage investigation into such a clue, citing the fact that there would be countless individuals with that background. Furthermore, journalists, recruited or not, could do little damage beyond propaganda. Although Krivitsky alluded to Philby, it is unlikely he knew him by name. Krivitsky had heard about the journalist in Spain while on his last trip to Moscow in 1937, which is shown in a letter from the Moscow Center to the London KGB resident:

  Our source Johnson (the code name for Blunt) passed to us the testimony of Krivitsky. . . . (He) announced that Maly sent a British journalist from a good family that sympathized with the Soviet Union and who was recruited on ideological grounds to Spain to assassinate Franco. This example must be kept in mind when dealing with valuable agents. In his work Krivitsky had no connection to Stanley (code name for Philby), but apparently using the loose lips of our former staff at the residence in England, he received top secret information on Stanley. . . .27

  Although not yet recruited to B Section of MI5, Blunt was already close to Liddell, who would have mentioned Krivitsky’s testimony to him. The scare would play hard on Philby’s mind over the next fifteen years and for decades after that. He touched on it three times in his memoir
s and elaborated further about the problems it caused him in his interviews with writers Phillip Knightley and Genrihk Borovik.28 (When British intelligence’s Helenus “Buster” Milmo interrogated him after the Burgess/Maclean defections in 1951, the Krivitsky comments led to a question about the young journalist sent by the GRU to kill Franco. Philby stuttered his way through this by pointing out that if he had been the assassin, he had plenty of chances to murder Franco in six interviews with him.)

  At the time of Krivitsky’s revelations, Philby had done excellent work in Spain, but he had yet to penetrate British intelligence. He did so in July 1940 when he joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which was to carry out sabotage in Europe, and a year later reached Special Intelligence Services (SIS), his long-term KGB assignment.

  The worry for the Moscow Center with Krivitsky was the damage he could do if he disclosed something that led to even one member of the ring. If this were done, the whole network would be in danger of unraveling, and at a time when Stalin and the center had high hopes for its penetrating key areas of intelligence, the military, and weapons research. Not only would Cambridge ring agents such as Maclean, Cairncross, Burgess, and Straight be lost, the long preparation to groom Blunt, Philby, Victor Rothschild (who had joined MI5 in September 1939), Tess Mayor, Leo Long, Alister Watson, and several others for additional service in high places would be a failure.

  In April 1940, a secret foreign office report on the Krivitsky case was circulated. It raised political issues generated by his visit to London and touched on some of the revelations, including hints about foreign office penetration. Maclean read the report and discussed it with his control, who had already been informed about it by Blunt, as had Burgess and Rothschild (who, with Tess Mayor, was also working for Liddell in Section B of MI5). The Cambridge ring was now fully alerted to the problems posed by this troublesome defector.

  The dangers were underscored as Europe slipped deeper into war. Stalin would not trust the words of anyone, especially his newfound pact-partner, Hitler. He had to have accurate intelligence to make assessments of the intentions of all his key friends and foes.

  Krivitsky had, in effect, been on Stalin’s hit list since he defected in mid-1937. This was confirmed by Trotsky in April 1940 when he told contacts in Mexico that Stalin wanted two adversaries dead before all others: one was himself; the other was Walter Krivitsky, who knew too many secrets, particularly about the highly successful Cambridge ring.

  Stalin was not about to let a great source of espionage dry up.

  9

  A DEFENSIVE MEASURE

  Winston Churchill took over as prime minister of Great Britain in May 1940, and the changes that came with his ascension saw Guy Liddell elevated to chief of counterespionage in British intelligence. A month later his close friend Anthony Blunt was appointed as his assistant (at Victor Rothschild’s recommendation) and Soviet intelligence had its strongest foothold yet inside its British counterpart. Guy Burgess soon after was to help Kim Philby into SOE and further strengthen the Soviet position. Then Burgess took off for Moscow via Washington and Japan with Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who wanted to become press attaché to the British embassy in Moscow now that the communist-supporting Stafford Cripps was installed there as ambassador. Burgess pulled strings at the foreign office to get himself a job as Berlin’s assistant. But the mission for both was aborted in Washington when Cripps objected to the foreign office’s appointing its choices to his staff.

  Burgess arrived in Washington on July 8, 1940, and was invited to Straight’s home for dinner.1 The discussion was friendly, with Burgess regaling Straight with details of his cavorting in a Paris male brothel with the French government’s chef du cabinet, Edouard Pfeiffer. Burgess seemed to have full confidence in his protégé. There was further chat that indicated to Straight that Leo Long had been recruited as a KGB agent by Blunt. It was something Burgess would never have disclosed had he doubted Straight’s “blood-brother” allegiances.

  Straight described Long as the strong, silent type, a noble working-class scholar member of the Trinity cell, presumably like John Cairncross, another spy in the Cambridge ring. He was one of five successful recommendations for the Apostles when Straight stacked the society with hard-line communists in 1937.2 One more of his appointees had been seduced into the next step and had followed him into KGB agency. According to FBI files, Burgess told Straight that at the annual Apostles dinner, held in London, Blunt had become “disillusioned when another [homosexual] Apostle made a play for Leo.”

  In the middle of the dinner, Burgess went further in his show of confidence in his protégé. “I’ve been out of touch with our friends for several months,” he remarked, meaning KGB representatives. “Can you put me back in touch with them?” Straight denied in his autobiography (published in 1983) that he could or would. But when he was interrogated by the FBI (1963 to 1975), Straight said he “merely accepted this statement and made no comment and changed the subject.”

  Either way, apparently, he did not help Burgess link up with the KGB. Straight was adamant that this meeting was the first in which he realized that Burgess was a KGB agent. Until then, he said that he assumed that only he and Blunt were operatives. This was disingenuous and contradicts his other observations about Burgess, whom he knew or suspected was behind Blunt’s overtures to him.

  After this convivial meeting with his recruiter, Straight made a hasty, persistent attempt to pull every string he could to get back into State. Burgess and the KGB wanted him on assignment there once more. There was a rush for Straight to be in place to monitor Krivitsky’s movements now that the defector was targeted for assassination.

  According to FBI files, on July 9, 1940—the day after Straight’s meeting with Burgess—he began moves to leave his speechwriting job at the White House to rejoin the State Department. A job on the British Empire desk had opened up, he informed family and friends. He said he was afraid of working for the State Department, particularly because he would be in intellectual exile after his stimulating work as a speechwriter for Roosevelt. He also worried about his wife’s social life, which would not be as active as it had been while he was at the White House.3

  Straight’s lack of enthusiasm about joining State again was understandable if, as he claimed, he had left the department a year earlier to avoid Michael Green. If Straight needed assistance in getting the job, he had several avenues to follow. For instance, he could have called on his stepfather Leonard, who had cemented his friendship with the U.S. president. Leonard had dined at the White House with Roosevelt two months earlier in May 1940.4 Then the president asked Leonard to ring him at the White House if there were anything vital England needed to withstand a then-expected Nazi invasion following the British retreat at Dunkirk in May. This resulted in Roosevelt giving fifty old destroyers to the Royal Navy in September.5

  Yet Straight’s connection to Ben Cohen and the president was probably enough without Leonard’s intervention this time. Straight had progressed since his days as a callow youth in 1937 when he first visited the White House. He had done his own networking and had cultivated those useful to him.

  The president sent a letter dated July 29 to State recommending Straight for a job, as did Ben Cohen.6 Straight claimed that a job was offered at State by the assistant secretary in the department, James C. Dunn, because a desk had become vacant in the European Division. Verne Newton, the director of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, disputes this in his book, The Cambridge Spies: “The only thing the two had in common was immense unearned wealth,” Newton commented. “Son of a Newark bricklayer and a high school dropout, Dunn escaped the tedium of minor State Department administrative posts when he married the heiress to the Armour meat-packing fortune.”7

  Furthermore, Dunn was an archconservative. He would not see eye-to-eye on anything with Straight whether he was acting as an archliberal or as a hard-line communist.

  “Where Dunn became the son the Secretary of State Cordell
Hull never had,” Newton added, “Straight’s ties were to the White House, which treated Hull like a leper.”

  James Dunn was the designated receiver of MI5 reports. British intelligence suspected that Straight had sought out and obtained a position of strategic importance to the KGB.8 But it was unlikely to be the reason for joining State, even though the Cambridge ring—well placed within MI5—would have known of Dunn’s role. There would be little point in the KGB receiving edited reports from MI5 through an agent with access to Dunn’s files in the United States. It could have all the data it wanted from MI5 from its agents on the inside in London, such as Blunt, Rothschild, Tess Mayor, and possibly Liddell himself.

  Rather than the desire to have Straight in the European Division, its assistant chief, Jack Hickerson, said that “we tried our damnedest to keep Straight out . . . we didn’t want him. He wasn’t our choice. He was not a professional. He had political pull and he used it.”9

  The president’s power won the day, and Straight was in at State, again. He got through routine clearances, which did not delve back into his Cambridge past, and began work on August 27 as a Grade 4 full professional at $3,800 a year in the European Division. It was his first real paid government appointment.

  Straight celebrated his twenty-fourth birthday in his underwhelming post. He had to sit and listen, Hickerson said, to the sad stories of the American expatriates who had returned from France when it was overrun by Hitler’s armies. Expats feared the Nazis would take over their townhouses in Paris and their French country properties. Hickerson remembered Straight giving the expats solemn assurances that State officials would place rosters on their land saying “American Property.” This cynical attitude added more to the apparent folly of Straight taking on such an innocuous position, unless he was there to monitor Krivitsky. He had nothing to gain from the position and much to lose. Had he been exposed at that time as one of Stalin’s men in the United States, it would have been contentious, to say the least, and dangerous for Straight. So far none of the Cambridge ring had been exposed. Stalin; key members of the ring, such as Burgess, Blunt, and Philby; their controls; and the assassination squads at their disposal were combining to solve the Krivitsky problem.