The Sword and the Shield

by Christopher Andrew

  Despite the improvements after Stalingrad, however, the quality of Soviet intelligence on the eastern front—in particular the SIGINT—never compared with the intelligence on Germany available to their Western allies. The ULTRA intelligence provided to British and American commanders was, quite simply, the best in the history of warfare. The Soviet Union’s most striking intelligence successes during the Great Patriotic War, by contrast, were achieved not against its enemies but against its allies in the wartime Grand Alliance: Britain and the United States.

  SEVEN

  THE GRAND ALLIANCE

  For most of the inter-war years the United States had ranked some way behind Britain as a target for INO operations. Even in the mid-1930s the main Soviet espionage networks in the United States were run by the Fourth Department (Military Intelligence, later renamed the GRU) rather than by the NKVD. Fourth Department agents included a series of young, idealistic high-flyers within the federal government, among them: Alger Hiss and Julian Wadleigh, both of whom entered the State Department in 1936; Harry Dexter White of the Treasury Department; and George Silverman, a government statistician who probably recruited White.1 Like the Cambridge Five, the Washington moles saw themselves as secret warriors in the struggle against fascism. Wadleigh wrote later:

  When the Communist International represented the only world force effectively resisting Nazi Germany, I had offered my services to the Soviet underground in Washington as one small contribution to help stem the fascist tide.2

  The main NKVD operations in the United States during the mid-1930s were run by an illegal residency established in 1934 under the former Berlin resident, Boris Bazarov (codenamed NORD), with Iskhak Abdulovich Akhmerov (YUNG), a Soviet Tartar, as his deputy.3 Bazarov was remembered with affection by Hede Massing, an Austrian agent in his residency, as the warmest personality she had encountered in the NKVD. On the anniversary of the October Revolution in 1935 he sent her fifty long-stemmed red roses with a note which read:

  Our lives are unnatural, but we must endure it for [the sake of] humanity. Though we cannot always express it, our little group is bound by love and consideration for one another. I think of you with great warmth.

  Though Akhmerov, by contrast, struck Massing as a “Muscovite automaton,” he was less robotic than he appeared.4 Unknown to Massing, Akhmerov was engaged in a passionate love affair with his assistant, Helen Lowry, the cousin of the American Communist Party leader, Earl Browder, and—unusually—gained permission from the Centre to marry her.5

  Bazarov’s and Akhmerov’s recruits included three agents in the State Department: ERIKH, KIY and “19.”6 Probably the most important, as well as the only one of the three who can be clearly identified, was agent “19,” Laurence Duggan, who later became chief of the Latin American Division.7 To Hede Massing, Duggan seemed “an extremely tense, high-strung, intellectual young man.” His recruitment took some time, not least because Alger Hiss was simultaneously attempting to recruit him for the Fourth Department. In April 1936 Bazarov complained to the Centre that the “persistent Hiss” showed no sign of abandoning the attempt.8 A year later, in the midst of the Moscow show trials, Duggan told Akhmerov that he was afraid that, if he “collaborated” with Soviet intelligence, he might be exposed by a Trotskyite traitor. By the beginning of 1938, however, Duggan was supplying Akhmerov with State Department documents which were photographed in the illegal residency and then returned. In March Duggan reported that his close friend Sumner Welles, under-secretary at the State Department from 1938 to 1945, had told him he was becoming too attracted to Marxism and had given him a friendly warning about his left-wing acquaintances.9 Duggan’s future in the State Department, however, seemed as bright as that of Donald Maclean in the Foreign Office.

  The Centre also saw a bright future for Michael Straight (codenamed NOMAD and NIGEL), the wealthy young American recruited shortly before his graduation from Cambridge University in 1937.10 Its optimism sprang far more from Straight’s family connections than from any evidence of his enthusiasm for a career as a secret agent. Straight’s job hunt after his return to the United States began at the top—over tea at the White House with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. With some assistance from Mrs. Roosevelt, he obtained a temporary, unpaid assignment in the State Department early in 1938. Soon afterwards, he received a phone call from Akhmerov, who passed on “greetings from your friends at Cambridge University” and invited him to dinner at a local restaurant. Akhmerov introduced himself as “Michael Green,” then ordered a large meal. Straight watched as he ate:

  He was dark and stocky, with broad lips and a ready smile. His English was good; his manner was affable and easy. He seemed to be enjoying his life in America.

  Ahkmerov seemed to accept that it would be some time before Straight had access to important documents, but was evidently prepared to wait. Before paying the bill, he delivered a brief lecture on international relations. Straight was “too stunned to think clearly.” Though Straight claims that he was “unwilling to become a Soviet agent in the Department of State,” he plainly did not say so to Akhmerov. The two men “parted as friends” and Straight agreed to continue their meetings.11

  With the approach of war in Europe, the Centre’s interest in the United States steadily increased. In 1938 the NKVD used the defection of the main Fourth Department courier, Whittaker Chambers, as a pretext for taking over most of the military intelligence agent network, with the notable exception of Alger Hiss.12 In the United States, as elsewhere, however, the expansion of NKVD operations was disrupted by the hunt for imaginary “enemies of the people.” Ivan Andreyevich Morozov (codenamed YUZ and KIR), who was stationed in the New York legal residency in 1938-9, sought to prove his zeal to the Centre by denouncing the Resident, Pyotr Davidovich Gutzeit (codenamed NIKOLAI), and most of his colleagues as secret Trotskyists.13 In 1938 both Gutzeit and Bazarov, the legal and illegal residents, were recalled and shot.14 Morozov’s denunciation of the next legal resident, Gayk Badalovich Ovakimyan (codenamed GENNADI), was less successful and may have prompted Morozov’s own recall in 1939.15

  Bazarov was succeeded as illegal resident by his former deputy, Iskhak Akhmerov, who henceforth controlled most political intelligence operations in the United States.16 Mitrokhin noted the codenames of eight rather diverse individuals in whom the Centre seemed to place particularly high hopes on the eve of the Second World War:17 Laurence Duggan (agent “19,” later FRANK) in the State Department;18 Michael Straight (NIGEL), also in the State Department; Martha Dodd Stern (LIZA), daughter of the former US ambassador to Germany, William E. Dodd, and wife of the millionaire Alfred Kaufman Stern (also a Soviet agent); Martha’s brother, William E. Doss, Jr. (PRESIDENT), who had run unsuccessfully for Congress as a Democrat and still had political ambitions; Harry Dexter White in the Treasury Department (KASSIR, later JURIST); an agent codenamed MORIS (probably John Abt) in the Justice Department”;19 Boris Morros (FROST), the Hollywood producer of Laurel and Hardy’s Flying Deuces and other box-office hits;20 Mary Wolf Price (codenamed KID and DIR), an undeclared Communist who was secretary to the well-known columnist Walter Lippmann; and Henry Buchman (KHOSYAIN, “Employer”), owner of a women’s fashion salon in Baltimore.21

  In August 1939, however, political intelligence operations in the United States, as in Britain, were partially disrupted by the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Laurence Duggan broke off contact with Akhmerov in protest.22 Others who had serious doubts included Michael Straight. At a meeting in October in a restaurant below Washington’s Union Station, Akhmerov tried to reassure him. “Great days are approaching!” he declared. With the beginning of the Second World War, revolution would spread like wildfire across Germany and France.23 Straight was unimpressed and failed to attend the next meeting.24 Duggan and Straight are unlikely to have been the only agents to break contact, at least temporarily, with the NKVD.

  Further disruption to NKVD operations in the United States followed Akhmerov’s recall, soon after his last me
eting with Straight, to Moscow where he was accused by Beria of treasonable dealings with enemies of the people.25 Though, for unknown reasons, the charges were dropped, Akhmerov was placed in the NKVD reserve and remained under suspicion for the next two years while his record was thoroughly checked. For the first time, the center of NKVD operations in the United States was moved, after Akhmerov’s recall, to the legal residency headed by Gayk Ovakimyan, later known to the FBI as the “wily Armenian.” Ovakimyan found himself terribly overworked, all the more so since he was also expected to take an active part in the complex preparations for Trotsky’s assassination in Mexico City. He would sometimes return home exhausted after meeting as many as ten agents in a single day.26

  Ovakimyan’s main successes were in scientific and technological (ST), rather than political, intelligence. He was unusual among INO officers in holding a science doctorate from the MVTU (Moscow Higher Technical School) and, since 1933, had operated under cover as an engineer at Amtorg (American-Soviet Trading Corporation) in New York. In 1940 he enrolled as a graduate student at a New York chemical institute to assist him in identifying potential agents.27 Ovakimyan was the first to demonstrate the enormous potential for ST in the United States. In 1939 alone NKVD operations in the United States obtained 18,000 pages of technical documents, 487 sets of designs and 54 samples of new technology.28

  Ovakimyan was probably also the first to suggest using an INO officer, under cover as an exchange student, to penetrate the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The first such “student,” Semyon Markovich Semyonov (codenamed TVEN), entered MIT in 1938. The scientific contacts which he made over the next two years, before changing his cover in 1940 to that of an Amtorg engineer, helped to lay the basis for the remarkable wartime expansion of ST collection in the United States. One of his colleagues in the New York residency was struck by Semyonov’s “large eyes which, while he was talking to somebody, [revolved] like parabolic antennae.”29 By April 1941 the total NKVD agent network in the United States numbered 221, of whom forty-nine were listed in NKVD statistics as “engineers” (probably a category which included a rather broad range of scientists).30 In the same month the Centre for the first time established separate departments in its major residencies to specialize in scientific and technological intelligence operations (later known as Line X), a certain sign of their increasing priority.31

  According to an SVR official history, the sheer number of agents with whom Ovakimyan was in contact “blunted his vigilance.” In May 1941 he was caught by the FBI in the act of receiving documents from agent OCTANE, briefly imprisoned, freed on bail and allowed to leave the country in July.32 But for the remarkably lax security of the Roosevelt administration, the damage to NKVD operations might have been very much worse than the arrest of Ovakimyan. On September 2, 1939, the day after the outbreak of war in Europe, Whittaker Chambers had told much of what he knew about Soviet espionage in the United States to Adolf Berle, Assistant Secretary of State and President Roosevelt’s adviser on internal security. Immediately afterwards, Berle drew up a memorandum for the President which listed Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White and the other leading Soviet agents for whom Chambers had acted as courier. One of those on the list was a leading presidential aide, Lauchlin Currie (mistranscribed by Berle as Lockwood Curry). Roosevelt, however, was not interested. He seems to have dismissed the whole idea of espionage rings within his administration as absurd. Equally remarkable, Berle simply pigeon-holed his own report. He did not even send a copy to the FBI until the Bureau requested it in 1943.33

  IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States in December 1941, Vassili Zarubin (alias Zubilin, codenamed MAKSIM) was appointed legal resident in New York. Already deeply suspicious of British commitment to the defeat of Nazi Germany, Stalin also had doubts about American resolve. He summoned Zarubin before his departure and told him that his main assignment in the United States was to watch out for attempts by Roosevelt and “US ruling circles” to negotiate with Hitler and sign a separate peace. As resident in New York, based in the Soviet consulate, Zarubin was also responsible for subresidencies in Washington, San Francisco, and Latin America.34 Though fragmentary, the evidence suggests that Stalin continued to take a direct personal interest in overseeing intelligence operations against his allies.

  A brief official SVR biography portrays Zarubin’s wartime record in New York (and later in Washington) as one of unblemished brilliance.35 In reality, his abrasive personality and foul-mouthed behavior caused immediate uproar. Zarubin’s preference for the operations officers whom he brought with him (among them his wife, Yelizaveta Yulyevna Zarubina)36 and his unconcealed contempt for existing residency staff led to open rebellion. Two of the operations officers whom he insulted, Vasili Dmitryevich Mironov and Vasili Georgyevich Dorogov, went to the remarkable lengths of reporting “his crudeness, general lack of manners, use of street language and obscenities, carelessness in his work, and repugnant secretiveness” to the Centre, and asking for his recall along with his almost equally unpopular wife. Feuding within the residency continued throughout the Second World War.37

  Zarubin’s recruitment strategy was simple and straightforward. He demanded that the leaders of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) identify supporters and sympathizers in government establishments suitable for work as agents.38 When Zarubin arrived in New York, the CPUSA leader Earl Browder (codenamed RULEVOY—“Helmsman”) was serving a prison sentence for using a false passport during his frequent secret journeys to the Soviet Union. His first contact was therefore with Eugene Dennis (born Francis X. Waldron, codenamed RYAN), a Moscowtrained Comintern agent who later succeeded Browder as CPUSA general secretary. Dennis reported that a number of Communists (mostly secret Party members) were joining the first professional American foreign intelligence agency, the Office of the Coordinator of Information, reorganized in June 1942 as the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Shortly before the foundation of OSS, Browder left prison to resume the Party leadership. He was, Dennis told Moscow, “in a splendid mood.”39

  Among the first Soviet agents to penetrate OSS was Duncan Chaplin Lee (codenamed KOCH), who became personal assistant to its head, General “Wild Bill” Donovan. Donovan had a relaxed attitude to the recruitment of Communists. “I’d put Stalin on the OSS payroll,” he once said, “if I thought it would help us defeat Hitler.” Throughout the Second World War the NKVD knew vastly more about OSS than OSS knew about the NKVD.40

  Browder’s recruitment leads also included foreign Communists and fellow travelers who had taken refuge in the United States. Among the most important was the French radical politician Pierre Cot, six times Minister of Air and twice Minister of Commerce in the short-lived governments of the prewar Third Republic. Cot had probably been recruited by the NKVD in the mid-1930s, but seems to have drifted out of touch during the chaotic period which followed the purge of much of Soviet foreign intelligence and had condemned the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Rebuffed by General Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French after the fall of France in 1940, Cot spent the next few years in the United States.41 In November Browder reported to Moscow: “Cot wants the leaders of the Soviet Union to know of his willingness to perform whatever mission we might choose, for which purpose he is even prepared to break faith with his own position.”42 Probably a month or so after his arrival in New York, Zarubin approached Cot and, with his habitual brusqueness, pressed Cot to begin active work as a Soviet agent forthwith. Cot’s KGB file records that he was taken aback by the peremptory nature of Zarubin’s summons and insisted that one of the leaders of the French Communist Party exiled in Moscow give his approval.43 On July 1 Zarubin reported to the Centre “the signing on of Pierre Cot” as agent DAEDALUS.44 In 1944 Cot was to be sent on a three-month mission to Moscow on behalf of de Gaulle’s provisional government. He concluded the report on his mission: “Liberty declines unceasingly under capitalism and rises unceasingly
under socialism.”45

  Though the Centre was plainly impressed by the quality of Communist recruits talent-spotted by Browder, it cautioned Zarubin against over-reliance on them:

  We permit the use of the Communist [Party members’] illegal intelligence capabilities… as a supplement to the Residency’s operations, but it would be a mistake to turn these capabilities into the main basis of operations.46

  At almost the same moment in December 1941 when Zarubin arrived in New York as legal resident, Iskhak Akhmerov (successively codenamed YUNG and ALBERT) returned to reestablish the illegal residency, also based in New York, which he had been ordered to abandon two years earlier. Though he had previously used Turkish and Canadian identity documents, on this occasion he carried a doctored US passport which he had acquired in 1938.47 Unlike Zarubin, Akhmerov avoided all contact with Browder—despite the fact that his wife and assistant, Helen Lowry (codenamed MADLEN and ADA), was Browder’s niece.48 In March 1942 the Akhmerovs moved from New York to Baltimore, a more convenient location from which to run agents based in Washington. There Akhmerov, whose stepfather had been a furrier, opened a fur and clothes business in partnership with a local Soviet agent, KHOSYAIN, to give himself a cover occupation.49