Unlike Blunt, three of the Magnificent Five—Philby, Burgess and Maclean—were all at their peak as Soviet agents, and Cairncross still close to his, when the Cold War began. Philby remained head of SIS Section IX until 1947, when he was appointed head of station in Turkey, a position which enabled him to betray agents who crossed the Russian border as well as their families and contacts inside the Soviet Union. Maclean established a reputation as a high-flying young diplomat in the Washington embassy, where he remained until 1947. In 1946 Burgess, who had joined the Foreign Office in 1944, became personal assistant to Hector McNeil, Minister of State to Ernest Bevin in the post-war Labor government.16 After the war John Cairncross returned to the Treasury, where the London residency renewed contact with him in 1948.17 Cairncross’s main job at the Treasury over the next few years was to authorize expenditure on defense research. According to his Treasury colleague G. A. Robinson:
[Cairncross] thus knew not just about atomic weapons developments but also plans for guided missiles, microbiological, chemical, underwater and all other types of weapons. He also needed to know, inter alia, about projected spending on aeronautical and radar research and anti-submarine detection, research by the Post Office and other bodies into signals intelligence, eavesdropping techniques, etc. He… could legitimately ask for any further details thought necessary to give Treasury approval to the spending of money.18
Cairncross’s controller, Yuri Modin, was, unsurprisingly, “overjoyed by the quality of [his] information.”19
The new security procedures introduced in the wake of the Gouzenko and Volkov alarms made controlling the London residency’s agents far more laborious and timeconsuming than during or before the war. On average, before every meeting with an agent, each case officer spent five hours moving on foot or by public transport (especially the London Underground) between locations he had studied previously in order to engage in repeated checks that he was not under surveillance. Once at the meeting place, both the case officer and the agent were required to establish visual contact and to satisfy themselves that the other was not being watched before they approached each other. If either had any doubts, they would fall back on one of three previously agreed alternative rendezvous. The system pioneered in London was later introduced into other residencies.20
The London residency also pioneered the use of radio intercept units to identify and monitor surveillance of its operations by the police and MI5. In addition to the main interception unit in the residency, mobile units were established in embassy cars to check the areas in which meetings took place with agents.21 However, the Centre’s experiment with the eight-man surveillance team sent to London during the Second World War to carry out checks on agents and visitors to the Soviet embassy, as well as to discover the surveillance methods used by British intelligence, was discontinued. A report in KGB archives records that, handicapped by its lack of fluency in English, the team had “no major successes.”22 The experiment was probably a total failure.
The London residency’s attempts to enforce the strictest standards of secrecy and security had only a limited effect on Guy Burgess. On one occasion, while coming out of a pub where he had established visual contact with his case officer, he dropped his briefcase and scattered secret Foreign Office papers over the floor. There were frequent complaints that he turned up for meetings the worse for drink and with his clothing in disarray.23 When George Carey-Foster, head of the embryonic security branch in the Foreign Office, first encountered Burgess in 1947, he was struck by his “disheveled and unshaven appearance. He also smelt so strongly of drink that I enquired who he was and what his job was.” Yet Burgess could still display fragments of the charm and brilliance of his Cambridge years. Late in 1947, probably to get rid of him, Hector McNeil recommended Burgess to the parliamentary under-secretary at the Foreign Office, Christopher Mayhew, who was then organizing the Information Research Department (IRD) to counter Soviet “psychological warfare.” Mayhew made what he later described as “an extraordinary mistake:” “I interviewed Burgess. He certainly showed a dazzling insight into Communist methods of subversion and I readily took him on.” Burgess went the rounds of British embassies selling IRD’s wares while simultaneously compromising the new department by reporting all its plans to Yuri Ivanovich Modin, who became his case officer in 1947 and acquired a reputation as one of the ablest agent controllers in Soviet intelligence. The chorus of protests at Burgess’s undiplomatic behavior led to his removal from the IRD and transfer to the Foreign Office Far Eastern Department in the autumn of 1948.24 Though it disturbed the Centre, Burgess’s frequently outrageous conduct paradoxically strengthened his cover. Even to most of those whom he outraged he seemed as unlike a Soviet spy as it was possible to imagine.
Modin was also concerned about Nikolai Borisovich Rodin (alias “Korovin”), who succeeded Kukin as London resident in 1947. Rodin considered himself above the tight security regulations on which he insisted for the other members of the residency. According to Modin, who loathed him personally, Rodin was “known to go to clandestine meetings in one of the embassy cars, and sometimes was foolhardy enough to place direct calls to agents in their offices.” But, in the rigidly hierarchical world of Soviet intelligence, Modin felt that “there was nothing I could do about it. It was hardly my place to denounce my superior in the service.” As head of Faculty Number One (Political Intelligence) in the FCD Andropov Institute in the early 1980s, Modin was less inhibited. He dismissed Rodin as an arrogant, pretentious nonentity.25
THOUGH THE MGB’S most important British agents were still undetected at the end of the 1940s, many of their American counterparts had been compromised. The Centre had complained as early as March 1945 that the membership of the Silvermaster spy ring was an open secret among “many” Washington Communists and that Harry Dexter White’s Soviet “connection” had also become known. It denounced “not only the falling off in the [New York] Residency’s work of controlling and educating probationers [agents], but also the lack of understanding by our operational workers of the most elementary rules in our work.”26
The defections later in 1945 of Igor Gouzenko and Elizabeth Bentley confirmed the Centre’s worst fears. In September J. Edgar Hoover reported to the White House and the State Department that Gouzenko had provided information on the activities of a number of Soviet spies in the United States, one of whom was “an assistant to the Secretary of State” (almost certainly Alger Hiss). On November 7 Bentley, who had first contacted the FBI six weeks earlier, began revealing what she knew of Soviet espionage to its New York field office. Next day Hoover sent President Truman’s military aide a first list of fourteen of those identified by Bentley as supplying information to “the Soviet espionage system:” among them Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, OSS executive assistant Duncan C. Lee and Roosevelt’s former aide Lauchlin Currie.27 Bentley’s defection, in turn, revived FBI interest in Whittaker Chambers’ earlier evidence of pre-war Soviet espionage by Hiss, White and others.28
On November 20 Gorsky, the Washington resident whom Bentley knew as “A1,” met her for the last time in front of Bickford’s cafeteria on 23rd Street and Sixth Avenue in New York. Unaware that they were under surveillance by the FBI, Gorsky arranged their next meeting for January 20. According to Bentley, he told her that she might soon be needed “back in undercover work.” By the time the date for their next rendezvous had arrived, however, Gorsky was back in Moscow.29 His hasty departure was probably due to the discovery of Bentley’s defection.30 A few months later the resident in New York, Roland Abbiate (alias “Pravdin”), whose wife was known to Bentley, was also withdrawn.31 A damage assessment in the Centre concluded that Bentley did not know the real name, address or telephone number of her previous controller, Iskhak Akhmerov, the illegal resident in the United States. As a precaution, however, he and his wife were recalled to Moscow.32
The almost simultaneous recall of Gorsky, Abbiate and Akhmerov left the MGB without experienc
ed leadership in the United States. There were few senior officers at the Centre with first-hand knowledge of North America capable of succeeding them. In any case, as Yuri Modin later acknowledged, “We were leery of sending people out of the Soviet Union for fear of defections. Most of our officers worked in Moscow, with the result that the few men posted in foreign countries had a workload so crushing that many of them cracked under the pressure.”33 Akhmerov was not replaced as illegal resident until 1948.34 Gorsky’s two successors as chief legal resident in the United States both became bywords for incompetence in the Centre. Grigori Grigoryevich Dolbin, who arrived to replace Gorsky in 1946, had to be replaced in 1948 after showing signs of insanity (due, it was rumored in Moscow, to the onset of hereditary syphilis). His successor, Georgi Aleksandrovich Sokolov, was reprimanded by the Centre before being recalled in 1949.35
The most effective damage limitation measure taken by the MGB after Bentley’s defection was to break off contact with most of the wartime American agents whose identities were known to her. As a result, Bentley’s many leads resulted in not a single prosecution. The FBI began its investigations too late to catch any of the spies named by Bentley in the act of passing on classified information, and it was unable to use evidence from wiretaps in court. The Centre, however, failed to grasp the extent of the legal obstacles which confronted the FBI and continued to fear for several years that it would succeed in mounting a major spy trial.
The Centre’s fears were strengthened by a major American codebreaking success, later codenamed VENONA. For its high-grade diplomatic and intelligence communications the Soviet Union had used since 1927 a virtually unbreakable cipher system known in the West as the “one-time pad.”36 During and immediately after the Second World War, however, some of the one-time pads were reissued, thus becoming vulnerable—though it took several years for American and British codebreakers to exploit the difficult opportunity offered to them by Soviet cryptographic carelessness. Late in 1946 Meredith Gardner, a brilliant cryptanalyst in the US Army Security [SIGINT] Agency, began decrypting some of the wartime messages exchanged between the Centre and its American residencies. By the summer of 1947 he had accumulated evidence from the decrypts of massive Soviet espionage in the wartime United States. In 1948 ASA called in the FBI. From October special agent Robert Lamphere began full-time work on VENONA, seeking to identify the agents (some still active) whose codenames appeared in the VENONA decrypts.37 Remarkably, however, the Central Intelligence Agency was not informed of VENONA until late in 1952.38 Even more remarkably, President Truman appears not to have been told of the decrypts, perhaps for fear that he might mention them to the Director of Central Intelligence, head of the CIA, at one of his weekly meetings with him. VENONA showed in graphic detail how OSS, the CIA’s wartime predecessor, had been heavily penetrated by Soviet agents. Both Hoover and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Omar N. Bradley, seem to have suspected—wrongly—that the same was true of the Agency.39
The Centre learned the VENONA secret in 1947—five years earlier than the CIA—from an agent in ASA, William Weisband (codenamed ZHORA).40 The son of Russian immigrants to the United States, Weisband was employed as a Russian linguist and roamed around ASA on the pretext of looking for projects where his linguistic skills could be of assistance. Meredith Gardner recalls Weisband looking over his shoulder at a critical moment in the project late in 1946, just as he was producing one of the first important decrypts—an NKGB telegram of December 2, 1944 which revealed Soviet penetration of Los Alamos.41
For the Centre, VENONA represented a series of unpredictable timebombs which threatened to explode over the next few years. It had no means of knowing precisely what NKGB telegrams would be decrypted in whole or part, or which Soviet agents would be compromised by them. Moscow’s anxieties were heightened by the public controversy which broke out in the United States in the summer of 1948 over Soviet espionage. In July 1948 Elizabeth Bentley gave evidence in public for the first time to the House Committee on Un-American Activities and achieved instant media celebrity as the “Red Spy Queen.” In evidence to the committee in early August, Whittaker Chambers identified Hiss, White and others as members of a secret pre-war Communist underground. The Centre wrongly feared that the committee hearings would be the prelude to a series of show trials which would expose its wartime espionage network.
DURING THE LATE 1940s Soviet foreign intelligence operations were further confused by a major reorganization in Moscow, prompted by the American National Security Act of July 1947 which established a Central Intelligence Agency “for the purpose of coordinating the intelligence activities of the several government departments and agencies in the interest of national security.” Though that coordination was never fully achieved, Molotov argued that the unified foreign intelligence apparatus envisaged by the National Security Act would give the United States a clear advantage over the fragmented Soviet system. The solution, he argued, was to combine the foreign intelligence directorates of both the MGB and the GRU under a single roof. Molotov’s proposal had the further advantage, from Stalin’s viewpoint, of weakening the power of Beria, whose protégé, Viktor Semyonovich Abakumov, headed the MGB.42 In October 1947 the foreign intelligence directorates of the MGB and GRU were combined to form a new unified foreign intelligence agency, the Committee of Information (Komitet Informatsii or KI).43 Under the new, highly centralized system, even the operational plans for arranging meetings with, and investigating the reliability of, important agents required the prior approval of the KI.44
The appointment of Molotov as first chairman of the Committee of Information gave the Foreign Ministry greater influence on foreign intelligence operations than ever before. The first deputy chairman, responsible to Molotov for day-to-day operations, was the relatively pliant Pyotr Vasilyevich Fedotov, who had become the MGB foreign intelligence chief in the previous year.45 Like most of the Centre management, Fedotov had almost no experience of the West. Roland Abbiate, the former resident in New York and probably the senior intelligence officer best acquainted with the West, was sacked on the formation of the KI. His file records that he was given no explanation for his dismissal and that “it was a terrible blow for him.” Though the reason for the sacking is not recorded, it may well have been related to his foreign Jewish ancestry, which is duly noted in his file. Abbiate was briefly reinstated after Stalin’s death, then sacked again and later committed suicide.46
Molotov sought to strengthen Foreign Ministry control of KI operations by appointing Soviet ambassadors in major capitals as “chief legal residents” with authority over both civilian (ex-MGB) and military (ex-GRU) residents. In the jaundiced view of the later KGB defector Ilya Dzhirkvelov:
This resulted in incredible confusion. The residents, the professional intelligence officers, resorted to incredible subterfuges to avoid informing their ambassadors about their work, since the diplomats had only amateurish knowledge of intelligence work and its methods…47
Some diplomats, however, became directly involved in intelligence operations. After the troubles in the Washington residency which led to the recall of two successive residents in 1948-9, the Soviet ambassador, Aleksandr Semyonovich Panyushkin, took personal charge for a year. He acquired such a taste for intelligence that he later became head of the KGB First (foreign intelligence) Chief Directorate.48
In 1949 Molotov, now out of favor with Stalin, was succeeded as both Foreign Minister and chairman of the KI by his former deputy, Andrei Vyshinsky, who had made his reputation as the brutal prosecutor in the prewar show trials. Vyshinsky retained a sycophantic devotion to Beria which showed itself even on the telephone. According to one of his successors, Andrei Gromyko, “As soon as he heard Beria’s voice Vyshinsky leapt respectfully out of his chair. The conversation itself also presented an unusual picture: Vyshinsky cringed like a servant before his master.”49 Unlike Molotov, Vyshinsky had little interest in KI affairs, handing over the chairmanship after a few months to Deputy Fo
reign Minister Valerian Zorin. Fedotov was succeeded as first deputy chairman in charge of day-to-day operations by the more brutal and decisive Sergei Romanovich Savchenko, like Vyshinsky a protégé of Beria. Savchenko seems to have answered to Beria rather than the Foreign Ministry. 50
By the time Vyshinsky succeeded Molotov, much of the Committee of Information had unraveled. In the summer of 1948, after a prolonged dispute with Molotov, Marshal Nikolai Aleksandrovich Bulganin, Minister for the Armed Forces, began withdrawing military intelligence personnel from KI control and returning them to the GRU. Probably with the support of Beria, Abakumov then embarked on a long drawn out struggle to recover control of the remnants of the KI. At the end of 1948 all residency officers in the EM (Russian émigré) and SK (Soviet colonies abroad) Lines returned to the MGB. The KI was finally wound up and the rest of its foreign intelligence responsibilities returned to the MGB late in 1951.51
THE MAIN LEGACY of the KI period to the subsequent development of Soviet intelligence was a renewed emphasis on illegals who, it was believed, would eventually establish a more secure and better-concealed foundation for foreign intelligence operations than the legal residencies, particularly in the United States. The Fourth (Illegals) Directorate of the KI, formed by combining the illegals sections of the MGB and the GRU, had a total staff of eighty-seven, headed by Aleksandr Mikhailovich Korotkov, who had made his reputation during pre-war missions to assassinate “enemies of the people” on foreign soil. In 1949, by which time military personnel in the directorate had returned to the GRU, forty-nine illegals were in training.52 Korotkov set up departments specializing in the selection of illegals, their training and the fabrication of documentation to support their legends. By 1952 the documentation department had forged or doctored 364 foreign identity documents, including seventy-eight passports. Illegal support (Line N) officers were sent by the Centre to all major legal residencies.53
The Sword and the Shield Page 27
