The first priority of the Fourth Directorate was the creation of a new illegal residency in New York to rebuild its American intelligence operations. The man selected as illegal resident, the first since Akhmerov’s departure from the United States at the beginning of 1946, was Vilyam (“Willie”) Genrikhovich Fisher, codenamed MARK, probably the only English-born Soviet intelligence officer.54 Fisher’s parents were Russian revolutionaries of the Tsarist era who had emigrated in 1901 to Newcastleon-Tyne, where Vilyam had been born in 1903.55 In 1921 the family returned to Moscow, where Fisher became a Comintern translator. During military service in 1925-6, he was trained as a radio operator and, after a brief period in the Fourth Department (Military Intelligence), was recruited by INO (OGPU foreign intelligence) in 1927. He served as a radio operator in residencies in Norway, Turkey, Britain and France until 1936, when he was appointed head of a training school for radio operators in illegal residencies.56
Fisher was fortunate not to be shot during the Great Terror. His file records that, as well as being automatically suspect because of his English background, he had been “referred to in positive terms” by a series of “enemies of the people,” and his wife’s brother was accused of being a Trotskyite. Though dismissed by the NKVD at the end of 1938, he survived to be reemployed during the Great Patriotic War in a unit training radio operators for guerrilla and intelligence operations behind German lines.57
Fisher’s training as an illegal began in 1946 under the personal supervision of Korotkov, the head of the MGB Illegals Department. His legend was unusually complicated. Fisher assumed one identity during his journey to the United States in 1948 and another shortly after his arrival. The first identity was that of Andrei Yurgesovich Kayotis, a Lithuanian born in 1895 who had emigrated to the United States and become an American citizen. In November 1947 Kayotis crossed the Atlantic to visit relatives in Europe. While he was in Denmark, the Soviet embassy issued a travel document enabling him to visit Russia and retained his passport for use by Fisher. In October 1948 Fisher traveled to Warsaw on a Soviet passport, then traveled on Kayotis’s passport via Czechoslovakia and Switzerland to Paris, where he purchased a transatlantic ticket on the SS Scythia. On November 6 he set sail from Le Havre to Quebec, traveled on to Montreal and—still using Kayotis’s passport—crossed into the United States on November 17.58
On November 26 Fisher had a secret meeting in New York with the celebrated Soviet illegal I. R. Grigulevich (codenamed MAKS), who had taken part in the first attempt to assassinate Trotsky in Mexico City and had led a Latin American sabotage group during the war attacking ships and cargoes bound for Germany.59 Grigulevich gave Fisher 1,000 dollars and three documents in the name of Emil Robert Goldfus: a genuine birth certificate, a draft card forged by the Centre and a tax certificate (also forged). Fisher handed back Kayotis’s documents and became Goldfus. The real Goldfus, born in New York on August 2, 1902, had died at the age of only fourteen months. Fisher’s file records that his birth certificate had been obtained by the NKVD in Spain at the end of the Spanish Civil War, at a time when it was collecting identity documents from members of the International Brigades for use in illegal operations, but gives no other details of its provenance. According to the legend constructed by the Centre, Goldfus was the son of a German house painter in New York, had spent his childhood at 120 East 87th Street, left school in 1916 and worked in Detroit until 1926. After further periods in Grand Rapids, Detroit and Chicago, the legendary Goldfus had returned to New York in 1947. The legend, however, was far from perfect. The Centre instructed Fisher not to seek employment for fear that his employer would make inquiries which would blow his cover. Instead, he was told to open an artist’s studio and claim to be self-employed.60 As Fisher mingled with other New York artists, his technique gradually improved and he became a competent, if rather conventional, painter. He surprised friends in the artistic community with his admiration for the late nineteenth-century Russian painter Levitan, of whom they had never heard, but made no mention of Stalinist “socialist realism,” with which he was probably also in sympathy. Fisher made no secret of his dislike for abstract painting. “You know,” he told another artist, “I think most contemporary art is headed down a blind alley.”61
In 1949, as the basis of his illegal residency, Fisher was given control of a group of agents headed by Morris Cohen (codenamed LUIS and VOLUNTEER), which included his wife Lona (LESLE).62 Following Elizabeth Bentley’s defection, the Centre had temporarily broken contact with the Cohens early in 1946, but renewed contact with them in Paris a year later and reactivated them in the United States in 1948.63 The most important agent in the VOLUNTEER network was the physicist Ted Hall (MLAD), for whom Lona Cohen had acted as courier in 1945 when he was passing atomic intelligence from Los Alamos.64 Early in 1948, Hall, then working for his PhD at Chicago University, had joined the Communist Party together with his wife Joan, apparently with the intention of abandoning work as a Soviet agent and working for the campaign of the Progressive candidate, the naively pro-Soviet Henry Wallace, in the presidential election.65 Morris Cohen, however, persuaded Hall to return to espionage. On August 2, 1948 the Washington residency telegraphed the Centre:
LUIS has met MLAD. He has persuaded him to break contact with the Progressive organization and concentrate on science. Important information obtained on MLAD’s two new contacts. They have declared their wish to transmit data on ENORMOZ [the nuclear program], subject to two conditions: MLAD must be their only contact and their names must not be known to officers of ARTEMIS [Soviet intelligence].66
The VOLUNTEER network expanded to include, in addition to MLAD, three other agents: ADEN, SERB and SILVER.67 Two of these were undoubtedly the two nuclear physicists contacted by Hall. Though their identities remain unknown, the Centre clearly regarded their intelligence as of the first importance. According to an SVR history, “the Volunteer group… were able to guarantee the transmittal to the Centre of supersecret information concerning the development of the American atomic bomb.”68
In recognition of the VOLUNTEER group’s success, Fisher was awarded the Order of Red Banner in August 1949.69 A year later, however, his illegal residency was disrupted by the arrest of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, for whom Lona Cohen had acted as courier. Both the Cohens were quickly withdrawn to Mexico, where they were sheltered for several months by the Soviet agents OREL (“Eagle”) and FISH—both members of the Spanish Communist Party in exile70—before moving on to Moscow. The Cohens were to resurface a few years later, under the names Peter and Helen Kroger, as members of a new illegal residency in Britain.71 Hall’s career as a Soviet spy was also interrupted. In March 1951 he was questioned by an FBI team which was convinced that he was guilty of espionage but lacked the evidence for a prosecution. 72
Under his later alias “Rudolf Abel,” Fisher was to become one of the best-known of all Soviet illegals, whose career was publicized by the KGB as a prime example of the success and sophistication of its operations in the West during the Cold War. In reality, Fisher never came close to rivaling the achievements of his wartime predecessor, Iskhak Akhmerov. During eight years as illegal resident, he appears never to have identified, let alone recruited, a single promising potential agent to replace the VOLUNTEER network.73 Unlike Akhmerov, however, he did not have the active and enthusiastic assistance of a well-organized American Communist Party (CPUSA) to act as talent-spotters and assistants. Part of the reason for Fisher’s lack of success was the post-war decline and persecution of the CPUSA.74
THE MOST IMPORTANT American agent recruited during the early Cold War, Aleksandr (“Sasha”) Grigoryevich Kopatzky, was a walk-in. Kopatzky had been born in the city of Surozh in Bryansk Oblast in 1923,75 and had served as a lieutenant in Soviet intelligence from August 1941 until he was wounded and captured by the Germans in December 1943. While in a German hospital he agreed to work for German intelligence. During the last two months of the war he served as an intelligence officer in General Andrei Vlasov’s
anti-Soviet Russian Army of Liberation which fought the Red Army in alliance with the Wehrmacht. At the end of the war, Kopatzky was briefly imprisoned by the American authorities in the former concentration camp at Dachau.76
Despite his service in the NKVD, Kopatzky’s anti-Soviet credentials seemed so well established that he was invited to join the American-supervised German intelligence service established in 1946 at Pullach, near Munich, by General Reinhard Gehlen, the former Wehrmacht intelligence chief on the eastern front.77 In 1948 Kopatzky further distanced himself from his Soviet past by marrying the daughter of a former SS officer, Eleonore Stirner, who had been briefly imprisoned for her activities in the Hitler Youth. Eleonore later recalled that her husband “drank a lot of vodka. He kissed ladies’ hands… He was very punctual, shined his shoes, did his gymnastics in the morning, had a neat haircut, short hair all his life. And he was a very good shot. Sasha liked to hunt and talked of hunting tigers in Siberia with his father.” Many years later, after Sasha’s death, it suddenly occurred to Eleonore, while watching a televised adaptation of a John Le Carré novel, that her husband might have married her to improve his cover. That realization, she says, “came like a mountain of bricks on me.”78 By their wedding day Kopatzky was probably already planning to renew contact with Soviet intelligence.
The SVR still regards the Kopatzky case as extremely sensitive. It insisted as recently as 1997 that no file exists which suggests that Kopatzky, under any of his aliases, ever engaged in “collaboration… with Soviet intelligence.”79 Mitrokhin, however, was able to take detailed notes from the bulky file which the SVR claims does not exist. The file reveals that in 1949 Kopatzky visited the Soviet military mission in Baden-Baden, and was secretly transported to East Berlin where he agreed to become a Soviet agent.80 Soon afterwards, he infiltrated the anti-Soviet émigré organization Union of the Struggle for Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (SBONR), based in Munich, which had close links with the CIA. In 1951, doubtless to his Soviet controllers’ delight, he was recruited by the CIA station in West Berlin as “principal agent.”81 Successively codenamed ERWIN, HERBERT and RICHARD by the Centre, Kopatzky received a monthly salary of 500 marks in addition to his income from the CIA. Among his earliest successes was, on November 5, 1951, to get one of his fellow CIA agents, the Estonian Vladimir Kivi (wrongly described in Kopatzky’s file as an “American intelligence chief”), drunk, transport him to East Berlin and hand him over to Soviet intelligence.82 Though Kopatzky was not a CIA staff officer and never worked at Agency headquarters, he did enormous damage to Agency operations in Germany for more than a decade.83 According to his file, no fewer than twenty-three KGB legal operational officers and one illegal “met and worked with him”—a certain indication of how highly the Centre rated him.84
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THROUGHOUT THE COLD WAR, Soviet intelligence regarded the United States as its “main adversary.” In second place at the beginning of the Cold War was the United States’s closest ally, the United Kingdom. In third position came France.85 Before the Second World War, France had been a major base for NKVD foreign operations. Her crushing defeat in June 1940, however, followed by the German occupation of northern France, the establishment of the collaborationist Vichy regime in the south (later also occupied by the Germans) and Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 drastically reduced the scope for Soviet penetration. The NKGB did, however, establish a strong presence within Communist sections of the French Resistance.
There were two main groups of Soviet agents in wartime France: one in Paris of about fifty Communists and fellow travelers headed by LEMOINE (transliterated into the Cyrillic alphabet as LEMONYE), and another of over twenty-five headed by HENRI, based on Toulouse, with, from 1941, a subgroup in Paris. According to KGB records, the LEMOINE group, most of whom believed they were working for the Communist Party rather than the NKGB, “was disbanded because of treachery.” Though six members of the HENRI group (KLOD, LUCIEN, MORIS, ROBERT and ZHANETTA) were caught and shot by the Germans, the core of the group survived. 86
At the end of the war Soviet intelligence had much greater freedom of action in France than in either the United States or Britain. The Parti Communiste Français (PCF) publicly congratulated itself on its undeniably heroic role in the wartime Resistance, proudly termed itself le parti des fusillés (“the party of the shot”), and greatly inflated the numbers of its fallen heroes. From August 1944, when General de Gaulle invited the PCF to join the Provisional Government, there were Communist ministers for the first time in French history. According to an opinion poll in May 1945, 57 percent of the population thought that the defeat of Germany was due principally to the Soviet Union (20 percent gave the most credit to the United States, 12 percent to Britain). In the elections of October 1945 the PCF, with 26 percent of the vote, emerged as the largest party in France. By the end of the year it had almost 800,000 members. Though support for the PCF had almost peaked, there were many who hoped—or feared, particularly after de Gaulle’s resignation early in 1946—that France was on the road to becoming a Communist-controlled “people’s democracy.” One socialist minister privately complained, “How many senior civil servants, even at the very top, are backing Communism to win!”87
The Centre’s first instructions to the newly re-established Paris residency after the Liberation, dated November 18, 1944, instructed it to profit from the “current favorable situation” to renew contact with the pre-war agent network and recruit new agents in the foreign and interior ministries, intelligence agencies and political parties and organizations. Inspired by the success of scientific and technological intelligence-gathering in Britain and the United States, the Centre sent further instructions on February 20, 1945, ordering the residency to extend its recruitment to the Pasteur and Curie Institutes and other leading research bodies.88 The appointment of the ardent Communist and Nobel Laureate Frédéric Joliot-Curie as the French government’s Director of Scientific Research doubtless delighted the Centre. Joliot-Curie assured Moscow that “French scientists… will always be at your disposal without asking for any information in return.”89
During 1945 the Paris residency sent 1,123 reports to Moscow, based on intelligence from seventy sources. Its operational problems derived not from any lack of agents but from a shortage of controllers. Up to February 1945 the residency had only three operational officers.90 In May MARCEL of the wartime HENRI group was instructed to set up a new group to assist in the penetration of the post-war foreign and domestic intelligence agencies, the foreign ministry and the political parties, and in re-establishing control over agents in the provinces.91 By November the number of operational officers in the Paris residency had increased to seven, supported by six technical staff, but there was to be no further increase for several years. In addition to recruiting new agents, the residency was ordered to check individually every agent recruited before the war. Unsurprisingly, its 1945 reports were criticized for lack of depth and insufficient attention to the most valuable agents.92
The next available statistics on the intelligence supplied by the Paris residency cover the period from July 1, 1946 to June 30, 1947, when it supplied 2,627 reports and documents, well over double the total for 1945. It also had some major recruiting successes. In 1944 WEST, recruited by HENRI from the Resistance in the previous year, joined the newly founded foreign intelligence agency the DGER (from January 1946 the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre Espionnage (SDECE)), working first on the British, then the Italian, desk. His file records that he provided “valuable information on the French, Italian and British intelligence services.” Though WEST (later renamed RANOL) was dismissed in 1945 and moved to a career in publishing, he retained contact with some of his former colleagues. RATYEN, the first of his recruits to be identified in the files noted by Mitrokhin, was dismissed from SDECE in 1946. In 1947 WEST recruited two, more important SDECE officers, codenamed CHOUAN (or TORMA) and NOR (or NORMAN).93
Soviet
penetration was assisted by the chronic infighting within SDECE. In May 1946 André Dewavrin (alias “Passy”), de Gaulle’s wartime intelligence chief and the first head of SDECE, was arrested on a charge of embezzlement of which he was later found innocent.94 For the next few years Dewavrin’s successor, Henri Ribière, and his deputy, Pierre Fourcaud, were engaged in such bitter feuding that Fourcaud was forced to deny accusations that he had sabotaged the brakes of Ribière’s car and caused a near fatal accident. On one occasion, during the fractious daily meeting of SDECE division heads, Ribière drove his deputy out of the room with his walking stick. As one SDECE officer complained, “[D]ivision heads, finding themselves with conflicting orders from their director and his deputy, did not know what to do.”95
In the year up to June 30, 1947, the Paris residency forwarded to the Centre 1,147 documents on the French intelligence services, 92 on French intelligence operations against the Soviet Union and 50 on other intelligence agencies.96 The files noted by Mitrokhin record that both CHOUAN and NOR worked on political intelligence (SDECE Section d’études politiques). CHOUAN was employed for a time in the American department of SDECE, but by 1949 was working on Soviet Bloc affairs. NOR specialized in intelligence on Italy.97 WEST was paid 30,000 francs a month by the Paris residency, and in 1957 was given 360,000 francs to buy a flat.98 Ivan Ivanovich Agayants, the Paris resident from 1946 to 1948, was fond of boasting of his success in penetrating SDECE. In a lecture at the Centre in 1952 he sneeringly described French intelligence as “that prostitute I put in my pocket.”99
Penetration of the Foreign Ministry at the Quai d’Orsay proved more difficult. During a visit to Moscow in June 1946, the Communist trade union leader Benoît Frachon reported pessimistically:
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