McCarthyism reinforced the Centre’s belief in the importance of expanding its illegal presence on the territory of the Main Adversary. While legal residencies based in official Soviet missions were inevitably subject to increasingly sophisticated FBI surveillance, illegal residencies could operate freely so long as they remained unidentified. Since his arrival in the United States in 1947 “Willie” Fisher (MARK) had attracted no suspicion whatsoever—despite the fact that his agent, Theodore Hall, was interrogated by the FBI in 1951 after his identity was disclosed by the VENONA decrypts.13 The Centre also took seriously the possibility that illegal residencies might have to take over all intelligence operations if war or other crises led to the expulsion of Soviet missions and legal residencies. The preparations for a major expansion of the illegal residencies were enormously detailed. In 1954 the Illegals Directorate drew up plans for a network of 130 “documentation agents” whose sole responsibility was to obtain birth certificates, passports and other documents to support the illegals’ legends.14 Operations officers specializing in illegal documentation were posted in twenty-two Western and Third World residencies, as well as in China and all Soviet Bloc KGB liaison missions.15
There were, however, more serious obstacles than the Centre was willing to acknowledge than the expansion of its illegal networks. The age of the Great Illegals—brilliant cosmopolitans such as Deutsch and Maly, able to inspire others with their own visionary faith in the future of the Soviet system—had gone, never to return. Turning Soviet citizens brought up in the authoritarian, intellectually blinkered command economy of Stalin’s Russia into people who could pass as Westerners and cope successfully with life in the United States was to prove a daunting, as well as time-consuming, business. Recruiting high-flying ideologically committed American agents was also vastly more difficult during the Cold War than during the 1930s or the Second World War. The Soviet Union had lost much of its appeal even to young radical intellectuals alienated by the materialism and injustices of American society. It was deeply ironic that when McCarthy’s self-serving campaign against the Red Menace was at its height, Soviet penetration of the American government was at its lowest ebb for almost thirty years.
The Centre was further hampered by its own cumbersome bureaucracy, complicated during the final years of the Stalinist era by the rise and fall of the Committee of Information (KI) as the overseer of Soviet foreign intelligence.16 In the course of the Cold War, the organization of the Illegals Directorate changed eight times, and the role assigned to it was modified on fourteen different occasions.17 Aleksandr Korotkov, the head of the directorate during the first decade of the Cold War, had no experience of life in the West and little understanding of the problems faced by illegals in the United States. Few of his grandiose plans for illegal operations against the Main Adversary were ever realized.
Throughout the 1950s, the Centre struggled to establish even one more illegal residency in the United States to add to that of Fisher. The first attempt to found a second residency collapsed in ignominious failure, the recall in 1951 of Makayev (HARRY), the intended resident, and the disappearance of 9,000 dollars of KI funds. The next attempt was more cautious. Using a strategy which it was later to repeat, the Centre decided to send a potential illegal resident to Canada, wait until he was well established, and only then move him on to the more difficult terrain of the Main Adversary. The first Soviet illegal to use Canada as a staging post for the United States was the 30-year-old Yevgeni Vladimirovich Brik (codenamed HART), who landed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in November 1951 with instructions to take up residence in Montreal.
Brik had the great advantage of a bilingual education. From 1932 to 1937 he had been a pupil at the Anglo-American School in Moscow,18 subsequently spending several years in New York, where his father worked for Amtorg, the Soviet trade mission in the United States,19 before returning to serve in the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War. In 1948 Brik was instructed to cultivate Western pupils at his old school in order to test his suitability for intelligence work in North America. Having succeeded in that exercise to the Centre’s satisfaction, he began a two-year training course in 1949, covering ciphers, secret writing, use of short-wave radio, selection and use of dead letter-boxes, anti-surveillance precautions and methods of intelligence collection. Brik was also taught the trade of a watchmaker in order to enable him to start a small business in Canada. 20
For his journey to Canada, Brik adopted the identity of a Canadian “live double,” Ivan Vasilyevich Gladysh (codenamed FRED), recruited in July 1951 specifically to provide cover for him. On instructions from the Centre, Gladysh crossed the Atlantic to Britain, then traveled through France and West Germany to Vienna, where he met Brik. In Vienna Gladysh briefed Brik on the details of his life in Canada and his journey to Europe, then gave him his Canadian passport. Brik pasted his own photograph in the passport in place of Gladysh’s and set off across the Atlantic.21 After landing at Halifax, Brik took a train to Montreal and went to the station lavatories. On one of the cubicle doors he saw the chalk mark he had been told to expect. He went inside, removed the top of the cistern and found taped to the underside the birth certificate and other documents belonging to another “live double,” David Semyonovich Soboloff.22 Soboloff (codenamed SOKOL) had been born in Toronto in 1919 but at the age of sixteen had emigrated with his family to the Soviet Union. In 1951 he was working as a teacher at the Magnitogorsk Mining and Metallurgical Institute. For the remainder of his time in Canada Brik became David Soboloff. In July he obtained a passport in his name.23
Brik succeeded in persuading the Centre that there was no realistic possibility of establishing himself as a watchmaker in Montreal, and that he should open a oneman photographic studio instead. While in Montreal, he was instructed to begin making plans for emigration to the United States.24 Brik, however, proved an even more disastrous choice than Makayev as the potential head of an illegal American residency. Without telling the Centre, in October 1953 he began a passionate affair with the wife of a Canadian soldier living in Kingston, Ontario.25 In order not to break contact with her, Brik persuaded the Centre that it would be premature for him to move to the United States. Before long he admitted to his lover that he was a Russian spy living under a false identity and tried to persuade her to leave her husband. She refused but begged him to go to the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) and make a voluntary confession.26
In November 1953 Brik gave in to his lover’s pleas and telephoned the RCMP headquarters in Ottawa. Terry Guernsey, the head of the diminutive B (Counter-intelligence) Branch of the RCMP Security Service, decided to run Brik (codenamed GIDEON by B Branch) as a double agent in order to uncover as much as possible about Soviet intelligence operations in Canada. GIDEON proved unusually difficult to run, particularly when his lover broke off their affair, and his drinking ran periodically out of control. On one occasion, after consuming more than a bottle of Old Tom gin, he rang the Montreal Gazette and, to the horror of the RCMP officer monitoring his telephone calls, said in a drunken slur, “I’m a Russian spy. Do you want a story?” Like the Ottawa Journal which had turned away Gouzenko in September 1945, the Gazette failed to realize it was being offered the spy story exclusive of the decade and dismissed the caller as a drunk.27
Until the summer of 1955 it did not occur to the KGB that the illegal HART (Brik) might now be a double agent. Once it was satisfied that he had successfully established his bogus identity and cover profession in Montreal, the Centre proceeded to the next stage in his development as an illegal resident whose main role would be as an agent controller. Between 1951 and 1953 the Ottawa legal residency, spurred on by Moscow’s criticism of its inertia since the defection of Gouzenko, recruited eleven agents (all apparently fairly low-level) with the assistance of the Canadian Communist Party. Five were Communists and most supplied scientific and technological intelligence.28 By transferring some of the agents to an illegal controller, the Centre hoped to overcome the problems created by t
he RCMP security service’s surveillance of the Ottawa embassy.
By the time the KGB realized that Brik was under RCMP control, it had put him in touch with five agents. Three were male: LISTER, a Toronto Communist of Ukrainian origin born in 1919; LIND, an Irish-Canadian Communist employee of the A. V. Roe aircraft company, also resident in Toronto; and POMOSHCHNIK, the Communist owner of a radio and television sales and service business in Ottawa.29 The intelligence supplied by LIND included plans for the CF-105 Avro Arrow, then among the most advanced jet fighter aircraft in the world.30 Brik also knew the identities of EMMA and MARA, two female agents used as “live letterboxes” (LLBs) for communications with the Centre. EMMA, who had been recruited while studying at the Sorbonne in 1951, took the Canadian External Affairs Ministry entrance examination, but was unsuccessful. In 1954 she opened an arts and crafts shop in Quebec. MARA was a French fashion designer, born in 1939, the co-owner of a furniture shop in Paris who was used as an LLB for KGB communications from Canada.31
The Centre later concluded that Brik had betrayed all five of the agents with whom he had been put in contact. He was unaware, however, of the identity of Hugh Hambleton, ultimately the most important of the agents recruited by the Ottawa legal residency in the early 1950s. Hambleton had been born in Ottawa in 1922 and had spent some of his childhood in France, where his father was a Canadian press correspondent. During the Second World War he served as an intelligence officer with the Free French in Algiers and, after the Liberation, in Paris, before becoming French liaison officer with the US army’s 103rd Division in Europe. In 1945 he transferred to the Canadian army and spent a year based in Strasbourg analyzing intelligence on occupied Germany, and interrogating prisoners-of-war. Unsurprisingly, the post-war years seemed dull by comparison. “To be important, to have people pay attention to you,” he once said, “that is what counts in life.”32 The KGB gave him the recognition which he craved.
Hambleton’s KGB file reveals for the first time that he emerged from the war as a committed Communist and was talent-spotted by the Centre’s “Canadian friends.” Harry Baker, one of the Canadian Communist leaders, picked him out at Party meetings and later vouched for his ideological reliability. Another Party member, codenamed SVYASHCHENIK (“Priest”), carried out background checks on him. In 1952 Hambleton was recruited as a Soviet agent by the Ottawa resident, Vladimir Trofimovich Burdin, and given the codename RIMEN (later changed to RADOV). Two years later Hambleton moved to Paris where he began postgraduate research in economics at the Sorbonne. In 1956 he gained a job in the economics directorate of NATO, whose headquarters were then on the outskirts of Paris. Over the next five years Hambleton handed over what his KGB file describes as “a huge quantity of documents,” most of which were assessed by the Centre as “valuable or extremely valuable in content.”33 Though Brik was unaware of his existence, Hambleton was eventually betrayed twenty years later by another Soviet illegal.34
Early in 1955, probably as part of its preparations to transfer Brik to the United States, the Centre made plans to move another illegal resident, codenamed ZHANGO, to Canada. ZHANGO was a 49-year-old Russian, Mikhail Ivanovich Filonenko, who had been given the genuine birth certificate, and had assumed the identity, of Joseph Ivanovich Kulda. Born on July 7, 1914 in Alliance, Ohio, Kulda had emigrated to Czechoslovakia with his parents in 1922. Filonenko’s wife, Anna Fyodorovna (codenamed successively MARTA and YELENA), took the identity of Mariya Navotnaya, a Czech born on October 10, 1920 in Manchuria. Anna was Czech on her father’s side; before marrying Filonenko she had spent two years in Czechoslovakia perfecting her grasp of the language and improving her legend. Posing as Czechoslovak refugees, the Filonenkos were initially unsuccessful in their applications for Canadian visas, but with the help of the UN Refugees Commission (later the UNHCR) gained entry to Brazil in 1954.35 In 1955 the Centre made plans to move Filonenko on to join Brik in Canada, where he was to have the new codename HECTOR. Brik duly informed the RCMP of HECTOR’s planned arrival.36
The KGB was saved in the nick of time from a major intelligence disaster, which, it believed, would have included the arrest and show trial of Filonenko, by a walk-in to the Ottawa residency. On July 21, 1955 a heavily indebted 39-year-old RCMP corporal, James Morrison, who for some years had taken part in surveillance of the Ottawa embassy, got in touch with Burdin’s successor as resident, Nikolai Pavlovich Ostrovsky (codenamed GOLUBEV), and reported that Brik had been “turned” eighteen months earlier. He was acting, he claimed, out of sympathy for the USSR and a desire to prevent a repetition of the Gouzenko affair which had done so much damage to Soviet-Canadian relations ten years earlier. Morrison’s request for 5,000 dollars, however, provides a better indication of his motives.37 Unknown to Ostrovsky, he had already been caught embezzling RCMP funds with which he hoped to pay off the debts caused by his taste for high living. Remarkably, instead of being sacked, Morrison was allowed to refund the money he had stolen. Ironically, he was to use money from the KGB to repay the RCMP.38
The Centre initially suspected that the intelligence from Morrison (later code-named FRIEND) was an elaborate “provocation” by the RCMP, but decided to interrogate Brik in Moscow. Fortunately for the KGB, it had already been decided in June that Brik would travel to the Soviet Union for a holiday and reunite with his wife later in the summer.39 Though understandably nervous at the thought of returning to Moscow, he appears to have been confident of his ability to continue to outwit the KGB.40 Before leaving Canada, Brik was briefed by Charles Sweeny of the RCMP and Leslie Mitchell, the SIS liaison officer in Washington, and asked to find out what he could about the fate of Burgess and Maclean, as well as to identify as many KGB officers as possible during his visit. They told him that if he needed assistance in Moscow it would be provided by the British SIS, since Canada had no foreign intelligence service. He was given details of one rendezvous point with an SIS officer, the location of two dead letter-boxes and signal sites to indicate when a DLB had been filled. If it became necessary to arrange an escape, SIS would leave in a DLB a short-wave radio, money, a pistol with silencer, false Soviet passports for himself and his wife, the internal travel documents needed to go to the town of Pechenga near the Soviet-Norwegian border and a map showing where to cross the frontier.41
The Centre took great care not to arouse Brik’s suspicions before his departure. His first stop, arranged in June, was in Brazil, where he was due to meet Filonenko (HECTOR) on August 7. Filonenko was warned not to attend the meeting, but the prearranged rendezvous was kept under KGB observation. When Brik arrived on August 7, the KGB watchers reported that he had two companions, thus providing strong circumstantial evidence that he was now a double agent. Apparently undeterred by Filonenko’s failure to meet him, Brik continued to Moscow via Paris and Helsinki. The residents in both capitals were ordered to give him a friendly welcome and discuss with him the travel arrangements for his return to Canada. A KGB strong-arm man was, however, sent to Finland in case Brik had any last-minute doubts about going to Moscow. If necessary, a Soviet agent in the Finnish police agreed to arrange for his expulsion to the Soviet Union.42
On August 19, 1955 Brik arrived at Moscow airport and was immediately arrested. He at first denied that he was a double agent, but his file records that he subsequently broke under “pressure” and “told all.”43 His confession confirmed everything reported to the Ottawa residency by James Morrison (FRIEND), who was then paid the 5,000 dollars he had asked for. Morrison volunteered for further payment what the Centre considered “valuable” information about the organization, personnel and operations of the RCMP and, in particular, its security service.44
On September 4, 1956, at a closed session of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court, Brik was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. The fact that he escaped the death penalty was presumably due to his cooperation in what his file describes as “an operational game.” Brik was not allowed to meet any member of the SIS station in the Moscow embassy, probably for
fear that he would blurt out what had happened to him, but instructed to arrange a rendezvous which he did not keep. By keeping the rendezvous site under surveillance, the KGB was able to identify Daphne (later Baroness) Park, the member of the British embassy who turned up there, as an SIS officer. During the “operational game” Brik was allowed to live at home with his family in order to try to give SIS the impression that he was still at liberty. The KGB discovered, probably by bugging his apartment, that he tried unsuccessfully to persuade his wife to flee abroad.45
Morrison continued for three years to work as a Soviet agent. Including the 5,000 dollars he received for betraying Brik, he was paid a total of 14,000 dollars by the KGB. The Centre, however, became increasingly dissatisfied with the quality of the information he supplied. In September 1955 Morrison was posted to Winnipeg as part of a unit investigating drug smuggling from the United States, and lost much of his previous access to RCMP intelligence. His last meeting with a Soviet controller took place on December 7, 1957. Morrison asked for help in paying off a debt of 4,800 dollars. The deputy resident in Ottawa, Rem Sergeevich Krasilnikov (ARTUR), however, paid him only 150 dollars and told him that he would need to arrange a transfer to Ottawa and get better access to RCMP intelligence if he wished to earn more money. Morrison failed to turn up to his next pre-arranged meeting with Krasilnikov and broke off further contact with the KGB. In 1958 the Ottawa residency discovered from press reports that Morrison had been dismissed from the RCMP and given a two-year suspended sentence for fraud.46
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