34. Melgounov, The Red Terror in Russia. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 646-9. The files for the period noted by Mitrokhin (mostly on foreign intelligence) make only indirect references to the atrocities of the civil war.
35. Speech by Lenin, December 23, 1921; text in Tsvigun et al., V.I. Lenin i VChK, pp. 534f.
36. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War, p. 424. The Dzerzhinsky Archive is Fond 76 in the All-Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Modern History in Moscow.
37. Volkogonov, Lenin, p. 239.
38. Tsvigun et al (eds.), V.I. Lenin i VChK, no. 198. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, p. 69.
39. Pipes (ed.), The Unknown Lenin, pp. 127-9.
40. vol. 6, ch. 1, part 1, n. 1.
41. Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, pp. 416-19.
42. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 99-100; Samolis (ed.), Veterany Vneshnei Razvedki Rossii, pp. 142-3; West and Tsarev, The Crown Jewels, p. 5.
43. Tsvigun et al (eds.), Lenin i VChK, no. 390. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 91-4.
44. West and Tsarev, The Crown Jewels, p. 5.
45. Tsvigun et al. (eds.), V.I. Lenin i VChK, no. 437.
46. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War, pp. 334-56. Leggett, The Cheka, pp. 334-8, 464-6.
47. k-9,87.
48. The first of five foreign intelligence priorities set out in INO instructions of November 28, 1922 was “The exposure on the territory of each state of counter-revolutionary groups who are waging both active and passive activity against the interests of the RSFSR and also against the international revolutionary movement.” vol. 7, ch. 1.
49. Mitrokhin’s handwritten note (k-9,87) makes it difficult to determine whether the date was June 16 or 26. Since Zavarny crossed into Romania on June 15 to negotiate details of Tutyunnik’s return with him, it seems highly unlikely, particularly in view of earlier delays, that this could have taken place as early as June 16. Because CASE 39 was run by the internal departments of the OGPU, the file was kept in the special archival collections of the Second Chief Directorate, to which Mitrokhin did not have access. He was, however, able to note a classified history of the operation which was based on, and quoted, the CASE 39 file.
50. k-9,87. During the 1930s an illegal residency in Germany, headed by I. M. Kaminsky (codenamed MOREZ and MOND), specialized in operations against Ukrainian émigrés (vol. 7, ch. 9, paras. 1-2; vol. 6, ch. 5, part 1). The Administration for Special Tasks also carried out the assassination of several leading Ukrainian nationalists (Sudoplatovs, Special Tasks, chs. 1, 2).
51. vol. 6, ch. 8, part 6.
52. vol. 6, ch. 5, part 1, n. 1. Though Mitrokhin read a number of classified studies of the TREST and SINDIKAT operations, he did not have access to the files on them. Since the operations were run by the internal departments of the OGPU, their files—like that for CASE 39—were kept in the special archival collections (spetsfondi) of the Second Chief Directorate.
53. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 111-12. Costello and Tsarev, Deadly Illusions, pp. 33-4.
54. vol. 6, ch. 8, part 1. On the previous careers of Syroyezhkin and Fyodorov, see Samolis (ed.), Veterany Vneshnei Razvedki Rossii, pp. 138-40, 147-9.
55. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 112-13.
56. k-4,199.
57. Costello and Tsarev, Deadly Illusions, p. 35.
58. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, p. 114.
59. The complex use of multiple aliases for the same individual in the 37-volume TREST file, together with the baffling mixture of fact and invention recorded in it, confused a number of the KGB officers and historians who studied it over the years.
60. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 115-17.
61. Costello and Tsarev, Deadly Illusions, pp. 35-41 (based on partial access to the KGB TREST file); and photograph (following p. 258) of Reilly’s corpse on display in the Lubyanka sickbay. Cf. Primakov et al., Ocherki Istorii Rossiyskoi Vneshnei Razvedki, vol. 2, pp. 121ff. The brief SVR biography of Syroyezhkin identifies him as “especially prominent in the arrests of the subversive White Guard organization of B. Savinkov” and “an active participant in operation TREST during which the British agent S. Reilly was detained and arrested in September 1925.” Samolis (ed.), Veterany Vneshnei Razvedki Rossii, p. 139.
62. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 118-21; Costello and Tsarev, Deadly Illusions, pp. 40-2.
63. vol. 7, ch. 14, item 1. Italian-Soviet diplomatic relations, broken after the Revolution, were not resumed until 1924, when the first legal residency was founded within the newly established Soviet diplomatic mission. The residency officer credited by KGB files with Constantini’s recruitment was Sheftel, codenamed DOCTOR. Mitrokhin’s notes give no further details on him. In 1997-8 the SVR gave privileged access to selected parts of Constantini’s file to the authors of two histories of Soviet intelligence operations: Primakov et al., Ocherki Istorii Rossiyskoi Vneshnei Razvedki, vol. 3, ch. 13; and West and Tsarev, The Crown Jewels, ch. 5. Primakov et al. do not reveal Constantini’s real name; West and Tsarev mistakenly refer to him as Costantini.
64. KGB files radically revise previous interpretations of leaks from the Rome embassy. A 1937 inquiry conducted by Valentine Vivian, head of SIS counter-intelligence, considered only leakage of classified documents to Italian intelligence. Though it was later discovered that some information had also gone to the OGPU/NKVD, the Foreign Office seems never to have realized that the original penetration was by the OGPU.
65. vol. 7, ch. 14, item 1.
66. Primakov et al., Ocherki Istorii Rossiyskoi Vneshnei Razvedki, vol. 3, ch. 13.
67. West and Tsarev, The Crown Jewels, pp. 94-9. Though Litvinov did not become Commissar for Foreign Affairs until 1930, Izvestia later noted that he had been “de facto head of our foreign policy from 1928.” Haslam, Soviet Foreign Policy, 1930-33, p. 10.
68. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, p. 126. On the Crémet spyring, see Faligot and Kauffer, As-tu vu Crémet?
69. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 126-7.
70. Professor Matsokin was succeeded at a date not recorded in Mitrokhin’s notes by another Japanese specialist, Kim Roman, an ethnic Korean from Nikolsk-Ussuriysk (k-9,73). Neither is mentioned in the account of the Tanaka memorandum episode in Primakov et al., Ocherki Istorii Rossiyskoi Vneshnei Razvedki, vol. 2, ch. 32.
71. k-9,73.
72. k-9,119. The official SVR history does not refer to ANO.
73. k-9,73. On the publication of the Tanaka memorandum, see Klehr, Haynes and Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism, pp. 52-3. The published version of the memorandum has been regarded by some scholars, unaware of the OGPU’s success at this period in intercepting Japanese communications in Harbin and Seoul, as a forgery fabricated by the OGPU. The KGB record of its interception, however, describes it as genuine. It is possible, though Mitrokhin discovered no evidence of this, that the published version was doctored to improve its propaganda value.
74. Primakov et al., Ocherki Istorii Rossiyskoi Vneshnei Razvedki, vol. 2, p. 257.
75. Article by Stalin of July 23, 1927, in Degras (ed.), Documents on Soviet Foreign Policy, vol. 2, pp. 233-5. The article also reflected alarm at the massacres of Chinese Communists by their former allies, the nationalist Kuomintang.
76. vol. 7, ch. 9, item 1. There is interesting detail on the Ilk-Weinstein residency in West and Tsarev, The Crown Jewels, ch. 3. The authors do not, however, appear to have had access to all the files seen by Mitrokhin, and conclude that the residency of Ilk and “Wanshtein” (sic—presumably a literal retransliteration from the Cyrillic) was “extremely effective” and pay tribute to “Ilk’s great organizational skill.” This judgment is somewhat at variance with the authors’ acknowledgement that the quality of the residency’s abundant British intelligence “left much to be desired”; the documents which they cite on Ilk’s attempts to excuse the quality of the intelligence probably deserve a less charitable interpretation. Both Ilk and Weinstein are conspicuous b
y their absence from the biographies of seventy-five foreign intelligence heroes published by the SVR in 1995 on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Cheka’s foreign department. Since the “Great Illegals” of the inter-war period are included, the SVR evidently accepts that Ilk and Weinstein were not among them.
77. Trotsky, My Life, pp. 539ff; Deutscher, Trotsky, vol. 2, pp. 392-4; Volkogonov, Trotsky, pp. 305ff.
78. A “special courier,” whom he refused to identify in his memoirs, delivered an additional eight or nine secret batches of correspondence from Moscow which, he claimed, kept him informed of “everything that was going on” in the capital. Trotsky replied to his Moscow informants by the same secret channel (Trotsky, My Life, p. 556). The KGB archives identify the “special courier” as a member of the carters’ cooperative which transported freight between Alma-Ata and the nearest railway station in Frunze. OGPU surveillance teams reported that the carter would meet Trotsky’s wife or elder son in the Alma-Ata market place, unobtrusively slip into their shopping baskets messages which had arrived at Frunze by the Trans-Siberian Express and collect the replies. vol. 6, ch. 3, part 1.
79. Volkogonov, Trotsky, p. 312. Menzhinsky became head of OGPU on Dzerzhinsky’s death in 1927.
80. vol. 6, ch. 3, part 1.
81. Deutscher, Trotsky, vol. 3, pp. 1-3.
82. k-4,198.
83. Ostryakov, Voyennye Chekisty, ch. 2. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, p. 170. In this instance, the published KGB version of events (summarized by Ostryakov) agrees with its archival record (vol. 6, ch. 3, part 1). Volkogonov suggests that Blyumkin “was guilty of nothing more than having visited Trotsky” (Trotsky, p. 329), but overlooks the fact that Trotsky himself later acknowledged that Blyumkin was “trying to establish a connection between Trotsky and his co-thinkers in the USSR.” Article signed “G. Gourov” [Trotsky] in La Voix Communiste, October 30, 1932; Vereeken, The GPU in the Trotskyist Movement, p. 13.
84. There is a sanitized version of Gorskaya’s career in Samolis (ed.), Veterany Vneshnei Razvedki Rossii, pp. 53-5.
85. Agabekov, OGPU, pp. 202-3, 207-8, 219-21, 238-40. Poretsky, Our Own People, pp. 146-7. Orlov, The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes, pp. 200-3. There are minor discrepancies between these memoirs, based on the authors’ varying personal knowledge of the affair. All agree, however, on Blyumkin’s meeting with Trotsky, Gorskaya’s involvement and Blyumkin’s execution. The records noted by Mitrokhin contain no details of Blyumkin’s recall to Moscow or of his interrogation; they mention only Blyumkin’s attempt to set up “a line of communication for Trotsky with the Trotskyites in Moscow” and his subsequent execution. vol. 6, ch. 3, part 1.
86. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 165-6.
87. k-4,198,206.
88. Sudoplatovs, Special Tasks, pp. 32, 58. On its foundation in 1926, the Administration for Special Tasks had been intended chiefly to prepare for and execute sabotage operations behind enemy lines in time of war. On post-war “special tasks,” see chapters 22-3.
89. Costello and Tsarev, Deadly Illusions, p. 439, n. 37.
90. k-4,198,206; the Kutepov operation is referred to in these files as “the liquidation of G.”
91. k-4,199.
92. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 166-8.
Chapter Three
The Great Illegals
1. vol. 7, ch. 9.
2. vol. 6, ch. 12.
3. In 1930 there was no legal residency in the United States and only one illegal residency, staffed by four OGPU officers and four illegal agents. Much of the Centre’s interest in the USA at this stage lay in the possibilities for operations against Germany and Japan offered by its large communities of expatriate Germans and Japanese. vol. 6, ch. 8, part 1.
4. vol. 7, ch. 9. The aim in 1930, never completely fulfilled, was to establish several illegal residencies in every major target country. By contrast, no country in the 1930s contained more than one legal residency.
5. vol. 7, ch. 9, para. 4.
6. vol. 7, ch. 9.
7. The most recent and best-documented biography of Sorge is Whymant, Stalin’s Spy. Though a Fourth Department (later GRU) illegal, Sorge was still being cited by the KGB in talks with Western Communist leaders during the 1970s as representing the kind of illegal it wished to recruit.
8. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 46-50. See the forthcoming study of Tsarist diplomacy by Barbara Emerson, the first historian to gain full access to the dossiers secrets of decrypts in the archives of the Tsarist foreign ministry.
9. See above, chapter 2.
10. As with many other inter-war operations, the record of Bystroletov’s foreign intelligence missions is incomplete. The main documents seen by Mitrokhin were a post-war memoir written by Bystroletov, some contemporary correspondence on his operations exchanged between the Center and residencies, and the 26-volume file on one of his leading agents, Ernest Holloway Oldham (ARNO). Though Bystroletov’s memoir is colorfully written, some—but not all—of the main events recorded in it can be corroborated from other sources. The SVR has given partial access to its records on Bystroletov for the writing of two books co-authored by the former KGB officer Oleg Tsarev (now an SVR consultant) and Western historians: Costello and Tsarev, Deadly Illusions; and West and Tsarev, The Crown Jewels.
11. Samolis (ed.), Veterany Vneshnei Razvedki Rossii, pp. 19-21. The account of Bystroletov’s career in the 1997 SVR official history also omits much that is of importance about it, including the identities of his main British agents. Primakov et al., Ocherki Istorii Rossiyskoi Vneshnei Razvedki, ch. 22.
12. vol. 7, ch. 9, para. 16. The file noted by Mitrokhin identifies LAROCHE, in Cyrillic transliteration, as Eliana Aucouturier, born 1898. Samolis (ed.), Veterany Vneshnei Razvedki Rossii, says simply that Bystroletov “successfully cultivated a secretary at the French embassy who had access to secret correspondence and ciphers of the French foreign ministry” (p. 19), but does not give the secretary’s name or codename, or refer to her seduction.
13. vol. 7, ch. 9.
14. The accounts of Bystroletov’s career published by the SVR in 1995 and 1997, as well as the material supplied by the SVR for two books co-authored by the former KGB officer Oleg Tsarev and Western historians, do not mention that Bystroletov was not an OGPU/NKVD officer. Mitrokhin discovered, on examining Bystroletov’s records, that he was simply an agent (vol. 7, ch. 9, para. 38). Even when fully rehabilitated in 1956, after spending sixteen years in prison from 1938 to 1954 as an innocent victim of the Stalinist terror, Bystroletov was denied a KGB pension on the grounds that he had never held officer rank. Since the SVR now portrays him as one of the main pre-war heroes of Soviet foreign intelligence, it is evidently embarrassed to admit his lowly status.
15. Though based in Berlin, Bazarov’s residency operated against a number of countries, including—from 1929—Britain. Other illegals in the residency included Teodor Maly and D. A. Poslendy, vol. 7, ch. 1.
16. vol. 7, ch. 9, paras. 24-30. De Ry later also came to the attention of the French Deuxième Bureau as “un trafiquant de codes” with access to Italian ciphers (Paillole, Notre espion chez Hitler, p. 223).
17. vol. 7, ch. 9, para. 26. Though not present at this first encounter with ROSSI, Bystroletov was given details of it by the Paris residency in order to help track him down.
18. In Bystroletov’s account (vol. 7, ch. 9, para. 26), the official who spoke to the walk-in at the Paris embassy is identified only as “a senior comrade.” Other fragmentary accounts of the same episode indicate that the comrade was Vladimir Voynovich, aka Yanovich and Volovich: Bessedovsky, Revelations of a Soviet Diplomat, pp. 247-8; Corson and Crowley, The New KGB, pp. 433-5; Costello and Tsarev, Deadly Illusions, p. 198.
19. vol. 7, ch. 9, para. 27. The photographer of the ciphers was identified as Voynovich’s wife by the defector Grigori Besedovsky, then a senior diplomat in the Soviet embassy. Bessedovsky, Revelations, p. 247.
20. vol. 7, ch. 9. Corson and Crowley, The New KG
B, pp. 140ff confuses the de Ry and Oldham cases, and claims that Oldham too was successfully defrauded. The authors, who had no access to KGB files, do not identify de Ry by name or codename and refer to Oldham as “Scott.” Andrew and Gordievsky, (KGB, pp. 195-6) identify Oldham but follow Corson and Crowley in suggesting that he was defrauded by Voynovich. Surprisingly, Costello and Tsarev, despite their access to KGB documents, make no mention of de Ry and claim inaccurately in their paragraph on Oldham that he “was thrown out on his ear” by Voynovich, who “evidently suspected a British provocation plot” (Deadly Illusions, p. 198).
21. Besedovsky’s memoirs, Na Putiakh k Termidoru, were published in Russian, French and German in 1930; an abridged English translation (in which the author’s name is transliterated as “Bessedovslay”) appeared in 1931. His insulting references to Stalin make the hypothesis that he was a bogus defector planted on the West untenable. There is, however, some indication that in the course of a sometimes bizarre life in exile, Besedovsky did co-operate to some degree with Soviet intelligence after the Second World War.
22. vol. 7, ch. 9.
23. The corrupt Italian diplomat was successively codenamed PATRON, CARTRIDGE and PATTERN by Soviet intelligence; vol. 7, ch. 9.
24. vol. 7, ch. 9.
25. vol. 7, ch. 9.
26. The only real post with which the non-existent position of head of intelligence at the Foreign Office might conceivably have been confused was that of head of political intelligence in SIS and liaison officer with the Foreign Office. The holder of that post from 1921 to early in the Second World War, however, was Major Malcolm Woollcombe.
27. vol. 7, ch. 9.
28. Mitrokhin found no note in the file querying the story.
29. vol. 7, ch. 9.
30. vol. 7, ch. 9, paras. 30-1. French intelligence records provide corroboration of both Lemoine’s friendship with de Ry and their common interest in obtaining foreign diplomatic ciphers; Paillole, Notre espion chez Hitler, p. 223.
31. On Lemoine’s career with the Deuxième Bureau and recruitment of Schmidt, see Paillole, Notre espion chez Hitler, p. 223.
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