A Brief History of the Spy

by Simpson, Paul

  Cairncross was also at Bletchley at this point early in the Second World War, passing on information about German troop movements, and contributing to the Soviet victory at the Battle of Kursk. In 1944, he then moved across to MI6, working on the German desk at Section V, before moving to the Political Intelligence section, where he didn’t prosper so well, lacking Burgess’ or Maclean’s innate talents for getting along with people easily.

  Guy Burgess’ contributions to the Soviet war effort were in a different field, following his dismissal from SOE. He ended up working once more as a talks producer for the BBC, and even managed to get the author of his own inspiration, Ernst Henri, on the air, proclaiming how great the Soviet Union’s intelligence network was!

  Maclean was the only one of the Five not to have a distinguished war career – at least at first. He didn’t handle the strain of his double life well, and although he was part of the General Department of the Foreign Office, he seemed to lack energy, not helped by problems with his domestic life. However in Spring 1944, he was posted to Washington DC, and seemed to regain his previous enthusiasm. He had access to information about the Allies’ plans after the war ended, and also became involved with liaison with the atomic-bomb project. His wife was in New York, and he travelled there from Washington regularly to see her – and pass on information to Gorsky, who had crossed to the United States to handle Centre agents there. Of course, this meant that there was signals traffic between the various Soviet missions on the East Coast regarding his movements – something that would come back to haunt Maclean a few years later, and eventually cause the downfall of the entire Cambridge Magnificent Five.

  Compared with their British or Russian allies, the Americans were latecomers to the espionage field – partly, of course, because as of the start of the Second World War, the United States as an entity had only existed for just over 150 years.

  During the First World War, which America only entered in 1917, the Army’s G-2 section along with the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) had operated against pro-German groups, and American cryptologist Herbert O. Yardley helped to organize the US Army’s Cipher Bureau, known as MI-8. This had some notable successes against German agents operating in the US, but its peacetime operations were brought to a close in 1928 when incoming president Herbert Hoover’s new secretary of state Henry L. Stimson shut it down, stating that ‘Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail’.

  G-2 and the ONI continued to function between the wars, working in tandem with the newly created Federal Bureau of Intelligence (formerly the Department of Justice Bureau of Investigation) to keep an eye on actual and potential subversive elements, including the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). It seems they didn’t realize the scale of Soviet infiltration: the daughter of the American ambassador to Germany was an early recruit, while Congressman Samuel Dickstein, a key member of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, which was seeking to eradicate Nazism in the States, was on the NKVD books during the late thirties, and earned the nickname Crook for his financial demands.

  Inevitably there were overlapping operations between the various groups, but it was only after the outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939 that President Roosevelt decided to regularize the situation. In June 1940, internal security was divided between the various parties: the FBI remained in charge of civilian investigations, while G-2 and the ONI dealt with those involving the military (including defence plants that had major Army or Navy contracts). They would also be responsible for the Panama Canal Zone, the Philippines and major Army reservations.

  Despite the shutdown of the Cipher Bureau, code-breaking had continued to form a major part of the intelligence work of the US forces, and a debate continues to this day about how much was known by President Roosevelt about the impending attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. It seems probable that the president was not aware of the danger, but what is absolutely certain is that the men in charge in Hawaii were not up to speed with everything that Washington knew and didn’t take the appropriate action. The code-breakers would redeem the reputation of their profession by breaking the Japanese code known as JN25, which prevented the invasion of Northern Australia and gave US Fleet Admiral Nimitz a vital edge before the Battle of Midway.

  Five months before Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt appointed William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, a successful Wall Street lawyer and Medal of Honor winner, as Coordinator of Intelligence (COI). Donovan had spent the previous year liaising with William Stephenson, the Scottish-Canadian millionaire who became an unofficial channel for British influence in the States following the outbreak of war in Europe. Donovan became convinced that a central coordinated American intelligence agency was required, and his appointment as COI, consulting with the heads of the existing agencies and reporting directly to the president, was a major stepping-stone towards that.

  The declaration of war with Japan and Germany in December 1941 led to a division of the COI’s responsibilities, with its propaganda work transferred to the Office of War Information, and the rest incorporated into the new Office of Strategic Services (the OSS). Donovan remained in charge of this new organization, but instead of reporting to the president as formerly, he now answered to the military Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  The OSS was split into three divisions: the Special Intelligence division gathered intelligence from open sources, and from agents in the field. Allen Dulles was in charge of a crucial station in Bern, Switzerland, which supplied a lot of vital information regarding the Nazi rocket programme, and the German atomic bomb project. The Special Operations group was an equivalent to the British Special Operations Executive, and carried out many of the same functions, sometimes in tandem with the British, but on other occasions, as in Yugoslavia, working with different groups opposing the Nazis. The Morale Operations division used the radio station Soldat Ensender as a propaganda weapon against the German army. Many senior figures in American intelligence circles after the Second World War were OSS agents, including future CIA chiefs Allen Dulles and William Colby.

  Although the FBI were involved with what might be termed traditional activities during the war years – dealing with potential saboteurs and other threats to national security – they did operate their own Special Intelligence Service (confusingly referred to as the SIS by the Bureau) in Latin America. According to the FBI’s own history its role ‘was to provide information on Axis activities in South America and to destroy its intelligence and propaganda networks. Several hundred thousand Germans or German descendants and numerous Japanese lived in South America. They provided pro-Axis pressure and cover for Axis communications facilities. Nevertheless, in every South American country, the SIS was instrumental in bringing about a situation in which, by 1944, continued support for the Nazis became intolerable or impractical.’

  At much the same time as the heads of British Intelligence were contemplating what would happen once the Axis was defeated, William Donovan was considering the future for American Intelligence. In a memorandum to President Roosevelt on 18 November 1944 he wrote:

  Once our enemies are defeated, the demand will be equally pressing for information that will aid us in solving the problems of peace. This will require two things:

  1. That intelligence control be returned to the supervision of the President.

  2. The establishment of a central authority reporting directly to you, with responsibility to frame intelligence objectives and to collect and coordinate the intelligence material required by the Executive Branch in planning and carrying out national policy and strategy.

  This central authority would be led by a director reporting to the president, aided by an Advisory Board consisting of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, the Secretary of the Navy, and such other members as the President might subsequently appoint. Its primary aim would be to coordinate all intelligence efforts and the collection ‘either directly or through existing Government Departments and agencies, of pertinent infor
mation, including military, economic, political and scientific, concerning the capabilities, intentions and activities of foreign nations, with particular reference to the effect such matters may have upon the national security, policies and interests of the United States’.

  The memo was leaked to the press, and caused an uproar. Columnist Walter Trohan said that it would be ‘an all-powerful intelligence service to spy on the post-war world and to pry into the lives of citizens at home’ which ‘would operate under an independent budget and presumably have secret funds for spy works along the lines of bribing and luxury living described in the novels of [British spy novelist] E. Phillips Oppenhem’.

  Roosevelt took no action on Donovan’s suggestion, and, following the president’s death, his successor Harry S. Truman decided not to allow the OSS to continue post-war, fearing that it would become an ‘American Gestapo’. The order to disband was given on 20 September 1945, and the OSS ceased functioning a mere ten days later, with some of its key capabilities handed over to the War Department as the Strategic Services Unit.

  Yet only four months after he had seen fit to shut down America’s key central intelligence-gathering organization, President Truman signed an executive order establishing the Central Intelligence Group to operate under the direction of the National Intelligence Authority. What had changed?

  2

  A NEW REALPOLITIK

  ‘I can say even today that I do not think any insoluble differences will arise among Russia, Great Britain, and the United States,’ President Roosevelt informed the American people in his ‘fireside chat’ broadcast around the world on Christmas Eve, 1943, following meetings with his counterparts – British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Soviet leader Josef Stalin, and the Chinese Generalissimo, Chiang Kai-shek – in Cairo and Tehran. He went on to say:

  In these conferences we were concerned with basic principles – principles which involve the security and the welfare and the standard of living of human beings in countries large and small.

  To use an American and somewhat ungrammatical colloquialism, I may say that I ‘got along fine’ with Marshal Stalin. He is a man who combines a tremendous, relentless determination with a stalwart good humour. I believe he is truly representative of the heart and soul of Russia; and I believe that we are going to get along very well with him and the Russian people – very well indeed . . .

  The doctrine that the strong shall dominate the weak is the doctrine of our enemies – and we reject it.

  Roosevelt certainly seemed prepared to accept Stalin’s assurances that people in the Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) would be free to choose whether they stayed under Soviet domination. Although Stalin made it clear that he wanted a far western border for Poland, bringing much of the country under Soviet control, the discussion was postponed. However Stalin’s appetite for increasing Soviet hegemony was noted by Roosevelt’s adviser Charles Bohlen, who told the US ambassador to the Soviet Union that ‘the Soviet Union would be the only important military and political force on the continent of Europe. The rest of Europe would be reduced to military and political impotence.’ It has been suggested that Roosevelt agreed to Stalin’s plans in return for the Soviet leader’s support for the establishment of the United Nations. (It’s worth noting that the NKVD had the US delegation’s property bugged, and that the Soviets regarded another of Roosevelt’s advisers, Harry Hopkins, almost as one of their own – Hopkins wasn’t a Communist by conviction, but he accepted that the Soviets would inevitably be the dominant power in Europe after the end of the war, and advised the president accordingly.)

  When the leaders met at Yalta in 1945, following the successful invasion on D-Day, the war was all but over. Russian and Allied troops were virtually in Berlin, and great swathes of Eastern Europe were now to all intents and purposes governed by Moscow. As one of Roosevelt’s advisers Bernard Baruch pointed out, it would be futile ‘to demand of Russia what she thinks she needs and most of which she now possesses’. Poland would be under Soviet rule, although Stalin promised there would be elections. Germany would be divided into four zones, with Berlin itself divided, an island within the Soviet zone.

  Charles Bohlen felt that Stalin was hoodwinking the president. ‘What [Roosevelt] did not understand was that Stalin’s enmity was based on profound ideological convictions,’ he wrote. ‘The existence of a gap between the Soviet Union and the United States, a gap that could not be bridged, was never fully perceived by Franklin Roosevelt.’ Roosevelt himself said, ‘I think that if I give him everything that I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace.’

  But Stalin had no intention of following through on his promises. Roosevelt told Congress that he hoped the Yalta agreement would ‘spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries – and have always failed’. It was a naive view, at best. Stalin refused to allow Western observers in for the elections, and Roosevelt realized, less than three weeks before his death, that: ‘We can’t do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.’

  On 12 April 1945, Roosevelt died of a cerebral haemorrhage. His successor, Harry S. Truman, was a great deal blunter than Roosevelt had ever been: when the Soviet Foreign Minister complained that he had never been addressed in such a way, after a dressing-down by the president, Truman replied, ‘Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like that.’ It was Truman who sat down with Churchill – and then new British Prime Minister Clement Atlee, whose Labour Party took power in the post-war election that occurred mid-conference – and Stalin at Potsdam, a suburb in the south-west of Berlin, and discovered that most of the important decisions had already been taken and Stalin had no intention of accepting any decisions that didn’t directly benefit the Soviet Union’s plans. Truman’s priority, initially, was the still-continuing war in the Far East, and gaining Soviet support for that. In the end, though, the use of the atom bomb, first at Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, prompted the Japanese surrender – and Truman could focus on the Soviet duplicity that he saw. Duplicity that would be revealed in detail when a cypher clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Canada, defected to the West that September.

  Just as the record executive who turned down the Beatles has gone down in history as missing one of the great opportunities of the twentieth century, in espionage terms so did the night editor at the Ottawa Journal in failing to take adequate notice of the nervous Russian standing in the offices on the evening of 5 September 1945.

  Igor Gouzenko had decided to defect from his post at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa. Although he was officially employed as a cypher clerk, he was in fact a lieutenant in Soviet Army intelligence, the GRU, and became determined to claim asylum when he learned that he and his family were due to return to the Soviet Union. He was well aware that anyone who served overseas was regarded with suspicion by the Soviet secret police, and he knew that life in Canada, even with the inevitable austerity post-war, would be better than in his homeland. In order to ensure that the Canadians would allow him to stay, rather than simply returning him to the embassy, he appropriated a packet containing more than a hundred decrypted messages that provided details of recent Soviet espionage against both Canada and the US.

  Gouzenko tried to interest both the Ottawa Journal and the Canadian Ministry of Justice in his story, but no one listened. Eventually his neighbour, a Canadian Air Force officer, took pity on him, and allowed Gouzenko to hide on his property. He then contacted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), who watched from Dundonald Park as NKVD agents searched Gouzenko’s apartment, desperately looking for the defector.

  The papers that Gouzenko brought with him were dynamite. Although they referred to agents by code-names, there was enough in plain language to reveal a string of Soviet informants in all
manner of places. ‘The amazing thing,’ Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King wrote in his diary after he had been briefed on the information Gouzenko provided, ‘is how many contacts have been successfully made with people in key positions in government and industrial circles.’

  In their official history, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) credits Gouzenko’s revelations with:

  . . . usher[ing] in the modern era of Canadian security intelligence. Previously, the ‘communist menace’ had been viewed by authorities in terms of its threat to the labour movement. Gouzenko’s information showed that the Soviets of the day were interested in more than cultivating disaffected workers: they were intent on acquiring military, scientific, and technological information by whatever means available to them. Such knowledge had become the key to advancement, and the Soviets intended to progress.

  The information he provided led to a sweeping investigation and arrests under the Canadian War Measures Act. Eleven of the twenty-one Canadians arrested were convicted, including member of parliament Fred Rose, the only Communist ever elected to the Canadian governing body.

  The British and Americans, understandably, wanted to know more about Gouzenko’s revelations, particularly since it was ‘supported by convincing documentary [evidence of] political and scientific espionage’, according to the official report. MI5 agent Roger Hollis was sent to assist with debriefing, and passed information back to London – although since one of the contacts there was Soviet agent Kim Philby, Moscow Centre was kept up to speed on the revelations, and able to attempt to minimise the damage.