During 1930–3 he was the senior illegal in Austria, where he riddled the French alliance system in eastern Europe and the Balkans with a network of agents and sources. He formed a trading company as cover for illicit movements across national frontiers, and penetrated the radio-telegraphic departments in Balkan capitals handling ciphered wireless traffic from foreign legations and embassies. This yielded good product until 1933, when the activities of Vinarov’s penetration agents were discovered, although misunderstood, in Bucharest. In 1936, after further training, he went to Spain under the cover of a commercial attaché, but was purged in 1938. Recalled to guerrilla warfare in the 1940s, he was appointed the Bulgarian communist government’s Minister of Transport and Construction in 1949.32
The illegals never travelled to and from Moscow under their own names. Nor did they use the passport attached to their primary alias. If Walter Krivitsky, who was the illegal in The Hague using the alias of Martin Lessner, had to return to Moscow, he travelled via Stockholm using the cover and documentation of an Austrian engineer named Eduard Miller. Elizabeth Poretsky, in her moving group memoir of Krivitsky and her husband Ignace Reiss, who served as an illegal in Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, France and the Netherlands (with oversight of England), shows that local conditions and the aptitude of the rezident counted for much. ‘Soviet agents’, Poretsky recalled, ‘were convinced that their historic role gave them an innate advantage in dealing with world politics.’33
The illegals’ commitment is incomprehensible unless one understands their certitude in their historical destiny. They all experienced the reality of the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin while they underwent indoctrination and training in Moscow. They knew the cruelty, hardship and scarcities while never doubting the future abundance. In their temporary Red Army accommodation in Moscow, Reiss and Poretsky gave parties at which they could serve only bad herring, horsemeat sausages, salted fish which made their gums bleed, and beetroot. On one occasion a visitor from Kiev described conditions in Ukraine to them: ‘the famine in the cities, the bloated corpses in the streets, the hordes of abandoned children hanging around the railway stations, the ghostly villages where people were dying of starvation and typhus’. Their other guest was a Red Army colonel who, hearing this recital, started sobbing. ‘He, he, is doing this,’ the colonel raged between sobs and obscenities, ‘he is ruining the country, he is destroying the party.’ Then he opened a window and vomited his meal outdoors.34
The development of this ramified illegal apparatus was required because Soviet military attachés dispersed in European capitals were otiose for intelligence work. Active combat in the war of 1914–17 or in the civil war of 1917–22 was poor training for gathering and evaluating political intelligence reports. The military attachés despised capitalism, but seldom understood it. They were easily duped by spurious material, especially forgeries emanating from White Russian émigré organizations or local counter-intelligence. Poretsky recalled one document, purportedly composed by the French General Staff, outlining a secret agreement between Poland and France on military collaboration against the Soviet Union, which was couched in excruciating French, with blunders of syntax and spelling which no Frenchman could have committed. This palpable fraud was bought, photographed and sent to Moscow because no one working for military intelligence at the Soviet embassy in Vienna knew a word of French. Poretsky considered that ‘a surprising number [of Soviet military attachés] showed signs of mental instability’.35
A costly apparatus watched its citizens, monitored public opinion, identified recalcitrant individuals and determined whom to kill. A Cheka circular of 1920–1 declared: ‘Our work should concentrate on the information apparatus, for only when the Cheka is sufficiently informed and has precise data elucidating organisations and their individual members will it be able … to take timely and necessary measures for liquidating groups as well as the individual who is harmful and dangerous.’ Moscow killed their own. The illegal Fedia Umansky @ Fedin @ Alfred Krauss predicted in 1929, ‘there are only two things in store for the likes of us. Either the enemy will hang us or our own people will shoot us.’ None of the illegals was executed by western imperialism: most were killed by the cannibal paranoia of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This phenomenon led to several damaging Soviet defections.36
In January 1930 Georges Agabekov (born Grigory Sergeyvich Arutyunov @ Nerses Ovsepyan @ Azadoff), who was chief of OGPU’s eastern section in 1928–9, tried to defect to the British in Istanbul. He was motivated by both ideological estrangement and infatuation with an Englishwoman whom he had met in Turkey. Defectors at that time were treated as despicable funks rather than valuable assets. They ranked as the civilian equivalent of selfish deserters who had been put before the firing-squad in wartime. Accordingly Agabekov was rebuffed by his girlfriend’s compatriots, although six months later he successfully defected in Paris. The French government, rather than cultivating him as a source, expelled him as a trouble-maker after the girlfriend’s parents denounced him as a heartless seducer. Before his deportation, it was recognized in London by Guy Liddell of Special Branch and by MI5’s Kathleen (‘Jane’) Sissmore and Oswald (‘Jasper’) Harker that, as the most senior OGPU officer to have defected, he was worth monitoring and interviewing. The Home Office warrant of 27 July 1930 requesting the interception of his mail was phrased in the patronizing, mistrustful terms with which foreign sources were often approached: ‘The individual named, who states himself to have been a member of the Russian OGPU, has made a rather theatrical “escape” from Constantinople to Paris. He has given a lurid account of orders from his former chiefs including the liquidation of recalcitrant Soviet employees. It is strongly suspected … that he may be acting as agent provocateur.’ London’s Morning Post newspaper sent its Paris correspondent to interview Agabekov, ‘chief of the OGPU for the five Mahomedan countries’, and duly reported: ‘He calls himself an American, and is a typical Levantine with yellow eyes and a coffee-coloured complexion.’ These were yet further expressions of that British condescension – a complacent amalgam of pride and insularity – that had led Robert Bruce Lockhart, the British acting Consul General in Moscow, to liken Lenin to a provincial grocer in 1917.37
The deaths or flight from Russia of the tsarists’ world-leading cryptographers lowered the quality of Soviet code-making and code-breaking. Partly as compensation for this deterioration in SIGINT (signals intelligence), but also as an outcome of their inclinations, the Bolsheviks collected excellent HUMINT (human intelligence) from other countries’ missions, legations and embassies both in Moscow and in other European capitals. There is a myth, as Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky write, that brilliant mathematicians achieved the major code-breaking successes. The reality is that HUMINT had a part in most major breaks of high-grade code and cipher systems. During the 1930s Moscow’s informants in the Communications Department of the Foreign Office supplied plain-text British diplomatic telegrams which Soviet code-breakers could, in some instances, compare with the ciphered versions as an aid to breaking the ciphers. Soviet SIGINT experts were, however, decimated during Stalin’s Great Terror. The cryptographer Gleb Boky, who led the SIGINT operations of the NKVD and the Fourth Department, was shot in 1937 together with his deputy. Boky’s successor survived in post only a month.38
Soviet espionage in foreign missions
Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) did not have a Moscow station in the 1920s or 1930s. Muscovites were too cowed to be approachable by foreign diplomats. Sir Robert Hodgson reported in 1924 on Soviet espionage on diplomatic missions in Moscow: ‘It is unfortunate that, in order to establish the new régime – the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat – the Soviet Government should find itself compelled to … extend on an unheard-of scale
