Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain
During the civil war of 1917–22, the Cheka was responsible for as many as 250,000 executions (possibly exceeding the number of deaths in combat). Lenin took a close interest in its operations, and discounted its brutality. He was less concerned by five million Russians and Ukrainians starving to death in 1921 than by his paranoia that the American Relief Administration was a front for subversion and espionage. In Odessa captured White officers were tied to planks and used to feed furnaces. In Kiev cages of rats were attached to prisoners’ bodies, and the rats then maddened by the heat until they gnawed their way into the prisoners’ intestines. In Tiflis the Cheka hauled persons of superior education from their beds, tied them head to foot, piled them into the back of a lorry, laid planks cross-wise over their captives so that the firing-party could clamber on board the lorry too and motored to a nearby agricultural college. There the victims were thrown into trenches and shot through the cervical vertebrae. ‘The Russian government is composed of utter brutes,’ wrote Sir Eyre Crowe, Permanent Under Secretary (PUS) at the Foreign Office, in 1924. It is important to add that atrocities were not all on the Red side. Between 50,000 and 200,000 Jews were massacred during the civil war period, and another 200,000 injured. Anti-Bolshevik forces seized the Jews from some soviets and boiled them alive in what they called ‘communist soup’. Peasants disembowelled members of Food Requisition Detachments sent by Lenin from the cities to harvest or collect grain. Violence, as Stephen Smith shows, had variable purposes: it killed enemies, intimidated opponents, punished ‘speculators’ who intruded into peasant communities, protected criminals, enabled the seizure of booty, settled neighbourly disputes, enforced ideological convictions, gave depraved pleasure and bonded group loyalties.18
The history of Soviet espionage is disfigured by permutations of acronyms. In December 1920 the Cheka formed a new foreign department, known as INO, to run operations outside Soviet frontiers. In 1923 the Cheka was reconstituted as OGPU. George Slocombe, who spied for the Soviet Union during the 1920s, paid his only visit to Russia in 1926. Kept awake by Moscow’s summer heat, he gazed through his open window: ‘the red star burning in the tower of the OGPU headquarters, a sign of the never-relaxed vigilance of the defenders of the revolution, shone steadily, like a great red eye above the roofs and chimneys of Moscow’. Reader Bullard, who arrived in Moscow as British Consul General in 1930, was oppressed by a huge placard outside the opera house urging Muscovites to ‘strengthen the sword of the dictatorship of the proletariat – the OGPU’. In 1934 OGPU was reincorporated into the NKVD. The later permutations were the NKGB (February 1941), NKVD again (July 1941), NKGB again (1943), MGB (1946), MVD (1953) and, from March 1954 until December 1991, the KGB. These bodies had a counterpart in the military intelligence section, which was known as the Fourth Department until it was renamed the GRU in 1942. The breaking or foiling of Fourth Department activities in Austria in 1931, in China in 1931–2 and in Latvia, Germany and Finland in 1933 was a chain-reaction caused by weak security between different cells. It proved ruinous for the department’s standing with Stalin, who transferred it in 1934 from the superintendence of the Red Army to INO and limited its remit to Finland, Poland, Germany, Romania, Britain, Japan, Manchuria and China. As Jonathan Haslam reminds us, the KGB ‘may have been the largest intelligence service in the world, but it was heavily weighted in favour of its domestic role, a role never played by its military counterpart, the GRU, the second largest intelligence service in the world’. KGB sources give a valuable if incomplete sense of events: the Fourth Department archive is unavailable to historians.19
The career of one Fourth Department man must represent hundreds of his colleagues. Ivan Zolov Vinarov @ Josef Winzer @ MART was born in 1896 to a family of prosperous Bulgarian landowners. He fled to Soviet Russia in 1922 to escape arrest for his part in the Bulgarian communist party’s arms-smuggling. He was trained in military intelligence, sent on clandestine missions and involved with the communists who detonated an ‘infernal machine’ beneath the dome of a cathedral in Sofia during the state funeral of an assassinated general in 1925. A total of 123 people (including thirteen generals and seven children) were killed in the atrocity, which failed in its objective to liquidate Bulgaria’s Prime Minister, Prince Alexander Tsankov, and his political cadre. Nor did it spark the intended communist revolution. The outcome was thousands of arrests, hundreds of executions and bitter destabilizing misery.
Two Labour MPs visiting Bulgaria, Josiah Wedgwood and William Mackinder, failed to dissuade Tsankov’s government from reprisals. Returning to Bradford, Mackinder told journalists that he would not revisit Bulgaria under Tsankov’s government for a million pounds, but was not quoted as condemning the communist bomb outrage. Wedgwood contributed a report on ‘Bulgarian vengeance-politics’ to the Manchester Guardian. ‘A Communist is outside the law, and the hunt is therefore up for Communists,’ he told liberal-minded readers. Torture was being used to obtain confessions and denunciations: ‘prisoners come back from Bulgarian prisons maimed for life, the bones of the feet all broken with the bastinado [caning the soles of feet]’. Wedgwood judged that Bulgaria’s leaders were less frightened of Bolshevism from Russia than of western European radicalism. He found patriotic solace, amid the reprisals following the explosion, in noting that the English community in Bulgaria ‘are doing their best to stem the spate of horrors. It is on occasions such as this that even the Labour member may thank God for an English gentleman.’20
The Communist International, abbreviated to Comintern, was established in Moscow in 1919–20 to act as the ‘global party of the proletariat’ organizing communist revolutionary activism across Europe and America. From the outset it stipulated that its affiliates must expel moderates, conform to Leninist domination and obey Moscow’s orders. Disbursements to foreign communist parties in the Comintern’s first financial year exceeded five million rubles: far more than was allotted for famine relief in 1921–2 when some five million Russians starved to death or died in epidemics. In accordance with Leninist paranoia, it developed its own spy network during the 1920s. The Comintern’s enforcement of the ‘Bolshevization’ of foreign Marxist parties, its inordinate demands of fealty and its rejection of collaboration with European social democrats all proved major obstacles to the spread of socialism, enabling left-wing parties to be depicted by their opponents as the dupes or fifth columnists of Moscow. The insistence on mental submission certainly alienated intellectual members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in the late 1920s, and caused defections from the party. The Comintern made headway in colonial territories with predominantly peasant economies. Factory workers in European capitalist economies proved averse to risking their limited prosperity and security by rising in support of revolutionary socialism, which had proved so impoverishing in Bolshevist Russia. Until 1934 the Comintern forbade cooperation with anti-fascists in Mussolini’s Italy or with anti-Nazis in Hitler’s Germany; thereafter it accepted a Popular Front policy, of which the first great achievement was the formation in 1936 of a French government supported by communists. The Comintern became Stalinized in the 1930s, it received directives from the Politburo and its officials and agents increasingly cooperated with Soviet diplomats in Europe and the USA.21
‘In our era,’ the Comintern propounded, ‘imperialist wars and world revolution, revolutionary civil wars of the proletarian dictatorship against the bourgeoisie, wars of the proletariat against the bourgeois states and world-capitalism, as well as national revolutionary wars of oppressed peoples against imperialism, are unavoidable.’ Many of the officers and agents in the Comintern’s international department were able linguists and seasoned travellers of central or eastern European birth. Cities like Prague produced alert, responsive men who noticed changing tendencies and were effective in getting what they wanted because their ambitions and insular pride were never as exorbitant as those of Londoners, Berliners and Muscovites brought up in imperial capitals. They were resourceful in selecting targets, laying plans and reading motives. By contrast, many of their counterparts in INO, OGPU and the NKVD were ill-educated, with the guile and brutality that fitted them for suppressing dissidents in provincial Russia and harassing counter-revolutionaries overseas, but less apt for collecting foreign intelligence material.22
Stalinist Russia
Shrewd appraisals of Marxism-Leninism were provided by Sir Robert Hodgson, Britain’s resilient diplomatic representative in Moscow during 1921–7. He chronicled the Bolshevik government’s continuous conflicts with its founding principles, and the pressures which forced it to forsake the revolutionary ideals of 1917. It was a huge challenge to misdirect attention so that ‘a trusting proletariat’ could continue to cherish the illusion that they, rather than a hefty, humdrum bureaucracy, governed Russia, Hodgson reported after the May Day celebrations of 1926, when Lenin had been dead for two years. ‘Moscow, however much nonsense is exhibited on red banners, stuffed into youthful brains, or poured out through loud-speakers to the populace, has to deal with precisely the same problems as any of its neighbours – and is dealing with them in very much the same way.’23
This focus became less helpful in assessing events after Stalin achieved undisputed supremacy in the Soviet Union in 1928–9. Wars, civil wars, threats of foreign wars and domestic class warfare were constant factors in the political careers and personal experiences of all Bolshevik leaders. Marxist-Leninist theory propounded the inevitability of wars between empires, of socialist revolution as a result of these imperialist wars, and of warlike interventions by capitalist powers against socialist states. Fears of internal adversaries and external encirclement were never assuaged. Stalin, though, intensified and invigorated this aspect of the Bolshevik mentality. He convinced the party cadres and general membership that he was a relentlessly industrious pragmatist who could manage the domestic and foreign crises that threatened the Soviet Union. He gained a well-deserved reputation for achievement. ‘He was assiduous in consolidating his power base throughout the party, state, secret police and military hierarchies,’ writes the historian of deStalinization Kevin McDermott. ‘His increasingly radical policies in the years after 1928 proved attractive to the new brand of militant unschooled proletarians who formed the base of the party at that time.’24
Stalin’s supremacy was characterized by crisis-paroxysms of socialist modernization. He sought to transform a ravaged agrarian economy into a global industrial power. The upheaval of forced agricultural collectivization and accelerated manufacturing capacity were akin to social and economic mobilization on a war footing. The first of Stalin’s Five Year Plans for headlong economic expansion was ill-considered, and caused huge instabilities. Bolshevik fears of counter-revolutionary plots, of foreign saboteurs and internal wreckers, of encirclement by hostile foreign powers all grew in ferocity. Opposition was equated with terrorism. Frank discussion and rational argument were precluded within the Moscow apparatus. Britain’s paramount instrument of civilized administration, the ‘circulating file’, which will be discussed later (p. 78–9), was unthinkable in communist bureaucracy.
A new ruling echelon was consolidated by Stalinism. Economic and social hierarchies were restored. The early Bolsheviks had been anti-patriarchal, had promoted the emancipation of women by improved educational and work opportunities, and had attempted to punish drunken wife-beaters. These advances halted after 1928. Stalin, whose wife shot herself in 1932 after being humiliated by him at a banquet, reconfigured masculine authority with his notions of motherhood and the criminalization of abortion in 1936. The early Bolshevik rejection of bourgeois morality ceased. Creative experimentation was stifled: stereotyped party hackwork dominated the arts; nonconformity was penalized. ‘Crucially,’ as Stephen Smith summarizes the development, ‘although the institutions of rule did not change, personal dictatorship, the unrestrained use of force, the cult of power, paranoia about encirclement and internal wreckers, and the spiralling of terror across an entire society, all served to underline the difference between Stalinism and Leninism.’ Smith sees Stalinism as a reversion to an earlier type: ‘the resurgence of … a patrimonial regime in which the tsar’s absolute and unconstrained authority derived from his ownership of the country’s resources, including the lives of his subjects’.25
Bolshevik foreign policy tactics were innovative. ‘The Soviet Government’, reported Sir Esmond Ovey soon after his appointment as the first British Ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1929, ‘have inverted the normal methods of diplomacy, and are past-masters in the fanning of hostility to a point which is useful for their internal political plans, without actually provoking an armed attack from outside.’ The desirable norm of Soviet diplomacy was a ‘vociferously cantankerous state of peace’, Ovey judged after some months in Moscow. Relatively minor incidents, such as the defection of Gregori Bessedovsky, the Soviet Chargé d’Affaires in Paris, could excite ‘a fever of alarm’ at ‘the sinister intentions of the ring of capitalist countries who are waiting, watching, scheming and plotting to destroy them’.26
Intelligence-gathering and subversion managed by SIS representatives, under cover of passport control officers, in Scandinavia and the Baltic states, made Moscow feel beset by fears of foreign capitalist intervention. This feeling was shared by members of the CPGB, which was founded in 1920. Norman Ewer, a loyal upholder of Bolshevist ideology who ran a spy network for Moscow in London during the 1920s, felt sure that capitalist governments must be plotting to overthrow the world’s first and only worker-peasant state by either invasion or secret subversion. As he wrote in 1927 in Labour Monthly, a magazine edited by a CPGB founder, Rajani (‘Raymond’) Palme Dutt: ‘I would lay heavy money that to-day the War Office, the Admiralty and the Air Ministry are very busy with their plans for a Russian war. For a variety of Russian wars, I expect. There would be one plan for a war in defence of “gallant little Esthonia”: another for a war to safeguard India from the Afghans … another for Manchurian possibilities; all these plans quite possibly interlocking and correlating, as did the pre-1914 plans for the aiding of France and for the conquest of Mesopotamia.’ Ewer saw the Tory government as pushing ‘a continuous movement in one direction and to one end. That end is war. War will come as certainly as harvest follows sowing.’27
After his defection from the Soviet embassy in Paris in 1929, Gregori Bessedovsky published his revelatory ‘Souvenirs’ in Le Matin. Summary translations, which were supplied to the British counter-espionage agency MI5 by the SIS station in Paris, show the ferocity of communist extremism. Ivanov, one of the Cheka chiefs, had confided to Bessedovsky ‘that passing sentences of death was not so difficult as one might think. It was all a matter of getting used to it. At first, of course, it made one feel a bit queer, but afterwards one no longer thought of the man – the living person – in front of one, and the only thing one saw was a “dossier” of documents and papers.’ Ivanov admitted that he never attended executions, although he was nominally in charge of them, because ‘he feared the madhouse’. Ivanov’s executioner-in-chief Gourov, who had killed 3,000 people and intended to reach the figure of 5,000, ‘could no longer “work” unless he made himself drunk’. Ivanov continued: ‘every Saturday night it is Hell’, with the condemned in the cellars shrieking like beasts in a slaughter-house. Ivanov’s assistant, who attended most executions, proposed gagging the prisoners’ mouths to stop their cries; but, so Ivanov told Bessedovsky, ‘I forbade him doing so. It would look too much like ordinary murders.’28
Maurice Dobb, an economist and pioneer Cambridge communist who was a key influence in assembling his university’s spy network, minimized these enormities in a lecture at Pembroke College. He admitted the famine, executions and reprisals against hostages – undoubtedly ‘the Red Terror has been at times exceedingly brutal’ – but most stories, including those of ‘torture’ or ‘the massacre of everyone with a white collar’, were fables spread by tsarist exiles. His optimism was not ignoble, although time would discredit it. The Bolshevik programme was committed to the abolition of standing armies and to establishing the workers and peasantry as the new ruling class. Dynastic absolutism and bigoted theocracy had already been replaced by a federation of soviet socialist republics. Ownership of the means of production had been transferred from exploitative capitalism to the socialist state. Reactionary hereditary landowners had been usurped by peasant uprisings. In consequence of these revolutionary changes, Dobb averred, ‘the extremes of riches & poverty exist no longer’. Although there were food shortages, rations were equitably shared. In Moscow ‘there are no slums; their former inhabitants having been accommodated in the flats & palaces of the former bourgeoisie … children are especially well cared for’. Dobb idealized Lenin as ‘a stern realist. Siberia & exile no doubt have tended to embitter him to a considerable degree. His political writings, which display acumen, erudition & logical reasoning, are invariably marred by virulent vilification of his opponents.’ Lenin resembled a Jesuit priest, continued Dobb, ‘with all the Jesuit’s sincerity & idealism, and at the same time the Jesuit’s callousness, casuistry, & bigotry’. He was ‘a man with a mission, subordinating all else to a single goal … a great leader, a great thinker and a great administrator’; but withal ‘a modest man, who regards himself as the mere instrument of the inexorable forces of social progress’.29
By contrast the diplomat Owen O’Malley, who journeyed through Russia in 1925 and 1941, described it as ‘a spiritual gas-chamber, a sinister, unnatural and unholy place’. People trudged through the streets of Leningrad with averted eyes: they had to efface themselves to stay safe; greeting a neighbour might prove fatal; children spied on parents. A red-bearded Cheka agent dressed in an engine driver’s peaked cap, black drill blouse and blue serge riding-breeches was charged with watching and eavesdropping on him in 1925. O’Malley believed that after he threw this tail, the ‘poor fellow’ was put to death. Even as a temporary visitor to the ‘Worker’s Paradise’ he grew nerve-racked by ‘the horrible feeling of being alone and in the power of these revolting barbarians’. After a few months as Consul General in Moscow in 1930, Reader Bullard felt repelled by what he saw: ‘the unscrupulous deception, the unrelenting despotism, and above all the cruelty’.30
The Great Illegals
Between March and June 1927 the Chekists suffered major reverses in their clandestine work in Poland, China, France and London. Stalin attributed these setbacks to hidden traitors: ‘London’s agents have nestled in amongst us deeper than it seems.’ The detection of espionage and subversion by accredited members of Soviet embassies, consulates and trade missions resulted in bad publicity and diplomatic tension. Accordingly, in August, the Politburo ordained that secret agents from OGPU, INO, the Fourth, the Comintern and cognate international bodies could no longer be members of embassies, legations or trade delegations. Top-secret communications must henceforth be transmitted as encrypted letters carried in the diplomatic bag: never by telegraph or wireless traffic. Although these orders were only partially implemented in 1927, they inaugurated the era of the Great Illegals.31
The illegal system had been pioneered in Berlin from 1925, and had subsequently been developed in Paris. The designation ‘illegal’ referred not to the illegality of agents’ intentions or conduct, but to the nature of their foreign posting. These were men and women who worked and travelled under false documentation and had no official ties to Moscow. If their activities were detected or they were arrested, they had no incriminating direct link to Moscow and could be disavowed. The presence of illegals did not obviate the use of agents and officers who were designated as ‘legal’, because they operated under the cover of a diplomatic post in a legation, consulate or trade delegation. (The exception to this was the USA, where successive administrations refused diplomatic recognition to Soviet Russia until 1933: perforce Soviet agents working in Washington or other locations had no official ties to Moscow, and usually worked and travelled under false documentation.) ‘Legal’ officers and agents had the advantages of easy communications with Moscow through official codes and by diplomatic bags. If their espionage activities were detected, they could claim diplomatic immunity. The chiefs of both legal and illegal operations based in European capitals were denominated the rezident. It was usual for each country to have both a legal rezident and an illegal rezident. These rezidents supervised a spying apparatus called the rezidentura.
The illegal rezidenturas were seldom involved in actual recruitment, but ran paid and unpaid agents, and cultivated sources who might unwittingly provide them with information. Many illegals had canny psychological insight, which they used to assess the ability, temperament and vulnerability of potential sources. These informants might receive an explicit approach or else be tapped for information without realizing the nature of their contacts. Officials were targeted, but also sources in journalism, politics, commerce and manufacturing. Informants were recruited by appeals to ideological sympathies or by exploiting the vanity of people who felt superior if their lives involved the exciting secret cleverness of espionage. The illegals identified people who needed money and would supply material in return for cash. They used sexual enticement, too. The illegals and their sub-agents often had to forfeit their human decency by cheating, lying, betrayal and abandonment of the weak. They rationalized their loss by arguing that only exploitative capitalists who were secure in power could afford scruples. Leninists or Stalinists who baulked at orders or confessed to scruples were betraying their cause and doubting its supreme value.
Following the Sofia cathedral massacre, the Bulgarian Vinarov served in 1926–9 as an illegal in China, where his wife worked as a cipher clerk in the Soviet legations in Peking and Harbin. 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