Spies have long existed in the p o p u l a r

imagination

as

glamorous

and

shadowy

With wit and crisp, journalistic precision,

figures. But how much is known about the

Volkman recounts a number of surprising

real-life practitioners of the "black art" of

espionage curiosities, including Pope Paul

espionage? In this enthralling look into the

Vl's work for the CIA, Graham Greene's less

world of covert intelligence, renowned his-

than glorious stint as a British agent, and

torian of espionage Ernest Volkman strips

the bizarre story of "Papa's Crook Factory,"

away the myths and Hollywood hype to re-

Ernest Hemingway's amateur spy ring in

veal the actual human dramas behind "the

Havana. Also included are pioneers of mod-

world's second oldest profession."

ern espionage such as the hard-hearted

Spies is a twentieth century "Hall of Infamy"

"Fraulein

packed with gripping true spy stories profil-

The mother of modern intelligence training,

ing many of this century's most notable

she was the creator of the "discard," the

agents, assets, sleepers, spymasters, and

deliberate sacrifice of one agent to protect

moles. These are the women and men whose

another more important one from detection.

espionage feats have, for better or worse,

Her story, along with others such as those of

irrevocably altered the course of history.

Laventri Beria, architect of Stalin's police

You'll read of the amazing exploits of leg-

state, and of Claude Dansey, the cantanker-

ends such as:

ous and much reviled spymaster of Britain's

"Counterfeit Traitor" Eric Erickson, the

MI6,

Doktor,"

bring

Elsbeth

history

Schragmueller.

to

life.

American businessman who, posing as

A solid reference work and an exciting read,

a Swedish Nazi, helped stanch the flow

Spies offers a uniquely intimate look into the

of oil to Hitler's war machine and end

shadowy world of espionage.

the war in Europe

ERNEST VOLKMAN, formerly a prize-winning

Fritz Kauders, the Viennese Jew who

national correspondent for Newsday, has

went from being a small time confi-

been a journalist for more than thirty-five

dence trickster to become one of Ger-

years He specializes in the dark world of

many's most valued spies and a Soviet

espionage, a subject about which he has

double agent

written hundreds of articl es and several

Amy Thorpe, the gorgeous American

books, i nc l udi ng

Secret Intelligencethe

companion volume to the U.S. television

debutante turned superspy

British agent 17F, Ian Fleming, author
of some of the most outrageous (and

series by that name, for which he served as

consultantand Warriors of the Night, a criti-

effective) "dirty tricks" in the annals of

cal history of American intelligence that is

spydom

now required reading in several U.S. military

intelligence training courses. Mr. Volkman

Dutch

housewife

turned

burlesque

dancer, turned secret agent Margareta

Zelle, a.k.a. Mata Hari, who, contrary to
popular belief, was neither beautiful
nor a very good spy

has lectured on intelligence at a number of

universities and government agencies, has
served as a consultant for several foreignproduced documentaries dealing with espionage, including those done by ITV and BBC

B r i l l i a n t Soviet superspy R i c h a r d

in Great Britain, and he has appeared on

Sorge, whose intelligence gathering

various American news programmes includ-

operation in Japan balked Nazi Ger-

ing "Nightline" and "Today."

many's attempt to seize Moscow

Contents
Introduction vii
Glossary xi
The Agencies xv

The Moles
Fritz Kauders: Triumph of the Schieber 2
H. A. R. Philby: The Mole's Mole 8
Anthony Blunt: "The Pope Wants You!" 17
Oleg Penkovsky: Soldier for Peace 23
George Blake: The Manchurian Candidate 31
Nikolai and Nadjeda Skoblin: Death and the Kursk
Nightingale 37
Israel Beer: The Man Who Never Was 43
Vladimir I. Vetrov: The Murder of Line X 48

Defectors: The Storm Petrels

Afansy M. Shorikhov: Flight of the Football Fan
Igor Gouzenko: The First Man 61
Anatoli Golitsin: Even a Paranoid Has Enemies
Whittaker Chambers: The Man with Two Faces

56
70
76

The Legends
Leiba Domb: The Red Orchestra 82
Wilhelm Wassmuss: The German Lawrence 90
Ian Fleming: Art Imitates Life 94
Dusko Popov: The Real James Bond 98
F. W. Winterbotham: The Spy in the Sky 103
Amy Thorpe Pack: The Siren Spy 107
Richard Sorge: The Greatest of Them All 112
Ruth Kuczynski: The Radio in the Teddy Bear 121
Herbert Yardley: The American Black Chamber 127
Eric Erickson: The Counterfeit Traitor 132
Elsbeth Schragmueller: Fraulein Doktor 136

vi

CONTENTS
Margareta Zelle: Mata Hari, The Eye of Dawn 140
Wolfgang Lotz, Eliyahu Cohen: The Eyes of Israel 144

The Traitors
Larry Wu-Tai Chin: The Spy in the Casino 154
Klaus Fuchs: The Man Who Stole the Atomic Bomb 158
Alfred Redl: Feasting with Panthers 163

The Spymasters
K'ang Sheng, Tai Li: Terror in China 170
Markus Wolf: The Hour of Karla 177
William Stephenson: The Saga of Intrepid 183
Claude Dansey: The King of Z 189
Feliks Dzerzhinsky, Jan Berzin: Midnight in Lubyanka 195
Kenji Doihara: The Snake in the Basket 205

The Infamies
Laventri Beria: "Give Me a Man" 210
Reinhard Heydrich: A Terrible Secret 215
Gabor Peter: The Hunchback of Budapest 222

Some Mysteries . . .
Heinrich Mueller: A Nazi in Moscow 230
Rudolf Roessler: The Enigma of Lucy 237
Vitali Yurchenko: The Spy Who Changed His Mind 247
Nicolai F. Artamanov: The Double Agent Who Wasn't 254

. . . and a Few Curiosities

Ernest Hemingway: Papa's Crook Factory 260
Graham Greene: Our Man in Havana 266
Giovanni Montini: The Pope as Spy 270
W. Somerset Maugham: Our Man in Petrograd 277
Index 281

Introduction

"Espionage," former CIA Director Allen Dulles once remarked,

"is not a game for archbishops."
Just so. The game of intelligenceto use the modern polite
euphemism for spyinghas been called "the world's second oldest profession," and it has much of the same tawdry reputation
as its two historical contempories. According to historians, espionage was one of three primordial professions that emerged at
the beginning of the human experience on this planet: shaman,
harlot, and spy. Shamans ultimately became politicians and lawyers, while spies and harlots evolved into . . . well, spies and harlots.
It is a matter of opinion which profession has acquired the
most odious reputation. There is no dispute, however, about
which profession has the most ambiguous reputation. Spies are
alternately reviled and honored, rewarded and ignored, praised
and disowned. This is largely a matter of perspective. Nathan
Hale, the American spy during the Revolutionary War, is honored
by his countrymen for his famous statement ("I regret that I have
but one life to give to my country") upon the occasion of his
execution by the British. But the British view of Hale is very different, understandably considering the number of British soldiers who died as a result of the intelligence he provided to General Washington. Similarly, the great Soviet spy Richard Sorge
was posthumously honored by a commemorative postage stamp
issued by Moscow some 25 years after his execution by the Japanese. But Germany will never proffer such an honor, for thousands of its young men died in the snows around Moscow in the
winter of 1941 at the hands of Siberian troops shifted west to
defeat the German onslaught against Moscowa deployment
that took place after Sorge found out the Japanese had decided
not to invade the Soviet Union.
Even today, in a time of vast national espionage establishments that has made the business of spying institutionalized,

viii

INTRODUCTION

"spy" is still not a nice word. (Which is why espionage organizations prefer to call themselves "intelligence agencies," and their
employees prefer the job title "intelligence officer.") However
much modern political cynicism might concede the necessity of
snooping on certain other people in a dangerous world, espionage is not a profession parents hope their children will enter.
Spying acquired its unsavory reputation at the moment of
its birth, somewhere around 5,000 years ago in ancient Egypt,
when King Thutmosis III hit upon the idea of concealing men
inside flour sacks to spy on the besieged city of Jaffa. Thutmosis
organized history's first official government state espionage apparatus, an innovation he later had chiseled among hieroglyphics
recording the triumphs of his reignalthough he was careful to
categorize his espionage feats under the heading of "secret science." They represented a distinctly secondary note alongside
such real accomplishments as the construction of cities and the
filling of granaries that provided food for his people. Thutmosis
may have been a great spymaster, but he sensed there was something not quite nice about snooping, even on his enemies, and it
is clear that he much preferred to be remembered for other examples of his statecraft.
The Bible subsequently recorded Moses dispatching spies to "go
spy the land," but it was not until the creation of great nation
states three centuries ago that organized espionageand spies
became an integral part of statecraft. At the same time, a distaste
for spies and spying began to develop among the people of those
great nation states. (James Bond is only the latest in a long line
of fictional characters who never seem to dirty their hands in the
real-life grubby world of the spy.)
In the twentieth century, entire armies of spies have been
deployed during a period in history marked by almost continuous
war. And where there is war, there are spies. To confront the more
than 200,000 spies employed by the Soviet Union at the height
of its power, and the slighdy smaller espionage army of the United
States is to understand how deeply spying has woven itself into
the fabric of modern civilization.
This century has sometimes been called "the century of the
spy," because the insatiable quest for information by modern industrialized states has created the vast armies of spies who have
come to play such a critical role in the course of world history.
This book makes no attempt to consider all the men and women
of those armies. Such a task would be impossible between the

INTRODUCTION

ix

covers of any size book; literally millions of spies have practiced

what is still known as the "black art." But there has been only a
relatively small number whose work has had a dramatic impact
on history. These are the men and women who have directly affected the fate of empires, of nations, of history itself.
Be warned, however; none of these people possess the stuff
of greatness. They run the gamut of human beings, from the
brave to the cowardly, from the wise to the foolish, from the intelligent to the appallingly stupid. Some are extraordnary people,
some very ordinary, and others somewhere in between. There is
no common thread that unites them, except that all of them have
been governed by the Three Great Spy Commandmants:
I. Thou Shalt Not Get Caught
II. If Thou Ist Caught, We Have Never Heard of Thee
III. Given the Foregoing, No Other Commandments Are
Necessary
This book grew out of some discussions with members of the
American intelligence communityas they prefer to call themselveswho like to ruminate on the place of the spy in history.
As those conversations developed, a gradual consensus emerged:
among the many spies who have ever attired themselves in the
metaphorical cloak and dagger, it is astonishing how many of
them had no impact whatsoever. Which is to say either they failed,
or the governments that hired them failed.
The exceptions to that general rule represent the core of
this book. I should emphasize that the men and women ultimately
selected for inclusion in this volume are the result of my own
research and conclusions. I'm certain that a fair number of people in the intelligence community will object to the inclusion of
some names, and argue for the addition of others. I take full
responsibility for the final list in this book, along with my interpretations. Readers may find a few familiar names missingalong
with a few surprises.
A word on methodology. The spies discussed in this book
are slotted into a number of categories, including moles, defectors, legends, traitors, spymasters, and infamies, along with several people I categorize as "mysteries" and "curiosities." Because
a number of espionage careers overlap, readers will find some
names bold-faced; those names so highlighted are treated separately elsewhere in the book. The names in this virtual espionage
hall of infamyspydom's "greatest hits," if you willare listed

INTRODUCTION

in no particular order, chronological or otherwise. Spying, as its

adherents learned a long time ago, is an activity that resists easy
categorization.
As usual, this book would not exist without the advice, support,
and direction of every writer's dream of a literary agent, Victoria
Pryor of Arcadia.
ERNEST VOLKMAN
Danbury, Connecticut
Winter, 1993

Glossary
Like many other fields of human endeavor, espionage has its own
special language. Whenever possible, I have tried to avoid using
the jargon in this book, but unavoidably, there are some unique
terms
that
have
no
ordinary
language
equivalents:
AGENT: A spy in the pay of a nation's intelligence service on a
regular, salaried basis, with the status of government employee.
AGENT OF INFLUENCE: An asset (a term to be defined subsequendy), usually in an important government position, who
is assigned the job of influencing policy, rather than collecting
intelligence.
AGENT PROVOCATEUR: An asset, usually under control of a
counterintelligence or police agency, assigned to infiltrate a
political organization and instigate violent action designed
to discredit that organization and justify extreme countermeasures.
ASSET: A foreigner enrolled by an intelligence serviceeither
for pay or because of political convictionto serve as an
intelligence
source.
BLACK BAG JOB: Break-in or burglary to gain access to secret
papers, which are photographed and returned, customarily
in the same operation. Such operations are carried out by
highly trained teams to conceal any trace of their presence.
BLACK PROPAGANDA: Propaganda whose origin is completely
disguised and takes the form of a "clandestine" operation
by alleged political dissidents against the target country,
most often by means of a "secret" radio station within the
country's borders or just outside them. The station is actually created by agents of a hostile intelligence service trained
in such techniques, and is designed to sow discord and confusion while boosting the political fortunes of an "exile"
faction.
BLOWN: Agent or asset revealed to counterintelligence. Also
called "burned."

xii

GLOSSARY

BRUSH CONTACT: Rapid, apparently accidental, contact

between an agent or asset and a case officer or control agent
to exchange material, most often in a crowded public place
to confuse surveillance.
CASE OFFICER: Agent assigned to supervise an agent or asset
(or a network"ring"of them), in matters of pay, collection of intelligence, and other details. Also called "control
agent."
CHIEF OF STATION: Agent assigned to head an overseas intelligence unit, normally part of an embassy. In Soviet intelligence parlance, such an agent is known as a rezident.
COVER: Organizational disguise under which an agent hides
connection to an intelligence agency. In American intelligence parlance, cover can be "light" (diplomatic) or
"deep" (commercial or other such organizational affiliation).
CRYPTANALYST: Trained analyst who works to break codes
and ciphers by attempting to recover the "key" (specific
method) used in encryption. Currently, such analysts tend
to be mathematicians who work with super-computers to attack computer-generated codes.
DEAD DROP: Site where agents can leave and exchange messages
with other agents or their control, most often in nooks and
crevices in public areas (a hole in a wall is a particular favorite). Such a technique is designed to avoid any contact
between those "filling" (inserting material) the dead drop
and those "servicing" it (removing such material). Also
known as dubok, from Soviet intelligence parlance.
DISCARD: Agent or asset deliberately sacrificed to deflect attention from other, more important, agents.
FRONT: Legitimate-appearing entity created by an intelligence
to provide cover for agents and assets. It can take many
forms, from a charitable foundation to a corporate entity.
ILLEGAL: In Soviet intelligence, agent operating in a foreign
country under an assumed identity or cover job.
LEGAL: In Soviet intelligence, agent operating in a foreign country under diplomatic cover, providing diplomatic immunity
in event of arrest.
LEGEND: Faked biography of an agent to conceal real identity.
LETTERBOX: Person used as a go-between (often called "cutout") to receive and pass on messages.

GLOSSARY

xiii

MOLE: Asset inserted into the political, intelligence or military

structure of a target nation with the specific objective of
rising to a key position, at which point the asset is "switched
on" to provide high-level intelligence.
ONE-TIME PAD: Cipher device that uses a pad with sheets of
random numbers that are used to encrypt messages once,
then discarded. Since each sheet is readable only to someone on the other end with the same pad, the system is theoretically unbreakable.
PLAYBACK: The technique of using a captured agent's radio to
feed misleading information to the agent's control. Also
called funkspiel (radio game) in German intelligence parlance. Intelligence agencies attempt to forestall such techniques by training agents to insert a "warn key" in their
transmissions if captured and forced to send messages (usually a specific word that warns a receiving station). They also
learn to recognize an agent's "fist" (distinctive method of
sending or touch) that is difficult to duplicate by someone
else using the agent's radio.
SLEEPER: Agent planted in another country with orders to carry
out a normal life and conduct no intelligence operations
until ordered to do somost often, in the event of hostilities.
STATION: Chief office of an intelligence agency in a foreign
country, most often located in an embassy.
WALKIN: Asset who literally walks into the embassy or intelligence headquarters of a foreign country and volunteers information or offers to work as a spy, either for pay or for
political motives. Intelligence agencies on occasion will deliberately send an agent posing as a walk-in in order to penetrate the other side and plant false intelligence. Such an
agent is called a "dangle."

The Agencies

(an alphabetical listing)

Abwehr
Allamvedelmi Hatosag (AVH)
Bundesamt fur Verfassungsschutz (BfV)
Bundesnachrichtdienst (BND)
Central External Liaison Department (CELD)
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Chrezuyehainaya Komissiya po Borbe s Kontrrevolutisnei i Sabbottazhem (CHEKA)
Direction de la Surveillance du territoire (DST)
Direccion General de Intelligencia (DGI)
Direction General de Securitie Exterieure (DGSE)
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo)
Government Code and Cipher School (GCCS)
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)
Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleni (GRU)
Hauptverwaltung fur Aufklarung (HVA)
Komit Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosi (KGB)
Mossad Letafkidim Meyouch-hadim (Mossad)
Mukhabarat el-Aam (Mukhabarat)
National Security Agency (NSA)
Naval Intelligence Division (NID)
Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI)
Office of Strategic Services (OSS)
Secret Intelligence Service (MI6)
Security Service (MI5)
Service de Documentation Exterieure et de Contre-Espionage
(SDECE)

xvi

THE AGENCIES

Sicherheitsdienst (SD)
Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa (SB)
Staatssicherheitsdienst (SSD)
Statni Tajna Bezpecnost (STB)
U.S. Army Military Intelligence Division (MID)

THE MOLES

FRITZ KAUDERS
Triumph of the Schieber
Code Name: MAX
Alias: Richard Klatt
1903-?

ith his ingratiating politeness, Viennese charm, and oily

manner, the short, stocky man with wavy hair was that prototypical European type known in German as a schieber (roughly,
con artist). By 1939, Fritz Kauders, a man who had lived by his
wits for most of the 36 years of his life, was among the sharpest
hustlers in all Europe. He was ready for the scam of his career,
which turned out to be one of the most significant deceptions in
the history of espionage.
In terms of background, Kauders seemed ideal for the Byzantine world of pre-World War II European espionage. Born in
Vienna of a Jewish mother and a Catholic father (this fact would
assume critical importance in his life later on), Kauders worked
as a journalist as a young man during the 1920s. However, he
soon found there was a lot more money to be made hustling:
setting up various shady deals, selling identity papers, and arranging introductions (for a price) to the officials of a half-dozen
European countries he had managed to charm or bribe into coconspiracy. A man who regularly visited most of the capitals of
Europe in the course of running his many business deals, Kauders
soon had a network of government contacts from the Baltic to
the Mediterranean.
It was only a matter of time before one intelligence service
or another would seek to recruit this artful schieber as an asset.
That moment came in 1939 when a mysterious character named
2

FRITZ KAUDERS

Andrei Turkhul recruited Kauders for his own network, a huge

ring comprised primarily of White Russian exiles, which provided
intelligence from all over Europe and even from inside the Soviet
Union. Or so Turkhul claimed to his ostensible employer, the
German intelligence agency, Abwehr. Actually, Turkhul's real loyalty was to Soviet intelligence, which had recruited him nearly 20
years before. Turkhul had been keeping Moscow informed of
Abwehr operations, but the recruitment of Kauders gave the KGB
the idea for an even bigger game, the hoodwinking of Nazi Germany.
This required an audacious and patient plan: over a period
of years, Kauders would be developed into the Abwehr's chief
source on the Soviet Union. He would be provided with a steady
diet of low-grade intelligence from Moscow, consistently building
his credibility until, at just the right moment, he would pass on a
major piece of doctored intelligence the Abwehr would find irresistible. Neither Turkhul nor Kauders could have guessed at that
point how poisonous that doctored intelligence would prove.
Turkhul slowly developed Kauderswho operated under
the alias of Richard Klatt, a businessmanand with assistance
from Moscow, soon was feeding a steady stream of middle-grade
intelligence to the Abwehr. Kauders enhanced his growing reputation with some operations he devised himself, including the feat
of stealing sensitive diplomatic papers from the office of the
American consul in Zagreb, Yugoslavia.
All the while, Kauders was drawing a handsome monthly
stipend from the Abwehr, but as the Germans became aware, there
was something else he wanted: a piece of paper that was beyond
price. That paper was a so-called "Aryanization certificate," a
document issued by the Nazi government that certified that its
holder, a presumed Jew, had been investigated by "race relations
experts" and found to be in fact "Aryan." To the offspring of a
mixed marriage like Kauders, that piece of paper could be a lifesaver; without it, he could be picked up at any moment and
shipped off to a death camp.
But this was no simple request. The Nazis took the business
of deciding who was a Jew very seriously, and even the highestranking officers of the Abwehr had very little influence in such
matters. The Abwehr could not get him a certificate, but it could
protect him from the Gestapo, in the process violating one of
Nazi Germany's sternest strictures: No Jew was allowed to serve
in any German intelligence agency. Incredibly, Kauders was not

THE MOLES

only protected by the Abwehr, this Jewish spy was also protected
by Germany's Nazi intelligence agency, the SD.
The reason was not hard to discern. Simply, Kauders was
regarded as German intelligence's prime source on the Soviet
Union, a source so valuable that the risk of employing a Jewa
capital offense in Nazi Germanywas well worth the result. Kauders' vaunting reputation had been stage-managed by Turkhul,
who claimed to his Abwehr controllers that Kauders had a network
of contacts inside the Soviet Union that extended into the Soviet
military's high command. The timing of this bait could not have
been better: the Germans had invaded the Soviet Union, and
were desperate for any intelligence on the Soviet military. Kauders said he could get it, provided that he be set up with his own
transmitter, serve as the exclusive go-between for his top sources
and German intelligence, and never be required to reveal the
identities of those sources.
The Abwehr happily assented to those conditions, and set up
Kauders in Sofia, Bulgaria, with his own radio transmitter. Almost
from the first moment, Kauders, code-named MAX, proved to be
a spectacular asset. He gave his Abwehr case officers a gushing
river of topflight reports on Soviet military dispositions, and to
the delight of the Germans, the reports were unfailingly accurate,
resulting in several spectacular tactical victories. By 1942, Kauders
represented the single most important intelligence source for the
Germans on the Soviet military. Such German intelligence sachems as Reinhard Gehlen, head of the German army's military
intelligence organization, and Wilhelm Canaris of the Abwehr
pronounced MAX pure gold.
But not all the Germans were so elated. The Abwehr case
officers in Sofia were suspicious of Kauders from the outset, and
their suspicions deepened as they considered his operation.
Where was all this top-level information coming from? Kauders
claimed that his sources included high-ranking officers assigned
to the Stavka, the Soviet high command, and he also had sources
close to Stalin himself. These sources radioed over a top secret
transmitter to Kauders, often within minutes of hearing of decisions reached inside Stalin's war council.
For any Abwehr officer with experience in Stalin's police
state, with its unprecedented internal securityespecially in wartimeKauders' claims rang hollow. Some Abwehr officers monitored Kauders' radio transmissions, and discovered that the
amount of traffic bore no resemblance to the volume of intelli-

FRITZ KAUDERS

gence Kauders claimed to be receiving. Moreover, the idea that

traitors in the Soviet High Command would take the extraordinary risk of radioing their treason direcdy from the Kremlin
strained credulity.
The Abwehr men in Sofia finally concluded that Kauders was
a Soviet mole, planted in German intelligence for the express
purpose of passing on high-level strategic deception. But despite
their complaints to Berlin, the faith of German intelligence in
Kauders remained unshaken. As even his worst critics in Sofia
were
compelled
to
admit,
his
informationwhatever
the
sourcewas rock solid. Where was the deception?
The Germans did not know that the Russians were biding
their time, waiting for the right moment. They had coldbloodedly
sacrificed entire units to bolster MAX, willing to trade lives for
the purpose of enhancing his bona fides. In the late winter of
1942, the Russians finally made their move: Kauders reported that
his sources had told him of the plan to confront the German
Sixth Army at Stalingrad, and Stalin's order that the city be held
at all costs. He provided further details: the actual identity of the
Soviet units assigned to the battle, the plan to ferry units across
the Volga at night, and the names of the generals assigned the
mission of evicting the Germans from the city.
The intelligence seemed nothing short of sensational, but
as the Abwehr discovered, incomplete: Kauders somehow did not
learn that the Soviet plan included a giant pincer movement to
sweep west and east of the city against the weak flanks held by
Hungarian and Roumanian forces allied with the Germans, and
trap the entire 250,000-man German Sixth Army. Within a
month, the Soviet offensive surrounded Stalingrad, forcing the
surrender of what was left of the Sixth Army, a defeat from which
Nazi Germany never recovered.
Despite this disaster, MAX was still regarded highly. But in
1944, an even more significant Soviet deception finally ended his
career as Germany's super-spy. It concerned the decision by the
Soviet Stavka to unleash a major military offensive designed finally to shatter German military power in the east. MAX revealed
that the offensive was code-named Operation Bagration, and
aimed at the southern Ukraine, with the eventual aim of capturing the Balkans. The Germans dutifully concentrated their thin
resources in the south, but when the blow fell, it came on the
central front, over 400 miles away. Nearly a half-million German

THE MOLES

troops perished in the onslaught, which did not end until the
Russians smashed their way into Berlin some months later.
MAX now began to look frayed around the edges, at least
to his control officers in Sofia. They had discovered that Kauders
was running a number of private business operations on the side,
in the process bribing the Bulgarian police to overlook some of
his more shady operations. It bespoke a character defect which
compelled them to review the entire MAX operation. Finally,
there was no doubt: He was a mole.
Interestingly, there was one intelligence agency outside the
Soviet Union which in 1943 had reached the same conclusion:
the British MI6. Thanks to its ULTRA code-breaking operation,
the British were reading the Abwehr traffic between Sofia and Berlin. Initially, the British were concerned, for the detail of Soviet
military secrets in the traffic indicated that the Germans had a
source (or sources) at very high levels in the Soviet military command structure who was feeding high-grade intelligence via radio
to Sofia, where an Abwehragentknown only as MAX in the radio
trafficwas then conveying it to Berlin. Alarmed, MI6 officials
told the Soviets about the leak, but Moscow indicated no interest
whatsoever in the revelation. MI6 concluded, correctly, that the
astonishing Soviet indifference could only mean that MAX was
part of an elaborate Soviet deception.
The Abwehr did not have the advantage of ULTRA, but nevertheless concluded that MAX was working for the Russians. Under ordinary circumstances, that would have meant death for
Kauders. For the moment, however, he was saved, because at this
critical juncture, German intelligence was in turmoil. After the
abortive plot to overthrow Hitler in July 1944a plot in which
Canaris was directly involvedthe Abwehr was disbanded and its
functions taken over by the SD. Curiously, the SD continued to
believe that Kauders was genuine and was determined to save
him. It transferred MAX to the Hungarian intelligence service as
a means of evading the rule against any German intelligence service using Jewish agents, but even that subterfuge failed. Hitler,
furious when he learned that his intelligence services had been
using a Jewish agent, ordered Kauders taken to a concentration
camp. It took the personal intervention of General Heinz Guderian, chief of the General Staff, to get the order rescinded, but
Kauders was imprisoned in a German military prison to get him
out of harm's way. In May 1945, as Nazi Germany was collapsing,
he was released. He fled to Austria under Turkhul's protection,

FRITZ KAUDERS

and a few weeks later, was arrested again, this time by the Americans, as a Nazi agent.
A lifetime of hustling had prepared Kauders for such eventualities, and within a year, he had not only gotten himself released,
but also had convinced the OSS to enlist him as an asset to operate against Soviet intelligence in Austria. The Soviets were displeased by this sudden switch when Turkhul told them about it,
and in February 1946, they attempted to kidnap him, using a
team of agents dressed in American Army MP uniforms. Army
intelligence agents balked the attempt, but Kauders got the message: He disappeared. In 1964, he reappeared in Vienna to offer
his services to the CIA. Suspicious CIA officials rejected the offer,
and Kauders disappeared again.
It was not until some years later, when captured German
intelligence records were analyzed, that the Americans realized
Kauders was the fabled MAX, the mole who had done so much
to undermine German military operations on the Eastern front.
The disappearance of Kauders left unresolved many mysteries connected with the MAX operation. Chief among them was
motive: Why had Kauders put his head in the lion's mouth to
carry out a deception that he must have known would inevitably
be discovered? There is no indication he ever had Communist
leanings, so any political motive apparently didn't inspire him.
Did he agree to help destroy Nazi Germany because he was a Jew,
determined to avenge Hitler's Holocaust against his people? Possibly, although he was not religious, and always insisted he was
Catholic. Money? Perhaps, although the lavish funds he received
from the Germans represented scant compensation for the near
certainty of a bullet in the head when they discovered the deception. Or the answer may be simply that Kauders, the lifelong schieber, could not resist the biggest scam he had ever seen.
Only MAX himself knows the answerwherever he might be.

H. A. R. PHILBY
The Mole's Mole
Code Names: STANLEY, AGENT TOM
1912-1988

"To betray," Harold Adrian Russell (Kim) Philby once said

near the end of his life, "one must first belong. I never
belonged."
However enigmatic, this is the only explanation Philby ever
offered to explain a career that amounts to the most incredible
in the entire history of espionage. Philby was the quintessential
mole, the man who on behalf of the Soviet KGB* infiltrated his
country's intelligence service and betrayed its secrets for nearly
30 years. He came within a hair's breadth of becoming chief of
that intelligence service, which would have represented the ultimate espionage fantasy: the chief of an intelligence service actually working for the opposition, with consequences that can
only be dreamed. The Philby saga has served as the inspiration
for countless works of fiction, along with a large pile of nonfiction
works that have attempted to explain the Philby phenomenon.
Analysts of the Philby case have unfailingly concentrated on
his early life for clues to what made him tick. Born in India just
before World War I, Philby was the son of a British mother and
* The KGB has undergone a number of acronymic evolutions, beginning
(1922-23), OGPU (1923-24), NKVD (1934-44), NKGB (1944-46), MGB
KGB (1954-91), and FIS (1991 to date). To simplify matters, "KGB" will
this book to refer to the Soviet Union's main foreign intelligence service
onward.

with GPU
(1946-53),
be used in
from 1922

H. A. R. PHILBY

The quintessential mole: H. A. R. (Kim) Philby in 1955, when he was already

under suspicion as a KGB agent who had infiltrated British intelligence.

a curious figure in British history, the Arabist H. St. John Philby.

A full-blown eccentric, Philby senior made his name in the Middle
East, where he worked on behalf of British intelligence to stir up
Arab revolution against Turkey. After the war, convinced that Britain had betrayed the Arabs, he moved to Saudi Arabia, where he
became a Moslem, took an Arabian woman as his second wife,
and warned his son never to trust the word of the British establishment.
Philby and his son were close, but the father had nothing to
do with his son's political conversion to communism. That process began when Philby entered Cambridge in 1929, where he
became close friends with Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, who
had already become full-fledged Marxists. They recruited Philby,
who would likely have remained just another undergraduate
Communist except for an experience that was to prove the seminal one of his life.
During his vacations, Philby liked to tour Europe, where the
sight of early Nazi terror further hardened his transformation
into an ardent Communist. But it was in Vienna during the sum-

10

THE MOLES

mer of 1934 that Philby decided he would become a "soldier,"

as he later put it, in the struggle against fascism.
He arrived in the midst of political turmoil. The right-wing
government was locked in a life-or-death struggle with its leftist
opponents, and Philby enlisted as a volunteer with Socialist revolutionaries (supported by the Austrian Communists), working
primarily as a courier between various anti-government outposts.
Coincidentally, he met and fell in love with Alice Friedman.
Known as "Litzi," Friedman was an Austrian Communist. She was
deeply involved in the struggle convulsing the city, which was
climaxed by the shelling by government forces of workers' housing, killing hundreds. The experience of seeing a government
slaughter its own people radicalized Philby.
Fortuitously for Soviet intelligence, at that time there were
two KGB operatives working in the city: Theodor Maly, a Hungarian ex-priest who had converted to communism, and Gabor
Peter, another Hungarian Communist. Both recognized in Philby
that rare combination of intelligence and blind devotion, and he
was recruited to serve the "cause of world revolution." But he
would no longer demonstrate his commitment to the Communist
cause by smuggling messages past police checkpoints; from now
on, he was told, he was to conceal his political convictions and
infiltrate the British government, preferably its intelligence service, by boring from within.
Upon his return to Britain, Philby immediately moved to
erase his Communist past, the essential first step in gaining entry
into the British establishment. Publicly, his politics veered suddenly rightward, and he joined the Anglo-German Fellowship, a
right-wing group that actively promoted the idea of an alliance
with Nazi Germany. As a further move toward concealment, he
divorced Alice Friedman.
His penetration of the establishment came in 1936, when
he landed a job with the London Times as a correspondent on the
Franco side in the Spanish Civil War. His blatantly pro-Franco
dispatches further cemented the idea of a right-wing Philby, although he was already providing to the KGB low-grade intelligence he picked up from Franco's entourage. (His espionage
career almost ended prematurely one day when he was picked up
by suspicious Nationalist soldiers for questioning. At the time, he
had several pieces of incriminating paper on him. Asked to produce his wallet, he deliberately skidded it across a table; when the

H. A. R. PHILBY

11

soldiers dived for it, Philby used the diversion to swallow the
papers).
In 1939, while still a Times correspondent, Philby got the
break he was looking for. Thanks to the influence of fellow alumnus (and Communist comrade) Guy Burgess, who was working
in Department D (sabotage and propaganda) of MI6, he was recruited to join the organization. As was the practice then in the
establishment-oriented MI6, Philby's vetting was casual. His father, asked about his son's known Communist sympathies while
at Cambridge, dismissed it with the comment, "Oh, just some
youthful political rot," and that was the end of it.
With this astonishingly easy background check out of the
way, Philby achieved the goal the KGB had set for him five years
before: to infiltrate British intelligence. At first, however, this entry did not seem very promising. Department D was eliminated
in 1941 and replaced by an agency called SOE, and MI6 did not
quite know what to do with Philby. For one thing, he had a lifelong stutter, which obviated the idea of putting him into the field.
The solution, finally, was to assign him as a desk officer in Section
V (counterespionage in foreign countries) of MI6. The decision
could not have been more perfect for Philby and the KGB, for
as a desk officer, he would be privy to a wide range of intelligence
reports, giving him a much better overview than any field agent.
Philby was a popular man in MI6. A hard drinker like many
of his fellow agents, he had sufficient credentials to be trusted by
the upper classes who dominated MI6's leadership, but was also
considered sufficiently common to mix easily with the more "ordinary blokes" who made up MI6's lower ranks. Called "Kim"
after the Rudyard Kipling character because of his birth in India,
Philby was regarded as a talented intelligence officer, and was
widely assumed to be a "comer," the kind of officer who might
someday become chief of the entire service.
In late 1944 Philby received another astonishing stroke of
luck: he was named to revive Section IX of MI6. The section,
assigned to combat Soviet subversion and intelligence operations,
remained virtually moribund while the Soviet Union was Britain's
wartime ally. Nevertheless, as the end of the war neared and it
was clear that the Soviet Union would be the West's next enemy,
MI6 decided to recreate the section under Philby, with 100 intelligence agents assigned to him.
A more perfect location for a KGB mole cannot be imagined. Precisely what Philby betrayed to Moscow may never be

12

THE MOLES

known for certain outside the KGB archives, but it is known that
Philby performed two vital services for the KGB during the war.
One was the systematic balking of efforts by the anti-Nazi German
underground to obtain British support for an overthrow of Hitler.
The underground represented Moscow's worst nightmare: a new
German government that almost certainly would seek a separate
peace with the West; with consequences that could be catastrophic for the Soviet Union if the Germans could bring their
full military might to bear in the East. To abort such an eventuality, Philby sidetracked reports by German anti-Nazis working for
MI6, denigrated the effectiveness of the anti-Hitler opposition,
and ensured that MI6 reports on the German opposition ranked
them as "ineffectual" and not worth dealing with.
Philby's second service was to keep the KGB informed of the
names of assets MI6 was recruiting in Eastern Europe (later, when
Moscow took control of the region, the assets were rounded up).
At the same time, Philby betrayed the very anti-Soviet networks
he was creating as head of Section IX; armed with this warning,
the KGB simply took over the networks and fed back misleading
intelligence that virtually blinded British intelligence for years.
In 1945, Philby was suddenly confronted with a crisis that
threatened an end to his career. Almost simultaneously, two members of Soviet intelligence defected to the West. One, Igor Gouzenko, a code clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Canada, had
fled with a batch of top-secret Soviet intelligence telegrams, along
with whatever knowledge was in his head. The second, Konstantsin Volkov, a senior KGB officer in Istanbul, had not yet actually
defected, but he had approached the British embassy with an
offer to defect, noting that he had intimate knowledge of KGB
infiltration of British intelligence. Volkov did not know the spe-.
cific identities of the KGB moles, but he mentioned several clues,
among them one, which if fully investigated, would ultimately
have revealed Philby.
Philby consulted his control, Yuri Modin, the legendary KGB
agent-handler in London who oversaw the KGB's great prize, the
"Ring of Five" of KGB moles in Great Britain (Philby, Maclean,
Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross). In Modin's calculation, Philby could not handle both defections, so the KGB
was confronted with choosing the lesser of two evils. Either Gouzenko or Volkov might blow Philbyand othersbut of the two,
the odds were that Volkov was the most dangerous. Gouzenko
worked for the GRU; thus, it could be assumed he might not

H. A. R. PHILBY

13

know of moles working for the KGB, an entirely separate intelligence agency. On the other hand, Volkov was a high-ranking KGB
officer who apparently had picked up some clues about the KGB's
penetration of British intelligence. Modin and Philby saw no option: Volkov was potentially the greatest danger, so as head of
Section IX, Philby would offer to debrief Volkov personally. Gouzenko's debriefing, meanwhile, would be left to otherswhile
Modin and Philby kept their fingers crossed.
Forewarned of Volkov's attempted defection, the KGB removed the threat while Philby took his sweet time getting to Istanbul. It has never been revealed what happened to Volkov, but
witnesses saw a body, swathed head to toe in bandages, hustled
aboard a Soviet airliner in Istanbul on the very same day that
Volkov suddenly disappeared. Philby blamed Volkov's presumed
capture on the Russian's "inattention to security."
As it turned out, Gouzenko had no real insight into KGB
operations in Great Britain, so with the disappearance of Volkov,
Philby was home free. At the end of the war, his star rose steadily
brighter in MI6, which had no idea that he was betraying to the
KGB a huge MI6 operation to infiltrate anti-Communist guerrillas
into the Baltic states. A number of other such operations elsewhere in Eastern Europe also went sour, but no one associated
Philby with the grim roster of intelligence disasters. Not yet,
anyway.
There was talk around MI6 of Philby eventually succeeding
his chief, Stewart Menzies, a career track confirmed in 1949 when
Philby was named to one of MI6's most important posts, chief of
station in Washington, D.C. There his duties included serving as
liaison between MI6 and American intelligence. The KGB could
hardly have wished for a more opportune posting, for Philby was
now in a position not only to betray MI6's secrets, but the CIA's
secrets, as well.
Philby had no sooner taken up residence in Washington
when he learned of America's biggest secret. Code-named
VENONA, it was a code-breaking operation directed against the
huge backlog of Soviet intelligence radio traffic during the war
from London, New York, and Washington. Both the Americans
and British suspected, correcdy, that the high volume was due to
Moscow cranking up all its assets to provide intelligence at a time
of greatest peril to the Communist regime. The operation had
begun with the recovery of a partially-burned Soviet codebook in
Finland, which provided several vital keys toward unlocking the

14

THE MOLES

Soviet intelligence ciphers. It was a long, tedious process (the

eventual operation took more than 30 years to complete), but the
early indications were alarming: the Russians apparendy had hundreds of assets in the United States and Great Britain.
The assets were identified only by code names, but the codebreakers were able to match those code names with other clues
contained in various messages. They concentrated on the most
significant ones, especially an asset who had provided information about the atomic bomb project (he turned out to be Klaus
Fuchs and, more ominously from Philby's standpoint, a highly
placed British asset code-named HOMER who was leaking highlevel intelligence from the British Foreign Office. A careless clue
contained in one messagethat HOMER had travelled to New
York from Washington at one point to see his pregnant and ill
wifepointed directly to a British diplomat serving at the British
embassy in Washington: Donald Maclean.
As the British intelligence liaison in Washington, Philby was
part of the intelligence team that monitored the progress of the
VENONA decrypts, and so was able to warn the KGB that by 1951,
the codebreakers had nailed Maclean. With that warning, Yuri
Modin decided that Maclean, close to a nervous breakdown over
the strain of his double life, would have to be exfiltrated to Moscow before he cracked under the strain of interrogation by British
counterintelligence. Modin managed that exfiltration skillfully
enough, but in the process an event he could not have anticipated
brought Philby's usefulness to an end.
Modin assigned one of his prime assets, Guy Burgess, the
task of getting Maclean out of Great Britain. Burgess was a close
friend of Maclean, but he was also a close friend of Philby, and
lived in Philby's house for a brief period when Philby was first
assigned to Washington. That connection was bad enough, but
when Burgess suddenly and mysteriously decided he would accompany Maclean on his flight eastward, that served to focus suspicion on Philby as the presumed "third man" who warned Maclean of imminent arrest.
From the KGB's standpoint, it was an unmitigated disaster.
Just at the very moment when Philby occupied a critical intelligence post and was tantalizingly close to becoming the chief of
MI6, Burgess' curious action ruined everything. Within months,
CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith sent a curt note to MI6 Director
Stewart Menzies: "Recall Philby or we break off the intelligence
relationship."

H. A. R. PHILBY

15

And with that, Philby's real service to the KGB was at an end.
MI6 kept him on, but under a cloud of suspicion, he was no
longer in a position to provide the kind of intelligence the KGB
had come to expect. Additionally, he was coming under attack by
British and American counterintelligence, which suspected he
was the top-level spy code-named STANLEY mentioned in the
VENONA traffic decrypts. To make matters worse, several Soviet
defectors were providing accumulating clues about him. By 1961,
it was clear that the net was drawing tighter. George Blake, another prize KGB mole inside British intelligence, had been
caught and made a full confession, in which he mentioned some
clues that pointed toward Philby.
Modin now went into action. Tipped off about a pending
MI6 plan to confront Philby and offer immunity in return for a
full confession (who imparted this vital intelligence to Modin remains unknown), the KGB agent-runner sped to Beirut, where
Philby was working under cover for MI6 as a newspaper correspondent. Modin's plan was for Philby to submit to MI6 interrogation to find out just how much hard information MI6 had on
him, then flee to Moscow as soon as his interrogators showed
their high cards. Philby duly gave his limited confessionhe admitted only what he sensed MI6 already knewand on January
23, 1963, he slipped out of a dinner party and disappeared. Six
weeks later, Moscow announced that he had been granted political asylum.
If Philby thought this most sensational defection in the history of espionage would lead to some sort of senior position in
the KGB, he was to receive a rude awakening. The Russians were
prepared to provide a large apartment and plenty of money to
live on, but they had no intention of using Philby in any intelligence operation. The simple fact was they did not trust him fully.
In the KGB's calculation, there was no guarantee that he not been
turned by the other side and was not now in the process of attempting to duplicate for the West what he had accomplished for
Moscow. Accordingly, Philby became a frustrated English exile,
wandering around Moscow with his copy of the London Times (another KGB benefit that allowed Philby to keep current with his
consuming passion, English cricket). He was a witty, rumpled alcoholic who occasionally granted tantalizing interviews to visiting
British newspapermen, and basked in the glow of the elaborate
respect with which all Soviet officials treated him. He kept up a
bustling correspondence with some of his old British friends, no-

16

THE MOLES

tably the novelist (and ex-MI6 colleague) Graham Greene, who

made the thinly-disguised Philby the central character in his
novel, The Human Factor.
Philby's arms-length relationship with the KGB did not
change until 1980, when KGB chief Yuri Andropov invited him
to serve as a consultant on operations in Great Britain. What
advice Philby was able to render is not known, but the chance of
getting back into the intelligence game appeared to reinvigorate
him, albeit briefly. Philby was a sick man, and never appeared
anywhere without a pair of white gloves to protect his hands from
a virulent skin allergy. It was among a number of ailments that
gradually sapped his strength, and in May 1988, he died.
The Soviets spared no effort to honor the greatest intelligence asset in their history. There was a funeral service attended
by virtually every important political and intelligence official in
the Soviet hierarchy, followed by an elaborate graveside service
with full military honors (Andropov had promoted him to full
general in the KGB). Philby insisted on being buried in Soviet
soil, and his coffin was lowered into the ground with medals
across his chest, Russian-style.
Prominent among them was the Order of Lenin, the Soviet
Union's highest decoration. In his last years, Philby was fond of
showing off the medal, but like the Englishman he remained to
his death, he sniffed it was not as prestigious as a knighthood.

ANTHONY BLUNT
"The Pope Wants You!"
Code Name: JOHNSON
1908-1983

t would be difficult to find a more rock-solid example of the

British establishment than Anthony Blunt, whose father was a
clergyman and at one time chaplain to the British embassy in
Paris, and whose mother was related to the Queen Mother. This
made his recruitment as a KGB mole all the more mysterious.
Like the other members of the "ring of five" (the KGB's
term for its major network of British assets), Blunt attended Cambridge in the angst of postwar Great Britain, a time of shattered
illusions and bleak futures in which Marxist ideology was nurtured and flourished. Like many other Cambridge students,
Blunt joined the Communist party, but unlike most of the others,
he took the momentous step from political conviction to espionage.
Although Blunt himself never told, it is believed that he was
recruited by the KGB in 1933 while a fellow at Cambridge, and
he is therefore ranked as "the first man" in the "ring of five." It
was Blunt who challenged younger Marxists to "do something"
about the perceived drift of Britain and the capitalist system toward disaster, and stressed the urgent need to aid what he claimed
was the beacon of the world's salvation: the Soviet Union.
Blunt's first recruit was Guy Burgess, a flamboyant homosexual (Blunt, also homosexual, was his lover), followed by others,
notably Donald Maclean, and Michael Straight, an American student who would turn out to be a much more significant recruit
17

18

THE MOLES

Anthony Blunt, a prominent art historian and art adviser to the Queen, in 1979
after his role as a Soviet spy was publicly revealed. (AP/Wide World)

than Blunt could have imagined. There was an ugly edge to

Blunt's role as a talent spotter: he often used sexual blackmail to
keep new recruits in line, threatening to expose their homosexuality. In the days when homosexuality was a serious crime in
Britain, this was no idle threat.
At first glance, the KGB's effort in recruiting an obscure
Cambridge fellow and art historian, along with the equally obscure men he in turn recruited, seems foolish. What could such
assets possibly provide the KGB? But appearances were deceiving,
for in fact the KGB had chosen shrewdly and well. It was from
Cambridge and Oxford that the British government drew its future political leaders, civil servantsand intelligence agents. By
investing early, and convincing their seedlings to subsume their
Marxist convictions in favor of infiltrating the establishment they
were so eager to destroy in the name of the proletariat, the KGB
had in effect implanted cancer cells into the British body politic.
There was another reason for recruiting Blunt. He was an
important figure in the British homosexual demimonde, giving him
a priceless network of contacts that extended up and down the

ANTHONY BLUNT

19

entire British ruling establishment. As the KGB was aware, one

of Blunt's close friendsand presumed loverwas a man named
Guy Liddell, a top official in MI5, who actively worked to recruit
and protect fellow homosexuals. The KGB was patient enough
not to bother attempting to blackmail Liddell, for he would serve
more important functions: easing the entry of homosexual assets
into British intelligence, while protecting such men from any awkward questions about their Marxist pasts or sexual proclivities.
At the KGB's urging, Blunt lobbied to enter British intelligence at the outbreak of World War II. He joined Field Security
of army intelligence, but was discharged when security investigators uncovered his Communist background. Undaunted, Blunt
then turned to his friend Liddell, who got him into MI5. At about
the same time, Burgess had managed to join MI6. He later
brought in H. A. R. Philby, which meant that the KGB had managed to plant three assets in British intelligence. Maclean, meanwhile, had joined the Foreign Office, so the KGB recruitments
years before had now borne fruit.
Blunt paid immediate dividends. He was put in charge of an
operation that surreptitiously opened diplomatic bags from neutral embassies in London, mostly by means of seducing the couriers with a stable of young men and women he had on the payroll.
MI5 was delighted at the haul of secret papers Blunt photographed from those bagsand so was the KGB, which got its own
copies. At the same time, Blunt kept Moscow informed about the
activities of a number of exile governments in London in which
the Soviets had a particular interestespecially Poland and
Czechoslovakia.
In 1944, Blunt was named MI5 liaison with the Supreme
Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) the Allied
high command in Europe, a crucial crossroads that not only gave
him access to ULTRA, the top-secret British codebreaking operation that cracked German codes, but also to high-level operational plans (including the Normandy invasion). It is not known
what other services Blunt was able to perform for the KGB, but
toward the end of the war, he carried out an operation that had
nothing to do with either the war or the KGB, but one that put
the Royal Family in his debt.
Throughout the 1930s, the British were worried about the
Duke of Windsor, who was a blatant pro-Nazi. He had been pressured into abdicating the throne of England after a brief reign
because of his refusal to break off his relationship with Mrs. Wal-

20

THE MOLES

lace Simpson, an American divorcee. In 1937 British intelligence

learned that the Duke, while visiting Germany, had met with Hitler and expressed such fervently pro-Nazi sentiments that Der
Fuehrer planned to install him as head of a puppet government
once the Germans had conquered England. Later in the war, the
British moved the Duke out of temptation's way, naming him
governor-general of Bermuda after learning there was at least a
reasonable possibility he was prepared to defect to the Germans.
The British government had managed to keep all this secret,
but they were aware of a potentially damaging cache of papers in
Germany, much of it correspondence from the Duke expressing
his fervent hopes for a victory by Nazi Germany. At all costs, this
cache had to be retrieved. Blunt successfully carried out the
assignment, and a grateful Royal Family rewarded him with a job
offer: Surveyor and Keeper of the Royal Pictures. (He was knighted in 1956).
Although Blunt officially resigned from MI5 at war's end, he
was still of value to the KGB. Through the old boy network, he
stayed in contact with ex-colleagues, and a weekly dinner with
senior MI5 officers often produced enough interesting tidbits for
passing on to the KGB. Blunt was also of value when MI5 became
involved in the first wave of postwar spy cases. In 1951, when
Burgess fled with Maclean to Moscow*, Blunt made things that
much more difficult for MI5 by sneaking into Burgess' apartment
before counterintelligence agents arrived and removing several
incriminating papers. Among them were notes in the handwriting of one of the "ring of five," John Cairncross, and some passionate love lettters written by Burgess to one of his favorite male
lovers: Anthony Blunt.
Nevertheless, as a known friend of Burgess, the cloud of
suspicion fell on Blunt. Yuri Modin, his KGB handler, offered to
get him out of Britain and to safety in the Soviet Union, but Blunt
refused. Over the next several years, he was interrogated 11 times
* Burgess, who never learned Russian, had a bad time in exile. With his drinking
nearly out of control, the KGB arranged for a small apartment, a menial job in a
publishing house, and a young man to play with. He died in 1963, a toothless alcoholic. Philby, still angry at the precipitous flight that cut short his career as the KGB's
greatest mole, pointedly did not attend the funeral. Maclean was given a job in a
Soviet think tank, wrote articles under the alias S. P. Madzoevski, and scandalized his
hosts by agitating for less control of Soviet society by the deadening hand of the
Soviet Communist Party hierarchy. He died of cancer in 1983. Philby wasn't at that
funeral, either, due to a certain awkward problem: he had seduced Maclean's wife
after she fled to the Soviet Union to join her husband and married her.

ANTHONY BLUNT

21

by MI5, but there was no solid evidence against him, and any case
against him languished.
In 1963, however, one of Blunt's recruits, the American Michael Straight, decided to apply for a federal job. Concerned that
the required FBI background check would uncover his secret
past, Straight volunteered that he had been recruited for the KGB
by Blunt and performed some minor espionage tasks before deciding to break with the Communist party. Armed with that
clinching piece of evidence, MI5 confronted Blunt and offered a
deal: tell all in exchange for immunity. Blunt agreed to the deal,
although there remains some question how enlightening he was
to his interrogators; a number of MI5 officials suspected that in
line with standard KGB practice, he revealed only what he was
quite certain MI5 already knew. However, Blunt did offer a few
nuggets. He revealed that Leo Long, a fellow MI5 officer during
the war, had been recruited for the KGB as a source (Long later
confessed under the same immunity arrangement that Blunt received). He also confirmed MI5 suspicions that John Cairncross
was the fifth man in the "ring of five." (Cairncross also subsequently confessed). Blunt also identified the KGB case officers
with whom he had worked, particularly Yuri Modin*, considered
the KGB's leading specialist in the handling of homosexual
agents. Given the fact that these Russians had long since departed
Britain, the revelations were of limited value.
British intelligence intended its arrangement with Blunt to
remain secret, but in 1979, some MI5 officers, outraged over what
they considered to be favorable treatment of a pillar of the British
establishment, leaked details of the deal to author Anthony Boyle,
whose book on the case, The Fourth Man, set off a public storm.
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was compelled to admit publicly that such a deal had been struck. There remains an ongoing
dispute over whether a man like Blunt should have received immunity, although the fact is that without his confession, there was
not enough solid proof to make an espionage case in court.

* Modin was resident in London in 1956, when he was reassigned to Moscow. Lionized
by the KGB for his masterful direction of the British assets, he later arranged for
Philby's escape to Moscow. Subsequendy, he became the KGB's leading disinformation specialist. Later, when that role was publicly exposed by the CIA, he became
a top KGB espionage instructor, training an entire generation of KGB agents in the
techniques of handling foreign assets. In 1990, as the KGB's senior statesman, he
gave TV and radio interviews to Western journalists on famous KGB operations, in
many of which he had played a key role.

22

THE MOLES

Nevertheless, Blunt paid a price. He was publicly reviled,

shorn of his knighthood, and finally consigned to a lonely retirement, hardly able to show his highly publicized face in public. He
died in 1983, apparendy unrepentant. When friends asked the
man born into wealth and privilege why he had felt compelled
to betray his country, he would answer with this historical anecdote: "The Florentine Army was fighting the Papal army and Benvenuto Cellini was on the Florentine side. During a lull in the
battle, a voice came from the Papal lines: 'Benvenuto! The Pope
wants you to work for him!' Cellini threw away his weapons, went
over to the Papal Army and became a silversmith for the Pope.
When he had finished his work, he returned to Florence where
he was received with honor and rejoicing because he was a great
artist."
Anyone hearing this anecdote could only wonder if the
strange mind of Anthony Blunt actually saw a parallel between
Cellini's betryal for art and his own treason.

OLEG PENKOVSKY
Soldier for Peace
Code Names: ALEX, CHALK, HERO, YOGA
1919-1963

n the evening of August 12, 1960, one of the most extraordinary chapters in Cold War espionage began on a bridge in
Moscow when two American tourists were suddenly confronted
by a stocky, red-haired man who thrust two envelopes into their
hands. He told them to take the envelopes "to the CIA," then
disappeared into the night.
The two young tourists were uncertain: they had been
warned that the KGB occasionally sought to entrap tourists by
just such a gambithaving someone put incriminating material
into their hands, then arresting them for spying. After debating
the matter a while, they finally decided to take the envelopes,
unopened, to the American embassy.
At the embassy, the diplomat who opened the envelopes realized at once he was looking at something very undiplomatic.
One letter, signed by "Colonel Oleg Penkovsky," offered to spy
for the Americans, and listed a few items of military information.
The second contained elaborate instructions for how the CIA
station in Moscow could contact him.
Turned over to the CIA station in the embassy, the letters
were regarded initially as an outright provocation, probably an
attempt to plant a phony asset on the CIA. Certainly, an examination of Penkovsky's background indicated caution, for he represented a prototypical example of the career track of a dedicated
Soviet functionary.
23

24

THE MOLES

Colonel Oleg Penkovsky during his 1963 trial in Moscow on espionage charges
after he was caught passing intelligence to the CIA and MI6. (AP/Wide World)

Born 1919 in the Caucasus, the son of a mining engineer,

Penkovsky entered the Red Army in 1939, and as a Communist
party member with a clean record, was made a commissar. He
fought in the Russo-Finnish war of 1940, then served during
World War II in the artillery branch, suffering a severe wound in
June 1944. Two years later, Penkovsky, regarded as one of the
army's brighter officers, was recruited for the GRU. By 1955, he
was the GRU's rezident in Ankara, Turkey, under cover as military
attache.
It seemed inconceivable that a man with this sort of record
of impeccable devotion to the Soviet cause would want to become
a spy for the CIA. Accordingly, the agency proceeded cautiously,
but all early doubts were cleared away when Penkovsky began
gushing forth an ocean of intelligence. Saying he wanted to be a
"soldier for peace," Penkovsky not only photographed every topsecret document he encountered, he added his own intimate
knowledge of Soviet military technology. For good measure, he
provided insights into GRU cryptographic systems, and identified
hundreds of GRU officers serving throughout the world.

OLEG PENKOVSKY

25

The Soviet SS-4 missile, seen on display in the 1962 May Day Parade in
Moscow, was secretly deployed a short time later in Cuha by Nikita
Khrushchev. Penkovsky revealed to the Americans the missile's deployment
pattern, allowing U.S. intelligence to spot it. He also revealed the Soviet
Union's greatest secret: the SS-4 was a technological white elephant, giving
President Kennedy a fifth ace in the Cuban missile crisis. (ITAR-TASS/
SOVFOTO)

The scope of Penkovsky's revelations was so vast, the CIA

operation became a joint one with MI6, which offered the services of one of its assets, a British businessman named Greville
Wynne, to serve as cutout for Penkovsky's voluminous material.
"The answer to a prayer," Maurice Oldfield, the MI6 station
chief in Washington, D.C., said of Penkovsky, and he was only
exaggerating slightly. The appearance of Penkovsky came at a
critical moment in Western intelligence, which was encountering
growing difficulties in taking the measure of the burgeoning Soviet military power. Despite the advances in overhead reconnaissance, there was ongoing debate about the size, scope, and significance of the Soviet military. The chief concern was the Soviet
rocket program; Moscow's space spectaculars indicated advanced
rocket designs of intercontinental range. As everyone understood, a rocket capable of putting a satellite or a man into space
was just as capable of delivering a megaton-sized nuclear weapon
thousands of miles away. Indeed, the perceived view of Soviet
nuclear-tipped rockets, boosted by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's boasts that his rockets could "hit a fly in space," indicated

26

THEMOLES

a massive force, much more powerful and numerous than the

American ICBM force. Charges of a "missile gap" had helped
elect John F. Kennedy during the 1960 presidential campaign.
To the shock of his MI6 and CIA debriefers, among Penkovsky's first major revelations was the intelligence that the "missile gap" was a myth. In fact, Penkovsky revealed, the Soviet rocket
force consisted of only a few rockets, and none of them worked
anywhere near their design parameters. In Penkovksy's earthy
Russian phrase, "They couldn't hit a bull in the backside with a
balalaika."
This astonishing insight into the true state of Soviet rockets
took place in London, where Penkovsky had been sent in early
1961 as head of a Soviet trade delegation (in fact a collection of
GRU operatives assigned to gather intelligence on British technology and industry). While MI6 operatives kept the delegation
busy with an exhausting schedule of visits to British industrial sites
during their six-day trip, Penkovsky each evening slipped away
from the delegation and met in a hotel suite with MI6 and CIA
debriefers. He would then spend hours unburdening himself of
Moscow's most vital military secrets.
His debriefers had long before discounted the idea of Penkovsky as a deliberate plant, for no plant would have conveyed so
much vital intelligence. That left the question of motive. As his
debriefers soon discovered, for all his impeccable record, Penkovsky actually was in serious trouble.
It had begun quietly enough: as part of the exhaustive background check as Penkovsky rose in the GRU hierarchy, KGB
counterintelligence agents had investigated his family background. To Penkovsky's dismay, they discovered that his father,
who he assumed died in 1920 of typhus (or so his mother told
him), in fact had died fighting in the White armies during the
Russian Civil War in 1919. The perennially suspicious minds in
the KGB reached two conclusions, neither one of them helpful
to Penkovsky: one, the fact that his father was a proven anticommunist raised the possibility that Penkovsky was not a dedicated
Communist, and perhaps of dubious loyalty; and two, the fact that
the circumstances of his father's death had been concealed by
Penkovsky indicated perhaps even more serious motives.
As a result of these suspicions, Penkovsky's career was stalled;
his scheduled assignment to India had been cancelled, and he
faced potentially even more serious consequences. Combined
with his growing disillusion with the Soviet system, it instilled a

OLEG PENKOVSKY

27

white-hot hatred of the regime in Penkovsky, sufficient to impel

him toward a dangerous plan of action. As he told his debriefers,
he had become convinced that the Soviet government intended
to prepare for an offensive war sometime in the future; that when
the Soviets felt militarily ready, they would confront the West in
a final Armageddon to decide whether communism or capitalism
would rule the world.
The fervency with which Penkovsky believed this apocalyptic
vision and his own perceived role in saving the world struck his
listeners as just this side of megalomania. Penkovsky betrayed further symptoms: he demanded a meeting with Queen Elizabeth
(denied, although he was permitted a brief meeting with the then
head of MI6, Dick White), and a face-to-face meeting with President Kennedy (denied on the grounds of a busy schedule). As a
sop, MI6 and CIA officers arranged for a tailor-made U.S. army
colonel's uniform and a British colonel's uniform to be prepared
for Penkovsky, in which he was photographed by his debriefers.
Penkovsky actually signed a contract with the CIA and MI6, in
which he agreed to become a "soldier of the free world" who
would be extricated from the Soviet Union with his family in the
event the KGB began to close in on him.
All this amounted to a small price to pay (the entire Penkovsky operation only cost $82,000) for the kind of intelligence
Penkovsky was providing. But the very value of Penkovsky created
an operational problem: his overseas travel was limited, so some
means would have to be devised to get his information in Moscow,
where he lived and worked.
The system MI6 and the CIA finally devised seemed secure.
Among the MI6 officers serving in Moscow under diplomatic
cover was Roderick Chisholm; his wife Janet, who had worked as
an MI6 secretary, lived with him in Moscow. One day each week,
Mrs. Chisholm would take her two small children to a park. At a
certain time, Penkovsky would approach, compliment her on the
beauty of the children, and offer them candy from a box. Mrs.
Chisholm would take the candy, which was actually microfilm. On
other occasions, Mrs. Chisholm and Penkovsky would exchange
messages at a dead drop located behind the radiator on the first
floor of a nearby apartment building. At the same time, Greville
Wynneunder cover as a businessman trying to drum up trade
with the Soviet Unionwould be used as a letterbox whenever
he visited Moscow.

28

THE MOLES

From the "candy" handed to Mrs. Chisholm, MI6 and the

CIA received a gold mine of intelligence on the status of the
Soviet rocket forces, Penkovsky's particular specialty in the GRU.
The information arrived at a crucial time, for unknown to Penkovsky and his handlers, Khrushchev had decided to install offensive missiles in Cuba. Early CIA intelligence that rocket sites
were being constructed on the island encountered a Soviet cover
story claiming the construction was for air defense missiles to
protect Cuban military installations and a Soviet brigade operating in Cuba. But the story collapsed when Penkovsky's intelligence was matched against Soviet claims; Penkovsky had provided
precise data on the unique construction and deployment patterns of the SS4, the main Soviet medium-range nuclear missile.
The information from their man in Moscow left no doubt in the
minds of MI6 and the CIA: the construction in Cuba was for
offensive nuclear missiles.
That was only the first benefit of Penkovsky's intelligence.
He also informed his handlers of the amount of time needed
from construction to actual deployment for the SS4, which told
the Americans precisely how much time they had to get those
missiles removed. And above all, Penkovsky provided President
Kennedy with the fifth ace in the game of international bluff that
became the Cuban missile crisis. Aware that Khrushchev's ICBM
force was a bluff, Kennedy knew he could force the Soviets to the
brink of nuclear war with the assurance they would have to back
down. The Soviets were in no shape to challenge the United
States in a nuclear war, which would have incinerated the Soviet
Union in a firestorm of massive American superiority.
But by the time the missile crisis was underway, Penkovsky's
career as a mole was over. Toward the end of summer, 1962, he
became aware the KGB was onto him. His access to the restricted
GRU librarywhere he photographed many documentswas
suddenly cut off, and during one contact with Janet Chisholm,
he noticed a car with men watching him. On October 22, 1962,
just as the Cuban missile crisis was reaching its climactic point,
Penkovsky was arrested.
How had the KGB managed to detect him? The question
was of paramount importance, because both the CIA and MI6
had taken extraordinary precautions to protect Penkovsky. Only
a handful of officials on both sides of the Atlantic were aware of
his specific identity, and only a slightly larger number had access to the intelligence he produced. The arrest of so precious a

OLEG PENKOVSKY

29

source indicated that worst of all intelligence nightmares: a mole

at a high level of either MI6 or the CIA.
However, it turned out that Penkovsky had been caught
through a combination of diligent KGB counterintelligence
work, a drunken U.S. Army sergeant, and a bad operational mistake by MI6.
As early as 1961, the KGB became aware that top-grade Soviet military secrets were finding their way westward. They had
managed to recruit an alcoholic U.S. Army sergeant named Jack
W. Dunlap, a low-level recruitment that paid unexpectedly huge
dividends when he was assigned as a courier-driver at the National
Security Agency, the American code-breaking agency. Despite his
lowly position, Dunlap managed to gain access to many of the
documents entrusted to his care, which he sold to the KGB. (Dunlap later committed suicide when FBI agents began closing in).
The KGB was appalled when they got a look at some of Dunlap's documents, for there was no doubt that the most sensitive
military information was reaching the West. The source was carefully concealed, but the KGB concluded that the CIA and/or MI6
had a high-level mole working somewhere at the top levels of the
Soviet military. But who? By KGB reckoning, some 1,000 officials
had access to the kind of information finding its way West, presenting a daunting task, for each one of the 1,000 peoplea list
which included Penkovskywould have to be investigated.
At the same time, the KGB concluded that the information
probably was being passed in Moscow, headquarters of the Soviet
military establishment. And that meant a CIA or MI6 agent under
diplomatic cover probably was receiving it. So the KGB instituted
a massive surveillance of all known MI6 and CIA agents operating under diplomatic cover in Moscow. The operative word is
"known," for not every Western agent in Moscow was known. But
they did know that Roderick Chisholm was, because their mole
inside MI6, George Blakewho had served with Chisholm in the
MI6's Berlin station during the late 1950shad provided the
KGB with a complete roster of all MI6 agents in Berlin. Chisholm's later assignment in Moscow was a bad mistake, for MI6 was
perfectly aware that he had been blown: Blake was arrested by
MI5 early in 1961, and admitted revealing the names of MI6
agents he knew.
Thus, when the blanket KGB surveillance began in Moscow,
among its targets were the Chisholms, for the KGB knew that
Janet Chisholm worked as an MI6 secretary in Berlin. The rest

30

THE MOLES

was pure end game: the spotting of Mrs. Chisholm in conversation with a GRU colonel named Oleg Penkovsky, the very same
Oleg Penkovsky rapidly entering and leaving a nearby apartment
building (an obvious dead drop), and Penkovsky's abnormally
frequent visits to the classified GRU library. To obtain final proof,
KGB agents implanted poisoned wax on the seat of the chair
Penkovsky used to sit in while working at his desk in his apartment. The poison hospitalized Penkovsky for a week; the KGB
used the time to install a movie camera concealed in the chandelier above the desk. When Penkovsky returned home, the camera recorded him writing out classified information for later delivery to the dead drop.
In early 1963, Penkovsky was put on trial (along with Greville
Wynne), a show meant as a propaganda exercise to demonstrate
his perfidy. Penkovsky, aware of the inevitable outcome, calmly
gave his public confession. Some months later, he was executed,
reportedly by the method reserved for the Soviet Union's worst
traitors: he was slowly fed into a live furnace, with some of his
closest former colleagues forced to watch.

GEORGE BLAKE
The Manchurian Candidate
Code Name: DIAMOND
Alias: Max de Vries
1922-

he thin man in the padded Chinese overcoat, a mere shadow

of his former stocky build, who stepped across the demarcation line that spring morning in 1953 looked as though he had
just emerged from a nightmare. In a way, he had: Vice-Consul
George Blake, along with his fellow British diplomats, had been
finally released following nearly three years of captivity in North
Korea and Manchuria.
Blake was met at the prisoner exchange point by, among
others, two MI6 agents who took him in hand for an immediate
debriefing. Blake's job as vice-consul was only cover; he was an
MI6 agent who in 1948 went to Seoul to open MI6's first Korean
station. In 1950, the North Korean invasion swept into Seoul;
Blake and his fellow diplomats had no time to escape, and they
were taken to the miseries of captivity in North Korea and later
Manchuria.
MI6 had an urgent question they needed Blake to answer:
had the Communists discovered his intelligence connections?
No, Blake reassured them; throughout his entire captivity, the
Communists assumed he was only Vice-Consul Blake. His fellow
captives spoke admiringly of Blake, recounting that he had acted
with "high standards of courage and fortitude," and served as an
inspiration to the other captives. There were further MI6 debriefings while Blake relaxed and recuperated in Hong Kong, but MI6
did not know that Blake met one night with a representative of
31

32

THE MOLES

another intelligence service, the one to whom Blake owed his

true allegiance: the KGB.
It seems unbelievable that Blake's loyalty to the Communist
cause would have remained unshaken after the experience of
captivity in Manchuria, but it is only one of several contradictions
connected with the man who represents what is surely the strangest spy story of all time.
To understand Blake, it is first necessary to understand that
he was born in 1922 as George Behar, son of one of the most
ancient and distinguished Jewish families in Amsterdam. Behar's
father died when the boy was 14, and in accordance with his dying
father's wish, he was sent to attend the famed English School in
Cairo. He lived with relatives, spending most of his time with his
uncle, Henri Curiel, who was not only a major figure in the Egyptian Communist party, but a longtime asset for the KGB as well.
Curiel recognized the potential as an agent in the very bright boy,
but bided his time; meanwhile, he was content to indoctrinate
his nephew in the intricacies of Communist theory.
By the time the young Behar returned to Amsterdam, he
was a fledgling Communist. He was attending a high school in
Rotterdam when the Germans overran the country in 1940. His
mother and two sisters fled to England; Behar decided to stay
behind. He became one of the first members of the Dutch resistance under the alias Max de Vries, but when the Gestapo got on
his trail, he fled to London via Belgium, disguised as a Trappist
monk. In England, he changed his name to Blake and volunteered for the Royal Navy, emphasizing his wish to get into intelligence work.
He got his wish, but to his frustration and disgust, he was
assigned a desk job. But it was while working at the desk job that
he underwent the seminal experience of his life. He fell madly
in love with an MI6 secretary named Iris Peake (later Lady in
Waiting to Queen Elizabeth), and following a whirlwind wartime
courtship, they decided to get married. But Peake's family
blocked the marriage; there was no way one of the most prominent British families was about to permit the marriage of their
daughter to a Jew. She reluctantly bowed to pressure, and the
relationship collapsed,
Blake was devastated, and in his rage and frustration, vowed
revenge against the snobbish establishment that had caused the
loss of the love of his life. His closest relative and confidant, uncle
Henri Curiel, listened carefully to his nephew's rage, and pro-

GEORGE BLAKE

33

posed a revenge: Blake would work for the "cause of world revolution." Translated, that meant Blake would infiltrate British
intelligence and at the proper moment, he would be in a position
to wreak his revenge.
It took a while for Blake to achieve his main goal, entry into
MI6. At the end of the war, still working for NID, he was posted
to Hamburg as head of a small unit that arrested U-boat commanders and debriefed them. A year later, MI6 reached out, and
by 1948, Blake was assigned his first major post, chief of the new
Seoul station.
It is a tribute to Blake's single-mindedness that his threeyear captivity did not diminish for a moment his determination
to injure the British establishment. That chance did not come
until 1955, when Blake, following two years of desk work at headquarters, won a key assignment: posting to one of MI6's more
important posts, Berlin.
There weren't many better postings than Berlin for a KGB
mole in 1955. Berlin was a virtual crossoads of East-West espionage, aswarm with agents of every description and a vital outpost
for at least a half-dozen intelligence agencies. Not only was Blake
assigned to this critical intelligence station, he worked as one of
the British representatives to a joint MI6-CIA committee that
oversaw various major intelligence operations in which both
agencies were involved.
Almost immediately upon his arrival in Berlin, Blake got his
first big opportunity. He learned that MI6 and the CIA were busy
working on Operation Gold, an audacious plan to dig a tunnel
under the border of East and West Berlin, and tap into the main
Russian communications lines through which virtually all military, diplomatic, and intelligence conversations passed. The Russians assumed those lines were safe, since all their phones had
scrambler devices. But CIA technicians had devised a brilliant
piece of technology that enabled them to pluck conversations
from scrambled signals. The new technology would be installed
in the tunnel and attached to voice-activated tape recorders that
would grab every signal over the Russian telephone lines.
Warned of this operation via a Berlin dead drop, Blake's
chief link with the Russians, the KGB played its end of the game
carefully, so as not to jeopardize their prize source in British intelligence. The KGB allowed the tunnel to be dug, but ensured
that nothing very sensitive or revealing was transmitted over the
tapped lines. Meanwhile, at a cost of millions, the CIAwhich

34

THE MOLES

had agreed to fund the costs of the operationrecruited battalions of translaters to handle the voluminous telephone traffic.
The CIA regarded the tunnel operation as a success, although
they began to wonder why there was so little of real use in all
those interceptions. Before the CIA could wonder too much
longer, the KGB closed down the tunnel by having some East
German guards "accidentally" discover it.
Blake followed up his betrayal of the tunnel operation by
blowing the names of all the MI6 and CIA assets he knew operating under control of the Berlin station. However beneficial to
the KGBMI6 and CIA operations behind the Iron Curtain became virtually paralyzedthis wholesale betrayal of Western intelligence assets inevitably focused attention on the possibility of
a mole in the Berlin station. Blake managed to talk his way out
of increasingly suspicious inquiries, even when Horst Eitner, a
German asset of the Berlin station, revealed that he was working
for the KGB and hinted that Blake might be, too. Blake explained
that he sometimes pretended to be a KGB sympathizer so as to
discover who among the station's German assets were also double
agents for the KGB.
Feeling the heat, Blake applied for another assignment. At
Curiel's suggestion, he told MI6 he wanted to work in the Middle
East. MI6 agreed, and in 1960 sent him to Lebanon to study at
the Middle East College for Arabic Studies to prepare for a job
in MI6's Beirut station. Blake did not know it, but his world was
about to collapse.
As Blake arrived in Lebanon, an official of the Polish UB
who was also functioning as a KGB asset began sending top-grade
intelligence to the CIA; among other revelations, he said that the
CIA/MI6 station in Berlin had been penetrated via a mole named
George Blake. In January 1961, the UB agent, who turned out to
be Mikhail Goleniewski, defected to the CIA, and brought incontrovertible proof lifted from the KGB files: documents to which
Blake had access had wound up in the KGB's hands.
Recalled to London on the excuse that MI6 officials wanted
to discuss his next intelligence posting, an unsuspecting Blake
arrived at MI6 headquarters and was confronted with the evidence against him. To the surprise of his interrogators, Blake
immediately confessed. He laid out an appalling picture of the
damage he had caused, including the blowing of at least 42 assets
(all of whom were executed), the secret of the Berlin tunnel, and

GEORGE BLAKE

35

a long list of other operations. Among them was the sad case of
Pyotr Popov.
In 1952, Popov, then a GRU colonel working in Vienna,
threw a letter into the car of an American diplomat. The letter
volunteered Popov's services to the CIA, which soon learned that
Popov had become disillusioned by the Soviet system and was
determined to destroy it. The son of peasants, he became enraged at the privileges enjoyed by Soviet officials while most Soviets still lived in near-poverty. (He only accepted one small payment for his services from the CIA, which he promptly turned
over to his brother to buy a cow).
Popov's intelligence was nothing short of sensational, for he
provided the first insights into the closed world of the Soviet military: new weapons, deployments of Soviet forces in Eastern Europe, and how the Soviets planned to fight a nuclear war in the
event of hostilities with the West. In 1956, he had been shifted to
the GRU station in East Berlin, which meant that operational
control for him was handled out of the MI6/CIA Berlin station.
The moment Blake became aware of Popov, he told the KGB.
Popov was recalled to Moscow for "consultations," and was
arrested. But instead of executing him, the KGB sought to turn
him; under threat of death for his family, he was ordered to wear
a body recording device and meet the newly-assigned CIA agent
who would be his CIA control in Moscow. At their first meeting
in a men's room, Popov wordlessly ripped off some bandages
covering one of his hands to reveal the word "torture" written in
ink on his palm. He then made a circular motion with both
hands, warning the CIA man that he was wearing a wire.
The CIA man's caution in subsequent meetings tipped off
the KGB that Popov somehow had warned him of the trap. The
KGB finally tired of the game, and when Popov and the CIA man
had a brush contact on a Moscow bus one day in October 1959,
both men were arrested. (But not before Popov was able to scribble a warning that the Soviet military had detected the high-altitude U2 flights and were determined to shoot down one of the
planes). The CIA man, under diplomatic cover, was expelled
from the country, but Popov suffered what had become the standard fate for GRU traitors: he was slowly fed into a live furnace
while his colleagues watched.
The betrayal of Popov was only one act in a lengthy catalog
that was presented when Britain's High Court justices convened
to decide Blake's punishment. Their mood was hardly improved

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THE MOLES

when they saw a defendant who seemed almost proud of the damage he had caused to an establishment he hated so much. Accordingly, the High Court sentenced Blake to 42 years in prison,
a sentence of unprecedented severity in a peacetime espionage
case.
This virtual lifetime sentence (he was 39 years old at the
time) would appear to have been the final chapter in the Blake
story, but there was to be one further amazing development. In
1967, after serving six years in prison, Blake escaped. Although
it was assumed that the escape had been arranged by the KGB,
in fact it was the work of an Irish Republican Army activist (and
former fellow inmate of Blake) named Sean Bourke. He hid
Blake for a few weeks while a nationwide manhunt was underway,
then contacted the Russians, who smuggled him to Moscow.
Bourke went to Moscow, too, but after a few months, depressed
by the city's grimness, returned to his native Ireland. He insisted
until his death some years later that he arranged for the escape
of Blake strictly out of friendship with the convicted spy, with no
involvement by the KGB. Very few people believed him, but if in
fact Bourke was working for the KGB, he took that secret to the
grave with him.
As for Blake, he was given a comfortable home by the KGB,
where he read, with some amusement, the Richard Condon
novel, The Manchurian Candidate, based on his case. He married
a Russian woman (abandoning a wife and two children in Britain). In 1990, he was interviewed by Soviet television, during
which he boasted of betraying 600 CIA and MI6 agents.

NIKOLAI AND NADJEDA

SKOBLIN
Death and the Kursk Nightingale
1899-1938
1897-1940

t seemed like something out of a movie script: the beautiful

female spy, tied to a stake, refusing a blindfold as she defiantly
contemplates the firing squad about to end her life. The dashing
young cavalry officer, moved by the sight of her beauty and courage, suddenly rides up and orders the firing squad not to fire. He
has her untied, then released into his custody. He'll handle this
matter himself.
However improbable, that is precisely how the youthful General Nikolai Skoblin first met Nadjeda Vassilievna early one spring
morning in 1920 in southern Russia. And it was at that moment
when he fell in love with her, with consequences that would ultimately result in the near-destruction of the Soviet Union and
the deaths of over 30,000 men. Among the victims was Skoblin
himself.
Both Skoblin and Vassilievna were like characters from some
sort of Romanov grand opera. Born into aristrocracy, Skoblin was
a Czarist cavalry officer during World War I, and after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, fought on the White side in the
Russian Civil War. By 1920, he was fighting a losing battle against
the Red armies in southern Russia, the same year of his fateful
encounter with Nadjeda Vassilievna. She was also born to an aristocratic family, became an opera singer, and before the war was
known as the "Kursk nightingale." Accustomed to the good life
of parties, fancy homes, beautiful clothes and jewels, her world
37

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THE MOLES

was shattered by the Bolshevik revolution, which had no time for

such frivolities. Worse, she had married a penniless ballet master
named Edmund Plevitsky; by the end of 1918, she was desperate
for money at a time when admirers no longer showered her with
cash and jewels for her concerts.
How the CHEKA, the Bolshevik intelligence agency, decided
that this spoiled, money-hungry diva would be the ideal asset to
use against the White forces remains unknown. In late 1918, apparendy appealing to her love of money, the CHEKA enlisted her
to penetrate the various White organizations threatening the new
regime.
To a certain extent, Vassilievna was almost perfectly suited
for her role. Traveling throughout the White-held areas, she entertained the troops at free concerts, at the same time ingratiating
herself with anti-Bolshevik leaders who had long admired the
"Kursk nightingale." In the process, she began to collect interesting intelligence tidbits from some of the more indiscreet
Whites (including those she slept with to pry even more information).
By 1920, with the civil war moving into a climactic phase,
suspicions about the possible relationship between Vassilievna's
visits and a series of catastrophic military defeats began to harden.
Early in 1920, having intercepted some of her messages to the
CHEKA, the Whites had final proof. She was caught and ordered
to be shot.
Enter Nikolai Skoblin. Totally smitten, he was willing to forgive her shocking confession that she had been working for the
CHEKA, meaning that she was an agent for the hated Bolsheviks.
Under ordinary circumstances, such a confession would have
ended Vassilievna's usefulness as an agent, but the CHEKA now
had another inspiration: why not recruit Nikolai Skoblin as an
asset?
The idea seemed preposterous, but as much as the CHEKA
understood Vassilievna's vulnerability, it also understood Skoblin's. He was obsessed with the idea of "Holy Russia," the mythical
land that existed before the czars. A megalomaniac, Skoblin saw
himself as the leader of a whole new movement that would some
day recapture the land of Russia and recreate his vision of a country out of a fairy tale. Vassilievna worked on that vulnerability,
and by the time in late 1920 when they retreated with the remnants of the White forces into Turkey and permanent exile, she
had convinced him.

NIKOLAI AND NADJEDA SKOBLIN

39

In Skoblin's mind, he was merely using the CHEKA to

achieve his eventual aim. On behalf of the CHEKA, he would
destroy the Russian exile movement and gain control; once he
had achieved that aim, he would lead a great holy crusade that
would march back into Russia and destroy the CHEKAand everything else Bolshevik. (At the same time, Vassilievna noted, she
and Skoblin would be paid handsomely, something like selling
rope to the hangman).
This most curious couple now departed for Paris, international headquarters of the Russian exile movement, which, in
1921, amounted to a considerable threat against the weak Communist regime. With more than 300,000 armed followers devoted
to the Czarist cause, and well-financed by contributions from over
a million followers scattered throughout the world, its very being
was a matter of abiding concern to the CHEKA, to which Lenin
had assigned the task of neutralizing or eliminating the threat.
Skoblin would be the prime instrument to accomplish that
task. He married Vassilievna (her apparently understanding husband was best man at the wedding), and set about infiltrating the
exile movement. Given his background and military experience,
with a proven record of actual combat against the Bolsheviks, no
one seemed to doubt Skoblin's bona fides. By the early 1930s, he
was a key leader in the ROVS organization, the main combat force
of the exiles. From that vantage point, he was able to keep Moscow informed of which "combat fighters" had been smuggled
across the border into Russia to organize anti-Bolshevik combat
units. He also became aware of the exiles' extensive forgery operations (whose products included allegedly "authentic" documents from the files of OKHRANA, the Czarist secret police,
"proving" that Stalin had been a police spy).
The very success of Skoblin's operation, however, caused periodic evaluations of the exile movement by its leaders. And what
they found was not encouraging, for the record was uniformly
bleak. All the teams of "combat fighters" dispatched to the Soviet
Union had disappeared, never to be seen again. The KGB (successor to the CHEKA) seemed to anticipate every exile move.
Exiles who had been enlisted as assets for various intelligence
organizations were routinely betrayed. Some 15 years after leaving Russia, the exiles had not made the slightest dent in the Soviet
Union.
Inevitably, exile leaders began to look inward: was it possible
that someone high in the organization was betraying the cause

40

THE MOLES

to Moscow? In that kind of spotlight, Mr. and Mrs. Skoblin stood

out in stark relief. Not only did they know everyone of importance
in the exile movement, they seemed to spend an inordinate
amount of time trying to find out about the movement's plans.
True, Skoblin had some justification for seeking such information, since he was officially head of foreign counterespionage operations for ROVS, a job he had held since 1934. Still, there was
the oddity of the Skoblins' opulent lifestyle. Skoblin had no visible means of support, yet he and his wife lived lavishly. Nadjeda
Skoblin claimed an income from recitals, but the limited market
for a Russian opera singer in France could not have generated
much in the way of money.
For the moment, Skoblin was under suspicion, although
there was no firm proof. If Skoblin was bothered by the gathering
suspicion, he didn't show it, for in 1936, he carried out his biggest
assignment yet from the KGB, one that would make him a major
figure in espionage history.
The assignment began with an approach by Skoblin to the
German SD. He offered his services, claiming that he wanted SD
help in gaining control of the entire exile movement, which he
would then turn over to SD control as a "spear of war" against
the Soviet Union. Since the SD didn't have much to lose in such
an arrangement, it jumped at the opportunity, enlisting Skoblin
as its asset inside the exile movement. There was to be a subsidiary
benefit: Skoblin claimed to have important sources in the Soviet
Union who occasionally provided top-grade intelligence, which
he was now willing to share with the SD.
With the SD hooked, Skoblin now moved to the next phase
of the operation. It was a bombshell: Skoblin claimed to have
documentary proof that the top echelon of the Soviet military
was planning a coup against Stalin. Skoblin was careful to say he
wanted $2 million for these documents, a clever twist: as the KGB
calculated, if a man like Skoblin were to offer the documents for
nothing, the SD would be suspicious. So high a price could only
mean that the documents were genuineor were the products
of the exiles' well-known paper mills that turned out very good
forgeries.
The irony in this little game was that Reinhard Heydrich,
head of the SD, could care less if the documents were genuine.
By extraordinary coincidence, Heydrich was just then planning
his own forgery operation, hoping to plant forged documents
incriminating senior Soviet leaders in a coup plot; the resulting

NIKOLAI AND NADJEDA SKOBLIN

41

reaction by a notoriously paranoid Stalin would tear the Soviet

Union apart politically.
A meeting between Skoblin and Heydrich presented an even
more bizarre irony. Heydrich quickly deduced that Skoblin was
working for the KGB, which obviously had been directed by Stalin
to produce "proof of the "conspiracy" the dictator had created
himself. For his part, Skoblin understood that the KGB's aims
coincided perfectly with the SD's. All of this made for an extremely smooth negotiation, with Heydrich finally agreeing to
buy Skoblin's documents. He straightfacedly claimed he had even
more sensational "documents" obtained by German intelligence,
and he planned on slipping them to Stalin via one of the few
intermediaries Stalin trusted: Eduard Benes, president of Czechoslovakia.
The result was one of the worst bloodbaths in history. Claiming that there was a military putsch in the making, Stalin purged
his armed forces, executing about 35,000 officers. When the
purge was over, 90 percent of the Soviet Union's generals, 80
percent of its colonels, and more than half of all other officer
ranks were dead. The Soviet military had not yet recovered from
this slaughter several years later when the Germans invaded; a
virtually leaderless military lost 7 million men within 24 months.
However delighted they may have been with the result, the
Russian exile movement knew nothing of Skoblin's role in it. The
exiles still had suspicions about him and his wife. Nevertheless,
he might have remained the KGB's prize mole in the movement
had not Moscow overreached itself, in the process exposing
Skoblin.
For reasons that have never been made clear, Moscow decided that General Anton Miller, head of the military wing of the
exile movement, was a dangerous man who had to be eliminated.
The decision was made to kidnap him from his Paris headquarters, then bring him to the Soviet Union for final disposal. So
radical a solution to the problem of the largely ineffectual Miller
seemed pointless, but Skoblin was nevertheless ordered to set up
the kidnapping. In September 1937, Skoblin invited Miller to
lunch, ostensibly to discuss future strategy. Unfortunately for
Skoblin, Miller was among the exile leaders who had become
suspicious of him. He agreed to the meeting, but cautiously left
behind in his office a note memorializing the appointment.
The note was to cost Skoblin his life. Miller arrived for his
meeting, and was immediately set upon by a KGB goon squad.

42

THE MOLES

The old general put up quite a fight, and the commotion attracted the attention of eyewitnesses. The KGB agents finally managed to bundle Miller into a car and speed off, but the alarm was
up. The police couldn't find Miller (who was smuggled to the
Soviet Union and disappeared), but they did find the note he left
behind. Then they went looking for Skoblin, who had gone into
hiding. Nadjeda Skoblin was arrested, and in a sensational public
trial, was convicted of involvement with her husband in the Miller
kidnapping. She was sentenced to 20 years in jail, and died in
prison in 1940.
As for her husband, the KGB helpfully offered to aid his
escape to the Soviet Union for what he assumed would be a comfortable life funded by a grateful Soviet government. The same
naivete that had led to his seduction by Soviet intelligence 19
years before led him in 1937 to follow a KGB rescue team to the
Soviet Union, blissfully unaware of an obvious fact: there was no
way Stalin would let a man like Skoblin remain alive. Simply put,
he knew too much.
Skoblin was last seen alive in Barcelona, Spain, being escorted aboard the Soviet ship Kuban. Offered something to drink,
he took one sip and dropped dead from the poison concealed in
the glass of wine. Upon arrival in the Soviet Union, his body was
given to a medical school teaching laboratory.

ISRAEL BEER
The Man Who Never Was
Code Name: COMRADE KURT
1908-1966

n the summer of 1960, an American businessman on a trip to

Israel sat down in a Tel Aviv restaurant one afternoon for
lunch. A man of some intelligence backgroundhe had served
in the OSS and before the war fought in the Spanish Civil War
he still retained the spy's involuntary habit of carefully scanning
all the people in a room the moment he entered it.
As he gazed around the small restaurant, his eyes suddenly
fastened on a man seated at a corner table. He stared, and the
memory came flooding back in vivid detail: the last time he had
seen that man, it was 1936 in Madrid. He was in a detention cell
and the man, considered one of the most sadistic torturers in the
KGB unit assigned to root out spies in the International Brigade
volunteers, was beating him, demanding he confess to being a
spy. The American was spared further agony when others vouched
for him, but he never forgot his tormentor: thin, with a cadaverous face that appeared to be nothing more than skull with a
thin layer of skin stretched over it.
And now, 24 years later, there his tormentor sat, no more
than 15 feet away, calmly eating lunch. More significantly, he was
wearing the uniform of a colonel in the Israel Defense Forces.
How had such an infamous KGB thug become a senior military
officer in Israel? Alarmed, the American left the restaurant and
headed for the nearby headquarters of Mossad.
43

44

THE MOLES

To the American's surprise, Mossad officials did not seem

especially shocked by what he told them, for he had simply confirmed what they already knew: There was something seriously
wrong with Colonel Israel Beer.
The matter of Beer had been an ongoing obsession with
Mossad chief Isser Harel for the past 10 years. Harel, the legendary spymaster who had built Mossad into one of the world's
greatest intelligence organizations, was renowned for his emphasis on the human element in intelligence operations. He set great
store on an instinctive "feel" about people: which ones make
good spiesand which ones become traitors. Relying on that instinct, he was quite convinced that Israel Beer was a KGB mole.
However certain, Harel had to admit that he did not have a
shred of proof. Indeed, before 1959, there had been nothing in
Beer's background that suggested he was anything but a loyal
citizen of Israel.
Like many of his contemporaries, Beer had emigrated to
Israel in the 1930s to escape Hitler's persecution. According to
Defense Ministry records, Beer had been born in Austria, and in
1934 joined the Socialists. Three years later, he fought in the
Spanish Civil War on the side of the Loyalists. In 1938, he emigrated to Palestine, and began a meteoric career track in the
Jewish underground.
Beer joined the Haganah, the Zionist underground army,
for whom he volunteered his services to the German Department
of the British Mandate intelligence organization trying to keep
track of the Zionist leaders. The British, unaware of Beer's link
with the Haganah, gave him virtually unlimited access to its records on German-speaking Zionist leaders; slipped to the Haganah, it enabled key leaders to avoid arrest. (At the same time,
Beer was able to learn which Jews were providing information to
the British.)
Among the leaders Beer aided was the leading Zionist in
Palestine, David Ben-Gurion. The two men became close friends,
a relationship that would play a crucial role in Beer's life. By 1945,
Beer was chief of operations in the upper Galilee for the Haganah. During the 1948 War for Independence, Beer served at
the headquarters of the Haganah general staff in Tel Aviv, where
he was considered among the important architects of the new
nation's victory.
After the war, Beer occupied a position high in the Israeli
military and intelligence establishment by virtue of his close re-

ISRAEL BEER

45

lationship with the nation's first Prime Minister, Ben-Gurion, for

whom he became a sort of general factotum. Among other duties,
he was put in charge of keeping Ben Gurion's diary, a job that
exposed him to an astonishing range of secrets that the Prime
Minister committed to paper, intending to use at least some of
them as the basis for his eventual memoirs.
Ben-Gurion trusted Beer totally, but Isser Harel, one of the
key officials in Israel's nascent intelligence service, did not. He
had one of his "feelings" about Beer. Nothing specific, but as he
told his men, there was something that did not "ring right" about
Beer; Harel resolved to keep an eye on him.
Since Beer was close with the powerful Ben-Gurion, Harel
had to move very carefully. In 1952, when Harel was named head
of the new intelligence agency called Mossad, he got some confirmation of his suspicions when Beer suddenly resigned his army
commission and went into politics, joining the Mapam, Israel's
most leftist political party. Less than a year later, he was ousted
for "leftist deviationism." Beer recanted his political views, and
became head of the party's information department. This sort of
expediency hardened Harel's suspicions. He successfully blocked
Beer's attempt to rejoin the army on the grounds of "security
risk," but Beer, drawing on his friendship with Ben-Gurion, got
a job in the Defense Ministry to prepare an official history of the
1948 war and to work on strategic studies.
Harel was alarmed, for Beer now had wide access to classified material. He was convinced Beer was a KGB mole, but
without the proverbial smoking gun, was reduced to warning
Ben-Gurion about his suspicions. Ben-Gurion, unimpressed, demanded proof. The first real proof did not come until 1959, when
Mikhail Goleniewski, the Polish UB agent and KGB asset, began
revealing to the CIA information on KGB assets around the
world. The CIA passed onto Harel one especially alarming revelation from Goleniewski: the KGB had a mole, code-named COMRADE KURT, "somewhere in the upper levels" of the Israeli Defense Ministry. Goleniewski did not know the mole's specific
identity, but provided enough clues that pointed to Israel Beer.
Several months later, Harel received another clue. The West
German BND told him that Beer, on a visit to West Germany for
a lecture to German military officials, had slipped across the border to East Germany, and returned after several hours. Beer had
told no one about this trip, nor had he noted it in his report on
the trip. Why would an Israeli colonel take a secret trip to East

46

THE MOLES

Germany? Then came the information from the American businessman, and Harel was positive: Beer was a mole. Armed with
the new information, he was able to convince Ben-Gurion to authorize a full-scale surveillance of Beer (something the Prime
Minster had refused to sanction up to that point).
One evening in March 1961, Mossad surveillance teams
tracked Beer, carrying an attache case, to a nearly-deserted restaurant in Tel Aviv. He sat there for a while, then was joined by a
man carrying the same kind of attache case as Beer. The team
immediately identified him as a Soviet diplomat who was in fact
a senior KGB officer. Beer and the Russian conversed for a short
period, then got up, each reaching for the other's case, a classic
espionage exchange. The team pounced: inside the case Beer
had handed to the Russian was a stack of classified documents.
Some months later, Beer was convicted of espionage and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
That would appear to have been the end of it, but Mossad
discovered the mystery of Israel Beer was just beginning.
Beer refused to cooperate in any way with his captors, so
Mossad was required to work backwards. Their first unsettling discovery was that they had arrested a ghost: the man calling himself
Israel Beer did not exist. Detailed checking revealed that nearly
everything known about Beer's background was a lie. The man
sitting in an Israeli jail cell, although he spoke fluent German,
was not from Austria. He had not been a member of the Austrian
Socialists. He had been in Spain during the civil war, but had not
served in the International Brigade. He was not Jewish. He had
not emigrated to Palestine to escape Nazi persecution.
Who, then, was he? Mossad never did find out. Beer, who
remained mute, died in 1966 of heart failure. Eventually, Mossad
was to conclude that the man who called himself Israel Beer represented a classic KGB mole operation; he had been planted in
Palestine before World War II with the specific purpose of infiltrating the Zionist underground. The unexpected bonus came
when that underground ultimately became the government of
the new nation of Israel.
Eventually, Mossad was to conclude that the entire operation
involved two men. One was the real Israel Beer. He in fact had
been an activist in the Austrian Socialist movement, and later
fought in Spain. But, Mossad was convinced, the real Israel Beer
had never left Spain alive; as was common KGB practice during
the Spanish Civil War, it appropriated the passports and other

ISRAEL BEER

47

papers of men righting in the International Brigade. When one

of the fighters died, the KGB had a genuine set of papers it simply
used for one its agents who took over the dead man's identity.
Who was the second man? His real identity was never discovered, but Mossad believed that he had been a fanatical Communist activist in Austria, joining the Communist party in 1928.
In 1931, he was recruited by the KGB to spy on fellow party members, an assignment he carried out successfully. Marked for bigger
and better things, he was recalled to Moscow in 1934 for intelligence training, and two years later was sent to Spain as head of
a squad assigned the job of rooting out "deviationists" from the
ranks of the volunteers fighting in the war. He apparendy overstepped himself at some point, for in December 1936, he was
recalled to Moscow to answer charges of "gross errors." Normally, that would have meant a death sentence in the purge era,
but he was "rehabilitated" a few months later and was transformed into "Israel Beer" for work as a mole.
And the real Israel Beer? His fate remains a mystery.

VLADIMIR I. VETROV
The Murder of Line X
Code Name: FAREWELL
1928-1983

urder was not a common occurrence in Moscow in that February of 1982, so when the police arrived in the park and
saw the body of a man stabbed to death and the severely wounded
woman, they realized they were confronting something unusual.
The case instantly became even more unusual when they identified the dead man as a senior KGB officer and the woman as a
KGB secretary.
In other words, it was a case now fraught with political complications. The police had barely absorbed this complexity when
they were confronted with another: An hour after police arrived
on the scene, already swarming with KGB agents, a 54-year-old
KGB colonel named Vladimir I. Vetrov showed up. The wounded
KGB secretary pointed to him and announced that he was the
man who had stabbed the dead man and tried to kill her. Police
seized him, and found a bloody knife still in his pocket.
It was one of those crimes of human passion that occasionally afflict even the KGB, and the agency worked hard to keep
the case from public view. Vetrov gave a full confession, during
which he admitted having an affair with the KGB secretary. One
night, they parked in his car at the park drinking champagne.
Suddenly, another KGB officer, who had been taking a walk in
the park, knocked on the car window. He had recognized his coworkers and wanted to exchange friendly greetingsand perhaps
also get a sip of that champagne. But for some odd reason, Vetrov
48

VLADIMIR I. VETROV

49

A Soviet MIG-25 in a training sortie. Vladimir Vetrov of the KGB, a mole

working for French intelligence, revealed that its technology was the result of a
top-priority KGB effort to steal Western military innovations. (ITAR-TASS/
SOVFOTO)

panicked; apparently assuming that the KGB man was about to

arrest him, he pulled out a knife and stabbed him to death. When
the KGB secretary bolted from the scene, Vetrov tracked her
down and stabbed her repeatedly. Assuming she was dead, he left,
but returned an hour later to make certain.
The suspicious minds of KGB counterintelligence pondered
this scenario. Why had Vetrov come so unhinged at the sight of
another KGB officer? The fact that the married Vetrov was conducting an affair with a KGB secretary was not exactly an unprecedented occurrence, and even if discovered by his superiors,
would not have resulted in any severe sanctions. So what was really
going on with this high-ranking KGB officer? What terrible pressure was he under?
For the moment, the KGB did not have an answer, but they
resolved to keep a close watch on Vetrov. He was convicted of
murder and was sentenced to prison for 12 years. A careful KGB
watch on his movements and actions in prison, along with opening and reading his mail, finally produced a clue. In one letter

50

THE MOLES

to his wife, Vetrov hinted that the murder case had forced him
to abandon "something big."
KGB counterintelligence now went to work on Vetrov.
Whether he was tortured is not known, but the result was a document Vetrov wrote out himself in longhand, which he defiantly
headlined, "Confessions of a Traitor." The document caused
grave shock to the KGB, for Vetrov revealed that he had been a
mole for French intelligence for several years. Worse, he had
blown the KGB's greatest secret, a revelation from which it never
recoverednor did the Soviet Union.
The first shock was that Vetrov, considered among the more
dedicated and accomplished KGB officers, had betrayed his country. A brilliant engineer, he had been recruited for the KGB after
finishing his graduate studies. He was assigned the job of creating
the KGB's most secret unit, known as "Line X," whose mission
was nothing less than saving the Soviet Union.
By 1964, when Line X was created, the KGB and the Soviet
Politburo were acutely aware that they were losing the Cold War
to the West. The problem was technology: the creaky Soviet system was falling further and further behind the West in every area
of technology and science, especially military technology. (Soviet
computer experts told the Politburo their technology was at least
30 years behind the United States, a gap widening each passing
moment). The eventual outcome was inevitable: the Soviet Union
would fall so far behind, superior Western technology would gain
the upper hand and turn the Soviet Union into a paper tiger.
Given the weak Soviet economy and even weaker militaryindustrial base, there was no hope the Soviets could catch up,
even with a crash program. The solution was a complete reorientation of Soviet intelligence toward the goal of stealing every
piece of Western technology they could get their hands on. Line
X, in the lead of this new offensive, would recruit a whole new
army of intelligence agents: technicians, engineers, and scientists
who would know what to look for and how to get it.
Line X succeeded brilliantly. In just one year, the KGB stole
over 5,000 of what it euphemistically called "industrial samples"
from the United States and other Western nations. Western military experts were astonished at the speed by which the Soviets
seemed able to obtain the most advanced technology and immediately incorporate it into their own designs. And what Line
X and their GRU helpmates could not steal, they bought. Western
intelligence agencies gradually became aware of a massive tech-

VLADIMIR I. VETROV

51

nology transfer operation: networks of dummy companies to divert sensitive technology barred from export to the Eastern Bloc,
elaborate operations to bribe engineers and scientists into turning over blueprints, and infiltration of government agencies to
influence shipments of sensitive technology.
And yet, in the midst of this glittering success, Vetrov began
to have his doubts. The son of landed gentry, he nevertheless was
concerned about the average Soviet citizen. He had always hoped
that technological progress would eventually better the life of the
Russian people, but as Soviet space stations circled the earth and
the massive Soviet military machine grew larger and larger, he
saw that the people were not sharing in the progress. The Soviet
Union, obsessed about its military power, was pouring every resource it could muster into arms. And while the mighty Soviet
rockets were trundled each May Day past the Kremlin on parade,
the people were still lining up for hours to buy a piece of bread.
Vetrov kept these doubts to himself, but in 1965, assigned to
Paris to supervise Line X operations in Western Europe, he began
to consider the contrast between the average French citizen and
his own countrymen. Even the poorest French family, he realized,
lived a life that could only be imagined by his countrymen. His
doubts grew. French intelligence became aware of them through
a curious encounter that was to prove momentous.
Vetrov one day was involved in a serious automobile accident. He was unhurt, but the Frenchman's car he had smashed
into was a virtual wreck. The Frenchman magnanimously offered
to pay for all the damage, and arranged for repairs. He and a
grateful Vetrov struck up a close friendship, and the Russian began to talk openly about his doubts.
What Vetrov did not know at the time was that the Frenchman, whom Vetrov assumed was a businessman, also happened
to be an asset for France's counterintelligence agency, the DST.
The DST knew that Vetrov was not merely the low-ranking diplomat he claimed to be, so the question arose of how his dissatisfaction could be exploited. DST officials decided to proceed
very cautiously, for their own surveillances on Vetrov convinced
them that he was a high-ranking KGB officer, probably involved
in technology theft operations. As the DST was aware, France at
that time was hemorrhaging its most vital technological secrets
Eastward, so a recruitment of Vetrov promised to staunch that

flow.

52

THE MOLES

In 1970, his tour of duty in France over, Vetrov was recalled

to Moscow to work in KGB headquarters. His French businessman friend maintained friendly contact, but did not attempt to
recruit him directly, content only to let him know in subtle ways
that he had a friend in France, available at a moment's notice to
help. The DST's patience paid off in 1980, when Vetrov wrote a
carefully phrased letter to his French friend, requesting an "urgent meeting" in Moscow.
So Vetrov had made his move at last. A subsequent meeting
in Moscow confirmed DST's supposition: Vetrov said he would
serve as a mole inside the KGB. In subsequent meetings right
under the Kremlin walls, Vetrov handed over copies of top-secret
documents, all of them stamped with the warning, PHOTOCOPY
FORBIDDEN.
The documents revealed everything there was to know about
the Soviet intelligence technology-theft operations. At that point
a senior officer in the KGB's Department T (technological espionage), Vetrov had an overview of the scope of the program.
Concerned that the time Vetrov spent at the KGB photocopying
machines might arouse suspicion, the DST equipped him with a
special high-speed camera that allowed him to photograph entire
file cabinets of documents.
The film cassettes that Vetrov turned over to his control officer, a DST officer serving under cover as a military attache at
the French embassy, provided the French (and the other Western
intelligence services invited to share the treasures) with a double
benefit. They not only revealed what Moscow was seeking in the
way of technology, but they also revealed precisely which areas of
the Soviet military were most technologically deficient. Moreover,
the identities of nearly 300 KGB and GRU agents involved in
technology theft operations were exposed, along with leads to
more than 100 assets in the West who were aiding those operations.
For the KGB, it was an intelligence disaster of the first magnitude. The disaster would have been all the greater had not
Vetrov, by 1982 near the breaking point because of the strain of
his double life, committed the murder in the park. Still, as soon
as the French became aware that Vetrov had been arrested, they
and the Western allies decided to roll up Line X: 47 KGB officers
under diplomatic cover were expelled from France, and another
150 were expelled from other nations. The KGB hurriedly pulled

VLADIMIR I. VETROV

53

out another 200 before they could be arrested or expelled. A

number of assets were arrested.
With that, Line X operations virtually collapsed, leaving the
Soviet Union most vulnerable just as the huge American military
buildup began during the Reagan administration. The Soviets,
forced temporarily to rely on their own resources, never did catch
up; the effort wrecked the Soviet economy and was among the
chief causes of the Soviet collapse several years later.
As for Vetrov, the KGB's fury at him can only be imagined;
not since Oleg Penkovsky had a mole working for the West caused
such terrible damage. Initially, the KGB had plans to put Vetrov
on trial, the idea being that a public airing of his "degenerate"
life style (to be blamed on his exposure to the dissolute West
during his Paris posting) would serve as a civics lesson. But no
matter the severity of the threats against him, Vetrov had no intention of participating in a show trial. If the KGB wanted a trial,
he made it clear he would use it as a forum on the failures of the
Soviet leadership. He also made it clear he was prepared to indict
the KGB, which he said was dominated by "alcoholism, corruption and nepotism." To underscore his determination never to
play the role of penitent traitor, he insisted on adding to his confession, "My only regret is that I was not able to cause more damage to the Soviet Union and render more service to France."
Hopeless, the KGB decided, so the man poignantly codenamed FAREWELL was taken out of his cell one morning in the
spring of 1983 and shot.

THE STORM PETRELS

AFANSY M. SHOROKHOV
Flight of the Football Fan
Aliases: Vladimir Petrov,
Proletarsky, Sven Allyson
1907-1991

o his fellow members of the Russian Club in Canberra, Australia, the man officially known as Vladimir Petrov, Third Secretary at the Soviet embassy, was a very odd fish indeed.
Oh, he was unmistakably Russian, all right, the kind of Russian who, like most of his countrymen, loved his vodka and those
throbbing, Gypsy-like songs of sadness and unrequited love. Curiously, however, he also took special delight in all things Australian, which included a passion for Australian football. His depth
of knowledge about the game's finer points rivalled any native
expert. Unusually enough for a Russian in those Stalinist times
of 1953, he seemed to have a real sense of humor. And unlike
the usual run of dour Russians who tended to regard Australians
as capitalist creatures just short of barbarians, Petrov seemed to
genuinely like Australians and often talked about how much he
admired the country.
Most members of the club did not know quite what to make
of Petrov, but one member made it his business to begin a close
friendship with the Soviet diplomat. This was no chance encounter, for Dr. Mikhail Bialogusky, a Polish immigrant, was an asset
for the Australian Secret Intelligence Organization (ASIO). He
had joined the Russian Club, a mecca for homesick Russian diplomats, trade officials (and even a few emigres) with the specific
assignment of scouting which Soviet official might be susceptible
to blandishments by the ASIO.
56

AFANSY M. SHOROKHOV

57

In selecting Petrov, Bialogusky was after a big fish. As ASIO

was aware, Petrov's real job in Canberra was KGB rezident for Australia. He had been there since 1951, and from the moment of
his arrival, ASIO realized he was pure KGB. Then 44, Petrovan
alias for Afansy M. Shorokhovhad already served more than 20
years in overseas posts from Peking to Stockholm, invariably accompanied by his wife Evdokia, who worked as a KGB clerk. Petrov's forte was cipher work; he had joined the Soviet navy in his
teens, become a cipher expert, and was recruited into the KGB
on the strength of his ability to handle codes. Trained by the KGB
in the espionage arts, Petrov became that rare agent able to function as his own code room.
Given his reputation as one of the top KGB agents, ASIO
suspected, correctly, that Petrov had been assigned to Australia
to revive a highly successful wartime network of assets, mostly
Communists and assorted sympathizers. After the war, the assets
began to crumble away in the face of Cold War anticommunist
purges, and the KGB wanted a revival.
ASIO's plan was for Bialogusky to pose as a rabidly pro-Soviet
emigre, engage Petrov in political discussions, and slowly draw
him out about his own real political leanings. To Bialogusky's
surprise, however, the last thing Petrov wanted to hear was anything pro-Soviet. As he drew closer to his newfound friend, Volodyato use Petrov's favorite nicknamebegan to open up. In
truth, Petrov was in the process of becoming a very disillusioned
spy. He took the dangerous step of revealing his disillusionment
to Bialogusky, at the same time telling him that his wife Evdokia
also was disillusioned. The problem, Petrov noted drily, was that
Moscow did not accept resignations.
Petrov was careful not to mention his actual job as KGB rezident, nor did he discuss the real source of his low morale. His
problem was twofold. One, he had been given an impossible assignment. By 1951, KGB operations in Australia, in part thanks
to ASIO vigilance, had fallen to a low ebb, with no prospect of
any immediate improvement. Moscow was demanding quick results, but to rebuild networks on the order of the KGB's wartime
success might require decades. Second, and more ominously,
KGB chief Laventri Beria was executed in 1953 after attempting
to take power in the Soviet Union in the wake of Stalin's death.
The inevitable anti-Beria purge had begun in KGB ranks; as Petrov knew, KGB operatives all over the world were being summoned to Moscow, there to receive a bullet in the back of their

58

THE STORM PETRELS

heads. Petrov felt especially vulnerable: Beria had recognized his

talents some years before, and had promoted his career up the
KGB ranks. This sponsorship was now a death warrant, for Petrov
would be regarded as one of "Beria's boys."
ASIO officials sensed the moment had come, and Bialgusky
was instructed to broach the subject of defection with Petrov. Any
doubt Petrov may have had about such a drastic step was removed
in April 1954, when he received the dreaded summons to report
to Moscow for "consultations." Forced to make an instant decision, Petrov elected to defect, with his wife scheduled to follow
later. He contacted Bialgusky and successfully made it to safety,
but the KGB, the moment it realized Petrov had fled the embassy,
seized Evdokia before she could escape the building. Petrov,
meanwhile, hid out in an ASIO safe house.
There now began one of the most astounding public chapters in the history of Cold War espionage. The KGB decided to
fly Mrs. Petrov back to Moscow as quickly as possible; the idea was
that holding her as a hostage in Moscow would tend to dampen
her husband's enthusiasm for revealing too much to the ASIO.
The KGB was acutely aware that Petrov, among its leading agents,
had a great deal of damaging information stored away in his head;
what he knew about KGB cipher systems alone could be catastrophic.
A plane was dispatched to Australia by the KGB to pick up
Mrs. Petrov, along with a squad of KGB thugs ordered to bring
her back by force, if necessary. Legally, there wasn't much Australia could do to halt Mrs. Petrov's repatriation, since she was a
Soviet citizen. But ASIO came up with a plan that would not only
rescue her, but also give the KGB a black eye in the process.
Aware that the return flight to Moscow would have to refuel
at Darwin, Australia, ASIO officials notified the media. By the
time the plane landed, the airport was crowded with reporters,
photographers and television cameramen drawn to the irresistible story: loving wife of defecting Soviet diplomat forced against
her will to return to Moscow.
Confused by the media circus, the KGB made several bad
mistakes. The KGB guards were ordered by Australian immigration officials to leave the plane with Mrs. Petrov. They did so
although there was no legal reason for them to heed such an
order. Then, they meekly complied with an order to go into the
terminalwhere ASIO agents separated Mrs. Petrov from their
care and pressed a telephone receiver to her ear. On the other

AFANSY M. SHOROKHOV

59

end was her husband, who told her to seek political asylum. "I
do not want to go back to Moscow," she announced, giving the
Australians sufficient legal reason to remove her from control of
her bodyguards.
The KGB guards then committed the final, and worst, mistake in the entire drama. Under orders to bring Mrs. Petrov back
to Moscow regardless of circumstances, they seized her and tried
to force her into the plane. The Australians intervened, and the
KGB thugs and their plane were ordered out of the country.
All of this was memorialized by the attending media contingent, and the pictures of a distraught-looking Mrs. Petrov, in the
grip of two squat KGB goons from Central Castingcomplete
with ill-fitting suits and thick-soled shoesmade the front pages
of every newspaper in the world. It was a public relations disaster
for the KGB, for at the very time the Soviet government was trying
to convince the world of its "peaceful" intentions, here was vivid
visual proof of the real face of Soviet communism. Infuriated KGB
leaders had a half-dozen KGB agents connected with the disastrous operation shipped off to Siberian labor camps as punishment, but the damage had been done.
Once safely in Australian hands, the Petrovs damaged the
KGB further. It turned out that Petrov had surreptitiously kept
copies of his reports to Moscow since 1952. These revealed a number of mid-scale Australian assets who were promptly rounded
up. More interesting were the insights the Petrovs provided into
the KGB cipher systems, of immense aid to the American and
British cryptographers trying to read the KGB's World War II
traffic.
Petrov's debriefing turned up a few surprises. One was his
revelation that Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, the British diplomats who had defected to the Soviet Union in 1951, were in
fact KGB moles who had been implanted nearly 20 years before.
He also told his debriefers that H. A. R. Philby, then under suspicion, was considered by the KGB to be their prize mole in Britain, and had been recruited in 1934. It was the first link in a chain
that eventually forced Philby to flee eastward.
When all the debriefings were finished and his usefulness to
Western intelligence at an end, Petrov settled down to a very
different life as an Australian citizen. Given a new identity as Sven
Allyson, a Scandinavian immigrant, Petrov and his wife wrote a
book on their experiences, then opened a small general store
they ran until Evdokia's death in 1990 and her husband's in 1991.

60

THE STORM PETRELS

And for all those years, Petrov's neighbors were unfailingly

puzzled why the pleasant Mr. Allyson had developed this consuming passion for Australian football. Pretty odd, they concluded,
for a bloke from Sweden, or Finland, or wherever he said he was
from.

IGOR GOUZENKO
The First Man
Code Names: CORBY, KLARK
Alias: Richard Brown
1919-1982

he 26-year-old Russian, newly arrived in Canada, had never

seen anything like it. He cut the small story out of the local
Ottawa newspaper and showed the clipping to all his co-workers.
Was this not, he asked them, the most incredible thing they had
ever seen?
The story, reporting a routine enough occurrence in the city
of Ottawa, concerned a Greek fruit merchant who was suing the
city for constructing a road in such a way that it was destroying
his business. Igor Gouzenko read the story repeatedly, and the
more he read, the more astonished he became. For a faithful
Soviet apparatchik, the idea that an ordinary citizen could actually
sue the government was almost beyond belief.
The fruit merchant episode was the first of several lessons
on life in the West that caused a profound change in Gouzenko.
The contrast between the standard of living of the average citizen
in Canada and the grim, grinding poverty of a Soviet citizen could
not have been greater. And as Gouzenko saw more aspects of life
in the West, he became steadily more disillusioned about the Soviet system.
Gouzenko was a GRU agent, assigned to the GRU station in
the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, under cover as a civilian cipher
clerk for the embassy's diplomatic communications system. Actually, Gouzenko was specifically assigned to handle only GRU
and KGB traffic from the embassy. He arrived in Ottawa, his first
61

THE STORM PETRELS

MI5 Director Roger Hollis, whose handling of Soviet defector Igor Gouzenko
caused mole-hunters in British intelligence to suspect him of being a KGB mole.
(AP/Wide World)

overseas assignment, in June, 1943, following espionage schooling in Moscow. He had been a young army soldier in 1941, working in radio communications, when his brilliant abilities in handling cipher work brought him to the attention of GRU
recruiters.
As Gouzenko was to learn, Soviet intelligence had a desperate need for cipher experts; the German invasion of the Soviet
Union had compelled the GRU and the KGB to crank up to maximum power. Wholesale recruitments of hundreds of assetsincluding Communists committed to the Soviet cause and noncommunists eager to help defeat Hitlerhad GRU and KGB radios
humming around the clock, transmitting intelligence to Moscow.
The radios (and the cipher experts who enciphered the messages) were essential, for intelligence in the fast-moving modern
world was perishable, and had to be sent to Moscow as quickly as
possible.
In Ottawa, Gouzenko learned that the GRU station was a key
outpost in the Western Hemisphere, with intelligence tentacles
that reached throughout North America. It had 25 well-placed

IGOR GOUZENKO

63

assets in Canada alone, and also handled some of the massive

volume of traffic generated from the United States.
But Ottawa represented something else to Gouzenko, who
was the son of poor parents. Like an orphan child entering a rich
man's home, he could hardly fathom that such a fairyland as the
Canadian city actually existed. Arriving in Ottawa from the nearstarvation radons of wartime Moscow, he was astonished to see
that even with wartime restrictions, people in Ottawa had plenty
to eat. Moreover, they were free in a way that no citizen of Stalinist
Russia could fathom: people freely spoke their minds in public,
on occasion actually criticizing the government.
Gouzenko seemed to be only dimly aware that wandering
around Ottawa to savor this refreshing breath of freedomand
then telling his co-workers about itwas an extremely dangerous
thing to do. For one thing, Gouzenko was a cipher clerk, which
meant he had access to virtually every secret that was transmitted
in and out of the embassy. For another, typical Stalinist paranoia
ruled both the GRU and KGB stations inside the embassy building; some of the more than 100 agents who worked there were
assigned the specific job of watching other agents to detect even
the slightest sign of disloyalty.
Almost certainly, somebody in the embassy finally informed
on Gouzenko, for in September, 1944, he received the dreaded
summons to return to Moscow for unspecified "discussions." He
had been in the GRU long enough to know what that meant: he
was in serious trouble, undoubtedly suspected of drifting toward
"dangerous Western deviationism." There was an even greater
worry. For some time, Gouzenko had been hearing whispers
among his GRU colleagues that that there was something strange
going on with GRU and KGB cipher clerks. According to those
whispers, Moscow had a habit of summoning home cipher clerks
who worked in especially sensitive embassies, following which
they would disappear. Reputedly, those cipher clerks were disposed of at regular intervals (and then replaced by new ones) for
the simple reason that they knew too much; Moscow did not want
to take the chance of a clerk defecting or becoming turned by
the opposition. (GRU and KGB cipher clerks, who saw all the
intelligence traffic, knew virtually all Russian secrets: the identities of all legals attached to the embassy, the illegals working outside who were in contact with the embassy, and the assets under
control of regular agents, to say nothing of ongoing operations.)

64

THE STORM PETRELS

Whatever the truth about these rumors, Gouzenko was

spared from finding out firsthand. He was saved by his superiors
at the Ottawa station, who furiously objected to his recall, arguing
that his skills were irreplaceable "at this critical moment." Moscow gave wayfor the time being, at least.
"At this critical moment" was no exaggeration, for the GRU
station in Ottawa had suddenly shifted gears. Soviet intelligence
had learned that the United States and Great Britain were jointly
working on a top-secret project to develop an atomic bomb, a
secret they were keeping from the Russians. A maximum effort
was ordered for both the GRU and KGB: at all costs, that project
must be penetrated. Stalin was not about to let his allies develop
a weapon that would allow them to dominate the postwar world.
The joint GRU-KGB effort, code-named Operation Candy,
focused much of its energy on Canada, where a scientific team
was trying to work out the problems of producing fissionable uranium. Gouzenko handled the quantum jump in cable traffic as
the Soviets reoriented their assets toward obtaining any information they could find on the atomic bomb project. Some
months later, he realized that the GRU had suceeded brilliantly:
he began transmitting volumes of technical data apparently obtained directly from assets working in the atomic bomb program.
The prize asset, Gouzenko concluded, was a man code-named
ALEX, who apparently was one of the scientists working on the
program.
In the early summer of 1945, Gouzenko transmitted a report from his superior, Colonel Nikolai Zabotin (code-named
GRANT), that indicated the GRU had penetrated the American
end of the program. Zabotin not only provided details of what
was going on at Los Alamos, New Mexico, the main development
center for the bomb, he also knew the scheduled date of the first
test, technical details of how the bomb was constructed, and, most
precious of all, he had actually obtained a sample of U-235 (enriched uranium) from ALEX. A special plane was detailed to fly
from Moscow to pick up the sample and bring it back to the Soviet
Union, where it was used to accelerate the Soviet nuclear weapons
program.
Awards, honors, and promotions showered upon the GRU
station in Ottawa for its brilliant espionage feat, but Igor Gouzenko was not among the celebrants. Still under suspicion for his
perceived "deviationism," he realized it was only a matter of time

IGOR GOUZENKO

65

before Moscow would re-issue the summons to return home

with the strong possibility of a bullet in his head.
Gouzenko resolved to defect, but concluded that since Canada and the Soviet Union were still allies, there was the possibility
the Canadians might simply give him back to the Russians. A plan
took shape: he would defect with as much documentary evidence
as possible of the massive Soviet spying operations in Canada.
Once the Canadians saw the depth of Soviet perfidy, there was
no way they would hand him back.
On the evening of September 5, 1945, Gouzenko finished
his regular tour of duty in the embassy code room and walked
out of the embassy with 109 GRU and KGB telegrams stuffed in
a briefcase. Given the tight security in the embassy, he knew it
would be only a matter of hours before the Soviets discovered the
missing cables, so he had only a limited amount of time to put
his plan into effect.
To his dismay, Gouzenko discovered that he could not even
make the Canadians understand what he was trying to accomplish. His first stop was at the offices of the Ottawa Journal, the
newspaper where he had read about the Greek fruit merchant
some years before. The newspaper's editors didn't seem to understand what he was talking about, and ordered him out of the
building. (Their failure in turning away the biggest story in decades resulted in succeeding generations of Journal staffers required to listen respectfully to every nut who wandered into the
place, even those claiming to be receiving orders from space aliens via steel plates in their heads).
Gouzenko next visited several government offices, which
also turned him away as some sort of crank. Increasingly desperate, Gouzenko locked himself in his apartment with his wife and
two-year-old son, hardly daring to breathe as he heard GRU and
KGB agents banging on his front door, demanding he come out.
In a desperate move, Gouzenko poured out his story to his nextdoor neighbor, a Royal Canadian Air Force sergeant who agreed
to give him and his family shelter. Gouzenko moved just in time:
he had just settled into the adjoining apartment when he heard
four KGB agents smashing in the front door of the Gouzenko
apartment and ransacking the place.
The KGB's rash act actually helped Gouzenko, for police,
summoned to the apartment building, realized that he was no
ordinary crank, and that he was being hunted by the Russians for
those papers he was clutching. By further fortuitous circum-

66

THE STORM PETRELS

stance, Canadian-born William Stephenson, the legendary MI6

spymaster in New York during the war, happened to be in Canada
as word spread throughout the Canadian security apparatus that
something very strange was going on at the Soviet embassy in
Ottawa. When Stephenson heard some of the first details, he instantly realized what had happened; thanks to his high-level contacts, he was able to mobilize the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
(RCMP) Security Service to take Gouzenko under its wing. Meanwhile, the Russians were demanding Gouzenko's return, claiming
that he had stolen a large sum of money from the embassy and
would be taken to Moscow to "face serious consequences."
The Canadians ignored the Soviet demand, for the initial
conversations with Gouzenkoand the treasures from the GRU
code roommade it clear that something very significant had
fallen into their hands. Of immediate concern were the 25 Canadian citizens revealed in those papers as Soviet intelligence
assets, but there were even bigger shock waves. President Truman
was informed that the great American atomic bomb secret
which the Americans had hoped they could keep for at least another 20 yearshad been compromised. The British were informed that at least one of their scientists (who turned out to be
Dr. Allan Nunn May,* the man behind the code name ALEX)
was working for the Russians.
When the Gouzenko case became public, it fell like a thunderclap across the Western world. The Cold War had not yet begun, and the Russians were still generally regarded as wartime
allies who had sacrificed the most in the struggle to defeat Hitler.
In terms of public opinion, the Gouzenko revelations shattered
at once the predominant impression that the Soviet Union was
an imperfect, but generally benign, dictatorship that had stood
shoulder to shoulder with the democracies. The Russians could
no longer preserve the myth that they had no aggressive intentions against the West, and that they could coexist in a postwar
world with their political opposites. The perfidy was there for all
to see during a long series of espionage trials that grew out of
Gouzenko's revelations: the massive recruitment of citizens to be* May pleaded guilty to espionage charges in 1946, and was sentenced to 10 years
in prison. He confessed that he was a Communist sympathizer, recruited by the GRU
early in the war to provide information on British scientific developments. The GRU
got an unexpected dividend when May was assigned to the British end of the atomic
bomb project. He received a total of $700 and two bottles of whiskey from the GRU
in appreciation of his efforts, one of the great bargains in espionage history.

IGOR GOUZENKO

67

tray their own country by a wartime ally. Judging by the indications contained in the telegrams Gouzenko brought with him,
the GRU and the KGB had recruited hundreds of assets to uncover virtually every single important secret in the United States,
Canada, and Great Britain.
The sheer scale of the effort was breathtaking, but to the counterintelligence agents of those three countries who now flocked to
Gouzenko, there was far more interest in some other things he
had to say.
Like all intelligence operatives in sensitive positions, Gouzenko had been exposed to the inevitable office gossip during the
years he worked in Moscow. Outsiders might be surprised to learn
that there are few real secrets inside the halls of the average intelligence agency; like human beings everywhere who work in
offices, intelligence agents like to exchange gossip about their
superiors, complain about their treatment, carp against their perceived rivals, and boast of their greatest accomplishments.
Even in the rigidly controlled Soviet intelligence system, office gossip and office politics ran rampant. Gouzenko recalled a
few choice tidbits he had heard in Moscow Center (as the headquarters of Soviet intelligence was known). Two of them were to
cause minor earthquakes in the espionage world.
For the representatives of American intelligence, Gouzenko
had very disturbing news: friends in Moscow Center had bragged
to him of an American asset they had recruited, described as
"high in the State Department." Since the Americans had already
been told by Whittaker Chambers that State Department official
Alger Hiss was working for the KGB, they concluded that Gouzenko probably was referring to Hiss. For the British, Gouzenko
had even more disturbing news: he had heard about an asset,
code-named ELLI, who he understood was a senior official "in
British counterintelligence." He had no other information to further pinpoint this vital source, but recalled some GRU officials
mention that there was "something Russian" in his background.
MI5 official Roger Hollis, assigned the task of debriefing Gouzenko, discounted this lead, since ELLI was also the code name
assigned to one of the GRU's Canadian assets. It was deemed
unlikely that the Soviets would assign the same code name to two
different assets.
Many years later, Gouzenko's revelation and its curt dismissal by Hollis would lead to suspicions that Hollis himself was
a KGB mole, but meanwhile Gouzenko settled into his new life

68

THE STORM PETRELS

in Canada. Under RCMP 24-hour guard, he was given a new identity as a Czech immigrant named Richard Brown (to account for
his heavy Slavic accent). He wrote a book of reminiscences of his
life in Soviet intelligence and his subsequent defection, and a
highly praised novel about life in the Soviet Union, both under
his real name.
Relations between Gouzenko and the RCMP were not warm.
He complained endlessly about the size of the government pension he was awarded, and seemed intent on becoming a rich capitalist. An enigmatic, very complex man, Gouzenko's relentless
hunt for money (in later years, he would charge $1,000 to reporters for a brief interview) antagonized his RCMP handlers,
who liked to joke that the motto on the Gouzenko family's coat
of arms was "What's In It For Me?" Eventually, as Gouzenko felt
more secure, the RCMP removed their guards, and its prize defector was on his own. His value as an intelligence source long
had passed, and he decided he wanted to live life in the fast lane.
Gouzenko went deeply into debt, caused largely by the $500,000
home just outside Toronto in which he insisted on living. To raise
money, he hit upon the expedience of filing libel suits: any author
or television commentator who even mentioned the name Gouzenko could expect a libel suit from him, filed under Canada's
very restrictive libel laws.
The proceeds of these suitsmost publishers setded out of
courthelped Gouzenko maintain a fairly comfortable life-style,
but they could not protect him from the ravages of time. He
began to go blind from an incurable eye ailment, a source of rage
and frustration. His frustration worsened in the 1970s when British investigators came to visit him. They were involved in reopening the whole matter of KGB penetration of British intelligence,
and busily reinvestigating what had happened when Gouzenko
first spoke to MI5 in 1945. Furious, he listened as British agents
read him the 1945 reports on the MI5 debriefing of him, for the
reports bore no relation to what he saidespecially his warning
that MI5 had a high-ranking KGB mole. "You have been penetrated!" Gouzenko shouted at them, unable to believe that British
intelligence in 25 years had been unable (or unwilling) to find
the mole.
On that sad note, history passed by Gouzenko. He died in
June, 1982, his funeral attended only by a few close relatives. Fol-

IGOR GOUZENKO

lowing an old Russian

one by one passed by,
denominational service,
describing the deceased
Prague."

69

custom, they lined up at the casket and

bending to kiss the corpse. During a nona clergyman delivered a brief eulogy,
as "Mr. Brown, who comes to us from

ANATOLI GOLITSIN
Even a Paranoid Has Enemies
Code Names: KAGO, STONE,
AE/LADLE, MARTEL
Aliases: Anatole Klimov, John Stone
1921-

ike high-stakes poker players pushing their stacks of chips

across the table toward a player they were convinced was probably bluffing, the counterintelligence officers shoved piles of paper before the bull-necked Russian. "Please go through these
reports," KGB Major Anatoli Golitsin was instructed, "and tell us
which ones came to your attention in Moscow."
The spy-hunters from Great Britain, the United States, and
France sat silently as the man nicknamed "Tolka" began to read
through the papers. As all the men in that room understood, this
was a very important litmus test.
It was January, 1962. A few weeks earlier, Golitsin had defected to the CIA from his post as rezident in Helsinki, Finland.
He claimed to possess an astounding amount of information on
KGB operations worldwide, and wanted to be set up as a virtual
one-man counterintelligence agency to root out the KGB moles
he claimed infested every Western government and intelligence
service, the CIA included. As a mere sample of his knowledge,
he told his debriefers he had read top-secret NATO documents
while stationed in Moscow several years before because the
KGB moles regularly provided Moscow with virtually all top-level
NATO decisions as soon as they were written.
If true, that meant the KGB's penetration was so extensive
that NATO was an open book. To some of his listeners, such
revelations smacked of self-aggrandizement, a not-uncommon
70

ANATOLI GOLITSIN

71

tendency by defectors to exaggerate their own knowledge and

importance in order to boost their credentialsand qualify for
the kind of lavish payments grateful counterintelligence agencies
can pay to useful sources.
To test Golitsin's claim about KGB penetration of NATO, it
was decided to present him with several documents, in which a
number of cleverly forged papers were included. If he really had
the knowledge he claimed he had, he should be able to spot the
difference. To the shock of his audience, Golitsin treated the test
as though it were child's play. "Deception," he announced in his
heavy Slavic accent as he put aside one of the forged documents.
Within a half hour, Golitsin scanned his way through the documents; unerringly, he was able to spot the fake ones. Asked how
he had managed this feat by only rapidly scanning the pile of
papers, Golitsin replied simply, "Because, as I've told you, I've
already read these documents in Moscow."
With that, Anatoli Golitsin passed into espionage legend.
Over the next two years, he was to uncover scores of KGB agents
and assets in the Western world, resulting in a roster of damage
unequalled by any other KGB defector. But, as things turned out,
the damage he caused was not limited to the KGB; he was also to
cause grave damage within the very Western intelligence agencies
he professed to aid.
There was nothing in Golitsin's background to indicate his
eventual role as any kind of wrecker, much less against the KGB.
Born in 1926 of Ukrainian peasants, his record showed a typical
profile for a loyal KGB careerist: military school, member of the
Komsomol (Communist party youth movement), army artillery
school, Communist party membership, transfer to military counterintelligence, and recruitment by the KGB. Clearly, he was a
man early on regarded as an up and comer, for the KGB sent him
to its High Intelligence Schoolthe agency's graduate school for
future senior espionage executivesand then posted him in 1953
to one of its most important outposts, Vienna. After a two-year
tour, he returned to Moscow Center to work as a case officer in
one of the KGB's most sensitive areas, the Anglo-American Department (where he saw the top-secret NATO documents while
learning of the KGB's extensive penetrations of their Western
opponents). In 1961, he was sent to another key KGB post, Helsinki, where on a snowy evening that December, he showed up at
the U.S. embassy with his wife and seven-year-old daughter and
announced he wanted to defect.

72

THE STORM PETRELS

Although Golitsin did not know it, the CIA was not entirely
surprised by his defection. Seven years before, another KGB officer operating in Vienna, Peter Deriabin, had defected. During
his debriefing, his CIA handlers took him through a standard
exercise for defectors: an analysis of all the other KGB officers he
knew at the Vienna station, noting which ones he thought were
susceptible to eventual defection or possible turning by the CIA.
Deriabin picked out fellow KGB officer Golitsin. Despite his unblemished record, Deriabin pointed out that Golitsin was in fact
regarded by Moscow Center as a royal pain in the neck. Arrogant,
with overweening ambition, Golitsin had a tendency to aggravate
his superiors. Some years before, while in Moscow, he had actually
proposed a plan to reorganize the entire Soviet intelligence structurea plan that placed himself somewhere near the apex. Golitsin, Deriabin reported, was regarded as insufferable and also
possibly dangerous. Deriabin predicted that Golitsin, with his ambitions thwarted, would at some point defect to the other side.
Deriabin turned out to be right. Golitsin, fundamentally, was
an intelligence chameleon. He was in the intelligence game for
the pure excitement and intrigue it offered; whether he was working for the KGB, the CIA, or MI6 was of little consequence, so
long as he was playing a key role. In later years, this mindset would
be of some significance, but at least in the early stages of his
defection, Golitsin was nothing short of sensational.
Thanks to his work in the KGB's Anglo-American Department, Golitsin had an overview of many of the agency's assets in
the West. Among them was H. A. R. Philby, whom Golitsin finally,
and positively, identified as a long-term KGB mole. It was Golitsin's clinching evidence that led MI6 to a final confrontation with
Philby, who understood he now faced evidence he could never
refute, and he fled behind the Iron Curtain.
Of more immediate operational interest, Golitsin then began blowing other KGB assets. Three of the more interesting involved deep penetrations whose revelation caused dismay among
Western counterintelligence agencies, since they had no clue that
such hemorrhages were taking place.
One involved John Vassall, a homosexual clerk in the British
Admiralty, who had been recruited in 1953 when he was posted
to Moscow. He was caught in a classic so-called "honeytrap" operation: the KGB set him up with a male prostitute (known as a
"raven" in Soviet intelligence parlance), photographed the result, then threatened to show the photographs to Vassall's supe-

ANATOLI GOLITSIN

73

riors unless he agreed to work for the KGB. Vassall made available
to the KGB a wide range of classified material that came across
his desk, most productively when he worked in NID and saw reports of British Naval intelligence.
In a similar honeytrap operation, the KGB had ensnared
John Watkins, a Canadian diplomat and homosexual who agreed
to work for the KGB when he was posted to Moscow as Canada's
ambassador in 1958. As an asset, he was almost perfectly placed,
since he could provide top-level diplomatic messages from Canada and other countries. (A subsidiary, and possibly even more
important, benefit was that access to such traffic enabled Soviet
cryptanalysts to find "cribs" that helped them break Western diplomatic ciphers).
The third, and most damaging of all, involved Georges Paques*, French attache to NATO, a secret Communist who had
been recruited in 1946. He passed on high-level material from
both NATO headquarters and the French government.
By late 1963, Golitsin had divested himself of just about everything he knew concerning specific KGB penetrations in the
West. He then moved to the second, and much more controversial, part of his postdefection career. It involved something for
which he had no hard information, but sufficient suspicions to
intrigue his counterintelligence hosts: KGB penetration of Western intelligence services.
Golitsin's first hints of KGB moles in Western intelligence
had a particular resonance in Britain, where a coterie of MI5
officers, led by Peter Wright and Arthur Martin, had been convinced for quite some time that both MI5 and MI6 were penetrated by the KGB. Further, they believed that the penetration
was at a very high level, a super-mole (or several super-moles)
who had facilitated the KGB's "ring of five" and subsequently
were responsible for the miserable record of British intelligence
throughout the first two decades of the Cold War.
Golitsin was lent by the CIA to the British for what had become a large in-house investigation code-named FLUENCY. Notoriously tightfisted with money for intelligence operations, the
* Golitsin revealed that Paques was only one of a large ring of KGB moles who had
infiltrated nearly every level of the French government. Golitisin's revelation on this
score was so alarming, President Kennedy personally wrote to French President
Charles de Gaulle to warn him of the operations of the ring, code-named SAPPHIRE
by the KGB. The effort by French counterintelligence to track down the ring was
the subject of the Leon Uris novel (and Alfred Hitchcock movie), Topaz.

74

THE STORM PETRELS

British nevertheless paid Golitsin $28,000 a month to serve as

"consultant" for FLUENCY. Basically, the job entailed review of
British intelligence operations, detailed examination of leads revealed by defectors, and myriad other clues in an attempt to pinpoint which man (or men) had been systematically undermining
British counterintelligence against the Soviet Union.
There was much for Golitsin to consider. More than 20
years before, a defecting senior GRU officer, Walter Krivitsky, had
warned of KGB moles in British intelligence. Although he did
not know their identities, he had a number of clues. For example,
he had heard about a "Scotsman of good birth" who was working
in the Foreign Office, and an "establishment figure" who was
working as a newspaperman in Spain. Even a moderate effort
would have tracked down the men behind these clues: Donald
Maclean and H. A. R. Philby, but nothing was ever done. There
was also the mysterious matter of how Igor Gouzenko had been
handled by MI5, and how his warning of a KGB mole in MI5 was
sidetracked. Additionally, there was the mystery of how such infamous KGB assets as Klaus Fuchs and Allan Nunn May had been
cleared for top-secret work by MI5 despite their open Communist
affiliations (Fuchs had been a member of the German Communist party and May was a leading activist in a notorious Communist-controlled association of scientists and technicians).*
A newspaper story reporting the FLUENCY probe and Golitsin's role prematurely ended his work in Britain. Returning to
the United States, he passed into the control of the CIA's famed
head of counterintelligence, the legendary James Angleton. At
that point, for reasons Angleton never made clear, the counterintelligence chief became a devoted acolyte of Golitisin.
As he had claimed to British intelligence, Golitsin insisted
that there was high-level KGB penetration of American intelligence as well, specifically in the CIA. According to Golitsin, this
super-mole was code-named SASHA, who in turn was supporting
a network of similar moles. Many of these moles were involved in
Golitsin's crowning theory: a massive and cunning KGB disinformation campaign that had completely misled the West about Soviet capabilities and intentions. (As part of that theory, Golitsin
* The molehunt in MI6 and MI5 was to paralyze British intelligence throughout the
1970s, with little to show for it: Anthony Blunt confessed, naming two other assets,
but the "big fish" were never found. Wright was convinced that MI5 Director Roger
Hollis was the KGB's "super-mole," but Hollis was finally cleared by the FLUENCY
investigation.

ANATOLI GOLITSIN

75

insisted that the Sino-Soviet split was in fact a large-scale deception.)

Angleton proceeded to tear the CIA apart looking for the
super-mole, spurred by Golitsin's hints that no one in the agency's Soviet Division could be trusted, especially any who spoke
Russian. As a result, CIA operations against the Soviet Union were
paralyzed, while the careers of more than 100 CIA officers were
blighted by suspicion. This mad hunt reached its nadir in 1964,
when another defecting KGB officer, Yuri Nosenko, was illegally
detained for nearly three years because Golitsin told Angleton
that Nosenko was probably a KGB plant to sow disinformation.
(Nosenko had told his debriefers that there was no KGB mole in
the CIA, and that, contrary to hints by Golitsin, the KGB had no
operational interest in Lee Harvey Oswald when the presidential
assassin lived in the Soviet Union).
Golitsin's baleful influence ended in 1974, when Angleton
was fired following public revelations of his role in an illegal CIA
domestic spying operation. Still, Golitsin had his devotees in both
British and American intelligence, and they were ready to help
when he produced his magnus opus, a million-word manuscript
for a book that turned the Western view of the world upside
down. Golitsin wrote that nearly all assumptions about modern
history were wrong, for the unbelievably cunning KGB disinformation operation had managed to fool just about everybody. He
tried to find a professional writer to convert this mass into a readable book, but all the writers he approached decided not to participate, possibly deterred by his insistence on carrying his manuscript around in a briefcase chained to his wrist. Golitsin's
devotees in MI5 and the CIA then sat down and extracted a book
from the manuscript, called New Lies for Old. It was published
commercially, but sunk without a trace.
Golitsin subsequendy faded from the intelligence scene.
Most of his supporters on both sides of the Adantic, including
Angleton, had either died or retired. In 1990, living in the U.S.
under an assumed identity, Golitisin claimed that the collapse of
communism in Eastern Europe was actually part of a long-term
Soviet deception operation. No one, aside from his few remaining
acolytes, paid any attention.

WHITTAKER CHAMBERS
The Man with Two Faces
Code Names: BOB, CARL, EUGENE
Aliases: George Crosley, Carl Carlson
1901-1961

n a spring morning in 1939, what would prove to be the most

momentous meeting in modern espionage took place in a
nondescript hotel room in New York City between two men who
were determined to severely injure Soviet intelligence.
The contrast between the two men could not have been
greater. One was a pudgy, slovenly man with bad teeth named
Whittaker Chambers, an editor for Time magazine. The other was
a former citizen of the Soviet Union, now alien resident in the
United States, named Schmeka Ginsberg (although he had been
using the operational alias Walter Krivitsky for some years). He
was a small, dapper, and very precise man with a distinct touch
of Old World courdiness.
Despite these contrasts, both men shared a common background: they were former spies. Chambers, then 38 years old,
had been a devout American Communist who had joined the
party in 1924 and eight years later was recruited for the party's
underground apparatus. The apparatus recruited promising
Communists who were officially stripped of party membership
and assigned various espionage missions for the KGB and the
GRU. In 1933, Chambers was secretly dispatched to Moscow for
espionage training, and on his return was assigned work as a courier for several cells of Communists working in U.S. government
positions who were providing information to the party. But in76

WHITTAKER CHAMBERS

77

creasingly disenchanted with communism, he quit both the party

and his underground assignment in 1937.
Krivitsky, then 41, had joined the GRU in 1923, and by 1936,
when he was transferred to the KGB, he was rezident in The
Hague, responsible for coordinating Soviet intelligence operations in Western Europe. But in 1938, when his fellow KGB operative and lifelong friend Ignace Poretsky was killed in a Stalinist purge to eliminate Jewish agents, Krivitsky defected to the
French. He later made his way to Canada, and then contacted
the FBI, which gave him sanctuary in the United States. By that
point, Krivitsky had become thoroughly disillusioned with communism, and was determined to wreak vengeance for his friend's
death against the KGB.
Chambers shared Krivitsky's determination, and they jointly
agreed that spring day to expose the depth of Soviet intelligence's
penetration of the western democracies. Both men were soon to
discover, however, that preconceptions about the Soviet Union
would make this no easy task.
To a certain extent, the difficulties Chambers initially encountered were the result of his own curious approach. In late
1939, he contacted Assistant Secretary of State Adolph A. Berle
and told him of KGB infiltration of the State Department, but he
apparently wanted to protect the identities of the people he knew
were members of Communist cells and working for the KGB.
Without names, Chambers' assertions were vague, at best, and
the Roosevelt White House decided to ignore the whole thing.
In 1942, when Chambers approached the FBI, he was still hesitant
about naming any assets.
But the FBI was already on the trail. They had been previously
alerted by Krivitsky, who told them he had heard of a key KGB asset
"high in the U.S. State Department," and that the Soviets had
another 31 well-placed assets throughout the U.S. government.
Additionally, Krivitisky said he had heard of another 61 KGB assets
in Great Britain. The FBI dispatched him to London to talk with
British intelligence. As a result, Krivitsky was able to pinpoint two
important KGB assets: John Herbert King, a Foreign Office code
clerk, and Tyler Kent, a U.S. State Department code clerk who was
also providing material to the German Abwehr.*
* Krivitsky was more concerned about exposing higher-level KGB moles operating
in Britain. He had only clues to H. A. R. Philby, Donald Maclean, and others, but
the British never followed up. Increasingly discouraged about the U.S. and British
failure to investigate his leads, he committed suicide in 1941.

78

THE STORM PETRELS

Whittaker Chambers, who set off the most explosive spy case in American
history. (AP/Wide World)

The FBI was puzzled by Chambers' reluctance to name

names. Since he admitted to serving as a courier for Sovet rings
operating inside the U.S. government, and thus obviously knew
the identities of those assets, the FBI suspected he was protecting
a close friend.
That suspicion was not confirmed until August, 1948, when
Chambers went before an executive session of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and dropped a bombshell: one of
the KGB assets from whom he received material was his former
friend, Alger Hiss. The assertion was explosive. Hiss, a top official
in the State Department's Far Eastern Division until 1944, and
later president of the Carnegie Endowment, was a pillar of the
American foreign policy establishment.
Informed of this allegation, Hiss demanded time from the
committee for a public session to deny the charge, vehemently insisting that he did not even know Whittaker Chambers.
The Hiss case ignited a public spy controversy that smolders to
this day.

WHITTAKER CHAMBERS

79

The committee was faced with a quandary: it seemed difficult to believe that Chambers would risk exposing himself to a
charge of perjury by making up the allegation about Hiss, but on
the other hand Hiss' denials had been so forthright and frank, it
was difficult to believe this distinguished establishment figure was
lying.
But however convincing Hiss appeared, one member of the
committee, Congressman Richard Nixon of California, was certain he was a liar. To prove it, he had Chambers return in executive session and recount every detail he could remember about
the time in the 1930s when he claimed to have known Hiss. Then
Hiss was called for a similar session and asked details of his life
during the same period. Almost all the details of both accounts
meshed, so there was no doubt: Chambers had known Hiss very
well. Hiss himself began to waver, and said he now recalled knowing a man named George Crosley, whom he said resembled
Chambers.
That still left the problem of proof: Chambers claimed that
Hiss gave him State Department documents for transmittal to the
KGB. Chambers said he photographed and then returned the
originals to Hiss, but his unsupported word amounted to insufficient evidence. Several months later, Chambers produced the
proof, consisting of a cache of microfilms of State Department
documents hidden in a dumbwaiter, and even more melodramatically, a further cache hidden inside a pumpkin on the Chambers farm. The cache included several notes in Hiss' own handwriting, along with material later proven to have been typed on
an old typewriter once owned by Mrs. Hiss.
Hiss ultimately was convicted of perjury, but the importance
of the case extended far beyond that. Aside from making Nixon's
political career, the furious public controversy set off the first
spasm in what came to be a nationwide anticommunist hysteria,
finally climaxing in the excesses of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Taken as a whole, it was not entirely the result Chambers
intended, but no one could have foreseen the explosion he would
set off the day he sat down with Walter Krivitsky. Until his death
in 1961, Chambers remained content to have succeeded in his
basic goal, exposing the multiple rings of American Communists
who worked in the government. More than three dozen such
assets ultimately were exposed. To this day, no one is quite certain
the precise dimension of their services to Soviet intelligence, but
it is known that at least three of them worked in the OSS during

no

THE STORM PETRELS

the war, and another, Lachlin Currie, served as an adviser to President Roosevelt.
More importantly, perhaps, Chambers can be regarded as
the real father of the American conservative movement, for his
lonely crusade was to inspire an entire generation of conservatives. Among them was the president of the Screen Actors Guild,
who in 1950 moved to purge Communists from that organization.
Thirty-six years later, the Guild chief, now President Ronald Reagan, arranged for the posthumous award of the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, to Whittaker Chambers,
the man whom, Reagan noted, "history has proven right."

THE LEGENDS

LEIBA DOME
The Red Orchestra
Code Names: UNCLE, OTTO
Aliases: Adam Mikler, Leopold Trepper,
Leopold de Winter, Jean Gilbert, V. I. Ivanoski
1906-1983

"I am a Communist because I am a Jew," Leiba Domb often

said. This was a standard explanation by those Eastern European Jews who saw Marxism as their only salvation in the pervasive anti-Semitism of pre-world War II Europe, when Jews were
always perched on the edge of a precipice. The sense of impending holocaust created in Domb a deeply committed revolutionaryand, as the intelligence agencies of a half-dozen countries
were to find out, one of the most formidable spies of all time.
By the time he was 19 in 1925, Domb already was a revolutionary activist who had been fired from a leather factory in his
native Poland, for agitating among its workers. In that year, Domb
joined the Polish Communist Party, where his revolutionary ardor, high intelligence, and natural leadership abilities marked
him as a man destined for greater things. Polish authorities also
noticed him, and in 1928 arrested him for "revolutionary activities." He was ordered deported from the country in lieu of a jail
sentence. Domb first went to Marseilles, France, and then emigrated to Palestine.
Once in Palestine, Domb went right to work organizing
Communist cells, an activity that quickly brought him to the attention of British Mandate authorities. They deported him back
to France, where he became a key figure in the Jewish immigrant
labor section of the French Communist party. His drive and organizational skills caused him to be noticed by still another set of
82

LEIBA DOMB

83

Leiba Domb (Leopold Trepper), the fabled head of the Soviet "Red Orchestra"
spy network during World War II, in Copenhagen in 1974. Beside him is his
wife Liba. (The Great Game by Leopold Trepper, McGraw Hill: 1977/Yivo
Institute)

governmental authorities, but before the French could act, the

party decided to move him out of harm's way to Moscow, where
he was to attend "higher party training" in the "university for
national minorities" of the Comintern (Stalin's organization of
international Communist parties that oversaw party activities
throughout the world).
Translated, that meant Domb, considered among the party's
brightest stars, was being trained and groomed for a future leadership role. But his future as a party leader never came to fruition,
for Domb's abilities were noted by an organization that was to
have the most profound effect on his life: the GRU.
The same qualities that had caused the Communist party
leadership to look favorably on Dombdaring, drive, total commitment, high intelligencewere also attractive to Jan Berzin,
head of the GRU. Noted for his ability to spot and recruit topflight agents, Berzin saw in Domb that combination of attributes
the GRU chief had decided were essential for good agents: "Cool
head, warm heart, and nerves of steel."

84

THE LEGENDS

Domb seemed to fit the prescription. A short, squat man, he

radiated a powerful personal energy and an aggressiveness that
created the impression of someone who would put his head
through a wall, if necessary, to achieve what he wanted. He also
projected an air of total fearlessness, and even in the rigid, doctrinaire world of the Communist party was known for his willingness to challenge people and doctrines he thought wrong.
Honed by years of clandestine underground party work,
Domb demonstrated a real flair for espionage. After a brief period working with a small network in France during the early
1930s to perfect his espionage skills, Domb was deemed ready for
the real role Berzin had in mind for him: rezident. In Berzin's
calculation, the GRU urgently needed to prepare for the war he
was certain would break out within just a few years. Germany was
the key, but with the German Communist party and almost all
Soviet intelligence networks in that country shattered by Hider,
it was essential to reconstruct an entirely new intelligence structure that would keep an eye on the Soviet Union's most dangerous enemy. Berzin's plan was to avoid the danger of attempting
to build networks in the Nazi police state, and instead create a
series of networks just outside German borders, the most important of which would be located in Belgium and France. Domb
would be their creator.
In May 1939, Domb arrived in Brussels and went to work.
He was to build a series of commercial covers throughout Europe
whose tentacles would reach into Nazi Germany itself. Under his
new identity as a Canadian-born businessman named Jean Gilbert, Domb created a commercial cover company called Simexco,
and a year later, created the Simex Company in Paris. He energetically began recruiting assets, and by the outbreak of World
War II, he had built a series of compartmentalized rings that consisted of professional agents, civilian assets, and local Communists. His rings extended from the North Sea to Switzerland, and
even included a small ring inside Nazi Germany itself, consisting
of a group of fanatical German Communists who had managed
to conceal their political sympathies and obtained jobs in the Nazi
government.
Most of Domb's nearly 200 assets were located at or near
what he like to call "switch points," the crossroads of modern
governmental bureaucracies where essential information came to
be processed. Domb believed that vital intelligence could be

LEIBA DOMB

85

found in even the most obscure government officeprovided

that his agents knew what they were looking for.
Domb demonstrated how that theory worked in France,
where most of his best assets were located. After the German
invasion, he discovered that the best way to obtain intelligence
on German troop dispositions in Francea secret closely
guarded by the Germanswas via a little-known agency known
as the French Billeting Office, a Vichy agency that handled billeting arrangements for German occupation forces quartered in
French army bases and civilian facilities. In the process, of course,
it learned the identities and movements of all German units in
the country. Similarly, a network of French railway officials, who
worked as liaison with the Germans on movements of German
military trains along the French system, knew precisely the levels
of German logistics and military units being moved in and out of
France. Yet another obscure government bureaucracy proved to
be an intelligence gold mine. This one handled the payments
under a French-German agreement that mandated that France
pay the costs of its own occupation. The precise Germans were
scrupulous about accounting for every penny, in the process revealing the exact numbers of their forces in France.
Even better was Domb's greatest inspiration: affiliating his
cover company with the German Organization Todt, a huge German bureaucracy that handled all the military construction and
other logistical details for the German war machine. Simex Company representatives, in the course of doing business with the
organization, were given precious travel passes from the German
military authorities that allowed them entry into restricted military areas. It was a spy's dream.
Throughout the first 18 months of the war, the Germans
were unaware of the proliferating Domb networks all over occupied Europe. Domb was cautious; aware that the radios he used
to transmit intelligence back to Moscow represented his weakest
linkGerman "radio finder" teams were adept at tracking down
clandestine radioshe made sure that the transmissions lasted
only a short period, following which the radios were moved to
new locations. The brevity of the transmissions (which did not
allow the radio-finders sufficient time to triangulate the beams)
kept his growing operation secure, but caused problems when he
uncovered one of the great secrets of the war to that point.
Domb's careful monitoring of German troop movements in
France and Belgium paid off in late 1940, when his assets detected

86

THE LEGENDS

the sudden shift of German military forces eastward. Since Poland

was in no imminent danger of attack, Domb concluded, correctly,
that Hitler, balked in the Battle of Britain, was about to turn his
attention to the Soviet Union. Combined with other intelligence,
Domb in December 1940, was able to transmit a huge volume of
traffic in bits and pieces from his constantly shifting radios. He
supplied an accurate outline of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's
plan to invade the Soviet Union sometime in the spring of 1941
including precisely which German units had been assigned to the
operation, giving Moscow a complete order of battle.
It had required a supreme effort to send all this information
in short transmissions, but Domb felt the work was worth it, since
the Soviet Union was now warned of the danger. But to his dismay,
Stalin refused to believe it. Convinced that the Germans would
not invade the Soviet Union, he scrawled across a GRU report on
Domb's intelligence, "Find out the author of this provocation
and have him punished." (Fortunately for Domb, GRU headquarters took the terrible risk of ignoring the order.)
Undeterred, Domb soldiered on, feeding Moscow a steady
stream of intelligence about the German military buildup for the
upcoming invasionwhich Stalin continued to ignore. All that
suddenly changed on the morning of June 22, 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Proved right, Domb was now
bombarded with demands from Moscow Center for every scrap
of intelligence he could collect on the German military machine.
In response, Domb's radios hummed nearly around the clock,
pumping transmissions eastward. He provided an almost minuteby-minute stream of intelligence on German military dispositions, and he was able to warn of German plans for an attack on
Moscow (which was checked by fresh Russian divisions that inflicted the first defeat on the German blitzkrieg in the East). In
November, Domb was able to learn details of the German plan
for an offensive in the Caucasus, an offensive that ended at Stalingrad.
But by that point, Domb concluded that time was running
out for his operation. As he was the first to realize, in the very
success of his organization lay the seeds of its destruction; the
longer his radios were on the air broadcasting reams of vital intelligence to Moscow, the more likely that the German radio-finders would track them down. The dilemma was insoluble: at that
critical hour, when the Soviet Union was desperate for the intelligence Domb was providing, he had no choice except to keep

LEIBA DOMB

87

his radios on the air for hours at a time. Which meant, as his
assets began reporting with more frequency, German radio-finder
trucks with their distinctive aerials were drawing nearer to the
transmitters.
The Germans were indeed drawing nearer. Since early 1941,
their radio-intercept stations had been detecting coded transmissions beamed eastward from a number of transmitters in Western
Europe. The messages proved unbreakable, so the Germans concluded that they had been enciphered by one-time padsthe
almost certain indicator that the radios belonged to Soviet intelligence. Although the ciphers couldn't be broken, the Germans
could track down the transmitters. A joint Gestapo-Abwehr counterintelligence operation went to work.
The Germans got a break in June 1941, when the transmitters suddenly began broadcasting for hours at a stretch, allowing
the radio-finder teams that much more time to triangulate the
signals. In the habit of using musical terms to describe clandestine transmitters, they decided to call this newly-discovered network of transmitters the "Red Orchestra," the name by which
Domb's network finally became known in espionage legend.
As the Germans began to close in, Domb made arrangements to dismantle his network and escape. He erased his legends
under various aliases, including the one he used most frequently,
Jean Gilbert. "Monsieur Gilbert" suddenly died a natural death,
and Domb actually had a fake tombstone in that name prepared
for an empty grave in a Paris cemetery.
Domb hoped to complete his dismandement by January
1942, but on December 13, 1941, the Germans tracked down one
of Domb's more important transmitters in a Brussels house. A
raid caught several members of the network and a radio operator
in the middle of a transmission. Incredibly enough, Domb himself showed up at the house as the raid was underway; thinking
fast, he was able to pass himself off as an itinerant rabbit-seller
whom Gestapo agents sent on his way.
Torture of the captured agents quickly revealed the real
identity of that rabbit-seller, and a continent-wide manhunt was
soon underway. Meanwhile, the Germans began rolling up the
entire Red Orchestra all over Europe, and by the middle of 1942,
Domb's network was collapsing. But Domb was still at large; constantly on the move, he evaded capture until October 1942, when
the Germans detected one of his many aliases and tracked him

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THE LEGENDS

down to a dentist's office in Paris. They found him in the dental

chair, waiting to have an aching tooth treated.
"Congratulations," Domb said in a professional's tribute to
the professional Abwehr agents who grabbed him. "You have done
very well."
What happened next remains a matter of dispute. According
to the Germans, the Abwehr had an ambitious plan in mind. In
their estimate, although Moscow knew the Red Orchestra was
under assault, the Russians could not be certain which branches
had been compromised, and certainly they did not yet know that
Domb himself had been captured. The Abwehr plan was to use
Domb in a funkspiel, as a means of feeding deception material to
Moscow. The Germans claim that Domb not only readily agreed,
but further agreed to betray the remaining components of the
Red Orchestra, along with members of the French Resistance
who had served as assets for his network. In Domb's later version
of these events, however, he claims that he agreed to play along
with the Germans for their little radio game, intending to warn
Moscow at the first opportunity. He denies ever betraying any of
the Red Orchestra assets.
In any event, using one of the captured Red Orchestra radio
operators (who also agreed to cooperate), the Germans began
transmitting to Moscow, signing the messages with Domb's name.
The Soviet response seemed to indicate that Moscow had taken
the bait, but in fact the GRU from the first moment, apparently
alerted by the captured radio operator's secret signal, realized
that Domb was now operating under Abwehr control. The Russians played out their end of the game, demanding more and
more precise information from Domb on German military plans.
By June, 1943, the Abwehr realized that the Russians were onto
the game somehow, and the funkspiel ended.
Whatever revenge the Germans might have planned against
Domb was obviated when he suddenly escaped from the Abwehr's
loose confinement by the simple expedient of asking to be taken
to a drug store for heart medicine, then walking out the back
door while Abwehr agents watched the front door. He went underground in Paris, and did not emerge until liberation. A few
months later, he was summoned to Moscow for unspecified "discussions."
Upon arrival in Moscow, Domb made the mistake of complaining how his intelligence on Operation Barbarossa was ignored, and how Moscow's insistence on keeping transmitters

LEIBA DOMB

89

working too long caused the network's breakup by the Germans.

He was promptly accused of betraying the Red Orchestra to the
Germans, and sentenced to 10 years in prison. He was released
following Stalin's death in 1953, and permitted to emigrate to his
native Poland.
By now disillusioned with communism, Domb turned to a
new cause: Zionism. He became the leader of the remnants of
the Polish Jewish community, and his agitation on their behalf in
the face of the Polish government's refusal to allow free emigration to Israel soon brought him into conflict with the authorities.
Facing the threat of another prison sentence, Domb was saved,
ironically enough, by Soviet intelligence. Embarked on a public
relations campaign to rehabilitate their image, the KGB and the
GRU began publicizing the feats of some of its most famous spies.
Among them was Domb, now lionized by the very institution that
had imprisoned him.
The sudden publicity saved Domb from prison in Poland,
but the authorities still would not allow him to emigrate to Israel
to live out his last years. Finally, under pressure from Moscow, in
1974 he was allowed to leave. He died in 1983 in Jerusalem.

WILHELM WASSMUSS
The German Lawrence
1880-1931

or a man who came to be called "the German Lawrence,"

Wilhelm Wassmuss did not look the partcertainly nothing
like his famous English counterpart's image of flowing Arab robes
and dashing rides through the desert. Short and corpulent, Wassmuss was bald, with a round face and narrow eyes behind large
spectacles. He appeared to have all the glamour and excitement
of an insurance agent.
Yet, this was the man who at one point had a $500,000 price
on his head for his capture dead or alive, preoccupied an entire
British army, was the virtual king of fierce hill tribes, and came
within a hairsbreadth of changing history. Although he was never
trained for it, he was espionage's first covert action agent: a spy
who does not collect intelligence, but works to reorient an entire
nation's politics in favor of his country. In years to come, the
methods Wassmuss used would become familiar staples of Cold
War espionage to destabilize nations: bribery, propaganda, and
political manipulation.
Wassmuss had no idea of his future role when he was assigned as a German consular agent in Bushire, Persia, in 1909.
Then 29, and considered among the brightest stars in the German diplomatic service, Wassmuss had arrived at an especially
sensitive time in an equally sensitive place. Persia was the battleground between Germany and Great Britain for the glittering
prize of Persian oil concessions. The prize was beyond price, for
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WILHELM WASSMUSS

91

whichever country managed to win those concessions would be

able to fuel its great industrial machine; the loser would be relegated to permanent second-class status. The kingdom of Persia,
with a society that seemed to exist in the 12th century, was in no
position to argue with either side. Weak, it was pressed between
the Ottoman Empire in the west, Russia on the north, and the
British Empire's crown jewel, India, on the south and southwest.
Its ruler, the Shah, presided over a feudal court but his influence
hardly extended a few miles outside Tehran; the rest of the country was in the hands of assorted hill tribe warlords.
Wassmuss' instructions were to promote German interests
in this vital region. To that end, he had been equipped with a
large cache of goldthe prevailing currency in that areato buy
the loyalty of the tribal leaders. Meanwhile, the British were also
buying warlords, creating a thriving market for loyalty. This competition would have remained a simple influence-peddling operation, but in 1914, Germany and Great Britain went to war,
instantly raising the stakes.
Like the other German diplomats in Bushire, Wassmuss could
have left for Germany. After all, German prospects in Persia were
now untenable: the country's location between Mesopotamia and
India and proximity to Turkey made it a vital sphere of influence
to the British, who began moving in military forces. Germany,
without equivalent military power in the region, was in no position to argue.
But Wassmuss was not prepared to admit defeat. He informed his superiors in Berlin he would stay in Persia and fight
the British occupation from the hills. At the same time, he informed German intelligence that he would function as their eyes
in the region. Berlin accepted this offer, although they had to
wonder what a single, obscure German diplomat could hope to
accomplish in an area now firmly under British control.
Wassmuss, accompanied only by a consular assistant and a
cache of 140,000 gold marks, soon demonstrated what one man
of determination, energy, and organizational ability could accomplish. Fluent in Farsi and the Tangistani dialect, within months
he had organized the hill tribes into an anti-British force; British
troops found themselves under attack the moment they moved
out of their coastal bases. He also organized a flourishing antiBritish propaganda operation that extended throughout the entire Persian Gulf region, utilizing a vast network of ordinary
Persian citizens to spread rumors about alleged British defile-

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THE LEGENDS

merits of Islamic shrines. (Such propaganda was especially effective among the Persian Islamic establishment, including a young
theological student named Khomeni).
By 1916, Wassmuss had become a full-fledged menace to
the British. He had not only turned Persia into a hornet's nest,
but also was busy as far afield as Afghanistan, where he was stirring up native tribes to attack the British. If all that weren't bad
enough, the British learned that Wassmuss had become something of a demigod among the Persians, whose warrior castes
admired this improbable chubby warrior who could barely ride a
horse. But he was a man who had won their hearts and respect.
The gold he paid from the steady stream of the precious metal
that arrived from Berlin helped, but they also appreciated that
Wassmuss had taken the trouble to become fluent in Farsi and
the Tangistani dialect. Moreover, in what was stricdy a marriage
of statecraft, he had married the daughter of the most powerful
Persian warlord; the wedding, to which Wassmuss had invited
thousands of ordinary Persians as guests, was the talk of the hills
for months. (Many of those guests had been enlisted for their
host's sprawling spy network that he called "ten thousand eyes.")
The British decided to put Wassmuss out of action, but several armed expeditions failed because Wassmuss' spy network
gave him plenty of warning of their approach. The same network,
the British discovered, had become active in India, and there
were indications that the Germans now had a complete picture
of virtually all British military moves from Baghdad to Bombay.
Desperate, the British offered a reward of $500,000 to anyone
who could capture Wassmuss for them. No one took the offer.
Despite Wassmuss' extraordinary talents, he could not reverse the tide of war. By early 1917, as the war turned against
Germany, the Persians began to examine their options: clearly,
despite Wassmuss' claims, Germany was not about to defeat Great
Britain, so perhaps it was time to strike a deal with the British.
Possibly even more importantly, their German patron's gold supply was beginning to dry up, while the British seemed to have an
inexhaustible supply. Wassmuss tried to head off this erosion with
ever more virulent propaganda, including his claim that the Kaiser had converted to Islam.
But it was only a matter of time. By early 1918, the 100,000
troops and flotilla of warships the British detailed to stop Wassmuss began a major offensive to end the problem once and for
all. Wassmuss slipped out of the trap and fled to Turkey, where

WILHELM WASSMUSS

93

the British tracked him down after the Armistice. Imprisoned,

Wassmuss was an endless source of fascination to his British jailers
who found it hard to believe that this plump character was the
fabled "German Lawrence."
Released in 1920, Wassmuss returned to the poverty and
turmoil of his native Germany, aware that Persia and its precious
oil had fallen under the influence of his enemy, where it would
remain for the next four decades. He tried to turn his talents to
business, but the genius he demonstrated in the wild Persian hills
was of no help in Germany's shattered economy. He died, bankrupt and sick, in 1931, virtually forgotten by his countrymen.

IAN FLEMING
Art Imitates Life
Code Name: 17F
1908-1964

ven for the broadminded men who ran wartime British intelligence, it was too much. Right there, in a London radio
studio, the announcer was calling Winston Churchill "that fat,
syphillitic Jew" in colloquial German, which somehow made it
seem worse. Who was responsible for such an outrage?
They might have guessed: Ian Fleming. The naval intelligence officer always seemed to be behind these kinds of stunts;
if there was something especially outrageous going on in any
phase of British intelligence, it was an almost certain bet Fleming
had dreamed it up.
Called on the carpet, Fleming took full responsibility and
explained that in black propaganda operations, it was essential
that the actual source be thoroughly concealed. In this case, he
had dreamed up the idea for a black propaganda radio station
targeted against the German military. Ostensibly based somewhere in Europe, the "clandestine" station actually operated
from London. It used announcers, speaking colloquial German,
posing as ex-German military men who had somehow obtained
access to their own transmitter. They broadcast gossip about the
German high command and other news of interest to German
forces, interspersed with caustic comments about Allied leaders
and policies.
As distasteful as the British government found this project,
it had to admit that Fleming's black propaganda operation was
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IAN FLEMING

95

The "perpetual schoolboy," British agent Ian Fleming, whose World War II
exploits paled beside his greater fame as the creator of James Bond. (AP/Wide
World)

proving brilliantly successful. Captured Germans, especially Uboat crews, recounted how the broadcasts were not only highly
popular, but credible, too; when they heard about General soand-so buying a mink coat for his mistress while his troops in
Russia were freezing to death, they believed it. The station's effect
on German military morale was devastating.
And so still another wild Fleming operation was entered into
the books as a success. There would be a string of them before
the war was over, for Fleming's fertileif somewhat oddmind
was constantly spinning out a stream of dirty tricks.
How Fleming had arrived at that point may have been inevitable. The son of wealthy parents, he early in life developed a
reputation as a "perpetual schoolboy," the incorrigible hell-raiser
who loved action, excitement, and constant motion. By the summer of 1939, he was a 31-year-old London dandy who had drifted
into his family's stock brokerage business. He was totally bored,
but in an encounter that would change his life, he met Admiral
John Godfrey, then head of NID. Godfrey, certain that war was

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THE LEGENDS

inevitable at any moment, was actively rebuilding NID for the coming struggle. He was looking for bright young men with brains
and daring.
In Fleming, Godfrey found exacdy what he was looking for.
He gave the stockbroker naval officer rank and enrolled him as
his "special assistant," meaning he would be the man who would
come up with ideas. And, Godfrey made clear, the wilder, the
better.
When war came, Fleming began spinning out ideas. Among
the more interesting was his plan for a special commando unit
that would include tainted, but talented, misfits suitable for "impossible missions" behind enemy lines. Called Assault Unit Number 30, it slipped into France as the country was being overrun
by the Germans and retrieved a vital cache of advanced military
equipment. The eventual basis for the novel and movie The Dirty
Dozen, Assault Unit Number 30 was to perform a number of derring-do missions, including the 1944 capture of an entire German
radar stationand its 300-man garrison.
But Assault Unit Number 30 was only one of Fleming's ideas.
Another, and much more esoteric one, involved an audacious
plan to sow dissension in the Nazi leadership by getting one of
its most senior members to defect to the other side. The chosen
target was Rudolph Hess, Hitler's deputy and oldest comrade-inarms. The British knew that the superstitious Hess was a fanatic
about astrology, so Fleming arranged for the recruitment of two
Swiss astrologers known to be regularly consulted by the Nazi
leader. By cleverly concocted astrological tables, prepared by
Fleming, Hess was led to believe that his "hour of destiny" had
arrived, and he flew alone to England to negotiate the peace
between Britain and Germany that, according to his charts, would
make him the greatest man of the century. Actually, he was probably the stupidest, and his flight served only to dramatically boost
British morale. (Hess, imprisoned, was later charged as a war
criminal. He died in prison in 1989.)
In 1941, Fleming was assigned to the MI6 station in New
York, then busily at work trying to get the United States involved
in the war. As part of that operation, a very close liason had been
established between the head of the MI6 station, William Stephenson, and William Donovan, President Roosevelt's COI (Coordinator of Information). Donovan, later head of the OSS, was
convinced by the British that the Americans needed a centralized,
civilian intelligence agency. Fleming was detailed to help Dono-

IAN FLEMING

97

van draw up a plan for such an agency, based on the British

model. Roosevelt decided not to adopt the plan, but later it would
serve as the template for the creation of the CIA.
Not a man to sit behind a desk for long, Fleming used part
of his time in New York to personally conduct a black bag job at
the Japanese Consulate General office. A team of safecrackers,
recruited from the elite of the criminal ranks, opened a safe to
allow Fleming to photograph code books. For good measure, he
made impressions of all the keys he found in the place.
By the end of the war, Fleming had been involved in so many
operations that ran across the entire intelligence spectrum, nobody had any real idea of precisely which ones had sprung from
his brain. Fleming seemed to be everywhere: in North Africa,
arranging for the theft of Italian naval records and ciphers; in
France, running an operation that stole advanced aircraft engines; in Germany, at the end of the war, capturing the entire
German naval archives section with records dating back to 1870;
in Lisbon, running an operation to bankrupt the Abwehr chief of
station at a gambling casino.
It all seemed to be the stuff of fiction, which is precisely what
occurred to Fleming after the war was over. A restless man, a
return to the staid world of stock brokerages quickly paled beside
the life he had lived for seven years. There was no new world war
to exercise his talents, but he could relive that life vicariously.
Fleming became a novelist, and it was in that role that he is best
known in espionage history.
His adventure tales, as Fleming was the first to admit, were
meant merely as entertainment. The central character of his
books, agent James Bond (code name 007), was a composite of
several agents he had known or worked with (along with a dose of
Fleming himself), and Bond's boss "M" was based on the real-life
Maxwell Knight, a renowned spy-catcher who was a senior executive in MI5. Fleming never intended his words to have serious literary merit, but to his surprise, the James Bond series of action
adventures became highly popular, especially as shown in films.
Until his death in 1964, Fleming insisted he was not James Bond,
but those who knew of his wartime feats had cause to wonder.

DUSKO POPOV
The Real James Bond
Code Names: TRICYCLE, SCOOT,
ND-63, IVAN
1912-1981

rom the moment he walked into the majestic office of FBI

Director J. Edgar Hoover that August day in 1941, Dusko Popov realized he was about as welcome as an attack of poison ivy.
Hoover, glaring, didn't even bother to get up and greet him.
From Hoover's standpoint, the problem was not Popov's espionage credentials. Popov, a star double agent of MI5, had been
sent by the British agency to Hoover for purposes of discussing a
very interesting piece of microfilm he had been given by the Abwehr a few weeks before in Portugal. The Abwehr, under the illusion that Popov was their agent, had dispatched him to the
United States with a spy's shopping list: a catalog of American
military installations about which Popov was supposed to learn
everything he could.
Hoover was willing to concede MI5's estimate of Popov as
its star double agent, but ever the stern moralist, he had strong
reservations about Popov personally. This antagonism was to have
grave consequences.
Popov represented everything Hoover hated. A pure hedonist, he had been given the code name TRICYCLE by MI5 wags in
tribute to his proclivity for taking two women to bed at once. That
was only one of a number of vices Popov actively pursued in a life
devoted to wine, women and song, although his ostensible avocation was commercial law. Born of a moderately wealthy family
in Yugoslavia, Popov had studied law in Germany, and in 1939
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DUSKO POPOV

99

Dusko Popov, the dashing double agent who convinced the Germans that the
British were much stronger than they actually were in 1940. His work
contributed to the abandonment of Operation Sea LionHitler's plan to invade
the British isles. (UPI/Betteman)

was hired by a consortium of Yugoslavian banks to represent their

interests in Lisbon, Portugal.
Then a young 27-year-old lawyer, Popov settled in Lisbon,
which as a neutral capital, was already the crossroads of international espionage. Given his fluency in several languages and his
commercial contacts all over Europe, he was a natural recruit for
any of the dozen espionage agencies then operating in the city.
The Abwehr made the first approach; some of his old university
classmates, now Abwehr officers, recruited him for the purpose
of gathering political and economic intelligence on the British.
They did not know that Popov had come to despise the Nazis;
soon after his recruitment, he approached the British and volunteered to be a double agent.
As both sides were to discover, Popov was an expensive proposition. Economically comfortable in his own right, he nevertheless needed much more money to support his lifestyle of expensive restaurants, women, and nightclubs. Both sides happily

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THE LEGENDS

underwrote such high living because to each, he was an espionage superstar. To the Abwehr, the asset they code-named IVAN
was a treasure, a fountain of intelligence on everything from
political events in London to military operational plans. (All
of which were carefully devised"cooked" in intelligence
parlanceby British intelligence, a shrewdly-prepared mixture of
genuine and fake material). To the British, he represented a pipeline into one of the more important Abwehr outstations. As a controlled source, he could be used to feed all kinds of deception
into the Abwehr mainstream, while at the same time he was in a
position to identify all the Abwehr operatives with whom he came
in contact.
At this point, Popov passed into control of one of the most
successful counterintelligence operations of all time, the so-called
"double cross system" of MI5.
The operation sought to take advantage of British intelligence's greatest secret and its greatest strength: the cracking of
the German Enigma machine codes. This unparalleled achievement, code-named ULTRA, enabled the British to read all the
Abwehr traffic, providing a double benefit. One, the British knew
from the decoded messages which agents and assets the Germans
were dispatching to any given point. Second, the British could
read the agent reports sent via Enigma back to headquarters in
Berlin. In the event of a double agent like Popov, the British could
monitor how well their deception material was playing in Berlin.
This second benefit gave birth to a brilliant idea: since the
British could monitor the material going back to Berlin, why not
attempt to turn captured German agents and assets instead of
merely arresting and then executing them? So the double-cross
system was born. MI5 was able to identify every single agent or
asset dispatched from Germany. Those sent to British territory
were rounded up and evaluated as possible doubles; those who
either refused or did not seem suitable for the task were executed.*

* Two star doubles were Wulf Schmidt (TATE) and Juan Pujol (GARBO). Schmidt,
who was arrested after parachuting into Britain one night in 1940, was turned and
used to feed misleading military intelligence via his radio to Germany. His greatest
triumph came in 1944, when he radioed false intelligence about where the German
V-2 rockets were landing; his "corrections" caused the Germans to redirect the
rockets away from more vulnerable targets in London. Pujol, a Spaniard operating
in Lisbon, was detected working for the Abwehr by an ULTRA decryption. Turned by
MI5, he fed misleading intelligence to the Abwehr until 1945. Among them was a

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101

Popov was considered the star player in the double-cross

system; completely trusted by the Germans, MI5 used him carefully, primarily for high-level political intelligence. His greatest
achievement was to convince the Germans, via cooked documents, that the British were militarily much stronger than the
Germans assumed (although in fact Britain had no real power to
halt a German invasion in 1940). The deception played no small
role in Hitler's eventual decision to abandon Operation Sea Lion,
the planned invasion of the British Isles.
This perceived intelligence triumph boosted Popov's stock
with the Abwehr, which decided in 1941 to use him for a major
operation: infiltrate the United States to collect intelligence on
the military power of the nation the Abwehr believed would soon
enter the war. He was given the shopping list later shown to
Hoover.
The puritanical Hoover, repelled by the snappily-dressed Popov (complete with ivory cigarette holder, diamond jewelry, and
pungent cologne), did not pay too much attention to the shopping list. He should have, for it contained a vital intelligence clue:
at the request of Japanese intelligence, the Abwehr wanted Popov
to find out what he could about Pearl Harbor, especially the antiaircraft defenses and which ships normally anchored there. Hoover routinely passed the message to military intelligence without
pausing to wonder why the Japanese would be so interested in
Pearl Harbor. (As it turned out, neither did military intelligence,
with devastating consequences.)
Given Hoover's hostility, there was no way that MI5 could
get his cooperation for an elaborate intelligence sting: to have
Popov feed misleading material about U.S. military preparedness
to the Germans. MI5 gave up, and Popov returned to Lisbon,
where he concocted an elaborate story to account for his inability
to carry out his mission in the United States. The Abwehr apparently believed him, although there was the first faint hint of
doubt: Was it possible that Popov was working for the British?
Apparently as a method of settling that question, the Abwehr sent
Popov to London, with orders to gather high-level intelligence
on British war plans. Once in London, Popov fed a steady stream

momentous deception: he convinced the Abwehr that the Allied landing on the west
coast of Europe would be at Pas de Calais, not Normandy. As a result, Hitler for four
critical days kept his reserves near Pas de Calais, convinced that the Normandy landing was only a feint.

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THE LEGENDS

of cooked intelligence reports back to Lisbon, but as the ULTRA

codebreakers knew from reading the subsequent Lisbon-Berlin
traffic, the Germans had come to regard Popov as untrustworthy.
Still, the game continued to the end of the war, and despite the
German uneasiness, Berlin still believed at least some of the misleading material Popov was sending.
With the end of the war, Popov's job was over. He refused
an offer of citizenship from a grateful British government, and
settled in the south of France to write his highly entertaining (but
inaccurate) memoirs. It was not until some years after the war,
when some records were declassified, that the role of Popov as
the star of the astonishing double-cross system was revealed. Still
later, it was learned how he had provided a vital clue that might
have prevented Pearl Harborif only the Americans had paid
attention.
Decades of living the high life finally caught up to Popov in
1981, when he dieda happy man, so his friends said.

F. W. WINTERBOTHAM
The Spy in the Sky
1897-1990

aced with the tedium of a German prisoner of war camp, the

20-year-old Royal Air Force pilot had plenty of time to think
about a problem that had been bothering him for quite some
time. How, wondered F. W. Winterbotham as he strolled the camp
grounds in that summer of 1917, could he take aerial photographs from altitudes above 8,000 feet?
Admittedly, this was not a problem on the minds of his fellow
prisonersor anybody else, for that matterbut it was something
that preoccupied Winterbotham. Enamored with the romance of
flying, at the outbreak of war he had enlisted in the Royal Flying
Corps. Early on, he became fascinated with the problem of aerial
reconnaissance. Then in its infancy, aerial reconnaissance consisted largely of flying a plane low over enemy lines, sticking a
camera out the cockpit, and taking a few pictures before getting
shot to pieces. There had to be a better way, Winterbotham
thought, a conclusion underscored when he was shot down and
captured during an aerial reconnaissance over German trenches
on the Western Front.
After the war, Winterbotham left the military and went back
to the family farm near Sussex. But aerial reconnaissance was
never far from his mind; he remained convinced that in a future
war, victory would go to the nation that developed the ability to
get above the battlefield and see the enemy before he moved. He
also believed that aerial photography would be critical in modern
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THE LEGENDS

intelligence, for photographs would provide the objective, irrefutable proof of a nation's actual capabilities.
Winterbotham often talked about his abiding obsession
around the flying clubs and with some ex-military types. What he
had to say came to the attention of MI6, which had just the kind
of job suited for his beliefs. In 1929, he was recruited for the
agency, and a year later was assigned the job of creating MI6's
first air section.
Winterbotham's instructions were simple: he was to create
the world's first aerial espionage operation, capable of covering
most of the worldwith special emphasis on Germany. To that
end, he set up a dummy aeronautical research company as cover,
bought several planes, and prepared to photograph everything
worth photographing all over Europe.
But he immediately encountered the same problem that
balked aerial espionage in 1917: the laws of physics, which decreed that any camera lens above 8,000 feet would become fogged
over by lower air temperatures. Flying any lower than 8,000 feet
meant that the planes were not only easily observable, but vulnerable to ground fire from sensitive military installations. The
only solution was to get those cameras to operate at higher altitudes, but how?
The answer came quite by accident. Winterbotham had convinced MI6 to invest in the very latest in airplane technology, the
American Lockheed 12A, a two-engine aircraft that could operate
at a ceiling of 22,000 feet. He then hired Sidney Cotton, a vagabond (and slightly crazy) Australian bush pilot to fly the plane.
Cotton, assuming he would have to use subterfuge to take espionage pictures on low-level flights, devised an ingenious system:
holes were cut in the fuselage, concealed by shutters operated by
controls inside the plane. The idea was that the plane would overfly its target, the shutters would be opened, the pictures would
be snapped via controls inside the cockpit, and then the shutters
would close after the pictures were taken. Anyone looking at the
plane would see only a blank fuselage, with no cameras in sight.
After installing the system, Cotton and Winterbotham took
the plane for a test run above the English countryside, and made
an astonishing discovery: at high altitudes, when the shutters were
opened, warm air from inside the plane was drawn out over the
camera lenses, preventing them from fogging. Modern high-altitude espionage was born.

F. W. WINTERBOTHAM

105

Equipped with their secret, the two men set off for Europe,
where they overflew even the most sensitive areas with impunity,
since everyone assumed no aerial photographs were possible at
altitudes higher than 8,000 feet. Winterbotham paid particular
attention to Germany, and a series of flightsall of them under
cover of drumming up business for Winterbotham's firmmanaged to photograph nearly every important military installation
in the country, at the propitious moment when Hitler was beginning his rearmament program. Winterbotham became wellknown to the Luftwaffe, and in 1939 Luftwaffe General Albert
Kesselring and other senior officers asked the Englishman if they
could take a ride in his American plane. Winterbotham obliged,
but during the flight his heart almost stopped when Kesselring
wondered aloud about the series of blinking green lights at the
controls. These were indicators showing continuity of the Leica
automatic cameras' exposures, but Winterbotham, thinking fast,
told the Germans the lights signified special controls that showed
"petrol flow to the engines."
It was a close call, and Winterbotham realized that with the
storm clouds gathering, it was time to end operations over Europe. He returned to Britain, where MI6 gave him a new assignment: agency liaison to GCHQ's ULTRA code-breaking operation. Winterbotham devised a system that solved the central
dilemma of ULTRA. Somehow, vital information that ULTRA uncovered had to be disseminated to forces in the field without
revealing that the information came from broken German codes.
The slightest hint that the German codes had been compromised
would destroy ULTRA, for the Germans would change all their
coding systems.
Winterbotham's solution was to set up Special Liaison Units
(SLU), which consisted of agents involved in the ULTRA operation who were assigned to various armies in the field to give instant intelligence about what ULTRA revealed. The system was
brilliantly successful: Throughout the war, Allied generals were
able to redeploy their forces immediately, reacting to information
provided by the SLUs about German plans and dispositions.
There was not a single breach of security about ULTRA, which
remained secret until 1974.*
* In that year, the British decided on a limited disclosure of the great secret, part of
an effort to rehabilitate the tattered image of British intelligence. Winterbotham was
detailed to write a report for public consumption on the history and scope of the
code-breaking operation. Published in a commercial version as The ULTRA Secret, it
caused a worldwide sensation.

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Yet, despite these great contributions to British intelligence,

at war's end Winterbotham was let go by MI6and, in the great
tradition of MI6 penuriousness, without pension. Not a wealthy
man, he returned to his farm, there in later years to reflect on
the furious controversies surrounding the U-2 spy plane and spy
satellites. He never said if he derived any satisfaction from knowing that the modern "technical means" (as the diplomats politely
called overhead espionage) all stemmed from his curious obsession many decades before. Content among his cabbages and livestock, he died in 1990.

AMY THORPE PACK

The Siren Spy
Code Names: E11, CYNTHIA
Alias: Elizabeth Thomas
1910-1963

ot many people who lived anywhere near the British embassy

in Santiago, Chile, were enjoying the balmy spring of 1939.
The reason was Mrs. Amy Thorpe Pack, wife of a senior British
diplomat assigned to the embassy. For reasons no one could understand, Mrs. Pack insisted on learning how to shoot a pistol; by
the hour, under the instruction of the British naval attache, she
banged away at targets on the embassy grounds.
Finally, the growing complaints of the embassy neighbors
compelled her to stop. Reluctandy, she put her new pistol away
and tried to settle into the stifling world of diplomatic protocol
and embassy teas. Mrs. Pack did not make much of an effort to
hide her boredom, a reaction that most of the embassy family
ascribed to her upbringing as an American debutante, accustomed to the glitter and swirl of a much more exciting social
circle.
But what no one knew was that Mrs. Pack had been an MI6
asset for the past two years, already involved in a number of truelife espionage adventures. After that experience, life in the backwater of 1939 Santiago was pretty dull stuff.
Then 29 years old, Pack was a stunningly beautiful woman,
an attribute that made her a very formidable spy. Put plainly, she
was an absolute man-killer, with an acute intelligence that kept
her at least two jumps ahead of the many men who pursued her.
The daughter of a Marine Corps captain who later became a
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THE LEGENDS

prominent maritime lawyer in Washington, D.C., she grew up in

an atmosphere of privilege and power. To the surprise of her
friends, in 1930, just one year after making her debut in Washington society, she ignored the attentions of a number of highly
eligible men and married a colorless minor British diplomat
named Arthur Pack.
The Pack marriage proved passionless, and Amy Thorpe began a series of affairs with other men, partially as a means of
stoking the fires of her restless energy. In many ways a remarkable
woman, she yearned to do something useful with her life, but a
dozen different things at which she tried her hand failed to satisfy
that craving. Finally, in 1936, she discovered a field of endeavor
that had the challenge she was looking for: espionage.
Accompanying her husband to a posting in Spain, she was
approached one day by five desperate Nationalist soldiers who
had been trapped behind Loyalist lines. Could she help them
through the lines? She agreed, and with her charm and beauty,
talked her way past Loyalist checkpoints in a car containing the
five soldiers hidden in a trunk. A small incident, but she had
discovered the narcotic effect of danger and conspiracy. She had
found her true calling at last.
The next year, in 1937, her husband was transferred to the
Warsaw embassy, where Pack simply approached the MI6 chief of
station and announced her availability for intelligence work. It is
a tribute to her forcefulness that the MI6 man felt he had no
choice but to accept. Any reservations he might have had about
enlisting this American debutante were dispelled almost immediately. Within a few weeks, Pack demonstrated a natural ability
in a field for which she had never received any training. She
seduced a Polish Foreign Ministry official, who provided her with
top-grade intelligence on Poland's plans for dealing with Hider
and Stalin. She followed that with an astonishing intelligence
coup: from another government official, she learned that a team
of Polish mathematicians had begun cracking the German
Enigma codes. (This intelligence was to pay dividends later for
MI6; after the German invasion of Poland, the Poles turned over
a complete Enigma machine and their solutions, the first step in
the ULTRA operation).
A year later, following her husband to a posting in Prague,
she managed to obtain the German plans for the invasion of
Czechoslovakia (obviated by the Munich Agreement). That was
to be Pack's last espionage for nearly two years because her hus-

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109

band was reassigned to Santiago, Chile. His wife followed him

and almost died of boredom. That may help explain why the Pack
marriage died in Santiago. In 1941, separated from her husband,
Pack went to New York to begin a new life. She had barely set
foot on American soil when William Stephenson, MI6 chief of
station, contacted her. He had heard a great deal about the beautiful American with nerves of steel; how would she like to work
for his sprawling operation?
Actually, Stephenson did not want her working in New York,
for he felt her amazing ability to penetrate foreign embassies was
better suited for the diplomatic corps in Washington, D.C., which
offered a richer field of targets. She was given only a general set
of instructions to infiltrate, as best she could, some of the embassy
staffs in which MI6 had the most interestespecially the Germans, the Italians, and the Vichy French. Stephenson, a shrewd
judge of character, understood that with an asset like Pack, there
was no necessity to weigh her down with a lot of detailed instructions. Given her talents, it was only necessary to point her in the
right direction; she would take care of the rest.
Stephenson also understood that behind Pack's eagerness
for intelligence work lay a complex set of psychological motives.
Although she was working for MI6 in part because of her aversion
to what she had seen of fascism in Europe, the real explanation,
Stephenson realized, was that there was no other field of human
endeavor that could satisfy her lust for danger and excitement
and that at the same time provided her with a feeling of accomplishment. Somewhat piquantly, he gave her the code name CYNTHIA, after a long-lost love.
Stephenson's faith in Pack's abilities was rewarded shortly
after she arrived in Washington. She set her sights on the Italian
embassy and in short order had seduced the chief of station for
Italian military intelligence at the embassy. With characteristic
boldness, when he asked her what she wanted in life, she replied:
"The Italian navy cipher." Apparently smitten beyond common
sense, he agreed to provide her with the name of an embassy
code clerk, desperately in need of money, who would be willing
to sell the cipher. Pack set up the deal, and the cipher came into
British hands.
And just in time. The Italian navy significantly outnumbered
the beleaguered Royal Navy in the Mediterranean, but equipped
with the Italian cipher, the British were able to read the Italian
messages, allowing them to anticipate all moves by Mussolini's

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THE LEGENDS

navy. Even more significantly, in March 1941, knowledge of the

Italian ciphers allowed the British to destroy a significant part of
the Italian fleet in the battle of Cape Matapan, ending forever
the Italian navy's threat to British supply lifelines in the Mediterranean.
This achievement alone would have been sufficient to put
Pack in the pantheon of espionage giants, but she was to pull off
still another amazing penetration of an embassy, an operation
that would become one of the great espionage stories of World
War II.
It began early in 1942. Pack, who with Stephenson's approval
had also become an OSS asset after Pearl Harbor (under the code
name E11) in addition to her work for MI6, was asked if she could
penetrate the Vichy France embassy. The OSS was especially eager to get a look at the Vichy ciphers; with planning underway
for the invasion of Vichy territory in North Africa, any insight
into the Vichy military ciphers would be critically important. As
usual, Pack's approach was direct: posing as a pro-Vichy journalist, she gradually won the confidence (and the heart) of Charles
Brousse, the embassy's press attache and coincidentally an important Vichy politician. Within a month, Pack had recruited him
as an OSS asset, and information began flowing out of the embassy.
The next step was the most delicate: getting a look at those
ciphers, without the embassy knowing about it. The cipher books
were inside a huge safe, so an elaborate operation was devised,
with Pack playing the key role. The plan was for her and Brousse
to enter the embassy one night for a presumed tryst. Once inside,
they would unlock a window; an OSS safecracker would enter,
deduce the safe combination, and remove the code books. An
OSS team would be waiting outside to take the books, bring them
to a nearby apartment outfitted as a photo studio, photograph
all the ciphers, then return the books. The entire operation had
to be completed before dawn, when the embassy security people
arrived to make their first check.
One evening in June 1942, Pack and her lover Brousse entered the embassy; Brousse winked at the watchman, noting he
and the beautiful lady would be in the embassy for a while to
"discuss world politics." With a replying wink, the watchman bid
them good night. A short while later, the OSS safecracker was
about to enter through the opened window when disaster suddenly appeared: The watchman, suspicious, decided to check on

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111

the lovers. As he entered the roomand before he could spot

the open window and the OSS safecracker on the top rung of a
ladderPack took matters in hand. Hearing the watchman's approach, she stripped entirely naked; as his flashlight beam caught
this vision, he murmured "Pardonnez moi" and quickly exited, for
no gallant Frenchmen would interrupt further what was obviously
a signficant moment in the couple's lovemaking.
With the watchman gone, the operation swung into motion.
It took nearly six hours, but by the time the code books had been
replaced just before dawn, there was no trace that anyone had
even touched the safe. To make certain, Pack wiped every inch
of the safe on her way out, lowering her eyes modesdy as she and
Brousse walked past the smiling watchman.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of the
Vichy embassy operation. The photographs of the cipher books
were flown to London within 24 hours, and less than a few days
later, the British codebreakers at GCHQ were reading all messages from Vichy military installations in North Africa. When the
Allies invaded several months later, almost all Vichy opposition
was neutralized.
Stephenson would say later that Pack's efforts had saved the
Allies 100,000 lives. There is no way to be certain, but there is no
doubt that her extraordinary efforts significantly aided the Allied
war effort. But her crowning achievement, the Vichy embassy
caper, would mark the end of her espionage career; a consuming
affair of the heart had replaced her lust for adventure. Ironically,
she had fallen in love with Brousse, the man she had originally
seduced for espionage. Following a divorce from Pack, she married the Frenchman. In 1944, they went off to France to live in a
castle.
In her later years, the spy known as CYNTHIA never discussed her espionage career; settled in a comfortable existence
with the man who became the love of her life, she preferred to
concern herself with the minutae of running a French castle.
Occasionally, old acquaintances from her MI6 and OSS days
would arrive for a visit, invariably urging her to write her memoirs. She eventually began working on them, and although she
finished before her death of cancer in 1963, they were never
published. She could not imagine that anyone would be interested in what she insisted were a few "minor adventures" in her
life.

RICHARD SORGE
The Greatest of Them All
Code Names: SONTER, RAMSAY, FIX
Alias: William Johnson
1895-1944

t's always the little things, counterintelligence agents like to say,

those minor frailties of the human species that will cause even
the most cautious of spies to commit a fatal error. And so it was
with Richard Sorge, among the greatest spies in history, who committed a very human mistake and paid for it with his life.
One night late in October of 1941, every instinct honed in
a 20-year espionage career told Sorge it was time to flee Tokyo.
For more than four years, he had managed a network that ferreted out nearly every important secret of the Japanese government. His superiors in the Soviet GRU agreed that his network's
usefulness was at an end. As Sorge was aware, the Kempei Tai, the
Japanese secret police, were already watching him. Two members
of his network had been arrested some hours before, and under
torture, it would only be a matter of time before they identified
Sorge as chief of the network.
And yet, he hesitated. The reason was a beautiful Japanese
dancer with whom Sorge had been intimately involved for more
than a year. Sorge, deeply in love, let his heart rule his head:
Despite the growing danger, he could not bear to flee without
one last tryst to say goodbye. Sorge spent some time with her at
the nightclub where she worked, and they then adjourned to her
apartment, where he assumed he would spend his last night in
Japan. The next morning, he would flee the country into China
and eventually to safety in the Soviet Union. He seemed morose,
112

RICHARD SORGE

113

Soviet agent Richard Sorge, perhaps the greatest spy of all time, during his stay
in Japan in 1940 under cover as a German journalist. (AP/Wide World)

and although he would not tell her why, she sensed he was under
some kind of intense pressureso intense that he violated an
elementary rule of tradecraft. It was a fatal error.
Sorge had been carrying a message sent to him a short while
before by a member of his network, warning that the Japanese
were closing in, and that he should flee as quickly as possible. On
the way to his lover's apartment, a distracted Sorge, instead of
burning the note, ripped it up and threw the pieces on the
ground. Not too far behind, trailing Japanese Kempei Tai agents
retrieved the pieces. They put them together, and now Sorge's
guilt was beyond question. Several hours later, Sorge was arrested
as he lay in the arms of his paramour.
So the Japanese had captured the head of the network at
last, but they had no idea what exactly they had ensnared. All the
Japanese knew was that there had been a major espionage network operating inside Japan for quite some time. Two years of
patient detective work had led them, finally, to Sorge. But for
whom was Sorge working?

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THE LEGENDS

Since Sorge was a German citizen officially working in Japan

as a correspondent for several leading German newspapers, the
Japanese at first assumed he was working for either the Abwehr or
the SD. But the Germans were adamant: despite Sorge's close
relations with the German ambassador, he was not a German
agent. It would take another year before the Japanese were finally
able to prepare a complete picture of Sorge and his network, and
the result surprised them. For one thing, Sorge was a Soviet agent.
Second, and even more significantly, his espionage operation was
primarily concerned not with Japan, but his native landand it
was Germany that had suffered terrible damage.
The deeper the Japanese dug, the more impressed they became with Sorge and his operation, for they encountered one of
the most remarkable operations in the history of espionage. It
was an operation headed by a very remarkable man.
The key to understanding Sorge lay in his deep Communist
convictions, which to a certain extent could be considered genetic. His paternal grandfather had been private secretary to Karl
Marx, and when Sorge was a small boy, among the first books he
read was a copy of Marx's Das Kapital given to him by his grandfather as a gift. Born in 1895 in the Russian Caucasus to a German
oil drilling engineer, Sorge enlisted in the German army at the
outbreak of World War I. He was wounded twice and spent his
long convalescences devouring books on Communist theory. By
1920, he was a fervent Communist, and was among the early
members of the German Communist party. Meanwhile, he obtained a Ph.D. in political science at the University of Hamburg.
Sorge's rare combination of revolutionary ardor, high intellect, and eagerness to serve the cause quickly brought him to the
attention of Comintern officials, who transferred him to Moscow
for training at the organization's higher party schools. In 1927,
he was sent to Hollywood to aid in setting up party cells in the
American film industry, a task largely designed to test his abilities
as a party organizer. He returned to Moscow a year later for further training, in the process demonstrating an amazing linguistic
ability (in addition to his native German, he became fluent in
English, French and Russian, later adding Chinese and Japanese). By 1929, the Comintern envisioned a future for Sorge as
a top party organizer in Western Europe.
But GRU chief Jan Berzin, noted for his ability as a talentspotter, also had noticed the bright German Communist, and
Sorge was recruited for a very different future. As he had done

RICHARD SORGE

115

with another of his brilliant recruits, Leiba Domb, Berzin was

planning something special for his newest recruit. After a year of
training, Berzin assigned him as rezident in Shanghai, with instructions to revive GRU networks in China. In short order, Sorge
operating under cover as a German journalist and, on occasion,
as an American journalist named William Johnsoncreated a
series of networks that extended throughout the country and
kept Moscow informed about its two main concerns: the steady
rightward drift of Chiang Kai-shek, and the growing power of the
Communist leader in north China, Mao Tse-tung. But his most
significant intelligence discovery concerned a development that
alarmed Moscow: Germany was abandoning its traditionally close
relationship with China to forge an alliance with Japan. To Moscow, this shift represented the nightmare of two hostile powers
facing the Soviet Union on the east and west.
This critical intelligence seems to have escaped the notice
of both the GRU and KGB chiefs of station in Tokyo. Summoned
home to Moscow to explain the gross failure, they confessed their
errors and were promptly executed. That created an intelligence
void in Tokyo, and Berzin devised a daring plan to fill it. In Berzin's conception, Japan was actually a secondary target; given the
new relationship between Germany and Japan, Tokyo now offered the potential as a good listening post on German plans, for
the Germans would have to consult and coordinate with their
Asian allies. An intelligence operation in Tokyo would be targeted
against the large German diplomatic structure, a line of attack
that avoided having to set up operations in Germany itself, where
the Nazi police state made espionage operations very difficult.
Berzin's idea was for Sorge to be assigned to Tokyo, with full
authority to recruit whomever he wanted and operate free of
direction from Moscow Center. This was an unprecedented arrangement in the tightly-controlled world of Soviet intelligence,
but Sorge's performance in China had been so brilliant, it had
been decided that he worked best when given total freedom of
action.
Sorge laid his plans carefully. From his China network, he
selected two veteran GRU agents who would work with him in
Japan: Max Klausen, a longtime German Communist and
brilliant radio operator, and Branko de Voukelich, an exYugoslavian army officer, considered an expert on military intelligence. Sorge also selected two key GRU assets, both secret Japanese Communists whom Sorge first recruited in 1933: Ozaki

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THE LEGENDS

Hozumi, political correspondent of a leading Japanese newspaper with extensive contacts throughout the Japanese government
and political establishment; and Miyagi Yotoku, scion of a respected Japanese family, who had extensive contacts among a
group of liberal politicians opposed to the policies of the rightwing government.
Sorge's next step was to create a new legend for himself. He
returned to Germany and became a fervent Nazi. Blessed with a
great personal charm, Sorge soon ingratiated himself with some
of the leading figures in Joseph Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry,
important connections that he used to gain appointment as Japan
correspondent for several leading German newspapers. It remains a mystery to this day how the Gestapo, which kept a strict
watch on all forms of political dissidence, somehow missed Sorge.
Given his former prominence as a Communist activist, there
seems no reasonable explanation of how a man with that kind of
record not only joined the Nazi party, but managed to become
closely connected with the ruling hierarchy.
Whatever the explanation, Sorge, now apparently a rabidly
Nazi foreign correspondent, arrived in Tokyo in April 1938. He
immediately took two important steps. One, he befriended Colonel Eugene Ott, the German military attache at the German embassy. Aware that Ott, who spoke no Japanese, was supposed to
gather intelligence in Japan, Sorge helped him out, passing on
various little tidbits that Ott could include in his reports to Berlin.
Ott, a singularly untalented intelligence officer, was very grateful,
and began to pass on to Sorge a few interesting items he had
heard from his superiors. (This connection would prove even
more valuable when Ott later was named German ambassador to

Japan.)
Sorge's second action was to expand his network. His original ring of four recruited a few more important assets, until
Sorge had a network of 20 people, all in key positions, who were
able to keep him informed of everything of importance occurring in a geographic area extending from Manchuria to the
northern tip of Japan.
What made the Sorge network unusual, and highly effective,
was the role of its chief. Instead of merely collecting intelligence
and passing it to Moscow, Sorge also functioned as the network's
chief analyst. He would collect all the scraps of intelligence gathered by his network, fit them together in a coherent whole, and
add his own analysis and conclusions. He had trained himself as

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117

an expert on all matters Japanese, and kept a 1,000-volume library

of Japanese books that reflected his deep knowledge of the country. In effect, he was a one-man intelligence agency.
Within a month of his arrival in Tokyo, Sorge was able to
keep Moscow informed of the ongoing debate within the Japanese government over future policy. Basically, the Japanese had
decided to go to war, but in which direction would they strike?
One faction, close to the Germans, wanted to ally Japan with
German war aimswhich included, as Sorge found out, an eventual invasion of the Soviet Union. Another faction, however, argued that Japan's lack of raw materials mandated a strike southward, toward the oil and rubber riches of Malaya and the East
Indies. This faction was beginning to gain the upper hand, although its adherents admitted their policy meant war with the
United States.
Sorge's Japanese assets were able to keep him informed of
the ongoing debate. Meanwhile, Sorge kept a close watch on the
German end of the equation, where the ever-helpful Ott sought
his advice about Hitler's latest policy decisions. In late 1940, Sorge
learned an earth-shattering piece of intelligence: in a secret conference of his generals, Hitler had announced his decision to
invade the Soviet Union.
In retrospect, it remains almost unbelievable that Stalin, as
he did with top-grade intelligence from other sources about the
imminent German invasion, discounted Sorge's report, wondering aloud why so brilliant a spy as Sorge had fallen for such a
transparent "deception." Sorge was angry, but resolved to collect
more intelligence sufficient to change Stalin's mind. But nothing
he sent Moscow seemed to make any difference, even when in
May 1941, he transmitted a warning that the German invasion of
the Soviet Union would begin at dawn on June 20 (the actual
invasion, planned for that date, was delayed 48 hours by bad
weather). Stalin still ignored the warning.
By that point, Sorge was transmitting a huge volume of material, raising the recurring problem of his radio being on the air
for too long. Aware that Japanese counterintelligence had an extensive radio-monitoring service, Sorge took elaborate steps to
conceal his transmissions from listening ears. Initially, he kept the
radio moving from house to house, but then hit upon the idea
of using a sailboat as a radio base. The boat would transmit, then
immediately move to another location. Klausen, the radio oper-

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THE LEGENDS

ator, used high-speed transmissions to keep on the air for as short

a period as possible.
Still, the Japanese became aware that there was a clandestine
radio operating somewhere in their territory. They could not pinpoint it, but the high volume of transmissions indicated the radio
was probably serving an espionage network. As early as 1938, coincidental with Sorge's arrival in Tokyo, the Japanese had detected indications of some kind of network in operation, but had
no idea of its size, scope, and for which intelligence service it was
operating. In late 1939, the Kempei Tax got its first break: they had
arrested Ritsu Ito, leader of the hard-line, rabidly pro-Moscow
faction of the Japanese Communist party, which had been outlawed some years before. The Kempei Tai, notorious for its hideous
tortures, extracted from Ito the interesting revelation that the
party had a secret underground section whose members were
involved in espionage for the Soviet Union. He did not know
specifically which members were involved, but nevertheless gave
his interrogators a list of all the names of party members he knew
had been assigned to the underground. Among them were Ozaki
Hozumi and Miyagi Yotoku, Sorge's two prime Japanese assets.
The Japanese now began the laborious process of investigating the more than 100 names wrested from Ito. It was the
equivalent of looking for a needle in a haystack, but the patient
sifting of all the names finally produced an interesting result:
surveillance of Ozaki and Miyagi revealed a close connection with
a German correspondent named Richard Sorge. Perhaps it was
time to take a close look at Sorge.
Coincidentally, the SD station at the German embassy also
began taking a closer look at Sorge. The SD did not suspect Sorge
of being a Soviet spy, but it was struck by his close relationship
with the German diplomatic staff, especially the ambassador, Eugene Ott. The SD's concern centered on the possibility that Sorge
might be working for its hated rival, the Abwehr.
Some sixth sense warned Sorge throughout those critical
months of 1941 that he and his network were in danger. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union's need for intelligence was more desperate than ever, especially anything Sorge could tell them about
German intentions. In early October 1941, as German troops began closing in on Moscow, Sorge came up with a piece of intelligence that would have a dramatic effect on the course of the
war, and one that would enshrine him in the Soviet Union's pantheon of intelligence demigods.

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119

For months, the Japanese cabinet debated where the country's military machine would strike. While the Germans pressed
for an invasion of the Soviet Union, the cabinet finally decided
it would move south, to gain the raw materials essential for Japanese industry. That decision, passed on to the disappointed Germans, immediately became known to Sorge. In a series of three
long transmissions from his moving sailboat, Klausen sent this
momentous news to Moscow, including texts of the cabinet deliberations.
What happened next was unprecedented: based on Sorge's
record of accuracy to that point, the Soviets decided to take an
extraordinary gamble. Virtually all the front-line troops kept on
alert in the east to check a possible Japanese invasion were shifted
westward, where they fell upon the surprised Germans battling
their way through the suburbs of Moscow. Fresh Siberian divisions, unaffected by the coldest weather in 50 years, inflicted the
first defeat on the German blitzkrieg, a shock that caused Hitler
to sack most of his East front field marshals and assume personal
direction of the warwith results that would prove catastrophic.
But by this point, Miyagi and Ozaki had been arrested, and
as the Kempei Tai began closing in, Sorge prepared to send his
last transmission: the Japanese would open their southward
march with a knockout blow against the American fleet at Pearl
Harbor sometime during the end of the year. To their relief, the
Japanese managed to arrest Klausen before he could transmit this
intelligence from Sorge (who still might have gotten away had it
not been for his fatal dalliance with his Japanese lover).
What Sorge underwent at the hands of the Kempei Tai is not
known; the surviving Japanese records indicate only that he cooperated completely, telling the Japanese everything. The Japanese resisted an urgent German request for Sorge's extradition,
preferring instead to keep him for possible exchange later. In
1943, the Japanese proposed an exchange deal with Moscow, offering Sorge for several Japanese spies who had been arrested by
the Soviets. But Moscow never replied; apparently, Stalin was not
eager to have still another witness around who knew of his blindness to the clear warnings of the German invasion.
The Japanese kept Sorge alive for three years, spending
much of that time painstakingly uncovering what he had imparted to Moscow in the more than 30,000 pages of information

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THE LEGENDS

he broadcast. Finally, in 1944, when there was nothing left to

learn from Sorge, he was executed.
For years afterward, his Japanese lover regularly visited his
unmarked grave and decorated it with garlands of chrysanthemums, noted for their ability to faithfully flower, despite the most
adverse growing conditions.

RUTH KUCZYNSKI
The Radio in the Teddy Bear
Code Name: SONIA
Alias: Ruth Werner
1908-?

he two police constables who knocked on the door of the

modest cottage near the university town of Oxford one spring
morning in 1941 were already quite certain they were on a wild
goose chase. They had gotten one of those calls that was typical
in those jittery times, when ordinary citizens, warned to be alert
for the presence of enemy spies, tended to call police with even
the slightest suspicion.
The cottage hardly looked like an espionage den. It was
rented by an RAF sergeant named Leon Beurton and his wife
Ruth, who lived there with their two small children. Although a
neighbor had told police of seeing a sophisticated shortwave radio in the cottage (ownership of shortwave radios had to be registered under wartime regulations), it did not seem likely, at first
glance, that such a sophisticated piece of technology would be
owned by a poorly-paid RAF sergeant.
The woman who answered the knock was a short, plump
woman in an apron; a small child huddled at one knee, staring
wide-eyed at the two men in uniform. Mrs. Beurton looked puzzled as the police constables explained why they were there. In a
pronounced but vague European accent, she invited them inside,
and showed them a child's toy radio. Could that be the "short
wave radio" a neighbor had seen?
Probably, said the police constables, smiling. They expressed
their apologies for bothering this charming hausfrau, and left.
121

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THE LEGENDS

Just another spy scare, and the two constables promptly forgot
about it. Only much later would they learn they had stood in the
presence of the most brilliant Soviet intelligence agent in all of
Great Britain.
As usual, Ruth Kuczynski Beurton had played her role perfectly. With that frumpy look of harassed mother of small children, the constables could be forgiven for not checking further.
It would not be the last time this consummate actress had fooled
her enemies.
Kuczynski's appearance concealed a totally dedicated Communist who was born into a very Communist family: her father,
Rene, a prominent economist, was one of the first members of
the German Communist party, as was her brother Jeurgen.
Daughter Ruth was enrolled in the party's youth movement in
1917 when she was only nine years old. In 1926, she joined the
party as an adult. That same year, she went to New York to run a
bookstore, and met Rudolph Hamburger, studying architecture
in the United States. They fell in love, married, and she followed
him to Shanghai in 1930, where he had taken a job as an architect.
Hamburger was not a Communist, and while he tolerated
his wife's rabid political convictions, he put his foot down when
she announced her intention to "work for the party" in the foreign settlement area of Shanghai. He wasn't sure what that meant,
but the idea of his wife marching in demonstrations, dodging
police, or manning barricades was not what he had in mind for
a dutiful German wife. Ruth ignored him, and soon was busily at
work within the city's foreign settlement organizing workers and
carrying out a number of other duties. She soon became a striking figure in the Communist underworld, noted for her high
intelligence, linguistic ability (she spoke four languages fluently),
and apparent fearlessness. Precisely the kind of qualities that tend
to catch the attention of intelligence agency recruiters; sometime
during late 1933, Richard Sorge, GRU rezident in China, enlisted
her for the GRU.
Sorge, enthusiastically recommending her as a potentially
great agent, sent her to Moscow for training in cryptography and
radio communications. She proved to be a brilliant pupil, and
when she returned to China a year later, Sorge gave her increasing responsibilities running various networks.
In 1935, Kuczynski was ordered by the GRU to divorce her
"inconvenient" husband, Rudolph Hamburger, an order she du-

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123

tifully obeyed. Subsequently, she married Alfred Schultz, a GRU

agent who also worked in China. (Two years later, Schultz disappeared in Stalin's purge; his wife, informed that her second husband was a traitor, calmly replied that his execution was therefore
justified; she was now a widow with one child).
By that time, Kuczynski's stock was high in the GRU, which
had great plans for her. Then in the midst of organizing a series
of networks in Europe aimed at Nazi Germanya sprawling octopus that came to be called the "Red Orchestra" by the Germansthe GRU intended Kuczynski to play a key role. Following
a brief assignment in Danzig to perfect her skills, in 1938 she was
sent to Switzerland with orders to find GRU assets among British
Communist veterans of the Spanish Civil War. Her prize recruitment was Alexander Foote, who had fought in the war and demonstrated ability as a radio operator. (Foote later was assigned to
a large-scale GRU network in Switzerland known to the Germans
as the "Red Three.")
Kuczynski's next assignment was a real challenge: she was
ordered to Britain to create a British branch of the Red Orchestra. A tall order, for as a German citizen, she could not enter
Britain without a passportsomething the Nazi government was
not about to give a known Communist. She solved the problem
with typical directness, simply approaching a number of British
Communists then in Switzerland and asking them to marry her
so she could obtain British citizenship by marriage. Foote turned
her down, but Leon Beurton, a young Communist veteran of the
war in Spain, agreed to this marriage of convenience. In 1940,
with her husband called up for RAF service, she settled down in
Kidlington, a small town near Oxford. The GRU ordered her to
act as a sleeperfor the moment.
How Kuczynski was managing all this represents a tribute to
her dedication and fortitude. She already had one child from her
marriage to Schultz, and quite unexpectedly, she and Beurton
had another. So now she had two small children to care for; when
in May, 1941, the GRU ordered her to go into action, she somehow had to carry out that order in addition to her domestic
burden.
She succeeded brilliantly. She started building a network
right in her own family, which had fled to Britain after Hitler
came to power. As dedicated Communists, they were ready to
answer the summons of duty to the cause. Her father, now teaching economics at Oxford, had become well-connected in the Brit-

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ish establishment, and he began to collect high-level political intelligence. Brother Jeurgen, also an economist, was working as an
analyst in the British Air Ministry; he provided top-level military
intelligence. (Later, after the United States entered the war, he
joined the OSS and served on the staff of the Strategic Bombing Survey, giving him even greater access to high-grade intelligence). Even closer to home, her husband put her in touch with
an RAF senior officer who was a secret Communist; he passed on
samples of the latest British air technology, along with technical
reports that Ruth arranged to ship to Moscow.
From there, Ruth went trolling among the exiled German
Communist party members living in Britain. She discovered that
as loyal Communists, they continued to pay their party dues and
hold regular cell meetings. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, they were desperate to help Moscow,
and Ruth Kuczynski organized them into a network of assets with
varying degrees of usefulness. Most occupied low-level jobs, but
they nevertheless came across bits and pieces of classified information that the GRU found useful. Her next recruit, however,
had much more to offer.
In late 1941, Kuczynski met a young German emigre scientist
who had fled Germany in 1933 when Hitler came to power. A
rabid Communist, he continued to attend party meetings in exile,
and told Kuczynski he was eager to help the Soviet Union in any
way he could. He did not seem in a position to offer much; after
a year in an alien internment camp at the outbreak of the war,
the British recruited him to work on something called "Tube
Alloys Project." When Kuczynski did not seem especially impressed, Klaus Fuchs told her that the project was a cover name
for the greatest technical secret in the war: Great Britain and the
United States were jointly developing an atomic bomb. Would
the Russians be interested?
They certainly were, and Fuchs was enrolled as the star asset
in Kuczynski's network. By this point, she confronted the problem of how to transmit all this intelligence to the main GRU
station at the Soviet embassy in London. Much of the material
she was gathering could be sent by courier, but really "hot" intelligence had to be sent via radio. She needed a transmitter, but
this was no simple matter in wartime Britain; she could not simply
pick one up at the store and take it home. The solution was at
once ingenious and resourceful: over a period of several weeks,
Kuczynski made periodic trips by train to London with her small

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125

son. They appeared ordinary enough; a mother and small son,

the boy clutching a large teddy bear, on their way to London.
Once there, Kuczynski met a GRU agent in a park. He handed
over a package; later, she removed the radio parts from the package and put them inside the hollowed-out teddy bear. On the way
back home, she and her son were just another ordinary mother
and son travelling on the train.
Once on the air, Kuczynski began transmitting, careful to
keep her transmissions short as British counterintelligence was
on the alert for any signs of clandestine radios. She even had a
neighbor help string her aerial, telling him it was a clothesline.
This was all part of a facade she maintained of domestic ordinariness. It was a facade that served her well, for despite the heavy
volume of material she sent to Moscow during the war, she was
never detected. She even managed to survive a development that
should have meant her end: in 1945, Fuchs was arrested in Britain
on charges of espionage, and gave a confession. But he avoided
mentioning Kuczynski, so she was still safe.
It was not until two years later, in 1947, that she finally was
unmasked. Alexander Foote, the British Communist she had recruited a decade before, defected to the British. He revealed all
the GRU agents with whom he had ever had any contact, including Kuczynskialthough he claimed that she had stopped working for the GRU in 1940. For reasons he never made clear, Foote
apparently meant this semi-revelation to protect her in some way.
It did: MI5 agents appeared at her door and began asking questions about her connection to Soviet intelligence. She put on
another of her hausfrau acts, and by the time the MI5 agents left,
they were wondering if Foote was mistaken, somehow. It did not
seem possible that this plump lady whose wide-eyed innocence
protested any knowledge of such nasty things as espionage could
be the spy Foote claimed her to beeven before 1940, when the
GRU and KGB were known to have enlisted anybody who agreed
to help them.
Before MI5 could decide what to do next, Kuczynski realized
her time was up. She, her husband and the two children left on
what she told her neighbors was a trip to see relatives in Germany.
But they never saw Kuczynski again; Mr. and Mrs. Beurton and
the children disappeared into East Germany, followed shortly by
the rest of the Kuczynski family.
MI5 was not especially upset by her disappearance, assuming
that at worst, she had been a very low-level asset for Moscow years

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THE LEGENDS

before, and in any event probably had not injured British security,
since she had not arrived in the country until 1939. It was not
until 1959, when more of the VENONA decryptions came to
light, that MI5 realized its error. The decryptions, of traffic from
the GRU station at the London embassy to Moscow during the
war, revealed a small ocean of material from a sourceobviously
head of a networkcode-named SONIA. From several clues
sprinkled in the transmissions, it did not take long for MI5 to
deduce that SONIA was in fact Ruth Kuczynski, the little housewife who had hoodwinked them years before.
Kuczynski, meanwhile, settled in East Germany, where she
became a loyal follower of the regime and worked in a government job that apparently had nothing to do with intelligence. (It
is unclear whether she is still alive). In 1982, now retired, she
published her memoirs and basked in the glow of a tribute from
Soviet intelligence, which said of her, "If we had five Sonias, the
war would have ended sooner."

HERBERT YARDLEY
The American Black Chamber
1890-1958

he restless 22-year-old former railroad telegrapher who arrived at the huge Victorian mausoleum on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., in 1912 to report for his new job as
code clerk in the State Department realized at once that his presumption that the job entailed excitement was quite wrong. The
place was a tomb; in the torpor of pre-World War I Washington,
the State Department, and the War and Navy departments located in the same building, had all the drama and excitement of
a birdwatchers' convention.
Herbert Yardley had arrived from Indiana assuming that the
very center of American power would be teeming with intrigue
and activity. Instead, the State Department reflected the country's
overall mood of isolationism; it had very little idea of what was
really happening in the rest of the world, and did not seem to
care, particularly.
Yardley settled into the dull routine of his job, and passed
the idle hours, of which there were many, pursuing his hobby of
cryptography. He haunted the Library of Congress in every spare
moment, reading everything he could find on the subject, and
by the beginning of 1914, the $900-a-year code clerk was the leading American expert on cryptanalysis. Not an especially difficult
feat, since American cryptography at that point was some 30 years
behind Europe.
The more Yardley studied the creaky American codes then
127

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THE LEGENDS

Herbert Yardley, the legendary American codebreaker whose Black Chamber

was to dramatically affect the course of World War II in the Pacific. (AP/Wide
World)

in use, the more he was convinced that they were so simple as to

make them useless for modern coded communications. Rebuffed
by his superiors when he complained about the codes, Yardley
decided on direct action to make his point: over a period of several months, he solved every single American code then in existence, and wrote up a report entitled Exposition on the Solution of
American Diplomatic Codes. He concluded that European nations,
known to have a first-class cryptographic ability, undoubtedly
were reading the simple American codes with ease. He impolitically presented this report to his superior, who just happened to
be the man who devised the codes in the first place. To further
make his point, Yardley coolly walked into the man's office and
opened his safewhose combination, Yardley figured out, was
based on the telephone number of President Woodrow Wilson's
fiancee.
Word of Yardley's feat got around the small American military establishment, and in 1917, as America entered the war, he
was recruited by Colonel Ralph H. Van Deman, then head of the

HERBERT YARDLEY

129

Army's Military Intelligence Division. Following only a 15-minute

conversation with Yardley, Van Deman concluded that he was just
the man to bring the United States into the forefront of cryptography. An entirely new Army intelligence unit, called MI-8, was
created for Yardley, who was given an Army commission, told to
recruit and train a staff of the best minds he could find, and sent
off to France.
Yardley then began one of the most amazing careers in the
history of American intelligenceand one of the most tragic.
A highly energetic man, Yardley in short order had a cadre
of trained cryptanalysts in an organization that he modelled on
the famous wartime French Chambre Noir (Black Chamber), one
of the most brilliant cryptographic organizations in the world. By
1918, Yardley added to a glittering record by organizing an effort
that cracked the German ciphers used to keep in touch with spies
in France; as a result, every single German spy dispatched to
France was caught.
At the end of World War I, MI-8 was scheduled to be eliminated in the wave of postwar cutbacks, but Yardley and his staff's
feats were so well known at the upper levels of the government
that an unprecedented arrangement was worked out: MI-8 would
continue to operate under cover of a civilian commercial codemaking company, secretly funded by the State Department. Setting up headquarters in a New York City brownstone, Yardley
unofficially called his group the "Black Chamber," in tribute to
the French organization that had taught the Americans so much.
Yardley began churning out a river of yellow flimsies that
began "We learn from a source considered reliable in the past..."
and continued with the text of the actual message as decrypted
by the Black Chamber. The codes of a dozen nations fell before
Yardley's efforts, but in late 1919, on orders of the State Department, the Black Chamber concentrated its efforts on the codes
of Japan, already considered to be a potential enemy of the
United States. Given the intricacies of the Japanese language and
the complexity of the codes, it took the Black Chamber nearly
two years to crack them; according to Yardley's later account, the
solution came to him one night in a dream.
At any rate, the solution came just in time to play a role in
one of the more amazing diplomatic episodes of the pre-World
War II era, an episode that would make Yardley a hero and a
pariah at the same time.

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THE LEGENDS

In 1921, the Washington Naval Limitations Conference

opened, with the objective of reducing the world's naval fleets by
means of a ratio system: each nation would be permitted a certain
number of capital ships in a proportion to the size of other naval
fleets. The presumption was that large maritime nations such as
the United States would need larger fleets to protect their interests than smaller nations. Japan was a participant in the conference, but was determined to get as close a ratio as it could in
relation to the American fleet.
The Japanese negotiators had been instructed to hold out
for a 10:7 ratio (700,000 tons of Japanese warship tonnage for
every 1,000,000 tons of American), but given further instructions
to compromise at 10:6 if the Americans proved intransigent.
Which is precisely what the American negotiators held out for;
given the transcripts that Yardley provided of the coded messages
exchanged between the Japanese negotiators and their superiors
in Tokyo, the Americans held fast. The Japanese finally gave in,
and the consequences would prove enormous. Some 15 years
later, the Japanese renounced the treaty, but by then it was too
late; in the brief period before Pearl Harbor, Japan was unable
to make up for lost time and build a navy sufficiently strong to
challenge American superiority.
For Yardley, the feat cemented his vaunting reputation as a
cryptographic magician. But that did not save the Black Chamber: In 1929, the new Secretary of State, conservative Henry L.
Stimson, learned the source of those yellow flimsies that so accurately revealed what the diplomats of other nations were thinking. Shocked. Stimson ordered the Black Chamber closed down
with the immortal words that would haunt him the rest of his life,
"Gentlemen do not read each other's mail."
Out of work, Yardley suffered a further blow when the money
he had invested in the stock market was lost in the crash. To support his family, he wrote an immensely popular book called The
American Black Chamber. The book infuriated the American government, and when Yardley tried to write another, called Japanese
Diplomatic Secrets, government prosecutors went to court and won
a landmark ruling that upheld the government's right to prepublication review of the writings of its intelligence agents. The government was aggravated by The American Black Chamber, and no
wonder: it revealed American intelligence's greatest secret, a revelation certain to cause all the nations whose communications had
been read by Yardley to tighten up their cipher systems.*

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131

Yardley professed to be unconcerned about all the controversy, preferring to invest his energies in a business career. But
however talented a cryptanalyst, Yardley was no businessman;
every scheme he tried failed, including one spectacular failure
involving his invention of a nearly undetectable secret ink, the
market for which proved to be obscure.
In 1938, by then desperate for money, Yardley returned to
the field in which he had won his fame, accepting a job with
Chinese leader Chiang Kai-Shek to work on solving Japanese
army ciphers. The appointment displeased the Japanese, who began to regard Yardley as a nemesis. After Pearl Harbor, Yardley
volunteered his services to Washington as a codebreaker, but the
American government, still furious about his book, would not
take him up on the offer. The Canadians, interested in upgrading
their codebreaking efforts, hired Yardley, but soon dispensed
with his services under strong U.S. government pressure.
Embittered, Yardley served during the war as a lowly official
in the Office of Price Administration. After the war, he faded into
obscurity. He wrote one book about his work in China, and another, this one a treatise on poker that still ranks as the greatest
work ever written on the subject. A heavy drinker, the habit began
to exact its toll on Yardley's health, and he died in 1958. The
general public had forgotten him, but the government had not,
although its long animosity had finally mellowed. Accordingly,
former Lieutenant Herbert Yardley, ex-chief of the MI-8 section
of the United States Army Military Intelligence Division, the man
who singlehandedly revolutionized American cryptography and
created the groundwork for the great American code-breaking
triumphs of World War II, was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.

* Among them was Japan, where Yardley's book was a best-seller. Appalled at learning
how easily their codes were compromised, the Japanese government overhauled its
cipher sytems, ultimately producing a complex cipher machine code-named PURPLE by the Americans. It required a herculean effort by U.S. Army cryptographers
to crack the machine, and as a result, the Americans were able to read all high-level
Japanese diplomatic traffic before and during World War II.

ERIC ERICKSON
The Counterfeit Traitor
1891-1983

n a crisp fall day in 1944, the weapon Nazi Germany was

convinced would turn the tide of war slowly rolled to a takeoff
position at an airfield in southern Germany. The Messerschmitt
262, the world's first operational jet fighter plane, was ready for
one of its final test flights.
Once deployed, the Germans were convinced, the ME-262
would dramatically alter the air war then pounding Germany to
pieces. The newjet, much faster than the fighter escorts protecting
the fleets of Allied bombers, would quickly decimate the slow-moving bombers. Free of bombing attacks, German industry would
then turn out the "wonder weapons" to finally win the war.
But the very circumstances of the ME-262's appearance on
the airfield underscored why Germany had no hope of winning
anything, much less the air war. This triumph of German technological genius was pulled onto the airfield by a team of cows. Once
airborne, it could only fly a few minutes because of Germany's
acute shortage of aviation fuel. Some miles away, the factory producing the ME-262 was having trouble getting parts and raw materials, because the trucks needed to carry them had very little
fuel. And even if maximum production was achieved, there simply
was not sufficient fuel to keep enough of the planes airborne.
All these problems devolved upon Nazi Germany's Achilles
heel in 1944: lack of oil. It was a critical deficiency that finally
wrecked the German war machine. And one man was responsible
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ERIC ERICKSON

133

for that fact, the man who had ensured that Nazi Germany's oil
supply dwindled to a mere trickle, a man that the Germans never
would have suspected. His name was Eric Erickson.
At the outbreak of World War II, Erickson was a 48-year-old
oilman who travelled frequently around the world working out
various deals. Like most men in the business, Erickson loved the
rough and tumble world of oil. Born in Brooklyn, he had emigrated to Sweden in 1924 to start his own oil production company. Nicknamed "Red" for his shock of red hair, Erickson was
known as a burly, easygoing man who liked nothing better than
hoisting a few with his oil industry cronies, exchanging stories
about the latest big find in the Persian Gulf.
But the mild exterior concealed an extremely shrewd man
who had strong moral convictions. Which is why his friends found
it all the more puzzling when in 1939, shortly after the outbreak
of the war, Erickson suddenly became something of a pro-Nazi.
To their further puzzlement, Erickson, never known for any prejudice, began to become openly anti-Semitic. He stopped talking
to his Jewish friends, and loudly insulted one prominent Jewish
businessman in a restaurant. Coupled with his open admiration
for Hitler, the transformation struck everybody who knew Erickson as very strange. They learned to avoid the Erickson home in
Stockholm, lest they be subjected to a tirade about the "dirty
Jews" and the genius of Adolf Hitler.
There was one group of men in Stockholm who did not find
such behavior so strange; in fact, they delightedly watched Erickson's growing infatuation with Nazi ideology. The men of the SD
station at the Stockholm embassy had taken notice of Erickson
as he veered suddenly rightward. This offered possibilities: Germany had an acute need for oil, and Erickson, one of the world's
leading experts on that subject, could prove valuable. A careful,
tenative approach was made: would Herr Erickson be interested
in helping the Nazi regime? Erickson replied enthusiastically.
And so the bait had been taken. In fact, Erickson loathed
the Nazis, but had been instructed to cultivate an image of proNazi to lure an SD recruitment. Some months before, Erickson
had been approached by an acquaintance, an American diplomat
named Laurence Steinhardt, who was on his way to Moscow to
serve as ambassador. Steinhardt, himself an expert on the oil business, concluded that the war between great industrial powers
would be decided in large measure on the issue of oil; the nation
that had sufficient oil to fuel its planes and tanks and keep its

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industrial machinery going would be the nation that won the war.
Steinhardt proposed a daring plan to Erickson: posing as a proNazi, he would allow himself to be recruited by the Germans as
a helpful expert willing to advise the Nazi regime on oil production. Naturally, that meant Erickson at some point would have to
take a look at the German oil production facilities.
And that is what American intelligence wanted to see. Since
World War I, the Germans had led the world in the technology
of synthetic oil, which involved an industrial process that converted coal into oil. It removed a dependency on imported oil
easily cut off in the event of waralthough the process was quite
expensive. The Americans wanted to know how advanced the
German synthetic oil industry was, and, even more importantly,
where the plants were located. (The plants were under heavy security, and neither the British nor American intelligence had
much information about them.)
Toward the end of 1939, Erickson began to make regular trips
to Nazi Germany to consult with oil experts. Blessed with a photographic memory, Erickson remembered every detail he either
saw or heard about; following each return to Stockholm, he sat
with several State Department aides and repeated it all to them.
Actually, as Erickson discovered, there was not much he could
help the Germans with; their synthetic oil industry was very far
advanced, to the point where Hitler believed he could fill almost
all the petroleum needs of his war machine from the output of
synthetic oil plants. To keep the game going, Erickson proposed
an idea that delighted SS leader Heinrich Himmler himself: the
Swede would construct a huge synthetic oil plant in Sweden, using German capital. Thus, in the event the German plants were
damaged or destroyed, the Germans would have a guaranteed
source of oil.
As Erickson anticipated, that led the Germans to approve
an extensive series of inspection trips to their oil plants, all in the
name of Erickson becoming familiar with the German technology
that he was to build in Sweden. By 1943, Erickson had a virtually
complete picture of the German plants. Concidentally, they began to be struck by persistent American bombing attacks. The
bombers not only seemed to know the precise location of the
plants, they were uncannily punctual in return bombings when a
damaged plant was restored to production.
The Germans did not make the connection between the
accurate American attacks and the presence of Erickson at the

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135

very same plants. Erickson artfully stalled while the Germans

pressed him to finish arrangements for the new plant in Sweden;
their anxiety was understandable, considering that synthetic oil
production was dropping precipitously.
By mid-1944, German synthetic oil production was drying
up, and the German war machine was tapping into precious reserves in order to keep going. Nevertheless, that machine was
clanking to a halt: most of the Luftwaffe was grounded for lack
of fuel, and there was not enough gas for those Panzer formations
that once swept across Europe. By the end of that year, the synthetic oil industry in Germany collapsed altogether.
Erickson's mission was over. There was no point for him to
make any more trips to Germany, for there was nothing left to
bomb. While the Germans hitched up a team of cows to pull their
technological wonder, the ME-262, onto an airfield, Erickson was
at a large dinner in Stockholm that had been arranged by his
American friends. At the dinner, it was announced that Eric Erickson was not a pro-Nazi after all; it was only a facade to aid his
"great work" on behalf of the Allies. The "great work" remained
unspecified, but the important fact was that Erickson now became
reconciled with the friends whom he once spurned in the name
of perfecting his cover.
With the end of the war, Erickson returned to his oil business. Praised by Dwight D. Eisenhower as the man who "shortened the war by at least two years," he shunned publicity. He
endured a best-selling book about his role in the war, and later a
movie, The Counterfeit Traitor, that starred William Holden in a
somewhat exaggerated account of Erickson's work as a spy.
The book and the movie appeared to say everything there
was worth saying about Erickson, but there was one secret he took
to the grave with him when he died in 1983: a list, given to him
by the Germans, of Swedes who secretly had agreed to serve in a
Nazi government should Germany invade Sweden. At Eisenhower's request, Erickson burned that document to forestall a witchhunt.

ELSBETH SCHRAGMUELLER
Fraulein Doktor
Aliases: Henrichsen, Christiansen, Rennmueller
1894-1939

he man in the clutches of two burly military policemen appeared miserable, a not unreasonable emotion considering
he was about to be shot as a spy. Facing a grim-looking British
officer seated behind a desk as a heavy rain in that wet summer
of 1915 pelted the tent, the man tried not to look at the evidence
of his espionage spread before him: the innocent-appearing letter
whose invisible writing between the lines had been developed,
the Belgian identity card proven to be a forgery, the small pieces
of rice paper with coded writing found in the sole of his shoe.
The British officer made an offer: if the spy would tell all he
knew, then he would be treated as a prisoner of war, and put into
a prison camp. If not, he would be shot within the next 20 minutes. The spy, a native Belgian recruited by the Germans, didn't
hestiate a second, and began telling his story.
To the British army intelligence officer, his story had a very
familiar ring, because he had heard it at least a dozen times before. It was always the same: an offer to spy for the Germans, a
mysterious summons in the dead of night, a ride in a car with
shades over the side windows, arrival at a building somewhere in
German-occupied Antwerp, and then a greeting by a woman who
announced she would be his spy trainer. She was a tall, blonde
woman with a pair of the most penetrating ice-blue eyes he had
ever seen. Like a drill sergeant, she barked out the orders that
would govern his every waking moment for the next three
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ELSBETH SCHRAGMUELLER

137

months: he would be known only by a code name, he would speak

to no other person at the school, he would spend 12 hours each
day training in the espionage arts, he would spend the remaining
part of each day locked in his room, and if he was a successful
graduate of this regimen, he would be sent behind British lines
to work as a spy. Any violation of these strictures would result in
his immediate execution.
Like almost every other spy trained at the spy school, he was
terrified of this blonde woman, who screamed and ranted at the
recruits. He did not know her name, but there was a rumor she
had been an academic with a Ph.D. in economics. As was the
German custom, which dictated that male holders of the degree
be addressed respectfully as Herr Doktor, the lady spymaster, reputedly unmarried, was known among the trainees as Fraulein
Doktor.
And it was as Fraulein Doktor that she became an espionage
immortal. Not until after the war did the British discover that her
real name was Elsbeth Schragmueller, and that despite her reputation as a stern taskmaster (hinting of a possible military background), her actual history was much more prosaic.
In 1914, Schragmueller, then 20 years old, was just finishing
her graduate studies in economics at the University of Freiburg
(her dissertation was on the medieval stonecutter guilds), and
when the war broke out, she volunteered her services. A fanatic
German patriot, Schragmueller actually suggested to military recruiters that she be trained in the infantry and sent to fight as an
ordinary front-line soldier. That was considered out of the question, but since she spoke four languages fluently, she was shuttled
off to the army's Postal Censorship Bureau in German-occupied
Brussels, a sleepy backwater where battalions of men and women
censored mail.
The energetic Schragmueller converted her dull job into a
flourishing intelligence operation. To the surprise of her superiors, she showed how the mails were being used by clever spies
who managed to convey a great deal of intelligence in even the
most innocuous messages. A man writing to his cousin about the
family farm, she lectured, was probably a spy; just look at this
detailed accounting of how many pigs, chickens, and horses he
was recounting for his cousin. Obviously, these referred to the
types and numbers of German units he had observed. And this
letter, ostensibly by a woman recounting how many sailboats she
had seen on a trip to the seashore; obviously, she was in fact

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reporting on the number of German warships she had spotted

in the area. Schragmueller, in a presentation that dazzled her
listeners, demonstrated how she had developed a system of textual analysis that would betray letter-writers who were conveying
military information, rather than idle family gossip.
Word of this feat soon reached the higher levels of German
military intelligence, which concluded that Schragmueller's talents were better suited for a job of greater responsibility. Schragmueller had just the job in mind: she wanted to run training at
the military intelligence's training school in Antwerp. It was not
a very good school, Schragmueller complained: army officers
with minimal intelligence experience trained recruits in a quick
once-over in espionage techniques, then sent them on their way.
Most never were heard of again.
Impressed with her determination and boldness, military intelligence gave her the job. Within a month, the old mansion at
10 Rue de Pepiniere (an address Belgians learned to fear because
they would be arrested if they showed any curiosity about the
place) was humming with activity. Schragmueller introduced an
entirely new curriculum, ranging from lessons on how to recognize the latest in enemy military technology to cryptography.
None of the several hundred recruits who went through the exacting training schedule ever forgot the woman they sometimes
called "Tiger Eyes," the single-minded blonde in German army
uniform, complete with pistol and riding cropwhich she didn't
hesitate to use on doltish students. Above all, they learned that
Schragmueller was not to be trifled with. She would fix an errant
student with a malevolent glare, and when especially infuriated,
tended to brandish her pistol.
British counterintelligence on the Western Front soon became aware that a new vigor had entered German intelligence
operations. They began to turn up indications that German spies
had managed to infiltrate some of the channel ports, and what
made things more difficult, they apparendy were a lot better
trained. Gradually, the British also heard about the "Fraulein
Doktor," and mounted a series of operations to infiltrate her operation and identify her. They never succeeded; Schragmueller
was adept at shifting identities, and lived at various addresses under multiple disguises, including that of an old washerwoman.
Meanwhile, she kept churning out highly trained spies, and
it is for her curriculum that she is best known in the history of
modern intelligence, for virtually all modern spy agencies copied

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139

her training regimen. She is also known for a particularly cynical

technique she contributed to the field: the "discard," an agent
deliberately sacrificed as part of an effort to conceal another,
more important, agent. One of her "discards" became much
more famous than her teacher.
In 1915, she was sent a new recruit to train for eventual
operations at the highest levels of French society, a plumpish
Dutch woman who had already won some fame as an exotic dancer named Mata Hari. Margareta Zelle did not impress Schragmueller, and seemed to have difficulty in mastering even the simplest techniques. "A dud shell," Schragmueller pronounced her,
despairing that Mata Hari would ever amount to anything. (She
turned out to be right, and it was Schragmueller who arranged
to have her dull student betrayed to French counterintelligence.)
In 1918, following the liberation of Belgium, Schragmueller
went back to Germany, and there disappeared into total obscurity.
By this time, fueled by a series of revelations from wartime British
intelligence operatives, "Fraulein Doktor," along with Mata Hari,
had become one of the most glamorous spies in history. Schragmueller refused all offers in Germany to write her memoirs, preferring a quiet life taking care of her aged mother (she never
married), and working as a lecturer in economics at the University of Munich. She briefly emerged into the limelight in 1932,
when a woman admitted to a Swiss sanatorium for drug addiction
claimed to be the legendary Fraulein Doktor. There was a furious
burst of publicity, in which the stories about Schragmueller got
wilder and wilder. Some newspapers ran a picture purported to
be of Fraulein Doktor, showing a stunning blonde in an army cap
and brandishing a cigar.
It was too much. Schragmueller broke her long silence to
deny she was a drug addict in Switzerland, to cite just one of the
wild stories. She faded back into obscurity, and died in 1939. One
can imagine what her reaction would have been, 29 years later,
to see the now-cult movie Fraulein Doktor, which featured the
Schragmueller character as a lesbian dope addict.

MARGARETA ZELLE
Mata Hari, The Eye of Dawn
Code Name: H21
Alias: Mata Hari
1876-1917

nd how did the accused propose to explain the 30,000 marks

she received from an official of German intelligence? The
prosecuting officer, with a flourish meant to impress the military
court, brandished the records of several money transfers from
German banks to Swiss accounts of the accused.
Margareta Zelle shrugged. "He was my lover," she said.
"That was the price of my favors."
"This amount seems rather large for a simple gift," the prosecutor said, allowing a pause before the word "gift."
"Not to me," Zelle snapped. At that moment, she was
doomed; the worldwise senior officers who constituted the
French court martial were not prepared to believe that even the
famed Mata Harito use Zelle's stage namewas worth the thenastonishing sum of 30,000 marks for a night of pleasure. They
unanimously voted that Maragareta Zelle was a spy in the pay of
the Germans.
A few months later, on October 15, 1917, she was taken to
the rifle range at Vincennes and, declining a blindfold, stood
before a firing squad at dawn and was executed. Instantly, she
became a legend. In the more than 75 years since that morning,
Mata Hari has become shrouded in myth as the greatest, the most
beautiful, and the most mysterious spy of all time. She has been
the subject of more books, articles, and movies than any other
140

MARGARETA ZELLE

141

Margareta Zelle, in costume as the "Eye of Dawn" (Mata Hari). (AP/Wide

World)

spy; she remains the one instantly recognizable name in the public's mind when the subject turns to spies.
And yet, ironically enough, the fact is that Mata Hari was not
very mysterious, she was not a great spy, and, if truth be known,
she was not very beautiful. Her legend was created for reasons of
statecraft, for it suited certain political objectives having little to
do with espionage.
For a long time, much of the legend centered on her origins,
which were reputed to be in Java, where a union of a Dutch adventurer and a Javanese temple dancer produced a beautiful
daughter. As a young girl, so the story went, she learned sensuous
temple dances, and adopted the stage name Mata Hari ("eye of
dawn" in Javanese) to bring those dances to the world.
In fact, her origins were much more ordinary. Margareta
Zelle was born in 1876 to a middle-class Dutch family. She attended convent school, and at age 18, was swept off her feet by a
Scottish sea captain named Macleod. She followed him to the East
Indies, where it turned out that Macleod was a mean drunk and

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THE LEGENDS

a man of violence. In 1901, the marriage collapsing, they returned to the Netherlands, and were divorced.
Subsequently, Margareta Zelle became Mata Hari. In special
private concerts all over Europe, she gave demonstrations of the
"secret Javanese erotic temple dances" that actually may have had
more to do with burlesque than East Indian art. Whatever the
case, she became a sensation; at a time when public nudity was
quite rare, Zelle presented dances in which she slowly divested
herself of seven veils to reveal a nude body that apparently a fair
number of aristocrats, political leaders, and senior military officers found alluring. In a short period of time, she became not
only a highly sought performer, she also was a highly paid courtesan for the ruling circles of Europe.
This access made her a natural recruit for intelligence, and
the Germans, with the deepest pockets, enlisted her after World
War I broke out. She proved inept, so she was sent to the famous
German spy school in Antwerp, run by Fraulein Doktor, Elsbeth
Schragmueller, and dispatched into France to seduce French officials and gather intelligence.
But French counterintelligence was already aware of her
links to the Germans. They moved to deport her, but Zelle surprised them by admitting she was close with some German officials, although denying she had ever spied for Germany. She then
offered to become a double agent for the French. The French
did not trust her, but as a test, sent her to Belgium with a list of
six agents she was to contact. Within a fortnight, one of those six
agents she contacted was arrested and executed by the Germans.
At this point, though she had given up the name of a French
asset, the Germans didn't trust her, either. Schragmueller became
convinced that Zelle's betrayal of the French agent was simply a
discard operation to bolster her bona fides, part of a larger
French operation to infiltrate German intelligence. Schragmueller recommended that Zelle be betrayed to the French. Accordingly, German intelligence assigned her to return to France,
and announced the move via a coded radio message to other
assets in Francein a code the Germans knew the French had
broken. When Zelle returned to France, she was arrested for espionage, the decoded message having noted the imminent arrival
of H21 (Zelle's German intelligence code name), along with
enough details to allow any counterintelligence officer to deduce
that the code name referred to Zelle.

MARGARETA ZELLE

143

She could not have picked a worse time to be arrested. The

French, at that time wracked with army mutinies, needed a convenient scapegoat to explain military disasters at the front. Mata
Hari was perfect; she was now described by the French as the
greatest spy of all time, the woman who had managed to obtain
all the secrets of the French High Command from officers fatally
lured to her beauty. In the French version, virtually all the military
setbacks on the Western Front could now be attributed to the
female spy. The French public, notoriously susceptible to the idea
of romantic entanglement as the cause of most world events,
lapped it up. In the process, the dimwitted French generals who
had sent their men to slaughter now had their alibi. The legend
of Mata Hari was born.
The verdict in Zelle's trial was thus a foregone conclusion,
but she didn't help her case by her idiotic explanation of why
some German official was paying her all that money. Nor did she
aid her defense when she claimed to have served French intelligence by revealing where in Morocco German U-boats were refueled. Too late, she realized she had entrapped herself, for the
prosecutor then asked the natural question: considering the fact
that she had never been to Morocco in her life, how could she
have known of such vital information unless the Germans had
told her?
She had no effective reply, except to insist repeatedly during
her trial, "Harlot, yes. But traitress, never!"
That statement may have been closer to the actual truth than
anyone in France realized, but no one was in a mood for subtleties. It was enough for everyone to believe in the myth of Mata
Hari the super-spy.
It took some years for the record to be set straight, finally,
but by then, it hardly mattered. Margareta Zelle, the Dutch convent girl who danced naked and made the mistake of dabbling
in the dangerous world of espionage, had already passed into
immortality. And there she remains, for no single individual has
ever done so much to glamorize the world of espionage.

WOLFGANG LOTZ
Aliases: Rusty Bey, Ze'ev Oar-Ayeh
1921-1993

ELIYAHU COHEN
Code Names: ALEX,
OPERATIVE 88, MENASHE
Alias: Karmal Amin Taabet
1928-1965

The Eyes of Israel

t dawn on June 5, 1967, Israeli warplanes streaked in at low

level to attack, with pinpoint accuracy, a half-dozen large military airfields in Egypt and Syria. The most devastating first strike
in military history destroyed the air forces of Israel's two most
dangerous enemies on the ground. Within 24 hours, an Israeli
military blitzkrieg recaptured Sinai and shattered six Syrian divisions guarding the Golan Heights.
At the end of six days, when a truce stopped the fighting,
the Israelis had won a stunning victory, a triumph that clearly
owed a great deal to their superior intelligence services. Arab
planes, armor, and fortifications were hit by Israeli pilots and tank
gunners who often operated with maps and diagrams showing
the precise location of their targets.
The triumph indeed owed much to Israeli intelligence, and
the lion's share of that credit should go to two extraordinary men.
Together, they were able to provide the intelligence that underwrote the victory, and their exploits demonstrated the effectiveness of human intelligence sources when properly trained and
motivated. It also helped that both men were perfectly placed by
an intelligence agency that knew how to make the best use of
human spies.
Of the two men, Wolfgang Lotz was the more interesting.
Born in Germany, he was 12 years old when Hitler came to power
144

WOLFGANG LOTZ, ELIYAHU COHEN

145

in 1933. The son of a Jewish mother and a Christian father, he

grew up in a non-observant home; his mother was so agnostic,
she didn't bother to have her only child circumcised. This omission, as it turned out, would save her son's life many years later.
Lotz's father died in 1932, and a year later, sensing what
Hitler would do to the Jews of Europe, his mother decided to
emigrate with her son to Palestine. When he was 16, Lotz joined
the underground Haganah, working as a guard at the Ben-Shemen Forest near Jerusalem, a job which to his delight allowed
him to patrol on horseback. A passionate horseman, Lotz was
nicknamed "sus" (horse in Hebrew) by his friends, who also marvelled at his complicated personal life. Married and divorced
three times by the time he was 20, Lotz pursued women avidly,
and clearly enjoyed the high life.
Even a stint in the British army during World War II failed
to dampen his joie de vivre, nor did a stint in the Israeli army
during the 1948 war. Immensely popular, the garrulous, fun-loving Lotz was well-liked by both native Israelis and the Eastern
European immigrants because in their view he was not yekke, a
contemptuous Israeli term for the snobbish and fanatically neat
German Jews whom most Israelis despised.
Lotz assumed he would spend the rest of his life in Israel
pursuing his chief passion and avocation, horse ranching. But in
1956, Aman, Israeli military intelligence, asked him to volunteer
for a mission that was to change his life.
At the time, the Israelis were most worried about Egyptian
President Gamal Nasser's recruitment of former German rocket
scientists and other military specialists to build a modern miitary
capable of waging a first-strike war against Israel. Aman needed
an agent to infiltrate this tightly guarded entity and identify all
those involved (for whom the Israelis planned assassinations).
The problem, of course, was that the agent had to play the part
of a German, with a legend that would withstand detailed checking.
Lotz seemed ideal for the part. Blonde and blue-eyed, he
did not look Jewish, and spoke German fluently without a trace
of accent. Given his open friendliness and his ability to get people
to like him, it was assumed he would be able to infiltrate the
German communitymany of them ex-Nazisin Egypt and find
out what the Israelis wanted to know. It would take a consummate
actor to pull off this dangerous infiltration, but as things turned

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THE LEGENDS

out, Lotz was not only a great actor, he was a nerveless one, as
well.
To prepare Lotz for the mission, Aman went through a curious exercise in reverse legend-creation. When his mother emigrated to Palestine, Lotz Hebraicized his name to Ze'ev Gur-Ayeh.
But now he would revert to his German identity of Lotzwith
some important differences. Lotz, instead of a Jewish boy who
fled Hitler, was now an ex-German soldier who had fought with
Rommel in North Africa during the war. He was not a Nazi, but
clearly had sympathized with Nazi aims and ideology. After the
war, he became a wealthy horse rancher and was now looking to
expand his business in the Middle East, especially Egypt.
With the help of the West German BND, the Israelis meticulously created the Lotz legend in Germany. Old documents attesting to Lotz's Jewish birth were destroyed, replaced by new
documents making him the offspring of impeccably German parents, along with military records noting his devoted service in the
Wehrmacht. Other false documents created a paper trail of his
successful horse business.
By 1959, the Israelis were ready. Wolfgang Lotz the German
horse rancher appeared in Cairo. Buttressed by extensive capital,
he opened a stud farm and riding stable just outside Cairo. He
immediately set to work.
Lotz was patient; as he anticipated, word of his riding school
soon spread among the Egyptian officer corps. Gradually, some
of them began enrolling for horsemanship lessons and were
charmed by the friendly German, who occasionally reminisced
about his wartime service with Rommel, a figure of immense respect to Egyptians. Lotz further cemented his relationships by
sprinkling anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli comments into his conversations. In all, his cover was very solid, further strengthened
by the presence of his blonde German "wife," who happened to
be a BND asset lent to Lotz for purpose of constructing his legend. (This move was accomplished with the reluctant acceptance
of Lotz's real wife, a very Israeli woman.)
The Egyptians were as cautious as Lotz, but after apparently
having him checked out in West Germany, they relaxed. Lotz
furthered the process by hosting a series of lavish parties to which
he invited top Egyptian officials, as well as military men. His image as wealthy German playboy fixed, Lotz then moved to the
next phase, infiltration of the enclave of German scientists and
military advisers.

WOLFGANG LOTZ, ELIYAHU COHEN

147

That task proved easier than he thought; some of the senior

Egyptian military officers with whom he became close also happened to be involved with the German rocket scientists, and their
willingness to vouch for one of Rommel's officers gained him
quick entree. Delighted to meet a fellow German, and one who
apparently shared their pro-Nazi sympathies, they welcomed Lotz
as a long-lost brother. In the process, they had the habit of discussing the progress of their work in Egypt, all of which Lotz
radioed back to Tel Aviv.
Over a period of time, Lotz was to develop a complete picture of the structure, size, and personalities of the German presence in Egypt. Aman did the rest: a campaign of letter bombs,
pressure against relatives, and sheer terror finally persuaded the
scientists and military experts that it was time to go home. Lotz's
mission had been brilliantly successful, but Mossad now saw further benefit in Lotz's presence in Egypt. In 1963, Lotz was formally transferred to Mossad to carry out a different mission, which
was nothing less than developing a detailed picture on the entire
Egyptian military structure.
The operation sought to make use of Lotz's already-established advantages: He was bosom buddies with senior Egyptian
military officers and government officials, he had an established
cover business in the country, and thus far, he was completely
above suspicion. A new round of lavish entertaining began, and
the escalating expenses (Lotz never stinted) moved Mossad auditors to call Lotz the "champagne spy," the nickname by which
he became part of espionage lore.
However much the Egyptians regarded Lotz as an amusing,
boisterous playboy with more money than sense, he in fact didn't
miss anything. Lengthy conversations with senior Egyptian military officerssometimes in drunken revels when Lotz only pretended to be drunkuncovered the plans, dispositions, and
strength of the Egyptian armed forces. The Egyptians could not
be more helpful to their German friend: they often invited him
to visit them at military bases, where they freely talked about the
state of their forces, the quality of their fortifications, the capabilities of their aircraft, and a virtual laundry list of everything
the Israelis would want to know. Assuming him to be an ex-Afrika
Korps officer, some Egyptians asked his advice on their planned
tactics for a desert war against the Israelis.
The sheer volume of all this intelligence created the problem that had confronted spies for a long time: radio. Even with

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THE LEGENDS

modern spy radios and their high-speed "burst" transmissions

that could send a large volume of material in a very short time,
Lotz was still vulnerable to an attack by radio direction-finders.
The moment Lotz had been dreading came early in 1965, when
the authorities began receiving complaints about heavy static that
interfered with ordinary radio reception. Suspecting that the
heavy static might be caused by an illegal transmitter, the Egyptians consulted with their largest arms supplier, the Russians. An
expert crew of GRU direction-finders was sent to Cairo from Moscow, and in short order they tracked an illegal transmitter to a
horse farm just outside Cairo. A raid found that transmitter; Lotz
and his "wife" were arrested.
The first task of Egyptian counterintelligence was to find out
for whom Lotz was working. Their initial suspicion of Lotz as an
Israeli agent was discounted immediately, for an inspection of
their prisoner revealed he was uncircumcised. So, the Egyptians
concluded, he was probably working for the West German BND.
But the BND played it deliberately coy, refusing to admit that Lotz
was its man, but not exactly denying it, either.
In an attempt to confirm that suspicion, the Egyptians subjected Lotz to extensive torture, including sensory deprivation
that drove him nearly mad. But he held on, insisting he was German. Finally, Lotz was put on trial on charges of espionage for
Israel, and in the hope of an eventual exchange, he was sentenced
to life in prison, along with his "wife," who had also been actively
engaged in collecting intelligence.
The Egyptians did not learn positively that Lotz was an Israeli until just after the 1967 war, when Israel offered to exchange
the incredible total of 500 Egyptian prisoners for Lotz and his
presumed wife. The Egyptians, reluctant to let an Israeli spy go
free, but also determined to get back its soldiers, assented to the
deal.
By that time, of course, the Egyptians knew how truly damaging a spy Lotz had been. Thanks to his intelligence, the Israelis
had been able to construct a complete order of battle for the
entire Egyptian military, even which pilots flew which planes.
When the Israelis struck in June of 1967, their intelligence on
the Egyptians was thorough, right down to the platoon level.
While Lotz was performing this feat, possibly an even greater
espionage coup was being carried out several hundred miles to
the east, in the heartland of Israel's other great enemy, Syria.

WOLFGANG LOTZ, ELIYAHU COHEN

149

The Israeli spy in that case was Eliyahu Cohen, a very different man than Lotz. Quiet and introspective, Cohen had been
born in Egypt in 1928. As a young man, he was active in the Jewish
underground's illegal immigration operations, which consisted
of smuggling Egyptian Jews (who had been denied exit visas to
go to Palestine) out of the country. This dangerous work was good
training for a clandestine operator, and in 1952, he was recruited
by Mossad for operations in Egypt. Following a one-year course of
espionage training in Israel, which Cohen covered by claiming to
have studied abroad, he returned to Egypt. It was a bad operational mistake: the Egyptians already knew him as a Jewish activist.
Luckily for Cohen, he had not yet become too deeply involved
in espionage, so in 1958, the Egyptians merely kicked him out of
the country.
Two years later, Mossad devised a much more ambitious operation for Cohen. Under the plan, Cohen would work in Syria,
where his real identity was presumably unknown. It amounted to
a complex infiltration operation: Cohen would assume the identity of a wealthy, playboy-type Syrian named Karmal Amin Taabet
and initiate contacts with the Syrian military and governmental
elite. With that infiltration complete, he would then learn topflight intelligence on Syrian military and political plans. Essentially, Cohen would be on his own, authorized to make operational decisions as he saw fit.
After a year of intense training in his new legend, Cohen
flew to Zurich, Switzerland. He entered the airport terminal as
Eliyahu Cohen; at the exit, he was met by a stranger who wordlessly handed over a packet of documents and took from him his
passport and papers in the Cohen name. With that exchange,
Cohen became Karmal Amin Taabet.
Cohen next flew to Buenos Aires, where he established himself in the large Syrian community in the Argentine capital. With
some flamboyant spending as a wealthy businessman (but not,
the Mossad auditors discovered with a sigh of relief, the dimension
of Lotz's expenditures) Cohen soon established himself as a playboy who hosted lively parties that featured plenty of luscious
women. He made it a point to become close friends with the
Syrian military attache at the Syrian embassy, a connection that
led to the next step: introduction to the attache's well-connected
friends in the Syrian hierarchy.
In January 1962, Cohen went to Damascus, where his reputation preceded him. Quickly, the playboy businessman had a

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THE LEGENDS

wide circle of friends from the Syrian military and government.

Their guard weakened by those lavish parties, the availability of
beautiful women, and magnificent gifts proffered by their
friendly host, Syrian military officers took Cohen to their bases,
showing off their latest weapons. Cohen's most productive contact was the Syrian colonel in charge of defenses on the Golan
Heights; proud of the "invincible" defense lines he was constructing to forestall an Israeli invasion, he showed everything to
Cohen. (Transmitted back to Mossad, Cohen's intelligence, amazingly specific in its detail, allowed the Israelis to construct a 3-D
model of the Golan Heights, in which every single Syrian position, down to individual foxholes, was pinpointed.)
By 1964, there was almost nothing about the Syrian military
that Cohen did not know. At one point, he learned the names of
all the pilots in the Syrian air forceintelligence which the Israelis later used to fake radio transmissions that lured the pilots
to their deaths. Yet, despite these intelligence bonanzas, Cohen
was getting worried. On the excuse of a business trip, he returned
to Israel for a rest from his nerve-wracking double life. During a
Mossad debriefing, he indicated his worries, which convinced him
he probably should not return to Syria.
First of all, Cohen noted, the volume of the intelligence required him to be on the air too long with his radio. That radio
was concealed in his apartment in an area where a number of
foreign embassies were located; the risk was that he might cause
interference with an embassy radio, and a complaint would lead
to his unauthorized transmitter. Second, and more ominously, he
had managed to charm virtually the entire Syrian hierarchy, with
one ominous exception: Colonel Ahmed Sue'edeni, head of Syrian military intelligence. Everybody was afraid of Sue'edeni, a
secret police chief noted for his brutality and horrible tortures.
Apparently jealous of Cohen's access to high-level officials,
Sue'edeni had been openly suspicious of Cohen, and seemed to
be working actively to check his bona fides. It would only be a
matter of time, Cohen warned, before Sue'edeni discovered that
"Karmal Amin Taabet" was a fiction totally created by the Mossad,
since no such person actually existed (a simple check of birth
records would uncover that fact in nothing flat).
But Mossad was desperate for the kind of intelligence that
Cohen was providing. While Israel was locked in a life-or-death
struggle with Syria's radical regime, war could break out at any

WOLFGANG LOTZ, ELIYAHU COHEN

151

moment. Against his better instincts, Cohen agreed to return to

Syria.
It turned out to be Cohen's death warrant. As he feared,
Sue'edeni had focused on Kamal Amin Taabet, suspecting that
there was something not quite right about the playboy. As he also
feared, his lengthy radio transmissions caused problems. The
nearby Indian embassy complained of interference, and another
GRU radio-finder team was dispatched. It found Cohen's radio
with little trouble, and as Cohen was in the middle of a transmission, a squad of secret policemen burst into his apartment.
Cohen's terrible torment now began. An infuriated Sue'edeni
subjected him to the full range of his tortures, designed to force
Cohen to operate his radio under Syrian control. Cohen refused,
and the Syrians finally gave up. Sue'edeni sent a message to Tel
Aviv via Cohen's radio:
KAMAL AMIN TAABET AND HIS FRIENDS ARE OUR
GUESTS IN DAMASCUS. ASSUME YOU WILL SEND
ALL HIS COLLEAGUES. WILL GIVE YOU NEWS OF
HIS FATE SHORTLY.
The Israelis did not have long to wait: on May 18, 1965, Eliyahu
Cohen was hung in a public square in Damascus. Nearly 200 Syrians who had enjoyed Mr. Taabet's hospitality and counted him
among their friendsand were now regarded as traitorspaid
the price a police state exacts for such folly: they were rounded
up and taken to Sue'edeni's torture cellars for their own torments. Many were later executed.
But it was too late. What Cohen had passed to the Israelis
was a virtual template for conquest. In June 1967, Israeli soldiers
and airmen exacted a terrible toll on the Syrian military, avenging
Cohen's death a thousand times over.
Shortly after the war, Israel's other great spy of the 1967
triumph, Wolfgang Lotz, returned in triumph to Israel, where the
"champagne spy" was hailed as one of the great agents in its
history. However, the bubbles suddenly went flat when it was
learned that Lotz had fallen in love with his German "wife," who
had converted to Judaism. He divorced the real Mrs. Lotz, and
headed off to California and, later, Germany, to become a wealthy
businessman. He died in 1993. As the Israelis learned the hard
way, even a great hero is human, after all.

THE TRAITORS

LARRY WU-TAI CHIN

The Spy in the Casino
1923-1986

he Las Vegas casino managers could not have been more

pleased when the shy, quiet, Asian man began to show up
periodically. He seemed of a type the casinos were happy to have
as patrons: rich Asian businessmen, mostly from Hong Kong, with
money to burn. They were also notoriously bad gamblers.
Larry Wu-Tai Chin was among the most consistent losers
whenever he dropped in. For that reason, he had a line of credit
at a number of casinos that were aware Mr. Chin had never heard
of the mathematical law of probability. No one was quite certain
what Chin did for a living, but no matter: he was a heavy gambler
seemingly unbothered by big losses. Win or lose, that inscrutable
face behind thick eyeglasses remained impassive.
But Chin was not a wealthy Hong Kong merchant, or any
other kind of businessman, for that matter. In fact, he was an
ordinary GS-9 federal bureaucrat. So where did he get the money
that allowed him to bet $100,000 or more during a night of gambling? The money came from the People's Republic of China's
intelligence service, the Central External Liaison Department
(CELD). Chin was worth every cent of the largesse, for he was
the greatest asset Chinese intelligence had ever recruited in the
United States. Indeed, the Chinese were pleased that Chin had a
gambling habit, because as long as he needed a lot of money to
feed that habit, he would have to keep betraying his adopted
country.
154

LARRY WU-TAI CHIN

155

How Chin arrived at that point represents a curious progression from political idealist to mercenary. Born in Peking in
1923 of a moderately wealthy family, Chin was a university student
in 1943 when he was hired by a U.S. Army detachment as an
interpreter. A gifted linguist, Chin already had mastered three
Chinese dialects, and was fluent in English. Chin had postwar
ambitions to become a professional translator, and enrolled at
Yenching University in 1945 to perfect his skills. One day, he was
approached by a fellow student, Ou Quiming, who began to talk
to him about Chinese-American relations. Chin had gotten to like
Americans as a result of his wartime job as an interpreter, and
told Quiming of the sadness he felt over the growing estrangement between the Chinese Communists and the United States.
Only
through
Chinese-American
understanding
could
world
peace be assured, Chin said, and he regarded such a rapprochement as his "personal mission" in life.
Quiming agreed enthusiastically. Tragic, he told Chin, how
the Chinese and Americans did not understand one another, and
how few Chinese were in a position to do anything about it. The
problem, Quiming said, was lack of information; the Chinese simply had no insight into the way Americans thought. Too bad there
were no Chinese in a position close to the Americans who would
be able to properly "interpret" American attitudes for the Chinese and thus foster greater understanding.
It was a subtle recruitment, for Quiming was actually a young
operative for the CELD, assigned the mission of recruiting among
Chinese university students for assets who had any contacts with
Americansor who were about to. Quiming was careful not to
reveal his hand too openly; he simply told Chin that he had "important friends" who were in a position to influence Chinese
policy toward the United States. These people, Quiming claimed,
wanted close friendship with the Americans; if Chin would be
willing to help, then his own personal mission could be achieved.
Chin swallowed the bait. Following graduation in 1946, he
approached the Americans, offering his services as a translator
and interpreter. By 1948, he was the leading translator for the
U.S. consulate in Shanghai, at that time the key American listening post in China. It was the chief conduit for nearly all American
intelligence reports on China, which Chin began to pass to Quiming. To Chin, he was not committing espionage, merely passing
on intelligence reports by means of demonstrating to Quiming

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THE TRAITORS

and his friends how ill-informed the Americans were about the
civil war then raging in China.
In 1952, the CELD's recruitment paid off when Chin hit an
intelligence gold mine: He was assigned the task of translating all
the American interrogations of Chinese military POWs during
the Korean War. Passed on to Quiming, it revealed to the Chinese
not only how much sensitive military information the POWs had
given the Americans, but also which prisoners had been especially
cooperative. As a result, thousands later found themselves thrown
into prison camps for "thought reeducation," and an unknown
number of others were executed outright.
By this point, Chin had developed a reputation as a linguistic wonder-worker, the man who could handle almost any Chinese dialect flawlessly and a linguistic scholar who could spot the
most subtle shift of emphasis in the spoken or written Chinese
word. He not only worked for the State Department, he also was
lent out to various other government agenciesamong them, to
Quiming's delight, the CIA.
Whether Chin realized at this juncture he was working for
Chinese intelligence is not known. However, it is known that at
some point, Quiming gave Chin a large payment of money "for
expenses." As Quiming perhaps had foreseen, Chin, living on a
meager U.S. government salary, was bedazzled by that sudden
infusion of cash. It opened a new world to him: expensive restaurants, vacation trips, women, and gambling, a vice Chin suddenly
discovered was irresistible.
From then on, Chin was a mercenary spy. As he passed more
and more intelligence to the Chinese, the larger the payments
became. Chin was living a double life: by day, a self-effacing government bureaucrat, by night a bon vivant who also began dabbling in real estate and other investments. He bought some property (he eventually wound up with a portfolio worth over
$700,000), and deposited more than $200,000 in Hong Kong
banks, drawing high interest for his retirement. Most of the
money, however, went to his gambling habit. He was a consistent
loser, sufficient to have casinos routinely "comp" him, meaning
the practice of providing free hotel rooms and other services for
high-rollers.
In 1970, Chin's recruitment finally reached full flower: he
was hired by the CIA, which put him in charge of handling the
bulk of its translation chores for material from China. In that
position, Chin saw all the reports from CIA assets in China, re-

LARRY WU-TAI CHIN

157

ports of CIA agents based in Taiwan (mostly from Nationalist

Chinese-recruited assets), and, for good measure, most of the
more sensitive diplomatic reports on China. In other words, Chin
was now perfectly placed. The Chinese had a window into everything the Americans knew about China, an advantage that allowed them to learn in advance of the CIA's most sensitive program, U-2 spy flights over China that used Nationalist pilots. (As
a result, most of the planes were shot down).
Chin's greatest coup came in 1972, when he was able to
provide complete details of the dramatic change in American
policy, the Nixon-Kissinger "opening" toward China. As an extra
benefit, Chin had access to Kissinger's reports on his impressions
of Chinese leaders.
Completely unaware of this leak, the American government
rewarded its star Chinese language expert with American citizenship, and in 1981, when Chin officially retired from the CIA, he
was awarded an intelligence medal. Chin did not bother telling
his employers that Chinese intelligence had awarded him one of
its own medals at about the same time, thus making him one of
espionage's great rarities: awarded a medal by the nation he was
betraying, while receiving a medal from the nation for whom he
was committing the treason.
Even after his retirement, Chin was retained by the CIA as
a consultant, giving him continued access to sensitive intelligence. Since there was still not the slightest hint of suspicion
attached to him, Chin might have continued indefinitely except
for an event he could not have anticipated. In 1983, his control,
Ou Quiming, disillusioned with the Communist regime, defected
to the CIA. Among his first revelations was a grave shock: Chin
was a Chinese intelligence asset.
Interrogated by the FBI, Chin glumly listened as the agents
recited a detailed catalog of his treason. "You have details that
only Ou knew," he said finally, realizing that he had been blown
by what must have been a defection by Quiming. Arrested on
espionage charges, Chin never went to trial. On February 21,
1986, he tied a plastic bag over his head and committed suicide.

KLAUS FUCHS
The Man Who Stole the Atomic Bomb
1913-1988

o William Skardon, the man seated before him seemed almost a comic book caricature of what a nuclear physicist was
supposed to look like: a tall, thin man with rimless eyeglasses, a
pronounced German accent, and a high-domed forehead. But
however much Klaus Fuchs looked like a cliche, Skardon knew
something very important that was not so evident: Fuchs was a
Soviet spy.
Skardon, considered MI5's most brilliant interrogator, was
facing a major challenge that January of 1950. Somehow, he had
to get Fuchs to admit what both British and American counterintelligence already knew. The super-secret atomic bomb program had been penetrated by Soviet intelligence, mainly through
the efforts of Klaus Fuchs. But although they were certain, they
dared not use the source of their information in a court case
involving espionage, because prosecuting Fuchs on the basis of
that source would reveal the greatest secret of Western intelligence.
Code-named VENONA, it was the patient decryption of the
mountain of Soviet intelligence radio traffic during World War
II. By 1949, the cryptanalysts had found the trail of a huge Soviet
effort to obtain the secrets of the atomic bomb. One of its key
sources, spelled out via a series of personal references in the
coded traffic, was Fuchs. So a decision was made to confront
Fuchs, and hope that Skardon's abilities would compel an admis158

KLAUS FUCHS

159

Klaus Fuchs, the German emigre nuclear physicist who betrayed the secrets of
the atomic bomb to the Russians. (AP/Wide World)

sion from him. Without it, as Skardon was aware, there would be
no legal case against Fuchs.
Skardon, renowned for his ability to "read" suspects, decided to play a game of bluff with Fuchs. In his quiet way, occasionally puffing on his pipe, he hinted that MI5 had a stack of
evidence that made Fuchs' guilt a foregone conclusion, so his
"cooperation" would merely confirm what MI5 already knew as
established fact. Fuchs listened quietly, but Skardon sensed that
he was wavering, mentally considering his options. Skardon then
played his high card, expressing understanding why a man in
Fuchs' position would see betrayal of secrets as a tactic to advance
the cause of world peace. Certainly, Skardon said, almost in a
fatherly tone, one could understand how a man like Fuchs would
come to believe that this very worthwhile cause would be best
served by ensuring that the Soviet Union shared in the great
secret of the atomic bomb.
Skardon had scored; the mushy idealism that coexisted in
Fuchs' mind with his Communist convictions now came to the
forefront. With a sympathetic listener, Fuchs began to pour out

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THE TRAITORS

his heart to Skardon. When he was finished, he had admitted to

an achievement for which he felt great pride: almost singlehandedly, he had given the Soviet Union the atomic bomb.
A year later, Fuchs' admission would earn him a 14-year
prison term for espionage, but by that time, the great VENONA
spy hunt had already passed him by, deep into a pool of even
greater mysteries for which Fuchs was only the proverbial tip of
the iceberg.
Among those mysteries was Fuchs himself. Born into a family
of German Quakers, most of whom were committed leftists, Fuchs
joined the German Communist party in 1932, when he was only
19 years old. Then studying at the University of Kiel, he was considered a brilliant physics student with a bright future in research
or university teaching. That career was cut short in 1933 when
the coming to power of Hitler threatened to make life impossible
for German Communists. Fuchs fled to Great Britain, where he
worked in some humdrum scientific jobs and joined the party's
exile group in Bristol. By then a hardened Communist slavishly
devoted to the Soviet Union, Fuchs actively searched for ways to
aid Moscow. He had no access to anything of importance, but in
1941 was recruited to work in something called the Tube Alloys
Project. Fuchs was told only that he was joining a very hush-hush
wartime scientific project, but on the first day he started working
at the project's laboratory, he realized Tube Alloys Project was an
innocent-sounding cover name for what was in fact work on an
atomic bomb. Apparently, Fuchs deduced, the British and Americans had made great strides toward overcoming the considerable
scientific and engineering obstacles in making a nuclear bomb.
Fuchs also learned that the British and Americans were keeping
this great secret from their ally, the Soviet Union. Now, at last, he
had something he could contribute to the cause. Already a recruit of Ruth Kuczynski, the GRU master spy in Great Britain,
Fuchs told her the news. Within days, he began stealing documents from the project for Kuczynski to photograph onto microfilm, adding his own scientific evaluations.
It was at this point that the first mystery about Fuchs arose.
Given the fact that he was an avowed Communist who participated openly in the activities of the exile faction of the German
Communist party, how was it possible that he received a security
clearance to work on so security-obsessed project as the atomic
bomb? A special section of MI5 in those days kept close tabs on
Communist activities in Britain; how had it missed Fuchs? Years

KLAUS FUCHS

161

later, mole-hunters from MI5 would examine this sequence of

events and conclude that a KGB mole inside MI5 had arranged
for Fuch's Communist leanings to be overlooked. The same mole
(never identified) may also have been responsible for another,
subsidiary, mystery about Fuchs.
In 1945, British intelligence managed to capture almost intact all the Gestapo files from the agency's field office in Kiel.
The cache included detailed records on all known Communists
in Kiel, records that had been collected since well before Hitler
came to power. Among them was an extensive dossier on Klaus
Fuchs. MI5 examined those records in an attempt to find any
Communists who might have emigrated to Britain during the
1930s and gone to work for Soviet intelligence. Curiously, there
was no record that MI5 had ever investigated Fuchs, an unbelievable lapse never explained.
These sort of lapses later stood in stark relief in light of the
damage that Fuchs caused. In 1943, he was assigned to the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where an elaborate
security screen was supposed to keep out any enemy agents attempting to infiltrate the project. But it was no help against a
man like Fuchs, equipped with a lofty security clearance from MI5
that permitted him access to any aspect of the project. By 1944,
he had provided the Soviets with the key secrets of the bomb,
most importantly the unique implosion design that created the
weapon's tremendous destructive power. But at this moment of
triumph, Soviet intelligence committed a grave mistake, a lapse
that ultimately would prove very costly.
Desperate for the intelligence Fuchs was providing, the GRU
decided to assign one of its important American assets, Harry
Gold, the job of picking up some material from Fuchs during a
brush contact near Los Alamos. But six years later, when Fuchs
was giving his confession, he revealed the contact with Gold. That
revelation was of acute interest to the FBI, which already suspected Gold.
Again, the VENONA decryptions had played a key role.
They hinted at the existence of three major espionage rings operating in the United States during the war that had been assigned the job of obtaining secrets of the atomic bomb project.
One ring operated at the University of Chicago, where Enrico
Fermi had conducted the world's first controlled nuclear reaction. The second operated at the Radiation Laboratory at the
University of California, Berkeley. The third, and most extensive,

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THE TRAITORS

was a ring of 22 American Communists who had been recruited

years before to steal American industrial and technological secrets. It operated out of New York and in 1943 had been diverted
into atomic espionage.
It was this ring for which Gold worked, primarily as a courier.
The FBI had some indications of the ring's existence, primarily
through its investigation of the theft of radar technology early in
the war. Later, in 1945, Elizabeth Bentley, a disillusioned Communist, approached the FBI and told them she was an aide to the
chief GRU controller for a number of rings, including a large
technology theft network. She did not know its members, but
remembered that her boss had contacted one of its members, a
man he called "Julius."
VENONA provided further clues, among them the revelation that there was a man and wife team of assets involved in the
atomic espionage operation who had a relative working in the
Manhattan Project. Those circumstances, it turned out, fit Julius
and Ethel Rosenberg, whose brother, David Greenglass, worked
as a technician at Los Alamos.
Fuchs provided the final link. Shown an array of photographs of suspected American GRU assets, Fuchs picked out the
one of Gold as the man to whom he turned over information in
Los Alamos. The FBI pounced on Gold, who confessed, leading
the FBI to the other members of the ring. The GRU's operational
error in using Gold to service two different sets of assets had now
borne bitter fruit.*
If Fuchs was bothered by the wreckage his confession had
caused, he didn't show it. He served his prison time quietly, teaching an elementary science course to fellow inmates. Released in
1959, he emigrated to East Germany and went to work at a nuclear physics institute, where he labored in obscurity until his
retirement in 1979 (he died nine years later). In 1993, in a belated tribute, Soviet nuclear scientists admitted that they had built
the Soviet Union's first atomic bomb largely on the basis of material provided them by Klaus Fuchs.

* In a tragic irony, the two most minor members of the ring, the Rosenbergs, were
convicted of espionage and executed in 1953. The more important assets were evacuated eastward by the GRU: Alfred Sarant and Joel Barr, who went to work in a Soviet
high-technology institute; and Morris and Lena Cohen, who resurfaced in 1962 as
Peter and Helen Kroger, working for an important Soviet spy ring in Great Britain.

ALFRED REDL
Feasting with Panthers
1864-1913

t is possible that if Hans Wagner had shown up to play for the

Storm I. soccer team on May 25, 1913, no one would have ever
known of the greatest traitor in historyand one of the biggest
attempted cover-ups of all time.
Wagner was the star player on the amateur Storm team, one
of the strongest in Prague. Scheduled to play another strong
team, Union V., that spring Sunday, Storm was counting on a
stellar performance from Wagner, its talented fullback. But Wagner, a locksmith, was called away on an urgent job just before
game time; to the fury of his teammates, Storm lost, 7-5.
Wagner was preparing for the Sunday afternoon game when
a captain and a general of the Austro-Hungarian army, in full
dress uniform, appeared at his home and told him that he was
urgently needed for a job that had to be done immediately: opening the doors of a locked house. When Wagner protested he was
about to play in an important soccer game, he was told the job
was "of the highest national urgency." He accompanied the officers to a house in the fancy section of town. He picked the lock
of the front door; once inside, he was instructed to open a number of locked cabinets and closets. Wagner performed the job
easily enough, but wondered why virtually every space in the
house was crammed with maps, documents, and thick bundles of
cash. Apparently anticipating Wagner's curiosity, the two officers
warned him he was never to mention to anyone what he had seen
163

164

THE TRAITORS

in the house; in fact, he was never to mention even being there.

As a means of assuring future discretion, the officers pressed a
lavish payment into Wagner's hands.
Wagner might have remained mute had it not been for an
angry encounter that night with his infuriated teammates. They
demanded to know why he didn't show up. Wagner replied simply
that he had to go out on a job. When that failed to appease them,
Wagner then told them of his mysterious encounter with the army
officers, the house, and the trove of papers and money. He recounted the warning never to say anything, although he did deduce that the house apparently was owned by a fellow officer of
the two men who hired him for the job. One of the teammates
came fully alert: Two days earlier, he heard of the mysterious
suicide of Colonel Alfred Redl of the Austro-Hungarian Army
General Staff. The army had taken great efforts to keep news of
that suicide from the public. Was there a connection between the
suicide and the search of the document-laden house?
This was no ordinary weekend soccer player asking the question; he was an editor on the staff of Prague's most important
newspaper, the Prager Tageblatt. He went right to work, and by the
next day had enough for a cautiously-worded story that nevertheless created a public sensation, for it reported that Redl was a
Russian spy. The modern equivalent would be a revelation that
General Colin Powell was working for the KGB. The possibility
that Redl, one of the stars of the Austro-Hungarian military establishment, a man whose brilliant career was an inspiration to
an entire generation of young officers, had committed treason
was unthinkable.
The very circumstances of Redl's career made the charge
hard to grasp. One of 14 children of a poor Austrian railroad
official, Redl went to military school as a boy of 14 in 1878 and
later joined the army, determined to become an officer, despite
the fact that the officer ranks amounted to a caste system based
on aristocratic birth and wealth. But Redl was one of the most
brilliant minds the army had ever encountered: Fluent in six languages and an organizational genius, by 1900 he was considered
a candidate for future chief of staff.
In that year, Redl was named head of the Kundschaftsstelle,
(KS) the army's counterespionage organization, with orders to
reorganize and reinvigorate it. The KS, as it was known, soon
responded to Redl's direction, and began to roll up a number of
networks run by the Okhrana, the intelligence service of Austro-

ALFRED REDL

165

Hungary's hated enemy, Russia. KS officers were armed with a

series of innovations invented by Redl, all of which later passed
into standard counterintelligence practice: fingerprint and photo
files on all suspected assets, monitoring of political dissidents, and
bugging of meeting rooms (in Redl's day by use of phonograph
wax cylinders).
The Russians, unhappy about this course of events, took a
close look at Redl's operation, determined to find some kind of
weak link they could exploit. They found it in Redl himself: to
the immense satisfaction of the Okhrana, it was learned that the
Austro-Hungarian colonel was a pedophile. Armed with that
priceless piece of information, the Okhrana set him up with a
boy, took some compromising photographs, and the colonel was
hooked.
Initially, this had all the trappings of a classic blackmail operation. But it turned out that Colonel Redl was money-hungry,
too, so the Russians happily began paying him huge sums, eventually reaching a total of over $1 million in 1913 dollars. The
Russians got a good bargain, for Red] gave them everything except the crown jewels. He handed over the names of all AustroHungarian agents operating in Russia, details of KS operations,
complete military plans for use of the Austrian railway system in
the event of war, Austro-Hungarian military cipher systems, schematics for all Austrian forts and military installations, and, most
damaging of all, the complete Plan 3, the detailed Austro-Hungarian mobilization and deployment plan to be used in event of
war with Russia.
Redl had access to just about everything, because in 1905 he
had been promoted to chief of staff for the Eighth Corps, the
most important unit in the Austro-Hungarian army. In that position, he was involved with the full scope of the country's military
mobilization plans and other important intelligence, all of which
found its way to Russia. In 1908, he was able to warn Russia of
the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia-Herzogovina, an action that led to an alliance between Russia and an infuriated Serbia, with consequences that resonate to this day.
All the while, Austro-Hungary had no idea that its secrets
were open books to the Russians. They did not learn of the disaster until March 1913, when several KS agents who had been
assigned to keep watch on mail from and to border areas noticed
something interesting. They had come across two letters, both
addressed to a post office box in Vienna, from Eydtkuhnen in

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THE TRAITORS

East Prussia near the Russian border, notorious as the site of numerous Okhrana letterboxes. The KS agents carefully steamed
open the envelopes, and found 6,000 kronen in one, and 8,000
kronen in the other (about $2,700, an average workingman's annual salary in those days). No letter, no note, just money. They
resealed the letters and sent them on with a surveillance operation set up to see who picked up the cash-laden envelopes.
The KS agents trailed the man in civilian clothes who eventually arrived to pick up the envelopes. They tracked him to a
hotel; a check of the register revealed that the guest's name was
Alfred Redl. The agents called headquarters, which went into
shock. Colonel Redl? There must be some mistake.
But there wasn't. When word reached the General Staff level
of Redl's treachery, a plan of action was worked out, which
amounted to a coverup. Redl would be offered a pistol to be used
in the traditional officer's honorable way out: suicide. It would
then be explained to the public that Redl had committed suicide
from the "stress of overwork." Only 10 senior military officers
would know of the real circumstances of Redl's death; sworn
among themselves to secrecy, no word of the colonel's treason
would leak out. Not even the Emperor Franz Joseph would be
told the truth of the highly-regarded colonel's death.
A few nights later, four grim-looking officers in full uniform
appeared at the hotel room in which he was staying. "I know why
you have come," Redl said. He asked for a pistol, which one officer handed him. With a slight bow of thanks, Redl asked to
be alone. The officers waited outside the front door. In a short
while, they heard a shot. Reentering the room, they found Redl
sprawled in front of a dressing mirror; he had stood in front of
the mirror and watched himself as he blew his brains out.
The next stage of the coverup began with the entry into
Redl's home to retrieve evidence; when the two officers assigned
the job couldn't find Redl's keys, they hired a locksmith. It might
have worked except for Hans Wagner, the locksmith who had to
explain his absence to angry soccer teammates. The first newspaper story only whetted the public's appetite for more, and
within a few days, the Austro-Hungarian government had a fullfledged scandal on its hands. Like a military force retreating before a huge enemy host, the army high command handed out
one cover story after another, each one looking more frayed with
still further revelations. Gradually, the whole truth emerged, but
it was rendered somewhat academic by the onset of World War I.

ALFRED REDL

167

And it was then that the full impact of Colonel Redl's treason
became apparent. Although the Austro-Hungarian high command knew the Russians possessed Plan 3, such plansinvolving
mobilization schedules, troop movements, and logisticswere
extremely intricate and often ran to many volumes. The plans
were not easy to change, so the Austro-Hungarians went to war
against an enemy who knew their main operational plan. As a
consequence, the Austro-Hungarians suffered a military disaster
in Galicia, with 500,000 casualties, a defeat from which it never
recovered. Less than four years later, the empire of Austro-Hungary collapsed into the dustbin of history.
Redl's suicide prevented any full exploration of the mental
process that had led him to treason. He left only a brief suicide
note that explained very little: "Levity and passion have destroyed
me. Pray for me. I pay with my life for my sins."

THE SPYMASTERS

K'ANG SHENG
Alias: Zhang Shuping
1898-1975

TAI LI
1895-1946

Terror in China

hanghai in 1927 was not a city for the faint of heart. With its
large international settlement, headquarters for almost all major businesses operating in China, and competing Chinese political factions, the city was in ferment. It was also an important
crossroads of international espionage and the main battleground
in a no-quarters struggle between the Communists and non-Communists seeking to take control of the country.
This seething cauldron produced two remarkable spymasters who were to spend the next 20 years in a deadly battle that
would ultimately cost millions of lives. One would triumph, although the word must be used advisedly in a nation where the
price in blood for that victory was very high. In truth, the Chinese
people faced something of a choice of two evils with these two
men, since one was known as "the Beria of China," and the other
as "the Himmler of China."
The eventual victor was K'ang Sheng, the Communist spy
chief who ranks as the most remarkable man in the long history
of Chinese espionage. Unlike most of his Communist revolutionary contemporariesparticularly his close friend Mao Tse-tung
Sheng came from a wealthy background. He was born in 1898 as
Zhao Jung, the son of a wealthy landlord, but as a teenager, turned
away from his family and adopted the name K'ang Sheng as a
protest against his father's exploitation of the peasants. By 1922,
he was a revolutionary; two years later, a university student, he was
among the early members of the Chinese Communist party. Soon,
170

K'ANG SHEING, TAI LI

171

K'ang Sheng, Communist China's spymaster. (Eastfoto)

he came to the attention of party leaders by demonstrating a flair

for espionage. He organized an informal spying operation to ferret
out police spies from the party, an operation he extended to include spying on "dissidents" in the party who failed to demonstrate sufficient zeal in toeing the latest party line.
In 1927, Sheng was to cross paths with the man who would
become his hated rival. Tai Li, born in 1895 in the same village
that had produced Chiang Kai-Shek, was the son of a poor peasant. Like Sheng, Li also became a revolutionary, but his zeal took
a very different turn. At the age of 14, he joined a warlord army,
and later enrolled in Chiang Kai-Shek's organization. Fanatically
loyal to Chiang, Li turned his energies toward espionage, creating
a network that kept tabs on Chiang's supporters for any sign of
deviation.
The 1927 clash between Sheng and Li took place in Shanghai, where a Communist uprising convulsed the city. Sheng, one
of the leaders in the city's Communist underground, was simultaneously running spying operations against the Shanghai police
to detect its next moves and unleashing a rule of terror against
defectors from the Communist cause. Many of them were mur-

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THE SPYMASTERS

dered by a platoon of killers Sheng had recruited from among

the city's underworld.
Li, meanwhile, was in charge of operations to put down the
uprising. Demonstrating the kind of ruthlessness that would
make his name as infamous as Sheng's, Li subjected the city to
his own reign of terror. He played a key role in the suppression
of the revolt, which featured the special fate he meted out to
captured Communist revolutionaries: they were thrown into the
red-hot boilers of steam locomotives.
And so the battle lines were now drawn between Sheng and
Li. Both men rose rapidly in the hierarchies of their respective
political movements. In 1931, Chiang named Li head of the innocuously-named Bureau of Information and Statistics, the Nationalist movement's intelligence agency. Li recruited over 300,000
agents and blanketed China with a network of informants and
agents directed to concentrate all their energies on Li's consuming obsession, the Communists. Li sought to create the impression that his agency had eyes and ears everywhere. His reach
even extended to prostitution: he created a network of brothels
staffed with women trained to wheedle out secrets from their
customers. The brothels were highly specialized, ranging across
every possible sexual taste. His most famous, called "The House
of One Thousand Assholes," catered to a homosexual clientele,
with the aim of obtaining information from homosexuals on what
they might know about Communistsor any other subject of
interest.
Sheng, meanwhile, had been named head of a special party
section known as Shehuibu (Department of Special Tasks), which
was the Chinese Communist intelligence service. The energetic
Sheng organized his own networks of informers and mounted
elaborate operations to infiltrate his agents into the ranks of Li's
intelligence agency. The result was a clandestine war in which
bodies from both sides routinely littered the streets. In an espionage war of no quarter, both sides played by the same rule: a
man or woman even suspected of working for the other side was
tortured to death, the body left for all to see as a warning. Li
rarely took part personally in these atrocities, but Sheng did. A
sadist, he enjoyed participating in the most horrible torture sessions, and became known even among his closest aides as "the
king of hell" for his love of inflicting agony on other human
beings.

K'ANG SHENG, TAI LI

173

There were other character defects that made some of the

senior party leaders nervous about Sheng. He was a heavy user
of opium, an opportunist, power-mad, and totally ruthless. But
given his close friendship with Mao, nobody was about to criticize
the man Mao thought essential for the security of the beleaguered Communist movement. (Sheng further cemented his relationship with Mao by providing the party's leader with a steady
supply of nubile young women to slake Mao's apparently limitless
appetite for female flesh).
By 1938, Sheng's influence within the party leadership was
very high. He had been elected to the party's Central Executive
Committee, and in that role was sent to the Soviet Union at Stalin's invitation to receive KGB training. His stay in the Soviet Union would prove significant, for Sheng, a shrewd judge of men,
concluded that the Russians were not really the fervid supporters
of Chinese Communism they claimed to be. Sheng's misgivings,
conveyed to Mao, mark the real beginning of the Sino-Soviet split.
For evidence, his agents had collected a considerable amount of
intelligence on how the KGB was actively recruiting within the
Chinese Communist party to develop its own assets who spied on
Mao and other party leaders.
Sheng hurried back to China to help combat the Japanese
invasion, but it never crossed his mind to join forces with his
enemy Li in the name of fighting a common enemy. Throughout
the war, Sheng and Li both spent most of their time trying to
infiltrate and neutralize their respective competing intelligence
services. Both men were looking ahead to the day when the Japanese would be defeatedan eventuality considered inevitable
and the final battle in their own private war would take place.
Li sought to improve his chances by an alliance with the
Americans by means of an extensive propaganda campaign that
sought to portray the Nationalist movement as the "true" representative of the Chinese people. He extended his Bureau's operations worldwide, recruiting a number of prominent ChineseAmericans who formed the nucleus of what would become the
influential "China Lobby." The result was a growing NationalistAmerican bond that was to create serious problems later when
the United States decided to give full backing to the Nationalists
in the Chinese Civil War. During World War II, Li forged close
links with the American military and intelligence establishments,
climaxed in 1943 when he was named director of the Sino-Amer-

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THE SPYMASTERS

ican Cooperation Organization (SACO), a joint operation to run

anti-japanese guerrilla units.
But Li's abiding concern remained the Communists, and
throughout the war, he and Sheng remained at each other's
throats. Both sides routinely murdered each other's agents as
they jockeyed for the dominant position after the war. Sheng, the
better organizer and planner, gradually began to get the upper
hand, an advantage he demonstrated in 1944 by obtaining a piece
of intelligence that later would have significant consequences.
Both Li and Sheng worked actively to infiltrate the groups
of assets recruited by American intelligence in China, especially
the OSS. Sheng developed one sourcenever identifiedwho
passed on the astonishing news, obtained from a talkative senior
OSS officer, that the United States was working on an atomic
bomb that would soon bring the war in the Pacific to an end.
Sheng pointedly did not pass on this intelligence gem to the Russians, and prepared his own plans. He began an immediate operation to recruit Chinese-born scientists working in the United
States, especially those involved in nuclear physics. He succeeded
in luring two of them back to China, where they went to work to
develop a Chinese atomic bomb. Some years later, when the Chinese government decided on a crash program to develop nuclear
weapons, Sheng already had a scientific nucleus that had been at
work on the problem for some time.
Li had no equivalent intelligence triumph, but he did have
an advantage Sheng lacked: the United States. As the relationship
between the Americans and the Nationalist government deepened, the American supply line began to hum with weapons and
supplies to help defeat Mao's forces. Li, who handled many of
the arrangments, further cemented his relationship with American intelligence. The Americans, in the name of political pragmatism, tended to overlook some of Li's less attractive qualities,
including the network of concentration camps he set up to imprison "enemies of the state," defined as any Chinese citizen who
ever uttered even a mild criticism of Chiang.
By early 1946, as the civil war raged across China, Sheng
decided that Li would have to go. Not a simple task, for Li was
always surrounded by tight security, kept his movements secret,
and avoided sleeping in the same bed for more than two nights
in a row. Some of Sheng's agents finally managed to infiltrate Li's
inner circle and made an interesting discovery: Li was totally smit-

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175

ten by a beautiful actress named Butterfly Wu. She happened to

be married, an inconvenience Li removed by offering the husband a huge bribe to disappear. That problem out of the way, Li
began a regular series of trysts with Wu, secretly flying to her
home in Shanghai (where she acted in Chinese movies) from his
base of operations in Chungking.
Armed with this intelligence, Sheng then approached the
pilot of Li's personal plane with an extraordinary offer: In exchange for a suicide mission, in which he would dive his plane
into the ground the next time Li was aboard, the pilot's entire
extended family would be lavishly compensated for the rest of
their lives. The pilot accepted, and one night in May 1946, he
dove the plane into the ground a few minutes after takeoff. He
and Li were instantly killed. The pilot's family never did collect
their reward, however. Li's agents, suspecting some kind of murder plot in the crash, ultimately found out out what happened,
and kidnapped all the members of the pilot's family, then tortured them to death.
With Li the spymaster gone, his Bureau of Investigations and
Statistics gradually withered on the vine. Bereft of his energetic
leadership, the agency fell apart before repeated assaults by
Sheng and his agents. In 1949, when Mao's forces triumphed,
Sheng became the intelligence master of all China. Anyone who
thought the replacement of Li by Sheng in that role would lead
to less oppression was soon disabused. Sheng organized the vast
purges that swept China, and opened his own concentration
camps, which he called "reeducation centers," where "improper
thought" was corrected in conditions that rivalled Auschwitz. As
a result, party leaders began calling Sheng the "Beria of China"
behind his back.
There was much worse to come. In 1958, Sheng, at Mao's
behest, organized the "great leap forward," an industrialization
campaign that turned China into an anthill, with all individuality
suppressed in the name of "Mao's thought." Later, he organized
the "great cultural revolution" that further suppressed the last
flicker of individual freedom in China. The total number of victims in all these violent spasms may never be known for certain,
but the estimates run into the tens of millions.
In the process, Sheng became a fanatical ideologue who had
drawn even closer to Mao; it was Sheng's well-known Russophobia
that played an important influence in Mao's decision to split with

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the Soviet bloc. Sheng became indispensable to Mao, but his service ended in 1970, when he became incapacitated by cancer. He
died five years later, but by that time, things had started to change
in China. In 1980, the new Chinese leadership posthumously expelled Sheng from the Communist party, calling him "an enemy
of the Chinese people."

MARKUS WOLF
The Hour of Karla
1923-

n a warm spring day in 1979, an East German HVA agent

named Werner Stiller walked through Checkpoint Charlie in
East Berlin and announced his intention to defect. In that crossroads of Cold War espionage, defections were not especially rare,
but this one was quite different. Stiller was greeted as though he
had arrived with the Holy Grail.
The avid interest shown in Stiller by the West German,
American, British, and French counterintelligence services was
only pardy related to the fact that he knew the identity of HVA
and KGB moles operating in West Germany. (Stiller blew 17 of
them, and another five fled eastward the moment they became
aware of his defection). The real focus of interest in Stiller was
because for the first time the West could gain insight into the
man they called "Karla," the mysterious East German spymaster
who had been making fools of them for years.
"Karla" was not the spymaster's code name; it was used in
the novels of John Le Carre to represent the fictional superspy
based on a real character, Markus Wolf of the HVA. Stiller, a close
personal friend and protege of Wolf, could now shed some light
on the man who was ranked as the most brilliant spymaster in
Cold War espionage.
Like the fuzzy outlines of a photo print becoming sharper
in a developing tray, Stiller's debriefings fleshed out the details
of Markus Wolf, both as a man and as a spy chief. In terms of
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THE SPYMASTERS

East German spymaster Markus Wolf, the model for John Le Carre's fictional
"Karla," in 1989 as his country's regime was collapsing. (AP/Wide World)

background, Wolf's antecedents revealed a certain familiar pattern for German Communists. Born in 1923, Wolf was the son of
the Communist playwright Friedrich Wolf, who as a Jew and a
Communist, realized he had no future under a Hitler regime.
Two months after Hitler took power, Wolf and his family fled to
the Soviet Union.
Initially, Wolf's son had ambitions of becoming a diplomat.
He studied at the Comintern schools in Moscow, then took university degrees in diplomacy. In 1945, he was first consul of the
new East German mission in Moscow. In contrast to the colorless
apparatchiks who dominated the first East German government,
Wolf was independent-minded, youthful, energetic, had an amazing grasp of technical detail, and was highly intelligent. These
qualities attracted the attention of a number of younger Soviet
officials who were chafing under the deadening hand of Stalin;
in Wolf, they saw a kindred soul who represented the future of
communism. Chief among them were Alexandr S. Panyushkin,
an important eminence grise in the Soviet diplomatic and intelligence establishments, and his own protege, Yuri Andropov, then

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179

a diplomat with a finger in KGB operations. (Some 30 years later,

Andropov became head of the KGB). Both men decided that
Wolf's considerable talents were better suited for intelligence
work in the newly-created East Germany. It was in Germany, Panyushkin argued, that the great battles between east and west intelligence would be fought. As he was aware, the first East German
intelligence structure was dominated by "old fighters" from preHitler days, the kind of men who spent two decades in underground work against the Nazis. Commendable, but not very good
preparation for the very different world of postwar espionage.
To a certain extent, the Soviet calculation took note of an
interesting figure on the other side. Reinhard Gehlen, the wartime head of Fremde Heeres Ost (Foreign Armies East), the German
military's front-line intelligence unit on the eastern front, had
won a reputation for honest and amazingly accurate evaluations
of Soviet military strength while demonstrating ability in running
a huge structure. Fired in 1945 by Hitlerwho demanded that
he be locked up in a lunatic asylumGehlen deserted to the
Americans. Later, they set him up in West Germany with lavish
CIA funds to run something called The Org, a sprawling intelligence apparatus designed to infiltrate East Germany and the rest
of the Eastern Bloc.
Faced with this sort of challenge, the KGB reached out to
Wolf and recruited him for a revised East German intelligence
structure. The key component of that structure was an arm called
Main Department IX, which ran foreign intelligence operations,
with emphasis on West Germany. When Wolf was named its head
in 1954 at the young age of 31, it was a clear signal of the regard
in which he was held by the KGB. He repaid that confidence
almost immediately, organizing a vast infiltration operation
against West Germany that eventually was to honeycomb the
country's governmental structure with interlocking rings of assets
who kept the HVA (and, by extension, the KGB) informed of just
about everything worth knowing.
Two years later, in recognition of his brilliance, Wolf became
head of the HVA. Known as the KGB's fair-haired boy, it turned
out that he had a few tricks to teach his masters. His most striking
innovation was the concept of "seamless penetration," a technique involving obtaining the passports and other papers of West
Germans who had moved to other countries. Wolf would then
recruit East German assets who matched the personal details in
those papers as closely as possible. Subsequendy, they would be

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THE SPYMASTERS

infiltrated into West Germany with "clean" backgrounds very difficult for counterintelligence to spot.
Another innovation was his "secretaries offensive," which
involved the recruitment of handsome young East Germans assigned the specific task of infiltrating West Germany under the
guise of refugees and striking up relationships with government
secretaries. Not just any secretary; the idea was for the men to
woo the plain-looking, lonely spinster types who seemed to make
up a large portion of the government secretarial force. Wolf's
young men prowled the bars, resorts, and vacation spas to find
lonely, middle-aged secretaries who would be swept off their feet
by the amorous attentions of handsome men. Once the seductions had been completed, the men would get the secretaries to
bring home government documents to be photographed and dispatched eastward via microfilm.
At the same time, Wolf was busily combatting Reinhard Gehlen's Org, which became the West German foreign intelligence
agency BND in 1955. In a covert war later immortalized in John
Le Carre's The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Gehlen and Wolf
conducted the battle of moles, infiltration, counter-infiltration,
double agent, and triple agent. The battle was even until Wolf
went to work on Gehlen's chief vulnerability, his tendency to hire
ex-SS, SD and Gestapo agents without detailed background
checks on the assumption that such men obviously had no proCommunist sympathies.
The assumption proved wrong in the case of Heinz Felfe,
an ex-SD official who during the war worked in counterespionage
operations against the KGB. Felfe had been a rabid Nazi, but was
also virulendy anti-American and anti-British for the terrible destruction of his beloved birthplace, the city of Dresden, during
Allied fire-bombing raids in 1945. Aware of this interesting schizophrenia, Wolf and the KGB went to work on Felfe, who was
recruited as an asset. The next step was to have Felfe infiltrate
the BND, accomplished by providing Felfe with a lot of low-level
(but nevertheless impressive-looking) material on the KGB and
the HVA. Gehlen enlisted the ex-SD man, and Felfe was off and
running. In a brilliantly-managed operation, Felfe was fed a
steady diet of material from the east that enhanced his credentials
as a brilliant counterintelligence officer. In some cases, the KGB
and the HVA deliberately sacrificed some of their lesser agents
in West Germany to further bolster Felfe's credentials. The Felfe
operation reached its pinnacle in 1958, when he was named head

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181

of the Soviet counterintelligence section of the BND and the

agency's liaison with the CIA and other Western intelligence
agencies.
The later exposure of Felfe* as a KGB/HVA asset destroyed
Gehlen, who was forced to resign in the ensuing scandal. Wolf
then moved to his next operation, which would become the
crowning achievement of his career.
The idea, basically, was to infiltrate the office of German
chancellor Willy Brandt. Not by means of a seduced secretary or
other low-ranking asset, but a full-scale mole who could get close
to Brandt and obtain access to all the material that came across
the Chancellor's desk. Wolf studied the problem for some time,
emerging with a plan that illustrated the kind of patience necessary for long-term mole operations.
Wolf learned that in his pre-World War II days in the antiNazi underground, Brandt had been treated by a Communist
doctor, Max Guillaume, who later fled Germany, eventually settling in East Germany after the war. He remained a committed
Communist and his son Guenther, Wolf learned, had also become
a devoted Communist. Wolf approached both men and recruited
them for what he described as a "long-term operation" in West
Germany. The first move was for Guenther Guillaume to become
a refugee; he "fled" across the border and wound up in a refugee
camp. The next step: in 1956, Max Guillaume wrote a letter to
his old friend, asking him to give the younger Guillaume a job.
The father regretted the son's decision to flee westward, but understood and respected the decision. Could Brandt help the son
of an old friend?
Brandt arranged for the younger Guillaume to be plucked
out of the refugee camp and hired as an administrative assistant
in Brandt's political organization. Not much of a job, but as Wolf
had calculated, officials in the organization were aware that Guillaume had been given the job through connections with Brandt
himself, a circumstance that tended to enhance Guillaume's career prospects. Guillaume helped things along by demonstrating
a talent for organization and administration. In 1969, he was appointed private secretary to Brandt, and was switched on. A 13year-long operation had now finally paid off; Guillaume was in a
* Felfe was blown by Mikhail Goleniewski, a Polish UB agent and KGB asset, in 1961.
Arrested on espionage charges, he was sentenced to 14 years in prison. In 1969, he
was exchanged in a spy swap, went to East Germany, and disappeared.

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THE SPYMASTERS

position to see every secret that crossed Brandt's desk (including

the rather interesting information that the Chancellor had been
on the CIA payroll since 1947).
The Guillaume operation ended in 1973, when it was detected by a British GCHQ decryption (Guillaume was sentenced
to 13 years in prison), but the damage had been extensive: All of
West Germany's diplomatic and military secrets flowed to the
HVA for four years. Wolf, the man behind the operation, by this
time had become something of a legend in the espionage world,
with a record unmatched by any other intelligence agency. He
had emasculated his chief opposition, the BND; infiltrated more
than 3,000 assets into West Germany, with another several thousand sleepers; balked a number of attempts to infiltrate his own
organization; and topped off all that by planting a mole inside
the West German Chancellor's office.
Western counterintelligence was aware of Wolf, but since he
had never served as an agent outside his own country, it was difficult to get a handle on him. Not until 1979, when his protege
(and presumed successor) Werner Stiller walked into West Berlin
did any of Wolfs opponents begin to get a real sense of the man.
The Stiller defection was to severely dampen Wolf's operations,
and he retired in 1987. But he was not ready for the rocking chair
yet. Still close with the KGB, he became involved in an operation
to replace East Germany's ailing leader, Erich Honecker, with a
faceless "moderate" whom Moscow assumed would be able to
rescue the faltering East German regime. One of Wolf's few operational failures, it was to be his last operation.
In 1990, following the collapse of East Germany, Wolf fled
to Moscow under KGB protection. That shield was removed when
the Soviet Union itself collapsed, and Wolf went back to Germany,
proclaiming that despite the shattering events of the previous two
years, he was still an unrepentant Communist. But the new German government had a long memory, and arrested him for espionage. Out on $150,000 bail, he filed a series of motions challenging Germany's right to try him, setting off complicated legal
arguments that continue to this day. In 1993, he finally went to
trial.
Whatever his espionage talents, Wolf seems to have no appreciation for irony. In his autobiography, written in 1992, he
complained bitterly about the inequities of the German legal system that put him on trial for espionage, apparently unaware that
he was undergoing due process that none of his East German
countrymen ever enjoyed.

WILLIAM STEPHENSON
The Saga of Intrepid
Code Name: INTREPID
1896-1989

he most frustrated official in the entire United States government during the spring of 1941 was Assistant Secretary of
State Adolph A. Berle. Assigned the major responsibility for ensuring that the United States adhered to the Neutrality Act and
stayed out of the war raging in Europe, Berle found almost daily
evidence that there was a British intelligence agent who had recruited many Americans to flagrantly violate the law. And no one
in the American government wanted to do anything about it.
That man's name was William Stephenson. To Berle, he was
a prototypical example of the British upper crust, complete with
Saville Row suit, what seemed to be a permanent ironic expression, and a snobbish arch of his eyebrows. Officially, Stephenson
was MI6 station chief in New York, but as Berle knew, Stephenson's mandate reached very wide: His mission was nothing less
than getting the United States into the war on the side of Great
Britain.
The source of Berle's frustration was the White House; every
time he brought evidence of Stephenson's lastest transgressions
there, he heard promises to get the problem straightened out at
a high diplomatic level with the British. But nothing was ever
done, and Berle began to get the impression that the White
House was in collusion with Stephenson. Berle was absolutely
right.
Stephenson occupied a unique niche in British intelligence,
one that has not been duplicated since. In espionage terms, he
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THE SPYMASTERS

One of the few existing photographs of William Stephenson. (AP/Wide World)

had been assigned a dual mission: first, a traditional intelligence

function, to keep an eye on German intelligence operations in
the United States; second, he was to work as a covert action specialist with the objective of getting the United States into the war
by any means, fair or foul. It was to this second mission that Stephenson was to devote most of his time and energy.
That mission came direct from Winston Churchill, who had
ordered Stephenson's posting to New York. Churchill knew Stephenson very well, enough to know if there was one man who
could carry it out, it was the man nicknamed "Little Bill" (for his
bantamweight physique.) Churchill ignored the restiveness in
MI6 over the appointment; Stephenson was not an MI6 officer,
and had virtually no intelligence experience. But as Churchill
argued, his conception of the mission in New York was very special, requiring a special man. Stephenson certainly was that.
Interestingly, despite Berle's perception of Stephenson as
typical English upper class snob, in fact Stephenson was a Canadian, having been born in Winnipeg in 1896. A restless youth
determined to make something of his life, Stephenson dropped
out of high school to join the Royal Flying Corps and fight in

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185

World War I. Shot down in 1917, he escaped from a German

prison camp, making his way back to Allied lines by walking the
entire length of Germany. On his return, Stephenson immediately sat down and wrote out a lengthy report on everything he
had seen in Germany, an incredibly detailed catalog drawn from
his photographic memory.
He had demonstrated the qualities necessary for a good spy,
but Stephenson had higher aspirations than espionage. Fascinated with radio, he went into the radio business and invented a
process of transmitting photographs via radio signals. The invention made him a multimillionaire by the age of 30, but Stephenson, a workaholic, was determined to push further. He went into
the plastics and steel industries, and a few more inventions by the
high school dropout brought him even further millions.
By this point, having obtained British citizenship, Stephenson had become a very patriotic Englishman. Like many of his
generation, he was concerned about the rise of Hitler. To his
frustration, the British government did not seem to grasp the
threat that Hitler represented. But one British politician, then
out of power, did: Winston Churchill. And around Churchill gathered a group of like-minded men, among them a number of industrialists and businessmen. This latter group, including Stephenson, began to function as Churchill's private intelligence
service; with strong connections in German industry, they were
the first to warn Churchill that Hitler was reorganizing German
heavy industry for war production. Stephenson, an expert on
steel mills, had visited German production facilities, and told
Churchill that entire production lines were being set aside for
large-scale manufacture of tanks and artillery, sufficient to equip
a very impressive military force.
Churchill was impressed with Stephenson. In the spring of
1940, having decided on a bold plan for a special MI6 operation
in the United States aimed at getting America into the war, he
selected Stephenson for the task. Stephenson set up headquarters
in New York on the 35th and 36th floors of Rockefeller Center
that officially were the offices of the British Passport Control Office. But the office conducted very little official business; with
only three regular MI6 officers as aides, Stephenson went right
to work. He set up his radio link to London and tapped out his
chosen code name, INTREPID, the first step in what would become the most successful covert action operation in history.

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THE SPYMASTERS

Stephenson had arrived in New York with two high cards.

First, his appointment came from Churchill, and it was to Churchill that he reported directly, bypassing the MI6 bureaucracy
and a number of MI6 officials who were convinced that this energetic amateur would cause a disaster. Second, Churchill and
President Roosevelt had reached a "private understanding" that
everything would be done to evade the U.S. Neutrality Act and
aid Great Britain. In effect, that made the President of the United
States a co-conspirator.
Stephenson was in very murky waters, but emboldened by
his top-level sponsorship, he created an empire. He took charge
of all British intelligence operations in the United States, ranging
from counterintelligence to port control. Given their sheer
scope, it would be difficult to summarize all of Stephenson's operations. A pure buccaneer, he was in favor of any plan that
worked, the bolder the better: a platoon of beautiful prostitutes
hired to seduce German diplomats and pro-German American
politicians; a squad of thugs retained to carry out kidnapping
operations; a group of experts detailed to open and reseal diplomatic mail without a trace; several professional safecrackers assigned break-ins at embassies and consulates to steal code books.
Stephenson's firm principle was that dedicated amateurs under the proper guidance will handle intelligence operations better than the professionals. For one thing, Stephenson liked to
argue, amateurs had no records as intelligence operatives and
were thus unknown to counterintelligence agencies. For another,
the amateurs were inexpensive to maintain, since they were working for patriotism, not money.
Stephenson recruited nearly 300 such amateurs, ranging
from the unknown to such famous movie stars as Greta Garbo,
Marlene Dietrich, and Erroll Flynn. Anyone who had even the
slightest value would be the subject of a recruitment by the tireless
Stephenson. Most were recruited for his extensive propaganda
and infiltration operations against his two key targets: the intelligence and propaganda operations of Germany and its allies in
the United States, and the powerful America First organization,
a significant political movement that lobbied actively to keep the
United States out of the war. Stephenson mounted an extensive
dirty tricks campaign against the isolationists with derogatory
items planted in the newspapers and on radio by means of assets
he recruited among the upper levels of American journalism. He
also enlisted the top newspaper columnists of the dayWalter

WILLIAM STEPHENSON

187

Lippman, Walter Winchell, and Drew Pearsonto plant items

alleging indiscretions by isolationist senators.
By early 1941, Stephenson had an army of 2,000 men and
women who worked on his disinformation, propaganda, and dirty
tricks campaigns. Among his key assets were the mystery writer
Rex Stout, who wrote propaganda pamphlets, and the famous
advertising genius David Oglivy, who churned out newspaper ads
for an apparently inexhaustible series of front groups Stephenson
created to urge U.S intervention in the war. Americans were also
bombarded with a series of lurid newspaper stories about assorted
Nazi plots allegedly boring away from throughout the hemisphere. None of them were true, but they sounded good: a Nazi
plan to sponsor a military coup in Bolivia and thereby seize Bolivia's deposits of wolfram, essential in the manufacture of military planes; an army of Spanish fascists being trained at secret
camps in Mexico by the Nazis for an eventual invasion of the
United States; a plan by Hitler to outlaw Christianity in Europe
and replace crosses on churches with swastikas; and Stephenson's
disinformation masterpiece, a map, said to be obtained from "secret sources" in Germany, showing a plan by the Germans to take
over several weak Latin American governments and gradually extend influence northward, into the United States. The map was
used by Roosevelt in a speech to underscore his plea for Congress
to repeal the Neutrality Act.
Aware that Stephenson was behind all thisand a lot more,
besidesBerle's complaints grew sharper. Stephenson decided
to deal with the Berle problem by instituting a massive surveillance operation against him, hoping to find some dirt he could
use to discredit the irksome State Department official. Stephenson's agents didn't find much, except the amusing intelligence
that Berle had two adjoining bathtubs installed in his home so
that he and his wife could bathe at the same timewhen she
would have to undergo the ordeal of listening to her husband's
apparently endless political lectures.
The attack on Pearl Harbor, and the declaration of war
against the United States by Germany two days later, effectively
brought Stephenson's operation to a close. He spent the rest of
the war running a much-reduced MI6 station and urging the
Americans to set up a centralized civilian intelligence agency. His
influence on that score was considerable. A close friend of William Donovan, intelligence adviser to Roosevelt and later head of
the OSS, Stephenson was the guiding spirit behind Donovan's

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THE SPYMASTERS

proposal for an American centralized intelligence agency. The

plan was rejected by Roosevelt, but most of it was later adopted
in creating the CIA.
In 1945, he was knighted by a grateful sovereign; Churchill
scrawled across the nomination letter, "This one is dear to my
heart." The knighthood made no mention of Stephenson's specific services to the crown, and most people assumed he was being
rewarded because he was a prominent industrialist. Very few knew
that he was the spy chief who had organized the vast covert operation that turned around American public opinion in the two
years before Pearl Harbor. No one will ever know whether Stephenson, in the absence of the Japanese attack and Germany's
declaration of war, would have succeeded in getting the United
States directly involved in the war. But it is a fact that Stephenson
created the proper conditions for Lend Lease and the vast American supply effort that kept Great Britain alive. For that alone, his
knighthood was well deserved.
Stephenson himself was content to remain in the shadows
(rarely photographed, only one picture of him during the years
1933 to 1945 is known to exist). With the end of the war, he
decided to retire from government service, from which he never
drew a penny in salary. He had one, but very significant, last
contact with the espionage world that year when he rescued Igor
Gouzenko, the defecting Soviet code clerk in Canada, an action
that initiated the era of Cold War espionage.
Stephenson retired to his palatial home in Bermuda. He
emerged into the public spotlight in 1964, when one of his former MI6 aides, H. Montgomery Hyde, wrote a book that revealed
for the first time the bare-bones outline of the story of INTREPID
and the New York operation. Some years later, Stephenson cooperated in the writing of another book, A Man Called Intrepid, a
much fuller account that put him in the espionage pantheon.
Stephenson became a public figure again in the burst of
publicity that followed publication of the book, and settled back
into retirement when all the attention ebbed. He died in 1989,
surrounded, as he had been for many years, by newswire tickers
and telex machines that spewed out the one commodity that the
multimillionaire could never get enough of: information.

CLAUDE DANSEY
The King of Z
Alias: Haywood
Code Name: Z
1876-1947

"An utter shit," an MI6 colleague once summed up the man

who was known by the deliberately sardonic nickname of
"Uncle Claude" around MI6 headquarters. Apparently, it was an
accurate evaluation, for there is no record that Claude Dansey
was ever regarded by his colleagues except as a thoroughly miserable human being. But no one seemed to doubt that this nasty
man was one of the greatest spymasters who ever lived.
Dansey's prickly personality stemmed in large measure from
what modern psychiatry would call a "dysfunctional" family.
Born in 1876 to an army officer, Dansey was one of nine children
who grew up in an atmosphere of strict military discipline that
included regular beatings for even the slightest infractions. All
the siblings came to hate each other, as well as their father. At
age 20, he joined the army, intending a military career (his father
would not have tolerated any other choice), and in 1910, ill from
the effects of service in North Borneo, he joined a new military
intelligence unit known as M05. The forerunner of MI6, the
agency was almost exclusively concerned with the Irish nationalist
movement. Dansey received on-the-job training in the intricacies
of modern intelligence during the relentless underground struggle between the British and the Irish revolutionaries: double
agents, triple agents, moles, penetrations, wiretapping. Above all,
Dansey learned the value of intelligence in anticipating the kind
of disasters a revolutionary movement was capable of carrying
out; on at least two occasions, assets he developed within the rev189

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THE SPYMASTERS

olutionaries were able to warn British intelligence about plans to

dynamite Buckingham Palace.
In 1911, Dansey was sent to Washington, D.C., to organize
operations against Irish revolutionary supporters in the United
States, an assignment that brought him into contact with America's miniscule intelligence organizations. More importantly, he
also made other significant contacts with American industrialists,
from whom he obtained intelligence on organizing efforts by the
Irish revolutionaries among their Irish workers. By then a talented administrator, Dansey was lured away from the army by an
offer to run the Sleepy Hollow Club in upstate New York, an
exclusive playground for American and British corporation executives, developing a network of contacts that also would prove
significant.
At the outbreak of World War I, Dansey returned to M05.
Because of his extensive American contacts, he was assigned to
Washington, there to work with the Americans in combating German intelligence operations in the United States. At the end of
the war, he was recruited by a number of corporations to work as
a general troubleshooter. But like many men who have come into
contact with intelligence work, corporate life paled beside the
excitement and intrigue he had known in the intelligence world.
Bored, Dansey in 1929 returned to M05, by this time renamed
MI6. He was assigned as chief of station in Rome, with instructions to keep a watch on Mussolini's Fascist movement, which
threatened British interests in the Mediterranean.
Dansey was not impressed by what he saw of MI6. Like every
other MI6 station chief, he was given diplomatic cover in the
British embassy as Passport Control Officer. MI6 had been using
this cover for years, and as Dansey discovered, even the lowliest
taxi driver knew that the head of MI6 operations in any given city
was always the Passport Control Officer. That was just part of the
problem. Its budget drastically cut back in the postwar austerity,
MI6 was a mere shadow of its reputation. With little operating
funds, for the most part it hired retired military officers who were
expected to draw little or no salary and live on their pensions.
Most were incompetent. The agency itself was under the direction
of retired Admiral Hugh Sinclair, a half-mad paranoid who preferred to communicate with his people exclusively via messages
left in a locked boxto which only his equally half-mad sister had
the combination.
As a result, Dansey realized, MI6 didn't have a clue as to

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191

what was going on in Europe, a continent in ferment. For his own

intelligence-gathering, Dansey preferred to rely on the network
of corporation contacts he had developed; businessmen, he discovered, knew much more about the true state of the world than
MI6 intelligence officers. Accustomed to cold-blooded assessments that focused on the bottom line, they were unencumbered
by some of the prejudices that tended to afflict intelligence officers. Moreover, they traveled widely, had intimate contacts with
foreign businessmen, and were their own experts. A steel company executive, for example, could walk into a foreign steel manufacturer and in a glance estimate the state of the plant's technology, its capacity, and the quality of its workers. An airplane
manufacturer, with just one look, could accurately estimate the
state of manufacturing technology in a foreign airplane.
As a result, Dansey began to formulate a plan. The more he
saw of the MI6 networks then operating in Europe, the more he
was convinced he was looking at a disaster waiting to happen. In
the event of a war, Dansey concluded, those MI6 stations and the
halfwits who ran them would be rolled up in a moment. There
would have to be a parallel MI6 structure, in effect a second,
hidden, MI6 that could take over when the inevitable happened.
Dansey slowly began to build that shadow network. From his
business world contacts, he put together a network of businessmen happy to help out, and by 1936 he had a structure of some
200 executives providing him with intelligence from all over Europe. Some of them were delighted to participate for the sheer
thrill of working in espionage. Their involvement, as per Dansey's
firm instructions, tended to be low risk: they were never to write
anything down, or attempt to take photographs, or to carry any
spy paraphernalia. They were simply to keep their eyes and ears
open, and later recount what they had witnessed. (Others were
somewhat more ambitious, especially the film producer Alexander Korda, a born conspiratorialist, who used his film company
as cover for an excuse to visit sensitive areas in Europe under the
guise of scouting film locations).
Dansey called his private network the "Z Organization" after
his code name, Z. Dansey got them ready for the war he was
certain to begin soon. Meanwhile, he was promoted to head MI6's
covert intelligence operations from its London headquarters. He
had no sooner arrived in London when war broke outas did
the intelligence disaster he had long predicted.
The blow fell in the Hague, which served as the major trans-

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shipment point for all MI6 operations in Europe; the station collected material from other stations around the continent and
transmitted them to London. But the Hague station, run by two
retired military officers with little intelligence experience, Payne
Best and Richard Stevens, had already been penetrated by one
of its assets, a Dutchman who was actually working for the German SD. The SD gradually uncovered the identities of all the
station's agents and assets.
But instead of simply attempting to neutralize the station,
the SD decided on a radical plan to cripple British intelligence
and at the same time discredit the anti-Hitler underground movement in Germany. The plan, a brainchild of a young SD officer
named Walter Schellenberg (who years later would become SD
chief) called for him to pose as a German military officer involved
in the underground. Via his Dutch asset, he would approach the
two MI6 men who were running the station and offer to provide
information, in exchange for MI6 aid to the underground.
The incautious Best and Stevens snapped at the bait and
agreed to a dangerous arrangment: they would meet this German
officer in the town of Venlo, on the Dutch-German border. On
November 9, 1939, they arrived at the meeting in a restaurant.
Within minutes of their arrival, an SD squad roared across the
border, kidnapped the two MI6 agents and sped back to Germany
in a fusillade of gunfire with Dutch border guards.
Once in Germany, a few days at the hands of the Gestapo's
tender mercies compelled Payne and Best to reveal everything
they knew. It was the greatest disaster ever to befall British intelligence. Because Payne and Best occupied the critical Hague post,
they knew the identities of every important MI6 agent in Europe,
along with the more important assets. Within days, the entire MI6
structure in Europe was destroyed.
Having
anticipated
this
disaster,
Dansey
immediately
switched on his Z Organization. It is no exaggeration to say that
at this moment, Dansey saved MI6. But however great his contribution, it won only grudging respect within MI6, even though he
was promoted as deputy to the new head of the agency, Stewart
Menzies. The problem was Dansey's personality: spiteful and vindictive with a foul temper, he hated anyone who had a university
degree as a worthless dilletante; only his businessmen friends, he
insisted, had the kind of down-to-earth appreciation of the real
world to serve effectively. In a word, Dansey was impossible; halfblind from the effects of diseases contracted during his military
service, he seemed to spend much of his time raging at the world.

CLAUDE DANSEY

193

Menzies grew to hate him, as did just about all other MI6 officials
who came in contact with him.
But there was no question of his brilliance as an intelligence
officer. Within weeks of the Venlo disaster, his Z Organization,
overseen by several MI6 officers personally selected by Dansey,
was up and running, providing more and better intelligence than
did the old MI6 structure. Its strength was in the vital area of
economic and technological intelligence; thanks to the businessmen with firsthand experience in visiting German industrial
plants, Dansey had a comprehensive overview of the size, scale,
and capabilities of the German industrial machine (an insight
which convinced him that machine was not up to the demands
of total war).
In 1941, Dansey was handed an assignment that looked impossible to fulfill. It represented an especially knotty problem:
thanks to its ULTRA decryptions, the British concluded that Germany was about to invade the Soviet Union. With the actual
source concealed, the intelligence was passed on to Stalin, along
with information pinpointing the exact day of attack and a list of
all the German units participating. Stalin, who had rejected all
intelligence from his own spy services that told him the same
thing, rejected the British intelligence as a "provocation."
The invasion, when it took place, created a dilemma for the
British. Thanks to ULTRA, they had a precious insight into German military plans on the Eastern Front, but they were not about
to let Stalin know that this intelligence came from the greatest
code-breaking operation of all time. The concern was only partly
related to fears that if given to the Russians, the ULTRA would
leak out somehow to the Germans; actually, the British had plans
to use ULTRA for reading Soviet traffic at some pointplans that
would be obviated by any premature disclosure. On the other
hand there was a lot at stake, for the bulk of German military
power after June 1941, was occupied on the Eastern Front. At all
costs, the Soviet Union had to be kept in the war, for in Churchill's cynical but accurate phrase, the two scorpions were bleeding each other to death. The idea that all that military might now
directed against the Soviet Union would be turned against Great
Britain in the event of a Soviet defeat was unthinkable.
So the question was how to convey ULTRA intelligence while
concealing the great secret and at the same time convince Stalin
that it did not emanate from the British, whom the Russian dic-

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THE SPYMASTERS

tator intensely disliked and distrusted. Dansey's solution was at

once intricate and elegant.
One of Dansey's operatives in Switzerland was aware of the
existence of a large-scale Soviet espionage network in that country known to the Germans as Rote Drei (Red Three) because it
used three separate radios to transmit to Moscow. One of the
network's intelligence sources was a German expatriate named
Rudolf Roessler, who had some contacts in his homeland providing low-scale information. Working with friends in Swiss intelligence, Dansey arranged for Roessler to be fed a diet of intelligence from ULTRA, all dealing with German plans and
dispositions on the Eastern Front. At first distrustful, Moscow
Center came to appreciate Roessler's intelligence, which was unfailingly accurate.
The operation ended in 1943, when the Russians, having
gained the upper hand militarily, no longer needed the concealed ULTRA intelligence. Although they did not know it, Dansey's operation often provided the difference between victory and
defeat on the Eastern Front.
It was to be Dansey's last achievement for MI6. Increasingly
estranged from colleagues repelled by his abrasive personality,
Dansey's career went into decline. As it became clearer that a
German defeat was inevitable, there was less reason to overlook
Dansey's character flaws for the sake of keeping him around for
his brilliance in intelligence work. Put plainly, Dansey had outlived his usefulness. In 1944, he was assigned a meaningless post
without much to do, and a year later, was pressured to resign from
MI6 on the grounds of ill health. He left without a word of thanks
(or any pension) from the organization he had done so much to
save.
Ailing, he took a job as a director of Korda's Lion Films
movie studio. In 1947, he died in a nursing home of heart disease.
No one from MI6 came to see him in his last days, nor did any
member of his family. His funeral was attended by a few old
friends from the Z Organization, including Noel Coward.
Toward the end of his life, Dansey had been bothered by a
strange incident. One morning he woke up to discover a large
"Z" had been painted on his front door. Since only a handful of
people knew his MI6 code name, Dansey tried to figure out who
among them had taken this puzzling action. He never did find
out, and until the end of his life he wondered aloud about it, the
old intelligencer frustrated by one of the few mysteries he could
not solve.

FELIKS DZERZHINSKY
1877-1926

JAN BERZIN
1889-1937

Midnight in Lubyanka

here were not many men who could make demands to Vladimir Lenin and get away with it, and Feliks Edmundovich
Dzerzhinsky was one of those few. And so Lenin sat meekly nodding his head in assent one night in the fall of 1917 as Dzerzhinsky laid down his demands for the job the Bolshevik leader
wanted him to do.
These demands were pretty stiff: Dzerzhinsky told Lenin he
would head up a new entity called the "security subcommittee"
only on condition that he be given full, unquestioned authority
and not be subject to any supervision whatsoever. Lenin's acquiesence had everything to do with his respect for Dzerzhinsky,
one of his oldest comrades in arms. It also bespoke a supreme
confidence in Dzerzhinsky's abilities, for the task clearly was
impossible.
In Lenin's conception, the security subcommittee would
handle the considerable security tasks for the upcoming Bolshevik coup. As Lenin was the first to admit, the putsch was a bold
gamble, fraught with danger. It could be snuffed out in a moment
by either the forces of the Kerensky government then in power,
or its more numerous Menshevik opponents, or its Social Revolutionary opponents, or the large remnants of Czarist forces still
roaming the country, or the remaining forces of the Czarist Okhrana intelligence serviceor a combination of all five. Lenin
would later say that "power was laying around in the streets, waiting to be picked up," but in truth it was Feliks Dzerzhinsky who
made the Bolshevik coup possible.
195

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THE SPYMASTERS

Feliks Dzerzhinsky (center) strategizing over a map during the October

Revolution. (Ullstein Bilderdienst)

He moved with decisive swiftness. He had all the Okhrana

officers he could find rounded up and offered a role with the
Bolsheviks, under pain of death or imprisonment. From the Bolshevik power base in St. Petersburg, he seized all communications, including the post, telegraph, telephone, and even messengers. All "non-Bolsheviks" were banned from using any of these
communications, so when Lenin carried out his coup, many
members of the Kerensky administration did not know what was
happening until it was too late. The communications blackout
also served to paralyze Lenin's other opponents; by the time
they tried to mobilize a countercoup, the Bolsheviks already had
seized the reins of power.
However, it was one thing to seize power, quite another to
keep it. In December 1917, only a month after the Bolsheviks
took overand at a time when their hold on Russia was very
tenuousLenin asked Dzerzhinsky to set up a security force to
protect the infant revolution and expand its power to the vast
country. Again, the insistent Dzerzhinsky demanded, and got, total authority to do whatever he wanted without any direction
whatsoever. With that authority, Dzerzhinsky proceeded to create

FELIKS DZERZHINSKY, JAN BERZIN

197

the CHEKA, an entity that would become the largest, most extensive, and most successful intelligence organization in history.
And it would make Dzerzhinsky a legend, the man commonly
acknowledged to be the greatest spymaster of all time.
In the dark days of December 1917, the possibility that Dzerzhinsky and his organization would ever rise to such heights
seemed remote. At the moment of its creation, the CHEKA consisted of exactly two dozen men, no headquarters, no cars or
other vehicles, no budget, and no experience of any kind in either internal security or intelligence operations. But it had the
mind and heart of Dzerzhinsky, the man whom Russians came to
believe had been born a secret policeman.
Actually, despite his revolutionary background, Dzerzhinsky
had been born in 1877 to a wealthy family of the Polish aristocracy. But he turned away from a life of privilege in 1897 when, as
a university student, he joined the Social Revolutionary Party. He
never explained his political transformation, but it would prove
costly. Working as a courier between Social Revolutionary cells in
Russia and exiles abroad, he was arrested twice by the Okhrana,
and served a two-year prison sentence in a Siberian labor camp,
where he worked as a coal miner. In 1903, when the Bolsheviks
and Mensheviks split, Dzerzhinsky made a fateful decision: He
threw in his lot with the Bolsheviks. He met Lenin, and the two
men immediately hit it off, becoming lifelong friends. What attracted Lenin to this thin Pole with a wispy beard were the qualities he most admired in certain men: ruthlessness, cold-blooded
dedication to the revolutionary cause, acute clear-headedness,
and organizational talent. As Lenin understood, there were two
obsessions that dominated Dzerzhinsky's life: serving as the
"sword and shield" of the Bolshevik revolution; and, even more
importantly, creating a Communist government in his homeland
of Poland.
But before such dreams could be achieved, Dzerzhinsky
faced the considerable challenge of keeping the infant Bolshevik
regime alive. There were plenty of threats to that regime. For one
thing, Russia technically was still at war with Germany, and German forces were decimating a demoralized Russian army. Second,
there were large forces of anti-Bolsheviks (known as "Whites")
who had seized entire chunks of Russian territory and were proclaiming a holy crusade to destroy the Bolsheviks. Third, Western
nations, concerned over Lenin's vow to sign a separate peace

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THE SPYMASTERS

treaty with Germany and take Russia out of the war, were openly
threatening intervention.
Within weeks of creating the CHEKA, Dzerzhinsky began to
demonstrate the talents that led fellow Bolsheviks to nickname
him "Iron Feliks." He recruited thousands of agents, most of
them brutal and semi-educated, who were subject to their boss'
simple rule of discipline: do what you're told, otherwise face immediate execution or life imprisonment. "We stand for organized
terror," Dzerzhinsky announced, as he unleashed his flying
squads all over Russia, with orders to wipe out any dissent to the
Bolshevik regime. Almost overnight, he created a sprawling
CHEKA bureaucracy, moving its headquarters from St. Petersburg (renamed Leningrad) to a Moscow building that had once
been the headquarters of an insurance company. Dzerzhinsky
converted it into offices and jail cells. The CHEKA's new location,
on Lubyanka Street, soon became the most infamous address in
all Russia; Muscovites actually would walk blocks out of their way
rather than use the sidewalk in front of the building. Their fear
was understandable; thousands of their fellow citizens were disappearing behind those walls, the only clue to their fates arriving
some weeks later in the form of a short, curt notice to their families that they had been found guilty of unspecified "counterrevolutionary activities" and executed.
In Lubyanka, as the CHEKA headquarters became known,
Dzerzhinsky worked up to 20 hours a day. Like an ascetic monk,
he spent days and nights closed off in a small room poring over
records and files. Constantly wracked by coughs, the result of the
tuberculosis he contracted during his Siberian imprisonment, he
sat for hours under the glare of a single, powerful electric light,
absorbing details and slowly hatching his plans. Occasionally,
brought a stack of death warrants, he scribbled his name across
the bottom.
By the early months of 1918, Dzerzhinsky had established
tight CHEKA control of the country, an astonishing feat considering the outbreak of civil war, pressure from outside powers (the
United States, Britain, Japan, and France had dispatched troops
to seize territory), and the general breakdown of communications. CHEKA strength neared 100,000, supplemented by a huge
network of informers Dzerzhinsky created.
With tight domestic control established, Dzerzhinsky now
turned his attention to some of the foreign intelligence threats
confronting the new regime. He recruited a staff of some of the

FELIKS DZERZHINSKY, JAN BERZIN

199

brighter CHEKA agents* and formed a counterespionage section, which targeted several Western embassies as the probable
sources for a large-scale covert operation to overthrow Lenin's
regime. They turned out to be right: The Americans, British and
French were jointly organizing anti-Bolshevik elements to overthrow the Bolsheviks in a Western-supported coup that called for
the arrest of all Bolshevik leaders, who would be paraded down
the main street of Moscow in their underwearto be followed
by their execution.
Dzerzhinsky devised a typical solution to the problem. He
created a whole new organization of alleged dissidents, a group
of Latvian soldiers who served as Lenin's praetorian guard. The
commander of the unit approached Western diplomats and offered to put his men at their service. Subsequent meetings with
the incautious diplomats revealed most of the details of the coup
plot. Aided by still another asset he had developeda Communist French diplomatDzerzhinsky soon had a complete
picture of the coup plan, along with details of a series of networks
that had been recruited by MI6 and U.S. State Department
Intelligence.
In the fall of 1918, Dzerzhinsky struck. In a series of sweeps,
he arrested all the agents and assets, including the chief American spy in Russia, Xenophon Kalamatiano, a Greek-American
businessman. (One MI6 agent was killed in a shootout). Dzerzhinsky's victory was total: Virtually all Western intelligence assets
in Russia, more than 200 people, disappeared behind the walls
of Lubyanka, a blow from which the West never recovered.
This was but a mild prelude to the next spasm of terror,
which erupted after a Social Revolutionary tried to assassinate
Lenin. Infuriated by the attempt on the life of the man he almost
worshipped, Dzerzhinsky unleashed what he called the "Red Terror." For starters, he rounded up 500 ex-officials of the Czarist
regime, none of whom had any connection with the assassination attempt that resulted in the severe wounding of Lenin, and

* Among them was Jakov Peters, a Latvian revolutionary who had fled to London in
1903 after imprisonment by the Okhrana for revolutionary activism. Working as a
pants-presser, Peters joined a group of Anarchists who carried out a jewel robbery
in which four policemen were killed during a shootout. Peters was acquitted of murder in a trial that featured his alibi, one that became the most famous in British legal
history: He claimed he was home fixing a mousetrap at the time of the robbery.
Later, he went to Russia to join Lenin, and was recruited for the CHEKA by Dzerzhinsky. He was executed in 1937 during Stalin's purge.

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THE SPYMASTERS

had them shot on the spot. Then, thousands of Russians were

rounded up and shipped off to Lubyanka; almost all of them
never returned.
Such terror had Lenin's full-hearted approval, and he began
to use Dzerzhinsky as a general trouble-shooter for various intractable problems. For example, concerned that foul-ups in the
railway system were preventing food from reaching Russian cities,
Lenin named Dzerzhinsky Commissar of Railroads. The first day
on the job, Dzerzhinsky traveled to one station where delays of
food shipments were reported. He called a meeting of all railway
officials in the area, announced that two of them were primarily
responsible for the delays, and had them shot on the spot. No
further delays were reported.
But there was one problem Dzerzhinsky could not solve: Poland. Determined to bring that nation back into the Russian fold,
the Russians had invaded in 1920, and early successes led Lenin
to appoint Dzerzhinsky as head of a Polish Soviet, with instructions to prepare for a Communist government following the inevitable Russian victory. But Polish resistance stiffened, then rallied to inflict a defeat on the Russians.
Dzerzhinsky returned to Russia to face a new threat, but this
one came from within the Bolshevik government. Not all the Bolsheviks had been enamored of his methods, most prominently
Leon Trotsky, head of the Red Army. In Trotsky's view, Dzerzhinsky had too much power; having one man in charge of both internal security and foreign intelligence was a dangerous precedent. To clip Dzerzhinsky's wings, Trotsky decided to form his
own intelligence organization, first known as the Fourth Department of the Red Army, later the GRU. To staff it, Trotsky recruited a number of promising army officers, along with some
CHEKA agents. Among this latter group was a Latvian who had
already demonstrated a flair for espionage. His name was Jan
Berzin.
At the time, Trotsky had no idea of the significant role Berzin's recruitment would play in the history of Soviet intelligence.
Berzin, whose real name was Peter Kyuzis, had been a revolutionary most of his youth, and by 1919, considered among the brightest of the revolutionaries, at the age of 30 was one of the leaders
of the Latvian Soviet. Their attempt to impose a Bolshevik-style
revolution in Latvia failed, and Berzin fled to the Soviet Union.
There, he was recruited by Dzerzhinsky for the CHEKA. His abilities were recognized early, and by 1920, he was an official in the

FELIKS DZERZHINSKY, JAN BERZIN

201

agency's Registry Section, which handled foreign intelligence operations. A year later, to Dzerzhinsky's annoyance, he transferred
to the new GRU.
Berzin had been critical of the way the CHEKA ran its first
foreign intelligence operations. He was unhappy with its reliance
on foreign Communists for espionage assetsCommunists tended
to be known by police and counterintelligence agencies, he arguedand was further displeased by the CHEKA's tendency to
use some of its heavy-handed killers as foreign intelligence agents
without much in the way of training. In Berzin's view, modern
intelligence, especially in Western Europe, required sophisticated, cosmopolitan agents capable of working under business or
other such cover.
Berzin had a chance to demonstrate his theories in 1924,
when he became head of the GRU. Known by the nickname starik
(old man) because of his completely bald head and prematurely
aged features, Berzin was very popular among his agents. He
instituted a rigorous training program whose every detail he
supervised personally. He was close friends with many of his
agents, who regarded him as brilliant and innovative. In time,
some of his recruits would enter espionage immortality, among
them Leiba Domb, Walter Krivitsky, Ruth Kuczynski, and Richard
Sorge.
Dzerzhinsky was not pleased by the rise of the competing
GRU, beginning a rivalry that was to continue for the next several
decadesand one that finally would consume Berzin himself.
Meanwhile, Dzerzhinsky was preoccupied by his own political
troubles. The terror of his CHEKA had begun to cause restiveness
among the Soviet public, and Lenin decided to rein in the agency's chief. First, he was ordered to carry out no further summary
executions, and told that suspected "enemies of the state" would
face the death sentence only if convicted in a trial. Then a government decree eliminated the CHEKA altogether, replacing it
with a new entity called State Political Administration (GPU),
which among other powers would have the job of screening future intelligence recruits.
Even with his powers reduced, Dzerzhinsky remained a formidable figure who still had exclusive power in running internal
security and counterintelligence operations. In that capacity,
Dzerzhinsky's chief worry was the nearly one million anti-Bolshevik Russians who had fled the country in the wake of the Bolshevik coup. They represented a multifaceted threat: a fertile source

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THE SPYMASTERS

of recruitment for foreign intelligence agencies, a potential military force, and a possible source of infiltrators who could enter
Russia across still-porous borders. Dzerzhinsky began to formulate a plan to neutralize this threat. His solution would become
the most famous counterintelligence operation of all time.
The CHEKA had managed to wipe out all opposition groups
during the terror, with one exception: a group of former Czarist
officials who had gone to work for the Bolshevik government, but
had gathered themselves into a secret opposition group that plotted ways to bring down the government. These men, known to
the CHEKA as "radishes" (red on the outside, white on the inside), pontifically called their group the Monarchist Union of
Central Russia, or, more commonly, The Trust. Dzerzhinsky was
perfectly aware of the group, having infiltrated it with his own
men. But instead of simply arresting all its members, he stayed
his hand for a bigger game he had in mind.
His first move was to secretly arrest Alexander Yakushev, one
of the highest-ranking leaders of the group. Dzerzhinsky's choice
was deliberate: Yakushev hated the Bolsheviks, but he was not a
fanatic and did not share the group's passion for violence and
sabotage operations. Dzerzhinsky went to work on him, and in a
series of protracted interrogations, convinced Yakushev that the
anti-Bolsheviks were just as bad as the Bolsheviks. A middle
ground was needed, Dzerzhinsky argued to the egostisical Yakushev, and Alexander Yakushev would be that man. Of course,
there remained the problem of those fanatical anti-Bolsheviks in
Europe; would Yakushev be willing to make contact with those
people and tell them that The Trust, operating right inside Russia, should now be the sole representative of the anti-Bolshevik
movement?
Yakushev bought it. He was let go, and began visiting various
emigre groups in Europe. He told the emigres about The Trust,
as proof presenting his listeners with a ream of interesting intelligence (all of which had been carefully prepared by the CHEKA).
Next, Yakushev proposed that since The Trust controlled all the
safest "windows" (border entry points), the emigres should infiltrate their saboteurs and agents only via those points.
Dzerzhinsky trumped this achievement with an even better
twist: to prove that The Trust was real, he had Yakushev arrange
special "tours" inside Russia. Emigre leaders were smuggled into
Russia, where they were introduced to Trust leaders (all of them
CHEKA agents), and shown a wide range of Trust activities.

FELIKS DZERZHINSKY, JAN BERZIN

203

Among them was a large underground religious service, complete with Orthodox priest (another CHEKA agent). Impressed,
the emigres returned to Europe with tales about how the Trust
was running an actual underground government. As Dzerzhinsky
anticipated, such wondrous tales soon attracted the attention of
various intelligence agencies, who began funnelling money to
The Trust, in return for apparently genuine intelligence that in
fact had been cooked up by the CHEKA.* It was a perfect closed
circle: Dzerzhinsky was not only in the process of infiltrating the
emigre movement's operations against Russia, he was also feeding
doctored information to Western intelligencewhich was actually financing this grand deception.
All deceptions eventually come to an end, and so did The
Trust. Increasingly suspicious about the emigres who infiltrated
Russia and never came back, the intelligence that never seemed
to be quite accurate, and the odd lassitude of the CHEKA in
confronting this presumably greatest of all internal security
threats, the operation's targets finally concluded that they had
been hoodwinked. Having achieved its purpose (and more), The
Trust was closed down in late 1925.
It was Dzerzhinsky's greatest triumphand his last. Increasingly plagued by his tuberculosis, he finally died of the disease in
1926. Without his leadership, his organization, now the KGB, entered a period of decline. Into that vacuum moved a resurgent
GRU under Jan Berzin.
By 1936, when Berzin was assigned to Spain to direct Soviet
intelligence operations in the civil war, the GRU reigned supreme. As a result, relations with the KGB were very tense. Berzin
had made enemies in the KGB, most importantly its rising star,
Laventri Beria, who was close to Stalin. In 1937, Berzin was summoned to Moscow "for consultations." Urged by GRU colleagues
to flee, Berzin told them resignedly, "They can shoot me here or
shoot me there." He went to Moscow; within an hour of his arrival, he was shot in the cellars of the infamous building on Lubyanka Street. His fate there was ultimately shared by almost
everyone involved in the Trust operation, including poor Alexander Yakushev.

* One MI6 agent was so impressed he decided to see The Trust for himself. Dzerzhinsky was delighted, for the agent, the legendary Sidney Reilly, had escaped a
CHEKA dragnet in 1918, when he worked in Moscow as part of the coup plot against
Lenin. In early 1925, Reilly infiltrated Russia, and was executed.

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THE SPYMASTERS

History was to render curious verdicts on Dzerzhinsky and

Berzin, the two greatest spymasters the Soviet Union ever produced. Following his execution, Berzin became a non-person; not
until Stalin's death in 1953 could his name even be mentioned.
He was rehabilitated, and memorialized as a great spymaster.
Dzerzhinsky, on the other hand, became a near-cult figure in the
Soviet Union. The area around Lubyanka Street was renamed
Dzerzhinsky Square in his honor, and a huge statue of him was
erected. Inside KGB headqarters, a smaller statute was built; each
day, fresh flowers were placed around it. KGB officers, in a tribute
to their founding father, preferred to call themselves Chekisti
(Chekhists).
But in late 1991, the Russian people rendered their own
final verdict on Feliks Dzerzhinsky: they pulled down the statue
on Dzerzhinsky Square and dragged it away to a junkyard.

KENJI DOIHARA
The Snake in the Basket
1883-1948

or a man consumed with ambition, Japanese army Major

Kenji Doihara did not look the part, which was precisely his
problem. Despite his mastery of 11 languages (including three
Chinese dialects), a brilliant mind, and membership in the Japanese Black Dragon Society, an elite club of officers dedicated to
an expansionist Japan, Doihara's career in 1926 was completely
stuck.
At 43 years of age, he was a little old to be a major; in a few
more years, he probably would be forcibly retired, having missed
his chance. Doihara was determined to do something great in a
military career which to that point had featured only brief service
in the Russo-Japanese War. Many of his contemporaries were moving up, to bigger and better things. Behind his back, they snickered about how the "ugly duckling" had been left behind. "Ugly
duckling" was quite accurate, for Major Doihara did not give the
air of a leader of men: Short and fattish, he had a plump face
with a Charlie Chaplin mustache and an odd, duck-like walk that
made him a comical figure.
Aware that other officers found him a laughable figure, Doihara was determined more than ever to succeedin what, he had
no real idea yet. It took some doing, but in the end the officers
who laughed at him would stand in awe of Lieutenant General
Kenji Doihara, the greatest spymaster in Japanese history.
How Doihara broke out of the dead-end career rut in which
he found himself at middle age reveals much about the man. He
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THE SPYMASTERS

approached a beautiful 15-year-old first cousin, convinced her to

pose in the nude for him, then sent a batch of the more pleasing
photographs to one of the princes in the imperial family. Impressed, the prince summoned the beauty to his presence, and
although a relationship developed, he could not marry a commoner. But they were devoted lovers, a circumstance Doihara patiently waited to see reach full flowering. At that point, his cousin
was instructed to mention to the prince about her incredibly
clever and brilliant army relative who was at that moment wasting
his talents in some boring staff job in Tokyo. Within a week, Doihara received orders to take a post as assistant military attache in
Peking.
As far as Doihara was concerned, it could not have been
more perfect: Japan had designs on China, so for a career-minded
officer, that was the right place to be. Even better, Doihara discovered, upon arriving in Peking, that the Japanese embassy was
busily engaged in espionage and covert political operations
against the Chinese. Like a duck discovering water for the first
time, Doihara had found his real milieu.
Within weeks, to the delight of his superiors, Major Doihara
demonstrated a real flair for plots, sabotage, assassinations, subterfuge, bribery, corruption, and espionage. The object was to
weaken the Chinese republican government, using any means, in
the hope that it would gradually collapse and pave the way for
Japanese conquest. His greatest stroke was his infiltration of a
powerful Chinese business organization called Anfu that had
high-level connections in the Chinese government. He recruited
several of its members who kept him informed on what was happening inside government councils.
Doihara was also involved in much less benign actions, including his recruitment among the city's underworld for "mobs"
who "spontaneously" demonstrated against the government. In
one case, he fomented a riot, then gallantly dashed inside a government building to rescue several trapped government officials.
In gratitude for saving their lives, they agreed to become assets
for Doihara. He followed that up with a few more similarly successful operations, and by 1928, he had been promoted to colonel
and hailed by his immediate superiors in reports to Tokyo as a
brilliant spymaster who should now be promoted to a post of
more responsibility.
Tokyo had just the assignment for him: Manchuria. China's
mineral-rich easternmost province was coveted by the Japanese,

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207

who planned to seize it as soon as conditions permitted. Kenji

Doihara was to create those conditions. Given carte blanche to
act as he saw fit in Manchuria, Colonel Doihara was named head
of Japanese military intelligence in the province.
His first step was to create a vast espionage network to cover
the entire province. Actually, it amounted to three separate networks: One was composed of 5,000 Russian criminals who had
fled to Manchuria after the Bolshevik revolution; the second enlisted White Russians eager to curry favor with Tokyo; and the
third represented an army of 80,000 spies formed from a Chinese
sect whom Doihara promised independence from the Peking government. Once he had all these men working, he then moved to
the next phase of his destabilization plan, which consisted of taking control of the province's opium trade. Doihara took over the
opium dens and put the traffickers on the payroll to make opium
a monopoly for Japanese intelligence. He sought to enlarge the
number of addicts by setting up booths at county fairs where "free
medicine" was offered to tuberculosis sufferers. Actually, it was
an opium derivative. He also convinced the Japanese government
to manufacture a new brand of cigarette called Golden Bat, which
was available for export only. No wonder: it contained small doses
of opium and heroin. Sold at rock-bottom prices to Chinese, it
created a whole new generation of addicts who had to buy the
drug from what Doihara had made into a Japanese monopoly. In
other words, the Manchurians were financing their own destruction.
Doihara's final preliminary move was to arrange the assassination of the warlord who then controlled Manchuria by means
of a bomb planted on the train he was riding. While provincial
authorities tried to figure out what to do next, Doihara struck:
he deliberately instigated a shootout between Japanese and Manchurian troops. The Japanese, called upon by some front groups
Doihara had created for just this purpose, graciously sent in large
military forces to seize the province and "protect" its citizens
from "rampages" by Manchurian troops. The central government in Peking, weakened by its own divisions and the years of
strife engineered by Doihara and other Japanese, was in no position to argue. Japan seized all of Manchuria.
To forestall international problems, Doihara had to maintain the fiction that all the turmoil in Manchuria was strictly indigenous. To that end, he hit upon a curious strategem: He went
to Peking and tried to enlist Henry Pu-Yi, the last emperor of

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China (at that point a strictly ceremonial post) into becoming

emperor of Manchuria. Pu-Yi hesitated, and while he was trying
to make up his mind, received a basket of fruit at his front door
which contained a poisonous snake at the bottom. Doihara hurried to his side, and convinced the naive aristocrat that he was
now the subject of plots by unspecified enemies and needed Japanese protection. Doihara, not bothering to mention that it was
he who had sent the fruit basket, whisked Pu-Yi to Manchuria to
become emperor. Too late, Pu-Yi realized he was nothing more
than a puppet (an incident later reprised in the movie The Last
Emperor).
With Manchuria firmly in Japanese hands, Doihara next
turned his attention to the rest of China. Following his standard
pattern, he created a full range of destabilization efforts in
China's southern provinces, including riots, murders, and a tenfold leap in the opium trade. Doihara's reach seemed to be everywhere; Chiang Kai-Shek executed eight of his divisional commanders after he discovered they were on Doihara's payroll. By
1938, when the Japanese invaded southern China, Doihara had
created the proper conditions, defined by one Japanese authority
as a "moral desert" in which the Japanese army could move unimpeded.
But Doihara could only do so much. The Japanese simply
did not have sufficient strength to simultaneously carry out a
major land war in China and an invasion of the South Pacific.
After Pearl Harbor, war with the United States preoccupied Japan, and China became a military backwater. Doihara continued
to work in China until 1944, when he was reassigned to Malaya.
In 1945, he was ordered back to Japan, where he was to organize
the last-ditch defense against the anticipated American invasion.
From his Tokyo headquarters, he heard the reports of Japan's
disaster in Manchuria, where Soviet forces in four days destroyed
Japanese forces. At home, whatever plans he might have made to
fight the Americans were obviated by Japan's surrender.
Doihara was captured by the Americans, who put him on
trial as a war criminal. There was much he had to answer for,
none of which was even remotely defensiblenotably, the chief
count in the indictment against him, his role in the opium trade.
Convicted, he languished in prison while his appeals were underway. In November 1948, he was executed, representing one
last achievement of Japan's ugly duckling: He was the only spymaster on record ever convicted for crimes committed in the
name of espionage.

THE INFAMIES

LAVENTRI BERIA
"Give Me a Man"
Alias: Yenon Lidze
1888-1953

"Give me a man and I'll give you a case," Laventri Beria was
fond of saying with his tight, reptilian smile. Uncounted
millions of Russians learned the hard way that this was no joke;
in the more than 15 years that Beria headed the KGB, no human
being who had fallen into his clutches ever failed to do exactly
what Beria wanted him to do.
There was no mystery about how Beria managed to achieve
this. He created the largest and most efficient secret police organization in history, a vast empire that included hundreds of
thousands of agents, millions of part-time informers, a network
of prisons, hundreds of slave labor camps, and an internal security control system that regulated the movements of more than
200 million Soviet citizens. At the same time, he directed a foreign intelligence service that was the world's largest.
The man who presided over this empire was a truly terrifying
human being, one of the real villains of history. Despite his reputation, he did not cut an impressive figure: balding and plump,
he regarded the world with a pair of cold, lifeless eyes from behind a pince-nez. He had a small, delicate set of hands that were
perpetually chilly and moist, and spoke in a flat monotone that
never betrayed the slightest emotion. An unfeeling, lifeless killer,
he was reputed to have no friendsexcept Joseph Stalin. In terms
of Beria's job, Stalin was the only friend he needed.
Beria first met Stalin in 1915, when, as a 27-year-old revolutionary, Beria was a fugitive in the hills of his native Georgia.
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LAVENTRI BERIA

211

He had just escaped from a Czarist prison after being sentenced

to death for "revolutionary activity," defined as agitating for communism among university students. In the hills, he contacted the
leader of the Georgian Communist underground, Stalin, from
whom Beria obtained arms and an order to foment an armed
revolution among the oilfield workers at Baku. The uprising
failed, and Beria had to flee for his life, escaping through Czarist
police checkpoints disguised as a woman.
When the Bolshevik revolution broke out, Beria was head of
a group of 500 Austrian prisoners of war who had converted to
communism and were now willing to become shock troops. Under Beria's command, they successfully fought in the civil war, a
success that brought Beria's talents to the attention of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, who recruited him for the CHEKA. By 1920, he was considered among Dzerzhinsky's best agents, and was assigned to
Prague to keep an eye on anti-Bolshevik exiles. In 1929, now working for the new KGB, he appeared in Paris with a new identity:
Col. Yenonlidze, a former Czarist army officer who claimed that
his estate and fortune had been seized by the Bolsheviks and was
now eager to wreak revenge. With that legend, he was able to lure
several ex-Czarist officers with him on a "mission" to Russia from
which they never returned.
A year later, Beria was named head of the KGB's Foreign
Office, the section that oversaw all foreign intelligence operations. The appointment represented a meteoric rise in the organization, and it had everything to do with the Beria-Stalin
friendship. As Stalin consolidated his power, Beria rose with him,
and in 1938, Beria was named head of the KGB. In tandem, they
would become a frightening combination; it was Beria who came
to represent Stalin's right arm. While Stalin maneuvered to overcome his political opponents, Beria was the man who collected
the files of derogatory information, who arranged for certain
anti-Stalin politicians to disappear, and who, when necessary,
would fabricate evidence to discredit opponents. It was said that
as their relationship deepened, Beria could actually read Stalin's
mind, often anticipating where his friend's next move would
come. When that move came, Beria already was prepared with
the dossiers of the targets, along with tidbits of derogatory information about their sexual peccadillos and other weaknesses.
Although Beria was in charge of the KGB's foreign operations, he left that task largely to deputies and concentrated on
the job of consolidating Stalin's power. In that function, Beria

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was to demonstrate a frightening talent for efficiency, systematizing repression of the people to a degree Dzerzhinsky could never
have dreamed of.
As Stalin tightened his grip on the Soviet Union in a bloodbath of purge and liquidation, Beria developed the machinery
that made the very mention of his name strike cold fear into the
hearts of Russians. Among his innovations was the "conveyer"
system, which amounted to a multi-step process by which those
arrested would be processed, like so many sausages, along a
stepped series of beatings, round-the-clock interrogations, and
tortures to emerge at the final stop as totally compliant prisoners
willing to confess to anything. A sadist, Beria liked to personally
participate in this process; he kept a set of truncheons in his desk
drawer that he used to beat certain "politicals" (men and women
arrested for presumed opposition to Stalin), often to death. He
ordered his top aides to participate in the beatings as a means of
insuring that they shared in the dirty work and could never claim
later that they knew nothing of such abuses.
For certain special cases, Beria created a "sincerity laboratory," where doctors and scientists developed new techniques of
torture, along with mind-altering drugs. For those victims who
were supposed to disappear without a trace, he built a special
"death house" in a fancy Moscow apartment, where they were
lured by experts on poisons and dispatched with an "accidental"
scratch from a cane whose tip had been dipped in a deadly
toxin. For defectors who had fled overseas, Beria founded a
chilling organization called SMERSH (from the initials of the
Russian phrase "death to spies"), a squad of expert killers dispatched around the world to murder anyone whom Stalin felt
might represent a threat to his regime. (Later, during World War
II, SMERSH was expanded to a small army that shot deserters,
collaborators with the Germansand all Soviet prisoners of war
on the grounds that they had "betrayed" the motherland by getting captured).
As head of the KGB, Beria had the important threads of
power in his hands. He carried out an extensive purge of KGB
ranks, first eliminating all Jews (he shared his friend Stalin's virulent anti-Semitism), and later the Old Guard from the CHEKA
days. At the same time, his repressive machinery grew inside the
Soviet Union. Millions of Russians disappeared into Siberian labor camps; countless others were simply done away with. Those
unfortunate enough to be put on the "conveyer" could expect

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213

to encounter a repressive machinery that had become so specialized, specific blocks of time had been allotted to convert a
suspect from innocent citizen to a bloody pulp, complete with
signed confession as a CIA spy, or MI6 saboteur, or anything the
KGB wanted that confession to say. Beria introduced many efficiencies into the system, including a special room where suspects
were brought to have mug shots taken. The camera release mechanism would be pressed twice: once to snap the picture, the second to fire a bullet into the back of the subject's head after the
picture was taken.
Beria spent the war tightening the screws of his repressive
machinery even further. His reach extended to careful reading
of soldiers' mail; even the slightest hint of doubt about Stalin's
direction of the war or the certitude of a Soviet victory would
land the writer in a Siberian labor camp for 10 years. (One such
victim was a young artillery officer named Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose mild criticism of Stalin in a letter to his mother landed
him in a Siberian camp. He used the experience to compile a
history of the camps, The Gulag Archipelago).
In 1945, Stalin enhanced Beria's powers still further by naming him head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, making him head
of all Soviet intelligence, border control, and internal security
forces. With that power, never achieved before or since by any
intelligence chief, Beria was given two very difficult, but essential
tasks: run the Soviet Union's crash program to develop an atomic
bomb, and develop a strategic rocket capability. Beria accomplished both tasks in characteristic fashion, mobilizing a million
slave laborers, the entire Soviet scientific establishment, and his
intelligence service to produce an atomic bomb in only four
years, less than a quarter of the time Western intelligence assumed it would take. Beria had mobilized Soviet intelligence to
steal the bomb's secrets, then harnessed that information to a
huge undertaking which constructed the test facilities, uranium
mines, processing plants, and other vast enterprises necessary to
build nuclear weapons. His approach to the problem of developing rockets was even more direct: he ordered a group of German rocket scientists kidnapped from Germany and brought to
the Soviet Union, where they were offered lavish salaries to build
a Russian version of the V-2 rocket. Beria did not need to mention
the alternative; the Germans could see the vast armies of slave
laborers working around the clock on the rocket testing facilities

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and bases the Russians were constructing. It did not require much
imagination to conclude that if the Germans refused to cooperate, a man like Beria was perfectly capable of making them slave
laborers, too. The Germans had no doubt of Beria's ruthlessness:
they watched one day as an early rocket experiment exploded on
the pad, killing over 100 Soviet technicians and army personnel.
"Clean the mess up and get back to work," Beria snapped.
The success of these two projects drew Beria even closer to
a grateful Stalin, who was willing to overlook some extremely odious aspects of his spymaster's private life. With a supreme power
second only to Stalin's, Beria could indulge his vices, the chief
one of which was little girls. Beria had little girls kidnapped all
over Moscow; they were taken to his luxurious dacha, where he
raped them. Parents of these unfortunate girls did not dare to
complain. Often, Beria, on his way to work in his chauffeured
limousine, would spot a pretty little girl on the street. He would
order his chauffeur to pull over. Two of his accompanying bodyguards would seize the girl and throw her in the back of Beria's
limousine, there to be raped and brutalized. Afterwards, more
often than not, Beria would have the victim killed.
With his power at an apex, this terrifying character began
to make plans for a post-Stalin Soviet Union. Aware that Stalin
was ailing, Beria assumed he would succeed the dictator, a possibility that alarmed the Soviet military. Aside from their personal
revulsion and fear of Beria, they also had long memories, having
never forgiven Beria for slaughtering so many of their soldiers
during and after the war. Curiously, despite his acute political
sense, Beria was unaware of the military's hostility toward him,
an oversight that was to cost him his life.
In 1953, when Stalin died, Beria made his move, in effect
declaring himself the new Stalin. But Georgi Malenkov, a Politburo member who was Beria's most implacable enemy, had been
busy lining up military support. One fall morning that year, when
Beria arrived for a Politburo meeting on the question of succession to Stalin, he was surprised to be met by a delegation of senior
military officers, who informed him he was to be put immediately
on trial for "crimes against the Soviet people." Shocked, Beria
heard himself pronounced guilty, whereupon one officer pulled
a pistol and shot him dead on the spot.

REINHARD HEYDRICH
A Terrible Secret
1904-1942

n the morning of June 14, 1931, a recently-cashiered German

naval officer traveled to a chicken farm near Munich to meet
its owner, Heinrich Himmler. Named a year earlier to head
Adolph Hitler's Schutzstaffel (SS), the Nazi leader's personal bodyguard, Himmler had summoned Reinhard Heydrich to offer him
a job.
Himmler had no idea if Heydrich had any qualifications for
the post, chief of a new Nazi intelligence service. But he was impressed with the 27-year-old Nazi, who had demonstrated the requisite qualities of ambitiousness and ruthlessness Himmler so admired. In 1920, Heydrich had joined the Freikorps, the roving
paramilitary bands that plagued Germany after World War I, and
two years later enlisted in the German navy. While still a naval
officer, Heydrich had joined the Nazi party, where he found his
true calling. By 1931, when he was dismissed from the navy by an
officers' honor court for refusing to marry a prominent man's
daughter whom he had impregnated, Heydrich had become a
full-time Nazi functionary in the SS.
Upon his arrival at Himmler's house, Heydrich was confronted with an assignment: sit down and write out a plan for a
new Nazi intelligence organization. Himmler gave him 20 minutes to complete the job.
The assignment put Heydrich in something of a quandary.
He did not have the vaguest idea of how an intelligence service
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THE INFAMIES

The sinister Reinhard Heydrich, called by Hitler "the man with an iron
heart." (AP Wide World)

was organizedor, for that matter, did he know anything about

intelligence. Nevertheless, drawing on his memories of spy movies and novels, he quickly sketched out how he thought a modern
intelligence service ought to be organized. Himmler, who didn't
know anything about intelligence either, was impressed; on the
spot, he appointed Heydrich head of the new service, which he
called the Sicherheitsdienst (SD).
Although Himmler intended the SD to function as a collector of foreign intelligence, Heydrich discovered his new organization for the moment had more pressing domestic concerns,
namely consolidating Hitler's grip on Germany. Heydrich first
demonstrated his skills in this area in 1933, when Himmler
named him to head a new "political section" of the Munich police, genesis of an organization that later became the Geheime
Staatspolizei (Gestapo). His performance in rooting out anti-Nazis
and stifling all dissent prepared him for Himmler's next big assignment, a bloodbath that became known as "the night of the
long knives."

REINHARD HEYDRICH

217

The impetus for the bloodbath was a cynical deal between

Hitler and the German military. In 1934, the military agreed to
support Hitler, with the proviso he eliminate his own private
army, the Brownshirts, led by Ernst Roehm. The Brownshirts,
known officially as the Sturmabteilung (storm troopers) were a collection of thugs and misfits who had achieved worldwide infamy
by attacking Jews in the streets and vandalizing Jewish-owned businesses. Although Hitler had consented to the removal of Roehm
and the disbanding of the Brownshirts, he hestitated; Roehm, a
World War I comrade, was his oldest and closest friend.
Himmler, a rival of Roehm, called on Heydrich for assistance
in inciting Hitler to action. Heydrich responded by preparing a
thick set of documents that proved Roehm was planning a coup
against the Fuehrer (all the documents were forgeries). For good
measure, he also collected (true) dossiers full of graphic details
about Roehm's homosexual escapades among his staff. Presented
with evidence that he assumed proved Roehm was planning to
overthrow him, the homophobic Hitler's resolve was further
strengthened by evidence of his old comrade's "depravity."
In June 1934, armed with lists prepared by Heydrich, SS
squads rounded up the entire Sturmabteilung leadership, including Roehm, who was thrown into a prison cell and murdered. But
the SS men had other targets as well, for the lists also contained
the names of Hitler's opponents across the entire political spectrum. By the time the SS men were finished, some 4,000 of Hitler's enemies had either been murdered or taken to a new institution in Germany, the concentration camp. With his enemies
dead or behind the barbed wire of such places as Dachau, Hitler
had become the unchallenged master of Germany.
Heydrich, the man who had collected the files and prepared the lists, basked in his share of the credit for the massacre.
"The man with an iron heart," Hitler said of him admiringly,
while Himmler proclaimed him the "true Nazi" and miracle
worker whose ruthlessness and organizational genius would ensure the triumph of Nazism everywhere. But what neither Hitler
nor Himmler knew was that at the very moment they were proclaiming the young SD chief as the very embodient of the Nazi
cause, he was busy concealing his greatest secret.
The secret was something unthinkable: Heydrich was in fact
part-Jewish. His maternal grandmother was Jewish, a circumstance Heydrich now moved to erase. He had all her marriage
and birth records destroyed, and even arranged to have her cem-

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etery headstone with its Star of David rooted up and replaced

with a Christian headstone.
However thorough Heydrich was in erasing this secret from
his past, one man in Germany knew all about it, a critical piece
of information he hoped to use as insurance in a deadly bureaucratic struggle. Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr since 1929,
was aware that Heydrich had been assigned the task of creating
a Nazi intelligence service that obviously was intended at some
point to subsume Canaris' non-Nazi Abwehr. Canaris intended to
keep a close eye on his rival, and to that end, his agents had been
collecting secrets about Heydrich, notably his Jewish background.
(This fact of Heydrich's life later would assume a terrible irony.)
The Abwehr made a number of other interesting discoveries
about Heydrich. Among them was the fact that Heydrich had
secretly set up an expensive brothel in Berlin to service foreign
diplomats stationed in the city. Called Salon Kitty, it was honeycombed with microphones and cameras to record any indiscretions by the diplomats that might prove of intelligence value. The
SD had recruited a staff of beautiful prostitutes to staff the place,
all of them under instruction to wheedle secrets from men in the
throes of passion. It was also discovered that Heydrich himself
was a regular patron of Salon Kitty, although the women who
worked there dreaded his arrival because of his sadistic tastes: He
got his thrills from torturing women. (The Abwehr learned that
although Heydrich ordered all cameras and microphones be shut
off during his visits, one night his aides forgot; the recorded result
of one of Heydrich's escapades found its way to the Abwehr.)
The Salon Kitty operation was Heydrich's first in the foreign
intelligence field, and for the moment, his only one. As Heydrich
learned the hard way, the Nazis could not simply will a foreign
intelligence service out of thin air. As a rigidly doctrinaire Nazi
organization, the SD tried to develop SD networks around the
world by posting its "pure Aryan" and politically correct men in
German embassies overseaswhere they stood out like elephants
at a dinner party.
Still, Heydrich persisted, apparently believing that by sheer
force of effort, the SD overnight could become something more
than a secret police agency. Canaris monitored this effort with
unease; although the SD was not demonstrating much success in
the foreign intelligence field (a record of failure that continued
until 1945),* he knew the ultimate objective was to replace his
Abwehr. He also knew that just as he was collecting derogatory

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219

dossiers on Heydrich, the SD chief was busily assembling similar

kinds of dossiers on Canaris. In Nazi Germany, everybody seemed
to be collecting dossiers on actual or presumed bureaucratic opponents. No one better understood that fact than Canaris, who
had secret vaults stashed with such powerful ammunition as the
records of Hitler's treatment for insanity after World War I, secret
financial deals by Martin Bormann and other Nazi leadersand,
of course, the truth about Heydrich's ancestry. For his part, Heydrich's dossiers revealed that Canaris secretly loathed the Nazis,
and was hiding Jews in his organization to keep them out of the
Gestapo's clutches. SD agents had also discovered that Canaris
had friends in British intelligence, and that some of his aides had
links with the anti-Nazi underground.
What made this deadly little game of dossiers all the more
interesting was that Heydrich and Canaris were neighbors in an
upscale Berlin suburb, and often spent evenings in each other's
homes. There, Canaris would see a very different Reinhard Heydrich. Son of a musical conductor, he was a gifted violinist who
could enthrall an audience with exquisite renditions. Canaris
never failed to be struck by the odd contrast between Heydrich
the sinister SD chief, whose very name was whispered in fear, and
Heydrich the romantic violinist, his wide hips, high voice and
long hands giving him an almost feminine appearance.
Officially, both men called each other friends, but neither
was fooled; they were locked in a deadly struggle for the soul of
German intelligence and a showdown was inevitable. The first
serious clash came in 1936, when Heydrich approached Canaris
to ask for a "loan" of some documents in Abwehr files dealing
with the period in 1929 when the Germans secredy provided military training and other assistance to the Soviet Union. Canaris
could guess why Heydrich wanted these documents, and his
agents confirmed it: the SD chief was preparing a massive forgery
to convince Stalin that his military chiefs were planning a coup.
* One famous exception was a walk-in: Elyesa Bazna, Albanian-born valet to the
British ambassador at Ankara, approached the SD station in that Turkish city in 1943
and offered to sell top-secret documents he had managed to obtain from the ambassador's safe. Initially skeptical, the SD was finally persuaded by the sheer volume
and quality of the material. They code-named Bazna CICERO and paid him $1.4
million in English pound notes. The British detected the leak in 1944 and used
CICERO as an unwitting conduit for deception material to the SD. Bazna later that
year stopped spying, intent on retiring for life on his money in Brazil. He planned
to live in luxuryuntil he discovered that the pound notes the Germans paid him
were all counterfeit.

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Canaris wanted nothing to do with such an operation, so he refused Heydrich's request, and another black mark was entered
against the Abwehr chiefs name.
Three years later, there was an even more serious encounter.
Heydrich told Canaris that the SD had been entrusted with nothing less than starting World War II. Hitler's plan was for the SD
to create an "incident" on the German-Polish border that would
provide the pretext for the Germans to invade Poland. Under the
scheme, concentration camp inmates would be dressed in Polish
army uniforms. An SD unit would attack a German radio station,
broadcast a fake announcement of a Polish assault, then flee back
to Germany. Meanwhile, the concentration camp inmates would
be executed, their bodies left around the station to "prove" the
Poles were responsible. Canaris argued furiously against the operation, to no avail. World War II began.
Whatever Canaris' misgivings, the success of the Polish operation elevated Heydrich to a new pinnacle of power. He was
awarded overall supervision of Germany's entire secret police
structure, including the criminal police and the Gestapo. In early
1942, he was given an assignment that dwarfed anything he had
ever encountered in his career, a task that was nothing less than
one of the great crimes of history: he was to arrange for the
destruction of the Jews of Europe.
On a warm spring day that year, Heydrich convened a conference in a luxurious villa on the shores of Lake Wansee in a
Berlin suburb. The site was chosen to remove the participants
the senior representatives of every department of government
from the pressures of their government offices and to an atmosphere more conducive to the task at hand. In the space of four
hours, under Heydrich's crisp direction, they worked out the considerable challenges of a plan to round up the 11 million Jews of
Europe and ship them to killing centers in Poland to be exterminated. The minutes of the conference, kept by the SD's chief
executive in charge of killing Jews, Adolph Eichmann, recorded
awe at Heydrich's masterful grasp of even the smallest detail. At
the conclusion of the conference, with the plan for the so-called
"final solution" worked out, everyone adjourned to sample a luxurious buffet lunch.
It was to be Heydrich's final contribution to the Nazi regime.
A month later, in May 1942, he had returned to work at still another special assignment from Hitler, as head of the Nazi occu-

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221

pation of Czechoslavakia. One morning, on his way to work, he

was shot to death by four Czech underground fighters.
Heydrich's end represented a classic, and somewhat ironic,
intelligence failure: the SD, unaware of the underground threat,
provided no security for its chief, who rode to work without bodyguards or any other form of protection. Whether it was true, as
whispers hinted later, that Canaris was aware of the plan to kill
Heydrich and did nothing to warn him, will never be known.
Canaris, implicated later in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hider, was
arrested and executed. His dossiers on Heydrich and other Nazis
were never found.
As for Heydrich, only one monumentthe word is used advisedlythat actually mentions his name exists. It is located in
what used to be the Czechoslovakian village of Lidice. Infuriated
by the slaying of Heydrich, Hitler ordered that the village and all
its 400 inhabitants be wiped off the face of the earth to serve as
an example. SD killer squads murdered all the people, leveled
the village to the ground, then plowed the area into a barren
field. No human being ever lived there again.
But, of course, there are other, unmarked, monuments to
"the man with the iron heart" all over Europe: the mass graves
that contain the ashes of six million Jews. It is as the architect of
their destruction that Heydrich will be remembered by history.

GABOR PETER
The Hunchback of Budapest
1898-1993

he 52-year-old American who walked out of a Budapest prison

in 1956, blinking at the sunlight he had not seen for the past
seven years, looked nearly twice his age. He also looked like a
man who had emerged from a terrible ordeal: gaunt, his hair
completely white, his eyes glazed. Indeed, Noel Field had undergone a nightmare that few ever survived, a nightmare that went
under the name Gabor Peter.
When Field walked out of that prison, it represented the
final chapter of a spy saga that had convulsed Eastern Europe for
nearly a decade. Thousands of men and women perished in a
madness that in fact was a carefully calculated gambit born in
Moscow. Its chief instrument was the intelligence agent and secret
police chief who had terrorized Hungarya fearsome, misshapen man who was to become the most infamous secret police
chief in all of Eastern Europe. And, ironically enough, this secret
police chief, Gabor Peter, would be consumed by the very conflagration he started.
Peter represented a casting director's dream for a villain: An
incredibly ugly man with a hunchback and a limp, he had a small
face with a Hitler mustache. His most common expression was a
sneer, often a prelude to a face contorted with pure fury. A sadist,
he liked to personally administer hideous tortures, boasting that
he had never failed to break anyone who fell into his clutches.
The man born as Benno Auspitz in 1898 in Hungary became
a fanatical Communist during the Bolshevik revolution in Rus222

GABOR PETER

223

siato the distress of his father, a tailor, who hoped his son would
follow in his footsteps. But Auspitz had become captivated by the
idea of serving the cause of world revolution. In 1919, as a Communist uprising swept across the new nation of Hungary, Auspitzby now using his Communist underground alias of Gabor
Peterwas among the militants who seized power in Budapest.
Proclaiming a Soviet republic under Communist revolutionary
Bela Kun, the militants immediately moved to suppress all nonCommunist dissent. Peter led an organization of terrorists who
tracked down, then tortured and murdered Kun's opponents
with a ferocity that led Hungarians to call Peter and his gang of
cutthroats "the Red Terror."
Peter and his fellow militants fled to the Soviet Union following the collapse of Kun's short-lived republic in 1919. Those
Hungarians who assumed that was the last they would see of Peter
were in for a rude shock 26 years later when he returned to Hungary, this time in an even more bloodthirsty personna.
Peter seemed to have faded into obscurity in the Soviet Union, but appearances were deceiving: in fact, he had been recruited into the KGB, which saw potential in the ugly hunchback.
After training, Peter served at a number of KGB stations around
Eastern Europe, and in 1930, was given a plum assignment: agent
in one of Europe's most important espionage centers, Vienna.
Peter, working with Theodor Maly, another Hungarian recruited into the KGB and also an ex-Catholic priest, focused their
attention on a Zionist underground organization known as Blau
Weiss. A Socialist group founded to provide recreational and
other services for young Viennese Jews, it was trolled by Peter and
Maly for promising KGB recruits. They discovered that although
Blau Weiss was Socialist, it included a number of avowed Communists, among them the wife of the group's founder, Alice Kohlman Friedman. Known as "Litzi," Friedman had divorced her
husband when they could not reconcile their respective political
convictions (He was a rock-hard Socialist who despised Communists) . Peter recruited the energetic and deeply committed Communist to work as a courier among various underground leftist
groups the KGB had infiltrated.
This recruitment was ordinary enough in the political turmoil of 1930s Vienna, but was to prove significant for a very simple reason: Friedman's parents took in a boarder.
Friedman was living at home following her divorce. Her parents, pressed for money in the collapse of the Austrian economy

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THE INFAMIES

in 1934, turned a spare room into cash by offering it for rent.

That summer, a British student from Cambridge arrived in Vienna to study European politics. Needing a place to stay, he spotted the Kohlmans' ad in a local paper, and took the room for the
summer. The day he moved into the room, he met the pretty,
dark-haired Litzi Friedman, and a spark was immediately struck.
Their conversations revealed a remarkable political affinity, for
the Cambridge student, a member of the Communist party cell
at the university, was already a committed Communist. Friedman
introduced him as a likely prospect "for important party work"
(meaning espionage) to Peter and Maly, and the Englishman was
recruited as a low-level asset. Like Friedman, whom he was to
marry later that year, he worked as a courier.
With that, H. A. R. Philby became an asset of the KGB. Peter
had no idea that Philby would go on to become the greatest mole
in history, but recruitment of the young British Communist
would later enhance his reputation in the KGB. For one thing, it
exempted him from the wave of anti-Semitic purges that swept
through the KGB in the late 1930s, when, under Stalin's orders,
virtually all Jewish agents were eliminated from Soviet intelligence. Peter also helped his cause with some pure Stalinism of
his own. He had returned to the Soviet Union after a right-wing
Austrian government in the late 1930s began a severe crackdown
on leftist organizations, including the outlawing of the Communist party. Peter had arrived at a bad time, for Stalin's purges
were decimating the KGB ranks. Besides Jews, KGB chief Laventri
Beria was also purging foreign Communists; among the targets
were the Hungarian Communists, like Peter, who had fled eastward after the failure of the 1919 uprising. Peter jumped on the
bandwagon,
denouncing
his
former
Hungarian
Communist
friends as "Western spies." The denunciations were death warrants, for the Hungarians disappeared into the great maw of Beria's death machinery. Among the victims was Bela Kun himself;
his old friend Peter denounced him as an "imperialist" who was
a secret agent of British intelligence. (After a few days in the
hands of Beria's goons, Kun confessed to precisely those crimes.)
By 1945, Peter was regarded by the KGB as potentially of
greater value than simple intelligence agent. A man who had
demonstrated a capacity for betrayal and brutality that rivaled his
mentor Beria, Peter was marked for a much more important assignment: secret police chieftain. With Hungary under Soviet military domination, the KGB was actively involved in communizing

GABOR PETER

225

the country, a task that in effect required a Hungarian Beria.

Gabor Peter was to be that man.
At this stage in his life a Stalinist acolyte who often said he
would unhesitatingly commit suicide if Stalin asked him to, Peter
arrived in Budapest with orders to put Hungary firmly under the
Communist grip. He set up an agency called AVO (later AVH), a
combined foreign intelligence and internal security organization,
and recruited a cadre of the most brutal Stalinist thugs he could
find among the ranks of Hungarian Communists.
They went to work on Peter's first targets, the non-Communist political organizations who were part of the country's first
ruling coalition. Within a year, Peter had destroyed them; politicians were kidnapped and murdered, others were bribed, and
still others were threatened into silence. By 1948, Peter had
turned Hungary into a one-party police state, a success that Beria
cited to other Eastern European Communists as the model of
how to use terror and repression to impose Communist domination.
Having established a one-party dictatorship, Peter then turned
inward, carrying out a Stalin-ordered purge of Hungarian Communists. In a nightmare of terror, thousands of loyal Communists
were dragged into Peter's office, there to confront the AVH chief
wielding a truncheon. Some of them were old friends, but that
didn't help; by the time Peter and his gang of torturers got through
with them, they would confess to unimaginable crimessuch as
one close friend of Peter who confessed to being a spy for Czechoslovakia since 1917, two years before Czechoslovakia even became a country.
Peter's reputation among Hungarians as "the Beria of Hungary" was well-established. His name, usually whispered in fear
among his fellow countrymen, was the subject of anecdotes about
this strange character. Victims who somehow had managed to
survive arrest told of Peter interrupting torture sessions to sniff
among the overflowing vases of flowers in his office or the window
boxes outside. A lover of flowers, Peter had his office bedecked
each day with freshly-cut blossoms, and it was only to these plants
that he demonstrated any tenderness. For human beings, regardless of station, Peter showed nothing but savagery. For example,
when Laszlo Rajk, the country's first Interior Minister, was caught
up in a Stalin-ordered purge, and arrested without warning and
taken before Peter, a furious Rajk demanded to see the party's
First Secretary. Peter smashed him in the face, snarling, "The

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THE INFAMIES

First Secretary does not talk to traitors!" (Rajk, promised by Peter

that his family would be protected if he confessed to being an
American spy, assented, whereupon Peter killed him and the entire extended Rajk family).
By 1949, the repression machinery of Peter darkened the
country like the shadow of some huge, malevolent spider. Hungarians learned to be very circumspect in their public conversations, for a network of 80,000 local informants (in a nation of
only 9.5 million people) flooded Peter's office with reports on
even the most innocuous utterances of ordinary citizens. Those
deemed treasonous would result in an AVH arrest in the middle
of the night, followed by torture, a sentence of several years in a
labor camp, and, in some instances, death.
Despite this model of a Stalinist state, Stalin himself decided
that Hungaryalong with other Eastern European satellites of
Moscowhad demonstrated insufficient Communist zeal. Obviously, there were still "counterrevolutionary elements" at work,
so a new purge was ordered. Given the previous waves of purges,
there was some difficulty in finding still another justification for
a new one, but Peter and his fellow Eastern European secret police chiefs suddenly discovered the perfect justification. His name
was Noel Field.
Described as a romantic Communist dreamer, Field was an
American Quaker who became a Communist sympathizer. In
1934, when he was a 30-year-old State Department official, Field
became friends with Alger Hiss, and was recruited as a KGB asset.
During World War II, Field handled refugee problems and did
some work for the OSS, attempting to enlist Communists for the
agency. After the war, he went to work for a private refugee aid
organization, but was fired in 1947 when the group discovered
that Field was using its facilities to help only Communist refugees,
among them Hungarian Communists. He would pay a terrible
price later for his aid to those Hungarians.
Field emigrated to Prague, where he hoped to start a new
career as a writer. But in 1949, he was suddenly arrested on espionage charges; a confused Field heard himself accused of being
an "American master spy" who had recruited hundreds, perhaps
thousands, of Eastern European Communists to destroy communism. However laughable the charge seemed, Field did not
know he had become a pawn in what would become the greatest
and bloodiest purge to strike Eastern Europe.

GABOR PETER

227

Peter was the man mainly responsible for it. He asked to be

given Field for an "investigation" of "American spy activities,"
and in short order, Field confessed to being the key agent in a
massive U.S. espionage operation that recruited virtually the top
leadership of all Moscow's Eastern European satrapies, especially
in Hungary. What horrors Field underwent to reach this point
can only be imagined. But the result was there for all to see:
hundreds, then thousands, of loyal Communists dragged into torture cellars, followed by their confessions at public show trials to
being American or British spies for most of their adult lives. The
Hungarian Communist leadership, along with those of other
Eastern European countries, was decimated.
The effect would not be obvious for years: With its leadership destroyed in purges, the nations of Eastern Europe began
to drift toward their final collapse some decades later.
Meanwhile, the "Field purge," as it became known, was to
claim one last victim: Gabor Peter himself. Concluding that the
purge perhaps had gone too far, Moscow now sought scapegoats.
In Hungary, Peter was the chosen victim. At the KGB's orders,
Peter was arrested in 1953 without charges and subjected, fittingly enough, to the same tortures he had inflicted on so many
victims. He dutifully confessed to being an "agent of British and
Zionist intelligence services." (This last touch was meant to underscore Stalin's new anti-Semitic purge of the KGB, justified on
the grounds that Jewish agents were automatically considered to
be under the control of Israeli intelligence).
But unlike most of his victims, Peter survived. He was given
the relatively lenient sentence of life imprisonment and locked
up in the same prison as Noel Field, one of his more prominent
victims. When the Hungarian revolution of 1956 broke out, the
revolutionaries released Field,* but kept Peter in prison. Peter
was lucky; until suppressed by a Soviet military intervention, the
revolutionaries rampaged through AVH headquarters, arresting
AVH agents (some were beaten to death) and destroying part of
the millions of files from the AVH's pervasive spying on ordinary
Hungarian citizens.
Three years later, there came an even stranger twist to the
Peter story, when he was ordered released from prison by Prime
* Despite his nightmarish experience, Field remained a devoted Communist. He
settled in Budapest with his wife Herta (she had been imprisoned with him), and
occupied his final years writing articles praising communism. He died in 1970.

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THE INFAMIES

Minister Janos Kadarthe very same Janos Kadar, curiously

enough, whom Peter had arrested and tortured some years before during one of the first Stalin purges. For motives that remain
unknown, Kadar gave Peter a minor government job. Some years
later, Peter retired. Reassuming his given name of Benno Auspitz,
he spent his last years humbly working as a tailor. Most people
avoided the wizened, hunchbacked old tailor, aware that he was
once the man who terrorized an entire country.
Peter died in 1993, and on orders of the government, his
body was dumped into an unmarked grave and its location left
unrecorded. It was part of an unsuccessful effort to erase forever
the memory of Hungary's most infamous citizen, but the stain
left by Peter on the soul of Eastern Europe remains forever.

SOME MYSTERIES . . .

HEINRICH MUELLER
A Nazi in Moscow
1900-1948 (?)

he gaunt, ravaged men who passed through the processing

center had returned home at last, but before being reunited
with the families they thought they would never see again, there
was one last service to be performed for their country. Although
exhausted, the German prisoners of war finally returning from a
decade or more in Soviet prison camps that summer of 1953 took
the time to sit for hours talking into tape recorders, recounting
every little detail of all they had seen and experienced while their
memories were still fresh.
Many of them, highly trained officers, had much technical
intelligence to impart to the men of Reinhard Gehlen's Org who
had been detailed to debrief the returning prisoners. This was
the meat and potatoes of intelligence work, the collection of a
myriad of details that later could be assembled into a coherent
whole: the freight capacity of a rail line, where an important oil
pipeline was located, the manufacturing process at a steel mill,
and so on. All useful, but some of the officers recounted something that was downright bizarre and impossible to believe. They
had seen a ghost.
Not just any ghost: They insisted, to their debriefers' open
skepticism, that they had seen Heinrich Mueller, chief of the infamous Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo) from 1935 to the end of
World War II, in the Soviet Union wearing a KGB colonel's uniform. Impossible, the officers were told; Mueller had died in Ber230

HEINRICH MUELLER

231

lin in 1945. And even assuming that Mueller had survived the
war, it hardly made sense that the KGB would enlist the chief of
the Gestapo, of all people, to work in the KGB.
Yet, as other officer prisoners reported the same sighting,
the Org men began to wonder. Was it possible? All the reported
sightings were consistent in terms of physical descriptionthe
broad, squarish skull, the stubby figure, the pasty face with just a
gash of mouth. That was Mueller all right, a man whose physical
appearance was one of the more distinctive in the entire Nazi
hierarchy. But there were more pressing intelligence tasks at the
moment, so the mystery of Heinrich Mueller was put aside, to be
revived later.
Taken at face value, it would be difficult to imagine a more
astounding recruitment than the KGB managing to enlist the
head of the Gestapo. It was Mueller, after all, who had destroyed
the German Communist partythe most powerful and numerous outside the Soviet Unionwith a ferocity that only his Russian counterpart Beria could have imagined. The German Communists, once several million strong, were hunted down like rats;
they were murdered, or thrown into concentration camps, or
driven into exile. By 1942, the country that was the birthplace of
Karl Marx contained only a few Communists living a precarious
underground existence. At the same time, Mueller's Gestapo
smashed all Soviet intelligence networks in Germany, always regarded by Moscow Center as the most important intelligence
cockpit in all of Western Europe.
The man who made all this happen was a cop, not a trained
counterintelligence agent. Born in Munich in 1900, Mueller
came from a family of typically stolid Bavarian policemen. He
followed the same career path, joining the Munich Police Department in 1919. By 1929, Mueller's steady, if unspectacular, record had brought him to the middle-level position of Criminal
Inspector (the equivalent of first-grade detective in an American
police department). Ironically enough, in the light of later events,
one of Mueller's chief concerns in the post-World War I era was
a small but noisy fringe political movement, the National Socialist
German Workers Party (NSDAP). Calling themselves "Nazis"
from the German acronym of their movement, they were led by
the brothers Gregor and Otto Strasser. The Strassers spouted a
strange blend of right-wing polemics and Socialist doctrines on
state ownership of all industry, but as Mueller reported to his

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SOME MYSTERIES . . .

superiors, they were being supplanted by the party's firebrand,

an ex-soldier named Adolph Hitler.
In Mueller's view, Hitler and his small band of followers were
a bunch of crackpots, not very different from the alphabet soup
of political splinters who existed in the turmoil of post-World War
I Germany. Nevertheless, he kept a close watch on the party, especially after Hitler's abortive putsch in 1923. By 1933, the year
the crackpot of the Munich beer halls became chancellor, Mueller was the world's leading expert on the Nazi movement. His
filesregrettably destroyed by an air raid in 1945contained the
most detailed information on the party and its officials. Mueller
had compiled this information in the process of arresting many
of the Nazis for various crimes, mostly brawling against political
opponents in the streets.
The key to Mueller's personality was his professional detachment. At root, Mueller was apolitical; he was the classic police
hound concerned only with duty. Whether he was investigating
Communists or Nazis, Mueller remained unswayed by the kind
of political convulsions that had torn Germany apart. He was
known within the Munich police as Der treue Heinrich, meaning
that he was the steady, incorruptible ideal of a dedicated cop who
remained impervious to any influencepolitics, money, or otherwise. Mueller followed orders.
For that reason, Mueller assumed he was out of a job in 1933
when the Nazis began to Nazify the German police. Mueller was
not a Nazi party memberor any other political party, for that
matterand had no intention of enrolling in the NSDAP as an
expediency to keep his job, as had many of his fellow cops. To
his surprise, that quintessential Nazi, Reinhard Heydrich, asked
Mueller to stay on and take charge of a new "anti-Soviet section"
within the police force. With the German Communist party about
to be declared illegal, Mueller would hunt down all party members. Additionally, he was informed, he would roll up all the Soviet intelligence networks believed to use German Communists
as assets.
Heydrich's decision infuriated the Nazi Party's old guard,
who complained that Mueller was the cop who had made their
lives miserable in the Munich days. Heydrich ignored the protests, for his choice of Mueller was shrewdly thought out. To begin
with, as Heydrich understood all too well, in a police state like
Nazi Germany, there was a tendency for anyone connected with
that machinery of repression to use the immense power for po-

HEINRICH MUELLER

233

litical advantage. The apolitical Mueller had no political agenda.

Second, the task of eradicating communism from Germany was
a job not for fanatics, but a disapassionate expert. Mueller certainly was that. As he had done with the Nazis, Mueller had built
a huge information bank on the Communists. Moreover, as Heydrich was aware, Mueller had studied the methods of Soviet intelligence, and was considered among Germany's leading experts
on the subject.
Armed with that knowledge, Mueller, put in charge of several dozen agents recruited from among the ranks of the Munich
police, hunted down Communists throughout southern Germany
with the same efficiency he had once demonstrated against the
Nazis. By 1935, the Communists were virtually eliminated. This
accomplishment earned Mueller a big promotion: he was named
to head an entirely new division of the SD, an internal security
agency called the Gestapo.
Mueller was to create in that new agency a tool of repression
that would make its very name a synonym for unchecked state
police power. To a large extent, the Gestapo was a reflection of
Mueller himself; he recruited extensively among the ranks of German police detectives, looking for men who shared his apolitical
views and blind devotion to duty. The Gestapo's approach and
methods were modeled on the KGB, an agency that Mueller
openly admired and often urged his men to emulate.
Within the SD, whose leadership was dominated by Nazified
intellectuals ("gentlemen killers," as the Abwehr sneeringly called
them), Mueller was not a popular figure. He had contempt for
all intellectuals, and once announced, "One really ought to drive
all the intellectuals into a coal mine and then blow it up." For
their part, the SD leaders regarded Mueller as a Neanderthal, a
typical flat-footed Munich cop whose intellectual breadth did not
extend beyond beer and sausages.
This was somewhat of a caricature of the real Mueller, but
there was no denying his narrow vision. A classic authoritarian,
his mind was dominated by the concept of duty. If the state passed
a law, as Nazi Germany did, making mere membership in the
Communist party a capital crime, then Mueller was prepared to
do his duty and round them up. And when the Nazis began to
conquer Europe, Mueller was prepared to send his men into
every corner of occupied Europe to slaughter "enemies of the
state," as defined by the state. He preferred to regard himself as
the implacable master of order. A man with a photographic mem-

234

SOME MYSTERIES . . .

ory who was reputed to know by name every single one of his
several thousand agents, he maintained a huge card file on millions of German citizens, constantly nourished by a KGB-style network of informers he planted in every German institution. (Toward the end of the war, he regretted his inability to finish the
objective of having a data card on every German citizen).
Mueller never made any moral judgments whatsoever; the
state decided who the enemies were, and Mueller dutifully went
after them. Similarly, he felt no compunction about what methods his organization used. The state told him that the enemies of
the state had no rights and that any method was to be used to get
results. Mueller was not a sadist, but he did recruit platoons of
sadists to get the results he wanted in the Gestapo's infamous
torture dungeons.
Known as "Gestapo Mueller" in Germany (to distinguish
him from the many others with this common German surname),
he appeared to be a prototypical Nazi, although few knew he was
not a Nazi Party member. This fact began to cause some rumblings within the government hierarchy; did it make any sense
for Nazi Germany's internal security to be headed by a non-Nazi?
Accordingly, Mueller in 1939 was ordered to join the Nazi Party.
The party, shockingly enough, rejected Mueller's application as
"unfit" for membership. Heinrich Himmler himself had to intervene, ordering party officials to enroll Mueller forthwithor
face imprisonment in a concentration camp.
The incident further worsened relations between Mueller
and the SD leadership, and their chief decided to take a closer
look at the Gestapo head. Walter Schellenberg, a universitytrained lawyer who had taken over the SD after the assassination
of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942, did not like Mueller personally.
But as a student of human nature, he also wondered about where
Mueller's true loyalties lay. To an ever-suspicious Nazi ideologue
like Schellenberg, Mueller's apolitical devotion to duty was a
cause of concern; such a man was just as capable of following
someone else's orders, if circumstances so dictated.
Schellenberg's first faint suspicions began to harden in
1942, when Mueller played a key role in the destruction of the
German branch of Soviet intelligence's Red Orchestra network.
A number of Red Orchestra radios had been captured, and to
Schellenberg's unease, Mueller insisted on keeping some of them
for purposes he did not make clear. Additionally, Schellenberg
learned, Mueller had recruited a top radio expert adept in the

HEINRICH MUELLER

235

art of funkspiel. Why, Schellenberg wondered, would Mueller

need such an expert? The Russians were well aware that the German section of the Red Orchestra had been destroyed, so there
was no possibility of a successful playback of a captured radio;
obviously, Moscow Center would not believe any radio message
from a network it knew to be in the Gestapo's clutches.
Schellenberg retained his own radio expert, and in 1944, he
detected some unexplained signals emanating from Gestapo
headquarters in Berlin eastward, toward a receiving station in
Danzig. These signals, Schellenberg discovered, were in a cipher
none of his experts could solve, leading him to believe that it was
a Soviet one-time pad. If so, what was a radio at the Gestapo headquarters doing communicating in a probable Soviet code to Danzig in far off Poland?
There were other clues that bothered Schellenberg. In early
1944, the Abwehr had lost favor with Hitler, who began breaking
up the agency. As a first step, he assigned its counterintelligence
section to Mueller's Gestapo, which meant that Mueller now had
exclusive control of all German counterintelligence operations.
Coincidentally,
Schellenberg
discovered,
counterintelligence
against Soviet operations came to a halt. Mueller's official explanation was that the Germans had been so brilliantly successful in
destroying Soviet networks, Moscow had in effect given up. But
Schellenberg knew the Russians better than that, so he could only
wonder the unthinkable: was it possible that Mueller, aware as
well as anyone of the inevitability of a German defeat, had
switched to the other side?
More pressing concerns forced Schellenberg to put the
Mueller matter aside for the moment, and by the time he got
around to it again, the war was just about over. Mueller, meanwhile, remained in Berlin until near the very end, when he suddenly disappeared. He was last seen alive on April 29, 1945, at
Hitler's bunker. Subsequendy, other Nazis in Berlin at the time
told investigators that Mueller and an aide had tried to escape
from the besieged city, but were killed by Russian troops in the
attempt and were later buried in a city cemetery.
And there the mystery rested until the startling claims by
returning German prisoners of war in 1953. All their stories had
a common thread: sometime after their capture, they were
marched through the streets of Moscow as part of a propaganda
exercise by the Russians to boost civilian morale. As they marched,

SOME MYSTERIES . . .
they noticed that among the Soviet officials watching them from
a reviewing stand was a man they identified positively as Mueller.
West German intelligence tended to discount these reports,
but before they could close the Mueller file, they began to hear
of other strange reports concerning Mueller, One, from reliable
contacts in Albania, reported that Mueller was in Albania sometime in 1953 as adviser to the Albanian secret police. That same
year, there was another sighting, this one reporting Mueller working in East Germany with the East German secret police. Finally,
to resolve the matter, the West Germans in 1963 decided to disinter the Mueller grave in Berlin and perform an autopsy on the
body. When the grave was opened, the Germans were surprised
to find three bodies in it; none of them proved to be Mueller.
So the story about Mueller's presumed death in Berlin in
1945 turned out be untrue. But what happened to him? The West
Germans never did find out, although there was an occasional,
tantalizing clue. In 1967, for example, two men were arrested for
attempting to break into the house of Mueller's widow. An apparently ordinary enough burglary, but then police discovered
that the two men were attached to the Israeli embassy and were
in fact Mossad agents. What was Mossad trying to learn by breaking
into Mrs. Mueller's house?
The Israelis would not say, and with that, a dark curtain settled over the case of Heinrich Mueller. Neither the Russians nor
any of their Eastern European allies have ever discussed Mueller,
although an East German source told the West Germans some
years ago that he heard Mueller had died in 1948 in East Germany
while serving as an adviser to the secret police.
The truth about what happened to Mueller after 1945 probably never will be known with certainty. Officially, he is wanted
by West Germany for war crimes, so his case technically remains
open. But the prospect that Mueller is still alive is quite remote;
he would be over 90 years old today. That's pretty old, even for a
cop with no political ambitions.

RUDOLF ROESSLER
The Enigma of Lucy
Code Name: LUCY
1897-1962

he regular monthly magazine of Die Entcheidung, a liberal

Catholic organization in Switzerland during the 1930s, was
not exacdy high on the reading list of most Swiss citizens. Packed
with gray columns of dense type, each issue was filled with tedious
essays arguing, often obtusely, assorted political and ecclesiastical
controversies. Aside from the 200-plus members of Die Entsheidung, nobody paid any attention to the publication.
But in 1936, the magazine suddenly became enlivened by
the writings of a new contributor, a German expatriate who
seemed to have an amazing and prescient grasp of events in Germany. His articles in this obscure magazine began to attract attention, for he seemed to know details printed nowhere else:
political maneuverings inside the Nazi hierarchy, economic developments, and, most significant of all, specifics of Hitler's thensecret rearmament program.
The author, Rudolf Roessler, was living in exile in Lucerne,
where he had fled in 1933 after being ousted from his job at a
theatrical publisher for his anti-Nazi views. In terms of appearance, he looked like a typical European intellectual: small and
thin, with thick spectacles, he seemed lost in thought most of the
time. Quiet and introspective, he suffered from asthma, an affliction that made an already-shy man seem even more withdrawn.
However unprepossessing, this mild-mannered man would
later become one of the greatest spies in historyor perhaps he
237

SOME MYSTERIES . . .

Rudolph Roessler (LUCY) arrives at a Swiss court in 1953 for his trial on
espionage charges. (AP Wide World)

wasn't. It is this ambiguity that forms the core of the Roessler

legend.
There was nothing in Roessler's background that suggested
his future notoriety. He was a typical enough example of a type
known as liberal German. Born in Augsburg, he enlisted in the
German army at the outbreak of war in 1914, when he was 17
years old. He managed to survive four years as a combat soldier,
but the experience created in him a permanent aversion to war
and German militarism. A devout Catholic, Roessler resolved to
dedicate his life to eliminating these twin evils.
After the war, Roessler decided to finish his schooling. He
enrolled at the University of Berlin to study law, supporting himself as a journalist. He became part of a circle of similar-minded
Catholic idealists, and one of them, a classmate at the University
of Berlin, was to have a profound effect on Roessler's life.
Xavier Schnieper, a Swiss from a moderately wealthy family,
shared Roessler's concern about the rise of the Nazis. A prominent member of Die Entsheidung back home, Schnieper advised
his friend he had no real future in Germany, so he should emi-

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239

grate to Switzerland. But Roessler decided to soldier on. In 1933,

once he was fired from his job at the theatrical publisher, Roessler
knew he was a marked man. Concluding he was no longer safe
in Germany, he fled to Lucerne at Schnieper's suggestion and set
up a small publishing house called Vita Nova to publish Catholic
literature. He remained in contact, however, with some of his old
similarly-minded friends in Nazi Germany, some of whom had
subsumed their anti-Nazi sentiments to take jobs in various government ministries.
Roessler might have remained the owner of an obscure publishing firm, content to produce works of tortuous philosophical
argument so beloved by Catholic theologians, were it not for a
change in his friend Schnieper's life. In 1939, Schnieper, a reservist in the Swiss army, was called to military service, in the
military intelligence branch. Schnieper told his superior, Major
Hans Hausamann, about Roessler, the German expatriate who
had been writing amazingly accurate articles about developments
in Germany and apparently had a network of old friends in that
country. Hausamann signed up Roessler as an evaluator, meaning
he would analyze all intelligence reports and material from open
sources about Germany, then write evaluations of what it all
portended.
Roessler did not know it, but he was now part of an intricate
intelligence game. Switzerland, in a hopeless strategic position
that allowed it no defense against a German invasion, was determined to maintain its neutrality. To that end, Swiss intelligence
was playing several ends against the middle. It cooperated, to a
degree, with the Germans, but at the same time allowed extensive
British and Soviet intelligence operations on its soil, with the covert understanding that neither the British nor the Russians were
to make those links obvious or carry out any operations that jeopardized Swiss security. The result was an intelligence free-fire
zone, with the intelligence services of a dozen nations running
elaborate operations in Switzerlandall the while the Swiss pretended to know nothing of such operations, although they cooperated in some form with all of them. It was an intelligence
carousel.
The largest and most active intelligence operation in Switzerland at the outbreak of World War II was a large Soviet GRU
network known to the Germans as Rote Drei because it was actually
composed of three separate rings. The most important of these
rings was run by Sandor Rado, a Hungarian Communist and vet-

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eran GRU agent, whose assignment was to gather intelligence on

the German military. Rado was finding it difficult to obtain such
intelligence when he was secretly approached by Hausamann
with an astonishing offer: the Swiss intelligence officer had a German contact with good sources in Germany who could provide
top-grade material to the Soviets on German military developments. Only some of the material was of interest to the Swiss, but
the rest, dealing with German military plans for Eastern Europe,
was obviously of interest to the Soviets.
Rado gratefully accepted the offer, and the intelligence circus in Switzerland had now taken still another new twist. By covertly cooperating with Soviet intelligence, Hausamann had
found a concealed conduit to transmit intelligence on Germany
without antagonizing the Germans. Even if the Germans discovered the leak, there would be no overt connection to Swiss intelligence. Rado enlisted Roessler on a modest monthly retainer for
Rote Drei. Seeking a code name for his new source, he settled on
LUCY, because Roessler was based in Lucerne.
Roessler entered espionage immortality under that code
name. Initially, however, LUCY made Moscow Center extremely
nervous. For one thing, Roessler told Rado he would provide
material to Soviet intelligence only on condition that he would
never have to name his sources. Under ordinary circumstances,
the GRU would never accept any intelligence without knowing
the precise source that could be checked; otherwise, it would be
too easy for the enemy to plant misleading information. The GRU
decided to adopt a wait-and-see attitude for the moment, postponing a final decision on how much to trust LUCY by taking a
look at his early material.
That material turned out to be very good, and it got better
as Roessler began feeding an astonishingly large amount of detailed intelligence. Rado was puzzled: How was this obscure German expatriate publisher obtaining such intelligence? Roessler
would not say directly, but hinted he had old friends in Germany
who had now risen to high positions in the German military command structure and were providing information to a man whose
political sympathies they shared. Occasionally, Roessler would
mention his sources by such personal code names as INGE and
WALTHER.
To Rado, an old hand at the intelligence game, none of this
made any sense. Roessler's intelligence was always very current,
meaning he was receiving it hot off the press, so to speak. Obvi-

RUDOLF ROESSLER

241

ously, as an anti-Nazi expatriate, he could not travel to Germany.

The mails would have been too slow, given the currency of the
material, so only one explanation was possible: Roessler's sources
were radioing intelligence to him. But that seemed unlikely; in
the Nazi police state, where all transmitters were rigidly controlled, would high-level traitors take the risk to stay on the air
for hours at a time to transmit their intelligence?
Rado had no answer for the moment, but the question was
largely academic. Roessler's material kept increasing in volume
and quality, and on June 17, 1941, he rushed to Rado with an
intelligence blockbuster: Germany would invade the Soviet Union within a matter of days. The next day, he had an even bigger
one: a complete order of battle for the invading forces, down to
individual battalions. For good measure, Roessler provided the
code name for the invasion (BARBAROSSA), and the precise
moment when the offensive was scheduled to be launched.
As is now known, this was at least the fifth major intelligence
source providing specific, detailed warning of the German invasion, all of which Stalin ignored. Rado received a waspish message
from Moscow Center warning him not to pass on any further such
"disinformation." But the Center's attitude changed dramatically
on the morning of June 22, when the Germans struck, at the
precise time and in the precise strength Roessler had revealed a
few days before. At that moment, Roessler was elevated to star
intelligence agent, and Rado was ordered to get from him anything he had.
Roessler obliged. In a massive stream that occurred almost
daily, he provided precise intelligence regarding Hitler's orders
governing strategic direction of the German forces, along with
the strength, location, and size of all German units on the Eastern
Front. Even more incredibly, he provided reportswhich appeared to have been obtained right from Abwehr headquarters
on what the German intelligence service was telling Hitler about
Russian positions, strength, and plans. Taken as a whole, it
amounted to a breathtaking intelligence coup; the Russians not
only were being told the precise strength and plans of their enemies, they also were learning of the scope and accuracy of their
opponent's intelligence. Nothing like it had ever been seen before, nor has it been duplicated since.
Eager to keep this golden goose laying eggs, the Russians
did not press Roessler on how he was managing to obtain such
incredible intelligence. As the GRU noted, on some occasions

SOME MYSTERIES . . .

Roessler provided such vital tactical intelligence as German plans

and axes of attack even before German units on the ground received their marching orders. What counted was that Roessler
was invariably accurate. He never hedged a piece of intelligence
with the words "expected" or "perhaps." If Roessler said a certain German Panzer corps would attack at 6 A.M. on a particular
day at a particular place, the Russians learned they could figuratively bet the mortgage that the Panzer unit would do precisely
that. Roessler also provided detailed figures on the actual (as
opposed to the publicly admitted) German losses in men and
equipment.
Rado and Roessler were unaware that the Russians derived
an extra benefit from such detailed intelligence. They were running a large-scale deception operation via Fritz Kauders (MAX).
Told of the German plans, the Soviet deception material could
be tailored more precisely to German preconceptions.
By early 1943, as the tide of war on the Eastern Front started
to turn in the Soviet Union's favorthanks in no small part to
their mysterious source in SwitzerlandRoessler began to report
on secret German preparations for one last, great throw of the
dice in the east. Toward spring, he uncovered some further details: as soon as the weather permitted, the Germans would
launch a tremendous offensive on the Southern Front, near a
town called Kursk. Involving several hundred thousand troops
and the bulk of the German armor, the plan was to punch
through the Russian lines and then trap over a million Soviet
troops in a gigantic double envelopment. Code-named Operation
Zitadelle, it would, if successful, inflict a defeat from which the
Soviet Union might never recover. Additionally, it would restore
German military dominance after the Stalingrad disaster.
Forewarned, the Russians took elaborate measures to defend against the German thrust, while at the same time they formulated plans for a counteroffensive that would envelop the envelopes. In intelligence terms, this was a risky course, since the
sole basis for believing that such a German offensive was in the
offing came from one single spy. But Moscow's faith in LUCY was
now total, and on that basis, the Russians gambled that he was
right.
As things turned out, Roessler, as usual, was absolutely correct. The German offensive began at the time and place he said
it would happen, and as a result, the Russians were waiting. They
built defenses up to 70 miles in depth; bristling with hidden anti-

RUDOLF ROESSLER

243

tank guns and tank hunter-killer teams, they took a devastating

toll of German armor. Within two weeks, the offensive was
smashed, forever breaking German offensive military power on
the Eastern Front. From that moment on, the Germans went on
the defensive, and were never able to go on the attack again. In
a war against a numerically superior foe, that meant certain
defeat.
The Kursk intelligence triumph would be Roessler's last;
shortly after the beaten Germans began to retreat, the Swiss suddenly moved against the Rote Drei networks, arresting all agents
and assets. Rado avoided arrest and went into hiding, while Roessler, officially considered an asset of Swiss intelligence, was left
alone. Although Roessler no longer had a means of sending his
intelligence to Moscow, the fact was that his services were not
really needed. Indeed, since the tide of war had turned on the
Eastern Front irrevocably, there was not much further need for
Rote Drei. Interestingly, just as the network begin to lose much of
its importance, Swiss intelligence chose that moment to close it
down. The Germans, aware from their radio intercepts of the
existence of Rote Drei for quite some time, had been pressuring
the Swiss for more than a year to crack down on the network.
The end of LUCY still left the great mystery unanswered:
How had the shy German publisher managed to collect the most
vital of German military secrets? When asked, Roessler would say
only, "I didn't know who my sources were." Although it was commonly assumed this represented his determination to protect a
network of German traitors who provided information to him,
nearly 30 years would elapse before some vital clues emerged
suggesting that Roessler may have been telling the truth.
The first clue emerged in the stacks of captured German
intelligence records, which revealed that the German radio monitors carefully checked on radio traffic moving from Germany
into Switzerland, known to be the location for major Allied intelligence operations. According to those records, the Germans
found almost no Germany-Switzerland traffic, but a veritable
flood moving from Switzerland eastward. The Germans were puzzled: Obviously, the networks in Switzerland, on the air nearly 24
hours a day, had plenty of material to transmit. Where was it
coming from?
An even more significant clue emerged in the 1970s, when
the first details about the British ULTRA code-breaking operation
became public. Among those details was an interesting fact: early

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SOME MYSTERIES . . .

in 1941, based on their ULTRA decryptions, the British warned

Stalin that Hitler was planning an invasion of the Soviet Union.
That means the British were reading the German high-level military traffic by that time. Further, it is known that the British,
frustrated by Stalin's refusal to believe their intelligence, set
about to find some way of conveying ULTRA intelligence to the
Soviet Union while concealing the source. That job was given to
Claude Dansey of MI6, and it is in Dansey's activities and connections that further clues about LUCY emerge.
Dansey was a close friend of the head of Czechoslovakian
Military Intelligence, Frantisek Moravec. In the 1930s, Moravec
had carried out several significant penetrations of German intelligence, including recruitment of a German communications expert who provided the first keys to the Enigma code-breaking
machine. Moravec turned over this material to Dansey, giving the
initial breaks into the then-unreadable Enigma system. Following
the Munich agreement in 1938, Moravec fled to London, where
Dansey set him up as head of a small intelligence unit for the
Czech government in exile. (In that capacity, Moravec worked
with the British in organizing the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942.)
Moravec maintained a network of good sources who operated in German-occupied Czechoslovakia, southern France, and,
most significantly in the context of the Roessler mystery, Switzerland. For some years, Moravec and Hans Hausamann of Swiss
intelligence had worked as close allies, exchanging intelligence.
Hausamann was also a close ally of Dansey, and when the MI6
spymaster set up his Z Organization, the Swiss began providing
intelligence on the German military. That intelligence was passed
to MI6 via Moravec's chief agent working in Switzerland, Karel
Sedlacek, a veteran Czech agent known as "Uncle Karl."
So by the beginning of 1941, the intelligence pipeline from
London to Switzerland looked something like this: Hausamann
of Swiss intelligence passed material to Sedlacek, who passed it
up the pipeline to his boss Moravec for Dansey. In turn, Dansey
passed material of interest to the Swiss down the pipeline to Moravec, then to Sedlacek, and onward to Hausamann. The elaborateness was necessary to protect Hausamann's delicate position;
at all costs, the Germans had to be convinced that he had no
business with British intelligence. Indeed, to all appearances, he
did not; German agents working in Switzerland kept a surveillance on Hausamann, and reported he had no contact with any

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245

known MI6 agents. They spotted Sedlacek, but all the Germans
knew about him was that he was a businessman with no intelligence connections.
With such a secure pipeline, can it be concluded that Dansey
used the conduit to funnel ULTRA decryptions to the Russians
by way of Hausamann's source, Rudolf Roessler? Dansey, Moravec, Hausamann, and Sedlacek all died without saying, but there
were two final clues which seem to clinch the case for Roessler as
mere pawn in a larger game. One clue came from the Russians,
and the second from Roessler himself.
When the Rote Drei network was rolled up in late 1943, the
Russians took the loss philosophically; all networks eventually
come to the end of their usefulness at some point. But they now
began to wonder about the source of Roessler's remarkable intelligence. Their curiosity centered on two members of Sandor
Rado's network: Rado himself, and Rado's chief radio operator,
Alexander Foote, a British Communist who had been recruited
for Swiss operations by Ruth Kuczynski in 1938. Aware of ULTRA
from information provided by their assets in Britain, primarily
H. A. R. Philby and Anthony Blunt, the Russians began to conclude that LUCY was in fact an elaborate British intelligence operation to feed ULTRA intelligence to the Soviet Union. Moscow
Center found this very worrisome, for if the British fed genuine
intelligence by this source, there was a perfectly good possibility
they also used it to feed disinformation.
To get to the bottom of the problem, Moscow summoned
Foote and Rado. Upon arriving in Moscow, Foote found himself
immediately confronted by GRU suspicions that he had some role
in transmitting "British information." Foote, who personally disliked Rado, said he knew nothing of the source of the material,
and blamed Rado. In turn, Rado* claimed ignorance of the
source of the LUCY material, so that was that.
Whatever questions Moscow still may have had about Roessler were eliminated in 1946 by LUCY himself. During the war,

* Rado, blamed for the breakup of the network, was imprisoned for 10 years in the
Soviet Union. Released in 1956, he returned to his native Hungary, resumed his
prewar profession of cartographer, and died in 1981, professing his unshaken belief
in communism to the end. Foote, readied for a new GRU assignment in South America, defected to the British in 1947. He died of cancer in 1956, but before his death
revealed he knew all along that he was transmitting ULTRA intelligence to Moscow.
He also hinted that he was a double agent for MI6, recruited years before to keep
an eye on Soviet networks in Switzerland.

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Roessler had received about $800 a month from the Russians for
his services, a handsome sum in 1940s-era dollars. He sunk every
cent into his publishing house, but by the end of the war, it was
failing. Desperate for money, Roessler decided to return to espionage. He contacted Karl Sedlacek, who had now switched sides
and was working for the Czechoslovakian Communists. Selacek
signed on Roessler to gather intelligence on American military
dispositions in Germany and waited for the kind of spectacular
material LUCY had once delivered to the GRU.
But there wasn't any; those presumably high-level sources
who had once made LUCY an espionage legend had now disappeared, apparently. Based in Switzerland, the best Roessler could
do was collect some fairly low-level material that the Czechs found
unimpressive. Nevertheless, they kept him on at $400 a month,
hoping for something better.
The better stuff never came. In 1952, Roessler was caught:
He had been sending his intelligence to the Czechs by means of
microfilm concealed in food parcels mailed to a Dusseldorf letterbox. One day, a misaddressed package was opened by the post
office, which found microfilm concealed in jars of honey. Arrested in Switzerland, Roessler was sentenced to a lenient one
year in prison on the grounds that he had committed no espionage against Switzerland. (It helped that his old control Hausamann quietly put in the good word to Swiss authorities.) During
his trial, Roessler insisted that he was not the master spy the media
had made him out to be. He admitted passing intelligence to the
Soviets during the war in the name of helping to defeat Nazi
Germany, but repeated, "I never knew who my sources were."
To the Russians, this chain of circumstances represented final proof that Roessler had worked as a conduit for the British.
Clearly, those fabled "high sources" like INGE and WALTHER
did not exist. Roessler himself refused to shed any light on the
matter, and until his death from cancer in 1962, he preferred to
remain a man of mystery. He continued to publish dense theological treatises, none of which offered any clues to his own motivationsexcept for an interesting emphasis in all the works on
the question of good versus evil. Clearly, LUCY considered himself an expert on the subject.

VITALI YURCHENKO
The Spy Who Changed His Mind
Code Name: ALEX
Alias: Robert Rodman
1935-

n the morning of June 22, 1985, a group of Soviet diplomats,

on a sightseeing stroll around Rome, stopped for refreshments. One of the diplomats, a 50-year-old man with a Fu Manchu
mustache named Vitali Yurchenko announced he was leaving the
group for a short while. "I'll join you later at the embassy," he
told them. "I want to visit the Vatican museums."
But Yurchenko had no intention of seeing Michaelangelo's
masterpieces. He headed straight for the American embassy,
asked to see the security officer, and told him he wanted to defect
to the United States. To the CIA personnel at the Rome embassy,
there was no necessity for Second Secretary Yurchenko to introduce himself, for they understood instantly they had landed a
very big fish indeed: Colonel Vitali Yurchenko, a senior officer of
the KGB's First Directorate.
Given his background, Yurchenko was the kind of defector
counterintelligence officers dream about. One of the KGB's
brightest stars, Yurchenko began his career in the Soviet navy,
which he joined in 1955. He demonstrated the kind of high intelligence and innovative thinking that tends to attract KGB recruiters always on the alert for bright military men, and in 1959
joined the agency. He showed a real aptitude for counterintelligence work, and by 1961 was chief operations officer for KGB
units in the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, with emphasis on protecting
its most advanced warships from prying Western intelligence
247

248

SOME MYSTERIES . . .

Vitaly Yurchenko, one of the KGB's brightest stars, entering the U.S. State
Department after he defected to the U.S. for love of a woman. (UPI/Betteman)

agencies. In 1968, he expanded into foreign intelligence operations, and was assigned to Alexandria, Egypt, under cover of Soviet naval adviser to the Egyptian navy; his real job was to collect
intelligence on the American Navy and other Western navies in
the Meditteranean.
It was his next big posting, in 1975, that brought him to the
attention of American intelligence. He appeared in the Washington, D.C., embassy, the KGB's most important station, as the embassy's security officer. Translated, that meant he was in charge
of keeping an eye on all intelligence and diplomatic personnel
at the embassy and at the same time prevent any CIA or FBI
penetrations. The job put him in the KGB major leagues, and
both the CIA and the FBI spent some effort studying their
adversary.
The first conclusion the Americans reached was that Yurchenko was a first-class KGB counterespionage expert. Sharp and
quick-witted, with a great deal of charm, he seemed to regard the
world most of his waking hours with a slight sardonic smile. But,
the Americans discovered, this exterior concealed a man in some

VITALI YURCHENKO

249

inner turmoil. It was a universal problem that afflicted a certain

number of men: Yurchenko, a married man with two children,
was in love with another woman. To make the situation more
complicated, the object of his affections was married to a Soviet
diplomat.
A very interesting situation, fraught with danger: under KGB
rules, even for a star like Yurchenko, such liaisons were forbidden, especially if they involved the wife of a Soviet diplomat. What
made this situation even more difficult was the fact that the
woman lived in Montreal, where her husband worked. Yurchenko's many trips to Montreal, at first suspected by the FBI as part
of some big cross-border intelligence operation, turned out be
much more prosaic than that, but they raised an interesting question: Was it possible that Yurchenko might consider defecting
with his lady love to a new life in the United States?
Before anyone in the American intelligence community
could figure out how such a defection might be arranged, Yurchenko himself appeared on the American doorstep. As the CIA
anticipated, his first step after defecting was to request a trip to
Canada. Accompanied by a CIA security detail, the spy now codenamed ALEX and travelling under his new American identity of
Robert Rodman arrived in Montreal for a CIA-arranged tryst with
his girlfriend. It was no ordinary tryst, since Yurchenko/Rodman
was to break the news to her that he had defected to the CIA,
and that he wished her to abandon her husband and begin a new
life with Yurchenko in America. But to Yurchenko's shock, she
announced that she was willing to continue the relationship, but
she had no intention of leaving her husband. And as for the idea
of defecting and joining him in the United States, she flatly told
him he was crazy.
The news put Yurchenko into something of a tailspin, and
cast a pall over the next stage in his life, which was to sit through
hours and days of debriefings while the CIA emptied his head.
In that role, despite his obvious personal turmoil, Yurchenko was
nothing short of sensational. Given his position, he not only knew
about all ongoing KGB operations in the United States, he also
knew a great deal about all other KGB operations.
As the CIA understood, it could not have hoped for a KGB
source as well placed as Yurchenko. In 1980, he had completed
a five-year tour in Washington, and was promoted to head Department K (counterespionage) in the First Chief Directorate,
the KGB's most important division, which handled foreign intel-

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SOME MYSTERIES . . .

ligence operations. By early 1985, he was deputy chief of the First

Department (United States and Canada) in the First Chief Directorate. In that post, he not only knew the identities of all KGB
agents assigned to the Soviet embassy, he was also aware of the
identities of their assets. In that latter group, Yurchenko revealed
two names that were to cause severe shock throughout the entire
American military and intelligence establishment.
The gravest shock was Yurchenko's revelation that the National Security Agency (NSA), the most secret component of the
American intelligence empire, had been penetrated by the KGB
through recruitment of a former employee. Actually, Yurchenko
said, it was not really a recruitment, for the former employee had
contacted the KGB at the Washington embassy in January 1980,
and offered to sell whatever he knew. It turned out that the former employee, Ronald W. Pelton, knew a great deal about his exemployer, which handles all American code-breaking and overseas electronic intercept operations. Over the next five years,
until blown by Yurchenko, he was to singlehandedly destroy virtually all NSA operations involving the Soviet Union. He revealed
to his KGB handlers precisely what the NSA knew about Soviet
signals and cipher systems, the precise NSA technology used to
detect those signals, the extent of American success in solving
Soviet ciphers, and, most damaging of all, something called IVY
BELLS. This deepest American intelligence secret involved an
amazing technological feat: American submarines had planted
sophisticated underwater devices near Soviet underseas cables
that carried communications. The devices recorded all transmissions moving over those presumed secure lines, then transmitted
the results to passing overhead satellites. The Russians, assuming
the underseas cables were safe, made no effort to scramble or
otherwise protect what was transmitted over those lines.
The next revelation caused even more shock: CIA operations in the Soviet Union had been compromised. The KGB asset
in this case was another walk-in, Edward Lee Howard, who in
1983, following training for work in the agency's sensitive Moscow
station, was blocked from taking the appointment when a CIA
polygraph test turned up indications of drug use and petty theft.
Subsequendy fired from the agency, Howard contacted the Soviet
embassy and offered to sell secrets about CIA operations in the
Soviet Union. His information turned out to be highly damaging
to the CIA: at least six CIA assets were rounded up and executed,
and CIA operations came to a virtual standstill. For good mea-

VITALI YURCHENKO

251

sure, Howard revealed to the Soviets the names of all CIA agents
working under diplomatic cover in the American embassy.
Yurchenko's revelations concerning Pelton and Howard destroyed, in one swoop, two of the most important assets the KGB
ever had in the United States. During the next few weeks of his
debriefing, Yurchenko was to cause even further damage. He revealed that Hans Tiedge, head of the West German counterintelligence agency, the BfV, was a long-time KGB mole, along with
three other West German government officials (all of them fled
to East Germany the moment they heard that Yurchenko had
defected). He also revealed that the KGB had a mole inside the
Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service.
This growing roster of severe damage to the KGB raised the
question: why was Yurchenko doing all this? That question would
never be satisfactorily answered. To his American handlers, Yurchenko never betrayed either of the two classic motives for defection: disgust with his nation's political system, or thwarted career ambitions. Yurchenko was a nominal Communist, but did
not demonstrate any especially deep political convictions; if anything, he was apolitical. And certainly he had no career problems
in the KGB, since he had already achieved lofty posts, with only
promise of greater rewards and promotions ahead. In terms of
the Cold War struggle, Yurchenko seemed to regard it all as a
game; he laughingly told his CIA debriefers about running the
KGB's "nightcrawler" operation in Washington, when KGB
agents were assigned to prowl nightclubs and bars to recruit U.S.
government employees who seemed too partial to drink, drugs,
or sex.
The lack of real motive for defecting led at least one group
of CIA officials to believe that Yurchenko was a KGB plant, assigned to infiltrate the CIA. This faction explained away Yurchenko's revelations by arguing these were probably all discards, assets
whose usefulness would expire at some point anyway. The problem with the theory, of course, was that it did not explain why the
KGB would forfeit so many of its greatest assets simply to bolster
Yurchenko in the hopes that some day he might join the CIA and
get access to high-grade intelligence.
The more likely theory was that Yurchenko, emotionally
torn apart by his love affair with the diplomat's wife, had made a
spur of the moment decision, however fatuous, that he and his
love could somehow walk away from their awkward marital arrangements and begin a whole new life in America.

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Whatever Yurchenko's real motives, the CIA proceeded to

complicate things further with several serious errors. The worst
mistake was then-CIA Director William Casey's decision to bolster
the agency's sagging imagethe Iran-Contra mess was just then
exploding into public scandalby leaking word of Yurchenko's
defection. Yurchenko was appalled, and a subsequent meeting
with Casey himself didn't help matters. Notorious for his New
York West Side accent nearly indecipherable to anyone not born
in that area, Casey befuddled Yurchenko, who was fluent in English. He was further put off by Casey's virulent anticommunism.
To worsen things, the CIA, known for its inept handling of
KGB defectors, mishandled Yurchenko. Some of its agents began
to condescend to him, and others openly mocked the love of his
life, the diplomat's wife in Canada. Spending his time in a Virginia safe house, Yurchenko was further upset when he saw his
name bandied about in television news reports. At some point,
he snapped, for on the night of November 2, 1985, taken to a
Washington restaurant for dinner with two CIA escorts, Yurchenko casually asked what the CIA would do if he simply got up
and left the restaurant. When the flustered agents said they weren't sure, Yurchenko got up from the table and casually walked
out of the restaurant, went down the street four blocks, and
walked into the Soviet embassy.
What happened next represented what was undoubtedly the
oddest spy soap opera in the entire history of Cold War espionage. Two days after his return, the Soviet embassy held a press
conference, with Yurchenko the star. He claimed that he had
been kidnapped and drugged by the CIA and forced into making
statements about the KGB. He had finally "escaped" from the
CIA, he said.
It was an operational disaster for the CIA, whose officials
had to endure hours of being raked over the coals in closed-door
sessions of congressional committees curious how the agency
somehow had managed to lose one of the most valuable defectors
in its history. One result of all this was a revamped American
intelligence
program for
handling
future
defectors,
which
amounted to something like locking the stable door after the
horse has bolted.
Back in Moscow, meanwhile, Yurchenko seemed to be having a wonderful time. Despite CIA leaks to the media that he had
been executed once he returned to the Soviet Union, he turned
out to be very much alive, happily granting interviews to reporters

VITALI YURCHENKO

253

about the "stupid" CIA. He claimed to know nothing about Pelton or Howard*or any other KGB asset he had blown, for that
matter.
Given Yurchenko's apparently free existence in Moscow,
what, then, was the truth of his appearance at the American embassy in Rome only a few months before? Only Yurchenko really
knows if he was a genuine defector, but the circumstantial evidence seems quite strong that he was not a deliberate KGB plant.
As for his later denials that he ever gave the CIA any significant
intelligence, that assertion again is contradicted by the evidence
at hand. Plant or not, the fact is that Yurchenko severely damaged
the KGB; his revelation of more than a dozen of its most important overseas assets represents an intelligence disaster of the first
magnitude.
These days, Yurchenko, still apparently working for the KGB,
is best known within that agency for his impression of William
Casey, complete with mumble. KGB officials swear it's hilarious.

* Confronted by FBI agents brandishing Yurchenko's revelation, Pelton confessed

and was sentenced to life in prison. Then 44, he said he approached the KGB after
finding it impossible to support a mistress on his $24,500 annual government salary.
He got $35,000 from the KGB, a bargain for the Soviets. Howard, 41, fled to the
Soviet Union, leaving behind $10,000 buried behind his house and $150,000 in a
Swiss bank account. Today, he lives outside of Moscow on a KGB stipend.

NIKOLAI ARTAMANOV
The Double Agent Who Wasn't
Alias: Nicholas Shadrin
1936-1975 (?)

or the seafarers along the Swedish coast who had a healthy

respect for the vagaries and furies of the Baltic Sea, the feat
was extraordinary. Sailing only with a compass, the man and his
wife somehow had managed to steer a small boat through stormy
seas across the Baltic from Poland to Sweden.
The voyage of Soviet naval captain Nikolai Artamanov and
his Polish wife Eva in June 1959, was the talk of Sweden for
months. Descendants of Vikings who admire seafaring feats, the
Swedes marveled how Artamanov, determined to escape from a
repressive regime and find freedom in the West, contrived to
obtain a boat, which he then piloted to Sweden several hundred
miles away, avoiding Polish and Soviet patrol boats.
Informed of Artamanov's defection, American authorities
indicated immediate interest in having him come to the United
States. Their interest focused on what Artamanov might be able
to tell them about the Soviet navy, then undergoing a large-scale
buildup. Artamanov was moved to Washington, D.C., given a new
identity as Nicholas Shadrin, and hired as a consultant to the
Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) to fill in the agency's blanks
about Soviet naval technology and tactics.
On the face of it, all of this seemed a fairly ordinary Cold
War defection case, with modest intelligence overtones. But it
ultimately would develop into an extraordinarily complex espionage puzzle, with enough twists and turns to rival any Le Carre
254

NIKOLAI ARTAMANOV

255

plot. Even decades later, only part of the full truth has emerged;
the rest may never be known.
By 1960, when Artamanov was settled in the United States
and busy at work with ONI, the brief flurry of world attention on
his flight to freedom had subsided. The new American citizen
named Nicholas Shadrin seemed like any other government employee, commuting each day from his modest Maryland home.
Meanwhile, his wife was studying to qualify for an American
dentistry license. But there were two agencies that had not forgotten him.
At the CIA, there were some in the agency's counterintelligence division who had a continuing interest in the case of Nikolai Artamanov. Concerned about Soviet penetration of U.S. intelligence, they had ongoing suspicions about the Soviet naval
captain. To these suspicious minds, Shadrin's dramatic flight
across the Baltic was less than it appeared; they had carefully
checked and rechecked the route, a bit of backtracking that convinced them Shadrin's story was a lie. They began to suspect that
Shadrin in fact had been planted, for what purpose at the moment seemed obscure. Perhaps, it was speculated, the KGB hoped
he would rise to a high level in ONI, in a position to provide some
top-grade intelligence. Meanwhile, the KGB also had a continuing interest in Shadrin. The reason for that interest is not known,
but the KGB ordered its agents in the United States to find out
where he was, under which new identity he was now living, and
for which government agency he might be working.
No overt move was made until June 1966, when a very puzzling event took place. Then-CIA director Richard Helms, playing
golf one Sunday morning at a Washington country club, got a
phone call from a man named Igor Kochnov, who said he wanted
to meet CIA officials for a "very important matter." Kochnov was
instantly recognizable to the CIA: at the time, he was a senior
KGB officer, stationed under diplomatic cover in the Soviet embassy. He was head of counterintelligence for the KGB station at
the embassy, assigned the job of guarding against CIA and FBI
penetration, but that was only part of his interesting background.
He also happened to be the son-in-law of Yazkaternina Furtseva,
the Soviet Minister of Culture, one of the most powerful figures
in the entire Soviet political hierarchy (and the reputed mistress
of Nikita Khrushchev). Additionally, his father-in-law was a close
friend of Yuri Andropov, a future KGB chief.

256

SOME MYSTERIES . . .

All in all, an interesting character who promised to pay dividends if he could be recruited by the CIAassuming, of course,
that that was the point of his strange call to Helms. In a subsequent meeting with several CIA senior agents, Kochnov offered
his services by means of a curious package deal. Essentially, Kochnov offered to become a CIA source who claimed he could
provide information on KGB penetration of the agency. He said
that he had been assigned by the KGB to locate Shadrin and
convert him into a double agent; if the CIA would help him in
this task, Kochnov said, then his stock would be boosted in the
KGB, allowing him even greater access for the kind of material
he could pass on to the CIA.
Taken as a whole, this was a very odd offer, but after an
acrimonious internal debate, during which some CIA officials argued that Kochnov unquestionably was a KGB plant, it was decided that the CIA would accept it. Accordingly, Shadrin was approached and asked to volunteer to serve as a fake double agent.
Some time later, he was approached by a KGB agent. So far so
good: the KGB had taken the bait.
Given some low-grade material (known as "chicken feed"
in the espionage trade) to keep the KGB's interest active, Shadrin
played his role as Soviet defector who had become disillusioned
with the United States and was now willing to help the Motherland, with the eventual hope of returning. Kochnov, meanwhile,
working under his new CIA code name KITTY HAWK, had begun
feeding out his own material to the CIA, which turned out to be
equally low-grade. By October of 1966, Kochnov's tour in the
United States was over, and he returned to Moscow, where he was
promoted and detailed to the International Atomic Energy
Agency, assigned the task of escorting (for which read keeping
tabs on) Soviet delegates. For the next several years, there were
only occasional brush contacts between KITTY HAWK and CIA
agents in Moscow.
This intelligence minuet continued through 1971, when
Shadrin was sent by the KGB to Czechoslovakia to receive special
training in the operation of several high-tech spy communications devices, including a burst transmitter. The growing effort
by the KGB connected with Shadrin seemed to indicate the agency's full confidence in his bona fides. That faith was further underscored in 1975, when the KGB asked Shadrin to go to Vienna
for a high-level meeting with senior KGB officials. Vienna, the
fulcrum point of East-West espionage, was the KGB's favorite ren-

NIKOLAI ARTAMANOV

257

dezvous site for its most important meetings with its top Western
assets. The CIA, sensing a breakthrough, approved the plan for
Shadrin to go to Vienna.
On December 17, Shadrin, accompanied by his wife, arrived
in Vienna. The following day, he met with two KGB senior officers, who told him there would be a "very important" meeting
with even more senior KGB officials on the 20th. Concerned that
KGB countersurveillance teams might spot any CIA attempts to
keep a watch on the meeting (which would reveal that Shadrin
was under CIA control), the CIA decided to let Shadrin attend
the meeting alone. On the night of December 20, Shadrin was
met by two KGB agents in front of a church; all three men drove
off in a dark sedan. Hours went by, with no word from Shadrin.
His wife sat by the telephone in their hotel room, vainly waiting
for the call her husband promised to make as soon as his "brief
business" was concluded.
By the time 24 hours had passed, Mrs. Shadrin was a nervous
wreck. A female CIA agent came to stay with her, but attempts to
calm Mrs. Shadrin were futile. Four days later, it was clear that
Shadrin, wherever he was, was not coming back. He had disappeared off the face of the earth.
There was no end of theories on what might have happened.
One CIA faction argued that Shardrin had been a KGB plant all
along, and had now returned to Moscow once the game was over.
Another faction argued that the KGB somehow had discovered
his role as a double agent; he had been kidnapped and taken to
the Soviet Union. KITTY HAWK was of no help; he claimed only
to have actually set up the meeting and claimed to have no knowledge of what happened afterward.
And there the matter rested for the next decade. Kochnov,
identified in a magazine story giving some of the bare details of
the Shadrin case, was warned before publication by the CIA. He
suddenly disappeared from his Moscow office and has not been
seen since. In the interim, despite a number of defectors from
the Soviet Union, no one had any insight into what happened to
Shadrin.
That changed in 1985, when Vitali Yurchenko defected.
Among his first revelations to the CIA was the fate of Nicholas
Shadrin. According to Yurchenko, the KGB plan was to drug
Shadrin and take him to Moscow, but one of the agents involved
in the operation injected him with too much of the knockout
drug, and Shadrin died on the spot.

258

SOME MYSTERIES . . .

On October 27, 1985, two FBI agents appeared at the door

of Mrs. Shadrin and informed her that her husband, missing for
the past decade, was now confirmed dead "beyond reasonable
doubt." But of course there was still plenty of doubt. Three years
after this supposedly final verdict, a Soviet source told the CIA
that Shadrin was very much alive, having been spotted at the
funeral of Admiral Sergei Gorshkov, head of the Russian navy.
So was the original Artamanov/Shadrin defection some sort
of elaborate KGB operation to plant a source in American intelligence who would mislead the Americans about Soviet naval capability? Or was the CIA source mistaken about seeing Shadrin
three years after his presumed death? Was Yurchenko wrong (or
possibly passing along KGB disinformation) when he reported
Shadrin's fate? Was Igor Kochnov, KITTY HAWK, a KGB plant?
At the moment, no resolution of these lingering mysteries
is possible, for they represent the classic "wilderness of mirrors"
effect of certain intelligence operations where all the lines between truth and untruth have been hopelessly blurred. But one
thing does remain clear: as a result of the Shadrin case, the CIA
abandoned the idea that it could play the KGB's kind of intricate
double and triple agent games so popular with spy novelists. The
KGB operated in a very different kind of world, where the notion of sacrificing, say, a Shadrin was routinely justified in the
name of operational necessity. But in a democracy, Shadrin was
a tragedy.

. . . AND A FEW
CURIOSITIES

ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Papa's Crook Factory
1899-1961

owever much respect he had for the abilities and talent of

one of his prime assets, U.S. Marine Corps Colonel John W.
Thomason Jr. of the Office of Naval Intelligence had to tell him
that in this case, he was completely wrong. "No, not possible,"
he said to Ernest Hemingway. "There is absolutely no possibility
that the Japanese Navy would be so foolish as to take on the
United States Navy. That would be suicide, and the Japanese are
not stupid people."
Hemingway strongly disagreed, but did not argue further.
After all, Thomason was a highly decorated officer of 20 years
experience, the last 10 spent in ONI. If Thomason said there was
no possibility that the Japanese would attack the United States,
then he was a man who presumably knew; he was the professional,
while Hemingway was just an amateur spy. Still, Hemingway was
bothered; everything he had heard that spring of 1941 during a
trip through the Far East pointed in the direction of an imminent
Japanese attack against the U.S. Navy.
The attack on Pearl Harbor some months later was to prove
Hemingway right, but he never mentioned or wrote about this
phase of his life. Nor did the dozens of other Americans who,
like Hemingway, were recruited before World War II to serve as
amateur spies for their country stricdy out of patriotism. In those
simpler times, they saw nothing wrong with combining professonal duties and intelligence-gathering for America's tiny espio260

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

261

In a 1947 ceremony that infuriated FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Ernest

Hemingway is awarded a Bronze Star by the U.S. military attache in Havana
for unspecified "meritorious war service." (AP/Wide World)

nage establishment.* Indeed, they amounted to America's real

intelligence capability, such as it was.
To a certain extent, Hemingway's willingness to do some
amateur spying for his country stemmed from his considerable
ego. He fancied himself a superspy, a role he began to assume
during his travels in Spain during the Civil War. Romantically
attached to the world of intrigue he encountered in the spy-infested capital of Madrid, Hemingway passed on snippets of intelligence to his friends in ONI. It was low-scale stuff, but Hemingway later was to claim he had invented the term "fifth column,"
supposedly representing an enemy's invisible column of spies
* This disparate group ranged from journalist John Franklin Carter to financiers
Winthrop Aldrich and Nelson Rockefeller and lawyers David K. Bruce and William
Donovan (later head of the OSS). Some of the volunteer amateurs were organized
into an informal intelligence agency called The Room, headed by financier Vincent
Astor, that reported directly to President Roosevelt. Astor, a director of Western
Union, covertly provided copies of foreign embassies' coded telegrams to American
codebreakers.

262

. . . AND A FEW CURIOSITIES

moving ahead of an army's conventional four columns in march.

He even wrote a play, The Fifth Column, whose main character, a
master spy, was a thinly-veiled portrait of the playwright himself.
Later, Hemingway was asked by Thomason of ONI, an old
friend, to provide whatever intelligence he might encounter during his worldwide travels. Thomason was appreciative of the intelligence his most famous asset provided, but he learned to be
patient every time Hemingway came to Washington to be debriefed, for the author insisted on adding seemingly interminable
analyses of what he thought the intelligence meant. Usually, Hemingway's conclusions were wrong, although there were exceptionssuch as his deduction early in 1941 that the Japanese were
about to strike the United States.
Hemingway was not happy to have that intelligence ignored,
so he broke off contact with ONI and sulked in his Havana villa,
Finca Vigia. Still eager to perform his patriotic duty (at age 42 he
was too old for military service), he went looking for some kind
of spying he could perform. He thought he had found it among
the several hundred thousand Spanish refugees who had fled to
the island after the end of the Spanish Civil War. As he subsequently told his friend Spruille Braden, then U.S. ambassador to
Cuba, there were at least 20,000 Fascist sympathizers among those
refugees, a large "fifth column" lying in wait for the signal from
Berlin to rise up and take over the island. Moreover, Hemingway
claimed, he had learned the Fascists were working closely with
German U-boats prowling offshore.
The otherwise sophisticated Braden believed this nonsense,
and enlisted Hemingway, on behalf of State Department Intelligence, to retain a network of Spanish refugees he trusted. They
would ferret out the Fascists among the refugees, while at the
same time Hemingway would select several of them for a daring
operation to hunt down U-boats, which would involve use of
Hemingway's famous 40-foot fishing boat, the Pilar. Hemingway
recruited a network of 26 motley types that amounted to the
dregs of Cubagunrunners, pimps, whores, bartenders, playboys, gamblers, and a few drinking buddies of the author. Paid
modest sums for their trouble, they were collectively called by
Hemingway "Papa's Crook Factory" after his favorite nickname.
"Papa's Crook Factory" would make no contribution to the
world of espionage, but it did unwittingly play a role in an important decision by American intelligence: mainly because of
Hemingway and his network, it was firmly resolved that no ama-

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

263

teur would ever be recruited again for any important intelligence

operation. Given the record of the "crook factory," there is little
doubt why that decision was made.
It was not long before all of Cuba knew of the "crook factory," mainly because none of its members could stop boasting
about it. Hemingway himself directed operations from atop a
stool in his favorite headquarters, the Floradita Bar, and although
much time was spent over Cuba Litres discussing various schemes,
there wasn't much intelligence collection going on. As for the Uboats, Hemingway and a crew sailed out regularly aboard the Pilar
to bring the German underseas navy to its knees, but never
seemed to find any submarines. This was a disappointment to two
of the crew, aging Basque jai-alai players who were assigned the
task of heaving an explosive into the conning tower of a U-boat
when it surfaced near the Pilar.
News of these shenanigans soon reached the legal attache
at the U.S. embassy, FBI Special Agent Raymond G. Leddy. Under
the then-existing arrangements in American intelligence, the FBI
had responsibility for all espionage and counterespionage operations in Latin America, South America, and the Caribbean.
Thus, Leddy was in fact chief of station for Cuba, and he was not
enthused by what he saw of "Papa's Crook Factory." He was even
less enthused when Hemingway one night introduced him at a
diplomatic party as "Mr. Gestapo."
Leddy wasted no time informing J. Edgar Hoover, who in
turn went to the State Department to get Hemingway closed
down. Cuba, argued Hoover, was a very important area of intelligence interest; given its crucial postion athwart major shipping
lanes, the island obviously would be a target of strong interest to
the Germans. The last thing the FBI needed in Cuba was an amateur crashing around the island like a bull in a china shop. And
the idea of Hemingway taking on U-boats from his fishing boat
was ridiculous; how could the embassy in Havana justify giving
him gas from its precious stocks for such nonsense? Hoover concluded, correctly, that Hemingway had dreamed up the whole Uboat idea merely as a way of getting rationed gas to continue his
regular fishing trips with his cronies. Leddy had a boatload of
agents trailing the Pilar during those trips; as far as the FBI agents
could determine, Hemingway and his cronies were spending all
their time fishing and drinking. Hoover was even more infuriated to learn that the embassy was paying Hemingway $1,000 a

264

. . . AND A FEW CURIOSITIES

month to dispense to the rabble he had recruited for the "crook

factory."
Hoover's protests were ignored by the State Department.
Leddy reported, to Hoover's growing fury, that the Pilar, thanks
to Braden's largesse, was now equipped with a powerful radio, a
brace of .50-caliber machine guns, and a collection of small arms
to do battleor so Hemingway saidwith the U-boats. Near the
stern was a huge explosive device that the two old jai-alai players
somehow were supposed to toss inside a U-boat conning tower,
which would have been quite a feat in rolling seas, even assuming
the German submarine would have conveniently surfaced a few
feet from the fishing boat.
Hoover continued to protest, and finally the State Department began to waver. Braden, the ambassador in Havana, was
compelled to admit that Hemingway's network had not produced
one single item of useable intelligence, and the Pilar, for all the
gallons of gas it was consuming, had not even seen a submarine,
much less gotten close enough to blow it up. At last, Braden gave
in: in April 1943, he ordered all support cut off for "Papa's Crook
Factory."
Hemingway carried on for another few months, but his amateurs could produce nothing in the way of intelligence. With the
remaining stocks of gasoline he had on hand, he took the Pilar
out for one last cruise for the duration of the war, a long trip that
turned out to involve an epic battle to land the biggest marlin
Hemingway had ever seen. A few months later, offered a magazine assignment to cover the war in Europe, he closed Finca Vigia
and threw a huge three-day party to bid farewell. The party reportedly put a severe crimp in the available supplies of liquor on
the island. Pointedly, Leddy of the FBI was not invited.
History later took some strange turns in the Hemingway
story. After the war, when American intelligence was transformed
into a large centralized bureaucracy using professional agents,
the opera bouffe known as "Papa's Crook Factory" underscored
arguments that in a newly dangerous world, the United States
could no longer afford to use amateurs in the spy game.
Hoover, noted for his long memory (and vindictiveness),
never forgave Hemingway; until the novelist's suicide in 1961, he
was kept under FBI surveillance, an operation that created tens
of thousands of pages of reports on every aspect of his life. Later
revelations of such spying operations led to new laws severely restricting the FBI's scope in this area. In the process, there was

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

265

extensive public airing of the FBI's dirty linenmassive (and illegal) domestic spying operations that ultimately were to drastically revise Hoover's reputation downward.
If the lesson of the "crook factory" for American intelligence was a determination never to repeat the experience, Hemingway learned quite something else. That final voyage of the
Pilar in 1943, including the epic battle with the giant marlin, led
to the plot for his novel, The Old Man and the Sea, which won for
Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature. The award was duly
noted in Hemingway's FBI file without comment. Apparendy,
Hoover was not impressed.

GRAHAM GREENE
Our Man in Havana
Code Name: 59200
1905-1991

rying not to look too bored, the distinguished writer sat in a

classroom full of other equally bored intellectuals listening
to a lecture on the intricacies of invisible inks. It was not exactly
what Graham Greene hoped for, but in that dark year of 1941,
he had volunteered to do whatever he could to help his country.
His resolve was now being tested.
Medically disqualified from active service, the 36-year-old author at the outbreak of war had joined the Ministry of Information. He was dissatisfied with the desk job, and yearning to be
more actively engaged in the war, heeded a suggestion from his
sister Elisabeth, who worked for MI6, that his talents would be
put to better (and more exciting) use in the agency. Assuming
that the real world of MI6 was like the fictional world of his novels,
Greene happily applied to the agency. It was a decision both sides
would come to regret.
As was the custom those days in the old boy network that
was MI6, Greene had no trouble surviving the agency's laughable
security check. Despite the fact that he had been a member of
the Communist party during his student days at Oxford, Greene
encountered no problems with his background. What counted
was his acquaintance with everyone worth knowing in the establishment, the fact that he had a sister in MI6, and, for good measure, his close personal friendship with an MI6 official named
H. A. R. Philby.
266

GRAHAM GREENE

267

Novelist and former MI6 agent Graham Greene. (AP/Wide World)

Greene was among a number of intellectuals who were recruited for MI6. The agency's officials tended to distrust such
types, but under wartime pressure to increase the agent ranks,
they were willing to bend their convictions a little bit. But they
would go only so far; they decided that the intellectuals would be
given a special, condensed MI6 training course instead of the
regular MI6 regimen, then assigned to quiet corners of the world
where they wouldn't get in the way.
Accordingly, Greene found himself in that abbreviated MI6
training course listening to an apparently endless dissertation
from some elderly MI6 veteran on the esoterica of invisible inks.
Like Greene, the other intellectualsamong them such glitterati
as Malcolm Muggeridgefound the lecture pointless; did MI6
expect its agents to carry around jars of invisible ink to write
letters to London headquarters, as though this was still the time
of Mata Hari? At one point, a student asked the instructor what
they should do in the event that the supply of invisible ink ran
out. No problem, the instructor replied, naming a number of
"temporary expedients," among which, Greene remembered

268

. . . AND A FEW CURIOSITIES

later, was a disgusting formula involving human saliva and pigeon

droppings.
The course completed, Greene was assigned to one of the
real out of the way MI6 stations, in Freetown, Sierra Leone. To
describe this tiny African nation as a sleepy outpost would be to
exaggerate its general importance; as Greene discovered, Freetown had all the excitement and glamour of a turtle race. Nevertheless, it overlooked the important shipping lanes along the
African coast, and thus MI6 wanted somebody there to keep an
eye on any attempts by the Germans to spy on the passing convoys
and convey that intelligence to lurking U-boats.
Any idea Greene may have had that his assignment would
involve skullduggery in dark alleys and other such esoterica of
spy novels was quickly disabused by the reality of the spy game in
Freetown. Thanks to the ULTRA code-breaking operation, the
British had broken the Abwehr's ciphers. Therefore, they could
read the messages dispatching agents to various places, along with
their reports once they arrived. Greene's function was merely to
arrange for the expulsion of German agents or their assets once
they were detected by ULTRA.
Not a very exciting or action-packed existence, and Greene,
to the annoyance of his superiors in London, began to relieve
the boredom with a number of pranks. Under cover as an inspector with the British Board of Trade in Freetown, Greene filled
his reports with obscure literary allusions, puns, wordplays, and
occasional chunks of quotations from novels. Once, when summoned to a meeting that he was unable to attend, Greene cabled
headquarters, AS THE CHIEF EUNUCH SAID, I CANNOT
REPEAT CANNOT COME. As usual, Greene signed the message
with his code name of 59200, but on other occasions would sign
himself with the names of various characters from classic novels.
Greene's escapades drew warnings of growing sternness
from MI6 headquarters, but Greene paid no attention. To the
exasperation of headquarters, Greene was just one of the troublesome intellectual recruits who tended to question all orders,
mock some of the more hoary of MI6 traditions, and devise assorted games and spoofs to relieve the boredom of their assignments. They drove MI6 headquarters nuts.
By 1944, when the German U-boat threat had passed and
Greene had virtually nothing to do, he arranged to be transferred
to the Foreign Office Intelligence Department. MI6 let him go
with a sigh of relief; then in the process of shedding its trouble-

GRAHAM GREENE

269

some intellectuals, the agency made a solemn vow never again to

hire such types as agents.
Greene later was to recall his wartime MI6 service with a
shudder, and he would get his revenge two decades after the war
by writing the classic satire of MI6, Our Man in Havana. Later a
brilliant film with Alec Guinness, the best-selling novel of a British
vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana who is recruited by MI6
struck its British readers as hysterically funny, but MI6 wasn't
laughing. In fact, the British intelligence establishment was so
infuriated, there were serious plans afoot to charge Greene with
offenses under Britain's Official Secrets Act. Wiser heads finally
prevailed, noting that the prospect of arguing in court that the
bumbling MI6 officials in the novel violated security could only
convince people that such caricatures were true. Plans for any
prosecution were dropped.
In subsequent years, Greene and MI6 would come to an
understanding of sorts. As the older generation in MI6 passed
on, their successors took a mellower view of the former MI6 agent
who had made a laughingstock of the agency. Greene even developed a close friendship with one of its brightest stars (and
eventual chief), Maurice Oldfield, who made it a point to say how
much he enjoyed Greene's "entertainments," as the author preferred to call his novels of spies and intrigues. His favorite, Oldfield would say with a twinkle in his eye, was Our Man in Havana.

GIOVANNI MONTINI
The Pope as Spy
1897-1978

ike many intelligence operations, it began quietly enough.

Vincent Scamporini, the chief of station for the OSS outpost
in newly-liberated Rome during 1944, reported receiving a piece
of intelligence that showed great promise, provided the OSS was
prepared to pay its bearer $125 a month.
A pretty handsome sum in 1944 dollars, and senior OSS
officials in Washington thought long and hard before finally
agreeing to pay the money. The recipient, known in OSS cable
traffic as VESSEL, was promising good value for the money. He
claimed to have a pipeline into the highest levels of the Vatican
that among other things had access to secret conversations between the Japanese representative to the Holy See and Vatican
officials, including Pope Pius XII. The Japanese representative,
VESSEL said, was sounding out Vatican officals on various peace
formulas that Tokyo hoped would lead to some sort of negotiated
peace settlement with the United States. VESSEL claimed the Japanese were seeking to avoid an American invasion of the home
islands that, however costly in American lives, would destroy Japan as a modern industrialized society.
With the OSS decision to buy the VESSEL intelligence, a
series of consequences were set in motion that no one involved
in the operation could have anticipated. Like the ripples from a
rock thrown into a pond, VESSEL set off shock waves in every
direction. In no particular order, they included one of the biggest
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mass surrenders in history, a huge covert action program that

prevented a Western European nation from becoming a Communist satellite, and the recruitment of a Pope as an asset for
American intelligence.
To understand how all this came about, it is first necessary
to take a look at the man who stood at the epicenter of the explosion VESSEL set off, Giovanni Battista Montinior, as history
more commonly records him, Pope Paul VI.
Born in 1897 of upper-class parents, Montini as a teenager
decided on the priesthood. However, unlike most of the other
Italian boys who had decided on the same calling, Montini very
early on demonstrated a striking ability for organization and administration; following his ordination in 1920, he was drafted for
the Vatican bureaucracy. By 1937, a meteoric career had taken
him to the post of Undersecretary of State for Ordinary Affairs,
a job that brought him into close contact with the reclusive and
enigmatic Pope Pius XII. With Pius as an important sponsor, Montini became one of the key leaders in the Vatican hierarchy, the
man who "knew all and saw all." His reach extended outside
Vatican walls, for after his promotion to head the Vatican's Secretariat of State, he was the chief papal contact with a wide variety
of diplomats and political leaders. Reputed to have a card index
for a brain, Montini soon had a network of worldly contacts that
would have been the envy of any politician. For anyone wanting
to do business with the Vatican, he was the man to see. He aso
acquired a reputation for his access to a tremendous variety of
information, stemming in part from his contacts with politicians
and diplomats and the fact that he had been assigned the job of
creating the Vatican Information Service, which was in fact the
Vatican's intelligence agency.
All in all, Montini represented an intelligence agency's
dream recruitment: Someone with his kind of access would represent the perfect asset. There did not seem to be anything that
Montini (promoted to bishop in 1944) did not know, and no one
had to wonder why: his intelligence service, which collected the
reports of papal representatives in every corner of the globe, was
reputedly the world's best.
But Montini resisted all attempts to tap into his storehouse
of knowledge. His mind was focused exclusively on the existence
of the Roman Catholic Church; as the representative of a tiny
city-state with no army, existing precariously in the midst of
nations at war, Montini maintained an air of studied neutrality.

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. . . AND A FEW CURIOSITIES

The representative of Adolph Hitler was accorded precisely the

same attention as the representative of Franklin Roosevelt. However subtle the approach, Montini was not about to play anybody's
gamenot, that is, until a chain-smoking Presbyterian showed
up outside the Vatican walls.
James Jesus Angleton arrived in Rome in early 1944 as the
27-year-old head of the OSS X-2 (counterespionage) branch in
the Italian capital. Already marked as one of the most brilliant
counterintelligence officers in the OSS, he was cadaverously thin,
with huge ears and a perpetually suspicious squint that often
made him look like some kind of ferret. A prodigious chain
smoker reputed to go through somewhere around four packs of
cigarettes a day, Angleton had an odd background for a counterintelligence officer. Born of a prominent family (his father
headed National Cash Register in Italy), Angleton went to Yale,
where he became the university's leading aesthete. He ran a poetry magazine that published Ezra Pound, became a close friend
of T. S. Eliot, and strolled around the campus like some sort of
fop. But after joining the OSS in 1942, Angleton found his real
true calling in counterintelligence. By the time he arrived in
Rome, the former devotee of such exotica as iambic pentameter
had become immersed in the world of double agents, dead drops,
and discards.
Apprised of the VESSEL operation, Angleton was immediately suspicious. As he was aware, the Vatican in intelligence terms
was an impenetrable, mysterious society headed by the remote
Pope Pius XII. How, then, did VESSEL manage to penetrate this
closed world and discover the most sensitive conversations and
deliberations? The more Angleton considered the VESSEL material, the more he became convinced that there was something
seriously wrong. He concluded that VESSEL was probably deception material, possibly planted by Japanese intelligence to mislead
the Americans. Or perhaps it was Russian, because several key
VESSEL reports talked about how importantly the Japanese regarded the Soviet Union's role in any settlement of the war with
the United States. So perhaps the Russians were feeding in material to boost their role in a postwar Asia; as the OSS already
knew from other sources, the Russians were very eager to obtain
major influence in the Japanese-occupied areas of Manchuria
and Korea, along with Japan itself.
Despite OSS headquarters' conviction that the VESSEL material was genuine and of great significance, Angleton set about

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to confirm his suspicion that it was not. He moved on two fronts.

One, he put some of his agents to work to uncover the source of
the VESSEL material. Two, he set about to recruit a source high
in the Vatican hierarchy who could confirm whether the kind of
conversations as VESSEL claimed really occurred. This latter task
was really tough, but Angleton succeeded in making one of the
really significant intelligence recruitments of all time. His name
was Giovanni Montini.
How the flap-eared OSS officer of irrefutably Presbyterian
stock managed to enlist the very Catholic Bishop with the great
beak of a nose that dominated a thin face remains a mystery.
Neither Angleton nor Montini ever discussed it, but the result
was that the American now had a nearly priceless resource. Officially, Angleton had enlisted Montini for the sole purpose of
tracking down the leak inside the Vatican that was finding its way
into the VESSEL reports, but as perhaps both men were well
aware, that was not to be the end of the relationship.
In any event, Montini proved to be invaluable in Angleton's
VESSEL investigation. After carefully examining copies of the
VESSEL reports purchased by the OSS, Montini had a surprise
for his case officer: there was no leak in the Vatican. VESSEL'S
material, Montini concluded, bore no relation to the actual content of diplomatic discussions inside the Vatican, particularly the
reports relating to alleged conversations with the Japanese representative. Actually, Montini told Angleton, the man from Tokyo
was floundering; beset by contradictory instructions from a divided Japanese cabinet, he was trying as best he could to cobble
together some sort of a peace deal that any experienced diplomat
instantly knew would be unacceptable to the Americans. As Montini himself had told the Japanese representative, the Americans
could not possibly accept a peace offer that would leave the military-dominated govenment in Tokyo still in power, nor would
the Americans accept the idea of Japan retaining its control over
Chinese territory it had seized.
The truth now dawned: VESSEL was a complete fakea
clever one, but a fraud nevetheless. But what was the motive? Who
was VESSEL really working for? The answers came when Angleton
finally tracked down the instigators behind VESSEL. The key man
in the deal who had first approached the OSS was a White Russian
exile named Dubinin. Angleton suspected, correctly, that Dubinin, a small fish, was in fact merely a cutout for the real man (or
perhaps intelligence service) behind the code name VESSEL.

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. . . AND A FEW CURIOSITIES

As things turned out, VESSEL proved to be a lot less complicated than many had presumed. Angleton discovered that VESSEL was Virgilio Scattolini, a short, fat journalist and author
whose chief claim to fame to that point was as a pornographer.
Before World War I, he had won dubious notoriety as the author
of a number of scorching pornographic books that became bestsellers, including his classic Amazons of the Bidet. Subsequently, he
married a devoutly Catholic woman who convinced him to undergo a dramatic religious conversion; he began attending Mass
every day, and became a lay officer in the Franciscan order. His
conversion was so complete, he was hired for the staff of L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican semiofficial newspaper. But in 1939,
the newspaper's editor, upon learning that one his writers was in
fact the infamous Virgilio Scattolini the pornographer, fired him.
Scattolini then turned to fiction, stitching together accounts of
what was happening inside the Vatican walls from his own knowledge of its inner workings, newspaper reports, and rumors he
heard around Rome. Scattolini was so good at it, he was sought
out by newspapers and wire services for "inside" news of developments in the Vatican. The war put a crimp in his little business,
but the arrival of the Americans in Rome in 1943 provided new
opportunities. VESSEL was the result.*
The VESSEL case made Angleton the most celebrated counterintelligence agent in the OSS (he would go on some years later
to become head of the CIA's counterintelligence division), but
his now-close friendship with Montini promised even greater rewards. The relationship proved invaluable in early 1945, when
the German SS, using the Vatican as a middleman, negotiated
with the OSS for the surrender of all Axis forces in northern Italy.
The deal, under which nearly a half million Axis troops laid down
their arms (in return for amnesty from war crimes for the SS
officials involved), was a triumph for the OSS. It was also a triumph for Montini, who had helped broker the deal, for he had
saved northern Italy's vital industries from the kind of de-

* And his downfall. Scattolini's exposure led to his indictment and arrest under an
obscure Italian law, originally designed to deter espionage on Italian soil, that made
it illegal for anyone to "commit hostile acts against a foreign government." In this
case, "foreign government" was interpreted to mean the Vatican, which indeed was
a sovereign entity. Scattolini was convicted and sentenced to seven months and four
days in prison. Upon his release, he disappeared and was never seen again. Some
reports said he became a monk.

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275

struction that inevitably would have resulted in a full-scale military campaign.

Three years later, Montini was to play still another critical
role, this one involving the very survival of Italy itself. By this time,
he had been promoted to the post of Archbishop of Milan, one
of the Italian church's most powerful constituencies and regarded as a stepping stone to the papacy. Moreover, Montini not
only still retained his strong ties inside the Vatican, he was coincidentally head of Catholic Action, a millions-strong Catholic political action group. They represented an essential counterweight
to the growing might of the Italian Communist party, which was
widely expected to take power in the 1948 national elections.
Such a result was unthinkable to Washington, so a large-scale covert political action operation by the CIA was set into motion.
Among the operation's important case officers was Angleton, who
again tapped into his friend Montini. The archbishop responded
by mobilizing Catholic Action, the Vatican's considerable resources, and his extensive contacts across the Italian political
spectrum to help the CIA's operation. In the end, the combination of American money, a supreme effort by Italy's non-Communist political groups, and the Vatican's considerable help
turned the tide. The Communists failed to win a majority, and
although they would remain a force in Italian politics for years
thereafter, their high-water mark had passed.
For his part, there were a few important favors Angleton
could perform to repay his debt to Montini. It was Angleton who
helped arrange the reestablishment of Vatican control over the
Catholic churches in southern Germany, an area within the
American zone of occupation. Angleton also helped the Vatican
reestablish contact with the important Catholic dioceses in western Yugoslavia. A few other, similar, arrangments helped cement
the Angleton-Montini relationship. It was to result in unanticipated dividends in 1963, when the wily Vatican diplomat was chosen as Pope Paul VI. A rigid ecclesiastical conservative who enforced mandatory celibacy for the priesthood and unwavering
church opposition to all forms of contraception, Montini nevertheless remained a pragmatic politician. Until his death in 1978
of a heart attack, he still had close relations with American intelligence, while at the same time began the first negotiations toward reestablishing church authority in Eastern Europe.
The precise details of what services Pope Paul VI was able
to perform for American intelligence are not known, but it is a

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fact that 14 years after his death, one of his successors, Pope John
Paul II, aided an American covert funding operation for the Polish Solidarity union. That very same Pope has now recommended Giovanni Montini for sainthood, a recommendation
that, interestingly enough, does not mention VESSEL.

W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
Our Man in Petrograd
Code Name: SOMERVILLE
1874-1965

hat must have been the world's most unusual intelligence

agent arrived in Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg) in August 1917. The new revolutionary Russian government, led by the
former Minister of War, Alexander Kerensky, did not quite know
what to make of this odd-looking character who claimed his journey to the turmoil of Petrogradin the middle of World War I,
no lesswas solely for the purpose of researching his next novel.
The Russians did not find this cover story very credible, but
could not bring themselves to believe that the Englishman W.
Somerset Maugham could be any kind of spy. He arrived in expensive, custom-tailored clothes, complete with spats and a walking stick. In the grimness of revolutionary Petrograd, he stood
out like a diamond in a slag pile, hardly the kind of cover spies
are supposed to adapt. Then too, there was the matter of his
speech, marked by a pronounced stutter, along with regular
coughs from his tuberculosis. To round out the portrait of unlikely spy, Maugham was an overt homosexual, prone to ogling
the revolutionary sailors who had stormed the Winter Palace and
overthrown the Czar.
But Maugham was a spy, dispatched by British intelligence
on a mission with very high stakes and very serious consequences.
The mission to Petrograd was not Maugham's first encounter with intelligence. In 1915, he was a popular 41-year-old writer
living in Switzerland who wanted to do something to help his
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country's war effort. Given Maugham's extensive contacts

throughout the Swiss establishment and the European homosexual demimonde, a new British War Office entity called M11(c)
later in the war to become MI6recruited him to keep an eye
on German agents and their assets operating in Switzerland.
Maugham was successful in the assignment, and although it involved no real danger, he later embellished his experiences for
the series of "Ashenden" spy stories he wrote, with himself as the
thinly-disguised hero, a daring British agent.
Maugham was related to one of MI6's senior sachems, William Wiseman, head of British intelligence in the United States.
Officially, Wiseman was chief of the British Purchasing Mission,
but in fact he was busily engaged in running large-scale intelligence,
propaganda,
and
counterespionage
operations
against
German intelligence in the United States. Based in Washington,
Wiseman had important connections throughout the American
corporate establishment, and, more importantly, the White
House via his friendship with Colonel Edward House, President
Woodrow Wilson's most trusted adviser. In the absence of any
effective American intelligence in that era, it was thus British intelligence that served to shape many of Wilson's perceptions.
Among them was Russia. The revolution of 1917 had complicated matters, because although the new revolutionary government under Kerensky vowed to continue Russia's participation in
the war against Germany, he was coming under increasing pressure from the Bolsheviks to sign a separate peace and take Russia
out of the war. "Peace and bread!" the Bolshevik slogan ran, and
it was striking a deep chord in the Russian masses.
British intelligence was alarmed; with Russia out of the war,
the Germans would be able to shift over a million troops from
the east to the Western Front, there to fall upon the exhausted
British and French. The war hung in the balance; even the arrival
of American troops would not occur in time to prevent disaster.
At all costs, Russia had to be kept in the war. First, however, British
intelligence had to find out two things: one, the prospects of the
Kerensky government surviving; and two, what was needed to
keep that government in power.
It was Wiseman's idea to use Maugham for the mission. In
Wiseman's calculation, Maugham's literary fame would work as
ideal cover for his real mission in Petrograd. Additionally, he had
some espionage experience from his work in Switzerland.

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279

But the world of neat, ordered Switzerland was nothing like

Petrograd. The city was a political madhouse. Worse, as Maugham
discovered almost immediately, he had arrived too late; German
intelligence had been busy and efficient. It had already arranged
for Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders to be secretly transported
to Russia in the famous sealed train, and had very effective propaganda operations well-entrenched. The German propaganda,
which argued to the Russian masses that they had no stake in a
European war that was bleeding Russia white, was having its effect. Entire Russian divisions were mutinying, and many Russian
soldiers, sick of the war, were simply leaving their units and walking back home.
Only drastic action could save the Kerensky regime,
Maugham reported to Wiseman. Unless the Allies were prepared
to infuse the Kerensky regime with massive amounts of money to
offset German intelligence's covert funding of the Bolsheviks,
then the provisional revolutionary government was in imminent
danger of falling. Further, Maugham reported, if the Allies
wanted to keep the Russian militaryor at least what was left of
itin the war, only direct military intervention would save the
day.
While the Allies were deciding what to do, events overtook
them. Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power; Kerensky fled into
exile, and the Russian war effort fell apart. Maugham fled Russia
aboard a British destroyer dispatched to take him quickly out of
harm's way.
Returning to Switzerland, Maugham, his tuberculosis worsened by the Russian climate, informed Wiseman that he was
through working for British intelligence. (Folowing his recuperation, Maugham returned to writing, finally entering literary immortality before his death in 1965).
Meanwhile, Wiseman went to work on Wilson, arguing that
only drastic action could "save" Russia. Wilson then agreed to a
number of steps that Wiseman believed would reverse the tide of
history: the landing of Allied forces in Russia, including 13,000
American troops, approval of a covert action program to disrupt
the infant Bolshevik regime, and direct support for anti-Bolshevik
forces in the Russian civil war that broke out at the end of World
War I. All of these actions resulted in a disaster whose consequences reverberated many decades to come. All that Wilson and
the Allies achieved was the undying enmity of the Bolsheviks, and
it remains an intriguing exercise to wonder what would have hap-

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pened if the Bolsheviks had not been made international outlaws

at the very moment of their coming to power.
The man who was at center stage for these cataclysmic
eventsand who played no small role in themprofessed to be
disinterested in anything having to do with Russia. He never publicly discussed his Petrograd mission, nor did he use any of his
experience in his novels. Clearly, he wanted to forget the whole
thing. "My dear boy," he replied when he was once asked about
it, "you cannot imagine a more God-awful place." He said nothing
more, the good spy revealing as little as possible.