Agent Sonya’s wireless: fact, fiction, fantasy and fable
Brian Austin G0GSF
Two recent articles [1,2] in Signal tell some of the story of the remarkable Soviet agent who plied her trade for almost twenty years, beginning in Shanghai and culminating in her sudden departure from England in 1950. In between, she operated under various names, familial as determined by her various marriages and her codename dictated by the secret nature of her work. For all of what follows, I shall refer to her by that nom de guerre. She was simply Sonya; though Sonia or even Sonja appear too, depending on which source you choose to cite.
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Born Ursula Kuczynski in 1907 in Berlin to a wealthy left- wing intellectual family, she espoused the communist cause at an early age. Her older brother Jürgen became an economist of some repute and a prolific author in his field. He was also an active promoter of communist philosophy which he pursued, with vigour, after following his parents to London and a post at the LSE following Hitler’s rise to power. In late 1929, Ursula married Rudolf “Rudi” Hamburger, an architect. Work had dried up owing to the worldwide Depression but Rudi was offered a post designing office buildings in Shanghai. The young couple arrived there in July the following year and, not long afterwards, Ursula joined the Chinese Communist Party. Her active promotion of the revolutionary cause in Berlin soon found an immediate outlet in Shanghai, the home of Chinese communism in a country ripe for revolution. Her career as a spy began when she met Richard Sorge, a German, dubbed by some as the most formidable spy in history [3]. And through Sorge she became aware of the part played by radio communications in the spying business.
If any aspect of espionage has been misunderstood and misrepresented, sometimes egregiously so, it is probably the use of radio or wireless communications to pass messages between spies and their headquarters or, equally, in the opposite direction. Why this should be so is not hard to fathom. To most people, including most professional historians, the transmission of messages ‘through the air’ without the intervention of wires is, at best, mysterious and, at worst, is something of a black art. Its technicalities are not understood at all and the technology to accomplish it requires, apparently, nothing more than a transmitter. That the author should have such a cynical view is, perhaps, best illustrated by the recent book written by Ben Macintyre [4]. The fact that it was a best-seller is certainly testament to Macintyre’s skill as a story-teller with his proven ability to write for a mass audience seeking titillation as well as a good yarn. This book certainly contains both. But it falls down badly when it comes to the technology of wireless communications. And it is this aspect that I intend to concentrate on here. All the other intriguing details, and there are many, of the ‘spying game’ will be left to the ever-expanding literature on the subject.
“On the nights she transmitted to Moscow …”
Clandestine communication is a science as well as an art [5]. Sonya herself was trained in Moscow. At the instigation of Sorge, she attended the Radio Training
Laboratory there in 1933 where she learnt the art of espionage and some of the technicalities of wireless. She was bright and was an excellent student because her heart was undoubtedly in it. She also displayed an above- average ability as a Morse code operator. Loyalty to her Soviet masters, and to their cause, had to be absolute and she signed up to it all with fervour. But it wasn’t a solitary activity; Sonya had assistance and assistants: all men. Her husband ”Rudi” Hamburger, though, was never more than a lukewarm communist and so she kept him in the dark. Sorge was the dominant figure and his radio expert was Max Clausen and Sonya absorbed much from him. There were others too and among them was a man called Johann Patra who was to have a significant influence on her clandestine life and it’s at this point that the fantasy begins. Patra was highly intelligent but wholly uneducated, according to Sonya. He also struggled to read in any language, though Macintyre informs us a while later that he was struggling to read Hegel’s Science of Logic. Remarkable, to say the least. More mundanely, he soon went “shopping for valves, rectifiers and wiring” with which to build a transmitter. How he went about selecting these components and their very important specific types, given his apparent lack of familiarity with the written word (except Hegelian), is not explained. One has to assume that Macintyre was quoting Sonya herself, now writing under the nom de plume of Ruth Werner, since he clearly makes liberal use of her memoir published as Sonjas Rapport, in German, in 1977 and then, as Sonya’s Report in 1991 [6]. And she published more too, in German, on this unfolding saga as listed among the references in [1].
Sonya and Patra went to Mukden in Manchuria, as instructed by the ‘Centre’, their headquarters in the Soviet capital. Mukden was occupied by the Japanese and their function was to be the point of contact between the Chinese communist partisans and Moscow. It was Patra’s job to assemble the radio equipment from the components he had recently acquired. From [1] we learnt what the strange “Hartley transmitter three-point switch”, as described by Sonya in her 1977 book, actually was. However, Macintyre, without providing such technical niceties, called it a transmitter-receiver whereas the circuit diagram in [1] shows nothing more than a simple one- valve Hartley oscillator which would have functioned quite adequately as a QRP transmitter but it was certainly not a receiver. Of course, any transmitter without an antenna is useless and so Sonya climbed onto the roof of the house she’d found in Mukden to erect what she called a Fuchs aerial. This was a half wavelength of wire which was end-
fed, hence presenting a high impedance at that point and thus necessitating some form of impedance transformation to a lower impedance transmission line, assuming such were used. Macintyre, needless to say, went into no such detail. But what is particularly important is that this is the only time in his book when any detail at all is provided about an antenna. Where he (and presumably she) mentioned it again it was simply a length of wire suspended from the roof of a house to a pole in the garden or secreted behind the panelling of a wooden wall. The assumption clearly being made is that an antenna is simply a length of wire whose dimensions are of no consequence.
While in Mukden, Sonya only transmitted at night to the GRU (Russian Military Intelligence) receiving station in Vladivostok, a distance of around 700 km. Both those facts are important because they involved the ionosphere, a subject never aired by Macintyre (and perhaps not by Sonya herself in her multi-volume tomes). None of her radio activities was every arbitrary: she will only have acted on instructions. But how they were conveyed to her wasn’t revealed anywhere. As we know, such long- distance transmissions depend entirely on the ionosphere and particularly on its critical frequency and height at a given time and geographical location. Those features change diurnally, with the seasons and particularly over the approximate 11-year period of the sunspot cycle. We are informed that she used one of two agreed wavelengths, though it is far more useful, as we will see, to define them by their appropriate frequencies. Again, this underscores the need for detailed operating instructions in order to “keep her skeds”, as they are referred to in the radio operating trade. Such trivia are not mentioned in Macintyre’s best-seller.
We are led to believe that Sonya was busy at her radio at least twice a week and always in the early hours. Messages consisted of information about partisan morale, Japanese counter-insurgency measures as well as political and military intelligence. What never emerges is what radio receiver she used to make all this possible. Brief, almost glib, comments about constructing transmitters – as simple as they were – were never accompanied by any details of the receiver. Once again, the impression is gained that Macintyre never appreciated the significance of the receiver even though he frequently mentions her taking down “the fastest incoming signals without making a mistake”. Again, as with the antenna, such things were apparently mundane since every home had a radio receiver and, in those days, they required the inevitable piece of wire to a pole outside. Need anything more be said? Well, yes. The receiver is by far the more complex piece of apparatus when compared with the simple transmitters she and Patra constructed. Even had it been as simple as a regenerative detector followed by a single stage of audio amplification, the circuitry to achieve that and the method of yielding optimum performance, were far from trivial yet such details are simply ignored. And then there’s the matter of operating both transmitter and receiver on the correct frequency.
“She established a good connection on a frequency of 6.1182 MHz …”
This intriguing gem of information pops up almost in the middle of Macintyre’s account when Sonya was sitting up in bed and just about to press her transmitter into service
to communicate with Moscow. What could be more convivial? But we need to get there first because this happened when she was in Poland and with yet a few more transmitter-construction projects behind her.
The mission in Mukden ended suddenly. The Japanese had penetrated Sonya’s network. Centre ordered her to pack up and leave as soon as possible for Peking. So, they dug a hole and buried the radio. No more no less. On reaching Peking, Patra, as is the pattern in this racy saga, “gathered parts to build another radio” and the first message from Moscow told them to hide the transmitter and take four weeks leave. One can only presume that any technical details are but background noise to the average reader of these fast-paced works of fact-based fiction. But to those of us who actually have an interest in the technology they are frustrating and infuriating because what is really important is reduced to the level of the almost banal. After this period of holiday bliss “they reassembled the radio” and, again, the first message from the Centre ordered Sonya to make for Shanghai while Patra was to remain where he was. The fact that she was pregnant with his child (though she never told him) was of no interest to Moscow but it added much flesh to the evolving life story of Macintyre’s heroine.
Reunited with Rudi Hamburger, Sonya was informed by her masters in Moscow that she and Rudi, now evidently a committed communist himself, were soon to leave for Poland. Their role there would be to provide the radio communications links between the Polish Communist Party, now driven underground, and Centre. The journey to Poland involved a detour to England to be reunited with the Kuczynski family whom she’d not seen for years. They were now well-established in London’s communist circles. MI5 were aware of Sonya’s arrival in England, though to them she was merely Ursula Hamburger neé Kuczynski of interest because of those family connections. Her skill as a radio constructor-cum-operator had not reached them. In view of her German passport, her length of stay was to be brief.
In January 1936 the Hamburgers reached Warsaw but were then sent on to Danzig. There she built a transmitter- receiver, no less. A revelation indeed but details about its electronic components and such trivia were clearly immaterial. This time the transmitter was hidden inside a gramophone but the companion receiver escaped mention. And, needless to say, the bothersome piece of wire going somewhere did too. An element of reality, however, did crop up when one of her neighbours asked Sonya if she received interference on her radio – the one that everyone possessed. That sent a chill down the Hamburger spine because, according to the neighbour, it happened at night and her husband thought it may have been caused by someone transmitting nearby. Sonya had been in contact with Moscow the night before. A new location was urgently needed and, once found, the transmitter came back to life. Inevitably, after many nights of transmitting and receiving, Moscow’s next instruction was to tell her to move back to Poland (the reader will be aware of the changeable geography in that part of the world occasioned by Nazi and Soviet machinations). At this point, Sonya confessed to her Soviet controller that she felt inexperienced and did not know enough about advanced techniques in radio construction. She requested further training. In the same technical compound in Moscow where she’d been trained previously, she began
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her course during which she operated a “sophisticated push-pull transmitter” as described in [1]. On completion she was informed that her next destination would be Switzerland.
Switzerland and further fables
Neutral Switzerland, with its long common border with Germany, was the ideal place to gather intelligence on Hitler’s military build-up. Sonya’s task was to set herself up near Geneva, then make contact with the existing Soviet- sponsored intelligence network in the country and, of course, construct another transmitter. She was also on her own: none of those ultra-masculine companions from her days in China or her recent convert-to-communism husband, who joined her in Poland, would be with her. Switzerland was to be Sonya’s solo performance. Following yet another brief detour via England, Sonya left Dover in September 1938 for Switzerland via France.
She set herself up in a village overlooking Lake Geneva. Macintyre then informs us that “[A]t night, when everyone was asleep, Ursula constructed her transmitter-receiver from parts bought at hardware shops in Geneva, Vevey and Lausanne”. The parts he mentions are indeed curious: a keypad (he surely means a Morse key since keypads are of our modern age on laptops), an antenna with banana plugs(!) plus two heavy batteries “each the size of a dictionary”. No mention at all of all the components that go to make up transmitters and receivers or, indeed, transmitter-receivers. How did she obtain the resistors, the capacitors, the valves, the RF chokes, the switches and the myriad other bits and pieces needed for even the simplest transmitter and its companion, though clearly much compromised, receiver? And, most importantly of all
– a component never mentioned by Macintyre – where or how did she acquire the quartz crystals which determined the frequency on which her transmitter operated? Surely not in a hardware shop no matter how sophisticated such places may have been in pre-war Switzerland. Credibility is put under some strain here. Macintyre only ever mentioned the frequency on which she operated, a very precise value of 6.1182 MHz, in a single sentence in his book. Such significant detail was clearly not of concern to him whereas it would have been vital to her and to the Centre. As is well known, achieving such frequency precision would have been impossible with a variable LC- oscillator unless Sonya had available to her accurate means of measuring frequency and unless she had also taken considerable care in constructing such an oscillator in order to render it ultra-stable. At this point I should mention that we learnt previously, but only in passing, that she had constructed frequency meters on one of her courses in Moscow but we were not enlightened as to how she went about calibrating such a thing. And, finally, electronic hardware has to be housed in some suitable box or other container. That requires metalwork, or at least woodwork, both of which need tools – a workshop even – and, of course, connecting all those components together means soldering. There’s ne’er a mention of any such oddities by Macintyre and, presumably, not by Sonya herself when she came to write her life story many years later.
On the woodworking front we learn that Sonya hid her assembled equipment in a built-in wardrobe behind a wooden panel held in place by screws. She drilled two small holes in the panel through which she passed the
leads (to and from what is not revealed). This, we are informed, enabled her to use the transmitter without removing it from the cupboard. Surely the mysterious receiver must also have been nearby with its vitally important headphones since having a loudspeaker blaring out Morse code was probably not a good idea. But she did conceal those two drilled holes with plugs made to resemble knots in the wood. So, all bases were well covered and, as noted above, she could sit up in bed while communicating with Moscow. Following the necessary call signs, the messages consisted of groups of five numbers each of which she had encyphered earlier.
Then we have to contend with a fascinating flight of fancy. Remember all this is taking place in September 1938. Sonya was “flooded with relief” at having successfully passed the information to the Centre and, being “too pumped with adrenaline to sleep” she reached out and turned on her transistor (my italics) radio in order to listen to the BBC news bulletin. Since the transistor was only invented at the Bell Telephone Laboratory in New Jersey in 1947 one can only assume that our heroine, or her 21st century biographer, were blissfully unaware of that fact but it made for a good story, particularly as the news bulletin focused entirely on the signing by Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, of the Munich Agreement. Peace with Germany was in the air. This was a horrifying prospect for all right-thinking communists. But, as we know, it wasn’t to last.
The International Brigade and Sonya
Yet another man of much interest, especially to the British security services, entered Sonya’s world of wireless, espionage and much else early in 1939. He was a former member of the International Brigade of volunteers who had enlisted to fight against General Franco’s forces in Spain. Len Beurton had been instructed to make contact with her by “Mrs Lewis” of Hampstead in London. Mrs Lewis happened to be Sonya’s younger sister who was an avowed apologist for and active supporter of the communist movement wherever it happened to be. Beurton’s background was mysterious but should not detain us here. It would, however, perplex both MI5 and MI6 as the years unfolded. His function, as Sonya explained it to him, was to undertake dangerous work in Germany. Beurton’s face evidently lit up at this. He was also smitten by Sonya.
The signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in August 1939 detonated a bomb under Sonya’s spying operation against Germany: Allies don’t spy on each other; well, not usually. But she still had a useful role to play in the interim while her future was being planned for her in Moscow. She should train Beurton and another former fighter in Spain, one Alexander Allan Foote, codenamed Jim, as radio operators. Foote, also an Englishman, followed a similar route to Beurton’s, though a short while before, in order to reach Sonya. It was the same Mrs Lewis who had interviewed him and then instructed him on what he was to do. Quite simply, he was to attend a designated meeting place in Geneva, at a very specific time, while holding the correct object in his hand and then responding to a particular question, asked by a mysterious woman, with a very specific answer. All good spycraft, of course. Foote was also told to “read up about wireless technology”. He clearly read well for, in no time, we’re informed that he was
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building transmitters. And he took over all Sonya’s clandestine duties in Geneva, becoming the Centre’s chief radio operator when the time came for her to leave for her new destination: England.
Readers must excuse the detour here in order to expose some of Sonya’s private life. She and Hamburger were divorced late in 1939 based on perjurious evidence provided willingly by Foote. In February 1940, she married Beurton but not before she’d proposed to Foote. She needed a British passport if she was to be able to live in England – as was Centre’s intention – and to get one she needed a British husband, however contrived. But Foote backed out for reasons we won’t go into, so she turned to Beurton. He agreed. And soon thereafter he excavated a hole in the garden into which they buried Sonya’s transmitter as the attention of the Swiss authorities became ever closer.
The saga of her passport caused consternation in England
– well, in MI5 at least. Beurton had already attracted their attention and was on a black list of communist sympathisers where his name appeared as Fenton. Now, his actual name was to be linked to a former Kuczynski and her world of London’s communists. However, MI5’s bureaucratic bungling failed to stop Sonya acquiring the prized document and she duly arrived, in Liverpool, with her two children (but without her new husband) in February 1941. Her immediate destination was Oxford because her parents had recently moved there from London. But it’s at this point that the conspiracy theorists begin to have a field day and none more so than another well-known writer of the spy genre, the late Chapman Pincher. In his sizeable 1984 book Too Secret Too Long Pincher asserts categorically that MI5’s Director General between 1956 and 1965, Sir Roger Hollis, was a Soviet agent. During the war it so happened that Hollis was based close to Oxford at Blenheim Palace and lived within half a mile of Sonya’s father. Pincher went into overdrive and concocted what to some was a very believable story that Hollis was not only a Soviet mole but that his collaborator was Sonya. Needless to say, when such accusations were made many years later, they (and Hollis himself) were subjected to intensive investigation. The finding was that there was no evidence to support the allegation against Hollis but individuals such as the notorious Peter Wright of Spycatcher fame dined out on it.
Oxford, Fuchs, Sonya and wireless
Sonya and her two children moved four times in four months after reaching Oxford. Her radio operating activities came to a halt, but not permanently. In April 1941 she moved into a furnished house in Kidlington, five miles from the city. MI5 was watching her and intercepting her post. She made regular trips to London and waited on a particular street corner for her expected contact with her Soviet masters. Eventually, after a number of false starts one appeared. His name was Aptekar, whose cover was to act as chauffeur for an attaché at the Soviet Embassy. But to Sonya he was simply Sergei. He asked when she could bring her transmitter back to life. She said in twenty- four hours. Despite her life having seemingly turned upside down over the previous few months, she was apparently able to make contact with Moscow quite effortlessly by the very next day. Such remarkable insouciance, technical
and otherwise, is staggering but it was happily accepted by Macintyre.
With the Soviets now fighting for survival against Hitler, Sonya’s “intelligence”, gleaned from among the communist community in London, proved to be important and it soon took on quite earth-shattering significance when she was introduced to Klaus Fuchs by her brother Jürgen.
I shall not recount the Fuchs life story here. It resides among the literature and, indeed, the folk-lore of the atom bomb and its consequences for the world. Where Fuchs is important in this saga is that Sonya became his courier and go-between with Moscow. They first met in the centre of Birmingham in the late summer of 1942. As they parted Fuchs handed her a file of some 85 pages of documents: the secrets of the development of the atom bomb. Her task was to get them to Moscow. Since they contained pages of mathematical equations and diagrams, as well as reams of text, there was no way such information could be sent by Morse code irrespective of the skill of the operator. Sonya used Sergei as the link man to the Soviet Embassy and from there the regular diplomatic pouch service did the rest. She and Fuchs continued to meet in rather more secluded surroundings in the fields and forests near Banbury. There, while maintaining their anonymity, one to another, for reasons of ultra-security, they walked hand-in- hand to add an element of normality to their country stroll and along the way Fuchs would hand Sonya yet more information. She then used a ‘dead drop’ among the roots of a tree some way off the road to get them to Sergei. Much mythology seems to have been attached to this story and again I shall leave it to others to tell. On one of their regular encounters, Sergei handed Sonya a miniature camera with which to make microdot photographs. He also gave her “a small but powerful transmitter measuring just 6 by 8 inches”, so she told us. This borders on the ridiculous. Small and powerful are simply contradictory in this context. And, yet again, the vitally important radio receiver, as well as the means of powering them both, escaped a mention. Between them Sonya and Macintyre, her trusting scribe, take most of their readers for granted, at the very least, because such technical details can so easily be ignored but those of us with an interest in such things do bridle!
However, we must assume that Sonya didn’t invent this story, she just attenuated it. The Soviets did have a miniature transmitter and it had its companion receiver and they were both powered by a third unit containing the necessary transformer, rectifier and smoothing circuitry. It went by the name of Tensor or Tenzor (Figure 1) and came into service in 1942, so Sonya may well have been one of its first satisfied customers. The Tensor Mk1 was actually designed in the USA (hence its collection of readily identifiable valves) but it was also manufactured near Moscow, no doubt an example of early American lend-lease? Judging by the available photographs, each of those three separate units was of the size mentioned by Sonya so yes, she may well have had a miniature transmitter but it was not powerful since it used a single 6L6 as its class C amplifier and, as we all know, that would have produced an output of 10 watts or so across the lower HF frequencies. According to the Tensor specification, it operated between 3.7 and 14.3 MHz, under either VFO or crystal-control. The magical quartz crystal eventually makes its appearance but no thanks to our scribes.
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Figure 1. The Mk1 Tensor. Left to right: receiver-PSU-transmitter
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The Tensor receiver used three 6J7 valves with the first two functioning as the RF amplifier and regenerative detector and the third as the AF amplifier driving headphones. Whereas constructing such units was well within the capabilities of a competently-trained technician, which Sonya claimed to be, the nonchalance with which she mentions the production of her transmitter-receivers, almost at will, raises all the issues I referred to above. And shopping for the necessary components, by a woman with a German accent, would surely have raised the odd eyebrow in the hardware shops she said she patronised for that purpose.
Between 1941 and his departure for the USA in order to join the Manhattan Project in August 1943, Fuchs is reported by Macintyre to have transferred “some 570 pages of copied reports, calculations, drawings, formulae and diagrams …”, and much more, to the Soviet Union. All would have gone via Sonya’s courier to the embassy. Late in 1942 she, Len Beurton, who was now in England, and their children had moved once again. Their new accommodation was in Summertown near Oxford. It was a cottage in the luxurious property belonging to one of the pillars of society by the name of Laski. His brother was a friend of Sonya’s father. Soon after moving in, Sonya asked permission to erect an aerial between the roof of the building and one of the stables. The Laskis never suspected that it was anything other than for improving the medium wave reception. Besides Fuchs and his more incidental messages, she also had many other sources of intelligence of interest to Moscow. According to Macintyre, they numbered at least a dozen spies and so, by the end of the year, Sonya was said to be transmitting to Moscow two or three times a week. This amount of radio activity, of the non-atomic variety, could not have gone unnoticed and it wasn’t. The Radio Security Service (RSS), a specialist branch within MI6, was well aware of all those transmissions originating from the vicinity of Oxford (Figure 2). As was their procedure, all the intercepted five- digit code groups were passed to the RSS Discrimination
Section for assessment and then onward to Bletchley Park for its attention. Macintyre affords the RSS just a single paragraph and concludes that the Soviet’s use of the “one- time pad” system would have rendered its messages unbreakable. This is probably true but there is no doubt that radio direction-finding techniques would have been capable of obtaining an accurate ‘fix’ on the location of Sonya’s transmitter. If this was done (and it must surely have been) we do not know the outcome. If there is an explanation, it lies in some vault or archive somewhere and is yet to be revealed. For a very detailed and forensic examination of MI5 and its dilatory performance, particularly in relation to wartime Soviet activity in England, the interested reader is referred to the book by Antony Percy [7].
Fuchs returned to England from the USA in June 1946. By then he had effectively given the secret of the atom bomb to the Soviet Union. Sonya had been the conduit until his 1943 departure for Los Alamos where an equally effective US-based team of spies had taken over that role.
Sonya and MI5
Soon after VE Day, Sonya moved to the village of Great Rollright (Figure 3) in the Cotswolds, north Oxfordshire. Her new home was called The Firs. It was conventionally fitted out for its time but, according to Macintyre, it lacked an electricity supply. From the point of view of wireless communications this fact it highly significant. It seems, though, not to have struck Macintyre at all since he only mentioned it in passing. Of its many attractions The Firs had a large locked cellar which was ideal for concealing illegal radio equipment and, so we are informed, Sonya’s transmitter was in constant use.
One can only ask how this was possible. The Tensor equipment, if indeed that’s what it was, required at least a couple of hundred volts (DC) on the anodes of the various valves hence a suitable mains supply, such as that supplied with the very Tensor equipment, was a key part
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And the mere fact that she seemed to be able to hide everything in a matter of minutes, whether in holes in the ground or behind a fern-covered rock in a fence post, surely makes that extremely unlikely and therefore was worthy of comment from Macintyre. But there was none. And, needless to say, the antenna never merited a mention.
Sonya wasn’t naïve; she appreciated that the more she used her
transmitter the more likely it was that she would be detected. It seemed,
therefore, only a matter of time before British security arrived. As we
know, MI5 was indeed aware of her presence and should have been well
aware that an illegal transmitter was being operated in the Oxford area.
But they apparently never made the connection. This was made blindingly
clear when, in September 1947, she was interviewed at The Firs by two
MI5 investigators, one of whom was Jim Skardon, its famed (at least in his
eyes) interrogator. The two men used aliases, as was the way in this world
of secrets, and despite their most determined efforts Sonya outwitted
them by simply refusing to answer questions. Since MI5 had no
evidence that she was an enemy agent, Skardon’s case evaporated.
All he had to go on was the confession made to MI6 in Berlin by
Alexander Foote when, just as month before, he had defected from the
Soviets and presented himself at the legation in the British sector of Berlin.
There he told MI6 almost everything. He explained how Sonya had trained
him and Beurton as radio operators and went on to reveal, in great detail,
the activities of the Soviet-sponsored espionage network in Switzerland.
But he insisted that Ursula Kuczynski was no longer engaged in spying
Figure 2. This page (provided to the author by Antony Percy [7] & wherever she happened to be. MI6 seemingly swallowed it all and
[10]) comes from the RSS file in the National Archives HW 34/23 and relayed their findings and shows a listing of daily RSS intercepts made between 16 March and conclusions to their security service 16 April 1942. Though somewhat cryptic, it is clear that these are the counterparts in England. Sonya call signs of the stations transmitting and/or receiving. Note the didn’t know this and naturally feared heading “RUSSIANS”so there’s no doubt RSS knew who they were that MI5 and the police could arrive at
listening to – at both ends of those links. This is concrete evidence, any minute. But they didn’t.
if ever any was needed, that RSS were aware of the transmitter For Sonya, 1947 was consumed with “somewhere in Oxford”. family tragedy. First her mother died
of the set-up. At no time is there the merest mention of and then, not long after so did her some form of DC to AC converter which may have allowed beloved father. Sonya was now at her most vulnerable but Sonya to overcome this rather unfortunate shortcoming at Britain’s security service was either inept or simply so The Firs. By that, admittedly rather cumbersome means, hidebound in its procedures that the person best equipped she may have been able to use more batteries than the to confront her, the highly astute Millicent Bagot, was side-
couple – “the size of dictionaries” – that she had, lined in favour of the much overrated Jim Skardon. And, apparently, to cart around from residence to residence. as we have seen, Skardon failed spectacularly.
Figure 3. A recent view of Great Rollright
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In August 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its first atom bomb, at least four years before the CIA believed they might achieve that exceptionally complicated scientific and technological feat. The reason they were able to surpass all Western expectations was because of Klaus Fuchs, the most dangerous spy in history [8]. And Sonya too.
The flight of Sonya and the fantasy of her radio activity
In February 1950, Klaus Fuchs was arrested and made a full confession that he had passed atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. The next day, the story was all over the newspapers which reported that he had transferred them to “a foreign woman with black hair in Banbury”. Sonya was gripped by fear but nothing happened. She immediately planned her escape by booking three tickets on a flight to Berlin. She and her two younger children would go, Beurton, who was recovering from a broken leg following a motor-cycle accident, would dispose of the contents of the house while her elder son would remain at university in Scotland. The final resting place of Sonya’s transmitter was, unsurprisingly a hole in the ground. No doubt, though she never mentioned them, the other paraphernalia of her spying trade – the receiver and the power supply – also went to earth in an Oxfordshire field. On 28 February 1950, the aircraft carrying Sonya and her children left London’s airport for Germany. She had escaped. The following day Klaus Fuchs was sentenced to fourteen years in prison.
MI5’s failure to make the connection between Fuchs and Sonya, despite the seemingly glaring evidence against
her, remains one of the catastrophes of Britain’s Security Service history. However, this is not the place to delve into whether it was due simply to incompetence or to some deeper, darker machinations at the very highest levels. Others more competent than I have been there and their opinions are all in print. Remarkably the official history of MI5 ignores Sonya completely never even mentioning her name or, indeed, any of her names [9].
Of more immediate concern to us here is the mythology that surrounds Sonya’s seeming invincible ability to communicate, apparently at will, by radio, with the Centre in Moscow from any number of locations with far from sophisticated equipment and even in the absence of electrical power. There is no need to go into great detail regarding the propagation of HF signals via the ionosphere but some aspects are so fundamental that they should be mentioned. A knowledge of the so-called maximum usable frequency (MUF) is vital to those planning a communication link between any two points beyond ground wave range (Figure 4). The fact that the MUF is so variable between day and night, with the seasons and within the period of the sunspot cycle poses issues which have to be addressed by those planning the link. In Sonya’s case, such details were not her responsibility but they were undoubtedly those of the Centre. Since she was alleged to have used her radio equipment from the mid- 1930s until at least the end of the war – a period spanning more than one sunspot cycle – there will have been significant changes in the MUF over the various paths she said she worked. In fact, the sunspot number reached its minimum in February 1944, which means that the optimum communication frequencies will have been decreasing
when she was acting as Fuchs’s wireless link with Moscow. In addition to the choice of operating frequency, this also has significant implications in terms of antenna length and also atmospheric noise. She will, therefore, have to had made changes to her operating frequencies to accommodate these natural phenomena. Her account, and Macintyre’s parroted version, do not enlighten us as to how this was achieved. Without suitable crystals, supplied to her by her masters in Moscow and not by the local hardware shop, Sonya’s communications activities will have been sorely compromised. And even had she had those crystals, the reliability of such low-power links will have been extremely variable as every QRP operator knows.
During her long sojourn in East Germany, after fleeing from England so precipitately in 1950, Sonya changed her name to Ruth Werner and became a successful author of children’s stories. She also wrote her memoir, as mentioned previously. The version in English has embellished her reputation as a prodigiously effective Soviet spy and wireless operator. It also served the cause of her communist masters, most particularly the Stasi, the East German secret police who, we can be sure, played a significant part in carefully scrutinising every word of Sonya’s Report before it was released to the world.
I end with one final reference to the literature on this fascinating woman and her achievements, but more particularly to the way she was portrayed in Ben Macintyre’s recent best-seller. His book was reviewed in great depth and detail and the published review appeared, in 2021, in an international journal devoted to intelligence matters [10]. As book reviews go, this one is well-worth reading!
References
A Thomas. A tale of two triodes. Signal 2022, 62 (February), 46–51.
I Underwood. Red Army GRU Colonel Ursula Maria Kuczynski. Signal 2022, 63 (May),14–16.
O Matthews. An Impeccable Spy- Richard Sorge Stalin’s Master Agent. Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2019.
B Macintyre. Agent Sonya – Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy. Penguin Random House, London, 2020.
B Austin. HF Propagation and Clandestine Communications during the Second World War. Journal of The Royal Signals Institution 2009, 28 (1), 35–42.
R Werner. Sonya’s Report. Chatto and Windus, London, 1991.
A Percy. Misdefending the Realm – How MI5’s Incompetence enabled Communist Subversion of British Institutions during the Nazi-Soviet Pact. University of Buckingham Press, 2017.
F Close. Trinity – The Treachery and Pursuit of the Most Dangerous Spy in History. Allen Lane, London, 2019.
C Andrew. The Defence of the Realm – the Authorized History of MI5. Allen Lane, 2009.
A Percy. Courier, Traitor, Bigamist, Fabulist: Behind the Mythology of a Superspy. Intelligence and National Security 2021, 36 (7), 1065–1075.
Acknowledgement
Figure 1. The author is grateful to …… for permission to use the featured photograph of Tensor Mk1.
(a)
(b)
Figure 4. Graphs of the reliability of propagation over the 2560 km Oxford to Moscow path in June 1942. They show the reliability for a given signal-to-noise ratio over a 24 hour period. Marked on the graphs are the propagation modes that would exist at various times for two frequencies of (a) 7 MHz and (b) 10 MHz. They also show the propagation modes of single and double ‘hops’ off the F1 and F2 layers, as 1F1, 2F2, etc. Clearly the 1F2 mode at 10 MHz yields
the highest reliability which peaks at just about
70% at 02:00 UT and falls rapidly after that. The lower frequency is always less reliable. Severe D-layer absorption is evident throughout the daylight hours, being far worse, again, on the lower frequency. The complexity of the propagation process should be obvious. In both cases the transmitter power was 20 W and the antenna was a dipole at a height of 6m
I received the above item in the mail a few weeks ago – completely out of the blue. It arrived from Greece, and the envelope included a packing-slip that informed me that the item had been bought from Mundus Souvenirs on Amazon Marketplace, and that the buyer’s name was ‘David’. The condition of the item was described as ‘New’, so I was happy that I was not the beneficiary of a re-tread. But who could the semi-anonymous donor be?
I know of only three ‘Davids’ who are aware of coldspur, and also have my home address. None of them is renowned for wearing his heart on his sleeve, but maybe each does adorn it on his refrigerator. It was a superbly innovative and generous gesture, and I determined to get to the bottom of it.
Maybe coincidentally, I happened to hear from David Puttock soon after. David lives in Hamilton, Ontario. We go back a long way: we studied together in the Sixth Modern at Whitgift, and we both went on to read German and Russian at Oxford, David at New College, I at Christ Church. We have met only once since 1968 – at a Gartner Group conference in Toronto ca. 1990, but have maintained a sporadic email correspondence, and the exchange of Christmas cards (heathen that I am), since his retirement. And, indeed, when I asked him about the magnet, he admitted that he was the benefactor.
David told me that he found the item by googling ‘coldspur’, and that the amazon link appeared on the first page of the selection. When I performed that function, however, amazon was nowhere to be seen, but my site gratifyingly appeared before the township of Coldspur, Kansas. The magnet was probably intended for the good citizens of that community, who may think they have stumbled into an alternative universe if they mistakenly look up www.coldspur.com. In any case, those coldspur enthusiasts who feel an urge to have their ardour more durably expressed know where to go. I vaguely thought of buying a stock of magnets, and making an arrangement with Mundus to send them out to well-deserving readers of coldspur, those who post congratulatory or innovative posts in response to my bulletins, but it all sounded a bit too complicated. For about $8.00, you can buy your own. (The SKU is mgnaplilo103600_1, in case you have difficulty. See https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08RZBNVJ3?ref_=cm_sw_r_ud_dp_F2MAMV1SC49R799FBKWJ.) Lastly, I am of course delighted with the magnet, as my enthusiasm for coldspur is boundless. But what about David? Did he purchase one for himself at the same time, for proud display to his friends on the Puttock refrigerator? I hope so.
Contents:
Introduction
Sonia and The Professor
Operation PARAVANE
The Coldspur Archive
‘Hitler’s Spy Against Churchill’
An Update on Paul Dukes
The PROSPER Disaster
2022 Reading:
General
Spy Fiction
‘The Art of Resistance’
‘The Inhuman Land’
‘Secret Service in the Cold War’
‘A Woman of No Importance’
Language Corner
Bridge Corner
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Introduction
Since I spent two weeks in Los Altos, California, in June, staying with our son and his family (whom we had not seen for two-and-a half-years), my research has been somewhat lagging. So I thought for my July bulletin I would perform a mid-year round-up instead. Not that there is much new material to report, but I usually find a few points of interest when I carry out this exercise. Moreover, the exercise of writing it all up helps to clarify my opinions on these research topics, and acts as a kind of journal and memoir should posterity (i.e. my grand-daughters) ever want to track down what was really going on.
I suppose that I must record a certain disappointment that my research in the first half of the year has resulted in a resounding tinkle. I would have thought that the disclosures that Henri Déricourt had definitely been recruited before he arrived on British shores in 1942, that SOE was harbouring a dangerously vulnerable cipher officer in George Graham when it set up its mission in Moscow and Kuibyshev in 1941 and 1942, and that Graham was later driven to madness, that M. R. D. Foot’s history of SOE in France is evasive and unscholarly, since Francis Suttill almost certainly made two visits to the United Kingdom in the months of May and June of 1943, shortly before he was arrested, that Peter Wright behaved in a scandalously irresponsible and mendacious manner when he claimed that Volkov’s hints in 1945 pointed to Hollis rather than to Philby, and that Colin Gubbins was not the innovative hero that his biographers have made him out to be, might have provoked some rapt attention in the world of spy-watching and intelligence connoisseurship. While I have received several private messages of support and approval, I have seen no public recognition – nor any challenge to my theories expressed. If I cannot receive due publicity for my pains, I would rather have someone step up and protest that my theories are hogwash, so that I could at least engage in a serious discussion about these outstanding puzzles.
If I were resident in the United Kingdom, I would eagerly take up any invitation offered to me to speak at any historical society that showed an interest in my subjects of study. I have undertaken a few such activities in the United States, but the good citizens of Brunswick County, while listening politely, are overall not particularly interested in predominantly British spy exploits of the 1940-1970 era.
Sonia and The Professor
Flyer for On-Line Talk by Glees & Marnham
Thus it was with considerable excitement that I heard from Professor Glees a few months ago that he had agreed to speak to an historical interest group in Oxfordshire (the Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum) about Agent Sonya (or Sonia), as I imagined this would generate some interest in coldspur. When I looked at the promotional material, however, I was slightly perturbed by the rather two-edged endorsement of my research. While Professor Glees spoke glowingly of my investigations, his overall message was that I was in reality a side-show to his own endeavours. “This is not just my story, it is his.” Considering that, according to my analysis, Glees has not written a word about Ursula Kuczynski since his book in 1986, I considered this observation rather troublesome. I was further dismayed when I listened to and watched the recording of his presentation. Coldspur gained only one mumbled acknowledgment. While the promotional material for the talk highlighted Ben Macintyre’s biography Agent Sonya as a teaser, Glees ignored completely my careful review of the book, which demolishes most of the falsehoods that Macintyre promulgated about his subject.
Furthermore, I believe that Glees grossly misrepresented my researches, and dug himself a hole when attempting to answer a question as to whether Sonya had been a ‘double agent’. Glees seems to be under the impression that it is he alone who has revealed that Sonya had been ‘recruited’ by MI6, but that her intentions may not have been entirely honourable. (“I made it very clear that the archival research aka ‘the trees’ was yours, not mine, & the thought that Sonya was an SIS agent aka ‘the wood’ was mine,” he wrote to me afterwards.) He appeared to be unaware of what I had published on coldspur back in 2017, when I showed that MI6 had been fooled by Sonya when she agreed to their terms in order to be exfiltrated from Switzerland, and her life effectively saved. She had no intention at all of serving British Intelligence loyally, and would have had to contact her Moscow masters in order to gain approval for the scheme of her marriage to Beurton, the resultant adoption of UK citizenship, and her subsequent escape to England. The fact that she then became a courier for Klaus Fuchs proves that she never intended to be of any useful service for Menzies and his pals, who were grossly hoodwinked. I do not know where Glees derived the illusion that it was he who prised out these discoveries.
When I gently protested to Glees about his misrepresentations, and his failure to give credit to my discoveries and analysis on coldspur, he was very patronising and dismissive, exaggerating his own ability to see ‘the woods’, and suggesting that I had been concentrating on ‘the trees’, while at the same time he compounded his forgetfulness (or inattention) over what I had written. In a responding email he wrote: “As I explained the release of KV 6/41 a few years ago, found by you, dissected by you, and read by me, thanks to you and esp[ecially] the Farrell letter which I ‘decoded’ to you, if you recall, & was imo [in my opinion] key to solving the riddle. You’ll remember that I put this to you, along with the notion that the simple fact this file from 1941 existed, showed that MI5 were aware of Sonya’s existence in Oxford.”
But that is absurd. Glees did not ‘decode’ the letter for me. My researches in 2017 showed quite clearly that MI5 was aware of Sonya’s presence in Oxford at that time. Glees’s ignorance is dumbfounding. I did indeed introduce him to the file KV 6/41, which Glees appears to believe constitutes an exclusive exposure of Sonya’s activities. But it stands out because it is the only digitized file on the Kuczynskis: I had inspected the others at Kew several years ago, and published my analysis of them. I tried to explain to Glees that these other files revealed much of her goings-on in Oxfordshire, but he did not want to listen. I am confident that he has not looked at these files (although I have shared my notes on them with him).
And his claim that he alone can see the ‘big picture’ (he is a ‘woodsman’, while I am only a ‘trees’ man’) is insulting and patently absurd. His distinction between different aspects of the forest was nevertheless exceedingly murky: in his talk he made some bizarre assertions that Sonya must have developed some useful contacts within the Oxford intelligentsia, without offering a shred of evidence (‘the trees’, about which matters he was punctilious when he was my doctoral supervisor).
He then accused me of behaving like M. R. D. Foot (the historian of SOE) wanting to stake proprietary claims about a sphere of research, and trying to prohibit anyone else from stepping on his turf. After saying that “No one will want to engage with someone who fires off furious emails at the drop of a hat”, he wrote:
You know I’m one of the biggest admirers of your work & have always made others aware of it. It’s easy to be cross & resentful, as MRD Foot, for example, excelled in being (an academic version of ‘outraged of Tonbridge Wells’) but much better to be charitable, particularly where you ought to be as here. You’re really way off beam here. Few people have done more to bring your work to the attention of others but at the end of the day it was I, and not you, who were giving this talk.
I graciously accept the compliment inherent in this, but on this public occasion Glees did all he could not to bring my work to the attention of others. Second, my email was not ‘furious’: it was regretful and calm, and tried to discuss real issues – which Glees side-stepped. (I could make the email available to anyone who is interested.) His reaction merely points to his own prickliness and egotism. Moreover, I am not sure where ‘charity’ comes in. Am I really supposed to be grateful for Glees for mangling my research. and failing to give me proper credit? And perhaps I should be pleased to be compared with M. R. D. Foot, a famous ‘authorized’ historian?Yet I could really not harbour any such protective ambition, as I was communicating through a solitary private email from 4,000 miles away! And then Glees tripped himself up over the absurd ‘double agent’ business. It appears that the professor has not bothered to read my research carefully, and does not understand the distinctions between penetration agents, traitors, and double agents. I have thus ignored his lectures to me. Some woodsman; some lumber.
It is all rather sad. I do not understand why an academic of Glees’s reputation would want to engage in such petty practices, and try to distort my researches in such a non-collegial manner. (I have indeed helped him on several matters when he has sought my advice.) Yet, in a way, I do understand. I have seen enough of the goings-on at the University of Buckingham to be able to write a David Lodge-type novel about the pettiness and jealousies of provincial English university life. I have described some of those exploits on coldspur already: I shall refrain from writing up the whole absurd business until another time (I would hardly want to lower myself precipitately to that level, would I?), as I presently have more important fish to fry. When I have run out of other research matters, I may return to the shenanigans at the University of Buckingham.
Yes, I admit this is all rather petty on my part, too. It was just the Soldiers of Oxfordshire museum, not an invitation on In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg. But, if ‘one of my biggest admirers’ can get things so wrong, what is he doing the rest of the time? I wanted to set the record straight. Besides, it is quite fun to bring the Prof down a peg or two.
And then, by one of those extraordinary coincidences that crop up more frequently than they should, I read these words in the July Literary Review, by the biographer Frances Wilson:
. . . . most memoirs, if not loaded guns, are written for the purpose of retribution and revenge. This is by no means a criticism: retribution and revenge are strong reasons for writing a book. You want to put the record straight, to tell your side of things, to correct a wrong. Even the mildest-mannered memoirs have reprisal at their hearts.
Thank you, Ms. Wilson.
Operation PARAVANE
I have not yet received anything substantial on the piece compiled by Nigel Austin and me, The Airmen Who Died Twice. That does not surprise me much, as the PARAVANE operation is a little-known episode, a side road to the main WW2 excursion. Yet the posting of my bulletin on June 3 placed an important marker for the story, and immediately made a synopsis available worldwide as a reference point for anyone who might be trawling on the Web for information on PARAVANE.
I shall not reveal here the astonishing denouement of this extraordinary series of incidents, but one aspect of the exploit merits some attention. And that is the uncharacteristically cooperative behaviour of the Soviet Air Force. It was only at the end of August 1944 that RAF Bomber Command concluded that an attempt to use the new ‘Tallboy’ bomb in a direct raid from Scotland was not feasible because of fuel capacity, and considered using a base in the northern Soviet Union, near Murmansk, as an intermediate destination after the raid at Alta Fjord. That Air Marshall Harris could take for granted at this late stage that the Soviets would agree to such an initiative indicates that negotiations for such must have been in place for some time, as the Russians were extremely wary of allowing foreigners on Soviet soil. Any such move would have had to be approved by Stalin, and recent events at Poltava and Warsaw had indicated that the Soviet military command was keen to obstruct any such cooperative operations.
For the relationships between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union were indeed at their lowest ebb at this time. (See http://www.coldspur.com/war-in-1944-howards-folly ) Stalin, having encouraged the Warsaw Uprising over the radio, then refused permission for air support operations by the western Allies to the Poles to be launched from Soviet territory, the missions having to be directed from the UK, and from Brindisi in Italy, and back. It was at the end of August, when the PARAVANE operation was being planned, that Churchill pleaded with Stalin to allow Soviet airfields to be used to support the Warsaw rebels, but Stalin was obdurate, and Roosevelt would not join Churchill in his appeal. Soviet forces waited the other side of the Vistula river until the uprising was quashed by the Nazis, at enormous loss of life.
Moreover, a precedent for the use of Soviet airbases had recently occurred in Operation FRANTIC, where the Soviets granted rights to the USA Air Force to conduct bombing-raids on German territory between June and September 1944. I have recently read books by Glenn Infield (The Poltava Affair) and Sergii Plokhy (Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front) which tell the sad story of how the Americans were misused by the Soviets, especially when, on June 21, Soviet air defences failed to prevent a highly destructive raid at Poltava by German airplanes, all of which escaped intact. By then, in any case, with the Soviet land forces moving close to Germany, the value of the base had sharply diminished.
Thus when Bomber Command had a further change of plan, and was apparently able to decide, on September 4, without further consultations with the Soviet Air Force, that the aircraft of the PARAVANE operation would better land in Soviet territory, and preferably at an airfield further away from German airbases than Murmansk, and thus less likely to be strafed, it was extraordinary (in my opinion) how smoothly and quickly the negotiations continued. In a matter of days, Yagodnik had been identified as suitable, and made available, but a week later, an even bolder version was aired. The new plan – to have the squadrons fly directly to the Archangel area, and rest and refuel, before launching the attack on the Tirpitz, and then return to that airbase – was likewise immediately approved by the Soviets. I believe that the groundwork must have been prepared some time before, and that the Number 30 Military Mission to Moscow (Air Section), which had been boosted in the summer of 1944, must have presented a case for the usage of airfields well before early September.
The fact is that Stalin was extremely wary of any Soviet citizens’ being exposed to foreign influences, and the NKGB and SMERSH were trained to consider all such persons on their soil as spies. While the cause of protecting convoys to Murmansk was no doubt genuine, it was becoming less important by this stage of the war, and Stalin must have had ulterior motives (such as the acquisition of the latest military technology) in granting such rights to the British squadrons. The Foreign Office, in its misguided belief that ‘cooperation’ with the Soviet Union would lead to harmonious relationships when the war ended (an echo of the attitude taken by President Roosevelt and his sidekick Harry Hopkins), was quick to see this offer as a sign of Soviet goodwill – a ridiculous mistake. I have started to investigate the 30 Mission records for further clues, as the RAF records are disappointingly vague.
I was able to make email contact with Professor Plokhy, and asked him whether he had any insights into the complementary PARAVANE operation. Unfortunately he did not, but he directed me to someone who, he thought, would be able to help, a Liudmila Novikova, in St. Petersburg, an expert (so Plokhy said) on British units in the Soviet Union. I was unable to gain any response from her; perhaps I went straight into her spam folder, or maybe she has uprooted because of the recent turmoil. Does anyone know her?
Lastly, one correspondent, having read the PARAVANE piece, drew my attention to another mysterious aircraft accident of 1944, in Newquay, Cornwall, the details of which have ever since lain in obscurity. The informant was Mark Cimperman, the son of the FBI’s wartime representative in London during the war, Frank Cimperman (who appears frequently in Guy Liddell’s Diaries). I tracked down the event at http://wartimeheritage.com/storyarchive2/storymysteryflight.htm , and was astonished at the eerie characteristics that patterned those concerning the crash at Nesbyen a few months later. Mark told me that the researcher for the story, David Fowkes, had written to the Cimpermans, believing that Frank might have known something about the accident. Sadly, Cimperman had died of cancer in 1968 at the age of sixty.
The Coldspur Archive
As part of my project to preserve the coldspur archive, I made contact in early May with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, and eventually received a very courteous response from Dr. Anatol Shmelev, a research fellow and Robert Conquest curator of the Russia and Eurasia Collection. Over email, he had advised me to seek out a smaller university as a destination for my book collection, as he believed there would be too many overlaps with what the Institution held for Hoover to be an appropriate donee. I have thus since attempted to contact the Librarians at a couple of other universities, but have received no response to my approaches. I arranged, however, to have a meeting with Dr. Shmelev, during my visit to the area, and it turned out that he and his family live a few minutes away from our son in Los Altos.
On June 11 I thus enjoyed a very pleasant lunch with Anatol and his wife, Julia, who was born in St. Petersburg, and who acted as research assistant to Robert Conquest in the latter years of his life. Robert Conquest was someone I admired greatly (another significant writer whose hand I hoped to shake, but he was too infirm by the time I wrote to him just before his death): his Great Terror and Harvest of Sorrow made a deep impression on me, as they must have done on many students of Russian history. He was also a close friend of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, two more of my enthusiasms, although their private correspondence betrays opinions that are highly inappropriate in today’s sensitive times. It was a privilege, nevertheless, to meet two academics who had worked so closely with Conquest.
Anatol gave me some further tips about finding a home for my books, suggesting that I seek the support of members of the history faculties at such universities rather than the librarians/archivists themselves. We had a lively and fascinating discussion about many topics of Russian literature and history, and intelligence matters, as well as regretting the obvious fact that many book collections are simply pulped when the cream has been skimmed off them. I would hate to see that happen to mine, but that is presumably what everyone says. I did also immediately order Shmelev’s recent book, on Russia’s path immediately after the Revolution, In the Wake of Empire. I expected it to be a fascinating companion to Antony Beevor’s volume Russia, Revolution, and Civil War, 1917-1921, which has received excellent reviews in the British press already, but will not be available in the USA until September.
‘In the Wake of Empire’ by Anatol Shmelev
Indeed, Shmelev’s book was absorbing – quite brilliant. The author had access to a large trove of correspondence between the exiled Russian diplomats and their military counterparts, such as Admiral Kolchak and General Denikin, and has exploited them to show the futility of a fractured opposition to the Bolsheviks. I had not understood all the dimensions of the conflict, what with outlying nations of the old Russia straining for independence, the struggles between those wanting to restore the old land-owning aristocracy, or even an emperor, and those who accepted that land reforms and a more democratic constitution were absolutely essential in order to give credibility and authority to any future regime. The challenge for pluralist political entities to counter effectively a determined and single-minded dictatorial force was brought home to me by the fact that not only did the Whites disagree among themselves, the Allies all had diverse interests, as did the borderland national territories of old Imperial Russia, and, even within one nation’s administration, the British War Office disagreed with the Foreign Office on policy, and within the Foreign Office itself, factions had sharply divided views on what the representation and constitution of the future Russian governing body should be. Eventually, Communist Might meant Right. Shmelev’s judgments are sure – authoritative without being dogmatic – and shed much light on the tortured dynamics of the civil war. I shall defer a full discussion until later, when I have read Beevor’s book.
Incidentally, Dr. Shmelev also wrote a book on Russian émigrés, titled Tracking a Diaspora: Émigrés from Russia and Eastern Europe in the Repositories, and I believe that the story of Serge Leontiev (aka George Graham) and his forbears, friends, and associates will be of interest to him.
‘Hitler’s Spy Against Churchill’
‘Hitler’s Spy Against Churchill’
This book, by Jan-Willem van den Braak, is now available – both in the UK and the USA – and I encourage coldspur readers to acquire it. It constitutes a very valuable addition to the chronicle of the Abwehr spies sent to the United Kingdom in the autumn of 1940, its subject, ter Braak, managing mysteriously to remain undetected for several months before committing suicide, or so the story goes. (I did supply an Afterword for the book, which I would not have done had I not thought that the author had carried out a stellar piece of research. In that piece I voice an alternative theory about the spy’s demise.) I have not seen any reviews of the work yet, but I know these things take time.
An Update on Paul Dukes
In my piece on George Graham, I had expressed some puzzlement over the behaviour of Paul Dukes in the 1930s, finding the official biographical records somewhat wanting. And then, while I was researching the Volkov business, I discovered that Keith Jeffery, in his Postscript for the new paperback edition of his history of MI6, had inserted some new analysis of Dukes’s activity at this time.
The essence of the account is that MI6 did attempt to exploit Dukes’s plans, in May 1934, to take a predominantly Russian troupe of ballet-dancers to Eastern Europe and to the Soviet Union. When Admiral Sinclair, the head of MI6, heard about this, he sent Harold Gibson to Vienna to discuss how Dukes might help develop intelligence sources in the U.S.S.R., since MI6’s sources there were practically non-existent (if, indeed, there were any at all). Yet the project soon foundered. Illness and disappointing box-office returns meant that the company never reached further than Italy, and, twelve months later, Dukes was in such bad favour that Sinclair told Monty Chidson, head of station in Bucharest (who asserted that Dukes was involved in arms dealing with Sofia) that he was to have nothing to do with Dukes.
MI6 belatedly realized that Dukes was a faded product: he had mixed too closely with White Russian emigrants (very true), and he would now constitute quite a security risk. Valentine Vivian issued him some advice before Dukes left London in August 1934, warning him to minimize his risks, but then minuted that the characteristics that had helped him become a valuable agent in 1919 would work against him now. Later, MI5 apparently took an interest in him, for Vivian posted another memorandum in February 1940, where he was forced to concede that Dukes’s finances were considered to be ‘catastrophic’, and that his sense of balance was considered by some to be ‘deficient’. Perhaps that was intelligence-speak that he was losing his marbles. Vivian went on to write: “His temperament is essentially artistic, and while his knowledge of things and people is encyclopaedic, his tastes rather run towards the eccentric and he would not be acceptable to those who look for a uniform service mentality”. In other words, no bohemians wanted.
The evidence I collected for my piece suggests that Dukes was trying to rehabilitate himself for a foray into the Soviet Union after these setbacks (John Stonehouse-like faked death, pro-Soviet writings), but it is not clear why anyone would have been sponsoring his intelligence-gathering aspirations. And, if he did now have an official assessment as being a loony and a spendthrift, why would anyone have listened to him when he came to recommend Serge Leontiev/George Graham as cipher-clerk for George’s Hill’s mission to Moscow? Sinclair was dead by then, but what was Valentine Vivian thinking? It is all very odd.
And then I alighted on another odd reference to Dukes while checking something in Michael Smith’s Station X (about Bletchley Park). While discussing the imaginary British spy Boniface (who was used as an alibi for Enigma decryption sources) Smith quotes R. V. Jones, who reported something he had been told:
Gilbert Frankau, the novelist, who held a wartime post in intelligence, told me that he had deduced that the agent who could so effectively get into German headquarters must be Sir Paul Dukes, the legendary agent who had penetrated the Red Army so successfully after the Russian Revolution.
This statement does not appear in Most Secret War, so probably comes from an article that Jones supplied to the journal Intelligence and National Security in 1994. I note that appalling use of ‘legendary’ again, presumably not meaning that Dukes was a mythical being, but that many tales were told about his exploits, and that a good proportion of them were tall. The irony here was that, instead of Dukes being able to infiltrate the Nazi command, he had, through his recommendation of George Graham, unwittingly enabled the Soviets to break into the supposedly clandestine exchanges of MI6 and the Foreign Office.
The PROSPER Disaster
As I was starting to write this piece, the thickness of the fog that surrounds the relationship between the Allies in the UK and French resistance during World War II was brought home to me. I was reading a review of Graham Robb’s France: An Adventure History in the Wall Street Journal when I encountered the following sentence: “Rather, he notes the Allies’ fatally tepid support of the Resistance and turns a sad gaze on the reprisals that tainted every corner of the mountains with ‘some ineradicable act of cruelty’.” The impression – and I suppose that it is Robb’s, but one endorsed by the reviewer – is that a potentially decisive opportunity was lost by the Allied armies (or SOE and OSS) in not supporting an extensive secret army that was simply waiting in the wings for a chance to make vigorous assaults on the German occupiers. Yet the story in fact played out on the following lines: initial experimental attempts to infiltrate agents; some vastly exaggerated claims about the size of secret armies; struggles to get the RAF to ship arms and equipment; betrayals to the Germans; stepped up shipments with the false promise of an early Allied assault; disillusionment and multiple arrests; a recalibration in the months before the Normandy landings; some vicious attacks and reprisals by the Gestapo and the Wehrmacht; a few spectacular successes in support of the Allied armies. And then de Gaulle attacked anyone who had co-operated with the Allies and tried to perpetuate the myth that the French exclusively had liberated themselves. Thus the representation of Allied strategy as being a failure to support the Resistance is both a distortion and an oversimplification of what actually happened.
I have still to post the concluding segment to my analysis of the betrayal of the PROSPER circuit. This will involve a close inspection of the minutes of the War Cabinet and Chiefs of Staff in June and July of 1943, as well as a closer study of the Bodington and Déricourt files. I do not intend to reproduce simply what has been published before, but I believe the current accounts are deficient in different ways. Robert Marshall’s All The King’s Men is on the money, but it is a little too hectic, and relies too much on oral testimony that cannot be verified. M. R. D. Foot’s SOE in France is packed with detail, but is fatally flawed by the constraints laid upon him and is still rooted in a 1960s perspective, which means that he evades the strategic issues. His Chapter XIV, Strategic Balance Sheet, completely ignores the premature attempts in 1943 to arm resistance forces with promises of an imminent arrival of Allied forces. (Moreover, the text of that summarization remained unchanged in 2004, nearly forty years after it first appeared – an extraordinary gesture of disdain towards all who had written about SOE in the interim.) Francis Suttill’s Prosper is driven by a need to track down all the details of his father’s circuit, but it is error-strewn, and he ignores the evidence in front of him in his eagerness to discount any conspiracy behind his father’s demise. Patrick Marnham’s War in the Shadows is very sound overall, but choppy: Marnham misrepresents some of the key events of 1942 and 1943, in my opinion, and weakens his case by introducing the Jean Moulin side-plot.
I therefore judge that my account of the saga needs a tidy conclusion, and I suspect that the evidence from the archives will embellish the assertion confidently made by Marnham and Marshall that the French Resistance was willfully misled as to the imminence of an Allied re-entry to the French mainland in the summer of 1943. I believe that my hypothesis that Suttill made two trips to England in May and June 1943 (see http://www.coldspur.com/feints-and-deception-two-more-months-in-1943/) contributes to a clearer picture of his motivations and disappointments. My next report on this saga will appear at the end of August.
It is a continuing research question of mine: what strategy was SOE executing when it tried to ship weapons to sometimes unidentifiable teams of resistance members in 1942 and 1943? According to their own records, at least 50% of arms were lost or fell into the hands of the Nazis. The submissions of SOE to the Chiefs of Staff about the potential of ‘secret armies’ showed that they had been completely misled by the claims of some of their agents. Furthermore, they showed a dismal lack of understanding of what would be required to store and maintain weaponry in good condition, and to train guerrilla forces in how to deploy it. Supplemented by some further reading of memoirs and biographies, such as in my study of Colin Gubbins last month, and the new biography of Virginia Hall (see below), I plan to provide soon a more detailed exposition of the controversial events of the spring and summer of 1943. Moreover, I have ordered a copy of Halik Kochanski’s Resistance: The Underground War in Europe, 1939-1945, in the hope that its 932 pages may reveal some fresh insights on the events of 1943 that the primary histories (including Olivier Wieworka’s recent The Resistance in Western Europe: 1940-1945) have in my opinion severely mismanaged.
P.S. As I was putting the finishing touches to this piece, I came across the following sentences in TheQuiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War (2020), by Scott Anderson (p 294):
In most Nazi-occupied countries of Western Europe, whatever partisan formations existed only became a factor on the battlefield when the arrival of Allied armies was imminent. Nowhere was this truer than with that most vaunted of partisan forces, the French Resistance. Despite the popular notion of a France united in undermining the rule of their German conquerors, in reality, the Resistance was little more than an intermittent and low-grade pest to the Nazis until their numbers suddenly swelled in June 1944.
Precisely! This was the colossal mess that Gubbins presided over, and which M. R. D. Foot, either through lack of imagination, or by intimidation, failed to reveal in SOE in France.
2022 Reading
As I peruse the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and the New York Review of Books, I am constantly reminded of the earnest volumes that are issued by the University Presses. Should I be reading The Kingdom of Rye: A Brief History of Russian Food, or Legacies of the Drunken Master: Politics of the Body in Hong Kong Fu Comedy Films, or Harry Potter and the Other: Race, Justice and Difference in the Wizarding World (all titles advertised in the June 17 issue of the TLS)? Probably not: life is too short. And sometimes I can’t help feeling that my speculative second book, The Unauthorized but Authoritative History of MI5 (affectionately known as TUBA), might have a better chance of commercial success than some of these rather dire works. And then the reviewers! Most of them are able to boast what their last published book is, but occasionally one is signalled by such phrases as ‘she is currently working on a collection of essays’. It all sounds rather drear, like those American waitpersons who approach you to ask whether you have ‘finished working on your meal’ so that they might take the plate away. But my work is fun (mostly). And I don’t have to consider the dreadful chore of dealing with publishers and editors: I just post my current essay on coldspur, and move on to the next one.
On reviewing my spreadsheet of Books Read for the year so far, I note that it consists mainly of volumes related to my researches, of which more later. Yet I do try to relax with lighter works in between. I started reading the fiction of Elizabeth Taylor: I was not very impressed with the short stories in You’ll Enjoy it When You Get There or the somewhat clumsy A Game of Hide and Seek, but enjoyed Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, and the well-drawn A View of the Harbour. And I am a keen reader of memoirs and biographies, The new edition of Konstantin Paustovsky’s Story of a Life, in a fluid and sparkling translation by Douglas Smith, gained some excellent reviews: I had let this work pass me by when it came out many decades ago. The reviews were merited: it is a beautifully written memoir of a vanished world, Paustovsky showing an ability to recall smells, sights, sounds, persons, conversations and situations without becoming over-lyrical or extravagant. As a picture of life before the revolution in eastern Europe (mainly in Ukraine), it is probably unmatched. For the short time about which he writes after the revolution, as in the escape from Odessa (Odesa), it lacks the irony and incisiveness of Teffi (Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya), whose Memories I read last year, but gives a very insightful picture of the rapid disillusionment that followed the drama and expectations of 1917. Paustovsky was a survivor in Stalin’s prison-camp: when many of his contemporaries were oppressed or even murdered, he managed to outlive the dictator (1892-1968), so must have had to compromise to be allowed to continue writing and avoid persecution.
Spy Fiction
I have also dabbled in a genre that is called ‘spy fiction’, and has received much media attention of late. I read Gard Sveen’s The Last Pilgrim because it is a book about the Norwegian resistance, and includes in its cast a real person, Kai Holst, who was of interest to me because of his strange death in 1945 soon after the Swedes received secret cipher material from the Abwehr. Holst was a Norwegian resistance fighter, resident in Stockholm, who died in mysterious circumstances in June 1945. Some writers have suggested that he was murdered because he knew too much about Operation Claw, a venture whereby the Americans and the Swedes gained vital intelligence material on Soviet ciphers from the Germans, something that would have embarrassed the Swedish government because of its claimed neutrality. The file at Kew, FO 371/48073 (https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C2805368) was supposed to be released under the 75-year rule in 2020, but is still marked as being retained by the Foreign Office. As for the book, it won several awards, but I found it rather laborious and repetitive, and the mixing of real and fictitious persons and events irritating.
And then there was Mick Herron. I read a few reviews of his Slow Horses, and decided that I ought to give him a try, and have since also read Dead Lions, Real Tigers, and Spook Street, volumes in his series concerning Slough House, an imagined dumping-ground for MI5 officers and personnel who committed some career-breaking faux pas during the cause of duty, and have been exiled to this dumpy office in London. The books are hilarious. Slough House is managed by a very sharp but foul-mannered slob, Jackson Lamb, who makes Horace Rumpole look like Jacob Rees-Mogg. Herron captures the essence of his characters with wickedly humorous speech patterns and dialogue, and his prose has a Wodehousian creativity and zaniness about it. I found the larger-scale plots a bit absurd (for instance, could there really have been a colony of communist sleeper agents of influence in the British countryside in the 1990s?), but they were not damaging enough to spoil the rollicking fun. I see that a TV series has been made of Slow Horses: I have not seen it yet, but Aunt Edna would probably not approve of the language (although these days, of course, Aunt Edna probably swears like a trooper).
One important point occurred to me as I read Herron’s books. The plots of spy fiction these days have to be dependent upon, and coherent with, the technology of its time, yet that technology is constantly changing. I vaguely recall reading a thriller by Charles Cummings a decade or so ago, sprinkled with Nokia mobile phones, VCRs, payphones, and SCART connections, all of which immediately date it, but also drove the plot. (I am constantly amused that my 2011 edition of Chambers Dictionary includes an entry for ActiveX.) Between the time an author starts writing his text and the date of the book’s publication, much of the technology must change radically. Herron sensibly does not identify many products so specifically, but such features as Google, (which was there in Cummings’ world of 2010), YouTube, and the dark web are prominent in his plot, and Twitter appears in Spook Street. Yet there must still be risks: I was astonished how Herron allows so many mobile phone-calls between different members of MI5 to be carried on in unencrypted mode. Was nobody listening? And how come no one seems to use their phone-camera? Pinpointing current technologies, and lavishly exploiting them, give verisimilitude – but also raise questions of accuracy and authenticity. And future novels involving flashbacks will have to be very precise about the technical context of the time. (‘Snapchat was not around in 2010!’) That was not a problem faced by Arthur Conan Doyle, or Eric Ambler – or even John le Carré.
I also picked up, on an impulse, An Unlikely Spy by Rebecca Starford, who is described as ‘the publishing director and cofounder of Kill Your Darlings, and, more alarmingly, as having ‘a PhD in creating writing from the University of Queensland’. I am not sure how Fyodor Dostoyevsky or Charles Dickens managed to be successful without some degree in Creative Writing, but then I am an old fuddy-duddy. The plot sounded intriguing, however: “In 1939, with an Oxford degree in hand and war looming, Evelyn finds herself recruited into an elite MI5 counterintelligence unit” (as opposed to those non-elite Slough House-type backwaters, I suppose).
I soon discovered that the book was originally published in Australia with the title The Imitator, so I suppose the reworked version was superior, as I doubt whether my eye would have been caught by the rather drab earlier headliner. And it turned out to be well-written, although it did carry that annoying post-modern trick of jumping around in chronology all the time, rather than approaching events in an orderly serial manner. (Is that what your Doctors of Creative Writing tell you to do? Do you get extra credits for displaying this habit?) I thus quickly entered the spirit of the plot, and started to acclimatize myself to the carefully placed markers of London in 1940, and the offices of MI5 at Wormwood Scrubs, as Evelyn Varley is recruited to help out with deciphering work.
A flicker of recognition then slowly dawned upon me, however. Evelyn Varley was a thinly-veiled representation of Joan Miller, author of One Woman’s War; Bennett White, her boss, was clearly the MI5 officer Maxwell Knight; Nina Ivanov was undoubtedly Anna Wolkoff. The whole story was a re-play of the Tyler Kent story, where the American cipher clerk stole copies of documents from the US Embassy in order to have them passed to the Germans. It reminded me of another clumsy effort at faction, Kate Atkinson’s Transcription, about which I wrote a few years ago. I really do not see the point of these ‘novels’: the authors take some characters from history, and then massage events and names to make it appear as if they have created a convincing psychological study. I quickly lost interest.
Ms. Starford admits her ruse in her ‘Reading Group Guide’, where she is also vain enough to offer some ‘Questions for Discussion’. She proudly describes her research activities (including a generous acknowledgment of Christopher Andrew’s history of MI5), and how she decided to ‘create’ Evelyn from the scraps of Miller’s memoir, and even manages to bring in ‘Brexit, the rise of far-right populism in Australia and abroad, and the ascent of Trump’ as a relevant backdrop to her writing, and even claiming that the fear and anxiety that those phenomena provoked found its way into her characters. What nonsense! And how pretentious to offer a review of her own book as collateral!
Moreover, she also offers an ‘Author’s Note’ to explain her deceptions, writing that she ‘tried to remain as faithful as possible to the history of these events’, but then declares that she had to make some ‘adjustments’ in order to provide a convincing story. She then lists a catalogue of her chronological changes to events that explicitly undermines the integrity of her story. All utterly unnecessary and distracting. In sum, I do not know why such works are attempted or encouraged. Either perform some innovative research to uncover the true facts about events, or use your imagination to create a convincing artificial world. These factional books are not for me.
The only interesting item I derived from the book is the statement from Stanford that Joan Miller ‘died in a mysterious car crash in the 1980s not long after she had published a memoir about her time in MI5’. Readers of Misdefending the Realm will recall my analysis of why MI5 tried to get her book banned, but this was the first I had heard about a suspicious car-crash. Sounds like an echo of the demise of Tomás Harris, or the accident involving George Graham’s son.
The Art of Resistance
‘The Art of Resistance’ by Justus Rosenberg
I have also read some remarkable books peripheral to my main course of research. Justus Rosenberg published his memoir The Art of Resistance in 2020, and in an epilogue wrote:
I will not write here of my extensive travels in the Soviet Union and its satellites during the Cold War, in Cuba just after the revolution, in the People’s Republic of China, of my visit with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, or of the interesting material I found about me in my FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act. Nor will I explore my years of teaching at Swarthmore, the New School for Social Research, and Bard College. I hope to deal with all these things in future memoirs.
The main problem with this plan was that Rosenberg was ninety-seven years old when he completed his memoir, and died in September 2021 at the age of 100. If his follow-up had been as action-packed and insightful as The Art of Resistance, it would have constituted another extraordinary work. Rosenberg’ s life was of interest to me mainly because of his experiences with the French Resistance in World War II. Born in Danzig in a secular Jewish family, Rosenberg managed to conceal his ‘race’ from the Germans when he escaped to France, where he eventually linked up with the American Varian Fry. After the latter had to return to the United States in some disgrace in 1941, Rosenberg worked in various roles for the French Resistance, achieved a miraculous escape from a prison hospital by simulating the symptoms of peritonitis (although I wondered whether he had in fact swallowed those special SOE pills that triggered the symptoms of typhoid), and ended the war by joining the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. He then gained a visa to the United States, where he enjoyed a distinguished career as a professor of literature.
I found Rosenberg an exceptionally level-headed and unmelodramatic chronicler, as well as a brave man. He was clearly a very smart and practical thinker, and was not caught up with the rhetoric of any ideology or religion. He has some illuminating things to say about Varian Fry (whose contribution to the escape of many European intellectuals has been over-romanticized), and scatters his memoir with many incisive vignettes and anecdotes. On two elements, I question him. He is one of those many who errantly contrast Soviet communism and ‘American capitalism’ as rival ideologies, when (as I pointed out in Misdefending the Realm) that it is a false contrast, since capitalism is neither a totalitarian ideology nor a political system, but an approach to the creation of wealth, and the comparison should be made between totalitarian communism and various forms of constitutional, pluralist democracy, whether presidential or parliamentary.
And I found him very loose on the practices of armed French resistance. He lists various categories: ‘partisans’, ‘freedom fighters’, ‘maquisards’, ‘guerrillas’, ‘underground armies’, ‘resistance fighters’, ‘saboteurs’, without explaining what characterized each. He recognizes the differences required in occasional guerrilla raids and the full engagement of an occupying army, and describes the rigorous training that was required to bring a raggle-taggle band up to proper military strength. Yet he also relates how ‘the French Underground Army’, described as ‘Resistance fighters waiting to join the Allied forces’ suffered a catastrophic defeat in the Vercors mountains, when a large section was annihilated by a glider-led force of 12,000 SS paratroopers. This vexed issue of the remote management of insurrectionist forces is a perennial interest of mine, as I believe that proper justice has not been performed to the topic in the writings about SOE and OSS in France. A book titled The Art of Resistance disappoints when it covers authoritatively such matters as the practices of secrecy, clandestine communications, and the isolation of networks, but does not explore what the implications of providing weapons to ‘secret armies’ were, and how such tasks should have been executed.
The Inhuman Land
‘The Inhuman Land’ by Jozef Czapski
Another valuable work was Jozef Czapski’s The Inhuman Land. I found that I had a copy of the 1951 edition on my bookshelf – a volume that I had never got round to reading. It has recently been resuscitated by New York Review Books, with an introduction by Timothy Snyder, but my edition (according to the price on abebooks) is now something of a rarity. Czapski’s book is vital, since, with the post-war knowledge that the NKVD had in the spring of 1940 slaughtered twenty-thousand Polish officers (of whom 4,421 were executed in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk), the author, who had managed to avoid the killings, described his attempts to discover what had happened as he worked as propaganda minister for General Anders’ emerging Polish Army, gathered in the Soviet Union.
The evil of the NKVD’s massacre was compounded when the Soviet Union tried to transfer the blame to the Nazis, who had themselves uncovered the graves in April 1943. When the Polish government-in-exile requested that the International Red Cross investigate the incident, Stalin broke off relations with the Poles. What made the whole business even more sordid was the fact that Churchill and Roosevelt, while privately acknowledging the Soviet guilt, did not dare challenge Stalin on the matter, fearful that they might lose his support, and that he might even abandon them in some fresh deal with the Germans. It was an abject display of appeasement.
What is remarkable about Czapski’s work is the fact that he was essentially allowed a free hand, from inside the Soviet Union, to investigate what had happened to so many of Poland’s elite force, who appeared to have disappeared from the face of the earth. He maintained a file of all missing officers, and was allowed even to make inquiries of the NKVD, when a careless and grudging admission that ‘mistakes were made’ led him first to conclude the awful truth. The other side of this effort was that he also learned at first hand a lot about the hideous cruelty of Communism from all manner of oppressed tribal people, forcibly migrated national groups, common citizens who had been split apart from lost family members, or dispossessed because of dekulakization, or who had simply witnessed the barbaric cruelty of the Soviet organs. And that he was able to commit it all to memory, or write and conceal encrypted notes, which allowed him to tell the whole grisly story after the war. The Inhuman Land was first published in French in 1949.
Amazingly, Czapski, born in 1896, died as late as 1993. I regret coming round to his work so late in life. One of the many whose hand I should simply like to have shaken before they died. Like Gregor van Rezzori (1914-1998), or Robert Conquest (1917-2015), or the recently encountered Justus Rosenberg, all long-lived witnesses to such chaotic times, who wrote about them so poignantly.
Secret Service in the Cold War
‘Secret Service in the Cold War’ by John and Myles Sanderson
Readers may recall that I noted, in my recent study of the Volkov affair, the existence of the interpreter Sudakov at the Ankara consulate in 1945. “The name of ‘Sudakov’ is an intriguing one. In An SIS Officer in the Balkans (2020), John B. Sanderson and Myles Sanderson write: “The First Secretary of the Soviet Embassy in Ankara was a Brigadier General Sudin, in charge of “illegal residents” (spies), within Turkey, some of whom were Bulgarians. Penkovsky was a friend of Sudakov’s (Sudin’s alias) and would have passed over to his SIS handlers useful intelligence on Bulgarian espionage in Turkey, picked up in conversation with his high-ranking friend.”
From the sources given by Myles Sanderson, it did not appear that any fresh light would be shed on the character of Sudakov, but I acquired the book, of which the full title is Secret Service in the Cold War: An SIS Officer in the Balkans. It is a compilation by the subject’s son, using unpublished memoirs of his father, and supplemented by some lengthy description of Cold War politics. It is an unusual, and overall praiseworthy study, as it tries to provide a thorough political background to all the espionage and counter-intelligence activities going on throughout John B. Sanderson’ s career. Yet, as time marches on, the contribution that Sanderson Senior made to counter-intelligence activity becomes very thin and strained, and thus the focus of the book likewise becomes very fuzzy.
The good points: as a general compendium of significant historical events, and the intelligence activity behind them, the book is probably unmatched, as many of the reviews posted on amazon confirm. Nearly all general histories of the winding-down of WWII, and the onset of the Cold War, do not do justice to the contribution made by Stalin’s agents to the ability of the Soviet Union to manipulate and outwit the democracies, especially Great Britain and the United States. Studies of intelligence and espionage are normally so wound up in the intricacies of spycraft and treachery that they do not pay enough attention to the political results of such activities. The second major quality of the book is the insight that it gives on the exploits of John B. Sanderson in his early career, culminating in a valiant role at the battle of Sangshak in Burma in 1944. He then served as a military intelligence officer in Eastern Europe, primarily in Bulgaria (Bulgarian being a language he had learned), when the show trials were held.
Yet the lack of discrimination in using sources drags the book down. Myles Sanderson (who seems not to be a qualified historian) has assimilated a vast number of books – many of which were new to me – but uses them in a completely unselective way. If Peter Wright (for example) states something he thinks might be relevant, he quotes it, and that goes for countless other references. Thus a large number of misunderstandings and errors have crept into his text, such as an endorsement of Wright’s fresh interpretation of Volkov’s letter, a reference to the perpetuation of SOE beyond 1946, the claim that Britain had a crew of agents working inside the Kremlin, and a simplification of GCHQ’s successes in ‘finally cracking the Soviet ciphers’ in 1976.
And a major question must revolve around the fact of whether Sanderson was an MI6 officer or not. His son even claims that his father was about to replace Philby as liaison officer with the CIA in Washington, and could even have risen to be chief of the Secret Intelligence Service – quite an astonishing assertion. Yet Sanderson pêre was a military attaché, and there is no clear evidence that he was ever strictly employed by MI6, as opposed to being someone who provided them with intelligence occasionally. Stephen Dorrill (who wrote a long, unauthorized history of MI6) expressed strenuous doubts about Sanderson’s affiliation in a brief review in 2019, and I had a similar reaction, based on the evidence shown in this book.
Sanderson was a military attaché in the key years after WWII, and that role itself induces some degree of amazement from me. What on earth would a military attaché be doing in a capital such as Sofia, except trying to gain intelligence about Bulgarian and Soviet intentions clandestinely? Such figures seemed to spend a lot of time at cocktail parties, where they would mingle with their counterparts from other western countries, and even banter with the opposition. Sanderson relates an incident where Sanderson suggests to a Soviet officer that he ‘come over to our side’, and the latter indicates that, despite his obvious criticism of communism, his life is too comfortable to be disrupted. And then, during that second tour of Sofia in 1961, Sanderson is caught photographing aircraft at an airfield outside Sofia. After claiming diplomatic immunity, he makes a quick escape across country so that he can evade the indignity of being expelled, something that he suspects would have damaged his career irretrievably. Astonishingly, he receives no reprimand on his file for behaving so stupidly. But maybe that was because it was not a surprise? Did his bosses expect him to gain such intelligence by using a camera himself, or should he have tried to use an agent? If he blew it, then he blew it, and should have been rebuked. On the other hand, might expulsion have been a point of pride in a Foreign Office career? The episode is all rather absurd.
In summary, Secret Service in the Cold War will be a rattling good educational read for the novice who is rather confused about the significance of various espionage stories during the post-war years, and how they related to each other, but will be somewhat irritating compilation for the more sophisticated reader, who will demand greater discipline, and an evident methodology in the exploitation of all the rich sources that Myles Sanderson has mined.
Lastly, I was going through the War Diaries of the 30 (Military) Mission to Moscow for 1943 and 1944 (to be found at WO 178/27 at Kew) when my eye alighted on the entry for June 8, 1943:
General Martel [head of the Mission] and Colonel Turner met General Dubinin and Colonel Sudakov, who appears to be Dubinin’s P.A. for the present discussions.
Could it be the same man? A promotion from Colonel to Brigadier by 1945 makes sense.
A Woman of No Importance
‘A Woman of No Importance’ by Sonia Purnell
Sonia Purnell’s 2019 biography of the SOE-OSS agent Virginia Hall, A Woman of No Importance (which I read in the 2020 Penguin edition) arrived with an impressive set of blurbs from such as Clare Mulley and Sarah Helm, as well as a number of prestigious media outlets, even selected as ‘Best Book of the Year’ by the Spectator, the Times, and others. Were such encomia merited? I was keen to investigate.
Notwithstanding its bizarre title, the book is indeed very well written, and reflects a thorough exploration of many obscure sources on Hall’s life. It offers a very sympathetic – even hagiographic – version of the life and career of the American socialite who transformed herself (even with a partially amputated leg) into an effective recruiter and in some ways leader of guerrilla groups in southern France, working initially for SOE and then, in 1944, for the American OSS. Purnell has collected some startling information about the odious Abbé Alesch, who infiltrated F Section’s circuits on behalf of the Abwehr (and was executed in 1949), that I do not believe has been published before. (Alesch has no entry in M. R. D. Foot’s Index to SOE in France.) She describes the escape at Mauzac (engineered by Hall), and the maquisard attacks at Le Puy with great verve. The account of Hall’s escape across the Pyrenees is breathtaking. Purnell has a fascinating light to show on the relationship of Nicolas Bodington (familiar to readers of this site because of his dealings with Déricourt) with Hall. He in fact recruited her, and thus followed her progress with great interest, which must cause a re-assessment of Bodington to be made. She offers some tantalizing suggestions that the Germans may have been tipped off about Sicily (cf. Operation Mincemeat!) and about the Dieppe Raid, both stories that I need to investigate more deeply. All in all, a biography of Hall was earnestly required, and this work will fulfill that function – to some degree.
But is it a wholly reliable account? I have several reservations. I could not detect any methodology behind Purnell’s analysis of sources: she is a bit too keen to trust anything that she reads in official archives, and is caught out particularly when she quotes Maurice Buckmaster, both from his memoir and from his in-house history, which works reflect a lot of wish-fulfillment and outright deceit. It is as if the book had been compiled from a cuttings library of anything that mentioned ‘Virginia Hall’, and was then transformed into a Ben Macintyre-like adventure. The author treats SOE very superficially, neglecting even to identify officers when there is no enigma behind their identity. She overlooks the tensions between MI5, MI6 and SOE – maybe not the book she wanted to write – but in that way she drastically oversimplifies the politics that were driving subversive activities in France. She dismisses Britain’s Intelligent Services generally as being populated by ‘posh boys’ – far from the truth. She continually misuses the term ‘double agents’ when she intends to describe traitorous spies in the pay of the Germans, infiltrators, or penetration agents. She has swallowed verbatim too much mythology about German radio-detection techniques, and recounts some bizarre stories about guerrilla teams intercepting Nazi wireless messages – an assertion that cries out for stronger evidence. Her coverage of Hall’s activity under OSS, and the manner in which OSS exploited SOE resources, when SOE make remarks about her performance, is muddled. She breezes past the destruction of the Prosper circuit without any indication that she understands the way it was betrayed.
Furthermore, her narrative reflects a lot of contradictions. Even though Purnell describes Hall as continually ‘recruiting, training and arming’ guerrilla groups, it is not clear what expertise she really had. She did not go through comprehensive SOE training, and seemed to derive her expertise solely from reading the SOE Handbook, so it is unlikely that teams of raw recruits would be able to become proper saboteurs under her direction, especially given her gender. Indeed, elsewhere, Purnell reports Hall as waiting intently for experienced SOE trainers to supplement her meager knowledge. In some places, she insists that guerrilla groups had to work in isolation: at others, she indicates that they should have been more coordinated. Moreover, M. R. D. Foot plays down her role in direct operations, representing her more as a liaison officer, a role that involved a lot of travelling, but nothing too arduous or dangerous. He claims that her cover remained intact, ‘mainly because friends at Lyons police station took care not to inquire too closely into her doings’.
The coverage of the supply of arms is bewildering. Purnell observes that, as early as late 1942, the secret armies were being provided with the munitions for the Allied assault – but D-Day did not happen until almost two years later. By then, according to her, some arms had started to rot, and were frequently discarded, or even thrown into rivers in despair, contradicting the blithe statements from Buckmaster that Purnell cites. She encapsulates the activity in early 1943 in a weakly casual way (“Parachute drops of arms and explosives were generally being stepped up when clear skies and light winds permitted”), showing that she has not internalized the complexities of the situation. This topic cries out for a more close-grained analysis. Purnell moreover never resolves the ongoing question as to how closely sabotage activities were directed by SOE in London. Hall herself was admittedly undisciplined, frequently made her own decisions without approval from Baker Street, and herself complained about the wastage and unauthorized sabotage that was frequently undertaken. Foot writes that she had ‘an imperturbable temper’.
Purnell scatters her text with multiple examples of shoddy tradecraft, from ruinous meetings like that at the Villa des Bois and excessively prolonged wireless time on air, through careless and disastrous carrying of papers that revealed names and addresses of contacts, the casual mixing of circuits against instructions, the issuance of false banknotes with consecutive serial numbers, to the failure to deal with traitors ruthlessly. These patterns receive no analysis from the author, who also provocatively claims that Hall’s name was given to the Gestapo by MI6, but does not explore the implications and reasons for such a dramatic and severely troublesome move. The source for this story is probably a mysterious footnote 68 to Chapter XI of Foot’s SOE in France, where he archly reports, on Hall’s second mission in 1944: “It was not known in SOE that her real name and her role on her first mission had been communicated to the Germans late in 1943 in the course of a wireless game played by another British secret service.” (Foot chose not to identify MI6, even in 2004, unless he was simply lazy: the footnote remained unchanged after forty years.) Foot gives the impression that Hall had been re-accepted by SOE as a wireless operator at this time, since they had disqualified her as a courier, but he seems to be unaware that it was OSS who had signed her up for the second mission.
Perhaps Alesch was a figure in this dastardly MI6 plot, the details of which are probably hidden in some dusty file, and cry out for further investigation. (Was Bodington perhaps a common element in this sickly charade?) Hall herself was fooled by Alesch, even though he was reported to have come from an MI6 cell, and had not been vetted. He caused immense harm: Hall was identified, and could have been arrested by the Abwehr. The unit held off, hoping to entrap more members of the Resistance, and Hall narrowly escaped the Gestapo entry into Lyon, and consequently made her escape over the Pyrenees. Many arms-drops were carelessly carried out and equipment lost; money was handed out indiscriminately to groups who were fighting rival resistance groups as much as the Germans. Too many loose ends and unsubstantiated claims.
On one important event Purnell appears to venture a challenging opinion. When Paul Vomécourt (Lucas) discovered, in January 1942, that his wireless operator Mathilde Carré (‘La Chatte’) had become the lover of the Abwehr officer Hugo Bleicher, and betrayed dozens of her comrades, Vomécourt decided to try to play her back in the hope of deceiving the Germans. Purnell writes: “At this point, Lucas should have eliminated la Chatte, gone into hiding, and immediately contacted Virginia to let her know she was at best compromised, at worst about to be arrested.” Such an action would have reflected Gubbins’ rules (as I explained last month), and sealed the circuit from any further contamination. It is not immediately clear how Purnell derived this standpoint other than reflecting proper SOE policy.
But, of course, SOE policies were not carried out in a disciplined fashion. And Bernard Cowburn, who was an integral member of the ensuing deception concluded after the war that the attempted ‘triple-agent’ play had been successful. He considered (in his 1960 memoir No Cloak, No Dagger) that the ruse had prevented the Germans from exercising a ‘North Pole’ scheme against the French, in the manner they had exploited the Dutch, and wrote that he thought that Lucas had handled the situation in the ‘best possible way’. Cowburn met Bleicher after the war, and recorded:
He then looked at me almost pleadingly, and suddenly asked, ‘Tell me, I beg of you . . . La Chatte . . . is it true she was double-crossing me?’ This proved beyond a doubt that our manœuvre had succeeded and that for once the Germans had been properly fooled.
Yet I believe that is naïve. For Bleicher to have imagined that his mistress’s act against him was a double-cross without considering the nature of the deaths that she had incurred beforehand, was simply vain and amoral. He was probably more concerned about the shallowness of their affair. Cowburn, moreover, appeared not be aware of the more drastic ramifications of Carré’s treachery.
I think Purnell’s judgment is spot-on, although she probably derived her response from what M. R. D. Foot wrote about the incident: “The correct course for him to take was to vanish at once, not even pausing to assassinate her if her death was going to complicate her escape.” When Vomécourt eventually escaped to England, he had to be rebuked by Gubbins when he suggested that he and Carré return to France, to rescue what was left of the circuit, and also assassinate Bleicher. Gubbins put his foot down, and forbad such exploits: Carré was incarcerated for the rest of the war, then sent to Paris, where she was tried, sentenced to death, and then reprieved. She died in 2007, at the age of ninety-eight. A case-study in treachery: all a very messy business, with several lessons on how to deal with traitors, and on the perils of playing with such in the guise of thinking they can be ‘turned’ at will.
None of this sub-plot detracts from the bravery of Hall, but it does undermine the hyperbolic claims made about the contribution to the overall war success of Purnell’s subject, described in the book’s blurb as ‘the American Spy Who Changed the Course of the War’, a completely unwarranted assertion. Purnell is relentless in promoting Hall’s skills and achievements, but a less breathless assessment is called for. It appears that the author had too many sous-chefs, who may not have been rigorous practitioners themselves, assisting her researches. To write with depth and authority in this realm, you have to immerse yourself, work close to the coalface, get your hands dirty, and not rely on too many intermediaries. I do not believe that Purnell has done that.
Lastly, I note that a movie on Hall’s life is now under way, perhaps to accompany a hypothetical one on Agent Sonya, ‘the Soviet Spy Who Changed the Course of the Cold War.’ Oh, lackaday! ‘A Woman of No Importance’ is a significant contribution to the history of French resistance in WWII, but it should not be regarded as a definitive account, and needs to be integrated with and checked against more serious histories.
P.S. I should have made room to discuss Stephen Tyas’s SS-Major Horst Kopkow. I have read some clunkers on intelligence matters over the past couple of years, but this book, about the notorious Gestapo officer who engineered the sham deal with Suttill and Norman, and provided testimony that sent Kieffer to the gallows, is excellent. A must-read.
Language Corner
Regular readers of coldspur will be familiar with my high sensitivity to incorrect spelling and grammar, especially when such solecisms are committed by professional writers and broadcasters. My biggest gripe is with those who cannot deploy ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘myself’ properly, and end up with such monstrosities as ‘between you and I’, and ‘he gave it to my wife and I’. I almost threw Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time (all twelve volumes) across the room because of his clumsy and excessive use of the reflexive ‘myself’ when he couldn’t work out whether he should have been using ‘I’ or ‘me’. I decry the decline of the subjunctive in conditional clauses, and, as a devoted student of German verb conjugation, get annoyed by any evident confusion over lie/lay/lain and lay/laid/laid.
Some of my objections are directed at the careless use of vocabulary that reflects lazy thinking, or politically correct viewpoints, such as Nobel Prize winning economists who use ‘plutocrat’ when they mean ‘rich people’ (Yes, Krugman P. at the back there, I am talking to you!), or the New York Times journalists who describe some region as ‘impoverished’, when they simply mean ‘poor’. (‘Impoverished’ implies that the region was at some time wealthy, but then was denuded by some oppressor, which is presumably the sub-marxist impression that the writers want to bequeath.)
My continuous and long-standing beef, however, is with the New York Times, and its inability to instruct its journalists to understand and use properly singular and plural forms of Latin words, even though the correct usage appears in its Style Guide. (I have been told as much.) This defect is shown mostly in the use of ‘bacterium ’and ‘bacteria’: dozens of articles over the years have deployed ‘bacteria’ with a singular verb, and I have collected the messages that I have sent to the editors in a single document, inspectable at NYTBacteria. I have surely not captured all the incidences during this period, since I must have overlooked many, and some I ignored because I forgot to write, but I believe the collection is rich enough. And now it is on-line, and the editors at the paper can use it as a teaching-tool. Bravo! (I would get out more, but my piles of books on intelligence are blocking the exit-doors.)
Bridge Corner
With the COVID epidemic ebbing, I have resumed playing face-to-face duplicate bridge, and normally play three times a week. It is an absorbing pastime, where the rewards are finding out how well you and you partner handle deals that will be played by all the other pairs of the same orientation during the session. Thus all the East-Wests compete against each other, as do all the North-Souths. The goal is to get a ‘top’ score on each hand, and minimize the disasters. One recent hand has absorbed me recently. I picked up as East:
(Spades): ♠ A K 10 9 6
(Hearts) ♥ A 6 3 2
(Diamonds) ♦ 8 3
(Clubs) ♣ 9 4
My partner, West, opened the bidding with 1 D; I responded 1 S; the opposition was silent; he replied 2S (showing 4 spades and regular opening values); and I jumped to 4S (a game contract that delivers extra points if made during the play), as I had 5 excellent Spades, and an outside Ace.
South led the King of Hearts, and West laid done his hand as Dummy, showing me the following cards:
♠ Q J 5 4
♥ 8
♦ K J 6 5
♣ A K 6 5
This was fine, but then every other pair would probably bid game, and thus face the same challenge. It looks fairly straightforward, as there is no side-suit that can be developed after trumps are drawn: win the Ace of H, draw trumps, hoping they split 2-2, take the Club winners, and trump Clubs and Hearts in both hands leaving a Heart loser, and the Diamonds to guess. (Who has the Ace? Who has the Queen?)
I thought I saw a superior play that would ‘guarantee’ 11 tricks, and maybe make 12, by exploiting my higher-value trumps, and get rid of that last pesky Heart loser, if Spades did indeed split 2-2. (And, if they don’t, I would at least match the less enterprising pairs). Thus I imagined 11 tricks: 2 Clubs, 1 Heart, 3 Spades in dummy, and 5 in hand, with a Diamond still to come as a possible twelfth. Win the Ace of Hearts, and trump a Heart. Play the Ace, then the King of Clubs, and trump the 5 of Clubs with the 9 of Spades (in case Clubs split 5-2), trump another Heart, play the last Club and trump with the 10, and lead the last Heart, trumping with the Queen. Lead the last spade to the Ace, and hope to draw the last two trumps with the King. Then see what the opponents do when I have to break Diamonds. I’ll hold on to my last trump just in case the owner of the Ace leads a Club or a Heart. (Defenders do not always keep count of the number of cards played in each suit.) South probably has two Diamonds and a Heart left, but probably not the Ace of Diamonds, as he or she might have bid over my 1 Spade with all those Hearts and the Ace of Diamonds. North probably holds two Diamonds and a Club: if he or she has Ace and Queen of Diamonds, it doesn’t matter, and just 11 tricks make (and all the ’conventional’ pairs will make only ten tricks). If South has the Ace of Diamonds, he or she will probably go up with it on the Diamond lead, and I am home and dry. If not, I have to play the Jack from dummy, losing to the Ace. I then make 12 tricks.
But I never got there! The Spades did indeed split 2-2, but the Clubs split 6-1, and South was able to trump the King of Clubs before I got going. Thus I had to guess the Diamonds properly in order to even make the game (10 tricks). Seven of the other pairs all made 11 tricks the obvious way (presumably), and must all have guessed the Diamonds correctly. Thus my partner and I received only 1 point, while seven pairs got 5 points each. A certain ‘Top’ was converted to a near ‘Bottom’ in an instant. The ninth pair made only nine tricks: presumably their East (a good player), played the same line as I chose, but mis-guessed the Diamonds. So much for enterprise and imagination. Those cursed computer-arranged hands!
The full deal:
North
♠ 8 3
♥ 7 5 4
♦ A 4
♣ Q J 10 8 3 2
West ♠ Q J 5 4 East ♠ A K 10 9 6
♥ 8 ♥ A 6 3 2
♦ K J 6 5 ♦ 8 3
♣ A K 6 5 ♣ 9 4
South
♠ 7 2
♥ K Q J 10 9
♦ Q 10 9 7 2
♣ 7
Such is the endless fascination (and frustration) of bridge. (‘A Bridge Too Far’? Do not worry: this column will not be repeated unless I receive overwhelming demand.)
The time has come to try to tidy up five threads of my research concerning wartime wireless usage in Britain, namely Sonia’s Radio; Sonia and the Quebec Agreement; The Mystery of the Undetected Radios; HASP: Spycatcher’s Last Gasp; and Sonia & MI6’s Hidden Hand. The puzzle remains: why was Sonia’s wireless activity not detected? Central to the whole inquiry are the circumstances of a crowded island, in wartime, when the intelligence services had a heightened fear of German spies, one that was communicated to the public at large. In addition, a well-trained unit, the Radio Security Service, was charged with identifying illicit wireless traffic. The probability must therefore be extremely low that a German-speaking woman with a known shady and subversive past could have contrived to outwit the authorities for so long without even having to resort to the traditional practices of concealment and avoidance that wireless agents infiltrated into mainland Europe had to pursue.
Therein lies the paradox to be resolved. That is why it is necessary to inspect very closely the various claims that she (and others) made about the frequency and extent of her transmissions.
The primary conclusions from my previous research can be summarised as follows:
Sonia’s Radio: Sonia’s most important radio transmissions probably occurred from Kidlington, and then from Summertown, Oxford, during the critical period that she handled Klaus Fuchs (October 1942 to December 1943). From September 1943 (when she and her husband, Len Beurton moved to Summertown after his arrival from Switzerland), any wireless activity was probably a feint for what I speculated might have been Len’s more clandestine transmissions from Kidlington.
Sonia and the Quebec Agreement:Chapman Pincher referred to some unverifiable wireless traffic stored by the GRU that appeared to confirm the fact that Sonia transmitted by wireless details of the 1943 Quebec Agreement about atomic research cooperation. For evidential and logistical reasons, this theory should be discarded.
The Mystery of the Undetected Radios: The London Controlling Section and B1A of MI5 displayed a degree of folly in managing its double-cross agents that was matched only by that of the Abwehr in reacting to what was going on. The so-called ’double-agents’, especially GARBO, were, under control, allowed to communicate from stationary positions for absurd lengths of time during a period when the country was on heightened alert. Those officers in the Abwehr who doubted the reliability of their agents were essentially quashed because it suited the careerists to maintain the fiction, and the successor organisation, the RSHA, was unfamiliar with the background. The RSS’s capabilities for detecting illicit transmitters on home territory were much weaker than the authorities claimed at the time, or after the war.
HASP: Spycatcher’s Last Gasp: Peter Wright’s memoir contains a high degree of fabulizing. His account of the HASP traffic is incoherent, and his described search for the missing recordings of Sonia’s transmissions an exercise in self-delusion.
Sonia & MI6’s Hidden Hand: The escape to Britain by Sonia, and the eventual return of her husband, Len Beurton, to join her, were part of an elaborate plot by MI6 (with MI5’s connivance) to use the pair as some species of ‘double-agent’ – a scheme that went tragically wrong.
I thus inspect the conventional ‘journalist’s questions’ of How? What? When? Where?, supplemented by an analysis of Why?
What equipment did Sonia own in Britain?
How did she acquire it?
When and where did she use it?
Whither did she transmit?
Why did she need to communicate by wireless?
What did she transmit?
Why was she not detected?
1) What equipment did Sonia own in Britain? How did she acquire it?
What is notable is that, as Sonia’s career in illicit wireless transmission progressed, she revealed, in her memoir Sonya’s Report, less and less about the details of the experience. Her account runs as follows:
P 105 She learned to build transmitters, receivers, rectifiers and frequency meters in Moscow
Pp 119-120 In Shanghai, in 1934, Sonia and Ernst bought parts for a transmitter (not available in Mukden), and stowed them away in luggage. The transmitter parts consisted of smaller pieces and two valves the size of a milk bottle. There were no parts available to build a transformer, thus they needed to build a rectifier, in Mukden. Ernst went back to Shanghai, found one and hid it inside a heavy armchair.
P 125 shows a picture of their house in Mukden with two bamboos holding the aerials.
Sonia’s House in Mukden
P 126 They used the same type of transmitter that Max described in the book Dr Sorge signals from Tokyo by Julius Mader (1966). The transmitter could be constructed from receiver parts, though even these were not readily available. It was a Hartley transmitter with a three point system. “We did not however – as Max did three years later – omit the rectifier, with its component transformer that caused us so many headaches.” The equipment was of massive proportions: it could not be dismantled every time. It contained a heavy rectifier, large valves, coils made from heavy copper tubing. The coils took more space than the whole transmitter a decade later.
P 127 A year later Ernst fitted the transmitter into a portable gramophone. He bought an American textbook for radio mechanics. Sonia, however, was not as expert a builder of transmitters as Ernst was. The transmitter’s signal was weak, and the Vladivostok end frequently jammed.
P 128 Listening was a torture: 500 groups (of five-figure enciphered characters) might take half the night. ‘We could only select one of two frequencies because with our length of receiver aerial the transmitter only worked on a specific wavelength. It was called a Fuchs aerial.” Sonia expressed amazement that the station was never discovered with regular operation (3 or 4 times a week from the same location). Sonia left China in the autumn of 1935. Before she left,she had caused a short-circuit in a hotel room in Peking, bringing the whole hotel into darkness.
Pp 136-138 By early 1936 Sonia had been established in Poland. She set up the transmitter, which she had had to build on her own, in a suburb of Warsaw, in a ground-floor flat. Again, it was constructed in an empty gramophone case. Yet it worked: she received a reply at once. (Maybe distance had something to do with it.)
Pp 163-168 Sonia moved to Danzig, and needed the privacy of a detached house for her transmitter. Unfortunately, humming sounds made the signals inaudible, a noise that she traced to a nearby power station. Thus she had to move to another apartment block, whence she sent messages twice a week. Yet she gained another valuable lesson: her neighbour pointed out that she was experiencing interference on her radio, and informed Sonia that her husband suspected someone was making secret transmissions. Nevertheless, Sonia persisted, and went on the air once more. She foolishly did not change the transmission time to make it later (and thus reduce the detection risk, although it might have required co-ordination of her proposed schedules with Moscow), or move to a fresh location.
Pp 169-171 By March 1937, Sonia had moved back to Warsaw. She used two batteries each of 120 volts, and, on one occasion, she received a severe electric shock from her equipment. She wrote that her comrade Andrei had informed her that sunspots were causing interference with radio communications, although this might have been based on a misunderstanding of how sunspots affect optimum frequencies.
Pp 184-185 After a recall to Moscow (which she survived, in the middle of the worst purges), Sonia returned to Poland, where she had to help a young comrade by building his transmitter. She transmitted only once a fortnight, and was recalled again in June 1938.
P 191 By September 1938, Sonia had been despatched to Switzerland, where she set up her transmitter. It had to bridge a distance of over 2,000 km. She constructed it in her linen cupboard, and started the schedule early: communication with Moscow was good.
Pp 204-207 By October 1939 (i.e. after war broke out, and amateur radio communications had been forbidden), she was using the transmitter two nights a week. She helped her colleague Hermann construct his, but they had to bury the transmitters when observation intensified. She dug it up again with Len Beurton, and a friendly carpenter made a closet for it. It was concealed in a one-and-a half-metre deep hole in a shed.
P 217 The transmitter was used to the full to help Radó (the leader of the Swiss cell), but
in December 1939 Hermann was arrested during radio work in Freibourg. Sonia thus stopped transmitting for a while
P 227 Now Sonia was transmitting from the Hamels’ kitchen, in Geneva.
P 228 Sonia left for the UK in December 1940.
P 240 She was short of money. Nevertheless, after a few weeks, she wrote: “I had already bought all the transmitter parts and worked on them between praying and playing cards in the Rectory. It could be in operation within 24 hours.”
Pp 242-243 Sonia claimed that she used her transmitter twice a week. Sergey (her contact from the Soviet Embassy) gave her a small parcel, 8 by 6 inches, which contained a small transmitter. It was reliable, handy and technically superior. She therefore dismantled her own transmitter, which was six times the size. Thereafter she transmitted from England for 5 or 6 years.
P 250 Amateur transmissions were forbidden. Sonia therefore had to count on her transmitter being discovered at some point. Thus she sought out ‘Tom’ as a back-up.
Sonia assuredly learned some lessons from her worldwide experiences. Having struggled early in her career, she gained in competence in both constructing and deploying wireless equipment. She was aware of the many problems: for instance, that signals could interfere with local domestic wireless reception, and that, similarly, local power sources could interfere with the quality of transmissions. She knew that transmitting from the same location was inherently dangerous, and she thus expected to be detected. She must have concluded that long-range transmission and reception were haphazard enterprises, although she reflected some misunderstandings about phenomena such as sunspots. And she learned that a well-disguised hiding-place was vital to elude the eyes of the authorities. Yet in one aspect, her account is very puzzling: she writes much about her transmitters, but never about receivers, which are much more complex items of equipment.
As for her account of her wireless work in Britain, she reflected a very careless attitude. Indeed, if one judged her radio-activity on the strength of the details on her equipment she provided, one might conclude her operation was meagre. Moreover, in her memoir she skated over a highly challenging part of her experience. How on earth was she able to buy the parts she needed, over the counter in wartime Britain, when the ownership of unauthorised wireless transmitters was illegal, and the challenges of constructing a receiver were substantial? To quote what my on-line colleague, Dr. Brian Austin, an expert in radiotelephony, has written on these matters: “A sensitive and selective receiver is a far more complex electronic device than a keyed power oscillator which is all a Morse code transmitter has to be.” Dr. Austin (in a review of Ben Macintyre’s Agent Sonya) went on to explain that none of the necessary components could have been purchased in the local hardware stores, especially in wartime, and continued: “Most vital of all, though they never received so much as a mention, were the quartz crystals that determined the transmitter’s frequency. To have used such a precise frequency as 6.1183 MHz, as Macintyre informs us, is only possible when a quartz crystal is the frequency-controlling element. And the ionosphere, so very frequency-dependent, never got a mention either. The antenna, as vital as anything, received no more than a fleeting comment.”
Yet it should be recalled that, according to the telegram sent by BRION (now believed to be Shvetsov) from the Soviet Embassy in London to Moscow on July 31, 1941 (see VENONA Documents – July 1941 (nsa.gov), Sonia, when she had a meeting with Apthekar (GRU cryptonym IRIS), claimed expenses of £105 on ‘radio and microdots’ purchases. It does not appear that she had been able to make any earlier claims, since one entry is for seven months’ salary, and thus, since she had described meeting Apthekar (known to her as SERGEY) in May, and informed him that she could have her transmitter in operation ‘within 24 hours’, one must assume that she had completed the exercise then. £105 presumably covered her total expenses. Dr. Austin very reasonably casts doubt not only on the fact of Sonia’s acquisition andassembly of the equipment, but also its deployment (which I shall address later). So what is the evidence that Sonia did in fact possess a transmitter/receiver, and how might she have obtained it?
The most famous is the police visit to Summertown in January 1943, when Detective-Inspector Rolfe reported to the Chief Constable, Charles Fox, that a visit to the Beurtons’ house in George Street, Summertown, Oxford had revealed that the occupants ‘had rather a large wireless set and recently had a special pole erected for use for the aerial’ (KV 6/41, sn. 55a). This had all been engineered quite openly, as Sonia had in fact asked her landlady, Mrs. Sissie Laski, the wife of Neville, for permission to erect the aerial (antenna) from the roof of their cottage, and link it to one of her landlady’s stables. Some commentators have suggested that this could have been presented as for reception only, but it was a flamboyant request, and should have merited deeper investigation than actually occurred by the Police Force or by MI5 – especially since the Beurtons were considered suspicious persons at that time.
Much of the evidence comes from her offspring. Thus Maik Hamburger, in his memoir of his mother, The German Riveter (see: https://www.eurolitnetwork.com/the-german-riveter-my-mother-sonya-by-maik-hamburger ), wrote, of the house called The Firs: “ Living in Great Rollright, a little village in the Cotswolds, Sonya achieved the apex of her career: she recruited the German-born physicist Klaus Fuchs, who lived in Birmingham and was employed in top-secret research work on the atomic bomb. Fuchs provided her with large quantities of classified information about the development of the bomb, which she duly passed on to her central office in Moscow. Whenever the material was too bulky or contained too many formulae for sending in Morse code, she deposited it in a secret letter-box in Great Rollright for a Russian agent to pick up.” Yet the occupation of The Firs took place after the war, and Maik’s testimony raises further serious questions [see below].
‘I am the Daughter’
Both Maik (Michael) and his sister, Janina, gave accounts of Sonia’s busy nights enciphering, transmitting to Moscow, and deciphering. Ben Macintyre reports (p 235) as follows: “By the end of 1942, Ursula was transmitting two or three times a week. Little Michael wondered why his mother often slept in the afternoons: She was frequently exhausted from working through much of the night.” And, indeed, Sonia explained that her sending Michael off to boarding-school in Eastbourne was largely to protect him from learning more about her nocturnal transmissions. In her memoir Die Tochter bin ich, Janina wrote (p 50), of the period when she returned to the house at Great Rollright from school:
Manchmal schlief meine Mutter um dies Zeit. Das taten andrere Mütter im Dorf nicht, und ich dachte: Mich schickte sie Unkraut jäten, und sie will schlafen. Wir wußten ja nicht, dass sie nachts oft überhaupt nicht oder or zwei Stunden schlief. Sie mußte nicht nur den Sender bedienen and Funksprüche aus der Sowjetunion aufnehmen; die Funksprüche kamen in Zahlen an, und sie mußte sie gleich nachts nach einem Geheimcode entziffern and das Papier verbrennen.
[Sometimes my mother slept at this time. That wasn’t something the other mothers in the village did, and I thought: She sent me out to pull up weeds, while she insisted on sleeping. Of course we didn’t know that she managed only one or two hours’ sleep, if any, during the nights. Not only did she have to handle the transmitter and wireless messages from the Soviet Union; the messages arrived in bunches, and she had to do her enciphering according to a secret code, and then burn her worksheets.]
While not precisely dated, these observations would appear to describe some time in 1947 or 1948, as all three children were attending school, and working in the garden, and the time referred to was after the famed holiday in Wales, at Butlin’s. (Peter was born in November 1943.) While this timing of Sonia’s afternoon naps has significance [see below], it is, of course, amazing that the poor woman found any time to do any espionage. Moreover, I received a communication from Mr. Roy Vincent a couple of years ago. He had been a lodger with the Beurtons at Great Rollright in 1947-48 (and, as an important sign of verisimilitude, recalled Nina’s interest in Princess Margaret). He wrote to me as follows:
Her daughter Nina was there, and her son Peter came occasionally. Peter told me that his mother had a radio in the basement, but of course to me the radio was just the normal kind – I never saw it, the door to the basement was always kept locked, but there was one occasion where it was left open, and regrettably I did not go down for a look.
I do remember though that there was a wire which came through the wall (or maybe behind some furniture) and went through a hole in the ceiling, which knowing what I do now was the radio antenna.
Mr. Vincent’s testimony is probably more reliable than that of Sonia’s son and daughter, however, or even Sonia herself. In his Introduction to Agent Sonya, Macintyre writes that she had ‘in the outdoor privy behind The Firs . . . constructed a powerful radio transmitter’, leaving it ambiguous as to whether she had built it there (as opposed to transporting it from its previous location), or had operated it there (not in the basement, then). One might also question why, since the miniature transmitter that Sergey had given her was, by Sonia’s account, able to replace her large, clumsy apparatus, she did not just use her new set . . . Another gross error is the fact that Maik asserted that his mother recruited Klaus Fuchs while she was living at Great Rollright. The meeting with Fuchs, however, had been set up in October 1942, and Fuchs left for the USA in December 1943, so Maik’s memory is clearly at fault. His account of his mother’s dropping material in a hiding-place in Great Rollright is pure fantasy, and in contradiction to how his mother even described the process. And is there a possibility that son and daughter were coached to communicate the identical message about Sonia’s sleeping habits, separated by several years? As I shall explore later, it is difficult to imagine what could have occupied so much of Sonia’s time on the wireless in 1947-1948, and her own testimony indicates that she had lost contact with her controller by then.
‘The Firs’ at Great Rollright
Lastly, for this section, is the matter of electricity. The fact that there was no current to the house at Great Rollright was described by Sonia (p 267), and echoed by Janina (p 40). Why Sonia would have selected premises lacking electric current if she had important espionage reports to deliver by clandestine wireless was overlooked by the ace agent when she and the GRU compiled her ‘memoir’. This story was nevertheless picked up by Ben Macintyre without the author’s considering how a transmitter-receiver could have been operated so extensively on battery-power alone, or how such batteries would have been charged and the voltage converted. In successive sentences, Sonia described the lack of electricity as well as the potential problem of having tenants, which might impede her radio work. The paradox of such circumstances apparently did not occur to Janina, either. Roy Vincent, however, assures me that the house was electrified, as he recalls a power-cord in the bathroom. In fact Janina remarked (p 43) that it was not until a year after the war that the village was hooked up to the power network (‘Strom erhielt’).
Moreover, it is much more likely that Sonia’s equipment was provided to her by the Soviet Embassy. Such devices were often brought over in the diplomatic bag, which, after the Soviet Union entered the war in June 1941, was often helpfully ferried into Britain by American ‘Liberator’ aircraft. In her memoir, Sonia reports that her contact, Sergey, handed her a miniature transmitter, probably in July 1941, measuring 8 by 6 inches (and an unknown third dimension), and that she was able to dismantle her existing transmitter. She was then able to conceal the new device in a wall when she moved to the cottage in Summertown, but how this miniaturized device stored enough power for the transmission to Moscow was not explained. (What she did to conceal the receiver is not recorded.) Thus, if she did engage in long-distance radio transmission, it was highly probable that the Embassy provided her with her equipment, crystals and all.
The ‘Tensor’ transmitter
(Dr. Austin has recently shown me evidence that the Soviets had constructed a miniaturised three-piece set of receiver, power-supply unit, and transmitter, known as the ‘Tensor’, and delivered it to its agents in 1942. See https://cryptomuseum.com/spy/tensor/index.htm , and I was able to verify such details in my copy of Meulstee’s and Staritz’s Wireless for the Warrior, Volume 4. This equipment is remarkable, as the receiver (on the right) has dimensions that closely resemble what Sonia described, but serious questions remain. Sonia indicates that she was supplied with her new transmitter in 1941, i.e. before this package was shipped. She never refers to the other two units, but the transmitter would have been useless without the power-supply component. It is not clear that she would have been able to operate such a new device without training. Moreover, I would judge that this equipment displays an unlikely degree of sophistication for 1942, at a time when Hitler’s armies were at the gates of Moscow, and Soviet factories were being dismantled and moved behind the Urals. The Soviet Union was also very dependent upon Great Britain and the USA for manufacturing materials. Intriguingly, the set’s inscriptions are in English. This topic will have to be studied elsewhere – and not by me – but it shows how complex the mythology behind Sonia’s wireless usage is.)
2) When and Where did Sonia transmit?
I next turn to the substance of her transmissions. We should recall that not a single verifiable transcript of any message that Sonia was reputed to have sent (or received) has been presented by any authority. The suggestive sources are as follows:
Evidence from VENONA (intercepted Soviet diplomatic and military intelligence traffic)
Sonia’s claims
Claims from the Soviet Ministry of Defence
Ben Macintyre’s claims
Chapman Pincher’s claims
Peter Wright’s claims
Bob King’s claims
Evidence from VENONA:
The most famous of the accounts of Sonia’s activity come from the telegram identified above, sent at the end of July, 1941, where BRION (Shvetsov) informed his bosses that Sonia had tried to contact Moscow on the immediately preceding four successive nights (July 26-29), without success. This phenomenon is vaguely echoed in Sonia’s memoir, but brought forward. She wrote (p 242): “After Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, several days went by without response to my call-sign, but then they came on the air again. I used the transmitter twice a week.” Since Barbarossa was launched on June 22, that would indicate that Sonia successfully made contact by the end of that month, and then settled into a regular and successful interchange of messages. Sonia indicated no interruptions of service during this period, stressing only the richness of the information she received from her brother, her father, Hans Kahle, and military contacts, which all resulted in her being able to compile four to six reports a month. So what was Shvetsov’s appeal all about? Was he simply reporting a failure that was never resolved? Was Sonia merely boasting?
Of course, if Sonia had failed to get through to Moscow, Sergey may have told her to abandon the idea, and simply use the miniature new set he had handed her to communicate with the embassy in London instead . . .
Sonia’s Claims:
Because of the contradictions and errors that Sonia and her children made about her wireless ownership and deployment, the claims that Sonia made about her level of busyness have to be processed with a certain degree of scepticism. She stated (Sonya’s Report, p 243) that she transmitted from England for five or six years (1941-1947, in that case).
Occasionally, she supplied examples of the content of messages that she sent. Hence (p 259), she claimed that, after a comrade ‘with worthwhile military information’ had turned to her brother, Jürgen, and the latter sought her advice. “I sent a coded message to Centre and received the reply that contact should be established. The name of this comrade, Klaus Fuchs”, she wrote. Frank Close, Fuchs’s leading biographer, has accepted Sonia’s account of this set-up completely, but why stress ‘coded’? Were other messages not ‘coded’? And it would have been poor spycraft if Fuchs’s name had been given to her by Moscow Central. After one of her trysts with Fuchs, she coded (so she wrote) Fuchs’s questions for Moscow, and decoded Centre’s replies for him. Centre twice acknowledged his messages with ‘important’ and ‘very valuable’ – which seems somewhat of a distortion, as, by all accounts (including that of Fuchs himself) they met only two or three times in total. The unlikelihood of the whole saga was reinforced by the fact that Sonia then stated that ‘about two years after we had started working together, Centre asked me to arrange a meeting for Klaus in New York.’ By all accounts, Sonia first met Fuchs some time between July and October 1942: he left for the USA in late November 1943. Unless a great new secret lies behind this disclosure, we must conclude that her sense of time was shaky.
Towards the end of the war, in the autumn of 1944, Sonia claimed that Jürgen asked her to gain approval from Moscow for his joining the Office of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey. When it consented, and she was able to pass on the good news, Jürgen joined, and was able to give her reports, such as the estimates of current enemy arms production, which Sonia ‘passed on to Centre’. Not only is this behaviour quite out of character for Jürgen, why he simply would not have passed on such reports to his contacts at the Soviet Embassy is never explained. At the end of the war, Sonia ‘had no contact with Centre for several weeks’. In the summer or autumn of 1946, according to her account, Centre broke off contact with her. The Vassiliev archive, namely in Yellow Notebook Number 1, p 86, claims it was even earlier: “Since January 1946, S. has been inactive, and no personal contact with her is maintained.” (January 1946 would have been in the Days before Electricity, in any case.) And that means that Janina’s story about her mother’s exhaustion because of night-time wireless work in 1948 is pure hokum.
Claims from the Soviet Ministry of Defence:
I reproduce here, verbatim, two paragraphs from Chapter 8 of Sonia’s Radio:
The earliest indication of Sonia’s activity appears to be given by an entry in the files of the Soviet Department of Defence, if the transcripts of these documents, which have authoritative-looking identifiers, can be relied upon. (They have been provided to me by a source who prefers to remain anonymous: I suspect they derive from the possessions of a CIA agent, who acquired them by undisclosed means.) It records that ‘soon after Sonia arrived in Britain and established radio communications with Moscow Centre, Ivan Proskurov, then head of Military Intelligence, responded with a message of encouragement’, and two days later (the entries are sadly not dated) sent her detailed instructions. “The assignments on information remain the same. Pay special attention to obtaining information concerning Germany, its army and military economy.” The first message signed off with ‘Warm regards to you and your kids. Regards from Frank [the codename for her ex-husband, Rolf Hamburger].’
I see several reasons for questioning the authenticity of (many of) these documents. First of all, the language here is avuncular and unbusiness-like, very much out of character for normal communications between Moscow and its agents. Rudolf was at that time under detention by the Chinese, causing the Soviets to request his release in June, so was hardly in a position to send his ex-wife his regards. The documents are undated, but the ‘soon after’ (and I am not sure who made that clarification), suggests to me ‘weeks’ rather than ‘months’. Sonia arrived in the UK in early February 1941, but did not construct her transmitter until late May, and made her first contact with the Soviet Union in late June, apparently. It is not totally bizarre to imagine that, even during the time of the Nazi-Soviet pact, Moscow might be seeking dramatic new intelligence on Germany’s army and military economy, but it is absurd to suppose that Sonia, as a new arrival in Britain, would be in a position, from the Oxfordshire countryside, to identify, cultivate, and recruit agents with fresh knowledge in that domain. Moscow already had her brother, abetted by his father, openly giving information to the Soviet Embassy. I have to conclude the documents are fakes, disinformation designed to show, retrospectively, the honourableness of Soviet espionage aims at the time.
I have no reason to change my assessment.
Ben Macintyre’s Claims:
The author of Agent Sonya takes every opportunity to boost his subject’s wireless activity, faithfully reproducing the claims she made herself, and magnifying the importance of her ‘network of spies’. “In the course of a year the Sonya network expanded to include at least a dozen spies, providing a wealth of intelligence: military, political, and scientific”, he writes (p 235), while her brother and father ‘tirelessly hoovered up information and gossip’. This rich seam of ‘intelligence’ had to be processed. “All this intelligence had to be marshalled into reports, coded, and sent to Moscow.” By the end of 1942, Ursula was transmitting ‘two or three times a week’, observes our intrepid researcher.
Yet Macintyre shows a combination of vagueness and unjustifiable precision. He describes the content of the messages that Sonya received from Moscow Centre after Operation Barbarossa: “When she finally established radio contact, Ursula found the Centre avid for intelligence about Britain. What were the politicians and generals really thinking? How sincere were Churchill’s words? Would Britain support Russia?”, he dramatically declares. No source for these messages is given: Sonia’s memoir includes no such precise testimony.
The only occasion where Macintyre reproduces, apparently verbatim, a message from Moscow occurs during the negotiations over Klaus Fuchs. He writes that Jürgen had taken Ursula aside at a family gathering in Hampstead in July 1942, and told her ‘a physicist by the name of F. had lost contact with a representative of the Soviet Embassy’s military department, who called himself “Johnson”’. (JOHNSON was Simon Kremer, the military attaché, who had indeed returned to the Soviet Union that summer.) When Sonia returned to Kidlington that evening, she sent a message to Moscow requesting instructions. “The Centre responded: ‘make contact with OTTO’.” Macintyre’s source for this factoid is Frank Close’s Trinity. Close, in turn, cites the Vassiliev Yellow Notebook Number 1, p 86, which refers to a GRU memoir of Fuchs.
That passage can be verified, and runs as follows: “On 22.10.42. ‘Sonya’ informed our worker that her brother, J. Kuczynski, had told her that in July 1942, a physicist by the name of F had lost contact with a member of the Sov. Embassy’s military department who called himself Johnson. ‘Sonya’ also reported that at Kuczynski’s suggestion, she already established contact with F., received materials from him, and asks us to indicate whether she should continue to maintain contact with him and accept materials from him. On our instructions, Sonya continued to maintain contact with F . . .” Chapman Pincher, incidentally, suggests that Fuchs attended the Hampstead gathering in July, and may have passed materials on at this encounter.
Careful readers will have noticed that there is no record, in the Notebooks, of Sonia’s rushing home to gain Moscow’s permission in July 1942, and certainly no confirmation of a ‘Make contact with OTTO’ message. In fact the item indicates that Sonia contacted Fuchs without any explicit permission from Moscow, and then informed her local contact (‘our worker’) by word of mouth of what she had done, rather than communicating by wireless. This is, in fact, the way that Pincher presented the events, with Jürgen, acting on GRU instructions, suggesting to his sister that she act as Fuchs’s courier, to which Sonia immediately assented, with Jürgen giving her details for a meeting in Birmingham. One might also wonder, if Moscow had given her sharp instructions to contact ‘OTTO’, why she had waited so long to make the assignment, or, if she attended to it promptly, why she took so long to report it. Wireless appears to have played no part in the project.
Macintyre categorises the secrets that Fuchs handed on as ‘one of the most concentrated spy hauls in history’ (p 232), but, nevertheless, still implies that Sonia transmitted a considerable amount by wireless. He appears to have accepted Maik Hamburger’s nonsensical ‘testimony’ at face value in this regard, ignoring the anomalies of time and space. “Much of this material was too complex and too technical to be coded and sent by radio”, he writes, thus declaring that Sonia still used the highly problematic medium for a sizable proportion of Fuchs’s material, even though she had a reliable channel to the Embassy established. I shall explore this apparent paradox later.
Chapman Pincher’s Claims:
When Chapman Pincher made his assertions about Sonia and the Quebec Agreement in Treachery, he claimed that ‘the Russian archives’ provided the evidence for Sonia’s leakage of ‘all the essential aspects of the Quebec Agreement’ (pp 16-17). This comprehensive report, laboriously encoded, enciphered, and transmitted, had, as ‘the GRU archives’ confirmed, impressed Stalin, as it went beyond what Roosevelt and Churchill had told him about their agreement in a personal message. No particular file or folder is identified, and Pincher did not provide an authorial source for these claims, although he did state that Dr. Svetlana Chervonnaya had, in July 2011, discovered a document confirming that Sonia had transmitted this information on September 4, 1943. Pincher then went on to write that Sonia had already transmitted at that time the list of the fifteen British scientists selected to move to America.
This is all bunkum, as I showed in my piece. Neither Fuchs nor Sonia could possibly have known the details of the Quebec Agreement at that time, nor which scientists had been chosen, and neither would Roger Hollis, Pincher’s prime candidate for the leakage, have been able to learn of such specific information.
Later, when discussing her interactions with Klaus Fuchs, Pincher played with the notion of Sonia’s role as ‘head of station’ to suggest that ‘Sonya’s Station’ represented her role as an ‘established operator with transmitting facilities’ – ‘Sonya’s Station’ (p 157). He reinforced this notion with a reference to the memoirs of Major General Petrov, a former chief of the GRU Radio-Communications Service, who apparently singled out Sonia’s transmitter as ‘Sonya’s Station operated by Ursula Hamburger.’ Yet Pincher sensibly indicated that the documents passed to her by Fuchs were so bulky, and so unsuitable for converting into Morse code (e.g. ‘100 pages of drawings and formulae’), that she had to take them by train to London ‘for onward passage to the Soviet embassy’. Pincher drew attention to the prominent aerial at the Laskis’ cottage, and rightly questioned why MI5 did not follow up the inspection (p 161), but he did not ascribe a role to it in the Fuchs business.
That was not to deny Sonia’s radio-activity, however. On page 138 of Treachery, Pincher wrote, of her time in Kidlington starting in April 1941: “It is now certain, from the identification of some of her radio traffic, that she was transmitting substantial amounts of material long before she would have had time to find and recruit any new sources of her own.” While this description is belied by Sonia’s own account of the time at which she started exploiting her equipment, Pincher provided no sources for what would be a breathtaking revelation of her traffic.
It seems that Pincher was relying largely on information fed to him by Chervonnaya, as well as three volumes published in Russian, Viktor Bochkarov’s and Alexander Kolpakidi’s Superfrau iz GRU, and Vladimir Lota’s Sekretny Front and GRU I atomnaia bomba. When I previously wrote about the Quebec Agreement, and Sonia’s dealings with Fuchs, I had not had access to any of these volumes. I have now acquired the first two, and can confidently report that the first book contains no reference to the Quebec Agreement, and relies heavily on Sonia’s memoir, while the second, while including photocopies of many useful telegrams from the spy-ring in Switzerland, has nothing on Sonia’s time in the United Kingdom.
Peter Wright’s Claims:
The author of Spycatcher made a number of speculative jumps in trying to persuade his readers that a large batch of Sonia’s transmissions sat somewhere on the planet waiting to be discovered (or re-discovered). It started with the so-called ‘HASP’ breakthrough, in which a lead from Sweden provoked the fortuitous unearthing of a book of trade statistics in the British Library, which in turn allowed a batch of messages sent by Simon Kremer and his meetings with Sonia to be decrypted. “They showed that Sonia had indeed been sent to the Oxford area by Russian Intelligence, and that during 1941 she was already running a string of agents.” Despite the claims made to Wright by GCHQ that she could have not been transmitting from her home between 1941 and 1943 without being detected, Wright was convinced that transcripts of her messages existed. He spent four years, between 1972 and 1976, travelling 370,000 kilometres round the globe trying to find that trove (or so he said).
No matter that the only message possibly concerning Kremer and Sonia that has survived in VENONA is the famous June 30, 1941 message actually sent by Shvetsov. No matter that this message describes a meeting that IRIS (Aptekar not Kremer) had recently had with Sonia. No matter that Kremer had previously acted as a cut-out for Fuchs, but had been withdrawn because Fuchs found him clumsy and furtive. No matter that Kremer has never been recorded as ever meeting Sonia, and was withdrawn from the Embassy in the summer of 1942. No matter that this sole surviving telegram reports on Sonia’s failure to make contact by wireless, rather than her success. Instead, Wright draws on this flimsy set of illogical connections to solidify the case against ELLI. “Once this was known I felt more sure than ever that Elli did exist, and that he was run by Sonia from Oxford, and that the secret of his identity lay in her transmission [sic], which inexplicably had been lost all those years before.”
No further questions, m’lud.
RSS Logsheet from December 1941
Bob King’s Claims:
Lastly, in this section, I re-present much of a commentary that I provided on the evidence of Bob King, which I reported on in May 2019.
I reproduce here an extraordinary artefact from December 1941 that was passed to me by Bob King, a veteran of RSS. As is clear, it is a log sheet of Mr. King’s as a ‘watcher’ in the Oxford area, where Sonia Kuczynski operated. In an email message to me last summer, Mr. King wrote: “The RSS knew of her [Sonia’s] presence, with over 2,000 widely spread operators listening for any unidentified signals we could hardly miss her. But as she was not Abwehr we didn’t follow her up. I expect someone else did.” He later added: “I can say the tests and good evidence shows that it is unlikely that any illicit transmission within the UK during the war years escaped our notice. If it was not our assignment we dropped it. Whether the information (call sign, frequency, time and procedure, if any) was passed to some other organisation I cannot say. I was informed by one RSS operator that Sonia (he later discovered it was she) was copied and told ‘Not wanted’”.
I was overwhelmed by being able to exchange information with a survivor from the war who had operated before I (now a 72 year-old) was born, and intrigued by Mr. King’s revelations. I followed up with other questions, asking, for instance, how his unit knew that the operator, was Sonia, even that she was a woman. Mr. King replied: “I am sorry but I have no further information. We identified the Abwehr by several means: procedure, tying in with other Abwehr (already known) and such things as operator recognition, note of transmitter and an experienced knowledge hard to describe. It was an operator (I forget who) who wrote to me long after the war saying that he had copied Sonia (this was sometime after 1946 I believe) when I left RSS and had no connection with it at all. Surveillance of short waves continued post-war I understand and exercises demonstrated that transmitters could not go undetected for long. Pre-war a rogue transmission was located by the GPO in many cases, it was their job to catch unlicensed transmitters and post war radio amateurs as well to report a station sending coded messages which in peace time was strictly forbidden. This is why I maintain that Sonia could not have been undetected at any time since. What the authorities did about it I am not in a position to say.’ Mr. King also told me that the Interceptors were instructed to log everything, indiscriminately, on the wavelengths they were responsible for. They could not make independent decisions, say, on listening for overseas transmitters.
When commenting on one of my posts on Sonia, Mr. King summed up his experiences and opinions: “I am convinced that no illicit, or other, transmission audible in the UK could escape detection for long. The whole high frequency spectrum was divided into sections (the size dependent on frequency) and searched regularly by several thousand skilled listeners. All signals, recognised or not, by the operator, were passed to Arkley unless directed otherwise. If not identified by us as Abwehr we either asked for a ‘Watch please’ or ‘Not wanted’. We had several VIs [Voluntary Interceptors] in or near Oxford (I was one in 1941) and I visited a full time one in Somerton so Sonia’s signals must have been reported. In my nearly 5 years at Arkley reading logged reports I may well have stamped ‘Not Wanted’ on a Sonia transmission. There were some inquisitive attempts to discover the ownership of strange signals but I know no more or where information that we had was dealt with. Embassy traffic also I am sure was monitored.”
Chapman Pincher echoed aspects of this account when he wrote (in Treachery, p 141): “James Johnston [a direction-finder operator in RSS] recalled in letters to me that he and his colleagues had intercepted messages from an illegal transmitter in the Oxford area, which he later believed to be Sonia’s, and had submitted them to MI6 or MI5. ‘Our logs recorded her traffic, but they were returned with the reference NFA [No Further Action] or NFU [No Further Use]. This meant that the RSS was not required to send out its mobile detector vans’.” Regrettably, no dates are given. No explanation is given as to how Johnston and his colleagues at the time learned about Sonia, and made the connection between the facts of unidentifiable – and not precisely located – signals and that of Sonia’s presence.
Mr. King has, sadly, since died. Of course, his testimony indicates not incontrovertibly that Sonia did or did not transmit, but proposes that, if she had, she would have been picked up, and thus, if nothing was done about it, it is because the RSS received instructions to ignore her messages. (Incidentally, he overstates the number of Voluntary Interceptors by about 50%.) Yet, in the light of what we know about the set-up at Great Rollright, his colleague’s placement of 1946 for picking up Sonia’s traffic is very dubious. King’s anecdote suggests that he was informed that Sonia had, on at least one occasion, been identified and ignored, but it is not at all clear how he was able to gain that knowledge. It all presents some further paradoxes, which I presented in my HASP piece last year, and which I shall re-examine in the section on Interception below. With the passage of time, Mr. King’s ability to recollect exactly what happened might have been impaired. [I should point out that the Log Sheet that Mr. King provided is one recording an Abwehr signal transmitted from Berlin, and has nothing to do with Sonia.]
3) Whither did Sonia transmit?
In the early 1960s, I recall using my Bakelite wireless to tune into Radio Luxembourg, noticing on the dial, as I did so, such stations as ‘Hilversum’ or ‘Moscow’. Trying to pick up their signals was very much a hit-and-miss affair, but the names and possibilities intrigued me, as I skipped pass all those anonymous morse beeps that presumably came largely from Soviet agents calling home, so that I could settle down with Pete Murray and David Jacobs, and switch off mentally when Horace Batchelor tried to sell me his winning football pools technique. What might I have learned with a little perseverance and expertise?
How easy was it to make contact with Moscow by wireless in 1941? In his Introduction to Agent Sonya, Ben Macintyre writes that Sonia’s neighbours in Great Rollright ‘did not know that . . . Mrs Beurton had constructed a powerful radio transmitter tuned to Soviet intelligence headquarters in Moscow’. Yet transmitting and receiving over a distance of nearly 2000 miles is not simply a process of moving a dial to ‘Moscow’ and pressing ‘Start’.
First of all, the vagaries of the ionosphere have to be dealt with. A journey that long will require more than one bounce off the ionised layer and back to earth. Long-distance transmissions are notoriously unreliable: interference occurs. Sender and transmitter would have to inspect the prospects for such phenomena as (helpful) sun-spot activity, and then select a range of day-time and night-time frequencies, and accompanying times, that would be most suitable for achieving contact (the ‘skeds’, or schedules). The agreement on such skeds required constant communication itself.
Second, precisely manufactured crystals for the frequencies selected would be required. They would not easily be acquired. Third, a powerful transmitter would be necessary. Whereas the sets used by Hitler’s LENA spies to communicate with Hamburg generated no more than about 5 watts (and were underpowered in the hope that that capacity would hinder groundwave detection), transmitting clearly to Moscow might require as much 50 watts of power.
Boosting the 240-volt mains supply of a residential property up to the larger wattage required for the transmitter would require a transformer, the parts for which (chokes and condensers) would have been extremely difficult to acquire in wartime. The miniaturized equipment would have required rectification of the mains AC (alternating current) to DC (direct current). Trying to operate without a mains supply (as Sonia and Maik claimed about operation at the Firs) would impose severe new constrictions for battery re-charging, presenting a practically insuperable challenge for Sonia. One thinks of the extremely heavy wirelesses and batteries that had to be borne by mules when SOE operators were parachuted into Yugoslavia, where there was no easily available mains supply, and the distances to be transmitted were long.
Fourth, and perhaps most important, was the effectiveness of the antenna. In order to transmit to Moscow, unlike the needs of a comparatively local broadcast, Sonia would have required an antenna that was elevated to a height of about 12.5 metres, and was aligned at right angles to the required direction of propagation. That would be distinctly more complicated than the simple horizontal antenna she reported using at Summertown, and much more conspicuous.
The combination of all these factors indicates that Sonia’s efforts to communicate with Moscow would have been extremely arduous, pushing several logistical limits, and would have immediately drawn attention to herself by the invasiveness of her electronic signals, both from her neighbours and from the RSS. If Sonia did transmit, it was more probably to the Soviet Embassy in London. The miniature transmitter that Sergey gave her would have been more suitable for such a distance.
Last is the question of detection. If Sonia was broadcasting to Moscow, the frequencies she would have had to use might have fallen outside the range that the RSS was concentrating on, since it was highly focused on illicit German agents transmitting to Germany (although, if Bob King’s claim is reliable, the service watched the entire spectrum). If she was broadcasting to a closer target, using a range of frequencies in the bands used by the Abwehr, however, it would have been more probable that her transmissions were picked up and noticed – and should therefore have sustained a greater chance of being followed up.
4) Why did she need to communicate by wireless? What did she transmit?
Sonia claimed that she operated her radio for about five to six years. It might be convenient to divide the duration of Sonia’s radio-activity (or non-activity) into four periods:1) Excitement (from June 1941 to about August 1942, in Kidlington); 2) Intensity (from September 1942 to November 1943, in Summertown); 3) Quiescence (from December 1943 to May 1945, in Summertown); and 4) Decay (from June 1945 to 1947, in Great Rollright).
In the first period, of Excitement, Sonia may have been trying to justify her salary. She was a trained wireless operator, of course, and, for whatever reason the GRU sent her to Britain, gathering intelligence and sending it back to Moscow would have shown proof of her commitment. The invasion of Soviet Russia by Hitler’s forces may have prompted a more intensive call for information about political intentions, and arms progress, by her bosses. Her claims of building a spy ‘network’, however, were exaggerated, as she relied on family members and friends to provide snippets of gossip and probably broadly available truths that could be packaged into simple reports that did not tax her resources unduly, or draw much attention.
Yet a recurring question appears. Why, if her brother was in constant touch with the Soviet Embassy, could he have not passed on such information, far more safely, and presumably just as quickly? Thereupon, GRU staff could surely have selected certain information for the diplomatic bag, and other for the dedicated station wireless. GRU-NKVD rivalry may have entered the picture, but even Chapman Pincher undermines his own theories in this regard, in discussing the role of Ambassador Ivan Maisky, who famously vacuumed up all the gossip he could find (or even invent). On page 127 of Treachery, Pincher wrote: “Kuczynski [Jürgen] was friendly with him [Maisky] and may have approached him for advice. Maisky, who allegedly hated the embassy’s KGB representative, Anatoli Gorski, may have then ensured that it was the embassy’s GRU man who acquired the promising new source [Fuchs].”
Furthermore, Pincher, moving ahead to the Gouzenko affair of 1945, then hinted at Sonia’s own relationship with GRU officers (p 139): “In view of the importance attached to Elli by the Kremlin, it is likely that most of his documents had to be passed by a courier to some GRU officer in the Soviet embassy, who would have had local responsibility for him. As has been proved by deciphered GRU cables [??], Sonia was in regular touch with GRU officers there, either directly on her occasional visits to London by train or through a cutout, who could conveniently have been her sister Brigitte, who visited her.”
So much speculation, and so many hypotheticals, but all pointing to the fact that busyness on the wireless would have been a dangerous complication, and that access to GRU resources in the Embassy was not difficult. Indeed, Bochkarov and Kolkapidi confirm the courier role of Brigitte (‘JOYCE’), who had helped recruit Allan Foote after Sonia had left London in 1938.
Sonia’s most productive period (‘Intensity’) was undoubtedly her time acting as courier for Klaus Fuchs. She indicated that she communicated with Moscow on Fuchs’s questions for Centre, and passed on their replies, as if this had been the bulk of her exchanges. She did acknowledge that one ‘thick book of blueprints’ required her to forward it quickly, thus necessitating a complex series of actions involving chalk signs on a pavement in London, and a subsequent meeting outside Oxford the same evening – which all sounds remarkably cloak-and-dagger and improbable. If her contact did not turn up, she had to return to the same location every evening until he did. She did claim that Moscow contacted her towards the end of 1943, asking her to help arrange a meeting-place for Fuchs in New York after his arrival in December.
As I have shown, Ben Macintyre asserts that much of the material that Fuchs gave her was encoded and enciphered, and hence transmitted to Moscow. Yet Sonia could presumably have simply called her brother on the telephone, given him a coded signal, caught the train to London, and handed over the complete package. Jürgen would have been able to walk into the embassy without an eyebrow being raised. Why would she stop and make decisions as to what needed to be transmitted by wireless, what with all the associated hassle, time, and risks? Why not let the GRU officer at the embassy make that determination, namely what should go in the diplomatic bag, and what was more urgent, and non-mathematical, and should be passed over the more secure embassy radio link? It does not make sense.
In 1944, the dispatch of Micha [Maik] to an expensive boarding-school in Eastbourne was attributed by Sonia to the problem of ‘concealing my nocturnal transmissions’ from him when ‘the workload increased, including more meetings in London’. But what were her sources and occupations in this period of Quiescence, after Fuchs had left? Some commentators have picked up on her relationship with Melita Norwood (TINA) as the reason for her occasional activity during this time.
David Burke, in The Spy Who Came in from the Co-op, attempted to unravel this rather tortured tale. First of all, drawing on Vasili Mitrokhin’s access to Norwood’s KGB file, Burke quoted that ‘she was controlled from 1941 to 1944 by an unidentified “head agent” codenamed FIR’, ‘who was also involved in the Klaus Fuchs case’. Burke suggested that the fact that Sonia’s address was ‘The Firs’ was a strong indication that FIR was indeed Sonia, conveniently overlooking the fact that Sonia did not move to The Firs until 1945. He then went on to cite an official history of the GRU, published in 2004 (an encyclopedia of Military Intelligence, apparently), which states that Norwood began passing information to her controller, who was ‘probably’ Ursula Kuczyinski, from September 1941. One might regret the lack of confidence with which such an authority could impart such insights, but let it pass. The history suggests that Norwood was then transferred back to the NKVD, under amicable circumstances, in 1944, when Sonia came under suspicion of being compromised.
Yet several holes in this theory appear. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, in The Sword and the Shield, unquestioningly picked up the idea that FIR was the NKVD’s name for Sonia, but could not explain why the GRU had adopted Norwood. The London NKVD residency was closed for most of 1940. ‘When reactivated in 1941”, they wrote, “she was for unexplained reasons handed over to SONYA of the GRU rather than to an NKVD controller.” And Burke shows some considerable confusion over these years. In Chapter 1, he declares that Sonia was Norwood’s controller between 1941 and 1944, but never explains how Norwood was assigned to Sonia. Suddenly, during the years 1941 and 1942 (p 126), Sonia was controlling both Fuchs and Norwood. At the end of 1943, however (p 129), we learn that Norwood left the British Non-Ferrous Metals Association (BN-FMRA) to have her baby. On page 132, Burke writes that, coincidentally, ‘as 1943 drew to a close, both Melita Norwood and Klaus Fuchs were taken away from the Kuczynski circle’, but he then echoes (p 134) the Mitrokhin story that Norwood was controlled from 1941 to 1944 by FIR.
Norwood was indeed active in 1945, as is confirmed by the Vasiliev Notebooks, which show (Yellow, Number 1, p 25) recommendations for starting work with Norwood. On June 22, IGOR reported that TINA had made her second removal of documents from her office. The BN-FMRA had been co-opted officially on to the Tube Alloys project in March, when Norwood had been asked to sign the Official Secrets Act. Burke does not identify her new controller, but states that she was meeting him ‘on a regular basis’.
Might the NKGB not have known of Norwood’s previous activity? Or did she perhaps not have access to anything critical beforehand (and thus had not had to sign the OSA)? The account is very sketchy, and confused. And the logistics of Sonia’s being her courier in that busy 1941-1942 period do not make a lot of sense. While occupied with Fuchs, would she have travelled to SE London to meet Norwood, returned home to digest what had been given to her, and then make further decisions as to what she should hand over by returning to London (having set up some special sign for a rendezvous), and then transmitted the rest? FIR was surely someone else.
Nevertheless, Macintyre authoritatively declares that Sonia was Norwood’s controller, though he transposes a 1945 incident concerning thefts from a safe to 1942. Pincher was also a proponent of the theory (while pointing out the problems of servicing Bexleyheath from Oxford), and claimed that Burke informed him that Norwood had told her biographer that Sonia had been her contact. Maybe Burke overcame his scepticism about the shaky etymology of FIR. Yet, after she had been exposed, in 2000, Norwood said that that person was now dead, before Sonia died later that year. Sonia had known Norwood in 1941, as their mothers were friendly, but there is no evidence that Norwood was a productive source before 1945, nor that Sonia acted as her courier before then. We find too many spies not telling the truth, and too many historians and journalists not applying much rigour to their analyses.
As for the period of Decay, no more needs to be written. No power at the house, no contacts to provide gossip or information, and communications broken off anyway. Simply more fabulizing from Sonia and her children. She lugs her wireless equipment from house to house, because it presumably aids her Walter Mitty-like illusions.
Why was Sonia not detected?
Irrespective of how active she was on her wireless, Sonia declared, very reasonably, that she would be detected at some stage. Yet she persisted in the regularity of her broadcasts (or so she claimed), and the permanence of her transmitting locations. That phenomenon might be cited as evidence that she knew she was under some kind of protection. Yet, even if that had been so, it does not explain fully the behaviour of the interception and detection services, who would not have been brought into any highly confidential secret owned and protected by MI5 and MI6.
Two prevailing stories have to be addressed: the official statements of the RSS (and subsequently, after the war, GCHQ), which strongly pointed out that it would have been impossible for Sonia to have evaded the RSS’s ‘detect, search and identify’ machinery; and the unofficial claims from Bob King (and espoused and amplified by Chapman Pincher) that Sonia’s wireless had been identified, but that the Discrimination Section of RSS had been advised that it should be ignored, with Pincher ludicrously bringing in Roger Hollis and Kim Philby as the intelligence officers who protected her. Yet, as I explained in http://www.coldspur.com/the-mystery-of-the-undetected-radios-part-5/ , http://www.coldspur.com/the-mystery-of-the-undetected-radios-part-8/ , and http://www.coldspur.com/hasp-spycatchers-last-gasp/, both these claims have to be explored and tested very stringently. (I recommend readers return to these pieces for a fuller discussion.)
In essence, the RSS was much more sluggish and inefficient in identifying possibly illicit transmissions than it claimed. It had started off with good intentions, under the vision of Simpson, and the administration of Gill, but, after the transfer to MI6 in May 1941, had become distracted under the leadership of Gambier-Parry, and the diversion of focus of interception activity to mainland Europe. While it may have been watching the whole radio spectrum, for a long time it maintained no complete registry of authorised transmitters (e.g. government departments, or units of governments-in-exile), and its ability to send out a rapid-response mobile force was embarrassingly meagre. Thus any wily illicit wireless operator could have outfoxed the authorities.
On the other hand, the claims made by Bob King, the young (17-year-old in 1941) Voluntary Interceptor who later joined the Discrimination Section also demand strict analysis. For the RSS to know that a probable illicit transmission from the Oxford area was assuredly Sonia’s it would have required knowledge that was not disclosed by King. I mercilessly reproduce the logic I used in HASP: Spycatcher’s Last Gasp to explain the flaws in both arguments.
“For GCHQ to be able to deny that Sonia had been able to broadcast would mean that it had 100% confidence that RSS had been able to detect all illicit traffic originating in the area, and that, furthermore, they knew the co-ordinates of Sonia’s residence at that time. Thus the following steps would have had to be taken:
All illicit or suspicious wireless broadcasts had been detected by RSS;
All those that could not have been accounted for were investigated;
Successful triangulation (direction-finding) of all such signals had taken place to localise the source;
Mobile location-finding units had been sent out to investigate all transgressions;
Such units found that all the illicit stations were still broadcasting (on the same wave-length and with the identical callsign, presumably);
All the offending transmitters were detected, and none was found to be Sonia’s.”
By the same token, it would have required such a visit for the RSS to have determined that the transmitter was indeed Sonia’s, and to pass that information on. Of course, had MI5/MI6 then gained that intelligence, it could have thereafter used the pattern of Sonia’s call-signs, fist, frequencies chosen – and maybe even decrypted text – to be able to alert RSS confidently of the characteristics of any future messages, and to advise the unit not to pursue. Indeed, one could interpret the January 1943 visit by the Oxford constabulary to Summertown as just such a follow-up, which confirmed the existence of wireless apparatus at Sonia’s residence.
Thus, unless Sonia did not broadcast at all (a theory that is not totally bankrupt, but then why did she make such a fuss about lugging that equipment around?), we have to face the fact that a portion of the interception story has been permanently withheld. It is more probable that a cat-and-mouse game did go on, where MI6 (and MI5) encouraged Sonia to broadcast, and that she played along, having worked out what was happening. She therefore transmitted only rarely, and sent politically harmless information, which GC&CS may or may not have been able to decipher.
Conclusions
Sonia was a trained wireless operator. Thus the KGB had to boost that reputation when she wrote her memoir, displaying a stunning but improbable track-record of virtuosity, in which the British intelligence services were outfoxed. If Sonia did not broadcast at all, then her memoir is a vast hoax, which has fooled all commentators and historians. If she did send any messages, then the failure to intercept and identify them was a massive embarrassment for the RSS. If they were intercepted and ignored for some reason, that represented an enormous lapse by MI5 and MI6.
If they were recognised and not acted upon, that would point to the game of connivance and manipulation to which I have continually hinted.
MI5 and MI6 were in a Morton’s Fork: if they ignored the story, and could not deny it, its veracity was accepted; if they tried to show they had been monitoring her, they would have to face the fact that Sonia had blindsided them in succeeding with the more conventional theft of secrets from Fuchs. It was a PR success for the KGB that has endured until today.
Exactly what Sonia used her wireless for, and how frequently, may never be known. Moreover, the puzzle of her husband, Len, and his activities at Kidlington, remains a mystery. My original theory was that Sonia had acted as a decoy for Len’s more serious broadcasts. Yet, if Sonia had struggled to contact Moscow, it must have been even harder for Len to do so.
Sonia’s overall account of her wireless activity is so inconsistent, and so full of holes, that the serious observer must question whether it ever took place at all.
[ I express my gratitude to Brian Austin and Ian Wraith for their advice on radio technology matters. Dr. Austin graciously reviewed an earlier version of this report. Any errors in the above analysis are my own.]
I return this month to the matter of the disclosure by the defector Igor Gouzenko of the existence of ELLI, the mystery spy within one of Britain’s intelligence agencies, and Kim Philby’s possible passing on of this information to his masters in Moscow – all occurring in late 1945. Gouzenko was a cipher-clerk in the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, who dramatically escaped with sheafs of documents that incriminated a complex network of spies, and led, first and foremost, to the conviction of Alan Nunn May. The identity of ELLI has been one of the most absorbing of the ‘molehunt’ controversies of the past decades, and Chapman Pincher devoted a large portion of his later career to trying to prove that Roger Hollis, chief of MI5 from 1956 to 1963, was in fact the person behind the cryptonym. Peter Wright, the author of Spycatcher, was the main intelligence officer supporting this theory, which has developed a reputation that far exceeds the strength of the claims it makes.
Contents:
Introduction
1. The Vassiliev Notebooks
2. Odd Events in Canada
3. Menzies in Ottawa?
4. MI5’s Response
5. The News About ELLI
6. Philby’s Reactions
7. Liddell’s Reactions
8. Hollis’s Interview
9. SOE & Alley
10. Interim Conclusions
Introduction:
This topic is very complicated, and the archival material very fragmented. (I issue my customary health warning.) I believe the analysis calls for a very close attention to chronology and geography – part of the methodology sadly lacking in most of the literature I have read. I believe it is essential, however, that the proper groundwork be laid out in order for the inspection of the ‘ELLI’ story, as it evolved in the following decades, to be carried out properly. I thus restrict my study in this piece to the months of September to December 1945, when the ELLI hints were at their freshest, and shall pick up the subsequent interviews and examinations in episodes to come. Yet many unanswered questions remain.
My approach is as follows: I first discuss the unwitting assistance that Alexander Vassiliev’s annotations contributed to the (incorrect) notion that Kim Philby’s disclosures helped identify ELLI as a GRU asset. I then explore the situation in Canada at the time of Gouzenko’s defection that allowed MI6 – and Philby – to wrest control of the case away from MI5, and I explain why MI5 was so passive in its response, and describe the minor role in the ELLI investigation that the reputed villain Roger Hollis played. I move on to examining the way in which the few extant messages concerning ELLI were processed, and the difficult circumstances surrounding their interpretation, affected severely by Philby’s control of much of the material, and his extraordinary diversion to Istanbul at the peak of the investigation. I explore the hints that ELLI was an SOE * asset, describe the background to the relationship between the SOE and the NKVD, which leads to the way that the insight provoked Guy Liddell to search for possible wartime leakages, and some of his speculation as to who ELLI might be. That project appeared to be in full swing as the year wound down, and I draw some interim conclusions.
[* SOE, Special Operations Executive, was a sabotage organisation established in 1940. Its mission was in direct conflict with that of MI6, which was intelligence-gathering. MI6 and SIS are used interchangeably in this report.]
1. The Vassiliev Notebooks:
Alexander Vassiliev
I had discussed this topic last May, when I recognized the extraordinary sleuthing that William Tyrer had performed in winkling out further details about the interrogations of Gouzenko. Yet I detected some errors in Tyrer’s analysis, especially in his study of the KGB * reports concerning Philby, ELLI and Stalin. I had next attempted to make contact with Alexander Vassiliev, now domiciled in the United Kingdom, who had transcribed vital records in the KGB archives, but he had apparently not received my letter. I am happy to be able to report that I have now communicated with Vassiliev #, and want to clarify and expand my previous comments. I believe I raised some important questions, but I had not reflected accurately all the activity that was going on in September 1945. Something seemed incongruous to me at that time, but I had not placed my finger correctly on what it was.
[* The NKVD was the wartime name for what evolved into the NKGB, and the post-war KGB. For all intents and purposes, their names are interchangeable.]
[# Several weeks ago, a communicant overseas kindly gave me Vassiliev’s email address. I then immediately discovered that Vassiliev had in fact just posted this item on his own Wikipedia page.]
I shall, for the sake of clarity, repeat here some information that I have published beforehand. The first item of analysis is the famed reference to ELLI (actually ‘ELLY’) in the Vassiliev papers. These were transcripts of files created by Alexander Vassiliev from the KGB archives, containing information on the GRU, the Soviet Union’s military intelligence bureau, as well, and available on the Internet at https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/collection/86/vassiliev-notebooks .
Chapman Pincher presented the assertion that Gouzenko had betrayed the existence of ELLI in British intelligence as appearing in a report from Boris Merkulov, chief of the NKGB, to Stalin in November 1945, and William Tyrer echoed Pincher’s claim in his article about ELLI in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence: see https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08850607.2016.1177404) .
Vassiliev’s commentary next appears, in parentheses:
[Summarizes the content of “S’s” message regarding Gouzenko and so forth. May is a Ph.D. in physics, a professor at Cambridge Univ., a GRU agent, information on atomic energy.] [Gouzenko reported on the GRU source in British intel. “Elly.”]
Inside Merkulov’s letter, the only direct citation of what Philby told his bosses runs as follows, (“S” standing for “STANLEY”, Philby’s cryptonym):
“Agent “S” reported: ‘In early November Bentley visited the Federal Bureau of Invest. (the FBI) and stated that World Tourists and the United States Service and Shipping Corporation were being used by Sov. intelligence for intel. work. What else Bentley told the FBI and which agents she knew were given up by her to the FBI, we don’t know yet. However, according to the information of agent “S”: “The FBI’s investigation of Golos’s network showed that his agents had penetrated deep into Amer. government agencies and the FBI believes that this network was controlled by the NKVD.’”
Thus the comment that “Gouzenko reported on the GRU source in British intel. ‘ELLY’” is not in the selected highlights of Merkulov’s report, but appears as an introduction in a separate pair of parentheses, looking as if it had been added by Vassiliev as editorial commentary, after the statement that informs us that what follows is a summarization of what Philby had told his Soviet handlers. If it is intended also to reflect the information received from ‘S’ that immediately precedes it, it is worth noting that the information attributed to Philby here likewise includes nothing about ELLI. Elizabeth Bentley, the subject of this report, did not defect until November 7, 1945, while Philby probably became aware of the existence of ELLI on September 13 (or soon after), and, as I shall explain, if Philby did pass on what he heard about ELLI, he would have done so almost two months earlier. The indication by Vassiliev that the letter ‘summarizes the content of “S’s” message regarding Gouzenko and so forth’is both vague and inaccurate.
Pincher also cites the comment as coming from Merkulov’s report, but uses the on-line version as his source. He is wrong. Tyrer reproduces the whole introduction in his article, but removes the parentheses. He is careless. Of course, it is very possible that Merkulov did write to Stalin about Gouzenko and ELLI, and that needs to be verified. Merkulov was, however, in the NKVD/KGB, not the GRU, and it seems implausible that he would want to lay any bad news concerning the GRU on Stalin’s plate. I cannot quickly see any other reference to the GRU in Merkulov’s communications, and Allen Weinstein and Vassiliev himself, in The Haunted Wood, suggest (note, p 105) that any reference to the GRU by Merkulov was an attempt to pass off some of the responsibility for Elizabeth Bentley’s defection to the GRU, who recruited her originally in 1936, and for whom she worked until 1938, when she was transferred to the NKVD.
Thus one might ask: if Vassiliev thought that the reference to ELLI was important enough to be highlighted, why did he not publish the original text that contained it? (I have checked the original Russian manuscript on the Wilson Center website: the texts are the same. Yet some pages are missing in all versions: the original scan of the manuscript, the Russian transcription, and the English translation). We should recall, also, that Vassiliev was not transcribing the texts surreptitiously: he had been given permission from the Association of Retired Intelligence Officers (KGB alumni) to inspect them, was well-briefed in western intelligence interests, and under no pressure. So that is why I decided to try to ask him what the significance of his commentary was.
Mr. Vassiliev kindly responded to my email, as follows:
“Now, about the document. It looks like the phrase about ELLI comes from Merkulov’s letter. I used to write my comments on the margins of the pages. There was an exchange of information between GRU and NKVD-KGB. I remember at least one document talking about someone from NKVD making enquiries in GRU. It doesn’t look like they were doing it every day due to the need-to-know principle. But in this case, before sending his letter to Stalin, Merkulov probably consulted GRU, or there was a constant exchange of information on the Gouzenko affair. And, as far as I understand, the initial info on ELLI came to NKGB from Philby.”
I had to re-inspect the Gouzenko documents from The National Archives, and wrote to Vassiliev:
“The more I looked at this, it seemed to me that it would have been very predictable for Philby to pass on what Gouzenko said about ELLI, but that it would have been the first time he had heard the name, and he would have had no contact with him (or her – since Akhmedov said that the London ELLI was female.) But he must have passed on that nugget much earlier.
I am still intrigued by the Merkulov submission. It appears (as you say) to be a summarization or paraphrasing of what Philby reported, but it is very much in the native idiom of a KGB officer (‘Bentley told us’, ‘ ‘we believe’, the renegade Budenz’, etc.), and Philby is introduced or quoted as an aside (‘However, according to the information of agent ‘S’ . . .’).
But there are these timing issues. The letter from Merkulov that you cite is dated November 24, but the Kew Gouzenko files (and Guy Liddell’s Diary) tell us that the news about ELLI arrived on September 13, and VENONA informs us that Philby’s initial report on Gouzenko was confirmed as early as September 17.
Thus there must be an earlier report that does not appear in your White Notebook. The November 24 missive is almost entirely consumed with the Bentley case, after Bentley’s statement to the FBI on November 7, so ELLI would have been old news by then.
I should also add Philby’s trip to Turkey on September 26, on the VOLKOV case. I had not entered that into my Chronology. He was obviously distracted for a while, and so was Merkulov.
My conclusion: that Philby or Merkulov mentioning ELLI towards the end of November would have been superfluous.”
Indeed, Keith Jeffery’s authorised history of MI6 appears to confirm Philby’s earlier communication on Gouzenko. On page 657, Jeffery writes: “A signal on 17 September from Moscow to Krötenschield, Philby’s controller in London, confirmed that information from ‘Stanley’ (Philby’s Soviet cover name) about ‘the events in Canada . . . does correspond to the facts’.” This was clearly VENONA traffic, as can be confirmed from the archive. Yet would Philby have been aware of ELLI that soon? Probably not. A further message, dated September 18 (a Tuesday) refers to ‘a meeting last week’, which would put it, at the latest, as Friday, September 14. If Philby received the news on the Thursday, he would have had to arrange, at very short notice, a rendezvous with Krötenschield (also known as KROTOV), which might have been a difficult task to accomplish unless he had some very efficient – but risky – intermediary working for him. Could Philby have been receiving information from another source – as Peter Wright in fact suggested? And why, in any case, was Philby the master of ceremonies in this business? To answer those questions, I shall have to examine the Chronology very carefully. But first: Philby’s inappropriate control of the situation.
2. Odd Events in Canada:
As a Dominion, and part of the British Empire, Canada fell under MI5’s bailiwick when it came to intelligence matters, not MI6’s. Yet, by a strange mix of ill luck, inattention, lack of forcefulness, and sheer incompetence, or possibly by virtue of a highly secret project, MI5 allowed MI6 – and Philby, as head of the latter’s new Section IX Counter-Intelligence division – to hijack the direction of the response to Gouzenko’s defection. The official historians have been extraordinarily negligent in reporting this anomaly. In his Secret History of MI6, Keith Jeffery wrote (p 657): “Philby was the principal point of contact for MI5, who naturally had a direct interest in the case.” Christopher Andrew, in Defend the Realm (p 346) avoids the issue, but enigmatically explains Hollis’s being sent to Ottawa in the following terms: “The fact that Gouzenko had defected in a Commonwealth capital, rather than foreign territory, meant that the Security Service, rather than SIS, had the lead role in responding to it”. Yet he studiously avoids discussing the fact that MI5 did not take a ‘lead role’. He subsequently ignores the strife until he describes Roger Hollis’s eventual complaints about Philby’s meddling on February 19, 1946. Gillian Bennett, former Chief Historian of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, echoes Jeffery’s comment, rather lamely, and incorrectly, in her article The CORBY case: the defection of Igor Gouzenko, as follows: “Since British subjects were implicated in Gouzenko’s revelations, the case was of primary interest to the Security Service”.
Yet MI5 had more than ‘a direct interest’: it was primarily responsible for counter-espionage on Commonwealth territory. Its mission was, however, confounded by i) the absence of its regular representative in Ottawa; ii) the relationship between Canada’s Department of External Affairs and Britain’s High Commissioner and the Foreign Office; iii) the resourcefulness of Peter Dwyer, who represented MI6 (and secondarily, MI5) in Washington; iv) the energies and preferences of William Stephenson, the head of British Security Coordination in New York, and the highly secure communications links that he controlled, v) the inattention of various MI5 officers in London, and vi) the direct influence of Stewart Menzies, MI6 chief. Kim Philby was able to exploit all these factors.
MI5’s Representative:
MI5 had maintained a representative on Canadian soil in the person of Cyril Mills, an MI5 officer who had worked on the Double Cross team, handling GARBO. He had been sent to Ottawa in 1943 to manage Operation WATCHDOG, an attempt to turn a German spy into a double agent. Yet, as luck would have it, at the end of the war, he had been demobilized, and sailed from Canada at about the time that Gouzenko defected. Guy Liddell records his arrival in London on September 19. MI5 presumably had not planned to replace Mills with any other officer, thinking that, with the war over (and many of its personnel returning to civilian life), it could afford to retrench. It did not have its own representative in the United States at this time, for such matters as liaising with the FBI. Peter Dwyer represented both MI6 and MI5 until Dick Thistlethwaite was appointed in 1947.
Cyril & Bernard Mills
Cyril Mills had pointed out the deficiencies in RCMP intelligence to his bosses in London. Dean Beeby writes, in Cargo of Lies (p 195): “Since December 1942 he [Mills] had been a window on Canadian security for MI5 and MI6, and his reports were alarming. Canada’s intelligence services were in a desperate state, he warned, beginning with the RCMP (witness its clumsy handling of the Watchdog case) and extending through the three armed forces. Mills’ repeated warnings perhaps help explain the speed with which British intelligence officers arrived in Ottawa to ensure Gouzenko would be in capable hands.” Yet the facts show that they were not able to right the ship properly. Liddell had not taken Mills’s warnings seriously enough.
The Department of External Affairs:
Norman Robertson & Mackenzie King
Canada’s undersecretary for the Department was Norman Robertson, described by Amy Knight as ‘a close adviser’ to Prime Minister Mackenzie King. It was Robertson who, on the evening of September 6, brought the news that Gouzenko had presented himself to the Minister of Justice, and who suggested to an alarmed Mackenzie King, someone very anxious not to upset the Soviets, that the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) offer Gouzenko protection. Jeffery reports that, on September 8, Robertson decided to cable Alexander Cadogan, the British Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, in a missive introduced as ‘strictly personal’. (Bennett echoes this version of the story, describing Cadogan as ‘Robertson’s counterpart’, which may have been strictly true, but was a relationship that did not pay homage to the protocols.) This message described Gouzenko, his defection, and the nature of the material he had exfiltrated, without identifying him. Yet the message was sent as originating in New York, and concluded, rather elliptically, that ‘the investigation is proceeding in consultation with Stephenson and F.B.I.’
This would all be highly irregular, if Robertson had not informed the High Commissioner for Canada, Malcolm Macdonald, and the FBI had been consulted before British intelligence were involved. Some historians have used this to suggest that Stephenson and an FBI representative were already in Canada, and the circumstances continue to be a subject of much controversy. The following day, however, Macdonald, writing ‘further to my telegram of September 8’, perhaps indicating that Robertson had admitted privately his error in protocol, and that he, Macdonald, had always been in charge, sent another cable to Cadogan, and was able to inform him that the cipher clerk worked for the GRU, and even to name the British atom scientist Alan Nunn May as an agent of Soviet military intelligence. It might not appear immediately obvious how or why this information was passed from Ottawa to New York so expeditiously: presumably the security of Foreign Office cables was not considered as secure as the New York-London channel, but an open telephone link between Ottawa and New York might have been regarded as safe As I shall show, however, BSC to London communications, which were used for all traffic, were able to take advantage of a highly convenient geographical location in Canada. In any case, the initial point of contact was Cadogan.
Peter Dwyer:
It was probably because of the vacuum in British intelligence in Canada that MI6’s representative in Washington, Peter Dwyer, was despatched to Ottawa. Yet even his involvement retains some measure of controversy. While Jeffery ignores Dwyer’s role completely, in Nigel West’s history of MI5, the author suggests that, owing to Mills’s departure, the news of Gouzenko’s arrest was sent to Dwyer in Washington (i.e., not New York), whereupon Dwyer immediately sent a message to his bosses in London, where it was routed to Philby. This appears not to have been the case, however. Other sources indicate that Dwyer had promptly flown to Ottawa. William Tyrer (using David Stafford’s history of Camp X), claims that Dwyer flew to Ottawa ‘immediately’ after Gouzenko mentioned that ’British citizens were involved’ (thus on September 8 or 9, presumably), but that would mean that Robertson (or Macdonald) contacted Dwyer directly in Washington before informing anybody else, which sounds highly unlikely. Macdonald would have felt completely capable of handling the implications himself.
A far more mysterious picture emerges from Amy Knight’s How The Cold War Began, however, where she cites records that indicate that, on September 6, Robertson was conferring at his home with ‘an eminent officer of the British Secret Service’. Speculation centred on this identity referring to William Stephenson, or even Stewart Menzies. Knight more safely plumped for Peter Dwyer as the enigmatic figure. In her text, she refers to a telegram to London from Macdonald, dated September 10, which refers to one of Stephenson’s men ‘who has been here for the last three days and who knows all the facts’, identifying her source as a later item from September 25, in KV 2/145. Indeed, s.n. [serial number] 3A confirms this, but Knight initially leaves the question as to why Dwyer was in Ottawa on September 6 as simply a possible coincidence. (I shall investigate Knight’s story in more depth later in this piece.)
David Stafford’s Camp X reinforces the claim that Stephenson was already in Ottawa at the time of Gouzenko’s defection, and that he summoned Dwyer (from Washington) and his fellow officer Jean-Paul Evans (from New York) on Saturday September 7. They were then briefed by George Glazebrook, from the Canadian Department of External Affairs, in a highly clandestine manner at the Chateau Laurier Hotel in Ottawa.
I recommend that readers turn to Knight’s book for a discussion as to what might have brought Dwyer to the scene, and whether Gouzenko had had contact with British intelligence before he sought asylum. Since Gouzenko struggled initially on being heard, and only narrowly escaped being re-captured by Soviet Embassy officers, it raises all manner of questions as to why the RCMP was not better prepared to accept the fugitive. Yet, if Dwyer was indeed on the scene, it also poses questions about the prior involvement of MI6. (I shall explore these matters in the last part of this section, as well.)
William Stephenson:
William Stephenson
In any case, Stephenson took charge. He saw himself as a much more natural associate of MI6, whose interests he primarily represented at BSC during World War II, than of MI5. Bennett writes: “All the high level CORBY messages were transmitted through SIS channels, between Stephenson’s BSC headquarters in New York and the SIS Chief in London. Stephenson, a Canadian, determined to enhance his own position and provide valuable leverage in his dealings with Ottawa and Washington, insisted on this.” The implication, however, is that low level (detailed?) messages could be sent over other media, or outside Stephenson’s control. Indeed, a host of messages, for example the transcripts of the exchanges that Gouzenko brought with him, must have been too voluminous to be sent to New York (or wherever BSC’s transmission facility was situated: see below) for encryption and transmission, and were passed directly from Ottawa to London, presumably by air in the diplomatic bag.
The corollary of Stephenson’s action is how Cadogan responded to all this traffic. It surprises me that his first instinct was not to alert David Petrie, director-general of MI5, but to pass on the communications to Stewart Menzies, the MI6 chief, who reported nominally to the Foreign Office. Perhaps this again suggests that the Foreign Office and MI6 knew beforehand of something going on, and the outcome was that Menzies immediately delegated all responsibility to Kim Philby, his blue-eyed boy who headed Section IX. Andrew’s history contains no mention of BSC, Stephenson or even Cadogan in this strange breach of protocol.
3. Menzies in Ottawa?:
I believe I first read about the possibility of Stewart Menzies’s being in Ottawa at the time Gouzenko defected in Amy Knight’s book. Citing Canadian government archives, she wrote that, on the evening of September 6, Robertson was conferring at his home with an ‘eminent officer of the British Secret Service’. She briefly discussed the possibility that this could have been William Stephenson, but followed this up by quoting the diary of Mackenzie King, who very explicitly recorded, the same day: “The head of the British Secret Service arrived at the Seignory Club today. Robertson was going down to see him tonight.” The following day, King ‘noted that he had authorized Robertson to telephone Stephenson in New York’, and the day after he inserts the comment that ‘Robertson said that Stephenson and the FBI representatives would be here tonight’. Yet, despite this apparently unequivocal evidence, Knight rejected the notion that this mystery visitor could have been Stewart Menzies, concluding that ‘the top British intelligence officer in North America’, Peter Dwyer, was a more likely candidate. Yet even the plodding and unimaginative Mackenzie King would not have misidentified his visitor so poorly.
David Levy, in Stalin’s Man in Canada, is another author who has investigated these matters, and he even followed up the dossier that King had instructed Robertson to create, in order to verify (despite what King’s September 8 entry declared) whether the person was in fact Stephenson. In a later volume, Fred Rose and Igor Gouzenko: The Cold War begins, Levy backtracked somewhat, but then muddied the waters by asserting that Peter Dwyer (whom he incorrectly dubbed ‘an MI5 man’) was at that time ‘in faraway England’. Yet Levy appeared unconvinced that the personage could have been Menzies, and he may have been relying on what Keith Jeffery, the authorised historian of MI6, wrote to him, in an email in October 2010, that there was no record of Menzies travelling to North America ‘much before 1949’ – an odd way of formulating a response, it must be said. Thus Levy’s final judgment was to sit on the fence: “Could it have been something Robertson invented to get round the prime minister’s reluctance to hold onto Igor Gouzenko?”
Stewart Menzies
For some reason, both Knight and Levy, who cite John Bryden’s Best Kept Secret (1993) as a source for information on Menzies’s visit, dismiss what this Canadian journalist has written. I came to Bryden’s book late in the cycle, but it is quite a revelation. It informs us that Menzies was indeed a member of the Seigniory Club, ‘one of the most exclusive private resorts in North America’. Bryden provides evidence that a conference on HYDRA, the communications centre for BSC, which was situated at the nearby SOE training ground, Camp X, was about to be held, and that George Glazebrook, Canada’s security chief in Washington had written to his predecessor, Thomas Stone, on September 3, about the imminent meeting with Menzies. HYDRA had been a vital cog in the secret communications network of the Allies: as Bryden wrote: “These vast, overlapping networks were made possible by the direct telekrypton cable links between Ottawa, Washington, and London, backed by HYDRA, the British Security Coordination transmitter at Camp X, plus similar American and British transmitters in the Pacific.” Its future was to be discussed.
Thus not only is there a substantial reason for Menzies’s paying a highly secret visit to Ottawa, one can also understand how smoothly the secure communications between New York and London were able to be achieved. HYDRA was a powerful and flexible wireless receiver/transmitter that routed all confidential traffic between the Americas and Great Britain. Telekrypton (also known as Rockex) was specialized teletype equipment that enciphered and deciphered telegrams for MI6. BSC In New York used it to send messages to Berkeley Street in London, via Arlington, Virginia, and another telekrypton machine was located at Camp X, where an automated system for the transformation of wireless/teletype messages was created. (Hence the highly efficient exchange of information between New York, Ottawa and London.) In addition, Bryden writes that Peter Dwyer ‘sent his own reports back to London to Kim Philby rather than to BSC.’ (His source, however, is the not entirely reliable Peter Wright in Spycatcher.) In a note he adds, describing Stephenson’s part in the scheme: “He appears to have arrived on the scene several days later and then only to provide Dwyer with a telekrypton machine for secure communications with New York for onward transmission by BSC cable to London.”
Yet the fact of an alternative conduit is confirmed by a remarkable entry in Liddell’s diary for September 11: “There is a serious [sic: ‘series’] of telegrams running between Robertson of External Affairs and Cadogan, another between Security Coordination and SIS.” [my italics] Thus, if Dwyer were communicating privately with Philby, a whole bunch of messages must have existed that may never have seen the light of day, even though Liddell (and others, presumably) knew about their existence. And evidence exists that many messages were not only weeded from the archives (or not even submitted to them), as gaps in the telegram sequence numbers show, but were also concealed from MI5. Someone has annotated, on cable CXG832 from Menzies to Stephenson dated September 18, in reference to Menzies’s answers to Stephenson’s questions from CXG317 (not on file): ‘not available to MI5’.
(Parenthetically, an additional advantage of this set-up is that Gouzenko was taken into protective custody, and housed at Camp X. Thus, as he revealed information about Soviet code and cipher systems, it proved highly efficient for the passing on of such insights in a highly secure fashion to cryptanalysts in Arlington and to those at the Government Code and Cypher School, at Bletchley Park and at Berkeley Street.)
But how long was Menzies in Ottawa? Did he have an alibi? One consideration that should be entertained is the fact that Cadogan was the recipient of the first few messages, not Menzies himself. Robertson and Macdonald would have been advised by Menzies, if he had still been in Canada, that Cadogan was the appropriate addressee, as custodian of MI6 affairs until Menzies returned to the United Kingdom. And maybe Menzies did decide that he should hotfoot it back on one of the regular RAF flights that transported VIPs across the Atlantic at that time, so that he could take charge of matters from the correct location. On September 10, Macdonald is still contacting Cadogan. On September 12, however, Stephenson is responding to a cable earlier that day from Menzies (CSS) himself, so the head of MI6 was by then back in his seat.
Yet another wrinkle in the affair occurs on September 10. In a telegram to Cadogan, jointly composed by Robertson and Macdonald, the latter write: “You will doubtless have seen telegram from Stephenson to ‘C’ reporting inter ALIA our present knowledge scientific side of espionage activities.” A handwritten annotation suggests that that message should be found at s.n. 6a, yet 6a contains a message from Menzies to Stephenson (CXG826), dated September 15, advising him of Hollis’s departure the next day, but referring to an earlier message of September 12 (CXG817), not on file, but to which Stephenson had replied the same day. As the interrupted sequence of telegram numbers shows, several messages have been weeded: perhaps some false information has been inserted. Maybe Stephenson sent a telegram to Menzies knowing that he would not yet be in his office to receive it. Moreover, it may be significant that, after September 14, messages between Cadogan and Macdonald were sent through Menzies, rather than directly to each other.
Liddell’s Diaries provide some clues as to Menzies’s whereabouts. He provides some fascinating entries about him in mid-September. Two occur on September 13 after he, Marriott and Philby draft a telegram, for Menzies’s approval, to be sent to Ottawa concerning Nunn May, recommending that the spy be allowed to leave Canada (so he could make his rendezvous with his Soviet controller in London). Curiously, Liddell adds the comment that Menzies agreed to the terms ‘over the phone’, which sounds a rather casual way of checking such an important document. The second reference runs as follows: “When I saw C the other day at the JIC he told me that it has been decided that he should be the co-ordinating authority between SIS and SOE.” Indeed, the entry for September 11 appears to confirm Menzies’s attendance at the meeting, but is couched, again, in extraordinary language: “C. who was present seemed to agree to our accepting responsibility for SIME [Security Intelligence Middle East].” Why on earth would Liddell bother to record that Menzies was actually ‘present’ at a meeting when he transcribed what he said? How could it be otherwise? And why did he not insert this conversation in his diary entry for September 11, rather than adding it as an unrelated item two days later?
Thus there remains a distinct possibility that Menzies did not return until September 12, and that Liddell and other senior officers in MI5 (and officials elsewhere) knew about his mission, and provided cover for him. If so, that would explain MI5’s collective lack of enterprise in the whole Gouzenko business, knowing that Menzies was intimately involved with the details of the case, and familiar with its cryptographic implications, and how it therefore let MI6 manage the more conventional aspects of it (e.g. the treatment of Nunn May) until it was too late. And all the highly secure Telekrypton processes could not keep the information out of the hands of the Soviets.
Perhaps Stephenson and Menzies were both in Ottawa already. There seems to be evidence of a deliberate attempt to muddy the waters, although the private testimony from the diary of the rather naïve Mackenzie King concerning the authorization to Robertson to telephone Stephenson in New York might be considered the most reliable factoid to work on. I leave it to more expert analysts to shed better light on this mystery.
4. MI5’s Response:
September 1945 was a fraught period for MI5 senior officers. Apart from the challenge of the exodus of many competent officers to civilian life, the charter of MI5 was coming under government inspection. The versatile civil servant Findlater Stewart was in the middle of another investigation, and his questioning occupied much of the time of Petrie, Liddell and others. Dick White was still in Germany, but was not immune to Stewart’s study, and he communicated with Liddell over the telephone on the implications of possible sharing of resources with MI6, and the latter’s growing ambitions.
During this period, the Director-General, Sir David Petrie, appears occasionally in Liddell’s Diaries. He was rather disillusioned, even demoralised, over Soviet infiltration by this time, as John Curry’s History suggests, and looking forward to retirement. No doubt he was preparing the ground for who his successor should be, but Liddell (head of B Division) did not get the nod: the announcement of the appointment of police officer Percy Sillitoe was made in November, in preparation for his arrival in early 1946. Liddell kept Petrie informed of the Gouzenko business, but Petrie did not react with authority. He was aware of the treachery of Alan Nunn May (whose identity was immediately revealed by Gouzenko’s disclosures), but rather curiously, on September 13, informed Liddell that he would rather ‘knock him off in Canada’ than bring him over to the United Kingdom. Certainly there is no evidence that Petrie protested to Cadogan, or Menzies, or even Attlee, that MI5 should be in control of the case.
Thus it was left to Liddell to handle affairs. Liddell, too cerebral, too contemplative, in his Diaries consistently betrayed his lack of drive by confiding in them what he ‘personally believed’ on controversial matters of policy, as if he did not have the courage of his convictions to try to persuade other persons and bodies of their correctness. He received the news of the Gouzenko defection with concern, but not alarm, and was certainly not provoked into trying to take charge. The situation was ‘murky’: he regrets that he no longer has any MI5 representative in Ottawa.
Ironically, it is Philby himself who eventually presses Liddell to authorize Roger Hollis to travel to Canada to take over the case. Liddell wanted to send out Herbert Hart, since Hollis was on holiday, but Marriott and Philby were insistent that the mission belonged to the anti-communism expert. Petrie consented: Hollis returned from leave on September 14, left from Prestwick on September 16, and arrived in Montreal the following day, so he hardly had time to have his laundry done, let alone be briefed properly. Dick White did not return to the UK until mid-October, where he immediately jumped into the Findlater Stewart project. Moreover, White had wedding plans. He married the communist Jane Bellamy on November 28.
Yet Hollis was not the ideal choice. He managed F Division (‘Subversive Activities’), with Section F2 responsible for ‘Communism and Left-Wing Activities’. Hugh Shillito (F2B & F2C) had been the real expert (as the Sonia business showed), but in September 1945 he had left MI5, probably in frustration at the obstinacies of MI5’s senior management, and Hollis’s disparagement of his efforts. Jane Archer would have been an excellent candidate, but she still worked for MI6, and, as a woman, would have faced enormous challenges with the RCMP and Canadian intelligence. The situation reinforced the fact that the split of counter-espionage and domestic subversion that Petrie had introduced in 1941 had not worked well: he and Liddell were again discussing how to re-unify the functions while the Gouzenko business was going on. Liddell confided in his diary entry for September 26 that he ‘wanted to get a proper Russian section going as early as possible’, implicitly admitting the flaws in MI5’s Soviet counter-espionage set-up. Yet speed did not appear to be of the essence. On November 30, he recorded having a talk with Dick [White] and Hollis on the formation of a Russian section, ‘the necessity of which Roger is now convinced, subject to DG’s approval’. Since the section would be in Hollis’s F Division (as a subsequent December 6 discussion with Petrie disclosed), that was a strange reaction on Hollis’s part. The nucleus would be Marriott and Serpell. Liddell, as the senior officer responsible for counter-espionage, should have travelled to Canada himself.
So Hollis was rushed off to Canada. On September 19, when Liddell contacted Hollis chez the RCMP, reporting on Nunn May’s arrival, he did implore Hollis to establish direct communication through that channel, even requesting ‘discontinuance of use of any other channel’, as the present situation was ‘unsatisfactory and causes delay and uncertainty’. The phrase about ‘discontinuance’ has been crossed out, however. It was too little, too late, and poor Hollis did not have the clout to remedy the situation, as he implied in a telegram to White and Liddell on the same day. Thus, on September 20, Hollis’s messages were still being sent to Menzies, under Stephenson’s codename (48000). Hollis wrote (September 24) that he and Stephenson assumed that all ‘CORBY’ (the codename for Gouzenko) messages were being sent to MI5, and, if that were not the case, offered to copy them all, and re-send them, adding, however, ‘but this seems ridiculous waste of time and effort justifiable only if you are meeting insoluble obstruction in London’. This message was sent by One-Time Pad from the RCMP to MI5, so maybe MI6 never saw it.
MI5’s overall response was passive and weak, and it appears that that behaviour led to the agency’s experiencing ‘insoluble obstruction’. Whether this was simply in character, or whether it occurred because of other arcane knowledge is a debatable subject, but Liddell’s private observations are ambiguous. One important diary entry for September 25 is worth quoting in full, however, since it shows that Liddell was more comfortable confiding his grievances to his journal than he was about remonstrating in the right places:
“I had a talk with Marriott & xxxxxx [Philby?]. Later on Marriott brought over a file of telegrams some of which were dated the 22nd Sept. and on which action was required. This is a typical example of inefficiency and the kind of thing that results when two offices are handling the same subject. I said that I did not wish to upset Stephenson or make Roger Hollis’s task more difficulty [sic] but that quite frankly I could see no possible reason why the Security Coordination should be having a finger in the pie at all. The matter was purely one between ourselves, RMCP and the FBI. If we wanted guidance on matters of higher policy we could get it ourselves from the F.O. In fact we had already done so. Stephenson is apparently kicking up the idea of our communicating direct with the RCMP and cites the British High Commissioner as supporting his view. This of course is typical of Stephenson. He came into the case through External Affairs and having set himself up as the Great Panjandrum does not now wish to be knocked off his perch. Everything that he doesor does not do is a matter of personal prestige and the organisation has to suffer accordingly.”
It sounds, however, that Liddell was not aware of the possible presence of Stephenson in Canada when the scandal erupted. It is surprising that he complains here about BSC’s interference, but not about that of MI6.
5. The News About ‘ELLI’:
While the primary focus in the flurry of messages that week concerned Nunn May (and other agents, including, rather confusingly, another Ottawa-based agent named ‘ELLI’, namely Kate Willsher), the existence of an agent in London surfaced from what Gouzenko revealed to his RCMP interrogators. William Tyrer has pointed out that the first reference to ELLI seems to be September 13, since Liddell responded, on September 23, to a telegram of that date in the following terms: “Ref. your CKG 301 of 13.9.45 – do not consider that ELLI could be identical with UREN.” Tyrer points out that CKG 301 is missing from the Gouzenko file, and that its succeeding items (303 & 303) have had information on ELLI redacted. [Unfortunately, Tyrer provides a source for this item as s.n. 27A of KV 2/1425, when it is in fact to be found in KV/ 2/1421. As he rightly points out, the Gouzenko files are ‘a shambles’. They need someone to compile a register of them, tabulated by number and source, so that a proper assessment of the chronology could be more easily gained.]
Tyrer makes two rather problematic assertions in this section of his analysis. The first is that ‘the existence of ELLI would have been telegrammed to London’ at the same time that the activities of Nunn May were described (i.e. September 10). Yet there is no evidence that ELLI was mentioned at that time: that is pure speculation. Moreover, Tyrer then claims that the fact that ‘MI5 in London knew about ELLI on or before 13 September’ is indicated by Liddell’s telegram responding to the message of September 13. How MI5 could have learned the contents of a cable before it was even sent is not explained by Tyrer, and his account ignores the perennial delays that were occurring between thought and reception at this time. It is true that Liddell first saw ‘CORBY’ telegrams on September 11 (since he records Kim Philby’s bringing them over with him), but he regards them as ‘somewhat corrupt’, and his lengthy diary analysis concerns itself solely with Nunn May and the latter’s prospective meeting with his handler in London. There is no mention of ELLI. Nor is there any when he discusses the case with Marriott and Philby two days later.
Yet researchers are indebted to Tyrer for finding another important text in the Canadian National Archives that corresponds approximately to the timing of the dispatch of the ‘UREN’ message. It was dated September 15, and Tyrer reproduces it as follows:
Alleged Agent in British Intelligence
CORBY states that while he was in the Central Code Section in 1942 or 1943, he heard about a Soviet Agent, in England, allegedly a member of the British Intelligence Service. This agent, who, was of Russian descent, had reported that the British had a very important agent of their own in the Soviet Union, who was apparently being run by someone in Moscow. The latter refused to disclose his agent’s identity even to his headquarters in London.
When this message arrived it was received by a Lt. Colonel POLAKOVA who, in view of its importance got in touch with STALIN himself by telephone.
Now this text raises some provocative questions. Who interrogated Gouzenko? Is what he told his interrogator the same message as was sent to Liddell on September 13? Did it go to both Liddell and Philby? What is the significance of the references to ‘British Intelligence Service’ and British agents in Moscow? Why was the hint not picked up with more urgency? If someone in Ottawa (presumably Dwyer) had two days earlier already made a link between ELLI and Uren, surely he must have been acting on more specific pointers to SOE and Uren, who was working for SOE when he was convicted of spying? Yet the most important conclusion to be drawn from this message is that a spy within the service had revealed to Chichaev (the NKVD-SOE representative in London )in 1942 or 1943 that George Hill (the SOE-NKVD representative in Moscow) maintained an agent in Moscow, and that, even though Hill’s bosses had requested that Hill identify him, Hill had refused. Yet Gouzenko does not name the agent as ELLI here.
The reference to POLAKOVA is highly significant, however. POLAKOVA – sometimes POLYARKOVA – was a major in the NKVD (with a GRU background) who instructed PICKAXE agents at the school at Kushnarenko, outside Moscow. * PICKAXE was the project shared by the NKVD and SOE for sending Soviet-trained subversive agents from UK soil into Nazi-occupied Europe (see below). If POLAKOVA received the message, it confirms that the informer was attached to SOE in some way.
[* Maria POLIAKOVA – known as ‘VERA’ – was a significant figure in Soviet espionage. She set up the Swiss section of the Rote Kapelle in 1937-38, handing over to SONIA. When Allan Foote was sent on his final mission (before ‘defecting’ back to the British), it was ‘VERA’ who gave him instructions, and it was Foote who informed MI5 of her identity. In 1945, therefore, the name would probably not have meant anything to Liddell & co.. She was presumably on loan to the NKVD for training of Soviet agents for SOE, and stood in for Ossipov, Hill’s opposite number in Moscow, when the latter was travelling. Why she would have been identified as masculine is puzzling.]
Tyrer assumes that this message is serial 2a in the Gouzenko file, noted, on page 30 of the report in KV 2/1420, as being extracted for placement in ELLI’s Personal File 66962, but I am unconvinced that we can rely on this.
i) First, an examination of the response indicates that it was sent by Liddell ‘for HOLLIS’, responding to CXG 323 of September 16, and Item 4 is the line that runs ‘Reference your CXG 301 of 13.10.45’. Yet Hollis did not arrive in Montreal until September 17, then moving on to Ottawa. The telegram is addressed to R.C.M.P, for Hollis’s attention. Thus someone with, or attached to, the RCMP sent the original.
ii) The message has been sent by use of the One-Time-Pad over MI5’s traditional link, and it has been annotated ‘Copy sent to SIS’, suggesting strongly that it was not sent directly to SIS for transmission, but that SIS was kept informed. Again, it indicates a more private correspondence between MI5 and the RCMP.
iii) The Canada-based representative, if coming to a conclusion that ELLI might be UREN, reveals a familiarity with British intelligence, if he came to the conclusion that the meagre hints provided by Gouzenko pointed to SOE, but he appears not to be addressing the substance of the September 15 message. Ormond UREN was an officer in SOE, of Scottish-Cornish background, who had been convicted in 1943 of passing secrets to ‘Dave’ Springhall of the CPGB. There was nothing ‘Russian’ in his background, and he would not have known about any SIS or SOE agents in the Soviet Union. Likewise, if Liddell had seen the message of September 15 at this time, he might have pointed out the obvious anomaly. Why, on September 23, would he not have referred to the September 15 information unless the reason was that it had not yet reached his desk?
The conclusion must be that a simpler statement, probably hinting at SOE’s wartime relationship with the NKVD, and perhaps the role of the Soviet military attaché, must have provoked the ‘UREN’ analysis. The sender specifically selected as a probable candidate an SOE officer whose espionage was known. Moreover, Liddell knew more than the Ottawa communicant did in order to be able to discount Uren, but had almost certainly not yet seen the September 15 message.
The CXG series of messages were sent care of BSC in New York to SIS, probably originated from Dwyer, and thus would have arrived on Philby’s desk first. It is highly unlikely, however, that Dwyer interviewed Gouzenko directly. In Molehunt (p 37), Nigel West claims that Gouzenko ‘made allegations . . . to Peter Dwyer’ about ‘a valuable Soviet spy inside British counterintelligence’, and that his assertions were later ‘reexamined in extraordinary detail’, but later (p 75) West states that Dwyer and Jean-Paul Evans flew in to Ottawa, but ‘neither of them ever actually met Gouzenko face to face’. West’s account suggests that John Leopold translated their questions and then reported Gouzenko’s answers (with Mervyn Black some time later assuming Leopold’s role as translator). West has the substance of this message about ELLI’s background surfacing only in 1981, thus confirming the existence of the withheld document in the Canadian National Archives. Gouzenko then gave an explanation to the Times, but for some reason changed the notion of ‘British Intelligence’ to MI5.
Peter Wright is also unreliable. He reports in Spycatcher (p 281) that, in 1965, he went over the Gouzenko transcripts again, and also describes the defector’s testimony as referring to what his co-worker in Moscow, Liubimov, told him, that there was ‘something Russian’ about ELLI, the use of a dubok, and the fact that the spy could ‘remove from MI5 the files which dealt with Russians in London’. Yet these two last ‘facts’ do not appear in the September 13 telegram. Liubimov was not named there. Wright then writes that Liubimov ‘showed him [Gouzenko] parts of the telegrams from the spy’, which cannot strictly have been accurate, as the information from ELLI would have been packaged by his handler, and not sent by ELLI himself (or herself).
It is presumably this telegram that Wright and Pincher refer to as the ‘Elligram’ (see Pincher, pp 205-206, & Wright, p 188), although Wright’s recall of it appears to draw from the September 15 telegram as well as new information appearing in Hollis’s message of November 23 (see below). Thus Pincher’s claim that Dwyer ‘quickly’ sent a fuller telegram ‘containing all the details about ELLI’ must be questioned. But then Pincher is wildly off the mark. He has Hollis at the centre of things when the Gouzenko story breaks, with his friend Philby conversing regularly with him. “By September 10, Hollis had known most of Gouzenko’s revelations”, he writes, next indulging in vague speculation about Hollis’ negligence in not taking the warnings about Nunn May’s rendezvous seriously enough, and his sorry attempts to divert suspicion from himself. Yet Pincher overlooks the fact that Hollis did not return from his holidays until September 14. He was completely out of the picture. Pincher’s account is pure fantasy.
The more careful Amy Knight also badly misrepresents Hollis’s involvement. She declares (p 137) that ‘Gouzenko’s information about “ELLI” was first conveyed during his interview with MI5’s Roger Hollis (with the RCMP present), who visited Gouzenko shortly after the defection’. Yet we know that references to ELLI appeared before Hollis’s return from holiday, and that he did not meet Gouzenko until late November (an encounter that Knight describes as his ‘second meeting’). She does, however, bolster the fact of the confused messages by citing papers from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service that indicated that Gouzenko could have been referring to two separate agents in his depositions.
What seems conclusive, however, is that several messages about ELLI were sent from Ottawa to Philby, that not all of them reached MI5, and those that were forwarded often were subject to delay. What is also critical to note, however, is that, in September, the only published observation about ELLI that Liddell makes is on the ‘UREN’ one of September 13. Yet he does not mention this observation in his Diaries (there is no obvious redaction here), and he does not react to the content of the more detailed ‘Russian connection’ message of September 15 until over a month later. I shall analyse the phenomenon later in this piece.
6. Philby’s Reactions:
Kim Philby
One might suppose that what Gouzenko had to say about ELLI could have been contained in one statement, but it appeared that it came out in dribs and drabs. One might also conclude that Philby saw every message that was issued from Ottawa about ELLI, but we cannot assume that either. As early as September 11 (namely before the first identifiable message on ELLI), Philby was preparing a report for his boss, Menzies, who, in turn, had to give Prime Minister Attlee a briefing on September 13. This was the same day that Philby introduced the case to Liddell. Jeffery quotes from his report, using an unnumbered archive in the Foreign Office papers, but makes no reference to ‘ELLI’. At that stage, Philby was probably relying on the fairly high-level report from Robertson that did, nevertheless, contain details about Nunn May. It was in a covering note to this report where he recommended that an expert in Soviet espionage be sent out. [Jeffery rather ambiguously writes: “He suggested Jane Archer or Roger Hollis from MI5”, where the syntax is unclear. Archer was still working for Philby at this time.] Philby was presumably not then aware that Hollis was on holiday, as Liddell pointed out to him on September 14, unless, of course, his recommendation was made out of devilry, in the knowledge that Hollis had been out of the picture, and would thus not be a very efficient investigator.
Thus it is difficult to determine exactly what ‘facts’ Philby passed on to Moscow to allow a confirmation of his findings by September 17. Had hints to ELLI alarmed him, or was he merely passing on the threat from the initial Nunn May revelations? In The Philby Files (p 239), Genrikh Borovik quoted a report from September that included the following: “Stanley was a bit agitated himself. I tried to calm him down. Stanley said that in connection with this he may have information of extreme urgency to pass to us. Therefore Stanley asks for another meeting in a few days. I refused a meeting, but I did allow him to pass urgent and important material through Hicks [Burgess].” Given that September 13, when the longer telegram from Canada was composed, it seems highly unlikely that it would been received, decrypted, and sent to Philby in time for him to internalize it, and arrange a meeting whereby Krotov could have likewise composed and sent a telegram so expeditiously. Indeed, Amy Knight states with confidence that this was a separate message from later in the month. Yet, if Philby were ‘agitated’, it might have been because of the ‘UREN’ message, since Philby had a strong link with SOE, having set up with Burgess its training programme at Brickendonbury Manor. He worked there for George Hill [see later], who had established the Russian section of SOE, after working in MI6’s D Section. Hill was sent out to Moscow as SOE’s representative to the NKVD in October 1941. The September 13 telegram, however, with its ‘Russian’ link might have been interpreted as drawing attention to someone else.
Tyrer (representing Wright’s opinions) also states that, after Philby received a telegram from Dwyer (that of September 13?), his communication, via Krotov, must have mentioned ELLI, and that when the KGB checked with the GRU to confirm what Philby had passed on, and sent the confirmation message on November 17, the existence of ELLI as a GRU spy was the subject of their response. The text runs as follows:
“The Chiefs have given their consent to the confirmation of the accuracy of your telegram concerning STANLEY’s data about the events in CANADA in the neighbours’ sphere of activity. STANLEY’’s information does correspond to the facts.”
There is no mention of ELLI: the facts may merely have described Nunn May and the associated network only. As I set out earlier in this piece, it would have stretched the limits of time and space for a message from Dwyer on ELLI to be created, encrypted, transmitted, decrypted, distributed, and analysed by Philby, and then a meeting set up with Krotov, whereafter a similar bureaucratic procedure occurred between London and Moscow, the KGB then checking with the GRU, gaining approval (presumably from Stalin), and lastly compiling its response for encryption, transmission and decryption – all in the space of five days (September 13-17), with a weekend in the middle, and across multiple time zones!
By similar analysis, since he did not reply to the ‘UREN’ suggestion until September 23, Liddell might have known nothing about ELLI at the time Hollis left (September 16). Of course, Hollis might have quizzed Dwyer on his arrival in Ottawa, but his surviving messages circle exclusively around the Nunn May business, and its considerable political implications. Hollis assuredly did not have a chance of seeing Gouzenko himself during this visit, and he had returned to London by September 28. And it was during the last week of September that Liddell noticed that a thick file of telegrams on Gouzenko was not being processed in a timely fashion.
And then, astonishingly, Philby was taken out of the picture for a while. On September 19, he learned that a potential defector, Konstantin Volkov, had contacted the British Embassy in Istanbul, Turkey, and had far more damaging stories to tell than Gouzenko could ever have imagined. Philby immediately informed Krotov, was thus consumed with the case, and eventually flew out to Istanbul on September 26, the day after a highly sedated Volkov (and his wife) had been abducted by the KGB for torture and execution in Moscow. Philby returned to London on October 1. Whether Philby delegated any of the Gouzenko work to Archer is not clear: Jeffery does not even discuss the matter. The impression that Liddell gives, however, is that there was a breakdown in communications.
The outstanding conclusion from Philby’s involvement here is that there is no evidence that Moscow Centre confirmed ELLI’s existence as a GRU asset. That suggestion appears to have been inserted by Vassiliev, on the basis that, since Gouzenko worked for the GRU, then ELLI must have likewise have done so.
7. Liddell’s Reactions:
Guy Liddell
For a while, the dribble of information on ELLI not unaccountably dries up. The Gouzenko archive (KV 1421, s.n. 35a) then shows a cryptic and incomplete reference, dated October 16, in Telegram No 533, sent with some urgency (‘MOST IMMEDIATE’). Its text runs as follows:
A. CORBY states that cover name for ?all foreign ?intelligence or counter espionage services is ZILONE repeat ZILONE meaning green in Russian.
B. Agent referred to by CORBY in 534 was referred to as working in ZILONE.
Handwritten annotations indicate that a copy of this message has been placed in the ELLI file (s.n. 4a).
Again, this is enigmatic. First of all, the telegram number precedes the item that it refers to. Second, there is no record of No. 534 in the file. Third, the construction ‘ZILONE’ is rather inaccurately formulated. The Russian word for ‘green’ would more properly be transcribed as ‘ZELYONNY’, which makes one question the Russian – and maybe the English – credentials of the interpreter. Stafford questions the ability of both men who ran the RCMP’s intelligence network: its head was Inspector Charles Rivett-Carnac, and his assistant was one John Leopold, who was the only direct contact with Gouzenko, Unfortunately, Leopold may not have been very accomplished. Stafford writes: “But the Czech-born Leopold knew little about Soviet intelligence, and his Russian was far from perfect.” That may explain some of the early misunderstandings over what Gouzenko said. Moreover, Gouzenko suspected that Leopold was a Soviet agent, and thus may have been reticent to open his mind while Leopold was the only translator. At some stage, Mervyn Black was brought in to help with translation, but Amy Knight does not state when this occurred.
So why was the revelation that the agent that Gouzenko had identified worked in counterintelligence suddenly that urgent? Had that fact not been communicated in September? ZILONE could presumably refer to either MI5 or MI6 – but also to SOE, since the Soviets made no distinction between SOE and MI6, which may have been significant. It might seem that someone in London had raised a question, and that Gouzenko wanted to clarify that his ‘Central Code Section’ handled traffic from all British intelligence services.
In any case, further messages start to appear. On October 24, Liddell reports in his Diary that John Marriott has brought more messages over, including ‘a further telegram about the agent known as ELLI who is alleged to hold some high position in British Intelligence’. (This is the first reference to ELLI in the unredacted part of Liddell’s Diaries.) Tyrer reproduces the text, but suggests that these telegrams were sent during Hollis’s second visit to Canada. This cannot be true, since, a week earlier, Liddell had written that Hollis personally brought him in another telegram from Canada (which was not ELLI-related), and the two of them had visited Petrie on October 18 to discuss the case. It sounds as if Liddell is describing the infamous Telegram 534, as he cites the claims that ELLI was working for British Counter-Intelligence, with the now notorious reference to ‘5’, which, especially now that we know of Leopold’s deficiencies, are highly ambiguous. “As CORBY’s theories are only based on scraps of information picked up here and there there is not much to work on,” he wrote, continuing: “It is possible that in mentioning the figure 5 he is referring to the five people who formerly signed JIC reports”, and he goes on to suggest that, as with the KING case, ‘it does not follow that because information is high-grade it comes from a high-grade officer’.
Hollis in fact sailed out of Southampton for Halifax, Canada, via New York, on October 22, and, according to Liddell, was ‘still there’ on October 30, although, with a five-day cruise, and an overland journey to Ottawa, Hollis could not have arrived until October 28, at the earliest. The next incident occurs on November 5, when Marriott shows Liddell ‘some recent telegrams’ on the subject of ELLI. As did Tyrer, I quote the text of Liddell’s diary entry in full:
“CORBY has been re-interrogated and refers to an incident when the Soviet M.A. [Military Attaché] in London referred to information that he had received from ELLI relating to a British agent in Russia. As the only organisations that can possibly have been running a British agent in Russia are SIS, SOE or the British Military Mission, it seems unlikely that ELLI could have any connection with ourselves. Nobody in fact knows anything about any agent in Russia. I should doubt very much whether there was one. The above does not necessarily throw any doubts on the bona fides of CORBY who may have got the story wrong.”
We should note that no mention of Hollis appears in this Diary entry: the ‘recently’ is irritatingly vague, so it may have been coincidental, or even antedated Hollis’s arrival. Tyrer categorises Liddell’s comments as ‘perplexing’, since Gouzenko had reported this information earlier (the September 13 telegram), but it would more probably indicate that Liddell had not seen that original telegram, or even that what he referred to was indeed exactly the same text, unaccountably held over for a month, and explained away by Philby’s absence in Turkey. Yet it is a very important reference, because it introduces the role of the ‘Military Attaché’, and thus partially explains M5’s lack of enthusiasm for an aggressive follow-up, as well as serving to prompt some personal reflections by Liddell himself.
Again, it is possible that some information was garbled. When Hill made a visit to London in October, he informed Liddell and White that he had been subject to provocation in Moscow, when the NKVD tried to set him up by sending him a man who had worked for him in 1920 (see Liddell’s October 5 diary entry). Despite Hill’s complaint, and the man’s being removed from the National Hotel, he made another attempt, to Hill’s exceeding annoyance. Thus both the time and circumstances of Hill’s ‘agent-running’ may have become distorted and misrepresented – a confusion over the pluperfect tense, perhaps: ‘ran’ versus ‘had run’? (There is no pluperfect tense in Russian.) Might ELLI have informed Chichaev that Hill had once run an agent in Moscow, after which Chichaev told Moscow Centre that Hill ran an agent there?
On the other hand, Hollis was still profoundly occupied with the political ramifications of the Gouzenko case. He was moving in exalted circles. On November 9, Liddell wrote: “Roger is to meet the PM, the President and Mackenize King in Washington, if required”, with rather shocking discussions scheduled on the atomic bomb, ‘and its handing over to the Russians or to the Security Council’. Meanwhile, Liddell was still focussed on the SOE connection, and the possibility of leaks in Moscow. He met with Archie Boyle (who had been Director of Security for SOE) on November 16, to discuss the ELLI case, and SOE’s set-up in Russia, where the highly dubious George Hill had been sent as chief SOE representative in October 1941. Quite a long entry appears in the Diary, in which Boyle is recorded as expressing ‘his grave suspicions about George Hill, and also about one George Graham whose real name is Serge LEONTIEFF, a White Russian.’ “The two are very close and one always backs up the other. Archie says he cannot understand how a man like Hill can possibly be acceptable to the Russians unless they are getting some sort [of] quid pro quo, the more so since they banished his mistress to Siberia and then brought her back after a certain delay.” (These comments echo what Liddell had written in his diaries about Hill back in 1943.) Hill was now on the Control Commission, and had recently told Boyle that he was about to make a private visit to Russia.
George Hill
At least Liddell started to dig more deeply. “I am getting the personal files for all the representatives of the SOE mission. Neither Hill nor Graham of course really fit the bill since the only concrete piece of evidence by CORBY is that he deciphered two telegrams indicating that ELLI was in London and worked through the Soviet M.A.” Yet George Hill, despite his dubious past, had been approved as SOE’s representative in Moscow in September 1941, and in 1942 and 1943 (the years that Gouzenko had referred to), was responsible for the Soviet end of the collaboration, in which Britain and the Soviets were supposed to cooperate in planting Soviet saboteurs in Nazi-controlled Europe. In Stalin’s world, of course, all foreigners were considered ‘spies’. But Hill might seriously have been assisting the NKVD. In his memoir From the Red Army to SOE, Len Manderstam described Hill as a ‘triple agent’, and accused him of supplying ‘a great deal of important information’ to the NKVD. Hill wrote a shameful piece of Stalinist propaganda in favour of the control of eastern Europe in his final report from Moscow when his position was wrapped up. Moreover, there should have been some controversy over ‘George Graham’ of the Intelligence Corps, whom Hill declared he had selected as his aide, and who accompanied him to Moscow. It seems that Leontieff had taken British nationality in 1933, but, as a White Russian, he would have been treated with utter scepticism by the Soviets – unless they had possibly planted him in the UK, or thought that they could exploit him once he was in Moscow.
For some reason, Liddell appears much more concerned about security problems with the mission in Moscow (not his area of responsibility) than he is about breaches in London. The NKVD was reading all of Hill’s postal communications, and the mission had initially not been provided with encrypted wireless support! Even Kim Philby, in My Silent War, wrote about the leakages from the Mission in Moscow, and the Russians’ ‘delight’ with Hill, a disclosure that must be inspected at some future time. Yet Liddell should have been focusing on security exposures on British soil.
It should be remembered that the period from late 1941 to 1943 was characterised by some wary attempts by MI6 and SOE to exchange intelligence with the NKVD, and even engage in shared subversive operations, where Soviet saboteurs were trained by SOE, and then parachuted into various European countries (Operation PICKAXE). (Attentive readers of coldspur will recall that the Radio Security Service, RSS, detected illicit use of wireless by Soviet operatives at the SOE training-centre at Brickendonbury Manor.) The head of the NKVD mission in London was the flamboyant but demanding and ruthless Colonel Chichaev. By most accounts he arrived in London, in the spirit of a cooperating alliance, in November 1941, but others indicate that he had arrived much earlier, and was perhaps acting as Gorsky’s substitute during the 1940 recall. For instance, Barros and Gregor, citing Russian archives in Double Deception, assert that, on May 14, 1941, Chichaev reported on the interpretation that Kim Philby gave him of Rudolf Hess’s arrival in Scotland (i.e. when the Soviet Union was technically still in an alliance with Germany), even though Gorsky had returned to London in November 1940. Such a claim must be treated cautiously.
For most of the time, as The Storm and the Shield (the Mitrokhin archive) indicates, Chichaev, as a secondary legal rezident in London, worked in parallel with the NKVD’s Gorsky, who continued to handle Philby & co. until he was transferred to the USA in 1944, and was replaced by Krotov. Thus Chichaev, who, unlike Gorsky, declared his role openly to the British authorities, must also have been the Military Attaché cited in the telegrams. He performed a dual role in dealing with SOE (overtly) and communist informants within foreign government-in-exile (covertly). It would have been quite natural for British diplomatic and intelligence personnel to have been meeting him openly during the period when Gouzenko describes ELLI as being active. Liddell describes a meeting that an unnamed officer had with Chichaev in July 1943 (see below).
Colonel Chichaev
The vitally important aspect of Chichaev’s status, however, is that, despite being represented as the ‘military attaché’, he was appointed by, and communicated with, the NKVD, not the GRU. (He had no contact with Sonia, for instance). Thus any SOE asset who provided intelligence would have been approved and acknowledged by the NKVD in Moscow. Even though Gouzenko (of the GRU) heard about ELLI, and reported his existence, it did not mean that ELLI was a GRU spy. Intriguingly, Amy Knight, in a footnote (pp 331-332) concludes, using a reference in Nigel West’s and Oleg Tsarev’s Crown Jewels that stated that Philby had reported the existence of an MI6 spy in Moscow called ‘TEMNY”, that ‘If it were not for the fact that Gouzenko’s “ELLI” was a GRU agent with a Russian background, this piece of information would point us straight to Philby as the ELLI suspect’. With two possible agents at large, and the fact that ELLI was an SOE-NKVD spy, the whole question remains up in the air.
8. Hollis’s Interview:
Meanwhile, the RCMP applied pressure on Hollis to extend his stay in North America, and return to Ottawa. Chapman Pincher wrote that Hollis interviewed Gouzenko on November 7, but that cannot be correct. In mid-November, Hollis was still occupied in explaining to London the reasons for the delays in publicizing the Gouzenko case, and Elisabeth Bentley’s confessions to the FBI created fresh turmoil when she named Cedric Belfrage (of BSC) as one of her spies. It was not until November 21 that he returned to Ottawa from New York to have his first interview with Gouzenko. Again, we are indebted to William Tyrer for persuading MI5 to release the telegram that he sent on November 23 – and which presumably provoked Liddell’s flurry of meetings with Military Intelligence officers (see below).
The full text of that message may be read in Tyrer’s article in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence, so I paraphrase its contents here. It was clearly Hollis’s first exposure to Gouzenko, who made a good impression.
i) Gouzenko had himself deciphered two telegrams from London, one stating that ELLI was going over to the dubok method, and another that the attaché in Moscow would not reveal name of British agent there.
ii) Gouzenko’s colleague Liubimov told him in 1943 that ELLI was a high-level counter-intelligence officer, and a member of an important committee. The number ‘5’ had an association.
iii) Koulakoff told Gouzenko a high-grade agent was still working in the UK in 1945, but it may not have been ELLI.
iv) Gouzenko told Hollis he was not aware that ELLI had reported two incidents of theft of papers from Military Attaché in London.
v) Hollis asked Gouzenko about the nature of information ELLI provided: was it about German war dispositions, political matters? Gouzenko could not say.
What are we to make of this? It is all rather a muddle. If Leopold was still in charge of the interpretation process, it must have been a difficult encounter, and Hollis must have wondered what fresh advances he could bring to the proceedings. What does Point i) mean? That George Hill had told Chichaev that he was running an agent in the Kremlin, but would not reveal his name? That would be the height of irresponsibility. Point v) is revealing, however. It strongly suggests that Hollis had MI14 on his mind. MI14 was responsible for analysis of German military operations and Leo Long had joined the section late in 1941. In 1944, he and Anthony Blunt had been discovered removing ULTRA decrypts to give to the Russians, so Hollis might naturally have wondered whether Long was ELLI. (That, incidentally, was the conclusion that Christopher Andrew came to in Defend the Realm, under the ‘guidance’ of Oleg Gordievsky.)
Point iv) is superficially puzzling: where did this item come from (was the anonymous Military Attaché the victim of a theft?), and did Gouzenko really speak up only in response to something Hollis knew? Did matters get garbled in translation? Yet I believe that this is one of the most significant items in the telegrams, something that has not received its due attention until now, and one that helps explain Liddell’s concurrent and subsequent actions. The full paragraph runs as follows:
“CORBY told me that he did not know that the two incidents of the theft of the papersfrom Military Attaché in London and attempt to Telephoto his office were reported by ELLI.”
First of all, this is clearly information that Hollis provided to Gouzenko, although the wording is slightly ambiguous. (Gouzenko may have known that the theft incidents had been reported, but not that ELLI was the source.) The intelligence must have been communicated to Hollis recently, while he was in Canada, else he surely would have tackled it with more urgency. So why were Hollis and MI5 so confident that this leakage could be placed at ELLI’s door? How could they have verified that ELLI provided any information unless either a) they knew who ELLI was, and had interviewed him or her, or b) they had access to an insider on the Soviet side who could confirm that such information could be traced to ELLI? Because of the ambiguities of the transcript, we cannot be sure whether they assumed ELLI was the source because of the close connections between the Military Attaché that Gouzenko had pointed out beforehand (and noted by Liddell in his diary), or because ELLI had been directly identified by a source in Moscow. Yet Hollis and Liddell knew that ‘the theft’ had been reported, presumably because MI5 had been involved in the exploit.
So what were the circumstances of the theft? A vital clue may be found in the memoirs of George Hill, Maia Shpionskaya Zhizn (My Life as a Spy), published in Moscow in 2000. They are cited by Dónal O’Sullivan in Dealing With the Devil, who also indicates that the Hoover Archives at Stanford University in Palo Alto preserve a copy of Hill’s unpublished 259-page manuscript titled ‘Reminiscences of four years with the NKVD’. When writing about Colonel Ivan Chichaev, NKVD’s representative in London between 1941 and 1945, O’Sullivan writes: “According to Russian accounts [in fact an introduction provided by the Russian editors to what turned out to be a reprint of Hill’s 1933 memoir, ’Go Spy the Land’: coldspur], British Intelligence attempted a ‘burglary’ of his residence to discover secret documents but found nothing as Chichaev had deposited them in the Soviet Embassy’ (Hill, p 37). Chichaev, unusually for such a functionary, established a private residence at 54 Campden Hill Court in Notting Hill, so that it is surely the house that is being referred to. (Rather incredibly, Colonel Gubbins, the head of SOE, lived in the same building.) Yet, if they found nothing, had ‘a theft’ occurred?
Thus the sequence of events would appear to be as follows: MI5 believed that secret documents were being passed to Chichaev (or had, perhaps, even planted them on him). They broke into his house in an attempt to find them, and to catch him red-handed. Chichaev was warned by an inside source of the planned raid, and thus moved the documents into a safer haven, in the Embassy. Chichaev reported the incident, and ELLI’s contribution, to Moscow. That information reached Hill, who may have passed on the information to his bosses in SOE. Alternatively, he may have been the source of the suspicions of Chichaev’s espionage. When he made a visit to the UK in November 1943, and had a meeting with Liddell, the question of the surveillance of Chichaev came up, and Hill requested that any evidence of possible espionage be reported to him, so that he might advise the NKVD of such complaints. Moreover, Anthony Blunt, assistant to Liddell, could conceivably have been an alternative, as responsible for the leakage.
MI5’s knowledge of Chichaev and the PICKAXE operation is worthy of a separate study. SOE employed an officer, John Senter, who was the liaison with MI5, so he surely kept Liddell at least partially informed of what was going on. Indeed, an entry in Liddell’s diary of August 14, 1942, rather provocatively states: “John Senter came to see me and brought with him an interesting document which had been extracted from the kit of one of the Russian parachutists sent over here”. It was probably a shoddily forged ID-card for one of the members of the COFFEE mission, characteristic of Soviet efforts. But at this stage, Liddell’s further comments show him not intimately familiar with the set-up under Chichaev, whose existence he first recognizes only at this late date. The archives show, as reported by Bernard O’Connor, that, when the COFFEE team struggled in its mission, unfit and ill-equipped, its members sought to defect, and on September 1, 1942, MI5’s Seddon and Wethered were brought in to consider the plea.
The complex relationships between Stephen Alley [see below], Chichaev and Hill – and indeed Philby, who worked with Chichaev, too, and the British Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Clark Kerr, who protected Hill – are too involved to explore here, and will have to be examined another time. Yet the conclusion must be that the Soviet Military Attaché in the ELLI incident was indeed Chichaev, that it involved SOE and SIS (between whom the Soviets made no distinction), and that, while Liddell was following the whole business closely, Roger Hollis had nothing to do with it.
Assuredly, this exchange would provoke some heated discussion over the years, which will be the subject of a later analysis. Suffice it to say that Hollis was a bit out of his depth at this stage. He had been focusing on high-level political strategy, dominated by the Allies’ vacillation over publicising the Gouzenko affair, and subsequently the fall-out from the Bentley revelations. He faithfully reported all that Leopold translated for him, but it cannot have made much sense to him. Knight cites some enigmatic handwritten notes written by the RCMP, summarizing the interview, that indicate possible confusion on Gouzenko’s part between information given to him in 1942 by Liubimov in Moscow and just recently by his successor Kulakoff in Ottawa, and which confirmed that there could be two agents described in his testimony. But the muddle may have been the fault of the interpreter/translator, and those who recruited and managed him.
Hollis had a reservation on the Clipper to return to the United Kingdom on November 26, and on his arrival was no doubt happy to pass the responsibility for Gouzenko over to Liddell, who, as has been shown, ran – and sometimes ambled – with the ball thereafter. As late as December 6, Petrie was still having discussions with Liddell about creating a new section in Hollis’s F Division to deal with Soviet espionage. At least, Liddell’s immediate meeting with the Director of Military Intelligence, de Guignand, [see below] showed some level of urgency. Because of this SOE story, however, and perhaps after speaking to Hollis immediately on the latter’s return, Liddell next indulges in some startling speculation.
9: SOE & Alley:
On November 16 Liddell had arranged to speak to one of George Hill’s closest friends and colleagues, a man called Stephen Alley. Nigel West’s Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence includes a short thumbnail sketch of Alley: “A veteran Russian-speaking Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officer, Major Alley was based in Paris between the wars and worked with Sidney Reilly. During World War 1, he had operated for SIS in St. Petersburg and had been evacuated in February 1918. After the war, he served in MI5 for three years and then moved to Paris, where he ran a business trading in commodities.” Yet the truth would turn out to be a bit more complex.
Stephen Alley
Liddell’s entry runs as follows: “I threw a fly * over Alley about George Hill. He said he had known him for many years and that he regarded him as a charlatan. He had in fact employed him on behalf of Imperial Tobacco in the Balkans but that he had been too expensive even for them. He had also used him in the old days to make contact with various MPs like Commander Kenworthy who seemed to be a spokesman for the Soviet Govt. in the House of Commons. There were periodical meetings in the form of luncheon parties which were arranged by Hill.”
[* This is presumably an angling term, used to indicate a lure being cast in the direction of a fish. I was not familiar with it, but it crops up regularly in Liddell’s Diaries.]
“The Commissar Vanishes’ (Stalin & Yezhov)
So what was Alley up to, so easily accessible by Liddell? It appears that he was still (or again) working for MI5 at this time. He does not appear in either West’s or Andrew’s account of MI5, as if he had been sanitized out of the picture, like Stalin’s commissar. John Curry’s internal history, however, shows him, in April 1943, as working in E Division, as E2, responsible for Alien Control of Finns, Poles and the Baltic States. Intriguingly, Liddell has a diary entry for July 19, 1943, where he records ‘that [XXXX] had made contact with Chichaev . . . who had considerable background in Finland and Riga’. The name of that redacted person could well have been Alley: the entry concludes by noting that XXXX is confident he can handle Chichaev.
In any case, it would appear that Alley had been a senior officer in MI5 throughout the war, and carried on afterwards. Another current Liddell diary entry, for September 11, 1945, recorded that Liddell had spoken to Alley about the arrival of Colonel Einthoven, who was the head of Dutch security in the Ministry of Justice. Alley was making ‘the necessary arrangements’: he was a loyal and trusted servant to Liddell. Richard Deacon records that Alley (unlike Dick White and Roger Hollis) attended Liddell’s funeral in 1958. Moreover, Alley had ‘something Russian in his background’. He had been born, in 1876, in a house at the Yusupov Palace in Moscow, and, after receiving his school education in Russia, he moved to King’s College in London, gained a degree in engineering at Glasgow University, before returning to Russia where (some claim) he was involved in the murder of Rasputin, and an attempt to rescue the Romanov royal family. Even more intriguing is the statement made by Michael Smith in Six (based on Alley’s unpublished memoir held at Glasgow University) that he was fired from MI6 because he refused to carry out an order to assassinate Joseph Stalin.
I have tried to contact the archivist at Glasgow University to determine whether this memoir can be made available, but, as so often happens with such inquiries, I have received no reply. The name and profile of Alley resonate, however. The close phonology, the Russian background, the presence in MI5 during the war, the connection with Hill and SOE in Moscow all make a lot of sense. So how does Liddell complete his diary entry? “ELLI=ALLEY is I think too fantastic to merit any serious thought.”
All those agents, or putative spies, with the double liquid consonant! Hollis, Mitchell, Ellis, Costello, Leo Long, Hill, Alley, Elliott – even Liddell himself, whom the author John Costello suspected, as he laid out in Mask of Treachery. And then Akhmedov said that ELLI was female – Evelyn McBarnet? Ray Milne, née Mundell? One longs for some traditional solid English names, like Hodgson or Winterbotham, who could immediately be dismissed from the inquiries because of the illiquidity of their surnames. It is, however, Liddell’s raising the possibility that Alley might be ELLI rather than his dismissal of the idea as preposterous that intrigues me more. It indicates that Alley at least fitted the profile of what could be deduced about the agent/informer. Did someone suggest it to him, or did he come up with it himself? Was the idea expressed outside his diaries? We may never know, but at least, for a while, MI5 officers were considering seriously whom Gouzenko might have been pointing towards.
Liddell was not finished yet. On November 21, he noted that he dined with Archie Boyle and Darton, and discussed the SOE Mission in Moscow. He added in parenthesis ‘See note in front of diary’, but that is not to be found. And then a very significant entry for November 27 needs to be cited in full:
Air Commodore Archie Boyle
“I saw the DMI [Director of Military Intelligence, Freddie de Guignand, who had replaced John Sinclair in September 1945] and told him about the ELLI case. He sent for the current files of telegrams between the British Military Mission in Moscow and London which only covered a period of 3 months. All back files are sent to the Record Office at Droitwich. He is sending for those covering the years 1942-43 so that we can go through them. There was nothing in the current files to show the Mission was running an agent. DMI also sent for a list of officers who had served on the mission during the relevant period. He found a Capt. Chapman, who he is going to see. He will merely ask him whether at any time the Mission had run agents and if so whether he recollects any request from London for the identity of such an agent. This seems to be as far as we can go at the moment.”
This exchange is puzzling. The mission in Moscow was designed as one of coordination with the NKVD over the running of saboteurs in Nazi-controlled territory: it was not an intelligence-gathering exercise (although the NKVD thought otherwise), and attempting to develop agents would only have incurred the additional wrath of MI6. De Guignand surely knew that. So had Hill really reported to his bosses in London that he was running an agent, but had concealed his identity? Or was it a bogus claim he made to Chichaev, to impress him? And how did ELLI learn that fact? George Hill should have been an obvious source to shed light on affairs.
Thus 1945 came to a close. In mid-December, Liddell had learned that he had been overlooked as Petrie’s successor, and was obviously disappointed. He had to re-apply himself to the tasks at hand. What happened to his SOE inquiry in 1946? Was George Hill picked up for questioning? What was Alley’s relationship with Hill? What was going on with the White Russian George Graham, aka Leontieff? Why did MI5 start to think, in 1951, that ELLI might be Philby? And how was Gouzenko’s testimony picked up in later years? I shall inspect these questions in a later report.
10. Interim Conclusions:
ELLI was an SOE asset providing information to Chichaev, the unnamed Military Attaché, who worked for the NKVD. The appearance of Polakova, the PICKAXE trainer, is a strong reinforcement of this theory. Because ELLI’s story was revealed by a former Central clerk who was assigned to the GRU, it has been wrongly assumed that ELLI must have been a GRU agent. Vassiliev’s unintentionally misleading account has done much to reinforce this misconception.
MI5 was sluggish. It should have demanded control, sent out an expert dedicated to the case, and ensured that a qualified interpreter was used. The confusion over the translations and transcriptions is unpardonable.
Hollis was not central to the inquiry. He was on vacation at the time of Gouzenko’s defection, and his mission in North America was to handle the high-level political implications of Nunn May’s actions. He was not introduced to the ELLI case until late, and he was the wrong man for the job.
There is no evidence that Philby actually referred to ELLI in his messages, and no detected confirmation by Moscow Centre that ELLI was a GRU asset. Philby’s references to GRU were probably in relation to Gouzenko and Nunn May. He surely saw the information, but never thought it pointed to him.
ELLI might well have been Alley, who was active in 1942-43, and knew Hill well. He was still around in 1945. His role may have been exaggerated. ELLI’s name may have been changed after the events of 1945, or he/she may have been taken out of service. The anomalies of the dubok and the committee remain. Gouzenko (or his translator) may have confused multiple events and personalities. Feeble and obvious attempts have been made to excise Alley’s name from the record.
SOE had shown gross laxity in allowing Hill to appoint ‘George Graham’ as his aide de camp. This may have led to the security exposures in Moscow that Philby and Boyle refer to.
Pincher’s account is mainly fantasy. Hollis was out of the picture when the Gouzenko story broke, and he had no business dealing with Chichaev and the SOE. Amy Knight’s much respected work also gets the story wrong.
The analysis reveals the relative slowness of everything, compared to today, and the primacy of Chronology and Geography. Cross-Atlantic travel, even by air, was laborious, and wartime passage between London and Moscow (or Kuibyshev) especially arduous; notwithstanding the advances of HYDRA and Rockex, the process of the composition of messages, encryption, transmission, decryption, recryption, transmission, decryption, distribution, analysis, and further routing was long-winded; arranging contacts between spies and handlers had to be undertaken very cautiously; other business processes, such as arranging meetings, and gaining approval and signatures for decisions and messages, were much more challenging in in a pre-electronic age.
Sources:
Gouzenko files at TNA (KV 2/1419-1429)
Guy Liddell Diaries at TNA (KV 4/185-196; KV 4/466-475)
The Unresolved Mystery of ELLI, by William Tyrer (in International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence)
The CORBY case: the defection of Igor Gouzenko, September 1945, by Gill Bennett (from FCO publication From World War to Cold War)
How the Cold War Began, by Amy Knight
Defend the Realm, by Christopher Andrew
The Secret History of MI6, by Keith Jeffery
The Crown Jewels, by Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev
The Security Service 1908-1945, by John Curry
The Secret History of SOE, by William Mackenzie
The Secret History of British Intelligence in the Americas, 1940-45, by Gilbert Highet, Tom Hill & Roald Dahl
MI5, by Nigel West
MI5: 1945-1972, by Nigel West
Molehunt, by Nigel West The Sword and the Shield, by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin
The Haunted Wood, by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev
Mask of Treachery, by John Costello
Treachery, by Chapman Pincher
Spycatcher, by Peter Wright
The Storm Birds, by Gordon Brook-Shepherd
The Philby Files, by Genrikh Borovik
Fred Rose and Igor Gouzenko: The Cold War Begins, by David Levy
Stalin’s Man in Canada, by David Levy
Best Kept Secrets, by John Bryden
Dealing With the Devil, by Dónal O’Sullivan
Sharing Secrets with Stalin, by Bradley F. Smith
Camp X, by David Stafford
Cargo of Lies, by Dean Beeby
Six, by Michael Smith
Double Deception, by James Barros and Richard Gregor
Churchill & Stalin’s Secret Agents, by Bernard O’Connor
From the Red Army to SOE, by Len Manderstam
Trotsky’s Favourite Spy, by Peter Day
My Silent War, by Kim Philby
To Spy the Land, by George Hill
The Greatest Treason, by Richard Deacon
Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence, by Nigel West
At the end of this dreadful year, I use this bulletin to provide an update on some of the projects that have occupied my time since my last Round-Up. I shall make no other reference to Covid-19, but I was astounded by a report in the Science Section of the New York Times of December 29, which described how some victims of the virus had experienced psychotic symptoms of alarming ferocity. Is there a case for investigating whether traditional paranoiacs may have been affected by similar viral attacks, harmed by neurotoxins which formed as reactions to immune activation, and crossed the blood-brain barrier?
The Contents of this bulletin are as follows:
‘Agent Sonya’ Rolls Out
The John le Carré I Never Knew
The Dead Ends of HASP
Anthony Blunt: Melodrama at the Courtauld
Trevor Barnes Gives the Game Away
Bandwidth versus Frequency
‘History Today’ and Eric Hobsbawm
Puzzles at Kew
Trouble at RAE Farnborough
End-of-Year Thoughts and Holiday Wishes
‘Agent Sonya’ Rolls Out
Kati Marton
Ben Macintyre’s biography of Sonia/Sonya received an overall very favourable response in the press, and it predictably irked me that it was reviewed by persons who were clearly unfamiliar with the subject and background. I posted one or two comments on-line, but grew weary of hammering away unproductively. Then Kati Marton, a respectable journalist who has written a book about one of Stalin’s spies, offered a laudatory review in the New York Times (see: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/books/review/agent-sonya-ben-macintyre.html?searchResultPosition=1) I accordingly wrote the following letter to the Editor of the Book Review:
Re: ‘The Housewife Who Was A Spy’
Even before Ben Macintyre’s book appears, enough is known about Agent Sonya to rebuff many of the claims that Kati Marton echoes from it.
Sonya was neither a spy, nor a spymaster (or spymistress): she was a courier. She did not blow up any railways in England: the most daring thing she did was probably to cycle home from Banbury to Oxford with documents from Klaus Fuchs in her basket.
A ‘woman just like the rest of us’? Well, she had three children with three different men. Her second marriage, in Switzerland, was bigamous, abetted by MI6, whose agent, Alexander Foote, provided perjurious evidence about her husband’s adultery. As a dedicated communist, she went in for nannies, and boarding-schools for her kids (not with her own money, of course). Just like the rest of us.
She eluded British secret services? Hardly. MI5 and MI6 officers arranged her passport and visa, then aided her installation in Britain, knowing that she came from a dangerous communist family, and even suspected that she might be a ‘spy’. The rat was smelled: they just failed to tail it.
Her husband in the dark? Not at all. He had performed work for MI6 in Switzerland, was trained as a wireless operator by Sonya, and as a Soviet agent carried out transmissions on her behalf from a bungalow in Kidlington, while her decoy apparatus was checked out by the cops in Oxford.
Living in a placid Cotswold hamlet? Not during the war, where her wireless was installed on the premises of Neville Laski, a prominent lawyer, in Summertown, Oxford. Useful to have a landlord with influence and prestige.
A real-life heroine? Not one’s normal image of a heroine. A Stalinist to the death, she ignored the horror of the Soviet Union’s prison-camp and praised its installation in East Germany after the war. Here Ms. Marton gets it right.
It appears that Mr. Macintyre has relied too closely on Sonya’s mendacious memoir, Sonjas Rapport, published in East Germany at the height of the Cold War, in 1977, under her nom de plume Ruth Werner. And he has done a poor job of inspecting the British National Archives.
As I declared in my Special Bulletin of December 8, I was, however, able to make my point. Professor Glees had introduced me to the Journal of Intelligence and National Security, recommending me as a reviewer of Macintyre’s book. Agent Sonya arrived (courtesy of the author) on October 8. By October 16, I had read the book and supplied a 6,000-word review for the attention of the Journal’s books editor in Canada. He accepted my text enthusiastically, and passed it on to his team in the UK. Apart from some minor editorial changes, and the addition of several new references, it constituted the review as it was published on-line almost two months later. It will appear in the next print edition of the Journal.
The team at the Journal were all a pleasure to work with, and they added some considerable value in preparing the article for publication, and providing some useful references that I had thought might be extraneous. But the process took a long time! Meanwhile, Claire Mulley had written an enthusiastic review of the book in the Spectator, and picked it as one of her ‘Books of the Year’. Similarly, the Sunday Times rewarded Macintyre by picking the production of one of their in-house journalists as one of the Books of the Year. I have to complement Macintyre on his ability to tell a rattling good yarn, but I wish that the literary world were not quite so cozy, and that, if books on complicated intelligence matters are going to be sent out to review, they could be sent to qualified persons who knew enough about the subject to be able to give them a serious critique.
Finally, I have to report on two book acquisitions from afar. It took four months for my copy of Superfrau iz GRU to arrive from Moscow, but in time for me to inspect the relevant chapters, and prepare my review of Agent Sonya. The other item that caught my eye was Macintyre’s information about the details of Rudolf Hamburger’s departure from Marseilles in the spring of 1939. I imagined this must have come from the latter’s Zehn Jahre Lager, Hamburger’s memoir of his ten years in the Gulag, after his arrest by the British in Tehran, and his being handed over to the Soviets. This was apparently not published until 2013. I thus ordered a copy from Germany, and it arrived in late November. Yet Hamburger’s story does not start until 1943: he has nothing to say about his time in Switzerland.
His son Maik edited the book, and provided a revealing profile of his father. Of his parents’ time in China, when Sonia started her conspiratorial work with Richard Sorge, he wrote: “Als sie nicht umhinkann, ihn einzuweihen, ist er ausser sich. Nicht nur, dass er sich hintergangen fühlt – sie hat die Familie aufs Spiel gesetzt.“ (“Since she could not prevent herself from entangling him, he is beside himself. Not just that he feels deceived – she has put the whole family at stake.”) When Sonia decided to return to Moscow for training, the marriage was over. And when she published her memoir in 1977 Maik noted: “Hamburger ist über diese Publikation und die Darstellung seiner Person darin hochgradig verärgert.“ (“Hamburger is considerably annoyed by this publication, and the representation of his character in it.”) Indeed, Maik. Your father suffered much on her account.
The John le Carré I Never Knew
John Le Carre
I noted with great sadness the death of John le Carré this month. I imagine I was one of many who, during their university years, read The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, and was blown over by this very unromantic view of the world of espionage. Perhaps it was that experience that led me into a lifelong fascination with that realm. He was a brilliant writer, especially in the sphere of vocal registers. I wrote an extensive assessment of him back in 2016 (see Revisiting Smiley & Co.), and do not believe I have much to add – apart from the inevitable factor of Sonia.
In our article in the Mail on Sunday (see: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8467057/Did-staggering-British-blunder-hand-Stalin-atomic-bomb.html , Professor Glees and I had characterized Sonia’s story as real-life confirmation of le Carré’s verdict that ‘betrayal is always the handmaiden of espionage’ , and I concluded my detailed explanation of the saga (see: http://www.coldspur.com/sonia-mi6s-hidden-hand/ ) with the following words: “What it boils down to is that the truth is indeed stranger than anything that the ex-MI6 officer John le Carré, master of espionage fiction, could have dreamed up. If he ever devised a plot whereby the service that recruited him had embarked on such a flimsy and outrageous project, and tried to cover it up in the ham-fisted way that the real archive shows, while all the time believing that the opposition did not know what was going on, his publisher would have sent him back to the drawing-board.”
I had rather whimsically hoped that Mr. le Carré would have found these articles, and perhaps reached out to comment somewhere. But my hopes were dashed when I read Ben Macintyre’s tribute in the Times (see: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/john-le-carre-the-spy-who-was-my-friend-svr8tgv82 ). This is a typical item of Macintyrean self-promotion, as he encourages the glamour of le Carré to flow over him (‘Oh what prize boozers we were! How we joked and joshed each other!’), while the journalist attempts to put himself in a more serious class than his famous friend: “We shared a fascination with the murky, complex world of espionage: he from the vantage point of fiction and lived experience, whereas I stuck to historical fact and research.” Pass the sick-bag, Alice.
And then there was that coy plug for his book on Philby, A Spy Among Friends. “On another long ramble, between books and stuck for a new subject, I asked him what he thought was the best untold spy story of the Cold War. ‘That is easy,’ he said. ‘It is the relationship between Kim Philby and Nicholas Elliott,’ the MI6 officer who worked alongside the KGB spy for two decades and was comprehensively betrayed by him.’ That led to another book, ostensibly about the greatest spy scandal of the century, but also an exploration of male friendship, the bonds of education, class and secrecy, and the most intimate duplicity. Le Carré wrote the afterword, refusing payment.” Did ELLI not even touch the Great Man’s consciousness? What a load of boloney.
Thus, if le Carré really believed that the Philby-Elliott relationship was the best untold story of the Cold War, I knew we were on shaky ground. And, sure enough, a discussion on Sonya followed. “We met for the last time in October, on one of those medical toots, in the Hampstead house. A single table lamp dimly illuminated the old sitting room, unchanged over the years. Having read my latest book [‘Agent Sonya,’ for those of you who haven’t been paying attention], he had sent an enthusiastic note and a suggestion we meet: “You made us over time love and admire Sonya herself, and pity her final disillusionment, which in some ways mirrors our own. What guts, and what nerve. And the men wimps or misfits beside her.”
Hallo!! What were you thinking, old boy? Macintyre had hoodwinked the Old Master himself, who had been taken in by Macintyre’s picaresque ramblings, and even spouted the tired old nonsense that Sonya’s disillusionment ‘in some ways mirrors our own’. Who are you speaking for, chum, and what gives you the right to assume you know how the rest of us feel? What business have you projecting your own anxieties and disappointments on the rest of us? ‘Loving and admiring’ that destructive and woefully misguided creature? What came over you?
It must be the permanent challenge of every novelist as to how far he or she can go in projecting his or her own emotional turmoils into the world of outside, and claiming they are universal. As le Carré aged, I think he dealt with this aspect of his experiences less and less convincingly. And there have been some very portentous statements made about his contribution to understanding human affairs. Thus, Phillipe Sands, in the New York Times: “David [not King Edward VIII, by the way, but oh, what a giveaway!] was uniquely able to draw the connections between the human and historical, the personal and the political, pulling on the seamless thread that is the human condition.” (Outside Hampstead intellectuals, people don’t really talk like that still, do they?) With le Carré, one was never sure if he believed that the intelligence services, with their duplicities, deceits, and betrayals, caused their operatives to adopt the same traits, or whether those services naturally attracted persons whose character was already shaped by such erosive activities.
I believe the truth was far more prosaic. MI5, for example, was very similar to any other bureaucratic institution. In the war years, recruits were not subjected to any kind of personality or ideological test. They received no formal training, and picked up the job as they went along. Rivalries developed. Officers had affairs with their secretaries (or the secretaries of other officers), and sometimes they married them. Plots were hatched for personal advancement or survival. (White eased out Liddell in the same way that Philby outmanoeuvred Cowgill.) What was important was the survival of the institution, and warding off the enemy (MI6), and, if necessary, lying to their political masters. The fact is that, as soon as they let rogues like Blunt in, did nothing when they discovered him red-handed, and then tried to manipulate him to their advantage, White and Hollis were trapped, as trapped as Philby and his cronies were when they signed their own pact with the devil. Only in MI5’s case, these were essentially decent men who did not understand the nature of the conflict they had been drawn into.
On one aspect, however, Macintyre was absolutely right – the question of le Carré’s moral equivalence. With his large pile in Cornwall, and his opulent lunches, and royalties surging in, le Carré continued to rant about ‘capitalism’, as if all extravagant or immoral behaviour by enterprises, large or small, irrevocably damned the whole shooting-match. Would he have railed against ‘free enterprise’ or ‘pluralist democracy’? He reminded me of A. J. P. Taylor, fuming about capitalism during the day, and tracking his stock prices and dividends in the evenings. And le Carré’s political instincts took on a very hectoring and incongruous tone in his later years, with George Smiley brought out of retirement to champion the EU in A Legacy of Spies, and, a couple of years ago, Agent Running In The Field being used as a propaganda vehicle against the Brexiteers. (While my friend and ex-supervisor, Professor Anthony Glees, thinks highly of this book, I thought it was weak, with unconvincing characters, unlikely backgrounds and encounters, and an implausible plot.)
I could imagine myself sitting down in the author’s Hampstead sitting-room, where we open a second bottle of Muscadet, and get down to serious talk. He tells me how he feels he has been betrayed by the shabby and corrupt British political establishment. It is time for me to speak up.
“What are you talking about, squire? Why do you think you’re that important? You win a few, you lose a few. Sure, democracy is a mess, but it’s better than the alternative! And look at that European Union you are so ga-ga about? Hardly a democratic institution, is it? Those Eurocrats continue to give the Brits a hard time, even though the two are ideological allies, and the UK at least exercised a popular vote to leave, while those rogue states, Hungary and Poland, blackmail the EU into a shady and slimy deal over sovereignty, and weasel some more euros out of Brussels! Talk about moral dilemmas and sleaziness! Why don’t you write about that instead? Aren’t you more nostalgic, in your admiration for the ‘European Project’, than all those Brexiteers you believe to be Empire Loyalists?”
But I notice he is no longer listening. I catch him whispering to one of his minions: “Who is this nutter? Get him out of here!”
I slip a few uneaten quails’ eggs into my pocket, and leave.
(A product of coldspur Syndications Inc. Not to be reproduced without permission.)
The Dead Ends of HASP
Professor Wilhelm Agrell
I had been relying on two trails to help resolve the outstanding mysteries of the so-called HASP messages that GCHQ had acquired from Swedish intelligence, and which reputedly gave them breakthroughs on decrypting some elusive VENONA traffic. (see Hasp & Spycatcher). One was a Swedish academic to whom Denis Lenihan had introduced me, Professor Wilhelm Agrell, professor of intelligence analysis at the University of Lund in Sweden. Professor Agrell had delivered a speech on Swedish VENONA a decade ago, and had prepared a paper in English that outlined what he had published in a book in Swedish, unfortunately not (yet) translated into English. The other was the arrival of the authorised history of GCHQ by the Canadian academic, Professor John Ferris. It was perhaps reasonable to expect that the VENONA project would undergo a sustained analysis in this work, which was published in October of this year.
Professor Agrell’s work looked promising. His paper, titled ‘The Stockholm Venona – Cryptanalysis, intelligence liaison and the limits of counter-intelligence’, had been presented at the 2009 Cryptologic History Symposium, October 15 and 16, 2009, at Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, MD. His annotations indicated that he had enjoyed extensive access to Swedish Security Police files, as well as some documents from the military intelligence and security services. Moreover, his analysis had benefitted from declassified American, German and British intelligence, along with some recently declassified Swedish files. His references included two useful-sounding books written in English, Swedish Signal Intelligence 1900-1945, byC.G. McKay and Bengt Beckman, and the same McKay’s From Information to Intrigue. Studies in Secret Service based on the Swedish Experience, 1939-1945. I acquired and read both volumes.
The experience was very disappointing. The two books were very poorly written, and danced around paradoxical issues. I prepared some questions for the Professor, to which he eventually gave me some brief answers, and I responded with some more detailed inquiries, to which he replied. He had never heard of HASP outside Wright’s book. He was unable to provide convincing responses over passages in his paper that I found puzzling. Towards the end of our exchange, I asked him about his assertion that ‘GCHQ has released agent-network VENONA traffic to the National Archives’, since I imagined that this might refer to some of the missing SONIA transmissions that Wright believed existed. His response was that he was referring to the ‘so called ISCOT material from 1944-45’. Well, I knew about that, and have written about it. It has nothing to do with VENONA, but contains communications between Moscow and guerilla armies in Eastern Europe, decrypted by Denniston’s group at Berkeley Street. At this stage I gave up.
In a future bulletin, I shall lay out the total Agrell-Percy correspondence, and annotate which parts of the exchange are, in my opinion, highly important, but I do not think we are going to learn much more from the Swedish end of things. The Swedes seem to be fairly tight-lipped about these matters.
I completed John Ferris’s Behind the Enigma on November 30, and put its 823 pages down with a heavy thud and a heavy sigh. This book must, in many ways, be an embarrassment to GCHQ. It is poorly written, repetitive, jargon-filled, and frequently circumlocutory. The author is poor at defining terms, and the work lacks a Glossary and Bibliography. Ferris has an annoying habit of describing historical events with modern-day terminology, and darts around from period to period in a bewilderingly undisciplined manner. He includes a lot of tedious sociological analysis of employment patterns at Bletchley Park and Cheltenham. One can find some very useful insights amongst all the dense analysis, but it is a hard slog tracking them down. And he is elliptical or superficial about the matters that interest me most, that is the interception and decipherment of Soviet wireless traffic.
One receives a dispiriting message straight away, on page 4. “This history could not discuss diplomatic Sigint after 1945, nor any technicalities of collection which remained current.” Yet this stipulation does not prevent Ferris from making multiple claims about GCHQ’s penetration of Soviet high-grade systems, and promoting the successes of other apparent diplomatic projects, such as Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Cuba. For example, he refers to Dick White’s recommendation in 1968 that more Soviet tasks be handed over to the US’s NSA (p 311), but, not many pages later, he writes of the Americans’ desire not to fall behind British Sigint, and their need to maintain the benefit they received from GCHQ’s ‘power against Russia’ (p 340). On page 355 we learn that GCHQ ‘ravaged Soviet civil and machine traffic’. I do not know what all this means.
It seems that Ferris does not really understand VENONA. His coverage of MASK (the 1930s collection of Comintern traffic with agents in Britain) is trivial, he ignores ISCOT completely, and he characterizes VENONA in a similarly superficial fashion: “It [GCHQ] began an attack on Soviet systems. Between 1946 and 1948, it produced Britain’s best intelligence, which consumers rated equal to Ultra.” (p 279). He fails to explain how the project attacked traffic that had been stored from 1943 onwards, and does not explain the relationship between the USA efforts and the British (let alone the Swedes). His statement about the peak of UK/USA performance against Soviet traffic as occurring between 1945 and 1953 (p 503) is simply wrong. VENONA has just four entries in the Index, and the longest passage concerns itself with the leakage in Australia. He offers no explanation of how the problem of reused one-time-pads occurred, or how the British and American cryptologists made progress, how they approached the problem, and what was left unsolved. Of HASP, there is not a sign.
It is evident that GCHQ, for whatever reason, wants VENONA (and HASP) to remain not only secrets, but to be forgotten. All my appeals to its Press Office have gone unacknowledged, and the issue of Ferris’s History shows that it has no intention of unveiling anything more. Why these events of sixty years and more ago should be subject to such confidentiality restrictions, I have no idea. It is difficult to imagine how the techniques of one-time pads, and directories, and codebooks could form an exposure in cryptological defences of 2020, unless the process would reveal some other embarrassing situation. Yet I know how sensitive it is. A month or two back, I had the privilege of completing a short exchange with a gentleman who had worked for GCHQ for over thirty years, in the Russian division. He said he had never heard of HASP. Well, even if he had, that was what he had been instructed to say. But we know better: ‘HASP’ appears on that RSS record.
Anthony Blunt: Melodrama at the Courtauld
Anthony Blunt
Every schoolboy knows who murdered Atahualpa, and how in April 1964 the MI5 officer Arthur Martin elicited a confession of Soviet espionage from Anthony Blunt. Yet I have been rapidly coming to the conclusion that the whole episode at Blunt’s apartment at the Courtauld Institute was a fiction, a sham event conceived by Roger Hollis and Dick White, in order to conceal Blunt’s earlier confession, and to divert responsibility for the disclosure on to an apparently recent meeting between MI5 officer Arthur Martin and the American Michael Straight, after the latter’s confession to the FBI in the summer of 1963. By building a careful chronology of all the historical sources, but especially those of British Cabinet archives, the FBI, and the CIA, a more accurate picture of the extraordinary exchanges MI5 had with Blunt, Straight and the fifth Cambridge spy, John Cairncross, can be constructed.
The dominant fact about the timing of Blunt’s confession is that all accounts (except one) use Penrose and Freeman’s Conspiracy of Silence as their source, which, in turn, refers to a correspondence between the authors and the MI5 officer Arthur Martin in 1985. Only Christopher Andrew claims that an archival report exists describing the events, but it is identified solely in Andrew’s customarily unacademic vernacular of ‘Security Service Archives’. The details are vaguely the same. On the other hand, several commentators and authors, from Andrew Boyle to Dame Stella Rimington, suggest that Blunt made his confession earlier, though biographers and historians struggle with the way that the ‘official’ account has pervaded the debate, and even use it as a reason to reject all the rumours that Blunt had made his compact some time beforehand.
This project has been several months in the making. I was provoked by Wright’s nonsense in Spycatcher to take a fresh look at the whole search for Soviet moles in MI5. I re-read Nigel West’s Molehunt, this time with a more critical eye. Denis Lenihan and I collaborated on a detailed chronology for the whole period. I reinspected the evidence that the defector Anatoli Golitsyn was supposed to have provided that helped nail Philby. The journalist James Hanning alerted me to some passages in Climate of Treason that I had not studied seriously. I was intrigued by David Cannadine’s rather lavish A Question of Retribution (published earlier this year), which examined the furore over Blunt’s ousting from the British Academy after his role as a spy had been revealed, and I pondered over Richard Davenport-Hines’s misleading review of Cannadine’s book in the Times Literary Supplement a few months ago. I went back to the source works by Boyle, Andrew, West, Costello, Pincher, Penrose and Freeman, Wright, Bower, Straight, Cairncross, Perry, Rimington, and Smith to unravel the incongruous and conflicting tales they spun, and acquired Geoff Andrews’s recent biography of John Cairncross. I inspected carefully two files at the National Archives, declassified in the past five years, that appeared to have been misunderstood by recent biographers.
The dominant narrative runs as follows: Golitsyn created interest in the notion of the ‘Cambridge 5’, and helped to identify Philby as the Third Man; Michael Straight confessed to the FBI that he had been recruited by Blunt at Cambridge; the FBI notified MI5; MI5 interviewed Straight; MI5 could not move against Blunt (the Fourth Man) simply because of Straight’s evidence; MI5 concocted a deal whereby Blunt would essentially receive a pardon if he provided information that led to the ‘Fifth Man’; Blunt revealed that he had recruited John Cairncross; at some stage, MI5 interrogated Cairncross who, on similar terms, confessed; Cairncross’s evasions deflected suspicions that he could have been the ‘Fifth Man’; other candidates were investigated. Blunt’s culpability, and the fact of a deal, remained a secret until, in 1979, Andrew Boyle revealed the role of ‘Maurice’ in Climate of Treason, Private Eye outed ‘Maurice’ as Blunt, and Margaret Thatcher admitted the unwritten compact that had been agreed with Blunt. Yet a muddle endured.
The archives show that this was not the actual sequence of events. The timing does not make sense. And it all revolves around Arthur Martin’s two interrogations of Cairncross in Cleveland, Ohio, in February and March 1964, i.e. before the date claimed for Blunt’s confession to Arthur Martin. Wright’s Spycatcher is perhaps the most egregious example of a work where the chronology is hopelessly distorted or misunderstood, and the author is shown to be carrying on a project of utter disinformation. All other accounts show some manner of delusion, or laziness in ignoring obvious anomalies. The fact is that Hollis, White, Trend & co. all hoodwinked the Foreign Office, and withheld information from the new Prime Minister, Alec Douglas-Home. In my report at the end of January 2021 I shall reveal (almost) all. In the meantime, consider these priceless quotations (from a FO archive):
“It is desirable that we should be seen to be doing everything possible to bring him [Cairncross] to justice.’ (Sir Bernard Burrows, Chairman of the JIC, February 20, 1964)
“At the same time I am bound to say I think MI5 are taking a lot on themselves in deciding without any reference not to pursue such cases at some time (in this instance in Rome, Bangkok, and U.K.) and then to go ahead at others (here in USA). The political implication of this decision do not appear to have been weighed: only those of the mystery of spy-catching. However effective this may now have been proved, it is apt to leave us with a number of difficult questions to answer.” (Howard Caccia, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, February 20, 1964)
“It is essential that I should be able to convince the F.B.I. that we are not trying to find a way out of taking action but, on the contrary, that we are anxious to prosecute if this proves possible.” (Roger Hollis to Burke Trend, February 25, 1964)
“We must not appear reluctant to take any measures which might secure Cairncross’s return to the United Kingdom.” (Burke Trend to the Cabinet, February 28, 1964)
The tradition of Sir Humphrey Appleby was in full flow.
Trevor Barnes Gives the Game Away
Trevor Barnes
Regular Coldspur readers will have spotted that I frequently attempt to get in touch with authors whose books I have read, sometimes to dispute facts, but normally to try to move the investigations forward. It is not an easy task: the more famous an author is, the more he or she tends to hide behind his or her publisher, or press agent. Some approaches have drawn a complete blank. I often end up writing emails to the publisher: in the case of Ben Macintyre, it got ‘lost’. When Ivan Vassiliev’s publisher invited me to contact him by sending a letter for him to their office, and promised to forward it to his secret address in the UK, I did so, but then heard nothing.
With a little digging, however, especially around university websites, one can often find email addresses for academics, and write in the belief that, if an address is displayed publicly, one’s messages will at least not fall into a spam folder. I am always very respectful, even subservient, on my first approach, and try to gain the author’s confidence that I am a voice worth listening to. And I have had some excellent dialogues with some prominent writers and historians – until they get tired of me, or when I begin to challenge some of their conclusions, or, perhaps, when they start to think that I am treading on ‘their’ turf. (Yes, historians can be very territorial.). For I have found that many writers – qualified professional historians, or competent amateurs – seem to prefer to draw a veil of silence over anything that might be interpreted as a threat to their reputation, or a challenge to what they have published beforehand, in a manner that makes clams all over the world drop their jaws at the speed of such tergiversation.
In this business, however, once you lose your inquisitiveness, I believe, you are lost. And if it means more to you to defend a position that you have previously taken, and on which you may have staked your reputation, than to accept that new facts may shake your previous hypotheses and conclusions, it is time to retire. If I put together a theory about some mysterious, previously unexplained event, and then learn that there is a massive hole in it, I want to abandon it, and start afresh. (But I need to hear solid arguments, not just ‘I don’t agree with you’, or ‘read what Chapman Pincher says’, which is what happens sometimes.)
Regrettably, Trevor Barnes has fallen into that form of stubborn denial. When I first contacted him over Dead Doubles, he was communicative, grateful, open-minded. He accepted that the paperback edition of his book would need to reflect some corrections, and agreed that the several points of controversy that I listed in my review were all substantive. But when I started to quiz him on the matter of the disgraced MI5 officer (see Dead Doubles review), he declined to respond to, or even acknowledge, my messages. (And maybe he found my review of his book on coldspur, since I did take the trouble to point it out to him.) The question in his case revolves around a rather clumsy Endnote in his book, which, instead of achieving the intended goal of burying the topic, merely serves to provoke additional interest.
Note 8, to Part One, on page 250, runs as follows:
“Private information. James Craggs is a pseudonym. The name of the case officer is redacted from the released MI5 files. The author discovered his real identity but was requested by MI5 sources not to name him to avoid potential distress to his family.”
The passage referred to is a brief one where Barnes describes how David Whyte (the head of D2 in MI5), swung into action against Houghton. I reproduce it here:
“He chose two officers to join him on the case. One was George Leggatt, half-Polish and a friend, with whom he had worked on Soviet counter-espionage cases in the 1950s. The case officer was James Craggs, a sociable bachelor in his late thirties.”
That’s it. But so many questions raised! ‘Private information’ that ‘Craggs’ was ‘a sociable bachelor’, which could well have been a substitute for ‘confirmed bachelor’ in those unenlightened days, perhaps? (But then he has a family.) What else could have been ‘private’ about this factoid? And why would a pseudonym have to be used? Did ‘Craggs’ perform something massively discreditable to warrant such wariness after sixty years? Barnes draws to our attention the fact that the officer’s name is redacted in the released file. But how many readers would have bothered to inspect the files if Barnes has simply used his real name, but not mentioned the attempts to conceal it, or the suggestion of high crimes and misdemeanours? By signalling his own powers as a sleuth, all Barnes has done is invite analysis of what ‘Craggs’ might have been up to, something that would have lain dormant if he had not highlighted it.
For ‘Craggs’’s real name is quite clear from KV 2/4380. Denis Lenihan pointed out to me that the name was apparent (without actually identifying it for me), and I confirmed it from my own inspection. The MI5 weeders performed a very poor job of censorship. Indeed, ‘Craggs’s’ name has been redacted in several places, in memoranda and letters that he wrote, and in items referring to him, but it is easy to determine what his real name was. On one report, dated May 25, 1960, Leggatt has headed his report: “Note on a Visit by Messrs. Snelling and Leggatt . . .”. Moreover, on some of the reports written by Snelling himself, the initials of the author and his secretary/typist have been left intact in the bottom left-hand corner: JWES/LMM.
So, J. W. E. Snelling, who were you, and what were you up to? As I suggested in my review of Dead Doubles, the most obvious cause of his disgrace is his probable leaking to the Daily Mail journalist Artur Tietjen the details of Captain Austen’s testimony on Houghton’s behaviour in Warsaw. Yet it seems to me quite extraordinary that the institutional memory of his corruption could endure so sharply after sixty years. If there is no other record of what he did, the weeders would have done much better simply to leave his name in place. I can’t imagine that anyone would otherwise have started to raise questions.
Can any reader help? Though perhaps it is over to Trevor Barnes, now that he has opened up this can of worms, to bring us up to date. Moreover, I do not understand why Barnes was working so closely with MI5 on this book. Was he not aware that he would be pointed in directions they wanted him to go, and steered away from sensitive areas? In this case, it rather backfired, which has a humorous angle, I must admit. Intelligence historians, however, should hide themselves away – probably in some remote spot like North Carolina – never interview anybody, and stay well clear of the spooks. Just download the archives that are available, arrange for others to be photographed, have all the relevant books at hand and put on your thinking-cap. I admit the remoteness of so many valuable libraries, such as the Bodleian and that of Churchill College, Cambridge, represents a massive inconvenience, but the show must go on.
Bandwidth versus Frequency
Dr. Brian Austin
My Chief Radiological Adviser, Dr. Brian Austin, has been of inestimable value in helping me get things straight in matters of the transmission, reception and interception of wireless signals. Sometime in early 2021 I shall be concluding my analysis of the claims made concerning SONIA’s extraordinary accomplishments with radio transmissions from the Cotswolds, guided by Dr. Austin’s expert insights. In the meantime, I want to give him space here to correct a miscomprehension I had of wireless terminology. A few weeks ago, he wrote to me as follows:
Reading your July 31st “Sonia and MI6’s Hidden Hand”, I came across this statement:
“Since her messages needed to reach Moscow, she would have had to use a higher band-width (probably over 1000 kcs) than would have been used by postulated Nazi agents trying to reach . . . ”
This requires some modification, as I’ll now explain. The term bandwidth (for which the symbol B is often used) implies the width of a communications channel necessary to accommodate a particular type of transmitted signal. In essence, the more complicated the message (in terms of its mathematical structure not its philological content) the wider the bandwidth required. The simplest of all signals is on-off keying such as hand-sent Morse Code. The faster it is sent, the more bandwidth it requires. However, for all typical hand-sent Morse transmissions the bandwidth needed will always be less than 1000 Hz. On the other hand, if one wishes to transmit speech, whether by radio or by telephone, then the bandwidth needed is typically 3000 Hz (or 3 kHz). Thus, all standard landline telephones are designed to handle a 3 kHz bandwidth in order to faithfully reproduce the human voice which, generally speaking, involves frequencies from about 300 Hz to 3300 Hz meaning the bandwidth is B = 3300 – 300 = 3000 Hz or 3 kHz.
By contrast, TV signals, and especially colour TV signals, are far more complicated than speech since even the old B&W TV had to convey movement as well as black, white and grey tones. To do that required at least a MHz or so of bandwidth. These days, a whole spectrum of colours as well as extremely rapid movement has to be transmitted and so the typical colour TV bandwidth for good quality reproduction in our British Pal (Phase Alternating Line) system is several MHz wide. As an aside, the North American system is called NTSC. When Pal and NTSC were competing with each other in the 1960s for world dominance, NTSC was known disparagingly by ourselves as meaning Never Twice the Same Colour!
So your use of the term band-width above is incorrect. What you mean is frequency. It is related to wavelength simply as frequency = speed of light / wavelength. And it is also more common, and more accurate, to specify a transmitter’s frequency rather than its wavelength. All quartz crystals are marked in units of frequency. The only occasion Macintyre took a leap into such complexities in “Agent Sonya” was on p.151 where he indicated that her transmitter operated on a frequency of 6.1182 MHz. That sounds entirely feasible and it would have been the frequency marked on the particular crystal issued to her (and not purchased in the nearby hardware shop as BM would have us believe).
You are quite correct in saying that to communicate with Moscow required a higher frequency than would have been needed for contact with Germany, say. But it would have been considerably higher than the 1000 kcs you mentioned. 1000 kcs (or kHz in today’s parlance) is just 1 Mcs (MHz) and actually lies within the Medium Wave broadcast band. Such low frequencies only propagate via the ground wave whereas to reach Moscow, and indeed anywhere in Europe from England, will have necessitated signals of some good few MHz.
In general the greater the distance the higher the frequency but that is rather simplistic because it all depends on the state of the ionosphere which varies diurnally, with the seasons and over the 11-year sunspot cycle. Choosing the best frequency for a particular communications link is a pretty complex task and would never be left to the wireless operator. His or her masters would have experts doing just that and then the agent would be supplied with the correct crystals depending on whether the skeds were to be during daylight hours or at night and, also, taking into account the distance between the transmitting station and the receiving station. In my reading about the WW2 spy networks I have not come across any agent being required to operate over a period of years which might require a frequency change to accommodate the change in sunspot cycle that will have taken place.
An example from the world of international broadcasting illustrates all this rather nicely. The BBC World Service used to operate on two specific frequencies for its Africa service. Throughout the day it was 15.4 MHz (or 15 400 kHz) while at night they would switch to 6.915 MHz (or 6 915 kHz). The bandwidth they used was about 10 kHz because they transmitted music as well as speech and music being more structurally complicated than speech needs a greater bandwidth than 3 kHz.
Thank you for your patient explanation, Brian.
Puzzles at Kew
The National Archives at Kew
I have written much about the bizarre practices at the National Archives at Kew, and especially of the withdrawal of files that had previously been made available, and had been exploited by historians. The most famous case is the that of files on Fuchs and Peierls: in the past three years, Frank Close and Nancy Thorndike Greenspan have written biographies of Klaus Fuchs that freely used files that have since been withdrawn. Then, in my August 31 piece about Liverpool University, I noted that, over a period of a couple of days where I was inspecting the records of a few little-known scientists, the descriptions were being changed in real-time, and some of the records I had looked at suddenly moved into ‘Retained’ mode.
My first reaction to this event was that my usage of Kew records was perhaps being monitored on-line, and decisions were being made to stop the leakage before any more damage was done. I thus decided to contact one of my Kew ‘insider’ friends, and describe to him what happened. He admitted to similar perplexity, but, after making some discrete inquiries, learned that there was an ongoing project under way to review catalogue entries, and attempt to make them more accurate to aid better on-line searchability. Apparently, I had hit upon an obscure group of records that was undergoing such treatment at the time. It was simply coincidence. (Although I have to point out that this exercise did not appear to be undertaken with strict professional guidelines: several spelling errors had in the meantime been introduced.)
A short time ago, however, another irritating anomaly came to light. I had been re-reading parts of Chris Smith’s The Last Cambridge Spy, when I noticed that he had enjoyed access to some files on John Cairncross which showed up as being ‘Retained’, namely HO 532/4, ‘Espionage activities by individuals: John Cairncross’. This sounded like a very important resource, and I discovered from Smith’s Introduction that, among the few documents on Cairncross released to the National Archives was ‘a Home Office file, heavily redacted’, which he ‘obtained via a freedom of information request.’ I asked myself why, if a file has been declassified by such a request, it should not be made available to all. It was difficult to determine whether Smith had capably exploited his find, since I found his approach to intelligence matters very tentative and incurious. I have thus asked my London-based researcher to follow up with Kew, and have provided him with all the details.
Incidentally, Denis Lenihan has informed me that his freedom of information request for the files of Renate Stephenie SIMPSON nee KUCZYNSKI and Arthur Cecil SIMPSON (namely, one of Sonia’s sisters and her husband), KV 2/2889-2993 has been successful. The response to Denis a few weeks ago contained the following passage: “Further to my email of 14 October 2020 informing you of the decision taken that the above records can all be released, I am very pleased to report that, at long last, these records are now available to view, albeit with a few redactions made under Section 40(2) (personal information) of the FOI Act 2000. The delay since my last correspondence has been because digitised versions of the files needed to be created by our Documents Online team and due to The National Archives’ restricted service because of the Coronavirus pandemic, this has taken the team longer to complete than it normally would. However the work is now compete [sic].”
This is doubly interesting, since I had been one of the beneficiaries of a previous policy, and had acquired the digitised version of KV 2/2889 back in 2017. So why that item would have to be re-digitised is not clear. And yes, all the files are listed in the Kew Catalogue as being available – and, by mid-December, they were all digitised, and available for free download.
Lastly, some business with the Cambridge University Library. On reading Geoff Andrews’s recent biography of John Cairncross, Agent Moliere, I was taken with some passages where he made claims about the activities of the FBI over Cairncross’s interrogations in Cleveland in early 1964. I could not see any references in his Endnotes, and my search on ‘Cairncross’ in the FBI Vault had drawn a blank. By inspecting Andrews’s Notes more carefully, however, I was able to determine that the information about the FBI came from a box in the John Cairncross papers held at Cambridge University Manuscripts Collection (CULMC) under ref. Add.10042. I thus performed a search on those arguments at the CULMC website, but came up with nothing.
My next step was thus to send a simple email to the Librarian at Cambridge, asking for verification of the archival material’s existence, whether any index of the boxes was available, and what it might cost to have some of them photographed. I very quickly received an automated reply acknowledging my request, giving me a ticket number, and informing me that they would reply to my inquiry ‘as soon as they can’. A very pleasant gentleman contacted me after a few days, explaining that the Cairncross boxes had not been indexed, but that he would inspect them if I could give him a closer idea of what I was looking for. I responded on December 17. Since then, nothing.
Trouble at RAE Farnborough
RAE Farnborough
Readers will recall my recent description of the remarkable career of Boris Davison (see Liverpool University: Home for Distressed Spies), who managed to gain a position at the Royal Aeronautical Establishment at Farnborough, shortly after he arrived in the UK, in 1938. I wondered whether there was anything furtive about this appointment, and my interest was piqued by a passage I read in Simon Ball’s Secret History: Writing the Rise of Britain’s Intelligence Services (2020). As I have suggested before, this is a very strange and oddly-constructed book, but it does contain a few nuggets of insider information.
On page 199, Ball introduces a report on Russian (i.e. ‘Soviet’) intelligence written in 1955 by Cedric Cliffe, former assistant to Cabinet Secretary, Sir Norman Brook. Its title was ‘Survey of Russian Espionage in Britain, 1935-1955’, and was filed as KV 3/417 at the National Archives. Ball explains how Britain suffered from penetration problems well before the Burgess and Maclean case, and writes: “The most notable UK-based agents of the ‘illegal’ [Henri Robinson] were two technicians employed at the time of their recruitment in 1935 at the Royal Aeronautical Establishment, Farnborough. They had been identified after the war on the basis of German evidence, but no action was taken because one was still working usefully on classified weapons and the other one was a Labour MP.” But Ball does not identify the two employees, nor comment on the astonishing fact that a spy’s role as a Labour MP presumably protected him from prosecution. Who were these agents?
Then I remembered that I had KV 3/417 on my desktop. Only I had not recognized it as the ‘Cliffe Report’: the author’s name does not appear on it. (That is where Ball’s insider knowledge comes into play.) And in paragraph 96, on page 24, Cliffe has this to say:
‘Wilfred Foulston VERNON was also [alongside one William MEREDITH] an aircraft designer employed at Farnborough. He was active in C.P.G.B. activities from about 1934 onwards and visited Russia twice, in 1935 and 1936. From 1936 onwards he was, like MEREDITH, passing secret information through WEISS, first to HARRY II and later to Henri Robinson. He was probably present when MEREDITH was introduced to WEISS by HARRY II. In August 1937, a burglary at VERNON’s residence led to the discovery there of many secret documents. As a result, VERNON was suspended from the R.A.E., charged under the Official Secrets Acts, and fined £50 – for the improper possession of these documents, it should be noted, and not for espionage, which was not at this time suspected.’
Cliffe’s report goes on to state that, when Vernon’s espionage activities first became known, he was the Member of Parliament for Dulwich, which seat he won in 1945 and retained in 1950, losing it the following year. It was thought ‘impracticable to prosecute him’, though why this was so (parliamentary immunity? not wanting to upset the unions? opening the floodgates?) is not stated. Cliffe closes his account by saying that Vernon ‘admitted, under interrogation, that he had been recruited by Meredith and had committed espionage, but he told little else.’ An irritating paragraph has then been redacted before Cliffe turns to Vernon’s controller, Weiss.
This man was clearly Ball’s ‘Labour MP’. So what about his confession? MI5’s chunky set of files on Vernon can be inspected at KV 2/992-996, and they show that, once he lost his parliamentary seat in October 1951, MI5 was free to interrogate him, and he was somewhat ‘deflated’ by Skardon’s approach. After consulting with his sidekick, Meredith, he confessed to spying for the Soviets, and giving information to his controller. In 1948, Prime Minster Attlee had been ‘surprised and shocked’ to hear that MI5 had evidence against Vernon. Now that the Labour Party had lost the election, the case of Vernon & Meredith seemed to die a slow death. Vernon became a member of the London County Council. He died in 1975.
Little appears to have been written about the Weiss spy-ring. (Nigel West has noted them.) Andrew’s Defending the Realm has no reference to Cliffe, Weiss, Meredith, Vernon, or even the RAE. The Royal Aeronautical Establishment was obviously a security disaster, and a fuller tale about its subversion by Soviet agents, and the role of Boris Davison, remains to be told.
Eric Hobsbawm and ‘History Today’
Eric Hobsbawm
Over the past six months History Today has published some provocative items about the historian Eric Hobsbawm. It started in May, when Jesus Casquete, Professor of the History of Political Thought and the History of Social Movements at the University of the Basque Country, provided an illuminating article about Hobsbawm’s activities as a Communist in Berlin in 1933, but concluded, in opposition to a somewhat benevolent appraisal by Niall Ferguson quoted at the beginning of his piece, that ‘Hobsbawm ignored entirely the shades of grey between his personal choice of loyalty and became blind to genocide and invasion, and the other extreme.’
The following month, a letter from Professor Sir Roderick Floud headed the correspondence. “As Eric’s closest colleague for 13 years and a friend for much longer”, he wrote, “I can testify to the fact that Casquete’s description of him as ‘a desperate man clinging to his youthful dreams’ is a travesty.” Floud then went on to make the claim that Hobsbawm stayed in the Communist Party because of his belief in fighting fascism, and claimed that Hobsbawm ‘did not betray his youthful – and ever-lasting – ideals’. Yet the threat from fascism was defunct immediately World War II ended. What was he talking about?
I thought that this argument was hogwash, and recalled that Sir Roderick must be the son of the Soviet agent Bernard Floud, M.P., who committed suicide in October 1967. I sympathize with Sir Roderick in the light of his tragic experience, but it seemed that the son had rather enigmatically inherited some of the misjudgments of the father. And, indeed, I was so provoked by the space given to Sir Roderick’s views that I instantly wrote a letter to Paul Lay, the Editor. I was gratified to learn from his speedy acknowledgment that he was very sympathetic to my views, and would seriously consider publishing my letter.
And then further ‘arguments’ in Hobsbawm’s defence came to the fore. In the August issue, Lay dedicated the whole of his Letters page to rebuttals from his widow, Marlene, and from a Denis Fitzgerald, in Sydney, Australia. Marlene Hobsbawm considered it an ‘abuse’ to claim that her late husband was ‘an orthodox communist who adhered faithfully to Stalinist crimes’, and felt obligated to make a correction. He did not want to leave the Party as he did not want to harm it, she asserted. Fitzgerald raised the McCarthyite flag, and somehow believed that Hobsbawm’s remaining a member of the Communist Party was an essential feature of his being able to contribute to ‘progressive developments’. “He was not to be bullied or silenced by Cold Warriors” – unlike what happened to intellectuals in Soviet Russia, of course.
So what had happened to my letter? Why were the correspondence pages so one-side? Was I a lone voice in this debate? Then, next month, my letter appeared. My original text ran as follows:
“I was astonished that you dedicated so much space to the bizarre and ahistorical defence of Eric Hobsbawm by Professor Sir Roderick Floud.
Floud writes that Hobsbawm ‘stayed in the Communist Party’ after 1956 ‘because of his belief in fighting fascism and promoting the world revolution, by means of anti-fascist unity and the Popular Front’. Yet fascism was no longer a threat in 1956; the Popular Front had been dissolved in 1938, to be followed soon by the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, which Hobsbawm and Floud conveniently overlook. Even though Stalin was dead by 1956, Khrushchev was still threatening ‘We shall bury you!’
Floud concludes his letter by referring to Hobsbawm’s ‘youthful – and ever-lasting ideals’, having earlier described the statement that Casquete’s description of him as ‘a desperate man clinging to his youthful dreams’ is ‘a travesty’. Some contradiction, surely.
Like his unfortunate father before him, who was unmasked as a recruiter of spies for the Soviet Union, and then committed suicide, Floud seems to forget that communist revolutions tend to be very messy affairs, involving the persecution and slaughter of thousands, sometimes millions. If Hobsbawm’s dreams had been fulfilled, he, as a devout Stalinist, might have survived, but certainly academics like Floud himself would have been among the first to be sent to the Gulag.”
Lay made some minor changes to my submission (removing references to the suicide of Floud’s father, for instance), but the message was essentially left intact. And there the correspondence appears to have closed. (I have not yet received the November issue.) I was thus heartened to read the following sentence in a review by Andrew Roberts of Laurence Rees’s Hitler and Stalin in the Times Literary Supplement of November 20: “That these two [Hitler and Stalin] should be seen as anything other than the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of totalitarianism might seem obvious to anyone beyond the late Eric Hobsbawm, but it does need to be restated occasionally, and Rees does so eloquently.” Hobsbawm no doubt welcomed George Blake on the latter’s recent arrival at the Other Place, and they immediately started discussing the Communist utopia.
End-of-Year Thoughts and Holiday Wishes
Tom Clark
Towards the end of November I received a Christmas Card signed by the editor of Prospect magazine, Tom Clark. The message ran as follows: “Thank you for your support of Prospect this year. Myself and the whole team here wish you a very happy Christmas.” I suppose it would be churlish to criticize such goodwill, but I was shocked. “Myself and the whole team . .” – what kind of English is that? What was wrong with “The whole team and I”? If the editor of a literary-political magazine does not even know when to use a reflexive pronoun, should we trust him with anything else?
I have just been reading Clive James’s Fire of Joy, subtitled Roughly Eight Poems to Get By Heart and Say Aloud. I was looking forward to seeing James’s choices, and his commentary. It has been a little disappointing, with several odd selections, and some often shallow appreciations by the Great Man. For instance, he reproduces a speech by Ferrara from My Last Duchess, by Robert Browning, which contains the horrible couplet:
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
This is not verse that should be learned by heart. To any lover of the language, the phrase ‘They turned to me’, not ‘to myself’, should come to mind, and, since ‘but’ is a preposition, it needs to be followed by the accusative or dative case, i.e. ‘but me’. How could James’s ear be so wooden? Yet syntax turs out to be his weakness: in a later commentary on Vita Sackville-West’s Craftsmen, he writes: ‘. . . it was a particular focal point of hatred for those younger than he who had been left out of the anthology.’. ‘Him’, not ‘he’, after ‘for those’, Clive.
Of course, another famous ugly line is often overlooked. T.S. Eliot started The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock with the following couplet:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
It should be ‘Let us go then, you and me’, since the pair is in apposition to the ‘us’ of ‘Let us go’. Rhyme gets in the way, again. What a way to start a poem! What was going through TSE’s mind? So how about this instead?
Let us go then, you and me,
When the evening is spread out above the sea
But then that business about ‘a patient etherized upon a table’ doesn’t work so well, does it? Poetry is hard.
It’s ROMANES EUNT DOMUS all over again.
Returning to Clark and Prospect, however, what is this ‘support’ business? Does Clark think that his enterprise is some kind of charity for which his subscribers shell out their valuable shekels? I recall our very capable and inspiring CEO at the Gartner Group offering similar messages of gratitude to our customers, as if he were not really convinced that the product we offered was of justifiable value to them. I shall ‘support’ Prospect only so long as it provides insightful and innovative analysis, and shall drop it otherwise. Moreover, if Clark persists with such silly and pretentious features as ‘the world’s top 50 thinkers’ (Bong-Joon Ho? Igor Levit?, but mercifully no Greta Thunberg this year), it may happen sooner rather than later. I was pleased to see a letter published in the October issue, as a reaction to the dopey ’50 top thinkers’, where the author pointed out that there are billions of people on the planet whose thinking capabilities are probably unknown to the editors. The letter concluded as follows: “I know it’s a ‘bit of fun’, but it’s the province of the pseudo-intellectual pub bore to assert a right to tell us who the 50 greatest thinkers are.”
I wrote to Clark, thanking him, but also asked him how many people were involved in constructing his garbled syntax. I received no reply. Probably no Christmas card for me next year.
I wish a Happy New Year to all my readers, and thank you for your ‘support’.
“These got a further boost when, just after midnight on 9 June, CATO [the German codename for GARBO] spent two full hours on the air sending a long and detailed report to his spymaster, Kühlenthal. The risk of capture was enormous when an agent transmitted that long, for it gave the direction-finding vans plenty of time to locate him. But this very fact impressed the Germans with the importance of his signal.” (Hitler’s Spies, by David Kahn, p 515)
“If the receivers of this vast screed had paused to reflect, they might have registered how unlikely it was that a wireless would have been able to operate for more than two hours without detection. But they did not.” (Double Cross, by Ben Macintyre, p 324)
“Garbo still ranked high in the esteem of his controller, but if Kühlenthal had thought coolly and carefully enough, there was one aspect of that day’s exchange of signals that might have made him suspicious. Garbo had been on the air so long that he had given the British radiogoniometrical stations ample time on three occasions to obtain a fix on his position and arrest him. Why was he able to stay on the air so long? Did he have a charmed life? Or was he being allowed to transmit by the British for the purpose of deception? These were questions that Kühlenthal might well have asked himself. But instead of being suspicious, he sent a message to Berlin. In it he recommended Garbo for the Iron Cross.” (Anthony Cave-Brown, Bodyguard of Lies, pp 676-677)
“The Abwehr remained remarkably naïve in thinking that in a densely populated and spy-conscious country like England an agent would be able to set up a transmitter and antenna without attracting attention. Moreover, it seems not to have smelled a rat from the fact that some agents, notably GARBO, were able to remain on the air for very long periods without being disturbed. It did have the good sense to furnish agents sent to Britain with only low-power sets that would cause minimal interference to neighbors’ receivers and would be more difficult for the British to monitor – though they also afforded less reliable communication. Once again, GARBO was an exception. Telling the Germans that he had recruited a radio operator with a powerful transmitter, he sent his messages at 100 watts from a high-grade set. Even this did not raise the Abwehr’s suspicions.” (Thaddeus Holt, The Deceivers, pp 142-143)
“And so, with Eisenhower’s authorization, Pujol transmitted, in the words of Harris, ‘the most important report of his career’. Beginning just after midnight, the message took two hours and two minutes to transmit. This was a dangerously long time for any agent to remain on air.” (Operation Fortitude, by Joshua Levine, p 283)
“GARBO’s second transmission lasted a record 122 minutes, and hammered home his belief that the events of the past forty-eight hours represented a diversionary feint, citing his mistress ‘Dorothy Thompson’, an unconscious source in the Cabinet Office, who had mentioned a figure of seventy-five divisions in England.” (Nigel West, Codeword OVERLORD, p 274)
“The length of this message should have aroused suspicion in itself. How on earth a real secret agent could stay on the air transmitting for so long in wartime conditions was unbelievable. British SOE agents operating in Europe were told to keep transmissions to less than five minutes in order not to be detected. However, this was not questioned.” (Terry Crowdy, Deceiving Hitler, p 270)
“We are sure that we deceived the Germans and turned their weapon against themselves; can we be quite sure that they were not equally successful in turning our weapon against is? Now our double-cross agents were the straight agents of the Germans – their whole espionage system in the U.K. What did the Germans gain from this system? The answer cannot be doubtful. They gained no good from their agents, and they did take from them a very great deal of harm. It would be agreeable to be able to accept the simple explanation, to sit back in the armchair of complacency, to say that we were very clever and the Germans very stupid, and that consequently we gained both on the swings and the roundabouts as well. But that argument just won’t hold water at all.” (The Double-Cross System, by John Masterman, p 263)
“Masterman credited only his own ideas, fresh-minted like gold sovereigns entirely from his experiences on the XX Committee. The wonder of it is, with the exception of the sporadic pooh-poohing from the likes of maverick Oxford historian A. J. P. Taylor and veteran counter-intelligence officer David Mure, The Double-Cross System came to be swallowed whole. Farago’s book was essentially forgotten; Masterman’s became celebrated.” (Fighting to Lose, by John Bryden, p 314)
“Yet, when all is said, one is left with a sense of astonishment that men in such responsible positions as were those who controlled the destinies of Germany during the late war, could have been so fatally misled on such slender evidence. One can only suppose that strategic deception derives its capacity for giving life to this fairy-tale world from the circumstance that it operates in a field into which the enemy can seldom effectively penetrate and where the opposing forces never meet in battle. Dangers which lurk in this terra incognita thus tend to be magnified, and such information as is gleaned to be accepted too readily at its face value. Fear of the unknown is at all times apt to breed strange fancies. Thus it is that strategic deception finds its opportunity of changing the fortunes of war.” (Fortitude, by Roger Hesketh, p 361)
“Abwehr officials, enjoying life in the oases of Lisbon, Madrid, Stockholm or Istanbul, fiddling their expenses and running currency rackets on the side, felt that they were earning their keep so long as they provided some kind of information. This explains why for example Garbo was able to get away with his early fantasies, and Tricycle could run such outrageous risks.” (Michael Howard, British Intelligence in the Second World War, Volume 5, p 49)
“However, the claim that the Double Cross spies were ‘believed’ in ‘Berlin’ needs some amplification. Even if the information was swallowed by the Abwehr, that is not to say that it was believed at OKW or that it influenced overall German policy. Part of the problem is that the Abwehr was not a very efficient organisation. Nor was it involved in significant analysis of its intelligence product: on the contrary, the Ast and outstations tended to pounce on any snippet of potentially useful information and, rather than evaluate its intelligence value, pass it on to Berlin as evidence of their ‘busyness’ and as justification for their salaries and expense accounts.” (David Kenyon, Bletchley Park and D-Day, p 163)
“We have succeeded in sustaining them so well that we are receiving even at this stage . . . an average of thirty to forty reports each day from inside England, many of them radioed directly on the clandestine wireless sets we have operational in defiance of the most intricate and elaborate electronic countermeasures.” (Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr, in February 1944, from Ladislas Farago’s Game of the Foxes, p 705)
“A fundamental assumption they [the Germans] made was logically simple: if they were reading parts or all of different British codes at different times, and no mention of any signal was ever found that referred to any material transmitted by the Germans in an Enigma-encoded message, then the system had to be secure.” (Christian Jennings, The Third Reich is Listening, p 261)
By 1943, the Radio Security Service, adopted by SIS (MI6) in the summer of 1941, has evolved into an efficient mechanism for intercepting enemy, namely German, wireless signals from continental Europe, and passing them on to Bletchley Park for cryptanalysis. Given the absence of any transmissions indicating the presence of German spies using wireless telegraphy on British soil, the Service allows its domestic detection and location-finding capabilities to be relaxed somewhat, with the result that it operates rather sluggishly in tracking down radio usage appearing to be generated from locations in the UK, whether they are truly illicit, or simply misguided. RSS would later overstate the capabilities of its mobile location-finding units, in a fashion similar to that in which the German police units exaggerated the power and automation of its own interception and detection devices and procedures. RSS also has responsibilities for providing SIS agents, as well as the sabotage department SOE (Special Operations Executive), with equipment and communications instructions, for their excursions into mainland Europe. SOE has had a very patchy record in wireless security, but RSS’s less than prompt response to its needs provokes SOE, abetted by its collaborators, members of various governments in exile, to attempt to bypass RSS’s very protocol-oriented support. RSS has also not performed a stellar job in recommending and enforcing solid Signals Security procedures in British military units. Guy Liddell, suspicious of RSS’s effectiveness, knows that he needs wireless expertise in MI5, and is eager to replace the ambitious and manipulative Malcom Frost, who is eased out at the end of 1943. It thus takes Liddell’s initiative, working closely with the maverick RSS officer, Sclater, to draw the attention of the Wireless Board to the security oversights. Towards the end of 1943, the plans for OVERLORD, the project to ‘invade’ France on the way to ensuring Germany’s defeat, start to take shape, and policies for ensuring the secrecy of the operation’s details will affect all communications leaving the United Kingdom.
Contents:
NEPTUNE, OVERLORD, BODYGUARD & FORTITUDE
Determining Censorship Policy
The Dilemma of Wireless
Findlater Stewart, the Home Defence Security Executive, and the War Cabinet
Problems with the Poles
Guy Liddell and the RSS
‘Double’ or ‘Special’ Agents?
Special Agents at Work
The Aftermath
NEPTUNE, OVERLORD, BODYGUARD & FORTITUDE
Operation Bodyguard
My objective in this piece is to explore and analyse policy concerning wireless transmissions emanating from the British Isles during the build-up to the Normandy landings of June 1944. This aspect of the war had two sides: the initiation of signals to aid the deception campaign, and the protection of the deception campaign itself by prohibiting possibly dangerous disclosures to the enemy that would undermine the deceits of the first. It is thus beyond my scope to re-present the strategies of the campaign, and the organisations behind them, except as a general refreshment of the reader, in order to provide a solid framework, and to highlight dimensions that have been overlooked in the histories.
OVERLORD was originally the codeword given to the assault on Normandy, but in September 1943 it was repurposed and broadened to apply to the operation of the ‘primary United States British ground and air effort against the Axis in Europe’. (Note that, on Eisenhower’s urging, it was not considered an ‘invasion’, a term which would have suggested incursions into authentic enemy territory.) NEPTUNE was the codeword used to describe the Normandy operation. BODYGUARD was the overall cover plan to deceive the enemy about the details of OVERLORD. BODYGUARD itself was broken down into FORTITUDE North and FORTITUDE South, the latter conceived as the project to suggest that the main assault would occur in the Pas de Calais as opposed to Normandy, and thus disguise NEPTUNE.
I refer the reader to six important books for greater detail on the BODYGUARD deception plan. Bodyguard of Lies, by Anthony Cave Brown (1975) is a massive, compendious volume, containing many relevant as well as irrelevant details, not all of them reliable, and the author can be annoyingly vague in his chronology. Sir Michael Howard’s British Intelligence in the Second World War, Volume 5 (1990), part of the authorized history, contains a precise and urbane account of the deception campaign, although it is rather light on technical matters. Roger Hesketh, who was the main architect of FORTITUDE, wrote his account of the project, between 1945 and 1948, but it was not published until 2000, many years after his death in 1987, as Fortitude: The D-Day Deception Campaign. (In his Preface to the text, Hesketh indicates that he was given permission to publish in 1976, but it did not happen.) Hesketh’s work must be regarded as the most authoritative of the books, and it includes a large number of invaluable, charts, documents and maps, but it reflects some of the secrecy provisions of its time. Joshua Levine’s Operation Fortitude (2001) is an excellent summary of the operation, lively and accurate, and contains a highly useful appendix on Acknowledgements and Sources. Nigel West delivered Codeword Overlord (2019), which sets out to cover the role and achievements of Axis espionage in preparing for the D-Day landings. Like many of West’s recent works, it is uneven, and embeds a large amount of source material in the text. Oddly, West, who provided an Introduction to Hesketh’s book, does not even mention it in his Bibliography. Finally, Thaddeus Holt’s Deceivers (2007) is perhaps the most comprehensive account of Allied military deception, an essential item in the library, very well written, and containing many facts and profiles not available elsewhere. It weighs in at a hefty 1000+ pages, but the details he provides, unlike Cave Brown’s, are all relevant.
Yet none of these volumes refers to the critical role of the Home Security Defence Executive (HSDE), chaired by Sir Findlater Stewart, in the security preparations. (Findlater Stewart receives one or two minor mentions in two of the Indexes, but on matters unrelated to the tasks of early 1944.) The HSDE was charged, however, with implementing a critical part of the censorship policy regarding BODYGUARD. The HSDE was just one of many intersecting and occasionally overlapping committees performing the planning. At the highest level, the Ops (B) section, concerned with deception under COSSAC (Chief of Staff to Supreme Allied Commander), was absorbed into SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) in January 1944, when General Eisenhower took over command, expanded, and split into two. Colonel Noel Wild headed Ops (B), with Jervis Read responsible for physical deception, while Roger Hesketh took on Special Means, whose role was to implement parts of the deception plan through controlled leakage.
In turn, Hesketh’s group itself was guided by the London Controlling Section (LCS), which was responsible for deciding the overall strategy of how misinformation should be conveyed to the enemy, and tracking its success. At this time LCS was led by Colonel John Bevan, who faced an extraordinary task of coordinating the activities of a large number of independent bodies, from GC&CS’s collection of ULTRA material to SOE’s sabotage of telephone networks in France, as well as the activities of the ‘double-agents’ within MI5. Thus at least three more bodies were involved: the W Board, which discussed high-level policy matters for the double-cross system under General Davidson, the Director of Military Intelligence; the XX Committee, chaired by John Masterman, which implemented the cover-stories and activities of both real and notional agents, and created the messages that were fed to the Abwehr; and MI5’s B1A under ‘Tar’ Robertson, the group that actually managed the activities and transmissions of the agents. Lastly, the War Cabinet set up a special group, the OVERLORD Security Sub-Committee, to inspect the detailed ramifications of ensuring no unauthorised information about the landings escaped the British Isles, and this military-focussed body enjoyed a somewhat tentative liaison with the civilian-oriented HDSE through the energies of Sir Findlater Stewart.
When Bevan joined the W Board on September 23, 1943, the LCS formally took over the responsibility for general control of all deception, leaving the W Board to maintain supervision of the double-agents’ work solely. Also on the W Board was Findlater Stewart, acting generally on behalf of the Ministries, who had been invited in early 1941, and who directly represented his boss, Sir John Anderson, and the Prime Minister. The Board had met regularly for almost three years, but by September 1943, highly confident that it controlled all the German agents on UK soil, and with Bevan on board, held only one more meeting before the end of the war – on January 21, 1944. It then decided, in a general stocktaking before OVERLORD, that the XX Committee could smoothly continue to run things, but that American representation on the Committee was desirable. As for Findlater Stewart, he still had a lot of work to do.
Determining Censorship Policy
The move to tighten up security in advance of NEPTUNE took longer than might have seemed appropriate. At the Quebec Conference in August 1943 Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed on the approximate timing and location of the operation, but it needed the consent of Stalin at the Teheran Conference at the end of November, and the Soviet dictator’s commitment to mount a large scale Soviet offensive in May 1944 to divert German forces, for the details to be solidified. Thus Bevan’s preliminary thoughts on the deception plan for OVERLORD, sketched out in July, had to be continually revised. A draft version, named JAEL, was circulated, and approved, on October 23, but, after Teheran, Bevan had to work feverishly to prepare the initial version of the BODYGUARD plan which replaced JAEL, completing it on December 18. This received feedback from the Chiefs of Staff, and from Eisenhower, newly appointed Commander-in-Chief, and was presented to SHAEF in early January, and approved on January 19. Yet no sooner was this important step reached than Bevan, alongside his U.S. counterpart Bauer, was ordered to leave for Moscow to explain the plan, and convince the Soviets of its merits. Such was the suspicion of Soviet military and intelligence officers, and such was their inability to make any decision unless Stalin willed it, that approval did not arrive until March 5, when the delegates returned to London.
Yet Guy Liddell’s Diaries indicate that there had already been intense discussion about OVERLORD Security, the records of which do not seem to have made it into the HDSE files. Certainly, MI5 had been debating it back in December 1943, and Liddell refers to a Security Executive meeting held on January 26. At this stage, Findlater Stewart was trying to settle what travel bans should be put in place, and as early as February 8 Liddell was discussing with his officers Grogan and (Anthony) Blunt the implications of staggering diplomatic cables before OVERLORD. The next day, he met with Maxwell at the Home Office to discuss the prevention of the return of allied nationals to the country (because of the vetting for spies that would be required).
More surprisingly, on February 11, when reporting that the Chiefs of the General Staff had become involved, and had made representations to Churchill, Liddell refers to the formation of an OVERLORD Security Committee, and comments drily: “The committee is to consist of the Minister of Production, Minister of Aircraft Production, Home Secretary and Duncan Sandys, none of whom of course know anything about security.” This committee was in fact an offshoot of the War Cabinet, which had established a Committee on OVERLORD Preparations on February 9, part of the charter of which was ‘the detection of secret enemy wireless apparatus, and increased exertions against espionage’, perhaps suggesting that not all its members were completely au fait with the historical activities of RSS and the W Board. It quickly determined that it needed a further level of granularity to address these complex security matters. Thus the Sub-committee on OVERLORD Security was established, chaired by the Minister of Production, Oliver Lyttleton, and held its first meeting on February 18, when Liddell represented MI5. Oddly, no representative from MI6 attended. Liddell continues by describing the committee’s charter as considering: 1) the possibility of withdrawing diplomatic communications privileges; 2) the prevention of export of newspapers; 3) more strengthened surveillance of ships and aircraft; 4) the detection of secret enemy wireless apparatus and increased precautions against espionage. Findlater Stewart is charged with collecting relevant material. In what seems to be an overload of committees, therefore, the HDSE and the War Cabinet carry on parallel discussions, with Findlater Stewart a key figure in both assemblies.
The primary outcome of this period is the resistance by the Foreign Office to any sort of ban, or even forced delay, in diplomatic cable traffic, which they believed would have harmful reciprocal consequences abroad, and hinder MI6’s ability to gather intelligence (especially from Sweden). This controversy rattled on for months [see below], with the Cabinet emerging as an ineffective mechanism for resolving the dilemma. Liddell believed that, if the Foreign Office and the Home Office (concerned about invasion of citizens’ rights) had not been so stubborn and prissy about the whole thing, the Security Executive could have resolved the issues quickly.
Thus the impression that Findlater Stewart had to wait for Bevan’s return for seeking guidance before chairing his committee to implement the appropriate security provisions is erroneous. Contrary to what the record indicates, the critical meeting on March 29 was not the first that the HDSE Committee held. Yet, when Bevan did return, he might have been surprised by the lack of progress. He quickly learned, on March 10, that the Cabinet had decided not to withdraw facilities for uncensored communications by diplomats, as it would set an uncomfortable precedent. That was at least a decision – but the wrong one. Bevan had a large amount of work to do shake people up: to make sure that the rules were articulated, that the Americans were in line, and that all agencies and organizations involved understood their roles. “Only under Bevan’s severe and cautious direction could they perform their parts in FORTITUDE with the necessary harmony”, wrote Cave Brown. Bevan clearly put some urgency into the proceedings: the pronouncements of LCS were passed on to Findlater Stewart shortly afterwards.
The history of LCS shows that security precautions were divided into eight categories, of which two, the censorship of civilian and service letters and telegrams, and the ban on privileged diplomatic mail and cipher telegrams, were those that concentrated on possible unauthorised disclosure of secrets by means other than direct personal travel. The historical account by LCS (at CAB 154/101, p 238) explains how the ban on cable traffic was imposed, but says nothing about wireless: “The eighth category, the ban on diplomatic mail and cipher telegrams was an unprecedented and extraordinary measure. As General EISENHOWER says, even the most friendly diplomats might unintentionally disclose vital information which would ultimately come to the ears of the enemy.”
What is significant is that there is no further mention of wireless traffic in the HDSE meetings. Whether this omission was due to sheer oversight, or was simply too awkward a topic to be described openly, or was simply passed on to the War Cabinet meetings, one can only surmise. When the next critical HDSE meeting took place on April 15, headlined as ‘Withdrawal of Diplomatic Privileges’, it echoed the LCS verbiage, but also, incidentally, highlighted the fact that Findlater Stewart saw that the main threat to security came from the embassies and legations of foreign governments, whether allies or not. Well educated by the W Board meeting, he did not envisage any exposure from unknown German agents working clandestinely from British soil.
The Dilemma of Wireless
It is worthwhile stepping back at this juncture to examine the dilemma that the British intelligence authorities faced. Since the primary security concern was that no confidential information about the details of the actual assault, or suggestions that the notional attack was based on the strength and movement of illusionary forces, should be allowed to leave the country, a very tight approach to personnel movement, such as a ban on leave, and on the holidays of foreign diplomats, was required, and easily implemented. Letters and cables had to be very closely censored. But what do to about the use of wireless? Officially, outside military and approved civil use (railway administration, police) the only licit radio transmissions were being made by Allied governments, namely the Americans and the Soviets, and by select governments-in-exile, the French, the Poles and the Czechs (with the latter two having their own sophisticated installations rather than just apparatus within an embassy). It was quite possible that other countries had introduced transmission equipment, although RSS would have denied that its use would have remained undetected.
Certainly all diplomatic transmissions would have been encyphered, but the extent to which the German interception authorities (primarily OKW Chi) would have been able to decrypt such messages was unknown. And, even if the loyalty and judgment of these missions could be relied upon, and the unbreakability of their cyphers trusted, there was no way of guaranteeing that a careless reference would not escape, and that a disloyal employee at the other end of the line might get his or her hands on an indiscreet message. (Eisenhower had to demote and send home one of his officers who spoke carelessly.) Thus total radio silence must have been given at least brief consideration. It was certainly enforced just before D-Day, but that concerned military silence, not a diplomatic shutdown.
Yet the whole FORTITUDE deception plan depended on wireless. The more ambitious aspect focused on the creation of dummy military signals to suggest a vast army (the notional FUSAG) being imported into Britain and moved steadily across the country to assemble in the eastern portion, indicating a northern assault on mainland Europe. Such wireless messages would have appeared as genuine to the Germans – if they had had the resources and skills to intercept and analyse them all. Thus the pretence had to be meticulously maintained right up until D-Day itself. In August 1943, the Inter-Services Security Board (ISSB) had recommended that United Kingdom communications with the outside world should be cut off completely, and Bevan had had to resist such pressure. As Howard points out, most involved in the discussion did not know about the Double-Cross System.
As it turned out, both German aerial reconnaissance and interception of dummy signals were so weak that the Allies relied more and more on the second leg of their wireless strategy – the transmissions of its special agents. Thus it would have been self-defeating for the War Cabinet to prohibit non-military traffic entirely, since the appearance of isolated, illicit signals in the ether, originating from British soil, and remaining undetected and unprosecuted, would have caused the Nazi receivers to smell an enormous rat. (One might add that it strains credibility in any case to think that the Abwehr never stopped to consider how ineffectual Britain’s radio interception service must be, compared with Germany’s own mechanisms, if it failed completely ever to interdict any of its own agents in such a relatively small and densely populated territory. And note Admiral Canaris’s comments above.) Of course, the RSS might have wanted to promote the notion that its interception and location-finding techniques were third-rate, just for that purpose. One might even surmise that Sonia’s transmissions were allowed to continue as a ruse to convince the Germans of the RSS’s frailties, in the belief that they might be picking up her messages as well as those of their own agents, and thus forming useful judgments about the deficiencies of British location-finding.
We should also recall that the adoption of wireless communications by the special agents was pursued much more aggressively by the XX Committee and B1A than it was by the Abwehr, who seemed quite content to have messages concealed in invisible ink on letters spirited out of England by convenient couriers, such as ‘friendly’ BOAC crewmen. Thus TREASURE, GARBO and BRUTUS all had to be found more powerful wireless apparatus, whether mysteriously acquired in London, from American sources, or whether smuggled in from Lisbon. The XX Committee must have anticipated the time when censorship rules would have tightened up on the use of the mails for personal correspondence, even to neutral countries in Europe, and thus make wireless connectivity a necessity.
In conclusion, therefore, no restrictions on diplomatic wireless communication could allow prohibition completely, as that would leave the special agents dangerously exposed. And that policy led to some messy compromises.
Findlater Stewart, the Home Defence Security Executive, and the War Cabinet
Sir Findlater Stewart
It appears that the War Cabinet fairly quickly accepted Findlater Stewart’s assurances about the efficacy of RSS. A minute from February 28 runs: “We have considered the possibility that illicit wireless stations might be worked in this country. The combined evidence of the Radio Security Service secret intelligence sources and the police leads to the firm conclusion that there is no illicit wireless station operating regularly in the British Isles at present. The danger remains that transmitting apparatus may be being held in readiness for the critical period immediately before the date of OVERLORD – or may be brought into the country by enemy agents. We cannot suggest any further measures to reduce this risk and reliance must therefore be placed on the ability of the Radio Security Service to detect the operation of illicit transmitters and of the Security Service to track down agents.” Thus the debate moved on to the control of licit wireless transmissions, where the HDSE and the War Cabinet had to overcome objections from the Foreign Office.
The critical meeting on ‘OVERLORD Security’ – ‘Withdrawal of Diplomatic Privileges’ was held on the morning of April 15, under Findlater Stewart’s chairmanship. This was in fact the continuation of a meeting held on March 29, which had left several items of business unfinished. That meeting, which was also led by Findlater Stewart, and attended by only a small and unauthoritative group (Herbert and Locke from Censorship, Crowe from the Foreign Office, and Liddell, Butler and Young from MI5) had considered diplomatic communications generally, and resolved to request delays in the transmission of diplomatic telegrams. After the Cabinet decision not to interfere with diplomatic cable traffic, Petrie of MI5 had written to Findlater Stewart to suggest that delays be built in to the process. A strangely worded minute (one can hardly call it a ‘resolution’) ran as follows: “THE MEETING . . . invited Mr. Crowe to take up the suggestion that diplomatic telegrams should be so delayed as to allow time for the Government Code and Cypher School to make arrangements with Postal and Telegraph Censorship for particularly dangerous telegrams to be delayed or lost; and to arrange for the Foreign Office, if they agreed, to instruct the School to work out the necessary scheme with Postal and Telegraph Censorship.”
It would be difficult to draft a less gutsy and urgent decision than this. ‘Invited’, ‘suggestion’, ‘to make arrangements’, ‘if they agreed’, ‘to instruct’, and finally, ‘particularly dangerous telegrams’! Would ‘moderately dangerous telegrams’ have been allowed through? And did GC&CS have command of all the cyphers used by foreign diplomacies? Evidently not, as the following discussion shows. It is quite extraordinary that such a wishy-washy decision should have been allowed in the minutes. One can only assume that this was some sort of gesture, and that Findlater Stewart was working behind the scenes. In any case, as the record from the LCS history concerning Eisenhower, which I reproduced above, shows, the cypher problem for cable traffic was resolved.
When the forum regathered on April 15, it contained a much expanded list of attendees. Apart from the familiar group of second-tier delegates from key ministries, with the War Office and the Ministry of Information now complementing Censorship, the Home Office, and the Foreign Office, Vivian represented MI6, while MI5 was honoured with the presence of no less than seven officers, namely Messrs. Butler, Robertson, Sporborg, Robb, Young, Barry – and Anthony Blunt, who no doubt made careful mental notes to pass on to his ideological masters. [According to Guy Liddell, from his ‘Diaries’, Sporborg worked for SOE, not MI5.] But no Petrie, Menzies, Liddell, White, Masterman, or Bevan. And the band of second-tier officers from MI5 sat opposite a group of men from the ministries who knew nothing of Ultra or the Double-Cross System: a very large onus lay on the shoulders of Findlater Stewart.
The meeting had first to debate the recent Cabinet decision to prohibit the receipt of uncensored communications by Diplomatic Missions, while not preventing the arrival of incoming travellers. Thus a quick motion was agreed, over the objections of the Foreign Office, that ‘the free movement of foreign diplomatic representatives to this country was inconsistent with the Cabinet decision to prohibit the receipt of uncensored communications by Foreign Missions in this country’. After a brief discussion on the movement of French and other military personnel, the Committee moved to Item IX on the agenda: ‘Use of Wireless Transmitters by Poles, Czechs and the French,’ the item that LCS had, either cannily or carelessly, omitted from its list.
Sporborg of MI5/SOE stated that, “as regards the Poles and the Czechs, it has been decided after discussion with the Foreign Office –
that for operational reasons the transmitters operated by the Czechs and the Poles could not be closed down:
that shortage of operators with suitable qualifications precluded the operation of those sets by us;
that accordingly the Poles should be pressed to deposit their cyphers with us and to give us copies of plain language texts of all messages before transmission. The Czechs had already given us their cyphers, and like the Poles would be asked to provide plain language copies of their messages.”
Sporborg also noted that both forces would be asked not to use their transmitters for diplomatic business. Colonel Vivian added that “apart from the French Deuxième Bureau traffic which was sent by M.I.6, all French diplomatic and other civil communications were transmitted by cable. There were left only the French Service transmitters and in discussion it was suggested that the I.S.S.B. might be asked to investigate the question of controlling these.”
Again, it is difficult to make sense of this exchange. What ‘operational reasons’ (as opposed to political ones) could preclude the closing down of Czech and Polish circuits? It would surely just entail an announcement to targeted receivers, and then turning the apparatus off. And, since the alternative appeared to be having the transmitters operated by the British – entrusted with knowledge of cypher techniques, presumably – a distinct possibility of ‘closing down’ the sets must have been considered. As for Vivian’s opaque statement, the Deuxième Bureau was officially dissolved in 1940. (Yet it appears in many documents, such as Liddell’s Diaries, after that time.) It is not clear what he meant by ‘French Service transmitters’. If these were owned by the RF Section of SOE, there must surely have been an exposure, and another wishy-washy suggestion was allowed to supply the official record.
The historical account by LCS says nothing about wireless. And the authorized history does not perform justice to the serious implications of these meetings. All that Michael Howard writes about this event (while providing a very stirring account of the deception campaign itself) is the following: “ . . . and the following month not only was all travel to and from the United Kingdom banned, but the mail of all diplomatic missions was declared subject to censorship and the use of cyphers forbidden”, (p 124, using the CAB 154/101 source given above); and “All [the imaginary double agents] notionally conveyed their information to GARBO in invisible ink, to be transmitted direct to the Abwehr over his clandestine radio – the only channel open after security restrictions on outgoing mail had been imposed.” (p 121) The irony is that Howard draws attention to the inconvenience that the withdrawal of mail privileges caused LCS and B1A, but does not inspect the implications of trying to suppress potentially dangerous wireless traffic, and how they might have affected the deception project’s success.
Problems with the Poles
The Polish Government-in-Exile
Immediately after the critical April 15 meeting, the War Office began to toughen up, as the file KV 4/74 shows. The policy matter of the curtailment of diplomatic privileges was at last resolved. Findlater Stewart gave a deadline to the Cabinet on April 16, and it resolved to stop all diplomatic cables, couriers and bags, for all foreign governments except the Americans and the Russians. The ban started almost immediately, and was extended until June 20, even though the Foreign Office continued to fight it. Yet it required some delicate explaining to the second-tier allies. Moreover, the Foreign Office continued to resist it, or at least, abbreviate it. They even wanted to restore privileges on D-Day itself: as Liddell pointed out, that would have been stupid, as it would immediately have informed the enemy that the Normandy assault was the sole one, and not a feint before a more northerly attack at the Pas de Calais.
Brigadier Allen, the Deputy Director of Military Intelligence, who had been charged with following up with the ISSB on whether the British were controlling French service traffic to North Africa, drew the attention of the ISSB’s secretary to the importance of the proposed ban. The record is sketchy, but it appears the Chiefs of Staff met on April 19, at which a realisation that control over all diplomatic and military channels needed to be intensified. The Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee was instructed to ensure that this happened, and a meeting was quickly arranged between representatives of the ISSB, MI6, SOE, the Cypher Policy Board and the Inter-Service W/T Security Committee, a much more expert and muscular group than had attended Findlater Stewart’s conference.
While the exposure by French traffic was quickly dismissed, Sir Charles Portal and Sir Andrew Cunningham, the RAF and Royal Navy chiefs, urged central control by the Service Departments rather than having it divided between SHAEF and Allied Forces Headquarters, and invited the JISC committee “to frame regulations designed to prevent Allied Governments evading the restrictions imposed by the War Cabinet on diplomatic communications, by the use of service or S.O.E. ‘underground’ W/T channels for the passage of uncensored diplomatic or service messages.” This was significant for several reasons: it recognized that foreign governments might attempt to evade the restrictions, probably by trying to use service signals for diplomatic traffic; it recommended new legislation to give the prohibitions greater force; and it brought into the picture the notion of various ‘underground’ (not perhaps the best metaphor for wireless traffic), and thus semi-clandestine communications, the essence of which was barely known. This minute appeared also to reflect the input of Sir Alan Brooke, the Army Chief, but his name does not appear on the document – probably because the record shows that he was advocating for the shared SHAEF/AFHQ responsibility, and thus disagreed with his peers.
The outcome was that a letter had to be drafted for the Czechoslovak, Norwegian and Polish Commanders-in-Chief, the Belgian and Netherlands Ministers of Defence, and General Koenig, the Commander of the French Forces in the United Kingdom, outlining the new restrictions on ‘communications by diplomatic bag and cipher telegrams’ (implicitly cable and wireless). It declared that ‘you will issue instructions that no communication by wireless is to be carried out with wireless stations overseas except under the following conditions’, going on to list that cyphers would have to be deposited with the War Office, plain language copies of all telegrams to be submitted for approval first, with the possibility that some messages would be encyphered and transmitted through British signal channels. A further amendment included a ban on incoming messages, as well.
Were these ‘regulations’, or simply earnest requests? The constitutional issue was not clear, but the fact that the restrictions would be of short duration probably pushed them into the latter category. In any case, as a memorandum of April 28 makes clear, Findlater Stewart formally handed over responsibility for the control of wireless communications to the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), reserving for himself the handling of ‘mail and telegrams’ (he meant ‘mail and cables’, of course). By then, the letter had been distributed, on April 19, with some special annexes for the different audiences, but the main text was essentially as the draft had been originally worded.
The Poles were the quickest to grumble, and Stanisław Mikołajczyc, the Prime Minister of the Polish Government-in-Exile, wrote a long response on April 23, describing the decision as ‘a dangerous legal and political precedent’, making a special case out of Poland’s predicament, and its underground fight against the Germans. He promised to obey the rules over all, but pleaded that the Poles be allowed to maintain the secrecy of their cyphers in order to preserve the safety and security of Polish soldiers and civilians on Polish soil fighting the German. “The fact that Polish-Soviet relations remain for the time being unsatisfactory still further complicates the situation,” he added.
It is easy to have an enormous amount of sympathy for the Poles, but at the same time point out that their aspirations at this time for taking their country back were very unrealistic. After all, Great Britain had declared war on Germany because of the invasion of Poland, and the Poles had contributed significantly in the Battle of Britain and the Italian campaign, especially. The discovery by the Germans, in April 1943, of the graves of victims of the Katyn massacre had constituted a ghastly indication that the Soviets had been responsible. Yet Stalin denied responsibility, and broke off relations with the London Poles when they persisted in calling for an independent Red Cross examination. Moreover, Churchill had ignored the facts, and weaselly tried to placate both Stalin and the Poles by asking Mikołajczyc to hold his tongue. In late January, Churchill had chidden the Poles for being ‘foolish’ in magnifying the importance of the crime when the British needed Stalin’s complete cooperation to conclude the war successfully.
Yet the Poles still harboured dreams that they would be able to take back their country before the Russians got there – or even regain it with the support of the Russians, aspirations that were in April 1944 utterly unrealistic. The file at HW 34/8 contains a long series of 1942-1943 exchanges between Colonel Cepa, the Chief Signals Officer of the Polish General Staff, and RSS officers, such as Maltby and Till, over unrealistic and unauthorized demands for equipment and frequencies so that the Polish government might communicate with all its clandestine stations in Poland, and its multiple (and questionable) contacts around the world. Their tentacles spread widely, as if they were an established government: on December 9, 1943, Joe Robertson told Guy Liddell that ‘Polish W/T transmitters are as plentiful as tabby cats in the Middle East and are causing great anxiety’. They maintained underground forces in France, which required wireless contact: this was an item of great concern to Liddell. Thus the Poles ended up largely trying to bypass RSS and working behind the scenes with SOE to help attain their goals. The two groups clearly irritated each other severely: the Poles thinking RSS too protocol-oriented and unresponsive to their needs, RSS considering the Poles selfish and too ambitious, with no respect for the correct procedures in a time of many competing demands.
The outcome was that Churchill had a meeting with Mikołajczyc on April 23, and tried to heal some wounds. The memorandum of the meeting was initialled by Churchill himself, and the critical passage runs as follows: “Mr. Churchill told Mr. Mikołajczyc that he was ready to waive the demand that the Polish ciphers used for communication with the Underground Movement should be deposited with us on condition first, that the number of messages sent in these ciphers was kept down to an absolute minimum; secondly, that the en clair text of each message sent in these ciphers should be communicated to us; thirdly, that Mr. Mikołajczyc gave Mr. Churchill his personal word of honour that no messages were sent in the secret ciphers except those of which the actual text had been deposited with us, and fourthly, that the existence of this understanding between Mr. Mikołajczyc and Mr. Churchill should be kept absolutely confidential; otherwise H.M.G would be exposed to representations and reproaches from other foreign Governments in a less favourable position.”
Thus it would appear that the other governments acceded, that the Poles won an important concession, but that the British were able to censor the texts of all transmissions that emanated from British soil during the D-Day campaign. And Churchill was very concerned about the news of the Poles’ preferential treatment getting out. Yet the JIC (under its very astute Chairman, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck) thought otherwise – that the news was bound to leak out, and, citing the support of Liddell, Menzies, Cadogan at the Foreign Office and Newsam at the Home Office, it requested, on May 1, that the Prime Minister ‘should consider the withdrawal’ of his concession, and that, if impracticable, he should at least clarify to Mikołajczyc that it ‘related to messages sent to the underground movement in Poland and not to communications with other occupied or neutral countries’.
Moreover, problems were in fact nor restricted to the Poles. De Gaulle, quite predictably, made a fuss, and ‘threatened’ as late as May 29 not to leave Algiers to return to the UK unless he was allowed to use his own cyphers. The Chiefs of Staff were left to handle this possible non-problem. Churchill, equally predictably, interfered unnecessarily, and even promised both Roosevelt and de Gaulle (as Liddell recorded on May 24) that communications would open up immediately after D-Day. Churchill had already, very naively, agreed to Eisenhower’s desire to disclose the target and date of NEPTUNE to France’s General Koenig. The Prime Minister could be very inspiring and insightful, but also very infuriating, as people like Attlee and Brooke observed.
And there it stood. Britain controlled the process of wireless communication (apart from the Soviet and US Embassies) entirely during the course of the D-Day landings, with a minor exposure in Polish messages to its colleagues in Poland. The restrictions were lifted on June 20. And B1A’s special agents continued to chatter throughout this period.
Guy Liddell and the RSS
Guy Liddell
Guy Liddell, deputy director-general of MI5, had been energized by his relationship with Sclater of the RSS, and, with Malcolm Frost’s departure from MI5 in December 1943, he looked forward to an easier path in helping to clean up Barnet, the headquarters of the Radio Security Service. In the months before D-Day, Liddell was focused on two major issues concerning RSS: 1) The effectiveness of the unit’s support for MI5’s project to extend the Double-Cross System to include ‘stay-behind’ agents in France after the Normandy landings succeeded; and 2) his confidence in the ability of RSS to locate any German spies with transmitters who might have pervaded the systems designed to intercept them at the nation’s borders, and who would thus be working outside the XX System.
Overall, the first matter does not concern me here, although part of Liddell’s mission, working alongside ‘Tar’ Robertson, was to discover how RSS control of equipment, and its primary allegiance to MI6, might interfere with MI5’s management of the XX program overseas. Liddell had to deal with Richard Gambier-Parry’s technical ignorance and general disdain for MI5, on the one hand, and Felix Cowgill’s territoriality on the other (since a Double-Cross system on foreign soil would technically have fallen under MI6), but the challenges would have to have been faced after D-Day, and are thus beyond my scope of reference. In any case, the concern turned out to be a non-problem. The second matter, however, was very serious, and Liddell’s Diaries from early 1944 are bestrewn with alarming anecdotes about the frailties of RSS’s detection systems. The problems ranged from the ineffectiveness of Elms’s mobile units to the accuracy of RSS’s broader location-finding techniques.
I shall illustrate Liddell’s findings by a generous sample of extracts from his Diaries, as I do not believe they have appeared in print before. Thus, from January 26:
Sclater gave an account of the work by the vans on an American station which had been d.f.d by R.S.S. The station was at first thought to be a British military or Air Force one as it was apparently using their procedure. The vans went out to the Horsham area where they got a very strong signal which did not operate the needle. Another bearing caused them to put the Bristol van out, which luckily found its target pretty quickly. The point of this story is that it is almost impossible to say more than that a wireless transmitter is in the north or south of England. Unless you can get into the ground-wave your vans don’t operate. To get into the ground-wave you may need to be very close to their target. There is still no inter-com between the vans and they cannot operate for more than 8 hours without having to drive several hundred miles in order to recharge their batteries. Not a very good show. Sclater is going to find out who is responsible for American Army signal security.
While this may not have been a perennial problem for units that were repeatedly broadcasting from one place, it clearly would have posed a serious exposure with a highly mobile transmitting agent. Moreover, at a meeting on February 17, MI6/SIS (in the person of Valentine Vivian, it appears) had, according to Liddell, admitted some of its deficiencies, stating, in a response to a question as to how its General Search capability worked: “S.I.S. did not think that an illicit station was operating in this country but it was pointed out that their observation was subject to certain restrictions. They were looking for Abwehr procedure, whereas an agent might use British official procedure, which would be a matter for detection by Army Signals, who were ill-equipped to meet the task.” Did Vivian not know what he was talking about, or was this true? Could an agent using ‘British official procedure’ truly evade the RSS detectors, while the Army would not bother to investigate? I recall that Sonia herself was instructed to use such techniques, and such a disclosure has alarming implications.
The minutes of the War Cabinet Sub-committee on February 17 confirm, however, that what Vivian reported was accepted, as an accompanying report by Findlater Stewart displays how the vision for wireless interception embraced by Colonel Simpson in 1939 had been allowed to dissolve. (In fact, as Liddell’s Diaries show, a small working-party had met on the morning of the inaugural meeting to prepare for the discussion.) In a report attached to the minutes, Stewart wrote the following (which I believe is worth citing in full):
“As a result of their experience extending over some four years the Radio Security Service are of opinion there is no illicit wireless station being worked in this country at present. Nevertheless it must be borne in mind that by itself the watch kept by the Radio Security Service is subject to some limitations. For example, the general search is mainly directed to German Secret Service communications and if an agent were to use official British signal procedures (there has already been some attempt at this), it is not likely to be picked up by the Service, and no guarantee that such stations would be detected should be given unless the whole volume of British wireless traffic, including the immense amount of service signal traffic, were monitored. This ‘general search’, however, is not the only safeguard. The danger to security arises from the newly arrived German Agent (on the assumption that there are no free agents at present operating here), but the art of tracking aircraft has been brought to such a point that the Security Service feel that in conjunction with the watch kept by the Radio Security Service even a determined effort by the enemy to introduce agents could not succeed for more than a few days. Admittedly if the agent were lucky enough to be dropped in the right area and obtain his information almost at once serious leakage could occur. But there is no remedy for this.”
I find this very shocking. While the RSS was justifiably confident that no unidentified spies were operating as its interceptors were monitoring Abwehr communications closely, it had abandoned the mission of populating the homeland with enough detective personnel to cover all possible groundwaves. Apparently, the sense of helplessness expressed in Stewart’s final sentence triggered no dismay from those who read it, but I believe this negligence heralded the start of an alarming trend. And the substance of the message must have confirmed Liddell’s worst fears.
Liddell and Sclater intensified their attention to RSS’s activities. Sclater also referred, later in February, to the fact that RSS had picked up Polish military signals in Scotland, but the Poles had not been very helpful, the signals were very corrupt, as picked up, and it was not even certain ‘that the messages were being sent from Gt. Britain’. Liddell also discovered that RSS had been picking up messages relating to Soviet espionage in Sweden, and blew a fuse over the fact that the facts about the whole exercise had been withheld from MI5 and the Radio Security Intelligence Committee, which Dick White of MI5 chaired. Thus, when he returned from two weeks’ leave at the end of March, his chagrin was fortunately abated slightly, as the entry for April 16 records:
During my absence there have been various wireless tests. GARBO, on instructions from the Germans, has been communicating in British Army procedure. He was picked up after a certain time and after a hint had been given to Radio Security Service. He was, however, also picked up in Gibraltar, who notified the RSS about certain peculiarities in the signals. This is on the whole fairly satisfactory. TREASURE is going to start communicating blind and we shall see whether they are equally successful in her case. Tests have also been taking place to see whether spies can move freely within the fifteen-mile belt. One has been caught, but another, whose documents were by no means good, has succeeded in getting through seven or eight controls and has so far not been spotted.
This was not super-efficient, however: ‘hints’, and ‘after a certain time’. At least the British Army procedure was recognised by the RSS. (Herbert Hart later told Liddell that ‘notional’ spies dressed in American military uniforms were the only ones not to get caught.) But the feeling of calm did not last long. Two weeks later, on April 29, Liddell recorded:
The Radio Security Service has carried out an extensive test to discover the GARBO transmitter. The report on this exercise is very distressing. The GARBO camouflage plan commenced on 13 March but the Mobile Units were not told to commence their investigations till 14 April. From 13 March to 14 April GARBO’s transmitter was on the air (and the operator was listening) for a total of twenty-nine hours, and average of one hour a day. On 14 April the Mobile Units were brought into action and they reported that the GARBO transmitter operated for four hours between 14 and 19 April inclusive. In fact, it operated for over six and a half hours, and it would seem that the second frequency of the transmitter was not recorded at all. On 15 April, GARBO transmitted for two whole hours. This incident shakes my confidence completely in the power of RSS of detecting illicit wireless either in this country or anywhere else. It is disturbing since the impression was given to Findlater Stewart’s Committee and subsequently to the Cabinet that no illicit transmissions were likely to be undetected for long. Clearly, this is not the case.
The irony is, of course, that, if the Abwehr had learned about RSS’s woes, they might have understood how their agents were able to transmit undetected. Yet this was a problem MI5 had to fix, and the reputation of the XX System, and of the claim that MI5 had complete control of all possible German agents in the country, was at stake. Liddell followed up with another entry, on May 6:
I had a long talk with Sclater about the RSS exercise. Apparently the first report of Garbo’s transmitter came from Gib. This was subsequently integrated with a V.I. report. The R.S.S. fixed stations in N. Ireland and the north of Scotland took a bearing which was well wide of the mark, and although the original report came in on March 13th it was not until April 14th that sufficiently accurate bearings were obtained to warrant putting into action of the M.U.s. They were started off on an entirely inaccurate location of the target somewhere in the Guildford area. Other bearings led to greater confusion. Had it not been for the fact that the groundwave of the transmitter was then ranged with the Barnet station it is doubtful whether the transmitter would ever have been located. The final round-up was not done according to the book, i.e. by the 3 M.U.s taking bearings and gradually closing in. One M.U. got a particularly strong signal and followed it home.
By now, however, Liddell probably felt a little more confident that homeland security was tight enough. No problematic messages had been picked up by interception, and thus there were probably no clandestine agents at large, a conclusion that was reinforced by the fact that the ULTRA sources (i.e. picking up Abwehr communications about agents in the United Kingdom) still betrayed no unknown operators. Nevertheless, Liddell still harboured, as late as May 12, strong reservations about the efficacy of RSS’s operations overseas, which he shared with the philosopher Gilbert Ryle at his club. At this time, MI5 was concerned about a source named JOSEFINE, sending messages that reached the Abwehr via Stockholm. (JOSEFINE turned out to be the Swedish naval attaché in London, and his associates or successors.) But then, Liddell expressed further deep concerns, on May 27, i.e. a mere ten days before D-Day:
I had a long discussion with TAR and Victor [Rothschild] about RSS. It seemed to me that the position was eminently unsatisfactory. I could see that the picking up of an agent here was a difficult matter. If he were transmitting on ordinary H.F. at fairly frequent intervals to a fixed station on the continent in Abwehr procedure we should probably get his signals. If he were transmitting in our military procedure it was problematic whether we should get his signals. If he were transmitting in VHF it was almost certain that we should not get him. I entirely accept this as being the position but my complaint is that the problem of detecting illicit wireless from this country has never been submitted to a real body of experts, and that possibly had it been given careful study by such a body at least the present dangers might have been to some extent mitigated. Victor agreed that it might be possible to work on some automatic ether scanner which would increase the chances of picking up an agent. There might also be other possibilities, if the ground were thoroughly explored. So much for picking up the call. The next stage is to D.F. the position of the illicit transmitter. Recent experiments had shown both in the case of GARBO and in the case of an imaginery [sic] agent who was located at Whaddon, that the bearings from the fixed stations were 50-60 miles out. This being so, the margin for error on the continent would be considerably increased. We have always been given to understand that fixed stations could give a fairly accurate bearing. The effect is that unless your vans get into the ground-wave they stand very little chance of picking up the agent. The D.G. is rather anxious to take this matter up; both TAR and I are opposed to any such course. I pointed out to the D.G. that the Radio Security Committee consisted of a Chairman who knew nothing about wireless, and that he and I had no knowledge of the subject, and therefore we would all be at the mercy of Gambier-Parry who could cover us all with megacycles. The discussion would get us no where and only create bad blood. He seemed to think however that we ought to get some statement of the position particularly since I pointed out to him that if an agent were dropped we should probably pick him up in a reasonable time. The fact is that unless the aircraft tracks pin-pointed him and the police and the Home Guard did their job, we should be extremely unlikely to get our man. Technical means would give us little if any assistance. By the time a man had been located the harm would have been done.”
Some of this plaint was misguided (VHF would not have been an effective communication wavelength for a remote spy), but it shows that, despite all the self-satisfied histories that were written afterwards, RSS was in something of a shambles. Fortunately there were no ‘men’ to be got: the Abwehr had been incorporated into the SS in the spring of 1944. Canaris was dismissed, and no further wireless agents were infiltrated on to the British mainland. Liddell was probably confident, despite RSS’s complacent approach, that no unknown wireless agents were at large because intercepted ISOS messages gave no indication of such. He made one more relevant entry before D-Day, on June 3:
TAR tells me that since 12 May RSS have been picking up the signals of an agent communicating in Group 2 cypher. They have at last succeeded in getting a bearing which places the agents somewhere in Ayrshire. The vans are moving up to the Newcastle area. Two hours later, TAR told me that further bearing indicated that the agent was in Austria. So much for RSS’s powers of D.F.ing. My mind goes back to a meeting held 18 months ago when G.P. [Gambier-Parry] had the effrontery that he could D.F. a set in France down to an area of 5 sq. miles.
Did someone mishear a Scottish voice saying ‘Ayrshire’, interpreting it as ‘Austria’? We shall never know. In any case, if Liddell ever stopped to think “If we go to the utmost to ensure there are no clandestine agents reporting on the real state of things here, wouldn’t German Intelligence imagine we were doing just that?”, he never recorded such a gut-wrenching question in his Diaries.
‘Double’ or ‘Special’ Agents?
Before Bevan left London for Moscow, he attended – alongside Findlater Stewart – that last meeting of the W Board before D-Day. They heard a presentation by ‘Tar’ Robertson, who described the status of all the double agents, confirmed that he was confident that ‘the Germans believed in TRICYCE and GARBO, especially, and probably in the others’. Robertson added that ‘the agents were ready to take their part in OVERLORD’, and offered a confidence factor of 98% that the Germans trusted the majority of agents. The concluding minute of the meeting was a recommendation by Bevan that the term ‘double agents’ be avoided in any documentation, and that they be referred to as ‘special agents’, the term that appears in the title of the KV 4/70 file. A week later, Bevan was on his way to Moscow.
The reason that Bevan wanted them described as ‘special agents’ was presumably the fact that, if the term ‘double agent’ ever escaped, the nature of the double-cross deception would be immediately obvious. Yet ‘special agents’ was not going to become a durable term: all agents are special in some way, and the phrase did not accurately describe how they differed. Liddell continued to refer to ‘DAs’ in his Diaries, John Masterman promulgated the term ‘double agents’ in his influential Double Cross System (1972), and Michael Howard entrenched it in his authorised history of British Intelligence in the Second World War – Volume 5 (1990).
Shortly after Masterman’s book came out, Miles Copland, an ex-CIA officer, wrote The Real Spy World, a pragmatic guide to the world of espionage and counter-espionage. He debunked the notion of ‘double agents’, stating: “But even before the end of World War II the term ‘double agent’ was discontinued in favor of ‘controlled enemy agent’ in speaking of an agent who was entirely under our own control, capable of reporting to his original masters only as we allowed, so that he was entirely ‘single’ in his performance, and by no means ‘double’.” The point is a valid one: if an agent is described as a ‘double’, he or she could presumably be trying to work for both sides at once, even perhaps evolving into the status of a ‘triple agent’ (like ZIGZAG), which applies enormous psychological pressure on the subject, who will certainly lose any affiliation to either party, and end up simply trying to survive.
Yet ‘controlled enemy agent’ is, to me, also unsatisfactory. It implies that the agent’s primary allegiance is to the enemy, but that he or she has been ‘turned’ in some way. That might be descriptive of some SOE agents, who were captured, and tortured into handing over their cyphers and maybe forced to transmit under the surveillance of the Gestapo, but who never lost their commitment to the Allied cause (and may have eventually been shot, anyway). Nearly all the agents used in the Double Cross System had applied to the Abwehr under false pretences. They (e.g. BRUTUS, TREASURE, GARBO, TRICYCLE) intended to betray the Germans, and work for the Allied cause immediately they were installed. Of those who survived as recruits of B1A, only TATE had arrived as a dedicated Nazi. He was threatened (but not tortured) into coming to the conclusion that his survival relied on his operating under British control, and he soon, after living in the UK for a while, understood that the democratic cause was superior to the Nazi creed. SUMMER, on the other hand, to whom the same techniques were applied, refused to co-operate, and had to be incarcerated for the duration of the war.
Thus the closest analogy to the strategy of the special agents is what Kim Philby set out to do: infiltrate an ideological foe under subterfuge. But the analogy must not be pushed too far. Philby volunteered to work for an intelligence service of his democratic native country, with the goal of facilitating the attempts of a hostile, totalitarian system to overthrow the whole structure. The special agents were trying to subvert a different totalitarian organisation that had invaded their country (or constituted a threat, in the case of GARBO) in order that liberal democracy should prevail. There is a functional equivalence, but not a moral one, between the two examples. Philby was a spy and a traitor: he was definitely not a ‘double agent’, even though he has frequently been called that.
I leave the definitional matter unresolved for now. It will take a more authoritative writer to tidy up the debate. I note that the highly regarded Thaddeus Holt considers the debate ‘pedantic’, and he decided to fall back upon ‘double agent’ in his book, despite its misleading connotations.
Special Agents at Work
The events that led up to the controversial two-hour message transmitted by GARBO on June 9, highlighted in the several quotations that I presented at the beginning of this script, have been well described in several books, so I simply summarise here the aspects concerning wireless usage. For those readers who want to learn the details, Appendix XIII of Roger Hesketh’s Fortitude lists most of the contributions of British ‘controlled agents’ on the Fortitude South Order of Battle, and how they were reflected in German Intelligence Reports. Ben Macintyre’s Double Cross gives a lively account of the activities of the agents who communicated via wireless – via their B1A operators, in the main.
TATE (Wulf Schmidt) was the longest-serving of the special agents, but the requirement to develop a convincing ‘legend’ about him, in order to explain to the Abwehr how he had managed to survive for so long on alien territory, took him out of the mainstream. In October 1943, Robertson had expressed doubts as to how seriously the Germans were taking TATE, as they had sent him only fourteen messages over the past six months, and in December, the XX Committee even considered the possibility that he had been blown. Their ability to verify how TATE’s reports were being handled arose mainly because communications were passed to Berlin from Hamburg by a secure land-line, not by wireless (and thus not subject to RSS/GC&CS interception.) Indeed, Berlin believed that the whole ‘Lena Six’ (from the 1940-41 parachutist project, and whose activity as spies was planned to last only a few weeks before the impending German invasion!) were under control of the British, but the Abwehr, in a continuing pattern, were reluctant to give up on one of their own. The post-war interrogation of Major Boeckel, who trained the LENA agents in Hamburg, available at KV 2/1333, indicates that Berlin had doubts about TATE’s reliability, but that Boeckel ‘maintained contact despite warnings’. TATE provided one or two vital tidbits (such as Eisenhower’s arrival in January 1944), and by April, the XX Committee judged him safe again. In May, he was nominally ‘moved’ to Kent, ostensibly to help his employer’s farming friend, and messages were directed there from London, in case of precise location-finding. But TATE’s information about FUSAG ‘operations’ did not appear to have received much attention: TATE’s contribution would pick up again after D-Day.
The career of TREASURE (Lily Sergeyev, or Sergueiev) was more problematical. In September 1943 she had had to remind her handler, Kliemann, that she was trained in radio operation, and that she needed to advance from writing letters in secret ink. Kliemann then improbably ordered her to acquire an American-made Halicrafter apparatus in London, and then promised to supply her one passed to her. He let her down when she visited Madrid in November, so the XX Committee had to start applying pressure. They engineered a March 1944 visit by TREASURE to Lisbon, where she was provided with a wireless apparatus, and instructed on when and how to transmit, with an emphasis that the messages should be as short as possible. She returned to the UK; her transmitter was set up in Hampstead, and her first message sent on April 13. There was a burst of useful, activity for about a month or so, but, by May 17, a decision was made that TREASURE had to be dropped. She confessed to concealing from her B1A controllers the security check in her transmissions that she could have used to alert the Germans to the fact that she was operating under control: she was in a fit of pique over the death of her dog. Robertson fired her just after D-Day.
TRICYCLE (Dusko Popov) had formulated a role that allowed him to travel easily to Lisbon, but the Committee concluded that he need to communicate by wireless as well. Popov had engineered the escape to London of a fellow Yugoslav, the Marquis de Bona, in December 1943, who would become his authorized wireless operator, and Popov himself brought back to the UK the apparatus that de Bona (given the cryptonym FREAK) started using successfully in February. Useful information on dummy FUSAG movements was passed on for a while, but a cloud hung over the whole operation, as the XX Committee feared, quite justifiably, that TRICYCLE might have been blown because Popov’s contact within the Abwehr, Johnny Jebsen (ARTIST) knew enough about the project to betray the whole deception game. When Jebsen was arrested at the end of April, TRICYCLE and his network were closed down, with FREAK’s last transmission going out on May 16. TRICYCLE explained the termination in a letter written in secret ink on May 20, ascribing it to suspicions that had arisen over FREAK’s loyalties. Astonishingly, FREAK sent a final message by wireless on June 30, and the Germans’ petulant response indicated that they still trusted TRICYCLE. After the war, MI5 learned that Jebsen had been drugged and transported to Berlin, tortured and then killed, but said nothing.
The career of BRUTUS (Roman Czerniawski) was also dogged by controversy, as he had brought trouble on himself with the Polish government-in-exile, and the Poles had access to his cyphers. Again, fevered debate over his trustworthiness, and deliberation over what the Germans (and Russians) knew about him continued throughout 1943. His wireless traffic (which had been interrupted) restarted on August 25, but his handler in Paris, Colonel Reile, suspected that he might have been ‘turned’. Indeed, his transmitter was operated by a notional friend called CHOPIN, working from Richmond. By December 1943, confidence in the security of BRUTUS, and his acceptance by the Abwehr, had been restored: the Germans even succeeded in delivering him a new wireless set. Thereafter, BRUTUS grew to become the second most valuable member of the team of special agents. A regular stream of messages was sent, beginning in from February 1, culminating in an intense flow between June 5 and June 7, providing (primarily) important disinformation about troop movements in East Anglia.
Lastly, the performance of GARBO was the most significant – and the most controversial. According to Guy Liddell, GARBO had made his first contact with the Abwehr in Madrid in March 1943. GARBO had also claimed to have found a ‘friend’ who would operate the wireless for him. The Abwehr was so pleased that it immediately sent him new cyphers (invaluable to GC&CS), and, a month later, advised him how to simulate British Army callsigns, so as to avoid detection. A domestic crisis then occurred, which caused Harmer in MI5 to recommend BRUTUS as a more reliable vehicle than GARBO, but it passed, and, by the beginning of 1944 GARBO was using his transmitter to send more urgent – as well as more copious – messages. GARBO benefitted from a large network of fictional agents who supplied him with news from around the country, and his role in FORTITUDE culminated in the epic message of June 9 with which I introduced this piece.
The Aftermath
BODYGUARD was successful. The German High Command viewed the Normandy landings as a feint to distract attention from the major assault they saw coming in the Pas de Calais. They relied almost exclusively on the reports coming in from the special agents. They did not have the infrastructure, the attention span, or the expertise to interpret the deluge of phony signals that were generated as part of FORTITUDE NORTH, and they could not undertake proper reconnaissance flights across the English Channel to inspect any preparations for the assault that they knew was coming. Interrogations of German officers after the war confirmed that the ‘intelligence’ transmitted by the five agents listed above was passed on and accepted at the very highest levels. This phenomenon has to be analysed in two dimensions: the political and the technical.
The fact that the Abwehr (and its successor, the SS) were hoodwinked so easily by the substance of the messages was not perhaps surprising. To begin with, the Abwehr was a notoriously anti-Nazi organisation, and the role of its leader, Admiral Canaris, was highly ambiguous in his encouraging doubts about the loyalty of his agents to be squashed. He told his officer Jebsen (ARTIST) that ‘he didn’t care if every German agent in Britain was under control, so long as he could tell German High Command that he had agents in Britain reporting regularly.’ Every intelligence officer has an inclination to trust his recruits: if he tells his superiors that they are unreliable, he is effectively casting maledictions on his own abilities. Those who spoke up about their doubts, and pursued them, were moved out to the Russian front. The Double Cross System was addressing a serious need.
When the ineffectiveness and unreliability of the Abwehr itself was called into question, and the organisation was subsumed into the SS, the special agents came under the control of disciplinarians and military officers who did not really understand intelligence, were under enormous pressures, and thus had neither the time nor the expertise to attempt to assess properly the information that was being passed to them. They had experienced no personal involvement with the agents supposedly infiltrated into Britain. What intelligence they received sounded plausible, and appeared to form a pattern, so it was accepted and passed on.
Yet the technical aspects are more problematic. Given what the German agencies (the Sipo, Gestapo, and Abwehr) had invested in static and mobile radio-detection and location finding techniques (even though they overstated their capabilities), they should surely have asked themselves whether Great Britain would not have explored and refined similar technology. And they should have asked themselves why the British would not have exercised such capabilities to the utmost in order to conceal the order of battle, and assault plans, for the inevitable ‘invasion’ of continental Europe. Moreover, Britain was a densely populated island, homogeneous and certainly almost completely opposed to the Nazi regime, and infiltrated foreign agents must have had to experience a far more hostile and obstructive environment than, say, SOE agents of French nationality who were parachuted into a homeland that contained a large infrastructure of Allied sympathisers. Traces of such a debate in German intelligence are difficult to find. Canaris defended his network of Vertrauensmänner, and referred to ‘most intricate and elaborate electronic countermeasures’ in February 1944, but his motivations were suspect, and he was ousted immediately afterwards. Why was GARBO (especially) not picked up? How indeed could anyone transmit for so long, when such practices went against all good policies of clandestine wireless usage?
Even more astonishing is the apparent lack of recognition of the problem from the voluminous British archives. Admittedly, the challenge may have been of such magnitude that it was never actually mentioned, but one might expect at some stage the question to be raised: “How can we optimise wireless transmission practices so that it would be reasonable to assume that RSS would not be able to pick them up?” That would normally require making the messages as brief as possible, switching wavelengths, and changing locations – all in order to elude the resolute mobile location-finding units. That was clearly a concern in the early days of the war, with agent SNOW, when B1A even asked SNOW to inquire of his handler, Dr. Rantzau (Ritter) whether it was safe for SNOW always to transmit from the same place. Rantzau replied in the affirmative, reflecting the state-of-the-art in 1940. But progress had been made by the Germans, especially in light of the arrival of SOE wireless agents, and the XX Committee must have known this.
Yet, four years later, all that the XX Committee and B1a appeared to do was allow GARBO to emulate British military traffic. And they showed a completely cavalier attitude to the problem of time on the air by allowing GARBO to compose his ridiculously windy messages. After all, if they were sharp enough to ensure that signals emanated from a location roughly where the agent was supposed to be, in case German direction-finders were on the prowl, why would they not imagine that the Germans were contemplating the reciprocal function of RSS? It was even more comprehensively dumb than the Abwehr’s credulous distancing from the problem.
Did MI5 try to communicate to the Abwehr the notion that RSS was useless? Guy Liddell confided his doubts about the apparently feeble tracking of GARBO only to his diary, so, unless the Abwehr had a spy in the bowels of RSS, and a method of getting information back to Germany, that would have been an impossible task. Perhaps some messages from the special agents indicating that they were close to being hunted down, but always managed to escape, would have given a measure of verisimilitude, indicating the existence of a force, but a very ineffective one. The behaviour of B1A, however, in reusing transmission sites, while paying lip-service to the location-finding capabilities of the foe, but allowing absurdly long transmissions to take place, simply denies belief. The utterly unnecessary but studied non-observance of basic protocols was highly unprofessional, and should have caused the whole scaffolding of deceit to collapse. It is extraordinary that so many historians and analysts have hinted at this debacle, but never analyzed it in detail.
In conclusion, the mystery of the Undetected Radios was not a puzzle of how they remained undetected, but of why both the Abwehr and MI5 both considered it reasonable that they could flourish unnoticed for so long, and behave so irresponsibly. Findlater Stewart’s 1946 history of RSS – which helped set the agenda for the unit during the Cold War – proves that he did not really understand the technology or the issues. What all this implies for the Communist agent Sonia’s transmissions (around which this whole investigation started) will be addressed in a final report that will constitute the concluding chapter of Sonia’s Radio and The Mystery of the Undetected Radios.
(This report, on the dubious testimony of Peter Wright, the author of Spycatcher, concerning Agent Sonia and her wireless transmissions, is a long and challenging one, and I issue my customary health warning: Do not read this if you are of a sensitive disposition, or while operating agricultural machinery. I decided to lay out every step of my reasoning, with references, as I believe that, with the delivery of the authorised History of GCHQ in a few months’ time, it is important to present a comprehensive story of the slice of wartime Soviet wireless traffic that Wright focused on in his book. The interest in Spycatcher indicates that a mass of persons are fascinated by this topic: questions about possible traitors in the midst of the Security Service do not go away. I believe the issuance of this report is especially timely, as the recent feature in the Mail on Sunday should intensify the interest in the case that Wright made against Sonia and her alleged protector, Roger Hollis. If any of my readers would prefer to work with a Word version of this bulletin, in the belief that they might want to pore over it, and annotate it, please contact me at antonypercy@aol.com. After a thorough background check by my team of ultra-sensitive, highly-trained, Moscow-based security personnel, the report will be sent to you.)
“Stella
Rimington and some friends in the Security Service called Wright ‘the KGB
illegal’, because, with his appearance and his lisp we could imagine that he
was really a KGB officer.”(Defending The Realm, p 518)
“I
want to prove that Hollis was a spy; if I can do that I will be happy.” (Peter
Wright to Malcolm Turnbull, from the latter’s ‘Spycatcher Trial’, p 31)
“The
time has come for there to be an openness about the secret world of so long ago
… the consequences of Hollis being a spy are enormous. Not only does it mean
that MI5 is probably still staffed by people with similar view to him, but it
means that ASIO was established on terms with the advice of a Russian spy.” (Peter
Wright in the witness-box, Sydney, December 1986)
Contents:
Peter
Wright and ‘Spycatcher’
The
Background
Cable
or Wireless?
War
and Peace
VENONA
and HASP
Wright
on HASP
The
Remaining Questions
The
Drought of 1942-44
Why
did Wright Mangle the Story so much?
Conclusions
Peter
Wright and ‘Spycatcher’
As an ex-IBMer (1969-1973), until I read Spycatcher in the late nineteen-eighties, the only ‘HASP’ I knew was the Houston Automated Spooling Priority program (about which I shall mercifully write no more). One of the major contributions to mole-hunting that Peter Wright believed he made, in his best-selling account of dodgy business within MI5, was the unveiling of a new source of electronic intelligence, namely (as he described it) ‘the wartime traffic stored by the Swedish authorities known as HASP’. By citing a previously unknown and ever since unrevealed message that purported to indicate the size of Sonia’s ‘network’ of spies in 1941, Wright’s assertion has exerted quite a considerable influence on the mythology of Soviet ‘superspy’ SONIA. If judged as credible, his testimony boosts her achievements in England even beyond what the woman claimed in her memoir, Sonya’s Report. Moreover, Wright used this discovery as a major reason for confirming his belief that Roger Hollis was the Soviet mole known as ELLI: he drew attention to this accusation in his presence in the witness-box during the Spycatcher trial, and thus the process by which he came to this conclusion is of profound significance.
Spycatcher
sold over two million copies. This success was mainly due to the outcome of Her
Majesty’s Government’s lawsuit against the author before publication, with
Malcom Turnbull’s successful defence in the trial of 1986-87 issuing a stern
blow to the forces of hypocritical secrecy. He was able to show that the
British authorities had connived at, or even encouraged, the publication of
Chapman Pincher’s two books, Their Trade is Treachery, and Too Secret
Too Long (as well as Nigel West’s A Matter of Trust), which made
nonsense of the claim that a ban on the whole of Spycatcher was
necessary for security reasons. It was the obstinacy of Margaret Thatcher,
abetted by poor advice, that caused the lawsuit to be pursued. The irony was
that it was Wright who had fed Pincher most of his stories, and Pincher would
later amplify Wright’s case against Hollis with the very influential Treachery.
That is why this article is so important. Those two million-plus readers need
to learn the facts about a critical part of Wright’s story.
The
Background
Another
significant outcome of a careful study of Wright’s claims concerning the HASP
story is the uncovering of secrets about the interception and decryption of
electronic traffic that the British intelligence services (MI5, MI6 and,
especially, GCHQ) would rather the public remain ignorant of. The authorised
histories of MI5 (Andrew) and MI6 (Jeffery) steered well clear of analysis of
the mechanics of wartime electronic espionage, since these volumes were
designed and controlled as organs of public relations. No discussion of Sonia,
or the controversies surrounding illicit wireless in wartime Britain, can be
found in their books, and Andrew (especially) points readers towards the
secondary literature without any indication of how reliable it is, or how selectively
it should be explored. Moreover, I
regret that I am not confident that all will be revealed to us when the authorised
history of GCHQ (Behind the Enigma, by Professor John Ferris) is
published later this year. While a subsidiary objective of my focus on Wright
is thus to provide a more rigorous analysis of the often puzzling story of the
Allied effort to interpret Soviet intelligence traffic in World War II, a more
thorough account will have to wait until a later bulletin.
The
secondary literature almost universally shows an alarming confusion about the
techniques and technology that underlay the surveillance of the traffic of
foreign powers before, during, and after WWII. The largely American literature
on the VENONA program (to which HASP was a critical adjunct: see below) is
distressingly weak on technology, and focuses almost exclusively on the
interception of traffic in the United States. Even such a well-researched and
methodical work as Philip H. J. Davies’s MI6 and the Machinery of Spying
contains only two short references to VENONA, guiding the reader (note 32, p
237) for ‘a (contested) British version of the story’ to Peter Wright’s Spycatcher.
This seems to me a gross abdication of critical responsibility. Davies
concentrates of human ‘machinery’, not technology, and delegates coverage of
problematic matters to a source he instantly characterizes as dubious. It would
appear, therefore, that, even though Wright’s story does not derive from any
published archive, his controversial memoir has become the default – but flawed
– authority. Yet he was a minor officer in the grand scheme of things, and an
elderly man with a grudge and a failing memory when his book was composed.
It
is certainly difficult to obtain reliable confirmation of the essence of HASP
from other academic, or pseudo-academic, sources. One might, for example, have
expected to learn about it in Richard J. Aldrich’s 2010 work, GCHQ, yet,
while providing a comprehensive chapter on HASP’s cousin VENONA, the author does
not mention the term. The only other analyst who appears to have written
explicitly about HASP without simply echoing Wright’s account is Nigel West, in
his 2009 book Venona. West has overall provided a competent guidebook to
the initial breakthroughs on decryption, and an excellent coverage of the content
of VENONA traffic, with emphasis on the London-Moscow communications, although
it would benefit from a revision to consider the relevance of such sources as
the Vassiliev Notebooks (see https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/collection/86/vassiliev-notebooks).
Venona is a highly readable summary for the curious student of
intelligence, but West’s coverage of the mechanics of VENONA is spotty
and inconsistent. Moreover, his representation of the HASP traffic is so
different from that of Wright that I believe the topic merits greater scrutiny,
and it is my goal here to provide that level of inspection, and assess the
validity of what Wright claimed. This is uncharted and complex territory,
however, and the landscape is strewn with pitfalls.
VENONA
was one of the major successes of British-American co-operation on intelligence
matters after WWII. Owing to a procedural mistake in 1943, a large number of
GRU (military and naval intelligence) and NKVD/KGB (* state security) messages
exchanged between Moscow and outlying stations in foreign embassies employed a
defective technique for enciphering highly confidential messages – the re-use
of so-called ‘one-time pads’. Intelligence agencies have regarded one-time pads
as the most watertight way of preventing enemy decryption of messages, and they
were adopted by the Soviet Union in the 1930s. (Many readers will be familiar
with the concept if they have read Leo Marks’s Between Silk and Cyanide.)
Alert cryptanalysts in the National Security Agency (NSA), inspecting messages
in 1946, noticed unusual patterns, and in 1948 were joined by their British counterparts
from GCHQ in exploring the phenomenon. By applying painstaking techniques to
detect repeated sequences, they were able to initiate a project that gradually disclosed
several networks of spies in the USA, Canada, Britain and Australia, leading to
the successful prosecution of such as Julius Rosenberg, Klaus Fuchs, and Alan
Nunn May, and the identification of Donald Maclean. VENONA was not formally
revealed to the public until 1995.
Yet
exactly what this ‘re-use’ entailed, and where and when it took place, and to
which cryptological tools it applied, remains one of the most vexing puzzles in
the VENONA story. It is as if the practitioners, when explaining their
successes to the lay historians who carried their accounts to the world, wished
to keep the process and sequence of events to themselves, as a defensive
measure to protect their secrets, and maybe, even, to exaggerate what they were
able to accomplish. A deep integrative history is sorely needed.
[*
The naming of the Soviet Security Organization changed frequently. In 1934,
the OGPU was transformed into the NKVD, which for a few months in 1941 became
the NKGB, before reverting to NKVD until April 1943. In March 1946, it became
the MGB, but foreign intelligence was transferred to the Committee for
Information (KI) from October 1947 to November 1951. In March 1953, on Stalin’s
death, the unit was combined with the MVD, out of which the KGB emerged, after
Beria’s execution, in March 1954. Source: Christopher Andrew. I sometimes use
‘KGB’ in this article to refer to the permanent body, as do many authors.]
Cable
or Wireless?
Eastern Telegraph Cables: 1901
One conundrum in the analysis of VENONA and HASP has endured: no author on the subject is precise about where and when VENONA (or HASP) was the result of intercepting cable traffic, and where and when it involved wireless traffic. This distinction is important when one considers the challenges facing the counter-espionage organisations of the nations trying to protect themselves. The term ‘cable’ is frequently used as a generic term for ‘telegram’, reflecting its historical background, but telegrams sent by wireless should definitely not be called ‘cables’. Christopher Andrew, in Defending the Realm, makes a useful distinction, but his account is incomplete and thus overall unsatisfying. He contrasts (on page 376) the regulations pertaining in the UK, where ‘even before the Soviet entry into the war, the Foreign Office had agreed that the Soviet embassy in London could communicate with Moscow by radio on set frequencies’, and adds that a project was soon underway to intercept these messages. On the other hand, no corresponding agreement existed in the USA, where, instead, ‘Soviet messages were written out for transmission by cable companies, which, in accordance with wartime censorship laws, supplied copies to the US authorities.’
This
statement is probably an echo of what appears in the staff (but not ‘official’)
story of VENONA, issued by the NSA/CIA in 1966 (VENONA: Soviet Espionage and
the American Response, edited by Robert Louis Benson and Michael Warner).
In the Preface (p xii) appear the following sentences: “Although Soviet
intelligence services had clandestine radio transmitters in diplomatic missions
located in several American cities, these apparently were to be used only in emergencies.
In consequence, KGB and GRU stations cabled their important messages over
commercial telegraph lines and sent bulky reports and documents – including
most of the information acquired by agents – in diplomatic pouches.” This
statement moves us closer to the truth, but in my opinion still misrepresents
the essence of the Soviet strategy concerning clandestine systems, and does not
explain whether these secret channels were intercepted at all.
Confusion
abounds. For example, in the very first sentence of Venona, Nigel West
writes of the project to intercept Japanese traffic in October 1942 as follows:
“Cable 906 purported to be a routine circular in seven parts and, as it had
come off the wireless circuit linking Tokyo to Berlin and Helsinki, it
underwent the usual Allied scrutiny to see if it betrayed any information of
strategic significance.” Cables cannot ‘come off’ (whatever that means)
‘wireless circuits’, and it is inaccurate to describe temporary wireless paths
as ‘circuits’, since wireless transmission is by definition unconnected.
It makes sense to refer to a ‘circuit’ linking ‘Tokyo to Berlin and
Helsinki’ only in terms of a conceptual agreement about callsigns, frequencies,
and schedules between intelligence services and outposts. As another example, the
heading for the NSA’s official packaging of the London to Moscow traffic (at https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/article/Venona-London-GRU.pdf
) is titled ‘London GRU – Moscow Center Cables: Cables Decrypted by the
National Security Administration’s Venona Project’, a regrettable
misrepresentation of reality. The messages were sent by wireless.
The
misconception is aggrandized by Peter Wright himself. In Spycatcher, the
author, the self-professed expert in these matters, writes (p 182): “Whereas
the Americans had all the Soviet radio traffic passing to and from the USA
during and after the war, in Britain Churchill ordered all anti-Soviet
intelligence work to cease during the wartime alliance, and GCHQ did not begin
taking the traffic again until the very end of the war.” Sadly, every clause of
this woeful sentence contains at least one blatant error, which casts serious doubt
on his reliability on other matters. Specifically:
The Soviet VENONA traffic to and from the
USA was almost exclusively commercial cable traffic.
‘Had all the Soviet radio traffic’ is
meaningless. Did the Americans intercept it all? Most certainly not. As other
experts have pointed out, wireless traffic was banned (officially) during the
war. The Soviets used wireless as an emergency back-up system, but also as a
channel for clandestine espionage traffic.
No one can point to the minute where
Churchill ordered all interception, let alone all intelligence work, to cease.
Hinsley’s famous footnote [see below] speaks only of ‘decryption and
decoding’, not interception, and does not constitute an authoritative record. (Professor
Glees reports conversations with Hinsley on this point in his book The
Secrets of the Service: what Glees was told, namely that the Y Board may
have issued such an order, now appears to be confirmed by the in-house history
of the NSA.) We know that interception of signals continued, if erratically, throughout
the war, and that Alastair Denniston, previously head of GC&CS, started his
new project on Soviet traffic in late 1942.
GCHQ did not come into existence until 1946.
Before that the institution was known as GC&CS (Government Code &
Cypher School). During the war, however, RSS was responsible for ‘taking the
traffic’, and never reported to GC&CS. We know from RSS files that it
monitored Soviet traffic, and that the ISCOT project started picking up
Comintern messages in 1943.
Within this fog of misrepresentation a very important distinction remains. A cable is a wire, with the important corollary that those agencies that control the input to the physical cable may have special authority (or power) to intercept and store the traffic that is passed to them. Such transmissions can also be detected clandestinely by specialized sensory equipment, which would have to be laid close to the cable. Thus cables are a direct, bounded, targeted medium and not universally detectable. (Today’s fibre optic cables, which GCHQ and the NSA tap, follow largely the same oceanic paths used by the cables laid at the end of the nineteenth century.) Wireless traffic is looser: it is transmitted over the ether. It may be picked up by local groundwaves, or, remotely, by any receiving device that is geographically well-positioned to receive shortwave transmissions, allowing for the vagaries of atmospheric conditions, and frequencies used. Yet, while the atmosphere is lawless, the source of the transmission is frequently concealed, and the activity unpredictable. Wireless transmission presents a completely different set of security challenges.
P. S. I am grateful to Ian W. who, on the day this report was published, informed me that ‘cables’ might be transmitted for part of their journey over ‘wireless’ links – something I had suspected, but had not been able to verify. Ian also mentioned that, half a century ago, it was common for wireless contacts to be referred to as ‘circuits’.
War
and Peace
Earlier
in the century, circumstances – and improvements in technology – had encouraged
the use of wireless as a medium for confidential traffic. Private or
nationally-owned cable facilities had been shown to be liable to attack and
destruction. Such sabotage happened when the British cut Germany’s
nationally-owned transatlantic cables in 1914, an event that forced German
diplomatic traffic to be routed through ‘neutral’ third parties. Britain used
its sway to intercept German traffic, and with cryptological skills abetted by
the provision of codebooks supplied by the Russians, started deciphering German
messages. In February 1917, the British deciphered the Zimmermann Telegram,
which had encouraged Mexico to join forces against the United States. When
Zimmermann admitted the truth behind the cable telegram, public disgust brought
the USA into the war.
Such
an exposure encouraged experimentation with a rapidly developing wireless
technology. (In Spycatcher, Peter Wright himself explained how, after
World War I, his father assisted Marconi in convincing the British government
that the beaming of short-wave wireless signals would be more effective than
deploying long-wave technology as a means of linking the Empire.) In turn, as
practices and understanding matured, that led to the important adoption of water-tight
encryption mechanisms. Correspondingly, in the next two decades of peace, host
governments tried to monitor such processes that originated on their home
territory, by attempting to pick up open transmissions from the air, to set
about decrypting them, and thus identifying possible hostile threats. The
British project known as MASK, which detected Comintern traffic in London in
the mid-thirties, was an example of such.
The
advent of war, however, made a more spirited approach to trapping and
prosecuting illicit wireless transmissions much more urgent. For example, at
the outset of World War II, the British were fearful of the possibility of
swarms of enemy wireless operators in their midst. They were initially not so
scared about routine intelligence-gathering as they were about the (imaginary) menace
of such spies using wireless to guide German bombers to their targets. The government
also wanted to control the dissemination overseas of secret intelligence by
conventional agencies. It made demands to foreign embassies and legations about
being informed of wireless frequencies, and even call-signs, before giving
approval for their use. Since a tacit understanding about reciprocal needs
existed, governments often turned a blind eye to some technical breaches (such
as the British with the Soviets, and the Swiss with the British). To monitor
abuse of the airwaves, interception services then had to deploy enhanced wireless
detection mechanisms to collect such clandestine messages, and maybe
direction-finding/location-finding systems and vehicles to verify the source of
such messages (as happened with the Soviet Embassy in London in 1942.) The
elimination of any possibly overlooked German wireless agents was critical for
the success of the Double-Cross system.
The
UK government thus permitted the use of wireless transmitters on embassy
premises only for Allies, while allowing, as a special case, the Polish and
Czechoslovak governments-in-exile to have their own independent wireless
stations, the Czech station in Woldingham, Surrey playing a very significant
role. In the UK, all represented governments (including those in exile) clearly
had a preference for using wireless rather than cable, in the belief that the
traffic might not be picked up at all, and thus be more secure. The Soviet
Union was in a unique position, as it was officially neither ally nor enemy
from September 1939 until June 1941, but was hardly neutral, as it had, in that
period been in a pact with Nazi Germany, and had aided the latter’s war effort
against Great Britain. In those circumstances, it was supposed to use its
wireless apparatus in the Embassy for diplomatic traffic only, and was instructed
to inform His Majesty’s Government of frequencies and callsigns being used.
Thus,
when any embassy or legation in World War II wanted to send a ‘telegram’, it still
maintained some level of choice. First, it had to deal with the local
government, consider the regulations, and assess how strictly the rules were
going to be enforced. Indeed, many such messages were enciphered, but still sent
over private circuits. Copies were frequently taken by the local authorities, especially
by those who (as with the USA) forbad the use of clandestine wireless by
foreign governments. Indeed (as Romerstein and Breindel remind us in The
Venona Secrets), in 1943 the US Federal Communications Commission detected
illicit radio signals coming from the Soviet consulates in New York and San
Francisco, and confiscated the apparatus. Consequently, the NKVD and GRU in the
USA had to rely almost exclusively on commercial telegraph agencies to send
their messages to Moscow. Likewise, all confidential traffic beyond the
diplomatic bag that was sent back to Moscow by the embassy in Canberra,
Australia (a vital VENONA source), was officially transmitted by commercial
cable companies.
Romerstein’s
and Breindel’s account corresponds in general with what NSA officers have
written. Their statement is an echo of what appears in Benson’s and Warner’s
history mentioned above. In that work’s Preface (p xii) appear the following
sentences: “Although Soviet intelligence services had clandestine radio
transmitters in diplomatic missions located in several American cities, these
apparently were to be used only in emergencies. In consequence, KGB and GRU
stations cabled their important messages over commercial telegraph lines and
sent bulky reports and documents – including most of the information acquired
by agents – in diplomatic pouches.”
Yet
the FBI offers an intriguing twist to this story. In the archive of that
institution (‘The Vault’) can be found some provocative assertions. An undated
memorandum outlining considerations in using VENONA information in prosecutions
(p 63) declares that ‘these Soviet messages are made up of telegrams and cables
and radio messages sent between Soviet intelligence operators in the United
States and Moscow.” While that is an implausible triad (cables and radio
messages are both ‘telegrams’), it suggests a more complicated situation. And,
on page 72, the writer measures, with some timidity, some political considerations,
indicating that the Soviet Union might react in a hostile fashion to the news
that the USA had been spying on its wartime ally, thus not acting ‘in good
faith’. He writes: “ . . . while no
written record has been located in Bureau files to verify this it has been
stated by NSA officials that during the war Soviet diplomats in the U.S. were
granted permission to use Army radio facilities at the Pentagon to send
messages to Moscow. It has been stated that President Roosevelt granted this
permission and accompanied it with the promise to the Soviets that their
messages would not be intercepted or interfered with by U.S. authorities.”
One
can imagine the frequently naïve Roosevelt making an offer like this, but it is
difficult to imagine that the wary Russians would take such an offer at face
value, and have their cypher-clerks trek over to the Pentagon to send their
material in the knowledge that it would probably be intercepted. Moreover, not
all their traffic derived from Washington: New York and San Francisco were busy
outlets. The item is undated, and apparently unconfirmed, and thus needs to be
recorded as a footnote of questionable significance.
On
the other hand, what is certain is that the Soviet Embassy in London breached
the rules, even before Barbarossa, first of all by sending not just diplomatic
traffic but also military and intelligence reports to Moscow on the
acknowledged channels. Yet Soviet Military Intelligence (the GRU), which was
for a while the only functioning intelligence unit in the Soviet Embassy, as
the NKVD officers had reputedly been recalled for almost all of 1940, went far beyond
what was permitted in order to deceive surveillance mechanisms. I refer to a
VENONA message of July 17, 1940, from London to Moscow, which is titled ‘Setting
up an illicit radio in the Soviet Embassy’. It unambiguously refers to
apparatus sent over in the diplomatic bag, but without clear instructions, and
requests more guidance on setting up the antenna. The GRU in London was trying
to establish an alternative mechanism for transmission without informing its
hosts, and, when the GRU rather absurdly suddenly were about to run out of
one-time pads in August/September 1940, messages at that time specify that the
‘emergency system’ should be used. The emergency system was planned not just as
a back-up procedure using a book-directed system for creating random keys (in
place of the printed one-time pads), but as the deployment of an alternative
wireless transmitter/receiver apparatus. (I analyse this phenomenon in more
detail at the end of this report.)
To
summarize, in the context of World War II: the pressures on combatants to
prevent unauthorised intelligence from leaving the nation were intense. The
distinction between the media was very important, as cables were finite,
self-contained, and asynchronous, and could easily be collected by the host country.
Wireless messages, on the other hand, were open, unconstrained, and
always somewhat speculative, but required a sophisticated infrastructure just
to be intercepted. Synchronicity was the goal with wireless, but was not always
achieved: your target might not pick up your message and acknowledge it, or
might receive it only partially. On the other hand, an unintended bystander
might intercept it. Moreover, to circumvent the efforts of the authorities,
units wanting to send intelligence back to their controllers would sometimes
set up alternative wireless systems in secret, of which the local government
had not been notified. I do not believe any analyst of VENONA has explained in
detail how the respective traffic was transmitted or collected in each country,
i.e. by cable, by authorised wireless, or by unauthorised wireless. Certainly,
the experience – and opportunity – differed greatly for the British and American
authorities.
VENONA
& HASP
This
confusion appears to have leaked into the VENONA-HASP muddle. In order to put
the HASP phenomenon into the context of VENONA, I shall soon turn to the texts
of Peter Wright, the primary source about HASP, and add detailed commentary on
each passage. One of the difficult concepts to bear in mind with VERONA and
HASP is that decryption (with the exception of the Australian intercepts) did
not happen in real time. We are thus dealing with a process that attempted to decrypt
messages that may have been transmitted two or three decades earlier, which
were intercepted and stored at the time, but represent only a small percentage
of the total messages that could have been theoretically available. Thus
discontinuities and gaps are par for the course. Moreover, it is important to
understand that the Soviets did not realise for several years that their
systems had been exposed, and consequently did not rush to fix the problem. The
fact of the breakthrough was revealed to the Soviets by the spies William
Weisband and Kim Philby in 1949. Only then did the Soviets change their
procedures, but they could do nothing about the historical traffic of 1940-48.
VENONA
itself is a murky project filled with anomalies and unanswered questions,
beyond the scope of analysis in this article. The set of facts that need to be
borne in mind when considering HASP are the following:
The key years of 1940 (when John Tiltman received a GRU code-book from the Finns); 1945 (when the damaged Soviet codebook gained at Petsamo was acquired by the USA, and when the GRU cypher-clerk Igor Gouzenko defected in Canada); 1946 (when Meredith Gardner made the first major VENONA decryption); 1949 (when ex-Comintern wireless operator Alexander Foote revealed GRU techniques in Handbook for Spies); 1954 (when Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, Soviet cypher experts who had worked in Stockholm, defected in Australia); and 1959 (when the Swedes handed over HASP, the result of their decryption successes, to GCHQ and NSA).
The GRU developed an auxiliary clandestine system to maintain secrecy. This consisted of a) an alternative method of using a secure one-time pad exploiting a reference book known to both parties (which could be used on the regular channel), and b) a separate wireless receiver-transmitter and protocols, not to be announced to the domestic authorities.
In the USA and in Australia, the Soviet units used commercial cable channels almost exclusively. In Britain, all traffic was sent by wireless.
Wright
on HASP
In
1987, Peter Wright (with the assistance of the journalist Paul Greengrass)
published his best-selling work Spycatcher, an account of the efforts by
the so-called ‘FLUENCY’ committee to identify a suspected mole in the senior
ranks of MI5. Wright, who had been ‘chief technical officer’ within the
service, was appointed chairman of the committee when it was set up in 1964. Because
of the way the programme had unmasked figures such as Fuchs and Maclean, the
disclosures from the VENONA project were viewed as possibly important providers
of further breakthroughs. Yet successes with VENONA traffic had been slowing
down in the early 1950s, and Wright stated that the project had come to a halt
in 1954. A few years later a fresh injection gave the project new life. I do
not intend to discuss the broader issues explored in Spycatcher: my
focus is on a strict analysis of the passages where Wright writes about HASP.
Pp
185-187 [i] “In 1959, a new discovery
was made which resuscitated VENONA again. GCHQ discovered that the Swedish
Signals Intelligence Service had taken and stored a considerable amount of new
wartime traffic, including some GRU radio messages sent to and from London during
the early years of the war. “
Wright
appears confused from the outset. He explicitly states that this traffic
included messages that could be classified as ‘GRU’ and ‘radio’. But if this
traffic had been stored, but not decrypted, how did the Swedish Service, or the
receiving agency, GCHQ, know they were GRU exchanges until they were decrypted?
Moreover, Wright states that these were radio messages sent ‘to and from London’.
Does that mean between London and Stockholm or between London and Moscow? The
suggestion could conceivably be the latter, as Stockholm would have been geographically
well-situated to pick up messages targeted at Moscow, and there would be little
reason for the GRU station in London to communicate with its Swedish
counterpart (although a few such messages do exist in the archive). Why the
Swedes would be interested, however, in intercepting and storing traffic that
did not concern them directly is a puzzle in its own way. As an added
complication, Fred. B. Wrixon, in his Codes, Ciphers & Other Cryptic
& Clandestine Communications, states that the Swedes ‘had intercepted
some GRU radio exchanges between agents [sic: my italics] in
Great Britain and their headquarters in the Soviet Union’, (p 118), and that
GCHQ gave the name HASP to the project to decipher them. Wrixon’s source
is not stated. How Wrixon derived this information is not clear, but it eerily
echoes one of Wright’s more outlandish caprices.
Did
Wright mislead his readers, whether intentionally or not? I think so. His
assertion about the nature of the traffic appears to be contradicted by Nigel
West, who, in Venona, on page 120, presents an alternative explanation.
He writes: “ . . . in 1959 the Swedish National Defence Radio Institute
(Forsvarets Radioanstalt, FRA,) revealed that it had retained copies of a vast
quantity of the Stockholm-Moscow traffic and negotiated with GCHQ to release
its archive to the NSA via Cheltenham. This was the batch of intercepts
codenamed HASP, and, bearing in mind that some of these texts had been encoded
and signed by Petrov, there must have been a great temptation to confront him
with them – if only to tax his memory by seeking clues to the missing,
unrecovered groups.” West further explains that when the HASP material became
available, ‘two 1945 VENONA intercepts from the Stockholm embassy, dated 16
July and 21 September, showed that Petrov, then codenamed SEAMAN, had been the
personal cipher-clerk to two rezidents, first Mrs Yartseva, then Vasili
F. Razin. However, their experience in Sweden had not prepared the Petrovs for
the atmosphere of intrigue in Canberra.”
Thus
West makes a very clear connection between traffic obtained locally in Sweden
and the defection of Petrov and his wife in April 1954, and suggests, moreover,
that HASP material was exclusively Stockholm-Moscow traffic. This is markedly in
contrast to Wright’s representation. Yet West does not explain what the
relationship was between the HASP and the VENONA material, how the former
helped the GCHQ cryptanalysts, or where he derived his information. He refers
to intercepts, but were these raw encrypted data, or partially decrypted texts
– or both? The logic is very elusive, since the HASP messages are not separately
identifiable, but it would appear that additional information enabled the
cryptonym MORYAK (SEAMAN), as a key member of the Soviet embassy in Stockholm,
to be identified as Petrov. And indeed, the source telegrams confirm Petrov’s
statements from the memoir that he and his wife published in 1956.
The message of July 16 can be seen at: https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/venona/dated/1945/16jul_cipher_text_seaman.pdf, but the VENONA records of September 21 appear to contain no Moscow-Stockholm traffic. Nevertheless, the identity of SEAMAN can be confirmed from earlier traffic from Stockholm to Moscow, when Petrov was working in Moscow (see telegrams No. 797, of September 6, 1941, and No. 821, of April 30, 1942), before the Petrovs’ dramatic seven-month journey to Stockholm, via Siberia, South Africa, and Great Britain.
A
significant distinction between the respective descriptions of HASP by Wright
and West can thus be seen, with West, to support his cause, providing more
tangible evidence of what the traffic contained. The account of another
historian, Christopher Andrew, would appear to reinforce West’s description, although
without actually mentioning HASP. On page 380 of Defend the Realm, Andrew
writes: “Following requests during 1960, the Swedes supplied copies of wartime
GRU telegrams exchanged between Moscow and the Stockholm residency, some of
which were discovered to have employed the same one-time pads used in hitherto
unbroken traffic with London. One hundred and seventy-eight GRU messages from
the period March 1940 to April 1942 were successfully decrypted in whole or
part.” Andrew’s message is explicit: these messages were not London-Stockholm
traffic, but Stockholm-Moscow messages that the Swedes had apparently enjoyed
some success in decrypting. His log of successful decryption applies to London-Moscow
traffic, however, the suggestion being that both sets of traffic used the same
one-time pads, and that no progress had been made by GCHQ on the London
messages beforehand.
Moreover,
what does that strange, anonymous notion behind ‘requests’ indicate? How did
the ‘requestor’ learn about them? What was the crypto-analytical expertise of
the Swedes, and had they previously shared experiences with GCHQ and NSA? The certain
implication here is that the FRA had successfully deciphered some local GRU
traffic, as West informed us. Yet it was not the messages themselves that were
of relevance to GCHQ’s investigations, but a suggestion that the process of
using stale one-time pads had been deployed, and that the revelations from
these could be applied to traffic that the GCHQ possessed, but had been unable
to break. This insight from Andrew (the source is the typically useless ‘Secret
Service Archives’ from the authorised ‘historian’), and his immediately
following comments, will turn out to be critical in working out what happened.
It should also be noted that Andrew specifically contradicts Wright’s
description of the essence of HASP, yet, with characteristic unscholarliness,
includes Spycatcher in his bibliography.
Andrew’s
failure to specify explicitly whether these one-time pads were the conventional
set of random numbers created and printed by the KGB, or the alternative
‘reference-book’ mechanism used as a back-up system, is a critical oversight. I
note also that this notion of ‘re-use’ suggests that deploying the same conventional
pads across different intelligence stations was as much against the
rules as was the ‘re-use’ over time of pads by a single pair of
stations. Alternatively, it could mean that London-Moscow and Stockholm-Moscow
both used the same reference-book in their emergency systems. In
any case, this ‘re-use’ evidently occurred in 1940, well before the much
publicized year of 1943 described in the VENONA histories as the time when the
first infraction occurred. Andrew provides no guidance for his readers.
[ii]
“GCHQ persuaded the Swedes to relinquish their neutrality, and pass the
material over for analysis. The discovery of the Swedish HASP material was one
of the main reasons for Arthur’s [Arthur Martin’s] return to D1. He was one of
the few officers inside MI5 with direct experience of VENONA, having worked
intimately with it during the Fuchs and Maclean investigations.
There were high hopes that HASP
would transform VENONA by providing more intelligence about unknown cryptonyms
and, just as important, by providing more groups for the codebook, which would,
in turn, lead to further breaks in VENONA material already held.
The
first point here is a reminder of Sweden’s neutrality – not just during World
War II, but during the Cold War, when it was not a member of NATO. Like
Portugal and Switzerland, Sweden had been abuzz with spies during World War II,
and its proximity to the northern ports of German-occupied Poland and the
Baltic States meant that Stockholm was well-positioned to supply information on
German naval capabilities, repairs, etc. Hence the feverish wireless
communications with Moscow. Moreover, that neutrality apparently endured, so
that Sweden would not have been a natural sharer of decryption techniques with
NATO members. Yet Sweden was not ‘neutral’ enough to be free of suspicions about
Soviet intentions, and thus pursued its own program of trying to gather
wireless intelligence.
In Venona, Nigel West relates how the Swedes collaborated with the more advanced, cryptanalytically speaking, Finns, who had provided the American with highly useful aids when they handed over the partially burned Petsamo codebooks that had been retrieved from the Soviet consulate in June 1941. And, no doubt, informal links were in place between the Swedes and the British, as Wright’s text suggests. West even indicates that the Finns managed to understand how the Soviets ‘built code-tables and relied on a very straightforward mathematical formula to encode emergency signals’, but it is not clear exactly how this happened, or whether the lessons learned applied to the GRU as well as to the NKVD.
Yet
one overlooked event was John Tiltman’s acquisition of a GRU code-book
retrieved from the body of a Soviet officer in1940. On Page 372 of his history
of SIS, Keith Jeffery wrote: “In January
1940 Menzies asked Carr to find out if the Finnish authorities had ‘procured any
Soviet cryptographic material which could be communicated to us’. Carr immediately
replied in the affirmative and it was arranged that Colonel John Tiltman of
GC&CS should travel out to Finland, where he was presented by Hallamaa with
a Red Army code-book taken off a dead Russian officer and which ‘bore the marks
of a bullet. GC&CS noted afterwards that it had been ‘of real assistance’
to their cryptographers.” It does not seem that this contribution, which
predated the official recognition of the Petsamo code-book by five years, has
ever been recognized in the few accounts of VENONA decipherment that exist.
Wright’s
suggestion here, however, is that HASP was, in essence, different from
traditional VENONA, although it is not immediately obvious in what manner. The
implication is that HASP would share much with the VENONA traffic, such as the
use of the same codebook (the reference by which otherwise meaningless
sequences of numbers represented terms, functions, identities of persons, countries,
institutions, etc., sometimes known as a nomenclator). The studies of VENONA tell us that the
different functions of Soviet commercial organisations and intelligence
(Amtorg, NKVD, GRU, Naval GRU and Foreign Ministry) used different code-books,
and thus breakthroughs in one area did not mean that other successes naturally
followed. For instance, all departments referred to the Germans as ‘KOLBASNIKI’
(’SAUSAGE-DEALERS’), but in the NKVD book, that word could have been
represented as, say, ‘1146’, and in that of the GRU, ‘9452’.
This
system was all independent of one-time pads for further encryption. Yet, if
Andrew’s description is correct, Wright’s concluding sentence in this extract
makes more sense. If the Swedes had managed to make inroads into the GRU
codebook from the analysis of their local messages, that experience would
transfer directly to the British study of GRU traffic. The emphasis on ‘VENONA
material already held’ is telling. Wright is starting to backtrack from his
original characterisation.
[iii]
Moreover, since powerful new computers were becoming available, it made sense
to reopen the whole program (I was never convinced that the effort should have
been dropped in the 1950s), and the pace gradually increased, with vigorous
encouragement by Arthur, through the early 1960s.
In fact, there were no great
immediate discoveries in the HASP material which related to Britain. Most of
the material consisted of routine reports from GRU offices of bomb damage in
various parts of Britain, and estimates of British military capability. There
were dozens of cryptonyms, some of whom were interesting, but long since dead. J.
B. S. Haldane, for instance, who was working in the Admiralty’s submarine
experimental station at Haslar, researching into deep diving techniques, was
supplying details of the programs to the CPGB, who were passing it on to the
GRU in London. Another spy identified in the traffic was the Honourable Owen
Montagu, the son of Lord Swaythling (not to be confused with Euan Montagu, who
organized the celebrated ‘Man Who Never Was’ deception operation during the
war). He was a freelance journalist, and from the traffic it was clear that he
was used by the Russians to collect political intelligence in the Labour Party,
and to a lesser degree the CPGB.
Some
of this is puzzling. Unfortunately, a detailed history of the evolutionary progress
of the VENONA decrypts is not possible, based solely on the selection of documents
released. As West writes in his Introduction: “Whereas the American policy appears to have provided a measure of
protection to the living, being those suspected Soviet sources who were never
positively identified or confronted with the allegations, their British
partners seem to have adopted political embarrassment as their principal
criterion for eliminating sensitive names. The only other deliberate excision
in the declassified documents is the consistent removal throughout of all
references to the first date of circulation. Each VENONA text is marked with
the last, and therefore most recent, distribution, but it is impossible to
determine precisely when the first break in a particular message was achieved,
or to chart the subsequent program of the cryptographers.”
Overall, West’s statement is accurate, although
some decrypts (such as those on BARON) do reveal a series of release dates, and
others have had the issuance date deleted. Unfortunately, many of the critical
items related to HASP, such as the discovery of the X Group, have no release
dates at all, so it is impossible to determine how much of the messages had
been decrypted before the contribution of the HASP codewords – and code-book. Wright’s
seemingly authoritative view is that the project was suspended in the early
1950s, and then reactivated at the end of the decade, but the redacted (or
concealed) data on the issuance of new decrypts does allow us to create only a
very partial evolution of texts through time.
All
this information described by Wright appeared as original VENONA material when
described by West in Venona (pp 62-63), and it can clearly be traced by
studying the on-line archive. So why does Wright revert to ‘the HASP material
which related to Britain’? He appears to be going back to his initial position,
that HASP consisted of traffic intercepted by the Swedes. That might have reinforced
the idea that HASP was a motley set of messages that included local
Stockholm-Moscow GRU/KGB traffic as well as interceptions of wireless messages
between London and Moscow – and maybe more. Yet that scenario continues to look
unlikely. And if these reports were ‘routine’, presumably familiar through
VENONA messages already deciphered, why did Wright not say so?
J B S Haldane
Furthermore, he introduces Haldane and Montagu as if their appearance were no surprise, and not scandalous. Haldane’s cryptonym was INTELLECTUAL and Montague’s NOBILITY: when did Wright learn that? The appearance of these cryptonyms would not have been ‘routine’ if this was the first occurrence, and their identities were not known. In fact, it would have been a stunning discovery to learn that one of Britain’s most respected scientists was a named spy. The fact that they were dead was irrelevant – except when it came to GCHQ’s heightened protectiveness about references to hallowed public figures, and maybe to their survivors. Wright’s manner here is astonishingly casual.
It
does not help that Nigel West (pp 75-81) presents the discoveries about Group X
and Haldane as standard VENONA traffic without mentioning any contribution from
HASP. He confidently identifies INTELLIGENTSIA as J. B. S. Haldane, and
NOBILITY as the Honourable Ivor Montagu. After all, West’s understanding of
HASP was that it concerned Stockholm-Moscow traffic: he writes that the arrival
of HASP allowed the project to ‘be put back into gear’, but does not explain
how that happened. West provides a lot of useful and fascinating information
about Haldane’s background and activities, but (for example) sheds no light on
how the decryption of the codeword INTELLECTUAL took place.
Christopher
Andrew, however, is more explicit on this portion of the traffic, although he,
too, still does not mention HASP, and the description of it as ‘new’ VENONA is misleading
and unfortunate. “The main discovery from this new VENONA source was the
existence of a wartime GRU agent network in Britain codenamed the ‘X Group’,
which was active by, if not before, 1940. The identity of the leader of the
Group, or at least its chief contact with the GRU London residency, codenamed
INTELLIGENTSIA, was revealed in a decrypted telegram to Moscow on 25 July 1940
from his case officer as one of the CPGB’s wealthiest and most aristocratic
members . . .” Thereafter, Andrew rather surprisingly goes on to identify
INTELLIGENTSIA as Ivor Montagu, instead of ‘Montagu’s friend’, J. B. S. Haldane.
In an endnote (p 926, No 81), Andrew states that ‘West misidentifies NOBILITY as
Ivor Montagu and INTELLIGENTSIA as Haldane’, but provides no argument for this.
Certainly the meaning of the two cryptonyms would appear to suit West’s
interpretation better.
In
2012, Nigel West amplified his previous analysis in the Historical Dictionary
of Signals Intelligence, where he added further detail: “. . . this unexpected windfall consisted of 390
partially deciphered messages, exchanged with Moscow between December 1940 and
April 1446 [sic!]. The FRA had succeeded, as early as 1947, in reading a
few messages, and between 1957 and 1959, some 53 texts were broken out.
Information identifying individual Soviet spies had then been passed to the
Allmänna Säkerhetstjänsten (General Security Service), which conducted
investigations that effectively neutralized them without compromising the
source.”
Apart
from the vagueness of such terms as ‘broken out’ (does that mean complete
decryption?), such level of detail is impressive, and authoritative-sounding,
and West piled on the authenticity by naming eighty NKVD cryptonyms that
provided ‘depth’ to the VENONA cryptanalytical process, including names that
would carry import for the Washington and London operations, such as DORA, EDWARD,
FROST, GROMOV, and LEAF. West then
listed an even longer array of GRU codenames, nearly all unfamiliar to me. But
he did explain that, in August 1942, Lennart Katz ‘a source run by a contact
working under diplomatic cover named Scheptkov, was arrested’, and provided
further leads. It sounds as if West had access to insider information (Venona
provides an Acknowledgement to ‘Stefan Burgland and some others who prefer to
remain anonymous’), and that those arrested may have been able to provide insights
on the ciphers and codes used. Moscow, however, appeared not to have worked out
what was going on, and how so many of its spies had been detected.
[iv]
The extraordinary thing about the GRU traffic was the comparison with the
KGB traffic four years later. The GRU officers in 1940 and 1941 were clearly of
low caliber, demoralized and running around like headless chickens in the wake
of Stalin’s purges of the 1930s. By 1945 they had given way to a new breed of
professional Russian intelligence officers like Krotov. The entire
agent-running procedure was clearly highly-skilled and pragmatic. Great care
was being taken to protect agents for their long-term use. Where there seemed
poor discipline in the GRU procedures, by 1945 the traffic showed that control
was exerted from Moscow Center, and comparisons between KGB and Ambassadorial
channels demonstrated quite clearly the importance the KGB had inside the
Russian State. This, in a sense, was the most enduring legacy of the VENONA
break – the glimpse it gave us of the vast KGB machine, with networks all
across the West, ready for the Cold War as the West prepared for peace.”
This
section is mostly irrelevant to the quest. It is difficult to discern what
Wright is talking about when he does not provide samples of the messages. The
KGB’s operation in London was (we have been told by several experts) suspended
for nearly all of 1940, so the GRU was the only game in town. And these
‘headless chickens’ did manage to recruit Klaus Fuchs, and manage a ring of
useful scientists, such as Haldane. What he may have been alluding to was the
somewhat casual way that information was supplied in telegrams, but that would
have been more a case of insufficiently well trained officers, cipher clerks,
and wireless operators – which were evidently in short supply at the beginning
of the war – rather than the quality of
those who recruited and handled British agents. Kremer’s struggles with setting
up the alternative wireless link may be an example of what Wright was thinking
of.
Pp
238-239 “Lastly there was the
VENONA material – by far the most reliable intelligence of all on past
penetration of Western security. After Arthur [Martin] left I took over the
VENONA program, and commissioned yet another full-scale review of the material
to see if new leads could be gathered. This was to lead to the first D-3
generated case, ironically a French rather than a British one. The HASP GRU
material, dating from 1940 and 1941, contained a lot of information about
Soviet penetration of the various émigré and nationalist movements who made
their headquarters in London during the first years of the war. The Russians,
for instance, had a prime source in the heart of the Free Czechoslovakian
Intelligence Service, which ran its own networks in German-occupied Eastern
Europe via couriers. The Soviet source had the cryptonym Baron, and was
probably the Czech politician Sedlecek [sic], who later played a prominent role
in the Lucy Ring in Switzerland.”
Wright’s
restricting of the ‘HASP GRU material’ to 1940 and 1941 is provocative, not
solely because he now seems to be classifying HASP material as GRU messages
collected locally. Is the temporal phrase ‘dating from 1940 and 1941’ merely adding
chronology for the full scope of the material, or is it a qualifying phrase
that subdefines a portion of it? The parenthesis, separated by commas, suggests
to me the former, namely ‘the only GRU material that can properly be classified
as HASP is that of 1940 and 1941’. Yet we have no way of knowing what GRU
material had been attacked, and partially decrypted, before 1960, apart from
various clues provided by the ‘experts’.
The
rubric around the published VENONA messages is disappointingly vague. Yet there
appears to be some discernible order behind the numbering scheme. In my
analysis of the traffic between March 1940 and August 1941 (the last date in
that year for which a message from London to Moscow has been published), I
counted 137 L-to-M messages, with the first numbered (by the GRU) as No. 120,
and the last as No. 2311. Yet a countback to zero seemed to occur at the
beginning of each year. The last listed in December 1940 is No. 1424, while the
first listed for 1941, on January 16, is No. 83. Thus one might assume that
well over 4,000 messages were sent by the London station in those two years.
The
Moscow to London traffic is sparser, with only 18 messages listed. The last
calendar entry present for 1940 is from September 21, numbered as 482, so it would
appear that Moscow was not so active sending messages to London, although the
record would suggest that the combination of RSS (Radio Security Service) and
GC&CS was picking up far fewer inbound messages, both in aggregate and proportionately,
than it was outbound. But that could also be explained by a far smaller
proportion of inbound messages being (partially) decrypted, or even a larger
amount being for some reason concealed.
These
numbers correspond closely with what Andrew has written (see above), where he
refers to 178 messages between the period March 1940 and March 1942. Yet the
autumn/winter of 1941/42 was clearly a period where activity of some sort
(number of transmissions, number of interceptions, number of partial decryptions,
number of released decryptions!) declined rapidly, and this is such a
controversial aspect of the whole business that I shall return to it after
completing my analysis of Wright’s text.
As
for the remainder of this passage, the information, again, is not breathtaking,
but Wright, alongside his rather laid-back commentary on Sedlacek [sic],
does suggest by his comments that GCHQ had decrypted nothing on the
Czechoslovak agent before the HASP project came along. Sedlacek [BARON] was a
familiar figure in the VENONA traffic (see West, pp 67-69), and he played a dangerous
game spying for the Swiss, the Czechs, the Russians – and the British, who later
supplied him with a passport under the name of Simpson so that he could enter
Switzerland and contribute to the Lucy Ring. Again, Andrew differs in his
analysis of BARON, quoting (page 926, Note 82) an unnamed MI5 officer as
saying, in 1997, that no serious attempts had been made to identify him. Why
anyone would expect an MI5 (or MI6) officer to be open and straightforward
about such a controversial figure as Sedlacek (if indeed that was who he was)
is puzzling. Andrew attempts to reinforce his argument by noting that the NSA
regards BARON as unidentified, but interest in these local European matters is unsurprisingly
muted on that side of the Atlantic.
BARON
indeed figures prominently in these messages: he was potentially very useful to
Moscow as he was clearly passing on, in the run-up to Barbarossa, information
about German troop movements in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary, gained via
his contacts around Prague who were transmitting information to him via
Woldingham. I write ‘potentially’ because, of course, Stalin ignored all
intelligence about the German invasion as ‘provocation’.
P
374-375 [i] “There had recently been a small breakthrough in the existing
traffic which had given cause for hope. Geoffrey Sudbury was working on part of
the HASP material which had never been broken out. Advanced computer analysis
revealed that this particular traffic was not genuine VENONA. It did not appear
to have been enciphered using a one-time pad, and from the nonrandom
distribution of the groups, Sudbury hazarded a guess that it had been
enciphered using some kind of directory.
This,
again, is distressingly vague. By alluding to ‘HASP material that had never
been broken out’, Wright again gives the impression that HASP was a collection
of London-to-Moscow (or Moscow-to-London) communications. Why would Sudbury
work on native Swedish transmissions? Presumably, ‘genuine VENONA’ to Wright was
traffic that had become decipherable because the Soviets, under pressure,
disastrously re-used one of their one-time pads. Distributing fresh pads was an
enormous task in war-time, so the London-Moscow GRU link may have resorted to a
different system whereby page-numbers and word-numbers in a shared book were
used for encipherment schemes. Such a mechanism was essential for any
transmission activity by clandestine agents, where the problems of distribution
and security with one-time pads would have been insuperable. Leo Marks composed
easily memorable verses for use in the field by SOE agents: the GRU used
statistical almanacs for in-house use.
On
the surface, Wright’s description of Sudbury’s analysis would appear, however,
to be reinforced by the few accounts of GRU espionage that we have. A classical
description of the use of one-time pads has the original cleartext (the passage
in native language) immediately processed by a portion of the one-time pad,
normally the next page, which would then be destroyed. In many accounts of the
Soviet system (e.g. James Gannon’s Stealing Secrets, Telling Lies), that
was the only method. Yet some accounts indicate that the GRU used a different
process of encipherment. Benson’s in-house history of the NSA informs us that Igor
Gouzenko described the method during his interview by Frank Rowlett in October
1945, when he revealed the back-up system of using a shared reference book in
place of classical one-time pads. (Oddly, in his CIA report, Cecil Phillips,
who assisted Nigel West in his researches, elides over this aspect of
Gouzenko’s contribution.) In Appendix A to his 1949 book, Handbook for Spies,
Alexander Foote (the Briton who was trained by SONIA as a wireless operator for
the GRU in Switzerland) explains how a keyword of six letters, ‘changed at
intervals by the Centre’ (and thus presumably communicated in later messages)
was first used to translate the letters of the alphabet into a set of apparently
meaningless numbers. Further manipulation transformed the text into five-figure
groups – not yet a very secure encipherment.
Then
came the ‘one-time’ aspect of the GRU’s process – but it was not through the
use of a ‘pad’. Messages were then further processed by a function known as
‘closing’. Foote explained that, after the first stage of encipherment, he had
to ‘close’ the message ‘by re-enciphering it against the selected portion of
the “code book”’. (This ‘code-book, or ‘dictionary’ is a different entity from
the ‘codebook’ that contained numeric representations of common terms.) This
was a mechanism whereby a passage in a book owned by both parties was referred
to by page and line number in order to identify a sequence of characters to be
used to encipher a text one stage further. Max Clausen used a similar technique
when enciphering for Richard Sorge, another GRU agent, in Japan. Foote said that
he used ‘a Swiss book of trade statistics’: David Kahn writes that Clausen used the 1935
edition of the Statistiches Jahrbuch für das deutsche Reich. Thus, for
the GRU, the one-time pad was not a miniature printed guide that could be
easily destroyed, but an accessible but otherwise anonymous volume that could
be used by both ends of the communication. (Christopher Andrew’s claim that the
Stockholm residency and the London residency employed the same one-time pads is
thus probably not true: they almost certainly used the same – or a similar – reference
work, however.) Sudbury had indeed hit upon the truth, and a directory was at
work. This is what must be meant by ‘not genuine VENONA’.
What
should also be recorded on this topic is the claim that Richard V. Hall makes
in his ineptly titled but engrossing study of Wright and the Spycatcher
trial, A Spy’s Revenge, that Wright acted as a ghost writer on Handbook
for Spies. Since Wright was still working at the Admiralty Research Station
in 1949, and did not join MI5 until 1955, this claim should be viewed
circumspectly. If true, Wright’s apparent unawareness, in 1970, of GRU
enciphering techniques is even more inexcusable.
[ii]
We began the search in the British Library, and eventually found a book of
trade statistics from the 1930s which fitted.
At
first glance, this represents an enormous leap of faith. From ‘some kind of
directory’ to stumbling on a book of trade statistics, with the implication
that many others had been tested and found wanting first? Can it really be
believed? That that is how the process worked, and that cryptologists would
stumble on the right book? They must surely have been able to exploit a message
that described the volume to be used, or gained a tip from someone. Suddenly,
Alexander Foote’s hint of a ‘Swiss book of trade statistics’ takes on new
significance. Wright echoes Foote’s words almost completely. Foote had died in
1956 (somewhat mysteriously: I am sure that Moscow’s ‘Special Tasks’ team was
after him), but was surely interviewed on these matters at length by MI5 and
GCHQ before he died.
Thus
the dominant reaction should be: why on earth were Sudbury and Wright not
familiar with Foote’s publication? It seems quite possible that they arrived at
this conclusion by other means – namely what the Petrovs told them, and how
Vladimir’s overall cryptological skills and knowledge, and particularly
Yevdokia’s experiences as a NKVD cipher-clerk in Stockholm, benefitted the FRA,
and in turn helped GCHQ. Yevdokia had worked for the GRU in her first eighteen
months with OGPU, so she may have had some insight into its coding techniques.
After
their post-war assignment in Stockholm, Vladimir Petrov and his wife had
arrived in Australia in 1951, and decided to defect in 1954. Nigel West writes
that Evdokia ‘was debriefed by western intelligence personnel, among them MI5’s
George Leggett, who travelled to Australia after the couple had been resettled
on their chicken-farm . . .’ Yet what Evdokia told them has not been disclosed.
Was she responsible for GRU coding and encipherment, as well as that of the
NKVD/MGB/KGB? Almost certainly not, but if so, she might have been able to
inform the Swedes of such items as the name of the code-book (dictionary) used,
and they thus were able to make some progress on the texts they had stored
before the British did anything. If she had no involvement with the GRU, she
might have been able to indicate the type of research volume that was used, and
repeated efforts by Sudbury on the few relevant books of trade statistics in
the British Library must have eventually borne fruit. Wright’s claim becomes
clearer. It looks, however, as if the Swedes kept their project to themselves
until 1959, when, for some reason, an informal link must have been elevated to
an official communication.
[iii] Overnight a huge chunk of HASP traffic was
broken. The GRU traffic was similar to much that we had already broken. But
there was one set of messages which was invaluable. The messages were sent from
the GRU resident Simon Kremer to Moscow Center, and described his meetings with
the GRU spy runner, Sonia, alias Ruth Kuzchinski [sic].
This
is very dramatic – ‘overnight’, but, again, Wright dissembles and confuses. If
the traffic was suddenly ‘broken’, he suggests that ‘HASP’ was in the hands of
GCHQ already, but in a poor state of decryption. Now, HASP appears to mean ‘GRU traffic
derived from both Stockholm and London’. But why next characterise it as ‘the
GRU traffic’ – what else could it be? And what does ‘similar to’ mean? Were
they the same messages, enciphered differently? Was there really nothing new in
them worth recording? And his reference to ‘one set of messages’ is also
ambiguous. He gives the impression that this was a new trove of London-Moscow
traffic supplied by the Swedes, when we now know that that cannot be true.
Certainly,
one meeting between Sonia and her handler is recorded in the VENONA
transcripts, dated July 31, 1941. The full item appears as follows:
“From
London to Moscow: No.2043, 31 July 1941
IRIS
had meeting with SONIA on July 30. Sonia reported (15 groups unrecovered):
Salary
for 7 months: 406
John: 195
??
from abroad: 116
Expenditure
on apparatus (radio and microdots): 105
??
Expenditure: 55
She
played [broadcast] on 26, 27, 28 and 29 July at 2400, 0100, 0200 hours . . . but did not receive you. BRION
(Comments
by translator: IRIS probably a woman, IRIS means either the flower, or a kind
of toffee. Unlikely choice for covername. JOHN probably Leon BUERTON [sic]
BRION probably SHVETSOV, Assistant Military Attaché.)”
Yet
the handler here is not Kremer: IRIS is probably Leo Aptekar, a GRU officer
registered as a chauffeur at the Embassy. The annotation here about BRION is
wrong: BRION has been confidently identified in the Vassiliev Notebooks as
Colonel Sklyarov, for whom Kremer worked. Wright (and the VENONA website)
identify Kremer as the rezident, i.e. senior GRU officer in London, but
that does not appear to be the case. In Venona (1999), Nigel West
described Kremer as being Sklyarov’s secretary, but in his 2014 HistoricalDictionary of British Intelligence, West declares that the position was
a cover for his ‘residency’, citing Krivitsky’s warning about him from 1940.
Gary Kern (the biographer of Krivitsky) reflects, however, on the fact that
others claim that Sklyarov was the boss. My analysis suggest that Sklyarov may
have been brought in because Kremer was struggling, and Kremer then probably
reported to Sklyarov after the latter arrived in October 1940. After all,
Kremer turned out to be an unsuccessful cut-out for Fuchs, a role he would have
hardly attempted had he been head-of-station. This is Pincher’s conclusion,
too.
Sandor Rado (DORA) & I. A. Sklyarov (BRION)
One of the irritating aspects of the Venona archive, as published, is that identification of codenames switches from page to page, and the identification of BRION is one such casualty, with the annotators not being able to make up their minds between Sklyarov and Shvetsov. Vladimir Lota, in his ‘Sekretny Front General’novo Shtaba’ (Moscow 2005), confirms that BRION was Sklyarov, and offers a photograph of the officer (see above). West selects one VENONA annotator’s analysis that the reporting officer was Shvetsov, but informs us that Shvetsov died in an air accident in 1942. (The source of this is not clear. The Petrovs record that the family of an unnamed London military attaché died in transit from Aberdeen to Stockholm in 1943, when the plane was shot down over Swedish territory by German aircraft, but suggest that the attaché himself was not on board. See Yuri and Evdokia Petrov’s Empire of Fear, p 165).
As
for Kremer, Mike Rossiter, the author of a biography of Klaus Fuchs, writes
that he returned to Moscow in 1941, while West indicates that he remained in
London throughout the war. Thus it is quite possible that Kremer composed
reports on Sklyarov’s behalf, although his role had hitherto been as a courier.
It was he who met Fuchs in August 1941, and he was Fuchs’s courier until the
latter found he could not work with him, whereupon Fuchs was handed over to
Sonia in the late summer of 1942. Kremer was also handling members of the X
Group, so it seems unlikely that, at the same time that Kremer was regularly
meeting Fuchs, he would also be meeting Sonia frequently, and then writing up
the reports for Moscow.
The
VENONA London GRU Traffic archive informs us that Kremer [BARCh] ‘was appointed in 1937 and is thought
to have left sometime in 1946. The covername BARCh occurs as a LONDON addressee
and signatory between 3rd March 1940 and XXth October 1940, after which it is
superseded by the covername BRION.’ (This analysis relies on the surviving
VENONA traffic only, of course.) BRION first appears as a signatory or
addressee on October 11, 1940. Thus the HASP traffic might provide evidence
that Kremer was still active, as courier or signatory, or both, or,
alternatively, the VENONA records might throw doubt on Wright’s claims about
HASP. All three officers (Kremer, Sklyarov, Shvetsov) were active in London on
June 7, 1941, as they are all cited as donating part of their salaries to the
Soviet government.
The
bottom line on Wright’s observations is that we are faced with another paradox.
Apart from the fact that no trace of the ‘set of messages’ exists (why not, if
they were solved overnight?), the association of Kremer with Sonia is very
flimsy. The instance above is the sole surviving message in the VENONA archive
that mentions SONIA. Wright’s account would imply the following: Apparently out
of frustration with the fact that her transmissions received no response from
Moscow, Sonia managed to contact the Embassy, and to meet her handler within a
day or so. Sklyarov reported this event. At some stage afterwards, she was
transferred to Kremer, who, apart from handling Fuchs, now had occasion to meet
Sonia several times, and to make reports that he signed and sent himself. Yet
the official archive informs us that Kremer stopped signing messages himself
before Sonia even arrived in the United Kingdom.
What is also noteworthy is that Wright makes no comment about Sonia’s ability to escape radio detection-finding at this stage. If Sonia, as Kremer had recorded, had been transmitting for four successive nights, and had not been detected by RSS, one might have expected him, as a senior MI5 officer, to have reflected, at least, on her success in remaining undetected. He appears, at this stage, not to subscribe to the Chapman Pincher theory that Roger Hollis was able to interfere in the process; neither does he show any awareness that the proximity of Sonia’s home near Kidlington Airport might have masked her transmissions – which would admittedly have been a remarkable insight for that time. (It is probable that Sonia, and her husband, Len Beurton, adopted call-signs and preambles that made their traffic look, superficially, like British military signals, and that, should any remote direction-finding have taken place, the traffic’s origins would have been assumed to have been Kidlington airport itself.)
[iv]
The Sonia connection had been dismissed throughout the 1960s as too tenuous
to be relied upon. MI5 tended to believe the story that she came to Britain to
escape Nazism and the war, and that she did not become active for Russian
Intelligence until Klaus Fuchs volunteered his services in 1944.
Apart
from an evasive non sequitur (the connection was held to be tenuous, but
MI5 accepted that Sonia became active with Fuchs in 1944, a very solid
interrelation), Wright enters dangerous territory here, with a vague and
undated summary of what ‘MI5 tended to believe’. Fuchs, of course, volunteered
his services in 1941, not 1944, and was in the United States throughout all of
1944. Yet Wright’s lapsus calami may reveal a deeper discomfort, in that
he utterly misrepresents the pattern of events. According to the archives, after
Alexander Foote had spilled the beans on Sonia’s activities in 1947, MI5 strongly
suspected that Sonia had been working for the GRU in the UK. They were ready (or
pretended to be so) to haul her in for questioning on the Fuchs case as early
as February, 1950, before his trial was even over, apparently unaware that she
had already fled the country! (The service probably connived at her speedy
escape.) The Fuchs archive at Kew shows that in November 1950, and again in
December, Fuchs, from prison, viewed photographs and recognized Sonia as his
second contact. Wright was either hopelessly uninformed, or acting completely
disingenuously.
[v]
In particular GCHQ denied vehemently that Sonia could have been broadcasting
her only radio messages from her home near Oxford during the period between
1941 and 1943.
But Kremer’s messages utterly
destroyed the established beliefs. They showed that Sonia had indeed been sent
to the Oxford area by Russian Intelligence, and that during 1941 she was
already running a string of agents. The traffic even contained the details of
the payments she was making to these agents, as well as the time and durations
of her own radio broadcasts. I thought bitterly of the way this new information
might have influenced Hollis’ interrogation had we had the material in 1969.
The
statement attributed to GCHQ, if it indeed was made – and Wright provides no
reference – needs parsing very carefully. We should bear in mind that no GCHQ
spokesperson may have uttered these words, or that, if someone did state
something approximating their meaning, Wright may have misremembered them. He
provides no reference, no date, no name for the speaker.
First
of all, Sonia’s home. She had, in fact at least four residences during this
period, but, if we restrict her domiciles to those where she lived after she
became active, probably in June 1941, we have Kidlington (from that June) and
Summertown (from August 1942). Summertown was in Oxford, not near it.
Thus a reference to ‘her home’ expresses lack of familiarity with the facts.
‘Only radio messages’ is perplexing. Does it mean ‘only those radio messages
sent from her home?’, thus suggesting she could have sent messages from
elsewhere? Maybe, but perhaps it was just a clumsy insertion by Wright. The
omniscience that lies behind the denial, however, expresses a confidence that cannot
be borne out by the facts.
It
would have been less controversial for GCHQ simply to make the claim that no
unidentifiable illicit broadcasts had been detected, and that Sonia must
therefore have been inactive. But it did not. It introduced a level of
specificity that undermined its case. It suggested that Sonia might have been
broadcasting, but not from her home. If Sonia had been using her set, and
followed the practices of the most astute SOE agents in Europe (who never
transmitted from the same location twice – quite a considerable feat when
porting a heavy apparatus, and re-setting up the antenna), she would likewise
have moved around.
For
GCHQ to be able to deny that Sonia had been able to broadcast would mean that it
had 100% confidence that RSS had been able to detect all illicit traffic
originating in the area, and that, furthermore, they knew the
co-ordinates of Sonia’s residence at that time. Thus the following steps would
have had to be taken:
All illicit or suspicious
wireless broadcasts had been detected by RSS;
All those
that could not have been accounted for were investigated;
Successful triangulation (direction-finding)
of all such signals had taken place to localise the source;
Mobile location-finding units had been
sent out to investigate all transgressions;
Such units found that all the
illicit stations were still broadcasting (on the same wave-length and with the
identical callsign, presumably);
All the
offending transmitters were detected, and none was found to be Sonia’s.
Apart
from the fact that transmissions from Kidlington were masked by proximity to the
airport, and Sonia’s traffic concealed to resemble military messages, GCHQ’s
assertion requires an impossible set of circumstances: that, if and when Sonia had
broadcast, the location of the transmitter would have been known immediately,
and the RSS would have been able to conclude that the signals could not be coming from Sonia’s
residence. That was not possible. No country’s technology at that time allowed
instant identification of the precise location of a transmission. Not even
groundwave detection was reliable enough to ‘pin-point’ the source of a signal
to the geography of a city, even. Reports and transcriptions of suspicious
messages were mailed by Voluntary Interceptors to the RSS HQ at Arkley
View, in Barnet! Sonia would have had to broadcast for over twenty-four hours
in one session to be detected by a mobile unit operating at peak efficiency,
supported by rapid decisions (which was never the case). GCHQ might have
claimed to Wright that no illicit transmissions originated from the Oxford
area, and therefore they could discount Sonia’s apparatus (if they knew she had
one.) Yet, again, that would require RSS to have deployed radio
direction-finding technology in order to locate the transmitter, and Sonia
would surely have stopped broadcasting by then.
Thus
GCHQ’s claim is logically null and void. If Sonia made only one transmission,
from her home or anywhere else, she would never have been detected. If she made
more than one, from the same location, she would (according to the RSS’s reported
procedures) inevitably have been detected, interdicted, and prosecuted. And
GCHQ’s claim that she made no transmissions is clearly false, as she did
transmit from the semi-concealed site at Kidlington, which was apparently never
picked up. (After the war, she broadcast from her next home, The Firs at Great
Rollright, as Bob King of RSS has confirmed, but these events are strictly
outside the scope of GCHQ’s claim here.)
Moreover,
GCHQ (actually named Government Code & Cypher School, or GC&CS, during
the war) was not responsible for intercepting illicit transmissions in
1941-1943: that was the responsibility of RSS, which reported to SIS. GCHQ took
over RSS after the war. Institutional memory may be at fault.
Ironically,
Wright then undermines the GCHQ statement as an unfounded ‘belief’, as if it
were a vague hope rather than a matter of strict execution of policy. Thus,
either Wright drills a large hole in the track-record of GCHQ’s inviolability,
or his claims about Kremer’s reporting of ‘the times and durations’ of Sonia’s
own broadcasts lack any substance – or a mixture of both, since, irrespective
of Sonia, RSS may not have been perfect in its mission of pursuing all illicit
broadcasts, as we know from its own files. And we also know from the VENONA
transcripts that Sonia tried to contact Moscow on successive nights in July 1941,
from Kidlington. Since RSS apparently did not detect any of these
transmissions, GCHQ’s boasts of omniscience are flawed. Wright’s lack of
expressed astonishment at the inefficiency of RSS is again a remarkable
reaction. Moreover, why would Kremer report on such details of her
transmissions, if she was successfully in touch with Moscow already? It was one
thing to report her failure to get through, but these claims appear
superfluous, even absurd.
How
we treat this claim about Kremer’s reports on Sonia’s broadcasts depends very
much on how reliable a witness one views Wright by now. As Denis Lenihan has
pointed out to me, what Wright asserts contains so much fresh information that
his claims should be taken seriously. On the other hand, I would say that the Kremer
telegrams are simply too implausible to be considered as valuable evidence.
That Sonia would have had a ‘string of agents’ by 1941, that they would need to
be paid, that Kremer would consider it necessary to report to Moscow the
details of recent successful transmissions she had made to Moscow, even the
role of Kremer himself in meetings and handling Sonia, fail to pass the
authenticity test with this particular analyst. West and Pincher apparently
agree with me. West relegates the item to an endnote on page 70. Pincher
ignores the whole matter: there is no mention of HASP in his Index to Treachery.
Lastly,
we have to deal with the final claims. It would be very unlikely for a wireless
message, sent to Moscow in 1941, to provide the information that Russian
intelligence had specifically sent Sonia to the Oxford area, although that
might be a reasonable conclusion for Wright to make. In addition, the claim
that Sonia had rapidly acquired a ‘string’ of agents, and was seeking expenses
for payments that she was making to these mercenaries, is very improbable.
Where and how she acquired them is not stated, but any contact who might have
been providing information to Sonia informally would have probably jumped with
alarm if Sonia had suggested that he or she should be paid for such
indiscretions. Even Sonia herself, in her memoir, stated that the informants
she nurtured provided her with confidential information out of principle, not
for payment.
Yet
the most awkward part of this testimony is the declaration that MI5 did not
have this evidence in 1969, when (so Wright claims) it might have helped with a
more successful interrogation of Hollis. Wright explicitly indicates that the
discovery occurred in 1970, or later. The critical discoveries that were made
in the decryption of reference book-based random numbers for the process of
‘closing’ were revealed, however, in the 1960s. The VENONA records show that
GCHQ tried to censor a series of the Moscow-Stockholm GRU traffic for the
Version 5 release of the decrypts, and that the Swedes had to restore the
excised passages in Version 6. I have studied all these messages: a few appear
to have no relevance to British affairs at all, but several do specifically
relate to the use of commonly owned books (knigi), and even identify the
titles of the volumes. All these messages have an issue date in the mid-1960s.
We
thus come to the conclusion that GCHQ and MI5 had four opportunities to learn
of the use of a common book to be used by agents and clandestine embassy
wireless when it was too dangerous to try to deploy conventional one-time pads:
Gouzenko’s revelations in 1945; Foote’s disclosures in his memoir of 1949; the
descriptions gained from questioning the Petrovs in 1954/55; and the
experiences of the Swedish FRA when they handed over their decrypts in 1960.
Practically all the final decryption work on GRU London-Moscow messages that
was possible was completed during the 1960s, yet Wright tries to pass off the
breakthrough by Sudbury, and the serendipity location of the directory in the
British Library, as occurring in the 1970s.
[vi]
Once this was known I felt more sure than ever that Elli did exist, and that he
was run by Sonia from Oxford, and that the secret of his identity lay in her
transmissions, which inexplicably had been lost all those years before. The
only hope was to travel the world and search for any sign that her traffic had
been taken elsewhere.
Over
the four years from 1972 to 1976 I traveled 370,000 kilometers searching for
new VENONA and Sonia’s transmissions. In France, SDECE told me they had no
material, even though Marcel told me he was sure they had taken it. Presumably
one of the Sapphire agents had long since destroyed it. In Germany they professed
total ignorance. It was the same in Italy. Spain refused to entertain the
request until we handed back Gibraltar. I spent months toiling around telegraph
offices in Canada searching for traces of the telex links out there. But there
was nothing. In Washington, extensive searches also drew a blank. It was
heart-breaking to know that what I wanted had onceexisted,
had once been filed and stored, but had somehow slipped through our fingers.”
This,
again, is a very controversial statement. Wright refers to ‘Sonia’s
transmissions, which inexplicably had been lost all those years before’. Yet
mentions of Sonia’s transmissions have never surfaced until now: the
HASP exercise concerned the GRU’s alluding to such messages. Wright has given
no indication that any of Sonia’s transmissions had been intercepted, and he even
cites GCHQ as saying she could not have operated her wireless set undetected. So,
if they never existed, they never could have been lost. Moreover, the records
of Kremer’s supposed transmission(s) have also been lost. Wright may have
wished that he had them in time to interrogate Hollis, but he cannot even
present them after 1970, when it was too late!
Thus
an astounding aspect of Wright’s testimony is his apparent lack of curiosity in
determining what happened to the missing messages. He does not investigate what
policy might have led to these last sets of decrypted traffic to be buried or
destroyed. Surely his named colleague Sudbury and his fellow-cryptologists must
have kept some copies of these vital messages, or at least have some recall as
to what happened to them? Yet Wright does not undertake a search domestically
first, or invoke his associates’ help in establishing the truth, and hunting
the transcripts down. He ventures no opinion on the fact of their possibly
being destroyed, but simply looks overseas.
Maybe
there was a glimpse of hope that other countries might provide further VENONA
nuggets, but, since we now know that the Stockholm operation concerned local
traffic only, the quest seems very futile. And why ‘telex offices’? Why Wright
expected further evidence of Sonia’s transmissions to come to light in
telegraph offices around the world is astonishing. In the United Kingdom,
Sonia’s messages were illicit, and subject to surveillance, with Voluntary
Interceptors dispersed around the country to pick up the ground-wave from
suspicious transmissions. If, by any chance, her messages were noticed anywhere
else, amongst all the other radio noise, it would have been remarkable for any
institution, public or private, to have dwelled upon them long enough to
transcribe and store them. And if GCHQ (RSS) was never able to detect them, why
on earth would Wright expect some foreign entity to be able to do so?
In
addition, the question was not whether ELLI existed or not, but who ELLI was,
and how significant a player he or she had been, and when he or she had been
active. If this is the piece that clinches the argument for the case that
Hollis was ELLI, it stands on very unsolid ground. Exactly what the link was
between Sonia’s ability to maintain a string of agents and the existence of
ELLI is not made clear by Wright. Did Wright really believe that he would have
been able successfully to confront Hollis with the transcripts of Sonia’s
messages to Moscow, and challenge him on the grounds that he had been able to
prevent superior officers in MI5, RSS and GCHQ from performing their jobs?
It
all echoes the laborious claims made by Chapman Pincher that the only way that
Sonia could have hoodwinked MI5, RSS and GCHQ so that they all turned a blind
eye to her shenanigans was through the existence of an intriguer in the middle
ranks of MI5 who was so devious that he could entice his colleagues to ignore
the basic tenets of their mission. Presumably it was ELLI who, instead of
warning Sonia that it might be dangerous for her to persist in her illicit
transmissions from one single geographic location, somehow convinced RSS that
its procedures could be put in abeyance, and the signals ignored, and,
moreover, that corporate memory allowed this oversight to become enshrined in
official statements of policy within GCHQ after the war.
The
Remaining Questions
Two
crucial questions arise out of all this analysis:
What
happened to the missing messages?
Why
did Wright mangle the story so much?
So
much evidence conspires to inform us that what has been released to the archive
of London-Moscow GRU traffic is only a small fraction of what was actually
transmitted. The period of intensity is July 1940 to August 1941, followed by
scattered fragments into early 1942, and a vast gulf until the end of the war,
in 1945. The sequential telegram numbers tell us that less than 2% of the
messages in 1940 and 1941 have been published. We have no idea how busy the
communication link was during the next three years. We must therefore consider
two separate sub-questions: i) given the ‘overnight breakthrough’ described by
Wright, why were more messages in the 1940-1941 period not decrypted?, and ii)
why was there a drought from the winter of 1941-1942 onwards?
The
first sub-question cannot be answered by external analysis, as we do not know
whether all messages were intercepted, which of these succumbed to even partial
decryption, and which then remained classified because of issues of sensitivity
or confidentiality. I do point out, however, that the official US VENONA
website informs us that GCHQ did not hand over to the USA 159 of the GRU
messages (i.e. close to the number I highlighted earlier) until 1996 – after
the general disclosure of the VENONA project, indicating a high measure of
discomfort about the disclosures (such as the Group X information).
What
is also significant is that, having been passed decrypts from the Swedish authorities,
GCHQ actually removed sections of the translated text before passing them on
(in Version 5) to the Americans, with the result that the Swedes had to restore
(in Version 6) the excisions GCHQ had made. Thus many messages in the VENONA
archive include the puzzling rubric in their headings: “A more complete version
of British Government-excised messages previously released in fifth VENONA
release on 1 Oct 1996.” These revelations would seem to prove the case that the
Swedes had made partial decryptions of their local GRU traffic, that they send
these translations alongside the original messages, to GCHQ. It does not
explain why GCHQ thought it was its business to edit them before passing them
on to the NSA, especially if they also passed back their treatments to the
Swedes at the same time. A close
analysis of all the relevant changes in Version 5 and Version 6 would be
desirable. As I have indicated earlier, many of them have to do with the
disclosures about shared reference volumes.
The
Drought of 1942-1944
The
second sub-question lays itself open to deeper inspection, because of the
availability of other sources. On the matter of the missing messages, we need
to judge:
Did
they not exist?
Did
they exist, but were never intercepted?
Were
they intercepted, but never stored?
Were
they stored, but subsequently lost?
Were
they discovered, but not decrypted (even partially)?
Were
they decrypted, but then not released?
The
first issue is especially fascinating, partly because of Alexander Foote’s experience
(or, at least, how he reported it). In October 1941, the Germans were at the
gates of Moscow, and the vast majority of Moscow’s government apparatus was
moved to Kuibyshev (now Samara), over a thousand kilometres to the east. In his
testimony to MI5 in 1947, Foote told his interviewers that, working out of
Switzerland, he lost contact with his controllers in Moscow in the middle of
October, and, a few days later, even cabled Brigitte (Sonia’s sister) in London
to determine what had happened. He then claimed that contact was not restored
until March 1942, when he resumed his broadcasts. (This is all in Handbook
for Spies, as well.)
Yet
the existence of this forced hiatus is belied on at least two fronts. The TICOM
(Target Intelligence Committee) archive indicates that Foote reported regularly
during those winter months. Moreover, his boss, Alexander Radó (DORA) was using
either Foote or another operator to communicate regularly with Moscow, as his
memoir Codename Dora describes, with frequent messages about German
troop movements. Radó echoes Foote’s story about the interruption, but states
that it was on October 29 that he sent a desperate message to Moscow Centre.
Contact was resumed at the end of November or the beginning of December, and
all dated messages from October (the texts of which appear in Radó’s book) were
re-transmitted. A telling detail indicates that Foote indeed was the chief
wireless operator at this time: a TICOM interception shows that he reported on
the source LOUISE from Berlin on December 3, and a related message listed by
Radó of December 9 similarly reported on LUISE’s intelligence from Berlin. It
could well be that Foote’s claim about radio silence was inserted by his
ghost-writer at MI5, Courtenay Young – but why?
Radó’s
telegrams are confirmed by Lota, who transcribes several of Radó’s messages
from this period, and even includes photographs of a few from 1942. A
satisfying match can be made between a telegram received on November 27, 1941 (Lota’s
Document No. 37, on page 353), and Radó’s original message created on October
27 (p 76 of Codename Dora), confirming the delay before ‘Moscow’
returned to the air, and, incidentally, discrediting Foote’s account. Thus one
might have expected a similar interruption to have occurred in London. Ivan
Maisky, the Soviet Ambassador, tells us otherwise, however. Molotov remained in
Moscow, and informed Maisky by telegram on October 17th that ‘most
of the government departments and the diplomatic corps’ had left for Kuibyshev.
This date, and the fact of the almost total evacuation of the Soviet
government, are confirmed by other memoirs, such as Tokaev’s and those of the
Petrovs. Maisky does not tell exactly when communications were re-established,
but hints it was after only a few days, and he was then able to resume full
contact. Thus he would have been able to pass on to the GRU officers inside his
embassy what was happening, and they would not have made futile attempts to
contact their bosses. Maybe, after a month, however, the watchers got tired of
waiting for something to happen, and dropped their guard?
Then
there is the ‘government policy’ theory. In Defending the Realm (p 376),
Christopher Andrew, following up his comments about British government approval
of Soviet use on ‘set frequencies’ (see above), writes: ”These radio messages
were initially intercepted and recorded in the hope that they could eventually
be decrypted, but interception (save for that of GRU traffic, which continued
until April 1942) ceased in August 1941 because of the need to concentrate
resources on the production of ULTRA intelligence based on the decryption of
Enigma and other high-grade enemy ciphers. Interception of Soviet traffic did
not resume until June 1945.”
This
must be partially true. Yet Andrew shows a remarkable disdain for the facts in
his endnote to this section, where he adds: “Since the intermittent Soviet
reuse of one-time pads, the basis of the VENONA breakthrough, did not begin
until several months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June
1941, the messages intercepted and recorded up to August 1941 proved of little
post-war value to GCHQ.” Au contraire, maestro! There was practically
nothing that was useful that occurred after August 1941, as Andrew
himself records a few pages later, when he describes the disclosure of Haldane
and the X Group, from July 1940. Moreover, Andrew does not explain why
interception of GRU traffic continued for so long, or what happened to the
messages stored. The VENONA GRU files show only two messages from 1942, both
fragments, from January 19 (London to Moscow) and April 25 (Moscow to London).
Whether
resources had to deployed elsewhere is a dubious assertion, too. Much has been
made of the famous Footnote supplied by Professor Hinsley, on page 199 of
Volume 1 of British Intelligence in the Second World War, where he wrote
that ‘all work on Russian codes and cyphers was stopped from 22 June 1941’,
variously attributed to Churchill himself or the Y Board. The Foreign Office had promptly followed up
the Y Board’s edict by forbidding MI5 to bug the Soviet Embassy, or to attempt
to plant spies inside the premises, but was apparently more relaxed about the
activities of MI6 and GC&CS, which nominally reported to the Foreign
Office. While it may have taken a while for the policy statement to seep
through, we should note that the edict said nothing about stopping the interception
and storing of messages.
Robert
Benson’s in-house history of the NSA (of which a key chapter is available on
the Web) contains far more direct quotations from British authorities, such as
Tiltman, Dill, Marychurch and Menzies, than can be found (as far as I know)
from British histories. It reinforces the message that interception of Soviet
traffic fairly rapidly tailed off towards the end of 1942, and that, during
1943 and 1944 any messages that had been stored were actually destroyed, to the
later chagrin of intelligence officers. But that was what the alliance with the
Soviet Union meant: a severe diminution in attempts to exploit Soviet
intelligence, and that pattern was echoed in the USA. Since, at that time, no progress
had been made on deciphering Russian traffic, it may have made little
difference. One might also point out that, unless RSS intercepted all traffic,
and inspected it, they would not know which was GRU and which was not, which
makes Andrew’s already puzzling claim about the extension for GRU until April
1942 even more problematic, unless RSS knew that the secondary clandestine line
was for GRU traffic only. Moreover, Andrew does not present Hinsley’s argument
as a reason for the cessation.
‘HASP’ Annotation to Soviet Messages Detected in 1942
Certainly the Soviet Embassy was watched, and traffic was being monitored closely in March and April 1942. As I write, I have in front of me (see photograph above) the page from the RSS file HW 34/23, which shows a set of daily messages intercepted from March 16 to April 16, with callsigns, that changed each day, also listed. Very provocatively, the word ‘HASP’ has been written in opposite the April 7 entry, in what appears to be an annotation of May 1, 1973, and on the following page appears ‘from Maisky to Cadogan April 1942’, as if Maisky had perhaps had to explain himself to the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office. (One cannot be certain that the annotation ‘HASP’ refers exclusively to the April 7 entry, or whether its serves as a general descriptor. If the latter, it would appear that, in 1973, the observer recognized this set of traffic, coming from the back-up GRU transmitter, as generic HASP material, but it does not explain how he or she reached that conclusion.) Other sheets suggest the surveillance went on into 1943. Yet all the evidence seems to point to the fact that, because of the signals being received from the Y Board and the Foreign Office, and the volumes of Nazi traffic to inspect, traffic from the clandestine line was either ignored, or simply piled up unused, and was discarded. Moreover, it was remarkably late for Wright (or whoever was the annotator) to be making, in 1973, a link between the HASP material of 1959 and the RSS files of 1943.
Nevertheless,
a completely new project to monitor Soviet traffic was started at the beginning
of 1943. After Commander Denniston had been replaced by Travis as the head of
GC&CS in January 1942, he moved to London to set up a team that would begin
to inspect and attempt to decipher Soviet diplomatic messages. This became
known as the ISCOT project, after its key contributor Bernard Scott (né
Schultz), and it led to the discovery of a rich set of ‘Comintern’ messages
between the Soviet Union and its satellite guerrilla operations, after Stalin
had supposedly closed down that organisation. Denniston was also involved in
direction-finding the illicit traffic of 1942 to the Soviet Embassy. Thus, even
if GRU/NKVD messages classified later as VENONA were ignored, it could hardly
have been because of scarcity of resources. In addition, Andrew never explains
why interception suddenly picked up successfully again in June 1945, and why
RSS/GCHQ had no trouble finding the frequencies and call-signs used by the GRU.
A
tantalising aspect of this whole investigation is the lack of overlap between
published records of the GRU, and interceptions stored as part of the VENONA
program. Verifiable records taken from Soviet archives are very thin on the
ground, and we should be very wary of claims that are made of privileged
access. Lota’s book (mentioned above) is a valuable source, containing multiple
texts, and even photographs. It concentrates very much on military matters,
especially concerning the movements of Nazi forces in the Soviet Union, and
thus does not touch the early aspirations of the ENORMOZ (atomic weapons
research) project. The familiar name of Sklyarov (BRION) appears quite
frequently, but the first example of his telegrams is dated September 23, 1941
(Document No. 25). The VENONA sample of intercepted GRU messages from London
(visible at https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/article/Venona-London-GRU.pdf
) shows regular communications from BRION up to August 28, 1941, followed by a
sprinkling of fragments up to March 1942, and then a long hiatus until 1945.
Lota’s coverage thus overlaps in time, but I can see no messages that appear in
both accounts.
Lastly,
I must include the maybe very significant possibility that the rival channel
set up in the London Embassy was not taken seriously enough. The official
VENONA USA website offers (in ‘The Venona Story’) a very provocative paragraph,
which runs as follows:
“Hundreds
of GRU New York messages remain unsolved. The loss to history in the record of
the GRU in Washington is particularly noticed. Of the several thousand
Washington messages from 1941 to 1945, only about fifty were decrypted, in
spite of the best efforts of the United States and the United Kingdom. Unlike
the New York GRU messages, where translations concern espionage, these few
Washington translations deal with routine military attaché matters (such as
overt visits to U.S. defense factories). However, a separate Washington GRU
cryptographic system, which was never read, presumably carried GRU espionage
traffic.”
One might ask: ‘How did
they know about this “separate Washington GRU cryptographic system’”?’ And what
does ‘never read’ mean? That it was not intercepted? How did they know it was
GRU if they never ‘read’ it? If it had been sent via cable, it would have been
accessible, like all the other messages. Are the USA authorities referring to a
clandestine wireless system, perhaps? And, if so, why did they not close it
down? The reason these questions are relevant is that we have ample evidence
that the GRU in London did attempt to set up a clandestine wireless system, and,
after considerable teething problems, were apparently successful. (Vladimir
Petrov confirms that such an arrangement happened in Stockholm, as well.) As I
suggested earlier, it is possible that the RSS had worked out that the
clandestine channel was for the GRU only. The intense USA focus of the VENONA
website, and the various books that have been published in the US, mean that
this project has not received the attention it deserves.
A
closer inspection of the London-Moscow GRU traffic reveals the evolution of the
project. The documents in this file are unfortunately not in chronological
order, but a careful review suggests that the first reference is in a report dated
July 17, 1940, from London to Moscow, where it is evident that a
transmitter/receiver had been received in the diplomatic bag, but that the
instructions for its assembly and deployment were deficient. London has to ask
Moscow for the measurements for the aerial for MUSE’s apparatus. BARCh (Kremer)
had decided to install the set in the lodgings of the military attaché, as he
considered it was not safe in the Embassy, where the NKVD was ever-watchful.
(“The only ones to fear are the NEIGBOURS’ people, who are in so many places
here that it is hard to escape their notice.” This remark would tend to
contradict the well-publicised notion that the NKVD staff had all been recalled
to Moscow during 1940.) A few days later, however, it appears that Kremer has
been ordered to change his mind, and install the radio-set in the Embassy, and
is making rather feeble excuses about the lack of progress. On July 26, Kremer
complains that the receiver works on 100 volts, which means it would be burned
out by the 200-volt current in the embassy, and a transformer did not work. On
August 13, they are back in the attaché’s house, where alternating current is
available, and MUSE plans to try again, as a telegram of August 27shows.
Kremer requests a schedule for the following months.
On
August 30, 1940, reference is overtly made to the ‘London GRU emergency
system’. The operator MUSE had been heard clearly, on schedule. Yet problems in communication begin to occur
in September, and the Director begins to show impatience, reporting again on
September 18 that MUSE’s message was not received in full. Maybe it was
Kremer’s struggles that prompted the transfer of Sklyarov from New York. Kremer
tries to get his act together. In a message of October 3, he remarks that
Sklyarov’s arrival is impending. In the same message he reports that MUSE has had
a successful communication with Moscow at last, and that she will be trying
again on October 7. Yet it was not a proper two-way conversation. On October
10, 1940, one of the few messages from Moscow shows the Director informing
Kremer of further problems receiving messages on the illicit line, with nothing
received since September 18. The
Director has to remind him of the correct wavelength, crystal, callsign, and
time.
It
takes Sklyarov himself to report on November 25 that MUSE is now ready to begin
regular communication, and that is the last we hear of the link for a while. Presumably
it worked satisfactorily. Yet a very significant message on July 31, 1941
indicates a hitch, and that MUSE has had to test communications again. Sklyarov
asked Moscow how well they had received her. The reason that this could be so
important is the fact that the only report on SONIA that appears in the
extracts was transmitted the very same day, suggesting perhaps that the
back-up system (for highly confidential espionage traffic) was not working. Similarly,
the only message from this period referencing Klaus Fuchs is of a short time
later, on August 10. It would seem, therefore, that Sklyarov had to resort to
the diplomatic channel to pass on critical information. Nearly all of the
messages in the intervening period (November 1940-July 1941) concern more
routine military matters (as Wright reported), so the absence of any other
information on SONIA, both beforehand and afterwards, could mean either that
there were no reports, or that they were sent on the clandestine channel.
It
was probably this traffic which excited RSS so much in the spring of 1942, when
they tracked unauthorised wireless signals emanating daily from the Soviet
Embassy, signals that displayed an unusual pattern of call signs. As I
described above, Alexander Cadogan in the Foreign Office seems to have
approached Ambassador Maisky about them, but may have received a brush-off. Yet
why only one of these messages was annotated with ‘HASP’ is puzzling. It is as
if the messages had been intercepted and stored, and one of them had been
(partially) decrypted through the assistance of the HASP code-book. But, in
that case, why only one? And where is it? Was it the missing message from
Kremer claimed by Peter Wright to show SONIA’s recruitment of her nest of
spies?
Moreover,
one final crucial paradox remains, concerning the two rare messages I
identified a few paragraphs earlier. In the 1940-1941 GRU traffic can be found
only one message referring to SONIA (3/NBF/T1764 of July 31, 1941: transcribed
above), and only one to Klaus Fuchs (3/PPDT/101 of August 10, 1941). The
singularity is startling. In their book, Venona; Decoding Soviet Espionage
in America, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr offer (on p 439) a footnote
on the Fuchs message, which describes Fuchs’s meeting with Kremer. Part of the
note runs as follows: “This message is from a period antedating the Soviet
duplication of one-time pads. Its decryption was made possible because the
London GRU station in 1941 ran out of one-time pads and used its emergency
back-up cipher system based on a standard statistical table to generate the
additive key. British cryptanalysts working with the Venona Project recognized
it as a nonstandard and vulnerable cipher and solved it, but not until well
after Fuchs’s arrest.”
I
found this analysis disappointingly vague. Apart from the unlikelihood of the
GRU’s suddenly running out of one-time pads, the note did not indicate for how
long the back-up system had to run, and how the problem of distributing new
pads was resolved. I took a look at West again. On page 26, he writes: “The clerk [Gouzenko] also described the GRU’s
emergency cipher system, and although this was considered at the time to have
potential, it was never found to have been used apart from the 1940-41 London
traffic, when the GRU apparently ran out of OTPs.” This was even more opaque.
It threw the traffic for two whole years into the ‘back-up system’ bin, when a
cursory inspection of the files indicates that the primary system was working
well until Moscow and London started discussing the problem. Yet
it rather wearily echoed the text that appears in The Venona Story, namely
that ‘ . . . several
messages deal with cipher matters — in 1940 to 1941, the London GRU used a
so-called Emergency System, a variation of the basic VENONA cryptosystems.
London GRU messages merit very close attention.’ Indeed.
I managed to contact Dr. Haynes by email, and asked
him whether he could shed any light on the source of the footnote. He promptly
responded, reminding me that two messages in the GRU trove from this period
referred to the OTP problem, citing telegrams No. 410, of August 30, 1940, and No.
1036, of September 19, 1940. Yet Haynes and Klehr had cited 1941 in their note!
These two messages were transmitted about a year before the phenomenon
of the Fuchs and Sonia messages! How could an OTP problem remain unaddressed
that long? Was the implication that the back-up system (using the reference
book OTP on the diplomatic channel, as the new GRU wireless link was not yet
working) was used for the next twelve months? How should this information be
interpreted? I tactfully raised these questions with Dr. Haynes, but, even
after conferring with Louis Benson, he has not been able to shed any light on
the confusion over the expiration of the one-time pads, and the use of the
back-up system, although Benson did offer the important information that he
thought the British had ‘identified the standard statistical manual used to generate the additive keys’.
But no date was given.
The sequence of events between April 1940 and
March 1942, the period that encapsulates the most frequent of the London GRU
traffic, is so confused that a proper assessment must be deferred for another
time. The primary problem is that both London and Moscow refer, in messages
presumably transmitted using the standard diplomatic channel, exploiting
conventional one-time pads, of the imminent exhaustion of such tools. In that
process, they ask or encourage the immediate use of the back-up system. Yet it
is not clear that all successive messages use that back-up system, as later
messages make the same appeal. It might be that the pads were in fact re-used
as early as 1940. One enticing message (1036, of September 19, 1940) talks
about ‘the pad used having been finally destroyed’, as if it should have been
properly destroyed earlier, but was in desperation, perhaps, employed again,
against all the rules.
In
any case, a possible scenario could run as follows. Coincident with the GRU’s
plan to move Sonia to Britain, to create a new espionage network, it decided to
establish a clandestine wireless channel to handle her potential traffic. The
task was entrusted to Kremer, but he struggled with getting the apparatus to
work, and Sklyarov was transferred from New York to take charge. The
conventional connection was used until November 1940, when the clandestine line
was made to work, at about the time Sonia prepared to leave Switzerland. It was
thereafter used successfully, until an interruption at the end of July 1941 caused
Sklyarov to use the standard diplomatic channel for a critical message about
Sonia – the only one to have survived in VENONA. RSS appears to have noticed
messages on the clandestine link, but, if it did indeed intercept them and
store them, no trace has survived. It is probable that no messages on that line
were ever decrypted (apart from fragments at the end of 1941, and the two 1942
messages identified earlier). If other messages concerning Sonia were picked up
and analysed from the standard link, GCHQ and MI5 must have decided to conceal
them. (I have outlined this hypothesis to Dr. Haynes.)
Why
did Wright mangle the story so much?
This
close inspection of Wright’s account in Spycatcher shows a glorious
muddle of misunderstood technology and implausible explanations. So why did he
publish such an incoherent account of what happened? I present three
alternative explanations:
Wright
simply did not understand what had been going on.
Wright
understood perfectly what had been going on, but wished to distort the facts.
Wright
had forgotten exactly what had been going on.
Number
1 is highly unlikely. He had been recruited as an expert with scientific
training, and had showed knowledge of audio-electronic techniques to the extent
that he uncovered Soviet bugs on embassy premises. He must have understood the
principles of wireless communication, and the practical implications of
intercepting both cable and wireless traffic. Number 2 does not make sense, as
the mistakes that appear in his narrative tend to undermine any case he wanted
to make about the identity of ELLI and the pointers towards SONIA. The sentence
I cited above (in Cable or Wireless) is so manifestly absurd that it
should immediately have alerted any knowledgeable critic to the fact that
something was awry. If Wright had wanted to place a false trail, or was on a
mission, he would have ensured that he appeared as a reliable expert on the
main issues, but inserted subtle twists in the subordinate texts – in the
manner in which Chapman Pincher operated. Wright definitely wanted to
incriminate Hollis, but overall did not think he was distorting the truth, even
if he was part of the ‘conspiracy’ to obfuscate what happened in the VENONA
project. If he did embroider his account with the inclusion of an improbable
and unverifiable message, he surely did not think it would be considered
important, or that he would be found out.
Regrettably,
one must conclude that, by the time Wright came to put his memoir together, he
was approaching his dotage. Even though he was only seventy-one years old in
1987, his health was not good: he had high blood-pressure, shingles, and
diabetes. In his account of the events, The Spycatcher Trial, Malcom
Turnbull repeatedly draws attention to Wright’s failing health and faulty
memory, pointing out that, as early as 1980 (when Wright was only sixty-four)
he was too frail to travel from Australia to the United Kingdom by himself. Wright
did not remember clearly how everything happened, how the intelligence services
were organized, what the processes behind VENONA were, or exactly what HASP
consisted of. His book was effectively ghost-written by Paul Greengrass, who
clearly did not understand exactly what he was told by Wright, and, by the time
it came for Wright to check the text, he was probably simply too impatient in
wanting to see the book published, and consequently did not go over carefully
everything that Greengrass had written. He was not concerned about the details:
he wanted to get back at MI5 over its mistreatment of him on the pension
business, he needed the royalties, and he was focused on getting the message on
Hollis out.
I
believe that it is entirely possible that, in his summoning up the telegram
from Kremer that reported on Sonia’s network and payments, Wright was recalling
the July 31, 1941 message that I reproduced in full above. It does mention
agents and payments, but was sent not by Kremer, but by Sklyarov (BRION),
mistakenly identified as Shvetsov in the annotations. We should not accept
Wright’s account simply because, at one time, he had been an expert and a
reliable witness. In addition, later reports suggest that there was an
untrustworthy, almost devious, dimension to Wright’s behaviour. In his book on
the trial, Malcom Turnbull expressed surprise at Wright’s ‘too uncritical
worship’ of his mentor, Lord Rothschild. In his 2014 memoir, Dangerous to
Know, Chapman Pincher asserted that Rothschild and his wife Tess loathed
Wright, and he implied that Wright had exerted some kind of blackmail over the
pair by threatening to include a chapter in Spycatcher that described
Tess’s ‘long relationship with Anthony Blunt’.
As
I indicated earlier, Chapman Pincher does not use his sometime accomplice
Wright’s ‘evidence’ in his comprehensive presentation of the case against
Hollis. Given that Pincher clutched at every straw he could find, and was
always willing to present testimony from anonymous but ‘authoritative’ sources,
this omission is somewhat startling. All Pincher states on Sonia’s recruitment
of agents (beyond Fuchs and Norwood) runs as follows: “There is also new
evidence that she and Len may have recruited and serviced a further fellow
German communist – an atomic scientist working at the Clarendon Laboratory in Oxford,
whose wife Sonia had met socially.” (p 198 of Treachery) Pincher also
acknowledges that members of her family were informants for her, but dismisses
Sonia’s claims about finding and recruiting ‘minor agents’ as possibly being a
‘GRU legendary cover’ (p 259). What this ‘new evidence’ consisted of is not
explained, and the first statement has a very hypothetical ring about it. The
conclusion, however, must be that Pincher did not trust Wright’s account of the
breakthrough telegram.
Conclusions
Apart from the fact that ‘Spycatcher’ caught no spies, Wright was an unreliable witness. As D. Cameron Watt observed about the case: “A moderately careful reading of Wright’s book, let alone any checking of such statements he makes that can be checked, reveals, as most serious reviews of the book in the American press have shown, that Mr. Wright’s command of the facts, let alone his claims to universal knowledge, are such as to cast the gravest doubts on his credibility where his assertions cannot be cross-checked.” He completely misrepresented the structure of the VENONA project, and the material it used. He was likewise confused about the elements of the HASP program, and what the Swedes brought to the game. He magnified an illusory message, unlikely in its authorship, improbable in its content, and dubious in its objective, in order to promulgate a claim about Sonia that has no basis in any other facts, and to provide ammunition for a flimsy case that ELLI was Roger Hollis, the incrimination of whom he blatantly stated was his goal in publishing the book. In his muddled argument, he committed much damage to the other aspects of his case. At the time of the Spycatcher trial, even though he was only 71 years old, he was portrayed by Richard Hall and Malcolm Turnbull as an old, sick man, with a reputation for mendacity. He received the news of the outcome of the trial while in hospital.
The
VENONA files, which should provide the archival evidence for his investigation,
are in a mess. The USA website is very US-centric, it is scattered with
spelling mistakes, chronologically misplaced items, contradictory and incorrect
annotations about identities, misrepresentations of English place-names, and
wayward references that could be cleaned up by recent scholarship. The British
GRU traffic has been broken out, but it is out of sequence. An intense analysis
of the pan-European communications could shed some strong light on a host of
new relationships. A comprehensive index needs to be built, so that scholars
could be more productive in bringing their expertise to bear.
HASP
was a project that exploited GRU traffic between Stockholm and Moscow, which
had been partially decrypted by the Swedes. It succeeded because of the policy
that the GRU deployed, for the operations of clandestine and emergency
services, and those of agents under their control, of using a common
reference-book as a one-time pad. The Petrovs’ experience in Moscow and
Stockholm contributed substantially to identifying the volume used. Thus
dramatic improvements in decrypting certain London-Moscow traffic were made.
Yet fresh work can be undertaken. The considerations of HASP, and other
published material (e.g. Vassiliev), need to be incorporated into the British
VENONA story (of which there is no ‘authorised’ publication at all, and nothing
fresh since Nigel West’s book of 2009) and cross-referenced. An analysis of the
excisions that the British Government is stated to have made between the
Version 5 and Version 6 releases should be undertaken. In other words, it
constitutes a major opportunity for GCHQ in the year that its authorised
history appears. It needs a professional cryptanalyst to work on the source
messages, and the evolution of the decipherment.
As
I have written before, an authorised history of wartime and post-war interception
services remains to be written. To begin with, the function crossed multiple
organisations – not just all the intelligence services, but the War Office, the
armed forces, the Post Office, even the Metropolitan Police. The Radio Security
Service (RSS), of interest primarily to MI5, was never owned by the Security
Service (despite Nigel West’s continued claims to the contrary), and was
managed by a section of SIS from May 1941 until the end of the war, when GCHQ
took control of it. Yet Keith Jeffery, in his authorised history of SIS,
treated RSS (and GCHQ, which also reported to SIS during the war) as
step-children. It will be interesting to see whether the coming history of GCHQ
(Behind the Enigma, The Authorised History of Britain’s Secret Cyber
Intelligence Agency, by John Ferris, due in November of this year), when
covering the wartime years, treats RSS as an essential part of GC&CS (as it
was then).
I
believe that this bulletin provides an accurate account of the phenomenon of
HASP, but a similar modern exercise needs to be performed against VENONA
itself. After I post this report, I intend to draw the attention of the GCHQ
Press Office to it. I ask all readers who would like to see some effort
expended on clearing up this significant episode in British Intelligence
History to contact the Press Office at pressoffice@gchq.gov.uk themselves,
and thus reinforce my message.
(I regret that this research has been conducted without detailed access to the several files on VENONA at the National Archives, which have not been digitized. My previous superficial scans of the information did not indicate to me that the matters I have discussed were covered by the archival material at all. If any reader has found information in them that either clarifies, expands or confounds what I have written, please contact me. I also want to express my gratitude to Professor Glees, and to Denis Lenihan, for comments and suggestions they made concerning an earlier version of this article. Denis has continued to provide, right up to the completion of this report, very useful insights from the material he has analysed. Dr. Brian Austin has been a perennial outstanding adviser on wireless matters. I alone am responsible for the opinions expressed here, and any errors that may appear in the text.)
Major
Sources:
Spycatcher,
by Peter Wright
Venona,
by Nigel West
GCHQ,
by
Richard Aldrich
The
Code Breakers, by David Kahn
Stealing
Secrets, Telling Lies, by James Gannon
Handbook
for Spies, by Alexander Foote
The
Code Book, by Simon Singh
Battle
of Wits, by Stephen Budiansky
Stealing
Secrets, Telling Lies, by James Gannon
Historical
Dictionary of Signals Intelligence, by Nigel West
‘Sekretnyi
Front General’nogo Shtaba’, by Vladimir Lota
Venona:
Soviet Espionage and the American Response 1939-1957,
ed. Robert Louis Benson & Michael Warner
Defend(ing)
the Realm, by Christopher Andrew
The
Haunted Wood, by Allan Weinstein & Alexander
Vassiliev
Venona:
Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, by John Earl Haynes
& Harvey Klehr
The
Venona Secrets: The Definitive Exposé of Soviet Espionage in America,
by Herbert Romerstein & Eric Breindel
The
Secrets of the Service, by Anthony Glees
The
Secret History of MI6: 1909-1949, by Keith Jeffery
Empire
of Fear, by Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov
Between
Silk and Cyanide, by Leo Marks
Codes,
Ciphers & Other Cryptic & Clandestine Communications,
by Fred B. Wrixon
British
Intelligence in the Second World War, Volume 1, by
F. H. Hinsley and others
The
Venona Story, by Robert L. Benson
MI6
and the Machinery of Spying, by Philip H. J. Davies
The
Petrov Affair, by Robert Manne
A
Spy’s Revenge, by Richard V. Hall
The
Spycatcher Affair, by Malcom Turnbull
Treachery,
by Chapman Pincher
Dangerous
to Know, by Chapman Pincher
Peter
Wright and the ‘Spycatcher’ Case, by D. Cameron Watt, in Political
Quarterly, Volume 59, Issue 2, April 1988
Virginia Hall of SOE & OSS operating, with Edmond Lebrat pedalling a generator, in July 1944 (by Jeff Bass)
The
previous chapter of this story concluded by describing the state of events in
the autumn of 1942. It had been a difficult year for the Allies, but the tide
of the war had begun to turn in their favour. The five-month battle of Stalingrad,
which represented the Soviet Union’s critical effort to repel the Wehrmacht, began
in October, and the USA’s arsenal was beginning to have an effect in the rest
of the world. Nazi Germany accordingly intensified its efforts to eliminate
subversive threats, and by this time had rounded up the sections of the Red
Orchestra operating on German soil, executing many of its members in December.
The Allied landings in North Africa (November) prompted Germany to occupy Vichy
France, which removed a safer base of operations for espionage and sabotage
work originating in Britain. Meanwhile, Churchill had ended his opposition to the
Overlord invasion plan in a deal over sharing of atomic research and
technology with the USA. Colonel Bevan had thus been appointed to reinvigorate
the important London Controlling Section, responsible for strategic military
deception, in August 1942, and serious plans for the invasion of Europe were
underway. Yet Bevan had a large amount of preparatory work to do, and
circulated his draft deception plan for the broader theatre of war, Bodyguard,
only at the beginning of October 1943. It was approved later that month, with
refinements still being made in December. All domestic intelligence agencies would
be affected by the objectives for the segment describing the European landings,
named Fortitude.
This
(penultimate?) chapter takes the story of wireless interception up to the end
of 1943, and again concentrates on the territories occupied by the Nazis in
Central Western Europe – the Low Countries and France, with a diversion into
Switzerland, as well as the domestic scene in Great Britain. Roosevelt had founded
the OSS (the Office of Strategic Services, roughly equivalent to MI6 and SOE) in
June 1942, and thus Britain’s dominant role in European resistance began to
fade. The rather haphazard approach to sabotage that had characterized SOE’s
work up till then began to evolve into a more considered strategy to support
the invasion. It was placed under closer military control in March 1943. The
uncertain role of Britain’s Double-Cross agents received a much sharper focus
in preparations for a campaign of disinformation to deceive the Germans about
the location of the landings. The RSS started to concentrate more on the
challenge of locating ‘stay-behind’ agents in Europe than on the detection of
illicit domestic transmissions in the United Kingdom. Yet issues of post-war
administrations began to surface and introduce new tensions: as the Red Army
began to move West, Churchill and Eden started to have misgivings about the
nature of some nationalist movements, SOE’s associations with communists, and
Stalin’s intentions. Moreover, Roosevelt’s OSS was much more critical of
Britain’s ‘imperialism’ than it was of Stalin’s ‘communist democracy’, which
also affected the climate with the various governments-in-exile in London.
The Reality of German
Direction- and Location-Finding
Whereas the missions of
the various German interception services had previously been focused on the
illogical basis of the political motivations of the offenders, in 1943 a split
based on geography was initiated. The WNV/FU assumed control for Northern
France, Belgium and South Holland, the Balkans, Italy, and part of the Eastern
Front, while the Orpo (Ordnungspolizei) was given responsibility for
Southern France, the rest of Holland, Norway, Germany and the rest of the
Eastern Front. This may have led to differences in operational policy, and
equipment used: little intelligence-sharing went on, however, because of
political rivalries. In the previous chapter I had suggested that the scope and
effectiveness of the German direction- and location-finding machine had been
exaggerated by the Gestapo as a method of deterrence, and that, in reality,
infiltrated wireless operators were betrayed more by shoddy practices and
informers. I now examine this phenomenon in more detail.
A popular reference work
on espionage (Dobson and Payne, 1997) describes the operation as follows:
“German
direction-finding operations in France were centered on Gestapo headquarters in
the Avenue Foch in Paris. Relays of 30 clerks monitoring up to 300 cathode-ray
tubes kept up a continuous watch on every conceivable frequency between 10
kilocycles and 30 megacycles. When a new set opened up it showed at once as a luminous
spot on one of the tubes. Alerted by telephone, large goniometric stations at
Brest, Augsburg and Nuremburg started to take cross-bearings. Within 15 minutes
they were able to establish a triangle with sides about 16 km (10 miles) across
into which detector vans from a mobile regional base could be moved to pinpoint
more precisely the area of transmission.
Typically, a mobile
regional base would be equipped with two front-wheel-drive Citroen 11ight vans,
each crewed by four civilians carrying machine guns, and two four-seater
Mercedes-Benz convertibles with fake French licence plates. If the transmission
had ended the vehicles would move to the intersection points of the triangle
and wait in the hope that the unknown station would acknowledge a reply to its
message. An acknowledgment of a mere three to four seconds would allow an
experienced team to reduce the sides of the triangle to no more than 800 m (0.5
mile). If the transmission were longer, the operator would almost immediately
be compromised.”
I see several problems
with this account. First of all, it contains no dates, no sense of gradual
establishment. I have not discovered any images of the CRT equipment claimed to
be deployed. If a transmitting set were to be detected without high-powered
interception stations working in harness first, it would have to be via
ground-wave, which would be restricted to a distance of about ten miles. That
limitation would not justify the huge expense required in the centre of Paris,
since most illicit transmissions occurred in the provinces. In any case, the
assumed illicit signals would have to be discriminated from all the other
police, military and industrial activity going on at the same time. The number
of personnel, vehicles and equipment to cover the whole of France would be
astronomically high, and, especially at this advanced stage of the war, Germany
did not have an available competent and dedicated labour force to deploy
successfully in such a project. How many ‘mobile regional bases’ were there? It
would have been a colossal waste of resources to deploy this infrastructure on
the assumption that occasional illicit transmissions could be promptly
identified and eliminated.
This dubious reference attempts to shed light on the process by means of an imaginative diagram:
German Direction-Finding
The text for this entry is echoed almost verbatim in Jean-Louis Perquin’s The Clandestine Radio Operators (2011), a work that boasts a serious bibliography and set of sources. Here a few additional details are supplied by the author. The German unit is identified as the Kurzwellenüberwachung [Short-Wave Observation], or KWU, with a codename for the operation of DONAR. (I cannot find any other reference to a such-named unit – a true hapax legomenon?) “A total of one hundred and six men, seven mobile goniometers mounted either on trucks or on one of the service’s 35 cars was made available”. The author adds that protection was provided by the French Sureté Nationale. Yet the mechanisms are vague. “A control station equipped with over 300 (ultra-modern) receivers continuously monitored over thirty thousand frequencies . . .” The principle behind the scheme was that any unregistered frequency used was ‘highly likely to signal a covert radio-operator’. Then a telephone message was immediately sent to the three direction-finding centres in Brest, Augsburg and Nuremberg, which would quickly be able to determine an equilateral triangle of 20 kilometre sides in which the operator was transmitting. Thereafter, the trucks were sent in to the tip of the triangle, sometimes supported by a team of pedestrian monitors using sensitive magnetometers on their wrists. In that way, they would quickly identify the building where the transmission was occurring, and arrest the agent before he or she committed suicide.
The operation was
claimed to be very efficient. “This was
the procedure used in 1943. If the clandestine transmitter was located in the
same city as a mobile goniometer base, the location of the transmitter could be
identified within a 200-metres radius in less than a quarter of an hour.”
Further: “As an example, the German DF could be within sight of a transmitter
half an hour after it sent its very first signal. It is likely that, by the
spring of 1944, the Germans were using a fully automated, car-mounted DF system
using a cathodic screen monitor.” The official historian of SOE, M. R. D. Foot,
may be the originator of this particular histoire, writing, in 1984: “The Germans, like the British, kept a constant
watch on every wireless wavelength, and it took only twenty or thirty minutes
for a team of their armed direction-finders to get within a few yards of an
operator who was fool enough to remain on the air so long. Relays of thirty
clerks with cathode-ray tubes in the Gestapo’s headquarters in the Avenue Foch
in Paris, for example, kept up a continuous watch on every conceivable
frequency. When a new set opened up, it was bound to show up on a tube; the
frequency could be read off at once. In a couple of minutes, alerted by
telephone, direction-finders at Brest, Augsburg and Nuremberg were starting to
take cross-bearings; within a quarter of an hour, detector vans would be
closing in on the triangle a few miles across that the cross-bearings had
indicated.”
It seems as if these
accounts were also received by the RSS, which at the end of the war compiled a
report on the Funkabwehr (available at HW 34/2 at the National Archives). The writer lists the claims made by captured
German officers, and ‘various sources’, illustrating them with such dramatic
detail as: “Within a period of two minutes each new suspect signal was observed
and reported by line to a large scale system of D/F networks which could obtain
bearings with an error of less than half a degree and so plot the position of
any station to an area within a radius variously estimated at from 4 to ten
kilometres. This process required a further seven minutes, after which five
further minutes were necessary to bring a very strong mobile unit organisation
into action and for them to proceed by short-range D/F and shifting to locate
the transmitter.” The report then casts serious doubts on the reliability of
these statements, which appear to be the work of German propaganda, sent out by
various media, in an attempt to discourage Allied wireless use.
The RSS report includes
some details about mobile unit operations: that the 1942 Operation Donar in the
Unoccupied Zone was largely ineffective, as few French-speaking persons took
part, and it was very obvious; that a single mobile unit roamed around Southern
France in 1943, ‘principally Marseilles and Lyons, until it settled in Lyons’
(which does not suggest dense coverage); that the communications between
interception and the D/F stations in the OKW were poor, certainly not as good
as the Orpo’s; that effectiveness was hindered by personnel transfer; that
local and atmospheric conditions greatly hindered accurate readings; that many
cases were recorded where the mobile units were totally unable to locate the
groundwave. In certain cases, mostly in urban areas, a very focused operation
could produce results, especially when the famous ‘guertel’ snifter (the Gürtel
Kleinpeiler für Bodenwelle) was introduced in 1943, but, overall,
location-finding was a very haphazard affair, and nothing like the streamlined
operation that the authorities liked to represent.
There is no reliable evidence of the number or names of clandestine operators who were caught by this method. It should be concluded that there must be a large amount of propagandizing in this scenario, with no reliable source provided. As previous incidents have shown, there is no dependable way of identifying the physical source of a ‘new’ message stream over the ether unless something is known about the data sent – the callsign, for instance, which may have been revealed through torture or collaboration. Only when triangulation occurs could the rough proximity of the transmission zone be determined. And the operator would have to continue transmitting for an inordinate amount of time for the detectors still be able to sense him or her when they eventually turned up in their vans. Moreover, part of agent practice was to employ ‘watchers’ who would look out for the tell-tale features of the DF vehicles, and agents were taught to stay on the air for only a few minutes at a time before signing off and moving location.
Inside a Gestapo DF Truck
The whole process is
belied by some of the autobiographical accounts that were published after the
war. Jacques Doneux’s They Arrived By Moonlight is considered one of the
most reliable descriptions of the life of a clandestine radio operator – this
time in Belgium. He explains how he managed to evade the direction-finding
vans, by transmitting at different times of the day, by varying the location,
by staying on the air for no more than half an hour, and by using a protection
team to warn him of approaching vans. Significantly, one of the statements he
makes runs as follows (p 105): “We went to a place called La Hulpe
which was a short way out of Brussels and fairly safe from direction-finding;
this meant that we could have a good long sked with little fear of
interruption.” This suggests that urban detection capabilities were based on
ground-waves, and that the mechanisms for intercepting and trapping illicit
broadcasters were much less sophisticated than has frequently been claimed. (I
return to Doneux when discussing SOE later in this piece.) Another technique used with
some success by the territorial guardians, however, was the deployment of
radio-detecting planes. Doneux reports that ‘a Fieseler-Storch, flying low, often
appeared about ten minutes after an operator had started to transmit’. This
very visible and obvious mechanism clearly encouraged radio operators to be
brief. The RSS Report on the Funkabwehr claims, however, that the
Fiesler-Storch was equipped to operate where mobile units could not go, namely
the Russian Front and the Balkans.
Perquin presents a more down-to-earth analysis at the end of his article, where he breaks down the record of SOE’s F Section. “For ten arrested radio operators, at least five fell victims to carelessness of breaches of basic security rules; another two arrest [sic] could have been avoided had the transmissions not been sent from cities where German DF teams had regional branches. Many radio operators like other members of resistance networks were compromised because of careless talk, gossip, indiscretion, police investigations or sheer bad luck in the form of a routine police check. On the other end, the fact that ten radio operators were captured should not hide the extraordinary usefulness and effectiveness of the remaining ninety if one is to mention only F section. ‘Kleber’, belonging to the French intelligence branch and not to the SOE, never had a single incident when it used its eight transmitters to send signals to Algiers from the immediate vicinity of Pau (SW France). By 1944, the average duration of a transmission was less than three minutes per frequency.”
In
summary, the existence of location-finding teams is not in doubt, but they were
certainly far fewer in number than claimed by some expansive reports. They may
have picked up some random operators. Yet, rather than a comprehensive mechanism
for picking up previously unknown operators, it is much more likely that the
system was deployed to try to mop up remaining members of a network whose
predecessors had already been betrayed by some source or behaviour, when the
general neighbourhood in which they were working was already known. Promoting
the mythology of a powerful and ruthless machine may however have acted as a
useful deterrent for the Nazi security organs, and ascribing failure to it may
have served to absolve leaders and remote directors of resistance groups of
lapses in security procedures.
The Red Orchestra
A more reliable model
for how the Gestapo worked is provided by the successful efforts to close down
the section of the Red Orchestra that operated out of neutral Switzerland. As I
explained in the previous episode, the units of the Red Orchestra in Germany and
France had been largely mopped up by the end of 1942, primarily because of
atrociously lax inattention to security procedures by the Communist agents.
(The executions at Plötzensee carried on until December 1943.)
Developing an accurate
account of the operation of the ‘Rote Drei’ (as the main three wireless
operators in Switzerland, Foote, Radó and Bölli, were known) is notoriously
difficult. The memoirs of Foote – which were ghosted – as well as those of
Radó, are highly unreliable, and the source of much of the strategic
intelligence, probably gained from Ultra decrypts, is still hotly contested. The
authoritative-sounding analysis emanating from the CIA is also riddled with
disinformation. For a refresher on the background, I refer readers to ‘Sonia’s Radio’,
especially http://www.coldspur.com/sonias-radio-part-vii/.
German Intelligence had
been intercepting the messages of the Soviet agents in Switzerland since
November 1941, but apparently no headway had been made on decrypting them. Then,
as the German network was being closed down, the volume of messages from across
the border increased. According to V. E. Tarrant, in The Red Orchestra: “During
the latter half of 1942 the German long-range radio monitoring stations in
Dresden and Prague reported heavy radio traffic from three short-wave
transmitters operating in neutral Switzerland. Through cross-bearings two were
tracked to Geneva, close to the Franco-Swiss border, and the third to Lausanne
on the northern shore of Lake Geneva.”
In January 1943, with
the German network rounded up and executed, attention thus switched to group in
Switzerland, and the pressure mounted for making sense of the transmissions,
and determining how vital and accurate they were. OKW/Chi (Chiffrier Abteilung)
was charged, on February 23, with attacking the messages, and, perhaps surprisingly,
made swift progress, an achievement which suggest, perhaps, that some work had
been undertaken in a more dilatory fashion before then. Tarrant again: “When
the intercepts of these transmissions were sent to the radio traffic analysts
in the Funkabwehr offices on the
Matthaïkirchplatz they concluded that the cipher employed by the Swiss
operators was of an identical format to the one-time pad that had been used by
the Grand Chef’s [Trepper’s] pianists.” Tarrant suggests
that the agent ‘Kent’, who was in the custody of the Gestapo, helped in the
deciphering process. In any case, the CIA reported that Chi had gathered all the
extant traffic by the end of March, and in a few days had discovered the main
principle of the encryption technique. By April 22, sixteen messages had been
broken.
The first reaction by
German Intelligence was to conclude that the information was of the highest
quality, and continued dissemination could seriously damage the war effort. Yet
the organs found it very difficult to identify a Berlin-based source
responsible for the information, or the medium by which the information could
have been passing. (I shall not re-explain here the claim that ‘Lucy’, the
enigmatic Rudolf Rössler, was in fact receiving his intelligence from the
United Kingdom, itself deriving form Ultra decrypts.) Instead, they resolved to
track down the suspects in Switzerland. Their location-finding techniques could
identify the cities from which the transmissions were being made, but
Switzerland was of course neutral territory.
Radó’s network took a
fairly relaxed attitude towards security. The Swiss Government was reasonably
tolerant of foreign intelligence activity, so long as it was not directed
against Switzerland itself. The unit considered itself free from the
observations and threats of the Gestapo, and was under enough pressure from
Moscow Centre, in the latter’s persistent requests for identifying sources, and
the torrents of questions that they presented to Radó and his team. Thus the
Germans had to use a combination of traditional espionage and political
pressure to help them track and close down the dangerous wireless trio.
In 1941 (or, according
to some accounts, 1942), Walter Schellenberg had been appointed by Himmler to
head Section VI, the RSHA’s foreign intelligence branch. Indeed, he had already
had clandestine meetings with the Swiss intelligence chief, Roger Masson, in
the summer and autumn of 1942, after Masson had heard rumours that the Germans
were planning an invasion of the country. Yet Schellenberg’s intentions in
setting up the meeting may have been to persuade Masson to cooperate in
prosecuting the Rote Drei. Max Hastings, in The Secret War,
informs us that Schellenberg told Masson then that Berlin had already decrypted
two of the ring’s messages, and was seeking help. The threat of invasion, which
was always a real threat to the Swiss, because of its German-speaking
population, and Hitler’s designs on the ‘Südmark’, was a not-so-gentle
incentive for Masson to ‘help with the RSHA’s inquiries’. The two met again,
early in 1943. It appears that Germany had made serious demands that
Switzerland maintain its neutrality, under threat of invasion, and Masson did
indeed crumble, and deploy his native counter-intelligence experts to mop up the
illicit wireless network.
The Gestapo had also
tried inserting agents to subvert and betray the network, but these were mostly
clumsy efforts that Alexander Foote was able to deflect. The mopping-up
operation did not take long, however. In September 1943, the Swiss Bundespolizei
(BUPO) began the operation to silence the transmitters. They used the
traditional goniometric techniques to locate the equipment more accurately,
starting with Geneva. Since the agents were not accustomed to moving premises,
or having to restrict the length of their transmissions (Foote recorded being
on the air for hours owing to the volume of work), there was no rush. Tarrant
even reports that ‘it took a few weeks for Lt. Treyer’s direction-finder vans
to pin-point the actual locations . . . ‘. That luxury would not have been
available in the pressure-cooked environment of Belgium or France. The BUFO
also used the famous method of turning off the power to houses individually in
order to notice when transmission stopped. And the frailties of war-time
romance took their effect, as well. Margrit Bölli, one of the wireless
operators, took a lover, Peters, who was in fact a German agent and stole her
cipher key. She ignored instructions, and moved to his apartment, where BUFO agents
tracked her. The Hamels were arrested on the night of October 13/14, and just
about a month after that Foote himself was arrested.
Radó escaped into
hiding, and some abortive attempts to resuscitate the network were made, but
they fell short – primarily because of funding. Ironically, BUFO tried to carry
on a ‘Funkspiel’ (along the lines of what the Germans performed in the
Netherlands) with the Soviets. Foote had owned a powerful wireless set, capable
of reaching Moscow, obviously, but also the Americas, and Treyer, in possession
of Radó’s code, initiated messages in German on Foote’s set, using that code.
Yet, as David Dallin inform us in Soviet Espionage, ‘Foote’s previous
messages, always in English, had usually been transmitted in his own code’.
(The Soviets deployed techniques for alerting Moscow Centre of code-switches to
be deployed in a following suite of messages.) The Soviets saw through the ruse
very quickly.
Because of the
sympathetic role that the spies had been playing in support of Switzerland’s
resistance to Nazism, they were all treated relatively well. Yet an important
source of intelligence was closed down. By then the Battle of Kursk (to the
success of which the Lucy Ring had substantially contributed) was over, the
Wehrmacht had been mortally damaged, and the war was as good as won. From the
standpoint of illicit wireless interception, however, the story has multiple lessons.
It reinforces the fact that remote direction-finding, across hundreds of miles,
could be an effective tool in locating transmissions at the city-level. It
shows that suborned and tortured agents, with knowledge of callsigns,
schedules, ciphers and codes, could provide a much quicker breakthrough to
decryption than laborious ‘blind’ brainwork. It stresses the importance of
solid tradecraft and security techniques for agents to avoid successfully those
in pursuit of them (although, in a small country like Switzerland, where their
activities were suspected anyway, it would have been impossible for the Rote
Drei to have held out for long). It emphasizes the role that simple
security techniques could play in avoiding the successful ‘turning’ of networks.
One other consequence of the operation was that Moscow stopped relying so much
on the illicit transmissions of mainly ‘illegal’ agents, and switched its focus
on using couriers and equipment in the Soviet Embassies to manage the traffic
that their spies were still accumulating.
Exploits of SOE &
SIS
I have earlier drawn
attention to the renowned actions taken by General Gubbins in tightening up SOE
security in 1943, and how they need to be questioned. Not only were these
initiatives very late, the claims about their success are not really borne out
by the evidence. Much has been written about the careful psychological
screening of potential SOE agents, and their wireless operators, and even more
has been written about their lengthy training in all manner of tradecraft as a
foreign agent, from practice at parachute-jumping to secure methods of wireless
transmission. Yet the experiences in France and the Low Countries, as recounted
by M. R. D. Foot, tell of a parade of broken backs, legs and ankles resulting
from clumsy parachute landings, of wireless sets that broke on impact, were
lost, or simply did not work. It seems quite extraordinary that so much would
be invested in preparatory training, only to be wasted in the minutes following
the dropping of the parachutists. (Several of these highly trained wireless
operators were killed in plane crashes.) SOE did not have the luxury of a rich labour
pool from which to select the most suitable candidates, and the pressures on it
to deliver were immense. Yet, despite the attention given to training, it was
clearly deficient in many areas.
Moreover, procedures
regarding wireless security were still inconsistently applied. Foot again: “It did not take long [sic] for Gubbins, as head
of operations, to spot what was wrong, or for the signals training school at
Thame Park to start to impress on operators – as Beaulieu explained to
organisers – that mortal danger lay in trying to send long messages by
wireless.” Yet the order that no transmission was to last more than five
minutes did not go out until the winter of 1943-44. In September 1943 (when
Gubbins replaced Hambro as head of SOE), more flexible and unpredictable ‘skeds’
(transmission schedules – a critical part of the software, since they had to
take into consideration such factors as atmospheric disturbance) were
introduced: irregular hours and switching of frequencies made detection more
difficult.
What became necessary
was a keen sense of how active the organs were in a particular area. Foot
relates how, in May 1943, an agent named Beckers was able to stay at his set
‘for two hours without any trouble, and only once heard of a D/F
car in the neighbourhood’. Another, Léon Bar, was quickly arrested after
starting to address a backlog of messages, and tried to shoot his way out of
trouble. He was tortured, and then killed, but it is not clear whether
direction-finding or betrayal caused his demise. Wendelen escaped surveillance
because he had an informer in the Vichy police, who warned him of all
direction-finding efforts in the Indre département. Yolande Beekman successfully
transmitted from same spot at the same hour on the same three days of the week
for months on end during 1943 and 1944. It is somewhat shocking to read, however,
that, in the summer of 1943, Wendelen returned to England, and had to make some
fundamental suggestions for better tradecraft, such as water-proofing the
containers, and requiring at least one look-out man during every schedule. Why
did it take so long to learn and apply these lessons?
Yet
some of the practices were not repeatable. Scheyven never transmitted from the
same house twice, and remained undetected. Goffin learned from predecessors:
“He kept his sets buried in large boxes in gardens; kept codes and crystals
hidden in a different address; never carried his set himself. His case can
stand for an example of how sensible SOE agents were able to benefit from the
more foolish mistakes of others.” Agents on the run, with no variety of safe
houses to choose from, could not afford such luxuries, and local residents
became increasingly petrified at being found out by the Gestapo harbouring an
illicit wireless operator. They knew the penalty. The operational pressures
were imperfectly understood by the controllers in London.
Jacques
Doneux’s memoir seems to be a more reliable guide to the psychological stress.
He provocatively wrote that the locals, who had been working on subversive work
much longer than any agent, were frequently dismissive of strict security
procedures, preferring to rely on their own wits, and sense for danger. Doneux
was certainly aware of detector vans, but always used a squad of look-out men,
and paid solid attention to location and transmission-times. He was one who
considered that Nazi claims of radio-detection efficiency were inflated (viz.
his comment about moving to La Hulpe), but it did not take much for the
transmission to be interrupted, and the carefully prepared sked ruined. Extra
controls deployed by the Gestapo made walking around with a wireless
transmitter even more perilous, so mobility caused fresh challenges.
Lastly must be considered the advances in equipment, especially when SOE set up its own workshop in 1942 on being freed from dependence upon SIS. One of its first breakthroughs was the S-Phone, which was designed to be worn on an agent’s chest, whereby he could make contact with an allied aircraft by voice, up to a distance of thirty miles, and to a height of 10,000 feet. This technology had the advantage of using UHF, and was not detectable by conventional D/F techniques owing to the highly focused antenna, and the low power consumption. The S-Phone was used primarily to guide arriving planes on drop areas or landing-sites, but was also used to convey brief instructions and information between the two parties. Articles published elsewhere indicate that the S-Phone had been deployed as early as 1941, which suggests that SOE was very early in its lifetime carrying on secret research while nominally still under the control of SIS. William Mackenzie’s Secret History states, however, that ‘one of the very early uses of the S-Phone’ occurred only on July 22, 1943, when Lieutenant-Colonel Starr had been deprived of any regular wireless contact since November 1942, and had up till then had to rely on couriers through Switzerland and Spain. In any case, Gambier-Parry of Section VIII got to hear about the development.
The SOE’s S-Phone
Certainly,
by 1943, smaller transmitters were being used for regular short-wave
communication. Doneux refers to his carrying round his set under his overcoat.
Foot describes the first innovations by F. W. Nicholls as follows: a Mark II in action by October 1942, 20lb in
weight, which sent at 5 watts on 3-9 mc/s. Its successor, the B2 (technically,
the 3 Mark II) was even more popular: it required 30 watts, and needed only two
valves. It could transit between 3 and 16 mc/s, and could also receive. “None
of the SOE’s sets suffered from a tiresome disadvantage of the paraset, which
when switched to receive would upset any other wireless set in use for a
hundred yards around: a severe brake on action in built-up areas where
civilians were still allowed their own receiving sets.” The B2 weighed 32 lb.,
which sounds a bit bulky to be slipped under an overcoat, however. It was for
longer ranges. Doneux may have been using the Mark III, which weighed only five
and a half pounds, and fitted with its accessories into a tiny suitcase. Its
5-watt output could reach up to 500 miles.
In Western Europe, electric current was usually
available, which meant that generating capabilities were seldom required.
Matters were much tougher in other areas, such as Yugoslavia and Albania.
During the same period, authors such as Deakin record the treks involved in
lugging 48-lb transmitters and chargers driven by bicycle-type pedalling
mechanisms across mountainous country. (A famous example with the OSS in France
can be seen in the painting of Virginia Hall that I selected as the
frontispiece to this article.) Mules were required to carry such a load, and in
one memorable passage Deakin describes such a mule toppling into a crevasse,
taking the equipment with him. For purposes nearer to home, successful miniaturization
was slow to take hold: later in the war, when the Jedburgh teams were set up, a
new small ‘Jedset’ was developed, but its fragility and size meant that it was
frequently broken on landing. Not enough attention had been paid to insulating
it from hard contact with the ground.
The
SIS appeared to have greater success in 1943, although its mission of
intelligence-gathering was subject to consistent interference from the sabotage
objectives of SOE. With the invasion plans starting to be made, the demands
made on SIS branches for information about German defences, installations, and troop
movements, and research on potential landing-sites for the invasion, and the
like, became more intense – and more immediate. Couriers were slow, which
switched pressure to wireless communications.
The
volume of information that was successfully passed back to London suggests that
dozens, or even hundreds, of wireless operators managed to evade surveillance,
and send their reports successfully across the airwaves. Keith Jeffery, in his
authorised history of SIS, praises ‘Section VIII’s outstanding achievement in
developing and refining radio transmitters and receivers’, which ‘made an
indispensable contribution’. The author adds, however, that ‘at the sharp end
it was up to individual men and women to operate the equipment in often very
hazardous circumstances’. As an example, he cites the experiences of ‘Magpie’
in March 1943, who, pursuing loyally the strategy of trying to keep mobile, had
to walk nine miles to his next safe house, during which journey the handle of
the set broke twice, as it was not strong enough. Perhaps not such an
outstanding job of design, after all. The answer was – more sets, a requirement
to which Kenneth Cohen in London complied.
In
Belgium, at the end of 1942, SIS also experimented with specialised
ground-to-air communications, which allowed agents to communicate directly (and
without the lengthy process of Morse codification) using the so-called ‘Ascension’
sets developed by Gambier-Parry’s team. (These were presumably similar to the
technologies used by SOE. Indeed, an article in Cloak and Dagger suggest
that the sets were an enhancement of the SOE invention: see https://www.docdroid.net/MEaQLK7/cloak-and-daggerair-enthusiast-2007-07-08-130.pdf ) Jeffery writes that
‘the Ascension sets were used with some success in Belgium and elsewhere,
but the system was not very useful for long messages which still had to be
smuggled out by courier across long and precarious land routes’. That statement implies that long
messages could not be trusted to conventional short-wave radio connections,
because of the requirement to be on air for hours at a time, and the real or
imagined threat of radio-detection techniques. Jeffery suggests soon afterwards
that a lag of three or four months was occurring between information-gathering
and receipt, and that the results were therefore valueless. By May 1943 even
the courier supply lines had broken down.
Whether that problem was restricted to Belgium is not clear
(remember the ‘elsewhere’). Certainly in France the networks were overall much
more productive, despite a new set of challenges. A continual danger of a
network’s having been suborned existed, but this threat was complemented by the
onset of ideological disagreements between the various resistance groups, who,
as the day of liberation became more real, each promoted their own view on what
the political shape of the country should be after the war. For a while, the
Gestapo appeared to use propaganda rather than competent feet on the ground,
and anecdotal evidence suggests that the organisation was having trouble
providing enough sharp and well-trained officers and men to control the noisy
underworld. It frequently resorted to denouncers to make up for its
deficiencies.
Yet, by the end of 1943, Madame Fourcade’s ‘Alliance’ organisation
was almost completely destroyed – not by super-efficient surveillance
techniques, but by Nazi infiltration of the groups. As Jeffery reports: “ . . . by the late autumn of 1943 most of the
Alliance groups in north-west France and the Rhone valley had ceased to
function”. Overall, communications out of France were considered to be
inadequate, and the main channel for passing information was with a French
diplomat in Madrid. Jeffery rather puzzlingly states that this person (named ‘Alibi’)
‘managed to establish wireless communications with networks in France’. This is
one of the many enigmatic, vague and incomplete observations in the authorised
history: no date is given, and the statement poses many questions. How were
skeds set up? How many staff were on hand to receive messages, at what hours?
And what did they do with them? Moreover, if a link could be made between
networks in France and Madrid, how was it that the sources could not
communicate with London directly?
The Evolution of the RSS
“James Johnston recalled in letters to me that he and his
colleagues had intercepted messages from an illegal transmitter in the Oxford
area, which he later believed to be Sonia’s, and had submitted them to MI6 or
MI5. ‘Our logs recorded her traffic, but they were returned with the reference
NFA [No Further Action] or NFU [No Further Use].’ According to Morton Evans, it
was Hollis and Philby who decided that the logs should be returned to the RSS
marked ‘NFA’ or ‘NFU”. This meant that the RSS was not required to send out its
mobile detector vans. No such action was ever taken against Sonia during the
whole duration of her illegal transmissions. ‘Her station continued to work,
off and on,’ Johnston recalled. ‘It must be a mystery as to why she was not
arrested.’’ (from Chapman Pincher’s Treachery,
p 141)
This now famous passage by Chapman Pincher is extremely
controversial, suggesting that the identity of Sonia was known to the
authorities who monitored and instructed the interception plans of the squad of
Voluntary Interceptors who scanned the airwaves. In this latest manifestation,
it even identifies the senior RSS officer making the claim to Pincher, Kenneth
Morton Evans, who, in a letter to Pincher, reportedly stated that gave ‘full
details to Hollis in MI5 and Philby in MI6’, and implied that those two
intelligence officers were unable to decrypt the messages.
That latter assertion is absurd, as neither Philby nor Hollis, had
they indeed been passed the original texts, would have possessed the skills or
authority to start trying to decrypt them. Yet it is the suggestion that the
order to send out the mobile vans was withheld that is even more provocative.
Earlier, Pincher had written: ‘The RSS had responsibility for locating any
illicit transmitters. Detector vans with direction-finding equipment could be
sent in the area to track down the precise position of a transmitter with
police on hand to arrest the culprit. As a former operator James Johnston told
me, ‘Our direction-finding equipment was so refined that we were able to locate
any wayward transmitter’.”
Thus the objective observer, perhaps now familiar with the urgent
security rules impressed upon SOE agents in Europe, has to accept the following
scenario: Possibly illicit Soviet signals are detected emanating from the area
of Oxford in the UK, perhaps identifiable by their callsigns. These are sent to
the RSS discrimination unit, which studies them, and passes them to officers in
MI5 and MI6. After these gentlemen get around to inspecting them (and perhaps
attempting to decode them), it is their responsibility to say whether or not
the transmitter should be located. If so, the vans are sent into action
(perhaps a few days later), in the hope that the transmitter will still be obligingly
cooperating by transmitting from the same place.
It is not the purpose of this analysis to determine whether the
RSS was negligent over Sonia. This reader is convinced that she was left in
place so that her transmissions could be surveilled. (Remember, on January 23,
1943, the Oxford police had visited Sonia’s residence, and reported to MI5 the
discovery of a wireless set on the premises.) What needs to be established is
how reliable is the testimony (if it truly exists) of Kenneth Morton Evans, a
senior and capable wireless professional. From 1941 to 1945 he was the officer
in charge at Arkley, the RSS facility that gathered and processed all the
messages received by the Voluntary Interceptors. (In 1951, as an MI5 officer,
he wrote a letter to the Guardian claiming that The National Association
for Civil Liberties was a Communist front: see https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/jan/06/humanrights.world ) How was it that Morton Evans expected an illicit agent to hang
around in the same location for several days? Was his understanding of the
readiness and efficacy of the mobile vans accurate? Or was he also a party to
the cover-up over surveillance of Sonia, contributing to the convenient story
that Hollis had successfully protected her? And how did his account overall undermine
the pretence that Nazi agents were able to work undetected in England for
years?
The facts about the mobile detection apparatus are elusive. I have started to examine some of the historical records at the National Archives. [But not all: I am still waiting to receive photographs of many critical files, such as the WO 208/5099-5102 series. This section may thus require a later update. This analysis is based on WO/208/5096-5098, HW 34/18, HW 43/6, CAB 301//77, ADM 223/793 and FO 1093/484.]
Soon after the outbreak of war, Colonel Burke of MI8c (the
forerunner of RSS) listed the equipment then in service, and made requests for
expansion. His deposition ran as follows:
Direction
Finding Stations 6 + 4
Listening
Stations 4 + 2
Mobile Vans 10 + 14
G.P.O.
Detection Vans 88 (up to 200
available)
Amateur
Listening Posts 27
Local D.F.
systems for regional centres 1 + 16
Transmitters
for beacons 0 + 20
He added that ‘only one
of the mobile vans is now fully equipped’, but that ‘the remaining vans should
be ready in two to three weeks’. It is not clear what the distinction is
between ‘mobile vans’ and ‘G,P.O. detection vans’. It could not be solely one
of ownership: an earlier memorandum noted that the GPO provided the six fixed
and ten mobile stations. It may have been one of designed function: a paper
written in January 1941 records that ‘mobile vans (which were normally used to
assist listeners in the detection and suppression of radio interference from
industrial and domestic equipment) had been lent by PO to deal with the problem
of detecting illicit radio beacons.’ Meanwhile the notion of ‘beacons’ (devices
to assist arriving bombers to find their targets) had evolved to one of illicit
transmissions. The Post Office was seen by military men as an unreliable, slow
and bureaucratic organisation, unsuitable for holding responsibility for such
critical tasks.
The
official SIGINT history reinforces a rather casual approach to the use of
mobile units: “Fixed interception stations would search the ether . . . In the event of signals being intercepted,
they would pass to the direction-finding stations the callsign, wavelength and
text of the message. Supplementing this would be the widespread corps of
voluntary interceptors whose function it would be to listen to the amateurs
working in their area, observe their habits and report anything unusual. Mobile
units were to perform the function of determining the exact location of the
illicit transmitter. After the fixed D/F stations had located the general area
of the transmitter, the mobile direction-finding units would proceed there,
await further signals, obtain more accurate bearings and so narrow down the
area of search.” And it indicates that, when the transmitter was located, the
responsibility for what happened next would be MI5’s: the service might want to
monitor it rather than close it down. (In that case, why sending out mobile
vans, which might frighten the transgressor, and cause him to stop
broadcasting, is not explained.)
But what happened to the expansion programme? It probably never
occurred. As I have described before, by 1940 the interception mission of RSS
was almost focused on overseas traffic. The History suggests a somewhat
desultory approach could have been taken to what was then considered a non-problem.
At some stage, a Mobile Units Group, under Major Elmes,
centred in Barnet, controlled also the bases in Gateshead, Bristol and
Gilnakirk, the establishment of which I described in the previous chapter.
Fixed stations would then locate a general area of about 400 square miles. A report
would be given to MI5, and the Mobile Unit organisation set in motion. At least
three mobile vans were posted on the perimeter of this area, in contact with the
Police Station in neighbourhood, a headquarters to which an MI5 officer would
be attached. When the transmitter was heard, simultaneous bearings were taken
by the Mobile Units and reported to HQ, where they were plotted on a map. The units
then moved closer, and took fresh bearings ‘until definite action was possible
on the part of the MI5 officer present’. But MI5 had no powers of arrest, and
it is not clear what judgments the MI5 officer would be able to make on the
spot in the event that a transmitter was caught red-handed. The narrative
sounds like a good deal of wish-fulfilment, and post facto puffery for
the historians.
Mobile
vans definitely did exist, as Guy Liddell makes occasional reference to them in
his Diaries. Yet, in 1943, as RSS started to consider the security needs for
the invasion of Europe, it encountered fresh challenges. The History
again informs us: “‘During this period RSS had accepted a further extension of
its commitments without, however, affecting the vital features of its
programme. This was the monitoring, by mobile units, of certain classes of
signal made by our own stations, to prevent the inadvertent passage of
information likely, if intercepted, to be of use to the enemy. the possibility
of such leakage had been recognized and dealt with in the early days of the war
by the cancellation of amateur transmitting licences and the impounding of
transmitters, and the vetting of MI5 of firms requiring licenses for
experimental or testing purposes. With GPO collaboration such action was easy
to take, since licences were granted by that body. As the GPO did not
necessarily license other Government departments however, it was found that
there was a number of organisations using radio transmitters of which the Security
Service had no official knowledge, as for example, experimental establishments
of the Ministry of Supply, the Ministry of Aircraft Production, the Railways,
the GPO stations themselves and Cable and Wireless stations. In addition the
Police and the Fire Service possessed their own transmitters.” The organisation
was under stress, and memoranda attest to the fact that its original mandate
was being ignored.
A
budgetary memorandum from 1941 indicated that capital expenditures for two
Intercept Stations, at £25,000, and for Vehicles & Equipment, at £3,500,
were requested. Annual Expenditures for P.O. Agency Services (D/F & Mobile
Unit [sic!]) were estimated at £78,000. Yet, after some disturbing gaps
in the record, the Estimates for RSS in the Budget Year of April 1942 to March
1943 include very little on mobile units, with Special Apparatus given as
£10,000, and expenses of Mobile Unit Operations a mere £8000. This is not the
high-powered, swift-moving organisation reportedly described to Chapman Pincher
by Andrew Johnston and Kenneth Morton Evans, but a service apparently being
rapidly wound down. (Were radio-detection vans perhaps later requisitioned and
repurposed as transmitting vehicles to roam around issuing bogus signals
of a phantom army? And an intriguing minute from D. I. Wilson of B1A in MI5,
dated February 24, 1943, recommends that, if phantom armies were to be created,
bogus wireless traffic needed to be realized as well, to support the false
information to be passed on by the agents. Was Wilson perhaps the originator of
one of the more spectacularly successful aspects of the whole OVERLORD
operation?) Other memoranda written at this time indicate that the resources of
RSS, including the reconstruction and repositioning of receiving stations at
Hanslope, Cornwall and Forfarshire, and the installation of rhombic aerials, were
being increasingly focused on mainland European needs.
Meanwhile RSS struggled
to resolve its political problems in 1943, caused mostly by the over-secretive
Cowgill, the highly-opinionated Trevor-Roper, the arrogant Gambier-Parry, and
the manipulative Malcolm Frost. Frost left MI5 in November 1943 to return to
the BBC, and some of the organisational issues were addressed by splitting the
RSS committee into two, one for high-level policy, and the other for detailed
intelligence. Guy Liddell continued to be frustrated that Gambier-Parry was not
performing his mission regarding illicit wireless interception. In his diary on
February 18, he recorded that RSS was not doing its job, as two German agents
had been detected. One might interpret this discovery as a sign that RSS had
indeed been doing its job, but maybe the agents – whoever they were, and whose
existence was an alarming fact since T.A. Robertson had already reported that
all agents had been mopped up – were not detected through electronic means. The
same month he recorded that one Jean Jefferson had left the CPGB to operate a radio
as an illegal, but she is not heard of again. On March 11, Liddell noted that
Gambier-Parry had refused to accept responsibility for signals security. On
April 1, he wrote that Frost had informed him that the Post Office had ‘bumped
into’ an unknown 75-watt transmitter in Bloomsbury. It may have been SOE’s, but
it all went to show (as indicated earlier in this piece) that a large amount of
authorised radio transmission was carrying on of which MI5 had not been
informed. And on June 3, not yet licit transmissions were detected coming from
the Soviet Embassy.
The problem certainly
got worse, with multiple foreign embassies now starting to transmit from the
privacy of their premises, and the British government unwilling to intervene
because of possible reciprocal moves. A major meeting occurred on September 10,
1943, at which (as Liddell noted) Colonel Valentine Vivian seemed ‘unaware of RSS’s charter for detecting illicit
wireless communications from UK’. Liddell went on to write: “As regards the
diplomatic communications of the allies there appears to be no real
supervision. It was felt that to monitor and break these communications would
impose too great a task on GC & CS, who were already overburdened with
operational work. It was agreed that we should have a permanent representative
on the Reid Committee, that we should continue to look after the security of
non-service bodies, but that the results of the monitoring of the
communications of non-service Govt. Depts. should be sent by RSS to the Reid
Committee and not to ourselves.” Gambier-Parry’s apparent disdain for
interception is shown in a record of October 13, where the head of Section VIII
is shown to be a lone voice, thinking that ‘mobile units should not be taken across
the Channel until RSS have detected an illicit transmitter’. The issues of
quick mobility and transmission habits were obviously lost on him. (I have
written more about this matter, and especially the illicit broadcasts of the
Soviet spy Oliver Green, at http://www.coldspur.com/sonias-radio-part-viii/) .
Several reports written at the end of the war, in the summer of 1945 (inspectable at HW 34/18), suggest that deploying mobile units to track down illicit transmitters was a laborious and often futile exercise. (Of course, operations may have been scaled back by then, as the obvious threat had diminished, but the experiences are still informative.) In March 1945, a team of four mobile units were sent to Cheshire, and after several days managed to apprehend a GPO employee, a Volunteer Interceptor in Warrington. Another case in Birmingham was abandoned after five days. When unidentified transmissions were found to be emanating from the area of Kinross in Scotland, a troop of mobile vans was ordered from Barnet (about 400 miles away – hardly a rapid-response force) to investigate. The vans eventually discovered a Polish Military Signals Training Unit, which had conveniently and innocently continued with its traffic. Repeated interception of signals in London led back several times to the Soviet Embassy, where a ‘prototype model of a wide band DAG-1 D/F receiver’, which could track rapid changes in wavelengths used, was successfully utilised. Such cases confirm that RSS worked under a serious lack of intelligence about potential transmitters, and it had no mechanisms for adding to the portfolio of sources of radio-waves listed above. Why was no register, with geographical co-ordinates, maintained? Moreover, the mobile force the RSS deployed was scattered so broadly as to be almost completely ineffective for trapping careful illicit operators.
The Ellipse in Kinross (from HW 34/18)
One last aspect of the interception
wars is that MI5 had a respectful admiration for the Germans, believing that
they were as efficient as RSS was in intercepting and interpreting traffic
emanating from domestic control stations. In his diary entry for May 23, 1942,
Guy Liddell describes how the Nazis were able to concentrate on Whaddon Hall
(the nerve-centre for SIS, which was also handling SOE traffic, at the time),
and quickly pick up the changes in frequency adopted by the British when they
were communicating with agents in Europe. He concluded by writing: “It seems
that the Germans have made a very close study of the form of Whaddon operators
and can recognize them very easily. Their Direction-Finding apparatus is
considered to be extremely good and accurate. They must think ours is very bad
in view of the fact that TATE and company have got away with it for so long.”
Indeed. Yet Liddell and his troops did not appear to conclude that that
observation represented a considerable exposure, or that the Germans might have
expected them to address this loophole as the plans for the invasion of Europe
solidified.
There is no doubt more
to be told of this period, but the evidence already points to a strong contrast
in perceptions about illicit wireless transmission in mainland Europe and Great
Britain in this period. In Nazi-occupied Europe, the organs of security moved
aggressively and cruelly to eliminate any dangerous wireless traffic, although
admittedly with propaganda about mechanized forces that clearly did not exist,
with agents feverishly trying to escape capture by keeping transmissions short
and moving around to other safe houses. In Britain, the problem was not seen to
exist, but if it did, agents were able to move around unmolested in what should
have been an openly hostile climate, with no safe places to withdraw to, or
believed to sit at their same stations waiting conveniently for the mobile vans
to turn up in a few days at the appointed time, when they would start
transmitting again – and then the vans and the nervous MI5 officer might do
nothing at all. Yet that is not what the RSS officers said after the war. The
judgment of Hinsley and Simkins, on page 181 of Volume 4 of the History of
British Intelligence in the Second world War (“In all its activities the
RSS achieved a high and continuingly increasing degree of efficiency”) merits
some re-inspection. The mission from Barnet to Kinross particularly epitomizes
the poor use of intelligence and resources.
The Double-Cross System
After the invasion of
Britain was called off by Hitler towards the end of 1940 (but kept alive for
propaganda purposes until well into 1941), the role of the captured and turned
wireless spies as an instrument for influencing Nazi policies was debated at
length. All through 1941, and the beginning of 1942, officers of MI5 had
discussed among themselves, and sometimes with outsiders, such as those in
Military Intelligence proper, what the role of the information passed on to the
Abwehr should be. Should it be veiled propaganda? Should it overstate or
understate Britain’s military capabilities? Dick White recommended to his boss,
Guy Liddell, in April 1942 that the Committee managing double agents should
change ‘from that of a body of censors to that of a body of planners’, adding
that ‘the difference is that we are now asking questions of the Germans while
previously we were answering questions from them’. Yet it needed a lead. It was not until July
1942, after John Bevan had replaced Oliver Stanley as head of the London
Controlling Section, that operational plans were able to take on more solidity.
The XX Committee, under Masterman’s chairmanship, and MI5’s B1A could start to
think about serious deception strategies. (Volume 4 of the authorized History,
by Hinsley and Simkins, covers this period very well. KV 4/213 at the National
Archives is useful. Ben Macintyre’s breezy but uneven Double Cross is
also generally recommended as a contemporary study of the project.)
Meanwhile, the Committee
had to convince the Abwehr that its remaining agents were safe, and ready for
action, but not over-exuberantly so. After all, the Abwehr was supposed to be
in control. Long discussions took place over the necessity of passing facts on
via the agents, in order to maintain credibility, but also allowing for
occasional mistakes. Yet one critical aspect of the whole double-cross
operation was the extent that the undeniable primary contributors to the
successful deception project (BRUTUS, TREASURE, GARBO and TRICYCLE) were mostly
very late arrivals to the scene. What is even more important to state,
moreover, is that none of these was a classical ‘double agent’. They were all
Allied sympathisers who had inveigled themselves into the Nazi apparatus under
the pretence of wanting to help the Axis cause, but who then betrayed their
recruiters by disclosing their true allegiance when they arrived in Britain (or
spoke to British officials in Lisbon.) Admittedly, they might have been lying
(and agent ZIGZAG fell into this highly complex netherworld), but MI5
strenuously tried to verify stories. TATE was the only true double agent, who
had been turned after he had been captured, convinced of the necessity of his
role as a tool of British intelligence, mostly out of the fear for his life,
but who then gradually came to appreciate the benefits of his democratic host
country. As I explained in the last chapter, TATE’s value as a contributor to the
deception over FORTITUDE was diminished because the necessity for him to find a
modus vivendi and occupation to survive in Britain forced him to be a
more reclusive and less mobile observer of invasion preparations.
For a short while in April,
1942, moreover, the Double-Cross Committee had considered the implications of
running double-agents overseas, and taking over the transmitters that SIS
maintained at Whaddon Hall. This was because the SOE agent VICTOIRE, Mathilde
Carré, who claimed she had escaped from her German captors, had convinced her
interrogators that she was genuine. Masterman and Marriott in B14 thus started
to plan how messages could be sent back to members of the Interalliée as a
method for deception, since MI5 and SIS knew that the agents had been turned by
the Germans, but the Germans were assumed not to know this. The task presented
fresh challenges as to how lies and truth should be managed without detriment
to the real war effort. Before this task became reality, however, VICTOIRE was
unmasked by one of the officers she had betrayed, agent BRUTUS (see below), and
she was incarcerated for the remainder of the war.
In any case the official
accounts need to be treated carefully. John Masterman’s Double Cross System
contains an Appendix that claims that there were at least 120 double agents
managed by the XX System, and it lists thirty-nine of ‘the more interesting
cases that were operated from this country’. Yet this list includes such
dubious characters as SNOW (who was dropped as early as March 1941 since he was
probably a triple agent), the enigmatic GANDER (who may never have been turned,
and disappeared mysteriously from the scene in November 1940), and the turncoat
SUMMER (who tried to escape in January 1941, and whose fate remains
controversial). It also includes such figures as BALLOON, who was recruited by
TRICYCLE, which hardly puts him in the class of ‘double agent’: the term
sometimes used in the authorised history by Hinsley et al., ‘double-cross
agent’, is more suitable. (Masterman omits to mention a figure named BRISTLE, the
cryptonym appearing in KV 4/214 at the National Archives, an oversight that suggests
there may be a yet undiscovered tier of ‘less interesting’ agents whose names
MI5 would prefer to forget.) As Hinsley and Simkins more accurately represent
the state of the game in late 1943: “The newly acquired double agents [sic!]
off-set the loss of Zigzag, Rainbow, Father, Dragonfly,
Balloon and Mutt and Jeff, whose operations were now
closed down or suspended.”
This account necessarily
focuses on agents who successfully contributed to deception through wireless
communications, which was a complex issue in its own right. Because of MI5’s
desire to have information passed quickly to the Abwehr, agents who had
hitherto used secret ink or microphotography requested wireless apparatus from
their controllers. Indeed, GARBO exploited a delayed, but highly accurate,
message about TORCH landings, which conveniently arrived after the event, to
encourage a move to wireless usage. This may have prompted the Germans to
accelerate the use of wireless communications with GARBO. That would, of
course, allow the British to get disinformation in the hands of their adversaries
in a much more timely fashion, but it would also eliminate the convenience of
delivering highly accurate information with a built-in delay, thus increasing the
risk of injurious retaliatory action. The adoption of radio did necessitate the
delivery of codes, however, which was mightily useful for GC&CS in
extending the range of intercepted signals that could be decrypted.
So how did these vital agents fare in the use of radio? The final 1942 entry in the files of TATE [Wulf Schmidt] at Kew expresses confidence that the enemy trusts him, and that his story about transmitting early in the morning, before the farm hands go to work, has been accepted. Yet 1943 appeared not to be so successful, and his handlers voiced concern about his viability. (It was impossible to verify what the Abwehr thought of him, as messages from Hamburg to Berlin were sent by land-line.) During the period March-September he received only fourteen messages from the enemy, most of them very routine, as if it could not expect much valuable information from an agent fully engaged in agricultural work. An added complication arose because of the repatriation of a Nazi in November 1943. It was feared that this officer might have picked up rumours inside the camp where he was being held to the effect that MUTT, JEFF, SUMMER and TATE were all under control of the British. That encouraged MI5 to put TATE on ice for a while. A report in early January 1944 also lamented the fact that he had only one transmitting frequency (4603 kcs), which made communication as far as Hamburg difficult outside daylight hours. TATE thus made a request to have a small portable apparatus workable off the mains, and the minor role he was able to play in OVERLORD will be described in the next episode.
Agent BRUTUS
BRUTUS [Roman Czerniawski], a former Polish fighter Pilot, experienced a comparatively short career as a double-cross agent. After the Germans arrested him in late 1941 in France, where he had built up an intelligence network, he manufactured a deal whereby he traded the safety of his family for a role spying in Britain. Before he left Paris, he was given quartzes to take with him for the purpose of building a transmitter with the help of his Polish friends, although BRUTUS asserted that it would be difficult finding a wireless operator. After an ‘escape’ via the Pyrenees, he arrived in England on October 2, 1942. Certain necessary checks with Poles in exile complicated his adoption, but he was approved, and established contact in December 1942, with an apparatus constructed for him by MI5. (The archive does not indicate how he suddenly acquired operating skills.) He was then instructed to build his own radio set in early January 1943. Masterman was cautious, telling Bevan he wanted to run BRUTUS giving information, not as a deception medium.
The year 1943 turned out to be problematic, as BRUTUS stumbled into hot water with the other Poles over the Katyn massacre, and his overexuberant politicking. (The Germans had discovered the site of the massacres in April, but the Soviets had denied any responsibility, thus causing a rift in Allied circles. On April 25, the Soviet Union broke off relations with the Polish government-in-exile.) Moreover, there was a security problem, as the Poles had access to BRUTUS’s codes (and thus might learn about the deception plan for OVERLORD). Harmer also reported to Robertson on May 6 that White and Liddell were concerned lest the Russians intercept and decode the BRUTUS traffic and use it ‘as a basis for their allegations that the Polish Government are maintaining contact with the Germans’. Reed assured Harmer that the range for BRUTUS’s transmitter was only 400 miles, so there was no danger of interception, but the episode showed the tangled politics that were starting to affect counter-espionage exercises. BRUTUS successfully reported on the arrest of CARELESS in May 1943, and Ultra decrypts showed that his reports were being taken seriously. However, BRUTUS’s arrest in the fracas over Katyn caused an awkward interruption. MI5 found him a notional ‘operator’ (purportedly in Reading, actually working in Richmond, thus apparently breaking the rules observed in other cases to protect against German direction-finding) so that he would not have to operate the wireless himself. Intercepts indicated that he was not fully trusted, and by the end of the year, Harmer was suggesting that he be used solely as a courier. On the last day of the year, however, BRUTUS informed his handlers that he needed a new transmitter.
Agent TREASURE
The career of TREASURE [Lily Sergueiev], a journalist of Russian extraction, was very short, and she was not even activated as a wireless agent until January 1944. Yet her association with German Intelligence went back as far as 1937, when she had declined to work for a contact in Berlin, one Felix Dassel. After the fall of France, when in Paris, she had recontacted Dassel, and agreed to work for the Abwehr. She had been introduced to her handler, Emile Kliemann, in June 1941, and soon started receiving training on operating wireless equipment. This was somewhat unusual, as the Abwehr seemed keener at this time to have their agents use couriers, secret writing and microdots. By February 1942, she had started practicing, transmitting and receiving on a proper set, but for reasons primarily to do with Kliemann’s rather erratic behavior and complicated love life, the practice was neglected. Indeed, as late as May 18, she was taught how to use invisible ink, and it was not until July 17, 1943 that she appeared at the British consular office in Madrid declaring that she intended to travel to England to spy, but wanted to switch her allegiance.
After researching her background, MI5 concluded that her intentions were genuine. But she still had to wait for the distracted Kliemann to get organised, and it was not until a few months later (her MI5 handler, Mary Scherer, said November 11; Ben Macintyre states October 7) that she was able to fly from Gibraltar to Bristol. Kliemann had promised her that she would be given a wireless set to be disguised as a phonograph, but he let her down, unable to procure one for her, instead promising that she would be passed one after she arrived in Britain. She boarded the plane without it – also without her beloved dog, an incident that would later cause deep rifts between her and those in MI5 she trusted. Her activity as a spy was then further delayed owing to her becoming seriously ill in December, and being hospitalised. Thus it was not until January 11, 1944 that MI5 started conceiving plans for putting TREASURE in possession of a wireless set. She was able to write to Kliemann informing him that she had now bought an American Halicrafter radio (actually supplied by MI5), even though possession of an unlicensed wireless transmitter was still a civil offence.
Agent TRICYCLE
For most of his career TRICYCLE [Dusko Popov] was not a wireless agent, and he never used such equipment himself. He had managed to convince the Germans as of his bona fides, while remaining free to travel because of his import/export business, but had declared himself to the British back in 1940. Yet he had been sent by the German to the USA in October 1942, and spent most of 1943 in what turned out to be a fruitless (and expensive) sojourn. Even before his spell in the USA, the British had deciphered messages that indicated that the Germans had suspicions about him, but TRICYCLE bravely walked back into the lions’ den in Lisbon, and managed to brazen out his interrogators, who were anxious to believe that they still had a valuable resource under their control. On September 14, 1943, TRICYCLE flew back to Britain, carrying with him various espionage material and money, and also a wireless transmitter. So who was to operate it?
TRICYCLE had ingeniously convinced the Abwehr of a scheme to infiltrate supposed Yugoslavian Nazi sympathisers into Britain, disguised as refugees. Through his brother, Ivo Popov, TRICYCLE arranged for a naval officer called Frano de Bona to be recruited by the Abwehr and trained as a wireless operator. TRICYCLE returned to Lisbon and Madrid in his role as a Yugoslav diplomatic courier in November 1943, and there negotiated de Bona’s [FREAK’s] passage via Gibraltar to London, where he would operate TRICYCLE’s equipment. On December 8, Guy Liddell recorded his fear that the whole TRICYCLE set-up might collapse at any moment, but later that month FREAK started his work as a wireless operator. He would transmit regularly (his location not apparently revealed) for five months until being necessarily closed down because of a scare.
Agent GARBO
The most famous of the double-cross agents, and the one who contributed most to the deception exercise of FORTITUDE, was the Spaniard Juan García Pujol (GARBO). Again, his career went back a long way, and it was not until late in the war that his ‘network’ was supported by wireless transmission. He had originally presented himself to the British Embassy in Madrid in January 1941, but was turned away. Inventing information for the Abwehr, his reports were picked up by SIS, and he was eventually interviewed again in November 1941. He was smuggled out of Lisbon to Gibraltar, and hence to London, where he arrived on April 24, 1942. After interrogation, GARBO was transferred to the control of B1A in MI5. Over the next few years he would craft hundreds of letters written in secret ink, which mysteriously managed to reach the Germans in Spain and Portugal. As Ben Macintyre writes: “The information they theoretically supplied was written up in secret ink and dispatched inside innocuous letters that the Germans believed were either brought by courier or sent by airmail to various cover addresses in neutral Spain and Portugal. In fact they were transported in MI6’s diplomatic bags.”
Yet this was not going
to be a swift enough medium for the purposes of FORTITUDE. In August 1942,
GARBO had in principle gained permission to use wireless. The Abwehr had
encouraged GARBO to make his ‘notional’ agents use secret ink to communicate
directly, which would have made the control and distribution of disinformation
very difficult. Thus GARBO, having fortuitously ‘discovered’ a radio technician
employed on the outskirts of London who was a friend of his ‘Agent No 4’,
suggested that wireless should now be attempted for communications. When GARBO
reported, in November 1942, on convoy departures for the TORCH landings, and
the information arrived too late for the Germans to act upon it, it was a
timely signal for them to adopt a newer technology, and they wrote to him on
November 26 more warmly accepting his recommendation. In the words of Hinsley
and Simkins: “To begin with a
large volume of material continued to pass by air mail and courier. From the
end of August [1943], however, almost all his [GARBO’s] messages were sent on his radio link. This followed
from the need, in support of Allied deception plans, to force the Germans’
correspondence with him on to the air and receive it with greater speed, and
also from the fact that, to give verisimilitude to his network by indicating to
the Germans that MI5 was aware of its existence but could not track it down,
steps were being taken to show them that its air mail letters were being
intercepted.”
The first transmission was
scheduled to take place on March 6, 1943, and Guy Liddell reported that GARBO
did in fact establish radio contact with Madrid on March 12, with the MI5
operator resident at 55 Elliot Road, Hendon. The provision of a new cipher by
the Abwehr was highly valuable: Liddell further commented, on June 5, that
GC&CS regarded the results of interception as ‘outstanding’. Yet wireless
procedures were outstandingly undisciplined. Despite instructions to their new
operator to keep messages as short as possible (‘No
transmission should exceed fifty groups for safety sake’), and warnings about direction-finders, even
referring to the use of aeroplanes (which was a technique the Abwehr was
domestically familiar with), GARBO’s operator was shown to be on the air for
two hours at a time in June 1943, owing to the prolix and flowery reports that
he and Tomás Harris, his minder, compiled. By the end of August, nearly all
GARBO’s messages were sent by the wireless link, and after one or two hiccups
due to the Abwehr’s concerns about British censorship of the mails, and
possible exposure of the wireless-led network, communications flourished for
the remainder of the year.
As an interesting sidenote on the efficiency of
RSS, Hinsley and Simkins report that the service was able to detect GARBO’s
station. It was clearly closely involved with tracking the transmissions of the
agents. What had happened was that GARBO had been given a transmitting plan
that required the station to adopt military procedures for callsigns and
introductions, with the result that the signals would be confused with a
swelter of other military traffic, making connection with Madrid difficult for
a while. “ . . . in fact GARBO’s
transmissions were temporarily lost by the operators who had been intercepting
them for the RSS from places as far apart as Scotland, Gibraltar and Canada. .
. “, the historians wrote. “It was a tribute to the efficiency of the RSS’s
intercept network that after a few weeks it again reported Garbo’s transmitter
as a suspect station.”
Conclusion
As the preparatory period for the long-awaited invasion of Europe started, a strange, asymmetrical confrontation of wireless intelligence had developed. From the German side, the notion of a powerful direction- and location-finding apparatus had been created in response to a pervasive and potentially dangerous threat. Yet it was hard to implement. Its menace was used more as a deterrent than an enforcement mechanism, the security organs struggling with the practical limitations of such techniques, and having to rely more on informers and infiltration to subvert and destroy the enemy’s networks. In Britain, a similar powerful detection capability kept a close ear on the airwaves. The authorities, however, confident that no genuine hostile agents were operating on native soil, owing to the RSS’s interception, and GC&CS’s decryption, of Abwehr traffic, maintained a surprisingly casual stance towards illicit transmissions and their origin. Both German and British Intelligence were justified in thinking that the capabilities of their foe were at least as advanced as their own. After the war, the British boasted of their capabilities in a manner similar to that of the Germans. Yet MI5, in managing its Double-Cross System, was woefully careless in supervising the transmission schedules of its agents, and the Abwehr deluded itself in thinking that its agents could survive undetected in a small, hostile island.
Alert readers will have noticed that I received important communications from Roland Philipps (the biographer of Donald Maclean) and from Jan-Willem van den Braak (the biographer of the Abwehr spy Jan Willem ter Braak), whose work is being translated from the Dutch for publication in the UK. I shall report on the outcomes of these dialogues in next month’s report.
An observation on Guy Liddell and Roger Hollis by one of my contacts in intelligence inspired me to break out in verse on the subject of MI5’s efforts to counter Soviet influences. The doggerel can be found at DiaryofaCounterEspionageOfficer.
After I had put Part 3 of this saga to bed at the end of
September, some thoughts that I had vaguely touched on in earlier episodes returned
to me with more vigour: What if the mistakes over ter Braak and the controversial
report by Walter Gill (which effectively concluded that domestic wireless
interception was not necessary) were both deliberate exercises by MI5 and its
partners? Were the plans for the double-cross operation that far advanced in
the last few months of 1940 that it was considered vital to give indications –
in the belief that the Abwehr would pick them up – that Britain’s wireless
interception policies were so weak that German agents could essentially roam at
will, and broadcast home undetected? After all, as early as September 1939, Guy
Liddell of MI5 had written that ‘it was in our interests that the Germans should
regard us as grossly inefficient in these matters’, and that ‘if they thought
our organisation was good they might well ask how it was we managed to get his
[SNOW’s] messages through’. And were the Abwehr’s planting of obviously fake
identification cards on its agents a deliberate ruse to determine how gullible
the British counter-espionage services were?
These may be utterly fanciful notions, but they have a modicum of
sense about them, as all such exploits at face value are very difficult to
explain. One has to assume that agencies like MI5 and the Abwehr were continually
thinking: how will our enemy counterpart think and act? (A British FOES
committee did in fact exist: Guy Liddell described it as ‘an inter-services
committee that tries to
put itself in the position of the enemy intelligence service’.) And, if some sensible
insight were applied, each intelligence section should have assumed that its
counterpart, because of native influences, might in some circumstances act in a
different fashion. Thus, in this instalment, I start to explore the variations
in the strategies and successes of the major European-based espionage/sabotage
organisations: SOE (Special Operations Executive), the German Abwehr, and the
network of the Soviet Union’s GRU and KGB spies, and what their controllers
should have learned from their experiences in one theatre of war to apply to
another. There is a symmetry in some of the things undertaken by each
organisation, as they strain to develop measures to confound the forces trying
to counter them. Yet one can also spot asymmetrical aspects, driven by the
idiosyncratic nature of each force, including their overall motivations and
objectives, the personnel they selected, the territorial dimensions, and the
cultural drivers behind their operations. It is hard not to suppose, however,
that the policies of each were not somehow affected by their knowledge of what
their adversaries were doing with their own offensive activities.
The focus of my research
in this series has been the detection of illicit wireless. It is worth
recording here that the primary purpose of what is commonly known as RDF (Radio
Direction-Finding, but implicitly including Location-Finding) had, before the
war, been the interception and decryption of government (e.g. military,
diplomatic and police) traffic. Initially, precise location was not as
important as content. As countries started to perform intelligent traffic
analysis, however, the origin – and mobility – of transmitting stations,
especially military units, became much more significant, often providing
intelligence even though the underlying messages could not be decrypted. Then,
as the combat started, organisations had to start to apply their knowledge to
the possible threat of illicit stations operating behind their own lines.
With all three
combatants, the techniques for long-range triangulation were well-developed by
the time war broke out, and thus could in principle be quickly adapted for
identifying illicit domestic transmissions. The paradox was that, owing to the
vagaries of the behavior of radio waves, it was often easier to pick up
transmissions originating abroad than those issuing from inside the country’s
boundaries. As I explained in Part 1 of this saga, low-powered wireless sets
operating on high-frequencies in domestic territory, designed to exploit
‘bouncing’ off the ionosphere, were often hard to detect because of the skip
zones involved, and widely dispersed human interceptors would have been needed
to pick up their ground waves. Such a set-up was possible in the United
Kingdom, but not in the expanding German Reich. Moreover, the finer granularity
required for locating individual wireless sets (at building-block or house
level) demanded new mobile equipment and techniques not explored in long-range
location-finding.
As I discuss the strategies and challenges of the three espionage
forces, and attempt to assess their effectiveness, I shall be considering them
under the following criteria:
Operational leadership:
How good were the directors in planning how objectives should be met, and
following up by providing the motivation, material, and structure to allow
agents to be successful?
Quality of operators:
Were agents with the appropriate profile chosen for the job in hand?
Quality of training: Did
the agents receive thorough and suitable training?
Quality of equipment:
How effective was the equipment (primarily wireless apparatus) for the location
of operation and for transmission needs? Were conditions such as local power
supply properly taken into account?
Operating procedures:
Were safe and secure operating procedures defined, and did the agents follow
them?
Remote support: Did the
agents receive reliable and effective support from their home controllers?
Detection capabilities: How
effective were the enemy’s radio-detection and direction-finding mechanisms?
Social environment: How
hostile or sympathetic was the social environment in which they had to work?
Counter-Intelligence
strategy: What goals drove the counter-espionage strategy of the enemy on whose
territory the spying took place?
June 1941 constitutes the major chronological dividing-line in the
conduct of wireless espionage. (In the light of my research, I have deviated
from the temporal Phases identified in my first post in this series, which had
Phase 1 completing at the end of 1940, and Phase 2 winding down in June 1942.) The
Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union immediately changed the German attitude in
Soviet counter-espionage from one of wary passivity to aggressive pursuit. The
Russian stance in illicit communications switched from cautious dormancy to careless
urgency. For Britain, it signalled that any planned invasion of the island
nation had been postponed indefinitely: the timing coincided with the transfer
of RSS to SIS, and the implementation of the new structure in MI5 under David
Petrie. The date has less significance for SOE: it was still in an
experimental, groping stage in the summer of 1941, with only two radio-stations
established in France by that time. My analysis thus presses forward in this
dimension of espionage and sabotage to address the continued struggles of the
unit into 1942. I now summarise the activities of the three agencies in this
period before delving into more detail.
I have shown how the greatest intensity of Nazi attempts to
infiltrate British territory occurred in the autumn of 1940 (Operation LENA),
with a couple of reconnaissance landings (by Jakobs and Richter) occurring in
the spring of 1941 – i.e. before Germany’s alliance with the Soviet Union
turned into a clash. By then, with the plan to invade the United Kingdom
abandoned, and Hitler’s attention now directed to Operation Barbarossa, the
agents whom the Abwehr had apparently successfully installed in Britain took on
less importance. They appear to have been largely forgotten, or abandoned, and
it took the arrival of new ‘spies’, such as TRICYCLE, GARBO and TREASURE (whom
I shall cover in the next chapter), to re-activate the espionage – and the
Double-Cross – project. Yet using wireless was not at the forefront of the
Abwehr’s plans, and MI5, in their efforts to facilitate the passing on of fake
information, had to be very careful and imaginative when encouraging use of the
medium.
As far as Britain’s own plans for espionage and sabotage were
concerned, Churchill had in the meantime (July 1940) established the SOE as a
force to penetrate Nazi-occupied Europe, and to soften up and harass the
invader’s government of occupied territories. Yet this was not primarily an
espionage organisation, like SIS (whose network had been almost completely destroyed
at the outset of war.) It was an outfit committed to sabotage, and, while
wireless communication became a critical part of its operational
infrastructure, the technology was used more to arrange for shipments,
drop-offs, and pick-ups, and only secondarily as a mechanism for providing
intelligence. Sabotage operations also drew more obvious attention from the
enemy: furthermore, in the first two years of its existence (i.e. until the
summer of 1942), SOE was hampered by being reliant on Section VIII of SIS for
its wireless equipment, wavelengths, codes, etc. The experience in responding
to illicit SOE transmissions in France may have given the German
counter-espionage agencies a leg-up when the Soviet apparatus fired up in the
summer of 1941, but, as will be shown, the evidence for this is shaky.
When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, all Soviet agents in place
in Germany were immediately activated to provide intelligence about Nazi
war-plans. Yet they had not been completely dormant before then. The situation
was in fact more complex than that. After the show-trials and purges of
1937-1938, the KGB and GRU networks had been patiently rebuilt – not just in
Germany, but across most of Western Europe. As early as May 1940, however, when
Paris fell, Moscow suspected that relations with Nazi Germany – despite the
Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact – might deteriorate, and diplomatic representatives
(e.g. Kobulov in Berlin) started building networks of informers, not only in
Germany but also in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Elsewhere, the Soviet Union’s
spies had long been active, such as in the origins of the famous Red Orchestra
group in Switzerland, led by SONIA (Ursula Kuczynski) and DORA, the Hungarian Sándor
Radó, who had been recruited in 1935, and moved to Switzerland in 1939. Before
1941, however, couriers, and communications through local Soviet embassies, had
been a much more convenient method of passing information than the use of
wireless transmission methods.
Abwehr Spies
up to June 1941
Admiral Canaris of the Abwehr
The decision to infiltrate spies into Great Britain in late 1940
was taken at short notice, but, like many events of a time when feints and
deceptions were part of the strategy, the exact date when Admiral Canaris
initiated the LENA programme is uncertain. In 2018, Bernard O’Connor, relying
on the rather dubious transcription of Lahousen’s War Diaries claimed by
Wighton & Peis sixty years earlier, asserted that Canaris told his Abwehr
officers as early as June 22 that gathering intelligence on Britain, in
preparation for the planned invasion, was of the highest priority. That early
preparation is vaguely echoed by Niklaus Ritter in his 1972 memoir, Deckname Dr. Rantzau, where he
improbably describes being in the company of Caroli (SUMMER) and Schmidt
(TATE), ready for their departure some time in July, when they had already
completed their eight-weeks’ training. Yet Ritter’s memory was at fault: he
describes them as leaving on the same plane – something which the British
archives strongly refute, so one must question the reliability of his memory.
John Lukacs, in The Duel, represents
Admiral Raeder as still trying to talk Hitler out of invading Britain as late
as July 11, with Hitler responding in terms of wanting to make peace with the
United Kingdom. O’Connor and Ben Macintyre both refer to a conference held in
Kiel ‘some time in July’ to plan the details of the LENA operation, an event
confirmed by the Kew file on the Hamburg Abwehr officer Praetorius (KV 2/170-1),
and given precision by KV 3/76, which sets it as taking place on July 16. That
would dovetail with Ritter’s account that eight weeks of training had to be
accomplished to meet Hitler’s deadline of September 15.
Praetorius’s recollection was that the agents parachuted in at
this time would ‘only have to be of independent means for 6-8 weeks as by at
time the invasion of England was expected to be an accomplished fact.’ Yet the
chronology does not work. If a decision had been made in July, the recruitment
and training of agents was supposed to take eight weeks, and their subsequent
independent existence on British soil might have been expected to take another
six to eight weeks, the latest date for a successful invasion would have to be
placed as late as early November. While Anthony Cave-Brown gave August 1 as the
date that Hitler issued his Directive 17 to prepare for the invasion of Britain,
Operation SEELÖWE (SEALION), Churchill himself reported it as being on July 16,
with Hitler’s apparent objective of having his forces arrive four weeks later.
On September 11, however, Hitler had to delay the invasion order until
September 24, and on September 17 he ordered the indefinite adjournment of
SEALION, and formerly cancelled it on October 12. Yet the first LENA agent,
Caroli (SUMMER) did not parachute in until September 3, and his colleagues were
still arriving in early November. It sounds as if Canaris gave Hitler
unreasonably optimistic indications of the speed with which agents could be
recruited and trained: if Hitler had been able to stick to his original plan,
there would have been no planting of infiltrators in the United Kingdom,
successful or not, to assist the invasion. Yet the program unaccountably went on
after invasion plans were suspended, which would have made nonsense of the
ability of the agents to survive independently for a few weeks.
Given the haste by which recruits had to be selected, vetted, and
prepared, it is thus difficult to take seriously the claim made a few years ago
(in Monika Siedentopf’s Unternehmen
Seelöwe) that the invasion of Britain was sabotaged by Canaris and his team,
in that they selected unsuitable candidates as spies who simply let the side
down. Apart from the chronological problems listed above, however successful
the few who landed might have been in evading capture, their effect on a
planned invasion that required destroying the Royal Air Force would have been
minimal either way. But that does not mean that the Abwehr’s project was not
quixotic, or even cruel. The agents were chosen in a hurry: they were not
native Germans, but mostly citizens of bordering countries (Denmark, Sweden, the
Sudetenland – the last, of course, transferred from Czechoslovakia to the
German Empire). Some were diehard Nazis, some were lukewarm, others were
pressured into signing up by threats. The belief was that agents from outlying
countries would fade into the background more easily than native Germans: some
had spent time in the UK beforehand, but, overall, they were hopelessly
unprepared for life in the United Kingdom. And as potential observers, they
were untrained. Reports at Kew indicate that ‘though they were expected to
report on such military objectives as aerodromes, land mines and gun batteries,
on examination they showed only a vague idea of the significant points to
note.’ They had ‘only an amateur
knowledge of transmission technique.’
The main point, however, was that the spies of the LENA operation
were not expected to be operational for long, a fact that is reinforced by the
way that most of them were equipped. More than half of the eighteen (the exact number
is debatable) who landed, either by parachute or boat, between September 3 and
November 3, 1940 either carried with them a transmitter only, or no wireless
equipment at all. A transmitter might have been useful for sending a brief set
of dazzling reports about air defences, bomb damage, or weather conditions, but
without an ability to have confirmed whether one’s messages were being received
correctly, it would have been a short and demoralizing career. For those agents
being parachuted in, wireless apparatus was a significant health hazard: at
least two spies were injured by virtue of their collision with the earth when
harnessed to sets weighing twenty pounds or more. Most had not practiced a
parachute-jump before. Moreover, many were told in Hamburg that there was not
enough shock-proof material available, and thus they would be equipped with
transmitters only. If wireless sets were dropped separately, there was the risk
of the apparatus’s never being found. TATE demanded he be equipped with a
combined Transmitter/Receiver. As his Kew file reports: “His
controller, RITTER [Captain Rantzau] then informed him that arrangements were
being made for him to take with him to England a separate transmitter and
receiver and also a large transmitter (called a ‘Z.B.V.’) which would be
dropped separately and which he could destroy if the smaller sets were unbroken
after landing.”
MI5’s analysis of the equipment the agents were provided with would indicate that they did not have a high chance of success in trying to contact their controllers. The boat agents (Meier, Waldberg, Kieboom and Pons, who arrived on the Kent coast) were equipped with compact and light cases, one weighing 7 lb., and containing batteries and connecting wires, the other weighing only 4 lb., containing the transmitter, aerial and spare valve. (This was in dramatic contrast to the bulky devices that SOE agents were required to take to France or, say, Yugoslavia, in following years.) Yet the experts judged that such low-powered devices ‘would require exceptional conditions to work over 100 miles’, with an expected range of nearer 50 miles. * If that assessment is correct, it would show an extraordinary misjudgment by the Abwehr experts: reducing power to such a degree that transmissions would not only be undetectable locally, but would also not have enough energy to reach their intended target. This statistic is put into perspective by the fact that the distance between the port of Southampton and Cherbourg is over 100 miles, while German wireless agents were transmitting home from as far afield as New York and Brazil.
[*
This opinion needs to be balanced against that of E. H. Cookridge, who, in his
1947 work Secrets of the British Secret
Service, described Kieboom’s equipment as ‘a masterpiece of radio
precision’, following up by claiming that ‘the transmitter allowed to send [sic] messages over a range of more than
600 miles, yet was so small that it could be hidden in two leather boxes . . .’ (see Figure below). In his Preface,
Cookridge thanked the Foreign Office, the War Office, the Home Office and the
Lord Justice’s Office for their assistance, so his book should probably be
regarded as an item of selective disclosure for propaganda purposes, perhaps
maximizing the wireless threat.]
SNOW’s
transmitter was reported to have a much more realistic range, of up to 1200
miles. Likewise, CAROLI’s (SUMMER’s)
equipment was much heavier and more powerful, but would have a corresponding
disadvantage of requiring much more space to set up the aerial. “Aerials
provided would not be easily untangled and satisfactorily erected except in
secure privacy with plenty of space. E.g. indoor space 60 ft. long or a
secluded wood with a fairly clear space 6o ft. long with trees etc. on which to
tie the end of the aerial to a height of at least 6 ft.” How a spy in tight
wartime conditions, in densely populated England, was supposed to accomplish
such a task is not clear. A tentative conclusion by the report at KV 3/76 was
that the agents were so ill-prepared that they should perhaps be considered as
decoys.
Kieboom’s equipment details (from Cookridge)
Nevertheless,
it seems that the Abwehr stations stayed observant, looking for transmissions
from the agents. The same file, K 3/76, based on interrogations of the six
prominent spies captured by September 1940, supplemented no doubt by RSS
interception and decryption of Abwehr exchanges, discloses the following: “It
appears from other sources [sic:
surely a code for Ultra decrypts] that a constant watch is kept by Hamburg, Berlin,
Paris and Cherbourg, for the reception of any wireless messages by all agents
despatched to the U.K. This is
presumably in order to make sure that messages shall not be missed through bad
atmospheric conditions.” The advantage gained by the German Reich’s territorial
extension into Northern France (which also aided triangulation for
location-detection) was counterbalanced by the fact that ENIGMA radio
communications had to be used rather than highly secure land-lines, which
allowed British Intelligence to tap into the plans and processes of the Abwehr.
Moreover, by this time, Hamburg (which would have had secure contact with
Berlin) was shifting its attention to Norway, placing the responsibility for
Britain on to Paris and Cherbourg. A dangerous increase in interceptible
traffic was caused by the fact that the Abwehrstelle
in Brussels was used as an intermediary point for traffic, with messages passed
to it from advance stations to be decrypted, and then passed on to Hamburg,
Paris, or Berlin.
Because nearly all of the spies were picked up soon after they
landed, little can be said about the adequacy of their training. Ter Braak
apparently struggled with his receiver: concealing aerials in densely-populated
Britain, with vigilant landlords and ladies, would have been a problem. TATE
had only one frequency to work on, which was effective only in daylight hours:
this inhibited his activity later. TATE admitted that he had been taught the
fundamentals of operating, but nothing about wireless theory, which would mean
he would be helpless when problems occurred. He said that he
only knew “the practical details of how to join it up, erect the aerial, and
tune the transmitter by the lamp. He thought he could spot a disconnected wire
inside, but that was about all”. As Reed of B1A reported: “He had been
instructed to join motor-cycle batteries in series, but three 6 volt batteries
would burn out his valves.” Consequently, even with MI5 assistance, TATE
struggled to make consistent contact. Reed reported, on October 1, that ‘experiments
with [TATE’s] wireless were unsuccessful due to inefficiency of aerial provided
with a set of so small an output.’ His first successful message was not sent
until October 10: he was supposed to send a postcard in invisible ink to a
contact in Lisbon if his wireless failed to work. She never received the
postcard.
TATE
had quickly understood that his life depended upon abandoning his Nazi
affiliations, and following the instructions of his new captors. Unlike SUMMER,
he did not have second thoughts, and thus did not employ any security code to
indicate that he had been turned. (He claimed that the possibility of being
captured and used had never been acknowledged by his trainers, and he thus did
not have such a code.) He initially operated his set himself, and thus
displayed a consistent ‘fist’. Yet the overall message to be gained from this
exercise is that the Abwehr controllers soon lost interest. As early as
September 7, Field-Marshal Jodl told the Abwehr to open up operations against
the Soviet Union. The realization that German could not dominate the skies
above Britain, and that a winter invasion across the Channel would simply be a
recipe for failure, had by then convinced Hitler that it was time to turn his
attention to the East.
What
TATE’s files at the National Archives show is the enormous lengths to which MI5
and RSS went to experiment with his apparatus, attempting to make contact with
Wohldorf. While SUMMER’s set had been shown to work quite quickly, MI5 provided
their counterparts at RSS with all the details of call-signs, frequencies, and
times so that the location-finding network of interception towers at Thurso, St
Erth, Gilnakirk, Sandridge, Cupar and Bridgewater could gauge the strength of
the signal, and give back advice. Hughes (W6B) and then Reed (who was on
secondment from the BBC) had to move the set around from city to countryside,
change the length of the aerial and fine-tune its alignment, and also have the
complex instructions for TATE’s back-up set translated before they were able to
send transmissions of consistent quality. Yet they were already sensitized to
the need to avoid German direction-finding – to a degree that was unnecessarily
cautious: they believed that the transmissions could have been localized to an
actual building (e.g. Latchmere House), a degree of accuracy way beyond what
the Funkabwehr was capable of at that time.
Meanwhile,
agent SNOW (Arthur Owens) was being kept in close confinement. It should not be
forgotten that SNOW was the original Abwehr agent equipped with wireless, and
was notionally active right up until April 1941. Yet the first experiments with
wireless were haphazard: he was supplied with a clumsy and reliable transmitter
(only) in February 1939, but, since he was able to meet his handler, Ritter, in
Hamburg until war broke out, and, after that, arrange regular rendezvous in the
Netherlands and in Belgium until the Nazis overran those countries in May 1940,
the use of wireless to pass on intelligence was not so critical. Of course,
that made the task of monitoring what he said impossible, and suggestions that
SNOW had betrayed his country by revealing suitable targets for bombing (i.e.
going beyond the ‘chickenfeed’ that he passed in his encrypted messages) caused
MI5 to terminate him, and incarcerate him for the remainder of the war.
Agent SNOW
MI5
was aware of SNOW’s wireless usage from the day his set was picked up. SIS even
broke the set, and had to repair it. But SNOW did not make his first successful
transmission until late August 1939: soon afterwards, MI5, aided by his wife’s
jealous reporting of his duplicitous activity, arrested him, and then found
both his transmitter, and then a receiver, concealed at his property in
Surbiton. Under MI5’s tutelage, SNOW moved house to premises where his aerial
would not stand out so obviously, and transmitted regularly on weather and less
than critical military operations and preparation. The first Double-Cross
message was sent on September 9, but no confirmation of receipt occurred for
some weeks. At some stage in October, Maurice Burton, who had earlier checked
to verify that SNOW was transmitting as instructed, took over the operation of
the apparatus, and eventually a new afu
transmitter-receiver was delivered through a third party.
Whether
the Abwehr had been careful enough to pay attention to SNOW’s radio ‘fist’, or
whether Burton was adept enough to emulate it, is not clear. The archival
reports give every indication that Robertson and his team assumed that Ritter
must have concluded that SNOW was being controlled by MI5. Guy Liddell even
wrote, on February 2, 1941: “Another
point that occurs to me us that the Germans must now be wise to the game of
collaring an agent and forcing him to use his wireless set in our interests.
There is in fact evidence that they are doing it themselves.” Yet
the Abwehr used what SNOW fed to them concerning passports and ration cards to
supply the LENA agents, and lure them to their doom or glory. Exactly who was
deluding whom by the time SNOW was regarded as a high security risk may well
never be established. A triple agent works only for himself, trying desperately
to play one employer against the other in order to survive. Interrogators of
Ritter after the war concluded that he had realized that SNOW had been turned,
but, when Ritter wrote his memoir in 1972, he gave no suggestion that SNOW was
anything but the genuine article. Ritter believed that SNOW was being used by
MI5, but that the Abwehr had outwitted them. He certainly would not wanted to
have admitted to his bosses in Berlin at the time that he had been deluded.
Other Abwehr officers interrogated were more outspoken and direct about their
suspicions: I shall explore these in a later chapter.
MI5
and RSS gained much from these experiences. They learned about the enemy’s
equipment, and the RSS was able to test out its interception and
location-finding techniques when they applied their sensors to TATE’s
transmissions, in order to evaluate how effective they were. Yet this was a
precarious time for MI5: the seeds of the successful XX Operation were quickly
sown, but Liddell and others also came to realise that allowing ‘undetected’
radios to operate would require the existence of a ham-handed and inefficient
detection service for them to evade interception. This concern would continue
to dog MI5 throughout the war – the fear that the Germans must assume that the
wily British had better radio-detection finding equipment than appeared to be
the case, and would thus assume that their agents were not operating freely.
And, as I pointed out in my article on ter Braak, is it not somewhat ridiculous
to think that, in densely-populated Britain, with a citizenship well advised to
look out for suspicious activity, that an obvious foreigner, with accented
English, could traipse round the country picking up information, and then
return to some lodging where he managed to conceal the existence of a lengthy
aerial while sending in his reports?
For
the Abwehr, their LENA spies were dispensable. The espionage service did not think
they would survive long, and it had low expectations of their deliverables. As
a July 1944 report submitted jointly by MI5 and SIS declared: “According to the
calculations of one Abwehr officer, eight-five per cent of the agents dispatched
were never heard of again; ten per cent turned in information which was either
worthless or false; the remaining five per cent provided sufficient accurate
reports to justify the expense of the remainder. The first two clauses of this
sentence may have a greater validity than the last.” (The last observation was
perhaps a tacit hint of the XX Operation.)
Agent Richter may have been sent in to verify whether TATE had been
turned, but the fact that the Abwehr never learned anything from Richter did not
deter them. The Abwehr no doubt had it confirmed for them how difficult it was
to infiltrate an island nation. MI5, even at that time, took pains to ensure
that manipulated transmissions took place in locations where the spy was
supposed to be, but the state of the technology on the German side at that time
was probably inferior to that of the British: even with appropriate
triangulation, transmitters could not be ‘pinpointed’ to much less than a
circle of 20-mile radius, and there is no evidence that the Germans bothered.
Yet the awareness of RDF as a technique for counter-espionage would have
registered with them, and would come sharply into focus a few months later.
As
a coda, and a point to be picked up later, the British apparently recognized,
after the war, the Germans’ superior techniques in detection and
direction-finding. In his 2011 memoir of his days at Bletchley Park, Secret Days, Asa Briggs writes that GCHQ
acquired a field north of Bletchley that was later named Furzton. “A radio
direction finding system developed by the Germans was installed there. Judged
superior to all existing British systems, it consisted of an outer circle of
forty and an inner circle of thirty smaller metal masts,” he adds. Yet a search
on ‘Furzton’ fails to come up with anything else. (Google led me to Hinsley’s
and Tripp’s Codebreakers, a book I
own, but with no incidence of ‘Furzton’, which does not appear in the Index.) To
learn more, perhaps, we must wait for the Official History of GCHQ to appear
next year. The overarching conclusion must be that, after the initial
excitement in setting up W Division in MI5 in August to track illicit wireless,
the transfer of RSS to SIS, and the establishment of the XX Operation,
accompanied by the belief that all German agents had been turned, incarcerated
or executed, concern about illicit radio
transmissions, whether they came from foreign embassies, maverick civilians,
Soviet spies, or even undetected German infiltrators, the demand for
prosecution of such activity through urgent and efficient location-finding went
somewhat off the boil.
The Funkabwehr
The
Nazis had their equivalent of Britain’s Radio Security Service, the Funkabwehr,
sometimes translated as the Radio Defence Corps. Yet the Germans came rather
later to recognize that the threat of domestic illicit wireless communications
required a more committed function. Created by Hans Kopp in 1940, the
Funkabwehr reported to the OKW, the Oberkommando
der Wehrmacht, and readers may find references to the OKW/WNV/FU, a
typically precise but wordy example of how the Germans described their units, Wehrmacht Nachrichten Verbindungen
Funküberwachung, loosely the surveillance of radio intelligence and
communications. Unfortunately,
a good history of the Funkawehr remains to be written, as German records are
unavailable. For a detailed history of the organisation, the
Wikipedia entry at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funkabwehr
is reasonably solid, but has
a very shaky chronology, is written too much in the passive voice, and in my
judgment contains several errors. * Moreover, it is highly
dependent on a 1946 report compiled by the RSS itself, which can be seen at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B_oIJbGCCNYeMGUxNzk0NWQtNzNhZi00YWVjLWI1NmItMzc2YWZiZGNjNjQ5,
a folder in Christos T.’s excellent website dedicated to military intelligence
matters. While this account lacks the benefit of historical distancing, and
integration of much new material, I shall not repeat here the detailed
evolution of the Funkabwehr’s capabilities.
[*
The danger of referring to Wikipedia, or indeed any on-line source, is that the
entry may change suddenly, or even disappear. The Wikipedia entry on the
Funkabwehr has been expanded considerably since I started this article.]
Germany
and Great Britain had long maintained ‘Y’ (signals interception) capabilities,
the focus of which had been primarily diplomatic and political communications
of foreign powers, but assumed interest in military plans and operations as war
approached. Britain had listening posts throughout the empire, and Germany had
established a similar network within the German borders. The Nazi interest in
the years before the war appears to have been directed more against the Soviet
Union: by 1937, from their intercept stations at Treunbritzen, Jüterbog,
Königsberg and Breslau, they were picking up a large amount of NKVD traffic
stretching from Murmansk to Odessa. This activity no doubt continued during the
period of the Nazi-Soviet pact (August 1939to June 1941), and helped Hitler
prepare for operation Barbarossa.
German Communications (from RSS report)
Yet, as the awareness of possible clandestine wireless activity within each nation’s borders increased, approaches to the problem started to diverge. True, the general methodology and use of technology were very similar, but the geographical and political constrains led the adversaries down different paths. First, the borders in the European theatre of operations remained stable for the British: the Germans had to deal with their fast expanding occupation of new territory. While it provided for a steady increase in suitable locations for interception stations (e.g. Brest, in France), it also increased the possible quantity of subversive communications. It also put more strain on inter-unit communications, since secure landlines were no longer available, and thus exposed more secret information transfer to interception itself. Moreover, the operations were frequently taking place in environments hostile to the invaders, with the risk of sabotage, and, certainly, non-cooperation.
Another
aspect was duplication of effort. It sometimes comes a surprise to learn how
fragmented the approach of a totalitarian nation could be to intelligence
matters. Hitler encouraged rivalries, however, and there was a large absence of
trust between organisations. In fact, the function of the Funkabwehr was split
between the OKW unit and a section of the Ordnungspolizei
(or Orpo) called the Funkabwehrdienst,
which was under the control of Heinrich Himmler. Both units were responsible
for the location and apprehension of those transmitting illicitly, but for most
of the war their missions were divided by what could seem to be an absurd and
unproductive distinction. Orpo was responsible for identifying clandestine
operations against the government and the regime, while the WNV/FU directed its
efforts against activities against the state. How they could confidently conclude
which category a transmission belonged to before analysis, or why they
discounted the fact that some factions might effectively be fighting both, has
not been explained. Britain, on the other hand, maintained a unified control
over interception, and generally benefitted from the large amount of trust that
existed between the military, the political, the interception and the
cryptographic organisations. It was not until 1943 that the Orpo and the WNV
divided their tasks more sensibly along geographic lines.
One
critical matter that the RSS report brings to the surface is that of distortion
of signals, and how the proximity of electrically conductive objects of
dimensions close to the length of the wave could affect both reception and
interception. What the receivers of transmissions
initiated from agents in enemy territory were interested in was content, and weakening of the signal
would affect successful reception. Communication was one-to-one: the receiving
station would be the sole unit dedicated to trying to capture a transmission. Distortion
could mean that the signal was lost completely, or fell into the skip zone. Location was not important to such
receivers: indeed, transmitters were encouraged to move around (with those
clumsy antennas – but not too far afield so as to jeopardise the signals plan) to
evade detection. Interceptors, on the
other hand, were rarely interested in content:
they probably did not have the resources or time to decrypt the messages. What
drove them was location, so that they
could quickly eliminate (or turn) the offending agent and equipment. Distortion
might not mean complete loss, as multiple detectors had to be in place to
perform the triangulation necessary, but it could mean that a faulty indication
of location was reached.
Yet
it was all a hazardous business. The presence of interfering objects
(buildings, mountains), by radiating signals in new directions, can confuse the
process of triangulation, or cause the assumed location to be challengingly
large. This distortion can also occur simply because of the erratic behavior of
the ionosphere, especially at time of sunrise and sunset. Guy Liddell reported,
on February 10, 1941 that ‘the
alleged parachutist’s [JAKOBS’s] transmitter from this country was heard again on
Sunday but turned out to be a communication between Paris and Cracow’. In
a 1944 report, written by British Intelligence to prepare its officers for the
invasion of Europe, appears the following observation: “The skip distance of
any transmitter is calculable in normal circumstances; but, occasionally, owing
to temporary changes in the atmosphere freak results may be obtained, as in the
summer of last year when the short wave transmissions of Chicago police cars
were clearly (and tiresomely) audible on the south coast of England.” (I am
confident that this pamphlet, available at Kew at WO-279-499, was written by
Hugh Trevor-Roper: he was the Abwehr expert, and the prose has a donnish flair,
and is regularly sprinkled with Latin phrases.) We should also remember that
Britain’s scheme of catching all groundwaves by the dispersion of interceptors
throughout the country could not conceivably be mirrored in Germany, let alone in
its expanded territories. The dynamics of the cat-and-mouse game played between
spies and enforcers must be evaluated in this context.
Overall,
therefore, the reputation of German counter-intelligence as a ruthless and efficient
machine, which has been encouraged by war-movies, and even historians of SOE,
is certainly overstated. The Funkabwehr suffered from duplication, tensions of
centralisation and decentralisation, inadequate training, poor communications,
a shortage of qualified amateurs (unlike Britain’s Voluntary Interceptors), too
rapid job movement, insufficient mobile units, sometimes poor quality
equipment, and lack of appropriate language skills. Coordinates provided by
remote RDF were frequently too vague to ensure successful local house-hunting.
Certainly the discovery of the Soviet Rote Kapelle spy network in the summer of
1941 moved operations into a higher gear, but the organisation in France (for
instance) remained weak until as late as 1943. The RSS report assesses the
technical resources at the outbreak of the war as being ‘completely
insufficient’, given the rapidly occurring military victories and the increase
in occupied territory’. It tells a story of frequent failure, that it took
weeks or even months before a transmitter was at all precisely located. Yet the
RSS seemed also to be under the impression that the number of Allied W/T agents
was rapidly growing in 1940, an illusion that is undermined by the histories of
SOE that have appeared. The more innovative technologies and approaches of the
Funkabwehr thus occur well after the period under the microscope in this
chapter, and will be analysed in a future episode.
SOE and Wireless:
1940-1942
The
SIS organisation in Europe had been greatly weakened by
the beginning of war, and the Venlo incident on November 9, 1939 (whereby the
Abwehr captured SIS officers in Holland, and gained detailed information about the
service’s structures and personnel) crushed it. SOE was launched, with a
charter written by the dying conservative Neville Chamberlain, and under the
ministerial direction of the socialist Hugh Dalton, in July 1940. Its mission
was to perform subversion and sabotage in those countries of Europe controlled
by the Nazis. While Chamberlain declared that its operations should be tightly
woven in to the greater military strategy of the war, this facet of its
decision-making was never really clear. Was it supposed to disrupt the Germans’
efforts to produce war material? Was it designed to initiate minor diversionary
attacks that would draw a high degree of military and police resources away
from other arenas? Or was it intended to help prepare for the eventual invasion
by softening up targets, and impeding troop movements? All these goals were
troubled by the fear of what reprisals the Nazis might take on such incendiary
activity, and what effect that might have on local morale. Moreover, SOE was
always competing for resources – especially for aeroplanes and wireless
equipment – and those often unfulfilled demands, hampered by other departments
that questioned SOE’s effectiveness, meant that SOE had a very chequered
history in the first two years of its existence.
The
sources on SOE are fragmented. M. R. D. Foot’s SOE in France, originally written in 1966, and reissued in 2004, is
an ‘official’ history, part of the Government Official History Series, but, as
is clear from its title, covers France only. (In an interesting sidenote, Foot
himself, in his 1976 work, Resistance,
refers to SOE in France as a
‘quasi-official’ history.) Foot wrote another volume covering all of SOE, SOE: The Special Operations Executive
1940-1946, in 1984, but it is not an ‘official’ or even ‘authorised’
history. Its chronology is hazy, and it provides little detail on wireless
equipment and procedures. After the war, an internal history was commissioned
from an Oxford don, W. J. M. Mackenzie (who had not been employed by SOE), and
was eventually published, in 2000, as The
Secret History of SOE: The Special Operations Executive 1940-1945. In all
three books, the coverage of wireless is very sketchy until 1943, after SOE’s
own research and manufacturing facilities had been set up, and Colonel Gubbins
rather belatedly introduced more rigorous signals procedures. Various memoirs
refer to the use of wireless, but they are not always reliable. A number of files have been released to the
National Archives in recent years, but few records of SOE’s activities in the
early years appear to have survived fire, destruction or the weeders, and what
have endured are (so far as I can judge) all undigitised
This report focusses on SOE in France, as it was the earliest field
of operation, and it is here that the most pressing lessons of wireless usage
were learned. SOE had two units working in France: the F Section, which was run
as a British operation, and the RF section, which was a Gaullist unit for which
French nationals only could work. F thus depended mainly on agents of
Anglo-French nationality who spoke the language fluently. And it took many months before SOE sorted out
is mission, recruited and trained people, overcame political opposition, and
were able to start placing agents deep inside France. It had infiltrated a few
agents equipped with wireless by sea, but their communications were apparently
spotty. The first confirmed F agent to be parachuted in with a wireless set was
Georges Bégué (aka George Noble), who
arrived in unoccupied central France on the night of 5/6 May 1941.
It might be expected that the local populace would be more
supportive of parachutists sent in to hinder and harass the invader, but it was
not necessarily so. Up until Barbarossa, the French communist party had
welcomed the Nazi allies of Moscow, and rapidly had to change their stance
after June 1941. Before then, however, communists were a threat to subversive
activities as possible informers. Even in Vichy France, considered to be safer
territory, many peasants were loyal to the administration, and would betray
illicit movements to the authorities, and hence to the Germans. SOE’s policy
with wireless operators was open to criticism: it would send in a team of three
(agent, courier, and wireless operator) rather than devolving the task of
transmission and receiving to the agent him- or her-self. Frequently the operator spoke no French, and
might be idle for weeks at a time, which meant concealment and exposure were a
constant concern. Yet progress was slow. Lorain (see below) writes that there
were only two clandestine stations working in France for Section F in May 1941,
and a year later, still only seven.
Thus one has to treat Foot’s claims about the rapidity with which
the Germans developed direction-finding techniques with some skepticism. He
reports that ‘the German
wireless interception service had detected Bégué’s transmissions
almost at once, had begun to jam them within half a week.’ The Vichy police was
involved, and ‘D/F vans joined in the search’. Elsewhere, in a general
commentary, Foot writes: “The German intelligence service’s wireless
direction-finding (D/F) teams were numerous and efficient, probably better than
the British, for whom Langelaan [George Langelaan, Knights of the Floating Silk, p 220] claimed that if ever an
unidentified transmitter was heard ‘in a manner of minutes a first, rough
direction-finding operation had been accomplished.’” Again citing Langelaan, Foot
then goes on to make the following rather nonsensical observation: “If the
transmitter was anywhere in the United Kingdom, in less than an hour experts
equipped with mobile listening and measuring instruments were converging on the
region where it had been located.” Why an official historian like Foot would
rely on Langelaan as a source, when the author was an SOE agent who probably
received the information second- or third-hand, is not clear. (Admittedly, Foot
would not have been able to find reliable information in the archives, but that
is no excuse for such slipshod reporting.) From other accounts (such as
Liddell’s Diaries), it is quite clear that, during this period, the approach by
RSS to suspicious signals was much less rigorous.
As
for what the capabilities of the Nazi teams were, ‘converging’ might mean
location-finding rather than physical movement, but the proximity of Augsburg
and Nuremberg to each other [see below] would mean any attempt at triangulation
with Brest on sites in Britain would be a very haphazard, as well as pointless,
exercise. Nevertheless, Foot goes on to
write: “French operators in the field early discovered that a long transmission
in a large town would probably bring a detection van to the door within thirty
minutes. The Germans soon worked out a technique for establishing what part of
a town a clandestine operator was working in, by cutting off the current
sub-district and noting when the clandestine transmission was interrupted; then
they would concentrate their efforts on the sub-district affected, and hope to
track down quickly at least the block, if not the building, the set was working
from.”
In
his general book about SOE, Foot reinforces the message. “In towns, sensible organisers and wireless
operators took care not to see too much of each other; for the wireless
operator was always the circuit’s weakest point. The Germans, like the British,
kept a constant watch on every wireless wavelength, and it took only twenty or
thirty minutes for a team of their armed direction-finders to get within a few
yards of an operator who was fool enough to remain on the air so long. Relays
of thirty clerks with cathode-ray tubes in the Gestapo’s headquarters in the
Avenue Foch in Paris, for example, kept up a continuous watch on every
conceivable frequency. When a new set opened up, it was bound to show up on a
tube; the frequency could be read off at once. In a couple of minutes, alerted
by telephone, direction-finders at Brest, Augsburg and Nuremberg were starting
to take cross-bearings; within a quarter of an hour, detector vans would be
closing in on the triangle a few miles across that the cross-bearings had
indicated. Some of SOE’s early organisers in France and Belgium insisted on
sending messages so verbose that their operators had to remain at their morse
keys for hours at a time; and, inevitably, they were caught.
German Position-Finding, Phase 1 (1942?)
(reproduced from Pierre Lorain’s ‘Secret Warfare’)
It did not take long for Gubbins, as head of
operations, to spot what was wrong, or for the signals training school at Thame
Park to start to impress on operators – as Beaulieu explained to organisers –
that mortal danger lay in trying to send long messages by wireless.”
Yet all this is undated, and
perhaps an indication why this analyst is wary is that Foot immediately follows
this last passage with the following: “By
the winter of 1943-4 – hardly before time – there was an order: no wireless
telegraphy (W/T) transmission was to last longer than five minutes.” In the
context of the war, this is an enormous chronological jump. Foot lists several
other operations (Forman and Labit, DASTARD, Bloch) in the second half of 1941
that he claims were terminated because the operators stayed on the air too
long, and were trapped by the efficiency of German detection-finding. Yet it is
perhaps more likely that many of these agents were betrayed by sloppy
tradecraft, or visible behavior that prompted the interest of citizens who felt
it their duty to report such activity before they were arrested for ignoring
it. In fact Mackenzie tells us that Labit (the wireless operator) had to escape
to the Unoccupied Zone without his set, while his partner Cartigny was probably
shot. Some gave the game away by weak identity cards, or obviously wrong serial
numbers on notes, the same types of error that had bedevilled the LENA spies.
In Resistance, Foot undermines his
argument by writing: “Early in the war, the Germans worked the process [of
interception] clumsily, but by the spring of 1943 they had main intercepting
stations in Augsburg, Berlin, Brest, Nuremberg, and no doubt elsewhere.” Again,
a distressing lack of precision, and a big chronological leap.
In his largely pictorial study of the use of wireless in the French Resistance, The Clandestine Radio Operators in France (2011), Jean-Louis Perquin presents an arresting account of the German special unit ‘dedicated to the detection of clandestine emissions’, describing a complex web connected to three detection-finding centres located in Brest, Augsburg and Nuremberg, and backed up goniometer trucks with equipped with the latest technology. Yet, again, chronology is vague: the text indicates that the procedure described was deployed in 1943. There is no evidence of the state-of-the-art in 1941. Perquin explains that RF agents were trained by British instructors, and also dependent on SOE equipment. “In Autumn 1941”, he writes, “following the numerous loss (sic) suffered by those specialists and considering how such losses were threatening the very existence of the networks, the SOE decided to create a security course in Grendon, Buckinghamshire.” Yet, if losses of agents were due to overlong transmission times, or failure to switch frequencies, one might think the problem could have been swiftly addressed through tighter discipline. Gubbins’s edict of winter 1943-44, after ‘it did not take him long’ to work out what was happening, simply seems absurd.
It appears that Foot and
Perquin were using the same source, but it is not clear what it is. In Resistance, Foot declares his heavy
reliance on Pierre Lorain’s Armement
Clandestin (1972), a book that also appears in Perquin’s Bibliography,
which was translated and published in English as Secret Warfare in 1983. Lorain gives a much more reasonable account
of what happened, and it is worth quoting three paragraphs in full.
“German detection methods had
made decisive progress in 2 years. In 1941 and 1942, the localization of a
clandestine station was extremely difficult. It could be carried out only if
the operator transmitted on the same days of the week, from the same site, and
on the same frequency during several consecutive hours. Direction-finding
operations were not yet automatic, and panoramic reception was non-existent.
The scanning of all usable frequencies was necessarily very slow and left substantial
gaps.
In addition, during the final
approach, each Gestapo agent had to hide a heavy suitcase containing a receiver
with a loop aerial under his coat. A Tirolean cap or Basque beret tilting down
over his ear just barely hid an earphone. Their general posture aroused the
curiosity of even the most naïve of passersby.
The arrest of a radio operator
thus required long months of continual surveillance, the operation was
complicated by the fact that if a clandestine operator was spotted in the
unoccupied zone of France (controlled by Vichy), the Germans could only signal
the suspect frequency to the French radio control group at Hauterive near
Vichy. The latter promised to look into the matter, but secretly warned the
clandestine station to move as quickly as possible, and then supplied the
Germans with an almost completely false position.”
The Funkabwehr article I
referred to before contains nothing about operations in France against SOE. I
have been advised that the unit’s records reside somewhere in Moscow, so one cannot
judge how much of Lorain’s account is true. Yet it seems as if Foot’s official
history tries to deflect attention away from other systemic problems in SOE’s
deployment of wireless. (His comments above need to be transferred en bloc to the state of the game in 1943
onwards, a period I shall cover in a later article.) A careful reading of
Mackenzie would suggest that a number of severe problems affected both the F
and R/F operations in France until 1942: a lack of radio expertise for
establishing reliable wavelengths and schedules, leading to failed use;
struggles with transporting and concealing the heavy equipment; inappropriate
choices of agents who had unsuitable personalities; careless practices by the
wireless operators, who were not always trained properly; inappropriate
centralisation of transmissions because of shortage of equipment, leading to
intense and long broadcasts; betrayal by agents (such as the notorious
VICTOIRE); the unreliability of the local police in Vichy France. It was easier
for SOE to blame German direction-finding.
And it seems more probable that
other territories – and another enemy – were the arena in which the Reichssicherheitshauptamt improved its
detection capabilities. As I shall explore, the Funkabwehr was provoked into
quick reaction after Barbarossa (June 1941), as the Red Orchestra started
tuning up, primarily in Northern France and Belgium. Colonel Buckmaster, who
headed F Section, reported that, as late as August 1942, in the Occupied Zone,
he had only two wireless sets, of which one was operational, while in the
Unoccupied Zone, the numbers were six and four. In Belgium, however, the
following distressing tale emerges, as German counter-action took place. In the
First Quarter of 1941, two out of 9 sets had been captured and operated by
the Germans: the figures for the next three quarters were 5 out of 6; 8 out of 8; and 7 out of 8. I shall return to the topic of whether German RDF advanced faster in Germany, because of the activation of the Red Orchestra after Barbarossa, and explore how soon operations in France were able to take advantage of such breakthroughs. Overall, my conclusion would be that the sluggishness with which SOE mobilised its wireless communications, and the slow but steady steps by which the Funkabwehr moved into action against Communist spies in the latter half of 1941, suggests that Foot’s suggestions of hyperactive German detection-finding in 1941 are premature, and that the losses were due to other causes.
In any case we know that SOE
was inhibited by the fact that SIS controlled its cyphers and communications
until June 1942. Up until then, it had had to accept whatever equipment SIS
gave it – clumsy and heavy apparatus. As Foot writes: “Agents were not best pleased at SIS’s first
offering, a plywood box that weighed some 45 lb. (20kg), already looked
old-fashioned and contained a Mark XV two-valve transmitter fitted with a morse
key, and its power-pack, a 6-volt car battery.” Foot does not describe the
travails that agents lugging a 45-lb. suitcase around an unfamiliar terrain
must have experienced, let alone the difficulties in setting up a suitable
aerial without drawing attention to themselves.
The conclusion about SOE’s
(and specifically Gubbins’s) track-record concerning wireless up to 1942 must
be that the operation was needlessly clumsy. It cannot all be blamed on
SIS. I read A. R. B. Linderman’s Rediscovering Irregular Warfare: Colin
Gubbins and the Origins of Special Operations Executive (2016) in the hope
of acquiring some deeper insights. Linderman informs us that a Frederick Nicholls
served under Gubbins as director of signals during World War II, but that is
the only mention that Nicholls merits in the Index, and the story is
disappointingly thin on wireless matters. Maybe the skills of Nicholls, who
‘had managed to establish wireless communications with the British Embassy in
Kabul during the Third Anglo-Afghan War’ (which occurred between May and August
1919) were stretched by the exigencies of communications in Nazi-occupied
Europe if that was his premier achievement. The clumsiness of SOE’s wireless
strategy would however endure until the end of the war, as I shall explain in a
later episode.
Major-General Sir Colin Gubbins
The Red
Orchestra
While the Comintern and its allies had enjoyed successful
experiences with illicit wireless transmission in the 1930s, Stalin’s purges of
1937 and 1938 had required much of the Soviet Union’s networks in the West to
be rebuilt. It was not hard to find native Soviet sympathisers outside Germany,
since the propaganda of communism as the only effective bulwark against fascism
had worked effectively both on the disenchanted ‘toiling masses’ as well as on
the guilt-ridden intellectuals. Since Hitler had either executed, incarcerated
or forced into exile any members of the Party, or outspoken supporters of
communist doctrine, Germany remained a more difficult country to penetrate. But
neighbouring nations provided a rich source of potential spies and informants:
many eastern Europeans found homes in the Low Countries and France, for
instance, and were able to fade into the background without being conspicuous.
Britain had its own nests of spies, of course, both from the older universities
– who had successfully detached themselves from any association with the
Communist Party of Great Britain – as well as more traditional working-class
enthusiasts. But these eager adherents to the cause of the proletariat needed
managing, and directing in their efforts. They needed intermediaries, and they
need a mechanism for getting the fruits of their espionage back to Moscow.
Soviet espionage had three arms – the Comintern, the NKVD, and military intelligence, the GRU. David Dallin, in his epic Soviet Espionage (1955), informs us that, as early as late 1935, “Only a comparatively small Soviet apparat now remained in Germany: the greater part of the network had either been dissolved or moved abroad. The OMS had moved with the Comintern’s West European Bureau, the WED, to Copenhagen; the passport apparat had gone to the Saar, and Soviet military intelligence to Holland and France; the party leadership had migrated part to Prague and part to Paris.” Thus what survived the purges (with the GRU the most hard-hit) was still a very fragmented approach to intelligence-gathering, with no guarantee that it would be efficiently shared back in Moscow. In Volume 2 of his biography of Joseph Stalin, Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941, Stephen Kotkin writes (p 496) that a dozen NKVD station chiefs abroad were arrested in 1937-1938, and that, in Berlin, ‘Stalin cleaned house, arresting nearly every NKVD operative there’. The GRU suffered even more, with 182 operational staff arrested in the same time-period. Yet the growing menace of Germany and Japan meant that, under Beria, a rapid repopulation of the networks had to be accomplished.
The International Brigades in Spain had constituted a useful
source of potential operatives, as well as an opportunity to grant new
identified to infiltrated agents, by virtue of the passports that had been
stolen from Brigade members when they entered Spain. Alexander Foote was a
famous example of such a footsoldier who was plucked from obscurity to be sent
to Switzerland to received training in wireless operation from Ursula
Kuczynski, agent SONIA. At the end of 1938, agents in their dozens started
arriving in Europe, as well as the Far East and the United States. Like the
Nazis, but with far more deliberation and craft, the Soviets chose, or allocated
citizenship to, agents who would never arouse suspicion owing to domestic
(Russian) nationality. The complex borderlands of the old Russian Empire
provided a rich environment for muddled heritage and absence of reliable
documentation, in order to allow unverifiable accounts of life-history to be
passed off.
Accounts of training for wireless activity are thin on the ground.
SONIA’s memoir (which in these technical aspects is probably much more reliable
than in political observations, such as her absurd accusations of imperialistic
infiltration helping to crumble the Soviet Union) is certainly not typical. For she was respected enough to avoid the
purges, and also had had a long experience in China as a wireless operator
before being recalled to Moscow for leave and ‘discussions’ in late 1935. Her
account is unfortunately very muddled in chronology, but it is educational in
that it clearly identifies some of the problems that illegal wireless operators
would experience anywhere in Europe. After a brief interlude with her family in
London, she was then sent to Danzig, then a ‘Free City’, where she was
instructed to ‘obtain residence permits, find work to legalise our existence,
and set up our transmitter for radio contact with the Soviet Union’.
SONIA had been instructed how to build a transmitter in China, by
her lover, Ernst, and claims that she received a response from Moscow
immediately she set up her apparatus. Her task was to advise a group of
labourers undertaking occasional sabotage at a shipyard building U-Boats in
Danzig (where the Nazis were outrageously breaching the constitution that the
city had been granted), and transmit on their behalf. At one stage, she and
Rolf moved to a new house, but discovered that proximity to a power-station
made signals inaudible, and she had to take her equipment to an apartment – a
lesson that probably stood her in good stead later in England. Yet she
immediately stumbled dangerously: the apartment block she chose was the
residence of several Nazis, and one day the wife of them asked her whether the
reception on her radio had been affected by interference. Her husband had told
her he believed that someone was transmitting secretly, and was going to
arrange for the block to be surrounded. SONIA even mentions triangulation of
radio detection, which would have been a very early indication of the Nazis’
fears – and progress in allaying them.
Soviet ‘Sever’ Wireless Model
SONIA did not take the right steps, however. She broadcast again,
from the same apartment at the same time, instead of the middle of the night
when neighbouring radios would not have been on. She should have moved to a
friend’s apartment, or returned to Warsaw. It appears that she was in awe of
doing anything without Moscow’s approval: the outcome was that she was ordered
to return to Poland as she could no longer transmit. Thus, when she met her
boss, Comrade Andrey, in Warsaw, she asked to receive further training in
wireless construction and use in Moscow. That need was reinforced by her
receiving a severe electric shock one night, burning her hand. SONIA would pay
two visits to Moscow during 1937 and 1938 (she admits that the details of each
congealed into a blur). Her return to Poland was uneventful. She had to return
to Danzig to help a comrade set up his transmitter, and admits that he was ‘slow
on the uptake’, so maybe Moscow’s selection and approval processes for its
agents were not very rigorous. Communist fervor may have been considered more
important than intelligence and the right psychological profile. SONIA felt she
was not accomplishing much: “The Danzig people had their own radio operator,
the Bulgarian comrade produced little information. I only transmitted once a
fortnight.”
In August 1938, it was decided to send her to Switzerland, where the plan was to infiltrate agents into Germany, to make contacts at the Dornier aeroplane factory in Friedrichshafen. And that is where the story of ‘Sonia’s Radio’ picks up, with her eventual successful establishment in Britain in the spring of 1941, and her activation as a wireless agent a few months later. She met up with Sándor Radó, who as agent DORA had been appointed head of the Swiss network, but had no wireless skills. In his memoir, Radó writes how Sonia visited in him in December 1939, and how the following month his radio contact with Moscow had been established. He also describes a visit in March 1940, set up by Moscow Central, by someone he knew only as KENT (see below). KENT spoke authoritatively about the necessity of secure wireless procedures, stressing the importance of changing the number and times of transmissions as often as possible ‘as the best protection against being located’. He added that operators should move around different residencies, as well. “Keep changing them if you can – but again, avoiding any kind of system. The thicker the fog, the better.” It suggests, again, that a prematurely intense fear of radio-detection capabilities existed with the Soviets, and that their listeners back in Moscow would be prepared to listen around-the-clock for their agents’ transmissions. But it was easier to preach such practices than to follow them.
The Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky also gave hints of subversive
radio activity in Central Europe. In his memoir In Stalin’s Secret Service, he related how Marguerite Browder, the
sister of the head of the US Communist Party, Earl Browder, had graduated from
the school in Moscow that specialised in wireless competency, and had then been
sent abroad as an illegal with an American passport issued in the name of Jean
Montgomery. “During 1936-1937 she worked in Central Europe where she laid the
ground for the establishment of our secret radio station,” he added, with an
unhelpful lack of precision. If we can rely on Krivitsky, shortly before his
recall to Moscow Sergei Spiegelglass, sent on a deathly mission by his OGPU
boss Yezhov, tried to get Krivitsky to assist in the assassination of his
friend and colleague Ignace Reiss. When Krivitsky demurred, he then asked
Krivitsky to hand Browder over to him, as he had an ‘important job’ for her in
France. The implication in Krivitsky’s rather fractured account is that he
managed to warn Browder of what Spiegelglass had in mind for her, and that she
was able to continue with her wireless activities.
In his biography of Kitty Harris, The Spy With Seventeen Names, Igor Damaskin informs us that the
European network was issued with much more sophisticated wireless equipment at
the end of 1936. Kitty Harris, who was Marguerite Browder’s sister-in-law, was brought
back to Moscow for retraining in January 1937. She apparently showed little
aptitude, and it was determined that ‘any more technical training would be a
waste of time. She was later assigned to be Donald Maclean’s handler in London
and Paris, where she specialised in photography.
Yet wireless usage in broader Europe at this time was sparse. It
was not necessary. Moscow had its eye on the long term. The presence of Soviet
legations or embassies in most capitals of the West provided a mechanism for
information to be collected and then sent by diplomatic bag or courier back to
Moscow. As a long-term measure, a wireless centre was set up in Brussels, where
Trepper, as the new leader of the western organisation, replacing Walter
Krivitsky, installed himself in March 1939. Yet, as Heinz Höhne tells us in Codeword Direktor, Trepper left it
dormant, concentrating first on recruiting a team of informers, and enlarging
his contacts with the world of business, the military and diplomacy. Even when
war broke out, there was no quick change of operation. Only when Nazi Germany
started its invasion of Belgium and the Netherlands in May 1940 did hasty
adjustments have to be made. Even though the Soviet Union was in a
non-aggression pact with Germany, its needs for information on Germany’s plans,
and the reactions of France and Great Britain to Nazi movements, placed
increasing pressure on Trepper and his cohorts to deliver.
Communication switched to radio sets when the Germans occupied
Brussels, and the staff of the Soviet legation was withdrawn. In August, 1940,
Trepper moved with his mistress to Paris, leaving there the unreliable playboy
Sukolov-Gurevich, known as KENT, as the only agent capable of representing the
GRU network. The Sokols were then recruited as wireless operators by the Soviet
Embassy, and trained by someone called Duval. By June 1941, the Soviet Military
Attaché, Susloparov, had moved to unoccupied France, and Trepper was in Vichy
on the day that Germany attacked the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, in Berlin, more
urgent plans were made in April 1941 to establish direct radio contact between
the cells led by Arvid Harnack and Harro Schulze-Boysen, the Soviet spies in
the heart of the Nazi administration. (Even if Stalin did not believe the
rumours of a Nazi invasion, some of his intelligence officers were presumably
more realistic.) In late May, two transmitters were sent by diplomatic bag from
Moscow to Berlin, ‘one a small battery model and the other a large
mains-powered set portable enough when broken down to fit in a suitcase’, as
Costello and Tsarev describe. Harnack was chosen to be the operator, but
declined, delegating it eventually to an engineer named Behrens, while
Schulze-Boysen took up the challenge for his group, with much more eagerness,
selecting a factory technician called Hans Coppi.
Costello and Tsarev report further: “The Berlin groups had
established several safe locations on the upper floors of trustworthy
colleagues’ houses in the countryside outside the city where the transmitters
could be assembled and their aerials run up into the attics in order to
communicate with Moscow. The Centre arranged to keep a listening watch on set
hours and days of the month, which were multiples of the numbers four and
seven.” Coppi received training from the local NKVD office, and successful
transmissions were made in the beginning of June, and picked up and decrypted
in Moscow. The infrastructure was in place when Operation Barbarossa was
started. As Dallin records the situation: “This,
then, was the setup on the eve of the Soviet-German war: a number of espionage
agencies with radio facilities and sources of information, organized but
dormant, in Belgium and Holland; rudimentary apparats in France and Denmark; a
few trading firms established as covers in Brussels, Paris, and Geneva; a
promising start in Switzerland; and a group of enthusiastic but inexpert
operators in the German capital.”
Summary
Thus, as the wartime alliances
solidified in the summer of 1941 (with the USA to join the Allies a few months
later) mainland Europe entered its most intense couple of years of illicit
wireless transmission and detection. Many agents – as well as dedicated
wireless operators – did not have a suitable profile for the tasks at hand, and
had been sketchily trained. The equipment they used was frequently clumsy and
unreliable. The support structures behind them had not always analysed the
variables of distance, sunspots, terrain, or mechanical interference in depth
enough to define the wavelengths and times that they should best operate. They
frequently disobeyed best practices in their transmission techniques, and
ignored rules of basic spycraft. But they all probably had an exaggerated sense
of the state-of-the-art of enemy detection and direction-finding techniques at
the time, and how efficient it was, and certainly used such capabilities as an
excuse for sloppy behaviour when agents were apprehended. All this would change
very rapidly as the battle of wits intensified in the second half of 1941, when
Nazi Germany honed its capabilities in the face of the Rote Kapelle activity. The
major significant conclusion is that, as Germany intensified its capabilities for
detecting the threat of domestic (or imperial) illicit wireless, Britain
moderated its own home coverage. Through policy and organisational change, it concentrated
much more on transmissions in mainland Europe, and on the interception and
decipherment of official transmissions made by the Nazi war machine.
The final observation to be
made is to note the anomalous attitude of British Intelligence towards its Nazi
enemy during this period. While crediting an exaggerated efficiency and skill
to the Abwehr’s counter-espionage activities, in the form of effective Radio
Detection- and Location-Finding, it attributed the obvious ill-preparedness of
the agents (training, language, identification papers, etc.) it sent to Britain
to the stupidity and clumsiness of the same organisation. Yet, while priding
itself on its superiority in both regards, the British intelligence services
(in this case MI5, RSS & SOE) developed casual habits in its interception
of domestic illicit wireless, and also sent agents to the continent who were likewise
unready or unsuitable for the challenges of working in hostile territory.
(I am again grateful to Dr.
Brian Austin for giving me guidance on matters of wireless technology. Any
mistakes or misrepresentation are mine alone.)
Sources, and for further reading:
SOE in France
by M. R. D. Foot
SOE, the Special Operations Executive by M. R. D. Foot
The Secret History of SOE by William Mackenzie
Resistance by
M. R. D. Foot
Deceiving Hitler
by Terry Crowdy
Soviet Espionage
by David Dallin
Codeword Direktor by
Heinz Höhne
Unternehmen Seelöwe by
Monika Siedentopf
Rediscovering Irregular Warfare: Colin Gubbins and the Origins of
Special Operations Executive by
A. R. B. Linderman
Secret Warfare by
Pierre Lorain
The Clandestine Radio
Operators by Jean-Louis Perquin
Wireless for the Warrior,
Volume 4 Clandestine Radio by Louis Melstee and Rudolf F.
Staritz
The Third Reich is
Listening by Christian Jennings
SNOW: The Double Life of
a World War Spy by Nigel West & Madoc Roberts
Operation Blunderhead
by David Gordon Kirby
Sonia’s Report
by Ursula Hamburger
Codename Dora
by Sándor Radó
The Duel
by John Lukacs
Double-Cross
by Ben Macintyre
Hitler’s Spies
by David Kahn
Fighting to Lose
by John Bryden
Deadly Illusions
by John Costello and Oleg Tsarev
Secrets of the British
Secret Service by E. H. Cookridge
Codebreakers: The Inside
Story of Bletchley Park by Alan Stripp & Harry Hinsley
Bodyguard of Lies
by Anthony Cave-Brown
Secret Days
by Asa Briggs
The Searchers
by Kenneth Macksey
The Spy With Seventeen
Names by Igor Damaskin
In Stalin’s Secret
Service by Walter Krivitsky
The Guy Liddell Diaries,
edited by Nigel West
The National Archives at Kew, London
This month’s Commonplace entries can be found here.
Monitoring the home security system at 3835 Members Club Boulevard
[Warning: This article may not be suitable for readers of a sensitive disposition. It describes encounters with information technology that may be disturbing to some.]
“Nowadays if there is an error in the input program the computer not only detects it but gives the approximate description and location of the error and recommends procedure for correction.” (Gerald S. Hawkins, in Stonehenge Decoded, 1965)
When IBM hired me as a trainee Systems Engineer in 1969, it was not because of my data processing skills. That day in late August, when I walked into the Katherine Street office in Croydon, Surrey (shortly before the branch moved into the new building on Cherry Orchard Road), I did not know the difference between a punched-card and a paper-clip. It was not a classical career beginning, and not a carefully-planned strategic move. In an indecisive third year at Oxford, I had applied to take the Certificate of Education after the completion of my degree in Modern Languages, but soon began to have doubts. On a weeklong visit to a local primary school in Purley, Surrey, before the first term started, I had innocently queried the headmaster as to why the classes did not appear to be learning multiplication tables by rote. “Oh, Mr Percy!”, he replied with a condescending smile. ‘We don’t do tables any more!” For this was the era of ‘child-centred’ learning, where every infant had to discover for him- or her-self that 7 x 8 resulted in 56, and so on. I recall the way that tables and mental arithmetic were drilled into my generation about fifteen years earlier, and how the pattern of number combinations has stayed with me ever since. In 1968, however, I was entering the world of Progressive Education.
Perhaps my aspirations were also checked by my term of teaching-practice. Having had a term of almost total inactivity, owing to my being on crutches because of a rugby injury, I was informed, in December 1968, that I was urgently needed as a replacement at Bognor Regis * Comprehensive School, as the previous teacher of Russian had been fired for getting one of his pupils pregnant. I did not learn the cause of the summons until I arrived: the school was also going through a painful merger of a grammar-school with a secondary modern, which also dampened what remained of my enthusiasm. Halfway through this term, I decided that a quick return to the classroom was perhaps not the most life-enhancing prospect to be contemplated. Taking advice from some outfit that suggested that my interest in chess, bridge, crosswords and logic puzzles might open up some doors in the computing industry, I secured interviews with some manufacturers, of which NCR and IBM were the most satisfactory. I took care to complete my Certificate of Education so that I could have a back-up career lest the corridors of business found my talents wanting.
[* Bognor Regis is a coastal town in West Sussex. It gained its regal addendum after King George V recuperated there, and the monarch’s dying words have been apocryphally reported as ‘Bugger Bognor!’. When Ursula Kuczynski (agent SONIA) needed a place for her children to stay while she returned to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1938, she left them with a friend in Felpham, which is part of Bognor. There is no truth to the rumour that I was in 1969 undertaking, under deep cover, some early sleuthing into Sonia’s contacts.]
Unfortunately, IBM was a little slow to snap up the opportunity to make me an offer, so I had to write to them to explain to them that this entrepreneurial youth was thirsting to make his contribution to the computing revolution. Perhaps the company was waiting for such a show of initiative, since I was rewarded with an appointment at the Head Office in Chiswick, to meet one of their Personnel Managers (no ‘Human Resources’ in those days: employees were certainly not ‘associates’, and customers were assuredly not ‘guests’). I was delighted to find that this benevolent soul had also studied Russian at Oxford. He started to quote me a quatrain of Pushkin’s, which I was happily able to complete. I passed the interview. I was in.
Before I started the eight-week basic training course at Sudbury, Middlesex, I had a week in the office, where I was directed to a small room, and given a Programmed Instruction text on IBM’s System/360 to work through. These matters were all rather daunting to me, and I recall I had to interrupt my study to ask the Systems Engineering Manager what the meaning of some concept was. It all comes back to me quite clearly: I wanted to know what was special about the sixteen ‘registers’ of any 360 computer system. Registers were (and no doubt still are) the mechanism by which the locations of computer memory were addressed, but they also seemed to have some properties that lent themselves to high-speed arithmetic. Somewhat confused, I asked the manager whether he could explain their nature to me. “Oh, I never really understood all that stuff”, he said. “I wouldn’t worry about it.” I think we adjourned to the squash court soon after that, and I gave him a good runaround in return.
The Systems Engineering class was tough. All new recruits were required to go through the same basic training, to make sure they were immersed into the IBM way of doing things. I recall a few students who had already served several years with IBM’s rival, ICL, and were thus already very familiar with the concepts and practice of data processing. Most of the graduates straight from university had scientific backgrounds, and had used computers in their laboratory work. There were times when I wondered whether I would make it. My ability to learn seemed to correlate exactly with the ability of the individual instructor to present topics in schemas that matched how my brain was able to integrate new ideas, namely very logically, with clear step-by-step evolution, and no grand jumps that left canyons of unexplored territory behind. Gradually, things began to make sense. I completed the three stages of the training about a year later, and was ready to roll.
Unfortunately, IBM was not sure at that time exactly what the role of systems engineers was, as anti-trust threats had meant that the company could not hand out systems engineering resources to its customers for free. At the same time, we were neophytes eager to learn by practical experience, while the projects we were given were haphazard, not always suitable, and not always educational. I soon learned that I liked coding, appreciated the value of well-designed and well-implemented systems, and became very frustrated with poorly written documentation. And I did have a knack for working out what was at fault when things went wrong, although that experience was marred by a disastrous project where I was asked to make some changes to a Vehicle Scheduling Package for a prominent and demanding customer. There was no guide to how the product worked, and I stumbled for weeks in trying to tweak it to meet the idiosyncratic needs of the customer. I received no help: the project was simply abandoned, I believe. But two lessons started to emerge in my mind: i) the knowledge that there was a logical explanation for every computer failure, and ii) the importance of good diagnostics being built into any product.
I move forward seven or eight years, and two jobs later. I was working as European Customer Service Manager for a small American software company. Our flagship product was known as a transaction-processing monitor, an adjunct to the operating system that handled communications with a network of terminals and managed the user programs that the customer wrote to provide on-line business functions. One of the challenges with this software configuration was that a motley set of technologies all operated in one partition, all clamoring for resources, and all potentially stepping on each other. Much of the code was written in low-level Assembler language, which provided greater manipulative power, and faster execution speeds, but also provided opportunities for corrupting storage occupied by other software. Frequent were the ‘core dumps’ (we still called them such, even though ferrite cores had been superseded as memory components by then) that were mailed in by customers when the system blew up, and we were unable to detect what had happened over the telephone. Then the support team would compare the state of computer memory with source listings of our product, in order to find out where our product (it was frequently the fault of the product) had gone wrong.
One particularly stubborn problem endures in my memory. A prestigious customer had experienced an execution failure, not recreatable, that caused the partition to explode. (The customer was actually the institution where the atom spy Klaus Fuchs, for whom Sonia had acted as courier in 1942-43, was working when he confessed in January 1950: there is no truth in the rumour that I was sent in by MI5, under subterfuge, to undertake an audit of its security procedures.) The requisite hundreds of sheets of print-out were sent in. No one could work out what had happened, and I devoted hours and hours to it. Eventually, I determined that it looked as if an error routine in IBM’s telecommunications package, VTAM, had failed to save properly the register contents that had been passed to it (and which had to be restored when the routine had completed its work), as all processes used those same registers I had been puzzled about back in 1969. I called the customer with my tentative suggestion, and asked him to pursue the matter with IBM. The next day he called back: indeed, one of the error handlers was incorrectly saving and restoring registers. He apologized for not searching for, and applying, the fix that would remedy the problem. Much goodwill was gained.
The second experience that reinforced my earlier lesson was in helping to roll out a new feature in the product, something called ‘Multiple Record Hold’ (MRH). The previous version had allowed only one file record to be held at a time, which was a heavy constraint. If a user application wanted to prevent anyone else accessing a customer record, say, while it then checked an inventory record that it might want to deplete, the systems designer was in a bind. MRH addressed that problem. But our developers designed and coded the feature too quickly and carelessly. Several occasions would arise where the programmer would try to invoke the feature inappropriately (for example, invalid keys, or multiple requests to the same file), or the software detected something illogical. It would return an ‘L’ code to the program, indicating such. But the programmer had no idea what it meant. There must have been several dozen places in the source code where an ‘L’ error code was returned. We, as support personnel, had to trace through the record of programmatic requests, and the source code listed, to detect at what point in the logic the ‘L’ had been returned, and then provide an explanation. But it could all have been made so simple: an auxiliary area existed where a return code could have been posted, and a corresponding piece of documentation could have explained what every code meant, with an enormous benefit in productivity. I was just about to start coding this enhancement when I was invited to work as Director of Technical Services for the parent company in Norwalk, Connecticut. At that time the flagship product was on the way out: the feature was never implemented. And so my wife and I, with ten-month-old son, moved to the USA.
[In parenthesis, for the more technical among my readership, I should also mention here that an unusual feature of this product was that the Control Program was written in a high-level language, COBOL, a decision presumably made in the interests of clarity and maintainability, not in the cause of performance. But when some advanced features were added to the product, it became necessary for the CP [not the Communist Party] to access low-level bitstrings, something COBOL cannot do. Thus an Assembler (low-level) language subroutine called GETBITS was added, to return statuses for further decision-taking and logic-branching. I recall very clearly how one of our most demanding – and shrewdest – customers in the UK, when undergoing performance problems, ascertained, through the use of a testing device, that GETBITS was consuming 6% of all machine cycles on its 370/145 – an enormous amount. Furthermore, when I inspected the new CP code, I discovered that, in many circumstances, the GETBITS routine was being invoked, but the CP was then taking branches that were completely independent of the results of the call! When I vaguely suggested to the President of the Company (who had probably written much of the original code himself) that I could rewrite the whole CP in Assembler language on my weekends, and deliver a much faster system to our customers, he declared, very seriously, that anyone who attempted that would be fired. He still relocated me to report to him in Connecticut, but later gracelessly told me that he only did so because the Director of R & D persuaded him. On such whims do whole lives change.]
The reason for this long introduction is that I recently had to replace my home PC, and experienced massive problems. For some months, my old HP Pavilion had been warning me of its imminent demise. The fan had broken, and the device was presumably in danger of overheating. I would get a warning message each time I re-booted, and occasionally Windows would blow up. So shortly before Christmas, I bought an HP Envy Desktop, preparing to install it after my winter break. I did not buy a printer or monitor: I had an HP Photosmart printer that was working well, and, only a year ago, I had had to replace the monitor that had suddenly died on me with a new model. This new monitor had HDMI support, but, since my PC was so old, it did not support an HDMI connection, and I thus had to use the older-generation VGA connector. This apparently meant that I had no sound support on my computer, but that was no great loss, even though I could not listen to music while I was working. I got used to it. Early in January, I thus loaded up the printer with new ink cartridges, backed up the files on the old PC, checked the cable configurations to ensure I knew what socket went in where, and unpacked the new machine.
To start with, all went very smoothly. True, Windows10 was a bit of a shock, with some features apparently dropped, and some weird patterns of activity occurring, such as random duplication of keyboard strokes. But overall it worked, and I restored my files (well, partially: but that’s another story.) Then I suddenly realised that I was not getting any sound from the computer, despite the new HDMI connection. The driver was okay, the system told me that the graphics was working properly, and yet no sound emanated from the monitor. It took me a while to work out that, all that long year ago, I had been sold a monitor with no sound support. Well, it was my fault for not asking, I suppose, but I think the salesperson was at fault, as well. Maybe he just wanted to move that product off the shelf. After all, why would I want to move from an antiquated broken monitor that supported sound to a spiffy new one that didn’t? There’s a lesson.
Next, I tried the printer. And here is where the problems started. Word documents would not print at all; PDFs would print, but very faintly. Crossword grids from the Web printed out partially. Emails from my queue printed fine, however. (I have one to prove it, as it relates to my problems.) What was going on with my device, which had been working so well a day beforehand? What caused such erratic behavior, where some items came out fine, but others were ignored? I did not believe it was a dirty printhead problem (something I had encountered and fixed a couple of years ago). My first step was, on my next trip into Wilmington (thirty-five miles away) to go to Best Buy, the store where I had bought both the printer and the PC, and ask for their advice. They immediately said ‘buy a new printer’, hinting that many users suffered from the same or similar experiences, as it would be too expensive to investigate the problem, and printers were so cheap. But I wasn’t going to give up that quickly.
After looking on the Web for users with similar complaints, I tried a number of things. I reloaded the printer driver (the current version was dated October 2015, which was perhaps not encouraging). I deleted the device, and added it back in. I reset it. I set it up as a default printer. I tried printing test pages. At some stage I logged on to the Microsoft and HP support forums, where ‘experts’ (but not employees of the respective companies) would generously offer suggestions to fix the problem. Nothing worked. Eventually, an HP employee joined the forum, and tried to help me. I shan’t go through all the steps he recommended, but he ended up giving me secret codes to enter on the printer itself, to determine why it wasn’t able to operate any off-line functions either. But even this process did not work as he outlined, as it was interrupted by another message. At this stage, we agreed that I should call up HP customer support.
Since the problem appeared to be with my newly warranted PC, I called the number for desktop computers, and was soon speaking to a support representative (in India), to whom I gave all the relevant information. Then, when I described my problem, he said that I needed to speak to the Ink-jet support group, and gave me another number to call. I went through the same process, was given a case-number, and started providing details of my problem. But when I gave the representative the Serial ID of my printer, she (in the US, this time) told me that I would have to pay for support, as the device was no longer under warranty. This did not completely surprise me – I have paid for such telephone support from HP beforehand – but I was not actually in the mood, given the trials I had already experienced, for having to pay for diagnosis that I really felt was HP’s responsibility. I somehow convinced her that she should at least provide an initial investigation of the problem for free. So we downloaded some software that allowed her to control my computer while I watched.
What happened next was rather disturbing. The representative asked me what make of router I was using, and when I responded ‘Ubee’, she expressed a degree of shock, almost one of recognition, as if the Ubee-Photosmart combination was a known toxic one. I tried to determine whether that was the case, but received no reply, as she started manipulating the Ubee tables on my PC. Clearly, she knows what she is doing, I said to myself. And then the connections were lost. First, the phone contact disappeared. She sent me a message indicating such, so I quickly sent her a text, imploring her to call me back. Then that connection went dead, too, and I was left stranded, with the shape of my router tables unknown, and the problem unresolved.
At least I had a case number. I called back, but this time was routed to another call-centre in India. Even though I gave the representative there the case-number, and told him what had happened, he claimed he could do nothing for me. I rung off in exasperation, hoping that the contact in the USA would call me back. But nothing happened. I suspect that the supervisor of the representative trying to help me in the USA had interrupted the process, probably reprimanding the young lady for not charging me for such support time, and thus had broken off all contact. I shall never know. Even when an HP customer relations person (who had presumably kept an eye on the forum, and had been alerted by the HP technician who joined it) contacted me afterwards, he was powerless to find out what had been going on. But to abandon a customer half-way through a process when the device was under the control of a remote technician was scandalous, in my unhumble opinion.
So I gave up, and bought a new printer, from Epson. Never again any HP products for me.
Perhaps it was all a strange coincidence, but one afterthought came to me. If my printer had enough intelligence in it that, when I ran out of ink, and inserted new cartridges, it could send a message in real-time to HP Central to encourage me to buy a replacement set, maybe it was also smart enough to detect that it was now being driven by a more modern, faster computer, and that a process akin to what we systems engineers used to call ‘graceful degradation’ should occur, so that the user would have to buy a new printer? That was the immediate recommendation of the technician at the company who sold me the printer, remember. After all, Apple has admitted slowing down its devices to preserve battery power, and Volkswagen fudged emissions when engines detected that they were running under laboratory tests. I would not be at all surprised if something like that happened.
And then my wife’s laptop computer started having problems. She would be told that an important Security update needed to be installed on Windows10, after which the process would hog her computer for hours on end, only to fail with the message ‘0x800700c1‘, when it was 99% complete. We ignored it for a while, since I was mightily consumed with sorting out my own PC, but I at last got round to investigating. ‘Contact Microsoft Support’ was the guidance, so I went on-line, and was soon directed to a document titled “You receive the error message ‘Something went wrong’, when attempting to install the latest version of Windows10.” I was amazed to learn that the company offered ‘many steps that I could try’, as there were ‘many possible reasons your device may be unable to update to the latest version of Windows’. This was extraordinary. A specific error message had been issued, yet the software had no clue as to what circumstances had cause it to fail, and the user of a consumer product was supposed to experiment with all these approaches in order to resolve the problem? What on earth would the Little Old Lady from Dubuque do?
I decided to request an on-line chat with a support person. This did not take long, and I was put in touch with Parthiban, in India. We set up the protocol by which such persons take over control of the computer, and he soon decided that the problem was due to a corrupt database, and a conflict with Norton Security. He initiated the update again, but he had to sign off before the process completed, leaving me with a link that I could invoke in case of failure. I was given a case-number, and waited for an hour or so. And then the installation failed again. So the next day, I used the reinvocation, and was before long involved in another on-line chat, with Deepthi. Now Deepthi did not appear to know what he (or she) was doing, as I could watch him wandering aimlessly around HP configuration options. My mistrust was justified, as he suddenly signed off the session without letting me know why.
Accordingly, the next day, I reinvoked the link, and noticed that I was 93rd in line, so decided to try again later. The queue had then diminished to 21, so I tried it again, and was soon engaged in an on-line exchange with Praveen. His diagnosis was that some cookies needed to be removed, and Norton Security had to be disabled for a while, as it was inhibiting the execution of the Microsoft Update routines. So I watched as he cheerfully went through the whole process leading up to the installation of the updates. Then he left me to watch for an hour, until the update failed again.
Yet, when I tried to re-invoke the link to resume my interchange, I was told that it was no longer valid. This time, I resolved to speak to a real person, called the support number, and, after a wait of about fifteen minutes, I described my problem to the support representative. She took my number, and soon I was talking to another agent, named Tony. (By asking him what time it was where he was working, I determined that he must be located somewhere in the Mid-West.) Anyway, while he seemed to be unable to look up my Call Number, and discover what approaches had already been applied, Tony sounded much more confident, and judged that I needed a larger partition size to run the routines. So I watched as he downloaded the Minitool Partition Wizard (how come Microsoft does not supply this facility?), which ran for about half an hour. That task having been successfully completed, he said he was going to re-install the whole of Windows10, so that I would not have to deal with a separate Security Update. I was getting a bit anxious as this process started, so I begged him to stay on-line until it completed, indicating that he could multitask with other customers while the update continued. Yet he was so confident that his solution would work, he said we should ring off: he did however commit to calling me in another hour to check how things were going.
Predictably, the update failed. After about an hour and a half of installation, verification, preparation and execution, I received a short message, with no diagnostic code: ‘Windows installation has failed’. And this saga would not be complete unless I informed you that, no, Agent 4 (Tony) never called me back, despite his promise. I had been abandoned again.
Before finally agreeing to give up completely, and simply to ignore the messages emanating from Microsoft that were constantly bugging my wife, as she worked at her computer, informing her that her security was at risk, and that updates still needed to be installed, I decide to post a plaintive appeal on the Microsoft Support Forum. I summarized all that had occurred, and expressed my frustration at Microsoft’s shoddy installation software, and its even more unprofessional support agents, who appeared to apply guesswork in trying to resolve problems, and repeatedly left consumers like me hanging dry. My appeal was quickly picked up by a Microsoft employee who has been very patient in going through my experiences. Yet his final recommendation, after I gave him the status of my Windows10 System Build, and maintenance applied, sounded very much like the process that Agent 4 had undertaken. When I pointed this out, he urged me to try what was (he said) a very simple process: indeed, he himself had written the on-line document that guided it. So I sat down, went through his steps, disabling Norton Security and trying again when that package told me that one of Microsoft’s modules was unsafe, and had had to be removed. About ninety minutes later, the Microsoft software, having gone through download, installation, verification, and preparation, started its execution. After half an hour, I received exactly the same message that had appeared in the previous try: ‘Windows installation has failed’.
The Forum Observer responded promptly, requesting that I send him (via OneDrive) a couple of log files from an obscure Windows folder. I am not sure why no one had thought of inspecting such data before (I had in fact suggested such a course of action several days earlier, as I suspected such files should exist somewhere). I had not used OneDrive (Microsoft’s file-sharing service on the Cloud) before, but I retrieved the logs, followed the instructions from my iPad, created the OneDrive link, and posted it on the Forum page.
And then I received the following amazing message from the moderator:
“A Windows upgrade requires DISM utility to work and in your case DISM fails which then triggers a rollback.
Right-click Start>Command Prompt (admin) and type in:
DISM /ONLINE/ CLEANUP-IMAGE/ SCANHEALTH
If that fails with 193 post back the DISM log present at C:\Windows\Logs\DISM\ again through Onedrive”
As John McEnroe would say: ‘You cannot be serious!” And don’t you just hate it when your DISM fails? So I went ahead, and yes, the SCANHEALTH failed with a 193, and I posted on the forum the link to the DISM log on OneDrive. Isn’t this exciting?
The next news was not good. My contact thought that the damage ‘was beyond repair, and that I would either have to reset Windows or do a clean install. He pointed me to another link, where a Mr Carmack had published a document titled ‘Clean Install Windows 10”. Mr Carmack attempted to sell the process by describing it as ‘a game-changing learning experience that will make you permanently the master of my PC’, going on to write that ‘to stretch this out over days or weeks you’ll learn better how each change affects performance.’ But typical home users of PCs do not have ambitions of becoming geeks, taking up Windows maintenance as a hobby. The only game I wanted changed was the one of getting Microsoft to fix its software. The steps that Mr Carmack outlined are monstrous (see https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-windows_install/clean-install-windows-10/1c426bdf-79b1-4d42-be93-17378d93e587), and must be very prone to error. And, even if I went through all this, what were the chances the problem would recur? I replied in this vein, thanking the moderator again, suggesting it was perhaps time to give up. ‘So what are the implications of simply ignoring the attempts by Windows to install the Security updates? Maybe the laptop should simply be replaced?’, I asked.
There is an easier way, replied the moderator. He outlined some other steps, recommending that I do a reset, ‘as it might remove the corrupt driver which is preventing the upgrade’. He had no idea what might have caused the problem, and suggested yet another site ‘where the experts might be able to help you better’. But, if a driver has been identified as defective, I wondered, why could it not be replaced? At this stage, I concluded that I had had enough. My wife and I would live with whatever nonsense Microsoft imposed on us, and replace the laptop with something from Apple when the time came.
It was difficult for me to imagine that my wife’s PC was the only one on the planet undergoing such experiences. She is a woman in a million, I know, but I do not understand how her rarity should extend to the tribulations on her laptop computer. And the exercise also reminded me how little way the software industry (or Microsoft, at any rate) has come in fifty years. The company delivers an upgrade to a system that is in many ways incompatible with the previous versions, and it has disabled certain functions. The on-line documentation frequently does not match how the screens of system information appear, so one is left groping. The diagnostic codes given when the software encounters problems are meaningless and obscure. One can find jokey tutorials on YouTube, but they are badly designed, often delivered in mumbles, and do not explain enough about the Whys of a particular feature. The support personnel who try to help the bewildered consumer are poorly trained, not provided with proper tools, and thus engage in guesswork. And, of course, we fogies have to deal with tracking down those tiny labels with product serial numbers, pasted in the most inaccessible places on the equipment, that have to be read with a magnifying-glass.
What galls me even more is that we (in the USA, anyway) are currently facing a bombardment of in-your-face advertising from Microsoft that promotes its new expertise in Artificial Intelligence as ‘Empowering Imagination’. It depresses me to think how such technology will be abused by a company so obviously inept at managing the release and maintenance of its own software. Perhaps the techniques of neural networks should be applied to Microsoft’s own configuration and diagnostic problems before they are imposed upon an unsuspecting world? Yet again, we have been here beforehand. I recall the surge of enthusiasm about AI about thirty years ago, when all number of hyperbolic claims were made about the advent of rule-based systems. Now we hear it again, with all sort of nonsense about systems that will be able to teach themselves how to be more effective, and thus achieve all manner of breakthroughs in medical diagnosis, or fraud detection, or whatever. Computers can be programmed to give results that appear to reflect intelligence, such as beating grandmasters at chess, but that does not mean that they are inherently intelligent.
Maybe this generation of AI is different, but a caveat remains. A key principle of computing science has been the verifiability of systems – the fact that code must be inspected to determine whether the logic has been implemented according to specifications. (If proper specifications actually exist, of course, which is a whole other problem: see Multiple Record Hold.) Thus I used to experience the process of ‘structured walk-throughs’, where one’s peers would wade laboriously through the code a colleague had written to apply more stringent tests that might escape the test data environment. If the onus of decision-making has now been delegated to the computing system itself, who now takes responsibility when something goes wrong? I was both amused and perturbed to read, in the New York Times, earlier this month, how engineers at Google have started analyzing how computers using neural networks reach the conclusions they do, as if the experts are concerned about the level of auditability that these systems provide. “Understanding how these systems work will become more important as they make decisions, like who gets a job and how a self-driving car responds to emergencies”, the article declared. (I write this the day after the Uber self-driving car in Tempe killed a pedestrian during a test-run.) Their concerns are appropriate: I smell litigation over unexplained, and inexplicable, disasters. The paradox is that, if the processes of AI are verifiable, the technology is considered mundane and unimaginative, while, if they are not, it is uncontrollable and dangerous. What do you think, HAL?
* * * * * * * * * * * *
A few years ago, the Times of London informed me it could no longer issue a cheque for the occasional fees for published Listener crossword puzzles without my submitting a complex form that confirmed that I was a proper US-resident tax-payer. The cost to complete the forms required was almost as much as the crossword fee, so I didn’t bother. Last year, my bank in the UK (with whom I have had an account since 1965) told me that I would have to change my deposit account into a long-term instrument that would mature in three years, as it was no longer allowed to pay interest on accounts to overseas customers. This month, I received a letter from Barclaycard (with whom I have had a sterling credit card for about forty years) advising me that my account would have to be closed in early April unless I could provide proof of a residential address in the United Kingdom. Thus another convenience (for paying magazine subscriptions, downloading files from the National Archives, purchasing gifts, even ordering a copy of my own book from amazon to send to a reviewer – all in sterling) disappears. I have maintained my UK citizenship, have paid all tax at source, as appropriate, and have always declared all my (puny) UK-based income to the US Internal Revenue Service. It is comforting to know that the British authorities are cracking down on the real risks to currency and tax fraud, and thus discouraging me from any further investments or expenditure in the UK, while allowing all that other soiled money from Russia and other places to be brought into London for the purposes of acquiring valuable assets and helping the economy.
This month’s Commonplace entries can be found here.