Category Archives: General History

Perceptive readers of my November 2017 blog will have noted that, while I confidently outlined the political climate in the UK in 1940, in the months after Kritvitsky’s revelations, I was more circumspect about the conditions in the USA, and why his warnings were ignored there. Had a band of moles been inserted deeply and clandestinely into US institutions, in similar fashion to the how the careers of the Cambridge spies were prompted? Was the F.B.I., the equivalent of MI5, trained to be on the alert against Communist subversion? Did the two counter-espionage services collaborate? Why was Krivitsky’s evidence to the Dies Committee, in an open forum (unlike the clandestine way Krivitsky provided testimony to British intelligence) not taken seriously? Were there links between the Soviet spies in the UK and the Americas? In summary, were the patterns of denial the same? Above all, I needed to understand better why the evidence provided in September 1939 by the Soviet courier Whittaker Chambers (who had broken off contact with the NKVD in 1938) had been ignored by J. Edgar Hoover of the F.B.I., and by President Roosevelt. This was apparently a far more scandalous act of negligence than that which occurred in the UK. What was going on?

I realised that I needed to dig around a lot more. I had many years ago read Chambers’s memoir Witness (1952), and more recently some of the major works on Soviet espionage (Dallin’s Soviet Espionage (1955), Lamphere’s The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent’s Story (1986), Andrew’s and Gordievsky’s  KGB: The Inside Story (1990), Weinberg’s and Vassiliev’s The Haunted Wood (1999), Haynes’ and Klehr’s In Denial (2003), and Haynes’, Klehr’s and Vassiliev’s Spies (2009)) without taking careful notes of the history of the KGB and GRU in America. A review of them has since reminded me that the state of play in the US was different from that in the UK in at least four significant ways: 1) The USA did not officially recognise the Soviet government until Roosevelt’s administration took the plunge in October 1933, which meant that the Soviet Union had no diplomatic presence in the US to mastermind operations, or to provide a channel for sending information back to Moscow; 2) The Soviet Union was slow to conclude that the USA was going to be a far more important country to track closely, with its influence on global affairs overtaking that of the British Empire, and its technological developments providing a rich lode of secrets to be stolen; 3) Since the New Deal was philosophically very sympathetic to the Soviet Union’s totalitarian instincts, the US government was in fact recruiting intellectuals and professionals with seriously leftist opinions and instincts, which meant that the problem of infection of the corridors of power via subterfuge was no longer necessary; and 4) While Soviet spies and couriers were able to cross between Europe and North America with impunity, there was an almost complete absence of exchange of intelligence about them between the different security services. Yet none of these books analyses in depth the ideological background of the dozens of officials who ended up spying for the Soviet Union, or why they considered that such treacherous behavior was necessary. I continue my search.

To start with, I have been boning up on other aspects of the transatlantic connections. I referred in my November blog to the cultural denial in the US over Soviet infiltration, and the threat it represented. While on holiday in California and Maui in December, I read M. Stanton Evans’s Blacklisted by History (The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies) (2007), and the memoir by one of the spies unmasked by Igor Gouzenko’s revelations in Canada in 1945, Gordon Lunan’s Redhanded (Inside the spy ring that changed the world) (2005). Lunan was a Scotsman who emigrated to Canada in 1938, and spent five years in prison for his role as a courier between some of the atom spies. He died in 2005. I have also read, this month, Lewis E. Lehrman’s Churchill, Roosevelt & Company (2017), which has an illuminating chapter on Harry Dexter White, the U.S. Treasury official who collaborated with John Maynard Keynes at Bretton Woods, and who was a Soviet spy.

Re-examining the McCarthy hearings is critical because a) they have suffered from a host of leftist distortion in the decades since, and b) their proceedings reveal a mine of information about the allegiances of dozens of US government officials around the war years. The name of Senator Joe McCarthy is almost always linked to the notions of ‘witch-hunt’ and ‘hysteria’ in today’s press. For example, on one page of Gordon Corera’s recent book Cyberspies appear the following two statements: “Venona’s revelations helped fuel the McCarthy era of witch-hunts in Washington amid fears that the Soviets had reached deep into the establishment”, and “That [Philby tipping off Maclean & Burgess] intensified the spy hysteria sweeping Britain and America.” Comparisons are also fluidly made between McCarthyism and the Trump administration. In a letter published in the December 22/29 issue of the Times Literary Supplement, the irrepressible Edward Horowitz wrote: “The paranoid style in American politics embodied by the late senator [McCarthy] and his followers seems to have been ominously resurrected in 2016”, while in the London Review of Books of January 4, Gordon Lears, in an otherwise very level-headed piece, wrote: “In its capacity to exclude dissent, it is like no other formation of mass opinion in my adult life, although it recalls a few dim childhood memories of anti-communist hysteria in the early 1950s.”

But wait! ‘Witch-hunts’? Whereas there is no such entity as ‘witches’, and thus hunts for them are bound to be abortive, Communist spies were a very real menace in the 1930 and 1940s, and for a long time after. To classify attempts to root out such subversives as ‘witch-hunts’, at a time when Stalin had been engaging in the most monstrous show-trials (or sentences without trial) of the century, resulting in the deaths of millions of innocents, displays an incredible degree of hypocrisy. And to classify as ‘paranoia’ or ‘hysteria’ the energies of those trying to defend the nation against such infection reflects an enormous naivety about the nature of the threat. Do such people not realise that it was Stalin’s plan to strengthen his country after the war before taking on the inevitable showdown with ‘the imperialists’? Did they really want to transform the USA into a totalitarian prison-camp on the lines of Stalin’s Russia? What is more, McCarthy’s role is frequently distorted. It is often overlooked that the better publicized investigations were undertaken by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), i.e. not by the Senate, to which McCarthy belonged.

The lore of McCarthyism focusses on attempts to deprive writers and actors (darlings in the public eye) of their right to a living, but, in reality, the thrust of the Senate hearings was very much on political infiltration, particularly in the State Department and the Army. Stanton Evans performs a very thorough job in explaining how the well-researched inquiries by McCarthy and his team were constantly stalled and deflected by career officials, primarily in the State Department. It was not considered a disqualification for a diplomat or civil servant to be (or have been) a communist, and McCarthy was instead attacked as the subversive. As Evans writes: “Throughout, the White House, Department of Justice, and other agencies of the Truman government showed far more interest in tracking down McCarthy’s sources than in uncovering alleged Soviet agents or Communist Party members, or in addressing the lax security standards deplored by the LRB [Labor Relations Board]. In the view of the Truman administration, the problem with Joe McCarthy was not that he didn’t have inside sources of loyalty data but that he all too obviously did. Which was from a national security standpoint beneficial, as information on such cases was sorely needed.”

Yet there were dozens of Soviet sympathizers in Roosevelt’s administration, many of whom engaged in real espionage. And this is where Evans misses an opportunity. Oddly, in his text he never mentions Walter Krivitsky (who was intensely interrogated by the Dies committee in 1939, and was a friend of Whittaker Chambers). Surely the highly public episode of Krivitsky’s denunciation of Stalin and his techniques merited some examination? Stanton provides some analysis of what happened before 1941, but fails to explain how all these persons had been hired, or whether there was a deep plot by Moscow to recruit early at academic institutions (along the lines of the Cambridge-Oxford strategy). He provides no thorough analysis of the different strains of socialist, from the democratic New Dealer, through the committed totalitarian and the dedicated Communist, to the Stalinist devotee and actual spy for the Soviet Union. He fails to explore the question of whether subterfuge was actually necessary – unlike in Britain, where Philby, Burgess and Maclean at least had to go through some display of ideological realignment before being recruited by the various government services.

The problem was that, from Roosevelt’s own leadership, the proliferation of government officials with open sympathies for Stalin’s Soviet Union was not something to be regretted. It had been going on for some time, and had been tolerated. This became clear in 1939. The pattern of subversion had started with Whittaker Chambers, who, when he became the leading courier for Soviet intelligence in 1932, was instructed to cut all his ties with the Communist Party. But it was Chambers himself who, shocked by the Moscow show-trials, and the persecution and murder of agents in situations like his, decided to cut himself loose, defy an order to travel to Moscow, and then go into hiding – all before the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet pact provoked tremors in such persons –  and then confess all in 1939. In September, he was convinced by Isaac Don Levine (the same man who befriended Krivitsky, and ghost-wrote for him) to speak to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle. At this meeting, Chambers named eighteen contacts in influential positions in government. Berle informed the White House, but Roosevelt did nothing: Chambers was not interviewed by the FBI until 1942.

As Andrew and Gordievsky write: “Roosevelt was not interested. He seems simply to have dismissed the whole idea of espionage rings within his administration as absurd. Equally remarkably, Berle simply pigeonholed his own report. He made no charges about Hiss until 1941, when he mentioned Chambers’s charges to Hiss’s former employer, Supreme Court Justice Feliks Frankfurter, and to the diplomat Dean Acheson. Both dismissed them out of hand. Berle took no further action; he did not send a report of his interview with Chambers to the FBI until the bureau requested it in 1943. Among others who brought Chambers’s story to Roosevelt’s attention were Ambassador William Bullitt, labor leader David Dubinsky, and journalist Walter Winchell. Once again, the president brushed the charges aside.”

And when Krivitsky provided his testimony to the Dies Committee, Roosevelt was equally defiant. In November 1940, as Gary Kern reports, Roosevelt replied to him: “I do not agree with you. I do not regard the Communists as any present or future threat to our country. In fact, I look upon Russia as our strongest ally in the years to come. As I told you when you began your investigation, you should confine yourself to Nazis and Fascists. While I do not believe in Communism, Russia is far better off and the world is safer with Russia under Communism than under the tsars. Stalin is a great leader, and although I deplore some of his methods, it is the only way he can safeguard his government

This is quite an extraordinary statement of political philosophy. Expressing a conviction that the Soviet Union might become an ally (implicitly against the Nazis: the US was not yet at war) was one thing. After all, Churchill was issuing similar messages. And, in the summer of 1940 in Britain, the campaign against a ‘Fifth Column’ likewise included Communists (and pacifists) among its targets – an initiative which, because of Guy Burgess’s moves, would likewise be restricted to ‘Nazis and Fascists’. But Roosevelt went further: he denied that communism was a threat to the country, and effectively gave his seal of approval to Stalin’s dictatorship. The millions who had been slaughtered under Stalin’s despotism had no say in the debate whether the country was ‘better off’, and to suggest that the only alternative to Stalinism was a perpetuation of Romanov tsarism reflects a monumental naivety. The fact that Roosevelt considered that Stalin’s government deserved to be safeguarded implies that the American president believed that the victims of Stalin’s purges were all guilty of attempting to undermine him, presumably as part of the rings of ‘capitalist encirclement’. Or else he was woefully ill-informed about the dictator’s regime. In any case, the conceptual similarities between New Dealerism and totalitarian control could not be more clear.

Another explanation might be that it was Roosevelt’s intellectual flabbiness – his vanity, his deviousness, his manipulativeness, all features accepted by his biographers – that led him to make such statements. He was notorious for sending contradictory messages to his subordinates, and for refusing to have any commandment confirmed in writing, as he implicitly did not believe in any kind of ‘cabinet’ decision-making, and wanted to reserve for himself the flexibility to change his mind at will, often bypassing his immediate ministers and ambassadors. This behavior was all part of his assumption that his role was to cooperate with Stalin on a higher plane, and thus ensure the safety of the world. Whichever case is true, it shows an example of unbridled hubris, and contempt for the democratic process. If he had seriously felt that certain state secrets should be passed to Stalin, he could have arranged for such communications (as did Churchill, with the massaged Ultra messages). Yet, instead, he condoned a furtive and uncontrolled process of leakage. Such behavior was irresponsibly ingenuous, and arguably treasonous.

What is more, a real Soviet agent had confessed to the security authorities, and named spies in Roosevelt’s administration. There was no exact equivalent in the United Kingdom of 1940, since no native Briton with a communist background had been recruited solely as a courier. The Cambridge group were indeed all spies. The closest analogue is perhaps Goronwy Rees, who was recruited as a spy, but had a Damascene conversion (or, if not a real conversion, a shocking revelation that the cause was unjust) after the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet pact. If he had gone to the authorities then, and named names, there must have been a possibility that his testimony would have been taken seriously: that is why Guy Burgess wanted him killed. Yet Chambers identified such persons as Harry Dexter White, Alger Hiss and Lauchlin Currie – and Roosevelt did not care. (Chambers wrote that FDR laughed out loud when informed of what was going on.) If Churchill had been offered significant evidence that equivalent figures (say John Maynard Keynes, Alexander Cadogan, and Orme Sargent) had been providing confidential material to the Soviet Union, they would have been purged (UK-style) immediately, and a wholesale cleansing of the stables would have occurred. And how close Krivitsky came! It is my belief – and that of others – that Krivitsky knew more than he was prepared to divulge when he was interrogated in January 1940, but the incompetence of MI5 and SIS on that occasion was dwarfed by the nonchalance of Roosevelt.

So what had been happening with US governmental institutions? Initial study gives the impression that no deep subversion in American universities had been taking place (although Harvard does feature prominently in the resumés of the offenders). Yet there were links with the Soviet espionage structure in Britain, which had been developed several years earlier. The curricula vitae of some of the agents bespeak much, hinting at hitherto unexplored relationships. In alphabetical order, here are some details of those spies (most of whom were revealed by Whittaker Chambers), many identifiable in the Venona transcripts, who had transatlantic links (with cryptonyms in parentheses):

Solomon Adler [SACHS or SAX]: Adler was born in Leeds in 1909, and studied at New College, Oxford (1927-1930), where he took a first, and then a master’s degree in economics at the London School of Economics. He moved to the USA in 1935 to perform research, and at some stage joined the Treasury Department. He became a US citizen in 1940, and was posted to China, from where he advised Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau. Identified by Chambers in 1939, he was a subject of a loyalty test in 1949, after which he returned to the UK to teach at Cambridge. He then moved back to China, and died in 1994.

Cedric Belfrage [CHARLIE]: Belfrage was born in 1904, and attended Gresham’s School, Holt, the same institution that educated W. H. Auden, Donald Maclean, Bernard and Peter Floud, James Klugmann, Brian Simon and Tom Wintringham. He reportedly went to Cambridge University (college unknown), leaving soon thereafter, in 1927, for Hollywood. He joined the Communist Party in 1937, and was recruited by British Security Coordination with responsibility for the Western hemisphere in December 1941. Identified by Chambers in 1939, his spying came to an end when he was inadvertently compromised by Earl Browder, head of the CPUSA in 1943. Nevertheless, at the end of the war, he obtained a post with the military government in Germany (like Jürgen Kuczynski). He appeared before the HUAC in 1953, and was deported back to England in 1955, as he had never taken up US citizenship. He then wrote some sophistical and self-serving volumes of autobigraphy.

Lauchlin Currie [PAGE]: Currie was a Canadian citizen, born in Nova Scotia in 1902, who was educated at the London School of Economics. He moved to Harvard for a doctorate in economics, became an American citizen in 1943, and was hired by Harry White at the Treasury. After a spell at the Federal Reserve Board, he joined the White House staff as an administrative assistant to Roosevelt in 1939. Two years later he was sent to China, and fulfilled other missions for FDR. He became deputy administrator of the Foreign Economic Administration in 1943, but resigned after the death of Roosevelt. Chambers had identified him as at least a ‘fellow-traveller’ in 1939: Venona confirmed his role, and Currie escaped to Colombia in 1950. He was stripped of his US citizenship in 195

George Eltenton [DORIN]: Eltenton was British, a communist sympathiser, and a physicist who at some stage studied at the Cavendish Laboratory. He visited the USSR in 1931 under the auspices of the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR and from 1933 to 1938 worked at the Institute of Chemical Physics in Leningrad. In 1942 while working in the USA he made indirect contact with Robert Oppenheimer with a request for information for the USSR about atom bomb technology. He approached the noted nuclear physicist through Haakon Chevalier. He was picked up in June 1946 by the FBI, and admitted trying to obtain documents on behalf of the Soviet consulate. He moved back to Britain in 1947. His wife Ada was an even more ardent communist than George, and worked at the nest of fellow-travellers and spies that was the Institute for Pacific Relations.

Elsie Fairfax-Cholmeley [GIRL FRIEND]: Fairfax-Cholmeley was the daughter of British missionaries in China, also a communist. At some stage, she became the second wife of Israel Epstein [MINAYEV], born in Warsaw, another Soviet spy, recruited in China in 1937. In a 1942 report, it was stated that she managed to escape from Hong Kong. She and her husband apparently visited Britain in 1944, but were able to reach the USA that year, where Fairfax-Cholmeley worked for the Institute of Pacific Relations alongside Anthony Jenkinson, or/and for United China Relief. Probably in 1951, the Epsteins left to return to China. Elsie died in 1984.

Michael Greenberg [YANK]: Greenberg was British, born in 1914, and attended Manchester Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was described as “the sort of fellow one could take to lunch at the Pitt Club” by Sir John Colville. A Chinese scholar, he was an effective Communist proselytizer as he knew how to put on social graces. He claimed that, in the City of London most people shared the Marxist analysis of capitalism that he had learned in Cambridge in the 1930s, but that they were, by contrast, quite content with the implicit inequalities.  He was a friend of Michael Straight, and won a scholarship to Harvard in 1939. Roland Perry states that he had by then been recruited by KGB. He became editor of Pacific Affairs, a journal published by the Institute of Pacific Relations. In 1942, Greenberg was appointed China specialist for Board of Economic Warfare, within Foreign Economic Administration. He was given the cryptonym ‘YANK’, as he had by then gained US citizenship. He resigned in 1946 after Bentley’s defection, and was questioned by the FBI in 1947. He did not admit to passing on information, returned to the UK, but was denied both US & GB citizenship. He died in 1992.

Anthony Jenkinson: Little is known about this Briton, except that he was a member of the Institute of Pacific Relations, working alongside Elsie Fairfax-Cholmeley. His name was mentioned alongside that of Fairfax-Cholmeley and Michael Greenberg in the Us Senate Sub-Committee report on the Institute for Pacific Relations.

Herbert Norman: Norman was a Canadian whom Chambers described as ‘an alumnus of the Cambridge circle’, alongside Greenberg and Straight. He was born in Japan, to missionary parents, in 1909, and, having taken his graduate degree in history at the University of Toronto, studied at Trinity College from 1933-1936, under the tutelage of John Cornford. Amy Knight (in How The Cold War Began) presents evidence that he joined the Communist Party in 1934. He entered the graduate program at Harvard in 1936, to study Japanese history. Stanton describes him as ‘a Cambridge grad who specialized in far East Affairs and would rise to a high-ranking job in Canada’s diplomatic service.’ He was also closely involved with the Institute of Pacific Relations. After suspicions of his having been a communist spy were voiced in the 1950s, he committed suicide by jumping off the roof of the Swedish Embassy in Cairo, in 1957 – a method of departure from this life experienced by several Soviet spies.

Michael Straight [NIGEL]: Straight was born in the US in 1916, but moved, after his mother’s remarriage, to Dartington Hall. He studied at the London School of Economics in 1933, and then at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he joined a Communist cell, and the Apostles. He became Secretary and President-elect of the Cambridge Union. Straight was recruited by the GRU in 1937 by Anthony Blunt, who passed on orders that he should return to the USA to gain information on the US banking industry. He spied in the USA, but confessed to his deeds when about to be re-hired by the US government in 1963, in the process naming Blunt and Leo Long.  He was a close friend of Roosevelt, and a speechwriter for the president. He claimed that Rothschild’s wife was in love with him (Blunt encouraged him to have an affair, according to Roland Perry); he married Belinda Compton, sister of Catherine Walston, who was to become Graham Greene’s lover. Guy Burgess tipped him off about Krivitsky during the former’s abortive trip to Moscow with Isaiah Berlin in the summer of 1940. Thereafter Straight moved to the State Department to watch Krivitsky’s movements, leading to the latter’s assassination. Straight died in 2004.

Julian Wadleigh [104^TH]: Wadleigh was born in the US in Greenfield, Mass. in 1904, but moved as a child to the UK, where he attended Furzie School in New Milton, and then Marlborough College. He took his undergraduate degree at Christ Church, Oxford, where he read Greats from 1922 to 1925.  His father, a clergyman, was based in Switzerland, c/o Haskard & Co. in Florence. He was known as the ‘bolshie American’ at Oxford, which indicates that his left-wing views were well-developed at that stage. He was awarded a second-class degree at Oxford, and subsequently enrolled at the London School of Economics, where he met his wife. He moved to the US for a fellowship at the University of Chicago, and then joined the Department of Agriculture in 1932. (His wife left him for a Canadian economist, but returned in 1936). Wadleigh then joined the Trade Agreements Division of the State Department in 1936, soon meeting Eleanor Nelson, a leftist, who put him in touch with communists in Washington. He was introduced to an intermediary named ‘Harold Wilson’ and then to Whittaker Chambers. Wadleigh was aware of Stalin’s purges and the murder of Ignace Reiss, but still went to Turkey in 1938. When he came back, Chambers told him he was defecting. He and his wife divorced, but both remarried (his wife marrying Carroll Daugherty, who was also named by Chambers), after which Wadleigh went to Italy and stayed with his brother Dickie, an intelligence officer. Even though his identity was revealed by Chambers, Wadleigh was able to write articles in the New York Post in July 1949 explaining why he spied for the Communists, and did not lose his job. He died in 1994.

I believe this list alone provides some great opportunities for further research. It includes the careers of Britons who seem to have avoided the radar-screen of espionage history writing up until now. It is hard to find firm evidence of the educational careers of these spies as they studied in the UK, yet it must exist somewhere. The pattern hints at extended rings of subversives – not only at the known hive of evil-doing at Cambridge University, but also at networks at Oxford and the London School of Economics. (How many familiar with the inextinguishable ‘Cambridge Five’ would not recognise the names of Leo Long and of Michael Straight, let alone those of Michael Greenberg and Herbert Norman?) It suggests extended efforts by the NKVD/KGB and GRU to export some of the expertise it had developed in Britain to the United States. And it all reflects some extraordinary light on the reactions of the respective governments of the two countries to the discovery of reputed Soviet espionage in their midst. Did they communicate at all, as these dubious persons crossed the Atlantic Ocean? Apparently not, since many in the United States maintained an intense dislike for Britain as a former colonial oppressor. Yet the National Archives are gradually revealing more about some of these goings-on. For example, in 2006, files on George Eltenton were declassified, and scope for further integrative research presents itself.

Lastly, there is the Canadian connection. In September 1945, the Soviet cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko defected in Ottawa, taking over a hundred documents with him. These files identified a ring of Communists, or communist sympathisers, who had been handing over secret material to the Soviet Union. The response of the Canadian government was markedly different from that of the USA or the UK. In the USA, where a large amount of support, even collusion, over the betrayal of confidential information was evident, and the process was delegated to the Senate to hear testimony from witnesses, the latter were able to invoke the Fifth Amendment in order not to incriminate themselves. In the UK, where the identification of spies was largely reliant on information gained from counter-espionage means (such as the Venona transcripts), the authorities were strongly opposed to revealing to the Russians that they had decrypted their secret messages, and thus were dependent on gaining confessions from suspects before any trial could be conducted. That was the case with Klaus Fuchs, as it was indeed also with Alan Nunn May, who was spirited to England, and confessed, as a result of the Gouzenko revelations. May was arrested on March 5, 1946, the same day that Churchill gave his ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in Fulton, Missouri.

The Canadian government, on the other hand, exploited wartime conditions to set up a Commission to investigate the evidence and interview the persons identified. Named the Kelloch-Taschereau Commission, it was set up on February 13, 1946, when it began hearing Gouzenko’s testimony. Two days later, the suspects were arrested, and were required to give their evidence, in a fashion that bypassed many of their traditional rights. Yet, as a mechanism for showing the world the deep subversive activities of Soviet espionage, it was a very successful exercise. The commission issued an interim report on March 4, 1946, and its final version (which can be inspected in full at http://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/472640/publication.html ) in July of that year. The trials of the suspects took place between March 1946 and March 1947: Gordon Lunan, who was considered one of the most important, had acted as a go-between for GRU colonel Rogov and three others accused, namely Edward Mazerall, Durnford Smith, and Israel Halperin. (It was Halperin’s address-book that led to Klaus Fuchs, and Herbert Norman was likewise unmasked by this object.) Under pressure, and fearing a possible death penalty, Lunan confessed in February 1946, and agreed to cooperate.

The definitive book on the Gouzenko affair is Amy Knight’s How The Cold War Began (2005). Yet I believe this work suffers from a common malaise in academic history of this genre: it suggests that the Cold War was caused by a mistrust of Stalin by the West, and that the ‘hunt for Soviet spies’ (as the phrase appears in the subtitle of Knight’s book) was somehow misguided. But there was no hunt. The names came out in broad daylight, and the intentions of Soviet intelligence were clear: to steal secrets from the West. In the USA, the identification of spies by Chambers had been ignored. Moreover, most governmental authorities had determined well before September 1945 that Stalin had misled the Allies at Yalta, and was not to be trusted. The roots of that breakdown went back to Warsaw in 1944, with Stalin’s cowardly refusal to assist in the uprising. Yet the follow-up was anaemic. Knight writes, without a trace of irony: “In chronicling Gouzenko’s story, this book renews a debate that began in the McCarthy era and divides historians to this day. To what extent were the people accused of passing secrets to the Soviets during the 1940s really spies, and to what extent were they merely individuals sympathetic to the communist cause and unwittingly drawn into the Soviet espionage network?” As if that distinction has any substance or merit: they were spies, and they knew it. For example, Fred Rose, one of her primary subjects, went into hiding when the CP was banned, and then approached the GRU in 1942: Knight reports that. Her implicit sympathy for communist ‘ideals’ pervades her work, and she shows all the conventional disdain for McCarthy and his operations (‘the frenzy of the espionage scare’).

Gordon Lunan originally published his memoir as The Making of A Spy. In 2005, it was re-issued, and updated, as Redhanded: Inside the Spy Ring that Changed the World. The title reflects the fact that Lunan admits his role as a spy: indeed the work is lacking in self-pity, and gives the impression that, for all the injustices of the process, and the way he was interrogated, his sentence of five years in the penitentiary was deserved. Moreover, it is a touching and well-written account of growing up in England in the 1920s and 1930s, a world that will be recognized by those who have read, say, George Orwell’s memoirs and fictionalized accounts of those times. Lunan was born in Kirkcaldy in Scotland in 1914: his family moved to Leeds when he was four years old. He was educated at Mill Hill School (although that institution’s website does not appear to be aware of his existence), after which he drifted into leftist circles, although he claims he never joined the communist party. He explains his decision to move suddenly to Canada in 1938 as in impulsive one made in order to ‘see the world’, and he quickly associated himself with ‘anti-fascist’ causes when he arrived there. He nevertheless managed to be recruited by the Wartime Information Board in 1943, where he was approached by Rogov of Soviet military intelligence. He provides some strong insights into government corruption, and is forthright in describing how the war commission undermined individual rights. He also offers a ruthless exposé of prison conditions, yet never suggests that his punishment was unearned. Lunan died soon after the book was published.

Yet there is humbuggery in Lunan’s account, as well. The account of his emigration is very dubious: he describes watching a May Day parade in London in 1938, where protests against the government’s inaction in Spain were being made. It was then, he writes ‘that I finally decided that war would surely come and that I had better see more of the world before the sword of Damocles dropped’. But escaping from the world of advertising in London to a similar milieu in Canada was hardly ‘seeing the world’. Is it possible he was despatched there by the CPGB, or by Soviet controllers? Installed in Canada, he was easily taken in by the hypocrisy expressed by the Nazi-Soviet pact, which was hardly the reaction of someone only on the fringes of the Communist Party. He sounds much more like a hard-line Stalinist: he completely ignores the monstrosities of Stalin’s prison-camp. His final appeal in the book shows all the self-serving cant of the communist apologist: “We must use the democratic rights we still have – to vote, to speak up in our communities, to write letters to the press and to the politicians – to show that we count. But to do so, we must first arm ourselves with a knowledge of our own history and the ability to take a critical look at world events, at history in the making.” Well, of course, comrade. Do exactly that. But nobody had those rights in the communist paradise, did they? There is a mountain of self-delusion in such statements. Yet it is a familiar refrain: ‘we thought we were helping Stalin, who was an ally in war, and were told that our governments were not doing enough to help him’. One can read this sad message again and again: last year Hamish MacGibbon trotted out the same explanation in Maverick Spy, the book about his spy father, James.

The reaction to the Gouzenko revelations shed a lot of light on the attitudes of the respective governments. Moscow Centre – promptly alerted by Kim Philby as to what was going on – was appalled, and after initial protests, by July 1946 had brought back home all its diplomats suspected of spying. The Prime Minister of Canada, Mackenzie King, was typically spineless: he initially wanted Gouzenko to return to the Embassy. He declared to the House of Commons that what he felt most important was ‘to see that nothing should be done which would cause the Russian Embassy to believe that Canada had the least suspicion of anything which was taking place there.’ No ‘hunt for spies’ in Ottawa, but abject appeasement. Mackenzie then travelled to Washington and London and had to be dissuaded from continuing to Moscow, since he was confident that the Soviet leader ‘would never have countenanced such activities’. The American press generally expressed naivety about what was going on, with Time and the New York Herald Tribune even condoning the espionage. One might have imagined that the British and American governments might have wondered whether, if a relative backwater like Ottawa was so riddled with Soviet spies, perhaps Washington and London might be similarly infected. Gouzenko, after all, had identified Nunn May, and given broad hints to the identity of Alger Hiss. But the USA was beset by indolence and nonchalance, and, in the United Kingdom, MI5 had by this time similarly transformed itself into an institution that condoned communism (as my book Misdefending the Realm explains). Thus, apart from a robust stance by Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, the British administration was suffused with the hope that the whole shooting-match was vastly overblown, and by the desire to keep matters firmly undercover. It was only when the courier Elizabeth Bentley revealed to the FBI all that she knew, on November 2, 1945, that the authorities started to become alive again, reinforced by the fact that decrypts from the Venona programme (though concealed from the public) started coming off the production line in 1946.

In summary, the common assessment of the Gouzenko affair is one of surprise and shock. The reaction of the Western Allies has been characterised as one of surprise, because they had no inkling of what was happening, and of shock, because Stalin was supposed to be an ally with whom they were ‘cooperating’. The negative attitude of Stalin had been ascribed to the fact that he was insulted when he discovered that the USA and Britain were sharing atomic secrets behind his back. But the democracies had had ample warning, from Chambers and Krivitsky, of what Stalin was up to, while Stalin had no misconceptions about the long-term adversarial relationship. He had had hundreds of spies working for over a decade, pillaging Western technology and secrets: he would not have expected anything less. As for Knight’s thesis that the Gouzenko affair signalled the beginning of the Cold War, enlightened opinion seems to have forgotten even this incident. The London Review of Books of January 25 carries a review of Odd Arne Westad’s The Cold War: A World History, under the headline ‘Who started it?’ Yet the index to Westad’s book contains no entry for Gouzenko, or even for Soviet espionage. Has a new generation of historians overlooked what went on?

If the democracies had developed mechanisms for sharing intelligence in the 1930s, I suspect a more robust counter to Stalin’s espionage might have been effected. And I believe that a lot remains to be uncovered in the relationships between the activities of the spies in the UK, the USA, and Canada, and how the authorities acted – or failed to react – in response. The lack of intelligence-sharing between the UK and the USA existed for reasons of territoriality, traditional mistrust, and political inclination. The most notorious lapse was probably the role of Kitty Harris, sometime wife of Earl Browder, the head of the CPUSA, as Donald Maclean’s courier and lover. But there were clearly other incidents. The renowned distaste for communism by the head of the F.B.I., Edgar J. Hoover, had been long muted – a phenomenon that merits further study. And I shall continue to look out for an explanation of the intellectual and academic relationships – especially as Harvard is concerned. In a future blog entry, I also plan to disclose the curious relationship between Alexander Foote and the testimony of one of the witnesses before the Canadian commission. Anyone with any insights or sources that can contribute to this debate, or who can shed more light on the more obscure of the characters listed, is encouraged to contact me at antonypercy@aol.com.

P.S. Shortly before he died, in 2014, Chapman Pincher advised me to study his new edition of Treachery, which included a number of new items of research, some based on Russian archives. I at last acquired the 2012 edition (‘Updated and Uncensored Version’), and have started reading it. Yet it is difficult to detect what is new unless one performs an exact comparison with the first edition. Indeed, I have found some useful fresh nuggets and insights, but the work is still flawed because of its relentless a priori argument that Roger Hollis was the GRU spy ELLI. It is impossible to conceive that such an insignificant and incompetent officer could have masterminded the whole Sonia deception, and hoodwinked his colleagues and superiors about what was going on. I continue to believe that Pincher was fed a bundle of false clues in order that he would be distracted from the main quarry.  More to be reported later.

January Commonplace entries appear here.

To be published by the University of Buckingham Press on October 26 (in the UK; March 2018 in the USA)

 

“The science of intelligence analysis is the piecing together of many different segments of information, rather than total reliance on a single source. The overall picture is gained by interlocking a series of small pieces together until the final picture shows a completed intelligence jigsaw puzzle and not a myth.” (Nigel West, A Thread of Deceit: Espionage Myths of World War II, p 126)

(To conclude the story of ‘Sonia’s Radio’. For the complete story, please see ‘Sonia’s Radio‘.)

Sonia acted as courier for the atom spies Klaus Fuchs and Melita Norwood, until both contacts were broken off at the end of 1943, with Fuchs and his mentor Rudolf Peierls sailing to the USA to join the Manhattan Project, and Melita Norwood having a child soon after Sonia’s Peter was born. In October, as the Gestapo pressed the Swiss authorities to close down the remaining radios of the Red Orchestra, Alexander Foote suggested to his leader, Rado, that they take shelter in the British Embassy. Moscow, not unexpectedly, dismissed this idea scornfully. Foote was arrested in November 1943, an event that caused John Curry (now back in SIS) to write to Shillito in February 1944, asking him whether MI5 had any trace on Foote. He replied in the negative. MI5 was curiously maintaining a file on every single International Brigader except Foote, it seemed. When Sonia’s first husband, Rudolf Hamburger, was arrested in Persia as a Soviet spy in late 1943, it caused a minor frisson with Shillito and MI5, but no dramatic action ensued. The intelligence agencies were obviously trying to keep a lid on things.

Sonia is mostly reticent about her work at this time, although she writes that she travelled regularly to London, and she installed a (more powerful) radio in her new residence in Great Rollright, where she moved in 1945. But in the summer of 1946, Moscow Centre broke off contact with her, perhaps for security reasons. In July 1946, Fuchs had returned to the UK to take up a post at AERE, Harwell, although MI5 did not notice the fact until several months later. The Security Service did begin to wonder, however, in the wake of the defection of Gouzenko in Canada in 1945, whether Fuchs might have been passing secrets to the Soviets. He was accordingly put under surveillance, but knew about the watch being put over him, since Kim Philby had alerted Moscow Centre about the investigation. Matters stayed relatively quiet until July 1947, when Foote gave himself up to the British authorities in Berlin. Interrogated soon after, he explained his relationship with Sonia as members of the Rote Drei network. MI5 suddenly woke up to the fact that it had a genuine Soviet spy under its watch, with the result that the extraordinary interview of Sonia was undertaken by officers Serpell and Skardon at ‘The Firs’ in September 1947. The hapless investigators made the statement to Sonia that they ‘knew’ she had not been involved in espionage since she came to the UK, but wanted to know more about her work in Switzerland. Yet they failed to gain any confession from her. She had received a warning of Foote’s disclosures, Foote himself telling a friend of hers that she should be on her guard. That may well have been part of Foote’s cover, of course, to indicate that his loyalties remained with the Communists.

When Fuchs was eventually persuaded to confess to his espionage, and then arrested in February 1950, Sonia made a bolt with her family to East Germany. MI5 was so disorganised and inefficient that, several months later, in May, MI5 officers Graham, Reed and Marriott decided that they should perhaps interview this Ursula Kuczynski woman. They learned only in August that she had left the country. Fuchs did not positively identify his former courier from photographs until December 1950, by which time he knew the coast was clear. Sonia died in July 2000, still loyal to the Communist cause.

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When I set out on the project of Sonia’s Radio, I was not sure there would be a successful outcome to my quest. All I knew was that the episode of the discovery of Sonia’s wireless transmitter, and the subsequent lack of follow-up, were simply too provocative to be explained by mundane circumstances. Thus I became engaged on an assignment of detective work, trying to piece together a plausible explanation of what happened based on very incomplete evidence. It has been a classical ‘Collingwoodian’ exercise in history-writing. Percipient readers will have noticed that each month’s episode appeared without a clear indication of where the whole saga might lead.

Is the case solved? Well, not completely. I do not have in my hand the piece of paper  – unlike my experience in discovering the item in the National Archives that proved that Guy Burgess had set out to Moscow in 1940 on a mission to influence the Comintern against Hitler   ̶  that shows incontrovertibly that SIS had arranged for Sonia to immigrate from Switzerland to Oxfordshire as a known Communist spy, so that the British authorities might eavesdrop on her transmissions. I cannot even prove that Alexander Foote was recruited by Claude Dansey to the Z Organisation, or that he was actually the medium through whom Ultra secrets passed to Stalin.  But my former supervisor (and now collaborator) Professor Anthony Glees, who is necessarily a tough man to convince, and who studied the Sonia phenomenon intently in the 1980s, has told me that he thinks that I have ‘cracked’ the Sonia riddle. By that, he means that he agrees that Sonia had set up her wireless set to be discovered, as a decoy operation from what was happening in Kidlington, and that MI5/SIS was taken in by any dummy transmissions she made from that address, while the more dangerous activity took place a few miles away, undetected and unsurveilled. If my conclusions are correct, they do point to a massive cover-up by SIS and MI5 over what turned out to be a highly embarrassing episode. SIS arranged for a dangerous operator to be installed in England, who then abetted Fuchs’s and Norwood’s treachery under the noses of MI5. Is it any wonder why this story has been hushed up?

I shall no doubt continue to dig around, and may pick up further clues, but what lessons can I draw at this stage from the project?

1) Lack of Academic Curiosity:

It astonishes me that, outside a few dedicated amateurs, and a similar number of professionals (such as Professor Glees and Nigel West), the interest in resolving the paradoxes implicit in the Sonia case appears to be depressingly low. After all, Sonia has been elevated and advertised as ‘the Spy of the Century’, even more notorious (or illustrious) than Kim Philby, or her close friend and colleague in China, Richard Sorge. Her excursion to England is one of the most inexplicable series of events that one could imagine for that time, riddled with questionable decisions and underhand deals. The story of Soviet spies is one of the enduringly popular themes of the British popular and serious press, with books coming out regularly about them, especially as new information from the National Archives is released. Two new biographies of Burgess last year followed another best-selling account of Kim Philby by Ben Macintyre, and this year a biography of the complete Kuczynski family was published. And yet the machinations of Sonia, and how she was allowed to operate in wartime Britain, have not received the attention they deserve. The dedicated Chapman Pincher still was chasing the trail up to his hundredth birthday, but with a bee in his bonnet that irredeemably flawed his conclusions. And where are the street protests over the deceptions and camouflages of the official histories? It is all very odd.

In addition, I have been very disappointed at the lack of scholarly rigour evident in many of the books that cover the matters in which I was interested. I have noted a failure to follow through, lazy referrals to other ‘authorities’, a lack of recognition by the author that he (and it has been exclusively ‘he’) simply does not know what happened, or how groups were organised, or who did what, indicating a lack of perseverance in following up leads and inspecting dubious assertions. Even when obvious loopholes or gaps in the official history appear, the various chroniclers who have addressed intelligence aspects of the hostilities just raise a hesitant query, and then move on. And the history of signals security in WWII conveniently falls through all the cracks of the authorised histories: the story of the Y interception organisation and the RSS does not fall tidily in the domain of the military, or of MI5, SIS, GCHQ, even that of the Joint Intelligence Committee. Yet it also touches the GPO as well as the general public, with the team of ‘Voluntary Interceptors’ employed to track signals a vital cog in the operation. Thus no one takes responsibility for it. I have located (and acquired, pending mail across the Atlantic) a book titled The Official History of British Sigint (Volume I – Part II and Volume II), written just after the war by the official historian of British Sigint, Frank Birch, but Volume I, Part I (which would appear to contain some relevant insights) very oddly does not seem to be available. (See http://militarypress.co.uk/bletchley-park-hut-books/) Moreover, it is impossible to find on amazon or abebooks. Maybe it was withdrawn – even pulped  ̶  because it displayed sensitive information. Could that be so? I have sent an email to the Military Press to seek guidance: my message was acknowledged, but no follow-up occurred. I called the Press, and left a message for the woman who responded, but there is still silence. It is all very strange. Will the coming official history of GCHQ perhaps remedy this shortcoming? I wouldn’t count on it.

2) Modest Public Response:

I should like to write that I have had received a swarm of useful information from readers of my saga. But it would not be true. I have received a varied set of feedback. The most intense was from a person in the world of media who wants to stay anonymous. He has published articles on espionage, and claims to have access to unpublished Soviet archives, some of which he has shown to me. A portion of it has been useful  – but one cannot wholly trust anything that comes out of Soviet/Russian archives. (As Max Hastings has observed: “In Modern China, as in Russia and to some degree Japan, there is no tradition of objective historical research. Absurd claims are thus made even by academics, unsupported by evidence.”) What is sometimes represented as official Soviet archival material has clearly been doctored  –  in this case, probably to support Sonia’s decoy activities. Overall this correspondent’s reserve, and reluctance to explain his sources  –  as well as the fact that he does not want his name to become public   ̶   discourage me from taking too seriously what he has provided. He wrote (before Chapter 9 appeared) that he disagreed with my analysis of Sonia, and he has recently confirmed his scepticism, but he has not written anything that explains to what degree or why. He went quiet for a while: perhaps Chapter 9 overwhelmed him. Towards the end of  this month, however, I did receive a message from him that alerted me to Hamish Macgibbon’s coming book on his father, James Macgibbon, who admitted to being a GRU spy. My contact speculated that Sonia might have been his intermediary and handler, known as ‘Natasha’. Because of chronology and geography, I find that unlikely.

The most fascinating response I received was from a former lodger of Sonia’s, who recalled the time he lived at ‘The Firs’ at Great Rollright: in her memoir, Sonia describes taking this gentleman’s mother breakfast-in-bed when she was pregnant with his brother. The correspondent is still living in the UK, and has maintained a fascinated interest in Sonia ever since his father realised in the 1980s who his family’s 1947 landlady had been. And I received a number of positive comments from persons who had no particular connection with Sonia, or anything to contribute about her, but who were generally just interested in stories of espionage. But overall, coldspur’s lack of visibility hindered the project.

3) The Untrustworthiness of Sources:

The dedicated reader will be familiar with my diatribe titled ‘Officially Unreliable’ from a few months back, where I analysed some of the mistakes and oversights that pepper ‘official’ or ‘authorised’ histories, including vacant and unsupported attempts to debunk rumours that might otherwise have not received any further airing. Yet another trend is pervasive  ̶  the tendency for historians and journalists to give far too much credit to presumed authorities who were witness to the events, as if the latter had far too much integrity for their word to be doubted. Thus I must include the influence that Gladwyn Jebb and Isaiah Berlin had on Verne Newton, that of Patrick Reilly and Dick White on Anthony Glees, Kenneth Cohen on Nigel West, Lord Rothschild on Peter Wright, Wright and Johnston (and many others unidentified) on Chapman Pincher. I could list others. The overall impeccable Harry Hinsley wove his spell on practically everybody, while countless earnest journalists and biographers went, armed with their notepads and tape-recorders to Moscow and Oxford and Arundel, to the wells of such as Kim Philby, Isaiah Berlin and Dick White, to learn how things really were, and solemnly transcribed their utterances. Yet all these sources had secrets to hide. Moreover, archival resources likewise have to be challenged and cross-verified. There is no doubt that some memoranda have been planted in the UK’s official records, to give a false trail.

Have I been scrupulous enough in questioning the sources who provided ammunition for my hypothesis? Malcolm Muggeridge? Edward Crankshaw? Victor Cavendish-Bentinck? Maybe not. But I believe there is a distinction to be made between, on the one hand, cross-checking the testimony of those who apparently had no motivation or potential gain to be made other than wanting a sometimes inconvenient truth to be disclosed, and, on the other, taking as gospel the observations of those who had a career and a reputation at stake, or were imbued with an over-developed sense of loyalty that demanded of them that institutions be protected at all costs. By extending the search beyond the obvious main actors on the stage, and the bit-players who observed them, to those in the wings who wondered whether the drama would ever involve them, one can make patterns, and develop hypotheses that provide a far more coherent explanation of what went on than was ever bequeathed in the utterances of the Great and the Good.

4. Exploiting the National Archives: ‘Traffic Analysis’

The volumes of material declassified to the National Archives in the past twenty years have provided a rich lode for the historian anxious to make his name. Yet the focus has almost exclusively been vertical, i.e. drilling down into the records of a famed spy or agent. Thus we have had such stirring stories as David Burke’s The Spy Who Came In from the Co-Op (about Melita Norwood), Ben Macintyre’s Agent Zigzag (about Eddie Chapman), and Stephen Talty’s Agent Garbo (about Juan Pujol), to name just a few. Far more arduous is the task of scouring the archives horizontally (for there is no indexing to support such a quest) to look for the activities of less than illustrious characters, and develop chronologies and story-lines about them, or to track themes that may be echoed or commented on in unlikely places. Yet only by that method can one find the links between what appear to be disparate cases, such as the involvement of Hugh Shillito in both the Green and the Kuczynski affairs, or the commentaries of Guy Liddell and the Madrid Abwehr  unit on radio-detection finding during the war that reveal much on the way that the RSS was led, and how espionage was carried out.

In addition, I have applied a methodology of what I call ‘traffic analysis’ to the archives – on the model of ‘traffic analysis’ in radio cryptography, where conclusions about the significance of messages can be made without having access to the texts of messages themselves, but alternatively on such phenomena as wavelengths, locations, call signs, regularity, and periods of silence. (“Traffic analysis is the science of extracting useful information from intercepted traffic, irrespective of whether the actual content is intelligible”, as Nigel West defines it in his Historical Dictionary of Signals Intelligence.) Thus gaps in the archive, redacted words, deleted pages, cross-references to records not made available, handwritten annotations, attempts at anonymity, decrypted signatures, hints at organisations, information on weeded documents that still appears in the index to the folder, and published descriptions (on the website) of records that have been identified but then withdrawn, or maintained by the holding government department, ‘for reasons of security’, all have delivered value in the development of workable hypotheses.

5. Outstanding Questions: Here are a few . . .

a) Sonia: The investigation into Sonia is not over. For example, as part of my discovery process into who had owned the property in Kidlington where Len Beurton spent so much time in 1943, I contacted the Land Registry in Cheltenham. Its website does not support electronic inquiries, so several weeks ago I wrote a letter, explaining that I need to know who were the owners (not the residents, who would have been on the electoral roll, and whose names I could have discovered via other sources). I invited the office to contact me by email, indicating that I could give a credit card number by telephone to pay for any services. I never even received an acknowledgment of my letter. Can anyone out there help?

And why did Shillito not dig further in what was going on in Kidlington? And was operating  a radio transmitter under the skirts of an aerodrome truly an effective camouflage? The Soviets appeared to think so. I do not know, but I am sure other information on Sonia’s and Len’s activities will appear. For example, my anonymous contact refers to his ‘chum’ in Moscow, who has access to the Soviet Military Intelligence archives. She must have some story to share. I have encouraged him to invite this lady (whose website on intelligence matters can be inspected at http://www.documentstalk.com/ ) to take a look at ‘Sonia’s Radio’.

b) Alexander Foote: Was ‘Footie’ really recruited by Dansey? I am hopeful that some documents will eventually be released that will prove it. Perhaps now that a good case has been made about his employment, it will prompt the authorities to declassify further documents. I almost regard it as providential that the government decided, in October 2015, just as my doctoral thesis was coming to the boil, to release a document that proved that the purpose of Burgess’s 1940 mission to Moscow was to help engage the Comintern in the war effort. That clinched it for me, and kept my thesis alive: perhaps it will happen again.

c) Sedlacek: Were Sedlacek and Roessler the same person? That is one of my fanciful hypotheses, indicating perhaps that the curriculum vitae of Roessler was carefully created by SIS after the war. Foote’s identification of Lucy as Sedlacek cannot have been a simple error, and MI5, when it re-issued Handbook for Spies without correcting the identification, must have wanted to reduce the amount of attention given to the problem. We have a famous photograph of ‘Roessler’ in mandatory homburg and trenchcoat, but no photographs of Sedlacek.

Rudolf Roessler (Agent LUCY)

Yet, if SIS hired him, and gave him a phony British identity and passport, his photograph must presumably lie in the archives of Petty France (or now, Globe House) somewhere. Can anyone help?

d) Radio-Direction Finding: This matter has the potential to be the longest-running open item. How and why Sonia’s and Len’s transmissions were overlooked by the RSS is still a mystery. If the watch was still out for illicit transmissions from German agents, all suspicious and unaccounted for radio noise would have to be investigated. For me, the most challenging aspect of the activities of the XX Committee (which turned German agents, and controlled their transmissions back to Germany or Spain) has been its failure to ask itself: wouldn’t the Germans wonder why Britain’s most efficient radio-direction finding capabilities failed to pick up the constant stream of messages between the German Control and the agents in Britain – especially the large-volumes of traffic between GARBO and Madrid? (Johnny Jebsen, working for the Abwehr, but with determinedly fragile loyalty, did indeed doubt the agents’ integrity.) And why were the Germans not amazed that their agents could escape detection for so long? Amazingly, no decent history of RSS exists, and what has been written is scattered and contradictory.

In an attempt to discover what the British and Germans were thinking, I have thus started to inspect the dozens of National Archives files on GARBO, and a startling result has started to emerge. It may have been that the Abwehr in Madrid, which sent its instructions for transmission protocols, callsigns, and cyphers, in invisible ink on letters purportedly carried by courier, or mailed, and to which GARBO responded similarly (but actually transported in the SIS diplomatic bag), ‘managed’ by Tomas Harris and MI5 officers, believed that it was leading GARBO and his network to transmit in a way that camouflaged the messages, making them look like British military traffic. That would have given the Germans a justification, and the British an alibi, for pretending all was well. But it is all rather too fantastic at the moment, and I am hoping to get professional guidance on the degree of preposterousness inherent in such assertions. It requires a knowledge of radio, and wavelengths, and cycles, and of the methods by which military and air units deployed radio during the war, that I simply do not have. I need help.

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Web Woes (an update):

1) The Bank: I had a pleasant call with my contact at the Bank, but he seems utterly unmoved by the lack of progress on fixing the simple problem of customer guidance on the web site. The problem remains unfixed, almost nine months after I drew notice to it.

2) The History Today on-line subscription: The matter was resolved. Carelesssness with special characters (£ and $) was the problem.

3) I had a new bad experience with an American stock company. I could not pay in a dividend check as the perforation had split the machine-readable numbers on the bottom of the check. I called the number listed on the certificate to request a replacement, and an automated system guided me to the company’s website. Having registered (and provided all manner of personal details for future security purposes), I found the page where I should have been able to find the form that allowed me to request a replacement. It was not there, but instead a message told me to call a different number. I called that number, where an automated answering system directed me to the website. I returned to it, and sent an email describing the loop the company had created, and requested my replacement that way. I have not heard back from the company after a week, so have had to write one of my infamous letters.

4) AOL: I was required to upgrade my AOL system to a new interface: the current 9.8.2 would not be supported in a month or two. I did so, and then clicked on the request to have my Saved Mail and Favorites imported to the new system. “This operation could take a few minutes. Do not close down your system”, the message said. Two hours later, it was still running, and then I was suddenly locked out. I invoked the Windows Task Manager, to find that AOL alone was running, taking 50% of my CPU cycles. I had to close it down. I went to the AOL Support page, where one window invited me to report my problem by email. But it did not contain an email address! I tried to engage in a Chatroom conversation, and, after waiting ten minutes for an agent to become free, described my problem. The agent said I had to call a Help number for that problem. I called that number, and, after fifteen minutes on hold, spoke to a real person who said that, yes, there was a known problem with Import. “Then why did you not advertise that fact, instead of encouraging your users to execute the process?”, I asked.  “And how would that affect the deadline that AOL had set on support for the old system?” “And did you know about the uselessness of the email invitation?’ “And should I re-install the system?” “And will you get back to me with an explanation via email?” She answered ‘No’ to the last question, but had no answers for the other four. Then, while she invoked her second-line support, I lost the connection with her.

What is the matter with Internet support these days? Do executives ever test out their web interfaces before they release systems? And where is Sir Tim Berners-Lee and his ‘Open Data’ initiative, in the wake of the Equifax scandal? Data ‘open’ enough for you, Sir Tim? (See August coldspur.) And don’t get me started on emails from Facebook containing invitations to be ‘Friends’ from ladies with exotic-sounding names . . .

Finally, on Sunday, October 8, I shall be giving a speech at the St. James Community Center titled ‘Stalin’s Revenge’, based on the key episode in my forthcoming book. The book will be published in the UK on October 26, and in the USA in March next year. Its title is Misdefending the Realm, and is being promoted by Palamedes: please see http://www.palamedes.co.uk/book-pr-palamedes-pr-appointed-by-antony-percy/. You may order your copies on amazon.uk now. More on what no one has yet called ‘the publishing event of the season’ in my next blog: at least the book will appear in the centenary month of the October Revolution.

This month’s new Commonplace entries appear here.

Supply, North Carolina, August 2017

Sonia had always had the dream that, when her spying days were over, she would open a little cafe in coastal Carolina.

Here ex-agents of Soviet Intelligence meet, over cabbage soup and grits, to discuss the old times.

“Shchi da kasha – pishcha nasha!”

(The story so far: Sonia, who has trained Alexander Foote, the secret SIS employee, in wireless transmission techniques, has made an ingenious escape from Switzerland to England, and installed herself and her two children in Oxfordshire. There they wait to be joined by her husband, Len Beurton (from a marriage gained by dubious methods), who has not been able to gain an exit visa from Switzerland because of his past as an International Brigader. The UK consul in Geneva helps him with false papers, however, and he arrives in the UK in the summer of 1942. He and Sonia are watched, and in January 1943 an illicit radio transmitter is discovered in their rented accommodation. For the full story so far, please see Sonia’sRadio.)

Oxford Movements

Sonia’s account of the installation of her radio is mostly very humdrum. Without explaining whether she and Len were assisted in their search for new premises after they were given notice to move out of their bungalow in Kidlington in the autumn of 1942, she wrote that  they ‘looked for a detached house where I could transmit’. They found suitable accommodation in a coachman’s house at ‘Avenue Cottage’ in the Summertown district of Oxford, part of the property of Judge Neville Laski and his wife. Soon after they moved in, Sonia approached the chatelaine, as she ‘needed her permission to erect an aerial leading from our roof to one of the stables’. Mrs Laski agreed: the aerial looked rather like a normal one for any radio receiver, Sonia added. Len thus clambered up and installed it, and they secretly inserted their little transmitter behind a loose stone in a thick wall.

And then she made the astonishing observation that, while amateur radio transmissions were forbidden, she and Len ‘had to count on my transmitter being discovered at some point’. Moscow Centre thus wanted her to train a new operator, and they found Tom, a fitter at a car plant, who was eager to do the job instead. How Sonia imagined that, if her transmitter were discovered, she would simply be let off with a warning, to continue spying, but now handing her material to a substitute, is not explained. In addition, it seems unlikely that Moscow would have lightly approved the casual recruitment of an apparent sympathiser to execute such an important security-sensitive assignment. Was this what she, and her bosses, sincerely believed at the time? Or was it simply a careless recollection in tranquillity, the absurdity of which was not recognised by her or her censors?  Whatever the explanation, the statement appears to cast further doubt on the accuracy of her overall testimony.

And what was Mrs Laski thinking? It would appear that Sonia had been carefully installed at Avenue Cottage. While Neville Laski was reputedly a conservative and respectable non-Zionist, his wife, Seraphina (known as ‘Sissie’), was the daughter of Moses Gaster, the prominent Zionist academic. “Mrs Laski had a social conscience and worked for various welfare organizations”, wrote Sonia. Her brother was the notorious lawyer, Jack Gaster, who married Isaiah Berlin’s close communist friend, Maire Lynd, called for revolution in the same manner as did Neville’s brother, Harold, and remained a staunch communist until his death in 2007. Moreover, Chapman Pincher interviewed the Laskis’ second daughter, Pamela, shortly before she died in 2008, and claimed that she told him that Sonia ‘insinuated herself into the company of Sissie’. Moreover, ‘Pamela disliked Sonia and became suspicious when she strung up an aerial from the cottage to a shed in the Laskis’ garden.’ She was twenty-two years old at the time: did she articulate her suspicions to anyone? Pincher apparently did not ask her.

And is it not strange that Neville Laski would not ask any questions about the suspicious-looking aerial, especially if he knew the background of his lodgers? Is it possible that he was taken into the confidences of the authorities? In the 1930s, he was providing covert intelligence to the Colonial Office on Zionist activity, so he may have had contacts in government. Certainly Harold Laski would have been well acquainted with the Kuczynski clan, but Neville’s political position was reportedly less sympathetic to their extremist views. According to the biographers of Harold Laski, Neville, in considering the arrival of émigrés from Nazi Germany, was too concerned about communist contamination of the Jewish Agency. Yet the National Archives (KV 6/41) show that Neville and Sissie were living next to the Kuczynskis in London by August, 1943, perhaps an unusual relocation given Neville’s opinions. Maybe there was some closer affinity between the two families. Whether it anteceded the arrival of the Beurtons is not clear. Perhaps Neville was acting deceptively; possibly he simply changed his opinions.

Yet one more intriguing fact comes to light: Alexander Foote’s files at Kew (KV2-1611-3) inform us that the Laskis’ son, Philip, was in Lausanne, Switzerland in April 1941, staying with the Countess de Chelmisnka, and had at that time sent a letter to his mother, at 302 Woodstock Road, Oxford, that was intercepted by the authorities. The file states: “Disjointed letter, written by apparently very unbalanced young man after the finish of an ecstatic love affair with someone of higher social standing he does not wish to mention. . . . He refers to his not being able to come to England.” Perhaps it was in code. Laski also referred to the fact that a Polish diplomatic courier would be bringing a letter by hand for his father. Chapman Pincher tells us that Sonia’s son Michael Hamburger ‘recalled playing with the young Laski boys, Philip, who was about the same age, and John  . . .’, but this clearly cannot be right. Anthony Blond writes (in Jew Made in England) that Philip, a homosexual, married a Bourbon princess in Barcelona during the war. Michael Hamburger was born in 1931, Philip Laski in 1918. What games was Hamburger playing? And why did the authorities believe that this report had a place in Foote’s file? As I show later, Lausanne was where Beurton was living in 1941: the fact seems too coincidental to be ignored.

In any case, if Sonia was concerned about the attentions of the much feared organs of MI5 and Special Branch, she did not have to wait long. Hugh Shillito had been an officer in B Division (B 10.e) when Sonia established herself in Oxford in early 1941, and had in March wisely recorded the conventional opinion that ‘an eye should be kept on her’. After the new Director-General, David Petrie, reorganized MI5 in the summer of 1941, Shillito was moved to the new F Division, and, as F2.b, was responsible for covering possible espionage carried out by the Comintern (F2b) and communist refugees (F2c). As will be shown later, in 1942 he was massively consumed with tracking another communist ring, but was reawakened to the possible threat from Sonia when her husband Len arrived in the country on July 29. Noting the discrepancies in Beurton’s account after his disembarkation, on September 15 Shillito initiated an interception of all correspondence, effective September 19, since the Beurtons had apparently by then moved to Avenue Cottage. A report dated October 10 shows that the Laskis were included in this sweep. Beurton was interviewed by Vesey (B4a) on September 18, where Beurton apparently made ‘a good impression’. Vesey had previously pointed out the discrepancies in Beurton’s account, and questioned the issuance of his passport, but had been fobbed off by a feeble excuse by the Passport Office in Geneva.

But then matters take an interesting twist. On November 30, Shillito made a request to the GPO about a possible telephone check at 134 Oxford Road, Kidlington, stating that Beurton had gone to live there, also asked for interception of post and telegrams, and provided as his justification that ‘this man has recently returned from Switzerland where he is thought to have been in touch with agents of a foreign power’. On December 19, he contacted Major Ryde, of Special Branch in Reading (with whom he had communicated about Sonia back in March of 1941), asking for the Police to make discreet inquiries about Beurton ‘as he may have been engaged in espionage on behalf of the U.S.S.R. against Germany from Switzerland’, his membership of the International Brigades adding credence to this hypothesis. Yet, if, as Sonia reported, ‘the owners of our bungalow gave us notice as they required it for their own use’, why and how would Len return to Kidlington for the winter?

This request might be unexceptional if its purpose had been solely to capture mail from abroad from correspondents who might not have been informed of the Beurtons’ movements. But the memo on file is very explicit: it states that Beurton has gone to live in Kidlington. Moreover, there are other memoranda, as late as August 1943, that refer to Len’s other place of residency. Shillito wrote to Mr Denniston in E5 (Aliens Control) of MI5 on August 16, asking whether he knew anything about the Kuczynskis, who then lived next door to the Neville Laskis in London, stating that Beurton currently lived at 134, Oxford Road, Kidlington. A further request from Shillito, to update the GPO on the status of the Home Office Warrant, informed Colonel Allen that Beurton moved that month from Kidlington to Avenue Cottage. Was this simply a case of marital discord, after the stress of being separated? Apparently not, as their son Peter was born on September 8, 1943. Maybe it was an attempt to make them look estranged, and to confuse their watchers, or perhaps the feint was required because the relationship between Sonia and Len had to be concealed from the Laskis. It is another anomaly in Sonia’s highly unreliable chronicle.

Yet, after Beurton had joined the RAF Station in Cardington on November 18, another HOW request by Shillito, dated December 13, 1943,  cancelled the current operation for Avenue Cottage, and required the reimplementation of the warrant for Oxford Road, Kidlington, since ‘it is desired to cover both his home and service address’. This cannot simply be an administrative error. One possible explanation is that Sonia’s residencies were all arranged by the authorities, and that Beurton was ‘encouraged’  to stay in Kidlington after his arrival in order to keep the attention off Sonia. But whom were they trying to mislead? And why would Beurton need to maintain two addresses, and move between them? Sonia carefully reminded her readers that she was still living at Avenue Road in 1943, but curiously stated that in May 1945 the owner [sic] ‘wanted her home back’.  (She reported that Mrs Laski organised the street party to celebrate peace  ̶  and even included a photograph [see below]. But is this another deception? It is problematic, given the evidence that the Laskis were by then living in London. ) Moreover, the Beurtons were renting the coach-house, not occupying the main premises. And why did she refer to ‘the owner’ rather than to ‘Mrs Laski’, or even ‘the Laskis’? Perhaps it was a simply a mistake in translation: the German reads: “Im Mai 1945 wollte die Besitzerin nach ‘Avenue Cottage’ zurückkehren”, which would appear better as “In May 1945 the occupant wanted to return to ‘Avenue Cottage’.” Was Sonia providing an alibi for Mrs Laski? It is all very strange.

Neville, Sissie & Marghanita Laski in 1916

Who can spot Mrs Laski? She is presumably at the centre of things. Or Sonia – with her three children?

Sonia and her children in 1945

The conundrum does return the spotlight to Chapman Pincher’s allegations. In Treachery, he suggested that the claim that the owners of the Kidlington bungalow wished to return there was ‘another part of her legend’, as Sonia needed to reside closer to Oxford railway station in order for her to meet Klaus Fuchs and deliver his documents to London. According to Pincher, living in Oxford allowed her to service both Fuchs and Roger Hollis, Pincher’s bête noire. But Pincher (like Sonia herself) never mentions that Beurton maintained the place in Kidlington, or at whose expense. Was Kidlington an area for secret meetings, and was Beurton acting as a courier for an unidentified third party, perhaps? Or perhaps he operated a radio there, and the device at Summertown was a ruse to distract the authorities? Professor Glees (in a private message) has supported the notion that this could have been the masterstroke of Sonia’s practice of deception – to display her wireless equipment openly, and then not exploit it, so that it would completely disarm any agency that was surveilling her, all the while the genuine transmissions taking place at the second residence.  But why does Shillito make no observation on this rather bizarre living arrangement? It is the lack of commentary that is as intriguing as the dual residency itself.

Though perhaps one should not abandon the notion of administrative confusion too quickly. As late as April 1946, J. H. Marriott, now F2.c, wrote to Kim Philby in SIS, asking whether he knew of the whereabouts of Sonia’s first husband, Rudolf Hamburger, giving an address in Lausanne, and commenting somewhat enigmatically that Sonia (in February 1941) ‘stated that to the best of her knowledge Leon Beurton was still residing there’. On May 1, a letter under Philby’s name responded that SIS’s agent in Switzerland was making enquiries in order ‘to find out whether Leon Charles Beurton is still living at No 129’. Marriott then called Philby on the telephone to let him know that ‘the man is no longer in Switzerland, and when last heard of in November of last year was . . .  in the Coldstream Guards’. Did Shillito not pass on intelligence to his successors? Were MI5 and SIS really that disorganised? It is difficult to pin down Shillito’s career at this point: he was F2b/c in December 1943, and appeared to be following Green and his associates through 1944. We owe it to West’s and Tsarev’s Crown Jewels (thanks to a leak from Anthony Blunt) to gain the information that Shillito left MI5 in October 1945, and was replaced by an officer named Spencer. In December 1944, Liddell reported that Hollis considered Shillito ‘lazy’, but that unworthy description does not match the officer’s dedication and energy as shown in the events of 1942. It is much more probable that he simply became demoralised, left in disgust, and may not have executed a smooth handover. After all, he might have asked himself, why had he been recruited to hunt down communist spies if the sister intelligence service was importing them behind his back? In any case, Spencer did not appear to last long.

Prompted by Shillito’s recommendations to Major Ryde back in 1942, however, the Oxford City Police Department moved into action. A report written by Detective-Inspector Rolfe to the Chief Constable, Charles R. Fox, was forwarded by Fox to Major Phipps in Reading on January 21, 1943. It referred to a letter received from Major Phipps a month beforehand, and described a visit made to the Beurtons’ residence. Rolfe did not actually meet the Beurtons, it appears, but he did speak to Mrs Laski, who claimed not to know much about the couple, although she was able to impart some details about Mrs Beurton’s relatives. It seems that Mrs Laski told Rolfe about the wireless set, since the report reflects some descriptive aspects that Rolfe could not have ascertained otherwise: ‘They have rather a [large? – that corner of the page has been torn off] wireless set and recently had a special pole erected for use for the aerial’. This would imply that Mrs Laski was either unaware of the law, believed that the set was used only for reception, or thought that the Beurtons’ operations had been approved. Yet if she knew it was ‘large’, she must have seen it. And why was the Detective-Inspector’s interest not piqued enough to demand an inspection of it, given the suspicions that Shillito had voiced?

Major Phipps’s letter to Shillito of January 24 confirmed the epithet ‘large’ for posterity, and he specifically drew attention to its existence, something ‘you may think  . . . is worthy of further inquiry’. Yet nothing happened. Or if it did, there is no record of it. The next communication from Shillito is dated April 21, when he followed up with Phipps on the paragraph in Rolfe’s report that described Beurton’s imminent call-up for the R.A.F.  On July 5, he wrote to John Curry in SIS, in response to the latter’s letters concerning Sonia’s first husband, Rudolph [sic] Hamburger, and made an astonishing statement that served to diminish suspicions about the Beurtons. “Since their return to this country the BEURTONS have been living together at Oxford in a house for which they have been paying 3 ½ guineas per week. It has not been possible to find out very much about their activities since they live very quietly, but what information there is does not arouse suspicion.” So what about the two residences? And the large wireless set? Moreover, by now Sonia had been meeting Fuchs regularly. Was she not being watched? Shillito’s conclusion represents an astonishing lack of imagination and resolve: it is almost as if he had been ordered to stop his investigations.

A highly plausible conclusion would be that Sonia expected her wireless set to be discovered; she was not concerned about it; she even welcomed it. For it was a distraction, a decoy. She knew that she would be watched, and the best way of diverting attention was to display the bogus equipment in plain view, while the real transmitter still lay in the premises in Kidlington, where Len could operate it.  #  Her comment about expecting to be discovered can now be interpreted as an accurate observation, with the dubious story about the eager fitter at the car plant an alibi for her alternative residence. As for the authorities, if SIS really had been planning to eavesdrop on her transmissions, the discovery of a wireless set would have been the last thing they wanted, for the law would have required Sonia to be fined and forced to desist, with the equipment confiscated. Better, no doubt, to pretend they never heard about it. But if Sonia did use the set in Summertown, she would no doubt merely have sent anodyne unencrypted messages about the great British proletariat cheering on their gallant Soviet allies, and calling for the opening of the second front. The RSS and GC&CS would have learned nothing at all.

# Note: Nigel West has written to me the following: “I have two explanations for SONIA’s traffic. Firstly, it was probably very low power, and was only intended to communicate with the embassy in London, and not Russia. Secondly, the Abwehr taught GARBO how to emulate authentic British Army radio traffic. These signals were ignored by RSS. It may be that the GRU adopted the same tactics.”

Shillito’s Project

Hugh Shillito’s inaction must be interpreted in the context of another project that had absorbed him in 1942, the case of Oliver Green. Oliver Green, like Beurton and Foote, had been a member of the International Brigades in Spain, and MI5 had been tracking him since 1937. Much of the information about Green’s career comes from Shillito’s report, written in July 1942, when he was making a case for Green’s prosecution [see TNA: KV 2/2203(2)]. Maxwell Knight’s M/9 team reported that Green had been recruited by the Comintern while in Spain. He returned to Britain in May 1938, but not much is recorded after that until a conversation at the bugged CPHQ in King Street was captured in January 1940. An exercise by the CPGB of recruiting CP members in the services, and collecting information from them, came to light. Green came to  MI5’s attention because R. W. Robson, who was on the Control Commission of the Communist Party, had been heard to ask a Bert Williams whether he knew of Oliver Green’s whereabouts. Williams responded in the negative, but Robson, implying a high degree of secrecy, then asked Williams to try to ascertain where Green was living.

For some reason, the trail went dark after this. Green did not appear again until he was arrested in May 1942 for possessing forged petrol coupons, and a Special Branch search discovered incriminating materials (including War Office Weekly Intelligence Summaries) at his house. He was imprisoned for fifteen months, and when Shillito was informed of the find by Special Branch, he took an interest in the case, and in July was expressing to his colleagues around MI5 that Green should be prosecuted for espionage. Shillito sought advice from the legal department of MI5. Yet he received some objections, some hinting at deeper investigations underway at the time. The solicitor Hale of SL(A)2 suggested on July 7 (incidentally the day before the Swiss consulate issued Len Beurton with his false passport) that such a move might disrupt Shillito’s work. “His prosecution would on the other hand inevitably disturb the ground on which your present enquiries, designed to round up all these miscreants, are proceeding and this I would take to be the decisive consideration.” One can sense an implicit fear that the British public might be confused if it should turn out that the communists in the UK were not wholly supportive of the British war effort. “The foregoing opinion is of course based on the assumption that H.M.G. have not at the present time any sufficient reason for wanting to bring home to the public mind the fact that our alliance with the U.S.S.R. has not made the C.P.G.B. a strictly loyal and correct British political party,” added Hale. Certainly the stresses of dealing with the Soviet Union, as a difficult ally, were intensely felt at that time. In September, 1942, the controversial Anglo-Russian agreement on the exchange of scientific information was signed, and pressure was exerted by Moscow on the opening up the second front. There were certainly voices in government (such as that of Gladwyn Jebb, at that time promoting post-war cooperation with the Soviets) who did not want to rock the boat.

A further hint from Roger Fulford (standing in for Roger Hollis, away on sick leave) two days later identified a group that could be the ‘miscreants’ referred to by Hale: “As the Green case stands there is no evidence to link him with the C.P.G.B. or the Robson organisation.” This is a provocative note, as the ‘Robson organisation’ has never been identified, either in the archives, or any publication. As West and Tsarev wrote in 1998 in The Crown Jewels, listing documents leaked by Anthony Blunt of MI5 to his Soviet masters in April 1943:  “ . . . MI5 reports on CPGB members and a survey conducted by Millicent Bagot of F2 (b) about the cultivation of the members of a GRU ring known as the Robson-Gibbons group (about which nothing has ever been published); and an investigation of another low-level GRU case, that of a man named Green, conducted by Hugh Shillito which revealed MI5’s methodology, including the use of bugging equipment that had exposed six of Green’s fellow conspirators.” Petrie agreed with Fulford a few days later: he did not want to disturb ‘the much more serious matter of the Robson inquiry’, an opinion with which the Home Office’s Sir Alexander Maxwell (whose secretary was the spy Jenifer Hart) agreed.

So where did Gibbons come from? Boris Volodarsky added a little more detail in 2015, in his Stalin’s Agent. Gibbons was Danny Gibbons, also an officer of the British Battalion of the International Brigades. Volodarsky simply states that ‘MI5 later tried to cultivate members of the “Robson-Gibbons” GRU spy ring’. Yet, if that were so, it might suggest that MI5 were trying to use the same tactics with communist agents that they had successfully deployed with Nazi spies – turn them, and play them back with disinformation. (Volodarsky appears to be the only historian making this claim.) That would, however, have been a questionable strategy at a time when SIS and GC&CS were surreptitiously trying to provide the Soviets with accurate intelligence derived from the Enigma decrypts. Moreover, Fulford was wrong in assessing that there was no evidence to link Green with Robson and the CPGB. The bugs exploited in 1940 were proof enough – although such evidence could never be presented in a court of law.

Meanwhile, Shillito persevered. He succeeded in arranging an interview with Green in prison, which took place early in August. (The published version of Liddell’s Diaries provides a good summary, in his entry dated August 11, 1942.)  The outcome was that Shillito was able to extract a confession from Green, who admitted that he had been recruited in Spain, and had built up a team of agents. He said he had forged the coupons (he was a printer by trade) so that he would have enough petrol to visit the members of his cell. One of the important facts he impressed upon Shillito was that the Communist party itself did not engage in espionage work: he, Green, had been told to break with the Party on his return from Spain (an instruction he carelessly ignored). He also told Shillito that half-a-dozen other members of the British Battalion had been recruited by the Russians at the same time. Perhaps the most dramatic part of Green’s revelations – as far as they would have relevance to the future incident of Sonia’s radio  ̶  was the information he offered about the radio communications of his cell of spies (see below), and the fact that he knew that the Soviets had an agent in MI5.

During August and September, Shillito dug around some more. He contacted Petrie directly, as Fulford was away. At some stage, the FBI was informed, and asked for more information. Shillito contacted Kimball of SIS about Soviet Intelligence’s recruitment techniques for members of the International Brigades. He reviewed the Krivitsky files. He sent messages to the Regional Security Liaison Officers (RSLOs), asking for information on the identified suspects in Green’s organisation. The record then goes quiet for a while, the next major entry indicating that Shillito has started to have doubts: perhaps Green was being boastful about his network? On November 11, however, he sprang back, asking Anthony Blunt (B1B) to have Green followed. But then he became more excited about the radio communications. On November 21, he sent another letter to the RSLOs, citing the fact that Green had revealed that one of his agents had admitted to a stranger in a bar that he had been doing work for the USSR, and was using a wireless transmitter to get information out of the country. Shillito stressed the urgency of being able to identify the place and time this remark was made, and by whom. He also made the following very telling observation: “The facts are that I have been engaged for some months in investigating a proved case of Soviet espionage involving a number of people, some in high positions. I need hardly say that the matter is one of the utmost delicacy, particularly as some of the persons implicated are in Government employment and still unidentified.”

It appears that Geoffrey Wethered, a lawyer who was an MI5 officer, and at that time the Birmingham RSLO, helped Shillito formulate his inquiry. It was his opinion that the police did not need to know the full facts, and that the other RSLOs should therefore make very discrete inquiries of their local police forces. Wethered had apparently also been closely involved with the interrogation of Green, as he provided original notes that indicate that there were two or three transmitters involved. In addition, he recommended that Shillito contact the Radio Security Service (RSS) to trace any transmissions that may have occurred.  Yet there is no evidence that Shillito followed up with the RSS. The next reported items are Shillito’s noting (on November 28) that Green is about to be discharged from Brixton prison, and the very next day voicing, for the first time, his suspicions about Sonia to Hollis and Liddell. He asked the police to make discrete inquiries about Len Beurton, and stated that he thought the Kuczynskis were spies. On December 2, he delivered a comprehensive report on Green, one endorsed by Petrie a couple of days later: Petrie even wanted to discuss the report with Hollis (who had returned from sick leave  and replaced Curry as head of F Division on October 7) and with its author. In the first half of January 1943, we can read further evidence that Shillito’s inquiries into Green were advancing. On January 23, the Oxford police report the discovery of the Beurtons’ wireless-set. And the record then goes silent.

Several aspects of the events of 1942 are very provocative. The first is the almost incontrovertible proof that Blunt would have known about the details of the Green investigation, and would thus have forwarded them to his masters, with the inevitable outcome that agents’ behavior would have been adjusted. Sonia, in particular, would have executed a diversionary plan. The second is the reference to Shillito’s investigation into people ‘in high positions’. It is very unlikely – despite references by Petrie and others – that such a group would have been part of a cell managed by an officer of the CPGB (the ‘Robson Group’), and these suspects thus remain a mystery. The third aspect is the similarity in the occurrences of clandestine radio operations within the Green cell and the sudden discovery of the Beurton equipment, and the lack of any appropriate action taken to follow up. The fourth is the fact that the only mention of radio-detection finding comes from Green himself, apart from Wethered’s recommendation about RSS. Extraordinarily, Shillito either ignores, or is unaware of, the function: his bosses appear to share such ignorance. The fifth is the timing: that, as soon as the Green case reaches a peak, with Petrie’s interest rising, the discovery of the Beurton radio surprisingly appears to cause a complete shutdown of investigatory work against suspected communist spies.

From Liddell’s diaries, one can conclude that Petrie was seriously concerned about the Communist threat, but his enthusiasm for heading MI5 starts to dissipate at this time.  Liddell would, as early as summer 1943, report that Duff Cooper, who was chairman of the RSS Committee (and also Chairman of the Security Executive, which oversaw all the intelligence services), doubted whether Petrie would ‘last the course’, as if something about intelligence operations had severely shocked the Director-General. It is true that he was caught in a squeeze at this time, with pressures from SIS to absorb his counter-espionage functions, and also from the Cabinet Secretary (Edmund Bridges) and the Metropolitan Police, who were urging that the Police should reassume responsibilities for counter-subversion. But perhaps he was also asking himself the question:  if a domestic intelligence organisation was inhibited in prosecuting dangerous communist spies, why did it exist? (In fact Petrie retired in 1946: the authorised history of MI5 is bland and uninformative about the last years of his incumbency.) And, of course, all this synchronicity does not come to light until Shillito’s involvement with the two cases is overlaid in a single chronology. It was his recognition of the shared membership of the International Brigades on the part of Green and Beurton that excited his interest. And, though he was not aware of it at the time, there was an important pattern of similar telegraphic activity between the Beurtons and the Green network.

Green’s Network

The interrogation of Green in August 1942 revealed a host of fascinating information about wireless transmissions. The National Archives file at KV 2/2204 (2) provides all the details.

Green managed several wireless operators. One constructed his set himself: this was in fact not a tough challenge, as all the materials were available on the Black Market in Fetter Lane in London. Batteries were preferably used, so that RDF [radio detection-finding] could not detect a set’s location when the mains were turned off. (It appears that the operators suspected that the now well-publicised techniques that the Gestapo used against the Red Orchestra were being employed by the British authorities.) “Transmissions were made about once a fortnight late at night or early in the morning when very few wireless owners would be listening in.”  Green disclosed that the set was located close to an airfield, so that the transmissions might be taken for official military communications.

Green referred to one of his agents as ‘the nervous operator’, whose set possessed dimensions of 12” by 6” by 4”. It was kept in a garden, concealed in a hollowed-out post. High speed morse was used – recorded on a slip of paper rather on the lines of a pianola roll, then sent out automatically at high speed. The operator, who lived in Northwood, Middlesex (surely not accidentally, near Northolt Airport), was aware of RDF vans, which suggests that the GPO was attempting to perform the task allotted to it, or at least making its presence felt. The extra apparatus necessary for high-speed morse was likewise purchased in London after the outbreak of the war. An Appendix in this file (see below) indicates that the device used to store messages was probably a ‘punch perforator’, which had become obsolete ten years before the war. Not all transmissions were made at high-speed, as one operator could detect the real-time uncertainty of his Russian counterpart in dealing with English letters.

More insights were recorded. Green gave hints about an infrastructure of support that helped operators in need. Thus the ‘nervous’ operator was equipped with a co-resident ‘aunt’ and ‘uncle’ to conceal the fact that he would not have been able to afford the semi-detached house from which he transmitted. Even more astonishing is the fact that, when he became alarmed after hearing a conversation in a public bar, where someone admitted to ‘working for the U.S.S.R’, he requested a change of residence, and ‘a new detached house in a cul-de-sac was found for him’. Who these resources were, or how they operated, is never explained. Either MI5 was distinctly incurious, or it simply failed to register its follow-up in the archives. Yet the hints of such an organisation, and its apparent pervasiveness, are quite shocking for our understanding of Soviet subversion.

Green’s radio operators appear to have all been International Brigaders, some of whom had been trained in Moscow. They were probably instructed by William Morrison, who between May 1935 and October 1937 had operated the illicit radio in Wimbledon that maintained almost daily contact with the Comintern in Moscow (the MASK project).  Morrison’s file at the National Archives (KV/2-606) tells that he had been in Moscow for almost two and a half years before that: when interrogated by MI5 in 1939, some time after he deserted from the International Brigades, he offered the names of some of the operators he had trained, such as Sydney Fink and George Ives. He may have held back on the identities of those he knew to be in Green’s network. Indeed some of Green’s agents were also ex-fighters in Spain, such as Lon Elliott and Joe Garber. In January 1943, Shillito was on the heels of the operator who lived in Northwood, ‘a clever radio technician with a Canadian passport’ who constructed his own set. He was the one who had been afraid of the RDF vans, the approach of which turned out to be false. Green’s own radio operator was Stanley Rayner, who died in February 1947. A note indicates his file was destroyed. All this came out in 1952, when a re-investigation of the Green case was launched after the prosecution of Fuchs and the escape of Sonia.

The relevance of Green’s testimony to the Beurtons’ case is crisp. The availability of technology for amateur building of wireless-sets matches what Sonia describes: the method of concealing the set is also identical to Sonia’s. The pattern of using stored capabilities for burst-mode transmission is also consistent with Sonia’s story. Two facts stand out, however. One is the availability of the support network. If an underground system of providing ‘safe houses’ was in place, it was probably used by Moscow Centre to provide accommodation for the Beurtons – including the bungalow in Kidlington and the coach-house belonging to the Laskis. Perhaps Arthur Salter, MP, the owner of Sonia’s later residence ‘The Firs’, was a member of the same network.  And the fact that Green mentioned the advantages of operating a transmitter close to an airfield explains why the Kidlington address – so near to Oxford Airport – was maintained despite Sonia’s assertions to the contrary. Shillito’s hunches were correct.

One of several Appendices to Shillito’s report likewise discloses more than appears on the surface. Several excerpts from an untitled and unsigned Appendix B, compiled by an ‘expert’ invited to comment, are worth citing verbatim:

1.  “The punched slip would almost certainly be prepared by means of a punch perforator of which there must be thousands in junk stores all over the country. It is an instrument which became obsolete at least ten years before the war, being replaced by instruments like typewriters, mostly made by the firm of Creeds, which punched up the slip (a long paper tape) as the operator typed the message.”
2.  “The radio transmitter described seems rather small and under powered for use with high speed transmission, but it would not be wise to attach too much weight to this comment, as it really depends on the valves employed. The use of batteries instead of power from the mains for the transmitter is quite sound as the method of detection by cutting off power street by street had been used in many countries and has been suggested, but not I think actually used, in this country. It seems curious to me that the radio transmitter itself should be carefully hidden in a hollow post in the garden if the perforator and automatic sending gear are left in the house – perhaps his garden was unusually well equipped with hollow posts.”
3.  “There would be no method of identifying the operator’s touch when automatic transmission was being employed, but it is almost certain that contact would first be established by an exchange of signals sent by hand and there would be many occasions when an exchange of operating instructions would have to be made by hand. Equally I should have expected the incoming traffic to be sent by hand, and read by ear as to avoid having to equip the agent here with recording apparatus. All the same quite small and simple recording apparatus would be suitable.
4.  “I am inclined to think that when he says that he placed his transmitter near an air force wireless station, he is referring to the frequency rather than the locality. Working close to the frequency of a regular short wave transmitter would tend to baffle interception, but it would also make the task of the station intended to receive the message more difficult.”
5.  “I think it possible that his description of the transmitting station is really a composite picture of several; and for instance that the nervous operator with the small transmitter was not in fact using the automatic sender.”
6. “The fact that the cypher messages from Moscow contained English letters not occurring in the Russian alphabet suggests, though it does not prove, that the messages were not in a code but in a cypher; i.e. that the original text in English was encyphered by some mathematical rearrangement of the letters and not by selecting code groups corresponding to the English words from a prearranged codebook. In any case the cypher is almost always used by agents because they are unwilling to have incriminating code books in their possession.”
7. “The method of using hollow trees, etc., as post boxes for the passing of information from one agent to another without making contact is well known, and the B.3.c files have information on the marking of posters.”

The overwhelming conclusions from evidence such as this is that a) the ‘expert’ was perhaps not quite as authoritative and knowledgeable as he should have been; b) that MI5’s interest in, and familiarity with, such matters were surely lamentable, and c) that the Soviet agents were well-prepared to avoid radio-detection mechanisms. Why was the expert not educated on the practices of radio-detection finding, and the processes by which the authorities located illicit transmissions? (One might also wonder why the Abwehr, or indeed the Soviet Union’s Red Orchestra, did not use proven store-and-forward capabilities, but that is a topic for another discussion.) And why did this expert misread and dismiss so quickly the strategy of placing transmitters close to airports? If, as he suggested, it was a matter of baffling interception, he might have been implying that British RDF was so precise that it did not require selective power cut-off, but by indicating that the receiving station’s ability to pick up the messages correctly might be impaired by the use of proximal wavelengths, he greatly undermined his argument. Yet the implications for MI5 are even more alarming. Why had the Security Service not been aware of a technology that had been obsolete for a decade, and why had it not pressed for a more innovative approach to countering such techniques? Indeed, MI5 was taken by surprise.

After reading Shillito’s report, Guy Liddell, the head of counter-espionage in MI5 (B Division) – no longer directly responsible for handling Communist subversion, but well experienced with it, and conscious that the threat would return –  made some disturbing comments, recorded in the Green file, on December 8, 1942. “I presume that in connection with this case a study has been made of the enquiries that were made some years ago into the illicit wireless activities of the C.P.G.B. It would be interesting to know exactly when illicit wireless activities recommenced. We have certainly had one case of a Russian station in this country which was coming up fairly regularly on a call-sign. The matter was taken up by A.D.B.3. [presumably Assistant-Director, B3, Dick White] The Russians were I think approached but denied all knowledge. This new development of high speed morse may raise serious problems for R.S.S. If it is possible to pin down time and dates when transmissions have taken place and to get details about frequencies it would be of the greatest value but A.D.B.3 would be better able to say exactly what was required.” What ‘Russian station’ was he referring to? And why had the authorities not been able to detect Green’s operators? The history behind Liddell’s assertion, and its implications, are covered in the next sections.

Wireless Conventions

Ever since wireless technology had been introduced in the beginning of the twentieth century, it had been regarded by governments as both an opportunity and a threat. The conventional means of transmitting diplomatic traffic, the cable, was predictable, tangible, and constrained. Security was addressed by encryption techniques: traffic was routinely copied and inspected by the authorities, as the incidents of the Zimmermann Telegram (in 1917, when the Germans issued a cable encouraging Mexico to take up arms against the USA), and the Arcos Affair (in 1927, when the British government disclosed that it had decoded cables transmitted by the Soviet Union’s commercial front in London) proved. The Official Secrets Act of 1920 empowered the Secretary of State, in peacetime, to issue a warrant to cable companies requiring them to hand over all cable messages: foreign-owned cable lines were routinely tapped. Ironically, it was Great Britain’s severance of vital German cables in WWI that prompted the German government to invest more in radio techniques.

The new technology, on the other hand, was intangible, mobile, and unstructured, with signals being broadcast for anyone to receive, unlike the point-to-point topologies of cable. Thus pressure quickly arose to regulate such activity, partly because of the chaos that would ensue if the problem of interference on assigned wavelengths were not addressed, but also from a security standpoint, with possibly hostile elements transmitting unregulated subversive material within national boundaries. Moreover, while most of the cable operators were nationalised industries, radio technology was introduced and controlled by independent commercial businesses, which made government supervision more difficult. As for the increased concerns for security during wartime, ever since the St. Petersburg Conference of 1875, it had been acknowledged that governments should have the right to restrict the transmission of telegrams that appeared to put the security of the state in peril. Yet that covenant was oddly phrased to refer to private, as opposed to diplomatic, transmissions. Furthermore, how could any authority detect whether a transmission was a threat unless it were able to decipher the underlying message?

Radio imposed new strains, because, instead of a government or security service routinely inspecting cables routed through one or two agencies, transmissions could come from anywhere, and would require a hefty investment in interception capabilities to be captured. While the major international concern was still the allocation of wavelengths, and the prevention of interference, the problem of sensitive information being concealed in non-transparent codes and ciphers (or a mixture of the two) carried over from cable to radiotelegraphy. Lengthy discussions over the new challenges proceeded in the 1920s, but were complicated by the fact that the USA had not been party to the agreements. Not until the Madrid Conference of 1932 was an attempt to unify the cable and radiotelegraphy codes, and to address the outstanding problems, made. The International Telecommunications Union was then formed.

The language of the regulations that arose from Madrid was precise in some areas, but loose or non-existent in others. Agreements on political matters were elusive: the Soviet Union was now a stumbling-block, refusing to have radiotelegraphic arrangements included in the general treaty. Such matters were complicated by the fact that the USA, which still allowed transmission of cables via independent companies, had not yet recognised the Soviet Union. Madrid’s emphasis on security was still very much on the avoidance of interference, although the agreement did include a clause that required all transmitting stations to be licensed by their national states. As Francis Lyall writes in his history of international communications: “In particular radio broadcasting within Europe remained insoluble. Accordingly provision was made for these problems to be dealt with by agreement within Europe provided that services authorised by other administrations elsewhere were not caused by interference.” No workable enforcement mechanisms on frequencies was defined. The ball was simply kicked in to the long grass.

The danger of unauthorised use of radio transmissions (and the implied threat voiced by the Soviets in 1932) was soon perceived by the British government in the mid-1930s, in the celebrated (but little-known) case of the Comintern’s radio interactions with agents in Britain, which were detected by the authorities. This project, known as MASK, has been thoroughly covered by Nigel West. It is worth quoting some significant extracts from his book:

“GC&CS’s monitoring station at Grove Park, Camberwell, headed by Commander Kenworthy, first began intercepting Wheeton’s signals in February 1934.”

“Through the use of direction-finding equipment located at the army intercept station at Fort Bridgewoods, outside Chatham, at the Air Ministry W/T Section at Waddington, headed by Wing-Commander Lywood, and the Royal Navy’s receiver at Flowerdown, near Winchester, GC&CS’s technicians were able to show that Moscow was also communicating with a Comintern station in Vienna using the call-sign 3PD, and others in Shanghai, Paris, Athens, 3OS and 9RP in Prague, Spain, Basle, Zurich, Copenhagen and the United States.”

“Once the address from which the illicit transmitter had been operating, 401 Durnsford Road, had been ascertained, the sole occupier was watched, and his identity established as Stephen Wheeton.”

These passages, and the fact that the messages were able to be decrypted with the help of one of the agents, show several relevant facts. One, that the Soviet Union was busily occupied in using radio technology to subvert its enemies. Two, that conventional detection-finding technology had powerful worldwide scope. Three, that a concerted effort by all three of His Majesty’s Armed Forces was required to reveal the extent of the Soviet Union’s activity, and to localise the offending transmitting station to a suburb in London. Four, that (in all probability) a radio-detection van was deployed to complete the exercise by homing in on a single house in Wimbledon. (In fact, one of the most significant MASK messages, that of May 20, 1936, alerted Moscow that it was necessary ‘to close down the station owing to Post Office enquiries in neighbourhood regarding interference’, which offers irrefutable proof that local residents were calling in the GPO when their own radio reception was being distorted.)  Certainly, the nature of this operation should have alerted MI5 to the techniques that the Soviet Union would continue to adopt. The comprehensive messages, which were exchanged between 1934 and 1937, moreover identify a host of persons with communist sympathies who would have come under MI5’s surveillance. It was, indeed, the evidence of William Morrison (see above, who took over from Wheeton when the latter fell ill) who helped the authorities identify some of the persons whose names appeared in the MASK traffic.

The use of radio communications by governments is more enigmatic. Some provisions were made in the covenants of the 1932 Agreements, but they barely touched on the complexities. For instance, Article 39 (‘Installations for National Defence’) stated: “The Contracting Governments reserve their entire liberty with regard to radioelectric installations not covered by Article 9, and especially with regard to military stations of the land, sea or air forces”, but the main provision thereafter was to ensure that full attention was paid to distress calls, and that the latter would not be interfered with by military traffic. The main focus of the convention was still on radio frequencies. It appears that rules for diplomatic traffic were set by unofficial agreements, and local edict. Thus it is a little surprising to read the following judgment of the historian Phillip Davies, in his MI6 and the Machinery of Spying: “The transfer of the Radio Section to the Foreign Office [in 1945] had also, in part, been made possible by a shift in diplomatic convention concerning the use of independent radio communications by embassies, previously banned by the Madrid Convention.”

No mention of any such ban appears in the agreements from the Madrid Convention (see http://www.itu.int/en/history/Pages/PlenipotentiaryConferences.aspx?conf=4.5) .  Indeed, proof of contrary practice before the war appears in Keith Jeffrey’s history of SIS (MI6) where he asserts that SIS stations abroad were quite capable of employing wireless equipment, so long as they received the permission of the local British minister, and that, furthermore, radio was the only effective means of communication during (for example) the Czech crisis. (One might question what ‘effective’ means in this context. German records show that telephone conversations between Prague and London were routinely tapped, not just those between Masaryk and Beneś, but also those between London and the envoy, Lord Runciman, thus aiding Hitler’s negotiations at Bad Godesberg.) Yet Davies uses the existence of such a ban to criticise Richard Gambier-Parry, the head of Section VII, the Communications Section of SIS, who, in 1947, defended the legality of the Diplomatic Wireless Service (DWS) at the Telecommunications Conference in Atlantic City. The DWS had been set up during the war as a secure radio mechanism, and had evolved from the Special Communications Units that were used for sending, among other items, the Ultra messages to British posts abroad, including embassies. Gambier-Parry claimed that diplomatic wireless ‘was a matter of diplomatic privilege and was not covered by the Madrid Convention which the conference had been convened to revise’. He recognised the sensitivity of the issue, but was merely observing that diplomatic wireless had been used ‘by a number of governments’ for some years now, and had never been challenged by any international authority.

The reason this is critical, and relevant, is the curious way that radio operations by foreign governments were allowed and managed in wartime Britain, the role the Soviet Embassy played in transmitting Sonia’s secret messages, and the method by which Britain’s interception services tried to monitor what was going on. Wartime imposed tougher restraints. Jeffrey again, writing on the SIS station in Geneva after war broke out: “There was a SIS wireless set at Geneva, but it could be used only for receiving messages as the Swiss authorities did not permit foreign missions in the country to send enciphered messages except through the Post Office.” No complete ban, but a restriction on sending out intelligence, no doubt in order to assist the country’s perceived neutrality. (It is very provocative and significant that Jeffery remarks that ‘SIS’s secure radio communications’ were being used in Europe as early as March 1941.) Thus, in principle, governments were apparently able to set their own rules for how the representatives of foreign legations could operate radio equipment, if at all. For example, the American military attaché in Cairo, Colonel Fellers, in 1942 had to send his encrypted reports on British troop movements to Washington via the Egyptian Telegraph Company. The signals were still picked up and quickly decrypted by the German interception station at Lauf, near Nuremberg, until the Americans changed the codes that autumn. Just before D-Day, the British government stipulated that all cables issued by foreign governments had to be sent en clair. Yet it could not – or would not attempt to  ̶  control wireless, and the Germans picked up communications from the Polish government-in-exile, as well as messages from Abwehr agents inserted into Britain.

The United Kingdom faced a unique challenge, as it was host to so many governments-in-exile. In fact it had approved the use of radio facilities for the Polish and Czech governments: the Czechs were generously provided with a dedicated communications facility in Woldingham, Surrey. This turned out to be two-edged sword, for, while the transmitter was used to contact loyalists in Czechoslovakia, eventually leading to the assassination of Heydrich, it was also used to communicate with the Soviet Union. Beneš and others on the Czech government-in-exile were strong allies of the communist regime, and passed on information that certainly harmed Britain’s ability to negotiate with its often dubious partner. Yet, as Bradley Smith reports, the Czechoslovak government at the same time provided Whitehall with details of Soviet operations and intentions, again showing how delicate it was trying to satisfy the varied military and security interests at the time.

Thus Britain’s preparedness to deal with illicit and dangerous radio domestic transmissions could be summed up as follows. At the outbreak of war, it had recent experiences of intensive exchanges from the combined Soviet/native communist threat, but probably too quickly and ingenuously transferred that menace to the direct Nazi enemy and its supposed agents in Britain. It knew that a hefty investment in detection capabilities, provided by the military, and complemented by GPO vans, was necessary to locate private transmitting wireless sets – the use of which was incidentally illegal. The MASK intercept shows that an educated public knew what to do when radio interference occurred, and that the illicit operators were well aware of the threat from radio-detection vans – certainly in built-up areas of London. The authorities would have concluded that the technological capabilities of Britain’s enemies were at least as advanced as its own – and in the case of the Germans, probably superior, given its lead in exploiting radiotelegraphy. It knew that a very strong decryption capability would be required to make sense of the overwhelming majority of messages intercepted. (The true art and value of ‘traffic analysis’, whereby important conclusions were derived on the basis of traffic patterns, volumes, call-signs, locations etc., other than message content, had not yet been recognised.) And it accepted that an over-aggressive approach to policing radio usage by foreign embassies in London might lead to reciprocal moves that would harm its intelligence efforts overseas.

Wartime Radio Detection

I have not yet been able to inspect the full records of the Radio Security Service at the National Archives (and nor can I find any work of history that has performed probable justice to them). My judgments on how the Radio Security Service operated in the first years of the war are thus necessarily tentative.  I refer readers to my analysis at https://coldspur.com/sonias-radio-part-ii/ for a refresher on the conclusion that no Nazi spies were operating on UK soil, and that the switch of focus to European broadcasts resulted in the transfer of responsibilities from MI8 to SIS. The impression gained from the histories is one in which very little monitoring of domestic wireless transmissions then occurred, and, with the entry of the Soviet Union on the side of the Allies in June 1941, a complete embargo on interception of Soviet messages was supposed to have taken  place. As I showed earlier, that was not true, especially with the project initiated by Denniston (ISCOT) in 1943 that again investigated Soviet diplomatic traffic, but the archives do hint at more serious efforts to deal with broadcasts from foreign missions that were made without the necessary approval of the British government.

The archive describing GC&CS’s tasking of the RSS [series HW 34] is spasmodic and sketchy. It does tell us that mobile detection units were operating out of Barnet, Bristol and Gateshead – in other words not limited to the Metropolitan Area, and that these units (known as ‘snifters and ferrets’) responded primarily to instructions issued by the Discrimination Group, which was the Section within RSS that ‘used its elaborate records to distinguish between suspicious and innocent intercepts’ (Hinsley & Simkins). A listing of the principal groups identified is given, for example Group 20 (Jugoslav diplomatic links), Group 21 (French diplomats and agents types), and Group 12 (Russian transmissions). Thus it must be that certain broadcasts were identified as ‘Russian’, either by their call signs, or by the language used in handshaking before encryption took over. The archive laconically reports that, in 1942, RSS started monitoring of Foreign Governments from the UK, ‘mainly Polish, Czech, Yugoslav, French, Russian’. These were all, of course, allies.

The archive elsewhere classifies the Group 12 as ‘Russian Clandestine’ (‘many odd circuits were tracked’), which would point unerringly to the fact that the authorities knew that Soviet agents were communicating with their masters. In other words, this was not solely unauthorised embassy traffic, which would have been categorised as ‘Soviet Diplomatic’. HW 34/23 discusses Russian transmitters in the country, going back to December 1940, but more specifically between October 1941 and December 1943. Messages’ call signs were recorded in March and April 1942. In September 1943, Russian transmissions were detected coming from Bricket Wood in Hertfordshire, and SOE was instructed to inform the Russians not to transmit from that address without permission. Brickendonbury Hall was the SOE Training Centre (originally set up by Kim Philby and Guy Burgess), and, during the short-lived period when British and Soviet Intelligence were attempting to cooperate, Soviet NKVD officers must have attended Brickendonbury and, like ET, attempted to call home.

Transmissions from the Soviet Embassy were another problem. In a way, the problem was easier for the interceptors. They knew where the embassies were located, all in the general area of the West End of London, and it would have been very easy for a detector van to roam around searching for illicit communications (as opposed to touring the countryside looking for agents). Yet even that exercise was fraught with confusion. One comment, which does incidentally cast some doubt on the accuracy of location-finding, states that a transmission believed to be emanating from Wimbledon turned out to be coming from the Soviet Embassy. The volatile Maurice Frost, who had originally joined MI5 from the GPO as an expert in these matters, wrote to Ted Maltby, who headed RSS at Hanslope Park, and reported to Gambier-Parry, on March 16, 1942, that ‘the investigation into the Rosary Gardens and Kensington affairs paid a very handsome dividend even if they have failed to result in laying a spy by the heels’. Perhaps echoing this investigation, a memorandum written in May 1943 recorded that RSS ‘found and watched’ transmissions between the Soviet Embassy and Moscow during March and April 1942, and that the indications were that they were not ‘diplomatic traffic’, with the implication that they had been decrypted.

And one side of government did not always know what the other was doing. The Air Ministry apparently had given the Russians permission to transmit, from their Embassy premises, on a circuit that had been constrained by the Foreign Office to purely diplomatic traffic. Another note indicates that Commander Denniston (recently demoted from leadership of GC&CS, and now working on the ISCOT project) was detecting illicit traffic from the Soviet Embassy on June 3, 1943 – illicit because it had not been ‘declared’. Richard Aldrich writes, while reporting the meeting then held between Maltby, Denniston, and Curry and Hollis of MI5, that ‘these messages had attracted interest because they had nothing in common with the old Comintern style of transmissions, and it was noted that they might be KGB traffic as they showed “great technical skill”. Collecting this material stretched Britain’s interceptor resources, since the traffic had lasted for eight hours in every twenty-four hour period.’

To what degree these arrangements were performed by treaty as opposed to informal agreements is not clear. During their fitful efforts to cooperate on intelligence matters, the British and Soviet governments apparently agreed to expanded radio-communications between their countries. Susan Butler writes that, some time before the Tehran Conference in late 1943, “Britain had already set up reciprocal radio stations with the U.S.S.R. in their respective capitals”. And such an assertion is dramatically underlined by Bradley Smith, who tells us that as early as June 1941, SIS established a direct wireless link with Moscow, using a highly secure one-time pad, in order to transmit, among other things, a massaged version of the latest Ultra decrypts. Even without an official approval that early in the relationship between the two allies, the Soviets would have learned what was going on, and it would have been difficult for MI5, as the domestic security agency, to override the Foreign Office’s tacit approval of such a reciprocal Soviet arrangement between London and Moscow.

Yet Britain’s policy towards its allies, in respect of the security of radio usage, appears disorganised. As Gambier-Parry started to extend his secure network for SIS, he grew increasingly more concerned about the uncontrolled propagation of radio sets than about the need to monitor the content of illicit transmissions. He wrote to Claude Dansey, on August 26, 1943 (incidentally proving that Dansey was intimately involved with the issue), about ‘the problem of clandestine wireless sets, which will seriously hamper the activities of RSS, and may result in our own agent communications being interfered with, or even compromised.’ Yet only a few months earlier, the Y Board (the joint services/intelligence committee responsible for interception policy) had approved the visit of a Soviet Navy delegation to study British radio intercept procedures, while in November 1943 a Major Till was trying to persuade Maltby of the danger of the Polish General Staff having ‘even a smell of a suggestion that we have ever thought of monitoring their traffic’. Thus a lack of strategic coherence and resolve is apparent: timidity in the face of the curiosities of an acknowledged bully, timidity in not being prepared to handle objections from an ally with little bargaining power.

One can imagine the complexities facing RSS as the volume of wireless traffic increased during the war. A primary concern must still have been the possibility of unidentified German agents broadcasting from the mainland. This was complicated by the knowledge that an unknown number of communist agents were probably transmitting as well, occasionally complemented by rogue operators like the NKVD visitors. Then there were the Poles and the Czechs, legally transmitting, alongside other allied legations and governments-in-exile exploiting confusion in the government ranks to establish their own links. There were many unauthorised sets floating around, as Gambier-Parry reported. At the same time, MI5 was controlling a number of turned Nazi agents in the XX System, who were transmitting frequently to their apparently credulous controllers overseas, and SIS was establishing secret radio links abroad in order to distribute sensitive Enigma information, as well as providing facilities for SOE to communicate with its agents in Europe. Did the known presence of the Beurtons with their own transmitter complicate matters further? It must have been extremely difficult to decide who should know what under what circumstances, and how much guidance should be given to the ‘Y’ organisation of ‘listeners’ as they tuned in to suspect frequencies amongst all this radio noise.

One significant paradox that the RSS committees must have had to face was the fact that, while RDF capabilities successfully located some illicit communist transmissions, the agents of the Double-Cross (XX) System (or the operators who stood in for them, sometimes on the air for two hours at a time) miraculously managed to evade the attentions of the vans. Agent GARBO (Juan Pujol) started broadcasting to Madrid in August 1942, as many as twenty messages a day. Stephan Talty writes that ‘monitoring stations as far away as Gibraltar picked up the suspicious traffic and reported it to the authorities’, which indicates it must have been detected by ‘listeners’ in Britain. Someone must have pointed out this loophole in the whole deception exercise at some stage: if the news leaked out that Britain had an efficient, but highly selective, location-finding service, the Nazis would have smelled a rat, the credibility of its agents in Britain would have been blown, and that aspect of the D-Day deception strategy made useless. (Is it possible that the Soviets, during the period of the Pact, shared their pre-war experiences in London with their Nazi allies?) Perhaps the RSS decided to soft-pedal the whole exercise precisely for that reason. And that explains the paucity of information about location-finding in the official histories.

The tension between the native concerns of MI5 over RSS and the more complicated agendas of SIS and the Foreign Office are never more clear than in what Liddell writes in his Diaries. As the leading MI5 officer overall responsible for the XX system, Liddell had every right to be concerned about the policies of RSS’s detection function, and to be eager to be properly informed. When Gambier-Parry is appointed to head RSS, he voices initial enthusiasm (March 5, 1941), and appears to trust the sifting of ‘suspicious traffic’ that RSS will undertake (March 16). Yet doubts set in when he reads of RSS’s documented mission (April 10), as he fears it will concentrate too much on what he calls ‘Group’ (presumably the original Group, generic German) traffic and will thus ‘neglect the possibility of illicit transmissions in this country’. Gambier-Parry attempts to diminish his concerns (May 10), and a meeting on May 20 produces a lukewarm recognition of the problem. An abortive search in June shows up Poles trying to communicate with Warsaw, and by the end of the year (December 31), Liddell expresses his frustration that the discriminators inspecting all traffic seem to be interested only in various Enigma (ISOS) transmissions. (This maybe echoes the somewhat arcane methodologies at which Hinsley and Simpkins hinted in their history.) He clearly believes that some important transmissions from communist agents are being withheld from MI5 by Gambier-Parry –  perhaps on the instructions of Claude Dansey, though Liddell does not mention his name. On January 17, 1942, Liddell records that a transmitter located in the Kensington Palace Road was actually operating from the Soviet consulate, but had been found by accident. To him, RSS is failing in its mission.

The jeremiad continues in 1942. This was the year, of course, in which Oliver Green was arrested: Liddell acknowledges that Green’s spies have been working since 1939 (August 13), and complains about lack of new technology to assist in detection (September 29). He notes on December 7, when Shillito’s investigation is in full swing, that Green ‘states that certain of his subordinates have been communicating with Moscow in high-speed Morse. He has refused to give their names or the location of their stations.’ This is important, as it is clear that Liddell now has reasonably solid proof, from the evidence that has arisen from Shillito’s interviews with Green, that a number of Soviet agents have been operating illegal wireless-sets, and he might well wonder why RSS had not been able to detect them. Remarkably, at this time Valentine Vivian, deputy director-general of SIS, who had incidentally undergone a nervous breakdown that summer, states that he wants the RSS committee (which discussed intercepts) to go into liquidation, and Liddell expostulates strongly in his diary that it might be because the committee (or presumably the members of it from MI5) had ‘in the Russian business talked out of turn’, hinting at undisclosed controversies over Soviet counter-espionage.

Yet by 1943, the matter appears to go off the boil  ̶  or else Liddell is worn down. In March, the RSS Committee is split into the Radio Security Committee and the Radio Security Intelligence Committee. Hinsley and Simkins recorded the latter’s mission as ‘[settling] interception priorities and discuss any question relating to the production and use of the ISOS material’. Despite the fact that Dick White will chair the RSIC, Liddell, a member of the higher-level RSC, is unimpressed with the new set-up: ‘should be ineffective and uninteresting’, he murmurs, on March 11, 1943. The RSS Committee consisted of Menzies, Petrie, Gambier-Parry, Vivian, and Liddell:  maybe Liddell thought it was weighted too much by SIS personnel, and focused too much on Nazi espionage. It certainly did not have any Section F (’communist subversion’) representation. And January 1943 had been the month in which Sonia’s wireless was found, so the threat of communist subversion should have been fresh in the committee’s mind.

Thus Liddell’s comments for December 8, 1942, that appeared only in the Green file (see above), are much more informative than anything he is prepared to disclose in his Diaries. He clearly is referring to the Comintern MASK operation. He knows about the Green network, and describes one station whose call-sign was coming up regularly. Therefore, he must have been told that there were Russian signals that had been traced, but presumably was not given any information about any location-searching, or was perhaps told, on the other hand, that the problem was a low-priority, and not worth pursuing. He talks explicitly about high-speed morse as a potential challenge for RSS, even though the report from the ‘expert’ would have taught him that this technology was ten years old. And then there is the outstanding paradox that shows his limited imagination: he seriously wants access to the information, in order that the miscreants may be hunted down, but also presents the truly shocking revelation that ‘the Russians were approached’, but denied all knowledge of the illicit traffic. (Was it truly Dick White who approached them?) What did MI5 expect them to say, given their experience with MASK? That, now as allies against the Nazis, they would own up and close the network down? And if Liddell vehemently disapproved of the decision to engage the Soviet Embassy, why did he not express his outrage?

It is hard to make sense of Liddell’s behavior. It appears he did not merely suspect there might be agents transmitting illicitly. He knew there were, and ranted at RSS for nor having the wherewithal to hunt them down. Of course, his concern would also have been that, if RSS was not detecting Soviet spies, it might well be overlooking hitherto unidentified Nazi radio operators as well. Nigel West’s observations about emulating British Army radio traffic should not be forgotten. But, then again, at some point Liddell must have been brought into the programme that demanded that these agents not be hunted down, but be watched and allowed to operate, and he began to dissemble in his journal entries. The interval (when apparently nothing happened at all) between Green’s meeting at CP HQ in January 1940 and his arrest in March 1942 – not because he had been detected transmitting messages, but because he had been discovered with forged petrol coupons in his possession  ̶  is simply too outrageous to be interpreted as due to a lack of interest. Was the arrest of Green perhaps an unfortunate unexpected consequence that complicated the task of surveillance? MI5 had known about Green in 1940, and about Morrison in 1939. They had always wondered why the MASK operation had been closed down in 1937, and in what form it would be resuscitated. They knew about Beurton (and presumably about his partner, Foote), and about all the International Brigades links. Yet, in spite of all Liddell’s remonstrations about RSS’s inefficiencies, when the Beurtons’ wireless transmitter was discovered in January 1943, MI5 turned off the heat.

Conclusions

While documentary evidence may never surface to confirm the hypothesis, the most likely explanation for what happened runs as follows.

Dansey’s Z Organisation successfully planted an agent (Foote) into the Soviet spy network in Switzerland, and then helped to engineer Sonia’s transfer to the UK, where SIS could extend its infiltration in, and surveillance of, communist espionage rings. Foote’s knowledge of codes gave them a leg up on decryption efforts. The Beurtons and Oliver Green and his team were all seen as part of the ex-International Brigades network, and thus treated the same. Senior Officers of MI5 had to be brought into the loop, since Sonia was operating on UK territory, and they were thus informed of the plan to let Sonia – and by implication, Green’s network – to carry on broadcasting, so long as the spies did not reveal any secrets that might have been perilous to the war effort if they reached German eyes. Keeping an eye on medium-sized fish in the hope of catching bigger creatures became the modus operandi, an excuse for not acting with resolve. All the time, of course, Anthony Blunt (who joined MI5 in the summer of 1940), was telling his bosses everything.

All such plans were disrupted when Oliver Green was suddenly discovered with the illicit petrol coupons and the stolen documents in his house. Now, dedicated lower-level officers in MI5 such as Vesey and Shillito could not be prevented from performing the task they had been chartered to do – catching communist spies, and then prosecuting them. Excuses were made as to why prosecution could not proceed with Green. When Sonia’s radio was discovered, however, the subterfuge could not be concealed any longer from officers carrying out investigations, and Shillito (in particular) was ordered to hold back. It is possible that even Petrie himself was not aware of the project, given his interest in prosecuting Green late in 1942, followed by rapid disillusionment. Shillito’s comments in the summer of 1943 on the Beurtons’ apparently placid and uncontroversial life may now be interpreted as a note to the files (a Soviet-style spravka) that would carefully conceal what was really happening. But one can understand why he (and his colleagues) might have become demoralized. He was recruited to hunt down communist spies; he successfully did so, but then was told to hold off.

MI5 was caught wrong-footed. It had failed to act firmly after the MASK experience. By 1940, its overall alertness to the Soviet threat had by then also waned, and it had been infiltrated itself by communist spies. It had reorganised in 1941, and the task of communist counter-espionage was given to a tenderfoot group. It had not developed a strong understanding of radio detection-finding techniques, and was out of date in its competence. The Soviets knew more about burst-mode operation, radio-detection vans, interference with private wireless reception, and the value of shelter by airports than MI5 did. The critical RSS unit was in 1941 moved even further from its influence. MI5 lacked political clout when competing with the needs of SIS and the Foreign Office. It ended up floundering, hoping against hope that no menacing activity was taking place on its watch, and being unprepared when it did. And its mission was severely complicated by the radio transmissions of the Nazi double-agents it was running.

The first half of 1943 was a period of high tension in Anglo-Soviet relations, with the doves (such as Eden and Jebb) pressing for greater cooperation with the Soviets, while the harder military men were starting to see through Russian duplicity. The Anglo-Russian agreement on scientific interchange was not revealed to the Americans at first: there was backlash after Roosevelt discovered it in December 1942. The JIC was becoming fed up with Soviet obstructionism (February 2), but the War Cabinet was nervous about public opinion: it decided not to publicise the links between the CPGB and Moscow. Both British and US inspection of Soviet diplomatic traffic started, in February and June 1943 respectively, when stories of the Soviet Union’s plans for post-war eastern Europe started to be picked up. In April 1943 the Germans announced the discovery of the graves at Katyn: despite Stalin’s protestations, Churchill believed that the Soviets were responsible. But Stalin had been misled over the timing of the Second Front, and the war still had to be won. A policy of keeping the dictator’s favour overrode more hawkish attitudes. In May 1943, Stalin made the symbolic (and empty) gesture of ‘abolishing the Comintern’, giving encouragement to those who saw Stalin as a ‘freedom-loving’ partner. He manipulated the Allies well.

Sonia – with the help of Blunt’s revelations, and her bosses’ guidance  ̶  had exploited this confusion, and hoodwinked both intelligence services. Her radio was found, and, in the belief of the security services that, with the help of RSS and the GPO, they had identified the sole danger, they no doubt eavesdropped on her transmissions. What little she probably communicated was listened to, and found to be harmless. That fact would be confirmed when Sonia was a few years later visited by MI5 at her home in Rollright, when officers Serpell and Skardon made a feeble attempt to interrogate her, telling her that they were sure she had not engaged in espionage on British soil. By then, she had successfully worked with Fuchs, transmitted from Kidlington, and routed his critical documents to the Soviet Embassy, which was then suitably equipped with its own radio transmission equipment. The damage had been done. In her memoir, she poked fun at the British authorities with subtle hints that superficially appeared as untruths, but which in fact pointed at a reality that has hitherto remained a secret. The Fuchs scandal almost destroyed MI5: had the public known that the intelligence services had arranged Sonia’s installation in England, and been duped by her ruses, several careers would have been prematurely terminated.

New Sources:

Roosevelt and Stalin: Portrait of a Partnership by Susan Butler

Unlikely Warriors by Richard Baxell

International Communications by Francis Lyall

Battle of Wits by Stephen Budiansky

Harold Laski: A Life on the Left by Isaac Kramnick & Barry Sheerman

Stalin’s Agent by Boris Volodarsky

The Clandestine Radio Operators by Jean-Louis Perquin

Hitler’s Spies by David Kahn

Agent Garbo by Stephan Talty

New Commonplace entries can be found here.

 

Soviet Radio Operator – Dickson Island, 1937

(The story so far: Alexander Foote, working secretly for Claude Dansey’s Z organisation, has been recruited by the Comintern to act as a radio operator in Switzerland, under the supervision of Sonia, born Ursula Kuczynski. Since Sonia’s visa is about to expire, her bosses order her to marry a British citizen, Len Beurton, a colleague of Foote’s from the International Brigades, also working for Sonia, so that she may gain British citizenship and resettle in England. Dansey hopes that Foote may thus reach a dominant position in the Swiss network. Sonia then makes plans for her voyage to England. In earlier chapters in this saga (II and VI: please refer to SoniasRadio for refreshment), I have described the circumstances of Sonia’s arranged marriage to Len Beurton, and her subsequent application for the British passport that would enable her and her two children to escape to the United Kingdom in wartime. Here I concentrate on the way that the application was handled by the British authorities, and what the implications were after Sonia took up residence in Oxfordshire.)

The most remarkable fact about Sonia’s voyage, in the winter of 1940-41, is not that she accomplished the arduous wartime journey from Switzerland across France, Spain, and Portugal, eventually to the United Kingdom, with two young children in tow. What is truly inconceivable is why Moscow Centre ever thought that the mission should have been undertaken in the first place. The circumstances should have dictated to the Soviets that trying to install, as an illicit agent in Great Britain, a German-born legal resident with Sonia’s reputation would be a pointless exercise. *  The facts were as follows: The Nazi-Soviet pact was in effect, and thus the potential sharing of intelligence between Hitler’s and Stalin’s regimes should have acted as an alarming deterrent to the sanctioning, by the officers in Britain responsible for immigration, of any unusual entry by communists. Sonia’s family (the Kuczynskis) – and especially her open rabble-rousing brother, Jürgen  ̶  were already suspected by the British authorities of being dangerous subversives, with Jürgen, the leader of the exiled German communist party, considered an especial hazard, and  accordingly interned. After the first candidate for betrothal (Foote) had suspiciously reneged on the agreement, Sonia had openly arranged a pro forma marriage in Switzerland to another former member of the International Brigades that fought illegally for the Republicans in Spain, someone known to the domestic authorities, in order to gain British citizenship. She had then applied for a UK passport, approaching the Passport Office in Berne, which was universally known as a front for the country’s Strategic Intelligence Service (SIS), sometimes known as MI6. The nanny hired by Sonia to take care of her children had then, out of pity for Sonia’s apparently ill-treated husband, or from despair at the prospect of being separated from Sonia’s daughter, reportedly ‘compromised’ [Moscow Centre’s term] Sonia by trying to alert the British consulate about Sonia’s shenanigans. Lastly, Moscow should have concluded that inserting an agent to work with a radio transmitter in a country known for its expertise in detection of alien wireless traffic would be a high-risk endeavour. It was almost as if SIS had been arranging for Sonia’s smooth transit behind the scenes. Who was bluffing whom?

[* The GRU referred to Sonia as its ‘illegal station head’ in the UK: she was in fact after 1941 a  ‘legal’ operative, even though her British passport may have been acquired via deceptive, even illicit, means.]

Chapman Pincher, in his 2005 book Treachery, gives the most comprehensive account of Sonia’s deceptions and escapades at this time, but his interpretation is flawed because he is continually at pains to show that the MI5 officer Roger Hollis was Sonia’s prime informer, and successfully concealed the whole affair. In this respect, Pincher completely ignores the connivance of senior SIS officers (and surely that of their counterparts in MI5) at Sonia’s marriage and passport applications, whereas the archive very strongly suggests that lower-level officers in MI5 were frustrated, in their attempts to keep Sonia out, by their superiors conspiring with SIS. On the other hand, Pincher claims access to letters written by Sonia, interviews with her relatives, and Russian archival material – none of which I have seen. I shall therefore have to quote him with extreme caution. In addition, I recently learned that Sonjas Rapport (her memoir), when published in English, apparently included clarifying comments not present in the original German, and I have had to wait for the arrival of the English publication to complete this research. #   The Soviet archive (what little has been released) appears to have been doctored, so a scrupulous cross-checking of testimony is constantly required.

[# The English version has some significant additions, including a somewhat rueful, yet defensive, Afterword, and a section on Sonia’s dealings with Klaus Fuchs (who was left unmentioned in the German version). I have not undertaken a detailed comparison of the texts, but some changes are startling. For example, ‘Im Sommer 1939 kam Rolf noch einmal zu uns’ (‘In the summer of 1939 Rolf visited us again’) is now rendered, with a combination of vagueness and precision, as ‘In 1939, Rolf came to see us for the last time.’ I pointed out the original chronological error, which completely misrepresents her husband’s movements, in Chapter VI: no doubt the author realised that subsequently revealed information about Rolf’s return to China would challenge her version of events. I have also just read John Green’s sympathetic portrayal of the Kuczynski clan, A Political Family, published this summer, where he confidently states that Sonia did not see Ernst (real name Johannes Patra), the father of her second child, Janina, between 1935 and 1955. That account dramatically destroys the episode of the sentimental reunion between Sonia, Rolf and Ernst in the summer of 1939 that Sonia described in Sonjas Rapport, and on which I cast serious doubts in Chapter VII of this saga.]

The Passport Application

Contrary to Sonia’s later claims that Moscow Centre did not order her (in her words ‘suggest’) to move until late autumn of 1940, the plans for England were established soon after the war started. On March 11 of that year the British Consulate in Geneva transmitted the application by Sonia [Ursula Beurton,  previously Hamburger, née Kuczynski] for a passport, based on her February 23 marriage to Beurton (who was known as ‘Fenton’ in the MI5 files), to the Passport Office in London. Sonia’s references were given as Dr. Churchill, D. M. Macrae-Taylor and Mr. Blelloch. The last individual is mentioned in Sonia’s autobiography, holding an elevated position in the International Labour Organisation (ILO), which was based in Geneva, and was dominated by leftists. Her father, Robert, had conveniently worked for the ILO after leaving Germany in 1933, before taking up a post at the London School of Economics.  Sonia had written to her parents thanking them for giving her an introduction to Blelloch and his wife, who was the daughter of a left-wing journalist Robert Dell, at the Manchester Guardian. Ten days after Geneva submitted the application, J. M. Stafford of the Passport Office in London wrote to Captain Mars of MI5, asking for records of Sonia. After another week, Captain Mars replied that MI5 had no records of ‘Ursula Beurton’ and only a possible trace of her ex-husband ‘with a communistic smell’. It appears that this was enough to satisfy Mr. Stafford. Captain Mars was clearly no sleuthhound.

Yet even details like these are disturbing. The submission by H.B. Livingston, His Majesty’s Consul in Geneva, indicates that Sonia knew no British subject in Switzerland who could vouch for her, so she ‘obtained the signature of Mademoiselle Ginsberg, Assistant Librarian at the League of Nations, who is well known for her communist sympathies’. This would appear to be ‘Marie’, credited in Sonia’s memoir with supplying her with a Honduran passport, and Len with a Bolivian one. The National Archives at Kew (KV 6/45) tell us that Ginsberg had been recruited by Jewish Intelligence in 1938. Alexander Foote later suggested that this transaction occurred as an insurance policy should Sonia’s strategy of marrying Len not work out successfully. Sonia herself provided the references of Dr. Stella Churchill (psychotherapist, Labour councillor, and supporter of the Spanish Republic), Duncan Macrae-Taylor (the husband of her sister, Barbara) and Blelloch, all resident in England.  Yet Livingston’s letter accompanying her application stated that Sonia was ‘not a British subject’, as if the marriage did not automatically give her that status, declaring: “There is reason to suspect that the main purpose of the marriage was to confer British nationality on the applicant to enable her to enter the U.K., the local Swiss authorities having refused to extend her residence permit”. Livingston goes on to confirm the divorce from Rudolf Hamburger that occurred the previous October. “A certified copy of the decree of divorce has been produced to me”. (The marriage certificate issued by the Canton of Vaud states that the divorce was not effective until December 28, 1939.)  Yet Sonia must have misrepresented the parenthood of the second of her two children, whom she wanted entered in her passport, if it were indeed to be authorised, as Livingston goes on to write that she ‘had two children by the former marriage’. He also seemed to be unaware of the perjury performed by Alexander Foote that facilitated the award of the divorce.

Sonia did indeed suggest in her 1977 memoir that in early March 1940 she had given the impression to the English consulate in Geneva that the underlying motive for her marriage had been to gain a UK passport, and reported that that official was not overjoyed to hear that news.  Yet this startling revelation is softened by a subtle change in the 1991 English translation. The original “Das englische Konsulat in Genf empfing mich unfreundlich, als ich auf Grund der Eheunterlagen einen englischen Paß beantragte” (‘The British consul in Geneva received me coldly when I applied for an English passport by virtue of my marriage documents’) is now presented as ‘Armed with our marriage certificate, I visited the British Consul in Geneva to apply for a passport; his response was distinctly cool.’  The latter formulation suggests the disdain was wholly incidental, removing any suggestion of the coolness being provoked by Sonia’s method of approach, or the evidence behind her application.  Did her bosses perhaps later suggest that this was a provocative statement that needed to be toned down? Apparently the consulate was not fooled, as Livingston’s memorandum makes very clear.

Why did she volunteer that information? And why did it not constitute an objection to the approval of her application? Were the SIS officers managing the strings beneficially for her? Did her brazen behavior indicate that she even knew that? We should recall that the Geneva consulate was one of the last solid bastions of SIS as the Nazis extended their tentacles across Europe. The authorised historian of SIS, Keith Jeffery, explained that Claude Dansey, the head of SIS’s even more clandestine Z organisation, moved to Switzerland at the outbreak of war to supplement SIS’s Passport Control Officer, assistant and wireless operator, in the hope of more effectively trying to penetrate Germany (which, it must be remembered, is what Foote and Beurton had been doing under Sonia’s guidance). Dansey in fact made his first base in Zürich, with his cover as consul, but was recalled after Menzies became Chief of SIS in November 1939. Read and Fisher add that Dansey’s goal had been to absorb the main body of Z into the SIS as its Swiss section, yet he maintained control himself of some individual agents.

Unfortunately Dansey’s second-in-command (named by Read and Fisher as one Rex Pearson) had a drinking problem, and was replaced by Frederick Vanden Heuvel in February 1940. Vanden Heuvel was promoted to consul in May, and soon after moved to Geneva. Thus there was some discontinuity in the execution of consular duties in Geneva at the time of Sonia’s passport application. Jeffery’s history also claims that the Swiss operation was hampered in its communications, with the Swiss authorities reportedly banning the use of embassy radio for sending enciphered messages. Up until the fall of France in June 1940, the diplomatic bag was used via Paris, so Sonia’s application presumably went by that route. En clair cables were used for brief and non-confidential matters, but how the two Passport Offices communicated thereafter is not clear. For a while diplomats were able to make the laborious journey with their bags through Vichy France and Spain to Portugal, and then by plane to London, but even that avenue soon disappeared.

It was two months later that Milicent Bagot became involved with Sonia’s application. Though not an officer, Bagot was a very significant figure in MI5. Christopher Andrew describes her thus: “[Jane] Sissmore’s successor as the Security Service’s most influential woman in the 1940s and 1950s was to be the redoubtable Milicent Bagot, a classics graduate from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, who joined the Service from Scotland Yard as a twenty-year-old secretary in 1931 at the same time as [Hugh] Miller and [Guy] Liddell, and is believed to be the model for John le Carré’s character Connie.” (Defence of the Realm, p 131) Andrew goes on to describe Bagot’s ‘encyclopedic knowledge which impressed even J. Edgar Hoover’. Bagot pointed out to an officer named Cazalet that MI5 certainly did have records of Ursula Kuczynski, as well as of her father, and shrewdly reminded her superiors that the marriage was probably one of convenience. A memo on file records an anonymous but strong opinion that Sonia should not be granted a passport. Some officer must have thought that there were enough subversive Kuczynskis in the country already. Thus, on May 25, Cazalet recommended to Stafford that Sonia should not be given a passport, but if it could not be refused, it should be for limited validity, and should not be usable for travel. He added that her husband, Beurton, was on the C.S.W. (Central Security War) Black List, and was believed to be in Germany. Sonia was in fact the subject of Individual Case No. 186 in the Black List, and thus subject to special surveillance.

At least MI5 was tracking the movements of suspect persons with communist affiliations, but maybe Cazalet should have shown more interest in the fact that the elusive Beurton was now in Switzerland, probably alongside Alexander Foote, who, with exactly the same profile as a communist sympathiser and International Brigade member, had been responsible for bringing Beurton to Switzerland and Germany. (Why was Foote not on the same Black List?) Would that information not normally have provoked a surge of activity in an alert and well-led counter-espionage organisation? Did MI5 and SIS not cooperate? And what was SIS thinking? If a member of the International Brigades, a known communist, had turned up on its doorstep, and expressed a desire to make a pro forma marriage to another known subversive, might they perhaps have investigated a bit more, and even tried to determine what Beurton’s partner-in-crime, Alexander Foote, was up to in Switzerland?

Perhaps MI5 officers were instructed to hold off.  Because, by then, events had taken their own course. On May 28, Stafford (of the Passport Office in London) replied that it was now too late to decline the application: the Passport Office had authorised issue on April 24. It shows either an extraordinary degree of negligence, or a remarkably high level of collusion. How could senior MI5 officers have ignored the recent happenings regarding Sonia’s family? On January 20, her brother Jürgen had been interned for his subversive opinions and behaviour, after publicly supporting the Nazi-Soviet pact. This immediately prompted the communist lawyer and MP, Dennis Pritt, alongside the fellow-travellers Dean Hewlett Johnson, John Strachey, and Harold Laski, to appeal for Jürgen’s release. MI5 and SIS were frustrated: the Home Office was persuaded by the Soviet sympathisers that Kuczynski was ‘an intellectual, and not an OGPU agent’, and hence issued instructions for his release on April 17, on the basis, presumably, that OGPU agents could only be uneducated thugs. That event happened on April 25 (the day after Sonia’s passport was approved), accompanied by the insight that membership of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) was not sufficient cause for continued detention. The record in the National Archives indicating that MI5 was overruled is dated May 8. Did MI5 receive some political message at this time that they should be indulgent towards Sonia as well? She presumably knew nothing of the protests that had gone on back in London. Her only comment was: “Ten weeks later, on 2^nd May, 1940, I held the precious document in my hands, much envied by other German refugees.” Indeed. They must have been puzzled how she achieved it so easily, even if she showed no surprise.

Departure Problems

So Sonia received the all-clear. Yet it was some time during that summer, as she made plans for her departure, that Sonia had problems with her nanny, Olga Muth, which affected her situation in Switzerland. Sonia does not provide exact dates, but the events are broadly confirmed by Alexander Foote’s testimony under interrogation. Sonia described Olga as devastated by the fact that, since she had only a German passport, she would not be able to accompany Sonia and her children to England. “She could not live without Nina”, Sonia wrote. At this time, however, it is not clear that Sonia was planning to take her children with her, although she may not at that time have understood the exact status of her offspring concerning legal residence in the UK. “She [Olga] had decided to betray us in the hope that if something happened to me she could keep the child and take her back to Germany”, Sonia explained. What transpired was that Olga did approach the consular representative in Montreux to inform them of Sonia’s misdeeds, but her broken English was so bad that no one paid any attention to her. Sonia moved her kids away, and confronted Olga, who had a breakdown, but soon after moved to Germany.

With Muth safely out of the way, Sonia then confused her story again, as she claimed that ‘in the late autumn of 1940 Centre suggested that Len and I move to England’, blandly contradicting her account that she had already been planning to leave the children in their new lodgings in Geneva while she was abroad. Even though Sonia had asked, back in March, for her children to be entered on her passport, she may not have considered taking them with her at this stage. Len’s later testimony to the Passport Office in Geneva asserted that he was to accompany her to England, leaving the children behind, and then return to Switzerland to continue his medical treatment for tuberculosis. Of course, he was not tubercular, and not receiving medical treatment, and this attempt to conceal his past would catch up with Len later. But when he was prevented from travelling because he could not acquire a transit visa through Spain, on account of his membership of the International Brigades, it would presumably have cast suspicion on Sonia’s motivations and heartless behavior if she had left her offspring behind. She thus prepared her departure through Vichy France, and then via Spain to Portugal’s Lisbon where she hoped to reach England by plane or ship.

Foote confirmed, in an interview by MI5 in July 1947, Olga Muth’s attempted betrayal. Yet in his memoir he ascribes it to different motives – the fact that Olga [disguised as ’Lisa Brockel’] was disgusted with Sonia’s marriage to Len [‘Bill’], out of her respect and affection for Sonia’s husband, Rolf [‘Alfred’]. “She thereupon rang up the British consulate and denounced Sonia and Bill as Soviet spies and told them where the transmitter was hidden.” Whether this account is a fabrication devised by Foote’s ghost-writer, Courtenay Young, cannot be verified, but we can read enough consistency in the stories to trust that Olga did indeed try to alert the consulate, but, for whatever reason, the British authorities did not want to know. Yet Foote added, in his interrogation, that Moscow Centre was told of the betrayal, and regarded it as ‘compromising’, and, further, that it provoked their order for Sonia and Len move to England. Why, if Sonia was ‘compromised’ in the eyes of the SIS outpost in Switzerland, it made sense for her to move to the United Kingdom is not explained, apart from the fact that the latter was the only country for which she owned a valid travel-pass. That had, of course, been the plan for a long time: maybe the date of departure was simply brought forward. And perhaps the timing was provoked by other external circumstances, such as the announced release of Klaus Fuchs from internment.

The alternative (Soviet) suggestion would be that Sonia would have been compromised in the eyes of the Swiss authorities, if, horror of horrors, they had discovered that Sonia was involved in espionage, and using an illegal wireless transmitter. But that does not make sense. Sonia had to leave the country, anyway, as her visa had expired, and the Swiss authorities knew exactly what was happening. Even though Sonia included an ambiguous story about a German national, Hermann, who was discovered with a transmitter, it is not clear that she was in any real danger because of her own radio work. If the Swiss authorities had been informed, and wanted to move on her, they would presumably have done so immediately. Switzerland’s security service was turning a blind eye to such subversive behavior so long as it was directed against the Nazis, and not towards the Swiss government, and the Swiss authorities were in fact colluding with foreign intelligence organisations.

Thus, with one more bound, Sonia was free. She never explained how she arranged to take her children (Micha and Janina) with her, moving in her narrative quickly to a scene of leaving Len at the roadside as the three of them boarded the bus on December 18. (Janina, her daughter by her lover in Shanghai, Ernst, was only four-and-a-half at the time.) Yet a hitch had apparently occurred. As indicated earlier, in March, 1940, Sonia had requested that her children’s names be added to the passport, and this indeed happened, as a letter from the Geneva consulate indicates. Yet someone must have warned her that, since her children were identified as German nationals, there might be a problem allowing them to land in the United Kingdom. On November 29, 1940, Stafford indicated that he had received a request from the consul in Geneva that Sonia’s children would indeed be allowed to land. The bureaucracy must have moved with amazing speed. On December 10, Cazalet of MI5 stated that the department had no objection (although he misunderstood the problem, believing that the children were not already included on the passport). Communications took place via open cables. Perhaps Sonia and Len must have come to a late conclusion, when Len learned that the Spanish government would not allow him entry, that the children would be safer (and happier) with Sonia, that their presence was essential to her cover, and that Moscow must have approved such a decision (which, after all, could have hindered Sonia’s effectiveness). Instead of rebuffing this somewhat impertinent and hasty request, the consulate appears to have done all in its power to accelerate the approval of ensuring that the completion of the journey would be successful.

Intelligence Strategies

At this critical point of Sonia’s departure, it is useful to take stock of the positions of the various authorities. MI5, monitoring known communists and members of the International Brigades, has shown some interest in Len Beurton, but surprisingly none in his colleague and mentor, Alexander Foote. While lower-level employees express surprise that the known subversive Ursula Beurton would have her passport application approved after an obvious sham marriage, senior officers are bewilderingly silent. SIS, in its Swiss outpost, suffers from a similar split personality. Sonia’s representations are treated with justified suspicion at lower levels, but senior officers seem keen to allow Sonia to leave the country. Vanden Heuvel must have known what was going on, in order to be able to handle Sonia appropriately, and as a contact to receive intelligence from Foote. He must have been aware of Foote’s perjurious role in Sonia’s divorce proceedings, and of Beurton’s presence on the Black List. His staff was perhaps subtly instructed to abet Sonia’s journey in order that Foote might assume a more prominent role in the Comintern spy network. They are obviously relaxed about the prospect of a known Communist radio-operator taking up residence in the UK at a time when the Soviet Union was still aiding the German war effort, maybe believing that she would be frightened into inactivity, or that her affairs would be easily monitorable.

On the other hand, SIS in Britain might have developed plans for using Sonia when she came to Britain. They could have quietly welcomed her arrival, planning to encourage her into indiscretions, so that she might lead them to other cells, or allow the authorities to intercept her traffic, and thus gain further insights into Soviet ciphers to complement what they learned from Foote. Maybe SIS calculated that letting Sonia go was a cover for their playing ignorance about Foote’s role: it is highly unlikely that they trusted her enough to allow Foote to negotiate a deal with her, as she would have had to pass on such information to her bosses. But that could certainly have been Dansey’s thinking. The benefit of having Foote installed as a more influential though phony Communist in a Comintern spy-ring far outweighed the risk of having Sonia prowling around in England looking for secrets to betray. And if she did engage in espionage, the authorities would be surveilling everything she did. Moreover, if MI5 had hauled her in and broken her down, she might have expressed her suspicions about Foote’s bona fides, which would have put the British authorities in a highly awkward position.

Moscow Centre appears unconcerned with what SIS knows about Sonia, and is determined to carry out its plan to install her as a spy, ruthlessly exploiting her new British citizenship in order that she may betray her adopted country. They surely cannot be aware of any duplicitous activity on Foote’s part, as they would thereby have had any suspicions immediately confirmed about his loyalties – something he managed to stave off even when he reached Moscow in 1945. Yet the insouciance of Soviet Intelligence about the whole affair, and the way it ignored what must have appeared as rank stupidity on SIS’s part, is extremely difficult to explain. How did the officers rationalise the craven indulgence of the British authorities, unless they simply judged that they were clueless, or fatally infected with bourgeois sentimentalism? The casualness of Soviet Intelligence would appear to make sense only if it was supremely confident about the ability of its penetration agents to pull strings in MI5, SIS and other government departments, and thus ignore signs of Soviet espionage, or, at the other extreme, if it harboured a very low respect for Sonia’s skills and chances of survival, and her ability to avoid detection. We know the little respect they maintained overall for the fate of their agents, since many exposed to western influences were simply recalled and shot, but that does not make sense in Sonia’s case. They trusted her implicitly. The ease with which the whole process transpired, however, could have affected how Sonia was instructed to act when installed, and she came to understand that she would have to be very careful with her contacts and with her radio transmissions.

Interlude in Lisbon

We have to rely on Sonia’s account for details of the arduous journey across Europe. The fact that she wrote a letter to her parents from Lisbon describing the ordeal adds a degree of verisimilitude to the account.  On December 23, 1940 the party arrived in Madrid, and by the next day reached Lisbon, the main exit point for refugees (and others) from Europe to the USA and Britain during the war. Lisbon was a city of desperate refugees: Ronald Weber describes the thousands, mostly Jews, who filled the city’s streets that winter, waiting for a chance to board one of the steamers sailing to the United States. The British unit MI9, responsible for setting up escape lines for stranded military men and agents, predominantly from France, was using the few airplane flights to England to repatriate its charges. Among this turmoil, Sonia admitted that all three of them were ill. Some time after Christmas, she had a meeting with the British consul, in order to gain approval for the voyage to England. She was told that she was about ‘the most insignificant person on the long list’. There were many destitute citizens without the means to survive, and those would take priority, since Sonia had access to funds (actually Moscow Centre’s Swiss bank account). Yet one obscure but revealing item in the archives indicates that the Portuguese issued her an exit visa as early as December 31. Sonia moved to Estoril, down the coast, and stayed – in relative comfort, to be sure – at the Grande Hotel.

One of the conundrums concerning her eventual arrival relates to the question of her destination in the United Kingdom. Her file at the National Archives (KV 6-41) includes a transcript of an intercepted letter that she wrote to her father on January 4, 1941, from the Grande Hotel, where the heading indicates that the letter was sent to 78 Woodstock Road, Oxford. The text expresses some desperation on Sonia’s part, because cables sent by her to her father had not been answered, and she does not know where to go upon her arrival in England. It shows Sonia’s request for the addresses of her father, of Brigitte (one of her sisters), and of the Taylors (her sister Barbara and her husband). She needs them, she says, because she does not know where they will land. Yet why would she ask for her parents’ address if she could send a letter to them? And why would she not just travel to her parents’ house from wherever she landed? And why would Barbara’s address be important in these circumstances? (Sonia naturally does not quote this letter in her memoir.) The report of the interrogation on arrival at Liverpool, however, records that Sonia’s immediately expressed intention was to visit her father at the address given above, and that she admits to having a sister, Mrs. D. B. Taylor, living in Red Ruth [sic]. The conflict between her frustration and ignorance in Lisbon and her comfort in Liverpool is partially explained by the existence of a photograph of the letter and envelope in the Taylors’ file at the National Archives (KV 2-2935-2). The letter was addressed to Dr. R. Kuczynski at 25a Upper Park Road in London, and forwarded to 78 Woodstock Road in Oxford. Sonia did thus not know about her exact destination while she was waiting for her passage in Portugal.

Milicent Bagot noted that Robert Kuczynski had moved to the Woodstock Road address on December 13, 1940, and was followed there by his son Jürgen, immediately after the latter’s release from a further spell of internment. She informed the Oxford Chief Constable of the fact in a letter dated January 26, 1941. Bagot unfortunately did not specify who lived at the house at the time: the Bodleian Record for 1941 indicates that a Mr. G. Churchill, a ‘friend of the Bodleian’, was resident there that year. It is possible that this gentleman was George Churchill (b. 1910), son of Sonia’s first referee, Dr. Stella Churchill. That hypothesis needs further investigation, but it would tie in with Sonia’s claim that the house was the domicile of friends of her parents. Chapman Pincher claims that Sonia had been ordered by her bosses to move to Oxford in October 1940, but I can find no evidence of this directive, and the letter from Lisbon would perhaps conspire against that theory. The location does, of course, support Pincher’s thesis that Sonia was sent to the United Kingdom to handle Roger Hollis, since the MI5 officer was now working at nearby Blenheim Palace, whither most of the Security Service had been evacuated in September 1940, but this seems coincidental. Pincher bizarrely ignores the Hotel Grande letter, which in its more familiar guise, would not help his argument. But he does point out that ‘somehow Sonia received that information [about her accommodations address], before or on her arrival in Liverpool’. The original of Sonia’s communication does point to the fact that the GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) probably went to work on her behalf behind the scenes. But how did it get a message to her?

In what at first appears as one of those strange coincidences of war, the historian of philosophy and intelligence officer Isaiah Berlin stayed in Estoril while Sonia was there. He had been ordered by the British Ministry of Information to return to New York for work as a member of the British Library of Information, a propaganda unit, and had had strings pulled to get him a berth on a safer American ship, the Excambion. After arriving in Bournemouth on January 1 for the flight to Lisbon (according to his father, Mendel), he had apparently been stranded in Hampshire for a few days because of bad weather, but eventually set off, and was put up at the Palácio Hotel in Estoril (where SIS appeared to have a standing set of rooms reserved for its agents, and where Berlin had stayed the previous October). Berlin’s father, Mendel, recorded that Isaiah was held up in Bournemouth for eight or nine days, because of bad weather. Yet this must be a mistake, and Mendel’s arithmetic does not work. The Meteorological Office reports for Southern England at that time indicate it was cold and wet, but not so inclement as to inhibit flying. What is more, in another letter, Berlin writes that he spent two days at the Palácio before his voyage on January 10. And Mendel overlooks a strange visit to Oxford that Berlin apparently made just beforehand.

Berlin sent a letter on Dorchester Hotel notepaper to the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann some time late in December. (He was assuredly not staying at the hotel: the Dorchester was where the Weizmanns kept their London residence, and Berlin was seeking them out.) He informed Weizmann that he was due to leave from Bournemouth on Friday January 3, but would be spending the Tuesday and Wednesday – namely the New Year holiday  ̶  in Oxford. He also expressed the hope that he would see Weizmann in Lisbon if they were unable to meet before he left. Strangely, this is a theme that loses its urgency by the time Berlin reaches Lisbon, but the Oxford visit is left unexplained. Moreover, Mendel wrote that he and his wife accompanied Berlin to Bournemouth on January 1: this entry ‘in the family memoir’ either represents a very faulty memory, or else a clumsy attempt to conceal Berlin’s brief excursion to Oxford, and to minimise the time his son spent in Lisbon. Could Berlin have been visiting the Kuczynskis in Oxford, in order to pick up an urgent message? He lived only a mile from them in Hampstead, and it is highly likely they knew each other.

“The Palácio Hotel greeted me like a long lost friend and gave me a wonderful double bedroom in which I slept comfortably for 14 hours after an exceedingly rough flight”, Berlin wrote to his parents on hotel writing-paper from the ship. There is no documentary evidence that he was in Portugal to intervene on Sonia’s behalf, even though on the same day that this marxisant Section D officer in SIS, recently returned from an abortive trip to Moscow with the arch-spy Guy Burgess, left Lisbon for the USA (January 10), Sonia was informed by the consulate that she and her children would be taken to England by ship. Her passport was endorsed that day (‘Category “C”’), and she was soon informed by the British consul that her passage had been approved in principle. She and her children sailed soon afterwards (about the 17^th). Did Berlin put in a good word at the consulate to accelerate her departure?

The circumstances of Berlin’s voyage are puzzling, from the muddled story of the delay onwards. Presumably staying at the Palácio was par for the course. The hotel’s website states: “The Hotel Palácio was the chosen home of numerous members of European royalty and was also the haunt of British and German spies, who could often be found in its bar.” Berlin hints at companion-travellers, but is coy about them, apart from an American financial journalist named Scriven, who flew with him from Bournemouth, also stayed at the Palácio, and with whom Berlin shared a cabin on the ship. Yet his introduction of Scriven is enigmatic, as Berlin’s first letter mentioning him, from on board the Excambion, merely suggests that they were sharing a cabin after meeting at the hotel. His next letter, however, from New York on January 28, refers to Scriven as his friend who accompanied him on the flight from Bournemouth. Was this explanation simply careless? Would Berlin’s parents not have encountered Scriven if he had been stranded with them all in Bournemouth for over a week, and thus not need an explanation by letter?

Edward Scriven was an American who had arrived in London in 1939 to open the London branch of Arthur C. Nielsen’s market research organisation. Berlin describes him as ‘head of a firm in England who supplies trade statistics to private firms and our Govt. departments’. Remarkably, that was very similar to the role that Sonia’s father, Robert Kuczynski, as a renowned economic statistician, was executing at that time, as demographic adviser to the Colonial Office. Were they acquainted? Scriven was apparently returning home since the war prevented him expanding the business in Europe, but why would he sharing a flight with Berlin, that was scheduled to leave nine days before the departure of the Excambion, on which ship he was allotted a berth with the Oxford don? This was not the time for weeklong holidays on the Portuguese coast. Maybe Berlin knew him already, and then acted as a courier, passing on information about where Sonia should stay in England, and addresses of contacts. If so, it would not have been the last time that Berlin acted as an intermediary to intelligence agents. It is unlikely he met Sonia in person, but he could have left a letter for her. Mendel Berlin’s testimony may have been crafted a little too precisely, with the purpose of laying an alibi (a not uncommon occurrence in Berlin’s life), since Berlin was loath to reveal anything concerning his intelligence-related engagements. Could Berlin have been working both for British and Soviet intelligence to facilitate Sonia’s voyage? The evidence is all circumstantial, but Pincher asked a very pertinent question, and I do not believe any more plausible method of communicating has been suggested.

Arrival in the UK

As for Sonia, after a voyage lasting three weeks, where the ship sailed in convoy with twelve others, trying to avoid the U-Boats, she and her offspring arrived on the SS Androceta in Liverpool on February 4. On her arrival, Security Control was ready for her. When questioned by the immigration authorities, she was very vague about her movements, and her testimony revealed some highly suspicious contradictions.  She could not recall when she had first met her husband. (She clearly states ‘January or February 1939’ in her memoir.) She claimed that Len had gone to Switzerland for health reasons, suffering from tuberculosis, a fact that was patently not true. He had (she said) happily now recovered, but could not join her as he could not obtain a Spanish visa, since the Spanish authorities regarded him as a hostile character still of military age, even though he was medically unfit.  She told Security Control that she had last arrived in Switzerland just before the war, but the Home Office report states that she said had been there only since February 1940, ‘where she married Beurton’ – which would have meant that she had not been present when her divorce was granted, and would have had to enjoy a whirlwind romance with her future husband (whom she married on February 23). (How could such widely different accounts emanate from the same interrogation?) She was able to provide her interrogator with the address of her sister (Barbara, Mrs D. B. Taylor) in Redruth, Cornwall, as well as the Oxford address, even though the intercepted letter indicated that she did not know where any of her relatives were living. Incidentally, Barbara and her husband were both reported to be members of the CPGB and thus under surveillance, even though John Green indicates that Barbara was the least politically active of the Kuczynski tribe: her spouse, Duncan, was astonishingly an intelligence officer in the RAF. Why did MI5 not pick up on these anomalies? If it had had shown the tenacity and attention to detail that such disclosures deserved, its officers might have been able to follow up with a more penetrating interrogation of her, but the spirit was missing. After all, had they not just approved and facilitated her entry to Britain?

And why Oxford? It might simply have been a convenient central meeting-point for the Kuczynski clan: the Taylors from Cornwall, Brigitte from Bristol, and her parents and brother from London. The children of her brother Jürgen and his wife Marguerite had been evacuated to Oxford, courtesy of their friend Celia Strachey (wife of John, who had helped engineer Jürgen’s release), so they knew the city. Perhaps they had to thrash out strategy. Jürgen was apparently not excited about her arrival. Alexander Foote told his interrogators that Jürgen feared that Sonia, as a spy, would draw attention to his own espionage and propagandist work in London, where he was openly communicating with the Soviet Embassy. Yet the secrecy itself was provocative. If Sonia were innocent, and had married a Briton, it might have been expected that her family would welcome her back warmly in London. The Kuczynski clan no doubt felt that having her close to them would be too dangerous, and draw the attention of MI5 and Special Branch, and thus chose Oxford as a rendezvous, but had trouble letting her know secretly, and in time.  Hence Sonia’s urgent letter, which in fact betrays the fact that a secret destination was being planned. But choosing Oxfordshire as a place for a newly-arrived German-born woman to live in isolation must have raised suspicions. Sonia declares in her memoir that she went to Oxford because her parents were staying with friends there because of the air-raids in London, but she never explains how she learned about her destination, or the specific address.

As has been shown, Milicent Bagot had also been keeping a close eye on the movements of the Kuczynskis during January. Bagot, who, it must be remembered, had in May pointed out that Sonia’s marriage to Beurton was probably a sham, had also recommended, on November 23, that Jürgen Kuczynski should be re-interned. He was in fact released, after a hubbub in the Home Office, on January 22, in time to make the rendezvous. His file at Kew (KV 2/1872) shows that he was considered thus: ‘An extreme communist and fanatically pro-Stalin. One of Moscow’s most brilliant and dangerous propagandists. From various sources it is claimed that he is an illegal contact with the Soviet Secret Service.’ (April 9, 1941) A report from Huyton Camp, where he had been interned, dated January 29 (while Sonia was en voyage) reveals that an informer had said that Jürgen was a ‘GPU agent at large’. There was a continuous war between Bagot and the fellow-travellers such as the lawyer and M.P. Denis Pritt who had influence, and repeatedly came to his defence. Bagot did not receive the support she deserved, but the Kuczynskis clearly realised that they were all regarded with suspicion.

‘With difficulty’ (understandably), Sonia and her offspring managed to find a hotel in Liverpool (it was during a wartime blackout, of course), and, even more remarkably, succeeded in reaching Oxford by train the next day. What is extraordinary about this highly onerous journey, which surely must have been accomplished with some external support, is that MI5 was fully informed about all its aspects. Sonia was picked up by watchers as soon as she left Liverpool, and they informed the Chief Constable of Oxford on January 26, 1941, of Sonia’s father’s taking temporary lodgings in Oxford. Sonia claimed that, because of the air-raids, her parents had been living with friends in Oxford, but they had to return to London soon after as the room was needed by their friends’ relatives. By February 24, she has moved to 97 Kingston Road. That day, the Chief Constable of Oxford confirmed to MI5 that her sister Barbara Taylor was staying at that address with Sonia, who finessed the events of her reunion in her memoir. About Barbara, she wrote nothing. On February 25, a Mr Ryde (probably of Special Branch, in Reading) wrote to Shillito of MI5, enclosing his report on Sonia. Shillito is of the opinion that no further action was required, but that ‘an eye should be kept on her’.  Yet another sister, Renate, wrote from 76 Woodstock Road on March 23 that she would be returning to London that week, and has ‘a lot to tell’ her brother Jürgen. Sonia moved again: on March 25 MI5 noted that she was now staying at the Rectory at Glympton, near Woodstock. There was much Kucyznski buzz in Oxford that February.

Work as a Spy

The next period of Sonia’s career is critical to the story. Yet it is difficult to describe accurately her actions in building an espionage network and using her wireless equipment to send illicit messages to her controllers. Her own memoir is bland, but known to be untrustworthy. The British archive gives ample evidence of the appeasement and indulgence of the authorities to Sonia’s activities, as well as to the effort of repatriating Len to join her, but understandably reveal nothing about her broadcasts. Some details ‘released’ from official Soviet archives look to be obvious fakes. The accounts of such as Peter Wright and Chapman Pincher are useful, but, frequently relying on unnamed ‘insider’ sources, are often embellished with details that fail the tests of chronology, psychology, procedure, or identity. Pincher includes multiple confidences from ‘impeccable’ British intelligence sources, unidentifiable transcripts supposedly provided by GCHQ, otherwise unrevealed documents from Soviet archives, and unreliable personal reminiscences from Sonia’s relatives. It is difficult not to conclude that much of the guidance offered by British intelligence officers is disinformation designed to encourage Pincher in his Hollis-hunt, and to distract him from more murky scenarios. Some of his suggestions are quite ridiculous (as, for example, the claim that RSS sent transcripts of Sonia’s broadcasts to Hollis and Philby for decryption), and he chooses to ignore the remarkable series of events by which the consulate in Switzerland provided a forged identity for Beurton so that he could rejoin his wife in England. One source is solider than all the others, however. The VENONA transcripts (partial decipherments of diplomatic cables between London and Moscow during the 1940s) give one rare glimpse into Sonia’s interaction with officials at the Soviet Embassy, and her practice of wireless telegraphy.

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 early February 1941, but did not construct her transmitter, and make contact with the Soviet Union, until late May – or possibly even later. 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.

According to her own autobiography, Sonia travelled every two weeks to London to see her family, and to make her rendezvous with her Soviet contact, as pre-arranged in Switzerland. Her chronology is flawed. She made several abortive attempts (‘I do not recall how often I travelled to London’), which suggests a passage of several months, before her contact showed up. During this time she learned (from her brother?) that Rolf had been arrested. Next (‘at last’, but in fact as early as April, so she could not have accomplished many visits to London), she found a furnished bungalow to live in, in Kidlington, and in May made contact with her Soviet Embassy contact, Sergey, one we now know as Nikolai Aptekar, in London.  She explained that she had all the parts of her radio ready, and could begin transmission ‘within 24 hours’. She noted that a few days passed since Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union (June 22), before she received any response to her call-sign, but that may have been a symbolically significant item of disinformation. She then stated that she started transmitting messages twice a week by radio, travelling every fortnight or so to visit her father or her brother in London, who supplied her with valuable information to send to Moscow. She stated that she was introduced by her brother to Hans Kahle, Klaus Fuchs’s associate in Canada, now working as a military correspondent for Time and Fortune magazines. Moscow Central agreed (so she averred) to her suggestion that she meet him regularly as well, as he has access to strategic information. She tells us that she reported such information on her radio to Moscow, ‘who frequently asked follow-up questions’. Thus the requirements of the earlier spravka were being fulfilled.

Sonia as Broadcaster

All thus suggests a high level of radio transmission activity in the summer of 1941, which one might have expected Britain’s Radio Security Services to have picked up – before Sonia’s transmission techniques significantly changed. There is little verifiable confirmation of her activity at this time, but we are fortunate to have the VENONA transcript of a single cable sent by the London residency to Moscow on July 31, 1941, by BRION (probably Boris Schwertzov, Assistant Military Attaché), describing a meeting that Sonia held the previous day with an intermediary codenamed IRIS. [For more information on the VENONA program, see https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified-documents/venona/ .] IRIS, indeed a woman, has not been identified, but she appears in an earlier 1940 cable after performing espionage in Liverpool. This 1941 cable reports Sonia’s list of expenditures on radio parts, as well as the information that she had tried on four consecutive nights (July 26 to 29) to make contact with Moscow without receiving a reply. The timing of the claim for expenses would seem to undermine the validity of Proskurov’s communications given above.

A hint that Moscow might have been concerned about the quantity and detectability of illicit transmissions taking place is given by Sonia when she explains that at some stage she was given a miniaturised transmitter. She does not provide a date (and her story is not strictly sequential), but it probably was some time later, as she states that ‘after I had succeeded in making some military contacts’, she had a meeting with Sergey – who may have been a completely different person from the earlier ‘Sergey’  ̶   when she was given a small parcel measuring about six by eight inches, in which was lodged a small transmitter that she was able to conceal. Sonia then rather illogically comments that, while she transmitted from England ‘for five or six years’, amateur radio activities were strictly forbidden. So what was the relevance of a less obvious transmitter if she still had to encode messages and send them over the airwaves?

The failure of the British authorities to track Sonia’s transmissions has caused a lot of anguished debate. When Peter Wright, the author of  Spycatcher, was investigating the case that Roger Hollis might have been a Soviet mole (under Sonia’s control), he doggedly tried to track down further transcripts of interactions between Moscow and London. He claimed to have found a trove of materials that originated in Sweden, known as HASP, derived from partially successful attempts by the Försvaerts Radioanstalt (FRA) to decipher the Soviet Embassy’s traffic between Stockholm and Moscow in the period December 1940 to April 1946. Nigel West reports that 390 such messages were passed by the FRA to GCHQ in 1959. Wright went on to say “But there was one series of messages which was invaluable. The messages were sent from the GRU resident Simon Kremer to Moscow Centre, and described his meetings with the GRU spy runner Sonia, alias Ruth Kuczynski.”

The reason this was important was that Wright had been fed the story by his bosses that Sonia did not become active for Soviet Intelligence until Fuchs returned from the USA in 1944! (Fuchs was in the USA from December 1943 until June 1946.) “In particular GCHQ denied vehemently that Sonia could ever have been broadcasting her only radio messages from her home near Oxford during the period between 1941 and 1943”, continued Wright. Yet Wright, even though he claimed that ‘Kremer’s messages utterly destroyed the established beliefs’, does not divulge what was in these messages. I can find no reference to Sonia in the transcripts available at https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/Venona-Stockholm-KGB.pdf: Nigel West has recently confirmed to me that no further Sonia-related material exists in VENONA beyond the cable listed above. There is no reason why Sonia should appear in Stockholm-based cables, or why Kremer’s messages should have been routed there. Moreover, Wright implied that GCHQ was responsible for radio interception at the time. It was not. That function belonged to RSS (the Radio Security Service), which was incorporated into SIS in 1941, and was not handed over to GCHQ until after the war. GCHQ was intently focused on decryption of German messages, and would not have known about any internal illegal transmissions unless RSS had brought them to its attention, since the security services agreed that all Nazi agents who had entered the country with radio equipment had been rounded up, and either executed, or ‘turned’ in the Double-Cross operation.

Chapman Pincher got the story even more wildly wrong, although he rightly pointed out that the team of Voluntary Interceptors (who listened out for possibly illicit broadcasts) sent their transcriptions to RSS for analysis. But Pincher claimed (in Too Secret Too Long, 1984) that a former senior officer in RSS, later identified, in Treachery, 2009, as James Johnston, had told him that undeciphered messages from Sonia, that must have been trapped by the interceptors, were sent to Roger Hollis, responsible for Soviet counter-espionage in MI5, and after 1944, also to Kim Philby in SIS, for analysis and further instructions. As if Hollis or Philby would have known where to start with enciphered messages that probably used one-time pads, which would have confounded even the experts in GCHQ! Pincher then goes on to claim that Hollis and Philby were thus able to hush up the whole series of events, convincing their colleagues in MI5 and SIS of the irrelevance of such findings.

In his later book, Pincher says more about the HASP archives (taking his feeds from Wright). In true Hinsleyesque style, he also offers the tantalising denial of a story that must have irked him: “A claim that British intelligence was ingeniously using her [Sonia’s] transmissions to feed disinformation to Moscow is equally without foundation.” Whose claim that was, and why he could so confidently reject it, is not explained, but one cannot help concluding that there was at least one party who was trying to air an inconvenient truth, even though I have been unable to detect any published claim that Sonia was being manipulated by SIS while in Britain. Yet, by his curt dismissal of such an assertion, Pincher weakened rather than strengthened his story, and drew attention to a plausible hypothesis. So there appears to have been another faction who thought that, by feeding Pincher those unlikely stories about the power of Hollis, it could safely distract attention from any investigation into the theory that Sonia’s role and activities were known to SIS, and may have been connived at for reasons of counter-espionage.

By then Anthony Glees had come to Hollis’s defence in The Secrets of the Service (1987), and reminded readers of the unlikelihood of Sonia’s being able to transmit so many messages undetected during the war. “Someone sending wireless traffic from an illegal source would have been picked up before they cleared their throats”, he wrote, thus suggesting either a) that Sonia’s claims about her multitude of transmissions were false, or b) if they were true, that there was a cover-up that must have gone beyond Hollis, since Glees dismissed the notion that the detection-finding mechanisms and processes were so poor that Sonia’s transmissions could not have been picked up. Glees, using his knowledge about how MI5 and GCHQ worked, very logically demolished Pincher’s case, declaring that i) it was not Hollis’ job to attempt to decipher messages; ii) if he had been her accomplice, Hollis would have warned Sonia not to transmit at all, rather than conceal her messages later; iii) it was highly unlikely that Sonia was in contact with any MI5 employee if she continued to broadcast; and iv) especially after June 22, 1941, when the heat turned off monitoring the Soviet Embassy, Sonia could have contrived to get her messages to the Soviet Embassy to be transmitted onward. “If Hollis were guilty of being Sonia’s contact”, Glees wrote, “it would be the absence of a wireless, rather than its presence, which would be suspicious.”

Sparring Techniques

The debate was then picked up by W. J. West, in his 1989 book The Truth About Hollis (also published as Spymaster: The Betrayal of MI5). West brought a new perspective to the issue. He responded that Glees (and those who advised him) could be wrong, first, because the attention and focus of the volunteer interceptors were directed at German traffic, and second, because of the technology used. The interceptors had no recording equipment, writing everything down by hand. “The Soviets”, West added, ‘”were able to defeat any attempts at monitoring by the simple process of transmitting morse with a tape machine run at a speed which prevented its being taken down manually.” While this observation slightly misrepresents the role of the Voluntary Interceptors (who were given frequencies to track), the revelation shone a markedly new light on the process of interception, indicating how advanced techniques might have been able to avoid traditional goniometric methods. No doubt this technology was part of the miniaturised package that Sonia had been given.

Moreover, MI5 had by then recognized the problem of high-speed morse. Guy Liddell reported in December 1942, after Oliver Green’s communist ring in Birmingham had been uncovered, that Green, another International Brigades veteran recruited by the Comintern, had admitted that his team used, early in 1942, that same technique to communicate with Moscow. Liddell noted, on December 7, 1942 that Green had ‘refused to give their [the agents’] names or the location of their stations’ (KV 4/191).  Moreover, a telling memorandum exists in the Green files, from Hale to Shillito, that hints at a deeper strategy: “His [Green’s] prosecution would on the other hand inevitably disturb the ground on which your present enquiries, designed to round up all these miscreants, are proceeding and this I would take to be the decisive consideration” (KV 2/2203). This communication represents proof that a project of surveilling suspected communist subversives was under way, and that a premature prosecution would frighten off other spies. Shillito’s inaction later suggests that some political constraints held him back.

On December 8, at a regular meeting with SIS, Liddell declared that the new technology would pose a problem for the Radio Security Service, and he then also referred to the fact that ‘we’ had experienced with some regularity the transmissions of a Russian station, identifiable by its call sign. The astonishing fact about this revelation, however, is that it appears not in Liddell’s Diaries that describe the same meeting, but in the Oliver Green files! It is as if Liddell was censoring himself because of the sensitivity of the admission – a definite case of the dog not barking in the night-time. Thus, instead of Liddell’s implicit suggestion that the new techniques might have posed a problem because it would have been RSS’s first encounter with illicit Soviet signals that happened to use high-speed morse, the Green papers prove that customary detection and direction-finding, that had been at least partially successful, would then have been impeded because of the new burst-mode transmissions. The files thus show evidence of investigations into clandestine radio transmissions by suspected Soviet spies, and it could well have been Sonia’s exchanges that were detected.  So why did Liddell mask the full account of Green’s ring using detectible techniques in 1941? I shall return to this vital question in the next episode.

As for the new techniques, another file on Green at the National Archives (KV 2/2204) describes in detail the established technology of the ‘punch perforator’ in which messages were converted, and the dimensions of a transmitter that exactly match how Sonia described her set. It also refers to the use of battery-driven power that would hinder detection-finding techniques that relied on mains power being selectively withdrawn. One sentence reads: “The use of batteries instead of power from the mains for the transmitter is quite sound as the method of detection by cutting off power street by street had been used in many countries and has been suggested, but not I think actually used, in this country.” Readers who have seen accounts of Gestapo techniques in Belgium, France and Germany will be familiar with this approach. Green was, however, not tracked down by interception of radio messages (or so we are told), but by a chance discovery of incriminating material, and the claims he made about the transmissions made by his cell members do not appear to have been confirmed. We simply do not know for certain whether previous messages sent by Green’s ring had been monitored, or whether what had been picked up earlier was from other agents.

One can see how this off-line process would work. A manual key of some kind would still have been required to translate the enciphered text into morse code. But that process would have been undetectable. An off-line procedure like this would have allowed a tape to be transferred to the miniature transmitter, and the messages to be sent in burst mode. *   T. J. West reminds us that the Soviet spies, the Krogers, were able to send their messages in the 1960s in a similar fashion, and remain undetected. Yet even if this technique had been used successfully, it does not answer all the questions. I have shown how Sonia was not able to deploy the technology until, at the earliest, late 1941, and she had been broadcasting regularly before then. Why were her earlier messages not picked up? Even if Sonia overstated her activity during that summer of 1941, we have it on excellent authority from the VENONA cable that she was busy on four successive nights trying to make contact with Moscow, and that her efforts were either not detected, or, if they were detected, were ignored. Was Sonia really just a disposable agent to Moscow Centre? Did they not care? Or did they guess what was going on, play Sonia along, offering ‘chickenfeed’ to the British authorities until they had a securer system in place? After all, the ability of the Swiss to detect illicit radios was known before Sonia left that country, and the Nazis started detecting the Soviet Rote Kapelle transmissions in June 1941: did the Soviets not think the British had similar technology and techniques at hand?

[* West refers to a photograph in a 1937 book by Peter Smolka (later Smollett), a Communist spy who infiltrated the Ministry of Information in WWII, titled Forty Thousand Against the Arctic, which shows the equipment in question. I reproduce it here.

 

A radio operator in the Soviet polar base of Dickson at the mouth of the Yenisei River (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dikson_Island), showing her playing telegraph chess. The spools are presumably the containers for the perforated tape. I am not sure whether the lady in the second photograph is admiring such a container.]

Fuchs, and Beurton’s Return

Sonia’s major claim to notoriety was based on her role as a courier to the atom spy, Klaus Fuchs. As with many of the events in her life, she represents the chronology wrongly in her book, where (in the English version only) she describes her first meeting with Fuchs as taking place towards the end of 1942. As I have pointed out in my doctoral thesis (to appear in book form later this year), it was in the interests of the British authorities, Soviet Intelligence, as well as Fuchs himself, to give the impression that Fuchs committed to espionage much later  ̶  namely well after Nazi Germany’s invasion of Russia  ̶  than he actually did, as the timing encouraged those involved to give his treachery a semblance of moral rectitude. Conscience-driven scientists believed it was their responsibility to share all the atomic secrets with their gallant ally, as it did not appear that the US and GB governments wanted to do so, or the scientists did not trust the authorities to deliver comprehensively. Yet the evidence shows that Moscow’s planning to exploit Fuchs’s sympathies and skills had evolved much earlier, and that Sonia’s mission to Britain may even have been conceived with the goal of installing her as Fuchs’s courier.

The Soviet attaché, Kremer, was already familiar with Fuchs when they met in Birmingham in August 1941, and Fuchs’s latest biographer, Mike Rossiter, notes that Fuchs met the Kuczynski family in Hampstead in early April 1941. Fuchs had been interned with the Kuczynskis’ friend, Hans Kahle in Canada, and while it cannot be determined exactly who initiated the move, in August Fuchs was effectively recruited by Sonia’s brother, Jürgen, and introduced to Sonia soon after. (Rossiter, reliant on his some of his conclusions on unverifiable Soviet archives, oddly suggests that Sonia did not take over the handling of Fuchs until after Kremer was recalled to Moscow in July 1942.) Fuchs’s first reports were received in Moscow in September, and Sonia started a productive arrangement with him that would continue until he was transferred to the USA in October 1943. Much of the material was too bulky to be transmitted by radio, so Sonia would also use drop areas to pass on what Fuchs gave her to contacts from the Soviet Embassy. Sonia also ‘recruited’ the valuable and prodigious spy Melita Norwood, who worked at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association, which covered the ‘Tube Alloys’ project, as well as other minor figures in British services.

Meanwhile, what of Len Beurton? Sonia is typically misleading in her memoir, ascribing Len’s continued absence in Switzerland to Rado’s desire to keep him there as a radio operator, despite Moscow’s ‘order’ that he should resettle in England. (It is interesting that Sonia should at this stage indicate that Len had received the same ‘order’ [‘Betrag’] as she had, when earlier she had characterized her instructions to move to England as a ‘recommendation’ [‘Vorschlag’].) She even indicates that she was the boss: when Len asked Moscow whether he should follow Sonia, as she wished, or stay in Switzerland, as Rado had requested, Moscow apparently replied that he should do as she said. That was not Soviet Intelligence’s way of working. Yet Len’s problems were still to do with his inability to gain French and Spanish visas, and Sonia writes that the British consulate was at first unwilling to issue him with a false passport, a mechanism (she claims) it was applying to other candidates of military age trying to get home.

Sonia thus invoked the help of the International Brigade Association, in the shape of Hans Kahle, and then wrote to her ally Eleanor Rathbone, the left-wing MP who had done so much to help German communists establish themselves in Britain before the war. Sonia claims that Ms. Rathbone put a question in the House of Commons, specifically making an appeal for Len’s repatriation in order that he might serve his country. That seems unlikely: I can find no trace of such a specific question in Hansard, but there is no doubt that Rathbone’s secretary, Richard Law, wrote a letter for help to Alexander Cadogan, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, on February 18, 1942, and Cadogan replied positively the next day. A follow-up letter from Law was required, dated March 4, which perpetrated the lie that Beurton had had a ski-ing accident in Switzerland that had prevented earlier return, and also mentioned his treatment for tuberculosis, which might be considered to be spreading the explanations a little too thickly. On June 3, Livingston even wrote to the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, from Geneva, saying that ‘in April Beurton was examined by a French military doctor, who declared him unfit for military service.’ Such a ruling would have reduced the threat that Beurton might have represented as a combatant in any war. Beurton had reportedly applied again for Spanish and French visas: the Spanish visa was granted, but not the French.

The response it received clearly spurred the consulate into action, and it provided Beurton with a false passport in the name of John William Miller, as well as a doctor’s certificate (as Sonia reminds us) confirming that tuberculosis had incapacitated him for military service. The office thus falsified the evidence again. The result was that Beurton left Geneva for Lisbon and the UK on July 11 (information communicated in an en clair telegram, as if he were someone of importance). He arrived on July 29 at the Bournemouth Airport at Poole, the return segment of the same VIP route that Berlin had taken two years before. There was no lengthy, uncomfortable sea voyage for him. Beurton promptly admitted that his passport was false, denied his tuberculosis, and gave a feeble explanation about the money that he claimed had been left him. He even ascribed the tuberculosis story to advice he had received at the consulate, forgetting that it was a rigmarole he must have shared with Sonia two years beforehand, since she gave it as an excuse for his absence when interrogated in Liverpool. All in all, he betrayed a sense of indignant entitlement, and gave a sorry performance to his interrogators, who had clearly not been prepped appropriately. Beurton even stated that he was disappointed that the British authorities in Lisbon had not contacted Poole, in order to ease his passage through Control. And he introduced a new lie. As the Security report (of which a large portion has been redacted) records: “He did not leave Switzerland in the early part of the war because he and Mrs. Hamburger were waiting for the divorce proceedings to be completed in the Swiss courts.”

All this brazen behavior provoked a justifiably stern reaction in MI5 – at least in its lower echelons. Vesey cast serious doubts on the whole exercise, and wondered why SIS would issue a passport on such flimsy evidence, and questioned Beurton’s story about the source of his money. SIS responded in a letter to Vesey, claiming that the Passport office was ‘not of course aware of the issue of the individual circular concerning Beurton’, which assertion was patently nonsensical. By December 1942, Shillito in MI5 wrote that he was of the opinion that Beurton could be a Soviet spy. Beurton remained under close watch, and his mail was intercepted, as he was is ‘thought to have been in touch with agents of a foreign power’. Yet nothing more serious was undertaken, and Beurton joined his wife in Summertown, Oxford.

The conundrum of why Sonia’s radio traffic was ignored will be examined more closely in the next chapter of Sonia’s Radio. It appears that up until the winter of 1942, she had gone about her secret business successfully. As has been shown, most of the information that Fuchs passed before he left for the USA was no doubt too long and complicated to be sent by radio transmission, but there is no doubt about Ursula’s use of clandestine radio, which was strictly forbidden in wartime Britain. Yet a major new provocative event was about to take place. Sonia describes how, in the autumn of 1942, she moved into a cottage in the grounds of the house of Neville Laski, the brother of the fellow-traveller, Harold Laski. (Harold Laski, like Eleanor Rathbone, had conspired with such as Strachey, Wilkinson and Cripps either to assist entry into Britain of Comintern agents, or free from internment CP members like Sonia’s brother.) With Len’s help, Sonia strung up her radio in her new accommodation: what is even more incredible is that the existence of this apparatus was known to MI5. On January 25, 1943, D. M. Campbell, reporting on behalf of Major J. C. Phipps, wrote that ‘the Beurtons own a large wireless set’. In December 1942, Shillito had voiced his belief that the Beurtons were Soviet spies. The following month, incriminating evidence was handed to him. Yet nothing was done about it. Why was such obvious illicit behaviour not pounced upon, and why were the offenders not prosecuted?

New Sources:

The Lisbon Route, by Ronald Weber

Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light, 1939-1945, by Neill Lochery

Sonya’s Report, by ‘Ruth Werner’

Letters 1928-1946, by Isaiah Berlin

A Political Family: The Kuczynskis, Fascism, Espionage and the Cold War, by John Green

Mortal Crimes, by Nigel West

The Truth About Hollis, by W. J. West

Forty-Thousand Against the Arctic, by H. P. Smolka

The Spy Who Changed the World, by Mike Rossiter

New Commonplace entries appear here.

Two readers have separately informed me that they found my last blog too exhausting. I have thus decided to offer health warnings in future. So, if you are not already utterly absorbed by the untold stories of the Ultra secret, and the saga of Sonia’s Radio, I alert you now that this month’s episode may send you to sleep. Please do not read it while operating agricultural machinery!

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(In this installment, I analyse the backgrounds and possible motivations of the contributors to the ‘revisionist’ theory of Ultra dissemination, namely that it was fed to Soviet intelligence in Switzerland by SIS – probably via Alexander Foote. All these claims were then magisterially denied by the official historian. For the full story so far, please see Sonia’sRadio.)

The leading German cryptologist from WWII, Wilhelm Flicke, who in the late 1950s committed suicide in mysterious circumstances, wrote that ‘the Rote Drei’s source of information remains the most fateful secret of World War 2’. Echoing this opinion, Nigel West has told me that he has for a long time held the view that ‘the precise source of Lucy’s material is the last great secret of the war’. West’s crisp assessment of the conundrum can be read in his 1985 work Unreliable Witness: Espionage Myths of World War II (published in the USA as A Thread of Deceit). He has also recently suggested to me that ‘nothing much has changed since then’. Yet a flurry of material was declassified in the first decade of this century that must surely be taken into consideration when re-inspecting the mystery of the Lucy ring. Furthermore, many writers have coolly suggested, despite Professor’s Hinsley’s curt denial in the official history of British Intelligence, that there is no longer any mystery behind the distribution of Ultra material to Stalin via the Communist network in Switzerland. It continues to happen. For example, as I pointed out in last month’s blog, in 2013 Peter Matthews wrote, in his SIGINT: The Secret History of Signals Intelligence 1914-1945, that Alexander Foote was working for SIS in Switzerland, and passing on to the Soviets the valuable Ultra information. Yet no controversy seems to exist: an astounding lack of intellectual curiosity on the part of professional historians is evident, with no protestations, no debates, no critical reviews. This chapter of ‘Sonia’s Radio’ tracks the progress of the revisionist theory over the past fifty years, and inspects the credentials and possible motivations of its proponents.

Muggeridge’s Revelations

Malcolm Muggeridge was the first to make an open statement about Alexander Foote’s possible role as an emissary, in the January 8, 1967, issue of the Observer. In this piece, presented as a review of Accoce and Quet’s The Lucy Ring, Muggeridge claimed to have first met Foote when the latter was installed, in some kind of sinecure, at the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries in the early 1950s. Without explaining how the facts of Foote’s position within an ostensibly Comintern-controlled network had come to the attention of the British authorities, Muggeridge indicated that the ‘Intelligence Department concerned with code-breaking’ faced the challenge of imparting information gained by breaking German codes. (Muggeridge did not use the term ‘Ultra’, nor did he identify Bletchley Park by name, at this time.) “A ready and convenient solution would have been to feed the information to the Russians through one of their own clandestine intelligence set-ups”, he wrote, implying that the Lucy ring was in fact largely a creature of British Intelligence. The availability of radio communications and diplomatic bag, according to Muggeridge, complemented by the country’s neutrality, made Switzerland, and Roessler, an obvious choice for the dissemination of Ultra secrets. In passing, Muggeridge trashed Accoce’s and Quet’s book for its ‘unresisting imbecility’.

Muggeridge was careful not to implicate Foote in this admission  ̶  somewhat oddly, as Foote had reportedly been dead for more than ten years. (It should be remembered, however, that the ex-SOE and SIS officer Ronald Seth in 1965 claimed that Foote was still alive.) “I put the suggestion to Foote, who looked faintly startled and then abruptly changed the subject,” wrote Muggeridge. The broadcaster and journalist known as ‘St. Mugg’ was either being very disingenuous, or he knew more than he admitted. While it might not have been obvious from this article, Muggeridge had in fact worked for SIS during the war. (More than that, apparently. In a blurb on the cover of Read’s and Fisher’s Operation Lucy [q.v.], he boasted that he was involved ‘in wartime clandestine Intelligence duties and in handling Ultra material.’) In an earlier Sunday Telegraph essay, The Case of Kim Philby, (1963) he had, in his customarily waspish way, explained that he had worked for Philby when on assignment in Mozambique. He found Philby congenial company, but considered him too ‘unstable and farouche’ to advance to the top of his career. Nevertheless, expressing some surprise at Philby’s advancement in SIS, he declared: “My own impression at the time was that the foolish and the phonies, not to mention the occasional rogues, were almost invariably preferred to the more honest, straightforward and perceptive.” It is clear that Muggeridge’s experiences with SIS soured him: in an even earlier Spectator article (1961), Public Thoughts on a Secret Service, he had scoffed at the pretensions of the British Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence services, concluding that the contradictions between security and freedom in a liberal democracy made their efforts largely pointless, offering along the way the sardonic observation that ‘Intelligence services are unfortunate in that the more suitable a person is for recruitment to them, the more disastrous he is likely to prove.’

How close was Muggeridge to the action, though? It is quite possible that he had taken advantage of access to information from Ultra insiders, for example his friend Edward Crankshaw, covered later in this piece. Nevertheless, it was Muggeridge, the irresolute counter-spy (he had considered suicide while on duty on the beaches of Mozambique) who broke fresh ground by hinting directly at a) a successful program of intercepting and deciphering vital German traffic, and b) the existence of a country-house where the project had been executed. He had probably offended the Official Secrets Act in such revelations, but no ‘D’ notice had been sent to his newspaper editors, and the response to his article was largely unremarkable. The week following his piece, the Observer published three letters.  The author Len Deighton, ignorant of Ultra, seriously missed the point, and stressed that the war in the Soviet Union was won by Russian blood and sacrifice rather than boffins in an English country house. A second correspondent, Alfred Fields, pointed out that Arthur Koestler (in The Invisible Writing) had recorded that Roessler had been one of the main wartime contacts of Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr. This letter hinted vaguely at a whole new dimension of intelligence co-operation: whether Canaris had in fact been working throughout his war with British interests in mind, a fascinating question that is beyond the scope of this investigation

The third letter is the most engrossing. One Charlotte Haldane, writing as a friend of Foote, explained how the confidences that Foote had shared with her indicated that he did not know where Lucy had gained his information, but at the same time she suggested that Foote’s experiences in being interrogated by both Soviet and British Intelligence would have deterred him from admitting anything. Haldane rather over-egged the pudding, however, by claiming that Foote ‘repeatedly [sic] told her that he had no idea, either at the time or later, where or how “Lucy” obtained his information, except that it came straight from the inner councils of the OKW’, as if she hadn’t wanted to accept his simple denial the first time. But why was she so interested in this matter, and why would she not accept Foote’s initial answer, but instead pester him so with her continual questioning? Haldane added that Foote was so puzzled about the origin of the intelligence that ‘he intended to revisit Switzerland to seek further information’. “The Swiss authorities, however, refused him entry owing to his former conviction and imprisonment”, she noted. Was this woman simply a very enterprising reporter?

Ms. Haldane’s role and interests were not revealed at the time. She had in fact been a member of the Communist Party well into the 1940s, and between 1926 and 1945 had been married to Professor J. B. S. Haldane, who was a Communist spy bearing the cryptonym INTELLIGENTSIA, as the VENONA transcripts show. She and her husband had been very active in helping the International Brigades reach Spain, so she had probably met Foote at that time. Indeed Foote recalled seeing her husband on the front line, waving a pistol at the advancing Franco troops: “Luckily for science, we managed to repel the Rebel attack and the professor was spared for his further contributions to world knowledge”, he wrote. Charlotte Haldane was also a close friend of the communist Hans Kahle, a co-conspirator with Jürgen Kuczynski, Sonia’s brother: Kahle became part of Sonia’s network. Shortly after the time of Foote’s interrogation by MI5, Charlotte claimed in a memoir (Truth Will Out) to have cut her ties to the Communist Party some years before, after which she had worked at the Talks Department of the BBC, replacing George Orwell. Her disenchantment was evidently more with Stalinism than with Communism, and she may well have maintained her contacts in the CPGB. She might have been given the mission by Moscow to ascertain the truth of Foote’s involvement with SIS: she never mentioned in her letter her past enthusiasms, or their shared involvement in the Spanish Civil War. Her credentials to comment objectively on the matter were thus somewhat dubious. Foote, knowing her history and allegiances, would have been very guarded in dealing with her.

The statement about his imprisonment needs clarifying, as well. Foote had indeed been imprisoned  ̶  but in no great discomfort  ̶   in Switzerland between November 1943 and September 1944, primarily as a gesture to assuage the Gestapo’s spy-hunters, but also to cover up possible misdeeds by Swiss intelligence. He had sensibly declined to return for a possibly more serious trial in October 1947, and was in absentia sentenced to thirty months in prison, a fine of 8000 francs, and fifteen years’ expulsion. The likelihood of his wanting to journey there on an idealistic mission to investigate Lucy’s sources, when leaving the UK would have exposed him to Soviet assassins, or, preferably but still unpleasantly, a probable spell in a Swiss prison, was extremely thin. It can safely be concluded that he was thus acting out his charade with Haldane. Foote’s file at the National Archives indicates that he hoped to show the manuscript of his Handbook for Spies to Charlotte before publication, in February 1949, as she wanted to use it for a BBC talk. A certain Copeman apparently talked him out of it, warning him of Haldane’s unreliability, but Foote was still in touch with Haldane in February 1952, considering a sequel. As is frequently the case with double-agents, the behavior is ambiguous: Foote might have been showing his true colours, but it is much more likely that he had been engaging in subterfuge to maintain his legend.  He clearly impressed Ms. Haldane, who trusted his story, and declared him ‘one of the bravest men I have known’. She doubtless held a romantic notion that Foote was an idealistic communist who had served the cause, and then seen the light, as had she. That is the outcome she wanted to occur, and Foote projected it for her.

The appearance of the gentleman named Copeman sheds a startling new light on the intrigue. For the individual was almost certainly Frederick Copeman, an ex-Communist of some repute who had been a prominent member of the Invergordon Mutiny. In his memoir, Foote indicated that Copeman, as ‘an old ‘friend’, had in 1938 recruited him for the dangerous assignment abroad. Copeman was a leading CPGB member who had headed the British Battalion of the International Brigades in Spain: that other communist apostate, Charlotte Haldane, attested to his courage and leadership, attributes that the archive now shows to be under question. Moreover, records recently released to the National Archives indicate that Copeman had abandoned his Communist allegiance in 1941, and was even awarded the MBE in that year for fire-fighting services. MI5 appeared to be aware of his recantation – and no doubt, too, was Moscow Centre. Copeman’s being introduced as some kind of external consultant to MI5 on dealing with the CPGB suggests that,  around the time of Barbarossa, he probably informed the Security Service of Foote’s recruitment. And Moscow Centre would also have learned then that one of their prime agents had defected, perhaps without massive concern now that Britain was an ally of the Soviet Union. But the relationships between Foote, Copeman and Haldane demand further investigation.

A comparison of Copeman’s 1948 memoir, Reason in Revolt (1948), with Foote’s Handbook for Spies (1949) sheds some important light on their respective political situations. The staging posts of Copeman’s initial mission to Spain closely match those of Foote. Foote left Dover on December 23, 1936, while Copeman sailed on January 1, 1937. They both assembled in Albacete, and were then drafted into the British battalion at Madriguerras (Madriguerus, according to Copeman), which they both stated was led by William Macartney, with Douglas Springhall as political commissar. Yet, while Foote asserted that almost half of the thousand or so British who served with the International Brigade were killed in Spain, and later characterised Copeman as ‘an old friend’ who was acting on behalf of Springhall in recruiting him for the Comintern, Copeman never mentioned Foote in his narrative. Foote felt free to write: “Later, of course, Copeman split with the Party and joined the Oxford Group [of moral rearmers, not spies, it should be added]”, but Copeman clearly wanted to conceal his role in recruiting Foote, and was sensitive to the latter’s precarious position in 1948. In fact, Copeman was somewhat of a surprising choice to help in Foote’s recruitment, as he was at that time already under a cloud with the CPGB because of his criticism of Communist brutality in the British battalion in Spain. If Moscow Centre had indeed learned of Copeman’s role in the hiring of Foote, it might have been doubly concerned about leakages to British intelligence over Foote’s mission in Switzerland. While all of this information was public at the time, none of these considerations appear to have been picked up after Charlotte Haldane’s contribution in the Observer.

Two weeks after Muggeridge’s article appeared, Accoce and Quet were given their chance to respond to his critique. They went on the offensive with some ill-focused bluster, but were on weak ground. Indeed, they admitted later that they had invented part of their story, which cast doubts on anything they wrote, despite their claims to extensive interviewing. (Witnesses do not always tell the truth.) Thus Muggeridge (on January 29) was able to demolish their riposte quite easily, though he did concede that his theory was ‘only a suggestion’. (Did someone have a quiet word with him in the interim?)  Moreover, he made the rather strange observation (given that in his original piece he had described Foote’s Handbook for Spies as ‘excellent’, and had noted its 1964 republication without identifying the obvious anomalies) that ‘though Messrs Accoce and Quet make a slighting reference to Alexander Foote, they seem to me to have drawn heavily on his Handbook for Spies in compiling their own, in my opinion, far flimsier and more credulous account of the Lucy set-up.’ Thus, despite his equivocal judgment on the merits of Foote’s book,  for a while Muggeridge had the last word  ̶  maybe a protest against a cover-up that he deemed pointless, and one that had condemned his friend Foote to a miserable and lonely life. A few years later, however, Muggeridge did go two steps further: hiding behind the protection of an American magazine, Esquire, in the September 1968 issue he went so far as to name ‘Bletchley’ as the location where the cryptographic work was done, and then asserted, more confidently, that ‘the Russians did get all relevant Bletchley material, routed to them via the ‘Lucy’ setup in Switzerland, whence it was transmitted to Moscow as having come from dissident German staff officers’. The seed had been cast, but appeared not to have landed on fertile ground.

Yet a few more years later, perhaps emboldened by other accounts starting to leak out, Muggeridge even identified the source of his information as Foote himself. In Volume 2 of his autobiography, Chronicles of Wasted Time, titled The Infernal Grove (published in 1973), Muggeridge repeated many ideas and phrases he had used in his Observer piece, but now explicitly quoted Foote as his source for the intelligence that Stalin was receiving ‘the requisite Bletchley material’ via the Lucy Ring in Switzerland. No one appeared to challenge this assertion, maybe not wishing to draw attention to the troublesome matter. Why Muggeridge, having admittedly protected Foote from any breach of secrets in 1967, would now claim that the Comintern radio-operator had revealed the whole story to him, has, however, not been addressed. Was it a harmless oversight? Or had he out of necessity been over-careful about Foote’s situation in 1967? It seems that no one pointed out this inconsistency to him.

Alarms and Diversions

Between the publication of Muggeridge’s Observer piece, and that of his autobiography, however, some significant events had occurred. It should be pointed out that all employees at Bletchley Park had signed the Official Secrets Act, and had thus promised to remain silent about their work, and even the existence of Bletchley Park itself. As Christopher Andrew wrote: “At the end of the Second World War, most of those who had been ‘indoctrinated’ into Ultra believed that it would never be revealed.”  Thus it was no doubt insulting to all of them that Muggeridge, as a former officer of SIS, would be allowed to refer to a centre dedicated to decryption, and even to name it, without any sanctions. However, when the work of a proven spy was published the same year (1968), identifying the Government Code and Cypher School, and describing the process of intercepting foreign traffic, the shock in many quarters must have been intense. For that is what Kim Philby revealed in his My Silent War, as Chapter 4 of Sonia’s Radio explained.

Philby’s escape to Moscow in 1963 had been a great embarrassment to the head of wartime SIS, Stewart Menzies, who, as Trevor-Roper reported, when challenged tried to downplay the significance of Philby’s role in SIS. But too many people knew the extent of Philby’s influence. Menzies had retired in 1952, but now had to endure the scandal of the fact that he had been responsible for recruiting, nurturing, protecting and promoting perhaps the most dedicated of the ‘Cambridge Spies’. Jeffery’s history of SIS contains the facsimile of a letter written by Menzies to the Foreign Office explaining how such an ‘able man’ as Philby could not possibly be released from working for SIS. Moreover, Menzies was not universally admired. Cavendish-Bentinck (the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee during the war) famously described him as ‘neither strong nor intelligent’, and opined that had he not had the fortune to be in charge of GC&CS after the death of his predecessor, Admiral Sinclair, in 1939, he would not have survived as head of SIS. Menzies died before Philby’s book was published, but, as his biographer Anthony Cave-Brown informed us, he had before his death been able to examine the proofs, with notable dismay.

Thus it is reasonable to assume that, once the cat was out of the bag, many officers who had been close to the cryptological events of World War II might have believed that a broader exposure was desirable: to set the record straight, to correct the unbalanced reputation of Menzies (and enhance their own for posterity, no doubt), by not just helping the veil to be lifted from the activities at Bletchley Park, but even to allude to the special project that, so they might have believed, helped win the war – the sharing of Ultra secrets with the Russians. But one thing at a time. The world did not yet know about Ultra, the secret of which was not declassified until the mid-1970s. That process, however, was no doubt facilitated by the gradual leaks of information that emanated from those who believed that their efforts demanded greater public credit, and thought to even the balance of bad publicity that had accrued to SIS and GCHQ from Philby’s acts and revelations. Other scholars put out tempting hints about collusion: the renowned chronicler of German intelligence, Ladislas Farago, in his 1971 book The Game of the Foxes, issued only one sentence on the Lucy Ring, but it hinted at sharing of agents: “It was there [Berne], too, that the British and Soviet secret services gained access to the operations plans [sic] and tactical dispositions of the Wehrmacht, through Alexander Foote and Rudolf Roessler,  . . .”. Even though Farago finessed the issue of the source, Foote was in this way explicitly identified as an agent of the British.

This story was soon amplified. Richard Deacon (the author of A History of the British Secret Service, published in 1969) was not a scholarly historian. His real name was Donald McCormick, he had worked for naval intelligence during World War II, and he had many contacts in the intelligence world, including Ian Fleming, from whom he gleaned his stories. His motivations appear to have been more for the journalistic main chance when he made his revelations. He openly claimed that Russian agents had been forewarned by spies within British institutions of Krivitsky’s disclosures, thus hastening the defector’s death, and he also trashed the theories of Accoce and Quet about the communications of multiple traitors within the German military machine: moreover, the information (so he pointed out) had arrived too regularly to have come from spies in Germany. The facts were quite clear, in his account. British Intelligence had cracked German military codes at Bletchley Park, with the aid of cipher machines captured from German submarines; neutral Switzerland was the ideal place for disseminating material to the Soviets; the Lucy Ring was an instrument of the British Secret Service; Roessler was known by the Czechs through the shadowy figure of van Narvig, and had spied for them; and Alexander Foote had for a long time been an agent of SIS and thus performed a patriotic service for his country.

In retrospect, if the accounts also leaked to Read and Fisher are to be believed, Deacon was right on the mark. And his book must have caused a few feathers to be ruffled in Whitehall. As British mandarins discussed the thorny problem of how to reveal the Bletchley Park story to the world at large, further accounts seeped out. Barton Whaley was an American academic who focused on deception and counter-deception – not just in military fields. His 1973 work, Codeword Barbarossa, inevitably concentrated on Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, but his insights are provocative, since, based on his research and interviews, he concluded that Foote and Roessler had indeed been active in 1941, warning Stalin through the Lucy Ring about Hitler’s intentions, a theory that goes much against the conventional grain that Lucy himself was not introduced until 1942.  Whaley was also a champion of Muggeridge, and made the following telling observation: “Muggeridge’s hypotheses drew immediate favorable attention in Germany, where any allegation of treason in the OKW [Oberkommando der Wehrmacht] is still excitedly rationalized away in many circles. More recently, Muggeridge has raised his original tentative speculation [i.e. in the Observer in 1963] to outright assertion [i.e. in Esquire in 1968], although he gives no evidence for this change in status.” (Maybe because Foote was really dead by then?) Yet, even though Whaley directly pointed out the links between the Swiss and British Intelligence (his contact, Puenter, known as PAKBO, the main source of information on German plans, was said to be working with SIS’s John Salter), he was not confident enough to go the whole way, and thus describe the Lucy Ring as an agency of British Intelligence, and he still gave credit to the assumption that several Nazi informers were providing the material.

The Ultra Secret Is Revealed

Explanations for the eventual decision to allow the Ultra secret to be exposed tend to overlook the pressure applied by Muggeridge and Philby, and frequently cite works published in other languages, such as Gustave Bertrand’s Enigma, which appeared in 1973.  The story of Bletchley Park and Enigma decryption was officially released in 1974, when F. W. Winterbotham’s The Ultra Secret was published, albeit with some reluctant approval. Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Slessor claimed in his Introduction to the book that he had been trying for twenty years to get the ban lifted, and admitted how the prohibition had inhibited any comprehensive writing of military history. Winterbotham’s entry in the Dictionary of National Biography betrays the reluctance of the government: ‘. . . he had had the text of his book vetted by the authorities, who finally allowed him to publish it, although they did not endorse it.’ In his autobiography, The Ultra Spy, published in 1989, Winterbotham revealed that, in 1972, he had approached Admiral Denning at the Ministry of Defence after an unidentified journalist had come to pick his brains about Ultra. He eventually managed to convince Denning that a ‘proper account of the Ultra secret should be published as soon as possible’. As is characteristic of such accounts, the claims of Winterbotham and Slessor do not gel neatly, and Winterbotham starts to display a pattern of self-promotion. Richard Aldrich, in his history of GCHQ, attributes the decision to desires by the government to balance the negative publicity arising from Philby’s absconding with positive PR: moreover, it could not control the stories about code-breaking coming out in the United States. On the other hand, Cave-Brown identifies Alistair Denniston’s son, Robin, as the agent who pushed through the publication of The Ultra Secret, as well as that of Philby’s memoir, as acts of retribution for the slight on his father.

Winterbotham was a respectable choice as chronicler, since he had set up the first Scientific Intelligence Unit in SIS in 1939, and had been a vital part of the project at Bletchley.  He had worked directly for Menzies, establishing Hut 3, which took control of the interpretation and packaging of raw decrypts with the help of intelligence officers recruited from the services, setting up the shadow OKW, and arranging for the secure distribution of Ultra material to allied commanders and intelligence officers who ‘needed to know’. But his book contained many errors, primarily because of the author’s lack of understanding of cryptology (which was an aspect of the whole Enigma story that Denning demanded should not be covered): the authorities allowed them to stand. Moreover, covering the project of releasing the material to the Soviets was not part of Winterbotham’s charter. He also received much criticism, primarily from those who had taken their vow of silence very seriously, for spearheading the disclosure of the Ultra secret, but also for some self-aggrandisement. In the 1993 publication Codebreakers: the Inside Story of Bletchley Park, Edward Thomas (who had worked in Hut 3) set out to clear up one of the ‘many mis-statements’ that Winterbotham made about Bletchley, namely that he had established it and staffed it with German-speaking officers. Thomas claimed that none of such a group had been recruited, implying thereby that Winterbotham had in his account attracted renown to himself instead of a Captain Saunders.

Winterbotham made one important statement, however, that demands close analysis, and represents some evidence for his later surreptitious disclosures. On page 92, he wrote:  “I was never told by Menzies the real reason for the takeover, but gradually pieced together the facts that the Foreign Office and the directors of Intelligence of the armed services became alarmed at the power that Ultra had placed in Menzies’ hands, so that the Foreign Office decided to place control of this vital source of information in the hands of the Joint Intelligence Committee, which was given a Foreign Office chairman (Cavendish-Bentinck). It had been considered advisable to put all the departments at Bletchley under one director, Commander Travis, who was put in to replace Commander Denniston, the real founder of Ultra, now posted back to London on other cryptographic duties.”

The ‘takeover’ that Winterbotham referred to was the handing over (in July 1942) of Winterbotham’s ‘shadow OKW’ to the General Administration at Bletchley, a transfer over which Winterbotham declared some veiled resentment. Yet this is at first glance a somewhat puzzling observation, since the new leader Travis still reported to Menzies, and the loss of one responsibility undergone by Winterbotham was compensated by his increased activities managing the Special Liaison Units that managed the secure distribution of Ultra to the field, adding now responsibilities to the US command. By all accounts, he executed this task with flair and skill, which makes his 1943 award of a mere CBE somewhat surprising. In this role, moreover, he would have been intimately familiar with the communication facilities being set up by Gambier-Parry of SIS’s Section VIII between Britain and offices abroad, including Switzerland, yet he obviously judged this change of assignment as something of a demotion. In his autobiography, he claimed that Menzies was too weak to resist the encroachment of the naval Commander in charge of cypher-breaking at Bletchley, who had decided ‘he wanted my Hut 3’. But was this the whole story?

Perhaps one can read a different message between the lines. Winterbotham’s respect for Denniston (‘the real founder of Ultra’) is clear, and maybe Denniston, who was very concerned about the security of Ultra, had complained about Menzies’s proprietary approach to the traffic, and his personal delivery of the messages to Churchill’s office, when it needed to be owned and assessed by the official Joint Intelligence Committee. It could have been that such insubordination had put Denniston in bad odour, resulting in his demotion. Maybe Denniston, Winterbotham, and Cavendish-Bentinck had all conspired to wrest control of Ultra away from Menzies, whom none of them respected very much, and this was Winterbotham’s coded method of explaining how they had attempted to undermine Menzies’s authority. In the mid-nineteen-seventies, however, they needed help in getting their message out.

It is not easy now to discern the factions involved in the disputes over control of Ultra in 1941 and 1942. Jeffery explicitly states that Menzies twice had to fight off attempts by the directors of intelligence in the three armed services to wrest control away from him. These three were authorised recipients of Ultra, and thus intimately familiar with it, but Goodman informs us that Cavendish-Bentinck, the very effective chairman of the JIC (but a civilian among military men) was incredibly not permitted to see the transcripts until well after the war started. Yet Cavendish-Bentinck had a good sense for security, and for trust in information sharing. He did not consider that Churchill should have access to information that had not been properly assessed by the JIC. Churchill was wont to trust raw Ultra data too credulously: sometimes he held it close to his chest away from his own officers, but at other times, as Peter Calvocoressi observed in Top Secret Ultra, he had to be restrained from telling too much. There were clearly tensions between the suppliers and the customers of intelligence – a not unprecedented phenomenon. But there was also strong rivalry between the Navy and the RAF’s Coastal Command in the battle against submarines, and the Navy, with its traditional leading role in intelligence, won out. Winterbotham blamed Ian Fleming, who, it should be emphasised, was also a source of ‘information’ to some of the 1970s chroniclers. Winterbotham and Cavendish-Bentinck were natural allies.

Then again, Nigel West implies that Denniston, while struggling with the pressures of growth at Bletchley Park, possibly received too much blame for the administrative problems, and, indeed, disputes over Denniston’s merits and failings carried on in correspondence into the 1980s. At the outset of the war, the Government Code and Cypher School was in fact managed by a Joint Committee of Control that included members of Bletchley Park (Travis and Tiltman) as well as officers from SIS (Winterbotham and Gambier-Parry) under the leadership of Menzies’s personal representative, Captain Hastings. Yet Denniston clearly had problems with relationships. Welchman’s biographer, Joel Greenberg, reports that Travis and Denniston could not stand each other, and that Travis had threatened that he would leave if Denniston were not dismissed. Denniston was also a sworn enemy of Richard Gambier-Parry of the Radio Security Service. This was clearly a personnel and bureaucratic mess. In addition, much of the tension arose because of the insertion of armed service experts into the centre, who had ideas about interpretation that went against the grain of the civilian staff who had developed good objective practices for assessing the traffic that came in to their hands. Thus it is probable that Winterbotham got himself embroiled in the controversy, struggling with dual allegiances.  Menzies (because of his reputation, and also due to his personality) was not strong enough to set down any firm policy, and thus resorted to the tactic of a temporising ‘inquiry’. When Hastings completed his report in the spring of 1942, Travis and the Directors of Intelligence came out of the episode rosily, while Winterbotham and Denniston suffered. Denniston was a natural third aggrieved party.

Rivalries and Resentments

I return to the literary chronology. In the year following Winterbotham’s revelations, in 1975, a new twist to the Ultra story appeared in a work by Charles Whiting. Whiting, a Briton, was a prolific author of thrillers who, although born in 1926, managed a varied experience with the Army in Europe at the end World War II. He developed an academic career, gaining his degree at Leeds University, as well as studying in several European universities. In his book Spymasters (as explained in Chapter 4 of Sonia’s Radio) Whiting openly acknowledged several high-powered names who had helped him in his researches, including R. V. Jones, Kenneth Strong, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Alexander Denniston, as well as Winterbotham himself. While it was not always clear which luminary had provided assistance in what areas (and thus no one could claim that Whiting’s thesis was unanimously approved by all those he acknowledged), in certain places he was very explicit. He emphasized the fact that Winterbotham had reportedly pressed upon Menzies that security over Enigma should be tightened, and thus the concept of the shadow OKW had come into being – initially for the purposes of keeping Allied personnel (not the Soviets) in the general dark as to sources. Yet Whiting echoed the bold breakthrough assertion that SIS was feeding this information to Foote in Lausanne: Menzies and Winterbotham ‘cooked up’ a plan to get the messages to Stalin when the official channel via Moscow (and Kuibyshev) was not working. Whiting also claimed that Dansey had boasted to Philby about the security of his carefully-built Lucy spy-ring, while adding that he did not believe that Philby understood the totality of the deception, even though the spy was aware of the interception process at the time.

Whiting’s confidants were clearly hard on the heels of the authorities in wanting the full story told. It was Whiting who first hinted at some of the stresses and rivalries at the time, which may have encouraged some officers harmed by Menzies to try to gain retribution for their mistreatment – even though Menzies was no longer alive. Whiting declared that Menzies ‘settled scores’ for past slights. He suggested that it was Denniston’s success at Bletchley Park that had gained him powerful enemies, ‘in particular Menzies’. Admitting that Denniston was sometimes his own worst enemy, ‘impatient, secretive, and quarrelsome’, Whiting stated that he fell out not only with Whitehall but also many of his colleagues. Menzies cruelly demoted Denniston, denied him the knighthood he deserved, and, after the war, unable to live on a pension of £591 a year, Denniston had to take up teaching again.

As for Winterbotham, he was reportedly left completely pensionless, and, after some time spent at BOAC, was, according to Whiting, left penniless. Yet this can hardly be true: Winterbotham was able to leave BOAC in 1952, and with his third wife, Petrea, left Effingham in Surrey to buy an eighty-acre farm in Devon. His distresses were probably less to do with money than with lack of recognition. It is revealing to note that Slessor observed in his Introduction to Winterbotham’s work that ‘it is a curious reflection on our system of Honours and Awards that he should have finished up after the war as a retired Group Captain with a CBE on a quiet farm in Devon’, hinting, perhaps, at unpublishable slights. Winterbotham himself contributed a fresh insight in his autobiography: one incident that pushed him over the edge and leave SIS, he wrote, was his re-assignment, at the end of the war, as a low-grade permanent civil servant by the Air Ministry, who claimed not to know what Winterbotham had been doing during the war, a snub that must certainly have soured him. Again, one suspects that this improbable incident is not the whole story. Maybe the authorities disapproved of his romantic life: as his autobiography discloses, he was a ladies’ man of some repute, and had been divorced twice by 1946. (He deftly ignores his second marriage in his autobiography.) Might some of these dalliances have made him a security risk? And, as has been shown, Winterbotham may have misrepresented his whole contribution.

Yet it must also be pointed out that Winterbotham’s professional exploits before the war, when on behalf of SIS he had negotiated with German Air Intelligence behind the back of the Foreign Office, did not endear him to its mandarins, and, indeed, Winterbotham’s account, in his Nazi Connection (1978), of what occurred at that time may not be wholly reliable. Some have claimed that Winterbotham had nurtured sympathies for the fascists in the mid-1930s, provoked by a profound hatred of communism, but that resentment may have been engendered by some of his bogus reports, part of a subterfuge to mislead his German contacts, that were misinterpreted by the Foreign Office. In any case, it appears he developed enemies. The hypocrisies and jealousies of the British diplomatic and intelligence establishment will be explored later, when the tribulations of Victor Cavendish-Bentinck are examined, but for the moment, I merely observe that those with an axe to grind over Stewart Menzies, or how pettily they had been treated after the war, believed they could regain some integrity by telling the truth: they did not need to spread any untruths.

One can see echoes of such frustrations elsewhere. The desire for greater openness about intelligence matters was apparently broad in the 1970s. For example, the writer of espionage thrillers and ex-SIS officer, John Le Carré, has recently written that Philby’s confidant, the officer who interrogated Philby in Beirut just before he absconded, Nicholas Elliot, explained to him how he was at that time obstructed from going public with his experiences. (Elliott, incidentally, took over Dansey’s agent-ring in Switzerland after the war.) “He was frustrated by our former Service’s refusal to let him reveal secrets that in his opinion had long ago passed their keep-by date. He believed he had a right, indeed a duty to give his story to posterity.” (The Pigeon Tunnel, p 177) Thus it is safe to conclude that the continued secrecy was resented by many who believed that the public had a right to know more about what had been, to them, honourable and successful operations. Le Carré omits, however, to mention Elliott’s highly entertaining 1993 ‘memoir’ With My Little Eye: unfortunately, Elliott did not disclose there much that was secret and pertinent to this story, limiting his formal disclosures to fresh observations on the disappearance of Commander Crabb, the diver who in 1956 died in Portsmouth Harbour while investigating a Soviet vessel, the Ordzhonikidzhe.

But it is not always easy to distinguish disclosures from disinformation. One curious contribution to the genre (which I have encountered only since I wrote Chapter 5) is that by a certain R. A. Haldane, whose 1978 book, The Hidden War, gave voice to Muggeridge’s claims, and highlighted the role of Lucy. Haldane nevertheless argued that ‘the theory that we fed the information via Lucy – who would thus have been no more than a cut-out – does not wash. What we fed to the Russians was fed direct’. To support this hypothesis, Haldane shrewdly pointed out the very vital fact (as I explained in Chapter 4) that the detailed requests that the Soviets made would have required an analytical capability stronger than information provided passively by intercepted messages. Without clarifying which particular agency, in what location, via which medium effected this transaction, Haldane’s elliptical comments do suggest that the message-passing occurred in Switzerland. It is obvious that passing Soviet requests for enhanced analysis via Roessler (who could not even operate a wireless set) would have been logistically pointless, and frustratingly slow. But the British believed that maintaining the façade of Lucy and his links was essential to keeping the trust of the Soviets.

The outcome was that Haldane discounted the role of subterfuge that Lucy gave to the whole operation, and which turned suspicion towards leaks in the German High Command. Thus, despite his analysis about the probability of a direct link between the Soviets and British intelligence, his conclusion surprisingly backed off from any tentative hypothesis, and treated the whole matter as a mystery. Moreover, he treated Foote’s memoir with a respect (‘it is entirely genuine’) that was unmerited when coming from an insider in MI5 who should have known the sordid history behind its creation. (He claimed that Foote purposely misidentified Roessler because the latter was still alive, but failed to record that Foote used the name of another real person, Sedlacek, rather than picking a pseudonym, as was used for other characters.) And why was Haldane not more demanding of the evidence behind the claims of Muggeridge and Calvocoressi, instead of pretending that there was probably no one still alive who knew the answer (p 116)? His argument is simply illogical.

Indeed, one has to wonder what the precise experience and qualifications of Haldane, who otherwise wrote a very competent and insightful book, really were. The flyleaf of the volume says that he was ‘a former intelligence officer and son of the Assistant Director of the M.I.5’. [From one hint in his book, and some elementary searches on Google, I have established that R. A.’s father was one Lt.-Col. M.M. Haldane, one of the first officers appointed to the future MI5 in 1914. R.A. was in fact a third cousin of the spy J.B.S.: R. A. was probably unaware of the irony of this relationship. The renowned Viscount Haldane was a cousin of M.M.] In his ‘Author’s Note’, Haldane said that, after cipher work, he moved to Home Security War Room, and in late 1941 was appointed Personal Intelligence Staff Officer to Brigadier-General C. C. Lucas, Director of Intelligence, Home Security, and a member of the Home Defence Committee. A gentleman of that name and rank did indeed exist, but a Google search elicits little, apart from the fact that Lucas was an aide to General French in WWI, and that he wrote a foreword to a book on how to ride side-saddle in 1938 – hardly the calibre of a man entrusted with Ultra secrets. Moreover, no such entity as the Home Defence Committee appears to have existed at that time; the Home Defence Executive, which was set up on May 10, 1940 ‘to coordinate the anti-invasion preparations of all the Service and civilian departments’ (Hinsley), was chaired by Findlater Stewart.

As for Haldane’s career, the author apparently wrote other books, on encipherment and business fraud, and was active after the war with the Nature Conservancy, but has otherwise sunk without trace. I have not come across The Hidden War in any bibliography. The book does indicate some expertise, and an experience in intelligence close to the major deception projects undertaken, but the purpose of its coverage of Enigma and Ultra is questionable. Four major aspects of his narrative, namely i) his use of an apparent cover organisation to conceal his role; ii) his disingenuousness over Foote’s memoir, iii) his highly ambiguous argument about Britain’s role in releasing Ultra to the Soviets, and iv) his failure to follow up research with Muggeridge and Calvocoressi (at least), suggest that his publication might have been part of a public relations exercise on behalf of MI5 and SIS.

Operation Lucy

The next major event in the saga (the publications of Radó, the CIA and Moravec having been covered in Chapter 5) was arguably the arrival of Operation Lucy, by the journalists Anthony Read and David Fisher, in 1980. It is difficult to review critically this volume, as it lacks any references apart from the confidences that are attributed to some of its advisers during the course of the text. It has a superficially impressive list of Acknowledgments, including such obvious heroes as the now familiar cast of Peter Calvocoressi, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Ronald Lewin, and F. W. Winterbotham. Yet some scoundrels also appear here: Jürgen Kucynski, the famous subversive and active Communist, brother of the spy Ursula, aka Sonia; Sándor Radó, now graced with the title ‘Professor’, as if that gave him more credibility, as well as a host of not immediately familiar characters whose authority and counsel are uncertain. Did the authors implicitly trust everything these people said to them, without questioning their motives? It is not clear. Whatever the methodology (if it can be called that), the message arriving from the Read/Fisher book is unfailingly clear. The Lucy Ring was a creature of Colonel Dansey and his Z Organisation; Foote had been recruited by Dansey back in 1936; the use of wireless links between London and Foote was a perfect mechanism for passing Ultra information to the Soviets; Sedlacek was in parallel receiving such information from his Czech bosses via the Woldingham transmitter; the information was presented as if it had been leaked from the German OKW to Roessler; and the Soviets began to rely exclusively on Lucy for their knowledge of the Nazi order of battle at Kursk and elsewhere.

At key points, Read and Fisher invoke their informants by name. For example, Cavendish-Bentinck: “When we talked to Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, wartime head of Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee, the overseer and co-ordinator of all Intelligence activity, he indicated Foote as one point of access and control. Foote was the obvious way in for Ultra material, particularly as he had his own transmitter/receiver – which could be used to contact Britain just as easily as Moscow – and his own personal cipher, which was unknown to Radó. There was no way that Radó or anyone else in the network could have checked what Foote was sending to Centre. In any case, Foote also had his own sources of intelligence in Germany and Switzerland, and so could be expected to send additional material to Moscow. He always remained semi-autonomous in the network.” And Winterbotham: “However, it would have been very rash for the British to have relied solely on Foote. The very fact that he was an obvious choice for use by London made it dangerous both to the security of Ultra and to Foote’s own cover as a genuine Soviet agent. In any case, such simplicity and directness were not Dansey’s way of doing things. He always favoured complexity, choosing twisting back alleyways in preference to the broad highway. The author of the first book on Ultra, Group Captain F. W. Winterbotham – who also confirmed that Britain controlled the Swiss network throughout the war – told us that this was typical of the way Dansey operated, and that he revelled in the pleasure of being able to ‘get one up’ on his rivals in the SIS.” (both on p 99) (Winterbotham divulged to his journalist friends far more than he ever committed to paper himself.)

Perhaps it is wiser to introduce here a contemporaneous critique of the book, by Edward Crankshaw, in the Observer of October 12, 1980. Crankshaw had good credentials: in 1940 he had joined SIS from the Army, where he had been a Signals Intelligence officer, and was sent to Moscow in 1941 to represent that function, to communicate the fruits of Ultra to his Soviet peers, and to try to gain captured documents from the Russian in exchange. As Calvocoressi wrote: “Attached to the British military mission in Moscow was a single officer – Major Crankshaw, already mentioned – who represented BP, Broadway, Military Intelligence and also the Admiralty. He was a complex node of intelligence in his own person and he reported to the ambassador who in turn passed on personally whatever secret intelligence London decided to vouchsafe.” (Crankshaw was educated at Bishop’s Stortford, the same school that produced Dick White and the Spycatcher officer, Peter Wright.) So he was undoubtedly an authority on the Ultra distribution program, and witnessed at first hand the breakdown of co-operation between the British and the Soviets in his time in Russia. The switch to using the Lucy network occurred before Crankshaw was re-assigned, in 1943, to Bletchley Park as liaison officer on matters Soviet.

Crankshaw’s Observer piece was titled ‘Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all’ (playing off the fact that the mysterious Sedlacek, also known as Selzinger, and owning a British passport in the name of Simpson, provided by SIS, was known by all as ‘Uncle Tom’), and Crankshaw crisply endorsed the main planks of Read’s and Fisher’s case, which he described as ‘a hilarious read’, while conceding that the authors may not have realised just how comical their concoction was. “So Lucy in Switzerland was built up into a legendary secret agent with sources in the German High Command and used as the main channel for telling the Russians what Hitler was going to do next and when and how”, he explained, adding: “The authors get into their stride and tell this absurd, enthralling, sometimes moving and formidably complicated tale so admirably that one forgets the huge unanswered questions”.  While Crankshaw identified several inaccuracies in the story, he credited the authors with having attained as close and correct an account of the liaison (‘if that is the word’) between British and Soviet Intelligence as was humanly possible. So why would Crankshaw deceive about such a serious matter as this? His experience and evidence speak for themselves.

In fact Crankshaw may have been Muggeridge’s informer. In the Introduction to his 1940 work, The Thirties, Muggeridge explained that he had completed his manuscript in December 1939 ‘in a barrack hut at Ash Vale, near Aldershot’, when he was a member of the embryonic Intelligence Corps. On one occasion (probably early in 1940), he had been instructed to meet an officer from the War Office at the local railway station. After the customary salute, he accompanied the officer in the staff car, with Muggeridge sitting next to the driver, and the officer viewable in the driving-mirror, at which point the two recognized each other. The officer was Edward Crankshaw. “To the consternation of our driver, we began to fall about in the car in a condition of hopeless mirth at the unconscious deception we had practiced on one another. I believe I never took the war, certainly not the army, quite seriously again,” he wrote. Either Muggeridge and Crankshaw engaged in a conspiracy over the distribution of Ultra, or they shared a less than utterly respectful regard for the solemn self-delusions that accompany the exercise of intelligence and counter-intelligence. The latter explanation is the more likely.

Scandal and Controversy

Meanwhile, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck provided more solid testimony. Cavendish-Bentinck (later Lord Portland) has been generally regarded as a highly competent Director of the Joint Intelligence Committee, a post he held throughout the Second World War. Michael S. Goodman is expansive with praise for him in his official history of the JIC. Major-General Kenneth Strong wrote, in his Men of Intelligence, that ‘when Bill Cavendish-Bentinck came upon the scene in October 1939 the British Intelligence community was confused and seeking leadership,’ and that he turned out to be ‘an excellent chairman, tactful, relaxed, and good-tempered’. Cavendish-Bentinck was a shrewd judge of political and military opportunities and risks: he quickly pointed out the hazards associated with the launch of SOE, he was one of the few who took seriously Hitler’s threats to invade the Soviet Union, and he was one of the first to recognize that the Soviet Union might be a post-war threat (as Percy Craddock records), before that was an acceptable opinion in the Foreign Office.

As has been explained, in the reorganization tribulations of GC&CS in early 1942 overall responsibility had been placed under the custodianship of the Joint Intelligence Committee, giving Cavendish-Bentinck an intimate role in guiding the use of Ultra. This was clearly a point of contention between Menzies and Cavendish-Bentinck. It was also something that irked Winterbotham, who could not hide his sense of disappointment with Menzies in both his books. Lastly, there is confirmation of the leads which Cavendish-Bentinck apparently fed to Read and Fisher, in the 1986 biography of him written by Patrick Howarth, Intelligence Chief Extraordinary. On page 164, Howarth casually recorded what Cavendish-Bentinck had obviously told him: “In practice one of the methods adopted for conveying information of strategic importance to the Soviet Union was to leak it through SIS to known Soviet agents in neutral countries, particularly Switzerland. This served incidentally to enhance the credibility, and also the post-war reputations, of the Soviet agents involved.”

Did Cavendish-Bentinck harbour a grudge, as well? He was well exposed to the foibles of Menzies. He was involved in two committees that analysed SIS’s role and organisation. The first was initiated by the Foreign Office’s Permanent Under-Secretary Alexander Cadogan in 1943, when Cavendish-Bentinck served under Nevile Bland. The second was set up in June 1945, with Cavendish-Bentinck himself as chairman, to consider the post-war shape of SIS, which had generally been regarded as an organisational disaster throughout the war, as Philip Davies has vigorously asserted in his MI6 and the Machinery of Spying. Menzies admittedly had inherited a broken structure in 1939, after Sinclair’s death. Sinclair had even merged Dansey’s Z Organisation, which had been established as a back-up command in the event that SIS outstations were destroyed – as happened when Hitler swiftly invaded most of Europe   ̶   with SIS, which defeated the purpose of the set-up. Yet Menzies, as critics like Jeffery and Davies have pointed out, failed lamentably to create an efficient structure throughout the war, appointing effectively two vice-directors in Vivian and Dansey, who could not stand each other, and sustaining a much too flat management hierarchy, with lack of any proper delegation. For similar incompetence, Menzies had demoted and humiliated Denniston, but, instead of undergoing the same treatment himself, he exploited his knowledge of how Whitehall worked, and his individual relationship with Churchill, to protect his throne. Jeffery has categorised Menzies‘s treatment of Denniston (and others) as ‘unsentimental’, but a better epithet might be ‘unfair’ or ‘vindictive’: Menzies’s treatment by his employers was certainly more generous.

Moreover, Cavendish-Bentinck was considered as a leading candidate to replace Menzies as head of SIS in 1949, after he had been recalled from his position as Ambassador to Poland in less than honourable circumstances, with pressure coming from Communist sympathizers in the Labour government. Yet this consideration was plagued with controversy. Jeffery relates how William Hayter (head of the Services Liaison Department in the Foreign Office), and Howard Caccia (Cavendish-Bentinck’s short-termed successor on the JIC) both considered him an excellent choice to succeed Menzies, despite the fact that Cavendish-Bentinck had been denied the Ambassadorship to Brazil in 1947 on policy grounds. External circumstances hurt Cavendish-Bentinck. Shortly beforehand, details of his marital problems had appeared in the newspapers: his wife had refused him a divorce, and he had made several admissions of extra-marital affairs in his testimony, and had had to resign from the Diplomatic Service. Thinking perhaps that such rules did not apply to the still Secret Service (the existence of which was not even admitted publically), Hayter and Caccia pressed their case, but were overruled by the veto of the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin.

Goodman’s Official History of the Joint Intelligence Committee (2014) makes no mention of the SIS appointment, but does add some colourful detail. In a scenario eerily reminiscent of how the wife of MI5’s leader of counter-espionage Guy Liddell, a lady named Calypso (née Baring), had left her husband for the United States when war broke out, Cavendish-Bentinck’s wife, an American heiress called Clothilde Quigley, had also departed across the Atlantic with their children at the start of the war. Wishing to re-marry, Cavendish-Bentinck had started divorce proceedings at the time he moved to Warsaw. Yet, as Goodman reminds us, ‘under F. O. rules of the time,  no one in the  diplomatic service was permitted to re-marry without the permission of the Secretary of State’, that individual no doubt being an impeccable judge of public probity and private morals.  The outcome was that Cavendish-Bentinck’s political career came to an end, and his pension rights were terminated.

The same rules did not apply to heads of intelligence services so strictly. Menzies himself had gained a divorce in 1931, after his wife of thirteen years, Lady Avice Sackville (who became the model for George Smiley’s wife, Lady Anne, in John Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) left him for another man. Yet such was the scandal of divorce that Menzies had had to resign from his regiment, and exert special influences to keep his job. And, as Goodman adds, there had been a precedent in the Foreign Office: Cavendish-Bentinck’s predecessor, Ralph Skrine Stephenson, had been allowed to re-marry. Cavendish-Bentinck’s error had been allowing the messy details of his private life to enter the columns of the press. Moreover, one of his most vigorous champions was Lord Beaverbrook, whom Bevin could not stand. With a classic touch of restrained sardonicism, Cavendish-Bentinck wrote to Bevin’s secretary: “The one matter on which I have strong feelings is that I should receive my pension, as I do not consider that an unfortunate divorce suit should be placed in a lower category than idleness or incompetence, and I understand that those who have to resign for these reasons are granted pensions.” But his fate was sealed.

The ‘revisionists’ can be said to fall into two camps. Muggeridge and Crankshaw were temporary intelligence officers, a touch cynical about the vanity and self-delusion that accompanied intelligence work, who believed that the façade needed to be undermined. Muggeridge was also obviously affected by the plight of his friend Foote, abandoned and abused, a traditional pawn in an unwritten novel by John Le Carré. Denniston, Winterbotham and Cavendish-Bentinck, on the other hand, were professionals who all harboured a strong belief in the importance of proper security for Ultra, whether it was to ensure that the right persons received it after proper assessment, or whether it was driven by the conviction that it should be kept from the eyes of those who might abuse it. It is not clear that they wanted the true story to come out because they were proud of the way that the information had been massaged and sent to Stalin, or because they were disgusted at the risks that the breach of security might have entailed. Yet it must have been particularly irksome for the three of them that, having instituted extremely tight procedures for distributing Ultra information to military commanders, they learned that GCHQ, SIS and MI5 all turned out to be leakier than the proverbial sieve. It seems inarguable that they agreed that Menzies’s reputation had been allowed to be swelled disproportionately, and that the revelation of the truth would no longer harm any national security interests.

Cavendish-Bentinck’s biography appeared in the mid 1980s, as a late sally in the war of words. By then, of course, Hinsley had issued his famous denial (“There is no truth in the much-publicised claim that the British authorities made use of the ‘Lucy’ ring”), effectively declaring that all of what I have listed above was merely tittle-tattle.  But why was there no protest? No inquiry? No interview? Why were Hinsley and Winterbotham not brought together in a studio? Why did BBC Panorama’s Ludovic Kennedy (who had survived the Arctic convoys, and whose sister was married to Peter Calvocoressi’s cousin) not take up the challenge? Why did Bruce Page and the Sunday Times’s renowned Insight team not delve into the murky controversy? Perhaps they were warned off. After all, in 1979 both Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross had been unmasked, two more spies (to add to Philby) who had been on the authorised list of Ultra recipients.

It clearly would not have helped the reputation of the British authorities if the world learned that the exercise to put Ultra into Stalin’s hands had been a complete waste of time because the corridors of power were riddled with his spies who were handing the stuff over in such quantities that they taxed the cipher clerks and radio operators in the Soviet Embassy. And the story of Leo Long in MI14 was yet to be revealed. It would not be surprising if British media leaders were advised that any further promotion of the alternative version of history would be harmful to the nation’s security interests, and were required to drop their attentions from the matter. Cavendish-Bentinck’s insertion is a rare example of plain speaking in the 1980s, and Winterbotham’s otherwise highly engaging autobiography – published a year before he died  ̶  was reticent and respectful in the extreme. Either what Winterbotham had divulged earlier was untrue, or he had been muzzled.

Alexander Foote

Lastly, what of Alexander Foote? Not much was added about his career in these works. Nigel West is of the opinion that Foote did not fit the mould of those that Dansey regularly hired for his Z Organisation, and cites Dansey’s deputy, Kenneth Cohen, as stating that he was ‘adamant that Foote had never been an MI6 agent’. Yet Cohen, by his own admission, did not join the group until 1937, while Foote had been recruited in 1936. [* – see below] In their biography of Dansey, Colonel Z, Read and Fisher assert that Dansey kept his groups well compartmentalised, so Cohen might well not have known about Foote. Moreover, Cohen was in charge of French operations during the war, and never responsible for Switzerland. Read and Fisher also assert that Foote was not alone: Dansey had selected other deep agents ‘with suitable qualifications to infiltrate communist spy rings’, although no others have apparently come to light. Maybe they did not survive the Spanish Civil War, or could not build a convincing enough cover to be accepted by Moscow.

[ * Kenneth Cohen’s son, Colin, informs me in January 2018 that his father’s memory was at fault. Commander Cohen was actually recruited by Dansey in 1936. Coldspur]

Yet it must be stated that, overall, hard evidence for Foote’s recruitment is thin, and tantalisingly provocative. The authors of Colonel Z claim Kenneth Cohen, Malcolm Muggeridge, Cavendish-Bentinck (a great admirer of Dansey), Frederick Winterbotham and Nigel West among the experts who provided them information for their story. Did they all see the final text, on which they could not possibly have agreed? Or was Cohen perhaps not telling the truth? That is one of the problems of books with an impressive list of sources and advisors, but where the claims made in the text are not directly linked to each individual contributor. Yet it would be unpractical to think that illuminating new sources will become available, unless an unexpected trove of SIS files is found and declassified.

In summary, the totality of the statements from the various revisionist officers still comprises a weighty message. So many distinguished men, who performed honourably for their country,  were prepared to promulgate statements that together made coherent sense, and helped resolve a longtime puzzle, while Professor Hinsley was allowed – or forced – to deny them in a shabby dismissal. The extraordinary outcome is that the contrarian view has entered the mainstream of public consciousness, but the claims of the authorised historian have remained unchallenged and unamended. Is it not time for an arbiter, wise and unbiased, to make a judgment on this timeworn debate?

New Sources:

SIGINT: The Secret History of Signals Intelligence, 1914-45 by Peter Matthews

The Official History of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Volume 1 by Michael S. Goodman

The Ultra Secret by F. W. Winterbotham

Men of Intelligence by Kenneth Strong

Intelligence at the Top by Kenneth Strong

The Hidden War by R. A. Haldane

The Hidden World by R. A. Haldane

The Pigeon Tunnel by John Le Carré

The Game of the Foxes by Ladislas Farago

The Thirties by Malcolm Muggeridge

The Nazi Connection by F. W. Winterbotham

The Ultra Spy, by F. W. Winterbotham

Unmasked! The Story of Soviet Espionage by Ronald Seth

VENONA: the Greatest Secret of the Cold War by Nigel West

The Philby Affair by Hugh Trevor-Roper

The Illegals by Nigel West

Truth Will Out, by Charlotte Haldane

With My Little Eye, by Nicholas Elliott

Gordon Welchman: Bletchley Park’s Architect of Ultra Intelligence by Joel Greenberg

Reason in Revolt, by Fred Copeman

***************************************

This month’s Commonplace entries can be found here.

This posting was updated on May 12 to correct a fact about Charlotte Haldane, to add an explanatory paragraph about Frederick Copeman, and to expand a statement about Alastair Denniston after I read Greenberg’s biography of Gordon Welchman. After reading Copeman’s autobiography, I added a further paragraph on Copeman and Foote  on May 30. Coldspur

(In this instalment, I examine the career of Alexander Foote in detail, and introduce some evidence that he was indeed employed by SIS. For the preceding instalments, please see SoniasRadio.)

In a review of the career of Alexander Foote, and an assessment of whether he was in fact recruited by Colonel Dansey for the latter’s Z Organisation, five major features of his career as a Soviet radio-operator are worthy of attention. One: the sincerity of Foote’s affiliation to communism and the genuineness of his commitment to espionage on behalf of the Soviet cause; two: his role in Sonia’s arranged marriage to Len Beurton, and in her subsequent move to the United Kingdom; three: his connections in Swiss society that enabled him to arrange funding for Radó’s cash-starved network, when paying for Lucy’s expensive services was a paramount concern; four: his identification of the informant known as ‘Lucy’ and his representation of the latter’s activity; and five: the credibility of his ‘defection’ in Berlin in 1947, when on assignment by the Soviets, and the nature of his subsequent interrogation by MI5. In the various accounts of his actions, certain contradictions point to the credibility of the claims for his recruitment by SIS, which, while substantial, unfortunately repose on largely hearsay evidence.

One of the problems is that much of the published material is inherently unreliable. The memoirs of Sonia and Radó have been broadly criticised as being controlled by their Communist masters. Foote’s memoir (which appeared itself in two self-contradictory versions) was ghost-written by MI5, and contains multiple untruths and distortions (to the extent that a verifiable and reliable account of his career does exist). Foote himself told the historian David Dallin that MI5 had ‘mutilated’ his book. Yet several source documents are available that give a more accurate account of what actually went on at the time, even allowing that the authors of such documents may have been distorting some of the facts themselves. (Even British archives may have been doctored!) The files on Foote’s interrogation by MI5 in 1947, and the 1949 report on the activities of the Rote Kapelle – both available at the National Archives – contain enough clues to counter what has for decades been presented as the ‘official’ story of Foote’s life.

The summarisation of Foote’s career – and in the form that Britain’s Security Services would rather have it expressed – runs as follows. He was born in 1905, in Kirkdale, Liverpool. After attending village school in Yorkshire, he was apprenticed to a salesman in Manchester, but joined the R.A.F. in 1935. A year later, however, he left the air force, and volunteered for the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil war, leaving in December 1936. In September 1938, he returned to England with a certificate of discharge on health grounds. On the recommendation of the British Communist Party, he was recruited by agents of Soviet Military Intelligence for unspecified work in Europe. In October 1938 he met Sonia (Ursula Hamburger, née Kuczynski) in Geneva, and early the following year was given training in sabotage for work in Germany. He introduced his International Brigade colleague, Len Beurton, to Sonia, and the two spent several months, primarily in Munich, planning sabotage activity. Recalled just before the war broke out, he and Beurton received wireless/telegraph training from Sonia, who, with her residence visa about to expire, looked for a way of moving to Britain. She arranged a divorce from her husband, and married Beurton. She was able to escape with her two young children via Portugal to Britain in December 1940/January 1941, while her new husband had to remain in Switzerland because of passport and transit problems. Foote became the leading radio operator in the Swiss network of the Rote Kapelle, and was active until the Rote Drei was dismantled, in 1943, through pressure of the Gestapo on the Swiss authorities. After a period in prison, Foote escaped to France in 1944, contacted his Soviet masters, and agreed to return to the Soviet Union, where he was interrogated, but found not guilty of any misconduct. Over two years later, after special training, he was sent to Berlin in the guise of a German, to prepare for a new mission in South America, but presented himself to the British authorities with a desire to defect. He was brought to Britain and interviewed thoroughly by MI5, who then assisted him in the writing of a memoir, Handbook for Spies, and arranged a job for him in The Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. Foote eluded any vengeance from the Soviet apparat, but died in August 1956.

The problem with this biography is that at every stage, if one delves a little more deeply, contradictions and paradoxes appear. To start with, Foote’s memoir, ghosted by the MI5 officer Courtenay Young, has massive errors of chronology and fact. As an example, in the first edition, published in 1949, Foote identifies the informant known as ‘Lucy’ as one Selzinger, a Czech who worked for his national General Staff. He describes the one occasion when he met him, after their release from prison in 1944, which is worth quoting (p 178): “A quiet, nondescript little man suddenly slipped into a chair at our table and sat down. It was Lucy himself. Anyone less like the spy of fiction it would be hard to imagine. Consequently he was exactly what was wanted for an agent in real life. Undistinguished-looking, of medium height, aged about fifty, with his mild eyes blinking behind glasses, he looked exactly like almost anyone to be found in any suburban train anywhere in the world.” Apart from the contradiction that Selzinger was both ‘little’ and ‘of medium height’, it is impossible to tell whether this encounter actually happened. Was Foote actually introduced to Selzinger, under the impression that this character was Lucy? Or did he meet the real Lucy (Roessler), believing that his name was Selzinger? Or even in reality meet Roessler, aware of his name and identity, after which MI5 distorted the whole episode with references to Selzinger, as a means of concealing the identity of Roessler (who might turn out to be a not very impressive superspy), in the belief that they could get away with it? The speculation is insoluble. (I shall return to Selzinger later.)

The pit that the officers of MI5 had started digging for themselves became deeper when Handbook for Spies was re-issued, in 1964. It was then graced with a new Introduction (anonymous, but presumably provided by MI5), which informs us that ‘Foote himself is dead: so is the fabulous ‘Lucy’ who even after the war could not refrain from continuing his real – as opposed to cover – occupation and worked for the Czech Intelligence Service’. It then adds blandly: “There have been no alterations to the original text save for the inclusion of Lucy’s real name.” Since the identity of ‘Lucy’ was now known from the trial that Roessler underwent in Switzerland in 1953, the pretence could not continue. (Selzinger was indeed not a pseudonym, unlike other fictions adopted, such as ‘Schulz’ for ‘Hamburger’, but indeed another person. Roessler died in 1958.) Thus Roessler’s name now appears where Selzinger’s was – but the descriptive information for him remains the same. Roessler – who was German, and escaped to Switzerland in 1933 – now becomes a Czech native. Several sentences describing Selzinger’s arrest, and subsequent granting of immunity by the Swiss government, because of his services (p 100), have been deleted. The result is a worse mess than that which appeared in the 1949 version, but for MI5 to attempt to unravel the lies it had told would probably only bring fresh inspection of the case. It was simpler to act as if it were merely a case of mistaken identity on Foote’s part, and to hope nobody noticed the anomalies. MI5 compounded its misjudgment, however, by claiming: “‘Sonia’ is living quietly in England. Foote’s original recruiter [Sonia’s sister, Brigitte] is now living equally quietly behind the Iron Curtain.” Both these facts were wrong. Sonia had rapidly escaped to East Germany after the arrest of Klaus Fuchs, the atom spy. The inevitable conclusion is that anything claimed in Handbook for Spies must be treated with suspicion. Sir Percy Sillitoe, the head of MI5, had to divert a request from the CIA (whose great interest had been provoked by Foote’s memoir) about the possibility of interrogating Foote: “I think Foote’s book should not be taken too literally as questions of detail are not necessarily accurately presented therein.” Indeed, Sir Humphrey.

The reader who is interested in further analysis of the workings behind this clumsy opus is pointed to Chapter 46 of Chapman Pincher’s 2009 book, Treachery, although Pincher concentrates on the cover-up behind Sonia rather than the events in Switzerland. (Intriguingly, Pincher incriminates MI5’s Dick White, who later rose to Director-General, even more than Roger Hollis.) The errors, however, clearly go beyond the deceptions over Sonia’s movements. Thus addressing the conflicts in Foote’s life-story requires a process of triangulation when all three sources of information (Foote’s memoir; the memoirs of others; and archival material) may be flawed. At this stage, when investigating the contradictions and puzzles, I deliberately use very conservatively Read’s & Fisher’s 1981 publication Operation Lucy, which contains (so far as I know) the most detailed account of Foote’s life available in print. While it contains a rich list of sources, and presents an equally deep array of impressive contributors in its Acknowledgments, very few of the facts of Foote’s life are anchored in any of the sources. The five features listed above are now analysed:

1) Foote’s commitment to communism:

Foote’s most significant two colleagues, his boss, Sándro Radó, and the person who trained him, Sonia, both nursed doubts about his ideological commitment. Radó was astonished at Foote’s lack of political education. While admitting his practical strengths, he declared: “ . . . the man had trouble finding his bearings in the complicated international situation and probably had only a vaguest notion of the working-class movement.” When Radó wanted to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the October Revolution, he turned up at Foote’s flat with a bottle of champagne. Yet Foote showed no recognition of the significance of the occasion. Radó even claimed that he complained to his bosses about the behaviour of ‘Jim’ (Foote’s cryptonym), but his protests were ignored, with Moscow showing an unexplained but maybe consequential confidence in Foote’s bona fides at that time. David Dallin, the author of Soviet Espionage, who interviewed Foote and other agents shortly before Foote’s death, wrote (in 1955): “Rado had no confidence in Foote or his loyalty to the Soviet cause and suspected him of being an agent of the British intelligence service assigned to penetrate the Soviet espionage machine. Rado and a few other members of the group believed that throughout his career, in Spain, in Switzerland, and later in Moscow, Foote had been in His Majesty’s service. ‘I have no documents to prove it,’ says a former member of the Rado network, ‘but I am certain that he was a British agent.’”

As for Sonia, when she first met Foote in 1938, she was impressed. He listened well, and asked good questions, and she concluded that he must be a brave and solid fighter to have joined the Brigades in Spain. (She was writing this account in 1977, long after the time when she learned that Foote had ratted, and was thus known to be a ‘traitor’.) Later, however, Foote prevaricated over the possibility of his marrying Sonia (i.e. before Beurton was selected for this glorious task), and Sonia wrote that he offered up the excuse that he had gone to Spain to avoid a reckless marriage offer he had made to an English girl. Sonia was not pleased. “Either the marriage offer had induced his going to Spain instead of political motives, or he had selfishly worked out an excuse for not committing to what Central wanted,” she wrote. While subtly endorsing the absolute authority of Moscow and its subjugation of personal desires (a point of great importance, as will soon be shown), she at this stage, in the summer of 1939, still did not doubt Foote’s political commitment.

Foote (or MI5) gave a rather unconvincing account of what propelled him towards communism, indicating that he was ‘discontent’ and ‘restless’, but that the Spanish Civil War crystallised his ‘somewhat inchoate thoughts’. The problem with this account is that it completely ignores what the archival evidence shows – that Foote signed up to join the RAF on July 26, 1935, (intriguingly under the name Alexander James Forde), but that the circumstances under which he was discharged were highly ambiguous. One note states that he was declared ‘illegally absent’ on December 23, 1936, the day he left on a one-day excursion ticket for Spain, to join the International Brigades. Foote claimed to his interrogators that he deserted because he was a ‘free-thinker’, and thus presumably not well-disposed to authority. Yet other records indicate that the RAF had no record of his desertion, and that his performance had been considered very satisfactory. His RAF discharge papers state that Foote’s services ‘were no longer required – at his own request’, and his character is identified as being ‘V.G’. No attempt was made to arrest him when he returned to the UK on September 16, 1938, and other notes suggest that MI5 (in the person of Roger Hollis) tried to hush the whole business up, when overeager junior officers in MI5 tried to pin down the RAF on the circumstances of Foote’s dismissal. A note indicates that Hinchley Cooke of C4a in MI5 asked the Home Office to cancel its inquiry into Foote as one of its ‘H.O.S.I.’ (‘Home Office Special Investigation’?) cases. It all suggests an outside agency was at work, that SIS had possibly intervened, and contrived the RAE to give Foote an unofficial discharge.

If anyone was pulling strings, it was a lengthy ordeal for Foote to undergo to build credentials. In his book, Foote gave an authentic account of his work as a battalion transport officer in Spain, and of his introduction to luminaries in the Communist Party movement, including Professor Haldane, and David Springhall, who would help recruit him for his ‘dangerous work’ in Europe on his return to Britain. He claimed that he was sent back on leave in September 1938 to attend the CP Congress in Birmingham. He was not a member of the Party, but his work as a transport worker made him ‘less vulnerable to accusations that he was a “Trotskyist”’. A project for him to work as a courier and smuggler between CPHQ and the battalion in Spain fell through, with the result that his old friend Fred Copeman informed him that the CPGB was recommending Foote for the mission in Europe (i.e. not Spain). Foote wrote that he did not know who his new masters were, but suspected that Copeman was involved with Soviet Military Intelligence. Foote then visited Brigitte Kuczynski in Hampstead (she remained anonymous, and the details in his memoir are wrong about the location) on ‘one fine October morning’, and quickly resolved to accept the assignment after a ten-minute encounter. There was no mention of a meeting with Sonia:  he had to make his arrangements quickly, as the meeting in Geneva was in a few days’ time. “I soon found myself on a boat crossing the Channel.”

Here again, the details are unreliable, as the chronology does not fit cleanly. As also explained by David Burke in The Lawn Road Flats, using the Kuczynski files at the National Archives, Sonia returned to the UK in October 1938, and approached Fred Uhlmann, an Austrian Communist who was also a Spanish Civil war veteran. Uhlmann spoke to Springhall, who in turn recommended Foote, whom Uhlmann then interviewed. Foote’s details were passed to Sonia, who had to get approval from Moscow. That having happened, Sonia was told to interview Foote before she returned to Geneva, but Foote was unable to make the appointment because of sickness (as Sonia explains in her memoir). Foote had to meet Uhlmann again at the King Street HQ, and receive his instructions to meet Brigitte instead.  This must all have taken some time, yet Foote was issued with a passport on October 12, after travelling to Manchester to have his former bank manager sign his passport application form – an unimaginably speedy process, especially given his background as someone who had recently absented himself from the country to join the International Brigades on a one-day excursion ticket. (To complicate matters further, MI5 believed that Foote and Brigitte had an affair.) Again, he must have had help in high places.

The incongruities in Foote’s account are many. If he was being given a deep cover, he actually showed a lot of resilience in going through with it all, but the hands of the authorities in managing his career are fairly obvious. Admittedly, if SIS did recruit him, it also enjoyed a lot of luck, in that Foote not only turned out to possess the right temperament, he also survived the conflicts in Spain. Yet his commitment to communism was less than red-blooded – a deficiency that will be explored further when his ‘defection’ is analysed.

2) Foote’s role in Sonia’s marriage and move to England:

Foote was eventually installed and trained as a radio-operator under Sonia, after paying visits to Germany to explore opportunities for sabotage. He was recalled just before war broke out, at the end of August 1939, when the implications of the Nazi-Soviet pact were playing havoc on the minds of communists in western Europe. Foote presents the announcement of the pact as a blow to Sonia’s resolve, after which she expressed a desire to Moscow to renounce undercover activities and move to England. In his memoir, Foote asserts that Sonia abandoned her work for the GRU at this stage. He suggests that her bosses in the Soviet Union had some misgivings about her opinions, but that to them a greater obstacle was her lack of papers, and she thus contrived both a divorce from her husband (identified as ‘Schulz’) and an ensuing marriage to Len Beurton, so that she would be given British citizenship, and thus be able to move to the UK. “She continued to obey such orders as she received, but at the first opportunity to the best of her ability she pulled out and returned to England”, Foote’s (MI5’s) account runs, and adds that “there are no Kremlin objections to retirement from the service if circumstances permit and discretion is maintained.” This is, of course, utter nonsense. The decisions of the party were not something between which agents could pick and choose: that would be bourgeois individualism. This account is admittedly echoed elsewhere: Radó gives the impression that Sonia left on her own initiative, and it is also possible that the Soviet Archive has been doctored to distort the truth. Yet Sonia would not have made any move without Moscow’s explicit permission.

One of the on-line readers of Sonia’s Radio (who wishes to remain anonymous) has given me a translation of a letter that Sonia was purported to have written to Moscow Centre in late August 1939, where she makes the suggestion that she divorce officially [sic] from Rolf (Rudolf Hamburger) and marry Jim (Foote) or John (Beurton). She tells them that she is ‘on firm footing’ in Switzerland (not true, as her residence pass is about to expire), and that her husband works as an architect in China (maybe not true, as she claimed in her memoir that he had just left Switzerland at that time, but certainly superfluous information, since Rolf also worked for the GRU, and Moscow would know what he was up to since it had ordered him to move there, and forced their separation). Yet her supposed letter strongly implies that it is her objective to continue her espionage work in Britain, and my contact comments that when she explained her predicament to Beurton, “Sonia said that in the interests of the future struggle with fascism, she needed to move to Britain”, thus confirming that she was still committed to espionage. In an extraordinary reversal of roles, the file indicates that Moscow goes along with Sonia’s plan – which, as will be shown in a later instalment, had been hatched some time beforehand.

Sonia’s record, in Sonjas Rapport, tells a different story. She had a worthless, expired German passport: she had been given permission by the Swiss authorities to stay only until the end of September 1939. At the beginning of 1939, Moscow Centre therefore sought possibilities for her gaining another passport, as it had fresh plans for her. At the same time, her marriage with Rolf was breaking up: as a symptom, her second child, Nina, had been fathered by Ernst, a fellow-spy in China. At the same time, Rolf was preparing to return, by order of Moscow, to China. According to Sonia, Rolf agreed to a divorce, and Sonia was instructed to marry one of the Englishmen (Foote or Beurton). She decided that Foote was more suitable, because of his similar age, and Foote consented to the plan. In another melodramatic twist (again in Sonia’s account only), Rudolf and Ernst visited her in August 1939, just before they jointly left for China, where Rudolf would be subordinate to Ernst, and Ernst here encountered his daughter for the first and only time. Sonia saw them both off at the railway station, and maybe allowed herself a single bourgeois tear. Yet the M15 report on the Rote Kapelle, written in October 1949, indicates that Rolf had arrived in Hong Kong in June 1939, so Sonia’s description of a sentimental reunion in August sounds very dubious. Is the Soviet archival piece more authentic than her memoir? Both show strong signs of disinformation.

Matters continued to get complicated. Sonia began to express a greater liking for Beurton than she had had for Foote, since Len was more sentimental, and loved both nature and her children. What is more, Foote was having second thoughts about the marriage, bringing up the story of his possible breach of promise, and he recommended that she marry Beurton instead. This is the occasion where Sonia expressed her doubts about Foote’s commitment, but she moved on, and the divorce came through at the end of the year. The fact that her Swiss pass had expired by then is overlooked in her narrative, but she does describe the problems she had trying to establish the legal basis on which a marriage between two persons whose countries were at war could be arranged. Moreover, she admitted that many sham marriages were going on at the time in Switzerland with the purpose of gaining British passports. It is very difficult to imagine Sonia getting her marriage approved, and her passport issued, without some generous assistance from the British Consulate in Berne. (I shall explore this part of the adventure in a future instalment.) Yet all the necessary documents became available for her marriage on February 23, 1940, and Sonia admits that she was brash enough to tell the Consulate that the reason for her marriage was to gain a British passport. On May 2, 1940, she held the papers in her hand.

The story is not yet complete, however. Foote’s evidence given to his interrogators at MI5 is not entirely reliable (as when, for example, he states that Sonia’s had requested to be posted to the USA after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact), but one remarkable statement arising from his interrogation by MI5 is so outrageous that Foote could have served no purpose in inventing it. In a memorandum dated September 17, 1947, he is reported as admitting that it was on his false testimony that Sonia obtained her divorce in the Swiss courts. “When I asked him what was the false evidence he had produced”, so MI5’s Serpell’s account runs, “he said that it had been a story of Rudolf Hamburger’s adultery with one of Sonia’s sisters in a London hotel. I asked which sister was selected for this episode and Foote replied, Mrs. Lewis [Brigitte].” (Coincidentally, Sonia’s narrative informs us that Brigitte was also visiting her in August 1939: did she help hatch the story herself?) This revelation indeed caused a massive re-think for Serpell, since it was he and Jim Skardon who had discussed the divorce with Sonia and Beurton at Great Rollright in Oxfordshire just four days earlier, and noticed the pair’s discomfiture. Yet Serpell still concluded that Sonia had not been involved in any espionage since she arrived in the country six years before. (On this delusion, more in a later instalment.)

The significance of this episode is great for other reasons. First, it suggests that the Swiss authorities needed more than a statement from Rolf that he approved the divorce, and also that they were probably unaware of the parentage of Sonia’s daughter. Yet unless Foote made a special return visit to the UK in 1939 (when there is no evidence that Rolf was in the country: on the contrary, Sonia says he was building up a false identity in France at the time), he was induced to perjure himself based on an imaginary event that would have had to happen a long time before. And the Swiss presumably accepted his evidence. On the one hand, in her version, Sonia probably wanted to avoid the sordid aspects of the whole affair, and show that Rolf’s agreement to the divorce was adequate justification for the Swiss authorities to approve it, when, in actual fact, Swiss law no doubt required some evidence of adultery (as was the case in Britain). Moreover, Foote told his interlocutors that Hamburger knew nothing about the divorce. If Rolf had been around in Switzerland at the time, it would clearly have been easier to manufacture the scene closer at hand. On the other hand, it was evidently very important to some influential British authority that Sonia secure her divorce, undertake her marriage, and gain entry to Britain, and it appears that Foote was organised to play a role in lubricating the event. Indeed, if Foote was entrapped by this ruse, it explains how MI5 was able to maintain another hold over him during his awkward time remaining in Britain after 1947. Moreover, the machinations behind the scene might suggest that SIS (if it was indeed pulling the strings) was not very excited about the prospect of Foote’s marrying Sonia, since it would remove him from a vital position within the Soviet spy network. Thus it probably coached him on an alternative plan.

Foote also admitted to the historian David Dallin that he knew the true motivation behind Sonia’s escape. In an interview on October 31, 1953, as Read and Fisher note, he told the historian that Sonia was transferred to England by her bosses. He does not declare outright that the purpose of her mission was to operate as an intermediary for Klaus Fuchs, but he does state that was what her role evolved into. Foote was a very bitter man by then: he felt monstrously abused by MI5, who had butchered his account of his experiences in Switzerland and in the Soviet Union, and he felt that British Intelligence had failed to act on all the warnings he had given them about the activities of the GRU in Britain. The evidence points to the fact that he been shamefully used, and that his grimy involvement in perjuring himself was a major reason why MI5 was able to maintain a hold over him.

3: Foote’s Swiss Connections:

Given Foote’s educational background, one of the more remarkable aspects of his career in Switzerland was his ability to find funding sources for the cash-starved network. That he did effect such a project seems certain. Handbook for Spies relates how, working with Radó, he convinced Moscow that arranging for funds to be transferred by the offices of American firms, at discounted exchange rates, would be a secure way of addressing the problem. Moscow agreed to his ideas. Radó says little about it, as it would clearly have indicated that he was not in total control. All he did admit was: “Jim had his radio-operating, and in addition Central set him special assignments that were not directly connected with the work of his group.” Radó had earlier admitted that Foote was ‘resourceful and ingenious when it came to tackling problems of a technical or economic nature’, but that is all. He was no doubt not very pleased with the fact that Jim had his own set of codes, and carried on conversations with Moscow Centre of the content of which he had no idea.

Part of Foote’s alibi to conceal his role as an illegal radio-operator was to set himself up as a rich but not very healthy ex-patriot. In this guise, he had several society friends. Indeed, Sonia indicates that he was having some kind of affair (‘ein Flirt’) with the sister of the Romanian Foreign Minister, whom he presumably met when, in the early days of the war, Moscow was suggesting that the whole apparat be moved to Bucharest – a transfer that was abandoned when the Germans invaded Romania. Foote claims he used such connections to advance the financial cause: “I made some discreet enquiries among my more monied Swiss friends and the shadier of my English acquaintances, and soon evolved a scheme which I thought would work. Through the agency of a Swiss friend I was able to get in touch with some firms which in the course of their normal business remitted money between Switzerland and the U.S.A.”  (The Rote Kapelle files at Kew indicate that one of the companies used was the R.K.O. Pictures organisation: it is worth noting that Claude Dansey was a director of Alexander Korda’s London Films, and that Korda made regular visits to Zurich, partly on Dansey business. The connection may be significant.)  In any case, Foote’s admission suggests that he must have been well-known to the British Consulate, who should no doubt have been making inquiries as to why this Englishman was resident in Switzerland, and not contributing to the war effort. Foote expands his story: “I then delved into the dim twilit world of the local black bourse and discovered that there were a large number of individuals who had friends in America who were prepared to take the place of my well-established firms and quite certain that their relatives would not question a sudden windfall of a few thousand dollars to the credit of their relative in Switzerland.” How this earthy and uneducated man (his ghost-writer, Courtenay Young, called Foote ‘well-nigh illiterate’, which was probably a bit unfair) suddenly acquired such polished skills is never explained.

In fact, rumours circulated in the circles in which Foote moved that he was a spy, and, in Guy Burgess-like fashion, he would refuse to deny them as part of the façade. David Dallin reports that, after Foote’s book was published, the Gazette de Lausanne ran a series of stories on several of his friends, accounts that contributed to his image as an eccentric but very likeable exile. Radó reports that this rumour went further than society friends. As he wrote, in a variation of Sonia’s story: “According to Jim the Lausanne authorities were under the impression he worked for British intelligence anyway. He had heard about this from the wife of the Rumanian minister of economic affairs [an almost exact echo of Sonia’s reference], a lady who visited Lausanne occasionally and from whom Jim had elicited quite a lot of useful information. On this occasion she had smilingly confessed over a glass of wine that her friend, the wife of the Rumanian ambassador, harboured this suspicion and had apparently communicated it at a diplomatic reception to one Colonel Perron of Swiss Counter-intelligence.” Radó indicates that Foote had been wise enough to report this impression to his bosses in Moscow. It was a wonder that they perceived the irony, that being a dangerous commodity in the offices of the Lubianka.

It is quite extraordinary that a) a person of Foote’s background would be able to manipulate such a deal, and b) the scheme would not have come to the attention of Swiss or British authorities. Did Foote possibly receive help from SIS? David Dallin’s testimony suggests he may have done. In the early 1950s, Dallin performed interviews with several people related to the Rote Drei and its network, one of whom was a lawyer, Roger Corbaz, who had been the presiding judge of the Swiss Military Tribunal that heard the case when Foote was tried in absentia, on October 30, 1947. Dallin relates that the money-transferring scheme was working quite satisfactorily, until a hitch occurred, some time in 1943. In order to try to fix the problem, Foote went to see a lawyer in Lausanne, to gain help in the transfer of a large sum from the United States, and brought along with him a British intelligence agent. In Dallin’s words: “Sensing something suspicious in Foote’s story, the lawyer told his new client: ‘I will arrange the transfer if you will bring proof that the money, deposited as you say in an American bank, belongs to you, and that the affair is clean and honest.’ Foote never reappeared.” Yet Corbaz himself may not have been entirely clean. The National Archives show SIS’s report on Foote’s trial in Lausanne (which a representative from SIS attended), where Corbaz stopped a court reader from calling out Foote’s list of contacts. Foote told Jim Skardon of MI5 that Corbaz had been involved with him in a black-market transaction just before he was arrested, and was thus probably embarrassed ‘in sitting in judgment in a case to which he had himself been a guilty party’. Foote nevertheless received a sentence of two-and-half years’ imprisonment, with an 8000 Franc fine, and confiscation of property. It is not surprising that he declined to attend.

The second major episode where Foote’s connections with the British Consulate came into play occurred when the spy ring was being hunted by the Gestapo, which was applying pressure on Swiss Security to identify and close down the Rote Drei. The way that Foote tells the story, the initiative came from Radó, who suggested seeking a safe house with the British – whether because he knew of Foote’s connections, or simply because the United Kingdom was a military ally, is not certain. Moscow Centre turned the idea down imperiously, suspecting Radó of, at best, ‘leanings towards the democracies, and at the worst downright treachery’. Radó himself had a different spin: he said that Foote brought him a message from Moscow advising them to ask ‘our friends’ for help. Justifiably, he wondered who such ‘friends’ might be. Not the Swiss Communist Party, for sure, as contact was forbidden. According to Radó, Foote then came up with the notion that Moscow might mean the Allies’ embassies in Berne, and Radó implies that Foote’s reputation would have played to good advantage. But Moscow found the suggestion completely unacceptable, and ordered him to go underground.

Radó’s ignorance of what was going on must also be questioned. His intermediary (at two levels of separation) with Roessler was a woman called Rachel Duebendorfer, who was working both for the Soviets and the British. She stubbornly refused to identify to Radó or to Moscow who Lucy was, but MI5’s file on Karel Sedlacek (aka Selzinger) states that in 1943 or 1944, Duebendorfer ‘reported to our Geneva representative that RADO’s W/T [wireless-telegraph] had broken down and that he had a lot of material which he did not wish to be lost to the Allied effort and which she passed to us on his behalf on the strict understanding that we did not report the fact to Moscow.’ Radó did not operate a wireless apparatus himself, but by then his operators had become compromised or captured. It was a big risk he took, defying his Moscow bosses by seeking assistance from the hated imperialists, and the action may have brought him into trouble later.

The conclusion must be that Foote enjoyed at least an unofficial solid relationship with the British authorities in Switzerland. And they, in turn, would have been very obtuse if they had ignored the rumours circulating, or were too idle to investigate what a character with Foote’s background was performing in those circumstances.

4) Foote’s Awareness of Lucy:

It is a fruitless endeavour to try to depict accurately the web of relationships in the intelligence world of Switzerland in WWII. Which informants were working for whom, who out of ideology and who for pecuniary reasons, who were merely couriers and intermediaries, who was officially on a foreign payroll, what information was fresh, which invented, who in Swiss Intelligence connived at the activities of foreign networks, how they held off the Nazis, which way intelligence was passed. Nor is it clear exactly how information was communicated, which radio sets were clandestine and which official and approved, or whether encrypted cables were being detected. Indeed, some recent opinion suggests that the whole reputation of the Rote Kapelle was boosted to impressionable allied officers by German intelligence experts anxious to curry favour, an initiative that only helped the post-war reputation of the Soviet Union. Yet a segment of the whole imbroglio can be taken under the microscope, based on the evidence that the CIA and British Intelligence gained from interrogations and captured German documents, the testimony of Foote, and other MI5 and SIS records.

One critical question to be posed is: why did MI5 allow the notion to be aired that Lucy was in fact Selzinger, instead of Roessler? This raises subsidiary questions, such as that raised earlier in this piece: whom did Foote really meet in 1944 – Selzinger or Roessler? And how much did he know about Roessler’s identity before then? The reasons these questions are important is that the account that Foote purportedly gives of Lucy’s activity in 1941 is probably wrong, as Radó and other sources have confirmed that Lucy was not recruited as an informant to the network until September 1942. Yet it is possible, as the head of intelligence in the Czech government-in-exile, Frantiśek Moraveč, claimed in his memoir Master of Spies, that Roessler was working for the British before then, using Sedlacek as a wireless-operator. The CIA Report asserts that this was so, that Sedlacek started reporting to London in September 1939, and his source was ‘Lucy’ [sic: a possibly very telling anachronism!]. It adds that he was activated and identified by the Communist ring only in September 1942 (i.e. when the ULTRA project incidentally took on life). The CIA Report points to the German transcriptions of the intercepted traffic as proof that Lucy’s material did not go to the Soviets until late summer of 1942, after Duebendorfer established the relationship. But that is not proof.  The historical focus on when ‘Lucy’ became known to Radó (and to the Gestapo) has diminished the role he may have previously played with Sedlacek and Foote. Sedlacek (or the Czech transmitting station at Woldingham) was almost certainly sending Roessler’s reports not just to London, but also to Moscow well before Moscow Centre became aware of ‘Lucy’s’ existence. If the Czechs were informing the British, they were surely informing the Soviets at the same time. That would explain why Foote (among others) made the claim – to Serpell during questioning – that ‘Lucy’ was active earlier than 1942, and that Moscow had been warned by Roessler of Hitler’s coming invasion in 1941. ‘Lucy’ was Roessler, but Roessler was not always ‘Lucy’, although the nickname may have anteceded his engagement by the Soviets.

Moreover, even though Foote was a radio-operator, and had his own codes, the intelligence that would have been passed to him (from Roessler to Schneider to Duebendorfer to Radó to Foote) would have been encrypted before it was given to him. Thus, if he were solely a Soviet-controlled operator, he would not have known at the time which messages were derived from Lucy’s sources, even though his memoir indicates the contrary. Moreover, when he finally met ‘Lucy’ (whom he might have heard of by repute), the book reports that he described him as less than average height, an assessment echoed by Dallin, although Dallin may have been merely repeating what Foote told him. Yet the few existing photographs of Roessler suggest a man of above average height. Perhaps Foote was introduced to Selzinger as a Lucy impostor (if indeed his account of the encounter is true) by arrangement of the British authorities, or maybe MI5 again just wanted to divert attention from Roessler when they massaged Foote’s testimony into his ‘memoir’. It is more likely that he knew them both.

By now, readers will be familiar with the claim that Malcolm Muggeridge made, reinforced by Read and Fisher, that Roessler was working for the British, as was the friend of his intermediary, Sissy Duebendorfer. In that case, MI5 was playing a dangerous game in presenting Selzinger as the vital link in the chain. It cannot be that they seriously believed that Selzinger was Lucy: the 1949 file on the Rote Kapelle clearly indicates that Roessler was the man behind the cryptonym. At that time, however (i.e. two decades before Muggeridge’s revelations), MI5 might have believed that there was too close a link between Roessler and SIS in Geneva to declare openly Roessler’s identity. Alternatively, they may have received pressure from SIS to confuse the issue. Claude Dansey had sadly died a few months before Foote’s return, and was thus out of the picture.  The text of Handbook for Spies was correctly passed to SIS before publication in 1949. Yet it was strangely signed off by Maurice Oldfield, who had joined the service only after the war, and was then only deputy to the head of counter-intelligence. (For some reason, Serpell had chosen to write to Oldfield about Foote’s case in November 1947.) Oldfield informed Reed of B2A that he could see no objection to its publication, but admitted that Colonel Vivian had not yet seen it. While he would later become director-general of SIS, at that time Oldfield could probably could not tell a Selzinger from a Seltzer. There is no evidence that Kenneth Cohen (Dansey’s deputy, who denied to Nigel West that Foote was ever recruited by SIS) saw the draft of the book. That was an extremely careless move by SIS.

One major cause of a possible exposure was that Selzinger had probably been in the employ of SIS himself. MI5 was not aware of that fact at the time, but a later investigation, in 1953, caused the Security Service to make a request to the Home Office about a British passport that had been issued to one Karl Sedlacek in the name of Charles Simpson. Eventually, MI5 was able to gain the following admission from SIS: “Sedlacek was a Czech Intelligence agent to whom we gave cover in 1939 and issued a British passport in the name of Mr. SIMPSON. . . . . to enable him to carry out a mission in Switzerland on behalf of the Czech Intelligence Service.” Why would the issuance of a British passport have been necessary to allow a Czech officer to work for the Czech Intelligence Service in a foreign, neutral country? SIS went on to state that, on one occasion when Sedlacek’s own wireless broke down in Switzerland (about 1941 or 1942), he requested that ‘our Geneva station’ transmit a quantity of material on his behalf. So why would SIS need to give Sedlacek cover? After all, he was a member of the Czech Intelligence staff, and in regular contact with Moraveč back in London. Was it perhaps so that he would be immune from prosecution, and would be able to be spirited back to the UK should a catastrophe happen, and the Nazis invaded Switzerland? Yet Moraveč wrote that Sedlacek moved painlessly from Czechoslovakia to Switzerland without having to go via London. The CIA Report makes no mention of Sedlacek’s being in England in May 1939 (when his UK passport was issued), but does puzzlingly state that ‘Sedlacek came to Switzerland (from Prague) with a British passport’, elsewhere saying that this was in June 1937. It states clearly that he was moving from Zurich to Lucerne in the spring of 1939. Again, it is a colossal muddle.

Another enigmatic entry in Foote’s archive reflects an interest expressed in March, 1952, by the French Embassy, who believed that a man called Simpson had been an agent of Foote in the Rote Kapelle, based on something Foote had said. The note goes on to indicate that Foote had stated (when, and to whom, is not clear) that ‘a certain Jean BOHNY was in 1942 instructed by Moscow to go to an address in St. Gallen and ask for “Charles SIMPSON” from whom he would obtain a short-wave wireless transmitter.’ These nuggets strongly suggest not only that the Czechs in London were in close communication with their Soviet friends (no revelation, this), but that Sedlacek was exercising his identity as a Briton at this time. Moscow should by all accounts have been advising its agents to stay well clear of any British intelligence operatives. Were the Czechs the ‘friends’ recommended by Moscow above? If so, why would Sedlacek masquerade as Simpson? The incident also sheds doubt on the story proposed in Handbook for Spies that Foote met Selzinger for the first time in 1944. It is all very bewildering – as it is no doubt intended to be.

Moreover, could Foote have been ‘our Geneva station’ as well as a Soviet radio operator? The authorized history of SIS suggests that its wireless capabilities in Geneva had been emasculated. Keith Jeffery writes: “There was a SIS wireless set at Geneva, but it could be used only for receiving messages as the Swiss authorities did not permit foreign missions in the country to send enciphered messages except through the Post Office . . .  Cypher telegrams could still be sent, but they ran out of one-time pads. Thus only messages of highest importance could be sent: much intelligence reached London only after delay. Lack of continuous secure communications meant London was unable to send out any signals intelligence material.” One should point out that Jeffery is being very evasive and disingenuous: the Swiss authorities turned a blind eye to such foreign transmissions, so long as their originators were not working against Swiss interests. They understood the common fight against the Nazi threat. Thus Jeffery’s account should probably not be taken very seriously. And indeed, he never explains how the problem was resolved, although by July 1943, he implies that it must have mysteriously been addressed.  He writes that the Abwehr spy, Hans Gisevius, considered that the communications channels of Allen Dulles, the Switzerland-based representative of OSS (the American equivalent of SIS) were so insecure that he advised the American to pass the information through British channels – which he did. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility to think that Foote’s equipment could have been used for official British purposes.

The result of this investigation is inevitably inconclusive, and may never be resolved satisfactorily. Yet it does point to a good deal of awkwardness on the part of British Intelligence in dealing with their activities in Switzerland, and a desire to muddy the waters as far as Foote was concerned. As indicated, Foote became immensely frustrated with the obtuseness he encountered in MI5, but one telling statement he made is recorded in his file: “During the war, you see  . . . . information  . . . . always looked upon by the Russians, more or less ran the war; it was an awful big  . . . Telegrams  . . .  to station; very important  . . . especially the way we handled it, a marvellous affair.. At least . . .  the way the information came, wonderful information.” Even this apparently highly edited fragment, a strangled mixture of pride and apology, seems to point unswervingly to Foote’s involvement with a Greater Game of Ultra distribution administered by SIS.

5: Foote’s Defection and Interrogation:

Given Foote’s remarkable escape from Switzerland to Paris in November, 1944, several questions arise concerning his motivations and objectives in reaching a safe haven, and his experiences thereafter. Why did he report to the Soviet Embassy, instead of trying to gain safety and liberty with the British? When he returned to Moscow, and was interrogated about his activities, why did the Soviets later send him back on a mission to Germany with a clumsily fake identity? When Foote then decided to ‘defect’, why was the GRU apparently so insouciant about his disloyalty? Why did they not eliminate him? And why, if he truly had been an SIS employee, did the service apparently disown him, and do nothing to protect him?

Three scenarios present themselves for the original approach to the Soviet Military Mission. One, Foote had always been a dedicated and obedient Communist agent, and any other course of action would have been out of the question. Two, he harboured severe doubts, valuing his freedom, but the fear of being hunted down in the West by GRU assassins was a less appealing prospect than facing the music with his bosses in Moscow. Three, he was instructed by SIS to continue the deception, and prolong his role as a Soviet radio-operator. From what is known about his character and associations, the first seems very unlikely. Foote liked his creature comforts, and he surely knew enough about life in the Soviet Union not to risk a sojourn to a place from which he might never return, no matter how strong his communist convictions might have been. He had helped the Allies win the war, and could probably expect a sympathetic hearing back in the United Kingdom. The second scenario is plausible: Foote had an exaggerated view of his own importance, considering himself the leader of Radó’s ring once the Hungarian had disappeared, and he claimed in his memoir that he had ‘voluminous’ information picked up from Roessler and another informer, Pünter, known as Pakbo, that he needed to pass on to Moscow. Maybe he expected a hero’s welcome, but also an opportunity to set the record straight with Moscow Centre (who was upset about the collapse of the Swiss network) before Radó had an opportunity to pitch his version. He also entered the Soviet Embassy with the goal of persuading them that the Swiss network could easily be resuscitated. That last fact might play into the third scenario: that SIS was very keen to see the deception maintained, and Foote to return to his role in Switzerland. Moreover, a breach in Foote’s commitment at this stage might have blown the whole operation, and drawn attention to Sonia’s enigmatic presence in England. Thus SIS might have strongly urged Foote to continue to work with the GRU, not realising that an order to go to Moscow was the outcome. And in a casual aside to Serpell that tells volumes, Foote made the ‘curious remark’ (in Serpell’s words) that he thought ‘the British would like him to go there’.

In fact both Foote and Radó were summoned to Moscow for ‘consultations’. Foote had considered all the options (so his ‘memoir’ claims), but he decided that, with the war still unfinished, he ought to see the project through, and defend himself. Readers may inspect Handbook for Spies to learn what he underwent in Moscow, but the outcome was that he managed to convince Poliakova and her successors (as she was purged after the Gouzenko affair) that he was not an agent provocateur, and even stressed, with true revolutionary ardour, how he wanted to continue the subversive campaign back in the West, noting, however, that ‘my first six weeks in Moscow had convinced me that Nazi Germany as I had known it was a paradise of freedom as compared with Soviet Russia.’ His story must have been persuasive. After undergoing intense training, he was established with a new identity – a German called Albert Mueller, born to an English mother, who was commissioned to set up a new espionage network in Argentina. Foote, who spoke poor German with an English accent, was instructed to spend six months in Berlin to strengthen his credentials. He left Moscow in early March 1947, and, after some curious experiences in Berlin, he entered the British Zone on August 2.

Why would the GRU send Foote on such a perilous and leaky expedition? Is it possible that they planned his defection, so that he could protect Sonia by reinforcing to British Intelligence the fact that she was a harmless ex-spy? Why did they not assassinate him? In Chapter One of his book, Foote writes (again, if  we can trust that the words are his): “When I walked out of the Soviet Zone and gave up my career as a Russian spy I was as surely condemned to death by the Russians as any criminal by a black-capped judge and through the due processes of law. The Soviet system knows only one penalty for failure or treachery – death.” But Foote was not killed, even though in the years after the war the Soviets did hunt down and kill multiple traitors or failures. Why would they be indulgent with him after they realised they had been hoodwinked at least once – by Foote’s blatant mendacity in Moscow, and probably by the deceptions played by the British in Switzerland? Is it possible that Foote was really a ‘Spy who Returned from the Cold’, and who was directed to re-insert himself in the British intelligence structure in order to distract attention from the pursuit of atomic secrets that Sonia was managing? Klaus Fuchs had returned from the USA to the UK in the summer of 1946, and had taken up a position at AERE Harwell. The possibility should not be discounted: David Dallin raises the idea, and even suggests that some British intelligence officers (who were sympathetic to Moscow) considered he might be a plant with an assignment to ‘worm his way in’.

When Foote was repatriated to the UK, it was MI5, not SIS, who interrogated him. It appears that SIS disowned any knowledge of him. That would have been necessary, of course, in order to maintain the fiction that he had not been under its control in Switzerland. Moreover, Claude Dansey had died on June 11, 1947, and was not around to take an interest. While Read and Fisher express surprise that Vanden Heuvel and Farrell (Dansey’s deputies in Switzerland) should have spoken up for him, any such action would have been a clear signal to the Soviets that their suspicions were justified. On the other hand, MI5 seemed bewildered by his experiences, and Foote was clearly threatened that he should keep silent about his experiences. One remarkable entry in the record of his interrogations (in this case, by Serpell and Hembly-Scales), in September 1947, runs as follows: “Essential he make no references to his connections with British Intelligence. I went on to emphasise that this was a general reservation and Foote’s associations with British Intelligence were not to be mentioned to anyone. I did not want to seem disloyal to Mr. Vesey, but Foote would understand that it was not safe for him to speak of British Intelligence interests even to this recommended firm of publishers! Foote lapped up this story and asseverated several times that he would never speak to anybody about his life with us or of our past interest in him . . .  Concluding, I told Foote that if he were to represent himself in any way as an assistant, past or present, of British Intelligence we were likely to hear it.” This statement crisply merges SIS and MI5 in the identity of ‘British Intelligence’. The message could not be clearer.

Obviously, as some commentators have suggested, MI5 had some power over Foote. Malcolm Muggeridge saw him as a broken man who was frightened of the Security Service. There was the possible dishonourable discharge from the Royal Air Force. There was the act of perjury in the matter of Rolf Hamburger and Sonia’s sister. And, to his credit, Serpell brought up the fact that acting as a Soviet spy when the Soviet Union was allied to the Germans during the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact was not an action to be taken lightly by the British authorities. So Foote only hinted at the connection with Z and SIS, in asides which the censors of the archive thankfully did not delete. Contrary to what his memoir says, he assuredly did warn that Sonia was still linked to Moscow, and actively involved in espionage, although his interlocutors softened the message in their transcripts. Foote even indicated that Sonia’s brother Jürgen (a communist agitator and spy) was angry about Sonia’s return as a penetration agent, since it might have compromised the political work of the Kuczynski clan. He also provided further evidence by showing how the Soviets had invoked the help of Elinor Rathbone (the leftist activist) to enable Beurton to join his wife in England in July 1942.

Yet, despite Serpell’s sensible recommendations for following up Foote’s accusations about Sonia and her family, MI5 seemed bewilderingly slow to follow up, as if his well-articulated suspicions about Sonia were being stifled by its senior officers. The MI5 report on the Rote Kapelle, dated October 17, 1949 astonishingly states that Ursula Beurton ‘is not known to have engaged in any subversive activity’ between 1941 and that date. (This trend would reach ludicrous proportions later, when, after Fuchs’s trial, junior MI5 officers made recommendations to question Sonia further, unaware that she had fled the country several months before, immediately Fuchs had been arrested.) MI5’s chief counter-espionage officers Liddell and White withheld Foote’s testimony from Percy Sillitoe when the painful Fuchs post-mortem occurred. On the other hand, Foote apparently made a gesture to protect his former collaborators. In her book, Sonia relates a strange episode whereby Foote turned up at the house of a comrade (almost certainly Ullmann), and whispered urgent warnings that Sonia and Len should be very careful, stop work, and destroy everything. It would probably be accurate to attribute this activity to another ruse devised by SIS to reinforce the image of Foote as a confused patriot who still wished his communist friends well. No doubt Moscow got to hear of it.

Moreover, Foote displayed rather shocking Fascist sympathies to his interrogators. It was one thing to have doubts about the theory and practice of Communism, but it was another to suddenly veer towards the Fascist version of totalitarianism. A conversation between Foote and his sister on September 12, 1947, bugged by MI5, alarmingly showed that Foote compared the current British treatment of Germany unfavourably with the humanity of the Germans, and that he considered stories of Nazi atrocities to be greatly exaggerated. Radó drew attention to Foote’s ‘volte-face’, as Foote ‘sank back into the swamp of petty-bourgeois existence’. But this was worse, and could not be ascribed simply to ignorance and disdain for the practice of Communism. Indeed, Foote’s ideological weakness had been on display earlier: he confided to Serpell that he and Beurton had discussed working for the Nazis at one time in 1938, when they were in Munich together. Serpell even came to the conclusion that Foote might have had ‘some conscious connections with representatives of the German Intelligence in Switzerland’. Foote was assuredly a mixed-up case.

Yet Foote’s frustrations with the obtuseness of MI5 about communist subversion persisted, and, in the years after, he took his suspicions about infiltration in the service to a broader audience, writing letters to MPs, and even (according to Read and Fisher) demanding that a committee of Privy Councillors should investigate why his information had been ignored. But no one paid attention to him. His book was published, he was given a job in the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, and his health declined. In 1955, Dallin published his book in which he indicated that Foote had approached Corbaz with a member of SIS. If Moscow Centre had picked that up, it might have concluded that Foote was not just a traitor, but a pernicious double-agent. At that time, as Boris Volodarsky informs us, the GRU was using poisons such as thallium to kill traitors in western Europe in a way that made the affliction look like severe gastritis. In any case, Foote was recorded as dying in August 1956 in University College Hospital, London, of acute peritonitis due to a perforated duodenal ulcer (Tarrant). Another account says he tore off his bandages in frustration and pain. Yet another claims that he did not die until several years later. The photograph of him at that time (see   http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/british-spy-alexander-foote-circa-1955-foote-worked-in-news-photo/80302908#british-spy-alexander-foote-circa-1955-foote-worked-in-switzerland-as-picture-id80302908  : from 1955)  would seem to portray a man much older than the fifty-one-year-old he would have been in 1956, but maybe his trials had worn him out by then. In any case, MI5 was probably not sorry to see him out of the picture, and Moscow would not have regretted his passing.

The conclusion must be that a large array of evidence points to the fact that Foote was not a naïve romanticist who was captivated by the idea of communism, and worked innocently as a radio-operator for the Soviets in Switzerland until his spell in the workers’ paradise convinced him the cause was unjust. He was an untutored adventurist, a mercenary. And he was manipulated in other ways, by a shady British intelligence service who lured him with its unique version of adventure, in which he was taken advantage of for some greater scheme which has never seen the light of day, but which probably involved inveigling Sonia back to the UK so that her wireless transmissions could be monitored, and maybe her cohorts in espionage unveiled. For that reason, the work of Read and Fisher – based so much on informal anecdote and guidance – needs to be reassessed very seriously. In the next instalment of Sonia’s Radio, I shall return to the persons who provided the information that supported their argument, before turning back to Sonia’s extraordinary escape and charmed life in the United Kingdom.

New Sources:

Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation (at second hand)

The SIGINT Secrets by Nigel West

The Lawn Road Flats by David Burke

Dealing with the Devil by Dónal O’Sullivan

The Red Orchestra by V. E. Tarrant

The KGB’s Poison Factory by Boris Volodarsky

P.S. Towards the end of the month, I received from the New York Public Library some extracts from the Dallin Papers that I had ordered. I did not have time to analyze them before compiling this instalment. Moreover the notes that Dallin took are primarily in Russian and German. My understanding of German is still decent, but my Russian, after nearly fifty years of disuse, is patchy. I shall need to spend some further time on what Dallin recorded. Yet one comment he made stood out immediately. He startlingly describes on one page, when outlining the flow of information from the German Higher Command, that it passed by ‘Rössler-Selzinger – Lucie’. Is this making an equivalence of Rössler and Selzinger as being one person?? If so, that would explain a lot of the conflicts in Handbook for Spies. Could Sedlacek (Selzinger) conceivably have been set up by Czech and British intelligence as a German with the name of Rössler? A photograph from Selzinger’s British passport application (Simpson) would probably confirm or refute such a theory immediately. I wonder whether anyone out there can shed any light on this matter. Does anyone know more about Sedlacek? If so, please let me know. (March 2)

(This month’s new Commonplace Entries can be found here. I have also added a sprinkling of new Hyperbolic Contrast examples noted since last September, which are located here.)