(In this instalment, I start to analyze a further contentious observation by the official historian of British Intelligence in WWII, namely the claim that the British authorities had no involvement in exploiting the Soviet spy-ring in Switzerland to pass disguised ULTRA traffic to Stalin’s government. The full text of ‘Sonia’s Radio’ so far can be seen here.)
Before Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Churchill (among many others) had tried to warn Stalin of the impending aggression. Yet the Soviet leader had given little credence to such warnings, treating them as provocations designed to create a rift between the two partners of the Nazi-Soviet pact. After Barbarossa, with the Soviet Union now a nominal ally instead of an auxiliary to the main foe, Churchill focussed on providing it with as much material and moral support as the country could afford. Bletchley Park had, moreover, been successful in deciphering several Enigma keys during the previous twelve months, which meant that vital intelligence about German troop movements in Eastern Europe was now available. Yet such breakthroughs in cryptanalysis, which included Soviet traffic that the Germans had intercepted and deciphered, had also taught the Chiefs of Staff and the JIC that Soviet codes were highly fragile. The risk of divulging to the Soviets that Enigma had been broken had to be eliminated in order to protect the secrecy of the whole programme. Thus Churchill, Menzies, and the Joint Intelligence Committee faced a daunting challenge – how to pass on to Stalin, without revealing the source, a steady flow of ULTRA-sourced information that might help him repel the Nazis?
In Volume II of his History of British Intelligence in the Second World War, Professor Hinsley explained how Stewart Menzies, the head of SIS, with responsibility for GC&CS, had to succumb to pressure to package ULTRA information (the generic term for intelligence gained by the analysis or decryption of all German radio communications) for distribution to Moscow. As Chapter 4 of Sonia’s Radio described, this was a contentious issue at Bletchley Park. Sanitised reports were approved by Menzies, and sent to the British Military Mission (BMM) in Moscow, camouflaged as coming from ‘a well-placed source in Berlin’ or ‘a most reliable source’. Critical identifying information (such as unit identifications) was removed from the messages, and the BMM was instructed to request the Soviets not to disclose by wireless telegraphy that they were receiving intelligence from Britain. Hinsley went on to explain that this project appeared to work quite well until the summer of 1942, when the intransigence and lack of reciprocity on the Soviets’ part began to grate. He reported that the telegrams including high-grade signals intelligence (sigint) then ‘dwindled to a trickle’, but not before inserting a gratuitous and highly problematic aside. “There is no truth in the much-publicised claim that the British authorities made use of the ‘Lucy’ ring, a Soviet espionage organisation which operated from Switzerland, to forward intelligence to Moscow”, he declared (p 60). [As Part 2 of Sonia’s Radio explained, the Lucy Ring was a group of Communist-led informants and radio operators managed by Soviet military intelligence (the GRU) during World War II, of which Rudolf Roessler, who lived in Lucerne and was the eponymous ‘Lucy’, was both the most fertile and the most enigmatic of the informants. The group was sometimes referred to as the Rote Drei (‘Red Trio’), a subset of the Rote Kapelle (’Red Orchestra’, a transnational network of communist spies) after the number of its leading radio operators tracked by the Abwehr.]
Hinsley wrote this denial in 1981. Where did that ‘claim’ originate, and where was it so broadly publicized? What events provoked Hinsley to draw attention to such rumours? And why did he go into print as he did, a move that could only encourage speculation? Did he really believe that, as ‘official historian’, his ex cathedra word would be accepted without question? Since it would be impossible comprehensively to debunk any such rumour unless he provided cast-iron evidence (e.g. a memo written by Churchill, Menzies or Cavendish-Bentinck, say, explicitly forbidding any alternative channel of communication), his statement simply appears weak and provocative. As has been shown in Part 4, ‘official historians’ such as Hinsley cannot be relied upon to relate the true story.
This instalment investigates the controversy, analyzing at a high-level the main sources of the counter-cultural claim, and records the reactions of various historians and biographers after the official history was published. The story starts in 1949. A Handbook for Spies, the ‘memoir’ of Alexander Foote, the highly productive and capable radio operator who worked in Lausanne as one of the Rote Drei, and also the most controversial and engrossing character in this saga, had been published in that year. It was a mixture of fact and distortion, but it was also responsible for introducing the Lucy network to the world. Yet Foote did not write it himself. The goals that MI5 had in ghosting this work (its author was in fact the MI5 officer Courtenay Young) were primarily: i) to conceal Foote’s associations with SIS; ii) to present Foote as a once sincere Communist who saw the reality of the Soviet Union, and defected back to the UK; iii) to represent Foote as being far more important than his boss Radó, which was not the case; iv) to indicate that Foote was hazy about the identity of Lucy; v) to suggest that Lucy had been providing information for the Soviets well before the actual date of September 1942; and vi) to demonstrate that Sonia (née Ursula Kuczynski) had truly become disillusioned by the Nazi-Soviet pact, and therefore renounced espionage. A few years later, in 1955, before the death of Foote, the American historian David J. Dallin, in Soviet Espionage, wrote of Soviet suspicions in 1945 (i.e. before Foote and his boss, Radó, had returned to the Soviet Union) that the British security services were behind the intelligence emanating from the Swiss network, an admission that they were reluctant to make publicly. Overall, Dallin’s research was perhaps too reliant on the participants’ memoirs, but he apparently conducted interviews with Foote and others that translated into unique, and startling, evidence that pointed to Foote’s role as a British agent, even though his conclusion was equivocal. (Dallin obviously knew nothing about ULTRA.) Yet it seems that Dallin’s book was largely overlooked at the time – except, perhaps, by the Soviets.
Thus the drama properly begins in 1967, when the former SIS officer Malcolm Muggeridge, reviewing in the Observer a contentious and highly imaginative book on the Lucy Ring (A Man Called Lucy) by the French authors, Accoce and Quet, hinted at the Bletchley Park cryptographic success in cracking Enigma traffic. He did not actually identify the place or organisation, but his claims were made seven years before the appearance of the first book in English that revealed the Enigma story, The Ultra Secret, by F. W. Winterbotham. Muggeridge also suggested that Foote had been working undercover for SIS, and ventured that SIS fed the Lucy Ring with critical information about German operations. This article provoked a brief but illuminating correspondence, after which Muggeridge then made his claim more assertively in the pages of Esquire in September 1968 (i.e. in an overseas publication). His theme was soon picked up and endorsed by Richard Deacon in his History of the British Secret Service (1969), where the author expressed a strong belief that a) the information could not have come directly from Germany, and b) Foote was working for SIS.
The next major sally in the debate, however, occurred when the Hungarian leader of the Lucy Ring, Alexander (Sándro) Radó, in 1971 published, in German, a memoir that extolled the virtues of his espionage team, articulated the doubts he had harboured about Foote’s loyalty at the time, but rubbished the claim that SIS had engineered the flow of information through his network – a work that was clearly controlled by his Communist bosses. (His book was translated into English, as Codename Dora, in 1977.) Next, in 1973, Muggeridge expanded his story in Volume Two of his autobiography Chronicles of Wasted Time, when he explicitly claimed that the information communicated to Moscow from Switzerland came from Bletchley Park. This assertion was picked up enthusiastically as a plausible explanation by Barton Whaley in his meticulously researched Codeword Barbarossa (1973). The same year, the supportive chorus was joined by the military historian Charles Whiting, in his Spymasters (originally published as The Battle for Twelveland). Whiting cited a distinguished set of experts who had helped him in his researches, namely (in England) Professor R. Jones, David Irving, Group-Captain F. Winterbotham, Sir Kenneth Strong, Field-Marshal Sir Gerald Templer, Patrick Seale, Professor Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper, and A. Denniston, which suggests that these grandees of intelligence must have been sympathetic to his conclusions. Whiting’s message was echoed by the Irish-American historian Constantine Fitzgibbon, who served both with the British army and US intelligence in World War II, in his 1976 work Secret Intelligence in the Twentieth Century. I shall in a later instalment analyze these volumes in more detail, to explain why insider sources tried to influence the private accounts, and how they attempted to counter the ‘official’ history by giving details of personal experiences to historians and journalists.
The CIA produced a comprehensive report on the Rote Kapelle in 1979, focusing sharply on some of the anomalies in other accounts, and indicating the flaws in Foote’s memoir. (The timing of the publication is odd: it reads as if it had been written ten years before, as it speaks of events ‘twenty-five years’ ago, and anticipates the appearance of Radó’s 1971 memoir.) It also appeared to be unduly influenced by the unreliable Czech intelligence officer Frantisek Moraveč, exiled in Britain, who wanted to stress the contribution that his own spies had made to British intelligence-gathering. Moraveč was a close associate of Claude Dansey, the head of the Z Organisation within SIS, who used governments-in-exile to further his shadow espionage efforts in mainland Europe. And the Czechs were one of only two such governments that had been authorised to set up their own wireless communications from Britain, with stations in Prague and Switzerland, which adds fuel to the claim that they may have been involved in transmission of intelligence on behalf of the British. Yet Moraveč was dangerous (both he and his boss, Beneš, feature in VENONA transcripts): he had been in regular wireless contact with his agents in Moscow since the autumn of 1941, and had been undermining the alliance by feeding rumours about the flight of Hess, and other matters, to the Soviets.
In his 1975 memoir, Master of Spies, which suffers from some severe chronological errors, Moraveč had implied that the major flow of information came from Roessler to London via his agent Sedlacek, rather than in the opposite direction. The CIA report echoed this role that Sedlacek played, and how in September 1939 he started reporting by wireless to his bosses in London about German troop movements, information gained from Swiss intelligence, who in turn (the report claims) derived it from Lucy. (The file on Sedlacek at the National Archives reveals that SIS granted him a false British passport in the name of Charles Simpson in that same month, a provocative fact that will be explored in a coming instalment. Intriguingly, Foote – or rather, Courtenay Young ̶ misidentified Sedlacek, by his alias Selzinger, as Lucy in Handbook for Spies.) Yet the CIA’s account failed to resolve satisfactorily the central issue of how Lucy obtained his information. It completely ignored Muggeridge’s suggestions about SIS involvement, and speculated that the information came somehow to Roessler by the highly dubious mechanisms of couriers or radio from the Abwehr. Moreover, the CIA was perhaps a bit too trusting of the claim that Roessler, shortly before he died, had revealed to a trusted friend the identities of his sources. The CIA even ‘improved’ Roessler’s claim by correcting the profile of one source he only obliquely identified. Yet its report still holds some clout in intelligence circles.
The year 1981 saw the arrival of Hinsley’s work mentioned above, the year after a radical new study of the Lucy Ring, Operation Lucy, had been published by the journalists Anthony Read and David Fisher, which heavily promoted the story that the Lucy Ring was largely controlled by Colonel Dansey. In this work, Read and Fisher provided acknowledgments to a long list of intelligence experts including Calvocoressi, Cavendish-Bentinck, Trevor-Roper, Lewin, Muggeridge and Winterbotham, who presumably approved of its message. No doubt this book provoked ire in intelligence circles, especially because of the prominent names identified as advisers, and Hinsley was therefore probably instructed by his political masters to insert his denial. The government’s concerns cannot have been eased by an Observer review of the Read/Fisher publication in October of 1980 by Edward Crankshaw – who happened to be the SIS officer sent to Moscow in late 1941 to handle the dissemination of ULTRA material to the Soviets. Crankshaw boldly asserted that Foote had been a double-agent recruited by Claude Dansey in the latter’s hyper-secret Z Organisation. Also in 1980, the GCHQ officer Peter Calvocoressi, in Top Secret Ultra, revealed Crankshaw’s role as emissary to Stalin in Moscow (naming figures was something Hinsley strenuously avoided, which prompted a backlash), but was coy about alternative channels. Chapman Pincher, a journalist who had been a continual thorn in the flesh of the British authorities, brought his individual spotlight to the rumour in his 1981 work, Their Trade is Treachery, briefly endorsing the theory of SIS manipulation of Swiss communist spies, but both in that book and his 1984 Too Secret Too Long, he absolved Foote of double-agent responsibility, on the rather skimpy grounds that he had found no evidence that Foote had provided British intelligence with Soviet secrets during World War II.
In 1985, the prolific writer on intelligence matters, Nigel West, included in his Espionage Myths of World War II a chapter on the Rote Drei, summarizing the research so far, and pointing out the improbability of the scenario painted by Accoce and Quet, who, he declared, had admitted their fabling. West nevertheless strove to demolish the claim of British control of the ring primarily on the grounds (as West had been told) that Foote never worked for SIS. Yet West may have been fed a misleading story by Commander Cohen of the Z Organisation, and he appeared to be unaware that the Selzinger identified in Foote’s narrative was in fact Sedlacek, with the Moraveč connection. West also ignored (or overlooked) the testimony of Crankshaw, as well as that of the other ex-officers who had furtively supported some of the revisionist accounts. In fact, West presented his conviction about Foote so confidently that he excluded the need for any other forensic analysis of the controversy, such as the detailed analysis of radio traffic. Swayed by Radó’s endorsement, his judgment favours more a group of anti-Nazi officers in Zossen supplying the Swiss intelligence, an interpretation that does not appear to have been seconded by anyone else. Again, Radó cannot be treated as highly reliable on this matter.
The following year, Phillip Knightley published The Second Oldest Profession, where he expressed severe doubts about the notion of an SIS feed, but he misunderstood and misrepresented what Dansey’s role would have been, ignored much of the evidence, and thus arrived at an illogical conclusion. Also in 1986, Read and Fisher published their biography of Dansey, Colonel Z, echoing their previous story. Perhaps the most startling revelation at this time, however, was a terse statement in the biography of Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, who had chaired the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) during the war. As an establishment figure, one might have expected Cavendish-Bentinck to toe the government line, but, alongside Winterbotham, he had explicitly given the game away to Read and Fisher, and presumably approved what his biographer, Patrick Howarth, wrote in Intelligence Chief Extraordinary, also published in 1986: “. . . 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.” The past chairman of the JIC thus added a generous dose of gravitas to the debate. Why would such prominent figures give their support to this theory unless it were true? It is hard to divine any ulterior motive.
One intriguing new observation that has come to light is a comment made by Sir Patrick Reilly, inspectable in his unpublished memoirs held by the Bodleian Library (6918). Reilly had been appointed as secretary to the head of SIS, Stewart Menzies’s, in 1942, as an initiative to improve morale and communications in the Secret Service. He wrote that he understood that ‘Dansey’s Z organisation in Switzerland was mopped up by the Germans’. This is provocative terminology to use, especially since the Germans never invaded or controlled Switzerland, and it surely can refer only to the way that the Gestapo was able to prevail upon the Swiss authorities to track down and arrest the wireless operators of the Soviet spy network, the ‘Rote Drei’. Thus Reilly provides an almost accidental proof that Dansey was indeed in control of the spies – not just Alexander Foote, but Uncle Tom Sedlacek and all. The Germans certainly were not able to touch Dansey’s Z officials at the consulate in Geneva.
And there the matter stood for a while, the pot boiling rather unproductively. This was the period when no new archival sources had come to light, a time when ageing participants wanted the untold story to be revealed even though they were still inhibited by the Official Secrets Act from full disclosure. What had been published became too frequently part of the lore, without deeper analysis. Dubious sources were cited by respectable historians, who were in turn quoted with an inappropriate authority. The inventions of Accoce and Quet were cited as much as the assertions of Muggeridge, but no one seemed to come to grips with the essential tension between the rival claims of Hinsley and those of the revisionists. Some of the main witnesses died before archival evidence came to light: Fitzgibbon in 1983, Crankshaw in 1984, Cavendish-Bentinck, Muggeridge and Winterbotham in 1990. Some stirred the pot: for example, in his 1987 biography of the traitor Fuchs, Klaus Fuchs: Atom Spy, Robert Chadwell Williams echoed some of the false assertions while introducing some new ingredients of his own. Others surprisingly ignored it: Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, in their 1990 work KGB: The Inside Story casually (and a little recklessly) cited both Accoce and Quet, as well as Read and Fisher, but wrote nothing about the role of the Lucy Ring as an indirect channel. In his 1995 book, The Red Orchestra, V. E. Tarrant attempted to debunk Read and Fisher by endorsing the myth that Roessler operated radio equipment himself, but his argument was inconsequential and illogical, for example suggesting that, since Cairncross took risks in passing on ULTRA information, the latter would not have concurrently have been sent clandestinely by SIS to the Lucy ring.
A surprisingly contrary voice from the other side appeared in 1994: while the Soviets generally had diminished any intelligence contribution by their allies in World War II, Pavel Sudoplatov, who had headed the project associated with atomic espionage, published Special Tasks, in which he expressed his belief that the British had indeed planted Enigma secrets in Switzerland. This represented a considerable change to policy expressed by the defunct Soviet Union, who had not liked to admit that its successes had been attributable to the wiles of their permanent enemies, the British imperialists. Moreover, Sudoplatov had been responsible for chasing down and eliminating traitors in Europe in the 1950s and 1960s, so presumably knew what he was talking about. His testimony is a little contradictory, however: on one page he states that he knew that the British were decrypting German traffic, but on the next he both indicates similarities between messages received from London and those from Switzerland, but implies that the British were protecting an agent in German headquarters. The publication of Nigel West’s and Oleg Tsarev’s Crown Jewels in 1998 made it absolutely clear that Moscow Centre was very much aware at the time that Enigma messages had been broken at Bletchley Park. So was Sudoplatov being deceitful, disingenuous, or simply forgetful? Probably a measure of all three. Yet by this time the relevance of Foote’s loyalties and involvement with the whole exercise of covert ULTRA distribution appeared to be going the same way as that of the Schleswig-Holstein question, of which Palmerston was said to have declared that only three men had ever understood it, one of whom was dead, the other mad, and the third (he himself) had forgotten it.
The decade of the 00s was one of declassification. In 2004 the files on Foote were released to the National Archives, and in 2008 the 1949 report on the Rote Kapelle produced by a joint project by MI5, SIS and the CIA was declassified. Richard J. Aldrich brought out his (unofficial) history of GCHQ (titled GCHQ) in 2010, but disappointingly sidestepped completely the question of ULTRA dissemination to the Soviets on the basis that the issue was ‘academic’, since Cairncross and his cronies had been doing the job for them. On the contrary, it was certainly not ‘academic’, given that Britain’s intelligence agencies were trying to negotiate with the Soviets while being utterly unaware of such espionage, but that truth eluded Aldrich. 2010 also saw the authorised history of MI5 by Christopher Andrew, Defending the Realm, and the following year Colin Jeffery produced his authorised history of SIS, The Secret History of SIS, although his account stopped in 1949. One might have expected the latter work to bring some precision – and even resolution ̶ to the debate. Yet the outcome was flat. While Jeffery brought out some fresh facts on the wartime SIS operation in Switzerland, he left many questions unanswered, skating over the challenges Menzies faced in delivering Ultra information to the team in Moscow, refusing to discuss the stalking-horse of alternative channels, and offering contradictory information on British wireless capabilities in Switzerland during the war. What is revealing, however, is what he stated in a note in Chapter 16, where he discussed intelligence sharing between the UK and the Soviet Union: “This book [Sharing Secrets with Stalin, by Bradley F. Smith] is excellent for Anglo-Soviet relations generally”, as if he could finesse the issue by delegating it to a work written fourteen years before – by an American author!
The full title of Smith’s 1996 book is Sharing Secrets With Stalin: How the Allies Traded Intelligence, 1941-1945. It is an extraordinary work – not primarily because of its scholarly thoroughness in tracking down official sources – but for its reckless irresponsibility over the effects of espionage. It spends about three lines only on the activities of the Cambridge Five and their cohorts. Yet Smith’s oversight in not covering the fact that Cairncross, Blunt, Long, Philby and maybe Jenifer Hart (through her husband, Herbert) had access to Ultra material, and passed them on prodigiously to their Soviet handlers, performs a massive injustice to the topic of negotiating strategies between the Soviet Union and Great Britain over intelligence material. Since the British were ignorant of the treachery being performed under their noses, their concerns about the security of the Enigma programme were in practice meaningless, and since the Soviets were receiving comprehensive reports via subversive channels, their opinions about British cooperation would have been utterly suspicious and cynical. The irony of writing a book titled ‘Sharing Secrets’ without proper coverage of the main thrust of secrets-sharing appeared to elude Smith – and this at a time when the secrets betrayed by British and American spies working for the NKVD/NKGB * or the GRU were familiar to all historians. No wonder that Jeffery (and SIS) were quick to endorse a work that pretended that Communist espionage was not a factor, but it was also incredibly naïve of them to think that the omission would be overlooked. Yet they almost succeeded in evading the whirlwind. [* The NKGB replaced the NKVD in 1943.]
Judgments today are all over the map. The issue lies in a perpetual fog, with observers dancing around it since they appear to be unable to assemble the various archival and anecdotal sources in order to analyze and distinguish them – something that this writer is attempting to address. Authoritative reference books fumble the story. The Oxford Companion to World War II (1995) studiously ignored the controversy, echoing the Hinsley line on its ULTRA entry, and that of the CIA in its paragraph on the Lucy Ring. Other works have taken a bolder line. For instance, Richard Bennett’s 2002 work Espionage: An Encyclopedia of Spies and Secrets, with a Preface by ex-SIS officer, David Shayler, boldly declared: “However it is certain that Roessler was a witting or unwitting British double-agent and that the Lucy Ring was used by SIS and probably later the OSS to feed ULTRA material through to the Soviet government.” No government spokesperson stands up to protest this ruling, or to invoke Professor Hinsley. The same year, John Keegan, in his well-respected Intelligence in War (2002), extraordinarily elided over the whole business, casually and improbably suggesting that Roessler was fed his information from Swiss Intelligence, ‘who maintained contacts with the German Abwehr’. A puzzling conclusion: but that was all.
Likewise, Nigel West’s own Historical Dictionary of World War II Intelligence, published in 2008, safely chose to decline even to acknowledge the debate, merely reflecting the puzzled conclusions of the outdated CIA report of almost thirty years before. Max Hastings, in his Secret War (2015), despite offering evidence of the identical nature of intelligence that the Soviet Union was receiving via their spies in Britain and from the Lucy Ring, could not bring himself to accept the notion that Foote was an SIS agent – what he dubbed the ‘conspiracist’ theory’. He based his conclusions on his judgment of SIS expertise, and the fact that Philby would have betrayed Foote, but did not consider the rich parade of intelligence officers who had supported the theory, was apparently unaware of the Foote archive, and refused to discuss the possibility that Britain may have been behind the communications channel. He even declared that Roessler was providing, to the SIS office in Bern, the same secrets from the German High Command that he was forwarding via Foote to Moscow.
Apart from Hastings’s superficial dismissal, no respected academic has stepped forward to challenge the story of British subterfuge, on the grounds of undocumented rumours or circumstantial evidence. Of course the ‘rumour-mongers’ are all dead, and can no longer make their case. And what is also extraordinary is that no historian has chosen to comment on the implications of the ‘conspiracist’ theory and its relatives. Why no curiosity about the effect this initiative had on the outcome of the war, or on the strategies for Soviet espionage – both during the war, and after it? If the activity did truly aid the Soviets and shorten the war, and the Russians now acknowledge that fact, why on earth would the whole process have to be concealed and denied? Why still the mystery over a cooperative venture that helped defeat Nazism? Could the ruse possibly have been effected without a compliant role by Alexander Foote, which would cast a blazing new light on the Kuczynski affair? Maybe that is the reason for the coyness.
It is worthwhile stepping back to recapitulate and consider the opposing thought-processes, motivations and strategies at the time of Barbarossa, and after relations broke down a year later. What effect did these events have on the progress of the war? As the introduction to this instalment explained, when Hitler’s Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the British wanted to increase the Soviet Union’s ability to resist the Nazis by offering it access to current ULTRA information, but it was imperative that they conceal the source. They knew, from intercepted German messages, that Soviet communications were severely fragile, and, if the Germans suspected that Enigma had been broken, the whole war effort (especially the campaign in North Africa and the protection of Atlantic convoys) was at risk. Yet for the same reason the British could also not explain to Soviet intelligence how they knew the latter’s encryption techniques were not secure enough. Moreover, in British military discussions, a renascence of the Soviet-Nazi alliance was also not excluded from the equation. The threat was real: in July 1942, Roosevelt was to learn from his ambassador in Switzerland that Hitler had made a peace offering to Stalin, and the fear endured. Stalin had to be appeased and assisted. (Yet Stalin would later make peace moves to the Germans himself.)
Thus, as Hinsley openly acknowledged, in the second half of 1941, an elaborate charade developed where raw ULTRA information was processed and packaged for Soviet consumption, using the British Military Mission. The British were of course completely unaware that the Soviet high command was concurrently receiving rich topical ULTRA information from their spies in British Intelligence. They thus faced more obstacles: the Soviets did not appear to trust what they were told, apparently because the information could not be accurately sourced, but in all probability because they quickly understood that they were receiving through official channels a lot less than they were gaining from their espionage network in Britain. Consequently, since the Soviets did not apparently appreciate their gestures, the British dithered and were inconsistent, and gave the Soviets the impression they could not be trusted – an exposure that was heightened by the rather arrogant manner of many officers in the military mission. Thus, so the theory goes, in the middle of 1942 Churchill insisted that his intelligence chiefs explore alternative paths for providing ULTRA intelligence, in the belief that the Soviets would more willingly trust information coming from a native Communist source – namely the GRU network in Switzerland.
What about the stance of the Soviets during that period? They certainly wanted all the intelligence about Hitler’s military formations and goals they could acquire, but were still innately suspicious of any information that the ‘imperialist’ British would give them, especially when the source could not be divulged. (Hinsley actually describes an incident in late 1941, in another footnote, which suggests that Macfarlane of the Military Mission may have carelessly let on where the intelligence derived, and Menzies had to cover quickly for him.) Thus the Soviets used what they were told as a measure of British sincerity, since they also had access to the trove of ULTRA information being passed to them by Cairncross, Blunt, Long, and Philby: they knew more than the British Mission in Moscow, and then in Kuibyshev, when Moscow was evacuated, and used what they learned to compare facts. Yet they also had to be wary, not giving away how much they knew, lest the British grew suspicious. (Ironically, the quality of the information received from their espionage network in Britain was so good that it caused the Soviets to ask whether they were being spoonfed with false information.) They could claim their own sources, but the Rote Kapelle was wrapped up by the Gestapo in everywhere but Switzerland by the late summer of 1942, and communications from NKVD agents behind the German lines on Soviet territory were very haphazard. In summary, the Soviets used British inconsistency about sharing secrets as an excuse for complaining, and were consequently stingy in providing reciprocal information. The hypocrisy of their withholding the insights gained from their extensive Rote Kapelle network in 1941 and 1942 would never have occurred to them.
If and when the British set up the shadow OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or Supreme Command of the Armed Forces) source ̶ probably in the summer of 1942 ̶ and decided to leak information through Foote, they probably used their Czech contacts to facilitate the exercise in Switzerland, and to mask Foote’s involvement. It may not be coincidental that three major events occurred in September 1942: the Gestapo’s wrap-up of the Rote Kapelle in Germany, Britain’s initiation of its ULTRA distribution in Switzerland, and Roessler’s joining the GRU spy network there as an informer. The British were obviously still unaware of Cairncross & Co., and evidence suggests that they may have received intelligence from the Soviet Union that they had sourced themselves. While believing that the Soviets would more easily accept intelligence coming from their own network, they omitted to consider that the Communists would be just as demanding of knowing sources for verification purposes as they had traditionally been. (One of the conditions of Roessler’s joining the Ring was that he would never identify his sources.) But the new strategy meant that the British pedalled back on any official ULTRA distribution via the Mission in the Soviet Union. The BMM was told on November 15, 1942, that distribution of decrypts was being discontinued, even though a few critical summaries were passed on after that date. For Moscow, the results of this policy must have cast fresh scepticism on the sincerity of the British, who thus gained no credit for helping the Soviet war effort. In fact Soviet trust decreased. Britain’s failure to match the highly detailed information supplied by Cairncross before Kursk, for example, indicated to the Soviets that the British had lost interest in its ally’s fortunes on the Eastern Front. That was a serious offence. (Intriguingly, Hinsley included, as Appendix 22 of Volume II of his History, a complete transcript of a vital April 23 intercept on Zitadelle, the German operation at Kursk – the very message that the Soviets must have received from Cairncross.)
When Roessler came on board in September 1942, the Soviets were very suspicious about possibly planted intelligence, making intense inquiries about the origin of his information. (Mirroring Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s concerns, Stalin was fearful of a separate rapprochement by them with Hitler.) Radó had to explain Roessler’s stipulations about anonymity of sources to them: he was also a mercenary, and needed to be paid. Yet, since the quality of the information coming from Lucy soon turned out to be of such high calibre, Moscow came to rely utterly on its Rote Drei sources. Moreover, as the texts of telegrams supplied by Radó in his memoir show, their demands became much more complex, so the Soviets appeared much more as customers of integrated intelligence rather than passive consumers of German bulletins and communications. It appears as if a dedicated team was creating packaged answers to complex questionnaires, a response that surely could come only from London. Sudoplatov relates how Moscow compared the reports coming from Switzerland with those arriving from the Cambridge ring in London, noted the similarities, but observed that the Lucy messages were more detailed than those arriving via British intelligence.
On the other hand, since the official supply-line was drying up, the Soviets co-operated less with the British Mission, shutting down (for instance) the intercept station at Polyarnoe they had allowed the British to use, and impounding Typex encoding machines. Thus they continued to diminish the sincerity of the Allied war effort, continuously applying pressure for the opening of the Second Front, over which Churchill had previously broken promises he had made to Stalin. Hinsley remarks on their failure to respond to the receipt of intelligence as well as their inability to collaborate on it. Heinz Höhne offered a disturbing example in his Codeword: Direktor (1971), where he reported that the Berlin Rote Kapelle group sent to Moscow intelligence that the Germans had captured British code-books which allowed them to know in advance British convoy plans for Murmansk: one hopes that this was passed on to London by Moscow, but evidence is not clear. Hinsley does not record any such communication. Relations deteriorated. The Soviets were resentful that they were sacrificing so much blood in repelling the Germans, while their allies kept delaying the opening of the Second Front. And after the Battle of Kursk in 1943, with the turning of the tide in their favour, the Soviets began to be less reliant even on the Lucy sources, which were themselves closed down with the arrest of the Swiss radio operators at the end of that year.
It would appear that the Soviets for a long time suspected the British role in the whole operation, and during the war did harbour suspicions that Foote was acting as a double-agent. Radó did not trust him, and provides several hints (confirmed by Dallin) of his links to British intelligence. But when Foote was interrogated in Moscow in 1945, having volunteered to return (in itself a strong symbol of innocence), he must have convinced his GRU masters that he had no knowledge of the link, or who Lucy even was, for they would surely have shot him if they had suspected otherwise. Following similar logic, Philby must surely not have been privy to Foote’s role supporting the ULTRA back-channel, else he would have advised his political masters so. The GRU thus regarded Foote more as a turncoat when he ‘defected’ back to Great Britain in 1947, probably changing their minds only when Roessler’s utility was shown to be negligible after Sedlacek recruited him to Czech intelligence after the war. Sedlacek, a true Communist (unlike Moraveč, who had to escape from the Communists as briskly as he had fled from the Nazis), had returned to the Czechoslovak Republic in 1947, and assuredly told his bosses the true story. Their fears were probably confirmed after Roessler’s trial in 1952, an event that prompted Dallin’s analysis given above. As will be shown, Dallin provided more damning evidence of Foote’s dual role.
Moscow probably wanted to elevate the role of its spy network in Britain above the possibly duplicitous behavior in Switzerland, and the reliance on British machinations. Accordingly, Cairncross was at some stage awarded the Order of the Red Banner by Stalin because of his contribution to the Battle of Kursk. Yuri Modin reports that Cairncross was handed the award by his new handler, Krechin, in 1944, but other accounts suggest it was not until 1948, and that Cairncross received only a monetary award in 1944 – in October. In fact, during 1943, at the time the Battle of Kursk was shaping up, Moscow Centre, through the exhortations of an NKVD officer, Elena Modrzhinskaya, was firmly of the impression that the whole ring of Cambridge spies were double agents: they were not cleared until August 1944. Thus it is worthwhile speculating that Cairncross’s award might have been given as a smokescreen, to distract attention away from the fact that the Soviets had finally accepted that they had been reliant on official British intelligence in their victory over Hitler. Moscow was reluctant to concede that it had been hoodwinked until Sudoplatov admitted as much, fifty years later.
Yet in 1943 the GRU apparently knew better than the NKVD. Sudoplatov claimed that the more precise version of the German battle plans that Cairncross provided in May 1943 (as explained earlier) proved to the GRU that the British had penetrated Radó’s group, that they were in that process ‘rationing information’, and thus were not so serious about contributing to a Soviet victory. That is also the conclusion of West and Tsarev, who, like Modin, claim that Cairncross provided far more detailed information about German troop movements before Kursk than did the British government. What is extraordinary, also, is the fact that, in June 1943, the GRU informed the NKVD of the value of Cairncross’s intelligence in winning the battle of Kursk. Since the two organisations were rivals, and the GRU prided itself on understanding its military needs far better than the NKVD did, that was a significant gesture. It is surprising that the Foreign Intelligence chief Fitin (the recipient of the report from the GRU) was not able conclusively to clear the spies of the charges of being double-agents until August 1944. The final point to be made is that Moscow, though clearly aware of the ULTRA project, since Blunt and Cairncross and Philby had all provided evidence of decryption of Enigma traffic, appeared not to appreciate Churchill’s fervent desire to protect its sources. Since, for most of 1943, it had regarded its spies as agents of British Intelligence, it maybe found it difficult to break away from the implications of that suspicion.
It may come as no surprise that Marshal Zhukov in his Memoirs (1969) gave no credit to Cairncross or other espionage sources, attributing the victory at Kursk to ‘the advantages of Soviet social order, and through heroic, tremendous efforts of the Soviet people led by the Party, both at the front and in the rear’ (i.e. partisans). Khrushchev echoed this assessment: Kursk was ‘the ultimate triumph of our Soviet Army, our ideology, and our Communist Party.’ In any case, the outcome was a further loss of trust on the Soviets’ part rather than an expression of gratitude. The Law of Unexpected Consequences was at work. British Intelligence made three strategic errors: 1) it failed to internalise the warnings of Walter Krivitsky about communist spies within the corridors of power, and thus left itself open to Soviet espionage; 2) it did not acknowledge that the Soviet Union was a temporary ally, but a permanent adversary, and thus failed to develop a consistent, resolute stance in negotiations with Stalin; and 3) it underestimated the discipline of Soviet Intelligence in wanting to verify sources of information before trusting them. Moreover its security turned out to be leakier than that of the Soviets. In summary, Menzies and his colleagues made a monumental but classical misjudgment of the thought-processes of their Soviet ‘frenemy’, assuming that they were well-intentioned intelligence officers in their own mould. But they were not gentlemen, they were inherently paranoiac, and they viewed conciliation as a great weakness.
This whole saga could prompt an observer to describe a regular course that such historiography takes in the world of Intelligence. (Indeed, some aspiring scholar might want to study other events to detect whether there is a pattern.) Stage 1 involves a period of silence, since secrets may still be of use against other enemies, and reputations have to be protected. Stage 2 reflects a desire by the authorities to gain recognition for their efforts, and they thus allow controlled leakages to occur, via trusted journalists or historians. The next Stage (3) is characterized by reactive measures, both by mavericks and by dedicated professionals who believe the whole truth is not being told. Inhibited by the Official Secrets Act, they themselves divulge alternative stories to their allies in publishing, while loyalists in turn release their own disinformation. To try to ensure a positive legacy, grandees issue dubious memoirs, or give deceptive interviews to their biographers. This leads to Stage 4, one of confusion, where both serious and speculative accounts cannot distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources, and questionable stories get cited in the indices of respectable historians, even. Stage 5 is led by the Official or Authorised History, where the powers-that-be attempt to bring order to the scene, giving an approved and trusted historian controlled access to secret files, and hoping that the public will treat such accounts with the reverence they do not deserve. By this time, most of the participants and witnesses are dead, and cannot question the conclusions, or promote their stories. Stage 6 is exemplified by the release of aged archives, which will have been weeded, but perhaps not very expertly so, and will thus provide a trove for a focussed historian. The declassification of such material leads to the final stage 7, where fact and fable are almost indistinguishable, but which gives an opportunity for an independent and enterprising historian, still relying on hypotheses, no doubt, but able to exploit a wealth of evidence in detective style, to put the archival record in context, and fill in pieces of the missing puzzle.
What is remarkable is that one sleuth practically experienced this complete cycle. Chapman Pincher started his career in tracking espionage and intelligence in 1950, at the trial of Klaus Fuchs, and published his last major work on it, Treachery, in 2011, three years before he died at the age of 100. Yet while uncovering several secrets, Pincher also contributed to the fog. His obsession with proving that Roger Hollis was the mole named ELLI blinded him to many research opportunities. Lest it be forgotten that this story is essentially about Sonia’s Radio, Pincher accepted the fact that the Lucy ring had been penetrated by SIS, but he established the conception that Foote could in no way have been a participant in this project. In his mind, had Foote truly been an SIS agent, he would no doubt have passed on what he knew about Sonia to his masters at the time she moved to the UK at the beginning of 1941, and not just when he ‘defected’ in 1947. Yet had Britain’s security services learned from Foote about Sonia’s true mission at that time, the guilt for the concealment and negligence over her could not have been laid at Hollis’s door alone. After all the words he had written about Hollis, Pincher could probably not face that reality.
Four theories about the source of the information, and the role of SIS, in the transmission of the Rote Drei’s intelligence can thus be postulated (ignoring the discredited Accoce/Quet theory of Roessler’s personally receiving radio transmissions from inside Germany, one echoed solely by Tarrant):
1) The Hinsley Denial: At its simplest, it unequivocably rejects any SIS involvement, but makes no other comment, implicitly suggesting that agents in the German High Command were responsible. This is the discredited thesis of Accoce and Quet, who later admitted they invented that part of the story. Max Hastings appears to be the lone defendant of this official line, without providing convincing evidence of the identity of the German sources, but any historian who declines to investigate the controversial claims (such as John Keegan) should also be listed here.
2) CIA/Nigel West/OUP Agnosticism: This group remains sceptical about both claims. It finds the theory of major leaks from the German High Command improbable, but tends to trust the story that Roessler identified his sources (primarily Gisevius and Oster) shortly before he died. It disbelieves (based on Commander Cohen’s evidence) the assertion that Foote was ever employed by SIS, and is influenced – perhaps too easily ̶ by Moraveč, who claimed that more information came from Roessler to GB than vice versa. This theory cannot conceive of an SIS back-channel to the Soviets in Switzerland working without Foote.
3) Muggeridge Revisionism: This school expresses a strong involvement by SIS in ULTRA distribution, with Foote as a compliant and vital member. It was initiated by Muggeridge’s disclosures in 1963, and its supporters presumably include all those luminaries who, behind the scenes, provided insights to Whiting, and Read & Fisher (e.g. Calvocoressi, Winterbotham, Strong, Cavendish-Bentinck, Denniston, etc.), as well as the open testimony of Crankshaw. This theory has now been endorsed by Sudoplatov – if not explicitly, at least by the statements of his collaborators, Jerrold and Leona Shechter.
4) The Pincher Doctrine: This sect believes in the existence of the set-up in (3), but concludes it was successful despite the lack of involvement of Foote, or even SIS’s knowledge of his role in the Soviet network. Chapman Pincher’s theory was presumably also adopted by Soviet Military Intelligence, whom Foote managed to convince that he was entirely innocent (otherwise they would have shot him), but Moscow may have come round to Theory 3 when they learned from Sedlacek, years after the war, about Roessler’s real value and role.
This extraordinary paradox will be explored in the next instalment, where the evidence for Foote’s recruitment by Colonel Dansey will be presented. For, if the probability that Foote was an agent of SIS and the Z Organisation can be shown to be high, it would presumably bring the (2) camp into (3), and demolish Pincher’s theory that Hollis was the prime culprit in facilitating Sonia’s entry to rural England, and was thus able to protect her thereafter from MI5 surveillance and subsequent arrest. And that would point to a major cover-up operation over the presence and use of Sonia’s Radio.
New Sources:
Special Tasks, by Pavel Sudoplatov
Master of Spies, by Frantisek Moraveč
Rote Kapelle: Spionage und Widerstand, by W. F. Flicke
Intelligence in War, by John Keegan
The Oxford Companion to World War II, by I. C. B. Dear & M. R. D. Foot (editors)
Codeword: Direktor, by Hans Höhne
Triplex, by Nigel West
Soviet Espionage, by David Dallin
Historical Dictionary of WWII Intelligence, by Nigel West
History of the British Secret Service, by Richard Deacon
Sharing Secrets with Stalin, by Bradley F. Smith
Their Trade Is Treachery, by Chapman Pincher
Espionage: An Encyclopedia of Spies and Secrets, by Richard Bennett
The Second Oldest Profession, by Phillip Knightley
Memoirs, by Marshal Zhukov
Top Secret Ultra, by Peter Calvocoressi
Intelligence at the Top, by Kenneth Strong
Klaus Fuchs: Atom Spy, Robert Chadwell Williams
Chronicles of Wasted Time, by Malcolm Muggeridge
Spymasters, by Charles Whiting
Codeword Barbarossa, by Barton Whaley
Secret Intelligence in the Twentieth Century, by Constantine Fitzgibbon
The Invisible Writing, Arthur Koestler
The Great Game, by Leopold Trepper
KGB: The Inside Story, by Christopher Andrew & Oleg Gordievsky
Roosevelt’s Secret War, by Joseph E. Persico
The Crown Jewels, by Nigel West & Oleg Tsarev
The Mitrokhin Archive, by Christopher Andrew & Vasily Mitrokhin
My Five Cambridge Friends, by Yuri Modin
Khrushchev Remembers, by Nikita Khrushchev
P.S. I have enough material to write Part 6 of this saga next month, although I really should inspect one important document first. In 1949, MI5 combined with SIS and the CIA to write a report on the case of the Rote Kapelle, an analysis that was declassified in 2008. Coming as it did between the defection of Foote and the arrest of Klaus Fuchs, and in the same year that Foote’s memoir was published, this report should contain a trove of information (or disinformation) that will in any event help shed light on the attitude of the intelligence services to the Soviets’ spy ring. I shall be in the UK in March, and plan to visit Kew expressly to read this document, and shall thus update my text should the archive justify it. I should also like to inspect the Dallin papers at the New York Public Library, which include some unique conversations Dallin had in the early 1950s with Foote and others involved with the Lucy network, but I have no plans to trek North at the moment. As this month comes to an end, I am trying to negotiate with the Library the electronic release to me of selected documents from the Dallin archive.
January’s Commonplace entries can be seen here.
