Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain. Richard Davenport-Hines
Foreign Office was seen as a matter of lowly office administration. Officials of mature judgement were dismissive and even scornful of crude espionage scares. Basil Liddell Hart was military correspondent of The Times, adviser to the Secretary of State for War and one of England’s most up-to-date tactical planners. ‘This ugly rash is again breaking out on the face of Europe,’ he warned of ‘spy-mania’ in 1937. ‘Its justification is probably slender, as usual. For the knowledge that matters is rarely gained by the methods that thrill the lover of sensational spy-stories: safer, in every sense, is the knowledge that comes by the application of ordinary deductive methods to a mass of data that is common property.’ It took the discovery in September 1939, after the outbreak of war, that for ten years Moscow had been buying secrets from the Foreign Office’s Communications Department (see Chapter 5), and the further belated revelation by SIS in January 1940 that Berlin had (during the previous July and August) received secrets from the Office’s Central Department, for an embryonic Security Department to be formed. ‘I can trust no one,’ exclaimed the Office’s exasperated Permanent Under Secretary, Sir Alexander Cadogan, who had been equally astounded on first hearing the long history of betrayals in Rome.43
It is easy to disparage these attitudes with hindsight. These were men, though, who never purged an enemy, and were never deluded that history was on their side. Their arrangements were no more defective or naive than those of the United States. William Bullitt was appointed as the earliest American Ambassador to Soviet Russia in 1933: he had earlier been psychoanalysed by Freud, and had co-authored with Freud a psychoanalytical biography of Woodrow Wilson. ‘We should never send a spy to the Soviet Union,’ Bullitt advised the State Department after three years in Moscow. ‘There is no weapon so disarming and so effective in relations with the Communists as sheer honesty.’ The corporate lawyer Joseph Davies, who replaced Bullitt in 1936, was a dupe who attended the Moscow show-trials and believed the evidence. The embassy at first had no codes, no safes and no couriers, but sent messages through the Moscow telegraph service where they could be read by anyone. The US Marines who guarded the embassy, and some of the cipher clerks, were provided with NKVD girlfriends. When an FBI agent, posing as a courier, visited the embassy in 1940, he found that the duty code clerk had left the code-room unattended, with the door open, for forty-five minutes. At night the code-room safe was left open with codebooks and messages on the table. It did not occur to the FBI agent to search for listening devices. When this was belatedly done in 1944, a total of 120 hidden microphones were found in the first sweep of the building. Further sweeps found more microphones secreted in furniture legs, plastered walls and elsewhere.44
The political culture of everlasting distrust
The most effective British Ambassador to Stalinist Russia was Sir Archie Clark Kerr, who was created Lord Inverchapel as a reward for his success. ‘Nearly all of those who now govern Russia and mould opinion have led hunted lives since their early manhood when they were chased from pillar to post by the Tsarist police,’ he wrote in a dispatch of December 1945 assessing diplomacy in the new nuclear age. ‘Then came the immense and dangerous gamble of the Revolution, followed by the perils and ups and downs of intervention and civil war.’ Later still came the deadly purges, when ‘no one of them knew today whether he would be alive tomorrow’. Through all these years Soviet apparatchiks ‘trembled for the safety of their country and of their system as they trembled for their own’. Their personal experiences and their national system liquidated trust and personal security.45
Stalin achieved supremacy by implementing a maxim in his book Concerning Questions of Leninism: ‘Power has not merely to be seized: it has to be held, to be consolidated, to be made invincible.’ To Lev Kamenev, whom he was to have killed, he said: ‘The greatest delight is to mark one’s enemy, prepare everything, avenge oneself thoroughly, and go to sleep.’ Dissidents who had fled abroad were assassinated. In 1938, for example, Evgeni Konovalets, the Ukrainian nationalist leader, was killed in Rotterdam by an exploding chocolate cake. Stalin compared his purges and liquidations to Ivan the Terrible’s massacres: ‘Who’s going to remember all this riffraff in twenty years’ time? Who remembers the names of the boyars Ivan the Terrible got rid of? No one … He should have killed them all, to create a strong state.’46
Stalin rewarded his associates with privileges so long as they served his will. ‘Every Leninist knows, if he is a real Leninist,’ he told the party congress of 1934, ‘that equality in the sphere of requirements and personal life is a piece of reactionary petit-bourgeois stupidity, worthy of a primitive sect of ascetics, but not of a socialist society organized on Marxist lines.’ But Stalin was pitiless in ordering the deaths of his adjutants when they no longer served his turn. The first member of his entourage to be killed on his orders was Nestor Apollonovich Lakoba, who was poisoned during a dinner at which his attendance was coerced by Stalin’s deadly subordinate Lavrentiy Beria in 1936. Beria then maddened Lakoba’s beautiful widow by confining her in a cell with a snake and by forcing her to watch the beating of her fourteen-year-old son. She finally died after a night of torture, and the child was subsequently put to death.47
The enemies of the people were not limited to saboteurs and spies, Stalin said at the time that he launched his purges. There were also doubters – the naysayers to the dictatorship of the proletariat – and they too had to be liquidated. The first of the notorious Moscow show-trials opened in August 1936. Chief among the sixteen defendants were Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had agreed with Stalin to plead guilty and make docile, bogus confessions in return for a guarantee that there would be no executions and that their families would be spared. They were faced by the Procurator General, Andrei Vyshinsky, the scion of a wealthy Polish family in Odessa, who had years before shared food-hampers from his parents with his prison cell-mate Stalin. Vyshinsky was ‘ravenously bloodthirsty’, in Simon Sebag Montefiore’s phrase, producing outrushes of synthetic fury at need, and using his vicious wit to revile the defendants as ‘mad dogs of capitalism’. The promises of clemency were ignored, and when all sixteen defendants were sentenced to death, there was a shout in court of ‘Long live the cause of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin!’ Stalin never attended executions, which he treated as ‘noble party service’ and which were officially designated the Highest Measure of Punishment. Vyshinsky seldom saw the kill, for he too was squeamish. At the Lubianka prison, Zinoviev cried: ‘Please, comrade, for God’s sake, call Joseph Vissarionovich [Stalin]! Joseph Vissarionovich promised to save our lives!’ He, Kamenev and the others were shot through the back of the head. The bullets, with their noses crushed, were dug from the skulls, cleaned of blood and brains, and handed (probably still warm) to Genrikh Grigorievich Yagoda, the ex-pharmacist who had created the slave-labour camps of the Gulag and was rewarded with appointment as Commissar General of State Security.48
Yagoda, who was a collector of orchids and erotic curiosities, labelled the bullets ‘Zinoviev’ and ‘Kamenev’, and treasured them alongside his collection of women’s stockings. At a subsequent dinner in the NKVD’s honour, Stalin’s court jester Karl Pauker made a comic re-enactment of Zinoviev’s desperate final pleading, with added anti-semitic touches of exaggerated cringing, weeping and raising of hands heavenwards with the prayer, ‘Hear oh Israel the Lord is our God.’ Stalin’s entourage guffawed at this mockery of the dead: the despot laughed so heartily that he was nearly sick. A year later Pauker himself was shot: ‘guilty of knowing too much and living too well: Stalin no longer trusted the old-fashioned Chekists with foreign connections’. When Yagoda in turn was exterminated in 1938, the ‘Zinoviev’ and ‘Kamenev’ bullets passed ‘like holy relics in a depraved distortion of the apostolic succession’ to his successor Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov. Two years later Yezhov was convicted of spying for Polish landowners, English noblemen and Japanese samurai. When taken to a special execution yard, with sloping floor and hosing facilities, Yezhov’s legs