Enemies Within. Richard Davenport-Hines
in a slaughter-house. Ivanov’s assistant, who attended most executions, proposed gagging the prisoners’ mouths to stop their cries; but, so Ivanov told Bessedovsky, ‘I forbade him doing so. It would look too much like ordinary murders.’28
Maurice Dobb, an economist and pioneer Cambridge communist who was a key influence in assembling his university’s spy network, minimized these enormities in a lecture at Pembroke College. He admitted the famine, executions and reprisals against hostages – undoubtedly ‘the Red Terror has been at times exceedingly brutal’ – but most stories, including those of ‘torture’ or ‘the massacre of everyone with a white collar’, were fables spread by tsarist exiles. His optimism was not ignoble, although time would discredit it. The Bolshevik programme was committed to the abolition of standing armies and to establishing the workers and peasantry as the new ruling class. Dynastic absolutism and bigoted theocracy had already been replaced by a federation of soviet socialist republics. Ownership of the means of production had been transferred from exploitative capitalism to the socialist state. Reactionary hereditary landowners had been usurped by peasant uprisings. In consequence of these revolutionary changes, Dobb averred, ‘the extremes of riches & poverty exist no longer’. Although there were food shortages, rations were equitably shared. In Moscow ‘there are no slums; their former inhabitants having been accommodated in the flats & palaces of the former bourgeoisie … children are especially well cared for’. Dobb idealized Lenin as ‘a stern realist. Siberia & exile no doubt have tended to embitter him to a considerable degree. His political writings, which display acumen, erudition & logical reasoning, are invariably marred by virulent vilification of his opponents.’ Lenin resembled a Jesuit priest, continued Dobb, ‘with all the Jesuit’s sincerity & idealism, and at the same time the Jesuit’s callousness, casuistry, & bigotry’. He was ‘a man with a mission, subordinating all else to a single goal … a great leader, a great thinker and a great administrator’; but withal ‘a modest man, who regards himself as the mere instrument of the inexorable forces of social progress’.29
By contrast the diplomat Owen O’Malley, who journeyed through Russia in 1925 and 1941, described it as ‘a spiritual gas-chamber, a sinister, unnatural and unholy place’. People trudged through the streets of Leningrad with averted eyes: they had to efface themselves to stay safe; greeting a neighbour might prove fatal; children spied on parents. A red-bearded Cheka agent dressed in an engine driver’s peaked cap, black drill blouse and blue serge riding-breeches was charged with watching and eavesdropping on him in 1925. O’Malley believed that after he threw this tail, the ‘poor fellow’ was put to death. Even as a temporary visitor to the ‘Worker’s Paradise’ he grew nerve-racked by ‘the horrible feeling of being alone and in the power of these revolting barbarians’. After a few months as Consul General in Moscow in 1930, Reader Bullard felt repelled by what he saw: ‘the unscrupulous deception, the unrelenting despotism, and above all the cruelty’.30
Between March and June 1927 the Chekists suffered major reverses in their clandestine work in Poland, China, France and London. Stalin attributed these setbacks to hidden traitors: ‘London’s agents have nestled in amongst us deeper than it seems.’ The detection of espionage and subversion by accredited members of Soviet embassies, consulates and trade missions resulted in bad publicity and diplomatic tension. Accordingly, in August, the Politburo ordained that secret agents from OGPU, INO, the Fourth, the Comintern and cognate international bodies could no longer be members of embassies, legations or trade delegations. Top-secret communications must henceforth be transmitted as encrypted letters carried in the diplomatic bag: never by telegraph or wireless traffic. Although these orders were only partially implemented in 1927, they inaugurated the era of the Great Illegals.31
The illegal system had been pioneered in Berlin from 1925, and had subsequently been developed in Paris. The designation ‘illegal’ referred not to the illegality of agents’ intentions or conduct, but to the nature of their foreign posting. These were men and women who worked and travelled under false documentation and had no official ties to Moscow. If their activities were detected or they were arrested, they had no incriminating direct link to Moscow and could be disavowed. The presence of illegals did not obviate the use of agents and officers who were designated as ‘legal’, because they operated under the cover of a diplomatic post in a legation, consulate or trade delegation. (The exception to this was the USA, where successive administrations refused diplomatic recognition to Soviet Russia until 1933: perforce Soviet agents working in Washington or other locations had no official ties to Moscow, and usually worked and travelled under false documentation.) ‘Legal’ officers and agents had the advantages of easy communications with Moscow through official codes and by diplomatic bags. If their espionage activities were detected, they could claim diplomatic immunity. The chiefs of both legal and illegal operations based in European capitals were denominated the rezident. It was usual for each country to have both a legal rezident and an illegal rezident. These rezidents supervised a spying apparatus called the rezidentura.
The illegal rezidenturas were seldom involved in actual recruitment, but ran paid and unpaid agents, and cultivated sources who might unwittingly provide them with information. Many illegals had canny psychological insight, which they used to assess the ability, temperament and vulnerability of potential sources. These informants might receive an explicit approach or else be tapped for information without realizing the nature of their contacts. Officials were targeted, but also sources in journalism, politics, commerce and manufacturing. Informants were recruited by appeals to ideological sympathies or by exploiting the vanity of people who felt superior if their lives involved the exciting secret cleverness of espionage. The illegals identified people who needed money and would supply material in return for cash. They used sexual enticement, too. The illegals and their sub-agents often had to forfeit their human decency by cheating, lying, betrayal and abandonment of the weak. They rationalized their loss by arguing that only exploitative capitalists who were secure in power could afford scruples. Leninists or Stalinists who baulked at orders or confessed to scruples were betraying their cause and doubting its supreme value.
Following the Sofia cathedral massacre, the Bulgarian Vinarov served in 1926–9 as an illegal in China, where his wife worked as a cipher clerk in the Soviet legations in Peking and Harbin. During 1930–3 he was the senior illegal in Austria, where he riddled the French alliance system in eastern Europe and the Balkans with a network of agents and sources. He formed a trading company as cover for illicit movements across national frontiers, and penetrated the radio-telegraphic departments in Balkan capitals handling ciphered wireless traffic from foreign legations and embassies. This yielded good product until 1933, when the activities of Vinarov’s penetration agents were discovered, although misunderstood, in Bucharest. In 1936, after further training, he went to Spain under the cover of a commercial attaché, but was purged in 1938. Recalled to guerrilla warfare in the 1940s, he was appointed the Bulgarian communist government’s Minister of Transport and Construction in 1949.32
The illegals never travelled to and from Moscow under their own names. Nor did they use the passport attached to their primary alias. If Walter Krivitsky, who was the illegal in The Hague using the alias of Martin Lessner, had to return to Moscow, he travelled via Stockholm using the cover and documentation of an Austrian engineer named Eduard Miller. Elizabeth Poretsky, in her moving group memoir of Krivitsky and her husband Ignace Reiss, who served as an illegal in Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, France and the Netherlands (with oversight of England), shows that local conditions and the aptitude of the rezident counted for much. ‘Soviet agents’, Poretsky recalled, ‘were convinced that their historic role gave them an innate advantage in dealing with world politics.’33
The illegals’ commitment is incomprehensible unless one understands their certitude in their historical destiny. They all experienced the reality of the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin while they underwent indoctrination and training in Moscow. They knew the cruelty, hardship and scarcities while never doubting the future abundance. In their temporary Red Army accommodation in Moscow, Reiss and Poretsky gave