Enemies Within. Richard Davenport-Hines

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СКАЧАТЬ London’s Morning Post newspaper sent its Paris correspondent to interview Agabekov, ‘chief of the OGPU for the five Mahomedan countries’, and duly reported: ‘He calls himself an American, and is a typical Levantine with yellow eyes and a coffee-coloured complexion.’ These were yet further expressions of that British condescension – a complacent amalgam of pride and insularity – that had led Robert Bruce Lockhart, the British acting Consul General in Moscow, to liken Lenin to a provincial grocer in 1917.³⁷

      The deaths or flight from Russia of the tsarists’ world-leading cryptographers lowered the quality of Soviet code-making and code-breaking. Partly as compensation for this deterioration in SIGINT (signals intelligence), but also as an outcome of their inclinations, the Bolsheviks collected excellent HUMINT (human intelligence) from other countries’ missions, legations and embassies both in Moscow and in other European capitals. There is a myth, as Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky write, that brilliant mathematicians achieved the major code-breaking successes. The reality is that HUMINT had a part in most major breaks of high-grade code and cipher systems. During the 1930s Moscow’s informants in the Communications Department of the Foreign Office supplied plain-text British diplomatic telegrams which Soviet code-breakers could, in some instances, compare with the ciphered versions as an aid to breaking the ciphers. Soviet SIGINT experts were, however, decimated during Stalin’s Great Terror. The cryptographer Gleb Boky, who led the SIGINT operations of the NKVD and the Fourth Department, was shot in 1937 together with his deputy. Boky’s successor survived in post only a month.³⁸

Soviet espionage in foreign missions

      Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) did not have a Moscow station in the 1920s or 1930s. Muscovites were too cowed to be approachable by foreign diplomats. Sir Robert Hodgson reported in 1924 on Soviet espionage on diplomatic missions in Moscow: ‘It is unfortunate that, in order to establish the new régime – the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat – the Soviet Government should find itself compelled to … extend on an unheard-of scale the most revolting expedients of dilation, espionage and administrative tyranny which disfigured the old régime.’ Foreign missions in the capital were beleaguered ‘panic-centres’, he said. Russians were afraid to attend Hodgson’s lawn-tennis tournaments; musicians were scared to perform at evening concerts. He regarded the Soviet regime as akin to a fundamentalist religious cult at the height of its zeal: a year later he told Lord D’Abernon that he hoped Russia’s government ‘will be laicised, and that normal human interests will resume their sway’. When Anglo-Russian diplomatic relations were temporarily severed in 1927, all but two of the Russian staff of Hodgson’s mission were given diplomatic protection with jobs at the Norwegian legation. Dire punishment for collaborating with capitalism befell the unfortunate pair who were not hired by Norway: the doorkeeper Vera Rublatt was exiled for three years in Siberia; the messenger Surkov was sent to the dreaded penal camp in the Solovetsky Islands.³⁹

      Security measures were primitive for most of the inter-war period not only in British embassies and legations but in those of the other powers. The need for specialist advice or strict procedures occurred to almost no one in the 1920s. In 1927 it was found that Soviet diplomats in Peking had recruited Chinese staff in the British, Italian and Japanese legations to supply copies of secret diplomatic documents.

      The most grievous lapse began on the watch of Sir Ronald Graham, who was the Ambassador in Rome for twelve years from 1921. Graham made the embassy at the end of the Via XX Settembre, with its beautiful garden shaded by the city wall, into a salon for literary and artistic connoisseurs as well as a political and diplomatic congregation point. Amid these amenities Francesco Constantini, an embassy messenger, was recruited by INO in 1924 and given the codename DUNCAN. When two copies of the diplomatic cipher went missing shortly afterwards, diplomats did not think to suspect him. In addition to cipher material, he stole dispatches on Anglo-Italian relations and often supplied the ‘confidential print’ which was circulated from London to heads of its overseas diplomatic missions giving up-to-date material from important Foreign Office documents and selected dispatches and summaries. Constantini was a mercenary who wanted to enrich himself. Some 150 pages of classified material left the embassy on average each week by 1925. In Moscow, Constantini was reckoned to be INO’s most valuable agent, whose material would betray British plots to destroy the Soviet Union and provide early warnings of the expected British invasion. ‘England is now the organizing force behind a probable attack on the USSR in the near future,’ Constantini was instructed by Moscow in 1925. ‘A continuous hostile cordon [of states] is being formed against us in the West. In the East, in Persia, Afghanistan and China we observe a similar picture … your task (and consider it a priority) is to provide documentary and agent materials which reveal the details of the English plan.’⁴⁰

      Security did not improve after Sir Eric Drummond had succeeded Graham as Ambassador in 1933. Slocombe’s pen-portrait of the new chief in Via XX Settembre evokes an unassuming, dejected, exact and unimaginative Scot who was heir-presumptive to the earldom of Perth: ‘the least elegant Foreign Office official who ever carried a neatly rolled umbrella in Whitehall … he had a small head, a long neck with a prominent Adam’s apple, a long nose’. Drummond and his staff could not think how to react to the brazenness of Mussolini in 1936 in publishing a secret British report on Abyssinia which had been filched from the embassy. They were confounded when Il Duce bragged that he had a copy of a memorandum ‘The German Danger’ circulated to the Cabinet by the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. They did not know that the Italians forthwith gave the text of Eden’s paper to Hitler.⁴¹

      No action was taken to improve security until in 1937 a necklace belonging to Lady Drummond vanished from a locked red box in the Ambassador’s office. Valentine Vivian of SIS, who was sent by the Foreign Office to report on the Rome embassy, warned that there was no ‘such thing as an expert in security measures, and I make no pretensions to being one’. He nevertheless made sound recommendations – of which one is especially notable. Although diplomats assumed that telephone conversations were tapped, they were unaware that telephones might be doctored so as to act as microphones recording conversations in embassy offices. Vivian suspected a new telephone on the cipher officers’ table, and after Foreign Office discussions, the PUS Sir Robert (‘Van’) Vansittart instructed that henceforth telephones should be excluded from the cipher-room. A month after Vivian’s visit to Rome, the Foreign Office discovered that the summary of a confidential talk with the Regent of Yugoslavia about his policy towards Italy had been leaked to Mussolini’s government.⁴²

      When Vivian inspected British embassy offices in Berlin a few months later, he found them vulnerable to breaches. Security in embassies, legations, consulates and the 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, СКАЧАТЬ