Deception (30 page)

The exceptions to this rather unimpressive performance came from British intelligence links with their local counterparts, especially in Estonia (history may not repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes). An agent called ‘Baron', run by Carr, reported the start of secret Nazi–Soviet negotiations in the spring of
1939
, and confirmed in June that they were making good progress. But the desk officer at SIS headquarters in London refused to circulate this intelligence further, believing that the agent could not possibly have had the access necessary.
⁴⁰
It contradicted the Foreign Office line, that its envoy to Moscow Sir William Strang was making progress on an Anglo-Soviet agreement. The same fate befell another scoop a year later. Although SIS closed its Baltic stations in September
1940
following the Soviet annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, many of the agent networks remained, mostly run from Helsinki. A British agent codenamed ‘Outcast', formerly run from Tallinn, presented himself to the Helsinki station in September
1940
.
⁴¹
A Russian émigré living in Berlin (but with no love for the Nazis), he had escaped from Tallinn with German help, in return for agreeing to work for the
Abwehr
against Russia. Now he wanted to spy against them, for the British. In November
1940
he reported to his British case officer: ‘German command preparing (June) campaign against USSR.' Sadly, Carr dismissed this as ‘incredible' and probably mere propaganda.

Had politicians in London heeded the SIS sources and gained advance warning of the Hitler–Stalin pact, what could they have done? The deal was the culmination of a long period of diplomatic and political failure, in which Britain and France had been outmanoeuvred and Hitler had seen obstacles to his expansion plans melt one by one. It is hard to imagine even the most piercing intelligence insight reversing that. Nor is it easy to see what Britain would have done with the warning of Hitler's assault on the Soviet Union. Stalin had plenty of warnings from other sources: he usually responded by punishing the messenger. Exercises in speculative history are as unrewarding as they are tempting. Yet it is hard not to feel frustration that such accurate intelligence went unnoticed. The wider lesson, if any, is that espionage is valuable only when decision-makers let the results change their thinking. Spies may provide confirmation only that the currents in the depths and shallows are similar. If they offer a different version of events, or prediction of them, officials and politicians must be willing to act on what they are told.

That is one weakness of Western intelligence even in the present day. Readers trying to understand why Russian spymasters so frequently run rings round their Western counterparts will also find it striking that so many other mistakes of the past are replicated so frequently. The tendency to pay good money for bad intelligence is deeply ingrained. Even after the fiascos of the early years, most intelligence from the interwar Baltic was barrel-scrapings, as this downbeat vignette illustrates.

 

Baltic agent ‘BP/
24
' who was resident in Moscow and had ‘connections in Soviet institutions', agreed for a retainer of £
50
a month to ‘send information three times monthly' about political matters and ‘on subject of propaganda'. After his own involvement with OGPU (who blackmailed him over gambling debts) was discovered, he was charged with treason but escaped to Austria, where he continued to peddle intelligence on Russia until the early
1930
s. There he was reported to be employed by the Nazi Intelligence Office in Berlin and was offering reports to SIS though a mutual contact in Finland. By
1934
(as SIS discovered in
1946
from captured German documents) he had graduated to the
Abwehr
, was reporting to them on Russia and into the bargain had passed them an SIS questionnaire on Russia received from his Finnish contact.
⁴²

 

If the later history of Western intelligence battles with Russia in the Baltic was ill-starred, one can at least say that it was part of a consistent pattern.

9

Between the Hammer and the Anvil

Carelessness, naiveté and wishful thinking were again on ample (and humiliating) display only twenty years later. The episode centred on the doomed underground struggle against communist rule in the Baltic states – one of the least-known chapters in modern European history.
¹
The names of the heroes and villains are unfamiliar; so too are the organisations they belonged to and the cause they espoused. But their death and destruction, the moral ambiguity and dilemmas that beset them, and the lethally unhelpful involvement of Western intelligence all deserve recognition. The central paradox was this: the goals of those resisting Soviet rule in the Baltic did not include gathering intelligence for Western spymasters, nor did their aims or origins make them ideal allies. But it was the spy agencies that offered them their only hope of outside support; and for all their faults, they were, at the start of the Cold War, a large part of the slender hand of cards that American and British intelligence could muster.

Intelligence links across the Baltic sea had reconnected during the war, in early
1943
. The cooperation was controversial for both sides. The Soviet Union was still officially Britain's ally and many of the Baltic agents were outspokenly anti-communist. Opinion on their side was divided. Many believed that the only hope of staving off another Soviet occupation was to intensify cooperation with the Germans. Others hoped that Britain would ditch its alliance with Stalin and rescue them as it had done in
1920
. The first fruits of the connection were bitter. Evald Aruvald, then in the Estonian resistance, recalled: ‘We passed to the British . . . details of our strengths and positions at the front, hoping for assistance. The British, in turn, passed on this information to the Soviets.'
²
Colonel Alfons Rebane, a legendary Estonian officer who later worked for SIS, complained: ‘This damaged the Estonian people's fight against our slave-masters the communists.'
³

The story starts with Alexander ‘Sandy' McKibbin, born in pre-revolutionary Russia, and then a timber-merchant in pre-war Estonia (and probably on the books of British intelligence)
⁴
. During the war, he worked for the SIS station in Stockholm: in those days one of the great spy nests of Europe. His main job was spying on the Nazis, who had occupied the Baltic states in
1941
and were now fighting a losing defensive battle against the advancing Soviet forces. Meanwhile the Lithuanian underground, hoping against hope to re-establish the country's independence, was eager to make contact with Western powers. One of its representatives was a regular visitor to Sweden and made contact with McKibbin, who signed him up.
⁵
(The British spy also contacted an Estonian underground leader, until his capture and torture by the Gestapo in
1944
led to the destruction of his network.)
⁶

From the Baltic point of view, the Nazis and Soviets were not hugely different. This perspective will be startling to those who see Hitler's Germany as the fount of all evil and the Soviet Union as a valiant (if ill-led) ally against it. But in the Baltic as in much of Europe the war was a three-way fight. In one corner were the Nazis, with an imperial doctrine based on racial supremacy, in the other the Soviets, who mixed Russian imperialism with the ideology of class warfare. In the middle, bearing the brunt of the bloodshed, were the peoples whose countries the Nazi–Soviet pact had obliterated. As the Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova notes, the war years offered the Baltics a choice between Hitler, Stalin and death, with one choice not necessarily precluding the others.
⁷

By the time of the first tentative contacts between the resistance and foreign intelligence, the damage inflicted by both fighting and invasion was severe. The forcible annexation and Sovietisation of the three Baltic countries in
1940
was followed in June
1941
by the deportation of much of the pre-war elite,
⁸
typically in the middle of the night, with an hour's notice. The class enemies, loaded on to cattle trucks to freeze, starve and suffer in distant labour camps, included: members of ‘anti-Soviet' political parties (whether of left or right), police, prison officers, military officers, political émigrés and ‘unstable elements', foreign citizens, ‘individuals with foreign connections' such as stamp collectors, senior civil servants, Red Cross officials, clergy, noblemen, industrialists and merchants. These comprised
10
,
000
people from Estonia,
15
,
000
from Latvia and
34
,
000
from Lithuania. They included much of the middle-class Jewish population of all three countries. As the Yale historian Timothy Snyder has pointed out, it would have been little comfort to those Jews to know that they were being persecuted for their class, not their race.

When the Soviet forces returned in
1944
, those who had failed to flee and showed any sign of resistance or independent thought were repressed as ‘bourgeois nationalists'.
⁹
This traumatic history is the emotional and strategic backdrop for the espionage debacles of the following years, for the independence struggle of the
1980
s, and for the headlong embraces between Western spy services and their Baltic counterparts in the
1990
s. Juozas Lukša, a CIA-trained Lithuanian resistance fighter, later wrote:

 

In
1940
, the Russians had come marching into our land to ‘liberate' us from ‘capitalist and Fascist exploiters.' In
1941
, the Germans had marched in after them and thereby ‘liberated' us from ‘Bolshevik bondage.' And now, the Russians were back again – this time to ‘liberate' us from ‘the tyranny of Nazi hangmen.' But since we still recalled how they had gone about ‘liberating' us the last time, we didn't think we had any cause to rejoice.
¹⁰

 

Helping the Soviets beat the Nazis made sense from a Western point of view (and was a question of life and death for the region's surviving Jews) but the bungling that followed was inexcusable. British intelligence was keen to find out what was happening in the occupied Baltic states, chiefly to know if the Soviet Union was planning a further push westwards. On
15
October
1945
it sent a boat with four agents from Sweden to Latvia on a reconnaissance mission. Unfortunately, it capsized and the men were caught and tortured to the point of insanity. Their ciphers and radio transmitters fell into the hands of J
ā
nis Luka
Å¡
evi
č
s, a brainy officer of the Latvian KGB. Here was proof that SIS operations against the Soviet Union had restarted – but how to respond? Waiting for more spies to come and trying to hunt them down was clumsy and risky: far better to lure future British agents into a trap. The operation was labelled
Lursen-S
¹¹
though it is usually called ‘Red Web' – the name of a book in
1989
by the British author Tom Bower, who first unveiled its dark secrets.

In March
1946
Luka
Å¡
evi
č
s forced a Latvian
^ax
who had operated a radio for the British during the war to start sending messages again, claiming that the agents had given him their codes and radio before capture. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the British eventually responded. A second SIS mission to Latvia in
1946
landed two agents
^ay
tasked with finding out what had happened to the previous mission. But the new arrivals' transmitter proved faulty. In an even graver breach of tradecraft, SIS instructed them to make contact with the existing – KGB-controlled – radio operator. That forged a fatal link between the new British operations and the compromised network now controlled by the KGB. With one thread in the web spun, Luka
Å¡
evi
č
s did not order the men's arrest. He wanted a bigger haul. SIS instructed its agents (now under KGB surveillance) to meet other British agents on the ground. That provided the Soviets with more leads and clues. Other efforts were equally farcical. Two more agents ended up stranded in Latvia and were arrested, along with their networks. Another émigré, Feliks Rumnieks, was instructed to return to Latvia and make contact with the KGB in order to work as a double agent. He was arrested and confessed everything.

Meanwhile the Lithuanian KGB was playing a similar game. It sponsored a rival resistance movement to the main partisan outfit.
¹²
The bogus organisation's underground leader was a distinguished American-born Lithuanian, Juozas Albinas Markulis, seemingly stalwart, but in fact a traitor since
1944
. Such ruses not only divided and distracted the anti-communist cause abroad. They also helped uproot real resistance at home. On
18
January
1947
Markulis summoned a meeting of all the partisan leaders in Lithuania. Though Lukša – a genuine anti-communist of remarkable brains, courage and eloquence – was sceptical, others were trusting: after all, Markulis was in contact with the revered British intelligence service. The Lithuanians walked straight into a KGB ambush. In a similar ruse in Latvia, Luka
Å¡
evi
č
s arranged for fourteen senior partisan leaders to be summoned for a meeting in Riga with representatives of the ‘Latvian government-in-exile' and a representative of the ‘British secret service'. To allay their suspicions, each leader was told to provide a photo, and in return received a valid Soviet ID card – supposedly proof of British prowess in forgery. On
13
October the unsuspecting men briefed the ‘British' visitor on every detail of their operations. They were then arrested and never seen again.