Deception (33 page)

 

The right eye is covered with haematomas, on the eyelid there are six stab wounds made, judging by their diameter, by a thin wire or nail going deep into the eyeball. Multiple haematomas in the area of the stomach, a cut wound on a finger of the right hand. The genitalia reveal the following: a large tear wound on the right side of the scrotum and a wound on the left side, both testicles and spermatic ducts are missing.
³¹

 

Probably the last active partisans, the Lithuanians Antanas Kraujelis and Pranas Kon
č
ius, were hunted down in
1965
; a few others continued living illegally in the forests or concealed in family members' houses for years after that. J
ā
nis P
Ä«
nups, a Latvian, lived underground during the entire fifty-year period of Soviet occupation, emerging from his ‘illegal' existence only after the last Russian troops withdrew from the Baltic in
1994
.
³²

In all, Operation Jungle sent at least forty-two Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians back to their homelands, usually in the small hours of moonless summer nights. Not only was their own fate tragic: their presence was toxic to their cause. If they made contact with genuine partisans, the result was disaster. It stoked Soviet paranoia and discredited the West. The bravery of the resistance proved less inspiring to later dissidents than the legacy of failure. The demoralisation in SIS, and corrosion of trust with the CIA, was lasting. For those inside the Soviet empire, the idea that the West was a reliable ally in the struggle against communism – and even that the struggle was worth waging – had taken a beating. In the West, the knowledge that the Soviet side had so easily penetrated the anti-Soviet operation, probably right from the beginning, was a huge hurdle for anyone suggesting anything bold in the coming years. That glum mood was compounded when news broke of the treachery of Kim Philby. It was easy to think that Western spies, particularly British ones, were worse than useless.

The great puzzle of Operation Jungle, and of its American and Swedish counterparts, is who at what stage on the Western side realised that the operations were blown, and how they reacted. The conventional account, as outlined by Tom Bower in
Red Web
, suggests all-encompassing naivety and incompetence. But it does not quite fit all the facts. One fragment of possible evidence for an alternative version of events comes from Mart Männik's memoirs. Confronted by his captors with every detail of his mission, the resourceful SIS man soon realised that the entire operation had been a sinister farce from the moment he set foot in Estonia. Yet he did not despair, instead working out if by any means he could warn Rebane, thus at least sparing the lives of other Estonians in London. In mid
1953
, having spent the intervening months in a prison cell teaching himself Russian from Soviet propaganda books, Männik was instructed to send some messages back to London. After sending seven flawless ones, he claims he carefully inserted a secret code (using the three-dot ‘S' in Morse code rather than the four-dot ‘H'). This was a signal agreed with Rebane in case he found himself having to make a forced transmission.

He sent a second signal during a meeting with ‘Albert', an Estonian partisan unaware of the KGB deception operation who was being sent back to Britain. Männik's job was to reassure him. Instead, risking torture and death, he did the opposite, snatching a chance to whisper: ‘Tell Robert (Rebane's code name), and only him, that “H” has been “S” from the very beginning.' It is not clear if the message was understood or got through. In interviews with Estonian officials after
1991
‘Albert' maintained that he had not heard any such words from Männik.
^bg
But other warnings did get through. Several other SIS men had on their return to London expressed suspicions about their ‘partisan' hosts. Ludis Up
ā
ns, the real partisan returned to London in
1952
by his KGB hosts because of his excessive zeal, later claimed that he had told SIS that the resistance was bogus.
³³
A KGB man sent to London in
1954
posing as a partisan leader was confronted with the puzzle of the radioactive water and suggested that perhaps one group of partisans had been penetrated, while his own was sound. In
1955
Rebane was alerted personally by a former wartime comrade, turned by the KGB and sent to lure him back to Estonia for a show trial, who confessed his mission during a drunken evening. At least two phoney partisans brought to London had been spotted by chance as communist collaborators by other émigrés.

It is quite possible, as Bower argues, that SIS simply ignored such warnings because self-deception and self-interest overlapped. But continuing with Operation Jungle may have also been a master-stroke of reverse deception. If the KGB could be made to believe it had fooled the British completely, it would greatly increase the chance of running real operations. One piece of evidence comes from Captain Bernhard Nelberg, an Estonian refugee in London, who in August
1950
wrote to his country's ambassador, August Torma (himself on SIS's books) to say that he was going on a dangerous mission during which he might be captured or killed by the Soviets. In that event, he said, he bequeathed his property to the Estonian embassy in London. (This was maintaining a precarious existence on the fringes of official diplomacy. It still had staff and a building, and plenty of work. But the country it represented had been wiped from the map.)
³⁴
Although I can find no trace of Captain Nelberg's mission, it was not part of Operation Jungle.

Harder evidence comes from an operation involving the Estonian Voldemar Kiik, one of the most successful British agents of the post-war era. His story is almost entirely unknown outside Estonia, where he was buried with military honours in the national cemetery, next to Rebane, after his death in
2002
. His mission was to reconnoitre the airfield at Tartu, Estonia's second city. Details of his mission remain classified to this day, but it would have been of huge interest to British and American intelligence to know about any hardened hangars, the quality and quantity of air defences, and signs of nuclear weapons storage and transport. Kiik was a medical student in London when Rebane approached him, probably in
1950
. He was the ideal recruit – brainy, determined and a cut above the other Estonian young men in London, whose patriotism often outweighed their other talents (they, in turn, found his successful womanising tiresome). He was already battle-hardened. Mobilised by the Red Army in
1940
, he jumped off a troop train and hid in a forest before being conscripted by the Germans. Wounded in the head in the battle of Velikaya Luka near Leningrad, he was left for dead during a German retreat, only to be rescued during a counterattack. He detested both occupying powers equally. Rather than exchange the mandatory ‘
Heil Hitler!
' greeting, he and the other Estonians in his unit would shout ‘
Ei Ütle!
' (Don't Say!). The pronunciation was close enough to fool the Germans, and gave a pleasant tingle of resistance.

As well as the usual tradecraft, he was schooled intensively in Russian (which he did not speak) and in Pelmanism – the knack of remembering large quantities of data. But in a notable difference from the carelessness that surrounded Operation Jungle, he does not seem to have been trained with the other Estonians. With a cyanide pill sewn into his lip he parachuted into Estonia in the summer of
1952
. Though tempted to visit his mother – it would have been his only chance to see her before she died – he concentrated on his mission, perhaps using the remnants of a pre-war British network for support. His route back involved a perilous crossing of the Norwegian–Soviet frontier where disaster nearly struck. Another British agent making the same crossing shortly beforehand had come across some border guards asleep at their post and had shot them, perhaps unaware that he was complicating things for anyone else. The result was a frenzy of border-guard activity. Starving, sodden and fearing capture, Kiik waited in a swamp for two weeks, living off berries. He then took a Benzedrine pill he had been saving for emergencies and crossed the border where his reception party was still waiting, as this previously unpublished picture depicts (Kiik is on the right).
^bh
His name did not appear on a list of Estonians wanted by the KGB, and his family was not harassed, showing that the Soviet authorities never got wind of his mission (they believed he had emigrated to Canada). Prematurely grey after his ordeal, he then worked for the British government as an instructor in covert operations (among his pupils, he once said, was the future King of Norway).
^bi

 

 

Kiik's successful mission, the mysterious agent who crossed the border before him, Captain Nelberg's letter and some other evidence of separate, successful missions all support the theory that SIS, perhaps as early as
1950
and certainly by
1952
, had reason to continue Operation Jungle as a bluff. If so, the human calculations are chilling. Were the agents still inside the Soviet Union counted as good as dead? What of the men being sent to join them? The verdict of sheer incompetence might be moderated by the steel nerves and stunning cynicism that such decisions would involve.

Meanwhile a conflict between intelligence and political objectives was plaguing the other side too. The Soviet authorities wanted to lure a senior Estonian émigré figure – ideally Rebane – across the border for a humiliating show trial. The KGB was more interested in further penetration of SIS and the CIA. But with Rebane belatedly aware of the deception, the hunters had become the hunted. It is unclear how far Rebane and SIS were at cross-purposes in the final years of the operation. The wily Estonian claimed later that even after the closure of the Latvian and Lithuanian operations, he fought to maintain the radio games with the KGB-controlled partisans, in the hope of getting his own agents back. He succeeded in at least one instance, but his career with SIS was over. The once-dashing officer ended up working as a night watchman before moving to Germany and a job in that country's intelligence service. Having dodged repeated attempts by the KGB to entrap him, he died in
1976
, having burned his papers; his devoted secretary Liis Dillie Lindre lived to see her country regain independence in
1991
, yet continued to sleep with a loaded revolver by her bed (in a suburb of Brussels) even after the Soviet Union collapsed. Rebane's Latvian and Lithuanian colleagues moved to the United States. Carr was shunted first sideways and then out of the service; until his death in
1988
he blamed Philby, not his own incompetence, for the fiasco. Viktor van Jung, a cerebral and charismatic Estonian émigré who had trained two CIA agents
³⁵
who went on a doomed mission in
1954
, went on to a high-flying career in the agency. Strong indications are that he was the CIA officer who ran Ryszard Kukil
ń
ski, a senior Polish officer who passed on invaluable Warsaw Pact secrets to NATO.
³⁶

According to Rositzke, none of the CIA operatives returned from their missions.
³⁷
But a sprinkling of former agents who survived inside the Soviet Union did crop up after
1991
, with embarrassing consequences for their spymasters. One of the most conspicuous cases involved Sweden, a country that had maintained a stony silence over its espionage efforts in the Baltics, which seem to have been every bit as disastrous as those of SIS and the CIA.
³⁸
The activities of the
C-byrån
(C-Agency), renamed in
1946
as
T-kontoret
(T-Office), began during the war and were stepped up in
1948
when a Soviet attack on Sweden seemed all too likely. Using Baltic émigrés and run in close cooperation with SIS, they finished in
1957
, after the humiliating public exposure of a Swedish spy ring and a formal Soviet diplomatic protest.
³⁹