A Brief History of the Spy

emphasized in the final version: the service didn’t investigate people ‘because of their political ideology’ but only when there was ‘prima facie evidence that [the] organisation in question may be used as instruments of espionage, or otherwise when specifically requested to do so… C would always be well advised to seek guidance from the Foreign Office as to what political parties in foreign countries need special watching, and for how long.’

And it became abundantly clear that the countries that would need watching would indeed be those from the Soviet Bloc.

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During the years leading up to the start of the Cold War, the intelligence agencies of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were as concerned with spying on their own people as they were with counter-intelligence against foreign agents. This would continue to be the case throughout the twentieth century until the break-up of the Soviet Union, and in fact was nothing new in Russia.

The first political police force in the country, the Oprichnina, was founded by Ivan the Terrible in 1565 and was responsible for the massacre of whole cities before it was abolished seven years later. Then Peter the Great created the Preobrazhensky Prikaz so secretively that even the KGB’s own histories are unsure of the exact date of its institution in the late seventeenth century. It too did not last long, but the Third Section of Tsar Nicholas I’s Imperial Chancellery, founded in 1826, was to survive for over fifty years, serving as the Imperial regime’s secret police. Although eventually discredited following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, the Third Section’s work against revolutionaries was carried on from 1880 by the Okhrana, the nickname for the Department of State Police and its regional security sections.

The Okhrana did operate outside the confines of Russia. Its Foreign Agency set up a centre to keep an eye on Russian emigres in Paris — and was welcomed by the French police, the Surete, who went so far as to note in a report shortly before the First World War that ‘It is impossible, on any objective assessment, to deny the usefulness of having a Russian police operating in Paris, whether officially or not.’ When the centre was forced to close (at least publicly), the Surete were quick to complain that ‘The French government will no longer be able to know as precisely as in the past what dangerous foreign refugees in France are doing.’

The leaders of the eventual Russian Revolution were understandably concerned about the Okhrana and its reach. The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, which would split into the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903, was riddled with Okhrana agents. Four of the five members of the Bolshevik Party’s St Petersburg Committee in 1908–9 worked for the security service. Roman Malinovsky, one of the Central Committee, was an Okhrana agent — and was shot as such when he foolhardily returned to Russia in 1918, a year after the Revolution.

The Soviet State Security organization would go through many name changes in the period leading up to the Cold War. The Cheka (The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage) operated from December 1917 to February 1922, when it was incorporated into the NKVD (the People’s Commissariat of State Security) as the GPU (the State Political Directorate). From July 1923 to July 1934 it was known as the OGPU (the Unified State Political Directorate) before reincorporating into the NKVD, this time as the GUGB (Main Administration of Soviet Security). For five months in 1941 it was referred to as the NKGB (the People’s Commissariat of State Security) before returning to the NKVD. However, unlike in MI6, where agents who served in the First World War might still be around at the start of the Second, it was highly unlikely that anyone would survive through all of these name changes. Various errors by Soviet agents during this period — not warning of the armed uprisings in China, MI5’s discovery of the Soviet spy ring in the UK — led to regular reorganizations of the State Security Service. Purges of those whom the paranoid leader Josef Stalin mistrusted meant that many NKVD officers fell victim to their own organization — particularly once it was under the control of its most feared chief, Lavrenti Beria, who rose to power as the head of the NKVD Nicolai Yezkov’s deputy from 1936 before taking over on 25 November 1938, getting rid of his former boss on charges of espionage, treason and homosexuality.

Under Beria, the NKVD operated abroad extensively, with one of its agents, Ramon Mercader killing Stalin’s great rival Leon Trotsky in Mexico in August 1940. The scale of their operations against their wartime allies would only become apparent in the aftermath of the Second World War. Various agents were uncovered or betrayed, and they had numerous agents in place reporting the movements of the Axis powers. One of their greatest agents, Richard Sorge, eventually became press attache to the German embassy in Japan, and sent details of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa — the invasion of Russia — to Moscow, complete with its starting date of 22 June 1941. To Sorge’s amazement, Stalin ignored the reports, until the invasion actually began, at which point the leader started to place more credence in Sorge’s information. When Sorge learned that the Japanese did not intend to attack Siberia, Stalin moved his troops under Marshal Zukhov from there to the front line, which by this stage was almost within sight of the Kremlin. They were in time to rout the invading Germans. (Sorge was arrested shortly after this, and was hanged in 1944.)

Sorge wasn’t the only Russian agent to warn about Barbarossa: according to KGB records, there were eighty-four separate attempts to persuade Stalin to take action. German journalist Rudolf Rossler, code-named Lucy, had a source apparently deep within the German supreme command. Werther, as this source was known, gave the start date for Barbarossa, and then, once the operation was under way, supplied details of where the German army was at its weakest — leading to the siege of Stalingrad. He also forewarned Stalin about the German invasion code-named Operation Citadel in 1943, allowing the Russian army to prepare the territory at Kursk and launch a pre-emptive attack on the Germans. Although Rossler never revealed who Werther was, some believe it might have been Hitler’s deputy, Martin Bormann, who was last officially sighted in Berlin in May 1945, or possibly Admiral Canaris, who was shot following the abortive assassination attempt on Hitler by Colonel von Stauffenberg on 20 July 1944.

The Second World War also saw the creation of the NKVD’s counter-intelligence section, known as SMERSH, an abbreviation of the Russian title Smert’ Shpionam — Death to Spies. SMERSH, of course, became famous in the post-war years thanks to its prominent role in Ian Fleming’s early James Bond novels, even though it had in fact been disbanded long before 007 was given his licence to kill. (When the stories were transferred to the screen in 1962, SMERSH was replaced as the villains by SPECTRE, a terrorist organization created for the first proposed film, James Bond of the Secret Service, and subsequently used in the novels.) Officially founded in April 1943, SMERSH operated for three years, both infiltrating the German secret services, and maintaining order within the Red Army: troops retreating in the face of enemy advances would be shot by their own side, and it was treason to be captured. They used any means necessary — informants, radio games, disinformation — to ensure the loyalty of both military and civilian personnel, and were highly regarded by Stalin, to whom they reported directly. They were tasked with finding Hitler’s body at the end of the war, and, some sources claim, even removing it to Russia (leading to the inevitable claims that SMERSH agents recovered Hitler alive, and took him back to Moscow for interrogation and execution).

There was another Moscow Centre operation that began running before the Second World War, would continue through the war, and still be effective during the critical first few years of the Cold War. Hailed by the KGB as the ablest group of foreign agents it ever recruited, the quintet of spies became nicknamed ‘The Magnificent Five’. The spy ring comprising Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, provided invaluable information during the war and in its immediate aftermath.

Some agents are motivated by greed, others by ideology. The Magnificent Five were all recruited during the thirties when, as Anthony Blunt explained after his treachery was made public in 1979, ‘It seemed to me and many of my contemporaries that the Communist Party and Russia constituted the only firm bulwark against fascism, since the Western democracies were taking an uncertain and compromising attitude towards Germany.’ British Labour Party leader Ramsay MacDonald’s agreement to head a National Government in 1931 was seen as a sell- out by the Magnificent Five and the Russian model seemed the only way forward.

The prime mover initially was Guy Burgess, a flamboyant Old Etonian whose Communist leanings were inflamed further by the book Hitler over Europe? by Ernst Henri, which proselytized the use of cells containing five members (Funfergruppen, as they were named in Germany) to help foment anti-fascism. Henri was in fact OGPU agent Semyon Nikolayevich Rostovsky, who was a major recruiter for Moscow Centre, talent-spotting in Cambridge during the thirties. Burgess set out to create his own ‘light-blue ring of five’.

Around the same time, one of his friends, former Cambridge man Harold ‘Kim’ Philby was signing up for Soviet Intelligence. Philby graduated in 1933 with ‘the conviction that my life must be devoted to Communism’. He