Edward Lucas - Deception

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had been saving for emergencies and crossed the border where his reception party was still waiting, as this previously unpublished picture depicts (Kiik is on the right). [60] bh I would be glad to hear from anyone who can identify the SIS officer on the left. 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). [61] bi He returned to Estonia for several visits in the 1990s, donating money for a war memorial and enjoying a belated recognition for his efforts. He passed on coordinates for the place near Murmansk where he buried his transmitter. A former Estonian official has the coordinates and plans to retrieve it when practical.

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 35who 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 Kukilński, 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. 37But 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. 38The 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

One of the Swedish agents was a young émigré called Ewald Hallisk. His story mirrored many of his generation: conscripted into the German army at the age of sixteen, he had fled to Sweden to escape the Soviet advance. Spurred by a mixture of adventure and patriotism, he volunteered to join the Swedish secret service in 1948 and was sent on a mission two years later. He left behind a fiancée, Margaret, and a toddler son, Peter. For forty-two years after he went missing, his family assumed he was dead. Nobody else wanted to admit that he had existed at all. Swedish authorities covered up the fiasco, citing official secrecy and claiming falsely that even if some such operation had existed all the documents involved had been burned in the 1960s.

On 29 June 1992, Peter Kadhammar, a journalist on the Swedish newspaper Expressen , produced a sensational scoop. 40Far from being dead, Hallisk was living in a modest cottage in Estonia. The ‘spy who never was’ proved only too happy to talk about his training in firearms, shortwave radio, and invisible ink. He also wanted money: he had, he insisted, been betrayed by the same incompetence that had marred the SIS and CIA operations. The KGB had picked him up within two days of arriving in Estonia. He had spent two months on death row and then fifteen years in a labour camp in Magadan, one of the harshest parts of the Soviet penal system, and remained under close KGB scrutiny after his release. Swedish officials initially argued that he had been a volunteer and knew what he was getting into. Then they offered him 500,000 kronor (about $80,000 in the money of 2011). He sued, and won a modest top-up of 120,000 kronor. But it was all too late: Margaret had died, and he found little common ground with Peter. 41After an unhappy stay in Sweden he returned to his humble life in Estonia.

Other survivors were even unluckier. In 1991 I tracked down Klemensas Širvys, parachuted into Lithuania in October 1950 together with Lukša. When I asked him about his mission, he burst into tears. A widower, crippled by a stroke, he lived in dismally poor conditions in a remote part of Lithuania. The botched operation had ruined his life. I was expecting a tirade. But he bore no bitterness towards the Americans or the British: indeed he spoke broken English proudly from his time spent in a British labour battalion in post-war Germany. His one regret was that the Western allies had sent so few people, so late, to fight the communists. It was hard to imagine that this lame, tearful old man had four decades ago come ashore with a Schmeisser MP-32 sub-machine gun, grenades, radios and cyanide tablets. After a year in a bunker he was captured, tortured and sent to Siberia for a twenty-five-year sentence with five further years in exile. 42Neither the CIA nor SIS appears to have made provision for him after 1991. [62] bj I shall be delighted if I am misinformed. A similarly poignant story concerns Zigmas Kudirka, a bright young Lithuanian émigré recruited by SIS in post-war London and sent in autumn 1952 as a radio operator. In 1956 he appealed to SIS to get him out, and was told (in his words) ‘chin up’ and to try to make his own way to Sweden. Speaking in 1989, in fluent English, Kudirka showed unconcealed rage: