Edward Lucas - Deception

I owe a great debt to people who must remain nameless. They know who they are.

No government agency has sponsored or censored this book.

1 Miss Fire: The Chronicle of a British Mission to Mihailovich 1943 – 1944 by Jasper Rootham (Chatto & Windus, 1946). Petar . A King’s Heritage; The Memoirs of King Peter II of Yugoslavia (Cassell,1955). Three Yugoslav-centred books that shaped my childhood are Lawrence Durrell’s neglected classic spy novel, White Eagles over Serbia (Faber & Faber,1957); the masterly ‘Sword of Honour’ trilogy by Evelyn Waugh (Chapman and Hall, 1955, 1951 and 1961); and Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (Macmillan,1941).

2 Smiley’s People by John le Carré (Hodder and Stoughton, 1980). Colonel Alfons Rebane, the Estonian officer who played a leading role in SIS’s Operation Jungle, was the model for le Carré’s ‘General Vladimir’, an Estonian émigré whose murder brings George Smiley back into the spy world.

3 See for example this report on the suicide of Nikolai Kruchina: ‘Soviet Turmoil; New Suicide: Budget Director’, New York Times, 27 August 1991 http://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/27/world/soviet-turmoil-new-suicide-budget-director.htmland also ‘Desperately Seeking Rubles’ by Susan Tifft and Yuri Zarakhovich, Time, 4 November 1991 www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,974181–1,00.html

4 The Cheka (formally the Vserossiyskaya Chrezvychaynaya Komissiya or All-Russian Extraordinary Commission) was itself in some senses a successor to the Tsarist-era Okhrana ( Otdelenie po Okhraneniyu Obshchestvennoi Bezopasnosti i Poryadka, or Department for Protecting Public Safety and Order ). Successor organisations were the OGPU ( Obyedinennoye Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravleniye , or State Political Directorate, the NKVD ( Narodnyy komissariat vnutrennikh del or People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs ) and the KGB ( Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti or Committee for State Security ). The FSB ( Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti or Federal Security Service ) is the main successor organisation to the KGB. The SVR is the much smaller Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki or Foreign Intelligence Service. It used to be the First Chief Directorate of the Soviet-era KGB. By contrast the GRU ( Glavnoye Razveditelskoye Upravleniye or Main Intelligence Directorate) is the military-intelligence service. Much diminished in recent years, it has changed neither its title nor its structure since Trotsky established it in 1918.

5 See ‘ Delo Poteyeva: predatel nanes ushcherb v 50mln dollarov no ne smog obmanut nachalstvo ukrainskoy lyubovnitsey ’ (The Poteyev case: the traitor cost $50m but couldn’t fool his bosses about his Ukrainian mistress) http://www.newsru.com/russia/28jun2011/poteev.html(this and all other links accessed July 2011).

6 ‘Spying Suspects Seemed Short on Secrets’ by Scott Shane and Benjamin Weiser, New York Times , 29 June 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/30/world/europe/30spy.html‘Russian Spies Too Useless, Sexy to Prosecute’ by Dan Amira, New York magazine, 7 July 2010 http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/07/russian_spies_too_useless_sexy.html‘Spy swap: Viennese Waltz’ Guardian , 10 July 2010 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/10/spy-swap-russia-us-editorial‘The Russian spy scandal that nobody much cared about’ by Alexander Chancellor, Guardian, 2 July 2010 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/02/russian-spy-ring-scandal

7 ‘Spy Swap’ by John le Carré, Guardian , 9 July 2010 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/09/spy-swap-john-le-carreThe Harry Lime reference is to the 1949 film The Third Man (later a novella by Graham Greene, who wrote the screenplay) of espionage in post-war Vienna.

8 Call For The Dead by John le Carré (Penguin, 1965). The first chapter is online. ‘A Brief History of George Smiley’, Guardian , 22 May 2009 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/22/le-carre-call-for-the-dead

9 http://charlescrawford.biz/blog/more-on-russian-illegals-and-sleepers(accessed 4 July 2010).

10 The central character in thrillers by Robert Ludlum, later made into films such as The Bourne Identity (2002).

11 An excellent fictional account of this comes in Vasily Grossman’s wartime classic Life and Fate (tr. Robert Chandler, Vintage Classics, 2010). The NKVD’s wartime role through the eyes of Soviet soldiers, is well portrayed in Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 by Catherine Merridale (Picador, 2007).

12 The home page for this programme (in Russian) is here http://www.ren-tv.com/pages/tayny-mira-s-annoy-chapman

13 The author Yulian Lyandres (1931–93), under the pen name Yuliam Semyonov, published his first book Semnadtsat mgnoveniy vesni (The Seventeen Instants of Spring ) in 1968. Unusually, it portrayed Nazi German officials as real people, not caricature monsters. Known as Colonel Maxim Isayev to his KGB colleagues, Stirlitz disrupts Nazi efforts to conclude a separate peace with the Western allies. After the war he hunts fugitive Nazis in Latin America, and is imprisoned at the height of the Stalinist post-war purges.

14 The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces Russia and the West (Bloomsbury, 2008). Published in America as The New Cold War: Putin’s Russia and the Threat to the West (Palgrave, 2008).

15 For details see http://russian-untouchables.com/eng/

16 Mr Mitrokhin made contact with an SIS officer in the British embassy in Riga on 24 March 1992. The CIA had previously turned him down. SIS brought him and his family to Britain in November and later retrieved a large amount of material, said to be six aluminium trunkfuls, copied from the KGB archives and hidden in his dacha garden. Some of it appeared in a series of books that he wrote with the historian Christopher Andrew (Allen Lane 1999–2005), The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB; The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World; The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West . A parliamentary inquiry criticised some aspects of this: http://www.archive.official-documents.co.uk/document/cm47/4764/4764.htm

17 Though this reflects a rise of one-third from the 3 per cent spent in 2008/9 to 4 per cent in 2009/10. It is a larger slice of a larger cake too: the Security Service has twice the staff and three times the budget it had in 2001. http://isc.independent.gov.uk/committee-reports/annual-reports

18 SB a Lech Walęsa. Przyczynek do biografii (The SB and Lech Walęsa: A Biographical Contribution ) by Slawomir Cenckiewicz and Piotr Gontarczyk (Institute for National Remembrance, Warsaw, 2008) http://www.ipn.gov.pl/portal/pl/229/7615/SB_a_Lech_Walesa_Przyczynek_do_biografii.html

1 Extensive documentation on this is available at www.russian-untouchables.comand www.lawandorderinrussia.org. A film telling the story is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aj2NLFL-lEand (full-length rental version) at http://vod.journeyman.tv/store?p=4455. A thorough legal presentation of the Hermitage case can be found here http://www.scribd.com/doc/20910344/DECLARATION-OF-NEIL-MICKLETHWAITE. A much more critical account is ‘Sergei Magnitsky, Bill Browder, Hermitage Capital Management and Wondrous Metamorphoses’ http://marknesop.wordpress.com/2011/01/19/sergei-magnitsky-bill-browder-hermitage-capital-management-and-wondrous-metamorphoses/but Mr Browder rebuts this criticism, to my mind convincingly.