Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

73. vol. 6, app. 2, part 5. The first VENONA reference to Yatskov’s responsibility for ENORMOZ dates from January 23, 1945; VENONA decrypts, 1st release, p. 60.

74. Samolis (ed.), Veterany Vneshnei Razvedki Rossii, pp. 169-71.

75. VENONA decrypts, 3rd release, part 2, p. 268.

76. Though Mitrokhin’s notes include references to most of the best-known, as well several hitherto-unknown, Soviet spies in the wartime United States, all refer to NKVD/NKGB agents. There is thus no reference to Hiss, who worked for Soviet military intelligence.

77. VENONA decrypts, 3rd release, part 3, p. 207.

78. k-27,appendix, para. 21.

79. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 343-8.

80. Kimball, Forged in War, p. 318.

81. VENONA decrypts, 3rd release, part 3, p. 207. A footnote to this decrypt, added by NSA in 1969, identifies ALES as “probably Alger Hiss.” The corroborative evidence now available puts that identification beyond reasonable doubt. Of the four Americans (other than US embassy staff) who went on to Moscow after Yalta, only Hiss fits Gorsky’s description of ALES (Moynihan, Secrecy, pp. 146-8). Gordievsky recalls a lecture in the Centre in which Akhmerov referred to his wartime contact with Hiss. Hungarian intelligence files on the Noel Field case show that Field also identified Hiss as a Soviet agent. Whittaker Chambers, the ex-GRU agent who exposed Hiss, testified that, as indicated by Gorsky’s telegram, Hiss first began supplying intelligence to Moscow in 1935. Both Chambers and Bentley, like Gorsky, implicated some of Hiss’s family, as well as Hiss himself, in Soviet espionage. Further evidence pointing to Hiss came from the Soviet defector Igor Guzenko in 1945. Though the statute of limitations prevented Hiss’s prosecution for espionage in 1950, the evidence used to convict him of perjury in that year, for lying about providing government documents to a Communist spyring, remains compelling. See, inter alia: Breindel, “Hiss’s Guilt,” New Republic (April 15, 1996); Schmidt, “The Hiss Dossier,” New Republic (November 8, 1993); Weinstein, Perjury; Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB. ALES, in the Cyrillic alphabet, looks like a contraction of “Alger Hiss”—one of a number of Soviet codenames at this period which contain clues to the identity of the agent concerned.

82. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, p. 347. On the basis of Akhmerov’s contact with Hiss (very unusual in the case of a GRU agent), Andrew and Gordievsky wrongly deduced that Hiss was by now an NKGB agent, in common with other leading American GRU agents of the late 1930s.

83. vol. 5, sect. 4. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 350-1. In 1946 SMERSH was reorganized on a peacetime basis and returned to the control of the MGB, the post-war successor of the NKVD.

84. Bethell, The Last Secret; Tolstoy, Victims of Yalta; Tolstoy, Stalin’s Secret War, ch. 17; Knight, “Harold Macmillan and the Cossacks”; Mitchell, The Cost of a Reputation, chs. 1, 3, 5. Tolstoy provides the most detailed and moving description of the forced repatriation of the Cossacks, but, as Knight demonstrates, exaggerates the personal responsibility of Harold Macmillan, minister-resident in Italy and political adviser to Supreme Allied Commander Field Marshal Alexander. Mitchell also concludes that Macmillan’s “responsibility for what ultimately occurred must be adjudged as small.” Tolstoy’s charge that Lord Aldington (formerly Brigadier Toby Low) had committed war crimes in connection with the repatriation led to the award to Lord Aldington in 1989 of 1.5 million pounds damages for libel.

85. The fourth White general on Smersh’s “most wanted” list, Timofei Domanov, was a former Soviet citizen whose fate, unlike that of the other three, had been sealed at Yalta.

86. vol. 5, sect. 4. A senior British officer reported, “All relations with Soviets most friendly with much interchange WHISKY and VODKA”; Knight, “Harold Macmillan and the Cossacks,” p. 239.

87. vol. 5, sect. 4, paras. 2-4.

88. For legal reasons, six words have been omitted from the first sentence of Mitrokhin’s note; they do not contain the name of the lieutenant-colonel. vol. 5, sect. 4, para. 5. The memoirs of the Deputy Chief of the Red Army, General Sergei Matveyevich Shtemenko, make no reference to bribery but confirm part of the sequence of events in the KGB files: “The Soviet government then made a firm representation to our allies over the matter of Krasnov, Shkuro, Sultan Ghirey, and other war criminals. The British stalled briefly; but since neither the old White guard generals nor their troops were worth much, they put all of them into trucks and delivered them into the hands of the Soviet authorities” (Tolstoy, Stalin’s Secret War, p. 298).

89. Alexander instructed on May 22, 1945, “All who are Soviet citizens and who can be handed over to Russians without use of force should be returned by 8th Army. Any others should be evacuated to 12th Army Group.” It has been argued that 5 Corps, the section of the Eighth Army which handed over the Cossacks, subsequently concluded that it had none the less been given “freedom of action” to use force if necessary. Controversy continues. Mitchell, The Cost of a Reputation, pp. 49-54. Brigadier Low left for Britain on May 22 or 23, some days before the “repatriation” began. There is no suggestion that, if bribery occurred, he was in any way cognizant of it.

90. Knight, “Harold Macmillan and the Cossacks,” pp. 248-52.

91. Tolstoy, Victims of Yalta, pp. 182, 188, 193, 266-8. The execution of the generals was announced in a brief note in Pravda on January 17, 1947.

1. vol. 8, ch. 2.

2. The large literature on the Gouzenko case includes Bothwell and Granatstein (eds.), The Gouzenko Transcripts; Granatstein and Stafford, Spy Wars, ch. 3; Sawatsky, Gouzenko; Brook-Shepherd, The Storm Birds, ch. 21. Christopher Andrew interviewed Mrs. Gouzenko and her daughter (both of whom live under other names) in Canada in November 1992.

3. VENONA decrypts, 5th release, part 3, pp. 206-7.

4. vol. 8, ch. 2. Burdin served as resident from 1951 to 1953. In the records of the Canadian Ministry of External Affairs his name is transliterated as Bourdine. In 1952 Burdin recruited Hugh Hambleton, who later became one of the KGB’s most important Canadian agents; see below, chapter 10.

5. vol. 8, ch. 10, paras. 7-8.

6. VENONA decrypts, 5th release, part 2, pp. 263-5, 272-3, 275.

7. The most reliable account of this episode is in Brook-Shepherd, The Storm Birds, ch. 4, which corrects a number of inventions in Philby’s version of events.

8. Philby, My Silent War, pp. 114-15.

9. vol. 5, ch. 7.

10. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, p. 379.

11. Philby, My Silent War, p. 120.

12. vol. 5, ch. 7.

13. vol. 7, ch. 6, para. 6.

14. Modin, My Five Cambridge Friends, pp. 137, 155; Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, pp. 86-8.

15. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 375-6.

16. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 377, 396.

17. West and Tsarev, The Crown Jewels, p. 222.

18. Letters from Geoffrey A. Robinson to Christopher Andrew, October 19, 1997, September 14, 1998. Cairncross’s memoirs are as unreliable about his post-war career as about his earlier work as a Soviet agent. He claims that he had virtually no access to secret material in the Treasury ( The Enigma Spy, pp. 124-7). According to Robinson, though, “That is totally untrue. The TUBE ALLOYS [nuclear weapons] files themselves were many inches thick, let alone all the other Secret and Top Secret files.”