Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

AN ANALYSIS BY the Centre concluded that about 30 percent of King’s material was the same as that provided by Francesco Constantini (DUNCAN), the long-serving OGPU agent in the British embassy at Rome. 51The overlap was, almost certainly, regarded as useful for checking the authenticity of the documents received from both agents. It was a sign of the importance attached to Constantini’s intelligence that Abram Aronovich Slutsky, who succeeded Artuzov as head of INO in 1934, decided to transfer him from the legal residency in Rome to another of the Great Illegals, Moisei Markovich Akselrod (codenamed OST or OSTO), one of the leading Soviet agent controllers. Born into a Jewish family in Smolensk in 1898, Akselrod had been a member of the Russian branch of the Zionist socialist organization Poale Zion, until its dissolution in 1922. He then joined the Bolsheviks and in 1925 began a career in INO. 52Like most of the Great Illegals, Akselrod was a remarkable linguist—fluent in Arabic, English, French, German and Italian—and, according to a fellow illegal, a man of “extraordinary culture” with “a fine indifference to risk.” 53In 1934 he traveled to Rome on an Austrian passport to establish a new illegal residency and act as Constantini’s controller. He had his first meeting with Constantini in January 1935. 54

Few—if any—Soviet controllers ever met an agent as frequently as Akselrod saw Constantini. At times they had almost daily meetings. On October 27, 1935 the Centre cabled Akselrod: “Between September 24 and October 14 you met [Constantini] 16 times. There must be no more than two or three meetings a week.” It is not difficult to understand Akselrod’s enthusiasm for agent DUNCAN. Constantini supplied him with a remarkable range of documents and cipher material from embassy red boxes, diplomatic bags, filing cabinets and—probably—the embassy safe. Far from consisting simply of material on British-Italian relations, the documents included Foreign Office reports and British ambassadors’ despatches on a great variety of major international issues, which were sent for information to the Rome embassy. A Centre report noted on November 15, 1935 that no fewer than 101 of the British documents obtained from Constantini since the beginning of the year had been judged sufficiently important to be “sent to Comrade Stalin”: among them the Foreign Office records of talks between Sir John Simon, the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, junior Foreign Office minister (who became Foreign Secretary at the end of the year), and Hitler in Berlin; between Eden and Litvinov, the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, in Moscow; between Eden and Joseph Beck, the Polish foreign minister, in Warsaw; between Eden and Edvard Beneš, the Czechoslovak foreign minister, in Prague; and between Eden and Mussolini in Rome. 55

A striking omission from the Centre’s list of the most important Foreign Office documents supplied to Stalin was Eden’s account of his talks with him during his visit to Moscow in March 1935—despite the fact that this document was sent to the Rome embassy and was probably among those obtained by Constantini. 56Since this was Stalin’s first meeting with a minister from a Western government, their talks were of unusual significance. The most likely explanation for the Centre’s failure to send the British record of the meeting to the Kremlin is that Slutsky feared to pass on to Stalin some of Eden’s comments about him. INO would have been unembarrassed to report the fact that Eden was impressed by Stalin’s “remarkable knowledge and understanding of international affairs.” But it doubtless lacked the nerve to repeat Eden’s conclusion that Stalin was “a man of strong oriental traits of character with unshakeable assurance and control whose courtesy in no way hid from us an implacable ruthlessness.” The Centre was probably also nervous about reporting some of the opinions attributed by Eden to Stalin—for example, that he was “perhaps more appreciative of [the] German point of view than Monsieur Litvino[v].” 57There was no more dangerous activity in Moscow than repeating criticisms of Stalin or attributing heretical opinions to him.

The British ambassador in Moscow, Viscount Chilston, optimistically reported that, as a result of Eden’s visit, “the Soviet Government appears to have got rid of the bogey in their minds, that we were encouraging Germany against Soviet plans for Eastern security.” 58Stalin, however, rarely—if ever—abandoned a conspiracy theory and remained deeply suspicious of British policy. In a communiqué at the end of his talks in Moscow, Eden had welcomed the Soviet Union’s support for the principle of collective security, following its entry the previous year into the League of Nations (hitherto denounced by Moscow as the “League of Burglars”). But Stalin must have learned from Foreign Office documents that Eden was disinclined to involve the Soviet Union in any collective security arrangements designed to contain Nazi Germany. 59To Stalin’s deeply suspicious mind, this reluctance was further evidence of a British plot to focus German aggression in the east. 60Though he was content to entrust most day-to-day diplomacy to the efficient and far more pragmatic Litvinov, it was Stalin who determined the strategic thrust of Soviet foreign policy.

The Centre had suspected for some time that its principal source of British diplomatic documents over the last decade, the mercenary agent Francesco Constantini (DUNCAN), had been selling some material to Italian intelligence as well as to the NKVD. It had dramatic confirmation of these suspicions in February 1936, when a British assessment of the Italo-Ethiopian war—purloined by Constantini from the British embassy—was published on the front page of the Giornale d’Italia. 61On being challenged by Akselrod, Constantini was forced to admit that he had supplied some documents to the Italians, but concealed the large scale on which he had done so. Constantini also admitted in 1936 that he had lost his job in the British embassy, though he apparently omitted that he had been sacked for dishonesty. He tried to reassure Akselrod by telling him that he had a former colleague in the embassy who would continue to supply him with classified documents. The colleague was later identified as Constantini’s brother Secondo (codenamed DUDLEY), who had worked as a servant in the embassy Chancery for the previous twenty years. 62

Secondo Constantini, however, took fewer precautions than his brother Francesco. In January he stole a diamond necklace belonging to the ambassador’s wife from a locked red box (normally used for diplomatic documents rather than jewelery) which was kept in the ambassador’s apartment next to the Chancery. The ambassador, Sir Eric Drummond (soon to become Lord Perth), who had previously dismissed the idea that the British diplomatic documents appearing in the Italian press might have been purloined from his embassy, now began to grasp that embassy security might, after all, require serious attention. Since the Foreign Office had no security officer, it was forced to seek the help of Major Valentine Vivian, the head of SIS counter-intelligence. Vivian modestly disclaimed significant expertise in embassy security but, in view of the even greater lack of expertise in the Foreign Office, agreed to carry out an investigation. 63Once in Rome, he quickly discovered an appalling series of basic lapses. The embassy files, safe and red boxes were all insecure and “it would not be impossible or even difficult for unauthorized persons to spend long periods in the Chancery or Registry rooms.”

Vivian quickly identified Secondo Constantini as the man probably responsible for the theft both of the diamond necklace and of at least some of the documents supplied to Italian intelligence: