Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

S. Constantini… has been employed in the Chancery for twenty-one years. He might, therefore, have been directly or indirectly responsible for any, or all, of the thefts of papers or valuables which have taken place, or are thought to have taken place, from this Mission. He was, I understand, not quite free of suspicion of being himself concerned in a dishonest transaction for which his brother [Francesco], then also a Chancery servant, was dismissed a short time ago. Moreover, though the Diplomatic Staff at the time did not connect him with the matter, I am clear in my own mind that the circumstances of the loss of two copies of the “R” Code from a locked press [filing cabinet] in the Chancery in 1925 point towards S. Constantini, or his brother, or both, as the culprits. 64

Though Sir Eric Drummond politely welcomed Vivian’s recommendations for improvements in the security of his embassy, he took little action. 65In particular, neither he nor most of his staff could credit the charges against Secondo Constantini, whom they regarded as “a sort of friend of the family.” 66Instead of being dismissed, agent DUDLEY and his wife were—amazingly—invited to London in May 1937 as the guests of His Majesty’s Government at the coronation of King George VI, as a reward for his long and supposedly faithful service. 67

When Secondo Constantini returned from his expense-paid junket in London, he was able to resume supplying classified British documents to his brother Francesco, who passed them on for copying by both Akselrod’s illegal residency and Italian intelligence before returning them to embassy files. The Centre regarded the whole improbable story of Constantini’s continued access to embassy files after Vivian’s investigation as deeply suspicious. Unable to comprehend the naivety of the British foreign service in matters of embassy security, it suspected instead some deep-laid plot by British and/or Italian intelligence. Regular meetings with Francesco Constantini were suspended in August 1937. 68

THE CIPHER MATERIAL obtained from the Constantini brothers, Captain King and other agents in Western embassies and foreign ministries was passed to the most secret section of Soviet intelligence, a joint OGPU/Fourth Department SIGINT unit housed not in the Lubyanka but in the Foreign Affairs building on Kuznetsky Bridge. According to Evdokia Kartseva (later Petrova), who joined the unit in 1933, its personnel were forbidden to reveal even the location of their office to their closest relatives. 69Like most young women in the unit, Kartseva was terrified of its head, Gleb Ivanovich Boky, who had made his reputation first in conducting the “Red Terror” in Petrograd in 1918, then in terrorizing Turkestan later in the civil war. 70Though in his mid-fifties, Boky still prided himself on his sexual athleticism and arranged group sex weekends at his dacha. Kartseva lived in fear of being invited to the orgies. During the night shift, when she felt most vulnerable, she wore her “plainest and dullest clothes for fear of attracting [Boky’s] unwelcome attention.” 71

Despite the personal depravity of its chief, the combined OGPU/Fourth Department unit was the world’s largest and best-resourced SIGINT agency. In particular, thanks to Bystroletov and others, it received more assistance from espionage than any similar agency in the West. The records seen by Mitrokhin show that Boky’s unit was able to decrypt at least some of the diplomatic traffic of Britain, Austria, Germany and Italy. 72Other evidence shows that Boky’s unit was also able to decrypt some Japanese, Turkish 73and—almost certainly—American 74and French 75cables. No Western SIGINT agency during the 1930s seems to have collected so much political and diplomatic intelligence.

The unavailability of most of the decrypts produced by Boky’s unit makes detailed analysis of their influence on Soviet foreign policy impossible. Soviet SIGINT successes, however, included important Japanese decrypts on the negotiation of the Anti-Comintern Pact between Germany and Japan. The published version of the Pact, concluded in November 1936, merely provided for an exchange of information on Comintern activities and cooperation on preventive measures against them. A secret protocol, however, added that if either of the signatories became the victim of “an unprovoked [Soviet] attack or threat of attack,” both would immediately consult together on the action to take and do “nothing to ease the situation of the USSR.” Moscow, unsurprisingly, read sinister intentions into this tortuous formula, though Japan was, in reality, still anxious not to be drawn into a European war and had no intention of concluding a military alliance. Three days after the signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact, Litvinov publicly announced in a speech to a Congress of Soviets that Moscow knew its secret protocol. His speech also contained a curious veiled allusion to codebreaking:

It is not surprising that it is assumed by many that the German-Japanese agreement is written in a special code in which anti-Communism means something entirely different from the dictionary definition of this word, and that people decipher this code in different ways. 76

The success of Boky’s unit in decrypting Italian diplomatic traffic probably provided intelligence on Italy’s decision to join the Anti-Comintern Pact in the following year.

THANKS TO ITS penetration agents and codebreakers, as well as to primitive Foreign Office security, Soviet intelligence was able to gather vastly more intelligence on the foreign policy of its main Western target, Great Britain, than the much smaller British intelligence community was able to obtain on Soviet policy. Since 1927 British codebreakers had been unable to decrypt any high-level Soviet communications (though they had some success with the less sophisticated Comintern ciphers). SIS did not even possess a Moscow station. In 1936 the British ambassador, Viscount Chilston, vetoed a proposal to establish one on the grounds that it would be “liable to cause severe embarrassment.” But without an SIS presence he despaired of discovering anything of importance about Soviet policy-making. 77

The Soviet capacity to understand the political and diplomatic intelligence it collected, however, never approached its ability to collect that intelligence in the first place. Its natural tendency to substitute conspiracy theory for pragmatic analysis when assessing the intentions of the encircling imperialist powers was made worse during the 1930s by Stalin’s increasing tendency to act as his own intelligence analyst. Stalin, indeed, actively discouraged intelligence analysis by others, which he condemned as “dangerous guesswork.” “Don’t tell me what you think,” he is reported to have said. “Give me the facts and the source!” As a result, INO had no analytical department. Intelligence reports throughout and even beyond the Stalin era characteristically consisted of compilations of relevant information on particular topics with little argument or analysis. 78Those who compiled them increasingly feared for their life expectancy if they failed to tell Stalin what he expected to hear. Their main priority as they trawled through the Centre’s treasure trove of British diplomatic documents and decrypts was to discover the anti-Soviet conspiracies which Comrade Stalin, “Lenin’s outstanding pupil, the best son of the Bolshevik Party, the worthy successor and great continuer of Lenin’s cause,” knew were there. The main function of Soviet foreign intelligence was thus to reinforce rather than to challenge Stalin’s misunderstanding of the West.

A characteristic example of the Centre’s distorted but politically correct presentation of important intelligence was its treatment of the Foreign Office record of the meeting in March 1935 between Sir John Simon, Anthony Eden and Adolf Hitler in Berlin. Copies of the minutes were supplied both by Captain King in the Foreign Office and by Francesco Constantini in the Rome embassy. 79Nine days before the meeting, in defiance of the post-First World War Treaty of Versailles, Hitler had announced the introduction of conscription. The fact that the meeting—the first between Hitler and a British foreign secretary—went ahead at all was, in itself, cause for suspicion in Moscow. On the British side the talks were mainly exploratory—to discover what the extent of Hitler’s demands for the revision of the Treaty of Versailles really was, and what prospect there was of accommodating them. Moscow, however, saw grounds for deep suspicion. While disclaiming any intention of attacking the Soviet Union, Hitler claimed that there was a distinct danger of Russia starting a war, and declared himself “firmly convinced that one day cooperation and solidarity would be urgently necessary to defend Europe against the… Bolshevik menace.” Simon and Eden showed not the slightest interest in an anti-Bolshevik agreement, but their fairly conventional exchange of diplomatic pleasantries had sinister overtones in Moscow. According to the Foreign Office record, “The British Ministers were sincerely thankful for the way in which they had been received in Berlin, and would take away very pleasant memories of the kindness and hospitality shown them.” 80