Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

The British record of the talks ran to over 23,000 words. The Russian translation circulated by the Centre to Stalin and others in the Soviet leadership came to fewer than 4,000. Instead of producing a conventional précis the Centre selected a series of statements by Simon, Eden, Hitler and other participants in the talks, and assembled them into what appeared as a continuous conversation. The significance of some individual statements was thus distorted by removing them from their detailed context. Probably at the time, certainly subsequently, one of Simon’s comments was misconstrued as giving Germany carte blanche to take over Austria. 81

Doubtless in line with Stalin’s own conspiracy theories, the Centre interpreted the visit by Simon and Eden to Berlin as the first in a series of meetings at which British statesmen not only sought to appease Hitler but gave him encouragement to attack Russia. 82In reality, though some British diplomats would have been content to see the two dictators come to blows of their own accord, no British foreign secretary and no British government would have contemplated orchestrating such a conflict. The conspiracy theories which were born in Stalin’s Moscow in the 1930s, however, have—remarkably—survived the end of the Soviet era. An SVR official history published in 1997 insists that the many volumes of published Foreign Office documents as well as the even more voluminous unpublished files in the Public Record Office cannot be relied upon. The British government, it maintains, is still engaged in a conspiracy to conceal the existence of documents which reveal the terrible truth about British foreign policy before the Second World War:

Some documents from the 1930s having to do with the negotiations of British leaders with the highest leadership of Fascist Germany, including directly with Hitler, have been kept to this day in secret archives of the British Foreign Office. The British do not want the indiscreet peering at the proof of their policy of collusion with Hitler and spurring Germany on to its eastern campaign. 83

Among the select group of inter-war heroes of foreign intelligence whose portraits hang today on the walls of the SVR’s Memory Room at Yasenevo is the Austrian Jew Arnold Deutsch, probably the most talented of all the Great Illegals. According to an SVR official eulogy, the portrait immediately “attracts the visitor’s attention” to “its intelligent, penetrating eyes, and strong-willed countenance.” Deutsch’s role as an illegal was not publicly acknowledged by the KGB until 1990. 1Even now, some aspects of his career are considered unsuitable for publication in Moscow.

Deutsch’s academic career was one of the most brilliant in the history of Soviet intelligence. In July 1928, two months after his twenty-fourth birthday and less than five years after entering Vienna University as an undergraduate, he was awarded the degree of PhD with distinction. Though his thesis had been on chemistry, Deutsch had also become deeply immersed in philosophy and psychology. His description of himself in university documents throughout his student years as an observant Jew ( mosaisch ) 2was probably intended to conceal his membership of the Communist Party. Deutsch’s religious faith had been replaced by an ardent commitment to the Communist International’s vision of a new world order which would free the human race from exploitation and alienation. The revolutionary myth image of the world’s first worker-peasant state blinded both Deutsch and the ideological agents he later recruited to the increasingly brutal reality of Stalin’s Russia. Immediately after leaving Vienna University, Deutsch began secret work as a courier for OMS, Comintern’s international liaison department, traveling to Romania, Greece, Palestine and Syria. His Austrian wife, Josefine, whom he married in 1929, was also recruited by OMS. 3

Deutsch’s vision of a new world order included sexual as well as political liberation. At about the time he began covert work for Comintern, he became publicly involved in the “sex-pol” (sexual politics) movement, founded by the German Communist psychologist and sexologist Wilhelm Reich, which opened clinics to bring birth control and sexual enlightenment to Viennese workers. 4At this stage of his career, Reich was engaged in an ambitious attempt to integrate Freudianism with Marxism and in the early stages of an eccentric research program on human sexual behavior which later earned him an undeserved reputation as “the prophet of the better orgasm.” 5Deutsch enthusiastically embraced Reich’s teaching that political and sexual repression were different sides of the same coin and together paved the way for fascism. He ran the Munster Verlag in Vienna which published Reich’s work and other “sex-pol” literature. 6Though the Viennese police were probably unaware of Deutsch’s secret work for OMS, its anti-pornography section took a keen interest in his involvement with the “sex-pol” movement. 7

Remarkably, Deutsch combined, at least for a few years, his role as an open disciple of Reich with secret work as a Soviet agent. In 1932 he was transferred from OMS to the INO, and trained in Moscow as an OGPU illegal with the alias “Stefan Lange” and the codename STEFAN. (Later, he also used the codename OTTO.) His first posting was in France, where he established secret crossing points on the Belgian, Dutch and German borders, and made preparations to install radio equipment on French fishing boats to be used for OGPU communications in times of war. 8Deutsch owed his posthumous promotion to the ranks of KGB immortals to his second posting in England.

The rules protecting the identities and legends of illegals in the mid-1930s were far less rigid and elaborate than they were to become later. Early in 1934 Deutsch traveled to London under his real name, giving his profession as “university lecturer” and using his academic credentials to mix in university circles. After living in temporary accommodation, he moved to a flat in Lawn Road, Hampstead, the heartland of London’s radical intelligentsia. The “Lawn Road Flats,” as they were then known, were the first “deck-access” apartments with external walkways to be built in England (a type of construction later imitated in countless blocks of council flats) and, at the time, were probably Hampstead’s most avant-garde building. Deutsch moved into number 7, next to a flat owned by the celebrated crime novelist Agatha Christie, then writing Murder on the Orient Express. Though it is tempting to imagine Deutsch and Christie discussing the plot of her latest novel, they may never have met. Christie lived elsewhere and probably visited Lawn Road rarely, if at all, in the mid-1930s. Deutsch, in any case, is likely to have kept a low profile. While the front doors of most flats were visible from the street, Deutsch’s was concealed by a stairwell which made it possible for him and his visitors to enter and leave unobserved. 9Deutsch strengthened his academic cover by taking a postgraduate course in psychology at London University and possibly by part-time teaching. 10In 1935 he was joined by his wife, who had been trained in Moscow as a radio operator. 11

KGB files credit Deutsch during his British posting with the recruitment of twenty agents and contact with a total of twenty-nine. 12By far the most celebrated of these agents were a group of five young Cambridge graduates, who by the Second World War were known in the Centre as “The Five”: Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, John Cairncross, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby. After the release of the enormously popular Western The Magnificent Seven in 1960, they were often referred to as the “Magnificent Five.” The key to Deutsch’s success was his new strategy of recruitment, approved by the Centre, based on the cultivation of young radical high-fliers from leading universities before they entered the corridors of power. As Deutsch wrote to the Centre: