Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Stalin must also have welcomed the fact that Roosevelt was bringing to Tehran his closest wartime adviser, Harry Hopkins, but leaving behind his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull. Hopkins had established a remarkable reputation in Moscow for taking the Russians into his confidence. Earlier in the year he had privately warned the Soviet embassy in Washington that the FBI had bugged a secret meeting at which Zarubin (apparently identified by Hopkins only as a member of the embassy) had passed money to Steve Nelson, a leading member of the US Communist underground. 64Information sent to Moscow by the New York residency on the talks between Roosevelt and Churchill in May 1943 had also probably come from Hopkins. 65There is plausible but controversial evidence that, in addition to passing confidences to the Soviet ambassador, Hopkins sometimes used Akhmerov as a back channel to Moscow, much as the Kennedys later used the GRU officer Georgi Bolshakov. Hopkins’s confidential information so impressed the Centre that, years later, some KGB officers boasted that he had been a Soviet agent. 66These boasts were far from the truth. Hopkins was an American patriot with little sympathy for the Soviet system. But he was deeply impressed by the Soviet war effort and convinced that, “Since Russia is the decisive factor in the war she must be given every assistance and every effort must be made to obtain her friendship.” 67“Chip” Bohlen, who acted as American interpreter, later described Hopkins’s influence on the President at the Tehran summit as “paramount.” 68

It was at Tehran, Churchill later claimed, that he realized for the first time how small the British nation was:

There I sat with the great Russian bear on one side of me, with paws outstretched, and on the other side the great American buffalo, and between the two sat the poor little English donkey… 69

Despite the closeness of the British-American wartime “special relationship” and Roosevelt’s friendship with Churchill, his priority at Tehran was to reach agreement with Stalin. He told his old friend, Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labor, how

Winston got red and scowled, and the more he did so, the more Stalin smiled. Finally, Stalin broke out into a deep, hearty guffaw, and for the first time in three days I saw light. I kept it up until Stalin was laughing with me, and it was then that I called him “Uncle Joe.” He would have thought me fresh the day before, but that day he laughed and came over and shook my hand.

From that time on our relations were personal… We talked like men and brothers. 70

In the course of the Tehran Conference, Hopkins sought out Churchill privately at the British embassy, and told him that Stalin and Roosevelt were adamant that Operation OVERLORD, the British-American cross-Channel invasion of occupied France, must take place the following spring, and that British opposition must cease. Churchill duly gave way. The most important political concession to Stalin was British-American agreement to give the post-war Soviet Union its 1941 frontier, thus allowing Stalin to recover his territorial gains ill-gotten under the Nazi-Soviet Pact: eastern Poland, the Baltic states and Moldova. The Polish government-in-exile in London was not consulted.

Stalin returned to Moscow in high spirits. The United States and Britain seemed to have recognized, as a Russian diplomat put it privately, Russia’s “right to establish friendly governments in the neighboring countries.” 71Roosevelt’s willingness to go so far to meet Stalin’s wishes at Tehran had derived chiefly from his deep sense of the West’s military debt to the Soviet Union at a time when the Red Army was bearing the overwhelming brunt of the war with Germany. But there is equally no doubt that Stalin’s negotiating success was greatly assisted by his knowledge of the cards in Roosevelt’s hand. 72

Despite the considerable success of the legal and illegal American residencies in penetrating the Roosevelt administration, however, they had failed totally in one important respect. Part of Zarubin’s original brief from the Centre had been to recruit agents from among the large German-American community who could be used against Germany. In the end he recruited not a single one. When asked to explain this omission, he told the Centre that most German-Americans were Jews and therefore unsuitable. 73The Centre, like Zarubin, had become so engrossed in the intelligence offensive against its allies that it appears to have judged leniently his failure against the enemy.

WARTIME INTELLIGENCE GATHERING continued to expand in Britain as well as the United States. At the beginning of 1942 a second legal residency began to operate in London under Ivan Andreyevich Chichayev (JOHN) alongside that of Anatoli Gorsky (successively HENRY and VADIM). Unlike Gorsky, who remained in charge of the agent network, Chichayev announced his presence in London to the authorities and was responsible for intelligence liaison with both the British and allied governments-in-exile. 74Chichayev also ran an agent network of émigré officials from central and eastern Europe who kept him informed of British negotiations with the Polish government-in-exile, the Czechoslovak president, Edvard Beneˇs, King Peter of Yugoslavia and his prime minister, Ivan Subǎs. 75

The Cambridge Five, meanwhile, continued to generate a phenomenal amount of intelligence. For 1942 alone Maclean’s documents filled more than forty-five volumes in the Centre archives. 76Philby too was providing large quantities of highly classified files. Since September 1941 he had been working in Section V (Counter-intelligence) of SIS. Though Section V was then located in St. Albans, rather than in SIS London headquarters at Broadway Buildings, it had the advantage of being next door to the registry which housed SIS archives. Philby spent some time cultivating the archivist, Bill Woodfield, with whom he shared a common appreciation of pink gin. As Philby later recalled, “This friendly connection paid off.” 77Over a period of months, Philby borrowed the operational files of British agents working abroad and handed them to Gorsky in batches to be photographed. 78Early in April 1942 the Centre completed a lengthy analysis of the SIS records removed by Philby up to the end of the previous year. Though praising SÖHNCHEN for “systematically sending a lot of interesting material,” it was puzzled that this material appeared to show that SIS had no agent network in Russia and was conducting only “extremely insignificant” operations against the Soviet Union. Centre analysts had two reasons for disputing these entirely accurate conclusions. First, though at least partly aware that the evidence used to convict some of their liquidated predecessors of working for British intelligence was fraudulent, they remained convinced that SIS had been conducting major operations against the Soviet Union, using “their most highly skilled agents,” throughout the 1930s. The reality—that SIS had not even possessed a Moscow station—was, so far as the Centre was concerned, literally unbelievable. The Centre refused to believe that the Soviet Union was a smaller priority for British intelligence (which was, in truth, almost wholly geared to the war effort) than Britain was for Soviet intelligence:

If the HOTEL [SIS] has recruited a hundred agents in Europe over the past few years, mainly from countries occupied by the Germans, there can be no doubt that our country gets no less attention. 79

Such reports merely echoed Stalin’s own acute suspicions of his British allies.

The intelligence from the London residency during the first year of the Great Patriotic War which ultimately had the greatest impact on both Stalin and the Centre came from Cairncross. On September 25, 1941 Gorsky telegraphed Moscow: