Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Always in Stalin’s mind when he brooded on Churchill’s supposed wartime conspiracies against him was the figure of Hitler’s deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess, whom, he told Maisky, Churchill was keeping “in reserve.” In May 1941 Hess had made a bizarre flight to Scotland, in the deluded belief that he could arrange peace between Britain and Germany. Both London and Berlin correctly concluded that Hess was somewhat deranged. Stalin, inevitably, believed instead that Hess’s flight was part of a deeply laid British plot. His suspicions deepened after the German invasion in June. For at least the next two years he suspected that Hess was part of a British conspiracy to abandon its alliance with the Soviet Union and sign a separate peace with Germany. 116At dinner with Churchill in the Kremlin in October 1944 Stalin proposed a toast to “the British intelligence service which had inveigled Hess into coming to England:” “He could not have landed without being given signals. The intelligence service must have been behind it all.” 117Stalin’s mood at dinner was jovial, but his conspiracy theory was deadly earnest. If his misunderstanding of Hess’s flight to Britain did not derive from Centre intelligence assessments, it was certainly reinforced by them. As late as the early 1990s the same conspiracy theory was still being publicly propounded by a KGB spokesman who claimed that in 1941 Hess “brought the Führer’s peace proposals with him and a plan for the invasion of the Soviet Union.” That myth is still, apparently, believed by some of their SVR successors. 118

On October 25, 1943 the Centre informed the London residency that it was now clear, after long analysis of the voluminous intelligence from the Five, that they were double agents, working on the instructions of SIS and MI5. As far back as their years at Cambridge, Philby, Maclean and Burgess had probably been acting on instructions from British intelligence to infiltrate the student left before making contact with the NKVD. Only thus, the Centre reasoned, was it possible to explain why both SIS and MI5 were currently employing in highly sensitive jobs Cambridge graduates with a Communist background. The lack of any reference to British recruitment of Soviet agents in the intelligence supplied either by SÖHNCHEN (Philby) from SIS or by TONY (Blunt) from MI5 was seen as further evidence that both were being used to feed disinformation to the NKGB:

During the entire period that S[ÖHNCHEN] and T[ONY] worked for the British special services, they did not help expose a single valuable ISLANDERS [British] agent either in the USSR or in the Soviet embassy in the ISLAND [Britain].

There was, of course, no such “valuable agent” for Philby or Blunt to expose, but that simple possibility did not occur to the conspiracy theorists in the Centre. Philby’s accurate report that “at the present time the HOTEL [SIS] is not engaged in active work against the Soviet Union” was also, in the Centre’s view, obvious disinformation. 119

Since the Five were double agents, it followed that those they had recruited to the NKVD were also plants. One example which particularly exercised the Centre was the case of Peter Smollett (ABO), who in 1941 had achieved the remarkable feat of becoming head of the Russian department in the wartime Ministry of Information. By 1943 Smollett was using his position to organize pro-Soviet propaganda on a prodigious scale. A vast meeting at the Albert Hall in February to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Red Army included songs of praise by a massed choir, readings by John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier, and was attended by leading politicians from all parties. The film USSR at War was shown to factory audiences of one and a quarter million. In September 1943 alone, the Ministry of Information organized meetings on the Soviet Union for 34 public venues, 35 factories, 100 voluntary societies, 28 civil defense groups, 9 schools and a prison; the BBC in the same month broadcast thirty programs with a substantial Soviet content. 120Yet, because Smollett had been recruited by Philby, he was, in the eyes of the Centre, necessarily a plant. His apparently spectacular success in organizing pro-Soviet propaganda on an unprecedented scale was thus perversely interpreted as a cunning plot by British intelligence to hoodwink the NKVD. 121

Even the hardened conspiracy theorists of the Centre, however, had some difficulty in explaining why the Five were providing, along with disinformation, such large amounts of accurate high-grade intelligence. In its missive to the London residency of October 25, the Centre suggested a number of possible answers to this baffling problem. The sheer quantity of Foreign Office documents supplied by Maclean might indicate, it believed, that, unlike the other four, he was not consciously deceiving the NKVD, but was merely being manipulated by the others to the best of their ability. The Centre also argued that the Five were instructed to pass on important intelligence about Germany which did not harm British interests in order to make their disinformation about British policy more credible. 122

The most valuable “documentary material about the work of the Germans” in 1943 was the German decrypts supplied by Cairncross from Bletchley Park. A brief official biography of Fitin published by the SVR singles out for special mention the ULTRA intelligence obtained from Britain on German preparations for the battle of Kursk when the Red Army halted Hitler’s last major offensive on the eastern front. 123The Luftwaffe decrypts provided by Cairncross were of crucial importance in enabling the Red Air Force to launch massive pre-emptive strikes against German airfields which destroyed over 500 enemy aircraft. 124

The Centre’s addiction to conspiracy theory ran so deep, however, that it was capable of regarding the agent who supplied intelligence of critical importance before Kursk as part of an elaborate network of deception. It therefore ordered the London residency to create a new independent agent network uncontaminated by the Five. But, though the Five were “undoubtedly double agents,” the residency was ordered to maintain contact with them. The Centre gave three reasons for this apparently contradictory decision. First, if British intelligence realized that their grand deception involving the Five had been discovered, they might well intensify their search for the new network intended to replace them. Secondly, the Centre acknowledged that, despite the Five’s “unquestionable attempts to disinform us,” they were none the less providing “valuable material about the Germans and other matters.” Finally, “Not all the questions about this group of agents have been completely cleared up.” The Centre was, in other words, seriously confused about what exactly the Five were up to. 125

To try to discover the exact nature of the British intelligence conspiracy, the Centre sent, for the first time ever, a special eight-man surveillance team to the London residency to trail the Five and other supposedly bogus Soviet agents in the hope of discovering their contacts with their non-existent British controllers. The same team also investigated visitors to the Soviet embassy, some of whom were suspected of being MI5 agents provocateurs. The new surveillance system was hilariously unsuccessful. None of the eight-man team spoke English; all wore conspicuously Russian clothes, were visibly ill at ease in English surroundings and must frequently have disconcerted those they followed. 126

The absurdity of trailing the Five highlights the central weakness in the Soviet intelligence system. The Centre’s ability to collect intelligence from the West always comfortably exceeded its capacity to interpret what it collected. Moscow’s view of its British allies was invariably clouded by variable amounts of conspiracy theory. The Soviet leadership was to find it easier to replicate the first atomic bomb than to understand policy-making in London.