Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Given the closeness of the British-American “special relationship,” the Centre inevitably suspected that some of the President’s advisers sympathized with Churchill’s supposed anti-Soviet plots. 1Suspicions of Roosevelt himself, however, were never as intense as those of Churchill. Nor did the Centre form conspiracy theories about its American agents as preposterous as those about the Cambridge Five. Perhaps because the NKVD had penetrated the OSS from the moment of its foundation, it was less inclined to believe that United States intelligence was running a system of deception which compared with the supposed use of the Five by the British.The CPUSA’s assistance in the operation to assassinate Trotsky, combined with the enthusiasm with which it “exposed and weeded out spies and traitors,” 2appeared to make its underground section a reliable recruiting ground. Vasili Zarubin’s regular contacts with the CPUSA leader, Earl Browder, plainly convinced him of the reliability of those covert Party members who agreed to provide secret intelligence.

By the spring of 1943, however, the Centre was worried about the security of its large and expanding American agent network. Zarubin became increasingly incautious both in his meetings with Party leaders and in arranging for the payment to them of secret subsidies from Moscow. One of the files noted by Mitrokhin records censoriously, “Without the approval of the Central Committee, Zarubin crudely violated the rules of clandestinity.” On one occasion Browder asked Zarubin to deliver Soviet money personally to the Communist underground organization in Chicago; the implication in the KGB file is that he agreed. On another occasion, in April 1943, Zarubin traveled to California for a secret meeting with Steve Nelson, who ran a secret control commission to seek out informants and spies in the Californian branch of the Communist Party, but failed to find Nelson’s home. Only on a second visit did he succeed in delivering the money. On this occasion, however, the meeting was bugged by the FBI which had placed listening devices in Nelson’s home. 3The Soviet ambassador in Washington was told confidentially by none other than Roosevelt’s adviser, Harry Hopkins, that a member of his embassy had been detected passing money to a Communist in California. 4

Though Zarubin became somewhat more discreet after this “friendly warning,” his cover had been blown. Worse was yet to come. Four months later Zarubin was secretly denounced to the FBI by Vasili Mironov, a senior officer in the New York residency who had earlier appealed unsuccessfully to the Centre for Zarubin’s recall. 5In an extraordinary anonymous letter to Hoover on August 7, 1943, Mironov identified Zarubin and ten other leading members of residencies operating under diplomatic cover in the United States, himself included, as Soviet intelligence officers. He also revealed that Browder was closely involved with Soviet espionage and identified the Hollywood producer Boris Morros (FROST) as a Soviet agent. Mironov’s motives derived partly from personal loathing for Zarubin himself. He told Hoover, speaking of himself in the third person, that Zarubin and Mironov “both hate each other.” Mironov also appears to have been tortured by a sense of guilt for his part in the NKVD’s massacre of the Polish officer corps in 1940. Zarubin, he told Hoover, “interrogated and shot Poles in Kozelsk, Mironov in Starobelsk.” (In reality, though Zarubin did interrogate some of the Polish officers, he does not appear to have been directly involved in their execution.) But there are also clear signs in Mironov’s letter, if not of mental illness, at least of the paranoid mindset generated by the Terror. He accused Zarubin of being a Japanese agent and his wife of working for Germany, and concluded bizarrely: “If you prove to Mironov that Z is working for the Germans and Japanese, he will immediately shoot him without a trial, as he too holds a very high post in the NKVD.” 6

By the time Mironov’s extraordinary denunciation reached the FBI, Zarubin had moved from New York to Washington—a move probably prompted by the steady growth in intelligence of all kinds from within the Roosevelt administration. As the senior NKVD officer in the United States, Zarubin retained overall control in Washington of the New York and San Francisco residencies; responsibility for liaison with the head of the CPUSA, Browder, and with the head of the illegal residency, Akhmerov; and direct control of some of his favorite agents, among them the French politician Pierre Cot and the British intelligence officer Cedric Belfrage, whom he took over from Golos. 7

With his cover blown, however, Zarubin found life in Washington difficult. One of his most humiliating moments came at a dinner for members of the Soviet embassy given early in 1944 by the governor of Louisiana, Sam Houston Jones. 8After dinner, as guests wandered round the governor’s house in small groups, a lady who appeared to know that Zarubin was a senior NKGB officer, turned to him and said, “Have a seat, General!” Zarubin, whose fuse and sense of humor were both somewhat short, took the seat but replied stiffly, “I am not a general!” Another guest, who identified himself as an officer in military intelligence, complimented the lady on her inside knowledge. He then caused Zarubin further embarrassment by asking for his views on the massacre of 16,000 Polish officers, some of whose bodies had been exhumed in the Katyn woods. Zarubin replied that German allegations that the officers had been shot by the NKVD (as indeed they had) were a provocation intended to sow dissension within the Grand Alliance which would deceive only the naive. 9

Zarubin subsequently sought to persuade the Centre that his humiliating loss of cover was due not to his own indiscretion but to the fact that the Americans had somehow discovered that he had interrogated imprisoned Polish officers in Kozelsk. The Centre was unimpressed. In a letter to the Central Committee, the NKGB Personnel Directorate reported that his period as resident in the United States had been marked by a series of blunders. 10Mironov not long before had informed on Zarubin to Hoover, now appears to have written to Stalin, accusing Zarubin of being in contact with the FBI. 11In the summer of 1944, both Zarubin and Mironov were recalled to Moscow. Anatoli Gorsky, who until a few months earlier had been resident in London, succeeded Zarubin in Washington. 12

Once back in Moscow, Zarubin quickly succeeded in reestablishing his position at the expense of Mironov and was appointed deputy chief of foreign intelligence. By the time he retired three years later, allegedly on grounds of ill health, he had succeeded in taking much of the credit for the remarkable wartime intelligence obtained from the United States, and was awarded two Orders of Lenin, two Orders of the Red Banner, one Order of the Red Star, and numerous medals. 13Mironov, by contrast, was sentenced soon after his return to Moscow to five years in a labor camp, probably for making false accusations against Zarubin. In 1945 he tried to smuggle out of prison to the US embassy in Moscow information about the NKVD massacre of Polish officers similar to that which, unknown to the Centre, he had sent to the FBI two years earlier. On this occasion Mironov was caught in the act, given a second trial and shot. 14

Even after the recall of Zarubin and Mironov, feuding and denunciations continued within the American residencies. As with Mironov’s bizarre accusations, some of the feuds had an almost surreal quality about them. In August 1944 the newly appointed resident in San Francisco, Grigori Pavlovich Kasparov, telegraphed to the Centre a bitter denunciation of the resident in Mexico City, Lev Tarasov, who, he claimed, had bungled attempts to liberate Trotsky’s assassin, Ramón Mercader, and had adopted a “grand lifestyle.” As well as renting a house with grounds and employing two servants in addition to the staff allocated to him, Tarasov was alleged to be spending too much time breeding parrots, poultry and other birds. 15The fate of Tarasov’s denounced parrots is not recorded.