Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

The residency not merely lost all its previous contacts in Canadian circles but did not even try to acquire new ones… The Soviet colony closed in on itself and shut itself off from the outside world, becoming wholly preoccupied with its own internal affairs.

The Centre agreed. The residency, it concluded, had “got stuck in a rut.” 4

For the rest of Gouzenko’s life the KGB tried intermittently and unsuccessfully to track him down. In 1975, after a Progressive Conservative MP, Thomas Cossit, requested a review of Gouzenko’s pension, the Ottawa residency deduced that Gouzenko lived in his constituency. The residency also reported that Cossit and Gouzenko had been seen together at an ice hockey match during a visit to Canada by the Soviet national team. A KGB officer stationed in Ottawa, Mikhail Nikolayevich Khvatov, sought to cultivate Cossit in the hope of discovering Gouzenko’s whereabouts. He had no success and the residency subsequently reported that parliamentary questions by Cossit were “clearly anti-Soviet in tone.” Some years later the KGB began to search for compromising material on Cossit’s private life and prepare active measures to discredit him. He died in 1982 before the campaign against him had begun. 5

Gouzenko’s defection in September 1945 also caused alarm at NKGB residencies in Britain and the United States. As head of SIS Section IX (Soviet Counter-intelligence) Philby was kept well informed of the debriefing of Gouzenko and reported “an intensification of counter-measures” against Soviet espionage in London. The Centre responded with instructions for tight security procedures to ensure that “the valuable agent network is protected from compromise.” Boris Krötenschield (aka “Krotov”), the controller of the residency’s most important agents, was told to hand over all but Philby to other case officers and to reduce the frequency of meetings to once a month: “Warn all our comrades to make a thorough check when going out to a meeting and, if surveillance is observed, not to attempt under any circumstances to evade the surveillance and meet the agent…” If necessary, contact with British agents was to be temporarily broken off. 6

Even greater alarm was caused by the attempted defection of an NKGB officer in Turkey, Konstantin Dmitryevich Volkov. On August 27, 1945 Volkov wrote to the British vice-consul in Istanbul, C. H. Page, requesting an urgent appointment. When Page failed to reply, Volkov turned up in person on September 4 and asked for political asylum for himself and his wife. In return for asylum and the sum of 50,000 pounds (about a million pounds at today’s values), he offered important files and information obtained while working on the British desk in the Centre. Among the most highly rated Soviet agents, he revealed, were two in the Foreign Office (doubtless Burgess and Maclean) and seven “inside the British intelligence system,” including one “fulfilling the function of head of a section of British counter-espionage in London” (almost certainly Philby). 7

On September 19 Philby was startled to receive a report of Volkov’s meeting with Page by diplomatic bag from the Istanbul consulate. 8He quickly warned Krötenschield. 9On September 21 the Turkish consulate in Moscow issued visas for two NKGB hatchet men posing as diplomatic couriers. The next day Philby succeeded in gaining authorization from the chief of SIS, Sir Stewart Menzies, to fly to Turkey to deal personally with the Volkov case. Due to various travel delays he did not arrive in Istanbul until September 26. Two days earlier Volkov and his wife, both on stretchers and heavily sedated, had been carried on board a Soviet aircraft bound for Moscow. 10During the flight back to London Philby drafted a cynical report to Menzies on the possible reasons for Volkov’s detection by the NKGB. As he wrote later,

Doubtless both his office and his living quarters were bugged. Both he and his wife were reported to be nervous. Perhaps his manner had given him away; perhaps he had got drunk and talked too much; perhaps even he had changed his mind and confessed to his colleagues. Of course, I admitted, this was all speculation; the truth might never be known. Another theory—that the Russians had been tipped off about Volkov’s approach to the British—had no solid evidence to support it. It was not worth including in my report. 11

Under interrogation in Moscow before his execution, Volkov admitted that he had asked the British for political asylum and 50,000 pounds, and confessed that he had planned to reveal the names of no fewer than 314 Soviet agents. 12Philby had had the narrowest of escapes. With slightly less luck in Ottawa a few weeks earlier, Gouzenko would not have been able to defect. With slightly more luck in Istanbul, Volkov would have succeeded in unmasking Philby and disrupting the MGB’s British operations.

The Gouzenko and Volkov alarms occurred at a remarkably busy period for the London residency, headed until 1947 by Konstantin Kukin (codenamed IGOR). From September 11 to October 2, 1945 the Council of Foreign Ministers of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the United States, Soviet Union, Britain, France and China) held its first meeting in London to discuss peace treaties with defeated enemy states and other post-war problems.The residency’s penetration of the Foreign Office gave it an unusually important role. Throughout the meeting, according to KGB files, the Soviet ambassador, Ivan Maisky, placed greater reliance on residency staff than on his own diplomats, forcing them to extend each working day into the early hours of the following morning. 13The Security Council meeting, however, was a failure, publicly exposing for the first time the deep East-West divisions which by 1947 were to engender the Cold War.

At this and subsequent meetings of the Security Council, Stalin’s foreign minister, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, depended heavily on the intelligence supplied by the MGB’s Western agents. Indeed, he tended to take it for granted. “Why,” he roared on one occasion, “are there no documents?” At the London conference which opened in November 1947, he appears to have received some Foreign Office documents even before they reached the British delegation. 14

The MGB’s most important sources during the meetings of the Council of Foreign Ministers from 1945 to 1949 were British. Thanks to the kidnapping of Volkov, four of the wartime Magnificent Five were able to carry on work as full-time Soviet agents after the war. The exception was Anthony Blunt, who was under such visible strain that the Centre did not object to his decision to leave MI5. Shortly before he returned to the art world in November 1945 as Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, Blunt made one extraordinary outburst which at the time was not taken seriously. “Well,” he told his MI5 colleague Colonel “Tar” Robertson, “it’s given me great pleasure to pass on the names of every MI5 officer to the Russians!” The Centre may well have hoped that Leo Long (codenamed ELLI), whom Blunt had run as a sub-agent in military intelligence during the war, would succeed him in the Security Service. Blunt recommended Long for a senior post in MI5 but the selection board passed him over, allegedly by a narrow margin, in favor of another candidate. Long moved instead to the British Control Commission in Germany, where he eventually became Deputy Director of Intelligence. There he resisted attempts to put him in regular contact with a case officer—a recalcitrance which the Centre attributed in part to the fact that Blunt had ceased to be his controller. Among the occasional services which Blunt continued to perform for the Centre were two or three visits to Germany to seek intelligence from Long. 15

Unlike Blunt, three of the Magnificent Five—Philby, Burgess and Maclean—were all at their peak as Soviet agents, and Cairncross still close to his, when the Cold War began. Philby remained head of SIS Section IX until 1947, when he was appointed head of station in Turkey, a position which enabled him to betray agents who crossed the Russian border as well as their families and contacts inside the Soviet Union. Maclean established a reputation as a high-flying young diplomat in the Washington embassy, where he remained until 1947. In 1946 Burgess, who had joined the Foreign Office in 1944, became personal assistant to Hector McNeil, Minister of State to Ernest Bevin in the post-war Labor government. 16After the war John Cairncross returned to the Treasury, where the London residency renewed contact with him in 1948. 17Cairncross’s main job at the Treasury over the next few years was to authorize expenditure on defense research. According to his Treasury colleague G. A. Robinson: