Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

[Cairncross] thus knew not just about atomic weapons developments but also plans for guided missiles, microbiological, chemical, underwater and all other types of weapons. He also needed to know, inter alia, about projected spending on aeronautical and radar research and anti-submarine detection, research by the Post Office and other bodies into signals intelligence, eavesdropping techniques, etc. He… could legitimately ask for any further details thought necessary to give Treasury approval to the spending of money. 18

Cairncross’s controller, Yuri Modin, was, unsurprisingly, “overjoyed by the quality of [his] information.” 19

The new security procedures introduced in the wake of the Gouzenko and Volkov alarms made controlling the London residency’s agents far more laborious and timeconsuming than during or before the war. On average, before every meeting with an agent, each case officer spent five hours moving on foot or by public transport (especially the London Underground) between locations he had studied previously in order to engage in repeated checks that he was not under surveillance. Once at the meeting place, both the case officer and the agent were required to establish visual contact and to satisfy themselves that the other was not being watched before they approached each other. If either had any doubts, they would fall back on one of three previously agreed alternative rendezvous. The system pioneered in London was later introduced into other residencies. 20

The London residency also pioneered the use of radio intercept units to identify and monitor surveillance of its operations by the police and MI5. In addition to the main interception unit in the residency, mobile units were established in embassy cars to check the areas in which meetings took place with agents. 21However, the Centre’s experiment with the eight-man surveillance team sent to London during the Second World War to carry out checks on agents and visitors to the Soviet embassy, as well as to discover the surveillance methods used by British intelligence, was discontinued. A report in KGB archives records that, handicapped by its lack of fluency in English, the team had “no major successes.” 22The experiment was probably a total failure.

The London residency’s attempts to enforce the strictest standards of secrecy and security had only a limited effect on Guy Burgess. On one occasion, while coming out of a pub where he had established visual contact with his case officer, he dropped his briefcase and scattered secret Foreign Office papers over the floor. There were frequent complaints that he turned up for meetings the worse for drink and with his clothing in disarray. 23When George Carey-Foster, head of the embryonic security branch in the Foreign Office, first encountered Burgess in 1947, he was struck by his “disheveled and unshaven appearance. He also smelt so strongly of drink that I enquired who he was and what his job was.” Yet Burgess could still display fragments of the charm and brilliance of his Cambridge years. Late in 1947, probably to get rid of him, Hector McNeil recommended Burgess to the parliamentary under-secretary at the Foreign Office, Christopher Mayhew, who was then organizing the Information Research Department (IRD) to counter Soviet “psychological warfare.” Mayhew made what he later described as “an extraordinary mistake:” “I interviewed Burgess. He certainly showed a dazzling insight into Communist methods of subversion and I readily took him on.” Burgess went the rounds of British embassies selling IRD’s wares while simultaneously compromising the new department by reporting all its plans to Yuri Ivanovich Modin, who became his case officer in 1947 and acquired a reputation as one of the ablest agent controllers in Soviet intelligence. The chorus of protests at Burgess’s undiplomatic behavior led to his removal from the IRD and transfer to the Foreign Office Far Eastern Department in the autumn of 1948. 24Though it disturbed the Centre, Burgess’s frequently outrageous conduct paradoxically strengthened his cover. Even to most of those whom he outraged he seemed as unlike a Soviet spy as it was possible to imagine.

Modin was also concerned about Nikolai Borisovich Rodin (alias “Korovin”), who succeeded Kukin as London resident in 1947. Rodin considered himself above the tight security regulations on which he insisted for the other members of the residency. According to Modin, who loathed him personally, Rodin was “known to go to clandestine meetings in one of the embassy cars, and sometimes was foolhardy enough to place direct calls to agents in their offices.” But, in the rigidly hierarchical world of Soviet intelligence, Modin felt that “there was nothing I could do about it. It was hardly my place to denounce my superior in the service.” As head of Faculty Number One (Political Intelligence) in the FCD Andropov Institute in the early 1980s, Modin was less inhibited. He dismissed Rodin as an arrogant, pretentious nonentity. 25

THOUGH THE MGB’S most important British agents were still undetected at the end of the 1940s, many of their American counterparts had been compromised. The Centre had complained as early as March 1945 that the membership of the Silvermaster spy ring was an open secret among “many” Washington Communists and that Harry Dexter White’s Soviet “connection” had also become known. It denounced “not only the falling off in the [New York] Residency’s work of controlling and educating probationers [agents], but also the lack of understanding by our operational workers of the most elementary rules in our work.” 26

The defections later in 1945 of Igor Gouzenko and Elizabeth Bentley confirmed the Centre’s worst fears. In September J. Edgar Hoover reported to the White House and the State Department that Gouzenko had provided information on the activities of a number of Soviet spies in the United States, one of whom was “an assistant to the Secretary of State” (almost certainly Alger Hiss). On November 7 Bentley, who had first contacted the FBI six weeks earlier, began revealing what she knew of Soviet espionage to its New York field office. Next day Hoover sent President Truman’s military aide a first list of fourteen of those identified by Bentley as supplying information to “the Soviet espionage system:” among them Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, OSS executive assistant Duncan C. Lee and Roosevelt’s former aide Lauchlin Currie. 27Bentley’s defection, in turn, revived FBI interest in Whittaker Chambers’ earlier evidence of pre-war Soviet espionage by Hiss, White and others. 28

On November 20 Gorsky, the Washington resident whom Bentley knew as “A1,” met her for the last time in front of Bickford’s cafeteria on 23rd Street and Sixth Avenue in New York. Unaware that they were under surveillance by the FBI, Gorsky arranged their next meeting for January 20. According to Bentley, he told her that she might soon be needed “back in undercover work.” By the time the date for their next rendezvous had arrived, however, Gorsky was back in Moscow. 29His hasty departure was probably due to the discovery of Bentley’s defection. 30A few months later the resident in New York, Roland Abbiate (alias “Pravdin”), whose wife was known to Bentley, was also withdrawn. 31A damage assessment in the Centre concluded that Bentley did not know the real name, address or telephone number of her previous controller, Iskhak Akhmerov, the illegal resident in the United States. As a precaution, however, he and his wife were recalled to Moscow. 32

The almost simultaneous recall of Gorsky, Abbiate and Akhmerov left the MGB without experienced leadership in the United States. There were few senior officers at the Centre with first-hand knowledge of North America capable of succeeding them. In any case, as Yuri Modin later acknowledged, “We were leery of sending people out of the Soviet Union for fear of defections. Most of our officers worked in Moscow, with the result that the few men posted in foreign countries had a workload so crushing that many of them cracked under the pressure.” 33Akhmerov was not replaced as illegal resident until 1948. 34Gorsky’s two successors as chief legal resident in the United States both became bywords for incompetence in the Centre. Grigori Grigoryevich Dolbin, who arrived to replace Gorsky in 1946, had to be replaced in 1948 after showing signs of insanity (due, it was rumored in Moscow, to the onset of hereditary syphilis). His successor, Georgi Aleksandrovich Sokolov, was reprimanded by the Centre before being recalled in 1949. 35