Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

As Philby had feared, the defection of his friend and former lodger, Burgess, placed him under immediate suspicion. The Director of Central Intelligence, General Walter Bedell Smith, promptly informed SIS that he was no longer acceptable as its liaison officer in Washington. On his return to London, Philby was officially retired from SIS. In December 1951 he was summoned to a “judicial inquiry” at MI5 headquarters—in effect an informal trial, of which he later gave a misleading account in his memoirs. According to one of those present, “There was not a single officer who sat through the proceedings who came away not totally convinced of Philby’s guilt.” Contrary to the impression Philby sought to create in Moscow after his defection twelve years later, many of his own former colleagues in SIS shared the opinion of MI5. But the “judicial inquiry” concluded that it would probably never be possible to find the evidence for a successful prosecution. Within SIS Philby retained the support of a loyal group of friends to whom he cleverly presented himself as the innocent victim of a McCarthyite witch-hunt. Soviet intelligence had no further contact with him until 1954. 159

Philby seems never to have realized that Burgess’s sudden defection was the result not of his own loss of nerve but of a cynical deception by the Centre, and never forgave Burgess for putting him in jeopardy. By the time Philby himself finally defected to Moscow in 1963, Burgess was on his death bed. He asked his old friend to visit him at the KGB hospital in Pekhotnaya Street. Philby refused to go. 160His sense of grievance was increased by his own reception in Moscow. Philby had long believed that he was an officer in the Soviet foreign intelligence service and was shocked to discover that, as a foreign agent, he would never be awarded officer rank. Worse still, he was not fully trusted by the leadership either of the KGB or its First Chief (Foreign Intelligence) Directorate. Not until the sixtieth anniversary celebrations of the October Revolution, fourteen years after his arrival in Moscow, was the KGB’s most celebrated Western agent at last allowed to enter its headquarters. 161

One of the most remarkable public appearances ever made by a Soviet illegal took place on November 6, 1951, when “Teodoro B. Castro” attended the opening in Paris of the Sixth Session of the United Nations General Assembly as an adviser to the Costa Rican delegation. Castro was, in reality, Iosif Romualdovich Grigulevich (variously codenamed MAKS, ARTUR and DAKS), 1a Lithuanian Jew whose main previous expertise had been in sabotage and assassination. He had trained saboteurs during the Spanish Civil War, taken a leading role in the operations to kill Trotsky in Mexico and had run a wartime illegal residency in Argentina which specialized in the sabotage of ships and cargoes bound for Germany. 2While in Argentina, Grigulevich had begun to develop an elaborate Latin American legend for use after the war. 3

Late in 1949, Grigulevich and his wife, Laura Araujo Aguilar (a Mexican illegal agent codenamed LUIZA), set up an illegal residency in Rome. Posing as Teodoro Castro, the illegitimate son of a dead (and childless) Costa Rican notable, Grigulevich established a small import-export business to provide cover for his intelligence work. In the autumn of 1950 he made the acquaintance of a visiting delegation from Costa Rica which included the leading Costa Rican politician of his generation, José Figueres Ferrer, head of the founding junta of the Second Republic which had restored constitutional government and later President of the Republic in 1953-8 and 1970-4. Grigulevich’s success in winning Figueres’s confidence must have exceeded his wildest expectations. Hoodwinked by Grigulevich’s fraudulent account of his illegitimate birth, Figueres told him they were distant relatives. Thereafter, according to Grigulevich’s file, he became the friend and confidant of the future president, using the Centre’s money to invest with him in an Italian firm importing Costa Rican coffee. 4

In October 1951, under his cover name Teodoro Castro, Grigulevich was appointed Costa Rica’s chargé d’affaires in Rome. A month later he was chosen as an adviser to the Costa Rican delegation to the Sixth Session of the UN General Assembly at its meeting in Paris. During the assembly he was introduced to the US Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, and the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden—but not, apparently, to the Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei Vyshinsky. 5Vyshinsky’s usual oratorical style at international gatherings was tedious and longwinded. On this occasion, however, he arrived with a caged dove, intended to represent the innocent victims of imperialist aggression, then proceeded to speak with the brutal sarcasm for which he had been infamous as prosecutor during the show trials of the Great Terror. Referring to a speech by President Truman on arms limitation, Vyshinsky declared in the course of a lengthy diatribe, “I could hardly sleep all night last night having read that speech. I could not sleep because I kept laughing.” 6

Among the other targets for Vyshinsky’s sarcasm was the Costa Rican delegation. One of the motions debated by the General Assembly was the call by the Greek delegation for the return to Greece of the children evacuated to the Soviet Bloc during the Greek civil war. At Acheson’s request, the Costa Rican delegation agreed to support the motion. Doubtless to his extreme embarrassment, Grigulevich was chosen to draft a speech in favor of it to be delivered by Jorge Martínez Moreno. He did his best to limit the offense to the Soviet delegation by somewhat vacuous rhetoric which emphasized “the anxiety and the interest with which [the Costa Rican] delegation had always considered any threat liable to endanger the peace of the world,” and congratulated the UN Special Committee on the Balkans “for its work of observation and conciliation, thanks to which… although the Balkans remained a danger, at least world peace had been safeguarded.” The Soviet delegation was unimpressed. Probably unaware of Castro’s real identity, Vyshinsky condemned the speech as the ramblings of a diplomatic clown. 7

Vyshinsky’s denunciation, however, did nothing to damage Grigulevich’s diplomatic career. On May 14, 1952 he presented his letters of credence as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of Costa Rica in Rome to the Italian president, Luigi Einaudi. According to his file, Grigulevich was on good terms with the American ambassador, Ellsworth Bunker, and his successor, Claire Boothe Luce, and successfully cultivated the Costa Rican nuncio to the Vatican, Prince Giulio Pacelli, a nephew of Pope Pius XII. Grigulevich had a total of fifteen audiences with the Pope. He also made friends with one of Italy’s leading post-war politicians, the Christian Democrat Alcide de Gasperi (Prime Minister, 1945-53), who gave him a camera inscribed “In token of our friendship.” 8

Grigulevich’s astonishing transformation from Soviet saboteur and assassin into a popular and successful Latin American diplomat, combined with the initial success of “Willie” Fisher’s illegal residency in providing “supersecret” nuclear intelligence from the United States, 9seemed to vindicate the Centre’s early Cold War strategy of attempting to recreate the age of the Great Illegals. The role of the post-war illegals was considered to be potentially even more important than that of their illustrious predecessors. If the Cold War turned into hot war, as the Centre thought quite possible, Soviet embassies and the legal residencies they contained would have to be withdrawn from NATO countries, leaving the illegals to run wartime intelligence operations.