Max Hastings - The Secret War - Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939–1945

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the forest an agent of the GRU, who would later become famous, or notorious, for his association with the German Red Orchestra – the extraordinary espionage network to be described later – was putting down roots in foreign parts. Anatoli Sukolov-Gourevitch, born at Kharkov in November 1913, was the son of Jewish parents who were both pharmacists. He started work in 1929 as an apprentice draughtsman in a factory, and hated the life. From an early stage, and like most Soviet citizens, he acquired the habit of obsessive secrecy, writing in his memoirs: ‘I learned to hide my feelings and troubles from my nearest and dearest, my friends, and indeed from everyone.’ Desperate to escape from the common ruck, while still very young he became a communist functionary, and somehow secured an appointment as a lecturer on military studies at a Leningrad school for Intourist guides, thereafter serving in intelligence.

In 1937 he was recruited to travel to Spain as one of the Soviet military group assisting the embattled Republican government. Gourevitch thoroughly enjoyed his subsequent Spanish adventures – as who would not, after sampling Soviet factory life? He was able to dress with an elegance unimaginable at home, and thereafter favoured a Warsaw tailor. He took a trip in a submarine, travelled in France and learned conversational French, Spanish and German. On returning to Moscow, he was selected for training as a foreign agent of the GRU. Asked much later if it had troubled him to join the Soviet Union’s murderous secret services, like Sudoplatov he shrugged that his country was encircled by enemies; he then believed that its defenders did only what they had to.

His chief, the gaunt, jug-eared intelligence veteran Major Simon Gendin, enquired whether he had any marriage plans which could complicate his future career overseas. Gourevitch replied that he was indeed in love, with a girl named Lialia whom he had met when they were both working in Spain, and who was now an Intourist interpreter. Gendin told his staff to add her name to the brief list of intimates with whom Gourevitch might correspond, though that relationship perished, like so much else, during the years that followed. On graduation from the GRU’s spy school, Gourevitch himself expressed doubts about his fluency as a coder and wireless-operator – he lacked a sensitive ear for Morse. Gendin reassured him: he would not need specialised radio skills, for he was destined to become an intelligence-gatherer and agent-runner.

Gourevitch was briefed to travel to Brussels to work with another Soviet agent, codenamed ‘Otto’, then to move on to Sweden after establishing himself and improving his language skills. He would exploit his knowledge of Spanish by adopting a cover identity as ‘Vincente Sierra’, a prosperous businessman with a Uruguayan passport. For the next three years, Moscow furnished him with funds to sustain an appropriately flashy lifestyle. Yet although he was instructed about the importance of dressing smartly, affecting the hat and gloves that were then badges of bourgeois respectability, Gourevitch later complained that he was untutored in social skills. When he checked into a smart Helsinki hotel on the first leg of his journey to Belgium, he was bewildered when a porter picked up his suitcase and carried it upstairs: never in his short life had he received such a personal service. He gasped on seeing an open buffet in the hotel dining-room, which at first he assumed was set for a banquet rather than for the daily fare of guests. Later, in Brussels, as he fumbled his way towards an entrée into relatively smart social circles, he was embarrassed to be taken aside one evening by an acquaintance who told him that only waiters wore white bow ties with smoking jackets. ‘I was completely ignorant of these subtleties,’ he wrote ruefully.

‘Otto’, the Soviet agent whom Gourevitch joined in Brussels, was Leopold Trepper, born in 1904 the son of a Galician shopkeeper, one of the key figures in Russia’s European intelligence operations, and later a heroic Soviet legend. As a young man, Trepper ran a Paris network which was rolled up by the French in 1933. He fled first to Germany, then to Russia where he found employment with Stalin’s spymasters while moonlighting as editor of a Jewish journal. Early in 1939 he was dispatched to Brussels, which was deemed a secure base from which he could forward information from the GRU’s network inside Germany. Centre boasted of running two important Berlin agents: Ilse Stöbe, who worked in the press department of Ribbentrop’s Foreign Ministry, and a diplomat named Rudolf Shelia. Trepper carried a Canadian passport in the name of Adam Mikler, stolen during the Spanish Civil War. He was married with two sons, but only one accompanied him to Brussels – the other, seven-year-old Michael, remained in Moscow. Trepper became known to his sources in Western Europe as ‘ le grand chef ’, while Gourevitch was ‘ le petit chef ’. Soviet narratives lavish praise on the Trepper network for its services to the socialist cause, and it was plainly useful as a post office for the messages of Stöbe and Shelia. But it seems unlikely that Trepper recruited useful informants of his own. The foremost achievement of the GRU agents in Belgium was to stay at liberty, make some friends and create lifestyles that supported their cover stories.

Of more importance to Moscow – certainly from 1941 onwards – were the GRU’s organisations based in Switzerland. These would later channel towards the Kremlin material derived from Berlin sources such as Western agent-runners could only dream of. One network had been established in 1937 by German-born Rachel Dübendorfer. A larger group, which became known as the ‘Lucy’ Ring, was run by Dr Alexander Radó – ‘Dora’ – a ‘sleeper’ permitted by his chiefs to slumber almost as long as Sleeping Beauty. A Hungarian, Marxist from his youth, Radó served as a commissar in Budapest’s 1919 Red Terror. Obliged to flee when Admiral Horthy became Hungary’s dictator, for a time he ran an émigré Resistance group in Vienna. He then decamped to Moscow, where he received intelligence training, and was deemed sufficiently significant to be introduced to Lenin. Posted to Western Europe, he served as an agent in Berlin and Paris, under cover as a correspondent for the Soviet news agency TASS. After marrying a German communist with whom he had two children, he tried to settle in Brussels, but was sent packing by the authorities, who held a thick dossier on him. Instead he went to Switzerland, where he parleyed a lifelong passion for maps into the creation of a cartographic publishing business, which quickly became profitable.

The Swiss police watched Radó for a while, then left him alone when they decided he was what he seemed – a quiet-living fellow, forty in 1939, who simply wanted to turn an honest penny. Radó was word-painted by one of his wireless-operators, an Englishman named Alexander Foote: ‘With his mild eyes blinking behind glasses, he looked exactly like almost anyone to be found in any suburban train anywhere in the world.’ Moscow instructed its man to do nothing until Europe erupted. Radó settled down quite happily with his maps, which enabled him to make a living without much recourse to GRU funds. When his handler was recalled to Moscow during the Purges, Radó for a time lost contact with his chiefs. But he made useful local friends, some of them communists, others not. One was a Swiss socialist, Otto Punter, who admired the Soviet Union and had worked for the Republicans in Spain. Punter forged connections in Germany, and with some German émigrés in Switzerland such as Baron Michel von Godin. Von Godin recruited the Vichy French press attaché, Louis Suss, codename ‘Salter’. The Chinese press attaché Pao Hsien Chu – ‘Polo’ – was another source, and Punter also had connections with influential local Catholics.