Deception (27 page)

It would be easy to dismiss this as harmless fun and games – a kind of circus in which an exotic bout of public service turns into an equally exotic private-sector phenomenon. If Ms Chapman and her colleagues seem to have done no real harm in the West, except perhaps to our image of invulnerability, then maybe it is time for bygones to be bygones. Outsiders may ogle her lightly clad figure, but must be resigned to the fact that her most interesting feature – her career in intelligence – is forever cloaked in shadow. Moreover, that someone who embodies superficiality rather than achievement has become a female role model speaks volumes about Russian femininity. Ms Chapman also embodies the contradiction between the regime's xenophobic attitude to the West in general, and its senior members' personal enjoyment of foreign fleshpots. As the journalist Ms Latynina notes caustically: ‘This great heroine of the Putin youth was crying, crying buckets when she was told she was going to be banned from Great Britain.'

Sleazy and sex-crazed, crass yet sinister, xenophobic yet obsessed with the West, an artificial creation of an ailing regime: Ms Chapman is emblematic of the country that recruited, ran and promoted her. She exemplifies too the threats and the failings of Russian intelligence: nepotistic in recruitment, with an increasingly blurred line between the professional and private duties of its officers, but still able to plant undetectable and effective agents in our midst.

I have explained Russia's motivation for spying, how it spies, and why we should mind. The next section of the book looks at the history of Western espionage efforts against Russia. Despite some occasional successes, these have in many respects been feebly focused and disastrously executed, something of which British and other Western taxpayers are largely unaware. The biggest losers in this saga of fiascos have been not the Western spymasters and their staff, but the locals who trusted them. This section also sets the scene for the final part of the book, looking at one of the most serious and damaging episodes in recent years: the case of the Estonian Hermann Simm. In both the Western bungles and Russian triumphs, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania play a central role. Too small to be able to determine their own destiny,
^an
they are also too important for outsiders to ignore. That has been a fateful combination: both Russia and the West have tussled for influence in the Baltic region and states, and used them as springboards for espionage efforts elsewhere.

8

The Cockpit of Europe

A Hollywood blockbuster would hardly do justice to the stories. A masterspy disguised as a ragged pianist plays in his foes' canteen – and receives a knighthood for his efforts. A blundering colleague believes his enemies' tale of a vast underground army just waiting for his visit, and pays for his credulity with his life. Bungling spymasters dismiss espionage scoops that could change history. Souped-up torpedo boats, once the pride of Hitler's navy, rocket across the sea on moonless nights, their heavily armed passengers bearing ciphers, radios, treasure – and cyanide pills. Hidden in forest bunkers, desperate men risk death by torture in a forgotten and futile war. A star military commander in the Waffen-SS becomes a top man in British intelligence. Among his superiors is an undercover KGB colonel. Neglected and misunderstood, these events from past decades are the background to the spy wars of the present day.

Big countries' interests collide in the Baltic, often secretly and mostly tragically. In the past hundred years the region has been the front line of two big wars and several small ones, with coups, uprisings, pogroms and guerrilla struggles as footnotes.
¹
The tides of history have swept the Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians along, just as they have drowned their now-forgotten ethnic cousins.
^ao
The region was one of the central killing grounds of the Holocaust: Germans and local collaborators murdered around
228
,
000
Jews, around
90
per cent of the pre-war population.
²
It is also a spies' playground. Trade, tourism, culture and family ties make foreign visitors plentiful and inconspicuous, whether they have really come to admire the architecture, do a business deal, see relatives – or empty a dead-letter box. Targets are plentiful and loyalties fluid: locals know from bitter experience that fortunes shift and that many irons in the fire are better than one.

The stories include colourful characters such as Arthur Ransome, better known as a best-selling author of children's stories in which the plentiful clues to his previous espionage career have long remained unnoticed.
³
Among others are Sidney Reilly, Britain's ‘ace of spies'; Paul Dukes, the only MI
6
officer to be knighted for his work in the field, and traitors such as Kim Philby. Shadows still cloak the region's intelligence history.
⁴
Details in an official British account are skimpy and stop in
1947
.
⁵
American records are mostly still classified. Swedish records were allegedly destroyed, though they later turned up in the basement of a retired general.
⁶
But the outlines are clear. The Baltic was the hub of Western spymasters' botched efforts to topple the Bolshevik leadership in Russia in the five years following the revolution. After the Second World War they backed a bogus underground partisan movement there. In the
1990
s they barged back into the region, believing it to be an ideal springboard for intelligence operations against Russia.

The story starts with the Bolshevik revolution. In Britain, France and America politicians wanted Russia's secretive and fanatical new rulers explained. Could they be enticed back into the war with Germany, or at least prevent the Kaiser's high command switching forces from the East to frustrate the allied advance in the West? Were the Bolsheviks really hell-bent on fomenting revolution elsewhere, or just prone to verbal flourishes about it? As spies sought answers, Mansfield Cumming, founder of MI
6
(and in spy jargon the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service) proposed on
18
January
1918
the creation of a new ‘Baltic area' division dealing with Russia.
⁷
By
1923
the British espionage effort centred on the Estonian capital, Tallinn, with networks of agents run from substations in the Latvian capital Riga, and Kaunas (Lithuania's ‘provisional capital' since the loss of the historic capital, Vilnius, to Poland).
⁸
The governments of the three newborn states, foreshadowing a similar reaction in
1991
, were glad to see the British presence grow.
^ap
Too weak to manage their own security, they welcomed an outsider with similar geopolitical interests but no direct desire to meddle in their affairs. America, in those days, was an untried newcomer in European security. Sweden was too close and too self-interested, Germany too familiar and too weak. France, though a great power, had no historical ties to the region. The simultaneous weakness of both Russia and Germany gave a unique chance to start, or re-start, a history harshly interrupted by centuries of colonial rule.
⁹
But for Russian leaders both then and now the loss of the Baltic provinces seemed an unfair, costly and temporary sacrifice.
¹⁰

As initial British, French and American efforts to bribe or browbeat the Bolsheviks into rejoining the war against Germany faltered, attention turned to toppling the regime. Countries that cherished order were turning to subversion.
¹¹
(Prevention would have been easier: a British military official posted to Russia in
1917
to monitor political radicals stopped Karl Radek and Fritz Platten, two well-known revolutionaries, from entering Russia; unfortunately he failed to notice that the third member of the party was Lenin.)
¹²
Officials took an apocalyptic tone. Admiral Sir William Hall, director of British Naval Intelligence, speaking on his retirement in November
1918
at the end of the First World War, said: ‘Hard and bitter as the battle has been, we have now to face a far, far more ruthless foe, a foe that is hydra-headed and whose evil power will spread over the whole world, and that foe is Russia.'
¹³
Cumming took a similar view, telling his Stockholm station in late
1918
: ‘The only enemy now to be considered are the Bolsheviks.'
¹⁴

The communist grip on power in August
1918
was precarious. The Bolshevik-controlled territory – barely bigger than the old sixteenth-century Muscovy – was short of food and chaotically run. Rows blazed about politics, economics and strategy. Anti-Bolshevik forces still presented a lively if fragmented opposition: an uprising the previous month by the ultra-leftist Social Revolutionaries had narrowly failed. A big British expeditionary force under General Frederick Poole had landed at Archangel on Russia's northern coast, aiming to provide muscle and leadership to the White Russian forces. The Red Army was in disarray. Allied leaders expected a swift victory.

This aspect of the struggle was purely military. Britain played a leading role in the Russian Civil War, intervening to help the White (monarchist) armies on four fronts.
¹⁵
A British poster of the time gives a flavour. It shows a British soldier, laden with arms, hastening to help three soldiers in the uniform of the White Army, fighting a hideous gap-toothed Bolshevik monster. It reads:

My Russian Friends! I am an Englishman. In the name of our common cause I ask you just to hang on a bit longer, like the good chaps that you have always been. I have delivered, and will deliver in unlimited amounts, all that you need; and most importantly I will deliver you new weapons with which to destroy those disgusting, bloodthirsty red monsters.
¹⁶

 

But that British soldier was representing his bosses, not the masses. Strikes and mutinies showed that many in Britain's big industrial towns, either war-weary or radicalised, regarded the Russian revolution of
1917
with sympathy and admiration, as did many idealistic intellectuals. Communism seemed merely an advanced and vigorous version of socialism. The murderous and dictatorial side of the Soviet regime, apparent to first-hand observers in the ‘Red Terror' of August
1918
, was yet to become fully visible. Outsiders' desire to eradicate Bolshevism was both stoked and constrained by fear of its attractiveness. Western rulers worried that efforts to crush the communist experiment might backfire, leading to the radicalisation of their workers – and, worse, their soldiers and sailors. But letting the Bolsheviks stay in power was dangerous too: Lenin, Trotsky and the others had made it clear that world revolution was their goal. If they succeeded in Russia then other countries would soon be facing a communist threat too.

The other front, seemingly less risky, was domestic subversion, which was to fail just as badly as the military intervention. Amidst the pressure and panic of their early months in power, the Bolshevik leadership found the time to manage an elaborate deception operation that would leave British and French spy chiefs humiliated. According to Aleksandr Orlov, later a top Soviet defector, Lenin in the summer of
1918
decided that as the foreign powers were trying to overthrow him, it would be a good idea to catch the plotters red-handed and expose them.
¹⁷
The Bolshevik leader gave the task to the fearsome head of the Cheka secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky, who decided to centre the deception operation on the regime's most effective fighting force, the Latvian Riflemen. Conscripted into the Tsarist army, the Latvians had become radicalised by their careless ill-treatment and high casualty rate, but were not fanatical Bolsheviks. Given the choice, many of them might have preferred a socialist Latvia to a communist Russia.

The first thread in Dzerzhinsky's web involved a short sallow-faced former naval ensign with a complicated name who offered a neat way into the British spies' plans and thinking.
¹⁸
An informer for the Cheka, he had already been approached twice by Commander Leslie Cromie, the British naval attaché in Petrograd.
^aq
On
7
August he opened the trap by responding to Cromie's overtures, with the claim that his friend, Colonel Eduard B
ē
rzi
ņ
Å¡
, a senior Latvian officer, wished to cooperate with the allies. This was exactly what British intelligence officers were hoping for, and they were all too willing to believe it. A week later the two men appeared at the Moscow apartment of the British envoy Robert Bruce Lockhart. An intriguing character in every sense, libidinous, extravagant, brainy and moody, Lockhart was a forerunner of Graham Greene's ‘Quiet American' – just the sort of person that secret service work most disastrously attracts. B
ē
rzi
ņ
Å¡
explained to Lockhart, who was accompanied by two French colleagues, that the Latvians did not intend to fight the Bolsheviks' battles indefinitely and wished to go home. If they were sent north to fight General Poole's forces, they would like to surrender: could Lockhart arrange it? He also requested four million roubles to get to work on his fellow-Latvians' sympathies. Lockhart countered that it would be better if two Latvian regiments would switch sides at the provincial town of Vologda, opening a second front against the Bolshevik forces there, while those remaining in Moscow would assassinate Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership. But he wrote a
laissez-passer
to help the Latvians reach General Poole and provided
900
,
000
roubles as a down payment.