Deception (34 page)

One of the Swedish agents was a young émigré called Ewald Hallisk. His story mirrored many of his generation: conscripted into the German army at the age of sixteen, he had fled to Sweden to escape the Soviet advance. Spurred by a mixture of adventure and patriotism, he volunteered to join the Swedish secret service in
1948
and was sent on a mission two years later. He left behind a fiancée, Margaret, and a toddler son, Peter. For forty-two years after he went missing, his family assumed he was dead. Nobody else wanted to admit that he had existed at all. Swedish authorities covered up the fiasco, citing official secrecy and claiming falsely that even if some such operation had existed all the documents involved had been burned in the
1960
s.

On
29
June
1992
, Peter Kadhammar, a journalist on the Swedish newspaper
Expressen
, produced a sensational scoop.
⁴⁰
Far from being dead, Hallisk was living in a modest cottage in Estonia. The ‘spy who never was' proved only too happy to talk about his training in firearms, shortwave radio, and invisible ink. He also wanted money: he had, he insisted, been betrayed by the same incompetence that had marred the SIS and CIA operations. The KGB had picked him up within two days of arriving in Estonia. He had spent two months on death row and then fifteen years in a labour camp in Magadan, one of the harshest parts of the Soviet penal system, and remained under close KGB scrutiny after his release. Swedish officials initially argued that he had been a volunteer and knew what he was getting into. Then they offered him
500
,
000
kronor (about $
80
,
000
in the money of
2011
). He sued, and won a modest top-up of
120
,
000
kronor. But it was all too late: Margaret had died, and he found little common ground with Peter.
⁴¹
After an unhappy stay in Sweden he returned to his humble life in Estonia.

Other survivors were even unluckier. In
1991
I tracked down Klemensas Å irvys, parachuted into Lithuania in October
1950
together with Lukša. When I asked him about his mission, he burst into tears. A widower, crippled by a stroke, he lived in dismally poor conditions in a remote part of Lithuania. The botched operation had ruined his life. I was expecting a tirade. But he bore no bitterness towards the Americans or the British: indeed he spoke broken English proudly from his time spent in a British labour battalion in post-war Germany. His one regret was that the Western allies had sent so few people, so late, to fight the communists. It was hard to imagine that this lame, tearful old man had four decades ago come ashore with a Schmeisser MP-
32
sub-machine gun, grenades, radios and cyanide tablets. After a year in a bunker he was captured, tortured and sent to Siberia for a twenty-five-year sentence with five further years in exile.
⁴²
Neither the CIA nor SIS appears to have made provision for him after
1991
.
^bj
A similarly poignant story concerns Zigmas Kudirka, a bright young Lithuanian émigré recruited by SIS in post-war London and sent in autumn
1952
as a radio operator. In
1956
he appealed to SIS to get him out, and was told (in his words) ‘chin up' and to try to make his own way to Sweden. Speaking in
1989
, in fluent English, Kudirka showed unconcealed rage:

 

British intelligence is known all over the world as one of the best. Of course I trusted them. I felt elevated to be a member of the British intelligence service and I tried to do my best.

 

He found the news that he had been a pawn in the KGB's game shattering:

 

It was like a blow on the head. I could not understand how an intelligence service like the British could have made such a mistake. It was unbelievable . . . I took the risk but I hoped for normal work. But what happened? I was from the beginning like a blind kitten put into the net of Soviet intelligence. What was the risk for, all the suffering, and all the broken life?
⁴³

 

A galling footnote came when Kudirka turned up in London in
1990
in the vain hope of retrieving his belongings, including irreplaceable family photographs, which he had left with SIS for safekeeping. His former case officer, John Ludzius, met him in a pub with the bracing greeting: ‘I thought you were all dead.'
⁴⁴
In the
1990
s another Lithuanian SIS man, Anicetas Dukavi
č
ius, also tried (apparently unsuccessfully) to gain some compensation from the British authorities. After some lobbying and the publication of Mart Männik's posthumous memoirs, the Männik family on
4
June
2003
received
€
10
,
000
from the British government.

Such stingy, tardy or outright hostile treatment contrasts sharply with the efforts made by SIS (and the CIA) to find dependants of dead agents from the more recent era. In one creditable and poignant episode in
1990
, a young woman received a startling and mysterious invitation, summoning her to a meeting in the presidential offices in Prague Castle where senior SIS officers and their local counterparts explained what until then had been an inexplicable misfortune in her life. Her father Miloslav Kro
č
a, the head of the British section of the communist secret police, the StB, had died (naturally) of a heart attack in
1976
; her mother had some time later became ill after mistakenly taking one of his invisible-ink pills, kept in an aspirin bottle. Puzzled, she took the pills to a pharmacist; an investigation eventually alerted the authorities that the dead man must in fact have been a Western spy. Forced to live in miserable conditions in a remote part of the country, the family was blighted. The mother died, while the daughter was barred from higher education or a proper career. The visitors then handed over a large sum of money, explaining that though her father had spied for the West solely on ideological grounds he had asked that if anything were to befall him his family should be taken care of.
⁴⁵
Mr Kro
č
a, one of the most important British spies behind the Iron Curtain, was recruited by Richard Dearlove, then a ‘First Secretary' (but actually SIS officer) at the British embassy in Prague and later Chief of MI
6
.

Perhaps the most tantalising loose end comes from Alexander Koppel, who is almost certainly the last surviving agent from Operation Jungle. Tracking him down was rather like finding a pterodactyl alive and well in a bungalow near London (in Mr Koppel's case, Wokingham). A glass-fronted bookcase containing medals and memorabilia is the only sign of his extraordinary past. A sprightly
85
(when I interviewed him in early
2011
), he described in matter-of-fact terms his recruitment, training, life in the ‘underground', capture, interrogation and eventual release. He came to Britain in
1947
, and worked in Dunstable in a cement works, along with many other Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian young men keen to leave the displaced person camps of post-war Germany. It was a hard, dull life. News from home was scant: even discovering which family members were alive and which had perished was hard.

In
1952
Mr Koppel was approached by Rebane and asked if he would be willing to go on a mission as a radio operator. He initially declined: his parents were still in Estonia, and would suffer horribly if he were caught. He recalls that Rebane tried to reassure him, in words that seem bizarrely complacent in retrospect: ‘Don't worry – it's quite safe, quite nice.' Getting there, he said, was ‘as simple as a bus ride'. Mr Koppel moved to Old Church St, and started training. His task was simply to operate a radio, so he received what he describes as ‘negligible' instruction in spycraft or combat.
^bk
The trainees were taken sightseeing to Stonehenge, and for a boat trip on the Thames. A Lithuanian taught them Russian, which they barely spoke. The evening before his departure, Rebane took him aside to give him a final briefing. ‘Take no initiative. You are only the radio operator. Take orders from “Karl” (the partisan commander). Don't drink. Know your place.'

The first hint of trouble came when Mr Koppel arrived in Saaremaa, an island off Estonia's coast that had once been a hotbed of anti-communist resistance. He was met by partisans who – had he known it – were all seasoned KGB officers. They took his carefully packed suitcase, which contained money, arms and other material for the resistance, and returned it with the contents jumbled, claiming that it had been dropped and burst open. His enquiries about the situation in the country got cursory answers. Hidden in an attic in a farm near Viljandi in southern Estonia, Mr Koppel got on with encoding and sending messages to London.

His KGB colleagues made life seem realistic, at one point staging a hurried forced march into the forests to avoid a house search. Mysterious lorries came and went in the night – in fact collecting and delivering teams of KGB watchers, but straining his nerves. In the winter of
1954
–
5
, the partisans said it was time to move to a new location in northern Estonia. The group broke its journey at a villa in Nõmme, a plush suburb of Tallinn. Food and drink were offered to celebrate – according to ‘Karl', the supposed leader of the group – a Soviet ID document that the partisans had obtained for their guest.

 

I started to feel funny. I said, ‘I'm not used to drinking.' But after that I had no time to think. I collapsed. I heard noises and sensed movement. When I recovered I was naked in a small room. There were Russians, faces looking in. And two Estonians, smirking.

 

The KGB was convinced that Mr Koppel would have a cyanide pill and had stripped him naked while looking for it. But this standard procedure had been overlooked during his trip – perhaps, he says, because he had been so seasick. His main worry was his parents. Unwisely, he had confided to his partisan ‘colleagues' in the bunker that his relatives were alive and in Estonia. He played for time, but soon realised that every detail of his mission was already known. ‘Every cloud has a silver lining,' he recalls thinking. ‘I can't give away anything because they know it all already.' It was Mr Koppel's good fortune, perhaps, that his capture came after Stalin's death, and when the focus of KGB efforts was far more on counter-espionage than counter-insurgency. His captors decided to try and use him for their own purposes. With the threat of sanctions against his relatives always in the background, they moved him to a new location and told him to keep sending regular messages to the British, just as before. This continued for more than a year. Then followed the great puzzle of the story.

In
1956
Mr Koppel was suddenly taken to Moscow, where he was held in the Lubyanka – the infamous headquarters of the KGB. No explanation was given, and the treatment was good – at one point his hosts even took him to the Bolshoi Ballet. ‘I am not pointing fingers,' he says. ‘They were nice and polite' (this may well be the only time that an imprisoned SIS agent has applied this particular set of adjectives to his KGB captors). References to Mr Koppel in KGB files make it clear that his captors believed they had secured his agreement to work in the West. In the small hours of a summer morning, they took him to the coast of northern Estonia, and to his huge surprise gave back his gun, and provided him with a boat, a compass bearing to a lighthouse, and a phone number in Finland.

Mr Koppel was convinced that this was merely a prelude to his murder (it is easy to imagine the KGB-sponsored news story about a ‘fascist bandit' being foiled in the act of escape). His captors' parting words were to remind him that his family remained in Estonia. As his boat chugged through the twilight, the truth dawned. He was indeed being released. As he approached Finnish territorial waters, a speedboat neared. Fearing that it was the Finnish coastguard, Mr Koppel hurriedly dropped his gun over the side of the boat. But the crew of the boat simply waved and passed by. He had returned to the free world. He found a house and made his phone call: Rebane answered. He had clearly been expecting Mr Koppel's return. Initially, the new arrival was uncertain what account to give. ‘I wasn't sure what to tell them – I was in this labyrinth of doubts,' he says. He was also worried that the KGB had a mole in SIS: ‘anything I tell them, he will tell the Russians'.

After a cursory debriefing by SIS, who appeared distrustful of him, he then told Rebane the full story – or at least his side of it. But what was the whole truth? Why had the KGB released someone who would, if he spoke candidly, blow away the cobwebs of deception? One possibility (and to my mind the most likely) is that his release was part of a straight spy swap – the first of the Cold War. Rebane had known for some time that Operation Jungle was blown, and had been in regular radio contact with the bogus partisans. When each side realised that the other no longer believed in the fiction of a serious resistance organisation inside Estonia, it would have been time for straight talking. It may well be that Rebane offered to send back one of the KGB plants in London, in exchange for Mr Koppel.