Art of Betrayal (9 page)

The KGB top brass decided to allow extensive communications from their colleagues in the Russian military to continue in Berlin, for a while at least, without telling them that they were being intercepted. This was because it was considered more important to preserve the secret of Blake's treachery – even if that meant allowing the CIA and MI6 to collect valuable intelligence – rather than risk his exposure by issuing a warning. When Blake was eventually transferred to a position where the trail would be harder to follow, the KGB decided to ‘discover' the Berlin tunnel, making out that this had happened by chance. In Vienna too, belated warnings were given by Moscow to colleagues on the ground. In the spring of 1955 a letter from Moscow explained that British intelligence had been intercepting
Soviet military telephone communications. Enclosed was a document of ninety to a hundred pages giving details of conversations between Soviet generals and other officers. The KGB Resident, or head of station, was told to show it to the chief of Soviet military counter-intelligence under strict conditions.
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By that time, the tunnel's work had largely been done. Vienna's time at the frontline of the intelligence war was about to pass, although it would remain a playground for spies of all sides.

The Viennese had not expected a ten-year occupation in 1945. But the Russians blocked moves towards independence until Stalin's death in 1953. His successor Nikita Khrushchev accepted the notion of Austrian neutrality, a policy aimed at winning over Third World countries, and this opened the way for a treaty reviving an independent Austria signed in May 1955. The Cold War's final demarcation lines between East and West in Europe were being drawn.

The signing led to a final, frenetic burst of activity for the spies. Most had operated under cover of the occupation and knew they would have to depart. The CIA managed to pay off an estate agent helping a senior KGB officer find a house and had the property promptly wired for sound.
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The KGB tried to place agents in positions of strategic influence in Austrian public life and buried ‘burst' radio transmitters which could send compressed messages around the suburbs in plastic containers.
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The departing powers all deposited their wares in preparation for the next war, which they still thought would be fought like the last. The KGB trained its men in surveillance, small arms and ju-jitsu before placing them deep under cover to prepare for ‘partisan' activity.
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It left caches of arms in villages across the Soviet zone as well as in a monastery and two ruined castles.
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Britain and America buried modern weapons, explosives and money in underground caves as part of Operation Gladio, which co-ordinated activity across all of Western Europe. MI6 sent out officers to prepare caches and recruit agent networks to lead the resistance. ‘It doesn't take much imagination to work out that the Russian army would have hunted us from pillar to post,' one of those MI6 men said decades later. ‘It would have been a short but interesting life I suspect.'
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In October, a vast crowd gathered to cheer as each of the four flags which had hung over the Allied Control Commission building was
lowered. The Soviet flag fell last. After ten years, the occupation was over. A few weeks later, the State Opera House, that symbol of Viennese pride, was reopened. Vienna had survived. The war had moved on. But the loyalties and betrayals nurtured in the crucible of Vienna were also moving on to play out on a larger stage.

2

THE COST OF BETRAYAL

A
violent banging on his front door summoned Anthony Cavendish from a deep slumber. It was three in the morning. He was MI6's liaison officer with the Royal Navy in Hamburg in the British zone of Germany, a city out of which operations at the northern end of the Iron Curtain were run.
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At the door he found one of his radio operators in a visibly distressed state. There was a problem that required his urgent attention. The previous night, Cavendish and a fellow officer had taken three Baltic agents to the red-light district of Hamburg. The men, plucked from refugee camps, had been offered a last indulgence before embarking on a secret mission. It should have been relatively safe since they had been led to a bar in the Reeperbahn where the manager was an informant for Field Security. When Cavendish had retired for the night, the men had still been enjoying themselves, knocking back a peculiar German brandy drink and talking to some over-made-up girls while they watched the floor show. But the radio operator explained that, although two of the agents had made it back to their own secluded safe house, the third and the MI6 officer ‘looking after him' had got into a fight.

Cavendish threw on some clothes and headed for the bar. He found it smashed up. The police had taken everyone involved to the station. Cavendish persuaded them to release his two men, but there followed a long, painful post-mortem to ensure that the agents' cover story as visiting businessmen had not been blown. This was the inauspicious prelude to one of MI6's most aggressive and ill-fated operations of the early Cold War, which, along with many others, would be betrayed.

A day or so later, when the weather had improved, the agents were taken down to a jetty at a nearby harbour. Waiting for them was a German called Helmut Klose. During the war he had captained
E-boats which dropped Germans behind Russian lines to carry out acts of sabotage. He knew every nook and cranny of the stretch of coast along the Baltic. A German boat had been purchased by MIE and taken back to Portsmouth to be kitted out with a new engine which offered fifty knots with barely a sound. Klose's cover was as part of the British Control Commission's Fishery Protection Service.

Cavendish's job had been to establish a safe house, look after the agents and liaise with the Royal Navy. His naval contact was Anthony Courtney, a bluff officer whose remarkable career would take him back and forth between Moscow and London, from the netherworld of intelligence to the bright lights of parliament, and end in disaster at the hands of the KGB. Courtney was perhaps unique among British intelligence officers in having donated blood to the Red Army.
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His father had once sold machine tools to the Russians and would return from trips to the Soviet Union with beautifully carved wooden bears and books full of fairy stories. They were impenetrable to his son but had contributed to an abiding fascination with all things Russian, including its women.

After joining the navy, Courtney was one of the few Westerners to visit the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s, a period when he was also in touch with MI6. He wrote up long reports for Naval Intelligence with details ranging from the battleships he saw to how many roubles a month a waiter earned. He also drafted papers on what operations could be mounted against the Soviets in the Arctic and Black Sea in the event of war. ‘I'm afraid I have rather violent ideas on what we really could do to the USSR if we tried,' he wrote in a 1936 report.
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His experience led to a posting as deputy head of the Naval Mission in Moscow during the war, sailing the Arctic to Murmansk through storms violent enough to detonate mines around the boat. Those years in Moscow were filled with frustration and obstruction but he managed not only to donate blood in an act of solidarity but also to embark on an affair with a Russian dancer at the Bolshoi, which lasted until the secret police warned her off.
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After the war, he advised MI6 on the use of fast surface craft and special submarines for operations in the Black Sea. In 1948, he had been made chief of intelligence staff to the Flag Office in Germany living with his wife in a house with a pool and tennis court, although he repeatedly complained of a lack of money. Germany offered him
the chance to run his own front-line operations as he learnt how German fast boats could be adapted to slip quietly and quickly out of smaller harbours.

Courtney had approached Helmut Klose in May 1949. Klose had not been a Nazi, but Courtney explained to him that his wartime activities had been discovered and suggested he might like to undertake similar work again.
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No pressure was needed since Klose proved happy to resume his duel with the Bolsheviks. Courtney's deputy was John Harvey Jones, later chairman of ICI and TV trouble-shooter, who had joined Naval Intelligence after studying Russian at Cambridge.

After a few false starts, Klose's white E-boat,
S-208
, carrying Cavendish's Baltic agents finally headed out from the harbour on 31 October 1949. Its destination was Latvia, which had been swallowed up by the Soviet Union during the war. The men included former members of the SS whose past had been conveniently overlooked. MI6 was fighting the new war as if it were the last one, finding exiles to drop behind enemy lines. These men had been trained in weapons and secret inks back in Britain, including at a firing range in Chelsea. They carried a brown suitcase containing radios, machine guns and pistols. In watertight plastic bags they had codebooks and false passports. They had money belts full of gold coins and each carried a cyanide pill in case of capture.
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The Latvian drop was not the first. The Baltic coast, MI6 believed, was a weak point in the Iron Curtain. British intelligence had studied it closely. They knew it was guarded by camouflaged watchtowers, concealed lookouts and guard patrols, but these were at irregular intervals. The area closest to the shore had been evacuated and islands declared prohibited zones. Fishing vessels had informers placed on board and were scrutinised by coastal cutters, which guarded the boundary with the British sea zone.
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MI6 had already tried similar missions to Lithuania but these had ended in disaster with a KGB ambush on the beach.

Klose dropped the men at an isolated spot. They made their way to the house of a priest and gave him their password: ‘Can I buy some beer here?' The agents radioed back to Hamburg that their mission had started well. They headed for Riga and knocked on another door. They had arrived to help the resistance in the forests, they explained.
The next day, their contact said he was going out to get food. Instead he got in touch with a man called Janis Lukasevics. ‘They're comfortable and feel quite at home,' he told Lukasevics.
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The Baltic operations were masterminded by a brooding, secrecy-obsessed MI6 controller in London called Harry Carr. With an arched nose, intense eyes and straight black hair, Carr was the leading member of a group of MI6 officers for whom the Second World War had been only a brief interruption in their single-minded struggle against the real enemy. Back in the nineteenth century, the Russians had been Britain's rivals as the first intelligence skirmishes were fought as part of the Great Game in Asia. The imperial roots of anti-Russian sentiment in the Secret Service were then supplemented by a deep distaste for Bolshevism and its class struggle. For Harry Carr, the appropriation of property was also personal. He had been born in the northern Russian port of Archangel in the last weeks of the nineteenth century. His father managed timber mills and Carr grew up in luxury with a grass tennis court and servants before everything was taken away by the Bolsheviks.
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A remarkable number of MI6 officers had links to the old Russia either personally or through marriage. This created a highly motivated faction who were emotionally committed to confronting the Soviets. In the 1920s they had fallen foul of a Soviet deception called the Trust – a fake émigré group which acted as flypaper to trap agents. But Carr and his like had not learnt their lesson. A doer, not a thinker, Carr demanded aggressive operations. ‘There was a philosophy which affected almost everything they did which was “We must do something. Never mind what – but something,'” recalls a colleague who worked in Carr's department just after the war.
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Carr was among those itching to start operations against the Soviets after the Second World War and chafing at the restrictions initially imposed by the government on operating inside Russia. Eventually, the leash was loosened and it was agreed that operations could be launched from outside the Soviet Union into its perimeter.
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One of those was the effort to support the partisans in the Baltic forests. But an ambitious KGB major called Janis Lukasevics was waiting. He had interrogated a group of Latvians who had landed as early as 1945 and by the time more groups landed in 1949, including those shepherded by Courtney and Cavendish, he was ready to
enmesh them in his web of deception.
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The real partisans had been almost totally crushed by the Soviet secret police, and six of his KGB officers would pose as fake partisans. ‘We put them in a safe place,' Lukasevics recalled decades later of the team dropped in October. ‘There was a decision not to touch them.'
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The newly arrived agents were hidden under fish boxes in a truck and taken to meet their fellow ‘forest brothers'. Deep in the woods, the MI6 agents spent months training the ‘partisans' and gave them codenames. They told them they would receive £20 a month paid into a London bank account. At one point, one of the MI6 agents put his arm around the shoulders of a ‘partisan' and confided that in the first few weeks he had been worried it was all a KGB trap. They began to supply information back to London – profiles of people, troop movements and factory production – nothing special but good enough to be included in MI6's weekly intelligence summary for the Foreign Office. More agents arrived, including another undercover KGB man planted to report back on every element of the operation.
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Over five years, Klose would drop many more agents into the Baltics. The KGB would capture and in some cases torture and kill them. MI6 had been ensnared. It had been betrayed. Who was to blame?