Читать книгу Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain - Richard Davenport-Hines - Страница 35

One of the leading figures in Room 22 and the Mine was Ernest Oldham. Born in 1894 in Lower Edmonton, he was the son of schoolteachers. Most of his education was at Tottenham County School, although he spent some months at an obscure sixth-form boarding school near Staines in Middlesex. In 1914, aged nineteen, he joined the Chief Clerk’s Department at the Foreign Office. As a junior officer on the Western Front in 1917–18 he endured bombardment and poison-gas attacks amid the trenches, dug-outs, shell-holes and mine-craters. He was never one of those Englishmen who were reconciled to the carnage of the Western Front by leaving wreaths of Haig poppies at the base of war memorials.

In his determination to rise from the ranks, Oldham made himself into a proficient French-speaker. His bilingualism resulted in his appointment in 1919 as a clerk at the Paris Peace Conference. During his six months in the French capital he mastered its streets and by-ways, which was to prove helpful when years later he needed to escape surveillance. After returning from Paris, Oldham applied for admission into the Consular Service. There seemed a chance of his appointment as Third Consul at Rio de Janeiro, for in addition to good French he had reasonable knowledge of Spanish, Italian and German. After some hesitation, he was rejected by the promotion board in 1920, but offered a post in the Communications Department. This was insufficient salve, for Oldham aspired to the social cachet of the Consular Service.

Like other men in the department, Oldham doubled as a King’s Messenger. He visited Constantinople and other Balkan capitals as well as closer destinations. In May 1922 he was sent by air – travelling in a fragile single-engine biplane – to deliver a document intended for King George V, who was visiting war cemeteries in Belgium. These travels made him adept at buying and selling foreign currencies at good rates. The offices of every embassy or legation in a foreign capital were alike, with similar stationery, filing cabinets, pencils, punches and calendars and the same red copies of the Foreign Office List and Who’s Who, as Owen O’Malley recounted. ‘In the residential part of the house too, though the servants may be white or black or yellow, there will be the same kindly discipline, the same Lux [soap], Ronuk [floor-polish], chintz, pot-plants, water-colours, large bath towels and Bromo [a patent cure for hangovers and upset stomachs], which the Englishman carries round the world like a snail its shell: which form indeed the temple and fortress of his soul.’ To these familiar surroundings King’s Messengers brought office talk from Whitehall and from other European capitals, and exchanged it for local gossip. All the staff, from the Ambassador downwards, pumped Oldham about diplomatic trends, promotions, political currents and whatever was afoot in London.¹⁰

Oldham was given charge of managing the routes for King’s Messengers across Europe. The location of the League of Nations in Geneva required his frequent visits to Switzerland, either as a courier of documents or as an encrypter and decrypter. For ten years meetings of the League there were held in the Hôtel Victoria. ‘By day the hotel was a babel of strange sounds,’ as Slocombe remembered: ‘conversations in many languages, the machine-gun rattle of typewriters, the shrilling of telephone bells, and the whine of the mimeograph machines multiplying copies of speeches just made in the drab hall beyond the faded plush of those Victorian sitting-rooms’. At night there was heavy drinking and poker. It was into this mêlée that the boy from Tottenham County School was pitched.¹¹

A change in Oldham’s circumstances came in 1927 when, falsely describing his father as a gentleman and giving the Foreign Office as his home address, he married a prosperous Australian widow twelve years his senior. With his wife’s money, they bought 31 Pembroke Gardens (near Kensington High Street) and employed two housemaids and a chauffeur for their Sunbeam coupé. Oldham filled his wardrobe with monogrammed clothes, and could afford to drink spirits more deeply than ever. ‘He arrayed himself, if not in purple, at least in fine linen, and fared sumptuously,’ said Antrobus. ‘So sumptuously … that he contracted delirium tremens.’ As an auspicious sequel to this marriage, Oldham was promoted to be Staff Officer of the Communications Department in 1928.¹²

In October 1929 Gregori Bessedovsky, the Soviet Chargé d’Affaires in Paris, who had been ordered back to Moscow for punishment after being denounced for criticizing Stalin’s maltreatment of the peasantry, fled over the embassy wall and was granted asylum by the French government. Maurice Oldfield, a future head of SIS, used to say that ‘defectors are like grapes; the first pressings are always the best’. Wilfred (‘Biffy’) Dunderdale, SIS’s station head in Paris, who had spent his boyhood in Odessa and spoke Russian fluently, interviewed Bessedovsky three days after his defection, but did not press him well. Dunderdale discounted Bessedovsky’s material because he found him sharp, ‘but neither frank nor principled’. Although Dunderdale had a reputation for shrewdness, he was prone to SIS’s cultural contempt for foreigners. ‘British intelligence’, recalled Elizabeth Poretsky, ‘appeared to consider the Soviets mere rabble.’¹³

Early reports of Bessedovsky’s revelations were garbled, but indicated that some months earlier an Englishman had called at the Russian embassy offering secret cipher books of the British government. The ‘walk-in’, as such unheralded visitors were called, was seen by the OGPU Director Vladimir Ianovich (born Wilenski), a coarse man who had previously been a dock-worker. Ianovich’s wife managed OGPU finances in Paris (she received large dollar bills in the diplomatic mail, and exchanged them for francs). Her impersonations of a Hungarian countess in Berlin, of a Persian diplomat’s wife in Vienna and of a diamond merchant’s widow in Prague were admired by the illegals, although her husband was not. Ianovich took away the codebooks, saying that he had to show them to the Ambassador, but gave them instead to his wife, who had a brightly lit room for taking photographs and a well-equipped darkroom for developing them. After she had copied the codebooks, Ianovich – either suspecting an agent provocateur’s trap or wishing to save OGPU money – threw them back at the walk-in Englishman and ejected him from the embassy in an insulting fashion.

SIS continued to assess Bessedovsky as shifty, talkative and imprudent. This was not far wrong: years later he tried to make money by forging the journals of Maxim Litvinov, the former Foreign Affairs Commissar of the Soviet Union. Accordingly, in 1929, Special Branch did not investigate his tale of purloined codebooks. Norman Ewer’s Daily Herald on 29 October pooh-poohed Bessedovsky’s information in a manner that suited Russian interests: it depicted the fugitive diplomat as an opportunist whose stories were derided in Whitehall. If leakages had occurred, the Communications Department was a likely source, and its Staff Officer, Oldham, should have led an investigation. He was however both the walk-in with the codebooks and absent undergoing treatment for alcoholism from mid-October until March 1930. It can be surmised that his collapse began with a panicky binge after Bessedovsky’s story appeared in London newspapers.

Bessedovsky’s warning was duplicated in 1930 by Georges Agabekov, then the most senior OGPU officer to have defected. The English parents of his young girlfriend complained to the French authorities that he was a seducer who had alienated her loyalty to them: he was deported to Belgium (more on grounds of public morality than national security) in July 1930. After his deportation, Jasper Harker, head of MI5’s B Division (investigations and inquiries), Guy Liddell of Special Branch and Jane Sissmore, who was MI5’s specialist in Russian community activity, agreed that Agabekov and his correspondence should be put under surveillance. Liddell was sent to interview him in Brussels, and maintained telephonic contact with Sissmore while in the Belgian capital. Agabekov was pressed about the Soviet agent who was obtaining Foreign Office secrets (now known to be the Rome embassy servant, Francesco Constantini). He described OGPU’s network of agents and their operations to Liddell. He also reported that Moscow received copies of the secret exchanges between the Foreign Office and the High Commissioner in Egypt, Lord Lloyd. This renewed confirmation of a breach in coded traffic was reported to the Foreign Office. It is known that the Communications Department led an internal investigation, but the identity and report of the investigators are unknown. Agabekov made similar revelations in newspaper articles and in two essays which were published together in a garbled, facetious English edition in 1931.

The truth behind the tales of Bessedovsky and Agabekov was that in July 1929 Oldham had gone to the Russian embassy in Paris with two books bound in red buckram containing Foreign Office, Colonial Office and Dominions Office ciphers (in some accounts the codebooks were those of the FO and of the India Office). He presented himself as a typesetter called ‘Charlie Scott’, disguising his status by speaking bad French, and demanding first £50,000 and then £10,000 for his material. ‘Charlie Scott’ was paid $11,000 in two instalments, and thereafter $1,000 a month. Oldham averted insolvency, and maintained his pretensions in Kensington, by making renewed visits to Paris in order to deliver secret material, which the Russians found patchy and low-grade. They did not trust him enough to risk giving him a handler in London who might be trapped. Oldham protected his true identity from his Paris handler, Dimitri Bystrolyotov.

After the ARCOS raid in 1927 London had severed official relations with Moscow, and ordered all diplomats and trade representatives to leave the country within ten days. OGPU thereupon ordained that only illegals could be used in Britain, but that there was to be no illegal residency there. All activities had to be run from the European mainland, usually from Amsterdam or Paris, but under the control of the Berlin rezidentura. Although Anglo-Soviet diplomatic relations were restored by the incoming Labour government in 1929, Moscow remained doubtful about sending permanent illegals to London, and continued running operations there from other European capitals.

Bystrolyotov was born in Crimea in 1901, the son of a village schoolmistress: he knew nothing of his paternity. In 1919 he smuggled himself into Turkey in the coal-hole of a ship, worked as a stoker, and got some education at the American College for Christian Youth. He had a nervous breakdown after witnessing massacres of Armenians, worked for the Red Cross in Prague and then as a cemetery worker. Around 1925 he was recruited to OGPU with the cover of a post in the Soviet trade mission in Prague and the task of collecting secret material on armaments production at the Franco-Czech Škoda factory in Pilsen. He was a clever linguist and perceptive student of character: his black eyes and dashing masculinity brought him success as a vorón (a ‘raven’, or male seducer of women with access to confidential material). In 1930 he was transferred to the illegal rezidentura in Berlin headed by Basil Bazarov (born Shpak), whose OGPU codename was KIN. The Greek Consul in Danzig, an Odessa-born swindler and drugs-smuggler, provided Bystrolyotov with a Greek passport and the false identity of a Salonika businessman, Alexander Gallas.

Bystrolyotov was instructed to elicit the identity of ‘Charlie Scott’, who was being run under the codename of ARNO. To this end, he adopted the alias of a Hungarian count, Lajos József Perelly, and went to Budapest to learn his part. He introduced himself to ‘Scott’ in a Paris restaurant as a nobleman who had been ruined by the war and who performed services for OGPU in return for an income that enabled him to keep caste. He felt that he was more acceptable to ‘Scott’ posing as a Hungarian hireling than he would have been as a Russian or Ukrainian communist. After months of patience, ‘Perelly’ discovered that ‘Scott’ was staying in a particular Paris hotel, where his luggage was stamped with the monogram ‘EHO’.

The scene shifted from Paris to Geneva. When Slocombe depicted Geneva as Europe’s ‘most secretive city’, he was indulging in an old spy’s misdirection. It was hard to keep secrets there. The lifeless official verbiage and stiff protocol surrounding League of Nations sessions there encouraged men to unbend with confidential admissions and gossipy indiscretions when they went off duty in bars and brasseries. ‘A vast concourse of politicians … is bound to bring all the ragtag and bobtail of the earth sniffing at their heels,’ as Antrobus recorded. ‘All the paraphernalia of leakage on a grand scale there assembled … the place swarmed with spies and secret agents who, I imagine, got what they wanted handed to them on a plate.’¹⁴

Bystrolyotov @ Gallas @ Perelly arrived in Geneva for a League meeting in, it seems, July 1931. He deduced that ‘EHO’ would attend the League sessions, found that a man with those initials was staying at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage, spotted ‘Scott’ in the hotel bar and sat next to him there in silence. ‘Scott’ looked aghast on catching sight of ‘Perelly’ and realized that OGPU had broken his anonymity. Bystrolyotov intended to consolidate his advantage by visiting Oldham at home and asserting OGPU control over him, but when he called at Pembroke Gardens in September with false credentials identifying him as a Dresden banker, Lucy Oldham, looking tense, explained that her husband was away from home. The courteous foreigner invited her for lunch at the Ritz. Amid the restaurant’s gilt and mirrors she revealed that Oldham was undergoing an expensive cure for alcoholism in a sanatorium in Suffolk called Rendlesham Hall.

She besought ‘Count Perelly’ to visit Oldham at Rendlesham, and insisted that he take the spare bedroom in Pembroke Gardens. On the night before Oldham’s return home in October, Lucy Oldham rolled up the hem of her dress, spread her legs and begged the Count not to waste time. He obliged, and reported his performance to Moscow, where the codename of MADAM was bestowed on her. Bystrolyotov came to suspect that she had instigated her husband’s approach to the Russian embassy in Paris in 1929, and that she had encouraged the subsequent espionage as a way of perpetuating their Kensington prosperity.

OGPU in Moscow and the rezidentura in Berlin continued to assess Oldham as too dicey to risk agents receiving material direct from him in London. Instead, he was required to travel to Bonn, Ostend, Paris, Calais, Trouville, Madrid, Amsterdam and Switzerland for handovers of purloined documents. Throughout he insisted that he was only an intermediary, acting on behalf of the material’s true source. Oldham became such a valued source that Bystrolyotov was joined in London in 1932 by two well-tried agents. Joseph Leppin @ PEEP @ PEPIKA, a young Prague journalist who was then working under Boris Bazarov in the Berlin rezidentura, was fluent in French, English and German, had intellectual and artistic interests and was used by Bystrolyotov as the courier carrying Oldham’s product out of England on its journey to Moscow. Leppin was married for ‘operational purposes’ to a fellow Czech agent, Erica Weinstein (ERIKA), who collaborated with him on operations for Bystrolyotov. Bazarov (presenting himself as an Italian communist called da Vinci) and Theodore Maly also came to London to help in running Oldham.¹⁵

Theodore Stephanovich Maly @ Theodore Mally @ Tivadar Mály @ Willy Broschart @ Paul Hardt @ Peters @ der Lange @ Mann is the most famous of the illegals. Born in 1894, the son of a provincial official in the Hungarian Ministry of Finance, he trained for priesthood in a seminary before his military mobilization at the age of twenty-one. He was an ensign-cadet by the time of his capture by tsarist forces in 1916. After gruelling train journeys, he was held in a prisoner-of-war camp at Astrakhan by the Caspian Sea, and later was transferred to the frontier town of Orenburg at the southern end of the Ural Mountains. ‘I lost my faith in God,’ he later said of his incarceration, ‘and when the revolution broke out I joined the Bolsheviks. I broke with my past completely. I was no longer a Hungarian, a priest, a Christian, even anyone’s son … I became a communist.’ Maly was a Chekist for ten years before joining INO in about 1931. He could pass as Austrian, Hungarian, German or Swiss. As described by his biographer William Duff, a special agent of the FBI who specialized in Soviet bloc espionage, Maly had ‘a tanned and strangely aesthetic face highlighted by deep-set but sad, almost childlike eyes’. For Elizabeth Poretsky, ‘“Teddy” … combined extreme sweetness with a great deal of determination, so that one felt at ease and protected in his company.’ OGPU admired Maly’s abilities, but felt perturbed by his outbursts of drunken and indiscreet remorse. They forced him to marry a woman whom he disliked because she kept him under watchful guard and kept him from binge-drinking.¹⁶

During the Lausanne Conference of June–July 1932, at which the British, French and German governments discussed the suspension of German reparation payments, Oldham provided Bystrolyotov with coded messages, dispatches and even a British passport bearing the invented name of ‘Sir Robert Grenville’. The strain of duplicity drove Oldham into dipsomania. His department began investigating the disappearance of a codebook from a basement safe, in a part of the building where Oldham had been seen when he was on sick-leave. He was reported for using the Office’s ambassadorial side-entrance so as to avoid the doorkeepers who maintained security at the main doors. Other reports had him in a drunken stupor. On 30 September 1932 he was summoned to a disciplinary meeting, confronted with a list of transgressions, including unexplained visits to the cipher-room and losing confidential material which he claimed to have taken home. He was asked to resign without any gratuity. Like other members of his department, he had no pension rights.

Oldham did not admit to the illegals that he had been sacked. On 18 October, avid for more OGPU money, he flew with his wife from Croydon aerodrome to Berlin for a rendezvous with ‘Perelly’. During their meeting he was so helplessly drunk that he could hardly move or speak, and vomited. MADAM subsequently revealed to her partner in adultery, ‘Perelly’, that Oldham had been fired from his job. She added that she was leaving him, would sell the house and go to work in a French resort either as a lady companion or, if that failed, as a prostitute. Just before Christmas 1932 Oldham tried to strangle her when she refused to give him brandy. He was sent for another cure at Rendlesham.

After drying out, Oldham revisited his old department to jaw with friends there, notably Thomas Kemp, who was in charge of the King’s Messengers’ itineraries, and a clerk named Raymond Oake. He had a further excuse for visits, because he had been allowed, incomprehensibly to modern thinking, to keep a safety-deposit box in the building after his dismissal. He used the pretext of examining personal papers in the box as the justification for two or three further visits. One evening in May 1933, he arrived at 6 p.m., loitered around Room 22, his speech slurred with drink, waiting for other clerks to go home. He asked for the combination number of the safe where keys were kept at night and briefly got custody of the keys to the cupboards known as ‘presses’ containing confidential material. Those ex-colleagues who saw him felt a mixture of pity, embarrassment, annoyance and suspicion at his conduct, but the blokey ‘good form’ of the department meant that his manoeuvres were watched but not challenged. During one of these forays he obtained documents which he sold in Paris to the Soviets in May 1933. He and his wife commuted by air between London and Paris during May and June to see Bystrolyotov. OGPU became so alarmed by the likelihood of Oldham’s exposure that all illegal operatives, including Bazarov and Maly, were withdrawn from England.

On 13 July 1933, desperate for OGPU money and under incitement from Bystrolyotov, Oldham returned to the Office in an attempt to lay hands on the cipher codes for the following year. He arrived just before 6 p.m., ostensibly to see Kemp who had already gone home, got hold of a set of keys left momentarily in the door, rushed to the lavatory and there took wax impressions of them. When he reappeared with the keys, he was sweating and his hands shook. Wax was found on the wards of the keys. Eastwood reported the incident next day to Sir Vernon Kell of MI5, who set Harker on the case. Oldham’s correspondence was intercepted, his telephone was tapped and he was put under John Ottaway’s surveillance. Bystrolyotov met Oldham on a bench in Hyde Park, and urged him to try again to get into the safes to obtain up-to-date codes. At lunchtime on Sunday 16 July Oldham was refused admittance when he called again at the Office.

Some days later he was heard in a bugged telephone call to say that he was going to Vienna. He evaded his watchers by instead flying from Croydon to Geneva. From there he hastened to Interlaken, where he met Bystrolyotov calling himself ‘Perelly’ and Bazarov calling himself ‘da Vinci’. After returning from Basel to Croydon on 4 August, Oldham was traced by Ottaway to the Jules Hotel at 85–86 Jermyn Street, St James’s, and tracked to a nearby pub, the Chequers, off a narrow alley joining Duke Street, St James’s to Mason’s Yard. At the poky bar in the Chequers, two MI5 operatives, Herbert (‘Con’) Boddington, a bookie’s son who had been Chief of Dublin Special Branch targeting the IRA in the early 1920s, and Thomas (‘Tar’) Robertson, set to work on Oldham. Robertson (born in Sumatra in 1909) had only recently joined MI5 after working in the City, and was known to his new colleagues as ‘Passion Pants’ because he wore Seaforth tartan trews at headquarters. ‘Con’ and ‘Passion Pants’ got Oldham hopelessly drunk in the Chequers, put him to bed in the Jules Hotel and searched his belongings while he was comatose.¹⁷

Oldham was not questioned or detained, although it was obvious to his watchers that he was falling apart. MI5 wished to learn from watching his activities and contacts. Probably the Foreign Office shrank from discovering the extent to which diplomatic secrets had been broached. Still striving to earn OGPU money, dosing himself with paraldehyde (a foul-smelling, addictive sedative taken by alcoholics and insomniacs), Oldham finally broke. He went to his former marital home at 31 Pembroke Gardens, now vacant and unfurnished, and gassed himself in the kitchen. The suspicions of some of his Room 22 colleagues and Russian handlers that he had been killed by MI5 seem unwarranted. In retrospect Antrobus despised his department’s first traitor. ‘A clever little upstart,’ he called him, ‘with a face like a rat and a conscience utterly devoid of scruples.’¹⁸

Until Oldham’s attempted break-in, members of the Foreign Office were often visited at work by friends. After 1933, however, visitors were filtered by policemen and doorkeepers: once admitted, they were escorted everywhere by hardy factotums. The locks and keys of the ‘presses’ were changed. Algernon Hay was retired from overseeing Room 22 in 1934. His replacement Antrobus thought of his staff as a ‘little brotherhood’ of ‘learned friends’. He explained: ‘everybody gave of his best, although (very properly) he got no credit for it beyond his own satisfaction’. He believed that ‘in all classes of life and among all sorts and conditions of men’, especially ‘in teams, regiments, and ships’, the best-performing organizations had consciously developed ‘the Spirit of the Old School Tie’. This Spirit motivated and unified men without appealing to class bias: public schools did not hold ‘a monopoly of true fellowship and devotion to an ideal’, insisted Antrobus. A minority of his staff had attended public schools.¹⁹

The Foreign Office conducted an internal, amateurish and self-protective investigation of the Oldham case without MI5 or Special Branch assistance. There was little investigation of Oldham’s overseas air journeys, or of his ultimate destinations and contacts, which might have given leads to Bystrolyotov and Bazarov. In gathering clues from outsiders, such as Oldham’s solicitor, it was represented that he was suspected of drugs-smuggling. No hint was permissible that he had been betraying official secrets to a hostile power. There were few leads, as ‘Count Perelly’ and ‘da Vinci’ had vanished and reverted to their true identities as Bystrolyotov and Bazarov. ‘I could have ended up in the Tower, but only if Vansittart had been willing to wash his dirty linen in public,’ Bystrolyotov judged; but the Foreign Office saw no benefit in publicizing the lax security. As to Moscow, OGPU had been exasperated by Oldham’s alcoholic volatility. At times the risks for his handlers seemed nightmarish. His low status in the Office hierarchy had moreover limited his access to secret material. OGPU’s frustrations with him perhaps contributed to the strategy of placing more reliable penetration agents in the Diplomatic Service through the device of recruiting young Cambridge high-fliers.²⁰