In order to avoid the dangers of overlapping and duplication, the British and Americans exchanged precise information about the timing and geographical coordinates of their operations. I do not know what happened to the parties concerned. But I can make an informed guess.17
As Britain and America marched deeper into the bog, the KGB became bolder. In October 1948 Lukaševičs organised the bogus ‘escape’ of a seasoned agent called Vidvuds Šveics, who claimed to be a representative of the Latvian resistance. In retrospect, that seems an obvious dangle and a leading Latvian activist in Stockholm working with SIS was immediately suspicious.18 But in another grotesque breach of tradecraft, Šveics was put in charge of a six-strong group (two from each of the three countries) trained by SIS. Worse, he was given a list of local sympathisers – just the people that the KGB most wished to catch. When his team landed near the Lithuanian resort of Palanga on 1 May Šveics separated from the others and alerted the border guards, who killed both Estonians and one of the Latvians. The others fled. Šveics sent a cipher message telling SIS that he had made a miraculous escape. By the year-end the entire network was under KGB control, though still, in the eyes of the British spymasters, operating and intact. The next expedition of the beefed-up operation was in October 1949, when a group of the elaborately trained recruits landed in Latvia to be met by KGB agents posing as resistance fighters. In London, SIS celebrated a successful landing.
The Americans were making mistakes too. They were starting from ‘virtually empty’ files: little more than whatever pre-war reference books and press cuttings could be found in the Library of Congress. Harry Rositzke, a senior CIA officer, noted: ‘Even the most elementary facts were unavailable – on roads and bridges, on the location and production of factories, on city plans and airfields.’19 Incoming intelligence was little help. ‘Most of it was trivial, much of it spotty, garbled or out of date.’ Amid the ignorance grew panic. Western military planners believed, wrongly, that Soviet forces were capable of reaching the English Channel in a matter of weeks. By late 1949, they reckoned that Soviet bombers could drop nuclear weapons on America. Rositzke recalls a military officer banging the table in the Pentagon and shouting: ‘I want an agent with a radio on every goddamn airfield between Berlin and the Urals!’ Faced with utterly impractical demands, America’s spy chiefs too threw caution (and ethics) to the winds,20 recruiting hundreds of émigrés for parachute drops into communist-ruled Europe, from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Among them were some notorious Nazi war criminals, including senior Nazis such as Otto von Bolschwing, a close associate of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust.21 This was not an oversight: German wartime intelligence had been excellent, and retained useful assets and insights in the East. The price was American moral credibility. It became a lot easier for Soviet propagandists to say that the West was crawling with fascists when Nazi collaborators were facing promotion, not punishment.
In the Baltics American efforts centred on the charismatic (and entirely honourable) Lukša, who had returned from Lithuania deeply worried about KGB penetration of the resistance. In January 1949 America flew Lithuanian émigré leaders to Washington, DC, to sign a formal agreement with the CIA, backed by an annual grant of $40,000. Meanwhile the SIS-backed Lithuanians were falling deeper into the KGB’s grasp. From being unwittingly under Soviet control, they were now working hand-in-hand with the country’s occupiers. Despite warning signals – a failure to answer a trick question and a failed assassination attempt on SIS’s top Lithuanian in Stockholm – Britain failed to notice anything amiss. The CIA was misreading the signs too: Lukša’s final mission to Lithuania was unsuccessful, because the partisans were by now so weak that collecting intelligence, let alone fighting the Soviets, was difficult. Quite unfairly, the Americans worried that Lukša’s lacklustre reporting showed that he had been turned or betrayed. The British-backed agents seemed to be doing so much better. The outcome could hardly have been better for the KGB: the British suspected that the American operation was leaky; the Americans suspected the British. Carr flew to Washington to have it out with Rositzke. The exchange between the two Harrys ran as follows:
R: Do we know which of these operations is already under Russian control?
C: Ours isn’t.
R: How can you be so sure that your agent isn’t under control?
C: We’re sure.
R: But how can you be?
C: Because we’ve made our checks. Our group is watertight.
R: So’s ours, but one group is penetrated.
C: Harry, I think we know our business on this one.22
Carr could hardly have been more wrong. Britain was making the biggest bungles imaginable, with a flawed concept, weak operational planning, poor assessment and sloppy compartmentalisation. Worse, the notetaker at this meeting was none other than Kim Philby.[53] The reaction that his account of this top-secret meeting aroused among his controllers in Moscow can only be imagined.
By 1949, the Baltic resistance was effectively over. Collectivisation of agriculture and the accompanying mass deportations had all but destroyed the partisans’ food supplies and support networks. Cruelty against those who continued to resist was extreme:
Extreme forms of torture, quartering, tongue-cutting, eye-gouging, burying heads down in ant hills, etc., were employed to break the fighters. Mutilated corpses were dumped in town squares – and reactions of passers-by were surreptitiously observed in an attempt to identify relatives and friends.23
Western spymasters seemed quite unaware of the disaster. In the spring of 1951, SIS, with Swedish help, sent four new agents to the Latvian coast. Unbeknown to the spymasters in London, one was a traitor planted earlier by the KGB. SIS had prudently ordered the Estonian agent to head straight for his own country rather than make contact with the Latvian group. But nobody in the Estonian KGB was prepared to take the risk of allowing the SIS man to complete even the semblance of his mission there. Instead, they arrested him. He swallowed a cyanide capsule. His code name was ‘Gustav’ but his real name is unknown. In 1952 more SIS-trained agents came ashore, including one with some excellent forgeries of Soviet passports, which were of great interest to the KGB. With a proper crop of such documents to examine, they could see what errors or omissions to look for. At least according to the KGB museum in Moscow, one such telltale was the high quality of staples used to hold the documents together. In the Soviet Union, these were made of cheap iron which left traces of rust. Western forgeries used staples made with stainless steel. Even if the paper, cover, ink and stamps were perfect, the lack of rust and shiny steel fasteners were a lethal giveaway.
Undeterred, Rebane recruited more agents, speaking of the ‘holy duty’ of resistance to the occupiers. One such recruit was a hapless young man called Mart Männik. He had been working in a cotton mill in Preston in the north of England – one of the many displaced Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians starting new lives in the West. Rebane told him:
A resistance organisation has been activated and is operating now, principally on the basis of the forest brothers who conduct an underground struggle against the Russian occupiers with the aim of restoring the Estonian Republic. For us, foreign Estonians, it is a holy duty to support this struggle in every way possible. Unfortunately, we do not have a link with the motherland so that at any price we need to create this… Therefore, we are forced to work together with the English, who on certain conditions set by themselves are ready to assist us materially.
53
ba After leaving SIS Philby worked briefly for my employer, the