The conditions are: obtaining every type of intelligence information concerning the Soviet Union. We must of course agree with these conditions, all the more so since this does not damage our endeavours, but on the contrary, it will be useful for us. So, the English have now created within their intelligence services a so-called Baltic Group… we are totally under their management… our only resource [is] brave and enterprising Estonian men who would be ready to carry out this difficult mission.24
Männik agreed readily. Rebane explained that he would be posted to Estonia for a year to eighteen months. Equipped with four radios, codebooks, forged Soviet documents, weapons, 2,000 cartridges and 150,000 Soviet roubles, his group successfully landed in Latvia in late September 1951. By now the Estonian KGB was following the example of its Latvian counterparts. It housed the arrivals in an elaborate network of bunkers and safe houses, complete with ‘colleagues’ from the supposed resistance movement, including an old friend of Rebane’s who had been turned by the KGB. On 3 February Männik and his colleague were invited to a party in a Tallinn suburb where he was given drugged vodka and captured.
Despite the brilliance of Lukaševičs and his colleagues, the deception operation was endangered by the feebleness of the intelligence being gathered. Lukša had provided Sweden with extensive information about political and economic conditions25 and gave the CIA an excellent report about a secret radio installation.26 To keep the operation credible, Lukaševičs urgently needed to provide more real secrets. But in the paranoid world of Soviet intelligence nobody was willing to take that risk. For example when SIS wanted details of ships docking at the Latvian port of Ventspils, the Soviet defence ministry insisted that the data be deliberately understated. Lukaševičs protested: foreign vessels used the port too so the information could be cross-checked. If the estimates were too low, they would dent the operation’s credibility. But Moscow was adamant. Unsurprisingly, SIS analysts in London did notice problems with the data and sent a stern message along with some more demanding tasks.
Compounding the growing unease in some quarters was the absence of trouble. Some seasoned SIS officers had noted that American and British efforts in Ukraine, Albania and Romania had ended in dismal failure. Why was the Baltic operation so curiously successful? An SIS officer of Lithuanian extraction, John Ludzius, was one of those sounding the alarm. But the obsessively secretive Harry Carr, smugly over-confident despite his lamentable failures in the interwar years, enjoyed the personal backing of the then SIS chief, John ‘Sinbad’ Sinclair. Ludzius was posted to the Far East.
Yet the worries were growing anew. In any clandestine operation, snags signal health and their absence should be profoundly troubling. The new CIA director, General Walter Bedell ‘Beetle’ Smith became convinced in 1951 that the lavishly financed covert operations against the communist bloc were in urgent need of scrutiny. He charged an old friend, General Lucian Truscott, to re-examine the whole programme.27 In early 1952, having inspected the training facilities, Truscott was horrified, particularly at the links to the heavily penetrated émigré organisations. An assistant, Tom Polgar, noted that Hitler’s 270 divisions had failed to topple Soviet power. How were a ragtag army of lightly armed guerrillas supposed to do any better? All their missions were proving, he scoffed, was the law of gravity. Drop agents out of aeroplanes and they would fall to the ground.
The American spymasters were unmoved. Rositzke thought that the scale of the operation must be causing nightmares in the Soviet leadership: even if they mopped up most of the agents, in a totalitarian system countering the slightest risk of subversion would consume huge resources. ‘Those in the Kremlin must be scared shitless,’ he said.[54] Caution was out of fashion and money was plentiful.[55] The Baltic operations seemed at least in terms of volume to be the most promising. General Eisenhower himself visited the Baltic agents to assure them of his support. The operation continued, with parachute drops supplementing the midnight naval excursions favoured by SIS. A new American case officer, Paul Hartman, took charge, telling his trainees to ignore ‘nationalist rubbish’ and concentrate on real spying. Three of his agents parachuted into Latvia on 30 August 1952, with the promise of a $15,000 bonus if they returned safely. Two were caught; one committed suicide, the second surrendered. The third[56] could have reported the truth: the partisans were defeated and the KGB in full control. Unfortunately, he proved to be an inadequate spy. He tracked down an old girlfriend and spent his operational funds on entertaining her. When he was picked up during a routine document check, the KGB determined that he had not transmitted any substantial intelligence. Armed with his codes and radio, it was able to spin the Red Web to include the Americans too.
Increasing political pressure heightened the chances of failure. John Foster Dulles, soon to become secretary of state, had denounced mere containment of communism as ‘negative, futile and immoral’; it consigned ‘countless human beings to despotism and godless terrorism’ and enabled the Soviets to ‘forge their captives into a weapon of our destruction’. Over at the CIA his brother Allen called for a ‘spiritual crusade’ for the liberation of Eastern Europe. As Tom Bower notes in Red Web:
At the very moment when the overwhelming majority of the CIA’s and SIS’s covert operations in Russia and the satellite countries was proving disastrous, the politicians were clamouring for more.28
The efforts were producing no usable intelligence and showed no sign of destabilising Soviet rule. The best agents were dead, such as Lukša, betrayed and killed in 1951.[57] Soviet propagandists were regularly publishing gleeful exposés of captured agents, with details of their training and missions. Meanwhile SIS was reeling from the news that two British diplomats, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, had been unmasked as Soviet spies. The case against Philby was unproven, but the CIA had demanded his recall from Washington. It would have been a good time to pull back and submit all operations involving the Soviet Union, émigrés and partisans to cold, clear-headed scrutiny. But Carr and his colleagues pressed on.
betray his leader, whose grave has never been found. Soviet propagandists were regularly publishing gleeful exposés of captured agents, with details of their training and missions. Meanwhile SIS was reeling from the news that two British diplomats, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, had been unmasked as Soviet spies. The case against Philby was unproven, but the CIA had demanded his recall from Washington. It would have been a good time to pull back and submit all operations involving the Soviet Union, émigrés and partisans to cold, clear-headed scrutiny. But Carr and his colleagues pressed on.
It also would have been tempting for the KGB to use the bogus networks to plant disinformation – perhaps to scare the West into wasting resources, or even to give phoney reassurance about the benign intentions of the Soviet leadership. But the KGB aim was narrower and deeper: first to distract and then to penetrate SIS and the CIA. The next stage was to send a seasoned KGB officer to the West. The choice was a man named Jānis Ērglis who had long fought the partisans in the forests of Latvia, and was now tasked with impersonating one. He ‘escaped’ to Sweden, convinced the intelligence service there of his bona fides, and then moved to Germany where, after feigning reluctance, he was recruited by SIS. After training he returned to Latvia, this time as leader of a group of four agents. Thus the KGB not only controlled the activities of the British agents; it was able to stage-manage them too. Flickers of discontent among the unfortunate genuine agents sent to Latvia had no chance of reaching London.
54
bb A CIA officer called David Murphy responded in a similar vein. ‘Even if they don’t send back good intelligence, we’re causing the Russians a lot of headaches.’
57
be An American-trained Lithuanian, Jonas Kukauskas, was captured soon after being parachuted into Lithuania in April. Faced with torture, he agreed to betray his leader, whose grave has never been found.