Lukaševičs next arranged for misfortunes to befall two of the genuine London-trained agents. Instead of smelling a rat, SIS decided to send replacements, receiving another phoney partisan, a radio operator called ‘Edmundas’, as well as a fiery and effective fighter,[58] whose desire to kill communists had strained the patience of his hosts. The KGB then sent a heavyweight ‘ambassador’ from the phoney partisans to London, who solemnly negotiated a deal with SIS and the émigré authorities, dividing ministerial portfolios in a putative independent Latvia. He returned home with a colossal cache of money – around a million roubles. Lukaševičs was later to boast that a total of 3.5m roubles from the British taxpayer had financed his entire deception operation. Real agents, such as a brave young Latvian CIA man called Leonids Zariņš, paid the biggest price of these games. He was parachuted into Latvia alone on 14 May 1953. But the CIA shared details with SIS, which took no precautions to keep the information secret from others in the operation. Zariņš walked straight into a trap and perished in a Siberian prison camp. His family, who believed their son was working for Bell Telephone, was told that he had died in an air crash in Austria.
But the KGB was becoming a victim of its own success. London requested a sample of water from the Tobol River, near the site of the reactor that produced the Soviet Union’s plutonium. The idea that a partisan, with forged papers or none at all, could emerge from a forest bunker and cross and recross the Soviet Union successfully, via a tightly guarded nuclear installation, was so bizarre that only a spy chief could have conceived it. But the Soviet response was equally incompetent. Told to provide some radioactive water, KGB technicians (presumably poorly briefed) decided to show off. They produced ‘river water’ of such lethal radioactivity that it could only have been created actually inside the core of a reactor. Once that was analysed in London, it was finally clear that something was seriously amiss. America commissioned an independent investigation and ended its operation in 1954. Operation Jungle limped on for two more years. A final message to the partisans in 1956 read:
We can no longer help you. Will be sending no further physical or material help. All safe houses are blown…This is our last message until better times. We will listen to you until 30 June. Thereafter God help you.
By this stage the real partisan forces numbered only a few thousand. Exhausted and demoralised, with their national identity being eradicated by the occupation29 and with no sign of the hoped-for Third World War in sight, their mood was bitter. The failure of the West to support the Hungarian uprising in 1956 was the last straw: in the words of the Estonian historian Mart Laar, ‘they finally realised that the white ships were not coming’. Elena Jučiūtė, a Lithuanian dissident deported for fifteen years for her ‘anti-Soviet’ activities, wrote in her diary that:
the Western states, which speak so many beautiful words about human rights, the right of national self-determination, freedom, humanitarianism…were unwilling to support with a firm word a small nation, heroically fighting for its freedom. None of us had expected such turpitude from the free world; we had a better opinion of them, and for this reason, the disappointment was devastating.30
By the end it was only the brutality of the Soviet authorities that kept the spark of resistance alive: if death in battle was bad, capture was far worse. A dry medical account of the wounds on the body of the American-born last leader of the Lithuanian partisan movement Adolfas Ramanauskas, codenamed Vanagas (Hawk), finally captured with his wife in October 1956 and tortured for a year before his execution on 9 November 1957, gives an indication of the horrors that awaited the inmates of the KGB’s dungeons:
The right eye is covered with haematomas, on the eyelid there are six stab wounds made, judging by their diameter, by a thin wire or nail going deep into the eyeball. Multiple haematomas in the area of the stomach, a cut wound on a finger of the right hand. The genitalia reveal the following: a large tear wound on the right side of the scrotum and a wound on the left side, both testicles and spermatic ducts are missing.31
Probably the last active partisans, the Lithuanians Antanas Kraujelis and Pranas Končius, were hunted down in 1965; a few others continued living illegally in the forests or concealed in family members’ houses for years after that. Jānis Pīnups, a Latvian, lived underground during the entire fifty-year period of Soviet occupation, emerging from his ‘illegal’ existence only after the last Russian troops withdrew from the Baltic in 1994.32
In all, Operation Jungle sent at least forty-two Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians back to their homelands, usually in the small hours of moonless summer nights. Not only was their own fate tragic: their presence was toxic to their cause. If they made contact with genuine partisans, the result was disaster. It stoked Soviet paranoia and discredited the West. The bravery of the resistance proved less inspiring to later dissidents than the legacy of failure. The demoralisation in SIS, and corrosion of trust with the CIA, was lasting. For those inside the Soviet empire, the idea that the West was a reliable ally in the struggle against communism – and even that the struggle was worth waging – had taken a beating. In the West, the knowledge that the Soviet side had so easily penetrated the anti-Soviet operation, probably right from the beginning, was a huge hurdle for anyone suggesting anything bold in the coming years. That glum mood was compounded when news broke of the treachery of Kim Philby. It was easy to think that Western spies, particularly British ones, were worse than useless.
The great puzzle of Operation Jungle, and of its American and Swedish counterparts, is who at what stage on the Western side realised that the operations were blown, and how they reacted. The conventional account, as outlined by Tom Bower in Red Web, suggests all-encompassing naivety and incompetence. But it does not quite fit all the facts. One fragment of possible evidence for an alternative version of events comes from Mart Männik’s memoirs. Confronted by his captors with every detail of his mission, the resourceful SIS man soon realised that the entire operation had been a sinister farce from the moment he set foot in Estonia. Yet he did not despair, instead working out if by any means he could warn Rebane, thus at least sparing the lives of other Estonians in London. In mid 1953, having spent the intervening months in a prison cell teaching himself Russian from Soviet propaganda books, Männik was instructed to send some messages back to London. After sending seven flawless ones, he claims he carefully inserted a secret code (using the three-dot ‘S’ in Morse code rather than the four-dot ‘H’). This was a signal agreed with Rebane in case he found himself having to make a forced transmission.
He sent a second signal during a meeting with ‘Albert’, an Estonian partisan unaware of the KGB deception operation who was being sent back to Britain. Männik’s job was to reassure him. Instead, risking torture and death, he did the opposite, snatching a chance to whisper: ‘Tell Robert (Rebane’s code name), and only him, that “H” has been “S” from the very beginning.’ It is not clear if the message was understood or got through. In interviews with Estonian officials after 1991 ‘Albert’ maintained that he had not heard any such words from Männik.[59] But other warnings did get through. Several other SIS men had on their return to London expressed suspicions about their ‘partisan’ hosts. Ludis Upāns, the real partisan returned to London in 1952 by his KGB hosts because of his excessive zeal, later claimed that he had told SIS that the resistance was bogus.33 A KGB man sent to London in 1954 posing as a partisan leader was confronted with the puzzle of the radioactive water and suggested that perhaps one group of partisans had been penetrated, while his own was sound. In 1955 Rebane was alerted personally by a former wartime comrade, turned by the KGB and sent to lure him back to Estonia for a show trial, who confessed his mission during a drunken evening. At least two phoney partisans brought to London had been spotted by chance as communist collaborators by other émigrés.
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bg His real name was Nikolai Urm. He worked until retirement in the electrical department of the John Lewis department store and died in 2005 in the drab London suburb of Neasden, where a rusty horseshoe (characteristic for Estonian homes) over the doorway of his house in Bermans Way is the only remaining sign of his remarkable career. If by any chance his niece, Karen ‘Kim’ Toley, should read this book I would be most grateful to hear from her.