One of the Swedish agents was a young émigré called Ewald Hallisk. His story mirrored many of his generation: conscripted into the German army at the age of sixteen, he had fled to Sweden to escape the Soviet advance. Spurred by a mixture of adventure and patriotism, he volunteered to join the Swedish secret service in 1948 and was sent on a mission two years later. He left behind a fiancée, Margaret, and a toddler son, Peter. For forty-two years after he went missing, his family assumed he was dead. Nobody else wanted to admit that he had existed at all. Swedish authorities covered up the fiasco, citing official secrecy and claiming falsely that even if some such operation had existed all the documents involved had been burned in the 1960s.
On 29 June 1992, Peter Kadhammar, a journalist on the Swedish newspaper Expressen, produced a sensational scoop.40 Far from being dead, Hallisk was living in a modest cottage in Estonia. The ‘spy who never was’ proved only too happy to talk about his training in firearms, shortwave radio, and invisible ink. He also wanted money: he had, he insisted, been betrayed by the same incompetence that had marred the SIS and CIA operations. The KGB had picked him up within two days of arriving in Estonia. He had spent two months on death row and then fifteen years in a labour camp in Magadan, one of the harshest parts of the Soviet penal system, and remained under close KGB scrutiny after his release. Swedish officials initially argued that he had been a volunteer and knew what he was getting into. Then they offered him 500,000 kronor (about $80,000 in the money of 2011). He sued, and won a modest top-up of 120,000 kronor. But it was all too late: Margaret had died, and he found little common ground with Peter.41 After an unhappy stay in Sweden he returned to his humble life in Estonia.
Other survivors were even unluckier. In 1991 I tracked down Klemensas Širvys, parachuted into Lithuania in October 1950 together with Lukša. When I asked him about his mission, he burst into tears. A widower, crippled by a stroke, he lived in dismally poor conditions in a remote part of Lithuania. The botched operation had ruined his life. I was expecting a tirade. But he bore no bitterness towards the Americans or the British: indeed he spoke broken English proudly from his time spent in a British labour battalion in post-war Germany. His one regret was that the Western allies had sent so few people, so late, to fight the communists. It was hard to imagine that this lame, tearful old man had four decades ago come ashore with a Schmeisser MP-32 sub-machine gun, grenades, radios and cyanide tablets. After a year in a bunker he was captured, tortured and sent to Siberia for a twenty-five-year sentence with five further years in exile.42 Neither the CIA nor SIS appears to have made provision for him after 1991.[62] A similarly poignant story concerns Zigmas Kudirka, a bright young Lithuanian émigré recruited by SIS in post-war London and sent in autumn 1952 as a radio operator. In 1956 he appealed to SIS to get him out, and was told (in his words) ‘chin up’ and to try to make his own way to Sweden. Speaking in 1989, in fluent English, Kudirka showed unconcealed rage:
British intelligence is known all over the world as one of the best. Of course I trusted them. I felt elevated to be a member of the British intelligence service and I tried to do my best.
He found the news that he had been a pawn in the KGB’s game shattering:
It was like a blow on the head. I could not understand how an intelligence service like the British could have made such a mistake. It was unbelievable… I took the risk but I hoped for normal work. But what happened? I was from the beginning like a blind kitten put into the net of Soviet intelligence. What was the risk for, all the suffering, and all the broken life?43
A galling footnote came when Kudirka turned up in London in 1990 in the vain hope of retrieving his belongings, including irreplaceable family photographs, which he had left with SIS for safekeeping. His former case officer, John Ludzius, met him in a pub with the bracing greeting: ‘I thought you were all dead.’44 In the 1990s another Lithuanian SIS man, Anicetas Dukavičius, also tried (apparently unsuccessfully) to gain some compensation from the British authorities. After some lobbying and the publication of Mart Männik’s posthumous memoirs, the Männik family on 4 June 2003 received €10,000 from the British government.
Such stingy, tardy or outright hostile treatment contrasts sharply with the efforts made by SIS (and the CIA) to find dependants of dead agents from the more recent era. In one creditable and poignant episode in 1990, a young woman received a startling and mysterious invitation, summoning her to a meeting in the presidential offices in Prague Castle where senior SIS officers and their local counterparts explained what until then had been an inexplicable misfortune in her life. Her father Miloslav Kroča, the head of the British section of the communist secret police, the StB, had died (naturally) of a heart attack in 1976; her mother had some time later became ill after mistakenly taking one of his invisible-ink pills, kept in an aspirin bottle. Puzzled, she took the pills to a pharmacist; an investigation eventually alerted the authorities that the dead man must in fact have been a Western spy. Forced to live in miserable conditions in a remote part of the country, the family was blighted. The mother died, while the daughter was barred from higher education or a proper career. The visitors then handed over a large sum of money, explaining that though her father had spied for the West solely on ideological grounds he had asked that if anything were to befall him his family should be taken care of.45 Mr Kroča, one of the most important British spies behind the Iron Curtain, was recruited by Richard Dearlove, then a ‘First Secretary’ (but actually SIS officer) at the British embassy in Prague and later Chief of MI6.
Perhaps the most tantalising loose end comes from Alexander Koppel, who is almost certainly the last surviving agent from Operation Jungle. Tracking him down was rather like finding a pterodactyl alive and well in a bungalow near London (in Mr Koppel’s case, Wokingham). A glass-fronted bookcase containing medals and memorabilia is the only sign of his extraordinary past. A sprightly 85 (when I interviewed him in early 2011), he described in matter-of-fact terms his recruitment, training, life in the ‘underground’, capture, interrogation and eventual release. He came to Britain in 1947, and worked in Dunstable in a cement works, along with many other Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian young men keen to leave the displaced person camps of post-war Germany. It was a hard, dull life. News from home was scant: even discovering which family members were alive and which had perished was hard.
In 1952 Mr Koppel was approached by Rebane and asked if he would be willing to go on a mission as a radio operator. He initially declined: his parents were still in Estonia, and would suffer horribly if he were caught. He recalls that Rebane tried to reassure him, in words that seem bizarrely complacent in retrospect: ‘Don’t worry – it’s quite safe, quite nice.’ Getting there, he said, was ‘as simple as a bus ride’. Mr Koppel moved to Old Church St, and started training. His task was simply to operate a radio, so he received what he describes as ‘negligible’ instruction in spycraft or combat.[63] The trainees were taken sightseeing to Stonehenge, and for a boat trip on the Thames. A Lithuanian taught them Russian, which they barely spoke. The evening before his departure, Rebane took him aside to give him a final briefing. ‘Take no initiative. You are only the radio operator. Take orders from “Karl” (the partisan commander). Don’t drink. Know your place.’
63
bk He had been conscripted in the German army briefly in 1944, but did not serve in Rebane’s unit.