The first hint of trouble came when Mr Koppel arrived in Saaremaa, an island off Estonia’s coast that had once been a hotbed of anti-communist resistance. He was met by partisans who – had he known it – were all seasoned KGB officers. They took his carefully packed suitcase, which contained money, arms and other material for the resistance, and returned it with the contents jumbled, claiming that it had been dropped and burst open. His enquiries about the situation in the country got cursory answers. Hidden in an attic in a farm near Viljandi in southern Estonia, Mr Koppel got on with encoding and sending messages to London.
His KGB colleagues made life seem realistic, at one point staging a hurried forced march into the forests to avoid a house search. Mysterious lorries came and went in the night – in fact collecting and delivering teams of KGB watchers, but straining his nerves. In the winter of 1954–5, the partisans said it was time to move to a new location in northern Estonia. The group broke its journey at a villa in Nõmme, a plush suburb of Tallinn. Food and drink were offered to celebrate – according to ‘Karl’, the supposed leader of the group – a Soviet ID document that the partisans had obtained for their guest.
I started to feel funny. I said, ‘I’m not used to drinking.’ But after that I had no time to think. I collapsed. I heard noises and sensed movement. When I recovered I was naked in a small room. There were Russians, faces looking in. And two Estonians, smirking.
The KGB was convinced that Mr Koppel would have a cyanide pill and had stripped him naked while looking for it. But this standard procedure had been overlooked during his trip – perhaps, he says, because he had been so seasick. His main worry was his parents. Unwisely, he had confided to his partisan ‘colleagues’ in the bunker that his relatives were alive and in Estonia. He played for time, but soon realised that every detail of his mission was already known. ‘Every cloud has a silver lining,’ he recalls thinking. ‘I can’t give away anything because they know it all already.’ It was Mr Koppel’s good fortune, perhaps, that his capture came after Stalin’s death, and when the focus of KGB efforts was far more on counter-espionage than counter-insurgency. His captors decided to try and use him for their own purposes. With the threat of sanctions against his relatives always in the background, they moved him to a new location and told him to keep sending regular messages to the British, just as before. This continued for more than a year. Then followed the great puzzle of the story.
In 1956 Mr Koppel was suddenly taken to Moscow, where he was held in the Lubyanka – the infamous headquarters of the KGB. No explanation was given, and the treatment was good – at one point his hosts even took him to the Bolshoi Ballet. ‘I am not pointing fingers,’ he says. ‘They were nice and polite’ (this may well be the only time that an imprisoned SIS agent has applied this particular set of adjectives to his KGB captors). References to Mr Koppel in KGB files make it clear that his captors believed they had secured his agreement to work in the West. In the small hours of a summer morning, they took him to the coast of northern Estonia, and to his huge surprise gave back his gun, and provided him with a boat, a compass bearing to a lighthouse, and a phone number in Finland.
Mr Koppel was convinced that this was merely a prelude to his murder (it is easy to imagine the KGB-sponsored news story about a ‘fascist bandit’ being foiled in the act of escape). His captors’ parting words were to remind him that his family remained in Estonia. As his boat chugged through the twilight, the truth dawned. He was indeed being released. As he approached Finnish territorial waters, a speedboat neared. Fearing that it was the Finnish coastguard, Mr Koppel hurriedly dropped his gun over the side of the boat. But the crew of the boat simply waved and passed by. He had returned to the free world. He found a house and made his phone calclass="underline" Rebane answered. He had clearly been expecting Mr Koppel’s return. Initially, the new arrival was uncertain what account to give. ‘I wasn’t sure what to tell them – I was in this labyrinth of doubts,’ he says. He was also worried that the KGB had a mole in SIS: ‘anything I tell them, he will tell the Russians’.
After a cursory debriefing by SIS, who appeared distrustful of him, he then told Rebane the full story – or at least his side of it. But what was the whole truth? Why had the KGB released someone who would, if he spoke candidly, blow away the cobwebs of deception? One possibility (and to my mind the most likely) is that his release was part of a straight spy swap – the first of the Cold War. Rebane had known for some time that Operation Jungle was blown, and had been in regular radio contact with the bogus partisans. When each side realised that the other no longer believed in the fiction of a serious resistance organisation inside Estonia, it would have been time for straight talking. It may well be that Rebane offered to send back one of the KGB plants in London, in exchange for Mr Koppel.
Another possibility is that the KGB had tried to recruit Mr Koppel. That would explain the hotel-style treatment at the Lubyanka. But he would have been an unlikely plant: with Operation Jungle being wound up, anyone connected with it would be coming under great scrutiny. SIS would be well aware that ‘Karl’ and his partisans had been phoneys all along. Even if he went along with the KGB plan, the likelihood of anyone trusting Mr Koppel with any more secrets was minimal. Indeed, SIS treated him and the other returning agents with suspicion: some of them complained about regular and intrusive surveillance from counter-intelligence officers. Mr Koppel insists, moreover, that the KGB gave him no instructions or contact in London. His name later appeared on a list of fugitives wanted by the Soviet authorities, which suggests that he failed to follow any instructions the KGB had given him.
Until I outlined them to him, Mr Koppel was apparently unaware of the full extent and nature of the deception surrounding his mission. He had not read Red Web. But his faith in Rebane remains undimmed to this day (indeed the legendary Estonian commander was a guest of honour at his wedding in 1960). ‘You told me “take no initiative”,’ he said to his boss wryly. Rebane responded coolly: ‘I am a soldier, not a trained intelligence officer.’ In any case, espionage was the last thing on Mr Koppel’s much-burdened mind. He moved to the countryside, becoming a British citizen, recovering from a near-breakdown and putting all thoughts of Estonia aside. Only in the 1990s did that change. The three surviving Estonians of SIS – Kiik, Koppel and Urm – made themselves known to the newly established Estonian embassy in London. An official there at the time recalls receiving a phone call, in which an anonymous voice asked: ‘How does my Estonian sound? You see I haven’t spoken it for thirty years.’ Along with other veterans of the partisan war, they received military decorations from their reborn country.46
After intense persuasion SIS also acknowledged its historical debt, inviting the three men to a champagne reception in 3, Carlton Gardens, where the service entertains foreign guests and the eternal ‘Major Halliday’ interviews graduate recruits.[64] It is just a stone’s throw from the Ryder St office where their controllers had botched and bungled their mission. In the presence of senior British and Estonian officials, they were given replica statues of the commando memorial at Auchtermuchty on the slopes of Ben Nevis, where the agents of Operation Jungle had trained forty years previously. The figurine shows three men in pre-war battledress, bunched together, alert and watching, over an inscription reading ‘United We Conquer’.[65] SIS added ‘Never Forgotten’. After Britain’s amnesia towards its debts in the Baltic, that could seem like wishful thinking. It is all the more poignant given the efforts that the authorities in Estonia were making to help British intelligence, for the third time in ninety years.
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bl In past years the recruitment interview has been conducted by men of varying build, height and hair colour. All introduced themselves as ‘Major Halliday’.
65
† The statues are available from gift shops, at a price of around £200 (including postage and packing). A solid silver version is also available, but was presumably thought too expensive.