Acknowledgements
Meelis Saueauk of Estonia’s Institute for Historical Memory kindly helped me find KGB documents about Operation Jungle from Estonian and Latvian archives. Ivo Juurvee also provided important examples of Soviet-era propaganda. Ritvars Jansons at the Occupation Museum in Riga generously shared his insights. Māra Grīnberga helped me find her article about the remarkable Mr Pīnups. Prokop Tomek in Prague shared his research on Miloslav Kroča and his daughter. Tom Bower effortlessly unearthed his twenty-year-old notebooks and lent me his unique copy of the film Red Web. Tina Tamman helped me track down Alexander Koppel, whose daughter Catherine and son-in-law Michael Breslin provided kind hospitality. Juho and Janno Kiik readily shared their memories of Voldemar. Ben Judah provided excellent research on Anna Chapman’s life in Russia. Sam Donaldson in Dublin investigated the mysteries of Rossmore Grove. I am grateful to all of them, and to the people I have quoted. Bill Swainson at Bloomsbury deftly untangled the book’s structure and helped me signpost it for a wider audience. Zoe Waldie at Rogers, Coleridge and Wright calmed my jitters.
My children Johnny, Hugo and Izzy uncomplainingly put up with my physical and mental absences. My wife Cristina Odone’s critique was invaluable, as were her love and patience from beginning to end. In 1970s Oxford, my father J.R. Lucas’s thoughts on espionage and communism inspired this book; it is dedicated to him and my mother Morar, who have been my unfailing support for fifty years. I am grateful to my editors at the Economist for giving me a sabbatical, and to my colleagues, particularly Ludwig Siegele, John Peet, Tom Nuttall and Bruce Clark, for uncomplainingly covering for my absences. However, the views, and mistakes, in this book are mine alone.
I owe a great debt to people who must remain nameless. They know who they are.
No government agency has sponsored or censored this book.
Notes
Introduction
1 Miss Fire: The Chronicle of a British Mission to Mihailovich 1943 – 1944 by Jasper Rootham (Chatto & Windus, 1946). Petar. A King’s Heritage; The Memoirs of King Peter II of Yugoslavia (Cassell,1955). Three Yugoslav-centred books that shaped my childhood are Lawrence Durrell’s neglected classic spy novel, White Eagles over Serbia (Faber & Faber,1957); the masterly ‘Sword of Honour’ trilogy by Evelyn Waugh (Chapman and Hall, 1955, 1951 and 1961); and Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (Macmillan,1941).
2 Smiley’s People by John le Carré (Hodder and Stoughton, 1980). Colonel Alfons Rebane, the Estonian officer who played a leading role in SIS’s Operation Jungle, was the model for le Carré’s ‘General Vladimir’, an Estonian émigré whose murder brings George Smiley back into the spy world.
3 See for example this report on the suicide of Nikolai Kruchina: ‘Soviet Turmoil; New Suicide: Budget Director’, New York Times, 27 August 1991 http://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/27/world/soviet-turmoil-new-suicide-budget-director.html and also ‘Desperately Seeking Rubles’ by Susan Tifft and Yuri Zarakhovich, Time, 4 November 1991 www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,974181–1,00.html
4 The Cheka (formally the Vserossiyskaya Chrezvychaynaya Komissiya or All-Russian Extraordinary Commission) was itself in some senses a successor to the Tsarist-era Okhrana (Otdelenie po Okhraneniyu Obshchestvennoi Bezopasnosti i Poryadka, or Department for Protecting Public Safety and Order). Successor organisations were the OGPU (Obyedinennoye Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravleniye, or State Political Directorate, the NKVD (Narodnyy komissariat vnutrennikh del or People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) and the KGB (Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti or Committee for State Security). The FSB (Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti or Federal Security Service) is the main successor organisation to the KGB. The SVR is the much smaller Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki or Foreign Intelligence Service. It used to be the First Chief Directorate of the Soviet-era KGB. By contrast the GRU (Glavnoye Razveditelskoye Upravleniye or Main Intelligence Directorate) is the military-intelligence service. Much diminished in recent years, it has changed neither its title nor its structure since Trotsky established it in 1918.
5 See ‘ Delo Poteyeva: predatel nanes ushcherb v 50mln dollarov no ne smog obmanut nachalstvo ukrainskoy lyubovnitsey ’ (The Poteyev case: the traitor cost $50m but couldn’t fool his bosses about his Ukrainian mistress) http://www.newsru.com/russia/28jun2011/poteev.html (this and all other links accessed July 2011).
6 ‘Spying Suspects Seemed Short on Secrets’ by Scott Shane and Benjamin Weiser, New York Times, 29 June 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/30/world/europe/30spy.html ‘Russian Spies Too Useless, Sexy to Prosecute’ by Dan Amira, New York magazine, 7 July 2010 http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/07/russian_spies_too_useless_sexy.html ‘Spy swap: Viennese Waltz’ Guardian, 10 July 2010 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/10/spy-swap-russia-us-editorial ‘The Russian spy scandal that nobody much cared about’ by Alexander Chancellor, Guardian, 2 July 2010 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/02/russian-spy-ring-scandal
7 ‘Spy Swap’ by John le Carré, Guardian, 9 July 2010 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/09/spy-swap-john-le-carre The Harry Lime reference is to the 1949 film The Third Man (later a novella by Graham Greene, who wrote the screenplay) of espionage in post-war Vienna.
8 Call For The Dead by John le Carré (Penguin, 1965). The first chapter is online. ‘A Brief History of George Smiley’, Guardian, 22 May 2009 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/22/le-carre-call-for-the-dead
9 http://charlescrawford.biz/blog/more-on-russian-illegals-and-sleepers (accessed 4 July 2010).
10 The central character in thrillers by Robert Ludlum, later made into films such as The Bourne Identity (2002).