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SECRET INTELLIGENCE IN THE EUROPEAN STATES SYSTEM, 1918—1989
By Jonathan Haslam, Karina Urbach Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8359-0
CHAPTER 1
"Humint" by Default and the Problem of Trust
Soviet Intelligence, 1917–1941
Jonathan Haslam
As far as I am concerned, reliance upon secret intelligence also carries little conviction.
—People's Commissarfor Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov, 11 April 1939
The Bolsheviks who seized power in Russia under Lenin on 7 November 1917 believed they had no need of a foreign intelligence network for the world socialist revolution to triumph, because hostile capitalist states would by definition disappear.
Indeed, the Bolsheviks expected the focus of world revolution to move from backward Russia to advanced, industrialized Germany. The revolution was thus at this early stage deeply internationalist in outlook: hence the creation of the Communist International (Comintern) in March 1919. "From provincial Moscow, from half-Asiatic Russia, we will embark on the expansive route of European revolution," Trotsky boasted. "It will lead us to a world revolution. Remember the millions of the German petite bourgeoisie, awaiting the moment for revenge. In them we will find a reserve army and bring up our cavalry with this army to the Rhine to advance further in the form of a revolutionary proletarian war. We will repeat the French revolution, but in the reverse geographical direction: the revolutionary armies will advance not from the West to the East, but from the East to the West. The decisive moment has come. You can almost literally hear the steps of history." Even the dour, skeptical Stalin crowed about moving "the centre of revolution from Moscow to Berlin." Yet uprisings in Germany collapsed ignominiously, and the Bolsheviks hesitated to risk all on one throw of the die.
Since the Bolsheviks expected a Europe-wide revolution within years, if not months, of defeating counterrevolutionary armies on Russian soil, the Soviet regime was taken by surprise and forced to improvise foreign intelligence at short notice when its plans faltered and fell through after the Polish defeat of the Red Army outside Warsaw in 1920 and the failures first of the Communist Märzaktion (March action) in Germany in 1921 and then of the "German October" in November 1923. The climate thus oscillated wildly between revolutionary optimism and deep despondency. Throughout, the counterrevolutionary emigration and its allies within Russia—a fifth column—remained a much feared (and exaggerated) focus of attention. The entire situation was regarded as fluid. There was no sense of permanence. This provides a critical clue as to the nature of the Soviet Union that emerged under Stalin from 1929 and to the story that unfolds: matters domestic necessarily overrode matters foreign. The Great Terror (1937–1939) that cost the Red Army over half its officer corps and much more besides proved the dreadful apotheosis of this perverse order of priorities.
After Lenin's death on 21 January 1924, this deterioration, which had become the focus of anxiety in his last letters, became ever more pronounced: hence the irresistible rise of Stalin, who, although Georgian, personified Russian provincialism. Hard though it may be to believe, as late as 1930 the Politburo still underscored its first priority as "exposing and penetrating centres of pernicious émigrés, independently of their location." The kidnapping of the counterrevolutionary leader General Evgenii Miller from Paris seven years later, at a time when the Soviet Union was in alliance with France, underlined Stalin's continued preoccupation, regardless of the cost in trust with the Popular Front régime. With war looming, on 10 May 1939, Pavel Sudoplatov was appointed deputy head of foreign intelligence within the GUGB/NKVD. He was astounded to be briefed by the new Commissar Lavrentii Beria and Stalin himself to the effect that the most important task that lay ahead was the liquidation of arch-rival in exile, Leon Trotsky.
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Having ejected the forces of General Anton Denikin from the Ukraine and thrown back Józef Pilsudski's offensive from Poland in the summer of 1920, the Bolsheviks switched from counting on spontaneous uprisings abroad to aiding revolutions at the point of the bayonet. Poland was always crucial. It bridged Bolshevik Russia with the long-hoped for revolution in Weimar Germany. "We decided to use our armed forces," Lenin told a conference of the Russian Communist Party, "in order to help sovietise Poland. Out of that arose the policy for the future as a whole." This was not done through Party resolutions, but "we said to ourselves that we must make contact by means of bayonets—has the social revolution of the proletariat in Poland not matured?" It had not.
When Mikhail Tukhachevskii marched on Warsaw in July–August 1920, Lenin stubbornly persisted in the extravagantly misplaced belief that success led by the Red Army was just around the corner. This was no accident. Such illusions were deeply embedded in this new regime. A fallacious confidence in the power of Soviet arms combined with willful misperception of conditions abroad was to continue, one way or another, throughout the life of the Soviet regime and at considerable cost to the efficient operation of its intelligence services. In 1947, Major-General Sir John Sinclair, who later headed MI6, wrote that "it was not generally realised that the controlling element in Russia had virtually no correct appreciation of developments in the outside world, and that they relied for their information on various channels who were successively bent on feeding their superiors with such information as they thought would be most acceptable. This inevitably led to the controlling element receiving a progressively exaggerated form of information on foreign affairs."
Faced with Lenin's obstinate disregard for the reality za kordonom—abroad—Karl Radek, himself a Pole, pointed out that "we must refrain from the practice of using bayonets to sound out the international situation. Bayonets would be good if we needed to aid a particular revolution; but for seeing how the land lies in this or that country we have another weapon—Marxism, and for this we do not have to call upon Red Army soldiers." Of course, Marxism is not an entirely unproblematic prism through which to view the world and, even if it were, one in any case needed to know what precisely the other side had in mind. After all, they were not Marxists. The only early gesture in the direction of reality had been the hurried establishment in April 1920 of a foreign department within the semi-autonomous Special Section (Osobii Otdel) of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police.
Confronted with the sobering fact of "colossal defeat" in Poland, Lenin sounded the retreat but warned that "in spite of complete failure in this instance, our first defeat, we will time and again switch from a defensive policy to the offensive until we have finally beaten all of them." The basic problem was not stated, however: those in Moscow knew little of how Poles really felt. In September, the Politburo thus laid out the case for reorganizing foreign intelligence along more effective lines: "We went to Warsaw blindly and suffered a catastrophe. Bearing in mind the complex international situation in which we find ourselves, the question of our intelligence service must be made the appropriate priority. Only a serious, properly constituted intelligence service will save us from blindly meeting the unexpected." As a result, the Cheka finally acquired its foreign department—INO (Inostrannyi Otdel) —on 20 December 1920.
Only with time and as revolution stubbornly failed to appear in the capitalist West did Moscow take a firm hand on foreign intelligence—both signals intelligence (sigint) and human intelligence (humint)—to enhance the conduct of diplomacy and the operations of Comintern. But the relationship between the world of intelligence and the world of the revolution was an awkward one. Given a dictator's reliance on the secret police, it might be supposed that intelligence professionals would be favored, but Stalin "was his own intelligence boss" and "reacted to intelligence material with irritation," senior officers recalled. This is scarcely surprising given the annoying way that material could all too frequently point to a reality that did not correspond with his own perceptions.
At first the Bolshevik leadership carelessly trusted in the security of their ciphers. This is not unusual. A veteran of Government Communications Headquarters in the United Kingdom has pointed out that in cryptography the "inherent advantages of the defence are matched by its scope for human frailty and the greater intellectual challenge presented by the offence; states are always confident about the security of their own ciphers and find it hard to exclude laziness in their use." Indeed, in 1921, when Britain was reorganizing the system for making and breaking codes and ciphers, professionals met with skepticism from users: diplomats in particular. One knowledgeable figure from the secret world complained bitterly of the "general apathy that exists in these matters and the disbelief in the powers of cryptographers." Moscow was no different in this from London. It is therefore not particularly surprising to learn that Soviet ciphers took a long while to become safe; and only became so after officials were repeatedly reminded of just how vulnerable they were.
Whereas diplomats in Britain were the spoiled beneficiaries of effective decryption against Soviet Russia in particular, the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs (Narkomindel) was forever nagging the leadership about the unsatisfactory state of cryptography and decryption. Neither for the first nor the last time, Commissar Chicherin protested to Lenin on 20 August 1920 that the "decryption of our ciphers ... is entirely within the bounds of possibility." This was not least because the existing staff were grossly overloaded. "An increase in the number of our cryptographers is now a task of primary importance," Chicherin wrote to the commissar for finance, Nikolai Krestinsky, on 1 September 1920. The consequences of failing to act on this did not take long to make themselves felt. Indeed, throughout the negotiations between July 1920 and March 1921 that led to the de facto recognition of the Bolshevik government by the British, London was reading Soviet ciphers. And the Russians more than once became aware of that fact. The trouble was, in the fevered atmosphere of revolution and conspiracy, it was all too easy for Chekists and, indeed, for Lenin himself, to assume that treachery lay behind the problem. Cuts in government spending after the inauguration of the New Economic Policy only made matters worse. Given the persistent priority accorded to the threat of counterrevolution, where human intelligence was at a premium, it was only too easy to neglect cryptography as a sphere of activity marginal to the success of the revolution.
Lenin had handed the job of setting up a reliable interdepartmental cryptographic service to the Cheka. In January 1921, the ruling collegium agreed to convene a meeting of all departments concerned: foreign affairs, military, foreign trade, and Cheka. Gleb Bokii, an ethnic Ukrainian, represented the Cheka. He had joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1900 and had taken part in both the 1905 revolution and the 1917 coup. In the process, he had been arrested twelve times and exiled to Siberia twice. Bokii had trained as a hydrologist, but he was not appointed for his skills in mathematics. By all accounts a pathological, gloomy disciplinarian and a tough individualist, he had acquired a fearsome reputation hunting down counterrevolutionaries in Turkestan. Bokii was tasked with defining the functions of the new service and appointed to head a new eighth special department, mandated by the "small" Council of People's Commissars, chaired by Lenin, on 5 May. This was named the Special Department (Spetsotdel or SPEKO). Bokii also joined the Cheka's ruling collegium in July at the initiative of its director, Felix Dzerzhinsky. The fact that a scourge of counterrevolutionaries was placed in such a position indicates the order of priorities. Bokii had also been a leading member of the Party underground for two decades in Saint Petersburg, however, creating and using various codes and ciphers. He resisted the creeping process of Stalinization, and as a result, his relations with the general secretary deteriorated. In the early 1930s, Stalin tried and failed to have him removed.
The Spetsotdel had the unique privilege of autonomy. Bokii communicated directly with the Politburo and Sovnarkom (the Council of People's Commissars) without intermediary. The department had six, later seven, sections of which cryptographic work in the strict sense occupied only three—the second, third, and fourth. Consisting of seven members and headed by F. Tikhomirov, the second section dealt with theoretical issues and the preparation of codes and ciphers. The third section, initially with only three members, was headed by the deputy chief of the department, Eikhmanis, and managed the process of delivering codes and ciphers to establishments abroad. The fourth and largest section, composed of eight members and run by Bokii's assistant A. Gusev, had the job of "breaking foreign and anti-soviet ciphers and codes and deciphering documents." It was the job of the fifth section to obtain foreign codes and ciphers.
The department was no great success, however. Progress in decryption was disappointingly slow. A few code breakers remained from the tsarist service—V. I. Krivosh-Nemanich, I. A. Zybin, and I. M. Yamchenko, among others—but the Bolsheviks sorely lacked cryptographers who were competent in foreign languages—a problem also under the tsar, and one that rival powers did not face, except from injudicious choice. The absence of linguists was a dilemma also faced by the Inotdel (INO) as a whole. Now a part of the Cheka's successor, the GPU (after the formation of the USSR, the OGPU), the INO became known as the INOGPU. But the OGPU did not yet have the unchallenged preeminence it was to acquire under Stalin. Relations between the Narkomindel at Kuznetsky Most and its "near neighbors" the INOGPU, next door at the Lubyanka, were ever uneasy. The Narkomindel depended on reliable intelligence, but it was inclined to go its own way when opportunity knocked. This inevitably led to disputes over turf, mediated in March 1923 by the indefatigable Party secretary Vyacheslav Molotov, who, as often happened, was asked to chair a Politburo committee to resolve matters.
Iosif Unshlikht, deputy head of the OGPU, complained that "Latterly, increasing instances of direct approaches to Narkomindel from an array of people with offers of a secret political character (for example, offers tendered to comrades Chicherin and Petrushevich) are leading to parallel activity alongside GPU structures that are specially devised for intelligence work; inevitably leading both to completely unnecessary expenditure on foreign currency and to negative consequences of a political nature for the organs of the Narkomindel." The GPU asked the Politburo "to concentrate all varieties of intelligence work (diplomatic, political) with which Narkomindel from time to time comes into contact exclusively in the organs of the GPU." And "when, in individual instances, representatives of Narkomindel are presented with this or that possibility in the field of intelligence work, the representative of Narkomindel has to agree on his moves in advance with the GPU or its organs on the spot."
Relations between the two departments were not improved as a result. Perhaps only those between the OGPU and the Razvedupravleniya—military intelligence—were worse; and they "always fought violently." In a rather transparent bid to gain a foothold within the Narkomindel, Dzerzhinsky proposed that his first deputy, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, join its ruling directorate—the collegium. This would have given him the right to challenge the views of the commissar and his deputies at Politburo meetings; something Chicherin and his first deputy, Maxim Litvinov, were unlikely to view with equanimity. In the end, Litvinov and Menzhinsky would attend the Politburo together, representing their different institutions.
Secure in its authority and with little sure instinct for the realities of the world behind the lines, complacency continued in the Spetsotdel's creation of secure codes and ciphers. Even when the British revealed what they had read in the traffic with publication of Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon's ultimatum of 1923, the Bolsheviks still failed to sit up and take note. A diehard Tory government swept to power in Britain on the back of a red scare in October 1924. That owed something to the publication of a notorious forgery—the Zinoviev Letter. This letter purported to emanate from the head of Comintern (the Communist International), Grigorii Zinoviev, with instructions to the British Communist Party concerning subversion of the armed forces, an entirely plausible action given Comintern policy and practice.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from SECRET INTELLIGENCE IN THE EUROPEAN STATES SYSTEM, 1918—1989 by Jonathan Haslam, Karina Urbach. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
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