The Craft of Intelligence (15 page)

The Gestapo unit that finally apprehended this group and other Soviet networks in Western Europe called them the
Rote Kapelle
, or Red Orchestra. After they were put out of operation by late 1942, the Soviets developed a fantastic source located in Switzerland, a certain Rudolf Rössler (code name, “Lucy”). By means which have not been ascertained to this day, Rössler in Switzerland was able to get intelligence from the German High Command in Berlin on a continuous basis, often less than twenty-four hours after its daily decisions concerning the Eastern front were made. Rössler was that unusual combination, a pro-Communist Catholic. Alexander Foote, who operated one of the secret Soviet radio bases that transmitted Lucy’s information to Moscow, said of him:

Lucy . . . held in his hands the threads which led back to the three main commands in Germany, and also could, and did, provide information from other German offices. . . . Anyone who has fought a battle from the general staff angle will know what it means to be able to place the flags of the enemy on the map and plan the disposition of one’s own troops accordingly. . . . Lucy often put Moscow in this position, and the effect on the strategy of the Red Army and the ultimate defeat of the Wehrmacht was incalculable.
4

The Sorge,
Rote Kapelle
and Lucy operations are the three best known of many Soviet penetrations in the war days. Altogether, the information which their intelligence work was able to collect through clandestine operations in World War II useful to the defense of the Soviets was about as good as any nation could hope to get.

In Allied countries the Soviet aim was essentially twofold. Stalin did not trust either Roosevelt or Churchill, and early in the game realized the coming clash of interests in the postwar world. Hence one aim of Soviet intelligence was to penetrate those offices of the American and British governments concerned with the “peace” settlements. The other targets were scientific and technological, in particular, nuclear. The Soviets knew that a great joint effort was being made in atomic research, and they wanted the benefits of it—hence Fuchs, Alan Nunn May, the Rosenbergs, Greenglass, Gold and a list of further names which came to light in the postwar years.

In the field of political intelligence, the cases and the agents have perhaps remained less fixed in the public memory, with the exceptions of the Hiss and Burgess-Maclean-Philby cases. The fact is, however, that in pursuit of their aim to learn what their ally the United Sates was planning for Germany, Central Europe and the Far East after the war, the Soviets had over forty high-level agents in various departments and agencies in Washington during World War II. At least this number was uncovered; we do not know how many remained undetected. Almost all of them, like the atomic spies, were persons of pro-Communist inclination at the time. Many have since recanted.

The Burgess-Maclean case, which broke in 1951 with the sudden flight of the two British officials to Soviet Russia, has perhaps been given too much the coloration of a defection. Also, its lurid angles have beclouded the real issues. This was no ordinary defection. The two men fled because they had timely warning from the “third man,” Harold (Kim) Philby, that British security was hot on their trail. These three men in positions of trust in the British foreign service had been working for Soviet intelligence for years. All three were Communist sympathizers while students at Cambridge in the 1930s. They eventually became long-term Soviet penetration agents. Their value to the Soviets was increased as each served a tour of duty in the British embassy in Washington in the early 1950s. Philby’s espionage activities were disclosed only in 1963, shortly after he had followed the other two behind the Iron Curtain.

In retrospect, it is Philby, less well known to the general public than his close friends, the notorious Burgess and Maclean, who deserves the closest scrutiny as perhaps the outstanding example of Soviet success in achieving high-level penetration through men who belonged to the generation of pro-Communist intellectuals of the twenties and thirties. Philby was not only a diplomat, useful as he and Burgess and Maclean may have been to the Soviets in this capacity; he was also a high-ranking intelligence officer.

In the postwar period, if we can judge from the cases that have been coming to light in the last ten years, Soviet intelligence in its pursuit of agents in sensitive positions in the U.S.A. and Britain began to run out of Communists and Communist sympathizers of the Fuchs-Rosenberg-Burgess-Maclean-Philby variety. There are a number of reasons for this. The hostile and aggressive intentions of Soviet Russia could no longer be masked by outwardly friendly diplomatic relations. The spectacle of the United States or Great Britain soft-pedaling a case of Soviet espionage because existing policy called for maintaining diplomacy on an even keel with the Soviets, a situation which prevailed from time to time in the late thirties and during the war, was unthinkable after about 1947. Instead, security precautions of a kind unprecedented in Western history began to be taken in our country and elsewhere to safeguard government offices, military establishments and sensitive scientific and industrial installations against penetration by employees who might be agents or potential Soviet agents. Secondly, the disillusionment with the once supposedly idealistic aims of Communism began to reach the intellectuals in the postwar period so that the late forties and fifties saw no groups of well-educated pro-Communists coming from the campuses of our universities and colleges, as had been the case from the depression days up to World War II.

The Soviets turned to other kinds of helpers, people who had other reasons for collaborating with them, willingly or unwillingly. Perhaps the most typical trend in the early postwar period, which illustrates the rapid adaptability of Soviet intelligence to new conditions, as well as the basic cold-blooded pragmatism of Communist tactics, was the massive recruitment by the Soviets of former SS and war criminals in both East and West Germany for intelligence work. The Soviets saw two strong factors they could exploit in dealing with such people. They were, first of all, by agreement of all the Allies, in the “automatic arrest” category. Under military government we had imprisoned many of them. The Soviets shot some of them. But what better way to force the recruitment of an agent than to stay his execution or excuse him from long imprisonment if he will consent to commit espionage in return for the favor? This was the line the Soviets took in East Germany. In West Germany, the de-Nazification procedures made it very difficult for former members of the SS, Gestapo and similar Nazi organizations to get decent jobs. Many of these men who had shortly before been riding high under the emblems of Nazi power were ostracized, unemployed and in dire straits. Their attitude toward the American and British occupation authorities was, to say the least, negative. They were ripe for the Soviet invitation to treason. They hardly felt it to be treason, since in their opinion there was with Germany under foreign military rule no real authority to which they felt any direct loyalty.

A case of this kind was that of Heniz Felfe, a senior officer of the West German intelligence service, who was caught by his own colleagues and superiors in November, 1961, after having betrayed what he knew of their work to the Soviets ever since he had joined the service over ten years before. In 1945 Felfe had been a rather junior member of the foreign arm of the Nazi security and intelligence service. He hailed from a part of Germany which came under Soviet occupation after the war was over. He had been captured and interned in Holland by the Allies and after his release tried to settle in West Germany. He went through the de-Nazification process but had great difficulties finding a job to his liking. Eventually, armed with questionable credentials and letters of recommendation he had talked some innocent people into giving him, he applied for a police job, the only kind of work he knew. In the rather confused atmosphere of the Allied-sponsored German civil service, he got a job in a minor office of the counterintelligence section. Later it turned out he had been helped to the job by certain German officials who themselves were under Soviet pressure.

During this period, Felfe himself became a Soviet agent, having fallen into Soviet clutches while on a secret trip to his home area of East Germany. The man who led the Soviets to him was a friend, also a former SS man, who had made his bargain with the Soviets at an even earlier date. Felfe, in turn, recommended others of similar ilk. The price of all this was cheap for the Soviets—past sins were forgiven and a little money and protection were offered for the future. But a sword hung over the heads of these people, and they knew it would fall if they betrayed the Soviets. The Soviets picked up all the old SS men they could find. Most of them were guaranteed to be ambitious and utterly unprincipled. A few would be clever enough to work their way up the ladder of the West German civil service. Felfe was one of these, and the Soviet investment paid off handsomely.

The case of Felfe was one of Soviet recruitment based on a Nazi past. The KGB, however, is just as ready to use old and hidden Communist connections where the victim to be recruited is working in the West and where his future is dependent upon creating the impression that he has had nothing to do with Communism. Such were the facts in the important case of Alfred Frenzel, a prominent member of the West German parliament (Bundestag), to which he was first elected in 1953. For some years he served on the parliamentary committee which dealt with matters of German defense, and in this capacity he had access to information relating to the build-up and equipment of the West German military forces and NATO plans therefor.

Frenzel had originally come from the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. There for a time he had been a member of the Communist party; in fact had been thrown out of the party under the accusation of embezzling party funds. All this was well known to the Czechoslovak secret service.

Frenzel, like so many of his fellow Sudeten Germans, became a refugee in West Germany in the postwar days. He entered politics there, had considerable success and felt that he had securely buried the past. When the Czechoslovak secret service approached him in the mid-1950s and threatened to ruin his career with a full disclosure of his Communist affiliations unless he cooperated, Frenzel easily succumbed. He was an ideal “set-up” for recruitment, a man in a prominent and sensitive political position with a secret and rather lurid Communist past: disclosure spelled ruin for him. Here, as in the Felfe case, the Soviets could offer him financial help and protection. For some five years prior to October, 1960, when he was arrested, he had been working for the Czechoslovak secret service and, through them, for the Soviets; and his intelligence masters saw to it that he produced “the goods” to compensate for the protection and favors granted.

There were also several cases of recruitment in West Germany based upon evidence that the victims had had abortions in the Eastern zone before fleeing westward. This vulnerability was carefully tabulated and used. It was thus that Rosalie Kunze, the secretary of Admiral Wagner, Deputy Chief of the German Navy, was recruited by the Soviets. In some cases, doctors who in their East German past had committed illegal operations were followed and became targets for recruitment when they came to West Germany.

But such displaced rootless vagrants of postwar Europe are only one type of agent that Soviet intelligence is looking for. Among those who still have home and country the Soviets will search out the misfits and the disgruntled, people in trouble, people with grievances and frustrated ambitions, with unhappy domestic lives—neurotics, homosexuals and alcoholics. Such people sometimes need only a slight nudge, a slight inducement to fall into the practice of treason. Sometimes entrapment is necessary, sometimes not.

The Soviets are, of course, well aware of the fact that persons with moral and psychological weaknesses do not make the best agents. They only use them where there is nothing better available. They would prefer the ideologically motivated people and still keep on the lookout for them.

If the postwar world presented the Soviets with a somewhat different breed of spies from the ideological types they had concentrated on in earlier years, it also presented them with brand new targets—NATO, for example. For a time at least, this was perhaps the most important target, representing as it does a powerful coalition of forces the Soviet considers potentially hostile. The lure of NATO’s structure from the point of view of Soviet intelligence is the access all its members have to important military secrets of the major participants. It is not necessary to recruit an American to get at American secrets we share with NATO. At the same time, of course, the overall plans of NATO itself are of prime importance to the Soviets. A Belgian, Frenchman or German serving with NATO can get his hands on both kinds of secrets.

On July 7, 1964, the Frenchman, Georges Paques, who had been deputy press chief at NATO headquarters in Paris before his arrest in 1963, was sentenced to life imprisonment for treason to France. Since NATO itself is neither a sovereign entity nor a judicial body, a man cannot be tried by NATO itself or condemned for being treasonable to it. But the fact is that Paques did a great deal of damage to France, America and NATO by passing documents, chiefly of a political-military nature, concerning all three to the Soviets, including, it is reported, Allied military contingency plans for Berlin, NATO force goals and other NATO military matters. He stated before the court that he did so in order to avert war, “to assure France’s survival” and “to try to save mankind.”

He professed to detest everything American and saw NATO as an “American dominated institution.” He claimed that there was nothing treasonable to France in betraying American secrets to the Soviets. The French court did not accept this cleverly contrived excuse and furthermore felt he had also betrayed enough French secrets to deserve a heavy penalty. The prosecutor actually asked for the death penalty, but the court gave a life sentence. Paques’ subtle defense was in all likelihood a divisive tactic suggested by the Soviets themselves. It made him appear quasi-innocent in the eyes of some people in France. Also the appeal to anti-American sentiments was secretly pleasing to some French quarters.