The Forgotten Spy (20 page)

The repeated boasts of Soviet defectors – that they had access to restricted British codes or confidential information – could not be ignored indefinitely, especially as the security of the entire communications network would appear to have been breached. An internal inquiry was instigated within the Foreign Office, led by the Communications Department. We do not know what, if anything, the investigation uncovered or indeed who was in charge because the file no longer exists. All that remains is a line in the Foreign Office correspondence index that states that the department looked into Bessedovsky’s claims that India Office ciphers had been compromised. In fact, all official Communications Department files have been destroyed for the crucial period from 1927 to 1935.

So what, if anything, occurred in July 1929? With the British files from the period missing, we have to turn to Soviet sources, specifically the personal notes and memoirs of a key illegal and man of many identities, Dimitri Bystrolyotov. He and his associates filed reports with OGPU which now form part of the archives of its successor body, the KGB.
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Born in Akchora, Crimea in 1901, Bystrolyotov had a difficult childhood and was caught up in the growing turmoil of the revolution and civil war. He fled Russia in 1919 and ended up in Constantinople where he spent the next few years struggling to survive before moving on to Prague in January 1922. It was here that Bystrolyotov came to the attention of OGPU operatives, who recruited him into their ranks in 1925. He began work as a legal
rezident
as part of the Soviet Trade Mission in Prague. One of his tasks was to secure the codes of a western power. Soviet intelligence networks had been severely damaged since the ARCOS episode in 1927 and in the wake of similar raids around the world against covert operatives in Poland, Turkey, France, Lithuania, Switzerland, Austria and Japan. The lack of information helped fuel Stalin’s paranoia about enemy attacks against the Soviet Union and made him more determined to find out what was actually being discussed – hence the need for cipher codes to crack the traffic of messages flowing between governments and embassies.

The period from 1925 to 1936 saw the establishment of the network of operatives dubbed the Great Illegals – spymasters who established
rezidentura
in places such as Paris or Berlin and identified key targets who provided them with intelligence, either unwittingly or with complicity. These targets included people working for official organisations or institutions with access to useful information. Access could be achieved via exploiting a need for money, a shared political ideology or a weakness for sex. The role of the illegal was not only to gather intelligence from their targets but also after the early 1930s to establish ‘recruitments in place’ or double agents, such as the Cambridge spy ring in the UK. These would then carry on their work undetected by the establishment. Given the attempts to re-establish Anglo-Soviet relations, no
rezidentura
was initially set up in London but counter-intelligence activity continued, controlled from abroad and predominantly coordinated out of Berlin.

Since 1925, Bystrolyotov had developed a network of operatives in Prague and – despite being married – in his quest for codes he had been required to use his good looks and charms to seduce a young worker at the French embassy, Marie-Elaine Aucouturier, who had access to promising material. However, in the spring of 1930 he was suddenly transferred to the Berlin
rezidentura
headed by Boris Bazarov (codenamed KIN) and given his own codename, ANDREI, later changed to HANS. Bystrolyotov was provided with a false identity and passport, that of Greek businessman Alexander S Gallas from Salonika.

Bazarov controlled illegals in other countries as well, including England, and the role of his group was mainly to gather information on Anglo-German relations. However, there was a pressing case that Bazarov was dealing with – a mysterious man called ‘Charlie’ who had walked into the Soviet embassy in Paris in July the previous year, the same person that Bessedovsky had referred to as ‘Scott’. Bazarov was able to brief Bystrolyotov on what had happened, providing us with an insider’s account of the affair. According to Emil Draitser, Bystrolyotov’s biographer who interviewed him in 1973:

Second secretary Helfand was working in his office when a messenger told him that a stranger was asking to see a high official. Intrigued, Helfand asked the messenger to bring the man to him. The man walked in, speaking ‘poor French with a strong English accent’.

Charlie was carrying a paper package under his arm which he placed on the desk in front of Helfand, asking if he wanted to inspect the contents. The
package was placed on the table and unwrapped. It contained two books, one of which was bound in red buckram; they were entitled ‘Foreign Office ciphers’ and ‘Colonial and Dominions Office ciphers’.
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At this point, Charlie was instructed to leave the room so that Helfand could privately consult with his OGPU superiors, something that Charlie was incredibly reluctant to do without possession of the cipher books. Eventually, Charlie was ushered into a waiting room and Ianovitch was summoned by phone. He then took over the interview, albeit with a degree of suspicion fearing that the ‘walk-in’ was a trap. Charlie quickly set out his stall:

Initially Charlie had demanded £50,000, a phenomenal sum worth well over £2.75 million in today’s money, but £10,000 was still a substantial amount. It was noted at the time that Charlie wore a look of ‘last and utter desperation’,
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suggesting he faced some unimaginable financial crisis that had brought him to this desperate resolution. Nevertheless, he remained determined and was not in the least bit reckless. In fact, in his dealings with Ianovitch he displayed a clear knowledge of the way intelligence agencies worked within the diplomatic services:

Charlie was clearly more than a humble typesetter, something Ianovitch and his staff suspected when he made his one non-negotiable precondition to doing business: anonymity. Charlie said he would provide no further information for the Soviets if he suspected in the slightest that they were attempting to shadow him once he left. It seems clear that no transaction was agreed at
that point; a further meeting was set up for the following month, again at the embassy in Paris, at which point Charlie would bring more material.

No attempt was made by Ianovitch to steal the codes that had been brought in by Charlie, despite Bessedovsky’s claims. Bessedovsky had, in fact, mixed up Charlie’s approach with events that had occurred exactly one year before in August 1928, when a short man with a red nose carrying a heavy briefcase had offered to sell Italian codes for 200,000 French francs. This was the occasion when Ianovitch deployed deception, taking the briefcase to the secure OGPU area within the embassy and passing the codes to his wife to photocopy. When this was complete, Ianovitch stormed back into the interview room and threw the case at the visitor in feigned rage, claiming that the attempt was a deliberate act of provocation and threatening to call the police. The visitor left angry and empty-handed, and Ianovitch was hailed as a genius for obtaining the codes for free. He was awarded $1,000 as a bonus.
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No wonder Ianovitch was nervous about Charlie. One walk-in was fortunate, but two seemed highly suspicious. Nevertheless, Charlie returned and provided more samples of his codes, as well as a variety of diplomatic telegrams and correspondence which he claimed he secured through a source at the Foreign Office. He insisted that he was only the middleman, taking a cut of the money on behalf of someone higher up. Satisfied that Charlie was genuine, a price was agreed; an initial fee of $6,000 was paid for the first instalment, $5,000 for the second and thereafter $1,000 per month depending on the quality of information provided. Charlie was assigned the codename ARNO, and at first all went well. However, the flow of information soon became patchy, as it was dependent on Charlie’s ability to get to France to hand it over. Furthermore, the quality of material started to diminish, with much of the diplomatic correspondence of little use to the Soviets and seemingly picked at random. Charlie also prevaricated about the sale of diplomatic cipher codes. Given the potential value of Charlie as an intelligence asset, a decision was made by OGPU officials to track Charlie down and bring him under closer control, with the aim of facilitating less risky exchanges of documents away from the embassy in Paris and exerting greater leverage over the type of material that the Soviets needed. This required knowledge about who
Charlie was and what he actually did. This operation was assigned to Bazarov in Berlin, which he passed to Bystrolyotov to undertake. In a briefing note Bazarov wrote:

Together Bystrolyotov and Bazarov decided upon a course of action that would help them establish Charlie’s true identity and if necessary investigate the source of his information within the Foreign Office. To do this, they had to concoct a plausible scenario, based on various assumptions about Charlie’s background. Most Foreign Office employees were thought to be of aristocratic stock, so Bystrolyotov assumed the identity of an impoverished Hungarian count by the name of Lajos József Perelly, based on a real person of the same name. To authenticate the cover story, he was provided with a passport and sent to Budapest to acclimatise himself in the role, visiting various haunts frequented by the local aristocrats and acquiring trinkets and paraphernalia with which they were adorned, including smoking pipes with the Perelly coat of arms and a little brush for his hat, as fashion dictated. He even managed to acquire a photo of himself with a Hungarian cardinal to whom the real Perelly was distantly related, along with other snaps taken in key landmarks to confirm his credentials. Meanwhile, Bazarov adopted the guise of a merciless Italian communist with the name of Da Vinci, a fanatic adherent to the Soviet cause who was pressuring Perelly for information on behalf of OGPU. The idea was that Charlie would sympathise with Perelly’s situation, permitting him to establish a bond and win Charlie’s confidence.
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However, before the plan could be put into action, Bystrolyotov was summoned to Moscow and interviewed by OGPU’s deputy chief of foreign intelligence, Abram Slutsky. On arrival he was shown a copy of Bessedovsky’s memoir written in Russian and his attention was drawn to the passage about the Italian cipher codes. A single word had been marked in the book against the description of the incident – ‘restore’ – which Slutsky revealed had been written by Stalin himself. In other words, the Soviet leader himself wanted them to track down the man they knew only to be short with a red nose. Instead of being pleased by Ianovitch’s cleverness, it was perceived as a tactical mistake to have let such a potentially valuable intelligence asset go free and now Bystrolyotov was charged with tracking him down. This was a matter of utmost urgency; he was given no more than six months to complete his assignment. All he had to go on was the physical description.

Despite the odds being heavily stacked against success, Bystrolyotov first travelled to Paris to gather local information and then Geneva, home of the League of Nations where diplomats gathered for regular meetings. He brought across two of his former agents, Dr Joseph Leppin (codename PEEP) and his ‘wife’ Erica Weinstein (codename ERIKA), who scoured Italian embassies across Europe taking pictures of anyone who vaguely matched the description of the mystery man. In Geneva, he enlisted another illegal, Dutch artist Henri Christian Pieck (codename COOPER) and together they visited the two most popular haunts of the foreign diplomats – the International Bar and Brasserie Universal – and began sketching the patrons. The gamble paid off when a man fitting the description appeared in both locations.

Bystrolyotov knew a barman at the International Bar, Emilio Spada, who earned extra money selling snippets of information about his client’s backgrounds – often gleaned when alcohol-loosened tongues. He immediately recognised the man in question and provided Bystrolyotov and Pieck with the name of their quarry: Swiss businessman Giovanni de Ry, known everywhere as Rossi (which was then used as his codename). It was only a matter of time before Bystrolyotov tracked down and confronted de Ry, securing his cooperation for the sale of further codes.
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