The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939–1945

Of more importance to Moscow – certainly from 1941 onwards – were the GRU’s organisations based in Switzerland. These would later channel towards the Kremlin material derived from Berlin sources such as Western agent-runners could only dream of. One network had been established in 1937 by German-born Rachel Dübendorfer. A larger group, which became known as the ‘Lucy’ Ring, was run by Dr Alexander Radó – ‘Dora’ – a ‘sleeper’ permitted by his chiefs to slumber almost as long as Sleeping Beauty. A Hungarian, Marxist from his youth, Radó served as a commissar in Budapest’s 1919 Red Terror. Obliged to flee when Admiral Horthy became Hungary’s dictator, for a time he ran an émigré Resistance group in Vienna. He then decamped to Moscow, where he received intelligence training, and was deemed sufficiently significant to be introduced to Lenin. Posted to Western Europe, he served as an agent in Berlin and Paris, under cover as a correspondent for the Soviet news agency TASS. After marrying a German communist with whom he had two children, he tried to settle in Brussels, but was sent packing by the authorities, who held a thick dossier on him. Instead he went to Switzerland, where he parleyed a lifelong passion for maps into the creation of a cartographic publishing business, which quickly became profitable.

The Swiss police watched Radó for a while, then left him alone when they decided he was what he seemed – a quiet-living fellow, forty in 1939, who simply wanted to turn an honest penny. Radó was word-painted by one of his wireless-operators, an Englishman named Alexander Foote: ‘With his mild eyes blinking behind glasses, he looked exactly like almost anyone to be found in any suburban train anywhere in the world.’ Moscow instructed its man to do nothing until Europe erupted. Radó settled down quite happily with his maps, which enabled him to make a living without much recourse to GRU funds. When his handler was recalled to Moscow during the Purges, Radó for a time lost contact with his chiefs. But he made useful local friends, some of them communists, others not. One was a Swiss socialist, Otto Punter, who admired the Soviet Union and had worked for the Republicans in Spain. Punter forged connections in Germany, and with some German émigrés in Switzerland such as Baron Michel von Godin. Von Godin recruited the Vichy French press attaché, Louis Suss, codename ‘Salter’. The Chinese press attaché Pao Hsien Chu – ‘Polo’ – was another source, and Punter also had connections with influential local Catholics.

Radó’s comrade Alexander Foote always claimed to have been an adventurer rather than a communist ideologue. A round-faced, bespectacled, mildly seedy young Englishman, in September 1938 he returned from service in Spain with the International Brigade. A few months later, one of Moscow’s British recruiters offered him unspecified new employment for the workers’ cause in Switzerland. Cheap melodrama was not lacking. In obedience to instructions, Foote reported to the main post office in Geneva at noon one day, wearing a white scarf and holding a leather belt. He was approached by a woman who fulfilled her side of the identification procedure by holding a string shopping bag and an orange. She asked in English where he had bought his belt, and he replied implausibly, at an ironmonger’s shop in Paris. When he had then asked where he could buy an orange like hers, she introduced herself. She was ‘Sonya’, Ursula Hamburger* of the GRU, whom Foote was pleased to find was no squat commissar, but instead an attractive woman of thirty-one, with ‘a good figure and even better legs’. This remarkable personality was the daughter of a Berlin economist. At the age of eleven she was briefly a child actress before taking up an alternative career in espionage. She was already a veteran of exploits in China for which she had been awarded the Order of the Red Banner.

Hamburger instructed Foote to travel to Munich, establish himself in the city, learn German and make friends. He was given 2,000 Swiss francs and told to meet her again in three months in Lausanne – once again, at the post office. Keeping this rendezvous after a German sojourn that was uneventful save for a chance glimpse of Hitler lunching in a restaurant, he was told that he was now on the GRU payroll as a ‘collaborator’, at a salary of US$150 a month plus reasonable expenses. Given the cover name ‘Jim’, and various means of making contact if ‘Sonya’ disappeared for any reason, he was then sent back to Munich with an advance of US$900 in cash. Nothing significant happened thereafter until in April 1939 he was visited by an old International Brigade comrade from Spain, Len Brewer, British-born son of German parents, whom he appears to have introduced to Hamburger, who promptly recruited him. In August he was summoned to yet another meeting, this time at Hamburger’s home, a chalet at Caux-sur-Montreux where she lived in incongruous bourgeois domesticity with her two children, Maik and Janina, and an old German nurse. Foote was disconcerted by the casualness with which his hostess left components of her wireless transmitter lying around the house.

The GRU ring in Switzerland was as traumatised as many other communists around the world by the August 1939 Nazi–Soviet Pact. Foote felt that it hit Hamburger even harder than himself; that her faith in the omniscience of the Party was shattered: ‘I think that from that time onwards her heart was not in the work’ – this seems implausible, since she later became courier for the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs, and died an avowed Stalinist. Desperate to get out of Switzerland, she divorced her husband and married Len Brewer. Initially, according to Foote, this was merely an arrangement of convenience to secure a ‘shoe’ – a passport – but then the couple fell in love. Their plans were momentarily threatened when their maid, Lisa, became disaffected and telephoned the British consulate to denounce them anonymously as communist spies. But the girl’s English was so poor that nobody at the other end understood, or at least took notice.

Days before the outbreak of war, Foote boarded a train bound for Germany once more, only to find his handler suddenly pushing her way along the carriage to reach him, just before departure time. She told him to get off, fast. New orders had come from Moscow: war was imminent; he must stay in Switzerland. During the period that followed, in which the ‘Lucy’ Ring was temporarily dormant, while living at a small pension in Montreux both Foote and Len Brewer learned how to operate a shortwave radio transmitter. They practised on Hamburger’s set, though its performance was not improved by being buried in her garden between transmissions – then waited to be given messages to transmit to Moscow.

Even as the GRU’s Swiss networks were bedding down, Centre’s German sources were already producing information of extraordinary quality. The first musician in what became known to history as the ‘Red Orchestra’ was recruited following an approach to the Soviet embassy one day in 1929, by an ex-Berlin policeman named Ernst Kur. He offered his services as an informant, and was promptly recruited by the local NKVD resident as agent A/70. Kur, a rackety and often drunken boor, had been dismissed from the police, but proved to have a critical contact in its counter-intelligence branch, who was soon designated by the Russians as agent A/201. On 7 September Moscow messaged its Berlin station: ‘We are very interested in your new agent, A/201. Our only fear is that you have got yourselves into one of the most dangerous predicaments where the slightest indiscretion on the part of either A/201 or A/70 could lead to multiple misfortunes. We think it necessary to look into the issue of a special channel of communication with A/201.’ Investigation showed that it was A/201 – an officer named Willy Lehmann, who had prompted Kur’s approach to the Russians, using him as a cut-out during their exploratory dealings.

Lehmann was born in 1884, and served twelve years in the Kaiser’s navy before becoming a policeman. His NKVD file spoke in the highest terms of his character, though noting the existence of a long-term mistress, Florentina Liverskaya, a thirty-eight-year-old seamstress who lived and worked at 21 Blumenstrasse. She was described, somewhat ungenerously, as a short woman with reddish hair and a plump face. When Kur started using his payments from the Soviet embassy to fund extravagant drinking sprees, Lehmann and his handler agreed that this now redundant intermediary must be got out of the way. With unusual sensitivity for Centre, instead of being pushed under a tram, in 1933 the dissolute ex-cop was rehoused in Sweden, where he passed the rest of his days as a small trader, occasionally moonlighting as an informant.

Lehmann, codenamed ‘Breitenbach’, thereafter became one of Moscow’s most valued German agents. For some time his handler was Vasily Zarubin, an NKVD star. Born in 1894, highly intelligent and personable though largely self-educated, Zarubin served successively in China and Europe as an ‘illegal’, latterly under cover as a Czech engineer. A cheerfully gregarious figure, though with ample blood on his hands, he spoke several languages and forged a warm relationship with Lehmann. Although Zarubin occasionally gave the policeman modest sums of money, Lehmann never appeared greedy, and seemed keen to assist the Russians simply because he disliked his own nation’s government – an animosity that became much more marked after the Nazis gained power.

Lehmann gave Moscow details about the structure and activities of Germany’s various intelligence organisations, and warned of forthcoming operations against Soviet interests. He provided samples of Abwehr codes, and passed on gossip about Nazi power struggles. He himself worked latterly in the Gestapo’s Department IVE, ultimately under Himmler’s control, and was made responsible for security at especially sensitive defence plants. Thus in 1935 he attended some early German rocket tests at Peenemünde, and produced a report on them which reached Stalin. He also acquired considerable information about other military and naval technological developments. As the Nazis tightened their grip during the 1930s, Lehmann became increasingly nervous about meeting Zarubin, or indeed any Soviet agent. He found himself under surveillance, as a result of a bizarre coincidence. A woman quarrelled with her lover, and denounced him to the authorities as a Russian spy: this proved to be another Gestapo officer, also named Lehmann. The muddle was eventually cleared up, and the shadow was lifted from ‘Breitenbach’. But in 1935 he asked for a false passport in case he had to run in a hurry, and this was duly provided. When Zarubin reported that Lehmann had fallen seriously ill, the news prompted a panic in Moscow: Centre declared that its most precious German source must be kept alive at any cost, and that the NKVD would meet his medical bills if the money could somehow be laundered. ‘Breitenbach’ recovered.

Later that year the GRU made a sudden decision to wind up its German networks amid the Nazis’ ruthless persecution of known communists, and to make a fresh start, beginning at the top. Both the Berlin station chief and his deputy were recalled to Moscow and liquidated. Early in 1937, the NKVD’s Zarubin also fell victim to the Purges. He was summoned home, and at an interview with Beria accused of treason. After interrogation, unusually he was neither executed nor cleared, but instead demoted. He remained for a time in Moscow, serving as assistant to a novice intelligence officer, Vladimir Pavlov.

Before Zarubin’s abrupt departure from Berlin, he transferred the handling of ‘Breitenbach’ to a woman named Clemens, one of his staff. She scarcely spoke German, but there was nobody else, and he himself expected soon to return. As matters fell out, Clemens was obliged to assume ongoing responsibility for the relationship, exchanging envelopes containing orders and information, which were then passed to another NKVD illegal, Ruben, who soon found himself the sole surviving member of the Berlin station as the Purges claimed ever more victims – the GRU’s Major Simon Gendin, who had sent Gourevitch to Brussels, was shot in February 1939.

Zarubin, in Moscow, contrived to send a note to ‘Breitenbach’, assuring him that he was not forgotten by his friends; that he should continue his intelligence activities, while exercising extreme caution. The Gestapo officer replied: ‘I have no reasons to worry. I am sure that they [in Moscow Centre] also know over there that everything is being done responsibly here, everything that can be done. So far there is no great need for anyone to visit from there. I will inform you if this will become necessary.’ As the NKVD’s silence became protracted, however, Lehmann grew frustrated and impatient. He sent another message to Zarubin via Clemens: ‘Just when I was able to make good deals, the company there stopped being interested in doing business with me, for completely unknown reasons.’ Zarubin responded soothingly that ‘the company’ tremendously valued his work, and besought him to keep going – which he did, until November 1938. But then, as the Soviet intelligence machine became paralysed by its domestic contortions, all contact between ‘Breitenbach’ and Moscow was lost: the relationship was not restored until the autumn of 1940.

Willy Lehmann was by no means Moscow’s only German source, nor even any longer its most important. One day in 1935 a Luftwaffe officer named Harro Schulze-Boysen, who held a senior post in Hermann Göring’s Air Ministry, contacted the Soviet embassy in Berlin with an offer of information, which was immediately accepted. He was given the codename ‘Corporal’, and NKVD file 34122. Schulze-Boysen was a champagne socialist from a smart Berlin family of intellectual inclinations – Admiral Tirpitz was among his forebears. From his desk in the Air Ministry he forged contacts in army staff communications, among Abwehr officers, and also with Hans Henniger, a government inspector of Luftwaffe equipment. Göring gave away the bride at his 1936 wedding, to the beautiful and exuberant Libertas Haas-Heye, who had worked for a time as a Berlin press officer for MGM Films. She now learned to share Schulze-Boysen’s political convictions and the burden of his labours for the Soviet Union, and her bed with a legion of lovers.

At about the same time, but independently, a senior civil servant in the economics ministry, Arvid Harnack, contacted the Soviet embassy, and was likewise recruited as agent ‘Corsican’, NKVD file 34118. Harnack was born in 1901 into a scholarly family in Darmstadt. He qualified as a lawyer and practised as an economist, spending some time in the United States. At the University of Wisconsin’s Madison campus he met Mildred Fish, a strikingly handsome and serious-minded student of English. They were married in 1929, and elected to live in Germany. Both were keenly interested in Marxism – they made a tour of the Soviet Union, and in 1932 launched a political study group. When Arvid began to pass information to the Russians, and to recruit fellow-foes of Hitler to his ring, he joined the Nazi Party to improve his protective colouring. Meanwhile both he and Schulze-Boysen steadily extended their groups of like-minded intellectual foes of Hitler. Between them, by 1939 they had opened windows into some of the most influential institutions in Nazi Germany.

Moscow now made a serious security mistake: it ordered that the two networks should collaborate. Their guiding spirits had very different temperaments. Schulze-Boysen was an exuberant, impulsive extrovert; Harnack was a quiet, intense intellectual, whose impeccable middle-class background enabled himself and his friends for years to escape the attention of the Gestapo and the Abwehr. The two men nonetheless forged a close relationship, driven by shared hatred of the Nazis and romantic enthusiasm for the Soviet Union. Until June 1941 they had no need of wirelesses, merely transmitting information through the Russians’ Berlin military attaché.

One of the most striking aspects of espionage is that its processes, the mere business of living a covert existence, acquire a life of their own, heedless of spies’ achievements as collectors of information. Anatoli Gourevitch, in his memoirs, touches on a weakness in his own training which might be applied to the experience of many other agents. He was exhaustively instructed in techniques – secret inks, passwords for rendezvous and suchlike. No matching effort, however, was expended upon explaining the purpose of his mission: ‘Why was so little heed paid to the means by which I might obtain information, to the whole organisational aspect of the business of intelligence-gathering?’ In other words, and as Gourevitch’s subsequent career illustrated, for many secret agents the management and perils of daily existence consumed a lion’s share of their energies, often overwhelming the function that mattered – the acquisition of information of value to their service and its government.

Arrived in Brussels early in 1939, fresh from the GRU training school, Gourevitch took rooms in a lodging house, enrolled himself in a language school in his guise as a Uruguayan visitor, and reflected that his own absolute ignorance of commerce seemed likely to prove an impediment to his intended cover life, helping to run a locally based business. This concern receded, however, in the face of a more serious one: disillusionment on first meeting his boss, Leopold Trepper. Gourevitch had forged a heroic mental image of this secret agent so much esteemed by Moscow Centre, yet now he was confronted by what he afterwards claimed was a drab, unimposing reality. He had been briefed to suppose that a solid business cover had been established for ‘Otto’s’ network in Belgium, whereas on the spot he found only a little suburban export business employing just three people and peddling ‘the Foreign Excellent Trench-Coat’. Its secretary was a young Russian émigré, married to a former tsarist army officer, who was apparently completely ignorant of the real nature of the firm’s operations. All the managers were Jews, which must make them instantly vulnerable in the event of a German takeover of Belgium.

Gourevitch felt more confidence in his fellow-agent ‘Andre’, a thirty-five-year-old Alsatian named Leon Grossvogel, who had deserted from the French army in 1925, then drifted around Germany before travelling to Palestine, where he became a communist, and forged a friendship with Trepper. After three years there he returned to Belgium, where his parents lived and ran a small trading house named ‘Au Roi’. It was the presence of the Grossvogels that persuaded Trepper to come to Belgium, and to exploit their commercial contacts as a cover, when in 1938 Moscow charged him with the formation of a West European espionage organisation. His new deputy nonetheless decided that Trepper’s supposed network of important intelligence contacts was nothing of the sort. While large allowance must be made for the fact that Gourevitch published his version long after he himself was denounced as a traitor, the thrust of his remarks makes sense. Whatever Trepper’s tradecraft skills, together with his plausibility in composing reports which found favour in Moscow, it is hard to imagine what useful intelligence he could have acquired in low-grade Belgian and French business circles, the only society that he had access to. Centre seemed content to accept Trepper’s claim to have created a system through which material could be gathered and passed to Moscow from its Berlin sources in the event of war with Germany. But Gourevitch dismissed as ‘completely false’ the claims of post-war Soviet historians that Trepper ran a large network of important agents extending into Scandinavia.

On the eve of war, Moscow Centre could boast that the Schulze-Boysen/Harnack groups in Germany provided excellent information from the Nazis’ inner circle. The ‘Lucy’ Ring in Switzerland had established itself soundly, but only began to provide important intelligence from 1941 onwards. The Trepper–Gourevitch networks trod water until 1940. The extensive Soviet secret machine in the US, which will be described elsewhere, produced a steady stream of technological intelligence, which would have been more useful to the Russians in advancing their own defence base if their industries had been capable of exploiting it.

We have left to last the best of all Moscow’s men – or rather, the most spectacular. Richard Sorge grips the imagination of posterity, more because of what he was than through his influence on history, which was marginal. He dispatched to Moscow a flow of privileged political and strategic information, acquired through an access to high places achieved through sheer force of personality. Much of his material was ignored, however, or merely duplicated similar reports from more authoritative Berlin sources. Some historians who selectively quote Sorge’s occasional brilliant insights have ignored his misjudgements and false prophecies – ‘noise’. His character and career as an agent were nonetheless extraordinary.

‘Ika’, as Sorge was nicknamed, was born in Baku in 1895, one of nine children of a German petroleum engineer and a Russian mother. After completing school in Germany he found himself thrust into the Kaiser’s war as a young soldier. While convalescing in Königsberg after suffering a bad wound, he was indoctrinated into communist ideology, allegedly by the father of one of his nurses, though there was already a family precedent: Sorge’s grandfather had been an associate of Marx and Engels. When the war ended he became a Marxist instructor, and acquired a PhD in political science. In 1921 he married Christiane Gerlach, having persuaded her to abandon a previous husband. His communist and revolutionary links attracted the unfavourable attention of the police, and he found Germany becoming too hot to hold him. In 1924 the couple moved to Moscow, where Sorge was recruited and trained as a Soviet agent. Uncertainty persists about his movements in the next five years, though it is known that he visited Britain. Christiane left him, without the formality of a divorce – his immense appeal to women made him careless about whether they stayed or went. The combination of rough-hewn good looks and a hypnotic, driven personality enabled him to attract, and often to maintain in tandem, an impressive range of lovers of all shapes and sizes. Though sceptics later condemned Sorge as a charlatan as well as a betrayer – a fundamentally shallow figure despite his intellectual pretensions – he was a strikingly successful one.

In 1929 the Red Army’s Fourth Department – later the GRU – offered him an overseas assignment. He requested China, and arrived in Shanghai that November under cover as a freelance journalist, with a wireless-operator in tow. He achieved rapid social success in the European concessions, and made well-informed friends. Also agents. He himself was masquerading as an American, but dropped the pose with Agnes Smedley, the American China traveller, whom he enlisted in Moscow’s service. In 1930 he met twenty-nine-year-old Hotsumi Ozaki, a struggling magazine writer with communist sympathies, whom he also recruited and who played a notable part in his subsequent career. Like almost all those who worked with him, Ozaki fell under the foreigner’s spell. Long afterwards, another of his Japanese network said wonderingly of the superspy that Sorge became, ‘You meet a man like him only once in a lifetime.’ The GRU agent threw himself into researching every aspect of Chinese life, and his reports earned warm approval from his chiefs.

In January 1933 he returned to Moscow, where he ‘married’ again: a young Russian girl named Yekaterina Maximova – ‘Katcha’ – to whom he wrote emotional letters through the years that followed. He himself wanted to stay in Russia, but what use was a foreign spy in his employers’ own country? The GRU decided to post him to Tokyo. In preparation for this assignment, Sorge travelled to Germany, now Nazi-ruled, to secure appropriate credentials, and achieved another brilliant social and professional success, while somehow evading exposure of his communist past. He met the publisher of Zeitschrift fur Geopolitik, an ardent National Socialist, and secured from him both a contract as a ‘stringer’ and a letter of introduction to the German embassy in Tokyo.