Investigating soviet espionage and subversion: the case of Donald Maclean

This essay sets out the dimensions of investigating Soviet espionage and subversion, highlighting how Maclean's image as a Soviet agent has developed over the past 50 years. It will then consider to what extent new documents at the Public Record Office alter his image. Maclean's crime was treachery but what exactly is the intellectual challenge in investigating espionage? Just what can be achieved? Sir Dick White former head of MI6 offered this advice: Espionage is a crime that often leaves no trace of evidence. The investigator relies upon intuition for coincidences. After considering the circumstances, he might reach the moment of epiphany when all the facts added up to one conclusion¹     

US Atomic Energy Intelligence Against the Soviet Target, 1945-1970

Throughout the Cold War, the United States and its allies mounted a massive atomic energy intelligence effort against the Soviet Union. Long-range, standoff technical systems provided the most data and allowed for successful tracking of many aspects of the Soviet nuclear program. Because of the closed nature of Soviet society and Soviet security and counter-intelligence measures, exploitation of open sources and traditional espionage operations, although important, were less productive. The relative lack of human intelligence made it difficult to understand important developments inside the Soviet nuclear complex and resulted in significant intelligence gaps.     

Soviet industrial espionage against American military technology and the US response, 1930–1945

Between 1930 and 1945, the Soviet Union played a significant role in American domestic affairs. Although its agents’ infiltration of social movements and government agencies is well known, their parallel and highly successful practice of espionage against American industrial and military technology is less familiar. Washington officials were aware of Soviet spying, but mired in the Depression and then preoccupied with war, they mounted only a limited response, reflecting a political culture that did not emphasize active counterintelligence efforts. As a result, early Cold War revelations of unmistakable Soviet espionage shocked Americans, polarizing the Soviet‐American relationship and introducing a zealous domestic security apparatus.     

Compartmentalized minds: the Communist security services’ understanding of the Western espionage threat to the Communist bloc during the Cold War

ABSTRACT

Marxism-Leninism required the counter-intelligence officers of the East German Stasi and Soviet KGB to believe in a Western espionage threat to their states which was far greater and more malevolent than was actually the case. In fact, the two counter-intelligence staffs knew that the Western states were trying to create small agent networks on their territory, tasked only with collecting intelligence. This accurate understanding enabled them to contain Western espionage during the Cold War. They ‘compartmentalized’ their knowledge of the real Western espionage threat from their belief in a much greater threat. They believed in one, but knew of another.     

‘Venona’: the British dimension

‘Venona’ remains the greatest secret of the Cold War yet to be declassified, and offers the pieces of a jigsaw that, when assembled and interpreted, reveals the identities of dozens of Soviet agents who participated in GRU and NKVD networks across the globe between 1940 and 1948. Among them, operating in London, were Professor J.B.S Haldane, codenamed ‘Intelligentsia’, and Lord Swaythling's son, the Honourable Ivor Montagu, appropriately codenamed ‘Nobility’. Contained in the sometimes partially decrypted texts are clues to hundreds of other, as yet unexposed, spies, active in Australia, Mexico, Sweden, the United States, Britain, and numerous other countries. Betrayed by William Wiesband and Kim Philby, the ‘Venona’ project failed to find the traitor known as ‘Baron’ inside the wartime GCHQ, but was responsible for the arrest of Klaus Fuchs, confirming the guilt of Alger Hiss, Donald Maclean and the Rosenbergs, supporting the allegations of Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, and sparking off molehunts on three continents. ‘Venona’ sheds important new light on the assassination of Trotsky, Soviet penetration of the Manhattan project at Los Alamos and Berkeley, and reveals high-level espionage in the White House, OSS, the State Department and virtually every government department in Washington DC.     

Ambivalent heroes: Russian defectors and American power in the early Cold War

This article uses recently declassified CIA documents to examine Soviet defectors of the 1950s, with a focus on US programs to court, receive, and utilize defectors against their homeland in espionage and psychological warfare operations. Eschewing the tendency at the time and in later scholarship to emphasize defectors’ ideological motivations, the piece argues that defectors often crossed over the Iron Curtain for reasons of self-preservation or self-advancement. Once in the West, defectors were mistrusted and badly assimilated into host societies. For these reasons, Soviet defectors rarely proved to be the committed anti-communists that American policy-makers expected them to be.     

The Dentist Chair: Dr. Gessel Schkolnikoff and the mysteries of Soviet espionage

The history of Soviet espionage is largely the story of failures and defections. This article considers the possibility that a low-key dentist, who had a surgery in London in the middle of the last century, was one of the exceptions and successfully avoided detection. While I was researching in the files of several well-known Soviet agents, the name of Dr. Gessel Schkolnikoff often appeared, and then in early 2018 a Home Office file was released to the National Archives of the UK that has provided some of the missing background to this Russian immigrant. There are precedents for Soviet intelligence agencies using a dental surgery as a conduit for passing on information and there are persuasive indications that Dr. Schkolnikoff’s surgery can be added to their list.     

Soviet Spies and British Counter-Intelligence in the 1930s: Espionage in the Woolwich Arsenal and the Foreign Office Communications Department

Among the recently declassified security documents from the MI5 archive have been files about British counter-espionage against the Soviet Union in the 1930s. The collaboration between Russian archivists and western academics and journalists has produced official and unofficial accounts of such espionage from the Soviet perspective. The management of the spies Percy Glading and John Herbert King, and their discovery by British counter-espionage, were interesting examples of the contest between Soviet intelligence and the British security authorities, which highlighted the strengths and weaknesses of both sides in a basically unequal contest.     

‘No Wishful Thinking Allowed’: Secret Service Committee and Intelligence Reform in Great Britain, 1919–23

The May 2002 tranche of British Security Service files released to the Public Record Office included hitherto classified policy files containing documents on Secret Service Committee meetings held from 1919 to 1923. This body wrote an important yet relatively obscure chapter in British intelligence history: the post-First World War reorganization and retasking of British secret service machinery, the focus now being Soviet Russia. However, by encouraging the deliberate overstatement of the Bolshevik 'subversive' threat and then backing excessive measures to counter it, some British officials may have sown the seeds of government's later inability to detect a much graver peril to national security, that of Soviet espionage.     

Operation ‘Schooner/Nylon’: RAF flying in the Berlin control zone

Shortly after the end of the Second World War six Allied and Soviet Military Liaison Missions were established on the territory of the former Third Reich. The British contribution to this was known as BRIXMIS, the British Commanders ‘‐in‐Chief Mission to the Soviet Forces in Germany. However, after a short time liaison was not the only activity, espionage inevitably became the most important function of BRIXMIS. One of the more important and dangerous operations was the acquisition of aerial intelligence of Soviet installations in East Germany and East Berlin taking photography with hand‐held cameras from a single‐engined Chipmunk aircraft which was ostensibly used by the RAF for training purposes.     

The Spies Who Loved Them: The Blairs in Barcelona, 1937

In recent years, and particularly around the time of his birth-centenary in 2003, George Orwell's reputation has come under a cloud. Both his unexampled honesty as a writer and his stainless political idealism have been brought into question. This article takes a further tentative step into this hitherto forbidden region by exploring the connections of Eric Blair and Eileen O'Shaughnessey with various espionage agents and intelligence networks in Barcelona in the spring of 1937. Although the argument is founded on a range of original contemporary documentation, as with many Spanish Civil War stories, facts are complicated and conclusions necessarily provisional.     

The scientist who came in from the cold: Heinz Barwich's flight from the GDR

The arms race between the superpowers made spying on science and technology very important during the Cold War. However, whether Western secret services managed to recruit valuable sources in the research laboratories of the Soviet Union is a subject about which very little is known. This article shows that in the early 1960s the distinguished East German physicist Heinz Barwich did indeed spy for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) within the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research, near Moscow. It also demonstrates that the Berlin Wall, built in 1961, had a considerable impact on Western espionage in East Germany.     

Anglo-American Intelligence and the Soviet War Scare: The Untold Story

Abstract

During the Soviet war scare of the 1980s, British intelligence shared vital information from KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky with its American partners. The US intelligence community, however, was suspicious of the message and the messenger, dismissing Soviet ‘war talk’ as disinformation. Some officials even believed that the British had tweaked their reports to influence US policy. President Ronald Reagan, however, on the advice of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, listened to Gordievsky rather than his intelligence advisors. The war scare had a profound influence on Reagan's thinking about nuclear war, Kremlin fears, and Soviet–American relations that led him to seek a new détente with Moscow and the end of the Cold War through diplomacy rather than confrontation.?Subsequent events and post-Cold War revelations vindicated Gordievsky. Reagan sought his advice on the eve of his first summit meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev and later expressed his gratitude during a private meeting in the Oval Office.     

Protecting secrets: British diplomatic cipher machines in the early Cold War, 1945–1970

This article examines how effectively Britain secured its diplomatic communications against hostile decryption during the early Cold War. It shows that between 1945 and 1970 the Foreign Office and the Commonwealth Relations Office introduced and operated four advanced cipher machines, Typex, Rockex, Noreen and Alvis, which produced very strong ciphers. However, Britain did suffer physical compromises of Rockex through Soviet espionage and an attack on the British embassy in Beijing. Rockex was also vulnerable to technical surveillance of its acoustic and Tempest emissions, and the Soviets exploited this to read the encrypted communications of the British embassy in Moscow.     

Seeing Red: U.S. Air Force Assessments of the Soviet Union, 1945-1949

In the immediate postwar period Army Air Force A-2 cultivated a unique intelligence culture that focussed on the air-atomic threat posed by the Soviet Union and the use of the most advanced technologies to monitor countries behind the 'Iron Curtain'. Although most intelligence reports presented a detailed analysis of Russian air power capabilities, consideration was also given to an assessment of intentions. Based on a literal interpretation of Marxist texts and an unambiguous reading of Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, A-2 more than any other agency was convinced of the Soviet willingness to wage war. As for a reading of capabilities, the fact that the Soviets were developing a long-range air force was in itself evidence of intentions. A-2 was, however, left out of the national security decision-making loop until after the successful test of the Soviet A-bomb, which was accurately predicted by the Air Force in the summer of 1949. Until that time most officials in the Truman administration believed in the likelihood of the slow incremental expansion of Soviet power rather than the launching of an 'atomic Pearl harbor' against the Western bloc.     

Subs and PSYOPs: The 1982 Swedish Submarine Intrusions

In the 1980s, the Soviet Union was believed to have targeted Sweden by sending submarines into Swedish archipelagos and naval bases, which forced Prime Minister Olof Palme to terminate his ambitious foreign policy. The ‘imminent Soviet threat’ changed Swedish public opinion drastically. Twenty years later, statements made by the responsible US and UK leaders, including then US Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and then UK Navy Minister Keith Speed, show that these operations were run by US and British submarines testing Swedish coastal defences. Then US Secretary of Navy John Lehman and the Swedish Secretary of the Submarine Inquiry, Mathias Mossberg, indicate that these operations were also deception operations and psychological operations. Swedish former defence ministers have said that ‘it was wrong to point to the Soviet Union’, indicating that the more visible submarines may have been from the West. Ralf Lillbacka's article in Intelligence and National Security in 2010 does not take this information into consideration. The technical evidence we now have is proof of Western submarines operating in Swedish archipelagos. This evidence confirms the statements made by responsible leaders.     

Venona and Alger Hiss

Alger Hiss, the American diplomat tried in a US federal district court in New York and convicted in 1950 of perjury, remains a disputed icon of the Cold War, representing either infiltration of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations by Communist spies or an historic miscarriage of justice. This article shows that a ‘Venona’ document released by the US and the UK in 1996 tentatively identifying Hiss as an espionage agent is erroneous and irreconcilable with the evidence presented by the US at Hiss's trials; that KGB documents have been misconstrued as supporting the identification; and that another Venona document tends to exonerate rather than to implicate Hiss. Venona errors regarding Hiss raise questions about the accuracy and reliability of the entire Venona process and its products.     

Planting the espionage tree: the French military and the professionalization of intelligence at the end of the nineteenth century

Abstract

Intelligence in France evolved as it professionalized at the end of the nineteenth century, led by determined individuals within the French army. However, in the centuries prior to the professionalization of espionage and counterespionage, military men rejected intelligence, viewing the practice with skepticism and disdain. This article asserts that there was a change in views towards espionage, particularly among the military, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century. As the army went from eschewing intelligence to embracing it and taking the lead in its practice, the nature of intelligence work in France consequently reflected the goals and aims of the army, prioritizing military intelligence over others.