The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

Reilly’s resistance after his arrest did not last much longer than Savinkov’s. His KGB file contains a letter, probably authentic, to Dzerzhinsky dated October 30, 1925, in which he promised to reveal all he knew about British and American intelligence as well as Russian émigrés in the West. Six days later Reilly was taken for a walk in the woods near Moscow and, without warning, shot from behind. According to an OGPU report, he “let out a deep breath and fell without a cry.” Among those who accompanied him on his final walk in the woods was Grigori Syroyezhkin, the probable assassin of Savinkov a year earlier. Reilly’s corpse was put on private display in the Lubyanka sickbay to allow OGPU officers to celebrate their triumph.⁶¹ Appropriately for a career in which myth and reality had become inextricably confused, rumors circulated for many years in the West that Reilly had escaped execution and adopted a new identity. The TREST deception was finally exposed in 1927, to the embarrassment of the intelligence services of Britain, France, Poland, Finland and the Baltic states who had all, in varying degrees, been taken in by it.⁶²

AS WELL AS engaging in permanent conflict with counter-revolution, both real and imagined, Soviet intelligence between the wars also became increasingly successful in penetrating the main imperialist powers. It had two major operational advantages over Western intelligence agencies. First, while security in Moscow became obsessional, much Western security remained feeble. Secondly, the Communist parties and their “fellow travelers” in the West gave Soviet intelligence a major source of ideological recruits of which it took increasing advantage.

While operation TREST was at its height, INO, the OGPU’s foreign intelligence service, succeeded in making its first major penetration of the British foreign service. The penetration agent was an Italian messenger in the British embassy in Rome, Francesco Constantini (codenamed DUNCAN), who was recruited in 1924 by the OGPU residency with the help of an Italian Communist, Alfredo Allegretti, who had worked as a Russian embassy clerk before the Revolution. Despite his lowly status, Constantini had access to a remarkable range of diplomatic secrets.⁶³ Until the Second World War, the Foreign Office did not possess a single security officer, let alone a security department. Security in many British embassies was remarkably lax. In Rome, according to Sir Andrew Noble, who was stationed at the embassy in the mid-1930s, it was “virtually non-existent.” Embassy servants had access to the keys to red boxes and filing cabinets containing classified documents, as well as—probably—the number of the combination lock on the embassy safe. Even when two copies of a diplomatic cipher were missing in 1925, it did not occur to British diplomats that they might have been removed by Constantini—as they almost certainly were.⁶⁴

For more than a decade Francesco Constantini handed over a great variety of diplomatic documents and cipher material. Probably from an early stage he also involved his brother, Secondo, who worked as an embassy servant, in the theft of documents. In addition to despatches on Anglo-Italian relations exchanged between London and the Rome embassy, Constantini was often able to supply the “confidential print” of selected documents from the Foreign Office and major British missions designed to give ambassadors an overview of current foreign policy.⁶⁵ By January 1925 he was providing, on average, 150 pages of classified material a week. Constantini made no secret of his motives. The Rome residency reported to the Centre, “He collaborates with us exclusively for money, and does not conceal the fact. He has set himself the goal of becoming a rich man, and that is what he strives for.” In 1925 the Centre pronounced Constantini its most valuable agent. Convinced of a vast, nonexistent British plot to destroy the Soviet state, it counted on agent DUNCAN to provide early warning of a British attack, and instructed the Rome residency:

England is now the organizing force behind a probable attack on the USSR in the near future. A continuous hostile cordon [of states] is being formed against us in the West. In the East, in Persia, Afghanistan and China we observe a similar picture… Your task (and consider it a priority) is to provide documentary and agent materials which reveal the details of the English plan.