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

A second copy of the memorandum was obtained in Japanese-occupied Korea by the residency at Seoul, headed by Ivan Andreevich Chichayev (later wartime resident in London). A Japanese interpreter, codenamed ANO, recruited by the INO residency, succeeded in extracting the document, along with other secret material, from the safe of the Japanese police chief in Seoul.⁷² A copy of the Tanaka memorandum was later leaked by INO to the American press to give the impression that it had been obtained by an agent working for the United States.⁷³ As recently as 1997 an SVR official history continued to celebrate the simultaneous acquisition of the memorandum in Harbin and Seoul as “an absolutely unique occurrence in intelligence operations.”⁷⁴ Though somewhat exaggerated, this judgment accurately reflects the enormous importance attached at the time to the discovery of Tanaka’s prediction of war with Russia.

The acute anxiety in Moscow caused by the breach of diplomatic relations with Britain and the apparent threat from Japan was clearly reflected in an alarmist article by Stalin, published a few days after he received the Tanaka memorandum:

IT IS HARDLY open to doubt that the chief contemporary question is that of the threat of a new imperialist war. It is not a question of some indefinite and immaterial “danger” of a new war. It is a matter of a real and material threat of a new war in general, and war against the USSR in particular.⁷⁵

The fact that Constantini had failed to provide anything remotely resembling a British version of the Tanaka memorandum did not lead either Stalin or the conspiracy theorists of the Centre to conclude that Britain had no plans to attack the Soviet Union. They believed instead that greater efforts were required to penetrate the secret councils of the Western warmongers. Stalin, who had emerged as the clear victor in the three-year power struggle which followed Lenin’s death, demanded more intelligence on the (mostly imaginary) Western plots against the Soviet Union which he was sure existed.

In an effort to make Soviet espionage less detectable and more deniable, the main responsibility for intelligence collection was shifted from “legal” to “illegal” residencies, which operated independently of Soviet diplomatic and trade missions. In later years the establishment of a new illegal residency became an immensely timeconsuming operation which involved years of detailed training and the painstaking construction of “legends” to give the illegals false identities. The largely improvised attempt to expand the illegal network rapidly in the late 1920s and early 1930s, without the detailed preparation which later became mandatory, brought into OGPU foreign operations both unconventional talent and a number of confidence tricksters. Among the secret scandals discovered by Mitrokhin in KGB files was that of the illegal residency established in Berlin in 1927 with the Austrian Bertold Karl Ilk as resident and Moritz Weinstein as his deputy. A later investigation concluded that the Centre should have noted the “suspicious speed” with which the Ilk-Weinstein residency claimed to be expanding its agent network. Within two months it was reporting operations in Britain, France and Poland as well as in Germany. Ilk refused to provide more than sketchy information on his agents’ identity on security grounds. His failure to supply detailed biographies was reluctantly accepted by the Centre, which was still reeling from the widespread unmasking of OGPU networks in the spring of 1927. It gradually became clear, however, that the core of the Ilk-Weinstein illegal network consisted of their own relatives and that some elements of it were pure invention. Its agent operations in Britain and France were discovered to be “plain bluff,” though an effective way of obtaining funds from the Centre for Ilk and Weinstein. The network in Germany and Poland, while not wholly fictitious, was under surveillance by the local police and security services. The Centre closed down the entire residency in 1933, though without attracting the publicity occasioned by the intelligence failures of 1927.⁷⁶