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

Bystroletov’s unconventional flamboyance may help to explain why he never achieved officer rank in Soviet intelligence and remained simply an illegal agent,¹⁴ attached in the early 1920s and late 1930s to the illegal Berlin residency of Boris Bazarov (codenamed KIN).¹⁵ Unlike Bystroletov, more conventional OGPU officers missed a number of opportunities to recruit agents with access to diplomatic ciphers. One such opportunity, which later led to a personal rebuke by Stalin to the OGPU personnel responsible, occurred in Paris in August 1928. A stranger, later identified as the Swiss businessman and adventurer Giovanni de Ry (codenamed ROSSI), presented himself at the Soviet embassy and asked to see the military attaché, or the first secretary.¹⁶ According to a later account by Bystroletov based on an embassy report, de Ry was a short man whose red nose contrasted colorfully with his yellow briefcase. ¹⁷ He allegedly told the OGPU resident, Vladimir Voynovich:¹⁸

This briefcase contains the codes and ciphers of Italy. You, no doubt, have copies of the ciphered telegrams of the local Italian embassy. Take the briefcase and check the authenticity of its contents. Once you have satisfied yourself that they are genuine, photograph them and give me 200,000 French francs.

De Ry also offered to provide future Italian diplomatic ciphers for a similar sum. Voynovich took the ciphers into a back room, where they were photographed by his wife. He then returned the originals to de Ry, denounced them as forgeries, ordered him out of the embassy and threatened to call the police. Though the Centre later changed its mind, at the time it commended Voynovich for his astuteness in obtaining Italian ciphers at no cost to the OGPU.¹⁹

Exactly a year later, in August 1929, there was another, similar walk-in at the Paris embassy. On this occasion the visitor was a cipher clerk from the Foreign Office Communications Department, Ernest Holloway Oldham, then accompanying a British trade delegation in Paris. Voynovich seems to have tried to repeat the deception practiced on de Ry a year earlier. Oldham, however, was more cautious than de Ry, brought no cipher material with him, tried to prevent his identity being discovered and sought to limit his contact with the OGPU to a single transaction. He identified himself only as “Charlie,” misled Voynovich by claiming to work in the Foreign Office printing department, and announced that he could obtain a copy of the British diplomatic cipher. Oldham asked for 50,000 pounds, Voynovich beat him down to 10,000 pounds and they agreed on a meeting in Berlin early the following year.²⁰

Before that meeting took place, the work of the Paris embassy and OGPU residency was disrupted by the defection of the Soviet chargé d’affaires, Grigori Besedovsky, in October 1929. Accused of counter-revolutionary “plotting,” Besedovsky made a dramatic escape over the embassy wall, pursued by OGPU guards who had orders to return him to Moscow for interrogation and, almost certainly, execution. Besedovsky’s memoirs, published in 1930, caused outrage in the Centre. They denounced Stalin as “the embodiment of the most senseless type of oriental despotism,” and revealed a number of OGPU secrets: among them the offers of Italian and British ciphers to the Paris residency by unidentified walk-ins.²¹

These revelations led to Bystroletov’s urgent recall to Moscow. At the Lubyanka, Abram Aronovich Slutsky (later head of foreign intelligence) showed him a copy of Besedovsky’s memoirs. Opposite the reference to the deception of de Ry, the unidentified walk-in who had provided Italian ciphers in 1928, the instruction “Reopen!” had been penciled in the margin by Stalin himself. Slutsky instructed Bystroletov to return to Paris at once, discover the identity of the walk-in swindled two years earlier, renew contact and obtain further ciphers from him. “Where can I find him?” Bystroletov asked. “That’s your business,” Slutsky replied. “You have six months to track him down.”²²