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

WHILE REISS WAS maintaining contact with Lemoine, Bystroletov was finding Oldham increasingly desperate to extricate himself from the OGPU. By the summer of 1932 Bystroletov feared that Oldham’s worsening alcoholism and carelessness at work would attract the attention of MI5. The Centre concluded that Oldham’s increasingly erratic behavior also risked exposing Bystroletov to a terrible revenge from the supposedly ruthless British intelligence services. On September 17, in recognition of his bravery in the face of nonexistent British assassination squads, it presented him with a rifle carrying the inscription “For unstinting struggle against Counter-Revolution, from your colleagues in the OGPU.”³⁷

On September 30, 1932, less than a fortnight after Bystroletov received his rifle, Oldham resigned from the Foreign Office, unable to stand the pressures of his double life.³⁸ To his despair, the OGPU still refused to leave him in peace. Over the next year Bystroletov extracted from him details of all his former colleagues in the Communications Department, hoping to recruit at least one of them as Oldham’s successor. As his drinking got further out of control, Oldham became convinced that his arrest was only a matter of time. His wife told Bystroletov that her husband believed that the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Robert Vansittart, had personally put him under observation and that British intelligence was also on the trail of Bystroletov.³⁹ Though there was probably no substance to these fears, the Centre took them seriously. The OGPU trouble-shooter and “flying illegal” Teodor Maly reported to the Centre from London on July 6 that Bystroletov was in great danger:

It is possible that ANDREI [Bystroletov] will be liquidated by the enemy. None the less I have not given an order for his immediate departure. For him to depart now would mean the loss of a source of such importance [Oldham] that it would weaken our defense and increase the power of the enemy. The loss of ANDREI is possible today, as is that of other colleagues tomorrow. The nature of their work makes such risks unavoidable.⁴⁰

The Centre replied on August 10:

Please inform ANDREI that we here are fully aware of the self-denial, discipline, resourcefulness and courage that he has shown in the very difficult and dangerous conditions of recent days while working with ARNO.⁴¹

Bystroletov continued to receive high praise for his skill in outwitting a British version of the Serebryansky Service which existed only in the conspiratorial imagination of the OGPU.

On September 29, 1933, almost a year to the day after his resignation from the Foreign Office, Oldham was found unconscious in the gas-filled kitchen of his house in Pembroke Gardens, rushed to the hospital and pronounced dead on arrival. An inquest found that he had taken his life by “coal gas suffocation” while of “unsound mind.”⁴² The Centre had no doubt that Oldham had been murdered. Its report on his death concluded: “In order to avoid a scandal the [British] intelligence service had ARNO physically eliminated, making his death appear to be suicide.” It believed, however, that Bystroletov had disguised his identity so successfully that the Foreign Office believed Oldham had been working for French rather than Soviet intelligence.⁴³