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

During almost four years as an illegal controlling British agents, Deutsch served under three illegal residents, each of whom operated under a variety of aliases: Ignati Reif, codenamed MARR; Aleksandr Orlov, codenamed SCHWED (“Swede”); and Teodor Maly, successively codenamed PAUL, THEO and MANN. By 1938 all three were to become victims of the Terror. Reif and Maly were shot for imaginary crimes. Orlov defected just in time to North America, securing his survival by threatening to arrange for the revelation of all he knew about Soviet espionage should he be pursued by an NKVD assassination squad.²⁶ Somewhat misleadingly, a KGB/SVR-sponsored biography of Orlov published in 1993 claimed that he was “the mastermind” responsible for the recruitment of the Cambridge agents.²⁷ There are probably two reasons for this exaggeration. The first is hierarchical. Within the Soviet nomenklatura senior bureaucrats commonly claimed, and were accorded, the credit for their subordinates’ successes. The claim that Orlov, the most senior intelligence officer involved in British operations in the 1930s, “recruited” Philby is a characteristic example of this common phenomenon.²⁸ But there are also more contemporary reasons for the inflation of Orlov’s historical importance. It suits the SVR, which sees itself as the inheritor of the finest traditions of the KGB First Chief Directorate, to seek to demonstrate the foolishness of Western intelligence and security services by claiming that they failed for over thirty years to notice that the leading recruiter of the Cambridge Five and other agents was living under their noses in the United States. For several years before his death in 1973, the KGB tried to persuade Orlov to return to a comfortable flat and generous pension in Russia, where he would doubtless have been portrayed for propaganda purposes as a man who, despite being forced to flee from Stalin’s Terror, had—like Philby—“kept faith with Lenin’s Revolution” and used his superior intelligence training to take in Western intelligence agencies for many years.²⁹

In reality, Orlov spent only just over a year in London—ten days in July 1934, followed by the period from September 1934 to October 1935.³⁰ During that period Deutsch, who was subordinate in rank to Orlov, had to seek his approval for his intelligence operations. On occasion Orlov took the initiative in giving instructions to Deutsch. But the files noted by Mitrokhin make clear that the grand strategy which led to the targeting of Philby and other young Cambridge high-fliers was devised not by Orlov but by Deutsch.³¹ And, as Philby himself acknowledged, no other controller equaled Deutsch’s tactical skill in implementing that strategy.

Philby’s first major service to Soviet intelligence was to direct Deutsch to two other potential Cambridge recruits, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess.³² If not already a committed Communist by the time he entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in 1931, Donald Maclean became one during his first year. As the handsome, academically gifted son of a former Liberal cabinet minister, Maclean must have seemed to Deutsch an almost ideal candidate to penetrate the corridors of power. On his graduation with first-class honors in modern languages in June 1934, however, Maclean showed no immediate sign of wanting a career in Whitehall. His ambition was either to teach English in the Soviet Union or to stay at Cambridge to work for a PhD. In the course of the summer he changed his mind, telling his mother that he intended to prepare for the Foreign Office entrance examinations in the following year.³³ That change of heart reflected the influence of Deutsch. The first approach to Maclean was made through Philby in August 1934. Deutsch reported that Philby had been instructed to meet Maclean, discuss his job prospects and contacts and ask him to open contact with the Communist Party and begin work for the NKVD. Maclean agreed. For the time being, however, the Centre refused to sanction meetings between Deutsch and Maclean, and contact with him for the next two months was maintained through Philby. Maclean’s first codename, like Philby’s, had two versions: WAISE in German, SIROTA in Russian—both meaning “Orphan” (an allusion to the death of his father two years earlier).³⁴