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

misery of a special and peculiar kind… and to many people it implies a final condemnation of the society which has produced it… If you tell men and women, already inclined by temperament and tradition to revolutionary opinions, that their sufferings are caused by an impersonal economic system, you leave them but one choice. Lenin could not do better.

One evening, probably at the beginning of 1938, sitting in Rees’s flat with, as usual, a bottle of whiskey between them, Burgess told him that his Spectator review showed that he had “the heart of the matter in him.” Then, according to Rees, he added with unusual solemnity, “I am a Comintern agent and have been ever since I came down from Cambridge.”⁶² In later years Rees was to try to give the impression that he did not agree to become an agent. His KGB file makes clear that he was recruited—though it confirms that Burgess asked him not to work for the NKVD but “to help the Party.”⁶³ As an NKVD case officer with whom Burgess made contact later in the year reported to the Centre, he regarded Rees (henceforth codenamed FLEET or GROSS) as a key part of his Oxbridge recruitment strategy:

The kind of work which he would do with great moral satisfaction and with absolute confidence in its success and effectiveness is the recruitment by us of young people graduating from Oxford and Cambridge Universities and preparing them to enter the civil service. For this kind of work he has such assistants as TONY [Blunt] in Cambridge and GROSS [Rees] in Oxford. MÄDCHEN [Burgess] always returns to this idea at every meeting…⁶⁴

Though unhappy with Burgess’s undisciplined recruiting methods, the Centre regarded Rees as potentially an important agent. Three of Britain’s leading appeasers—Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary; Sir John Simon, then Home Secretary; and Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times—were nonresident Fellows of All Souls. The Center attached exaggerated importance to the fact that Rees met all three from time to time on high table. It also overestimated the influence of Rees’s friend Sir Ernest Swinton, a retired major-general who had been Chichele Professor of Military History since 1925 and was referred to by the Centre as “General Swinton.”⁶⁵

WHILE BURGESS WAS pressing ahead enthusiastically with his Oxbridge recruitment strategy, INO was in turmoil. On February 17, 1938 its head, Abram Slutsky, was found dead in his office, allegedly from a heart attack. But at his lying in state in the NKVD officers’ club, his senior staff noticed on his face the tell-tale signs of cyanide poisoning.⁶⁶ Yagoda, meanwhile, was confessing at his trial to working for the German, Japanese and Polish intelligence services, to poisoning his predecessor, Menzhinsky, and to attempting to poison his successor, Yezhov.⁶⁷ By the end of the year, Slutsky’s two immediate successors as head of INO, Zelman Pasov and Mikhail Shpigelglas, had also been shot as enemies of the people.⁶⁸ INO collapsed into such confusion during 1938 that for 127 consecutive days not a single foreign intelligence report was forwarded to Stalin.⁶⁹ In December Yezhov was replaced as head of the NKVD by Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria; a few months later he was accused of treasonable conspiracy with Britain, Germany, Japan and Poland.⁷⁰ As NKVD officers went home in the evening, each one must have wondered whether the knock at the door in the early hours would signal that his own doom was nigh.