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

A minority of the ideological agents in the West, however, were so sickened by the Nazi-Soviet Pact that they ended their connection with the NKVD. The most important of those who broke contact in Britain was FLEET, Goronwy Rees. During a visit to Moscow in 1993, Rees’s daughter Jenny was informed, accurately, during a briefing by an SVR representative that Rees had refused to cooperate after the Pact: “We hear no more of him after that.” At the end of the briefing, Jenny Rees asked perceptively: “You know something else, do you, about Rees that you are not going to tell me?”⁹⁴ The SVR did indeed. The most important of the secrets that the SVR was unwilling to reveal was that Burgess, by now an SIS officer, panicked when Rees decided to break away, sent an urgent message to the Centre warning that Rees might betray both himself and Blunt, and asked for Rees to be assassinated. The Centre refused. Rees’s KGB file, however, records that he did not betray Burgess and Blunt because of his “old friendship” with Burgess. In an attempt to make betrayal less likely, Burgess told Rees that he too had been disillusioned by the Nazi-Soviet Pact and had ended illegal work for the Communist Party.⁹⁵ Maclean was also deeply worried by Rees’s “defection.” Years later, as he was beginning to crack under the strain of his double life as British diplomat and Soviet agent, he spat at Rees: “You used to be one of us, but you ratted!”⁹⁶

The doubts about Moscow felt by some of the NKVD’s British agents after the Nazi-Soviet Pact were more than matched by the Centre’s doubts about its agents. The Center launched an investigation into the possibility that Philby was either a German or a British agent.⁹⁷ Since Philby had provided the original leads which led to the recruitment of Burgess and Maclean, and ultimately to all the Cambridge recruits, doubts about him reflected on the whole British agent network. The lowest point in the history of NKVD operations in Britain came at the beginning of 1940 when Gorsky, the last member of the London legal residency, was withdrawn to Moscow, leaving not a single NKVD officer active in Britain. A file in the KGB archives records, “The residency was disbanded on the instruction of Beria [head of the NKVD].”⁹⁸ Beria’s reasons are not recorded, at least in the files examined by Mitrokhin, but chief among them was undoubtedly the recurrent fear that the British agent network was deeply suspect. In February 1940 the Centre issued orders for all contact with Philby to be broken off.⁹⁹ Contact with Burgess was terminated at about the same time.¹⁰⁰

DURING THE LATER 1930s the hunt for “enemies of the people” replaced intelligence collection as the main priority of NKVD foreign operations. The NKVD’s most active foreign intelligence agency was Serebryansky’s Administration for Special Tasks, whose persecution of INO officers steadily diminished the flow of foreign intelligence and degraded its analysis at the Center. Even the executioners abroad, however, were not immune from the Terror at home. Serebryansky himself became one of the victims of his own witch-hunt. Though he held the Order of Lenin for his many victories over enemies of the people, he was recalled to Moscow in November 1938 and exposed as “a spy of the British and French intelligence services.” An inquiry later concluded that his network contained “a large number of traitors and plain gangster elements.” Though the allegations of espionage for Britain and France were absurd, the charge that Serebryansky had inflated both the size of his illegal network and the scale of its accomplishments in reports to the Centre was probably well founded.¹⁰¹

Serebryansky’s successor was Pavel Anatolyevich Sudoplatov, who a few months earlier had assassinated the émigré Ukrainian nationalist leader Yevkhen Konovalets with an ingeniously booby-trapped box of chocolates. In March 1939 Sudoplatov became deputy head of foreign intelligence, thus bringing “special tasks” and INO into closer association than ever before.¹⁰² He was personally instructed by Stalin that his chief task was to send a task force to Mexico to assassinate Leon Trotsky. The killing of Trotsky, codenamed operation UTKA (“Duck”), had become the chief objective of Stalin’s foreign policy. Even after the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, discovering the intentions of Adolf Hitler remained a lower priority than arranging the liquidation of the great heretic. Sudoplatov’s task force was composed of Spanish and Mexican NKVD agents recruited during the Civil War, supervised by his deputy, Leonid Eitingon, whose long experience of “special actions” included the liquidation of “enemies of the people” in Spain.¹⁰³