The end of the Second World War marked a sea change for the world’s intelligence agencies. In some countries, such as the United States, it would lead to a major reorganization of the way in which they worked; in others, including the Soviet Union, it would mean that some operations, which had perhaps been of lesser significance during the war against Hitler, took higher priority, as former wartime allies became enemies.
In the United Kingdom, those in charge of MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), saw the close of hostilities as a chance to put the service on a better footing, in much the same way that their colleagues at the Security Service, MI5, had needed to do at the start of the war.
Organized intelligence gathering has taken place on behalf of the English state ever since Tudor times: Thomas Cromwell, chief minister of Henry VIII, was in charge of agents reporting back from across Europe, while during the period Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth I, was on the throne, her private secretary, Sir Frances Walsingham, ran a network of fifty agents, and developed a highly effective system of interception – the precursor of both MI5 and MI6 today.
The perceived threat from Germany in the early years of the twentieth century led to the creation of a Secret Service Bureau by the Committee for Imperial Defence in 1909. There were multiple reports of German agents working in Britain, often covered in a very sensationalist way by the newspapers of the time. As the MI5 website recounts, the Weekly News offered £10 to readers to provide information on German agents to its ‘Spy Editor’; it was quickly overwhelmed with letters! Nor was it any secret that Kaiser Wilhelm was expanding the German military machine. The Bureau was therefore instructed to counter foreign espionage in the UK (the Home Section) and to collect secret intelligence abroad on Britain’s potential enemies (the Foreign Section). The Home Section was led by Army Captain Vernon G.W. Kell, while the Foreign Section was headed initially by Commander Mansfield Smith-Cumming RN – his habit of initialling his correspondence ‘C’ led to the use of that single letter for the head of the service, a fact which author Ian Fleming adapted when creating his fictional head of service, M, for the James Bond novels.
When they were requested by the Government to investigate the growth of the German Imperial Navy, Kell and Cumming agreed to split the Bureau into two different organizations: the Home Section became the Security Service (known as MI5 from 1916 onwards) and the Foreign Section became the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). While MI5 operated against German spies in Britain – arresting over twenty agents before the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 – MI6 set up networks in France and Belgium that would prove highly important during the four-year conflict.
With the German menace seemingly removed following the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the war, MI6 turned its attention to a troubling development: the rise of a new political creed following the 1917 Russian Revolution – Communism. Cumming saw the rise of international communism as a major threat to the security of Great Britain, and a lot of MI6’s attention during the twenties and thirties was devoted to the Comintern, the Soviet-dominated Communist International organization. The Comintern was established in 1919 to work by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and for the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the State. (The Soviets would also target MI6 in return, embedding one of their most important agents, Kim Philby, into the service: he would prove to be one of their best assets in the period immediately after the Second World War.)
MI5 was renamed the Defence Security Service in 1929, dropping the word ‘Defence’ from its title in 1931. Around the same time it was given responsibility for assessing all threats to the security of the UK – with the exception of Irish terrorists and anarchists, which stayed part of the police remit. (The service itself continued, and still continues, to refer to itself in shorthand as MI5, a convention adopted here.) During the period leading up to the Second World War, despite limited personnel, they dealt with the spy ring created by left-wing journalist William Norman Ewer (which led to the dismissal of various sympathizers at Scotland Yard), and leading member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and official of the League Against Imperialism, Percy Glading’s spy ring based at the Woolwich Arsenal in south-east London, which was sending blueprints to the Soviets.
The rise of Nazism unsurprisingly became an important part of both services’ remit during the thirties, with MI5 keeping a weather eye on British fascists, including Sir Oswald Mosley and his blackshirt organization, the British Union of Fascists. MI5 underwent a massive reorganization in April 1941 under the aegis of Sir David Petrie. Although it was discovered post-war that only 115 agents were targeted by the Nazi regime against Britain (all bar one of whom were captured by MI5, the exception committing suicide), there were thousands of vetting requests flowing through the service’s hands, as well as all the reports of potential ‘Fifth Column’ sympathizers who might assist the expected German invasion.
MI6 also had to carry out some drastic rethinking. Many networks of its agents were lost during the Nazi domination of Western Europe after the start of the Second World War, but subsequently many more civilians volunteered to cooperate with the service, providing invaluable information for the Allied forces. During this period, the service was formally known as MI6 (it had briefly been MI1(c) during the First World War, but had rid itself of this title post-war), partly as a flag of convenience and partly to emphasize the links with MI5.
The secret service was also responsible for the vitally important code-breaking work carried out at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, 40 miles north of London. The Germans believed that their vaunted Enigma code machine produced signals unreadable by anyone not in possession of a copy of the device, but in fact the experts at Bletchley Park were able to do so, and provided information, code-named ULTRA, which proved invaluable to the prosecution of the war.
A third organization was involved in covert (and not-so-covert tasks) during the war: the Special Operations Executive (SOE) carried out sabotage, bombing and subversive actions behind the enemy lines. Where MI6 provided the raw intelligence about troop movements, the SOE were actively haranguing the enemy. MI6 head Sir Stewart Menzies regarded them as ‘amateur, dangerous, and bogus’ but because they were the brainchild of Prime Minister Winston Churchill their operations continued. Some of their actions led to terrible revenge being wreaked by the Nazis: the assassination of SS deputy Reinhard Heydrich led to the extermination of 5,000 people as a reprisal. The life expectancy of an operative may have been judged in weeks, but they became feared by the forces in Occupied Europe. General Eisenhower would even comment that ‘The disruption of enemy rail communications, the harassing of German road moves and the continual and increasing strain placed on German security services throughout occupied Europe by the organised forces of Resistance, played a very considerable part in our complete and final victory.’
As the tide of the war began to turn in the Allies’ favour, the Foreign Office began to consider post-war plans. One suggestion in 1943 was that a unified Secret Service could be set up that combined MI5, MI6 and SOE into one organization, with branches covering Information, Security and Operations. Churchill didn’t approve of this, and after many discussions between the various interested parties, the Bland Report, formally titled ‘Future Organisation of the SIS’, suggested that the secret service ‘must start to build up a really secret organisation behind its existing, much too widely known, façade’.
The Bland Report covered all aspects of the service, including recruitment (‘If . . . the SIS does not succeed in attracting the right men, first-class results cannot possibly be forthcoming’), and stated bluntly that the main task was ‘to obtain by covert means intelligence which it is impossible or undesirable for His Majesty’s Government to seek by overt means’. The report also emphasized the need for clarity in the division of responsibility between MI5 and MI6, and suggested that SOE be wound up and operations handled by MI6. (The SOE weren’t made aware of this, since it was already clear they envisaged a role for themselves in peacetime Europe.)
The draft of the Bland Report did suggest that MI6 ‘should not direct its energy to investigating the activities of political organisations, e.g. Communists, Anarchists, &c’ but Sir Stewart Menzies pointed out that they were dealing with this sort of work already – and indeed had set up a department, Section IX, specifically to do so. The Foreign Office ‘desiderata’ in regard to Europe (the guidelines by which the service operated) made it clear that while keeping an eye on any attempts by Germany to revive activities was the first priority, observing ‘Russian activities . . . and the activities of national parties or groups in different countries who look to Moscow for leadership or support’ came a close second. After further discussion, the non-political nature of MI6 was emphasized in the final version: the service didn’t investigate people ‘because of their political ideology’ but only when there was ‘prima facie evidence that [the] organisation in question may be used as instruments of espionage, or otherwise when specifically requested to do so . . . C would always be well advised to seek guidance from the Foreign Office as to what political parties in foreign countries need special watching, and for how long.’
And it became abundantly clear that the countries that would need watching would indeed be those from the Soviet Bloc.
During the years leading up to the start of the Cold War, the intelligence agencies of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were as concerned with spying on their own people as they were with counter-intelligence against foreign agents. This would continue to be the case throughout the twentieth century until the break-up of the Soviet Union, and in fact was nothing new in Russia.
The first political police force in the country, the Oprichnina, was founded by Ivan the Terrible in 1565 and was responsible for the massacre of whole cities before it was abolished seven years later. Then Peter the Great created the Preobrazhensky Prikaz so secretively that even the KGB’s own histories are unsure of the exact date of its institution in the late seventeenth century. It too did not last long, but the Third Section of Tsar Nicholas I’s Imperial Chancellery, founded in 1826, was to survive for over fifty years, serving as the Imperial regime’s secret police. Although eventually discredited following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, the Third Section’s work against revolutionaries was carried on from 1880 by the Okhrana, the nickname for the Department of State Police and its regional security sections.
The Okhrana did operate outside the confines of Russia. Its Foreign Agency set up a centre to keep an eye on Russian emigrés in Paris – and was welcomed by the French police, the Sûreté, who went so far as to note in a report shortly before the First World War that ‘It is impossible, on any objective assessment, to deny the usefulness of having a Russian police operating in Paris, whether officially or not.’ When the centre was forced to close (at least publicly), the Sûreté were quick to complain that ‘The French government will no longer be able to know as precisely as in the past what dangerous foreign refugees in France are doing.’
The leaders of the eventual Russian Revolution were understandably concerned about the Okhrana and its reach. The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, which would split into the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903, was riddled with Okhrana agents. Four of the five members of the Bolshevik Party’s St Petersburg Committee in 1908–9 worked for the security service. Roman Malinovsky, one of the Central Committee, was an Okhrana agent – and was shot as such when he foolhardily returned to Russia in 1918, a year after the Revolution.
The Soviet State Security organization would go through many name changes in the period leading up to the Cold War. The Cheka (The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage) operated from December 1917 to February 1922, when it was incorporated into the NKVD (the People’s Commissariat of State Security) as the GPU (the State Political Directorate). From July 1923 to July 1934 it was known as the OGPU (the Unified State Political Directorate) before reincorporating into the NKVD, this time as the GUGB (Main Administration of Soviet Security). For five months in 1941 it was referred to as the NKGB (the People’s Commissariat of State Security) before returning to the NKVD. However, unlike in MI6, where agents who served in the First World War might still be around at the start of the Second, it was highly unlikely that anyone would survive through all of these name changes. Various errors by Soviet agents during this period – not warning of the armed uprisings in China, MI5’s discovery of the Soviet spy ring in the UK – led to regular reorganizations of the State Security Service. Purges of those whom the paranoid leader Josef Stalin mistrusted meant that many NKVD officers fell victim to their own organization – particularly once it was under the control of its most feared chief, Lavrenti Beria, who rose to power as the head of the NKVD Nicolai Yezkov’s deputy from 1936 before taking over on 25 November 1938, getting rid of his former boss on charges of espionage, treason and homosexuality.
Under Beria, the NKVD operated abroad extensively, with one of its agents, Ramón Mercader killing Stalin’s great rival Leon Trotsky in Mexico in August 1940. The scale of their operations against their wartime allies would only become apparent in the aftermath of the Second World War. Various agents were uncovered or betrayed, and they had numerous agents in place reporting the movements of the Axis powers. One of their greatest agents, Richard Sorge, eventually became press attaché to the German embassy in Japan, and sent details of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa – the invasion of Russia – to Moscow, complete with its starting date of 22 June 1941. To Sorge’s amazement, Stalin ignored the reports, until the invasion actually began, at which point the leader started to place more credence in Sorge’s information. When Sorge learned that the Japanese did not intend to attack Siberia, Stalin moved his troops under Marshal Zukhov from there to the front line, which by this stage was almost within sight of the Kremlin. They were in time to rout the invading Germans. (Sorge was arrested shortly after this, and was hanged in 1944.)
Sorge wasn’t the only Russian agent to warn about Barbarossa: according to KGB records, there were eighty-four separate attempts to persuade Stalin to take action. German journalist Rudolf Rössler, code-named Lucy, had a source apparently deep within the German supreme command. Werther, as this source was known, gave the start date for Barbarossa, and then, once the operation was under way, supplied details of where the German army was at its weakest – leading to the siege of Stalingrad. He also forewarned Stalin about the German invasion code-named Operation Citadel in 1943, allowing the Russian army to prepare the territory at Kursk and launch a pre-emptive attack on the Germans. Although Rössler never revealed who Werther was, some believe it might have been Hitler’s deputy, Martin Bormann, who was last officially sighted in Berlin in May 1945, or possibly Admiral Canaris, who was shot following the abortive assassination attempt on Hitler by Colonel von Stauffenberg on 20 July 1944.
The Second World War also saw the creation of the NKVD’s counter-intelligence section, known as SMERSH, an abbreviation of the Russian title Smert’ Shpionam – Death to Spies. SMERSH, of course, became famous in the post-war years thanks to its prominent role in Ian Fleming’s early James Bond novels, even though it had in fact been disbanded long before 007 was given his licence to kill. (When the stories were transferred to the screen in 1962, SMERSH was replaced as the villains by SPECTRE, a terrorist organization created for the first proposed film, James Bond of the Secret Service, and subsequently used in the novels.) Officially founded in April 1943, SMERSH operated for three years, both infiltrating the German secret services, and maintaining order within the Red Army: troops retreating in the face of enemy advances would be shot by their own side, and it was treason to be captured. They used any means necessary – informants, radio games, disinformation – to ensure the loyalty of both military and civilian personnel, and were highly regarded by Stalin, to whom they reported directly. They were tasked with finding Hitler’s body at the end of the war, and, some sources claim, even removing it to Russia (leading to the inevitable claims that SMERSH agents recovered Hitler alive, and took him back to Moscow for interrogation and execution).
There was another Moscow Centre operation that began running before the Second World War, would continue through the war, and still be effective during the critical first few years of the Cold War. Hailed by the KGB as the ablest group of foreign agents it ever recruited, the quintet of spies became nicknamed ‘The Magnificent Five’. The spy ring comprising Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, provided invaluable information during the war and in its immediate aftermath.
Some agents are motivated by greed, others by ideology. The Magnificent Five were all recruited during the thirties when, as Anthony Blunt explained after his treachery was made public in 1979, ‘It seemed to me and many of my contemporaries that the Communist Party and Russia constituted the only firm bulwark against fascism, since the Western democracies were taking an uncertain and compromising attitude towards Germany.’ British Labour Party leader Ramsay MacDonald’s agreement to head a National Government in 1931 was seen as a sell-out by the Magnificent Five and the Russian model seemed the only way forward.
