Mrs Petrova's Shoe: The True Story Of A KGB Defection 9781838600914, 9781786735683

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I wonder if we shall ever encounter a defector whose case is simple and straightforward. Derek Hamblen MI5 security liaison officer in Australia, to his superiors in London on 23 June 1954

List of Photographs Images are listed in order of appearance. Vladimir Petrov and Evdokia Petrova in Canberra: two intelligence officers posing as a diplomat couple. Photo: Fairfax Syndication. Colonel Vladimir Petrov taking the decisive step into the car of the Australian Security Service, 3 April 1954. Photo: News Ltd. Mascot, 19 April 1954. Evdokia Petrova flanked by the couriers Yarkov and Karpinsky. To the left of Yarkov, in a Panama hat, is Philipp Kislitsyn. Photo: News Ltd. Between a rock and a hard place: Evdokia Petrova has just lost her shoe. Photo: News Ltd. The crowd on the tarmac tries to persuade Evdokia Petrova to stay. The Soviet authorities described the incident as an intentional provocation staged by ASIO. Photo: News Ltd. A last attempt to block the departure – the crowd tries to pull away the gangway. Photo: Fairfax Syndication. Darwin shortly before dawn, 20 April 1954. Reginald Leydin makes the initial contact with Evdokia Petrova. Photo: News Ltd. Karpinsky is overpowered by the policemen and disarmed. Photo: News Ltd. Colonel Charles Spry, director of ASIO, the Australian Security Service. Together with Ronald Richards, also pictured, he was the main architect behind Operation Cabin 12, designed to induce Vladimir Petrov to defect. Photo: Frank Burke/Fairfax Syndication. Herbert Vere Evatt, chairman of the Labor Party and in his capacity as lawyer acting as solicitor for his press secretary at the Royal Commission on Espionage. Photo: News Ltd.

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Li st of P h otogr ap hs Roger Hollis, Deputy Director of MI5 at the time of the Petrovs’ defection. In the 1960s and 1970s Hollis became the target of a prolonged but futile mole hunt. Photo: Keystone/Getty Images. Kim Philby, the ‘third man’ in the Cambridge Spy Ring. Philby feared that Petrov was in possession of incriminating information about him. Photo: Popperfoto/Getty Images. Vladimir Petrov in 1957, aged and in constant fear of KGB executioners. Photo: Fairfax Syndication. Gusti Stridsberg, alias Augustine Jirku, alias Klara. Soviet agent with an astonishing social network in Stockholm in the 1940s. Petrova was her last handler. Photo: Dagens Nyheter/TT. Sverker Åström, career diplomat and eventual grand old man of Swedish neutrality policy, for decades under suspicion by Säpo, the Swedish Security Police, for cooperating with the Russians. Through Petrov, Säpo got information on the early contacts between Soviet intelligence and the cover name Osa (Wasp). Photo: Bonnier-arkiv/TT.

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The Characters Main characters Evdokia Alexeyevna NKVD officer, cover post as a member of the Kartseva, alias Petrova embassy staff (cover name Tamara) Vladimir Mikhaylovich NKVD officer, acting chief resident in Canberra Proletarsky alias Petrov (1952–4), cover post as consul (cover names Moryak and Mikhail)

Russia Lavrentiy Beria People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs (NKVD) (1938–45), Minister of Internal Affairs (March– June 1953) Nikolai Generalov Soviet ambassador to Australia (1953–4) Igor Gouzenko GRU cipher clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa Tamara Alexeyevna Sister of Evdokia Kartseva Kartseva Philip Kislitsyn MGB officer, cover post as first secretary at the Soviet embassy in Canberra (1952–4) Walter Krivitsky NKVD officer, illegal resident in the Netherlands, defected in 1937, died in unclear circumstances in 1941 Roman Krivosh Encryption expert at Spetsialnyi Otdel, Evdokia’s first husband Nikolai Lifanov Soviet ambassador to Australia (1948–53)

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The Char acter s Alexander Orlov NKVD officer, resident in Spain (1937–8) Vassili Razin, alias NKVD officer, resident in Stockholm (1943–5), Roshchin cover post as first secretary of the legation Boris Rybkin, alias NKVD officer, resident in Stockholm (1940–3), Yartsev cover post as counsellor Zoya Rybkina, NKVD officer, acting resident in Stockholm alias Yartseva, alias 1943, cover post as press attaché Voskresenskaya Valentin Sadovnikov MGB officer, cover post as first secretary of the embassy in Canberra (1949–51) Yelisei Sinitsyn, alias NKVD officer, cover post as consul, resident in Yeliseyev Finland (1944–5)

Australia Michael Bialoguski Doctor, ASIO agent, Petrov’s informer Herbert Vere Evatt Leader of the Australian Labor Party (1951–60) Roger Hollis Deputy Director General of MI5 (1953–6), Director General (1956–65) Reginald Leydin Acting administrator of the Northern Territory Robert Menzies Australian Prime Minister (1939–41 and 1949–66) Ronald Richards ASIO’s regional director in New South Wales (1949– 50), deputy director, New South Wales (1953–4) Charles Spry Brigadier, Director General of ASIO

Britain Guy Burgess Cambridge graduate, Foreign Office official, Soviet agent, fled to the Soviet Union in 1951 Donald Maclean Cambridge graduate, Foreign Office official, Soviet agent, fled to the Soviet Union in 1951 Kim Philby Cambridge graduate, SIS officer, Soviet agent, fled to the Soviet Union in 1963

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The Char acter s

Sweden Sverker Åström Attaché at the Swedish mission in the Soviet Union (1940–3), secretary of the Swedish legation in Washington DC (1946–8) Otto Danielsson Superintendent, head of Säpo’s counterespionage section Augustine ‘Gusti’ Journalist, author and Soviet agent Stridsberg

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1 Mrs Petrov’s Shoe The two men are holding the woman between them in a firm grip. In one hand she is carrying her handbag; the other hand she places on her heart. The man on her right stares into the camera lens with his lips parted. His colleague stares resolutely ahead, beyond the photographer, towards something outside the picture. But there is also something else, something missing. The despairing woman being dragged away is wearing only one shoe. The scene appears to have been composed as painstakingly as one of the Old Masters’ martyr portraits, with each detail designed to reinforce the overall significance. But whose martyrdom is being depicted in this way? From which Cold War film has the scene been taken? The Third Man, perhaps, or, more likely, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, with the totalitarian security service’s brutal henchmen carting off their defenceless victim to be tortured and executed. However, the woman in the picture is not a well-known actress. She has certainly performed different roles and has been educated and trained for this. But here, in front of the flashlights at Mascot Airport outside Sydney, she seems to be just playing herself. Her name is Evdokia Alexeyevna Petrova, and the scene immortalized by an attentive press photographer is the prelude to one of the early Cold War’s great spy dramas. Evdokia Petrova, the woman who has just lost her shoe in the turmoil, was, from the beginning, a minor character in a complicated intelligence operation. The main role was played by her husband, Vladimir, whom the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO), kindly assisted by its far more experienced British MI5 colleagues, had for several years been ‘grooming’ as a suitable candidate for defection. To the extent that Evdokia even featured in the

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe equation, she did so as an operational problem and a potentially disturbing factor. Once her husband had finally been persuaded to take the decisive step and had climbed into one of ASIO’s cars, ASIO made every effort to get as much information out of him as quickly as possible before the Soviet authorities understood what had happened and began to take familiar steps. The prognosis for defectors was not a particularly good one, especially if they came from the military intelligence service or, like Petrov, from the omni­ potent security service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), the predecessor to the Committee for State Security (KGB).1 Neither ASIO nor MI5 knew from the outset who Vladimir Petrov was. But while they continued to groom him, they received indications from various sources that he was no ordinary Soviet diplomat with a predilection for Sydney’s nightlife; instead, he had other duties. One of these tip-offs came from the Swedish Security Police, which held information about Petrov, who between 1943 and 1947 had been stationed at the Soviet legation in Stockholm. Once ASIO had reeled in its prey, it could finally see what a big fish it had landed; Petrov was in actual fact the resident, the head of the embassy’s secret intelligence station. The few Soviet intelligence officers who had previously defected had done so along with their loved ones, very conscious of the fate that would have otherwise awaited them. But when Vladimir Petrov got into the car that was waiting for him, he did not take his wife with him but a collection of classified documents from the residency’s safe, documents that served as a defector’s combined dowry and insurance policy. This moment was also immortalized, not by a press photographer but by a picture taken by one of the ASIO officers present, showing a hunched man in a suit ducking into a waiting car. Evdokia Petrova was still in the dark. Perhaps her husband had taken his life; maybe he had been kidnapped by the enemy. She received no word from the embassy, just an order to fetch the most essential items from her home and assurances that she would be under guard. Petrova was then confined to the building while awaiting Moscow’s decision, which came in the form of two armed KGB

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Mrs P etr ov’s Shoe men arriving to ‘escort’ her to her homeland, and if this failed, they were under orders to ensure that she did not fall into enemy hands alive. One defector was already one too many. Who was she, this woman who with the flash of a camera was transformed into a Cold War icon and a symbol of the fight between good and evil? When she was led out to the waiting plane, ASIO and MI5 had already been clearly informed by her husband that this was no ordinary childless diplomat’s wife who handled the embassy’s administrative work. She was in fact a trusted colleague and one of the very few women to be promoted to the rank of officer within the Soviet security apparatus. The Australian authorities put forward a futile proposal to the Soviet embassy to arrange a meeting between Vladimir and his wife, but the Australian agent who had wormed himself into the couple’s favour had firmly advised against any such contact. In his opinion, Evdokia intellectually dwarfed her husband, and any meeting might therefore have an undesirable and perhaps devastating outcome. Moreover, one defector was more than enough for the Australian authorities, whose relations with the Soviet Union were already at breaking point.2 MI5, the newly formed ASIO’s perpetual and discreetly present mentor, was, however, interested in hauling in the entire booty, in what was given the cover name Operation Cabin 12. The BOAC plane was scheduled to make a stopover in Darwin first before continuing to the then Crown Colony of Singapore, where they would make their move. The primary target was not Petrova but the fourth person in the party, the MGB cipher clerk Philip Kislitsyn, who had also been recalled to Moscow. Early in the questioning, Petrov had told how Kislitsyn had confided in him that while posted in London he had handled reports from centrally placed Soviet agents. The Australian authorities had trumpeted Vladimir Petrov’s defection as a major foreign policy coup, and the event was well timed for the government, which was facing new elections. The politicians took a more cautious approach to dealing with Evdokia, though; they were certainly happy to grant her asylum if she so requested, but they were not prepared to actively intervene in the course of events. If she

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe went with her executioners, they could do very little other than wash their hands of the situation. But the commotion at Mascot Airport, where the Soviet party ended up in the middle of a heated crowd, threatened to overshadow all this and make the government and the authorities appear powerless against this brutal assault. Prime Minister Menzies received a first-hand report from the airport and realized that they now needed to change course to avert a domestic policy catastrophe and a subsequent election defeat.3 During the Darwin stopover, available police and security agents had been mobilized. They overpowered and disarmed the two KGB men, Yarkov and Karpinsky, on the grounds of breaching air safety. Vigilant press photographers were also on hand to capture the heavily built Karpinsky being wrestled to the ground. After the commotion, the responsible government official there first arranged a telephone call between the spouses and then a short private conversation with Evdokia where she finally, and with great hesitation, uttered the words protocol demanded: she wanted to remain in the country. A drama in two acts had thus been played out in less than twelve hours, or as historian Robert Manne summarized the prevailing mood: ‘At Mascot the forces of Good and Evil had contended; at Darwin Good had triumphed.’4 While both the international and Australian press described what Vladimir Petrov had initiated and his wife had completed as a romantic escape to freedom, the reality behind the headlines was entirely different. Vladimir had fled because of his recall by Moscow, where he expected to pay the price for professional incompetence and his previous loyalty to the liquidated minister of the interior, Lavrentiy Beria. Evdokia was gradually faced with the choice between accepting the same fate as her husband or allowing the retributions to be exacted on her family, her parents and her little sister, Tamara. Evdokia had not defected to freedom but had been forced to step into a vacuum. Australia was a peripheral arena in a Cold War that was mostly other people’s business and fought along front lines in other parts of the world. But the Petrovs’ defection suddenly brought the Cold War to this distant and politically peaceful continent. What had previously

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Mr s P etr ov’s Shoe shaken Western Europe, and more so the United States, had now broken out in Australia: the hunt for the Soviet intelligence service’s agents and sympathizers, and with that the link between the external and internal enemy in the form of the Australian Communist Party and its open or secret sympathizers. The Australian government quickly set up a Royal Commission to investigate Soviet espionage in the country. What the Australian public and the rest of the world came to know as the Petrov Affair had now begun: a protracted legal and political battle that would culminate in the Labor Party splitting into right and left factions, ensuring that Prime Minister Menzies would remain in power for the next 12 years. As a result of its domestic policy repercussions, the Petrov Affair would cast its shadow over the Australian public for a very long time, with lingering suspicions that several individuals had served as tools for Soviet intelligence or had operated in the legal and ethical grey area between normal social or professional contacts and spying. But just as long-lasting were the suspicions that Prime Minister Menzies and his confidant, Director General of ASIO Brigadier Spry, had actually staged the defection to discredit the leader of the opposition, Herbert Vere Evatt, by revealing that some of his staff were part of the circle which had been in contact with Soviet intelligence. Many people regarded Menzies’s triumph in Darwin, followed by his parliamentary election victory, as evidence of political manipulation of the worst conceivable kind. All this was a mystery to the Petrovs, and no concern of theirs anyway; they were simply pawns in a big game they had no idea they were playing or any control over. In reality, they were kept under house arrest in a ‘safe house’, constantly watched and monitored. No unpremeditated events were allowed to disrupt the plan either inside or outside the safe house. In parallel with the Commission’s largely public process, another, more prolonged and probing process was secretly taking place, namely the central element of the Australian– British intelligence operation, internally known as ‘the Exploitation of the Petrovs’. During the endless questioning, everything of intelligence value was to be extracted, not just information mainly concerning Australia. The Petrovs’ information provided clues to several of the

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe great Cold War spying affairs, including the then partially uncovered Cambridge Spy Ring, and there were suspicions that other senior Soviet agents had infiltrated the British secret services. But the clues also led to Sweden, where the couple had been stationed between 1943 and 1947. Through British MI6, the Swedish Security Police (Säpo) were brought into the investigation; this cooperation was extremely politically sensitive but also regarded by the Swedes as important enough to outweigh the risks. The couple knew practically everything about the entire Soviet intelligence network during their years in Sweden but were also aware of individuals involved in various phases of the recruitment process or, using Soviet terminology, ‘objects of study’. Time after time, the interrogators went through the long lists of questions, sometimes including new information or a picture from a collaborating security service. One of the things the interrogators discovered concerned not these factual matters but the people who were being interrogated. The entire operation had started with the assumption that it was the KGB resident, Colonel Vladimir Petrov, who was the big fish in the net. But the longer the questioning went on, the clearer it became that Evdokia was not just any old by-catch they could just as well have thrown back into the sea; she was actually the most credible and, in some important aspects, most knowledgeable informant of the two. When questioned, she seemed the total opposite of the apparently helpless woman who had been dragged away at Mascot Airport. She was general material, with intellectual capacity and willpower far exceeding her rank of captain. So, if she actually was – and remained – much more of a professional intelligence officer than her husband and was not really a defector at all, then why did she choose to cooperate? This is one of the questions at the very heart of the Petrov Affair, one which the interrogators failed to ask and which remained unanswered. As the years went by, the wheels of the interrogation machine trundled slower and slower before finally coming to a halt. At the end of the 1950s, MI5’s liaison officer had no choice but to report to London that the Petrovs were now definitely ‘out of production’. Their exploitation had come to an end, and terminal storage had

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Mr s P etr ov’s Shoe commenced. The couple were and remained irretrievably shackled to each other, under constant surveillance. Officially, this was for their own safety, but had they been prone to making imprudent statements, this could have caused trouble or even been dangerous for the organizations that had taken over control of their lives. One thing was absolutely clear from the outset: they would never be allowed to return; their change of sides was irreversible. In 1996, Robert Manne was granted an interview with Evdokia, who by then was in her eighties.5 Vladimir had died a few years earlier after a long illness. The Petrov Affair certainly had a life of its own, but Evdokia had become less and less plagued by journalists ferreting around to find her address so they could interview her. The KGB death squads, which Vladimir had lived in constant fear of, had never worried her. The great scar she bore was not fear but her longing for the Russia she had lost, and no Australia in the world could replace this. She told Manne of a recurring dream she used to have where she was strolling along Lubyanka (a street in Moscow) and came upon the street where her family lived, the communal apartment she had moved into as a child in the 1920s and where her family had continued to live for a long time. In her dream, she always reached the building but could never enter. Manne asked her about the dramatic circumstances surrounding her captivity at the embassy, the men dispatched from Moscow and the scenes at Mascot Airport. He enquired whether she had been afraid, but she dismissed this suggestion. What about the tears then? Yes, they were genuine enough, but had been caused by one of the couriers giving her a swig of brandy to calm her nerves without knowing that she was allergic to spirits. She had suffered an allergic reaction. ‘Yes, that was when I lost my shoe.’6

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2 The Escapees and the Bloodhounds On the evening of 5 September 1945, the Soviet official Igor Gouzenko left his workplace at the embassy in Ottawa. His closest colleagues had gone to the cinema, leaving Gouzenko alone at the residency, the secure section where the Soviet intelligence station was housed and where he worked as a GRU (the Soviet general staff’s chief intelligence directorate) cipher clerk. This was an important and sensitive assignment. His role was to convert outgoing telegrams from clear text into essentially uncrackable sequences of digits. These would then be sent to Moscow as ordinary commercial telegrams without the Canadian authorities, or anyone else listening on short wave, gleaning any of the content. Similarly, the cipher clerk would convert the incoming telegrams’ sequences of digits into clear text to be passed on to the specified recipient at the residency. The work was not actually difficult, but it required accuracy and patience. It could take half the night to convert long telegrams from Moscow into clear text. But this evening, Gouzenko had another kind of night job in store. He had just been told he was to hand over his duties to a newly arrived cipher clerk the following day. He was to be replaced and to return to Moscow in October with his pregnant wife and their young son. Gouzenko was to have been recalled the previous year following an inspection which revealed that the family was living outside the embassy and not with any other Soviet personnel, a misdemeanour which, no matter how petty, sufficed to arouse Moscow’s suspicions.1 Gouzenko’s boss, Colonel Zabotin, provided guarantees for his cipher clerk and had the decision to recall him deferred. However, because of this scare, Igor and his wife, Anna, began in utmost secrecy to consider the ultimate forbidden alternative, fleeing instead of being

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Th e Escap ees an d th e Bloodhounds sent home to an uncertain fate. Igor realized that to be afforded the protection of the Canadian authorities, he needed something of value with him, an admission ticket in the form of documents showing what the Soviet intelligence station was actually up to: the extensive intelligence network Zabotin had built up in Canada had branches in the United States and a project that in intelligence reports went under the name of Enormouz, whose significance had come to the attention of the entire world a month earlier, on 6 August 1945, when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan. Gouzenko had been gradually collecting classified documents from the GRU residency: a downright dangerous business, since such material was closely monitored. On this warm evening, he took the final batch, stuffed the papers under his shirt and hurried away. But where was he heading? Instead of making his way to the Canadian police, he went to the editorial offices of the Ottawa Journal, but once there he lost his nerve and returned home instead, where his wife convinced him to make another attempt. His embassy colleagues would not discover that the documents were missing until the following morning. It was already 9 p.m. by the time Gouzenko finally entered the editorial offices, but by now he was so nervous and his English so poor that he could not explain why he was there. He could not intelligibly answer the night editor’s questions, instead simply repeating: ‘It is war, it is war, it is Russia.’ The editor eventually grew tired of this and advised the bewildered man to contact the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), whose offices were in the same building as the Department of Justice. But once there, Gouzenko requested to speak to the minister of justice and was asked to return the following morning. He saw no choice but to go back home. After a sleepless night, the real nightmare began. The entire family now made its way to the Department of Justice, but after a two-hour wait, they were refused entry. When he again visited the editorial offices of the Ottawa Journal, the penny finally dropped, and the journalists realized what their nervous visitor was trying to tell them. But they now considered the matter both unverifiable and far too politically sensitive, and the tipster was advised to contact the police’s naturalization bureau at the Crown Attorney’s office.

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe Gouzenko finally asked for protection but was again refused. In mounting desperation, the couple left their hungry and tired son, Andrei, with a female neighbour they knew, and headed to the Crown Attorney’s office. An official there alerted the RCMP, who dispatched a Mountie to explain there was nothing they could do. The official at the Crown Attorney’s office then phoned the assistant chief for intelligence at the RCMP, who evasively answered ‘We can’t touch him,’ but finally agreed to meet Gouzenko, although not until the following morning.2 Again, the Gouzenkos felt they had no choice but to make their way back to the worst conceivable hiding place of all: the family’s own apartment. That the Soviet staff had discovered what had happened was soon confirmed to them when an embassy vehicle stopped outside. The driver entered their building and repeatedly knocked on the door before finally giving up and disappearing. Igor persuaded a neighbour to cycle to a nearby police station; as before, he was given an equally feeble answer. The local police volunteered, however, to dispatch a patrol to drive past their address, but that was all. Another helpful neighbour across the landing offered the family shelter in her apartment. From here, they heard at midnight a group of men from the Soviet embassy arrive, break down the door to their apartment and rummage among their belongings, obviously looking for the missing documents and other clues.3 The police finally arrived and caught them red-handed, and after a heated exchange of words – the apartment had diplomatic status – the Soviet group left the building. One police officer remained behind on guard duty, and the following morning Igor Gouzenko was driven to the first of a series of interrogations that would continue over the coming months and years. The remarkable indifference shown by the Canadian authorities was not just due to their lack of familiarity with defectors. When the Department of Justice official phoned the RCMP, they were already aware of the case. The response, to keep the defector at arm’s length, had been decided at the highest level by Prime Minister William Mackenzie King. He had been informed on the morning of 6 September that the couple were threatening to defect, the same

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Th e Escap ees an d th e Bloodhounds time as the Gouzenko family were trying in vain to arrange an audience with the minister of justice. He was also told that the defector claimed to have important information about Soviet espionage in Canada and the United States, and that some of the spies were in the US secretary of state’s circle. King’s advisers felt that the matter could be important enough to warrant contacting their American and British allies. But the prime minister hesitated. King’s diary notes show he had told his advisers that they ‘should be extremely careful in becoming a party to any course of action which would link the govt of Canada with this matter in a manner which might cause Russia to feel that we had performed an unfriendly act’.4 King then turned the question of guilt on its head; it was vital the Canadian authorities did not appear as if they had been gathering information in an underhand manner, as this would imply they distrusted the Soviet legation. King was also suspicious of this person who had suddenly turned up out of the blue, seeing him as most likely someone who had incurred the legation’s disapproval and was now trying to protect himself.5 The prime minister’s reaction thus involved two issues: first, whether a defector could be taken at his word, and second, weighing up the right of asylum against the benefits for Canada’s foreign policy. International relations carried considerable weight in the latter respect. This sit-on-the-fence approach to asylum cases involving the Soviet Union was not unique to Canada. Postwar Sweden also wrestled with the same dilemma, which was most clearly manifested in the extradition of Baltic soldiers but also left its mark on individual defector cases that were more or less similar to Gouzenko’s. In the autumn of 1946, for example, the Soviet seaman Anatoli Granovsky sought asylum after leaving a merchant ship in port in Stockholm. Granovsky was no ordinary seaman, but an agent of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD). He had first gone to the American legation before being referred to the Swedish authorities.6 The Swedish minister for foreign affairs, Östen Undén, also a professor of international law, felt Granovsky should be handed over to the Soviet legation, which had requested this, the reason being that the defector worked for the NKVD and had admitted to getting on

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe the wrong side of some of its officials. Undén simply considered the entire thing a personal conflict and did not regard Granovsky as a political fugitive or fear any harm would befall him if he were sent home. The head of the political department, Sven Grafström, sourly noted in his diary: ‘Undén’s soft spot for the USSR’s power is almost bigger than Günther’s [Undén’s predecessor] for Germany’.7 The case, however, developed in such a way that it led to exactly the kind of strained international relations Undén had feared. The Swedish government had deported Granovsky to the American zone in Germany, which, in turn, provoked repeated Soviet protests.8 Back in Ottawa, once the Canadian government had decided to give Gouzenko protection after its initial hesitation, he and his family were moved between various safe houses outside the capital. The interrogations were laboured, partly due to language difficulties caused by a combination of poor English and a lack of Russian. The greatest obstacle was not language, however, but suspicion. Ever since fleeing the legation, Gouzenko had been petrified at the thought of a possible assassination attempt and had begun to suspect that the Canadian interrogator was actually a Soviet agent.9 The RCMP’s inexperience in interrogating defectors did not help matters, and so it became necessary for the Canadians to contact the United States and United Kingdom intelligence and security services at an early stage. The reason for this was not just the link to individuals and networks in the United Kingdom and the United States, but the British and American organizations having the requisite peripheral knowledge to allow them to interpret and evaluate the information Gouzenko could be persuaded to provide. One of the first collaborating intelligence services to receive word of Gouzenko’s revelations was MI6. Since the war, the British had had a special office in Washington DC, the British Security Coordination (BSC) headquarters, which coordinated intelligence matters involving the United States and Canada. All material on Gouzenko, actually a matter for MI5, thus went via the BSC to MI6 in London before being passed on to their MI5 colleagues. Besides the time delay this arrangement built in, it also had other, more serious side-effects: the recipient of the material from Washington was namely Kim Philby,

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Th e Escap ees an d th e Bloodhounds probably the best-placed Soviet intelligence agent of the twentieth century. As head of MI6’s counter-espionage section, Philby not only kept his Soviet handlers constantly up to date on the information Gouzenko was divulging during the interrogations but also discreetly steered both his own colleagues and MI5 in a suitable direction.10 In this way, Philby played a part in the many damage-limiting measures the Soviet Union took to protect various individuals under suspicion. The British atomic physicist Alan Nunn May, whom Gouzenko had singled out as an important source of information from the Manhattan Project, was one such person. Admittedly, Gouzenko had not provided any information that would suffice as evidence per se, but he was aware of the dates when Nunn was scheduled to meet his Soviet contact outside the British Museum, and so the British decided to catch him red-handed. MI5 and Special Branch kept the meeting place under surveillance, but no one turned up. Philby, who knew about the whole thing, had secured an easy (albeit temporary) victory for his handlers.11 Once the Canadian authorities had actually given Gouzenko protection and understood his intelligence value, Soviet intelligence’s opportunities to silence him were more limited but not entirely nonexistent. Gouzenko’s panic attacks and suspicions were not unfounded paranoia given that the Soviet state security service had been working throughout the Cold War, and probably after this, on a death list of defectors.12 The Soviet authorities publicly described Gouzenko as a criminal, and he was almost routinely accused of embezzlement. Secretly, he was sentenced to death for being a traitor, but this was not until the 1950s.13 By then the NKVD had already exacted its vengeance according to the 1938 principle which ruled that not only the defector but also his family and close relatives bore a collective responsibility for the treachery. In Gouzenko’s case, this had terrible consequences: although his brother and sister survived, his mother was arrested and died ‘during questioning’ at the dreaded Lubyanka Prison within the NKVD’s headquarters, while his wife Anna’s parents and sister were imprisoned for five years and her niece, Tatiana, was put in an orphanage.14 The price in human suffering that the defector was thus forced to pay presumably influenced many other

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe potential defectors. This is reflected in the Soviet legation official’s parting question to seaman and NKVD colleague Granovsky, who was in custody in Stockholm: did he want him to pass on his regards to his mother?15 The end of the 1930s saw the NKVD’s Foreign Intelligence Directorate and the GRU (the parallel military intelligence service) suffer a number of high-level defections. The driving force was the purges that from 1937 swept through the organizations, in particular with individuals operating abroad suspected of actually having been recruited by the imperialist forces or switching allegiance to Stalin’s mortal enemy, Trotsky. The suspects were recalled to Moscow on various pretexts, only to be arrested, tortured and then executed, either immediately or after some time, for the crimes they had confessed to during the proceedings. Two illegals, that is, underground intelligence officers, disobeyed the order to return to Moscow. One of them, Ignace Reiss, fled to Switzerland in July 1937 after first leaving a letter with the Soviet Paris delegation in which he declared that he was now ‘returning to freedom – back to Lenin’. Stalin immediately ordered that Reiss and his family be wiped from the face of the earth, an order dispatched to the mobile groups operating in places like Western Europe and Spain whose task was to carry out kidnappings and extrajudicial executions. Reiss was lured into a trap by an old friend and confidant, and his bullet-riddled body was later found in a ditch outside Lausanne.16 The next defector, Walter Krivitsky (originally Valter Krivitsky), lasted a bit longer. Assisted by the French security service, Krivitsky, an illegal NKVD resident in the Netherlands, defected in 1937. He and his family then fled to the United States, where he provided information to the American authorities, but he distrusted the Americans and did not feel safe, so the family moved on to Canada. Here Krivitsky contacted the British and secretly travelled to London, where he was questioned by MI5 and provided information about several agents the Russians had recruited – apparently one of them had gone to Spain as a journalist during the Spanish Civil War. The full significance of this vague clue about a wealthy, university-educated man whose name started with P would not be understood until later.17

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The Escap ees an d th e Bloodhounds Krivitsky was described as a short man who appeared to be perpetually afraid, and he had every reason to be. In February 1941, he was found shot dead in a Washington DC hotel room, with a Colt Automatic and a cryptic suicide note to his wife next to him (‘… think about me and you will understand that I have to go’).18 The circumstances surrounding his death were never satisfactorily explained. We now know that the NKVD had tracked Krivitsky down to the hotel, but his personal file in the KGB archive suggests that the first Soviet intelligence heard of his death was from the American media. In any case, his death had come unexpectedly. Krivitsky, who had finally been granted immigrant status in the United States, had spent his last days on earth travelling around Virginia looking for a chicken farm to buy for himself and his family.19 Philby continued to hover like an evil spirit above all defectors who could be conceived of as knowing too much, talking too much or simply existing. Philby and his handler’s greatest and most barbaric triumph in this respect involved the Volkovs, a married couple. Shortly before Gouzenko’s defection, the NKVD was put on a state of alert. On 27 August 1945, the British vice-consul in Istanbul received a letter apparently written by a Soviet diplomat and requesting an urgent meeting. When the author of the letter failed to receive a sufficiently quick reply, he turned up in person at the consulate and asked for political asylum for himself and his wife, along with a sum of £50,000. He introduced himself as Konstantin Volkov, an NKVD officer stationed in Turkey. In return for asylum and the amount requested, he promised to provide the British with documents he had come across while serving in the British section at the NKVD headquarters in Moscow. These documents referred to a number of Soviet agents in senior positions: two at the Foreign Office and seven within the British intelligence system, one of whom was the head of the counter-espionage section in London.20 It appears a message to this effect reached London by diplomatic mail on 19 September, and, of course, landed on Philby’s desk, as he was the head of the counter-espionage section in London. Philby now acted quickly and passed on this intelligence to Moscow via his contact man. Drastic measures were taken in Moscow. Back in London, Philby

15

Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe explained to his colleagues that he would be personally travelling to Istanbul to take care of the case, a journey he was in no hurry to make since there would be no prospective defector to meet up with. On 21 September, the Turkish consulate in Moscow issued visas for two Soviet diplomatic couriers to travel to Istanbul. When Philby finally arrived to make contact with Volkov, the latter had disappeared, and the Soviet consul general announced that Volkov had returned to Moscow. Volkov and his wife had in fact been taken care of by the dispatched special team. They had been drugged and carried on board a Moscow-bound Soviet aircraft. When tortured, Volkov admitted he had intended to reveal the names of 314 Soviet agents, and he was later executed.21 Afterwards, Philby was very proud of his fast and effective action. However, the most senior and dangerous by far of all the early Soviet defectors slipped through all the nets and traps, largely because he was a more cunning intelligence officer than all the bloodhounds in the East and West put together. General Alexander Orlov had served in the NKVD command and as a legal resident in London in the mid-1930s. Moreover, he was a confidant of Stalin. After serving in London, he was aware of the recruitment of the Cambridge Spy Ring: in addition to the young man from a good family whose surname started with P, there were his two university friends, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, and Anthony Blunt, the learned art historian.22 After the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1935, Orlov was dispatched to be the NKVD’s representative for the Republican side. He had been given two tasks: to train and organize guerrilla units to be deployed behind Franco’s lines, and to monitor, infiltrate and gradually liquidate the Trotskyist organizations operating alongside the Republicans.23 Over time, the second task became the dominant one when the NKVD and its Spanish allies turned to purging, terrorizing and murdering political opponents.24 On 9 July 1938, Orlov received a cipher telegram from Moscow ordering him to immediately make his way from Spain to Paris. He was to meet the Soviet consul general there before accompanying him to Antwerp in a diplomatic car and meeting an anonymous

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Th e Escap ees an d th e Bloodhounds individual on board a Soviet ship. Orlov realized that he was living on borrowed time and took appropriate measures. So as not to attract unnecessary attention, he telegraphed his confirmation, dealt with various routine matters and headed for the French border, where he took his leave of his bodyguard and continued on his own. He had sent his wife, Maria, and daughter, Veronika, on ahead to a rendezvous in the southern French city of Perpignan.25 In Paris, Orlov arranged a visa to Canada and obtained tickets for a passenger ship. The family then entered the United States legally, where Orlov first lived under an assumed name until 1953 and afterwards under his own identity until his death in 1973. He had carried out the whole escape using his diplomatic passport, which was still valid. Unlike in the cases of almost all contemporary and future defectors, particularly those in senior positions who were very capable of causing damage to Moscow, the NKVD and its successors made no serious attempts to track him down. Orlov later explained that immediately after defecting, he had sent a letter to Stalin proposing a deal. In this letter, he promised not to tell about how the network of agents in Europe operated but above all about Stalin’s many crimes, of which he was personally aware (and sometimes had participated in). All he asked for in return was to be left in peace.26 The fact that several of the agents mentioned in Orlov’s letter were not immediately arrested was confirmation enough for Stalin and the NKVD that their former employee may well have absconded from his post but had not joined the enemy. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Orlov broke his Faustian pact; or at least that was how he sold it. He published a series of articles in Life magazine revealing first-hand information from inside Stalin’s Terror, a series later published in book form.27 Overnight, Orlov went from being by far the most anonymous of the Stalin era’s defectors to the most famous, mythical and mystical of these, mainly thanks to his own image. Someone not impressed, however, by Orlov’s media appearance was the furious director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), J. Edgar Hoover, who realized that this general had been more or less living on his doorstep for 15 years. The FBI’s attempts at making up for this lost time by using aggressive

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe interrogation techniques were apparently not effective on this veteran of Lubyanka and Spain. It would be a long time before an FBI case officer established any kind of normal relationship with the nowageing general, who still stubbornly refused to divulge any secrets the FBI was not already aware of.28 Although Stalin and his men had left Orlov in peace, the KGB had not lost all interest in him; on the contrary, in 1969, after three decades, they had finally tracked down the former general and his wife to Ann Arbor in Michigan. The KGB leadership had now also performed a damage assessment of the case, deciding that there was nothing to suggest Orlov had revealed any of the NKVD’s secrets to the enemy. The KGB therefore did not regard him as a defector but as a ‘non-returner’, albeit one absent without leave and whose record would take some beating. After considering the matter at the highest level, the KGB attempted to make contact. They initially planned to use some of Orlov’s former confidants from his time in Spain, but the problem was that the old resident from Barcelona they had in mind would have to be illegally infiltrated into the United States and therefore risk being arrested by the FBI, which would turn the whole thing into an embarrassing debacle. They opted instead for a younger KGB officer and lawyer, Mikhail Feoktistov. At the third attempt, Feoktistov got past Orlov’s bodyguard and revolver-packing wife and spoke to the general to put forward his case. Feoktistov said that the general’s old employer wanted to make peace: they had realized they had a loyal comrade in exile who, unlike many others, had kept his oath, and they had no intention of kicking up a fuss about his absconding with the residency’s petty cash of $40,000 as a self-assumed severance payment. All these trivialities had been forgiven and forgotten, Orlov was told, and Feoktistov offered the Orlovs the opportunity to move back to Moscow, with a big apartment, a general’s pension and full honours into the bargain. Alexander Orlov would be allowed to return home to his Russia. The KGB could demonstrate that, in its heart of hearts, all nonreturners ultimately wanted to come back home and that rewards and forgiveness could be offered to those who proved themselves worthy by keeping Lubyanka’s secrets. The Orlovs thanked the KGB

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Th e Escap ees an d th e Bloodhounds for its offer, but they were old and wanted to remain close to their now-deceased daughter’s grave. However, Feoktistov noticed that his words about their homeland had pulled on Maria’s heartstrings; perhaps there was still a chance. Three months later, on 16 November 1971, Maria Orlov died of a heart attack. Two further years elapsed and her husband was taken ill and passed away after a short spell in hospital. The FBI, which had been keeping Alexander Orlov under discreet surveillance, had noted that he had received considerable assistance during his last months from a young Hungarian couple who had moved into the same building. Shortly after Orlov’s death, his apartment was broken into, and right around that time the young Hungarian couple moved to an unknown address and were never traced.29

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3 A Room in Moscow In December 1924, the Kartsev family moved into a former hotel right in the centre of Moscow on Varsonofyevsky Lane, one turning away from Bolshaya Lubyanka Street. It had six floors and, like many other buildings in the city centre, had accommodated the continuous post-Revolution flow of people from the countryside into the big cities. Here work could be found and the future was bright; sometimes there were even goods to buy. But one thing that could not be acquired for love nor money, particularly in Moscow, was empty apartments, and those which could were no ordinary apartments. The Soviet Union’s method for solving this chronic lack of housing, which started to escalate in the mid-1920s, was the invention of the kommunalka, the communal apartment.1 Instead of offering every family an apartment, each individual was allocated a floor area according to the 1930s standard of four square metres. This standard did not guarantee four square metres, however; it just meant that only those with friends in high places could expect to be allocated more space. Large city apartments – as was the case with the scantily modified hotel on Varsonofyevsky Lane – could well house several families sharing a kitchen and toilet as best they could. The kommunalka was a powder keg of conflict, and the jam-packed inhabitants could in no way avoid this. Consequently, one of the most common forms of social intercourse in overpopulated Moscow was the kitchen squabble.2 The Kartsev family had trodden the same roads to Moscow as a growing number of other Soviet citizens. Aleksei and his wife, Daria, both came from a poor hamlet 150 kilometres outside the city. The hardships of the Revolution and civil war had led them to seek a more tolerable livelihood as settlers in the countryside outside Semipalatinsk

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A Room i n Mos cow in Siberia, but drought, bad harvests and disease had shattered the family’s plans for the future, and they had paid a heavy price: they had lost their three-year-old son, before going on to have twin boys who then died of dysentery at just a few months old; later, one of their daughters suffered the same fate. Evdokia and her brother, Ivan, who had hurt his back in an accident and had become an invalid, were all that remained of the decimated family’s children. In 1924, word reached the family that conditions had improved in their home village, and the family abandoned their attempt at putting down roots in Siberia and moved back west. But these rumours proved false, and Daria decided that they needed to stop their wandering. Aleksei set off to look for a job in Moscow and, soon after, sent word to the family that he was not only working as a tram driver but had also found them an apartment.3 During the post-Revolution years, the Kartsev family’s fate was by no means unique. Quite the contrary: the first decades of the newly established Soviet Union were characterized by a social and demographic revolution not seen elsewhere in Europe. It is estimated that between 1926 and 1939 at least 26 million people moved into the cities from the countryside,4 driven often by the deterioration in living conditions resulting from civil war and, later on, the compulsory collectivization of the Stalin era. But this migration from the countryside was also a prerequisite for the intense industrialization under way. People made their way to the cities, and the railway lines and streams of migrants converged at one single point: Moscow. Although there was not enough room for everyone, the Soviet Union had radical solutions to every problem. Factories, for example, erected barracks where employees could if they were lucky get a roof over their heads, a bed and a cupboard for their few personal possessions. Others, and those arriving later, had to make do, living in corners of cellars or sleeping under staircases, marking out their small amount of private territory with a sheet or blanket. Under the slogan ‘All for the Five-Year Plan’, it was vital for everyone to focus their gaze on the future, where everything would be rosier.5 And, after all, a place in a kommunalka was not that bad, not compared with a shed or a

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe corner of a cellar, and in any case, it was a starting point in the great housing bureaucracy gamble for a few extra square metres. For the majority of people, the unachievable great prize was having their own apartment, and some were prepared to stop at nothing to obtain one. The newly arrived Kartsev family had managed to get their square metres allocated in a kommunalka in an almost unbelievably central location, just a few kilometres north of the Kremlin. This was because Alexei’s sister, who was also Evdokia’s godmother, lived here with her husband, and they quite simply moved closer together to create room for the new arrivals. If the quarrels and intrigues were the curse of this overcrowding, then helpfulness was a prerequisite for everyday life to work and, in emergencies, for physical survival. Alexei, Daria and their children moved into a big room that would have enjoyed a lot of light had it not been for the factory wall right opposite the window. It also served as a through room for others living in adjoining rooms. Like most rooms, this one had four walls with a bed positioned along each wall. These had space for almost all the room’s ten inhabitants. Evdokia’s godmother and her husband slept in one of the beds, her parents in another and a childless couple in the third bed while Evdokia, her brother and their two cousins took turns sleeping on the fourth bed or on the floor. The communal kitchen was shared by 20 people. Each family had a Primus stove and a small table with a drawer. There was a tap with running water and a communal cold store. For children who had grown up in the Russian countryside, this crowding was nothing new; besides, the apartment offered considerably more conveniences. Evdokia’s brother, Ivan, contracted tuberculosis and was admitted to a sanatorium. He returned to the apartment after a while, but his condition further deteriorated. Daria, the family’s driving force, commenced a lengthy battle with the building’s property board and the local health authorities to get a better apartment for the family; she eventually succeeded, and they were given their own room on a different floor, in apartment number 6, which even had an extra alcove for the family. This apartment was to remain the Kartsev family home in Moscow; Evdokia’s ailing brother, Ivan, passed away there

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A Room i n Mos cow towards the end of 1926, and her little brother – named Valentin after the three-year-old son who had died in Siberia – was born in the capital the year after. Outside the apartment lay Moscow, full of remarkable new experiences but also unexpectedly frightening elements. On the way to her first day at school, Evdokia was about to cross the road when a car came up behind her and tooted its horn. This unfamiliar sound absolutely terrified her, and she raced up onto the pavement and clung firmly to a lamp post, convinced that her last hour had come. Kind passers-by stopped to ask what was wrong and helped her compose herself and showed her the way to school. Her future classmates flocked around her, and one of the bigger girls claimed that she must be a newcomer, a ‘country dweller’. Evdokia assured her that she lived in Moscow, but before she knew it, the teacher came and explained to everyone that this was the new girl from the countryside, and that they needed to be nice to her and not tease her. Evdokia found school easy, with mathematics and geography some of her favourite subjects. She would also have liked to study music, but their teacher, who played the violin with her eyes closed, was far too engrossed in the music to teach her pupils anything. Evdokia’s walk to school took her past the large, solid building located at Dzerzhinsky Square at the southern end of Bolshaya Lubyanka Street. The property had originally belonged to the Rossiya insurance company but became state-owned after the Revolution. It was officially designated an ‘administrative building’; however, everyone knew what it was: the headquarters of the Cheka, the powerful (and in due course omnipotent) state security service, which changed its name first to the State Political Directorate (GPU) and then to the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU).6 Inside the building was an enclosed courtyard containing yet another building concealed from the street: the internal prison. Both the building and the organization with its key functions there gradually took on the name of the street, Lubyanka.7 Just a couple of weeks after arriving in Moscow, Evdokia saw a large group of children noisily streaming out of the building. They were her own age and were wearing red scarves. Evdokia was

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe sufficiently curious that she overcame her shyness and daringly went in through the door the children had come from. In the hall, there were more red-scarf-wearing children and a woman who was clearly their leader. Evdokia asked her who the children were, and the woman politely replied, ‘This is the OGPU building, little girl, and all these children are Pioneers’. Evdokia asked whether she too could become a Pioneer, but, according to the kind woman, that depended on a few things; this was the OGPU’s Pioneer Section. ‘Does your father work for the OGPU?’ Evdokia was delighted to confirm that this was the case: her father had found a new job not long before, this time as a driver in the OGPU’s transport section. Evdokia was given a bundle of forms to complete, with a lot of information required about herself and her parents. She happily rushed home and told Daria and Aleksei about her discovery and decision. Probably few Soviet citizens had been given as idyllic a first impression of the large building at Dzerzhinsky Square and its inhabitants as the ten-year-old Evdokia. This encounter with the Pioneers was a pivotal moment, one of those chance happenings that turn out to be instrumental in determining a path in life and shaping this. Evdokia Alexeyevna Kartseva had taken the first decisive step in her future career. The steps that followed over the course of many years were more or less automatic. This moment also reveals something about her personality, demonstrating her inner confidence even at an early age. The Pioneers were the party’s version of the Scout movement, although here the children swore their allegiance to Lenin. This was nothing particularly remarkable, however, in a country where this was a matter of course. For the big-city children, the Pioneers offered a sense of community and a leisure activity in an everyday life characterized by overcrowding and parents who often both worked. Above all, the organization provided an opportunity for big collective adventures, trips to Moscow’s surroundings and, in particular, the child’s equivalent of the adult’s coveted paid week’s holiday on the Crimea’s Red Riviera: visits to camps by the Black Sea. Joining the Pioneers marked the first step into the new Soviet society. The next step was the Komsomol, the Communist youth organization for those as young as 15. There was less playing and

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A Room i n Mos cow recreation and more ideology, responsibility and preparation for the seriousness of life and the huge step that loomed: party membership. For the youngsters, the Komsomol perhaps first and foremost provided a sense of community and friendship but also an obvious idealism that would, for the majority, one day clash with actual Soviet society. It is said that even the NKVD’s most hardened torturers were astounded when they got these youngsters on the ‘conveyor belt’ during the Great Terror of 1937–8. No amount of ill-treatment seemed to affect them, and instead of the usual forced confessions, they would stubbornly keep on asserting that they were Communists. Fired with youthful idealism, they would sacrifice themselves for the cause, unable to understand that the party they were fighting for was now consuming its children, the dreadful misconception they shared with hundreds of thousands of others in the interrogation rooms.8

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4 Spetsialnyi Otdel Evdokia wanted to study languages, so after finishing her regular schooling she applied to the Technical College for Foreign Languages and studied English. She never met any foreigners, which was for the best. One of her friends, Sara, both of whose parents worked for the OGPU, was also interested in studying languages and was lucky enough to meet a young American. Sara’s parents strongly cautioned her against this relationship, a warning not unfounded. In 1937, the American was arrested during the Great Terror, but his relationship with Sara clearly remained unknown.1 Another friend and male admirer was David Kunin, one of the Pioneer leaders. Like many others, he worked among his circle of OGPU acquaintances and suggested that Evdokia apply for a position there too. When she declined due to being in the middle of her studies, he assured her that this would be no problem. She could complete her language studies there, but she should perhaps think about learning some other language, since the work he was talking about required this skill.2 David assisted her with the formalities and gave her the bundle of forms she needed to complete. The questions were not always very relevant and asked about things like her pre-Revolution activities and whether she had served in the Red or White Army. More obviously meaningful in her case were all the questions about her parents and relatives and whether any of them were living abroad. Finally, she needed a reference from someone who knew her personally, and she did not need to look far: residing in the same apartment was an OGPU man who had served overseas and been stationed abroad. He was Jewish by birth and like so many others disappeared during the Great Purge, but in 1933 a good word from him still opened the door to a secret world.

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Sp ets i aln yi Otd e l Her new workplace was around the corner from the apartment. Varsonofyevsky Lane led into Bolshaya Lubyanka Street; down to the right, at the corner of Kuznetsky Most Street, was a building that had previously belonged to the NKID, the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (later the MID, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs). The big OGPU headquarters were on the other side of Lubyanka. David had given her the pass she needed in order to be admitted the first time and accompanied her to show her the way. The unit she would be working in was on the top floor, and ordinary apartments occupied the floor below. Evdokia entered a room and suddenly found herself surrounded by older people, mostly men. She was only 19 and could not help but be aware of the age difference. A high-ranking officer, Colonel Kharkevitch, received her in his office. First, he asked her to take a seat, and then explained the kind of institution she had come to. He expected that she would find it rather strange, but he would be instructing her, adding that she had been accepted at the OGPU’s special cipher department, known as Spetsialnyi Otdel (abbreviated to Spets Otdel). For reasons he did not go into, however, she would be serving in the GRU unit for the time being. GRU’s work involved deciphering messages sent between foreign states and their legations in Moscow. Kharkevitch explained that this was a crucial task for state security; these countries were constantly conspiring to crush the Soviet Revolution, and so discovering their intentions was vitally important. The elderly gentlemen she had just seen, some of whom had held senior positions and even titles before the Revolution, were conducting this work. Due to a lack of knowledgeable linguists, they sometimes had to compromise on their principles and use individuals whom they would otherwise have weeded out as class enemies. Then her boss got to the warnings: she would be working in a very secret location and unit, and she must not disclose her line of work or where she was working, not even to her parents and friends. And if that was not enough, as a worker in this special institution she had to constantly maintain her vigilance and was forbidden from visiting restaurants; according to the colonel, these were dangerous places. The building chosen for this secretive workplace was

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe no coincidence: it was not a shortage of premises that resulted in their sharing the building with floors of apartments and an NKID club; in actual fact, all of this disguised their activities and made it easier for staff to disappear into the crowds when they left work. The Spets Otdel’s analysis section was a big unit, with a joint GRU–OGPU operation, and Evdokia’s placement with Colonel Kharkevitch was not therefore of such great significance as the language section she was assigned to. When she was assigned to the Japanese section, in a post that could almost be described as probationary, it became clear what her friend and intermediary David Kunin had meant about other foreign languages. The Japanese section was small and full of odd individuals, one of whom was a woman named Galina Podpalova. As well as having lived in Japan and mastered the language, she had also embraced the Japanese culture so much so that she had filled her home with Japanese utensils, walked around in clothes bought while in Japan and adopted the Japanese form of greeting. For obvious reasons, Galina, a slightly older divorcee, was an eccentric and fascinating acquaintance for the young Evdokia, who came to live a very sheltered life following her admission to the closed world of the specialist section. Professor Shungsky, both a linguist and an expert in Japanese terminology, was the anchor of the Japanese section. He had served in the tsarist army and belonged to the group of useful individuals of a dubious class. Shungsky was Evdokia’s language teacher and mentor for several years, and she eventually learned to read, write and translate Japanese to his satisfaction. The Japanese section’s work was certainly demanding and trying but was essentially rather simple, with the basic material consisting of telegrams sent to and from the Japanese legation in Moscow. This was also the reason for the GRU–OGPU collaboration: the former deciphered the traffic to and from the Japanese military attaché’s office, while the latter handled the diplomatic traffic.3 At this time and later during the Cold War, Soviet cryptology worked according to the principle of not needlessly complicating matters. While the deciphering work of the Western powers and Germany was all about breaking encryption by analysing great

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Sp ets i aln yi Otd e l volumes of traffic and the structure of the cipher systems in order to discover their weaknesses and how to exploit them, the Soviet Union concentrated on the keys to these cipher systems. In practice, this meant using various forms of infiltration to access the ordinary users’ enciphering and deciphering keys, in the Japanese case at the legation in Moscow and the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (JMFA). Thus, a centrally placed source could cut down on a lot of often impracticable work. Other sections of the intelligence service were assigned the task of acquiring cipher keys and codes, while interception of the enciphered traffic was conducted according to the same principles as in other countries, depending on whether a telegram was sent via the Soviet telegraph authorities or transmitted to or from the different legations.4 Russia was not the only country interested in Japanese codes during the interwar period; the US State Department’s Black Chamber had cracked the Japanese diplomatic code just in time for the 1921–2 Washington Naval Conference, attended by the world’s leading naval powers. Once the code had been cracked, it could be seen how valuable this kind of material could be when conducting negotiations: the JMFA informed their negotiators of the quotas Japan would be demanding in the negotiations on future armament levels, but the telegram also stated the levels they would accept as a compromise if they met with tough opposition and what their pain threshold was, information which the American negotiators were not slow in incorporating into their strategy.5 The US navy also made successful advances, but using other methods. Since World War I, the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) had had a slush fund hidden in a bank account which was inherited by each new director. The money was, however, starting to burn a hole in their pockets. To get rid of it, the ONI financed a number of break-ins at the Japanese consulate in New York and photographed the Japanese navy’s code book, known as the ‘Red Book’.6 But in spite of this, the book only solved half the problem: the encoded text had an additive cipher in the next stage, which required an additional book the Americans did not have. Despite increasing efforts towards the end of the 1930s that involved the early data processing of large

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe volumes of messages, the ONI failed to decipher any of the Japanese navy’s cipher telegrams before Pearl Harbor. However, it was a different matter for diplomatic traffic, which from the early 1920s could be read, at least in theory. But in 1928, when several deciphered telegrams landed on his desk, Henry Stimson, the Secretary of State, erupted with fury, ordering the Black Chamber to cease operating with immediate effect. Stimson, a lawyer, felt that this surreptitious reading was deeply unethical at a time when the countries of the world were expected to collaborate and trust one another.7 This event would later go down in the annals of cryptology. A further spanner in the cryptological works came from the now unemployed chief of the Black Chamber, Herbert Yardley, who as well as selling details to the Japanese of the code-breaking of 1922 also described these exploits.8 In light of these revelations, the Japanese carried out a thorough overhaul of their diplomatic code system and switched from manual cipher to cipher machines, which they believed were impenetrable to cryptanalytic attacks. A science or not, by September 1940 the US army’s Signal Intelligence Service (SIS) had after 18 months cracked this mechanical cipher (which the Americans called Purple) by constructing a copy of the Japanese cipher machine using freehand drawings and various parts from a telephone exchange. The SIS had also established the pattern to the daily settings after studying this over a period of time. The Spets Otdel’s Japanese section had considerably more modest resources but still achieved good results. For long periods, Evdokia worked as part of a two-person team along with an assistant, a 55­-year-old man whom she felt was uncultured and almost illiterate but, despite this, in the right place. Unlike Evdokia, he did not know any Japanese, but he had a phenomenal ability to recognize images and used this talent to work out which key setting was needed for a certain telegram. Using this information, Evdokia could then enter the telegram text into what was called the machinka, a decoding machine constructed not from telephone parts but slabs of wood. The clear text produced was often incomplete, and at that point her knowledge of Japanese helped her guess the rest.9

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S p ets i aln yi Otd e l But it was not all about kindly, fatherly bosses and camaraderie. After a year under the GRU, the operation was reorganized, with the whole cipher section transferred to the OGPU’s Spets Otdel. This marked an important change for Evdokia, who was now given a permanent position, known as an NKVD cadre. She held the rank of junior sergeant and worked as an operational officer. A year later, in 1935, the analysis section also physically moved to the large headquarters building on the other side of Bolshaya Lubyanka Street, where the other sections already had their premises.10 The OGPU’s Spets Otdel was a vital component in a constantly changing bureaucratic labyrinth, with the specialist sections in particular constituting a parallel structure and enjoying an independence from the line organization that consolidated their position of power.11 One person who really reaped the rewards of this was the mystical and feared commander Gleb Bokii, a veteran who had worked for the Cheka since its inception in 1917. Most of the time, Bokii kept to his office (which, as it later turned out, had both a bathroom and a bed) and only made occasional sweeps of the department’s premises, often at night. One of his foibles was always wearing a raincoat, regardless of the time of year or weather. Somewhat worse were his ‘leisure pursuits’, which she would hear about from her colleagues. Like other senior OGPU chiefs, Bokii had a dacha where he held parties, or rather orgies, at which he requested the young female employees’ company, an invitation that it was inadvisable to decline. Evdokia thought he was bizarre and unpleasant. Evenings were the most dangerous, and the female personnel dreaded doing the night shift in the special section. Bokii could emerge at any time from his cave-like residence, creep around the premises and ask whether anything important had come in. Evdokia tried to make herself as insignificant and anonymous as possible so as not to attract his attention, but she discovered that Bokii had still noticed her and had also figured out somehow that she knew his dacha secrets. Her colleagues warned her that he would try to get her to accompany him there in order to compromise her and guarantee her silence.12

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5 Night at Noon The year 1937 spelt not only the end of Bokii’s powerful position and persecutions but also saw many others brought down. Stalin’s Great Terror did not come suddenly but emerged gradually; the first sign was when senior party officials inexplicably began to disappear. In retrospect, it is no surprise that the chief of the Spets Otdel also had a special position in this respect. Bokii was arrested and shot, presumably for the same fabricated crimes as all the other victims of the Great Terror. As for the real crimes, no one showed any interest in them. It is estimated that between August 1937 and November 1938 1.5 million Soviets fell victim to an unparalleled wave of purges. About 700,000 of them were executed, or rather murdered.1 The rest were dispatched to the camps in the Gulag Archipelago, from where many never returned, and those who did were physically and mentally scarred for life by the horrors endured. But there was more to the Great Terror than just this final body count, however abhorrent this seems; it was also a state of mind, a collective crippling horror that spared no one and descended like darkness upon the country and its capital. The Great Terror spread like an incarcerating, torturing and killing epidemic, from the top down through the cadres, with its tentacles spreading from the capital to the regions. No part of the Soviet state escaped it, but nowhere was the horror as palpable as in Moscow. If the Great Terror’s periphery was the inhospitable penal colonies in the north and east, then its centre resided in Moscow or, more specifically, in what the German historian Karl Schlögel describes as a ‘labyrinth of terror’, with its obvious centre in the security service’s headquarters. From here, the huge administrative apparatus (in 1937

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N i gh t at Noon it changed its name to the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, better known as the NKVD) was controlled. The building, with its internal prison, came to be known by the name korabl smerti (the ship of death) in popular parlance. Lefortovo Prison, serving as the main torture centre, was another hub in this labyrinth of terror. The security service’s interrogators noted with satisfaction the demoralizing effect that just being informed of their transfer to Lefortovo had on their victims. Other centres just as terrifying were Taganka Prison, death’s waiting room, where those to be liquidated were locked up, and the various places of execution. The most centrally located and thereby practical one was the so-called ‘shooting garage’ in the security service’s central garage at 5–7 Varsonefyevsky Lane, right across from the building that housed the Kartsev family’s apartment. The Great Terror brought not just suffering and death but, just like the Nazi machinery of destruction, increasing organizational and logistical consequences. Simply finding suitable places for shooting so many people presented a difficult problem to solve, but it was overshadowed by how to dispose of this harvest of corpses. In his monumental work Moscow, 1937, published in 2012, Schlögel describes an alarmingly precise timetable for the Great Terror, based on a single critically located control point, namely the meticulously kept figures from what was turning into a mass graveyard at Butovo on the southern outskirts of Moscow. These statistics represent a kind of temperature curve for the Great Terror, commencing on 8 August 1937, when the first 91 victims were taken here from various prisons. The very next day (or presumably night) the second batch arrived, this time 115 bodies. These shipments continued at intervals of a few days, with two longer breaks in January 1938, probably due to the difficulty of digging mass graves. During its 15 months in operation, 20,761 people were murdered at Butovo.2 NKVD officials meticulously recorded the figures because ultimately it was all about achieving the goal of the centralized killing machine. Statistics do not show who the victims were and why they were shot, and, in some sense, this did not matter either. The Great Terror initially targeted undesirable key figures and potential opponents of absolute power, but they usually received a bullet in

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe the back of the head down in the cellars of the ship of death. Once the machinery was set in motion, the incarceration, torture and killing were indiscriminate. It involved ‘purging’ certain counterrevolutionary strongholds, liquidating the suspect social strata or simply meeting the grotesque execution quotas dictated from above. The majority of those killed were convicted following a standardized quick 20-minute trial and based on the evidence of forced confessions. That this madness continued and accelerated is as much a mystery as why it suddenly came to an end. The last delivery arrived at Butovo on 19 October 1938. After that, the NKVD removed the tracks and fenced in the field of death. The site remained inaccessible for half a century, cloaked in rumours that something unpleasant had gone on there. While the victims were mired in despondency and death or, in some cases, such as the Komsomol youth, offered equally heroic and futile resistance, the fiends of the Great Terror advanced, climbing over one another before finally settling into the NKVD posts from where they could savour the fruits of their labour. No one did this more painstakingly than its newly appointed head, Lavrentiy Beria, who took up the post in 1938 and whose fondness for amusement made the liquidated Bokii’s dacha weekends look like rather innocuous social gatherings.3 Nevertheless, the monstrous Beria was not unpopular in the wounded organization he had taken over following the removal and predictable demise of the ‘Bloody Dwarf ’ Yezhov. Beria brought a measure of stability and recovery to the central functions and the cadre workers. Unlike Yezhov, who had been a people’s commissar clad in an NKVD uniform, Beria quickly showed considerable interest in and intimate knowledge of the conspiratorial work’s different aspects. Moreover, he could give matters professional consideration, like when he instructed the New York residency to shelve plans to liquidate the defected agent Elizabeth Bentley because the risk of failure was too great. In February 1937, the purges of the NKVD’s Foreign Intelligence Directorate had already begun, not with any visible arrests or public death sentences but with its head, Abram Slutsky, found dead at his desk. In this case, the official cause of death was cardiac arrest – typical

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N i gh t at Noon for NKVD functionaries – but there were obvious external signs of strychnine poisoning.4 The extent of the damage that the subsequent Great Terror inflicted on the NKVD’s Foreign Department (the Inostranny Otdel (INO), the First Main Department) was incalculable. Some residencies in key countries lay deserted like farms after the Black Death, while others had been reduced to just a single cadre worker. Several of the important underground illegal residents were recalled to Moscow and liquidated. Others, such as Alexander Orlov and his colleague in the Netherlands, Walter Krivitsky, escaped the Great Terror by seeking protection with the enemy. That the Foreign Department did not forward a single telegram to Stalin for 127 consecutive days in 1938 was a measure of the massive destructiveness.5 Much more serious – and, as it would turn out, almost fatal – was the INO losing contact with the extensive, well-placed network of agents (later known as Rote Kapelle) built up in Nazi Germany. The years before the Great Terror were happy ones for Evdokia Kartseva, perhaps the happiest of her life. It all began with an attentive admirer, not the repulsive Bokii but the considerably younger and more courteous colleague at the Anglo-Saxon section, Roman Krivosh. Evdokia had met him early on while he was still married to a variety artiste. But he divorced after a few years, and when the department moved into the headquarters building in 1935, Roman began to woo Evdokia. She had several male acquaintances, including David Kunin, and enjoyed socializing with them while also keeping them at a certain distance. Her attempts at using this tactic against Krivosh proved unsuccessful, however. He pursued her tirelessly, and Evdokia discovered that this game was attracting her colleagues’ attention, with some warning her against the dangerous charmer while others cheered her on. Things then took their course. In 1936, Evdokia moved into Roman’s apartment but without registering the marriage, which was common in Moscow at that time. Roman was 11 years older and a considerate, loving partner. He had linguistic talent and literary ambitions and was a published poet. His current writing project was a major work of fiction, which he liked discussing with Evdokia. The only disruptive element in their everyday lives was a female neighbour who longed for company

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe and always wanted to impose on them, particularly when they had guests. Their daughter, whom they named Irina, entered the world on 4 June 1937. Nine days later she was joined by a maternal aunt. Evdokia’s mother had fallen pregnant at roughly the same time as her daughter and given birth to Tamara, who gradually became a playmate and effectively a little sister for Irina and an extra daughter for Evdokia, who sometimes breastfed her. One night in July there was a loud knock on the apartment door. It was two o’clock, but Irina had been restless and both Evdokia and Roman lay awake. Roman assumed it was the persistent female neighbour again. However, when he asked through the door slit who it was, he was told it was the caretaker. Roman said it was late and they had gone to bed, but the voice on the other side told him he needed to have a word. Roman opened the door, and the caretaker was indeed there in the hall, but he was not alone. Two men in NKVD uniforms stood behind him and accompanied him into the apartment. The ensuing conversation followed a stereotypical template reproduced in countless contemporary and later testimonies, memoirs and literary portrayals. The uniform-clad men asked whether the man who had opened the door was Roman Krivosh, and when he confirmed this, they informed him that they had a warrant for his arrest. Roman asked why they were going to arrest him, and just like so many future victims of the Great Terror, he protested his innocence and maintained that there must have been a mistake. Many people clung to this idea of a mistake as they were being led to their cells, while their torturers were beating them and as they were being carted off to their place of execution or to the Gulag, where they desperately wrote letter after letter to President Kalinin, to Stalin, or to their old bosses, many of whom had already been murdered. Prior to departing, the NKVD men conducted the customary house search, a time-consuming procedure since they needed to go through all of Roman’s hundreds of books, none of which were confiscated. They did, however, take his typewriter and papers, including his still-unfinished manuscript. Before being led away, he tried to console Evdokia, repeating that it was obviously all a mistake.

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Ni gh t at Noon And just like that, he was gone. That morning, standing in his place on the stairway, was a group of neighbours. They had heard noises and were wondering what had happened during the night. This scene also followed the stereotypical pattern: along with the usual brotherly consideration, concern and curiosity, these neighbours had rouble signs in their eyes at the thought of the opportunities afforded by the suddenly vacant apartments. The years 1937–8 were not just a time of horror and tears but also one of people making a killing on apartments.6 In particular, the NKVD top brass could feather their own nests thanks to excellent tip-offs that people were about to move out.7 Later the same morning, Evdokia phoned Gusev, her section chief, to tell him what had happened. She could hear in his voice how afraid he was when he told her she could no longer work after this. But he still asked her to come to work once her maternity leave was over a few days later. When she arrived, he explained the situation. Because her husband had been arrested for being an enemy of the people, her continued membership of Komsomol was in question; her fellow members would apply special regulations to determine this matter. Being expelled from Komsomol was not simply a technicality; instead, as a consequence, she would immediately lose her job and the extra food allocation she enjoyed as a member. And, of course, the security service would take further action. What now followed was the ritual collective process of investigation and expulsion from the youth organization. Those who had committed actual or alleged breaches of party discipline and regulations were publicly censured here and were to respond to this with self-criticism. During the Great Terror, these sittings were the equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition’s auto-da-fé, the public ceremony in which the sinner was transferred from the ecclesiastical to the secular legal system.8 A few days after having been informed, Evdokia was summoned to a meeting with the local Komsomol branch’s thirty or so members, who were to pronounce on the ‘personal matter regarding Comrade Kartseva’. There were two possible outcomes: expulsion from Komsomol or a stern warning and conditional membership. The

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe main accusation levelled at Evdokia, as formulated by the Komsomol branch secretary, was that by living with Krivosh, who had been arrested for being an enemy of the people, she had demonstrated her unsuitability as a Komsomol member and should consequently be expelled. Evdokia refused to acknowledge her guilt, citing her impeccable record with the Pioneers and Komsomol and as an NKVD cadre, but she noticed that no one was swayed by anything she said. The meeting was simply a formality, a way for the attendees to distance themselves from the suspect, and everyone duly voted for expulsion. This decision was not final, however. First, the party section at the Spets Otdel needed to confirm this, and here the story took an unexpected turn. An older officer in the Chinese cipher section, who was also serving as secretary of the party section for the entire Spets Otdel, asked for permission to speak. Once granted, he emphasized ‘Comrade K’s’ unblemished record. She had certainly made a big mistake by having a relationship with an enemy of the people, but it was now more important to correct this mistake than to expel her.9 No one dared protest against such an intervention for fear that it may have been an order from above and actually part of the ceremony. Monsters like Yezhov, Beria and Stalin could also be capricious at times and unpredictably scribble a note in the protocol and, with just the stroke of a pen, ‘save’ someone from the fate they had themselves decreed. Uncertainty pervaded the whole system, thus reinforcing the crippling effects of the Great Terror. The meeting ended in anticlimax. Instead of her anticipated expulsion, ‘Comrade Kartseva’ was severely reprimanded but allowed to remain a member and thereby continue in her post. A few years later, Evdokia asked for the reprimand to be reviewed and had it rescinded. But as part of the over-bureaucratic Soviet system, all her curricula vitae had, in future, to begin by mentioning her withdrawn reprimand. It is evident from her quick rise through the ranks that everyone, including the Spets Otdel top brass, knew that this was a necessary formal procedure. Even before the NKVD rescinded her reprimand, she had in 1939 been promoted to the rank of junior lieutenant. Three years later, she became a lieutenant and, in 1944,

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N i gh t at Noon a captain aged 30. She rarely wore uniform; for reasons of secrecy, the Spets Otdel staff were ordered to dress as civilians. Even later on, when permitted to wear uniform, she preferred her own clothes.10 As of late autumn 1938, the Great Terror subsided, and with that the deliveries to Butovo and other ‘shooting locations’ came to an end. The arrests and liquidations continued, but not on the same mind-numbing mass scale as before. The newly appointed NKVD chief, Beria, saw to it that a handful of sentences were reconsidered and a few prisoners released in order to spread the word and raise false hope among all the prisoners and their desperate relatives.11 Within the NKVD itself, the laborious work was under way to build up everything that had been lost. New cadres needed to be created from scratch, and the party apparatus was tasked with selecting suitable candidates to be trained quickly to fill the vacancies. One such candidate was the 31-year-old engineer Pavel Fitin, who had been working as a translator at the State Publishing House of Agricultural Literature and subsequently lacked experience of either foreign policy issues or intelligence work. In 1938, he was hand-picked and, after a short period of training, appointed deputy chief of the NKVD’s literally decapitated Foreign Intelligence Directorate before attaining the rank of lieutenant general and becoming chief after only a year.12 This rapid system of promotion could have had devastating consequences, but over the coming years Fitin proved to be an efficient intelligence chief and somehow got on well with the butchers around him. Over the following years, Evdokia would hear fragments of Roman’s fate every now and then. He had been incarcerated in Butyrskaya Prison, where the chief of the Spets Otdel continued to send him cipher material to work on. Convicts were still expected to be of use in their old positions. Evdokia found out from the chief of the Spets Otdel that Roman had written letters to her, but she had never received them. When the war broke out in 1941, he was released from prison and returned to his old post, but he later became a chronic alcoholic and was dismissed. Not until 1947 – by which time both their lives had taken completely different paths – did they meet again, this time by chance at

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe the home of a mutual friend. What first struck Evdokia was how much Roman had changed; the handsome charmer was the worse for wear and seemed somewhat shorter. Several of his front teeth were missing: the visible sign of the interrogators’ ‘physical pressure’. Appearing more resigned than bitter, he discreetly greeted her. He explained that he had not been arrested for anything he had done but for what they thought he might have done. His crime was his middle-class background, and there was nothing else to be said on the matter. They chatted for a while, and Roman wanted in some way to apologize for insisting on courting her. He knew that she had remarried, and he was glad that things had gone so well. Then they said their goodbyes and never met again.13

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6 Shorokhov, Alias Proletarsky, Alias Petrov Evdokia and her daughter’s troubles remained after the party branch meeting. The immediate danger had certainly been averted, but they were not out of the woods yet. A sudden telephone call to her workplace from her persistent female neighbour warned her of another immediate threat: the housing committee had been there sneaking around the hall and trying to force the lock to her apartment, which someone was clearly after. It turned out that Evdokia and Irina were not registered at the apartment, which had been made available after the official occupier’s arrest. In its eagerness, the housing committee had, however, overlooked the fact that the property belonged to the NKVD and could not simply be allocated willy-nilly. Evdokia rushed to her personnel department and obtained a piece of paper confirming she was living there. But her success was short-lived. A more senior Spets Otdel official was interested in Krivosh’s many square metres. She was thus powerless to resist a takeover like this and was forced to move into a much smaller corridor-like room she fitted out as well as she could with Roman’s furniture.1 At the Sixth Section (which handled cipher communications within the USSR) of the Spets Otdel of the NKVD, a cipher clerk with the rank of major used to visit the analysis section every so often. He had with him important telegrams, sometimes those to be shown to Stalin.2 The major’s name was Vladimir Proletarsky, but to those who knew him, he went by the diminutive of Volodya. He was well connected and did not always arrive with just a telegram but sometimes also with various much-coveted goods. Proletarsky was born Vladimir Mikhaylovich Shorokhov in 1907 to a peasant family. He had very little schooling; just two years into his education, the Revolution broke out. Until 1927, he worked

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe as the village blacksmith’s apprentice. Four years earlier, in 1923, Shorokhov had joined the Komsomol, which saw to it that he completed his insufficient education. In 1927, he became a member of the Communist Party and two years later changed his name using a formula popular at the time. Wanting to emphasize his background and ideological conviction, what could be better than Proletarsky? In 1930, he began his military service in the navy and was posted to a technical college in the seaport town of Kronstadt where he was trained as a cipher clerk. After leaving the navy a few years later, Proletarsky made his way to Moscow, where he met two former colleagues who were now OGPU workers. Their references helped him to find a position there, and he was posted to the Fifth Section, which handled cipher communication between the INO and residencies all over the world. Since this section was not divided up into regions, a cipher clerk could work with traffic to and from everywhere on the globe that the OGPU had links with.3 After a brief posting in Central Asia, Proletarsky returned to Moscow in February 1938 and was now posted to the Sixth Section of the Spets Otdel of the NKVD, where he was first promoted to deputy chief and then, following the German offensive in 1941, to chief. Evdokia used to leave Irina with her mother and Tamara, and the two little girls more or less grew up as siblings. When Irina got bigger and heavier to carry, Evdokia had to get a nanny to look after her when she was working. In 1939, she noted that Volodya was starting to show an interest in her, and gradually he began to visit her at her apartment. Irina immediately became enchanted with this almost teddy-bear-like former sailor, and her feelings were clearly reciprocated. Evdokia was more cautious, mostly because of Volodya’s tendency to try to control her comings and goings and to take liberties, such as phoning to ask why she had not returned to her apartment and where she had been. On the last Saturday in April 1940, the nanny phoned Evdokia at work. Something was wrong with Irina, who was complaining about pains in her legs and not feeling well. She seemed better the following morning, and an NKVD doctor examined her and assured

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S horokhov, A li as P r oletarsky , Alia s Pe t rov them she just had a common cold. But Irina’s condition quickly deteriorated, her fever got worse and she became delirious. Evdokia tried to contact the doctor again, and Volodya, but at eleven o’clock in the evening, Irina died. The doctor arrived a while later, as did Volodya, who stayed with her while she sat all night cradling her dead child in her arms.4 Two months after Irina’s death, Evdokia and Vladimir were married. Much later, Evdokia made reference to their colleagues speaking well of him and the women saying that he was good-hearted. But he also had a fine reputation; Evdokia knew that he was well thought of within the NKVD. He had been decorated with the organization’s Distinguished Service Medal and was the first Spets Otdel employee to be awarded the Order of the Red Banner. As his new name suggested, he had a staunch proletarian background. And Evdokia had not failed to realize the significance that he was willing to risk seeing her despite his position in the organization and offer her his hand in marriage at a very low point in her life.5 Volodya was, for better or worse, a protector, her knight in shining armour, and in any case the man she ultimately needed and the complete opposite of Roman Krivosh. Her marriage to Proletarsky led to a quick promotion up the accommodation ladder. In the summer of 1940, the couple moved into a spacious two-room apartment with a kitchen and bathroom. A year later, war arrived. For the NKVD, as with the entire communications and cipher organization, this necessitated a sudden change, the effects of which could be detected far beyond the Soviet Union’s borders. The xB-Dienst, which came under the Abwehr (the German military intelligence service) and monitored the Soviet radio communications between illegal transmitters and a large Moscow-based main station, recorded how this station suddenly ceased transmitting in the autumn of 1941 and remained absolutely silent for several weeks before coming back on air. This was because the NKVD had carried out a large-scale regrouping: its headquarters, including its gigantic archive, was evacuated from Moscow prior to the German offensive on the capital and regrouped in the temporary capital of Kuybyshev.

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe Some NKVD detachments remained in Moscow, however, including the cipher section Vladimir now headed. Evdokia’s family was evacuated to the city of Ufa in the Urals, while Evdokia found herself serving in Kuybyshev, where Vladimir later ended up being posted. In early 1942, his section chief enquired whether he would like to serve in Sweden. He had heard of an opening and thought about Vladimir, but above all about his wife and her taste for clothes, which he had clearly noted. Serving abroad was a good opportunity for someone wanting to establish a home, his boss pointed out. Vladimir was cautious since he knew that serving overseas brought with it not just opportunities but also risks, and that many returnees from posts abroad had blotted their copybooks. Demonstrating too much enthusiasm for an overseas post was also a dangerous thing.6 In Sweden, Vladimir was to serve as a cipher clerk in the legation’s NKVD residency, so, in principle, it was the same work as he had been doing at the Fifth Section of the Spets Otdel. However, he was also given a parallel position with responsibility for SK (Soviet Colony) duties, meaning that he carried out the surveillance of legation staff (internal security) and other overseas Soviets. Still, these were both clandestine positions, since the NKVD officially had no residency at the legation; this needed to be ‘incorporated’ into the regular diplomatic organization and the staff provided with suitable cover posts. This was no problem for a cipher clerk, and his cover post was quite simply that of a diplomatic cipher clerk, since diplomatic reporting also used cipher and was transmitted via the same means of communication as the intelligence traffic.7 The formal process for being stationed abroad was extensive, and before the couple could apply for visas at the temporary Swedish legation (also evacuated to Kuybyshev), the matter needed to be considered and approved by the Central Committee’s committee on foreign affairs and the NKID. Deputy People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs Vladimir Dekanozov, one of Beria’s confidantes, objected that the couple’s surname was far too offensive. Something would need to be done about this. Only when Evdokia and Vladimir received their foreign passports and opened them did they find out that they were now called Petrov.8

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Shorokhov, A li as P r oletarsky , Alia s Pe t rov This procedure was by no means uncommon for intelligence personnel stationed abroad. To hamper the work of the enemy intelligence services, they simply changed the identity of those dispatched so that it would become more difficult to track who was actually working in intelligence and whether the individual concerned had previously been stationed in another country. Gaik Ovakimian, the NKVD resident in Washington DC at the end of the 1930s, was therefore able to pose as ‘General Ossipov’ when William Donovan, head of the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), visited Moscow in 1943, without the latter smelling a rat.9 Petrov was and remained their alias for foreign use, first in Sweden and then in Australia. During the intervening period in Moscow, from 1947 to 1951, they reverted to being Evdokia Kartseva and Vladimir Proletarsky. Not until 1954 did these names cease to fulfil any purpose, and they became irrevocably one with their alias, even when the couple were finally provided with new cover names as false identities.

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7 The Island in the Middle of the War From the outbreak of war in 1941 until the autumn of 1944, travelling from the Soviet Union to the encircled Sweden was an enormously time-consuming and often highly dangerous undertaking. There were three main routes out of the Soviet Union: the first went north by sea from the port city of Archangel through the northern waters patrolled by German planes and naval forces. The second was the route east from Vladivostok to the West Coast of the United States. Finally, the third headed south via Persia, the Indian Ocean and South Africa. All three routes converged in Britain, and if the traveller had not previously faced any great problems and dangers, they were lying in wait here. All the passenger traffic to and from Sweden that could not pass German-controlled areas needed to follow a single unsafe route, namely the air link between Britain and Sweden. The air traffic between Scotland and Bromma Airport (on the outskirts of Stockholm) was irregular and had little capacity to carry passengers. Unlike the safe-conduct vessels, known as the Gothenburg traffic, no agreement had been reached regarding passage through the Skagerrak blockade. The safe-conduct vessels were forbidden to carry passengers, and compliance was monitored by the Germans. Avoiding detection, primarily by flying at night or in reduced visibility, was therefore the only protection for air traffic, making things particularly difficult in the summer months. But darkness did not always guarantee protection: on the night of 22 October 1942, the Stockholm-bound Swedish passenger plane Gripen was shot down, killing everyone on board, including a number of Soviet diplomats, couriers and relatives on their way to the legation. It turned out that the Germans had detected and attacked the Gripen

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The Island i n th e Mi ddle of t he Wa r after an agent at Bromma Airport reported that a plane was on its way from Britain. The air bridge was operated by both the Swedish airline AB Aerotransport and the British, who used the Mosquito light bomber. The Mosquito flew faster and at a higher altitude than most German fighter planes, but it could only carry one passenger at a time, stowed in the bomb bay and wearing an oxygen mask. From 1943, the majority of planes flying this route were converted American Liberator bombers, but they could not take off from there fully fuelled due to the short runways at Bromma Airport.1 Initially, the newly-wed Petrovs were to take the northern route to Britain, and so they made their way to Archangel to await a suitable convoy. However, a heavy German air offensive against the Arctic convoys meant that they had to wait until September 1942 and were then recalled to Moscow. From here, they journeyed to Kuybyshev, where the NKID issued them with Persian visas before they flew on via Baku to Tehran. On this occasion, a large Soviet party was travelling together to Egypt, where they boarded a British passenger ship destined for Cape Town. The sea voyage ended abruptly off the coast of Mozambique when the ship was torpedoed. Boarding the lifeboats, the passengers watched as the burning ship sank. In its place, a German U-boat surfaced, illuminating the shipwrecked party with a searchlight while a voice enquired as to the identity of the sunken ship and its cargo. The Soviet party now believed that their time was up, but the voice from the U-boat simply told them to rescue themselves as best they could, which was easier said than done. For several days, the lifeboats rode the waves out at sea, the wind picked up, and one of the boats worked its way loose of the ropes holding them together and disappeared. The remaining boats were finally discovered by a British destroyer that picked up the shipwrecked passengers and took them to Durban. After waiting more than a month in Cape Town, the Petrovs and the rest of the Soviet party arrived in Britain in early March 1943 and flew to Sweden after a week or so. The journey had taken over eight months, and all they had left of their original luggage were the passports Vladimir had insisted on rescuing from his jacket on the torpedoed ship.2

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe During their long journey, the fortunes of war had turned. The German 6th Army had been surrounded and defeated at Stalingrad and the German forces vanquished in North Africa. The three allies – the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union – could now sense that they were slowly but surely on their way to securing a final victory. At the same time, Germany’s allies were starting to explore ways of pulling out of the war. Neutral Sweden, which had been forced to make major concessions and had since the summer of 1940 conducted an extremely profitable wartime trade policy vis-à-vis Germany, now began to tactfully realign its course and be more sensitive to Allied proposals. The pro-German elements of the Swedish public quickly waned and were replaced by support for the Allied cause. This was a time for democrats, be they ‘El Alamein democrats’ or ‘Stalingrad democrats’, depending on when their conversion had taken place. Sympathy for the Soviet Union, barely existent outside Communist Party ranks still faithful to Moscow following the attack on Finland in 1939, increased and, as in the United States, many watched a new, more collaborationfocused Soviet Union emerge, albeit even more powerful than in the 1930s. Stockholm had played an important interwar role for the Soviet Union, particularly regarding trade and financial transactions. But Sweden’s capital was also one of the nodes in a worldwide network for the political control and financing of the Communist parties affiliated as sections of the Communist International (Comintern), with its headquarters in Moscow.3 In 1921, all Comintern-affiliated domestic Communist parties were instructed to establish parallel legal and illegal organizations.4 Since the legal (i.e. open) party organizations were assumed to be monitored, their illegal counterparts could guarantee that the Comintern leadership (in reality the Soviet party leadership) had a network of agents and sympathizers at its disposal. Comintern had its own counterpart to the Soviet intelligence services, namely the OMS (Otdel Mezhdunarodnoy Svyazi).5 The OMS had its own parallel courier service, used for the remittances from Moscow that kept the local parties afloat.6 But the OMS was also a valuable instrument for Soviet intelligence because of its local contacts and its

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Th e Island i n th e Mi ddle of t he Wa r ability to identify individuals who could later be passed on as agents for the regular intelligence services. Moreover, it was the OMS that introduced the technique of creating and operating through front organizations not formally run by Moscow or Communist parties loyal to Moscow but by agents and intermediaries under Soviet control, a practice employed throughout the Soviet period. The dividing line between the OMS and Soviet intelligence was not hard and fast, disappearing entirely in 1936–7 as a result of the purges within the Comintern’s leadership and its central functions.7 During the Great Terror, the OMS was dismantled and its remnants incorporated into the NKVD. The latter now took full advantage of the existing networks in different countries for recruiting intelligence agents and helping agents who could be used for technical and logistical support during intelligence operations. In Soviet intelligence reports, this supporting contingent was known as ‘our people’. At the same time, Soviet intelligence was consistently cautious about utilizing known party members or sympathizers, at least in those countries where these people had been under surveillance by the security agencies.8 Sweden was therefore useful as a courier stop and for money laundering, but the country had little political importance. The Moscowloyal Swedish Communist Party was indeed legal but lacked major political influence. Nor was Sweden an important military target, even though the Soviets regarded the country as a hostile neutral assumed to be ready to rally behind the Soviet Union’s enemies at the first opportunity. That Sweden was the only power to support Finland during the Winter War of 1939–40 was entirely in keeping with this view, but Sweden’s significance had already started to change from an intelligence standpoint. As Germany occupied more and more countries, Soviet intelligence’s room for manoeuvre in Western Europe began to shrink. Although Germany and the Soviet Union were allies under the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the German secret police (Gestapo) did not turn a blind eye to illegal Soviet activity. Soviet intelligence had therefore already started to regroup or resettle its valuable agents and illegals in more sheltered areas, such as Sweden.9

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe The German offensive against the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 fundamentally changed Sweden’s role. Stockholm now became the main base for operations directed against Germany and the Germanoccupied countries in Northern Europe. Soviet intelligence here availed itself both of past infiltrators of the system and a network of Communists and Republican veterans of the Spanish Civil War, some of whom were very experienced in sabotage techniques and guerrilla warfare under the tuition of Orlov. Only from Sweden and Switzerland could Soviet intelligence try to re-establish contact with its extensive networks of German agents built up before the war and, in instances where these agents had been tracked down and liquidated by the Gestapo, seek new ways to infiltrate the Third Reich. But Sweden had also acquired greater importance as an intelligence target due to having in reality supported the German war effort by extensively exporting strategically important goods to Germany and allowing German transit traffic both by rail through Sweden and by sea in Swedish territorial waters.10 Last but not least, Stockholm was a place where all belligerent countries could operate with or without each other, recruit agents, spread disinformation or enter into tacit agreements. This pertained not only to traditional intelligence activities but also to the entire spectrum of clandestine warfare and diplomacy, sometimes with the blessing of the Swedish authorities but often behind their backs or contrary to their interests. Most people who came to Sweden from the war-torn outside world were struck by the bubble of normality they encountered. Europe may have been in flames, but in Stockholm life went on as if there was no war. Yes, there was rationing and fuel shortages, but the restaurant life continued unabated and, with a few annoying exceptions, there were plenty of goods in the shops. This bubble was both a material and a psychological one; the Norwegian-born American OSS officer Iver Olsen, who arrived in Stockholm in late 1943, was struck by this absence of reality.11 In Stockholm, nothing was allowed to disrupt the way things had always been, which presented the newcomer with many pitfalls, particularly the chronic weakness for titles. Olsen, who sent agents to the Baltic countries

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Th e Island i n th e Mi ddle of t he Wa r and recruited the diplomat Raoul Wallenberg for the assignment in Budapest, despised this Swedish indifference and introversion.12 In addition, his meagre daily allowance did not stretch to cover the social life the social norms demanded he live as a financial attaché (his cover post). Another observer of the small-mindedness of 1940s Stockholm was the British press attaché Peter Tennant. Behind this cover post, he worked for the Special Operations Executive (a British clandestine organization), and in his own memoirs, Touchlines of War (1992), he maintains a certain British reserve while depicting the same mentality Olsen’s reports complained about.13 Both Olsen and Tennant were not who they claimed to be. And as the war progressed, Stockholm became increasingly overrun by such people. There was no war going on here, and on the surface everything seemed normal; but underneath a great deal more was going on. Wartime Stockholm was blighted by a growing housing shortage and overcrowding, and almost all foreign representations had a chronic lack of premises; this was not helped at all by the nature and the rapidly increasing scale of their activities. After the German occupation of Norway in April 1940, the relatively modest Norwegian Stockholm legation became the exiled Norwegian government and intelligence service’s most important advanced base, but its personnel had to work in extremely overcrowded conditions.14 In the Stockholm district known as Diplomat City, the British intelligence station was bringing the legation very close to bursting point, partly because of the invasion of individuals posted there, under various more or less transparent pretences, and partly due to the space it took up storing things in cellars and suitcases at times. The American diplomatic representation in Stockholm had the fastest growing foreign diplomatic presence: from a staff of fewer than ten in 1939, their operation expanded to around four hundred individuals towards the end of the war, roughly a quarter of whom were intelligence personnel.15 For Stockholmers, Sweden stood perhaps on the sidelines of the war; however, for the belligerents it was, if anything, the opposite, and it was not just – or even principally – the Soviet Union that regarded Sweden as an increasingly important vantage point and operating base.

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe Evdokia Petrova’s first impression of her encounter with this Swedish normality was entirely positive, and she was particularly impressed by how clean and tidy the Swedish capital was.16 Upon seeing loads of people sitting outside large buildings in the spring sunshine, she initially concluded that unemployment must be really high since people were obviously queuing up to be allowed into some official institution.17 With just a few exceptions, neither she nor Vladimir got to know these residents who spent their time either sun-worshipping or constantly cleaning and cycling. Like so many other non-Swedes, she was struck by the locals’ stand-offishness and well-developed ability to ignore their fellow public transport users or fellow visitors at the spa hotel where she was later sent to convalesce after a period of illness.18 Although all diplomatic personnel were supposed to learn Swedish, and the rest of the legation staff could participate in the approved language instruction, a huge language gap nevertheless existed in practice.19 In addition to this, the Soviet personnel in Stockholm, like those at other permanent stations, needed to live in either the actual legation or in apartments next to each other so as to make foreign infiltration difficult and, above all, facilitate the surveillance of one another and prevent defections. Stockholm offered considerable cosmopolitan entertainments, not least as a result of the influx of foreigners with more or less credible backgrounds and occupational titles. The same fundamental rules laid down for the 19-year-old Evdokia when she started her career at the Spets Otdel also applied in the Swedish capital. Restaurants were, from a security perspective, generally regarded as dangerous places. This was often the case in wartime Stockholm, with various groupings sticking to their respective haunts, and so it was not advisable for those needing to act with caution to go out aimlessly. In 1944, the OSS compiled what could almost be described as a restaurant guide for spies, in which it marked a number of eating establishments as ‘Nazi hang-outs’ with the skull and crossbones. This guide also issued a general warning that there was no such thing as a safe restaurant in Stockholm, although some were friendlier than others. Berns

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The Island i n th e Mi ddle of t he Wa r Salonger held, however, a unique position as a neutral safe area, since everyone went there.20 Unsurprisingly, the Soviet legation staff normally kept to the Soviet club, an obvious meeting place where in the days of ration books they could still be served vodka, one of the items in short supply. Here they had no need, either, to fear being monitored by anyone other than their own security service and its network of recruited informers. The party and the Komsomol’s local organizations at the legation also played an important monitoring role. All NKVD personnel belonged to one of these organizations, as did practically all the other legation staff. The party was responsible for continuous political training, either in groups or individually. Party meetings were held three times a month in the evening, and attendance was compulsory, with the only excuse being official duty. As in Moscow, party meetings here served as the main forum for airing criticism and letting personal antagonism play out.21 Unlike at many permanent stations, off-duty Soviet personnel in Stockholm were actually not forbidden from socializing with Swedish citizens; however, they mainly kept themselves to themselves. Soviet citizens were taught to be on their guard against all foreigners – once again, just as Evdokia had had drilled into her on her first day of clandestine work. For obvious reasons, the foreignness was totally dominant when serving abroad, making it a dangerous place to be per se. Another danger came in the form of the Soviet diplomatic regulations, which prescribed that any contact with these foreigners other than of a trivial nature must be reported and, where necessary, approved by Moscow. Failure to do so could result in a reprimand or more serious sanctions.22 Unless part of the intelligence operatives’ recruitment methods, close relationships with foreigners were strictly forbidden, and moving in and living with a foreigner would be a transgression of unimaginable proportions. All these regulations and prohibitions were, however, like being at home for people such as Evdokia, who had spent their entire working lives in the NKVD headquarters. These echoes from home were insignificant in light of the altogether positive sides of life in Stockholm, which were not confined to the orderly streets and

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe parks. One of the Petrovs’ greatest sources of joy, for example, was the apartment they were soon allocated in the Stockholm district of Gärdet. They had initially been billeted in the actual legation building, which was common for cipher clerks, who needed to be available at short notice for urgent incoming or outgoing messages.23 The Petrovs had certainly been privileged when it came to accommodation in Moscow; however, their Stockholm apartment was to be their first home together – mostly because they could furnish it themselves and Evdokia was able to acquire something she had always dreamed of, namely a piano of her own. Another feel-good factor in the Petrovs’ everyday lives was their personal financial situation. NKVD personnel normally enjoyed a higher salary than their cover posts offered; this was paid for by the MFA, with the NKVD making up the difference. In Sweden, their entire salary was paid in the local currency and not, as was the case later in Australia, with a percentage being paid into an account in Moscow. Although these war years, during which Sweden prepared itself against a possible attack, were a relatively expensive period, the couple had a large disposable income, and just like most Soviet overseas personnel, they acquired as many consumer goods as possible while the opportunity lasted.24 In Stockholm, the Soviet legation was situated in the old diplomatic quarter in Östermalm. The main building was a relatively narrow brick house with four floors and a penthouse, and at the back could be found a smaller building that contained, among other things, a garage. Other than a cast-iron railing which surrounded the property, it was not closed off in any other way. The legation building in Östermalm was not the only official Soviet institution in Stockholm. Just like the other belligerent countries, Soviet activity in Sweden tended to increase. The Soviet consulate general, Press Section and Trade Representation all had central Stockholm addresses; in fact, the Trade Representation was a stone’s throw from the German Abwehr’s official premises during the latter part of the war. In addition, TASS, the official Russian news agency, Intourist and Aeroflot had their own premises elsewhere in Stockholm. Several of these Soviet agencies were patently oversized

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The Island i n th e Mi ddle of t he Wa r or totally unnecessary, such as Intourist, but they had other functions. The Soviet legation personnel totalled around 150; most of these, however, did not have diplomatic status, and many were employed as guards, typists, secretaries and technical staff, such as the legation’s own electricians. Soviet ambassador Alexandra Kollontai mingled freely in Stockholm’s political, cultural and financial circles until her failing health became too great an obstacle. Kollontai was by far the most renowned Soviet diplomat of the time thanks to her competence and personality, coupled with her being the last to survive of Lenin’s close colleagues after the others had, one by one, fallen foul of Stalin’s Terror in its various forms. How Kollontai avoided this fate was a mystery, even to her, and there is no clear explanation for this, even retrospectively.25 Kollontai’s posthumous diary from her time in Sweden points to her extensive network of contacts but, above all, to her sharp eye and ability to see through the then Swedish political elite.26 Legation work was somewhat routine and involved long hours. Certain functions needed to be constantly manned, and the cipher clerks’ working conditions were strictly controlled to minimize the risk of unauthorized persons gaining an insight into their work. The workload also varied periodically due to the arrival and departure of the diplomatic couriers. During the war years, there could be a long time between the two. When the legation received a message that couriers were on their way, its workload increased as outgoing mail and other material needed to be prepared. The couriers sometimes had letters requiring a reply by return post, which could mean a lot of work, occasionally long into the night. In the meantime, the couriers would stay at the legation or in one of the guards’ apartments, anything from a few days to a couple of weeks depending on how much business they had to attend to and when they could set out on the return journey.27 The couriers worked for the NKID, and the diplomatic mail was a joint communication channel for diplomats and intelligence personnel. The couriers’ pouches were opened in a separate room at the NKID headquarters, whence the mail was distributed to the

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe various agencies. The NKVD had no couriers of its own, but it could, where necessary, use the courier role as a cover for its personnel on various assignments; this was because the couriers had legitimate reasons for making their journeys at short notice and they did not attract special attention.

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8 The Concealed Legation The Soviet legation, headed by Alexandra Kollontai and her diplomatic staff, was no front; it served as a lookout post and contact point with the Swedish government and society in several important respects. No one, not even among the Stockholm-based NKVD representatives, had the kind of network of elites Kollontai boasted, and Säpo therefore took it for granted that she was masterminding the illegal Soviet activities in Sweden. Only much later did Säpo realize the reverse to be true: she was the only one not involved at all in these activities and instead represented one of their priority targets.1 But in one vital respect and from an intelligence standpoint, the legation was a front. It housed three secret intelligence stations, which were collectively bigger than the official activities being carried out to conceal them. Alongside the NKVD, there was the GRU, headed by the military attaché, and a separate naval intelligence section, run by the naval attaché. Formally, they were three individual residencies or intelligence stations with strikingly little to do with each other, and they did not work together at the permanent station. In one case, a conflict of interest arose when the GRU discovered that the NKVD had begun to take an interest in an individual it was recruiting. Instead of resolving this rather simple issue by discussing it, the military attaché telegraphed the general staff, asking it to raise the matter with the NKVD so that it could ward off a rival recruitment attempt.2 The NKVD residency played a more central role than the other two, as reflected in its unrivalled position of power. Thus, the NKVD monitored the personnel at the other residencies and was both a formal and informal rival to the actual diplomatic representation. This underlying conflict was not simply a Soviet phenomenon – although

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe the conflict here tended to manifest itself in a specifically Soviet way, such as the inclination in every situation to refer issues to Moscow for a decision – and could be found at all permanent stations where an intelligence station was incorporated into the diplomatic representation. Both the American and British Stockholm legations at times also experienced acute antagonism between diplomats and intelligence chiefs, with the legation heads wishing they could get rid of their imposed subtenants since their activities were deemed illegal, politically dangerous and high-handed. A lot depended of course on how well the legation and station heads could get along, which could not be resolved by referring matters to Moscow, London or Washington.3 This NKVD–NKID conflict was also rooted in the unclear division of work and an underlying battle for territory. NKVD employees gathered political intelligence, but so did the diplomats. Doing the best job was not always about the method employed, but sometimes, as in Kollontai’s case, about knowledge, contacts and being able to have confidential conversations. In Stockholm, the NKVD resident was formally subordinate to the ambassador, the only diplomat informed of the resident’s identity. The intelligence station was concealed not only from the outside world but also internally from the rest of the staff, who did not know who was one of them and who represented ‘the others’, although they could, of course, come to their own conclusion with the help of small clues. Essentially, the intelligence staff employed the same measures to disguise themselves from their colleagues as they did for the foreign security services, against whose surveillance operatives, bugging devices and infiltrators they had to be constantly on their guard. The individual’s legend, the fictitious background all cadre personnel stationed abroad had to concoct and learn off by heart, was an important part of this internal camouflage. Each member of intelligence staff would use this legend in all contact with colleagues, and it was even reused and elaborated on for new foreign assignments in order to avoid any contradictions. The legend was linked to the individual’s assigned cover post. If an NKVD officer was

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The Concealed Legat ion to be posted as a TASS correspondent – a position nearly always earmarked as a cover post – the legend would have a background in some appropriate government agency. It would also involve media work, including work experience at the TASS central office to learn the trade and acquire sufficient knowledge of the environment and individuals so the NKVD officer could answer simple questions to verify their ‘identity’.4 Cover posts were a further source of conflict between the NKID and the various Soviet intelligence services, which usually fought to retain their cover posts and regarded them as their own.5 This conflict was intensified owing to the fact that not all the cover posts were suitable. It was important for operational personnel to have cover posts allowing them to move freely and naturally make contact as part of their duties; the consular section was therefore much coveted, as was the post of cultural attaché, the VOKS (Vsesoiuznoe Obshchestvo Kul’turnoi Sviazi s zagranitsei, All-Union Society for Cultural Relations Abroad) representative, even though these posts appeared to be less important. Two of the four residents the Petrovs served under in Stockholm, therefore, had cover posts as embassy secretaries with VOKS duties. But two aspirations also risked colliding here. Cultural exchanges opened up a world of opportunities to discover, cultivate and maintain agent contacts, but they were also time-consuming: the resident needed to be a cultural attaché by day or in the evening and during the rest of their time conduct all the duties that came with being head of the shadowy and formally non-existent organization. Therefore, the resident and their closest assistant had the longest working days of all the legation staff, often burning the midnight oil, particularly if they had received important cipher telegrams from Moscow or urgent reports needed to be sent. For Vladimir, the cover post’s credibility and practicality were not a problem: his cover post as a cipher clerk completely overlapped with his actual post as the NKVD residency’s cipher clerk, and he worked alongside the regular cipher clerk in the locked cipher room in the closed-off section of the legation. What Vladimir required, however, was a legend to conceal his intelligence background. Having dabbled

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe in trade union work, he created a made-up professional background at the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions, which he later expanded on by getting to know the premises and the senior persons at this fictitious workplace. In both Sweden and then in Australia, the version he told his colleagues was that the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions had seconded him to the NKID (later the MFA).6 Evdokia’s legend was that she had been working as a secretary at the Ministry of Higher Education. The very fact that she had been provided with a legend shows the NKVD had prepared her to be called on for intelligence work in Stockholm. To ensure its workers did not stand out from other legation personnel and to make it difficult for foreign security services to identify and monitor these workers, the NKVD went to great pains. It was extremely important that the cover post and intelligence assignment overlapped as far as possible, or at least did not differ materially.7 For example, those in subordinate posts were not allowed to have the same level of contact with foreigners as was normally reserved for diplomats. As another precautionary measure, the addresses of overseas NKVD personnel were removed from the register of Moscow addresses to prevent their cover stories being checked by the back door.8 An important part of the camouflage was for the residencies not to be separately located from the rest of the work or in completely different premises. Since the foreign security services carried out entry and exit checks as part of their surveillance, it was vital to shuffle the staff around, which was, however, made more difficult by the high security requirements for the premises. In Stockholm, the three intelligence stations shared a closed-off floor in the legation building; here all the technical and administrative work was carried out and the documents archived. As another precautionary measure, they did not store copies of the files on recruited agents (known as agent cards) at the permanent station; these were only available at the Moscow headquarters. If diplomatic relations were to break down, they would have limited time to destroy the documents, and a residency could not risk being forcibly taken over during war.9 Before setting off from Moscow, a prospective resident needed therefore to read up on the agents’ personal details and previous reports.10

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Th e Concealed Legat ion The resident, his deputy and the residency’s cipher clerks worked at the NKVD residency, home also to the technical personnel who handled the paperwork and ran an internal photographic laboratory. Apart from the resident, the cipher clerk was the only postholder the legation head needed to be apprised of. In very urgent cases, the cipher clerk could directly contact the head of the legation. At other times, the cipher clerk was isolated as much as possible and was not usually allowed to be used in operational intelligence work because attempts would be made to recruit them. The cipher clerk knew two kinds of classified information: not only the kind that concerned the communication service’s procedures and the actual cipher but also knowledge of all the residency’s operational activities. By manually converting the words in an outgoing clear-text message into a cipher code using the code book and subsequently shuffling these numbers into a random sequence (known as overencrypted code) using one-time pads and then doing the same in reverse for the incoming telegram traffic, the cipher clerk read all telegram communication with Moscow. Consequently and unavoidably, they were just as well informed as the resident in this respect. Cadre personnel (i.e. NKVD officers with different cover posts) and operational workers conducted the actual intelligence activities. The latter category consisted of employees at the legation or other Soviet institutions who had been enlisted at their workplaces and so already had their cover posts into the bargain. Operational workers could be recruited from among the senior diplomats but also from among drivers and guards, depending on what kind of intelligence work they were to be used for. Both cadre personnel and operational workers, therefore, operated outside the residency, with which they only had contact through verbal or written reports. An operational worker was not made aware of anyone else recruited in a similar manner. The next group was those people with whom the cadre personnel and operational workers were in contact and had established some kind of cooperation. Of these, the most senior category was described as fully recruited agents. They were part of what was collectively known as the agency, a network expected to act on orders from the

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe residency or directly from Moscow. The resident could therefore receive orders from the head of the NKVD’s Foreign Intelligence Directorate, General Fitin, to activate the agency in order to obtain intelligence on a certain matter. Recruitment needed to be done carefully and was often a long process, but it could sometimes be speeded up if circumstances required. The basic rule was, however, that the prospective agent would be ‘studied’ to assess their suitability and inclination, and their background would be diligently scrutinized. In Sweden, the Soviet Union often used ‘our people’ and the remnants of the Comintern in Moscow to enquire about a prospective recruit’s personal circumstances. Sometimes the NKVD in Moscow actually had a better knowledge of Swedish individuals than the residency had.11 To conclude the recruitment process, the agent had to sign a contract obligating them to work for the NKVD and imposing a duty of confidentiality regarding the whole affair. Agents could also be bound by a duty of confidentiality when the recruitment failed. In the 1940s, recruitments were generally motivated by ideology or realpolitik, but often a financial aspect was involved. All agents received a monthly payment, which they could, in theory, decline. The NKVD took a somewhat dual approach to this: on the one hand, it needed to express its gratitude to agents willing to work unselfishly for the great cause, and on the other, payment meant that the person in question was, in principle, hopelessly compromised and could not unilaterally terminate the agent contract. A case illustrating this conundrum is that of the German diplomat Rudolf von Scheliha. At the end of the 1930s, the GRU had recruited von Scheliha, obviously primarily with a financial incentive. During the war, he wanted to stop this collaboration for fear of being found out, but his handler had other ideas: he sent an agent who showed von Scheliha a signed receipt from 1938; this would be handed over to the Gestapo unless he resumed his activities. When both the NKVD’s and the GRU’s networks were uncovered in 1942, von Scheliha was also arrested and executed.12 The next category was made up of informers who freely supplied the residency with information and who could not normally be

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The Concealed Legat ion press-ganged into cooperating or continuing to provide their services, since they had not bound themselves to be at the residency’s disposal. They could, however, become compromised in some situations, like former West German chancellor Willy Brandt, who, for political reasons, supplied information to Nazi Germany’s enemies while in wartime exile in Stockholm. Another informer was LieutenantCommander Hans Henriksen, the Norwegian naval attaché in Stockholm, who shared information about German naval forces in Norway with his Soviet counterpart and the Naval GRU’s Captain Taradin. The Norwegians nevertheless deemed this collaboration controversial, and Henriksen was transferred to London in 1943.13 Finally, the most common sources were unconscious informants. With the residencies’ existence a secret and the intelligence staff hidden away from their legation colleagues, an outsider generally had difficulty determining whether the person with whom they had contact was an ordinary diplomat or something else. Sometimes this was not even clear until the Soviet intelligence officer broached the question of a formal recruitment and it was time to sign the agent contract; however, this was very rarely the case, and the informant normally remained in the dark. Operational intelligence staff thus used their cover activities to acquire information from individuals who believed that they were conversing with a press attaché, dining with a consul or ‘pillow talking’ with a refined and linguistically talented cultural attaché. Informing the person concerned of the true situation would not entail any intelligence advantage; quite the contrary. Unconscious informants were thereby not just low-maintenance but were also more reliable sources in many respects than either agents or informers. This was because the information supplied was provided spontaneously, and it never crossed their minds that they or anyone else could be harmed by it. These unwitting informants were the main losers in the intelligence system’s complex food chains. The military intelligence residencies were run by their respective controlling agency, either the general staff in Moscow or the Soviet naval headquarters, and the tasks assigned to the Stockholm residencies reflected the military intelligence needs and current Soviet or enemy activity. As long as German troop and material transports

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe were passing through Sweden, keeping tabs on them would remain an important military task. The GRU also monitored the Swedish military structure and capacity, and the Naval GRU reported ship movements, including information on the German naval forces in Norway received via the Norwegians or its own network of agents in Norway. The Naval GRU was interested too in the convoy traffic along the Swedish coast, particularly once Soviet submarines had begun attacking ore ships bound for Germany. There was considerable overlap between the military and naval ‘neighbours’ on the one hand and the NKVD on the other. There were times when it was unclear whether information about Swedish– German collaboration was political or military intelligence. But there was also a degree of randomness depending on who had established which contact. One such example was the agent Nabludatel (Observer), whom the NKVD recruited in 1943 and who was entrusted with supplying information on Swedish military strength in northern Sweden. As a cipher clerk, Vladimir Petrov handled numerous telegrams from this Nabludatel, whom he also knew to be an NKVD agent who had been transferred to the GRU after some negotiation. However, he turned out not to be one of the GRU’s greatest assets after all, since Nabludatel was actually the pathological Swedish liar Fritiof Enbom, who was arrested and convicted of gross espionage after having duped the NKVD, the GRU, Säpo, the spy prosecutor Werner Ryhninger, Stockholm City Court, the Svea Court of Appeal and the press. They had all readily swallowed the story that he was the most dangerous super-spy of that period. The victims were once again the unconscious informants who had provided information in good faith to the railway employee Fritiof Enbom, who personally upgraded them to members of his secret spy network, Grupp Norr.14 The NKVD conducted extensive and complex intelligence work that to some extent was very similar to and overlapped diplomatic reporting. In other respects, it reflected the NKVD’s domestic duties, namely preventing infiltration, combating counter-revolutionary activities, preventing Soviet citizens from leaving the country illegally and, last but not least, hunting down real or fictitious spies, Trotskyites

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The Concealed Legat ion and other subversive elements. These latter duties were performed within the framework of two specialist functions: Line SK (which focused on the Soviet colony in the country in question) and Line EM (which monitored emigres and their organizations). Intelligence gathering and secret diplomacy were, however, the most widespread areas of activity. This was where Stockholm had most potential. From Swedish government agencies, companies, journalists and researchers the residency received information not only about Swedish matters but also about other more vital intelligence targets. In the same way, the various legations in Stockholm and their own intelligence stations could be utilized for infiltration, informal contact or secret intelligence cooperation. For example, the Soviet residency obtained through infiltration diplomatic reports from Budapest to Stockholm and gained access to information from Romania, one of Germany’s increasingly wavering allies. For the NKVD, using its secret contacts with Finland played a special role from 1943 on; through its Stockholm contacts, the NKVD gathered intelligence about Finnish public opinion on peace and attempted to exploit these contacts in various ways to facilitate a separate peace with the Soviet Union. Both the NKVD residency and Ambassador Kollontai handled this secret top-level politics. Here the NKVD also laid the foundations for the widespread penetration of postwar Finnish political life.15 The hub of this activity was not the legation, but the spacious central Stockholm apartment of an agent with the cover name Klara.

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9 Tamara Using the name Petrova, Evdokia Kartseva had accompanied her new husband on his first foreign assignment. However, despite being an NKVD lieutenant, she had not received any assignment prior to her leaving. There may have been several reasons for this. The NKVD headquarters certainly micromanaged the residencies’ operational work and carefully examined each proposed agent recruitment; but distance and time-related aspects nevertheless meant that to some extent, depending on the situation, residents needed to organize the work at the permanent stations. Evdokia could remain available and be used for those tasks where she was needed, which turned out to be the case. Another possible explanation is that Evdokia’s formal qualifications and service experience were not actually suited to an intelligence station’s work. How should an expert in breaking Japanese code be best utilized in Stockholm? Evdokia and the prevailing circumstances had the answer to this question. Another factor probably proved decisive. As a matter of principle, the NKVD did not post single employees overseas for long periods of time and considered the risk too great that they would become compromised and recruited by a foreign power.1 From this perspective, NKVD couples were a practical solution. Vladimir would simply not have been considered for a foreign post had he not been married, a circumstance that may have figured considerably earlier than the reported conversation with his section chief. When the Petrovs arrived in Stockholm, the NKVD residency was run by Boris Rybkin, who was operating in Stockholm under his alias of Yartsev. He had previously been a resident in Helsinki and played an important role in putting out Soviet feelers to persuade Finland

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Tamar a to concede territory during 1938–9. Rybkin and the female NKVD officer Zoya Voskresenskaya had found one another in Helsinki and married with the blessing of the NKVD headquarters. The pair were subsequently transferred to Stockholm during the Winter War and, after a brief interlude, returned in the autumn of 1941 when the then resident, Andrei Graur, was declared persona non grata by the Swedish authorities and was transferred to London. Vladimir and Evdokia had met Graur’s wife in Archangel when she was on her way to join her husband, and they saw her again later on the return journey to Sweden.2 Not long after the Petrovs’ arrival in Stockholm, Yartsev ordered Evdokia to work as a residency typist and technical assistant and cover for her husband as a cipher clerk where necessary. Vladimir often worked at night and slept during the day, so sometimes another person was needed to handle the traffic. Evdokia did not think much of her new boss. Nor was he rated particularly highly in Moscow and was quite correctly recalled in the early autumn of 1943 as his superiors considered his work unsatisfactory and lacking in initiative.3 The NKVD headquarters’ criticism was seldom veiled and was usually straight to the point. Yartsev’s recall might have also had something to do with Säpo’s arrest of his most important Swedish agent, Per Meurling, in June 1943, which came about after the Swedish Security Police’s surveillance had established that he had received money from the Soviet legation.4 Boris’s wife, Zoya Yartseva, was appointed a temporary resident while awaiting the arrival of a new chief from Moscow. She did not particularly impress Evdokia either, except in one respect: she was an incredibly fast typist. Unfortunately, the quality of her typing did not match its speed and volume. Her cover post was that of a press attaché, and her main intelligence source was Swedish newspaper clippings she later wove together with conversations she had had with people. Moscow quite rightly did not think much of the material and lambasted the residency. However, there was no stopping Zoya Yartseva; she continued to churn out reports.5 According to Evdokia, Yartseva failed to recruit a single new agent during her time in Sweden.6

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe The new permanent resident arrived by air from Britain on 25 October 1943. Säpo’s surveillance operatives at the border checkpoint jotted down a quick description of the arriving diplomat: Approx. 177–180 cm tall, heavily built, dark combed-back hair, bushy eyebrows, broad face, broad pointed chin, brown eyes, straight, short nose, yellow-brown windproof sports cap (low at the neck, the peak high), grey check single-breasted casual suit with long trousers, red and white striped woollen tie, yellowish-brown windproof slip-on coat, brown shoes with white stitching on the sole. Smokes thin cigarettes without a holder. Speaks German.7 This was Vassili Razin, born in 1903 according to his diplomatic passport, and the incoming first secretary of the Soviet legation. In reality, Razin was a completely different person – Vassili Roshchin, with the cover name Valerian – and his posting as cultural secretary was a useful cover. Razin was a senior NKVD officer, one of its few surviving veterans and a professional in the same class as Alexander Orlov. He had been the resident in Harbin in Manchuria and then the resident in Berlin and Vienna in the 1930s, and had only narrowly escaped the same fate as the other intelligence veterans during the Great Terror. The ostracized Razin was indeed purged in 1938 and had to work as a translator, but he was brought back into the NKVD fold in 1941 to work with disinformation before being posted abroad again. Säpo’s surveillance operatives soon got a taste of Razin’s professionalism, but without understanding its full significance. Like all the diplomatic staff, he was routinely monitored for a few weeks at a time so that Säpo could detect any contact with agents or conspiratorial behaviour. There were no clear signs of this, but the surveillance operatives complained about losing their target time after time without being able to determine where he had got to. During one monitoring period, Razin gave them the slip on three occasions late in the evening, and they then checked his central Stockholm

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Tamara apartment but could see no sign that he had been there. On one of these occasions, they continued their surveillance only to discover Razin walking along the street the following morning; he popped into a nearby shop and bought two lagers before proceeding to his apartment; once inside he pulled down the Venetian blind and did not surface until lunchtime.8 Not until May 1945, more than eighteen months later, was Säpo finally certain of the actual identity of its evasive surveillance target. The Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs (MFA) had by then received word from the Danes that Razin was a senior NKVD official suspected of maintaining contact with a Danish citizen. Nevertheless, Säpo did not conclude that Razin was the NKVD’s Stockholm resident, a post he in any case vacated just a couple of weeks later to take up the then considerably more important post of Helsinki resident. By then he had already completed his main mission in Stockholm, namely to use a growing network of agents in exile and at various legations to influence the political development of Germany’s shrinking circle of allies and thereby hasten the country’s defeat.9 Razin was a good linguist, well-mannered and soon popular with the female legation staff due to his well-groomed appearance and polite and respectful behaviour towards them, something they were not exactly used to. Evdokia rated her new boss, not just because of his comportment but owing to the fact that he was so good at his job.10 Razin was also the first person in Stockholm to realize her competence and ability and gradually assigned her new and more difficult duties regarding not just the routine residency work but also the conspiratorial work. The first of these duties as an operational intelligence officer was to begin ‘studying’ a young Swedish woman with a view to recruiting her as an agent. Like all operational intelligence personnel, Evdokia now needed a cover name, and not just the fictitious Petrova surname. Cover names were used in all documentation, letters and telegrams to and from Moscow. Ideally, agents or prospective agents would only know their contact’s cover name, to reduce the risk of permanent intelligence personnel’s identities being revealed. Agents and informants were in turn given cover names. The agents recruited knew their

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe own cover names and used them when signing their reports and collecting their monthly remuneration. Informers and objects of study, however, were usually in the dark about their assigned cover names. The aforementioned Willy Brandt, a wartime journalist in Stockholm who supplied the NKVD with information from Norway and Finland, was presumably unaware that his cover name was Polyarnik (Polar Explorer).11 The operational staff had the privilege of deciding their cover names themselves. Evdokia chose Tamara, her little sister’s first name. Just like her assigned surname Petrova, this name would stay with her during future overseas postings. Normally, cover names were not simply random creations and often had a connection to the person they referred to. The last resident Evdokia served under in Stockholm, Pavel Kirsanov, thus had the cover name Apraksin, which quite simply referred to his hometown, Apraksino, in the Gorky district. Somewhat stranger is the fact that the cover names assigned to agents, informants and recruitment targets often referred to their social position or personal qualities, which of course had a counterproductive effect on the cover name’s purpose of making identification difficult. For instance, the Hungarian press attaché Andor Gellért was thus assigned the cover name Gorets (Highlander), a clear link to Gellért Hill in Budapest.12 Evdokia was given her first operational assignment once Moscow had approved this. The task of ‘studying’ a young Swedish woman who gave language lessons had originally been assigned to Lena Kandakova, secretary to Alexandra Kollontai and later to her successor, Ilya Chernyshev. Kandakova was recruited as an operational worker to perform SK duties, which Chernyshev was unaware of since legation chiefs were not informed of this work. On one occasion, a legation employee happened to visit Lena, discovered her socializing with a foreigner and dutifully reported the matter to the ambassador. Lena asked Razin to be taken off her recruitment assignment, and so he gave the task to his overqualified typist. By the time Razin told Evdokia about the assignment, the matter was already finalized and Moscow had given its approval. This was a huge moment for her; as she later recalled the occasion, it was

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Tamar a undoubtedly the most important and sensitive assignment of her intelligence career so far.13 The individual she was to study, or rather to make the subject of an ‘in-depth study’, was much younger than her and had already been assigned the cover name Maria.14 She was working as a shorthand writer at the Swedish MFA, thus making her an interesting recruitment target. Evdokia took up the job where Lena had left off and continued with the language exchange lessons: Maria taught her Swedish and Evdokia tutored Maria in Russian. Maria still lived at home and they would often sit in her bedroom. Evdokia gradually won her trust and friendship, exactly as planned, and gathered much personal information about the other woman, which was child’s play since the latter was happy to confide in her slightly older and considerably more experienced friend. They became really good friends, although Evdokia never forgot her assignment. This friendship was a means, not a goal, and the more genuine it was, the more effectively it facilitated the recruitment process. What must not happen – and the NKVD was observant about this – was for any emotional ties to create loyalties that went beyond operational targets. Evdokia continued to ‘study’ Maria for a year, which was not unusual for this type of recruitment process where the agent could then be used for years or even decades. She also used Maria as an unconscious informant during the recruitment process. As Maria gained confidence in her intended controlling officer, she opened up about not only her personal relationships but also her duties and working conditions at the Swedish MFA, which Evdokia then described in her reports to Moscow. External circumstances meant the recruitment process had to be accelerated, however. Maria told her confidante about her new assignment: her first overseas posting, at the Swedish legation in Vienna. When Evdokia reported this, she received orders from Moscow to complete the recruitment before Maria left. Evdokia met her for the last time: they sat on her bed, and Evdokia turned the conversation to the big issues of the day, anti-fascism and peace and those who threatened this, and the contribution Maria could make by working with the progressive powers. But Maria was bewildered; she clearly

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe never imagined doing what her friend had just suggested, and there was no question of her supplying secret information. The illusion was shattered, and a year’s hard work lay in tatters. Given the situation, Evdokia now changed roles, from older friend to NKVD officer. She explained that no matter what Maria thought of her proposition, it was Maria’s duty to maintain absolute silence about what had gone on between them. Evdokia was naturally bluffing, but this was part of the tactics required to cover the retreat and limit the damage as much as possible. All those confidences Maria had let slip were of course there in the background acting as a deterrent after having revealed so much to a person whom she had so terribly misjudged. The unsuccessful recruitment of Maria left a bitter aftertaste of emotional treachery. Evdokia made no attempt to rationalize this away and dealt with the matter professionally, brushing herself off and moving on. She reported the failure to Moscow, but there were no repercussions, and the episode did not negatively impact on her future intelligence career. Unlike many other situations where an individual could suffer without being at fault, this was accepted as part of conspiratorial work. An unsuccessful recruitment was simply just that, and it was merely a case of trying again with new candidates. Maria, however, found it harder to put events behind her. She told her father what had happened, but he advised her to say nothing to her superiors at the Swedish MFA because this could jeopardize her imminent posting abroad. Nevertheless, she continued to ponder over what she had gone through and finally decided to speak to her boss at the Vienna legation. He listened to her but confined himself to stating, ‘There you are! It is important to be on your guard against the Russians.’15 Nothing in the Säpo archives suggests that Evdokia was put under surveillance or suspected of being involved in intelligence work. The only note concerning her, apart from her date of birth, is the occupation ‘housewife’ written on the brown cover of her personal file and a note that she worked as a legation typist. Maria’s silence, or rather the legation chief ’s reaction when she informed him, probably saved Evdokia Petrova from being compromised and possibly deported. A

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Tamar a more serious outcome for the NKVD would have been if she had been put under constant surveillance instead of being deported, a tactic the Soviet hierarchy was aware the Swedes employed in the hope of being led to other, more important illegal contacts. Evdokia’s next clandestine assignment, completely different this time, was indeed to handle contacts with one of these highly valued agents. Razin had charged her with handling contacts with the experienced Klara, the NKVD’s most important and most trusted agent in Stockholm, not because she held any key position but due to the fact that she was able to develop social networks in every Stockholm milieu of interest to the intelligence services. Razin had Klara’s back and protected her when she risked being compromised in the eyes of Moscow after a British attempt to recruit her. In a report, Razin praised her skill in extricating herself from a delicate situation. He telegraphed Moscow that she was ‘someone completely dedicated to our cause’, which suggests he might have known her from his earlier overseas assignments.16 Klara was an agent whose controlling officer was the actual resident, first Boris Yartsev, then Zoya Yartseva and, from late 1943, Razin, who knew of Säpo’s surveillance. Razin realized that this posed a risk that he might unintentionally compromise Klara by holding their regular clandestine meetings. He therefore arranged for Evdokia, a young blonde who could easily pass as Swedish, to act as a messenger between the agent and the residency. This arrangement was initially temporary, but once Moscow had decided that Razin would assume the post in June 1945 as the resident in Helsinki, Evdokia had to take over all contact with Klara. Evdokia had now been promoted to captain in the NKVD and had been entrusted with being the controlling officer for its most important Stockholm agent. Klara was considerably older, very experienced and skilled in clandestine work. Evdokia got the impression that the other woman had been an NKVD agent for a long time and had been transferred to Stockholm to conduct intelligence work. Razin had taken Evdokia along with him to Klara’s apartment and introduced her as he would when handing over an agent. Klara was not told Evdokia’s real name, and called her Duscha or Tamara.

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe On average, they met twice a month, generally at predetermined times. If Klara had anything urgent to report or needed to make contact, they followed a special procedure: she would call Evdokia’s home number at agreed times, and when Evdokia answered, Klara would hang up. This was the signal for a meeting in Klara’s apartment. Klara’s controlling officer also employed the same method when phoning her. They rendezvoused at either a bookshop or some other place along Kungsgatan, a fashionable central Stockholm street, and would never exchange words; Klara simply passed on written material. They could, however, speak freely in Klara’s apartment. Evdokia was surprised at this and at Klara not having taken the usual precautionary measures to avoid being bugged. Klara explained that she need not worry about being bugged because she had a contact who would warn her if she was under surveillance. Evdokia never discovered who this contact was.17 Klara spoke good Russian, and they conversed in either Russian or English. The written reports she submitted to Razin had been in German, while those Evdokia received were in English. Klara seemed to have mastered most major European languages. She had been married several times and had tied the knot with a young Swede after her arrival in Sweden, divorcing him not long afterwards. She had a daughter from a previous marriage, who lived in the United States and whom Evdokia understood to be wed to an American officer. Her family had property somewhere in south-east Europe, which later played an important role in her story. Klara was a paid agent and received a monthly remuneration of between 150 and 200 Swedish krona, the average for a recruited agent. She signed for these amounts using her cover name. Formally, Klara worked as a freelance journalist for various newspapers, including a daily newspaper in Canada. The NKVD was aware that the lack of an adequate income could arouse the authorities’ suspicions, and so it went to considerable efforts to provide Klara with an official income, including channelling money via her daughter in the United States.18 For her part, Evdokia could not decide whether Klara was ideologically or financially motivated, or both.19 During her time in Stockholm, Evdokia saw a document

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Tamara containing information that Klara had openly been a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s and had lived in the Soviet Union during this period.20 Klara did not have access to classified material. Her capacity as an intelligence agent was based entirely on her phenomenal social network of good contacts at the US, British and French legations as well as journalists and Swedish diplomats. Klara had been in Spain during the civil war and was well connected with prominent Swedish left-wing politicians. The information she supplied her Soviet handler with was twofold: the kind provided by contacts acting as unconscious informants and the kind provided concerning individuals and potential contacts. Evdokia got the impression that she was extremely important to the NKVD in this role as a ‘talent scout’. As well as this networking role, Klara also studied individuals with a view to recruiting them for the NKVD. One such person was the young French press attaché who went by the cover name of Grisya and who ended up working as her subagent, a by no means uncommon practice. But in this case, matters became complicated because Klara had lent her apartment to Grisya while she was on a long trip abroad after the war, thus linking them and increasing the risk of compromising them both. Klara only got away with this because Razin’s successor, Pavel Kirsanov, was an inexperienced intelligence officer who could not hold his own against her. Evdokia got the feeling that the relationship between Klara and her subagent was not simply to do with intelligence.21 Clandestine intelligence work, in which establishing relationships played a major part, meant that the dividing line between professional and personal relationships could easily become fluid. Unlike Evdokia’s dealings with Maria, not everyone could systematically develop a relationship based on trust and then be prepared to destroy it just because the assignment required this; recruiting agents was no job for those with a conscience or of a sensitive disposition. The actor’s empathy and emotional involvement also took its toll and required self-discipline and professionalism. Not everyone could live up to these sometimes inhuman demands, not even Evdokia’s popular boss, Razin.

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe While Evdokia was still the messenger between Klara and Razin, she received a report concerning one of the persons Klara had been tasked with studying, namely a female Swedish journalist, the chief editor of a political journal and, like Klara, someone with an extensive network of contacts, particularly among Swedish politicians. Klara worked resolutely to develop a relationship. She reported both intelligence and personal details about the recruitment target as well as the fact that the journalist was in a relationship with a man she was living with: a senior Soviet diplomat.22 Evdokia realized whom this referred to. She knew that Razin, whose family life was complicated, had applied for permission for his latest wife to come to Stockholm. But despite the general rule about married couples, the NKVD had refused; a relative of his wife had been found guilty of subversive activities, and so permission to leave the country was out of the question.23 This had been a real blow to Razin, which was possibly partly responsible for making him less inclined to adhere to Moscow’s directives in every respect, at least where he was concerned. Klara’s report put Evdokia in a sensitive and potentially dangerous position. Failure to notify infringements of the security regulations was itself a serious offence, and the consequences could be just as harsh as for the actual offence. One of Evdokia’s female NKVD friends had failed to report an anti-regime joke she must have heard at a private party in Moscow; this resulted in her being expelled from the Komsomol and losing her post.24 After consulting with Vladimir, who was responsible for the surveillance (internal security) of the legation staff, they agreed that she would hand over the report to Razin. He glanced through the text and then asked her whether she had read the report, which she denied. Razin folded up the paper and put it in his pocket, and as far as Vladimir could tell in his capacity as a cipher clerk, the report was never forwarded to Moscow. The Petrovs did nothing further about the matter. In purely formal terms, this would also have been difficult since Razin, as the resident, needed to approve all outgoing telegrams.25 But there was more to come in this game of emotions and relationships. The Soviet telegram traffic from Stockholm contains

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Tamara several reports signed by Razin in which he describes various pieces of political intelligence. His source is the female journalist; however, her name is written in clear text here, a procedure showing that this informant has no relationship with Soviet intelligence.26 Even when he violated the ban on socializing with foreigners, Razin remained faithful to the intelligence cause and was obviously using his lover as an unconscious informant, or ‘agent in the dark’. The story did not have a happy ending. Once Razin had taken over the post of Helsinki resident, his Swedish lover turned up unannounced, and the matter could no longer be dealt with as discreetly as in Stockholm. Consequently, the relationship came to the attention of Moscow, whose only course of action was to provisionally transfer him to the large Soviet intelligence station in Karlshorst in East Germany.27 He was recalled from there in 1950, apparently after falling out with his boss. Back in Moscow, Razin had expected to be promoted to head of the disinformation section but was disappointed to be overlooked and made head of the foreign library. Evdokia, whose career had continued, witnessed how he aged greatly over just a few years. His star kept on waning, and after Beria’s fall, he was finally purged along with others known as ‘Beria’s men’.28 A shadow of mistrust also hung over the most skilled and trusted of the Stockholm residency’s agents. The NKVD trusted no one, not even someone described as ‘completely devoted to our cause’. Thousands and thousands of such people had been purged and liqui­ dated in the late 1930s as spies of the capitalist and fascist enemies or followers of Trotsky’s heresy. ‘The Greens’, the NKVD’s name for the enemy security services, were constantly infiltrating and turning agents the NKVD believed it could rely on. This nagging distrust sometimes led to valuable agents being cut adrift and the material they supplied to their handlers being regarded as disinformation, a fate that for several years befell the Cambridge Spy Ring’s hardworking and completely devoted agents.29 Not long after the war, Klara was ordered to leave Stockholm; she had completed her mission and was now needed in other main operational areas where the good contacts she had established with

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe the Americans and British could be exploited. She was posted to one of her native countries in south-east Europe and travelled there via Moscow. Evdokia assumed that this was Hungary, but in actual fact Klara’s mission was to journey to Belgrade. However, she was back in Stockholm after just a few months. Although the NKVD resumed contact with her, the seeds of doubt had been sown that she was actually now working for the Americans.30 It was unclear what had happened during her journey. Klara explained that all her money had been stolen at the hotel she was staying in, but she had clearly returned of her own volition and without the blessing of Soviet intelligence. Perhaps she was a double agent, or maybe she had simply tired of all the double-dealing and wanted to get on with her life.

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10 The Seaman and His Net Vladimir Petrov clearly loved life in Stockholm. Like Evdokia, he appreciated the material advantages; clothes and shoes were not at the top of his list, but buying a motorbike was. It served as a legation vehicle, and just before returning to Moscow, he transferred it over to the resident, Pavel Kirsanov. Consequently, the motorcycle continued to cause trouble for Säpo’s surveillance by turning up, disappearing and suddenly being found parked without any trace of the driver.1 Vladimir explored the city and its beautiful surroundings on his motorbike, which, along with his fishing equipment packed on board, was a means of recreation and an excellent pretext for meeting agents. The two activities were in some respects interchangeable: failing to meet an agent could be compensated for with six or seven perch.2 By the 1940s, there was among Soviet intelligence personnel in Stockholm a well-developed interest in fishing in all senses of the word. Behind his cover post as a legation cipher clerk, Vladimir’s main job was handling the NKVD residency’s own cipher traffic. He worked long shifts in the locked cipher room, to which only he and the legation’s chief cipher clerk had access. The legation’s cipher office, known as Shifr Otdel, formed a separate section behind a locked steel door on the same floor in the legation building as the residency and the military attachés’ offices, and was always staffed by either one of the cipher clerks or special guards working in shifts. Shifr Otdel also housed a separate reading room in which authorized staff were allowed to peruse confidential material. A complicating factor was the sliding puzzle this could entail: the guards were not allowed to know who the residency staff were, and when the resident or any of his assistants were working inside the cipher office, its head needed to be there.3

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe The work of the resident’s cipher clerk, which often lasted long into the night depending on the resident’s work rhythm and incoming and outgoing telegram traffic, was not a front but camouflage. Under the cover name of Moryak (Seaman), Petrov’s main task was responsibility for SK duties. The fewer people who knew who was responsible for this monitoring the better, and, in theory, only the resident (who was also monitored) knew who Line SK’s representative was. These duties were seemingly the principal task Vladimir had prepared for in depth by studying personal files and several years’ worth of reports and correspondence from the Stockholm residency.4 Until then, SK duties had been a low priority and usually carried out as part of routine operational work. Petrov’s posting was part of a broader increase in and more rigorous monitoring of growing Soviet colonies that were home to formal allies or neutral powers. A network of informers, either already recruited in the Soviet Union or in the country of posting, carried out the work. For his part, Vladimir started off with two informants and built up his network to 13, an appropriate number. In principle, there was supposed to be one informant in every section of the legation and in each independent Soviet institution. In addition to this, informants operated among specific categories of individuals, such as Soviet seamen and, in the case of Sweden, jailed prisoners of war who had fled to the country. The NKVD strove for one in ten of the legation personnel to be an informant. Wives of male legation staff were also monitored, and here Vladimir endeavoured to recruit those most socially active and outgoing. Recruiting Line SK’s informants was considerably easier and less time-consuming than studying prospective intelligence agents. Vladimir began by identifying suitable individuals and then contacted Moscow for a background check and approval of the person concerned to be an informant. His third step involved directly contacting that person and suggesting they work for Line SK. To his delight, he could confirm that none of his intended recruitments had been unsuccessful – those asked to be informers accepted the offer. If they had declined, they would have had to sign a confidentiality contract, and the matter would have subsequently been documented in Moscow.5 In practice, there was really no way out of the informer trap, which

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The Seaman an d Hi s Ne t played a part in Vladimir’s success. An informer was then expected to write monthly reports on the individual(s) they were tasked with monitoring or report important observations where necessary. One of the privileges the informers enjoyed was choosing their own cover name, just like the cadre workers. However, they were not allowed to know their handler’s cover name. The meetings with Line SK’s representative took place discreetly at the workplace; however, for those informers who were not legation staff, it was perhaps sometimes necessary to arrange clandestine meetings. Nevertheless, SK work was generally regarded as less complicated than external intelligence work. Moreover, it made considerably fewer demands on the practitioner’s language skills and previous experience of clandestine work other than that which applied to informers within the Soviet Union. Like many comrades of his generation, the representative had little education and did not speak any foreign languages.6 As Evdokia and her colleagues had quickly noticed, he was the kind of fellow you would go for a drink with, and a man not lacking in charm. Above all, though, he was a Soviet citizen who carried his party book with pride and was not ashamed of his blue NKVD uniform cap. The internal monitoring service had several tasks, the largest of which was almost disciplinary in nature and aimed to combat the influence of capitalist tendencies in the country of posting. In principle, Line SK’s representative had the same task as the party and Komsomol branches, the only differences being that he had other, more effective information channels at his disposal and was able to report both to the head of the legation and to his superiors in Moscow. The other task was counter-espionage: to prevent foreign intelligence and security services infiltrating the legation. This infiltration normally took the form of break-ins, wiretapping or the recruitment of Soviet personnel, and the rigorous rules for protection against enemy wiretapping meant compliance had to be continuously monitored. It was necessary for the Soviet residencies and their superiors in Moscow to carefully study the Swedish security agencies and their activities. Locally, this involved continually following up on which Soviet intelligence personnel were being monitored at any given time.

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe They had figured out that Säpo rarely conducted around-the-clock surveillance, other than for a couple of weeks at a time to establish whether the person in question had any clandestine meetings or other­ wise behaved in a way that warranted a more in-depth investigation. The residencies and their Moscow superiors were also constantly on guard against infiltrators whom the Swedes or others would attempt to plant in the Soviet agencies, either to spread disinformation or work as a mole. One example of this was in January 1944, when the NKVD residency complained that a former agent or informer who for several years had been in contact with the trade attaché, Mikhail Nikitin, was being put under pressure by the Swedes at every suitable opportunity. The residency therefore felt it was best to stop the recruitment process.7 Line SK’s third main task involved defectors. Soviet personnel posted abroad for either a long time or temporarily needed to be monitored and the slightest sign of an imminent defection reported and dealt with using every means at their disposal.8 Depending on when these signs were reported, they could take a number of standard measures. Simply recalling the person to Moscow was the best pre-emptive measure, but this needed to be done without arousing suspicion of what it was all about. A diplomat could be summoned back on the pretext that their superiors in Moscow wanted them to present some issues in person (which was somewhat true). Sometimes personal reasons might be cited, or administrative problems. In one case, for example, a second secretary was duped into returning when one of the dispatched diplomatic couriers feigned illness. The regulations stipulated that couriers had to travel in pairs, and the second secretary had to step in as a replacement. In actual fact, both couriers were NKVD personnel tasked with setting and executing the trap. Any suspicions of imminent defections were always investigated in the Soviet Union, never overseas.9 Once someone had defected and had been taken into the custody of a foreign power’s authorities (like Igor Gouzenko, discussed in Chapter 2) or had otherwise fled and was staying well hidden, the standard course of action was to try to arrange a meeting with the SK officers in order to make the individual see reason. They promised to

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The Seaman an d Hi s Ne t iron out any misunderstandings, telling the defector that there would be no unpleasant repercussions, and where this failed to have the desired effect, they threatened that an unfortunate fate might befall the defector’s family and relatives. The defector Anatoli Granovsky, whose case is also discussed in Chapter 2, described in his memoirs how the Soviet legation personnel who visited him had first tried to talk some sense into him and then asked him what message he wanted them to pass on to his mother and brother.10 Line SK did not appear to particularly focus on ideological monitoring and closing the ranks, presumably because the party sections and Komsomol branches were already taking care of this task. In their review of the legation personnel in Stockholm during their years there, the Petrovs describe a total of 25 recalls. The main reasons were, in order, alcohol abuse, marital problems, becoming compromised while carrying out illegal work, and one classic case of fraud in which a GRU cadre worker was running a network of agents whom he collected money for but never paid. There are no recorded cases of any member of the legation staff having tried to defect, although someone might have let it slip that they wanted to remain in their post in Sweden. The opulence of capitalist Sweden, coupled with the opportunities afforded by the Soviet diplomatic service, could also prove far too great a temptation for personnel expected to maintain high moral standards and to be disciplined. As Razin’s own actions demonstrate, not even the residencies were immune. In May 1943, the Naval GRU residency telegraphed Moscow, declaring that ‘discipline is breaking down and our chiefs are unable to do anything about this’. For obvious reasons, the sender was not the naval station chief, Captain Alexei Taradin, but the signature ‘I’, the residency’s own cipher clerk, Ivachenko. That it was Ivachenko who sent a telegram reporting his own boss’s failings was because, unbeknown to Taradin, he was also one of Vladimir Petrov’s informers. The reason Petrov did not send the report to Moscow was presumably because Ivachenko had access to the naval code and could directly contact Taradin’s superiors.11 Petrov had recruited a total of three Naval GRU informers: not just to keep an eye on each other but also to help monitor Soviet seamen.

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe Ivachenko’s warning to Moscow appears not to have helped matters. In November 1944, Razin sent a telegram, this time about the NKVD leadership. He wrote of ‘moral corruption’ among ‘his military neighbours’ and now clarified his allegation. Taradin and seven of his staff had put some personal registered letters to friends and relatives in the diplomatic mail to leave the legation the following day by courier. Given the seriousness of the matter, Razin suggested to the NKVD headquarters that it take the extraordinary step of opening the sealed mail directly in the NKID mailroom in the presence of representatives of the Party Control Commission and then make the culprits answer to the party.12 After this, Taradin’s career went downhill, and he was recalled and posted to the Soviet port of Murmansk.13 In Stockholm, the most delicate task for Line SK involved Ambassador Alexandra Kollontai. The legation chief did not formally come under the residency’s surveillance and was therefore not moni­ tored. Kollontai’s case was a special one because her international renown and large network of contacts meant she was in a league of her own. Above all, though, Moscow and Stalin personally were greatly interested in her. After the Great Terror, Kollontai was the last of Lenin’s living confidantes, and her not being recalled or liquidated can only be explained by Stalin’s well-documented capriciousness, which ultimately demonstrated his absolute power over life and death. Kollontai spent her last years in Stockholm in constant fear of receiving the cipher telegram recalling her to Moscow for ‘consultations’ on some important matter. As the purges continued, she became more and more alone and isolated until she ultimately had no one she dared share her thoughts with. All she had was her diary.14 The order to monitor Kollontai came from Moscow. They first and foremost monitored her entourage; her private secretary, Emma Dabbert, was to be removed and replaced with an NKID secretary who had of course been recruited from the outset as an NKVD informer. This was Lena Kandakova, from whom Evdokia later took over the job of studying Maria. Kandakova’s initial task involved the ambassador herself. Kollontai was aware of the net being spun around here and feared the arrival of new ‘Chekists’ she assumed were being sent by state security to spy on her. The person she was most suspicious

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The Seaman an d Hi s Ne t of went by the cover name of Klim and arrived in Stockholm shortly after Razin in early 1944. Klim was stationed in Stockholm under the name of Yelisei Yeliseyev, although his real name was Sinitsyn, and had only been tasked with monitoring Kollontai’s political approach during the ongoing informal contacts with Finland. Yeliseyev was the head of the Finland Group, a separate residency operating against Finland, and was transferred there at the first legal opportunity.15 Kollontai’s spy phobia was perhaps unfounded with regard to Yeliseyev in particular, but usually it was not. Her suspicion of him even came to the residency’s attention, and news of this was relayed to Moscow. The source was none other than Kollontai’s own trusted private secretary, Emma Dabbert, who in the telegram is referred to under her cover name of Dunya. Dabbert was not recruited as an informer, but she could be used successfully as an unconscious informer since she was one of agent Klara’s friends.16 All relationships, all friendships and all confidences were systematically compromised. The photographing of Alexandra Kollontai’s private papers represented, however, the most intrusive form of spying. Moscow suspected that she was working on her memoirs and wanted to read the manuscript, which was stored in a locked cabinet in her private apartment. Razin and Petrov, with Lena Kandakova’s assistance, jointly carried out an operation to get into the cabinet while Kollontai was away. Another NKVD man, a technical specialist at the residency, photographed the papers they found before putting them back; this was such a big job that it took three nights.17 This monitoring of legation personnel was, however, only one of Petrov’s activities, and as the end of the war approached other areas of activity assumed greater urgency. One of these involved the escaped Soviet prisoners of war who had made their way to Sweden before being interned in special camps. Another important category was the large group of Baltic refugees, whom the Soviet Union regarded as Soviet citizens and who had either arrived in Sweden wearing German uniforms – the so-called military Balts – or as civilian refugees. The Soviet authorities took the view that everyone should be ‘repatriated’ to their homeland, and a special repatriation commission arrived in Sweden.18

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe Vladimir monitored the prisoners of war with the help of Misya, an agent he had recruited from among them. Ilya Misyarin was a Soviet naval officer and a captain of the second rank who had been imprisoned along with the crew of a Soviet minesweeper that had put into a port of refuge in Sweden. During his contact with Taradin, the naval attaché, Misyarin had reported that he was an NKVD agent with the cover name of Misya. This was checked out with Moscow, who ordered the Stockholm residency to put him on SK duties. Taradin put Petrov in touch with Misya and Petrov went on to use him, initially to monitor the Soviet prisoners of war and then to infiltrate exile circles. The naval prisoners of war eventually split into two camps: one pro-Soviet and the other anti-Soviet, the latter of which Misya was tasked with infiltrating. His collaboration was primarily motivated by patriotism, but he also received a monthly salary. Misya actually belonged to the imprisoned group that wished to return to the Soviet Union. He had a wife and children and wished to be reunited with them, but the NKVD wanted him to remain an agent in exile circles where he was trusted and therefore could operate with ease. Misya tried to contact his family in various ways and wanted the legation to help send a food package to them. But the NKVD had investigated his family circumstances and discovered that his wife, assuming he had been lost at sea during the war, had remarried. Instead of telling him the truth, Moscow simply informed him that it had been unable to contact his wife; this was so as not to worry Misya and to persuade him to continue his collaboration while it claimed to be carrying on the search.19 The surveillance operatives were also being monitored. Säpo attempted, with varying degrees of success, to work out which of the Soviet personnel were working for Soviet intelligence. The relatively hazy notions of how this was organized into separate and independent activities and the great secrecy involved made it difficult for the Swedes to gain an overall picture. Säpo depended mainly on its own vast surveillance organization, which divided the country into seven monitoring areas, with Säpo’s surveillance resources concentrated in the capital because of its high concentration of foreigners. Although

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The Seaman an d Hi s Ne t the goings-on inside the legations often remained a mystery, journeys, meetings in public places and recurring visits to certain addresses could be observed and mapped. If, as depicted in wartime posters, the spy was putting together the pieces of a jigsaw, so was Säpo, whose officers were slowly producing huge sheets of paper with diagrams of the networks: these showed who was in contact with whom, which parts of the network were peripheral and which were the nodes. Most of this work was time-consuming and boring. Early on, Säpo had acquired a surveillance apartment right opposite the Soviet legation, and from there the on-duty surveillance operatives could observe who came and went at the legation, a simple entrance and exit check that suddenly produced unexpected results. Evdokia Petrova later stated that the Soviets suspected the legation of being under permanent surveillance from up to four buildings, and one of these did indeed contain Säpo’s surveillance apartment. Soviet personnel had noted that the curtains in one of the rooms were drawn, but a small slot had been left open.20 One day at the end of September 1943, Säpo’s surveillance operatives discovered a Swedish officer in an air force uniform entering the legation building. One of the Säpo officers in the apartment happened to be Thorsten Söderström; he had been working for Säpo since the 1920s and recognized the officer visiting the NKVD. It was Captain Stig Wennerström, who had been of interest to both Säpo and the military security service due to his regular and unauthorized contact with both Germans and Russians in Stockholm. Söderström phoned his superior and requested permission to take Wennerström in for questioning as soon as he left the building, but for some reason this was refused.21 Two decades later, Wennerström was arrested for spying on behalf of the Soviet union, and this old observation from the surveillance apartment again became topical, albeit with a completely different significance.22 As for Petrov, his comings and goings also caught Säpo’s attention. It had been suspected at an early stage that he was no ordinary legation official, which was confirmed in due course. In April 1947, a Russian-speaking man turned up at Lindholmen shipyard in Gothenburg without first contacting its management, who

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe informed the Gothenburg police of this and tipped them off once the man had left the yard. Deciding the best course of action was to tail the man, the first remarkable thing the police noticed was the visiting Russian’s behaviour; he walked over to a tram stop and stood on the traffic island, but when the tram arrived, he quickly walked behind it and jumped onto another tram heading in the opposite direction. ‘He then leaned out from the back platform and carefully looked behind him,’ those monitoring him noted. Despite this display of self-accentuating clandestine behaviour, the Russian failed to shake off the Gothenburg police, who knew their city better than the visitor. Outside the centrally located Grand Hotel, he performed some new manoeuvres to flush out any pursuers. The Russian ducked into a side street, only to turn back again to have a look around. After then standing in front of the clock outside the hotel for quarter of an hour, he went into a side street and rendezvoused with a woman: ‘Almost immediately after meeting up, they made their way to the Hotell City and went inside.’ After about an hour, the pair came out and went their separate ways.23 Now knowing where they could find the Russian visitor, the surveillance operatives focused their attention on the woman and shadowed her. When a car stopped, ready to pick her up, the police swooped in and arrested her. When searching the woman, they found 40 Swedish crowns but no identity documents. Who was the man she had just met? According to her, he was an old acquaintance, a ship’s cook by the name of Johan Johansson, and they had simply been up in his room chatting. The following morning, the police turned up at Hotell City to check out the alleged ‘ship’s cook’ in more detail. The guest had indeed signed himself in the register as a cook, but under the name of Jakob Pettersson from Gothenburg. The police knocked on the door, and the guest opened it. Yes, he could confirm that he was the seaman Jakob Pettersson, but when asked for identification, ‘Pettersson’ wondered what on earth that was. After a few moments of confusion, the man produced an identity card issued by the Swedish MFA showing that he was the Soviet legation official Vladimir Petrov. The detective sergeant then politely apologized and left Petrov’s room.24

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The Seaman an d Hi s Ne t This whole unremarkable story could have ended there and then, but Säpo’s suspicions had now been aroused. The woman was taken in for further questioning and her background and circle of acquaintances investigated, obviously based on Säpo’s suspicion that the apparently chance meeting between a male visitor and a female prostitute was perhaps not as chance as external circumstances might have suggested. If Petrov the legation official was actually Petrov the NKVD man, what was he doing in Gothenburg at that time? And why the clandestine behaviour just to disappear up to a hotel room for an hour? Säpo does not appear to have considered the possibility that it was perhaps not the police whom Petrov was trying to shake off. Säpo gradually formed a clearer picture of the Gothenburg visit. There had been two Soviet vessels in the harbour and they had changed crews. Petrov had not only been behaving oddly, but he had also committed an offence by registering at the hotel under a false name; the detective superintendent in Gothenburg therefore made a note at the very end of the report to Stockholm that the Swedish MFA should receive the report to consider what action, if any, to take.25 Vladimir Petrov had been a hair’s breadth away from being deported on this occasion. Or perhaps not; that year, 1947, was not a time of foreign policy friction, particularly not with Sweden’s almost omnipotent neighbour in the east. In any case, Petrov had now really attracted Säpo’s attention and was occasionally placed under surveillance. Above all, this confirmed Petrov and his colleagues’ avid interest in fishing, as observed by surveillance operatives one July evening at Stora Värtan (a bay in the Stockholm archipelago), where three gentlemen had made their way in legation vehicle A 23366: At the jetty there, Petrov, Kirsanov and Vinokuorov were taking a great interest in angling and, even with the best will in the world, it was impossible to deduce any clandestine tendencies. Their fishing trip, a relatively rewarding one – they showed their delight as they caught a few smallish perch every so often – went on peacefully and quietly until 22.15, when the gentlemen got into the car and headed home.26

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11 The Age of the Information Empire The Petrovs returned to a different but nevertheless very familiar Soviet Union in October 1947. They had left a nation at war with the enemy still deep in Soviet territory, but now the Soviet Union was among the victorious powers, one of the giants with much to say on how postwar Europe should be divided up into Western and Eastern spheres of influence, with each side having free rein. That was at least how Stalin had interpreted the division, which the United States, United Kingdom and Soviet Union began to outline in Tehran and then established in Yalta. The Soviet Union had also changed. It was bigger and more powerful than ever, with its borders and buffer zones having shifted far to the west. But the country had been wounded, and the scars left by the war and the siege years were still evident as the Petrovs sailed into Leningrad. Their old apartment was still there in Moscow: neither the war nor the housing market free-for-all had changed that. The reason for this was the system the MGB applied: generally, apartments that were like official residences were either rented out to other MGB personnel – in the Petrovs’ case, the Spets Otdel – or used by them as conspiratorial apartments.1 And in Moscow, the Petrovs shed the skins they had acquired during their years abroad and became themselves again, Vladimir Proletarsky and Evdokia Kartseva. The now-resurrected Evdokia Kartseva was not just older but also an experienced intelligence officer, and very different to the person she had been immediately after her years with the Spets Otdel. She had been promoted in Stockholm, transferred to operational intelligence work and, due to fortunate circumstances, had become the controlling officer for the residency’s most important agent. Instead of her old job at the Japanese section, other duties awaited her at the newly

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Th e A ge of th e Infor mation Em pire established Committee of Information (Komitet Informatsii, or KI). She now held the rank of captain and, to her knowledge at least, was the only female intelligence officer, apart from Zoya Voskresenskaya, to come this far in the promotion system. These two did not enjoy the best of relationships, however. Voskresenskaya barely even said hello, and Evdokia suspected that this had something to do with her husband, Boris Yartsev, having been recalled and Zoya in some way blaming her for this.2 A few years after the war, Boris had been posted to Czechoslovakia and been killed in a car accident. It was not just their homeland that had changed and become a world power that would soon seriously challenge the United States; the restructure of Soviet intelligence had had a similar effect. This reorganization was mainly an attempt to make things more effective, to create the specialist agencies required to strengthen the Soviet Union’s internal and global control. However, there were also constant power struggles going on in the background, although during this late Stalinist period these were no longer being waged through mass purges and liquidation but by introducing difficult-to-interpret changes to the great central administrative machinery.3 It therefore required good intuition to work out which way the wind was blowing. Although never discussed, everyone knew that one day the wind of change would become stronger. Generalissimus Stalin was to be regarded as immortal, but, regardless of this, there would also be a time after him. Since the Petrovs had last been based in Moscow, their original workplace had ceased to exist either spatially or organizationally. Instead, they were given other duties and both were assigned posts in a new intelligence colossus created in the autumn of 1947 on Stalin’s express orders. By December, it had moved into new – or rather a blend of old and new – premises out in Ostankino, about ten kilometres north of central Moscow. Ostankino had been the site of the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition at the end of the 1930s and was also home to two large government buildings that had belonged to the Comintern, which had been dissolved in 1943. In a way, this had come full circle. The NKVD (later the MGB) had first devoured the Comintern from the inside and then assumed control over its areas

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe of intelligence interest: the International Liaison Department’s secret communication and courier networks and the cadre department’s register. This process had subsequently been overtaken by the NKVD’s internal bloodbath and ended with Stalin’s decision to disband the Comintern so as to make the Western powers more amenable in the run-up to the imminent scramble for Europe. The Comintern’s most valuable specialist agencies were of course not actually closed down; they had simply disappeared from the map and had turned up on a hidden one as Institute No. 100, with the same tasks and personnel.4 The buildings out in Ostankino had in any case become available to house new activities; and what could be more suitable than one that did not exist? The KI was the result of a radical reorganization and merger of the intelligence agencies operating outside the Soviet Union’s borders in the people’s democracies of Eastern Europe and the rest of the world. The United States, following long-drawn-out territorial battles, finally created a new intelligence agency reporting directly to the president, namely the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), whose director had the task of coordinating the national intelligence service. Simultaneously, Stalin was taking it one step further and had ordered a merger of the GRU and the First Directorate (Foreign Intelligence) of the MGB. This was not simply a liaison council or a paper merger but the creation of a new joint intelligence apparatus and joint residencies abroad run by a joint chief resident who was often (but not always) the ambassador. The KI did not come under the MFA, although it was formally run by two ministers of foreign affairs in succession: Vyacheslav Molotov and the prosecutor general in the Moscow trials, Andrei Vyshinsky. There were a number of good reasons for this drastic reorganization across professional and territorial boundaries. These changes were, first and foremost, about bringing the duplication of residency work to an end. Here the NKVD and its military neighbours had been working on the same lines of enquiry, chasing each other’s tails, falling over each other trying to recruit agents and creating additional work for senior leaders in Moscow, where all disputes needed to be referred sooner or later.5 But there was also another, more disturbing

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Th e A ge of th e Infor mation Em pire development: the volume of information in the intelligence system was rapidly increasing, and the top-down Stalinist system had resulted in a lack of supervision. Just as in the United States, the senior leadership needed an agency that could separate the wheat from the chaff (and identify red herrings) and put together the complete picture. Quite simply, the Soviet Union was moving from a traditional intelligence system with its focus on obtaining classified information which was forwarded up the line, and towards a system of delegation and division of work.6 The actual reorganization involved a couple of quick, drastic measures. In December 1947, the First Directorate of the MGB moved from the headquarters complex at Lubyanka out to the new KI headquarters. What remained of the MGB were, for example, the Second Directorate (internal security and counter-espionage) and the Fifth Directorate (internal political surveillance). The radical aspect of these drastic measures is illustrated by the fact that the MGB had no First Directorate for several years after this amputation. Things went even worse for their military neighbour, the GRU, if that was at all possible. Its operations were carved up and incorporated into the transferred First Directorate, which meant that the MGB determined the organization’s structure and occupied the most important top positions. In contrast, the military had to satisfy itself with second-rank posts and the proviso that there would be at least one subsection in each department with military personnel.7 While the purpose of this reorganization had been to reduce areas of conflict out in the field, it instead created multiple ones in the central organization. Not even the ageing and increasingly despotic Stalin could keep this forced intelligence marriage together for any length of time. The first to break up and move out was the GRU. The Ministry of Defence and the general staff realized that they were the losers in this new order, and Minister of Defence Marshal Bulganin had sufficient clout with the MFA to force through the departure, around the end of June 1948. Military intelligence personnel came back under the control of the armed forces, and the GRU was resurrected as an independent organization under the minister of defence. The

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe next bloodletting followed shortly after in December 1948 when the entire Security Division (including the monitoring activities in the people’s republics as well as Line SK and Line EM) of the one-time First Directorate essentially returned to the MGB and the old familiar premises. In principle, all that remained of the KI were the former intelligence sections and their support functions. Thus, the KI underwent a year-long transformation in three distinct phases, followed by three years of organizational calm where it continued as an independent civilian intelligence organization; but it became slowly depleted of key personnel as they trickled back to the MGB. In their stead came a large cadre of newly recruited younger specialists obtained from the Institute of International Relations and the Institute of Foreign Languages.8 Several of these specialists later became prominent Soviet diplomatic figures.9 The final bloodletting took place at the end of 1951, when the First Directorate rejoined the MGB and filled the four-year vacuum in the organizational chart. But some personnel – younger and newly recruited staff in particular – remained temporarily in what came to be known as the ‘small KI’, an analysis and intelligence assessment staff that existed until the early autumn of 1953. In the wake of the great power struggle following Stalin’s death in March 1953 and the arrest of Beria in July the same year, the small KI was no more. Both the Petrovs were thus posted to the newly created ‘big’ KI, with its six directorates and several independent departments. The first four directorates were divided geographically by continent and then in turn by country and specialist function. Both Vladimir and Evdokia worked for the Second Directorate (mainland Europe) and were posted to the Sixth Department, which was in charge of Line SK. This was a natural posting for Vladimir; he had been working for Line SK, and, what is more, he was posted to the specialist naval unit. Over the next three years, he monitored Soviet sailors serving on ships on the Lower Danube, but without ever visiting his area of responsibility; the post was strictly a desk job, with no operational work in the field.10 Evdokia, on the other hand, carried out SK duties. She was not assigned to the naval unit but to the unit responsible for the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen and the Soviet miners there.

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Th e A ge of th e Infor mation Em pire For KI workers, living a normal life was practically impossible. Their working hours were 10.30 to 19.30, six days a week. These hours applied in principle (and not necessarily only) to the respective directorate and section, where extra evening work was often required. The workers also received six or seven hours of compulsory language instruction a week and, of course, attended party meetings. Their place of work, Ostankino, was a fair distance away from the trolleybus termini, and many employees spent up to four hours travelling to work each day. Things were even worse for new employees; they were ordered to undertake a year’s basic training in intelligence methods at ‘the 41st kilometre’, a facility that got its name from the distance to Moscow. The upside of the post was the money. Evdokia had a basic salary of 1,500 Soviet roubles a month, but the personnel also received a separate rank supplement from the MGB, which in her case was 700 roubles. Housing committees in the residential blocks where MGB personnel lived were informed of their employment and received salary statements that were used to calculate their rent.11 However, the MGB only reported part of their salary, which meant a lower rent. Every housing committee knew that one of the greatest dangers in Moscow was getting involved in the MGB’s business, even when this just involved gathering the right figures for calculating rents. Any benefits going were gratefully received, no matter how small. One of the KI personnel’s unusual privileges was deciding not only whether to wear plain clothes or uniform but also the uniform they preferred – as long as it was not the navy’s. This was an easy decision for the fashion-conscious Evdokia, who did not even go to the trouble of getting a uniform of her own and instead borrowed a captain’s uniform for her identity card photograph. Despite being allowed to wear uniform, personnel were forbidden from telling anyone that they worked for the KI or where this non-existent unit was located.12 Following the second round of cuts at the KI in December 1948, Vladimir and the entire directorate were transferred back to the MGB’s headquarters. Evdokia was now transferred at her own request to the part of the intelligence service she was already familiar

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe with, namely the Scandinavian department, where she worked on matters concerning Sweden. This was a normal post rotation; most of the personnel were cadre workers who had served in the area of operations or were being readied to be dispatched there. In the latter case, they shadowed experienced staff and were not given actual intelligence production duties.13 The Scandinavian (Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden) department was relatively small, with eight or nine employees, the majority of whom had varying knowledge of the Scandinavian languages, either acquired during previous postings abroad or at the Institute of Foreign Languages. Essentially, the department was the same one that had been part of the MGB before being transferred to the KI. Evdokia, therefore, already knew most of the employees, including the head of the department, Yelisei Yeliseyev, alias Sinitsyn, the very Klim who had intimidated Alexandra Kollontai with his arrival but who worked well with her in his role of ‘shadow resident’ for Finland. Sinitsyn, who had twice served in Finland, had taken over as the head of the Scandinavian department in 1945 when Razin replaced him in Helsinki. But apart from Finland, the area of operations was an intelligence backwater for several reasons. The Scandinavian countries were now of secondary interest, both strategically and politically, and there were no established residences in either Denmark or Norway, so these needed to be built up from scratch. In Sweden, the MGB had lost many of its agents, for three reasons: they had been arrested, they were no longer usable or they had simply tired of their task once the war was finally over. And while the Americans and British were packing up and returning home from Stockholm, some of the important intelligence targets were disappearing too. However, it was also necessary for Soviet intelligence to look to the future and lay the foundations for future intelligence work. In December 1945, Sinitsyn contacted his colleague Mikhail Vetrov, the head of the MFA’s own Scandinavian department. The two had known each other since their time in Stockholm, where Vetrov had been posted as the consul but also recruited as

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The A ge of th e Infor mation Em pire an NKVD operational worker. Moreover, it turned out that Vetrov was anxious to have a meeting about a particularly sensitive matter. When they met, Vetrov told Sinitsyn that the Swedish minister for foreign affairs had started asking questions about the diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. Vetrov had made discreet enquiries and had found out in a roundabout way that Wallenberg had been arrested by counter-espionage and was imprisoned in Moscow. Sinitsyn now asked for information using his personal contacts. He received confirmation that Wallenberg was indeed in Moscow and had been held for almost a year in solitary confinement in the internal prison in Lubyanka, where he was being interrogated using the tried and tested ‘conveyor-belt’ method in order to extract a confession that he was an American spy.14 Sinitsyn had the idea of exploiting the situation and the obviously embarrassing impasse that had arisen when the Swedes began to enquire about the officially non-existent prisoner. Together with the head of the NKVD’s Foreign Intelligence Directorate, Lieutenant General Pavel Fitin, he contacted the head of the Chief CounterIntelligence Directorate (better known as SMERSH, the Russian abbreviation of ‘death to spies’), Viktor Abakumov, to propose that the prisoner quite simply be transferred to them. The NKVD would take on the task of ‘turning’ the prisoner, as it had much experience of this, and Wallenberg could then prove very useful given his family’s influential position. Abakumov turned a deaf ear, however; the same kind of thinking and methods that prevailed during the Great Terror dominated counter-espionage: an individual arrested on suspicion of subversive activities was, by definition, guilty, and the rest was simply a matter of psychologically and physically softening them up. And so the entire plan fizzled out, and senior-level personnel changes sealed the matter. Fitin left his post as head and Abakumov was promoted to minister and head of the MGB.15 The work at the KI’s Scandinavian department was strictly compartmentalized. Administrative personnel worked on ongoing cases and compiling material, while the head of the department personally handled the identity of their sources and current or planned recruitment. Although Evdokia dealt specifically with Swedish matters, she

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe could not determine whether her own agent, Klara, whom she had handed over to the resident, Pavel Kirsanov, when she left Sweden, was still active.16 Staff working in a big government agency in Moscow had less of an overview than those out in the residencies, where it was difficult in the long term to prevent information being relayed from person to person and where cipher clerks in particular had a disproportionate and actually undesirable insight into a number of operational matters. But the KI was of course also a place where information was passed on in conversations outside the circle of employees who needed to know the information as part of their job. In one such conversation, held in 1949, Sinitsyn told Evdokia about the agents he had recruited from within the Finnish government. When asked how this was possible, he replied that it was very easy, since the Finnish government was pro-Soviet as a result of the Soviet Union’s victory over Germany and Moscow’s generous policies towards its neighbour.17 Evdokia tended to divide her colleagues up into those she liked and those she disliked. She paid close attention to how people dressed, how they behaved, whether they were unrefined, lazy and hung-over or diligent and competent intelligence officers. Sinitsyn had already made a favourable impression on her in Stockholm, which was reinforced now that she was working for him directly. As well as gifted and enterprising, he was a good boss. This was particularly evident in one specific respect that Evdokia had learned to understand the significance of; she had never heard anyone criticise Sinitsyn at party meetings, where this was otherwise the rule. He had also recommended her for full party membership.18 A different kind of old acquaintance was General Alexander Korotkov, head of the KI’s Illegal Department, whom Evdokia had already met in the 1920s when he was one of the leaders in the OGPU’s Pioneer Section, a party role he performed alongside his post. He had a meteoric wartime career, presumably helped by his close relationship with Beria. When he arrived at the KI, he was a lieutenant general. During his voluntary work with the Pioneers, Korotkov got to know one of Evdokia’s friends and later married her. They had two children but were unhappily married; they separated

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Th e A ge of th e Infor mation Em pire at the end of the war, although they remained married. By this stage, Korotkov had found himself a concubine who, for the sake of simplicity, lived with his official family in the home provided by the MGB.19 The strict regulations tended to be lifted the more senior a rank or position a state security official attained and the closer their friendship with, and the degree of protection afforded by, powerful men.

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12 The Australian Assignment The order regarding the new overseas assignment arrived in the early autumn of 1950. Once again, Vladimir’s career would dictate their destination. However, the great turmoil KI’s organizational changes were gradually creating in the worldwide intelligence system remained in the background. In its original form, the KI had come into existence as a radical move to simplify and streamline the permanent stations’ work. The GRU’s withdrawal meant that much had returned to how things used to be, with the left hand not knowing what the right was doing and where both were only loosely connected to a shared body. With the return of Line SK and Line EM to the MGB, something else happened. Although the KI had taken over the former residencies, now internal security service and émigré work were up in the air. The MGB quite simply had to start building up its own parallel residencies, meaning in practice that the attempt at simplification and coordination had now caused further splits and overlapping chains of command out in the field. Vladimir Petrov’s task in Australia was to take over as head of one of these newly established MGB residencies, with responsibility for internal security and émigré work. Although not quite the same thing as the river traffic on the Lower Danube, it was still in keeping with his work at the MGB and his previous posting in Stockholm. This assignment meant Evdokia also needed to be transferred, but to a post subordinate to the KI (and, more specifically, the First Directorate), dealing with Anglo-American affairs. She was well prepared for this role, since she had resumed her English studies during her stint at the KI and had one of her old fellow students from her time before the OGPU as her instructor. Instead, Evdokia needed to concentrate on other preparations. She was to be given a cover

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The A u str ali an A s si g nm e nt post as embassy secretary and accountant, a newly created position, and this required that she first learn accounting, which, as it turned out, she perhaps did too thoroughly. Before leaving Moscow, Evdokia received instructions from the head of the directorate, Colonel Raina. Evdokia’s secret intelligence assignment was wide-ranging, and her primary task was to assist the KI resident, Valentin Sadovnikov, with various technical assignments, but she was also to perform operational duties.1 The work was thereby similar to what she had done for Razin and his successor, Kirsanov, in Stockholm. This time, the outward journey was much less dramatic. The Petrovs flew to London via Prague on New Year’s Day, more or less straight from a farewell New Year’s party. They were going to be away for a long time, and her little sister, Tamara, had been reading up on this country where the seasons were upside down. They left the Moscow winter behind without needing to take anything with them! Evdokia had the same idea, but for different reasons – she was counting on getting herself a whole new wardrobe in Australia. It was now 1951; the 1940s were but a memory, and Evdokia intended to fit in with the new country’s dress code, no matter how much it cost. Clothes were incidentally one of the countless details the MGB had prepared, but with the customary economical thinking. Special foreign wardrobes had been procured and stored, along with other useful equipment like typewriters, radio transmitters and pistols. Of course, capitalist inventions like changes in fashion were not taken into account, and the contents of these wardrobes were never replaced, the result being that personnel stood out from the surroundings they were meant to blend in with. Their tendency to appear in pairs or groups of three did not exactly help matters, thus emphasizing the unintentional comical impression they made and providing constant material for the newspapers’ cartoonists.2 Some attempts were made, however, to address the most glaring shortcomings in this system: one of Evdokia’s own more unusual side jobs in Stockholm was purchasing ladies’ clothing for the overseas wardrobes.3 On 2 February 1951, the Petrovs arrived in Sydney on the liner Orcades. Just like during their wartime journey to Britain, several of

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe the embassy employees were travelling together, this time in a party of six. They were met in Sydney by the second secretary, Sadovnikov, and the Sydney-based TASS correspondent, Ivan Pakhomov. Both Sadovnikov and Pakhomov were intelligence officers, as were two of the four newly arrived employees. ASIO routinely ticked off the newcomers, and while they were still on the quay, the surveillance operatives made their first observation: Vladimir Petrov gave the impression that he was the ‘boss’.4 The party got into the legation’s Cadillac, and the new arrivals were given a foretaste of what characterized their country of posting, namely the distances. The capital, Canberra, looked like it was close to Sydney, but in Australia ‘close to’ meant 290 kilometres on at times rather poor roads. The other big city, Melbourne, was a further 650 kilometres to the south, and it was best not to even think about the rest of the country in terms of driving distances. Late-1940s Canberra was not exactly what you would call a bust­ ling metropolis, not even a medium-sized town. After the war, the country’s capital had barely 14,000 inhabitants, many of whom were civil servants with their families. Apart from the official institutions, there was practically nothing here. It was a place of banishment like wartime Kuybyshev but, of course, infinitely more pleasant. And there was always Sydney, just a ‘short’ distance away. The Soviet Union was a relative newcomer to the Australian capital and part of a diplomatic colony still dominated by the Commonwealth countries. Australia was independent, but because it was a Commonwealth member the country retained strong ties to Britain, including their common head of state and the British governor general. Australia depended on Britain in many areas, particularly regarding security matters. The two-storey Soviet embassy building in Canberra had been procured in 1943 once the countries had established diplomatic relations. It was protected from view and surrounded by a mature, park-like garden. Soviet workers had carried out internal renovations, including the reinforcements required for the future residency.5 The floor plan and room partitioning were simple; the ambassador and diplomatic personnel were based on the lower floor along with the

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The A u str ali an A s si g nm e nt reception and other open premises, while the upper floor was reserved for the residencies in accordance with the rule that a residency must, for security reasons, never be at ground level.6 As in Stockholm, access to the residencies was strictly limited. In Canberra, the upper floor was also divided by two separate steel doors: one led to the GRU and the other to the KI. Inside the KI section, there was a further secure unit, the cipher room, with separate areas for the various cipher clerks.7 On exiting the KI residency, you were greeted by a steel door on the other side of the landing, leading into the military section. The GRU residency operated entirely separately after the brief joint organization experiment, and KI personnel had no control over its operational activity in the country.8 Soviet intelligence had established residencies and built up its network of agents from the outset. For the NKVD and its successor, the KI, this would have generally been quite a simple task if it had not been for the distances; conducting operational work from a legation half a day’s travel from any intended agent contact was simply impossible. The solution was to set up a TASS office in Sydney that could act as a branch of the Canberra residency. The Sydney branch, however, had to rely on the main residency for storing classified documents and codes and maintaining contacts with Moscow.9 Foreign policy issues were the focus of Soviet intelligence collection, and the NKVD initially followed two well-trodden paths in order to obtain this information. The first was to have Fedor Nosov, the intelligence officer masquerading as a TASS correspondent, utilize his journalist contacts, a task made easier by the low level of security consciousness among Australians in general. The second was the Australian Communist Party, of which Moscow had a good knowledge thanks to the OMS’s secret network of contacts in the 1930s. Thus, Moscow had no need to start from scratch here either and could benefit directly from the party’s well-developed ability to conduct clandestine work. The key figure involved in establishing and controlling the network of agents was neither Nosov nor the resident Semen Makarov, but Walter Clayton. He held a key position within the Australian Communist Party and was an active member of its underground organization for a

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe short period at the beginning of the 1940s when the party was banned. Clayton was apparently the first contact the NKVD had made in 1943, and he later operated with Nosov as his controlling officer until the end of the 1940s. Moscow was initially not very impressed with the material Clayton passed on, which mainly contained political gossip, but the quality gradually improved and he could also supply copies of classified documents from the Department of External Affairs. In 1945, the residency was instructed to recruit him, or, as they put it, ‘tie him to our work’. Clayton was persuaded in due course to accept financial reimbursement, ostensibly for his own outgoings.10 Clayton, whose cover name was Klod, was now virtually operating as a more or less autonomous illegal resident, although he depended on Nosov as a reporting channel. The Klod group’s structure was similar to the agent-led networks built up during and after the war in North America and Western Europe: Clayton had nine subagents in total, all of whom reported to him directly, and only two had contact between themselves. The subagents were unusually well placed and complied with Moscow’s instructions that their activities should focus on the Department of External Affairs, to which five of the nine subagents were linked in one form or another, while one was a police officer in New South Wales and could thereby alert Clayton if he was being monitored.11 In 1945, Clayton established this productive network and could supply Nosov and Makarov with a stream of still mainly low-quality information, which Moscow tried to get the residency to put a stop to. This information nevertheless also contained the odd nugget. In early 1946, for example, Moscow had realized that one of its subagents, Ian Milner, a civil servant at the Department of External Affairs, had access to classified British strategy documents, copies of which Clayton was instructed (through Nosov) to try to obtain – which he did. The information was deemed so important that the residency received orders to send the text as a cipher telegram, even though it was 12,000 words long and required cipher work of Herculean proportions, taking from 22 March to 3 April.12 This marked the zenith of the Klod group and the Australian residency’s intelligence work. After this, the problems quickly mounted

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The A u str ali an A s si g nm e nt up. The Soviets viewed the entire group and Clayton in particular as a potential security risk. He was actually someone they should have given a wide berth, since he was a well-known party member and organizer. Clayton had also set up the group sans Moscow’s approval and without any planning or thorough checks on individuals. These risks were deemed so great that the resident, Makarov, was instructed to temporarily sever his contact with the group. When Moscow ordered the group to be resumed in late 1947, it wanted its size to be reduced, with fewer individuals doing the same activity. Instead of one central group under Clayton, a number of smaller cells were formed.13 Time, however, was now running out for the entire Australian operation, although this was no fault of the Klod group and its leaders. In early 1948, American signals intelligence had, within the framework of its gigantic project of deciphering what were, in theory, uncrackable Soviet telegrams sent using one-time pads, made a breakthrough with the Canberra–Moscow traffic and could read the telegrams in almost real time. The entire planning involving the reorganized Klod group came to the Americans’ attention and, via them, to that of the British, since they were jointly doing the deciphering work.14 All was now revealed; the only remaining question was how the British should avail themselves of this information that, while devastating, could not be used due to secrecy. What followed was an intelligence shadow play that continued right up to 1996, when the deciphered telegrams and their content were finally made public.15 The British could not hand over the material to the Australian authorities in its present condition. For starters, it was far too sensitive; the deciphered telegrams were one of the Cold War’s crown jewels they hoped the Soviet Union was not aware of. Secondly, the Americans refused because the decoded telegrams showed that Australia was leaking classified information like a sieve. And thirdly, there was still no actual Australian security service to inform and work with. This needed to be set up first, with the kind assistance of the British, and to be designed more or less as a branch of MI5. But something still had to be done to plug the leak, and the British decided to have their cake and eat it. They did this by making the

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe Australian prime minister, Ben Chifley, understand that an absolutely reliable, highly secret and extremely sensitive source showed that classified British documents had been leaked from the Australian Department of External Affairs to Moscow. The British also provided clues as to where – or rather to whom – to look for the prospective leaks. This marked the beginning of what was to become known in Australia as ‘The Case’, a major but unfinished investigation of suspected cases of espionage. Their common denominator was the leaked documents, a denominator only consisting of insinuations, which thereby gave ‘The Case’ a Kafkaesque nature in keeping with the early Cold War spy phobia. MI5 questioned one of the Klod group’s main sources during a visit to London. Another suddenly made his way to Czechoslovakia with his wife, officially so that she could receive suitable treatment for her rheumatism, but he remained in the country for safety’s sake even after their divorce.16 Clayton himself kept a low profile and for long periods successfully avoided being monitored by the newly established ASIO. The Petrovs secretly arrived in the midst of this turbulence at what resembled less a well-developed intelligence station and more a bankrupt’s estate in need of complete reorganization and fresh recruitment. Matters were not helped by the fact that the relatively small intelligence staff tasked with managing this reorganization and reactivation had shrunk in size, partly as a result of personnel rotation but above all due to unforeseen circumstances unrelated to the actual intelligence work. Evdokia had been posted to the KI residence to bolster the leadership team, namely the resident, the young, selfassured Sadovnikov, and his assistant, the cipher clerk Gubanov. The third intelligence officer was the TASS correspondent, Pakhomov, but he was stationed at the outpost in Sydney and the principle of maintaining the illusion of the cover post in all situations had, in his case, the complicated consequence that he was not even allowed access to the residency’s premises. If one of the legation personnel had seen him being admitted or leaving, they would instantly have realized what he actually was.17 Besides this small group, the KI residency had operational workers among the other legation staff. However, the personnel changes had resulted in only one operational worker

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Th e A u str ali an A s si g nm e nt remaining at the location when the Petrovs arrived. They had met the press attaché, Visselsky, in London on their outward journey as he was on his way back home, and Vladimir Dimitriyev, the embassy’s administrative officer, remained in Canberra. The first task Sadovnikov gave Evdokia was to acquaint herself with the residency and the local conditions. The latter was linked to the operational work in her assignment; apart from Sadovnikov and Pakhomov in Sydney, she was the only person used for contact with agents. But in April 1951, Sadovnikov was ordered to return to Moscow to present a report on his work. Not expecting anything untoward, he left the residency after first giving a succinct handover to Pakhomov, who was to be the acting resident during Sadovnikov’s visit to Moscow. What he had not realized – or did not want to realize – was that his visit would be more permanent. Sadovnikov was married and, as prescribed by the rules, had his family with him in Australia. This did not prevent him, however, from entering into a relationship with the ambassador’s young secretary and getting her pregnant. Besides this indiscretion, Sadovnikov had committed one of the deadly security sins: he had got drunk and without permission stayed overnight in an apartment belonging to an Australian citizen. Sadovnikov did not help matters by behaving arrogantly when summoned to see Ambassador Lifanov, who reported his first secretary to the MFA in Moscow.18 The conflict between Lifanov and Sadovnikov was about much more than just the latter’s inappropriate behaviour or tone towards a formal superior; it also reflected the chronic discord between diplomats and intelligence people at all permanent stations, which the great KI experiment was intended to remedy. This antagonism varied in intensity and form. It very much depended on the key players’ personalities, but was an unavoidable structural condition as long as the ambassador and diplomats perceived the intelligence stations as uninvited, self-indulgent enclaves that the ambassador had no control over and that could totally ignore diplomatic etiquette – and, in the worst-case scenario, complicate foreign policy. For their part, the intelligence personnel, particularly the MGB staff, felt that the diplomatic cover posts imposed on them were unnecessary and

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe onerous. They also believed that the rank the ambassador could pull on them by ordering them to work overtime and do endless extra tasks was a badly disguised attempt to sabotage their intelligence work as much as possible. Evdokia, who had good powers of observation regarding what was stirring under the surface, understood that the Lifanov– Sadovnikov conflict went back a long way and had begun earlier under Sadovnikov’s predecessor, Makarov. According to her, the affair with the secretary was not just the culmination of this longer process but a deliberate trap. Lifanov could not have failed to see what was brewing between Sadovnikov and his secretary, but instead of trying to nip the situation in the bud, he had allowed it to continue and, if anything, fanned the flames of the romance. It suited him well when the snooty, arrogant resident thus brought about his own demise.19 The conflict between Lifanov and Sadovnikov was the first serious warning signal that Australia was no quiet or idyllic base and that intelligence personnel could not look for favours from the community they were expected to blend in with. A more urgent problem was the vacuum created by Sadovnikov’s sudden disappearance, not just in terms of personnel but for the entire future of the intelligence activities. Sadovnikov had only mentioned in passing to Pakhomov, his second in command, that the resident’s safe contained an envelope which the latter could open if necessary, but Sadovnikov had said nothing about what it concerned or how the content was to be used. The envelope was marked with the Cyrillic letter H (‘N’). N was the initial of the Russian word navodki, which in MGB terminology meant brief notes on people and matters of interest. Evdokia later kept this envelope unopened in the residency safe.20 Moscow, which, in its customary conspiratorial manner, had recalled Sadovnikov to prevent any indiscretions on his part, knew of course that in so doing it had created a problem in Canberra. As soon as Sadovnikov had been dealt with appropriately and given a permanent desk job, Pakhomov received the order to take over as resident until they found another solution. Pakhomov, who only expected to hold the fort for a few weeks, ended up in a remarkable

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The A u str ali an A s si g nm e nt in-between position. From his post at the TASS office in Sydney, he was thus expected to run the Canberra residency, which he could not even access – or, to be more exact, could access in his capacity as resident but was forbidden from entering in his cover post as TASS correspondent. This situation was not made any easier by Gubanov, the residency’s cipher clerk, having left Australia a month before Sadovnikov, who then took over the cipher work. In addition to everything else, poor Pakhomov was to do this job in the cipher room, to which he had no access. Had Evdokia not been there, none of this would have worked. She handled all the paperwork and cipher documents and was soon appointed the KI’s secret cipher clerk.21 In practice, she dealt with the entire KI residency’s work on her own from April 1951 to February 1952. Pakhomov occasionally visited Canberra for updates and was then allowed to sit in a separate reading room and peruse the classified material. In July 1951, Evdokia accompanied him to Sydney and spent a week there.22 As the de facto resident, her duties were now extremely wide-ranging, since Ambassador Lifanov demanded that she also perform her overt duties as his secretary and the embassy accountant. She only drew the line at his sexual advances. With the KI’s final closure in the late autumn of 1951, order was restored in Moscow. Out in the field, however, things appeared to be much the same as they had been before, but with one important exception: henceforth, all activity was subordinate to the MGB. Vladimir, who up until then had been working separately from Evdokia and Pakhomov’s KI residency, now came under its jurisdiction, and since Pakhomov was where he was, Evdokia became in practice her husband’s boss, not that this caused her any major problems. In February 1952, however, Moscow restored this order and appointed Vladimir Petrov acting chief resident for the reunited MGB, promoting him to colonel.23 The reorganized MGB station now gradually received reinforcements. Pakhomov was replaced by another MGB officer, Viktor Antonov, who also had a cover post as a TASS correspondent. More important was Philip Kislitsyn’s arrival in October 1952; he was

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe charged with reactivating former agent contacts and creating the foundations for building up illegal networks in the country, which reflected Moscow’s increasing concern that a major war was imminent.24 Evdokia could now be released from her operational duties and instead work entirely at the residency, where she also continued to perform her cipher work.

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13 Recruiters and Drinking Companions What specific work was acting chief resident Vladimir Petrov actually doing within his broad area of responsibility? His superiors in Moscow gradually began to ask themselves this question when they saw no particularly tangible signs of activity from the merged residency. Where were the recruited agents? Where were the reports? The sad truth was Colonel Vladimir Petrov was simply not up to the job. As a former Spets Otdel section head, he had many subordinates, but ones who were all doing essentially the same kind of job and knew what they were doing. And his job had been monitoring his compatriots, which required a modicum of cunning and persuasiveness, like when he needed to persuade defecting seamen to realize what was in their own and their loved ones’ best interests and get them to return to their ships. But he had only been acquainted with intelligence work through the telegrams he had handled as a cipher clerk. Before his appointment as chief resident, he had never conducted, let alone led, any operational intelligence work in a foreign and hostile environment. But it was not just about his inexperience. He was also no linguist; his English was clumsy and shaky and considerably poorer than his wife’s, whose fluency was graded ‘above average’ by ASIO’s surveillance operatives.1 Vladimir had thus started off in Australia as the MGB resident for Line SK and EM, with which he was reasonably familiar. But he was unaccustomed to this setup and had limited knowledge of local conditions, partly because neither the MGB nor the KI seemed to have much information available. The file Vladimir read on the enemy’s intelligence and security services turned out to contain only newspaper clippings.2

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe Petrov’s predecessor was Gubanov, who had been posted to Australia before the creation of the KI. Gubanov had more or less gone into hibernation as an intelligence officer under the previous organization, performing tasks for both the MGB and the KI as a subordinate of Sadovnikov while the latter was still there. No one could explain exactly how this worked, but Australia was far away, so there was obviously no need. In any case, once Vladimir had arrived as the MGB resident, Gubanov handed over responsibility for the SK and EM work to him and headed back to the Soviet Union. The actual handover Petrov received was not particularly comprehensive, for one simple reason: Gubanov had no active agents to introduce to his successor. There was Novikov, whom Gubanov had begun ‘studying’ on the orders of Moscow but as yet unrecruited. However, there was an agent whose cover name was Sigma, whom Moscow had instructed Gubanov to reactivate, but he had yet to make direct contact. It suffices to say that nothing had been done, but, on the other hand, no dark clouds had appeared on the MGB horizon either. Vladimir met Novikov on two occasions when the latter was visiting the embassy to renew his Soviet passport, but for some reason he made no attempt to resume intelligence contact with him. If you did nothing, then you would not need to do anything. The only active measure Vladimir took was to contact Sigma, a Latvian-born man who had had links with the Germans during World War II. In light of this, he was expected to make the wise decision to collaborate so as not to come to the authorities’ attention. Vladimir visited him at home, greeted him using his cover name and showed Sigma a photograph of himself from the NKVD archive. Sigma clearly knew what was expected, and so immediately declared himself ready to cooperate and, for a small financial payment, began submitting reports on Latvian immigrant activity in Australia. Vladimir did not see how Sigma could be a particularly useful EM agent. He cut his links with him in July 1953 after Sigma had received a visit from two plain-clothes police officers who questioned him about whether he had any contact with the Soviet legation personnel.3

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Recr ui ter s an d Dri n ki n g Com pa nions And that was the end of that. The Line SK and Line EM work, which Petrov was posted to Australia to take care of and activate, had stagnated, and that remained the case over the next few years. He and the new officials at the residency failed to recruit a single agent in the more than three years before it was finally shut down in April 1954. A measure of their inactivity was the residency’s very sound finances, the simple reason being that it had practically no expenses. But for Vladimir, the move to the reunited residency after the KI’s demise meant a change in focus. From the spring of 1952, he found himself not just in charge of Line SK and Line EM but also ultimately responsible for the main task of conducting operational intelligence work that targeted Australia and other Western bloc allies.4 In particular, the aim was to acquire political information from sources close to the Department of External Affairs and elsewhere in government, the type of material the Klod group had obtained. When the temporary and off-site resident, TASS correspondent Ivan Pakhomov, handed over to Petrov, he went through his network of contacts with his successor, which was not a particularly long list either. Most were to various degrees ‘objects of study’, but there were also others the MGB had previously had contact with but who had dropped off the radar for one reason or another. Petrov enjoyed just as little success with these potential agents who were objects of study as he did with Line EM. He either failed to make contact with them or delegated the task to Pakhomov’s successor, TASS correspondent/ intelligence officer Viktor Antonov. Two cover names did, however, look more promising. One of these was Zemlyak, a young journalist with so-called progressive views who worked at the Sydney Morning Herald. He had provided his contact with valuable information. Zemlyak, or Fergan O’Sullivan, does not appear to have been formally recruited and was of greatest use as a ‘talent scout’ due to his personal knowledge of the newspaper world. However, it was his future career after leaving the Sydney Morning Herald that made him of great interest as a potential infiltrating agent, the very kind Soviet intelligence was always on the lookout for.5 In March 1953, O’Sullivan became press secretary to the leader of the opposition, H. V. Evatt, and hence a candidate for

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe various government posts if his party should ever come to power. The former journalist’s name would thereby be the main fuse in the political bomb that went off in the spring of 1954. Moscow clearly saw the potential benefits of this contact with O’Sullivan, whereas Antonov obviously did not, so Petrov asked to take over this contact with him. Moscow gave its approval at the end of 1953, but time was running out for the Petrov residency for entirely different reasons.6 Another cover name on the list that from day one fell to Petrov’s lot was Olga, an agent within Canberra’s diplomatic community. Olga was actually Rose-Marie Ollier, the second secretary at the French embassy, whom Sadovnikov had recruited. Ollier was of interest because she had access to French foreign policy documents and also worked as a cipher clerk.7 Madame Ollier, a widow with two adolescent sons, turned out to be an agent difficult to keep tabs on. On Moscow’s orders, Vladimir attempted to contact her using the template she had agreed with Pakhomov. His three attempts all ended in failure. Not until six months later did he happen to meet her at a reception. He exchanged a few words with her and asked to arrange a meeting, but Ollier did not have the time; she had to leave for Paris on holiday and was reluctant to say when she would be returning. Petrov’s renewed attempts at establishing contact were equally fruitless, and not until April 1953 did they meet again, this time at a film screening at the Soviet embassy. When asked why she had not responded to any of his contact attempts, she answered that she had forgotten the agreed procedures. Only the following summer did Petrov successfully engineer a meeting, which produced extremely poor intelligence; Ollier was only interested in talking about her trip to Paris and her sons’ schooling. At later meetings in 1953, including a disastrous one in the New South Wales town of Cooma on 24 December, Petrov attempted to bring up issues of greater intelligence interest, such as information about arms shipments from Australia to French Indochina. Ollier could not, however, provide any specific information about what kind of weapons were involved because the documents were locked in the ambassador’s safe. Moscow was very anxious for Petrov to get her to supply information on the

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R ecr ui ter s an d Dri n ki n g Com pa nions cipher duties at the French legation, but there was never a time when he felt it wise to raise this.8 Petrov’s residency had therefore failed to notch up any real intelligence success in either 1952 or 1953; this was despite intelligence officer Kislitsyn having bolstered staff numbers. Neither Petrov nor his colleagues had cultivated the contact networks required to access the information flows and environments necessary for achieving the objectives set. This failure could, to some extent, be put down to the external conditions for conducting intelligence work. Although Ambassador Lifanov’s demands severely pushed Evdokia to carry out a full day’s work in her cover posts, Vladimir did not get off any lighter. A consul was an excellent cover post for Line SK since it provided natural opportunities for contacting the intended surveillance targets. The VOKS representative was just as flexible a cover post as the TASS correspondent; however, the target group was a different, broader one, namely Australians interested in Soviet news and impulses, precisely the section of the population ideal for mixing with in order to cultivate contacts for Line EM work. But there was also a catch here: a cultural attaché preferably needed to know something about culture, or Soviet culture at least. A recurring theme in consular work, but particularly in that of a VOKS representative, was the logistical complication for the Australians in operating over vast distances. To forge contact with potentially interesting groups, Vladimir needed to seek them out in the big cities of Sydney and Melbourne. He thus had to make frequent journeys, which ate into the time spent on regular intelligence work. But no pain, no gain. The city jungles had many other enticing distractions, but he needed a reliable guide and companion before seriously daring to venture out into this terrain. One of the first circles Petrov began to move in was the Australia– Soviet Friendship League’s Sydney and Melbourne branches, particularly the Russian Club in Sydney. This was a meeting place for precisely the kind of exiles Petrov had been charged with infiltrating so he could actively work to persuade members of the Russian diaspora to return to their mother country. But to do so, he would have

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe to acquire the appropriate knowledge of these individuals, and this is where he needed reliable EM agents. Petrov’s own approach to the task was not characterized by a high degree of intelligence sophistication; for example, a young man who applied for a visa to the Soviet Union declared that he wanted to travel to Korea as a volunteer to ‘kill Yanks and bloody Australians’. On hearing this declaration of intent, Petrov patted him encouragingly on the back and said, ‘That is good. You are a good Soviet citizen already.’9 In July 1951, shortly after starting his work in exile circles, Petrov was introduced to a Russian-speaking Polish exile, Doctor Michael Bialoguski, who had arrived in Australia as a refugee from Vilnius in 1941. Bialoguski had his own, apparently lucrative, doctor’s practice in Sydney and felt at home moving in a number of social and political circles, including the local branch of the Moscow-funded World Peace Council. The doctor generally expressed ‘progressive’ views that very much matched the kind of individual Petrov was interested in establishing contact with. Petrov began therefore to systematically cultivate this apparently useful contact, and it looked like at least here he would, given time, eventually achieve some recruitment success. On Petrov’s recommendation, Moscow assigned Bialoguski as a prospective Line EM agent the cover name Grigoriy.10 But Bialoguski was not just promising agent material. He was also a charming, unscrupulous, social animal very much at ease not only in emigrant circles and various friendship and peace associations but also on the city’s entertainment scene. In his company, Petrov confidently combined work with pleasure, or at least that was how he saw it. In actual fact, the dynamics of their relationship were completely different and nearly the opposite of how Petrov saw things. Bialoguski had really been an informer for six years, first for the federal police and then for its successor, ASIO.11 His main task was strikingly similar to Petrov’s: to infiltrate various pro-Soviet front organizations, although under the cover of his own pro-Soviet views, playing a role that obviously appealed to him. In May 1951, Bialoguski, whom ASIO had assigned the more suitable cover name of Diabolo, had already been instructed by his paymaster to cultivate contact with Petrov and other members of the Soviet legation. So it was not actually Petrov

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R ecr ui ter s an d Dri n ki n g Com pa nions who established contact with Bialoguski but the other way around. Of all the conceivable candidates to recruit as an EM agent, Vladimir Petrov had only gone and picked the worst imaginable, an enemy agent who saw the unsuspecting recruiter as easy prey for his own far more ambitious plans. Bialoguski and Petrov’s fraternal tango among Sydney’s nightlife slowly assumed Bulgakovian dimensions. Gradually, Petrov became increasingly dependent on this charming pro-Soviet Polish exile – an odd combination he apparently never even gave any thought to. Nor does he appear to have asked himself why this man with his large circle of friends, his lucrative illegal abortion practice and his interest in classical culture was always available and had all the time in the world to spend down the pub with Petrov getting blind drunk. While Petrov was in many ways a clumsy and not particularly motivated recruiter, more familiar with seamen and terrified legation assistants, Diabolo was the exact opposite, with his supreme capacity for long-term systematic manipulation and seduction. Instead of getting to work on his new friend Volodya with inquisitive questions about the legation staff, why there were bars in front of certain windows, or what the trade attaché actually did, he took his friend along on one pub crawl after the other, something which soon became established as a little ritual. On arrival in Sydney, Petrov would contact his new friend and the party would get started, first at the Russian Club but then on to more nondescript establishments where they would be undisturbed. The only concern Volodya appeared to have was how quickly and easily he could give the slip to his Soviet shadows, Pakhomov and the embassy’s driver. They had an irritating tendency not to let Third Secretary Petrov out of their sight even though he was in safe, almost Russian, hands with his prospective agent. Diabolo worked hard on bringing out the worst in Volodya, which was not a very difficult job. He made sure the spirits kept coming, occasionally with two or three beer chasers. If Volodya wanted the company of ladies of the night, Diabolo procured their services in a businesslike manner, and later, when suitable opportunities arose, he would go through the snoring Volodya’s wallet and pocket diary to hunt for information of potential interest to his ASIO handlers.

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe Slowly and methodically, Diabolo, posing as Grigoriy, led his friend Volodya to increasingly assume a double life that would eventually unravel, which was precisely the doctor’s plan. Early on, his time spent with the ever-thirsty and clinging Petrov had given him an idea of how he could crown his extremely personal anti-Soviet demolition work. By the time Diabolo was finished, everything lay in ruins, everyone had turned on each other.12

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14 Operation Cabin 12 The first difference ASIO observed was the newly arrived Vladimir Petrov acting like he was the Soviet party’s leader, and more differences were to follow. If Petrov, who, according to his documents, was a lowly attaché but was acting like the leader among more senior individuals, this must be due either to his personality or, more likely, to other as yet unknown factors. Perhaps he was a party official or not actually a diplomat at all, and his travelling companions knew this or merely suspected it. Vladimir Petrov thus ticked one of the boxes. This sufficed for a report, but no more. ASIO had been taught by its infinitely more experienced British mentors to pick up on these small discrepancies. MI5 had decadeslong experience of surveillance of Soviet diplomats and other emissaries, the focus of which was not clandestine behaviour and secret agent contacts but things that were much more basic. They conducted almost ethnographic surveillance, mapping behavioural patterns, body language and social relationships. Even if individuals did not go around with a sign on their foreheads saying that they worked for the MGB, this identity was ingrained in them and often in the attitudes and behaviours of those around them. The British had learned to look for small signs of rank imbalances: senior individuals taking orders from subordinates, younger people with a self-assurance not in keeping with their age, and people acting alone in situations that normally involved pairs. This procedure was the totalitarian state’s smallest surveillance unit, with two Soviet citizens monitoring each other, both uncertain whether the other was actually a recruited informer. MGB staff were more free and easy when socializing; they could afford to do this as it was all part of their job. But no matter how relaxed they appeared, they never dropped

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe their guard. Only the MGB workers endeavoured, for example, to follow the special procedures for exposing surveillance, which all surveillance operatives worth their salt had learned and adapted their techniques to. Evdokia would later divide the legation staff into a social equivalent of the German psychiatrist Ernst Kretschmer’s personality types; while MFA staff were generally boring and lacked initiative, their MGB counterparts were observant and enterprising and GRU personnel happy and easy-going.1 In the second half of the 1940s the British secret services began to work more systematically towards gathering information about Soviet and other Eastern European diplomats, the aim of which was to identify, study and cultivate potential defectors. They did not have to be Soviet intelligence personnel; all defectors with an official function were of potential interest, possibly carriers of information, perhaps without even knowing its value. But, of course, the bigger and more exceptional the fish the better. Defector cases found themselves in the borderland between the two powerful but officially non-existent agencies: the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6, or more familiarly ‘Broadway’, after Broadway Buildings, home to its headquarters). The wartime (and still observed) demarcation lines ran along the territorial water borders of the island nation, its crown colonies and the Commonwealth countries. MI5 handled everything within these boundaries, while MI6 took care of the rest. This dividing line was simple and clear, but unfortunately it did not entirely correspond to the jobs they were tasked with. Hostile intelligence activity tended to originate in a foreign country and later conducted either there or in territories under MI5’s jurisdiction. MI6, therefore, also had a counter-espionage department, led for several years by the assiduous Kim Philby. Every defector case thus required, to a greater or lesser extent, smooth cooperation between the two organizations. If a Soviet defected in a non-Commonwealth country, MI6 and the cooperating local intelligence and security services would principally handle the case. If it happened in the United Kingdom, MI5 would be in charge. And if a Commonwealth country was involved, the local security

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Op erati on Cabi n 1 2 services would handle the matter, but with MI5’s assistance. MI6 could certainly play a part, as in the case of Gouzenko, but only to support its MI5 colleagues.2 While MI6’s intelligence stations were ‘housed’ in embassies and consuls, often disguised behind the Passport Control Officer post, MI5 had a similar liaison organization headed by a Security Liaison Officer (SLO), of which there were around twenty at the start of the 1950s. In the Far East, there was also a hybrid, a British equivalent of the Soviet KI, called Security Intelligence Far East (SIFE). This Singapore-based multi-agency organization was headed by an MI5 officer. The SLO served as the point of contact with the local security services and, as the name indicated, functioned as a liaison and not a branch, although the dividing line was not always very well defined. It was important that an SLO operated tactfully and flexibly so as not to tread on the toes of the local authorities and, above all, their bosses. Avoiding these toes was not always an easy task since a foreign security service and MI5 did not, by definition, have the same interests even if they were fighting the same opponent.3 In the case of Australia in particular, a complicated recent history had to be taken into account. ASIO and MI5 were very close professionally, yet ASIO’s relations with its UK ‘cousins’ and the American CIA and FBI were very much a minefield. These strained relations stemmed from the leaked top-secret British documents telegraphed from Canberra to Moscow and deciphered by US signals intelligence (SIGINT). The British had to now plug the leak in their own Commonwealth system as quickly as possible. For the Americans, however, it was instead a question of Australia’s future reliability as a recipient of sensitive US technology. In the 1940s, Washington had threatened to simply blacklist Australia for security reasons, which would, in turn, have affected all Anglo-American military technology and intelligence collaboration. All three parties agreed here that a reorganization of the Australian security service would solve the problem, which was, however, largely a political one of having to accept US demands.4 So some heavily trodden-on toes remained and would make their presence felt when

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe the Americans stood cap in hand asking for favours following the Petrovs’ defection. ASIO was the creation of a quick British consultancy assignment. The head of MI5 counter-espionage (section D1), Roger Hollis, arrived in Australia at the beginning of 1949 with a more or less complete proposition with him, and by March 1949 Prime Minister Chifley had tasked Justice Geoffrey Reed, the newly appointed director general of security, with setting up the proposed organization. ASIO was basically a scaled-down version of MI5; most importantly, it would be a civilian security service with sole responsibility for the country’s internal security. It also copied the British model of weak and informal political leadership: ASIO was to be a ‘non-political’ agency, meaning that it would report directly to the prime minister, thus maintaining confidentiality at as high a level as possible but also restricting insight and political control to whatever the prime minister and director general agreed between them.5 When the Petrovs and their companions arrived in Sydney in February 1951, the fledgling ASIO had hardly even got going, let alone achieved any results. It did manage early on to leave its mark, but unfortunately only on the roof of TASS correspondent Fedor Nosov’s Sydney apartment. The ASIO new boys lacked MI5’s experience of conducting discreet break-ins; instead, they had drilled too deep, thus causing parts of the ceiling to fall down into the apartment.6 Petrov later confirmed that the bugging attempt had indeed been discovered. ASIO’s predecessor had long been involved in embassy surveillance, and its methods were the same as other security services’. In close proximity, they carried out physical surveillance of the embassy building, made somewhat more difficult by the big garden and its dense vegetation. This surveillance focused on those entering and exiting and on the view through the windows of the building interior. By identifying those present in any particular room, they tried to work out how the premises were being used and which personnel were working together.7 They then conducted wiretapping. This source produced little information but provided valuable support for the next stage, namely monitoring legation staff’s domestic and

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Op erati on Cabi n 1 2 international trips. With information about journeys and possible meetings, ASIO found it easier to shadow staff, and the pattern of movements and contact that could thus be mapped enabled the organization to recruit or target informers, something which its predecessor, the Commonwealth Investigation Service, had done with Doctor Bialoguski. Upon his arrival, ASIO immediately put Vladimir Petrov under surveillance. This continued periodically depending on his journeys, which were always monitored. In 1952, ASIO stepped up surveillance, and from September 1953, Petrov appears to have been almost constantly monitored.8 As a result of this surveillance, ASIO gradually noted a number of factors all pointing to Petrov being in a different embassy post than his official rank and position indicated; these included for instance the attitudes of other legation members, and also his greater freedom of movement and the fact that the Petrovs lived in a detached house away from the other legation staff.9 ASIO’s interest focused entirely on Vladimir. Evdokia was certainly observed and her journeys recorded, like all the legation staff. But there was nothing to suggest the surveillance operatives had detected any change in her embassy role or in her behaviour; on the contrary, she was described as less socially active than her husband. Also, the information that she was the secretary and accountant was confirmed by the fact she had ordered account statements from the bank the embassy used. As in Stockholm, her feminine disguise and role of staff assistant worked well and emphasized her insignificance, while her spouse quickly attracted attention as a ‘big shot’. It is unclear when Vladimir Petrov went from being a counterespionage surveillance target to an object of study for Operation Cabin 12, a large-scale operation the British security and intelligence services were conducting to very specifically identify potential defectors and recruit them. An internal handwritten ASIO memo, dated January 1952, mentions Petrov’s ‘apparent discomfort’, which, along with other vague indications, could make him a potential ‘CABIN Candidate’. ASIO would therefore employ every measure possible to forge a close relationship with him.10

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe During 1951–2 ASIO developed a clearer picture of Petrov’s work and personality, primarily thanks to Bialoguski’s ‘cultivation’ of him. In November 1951, Bialoguski reported that neither Vladimir nor his wife wished to return to the Soviet Union once their posting in Australia came to an end. When asked by his handler to back up this assertion, Bialoguski replied that this was simply based on his own observations of Petrov and not on anything Petrov had explicitly said.11 That ASIO had early on identified Petrov as worthy of greater scrutiny was not simply due to its sharp-eyed surveillance operatives and their ability to interpret weak signals; ASIO’s British partner had actually reached the same conclusion before the Petrovs had even arrived in Australia. The couple had had to fly to London, which required a visa. MI5 and its MI6 colleagues gave their files a quick look, resulting in an immediate match: an MI6 report from 1946 regarding Soviet legation staff in Stockholm contained brief information that Petrov had been involved in intelligence activities.12 In March 1952, MI5’s SLO in Australia sent a status report on the Petrov case and his emigrant contacts in Sydney. The SLO asked whether ‘as the result of recent events in Sweden’ it could obtain further details via MI6 to clarify the vague information on an intelligence link.13 The SLO was here clearly referring to Fritiof Enbom’s arrest. The crucial discovery would take a while, however, and come from somewhere else. At the beginning of May 1953, Petrov arrived in Sydney for one of his customary pub crawls. But this time, a couple of important changes had been made. Firstly, Bialoguski had gone out on his own and bought an apartment, presenting this purchase to Volodya as an ideal clandestine meeting place for his future work as an EM agent. Although Bialoguski’s ASIO handlers were not best pleased with his power of initiative, Volodya immediately realized the apartment’s dual potential. Following a brief visit to a café, the gentlemen picked up two prostitutes in Bialoguski’s car and drove back to the apartment. Once inside, Volodya bedded one of them while Bialoguski paid the other. Straight after the girls had left, Volodya got

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Op erati on Cabi n 1 2 drunk and launched tirades against his embassy enemies. Finally, once Volodya had collapsed into bed, Bialoguski sneaked into his room and went through his wallet. In it he found a note addressed to Madame Ollier with the time and place of a proposed rendezvous. It was now clear to Diabolo that he had not caught just any old drunken sailor in his net but a very significant catch who would hold the key to the entire Soviet-led espionage in Australia.14

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15 The Knives Are Sharpened If Vladimir Petrov ever thought he would be left in peace to conduct low-level intelligence work as a cover for his burgeoning double life, then he had another thing coming. Australia may have been far away, but not sufficiently far away from Moscow’s watchful eyes. His superiors had seen poor performances before and were very familiar with the various smokescreens and excuses the residents used to try to pull it off. Nor did they even try to hide their criticism; at the end of the day, the Chekists were no diplomats. On 6 June 1952, Petrov received his first reprimand when Moscow drily stated in plain terms that ‘intelligence work in Australia in 1951–1952 was actually at a standstill, and had not produced any noticeable results’.1 It accepted, however, that there were mitigating circumstances: the residency had been undermanned, and neither Pakhomov nor Petrov had been set clear targets. Given the international situation, the residency needed to reorganize its work and create the conditions for establishing an underground network of illegals. Its intelligence collection and recruitment had to focus on this goal.2 When Philip Kislitsyn arrived in Canberra as a reinforcement in October 1952, Petrov asked him how Moscow regarded his own work. Kislitsyn’s news was not particularly encouraging: Petrov’s inferior achievements had so far fallen short of the level expected, and his handling of agents, including Madame Ollier, had been described as ineffective.3 As if this were not enough, Petrov received a rebuke from Moscow at the beginning of 1953, after which he could not have failed to see the writing on the wall. But he also came under fire from nearer to home. Ambassador Lifanov had initially shown some goodwill towards Vladimir by elevating his diplomatic rank from attaché to third secretary. This

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Th e Kni ves A r e Shar pe ne d was temporary, however, and perhaps a case of making a virtue of necessity since as the third secretary he could be entrusted with more time-consuming consular and representative tasks. Lurking in the background was the conflict that emerged with the recall of Sadovnikov, directly followed by the recall of Pakhomov, who had been cooking the books. Lifanov had simply had enough of this succession of troublemakers from Lubyanka thinking they could do what they wanted without regarding him as their boss. But there was more to this than met the eye: the NKVD had arrested Lifanov’s brother in 1938, and he had hated this mob ever since.4 Vladimir understood that much of the hostility he encountered at the embassy was actually towards Evdokia. Perhaps it was not her fault, but it was still connected with her, and now she was creating problems for him. She was beautiful and irresistibly attractive – it is striking how often male observers described her in exactly these terms.5 One such person obviously magnetized by her physical assets was Lifanov, and when she rejected his advances, a scene ensued. She was also outspoken and not afraid to criticize, even when others would have trodden more carefully. As the auditor of the embassy’s finances, she clamped down on any irregularities she discovered, and here the meticulous and methodical side of her personality manifested itself: rules and regulations were in place and she would be applying them, end of story. She went about the work of an accountant with the same seriousness she had applied to the Japanese codes, the agent contacts in Stockholm and her role as de facto KI resident. Perhaps someone had thought that she should let the odd indiscretion by the ambassador and the local party secretary go. But if so, they did not know Evdokia. Lifanov and Evdokia’s overly interested male work colleagues were not her only problems; neither the female personnel nor the wives held Evdokia in high regard. Through their various sources, ASIO had noted that Evdokia’s Western style of dress and interest in Western culture made her stand out from other Soviet women. At a party meeting, one accusation levelled at her was that she had stuck two pictures under the glass cover of her desk: one of a Hollywood film star and the other of a dog playing the piano. But a portrait of Josef Stalin was already there! Evdokia’s way of dealing with such a

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe source of irritation is illuminating. Instead of shrugging her shoulders or removing the film star and dog, she launched a counter-attack, writing a submission to the Central Committee in Moscow, where all the minutes of meetings were sent, and attaching a sketch of the desk showing the relative position of the various pictures.6 The criticism was not, however, confined to envious glances and snide remarks at party meetings. Lifanov sent half-yearly personnel reports to the MFA’s Cadres Department. The intelligence personnel were formally his employees, but in Moscow, this information was passed on to the KI and the MGB respectively. The letter of instructions in which Lifanov’s bosses referred to the quality of Petrov’s intelligence work as substandard also included a separate point with the heading ‘Concerning Mrs. Petrov’. Firstly, since she had now taken over the post of residency cipher clerk, she was, in accordance with the existing security regulations, no longer allowed to be used in operational work; she needed to concentrate exclusively on the technical work at the residency and other duties not requiring external contacts. This was hardly anything new to her. But then came the second point: According to data in our possession, Mrs. Petrov sometimes exhibits lack of tact in her dealings with fellow workers in the Embassy, including the Ambassador, which cannot fail to have a detrimental effect on her work. In this connection we request you to give her an appropriate reprimand.7 Acting on Moscow’s orders, the resident Vladimir Petrov thus had to appropriately rebuke his intelligence officer and cipher clerk wife, Evdokia Petrova. This brutal request echoed the ‘reprimands’ of the late 1930s: punishments totally unrelated to any reprehensible acts perpetrated and that only served to represent the indisputable power wielded by the authorities. Those given a reprimand deserved it because it was issued. No matter how much Evdokia’s personality or behaviour stuck out at the embassy, it was nevertheless Vladimir’s actions that started making serious waves. He had always been a heavy drinker, but the

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The Kni ves A r e Shar pe ne d admonishments from Moscow, his unsuccessful intelligence work and Lifanov’s increasingly open hostility meant that he sought solace wherever he could find it. This had the equally predictable and tragic effect that his problems simply multiplied. Lying blind drunk in Bialoguski’s secret apartment was doing nothing to put Vladimir back in the good books. He had not helped his standing with Lifanov at all when, in July 1952, he had driven his newly purchased official Skoda after a few too many drinks and only narrowly avoided crashing into a police motorcyclist. During the Revolution celebrations in November 1952, alcohol was involved again, leading to an argument with Lifanov and accusations of insubordination. Lifanov’s posting ended in September 1953, and the Petrovs hoped that the ‘campaign’ against them would calm down once his successor, Nikolai Generalov, took over.8 By all accounts, he was nevertheless well prepared for the personnel problems awaiting him, and in December, Vladimir suffered another misfortune. Early on a sweltering Christmas Eve, he finally arranged a clandestine meeting with Madame Ollier at an out-of-the-way hotel in Cooma, south of Sydney. While en route Petrov’s car suddenly ended up on the wrong side of the road, turned over and was destroyed by fire. Fortunately, Vladimir was not seriously injured, but his luck had run out: he had forgotten to pay the car insurance. Naturally, Generalov was furious and demanded that Vladimir replace the burnt-out wreck out of his own pocket. As if this were not enough, the New Year celebrations at the embassy took a turn for the worse when Vladimir’s very popular Alsatian, Jack, began to behave boisterously and inappropriately, including biting the Soviet flag. For her part, Evdokia ended up quarrelling with Generalov’s wife, who accused Evdokia of throwing a pie at her. Behind this endless series of setbacks (or, as Robert Manne more correctly described the matter, ‘a long chapter of drink-induced misfortunes’,9 combined with the individual dynamics of territorial and personal conflicts) a considerably more serious threat loomed on the horizon. In March 1953, Joseph Stalin died without leaving a successor or order of succession. Minister of Internal Affairs Lavrentiy Beria was the first person to exploit this power vacuum; he quickly

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe merged the MGB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) into a new power colossus with himself as its head. For Vladimir Petrov, this meant that he was automatically promoted from MGB to MVD resident. Although simply a technicality, it transformed him in everyone’s eyes into a ‘Beria man’ and thereby a representative of one camp in the ongoing power struggle, and it became increasingly apparent that MFA personnel belonged to the other camp. Later Vladimir would speak with great bitterness of the open and simultaneously veiled campaign, with its treacherous double-dealing and scheming, that he felt had been waged against him and Evdokia. His description greatly resembles a workplace characterized by staff who have difficulty working together, a bad work climate and the bullying of those who are different. He obviously regarded himself and Evdokia as victims of the meanness displayed by the other embassy staff and felt that they had suffered a great injustice.10 The embassy’s ‘Petrov campaign’ may very well have been a reality, particularly given the more or less entrenched conflict between the ambassador and the resident, time and again triggered by events like Vladimir’s repeated drunkenness on duty. But the way the married couple described it, the campaign also had elements which brought the Petrovs closer together. In a marriage no longer (if ever) characterized by harmony, the image of a common enemy and the role of victim acted as a cohesive force, something they could talk about, dwell on together and inflame over time. The most striking element in the couple’s description of the campaign and its perceived growing threat is their complete inability to see the obvious: they were genuinely hated, and this hatred had nothing to do with Evdokia’s impeccable dress sense or Vladimir’s beloved but badly trained dog. Nor was it essentially about jealousy or envy, but was something more basic: the fact that they represented – and had always done so throughout their professional careers – an arrogant, dictatorial and feared state within a state. Nevertheless, it was not the embassy staff’s hostile campaign that posed the most serious threat, but Moscow. Petrov’s low production and his repeated blotting of his copybook were exacerbated in this case by the incipient power struggle that would inevitably spread

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Th e Kni ves A r e Shar pe ne d from the centre to the periphery. On 5 May 1953, Petrov received a telegram from the newly merged MGB and MVD ordering him to hand over his duties to Kislitsyn and return to Moscow immediately, together with Petrova and Antonov, to receive new instructions. Vladimir knew what this could mean, particularly given how he had previously been assessed. But this time salvation came from an unexpected quarter, namely Ambassador Lifanov, who opposed this; he simply could not do without Evdokia’s work contribution, and having received no instructions from the MFA, he would not be allowing Antonov to travel with Petrov.11 By the end of April, Petrov’s drinking companion, Bialoguski, had noticed a change. The otherwise good-humoured Volodya appeared troubled and depressed and was also complaining about problems with his eyes. In May, he told Bialoguski that he would be travelling to Moscow for a few months and was unsure whether he would be returning. He also confided in his good friend that relations at the embassy had become increasingly strained. Bialoguski arranged for Petrov to see an eye specialist, who then referred him to a hospital for treatment. The planned return journey was therefore postponed until mid-July; both Bialoguski and his handlers realized that the time for persuading Petrov to defect was running out. ASIO had long been unsure about how to categorize Petrov and whether or not he was a Soviet intelligence officer. He demonstrated several of the typical characteristics of one, but there were also factors that suggested otherwise: above all, with so many external duties, he could not possibly have time for any intelligence work. What tipped the scales in their considerations, however, was that he moved around freely and could travel on his own. Besides this, ASIO had received information from MI5 that pointed more clearly to Petrov having links with the NKVD during the 1940s. By the summer of 1953, ASIO had made up its mind: Petrov was the big catch; the only question was how to reel him in. The most important limiting factor in what was now known as Operation Cabin 12 was that they must not take any active measures which could in any way compromise the Australian government or authorities. If they made an approach and Petrov failed to take the bait, he could

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe report the matter, with Moscow in turn presenting the entire episode as an act of aggression and a breach of the inviolability of their diplomats. What was required, therefore, was a more indirect strategy, and here Bialoguski played an important role. He could not proceed too aggressively for fear of giving himself away, and, above all, he could not provide the reassurances that appeared increasingly more important for getting Petrov to voluntarily take the decisive step. Things did not look particularly promising. Petrov had recovered, and on 30 June 1953 he booked a one-way ticket from Sydney to Zurich for 15 July, with a planned stopover in Singapore to allow the passengers an overnight rest at a hotel. In all likelihood, this meant Operation Cabin 12 would come to nothing.12 Unbeknown to ASIO, however, MI5 had meanwhile stepped up the pace and devised its own plan B to be put into effect the moment Petrov got on the plane in Australia. On 9 July, SIFE telegraphed the SLO in Australia, requesting an update on Petrov’s journey and whether he would be accompanied; could their colleagues in Australia confirm that Petrov would be travelling alone without anyone from the Soviet embassy in tow? If so, SIFE wanted to know whether it was possible to quickly find someone booked on the same flight who could be recruited to make contact with Petrov during the journey and keep him company during the stopover. Doing so would enable MI5 to gather up-todate operational intelligence on Petrov’s state of mind on departure and up until he landed in Singapore. If MI5 could get hold of this intelligence, SIFE could then decide whether to exploit his alcohol abuse ‘for a possible smear and spoil operation’.13 By the following day, though, the situation had changed. On 10 July, the Soviet media announced the arrest of the country’s minister of internal affairs and undeniably most important man, Lavrentiy Beria. On 13 July, two days before Petrov’s planned departure, SIFE telegraphed MI5 headquarters in London to propose a modified plan. With Beria’s downfall and the uncertainty this had created among Russians abroad, it was considering trying to get Petrov to defect, but this time without trying to discredit him and by simply slipping a letter into his pocket with an invitation to defect and details of a

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The Kni ves A r e Shar pe ne d rendezvous. The letter would be worded in such a way that it could not be traced to any official British source. SIFE also announced it had already informed the senior British intelligence body, the Joint Intelligence Committee, and had received its blessing in principle. Finally, SIFE asked MI5 headquarters to inform MI6 and ASIO. As a consequence, ASIO found itself completely taken off the Petrov case.

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16 Fear and Flight Even though the effect of Beria’s downfall took almost nine months to make itself felt, no other single event was as decisive in Vladimir Petrov’s decision to defect. After Beria was removed from office, fear began to gradually grip Mrs Petrova’s husband. The Petrovs already lived largely separate lives, with their own bedrooms, but now Vladimir increasingly kept himself to himself. Much later, Evdokia pointed to Beria’s arrest and subsequent imprisonment as a watershed moment.1 Most Soviet citizens had no difficulty reading the writing on the wall after Beria’s overthrow, and this was even easier and more threatening for MVD officials. The demise of their bosses Yagoda and Yezhov had been followed by purges and massacres, and once again it was not a case of actual crimes committed but a matter of having supported a deposed ruler. It was vital for everyone possibly affected by such proceedings to distance themselves from not only those deemed ‘criminals’ but from everything and everyone connected to them in any way. This was the Great Terror’s dead hand that had made colleagues deceive each other, bosses refuse to save their most loyal employees and neighbours rat on each other. The threat of a repeat loomed, and Vladimir’s senior post did not improve his and his wife’s position; on the contrary, such purges started at the top and worked their way downwards, layer by layer. Vladimir Petrov had admired Beria. One time, during the war, Petrov had appeared before the powerful People’s Commissariat. As a Spets Otdel section head, he required personnel reinforcements. Beria had listened, understood the situation and ensured that the necessary resources were put at Comrade Proletarsky’s disposal. Just like many junior party officials given a pat on the back and a

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Fear an d Fli gh t word of encouragement from Stalin, Petrov was impressed by his powerful boss after this. And nor would he have been promoted to colonel or appointed acting resident without his boss’s blessing. For a long time afterwards, he continued to defend Beria, pointing out his good qualities and dismissing the allegations that he had sent his henchmen around in the NKVD’s armoured Packard to kidnap women for his gang rapes.2 Petrov wondered how anyone could say those things about such a powerful man as Beria. But what really mattered was not what he thought but what he accidentally let slip in one unfortunate moment at the embassy, and the fact that he was a colonel in the MVD, the overthrown minister’s creation. Once embassy staff had accused him of belonging to a ‘Beria clique’, there was no return and no salvation. Such an allegation was impossible to exonerate yourself from; as at the time of the Great Terror, it was both an accusation and a judgement. With Beria’s execution at the end of the year, the starting pistol had been fired for what was to follow. For Vladimir, the immediate effect of Beria’s downfall was, para­ doxically, a sense of relief. He had begun to hand over his resident duties to Kislitsyn when he received a cipher telegram from Moscow instructing him to cancel his journey and remain in his post.3 Had it not been for Beria’s overthrow, he would have breathed a sigh of relief, but now the telegram was instead a portent of the turmoil that had begun in Moscow, and, in the end, hardly any good would come of it for him. Singapore and the SLO in Australia were thereby given time to seriously coordinate their action. Only now were their MI5 colleagues in Singapore informed that ASIO had actually been studying Petrov for some time, with a view to a potential defection. Plans A and B could therefore benefit from coordination once the postponed journey was undertaken: with MI5’s kind assistance, ASIO would now attempt to get Petrov to defect in Sydney, or during the stopover in Darwin at the very latest. If the opportunity did not arise, ASIO could pass the baton on to Singapore; if this did not work, Karachi was the next stop along the route. But there was, the SLO in Australia informed them, a catch, namely Evdokia: ‘Only foreseeable complication is

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe Petrov’s wife who is ambassador’s secretary (he has no children), virtually nothing is known about her nor is anything known about his relationship with her which may affect his state of mind.’4 As for Vladimir, they had a more clear-cut picture of his solid reputation for drunkenness and ‘hard living’. However, they had also received information about his embassy colleagues’ criticism and the fact that he had indicated that he wanted to stay in Australia. This last piece of information, MI5 noted, came from an unreliable source, a drinking companion.5 This was of course Diabolo, whose credibility neither ASIO nor MI5 rated particularly highly. By 20 July 1953, it was clear that Petrov’s journey home had been indefinitely postponed. Instead, Lifanov was about to leave Australia, and MI5 considered whether its plan could be used for him; however, this idea was shelved at an early stage when it turned out he had a teenage daughter in Moscow.6 MI5 agreed instead not to proceed with plan B until further notice and to let ASIO continue cultivating Petrov, with MI5 in a discreetly supportive background role – at least as long as everything looked like it was going to plan. Given this situation, the ASIO leadership decided to quite simply remove its agent and establish a different direct channel to Petrov in the form of the eye specialist Doctor Beckett, who had no link to ASIO but had declared his willingness to assist it. He requested that Petrov make another visit, the pretext being that he wanted to check how the eye operation had gone. During the examination, he mentioned in passing Petrov’s imminent journey home; he told him that he personally would think twice about it, given everything he had heard about events in the Soviet Union, particularly regarding Beria. For Petrov, it was his duty to go, even though he liked Australia. ‘Why don’t you stay here?’ asked Doctor Beckett, getting straight to the point before adding, ‘If I were in your shoes, I would stay.’ Petrov answered evasively that it could be difficult to get a job, but Beckett assured him this would not be hard to arrange, adding cryptically: ‘I have friends who know about these things.’7 After his appointment, Petrov returned to Bialoguski’s apartment, whereupon he described his recent conversation and warned his good friend that this Doctor Beckett was an ASIO man whom they needed

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Fear an d Fli gh t to be on their guard against. The message had clearly hit home, but the question was what effect it had had. At the next appointment a month later, Petrov’s guard was raised; this time he merely reeled off praise for his homeland and deflected every attempt by Doctor Beckett to steer the conversation in the same direction as last time.8 At the end of September, not long after this second appointment, ASIO and Bialoguski had a serious falling-out, triggered by the latter’s demands for a more prominent role in the operation and greater financial remuneration. Having never particularly trusted him, ASIO now tired of their unorthodox and increasingly self-indulgent agent. It did not want some maverick, particularly now that the operation had gone from being a study of a possible defector to an actual attempt at triggering a defection. Diabolo was consequently taken off his assignment.9 ASIO now discovered the cover name it had given Bialoguski was considerably more apt than anticipated: Diabolo made it known that if ASIO was serious about dismissing him, he intended to take Petrov with him to a newspaper in Sydney where he already had useful connections. The director general of ASIO, Brigadier Spry, had to decide how to proceed with this agent, whom they now trusted less than ever but who could at a moment’s notice ultimately ruin the entire operation by leaking the matter to the press. They quite simply had to opt for the lesser of two evils and, despite everything, bite the bullet and reinstate Diabolo, however repulsive this felt. All they could do was spell out to him that he had no mandate to negotiate the terms of the defection and ensure that, in future, he was kept on a tight rein by ASIO’s regional director for New South Wales, Ron Richards, who with this role had become a serious player in this drama. For his part, Bialoguski showed no signs of resentment and put all his energies into this intensified phase of the operation. At the end of November, he took up with Petrov the idea that Doctor Beckett had been pursuing, namely his future in Australia. He was now willing to help his old friend lay the foundations for a new life by assisting him in his search for a suitable chicken farm. Vladimir admitted that deep inside this was the life he wanted to live, but he was still hesitant

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe about his friend’s suggestion. Having also assessed Petrov’s intentions, Bialoguski realized that Vladimir had no relatives of his own and his primary concern was now his own personal safety.10 He could sense how this fear had now seriously gripped Petrov. The time had come to show Vladimir the promised land and everything that could be his if he just made his choice, and Bialoguski continued to work tirelessly despite Petrov’s hesitant reaction to his chicken farm suggestion. On 12 December, they drove out to a farm Bialoguski had found for sale. Vladimir was introduced to the owner as Peter Karpitch, a newly arrived immigrant, and there and then they came to a preliminary purchase agreement.11 Petrov had once again operated under a false name and had also taken a step he would find difficult to explain away if his superiors found out about it: he was caught in the trap. But first, he needed to realize this himself. Vladimir now confided in his friend that Evdokia was very ill and might not live very long. Bialoguski interpreted this as a pretext for acting without consulting her. Sometime later Vladimir was clearer about this point; the farm was a fantastic opportunity that might never come again, and he could perhaps take it without Evdokia. A few days into January 1954, Vladimir and Bialoguski met again. Vladimir was now a broken man after the road accident outside Cooma, above all due to Generalov’s demand that he pay the cost of the uninsured, written-off car himself. Now, for the first time, he began to seriously discuss the matter of Evdokia. He wanted to stay in Australia even without her. Defecting, he explained, would be a very difficult decision for her; out of consideration for her family in Moscow she would never agree to stay, but, if she returned to the Soviet Union, ‘her head would be cut off’. The authorities there would be indifferent to the question of guilt.12 Finally, Vladimir took the decisive step and asked his friend to put him in contact with the Australian authorities. ASIO had hitherto been open-minded about whether everything could be a bluff or a trap. It distrusted Bialoguski so much it had put him under surveillance to determine whether his reported meetings with Petrov had actually taken place, and suspected the entire thing was a trick by Petrov to discredit ASIO.13 Only when Richards came

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Fear an d Fli gh t on the scene and had repeated conversations with Bialoguski did ASIO realize that these suspicions could be allayed. Meanwhile, Evdokia was still working to keep the residency afloat while her own situation at the embassy was becoming increasingly vulnerable. The new ambassador and his wife took turns to make life difficult for her. In fact, Kislitsyn, formally the second secretary and therefore operating outside the residency, was the only person who was nice to her; he continued to treat her kindly when the situation became even more tense. At the beginning of November, Generalov relieved Evdokia of both her accounting and secretarial duties. Now without a cover post at the legation, she was nevertheless expected to still conduct her intelligence work. On 31 January 1954, Vladimir turned up at their home with Doctor Bialoguski in tow, a mutual acquaintance whom they had met at a few embassy receptions. The visit had been arranged in consultation with Bialoguski’s new ASIO handler, Ron Richards, the person now coordinating the rapidly growing work for Operation Cabin 12’s execution. Without knowing it, Evdokia had already come into contact with these preparations. Late one evening when she had gone out for a walk with Jack, a strange man had appeared in the street; excusing himself, he had asked for directions to a nearby address. She had noted at the time how he had lingered for a while as if he had wanted to get a good look at her first.14 The man in question was Leo Carter, one of Richards’ closest confidants, who had been scouting the target of ASIO’s plan B, which they had initiated at an early stage: whenever Vladimir Petrov defected, and however this happened, preparations needed to be in place to pick up Evdokia immediately.15 Bialoguski’s mission this evening was very difficult. He wanted to discuss with Evdokia in simple terms the option of staying in Australia, thereby unavoidably revealing Vladimir’s intentions, which Vladimir himself had not yet explicitly mentioned to his wife. If she lashed out and notified the Soviet embassy of the matter, the entire operation would go up in smoke. But his handler needed to know the lie of the land, and whether they were prepared to ‘pick her up’ when the critical moment came.

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe The conversation was conducted in two phases: at first, all three were together, and then Vladimir left. Only later did Evdokia realize they had done this intentionally so that Bialoguski could establish what her attitude was. He began by lauding Australia, telling her how he too was an immigrant in the country, and then he got to the point: had she ever considered staying in the country? Considered staying? Was he crazy? she asked rhetorically. Forget it! Bialoguski quickly backed off and dropped the subject. His mission had been completed and the wife written off.16 More than forty years later, Evdokia would remember the evening when Vladimir turned up with Doctor Bialoguski. She did not actually dislike him; he was handsome and well groomed. Yes, she admitted, this was the kind of thing she noticed and liked in a man. But she did not suspect Bialoguski was actually working for ASIO; he was just one of her husband’s (the resident’s) EM colleagues. The idea of defecting had never even entered her head.17 Later, when questioned by the Australian Royal Commission on Espionage, she stubbornly stuck to her version: Vladimir had never let her in on his plans. Had she found out what was actually going on, she would have put a stop to it.18 She was in fact a ‘very devoted Russian KGB-person’.19 In early March, the axe was wielded, and this time it was definite. The Petrovs were recalled, and no longer was it disguised as a temporary return visit. Vladimir’s replacement as temporary resident had been appointed and would arrive at the beginning of April. Their Australian sojourn was at an end, and thereby presumably any further postings abroad. Bialoguski, who had gradually led Volodya into a social relationship with Doctor Beckett, arranged another meeting with the latter. This time it was Volodya who took the initiative during the conversation. ‘They can shoot me!’ he declared. Pleading for help, he finally said the magic words: he wanted to meet with someone from ASIO with a mandate to negotiate with him. Doctor Beckett replied that he had a personal friend, a Mr Richards, who was ASIO’s regional director for the state.20 The first attempt to organize a meeting proved unsuccessful: Petrov pulled out and wanted to wait. More than a week elapsed before he was back in Sydney, and the meeting went ahead in Bialoguski’s

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Fear an d Fli gh t apartment. Petrov was sober but dreadfully nervous and sweating profusely. Time after time he burst out laughing for no apparent reason. Richards showed Petrov his ID card and an asylum application for him to sign. Vladimir promised to do so but not right now. He wanted to discuss it with his wife first, although he was prepared to defect alone. First, he needed to sort something else out, namely his future in the country. Could the authorities promise to protect him? And what material assistance would he receive from them?21 Here Petrov raised for the first time the question of whether he would receive something in return. He would be prepared to tell the authorities what he knew of Soviet operations in Australia. And he wanted to write a book ‘for the world to know the truth’.22 As a result of this conversation, the matter had gone from being about his defection to a quid pro quo negotiation. Where did Vladimir Petrov get the idea of writing a book and telling his story to the world? A peculiar fact suggests that it came from his own organization, more specifically from his own office at the residency. In this extremely isolated room, to which only the resident and the cipher clerk had access, there was a locked bookcase, home to unexpected and puzzling titles. Among the small number of books were some about Australian political life and a collection of Russian novels intended for the residency’s emergency code system (the so-called ‘book cipher’). But the bookcase also housed two other volumes: the defected diplomat Victor Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom and the cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko’s This Was My Choice. It is not known who had placed these strictly forbidden books in the locked library, but they were already there when Evdokia and Vladimir started work in Australia.23 What Vladimir could not have possibly known, however, was that his second proposal completely mirrored a plan MI6’s propaganda unit had put forward, where the British organization had pointed out that it was ‘keen to exploit and make offensive plan now on cold war propaganda aspects of such a defection’. MI5 wanted to put the brakes on this, however; if the defection took place, exploitation for counter-espionage purposes had to be the number one priority, with other aspects taking a back seat.24

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe The negotiations between Petrov and Richards continued; they met more and more frequently and discussed the material terms as well as the date and location of his defection. Richards made it clear that they would particularly value any information about current espionage and subversive activities, especially that which could help identify specific individuals.25 The financial terms also gradually became clearer, and at one meeting Richards demonstratively opened a briefcase containing 5,000 Australian pounds in banknotes. Bialoguski, present on this occasion, felt that the sight of these banknotes made a deep impression on everyone present in the room, himself included. The money was to be handed over to Petrov immediately after his defection and was to be locked in a safe to which only he had the key.26 Richards raised the stakes in the ensuing discussion: this was a basic fee that Petrov could count on no matter when he defected. But if he could bring documents with him to support his information, then they could be talking about considerably more, perhaps as much as double this amount.27 The defection date kept being put further and further back, however, and time was running out. The Petrovs had booked their passages for 8 May, and Richards and others at ASIO became increasingly ill at ease with every fresh delay. They had for some time felt the risks were increasing every day, that the Soviet authorities would somehow find out or begin to suspect what was in the offing, and that Petrov would, in this case, be ‘swallowed up by [the] Embassy’ and disappear for good.28 For his part, Vladimir proposed picking up the new resident in Sydney on 2 April and then accompanying him back to Canberra to deal with the handover. He would thus be able to obtain current intelligence on the purges of Beria’s men in Moscow. This would mean delaying the defection, and ASIO strongly advised against this. On 1 April, two alarming events occurred one after another. During an embassy meeting, Generalov criticized several of the personnel and was particularly hard on Evdokia. After the meeting, Generalov and the embassy’s head cipher clerk opened the safe which Petrov, in his cover post as consul, had at his disposal. There they found a secret draft telegram, which was a breach of the security

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Fear an d Fli gh t regulations. Generalov called Petrov in immediately and gave him a dressing-down. Vladimir now changed his plans. He would travel to Sydney to meet the arriving group and put them on a plane to Canberra before disappearing, reasoning that the longer his disappearance could be kept secret and the longer the Australian authorities denied any knowledge of this, the easier things would be for Evdokia. This would be his way of helping her.29 In his discussions with Richards, he was concerned about two more immediate practical issues: one was his sporting gun and fishing equipment, and the other was his dog, Jack, to whom he was much attached. What would happen to him?30 Given the situation, Richards was not taking any risks. He would personally fly in the same plane as Petrov from Canberra to Sydney and then keep a constant but discreet eye on him. ASIO was also monitoring the legation and the homes of the most important diplomats to detect any signs of unusual activity. On the afternoon of 2 April, Petrov was taken to Richards’ apartment, where he presented a number of documents he had taken from his residency safe, although not the one Generalov had examined. Evdokia, responsible for the residency in his absence, would thus never be able to account for the residency’s secret documents in the event of an audit. Petrov let Richards skim the papers but then kept hold of them; only at this point did he tell Richards that he was an MVD officer.31 That evening he signed the political asylum application, and a short time later Brigadier Spry, the director general of ASIO, joined them. Bialoguski was still on the scene for a bit longer, and Petrov spent the night in his apartment. ASIO had, however, decided Bialoguski would be completely taken off the operation as soon they (rather than the embassy) gobbled up Petrov. On the surface, the latest phase in the defection was undramatic but rather nerve-racking for Richards and the other ASIO officials who still had very little room for manoeuvre. If Petrov suddenly changed his mind, they could do nothing to stop him. Initially, however, everything went according to plan. Petrov met up with his successor, who happily declared that Vladimir had nothing to worry about in Moscow. But the experienced SK officer recognized

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe this immediately as the kind of false comfort signals used to numb prospective purge victims.32 At 11.15 a.m., Petrov accompanied Ron Richards out of the departure hall at Mascot. Richards held open one of the rear doors of the waiting car and Petrov climbed in. Colonel Vladimir Mikhaylovich Petrov had defected. Richards’ relief was short-lived, however. The subject under his protection suddenly asked to stop at a hotel to take care of one piece of unfinished business. In its meticulous planning for this phase of the operation, ASIO had also anticipated this kind of eventuality. If the subject wished to get out, he was not to be retained by force, and Richards’ assessment was that in the present situation it was best to let him have his way. They stopped a bit away from the hotel; Petrov got out and disappeared in a taxi. He eventually returned to the increasingly nervous party in the car, explaining that he had been entrusted with giving money to the hotel for a Soviet delegation that would be travelling on to New Zealand. After that, he needed to slip into a bar for a couple of beers.33 The car now took him to the safe house, which had been ready since 1953 to welcome the defector ASIO had been waiting for. Here they got down to the business side of the operation: Petrov handed over the documents, Richards gave him his basic fee of 5,000 Australian pounds, and with that, there was no way back. Everything would sort itself out. His dream of a chicken farm awaited him, as did his new life without Lifanov or Generalov, without urgent cipher telegrams from Moscow. Presumably also without Evdokia. But this was not his responsibility, not really. He had done everything in his power to make things easier, leaving behind the latest cipher telegrams from Moscow and the code books, which were her personal responsibility. Vladimir would part company with his wife simply by doing nothing and putting the ball in her court. She would have to decide. And Evdokia intended to make the journey back. She loved her family too much, and so she would rather choose death.

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17 Mole Tracks Holed up in the safe house with his escorts, Petrov initially had to wait to be interrogated. The transcriptions from the tape of 3 April clearly show that it was almost impossible to get through to Petrov, who answered with hysterical fits of laughter.1 MI5’s liaison officer reported that Petrov was in a bad way and that it was important to proceed with caution. The defector was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and they would have to take great pains to get him into any kind of communicative state. For Vladimir, the realization had sunk in that he had defected, and this was accompanied by the fear that now finally overpowered him and that he would never again be entirely free of. On 6 April, the first real interrogations were held. Richards soon noticed that Petrov practically needed to have the information milked out of him, a term he would return to time after time in his many reports with titles such as ‘The Petrov Progress’ or simply ‘Report from the Safe House’. Richards asked questions and Petrov answered, sometimes briefly, sometimes with longer comments. But if Richards did not ask, he did not find out either. This stood in stark contrast to the sources who, for better or worse, voluntarily recounted, wanted to recount and needed to recount what had happened. Petrov’s reactive behaviour during the interrogation constituted a great obstacle, especially now at the outset. How much did he actually know? And how could Richards guess his way to the right questions? The planning phase had foreseen all of this. Interrogating a defector required considerably more deftness than the RMCP had shown when questioning Gouzenko. An interrogator too much on the offensive could cause the defector to clam up or, in the worst-case scenario, create the impression that his interrogators were actually

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe working for Soviet specialist agencies or secretly gathering information on their behalf, which was not always a paranoid notion. A passive interrogator like MI5’s Roger Hollis could have a similar overall effect. If the person under interrogation felt the interrogator was uninterested or uninformed, they would quickly lose any incentive to provide secrets. Richards was no rookie police officer, but his ASIO duties had mostly involved monitoring communists and the front organizations out of which they were assumed to be operating. And then of course there was ‘The Case’, the unfinished investigation of the Soviet spy ring with the cover name Klod. But no one had ever snared a genuine illegal, let alone a defecting MVD intelligence officer. What questions, apart from ones about the Klod group and the future reach of its tentacles, should be asked of someone like this? What was the Lubyanka emissaries’ thought process? What kind of people were they? MI5’s interrogators were not all incompetents like Roger Hollis and the somewhat overrated Jim Skardon. Admittedly, the latter had got the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs to confess despite no concrete evidence against him. However, six months later, Skardon had ruined the investigation into ‘The Case’ by revealing to one of the main suspects, Ted Hill, how much MI5 knew.2 Nevertheless, the organization had a broad skill set from World War II, during which it had succeeded in ‘turning’ numerous German Abwehr agents before using them to feed the enemy disinformation. MI5 conducted this activity on a semi-industrial scale at a special facility where subjects were kept in isolation to make them open to persuasion. But above all MI5 possessed a knowledge of unanswered questions and all the peripheral information required to ask these and then follow up on the answers. As late as 3 April, neither MI5 nor ASIO knew who Petrov actually was. Their hunch was that he was an intelligence officer, and a few hints about his background could be found in the information from Sweden, although the documents he had taken with him solely concerned Soviet intelligence work in Australia. However, as soon as ASIO interrogated him, Richards was able to form an initial general

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Mole Tr acks picture of Petrov’s previous service and also the division of work at the Canberra residency. On 7 April, MI5’s security liaison officer sent his first progress report to London, which began with the statement ‘Subject defected’. Because of a transmission error, MI5 headquarters could not initially tell from the encrypted telegram whether Petrov had defected alone or along with his wife.3 A list of his posts then followed. What immediately caught their attention was the fact that Vladimir had worked for a long time as a cipher clerk in Moscow. Right there and then, the entire case changed character. Vladimir Petrov was a source not only of the MVD’s operations in Australia but also of something else and potentially much more valuable, namely the Soviet cipher system. With the Petrov defection now taking on a cryptographic dimension, the circle of interested parties grew in all directions. In the latter half of the 1940s, the Western signals intelligence services had made major breakthroughs in cracking the Soviet cipher traffic. But when the American William Weisband, a linguist at the US Army Security Agency, furnished the NKVD with information about this and Philby also got wind of the matter, the Soviet authorities discovered that their apparently secure system had been compromised. And so they duly changed their procedures. The information Gouzenko had provided in 1945 concerned the old Soviet system. On ‘Black Friday’, 13 August 1948, the Soviet Union had changed all its cipher systems, thus blinding the Western SIGINT services. In the wake of Black Friday, the British and the Americans had lost the most important and the most heavily encrypted Soviet traffic. And although later at the beginning of the 1950s the US intelligence community put great resources into solving ‘the Soviet Problem’, it could in no way crack this traffic, including the telegrams to and from the residencies.4 But if the defector Vladimir Petrov had been working with the new system, could he not provide important clues as to its structure and how it was used by the cipher clerks? Just by chance, or perhaps not, Eric Jones, director of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British SIGINT agency, happened to be on a business trip in the Far East and quickly got GCHQ involved in the exploitation of Petrov. Jones directly contacted Brigadier Spry and

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe was promised that the SIGINT interests would be catered for only once they had ‘milked’ Petrov of the information counter-espionage officers needed. One complicating factor was, however, the UK–US agreement between GCHQ and NSA, which committed both parties to sharing all SIGINT and code-breaking material. An exception needed to be made here for the British promise to ASIO that they would not share information from Petrov with any third party.5 So there were two kinds of Americans: those to be kept at arm’s length and those who were part of the family. Now Evdokia suddenly entered the picture. When Richards started questioning Vladimir about the cipher system, the latter mentioned in passing that it was actually his wife who had conducted the cipher duties at the residency throughout their time in Australia. This information instantaneously transformed Evdokia from an administrative problem they thought they had just got shot of into an informant who was of just as much interest as her husband, possibly more so. On 9 April, ASIO, MI5 and GCHQ had a clear idea that Evdokia was a valuable subject in her own right; they began to seriously consider the possibility of getting her to defect during her journey home. But they also stressed that there was little chance of this happening, given that she had relatives in Moscow.6 It was therefore vital to extract as much information as possible from Vladimir Petrov as quickly as circumstances would permit. On 12 April, the head of MI5’s D1 branch (Soviet espionage), J. C. Robertson, contacted one of his colleagues at GCHQ headquarters in Cheltenham (‘our friends in the country’). He informed him that they had just received word from Australia that Petrov had told them that while in Moscow he had worked for two years on creating codes. Although they did not yet know when this was, this intelligence was sufficiently important that it needed to be shared over the phone. GCHQ had been entertaining the idea of dispatching one of its specialists to handle this part of the interrogation but hesitated since its director was still in the Far East. For his part, Robertson advised his colleagues in Cheltenham not to wait given the situation; the first reports showed that Petrov had already begun talking about matters of direct SIGINT interest. Robertson added that unexpected things

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Mole Tr acks could occur in defector cases; they could not rule out the possibility that the subject might be liquidated, commit suicide or change his mind and stop talking. So if GCHQ was considering sending someone out, it should do this as quickly as possible without any delay.7 If Petrov’s information about his previous work at Spets Otdel caused considerable activity within the British intelligence community, this was nothing compared to the sensation triggered by the next interrogation report. On 7 April SLO Australia had dropped a political and intelligence bombshell: Petrov had hitherto unknown information about the defection that had shaken Britain three years earlier when the two Foreign Office officials, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, had disappeared without a trace once MI5 began to suspect the latter of being a Soviet spy. No word had been subsequently received from either, but they were assumed to be ensconced on the other side of the Iron Curtain. What the British knew about this matter had again come from the Venona material. Soviet telegrams from the Washington residency stated that a certain Homer, with links to the British embassy in 1945–6, had supplied the NKVD with classified documents. This description was vague and could apply to hundreds of individuals, but the deciphered telegrams were the fault line along which the entire Cambridge Spy Ring would eventually rupture. The more telegrams about Homer that turned up, the smaller the number of suspects became. By the spring of 1951, MI5 was more or less certain this involved Donald Maclean, who was now put under surveillance. The coordination between MI5 and Special Branch broke down, however, and this surveillance was not around the clock. The British pulled out, very conscious of the legal problems awaiting them. Even if the Venona telegrams confirmed Maclean’s guilt beyond any reasonable doubt, this would still not suffice because these telegrams were inadmissible in a court given that their sources were protected. No spy was worth paying that price for. What they only found out after the Cold War was that there was no secret left to guard because the Russians already knew about it. Somewhat anguished, MI5 finally attempted to replicate its tactics against Klaus Fuchs and bring in Maclean, using bluffing

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe tactics, threats and persuasion to get him to compromise himself. They never found out whether that path would have led anywhere. On 25 May 1951, a couple of days before the planned swoop, Guy Burgess pulled his car into the courtyard of the Maclean family house in Kent. It was Maclean’s 39th birthday, and he and his wife had just sat down for dinner when Burgess knocked on the door and introduced himself as ‘a colleague’, which was not strictly untrue. Regrettably, Donald needed to accompany him on very urgent official business. Both gentlemen left Maclean’s furious wife and drove at high speed to Southampton, arriving there at midnight, in time to catch the ferry to Saint-Malo in France. All tracks ended there. The two escapees appeared to have vanished into thin air, and despite extensive inquiries, no tracks were discovered.8 The moles were gone. In the second high-priority telegram, sent by the SLO in Australia on 7 April, the sequel to the Burgess and Maclean story now arrived in telegraphic bullet points: 1. Source has so far produced following information on Burgess and Mclean [sic]. (a) (? N.K.V.D.) recruited them as students and targeted them into Foreign Office. (b) Moscow valued them highly and when Burgess and Mclean [sic] considered Security Service were on their track M.G.B. ordered their withdrawal. (c) Escape arrangements handled by Kislitsyn now M.G.B. officer under Petrov in Canberra. These included planning trip over Czech border. (d) Burgess and Mclean [sic] brought out valuable Foreign Office information and are now living in Kuibyshev [sic]. 2. Source states he was given para 1 (a) by Kislitsyn.9 This follow-up telegram of 7 April had an effect at several different levels. The first and obvious one was that some factual information was now available regarding their escape, the background to it, and where both defectors were residing. At the same time, this was unconfirmed information from a single source who had received

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Mole Tr acks this second-hand from the person with the real insight into the case: Philip Kislitsyn. In London, demands were growing for further, more complete information, and ultimately they also came directly from the ageing prime minister, Winston Churchill.10 Everyone wanted more details, and suddenly Petrov had been transformed from an at best useful mid-level source into the possible key to a national trauma. Or had he? The other effect of the information was to turn the spotlight on the previously peripheral Kislitsyn. If he had organized the escape, he must have had detailed knowledge of these agents, their work and contact procedures. A look at the files also provided a lead: Kislitsyn had served at the Soviet legation in London and had presumably been very familiar with the case for a long time. Suddenly, the entire Petrov operation was turned on its head. Had they actually caught the wrong fish? Why had they cultivated the drunkard Petrov and ignored Kislitsyn, who would have been infinitely more valuable to MI5? Yet all was not lost; Kislitsyn was still in Canberra. Perhaps MI5 would get further opportunities. With the utmost haste, MI5 began to prepare a Kislitsyn operation. On the very same day as the SLO in Australia had sent the telegram containing Petrov’s information about Burgess and Maclean, Robertson wired back an urgent telegram stating that MI5 was now ‘vitally interested in Kislitsyn in view of his responsibility for Burgess/ Maclean escape’. Robertson hoped that in light of this ASIO would consider every opportunity to get Kislitsyn to defect. And if this required a financial incentive, London would be only too pleased to contribute.11 On 8 April, the SLO replied that planning was already under way and that Petrov had indicated that Kislitsyn would not be an impossible case, but they did not have the right contacts to reach him.12 Robertson responded that he understood the operational difficulties, but if Petrov’s information was actually correct and Kislitsyn did hold valuable information about Soviet intelligence activity in the United Kingdom, they were prepared to go to ‘any reasonable limit’ to help finance a defection. There was, Robertson pointed out, the potential domino effect of Petrov’s defection if his colleagues, including Kislitsyn, were recalled. So ASIO needed to move quickly.13

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe This situation caused the earlier planning from 1953 to be put into action. SIFE was informed of Petrov’s still top-secret defection and the contingency that Soviet personnel would travel via Singapore in the event of a recall. Kislitsyn was of special interest due to his knowledge of Burgess and Maclean, while Petrova was a secondary target, also of interest on account of her being a cipher clerk.14 On 12 April, it was clear that whenever the Australian government decided to make the defection public, a number of Soviet legation staff would be declared personae non gratae. One would be Kislitsyn, and ASIO planned to exploit their departure arrangements to try and get both Kislitsyn and Petrova to defect, even though they already had no great hopes for Petrova.15 Two days later, the Soviet authorities applied for a transit visa for Petrova, and SIFE was instructed to be prepared, although there was little prospect of triggering a defection since she would presumably be carefully monitored. Singapore requested further information that could be of use during an attempt to make contact. They also wanted to know where to send Petrova if she defected. Should she be flown back to Australia or taken to Britain?16 Kislitsyn and two diplomatic couriers would clearly be on the same flight as Petrova, and Singapore received explicit orders from London: Kislitsyn’s defection would be even more valuable than Petrova’s.17 On the evening of 13 April, Prime Minister Menzies gave a speech announcing Vladimir Petrov’s defection; he had handed over classified documents demonstrating the Soviet Union’s widespread intelligence activities in the country. In light of this disclosure, a Royal Commission on Espionage would be appointed. Once the defection had in this way been turned into the Petrov Affair, Brigadier Spry got cold feet. One defection was enough for Australia; if the British wanted to get others to follow suit, they would have to do it somewhere else. ASIO thereby cancelled all plans for getting Kislitsyn and Petrova to defect. MI5 now had to try to do this on its own in Singapore, but it did not rate its chances as particularly good given the size of the Soviet contingent.18 However, they could still make one final move. A Russian-speaking MI5 officer who had arrived from London a day or so earlier was flying back to Singapore

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Mole Tr acks on 17 April.19 He would have a letter with him that Petrov had written to Kislitsyn encouraging ‘Philip Vasilievich’ to defect; otherwise, his fate would be sealed in Russia. As Petrov put it: ‘Now choose whether to go to disaster or take the path of freedom.’20 On the evening of 19 April, the SLO in Australia sent Singapore the final telegram about the potential defection. The Soviet party had now left Mascot Airport bound for Darwin and Singapore. Petrova was ‘obviously upset’, but this could have been due to the trying situation. Kislitsyn kept himself to himself and handled his own travel formalities while the others seemed to be focusing on Evdokia.21 In London, it was not just Winston Churchill who had reacted to Petrov’s information about Burgess and Maclean. The former MI6 officer Kim Philby, who via Burgess had warned Maclean, was also very much involved and would follow the Petrov case with increasing concern. Unlike his showpiece, where he had prevented Volkov’s defection in Istanbul in 1945, Philby was now powerless. Maclean defecting was one thing, but Burgess also doing so fatally linked their actions to Philby, who had access to the compromised Venona telegrams and was aware of MI5’s plan of action. Proving that Philby was the third man in the drama was not enough, but it would suffice to put him on leave, wiretap him and open his mail. At MI5, the Philby case was code-named Peach, and the question was whether the Petrov Affair would make enough waves to flush him out (or more likely make him disappear à la Burgess and Maclean). On 12 April, MI5 recorded a significant increase in the diplomatic telegram traffic between the Soviet embassy in London and Moscow, putting this down to Petrov’s defection. Given the situation, Deputy Director General Mitchell took certain measures in case the Soviets launched an operation to ‘withdraw’ Peach. In such an event, there would not be much the British authorities could do; they had no evidence against Philby and thereby no legal grounds for arresting him or imposing a travel ban on him. But they wanted to at least prevent yet another inexplicable disappearance like that of Burgess and Maclean. Shrouded in the greatest secrecy, MI5 provided border staff with Philby’s description, and they were instructed to report if he had left the country.22

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe Peach hung on, to all appearances oblivious to the turmoil. But in actual fact he had been worried enough to contact his old handler at the London residency, whereupon he received the reassuring news: Petrov knew nothing of the Cambridge Spy Ring. And there would be no more defections. Feeling secure after having been given this reassurance, Philby later performed political theatrics of the highest order in 1954, playing his favourite role of the falsely accused when his name was mentioned during a parliamentary debate.23 He thus moved to Beirut, whence, when the time was ripe, he disappeared without a trace, just as MI5 had feared.

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18 The Man in the Panama Hat Not coming home was nothing unusual for Vladimir, so Evdokia did not react this time either, despite Generalov’s renewed attack and the raid on the safe. On 4 April, while the Soviet residency was still unaware of Vladimir’s defection the day before, she performed a handover to the newly appointed resident, Evgeny Kovalenok. The disappearance of the documents had apparently not been detected at this stage. She had already been relieved of all her embassy duties but was still working at the residency until her departure on 8 May. Two days later, on 6 April, Generalov had Evdokia summoned to the embassy. He wanted to know whether her husband had phoned her; Evdokia told him no. Generalov was very concerned about Petrov not returning from Sydney. The embassy had contacted the Australian Department of External Affairs to seek the authorities’ assistance in finding him, and he feared Petrov had been kidnapped. Given the situation, they now needed to take certain precautionary measures, the most important of which was Evdokia leaving their home and taking up residence at the embassy; the reason for this was that she too was at risk of abduction. She needed to leave their home immediately, and for her own protection she would be accompanied back to the house by some of the embassy staff so she could pack her most essential personal belongings. On entering their home, she encountered the first warning signals of what she could expect. Someone had searched the rooms, and the couple’s clothes had been thrown into a large pile on the floor.1 There was, however, a more innocent explanation for this apparent search, namely that the newly arrived diplomats were to take over their home.2 Following the same model used during the Great Terror, it was vital to take possession quickly of a dwelling occupied by

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe enemies of the people. Just because Canberra was on the other side of the world, it did not mean that the rules of the Moscow housing market did not apply there. Once back at the embassy, she was essentially confined to her room and prevented from leaving the embassy building or having any contact with the outside world. This was all still justified out of consideration for her personal safety. Vladimir Petrov had escaped the fate MI5 had early on warned their Australian colleagues of; instead, it was now Evdokia who had been ‘gobbled up’ by the embassy and was thus out of range for the rescue operation MI5 and ASIO had considered at various stages but had never put into action. On 8 or 9 April (Evdokia could not remember afterwards which day it was), she was again summoned to Generalov, who apologized for being the bearer of bad news. According to certain information he had received, her husband would not be returning to the embassy. He had not had this information confirmed, but he was working on it. Generalov steered clear of saying where this information had come from. Evdokia’s surprise was genuine. She really had no idea what had happened to Vladimir. She had noticed that he had changed and kept himself to himself, and that he had been very upset after that last staff meeting – and, in particular, the subsequent raid on the safe. He had mentioned staying in Australia, but this was impossible, and he knew that. Perhaps Generalov’s suspicions were correct and he had been kidnapped. Had the kidnappers made contact? A few days later, she received confirmation that Petrov was in the care of the Australian authorities. Generalov informed her that they had received a letter via the Australian Department of External Affairs, allegedly written by her husband and requesting a meeting. He now ordered Evdokia to write a reply. For security reasons, he dictated the letter. In it she rejected the proposal, saying that it could be a trap. She was opposed to writing a reply, but Generalov insisted. Evdokia wanted to start the letter using the familiar diminutive form Volodenka, but Generalov demanded that she use the more neutral Volodya. Her already negative opinion of Generalov was not exactly softened by what she considered senseless pettiness.3

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The Man i n th e P anama Hat Evdokia found herself gradually subjected to more restrictions. She could only move between her room, practically a prison cell, and the kitchen, to which she had to request access. On 15 April, she handed over all her remaining MVD documents, including the codes, to her successor, Kovalenok. She also did the final accounts for the petty cash for him in order to assure him that the money was all there. After this, she no longer had access to the holiest of places, the cipher room. There was something forced about this demonstration of orderliness and dedication, as if the meticulously reported accounts would play a part in the inquisition process of which she could now clearly make out the outlines and of which Kovalenok had expressly warned her. What would happen when she got back to Moscow? His answer confirmed what she already knew: the Soviet penal code required relatives of enemies of the people to also be punished. For the wife of someone who had defected voluntarily and gone over to the enemy, this meant imprisonment or the death sentence.4 Evdokia requested a meeting with Generalov and asked him to obtain a guarantee from Moscow that she would not be punished; she had diligently carried out her duties and was not a traitor. Generalov said he would make enquiries. But when she asked him about this just before her departure, he still had not received word, possibly because he had not sent the enquiry in the first place. Evdokia could read an Australian morning newspaper but had not been permitted to listen to the radio during the final twenty-four hours before her flight. The explanation given, that the radio was ‘kaput’, did not inspire confidence. It was not the physical imprisonment that made the greatest impression on her, however, but the change in atmosphere at the embassy. She had been ostracized by all of the staff. She had been transformed into a ‘non-person’, a fate she had only just escaped in the summer of 1938, when another man, innocent as he was, had brought misfortune on her. Only one person continued to treat her as before, namely Philip Kislitsyn, even though, as Vladimir’s closest colleague at the residency, he would have more reason than most to disown her. But they were good friends from back in their

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe KI days in Moscow and had done the English language course together. That kind of thing did not usually make a difference, but it did in his case. Two diplomatic couriers had arrived from Moscow: big, silent men radiating determination. Their names were Yarkov and Karpinsky, and Evdokia was informed that she and Kislitsyn would be travelling back to Moscow with them on 19 April on a flight from Mascot via Darwin and Singapore and on to Europe and Moscow. Generalov also pointed out to her that both couriers were armed.5 This information was superfluous since couriers always carried guns, but she understood his veiled threat; if she attempted to escape or make contact with the authorities, she would not live long. Perhaps they had planned to bump her off during an escape attempt, and this was their way of letting her know what her sentence would be. Three cars left the embassy grounds in the afternoon so the travellers would make the evening flight. One final, apparently insignificant gesture left a decisive impression on Evdokia: neither Generalov nor any of the other personnel came out to say goodbye to her. She was already purged, sentenced to death, on her way to the stake. It was a long car journey. Evdokia felt unwell and was unable to eat anything. She asked to listen to the car radio but was told it was broken. ‘Everything seems to be broken,’ she replied.6 One of the couriers – or whoever they actually were – tried to cheer her up, but in such a transparent manner that it had the opposite effect; she understood that he just wanted his consignment to be as easy as possible to handle. He took out a hip flask and told her to take a drink. It was Russian brandy. She was allergic to spirits, and her eyes began running profusely. During a break, she tried to give her Australian cash away to a diplomat’s wife who was escorting her. Evdokia asked her to buy something and send it to her mother in Moscow. A while later, she changed her mind and asked for the money back. She could not seem to make up her mind.7 By the time the party arrived at Mascot it was evening, and one of the escorts went on ahead to find out the departure gate. The formalities were no problem, but when the four travellers and their

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The Man i n th e P anama Hat party started heading outside to the plane, they were surrounded by an agitated crowd trying to stop them and shouting at Evdokia to stay. Yarkov and Karpinsky grabbed hold of her, shoving her through the throng towards the boarding ramp, past the sharp-eyed photographer whose picture presumably turned out much better than he could ever have imagined when he pressed the shutter release amidst the darkness and commotion. The impression the photograph gave, apparently borne out by the external circumstances, was of the desperate and weeping Evdokia Petrova being brutally dragged onto the plane to meet an unpleasant fate, with the Australian authorities passively allowing this to happen. This interpretation was so powerful it lived on despite her repeatedly stressing during the cross-examination that this was not the way things had been at all. She had certainly been afraid during the hullabaloo, but the reason was the crowd, the members of which thought they were trying to save her. In one of the press photographs, a man sporting a light Panama hat can be glimpsed lagging a bit behind the rest of the party: Philip Kislitsyn, the other recalled intelligence officer. Kislitsyn scarcely had an easier homecoming to look forward to. Being the closest colleague of a defector, he risked appearing just as complicit as Evdokia, so he kept himself to himself, as the SLO Derek Hamblen noted in the report he telegraphed to London later in the evening: 1. Party left this evening according to schedule. 2. PETROVA obviously upset but this could be due to general strain. Large crowd attended airport to watch departure. 3. It was noticed that KISLITSYN kept very much to himself at airport and handled his own formalities independent of Soviet Embassy official who looked after PETROVA.8 Then the party was on board the plane. The couriers caught their breath; they had successfully averted a kidnap attempt. No MVD officer would have imagined in his wildest dreams that this had been

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe anything other than a ‘rent-a-crowd’ sent there to create a commotion so ASIO could capture its intended prey. But things had gone well. And the object of their attention had behaved, had not called out and had not resisted. They now took the opportunity to praise her for how she had handled the enemy’s provocation, and it was instead Kislitsyn, sitting next to her, who was unpleasant, telling her to stop crying.9 The only person she had had contact with while confined to the embassy had now turned his back on her, but he had also shunned the others. Evdokia had just made her first and only major stage appearance as the weeping, defenceless victim. She was still upset and had been roughly treated, and the brutality of this ‘protection’ told her everything she needed to know. This was the first time she had been roughly handled during this journey into hell. Her handbag was torn, and they had ripped three buttons from her dress. And then there was the lost shoe. But, despite everything, the tears had been caused by the allergic reaction to the brandy, and once they were up in the air, the apparently compliant victim took on again her old persona of an experienced intelligence officer. She began to act calmly and according to plan. She ordered a beer, and twenty minutes later, she needed to go to the toilet. She teasingly asked the couriers whether they intended to accompany her. Embarrassed by this, they waved her away. Where could she go? It took two visits to the toilet before she finally got a lucky break. A flight attendant appeared, asking her how she felt and whether she actually wanted to stay on board.10 This is where the actions of the two parties converged. Evdokia was seeking contact and the flight attendant, in turn, was looking for a sign of her desire to seek contact. Following the catastrophic scene at Mascot, ASIO had radioed the pilot of the plane, instructing him to find out whether Petrova wished to remain in Australia. The person best placed to do this was the air hostess; she tried to speak to Petrova in the powder room, the relatively spacious anteroom to the ladies’ toilet. During Evdokia’s second visit there, the flight attendant struck up a conversation; not beating around the bush, she asked whether there was something Mrs Petrova wanted to say to her. Evdokia now confided in the flight attendant that she had not slept for two weeks,

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Th e Man i n th e P anama Hat had been interrogated and was afraid, particularly of her two armed guards. Finally, she said that she wanted to stay but would leave it to the flight attendant to decide.11 Somewhere between the brief commotion out on the runway and the couriers’ clumsy encouraging words on board the plane, everything had finally fallen into place; or at least half of it had. While still at Mascot, she would have rejected any offer of help. On board the plane, the matter was less clear-cut. But she could not take the step herself; no one could ask that of her. They needed to take that step for her. This was the situation she gradually attempted to conjure up, and it was the reason for her ambiguous choice of words when speaking to the air hostess. The potentially devastating media reports from Mascot had already thrown ASIO’s plans into disarray. Instead of letting the Soviet party depart Australia and leaving it to MI5 in Singapore to continue with the operation, it was now vital to show initiative and good intentions on home soil. This information from the BOAC plane presented ASIO with new possibilities. Firstly, Mrs Petrova had expressed her desire, suggesting that despite ASIO’s earlier assessment she perhaps did want to stay. Secondly, they received confirmation that the two couriers were armed; by taking loaded weapons on board an aircraft with a pressurized cabin, they had breached international air safety regulations. The BOAC Super Constellation approached the runway at Darwin Airport shortly before dawn on 20 April. Waiting for the plane on the tarmac was the acting administrator of the Northern Territory, Reginald Leydin, with the small force he had managed to muster at short notice. Besides his second in command, Principal Legal Officer K. S. Edmunds, one ASIO officer, one Darwin Special Branch officer, a Northern Territory Police superintendent and a handful of police officers were in attendance. While the plane was being refuelled and made ready for the next stage, the passengers would disembark and be served breakfast in the terminal building. Leydin’s tactics were simple and designed to exploit the element of surprise. As soon as the Soviet party had disembarked, they would make sure they split them up. Edmunds and

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe ASIO regional officer Barrington would start talking to the couriers to distract them, enabling Constable Tiernan from Darwin Special Branch to speak with Kislitsyn and Leydin to deal with the now number one priority Petrova. The major and immediate element of uncertainty at this point was the couriers and the risk that they would draw their firearms; the police officers were therefore charged with staying close to them and overpowering them at the slightest sign they were trying to produce their weapons.12 Earlier that evening, Leydin had received clear instructions over the phone from Brigadier Spry. As the government’s senior representative on the ground, the prime minister wanted Leydin to ask Mrs Petrova directly whether she wished to stay. If ‘yes’, Leydin would be empowered to immediately grant her asylum on behalf of the government. Spry had also added that the embassy official accompanying her, Kislitsyn, was, according to their information, travelling under coercion and so it was desirable to also ask him whether he wanted asylum. But the order of priority was clear; after what had happened when departing Mascot, Petrova was to come first. It is evident that Spry did not clearly emphasize that Kislitsyn was of the greatest intelligence value, perhaps due to several contributory factors, including the extraordinary haste with which their plans had needed to be changed after Mascot. Another explanation was that Kislitsyn’s importance only made sense in light of the information about Burgess and Maclean, which under no circumstances could be disseminated to a wider circle. A third (and possibly decisive) explanation was that this was now absolutely a matter of immediate Australian political interests, and MI5’s requests, no matter how important they were, needed to take a back seat. Initially, everything seemed to be going according to plan. Mrs Petrova was the last to disembark, whereupon Leydin approached her. But Karpinsky, the bigger of the two couriers, noticed what was happening and abruptly shoved Edmunds aside. A scuffle broke out and many of those present thought Karpinsky was now attempting to draw his weapon. Several of the police officers rushed to the spot, one of whom locked Karpinsky’s arms by pulling down his jacket while another held him in a headlock. They then quickly

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The Man i n th e P anama Hat disarmed both couriers, thus eliminating the imminent threat of bloodshed. Amidst the commotion, Leydin managed to strike up a conversation with Petrova. They spoke for around twenty minutes and their talk did not entirely clarify matters. She had not unambiguously stated that she wished to defect, and had not requested political asylum. Instead, she had come up with a peculiar counterproposal that was difficult for ASIO to deal with; seeing as her family were in Russia, it would be best if the Australian authorities forcefully seized her and took her away. Moreover, she doubted whether her husband was still alive and expanded on why she was sceptical: he had to be dead; he would never have defected to ASIO of his own volition without first asking her advice.13 Here Evdokia was clearly following an alternative plan contrary to what Brigadier Spry had pictured or what Leydin and his assistants had planned for. The Australian authorities could help with a lot of things in this situation, but being guilty of abduction was not exactly part of the plan. Evdokia returned time and again to how she could not make up her mind and needed someone else to do it for her. But no one appears to have understood her message’s hidden meaning, not even after she had specifically suggested to Leydin what they needed to do. Evdokia went off and joined the two couriers in the arrival hall. Once disarmed, they were passive and did not take the initiative. They did not want any breakfast either. Leydin received a message that it was actually Kislitsyn who now wanted to speak to him instead. Kislitsyn then asked why the Australian authorities had breached the Soviet party’s diplomatic immunity. Leydin did not understand what Kislitsyn was referring to. Kislitsyn pointed out that they had a lot of police at the airport, to which Leydin replied that this was normally the case. Why, Kislitsyn wondered, were they holding him, Mrs Petrova and the rest of the party prisoner? Leydin assured him this was not so; he had simply wanted to ask Petrova if she wished to remain in Australia, and now that the subject had been raised, he wondered whether Kislitsyn would also like to remain. Instead of totally rejecting this proposal, Kislitsyn enquired whether they could

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe arrange this then and there. Leydin assured him he could and that the government was able to make this kind of commitment, which Kislitsyn thought was very interesting indeed.14 The big catch was halfway over the gunwale, but for some reason Leydin let this go and returned to his main task, namely that of working on the apparently considerably less cooperative Petrova. He said he understood how difficult the decision she had to take was, but he appealed to her to make it now while there was still time. Even now she did not want to give a yes or no and repeated her earlier request to speak to her husband. Leydin clutched at this straw, rushed into an office and phoned Brigadier Spry, who explained he would arrange this. Once the call was put through, Edmunds went out to Mrs Petrova and told her that her husband was on the telephone. The couriers then insisted on accompanying her, to which he consented. A brief conversation ensued in Russian, with Petrova replying in monosyllables. Then she put the phone down, turned to Leydin and, in the presence of the couriers, declared that it was not her husband on the other end of the telephone. Leydin made a last-ditch attempt and asked her whether she wished to remain in Australia, but she simply repeated that the voice on the phone was not her husband’s. He respected her decision and wished her good luck.15 So the entire operation had come to nothing. The plane would soon be ready to depart, and a kidnapping was out of the question. Leydin nevertheless decided to make one final attempt but now rephrased his question, asking if she would like to have ‘a short conversation’. She unexpectedly agreed to this, whereupon he put his hand on her elbow and led her into the office. He could hear Kislitsyn loudly protesting in the background. Leydin turned around and explained that Petrova had willingly agreed to have a quick chat. Two of the police officers accompanied them inside and locked the door. Someone knocked and Kislitsyn could be heard demanding they open the door. Once inside, Leydin asked Evdokia whether she had spoken to her husband, and she confirmed this. It was now beyond the realms of possibility that anyone had attempted to pretend to be him. He

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The Man i n th e P anama Hat again asked whether she wanted to stay in Australia and on this occasion she did not beat around the bush, answering affirmatively for the first time. Leydin explained that he was thereby granting her political asylum, and asked her to sign an asylum application. Evdokia refused. She would sign this, but not until later, once she had met her husband. Leydin tried to persuade her to sign, but got nowhere. Instead, he left the office and got hold of Spry on another telephone. No, a signed application was unnecessary in this situation. A verbal declaration of intent in the presence of two witnesses would suffice, which they already had. Mrs Petrova was hastily led out to a waiting car, without the rest of the Soviet party seeing what was happening. Evdokia Alexeyevna Kartseva, alias Petrova, an MVD captain, decorated with a service medal during the Great Patriotic War and awarded the Order of the Red Star, had defected to the enemy entirely of her own accord, which would have been absolutely inconceivable to her just 12 hours earlier. What had happened to her? Or rather: what had actually happened? Later, in various contexts, Evdokia would suggest that, no matter how much she was and remained a faithful intelligence officer, something within her had started thinking along different lines, hence her attentiveness to the opportunities arising during the course of events. Vladimir had touched on the possibility of remaining, and although she had firmly rejected this alternative, the idea had nevertheless been put in her head. As she later phrased it, he had insidiously planted it in her, and the rough and unfair treatment she had experienced at the embassy had later fuelled it.16 With her sharp eye, she had observed small-mindedness, power games and intrigues, first in the relatively harmonic Stockholm and later in the much more hostile environment of Canberra. But, above all, she knew her own organization, its suspicion, its draconian judicial decisions and its collective and irrevocable punishments. The treatment she had been subjected to at the embassy confirmed this picture and, above all, was a portent of what awaited her. Ambassador Generalov’s blatant unwillingness to put in a good word for her and obtain a letter of safe conduct from Moscow was tantamount to the judgement that would thereby just be a formality.

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe In the post-analysis of the defection operation, ASIO stated that the Soviet embassy’s actions had been the most important unforeseen factor, playing right into ASIO’s hands.17 But yet another decisive factor had helped ASIO enormously. As MI5’s J. C. Robertson had stated, defection cases were, by definition, totally unpredictable, particularly when it came to the actual protagonist. Behind the unintentional but consequently convincing mask of the weeping, helpless woman, Evdokia Petrova was a very scheming and skilled intelligence officer who would prove far superior to both her warders and helpers. From the moment she calculatingly drank her first beer on board the plane, she had begun improvising her last great intelligence operation, namely extracting herself from the trap in which her brutal superiors, her selfish husband and life’s insoluble emotional dilemma had caught her. She would quite simply do the impossible and save both her family and herself as far as humanly possible, and at any cost. If she returned, she would sacrifice herself without having achieved anything, which is exactly what Vladimir had told her during their brief private conversation. He did not waste his time telling her he loved her or that he wanted nothing more than a reconciliation with her; he knew time was running out and emphasized that he was no longer speaking as her husband and wanted to say just one thing: the idea of returning to her family in Moscow was delusional.18 She would never get to see them again, no matter what she did. As the closest family of a convicted traitor, they would be just as doomed as if she now defected. The only way for her to try to save her loved ones was to neither return home nor defect, but to stage the forced abduction she had asked her unsympathetic helpers to orchestrate. Her contact with the flight attendant was the first step, the second was the telephone call and its faked outcome, and the third was refusing to immediately sign a paper that could betray her. The theatrical performance she put on for Kislitsyn and the couriers was her way of creating the interpretive framework into which the subsequent course of events could be incorporated. So it was Petrova who insisted on taking the telephone call where the rest of the party were waiting and not one floor above in the building;

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Th e Man i n th e P anama Hat she had also ordered the couriers to accompany her as witnesses.19 By creating a scenario where she saw through an attempt to lure her into a trap, she had convinced her escorts she did not want to defect. When she was later led away and the door locked – also at her request – and she was suddenly gone, this was no defection they had witnessed but an abduction. Kislitsyn’s loud protests and banging on the door were proof that this charade had worked. Just as unintentionally as the Soviet embassy had created the psychological prerequisites for her defection, the Australian authorities had now reinforced this picture by initially stating that Petrova was not being held captive at all. To then announce that she was no longer at the airport – and, finally, when Kislitsyn asked to speak to her on the telephone, apologizing for unfortunately not being able to connect the call in the time remaining before the depleted travel party needed to reboard the plane – reinforced the illusion. Evdokia Petrova was now sitting quietly out on the veranda at Government House, the Office of the Administrator of the Northern Territory, where Leydin had arranged to have her taken. A military transport plane was on its way from South Australia to pick her up. On board was Ron Richards, the man who would be Vladimir and Evdokia’s joint interrogator at the various secret locations that would be her future home. Her fate now lay in the hands of others. But that is another story. Out there, beyond her control, the stories about Evdokia had been spun and begun to take on a life of their own. The handful of reporters the local newspapers had mobilized attempted to manage the drama they had just witnessed, using headlines like ‘History Made at Darwin’ and then proudly stating that the Northern Territory Police Force had had to intervene and disarm the two couriers taking Petrova away by force. Once freed from this threat, she had sought political asylum.20 The outcome in Darwin was apparently beyond doubt: Evdokia Petrova had been liberated. The powers of evil that had triumphed at Mascot had been defeated by the officials and police officers who had been given clear orders this time. Soon, however, a different version would shake Australian–Soviet relations to the core. Kislitsyn had been granted a telephone call to the

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe embassy, and the first brief cipher telegram had presumably already been sent to Moscow. Evdokia Petrova had been abducted by the Greens. They wanted her, and so they had taken her, locked the door, talked their way out of the matter, said that she had left, disconnected the phone and blamed technical faults. As a prisoner, she would soon see that it was in her best interests to sign the papers put before her, and she had no choice but to cooperate. When called as a witness in the big show trial, she would be beautiful and charming and answer their questions with ease, just as they expected of her. Why couldn’t the enemy also arrange things that easily? And of course she would never again be released from their clutches. So who were the real winners and losers? The journalists had already chosen the winners, as confirmed by the Australian voters in the coming parliamentary elections. It seemed just as obvious who the losers were. But along with the MVD and its emissaries, there were two other losers, one of whom was Evdokia. For another nine years, she would be in a perpetual state of uncertainty about the fate of her family, whether the staged abduction had been sufficiently convincing and whether the price she had been forced to pay, betraying her oath and her country, had benefited anyone other than the enemy. Paradoxically, the second major loser was this enemy. Although no one wanted to suggest this about the defection, the ‘triumph’ in Darwin had come at a high price for the security services. The target London had actually prioritized, Philip Kislitsyn, had been lost to them. A clumsy last-minute attempt had proved unsuccessful, and once Petrova had been separated from the group, there were no suitable opportunities to approach Kislitsyn again in Singapore. The game had been irretrievably lost. In return, MI5 – or rather ASIO – had got Evdokia Petrova. At first, she was regarded as a small bonus, a by-catch along with the main intelligence catch they had already landed. But the more they unwrapped their consolation prize, the more unsure MI5, its colleagues in Broadway and in particular their ‘friends in the country’ became about whether this consolation prize wasn’t actually the big catch, thus confirming Robertson’s words about the unpredictability of defection operations.

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19 Exploitation The Australian government held out little hope that the Soviet Union would accept its version of the events leading up to the Petrovs’ defection. But those who might have imagined that the Soviet Union had been weakened or become more defensive after Stalin’s death and Beria’s downfall were quickly disabused of this delusion. Four days after Evdokia Petrova was, according to a unanimous Australian press corps, rescued from the clutches of the Soviet authorities, the Soviet Union hit back. On 23 April 1954, the Australian chargé d’affaires in Moscow, Brian Hill, was summoned to see the deputy minister of foreign affairs, Andrei Gromyko. The Soviet Union broke off diplomatic relations with Australia with immediate effect and ordered the Australian diplomats in Moscow to leave the country within the next two or three days.1 According to the international rules of diplomatic interaction, this was one step down from a declaration of war. And in the long note Gromyko handed over, this was exactly how the situation was described: Australia had crossed every line and subjected the Soviet legation’s personnel to provocations and open hostilities, culminating in the kidnapping of one of its officials. The Soviet government began by stating that an audit of the embassy’s accounts had indicated that Third Secretary Petrov had been guilty of falsification and embezzlement prior to his disappearance. They had asked the Australian authorities to arrest and hand over this criminal, but this had not happened. These authorities had instead taken a number of measures designed to further worsen their relations, measures which had primarily focused on Petrov’s wife, who wished to return to the Soviet Union, and the memo quoted information in the Australian press that the government’s intention had been to forcibly seize her. The Soviet ambassador had warned

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe the Australian government that any action aimed at obstructing her departure would be regarded as a forced detention. Despite this, ‘a group of obviously selected persons, acting in full accord with representatives of the Australian police at the airport, tried to seize Mrs. Petrova by force and prevent her from getting on the plane’. Later, in Darwin, the Australian police and security service, led by Leydin, had intervened. Once the plane had landed, the passengers were ordered to disembark, ‘after which they were immediately surrounded by the policemen, who seized Petrova, who was after that taken away from the airport in a police car’.2 The Soviet note was a typical piece of rhetoric and source mani­ pulation. Statements where Prime Minister Menzies defended himself against accusations of being too passive supported the theory that he had personally ordered Petrova’s arrest. The Soviet memorandum took these statements out of their original context and added them to this conspiracy theory. Menzies’s statement – that he had given the director general of ASIO the order to contact the captain of the plane to ascertain whether Mrs Petrova wished to remain – thus demonstrated that he knew she did not want to stay and that subsequent events in Darwin were part of a preordained plan. The front lines were thereby drawn, not just in the immediate diplomatic conflict between Australia and the Soviet Union but also in what quickly became the ‘Petrov Affair’, the profound and protracted domestic policy controversy triggered by the defection. In essence, this controversy revolved around the details in the documents Vladimir Petrov had taken with him and the verbal information he and Evdokia had provided in interrogations prior to the Royal Commission, which Menzies had already announced on 13 April. On 17 May the Royal Commission was convened for the first time, and its work affected (and at times dominated) Australian political life for 16 months. The question of the Petrovs’ credibility was thereby decisive, but it also involved the role the Australian authorities, and the Menzies government in particular, had played before and in connection with the defection. On 29 May, the leader of the opposition, Doctor Evatt, narrowly lost the parliamentary election, which he had long expected to win.

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Exp loi tati on As a result of this defeat and how he was directly drawn into the Commission’s enquiry, he became the main advocate of the theory that the Petrovs’ defection was actually an unparalleled political conspiracy, hatched jointly between Prime Minister Menzies and his faithful director general of ASIO, Brigadier Spry. One of the names which appeared in the Petrov material was that of Evatt’s own press secretary, Fergan O’Sullivan. Without informing his boss, O’Sullivan had been in regular contact with the Soviet embassy and intelligence officers masquerading as TASS journalists. Appearing before the Commission as O’Sullivan’s legal representative, Evatt, along with other representatives, based the defence on the theory that ASIO had falsified all documents. It was also alleged that the Petrovs, particularly Vladimir, had been cultivated and then bought as hired political assassins charged with spreading the lies and de­­ famation their handlers had instructed them to. Evatt, however, claimed not only that his political opponent had committed unlawful manipulation but also that the entire secret world the Petrovs had described did not actually exist. The Soviet Union was not conducting any espionage in Australia; it was all just humbug and spectres of McCarthyism intended to frighten the Australian general public into political compliance.3 Time and again, Evatt became inescapably entangled in his own conspiracy theory. At the same time, his own Labor Party’s irritation developed into an open confrontation between his supporters and the growing internal opposition. His party critics asked why their leader was sounding like an echo of the spokesman for the tiny Moscow-loyal Australian Communist Party and wasting all his time playing lawyer. The culmination of this came at the beginning of 1955 when Evatt wrote to the Soviet minister of foreign affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, asking him to provide incontrovertible proof that the Petrovs were lying and the documents were falsified. Any reply was a long time coming, and when it finally did, it was simply a reiteration of the original Soviet position from April 1954 and not even signed by Molotov, but by an underling at the MFA’s press department.4 With barely concealed delight, MI5 observed these developments. The Russians knew their argument about the authenticity of the documents was

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe bogus, and now they had an unsolicited supporter who had clearly swallowed the entire story. MI5 drew the conclusion that the Soviets might have been confused by the lies they had spun themselves.5 But Evatt refused to be deterred by the non-committal reply. On 19 October 1955, he gave his major speech on the Petrov Affair in the House of Representatives. He said that he needed 12 days, but the Speaker allowed him a mere two hours, which turned out to be more than enough for him to commit political suicide. Doctor Evatt explained to an increasingly confused House of Representatives how he had written to the Soviet minister of foreign affairs, who had told him that the Soviet Union was not conducting any espionage in Australia. But instead of the applause he had expected, he was ridiculed by both sides of the House. The opponents within his own party had now had enough and staged an open revolt, causing the party to split. In a political system with single-member constituencies, the Australian Labor Party thus found itself marginalized, paving the way for the Menzies government’s uninterrupted 12-year reign. The Petrov Affair turned out to not just be a ripple on the surface but a domestic policy catalyst with unimaginable repercussions. Evatt’s letter to Molotov and his use of the Soviets’ reply were interpreted as evidence of a naivety difficult to explain away as well as of his poor political judgement. But the background provides some explanation. Following a personal meeting with Molotov in London during World War II, Evatt, the then minister for external affairs, had laid the foundations for establishing Australian–Soviet diplomatic relations. These relations were largely his project, and the fact that the Soviet authorities had exploited this as a cover for an entirely different kind of activity was perhaps more difficult for Evatt to come to terms with than for many other politicians. At the same time, this special relationship with Molotov, with Soviet foreign policy, and with the early 1950s question of peace touch on the Petrov Affair’s deep political and intelligence roots. It was during Evatt’s time in the Department of External Affairs that the information which would give rise to ‘The Case’ was communicated to the then prime minister Ben Chifley’s tiny circle, including Evatt. To what extent had Evatt in these instances worked out the source of this precise information,

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Exp loi tati on whose origin was unclear? And what would happen if, in his role as a public defence counsel, he began interrogating various senior officials about when and why different individuals in the alleged Soviet intelligence network had become suspects?6 Doctor Evatt’s conspiracy theory was spawned by an aggrieved and increasingly hard-pressed politician. But was his version totally unfounded? Menzies breached an unwritten practice when he failed to inform Evatt, the opposition leader, in advance of the announcement on 13 April of Petrov’s defection and of the existence of information critical to the country’s security. The prime minister explained that this was due to a lack of time and how events had played out, and that the matter had long been regarded as simply an unwise move on his part, an indication of his suspicion of Evatt that later set the ball rolling. But was it really just the case that a technicality had been overlooked? When, shortly after Petrov’s defection, Menzies received the first report on the content of the documents Petrov had taken with him, everything seemed to fall into place. Moreover, the details breathed fresh life into the old suspicions from ‘The Case’, namely that the Department of External Affairs was a hotbed for Soviet agents and leaking like a sieve. On 12 April, MI5 reported to London that Menzies was planning to make the defection public in a speech to Parliament. Menzies had, MI5 explained, reasons for doing this so early, the most important being that the prime minister, having studied the documents and Petrov’s comments on them, had judged the revelations about Evatt to be sufficiently serious that ‘everything must be done in national as distinct from political party interests to prevent Evatt becoming Prime Minister’. The source of this information was Brigadier Spry, who totally supported his prime minister and had serious misgivings about working with Evatt. He felt that if Evatt were elected, the British government should seriously consider withholding certain secrets.7 If Evatt could have waved this telegram instead of the Molotov letter, Parliament would probably not have ridiculed him. For the Petrovs, the Royal Commission’s endless proceedings were an enigmatic game and a recurring physical and mental test that

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe at times became overwhelming. They were objects, a means to be exploited by ASIO and its clients. This officially involved informing the Australian public of the threat posed by the Soviet Union’s subversive activities in a country still spared the original sin of the Cold War. Secretly, it was about crushing Evatt and those perceived as his ‘fellow travellers’. No one asked what the couple actually thought or wanted. The Royal Commission and the fact that they would be called as star witnesses were the first of several unpleasant surprises awaiting them. Nor was it about a lack of time or an oversight. Vladimir Petrov had been intentionally kept in the dark about the role it was already clear at the beginning of spring he would play, to avoid complicating attempts to persuade him to defect. He was not an agent, but a defector in the dark. Here, in its eagerness, ASIO had also done the prospective key witness a terrible disservice. He had received 5,000 pounds in return for the documents, but clearly no one had given any thought to how the Royal Commission would handle this factual information. Brigadier Spry felt there was no point discussing it; a secret service’s information needed to be secret. Victor Windeyer, senior counsel assisting the Royal Commission, took a different view. Such essential information must not be withheld from the Royal Commission.8 Spry, who realized what these pieces of silver would do for the credibility of the witness and his documents, achieved a compromise. They would certainly disclose it, but later, at a suitable time, rather than straight away. A similar question that cropped up immediately after the defection was which countries the Petrovs’ information would be shared with and to what extent. Like all intelligence work, this was also a two-way process. Other countries’ security services could have an acute need to be informed of people under suspicion and ongoing Soviet penetration of various organizations. In some cases, time was running out since the MVD could be expected to launch a largescale damage-limitation operation, recall personnel at risk of being unmasked and break off agent contacts or put them in cold storage. MI5 was allowed continuous access to all material, but the British knew this was a perk from ASIO. Therefore, no material was to

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Exp loi tati on be passed on without ASIO’s approval, and the same went for the Americans and other friendly countries. The Americans had shown a great interest in getting access to the material, which thus became a valuable bartering tool for a partner they had previously looked down on and regarded as a security risk. Now FBI Director Hoover was instead sending his congratulations and a personal emissary to discuss how they could cooperate as smoothly as possible. The Petrovs were thus exploited for what in theory were different overlapping interests, but which in practice conflicted with each other. For the Australian government and thereby ASIO, revealing the Soviet threat to the Royal Commission was by far the top priority. This was what ASIO’s ability and hence its future would be measured against. ASIO would certainly consider other parties’ intelligence interests but with a consistently lower priority, and the more incisive the Royal Commission’s protracted and Byzantinely unpredictable proceedings became, the more these secondary objectives took a back seat. For MI5, it was the exact opposite. For the British, the Soviet intelligence activities in Australia were a marginal phenomenon. In 1954, the Soviet Union was establishing itself here and the MVD resident Petrov was, as his superiors in Moscow gradually realized, a poorly performing bad recruit who lacked sufficient initiative. The GRU did not have an effective network of agents in the country; the Soviet contacts within the Department of External Affairs, at various embassies and, in particular, among Evatt’s staff were certainly political dynamite, but the explosive blast only affected domestic policy. For MI5 and MI6, the central issues were the Petrovs’ information about Soviet intelligence’s almost impenetrable organizations, details of their operating principles and, above all, the identities of as many overseas personnel as possible. The outcome of Operation Cabin 12 had resulted in ASIO securing two defectors, while MI5 – or rather SIFE – had failed to snare any.9 They had stood by and watched as the most coveted catch, Philip Kislitsyn, disappeared in the direction of Moscow and towards an uncertain fate, to become a future source of inspiration for Karla in John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. No novelist was required, however, to pen the continuing drama of the partially uncovered Cambridge Spy Ring. Losing Kislitsyn

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe guaranteed years of groping in the dark, lost clues and growing conspiracy theories that increasingly converged on one man with a remarkably long CV of missed tip-offs and lost trails: the very same Roger Hollis, who, as deputy director general of MI5, had handled the Petrov Affair before being promoted to director in 1956. Once Kislitsyn was out of the frame, fresh mole tracks began to turn up in the Petrov material. In retrospect, what is most interesting is a piece of information Vladimir Petrov provided when describing his time in Stockholm. The then-resident Razin had given Petrov, who was in charge of Line SK and with that the residency’s counterespionage against Säpo, the tip that he should try to recruit a source inside Säpo; that way they would be forewarned about which of their own intelligence personnel were currently under surveillance. This tip was not particularly remarkable: all intelligence stations wanted this kind of source. What was peculiar was that Razin did not refer to its value in general terms but to information he had acquired at the London residency, which he had passed through in 1943 on his way to Sweden. The resident at the time had told him they had such a source in British counter-espionage and that he was of great service.10 Who was this source? It could hardly be Philby; at that time, he had been head of SIS’s Iberian subsection and had not become head of counter-espionage until 1945. It is most likely that Razin’s information referred to the fourth – and, to the British, still unknown – man in the Cambridge Spy Ring, Anthony Blunt, personal assistant to Guy Liddell, the director of MI5’s counter-espionage division. Like his traitorous colleagues, Blunt had gone to the right schools and was above suspicion, so much so that after having left MI5 in 1945, he would still be brought back into the fold to carry out particularly delicate tasks. So it was Blunt to whom MI5 turned when it realized that Burgess and Maclean had escaped the net. To avoid requesting permission to conduct a house search, MI5 assigned the task to someone who would prove particularly suitable: Blunt. He quickly obtained the keys to Burgess’s apartment from the latter’s latest lover and then carried out a kind of inverted house search among the indescribable mess Burgess had left posterity to tidy up. Blunt quickly found a compromising note from Philby warning his

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Exp loi tati on fellow conspirators, which he discreetly made disappear before continuing his career in public service, crowned by his appointment as the queen’s art adviser and a subsequent knighthood. But time was running out for Blunt. This was not due to Petrov’s information, which clearly led nowhere, but because Michael Straight, a former Cambridge student whom Blunt had recruited as a KGB spy before World War II, had finally fingered him. On the evening of 23 April 1964, Arthur Martin, the then head of MI5’s counterespionage section (D1), visited Blunt and made him an offer he could not refuse: a full confession in return for immunity from prosecution and complete discretion. Blunt, an alcoholic, needed only a glass of gin to make up his mind.11 His confession finally cleared up whom Razin had been referring to in his conversation with Petrov and who had helped sweep away the tracks left by Burgess and Maclean. But it was not until 1979 that the identity of the mythical ‘fourth man’ in the Cambridge Spy Ring was announced by the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who had tired of this way of treating traitors as if they were members of a gentlemen’s club. The Australian authorities had decided early on that their responsibility for the Petrovs would be time-limited and conditional. Ron Richards and Vladimir had discussed this matter right at the outset of the initial negotiations: the authorities would help pay his living costs until he set up his business, which, at the time, was the planned purchase of his dream chicken farm. Like all other immigrants, the Petrovs were expected to assimilate quickly and support themselves. ASIO expected this to take two years. However, the Operation Cabin 12 documents also reveal an important condition: the financial assistance was contingent on his willingness to continue to cooperate.12 Petrov was expected to provide information voluntarily, but, in practice, he had no choice. The same went for his physical safety. Vladimir had been assured that he and Evdokia would receive complete physical protection. But this was as much in ASIO’s interests as those of the Petrovs; it was vital to keep these subjects alive and willing to cooperate as long as they were useful. As early as February 1954, two months before Vladimir’s defection, Brigadier Spry had discussed the matter of

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe protection with Attorney General John Spicer; they had agreed this would continue until they were convinced they had extracted every last drop of information from the Petrovs. Protecting them would then become a matter for the ordinary police. Spicer emphasized that during the initial interrogations of the ‘subject’ it should be borne in mind that Vladimir’s safety needs could serve as an incentive for extracting more information from him.13 As Spry’s discussion with the attorney general showed, the West was no stranger to using protection as a negotiating card. No one got anything for free, particularly not a defector. In the summer of 1954, when the Petrovs had finished giving their first lot of evidence to the Royal Commission, the interrogation team began compiling the documents that would over the coming years become the unfinished intelligence encyclopaedia in which the couple’s statements from successive supplementary interrogations were summarized. The interrogators were wary of several pitfalls: one was the risk that Evdokia and Vladimir would speak to each other and come up with their own version, which was often unavoidable but meant at times their conflictual relationship determined the nature of the intelligence material. Another pitfall was the risk that they would subconsciously influence each other and so their actual recollections would become hazy. Where possible, they tried, therefore, to question Vladimir and Evdokia individually, depending on their current state of mind and willingness to cooperate. MI5 had long had a well-developed technique for conducting this kind of interrogation, the most important element being that the interrogators returned to the same topic in successive interrogations over a long period of time. In so doing, the uncertain points in the account of the person under interrogation could become clear while stimulating their memory process. These protracted and repetitive methods are reflected in the ‘Petrov library’, where the same facts are sometimes discussed in several consecutive reports on the same or overlapping subjects.14 The technique’s inevitable drawback was that a person initially keen to cooperate would tire out and be suspicious of what the actual meaning of the constant questioning was. Gouzenko amazed his interrogators when he told them what he thought his fate

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Exp loi tati on would be as a result of this process. Ultimately, once they had gone through all conceivable questions and subjects enough times, they would torture him to ensure they had extracted everything of value, before shooting him or sending him to a prison camp. So he just wanted to give them some good advice: when it was time to get rid of him, the authorities would be wise to make sure the press cover up the matter. All potential Soviet defectors would be following what was reported about him to see how the West operated.15 On 21 July 1954, George Leggett, on secondment to ASIO from MI5 to handle the intelligence side of the interrogation, wrote a document titled ‘Plan of Intelligence Exploitation’.16 At the same time, MI5 headquarters had sent over a comprehensive ten-page list containing a total of 84 detailed questions.17 In his plan, Leggett described the current conditions that were already well known in the safe house. Vladimir, whom they had initially regarded as the main source, was viewed as a lazy and poor writer by the interrogators. Thus, they did not expect him to spontaneously spew forth accounts; he needed to be milked during the sessions with continual questions and answers, leading to sudden new and interesting information as well as all kinds of dead ends.18 So all the changes in scheduling and structuring were therefore approximate. Allowing for this difficult-topredict operational process and the delays arising along the way due to external circumstances, Leggett produced a timetable. It spanned more than eighty working days, with half devoted to the interrogation and the rest to translating the results and compiling them in a report. He expected the entire process would take three and a half months, with some days off included. One uncertain factor, Leggett warned, was that the interrogation team had not yet mapped how much the couple actually knew about certain subjects. Of the 21 items in the exploitation plan, only the first was almost complete, namely mapping the structure of Soviet intelligence activities in Australia and the personnel involved. Of the other items, ‘Swedish operational cases’ was the one expected to take the longest: a total of five days, with each case being discussed separately.19

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20 Evidence from Stockholm The gap in the Petrovs’ intelligence value became increasingly apparent the deeper ASIO and MI5 dug into the various cases. Vladimir was not just a bad writer; he also tended to have an increasingly poor memory. The rather unclear written account of his personal circumstances that he provided shortly after his defection had become slightly better in a second version but even worse in other respects. Evdokia’s account, however, made a completely different impression on the interrogators, who noted her ‘much tidier mind’.1 They also now began to realize that having been an agent handler, she was the one with the actual first-hand knowledge of operational intelligence work in Sweden.2 Early on, MI6 had contacted the Swedes, not because they were a particularly close partner, but for more practical purposes. Since the Petrovs’ previous overseas posting had been in Stockholm, the British could search there for the first evidence of any intelligence assignments. The crucial information from Säpo’s central register could thus via the British intelligence station in Stockholm be fed into the operation’s planning: all things considered, Petrov was worth a try. But of course the Swedes expected something in return. One of the intelligence world’s paradoxes is that cooperation between the intelligence and security services of different countries is distinctly fraternal and equally distinctly businesslike. (Or, in other words, no matter how well they got on and trusted each other, this was a business where there was no such thing as a free lunch.) Having searched its central register, Säpo had made an advance payment and bought a ticket for the great intelligence lottery. This did not need pointing out. The British knew the Swedes expected a favour in return, and

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Evi den ce fr om Stockholm they were also conscious that the more valuable this was, the more they could ask for things only the Swedes could give them. With the first summaries from the interrogations on the Stockholm period almost ready, it was time for Säpo to receive its repayment. At the beginning of August, MI6 furnished Säpo with a series of reports on those cases of intelligence activity in Sweden of which the Petrovs had in different ways been aware. The first report concerned an informant whose cover name was Senator. For Säpo, the problem was not that it was difficult to identify who this referred to, but the opposite: it was too easy, a fact which the British had also pointed out. Neither of the Petrovs had direct contact with Senator, but he had visited the legation on a number of occasions, and Vladimir had encoded many reports (two a month on average) based on his information. Vladimir knew that Senator was a senior Social Democrat politician who did not hide his pro-Soviet views and provided his information in conversations with Ambassador Kollontai or the succession of residents. However, he never provided any written reports. His information concerned the Swedish political situation, about which he was very well informed. Vladimir described him as a man in his fifties with grey hair and a typically Swedish appearance. But he also knew that Senator had been a member of the Swedish parliament, as his cover name correctly suggested.3 Senator was not a formally recruited agent; this process could not be used for individuals high up in society. Nor was he a regularly paid agent, although, according to Vladimir, Zoya Yartseva had once given him 1,000 Swedish kronor in gratitude for his great services.4 Superintendent Otto Danielsson needed only to glance at the report to realize who this Senator was.5 It was obviously Georg Branting, an enigmatic Stalin-admiring Social Democrat member of the First Chamber. This was not exactly a catastrophic leak or a great spy; plus, he had never hidden his sympathies.6 The problem lay elsewhere. Georg Branting was the son of the great Hjalmar Branting, the former Swedish prime minister.7 Säpo, the only cooperating security service to be granted the privilege of interrogating the Petrovs, claimed a major success in the silent diplomacy of the intelligence services: it had obtained a promise that the Senator’s details would

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe be kept secret.8 At this point Säpo showed no interest whatsoever in taking the matter any further. By 1954, Branting was a political (and hence an intelligence) has-been. More topical and threatening tracks came to light in the information furnished by the Petrovs. The first of these was Klara, the Stockholm residency’s most trusted agent, of whom her handler, Evdokia, had intimate first-hand knowledge.9 One of the problems was that Evdokia, who had consistently used the agent’s nickname, could not initially recollect her real name. But she could describe exactly her apartment opposite a small park and a church a bit north of Kungsgatan. Klara was a slip of a woman in her early forties, with short reddish hair. The name finally came to her: Gusti Stridsberg. Säpo’s new searches of the central register revealed little about Stridsberg. She had no personal file, and according to the documents she had arrived in Sweden in 1938 as the Czech citizen Augustine Jirku. Having married a Swedish communist, she had been granted Swedish citizenship. Her then husband was known to Säpo. For a while, Säpo had opened her mail without finding anything suspicious. Then she disappeared off the surveillance system’s radar, and Swedish intelligence could find neither hide nor hair of Klara. Had she even existed? In September 1954, Säpo started conducting physical surveillance of Stridsberg and tapping her phone. They detected no sign of clandestine contacts, except for a younger man she occasionally met; he was eventually identified as the French diplomat Jules Guesde. On 26 September 1955, the Dagens Nyheter newspaper had published a series of articles based on information provided by the Petrovs, including details of Klara, and so Säpo now swooped and arrested Gusti Stridsberg. After her first interrogation, she unsuccessfully attempted to kill herself by overdosing on sleeping pills.10 Danielsson began interrogating her with inquisitorial questions about her relationship with the Soviet legation and where her wartime income had actually come from. But the interrogations slowly changed character, in the end being referred to as ‘interviews’ in the records. Their roles had gradually altered, and the interrogator became spellbound by Stridsberg’s remarkable kaleidoscopic life story, from

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Evi den ce fr om Stockholm interwar Yugoslavia and the Comintern in Moscow to the Spanish Civil War. Danielsson had unwittingly become the test audience for what would later become Gusti Stridsberg’s international literary breakthrough, her autobiography, My Five Lives.11 After her initial denials, Stridsberg basically admitted she was Klara. But she maintained that her activities had never targeted Sweden and instead had been part of the ‘anti-fascist struggle’. In Sweden, she had been entrusted with identifying suitable individuals the Soviet Union could use. She intended to never reveal their identities. Danielsson brought up Evdokia Petrova, but Stridsberg had never heard of her. Then she remembered that Razin had had a blonde ‘errand girl’ she used to meet, but her name was Tamara. Stridsberg had understood that this Tamara had suffered a great misfortune, and she had found out what this was: Tamara had lost a child, and she had been very ill and could never have any more children. The investigation of the Klara case led into a maze of unanswered questions with more literary than intelligence potential. They were in any event legally obsolete; had Klara committed any violations of Swedish law, their statute of limitations had already passed. This was also the case with several other matters based on information from the Petrovs. Before retiring at the end of the 1960s, Danielsson summarized these in a memo with the revealing heading ‘Old Problems’.12 The case of the cover name Osa (Wasp) was the total opposite of Klara in this respect and was not listed as an ‘old problem’. The source was a brief description in a report with the hardly sensational title ‘Third Report on Miscellaneous Cases of Soviet Intelligence Operations in Sweden’.13 It was compiled in January 1955, when the interrogations on Sweden had long since ended, and primarily contained some supplementary details of the kind of case previously discussed, in some way the Petrov investigation’s own equivalent of Danielsson’s ‘Old Problems’. Point 45 in the Petrov investigation’s collection of loose leads concerned the case of Osa. According to Vladimir Petrov, this was the cover name given to a Swedish MFA official whom the Soviets had studied until shortly after the war, when he was posted abroad,

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe possibly to North America. The man, whose name escaped Petrov, had a rank equivalent to second secretary, was born in 1911 and was probably unmarried. Osa was cultivated by the consul (in reality the NKVD officer) Fyodor Chernov, who had long enough tentacles to attempt to recruit him, but Osa declined the offer. In some ways, Osa seemed to be a dead-ender, one of a number of uncompleted recruitments by the Stockholm residency. But two facts suggested otherwise. The first was that Chernov and Osa had kept up their contact after the subject had declined the recruitment and Osa had provided the NKVD with some verbal intelligence. The second fact was that prior to returning from Sweden, Chernov had handed Osa over to Yelisei Yeliseyev, one of the intelligence officers specializing in Finland and Scandinavia and who became Evdokia’s boss at the KI’s Scandinavian department. It was again time for Säpo to consult its central register, and on this occasion it had more success. There were of course no trails leading directly to Osa, but Yeliseyev had been under Säpo’s surveillance at times, and the notes produced from this were still in his file. This surveillance had gone on from the beginning of August to the end of September 1944. It involved the usual farcical elements that came with searching for the ever-elusive legation vehicle with its supernatural ability to be swallowed up by the earth in a Stockholm forest and attempting to locate Yeliseyev once he had disappeared among the woodpiles on Norr Mälarstrand, a chic Stockholm street. On 16 August, the problem had been neither the legation vehicle nor Yeliseyev but the unknown male picked up outside the Royal Opera House and then driven out to the Stallmästaregården Inn in Stockholm’s Haga Park. This was also purely routine, but Yeliseyev had later taken a taxi back into the city, stopped off in the Old Town and dropped off his dinner guest. The surveillance operatives had stayed put to try to ascertain his identity, which was also routine. Then something had happened that was remarkable enough to warrant the police writing a separate report on it: The unknown man walked along Köpmangatan back to Stortorget, crossed this and went into Trångsund. At the

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Evi den ce fr om Stockholm entrance to this alley, he turned around, probably to check whether he was being followed. In the middle of the alley, he turned around, went back to Stortorget and back along Köpmangatan to Trädgårdstvärgränd where he entered a house/corner house with the address 16 Köpmangatan. Since he appeared suspicious, he was not followed into the property. Surveillance commenced outside the property early today, and at 09.20 the man came out and went straight to Arvfurstens Palace [home to the Swedish MFA], where he was clearly known. An examination of the population register ascertained that MFA Second Secretary Karl Sverker Åström, born on 30/2/15 in Uppsala, lives at 16 Köpmangatan, on the first floor, and the man, who is of the same age, is clearly the same Åström.14 On 27 May 1955, Danielsson finally got to question the Petrovs in Sydney in the presence of ASIO staff.15 ‘Osa’, Vladimir now remembered, was called Åström. Chernov had presumably met him at an embassy reception, and Vladimir, in his capacity as a cipher clerk, had seen many reports containing information from Åström: information solely about political matters and nothing about individuals. The contact between Chernov and Åström developed so much they also met in Åström’s sparsely furnished apartment, as described in Chernov’s reports. To avoid such rendezvous, Chernov wanted to give him a radio; Moscow gave its approval, but he never got to hand it over, presumably because Åström was later posted abroad. Sinitsyn (alias Yeliseyev), who, according to Vladimir, was far more senior than Chernov, took over Åström on Moscow’s orders but made no attempt to formally recruit him. According to Vladimir, Åström liked Russia, had Russian friends and spoke Russian, a prerequisite for his dealings with Sinitsyn, whose only foreign language was a little German.16 In the summer of 1955, Säpo linked Vladimir’s information with the observations from an August evening in 1944 and hence launched one of its presumably most protracted and also fruitless investigations into suspicions of espionage; its target was Sverker Åström, the future ambassador and state secretary of foreign affairs. Fresh facts emerged,

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe particularly about Åström’s friendship with Stig Wennerström, an old colleague from his time at the Swedish legation in Moscow at the beginning of the 1940s.17 Osa was and remained a thorn in Säpo’s side; it continued to hurt as the years went by. This was the closest Swedish intelligence ever came to the hunt for real and imagined moles that ended up plaguing MI5 for much of the Cold War. Klara also very much remained an unsolved case, although this did not cause Säpo a great deal of trouble, apart from Stridsberg phoning up her old interrogator every now and then and asking to meet him, mostly to talk about the literary breakthrough he had probably done more to help with than he realized. And he was also a good listener. The Klara case did, on the other hand, have apparently minor but potentially significant ramifications across the Atlantic. In 1942, Stridsberg’s daughter, Marietta, had married an American, Noel Voge, and moved to the United States shortly after the wedding. Voge was an academic at the University of California, and he and his wife lived in Berkeley. According to Evdokia, the Soviet residency had to deal with the recurring problem of how to provide their agent Klara with a legal income and, in this way, reinforce her cover identity as a journalist. They resolved this through a complicated procedure whereby Moscow transferred money to Klara’s daughter, Marietta, via the residency in San Francisco, with Marietta, in turn, legally wiring this to her mother. After carrying out its task, the San Francisco residency reported this to Moscow, who then notified Stockholm that the funds were on their way to Klara.18 This arrangement ought not to have had any further implications, and Marietta Voge could very well have been used as an unconscious agent, but the circumstances sufficed to arouse the FBI’s interest. Besides the original report on the Klara case, the FBI twice received further information in May and August 1956, provided by Evdokia Petrova and referred to in the file as SF T-1. FBI agents arranged to question the Voges to clarify their relationship with Gusti Stridsberg, or Augustine Jirku, as she had been known during her first marriage.19 The FBI’s investigation into the case, classified as Internal Security, uncovered yet another fact. Both Noel Voge and another informer told them that Mrs Stridsberg had visited her daughter in Berkeley

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Evi d en ce fr om Stockholm for a number of weeks, either in 1946 or a few years later. The FBI found a visa application submitted to the embassy in Stockholm containing the information that, apart from visiting her daughter, she would be working as a journalist and giving lectures. Although the FBI established that she had arrived in New York in October 1946 to visit her daughter, the trail went cold after that. Marietta Voge confirmed she had sent money to her mother between 1944 and 1945; the sums were never great amounts, and depended on how much she could afford.20 But for the FBI there was more to come in the case investigating Augustina Stridsberg and her daughter. The file contains two references to another case, one that involved espionage and went under the name of Brother-in-Law. This case alluded to information from the Venona project and the deciphered telegrams between the Soviet residency in San Francisco and Moscow. One of these was an outgoing telegram from San Francisco, clearly a reply to an enquiry from Moscow. The short text read as follows: ‘KLARA’s’ daughter lives at her sister’s house at the following address: 790 Keeler St. BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.21 This was the address of Marietta’s sister-in-law and her husband Hervey Voge, in whose house the couple had initially lived after their arrival in America in December 1942 up until the end of 1943. The sender was ‘Charon’, the cover name of Grigory Kheifets, the Soviet vice-consul and NKVD resident in San Francisco and a driving force behind the Soviet intelligence work on the American West Coast, particularly targeting the Manhattan Project’s offshoots in different scientific institutions.22 The telegram confirmed the picture painted by Petrova of an arrangement whereby the NKVD would provide Klara with a legal income via its American residencies, transfers that were no burden to her daughter, at least not financially.

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21 A Sister in Need The Kartsev family continued to live in apartment number 6 at 6 Varsonofyevsky Lane. But in the spring of 1954, something had happened on the other side of the world. The letters from Duscha stopped arriving, and the father lost his job as a driver for the KGB, the omnipotent security agency with its headquarters still at Dzerzhinsky Square. Tamara was 17 at the time and still at school. Her big sister had set out into the big wide world three years earlier; she had been waved off after the New Year’s party in 1951 and had climbed into one of the MGB’s vehicles along with Uncle Volodya as if they were heading off on their honeymoon. Since then she had not visited her homeland. And now she was gone. On 28 April 1954, Pravda published a long article, signed ‘Zaslavsky’, furiously criticizing the Australian government; this attack mirrored the note handed over to the Australian chargé d’affaires in Moscow five days earlier. The article, which listed examples of the Australian authorities’ duplicity and unfair treatment, stated that Australian prime minister Robert Menzies had, with unparalleled cynicism, devised new forms of provocation and ‘ordered the seizure of Mrs. Petrova’.1 Tamara was firmly advised by everyone around her not to contact the authorities. Her parents were of course aware that Evdokia was an MGB worker, but strict security regulations precluded Tamara from knowing anything about her big sister’s actual mission abroad. Tamara thus tried to draw her own conclusions; she made up her mind that Duscha had simply fallen victim to the kind of top-level political scheming everyone had to be on their guard against. She had been arrested and taken away and was now imprisoned on another continent. How would Tamara ever find her again? And who could save her?2

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A Si s ter i n Need In one sense, Tamara’s notion of her sister’s fate was not that far from the truth; Evdokia Petrova had indeed voluntarily requested political asylum in Australia. But she was not really a defector, and even ASIO admitted this fact in its internal reports.3 She had never shown any desire to betray the organization she was and remained very much a part of. She loved Russia, and the more inaccessible her lost motherland became, the more this love and concern for the family with whom she no longer had contact consumed her. Like the Australian general public, the planners of Operation Cabin 12 were characterized by the Cold War’s Manichaean ideological division and therefore failed to foresee the human complications the defection would entail. The technically successful operation drove a divided couple together in the confinement of the safe house. Evdokia could not forgive her husband for leaving her and her family and putting her in a hopeless situation from which she only managed to extract herself thanks to an unlikely combination of luck, clear-sightedness and cold-bloodedness. However, on an emotional level, it had cost her her life. Vladimir was not exactly happy with his lot either. He had taken his accursed thirty pieces of silver, but what would they live on now? And what would he live for? He had long lived in the hope of producing his great lifetime achievement: the book where they would tell the world about the cruel system they had escaped from and now wanted to unmask, and about all the sordid intrigues, injustices and slanderous campaigns which they had been victims of. ASIO was initially enthusiastic, and Michael Thwaites, director of counter-espionage at the time and also an aspiring poet, became their ghostwriter.4 But the project hit one hidden stumbling block after another: first, the stipulation that it must not be published until the Royal Commission had presented its report, and second, that the account – and also the publisher, André Deutsch – would need to go through a security review.5 This autobiography project, Empire of Fear, was apparently a lifelong deception. Or perhaps it was simply a banal misjudgement of an already rather capricious market. The Petrovs had had their fifteen minutes of fame, and now they were just yesterday’s news. And

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe in this period of temporary international détente following Stalin’s death and the incipient de-Stalinization, these portrayals from yesteryear’s terror regime were passé and boring. On closer inspection, the agreement between ASIO and the Royal Commission on who would publish first had destroyed the book’s original news value. The Royal Commission’s report had not thrown the only spanner in the works; the delays caused by this procedure had led to the Petrovs’ book being hopelessly overtaken by their most detested rival, the deft manipulator Bialoguski. In his ‘now-it-can-be-told’ book, The Petrov Story, with accompanying interviews, Bialoguski rubbed salt into the Petrovs’ wounds. He made it known how fed up he had actually been of showing the uncouth drunkard around whom he had been forced to be friends with for years.6 But perhaps the worst aspect of all was that the big money expected from the world-famous bestseller ended up being just peanuts. ASIO did its best to conduct a defensive battle on its inner lines, generously providing a free bar, and Vladimir was ready and willing to grasp the only comfort available to him. He did not miss Russia the way Evdokia did. What he pined for was his own dream of a better life. Slowly but surely, Vladimir Mikhaylovic succumbed to alcoholism and melancholy. The new life his two-faced drinking companion had tempted him with had been no more than an illusion, a mirage he had been encouraged to reach out for, further and further until he finally lost his footing. But there was no happiness over there, no new life on a paradisiacal chicken farm. There was certainly an abundance of chicken farms, but what was missing was the happy chicken farmer. In his place was an ageing, unhappy man in failing health who had lost his way for the last time in his life. He would never return home and was hounded by the fear of the executioners he knew would find him sooner or later. Four decades later, Evdokia Petrova, who once described herself as extremely unhappy in the safe house and longing for death as her only path to freedom, spoke about her by then deceased husband in reconciliatory terms. The drunken shouting and clenched fists were forgotten; she just wanted to cherish the memory of the cheerful, warm-hearted Volodenka, the husband who had never

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A Si s ter i n Need once reproached her for purchasing an expensive item of clothing, of which there had been many over the years. Another man who had passed away by then, 40 years later, was Ron Richards, their faithful shadow and interrogator, whom Evdokia also described as an unhappy man who had never had a proper home. Nevertheless, the series of photographs of them sitting laughing together out on the veranda that was the prison’s exercise yard perhaps captured them at an impromptu happy moment. On 12 November 1963, the Australian Red Cross in Melbourne received a letter from Director Titov of the Tracing Bureau of the Executive Committee of the Alliance of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Moscow. It had been sent a request from a female citizen, Tamara Alexeyevna Kartseva, to trace her sister, Evdokia Alexeyevna Petrova, neé Kartseva, and her husband, Vladimir Mikhaylovich Petrov, who had been living in Canberra, Australia. Evdokia had last sent a letter to her family at the end of 1953 and since then had been incommunicado.7 The letter from Tamara was also the first sign of life from the opposite hemisphere. Ten years of silence were at an end. Using the Red Cross as an intermediary, the overjoyed Evdokia wrote to her sister immediately. Vladimir understood her joy but warned her at the same time. This seemed too good to be true, and they both knew how the KGB operated and how it viewed traitors. Nothing ever happened by chance. Spry, the long-serving director general of ASIO, was also sceptical about the letter and Petrova’s enthusiasm. He understood this enthusiasm, of course, but disliked the new-found sisterly correspondence, which, besides the joy at resuming contact, also had the underlying theme of their shared Russian memories. Was this not simply a KGB attempt to manipulate the defector whose emotional buttons were the easiest to press? And how could anyone know whether this Tamara was really Evdokia’s sister? The picture she had sent of herself was so different from the little 13-year-old that even Evdokia said she would not have recognized the other woman. What if the KGB were to send one of its own masquerading as the beloved little sister? Another thing which stuck out a mile for Spry was that the letters made no mention of any defection. Spry

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe reasoned that this was possible; however, he could barely entertain the thought that Evdokia’s family were not fully aware of the fate which had befallen her and her husband.8 The correspondence soon got onto the question of whether it would be possible for Tamara and their mother to visit Australia. For this to happen, a number of formalities would need to be dealt with first, and ASIO also became increasingly wary of the risk that any clue as to the couple’s hiding place and new identities would be unintentionally leaked during the process. But instead it was the Soviets who slowly extinguished their hope. First, Tamara wrote that she would probably not be granted permission to leave the country. Then it gradually became increasingly uncertain whether their ailing mother would manage the long journey. ASIO breathed a sigh of relief; it had become more and more convinced that the entire thing had been a KGB ruse to lay the foundations for a ‘redefection’, which would have had catastrophic consequences. If this had happened, the KGB would have had little difficulty getting Petrova to repudiate the Royal Commission and its conclusions, thereby causing the entire foundations on which ASIO had developed its future work to collapse. Hence, Spry categorically stated that Mrs Petrova must not be allowed to leave Australia under any circumstances.9 So Tamara had been right all along. Her big sister was the victim of political scheming and was being kept captive in a far-off country. But Spry’s assumptions had also been correct, although he did not know just how much. Neither he nor the Petrovs were aware that in November 1962 the KGB had adopted a secret plan to seriously address the danger posed by its defectors. The triggering factor for this was KGB officer Anatoliy Golitsyn’s defection in Helsinki the year before. Convinced he had betrayed vital secrets to the CIA and its British allies, the KGB’s internal court had, as usual, sentenced him to death in absentia.10 But what the KGB required now was a more stringent penal and deterrent system. Its secret plan involved purging the death list by making the process a short one containing a number of ‘particularly serious traitors’ to be liquidated abroad.11 The first name on the death list was Igor Gouzenko, but Vladimir Proletarsky and Evdokia Kartseva also featured, divested of their

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A Si s ter i n Need NKVD-assigned aliases.12 Evdokia’s diversion in Darwin may well have convinced Kislitsyn and both the couriers and, in any case, played into the hands of the Soviet propaganda machine. In practice, this offered the family some protection seeing as their imprisonment and deportation would have revealed that Moscow did not believe its own version of events. But these considerations were unnecessary for the KGB’s internal court. As far as the KGB was concerned, the traitors needed to die; the only problem was finding them in the first place. The actual job of tracking them down fell to the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate (counter-intelligence), while the Eighth Department (Special Actions), whose staff were suitably trained and equipped, would carry out the liquidation. In the mid-1970s, they finally got a lead and found Vladimir Proletarsky, now living under the new identity of Sven Allyson. Oleg Kalugin, head of Directorate K (counter-intelligence), requested the go-ahead from the then chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, to liquidate Proletarsky and a defector in the United States they had also located. But to his surprise, Andropov became furious, shouting, ‘To hell with them! They are old men!’ Kalugin would certainly get his liquidations, but first he needed to find some of the contemporary defectors whose blood Andropov wanted to see flow.13 Andropov was right. Even without the Eighth Department to help, time was running out for Vladimir. After repeated strokes, he lost his ability to speak and spent the last ten years of his life in a nursing home, where he passed away in 1991. Evdokia did not attend his funeral, which she believed would attract journalists. Whether or not the KGB had a finger in the pie, nothing ever came of Evdokia’s mother’s potential visit to Australia, and she died in 1965 without ever seeing her daughter again. But the great upheavals of the late 1980s in the former Soviet empire changed everything that had previously been set in stone, and in 1990 Tamara Kartseva was finally able to travel to Australia to meet her sister once again. She permanently emigrated a year later, setting up home with Evdokia in a Melbourne suburb. In Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita, the choir sings the praises of Eva Perón, the Argentine president’s wife, and how she had finally succeeded in becoming front-page news all over the world. Yet the

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Mrs P etr ova’s Shoe woman who, like Perón, had achieved a feat so few have been fortunate enough to do – namely to be in the global spotlight for a shining moment – passed away virtually unnoticed in July 2002. One of the few obituaries of Evdokia simply confirmed just how far into oblivion she had sunk. The political upheavals following her defection were dealt with under the heading ‘Mrs Petrov’s death brings bizarre affair to end’. The protagonist Evdokia Petrova, alias Anna Allyson, was simply an excuse for recapitulating a piece of history from the bygone Cold War. Mrs Petrova’s shoe disappeared, even though someone in the crowd briefly had hold of it, waving it like a trophy left behind by a fleeing movie star. Nevertheless, this missing shoe stubbornly remained a presence. While its owner faded away into public obscurity, it was as though her shoe followed a different path, conquering the stage, appearing on TV shows and dancing around like a magical fetish in an animated children’s film about a little girl who sees a woman lose her shoe on the news on TV, realizes that her own family are actually living next door to the security service’s safe house, and fantasizes about the mystical and unhappy woman whom she sometimes glimpses inside the building and who has perhaps lost her shoe.14 The real shoe was never found, but the sisters found each other. Evdokia and her alias, Tamara, were reunited after 40 years: the ultimate example of the veracity of the prophetic words penned by J. C. Robertson, former head of MI5’s D1 branch, about the unpredictability of defection cases. I would like, always liked. This dream maybe just recently left me. I always dreamt that I am already in Moscow and I go along Liublianka [sic], but Liublianka [sic] that way and then Tamara […] I come to this street, come to the building and never ever could enter her flat, to her too. It kept me years and years and years. Evdokia Kartseva alias Evdokia Petrova alias Anna Allyson Melbourne, 1996.15

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Notes 1. Mrs Petrov’s Shoe 1 The Soviet state security service, the Cheka, underwent a number of reorganizations and name changes between the 1920s and the mid-1950s. In 1953, the security service was part of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (the MVD); it was transformed into the Committee for State Security (the KGB) the following year. 2 Robert Manne, The Petrov Affair: Politics and Espionage (Sydney: Pergamon, 1987), p. 77. The agent, the Polish-born doctor Michael Bialoguski, pointed out that ‘she would have it all over him’. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., pp. 88–9. 5 Recorded interview with Petrova Evdokia, 21 June 1996, National Library of Australia (NLA), Oral History Section. 6 In Australian popular culture, literature and dramatic art, it is this very shoe that has survived by virtue of its suggestive symbolic charge. Some of the notable works inspired by the Petrov Affair are Ursula Dubosarsky’s novel The Red Shoe (Crow’s Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2006), and the play Mrs Petrov’s Shoe by Noëlle Janaczewska (Brisbane: Playlab, 2013). The fictitious Australian ‘diplomat’ Sir Les Patterson, played by the comedian Barry Humphries, finally solved the puzzle of the missing shoe. He claimed that it was in his possession after having bought it from someone in the crowd at Mascot. And the fictitious relic of the drama did indeed turn out to be red.

2. The Escapees and the Bloodhounds 1 Gouzenko and his superiors used the defence that the family’s child had caused a disturbance in the legation building. The inspector Colonel Mikhail Mil’shtein, also deputy director of the GRU, was, however, not impressed; an infringement of the security regulations was an infringement regardless of what other facts could be adduced. On Mil’shtein’s inspection, see Amy Knight, How the Cold War Began: The Igor Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005).

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N otes 2 Ibid., p. 34. 3 Ibid., p. 35. 4 Ibid., p. 37. Knight quotes from King’s diary, which was later published. 5 Ibid. 6 The reason for this was that the Americans had found out that there was an agreement with the Soviet Union under which there would be a reciprocal repatriation of deserters. The Western powers and Sweden were obligated under this same agreement to repatriate Soviet prisoners of war after the war had ended. See Sven Grafström, Anteckningar 1945–1954 (Stockholm: Kungl. Samfundet för utgifvande av handskrifter rörande Skandinaviens historia, Handlingar del 15, 1989), p. 779. At this time, Grafström was head of the Swedish MFA’s political department. 7 Ibid., p. 780. Granovsky later wrote his memoirs, I Was an NKVD Agent: A Top Soviet Spy Tells His Story (New York: The Devin-Adair Company, 1962). Despite the title, Granovsky was never a high-level NKVD officer; he had defected at the tender age of 24. 8 Grafström, Anteckningar, p. 784 f. 9 Gouzenko is to have later said that the interrogator had threatened to hand him over to the Russians if he was not more cooperative. Knight, in How the Cold War Began, cites the details provided by Gouzenko’s daughter (p. 51). 10 Ibid., p. 9. On Philby’s role in the Gouzenko Affair, see also Christopher Andrew, Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (New York: Knopf, 2009), p. 343 f., and Chapman Pincher, Treachery: Betrayals, Blunders and Cover-Ups: Six Decades of Espionage (London: Mainstream, 2012), p. 214 ff. 11 Andrew, Defend the Realm, p. 341 ff. Philby also personally provided his not entirely reliable contribution to historical writing with his autobiography, My Secret War (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968). Alan Nunn May was arrested in February 1946, without any conclusive evidence, but was persuaded to make extensive admissions during the interrogations. It was not until 1953 that MI5 began to suspect Philby of having something to do with the matter. 12 See Vladislav Krasnov, Soviet Defectors: The KGB Wanted List (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1985). Both Gouzenko and his wife were on this death list, which also detailed incriminating events, such as antiSoviet statements or collaborating with foreign intelligence services. One peculiar detail is that several books written by defectors and often very critical of the Soviet Union are not mentioned, possibly to avoid making people aware that these works existed. Ibid., p. 90. 13 Stalin forbade the GRU from liquidating Gouzenko, citing the fact that the Soviet Union had just won the war and they did not want to destroy the goodwill extended to them. Knight, How the Cold War Began, p. 100. 14 Ibid., p. 101.

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N otes 15 Grafström, Anteckningar, p. 780. 16 Reiss’s fate is well documented in the files released from the KGB archive after the Cold War. See John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, Deadly Illusions (New York: Crown, 1993), p. 297, and Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 103. 17 Material from the British interrogations of Krivitsky has now been declassified. On the Krivitsky case, see Gary Kern, A Death in Washington: Walter G. Krivitsky and the Stalin Terror (New York: Enigma, 2003). 18 Ibid., p. 100. 19 Ibid., p. 305. 20 Andrew, Defend the Realm, p. 344 ff. It is unclear exactly what role the British vice-consul played, and especially unclear whether he was an MI6 representative or not. 21 Ibid., p. 345. For the wider audience, the Volkov case is best known as the incident that, in a reworked form, serves as the basis for the intrigue in John Le Carré’s novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1974). 22 There were at least five people in the Cambridge Spy Ring. The fifth was John Cairncross, private secretary to Lord Hankey, minister without portfolio in the War Cabinet, through whom the former gained access to a wealth of documents on British intelligence. On the Cambridge Spy Ring, see Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev, The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB Archives (London: HarperCollins, 1999), which is based on the agents’ KGB files. 23 In his memoirs, Orlov’s NKVD colleague Pavel Sudoplatov writes appreciatively about Orlov’s efforts in Spain and his elimination of Trotskyists in particular. Sudoplatov notes, however, that Orlov was not a general but ‘only’ a senior major. See Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoli Sudoplatov, with Jerrold L. Schecter and Leona P. Schecter, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness: A Soviet Spymaster (Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Co., 1994). Much later in his life, Orlov published the Handbook of Intelligence and Guerrilla Warfare (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1963), based on the textbook he had written for the NKVD’s intelligence officer training. 24 Costello and Tsarev, Deadly Illusions, p. 287 ff. It is clear from the documents in the KGB archive that the ‘evidence’ against Andrés Nin, the leader of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification, had been fabricated on the orders of Orlov. 25 Ibid., p. 301 ff. 26 The 11-page letter is preserved in Orlov’s KGB file. However, it is clear from this letter that the promise not to reveal Stalin’s crimes was an ex post facto reconstruction designed to portray Orlov in a better light in the eyes of a Western public. The letter solely refers to the intelligence secrets Orlov promised to keep quiet about. Ibid., p. 308 ff.

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N otes 27 Alexander Orlov, The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes (New York: Random House, 1953). 28 Costello and Tsarev, Deadly Illusions, p. 366 ff. 29 See Edward P. Gazur, Secret Assignment: The FBI’s KGB General (London: St Ermin’s Press, 2001).

3. A Room in Moscow 1 For an introduction to the Soviet phenomenon known as the kommunalka, see, for example, Paola Messana, Soviet Communal Living: An Oral History of the Kommunalka (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 2 These kitchen arguments are also mirrored in contemporary Soviet fiction such as Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (London: Penguin, 2016). 3 Evdokia Kartseva’s childhood and youth are described in several sources. The autobiographical Empire of Fear (London: Deutsch, 1956) is a detailed and expressive account but has some source-critical problems. Two documents from her interrogations by ASIO provide a rough (but in some respects more accurate) picture. Finally, there is material produced from several long interviews the historian Robert Manne conducted in 1996 with the 81-year-old Evdokia. Recorded interview with Petrova Evdokia, 21 June 1996, NLA, Oral History Section. 4 See Karl Schlögel, Moscow, 1937 (Cambridge: Polity, 2012). 5 The first five-year plan was introduced in 1928 and marked the end of a certain post-Revolution economic liberalization, known as the New Economic Policy period. Under the iron fist of Stalin, the five-year plans dictated all economic life, particularly the accelerated expansion of heavy industry and the compulsory collectivization of agriculture. 6 The terms Cheka and Chekist refer to the abbreviation ChK, for the Russian name of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle against Counter-revolution, Speculation and Sabotage. 7 See Arkady Vaksberg, The Prosecutor and the Prey: Vyshinsky and the 1930s Moscow Show Trials, trans. Jan Butler (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990). 8 See for instance ibid., p. 160 f.

4. Spetsialnyi Otdel 1 Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, Empire of Fear (London: Deutsch, 1956), p. 125. 2 Mrs. Petrov’s statement concerning her past intelligence history, 15 May 1954, KV2/3442, TNA. 3 Ibid, p. 2. It is worth noting that the more detailed information about the cryptologic work at the Japanese section was left out of the classified

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Notes version of the widely distributed biography. The Petrovs’ memoirs, Empire of Fear, do not contain these details either. 4 Spetsialnyi Otdel comprised a total of seven sections, the first four of which were responsible for cipher systems and communication security at all Soviet institutions, while sections 5, 6 and 7 were in charge of intercepting diplomatic and illegal radio messages and deciphering. Niels Erik Rosenfeldt, The ‘Special’ World: Stalin’s Power Apparatus and the Soviet System’s Secret Structures of Communication, vol. 1 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2009), p. 20. 5 See Stephen Budiansky, Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II (New York: Touchstone, 2002), p. 25 ff. The classic work on code-breaking before and during World War II is David Kahn, The Codebreakers (New York: Macmillan, 1973). 6 Ventures like this also proved to be surprisingly cheap. When the then director of naval intelligence had had enough of double-entry bookkeeping and had returned the funds in 1931 to the US Department of the Treasury, 65,000 of the 100,000 dollars remained. Budiansky, Battle of Wits, p. 5. 7 Kahn, Codebreakers. 8 Herbert Yardley, The American Black Chamber (Indianapolis, IN: BobbsMerrill, 1931). 9 Recorded interview with Petrova Evdokia, 21 June 1996, NLA, Oral History Section, p. 10 ff. 10 Wilhelm Agrell, Venona: Spåren från ett underrättelsekrig (Lund: Historiska Media, 2003). 11 One of the layers of secrecy surrounding its work was that the actual phenomenon of Spetsialnyi Otdel was a state secret right up to the fall of the Soviet Union. The Western intelligence services were of course aware of its work, but only recent research has made it possible to reconstruct the network of secret special departments that formed a kind of state within the state, even within the actual state security service. See Rosenfeldt, The ‘Special’ World, vols 1 and 2. 12 On Bokii’s background and central position of power, see Rosenfeldt, The ‘Special’ World, vols 1 and 2. On his orgies and harassment of female colleagues, see Petrov and Petrov, Empire of Fear, p. 129 f.

5. Night at Noon 1 Stalin’s terror is an extensive and complex phenomenon that swept across the Soviet Union in successive waves. The Great Terror, known at the time as the Yezhovshchina (after the head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov, whose nickname was the Bloody Dwarf), was not the biggest wave of purges but exceptional in the sense that it affected the state and party apparatus, including the security service perpetrating the terror, to

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Notes such a great extent. Stalin’s personal role was long debated; however, it is absolutely clear today that his orders unleashed the Terror, which he meticulously followed up, often with a pathological and sadistic interest. See, for instance, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003). The classic works on the Stalin terror are Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (London: Macmillan, 1968); Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, trans. and ed. Harold Shukman (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991); and William J. Case, Enemies Within the Gates? (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). 2 Karl Schlögel, Moscow, 1937 (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), p. 557 ff. 3 On Beria’s time in power, see, for instance, Montefiore, Stalin, Arkady Vaksberg, The Prosecutor and the Prey: Vyshinsky and the 1930s Moscow Show Trials, trans. Jan Butler (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990) and idem, Lubjanka: Sanningen om Stalins skräckvälde: dess torterare, bödlar och miljontals offer (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1993). 4 Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 105. 5 Ibid., p. 106. 6 This side-effect of the Terror is a central theme in Bulgakov’s Moscow allegory The Master and Margarita. The more the Terror accelerated, the greater the opportunities for speculators to work proactively and report neighbours to the authorities on spurious grounds simply because they owned desirable apartments. 7 See Montefiore, Stalin, p. 259. Montefiore states that the nomenklatura’s children also had to move around a lot, ‘because every execution created a vacant apartment and dacha which were eagerly occupied by survivors and their aspirational Party housewives, ambitious for grander accommodation’. 8 These comrade courts are depicted in many contexts. See, for instance, Yvonne Hirdman, Den röda grevinnan: en europeisk historia (Stockholm: Ordfront, 2010), p. 267 ff., who describes in detail the internal witch trial against the German communist Heinrich Kurella, who was living in exile in Moscow. See also J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 9 Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, Empire of Fear (London: Deutsch, 1956), p. 146 f.; Recorded interview with Petrova Evdokia, NLA, Oral History Section, p. 17 f. 10 ‘Personal history of Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov’, KV 2/3447, TNA, p. 6. 11 Vaksberg, The Prosecutor and the Prey, p. 165 ff. 12 Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990). 13 Petrov and Petrov, Empire of Fear, p. 141.

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Notes

6. Shorokhov, Alias Proletarsky, Alias Petrov 1 Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, Empire of Fear (London: Deutsch, 1956), p. 147 f.; Recorded interview with Petrova Evdokia, NLA, Oral History Section. 2 A special procedure gave important telegrams precedence. As a result, they did not end up lying on the desks of the different levels of reviewers who sorted the telegrams and determined which ones would be passed up the hierarchy. Vladislav M. Zubok, ‘Soviet intelligence and the Cold War: the “small” Committee of Information, 1952–53’, Diplomatic History 19/3 (1995), p. 455. 3 ‘Personal history of Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov’, KV 2/3447, TNA. 4 Petrov and Petrov, Empire of Fear, p. 154 f. 5 Ibid., p. 155 f.; Recorded interview with Petrova Evdokia, NLA, Oral History Section, p. 18 ff. 6 Petrov and Petrov, Empire of Fear, p. 157. 7 See Wilhelm Agrell, Venona: Spåren från ett underrättelsekrig (Lund: Historiska Media, 2003). 8 ‘Personal history of Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov’, KV 2/3447, TNA. 9 See Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America – The Stalin Era (New York: Random House, 1999).

7. The Island in the Middle of the War 1 The air traffic between Great Britain and Sweden was very complicated, both technically and organizationally, and there were no fewer than four main operators: in addition to AB Aerotransport and BOAC, there were the Norwegian government-in-exile and the US Air Force. For reasons of neutrality, the air bridge had to be ‘civilian’, in name at least. On the air bridge, see Wilhelm Agrell, Skuggor runt Wallenberg: Uppdrag i Ungern 1943–1945 (Lund: Historiska Media, 2006); the English translation is published in 2019 as The Shadows around Wallenberg: Missions to Hungary, 1943–1945 by Historiska Media. 2 Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, Empire of Fear (London: Deutsch, 1956), p. 157 ff.; Recorded interview with Petrova Evdokia, NLA, Oral History Section, p. 24 ff. It is striking how similar these two accounts are regarding this particular point, and it appears as if Evdokia had been inclined here to just read out or reproduce the text from Empire of Fear. 3 See, for instance, Holger Weiss, ‘Global internationell solidaritet: Om transnationella subversiv kontakter, understödsformer och nätverk under mellankrigstiden’, Historisk tidskrift för Finland 94/2 (2009), pp. 117–38 and idem, ‘Stockholm – Hamburg – Köpenhamn: Nordeuropeiska noder

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Notes i Kominterns globala kommunikationsnätverk, 1920–1933’, Historisk tidskrift för Finland 94/2 (2009), pp. 139–69. 4 Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990), p. 45. 5 David McKnight, Espionage and the Roots of the Cold War: The Conspiratorial Heritage (London: Frank Cass, 2002), p. 60 ff. 6 On the scope and importance of the Soviet financing, see Morten Ting (ed.), Guldet fra Moskva: Finansieringen af de nordiske kommunistpartier 1917–1990 (Copenhagen: Forum, 2001). 7 On OMS’s structure and mode of operation, see Niels Erik Rosenfeldt, The “Special’ World: Stalin’s Power Apparatus and the Soviet System’s Secret Structures of Communication, vol. 2 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2009), p. 220, and Mikhail Narinsky and Jürgen Rojahn (eds), Center and Periphery: The History of the Comintern in the Light of New Documents (Amsterdam: International Institute of Social History, 1996). 8 Wilhelm Agrell, Venona: Spåren från ett underrättelsekrig (Lund: Historiska Media, 2003), p. 173. On the Swedish intelligence service’s interwar surveillance, see Ulf Eliasson, I försvarets intresse: Säkerhetspolisens övervakning och registrering av ytterlighetspartier 1917–1945 (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2006). 9 Two important Soviet illegal networks, one led by the NKVD and the other by the GRU, carried out sabotage operations in Sweden at the beginning of the war. Both organizations also had considerable intelligence collection networks in Sweden. See Agrell, Venona, p. 200 ff. 10 A little while after the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, the SOE, Britain’s sabotage organization, reached an agreement with the NKVD on how they would divide up their areas of operation and targets. When it came to Sweden, they agreed that the sabotage should primarily target the German transit traffic through the country. The actual text of the agreement was published in the 1990s in Otjerki istorii rossijskoj vnesjej razvedki, vol. 4, 1941–5 (Moscow: Mezjdunarodnyje otnosjenija, 1999). 11 Above all, what stuck out a mile for Olsen was the open and unconstrained Swedish economic and industrial support that the German war machine received. 12 ‘Monthly report for January 1944: Office of the Financial Attaché’, WRB files, Box 38, Sweden, vol. 4 (FDR Library); see also Agrell, Skuggor runt Wallenberg, p. 31 f. 13 Peter Tennant, Touchlines of War (Hull: University of Hull Press, 1992). 14 On the Norwegian intelligence service’s activities in Stockholm, see Ragnar Ulstein, Etterretningstjenesten i Norge 1940–45, vols 1–3 (Oslo: Cappelen, 1989, 1990, 1992). 15 On the OSS station, see Agrell (2006); Tore Pryser, USAs hemmelige agenter: Den amerikanske etterretningstjenesten OSS i Norden under andre verdenskrig (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2010).

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Notes 16 ‘Internal organization and function of a Soviet embassy’, 28 February 1955, KV2/3463, TNA, p. 14. 17 Recorded interview with Petrova Evdokia, NLA, Oral History Section, p. 26. 18 Ibid., p. 33. 19 ‘Organization of a state security legal residency’, 10 March 1955, KV2/3463, TNA, p. 11. 20 On the restaurant guide, see Wilhelm Agrell, Stockholm som spioncentral (Lund: Historiska Media, 2006). 21 ‘Internal organization and function of a Soviet embassy’, 28 February 1955, KV2/3463, TNA, p. 15. 22 During the interrogations the Petrovs went through 293 legation employees in Sweden in the years 1940–7. They were able to specify four out of a total of 25 recalls where the recall was the result of forbidden relations with Swedish or other non-Soviet women. ‘Report on the identification by Mr. and Mrs. Petrov from list and photographs of Soviet officials serving in Sweden between 1940 and 1947’, 17 February 1955, KV2/3463, TNA. 23 ‘Organization of a state security legal residency’, Section D, Embassy Cypher Office, 10 March 1955, KV2/3463, TNA, p. 11. 24 Ibid., p. 14. 25 See Arkady Vaksberg, Aleksandra Kollontaj (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1997). 26 Aleksandra Kollontai, Diplomaticeskie dnevniki: 1922–1940 (Moscow: Academia, 2001). 27 ‘Internal organization and function of a Soviet embassy’, 28 February 1955, KV2/3463, TNA, p. 9.

8. The Concealed Legation 1 Alexandra Kollontai’s personal file in the Säpo archive gives an idea of just how little the Swedes knew about the actual power relationship in the legation and about the low-level information with a liberal sprinkling of gossip from ‘confidential informants’. Personal file P 753, Kollontay, Alexandra (SNA). 2 Wilhelm Agrell, Venona: Spåren från ett underrättelsekrig (Lund: Historiska Media, 2003), p. 194. 3 On this antagonism, see Wilhelm Agrell, Skuggor runt Wallenberg: Uppdrag i Ungern 1943–1945 (Lund: Historiska Media, 2006). 4 ‘Organization of a state security legal residency’, 10 March 1955, KV2/3463, TNA, p. 9. 5 Ibid., p. 8. 6 Ibid., p. 7 f. 7 Ibid., p. 23. 8 Ibid., p. 7. There were no phone books at this time.

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Notes 9 An example of this is the Soviet consulate in Petsamo, which the German forces captured at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa. Here the Germans found a partially burned code book used for the NKVD’s cipher telegrams. The code book ended up in American hands after the war, but the role it came to play in breaking the encryption of the Soviet intelligence traffic is a matter of dispute. See Tore Pryser, ‘From Petsamo to Venona’, Scandinavian Journal of History 24/1 (1999). 10 ‘Organization of a state security legal residency’, 10 March 1955, KV2/3463, TNA. 11 Agrell, Venona, p. 172 ff. 12 Ibid., p. 63 ff. 13 Ibid., p. 237. 14 The classic work on Enbom’s mythomania is professor of educational psychology Arne Trankell’s Chef för Grupp Norr: en dagdrömmares fantasier i skuggan av det kalla kriget (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1974). None of Enbom’s ‘accomplices’ were granted a new trial. 15 On the NKGB’s contacts in Finland after the 1944 armistice, see Henrik Meinander, Finlands historia: linjer, strukturer, vändpunkter (Helsinki: Schildt, 1999), p. 323 ff.

9. Tamara 1 ‘Organization of a state security legal residency’, 10 March 1955, KV2/3463, TNA, p. 11. 2 ‘Soviet intelligence personalities in Sweden’, KV2/3458, TNA. 3 ‘Report on identification by Mr. and Mrs. Petrov from list and photographs of Soviet officials serving in Sweden between 1940 and 1947’, 17 February 1955, KV2/3463, TNA, p. 12. 4 On the Meurling case, see Wilhelm Agrell, Venona: Spåren från ett underrättelsekrig (Lund: Historiska Media, 2003), p. 182 f. Meurling was a member of the Swedish Communist Party but left it at the end of the 1940s. He admitted at the time that during the war he had worked for the Soviets. 5 ‘Soviet intelligence personalities in Sweden’, KV2/3458, TNA; Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, Empire of Fear (London: Deutsch, 1956), p. 203. 6 ‘Report on identification by Mr. and Mrs. Petrov from list and photographs of Soviet officials serving in Sweden between 1940 and 1947’, 17 February 1955, KV2/3463, TNA, p. 12. 7 Vasili Razin, personal file P 6779, Säpo Archive. 8 Övervakningspromemorior [surveillance report], Vasili Razin, personal file P 6779, Säpo Archive. 9 Razin later wrote his memoirs, from which an extract is published in his predecessor Zoya Voskresenskaya’s (Jartsev’s) memoirs, Pod psevdonimom

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N otes Irina (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1997). In his extract, he pointed out how easy the intelligence work was at the time in Stockholm thanks to the broad sympathy the Soviet Union enjoyed from various quarters. In many instances, the NKVD was offered information and cooperation without having to actively try and obtain them. 10 ‘Second report on Soviet intelligence personalities in Sweden since 1944’, KV2/3459, TNA. 11 Information from Willy Brandt appears in a number of Soviet intelligence telegrams from Stockholm. In 1962, the KGB considered the idea of attempting to compromise Brandt using this information but abandoned its plans when it discovered that the receipt Brandt had signed for the 500 Swedish kronor received from the Stockholm residency had been weeded and destroyed a few years earlier. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 575 ff. 12 Andor Gellért furnished British and American intelligence with information from the Hungarian legation in Stockholm. A middleman even supplied Soviet intelligence with this material, and the resident suggested that Gellért should be recruited as an agent, but Moscow forbade this, presumably because of his political background and link to the Allies. Sure enough, Gellért was recruited by the American OSS in the spring of 1944. See Wilhelm Agrell, Skuggor runt Wallenberg: Uppdrag I Ungern 1943–1945 (Lund: Historiska Media, 2006). 13 Petrov and Petrov, Empire of Fear, p. 177. Evdokia understood Moscow’s approval to be confirmation that her reprimand, which was still lurking in her file, was no longer of any importance. 14 Maria is no longer alive. There is no reason for her identity to be revealed. 15 Vladimir and Jevdokia Petrov, personal file P 5229, G-file FB-folder, förhör hållna med personer i Sverige efter avhoppet [interrogations of persons in Sweden after defection], Säpo Archive. 16 Agrell, Venona, p. 302; Stockholm-Moskva no. 568, 24 February 1944 (NKVD-trafiken), Säpo Archive. 17 ‘Soviet intelligence activities in Sweden: the case of “Klara”’, KV2/3458, TNA. Klara was never at the time put under surveillance, but for a period her letters were opened. Evdokia assumed that this contact did not work for the Swedish intelligence service seeing as the residency would have otherwise demanded to be informed about them in order to be able to personally secure their services. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 ‘Soviet intelligence activities in Sweden: the case of “Grisha”’, KV2/3458, TNA. See also Agrell, Venona, p. 329 ff. 22 ‘Second report on Soviet intelligence personalities in Sweden since 1944’, KV2/3459, TNA. Petrova stated that Razin’s name was mentioned in

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Notes the report. In a subsequent interrogation, she was more uncertain how she found out about Razin’s secret relationship. It does not seem probable that Klara would have explicitly mentioned this in a report for Razin. 23 Ibid. 24 Petrov and Petrov, Empire of Fear. 25 ‘Second report on Soviet intelligence personalities in Sweden since 1944’, KV2/3459, TNA. Empire of Fear contains a more graphic description of the scene, but this goes beyond what is covered in the interrogation material and smacks of fiction. A somewhat different picture emerged in later interrogations, and the interrogators were inclined to draw the conclusion that Razin’s lover had probably been reported to Moscow and had subsequently become a millstone around his neck. 26 Agrell, Venona, p. 189. 27 Nikita Petrov, Die sowjetischen Geheimdienstmitarbeiter in Deutschland (Berlin: Metropol, 2010). 28 On Razin’s subsequent service after having operated in Sweden, see ‘Second report on Soviet intelligence personalities in Sweden since 1944’, KV2/3459, TNA. 29 On Moscow’s scepticism of the information provided by the Cambridge Spy Ring, see, among others, Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, p. 156 ff. 30 ‘Soviet Intelligence Activities in Sweden: The Case of “Klara”’, KV2/3458, TNA, p. 3.

10. The Seaman and His Net 1 P.M angående övervakningen av Vlad. Petrov den 4/7 1947 [Report concerning the surveillance of Vlad. Petrov, 4 July 1947], file HA 633/45, Säpo Archive. 2 Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, Empire of Fear (London: Deutsch, 1956), p. 202. 3 ‘Organization of a state security legal residency’, Annex D, Embassy Cypher Office, 10 March 1955, KV2/3463, TNA. 4 ‘S. K. function of the state security service’, 25 January 1955, KV2/3462, TNA, p. 10. 5 Ibid., p. 10 ff. 6 It is unclear to what extent Vladimir Proletarsky/Petrov had carried out surveillance work with regard to internal security matters during his time in the Soviet Union before his posting to Sweden. There is no account of this in the material from the interrogations in Australia, but this was probably the kind of thing that was of no interest to the interrogators and about which Vladimir may have had reasons for keeping quiet. The fact that he was made responsible for Line SK at the Stockholm legation must, however, be regarded as an early indication that he was

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N otes familiar with this kind of clandestine surveillance work. There is a clear tendency in Empire of Fear to play down the less attractive aspects of the Line SK work. 7 ‘Stockholm-Moskva Nr 309’, 28 January 1944 (NKVD), Säpo Archive. In 1965, this telegram caused a lot of trouble for Säpo’s analysts when it was turned into clear text. Police Commissioner Lindroth noted that they had been unable to find any indication that Nikitin had been courted to work either for Säpo or the Swedish defence staff. Lindroth made a note in red, ‘Whom do the Russians suspect?’ 8 When the deciphered telegrams were analyzed as part of the Venona Project, which primarily concerned telegram traffic from the Soviet intelligence stations in the United States, one of the conclusions they reached was that the Soviet efforts to trace and bring back defecting sailors in North American ports were unexpectedly large-scale and seemingly disproportionate. See Robert Louis Benson and Michael Warner (eds), Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response, 1939–1957 (Washington DC: National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency, 1996), p. 473. 9 ‘S. K. function of the state security service’, 25 January 1955, KV2/3462, TNA, p. 12. 10 Anatoli Granovsky, I Was an NKVD Agent: A Top Soviet Spy Tells His Story (New York: The Devin-Adair Company, 1962), p. 340. This very retort is confirmed in the diary of Sven Grafström. It quotes what the Swedish staff present reported. Grafström, Anteckningar 1945–1954 (Stockholm: Kungl. Samfundet för utgifvande av handskrifter rörande Skandinaviens historia, Handlingar del 15, 1989), p. 780. 11 Stockholm–Moskva no. 1474, 8 May 1943 (GRU-M), Säpo Archive. See Wilhelm Agrell, Venona: Spåren från ett underrättelsekrig (Lund: Historiska Media, 2003), p. 162 f. 12 Stockholm–Moskva no. 3614, 2 November 1944 (NKVD), Säpo Archive. See Agrell, Venona, p. 162 f. 13 In 1943, Taradin suffered a family tragedy when the ABA plane Falken, on which his wife and children were travelling, was shot down on its way from the United Kingdom. According to Evdokia, Taradin was seeing a colleague’s wife who also worked at the residency’s naval section. It is possible that this was the marital game of ‘musical chairs’ to which Ivachenko was referring. Evdokia seems to have had good powers of observation regarding the legation personnel’s conduct and often complicated personal relationships. In the comprehensive biographical summary of the legation personnel based on information from both Evdokia and Vladimir, it is clear how much more Evdokia knew. ‘Report on identification by Mr. and Mrs. Petrov from lists and photographs of Soviet officials serving in Sweden between 1940 and 1947, 17 Feb. 1955, KV2/3463, TNA. 14 See Arkady Vaksberg, Aleksandra Kollontaj (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1997).

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Notes 15 Agrell, Venona, p. 190. 16 Ibid., p. 305. 17 Petrov and Petrov, Empire of Fear, p. 192 f. It is totally conceivable that this is one of the episodes Petrov embellished to a certain extent. The surveillance of Kollontai has, however, been confirmed by other material. 18 See Anders Berge, ‘Urholkad frivillighet: Sveriges repatriering av sovjetryska f.d. krigsfångar 1944–1945’, Militärhistorisk tidskrift 12 (1990), pp. 217–33. 19 ‘Second report on miscellaneous cases of Soviet intelligence operations in Sweden and touching upon Finland’, 17 September 1954, KV2/3460, TNA. 20 ‘Memo. Conversation with Mrs. Evdokia Petrov in Sydney, Friday 27.5.55 from 15–16.30 o’clock. Present Mr [name omitted]. Mr [name omitted/WA] (who knows the Russian language), Mr. [name omitted] and undersigned’, Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, personal file P 5279, G file, folder S 2, Säpo Archive. 21 Anders Sundelin, Fallet Wennerström (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1999), p. 159f. 22 See ibid. for full details of the Wennerström case. 23 ‘PM till HA 868/44 ang. sovjetryske medborgaren tjänstemannen vid ryska legationen i Stockholm Vladimir Petrov, född 15.2.1907’ [Report to HA 868/55 concerning Soviet-Russian citizen, official at the Russian legation in Stockholm Vladimir Petrov, born 15.2.1907], personal file P 5229, Säpo Archive. 24 Ibid. 25 ‘PM angående besök i Göteborg den 21/4 1947 kl. 6.35 – 22/4 22.40 av ryske legationstjänstemannen Vladimir Petrov’ [Report concerning visit in Gothenburg 21 April 1947 6.35 a.m. to 22 April 10.40 p.m. by the Russian legation official Vladimir Petrov], 22 April 1947, personal file P 5229, Säpo Archive. 26 ‘PM angående övervakningen av Vlad. Petrov den 4/7 1947’ [Report concerning visit in Gothenburg 4 July 1947], file HA 633/45, Säpo Archive.

11. The Age of the Information Empire 1 ‘Organization of a state security legal residency’, 10 March 1955, KV2/3463, TNA, p. 8. 2 Evdokia evidently did not know that the Yartsevs had turned to Moscow to get Vladimir recalled. See Boris Grigorjev, Mötesplats Stockholm: Underrättelsekriget i Sverige 1939–45 (Nacka: Efron & Dotter, 2008), p. 149. 3 Niels Erik Rosenfeldt, Bent Jensen and Erik Kulavig (eds), Mechanisms of Power in the Soviet Union (London: Macmillan Press, 2000). 4 See Niels Erik Rosenfeldt, The ‘Special’ World: Stalin’s Power Apparatus and

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Notes the Soviet System’s Secret Structures of Communication, vol. 2 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2009), p. 252. 5 ‘The Committee of Information (“K. I.”) 1947–1951’, 17 November 1954, Petrova, Evdokia Alexeyevna, vol. 3, A6283, NAA. 6 See Vladislav M. Zubok, ‘Soviet intelligence and the Cold War: the “small” Committee of Information, 1952–53’, Diplomatic History 19/3 (1995), p. 455. 7 ‘The Committee of Information (“K. I.”) 1947–1951’, 17 November 1954, Petrova, Evdokia Alexeyevna, vol. 3, A6283, NAA. 8 Ibid., p. 19. 9 Zubok, ‘Soviet intelligence and the Cold War’, p. 456. 10 ‘Personal history of Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov’, KV 2/3447, TNA, p. 10. 11 ‘The Committee of Information (“K. I.”) 1947–1951’, 17 November 1954, Petrova, Evdokia Alexeyevna, vol. 3, A6283, NAA, p. 21. 12 Ibid. 13 ‘Identification by Mrs. Petrov from list and photographs of Soviet officials serving in Sweden since 1948’, undated, KV2/3465; see also ‘Miscellaneous Soviet intelligence personalities who have served abroad’, 29 September 1954, Petrova, Evdokia Alexeyevna, vol. 2, A6283, NAA. 14 The ‘conveyor belt’ was a method to exhaust the prisoner by virtually endless interrogations, where the interrogators were replaced according to a running scheme. The method is perhaps best described in Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon (London: Macmillan, 1940). 15 Sinityn’s account of his involvement in the Wallenberg case is well known as a result of his posthumously published memoirs, Rezident Svindetel’stvuet (Moscow: Geia, 1996). There is no other material to support his account, which also shows clear signs of dramatization with exchanges of words reproduced. There was probably never any written material. 16 ‘Soviet intelligence activities in Sweden: the case of “Grisha”’, 3 August 1954, KV2/3458, TNA, p. 3. 17 ‘Elisei Tikhonovich SINITSYN @ ELISYEEV’, memorandum for Liaison Security Officer, 1 June 1955, KV2/3465, TNA. 18 ‘Report on identification by Mr. and Mrs. Petrov from list and photographs of Soviet officials Serving in Sweden between 1940 and 1947’, 17 February 1955, KV2/3463, TNA, p. 12 f. 19 ‘Miscellaneous Soviet intelligence personalities who have served abroad’, 29 September 1954, Petrova, Evdokia Alexeyevna, vol. 2, A6283, NAA, p. 6 f.

12. The Australian Assignment 1 ‘Personal history of Evdokia Alekseyevna Petrova’, 2 July 1954, KV2/3457, TNA.

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N otes 2 ‘There was no mistaking the men. They were always in twos and threes, shock-headed fellows in square double-breasted suits that looked as if they had come out of prewar ads for a closing-down sale at a men’s emporium.’ Ric Throssell, My Father’s Son, quoted in Desmond Ball and David Horner, Breaking the Codes: Australia’s KGB Network, 1944–1950 (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1998), p. 128. 3 ‘Report to Head Office’, 26 November 1954, KV2/3461, TNA. 4 ‘Arrival of Soviet Embassy diplomatic officials ex Orient liner “Orcades” on 5.2.51’, Petrov, Vladimir, Mikhailovich, A6119, NAA. 5 Ball and Horner, Breaking the Codes, p. 125. 6 ‘Organization of a state security legal residency’, 10 March 1955, KV2/3463, TNA. 7 Ibid., p. 25 ff. 8 On the GRU’s activities in Australia, see ‘Personal history of Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov’, KV 2/3447, TNA, p. 16. 9 Ball and Horner, Breaking the Codes, p. 125. 10 On the recruitment of Clayton, see Ball and Horner, Breaking the Codes, p. 209 f. 11 On the Klod group, see ibid., p. 212 ff., and David McKnight, ‘The Moscow–Canberra cables: how Soviet intelligence obtained British secrets through the back door’, Intelligence and National Security 13/2 (1998), pp. 159–70. 12 Ball and Horner, Breaking the Codes, p. 213 f. 13 Ibid., p. 214 f. 14 Ibid., p. 215. 15 See Frank Cain, ‘Venona in Australia and its long-term ramifications’, Journal of Contemporary History 35/2 (2000), pp. 231–48. 16 Ball and Horner, Breaking the Codes, p. 254 ff. 17 ‘Personal history of Evdokia Alekseyevna Petrova’, 2 July 1954, KV2/3457, TNA, p. 9. 18 ‘Internal organization and function of a Soviet embassy’, 28 February 1955, KV2/3463, TNA, p. 18. 19 Ibid. 20 ‘Statement by Mrs. E. Petrov’, 14 August 1954, Petrova, Evdokia Alekseyevna, A 6283, no. 14, NAA. 21 ‘Personal history of Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov’, KV 2/3447, TNA, p. 14. 22 Evdokia visited Pakhomov in Sydney to pass on an order from the KI. It is clear which dates by ASIO’s surveillance of Vladimir Petrov’s trips. ‘Chronological Diary of Events in the Official Life of Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov (3rd. Secretary of the Soviet Embassy, Canberra) and his Wife Evdokia Alexeyeva Petrov’, undated, Petrov, Vladimir Mikhailovich, vol. 4, A6119:10, NAA. 23 ‘Personal history of Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov’, KV 2/3447, TNA, p. 15.

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Notes 24 The instructions dated 27 September from Moscow to the Canberra residency stipulated that Kislitsyn’s main duty was to select and study the kind of individual who could assist illegal cadre workers with their arrival and getting set up. ‘MVD activities in Australia 1950–1954, Section III, M.V.D. methods of recruitment’, KV2/3460, TNA.

13. Recruiters and Drinking Companions 1 ‘Petrov, Vladimir Mikhailovich. Appointment: 3rd Secretary and VOKS representative’, Petrov, Vladimir Mikhailovich, Part 1, A119:8, NAA. 2 ‘Personal history of Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov’, KV 2/3447, TNA, p. 12. 3 ‘Andrey Andreivich Friedenbergs, statement of V. Petrov’, Petrov, Part 1 (ref. copy), A6383:1, NAA. 4 ‘Personal history of Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov’, KV 2/3447, TNA, p. 17. 5 Desmond Ball and David Horner, Breaking the Codes: Australia’s KGB Network, 1944–1950 (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1998), p. 138. 6 ‘Mrs. E. A. Petrov states’, 12 September 1954, Petrova, Evdokia Alekseyevna, A6283, no. 14, NAA. 7 Ball and Horner, Breaking the Codes, p. 139. 8 Robert Manne, The Petrov Affair: Politics and Espionage (Sydney: Pergamon, 1987), p. 203 ff. 9 ‘Soviet Embassy and Russian Social Club’, informant report, 31 October 1951, Petrov, Vladimir Mikhailovich, Part 1, A119:8, NAA. 10 On the relationship between Bialoguski and Petrov, see Manne, The Petrov Affair, p. 9 ff.; ‘Defection of Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov @ Proletarski and Evdokia Alexeevna Petrova @ Kartseva’, undated, Petrova, Evdokia Alexeyevna, Part 2 (ref. copy), A6283, NAA. 11 ‘Defection of Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov @ Proletarski and Evdokia Alexeevna Petrova @ Kartseva’, undated, Petrova, Evdokia Alexeyevna, Part 2 (ref. copy), A6283, NAA. 12 For Bialoguski’s own account of his role in the Petrov Affair, see Michael Bialoguski, The Petrov Story (London: Heinemann, 1955).

14. Operation Cabin 12 1 ‘Internal organization and function of a Soviet embassy’, 28 February 1955, KV2/3463, TNA, p. 19. 2 From the end of the 1960s, the SLO function was gradually transferred to the MI6 stations based in those countries; this was a measure mainly motivated on cost-cutting grounds, but it also reflected the underlying competition between the two clandestine organizations. See Christopher

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N otes Andrew, Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (New York: Knopf, 2009), p. 481 f. 3 Ibid., p. 372 f., 447 ff. 4 See Frank Cain, The Australian Security Intelligence Organization: An Unofficial History (London: Frank Cass, 1994), p. 39 ff. 5 Ibid., p. 52 ff. On the creation of ASIO, see David Horner, The Spy Catchers: The Official History of ASIO, 1949–1963 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2014). 6 Andrew, Defend the Realm, p. 372. 7 ‘Soviet Embassy, Canberra – review no. 3’. 10 March 1954, Petrov, Vladimir Mikhailovich, vol. 4, A119:10, NAA. 8 ‘Summary of surveillance on V. M. Petrov’, 4 September 1954, Petrov, Vladimir Mikhailovich, A6119:10, NAA. 9 ‘Petrov, Vladimir Mikhailovich’ (extract from the report dated 18 April 1952), Petrov, Vladimir Mikhailovich, Part 1, A6119:8, NAA. 10 Handwritten PM D1B2, 14 Jan. 1952, Petrov, Vladimir Mikhailovich, vol. 5, A119:10, NAA. 11 ‘Defection of Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov @ Proletarski and Evdokia Alexeevna Petrova @ Kartseva’, undated, Petrova, Evdokia Alexeyena, Part 2 (ref. copy), A6283, NAA. 12 ‘Extract from S.I.S. report re activities of the Soviet Legation in Stockholm – mentioning Petrov Vladimir’, 4 December 1950, KV2/3439, TNA. 13 ‘Letter to Director General, Security Service, subject: Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov’, 11 March 1952, KV2/3439, TNA. The letter is here clearly referring to the arrest of Fritiof Enbom on 11 February 1952. 14 Robert Manne, The Petrov Affair: Politics and Espionage (Sydney: Pergamon, 1986), p. 18 f.

15. The Knives Are Sharpened 1 Amy Knight, How the Cold War Began: The Igor Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005), p. 65 f. 2 ‘Concerning the plan of work. Letter no. 3 of 6 June 1952 to Canberra’, Petrov, Part 1 (ref. copy), A6383:1, NAA. 3 Robert Manne, The Petrov Affair: Politics and Espionage (Sydney: Pergamon, 1986), p. 28. 4 Ibid., p. 30. 5 Robert Manne describes her, for example, as ‘an extremely attractive woman in her prime’. Ibid. In 1954, Australian journalists went even further when describing her charisma and its devastating effects on the men around her. 6 Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, Empire of Fear (London: Deutsch, 1956), p. 247. Their memoirs are an unreliable source for the description of embassy intrigues, but this first and foremost applies to the anecdotal material, such as the episode with the Stalin portrait. The historian

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Notes Robert Manne thus states that Evdokia, who wished to portray herself ‘as an island of fiscal propriety in a sea of petty corruption’, did not really have full backing here. (Manne, The Petrov Affair, p. 29). 7 ‘Concerning Mrs. Petrov. Letter no. 3 of 6 June 1952 to Canberra’, Petrov, Part 1 (ref. copy), A6383:1, NAA. 8 ‘Defection of Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov @ Proletarski and Evdokia Alexeevna Petrova @ Kartseva’, undated, Petrova, Evdokia Alexeyevna, Part 2 (ref. copy), p. 8, A6283, NAA. 9 Manne, The Petrov Affair, p. 30 f. 10 Their memoirs, Empire of Fear, have the character here of a combined prosecution and defence statement and are thus, above all, a source of the couple’s subsequent rationalization and desire to convey this to the surrounding world. 11 ‘Personal history of Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov’, KV 2/3447, TNA, p. 18. 12 ‘Chronological Diary of Events in the Official Life of Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov (3rd. Secretary of the Soviet Embassy, Canberra) and his Wife Evdokia Alexeyeva Petrov’, undated, Petrov, Vladimir Mikhailovich, vol. 4, A6119:10, NAA. 13 Telegram from SIFE to SLO Australia, 9 July 1953, KV2/3439, TNA.

16. Fear and Flight 1 Recorded interview with Petrova Evdokia, 21 June 1996, NLA, Oral History Section, p. 64 f. 2 Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, Empire of Fear (London: Deutsch, 1956), p. 88. 3 ‘Personal History of Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov’, KV 2/3447, TNA, p. 18. 4 Telegram from SLO Australia to SIFE, 15 July 1953, KV2/3439, TNA. 5 Ibid. 6 Telegram from SLO Australia to Head Office, 20 July 1953, KV2/3439, TNA. When Lifanov finally left Australia at the end of November, SLO Australia telegraphed MI5 headquarters that there was ‘no indication likely defection’. Telegram from SLO Australia to Head Office, 18 September 1953, KV2/3439, TNA. 7 ‘Defection of Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov @ Proletarski and Evdokia Alexeevna Petrova @ Kartseva’, undated, Petrova, Evdokia Alexeyevna, Part 2 (ref. copy), A6283, NAA, p. 6 f. The conversation is reproduced verbatim and was presumably monitored by ASIO. 8 Ibid., p. 7. 9 Telegram from SLO Australia to Head Office, 21 December 1953, KV2/3439, TNA; Robert Manne, The Petrov Affair: Politics and Espionage (Sydney: Pergamon, 1986), p. 38 ff.

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Notes 10 ‘Defection of Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov @ Proletarski and Evdokia Alexeevna Petrova @ Kartseva’, undated, Petrova, Evdokia Alexeyevna, Part 2 (ref. copy), A6283, NAA, p. 8. 11 Ibid., p. 9. 12 Ibid. 13 Telegram from SLO Australia to Head Office, 21 December 1953, KV2/3439, TNA. 14 Recorded interview with Petrova Evdokia, 21 June 1996, NLA, Oral History Section, p. 63. 15 Telegram from SLO Australia to Head Office, 17 July 1953, KV2/3439, TNA. 16 Recorded interview with Petrova Evdokia, 21 June 1996, NLA, Oral History Section, p. 60 f. 17 Ibid. 18 Transcript of proceedings of the Royal Commission on Espionage (Canberra: Govt. Pr., 1954–5), p. 715. 19 Recorded interview with Petrova Evdokia, 21 June 1996, NLA, Oral History Section, p. 63. 20 ‘Defection of Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov @ Proletarski and Evdokia Alexeevna Petrova @ Kartseva’, undated, Petrova, Evdokia Alexeyevna, Part 2 (ref. copy), A6283, NAA, p. 11. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., p. 12. 23 ‘Organization of a state security legal residency’, 10 March 1955, KV2/3463, TNA, p. 31. 24 Telegram from SLO Australia to Head Office, 30 January 1954, KV2/3439, TNA. 25 ‘Defection of Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov @ Proletarski and Evdokia Alexeevna Petrova @ Kartseva’, undated, Petrova, Evdokia Alexeyevna, Part 2 (ref. copy), A6283, NAA, p. 13. 26 Ibid. 27 Manne, The Petrov Affair, p. 61. The information regarding the increased offer in exchange for documents is not included in ASIO’s official account nor in its written documentation, which only covers the first half of the conversation in question. The original recording of the bugged conversation still exists, however, and that is where Manne found this offer. 28 Telegram from SLO Australia to D.1.A, 30 January 1954, KV2/3439, TNA. 29 ‘Defection of Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov @ Proletarski and Evdokia Alexeevna Petrova @ Kartseva’, undated, Petrova, Evdokia Alexeyevna, Part 2 (ref. copy), A6283, NAA, p. 13. 30 Ibid. 31 Manne, The Petrov Affair, p. 62 f. 32 Ibid., p. 63.

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Notes 33 Ibid.; ‘Defection of Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov @ Proletarski and Evdokia Alexeevna Petrova @ Kartseva’, undated, Petrova, Evdokia Alexeyevna, Part 2 (ref. copy), A6283, NAA, p. 15.

17. Mole Tracks 1 Extract from spool 221/7, 3 April 1954, Petrov, Part 1 (ref. copy), A6383:1, NAA. 2 Desmond Ball and David Horner, Breaking the Codes: Australia’s KGB Network, 1944–1950 (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1998), p. 303 ff. The authors state that ‘Skardon’s fame as an MI5 interrogator greatly exceeded his effectiveness.’ 3 Telegram from SLO Australia to London, 7 April 1954, KV2/3440, TNA. 4 See Richard J. Aldrich, GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency (London: HarperPress, 2010), p. 108; Matthew Aid, The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009). 5 Telegram from Head Office to SLO Australia, 14 April 1954, KV2/3475, TNA. 6 ‘Top Secret and Personal’ teleprinter message from GCHQ London to GCHQ Cheltenham, 9 April 1954, KV2/3475, TNA. 7 Note D1, 12 April 1954, KV2/3475, TNA. 8 On the circumstances surrounding Burgess and Maclean’s escape, see Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990), p. 322 ff. 9 Telegram from SLO Australia to Head Office, D1a, 7 April 1954, KV2/3440, TNA. 10 Telegram from Head Office to SLO Australia, 30 April 1954, KV2/3442, TNA. 11 Telegram from Head Office to SLO Australia, 7 April 1954, KV2/3442, TNA. 12 Telegram from SLO Australia to Head Office, 8 April 1954, KV2/3442, TNA. 13 Telegram from Head Office to SLO Australia, 9 April 1954, KV2/3442, TNA. 14 Telegram from Head Office to SIFE, 9 April 1954, KV2/3442, TNA. 15 Telegram from SLO Australia to Head Office, 12 April 1954, KV2/3442, TNA. 16 Telegram from SIFE to SLO Australia and Head Office, 15 April 1954, KV2/3442, TNA. 17 Telegram from Head Office to SIFE, 15 April 1954, KV2/3442, TNA.

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N otes 18 Telegram from SLO Australia to Head Office and SIFE, 15 April 1954, KV2/3442, TNA. 19 Ibid. 20 Robert Manne, The Petrov Affair: Politics and Espionage (Sydney: Pergamon, 1986), p. 78. 21 Telegram from SLO Australia to SIFE, 19 April 1954, KV2/3442, TNA. 22 Note, G. R. Mitchell, 12 April 1954, KV2/3442, TNA. 23 Christopher Andrew, Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (New York: Knopf, 2009), p. 432 ff.

18. The Man in the Panama Hat 1 Statement of Evdokija Alekseevna Petrov, 22 April 1954, Petrova, Evdokia Alexeyevna, A6283, no. 14, NAA; ‘Defection of Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov @ Proletarski and Evdokia Alexeevna Petrova @ Kartseva’, undated, Petrova, Evdokia Alexeyevna, Part 2 (ref. copy), A6283, NAA, p. 15 f. 2 Recorded interview with Petrova Evdokia, 21 June 1996, NLA, Oral History Section, p. 74. 3 ‘Defection of Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov @ Proletarski and Evdokia Alexeevna Petrova @ Kartseva’, undated, Petrova, Evdokia Alexeyevna, Part 2 (ref. copy), A6283, NAA, p. 16. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 ‘Madame Petrova, Evdokia Alexseyevna’, memorandum for Director General, Headquarters ASIO., 27 April 1954, A6122, no. 11, NAA, p. 4. 7 Recorded interview with Petrova Evdokia, 21 June 1996, NLA, Oral History Section, p. 74. 8 Telegram from SLP Australia to SIFE, 19 April 1954, KV2/3440, TNA. 9 Statement of Evdokija Alekseevna Petrov, 22 April 1954, Petrova, Evdokia Alexseyevna, A6283, no. 14, NAA. 10 Recorded interview with Petrova Evdokia, 21 June 1996, NLA, Oral History Section, p. 78. 11 ‘Confidential voyage report by Captain Davys – BA 705/698’, 19 April 1954, KV2/3443, TNA. 12 ‘Statement by the Government Secretary Mr R. S. Leydin concerning Mrs Petrov’, 21 April 1954, USSR Embassy Canberra, A6122, no. 11, NAA. 13 ‘Madame Petrova, Evdokia Alexseyevna’, Memorandum for Director General, Headquarters ASIO, 27 April 1954, A6122, no. 11, NAA. 14 ‘Statement by the Government Secretary Mr R. S. Leydin concerning Mrs Petrov’, 21 April 1954, USSR Embassy Canberra, A6122, no. 11, NAA, p. 4. Note that in his report Leydin reproduces the actual conversation in quotation form.

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N otes 15 Ibid., p. 6. 16 ‘Defection of Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov @ Proletarski and Evdokia Alexeevna Petrova @ Kartseva’, undated, Petrova, Evdokia Alexeyevna, Part 2 (ref. copy), A6283, NAA, p. 15. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., p. 18. 19 Recorded interview with Petrova Evdokia, 21 June 1996, NLA, Oral History Section, p. 81. 20 The Northern Standard, 22 April 1954.

19. Exploitation 1 On the crisis in Australian–Soviet relations, see Robert Manne, The Petrov Affair: Politics and Espionage (Sydney: Pergamon, 1986), p. 90 ff. 2 Outgoing telegram from Commonwealth Relations Office to UK High Commissioner Australia, 24 April 1954, KV2/3444, TNA. 3 Evatt’s role in the Petrov Affair is, for instance, discussed in Manne, The Petrov Affair, p. 133 ff. 4 Ibid., p. 245 f. 5 Note from D.1. to D.G., 1 September 1955, Top Secret Y-file, KV2/3475, TNA. 6 Note from D. 1.a. de Wesselow to D. 1., 19 October 1954, minute sheet, Top Secret Y-file, KV2/3475, TNA. 7 Telegram from SLO Australia to Head Office, 12 April 1954, KV2/3440, TNA. 8 Manne, The Petrov Affair, p. 117. 9 Even after Petrova’s defection, MI5 had not totally given up hope of being able to try again and get Kislitsyn to defect in Singapore. Emergency telegram from SLO Australia to SIFE, 20 April 1954, KV2/3440, TNA. 10 Telegram from SLO Australia to Head Office, 14 July 1954, KV2/3457, TNA. 11 Christopher Andrew, Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (New York: Knopf, 2009), p. 437 f. 12 ‘Operation Cabin 12: summary of actions to be taken by RD. ACT’, undated, Operation Cabin 12A Procedure Policy Admin. Arrangements, A6122, NAA. 13 ‘Operation Cabin 12: memorandum for file, 10 February 1954, Operation Cabin 12A Procedure Policy Admin. Arrangements, A6122, NAA. 14 See, for example, ‘Preliminary report on some cases of attempted Soviet espionage in Sweden’, 5 August 1954, KV2/3458; ‘Second report on miscellaneous cases of Soviet intelligence operations in Sweden’, KV2/3460; ‘Third report on miscellaneous cases of Soviet intelligence operations in Sweden’, 19 January 1955, KV2/3462, TNA.

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N otes 15 Amy Knight, How the Cold War Began: The Igor Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005), p. 65 f. 16 ‘Plan of intelligence exploitation’, 21 July 1954, KV2/3457, TNA. 17 Summary of brief, undated, KV2/3454, TNA. 18 ‘Note on PETROV exploitation programme’, 21 July 1954, KV2/3457, TNA. 19 ‘Plan of Intelligence exploitation’, 21 July 1954, KV2/3457, TNA.

20. Evidence from Stockholm 1 Letter from SLO Australia to Peter de Wesselow, 16 June 1954, KV2/3444, TNA. 2 Copy of letter from SLO Australia giving information contained in written statements by Mr and Mrs Petrov, 21 June 1954, KV2/3456, TNA. 3 ‘Soviet intelligence activities in Sweden: the case of “Senator”’, 16 July 1954, KV2/3457, TNA. 4 Ibid., p. 2. 5 ‘Given the information Petrov provided about the “Senator”, there would appear to be no doubt about the latter’s identity. It is clearly the lawyer Georg Branting, date of birth 21/9/1887, who is referred to.’ Memo, Otto Danielsson, 3 September 1954, Vladimir and Jevdokia Petrov, personal file P 5229, G-file, folder A2, Säpo Archive. 6 Only when sections of the Stockholm residency’s telegram traffic were cracked at the beginning of the 1970s as part of Sweden’s participation in the Venona Project did it become clear what kind of information Branting had furnished Soviet intelligence with. Branting had, for instance, provided a detailed account of a meeting of the Executive of the Social Democratic Party where the subject of discussion had been postwar relations with the Communist Party of Sweden. On this telegram, see Wilhelm Agrell, Venona: Spåren från ett underrättelsekrig (Lund: Historiska Media, 2003), p. 271 f. 7 In 1955, Prime Minister Erlander wrote in his diary that the Security Police commissioner’s worst news from the Petrov interrogations was that Branting had once received 1,000 Swedish crowns from the Russians. Erlander was also relieved that Branting had clearly not provided a receipt. Tage Erlander, Dagböcker, 1955 (Hedemora: Gidlund, 2005), 18 October, p. 175 f. 8 Ibid., 26 September, p. 155. 9 ‘Soviet intelligence activities in Sweden: The case of “Klara”’, 27 July 1954, KV2/3458. 10 Augustine ‘Gusti’, personal file P 5360, folder A2 and FA, Säpo Archive. For a summary of the investigation into the Klara case, see Agrell, Venona. 11 Gusti Stridsberg, My Five Lives: An Autobiography (London: Heinemann,

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Notes 1963). The English edition is a translation of the German original, Menschen, Mächte und ich (Hamburg: Hoffman & Campe, 1961). 12 ‘Gamla problem’, 5 October 1967, handwritten memo, Vladimir and Jevdokia Petrov, personal file P 5229, G-file, folder A2, Säpo Archive. 13 ‘Third report on miscellaneous cases of Soviet intelligence operations in Sweden’, 19 January 1955, KV2/3462, TNA. 14 Utdrag ur av Simon Roos gjorda dagboksanteckningar i aug. 1944 [Transcript of diary notes made by Simon Roos in August 1944], Jelisejev, Jelisej, Tihonovitsh, personal file P 4641, Säpo Archive. 15 The Swedish visit caused some friction between the security services. By July 1955, ASIO still had not received word from Säpo, which had neither expressed its gratitude nor sent its own evaluation of the interview. The SLO in Australia pointed the matter out to MI5 headquarters and suggested that they should give the Swedes a reminder. Letter from SLO Australia to Head Office, 15 August 1955, KV 2/3467. 16 ‘Memo. Conversation with Mrs. Evdokia Petrov in Sydney, Friday 27.5.55 from 15–16.30 o’clock. Present Mr [name omitted]. Mr [name omitted/WA] (who knows the Russian language), Mr. [name omitted] and undersigned’, Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, personal file P 5279, G file, folder S 2, Säpo Archive. 17 See Anders Sundelin, Fallet Wennerström (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1999); Olof Frånstedt, Spionjägaren, vol. 2 (Västerås: ICA, 2014), p. 222 ff. Frånstedt states that Säpo received information from the Petrovs that two Swedes were working for the Soviets: one in the military and the other a senior diplomat. Frånstedt’s information does not, however, tally entirely with the contemporary documents and contains obvious memory lapses, including the circumstances surrounding the defection. 18 ‘Soviet intelligence activities in Sweden: the case of “Klara”’, 27/71954, KV2/3458; ‘Report on case Augustina Stridsberg, aka Gusti Stridsberg, Auguste Mayer – Stridsberg, Augustina Jirku, Augusta Meyer, Augusta Mayer, “Klara”’, San Francisco Office 24 August 1956, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Records Management Division. 19 ‘Report on case Augustina Stridsberg, aka Gusti Stridsberg, Auguste Mayer – Stridsberg, Augustina Meyer, Augusta Mayer, “Klara”’, San Francisco Office 24 August 1956, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Records Management Division. 20 ‘Report on case Augustina Stridsberg, aka Gusti Stridsberg, Auguste Mayer – Stridsberg, Augustina Meyer, Augusta Mayer, “Klara”’, San Francisco Office 31 October 1956, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Records Management Division. 21 Telegram from San Francisco to Moscow No. 0039, 22 January 1944, Venona documents, January 1944, www.nsa.gov. 22 On Kheifets’s activities, see, for instance, Nigel West, Venona: The Greatest Secret of the Cold War (London: HarperCollins, 1999).

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Notes

21. A Sister in Need 1 Pravda, 28 April 1954. 2 Tamara’s representation of the course of events is based on Recorded interview with Petrova Evdokia, 21 June 1996, NLA, Oral History Section, p. 125 ff. 3 Letter from C. C. F. Spry to The Right Honorable Sir Robert Menzies, 29 January 1965, and Annex, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Top Secret File A338, NAA. 4 Michael Thwaites later described his role in the operation and its literary follow-up in the book Truth Will Out: ASIO and the Petrovs (Sydney: Collins, 1980). 5 MI5 practically functioned as the writer couple’s literary agent and conducted, for instance, a review of the publishing house. Review undersigned W. J. Skardon, 26 May 1955, KV2/3450, TNA. 6 Michael Bialoguski, The Petrov Story (London: Heinemann, 1955). 7 The letter from Titov is reproduced in the annex to the letter from C. C. F. Spry to The Right Honorable Sir Robert Menzies, 29 January 1965, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Top Secret File A338, NAA. 8 ‘Mrs. Evdokia Petrov’, letter from C. C. F. Spry to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, 23 October 1964, Top Secret File A338, NAA. 9 Letter from C. C. F. Spry to The Right Honorable Sir Robert Menzies, 29 January 1965, and Annex, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Top Secret File A338, NAA. 10 On the Golitsyn case, see Wilhelm Agrell, Maskerad front: Det kalla krigets underrättelsehistoria (Lund: Historiska Media, 2008). 11 Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 477 ff. 12 Vladislav Krasnov, Soviet Defectors: The KGB Wanted List (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1986), p. 171 ff. 13 Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, p. 505. 14 The Safe House, directed by Lee Whitmore (2006). 15 Recorded interview with Petrova Evdokia, 21 June 1996, NLA, Oral History Section, p. 145.

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Sources and Literature The source material The Petrovs are named as co-authors of the book Empire of Fear, published in 1956 by the reputable British publishing house André Deutsch. An extract has also been printed in daily newspapers and journals. Empire of Fear has long served as the main source for both the spouses’ lives and their defection as well as their information about the Soviet intelligence system. The book is, however, a problematic source, primarily because it was not written by them but by the poet Michael Thwaites in his capacity as ASIO’s director of counter-espionage. In terms of sources, the book is reminiscent of the old NKVD veteran Pavel Sudoplatov’s dictated memoirs, co-written by Sudoplatov’s son, Anatoli, with the help of the American researchers Jerrold and Leona Schecter. Empire of Fear has a clear bias, such as the couple’s desire to distance themselves from Stalinism, their reluctance to use facts that could discredit them personally, the need to include interesting information and, last but not least, the clear desire to concoct a marital ‘legend’ of the defection and their shared longing for freedom. The first available archive material on the case was the background material from the Royal Commission on Espionage, appointed in 1954 to investigate the information provided by the Petrovs about Soviet intelligence activity in Australia. The bulk of this material was published in the 1980s. ASIO’s material was still classified, but parts have been gradually declassified and made available by the National Archives of Australia. The material has, however, been weeded out of consideration for the personal integrity of those involved and on account of ASIO’s protection of both sources and national security. In 1996, the US National Security Agency published the Venona material, containing, among other things, deciphered Soviet signals

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Sources an d Li terature traffic from Australia. Although its existence was already known, the actual material now added an important frame of reference to the Petrovs’ information. In 2011, British MI5 released from its archives the 42 volumes relating to the Petrovs. MI5 does not automatically declassify information after a specific period of time, but it decides which material is passed on to the National Archives and made available to researchers and other interested parties. As in Australia, the material transferred to the National Archives is screened. This applies, in principle, to all documents on links with foreign security services. It is not possible to request documents in the same way as in Sweden or the United States. Säpo’s material on the Petrovs is still mainly classified but, in principle, available for research. All its pre-1949 material has now been declassified after a one-off decision by the Swedish government in 2000. Under the 95-year rule on intelligence documents, no further material will be automatically released until 2034. Many of Säpo’s Cold War files have, however, been gradually transferred to the Swedish National Archives and, in an equivalent of the Russian Spring of the 1990s, were quite freely available for a period of time to researchers and journalists. This practice abruptly ended with the release of the KGB resident Yevgeny Gergel’s Säpo file, which contained information on the Swedish author and journalist Jan Guillou. The Petrov file was thus initially classified, then made available, before becoming classified again. Such material can also be made available for research but with restrictions, as in my case. The Säpo file contains both material obtained via its British partners and Säpo’s own investigations into the Swedish cases about which the couple provided more or less detailed information. But having access to the archive is not the same as having access to the full story. In his book The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence, British intelligence historian Richard Aldrich warned against the common misconception that the intelligence archive contains the truth about the organization’s activity or even a reliable reflection of it. Firstly, the archives of the intelligence and security services are work tools and not a log designed for future historical descriptions. Secondly, all secret services are unwilling for

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Sources an d Li terat ure various reasons to document every aspect of their activity. The term ‘eyes only’ means a document may only be read and memorized, not copied or printed. Thirdly, all intelligence archives are more or less heavily weeded and, in extreme cases, entirely or partially destroyed. In the best-case scenario, the weeding of the actual files is visible, as is the case with the Australian and British material. A few redactions have been made (in some instances, more radical surgery where the original documents have holes where the paper has quite simply been cut out or scraped away), and still-classified documents or series of documents have been withheld. It is mainly personal names that have been redacted; both the Australian and British security services adhere to the principle of protecting the individual’s identity, with certain exceptions. The name of the young British MI5 linguist who acted as an interpreter during the interrogations has therefore been removed from hundreds of documents, but it still appears in other material. All classification reviews follow a particular process and have a certain degree of randomness or arbitrariness. The British material is special in that you can to some extent ‘read’ completely redacted documents. Each volume normally contains a minute sheet at the beginning; this sheet fulfils roughly the same function as a diary and lists the dates and titles of the withheld documents. For example, using this back door, we can reconstruct the main features of the early Anglo-Swedish contacts regarding Vladimir Petrov’s defection. The Venona material is similar in some respects to this archive material, but with some crucial differences. It basically consists of telegraphic reports to and from various Soviet intelligence stations. This is essentially the same kind of material that can be found in the then KGB archive, but the Venona material does not have its origins in any archive; it consists of intercepted and painstakingly deciphered telegraphic messages. Some coded texts are completely deciphered, while others have smaller or larger gaps where a linguist has occasionally attempted to interpret the possible context. The Venona documents are SIGINT material and not extracts from an original archive. What information is available is to some extent dependent on the traffic intercepted and which parts of the code could be

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Sources an d Li terature deciphered, while the processed text has a layer of uncertainty and interpretation that an original document would not normally have. There is of course a Soviet Petrov file, or rather a Proletarsky file and a Kartseva file, and for two reasons: (1) such files exist for all intelligence officers; and (2) they were defectors who had collaborated with the ‘enemy’ and undeniably supplied information about Soviet intelligence and its network of agents. During the short-lived Russian Spring of archival glasnost in the mid-1990s, very little emerged about the Petrovs, however. Nor have the often-quoted latter-day defectors Oleg Gordievsky and Vasili Mitrokhin reported anything other than the odd detail about the case in their published works. Once again, we have good reason to draw attention to Richard Aldrich’s warning. What Gordievsky and Mitrokhin actually brought with them is one thing, and what finally ended up in their books, after editorial screening and security reviews, is another. There may be a trivial explanation for why references to KGB material about the Petrovs are so rare, namely that the case has received little attention in works on Cold War intelligence history. This is possibly because researchers had long underestimated the Petrovs’ importance as sources, and only with the release of the MI5 files in 2011 could they really be evaluated.

Unpublished sources National Archives of Aus tralia (NAA) ASIO and related files Petrov, Vladimir Mikhailovich, vol. 3, A6119 Petrov, Vladimir Mikhailovich, Part 1, A119:8 Petrov, Vladimir Mikhailovich, vol. 4, A6119:10 Petrov, Vladimir Mikhailovich, vol. 5, A6119:11 Petrov, Vladimir Mikhailovich, vol. 7, A6283:9 Petrov, Vladimir Mikhailovich, A9122:11 Petrov, Part 1 (ref. copy), A6383:1 Petrova, Evdokia Alekseyevna, A 6283, no. 6 Petrova, Evdokia Alekseyevna, A 6283, no. 14 Petrova, Evdokia Alekseyevna, Part 2, A 6283, no. 15 Petrova, Evdokia Alekseyevna, vol. 3, A 6283, no. 16 Petrova, Evdokia Alekseyevna, Part 2 (ref. copy), A6283

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S ources an d Li terat ure Briefs for Interrogation of Petrovs, vol. 2, A6283 Operation Cabin 12A Procedure Policy Admin. Arrangements, A6122 Operation Cabin 12A Procedure Policy Admin. Personal correspondence, A6122 Cabin 12 – vol. D (ref. copy) A6283 Naturalization of Petrovs, A4940, C1293 USSR Embassy Canberra, A6122:11 Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Top Secret File A338, Petrov, Mrs Evdokia

National Library of Aus tralia Recorded interview with Petrova Evdokia, 21 June 1996, Oral History Section, 270983; ORAL TRC 3500 (Transcript)

The National Archives (TNA), UK Security Service files KV2/3439–3474 Petrov KV2/3475–3476 Petrov Top Secret Correspondence KV2/3477 Copies of Original Petrov Documents KV2/3478–3488 Report of Royal Commission on Espionage

The Swedish National Archives (Riksarkivet, RA) Secret Police (Säpo) archive Personakt [personal file] P 753, Kollontay, Alexandra Personakt P 6779, Razin, Vasili Personakt P 5229, Petrov, Vladimir and Jevdokia Personakt P 5360, Stridsberg, Augustine ‘Gusti’

Federal Bureau of Inves tigation (US) Stridsberg Augustina, Records Management Division

National Security Agency (US) VENONA Documents

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Sources an d Li terature

Published sources Transcript of proceedings of the Royal Commission on Espionage (Canberra: Govt. Pr., 1954–5).

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S ources an d Li terat ure Aid, Matthew and Cees Wiebes (eds), Secrets of Signals Intelligence during the Cold War and Beyond (London: Frank Cass, 2001). Aldrich, Richard J., The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence (London: John Murray, 2001). ——— ‘Policing the past: official history, secrecy and British intelligence since 1945’, English Historical Review 119/483 (2004), pp. 922–53. ——— GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency (London: HarperPress, 2010). Andrew, Christopher, Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community (London: Heinemann, 1985). ——— Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (New York: Knopf, 2009). Andrew, Christopher and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990). ——— Instructions from the Centre: Top Secret Files on KGB Foreign Operations, 1975–1985 (London: Sceptre, 1993). Andrew, Christopher and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West (London: Penguin, 2000). ——— The KGB and the World: The Mitrokhin Archive II (London: Penguin, 2006). Ball, Desmond and David Horner, Breaking the Codes: Australia’s KGB Network, 1944–1950 (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1998). Bamford, James, Body of Secrets: How America’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ Eavesdrop on the World (London: Arrow Books, 2002). Benson, Robert Louis and Michael Warner (eds), Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response, 1939–1957 (Washington DC: National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency, 1996). Berge, Anders, ‘Urholkad frivillighet: Sveriges repatriering av sovjetryska f.d. krigsfångar 1944–1945’, Militärhistorisk tidskrift 12 (1990), pp. 217–33. Breindel, Eric and Herbert Romerstein, The Venona Secrets: The Soviet Union’s World War II Espionage Campaign against the United States and How America Fought Back: A Story of Espionage, Counterespionage, and Betrayal (New York: Basic, 1999). Budiansky, Stephen, Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II (New York: Touchstone, 2002). Bulgakov, Mikhail, The Master and Margarita, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London: Penguin, 2016). Cain, Frank, The Australian Security Intelligence Organization: An Unofficial History (London: Frank Cass, 1994). ——— ‘Venona in Australia and its long-term ramifications’, Journal of Contemporary History 35/2 (2000), pp. 231–48. Cave Brown, Anthony, The Secret Servant: The Life of Sir Stewart Menzies, Churchill’s Spymaster (London: Sphere, 1988). Chase, William J., Enemies Within the Gates? (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).

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230

Index AB Aerotransport 47 Abakumov, Viktor 97 Abwehr xB-Dienst 43 Aeroflot 54 alcohol abuse 83, 132 Aldrich, Richard 215, 222, 224 All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions 60 Andropov, Yuri 193 Ann Arbor 18 Antonov, Viktor 109, 113–14, 131 Antwerp 16 Apraksino 70 Archangel 46–7, 67 Åström, Sverker (cover name Osa) x, xiii, 183–6 asylum 3, 11, 15, 141, 143, 162–3, 165, 167, 189 Australia xi–xii, 4–5, 7, 45, 54, 60, 100–2, 105–9, 111–16, 121–2, 124–6, 132, 135–41, 146–53, 156, 160–1, 163–5, 167, 169–72, 175, 179, 189, 191–3 Department of External Affairs 104, 106, 113, 155–6, 172–3, 175 Australian Communist Party 5, 103, 171 Australian Labor Party xii, 172 Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) 1–3, 5, 102, 106, 111, 116–17,

119, 121–4, 127, 131–3, 135–40, 142–4, 146, 148, 151–2, 156, 160–3, 166, 168, 170–1, 174–5, 177, 179–80, 185, 189–92 Baltic countries 50 Baltic refugees 85 Barcelona 18 Beckett, H. C. 136–7, 140 Belgrade 78 Beria, Lavrentiy xi, 4, 34, 38–9, 44, 77, 94, 98, 129–30, 132, 134–6, 142, 169, 200 Beria clique 135 Berkeley 186–7 Berlin 68 Berns Salonger 52 Bialoguski, Michael (cover names Diabolo, Grigoriy) xii, 116–18, 123–5, 129, 131–2, 136–40, 142–3, 190, 195, 211, 220 Black Chamber 29–30 Black Friday 147 Blunt, Anthony 16, 176–7 BOAC 3, 161 Bokii, Gleb 31–2, 34–5, 199 Brandt, Willy 63, 70, 205 Branting, Georg 181–2, 218 Branting, Hjalmar 181–2, 218 Britain xii, 46–7, 68, 101–2, 149, 152

231

I ndex British Security Coordination (BSC) 12 Broadway 120, 168 Bromma Airport 46–7 Budapest 51, 65, 70 Bulgakov, Mikhail 198, 200 Burgess, Guy xii, 16, 149–53, 162, 176–7, 215 Butovo 33–4, 39

Commonwealth 102, 120–1, 123 Communist International (Comintern) 48–9, 62, 69, 91–2, 183 conveyor belt 25 Cooma 114, 129, 138 courier 48–9, 56, 84, 92 cover name x–xi, 3, 65, 68–71, 74–5, 80–1, 85–6, 104, 112, 114, 116, 137, 146, 181, 183, 187 cover post xi–xii, 44, 51, 58–60, 67, 79, 100, 106, 109, 115, 139, 142 Crimea 24 Crown Attorney’s Office (Canada) 9–10 cryptology 28, 30 Czechoslovakia 91, 106

Cambridge Spy Ring x, 6, 16, 77, 149, 154, 175–7 Canada 9, 11–12, 14, 17, 74 Canadian Department of Justice 9–10 Canberra ix, xi–xii, 102–3, 105, 107–9, 114, 121, 126, 142–3, 147, 150–1, 156, 165, 191 Cape Town 47 le Carré, John 175, 197 Carter, Leo 139 ‘The Case’ 106, 146, 172–3 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 92 Chernov, Fyodor 184–5 Chernyshev, Ilya 70 Chifley, Ben 106, 122, 172 Churchill, Winston 151, 153 cipher clerk xi, 3, 8, 41–2, 44, 59, 61, 64, 67, 76, 79–80, 83, 106, 109, 111, 114, 128, 141–2, 147, 152, 185 cipher keys 29 cipher machine 30 cipher systems 29, 147 clandestine meeting 124, 129 Clayton, Walter (alias Klod) 103–6, 210 code-breaking 30, 148 codes 29, 103, 127, 148, 157 Cold War 1, 3–4, 6, 13, 28, 105–6, 141, 149, 174, 186, 189, 194 Committee for State Security (KGB) 2

Dabbert, Emma 84–5 Dagens Nyheter x, 182 Danielsson, Otto xiii, 181–3, 185, 218 Danube 94, 100 Darwin ix, 3–5, 135, 153, 158, 161–2, 167–8, 170, 193 Government House 167 Special Branch 13, 149, 161–2 defection x, 1, 3–5, 15, 82, 122, 135, 137, 141–3, 147, 149, 151–3, 155, 166–71, 173–4, 177, 180, 189, 191–2, 194 defector 2–3, 6, 10–11, 13–14, 16, 18, 83, 120, 137, 144–5, 147, 149, 159, 174, 178, 189, 191, 193 Dekanozov, Vladimir 44 Diabolo (cover name) 116–18, 125, 136–7 Dimitriyev, Vladimir 107 diplomatic relations 60, 102, 169, 172

232

I ndex diplomats 46, 55, 58, 60–1, 75, 107, 119–20, 126, 132, 143, 155, 169 documents 2, 9–10, 15, 60, 88, 103–4, 106, 109, 114, 119, 121, 142–4, 146, 149, 152, 155, 157, 170–1, 173–4, 177–8, 182 Donovan, William 45 Durban 47 Dzerzhinsky Square 23–4, 188

Gordievsky, Oleg 200, 202, 215, 224 Gothenburg 46, 87–9 Gothenburg traffic (safe-conduct vessels) 46 Gouzenko, Igor xi, 8–13, 15, 82, 121, 141, 145, 147, 178, 192, 195–6, 212, 218 Gouzenkova, Anna 8, 13 Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) 147–9 Grafström, Sven 12, 196–7, 207 Granovsky, Anatoli 11–12, 14, 83, 196, 207 Graur, Andrei 67 Great Terror 25–6, 32–9, 49, 68, 84, 97, 134–5, 155 Greens (cover name) 77, 168 Grigoriy (cover name) 116, 118 Gripen 46 GRU xi, 8–9, 14, 27–8, 31, 57, 62–4, 83, 92–3, 100, 103, 120, 175 Grupp Norr 64 Gubanov 106, 109, 112 Guesde, Jules 182 Gulag Archipelago 32 Günther, Christian 12

Edmunds, Keith 161–2, 164 Egypt 47 El Alamein democrats 48 Enbom, Fritiof 64, 124, 204, 212 Enormouz (cover name) 9 Erlander, Tage 218 Evatt, Herbert Vere ix, xii, 5, 113, 170–5, 217 ‘Exploitation of the Petrovs’ (intelligence operation) 5–6, 141, 147, 169, 179 extrajudicial executions 14 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 17 Feoktistov, Mikhail 18–19 Finland xii, 48–9, 65–6, 70, 85, 96, 184 Winter War 49, 67 Fitin, Pavel 39, 62, 97 Foreign Office xii, 15, 149–50 French Indochina 114

Hamblen, Derek 159 Harbin 68 Helsinki 66–7, 69, 73, 77, 96, 192 Henriksen, Hans 63 Hill, Brian 169 Hill, Ted 146 Hollis, Roger x, xii, 122, 146, 176 Homer (cover name) 149 see also Maclean, Donald Hoover, J. Edgar 17, 175, 196, 220

Gärdet 54 Gellért, Andor 70, 205 Gellért Hill 70 Generalov, Nikolai xi, 129, 138–9, 142–4, 155–8, 165 Germany 12, 28, 35, 48–50, 63–5, 69, 77, 98 Gestapo 49–50, 62 Golitsyn, Anatoliy 192, 220

illegals 14, 49, 126

233

I ndex ‘in-depth study’ (cultivation for recruitment) 71 Indian Ocean 46 Inostranny Otdel (INO) 35, 42 Institute of Foreign Languages 94, 96 Institute of International Relations 94 Institute No. 100 92 interrogation 6, 18, 25, 145–6, 148–9, 178–9, 182 Intourist 54–5 Istanbul 15–16, 153

KGB x, 2, 4, 6–7, 15, 18, 140, 177, 188, 191–3 Directorate K 193 Eighth Department 193 Second Chief Directorate 193 Kharkevitch, Colonel 27–8 kidnapping 164, 169 Kirsanov, Pavel 70, 75, 79, 89, 98, 101 Kislitsyn, Philip ix, xi, 3, 109, 115, 126, 131, 135, 139, 150–3, 157–60, 162–4, 166–8, 175–6, 193, 211, 217 Klara (cover name) x, 65, 73–8, 85, 98, 182–3, 186–7, 205–6, 218–19 see also Stridsberg, Augustine ‘Gusti’ Klod group (cover name) 104–6, 113, 146 Kollontai, Alexandra 55, 57–8, 65, 70, 84–5, 96, 181, 203, 208 Komitet Informatsii (KI) 91 Illegal Department 98 Scandinavian Department 96–7, 184 Kommunalka 20–2 Komsomol 24–5, 34, 37–8, 42, 53, 76, 81, 83 korabl smerti 33 Korea 116 Korotkov, Alexander 98–9 Kovalenok, Evgenii 155, 157 Kravchenko, Victor 141 Krivitsky, Walter xi, 14–15, 35, 197 Krivosh, Roman xi, 35–6, 38, 41, 43 Kronstadt 42 Kungsgatan 74 Kunin, David 26, 28, 35 Kuznetsky Most 27 Kuybyshev 43–4, 47, 102

Jack (V. Petrov’s dog) 129, 139, 143 Japan 9, 28–9 Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs 29 Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) 23 Kalugin, Oleg 193 Kandakova, Lena 70, 84–5 Karlshorst 77 Karpinsky ix, 4, 158–9, 162 Karpitch, Peter 138 Kartsev, Aleksei 20–2, 33, 188 Kartsev, Ivan 20–2, 33, 188 Kartsev, Valentin 20–2, 33, 188 Kartseva, Daria xi, 24, 35, 37–8, 45, 66, 90, 165, 191–4, 198, 211–17, 224 Kartseva (alias Petrova), Evdokia Alexeyevna xi, 24, 35, 37–8, 45, 66, 90, 165, 191–4, 198, 211–17, 224 Kartseva, Irina xi, 24, 35, 37–8, 45, 66, 90, 165, 191–4, 198, 211–17, 224 Kartseva, Tamara Alexeyevna xi, 24, 35, 37–8, 45, 66, 90, 165, 191–4, 198, 211–17, 224

234

Index Lefortovo (prison) 33 Leggett, George 179 Leningrad 90 Leydin, Reginald ix, xii, 161–5, 167, 170, 216 Liberator (bomber) 47 Liddell, Guy 176 Lifanov, Nikolai xi, 107–9, 115, 126–9, 131, 136, 144, 213 Life magazine 17 Lindholmen Shipyard 87 Line EM 65, 94, 100, 113, 115–16 Line SK 65, 80–4, 94, 100, 111, 113, 115, 176 liquidations 39, 193 London 3, 6, 12, 14–16, 58, 63, 67, 101, 106–7, 124, 132, 147, 151–4, 159, 168, 172–3, 176 Lubyanka (prison) 13, 18, 97, 127, 146 Lubyanka (street) 7, 20, 23, 27, 31, 93, 97

MI5 x, xii, 1–3, 6, 12–14, 105–6, 119–22, 124, 131–3, 135–6, 141, 145–9, 151–4, 156, 161–2, 166, 168, 171–80, 186, 194 D1 branch 148, 194 Security Liaison Officer (SLO) 121, 147 MI6 6, 12–13, 120–1, 124, 133, 141, 153, 175, 180–1 Michigan 18 Milner, Ian 104 Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID) 27, 29 Cadre Department 92 Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) 2, 130 Ministry of State Security (MGB) 3, 90–9, 100–1, 107–9, 111–13, 119–20, 128, 130–1, 188 Misyarin, Ilya 86 Mitchell, Graham 153, 216 Mitrokhin, Vasili 197, 200, 205–6, 220, 224 mobile groups 14 Molotov, Vyacheslav 49, 92, 171–3 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact 49 Moscow 2–4, 7–8, 14–18, 20–4, 27–9, 32–3, 35, 42–5, 47–9, 53–4, 58–63, 67, 69–73, 76–86, 90–2, 95, 97–8, 101, 103–12, 114, 116, 121, 126, 128–32, 135–6, 138, 142–4, 147–8, 150, 153, 156–8, 165–6, 168–9, 171, 175, 183, 185–8, 191, 193–4 Moscow trials 92 Mosquito (bomber) 47 Mozambique 47 Murmansk 84

machinka (decoding machine) 30 Mackenzie King, William 10 Maclean, Donald (cover name Homer) xii, 16, 149–53, 162, 176–7, 215 Makarov, Semen 103–5, 108 Manhattan Project 13, 187 Manne, Robert 4, 7, 129, 195, 198, 211–14, 216–17 Maria (cover name) 17, 19, 71–2, 75, 84, 205 Martin, Arthur 177 Mascot ix, 1, 4, 6–7, 144, 153, 158, 160–2, 167 Melbourne 102, 115, 191, 193–4 Menzies, Robert xii, 4–5, 152, 170–3, 188, 220 Meurling, Per 67, 204

navodki 108 neighbours 37, 64, 84, 92, 134

235

I ndex New South Wales xii, 104, 114, 137 Nikitin, Mikhail 82, 207 non-person 157 North Africa 48 Northern Territory 161, 167 Norway 51, 63–4, 70, 96 Norwegian Naval Attaché (Stockholm) 63 Nosov, Fedor 103–4, 122 Nunn May, Alan 13, 196

Peach (cover name) 153–4 see also Philby, Kim Pearl Harbor 30 People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (NKID) 27 People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) 11 cadre personnel 58, 61 operational workers 61, 106 recruited agents 60–1, 111 unconscious informants 63–4, 75 Perpignan 17 Persia 46 personae non gratae 152 Petrov Affair 5–7, 152–3, 170, 172, 176 Petrov campaign 130 Philby, Kim (cover name Peach) x, xii, 12–13, 15–16, 120, 147, 153–4, 176, 196 Pioneers 24, 38, 98 Podpalova, Galina 28 Prague 101 Pravda 188 Proletarsky (alias Petrov), Vladimir Mikhailovich (cover names Moryak and Mikhail) xi, 41–3, 45, 90, 134, 192–3, 201, 206, 224 Purple 30

Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) 29 Office of Strategic Services (OSS) 45 Ollier, Rose-Marie 114, 125–6, 129 Olsen, Iver 50–1, 202 OMS (Odtel Mezhdunarodnoy Svyazi) 48–9, 103 one-time pad 61 Operation Cabin 12 ix, 3, 119, 123, 131–2, 139, 175, 177, 189 Orcades 101 Order of the Red Banner 43 Orlov, Alexander xii, 16–19, 35, 50, 68, 197–8 Orlova, Maria 19 Orlova, Veronika 17 Osa (cover name) x, 183–6 see also Åström, Sverker Östermalm 54 O’Sullivan, Fergan 113–14, 171 Ottawa xi, 8–9, 12 Ottawa Journal 9 our people 49, 62 Ovakimian, Gaik 45 overencrypted code 61

Raina, Colonel 101 Razin, Vassili (alias Roshchin) xii, 68–70, 73–7, 83–5, 96, 101, 176–7, 183, 204–6, 225 recruitment 6, 16, 53, 57, 62–3, 66, 70–2, 76, 81–2, 97, 106, 116, 126, 184 Red Cross 191 redefection 192 Reiss, Ignace 14, 197 reprimand 38, 53, 126, 128 Republicans (Spanish Civil War) 16

Pakhomov, Ivan 102, 106–9, 113–14, 117, 126–7, 210 Paris 14, 16–17, 114

236

Index residency (intelligence station) 2, 8–9, 18, 34, 44, 57, 59–63, 65–7, 69, 73, 77, 79–80, 82–6, 90, 92, 102–4, 106–11, 113–15, 126, 128, 139, 141, 143, 147–9, 154–5, 157, 176, 182, 184, 186–7 resident (chief of intelligence station) xi–xii, 2, 6, 14, 16, 18, 35, 45, 58–62, 66–70, 73, 76–7, 79–80, 92, 96, 98, 101, 103–9, 111–13, 126–8, 130, 135, 140–2, 155, 175–6, 181, 187 Richards, Ronald ix, xii, 137–46, 148, 167, 177, 191 Robertson, J. C. 148, 151, 166, 168, 194 Rote Kapelle 35 Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) 9–10, 12 Royal Commission on Espionage ix, 140, 152 Rybkin, Boris (alias Yartsev) xii, 66–7 Rybkina, Zoja (alias Yartseva, alias Voskresenskaya) xii xii Ryhninger, Werner 64

SK (Soviet Colony) 44, 65, 70, 80–4, 86, 94, 100, 111–13, 115, 143, 176 Skardon, Jim 146, 215, 220 Slutsky, Abram 34 small KI 94 SMERSH 97 Söderström, Thorsten 87 South Africa 46 Soviet Club (Stockholm) 53 Soviet Communist Party 24–5, 42 Control Commission 84 Soviet Legation (Stockholm) 2, 11, 14, 53–5, 57, 67–8, 83, 87–8, 112, 116, 124, 151–2, 169, 182 legation personnel 55, 60, 80, 83, 85, 106, 112 Soviet Military Attaché 57, 79 Soviet Naval Attaché 57, 86 Soviet prisoners of war 85–6 Soviet Trade Representation (Stockholm) 54 Soviet Union xii–xiii, 3, 11, 13, 20–1, 29, 43, 46, 48–51, 62, 65, 75, 80–2, 85–7, 90–3, 98, 102, 105, 112, 116, 124, 136, 138, 147, 152, 169–72, 174–5, 183 Soviet Embassy (Canberra) xi, 3, 10, 102, 114, 132, 139, 153, 159, 166–7, 171 Spanish Civil War 14, 16, 50, 183 Spanish Inquisition 37 Special Branch 13, 149, 161–2 Special Operations Executive 51 Spetsialnyi Otdel (Spets Otdel) 27–8, 30–2, 38–9, 41–4, 52, 90, 111, 134, 149 Anglo-Saxon Section 35 Japanese Section 28, 30, 90 Spitsbergen 94

Sadovnikov, Valentin xii, 101–2, 106–9, 112, 114, 127 Saint-Malo 150 von Scheliha, Rudolf 62 Schlögel, Karl 32–3, 198, 200 Shifr Odtel 79 Shungsky, Professor 28 Siberia 21, 23 SIFE (Security Intelligence Far East) 121, 132–3, 152, 175 Sigma (cover name) 112 Singapore 3, 121, 132, 135, 152–3, 158, 161, 168 Sinitsyn, Yelisei (alias Yelisiyev) xii, 85, 96–8, 185, 209

237

I ndex Sydney Morning Herald 113

Spry, Charles ix, xii, 5, 137, 143, 147, 152, 162–5, 171, 173–4, 177–8, 191–2, 220 Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The 1 State Department (US) 29 State Political Directorate (GPU) 23 Stalin, Josef 14, 16–18, 21, 32, 35–6, 38, 41, 55, 84, 90–4, 127, 129, 135, 169, 181, 190, 196–202, 208, 212 Stalingrad 48 democrats 48 Stimson, Henry L. 30 Stockholm x, xii, 2, 11, 14, 46, 48, 50–5, 57–60, 63–70, 73–4, 76–80, 83–7, 89–90, 96, 98, 100–1, 103, 123–4, 127, 165, 176, 180–2, 184, 186–7 Stridsberg, Augustine ‘Gusti’ (cover name Klara) x, xiii, 182–3, 186–7 Sudoplatov, Pavel 197, 221 surveillance 7, 13, 19, 44, 49, 52, 58, 60, 67–9, 72–4, 76, 79, 82, 84, 86–9, 93, 102, 111, 115, 119–20, 122–4, 138, 149, 176, 182, 184–5 Sweden xiii, 6, 11, 44–51, 54–5, 57, 60, 62, 64, 67, 74, 80, 83, 85–6, 89, 96, 98, 124, 146, 176, 180–4 German transit traffic 50 Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) 27, 29 Swedish Communist Party 49 Swedish Security Police (Säpo) x, 2, 6, 67 surveillance apartment 87 Sydney 1–2, 101–3, 106–7, 109, 113, 115–17, 122, 124, 129, 132, 135, 137, 140, 142–3, 155, 185 Russian Club 115, 117

Taganka (prison) 33 Taradin, Alexei 63, 83–4, 86, 207 TASS 54, 59, 102–3, 106, 109, 113, 115, 122, 171 Tennant, Peter 51, 202 Thatcher, Margaret 177 Third Man, The 1, 153 Thwaites, Michael 189, 220–1 Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy 175 Trotsky, Lev 14, 77 Trotskyites 64 Tsarist Army 28 Turkey 15 Turkish Consulate (Moscow) 16 Ufa 44 Undén, Östen 11–12 University of California 186 Urals 44 US Army’s Signal Intelligence Service 30, 105 Varsonofyevsky Lane 20, 27, 188 Venona telegrams 149, 153 Vetrov, Mikhail 96–7 Vienna 68, 71–2 Virginia 15 Visselsky 107 Vladivostok 46 VOKS (All-Union Society for Cultural Relations Abroad) 59, 115 Volkov, Konstantin 15–16, 153, 197 Vyshinsky, Andrei 92, 198, 200 Wallenberg, Raoul 51, 97, 201–3, 205, 209 Washington xiii, 12, 15, 29, 45, 58, 121, 149

238

I ndex Washington Naval Conference (1921–2) 29 Weisband, William 147 Wennerström, Stig 87, 186, 208, 219 White Army (Russian) 26 Windeyer, Victor 174 World Peace Council 116

Yagoda, Genrikh 134 Yalta 90 Yarkov ix, 4, 158–9 Yezhov, Nikolai 34, 38, 134, 199 Zabotin, Colonel 8–9 Zurich 132

239