The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939–1945. Max Hastings
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an Englishman named Alexander Foote: ‘With his mild eyes blinking behind glasses, he looked exactly like almost anyone to be found in any suburban train anywhere in the world.’ Moscow instructed its man to do nothing until Europe erupted. Radó settled down quite happily with his maps, which enabled him to make a living without much recourse to GRU funds. When his handler was recalled to Moscow during the Purges, Radó for a time lost contact with his chiefs. But he made useful local friends, some of them communists, others not. One was a Swiss socialist, Otto Punter, who admired the Soviet Union and had worked for the Republicans in Spain. Punter forged connections in Germany, and with some German émigrés in Switzerland such as Baron Michel von Godin. Von Godin recruited the Vichy French press attaché, Louis Suss, codename ‘Salter’. The Chinese press attaché Pao Hsien Chu – ‘Polo’ – was another source, and Punter also had connections with influential local Catholics.
Radó’s comrade Alexander Foote always claimed to have been an adventurer rather than a communist ideologue. A round-faced, bespectacled, mildly seedy young Englishman, in September 1938 he returned from service in Spain with the International Brigade. A few months later, one of Moscow’s British recruiters offered him unspecified new employment for the workers’ cause in Switzerland. Cheap melodrama was not lacking. In obedience to instructions, Foote reported to the main post office in Geneva at noon one day, wearing a white scarf and holding a leather belt. He was approached by a woman who fulfilled her side of the identification procedure by holding a string shopping bag and an orange. She asked in English where he had bought his belt, and he replied implausibly, at an ironmonger’s shop in Paris. When he had then asked where he could buy an orange like hers, she introduced herself. She was ‘Sonya’, Ursula Hamburger* of the GRU, whom Foote was pleased to find was no squat commissar, but instead an attractive woman of thirty-one, with ‘a good figure and even better legs’. This remarkable personality was the daughter of a Berlin economist. At the age of eleven she was briefly a child actress before taking up an alternative career in espionage. She was already a veteran of exploits in China for which she had been awarded the Order of the Red Banner.
Hamburger instructed Foote to travel to Munich, establish himself in the city, learn German and make friends. He was given 2,000 Swiss francs and told to meet her again in three months in Lausanne – once again, at the post office. Keeping this rendezvous after a German sojourn that was uneventful save for a chance glimpse of Hitler lunching in a restaurant, he was told that he was now on the GRU payroll as a ‘collaborator’, at a salary of US$150 a month plus reasonable expenses. Given the cover name ‘Jim’, and various means of making contact if ‘Sonya’ disappeared for any reason, he was then sent back to Munich with an advance of US$900 in cash. Nothing significant happened thereafter until in April 1939 he was visited by an old International Brigade comrade from Spain, Len Brewer, British-born son of German parents, whom he appears to have introduced to Hamburger, who promptly recruited him. In August he was summoned to yet another meeting, this time at Hamburger’s home, a chalet at Caux-sur-Montreux where she lived in incongruous bourgeois domesticity with her two children, Maik and Janina, and an old German nurse. Foote was disconcerted by the casualness with which his hostess left components of her wireless transmitter lying around the house.
The GRU ring in Switzerland was as traumatised as many other communists around the world by the August 1939 Nazi–Soviet Pact. Foote felt that it hit Hamburger even harder than himself; that her faith in the omniscience of the Party was shattered: ‘I think that from that time onwards her heart was not in the work’ – this seems implausible, since she later became courier for the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs, and died an avowed Stalinist. Desperate to get out of Switzerland, she divorced her husband and married Len Brewer. Initially, according to Foote, this was merely an arrangement of convenience to secure a ‘shoe’ – a passport – but then the couple fell in love. Their plans were momentarily threatened when their maid, Lisa, became disaffected and telephoned the British consulate to denounce them anonymously as communist spies. But the girl’s English was so poor that nobody at the other end understood, or at least took notice.
Days before the outbreak of war, Foote boarded a train bound for Germany once more, only to find his handler suddenly pushing her way along the carriage to reach him, just before departure time. She told him to get off, fast. New orders had come from Moscow: war was imminent; he must stay in Switzerland. During the period that followed, in which the ‘Lucy’ Ring was temporarily dormant, while living at a small pension in Montreux both Foote and Len Brewer learned how to operate a shortwave radio transmitter. They practised on Hamburger’s set, though its performance was not improved by being buried in her garden between transmissions – then waited to be given messages to transmit to Moscow.
Even as the GRU’s Swiss networks were bedding down, Centre’s German sources were already producing information of extraordinary quality. The first musician in what became known to history as the ‘Red Orchestra’ was recruited following an approach to the Soviet embassy one day in 1929, by an ex-Berlin policeman named Ernst Kur. He offered his services as an informant, and was promptly recruited by the local NKVD resident as agent A/70. Kur, a rackety and often drunken boor, had been dismissed from the police, but proved to have a critical contact in its counter-intelligence branch, who was soon designated by the Russians as agent A/201. On 7 September Moscow messaged its Berlin station: ‘We are very interested in your new agent, A/201. Our only fear is that you have got yourselves into one of the most dangerous predicaments where the slightest indiscretion on the part of either A/201 or A/70 could lead to multiple misfortunes. We think it necessary to look into the issue of a special channel of communication with A/201.’ Investigation showed that it was A/201 – an officer named Willy Lehmann, who had prompted Kur’s approach to the Russians, using him as a cut-out during their exploratory dealings.
Lehmann was born in 1884, and served twelve years in the Kaiser’s navy before becoming a policeman. His NKVD file spoke in the highest terms of his character, though noting the existence of a long-term mistress, Florentina Liverskaya, a thirty-eight-year-old seamstress who lived and worked at 21 Blumenstrasse. She was described, somewhat ungenerously, as a short woman with reddish hair and a plump face. When Kur started using his payments from the Soviet embassy to fund extravagant drinking sprees, Lehmann and his handler agreed that this now redundant intermediary must be got out of the way. With unusual sensitivity for Centre, instead of being pushed under a tram, in 1933 the dissolute ex-cop was rehoused in Sweden, where he passed the rest of his days as a small trader, occasionally moonlighting as an informant.
Lehmann, codenamed ‘Breitenbach’, thereafter became one of Moscow’s most valued German agents. For some time his handler was Vasily Zarubin, an NKVD star. Born in 1894, highly intelligent and personable though largely self-educated, Zarubin served successively in China and Europe as an ‘illegal’, latterly under cover as a Czech engineer. A cheerfully gregarious figure, though with ample blood on his hands, he spoke several languages and forged a warm relationship with Lehmann. Although Zarubin occasionally gave the policeman modest sums of money, Lehmann never appeared greedy, and seemed keen to assist the Russians simply because he disliked his own nation’s government – an animosity that became much more marked after the Nazis gained power.
Lehmann gave Moscow details about the structure and activities of Germany’s various intelligence organisations, and warned of forthcoming operations against Soviet interests. He provided samples of Abwehr codes, and passed on gossip about Nazi power struggles. He himself worked latterly in the Gestapo’s Department IVE, ultimately under Himmler’s control, and was made responsible for security at especially sensitive defence plants. Thus in 1935 he attended some early German rocket tests at Peenemünde, and produced a report on them which reached Stalin. He also acquired considerable information about other military and naval technological developments. As the Nazis tightened their grip during the 1930s, Lehmann became increasingly nervous about meeting Zarubin, or indeed any Soviet agent. He found himself under surveillance, as a result of a bizarre coincidence. A woman quarrelled with her lover, and denounced him to the authorities as a Russian spy: this proved to be another Gestapo officer, also named Lehmann. The muddle was eventually cleared up, and the shadow was lifted from ‘Breitenbach’. But in 1935 he asked for a false passport in case he had to run in a hurry, and