CHAPTER 1

"Humint" by Defaultand the Problem of Trust

Soviet Intelligence, 1917–1941

Jonathan Haslam

As far as I am concerned, reliance upon secret intelligence also carries littleconviction.

—People's Commissarfor Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov, 11 April 1939

The Bolsheviks who seized power in Russia under Lenin on 7November 1917 believed they had no need of a foreign intelligencenetwork for the world socialist revolution to triumph, because hostile capitaliststates would by definition disappear.

Indeed, the Bolsheviks expected the focus of world revolution to movefrom backward Russia to advanced, industrialized Germany. The revolutionwas thus at this early stage deeply internationalist in outlook: hence thecreation of the Communist International (Comintern) in March 1919. "Fromprovincial Moscow, from half-Asiatic Russia, we will embark on the expansiveroute of European revolution," Trotsky boasted. "It will lead us to a worldrevolution. Remember the millions of the German petite bourgeoisie, awaitingthe moment for revenge. In them we will find a reserve army and bringup our cavalry with this army to the Rhine to advance further in the formof a revolutionary proletarian war. We will repeat the French revolution, butin the reverse geographical direction: the revolutionary armies will advancenot from the West to the East, but from the East to the West. The decisivemoment has come. You can almost literally hear the steps of history." Eventhe dour, skeptical Stalin crowed about moving "the centre of revolution fromMoscow to Berlin." Yet uprisings in Germany collapsed ignominiously, andthe Bolsheviks hesitated to risk all on one throw of the die.

Since the Bolsheviks expected a Europe-wide revolution within years, ifnot months, of defeating counterrevolutionary armies on Russian soil, theSoviet regime was taken by surprise and forced to improvise foreign intelligenceat short notice when its plans faltered and fell through after the Polishdefeat of the Red Army outside Warsaw in 1920 and the failures first ofthe Communist Märzaktion (March action) in Germany in 1921 and then ofthe "German October" in November 1923. The climate thus oscillated wildlybetween revolutionary optimism and deep despondency. Throughout, thecounterrevolutionary emigration and its allies within Russia—a fifth column—remaineda much feared (and exaggerated) focus of attention. Theentire situation was regarded as fluid. There was no sense of permanence.This provides a critical clue as to the nature of the Soviet Union that emergedunder Stalin from 1929 and to the story that unfolds: matters domestic necessarilyoverrode matters foreign. The Great Terror (1937–1939) that cost the RedArmy over half its officer corps and much more besides proved the dreadfulapotheosis of this perverse order of priorities.

After Lenin's death on 21 January 1924, this deterioration, which hadbecome the focus of anxiety in his last letters, became ever more pronounced:hence the irresistible rise of Stalin, who, although Georgian, personified Russianprovincialism. Hard though it may be to believe, as late as 1930 the Politburostill underscored its first priority as "exposing and penetrating centresof pernicious émigrés, independently of their location." The kidnapping ofthe counterrevolutionary leader General Evgenii Miller from Paris seven yearslater, at a time when the Soviet Union was in alliance with France, underlinedStalin's continued preoccupation, regardless of the cost in trust with thePopular Front régime. With war looming, on 10 May 1939, Pavel Sudoplatovwas appointed deputy head of foreign intelligence within the GUGB/NKVD.He was astounded to be briefed by the new Commissar Lavrentii Beria andStalin himself to the effect that the most important task that lay ahead was theliquidation of arch-rival in exile, Leon Trotsky.

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Having ejected the forces of General Anton Denikin from the Ukraine andthrown back Józef Pilsudski's offensive from Poland in the summer of 1920,the Bolsheviks switched from counting on spontaneous uprisings abroad toaiding revolutions at the point of the bayonet. Poland was always crucial.It bridged Bolshevik Russia with the long-hoped for revolution in WeimarGermany. "We decided to use our armed forces," Lenin told a conferenceof the Russian Communist Party, "in order to help sovietise Poland. Out ofthat arose the policy for the future as a whole." This was not done throughParty resolutions, but "we said to ourselves that we must make contact bymeans of bayonets—has the social revolution of the proletariat in Poland notmatured?" It had not.

When Mikhail Tukhachevskii marched on Warsaw in July–August 1920,Lenin stubbornly persisted in the extravagantly misplaced belief that successled by the Red Army was just around the corner. This was no accident. Suchillusions were deeply embedded in this new regime. A fallacious confidence inthe power of Soviet arms combined with willful misperception of conditionsabroad was to continue, one way or another, throughout the life of the Sovietregime and at considerable cost to the efficient operation of its intelligence services.In 1947, Major-General Sir John Sinclair, who later headed MI6, wrote that"it was not generally realised that the controlling element in Russia had virtuallyno correct appreciation of developments in the outside world, and that theyrelied for their information on various channels who were successively bent onfeeding their superiors with such information as they thought would be mostacceptable. This inevitably led to the controlling element receiving a progressivelyexaggerated form of information on foreign affairs."

Faced with Lenin's obstinate disregard for the reality za kordonom—abroad—KarlRadek, himself a Pole, pointed out that "we must refrain fromthe practice of using bayonets to sound out the international situation. Bayonetswould be good if we needed to aid a particular revolution; but for seeinghow the land lies in this or that country we have another weapon—Marxism,and for this we do not have to call upon Red Army soldiers." Of course,Marxism is not an entirely unproblematic prism through which to view theworld and, even if it were, one in any case needed to know what preciselythe other side had in mind. After all, they were not Marxists. The only earlygesture in the direction of reality had been the hurried establishment in April1920 of a foreign department within the semi-autonomous Special Section(Osobii Otdel) of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police.

Confronted with the sobering fact of "colossal defeat" in Poland, Leninsounded the retreat but warned that "in spite of complete failure in thisinstance, our first defeat, we will time and again switch from a defensivepolicy to the offensive until we have finally beaten all of them." The basicproblem was not stated, however: those in Moscow knew little of how Polesreally felt. In September, the Politburo thus laid out the case for reorganizingforeign intelligence along more effective lines: "We went to Warsaw blindlyand suffered a catastrophe. Bearing in mind the complex international situationin which we find ourselves, the question of our intelligence servicemust be made the appropriate priority. Only a serious, properly constitutedintelligence service will save us from blindly meeting the unexpected." As aresult, the Cheka finally acquired its foreign department—INO (InostrannyiOtdel) —on 20 December 1920.

Only with time and as revolution stubbornly failed to appear in the capitalistWest did Moscow take a firm hand on foreign intelligence—both signalsintelligence (sigint) and human intelligence (humint)—to enhance theconduct of diplomacy and the operations of Comintern. But the relationshipbetween the world of intelligence and the world of the revolution was an awkwardone. Given a dictator's reliance on the secret police, it might be supposedthat intelligence professionals would be favored, but Stalin "was his own intelligenceboss" and "reacted to intelligence material with irritation," seniorofficers recalled. This is scarcely surprising given the annoying way thatmaterial could all too frequently point to a reality that did not correspondwith his own perceptions.

At first the Bolshevik leadership carelessly trusted in the security of theirciphers. This is not unusual. A veteran of Government CommunicationsHeadquarters in the United Kingdom has pointed out that in cryptographythe "inherent advantages of the defence are matched by its scope for humanfrailty and the greater intellectual challenge presented by the offence; statesare always confident about the security of their own ciphers and find it hardto exclude laziness in their use." Indeed, in 1921, when Britain was reorganizingthe system for making and breaking codes and ciphers, professionalsmet with skepticism from users: diplomats in particular. One knowledgeablefigure from the secret world complained bitterly of the "general apathy thatexists in these matters and the disbelief in the powers of cryptographers."Moscow was no different in this from London. It is therefore not particularlysurprising to learn that Soviet ciphers took a long while to become safe; andonly became so after officials were repeatedly reminded of just how vulnerablethey were.

Whereas diplomats in Britain were the spoiled beneficiaries of effectivedecryption against Soviet Russia in particular, the People's Commissariat ofForeign Affairs (Narkomindel) was forever nagging the leadership about theunsatisfactory state of cryptography and decryption. Neither for the first northe last time, Commissar Chicherin protested to Lenin on 20 August 1920 thatthe "decryption of our ciphers ... is entirely within the bounds of possibility."This was not least because the existing staff were grossly overloaded."An increase in the number of our cryptographers is now a task of primaryimportance," Chicherin wrote to the commissar for finance, Nikolai Krestinsky,on 1 September 1920. The consequences of failing to act on this didnot take long to make themselves felt. Indeed, throughout the negotiationsbetween July 1920 and March 1921 that led to the de facto recognition of theBolshevik government by the British, London was reading Soviet ciphers.And the Russians more than once became aware of that fact. The trouble was,in the fevered atmosphere of revolution and conspiracy, it was all too easy forChekists and, indeed, for Lenin himself, to assume that treachery lay behindthe problem. Cuts in government spending after the inauguration of theNew Economic Policy only made matters worse. Given the persistent priorityaccorded to the threat of counterrevolution, where human intelligence was ata premium, it was only too easy to neglect cryptography as a sphere of activitymarginal to the success of the revolution.

Lenin had handed the job of setting up a reliable interdepartmental cryptographicservice to the Cheka. In January 1921, the ruling collegium agreedto convene a meeting of all departments concerned: foreign affairs, military,foreign trade, and Cheka. Gleb Bokii, an ethnic Ukrainian, represented theCheka. He had joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1900 andhad taken part in both the 1905 revolution and the 1917 coup. In the process, hehad been arrested twelve times and exiled to Siberia twice. Bokii had trainedas a hydrologist, but he was not appointed for his skills in mathematics. Byall accounts a pathological, gloomy disciplinarian and a tough individualist,he had acquired a fearsome reputation hunting down counterrevolutionariesin Turkestan. Bokii was tasked with defining the functions of the new serviceand appointed to head a new eighth special department, mandated bythe "small" Council of People's Commissars, chaired by Lenin, on 5 May.This was named the Special Department (Spetsotdel or SPEKO). Bokii alsojoined the Cheka's ruling collegium in July at the initiative of its director,Felix Dzerzhinsky. The fact that a scourge of counterrevolutionaries wasplaced in such a position indicates the order of priorities. Bokii had also beena leading member of the Party underground for two decades in Saint Petersburg,however, creating and using various codes and ciphers. He resisted thecreeping process of Stalinization, and as a result, his relations with the generalsecretary deteriorated. In the early 1930s, Stalin tried and failed to have himremoved.

The Spetsotdel had the unique privilege of autonomy. Bokii communicateddirectly with the Politburo and Sovnarkom (the Council of People'sCommissars) without intermediary. The department had six, later seven, sectionsof which cryptographic work in the strict sense occupied only three—thesecond, third, and fourth. Consisting of seven members and headedby F. Tikhomirov, the second section dealt with theoretical issues and thepreparation of codes and ciphers. The third section, initially with only threemembers, was headed by the deputy chief of the department, Eikhmanis,and managed the process of delivering codes and ciphers to establishmentsabroad. The fourth and largest section, composed of eight members and runby Bokii's assistant A. Gusev, had the job of "breaking foreign and anti-sovietciphers and codes and deciphering documents." It was the job of the fifth sectionto obtain foreign codes and ciphers.

The department was no great success, however. Progress in decryptionwas disappointingly slow. A few code breakers remained from the tsaristservice—V. I. Krivosh-Nemanich, I. A. Zybin, and I. M. Yamchenko, amongothers—but the Bolsheviks sorely lacked cryptographers who were competentin foreign languages—a problem also under the tsar, and one that rivalpowers did not face, except from injudicious choice. The absence of linguistswas a dilemma also faced by the Inotdel (INO) as a whole. Now a part of theCheka's successor, the GPU (after the formation of the USSR, the OGPU),the INO became known as the INOGPU. But the OGPU did not yet have theunchallenged preeminence it was to acquire under Stalin. Relations betweenthe Narkomindel at Kuznetsky Most and its "near neighbors" the INOGPU,next door at the Lubyanka, were ever uneasy. The Narkomindel depended onreliable intelligence, but it was inclined to go its own way when opportunityknocked. This inevitably led to disputes over turf, mediated in March 1923by the indefatigable Party secretary Vyacheslav Molotov, who, as often happened,was asked to chair a Politburo committee to resolve matters.

Iosif Unshlikht, deputy head of the OGPU, complained that "Latterly,increasing instances of direct approaches to Narkomindel from an array ofpeople with offers of a secret political character (for example, offers tenderedto comrades Chicherin and Petrushevich) are leading to parallel activityalongside GPU structures that are specially devised for intelligence work;inevitably leading both to completely unnecessary expenditure on foreigncurrency and to negative consequences of a political nature for the organs ofthe Narkomindel." The GPU asked the Politburo "to concentrate all varietiesof intelligence work (diplomatic, political) with which Narkomindel fromtime to time comes into contact exclusively in the organs of the GPU." And"when, in individual instances, representatives of Narkomindel are presentedwith this or that possibility in the field of intelligence work, the representativeof Narkomindel has to agree on his moves in advance with the GPU or itsorgans on the spot."

Relations between the two departments were not improved as a result.Perhaps only those between the OGPU and the Razvedupravleniya—militaryintelligence—were worse; and they "always fought violently." In a rathertransparent bid to gain a foothold within the Narkomindel, Dzerzhinskyproposed that his first deputy, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, join its ruling directorate—thecollegium. This would have given him the right to challenge theviews of the commissar and his deputies at Politburo meetings; somethingChicherin and his first deputy, Maxim Litvinov, were unlikely to view withequanimity. In the end, Litvinov and Menzhinsky would attend the Politburotogether, representing their different institutions.

Secure in its authority and with little sure instinct for the realities of theworld behind the lines, complacency continued in the Spetsotdel's creation ofsecure codes and ciphers. Even when the British revealed what they had readin the traffic with publication of Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon's ultimatumof 1923, the Bolsheviks still failed to sit up and take note. A diehard Tory governmentswept to power in Britain on the back of a red scare in October 1924.That owed something to the publication of a notorious forgery—the ZinovievLetter. This letter purported to emanate from the head of Comintern (theCommunist International), Grigorii Zinoviev, with instructions to the BritishCommunist Party concerning subversion of the armed forces, an entirelyplausible action given Comintern policy and practice.