In the last chapter I digressed from the main story to indulge in anecdotes about Moscow. The main thread was broken off at the meeting with the director.
Before he left me that memorable night when I felt I was on trial for my life, he had said that I would have to lie fallow in Russia for some time until things had quieted down and I had been forgotten by the counterespionage service of other powers. I protested violently against this. I explained with great force and eloquence that Russia had had its Revolution and that I had no intention of sitting quietly in Moscow when postwar conditions would make the rest of the world ripe for revolution. If the Centre was not prepared to use me for espionage work I demanded to be sent back to England to return to legal Party work there. This "revolutionary" zeal seemed to impress the director and he told me to work out a few alternative plans for possible espionage work abroad and put them down on paper for him to consider. We parted, with him convinced, I think, of my flaming enthusiasm for the cause in general and Soviet espionage in particular. That was the impression I wished to convey.
In fact my first six weeks in Moscow had convinced me that Nazi Germany as I had known it was a paradise of freedom as compared with Soviet Russia. I was determined to get out of it as soon as possible and return to a world where freedom was more than a propaganda phrase. The only way that I could get out alive was to feign enthusiasm for any espionage plan put up, earn on in Moscow as a good Communist till I was posted elsewhere, and then get out of the clutches of the Centre as fast as possible. I had done my best to help the Russians win their war but after I had seen them and their methods firsthand and at home I was determined not to help them win their peace.
I did not see the director again till about six months later, in September 1945, but I continued to receive lists of questions to answer; however, these now arrived only about once a week instead of almost daily. I duly replied to them and also sent off my suggestions regarding possible future employment. The only work I did for the Centre was to note down salient points of news and policy line which I was able to pick up from listening to foreign broadcasts on the short-wave set the director had sent me. About the time the set arrived I also received Soviet documentation which made me out to be Alexander Alexandrovitch Dymov, born in Madrid; the birthplace being of course to explain my faulty Russian.
Peace did not bring that return to normalcy which every Russian seemed to expect. The average inhabitant of Moscow seemed to have the idea that as soon as the shooting had stopped the shops would overnight fill with goods, the general theory being that these goods would be German. In fact the end of Lease-Lend resulted in a worsening of the ration for those who until then had been living on American goods bought in the special shops. Also, with the end of the war military movements seemed to go on at the same tempo. Many of the generals who came back from the West had only a few days' leave and then were transferred to the Southeast. The tension was not decreased by the construction and manning of even more balloon-barrage posts in and around Moscow after VE Day.
It was perfectly obvious from the talk of the generals, and especially their wives, and the propaganda line doled out by Vera, that the heat was about to be turned on Turkey and Iran. Vera explained the policy with great frankness. The war with Japan tied the hands of the Anglo-Saxon powers while neutral Russia had her hands free and could achieve her ambitions in the Southeast without interference, for if the worst came to the worst she could always hold the threat of a deal with Japan over the heads of her late allies. The dropping of the atom bomb put an end to this tense situation and enabled Russia to get her cheap gains in the Far East, though temporarily shelving her ambitions nearer home.
About six months after my arrival in Moscow, that is, about July, I was told that Rado had been brought by force to Russia from Cairo, and that I might be confronted with him. This never actually occurred but during the September visit from the director I was told the end of the Swiss affair.
This call was far less formal than the last, as the director was accompanied only by Vera and there were no skeletons in the shape of N.K.V.D. officers at the usual feast which celebrated the visit. The director stated that
Rado had been intensively interrogated, that a military mission had visited Switzerland, that the Centre was busy- investigating in Berlin, and that as a result of their findings there was nothing with which I could be reproached.
Rado on the other hand would be shot for negligence in allowing his cipher to fall into the hands of the Swiss police, for falsely reporting that the network in Switzerland was liquidated, and for embezzling some fifty thousand dollars. The bait which had lured Rado from the safety of Paris as far as the slums of Cairo had been a promise by the Centre to pay him eighty thousand dollars to liquidate the alleged debts of the network in Switzerland and a promise that he would be allowed to return to Paris from Moscow after a stay of only fourteen days. How an old fox like Rado fell for such an obvious lure | and embarked on the plane with me I cannot conceive, as he must have known that his misdemeanours would ultimately be found out. His wife, Helene, was still in Paris, but the director said that steps were being taken to try to get her back to Moscow. I do not know whether or not these were successful. She was a woman of intelligence and I should think it unlikely that she would put her head in the noose and go back to Moscow, in all probability to join her husband against a wall or be sent to the living death of an N.K.V.D. labour camp.
The director was also anxious to get Cissie back to Moscow and asked me if I could think up a suitable scheme to lure her there. She had apparently been interviewed by an agent of the Centre but had been reluctant to make the journey. In this she showed good sense, as the director had several bones to pick with her, not the least being her sending of the en clair telegram to Canada which the Centre was convinced had led to the unveiling of the Canadian spy case.
I was told that though it was against the general rule to send an agent abroad so soon after an assignment in which he had had trouble with the foreign police, the Centre were so short of good people that the director was making an exception in my case and was making arrangements for me to be sent off as soon as possible. He explained that the various networks in the United States had lain more or less fallow throughout the war but that they must now be rebuilt and reinforced as a matter of urgency in view of the "aggressive attitude" of that country. Before the war the network in the States had been principally occupied with industrial espionage, but now that the United States and Great Britain were the greatest potential enemies of the Soviet Union, all types of information were of great value and the network and sources were to be developed as fast and as extensively as possible.
As a result of wartime experience the main rules of the Centre, which had been occasionally allowed to lapse in the past, were to be rigidly enforced. All network chiefs were to live and direct their networks from outside the United States. I was to live in Mexico. There I would live on a genuine Canadian passport. The director added that they had not used the Canadian "cobbler" since before the war so that there might be some delay before the passport arrived. (See Appendix C.)
As a result of my new assignment I received from the Centre numerous books, magazines, newspapers, etc., published in Canada, America, and Mexico in order that I could "read myself in" and familiarise myself with recent developments in those countries. For practical a; well as cover reasons the Centre always requires an agent to have a good working knowledge of the political trends in the countries in which he is living and against which he is working. As I had only one idea, namely to get out of Russia and quit the service of the Centre forever, I naturally feigned great enthusiasm for the project. At last freedom seemed almost possible.
Any idea of a speedy departure from Russia was knocked on the head in November when my health broke down and I became seriously ill with a duodenal ulcer. A legacy from the hectic days of my work for the network in Switzerland, it had not been improved by Russian food and got so bad that I was taken to hospital where I remained for a month and then had a further month in a convalescent home.
I was taken to the Central Military Hospital in Moscow, which was reserved for senior officers and their families, and there I was treated with great kindness and efficiency. The hospital was most competently run on lavish lines, with at least as many doctors and nurses as there were patients. The sanatorium at Bolshova whither I went after my time in hospital was equally comfortable and efficient and I have the happiest memories of this period of my life in Moscow.
I was something of a mystery to my fellow patients as I was an obvious foreigner though I had Soviet documentation. One theory was that I was a high-up German officer, and one elderly general at Bolshova tried to have a conversation with me about military tactics. It was there that I made probably my only contribution to culture and enlightenment during my stay in Russia.
Playing cards were illegal in Russia, but many of the officer patients had brought back packs with them from Germany. I therefore taught all the patients (the sanatorium was mixed, with a preponderance of women) all the gambling I knew. If anyone ever finds a Russian abroad with a profound knowledge of the complexities of gin rummy or stud poker he probably learnt it from me during those winter days in Bolshova.
I returned to the flat in the early days of 1946 but was soon informed that my assignment to Mexico was off as the Canadian spy case had made it impossible for them to get Canadian passports. Vera continued to visit me weekly and she was obviously deeply worried over the Canadian affair, as both she and the director were being blamed for having allowed the organisation to be run against all the rules and regulations.
I gathered that the resident director for Canada had been withdrawn sometime in 1941. Sometime later the intelligence liaison member of the Canadian Communist Party had approached the official Soviet representative in Ottawa and informed him that they were in a position to obtain valuable scientific information. As, owing to wartime conditions, there was no possibility of sending out another resident director who could build up his network in the classic and secure way, the Centre was forced to organise on an ad hoc basis. They had been compelled to use regular members of the legation staff to handle the agents and sources, tasks for which they were not trained, and their position made them particularly vulnerable should anything go wrong. That something did go wrong, and disastrously so, is now history. The repercussions of the case spread far outside the bounds of Canada and affected the Centre's work all over the world, as, quite apart from internal organisational repercussions, it demonstrated clearly to the world Soviet post-war intelligence intentions.
The director and Vera were removed from their posts and replaced about May 1946. I never saw them again nor were they ever mentioned. The Centre has only one penalty for failure.
Vera was succeeded by one "Victor" who became my contact with the Centre. He had not Vera's long espionage background but he had had some pre-war espionage experience in the United States. During the war he had had no connection with the Centre, having served as a staff officer. As a result of his pre-war training he spoke excellent English and was in some ways a pleasanter character than Vera, who had been a little too much imbued with the atmosphere of the Centre to be an entirely agreeable companion.
A little later the new director came to visit me. Like his predecessor, he was not a pure Russian and was also possibly a Georgian, although he had a very Mongolian cast of features and an unimpressive personality, being short and rather squat. About his previous career I know nothing, and the only foreign language he appeared to speak with any fluency was German.
The director said that he was very anxious for me to go abroad on my new assignment as soon as possible. The one great delaying factor was documentation. He said that the Centre could produce admirable passports, as well as the originals if not better, but the day of the forged passport was over for the moment. Owing to post-war restrictions and controls, it was essential for an agent to have a passport whose number and particulars tallied exactly with the details in the central archives of the issuing country. In the old days when travel was easier and authorities less suspicious it had been enough to have a well-forged passport, such as the Special Department of the Centre could turn out in a matter of days. Nowadays, however, there was a tendency for suspicious travel-control authorities to check up with central records and so only the genuine article would do.
There was no doubt from the director's and Victor's conversation that the Centre's network in the States was in a bad way. Only a proportion of their agents had been uncovered or compromised by the Canadian affair, but the moral effect on the remainder had been great. The publicity accompanying the case had thoroughly put the wind up their various sources and many of them had "dried up" or firmly "gone private" rather than risk detection and the inevitable publicity which would have followed. The Centre was determined to build up the network again from the bottom.
The first result of the new director's decision to use me as soon as possible was my despatch in the early autumn of 1946 to one of the Centre's secret training establishments near the village of Sehjodnya, some twenty-five miles northwest of Moscow. The place had been used during the war to house a portion of the General Staff and then later had been turned into a prison for high-ranking German officers. There were many similar establishments in the neighbourhood, all under the control of the General Staff and some still used as prisons. In one, quite close by, was a group of czarist generals who had been taken prisoner while serving with the Japanese forces in Manchuria. These were shot about November. Other prisoners must have met a similar fate, as this was not the only time I heard the crackle of machine-gun fire at dawn.
The place, if somewhat primitive, was not uncomfortable. The main building was a sixteen-room log house standing in its own timbered grounds of about five acres. The whole was surrounded by a high wooden fence crowned with barbed wire. The staff, consisting of a housekeeper, a cook, and a maid of all work lived apart in a small log cabin in the grounds.
At this establishment I was to receive intensive training in the latest developments in the technicalities of espionage, ranging from microphotography to sabotage equipment and secret inks. This was the theory, but as so often in Russia the actual results in practice lagged far behind. I was the first pupil, and whether it was that the school was not yet properly organised or whether it was sheer incompetence I do not know, but in fact I learned singularly little during my time there. I lived in the house together with the director of the establishment, "Vladimir," a genial Georgian who spoke good German, having worked in Germany for the Centre before the war. In theory I was taught by instructors who came out to the house for the purpose. In fact I received instruction in radio procedure and technique from a teacher who knew little more than I did, and my instructor in, photography appeared only twice, when he fell ill. I received some vague instructions in regard to secret ink, but the only details I can remember were on the use of Pyramidon, which is developed by iodine, and this I had known of in Switzerland and knew it was a low-grade ink for secret use. In fairness to the Centre it is possible that they sent me there so that I should not think my time was being wasted, while they thought out ways and means of getting me abroad. I was later told when I was on my way to Germany, that before I finally left on my mission I would be taken back to Moscow for a last-minute course in all the very latest developments.
At Sehjodnya I was visited frequently by Victor and on occasion by the director. Plan after plan, formulated to get me good documentation, was discussed and had finally to be discarded. In the end it was decided that I should be documented as a German and that my headquarters was to be the Argentine and not Mexico. My primary mission remained as always to set up an organisation to work in and against the United States. It was planned that I should arrive in Berlin ostensibly as a repatriated prisoner of war and take up a new identity and a new life there.
My life story as worked out by the Centre was as follows. I was a German, Albert Mueller, born in Riga in 1905, of a German father and an English mother. In 1919 my parents moved to Spain and there they both died, leaving me an orphan. I had later travelled to Cairo and the Far East and at the end of 1940 I had returned to Europe via the Trans-Siberian Railway to Koenigsberg in East Prussia in order to collect an inheritance which had been left me by my uncle. The authorities had not permitted me to return to the Far East and in 1942 I had been mobilised as a truck driver in a special transport command and after little or no training been sent with my unit to the eastern front and there I had been captured almost immediately by the Russians at Kalatch near Stalingrad. After being a prisoner of war in various camps on the Lena River in Siberia, I had been repatriated to Germany, owing to ill-health. My English accent was explained away by my English mother and the fact that in the Far East I had associated a lot with English people.
I remember that I objected to this story in respect to the time and place of my capture, for it appeared likely that if I said I had been captured near Stalingrad I might easily come in contact with one of the thousands of prisoners who had in fact been taken prisoner there and my story would then be exposed. The director told me not to worry about that as more than ninety per cent of the Stalingrad prisoners had died of typhus in Siberia.
The intention was that I was to live as a German in Berlin in order that I might acquire enough background to enable me later to pass as a German without doubt or question in the Argentine. I was to avoid any open political opinions and to have no connection, open or otherwise, with any sort of left-wing activity. In private I was to favour the extreme right wing and give vent to discreet pro-Nazi sentiments. This was with the object of trying to discover secret Nazis who would vouch for me in the Argentine. If necessary the Centre would facilitate their "escape" to the Argentine or America, and similar facilities would be extended to me. (In this connection it is perhaps interesting to speculate about the many stories of Nazi "escape routes" from Germany. The majority of these can probably be put down to journalists in want of a good story. It appears possible, however, that there may be a grain of truth in the heap of chaff and if so perhaps some of the routes have been organised by the Centre for purposes similar to mine.)
It was decided that I should stay in Berlin for at least six months and probably for a year, in order that I should merge completely into the post-war German background. The director assured me that all was laid on in Berlin and that on my arrival I would at once step into my German identity.
Late in February 1947 I left Sehjodnya and returned to Moscow. Here I was put through an intensive interrogation by the Political Department of the Centre in a last final check-up of my political reliability. All was apparently well, and I passed this, my final examination at the hands of the Russians, with flying colours.
There was one final banquet for me at which the director, Victor, and the chief political instructor of the Centre were present, and then one morning early in March I left Moscow for the airport and Berlin. I was travelling this time as Major Granatoff and was accompanied by a courier whose job was to steer me through the controls and customs in Moscow and Berlin and to ensure that all was done with the minimum of publicity.
As I flew over the endless, dreary wastes of Russia, at last travelling westward for the first time for over two years, I comforted myself with the thought that I had at least left the frying pan and was within measurable distance of being out of the fire. Unless unforeseen circumstances prevented it, or I bungled things at the last moment, there now seemed every chance that shortly I should be able to cut myself loose from the Centre forever.