We had not landed at the main Moscow airport, but at one of the smaller ones on the outskirts of the city. In fact only as we were coming down was it possible to catch a glimpse of the capital. It appeared quite un- bombed and indeed untouched by war. Like most buildings in Moscow, the airport had a shabby air and the concrete waiting hall was unadorned by any decoration nor was it warmed by any central heating, which would have been welcome as it was bitterly cold with snow on the ground. The only gesture towards luxury was a small wooden booth selling fruit juice.
I was met by two characters, a man and a woman. The man was a nondescript individual whom I was never to see again. The woman, whom I knew as "Vera," was dressed as a major in the Red Army. Aged about forty, with raven hair, she must have been quite a beauty in her youth. She spoke fluent English, French, and German, so there was no language difficulty at all.
With her and her companion, or possibly it might be more suitable to call him chaperone, as his duties were purely those of an escort, we drove to 29 the 2 nd Izvoznia Ulitza, which was to be my home for the next eighteen months. This was a comparatively modern block of flats and, apart from myself, was occupied by the wives of generals who were away fighting at the front. In my flat, which consisted of a bedroom and a sitting room, I was introduced to Olga Pugachova, my housekeeper, her eight-year-old daughter, Ludmilla, and Ivan, my permanent interpreter who I was told would live with me. Interpreter, escort, guard, all in one. Olga was a pleasant woman, the widow of a lieutenant colonel in the Red Air Force. For a variety of reasons which will be explained later, I think she enjoyed her time as housekeeper. After the introductions we settled down to the usual banquet, which was ready and waiting for us in the flat.
At the banquet, attended by Vera and Ivan, no business was discussed, but when Vera left she said she would come again in the morning with a number of questions to which she would like the answers. She was as good as her word and turned up again the next morning with a list of questions as long as my arm. She was also considerate enough to bring along a nice new German typewriter on which I could write my answers. Before settling down to the questions we had a long discussion on the whole situation in general and Rado's mysterious disappearance in particular. Vera was perfectly au fait with the whole organisation of the network- and indeed knew more about the identities of some of the agents than I did. This was not surprising, since before she had been posted to the Centre she had been in Switzerland and in fact had been the resident director there before Rado. As a result she knew all of the pre-war sources not only by name but from personal experience. In addition to this, she was the officer who had run the Swiss network all through the war from Moscow and knew all our difficulties and all the various transactions, trials, and tribulations in which we had been entangled.
Vera finally left me with the list of questions, and after studying them I was, to say the least, far from happy. It was obvious from the tone of the questions that the Centre regarded me as an agent provocateur planted on them by the British. It was equally apparent that Rado's report (which had been telegraphed to the Centre about a fortnight after mine) gave quite a different version of the story. He had obviously stated that all our Swiss sources were either liquidated or compromised and that at least a couple of years should be allowed to elapse before any effort was made to revive either them or the network.
In the view of the director I had obviously been released by the Swiss police on British intervention, the British quid pro quo being that I would transmit to the Centre only such information as the British would supply, though attributing it to the various sources known to Moscow. The British object in all this being, of course, to hinder the advance of the Red Army by feeding them false information. Equally the director was certain that Rado had been conveniently "liquidated" in Cairo by the British to prevent his giving a different story to Moscow. I was by now comparatively inured to the Soviet conception of Allied co-operation, after my experience with Rado at the time he wished to go into hiding, but this fairly took my breath away. Fantastic as the whole thing was, the Centre obviously believed quite seriously that the British would, in the middle of a war when all the Allies were fighting for their lives, settle down to produce as complicated a plan as this, merely to deceive their allies. The whole conception could only have been bred in brains to whom treachery, double-crossing, and betrayal were second nature. It was, in the abstract, high farce; but, like so much farce, in the concrete it bordered on high tragedy as far as I was concerned. Unless I could clear myself I was obviously in for a very difficult period and might only too easily find myself against a wall as a British spy- which, regarded impersonally, was an interesting twist of fate, but which personally I regarded with the utmost disfavour. If, in addition to all this, Rado was tiresome enough to commit suicide and his body was fished out of the Nile or found in a Cairo back street, then the final factual coping stone would have been put to the elaborate structure of fancy erected by the Centre.
In the meanwhile there was obviously nothing for me to do save fill in the questionnaires and answer the questions fully and truthfully. Luckily my conscience was perfectly clear and I could and did answer all the long lists of queries accurately. The system was ingenious and, though it took time, was extremely effective. No pressure was ever brought to bear on me in any shape or form. With the utmost kindness and courtesy the various lists of questions were put to me over a period of weeks. Many of the questions overlapped and dovetailed into others which may have been asked days or weeks before. Questions, apparently put at random, were in fact cross-checks on other points that may have arisen only in casual conversation. As a result, at the end of the time my interrogators- if I can call them that, as I knew them only on paper- had not only the whole story but a complicated, overlapping, interlocking series of questions and answers. Luckily I was telling the truth and so the answers were consistent and easy to give. It would need a very clever man with a very elaborate and word-perfect cover story to stand up to such a test, for the slightest discrepancy would show up at once and give the unseen interrogators more ammunition to break the story down.
During this period of question and answer I was not kept a prisoner in any sort of way. Vera said that I was perfectly free to walk about the streets as much as I liked, provided of course that I was accompanied by Ivan. She did recommend that I stick to the side streets, because if I walked down the main streets I might be picked up for questioning by the police as a foreigner, which might be embarrassing. On several evenings I was taken to the theatre. Tickets were obtainable only on priority and thus not only the spectators but also the allocation of seats were government-controlled. It was not coincidence that on several occasions when I went to the theatre I found myself sitting between English or American officers. Nor was it coincidence that in the seats behind me was sitting a couple of hard-faced individuals who appeared more interested in the row in front than in the scene on the stage. I can also hardly believe that it was a demonstration of inter-Allied amity which made Ivan take me for a walk one day and show me the British Embassy. They were still obviously convinced that I was a British double agent and were giving me every opportunity to prove it and as much rope as I wanted in order to hang myself. It frequently occurred to me that if in fact I had been a British agent the last thing I would have done would have been to talk to anyone in a theatre or go to the British Embassy. The Centre might have credited me and British Intelligence with better sense than that.
The one bright spot to lighten these rather dark days was the news, about a month after I arrived, that the Egyptian police had located Rado and that the Centre were sending someone to interview him. I do not think I was told this news out of any consideration for me, but merely to see my reaction to it. Later I was told that he had been interviewed by an emissary from the Centre hut had refused to continue his journey or to give any reasons for his refusal.
About a fortnight after that, roughly six weeks after my arrival, I was told by Vera that the next day the director himself and some others would be coming to see me. Punctual to the minute, at six the next evening the director arrived. He was accompanied by a couple of stern-looking gentry who were either minor members of the Centre or members of the N.K.V.D. In any case they played little part in the events of the evening, spending most of the time looking hard at my face to judge my reactions to the various questions shot at me. I was told that the director held the rank of lieutenant general. That he was high up in the hierarchy could be seen from his car. The easiest and by far the best touchstone as regards the importance of an individual in the Union are the size and grandeur of his automobile. If (as the director had) he has a large, new black limousine, then one can be sure he is pretty important. If in addition to that he has a bodyguard, then he is more important still. If he has not only a fine new limousine but also another car to house the bodyguard, then one is certain he is a very big shot indeed. The director fell into the last category, and I was suitably impressed.
Outwardly nothing could have been more convivial and pleasant than the early stages of that dinner. A casual eavesdropper would have been enchanted at the sight of so great a man graciously at his ease with an honoured guest. The undercurrents were not so pleasant. I was irresistibly and unpleasantly reminded of a story told me by a former czarist cavalry officer friend of mine in Switzerland. Before the First World War he had been stationed in Siberia, where the tedium got too much for them at times. To lighten the boredom of their existence they used occasionally to have a large and sumptuous banquet. At the end of it they would all draw their revolvers and throw them in the middle of the table, where they would be shuffled by the orderlies. One pistol would be loaded. At a given signal they would all put a gun to their heads and pull the trigger. My friend said that the thought that at the end of the meal one of his comrades, or himself, would be a corpse added spice to the feast. I felt rather the same, only in this case I knew only too well who the corpse would be.
The director was a charming individual. Like so many of the high officials whom I saw, he did not seem a true Slav, but had more of a Georgian cast of countenance. In his early forties, he was intelligent and intellectual, and looked it. He spoke fluent, almost faultless English and had obviously spent some time in the United Kingdom; his occasional lapses into Americanese indicated that he may also have seen service in the States. I was to learn in the course of the evening that he spoke equally good French and German. The only point of criticism that I could find was his taste in ties, which was gaudy in the extreme. This may have been a relic of his American days. In addition to all this, he was a first-class interrogator. From my rather scanty knowledge of him, derived from the few meetings we had together, I should think that he was admirably fitted for his job. He had a heavy responsibility to bear as he was, I believe, directly responsible to Stalin himself, and according to Vera was one of the few people in the Soviet Union who could see Stalin without an appointment. He also had a direct private line to Stalin's office.
The interrogation lasted from six in the evening till two the next morning and continued over and after the food. The four of them, the director, Vera, and the other two, had what I assume was my dossier in front of them and occasionally they would produce from it a telegram that I had sent and question me as to its contents and how it had come to me. They went through my whole career with the Centre very closely and questioned me minutely on all the various sources that we had. They were especially interested in Lucy and Pakbo and wished to know who Lucy's sources were and how they reached the network so quickly. On this point I was of course as ignorant as they were.
The director stated that usually Lucy's information had been correct but once it had proved disastrous. He pulled a telegram out of the dossier and handed it to me. "Do you remember sending that?" he said. I looked at it; it gave details from Werther of troop dispositions on the eastern front. I replied that I had sent so many similar ones that I could not remember after the lapse of years anything about that particular one.
"That message cost us a hundred thousand men at Kharkov and resulted in the Germans reaching Stalingrad. It was sent over your transmitter," replied the director. "After we received this and saw the damage that it wrought we could only assume that Lucy was a double agent and all his information was false and supplied by the Abwehr. For a long time after that we ignored the information, convinced that it was planted on us. Only after months of checking did we decide that, as all the other information from that source was correct and could be proved correct, the source was after all reliable. The information must have been falsified after it left Germany. Perhaps, my dear Jim, you can throw some light on this?"
I could only reply that I received the Lucy information, already edited by Rado, either direct or via one of Rado's couriers. In the latter case it was always in a sealed envelope. I was also able to assure the director that I had never left the material lying about, so there was no question of substitution.
After the ordeal, when I felt completely sucked dry of all information and also extremely tired, as I had been at it for eight hours with my senses alert the whole time, I was asked to withdraw to my bedroom as the others "had some matters which they wished to discuss." I felt rather like the prisoner when the jury have withdrawn. After an interval- it may have been half an hour, though it felt like an age - the director joined me. He appeared to be in an extremely good humour and slapped me jovially on the back. He stated that the Swiss affair was not yet cleared up and would not be until the end of the war when a military mission would be sent to investigate the whole thing on the ground in Switzerland and Germany. In the meanwhile, there was nothing with which I could be reproached and as far as the Swiss debacle was concerned I was entirely exonerated and he thanked me for my efforts in Switzerland and also for my plans and attempts to re-establish the network after my release from jail. As regarded Lucy and Pakbo, he felt that I had been perhaps a little naive.
"These two individuals were not motivated by ideological reasons but were primarily concerned with gain. There is no doubt that after their release from prison"- Pakbo, of course, had never been arrested but that was a minor matter- "they had obviously been approached by the British Secret Service who had seduced them away by gold in order that in the future they could send false information in order to hinder the advance of the victorious Red Army."
He regarded the fact that I had not been questioned by the British after my release as proof positive that Lucy had been "got at" by the British. He was quite satisfied that I had had nothing to do with this British plot and added that it was quite clever of the British not to approach me as it was not likely that I would put myself into the "Bear's embrace" if I had had a guilty conscience and had accepted a British offer to double-cross.
As regarded Rado, he said that measures were being taken to bring him to Moscow by force. Rado's refusal to come he attributed to pressure brought to bear by the British, who were threatening reprisals against Rado's wife, still in Paris. In any event he would come to Moscow in the end. "Very soon there will be no place in the world where it will be possible to hide from the Centre."
In the meanwhile he advised me to leam Russian as quickly as possible and said that a good job would be found for me in Moscow. It would be dangerous for me to go abroad for some time as my arrest would have "blown" me to all the counterespionage services in the world and no doubt the Swiss would have already supplied them with my particulars, fingerprints, etc. It would therefore be necessary to let things calm down for a period before I could be used abroad again.
When he left me I sank onto my bed exhausted. I was dog-tired physically and mentally. I slept like a log that night and woke late next morning. The sun was shining brightly and was reflected gaily off the glistening snow on the rooftops. Moscow was a pleasanter place than it had seemed for some weeks past. I might still be behind the Iron Curtain but my name was now cleared and, come what may, I was still free and alive- and that is a lot in Soviet Russia.