The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939–1945

3 THE RUSSIANS: TEMPLES OF ESPIONAGE

Just before noon on 23 May 1938, Pavel Sudoplatov of the NKVD strolled into the Atlanta restaurant in Rotterdam and greeted a Ukrainian nationalist leader whom he had come to know well, in the guise of being a sympathiser with the man’s cause. Sudoplatov, newly arrived on a merchant ship from Murmansk, presented the man with a handsome box of chocolates adorned with the Ukrainian crest. The two chatted for a few moments to arrange a further rendezvous, then Moscow’s agent bade his companion farewell and moved on. He was a safe distance down the street by the time he heard a sharp explosion. A timing device had detonated a bomb inside the box, killing the nationalist. This was a typical Moscow Centre* operation of the period, one thrust in the relentless campaign to liquidate state enemies, real or supposed traitors. Sudoplatov’s success earned him a four-hour meeting with Stalin’s foremost secret policeman, Lavrenti Beria, who marked him for bigger things, such as managing the assassination of Leon Trotsky.

The Soviet Union owned the most active and best-resourced intelligence organisations in the world – the Red Army’s GRU and the NKVD, the latter controlled by Beria from December 1938. The foremost purposes of Joseph Stalin, master of the Kremlin, were the promotion of socialism abroad through the Comintern and the maintenance of his own power against domestic and foreign enemies. Both required spies in profusion. Throughout the 1930s, Russia pursued a strategy more far-reaching in its means – the plantation of deep-penetration agents – and its ends – the worldwide triumph of communism – than those of any other nation. How far the funds and energy lavished on its secret war profited the Soviet Union will be considered below. Here, it suffices to say that the espionage networks it established in the US, Britain, Japan and Europe were on a scale far beyond those of any other nation, and manifested in big things and small. When Japanese police arrested a Soviet agent carrying a Leica camera, Tokyo’s intelligence officers were pathetically envious: they could not afford to equip their own spies with technology remotely so sophisticated. This was a time when tens of millions of Russians were starving, yet Stalin’s agents spent whatever seemed necessary to purchase information and the deaths of enemies. From Switzerland to Mexico they left roadsides studded with corpses, and created some of the most remarkable agent networks in the history of intelligence.

The Russian addiction to espionage and conspiracy was as old as time. In 1912, when according to official figures Germany spent £80,387 on its secret service, France £40,000 and Britain £50,000, the Russians avowed a budget of £380,000, plus a further £335,000 for the tsar’s secret police. Tsarist codebreakers achieved some notable coups, and their successors sustained the tradition. In the 1930s the NKVD’s Fourth Department, the world’s most lavishly-funded signals intelligence unit, was based in the Foreign Affairs building on Moscow’s Kuznetsky bridge. Its chief, Gleb Ivanovitch Bokii, achieved a reputation as a killer and sexual predator matching that of Beria. Though Bokii’s team never broke wartime German Enigma messages, it enjoyed useful earlier and lesser successes, such as securing the secret protocol to the 1936 Anti-Comintern Pact between Germany and Japan, before its chief faced a firing squad the following year. Stalin personally read many decrypts; like Churchill later, he trusted the codebreakers’ product as he never did humint. The Kremlin displayed as brutal a carelessness about casualties among its spies as it did towards the fate of its soldiers. In 1936 František Moravec of Czech intelligence received a Soviet proposal that his service should provide crash espionage training for a hundred Russians, who would then be dispatched into Germany. Moravec expostulated that such novices would face wholesale extinction. His Moscow contact shrugged: ‘In that case, we shall send another hundred.’

The Soviet Union enjoyed a critical advantage in building its empire of espionage. While fascism gained millions of supporters in Germany, Italy and Spain, it never matched the appeal of worldwide communism during the decades before the latter’s bloodstained reality was laid bare. In every nation, men and women of brains and education, lofty ideals and unbounded naïveté queued to betray their own societies’ secrets for what they deemed a higher cause. From Moscow, hundreds of men and women were sent forth to direct networks in Japan and the United States, Germany, France and other European nations. The NKVD achieved excellent penetration of the French Foreign Office, and frequently quoted its ambassadors’ dispatches. Many of its informants deluded themselves that they were passing secrets not to the Soviets, but instead to the Comintern – which was in truth merely a postbox for the Kremlin.

Pavel Sudoplatov became one of the principal puppeteers of the Kremlin’s danses macabres. He was a Ukrainian miller’s son, born in 1907, who served as a cipher clerk with the Red Army before joining the Bolshevik security service. As a teenager, Sudoplatov ran a network of informers in his home town of Melitopol. Secret police work became a family affair when he married in 1928, since his Jewish wife Emma was a more senior officer than himself in the OGPU, forerunner of the NKVD. He was trained by its foreign department before being posted to Germany as an ‘illegal’, posing as a Ukrainian nationalist. He led a roving life in the years that followed, travelling across Europe and spending a month in a Helsinki jail. He saw his wife just once, when she turned up in Paris as a courier. In 1938 he visited Spain, describing its civil war as ‘a kindergarten for our future operations’. At an early stage of his relationship with Beria, Sudoplatov noted a curiosity: this most terrible of Soviet secret policemen displayed meticulous civility to little people – junior staff – while treating big ones – his rivals in the Kremlin hierarchy – with lacerating rudeness. ‘Beria had the singular ability to inspire both fear and enthusiasm,’ he wrote.

Sudoplatov became one of the spy chief’s most devoted servants, graduating from field work to senior desk roles, assisted by the demise of rivals. Between 1937 and 1939, thousands of intelligence officers of all ranks died before firing squads or were dispatched to the gulag. Stalin lashed out at the intelligence services during a meeting of the Soviet Military Council in language that defied parody: ‘We have defeated the bourgeoisie on all fronts. It is only on the intelligence front that they beat us like small boys. This is our chief weakness … Our military intelligence service … has been polluted by spies. [Its chiefs] were working for Germany, for Japan, Poland, for anyone but us … Our task is to restore the intelligence service. It is our eyes and ears.’ In his madness, Stalin insisted upon not merely the execution of scores of senior officers of the GRU and NKVD, but also on the severance of Moscow Centre’s relations with their informants in the field, thousands of whom were branded as fascist stool-pigeons. The chaos that followed impacted variously upon different departments and regions, but paralysed some networks until 1941 and beyond. After the destruction of Nazism, in Vienna a veteran NKVD officer met an old German source, one of many with whom he had broken contact in accordance with orders back in 1938. Now, this man demanded of the Russian: ‘Where on earth were you all through the war? I was General Kesselring’s personal orderly!’

Among the foremost of the NKVD’s overseas agent-runners was Theodore Maly, a Hungarian who in his youth had belonged to a Catholic monastic order. He was taken prisoner as a Hapsburg officer in 1916, joined the Bolsheviks and forswore God. In 1936 Maly was posted to London, where many of Moscow’s British informants later testified to their respect and affection for him. Yet in 1938 he was among those recalled to Moscow and shot as a supposed traitor, along with the NKVD’s equally talented Rome resident and several of its Berlin men. An obvious question persists: why did any officer with a brain obey the order to go home, when they could surely have read the runes? The most plausible answer is that even in those crazed and bloody days, adherents to the world socialist ideal, such as Maly was, cherished a lingering faith in the Soviet system, though he also professed fatalism if his death was decreed.

Many Russian knees quaked during the Purges. Thirty-nine senior GRU officers, intelligence veterans, are known to have been shot, and the NKVD suffered in proportion. Pavel Sudoplatov survived an investigation and the threat of expulsion from the Party; he believed afterwards that he might have been preserved by Stalin’s personal intervention. Clambering over a mound of corpses, he acquired his own office in the Lubyanka building at 2 L Street – cosily referred to by its occupants as ‘Dom Dva’, ‘Number Two’, a place of dread for every passer-by, and for any prisoner who crossed its threshold. Like all those who prospered in Stalin’s dreadful universe, Sudoplatov learned to regard the grotesque as normal, the unspeakable as familiar. During family conversations in their apartment, for instance, he and Emma never deviated from a rigidly domestic script, because they took it for granted that every word spoken was recorded by Beria’s eavesdroppers. He wrote long afterwards in an apparently half-truthful memoir: ‘I accepted the brutality and stern order that characterised our centralised society; it appeared the only method of preserving the country when it was surrounded by German, Polish and Japanese enemies.’

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the forest an agent of the GRU, who would later become famous, or notorious, for his association with the German Red Orchestra – the extraordinary espionage network to be described later – was putting down roots in foreign parts. Anatoli Sukolov-Gourevitch, born at Kharkov in November 1913, was the son of Jewish parents who were both pharmacists. He started work in 1929 as an apprentice draughtsman in a factory, and hated the life. From an early stage, and like most Soviet citizens, he acquired the habit of obsessive secrecy, writing in his memoirs: ‘I learned to hide my feelings and troubles from my nearest and dearest, my friends, and indeed from everyone.’ Desperate to escape from the common ruck, while still very young he became a communist functionary, and somehow secured an appointment as a lecturer on military studies at a Leningrad school for Intourist guides, thereafter serving in intelligence.

In 1937 he was recruited to travel to Spain as one of the Soviet military group assisting the embattled Republican government. Gourevitch thoroughly enjoyed his subsequent Spanish adventures – as who would not, after sampling Soviet factory life? He was able to dress with an elegance unimaginable at home, and thereafter favoured a Warsaw tailor. He took a trip in a submarine, travelled in France and learned conversational French, Spanish and German. On returning to Moscow, he was selected for training as a foreign agent of the GRU. Asked much later if it had troubled him to join the Soviet Union’s murderous secret services, like Sudoplatov he shrugged that his country was encircled by enemies; he then believed that its defenders did only what they had to.

His chief, the gaunt, jug-eared intelligence veteran Major Simon Gendin, enquired whether he had any marriage plans which could complicate his future career overseas. Gourevitch replied that he was indeed in love, with a girl named Lialia whom he had met when they were both working in Spain, and who was now an Intourist interpreter. Gendin told his staff to add her name to the brief list of intimates with whom Gourevitch might correspond, though that relationship perished, like so much else, during the years that followed. On graduation from the GRU’s spy school, Gourevitch himself expressed doubts about his fluency as a coder and wireless-operator – he lacked a sensitive ear for Morse. Gendin reassured him: he would not need specialised radio skills, for he was destined to become an intelligence-gatherer and agent-runner.

Gourevitch was briefed to travel to Brussels to work with another Soviet agent, codenamed ‘Otto’, then to move on to Sweden after establishing himself and improving his language skills. He would exploit his knowledge of Spanish by adopting a cover identity as ‘Vincente Sierra’, a prosperous businessman with a Uruguayan passport. For the next three years, Moscow furnished him with funds to sustain an appropriately flashy lifestyle. Yet although he was instructed about the importance of dressing smartly, affecting the hat and gloves that were then badges of bourgeois respectability, Gourevitch later complained that he was untutored in social skills. When he checked into a smart Helsinki hotel on the first leg of his journey to Belgium, he was bewildered when a porter picked up his suitcase and carried it upstairs: never in his short life had he received such a personal service. He gasped on seeing an open buffet in the hotel dining-room, which at first he assumed was set for a banquet rather than for the daily fare of guests. Later, in Brussels, as he fumbled his way towards an entrée into relatively smart social circles, he was embarrassed to be taken aside one evening by an acquaintance who told him that only waiters wore white bow ties with smoking jackets. ‘I was completely ignorant of these subtleties,’ he wrote ruefully.

‘Otto’, the Soviet agent whom Gourevitch joined in Brussels, was Leopold Trepper, born in 1904 the son of a Galician shopkeeper, one of the key figures in Russia’s European intelligence operations, and later a heroic Soviet legend. As a young man, Trepper ran a Paris network which was rolled up by the French in 1933. He fled first to Germany, then to Russia where he found employment with Stalin’s spymasters while moonlighting as editor of a Jewish journal. Early in 1939 he was dispatched to Brussels, which was deemed a secure base from which he could forward information from the GRU’s network inside Germany. Centre boasted of running two important Berlin agents: Ilse Stöbe, who worked in the press department of Ribbentrop’s Foreign Ministry, and a diplomat named Rudolf Shelia. Trepper carried a Canadian passport in the name of Adam Mikler, stolen during the Spanish Civil War. He was married with two sons, but only one accompanied him to Brussels – the other, seven-year-old Michael, remained in Moscow. Trepper became known to his sources in Western Europe as ‘le grand chef’, while Gourevitch was ‘le petit chef’. Soviet narratives lavish praise on the Trepper network for its services to the socialist cause, and it was plainly useful as a post office for the messages of Stöbe and Shelia. But it seems unlikely that Trepper recruited useful informants of his own. The foremost achievement of the GRU agents in Belgium was to stay at liberty, make some friends and create lifestyles that supported their cover stories.

Of more importance to Moscow – certainly from 1941 onwards – were the GRU’s organisations based in Switzerland. These would later channel towards the Kremlin material derived from Berlin sources such as Western agent-runners could only dream of. One network had been established in 1937 by German-born Rachel Dübendorfer. A larger group, which became known as the ‘Lucy’ Ring, was run by Dr Alexander Radó – ‘Dora’ – a ‘sleeper’ permitted by his chiefs to slumber almost as long as Sleeping Beauty. A Hungarian, Marxist from his youth, Radó served as a commissar in Budapest’s 1919 Red Terror. Obliged to flee when Admiral Horthy became Hungary’s dictator, for a time he ran an émigré Resistance group in Vienna. He then decamped to Moscow, where he received intelligence training, and was deemed sufficiently significant to be introduced to Lenin. Posted to Western Europe, he served as an agent in Berlin and Paris, under cover as a correspondent for the Soviet news agency TASS. After marrying a German communist with whom he had two children, he tried to settle in Brussels, but was sent packing by the authorities, who held a thick dossier on him. Instead he went to Switzerland, where he parleyed a lifelong passion for maps into the creation of a cartographic publishing business, which quickly became profitable.

The Swiss police watched Radó for a while, then left him alone when they decided he was what he seemed – a quiet-living fellow, forty in 1939, who simply wanted to turn an honest penny. Radó was word-painted by one of his wireless-operators, 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 this was duly provided. When Zarubin reported that Lehmann had fallen seriously ill, the news prompted a panic in Moscow: Centre declared that its most precious German source must be kept alive at any cost, and that the NKVD would meet his medical bills if the money could somehow be laundered. ‘Breitenbach’ recovered.

Later that year the GRU made a sudden decision to wind up its German networks amid the Nazis’ ruthless persecution of known communists, and to make a fresh start, beginning at the top. Both the Berlin station chief and his deputy were recalled to Moscow and liquidated. Early in 1937, the NKVD’s Zarubin also fell victim to the Purges. He was summoned home, and at an interview with Beria accused of treason. After interrogation, unusually he was neither executed nor cleared, but instead demoted. He remained for a time in Moscow, serving as assistant to a novice intelligence officer, Vladimir Pavlov.

Before Zarubin’s abrupt departure from Berlin, he transferred the handling of ‘Breitenbach’ to a woman named Clemens, one of his staff. She scarcely spoke German, but there was nobody else, and he himself expected soon to return. As matters fell out, Clemens was obliged to assume ongoing responsibility for the relationship, exchanging envelopes containing orders and information, which were then passed to another NKVD illegal, Ruben, who soon found himself the sole surviving member of the Berlin station as the Purges claimed ever more victims – the GRU’s Major Simon Gendin, who had sent Gourevitch to Brussels, was shot in February 1939.

Zarubin, in Moscow, contrived to send a note to ‘Breitenbach’, assuring him that he was not forgotten by his friends; that he should continue his intelligence activities, while exercising extreme caution. The Gestapo officer replied: ‘I have no reasons to worry. I am sure that they [in Moscow Centre] also know over there that everything is being done responsibly here, everything that can be done. So far there is no great need for anyone to visit from there. I will inform you if this will become necessary.’ As the NKVD’s silence became protracted, however, Lehmann grew frustrated and impatient. He sent another message to Zarubin via Clemens: ‘Just when I was able to make good deals, the company there stopped being interested in doing business with me, for completely unknown reasons.’ Zarubin responded soothingly that ‘the company’ tremendously valued his work, and besought him to keep going – which he did, until November 1938. But then, as the Soviet intelligence machine became paralysed by its domestic contortions, all contact between ‘Breitenbach’ and Moscow was lost: the relationship was not restored until the autumn of 1940.

Willy Lehmann was by no means Moscow’s only German source, nor even any longer its most important. One day in 1935 a Luftwaffe officer named Harro Schulze-Boysen, who held a senior post in Hermann Göring’s Air Ministry, contacted the Soviet embassy in Berlin with an offer of information, which was immediately accepted. He was given the codename ‘Corporal’, and NKVD file 34122. Schulze-Boysen was a champagne socialist from a smart Berlin family of intellectual inclinations – Admiral Tirpitz was among his forebears. From his desk in the Air Ministry he forged contacts in army staff communications, among Abwehr officers, and also with Hans Henniger, a government inspector of Luftwaffe equipment. Göring gave away the bride at his 1936 wedding, to the beautiful and exuberant Libertas Haas-Heye, who had worked for a time as a Berlin press officer for MGM Films. She now learned to share Schulze-Boysen’s political convictions and the burden of his labours for the Soviet Union, and her bed with a legion of lovers.

At about the same time, but independently, a senior civil servant in the economics ministry, Arvid Harnack, contacted the Soviet embassy, and was likewise recruited as agent ‘Corsican’, NKVD file 34118. Harnack was born in 1901 into a scholarly family in Darmstadt. He qualified as a lawyer and practised as an economist, spending some time in the United States. At the University of Wisconsin’s Madison campus he met Mildred Fish, a strikingly handsome and serious-minded student of English. They were married in 1929, and elected to live in Germany. Both were keenly interested in Marxism – they made a tour of the Soviet Union, and in 1932 launched a political study group. When Arvid began to pass information to the Russians, and to recruit fellow-foes of Hitler to his ring, he joined the Nazi Party to improve his protective colouring. Meanwhile both he and Schulze-Boysen steadily extended their groups of like-minded intellectual foes of Hitler. Between them, by 1939 they had opened windows into some of the most influential institutions in Nazi Germany.