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Abstract
The decision to declassify selected historical documents from the archives of the Security Service in 1997 has been a boon to academic historians of intelligence. The declassified files reveal the successes and failures of the Security Service in fulfilling its statutory function of defending the realm. Yet the activity of Soviet spies continues to be one of the most challenging topics in intelligence history. The role of Soviet defectors in transforming the Security Service's understanding of the nature and extent of Soviet intelligence operations, meanwhile, remains largely understudied. In the case of Agabekov, for example, the reaction of SIS or MI5 to his ‘disappearance’ in the spring of 1938 has long been neglected. It is possible that there was no reaction at all, because both services had long-since written off Agabekov as a source. This helps explain why Agabekov's case has been ignored in the relevant literature in both Russia and the West.
Notes
1Gordon Brook-Shepherd, The Storm Petrels: The First Soviet Defectors, 1928–1938 (London: Collins 1977) p.129.
2There is a certain confusion in the Security Service files regarding Agabekov. Even his recently declassified personal file TNA: KV 2/2398, which in fact is a part of his MI5 Personal File 4096 V. 1, is entitled ‘Nerses OVSEPIAN, aliases George AGABEKOV, George ARUTIUNOV’, which is wrong. His real name, as stated, was Georgy Sergeyevich Arutyunov, born on 15 January 1895 in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, and he used the aliases ‘Azadov’ in Bokhara (Bukhara), ‘Georges Agabekov’ when he worked in Afghan and Persia, and ‘Nerses Ovsepyan’ when he operated as an illegal resident in Istanbul. One of the reports about Agabekov's career claims in one and the same document: ‘(8) In 1927 Agabekov was posted to the Soviet legation in Tehran, where he took over the duties of OGPU representative from one Kazas’, and a little further on: ‘(10) In 1926 he became Resident of the OGPU in Tehran, with the official title of Attaché to the Embassy, where he remained until May 1928’. See TNA: KV 2/2398 Serial 15a (20a) Enclosure B.
3Georges Agabekov, OGPU: The Russian Secret Terror (New York: Brentano's 1931). There were some reprints of the first English edition, namely OGPU: The Russian Secret Terror (Westport, CT: Hyperion Press 1975), and after the collapse of the Soviet Union one of Agabekov's books was finally published in Russia under the title Sekretnyi terror: zapiski razvedchika (Moscow: Sovremennik 1996), and two years later as Sekretnyi terror (Moscow: Terra-knizhnyi klub 1998), which is a slightly edited version of his GPU: zapiski chekista (Berlin: Strela 1930) but this is practically all. Agabekov's second book, Cheka za rabotoi (Berlin: Strela 1931), is a rarity even in the best European libraries, though its modern reprint (Berlin: Energiadruck 1983) and an old German translation (Grigori Agabekov, Die Tscheka bei der Arbeit (Stuttgart: Union Deutsche-Verlagsgesellschaft 1932)) are available at least in London.
4The Reza Shah's Court Minister, Teymourtash, was thought to have been implicated in some Soviet espionage activities because Soviet intelligence, at least before 1930, had maintained several agents in Iran, some of whom had been directly recruited from Teymourtash's own relations. The reason for suspicions regarding the minister's role has become clear only five decades later. Actually what had first appeared and caused so much speculation was a series of articles published in the Paris newspaper Le Matin between 26 and 30 October 1930 (quite possibly based on some of Agabekov's revelations). ‘It is these accounts of Soviet subversion’, as one researcher notes, ‘that pointed an accusing finger at the Court Minister by implying that he had been working closely with Loganovsky, charge d'affaires at the Soviet embassy in Teheran. Not a word was said about the important discrepancies between these articles and the memoirs published later by either British officials or Iranians in responsible positions. Only Charles Hart commented in his report to the US Department of State, “I have no way of ascertaining in which papers these articles appeared, but I understand they are not included in the Agabekov book”. Indeed, on close examination of the Russian version of Agabekov's memoirs – and he did originally write these in Russian – it transpires that Teymourtash does not himself figure in these descriptions as an agent of the Soviet Union. In the French and English editions of Agabekov's account, there is a serious anomaly in that the name of the Court Minister sending instructions to his representative in Moscow is not even given; its omission at the time, however, appeared to be more a case of faulty translation from the original than an effort to conceal the Court Minister's identity’. See Miron Rezun, ‘Reza Shah's Court Minister: Teymourtash’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 12/2 (1980) p.126.
5Usually an officer or civil employee operating ‘in the dark’, i.e. without diplomatic cover and running a group of agents. The illegal resident can operate either under his real or a bogus identity.
6Brook-Shepherd, The Storm Petrels, p.111.
7TNA: KV 2/2398 OVSEPIAN (Agabekov), Serial 9a.
8Ibid., Serial 12a.
9Ibid., Serial 14a, CX/12650/2205.
10The SIS representative in Paris was sent ten photographs of suspected OGPU agents in Europe allegedly acting against the British interest for Agabekov's identification, followed on 30 July 1930 by another two. Agabekov recognized a person on photo no. 3 as an OGPU agent whom he knew and who, according to Agabekov, was of some importance, though he gave an incorrect name. According to the security service files, on the photo was ‘Lev Gillairovich ELLERT’, a suspected OGPU agent who operated in Europe in the 1930s (see TNA: KV 2/2398 and ELLERT's file KV 6/59). In reality, it was Lev Gilyarovich ELBERT, a prominent Chekist and a member of the GPU from December 1923. From January until May 1926 ELBERT worked in Greece under the cover of the attaché of the Soviet Embassy in Athens. In 1929 he was a member of the Soviet Embassy in Paris and, according to some sources, took part in the abduction of General Kutepov in January 1930. In November 1945 ELBERT was in Berlin, where he died the next year from a heart problem. It is on the record that when in Moscow ELBERT used different aliases – the poet Mayakovsky, with whom Elbert was friendly, also knew him as Heifetz.
11Brook-Shepherd, The Storm Petrels, p.118.
12TNA: KV 2/2398 OVSEPIAN (Agabekov), CX/12650/2205, dated 20 August 1930.
13Ibid., Serial 20a. The Security Service was quite well informed about the activities of the Soviet agents in London and kept files and tracks on many of them. Thus, agent B-1 was known to have been William Norman Ewer (see TNA: Personal File EWER KV 2/1016-1017), foreign editor of the Daily Herald. Ewer (codenamed HERMAN) was receiving information that he then sent to the OGPU London station from his many sub-sources. Among those were GINHOVERN, JANE and DALE from the Special Branch of Metropolitan Police, as well as the journalists George Edward Slocombe (alias Nathan Grünberg), a British national who was the Paris correspondent of the Daily Herald, and Frederick Robert Kuh, a Federated Press of America (FPA) representative in Berlin. If one is to believe West and Tsarev, the OGPU had at least two important sources in the Foreign Office. It is difficult to say whether Agabekov was able to provide leads on any of them. According to The Crown Jewels, two highly-placed old Etonians in the Foreign Office were Ewer's contacts: Sir Arthur Willert and John D. Gregory; Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev, The Crown Jewels (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press 1998) pp.9–12. At that time Willert was, as Head of the News Department, press officer at the FO while Gregory, a former British chargé d'affaires in Bucharest, served as Assistant Secretary. For more details, see Personal File SCOLOMBE, KV 2/485; Personal File KUH, KV 2/983-988; and Personal File FEDERATED PRESS OF AMERICA, KV 2/1099-1101.
14A. Kolpakidi and D. Prokhorov, KGB prikazano likvidirovat: spetsoperatsii sovetskikh spetssluzhb (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo 2004) p.244.
15See Brook-Shepherd, The Storm Petrels, p.120. The author never specified which particular Sûreté he meant. As he himself admitted, Brook-Shepherd's sources were summaries based on appropriate SIS files.
16See Rudi Van Doorslaar, ‘Anti-Communist Activism in Belgium 1930–1944’, The Social Register, 1984, p.116.
17See Wim Coudenys, ‘Russian Collaboration in Belgium during World War II’, Cahiers du Monde russe 43/2–3 (2002) p.479.
18Hearings Before a Special Committee to Investigate Communist Activities in the United States of the House of Representatives, Seventy-First Congress, Third Session pursuant to H. Res. 220 providing for an investigation of Communist propaganda in the United States. Part I–Volume No. 5, December 1930 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1931).
19Rezun, ‘Teymourtash’, p.127.
20The first account of the ‘Philomena Affair’ is in Brook-Shepherd, The Storm Petrels, pp. 130–46, understandably without any reference to any source or archive.
21TNA: M.I.1.c. 20.10.31, 450/Germany 30a, in KV 2/2398 OVSEPIAN (Agabekov), Serial 65a.
22Wilson was transferred to Riga, Latvia, to take over SIS anti-Soviet networks operating from this Baltic state.
23TNA: CX/12650/2205, dated 15.3.32, in KV 2/2398 OVSEPIAN (Agabekov), Serial 86a.
24Brook-Shepherd, The Storm Petrels, p.135.
25It was stated that Piklovič worked in Moscow at the OGPU KRO's 4th section (counterintelligence, Eastern Europe), and that he was known under this name as a student in Vienna in 1922. Those familiar with the OGPU practices of the time will agree that there is nothing strange or unusual in a secret service operative using different names when travelling or living abroad, so Agabekov could have indeed known him in Russia as Schulman.
26ÖStA/NPA: Box 671, Case Pr. Zl IV-5338/31, Report of 24 November 1931.
27Agabekov, Cheka za rabotoi.
28This writer is reminded of ‘how common it was for defectors to exaggerate the importance of their roles and contacts within the Soviet system and sell books to a popular market that were full of fiction’. Indeed, among Brook-Shepherd's ‘storm petrels’ or, in the words of Vladislav Krasnov, author of Soviet Defectors: The KGB Wanted List (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press 1986), ‘five select trailblazers of that long line of Communists who chose freedom’, two – Walter Krivitsky and Alexander Orlov – published books and articles that hugely exaggerated their role and for years duped not only the ‘popular market’ but also respected historians and intelligence experts. The same may be said about the book by Nikolai Khokhlov, a postwar defector. This writer deals with these phenomena at great length in his works. But these are exceptions rather than the rule, and Agabekov's two books can perhaps accurately be described as a ‘story of lost opportunity’. But in his case, it was a lost opportunity for the services to learn how Soviet intelligence really worked. To a great degree, SIS and MI5 remained in the dark about Soviet operations in Britain and elsewhere until well into the 1950s, when Maclean and Burgess defected. For details, see Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Allen Lane 2009).
29TNA: KV 2/2398 OVSEPIAN (Agabekov), General Direction of Police, Corps of Detectives, Report dated 25 January 1932, Serial 80b. See also Brook-Shepherd, The Storm Petrels, p.131. The author names the bank as the Banque Fédérale in Geneva and refers to an unattributed version of the story in which the sum of 400 million Swiss francs is named.
30ÖStA/NBA: Box 671, Document Die Affaire Arutiunov-Agabecov: Das Komplott von Constantia, 1931–1932. Romanian police headquarters, Ministry of Interior, 1932. In the British document the name is given as PANAYOTTI, a Greek subject born in Odessa, Russia, and his supposed secretary is named SERGIUMINTZ (clearly an error, should be Sergey or Serge Mintz), both domiciled in Paris.
31Kolpakidi and Prokhorov, KGB prikazano likvidirovat, p.244.
32TNA: KV 2/2398 OVSEPIAN (Agabekov), General Direction of Police, Corps of Detectives, Report dated 25 January 1932, Serial 80b. See also ÖStA/NBA: Box 671, Document Die Affaire Arutiunov-Agabecov: Das Komplott von Constantia.
33Ibid.
34TNA: KV 2/2398 OVSEPIAN (Agabekov), Serial 82a. At the time, MI5 and Scotland Yard were able to only partially confirm this information. They also shared it with their Austrian colleagues. Documents found by this writer in the Austrian and Soviet archives fully corroborate Agabekov's story. In 1930 Mikhail Gorb became deputy chief under Artur Artuzov, who had succeeded Meier (Mikhail) Trilisser as chief of the Foreign Section (INO) – a post Artuzov held in 1930–35 (OGPU administrative order No. 12, dated 12 January 1930 confirming the new staff of the INO – 94 officers – and setting up eight operational sections). When Agabekov saw him in Vienna, Gorb, the OGPU resident, was posing as Press Attaché with a diplomatic passport in the name of ‘Konstantin Komarovsky’. Igor Lebedinsky, alias Vorobyov, was later the OGPU legal resident in Austria who handled both Dr Arnold Deutsch and Edith Sushitzky, the future recruiters of Kim Philby in London. See also ÖStA/NPA: Box 671, Bundespolizeiamt-Inneres, Case Pr. Zl. IV-3412/4/31.
35Agabekov's personal account of the events; see KV 2/2398 OVSEPIAN (Agabekov), Serial 82a.
36TNA: KV 2/2398 OVSEPIAN (Agabekov), General Direction of Police, Corps of Detectives, Report dated 25 January 1932, Serial 80b.
37It is possible that in Bucharest he was meeting Major Chidson and/or his assistant, Archie Gibson, who reported to the head office that the OGPU had penetrated the Romanian and SIS anti-Soviet networks; for details, see Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909–1949 (London: Bloomsbury 2010). Therefore, SIS might have needed Agabekov to help uncover the ‘moles’.
38TNA: KV 2/2398 OVSEPIAN (Agabekov), General Direction of Police, Corps of Detectives, Report dated 25 January 1932, Serial 80b.
39Agabekov's personal account of the events, see KV 2/2398 OVSEPIAN (Agabekov), Serial 82a.
40ÖStA/NPA: Box 671, Case Pr. Zl. IV-743/32, Report of the Vienna Police Directorate to the Foreign Ministry of 8 March 1932. This episode was part of the large-scale document forgery operation conducted by the OGPU in Austria and Germany in the late 1920s to early 1930s. David Dallin describes the case in his book Soviet Espionage (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press 1955) pp.92–103. It became known as the Klose Affair.
41‘Kouril’ and ‘Zenner’, Soviet illegals based in Vienna, made up a second team in the Philamena operation. They both escaped to Austria and have never been identified. See ÖStA/NBA: Box 671, Case Pr. Zl. IV-742/32, Report of the Vienna Police Directorate of 19 March 1932.
42According to a police record, this telephone call to the Grand Hotel in Constanza, where ‘Kouril’ stayed, was made from the Post Office (Telegraphenamt) on Laurenzberg in Vienna's I district, which is still there, on 10 January at 1.30 pm. See ÖStA/NPA: Box 671, Case Pr. Zl. IV-742/32, Report of the Vienna Police Directorate to the Foreign Ministry of 8 March 1932.
43ÖStA/NBA: Box 671, Document Die Affaire Arutiunov-Agabecov: Das Komplott von Constantia.
44Ibid.
45ÖStA/NBA: Box 671, Case Pr. Zl. IV-742/6/32, Report of the Vienna Police Directorate dated 19 March 1932.
46Agabekov's own version differs in some details. According to him, Alekseyev tried to kill him on Monday 11 January, shortly after Tzonchev left him in a restaurant and while he was still finishing his dinner. Alekseyev was allegedly arrested by the Romanian police near the restaurant's window with a Mauser pistol in his hand. See TNA: KV 2/2398 OVSEPIAN (Agabekov), Serial 82a.
47ÖStA/NBA: Box 671, Case Pr. Zl. IV-742/6/32, Report of the Vienna Police Directorate dated 19 March 1932. Shortly after the operation collapsed, Jean Panayotis went to Vienna, where he stayed from 21 February to 2 March 1932 at the hotel Stadt Triest, and then left for Paris. See ÖStA/NPA: Box 671, Case Pr. Zl. IV-742/32, Report of 8 March 1932. Nothing more was heard of him.
48See Brook-Shepherd, The Storm Petrels, p.146.
49For details about Foley's activities in Berlin, see Michael Smith, Foley: The Spy who Saved 10,000 Jews (London: Hodder 1999). See also Henry Landau, All's Fair: The Story of British Secret Service Behind German Lines (New York: Putnam 1934) and Spreading the Spy Net: The Story of a British Spy Director (London: Jarrods 1938). Captain Landau was Foley's predecessor in Berlin.
50TNA: KV 2/2398 OVSEPIAN (Agabekov), Cross-Reference, dated 29 May 1933, Serial 88b.
51See below.
52KV 2/2398 OVSEPIAN (Agabekov), Cross-Reference dated 3 December 1936, Serial 96a: ‘On 30.11.36 S.I.S. forwarded under CX/12650/2205/V a translation of a letter from Georgi Agabekov with regard to the GPU [sic, from 1934 it was NKVD] and the general situation in the USSR. Agabekov stated that, with the knowledge of the local Sûreté, he had been in contact for about three months with the representative of the Opposition group of the Bolsheviks-Zinoviev-ists, who held a responsible diplomatic post in the Soviet Embassy in Brussels. SIS reported that they had not been in contact with AGABEKOV since 1933, and were not altogether satisfied with the accuracy of the statements made in the above-mentioned letter. Taking full account of the possibilities of provocation, SIS were not encouraging any closer association’. Original in S.F. 420/1, Vol. 5, 197a. It may be added that work with the earlier defector, Grigory Besedovsky, who defected to France, was as unsuccessful as the work with Agabekov. The situation was beginning to change in 1940 when Jane Sissmore (by then Archer), one of the leading Soviet experts of MI5, was given an opportunity to debrief Walter Krivitsky (‘Dr Martin Lessner’), who defected to France and later moved to the USA.
53About Johnny, see Boris Volodarsky, Stalin's Agent: The Life and Death of Alexander Orlov (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013). See also R.S. Rose and Gordon D. Scott, Johnny: A Spy's Life (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press 2009). The case is also mentioned in Michael Smith, Foley, and Keith Jeffery, MI6, but many important details, like – for example – his life and work after 1945, are missing in both accounts.
54Brook-Shepherd, The Storm Petrels, pp.148–9.
55Ibid., p.149.
56TNA: KV 2/2398 OVSEPIAN (Agabekov), Serial 96b, Extract for File P.F. 4096, V. 2, Serial 33a, dated 14.1.39.
57Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoli Sudoplatov with Jerrold L. Schlecter and Leona P. Schlecter, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness – A Soviet Spymaster (London: Little, Brown and Company 1994) p.48.
58Pavel Sudoplatov, Spetsoperatsii Lubyanka i Kreml 1930–1950 (Moscow: Olma-Press 2007) pp.80–1.
59Stanislav Lekarev, ‘Hasan: chelovek-kinzhal’, Argumenty Nedeli, 25–26 October 2006.
60This is also hearsay. Baron Verhulst allegedly said it to Boris Bazhanov and the latter, four decades later, to Gordon Brook-Shepherd. See Brook-Shepherd, The Storm Petrels, p.149 n.1.
61La Vanguardia, Edición del domingo, 8 November 1936, p.2.
62See, for example, Kolpakidi and Prokhorov, KGB prikazano likvidirovat, p.362; Lt. Colonel Deryabin, ‘“Petrov”, “Grisha” on zhe Agabekov’, Krasnaya Zvezda, 23 May 1990.
63Besides the above-mentioned penitential ‘Letter to the Soviet authorities’, the NKVD appeared to have been in the possession of several private documents of Agabekov, including the manuscript of his memoirs (286 typed pages, 26 chapters) in the Central State Archive of the October Revolution in Moscow that the author of the article says arrived there from a Prague archive after the war. See Victor Bortnevsky, ‘Oprichnina. Nevozvrashchenets Grigorii Agabekov i sekretnaya sluzhba Stalina’, Sobesednik no. 34 (August 1989). The same document is referred to in Kolpakidi and Prokhorov, KGB prikazano likvidirovat, p.617 as of GARF, f. 5881, op 1, d. 701a. Also mentioned is his original receipt dated 8 May 1933 for 9000 French francs that he received in Brussels from an unnamed person or organization.
64Report of Interview, 9.5.1940 in TNA: KV 2/2398 OVSEPIAN (Agabekov), Serial 103a.
65Neue Freie Presse, Vienna, 5 March 1932, p.2.
66See ‘Fememord in Gersthof’, Die Presse, 22 May 2009.
67See TNA: ‘Engelbert BRODA’ KV 2/2349-2354.
68John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press 2009) pp.65–6.