Soviet Espionage in France between the Wars

Abstract

After the Bolsheviks consolidated their newly won power, they looked toward the Western democracies to achieve additional victories. Under cover of diplomatic recognition, trade agreements, and local communist parties, Soviets sent numerous clandestine agents abroad to pursue national security objectives, including theft of military and industrial secrets on a large scale. France, Britain, and the United States were the main targets in which, organizationally, Soviet intelligence used a consistent pattern. As an existential threat, France was the first priority until displaced by the fear of German rearmament. France represented a rich resource for advanced military and industrial technology that the Soviets needed to transform Russia’s infrastructure. In 1935, France and Russia signed a mutual defense pact that effectively ended Soviet espionage in France.

Notes

1 Philippe Robrieux, Histoire Intérieur du Parti Communiste, 1920–1945 (Paris: Fayard, 1984), p. 181.

2 Le Matin, 29 October 1924.

3 Grigory Bessedovsky, Revelations of a Soviet Diplomat (Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1931; 1977 reprint), p. 193.

4 Sarah Davies and James Harris, Stalin’s World: Dictating the Soviet Order (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 109.

5 Quoted from Jane Degras, ed., The Communist International, 1919–43: Documents, Vol. III: 1929–43, p. 217. Cited in Jillian Louise Stotter, “The French Popular Front and the Franco-Soviet Pact 1935–1938” (Unpublished thesis, University of London, 1984). https://core.ac.uk

6 Eugene Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (London: Sinclair Stevenson, 1995), p. 173.

7 Georges Vidal, “‘L’affaire Fantômas’ (1932): Le contre-espionnage français les premier de la preparations à la guerre,” Vingtième Siècle: Revue de Histoire 3, no. 119 (2013), p. 3.

8 Henry L. Zelchenko, “Stealing American Know-How: The Story of Amtorg,” American Mercury 74, no. 338 (1952), pp. 75–84. Zelchencko describes Soviet methods for stealing industrial secrets. Most English and French studies do not address industrial espionage, which was rampant during the 1920s and 1930s.

9 Bessedovsky, Revelations of a Soviet Diplomat, p. 102; Le Figaro, 8 September 1931.

10 Roy A. Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origin and Consequences of Stalinism (New York: Knopf, 1972), p. 104; Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (New York: Knopf, 2003), p. 16.

11 Boris Volodarsky, Stalin’s Agent: The Life and Death of Alexander Orlov (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 16.

12 David Dallin, Soviet Espionage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955), p. 14.

13 Bessedovsky, Revelations of a Soviet Diplomat, pp. 243–244. Communist techniques for investigating private lives in East Germany (DDR) were effectively portrayed in the German feature film, The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) (2006).

14 Douglas Porch, The French Secret Service: From the Dreyfus Affair to the Gulf War (New York: Strauss and Giroux, 1995), p. 118; Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordiensky, KGB: The Inside Story (New York: Harper Collins, 1990), p. 151.

15 Andrew Meir, The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin’s Secret Service (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), pp. 144–165.

16 Roger Faligot and Pascal Krop, DST: Police Secrète (Paris: Flammarion, 1999), pp. 32–34.

17 Robrieux, Histoire Intérieur du Parti Communiste, 1920–1945, pp. 168–169 and 338.

18 Ibid., pp. 150–153. Robrieux cites Barbe’s memoirs but doubts these figures.

19 Le Figaro, 6, 13, and 20 December 1931.

20 Le Figaro, 13 May 1927; Robrieux, Histoire Intérieur du Parti Communiste, 1920–1945 , p. 339.

21 Le Figaro, 24 January 1928.

22 Le Figaro, September 1927.

23 Robrieux, Histoire Intérieur du Parti Communiste, 1920–1945, p. 180.

24 Weber, The Hollow Years, pp. 87 and 107.

25 Marilene Haroux, “Attempting the Impossible: Romain Rolland’s Pacifism and Crisis in his Personal Diaryand the Novel ‘Clerambault,’” Peace Research 42, no. 1/2 (2010), pp. 53–71.

26 Le Figaro, September 3, 1927.

27 Bertrand Warusfel, “Histoire de l’organization du contre-espionnage français 1871–1945,” www.parisdescartes.fr

28 Paul Paillole, Fighting the Nazis: French Military Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence, 1935–1945 (New York: Enigma Books, 2003), pp. 18–19.

29 Richard Deacon, The French Secret Service (London: Grafton, 1990), p. 118; Warusfel, “Histoire de l’organization du contre-espionnage français 1871–1945,” p. 13.

30 Roger Faligot and Rene Kauffer, Histoire Mondiale du Renseignement, Tome 1: 1870–1939 (Paris: Laffont, 1994), pp. 194–195. These pages reprint a sample GRU questionnaire.

31 Ibid., p. 195; Vidal, “‘L’affaire Fantômas’ (1932),” p. 4; Porch, The French Secret Service, p. 121.

32 Le Matin, 10 May 1927; Nigel West, The Illegals: The Double Lives of the Cold War’s Most Secret Agents (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1993), p. 12.

33 Richard Deacon, A History of the Russian Secret Service (London: Grafton Books, 1972; rev. ed., 1987), p. 195.

34 Faligot and Krop, DST: Police Secrète, p. 27.

35 Le Matin, 15 April and 8 May 1927.

36 Le Matin, 16 April 1927.

37 Le Figaro, 13 May 1927; Petit Parisien, 29 February 1928; Faligot and Kauffer, Histoire Mondiale du Renseignement, Tome 1, p. 196.

38 Le Figaro, 13 and 16 May 1927.

39 Quoted in Dallin, , Soviet Espionage, p. 39.

40 L’Humanité, 11 and 15 April 1927; West, The Illegals, p. 12.

41 Deacon, A History of the Russian Secret Service, p. 197; Dallin, Soviet Espionage, p. 37.

42 Le Matin, 26 July 1927; Le Figaro, 3 September 1927.

43 Vidal, “‘L’affaire Fantômas’ (1932),” pp. 1–3. During Stalin’s purge of the military in the mid-1930s, more than 500 secret service agents were executed. Deacon, A History of the Russian Secret Service, p. 224. According to Faligot and Kauffer, Histoire Mondiale du Renseignement, Tome 1, Cremet faked his death in China and returned to Europe where he lived out his life mostly in Brussels (p. 197).

44 Porch, The French Secret Service, pp. 122–123.

45 Faligot and Kauffer, Histoire Mondiale du Renseignement, Tome 1, p. 196; Deacon, A History of the Russian Secret Service, p. 105.

46 Dallin, Soviet Espionage, p. 59.

47 Ibid., p. 36.

48 William T. Murphy, “The Honeymoon Spies: Robert Gordon Switz and Marjorie Tilley,” American Intelligence Journal 36, no. 1 (2019), pp. 75–97.

49 L’Humanité, 19 May 1927.

50 Le Matin followed the raid in detail; 13–14 and 18–19 May 1927.

51 Bessedovsky, Revelations of a Soviet Diplomat, p. 208.

52 Georges Agabekov, OGPU: The Secret Russian Terror (New York: Brentano’s, 1931).

53 Michael B. Miller, Shanghai on the Metro: Spies, Intrigue and the French between the Wars, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Primarily a cultural history, this book describes espionage in terms of popular French fiction of the era.

54 Vidal, “‘L’affaire Fantômas’ (1932),” pp. 8–9.

55 Faligot and Krop, DST: Police Secrète, p. 29.

56 Dallin, Soviet Espionage, p. 56; Vidal, “‘L’affaire Fantômas’ (1932),” pp. 6–7.

57 Le Matin, 6 December 1932; Volodarsky, Stalin’s Agent, p. 21, wrote that Duclos received a sentence of 47 years, an unfortunate error, in an era where sentences were lenient.

58 Murphy, “The Honeymoon Spies,” pp. 88–89.

59 According to Volodarsky, Stalin’s Agent, p. 53, the real spymasters were Marcovich, Veniamin Berkovich (the “Paymaster”), and Switz.

60 Leopold Trepper, The Great Game: Memoirs of the Spy Hitler Couldn’t Silence (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977), p. 78.

61 Murphy, “The Honeymoon Spies,” p. 81.

62 Volodarsky, Stalin’s Agent, p. 51, describes Bostrom as a spy, although she was never implicated in espionage in New York, Helsingfors, or Paris. Neither Faligot and Kauffer (Histoire Mondiale du Renseignement, Tome 1) nor Faligot and Krop (DST: Police Secrète) commented on Trepper’s bad history.

63 Volodarsky, Stalin’s Agent, p. 53.

64 William T. Murphy, “Lydia Stahl: A Secret Life, 1985–?,” Journal of Intelligence History 18, no. 1 (2019), pp. 38–62.

65 Several writers have repeated numerous biographical errors about Lydia Stahl. Faligot’s errors, for example, include that she and her husband left for the United States when in fact Boris had divorced Lydia and left for the United States with his new wife, Ludmila; that he became a stock broker in New York when he actually was an engineer; that Stahl’s son died in 1918 when it was really 1927. Further, Stahl did not study law at the Sorbonne but graduated with a Certificate in Physics, Chemistry, and Natural Science. Discovery of a counterfeit plot in America did not force her to return to Paris, because neither Nicholas Dozenberg, the real ringleader, nor Stahl was identified with counterfeiting.

66 Faligot and Krop, DST: Police Secrète, pp. 24–30, emphasize the use of seduction to gain intelligence information.

67 Volodarsky, Stalin’s Agent, p. 53, is correct in writing that Stahl was mainly a photographer.

68 Faligot and Krop, DST: Police Secrète, p. 31, wrote in error that “During the summer of 1934 Stahl was condemned to 10 years.” Actually, she was sentenced in April 1935 to five years, the maximum, reduced to four on appeal. Faligot and Kauffer, Histoire Mondiale du Renseignement, Tome 1, pp. 212–213, believe Stahl was rescued by Abwehr, met with Admiral Canaris, worked for the Germans in the Balkans and Norway, was a mistress of Ion Antonescu, and after the war escaped to Argentina. See also Faligot and Krop, DST: Police Secrète, p. 53. No sources are cited for these fanciful tales. Oscar Reile, head of Abwehr in occupied France, in his memoirs, L’Abwehr, le Contr-Espionage Allemand en France (Paris: France Empire, 1970), does not mention rescuing Stahl from prison. Further, Erich Borchers, the Abwehr officer purportedly in charge of the rescue mission, does not mention Stahl in his memoirs, Abwehr Contre Résistance (Paris: J’ai Lu, 1968). The court decision is “Judgement of the Court of the Seine,” 17 April 1935. Unpublished. Translated by the U.S. Department of State and obtained in response to an Freedom of Information Act request.

69 Matthieu Boisdron, “Le project de pacte orientale (Février 1934–Mai 1935),” Guerres Mundiales et Conflits Contemporaines 4, no. 220 (2005), pp. 23–24. www.cairn.info. See also J. Basdevant, “Le pacte franco-sovietique,” Politique Etrangère 4, no. 1 (1939), pp. 28–29.

70 Stotter, “The French Popular Front and the Franco-Soviet Pact 1935–1938,” pp. 37–40; Volodarsky, Stalin’s Agent, p. 215.

71 Paillole, Fighting the Nazis, p. 55.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

William T. Murphy

William T. Murphy, retired from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), is a recipient of the International Documentary Association’s Preservation and Scholarship Award. Since leaving NARA he has provided archives research for numerous television documentaries, most notably the French Apocalypse history series. His interest in espionage stems from his work in archives. The author can be contacted at [email protected].