WALTER G. KRIVITSKY: BRIDGING OCTOBER IDEALS WITH JANUARY REALITIES, 1917 – 1941.

IAN S. WASSINK

SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN HISTORY

NIPISSING UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES NORTH BAY, ONTARIO

© IAN S. WASSINK NOVEMBER 2012

AUTHOR’S DECLARATION PAGE

I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this Major Research Paper.

I authorize Nipissing University to lend this Major Research Paper to other institutions or individuals for the purpose of scholarly research.

I further authorize Nipissing University to reproduce this Major Research Paper by photocopying or by other means, in total or in part, at the request of other institutions or individuals for the purpose of scholarly research.

ABSTRACT

The historiographical debate concerning Walter Krivitsky and his debriefing with

Britain’s MI5 in 1940 is controversial. The extent that Krivitsky provided clues on Cambridge

Five members such as Kim Philby and Donald Maclean to MI5 and the ability of MI5 to counter the Soviet intelligence threat in the midst of the Second World War and into the

Cold War remains to be settled. By incorporating memoir material that reveals Krivitsky’s early years as a dedicated Bolshevik revolutionary, this paper seeks to better understand

Krivitsky’s Bolshevik ideals and pragmatic actions at his defection and debriefing with the ultimate goal of understanding the value that Krivitsky provided to MI5. Krivitsky’s MI5 personnel file, as released from The National Archives in Kew and categorized in the KV 2 series, is analyzed with the goal of understanding what Krivitsky was saying to MI5, and what he was shielding and withholding from them. By contesting Christopher Andrew’s narrow view of Krivitsky being confused, unknowing, and garbling information about Philby and Maclean, and arguing that Krivitsky revealed information on his own terms and for his own purposes, this paper presents a more nuanced view of Stalin’s defectors of conscience. Intelligence historiography and Anglo-Soviet historiography will certainly benefit from a study such as this one.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project began in 2011, when I decided to return to Nipissing University in North

Bay, Ontario, Canada to further my studies at the graduate level. As the assignments began to build and conversations with colleagues continued, this paper took on a life of its own and was shaped by my own thoughts and the thoughts of others. It is the thoughts and helpful comments of others that certainly deserve my thanks and acknowledgement for, without them, this paper would never have been possible. First and foremost I want to thank my Research Supervisor Dr. Gordon Morrell. His helpful comments, insightful discussions, brain-wave stimulations, and eyes that looked afresh at each draft have enabled me to learn and gain further insight into the inner-workings of Britain’s intelligence services. I also thank him for providing to me the various KV series documents from The National Archives in Kew on which this paper is based. Second, I want to thank Dr. Stephen Connor, whose supportive role in this paper and in my other university courses has helped demonstrate to me the excitement that can be found in historical research. Third, I want to thank Dr. David

Tabachnick for agreeing to serve as the external examiner on my examination committee.

Each member of the History Department Faculty at Nipissing University in some way, shape, or form has contributed to the ideas presented in this paper. I also gratefully thank the staff at the Library at Nipissing University, North Bay Campus, for tolerating and sometimes embracing my persistent pestering, perpetual late-returning of materials, and general witticisms. Specifically, I want to thank Johanna Tapper and the Inter-Library Loans staff for helping me acquire excerpts of Kevin Quinlan’s doctoral dissertation from the

University of Cambridge. I am also grateful to previous Master of Arts candidates for their submitted research works, and specifically Curtis Robinson, Greg Richardson, and Shane

Cliff. I have enjoyed standing on the shoulders of these (sometimes literal) giants.

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To my colleagues in the program this year – Andrea Gelinas, Grant Doherty, Chris

Peemoeller, Dominic Mammola – and in a way Dr. Nestar Russell: you have taught me to approach primary source documents beyond the methodologies employed by that of a

‘typical historian’ and, before reading anything, to do so with clean glasses. I also want to thank Ms. Catherine Smith, my history teacher at Walkerton District Secondary School in

Walkerton, Ontario, who in a sense started it all. Finally, I want to thank my family and friends. You know who you are. Your positivity and love have always encouraged me to try my very best. All of the paper’s mistakes and omissions, of course, are my own, but hopefully well hidden.

I.S.W.

November 2012

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………………1

Debates Among Historians………………………………………………………………………4

Memoirs and the Communist Party……………………………………………………….…..19

Krivitsky in London………………………………………………………………………………25

Krivitsky and the Notion of Traitor/Defector…………………………………………...……44

Krivitsky’s Logic and Conclusions...………………………………………………………….52

Working Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………55

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1

Introduction

The role of traitors/defectors has long held an important place in the study of Anglo-

Soviet relations in the interwar period and Cold War era. In 1937 one such traitor, Walter

Krivitsky, turned his back on Stalin and made himself available to French, American and ultimately British authorities. This study considers his importance to British intelligence. In early 1940, at a time when the British government was entertaining ideas of waging war against the Soviet Union, this Soviet spy turned traitor/defector was invited by Britain’s counter-intelligence service (MI5) to London for conversations the British hoped would shed light on Soviet intelligence operations and the wider threat of what historian Christopher

Andrew has called the ‘Red Menace’.1 Over the past decade, historians who study Anglo-

Soviet relations have increasingly turned to the recently declassified secret documents of the British state to examine what Richard Aldrich has identified as the “hidden hand”2 of intelligence operations. In the British case, in the first half of the twentieth century, documents released by The National Archives in Kew have permitted historians to revisit the inter-war period that ended with the Second World War and provided the foundation for much that would shape the Cold War.

Historians are now able to analyze the British secret intelligence organizations in increasingly nuanced ways by utilizing these documents. Most of these files are the working files generated by intelligence officers and agents who were employed by British intelligence organizations. Britain’s MI5 and its foreign intelligence service (MI6), also known as Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), were two of the main intelligence organizations in the inter-war period that were tasked with assessing domestic threats (MI5) and pursuing

1 For ‘Red Menace’, see chapter titles in Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London, Penguin Books Ltd., 2009), 139 and 160; and Andrew, Her Majesty’s Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community (New York: Viking Press, 1986). 2 Richard J. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence (London: John Murray Ltd., 2001). 2 foreign intelligence opportunities (MI6). These organizations generally dealt with various foreign threats, secret information, counter-subversion, and some of this information came from individuals who were employed by other states.

Krivitsky, a Polish-Jew born in the borderlands of Galicia at the turn of the twentieth century in what is now modern-day Ukraine, was one of those individuals who worked for the Soviet Union under both Lenin and Stalin. For a brief period in the 1930s, Krivitsky oversaw Soviet spy networks throughout Western Europe and broke with Stalin in 1937.

When he came to Britain in January 1940, MI5’s objective was to obtain as much information from Krivitsky as possible about Soviet operations against Britain. Krivitsky’s approximately two-decade long intelligence career came to an abrupt and violent end when he was found dead in a hotel room in Washington, D.C. in February 1941.

By early 1940, the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact had been signed and Poland was invaded and divided by Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. Krivitsky’s debriefing has been fascinating for historians and others because of both the general interest in the role of traitors in intelligence history and the more specific contribution

Krivitsky potentially made regarding the penetration agents collectively known as the

Cambridge Five. By considering MI5 files released over the past decade by the British government, augmented with memoirs addressing the period of Krivitsky’s life, this reevaluation will enhance our current understanding of this important figure in Anglo-Soviet intelligence history. Of particular importance to this assessment is an evaluation of what

Krivitsky chose to disclose to the British and what he appears to have understated or hidden from view. This material is evaluated within the context of two sets of motivations— revolutionary ideology and pragmatism. The former is considered within the wider context of his formative years in the East European borderlands, his relationship to close comrades such as Ignace Poretsky who shared Krivitsky’s commitment to the Revolution of 1917, and the politics of internationalism as against Stalinism. These contextual elements enhance an 3 understanding of Krivitsky’s worldview and consider the possibility that he did not completely abandon his revolutionary Bolshevik convictions. In the second type of motivation, pragmatism, there was the reality that Krivitsky was a man on the run, a man without a country, and a man who needed to fund his survival. These aspects have been considered by others, chiefly Earl M. Hyde Jr., but are not sufficient to explain Krivitsky’s behaviour in 1940.3 Finally, this study explores explanations of Krivitsky’s behaviour from his defection to his death that have been ignored or understated in the existing historiography.

The overall conclusions of this paper would suggest that previous historians’ accounts of the interrogation of Krivitsky, such as Christopher Andrew’s The Defence of the

Realm and Gary Kern’s A Death in Washington,4 have been significantly narrow in their scope and have sought to examine his testimony almost solely in regard to the clues that he gave to MI5 about the identity of the Soviet moles Donald Maclean and Kim Philby.

Although helpful in encouraging an understanding of MI5 as an intelligence organization that struggled in a context where resources were scarce and priorities numerous, the very design of such an approach makes these accounts too tendentious. The consequence of this deficiency in the scholarship is that the understanding of MI5’s development as a security agency neglects the opportunities that Krivitsky’s debriefing provided beyond the potential unmasking of Maclean and Philby. Such studies have failed to appreciate the traitor/defector’s overall contribution to MI5’s knowledge about Soviet operations. In this sense, Krivitsky gave MI5 much more than is usually acknowledged, though as we shall see he also sought to shield some information from them in 1940.

3 Earl M. Hyde Jr., “Still Perplexed About Krivitsky,” International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence 16:3 (2003): 428 – 441. 4 Andrew, The Defence of the Realm; Gary Kern, A Death in Washington: Walter G. Krivitsky and the Stalin Terror (New York: Enigma Books, 2003). 4

Studies to date also have not adequately considered Krivitsky’s East-Galician origins that carried a Jewish background that Stalin never forgot, and few studies have taken his ideological convictions as a dedicated Bolshevik revolutionary seriously. There is certainly evidence in Krivitsky’s MI5 file that the British were advised by the British that their informer in the American communist movement, Jay Lovestone, had spent time with

Krivitsky since his arrival in the United States and they considered Krivitsky to be an anti-

Stalinist communist. Most studies ignore such factors and Hyde Jr. is virtually alone in suggesting that Krivitsky might have considered abandoning his revolutionary ideology as being too a radical decision despite the fact that doing so might well have afforded him greater security.5 This study also suggests that Krivitsky was not without his revolutionary ideals of Bolshevism while concurrently hating Stalin’s regime, and it is these two aspects – pragmatism and idealism – that assist in explanations of his actions during this time. The wider implication of this case study of Krivitsky is a better understanding of Krivitsky’s value to MI5, a more nuanced account of his actions in the debriefing moment and possible explanations for them, and wider implications on how traitors/defectors are understood by historians.

Debates Among Historians

The historiography of Anglo-Soviet secret intelligence in the West has its roots not in professional historians’ work, but in popular writings by journalists and former intelligence professionals. Christopher Moran identified this feature of intelligence history, especially that written up to the late 1980s, as a period when it was marginalized in academia.6

Understanding Walter Krivitsky’s career was greatly enhanced when his MI5 personal file

5 Hyde Jr., “Still Perplexed About Krivitsky,” 429. 6 Christopher R. Moran, “The Pursuit of Intelligence History: Methods, Sources, and Trajectories in the United Kingdom,” Studies in Intelligence 55:2 (2011), 34. This article by Moran also provides a useful assessment of the progress of intelligence history from the 1960s to present. 5 was released in 2002.7 Also helpful around this time were Soviet secret intelligence files that were smuggled out of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s by Vasili Mitrokhin, a senior archivist in the KGB who had wide access to many important and secret Soviet documents concerning foreign relations, which were then shared with Britain’s Secret Intelligence

Service. With the assistance of Christopher Andrew, Mitrokhin’s archive was interpreted and published in 2000. The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West, revealed much about the Soviet view of foreign intelligence threats and assisted scholars in corroborating and evaluating what the KGB knew and how it achieved its great success recruiting numerous agents who served Soviet intelligence operations against Britain.8

Nigel West has published numerous books on British and Soviet intelligence issues including the role of Krivitsky.9 For example, West argued that defector information concerning the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was relevant to understanding communist activity.10 Krivitsky confirmed that communist parties would play an important role in the event of a worldwide revolution,11 and certainly the communist resistance during the Second World War in France and Italy helped to defeat the Nazis. ‘The crown jewels’, as KGB officers described the Soviet residency in London, were the fruits of years of Soviet intelligence tradecraft aimed Britain.12 During the late 1970s Moran suggested that

7 The release of these files is the responsibility of The National Archives in Kew, UK. 8 Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West (London: Penguin Books, 2000). 9 Nigel West is actually a pseudonym for Rupert Allason who served as a former Conservative Party politician in the UK. 10 Nigel West, MI5: British Security Service Operations 1909-1945 (Briarcliff Manor, New York: Stein and Day, 1982), 64-66. 11 TNA KV 2 805 55x (xx/01/40 – xx/02/40), 58. 12 Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev, The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB Archives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, 261. On more works by Nigel West, see his works: At Her Majesty’s Secret Service: The Chiefs of Britain’s Intelligence Agency, MI6 (London: Greenhill Books, Lionel Leventhal Limited, 2006); Molehunt: The Full Story of the Soviet Spy in MI5 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987); Seven Spies Who Changed the World (London: Martin Secker & Warburg Limited, 1991). The Secret War for the Falklands: The SAS, MI6, and the War Whitehall 6 journalists incensed the Establishment with the help of well-connected friends who had access to Whitehall’s inside information.13 This is true of Gordon Brook-Shepherd’s The

Storm Petrels that revealed accurate information that may have come from an MI5 insider.

Brook-Shepherd stated “at the beginning of 1941, the British Government was making preliminary enquiries in Washington with a view of having Krivitsky come over to London for a second extensive interrogation. There were, it seemed, additional names and cases on which they would have greatly liked his help.”14 Chapman Pincher, another British journalist, stated that he could confirm, from a source that was not named, that Brook-Shepherd was actually given access to Jane Archer’s summary of Krivitsky’s debriefing report.15

The themes in writings on Krivitsky have almost exclusively focused on the period of his life from his defection in 1937 to the circumstances of his mysterious death in 1941, and the primary interest in his case has revolved around the extent of his knowledge about

Soviet intelligence operations and whether he revealed enough information to enable MI5 to unmask the Cambridge Five. The two authoritative and tendentious accounts by historians on these themes are Kern’s 2003 biography on Krivitsky entitled A Death in

Washington and Andrew’s ‘authorized’ history of MI5 as an intelligence organization entitled

The Defence of the Realm.16 Kern’s work can be characterized as a narrative account of

Krivitsky’s early life in Soviet intelligence through to his flight from Stalin in 1937, debriefing with MI5 in early 1940, and death in February 1941. Andrew’s work is an authorized

Nearly Lost (London: Little, Brown and Company, 1997); MASK: MI5’s Penetration of the Communist Party of Great Britain (London: Routledge, 2005). 13 Moran, “The Pursuit of Intelligence History,” 36. 14 Gordon Brook-Shepherd, The Storm Petrels: The First Soviet Defectors, 1928-1938 (London: Collins, 1977), 194. See also in MI5’s file on Krivitsky: TNA KV 2 802 73ab (03/01/41) which is a letter from SIS to MI5’s Dick White about securing Krivitsky’s confidence with a new contact in America. 15 See endnote no. 18 from “Chapter 22: How Traitors Survive” where Pincher stated, “My inquiries have satisfied me that Brook-Shepherd was given access to the contents of the report of the MI5 debriefing of Krivitsky by the MI5 officer Jane Archer.” in Chapman Pincher, Traitors: The Labyrinths of Treason (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1987), 327. 16 Kern, A Death in Washington; Andrew, The Defence of the Realm. 7 institutional history of MI5 from its inception in 1909 to its centennial year milestone in 2009.

Andrew’s account is more focused on providing explanations for British intelligence failures such as political interference, the quality of intelligence leadership, and the competition for resources in the inter-war period. Hyde Jr. analyzed Krivitsky’s death scene in similar ways that Kern did, but reached the conclusion that Krivitsky could not possibly have killed himself and that surely the KGB were successful in their assassination of him.17

Kern’s work, along with another account by Frederick Giffin, assessed the mysterious circumstances of Krivitsky’s death. Krivitsky was found dead in a Washington hotel room on February 10, 1941 with a gunshot wound to his head. The main question of interest for historians in this area has been whether Krivitsky killed himself or was assassinated. Frederick Giffin, in a 1979 article entitled “The Death of Walter Krivitsky”, argued that there were three possibilities for Krivitsky’s death that were: 1) voluntary suicide; 2) murder or assassination by the NKVD; or, 3) forced suicide whereby Krivitsky was coerced into killing himself under the threat of harm to his family. Giffin does not explicitly side with one scenario or another, but seems to lean toward outright assassination.18 Kern similarly identified these three death explanations. In the last third of his book, Kern investigated various death scenarios and evaluated their feasibility and likelihood against available evidence and sided with the voluntary suicide scenario where

Krivitsky both faked his own suicide notes and could not possibly trust an NKVD blackmail contract that would guarantee his family’s safety.19 The close analysis of Krivitsky’s death scene is helpful in unraveling the possibilities of Krivitsky’s death, but it is now time that historians and others have moved on from this part of Krivitsky’s life in order to shed light on other areas.

17 Hyde Jr., “Still Perplexed About Krivitsky,” 435-439. 18 Frederick C. Giffin, “The Death of Walter Krivitsky”, Social Science 54:3 (1979): 139-146. 19 Kern, Death in Washington, 297 – 394. 8

Kern investigated Krivitsky’s life from his defection in 1937 and his travels to the

United States along with his voyage to London in January 1940 that occurred just over two years from the time of his defection. Kern helpfully traced the progress of Krivitsky through

American emigration and the process through which he wrote and published his Saturday

Evening Post articles. Kern argued that Krivitsky’s purpose at the debriefing was not to continue condemning Stalin’s regime, but to encourage the British to further investigate the

Soviet espionage threat. This was the first time that a historian used Krivitsky’s debriefing file in an attempt to assess Krivitsky’s possible motivations during the debriefing. However, though it is difficult to ascribe explanations of motivations to historical figures, exploring the possibilities based on contextual factors such as time period, circumstances, and background are necessary. Kern also argued that Krivitsky’s knowledge of the Cambridge ring was limited to small pieces of the operation learned in his last year with the Soviet service.20 This can be identified as the ‘limited knowledge’ argument. Kern identified how

MI5 viewed Krivitsky as a person with communist convictions, and MI5’s decision to take an anti-Soviet line with him was taken with this in mind. But Kern quickly dismissed Krivitsky as a true-believing communist and instead emphasized the individuals who Krivitsky named and subsequently what MI5 did with that information. Again, the focus here is on what

Krivitsky revealed and what MI5 did with his information. But Kern did not give a full account of other information that Krivitsky provided that is recorded in his MI5 file, such his overview of Soviet intelligence tradecraft and his discussion of how its agents actually operated and were recruited. Kern’s analysis also failed to take into account the emphasis that Krivitsky gave concerning the Communist Party of Great Britain and its importance to Moscow partly because Kern’s main questions did not require attention to these ideas. However, these ideas do deserve further emphasis and examination if historians are going to write history beyond their forensic hunt for the Cambridge spy ring. Additionally, Kern argued that, “Life

20 Kern, Death in Washington, 253 – 278. 9 for Krivitsky was pure calculation.”21 However, Kern’s grounds for this argument are not necessarily found in Krivitsky’s MI5 file, but in Krivitsky’s actions in America prior to arriving in London for the debriefing such as the articles published in the Saturday Evening Post.

Andrew came close to shedding new light on Krivitsky’s debriefing file, but the contribution of the authorized historian of MI5 was also limited by a vision of evaluating

Krivitsky’s usefulness and knowledge about the Cambridge ring. The fact that Andrew’s work was an ‘authorized’ history if not an ‘official’ history calls into question the extent of

Andrew’s independence as an academic. On the one hand, it is beneficial for one scholar to have access to a wide range of MI5 and SIS files that have not been completely released to the public or other historians from The National Archives if the result is that more information is revealed through one academic. The state claims it is required to protect its sources in order to maintain legitimacy of its operations and the confidence of future agents, though there are clearly other possible motivations at work. On the other hand, for academics this is not completely desirable because it is difficult for others in the field of intelligence history to scrutinize arguments when many sources and documents remain classified and unnamed. This situation is made increasingly difficult when it is not clear which documents have not been disclosed to Andrew and what type of agreements for non- disclosure Andrew entered into in order to produce his history. Hyde Jr. argued that had

MI5 followed up Krivitsky’s leads, Maclean and Philby would have been uncovered as

Soviet spies. For Hyde Jr., this failure on behalf of MI5 has not been adequately explained, and is something that Andrew sought to do in his authorized history.22

In his work, Andrew assessed the value of Krivitsky’s knowledge of Soviet operations against Britain on the assumption that what Krivitsky revealed to MI5 was indeed the limit of his knowledge and ability to recall information. Andrew argued that when

21 Ibid., 253-54. 22 Hyde Jr., “Still Perplexed About Krivitsky,” 434. 10 interviewed by MI5’s Jane Archer in early 1940, Krivitsky was confused about the biographical details and background of Maclean and Philby and that he did not know enough about them to reveal significant information to MI5 about who they were. He views

Krivitsky’s information as imprecise, limiting, and garbled.23 Kevin Quinlan, whose dissertation was supervised by Christopher Andrew, made the argument that MI5 should have been able to uncover Maclean and Philby. Quinlan gave more weight to Krivitsky’s initial reluctance to reveal information as a strategy to maintain his loyalty to former colleagues and to avoid self-incrimination. However, Quinlan’s overall focus centred on general aspects of human intelligence (HUMINT), as opposed to signals intelligence

(SIGINT) such as intercepting secret messages and transmissions, and psychological impacts on defectors.24 Quinlan narrated the details of Krivitsky’s knowledge of Soviet intelligence tradecraft to MI5 and accepted Krivitsky’s assertion that he did not know much about nor was he responsible for Soviet operations against Britain. Indeed this is what

Krivitsky told MI5. But is that a believable limit of his knowledge? By viewing Krivitsky in this way, Andrew and Quinlan failed to fully take into account different possibilities of why

Krivitsky’s information appeared to be limited. According to Andrew, he did not know enough and was confused at other times. However, Krivitsky was a professional intelligence officer and certainly not a low-ranking Soviet agent. Insufficient consideration is given to other possibilities such as Krivitsky limiting his own information in order to protect his friends or to be paid for information at a later time. Andrew’s assessment stops short of investigating whether Krivitsky actually knew more information that he revealed to MI5. It is

23 Andrew, Defence of the Realm, 263 – 282. In particular, see page 266 where Andrew argued, “With the exception of the King case, Krivitsky’s information on Soviet agents still operating in Britain was too muddled to make identification possible. Claims that the Security Service should have been able to identify Maclean and/or Philby after the debriefing are ill founded.” It is here that Andrew referenced this claim made by one of his PhD students Kevin Quinlan. See footnote below. However, Andrew did not use any helpful logic or references to refute Quinlan’s claim and simply states his view to be the case. 24 Kevin Quinlan, “Human Intelligence Tradecraft and MI5 Operations in Britain 1919-40” (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2007), 285-328. 11 through considering these possibilities and weighing various assumptions based on the same evidence that this paper contributes to the historiography of Krivitsky’s case. In short,

Andrew’s view is that what Krivitsky told MI5 was all that he knew and that Krivitsky did not hold information back.

Nigel West argued that Krivitsky’s information that pointed to Maclean was not relevant since Krivitsky could not have possibly known about Maclean.25 However, this argument is not convincing. Krivitsky had a senior rank and was responsible for overseeing

Soviet intelligence operations and networks throughout Western Europe and this would include Britain. Prior to his Western Europe post, he was the “Chief for Central Europe of the Third Section of the Soviet Military Intelligence” as early as January 1926.26 Krivitsky’s base was in The Hague, The Netherlands and he used the cover of an Austrian antique dealer with a storefront, which was a “disguise [that] accounted plausibly for my residence, for the funds with which I was supplied, and for my frequent journeys to other parts of

Europe.”27 The Hague is also where Henri Christiaan Pieck, the recruiter of John Herbert

King, was located. This connection is important because Krivitsky revealed King’s Soviet espionage role in the British Foreign Office to Krivitsky’s ghostwriter Isaac Don Levine, who then assisted in passing the information to the British. However, historians have not adequately explored this King-Pieck-Krivitsky link. Krivitsky was also interested in the fate of Brian Goold-Verschoyle, an Irish communist, likely due to Goold-Verscholye’s connections with both Pieck and the Woolwich Arsenal spy ring. Goold-Verschoyle made two trips to the USSR in the 1930s and was then sent to Spain at the time when Kim Philby was in Spain too. Krivitsky took steps to obtain British information about Goold-Verschoyle by mentioning it in the debriefing, and perhaps he held out the hope that Goold-Verschoyle might yet be saved after he was kidnapped in Spain while his brother was deported to

25 West, MI5: British Security Service Operations 1909-1945. 26 W. G. Krivitsky, I Was Stalin’s Agent (Bristol: Western Printing Services Ltd., 1940), 159. 27 Ibid., 95. 12

Russia.28 Krivitsky’s friend and colleague Ignace Poretsky (code name Reiss) was an important link in this story. According to Roman Bernaut, Ignace Reiss’s son, Reiss was in

Vienna a “great deal in 1933-34…He knew Britain well. It was he who had recruited a cipher clerk in the Foreign Office…Once the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, Ludwik

[Ignace Reiss (Poretsky)] was in charge of placing spies at the heart of Franco’s operation.

That is where Philby won his spurs.”29 Arnold Deutsch [the man credited with recruiting most of the Cambridge Five] also came from Vienna to Britain, and according to Krivitsky’s testimony in Britain, Deutsch arrived in 1933-34.30 Early in the debriefing, Archer discovered that Krivitsky’s wife “at one time worked officially in the U.S.S.R. Embassy in Vienna.”31 All of these links are puzzling only if historians accept Krivitsky’s assertion that he did not know much about Soviet intelligence operations in Britain. If we instead see his assertion as a preliminary posture in the interrogation, the evidence of his close associations with those who operated in Britain has real weight.

Andrew also pointed to structural deficiencies, scarce resources, and an overwhelming workload that prevented MI5’s success in leveraging Krivitsky’s testimony to its full capacity. Alternatively, West found it amazing that MI5 was able to do as much as it did with the few resources that it had. Like West, however, Andrew did not take into account sufficient information about who Krivitsky was, what his revolutionary background was like, what his ideological beliefs and possible motivations might have been and how these aspects might have contributed to Krivitsky’s tactics during his debriefing.

Some other earlier works that preceded Andrew and Kern concerning Krivitsky also discussed various aspects of the Krivitsky legacy. Jean Monds, publishing in a journal with a critical Marxist perspective, assessed Krivitsky’s role in the Spanish Civil War and

28 TNA KV 2 804 3a (24/01/40). 29 Tariq Ali, “The spymaster’s son,” The Guardian, February 20, 1999, http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/1999/feb/20/weekend7.weekend1. 30 TNA KV 2 804 4a (25/01/40), 2. 31 Ibid., 4. 13 extensively utilized his articles and memoir to this end. Monds argued that it was not just some parts of the political left in America that spoke out against Krivitsky, but it was the conservative Right as well that discounted Krivitsky’s account of Stalin’s purges, kidnappings, and murders. Monds concluded that historians who have refused to hear

Krivitsky have effectively silenced him. Certainly this was the case in 1978, but for different reasons than those promoted by Critique’s that sought to reassess Marxist debates that had been clouded by Stalin’s crimes.32

There has been some attention to the idea that Krivitsky withheld information for his own personal reasons. Hyde Jr. pointed out that Krivitsky told the Dies Committee that he was “withholding much information until he could be granted resident status”33 in the United

States. This type of reason for holding back information for his purposes is one factor –self- preservation and personal security – that assists in explaining Krivitsky’s post-defection behaviour. Another strand of this idea lies in the direction that Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev note on the significance of Anthony Blunt’s penetration of British intelligence when he passed on a copy of Krivitsky’s debriefing to his Soviet handler in January 1941.34 This possibility might well explain why Krivitsky’s information appeared confused and garbled to

Andrew: if he revealed too many particular details that were important to Soviet intelligence success such as the identity of Maclean and Philby, then it was likely that Stalin would find out. In this respect, Krivitsky’s actions were almost certainly thought through as Kern has argued.35 As will be demonstrated below, it is clear that Krivitsky’s information about Soviet operations was significant. How MI5 would handle Krivitsky and what sort of information he would share became important questions for British intelligence.

32 Jean Monds, “Krivitsky & Stalinism in the Spanish Civil War,” Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory 9:1 (1978): 7-35. 33 Hyde Jr., “Still Perplexed About Krivitsky,” 437. 34 West and Tsarev, The Crown Jewels, 145. 35 Kern, A Death in Washington, 253-256. 14

A Death in Washington lacks an analysis of Krivitsky’s early intelligence years and the context of Polish-Soviet relations, Polish-Jewish relations, Bolshevism, and questions of national self-determination in the East European borderlands areas between Hitler’s

Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union in what Timothy Snyder has identified as the

Bloodlands.36 Kern’s strength is in the narration of Krivitsky’s travels to the United States and his struggle to prove financial sustainability to immigration officials while gaining the attention of the West through his articles condemning Stalin’s regime and the Great Purges and his memoir I Was Stalin’s Agent.37 Many of Andrew’s sources are not sufficiently referenced and simply point to the existence of files in the Security Service Archive rather than identifying which files/documents in which the information can be found.38

MI5’s file on Krivitsky can be read from a number of different viewpoints. One possibility would be a reading of the file in order to get a sense of how MI5 agents and officers went about the task of contacting Krivitsky and having him travel to London. This task required attention to logistics – or what is known as intelligence tradecraft – such as which passports the British provided to Krivitsky to use as cover to travel to London, method of transportation, and how his safety could be ensured. Much of this happened quite quickly in late 1939 until his arrival in January 1940. Another possibility would include assessing the value of Krivitsky’s information to MI5 and what MI5 did with that information after his debriefing. This reading is linked to questions about how the British viewed the

Soviet threat over time. A further possibility is a reading of the file while paying particular attention to the information that Krivitsky provided to MI5.

36 Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 37 Krivitsky, I Was Stalin’s Agent. This book was originally published in the United States in late 1939 and is essentially a compilation of his Saturday Evening Post articles and was ghostwritten by a Russian born New York journalist named Isaac Don Levine. 38 This is indeed the problematic nature of Andrew’s work where he claimed that some of his assertions could be substantiated, but historians based on documents currently available to them cannot verify this information and assess the validity of Andrew’s statements. 15

Historians and other academics have studied various aspects of the East European borderlands in the general area of what now encompasses Poland, Ukraine, Eastern

Galicia, and the Soviet Union. However, Kern and Andrew have either not adequately consulted these types of sources in their accounts of Krivitsky or have ignored them outright. These sources provide context for Krivitsky’s background. Krivitsky was born as

Samuel Ginsberg in 1899 in a small town named Podwoloczyska, located about 170 km east of Lviv and nearly 200 km west of Vinnytsia, which was at the time located in Austria-

Hungary and bordered Russia. This town was located in Eastern Galicia and is now located in modern day Ukraine.40 Kern described the town at the time as a “polyglot settlement” that contained Poles, Ukrainians, Austrians, and Russians and where “Jews formed the merchant class.”41 Concerning Krivitsky’s background, Kern stated that “Other accounts, including his own, emphasize his [Krivitsky’s] Jewish heritage.”42 However, Krivitsky does not reveal any significant information about his Jewish heritage in his newspaper articles or his book. It seems that early on in his life, Krivitsky possibly abandoned his Jewish-

Ginsberg identity as he embraced Bolshevism. Krivitsky could not completely shrug off his

Jewish identity since, according to Oleg Khlevnyuk, the main goal of the Great Terror in

1937-38 was the removal of all individuals who could have been considered hostile toward the Soviet Union.43 In his discussion of Stalinist anti-semitism, Timothy Snyder argued that

Soviet and Polish-Jews had two possible labels from Stalin’s perspective. They were either nationalists as in the case of most Polish-Jews or they were rootless cosmopolitans without loyalty to Soviet motherland.44 Certainly Krivitsky wore such a label as a foreign threat to

40 Kern, Death in Washington, 12. 41 Ibid., 13. 42 Ibid., 14. 43 Oleg Khlevnyuk, “The Objectives of the Great Terror, 1937-1938,” trans. By E.A Rees, in Soviet History, 1917-53 Essays in Honour of R. W. Davies eds. Julian Cooper, Maureen Perrie, E. A. Rees, (London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1995), 167-68. 44 Snyder, Bloodlands, 348. 16 the Soviet Union, in Stalin’s eyes, with a Polish-Jewish background that was likely not ignored despite his dedication to the Soviet cause. According to Elisabeth Poretsky in her memoir, her husband’s brother, who was a staunch conservative, joined the Polish army in the fight against the Soviet Union in early 1920 and was killed in an ambush shortly thereafter. This connection would later factor into Krivitsky’s Polish foreigner label because:

It was a shock to us when Krivitsky was asked by the N.K.V.D. in Moscow in 1937 whether he knew Ludwik’s [Ignace Poretsky’s] brother had been killed in the Polish army fighting against the revolution – and was told that it was on his brother’s orders and in the service of the Polish government that Ludwik had ‘infiltrated’ first the Polish Communist party and then the Soviet intelligence service.45

Snyder further argued that this Stalinist anti-semitism continued into the early Cold War and illustrated that, even when victorious, Communists who were Jews in Poland were highly suspect and driven out of power. This idea was reinforced with the creation of the state of

Israel, but its roots go back to Stalin’s own concern about the loyalty of Jews and especially

Polish-Jews.46

Related discussions can be found in early Cold War scholarship on communist movements. In 1957, Demetrio Boersner argued in his book The Bolsheviks and the

National and Colonial Question that Rosa Luxemburg’s version of international revolution conflicted with Lenin’s Bolshevism due to her Western-oriented socialism that saw only

45 Elisabeth K. Poretsky, Our Own People: A Memoir of ‘Ignace Reiss’ and His Friends (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 25 – 26. 46 Ibid., 371 – 377. The conclusion that Snyder made on this point is found on page 377. “Like the vast majority of the mass killing of civilians by both the Nazi and the Soviet regimes, the Holocaust took place in the bloodlands. After the war, the traditional homelands of European Jewry lay in the communist world, as did the death factories and the killing fields. By introducing a new kind of anti-Semitism into the world, Stalin made the Holocaust something less than it was. When an international collective memory of the Holocaust emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, it rested on the experiences of German and west European Jews, minor groups of victims, and on Auschwitz, where only about one in six of the total number of murdered Jews died. Historians and commemorators in western Europe and the United States tended to correct that Stalinist distortion by erring in the other direction, by passing quickly over the nearly five million Jews killed east of Auschwitz, and the nearly five million non-Jews killed by the Nazis. Deprived of its Jewish distinctiveness in the East, and stripped of its geography in the West, the Holocaust never quite became part of European history, even as Europeans and many others came to agree that all should remember the Holocaust.” 17 immediate proletarian revolution as the way forward. This meant that for Luxemburg, Polish nationalism had a negative effect on workers and hindered the revolution whereas Lenin supported national self-determination as one means of creating more favourable conditions for revolution.47 However, Jeremy Smith argued that according to Luxemburg, Polish national autonomy was sufficient due to a large majority of ethnic Poles in a specific area, but that this concept, according to Luxemburg, could not be applied to the Jews because they did not have a specific territory and were being assimilated into Polish and Russian cultures.48 In Krivitsky’s early Bolshevik years in the 1920s, he assisted in operating behind

Polish lines during the Russo-Polish War “to create diversions, to sabotage the shipment of munitions, [and] to shatter the morale of the Polish Army by propaganda.”49 Though to most observers this would be clear evidence that Krivitsky had long rejected Polish nationalism and self-determination in favour of a Soviet and Comintern guided revolution, for Stalin and

Stalinists this remained a problematic identity.

As Carole Fink argued in Defending the Rights of Others, Polish-Jews in the borderlands region were neither a unified nor a homogenous group. Jews of the area spoke

Yiddish, Polish, Hebrew, Russian, and German and their religious practices spanned from ultraorthodox to secularism and atheism. Political beliefs also diverged from Jewish nationalism as Zionism, various forms of socialism, assimilation and Polish patriotism.50

Jeremy Smith also argued that the parties in the area that controlled national governments in 1917 that had previously advocated socialism and internationalism from 1917 – 1923

47 Demetrio Boersner, The Bolsheviks and the National and Colonial Question (1917-1928) (Hyperion Press, 1957), 42. 48 Jeremy Smith, The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917-23 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 13. 49 Krivitsky, I Was Stalin’s Agent, 46. 50 Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, The Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878 – 1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 77. 18 resorted to anti-Bolshevism and populist nationalism.51 The end of World War I in

November 1918 did not signal peace for the Jewish inhabitants of this borderlands area. As

Omer Bartov argued in Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine, the brutality of the invading Russian army during the war forced approximately 400,000

East Galician Jews to escape to the west. The fighting culminated in violence against the

Jews such as the pogrom in L’viv in November 1918 when Polish soldiers murdered Jews.

The consequence was that Jews never recovered from being displaced as a result of the war.52 It is here that Bartov’s argument becomes clear and persuasive: Jews in interwar

Poland increasingly faced anti-Jewish policies, and many turned to communism in order to assure their better treatment and survival at a time when nationalism and racism was on the rise.53 Krivitsky early life was located in the midst of this complex entanglement of uprooted populations and a radically changing political environment. Much of Bartov’s research is on the town of Buczacz, located in Eastern Galicia and approximately 100 km southwest of

Krivitsky’s hometown of Podwoloczyska. Bartov indicated that in researching the question of perpetrator motivation in the Holocaust from 1941-44, “in many cases the roles of victim and perpetrator were reversed more than once; that rescuers at one point were denouncers at another.”54 Although Bartov’s focus dates are after Krivitsky’s death, this is another indication of a complex situation with often murderous results and certainly Krivitsky’s own

51 Smith, The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 2-3. 52 Omer Bartov, Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 18. 53 Ibid., 36. 54 Omer Bartov, “My Twisted Way to Buczacz,” in The Holocaust: Voices of Scholars Ed. Jolanta-Ambrosewicz-Jacobs (Cracow: Austeria Publishing House, 2009), 101-102. According to Bartov’s faculty profile on Brown University’s website, Bartov is “currently…writing his new book, Blood Brothers: Buczacz, Biography of a Town.” Further on, Bartov stated that “My goal is to trace the origins of local mass murder in the complexities of relations between different ethnic and religious groups over a long time span in the Eastern Galician town Buczacz.” Quotations taken from . 19 role as a Bolshevik fighting against Poland in the 1920 but being targeted as a Polish-Jew in the 1930s highlights this ‘reversal’.

Memoirs and the Communist Party

The use and value of memoir material is important in understanding the arguments that this paper presents. In order to obtain a better understanding of the political climate of

Krivitsky’s early intelligence career, it is helpful to consult Elisabeth Poretsky’s memoir on the subject and to verify its information in light of secondary source accounts. Poretsky’s memoir was published in 1969. Thus, it is distantly removed from the tensions of her husband’s and Krivitsky’s deaths. It is also distanced from Krivitsky’s own book I Was

Stalin’s Agent that helped him get the attention of the West about what was happening in the Soviet Union. Poretsky established the goal of her book in the first sentence in the first chapter where she stated, “This book will tell the story of six men who came from a small town in the province of Galicia, on the border of the Austro-Hungarian empire.”55 This group of men, including Krivitsky, became involved in the Soviet intelligence apparatus and assisted in building intelligence networks throughout Europe after the 1917 Bolshevik

Revolution. By consulting Poretsky’s memoir for details about Krivitsky and the context of his early life, a better understanding can be brought to light that will assist in evaluating assumptions about what he was doing at his MI5 debriefing.

Poretsky dedicated an entire chapter in her book to the Polish Party. This refers to the Communist Party of Poland and its many factions.56 It is this context of the Inter-War

Polish nation and the development of the Communist Party that, in Poretsky’s words, “have

55 Poretsky, Our Own People, 5. 56 Generally, for ease of reference here, the term “Communist Party” will refer in general to the Communist Party movement and its many factions in Poland. Of course, many separate organizations existed throughout time, and they will be mentioned as such when necessary. 20 much to do with the fate of the protagonists of this book.”57 Poretsky saw the Communist

Party as a key organization for this group of men from Galicia and the political situation in

Poland. Poretsky also mentioned the impact of a significant Jewish population in Galicia where Polish independence meant a nationalism that was anti-Semitic.58 Given the secondary scholarship previously discussed here, this assessment seems reasonable. After being involved in the working-class movement in his early teens, Krivitsky established his dedication to the Bolshevik Party in his book I Was Stalin’s Agent where he stated “the

Bolshevik Revolution came to me as an absolute solution of all problems of poverty, inequality and injustice. I seized the Marxist and Leninist faith as a weapon with which to assault the wrongs against which I had instinctively rebelled.”59 Poretsky, in recalling the group’s friend Krusia’s words, mentioned that Krivitsky “had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and that he was lucky and would go far.”60 Krivitsky did go far, and according to Poretsky “Moscow had no experienced men available to do its intelligence work or to train the young men starting out in it, a network had to be built out of nothing, and men like…Krivitsky [and his friends] had to acquire for themselves the skills necessary to compete with the well-established and trained intelligence services of other European

States.”61 In any event, Krivitsky was a dedicated communist from his young adult years when he was 18 in 1917.

The communist movement in Poland was not unified. Poretsky attributed this lack of a unified movement to a Poland that was long divided by three separate empires and stated that “political groups in the three parts of the country were marked by the traditions of the empires under which they arose, and even those movements which were truly national in

57 Poretsky, Our Own People, 27. 58 Ibid. 59 Krivitsky, I Was Stalin’s Agent, 8. 60 Poretsky, Our Own People, 11. 61 Ibid., 69-70. 21 character faced completely different problems in the different areas of the country.”62 The fact that these communist parties were illegal and brutally suppressed pushed their operations underground. It is here that Poretsky is referencing the development of the

Polish Communist Party as a “fusion of various left-wing Marxist groups.”63 The main party of reference here is the Communist Workers’ Party of Poland (KPRP), which was a fusion of two left-wing political parties: the Social-Democratic Part of the Kingdom of Poland and

Lithuania (SDKPiL) that was founded in 1893 by Rosa Luxemburg, and the Polish Socialist

Party (PPS). However, Poretsky conflated the PPS and the PPS-Left (PPS-Lewica).64 PPS split into two factions in 1906 with national reformist socialists (Polish Socialist Party-

Revolutionary Fraction led by Pilsudski and the internationalist revolutionaries led by

Lapinsky that remained the PPS-Left.

Both the PPS-Left and SDKPiL adopted Marxist socialism and international revolution, but had radically different approaches to revolution. The SDKPiL favoured grassroots revolutionary activity that was not strictly coordinated by a central committee. It was this centrality that was desired from the Russian army as a result of intelligence failures in World War I where the General Staff attempted to establish centrality and rigidity for intelligence processing.65 The party also excluded the possibility of a Polish republic lead by the bourgeoisie.66 This was one of the critical differences that separated Luxemburg from

Lenin. As Poretsky put it, “To Rosa Luxemburg the party was the political organization of the working class, not, as Lenin held, an instrument of the political leadership designed to seize power.”67 According to Demetrio Boersner, Lenin advocated for a nationalistic

62 Ibid., 28. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 65 Raymond W. Leonard, Secret Soldiers of the Revolution: Soviet Military Intelligence, 1918-1933 (Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1999), 4. 66 Gabriele Simoncini, The Communist Party of Poland, 1918 – 1929: A Study in Political Ideology (Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1993), 12. 67 Poretsky, Our Own People, 29. 22 movement only to the extent that it could contribute to an international proletarian revolution. This stance placed Luxemburg in conflict with the Bolsheviks where an immediate proletarian revolution was imminent as opposed to Lenin’s revolution in stages that was not a simultaneous world-wide revolution.68 In 1908 the PPS-Left opposed Polish nationalism and independence on the basis of it being unrealistic. It adopted the objective of establishing a Russian democratic republic that would grant significant autonomy to the

Kingdom of Poland.69 It was this critical difference that separated the PPS-Left and SDKPiL that had to eventually be reconciled when the KPRP was created in December 1918.70 This was the Polish dilemma, as labeled by Roman Dyboski, particularly in 1914 of who to take sides with at the outbreak of the First World War due to the proximity of Europe’s major powers and the long history of a divided Poland and multiple occupations.71

This complicated political situation and development for the Communist Party resulted in most foreign communist parties becoming sections and under the supervision of the Communist International in 1920. The newly formed KPRP adopted leaders from both the SDKPiL and PPS-Left and the SDKPiL leaders were influenced by Luxemburg’s ideas and, according to Poretsky, even after her death in 1919. This Luxemburgism, that favoured spontaneous and immediate world-wide revolution and resisted centralization by Moscow, resulted in a purging of the Polish party leadership and Luxemburgists being replaced by

Leninists.72 According to Poretsky, the final blow to the Polish communists that labeled them as a foreign threat by Stalin was their support for Trotsky. In Poretsky’s words, “the

Poles expressed indignation at the treatment of Trotsky’s followers and warned of the

68 Boersner, The Bolsheviks and the National and Colonial Question, 42. 69 Simoncini, Communist Party of Poland, 1918 – 1929, 12. 70 Poretsky, Our Own People, 28. 71 Roman Dyboski, “Polish-Soviet Relations,” International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1931-1939) 13:2 (1934): 226. 72 Poretsky, Our Own People, 30-32. 23 possible consequences to the rest of the movement.”73 For Poretsky, this was unforgivable from Stalin’s perspective. It is in these complexities that Poretsky indirectly referenced the motivations of the group of men from Galicia including Krivitsky that, due to this “peculiar history of the Polish Communist Party”, that “also explains how some of its members, although dreaming only of building a socialist Poland, were inexorably drawn from their purely political aims into serving the cause of the Soviet Union because it was impossible to realize their own aspirations.”74 Certainly this statement supported Krivitsky’s conviction of combating the “problems of poverty, inequality and injustice” that led him to adopt and internalize the “Marxist and Leninist faith” but it also suggests that serving the USSR was perhaps the second best alternative to that of building a socialist Poland for these men.75

It was these competing convictions that Krivitsky held close when his close friend and intelligence partner, Ignace Poretsky, Elisabeth’s husband, requested an urgent meeting with Krivitsky in Paris in the summer of 1936. According to his wife, Ludwig

[Ignace] had been informed by a friend named Massing that the first Moscow show trial was underway in August that resulted in a death sentence for Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others.76

Previously, Zinoviev and Kamenev had both paired with Stalin to form the ruling troika of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and helped limit Trotsky’s influence. Zinoviev had also been the head of the Comintern and like Krivitsky was born outside of Russia in what is now modern day Yelizavetgrad, Ukraine. Both Zinoviev and Kamenev were Jewish, although Kamenev was born in Moscow. The point here is that after the execution, Ignace

Poretsky and Krivitsky discussed leaving Stalin’s service due to the purge of these old

Bolshevik leaders who were, in many respects, similar to themselves. The purges also extended to embassies abroad. Krivitsky stated in his debriefing with MI5 that “there would

73 Ibid., 33. 74 Ibid., 36. 75 Krivitsky, I Was Stalin’s Agent, 8. 76 Poretsky, Our Own People, 150. 24 be no people of the old Bolshevik faith working in important jobs in the Soviet Embassy in

London: they would all be new people.”77 Krivitsky referred to the Ludwig-Massing meeting in his book as well, but did not provide as many details as Elisabeth Poretsky did in her memoir. Krivitsky claimed in his memoir that “Reiss [Poretsky] had been deeply shocked by the purge of the Old Bolsheviks and the “treason trials” and was already determined to break away from Moscow.”78 In Elisabeth Poretsky’s words, “Ludwik [Ignace] insisted they must make an open break with Stalin as a protest against the execution of the old

Bolsheviks.”79 This moment was an important one for Krivitsky and it is helpful to have

Elisabeth Poretsky’s perspective on it. It means that Krivitsky was considering a break from

Stalin for an entire year prior to Ignace Poretsky’s assassination in Switzerland that ultimately sealed Krivitsky’s fate and forced the break. According to Ignace’s wife, Krivitsky was initially reluctant to leave the service and this illustrated his continued dedication to the communist cause and his desire to help where possible as was the case with Spanish Civil

War. Elisabeth suggests that one of Krivitsky’s arguments against turning on Stalin was that if the revolution in Spain succeeded, then the ideals of the October revolution would be restored and Stalin would be overthrown. In Poretsky’s words, “Any assistance one could give the Spanish Republicans was more important, he [Krivitsky] argued, than a gesture of solidarity with the old Bolsheviks who had been executed. His second argument against a break was its technical impossibility.”80 Indeed, one did not simply retire from Stalin’s secret service.

In seems clear that reassessing the use of both Poretsky’s and Krivitsky’s memoirs to clarify elements of his career prior to 1937 can add depth to our understanding of his actions from that time on. Most historians, however, have been reluctant to pursue this line

77 TNA KV 2 804 20a (31/01/40). 78 Krivitsky, I Was Stalin’s Agent, 275-276. 79 Poretsky, Our Own People, 150. 80 Ibid. 25 of inquiry. By way of one example, Gary Kern first used Poretsky’s memoir in the context of comparing the suicidal nature of Bolshevik spies and Al Qaeda terrorists along with sorting out biographical details of Krivitsky and his friends.81 Kern continued to present this Soviet agent as one predisposed to suicide by identifying the part of Poretsky’s memoir where their friend, Gorsky, had a nervous breakdown in Elisabeth’s apartment where he exclaimed that he would rather shoot himself than sign a false confession.82 Kern also dismissed Poretsky’s knowledge of Soviet operations by arguing that although she may have had access to many of Ignace’s secrets, she was still not actually an intelligence officer.83 However, this is not the area where Poretsky’s memoir is useful anyway;

Poretsky’s use for historians is in accessing Krivtsky’s early years where much of the story is otherwise unknown given that Krivitsky did not publish much about it himself in his newspaper articles or book. All of this permitted Kern to build up to his forensic analysis of the various possibilities concerning Krivitsky’s death that appear at the end of his book.

Although this was helpful for the historiography at the time, it is time to turn to further study in other areas of Krivitsky’s case.

Krivitsky in London

Before turning to an analysis of Krivitsky’s MI5 case file, it is necessary to remember the value that Poretsky’s memoir has provided in shedding light on Krivitsky’s early life.

Krivitsky was a Bolshevik revolutionary from a young age. However, he was not Russian and as Snyder and others have pointed out, Stalin regarded Polish-Jews in Soviet service as highly suspect by the time of the Great Purges.84 Krivitsky, along with his group of friends, had essentially worked to build a Soviet intelligence network in Europe out of

81 Kern, Death in Washington, 9, 12-15. 82 Ibid., 89; Poretsky, Our Own People, 151, 171, 198-99. 83 Kern, Death in Washington, 114. 84 Snyder, Bloodlands, 89 – 109. 26 nothing. This process was likely a long and arduous one with many bumps in the road; however, it was a career dedicated to a cause that was not easy to give up. According to

Krivitsky in his ghost-written memoir,

For nearly twenty years I had served the Soviet government. For nearly twenty years I had been a Bolshevik. As the train sped towards the Finnish border I sat alone in my compartment, thinking of the fate of my colleagues, my comrades, my friends – arrested, shot or in concentration camps, almost all of them. They had given their entire lives to build a better world, and had died at their posts, not under the bullets of an enemy but because Stalin willed it.85

Krivitsky also reflected on the last time he left Moscow in May 1937. “I little realized then that I was seeing my last of Russia as long as Stalin is her master.”86 If there is any quotation from Krivitsky that embodied his turn from Stalin in 1937, then that is it. These reflections, offered to an American audience in 1939, do not have Krivitsky denouncing the

Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks or the Soviet experiment itself. Instead they show a break with Stalin, which made Krivitsky’s break akin to Trotsky’s notion of a ‘revolution betrayed’ by Stalin. Whether or not Krivitsky knew on that train ride whether he would defect or not, the issue was eventually forced when Ignace Poretsky was assassinated and this event forced Krivitsky into survival mode. He travelled to Paris and made contact with

Trotsky’s son, Lev Sedov, sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to New York, engaged in a short publication career, and eventually met face to face with Britain’s intelligence agency in

London.

In the academic study of intelligence history, historians understandably give substantial weight to state documents, most of which have been kept from them until recently. This study does attach importance to such sources. Krivitsky’s KV 2 series file includes his testimony as given to MI5’s Jane Archer in addition to other relevant documents. However, the interview sessions were not recorded verbatim. As Kevin Quinlan

85 Krivitsky, I Was Stalin’s Agent, 7. 86 Ibid. 27 has stated, “what the defector knows does not pass to the debriefer by osmosis.”87

Therefore, the limitation here is that the historian is actually dealing with Jane Archer’s interpretation of Krivitsky’s testimony including what she heard and thought was important at the time. If that is the case, then some questions about state documents should really be concentrated on how the state, or its agents and individuals, viewed various situations and information in various contexts at various points in time. Again, this is the primary focus of this paper: seeking an answer to the question of how MI5 benefited from Krivitsky and his information. Krivitsky’s context in the debriefing situation must take into account his situation and 1917 background in order to secondarily understand what he was doing in the debriefing.

Before making the decision to bring Krivitsky to the UK, MI5 devoted some time to an assessment of his potential value as a source. In part they were assisted by Krivitsky’s public attacks on the USSR. In April 1939, Krivitsky published newspaper articles condemning Stalin’s regime in the Saturday Evening Post. These articles, along with communications between representatives from Britain’s MI5 and Security Intelligence

Service (S.I.S.) and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), are found in Krivitsky’s personal MI5 file.88 Set against the drama of an expanding Second World War when Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, in November 1939 Krivitsky’s book I Was

Stalin’s Agent was published as a compilation of his previously written articles all of which were ghostwritten by Isaac Don Levine.89

87 Quinlan, Human Intelligence Tradecraft, 258. 88 For ease of reference and tidiness of footnotes, references to Krivitsky’s file are from The National Archives KV 2 802-805 inclusive. References to file documents from herein will appear in the following format: TNA KV 2 805 1a (28/09/44) which references The National Archives in Kew, the KV 2 series, file number, document number as it appears on the file minute sheet (essentially a table of contents for the particular file), and date of document as it appears on the minute sheet (DD/MM/YY). Where the date on the document differs from the date on the minute sheet, all efforts have been made to clarify if that is the case. 89 Krivitsky, I Was Stalin’s Agent. 28

MI5 had been tracking Levine since mid-1919. The first document that appears in

MI5’s personal file on Levine is an excerpt of a letter that he sent to New York to his fiancé concerning his travels at the time in Stockholm. This document serves as the first indication from MI5’s perspective about Levine acting as a journalist and book author with an interest in the Russian situation.90 Britain’s Military Intelligence continued its interest in Levine because they considered him, as a Russian, to be a Soviet agent. This early glimpse of the

Soviet threat after the First World War, in a report to the Director of Military Intelligence in

Whitehall from Major J.D. Scale, the Assistant Military Attache in Stockholm, which excerpts a Despatch of information from the American Military Attache in Stockholm to Washington, stated that “Some Russian officers who are not Bolshevik at heart, but due to lack of funds, they become Bolshevik agents in various countries in Europe. These men are not dangerous as the type of Levine, but all of them area a menace and can do harm to our country.”91 Levine’s file ends briefly with an immigration officer’s report of his short landing in the UK in mid-March 1925, and then resumes again more than a decade later in

September 1939 with the John Herbert King case.92 Levine cultivated important connections with American authorities and was able to arrange a meeting between Krivitsky and the Department of State in Washington in January 1939. Given the popular attention in the press of Krivitsky’s Saturday Evening Post articles and Levine’s connections, Krivitsky was easily put in a position to provide testimony at the House Committee on Un-American

Activities, which was a committee of the House of Representatives. Levine had a keen interest in reporting and writing on matters that brought to light issues concerning the

Russian Revolution. Some works included biographies of Stalin and Lenin, letters of Soviet

90 TNA KV 2 1585 (13/05/19). The extract from the letter itself is dated 25/04/19. 91 TNA KV 2 1585 (04/10/19). 92 TNA KV 2 1585 22a (04/09/39). 29 prisoners, the execution of Tsar Nicholas II, and the death of Lenin.93 Indeed Levine played a key role in alerting the British to Krivitsky’s value.

One of the first documents in Krivitsky’s file that reveals some level of value to MI5 is a deciphered report from Britain’s ambassador in Washington, Lord Lothian, to Gladwyn

Jebb in the British Foreign Office. The document summarized information provided by

Levine, via Krivitsky. Lord Lothian reports,

He [Levine] said that he knew through KRIVITZKY [sic] that Soviet has two agents. One is KING of Foreign Office Communications Department. The other is in cypher (sic) department of Cabinet Offices but name unknown. KING selling everything to Moscow. His predecessor as spy in Foreign Office was a man name unknown who drank heavily and who committed suicide a few years ago. LEVINE suggests that if KING is carefully watched so that his suspicions are not aroused you may discover the whole network.94

This was the first report of John Herbert King’s betrayal of British secrets to Moscow and

MI5 quickly followed up on it. This was an important moment in terms of MI5’s relationship with Krivitsky. It is odd that MI5 still had doubts about Krivitsky’s knowledge of Soviet operations in Britain. After all his knowledge about King does show that Krivitsky was aware of some of the most successful operations against Great Britain and this is not surprising as the recruitment of King and others was done by Henri Pieck, who was based in the Hague as was Krivitsky.95 However, upon MI5’s closer supervision of King and his eventual prosecution under the Official Secrets Act, it became increasingly clear that

Krivitsky knew enough to warrant an in-person interview. Krivitsky later revealed to MI5’s

Jane Archer that King’s predecessor, whose name was unknown in Lothian’s report, was

E.H. Oldham, code named ARNO, who was a “Clerk in Cypher Department of the Foreign

Office. [And] committed suicide October 1933.”96 Archer summarized “At some date which

93 Kern, A Death in Washington, 177. 94 TNA KV 2 802 7a (03/09/39). Agent code names and person names appear in capitalized letters for ease of reference and location in the files. This capitalization strategy has been maintained in direct quotations of various documents. 95 TNA KV 2 804 2b (23/01/40). 96 TNA KV 2 805 55x (xx/01/40 – xx/02/40), pages 77 and 84. 30

KRIVITSKY cannot remember but believes was about 1930 or 1931, a man called

OLDHAM…called at the Soviet Embassy in Paris offering to sell British diplomatic ciphers and other secret material to which he had access.”97 Archer dedicated 3 pages of her debriefing summary to the Oldham link. According to her, Krivitsky revealed that:

OLDHAM had become a confirmed drunkard and drug addict… As it appeared that OLDHAM would shortly break down completely GALLENI [Oldham’s controller] concentrated his efforts in trying to obtain from him sufficient details of the private lives of his colleagues to guide the Ogpu in their attempts to obtain a future source for the same material. OLDHAM at first refused to supply the requisite information but after considerable pressure had been brought to bear both on him and his wife, he gave GALLENI five or six names. One of these names was that of J.H. King also employed in the Foreign Office Cypher Department.98

This information was valuable to MI5 as it provided more background information to the

King case. It is significant that Krivitsky chose to emphasize this information about King’s predecessor, who by 1940 was already dead 7 years. Krivitsky certainly knew significant details about Soviet intelligence operations against the British, but it appears he was most comfortable when talking about deceased agents and completed missions.

At the initial outset of his interview with MI5, Krivitsky “repudiated any suggestion that he had knowledge of, or was in any way responsible for Soviet secret activities in this country, and appeared quite unable to remember the names of any of his assistants or friends who had operated in or against the United Kingdom.”99 However, this was puzzling and may suggest that Krivitsky was shielding information that he knew concerning his role in Soviet intelligence operations with MI5. The best example of this is the Dutch communist and artist named Henri Christiaan Pieck who lived in the The Hague, recruited King and ran him until some time in 1936. MI5 showed Krivitsky a picture of Pieck and he was able to identify him and also stated that Pieck had employed King. This may well have alerted

Krivitsky to the fact that MI5 knew Pieck and that he might need to take precautions

97 Ibid., 44. 98 Ibid., 45-46. 99 Ibid., iii. 31 concerning details about him if he wanted to protect him.100 According to Krivitsky’s information provided to MI5, Pieck began working with King in August – September 1935.101

Krivitsky also attempted to distance Pieck from the second Foreign Office mole in the

“Council of State” as Archer noted, “He [Krivitsky] said that as regards these sources of leakage PIECK knew nothing and that it was worked through HART [Maly].”102 Importantly,

Krivitsky was adamant about Pieck’s lack of knowledge, which inadvertently indicated that

Krivitsky knew Pieck well enough to know what the extent of Pieck’s knowledge would have been. This claim indicates that Krivitsky knew Pieck quite well.

According to Poretsky’s memoir, Pieck operated King under the direction of her husband and Soviet officer Ignace Poretsky. Given that Krivitsky also used the cover of working as an antique dealer out of The Hague, the same city where Pieck was based, and given the close network of contacts between Krivitsky, the Poretskys, and Pieck, it is important to note that on one hand Krivitsky seemed to know much about King and his operations, yet on the other hand seemed to shield details about Pieck from MI5 throughout his debriefing even though he identified him in a photograph.103 One of these details involved Krivitsky’s role in financing Soviet intelligence operations in Western Europe in

1936. King’s bank account indicated that large sums of money were deposited from 1935 to

1937 that were above and beyond his Foreign Office salary. In his confession to British authorities, he admitted to receiving money from Maly and Pieck.104 Krivitsky would have known about these payments given his oversight of finances.

Krivitsky also revealed to Archer during one interview session that he “read a large number of the trlegrams [sic: telegrams] that had been provided through King’s efforts.”105

100 TNA KV 2 804 1a (23/01/40). 101 TNA KV 2 804 2b (23/01/40). 102 TNA KV 2 804 1a (23/01/40), 2. 103 TNA KV 2 804 1a (23/01/40). 104 Thurlow, “Soviet Spies and British Counter Intelligence in the 1930s”, 626. 105 TNA KV 2 804 17a (30/01/40). 32

In order to see these telegrams, King would have deposited them at a safe house where they were collected by a courier and Irish communist Brian Goold-Verschoyle, who would then deliver them to Maly – who replaced Pieck’s oversight of King – for photographing and then sent to Moscow. However, Krivitsky did not divulge the content of these telegrams to

Archer, and MI5 did not seem to have pursued this information further. Perhaps Krivitsky was trying to protect detailed information that he had about Pieck given that Theodore Maly replaced Pieck after the OGPU realized that King had been discovered.106 Krivitsky also had detailed knowledge of and personally knew Brian Goold-Verschoyle who he identified in his book by his code name as “Friend.”107 Krivitsky later identified him to MI5.108 Pieck,

Maly, Poretsky, and Krivitsky were all involved in developing long-range plans for infiltrating the British state and recruiting agents for the Soviet cause based on idealist motivations.109

Maly was also responsible for Pieck in addition to Percy Glading and the Woolwich

Arsenal spy ring. Additionally, Maly was responsible for Arnold Deutsch who, through Kim

Philby, was able to recruit Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, and others who eventually comprised the Cambridge Five spy ring.110 At the same time, the British had their own

106 Richard C. Thurlow, “Soviet Spies and British Counter Intelligence in the 1930s: Espionage in the Woolwich Arsenal and the Foreign Office Communications Department,” Intelligence & National Security 19:4 (2004), 620. 107 Krivitsky, I Was Stalin’s Agent, 123-124. 108 TNA KV 2 805 55x (xx/01/40 – xx/02/40), 80. 109 Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, 263-265; Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, 64-65; Poretsky, Our Own People, 77; Shane Cliff, An Irish Communist and MI5 Contra-Intelligence in the 1930’s (MA Major Research Paper, Nipissing University, 2010), 21; Gregory Terrence Benjamin Richardson, Shedding Light on Blind Spots in the British Intelligence Establishment: MI5, SIS and John Herbert King, 1934-1940 (MA Major Research Paper, Nipissing University, 2010), 4-5; Curtis B. Robinson, Two Front War Between the Wars: Britain’s Stand Against Stalin’s Naval Rearmament Program in the Woolwich Arsenal (MA Major Research Paper, Nipissing University, 2010), 35-44; Thurlow, “Soviet Spies and British Counter Intelligence in the 1930s,” 618. 110 Genrikh Borovik, The Philby Files: The Secret Life of Master Spy Kim Philby (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1994), 42-50. 33 information on Pieck and particularly that he was considering a change of name in light of

Krivitsky’s revelations in the Saturday Evening Post articles.111

It was clear that Krivitsky knew a good deal about Soviet operations against Her

Majesty’s Government. The mystery then became who the second Soviet mole was in addition to King and whether Krivitsky would shed light on this information. It is clear that the reference of possibly discovering the whole network in Lothian’s September 1939 report to Jebb would lead one to believe that there was more to Soviet operations than these two agents. This could have pointed to the Cambridge Five network, which MI5 was just beginning to scratch the surface of with Krivitsky’s information.112

The potential intelligence value of Krivitsky to MI5 continued as Jane Archer,

Krivitsky’s main interviewer, analyzed the newspaper articles that Krivitsky had written through Levine. In a note to Valentine Vivian, Britain’s S.I.S. Deputy Chief of Section 5,

Archer concluded that “Personally, I am convinced from these articles, and from the scraps of information that LEVINE has obtained from KRIVITSKY and given to our Ambassador in

Washington, that if we wish to get to the bottom of Soviet military espionage activities in this country, we must contact KRIVITSKY.”113 The importance of Krivitsky and his information, especially since by the end of September as King had been arrested and imprisoned for betraying secrets to the Soviets, had become clearer to Archer.114 Further on she noted,

“There is a wealth of information in the KRIVITSKY articles and, as far as I can see, no reason to doubt the veracity of any of the statements therein made.” Here Archer was referring to an individual named W.G. Fitzgerald, and this is significant because “This was the first we ever heard of FITZGERALD having other than commercial interests in communism. It is interesting, as I was toying with the idea of asking Inspector Rogers to

111 TNA KV 2 802 60a (08/03/40). 112 TNA KV 2 802 7a (03/09/39). 113 TNA KV 2 802 13a (10/11/29). 114 Kern, Death in Washington, 236. 34 interview FITZGERALD to see if he could find out from him any more of PIECK’s contacts over here.” In a post-script to the same letter dated a day later, Archer stated “We should, I think, in any case see how the PIECK business develops before going further as regards

KRIVITSKY. I think perhaps it might be as well also to hold up the interrogation of

FITZGERALD and KIRBY until after we have seen PIECK.”115 A few days after Archer’s letter to Vivian, a telegram from Lord Lothian to the Foreign Office noted that Krivitsky

“apparently has a good deal of information which he is at present reluctant to disclose.” This reluctance was apparently due to a disagreement between Krivitsky and Levine while the former’s book was being published.116

Many other references to Krivitsky’s value in the KV 2 802 file come from the time period after Krivitsky’s debriefing with MI5 and these also contribute to an understanding of how MI5 viewed Krivitsky. In a letter from Major General Sir Vernon Kell to Brigadier Wood,

Commissioner of the RCMP, Kell notes that “GINSBERG [Krivitsky] has given us most important and valuable information during his stay here, and we are most anxious, for every reason, to do everything possible for him.”117 Kell was the head of MI5 at the time and this indicated that Krivitsky was being handled at the highest level of MI5. This statement is made in the context of Krivitsky’s departure back to North America and in Kell’s request for

Canadian co-operation with Krivitsky’s journey, which never seemed to be in doubt.

Nevertheless, this letter is an indication of the importance of Krivitsky to MI5. It can also be read as a desire to contact Krivitsky at a later date, which certainly was the case. The desire to keep the former Soviet intelligence officer’s presence in London out of the media spotlight and to ensure his safety also speaks to his importance and the need to keep

Krivitsky safe from OGPU assassins. Furthermore, the RCMP was considering taking on

Krivitsky as an agent for intelligence purposes in an unknown capacity. In a letter from

115 TNA KV 2 802 13a (10/11/29). 116 TNA KV 2 802 15a (13/11/39). 117 TNA KV 2 802 54a (15/02/40). 35

Wood of the RCMP to Kell after Krivitsky arrived back in Montreal in February 1940, the

RCMP requested an opinion from Kell about how to approach Krivitsky because they were contemplating “that if KRIVITSKY is residing in Canada for any length of time he might be a valuable agent for us… It is felt that there are many points on which he may be able to supply us with valuable information.”118 However, the RCMP never took on Krivitsky in any capacity despite the agreement and encouragement from MI5 in a telegram sent in reply to

Wood’s request at the end of March 1940. The paraphrased entry of the reply via telegram states, “We should welcome your proposal and would suggest your saying the approach made on our recommendation. Feel sure you will find the conversations well worth while.”119 The overall sense here of Krivitsky’s value is one of supplying useful information through conversations that are worth the time and effort. Significantly, no notes in the file are made that speak to the unreliability of Krivitsky’s information or ability to provide information. This view is quite different from Christopher Andrew’s portrait of a Krivitsky who was confused or unknowing about various intelligence information as it related to Soviet operations.120

Despite Krivitsky not being used or employed by the RCMP in any formal sense,

MI5 still made attempts to acquire further information from Krivitsky after his visit to London.

In one case, Kell sent a letter to Wood in early April 1940 with an attached photograph of

Ivan Privetsky who had lived in the United Kingdom since late 1935, had changed his nationality to Russian, and was thought to be employed as a fruit export merchant. As we will see, Soviet agents used these types of merchant businesses as cover organizations for

118 TNA KV 2 802 62a (29/03/40). The letter bears the date of “February 26, 1940” which coincides with Krivitsky’s recent return from London to Montreal despite the minute sheet entry of “29/03/40”. 119 TNA KV 2 802 63a (30/03/40). The telegram incorrectly references a letter dated the 26th of January. The original letter sent by Wood bears the date February 26, 1940 (62a). 120 Andrew, Defence of the Realm, 263 – 282. 36 clandestine activities.121 At about the same time after Krivitsky’s departure, his British interviewer Jane Archer was conducting various investigations into cover organizations based on information that Krivitsky provided. Two of them were the Far Eastern Fur Trading

Co. and the Novelty Trading Co. and according to Archer the latter was thought to be

“another firm formed for the purpose of Soviet political or military espionage.”122 Again, this information was of real value to MI5 given that Archer took action on it. However, the

RCMP’s ability to contact Krivitsky was made increasingly difficult because Krivitsky soon moved out of Canada and back to New York.123

Another significant aspect of MI5’s involvement with Krivitsky is how MI5 planned to handle him. As a Soviet defector, Krivitisky was seen by MI5 as a particular challenge who needed special handling in order to have the most useful amount of information extracted from him as possible. As plans to have him travel to London quickly developed in late 1939, increasingly MI5 and S.I.S. (MI6) were strategizing over how best to handle or deal with

Krivitsky prior to his voyage, while he was en route, and during the time of his stay in

London.

One of the first concerns was to allay Krivitsky’s fears for his safety or the potential of the British turning him back over to Stalin in order to preserve a relationship with a potential ally in the Second World War. To this end, his New York lawyer Louis Waldman requested a letter from the leader of the opposition Labour Party and anti-Stalinist Herbert

Morrison “so that the latter should be responsible for KRIVITSKY whilst in England”

121 TNA KV 2 802 67a (08/04/40). The letter also acknowledges receipt of previous letters sent by the RCMP that confirmed the return of Krivitsky’s British passport under the name of “Walter Thomas” for use on the voyage and payment of two thousand pounds sterling by MI5 to Krivitsky for his information. See TNA KV 2 802 61a (29/03/40) letter dated February 29, 1940 and 66a (07/04/40) letter dated March 18th, 1940 that confirms the transfer of the British pounds to Canadian dollars in the amount of CAD$8,860.00. See also Kern, A Death in Washington, 280. 122 TNA KV 2 802 68a (09/05/40). The letter is from Archer to Vivian in S.I.S. 123 TNA KV 2 802 70x (26/11/40). 37 because Morrison was seen as “definitely anti-Soviet and violently anti-communist.”124 It was around this time that the Foreign Office sent a letter to Jasper Harker who communicated the view that “you could get Krivitsky to do a great deal by flattery. He therefore thought it might be useful if the letter of recommendation [i.e. Morrison] referred to

“General Krivitsky, who is going over to England on important business” or words to that effect.”125 It was this title that Krivitsky used to reference himself in his Saturday Evening

Post articles, which inflated his level of importance. Krivitsky did not hold the rank of

General, but MI5 recognized this heightened sense of importance. This opinion on Krivitsky was further communicated to Archer from S.I.S. that states, “He [Krivitsky] has a great opinion of his own importance and,if [sic] “buttered up”, he may only require his expenses to be paid.”126 Additionally, as Krivitsky was en route to London, S.I.S. had its input on

Krivitsky and communicates that their contact in Canada with Krivitsky stated “he has an inflated idea of his own importance and therefore needs flattering and tactful handling.”127

We know now that more than Krivitsky’s expenses were paid for the journey as has previously been mentioned.

The planning of Krivitsky’s voyage changed slightly with increasing emphasis on an attempt to impress him with MI5’s importance in order to communicate seriousness and legitimacy. One of the concerns was who should meet Krivitsky at the port of arrival when the S.S. Duchess of Richmond arrived in mid-January. Archer felt that a British officer of sufficient rank should greet him upon disembarking such as Major Alley. S.I.S. favoured an officer who could speak Russian.128 There was also the question of whether it should be

124 TNA KV 2 802 18b (06/12/39); this was a letter from S.I.S. to Archer. For the second quotation about Morrison’s anti-Soviet/anti-communist views see TNA KV 2 802 22a (13/12/39); this was Archer’s response on the matter back to S.I.S. See also Kern, Death in Washington, 240. 125 TNA KV 2 802 23a (13/12/39). 126 TNA KV 2 802 28a (21/12/39). 127 TNA KV 2 802 44a (17/01/40). 128 TNA KV 2 802 35a (09/01/40); 36a (12/01/40); 42a (15/01/40). 38 revealed to Krivitsky that it was indeed MI5 or S.I.S. that would be speaking with him. One of the questions from Archer queries “Who are we to tell KRIVITSKY that we are? He will naturally want to know by whom he is being interviewed and what department we represent.” Archer continues to emphasize the need to impress Krivitsky and states, “As

KRIVITSKY is notoriously a vain man we ought to produce somebody pretty big in the first place [who would interview him].”129 Further investigation revealed that Krivitsky had not been told up to that point who it was and what department was seeking to interview him; however, he had been told that the interviewers were “some official authority, but

Department not specified.”130 This could mean that as far as the British and MI5 were concerned and understood, Krivitsky did not know who he was going to be interviewed by in terms of department. Although it is not certain, Krivitsky may have had some idea since he had the attention of the British and may have known more than he revealed about the

Soviet role in Britain due to his position in Western Europe of overseeing Soviet intelligence operations there. In either case, Krivitsky was told prior to his arrival that the purpose of his visit would be to provide “the fullest possible information about Soviet Military Intelligence activities in this [Britain’s] country.”131

Plans were also made concerning how the actual interviewing of Krivitsky would be carried out. This interview would not be a typical interrogation of a suspect in a criminal investigation by police. In a letter to Vivian of S.I.S. concerning the matter, the question became “How are we to deal with KRIVITSKY in so far as the long-drawn-out conversations and cross-examinations have to be carried out?”132 It is at this point in mid-January that some thought and strategy had been put into how the interview was to occur. In some respects, historians’ knowledge of what actually occurred is limited by the nature of MI5’s

129 TNA KV 2 802 35a (09/01/40). 130 TNA KV 2 802 44a (17/01/40). 131 TNA KV 2 802 38a (13/01/40). 132 TNA KV 2 802 36a (12/01/40). 39 sources. Telephone and in-person conversations amongst MI5 staff were not recorded or typed, and Archer’s interview sessions with Krivitsky are summaries as opposed to discussions recorded verbatim. Nevertheless, Archer seemed to think that convincing

Krivitsky about MI5’s ability and maturity as an intelligence organization played into this planning. She stated “We must I think display to KRIVITSKY a good deal of information that we have in order to convince him that we know what we are talking about.”133 In a similar vein, being direct with him may well pay benefits for MI5 where it was thought “that an anti-

Stalin line is probably wisest” and “a certain amount of frankness would probably pay.”134 In the interview room, this translated into MI5 revealing its uncovering of King, which was a change of approach from an earlier suggested tactic of “it being fatal at this stage to let him

[Krivitsky] know anything about what has happened to KING [as far as his arrest was concerned].”135 This approach may have been appropriate given the circumstances in

Europe at the time as well as MI5’s understanding of Krivitsky’s frustration with Stalin.

Krivitsky had accurately predicted the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, Britain was at war with Germany, and the Soviets had already occupied Eastern Europe for some time including the Baltic and Finland. The result was that MI5 revealed to Krivitsky at the start of his interviews that they had arrested the Soviet mole in the Foreign Office known as John

Herbert King. This tactic served to impress Krivitsky that MI5 knew what they were talking about even though this success was the result of Krivitsky’s own information being conveyed through Levine.136 Assuming that Krivitsky and Levine had a close working relationship, it is highly probable that Krivitsky knew that Levine had forwarded the tip about

King to the British especially given the timing of King’s arrest.

133 TNA KV 2 802 35a (09/01/40). 134 TNA KV 2 802 36a (12/01/40). 135 Ibid. 136 TNA KV 2 804 1a (01/23/40). See also Kern, Death in Washington, 256. 40

An underlying concern that Britain’s MI5 had as it concerned Soviet intelligence was the extent to which German and Soviet intelligence agents co-operated and shared information to the detriment of the West. At the time of Krivitsky’s debriefing, this was significant when the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact was signed and it appeared as though two major world powers – Germany and the Soviet Union – were lining up against the West. This concern is found in the introduction of Archer’s debriefing summary, where she stated:

Of greater importance to the contre-espionage service is the probability that the line of demarcation between the Soviet and German Intelligence Services has become equally indistinct. In view of the close co-operation which existed between Soviet and German Intelligence personnel less than a decade ago, it is only to be expected that there is now a resumption of that co-operation and that the German espionage service is taking full advantage of the existing Soviet intelligence organisation in this country.137

The greater concern that MI5 had about Soviet intelligence in 1940 was not only that the

Soviets were conducting espionage in Britain for Stalin’s benefit, but also that this information would – in all likelihood from MI5’s perspective – be shared with the Germans with whom Britain was formally at war.

Of the many agents that Krivitsky identified to MI5, one of them was Hans Brusse. In

Archer’s summary, Krivitsky’s description of Brusse, in part, was “Dutch, born in Rotterdam.

Age 25-26, looks about 35. Height about 5’7’’. Travels on a legal passport in his own name.

Was originally a Social Democrat. One of KRIVITSKY’s best agents.”138 According to

Archer, “KRIVITSKY believes he [Brusse] would like to get out of Ogpu service and would work for the British if he was properly approached. It would be well worth while to take pains to find him.”139 Although Krivitsky suggested to MI5 that they try to find and contact Brusse, according to Brusse’s file these efforts did not commence until a few months after

137 TNA KV 2 805 55x (xx/01/40 – xx/02/40), v. 138 Ibid., 77. 139 Ibid., 78. This quotation is located at the end of the description of Brusse. 41

Krivitsky’s death. A personal file for Hans Brusse was created by MI5 in May 1947 and is categorized by The National Archives as KV 2/2776 and was declassified in June 2007.140

The documents in the Brusse file illustrate MI5’s efforts to locate and identify Brusse while verifying Krivitsky’s information provided to Archer. The first document in the file is an extraction from Archer’s description of Brusse dated the 7th of May 1947 that is cross- referenced to Archer’s summary of Krivitsky’s debriefing.141 The first indication that MI5 attempted to follow up this lead is a letter dated the 10th of June 1941, which references an earlier April 1941 date, where a certain R. Pilkington inquired to a certain Mills about the likelihood of corroborating British information on Brusse with American information potentially obtained by the FBI. R. Pilkington wrote, “It would be interesting to know whether any information was obtained from the Americans from KRIVITSKY which in any way adds to or amplifies the material contained in the “Thomas” [cover name the British gave to

Krivitsky for his travel to London] memorandum which we sent to you for the F.B.I. on

25.4.41.” Further on, Pilkington stated that, based on a newspaper article published shortly after Krivitsky’s death in February 1941, “The inference is that BRUSSE may still be in

America and you could perhaps make enquiries upon this point.”142 This was a real value to

MI5.

It is not clear why MI5 followed up this lead provided by Krivitsky. One possibility among many is that MI5 wanted to obtain further information about Soviet operations from

Brusse in an attempt to corroborate Krivitsky’s information. Another possibility is that MI5 would have paid Brusse for doing work or providing information to the British, as Krivitsky had suggested to Archer. Given the timing of the inquiry that commenced in February 1941, a more likely possibility was the desire to solve the mystery of Krivitsky’s Washington hotel

140 TNA KV 2 2776. 141 TNA KV 2 2776 1a (07/05/47). 142 TNA KV 2 2776 3a (10/06/41). 42 room death. In any case, efforts to at least find and identify Brusse continued into the

1950s.

MI5 also took efforts to understand the relationship that Krivitsky had with Brusse.

According to Archer’s summary, “At the end of 1937 he [Brusse] was one of the people sent to Marseilles to assassinate KRIVITSKY when he was leaving France for America.

KRIVITSKY is, however, sure that he did not realise with what object he was in Marseilles as he was devoted to him and would not voluntarily have harmed him.”143 MI5 attempted to corroborate this point four years later. In a letter from M. Joseph Lynch of the American

Embassy to Hart dated March 30th, 1940, “Paul Wohl, the individual who collaborated with

Krivitsky in the preparation of several of his printed articles, advised that he was acquainted with Hans BRUSSE and his wife, NORA during the period of time he was in Europe in 1936 and 1937. He stated that Krivitsky had told him that Brusse was an agent of the Soviet

Military Intelligence and was one of the few individuals of whom he was afraid. Wohl stated that he knew Brusse as a chauffeur and general handy man for Krivitsky and an expert lock picker.”144 Based on this information alone, MI5 confirmed that Brusse was indeed an expert lock picker and had been in American and France in 1937. However, the waters were still murky if indeed Krivitsky was afraid of Brusse, but at the same time stated to MI5 that Brusse would be willing to work for the British if properly approached. Meanwhile,

Roger Hollis replied to Lynch and stated that as far as MI5 was concerned “we have no additional information about him or his wife and no means of ascertaining his present whereabouts.”145 The lead resurfaced in 1946 when Brusse was thought to have been

143 TNA KV 2 805 55x (xx/01/40 – xx/02/40), 77. 144 TNA KV 2 2776 5a (30/03/1944). The header on this letter indicates that it was extracted from “PFR.4342 98a.” PFR.4342 was the classification code assigned to Krivitsky’s MI5 personal file at the time it was created and utilized in the secret service. However, this letter is not referenced on any minute sheets in Krivitsky’s MI5 files, and it is not found in Krivitsky’s MI5 file that was declassified in 2002. 145 TNA KV 2 2776 6a (19/04/44). 43 spotted in Paris and working for a Dutch communist newspaper,146 but that lead dried up when an agent shadowed this Brusse in Paris and it was discovered that this Brusse, while indeed was a Jan Brusse, did not match the description of Hans Brusse as provided by

Krivitsky.147 Pursuing the identity of Brusse, which had its basis in Krivitsky’s 1940 information, continued as late as 1959.148 This continued referencing of Krivitsky’s debriefing summary well into the Cold War is one of the legacies of the file for MI5.

The legacy of Krivitsky’s file can be found in other MI5 files. For example, extracts appear in Alexander Orlov’s file in the 1950s. In one instance, the FBI was interrogating a source and had come across a shorter 28-page version of Archer’s debriefing summary of

Krivitsky that was provided to the Americans in 1944. In a letter from a certain J. Philip

O’Brien to Miss Evelyn McBarnet, the FBI requested further information. “The Bureau would appreciate it if you would furnish all additional information you obtained from your interviews with KRIVITSKY, to assist them in interrogating their source.”149 Even the American secret service was interested in Archer’s summary on Krivitsky’s debriefing nearly fifteen years after it occurred.

MI5 was not quite sure what his motivations might be aside from being upset with

Stalin’s regime, his version of communism, and the possibility that he might want some money for his information. Kern argued that Krivitsky was motivated by revenge and a desire to strike back against Stalin who had purged most of Krivitsky’s friends and true- believing Bolsheviks.150 But it is these types of considerations that have not been fully explored by historians. Krivitsky’s beliefs and motivations are certainly contributing factors to the moments when Archer was interviewing him. How much should he give to the British in order that he could be paid? What would his future be, seeing that he did not have stable

146 TNA KV 2 2776 7a (16/11/46). 147 TNA KV 2 2776 extracted document undated. 148 TNA KV 2 2776 23a (15/09/59). 149 TNA KV 2 36a (16/02/54). 150 Kern, Death in Washington, 237. 44 employment and a wife and child to support? Did he still believe in the Bolshevik if not the

Stalinist cause? We know that Krivitsky attempted to reach out to the Trotskyites and

Trotsky’s son Leon Sedov in Paris. In normal circumstances, it is likely that Krivitsky and his friends would not have attempted to contact the Trotskyists, who were deemed anti-

Stalinists and fascists who were against the revolution. Mysteriously, Sedov was found dead a short time after Krivitsky left. If it is plausible that Krivitsky was confused about some information and did not know much about other details, then it is equally plausible that he held some information back – perhaps to protect his friends or to be paid at a later date – or shielded various details from Archer. In order to explore this area, it is therefore important to consider the likelihood of Krivitsky not revealing all that he knew. In order to do this, a better understanding of his beliefs and motivations is required, and it is to this aspect that we now turn.

Krivitsky and the Notion of Traitor/Defector

It is not at all clear from the evidence in his memoir and his testimony to the British that Walter Krivitsky had completely abandoned his Bolshevik beliefs even while sharing information with MI5. British journalist Chapman Pincher identified traitors, from the aspect of British law, as “those consciously involved in treasonable acts.” But why they engaged in treason in the first place is the question. From the Soviet perspective, Pincher identified a

Soviet traitor as “anyone accused of treason by Stalin or his associates.”151 Given that many perished in Stalin’s Great Terror or were banished to the Gulag for years in hard labour, from Stalin’s perspective, the accusation of treachery was certainly in the eye of the beholder. Stalin saw Krivitsky as a traitor due to Krivitsky’s failed loyalty test in 1937, but

151 Pincher, Traitors: The Labyrinths of Treason, xv - xvi. 45

Krivitsky may not have seen himself this way.152 In order to answer this question, it is necessary to consider what exactly it was that Krivitsky was a traitor to.

Information in Krivitsky’s MI5 file suggests that Krivitsky was a traitor to Stalin, but not necessarily to the overall communist cause. This situation is complex but the world of the Comintern, the critique from Trotsky and his followers, and the example of Ignace

Poretsky himself does offer a context for Krivitsky’s actions that does not mean he had abandoned the hope of 1917. Reiss, in his defection letter to the Central Committee of the

Communist Party of the U.S.S.R. dated the 17th of July 1937, stated “Up to this moment I marched alongside you. Now I will not take another step. Our paths diverge!...For it will indeed be necessary to begin everything all over again to save socialism. That fight began a long time ago and I want to take my part in it.”153 In a newspaper article published in the

Daily Express shortly after Krivitsky’s death, the editor reported that Krivitsky broke with

Stalin due to the purges that were occurring in 1937.154 It is also known that the OGPU assassination of Krivitsky’s friend Ignace Poretsky and Stalin’s test of Krivitsky’s loyalty to lend assistance in this regard also helps explain Krivitsky’s decision to defect in 1937 to the

West. Once he discovered that Poretsky had been assassinated, Krivitsky knew that he could not return to the Soviet Union even though he had already been recalled. Elisabeth

Poretsky’s account sheds some light on the difficulty of what her husband and Krivitsky should do after her husband’s insistence that “they must make an open break with Stalin as a protest against the execution of the old Bolsheviks.” Further, Poretsky explained, “The possibility of betraying their ideals and turning to any of the Western intelligence services was not even discussed.”155 This left Krivitsky in a complex situation when he found himself in London barely three years later sharing information with Britain’s MI5. Historian Gary

152 Krivitsky, I Was Stain’s Agent, 283-84. 153 Ignace Reiss as found in Poretsky, Our Own People, 1-3. 154 TNA KV 2 802 80b (18/02/41). 155 Poretsky, Our Own People, 150. 46

Kern characterized Krivitsky’s post-defection life as one of pure calculation where he had to think about what he said and to whom he said it in his quest to hit back against Stalin’s regime without putting his friends in jeopardy.156 For Krivitsky, leaders like Stalin would come and go; Meanwhile, the progression of the Soviet Union’s history would keep marching forward, sometimes in a zig-zag pattern, but would ultimately result in the establishment of a classless society.

Britain’s MI5 was also aware of some aspects of Krivitsky’s unique situation and they considered some aspects of Krivitsky’s beliefs and motivations. A report on Krivitsky near the moment of his arrival in London in 1940 t detailed some brief biographical data about Krivitsky such as his age and physical appearance. It also stated that the reason for

Krivitsky’s travel to the United Kingdom was to publish another book to be entitled Between

Two Wars. Although it is not certain, this piece of information indicated that either Krivitsky was making plans to publish another book to follow on the success of I Was Stalin’s Agent, or that he was providing a cover story for his real reason to visit London in order to inform on Soviet operations. The unknown author of the report seemed to have conversed with

Krivitsky and this likely occurred during the trip from Montreal to London aboard the ship that Krivitsky travelled on: the Duchess of Richmond. One aspect of the report indicated to

MI5 what Krivitsky’s view was concerning the relationship between Hitler and Stalin.

Specifically, the report stated, “From the tone of his [Krivitsky’s] conversation his sympathies are entirely anti-Hitler and anti-Stalin, [and] he is expecting to become a nationalized American Citizen in due course.”157 On this basis Krivitsky can be seen as a communist who was enthusiastically anti-fascist and opposed to the manner in which Stalin was running the Soviet Union.

156 Kern, Death in Washington, 253. 157 TNA KV 2 802 47a (19/01/40). 47

An additional source of information for MI5 on Krivitsky’s beliefs and motivations is known as the Lovestone source. Kern referred to the source as someone who had access to the American ex-communist Jay Lovestone.158 Nevertheless, Lovestone’s information was taken into consideration when MI5 was planning on how Krivitsky would be handled in

London. Particularly, “As the Lovestone source is convinced that KRIVITSKY, though infuriated with the present Soviet regime, is still an ardent communist, we shall have to think out very closely our line of approach.”159 This consideration was significant for MI5 given that Lovestone was the leader of a communist group that was expelled by the Comintern.

Lovestone had also testified before the Dies Committee.160 This link illustrates that Krivitsky was in contact with American communists, and that Lovestone was convinced that Krivitsky remained a true believer. An additional report, again author unknown, made a similar observation about Krivitsky that was communicated to MI5 near the end of December 1939.

In the memo, it was stated that “KRIVITSKI [sic] may have been thrown out of Russia by

Stalin but he is still a Communist.” Further on it is noted “KRIVITSKI [sic] has not severed his connections with the Revolutionary movement in any sense of the word.” This due diligence indicates that MI5 took into consideration Krivitsky’s politics in crafting its strategy on how to deal with him in the debriefing room.

Of vital importance to assessing the nature of Krititsky’s defection is considering the possibility that Krivitsky held back information from MI5 on his own terms and for his own reasons. As has been suggested earlier, this is a dimension that has not been given sufficient attention in the historiography on Krivitsky’s case. The first example of this came from his initial interview with MI5. In her interview summary notes that appear in his file,

Jane Archer recorded that Krivitsky informed that he was aware of some sort of organization in Britain for obtaining information. However, Krivitsky seemed to immediately

158 Kern, Death in Washington, 249-50. 159 TNA KV 2 802 35a (09/01/40). 160 Kern, Death in Washington, 209. 48 clear the air about his purported lack of involvement and lack of knowledge in these Soviet operations against Britain. Archer noted that “He was very anxious to point out that he himself was not responsible for the direction of activities against the U.K., but was concerned wholly and solely during 1935, 1936 and 1937 with operations against

Germany.”161

In her memoir, Elisabeth Poretsky solidified her connection to Pieck for historians.

Poretsky stated “H.C. Pieck [undoubtedly a reference to Henri Christiaan Pieck], and others with whom we formed lasting friendships, some of which I have kept up in spite of wars and concentration camps” and appears to be the only blatant reference to him.162 During the

Second World War, Pieck was deported to Buchenwald from a transit camp in Amersfoort and survived. Krivitsky also gave direction to Pieck during the Spanish Civil War in the

1930s by reassigning him to work on getting arms to the republic.163 Essentially, Pieck was well-connected to the Poretsky’s and Krivitsky, and thus Krivitsky is intimately tied to Soviet operations against Britain.

The first hint that Krivitsky gave directly to MI5 about what is now known as the

Cambridge Five spy ring was also in these initial days of interviewing. On a separate occasion, Krivitsky was adamant that he did not have direct knowledge of Soviet operations that occurred in Britain. His insistence that British operations were not under his control is technically true, and is also strategic since he likely would not want to appear as an enemy of the British. In an interview note that she made concerning communication between

161 TNA KV 2 804 1a (23/01/40). 162 Poretsky, Our Own People, 77. 163 Paul Arnoldussen and Hans Olink, Twee Broers Drie Levens [Two Brothers Three Lives]: Henri & Anton Pieck, (Uitgeverij Bas Lubberhuizen, 2008), 124. The author wishes to thank Dr. Maartje Abbenhuis, of the University of Auckland, New Zealand, for her translations of the material cited here.

165 TNA KV 2 804 11a (27/01/40). 49

Soviet agents and transferring funds, Archer recorded that “I had a long talk with THOMAS

[Krivitsky] on the subject of methods of communication between Soviet agents operating on underground and espionage matters, and method of transmitting funds. Throughout this part of the business, conversation was rather hampered through THOMAS [Krivitsky] continually saying [my emphasis] “this is what would have been done abroad, but of course

I do not know in your country.”165 According to Poretsky:

The picture of Soviet espionage operations given by writers without first-hand experience is of a fairly rigid pattern laid down by order form Moscow, operating through networks organized along much the same lines in each country and closely supervised by the centre. This is more or less accurate – though considerably over- simplified – for the period which followed the great purges of the 1930s, but it is completely untrue of the earlier years. Far from following a fixed pattern, the methods of organization then differed from country to country and depended on local circumstances, often on luck, and, perhaps most important, on the personality of the resident – a man who was willing to spy for the Soviet Union out of ideological commitment.166

In that same interview, Krivitsky slipped up and told Archer that “he received large packets of such notes [bundles of Bank of England notes] and forwarded them to the Soviet

Embassy here or, occasionally, to the Soviet Embassy in Paris.” The emphasis on no- knowledge-in-the-U.K. continued when Archer asked him how Percy Glading would be able to communicate with Theodore Maly when information or documents were to be passed on.

Krivitsky’s reply was again an insistence that “he did not know how it was worked here

[Britain], explained how he would arrange it abroad.” Krivitsky would then detail how the process would work in other European centres and this painted a picture for Archer.167 In this way, Krivitsky presented information using analogy. Meanwhile, Archer may have been catching on to Krivitsky’s tactic. At the very least, his emphasis was continually reported in the interview notes, and this is an indication that Archer thought it significant enough to record in her summaries. Krivitsky advised MI5 to “Look up names of communist leaders in

U.K. Name begins with “B”. This was one of Hardt’s [Theodore Maly’s] most important

166 Poretsky, Our Own People, 81. 167 TNA KV 2 804 11a (27/01/40). 50 recruiting agents on party lines.”168 The reference here is likely to Guy Burgess (or Anthony

Blunt) who was suggested to Arnold Deutsch, along with Donald Maclean, as a potential recruit from Kim Philby.169

On occasions when MI5 provided Krivitsky with some information that it knew,

Krivitsky took steps during his interview to gauge the significance or importance of the information for his own future. A particular example on this point occurred a couple of days into the debriefing sessions. In a separate note, Archer described that she had informed

Krivitsky that “it was reported to us that he [Krivitsky] had appropriated certain funds entrusted to him by his Department when he decided to break with the Soviet and proceed to America.”170 Krivitsky contested this embarrassing allegation though in fact it was true and stated in response that “this accusation had been made in order to discredit him. He said he would tell us more about this later.”171 At the very least, Krivitsky’s strategy in this moment was likely to process this information that MI5 gave him, and to take some time to assess it and to craft a response on how should he enlighten them further.

Krivitsky was able to reveal information about the Soviet espionage tradecraft to

MI5. Some of this information did reveal names of various agents and assisted Archer and

MI5 in understanding how various Soviet networks regulated themselves under Stalin’s rule. One of the checks and balances in this regard concerned the use of foreign agents who were not Russian. The rule was that foreigners were not to be used in any military departments in Moscow. Similarly, foreign Soviet agents were never assigned to any operations that dealt with their country of origin. The example that Archer reported according to Krivitsky’s testimony was that Hardt, also known as Theodore Maly, “would

168 TNA KV 2 804 2b (23/01/40). 169 Borovik, The Philby Files, 42. 170 TNA KV 2 804 8a (26/01/40). 171 Ibid. 51 never be allowed to deal with Hungarian matters” given that he was Hungarian.172 Krivitsky, who was from a small town in Eastern Galicia, was eventually put in charge of operations in

Western Europe, and this fulfilled the foreign-agent-at-arms-length requirement.

In the debriefing, Krivitsky also appears to have directed Archer and MI5 away from the “Imperial Council” source. Early in the debriefing, Archer noted that Krivitsky “told us that there had been for some time a leakage of valuable information which emanated from what he described as the Council of State.”173 This source apparently “came from person of titled family”174 and nearly two weeks later became a young aristocrat, under 30, who had plenty of money, a University man who’s name began with “P.”175 It is this source, and the extent of Krivitsky’s knowledge of it, that has been the subject of debate in the historiography. We now know that this source was Donald Maclean who seemed to be a hybrid of characteristics from Maclean and Philby. In a letter from Archer requesting identification of a report that Krivitsky referred to addressed to MI5’s head Valentine Vivian,

Archer stated that the report “contained information of high Naval, Military, Air Force and political importance.”176 It appeared that Krivitsky was successful in diverting attention away from his knowledge of the source for the time being. Archer noted, “As regards the source of the information, I am now sure that Walter does not know. He cannot say that it did not come from HARDT [Maly], but he does not think that it did. He did however give me much fuller particulars about Dr. Alfred DEUTSCH.”177 Krivitsky later clarified that he actually meant Arnold Deutsch, not Alfred, when Archer returned with particulars a few days later.178

This may have been a confusion of first names on Krivitsky’s part, or a strategy to determine whether MI5 knew who he was referring to when they returned to him with the

172 TNA KV 2 804 4a (25/01/40). 173 TNA KV 2 804 1a (23/01/40). 174 TNA KV 2 804 2a (23/01/40), 2. 175 TNA KV 2 804 29a (03/02/40), 2. 176 TNA KV 2 804 9a (26/01/40). 177 Ibid. 178 TNA KV 2 804 13a (30/01/40). 52 correct name for further information. In another instance, Krivitsky diverted attention away from Pieck’s British connection when he stated that Pieck “was bound up in the German work in which he was a specialist, and that he left other countries, less important for instance the United Kingdom, to his assistants.”179 In an indirect way, Krivitsky connected

Maclean and Philby together as friends, although MI5 might not have known it at that moment. Towards the end of Krivitsky’s debriefing, Krivitsky revealed some clues that we know now point to Philby. Krivitsky, in Archer’s words, stated that “it was HARDT [Maly] who on the orders of YEZHOV approached the young English aristocrat [Philby] who was to go to Spain to murder Franco…He [Krivitsky] says that…he is pretty certain that the Foreign

Office source would be amongst [illegible] his friends (That is amongst the friends of the boy who was sent to Spain.)”180 Given that Philby recommended Maclean for recruitment to

Deutsch and that Philby was a journalist sent to Spain for the Franco expedition and that

Maclean was the Foreign Office source and that Krivitsky knew that the Foreign Office source and the English aristocrat sent to Spain were friends, it is clear that Krivitsky knew more than he was willing to share with MI5 in his debriefing moment. Additionally, Archer learned from Krivitsky that “HARDT [Maly] was not directly under KRIVITSKY’s orders, but

KRIVITSKY had the right to know what he was doing and advise him on his work.”181

Indeed, Krivitsky was providing information to MI5 about Soviet operations, but he did so on his own terms.

Krivitsky’s Logic and Conclusions

When MI5 intelligence officers interviewed Walter Krivitsky, he knew that he was in a difficult situation. He was in a life and death struggle with the leadership of Stalin and had sought assistance in Paris from the Trotskyite community there. For Krivitsky, Stalin had

179 TNA KV 2 804 25a (02/02/40). 180 TNA KV 2 804 41a (10/02/40). 181 TNA KV 2 804 51a (13/03/40). 53 betrayed the revolution and the old Bolsheviks who had instigated the struggle of the proletariat. But Krivitsky had also agreed to travel to London, so he had to provide some level of information that was valuable to MI5. This paper argues that Krivitsky provided some information to MI5, but held some information back on his own terms, and did not abandon his revolutionary convictions while doing so. The possibilities for his reasons for holding back information are evident. First, Krivitsky seemed to have a desire to protect a friend that the British were tracking such as Pieck, and assisting the British on their own nationals such Brian Goold-Verschoyle by drawing British attention to his potential survival after kidnapping. He had already lost a long-time childhood friend, Ignace Poretsky (Reiss), through assassination at the hand of Stalin’s men in 1937. Therefore, if Krivitsky did not provide all of the information that he knew concerning individuals such as Pieck, then there might be a chance that Stalin would not reach them.

Second, there is also a possibility, and an explicit strategy in one case as already discussed here and identified by Hyde Jr., that Krivitsky could be paid for information that he did not reveal in the early 1940 debriefing that he later ‘remembered.’ Krivitsky had already generated some income with his newspaper article publications, his book, and he had also received money from the British for his information. Although this might not have been his primary concern for sharing his information, he knew that he could be paid for it.

Third, it is also likely that Krivitsky knew that Stalin would eventually find out about his interview sessions with MI5. This indeed occurred when Anthony Blunt handed Krivitsky’s entire debriefing summary to his handler in early 1941. After all, Krivitsky had knowledge of

Theodore Maly’s and Arnold Deutsch’s networks through Henri Pieck and information provided by John Herbert King. Fourth, Krivitsky may have also been trying to wait out

Stalin and his rule with a potential hope that Stalin’s reign would somehow end and that he could contribute once again in a formal capacity to the Soviet and communist cause. 54

Britain’s MI5 learned much from Krivitsky’s information even though it was confusing and incomplete at times. MI5 dedicated time and resources to Krivitsky at a moment when the focus was not completely on the Soviet threat, but on Nazi Germany. MI5 had dedicated some special thought and time toward how it would handle Krivitsky. They knew that they were dealing with a unique individual, with information from sources that indicated he was still a communist. The task was more difficult as Krivitsky was an experienced agent who understood tradecraft and interrogation after more than twenty years in the profession.

Along with this, they also factored into their planning what Krivitsky’s motivation(s) could be.

At various points in time during Krivitsky’s dealings with MI5, the British agency, and especially Jane Archer, valued and believed aspects of Krivitsky’s information. MI5 sought to return the favour by making Krivitsky’s voyages to and from London and his stay in the city as comfortable and out of the spotlight as possible. This also served MI5’s purposes well by shielding the interrogation from being reported to Stalin, although as discussed earlier this did not last long. For MI5, the payoff could have been into the future as the investigation continued with the potential of Krivitsky providing further information and clarification.

Krivitsky’s case is enlightening for historians who study traitors/defectors. This paper has argued that Krivitsky both held idealistic convictions and acted in pragmatic ways.

Although these two aspects can be contradictory in some ways, and added to the stress that Krivitsky was under, there is evidence here that he clung to many of his personal convictions. What we learn about traitors/defectors is that not all post-defection actions necessarily indicate an abandonment of political convictions. This reassessment, particularly of this 1930s era defector, indicates that ideas and comrades were still important to Krivitsky in 1940. 55

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