The Bedbug (36 page)

We estimate that we have here at least 100 Communists with long records of political activity in Central Europe in fully organised groups and still under the direct instructions of Moscow.
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One known Communist whose name cropped up in this connection was an American architect, Hermann Field, who married an English Communist supporter, Kate Thorneycroft. MI5 noted that he had been in Poland in 1939 when Germany and the Soviet Union both invaded under the aegis of their joint non-aggression treaty. Field had shown outstanding qualities of leadership and personal courage in bringing hundreds of refugees to the West. But he was known to have spent part of the 1930s on a collective farm in Russia and was believed to have trained as a Comintern agent for the purpose of infiltrating Western society and promulgating the Soviet creed. He was a known associate of William Koenen, the German Communist responsible for the London branch of the Comintern. His brother Noel, who shared his political convictions, worked during the war for the League of Nations in Geneva. These two brothers, and the Czech Refugee Trust, would now feature prominently in Stalin’s Cold War purges of Eastern Europe.

As Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania fell increasingly under Soviet domination in the immediate post-war period, Czechoslovakia held out a glimmer of hope that an independent, reforming government, under President Beneš, might survive by
negotiating a careful path between the might of the dominant power in Eastern Europe and the desire to benefit from the modernising influence of the Western Allies. Britain was anxious to see it succeed, feeling under some obligation for its abandonment of Czech interests at Munich in 1938 and the subsequent contribution that the government in exile in London and its armed forces had made to defeating Hitler. It was not to be. After elections in 1948, Communists increasingly controlled the main offices of state. Their influence, dictated by Stalin, led the country to reject American aid under the Marshall Plan. The Americans blamed the snub on the failure of President Beneš and his Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk to be sufficiently robust in their resistance to Stalin. Within weeks Masaryk died in a fall from a Foreign Ministry window; whether he committed suicide, fell accidentally, or was pushed, has never been finally established. But it marked the end of any pretence that Czechoslovakia was anything other than a Soviet satellite.
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Into this new regime in October 1948 stepped Noel Field, aged forty-four, British-born of an English mother and an American father. He was a committed Communist who had taken it into his head that his future lay in a career as a university lecturer in Prague. In his pursuit of this objective he would plunge his family into the nightmare world of secret police, incarceration without charge and treason trials where the verdict was inevitable and the death sentence a probability. The British-based Czech Refugee Trust would feature in the evidence as an alleged MI6 front operation.

Noel Field had worked as a senior economic adviser for the US State Department before taking a job in 1936 with the League of Nations in Geneva. When the Second World War broke out he stayed on in Switzerland as a member of the Unitarian Service Committee formed to offer relief to refugees from Nazi persecution. It was particularly active in Czechoslovakia where the Unitarian Church had many adherents. Noel Field was introduced to Allan Dulles, head of the Office of Strategic Studies
in Berne, who realised that Field’s refugee contacts were potential sources for US intelligence. As the war progressed, Field was also able to supply Dulles with contacts, many of them Communist sympathisers, in occupied Germany. It was never entirely clear in whose interests Field was working, Moscow’s or Washington’s, and in post-war years Dulles came to believe he had been duped. Equally, the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe regarded the Unitarians as a CIA front.

When the new Communist government in Prague came to carry out security checks in connection with Noel Field’s application for a position at the Charles University, what they found was a man with many contacts, not only in Czechoslovakia but among members of the politburo throughout the Eastern Bloc; plus a highly suspicious association with Allan Dulles. As inquiries broadened, it became apparent that his younger brother Hermann had equally extensive contacts in Poland – pre-war he had been based in Katowice near the Czech border working for the Czech Refugee Trust.

In May 1949 Noel Field returned to Prague believing he was on the verge of getting his coveted university appointment. Instead, he simply disappeared. His German wife Herta, living in Geneva, chose not to mention this to the American authorities. In August she and Hermann went to Prague to look for him. They drew a blank and Hermann flew on to Warsaw … and vanished. Herta decided it was time to visit the US authorities in Prague. Twenty-four hours later she too had gone missing. The following year Erica Glaser Wallach, whom Noel and Herta Field treated as their daughter, also travelled behind the Iron Curtain in the hope of picking up the trail. She was neither seen nor heard of for many years.

Then the purges and the trials began. Klop’s wartime contact in London, Josef Bartik, who had been promoted to the rank of general and head of Czech military intelligence in 1945, had already lost his job on the strength of forged documents.

Noel Field had been handed over by Czech security to their Hungarian counterparts. In September 1949 the trial began in Budapest of the former Foreign Minister László Rajk and accomplices. They pleaded guilty to belonging to an organisation dedicated to the overthrow of the state. They had been recruited, it was alleged, by Allan Dulles, Noel Field and British intelligence agents in Switzerland. This was the first acknowledgement that Field was in Hungarian custody. Similar trials followed in Czechoslovakia and Poland. These Communist enemies within the state were often accused of being Titoists, supporters of the Yugoslav Communist leader who had broken away from Soviet constriction. Stalin was purging potential dissenters.

MI6 did not officially exist in those days and since none of the missing individuals was British it was not too difficult for the Foreign Office to adopt the policy that serves them well so often: they sat back and awaited developments. The Americans made the obligatory inquiries about their absent citizens but did not quite raise the hullabaloo that might have been expected.

After Stalin died, on 5 March 1953, the gulags slowly began to give up their secrets. The following December, Lt Col. Józef Światło, deputy head of internal security in Poland, defected and began to reveal how the terror trials had taken place and how the Fields, and their East European friends, had been set up by the security police, including Światło himself, to satiate Stalin’s lust for power and paranoia that he was being betrayed. He divulged some of the details on Radio Free Europe, the US-sponsored propaganda station whose broadcasts reached behind the Iron Curtain.

Extraordinarily, in October 1954 Hermann Field was freed from his Polish jail, given $40,000 compensation, and allowed to return to the US and his architects’ practice, taking his English wife with him. While Hermann was en route, Noel and Herta Field quietly emerged from their separate prisons, were reunited and astonished everyone by accepting the Hungarian authorities’ apologetic offer of a villa on the outskirts of Budapest where they
could live out their lives in a Communist sanctuary of which they apparently approved. It took another twelve months for Erica Glaser Wallach to find her way out of a Russian labour camp but she too returned to the West. Between them they offered little by way of explanation but the impression lingered that they had been part of a CIA mission which had been exposed and for which retribution had been taken. Britain was in no position to criticise: this was the era of Philby, Burgess and Maclean when any number of agents behind the Iron Curtain had been betrayed.

Klop, with his keen interest in Czech intelligence matters, must have followed it with interest. He may even have been involved but there is very little information in the public domain to address that point. It was not until twelve years after his death that a different interpretation began to be put on these events. It was argued that the whole thing had been an elaborate CIA charade, implemented by Jozef Światło himself, on the instructions of Allan Dulles, who was by that time head of the CIA. Światło had been a double agent since 1948 when he had been recruited by MI6 and handed over to an American controller. The operation was codenamed Splinter Factor and its purpose was to win the Cold War by provoking antagonism between the nationalist sympathisers of the individual east European and the unflinching Soviet idealogues in their midst, laying the blame firmly at Stalin’s door. Dulles, it was said, set out to alienate every East European country from the Soviet dictator and bring about the collapse of the Soviet bloc from within.
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On 5 September 1945, Igor Gouzenko, aged twenty-six, a cipher clerk for the GRU – Soviet military intelligence – in Ottawa walked into the Canadian Ministry of Justice with more than a hundred secret documents stuffed inside his shirt. Shortly afterwards he walked out again, still with the wad of paperwork bulging under his jacket, and tried his luck at the
Ottawa Journal
.
He was the first important defector of the immediate post-war era. Unfortunately, nobody believed him. He had burned his bridges with his employers and had nowhere safe to go. He hid out in a neighbour’s flat and it was not until the following evening, when Russian security men broke in and started ransacking his flat in search of the stolen secrets, that the Canadian authorities started to take notice. The documents soon revealed a network of agents stretching across the United States and Canada, linking back to Britain. The three countries had collaborated in the development of the atomic bomb, detonated over Hiroshima on 6 August. In particular, an agent Alek was quickly identified as Alan Nunn May, a Cambridge-educated physicist with long-standing association with the Communist Party who had been working on the heavy water reactor at Chalk River, Ontario. He had handed information on the project and samples of its key uranium isotopes U233 and U235 to his case officer, Pavel Angelov.

By 7 September news of the investigation began to filter back to Britain, straight into the hands of Kim Philby at MI6 who became the liaison point between Canada, MI6 and MI5, and the British government. Within a week Philby’s Soviet controller in London, Boris Krötenschield, was able to confirm to Moscow what they must already have guessed about the extent to which their Canadian network was compromised. However, Philby was able to buy them some time, first by subtly impeding the flow of information and then by leading the chorus recommending that there should be no arrests until Nunn May returned to Britain. MI5 was initially opposed to this and the Foreign Office feared that Nunn May would realise the game was up and flee to Moscow, but Philby’s view prevailed.

Among the stolen documents were the precise instructions from Moscow to the scientist laying down the procedure for establishing contact with his new Soviet handler in London. Since the documents could not be produced in court, catching the spy red-handed with a Soviet intelligence officer and possibly
exposing a network in Britain was obviously an attractive option but it meant no action could be taken publicly against the ring in Canada. Philby and his masters had more time to wind up the operation and safeguard their best agents. With every day that passed Philby could tell them more about where the investigation was leading.

Nunn May was kept under observation on the plane from Canada and surveillance continued when he arrived at Prestwick at 6:15 a.m. on Monday 17 September and flew from there to Blackbushe airport in Surrey. MI5’s team of watchers were briefed to pick him up from there but they had a problem. He was not due to make contact with his new controller until 7 October at the earliest and round-the-clock surveillance over such a long period was impossible without being detected. His phone was tapped at King’s College, London, where he resumed his old job as a lecturer, and at his digs, which he kept changing. He took precautions to make sure he was not followed, including jumping on to buses at the last minute and watching from the conductor’s platform to see if anyone jumped on after him. He contacted hardly anyone, most days eating alone in restaurants near the college.

Nunn May’s instructions from Moscow, as revealed by Gouzenko, had been that he was to attempt a clandestine meeting with his new handler at 8 p.m. on 7 October or on any date ending in seven thereafter. It was to take place opposite the British Museum, in Great Russell Street, near the junction with Museum Street. Nunn May was to approach from the direction of Tottenham Court Road and have a copy of
The Times
tucked under his left arm. The contact would come from the direction of Southampton Row, clutching a copy of
Picture Post
in his left hand, and say to Nunn May: ‘What is the shortest way to The Strand?’ Nunn May would reply: ‘Well, come along. I am going that way.’ The contact would then say: ‘Best regards from Mikel.’