Too Secret Too Long, page 9
Having vacated his London house, Hollis moved into accommodation at 29a Charlbury Road in Oxford. Number 29 was then owned by Hugh Cairns, Professor of Surgery at Balliol College, and 29a seems to have been an annexe to the house, which still exists.[5] It is not known when his wife joined him with their infant son but she eventually did so, paying frequent visits to her parents in the safety of the West Country, Oxford being a likely target for the Luftwaffe because of the nearby motor works.[6] After about a year the Hollis family moved to a house in Garford Road, which is next to Charlbury Road. They remained there until February 1943.[7]
These locations and the proximity of the MI5 out-station at Blenheim Palace would seem to be of considerable significance in view of the contemporary moves of Sonia (see map page 63).
After a three-week wait in Lisbon, following her departure from Switzerland, Sonia secured a steamship passage to Britain via Gibraltar, arriving in Liverpool early in February 1941. After a routine interrogation by immigration officials, she spent one night in a Liverpool hotel with her two children and, next day, she travelled straight to Oxford, a city with which she had no known associations.[8] Why did she go to Oxford where, as events showed, she intended to settle for the duration of the war at least?
It was assumed – all too readily – by MI5 officers who later investigated her movements that she went to Oxford because her parents were living there. Her father, Dr Robert René Kuczynski, the distinguished demographer, was believed to be attached to one of the Oxford colleges.[9] The truth is very different.
Sonia’s father, who had been born in Berlin in 1876 and was of Polish–Jewish origin, was involved in radical German politics after the First World War and became a leading member of the German communists in exile. After six years at the Brookings Institution, a research organization in Washington promoting public understanding of economic and foreign policies and related issues, he entered Britain in 1933 as a political refugee and was awarded a research fellowship at the London School of Economics, becoming the first Reader in Demography there in 1938.[10] I have established that he remained in that post until August 1941, when he reached the compulsory retiring age of sixty-five.[11] The L.S.E. was evacuated to Cambridge at the outbreak of the war but Dr Kuczynski did not accompany it there and his daughter’s memoirs make it clear that her parents maintained their London home. He was, however, researching a British colonial populations project, for which purpose he had reading facilities at the Rhodes Library and the Bodleian Library in Oxford.[12] From time to time, therefore, he visited Oxford for brief periods, taking advantage, as many other academics did, of some respite from the London bombing.
In October 1940 he secured accommodation in a smallish semi-detached house at 224 Headington Road, then held in the name of a Mr John Bedding.[13] From that address he wrote to a friend saying that he would be staying there only a few days, having secured more suitable occasional lodgings. These proved to be in a large Victorian house at 78 Woodstock Road to which he moved some time after 13 November, when Dr Stella Churchill, a physician and surgeon, acquired the lease.[14] Dr Kuczynski remained there, at intervals, until mid-1942, when he returned permanently to London.[15] He was certainly using a room or rooms in the house when Sonia arrived in Oxford in February 1941 but was not a regular sub-tenant, as Dr Churchill was required to list sub-tenants on her lease.[16]
Sonia claims that there was no room for her and her children with her parents ‘who had squeezed in with friends’, but 78 Woodstock Road is so large that it is now student accommodation for St Hugh’s College.
Juergen Kuczynski published a detailed biography of his father in 1957 and made no mention of any post or stay in Oxford.[17] Nor is there any such mention in his own memoirs or in the German biographical dictionaries which record Dr René Kuczynski’s career in considerable detail. His obituary notice in The Times, which was written by his daughter Brigitte, traces his academic career and does not mention Oxford.[18] My inquiries at the colleges where he was most likely to have worked have all produced negative results. Academic acquaintances of his, one of whom was at Oxford himself during the war, cannot recall any connection between Dr Kuczynski and any Oxford college.[19] Sonia herself records that he spent most of his time in London because she travelled there twice a month to speak with him, not only for family reasons but ‘conspiratorially’. Dr Kuczynski knew what Sonia was doing and did all he could to help her by giving her confidential information from high-level friends such as Sir Stafford Cripps, the Labour politician. As she records, she passed it on to the G.R.U. Centre in Moscow.
It would seem to be more than coincidence that the Moscow Centre delayed its instructions to Sonia to start arrangements for her move from Switzerland to Oxford until the very month, October 1940, that her father had secured his pied-à-terre in Oxford and his cover for being there. His presence then gave Sonia her own cover for being in Oxford if she was ever questioned about that, which she never was. In view of the undoubted fact that Juergen Kuczynski and his father already had G.R.U. connections and, as Sonia herself was in touch with her family by letter from Switzerland, her parents must have known of her intention to move to Oxford and her father may well have been instructed to be there to assist with money as well as with parental welcome.
Sonia had certainly not chosen Oxford because her parents were living there, as MI5 itself has assumed. What, then, was her real reason for going there rather than anywhere else in Britain? Unwittingly, she answers the question herself in her memoirs by stating, in a reference to her husband’s eventual departure from Switzerland, that like herself, he received instructions from headquarters – the Centre – to move to England. She confirms it, more forcibly, by revealing that she was a regular officer in the Red Army with the rank of major, later to be colonel. No serving officer of any army decides where he or she will live. When Sonia left Shanghai she was posted to Mukden and then ordered to move to Peking. She was assigned to Warsaw – not just anywhere she chose in Poland – and then ordered to move to Danzig.[20] She was posted to the Lausanne area of Switzerland – not to any place of her choice in that country. And, in view of her subsequent behaviour, she was posted to Oxford. The ‘legend’ with which she deluded her Swiss replacement, Alexander Foote – that she was giving up espionage to live in the safety of England – is disposed of by Sonia herself in her account of her immediate resumption of Soviet intelligence work and her continuation of it throughout the war and afterwards. Her account of her arrival in Oxford because her parents were living there is part of that legend, which the G.R.U. authorities wished to preserve in the interests of her real activities there. Those activities must have been important to warrant the posting of such an experienced officer, who had already earned the high distinction of the Order of the Red Banner, and would be awarded another.[21]
In furtherance of her legend, Sonia tries to convince her readers, probably on instructions from Soviet officials who vetted her book, that she was given carte blanche to go to Oxford to recruit a completely new network of spies, but as already mentioned this would have been totally out of character for the G.R.U. Centre, which always insisted on controlling its agents in fine detail. Sonia knew little about Britain and nothing about the Oxford area. Further, she had been forbidden by Moscow, for conspiratorial safety, to approach the Communist Party or any overt British communists who might have assisted her in securing recruits. She eventually met several German communists who were spying for the Soviet Union, but they already had effective arrangements for transmitting their information to Moscow and, as none of them was a major spy, it is unlikely that an agent-runner as experienced as Sonia would have been uprooted from Switzerland just to assist them. It is also known now, from some of her radio traffic which has been identified, that she was transmitting substantial amounts of material to Moscow soon after her arrival in the Oxford area, making it nearly certain that she either had advance knowledge of how to contact a productive source or that she was quickly given it.[22]
Sonia records that she had great difficulty in finding lodgings in Oxford and had to place her children in boarding school, though this may really have been a move to give her greater freedom of action while she was making her preparations. The first address where she found proper accommodation for herself – ‘Glympton Rectory, near Woodstock’, as she describes it – is intriguing in the extreme, as I have already pointed out, and offers an indication of her likely mission in the Oxford area. Woodstock is a small town adjacent to Blenheim Palace, where the major part of MI5, including the section headed by Hollis, had been evacuated. It is stretching belief in coincidence rather far to accept that Sonia, a highly professional G.R.U. agent, posted to the area for a specific purpose, happened to have MI5 on her doorstep purely by chance. I have established that the rector of Glympton, the late Reverend Charles Cox, did take in such refugees in 1941, but regrettably the visitors’ book no longer exists.[23]
The probability is that Sonia’s target was some MI5 officer who had already been recruited. Could this have been Anthony Blunt who is known to have been spying for the Soviet Union at that time? There are three compelling reasons why it could not. First, Blunt was based in London throughout the war, visiting Blenheim only occasionally. Secondly, Blunt was always an agent of the K.G.B., not the G.R.U., to which Sonia belonged. Thirdly, Blunt’s controllers when Sonia was active in the Oxford area have been positively identified through information which he provided, and on other grounds could not have included Sonia.[24] They were all men, K.G.B. officers with ‘legal’ status, posing as diplomats in the Soviet Embassy in London and able to use the Embassy’s radio transmitting facilities. It would have made no sense to have a controller based in and around Oxford to service such a productive spy as Blunt in London, especially when Sonia had no motor car. On the other hand, to service a spy working in or near Oxford, an ‘illegal’ operator like Sonia with her own transmitter, made excellent sense, and several counter-espionage officers have told me that it would have been standard practice for the G.R.U. to have used an ‘illegal’ in such circumstances. A ‘legal’ controller based in London at the Embassy would have needed to make frequent visits to Oxford, not always easy during the war and likely to arouse suspicion.
If it is accepted as likely that her target was MI5 – Bletchley, the only alternative target of note, was too remote for someone with no transport – it follows that the spy she was servicing had been recruited by the G.R.U., for in the early 1940s the two Soviet intelligence agencies operated so independently that no G.R.U. officer would have been permitted to run a K.G.B. spy. Again, it seems oddly coincidental that if Hollis, who was living in Oxford and commuting to Blenheim, had been recruited to the Soviet service either in China or later through his Chinese connections, it would have been by the G.R.U. because all the known recruiters he may have met were involved with the G.R.U.
Sonia remained a paying guest of the rector of Glympton for only a few weeks, but that would have been long enough for her to have established contact with her target and, as she herself records, to build a radio transmitter.[25] The haste with which she built a transmitter in her bedroom at Glympton, which was not without the risk of discovery, suggests that she knew she would have information to transmit and does not accord with her story that she had to build up her own network of contacts. When an ‘illegal’ agent is establishing cover in a new country every precaution is taken, usually over many months, to avoid arousing suspicion, but Sonia’s behaviour showed a sense of urgency suggesting that she knew that important secret material would soon be in her hands.
In order to be able to transmit she needed privacy and a place where she could construct an aerial in safety. She found this in April, after only a few weeks at Glympton, in the form of a furnished bungalow in Kidlington, which she describes as a ‘suburb’ four kilometres from Oxford. It was, in fact, half way between Blenheim Palace and Oxford (see map p.63) and ideally placed for servicing a spy inside MI5, especially one who could call at a convenient dead-letter box on the way home from Oxford by car. Sonia recalls how, being alone, she had to climb on to the bungalow roof to fix up a radio aerial for her transmissions to Moscow. She claims that Moscow did not contact her until May 1941, but some of her earliest traffic was picked up and recorded by a foreign intelligence service and when MI5 was able to secure this, many years later, it left no doubt that she had begun to transmit in April at the latest.[26]
Before leaving Switzerland she had been instructed on how to meet a senior G.R.U. officer whom she would need to contact on occasion when in possession of documents which needed to be transported to Moscow rather than transmitted. After a number of abortive attempts she made contact with the man. She was to know him only as ‘Sergei’; his name was Simon Kremer, a secretary to the Military (G.R.U.) Attaché at the Soviet Embassy in London.[27] His espionage activities have been confirmed by the decipherment of G.R.U. traffic between himself and Moscow, but only long after he had returned to the Soviet Union. Kremer supplied Sonia with ample funds and she quickly had enough important information to use her transmitter twice a week.
Once she had secured a permanent home for herself her cover was secure, for she could pose as a British housewife and mother waiting for her British husband to return from Switzerland, where he had been delayed because of the sudden outbreak of war. Her British nationality made her immune to possible internment and as long as she obeyed the conspiratorial rules and her transmissions went undetected she could look forward to a long spell of constructive effort for her beloved Soviet Union. Her hundreds of transmissions did indeed go undetected by British counter-intelligence, or at least appeared to do so, and in view of that it is necessary to consider her transmitting methods and the hazards she faced, or should have faced.
chapter nine
A British Bonus for Soviet
Spies
Sonia gives some details of her transmitting and receiving methods in her memoirs, but greater insight into the system used by the G.R.U. during the war is provided by Alexander Foote in his Handbook for Spies, first published in 1949. As he had been taught by Sonia, and both were operating as ‘illegals’ at relatively equal distances from the Centre in Moscow, it is reasonable to assume that their methods were broadly the same. It is certain, from what both reveal, that the system was bilateral. Sonia not only transmitted to Moscow but received messages in reply. Such a system should be easier to detect than the alternative blind system in which the Centre replied later by a coded signal sent over Moscow radio or by some other concealed device.
On average, Sonia transmitted twice a week at prearranged times so that the Centre would be listening, and in the small hours of the night so that local interference with the radio sets of nearby residents, which might have aroused suspicion, would be minimal. Using a hand morse key, with which she was an above-average performer, she first sent out her call sign which probably consisted of three letters – Foote’s, for example, was FRX – repeated. The Centre then acknowledged receipt by sending its call sign for Sonia, Foote’s being NDA. In addition the Centre would give some indication, using a number, of the strength with which the signal was being received. These call signs were varied according to a prearranged plan in Sonia’s possession. Once communication had been established on a certain wavelength, both Sonia and the Centre then switched to a different wavelength for the transmission of her messages to reduce the risk that it might be monitored.[1]
Sonia sent all her messages in a cipher which she had brought with her from Switzerland or had been supplied to her by ‘Sergei’ in Britain. By the time she called Moscow she would have enciphered her messages and would get them off as rapidly as possible. This encipherment might take several hours, depending on the amount of material.
Whatever the method of encipherment which Sonia used it was certainly very safe. In addition to her regular transmissions she would have been required to listen for her call sign on other days in case the Centre needed to contact her, and there would also have been days when the Centre listened for her in case she had urgent information. Such a bilateral system ensures the maximum receipt of information from both sides and the minimum time on the air, but if it is being monitored by counter-intelligence it is not only more detectable than a blind system but more likely to lead to the location of the agent.
In the spring of 1941, when Sonia started her regular transmission from the Oxford area – of which there is no doubt – an organization called the Radio Security Service (R.S.S.) had the responsibility for detecting, monitoring and locating such clandestine transmitters. This service, which was part of a section of MI5 called MI8c, was centred on Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire, about thirty-five miles from Oxford. It had listening stations at strategic points and the services of about 1,500 amateur radio operators, known as Voluntary Interceptors, working in their homes. Foreign transmissions which might be of interest were recorded by hand, as there were no magnetic tapes then, and passed to Bletchley Park for possible deciphering.[2]
The R.S.S. was able to work out the nationality of the traffic and its likely destination by processes collectively called ‘discrimination’. When relevant, Bletchley Park fed back any deciphered material to the R.S.S. to assist it in tracking down further messages. Bletchley dealt with MI5 and MI6 directly, but there was also direct liaison between the R.S.S. and MI5 and MI6 concerning traffic which was believed to be Soviet and illegal, in other words, not emanating from the Soviet Embassy or a consulate but from a possible spy. A former officer who was very senior in the R.S.S. has told me that such coded messages, which had not been deciphered, were passed personally to Hollis in MI5, as head of the section responsible for Soviet counter-espionage. After 1944, when Philby became responsible for Soviet counter-espionage in MI6, they also went to him personally.[3] The R.S.S. then waited for instructions from MI5 or MI6 if they felt there was any need to locate the source of the illegal traffic.[4] For that purpose the R.S.S. had mobile detector vans which could be sent out to pinpoint the transmitter by taking bearings, a process called radio-goniometry.
