Harder evidence comes from an operation involving the Estonian Voldemar Kiik, one of the most successful British agents of the post-war era. His story is almost entirely unknown outside Estonia, where he was buried with military honours in the national cemetery, next to Rebane, after his death in 2002. His mission was to reconnoitre the airfield at Tartu, Estonia’s second city. Details of his mission remain classified to this day, but it would have been of huge interest to British and American intelligence to know about any hardened hangars, the quality and quantity of air defences, and signs of nuclear weapons storage and transport. Kiik was a medical student in London when Rebane approached him, probably in 1950. He was the ideal recruit – brainy, determined and a cut above the other Estonian young men in London, whose patriotism often outweighed their other talents (they, in turn, found his successful womanising tiresome). He was already battle-hardened. Mobilised by the Red Army in 1940, he jumped off a troop train and hid in a forest before being conscripted by the Germans. Wounded in the head in the battle of Velikaya Luka near Leningrad, he was left for dead during a German retreat, only to be rescued during a counterattack. He detested both occupying powers equally. Rather than exchange the mandatory ‘Heil Hitler!’ greeting, he and the other Estonians in his unit would shout ‘Ei Ütle!’ (Don’t Say!). The pronunciation was close enough to fool the Germans, and gave a pleasant tingle of resistance.
As well as the usual tradecraft, he was schooled intensively in Russian (which he did not speak) and in Pelmanism – the knack of remembering large quantities of data. But in a notable difference from the carelessness that surrounded Operation Jungle, he does not seem to have been trained with the other Estonians. With a cyanide pill sewn into his lip he parachuted into Estonia in the summer of 1952. Though tempted to visit his mother – it would have been his only chance to see her before she died – he concentrated on his mission, perhaps using the remnants of a pre-war British network for support. His route back involved a perilous crossing of the Norwegian–Soviet frontier where disaster nearly struck. Another British agent making the same crossing shortly beforehand had come across some border guards asleep at their post and had shot them, perhaps unaware that he was complicating things for anyone else. The result was a frenzy of border-guard activity. Starving, sodden and fearing capture, Kiik waited in a swamp for two weeks, living off berries. He then took a Benzedrine pill he had been saving for emergencies and crossed the border where his reception party was still waiting, as this previously unpublished picture depicts (Kiik is on the right).bh His name did not appear on a list of Estonians wanted by the KGB, and his family was not harassed, showing that the Soviet authorities never got wind of his mission (they believed he had emigrated to Canada). Prematurely grey after his ordeal, he then worked for the British government as an instructor in covert operations (among his pupils, he once said, was the future King of Norway).
Kiik’s successful mission, the mysterious agent who crossed the border before him, Captain Nelberg’s letter and some other evidence of separate, successful missions all support the theory that SIS, perhaps as early as 1950 and certainly by 1952, had reason to continue Operation Jungle as a bluff. If so, the human calculations are chilling. Were the agents still inside the Soviet Union counted as good as dead? What of the men being sent to join them? The verdict of sheer incompetence might be moderated by the steel nerves and stunning cynicism that such decisions would involve.
Meanwhile a conflict between intelligence and political objectives was plaguing the other side too. The Soviet authorities wanted to lure a senior Estonian émigré figure – ideally Rebane – across the border for a humiliating show trial. The KGB was more interested in further penetration of SIS and the CIA. But with Rebane belatedly aware of the deception, the hunters had become the hunted. It is unclear how far Rebane and SIS were at cross-purposes in the final years of the operation. The wily Estonian claimed later that even after the closure of the Latvian and Lithuanian operations, he fought to maintain the radio games with the KGB-controlled partisans, in the hope of getting his own agents back. He succeeded in at least one instance, but his career with SIS was over. The once-dashing officer ended up working as a night watchman before moving to Germany and a job in that country’s intelligence service. Having dodged repeated attempts by the KGB to entrap him, he died in 1976, having burned his papers; his devoted secretary Liis Dillie Lindre lived to see her country regain independence in 1991, yet continued to sleep with a loaded revolver by her bed (in a suburb of Brussels) even after the Soviet Union collapsed. Rebane’s Latvian and Lithuanian colleagues moved to the United States. Carr was shunted first sideways and then out of the service; until his death in 1988 he blamed Philby, not his own incompetence, for the fiasco. Viktor van Jung, a cerebral and charismatic Estonian émigré who had trained two CIA agents who went on a doomed mission in 1954, went on to a high-flying career in the agency. Strong indications are that he was the CIA officer who ran Ryszard Kukilński, a senior Polish officer who passed on invaluable Warsaw Pact secrets to NATO.
According to Rositzke, none of the CIA operatives returned from their missions. But a sprinkling of former agents who survived inside the Soviet Union did crop up after 1991, with embarrassing consequences for their spymasters. One of the most conspicuous cases involved Sweden, a country that had maintained a stony silence over its espionage efforts in the Baltics, which seem to have been every bit as disastrous as those of SIS and the CIA. The activities of the C-byrån (C-Agency), renamed in 1946 as T-kontoret (T-Office), began during the war and were stepped up in 1948 when a Soviet attack on Sweden seemed all too likely. Using Baltic émigrés and run in close cooperation with SIS, they finished in 1957, after the humiliating public exposure of a Swedish spy ring and a formal Soviet diplomatic protest.
~~Deception: The Untold Story of East West Espionage Today -by- Edward Lucas
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