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By Root 2560 0

Their evidently sincere dedication to the destruction of Bolshevism, along with the fact that SIS had also recruited a number of Anglo-Russian case officers who were like-minded and thus predisposed to trust them, contributed to an initially rather uncritical acceptance of their product. Their dependence on the pay of Western intelligence services, however, combined with the steady erosion of their access, led inevitably to the fabrication of reports which neither Head Office nor customer departments were initially able to validate with confidence against other comparable Russian material, although it is clear that the existence of the problem was recognised by SIS from the early 1920s onwards. In April 1921, for example, Orlov reported from Berlin that ‘a band of adventurers’ had ‘sprung up’ who were ‘fabricating forged documents supposed to be of Soviet official origin and are selling these forgeries to various papers and “White” organisations’. In August, another report from Orlov named an individual who supplied forged documents ‘to the French Government who would seem to swallow them wholesale. We could’, he added, ‘send you tons of them.’ Passing the report on to Special Branch, Desmond Morton noted that SIS had recently ‘sent out a stiffener to our people abroad to the effect that they must give something definite about the origin of any documents they get hold of ’. Reflecting a persistent problem with potentially forged documents, this sensible warning was repeated in a circular Sinclair sent out to all stations in May 1925, instructing them to ‘use every precaution in accepting as genuine any alleged Communist document that may be offered to you . . . The only facts which can be considered in future as in any way proof of authenticity is the complete story of the manner in which the alleged document has been obtained, and the hands through which it has passed between those of the alleged writer and the S.I.S. representative.’

In due course some of these agents began to work for several services simultaneously, including German Military Intelligence (the Abwehr), and they also became channels for double-agent operations. As the White Russian diaspora settled down into communities in Warsaw, Berlin and Paris, in addition to the Baltic states, they formed inter-communicating centres of counter-revolutionary plotting, propaganda and intelligence. They consequently became easily identifiable targets for penetration and disinformation by the Cheka and its successor, the OGPU. They also began to produce mutually corroborative fabrications, which purported to be from different sources but all too often were not. SIS assisted this process after Cumming in 1921 helped Orlov to set himself up in Berlin as an anti-Bolshevik propagandist working partly for the German police and partly on his own behalf. He soon became well known throughout European intelligence circles for running a ‘factory’ for creating and circulating reports, which, if not forged, were mostly from dubious sources. He was paid off by Cumming in the spring of 1922, though the Service continued informal contact. In 1924 Morton described him to Sinclair as a ‘born intriguer and ambitious’, and warned that a document produced by Orlov alone could ‘never be accepted’ without corroboration from a separate source. In April 1927 a Constantinople agent who had recently visited Berlin and contacted Orlov reported that his organisation was ‘completely controlled by the [O.]G.P.U. and with the consent and cooperation of the German S.S. [Secret Service]’. Orlov had ‘an elaborate machinery for forging documents’ and, ‘with information supplied by the G.P.U.’, his organisation wrote up ‘numerous reports for various Intelligence services throughout Europe’. The agent provided a list of twenty-one Russians used by Orlov to distribute material, three of whom (based in three different countries) were existing SIS contacts. By December 1937 Orlov had been written off completely. ‘We cannot lay it down too strongly’, instructed London, ‘that our experience of this individual