The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [165]
Opportunities and difficulties in Europe
Under Harold Gibson, head of station in Bucharest from December 1922, Romania was regarded as an important location for work on the Soviet Union. Gibson had originally gone to Romania as a correspondent for the Morning Post, and from 1924, assisted by his younger brother Archie (who also operated under journalistic cover) and drawing extensively on White Russian contacts from his time in Turkey (including his agent HV/109), he assembled a sizeable network of sources. During the 1920s he ran some seventy individuals, though not all necessarily at the same time, on the Romanian and Soviet sides of the frontier. One of Gibson’s groups was run by a clerk (‘313’) in the Sevastopol naval base. He worked for a Romanian secret service officer who was also passing information to Gibson. Agent 313 had sub-sources who provided an ‘abundance of useful material’ on the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, before one of them betrayed him in 1930. There were also Red Army sources in the Ukraine and as far afield as Irkutsk in Central Asia. In 1930, the heads of both the Naval and Military Sections at Broadway - Russell and Menzies respectively - commented favourably on the reports produced (none of which has survived). Menzies declared that they ‘have proved accurate time after time’. After Harold Gibson’s departure for Riga in March 1931 (taking HV/109 with him), his successor, Major Montagu ‘Monty’ Chidson, and Archie Gibson established new networks, based in part on Ukrainian nationalist groups with sources in Soviet military and industrial organisations. Although SIS forged quite close relations with both the Romanian security police and military intelligence - with the latter greatly facilitating the movement of agents and couriers across the Romanian-Soviet frontier - Archie Gibson claimed afterwards that (unlike the position in the Baltic states) nearly all of the Bucharest station’s Soviet reports came from its own sources.
Maintaining independent lines of information like this was valued in London. In January 1936 Menzies’s deputy at Head Office insisted that it was ‘most important’ that SIS’s organisation in Romania ‘should be maintained in one form or another; otherwise we shall be entirely dependent on the S.I.S. posts in the Baltic states, which are themselves practically dependent on information provided by the General Staffs of those states’. But by this stage SIS’s Romanian operations had been fatally compromised by the Flemmer affair. In October 1935 the head of the Romanian Military Secret Service, Major Mihail Muruzov, informed Chidson that he had arrested two brothers, Mikhail and Alexander Flemmer, who had been working both for the Romanians and for Harold Gibson’s agent 109 (though not for SIS). Muruzov had discovered that the Flemmers were OGPU agents. He said that any public trial would be most undesirable - especially as it might reveal the close association between the Romanians and SIS - and that he planned to shoot the two men, having first interrogated them. Chidson strongly agreed with the need for secrecy and accepted Muruzov’s offer to question the Flemmers himself in order to ascertain the extent to which SIS’s organisation in Romania and its courier lines in the Soviet Union might have been compromised. After interrogating the unfortunate brothers and 109, Muruzov concluded that the latter was innocent, but that the OGPU had thoroughly penetrated both the Romanian and SIS anti-Soviet networks. Chidson, while conceding the possibility of some damage, refused to panic and wanted to carry on as usual until he had firm evidence to the contrary. As it turned out, this was a serious error of judgment.
Muruzov, meanwhile, had arrested one of 109’s sub-agents, ‘109/18’, and satisfied himself that he, too, was working for the Soviets, though he admitted to Chidson in December 1935 that it ‘was difficult to pin anything definite on him’. Nevertheless, as with the Flemmers, he proposed arranging his ‘quiet disposal’. Chidson, vehemently