The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [391]
SIS’s sources of intelligence in postwar Germany included defectors, of whom quite a few crossed over during the late 1940s. Indeed, defectors came to be seen as an easier and more satisfactory source of intelligence on Soviet matters than agents laboriously infiltrated into, or recruited from, the Soviet Zone, Poland or even the USSR itself. In Berlin in October 1947 Lieutenant Colonel Grigori Aleksandrovich Tokaev (code-named ‘Excise’), a distinguished aeronautical engineer, was the first high-level Soviet defector in Germany. Both SIS and MI5 were able to interrogate Tokaev (who produced a great deal of intelligence of varying quality), but were only peripherally involved in handling the defection. SIS, however, was soon active in trying to use Tokaev to encourage the defections of other Soviet officers known to him as having dissident tendencies and a new post was created at Bad Salzuflen to co-ordinate policy and the efforts of outstations to provoke defectors.
The encouragement of other defectors did not always go to plan and Tokaev became involved in an embarrassing episode in the spring of 1948. A Russian officer acquaintance of his, Colonel J. D. Tasoev (code-named ‘Capulet’), who was working in the American Zone, had been earmarked for possible recruitment by SIS. In April it was learned that Tasoev was being posted back behind the Iron Curtain, and, using the Chief of the Imperial General Staff’s plane, Tokaev, with an SIS minder, flew to Germany to meet him. There Tasoev announced that he, too, wanted to defect, and, without consulting anyone, Tokaev’s SIS escort brought him back to England. This upset everyone: the Russians protested about his having been ‘abducted’; the Foreign Office complained when they found out, as did the JIC, who were supposed to handle all defections; and MI5 grumbled because they had not been consulted at all. To make matters worse, Tasoev, as Sargent told Bevin on 12 May, ‘overcome by a fit of remorse and in a mood of Slavic penitence’, now wished ‘to give himself up to the Soviet authorities to pay the price of his treason’. He had attempted to escape and had had to be placed under restraint in a police station. He was eventually returned to the Soviet Union, but SIS had to take the blame for the very unwelcome publicity, with lively press speculation and questions asked in parliament. Bevin was very annoyed and asked specifically ‘that he should never again be put in such a false position’. Menzies tried to defend the Service’s role in the affair, though William Hayter in the Foreign Office thought he ‘would have done better to have admitted frankly that he made a bad muddle of all this’.15
Using SIS lines to help exfiltrate individuals from Communist Eastern Europe - in a kind of revival of SIS’s wartime association with the escape organisation MI9 - raised questions of what the Service was actually for. In the autumn of 1947, not least to test the possibility of safe routes for agents out of Poland, SIS agreed to make a plan to get the former Polish Prime Minister, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, whose life was threatened by Communist groups, out of the country. The scheme came to nothing and Mikołajczyk escaped with the help of British and American diplomats. But when the Foreign Office asked for assistance with the escape of a locally employed member of the Warsaw embassy staff, Mrs Buyno, doubts were expressed as to whether