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By Root 2638 0

The following spring an updated directive from London emphasised preparations for penetrating the Soviet Union, and instructed that ‘immediate priority’ should be given to ‘the proposed expeditions to Baltic States’ which, if successful, ‘may well be the foundation for a permanent channel for physical penetration of Russia’. The officer was told to explore ‘every possibility of physical entrance by our agents into Russia and her spheres of influence’. He was able to pick up some of the Baltic contacts which the wartime Helsinki station-in-exile had used (with mixed results) to gather intelligence on German targets. But by the late 1940s the intensely nationalist and anti-Russian groups from whom penetration agents might be recruited also wanted weapons, medicines and other practical assistance for active resistance operations against the Russians who had occupied their countries in August 1940. Matters were complicated by the fact that Swedish intelligence had also been running cross-Baltic operations during the war in co-operation with some of the same refugee organisations, and continued to do so in the postwar period.

Some (but by no means all) of this activity formed the basis of formal liaison between the Swedish and British services. In late 1947 the Swedes asked whether SIS could help them obtain a German E-boat (motor torpedo boat) for their operations. Vessels were available in Germany, and fortuitously a former German naval officer with wartime experience of secret operations into the Baltic states offered his services to SIS the following year. With ‘informal clearance’ from the Foreign Office, Menzies gave his approval for a boat and crew to be supplied for use by both the Swedish Intelligence Service and SIS. The boat was used for a Swedish operation in May 1949 and in October SIS infiltrated two trained Latvian émigrés who ‘claimed to have the possibility of making contact . . . with some patriots who supported groups of Partisans living in the Latvian forests’. That SIS’s Baltic operations depended on such émigré assurances illustrates the immense difficulty faced by any Western intelligence organisation seeking to penetrate the Soviet Union, and the consequent risks individuals (from intelligence chiefs to agents themselves) were prepared to take in the early days of the Cold War. As it happened, the Soviets had themselves penetrated most of the émigré groups, as well as some of the intelligence services, and most of the operations launched with such high hopes against the Soviet bloc in the late 1940s ended in disaster within a very few years.

The ‘Climber’ operations on the Soviet southern flank were no exception. ‘Climber I’ in 1948 had been designed to infiltrate two Georgians ‘with an intelligence brief’ into Soviet Georgia, but the unfortunate men had died on the frontier in obscure circumstances. ‘Climber II’ in August 1949 aimed to insert two further Georgians into the Soviet Union from mountainous north-east Turkey. In the spring of 1949 two émigrés, one apparently in his late forties and the other in his early thirties, were recruited in France and brought to England for training. They were given a special tradecraft course, with particular emphasis on secret writing, and two weeks’ physical ‘hardening-up’ walking on Dartmoor. Here the only reported problem concerned their military clothing, which made them conspicuous among locals and holidaymakers. Next time, their trainer recommended that ‘when eating in cafes or local farmhouses grey flannel trousers, light coloured shirts and sports jackets would have been better dress’. This snag was accentuated because the younger man ‘refused to shave for days on end and at times he must have been considered as anything from a Moroccan Arab to an escaped convict’. But they finished the course satisfactorily, and travelled to Istanbul under false passports, posing as proprietors of a yoghurt factory in South America visiting Turkey ‘to discuss various unspecified plans for improving and extending their business’.

The two men were met in Istanbul by Kim