Mrs Petrova's Shoe by Wilhelm Agrell Simon Moores

Author:Wilhelm Agrell, Simon Moores [Wilhelm Agrell, Simon Moores]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, British, Biography & Memoir, Political
ISBN: 9781786725684
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-02-21T05:00:00+00:00

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Operation Cabin 12

The first difference ASIO observed was the newly arrived Vladimir Petrov acting like he was the Soviet party’s leader, and more differences were to follow. If Petrov, who, according to his documents, was a lowly attaché but was acting like the leader among more senior individuals, this must be due either to his personality or, more likely, to other as yet unknown factors. Perhaps he was a party official or not actually a diplomat at all, and his travelling companions knew this or merely suspected it. Vladimir Petrov thus ticked one of the boxes. This sufficed for a report, but no more.

ASIO had been taught by its infinitely more experienced British mentors to pick up on these small discrepancies. MI5 had decades-long experience of surveillance of Soviet diplomats and other emissaries, the focus of which was not clandestine behaviour and secret agent contacts but things that were much more basic. They conducted almost ethnographic surveillance, mapping behavioural patterns, body language and social relationships. Even if individuals did not go around with a sign on their foreheads saying that they worked for the MGB, this identity was ingrained in them and often in the attitudes and behaviours of those around them.

The British had learned to look for small signs of rank imbalances: senior individuals taking orders from subordinates, younger people with a self-assurance not in keeping with their age, and people acting alone in situations that normally involved pairs. This procedure was the totalitarian state’s smallest surveillance unit, with two Soviet citizens monitoring each other, both uncertain whether the other was actually a recruited informer. MGB staff were more free and easy when socializing; they could afford to do this as it was all part of their job. But no matter how relaxed they appeared, they never dropped their guard. Only the MGB workers endeavoured, for example, to follow the special procedures for exposing surveillance, which all surveillance operatives worth their salt had learned and adapted their techniques to. Evdokia would later divide the legation staff into a social equivalent of the German psychiatrist Ernst Kretschmer’s personality types; while MFA staff were generally boring and lacked initiative, their MGB counterparts were observant and enterprising and GRU personnel happy and easy-going.1

In the second half of the 1940s the British secret services began to work more systematically towards gathering information about Soviet and other Eastern European diplomats, the aim of which was to identify, study and cultivate potential defectors. They did not have to be Soviet intelligence personnel; all defectors with an official function were of potential interest, possibly carriers of information, perhaps without even knowing its value. But, of course, the bigger and more exceptional the fish the better.

Defector cases found themselves in the borderland between the two powerful but officially non-existent agencies: the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6, or more familiarly ‘Broadway’, after Broadway Buildings, home to its headquarters). The wartime (and still observed) demarcation lines ran along the territorial water borders of the island nation, its crown colonies and the Commonwealth countries.

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