Book Reviews
Spies who loved too well
Times Literary Supplement – June 8, 2001
Igor Damaskin and Geoffrey Elliot: Kitty Harris: The Spy with Seventeen Names
W G Krivitsky: In Stalin’s Secret Service: Memoirs of the first Soviet master spy to defect
“A society that admires its shock troops had better be bloody careful about where it’s going,” John le Carre wrote in his 1986 novel, A Perfect Spy. One society that grew notoriously careless both in choosing its direction and in looking after the enthusiastic shock troops whose work it professed to admire was the Soviet Union during the Stalinist Terror of the 1930s. The cautionary tales of two of the spies who risked their all for international Communism between the First and Second World Wars – but who died miserably once the Revolution began to devour its young – are reminders of the dangers of idealism gone wrong.
Kitty Harris, whose Russian-Jewish parents escaped the pogroms of the tsars by fleeing to Britain and starting a new life in the slums of Whitechapel at the end of the nineteenth century, was a Communist by conviction from her earliest youth. Cheeky, chippy and bright, she emigrated with her family to Canada and then Chicago, where she was drawn into the Communist Party of the United States and married one of its leading lights, Earl Browder. From then on, her life was a whirl of overseas spying assignments and narrow escapes from the law, lightly interrupted friendships, hasty shifts of continent and ever-changing code names. Stints in Asia, around Europe and Latin America were interspersed with study and briefing trips in Moscow throughout the 1930s. In the run-up to the Second World War, the forty-something Kitty became the twenty-five-year-old British spy Donald Maclean’s handler – and lover. Extraordinary coincidences repeatedly reunited her, in different capitals, with implausibly named agents for various rival powers, leaving the impression that international spying, in those cloak-and-dagger glory days, was more fun but perhaps no less socially restricted than the shtetl her parents had run away from.
Igor Damaskin’s and Geoffrey Elliot’s romp through the underside of twentieth-century history, flamboyantly reconstructed from secret KGB files with liberal dashes of extra drama, is entertaining, lively tabloid writing. Cheerfully disregarding Philip Toynbee’s dictum that the primary duty of a serious biographer is to illuminate his subject’s work, not to play the spy in his bedroom, Damaskin and Elliot never pass up the chance for authorial mention of her shipboard flings, hot dinner dates, temper tantrums or cosy romantic enthusiasms: “Whatever the Centre thought of the flat, Kitty felt very much at home there and tried to turn the rooms into a comfortable little nest, somewhere where Donald [Maclean] really wanted to come rather than felt he had to, especially the kitchen-dining room, where they spent the nicest part of those first few meetings”. This semi-fictionalised Kitty may have little depth of character, but the sheer number of adventures she gets embroiled in still makes the reader gasp and keep turning the pages.
The book passes lightly over the loneliness of Kitty’s final years – first imprisoned in a Soviet psychiatric hospital, then exiled to the provinces – and the last tormented questions transferred from her diary to her file: “Who will take responsibility for my sufferings? … Just why have I had to go through this hell?” But the authors’ apparent heartlessness in describing their dying heroine is perhaps not misplaced. For, in the version of Kitty’s life sketched out entertainingly in Kitty Harris: The spy with seventeen names, nothing, not even the Terror, ever caused her to rethink her youthful convictions. On the rare occasions when she did comment on the purges of millions of innocent people in Russia, the terrifying late-night arrests and betrayals perpetrated by the state she was working to build, she responded with the most perfunctory naivety: “She was well aware that something was wrong but, as she told Donald, she genuinely believed that those who confessed in open court to spying, sabotage, terrorism or Trotskyite and other hostile acts, were really guilty”.
A more thoughtful spy who did question the changing role of the Soviet state was Walter Krivitsky, the country’s top Soviet espionage officer in Western Europe in the 1930s. He had been Kitty Harris’s boss before he defected to America in 1937, testified before the House Committee on un-American Activities and wrote the articles which make up In Stalin’s Secret Service on the eve of the Second World War (his public identification of Kitty as a Soviet agent added to the many dangers she faced). This is a fascinating work of anguished confession, written by a repentant participant in many of the crimes he recounts, a party to the most hidden secrets of Stalin’s heyday.
Krivitsky’s book first came out in October 1939. It is republished now with a new introduction by Sam Tanenhaus, biographer of the most important American ex-Communist, Whittaker Chambers, whose own disillusionment with his cause had prompted him to quit a job as courier for a Soviet spy ring in Washington in 1938 (Chambers subsequently became Krivitsky’s closest friend in America). The book also contains reproductions of documents declassified over the years from FBI files, and a gripping 1966 account from the Washington Post of Krivitsky’s death.
“Who is there left to respect or admire? What hero or heroine of our revolution has not been broken and destroyed?” were the questions that Krivitsky asked himself as he left his homeland behind. “I think that all those not destined for the camp of Hitler and Stalin will agree that truth must be the first weapon, and murder must be called by its real name.”
Once in America, Krivitsky tried to demolish every last illusion about the Stalinist Soviet “experiment”, and disclose the ugliest facts about a regime whose atrocities included mass murder and slave-labour camps. But his revelations – among them laying bare Stalin’s secret admiration for Nazi Germany even before the Soviet leader cynically threw in his lot with Hitler in 1939 – aroused tremendous hostility among left-leaning Americans. Krivitsky was denounced as “an opportunist and a coward” and “a gangster and traitor” in the New Republic; the American Communist Party taunted him with a mocking version of his Jewish birth name, “Shmelka Ginzberg”.
Although American authorities did not comply with Soviet demands for Krivitsky to be deported to Moscow, the ex-spy-s defection may nevertheless have been his death warrant. He is best remembered today for the unsolved mystery surrounding his death in a Washington hotel room in 1941. He was found with a bullet in the brain and three farewell notes at his side. Krivitsky’s sympathizers believe that this apparent suicide was, in fact, one of the murders by Soviet agents that has never been called by its real name.
ENDS