In the autumn of 1933, MI5 agents compiled a depressing inventory of a London hotel room, with effects including six empty bottles of gin and a used plane ticket to Switzerland.
Shortly afterwards, the occupant of the room, alcoholic Foreign Office official Ernest Holloway Oldham, took his own life.
The list of his possessions is preserved in his file at the National Archives in Kew. It also includes a box of liver pills, a packet of cigarettes, five and a half pence, some dirty clothes, and a notebook listing foreign addresses including one for a Mr JP, poste restante in the French town of Trouville.
Mr JP, British investigators realised after Oldham’s death, was Joe Perelly: the Dresden bank trustee who was often seen in his company, and who was now believed to be a spy to whom Oldham was passing British secrets.
Perelly, the Foreign Office believed, was a “Jew from Vienna”, or a Hungarian, or a German – nobody was quite sure. As late as the 1970s, British authorities were still trying to work out who exactly he had been. The working assumption was that Oldham had been handing over secrets to the Germans.
In fact, “Joe Perelly” was the cover identity of Dmitry Bystrolyotov, one of the first and greatest of the Soviet Union’s “illegals” – deep cover operatives who adopt foreign identities to spy for Moscow. Operatives like him laid the groundwork for a programme that has lasted a century and continues today, as Russia’s spy agencies still try to infiltrate illegals into the West.
Bystrolyotov charmed Oldham and seduced his wife, Lucy. In return for envelopes of cash, he received thousands of British diplomatic documents from Oldham, of crucial importance to Moscow at a time when the Soviet Union was still struggling to establish itself on the world stage.
Illegals were a brilliant answer to the foreign policy dilemmas of the early Soviet state. Moscow did not have diplomatic relations with most countries, so it could not send spies posing as diplomats. But it did have a large pool of talented, passionate Communists, who were already multilingual and used to switching identities.
By the time he became an illegal, at the age of 28, Bystrolyotov had already lived as an aristocrat and a refugee; he had been a bookish student and a manual labourer. He spoke fluent Russian, English, French, Turkish and Czech. For Bystrolyotov, who grew up in the tumultuous years of the Russian revolutions, transforming himself into another identity was second nature.
During his years as an illegal he would take on many different identities – a Greek merchant, a Canadian timber salesman, a Yugoslav butcher and a Norwegian herring salesman among them – but József “Joe” Perelly, Hungarian trustee of a Dresden bank, was his most successful cover.
Perelly, so the story went, was from Hungarian noble lineage, but his family had lost everything during the Second World War. Bystrolyotov took a trip to Budapest to help bring Perelly to life, ordering suits and hats from local tailors and a set of smoking pipes embossed with what was supposedly the Perelly coat of arms. A photoshoot in the city gave him plenty of “evidence” of his life back at “home” to be shown at key moments.
He ingratiated himself to Oldham as a struggling aristocrat, and made such a good impression on the young official that Oldham even managed to procure a British passport for his “friend”, in the name of Robert Grenville – another document to add to Bystrolyotov’s collection of identities. With effortless charm and Clark Gable looks, Bystrolyotov seduced numerous women for the Soviet cause over the years. He added Oldham’s wife to the list, visiting her at their Kensington home while Oldham was in a rehab clinic for alcoholics, to increase his leverage over the family.
The documents stolen by Oldham were enough to fill 26 fat folders in the Moscow archives and covered much of the secret European diplomacy of the time, amid the economic hit of the Depression and Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. When he felt the net closing in, Bystrolyotov fled London, switching his Joe Perelly passport for one in the name of Greek merchant Alexander S Gallas to avoid police checks.
Dmitry Bystrolyotov’s world was very different from our own – these days, biometric passports, computerised databases and facial recognition technology make switching identities a much tougher proposition.
Yet more than 90 years after Bystrolyotov disappeared from London, Russia’s foreign intelligence service still uses illegals, and while the technological advances in the interim have been numerous, much of the basic tradecraft used by illegals remains the same, including communicating via codes, with the “Centre” in Moscow, using hidden “dead drops” to receive money or send intelligence, and practicing extreme compartmentalisation, so if one illegal is caught, they won’t be able to give away others, because they have never met them.
I have spent the last few years researching a book on the century-long history of the programme, and one of the many extraordinary things about it is its durability. At many times over the last century it seemed as though the programme had outlived its usefulness, but every time it was resurrected again.
Many of the early “Great Illegals” were shot in Joseph Stalin’s purges. Bystrolyotov, who evaded detection so masterfully in the West, was arrested by his own side and sent to the Gulag for 20 years, accused of having been a Western spy pretending to be a Soviet spy all along.
During the Cold War, illegal missions were restarted, but there was no longer a pool of ready-made cosmopolitan polyglots to choose from, Stalin having jailed or shot most of them. Instead, the KGB had to train up Soviet citizens for years until they could convincingly pass for westerners. Many illegals became sleeper agents, sent to burrow into American society and lie low, sometimes for decades, waiting in case the Cold War became hot, when they would be activated.
When the Soviet Union collapsed and the KGB was disbanded, many assumed that the illegals programme would finally come to an end, but after the accession of Vladimir Putin in 2000, it was reborn. Putin had spent many of his KGB years working in illegals support, and retains a fondness for illegals, so unique in the annals of espionage history. These days, illegals are not used on risky missions such as assassinations or recruitments – the training takes too long to risk blowing their cover if it all goes wrong. Instead, they are used to profile potential recruitment targets and get close to decision makers in the West.
Most recently, the prisoner swap that saw Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich return to the US last summer saw several captured illegals travelling in the other direction. Among them were a couple who had spent a decade posing as Argentinians, most recently based in Slovenia. When I reported there after their arrest, people who had known them expressed profound scepticism about claims that their friends had actually been Russian spies.
One artist friend of the couple told me it was unthinkable that “Maria Mayer” could have been a spy. After all, spies were meant to be swashbuckling and sexy, and his friend had been neither. “She was a grey mouse,” he told me, shaking his head. “I don’t believe she could have been a spy. Maybe she just got mixed up in something.”
I wondered how he must have felt on the day of the exchange, when Vladimir Putin met the family off the plane, presenting “Maria Mayer” (real name Anna Dultseva) with a bouquet of flowers, and greeting the couple’s two children with “Buenas noches”. It was only on the plane to Moscow that they had been told the truth – that their family was not Argentinian but Russian.
Bystrolyotov, in post-Gulag memoirs, wrote eloquently about the psychological scars that his work left: “It not only disfigures your life and soul; it does the same to strangers who are forced to become involved in it.”
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Many of the illegals I spoke to also talked about the difficulties of combining a family life with their work. Children created a particularly difficult dilemma: telling them the truth was risky – what if they blurted it out to a friend or teacher? Sometimes illegals only told their children when they returned to Moscow at the end of their mission, sparking unthinkably difficult conversations with teenagers who thought they were ordinary Germans or Americans and were now told their new home was Russia.
In Putin’s Russia, where nationalist mythmaking is the order of the day, illegals are held up as the ultimate patriots. A few days after last summer’s swap, the Dultsev family appeared on a Russian state television programme.
As the children played, the breathless correspondent praised the couple’s devotion to the Motherland: “They are high-class professionals who devoted their whole lives to the Motherland, making sacrifices that ordinary people could never understand. They raised their children as Spanish-speaking Catholics. Now, they will have to teach them what borscht is.”
