ARTIST• 21acting as his cipher clerk, and together they conveyed supposedly
high-grade political intelligence, some of it derived from contact with
Marshal Badoglio, to the Germans until the end of the war.ARMSTRONG, GEORGE.ACommunist Party of Great Britain
member, George Armstrong deserted his ship in Boston and in Octo-
ber 1940 was reported byBritish Security Coordination(BSC) as
having attempted to contact theAbwehrin New York using the alias
George Hope, offering information about transatlantic convoys. BSC
tipped off U.S. immigration authorities, and Armstrong was arrested
and deported. He was detained upon his return to Cardiff in February
1941, tried under the Treachery Act in June, and executed at Wands-
worth in July.
ARMSTRONG, ROBERT.Later ennobled as Lord Armstrong, Rob-
ert Armstrong wasCabinet secretarywhenPeter Wrightpublished
his memoirs in Australia in 1986 and traveled to Sydney to appear as
a witness to support the British government’s attempts to suppress
SpyCatcheras a breach of the author’s duty of confidentiality to
MI5. Armstrong argued that Wright’s book contained information
that was highly classified and had not been released elsewhere, but
the court found that much of the content had in fact appeared else-
where, with the implicit consent of the Thatcher administration.
Earlier in his career as a civil servant, Armstrong had been indoc-
trinated intovenonaand undertook a research project to identify a
Soviet spy with access to the White House in 1944, referred to in
venonatexts as ‘‘Agent 19.’’ MI5 subsequently concluded that
Agent 19 was probably the Czech prime minister, Eduard Benes.
ARNIKA.Code name for the intelligence supplied by ColonelOleg
Penkovsky, theGRUspy arrested in 1962 and executed the follow-
ing year. Penkovsky’s access to Soviet missile handbooks provided
the Secret Intelligence Service and the Central Intelligence
Agencywith invaluable insight into Soviet missile strengths and re-
vealed the distinctive trapezoid configuration of surface-to-air missile
sites that proved so useful during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
ARTIST.Code name for aSecret Intelligence Serviceagent, Johann
Jebsen, who was anAbwehrcase officer based in Lisbon during