Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence

BEST, SIGISMUND• 47

French, during which he made no mention of having been suspected

of having stolen large sums from the Soviet Foreign Ministry, Bes-

sedovsky revealed what he believed was the identity of a British civil

servant who had visited a colleague at the embassy in July 1929 in a

vain attempt to sell secrets, including copies of the Foreign Office’s

ciphers. The offer had been rejected, but Bessedovsky supplied

enough information about the mysterious Briton thatMI5was even-

tually able to identify him, albeit posthumously, asErnest Oldham,

a junior clerk in the communications department who gassed himself

in September 1933.

Within two days of Bessedovsky’s defection, he was interviewed

by CommanderWilfred Dunderdale, the Russian-bornSecret In-

telligence Servicehead of station in Paris, who formed a poor opin-

ion of the man claiming to be his Soviet counterpart, a member of

the local OGPUrezidentura. He was described as ‘‘smart and intelli-

gent, but neither frank nor principled, and quite possibly not honest.’’

Nevertheless he was ‘‘extremely talkative and indiscreet,’’ so he was

considered an important catch by the British and French security

agencies.

Bessedovsky subsequently made a living as a journalist and wrote

Revelations of a Soviet Diplomat(1931). He continued to live in

France, and there were rumors during World War II that he was active

in the Communist resistance and that he had also maintained links

with the Gestapo. He was last seen in the south of France in the

1950s, where he was believed to have reestablished contact with the

NKVD, on whose behalf he is thought to have peddled numerous

literary forgeries, includingJ’ai choisi la potenceby General Vlas-

sov,Ma carrie ́re a`l’Etat-Major Sovietiqueby Ivan Krylov, andLes

Mare ́chaux Sovietique vous parlentby Cyrille Kalinov. Masquerad-

ing as Stalin’s nephew, Budu Svanadze, he wrote bothMy Uncle Jo-

seph StalinandIn Conversation with Stalin, and under his own name

wrote an authenticating foreword to both, in which he vouched for

the author’s identity. As Boris Souvarine, a French expert on Com-

munism, later demonstrated, Svanadze never existed. In 1952 Bes-

sedovsky pulled off his most impressive and ambitious coup,Notes

for a Journal, which were attributed to Maxim Litvinov.

BEST, SIGISMUND.Sigismund Payne Best was the product of an
Anglo-Indian marriage that left him with an acute sensitivity about