Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Intelligence

place the Soviet mission under surveillanceduring the war, which al-

lowed NKVDofficers to move freely in London. Anthony Blunt

stole a copy of the official MI5 report of the Woolrich Arsenal Case,

which provided Moscow with a very good idea about the modus

operandi of British counterintelligence. The NKVD learned that if

they were to recruit and run communists, they must make very sure

that their sources had no recent overt contact with the Communist

Party. Part of the intelligence successes in the 1940s and 1950s in

London came from the Soviets’ ability to convince their recruits to

break contact with communist and left-wing organizations.

WORLD WAR I. Neither the Okhrananor Russian military intelli-

gence was prepared for a general European war in 1914. Russian mil-

itary intelligence had good basic intelligence on the border districts

of imperial Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as well as a

great deal of information on the enemies’ general staff plans, thanks

to an agent within the Hungarian Ministry of War, Colonel Alfred

Redl. Russia also provided one of the first military intelligence coups

of the war. Having retrieved a code book from a stranded German

warship in 1914, the Russians immediately made the contents known

to their British ally, who used it to break German military and diplo-

matic codes throughout the rest of the war.

Nevertheless, in 1914 the Okhranawas having difficulty coping

with a series of major industrial strikes that had exploded in 1912 and

continued for almost two years, while military intelligence was very

short staffed. Even more critical for the survival of the regime, nei-

ther service was capable of countering German subversion inside the

imperial court. German military intelligence had agents inside the

army’s general staff, and Berlin was well informed of the regime’s

plans. As the war progressed, German intelligence was able to recruit

agents within the Russian court and manipulate policy.

The tsarist regime also lacked basic military communications se-

curity. Radio traffic frequently was sent using primitive or very el-

emental codes. The German general staff’s ability to read Russian

military traffic in the summer of 1914 allowed it to counter the first

Russian offensive of the war and win the battle of Tannenburg. As

the war progressed, the Russian military intelligence service did far

better in providing information about the Austrian enemy than the

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