190 • FOOTMAN, DAVID
St. John’s Wood. His first assignment was to travel to Geneva and
make contact with a woman in the main post office, whom he subse-
quently learned was Ursula Kuczynski, his recruiter’s sister. She sent
him on a mission to Munich, where he fell in love with a beautiful
Kommunist Partei Deutschland (German Communist Party) activist
who was brutally beaten by the Gestapo and later died in a concentra-
tion camp.
When Foote returned to Switzerland, he was trained as a wireless
operator and, until his arrest by the Bundespolizei in November 1943,
he managed the radio communications for an extensive GRU net-
work based in Lausanne but with contacts in Italy, France, and Ger-
many. Foote was released from jail by the Swiss in September 1944
and reported to the Soviet military mission in Paris, which arranged
for him to be flown to Moscow. There he underwent a lengthy period
of debriefing and training in preparation for a new appointment as a
Soviet illegal in the United States. Foote was intended to travel to
America via Germany and Argentina, but when he arrived in Berlin
in March 1947 he surrendered to the British authorities. His subse-
quent interrogation byMI5formed the basis of his 1949 autobiogra-
phy,Handbook for Spies, which was largely written by his inquisitor,
Courtney Young.
On the basis of Foote’s evidence, the Security Service embarked
upon a long investigation of Soviet spy rings in Britain, but although
Ursula Kuczynski, who had moved from Switzerland to Oxfordshire,
was interviewed, no one was arrested or charged with offenses. Nev-
ertheless, Foote was regarded as a traitor by his former comrades,
and he provided MI5 with a wealth of detail about Soviet espionage.
When Foote had outlived his usefulness as a source on the GRU, he
found a job in the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries and lived in
a small residential hotel in North London until his death in August
1956.FOOTMAN, DAVID.David Footman, who was later to take up an aca-
demic existence at Oxford, was a gifted commentator on the world
scene and a recognized expert on political trends in Eastern Europe.
He wrote several novels while atBroadway, but never divulged any
aspect of his operational work. In his curiously intimate autobiogra-
phy published in 1974,Dead Yesterday: An Edwardian Childhood,