John Costello and Oleg Tsarev: Deadly Illusions. NY: Crown Publishers, 1993. 538 pp. Ill.
General Alexander Orlov (1896-1973) was the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to defect to the West, if that is what he did. During perestroika, John Costello and Oleg Tsarev were allowed to examine the file the Soviets kept on him, thus enabling them to tell his story from a new angle. Though they doubt Orlov was any sort of hero, they do concede that he was the most remarkable of the great illegals, “a much more pivotal figure in the history of twentieth-century intelligence than has hitherto been assumed. If only for the part he played in the recruitment of the original members of the Cambridge network and then keeping this secret throughout his long American exile, Orlov deserves an honoured place in the memorial room” at Yasenevo outside Moscow. (pg. 150)
For a good part of his career, Orlov willingly carried out Stalin’s ruinous, homicidal policies, especially during the civil war in Spain. The files provide plenty of proof that he behaved there like a colonial overlord, deciding matters of life and death without bothering about legal niceties. Not only was he instrumental in spiriting the country’s gold reserves to the USSR in the midst of the fighting, he was directly involved in the murder of POUM leader Andrés Nin. Then in 1938, distrusted by Stalin (who eventually came to suspect anyone who knew too much), Orlov was ordered home. Knowing what likely awaited him, he and his family instead boarded a steamer and fled to Canada.
When they eventually arrived in America, they had taken enough money with them to survive for years without needing to find work. Back in Moscow, the Russians were left wondering about where he was, while the Americans were scratching their heads about who he was. It would not surprise me to learn that Orlov spent some of his funds reimbursing his distant American relatives for their significant material help, though he and they always denied this. Perhaps it is relevant to note that they risked legal consequences had they admitted providing him assistance.
In any case, when reserves started to run low after the war, Orlov decided to cash in by writing his memoirs, laboring over them for hours in Cleveland’s White Memorial Library. While he refused to sell out his agents, including Philby and Maclean, to the Americans, or to support the claim that Stalin had once been an undercover agent for the tsarist secret police, there were other, lesser, secrets he could make money on (as Walter Krivitsky had done before). He was quite prepared, for example, to reveal how Stalin had “murdered his way to power.” (pg. 332)
Once the manuscript was finished, he started negotiations to have the work published. It must have been tempting to accept the deal proposed by Max Eastman, who offered to do the translation from Russian into English and make all the other arrangements in exchange for a one-third share of the royalties. Orlov, who never lacked self-confidence, decided that the price was too steep, so he and his wife set to work translating the manuscript themselves, with Orlov taking a secretarial course so he could learn to type. At one point they were reduced to a daily diet of corn flakes. In the end, his plan paid off: Life magazine came through with an offer, and The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes was published to great success, such that they never had to worry about money again.
That book, as it turns out, took some liberties with the truth. Costello and Tsarev call it a “delicate balancing of truth and fiction” which mainly served to conceal the author’s own complicity in the crimes described. (pg. 334) In essence, the accomplice presented himself as victim.
Still, by the end of Deadly Illusions, one comes to have a certain grudging respect for this man who outwitted both Stalin and J. Edgar Hoover, and who remained true to his own lights. One of Tsarev’s major coups is to have been granted access to the Kremlin files, which include the actual letter Orlov wrote to Yezhov in 1938, making clear that the story he later spun about having written a threatening letter directly to Stalin was an invention. Orlov made sure to keep his life insurance policy in effect by never revealing all he knew about Soviet agents still active in the West.
Even the partial revelations in Orlov’s Secret History were sufficient to make Hoover “look very foolish indeed,” both crude and ineffective. (pg. 342) After all, this spy had succeeded in evading the Bureau’s attention for fourteen years before choosing to come forward on his own terms. Embarrassed by this, the FBI treated him so rudely it became a point of personal honor for him to refuse cooperation with them. Appearing before the US Congress, the wily old general set forth on one final adventure, which he pulled off in bravura fashion, as he managed to win the acclaim of the senators he was deceiving, giving up just enough to convince them he was being cooperative without surrendering anything essential. His strategy proved such a success that he earned the voluble praise of Senator Eastland, and was given US citizenship even though he had technically overstayed his original visa by many years.
Orlov was a spy who went into the cold and never returned. By keeping his promise to withhold his most vital secrets, he avoided the fate of Münzenberg, Krivitsky (assuming they did not commit suicide) and Trotsky. Eventually, Orlov came to be accepted by the Soviets not as a defector, much less a traitor, but as an escapee. They knew him for what they had trained him to be: “a thoroughgoing, if ruthless, professional.” (pg. 300)
Bibliographical Note
Costello and Tsarev were able to draw heavily on Philby’s KGB memoir, compiled in the mid-1980s. This unpublished 283-page work is evidently quite different from My Silent War. “If for no other reason than it was given in confidence to the KGB, his secret memoir is a more credible version of the truth than his coy and malicious published account, My Silent War.” (pg. 124) It includes, for example, Philby’s account of his meeting with Nazi foreign minister Ribbentrop, which though brief, opened many doors for him in Franco’s camp. My Silent War also never mentions Orlov, though they met in London some ten to twelve times.
About this book, caution is advised: “We know only what the Russians have chosen to share in authorised books such as Deadly Illusions and [Nigel West’s] The Crown Jewels, fascinating accounts but which have to be treated carefully as the Russian authorities often had another agenda.” Andrew Lownie: Stalin’s Englishman. Guy Burgess, the Cold War, and the Cambridge Spy Ring (NY: St. Martin’s, 2015), pg. 323.
Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrohkin have written: “Though containing valuable material from KGB archives on the recruitment of British agents in the 1930s, this SVR-sponsored volume not merely inflates Orlov’s importance but is also misleading in some other respects.” For example, Costello and Tsarev claim the identity of agent ABO has remained hidden. “In reality, ABO was Peter Smollett….” (The Sword and Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive (1999), pg. 582f, n. 29)
With further reference to Philby, Costello and Tsarev write: “By the time of his departure [for Spain in early 1937], he also claimed to represent two press agencies, London Central News and Continental News Service as well as the German magazine Geopolitics, to which he had been a contributor.” (pg. 165) They provide no further details. Even Hayden Peake’s invaluable essay “The Philby Literature” (in Rufina Philby: The Private Life of Kim Philby, 2000) gives no reference.
In fact, the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik was edited by Dr. Karl Haushofer (1869-1946) and Dr. Erich Obst, and was published in Heidelberg by Kurt Vowinckel from the 1920s until 1945. Back when it was politically opportune to do so, Haushofer liked to refer to Hitler and Rudolf Hess, his former Ludwig Maximilian Univ. student (Munich), as his “young eagles.” In the Western press, Haushofer was commonly called “Hitler’s Brain,” though he evidently complained that Hitler failed to understand his ideas (unlike Hess). After Kristallnacht, he begged Hess to protect his wife, who was Jewish. Hess complied, issuing a statement that she was “not a Jewess in the sense of the Nuremberg Laws.” Haushofer and his wife committed suicide a year after the end of the war, after he had been found unfit to stand trial in Nuremberg.
In1936 three essays appeared in Geopolitik under the byline “H.A.R. Philby.” In Vol. 36, Nr. 2: “Japans letztes Vorgehen in China” (Japan’s Latest Advance in China), translated into German by Ernst Samhaber; and in Nrs. 7 and 8 of the same volume: “Tibet – Bollwerk oder Durchzugsweg? I + II” (Tibet – Bulwark or Transition Point? I + II, pp. 427-435 and 512-519; the contribution on Tibet also appears to have been published separately as a 17-page booklet in 1936). The idea for writing the last of these essays was put to Philby by his Soviet handler, Teodor Maly: “I told him to write another article for Geopolitik.” (Quoted in Genrikh Borovik: The Philby Files, pg. 90.) Publishing in this journal was part of Philby’s pro-German pose that eventually led him to be accredited to Franco’s side in the civil war, from where he was able to pass information on to Moscow.
© Hamilton Beck
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