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Soviet Spy Swap
Gerald Brooke’s time in a Soviet prison was a pivotal moment in Cold War espionage.
The Cold War was at its height in the 1960s, when arrests, expulsions and exchanges were rife. In 1967, for example, the American John A. Walker walked into the Soviet Embassy in Washington DC and offered his services as a naval cryptographer with access to highly classified material. Walker had worked as a key supervisor in the communications centre for the US Atlantic Fleet’s submarine force and had knowledge of top-secret technologies, such as the SOSUS underwater surveillance system. He was one of the Soviet Union’s most successful and highly paid agents (he is said to have received between $500 and $1,000 per week from his handlers) until his arrest in 1985, when he agreed to plead guilty as part of a deal with prosecutors. Walker received a life sentence and remained in prison until his death in 2014.At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, information was reaching the Soviets from Britain’s Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment and HMS Osprey at Portland, Dorset, where the Royal Navy tested equipment for undersea warfare. The CIA had received letters in 1959 from a mole, codenamed ‘Sniper’, and passed them on to MI5, which began surveillance of a number of suspects. The so-called Portland Spy Ring was rounded up and shut down in the early 1960s. Its prominent members included Gordon Lonsdale (aka Konon Molody, later exchanged for Greville Wynne, a British businessman, in 1964) and Morris and Lona Cohen (aka Peter and Helen Kroger).In the midst of all this intrigue, a young British lecturer in Russian at Holborn College in London – Gerald Brooke – found himself embroiled in Cold War politics. He was to spend four years in a Soviet prison before being exchanged for two Russian spies serving long sentences in Britain. Brooke was arrested by the KGB in Moscow in April 1965, while leading a group of student-teachers on a cultural visit. The agents who searched the flat where he was staying discovered printed leaflets in Russian hidden in the padded cover of a photograph album – plus currency, larger printed papers and a small rubber stamp.Anti-Soviet activityBrooke was arrested along with his wife, Barbara, who was soon released and returned to Britain. He was found guilty of passing propaganda material to Soviet dissidents and was sentenced to five years’ detention for ‘subversive anti-Soviet activity on the territory of the Soviet Union’.Brooke’s case became a cause célèbre. Urged on by media and parliamentary pressure (sometimes manipulated by the Soviets), British officials and ministers repeatedly asked for clemency. In response, the Soviet government offered an exchange for its two imprisoned agents, Helen and Peter Kroger. At first the British firmly rejected this proposal, but in 1967 the Russians finally admitted that the Krogers were indeed Soviet agents. Furthermore, if an exchange were not accepted, then Brooke, whose health was failing, would be threatened with a retrial for a much more serious crime and given a long extension to his sentence.Margaret Thatcher, then opposition spokesman on Housing and Brooke’s constituency MP, strongly supported his release. According to the Finchley Times of 7 May 1965, she put forward a motion to make the strongest protest to Russia, asking the government to reconsider cultural exchanges owing to their flagrant violation of accepted international practice: ‘You could not have a person held in custody like this and nothing done about it’, she was reported as saying:I am doing everything I can to try to help Mr. Brooke, but you know how difficult it is when the Russians have, in fact, got this man. I am hoping the motion will be backed by all parties. To hold a person without him seeing anyone from his own country or his wife is appalling.Her ‘Private Notice Question’ in 1967, asking for the latest information, was reported in Hansard on 6 November, though the government had already given a detailed report on the issue on 26 April 1966:The Soviet Government have given no indication of willingness to release Mr. Brooke except on unreasonable conditions which they know to be totally unacceptable. They have refused Mr. Brooke’s request to be allowed to spend a second year in prison instead of being transferred to a labour camp … They have also made it clear that he will not be granted the concessions he has hitherto enjoyed in the way of parcels and visits by his wife and Her Majesty’s Consul in excess of the limits permitted by the Soviet regulations.In general, any prisoner exchange of the Krogers was heavily criticised by the opposition. Typical opinion is illustratedby yet another parliamentary question:An exchange for the Krogers would be a demonstration of the omnipotence of the KGB and a boost for the morale and thus the audacity of every Soviet agent working in this country and, indeed, in the Western world. Furthermore … no British tourist, businessman or traveller to the Soviet Union will be safe from provocation, compromise and false arrest.The Krogers had seriously compromised UK national security by passing on secrets about submarine activities, whereas Brooke had merely smuggled documents for the Russian émigré body Narodno-Trudovoj Soyuz (NTS), the ‘Popular Labour Union’.Changing placesBritish ministers acceded to Soviet demands. In 1969 Brooke was exchanged for the Krogers, who had by then served almost nine years of their 20-year sentence. The exchange was so unusual – two top spies for a young academic – that the Soviet authorities included in the deal three Soviet citizens who wanted to marry Britons. The son of one of these couples recalls:[My mother] had been fighting for six years to be allowed to wed my Welsh father. On the day that the Krogers were released from Parkhurst prison [some weeks after Brooke’s release, for political reasons], the other prisoners held a ‘patriotic protest’ against allowing the spies to return to the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, at the Soviet Consulate General in London, my father was kept waiting until the Krogers’ plane was safely out of British airspace before the consul handed him the visa that would allow him to return to Moscow to marry his fiancée.Speaking at Heathrow airport on his return on 24 July 1969, Brooke explained that the Russian authorities had given him just 24 hours’ notice. He had been suffering from an inflamed colon, aggravated by prison food, and was not used to speaking English or seeing so many people. His prison conditions, he said, ‘were not particularly soft’. The following day the Guardian presented a somewhat tongue-in-cheek report of Brooke’s return: dominated by a three-ring press circus of the most old-fashioned kind, and one not without a certain period charm – although the Brookes probably didn’t think so. The press put on a first-class show for the Brookes which began quietly, even decorously, with some balletic jostling at the airport before the interviews. … [The press corps] leapt from their vehicles like commandos jumping from landing craft, and ran low and fast, cameras at the ready. Within seconds confusion reigned.Brooke had not been a completely innocent lamb to the slaughter. He appears to have acted knowingly as an NTS courier to pass material to Russian dissidents. The NTS had been founded in prewar Yugoslavia, had collaborated with the Germans against the Soviet Union during the war and had representatives in European capitals as well as Latin America and the Far East. According to MI5, the main activities of the NTS were ‘propaganda against the Soviet Union and clandestine operations behind the Iron Curtain’. In a Sunday Times interview, Kim Philby expressed the view that: ‘The NTS really belongs to the CIA. It used to be financed by the SIS [British Secret Intelligence Service] but it was handed over to the CIA. This certainly makes Brooke some sort of Western agent, doesn’t it? It’s up to you and the Americans to decide who wants him back.’Celebrity spiesThere is no doubt that the Brooke affair had a higher profile than other espionage, defections and exchange cases, such as those of the writer Anatoly Kuznetsov in 1969 and the ballerina Natalia Makarova in 1970. The latter, while creating waves in both London and Moscow, did not have any lasting serious effect, whereas Brooke’s imprisonment had severe repercussions for Anglo-Soviet relations.Harold Wilson, who became prime minister in October 1964, was eager to establish a relationship with the new Soviet leaders, but an early meeting with his Russian counterparts suffered as a result of the escalation of the war in Vietnam in the mid-1960s. The period of Brooke’s incarceration coincided with the British government’s attempts to promote the Anglo-Soviet relationship and the lecturer’s fate cast a shadow over efforts to foster a closer dialogue with Moscow. Indeed, there was immediate press and parliamentary interest; to many, Brooke was seen as an innocent victim and there were numerous calls for the government to secure his release.Brooke was tried in a Moscow theatre before an audience of 600, in front of TV and film cameras. He was charged with anti-Soviet subversive activities; the evidence against him included not only the smuggled documents but also his visits to churches and attempts to find out the attitude of the Soviet state towards religious worship. It seems likely that he was set up by his Russian contact, the KGB agent Yuri Konstantinov, who tried deliberately to entrap him. He pleaded guilty to all charges and was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment: one year in jail followed by a ‘labour colony with strict regime’.The British press had a field day, offering weekly reports on Brooke’s health, prison conditions, the threat of new charges and, finally, the growing appreciation that some sort of exchange would be necessary.To most British eyes Brooke was, at worst, a ‘foolish young man’ who had got himself in trouble with the Soviet authorities owing to his personal links to the NTS; he should not be connected in any way with state-sponsored agents such as the Krogers. To the Soviet authorities, however, his involvement with the NTS made him a British agent, which justified aggressive action to procure an exchange.The climbdown by the British government was a victory for the Soviet Union. The saga illustrates the difficulties faced by British ministers and officials in maintaining a coherent approach to Anglo-Soviet relations. Throughout the Cold War, there was an ongoing propaganda battle as both sides sought to influence opinion at home and subvert initiatives of the opposing side.By 1971, the Conservative government of Edward Heath was not so concerned about maintaining good Anglo-Soviet relations. On the afternoon of 24 September 1971 the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) put Operation Foot into practice. The USSR was given two weeks to withdraw 90 suspected intelligence officers from its embassy, as well as staff at the trade delegation at Highgate and the Aeroflot, Tass, Intourist and Narodny Bank offices in London. A further 15 officials on leave in the USSR were refused permission to return to the UK. The intelligence services had a clear interest in reducing the Soviet diplomatic presence, but it is also possible that MI5 and SIS felt that it had to demonstrate (particularly to the Americans) that Britain could take effective action against the Soviet intelligence threat. Furthermore, there were old scores to be settled concerning the Cambridge spies and even Brooke.Spy skillsThe current whereabouts of Brooke and details of his later career are unknown to researchers. He subsequently became a distinguished university academic in the field of Russian language and Soviet studies, having developed exceptional skills in both Russian prison slang and sewing while doing time. Dating back centuries, prison argot was originally a ‘secret’ language, which could not be understood by outsiders. More recently, it has become common in modern Russian, particularly in young people’s usage. Brooke mentioned his personal experience and expertise in prison slang in his 1973 book review of Soviet Prison Camp Speech: A Survivor’s Glossary by Meyer Galler and Harlan Marques. He noted the problems of researching this subject outside the Soviet Union: Soviet scholars are inhibited by political fastidiousness as well as by the thought that, with the advent of full communism, everyone in the Soviet Union would be speaking the same jargon. The contents of the book’s glossary accord substantially with terms Brooke heard in prison in Mordovia between 1966 and 1969. He had become proficient in prison argot and commented on many of the words, noting in particular ment and musor for the warders, mast’ for an underworld grouping and nakolka and nakolot’si (tattooing).All Soviet prisoners at the time were required to work; sewing – although more often done by women – was a common experience and could be strenuous. A samizdat (a clandestine Soviet publication) reported on a Hebrew teacher transferred to prison with arthritis of the hands, making it difficult for him to carry out the required work sewing potato sacks. Indeed, there was little reasoning behind the allocation of work – certainly not rehabilitation or training for release. One inmate reported having been put to work over four years at jobs including logging, gravel mining and fixing water pipes, as well as sewing (admittedly in a recently constructed production facility with new sewing machines). A persistent complaint of the 1960s was that male prisoners were learning specialised sewing skills, which they were highly unlikely to use after release. Brooke, however, seemed proud of his ability.The neglected story of Gerald Brooke continues to cast a light on the more esoteric nature of Anglo-Soviet relationships during the Cold War.Chris Bissell was Professor of Computing and Communications at the Open University.
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