Spies who brought early warnings

Press, 15 April 1978, Page 17

Spies who brought early warnings

The Storm Petrels. By Gordon BrookShepherd. Collins. 257 pp. Index. $14.40. (Reviewed by Oliver Riddell) Into a world sated with spy fiction comes a book about real spies who lived, intrigued, murdered, and finally defected to the West, before the whole spy literature cult got out of hand. The most jaded reader of spy stories will enjoy “The Storm Petrels” because, apart from being true, its twists and turns are at least as sensational and unexpected as all but the most lunatic of its fiction counterparts. Yet it cannot help but suffer in comparison with the work of such writers as lan Fleming or John Le Carre, because its characters are real and not fictional exaggerations. Some writers of spy fiction have done a great disservice in making serious, true accounts of spying seem less astonishing than they really are. The author here has given an account of the lives, defections, and subsequent fates, of five important Russians who defected to the West between 1928-38.

These five were important in themselves — one was a former

secretary of the Politburo who had also been Stalin’s private secretary, another was a full general in the N.K.V.D. — and the author has sifted through a mountain of truth and halftrutn to present them as credible and living people. As he traces their subsequent careers, he also uncovers frightening evidence of the incompetence of the Western counter-intelligence agencies. Two of the five were murdered, one disappeared, but two others were so capable that they survived retribution on their own, often in spite of the incompetence of the agencies which might have protected them. These two, Boris Bajanov and Alexander Orlov, are still the most important defectors to the West from Russia. But the author has a further point to make , and this is how the book gets its title. He considers these five were like birds flying before a storm, trying to tell those in the Western democracies of the antagonist they had in Stalinist Russia and of the steps being taken to undermine and destroy them. Few really appreciated the malignancy of this antagonism until

after 1945, but all five brought this warning with them.

It was a warning a few individuals they me. seem to have understood, but which the Western Governments and their agencies did not. The incompetence of these agencies has to be seen in the light of this failure to understand. Subsequently, the overreaction of the McCarthy era in the United States and the flood of cheap pulp fiction has obscured this antagonism.

Bajanov, Stalin’s former secretary, who defected in 1928 and who still lives in France, wrote: “Our Civilisation stands on the edge of an abyss . . . those who seek to destroy it put forward an ideal. This ideal has been proved false by the experience of the last 60 years; but the masses, taken in by tireless propaganda, believe, to some degree, that it is genuine,' and their belief is a . great source of strength .. .” Bajanov wrote this after meeting the most famous of all Russian emigres, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in 1975, but he has been saying it for naif a century. He, in spite of all the extraordinary events of his life since 1928. would still consider himself a: a storm petrel who lived to see the storm break.