Soviet intelligence enjoyed gobsmacking success in the UK, too. Harold Philby, nicknamed “Kim” after the Rudyard Kipling character, had been born in British India (1912); his father was an adviser to the Saudi king, and the son aimed to join the foreign office. As a student at Cambridge University, Philby had been helped by Maurice Dobb, an economics lecturer and an early British Communist party member, to go abroad and work for the World Committee for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism. Aiding refugees from Nazism in Austria, Philby married a Hungarian-Jewish divorcée who belonged to the Austrian Communist party and came to the attention of Tivadar (Theodore) Maly, a Hungary-born Soviet intelligence operative who secretly recommended him for recruitment. Back in London, a friend of Philby’s wife set up a meeting in Regent’s Park with the Artuzov protégé Arnold Deutsch, a chemical engineer born in Habsburg Slovakia, of Jewish extraction, who had joined the Austrian Communist party and relocated to the Soviet Union, before being posted as station chief to the UK.193 Deutsch transformed Philby, a budding journalist, into a playacting right-winger and reliable courier with a valuable British passport. Through Philby, Soviet intelligence recruited Guy Burgess (b. 1911), another Cambridge University student; Anthony Blunt, a Cambridge student and then tutor in art history; and the invaluable Donald Maclean, a fourth Cambridge University graduate who entered the British foreign office in 1935. Artuzov’s team would even penetrate MI6.194
All the while, Soviet counterintelligence was spending as much or more time on its own diplomats and military officers as on foreign governments. NKVD special department operatives for watching the Red Army had ballooned to an all-time record of 3,769 by January 1935.195 Mark Stokland, known as Gai, the head of the special department, received yet another phantasmagorical secret “report” from the informant Tatyana Zaionchkovskaya, who socialized with Tukhachevsky, among others, and asserted that the “counterrevolution” inside the USSR was counting on former officers to shoot Stalin. “This is complete rubbish of a stupid old woman who has lost her mind,” Gai wrote. But such “reports” kept coming.196
What use Stalin and the Soviet regime would make of the intelligence windfall inadvertently delivered by Hitler and Nazism, meanwhile, remained to be seen. Hermann Göring, under the pretext of a hunting trip, was invited to undertake a diplomatic trip to Poland from January 26 to 31, 1935. He had just spent several days with Hitler in the Obersalzberg, and now, on the anniversary of the nonaggression declaration with Poland, he told Beck that Germany would not sign a broad Eastern Pact or any treaty with the Soviet Union, and that “the chancellor has decided to continue the policy of developing good neighborly relations with Poland.” Göring told Józef Lipski, the Polish envoy to Berlin, who was back in Warsaw for the occasion, that Germany would have to expand, but not at Polish expense, and that Poland might acquire more Lithuanian territory in any deal over the Polish Corridor. At a reception in his honor, Göring tried to prove a lack of aggression toward Poland by pointing out that, for Germany, creating a common border with the USSR would be “highly dangerous.” At the former tsarist family hunting grounds in the Białowieza (Belovezh) Forest, in the presence of two Polish generals, Göring “almost proposed an anti-Soviet alliance, and a joint march on Moscow,” according to the Polish record. “Ukraine would be a Polish sphere of influence, while northwestern Russia would go to Germany.” Göring conveyed something similar in his audience with President Piłsudski, even offering that the marshal could command a joint Polish-German attack on the USSR. The elderly president answered that Poland, having a 600-mile border with the Soviet Union, needed peace.197