The Pests

SOVIET ESPIONAGE (558 pp.)--David J. Dallin--Yale University ($5.75).

And the incorruptible Professor walked . . . averting his eyes from the odious multitude of mankind. He had no future. He disdained it. He was a force . . . He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable--and terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world. Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in a street full of men.

Thus Joseph Conrad, in The Secret Agent (1907), gave a prophetic portrait of that now familiar pest of the West--the Communist espionage agent.

All big nations maintain intelligence services outside their frontiers. It is the difference in the vast Soviet espionage apparatus, not only in scale but in kind, that makes this book an impressive document in a new field of scholarship and an important study of the enemy.

Oranges & Pennies. Author Dallin, an old Russian Social Democrat who fled the Bolsheviks in 1921 and has lived in the U.S. since 1940, has doggedly forked over a mountainous compost heap of material (main sources: court and tribunal transcripts, memoirs of ex-spies), covering networks in Switzerland, France, Germany, Canada and the U.S.

The first effect of Communism's claim to liberate mankind and introduce a higher morality is to convert its most devoted adherents into a dark, anonymous army committed as a duty to crime, duplicity and terror. The main spy organization is the GB (Gosudarstvennaya Bezopasnost --State Security), whose list of names reads like alphabet soup, e.g., GPU, NKVD, MGB, since it began life as the CHEKA in 1917. Furthermore, allied and sometimes competing with the GB are the spy apparats of the Red army, the Ministry of Trade and the Communist Party itself. Their strength lies in two things: 1) size, i.e., their agents probably outnumber, says Dallin, the intelligence officers of all other nations combined; 2) the nature of international Communism, which allows it to draw on some people in every part of the globe who are prepared, by conversion to the mesmeric pseudoreligion of Marxism, to transfer their first allegiance to Russia. This gives the Soviets a million eyes and ears in a world outside their knowledge or mercy.

When the non-Russian recruit enters the world of Conrad's professor, he is bound about with rules which at first seem incredibly naive. The details of conspiratsia involve the dimmest kind of drudgery. No thriller writer would condescend to invent a scene as clumsily conceived as the actual meeting of two spies in a Geneva street. One of them thus summarized his instructions from Moscow: "I was to be wearing a white scarf and to be holding in my right hand a leather belt. As the clock struck noon, I would be approached by a woman . . . holding an orange in her hand . . . [She] would ask me in English where I had bought the belt; and I was to reply that I had bought it in an ironmonger's shop in Paris. Then I was to ask where I could buy an orange like hers, and she was to say that I could have hers for an English penny . . ."

Yet such measures can be surprisingly effective, like the shrewd stratagems of a deceitful child. Author Dallin industriously points out how the good spy should never cheat on the rules of his own cheat's game, e.g., Alger Hiss and Hede Massing, as members of rival spy rings, should never have been permitted to meet; Harry Gold should not have known about David Greenglass, etc. Spies should, of course, be inconspicuous. One spy in France was guilty of an infraction of this employment code; she was a strapping baroness 6 ft. 4 in. tall. Another was caught in Germany; his unwise practice was to cover the work of sub-agents while brandishing a revolver and dressed in the full uniform of a Luftwaffe officer.

The Lonely Ones. For the recruit, as he starts his first exercise in the jungle gym of Communist morality, the job offers a hard life, and in the end bitter paradox. This echoes in the words quoted by Dallin from a Russian agent in Germany, forced to pretend friendship with the enemy and getting in return harsh and ugly suspicion from his masters at home. "It would give me strength . . . to hear something warm, happy, pleasant from time to time," said the lonely Red patriot in the accents of truth.

Even lonelier is the fate of the non-Russian. Klaus Fuchs and Whittaker Chambers had great gifts that raised them into tragedy above a thousand squalid dossiers of misery. To the ordinary native spy, honor is to be a good liar.

The GB can always rely on the anvil chorus of liberals who say the following things: it was a frame-up; no secrets of any value were stolen; it was all done to help an ally, or maybe humanity; the informer (there almost always is one; otherwise the show would still be merrily going on) is an ex-Communist, therefore unreliable. The GB can also rely on Western '''bourgeois" courts either not to convict or in the interest of appeasement impose trivial sentences--notably in France, where a few years for espionage was about standard during the '30s.

Each of these items is documented in country after country. But Author Dallin also reports stupidity and parsimony. For a few score thousand francs, from time to time, the Red spymasters let their Swiss ring go to pieces. Then there was the case of Alexander Rado, a Hungarian, who gave brilliant service to the Soviet network in Switzerland during World War II. The British (who were fighting Hitler too) offered to help, but when Rado reported this to Moscow, "the Centre" went into hysteria. Clearly this Rado, they reasoned, was a tool of the British. Suspicion often cripples the Russian spy system. This is the most heartening conclusion to be drawn from Author Dallin's immense study. It is because of such shortcomings that the streets of the West are still full of men. But Author Dallin's book is a documented reminder that the pests are still among them, and that pest control is not witch-hunting.

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