Moscow Mission
An FBI agent goes undercover at the US Embassy in Moscow during the Second World War.
The train carrying FBI Special Agent Louis C. Beck arrived in Moscow on 2 August 1940. He was a quiet and unremarkable-looking thirty-two-year-old former lawyer, who had travelled there from Detroit via New York City, Berlin, and Riga. As a citizen of the United States, which had so far remained neutral in the European war that had broken out almost a year earlier, Beck had no trouble entering either Nazi Germany or its ally, the Soviet Union.
Driving down Gorki Avenue in a taxi, Beck concluded that “the poorest people in the slums of New York are better dressed and present a better appearance than the throngs that moved along the streets of Moscow.” His destination—just a short distance from Red Square—was the Mokhovaya Building, which housed the US Embassy and Consulate, where he would be embarking on a top secret undercover assignment of indeterminate duration. To all but a few high-ranking people in the US government, he was just the embassy’s newly appointed courier, responsible for delivering messages between there and other outposts of the American diplomatic and consular services. Even Ambassador Laurence A. Steinhardt, the Moscow embassy’s most senior member of staff, knew nothing about either his true role or the investigation he’d been ordered to carry out.
Beck’s mission had its roots in the recent discovery of two major security breaches, first at the US Embassy in London, then at its counterpart in Helsinki. A couple of junior employees, namely Tyler Kent and Philip Antheil, were the source of these problems. When Kent’s London flat had been raided in May of that year, duplicates of almost two-thousand confidential embassy documents, including correspondence between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill were found there. Only a few weeks after Kent was arrested and charged with acts of espionage, the State Department chanced upon evidence of Antheil’s equally alarming activities. These might never have come to light were it not for the Soviet fighter planes that had shot down the Estonian airliner on which he was flying.
While packing his possessions, ready to have them shipped back to his family in America, a fellow embassy employee in Helsinki had found a wad of paperwork indicating that Antheil had been stealing confidential government messages. The dead clerk-turned-courier also turned out to have suppressed and falsified other messages, as well as leaking secret information to his brother, who had been working on a short book about the probable trajectory of the war in Europe. Among the leaked material were reports on Germany’s military strength and its planned invasion of France.
In the wake of the shocking revelations about Antheil and Kent, the US government’s system of communications with its embassies and consulates could no longer be regarded as secure. Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long was put in charge of sorting out the situation. He confided in his diary that a disturbing aspect of it “was this clerk from Helsinki and the one from London served together in Moscow.” These concerns about the Moscow connection are likely to have been magnified by reports that Kent’s thefts of US government messages dated back to the period between 1934 and 1940 when he’d been stationed there.
With the help of General Sherman Miles, chief of US Army intelligence, and the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, Assistant Secretary of State Long launched a secret investigation of security at the Moscow embassy. Special Agent Beck was chosen to carry this out.
On arrival at the Mokhovaya Building, he was allocated what he regarded as “a very nice apartment” on one of its upper floors. His accommodation even came with its own Russian cook.
Until his services as a courier were needed, he was given the job of so-called “internal messenger”, which provided him with convenient access to the entire building and its staff. Though he was soon on friendly terms with his colleagues, he realised that many of them had an absurdly casual attitude towards security. “On the second night of my stay in Moscow,” he later wrote, “I visited with Robert Hall, Code Clerk, in the Code Room. All safes were open, code books lay on the tables together with messages to be encoded and decoded. On this occasion Hall left the room for three-quarters of an hour, leaving the place in my complete control. The door of the place was open almost at all times.”
Beck noticed that coded and decoded versions of messages were routinely bundled together and taken to be burned in the basement, where the embassy’s large contingent of Soviet employees lived. “No guard or control was ever exercised to see whether the messages were destroyed…,” he observed. “It is the custom of the Soviets to… gather around and watch the fire. Paper bundles, such as the bundles of confidential messages, do not burn readily and even after being in the fire for several minutes may still be removed and the messages read.”
Paperwork that wasn’t taken down to the basement ended up being archived in the File Room. To Beck’s horror, the room served as an informal social club for the staff, many of whom spent their spare time reading supposedly confidential messages.
As if all that wasn’t bad enough from a security point of view, the State Department’s ban on appointing married men to the embassy’s all-male staff left them vulnerable to entrapment by Soviet intelligence services. Glamorous young women working for the NKVD—precursor to the KGB—would loiter outside the building in the hope of picking up Americans employed by the embassy. Any other Russian women who formed romantic relationships with them were, in contrast, arrested by the NKVD, which kept the building under constant surveillance.
Beck was appalled to see that his colleagues’ Soviet-supplied girlfriends “had free access to the embassy building and there was hardly a night when several of them were not there.” He also noted that “the men are unable to speak Russian and the girls claim to be unable to speak English. Consequently, the men being unable to talk with the girls, discuss among themselves in the presence of these prostitutes… There is little to talk about among the men in the way of sports and other activities normal to Americans and as a result the talk generally centres around the affairs of the embassy.”
Despite the security failings he witnessed, as well as the dismal atmosphere in Soviet-era Moscow, and the onset of the usual frigid Russian winter, Beck had what, he admitted, was “a wonderful time” over the next four months. He didn’t just deliver messages around the Mokhovaya Building, gather information about the security situation at the embassy, and courier diplomatic paperwork to Persia, Finland, Sweden, and Germany. He went skiing, attended the opera, and threw parties in his apartment.
Though he claimed to regard all of his colleagues as friends and as “a good lot”, he had no compunction about naming more than half-a-dozen of them in the lengthy and disparaging report he produced for his bosses in Washington, DC. Besides complaining about homosexuals such as the Ambassador’s secretary, George Wilton, whom he had seen “in passionate embrace” with one of the code clerks, he implied that a number of his heterosexual colleagues were security risks. One such person was James Lewis, who worked in the Code Room. He had, as Beck pointed out, become very susceptible to manipulation because he wanted to marry his Russian girlfriend, yet knew that the Soviets wouldn’t let her out of the country. Marrying her would, in any case, violate embassy rules and lead to him being transferred to a different city.
But the man who most aroused Beck’s suspicions no longer worked at the embassy. That man was an erstwhile friend of Tyler Kent’s named Sylvester A. Huntowski, by then employed by the Berlin Embassy. Beck reported that Huntowski earned no more than $125 per month as an electrician and courier, but had amassed considerable wealth in the form of cash and rubies, with which he’d acquired a new car, expensive clothes, a house in the countryside near Moscow, and “established himself in a luxurious apartment formerly the property of a Swedish nobleman.” According to the evidence presented by Beck, Huntowski appeared to be spying for a foreign country, running a smuggling operation together with another of Kent’s friends, and helping to supply illegal drugs to Alexander Kirk, the US Ambassador to Germany.
In a bemused aside, Beck remarked that Huntowski’s Russian girlfriend, Valentina, had offered to switch her allegiances to him. Beck also stated that she’d confided in him that Huntowski wanted to marry her, but she was only interested in his money.
During a trip to Helsinki in mid-November 1940, Beck submitted his handwritten report to J. Edgar Hoover. Its contents were so incendiary that he concealed it inside an envelope addressed to the Assistant Secretary of State. His covering letter admitted that he was “thoroughly enjoying” himself and would be happy to remain at the Moscow embassy for as long as necessary. Hoover regarded the report as sufficiently serious to forward to President Roosevelt.
On returning to Moscow, Beck had a meeting with Ambassador Steinhardt, who had at last been told about the investigation. Following their discussion, all sorts of security measures were implemented at the embassy. Beck nonetheless remained there, presumably to ensure they achieved the desired effect. He was still based in the Soviet capital in June 1941 when Nazi Germany launched a massive military assault on the Soviet Union. With the seemingly unstoppable Nazi armies bearing down on Moscow, Beck chose the following month to notify Washington that the embassy had been purged of what he termed its “laxness and carelessness”. His mission completed, he headed back to the comparative safety of America, which remained almost five months away from entering the world’s bloodiest and most destructive war.