by Irina Tsukerman
Recently, Craig McKay came out with a fascinating new volume with three major essays exploring the history of Comintern from a unique perspective.
The blurb reads:
“If you are curious about the clandestine world of the Comintern, you may find my new book, Three in One, Essays on the Comintern, of real interest. It consists of three essays. The first and longest essay is devoted to Comrade Thomas, an acknowledged master of conspiratorial technique who headed the crucially important West European Secretariat in Berlin in the early 1920s. The second essay deals with that old riddle, the Zinoviev Letter , the centenary of which takes place this autumn. In it, I reveal a number of new facts which I have discovered and which have led me to change my own interpretation of the factors at play behind the murky chain of events. This is likely to prove the most controversial of the essays. The third essay is devoted to the life of Karl Knüfken, a German Spartacist who just before the outbreak of the Second World War became an agent of British Intelligence’s Section D (for Destruction).”
Details about obtaining the book:
The first run of books is a modest 100 copies , so non-early birds may have a longer wait in store for them. It costs £15 and purchasers pay the postage. The book which has ISBN 978-1-3999-9631-0 can best be ordered directly from my printer and distributor by writing to sales@spiegl.co.uk
The book raised a host of interesting issues for further research and exploration, particularly for those with a passion for intelligence, counterintelligence, and the history of both subjects.. I am sharing a brief written interview with the author, which focuses on the highlights of the essays and addresses some of the points worthy of further investigation.
Q. Why was Thomas not detected during his lifetime ?
Comrade Thomas arrived in America from Prague, Czechoslovakia on August 23 , 1938 and he lived in New York until his death in March 16, 1955. In the USA, he was known as Arnold Rubinstein. His wife (Nr 3 by the way) Annie Reich,who also moved from Prague with her two daughters from her previous marriage with the controversial psycho- analyst Wilhelm Reich, worked as a psycho-analyst in New York. As a former pupil of Freud in Vienna, she was also an esteemed psycho-analyst in her own right and her New York practice appears to have flourished.
In the USA, Comrade Thomas became essentially an ‘at home’ husband, helping with domestic tasks. His professional career in the Comintern had ended by 1925 when he had been dismissed, accused of certain supposed financial irregularities. ( The real reason was more likely to be intertwined with Stalin’s rise to power in the Party apparatus.)He spent most of his time in his study in New York engaged in various historical projects. As an admirer of Trotsky, he scrupulously avoided any contacts with people he suspected of being in the service of Stalin’s regime. In 1933, Comrade Thomas had been interviewed in Prague by Boris Nikolayevsky about his part in Comintern history. The gist of this interview remained totally unknown until 1965 when Nikolayevsky published it in French. Comrade Thomas’s FBI file reveals it was first then, 10 years after his death, that the Bureau became interested in him.
Can this be seen as a security failure? Not really. Comrade Thomas was in no sense engaged in conspiratorial work in USA. He was in no sense a security threat to US interests. On the other hand, the FBI lost an opportunity to access the great deal of information about the communist movement in Europe which Thomas undoubtedly had. If Thomas had chosen London rather than New York, the result might have been very different. The British Security service has always been interested in gathering historical accounts since they have been more conscious that the past and present intersect. Knowledge of the past is necessary for understanding the present.
Q.Was the role of possible Polish involvement in the Zinoviev Letter underplayed and if so why?
The Zinoviev Letter is an extremely complex case, and it is fair to say that there are still many things we do not know. However, I accept the view that the Zinoviev Letter was simply a propaganda trick used by a small group of Tories (members of the Conservative Party) with contacts in the British secret services to try to unseat the Labour Government in the General Election of 1924. At the same time, there is no doubt that the subversive ideas involved in the text of the letter had appeared in other genuine Zinoviev inspired texts. What is called the Zinoviev Letter is basically a text cobbled together from some of the other texts.
The notion that Polish intelligence was somehow involved is an idea that was present from the very beginning of the story . But like all activities involved in genuine conspiracies, many of the bits of evidence pointing in this direction appeared only after a long time. The
most modern exposition of the Polish involvement theory is to be found in the book by Chester, Fay and Young, The Zinoviev Letter, published in 1967. However, they were not in possession of all the pieces of evidence. This is the nature of my own contribution. I have discovered NEW pieces of evidence which appreciably strengthen their hypothesis. A important element of the new evidence concerns an officer of the Polish Intelligence service called Paciorkowski. Another important Polish figure was Ciechanowski, who was serving as a diplomat at the Polish Legation in London in 1924, only to be transferred to Washington DC the following year. Eventually he became the Polish Ambassador to the USA during WW2. A memorandum by Ciechanowski from 1920 sets out in detail Polish disquiet over the behaviour of the British Labour party at the time of the Russian-Polish war which he sees as entirely favourable to the Russian Bolsheviks and opposed to the strategic interests of Poland. Incidentally Ciechanowski was a good friend of Gregory, a member of the British Foreign Office who played a crucial role in the practical handling of the Zinoviev Letter incident . Gregory was subsequently fired from the Foreign Office because of his involvement in currency speculation, which was judged to be in breach of his duties as a high British civil servant. This too has its interest .
A last point concerning Paciorkowski. I discovered ( what had never previously been known ) that Paciorkowski had actually visited Britain not so long after the Zinoviev scandal. During this visit as I discovered, Paciorkowski had had a file opened on him by MI5,the British Security Service,and was placed formally under surveillance with the authority of A Home Office warrant. What happened to this important file is unclear. I wrote to MI5 to discover its fate but received the classic reply that MI5 could neither deny nor confirm that such a file existed !!! I understand the reason why most files inside MI5 must be kept secret for many years ( in other words I believe there are entirely legitimate legal reasons for official secrecy. But I believe that in the case of a file which approaches a century old, where all those actively involved are dead and where the file has an overriding historical interest, a spirit of greater openness should prevail.
Q Why was Knüfken drawn to the KPD, why was his clash with it inevitable and what is your own attitude to Knüfken?
Knüfken was brought up by his mother in economically challenging circumstances and he lived among a group of people who had to struggle for existence. He went to sea when he was little more or than a boy and eventually he served in the German Navy. Politically because of the circumstances he witnessed, he became not simply a Socialist but a Spartacist who saw that socialism was best served neither by Social Democracy based on a parliamentary representative system nor by entrusting power to a party elite such as that endorsed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. He believed that basic socialist decisions should be taken at grassroots level in more syndicalist fashion. His future work in various parties from KPD to later smaller splinter parties was concentrated in the labour unions. When he was in KPD he worked within the ISH organisation in Germany, Leningrad, Copenhagen and Antwerp. Later when he had broken with the KPD ,he joined the ITF – the International Transport Federation which represented social democratic movements in Western Europe.
Knüfken was no admirer of party hierarchies and their decisions. This inevitably brought him into conflict with the Stalinists. For example, he supported a strike involving Swedish ships then at Leningrad , in opposition to the Russian Communist Party which was then his boss. As a result of his defiance, he was arrested and spent a period in the Ljubjanka in Moscow and was only released after vigorous local protests in Leningrad and the intervention of (among others Bukharin).
Knüfken was naturally a vigorous opponent of Nazism ( his wife was Jewish and was born in Riga). When he began working against the Nazis in the run -up to WW2 , he found himself being recruited by the British Secret Service for his potential skills in propaganda, subversion and sabotage against German shipping. In this role, he was sent to Sweden at the beginning of the war on a counterfeit Danish passport. Unfortunately he was arrested by the Swedish security authorities . The Germans were soon alerted to his presence in Sweden and wanted him to be sent to Germany to be tried. After the occupation of Norway and Denmark, Sweden was entirely isolated as a neutral power, and the Germans could exert considerable pressure. However the Swedes managed to ensure that Knüfken was not sent to Germany where he would have undoubtedly been executed as a known enemy of the Hitler régime. They did this by hiding Knüfken away in a lunatic asylum in Stockholm where he was referred to as ‘Friday’ , his day of admission!!
During all his time in British service, Knüfken displayed courage and resilience of the highest order where weaker men might have crumbled. That is why I personally admire him. As for his politics, I find nothing in common with my own political philosophy. I am essentially a British Burkian conservative of the old school who considers most violent revolutions to be condemned to failure, whether French or Russian, whether socialist or right wing military coups.
Q: Can you comment on neutral Sweden during WW2?
Historically The Swedes lost out in military power to the Russians in the Baltic region, a fact which they understandably resented. As a result, among Swedish military and foreign affairs elites , Russia has always been considered as their ‘arvsfiende’ ( hereditary enemy) , in other words enemy numero uno! In contrast, Germany was seen as a potential ally in opposing the Russian Bear . Futhermore, there were strong cultural, religious and economic ties between the two countries. In Swedish military circles, the German officer corps was admired for its superior technical skills and prowess. Although liberal Swedes had no time for Hitler and his politics , the long established admiration for German virtues persisted. Many expected that the little Corporal would be set aside by the German General Staff . In this assumption, the Liberal admirers of Germany were completely mistaken.
As a result in the ensuing conflict that was WW2 , Swedish neutrality was opportunistic and oscillated very much depending on the relative military successes of the belligerents. By the end of 1942, it began to be recognised that Germany although far from being knocked out, was militarily in trouble . Concessions that had previously gone to the Germans were now increasingly withdrawn and assiduous efforts were made to cultivate a more friendly attitude to the Western Allies, particularly with the Americans who were eventually seen as emerging as the real victors of the war. No such sympathy was extended to the Russian side. Russian expansion became a great worry. The complete collapse of Germany as the Red Army rolled westwards was not desired, Swedes now found themselves cautioning the Americans about their naivete about Uncle Joe and his real aims.
After the war, Swedish foreign policy was avowedly neutral under the Social democrats. Trade between Sweden and Russia was carefully watched and often disliked by the Western powers, particularly by the Americans, as were hypocritical political utterances about Swedish neutrality. In actual fact, Sweden co-operated secretly with the Western powers in intelligence monitoring and active operations against the Soviet Union. In reality, Sweden was far from neutral but this fact was kept secret from the Swedish people.
Q. Why have the Russians refused to come clean about their abduction of Raoul Wallenberg?
Successive Swedish government official enquiries and the efforts of private researchers such as the late Vadim Birstein and Susanne Berger, although yielding, many new pieces of evidence , have failed in their attempts to open key archives in Moscow. Given the present political situation, there is little chance of the Russians agreeing to opening these archives in the near future.
As a result, speculations about Wallenberg’s activities in Hungary continue to fill the vacuum. These speculations are many and various but for the most part lack any secure foundation.
I have sometimes wondered if the real reason for Russian discomfort about the matter is in fact due to the uncovering of a disastrous series of administrative mistakes by previous Soviet regimes in dealing with the the Raoul Wallenberg issue which are a matter of shame and embarrassment . Rather than confess all this, it is better to remain silent in the hope that interest in the issue will eventually subside. It would not be the first time in the history of the world, that embarrassment about terrible mistakes due to incompetence, have led to state secrecy.