Dealing with the Devil: Anglo-Soviet Intelligence Cooperation during the Second World War by Donal O’Sullivan (review)

Allied intelligence cooperation during World War II has been studied from different perspectives, including its Soviet angle, but this new book by Donal O’Sullivan sheds new light on Anglo-Soviet cooperation by making use of recently declassified files from The National Archives in the United Kingdom. O’Sullivan is also well versed in German historiography on Nazi counterintelligence operations and the growing Russian scholarship on the subject, which makes his research balanced and comprehensive. The most novel and interesting part of the book deals with “Pickaxe,” a joint operation by Soviet foreign intelligence (under the NKVD organs) and British Special Operations Executive (SOE) to introduce Soviet secret agents into Nazi-occupied Western Europe. This operation remained top secret for sixty years and is a good illustration of Anglo-Soviet wartime intelligence cooperation.

The intimate nature of the NKVD-SOE relationship during the war (as compared to the NKVD’s less amicable ties with the U.S. Office of Strategic Services) has been shown before, but “Pickaxe” reveals for the first time how close and daring that cooperation really was. Nearly two-dozen Soviet agents were brought to England, trained there, and then dropped by British aircraft into the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy, Austria, and Germany from September 1941 to May 1944. O’Sullivan writes that “Soviet intelligence ‘sub-contracted’ with the British to transport spies to Western Europe” (p. 1) and gives a convincing explanation of the different incentives behind this unprecedented joint enterprise: Soviet officials’ desperate need to revitalize their much debilitated intelligence network in Western Europe for provision of military information; and British interest in sabotage and subversion.

Through skillful use of declassified personnel files, O’Sullivan shows the human side of “Pickaxe,” telling stories of brave and often amateurish individuals, most of whom lost their lives during the operation. One particularly tragic story is that of Willy Kruyt and Nicodemus Kruyt, the only father-and-son team dropped into Western Europe. An idealistic theologian from the Netherlands, Willy Kruyt became active in Dutch radical politics, emigrated with his family to the Soviet Union in 1935, became disillusioned with Stalinist Russia, and was recruited by the NKVD for this mission when he requested to return to his native country. Parachuted into Belgium at the age of 64, he was soon betrayed by neighbors and died in a German concentration camp. His son escaped the Gestapo in the Netherlands and survived the war, only to be hunted down by the Soviet secret police as a suspected double agent. In 1954 he committed suicide under mysterious circumstances. Aside from poor SOE-NKVD preparation, the Gestapo’s effectiveness in arresting Soviet agents is what doomed “Pickaxe.” O’Sullivan’s firm grasp of German sources serves him well in documenting this gruesome reality.

The “Pickaxe” story is well integrated into the book’s broader picture of NKVDSOE cooperation from its inception in 1941 to the end of the war. That cooperation included running double agents, exchanging gadgets and information, and providing logistical support to each other. The story is full of colorful personalities on both sides, some of them already familiar (like the SOE’s chief in Moscow, George Hill, and his counterpart in London, Ivan Chichaev) and others less well known.

O’Sullivan examines several other SOE operations, including the previously overlooked “Mamba,” a scheme to recruit Soviet prisoners of war stationed in the United Kingdom for subversive activity in Germany and Nazi-occupied France. Faced with NKVD opposition, the SOE ultimately abandoned this plan and handed over the Soviet participants to the Soviet authorities, with quite predictable consequences. But at the last moment the SOE set up the “escape” of these personnel from the Kempton Park prisoners-of-war camp, to the great displeasure of Colonel Chichaev. Their subsequent fate is unknown.

On the basis of this rich empirical material, O’Sullivan provides a balanced estimate of the intelligence cooperation...