West, Nigel Soviet and Nazi Defectors. Counter-Intelligence in WW2 and the Cold War

A well-informed defector is the most dangerous counterintelligence commodity, because it takes a spy to catch a spy. On rare occasions, an agent, especially a mole or an intelligence professional, makes a mistake and incriminates himself, but usually it is a denunciation, a tip or a vague hint from a defector that provides the crucial information to uncover the source of a leak. Drawing on recently declassified intelligence files and interviews with defectors, their handlers, their families and their victims, Nigel West has analysed nine examples of wartime and post-war defectors to shed new light on the phenomenon. Defectors are notoriously difficult to handle and resettle, as there are a range of real or invented motives that lead them to take such drastic action. Some cite a noble political motive to impress their host, while others are driven by less honourable compulsions - perhaps greed, revenge, career disappointment, envy, anger or nothing more complicated than a desire to start a new life with a different partner. Defectors are the tools of the trade for all counterintelligence specialists seeking the background and context of corridor gossip and regulars' table talk that no amount of technical surveillance, aerial reconnaissance or hard-to-interpret intercepted communications can replace. This is the essence of human intelligence and goes to the heart of loyalty, trust, betrayal and deception - the very DNA of espionage. These nine examples of switching sides apply to all intelligence officers who followed Erich Vermehren's example. Due to his religious convictions, Vermehren was forced to desert from the Abwehr in January 1944, even though this meant the arrest of his parents and siblings, who were sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. West tracked down Vermehren, who was living under an assumed name in Switzerland at the time, to find out his story first-hand. He then questioned the British MI6 officer who had organised the covert smuggling of the German and his wife out of Istanbul. Sometimes a defector is the result of some cultivation, as in the case of Vladimir Petrov, who was gently persuaded over many months by his Polish dentist to give up his secret role as a resident in Canberra in favour of a chicken farm. The facilitator, Dr Michael Bialoguski, admitted to the author that he and his colleagues at the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation were not entirely sure of Petrov's true status until the time of the defection. After resettlement, the life of a defector is fraught with daily challenges, as explained by the widow of Yuri Rastvorov, herself a CIA counterintelligence officer, who recalled the day she had to tell her two daughters that their father was not a Czech tennis coach but an NKVD defector stationed in Tokyo.