The director was a charming individual. Like so many of the high officials whom I saw, he did not seem a true Slav, but had more of a Georgian cast of countenance. In his early forties, he was intelligent and intellectual, and looked it. He spoke fluent, almost faultless English and had obviously spent some time in the United Kingdom; his occasional lapses into Americanese indicated that he may also have seen service in the States. I was to learn in the course of the evening that he spoke equally good French and German. The only point of criticism that I could find was his taste in ties, which was gaudy in the extreme. This may have been a relic of his American days. In addition to all this, he was a first-class interrogator. From my rather scanty knowledge of him, derived from the few meetings we had together, I should think that he was admirably fitted for his job. He had a heavy responsibility to bear as he was, I believe, directly responsible to Stalin himself, and according to Vera was one of the few people in the Soviet Union who could see Stalin without an appointment. He also had a direct private line to Stalin's office.
The interrogation lasted from six in the evening till two the next morning and continued over and after the food. The four of them, the director, Vera, and the other two, had what I assume was my dossier in front of them and occasionally they would produce from it a telegram that I had sent and question me as to its contents and how it had come to me. They went through my whole career with the Centre very closely and questioned me minutely on all the various sources that we had. They were especially interested in Lucy and Pakbo and wished to know who Lucy's sources were and how they reached the network so quickly. On this point I was of course as ignorant as they were.
The director stated that usually Lucy's information had been correct but once it had proved disastrous. He pulled a telegram out of the dossier and handed it to me. "Do you remember sending that?" he said. I looked at it; it gave details from Werther of troop dispositions on the eastern front. I replied that I had sent so many similar ones that I could not remember after the lapse of years anything about that particular one.
"That message cost us a hundred thousand men at Kharkov and resulted in the Germans reaching Stalingrad. It was sent over your transmitter," replied the director. "After we received this and saw the damage that it wrought we could only assume that Lucy was a double agent and all his information was false and supplied by the Abwehr. For a long time after that we ignored the information, convinced that it was planted on us. Only after months of checking did we decide that, as all the other information from that source was correct and could be proved correct, the source was after all reliable. The information must have been falsified after it left Germany. Perhaps, my dear Jim, you can throw some light on this?"
I could only reply that I received the Lucy information, already edited by Rado, either direct or via one of Rado's couriers. In the latter case it was always in a sealed envelope. I was also able to assure the director that I had never left the material lying about, so there was no question of substitution.
After the ordeal, when I felt completely sucked dry of all information and also extremely tired, as I had been at it for eight hours with my senses alert the whole time, I was asked to withdraw to my bedroom as the others "had some matters which they wished to discuss." I felt rather like the prisoner when the jury have withdrawn. After an interval- it may have been half an hour, though it felt like an age - the director joined me. He appeared to be in an extremely good humour and slapped me jovially on the back. He stated that the Swiss affair was not yet cleared up and would not be until the end of the war when a military mission would be sent to investigate the whole thing on the ground in Switzerland and Germany. In the meanwhile, there was nothing with which I could be reproached and as far as the Swiss debacle was concerned I was entirely exonerated and he thanked me for my efforts in Switzerland and also for my plans and attempts to re-establish the network after my release from jail. As regarded Lucy and Pakbo, he felt that I had been perhaps a little naive.
"These two individuals were not motivated by ideological reasons but were primarily concerned with gain. There is no doubt that after their release from prison"- Pakbo, of course, had never been arrested but that was a minor matter- "they had obviously been approached by the British Secret Service who had seduced them away by gold in order that in the future they could send false information in order to hinder the advance of the victorious Red Army."
He regarded the fact that I had not been questioned by the British after my release as proof positive that Lucy had been "got at" by the British. He was quite satisfied that I had had nothing to do with this British plot and added that it was quite clever of the British not to approach me as it was not likely that I would put myself into the "Bear's embrace" if I had had a guilty conscience and had accepted a British offer to double-cross.
As regarded Rado, he said that measures were being taken to bring him to Moscow by force. Rado's refusal to come he attributed to pressure brought to bear by the British, who were threatening reprisals against Rado's wife, still in Paris. In any event he would come to Moscow in the end. "Very soon there will be no place in the world where it will be possible to hide from the Centre."
In the meanwhile he advised me to leam Russian as quickly as possible and said that a good job would be found for me in Moscow. It would be dangerous for me to go abroad for some time as my arrest would have "blown" me to all the counterespionage services in the world and no doubt the Swiss would have already supplied them with my particulars, fingerprints, etc. It would therefore be necessary to let things calm down for a period before I could be used abroad again.