I did not see the director again till about six months later, in September 1945, but I continued to receive lists of questions to answer; however, these now arrived only about once a week instead of almost daily. I duly replied to them and also sent off my suggestions regarding possible future employment. The only work I did for the Centre was to note down salient points of news and policy line which I was able to pick up from listening to foreign broadcasts on the short-wave set the director had sent me. About the time the set arrived I also received Soviet documentation which made me out to be Alexander Alexandrovitch Dymov, born in Madrid; the birthplace being of course to explain my faulty Russian.
Peace did not bring that return to normalcy which every Russian seemed to expect. The average inhabitant of Moscow seemed to have the idea that as soon as the shooting had stopped the shops would overnight fill with goods, the general theory being that these goods would be German. In fact the end of Lease-Lend resulted in a worsening of the ration for those who until then had been living on American goods bought in the special shops. Also, with the end of the war military movements seemed to go on at the same tempo. Many of the generals who came back from the West had only a few days' leave and then were transferred to the Southeast. The tension was not decreased by the construction and manning of even more balloon-barrage posts in and around Moscow after VE Day.
It was perfectly obvious from the talk of the generals, and especially their wives, and the propaganda line doled out by Vera, that the heat was about to be turned on Turkey and Iran. Vera explained the policy with great frankness. The war with Japan tied the hands of the Anglo-Saxon powers while neutral Russia had her hands free and could achieve her ambitions in the Southeast without interference, for if the worst came to the worst she could always hold the threat of a deal with Japan over the heads of her late allies. The dropping of the atom bomb put an end to this tense situation and enabled Russia to get her cheap gains in the Far East, though temporarily shelving her ambitions nearer home.
About six months after my arrival in Moscow, that is, about July, I was told that Rado had been brought by force to Russia from Cairo, and that I might be confronted with him. This never actually occurred but during the September visit from the director I was told the end of the Swiss affair.
This call was far less formal than the last, as the director was accompanied only by Vera and there were no skeletons in the shape of N.K.V.D. officers at the usual feast which celebrated the visit. The director stated that
Rado had been intensively interrogated, that a military mission had visited Switzerland, that the Centre was busy- investigating in Berlin, and that as a result of their findings there was nothing with which I could be reproached.
Rado on the other hand would be shot for negligence in allowing his cipher to fall into the hands of the Swiss police, for falsely reporting that the network in Switzerland was liquidated, and for embezzling some fifty thousand dollars. The bait which had lured Rado from the safety of Paris as far as the slums of Cairo had been a promise by the Centre to pay him eighty thousand dollars to liquidate the alleged debts of the network in Switzerland and a promise that he would be allowed to return to Paris from Moscow after a stay of only fourteen days. How an old fox like Rado fell for such an obvious lure | and embarked on the plane with me I cannot conceive, as he must have known that his misdemeanours would ultimately be found out. His wife, Helene, was still in Paris, but the director said that steps were being taken to try to get her back to Moscow. I do not know whether or not these were successful. She was a woman of intelligence and I should think it unlikely that she would put her head in the noose and go back to Moscow, in all probability to join her husband against a wall or be sent to the living death of an N.K.V.D. labour camp.
The director was also anxious to get Cissie back to Moscow and asked me if I could think up a suitable scheme to lure her there. She had apparently been interviewed by an agent of the Centre but had been reluctant to make the journey. In this she showed good sense, as the director had several bones to pick with her, not the least being her sending of the en clair telegram to Canada which the Centre was convinced had led to the unveiling of the Canadian spy case.
I was told that though it was against the general rule to send an agent abroad so soon after an assignment in which he had had trouble with the foreign police, the Centre were so short of good people that the director was making an exception in my case and was making arrangements for me to be sent off as soon as possible. He explained that the various networks in the United States had lain more or less fallow throughout the war but that they must now be rebuilt and reinforced as a matter of urgency in view of the "aggressive attitude" of that country. Before the war the network in the States had been principally occupied with industrial espionage, but now that the United States and Great Britain were the greatest potential enemies of the Soviet Union, all types of information were of great value and the network and sources were to be developed as fast and as extensively as possible.
As a result of wartime experience the main rules of the Centre, which had been occasionally allowed to lapse in the past, were to be rigidly enforced. All network chiefs were to live and direct their networks from outside the United States. I was to live in Mexico. There I would live on a genuine Canadian passport. The director added that they had not used the Canadian "cobbler" since before the war so that there might be some delay before the passport arrived. (See Appendix C.)