Red leader
martin short
The Great Game: Memoirs of a Master Sal,95)
Leopold Trepper (Michael Joseph £6.
The most extraordinary thing about The oreat Game is that its author has survived ng enough to write it. Leopold Trepper, trisle Grand Chef of the Red Orchestra the Kussian Spy-ring operating in Nazi°ecupied Western Europe until the end of 1942 has become a legendary spymaster. Rooks have been written, films have been made, and documentaries painstakingly ds.sembled about the man who dedicated hpunself to communism in his youth. in b°.I,and and served it with self-sacrifice, hance and plain commonsense during !He war against Hitler. But that period of anense activity occupied less than five years Treppees life, from leaving Moscow in 938 in order to set up an import-export Cover in Brussels to his arrest in a dentist's chair in Paris. The next year was even more Intense and nerve-racking when Trepper sl3ught to upset the German counterespionage effort since he himself was e,..aPtive to a fkJermys-..us 'great game' in which the u were trying to feed Moscow if uicludes .a`se military information. But even if one lin, Western Trepper's entire period of service Europe, from his escape from mne Gestapo to his exultant return to th°sCoNv in January 1945, it amounts to less an seven years out of a life of more than .eventy. The rest of Trepper's life has been unre i tting tragedy. It is a personal tragedy n ;line sense that his own family was decimated 13 4)110 the first and second world wars. ut a tragedy also because those political !uthorities to which he dedicated his life have so often betrayed him. Trepper 'S shervice for Moscow during the war should ave been rewarded with outward recognition, some form of public acknowledgment, ()i r‘r at least some respected position in the yanrtY machine. But as soon as he returned in r '45 and sat down to write his official ,sePort of the achievements of the Red urchestra (and of the stupidity and incom
113,r i ence of the Intelligence Centre n
taken which betrayed it) Trepper was 1r!ken off to the Lubianka prison and _rnairied a captive until 1953. His pre-war ic.ennection with General Jan Berzin, the ,‘"ec.1 of Red Army Intelligence who had uariginat, recruited him, was still held acgra!nst him irrespective of his wartime In.evements: Berzin had opposed Stalin's 1(911-lidation of the Red Army leadership in T.37, and was himself killed soon after. n_tePper was told this in so many words by "'le other than General Abukumov, Minister of Security and former head of SMERSH: 'If you hadn't worked with that gang of counter-revolutionaries Tukhachevsky, Berzin and so on -you would be a man laden with honours today . . . Alas, we don't-have the means of the King of England, who receives secret agents, raises them to the rank of lords and confers magnificent estates on them. We are poor, you know, and we give only what we have. Well, what we have are prisons -and prison is not so bad, don't you agree?'
Fortunately, Abukumov was to fall with Beria, at about the same time as Trepper emerged from Lubianka to see his family again after twelve years' separation. In 1957 he decided to return to Poland, by then fully exonerated and with a military pension for 'services rendered to the Soviet Union'. He became the leader of the tiny Jewish community still remaining in Warsaw, and for some ten years Trepper appeared to be settled as a respected elder statesman with direct access to the apparently 'liberal' regime of Gomulka. But in 1967 a wave of anti-semitism wrecked the life of his community and his family. His children and then his wife left Poland, yet he was not allowed to leave. Unspecified 'reasons of state' were cited for refusing him an exit visa. It was at this time, in 1972, that I first met Trepper, alone in his dingy apartment in the middle of Warsaw. At that Point neither I nor I suspect he felt he would ever be able to write his autobiography. But after intense international lobbying, and an undertaking that no medical expenses would be billed to the Polish authorities, Trepper was finally allowed to come to England in November 1973. Since then he has steadily recovered his health and has enjoyed a few years' peripatetic tranquillity with his three sons in three continents.
The Great Game has to be considered alongside The Red Orchestra by Gilles Perrault. This is unfortunate since Perrault's book was -in large part derived from conversations he had had with Trepper from 1964 onwards. At that time Trepper appears to have had no intention of writing a book; he had put his past in Soviet intelligence behind him. But when the time eventually came for him to write his own book most of his story had already been told. In this sense the bulk of The Great Game is a little flat after Perrault's fuller and wittier account. Trepper was clearly aware of this problem, and seems to have tried to write instead a memorial to his colleagues in the Red Orchestra, most of whom suffered the most unspeakably miserable ends in the torture chambers of the Gestapo or in the concentration camps. But Trepper's personal account does finally lay the lie, put about by German intelligence historians, that Trepper betrayed what was still [eft of the Red Orchestra when he was himself captured. It is now beyond dispute that Trepper did his utmost to protect his colleagues and that he did succeed in warning Moscow that the 'Red Orchestra' had been converted by the Nazis into a forcibly collaborating 'Brown Orchestra'. But neither Moscow nor post-war German historians have forgiven Trepper for surviving. This alone has 'proved' to some that he must have collaborated. But that is not the case.
The nagging question which remains, however, has nothing to do with that period of Trepper's extraordinary life. It is, still, how did he stick to Moscow for so long both before and after the War? It is clear from his account that he knew of Stalin's purges while living and working in Moscow in the 'thirties: 'Stalin, the great gravedigger, was liquidating ten times, a hundred times, more communists than Hitler'. But Hitler, of course, was singling out the Jews, and Trepper had long since decided that communism was the only answer to the Jewish dilemma in an age of nationalism. As the second world war approached Trepper was trapped between 'the hammer of Hitler and the anvil of Stalin'. But Hitler was-the incarnation of Nazism, its perfect form, whereas Stalin was the complete distortion of Communism. And Trepper had always dedicated himself to the ideal rather than the reality: a paradox in a man who proved himself in those years as leader of the Red Orchestra to be perhaps the most pragmatic and worldly-wise of spymasters. But a little naivety can be forgiven in the man who made a spy ring out of a commercial company, which then went on to trade at a profit with the black-market supply organisation of the Wehrmacht itself. Chutzpah.
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