Espionage
The spy left out in the cold
Martin Short
Leopold Trepper, the Grand Chef of the Red Orchestra, Russia's vast espionage outfit in Nazi-occupied Western Europe, is today living alone in Warsaw, waiting for a visa that will allow him to come to London for medical treatment. Trepper suffers from Burger's Disease, a condition that may necessitate the amputation of a leg; a leading British vascular surgeon is anxious to treat him. Trepper has no reason to be optimistic for he has had five exit visa applications rejected by the Ministry of Interior in the last three years, but he is hoping that since a medical application is considered by the Communist Party's Central Committee it will bypass the Ministry of Interior. There Mieczyslaw Moczar spearheaded the antisemitic campaign of the late 'sixties which has been the source of all Trepper's present woes. Since then, his wife and his three sons have all left Poland, but for some reason the ministry has been reluctant to get rid of Trepper himself.
Trepper was one of the great spies of the second world war, not as a discoverer of vital information himself, but as the recruiting officer, co-ordinator and boss of a network operating throughout France, Belgium and Holland under the cover of a series of import-export businesses. These made substantial profits in selling the German forces any commodity from uniforms to mattresses to oil drums with holes in the bottom, and while carrying out these deals his agents were able to compile detailed information on many German military activities. The network's history has been told before: how it was destroyed more through Moscow's stupidity than Berlin's brilliance; how Trepper was captured in a dentist's chair in Paris and how he escaped from the Gestapo in 1943 through the back entrance of a chemist's shop near the Gare St Lazare. He went into hiding until the Liberation, and at the beginning of 1945 flew back to Moscow to receive Stalin's thanks: ten years without trial in the Lubianka Gaol. Just another victim of Stalinist terror? Or a double agent getting his overdue comeuppance?
I put that question because it was the central issue in a defamation suit which Trepper brought in his absence against Jean Rochet, until very recently the Director of France's police department for Internal Security. Last April Rochet wrote a letter to Le Monde in which he stated that Trepper was not only a spy for Russia against France before the war (which is probably true), but also that he betrayed some Red Orchestra colleagues to the Gestapo in order to save his own skin. At the trial the evidence against him came almost entirely from Gestapo files, hardly an impeccable source. But worse still for Rochet, none of the surviving Gestapo officers who wrote the stuff came to testify against Trepper, though they were asked to do so. French resistance leaders and the relations and friends of men he's alleged to have sent to their deaths spoke up in his defence, and none accused him. Trepper's soft treatment by the Gestapo could have been explained by his high military rank (at the time of his arrest he was a brigadier in the Rasvedupr), and although he certainly indulged in the Germans' radio game with Moscow (sending false messages to give the impression that the network was still intact) Trepper claims to have done so to gain time. In any case, he managed to tell Moscow through another route that the funhspiel was indeed being played. Last Thursday, Rochet was found guilty of defamation and Trepper was vindicated; he has emerged from the affair as quite a different character from the nasty piece of work that several books on world war two espionage have made him out to be. If Trepper had indeed betrayed the Red Orchestra, we can be sure that he would have received a fate far worse than a mere ten years in the Lubianka. Stalin treated almost everyone who came back from the West after the war in the same way. Trepper told World in Action, when we filmed him in Warsaw two weeks ago, that he had additional black marks against his name, for he was one of those who before the war had worked for General Jan Berzin, head of Red Army Intelligence, who in turn supported Marshal Tuchachewsky, the Chief of the General Staff, in the view that war against Hitler's Germany was inevitable. If free to talk, Trepper would no doubt have criticised Moscow on the grounds that the Red Orchestra had been grossly ill-equipped. Trepper's own Paris outfit, for instance, was without a transmitter, despite the glowing promises of Russia's VichY ambassador. Trepper would have mercilessly criticised Moscow for its stupidity in sending messages which if ever decoded (as they soon were) would reveal the precise identities and whereabouts of its key Berlin agents, of whom forty were executed by their captors. Trepper might even have dared to suggest that such stupidity had been deliberate. However, after Stalin's death, and the execution of Beria and Abukumov, Trepper was released, fully rehabilitated and awarded a distinguished service pension, with a double rate for the years in prison, Apparently, a traditional way of saying sorry.
All this is now history, but Trepper is much more than a man who for eight years was a Soviet spy. His life storY throws perspectives on a whole range of problems and dilemmas that remain with us today. In 1904 he was born into a large family of poor Polish Jews in the Galician town of Nowy Targ, then part of the Austrian Empire. By the early 1920s he was organising strikes in the mines and foundries of Silesia, for which he was soon imprisoned by the Pilsudski government. He was converted to communism because it seemed the only way to overcome the problem of nationality at a time when nationalism threatened any minority, but particularly the Jews. He was forced to leave Poland, so he went to Palestine where he proceeded to build up a communist party which aimed at ArabJewish unity (Ittihad — Ichut — Einigkeit). Trepper was imprisoned by the Mandate authorities and so he moved on to France where he organised communist cells among predominantly Jewish immigrant workers from eastern Europe. In 1932 he paid his first visit to Moscow, Where he studied for four years at the Marchelewski University for National Minorities. In 1936 he became an officer in Red Army Intelligence, and by 1938 his specific task was to build up the Red Orchestra in western Europe, in readiness for the coming catastrophe. He believed in communism in order to save the Jewish nation, along with other nations: "For fifty years I was a militant because the ideals of socialism were my ideal, and they are still my ideal. But that was never in contradiction with my thinking as a Jew • . . and I think that even those eight Years I spent in Russian military intellegence were the fulfilment of my task as an anti-Nazi, as a Jew and as a Communist." His own family — except for a sister in Palestine — were all liquidated at Auschwitz and Treblinka.
His wife and children survived, for they were in Moscow during the war, but they had no idea that he was still living until a Pathetic wreck of a man was dumped outside their home in July 1954. All his Wife had been told in 1945 was that he had "disappeared without trace in circumstances which did not entitle her to receive a pension." Trepper picked himself up and started badgering the Russian authorities to allow the public revival of Jewish cultural life, but after three fruitless years he took his family off to Poland, where indeed such a life was possible for the thirty thousand Jews still there. But in 1967 Trepper's world was destroyed by Gomulka's speech to the Congress of Trade Unions in which he stigmatised the ' fifth column," meaning those Jews whose loyalties may have been stretched by the Arab-Israeli war. The gamut of articles Which followed in 1968, attacking nihilists and " rootless cosmopolitans," and press ures where his sons were working or studying, eventually forced them to leave Poland for Denmark, Israel and Canada, a diasnora all of their own.
Why, then, hasn't the Polish government taken the opportunity to get rid of
Trepper and let him join his family
elsewhere? Is it that he knows too much about present-day Soviet espionage tech niques? That's unlikely, for he hasn't been nn active service for thirty years. Is it that he can still damage Russia's espionage
reputation by detailing its incompetence during the second world war? Perhaps, for he is a man with immense knowledge and a fiercely ironic, bitter wit which could humiliate certain people still working in
the Soviet Ministry of Defence. But if this were the reason, why was Trepper allowed to visit Israel in 1966? Perhaps, again, because at that time he had no intention of leaving Poland: he had his job to do, his family were fairly happy, and he had never been a Zionist. As an orthodox communist he would not have been likely to feed the propaganda machines of the west.
It's only since the events of 1967-68 that the authorities seem to have adopted their hard line on Trepper, so perhaps it has been caused by Trepper knowing too much about the people who — other than the now fallen Gomulka and Moczar — instigated the anti-semitic purges. All tht more embarrassing since the purges were a way of ousting the Muscovite faction, among whom Jews formed a large proportion. Perhaps Trepper has a few unique insights on another former Silesian miner, Mr Gierek. But even today, Trepper can still pass these on to any foreign journalist who cares to visit him — the Poles do not watch him closely enough to prevent such visits. Most likely, Trepper hasn't been given his exit visa because of the personal spite of a few individuals in key positions, whom Trepper has antagonised in the past.
The saddest aspect of the Trepper affair is that it has occurred at a time when the government is trying to boost both its trade and its image in the west. It would now seem to be a magnanimous gesture for Poland to give this venerable anti-Nazi, the holder of one of the country's highest honours — the order of Polonia Restituta — the break he needs. As Trepper himself says, "After fifty years of revolutionary activity in the service of Communism, I think I have earned it."
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