How British Spy Kim Philby Helped Russians Capture, Kill or Turn Lithuanian Partisans
- kapochunas
- 24 hours ago
- 5 min read
British Double Agent Kim Philby and Lithuanian Partisan turned traitor Jonas Deksnys
When I read the reviews of Antonia Senior's new book: "Stalin's Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire," I realized that I had never associated the British ring of spies, who infiltrated the highest levels of British government from the 1930's to 1951 and helped Stalin cement 50 years of Soviet domination over Eastern Europe, with Lithuania's Partisan movement.
That movement, consisting of an estimated 30,000 armed fighters (some 20,000 of whom would be killed) — known as Miško Broliai, or Forest Brothers (there were Forest Sisters, too!) -- waged a guerrilla war against the Soviet re-occupation of Lithuania from 1944 to 1953, when overwhelming Soviet security forces, helped by infiltraitors and collaborators, decimated partisan leadership. Individual partisans, however, continued guerilla attacks for decades.
What Senior's research makes clear, with acknowledged help from the Lithuanian Special Archives (https://lya.archyvai.lrv.lt/en/), is Kim Philby's role in the capture and turning of partisans like Jonas Deksnys. As author Antanas Sileika said in his blog (https://antanassileika.com/jonas-deksnys-a-broken-partisan/): "Jonas Deksnys was initially a hero of the Lithuanian resistance, but when he went back into Lithuania for the British, he was captured and turned. When his usefulness was over, he spent the last years of his life as a pathetic mooch at the Hotel Neringa bar in Vilnius."
Senior says that Deksnys "...belonged to the same generation as Stalin's Apostles, but unlike them, he had experienced the 'gift' of Soviet utopia firsthand: he was a university student in Kaunas when the Red Army marched into Kaunas in 1940. Seeing Sovietisation in practice, rather than in the smug theorising of a Cambridge society, prompted Deksnys to join the resistance. He was arrested by the NKVD [The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, Romanized Narodnyy komissariat vnutrennikh del] in Autumn 1940 and imprisoned in brutal conditions. In June 1941, Deksnys was rescued by Lithuanian rebels who freed political prisoners when the Nazis occupied Lithuania.
"At first, in common with many non-Jewish Lithuanians, Deksnys welcomed the Germans as liberators. Germans had taken Lithuania before, in World War I, and although it had been a hungry, repressive time, it had not been inhuman. But Deksnys was quick to realize that the Nazis were different and sinister beyond his worst fears. The Nazis did find some willing allies among the anti-Soviet Lithuanian partisans, who were quick to provide manpower for genocide against the country's Jews. Many others, including Deksnys, joined the anti-German resistance. He ran propaganda operations against the Nazis, including an underground newspaper. He had his first contact with British intelligence in 1943, writing reports for them about German military positions and the horror of the ghettos in Vilnius and Kaunas. The reports were sent by radio to British intelligence in Stockholm. He also prepared three large briefings on German-occupied Lithuania which were smuggled out -- once by contacts in similar Latvian and Estonian resistance groups. He was arrested by the Gestapo in July 1944, alongside his radio operator.
"The Gestapo [the official secret state police, the Geheime Staatspolizei, of Nazi Germany] found his ciphers and tried to use them to trick the British, but Deksnys refused to give them the information they needed to successfully dupe the British. He ended up in a German prison and was liberated at the end of the war. Just a few weeks after the end of the war, British intelligence leaders agreed that all anti-Soviet counterintelligence cooperation would go through Kim Philby...who arrived in Germany shortly after.
"Deksnys made the first of his trips to [Soviet-]occupied Lithuania in November 1945, backed by American intelligence. He met with a resistance group and brought the first news of Western intelligence interest in their struggle. On his return to Germany, he made contact with British intelligence." Meanwhile Philby was making certain that his Soviet handlers knew the names and responsibilities of everyone who worked with him.
"The Western intelligence agencies began to compete for contacts among the displaced anti-Bloshevik elements. Deksnys was wooed by the British. An old British main contact of the Lithuanian underground during the war turned up in Germany looking to resume previous ties: Alexander McKibbin, a Scot born in Moscow in 1891 and raised to hate a Bolshevik like the devil. McKibbin put the Lithuanians in touch with an English 'Captain' in intelligence, and Deksnys would later recall a January 1946 meeting where that 'Captain' spent two hours trying to dissuade the Lithuanians from having contact with the Americans, explaining that they 'did not understand the subtle nuances of European politics.' Their best bet for help, he said, was the far more experienced, watertight, British intelligence operation. Deksnys and his co-conspirators threw their lot in with the British."
While Deksnys "...seems to have been in conversation with every competing intelligence agency...By mid-1946 Soviet intelligence had concluded that Deksnys was working for Western intelligence on behalf of Lithuanian intelligence, and any overtures to them by him were suspect. They set spies within the emigre community on him, to watch him closely."
Deksnys returned to Lithuania in May, 1946, financed by British intelligence. That August, partisans from across Lithuania traveled to an apartment in Vilnius owned by a partisan to meet Deksnys. "His mission," says Senior, "was to forge links between between the resistance on the ground and the emigre communities in Sweden and Germany. He was also trying to unite disparate groups on both sides of the Iron Curtain into one organized force. There was no doubt, he said, that there would be a war, a crusade against the terrors of Bolshevisim. Western countries, the Pope and the nations of Europe support such an offensive, he said. He told the assembled partisans that emigre organizations abroad were working towards creating a single structure, one that would fight for independence: VLAK, which would be the link between the West and the partisans."
"Four of the partisans nodding back at him were agents of the MGB, the Soviet Ministry of State Security created out of the NKVD in March 1946. The flat they were in belonged to an MGB agent, and was riddled with MGB bugs. Deksnys asked the assembled partisans for exactly the sort of information of interest to Philby and his contacts. When Deksnys crept back across the border into Poland a week later, he not only was carrying documents supplied by the MGB, he was accompanied by an MGB 'partisan.'
"By May 1949, Deksnys, [who had been sent on compromised missions to Lithuania by British intelligence] was in an interrogation cell in Vilnius, telling his captors all about his past, his comrades in the resistance, and his links with British, Swedish and American intelligence. Perhaps it was the physical beatings that turned Deksnys. Perhaps it was the hopelessness: he knew that the partisans were riddled with traitors, and must have guessed that the British side was also compromised."
For how many of the tens of thousands of murdered and tortured -- and their families sent to the gulag -- Lithuanian (and Latvian, Estonian, Polish, Ukrainian, Romanian, and Bulgarian) partisans were Philby and his fellow Apostles held to account? None of the infamous Cambridge Five ever served time in jail.
The Cambridge Five: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross, were shielded by their elite establishment backgrounds and connections.
Maclean and Burgess defected to the Soviet Union before they could be arrested.
Philby later fled to Moscow, and died there as a Soviet hero.
Blunt and Cairncross were exposed or confessed later on, but prosecutors never charged or imprisoned them, and all five ultimately died free men.
1990 Russian stamp honoring Kim Philby; Philby's grave in Moscow's Kuntsevo Cemetery. From wikipedia
