Theodore Maly was an undercover Soviet intelligence officer

Intelligence officer

An intelligence officer is a person employed by an organization to collect, compile and/or analyze information which is of use to that organization...

 who recruited and controlled spies

Espionage

Espionage or spying involves an individual obtaining information that is considered secret or confidential without the permission of the holder of the information. Espionage is inherently clandestine, lest the legitimate holder of the information change plans or take other countermeasures once it...

 in the 1930s. He lived illegally in the countries where he worked and was one of Russia’s most effective illegal recruiters and controllers. Like many other illegals he was not Russian

Russians

The Russian people are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Russia, speaking the Russian language and primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries....

 but had Russian citizenship.

Early life

He was born in Hungary

Hungary

Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...

 in 1894 at Timişoara

Timisoara

Timișoara is the capital city of Timiș County, in western Romania. One of the largest Romanian cities, with an estimated population of 311,586 inhabitants , and considered the informal capital city of the historical region of Banat, Timișoara is the main social, economic and cultural center in the...

 (now Romania

Romania

Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...

) into a middle class family. His father was an official of the Ministry of Finance. He entered a monastic order and studied theology and philosophy. At the outbreak of World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

 he enlisted in the Austro-Hungarian Army

Austro-Hungarian Army

The Austro-Hungarian Army was the ground force of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy from 1867 to 1918. It was composed of three parts: the joint army , the Austrian Landwehr , and the Hungarian Honvédség .In the wake of fighting between the...

. He attended the Military Academy and graduated in December 1915 with the rank of cornet.
Maly later related his experiences to a friend:

During the war I was a chaplain, I had just been ordained as a priest. I was taken prisoner in the Carpathians. I saw all the horrors, young men with frozen limbs dying in the trenches. I was moved from one camp to another and starved along with other prisoners. We were all covered with vermin and many were dying of typhus. I lost my faith in God and when the revolution broke out I joined the Bolsheviks. I broke with my past completely. I was no longer a Hungarian, a priest, a Christian, even anyone's son. I became a Communist and have always remained one.

Illegal identities

The Russians recognized that his passionate pride, intellect and charm were assets, and in 1932 he assumed the identity of Paul Hardt, a Central-European intellectual, and travelled to England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 to control two British Foreign Office spies; John Herbert King

John Herbert King

John Herbert King, alias 'MAG', was a British Foreign Office cypher clerk who provided Foreign Office communications to the Soviet Union between 1935 and 1937. He was sentenced to 10 years' in prison as a spy in October 1939....

 and Ernest Holloway Oldham

Ernest Holloway Oldham

Ernest Holloway Oldham was a cipher clerk in the British Foreign Office who spied for the Soviet Union between 1929 and his death in 1933, in return for money...

. Another identity that he used in England was Mr Peters; an Austrian who had spent time in a monastery before becoming a captain in the Russian cavalry.

Espionage activities

He was one of the controllers of the British Soviet spy ring known as the Cambridge Five

Cambridge Five

The Cambridge Five was a ring of spies, recruited in part by Russian talent spotter Arnold Deutsch in the United Kingdom, who passed information to the Soviet Union during World War II and at least into the early 1950s...

: Kim Philby

Kim Philby

Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby was a high-ranking member of British intelligence who worked as a spy for and later defected to the Soviet Union...

, Donald Maclean

Donald Duart Maclean

Donald Duart Maclean was a British diplomat and member of the Cambridge Five who were members of MI5, MI6 or the diplomatic service who acted as spies for the Soviet Union in the Second World War and beyond. He was recruited as a "straight penetration agent" while an undergraduate at Cambridge by...

, Guy Burgess

Guy Burgess

Guy Francis De Moncy Burgess was a British-born intelligence officer and double agent, who worked for the Soviet Union. He was part of the Cambridge Five spy ring that betrayed Western secrets to the Soviets before and during the Cold War...

, John Cairncross

John Cairncross

John Cairncross was a British intelligence officer during World War II, who passed secrets to the Soviet Union...

 and Anthony Blunt

Anthony Blunt

Anthony Frederick Blunt , was a British art historian who was exposed as a Soviet spy late in his life.Blunt was Professor of the History of Art at the University of London, director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, Surveyor of the King's Pictures and London...

. Maly also controlled Arthur Wynn

Arthur Wynn

Arthur Henry Ashford Wynn , was a British civil servant, social researcher, and recruiter of Soviet spies.Recruited by Edith Tudor-Hart in 1936, Wynn was the well known Soviet spy "Agent Scott" of the KGB...

, founder of the Oxford spy ring, who had been recruited by Edith Tudor-Hart

Edith Tudor-Hart

Edith Tudor Hart , an Austrian-British photographer, communist-sympathiser and spy for the Soviet Union. Some of her work is in the National Gallery in London.-Early life and education:...

. In 1937 he left England on a false passport to escape arrest for his involvement in the Woolwich Arsenal

Royal Arsenal

The Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, originally known as the Woolwich Warren, carried out armaments manufacture, ammunition proofing and explosives research for the British armed forces. It was sited on the south bank of the River Thames in Woolwich in south-east London, England.-Early history:The Warren...

 spy case. It is assumed that he was tipped off before MI5

MI5

The Security Service, commonly known as MI5 , is the United Kingdom's internal counter-intelligence and security agency and is part of its core intelligence machinery alongside the Secret Intelligence Service focused on foreign threats, Government Communications Headquarters and the Defence...

 could arrange for his arrest.

Final days

In 1937 as Stalin's Terror took hold, Soviet intelligence personnel working abroad became a principal target of suspicion and were subject to recalls back to the Soviet Union. In June, Maly received orders from Moscow Center to return. He knew his background in the atmosphere of the time made his position particularly dangerous, being quoted as commenting 'I know that as a former priest I haven't got a chance. But I've decided to go there so nobody can say: "That priest might have been a real spy after all."'

Maly returned to Moscow and worked at the Lubyanka

Lubyanka (KGB)

The Lubyanka is the popular name for the headquarters of the KGB and affiliated prison on Lubyanka Square in Moscow. It is a large building with a facade of yellow brick, designed by Alexander V...

. Any hope of returning to Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

 was dashed with the defection

Defection

In politics, a defector is a person who gives up allegiance to one state or political entity in exchange for allegiance to another. More broadly, it involves abandoning a person, cause or doctrine to whom or to which one is bound by some tie, as of allegiance or duty.This term is also applied,...

s of Ignace Reiss in July 1937 and Walter Krivitsky

Walter Krivitsky

Walter Germanovich Krivitsky was a Soviet intelligence officer who revealed plans of signing Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact before defecting weeks before the outbreak of World War II....

 in October 1937. Alexander Orlov reports in the Secret History that Maly disappeared from his post in November 1937. This is contradicted in West's Crown Jewels where a document is cited that indicates that Maly was still at work on May 23, 1938. Although the exact date of Maly's arrest is unknown, it was probably after May 1938 and before Orlov's own defection to North America

North America

North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...

 in July 1938.

Under interrogation, Maly confessed to being a German

Germans

The Germans are a Germanic ethnic group native to Central Europe. The English term Germans has referred to the German-speaking population of the Holy Roman Empire since the Late Middle Ages....

 agent. On September 20, 1938 a tribunal sentenced Maly to death under Article 58 (6) of the Criminal Code, and he was executed soon afterwards. The Soviet government rehabilitated Maly on April 14, 1956.

Sources

• John Costello, Mask of Treachery, Warner Books,1990.
• Peter Wright, Spy Catcher, Viking Adult, 1987.
• Hede Massing ,This Deception, Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1951.
• Alexander Orlov, The Secret HIstory of Stalin's Crimes, Random House, 1953.
• Elisabeth Poretsky, Our Own People: A Memoir of Ignace Reiss and Friends, University of Michigan Press, 1969.
• Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev, The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB Archives, Yale University Press, 1998.