Theodore Stepanovich Maly

Maly was born in 1894 in Temesvár in Austria-Hungary, now Timișoara in Romania, the son of a Finance Ministry official. He entered a monastic order to study theology and philosophy and enlisted when the First World War broke out. Accounts of his service differ: Orlov and his friends remembered him as a chaplain, while an account drawing on military records has him finishing military school in December 1915 as a cavalry cornet. Either way, he was taken prisoner by the Russians on the Carpathian front in 1916.

He later told a friend that he had seen young men with frozen limbs dying in the trenches, had starved as he was moved from camp to camp, and had watched many die 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." He volunteered for the Red Army in 1918, became a party member in January 1920 and joined the Cheka in 1921.

Orlov counts Maly among the best men in the NKVD's Foreign Department. Where a Russian officer had to work hard to pass as a foreigner, Maly was taken without effort for a Hungarian, Austrian, German or Swiss, and his height, blue eyes and almost childlike expression drew people to him.

In 1932 he entered Britain as Paul Hardt, a Central European intellectual, to handle the Foreign Office cipher clerk John Herbert King and others. From April 1936, as head of the illegal station in London, he ran the Cambridge network with Arnold Deutsch, who had reached London first. Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean were among their sources.

In 1937 Moscow demanded that Philby be used to assassinate Franco. Maly thought this impossible from the start, reporting that Philby was devoted but lacked the qualities an assassin needed. A report by Deutsch noted that he had passed on the Centre's order in such a way that Philby would not take it seriously, and this later served as grounds for doubting his loyalty.

In July 1937 Maly received his recall. Orlov describes meeting him in Paris: Maly knew that his old friends and fellow former prisoners Steinbrück, Sili and Bodesko had already been arrested, and that as a former priest he had no chance. Orlov writes that he could not understand why a man with no family in the USSR was going back. He would go back "so that nobody can say that priest really was a spy after all."

The date of his arrest is disputed. Orlov writes that he worked in Moscow for about three months and vanished in November 1937, Russian-language sources give 7 March 1938, and a KGB document cited by West and Tsarev has him still at work on 23 May 1938. What followed is not in dispute: he confessed under interrogation to being a German agent, was sentenced to death on 20 September 1938 and was shot at Kommunarka. He was rehabilitated on 14 April 1956.