Hitler had just been defeated, Stalin was victorious and Viktor Bogomolets was down on his luck. After more than three decades spying for British intelligence, Bogomolets, who began working for MI6 shortly after the Russian revolution, was curtly informed that he had been stripped of his British citizenship.
It was at this point that Bogomolets decided to betray his British masters. According to papers declassified yesterday by Russia's foreign intelligence service, the SVR, he became one of Moscow's most accomplished double agents.
In 1945 he began spying for the Soviet Union, passing crucial information back to Moscow about British intelligence at the height of the Cold war. Codenamed "Britt" by his Soviet handlers, Bogomolets' reports were circulated among the top echelons of the Soviet Union's leadership - and were even read by Stalin himself.
The double agent also betrayed the man who had recruited him to MI6 in the first place, Colonel Harold Gibson. Gibson was responsible for a network of undercover British agents working deep inside the Soviet Union. Soviet intelligence tracked Gibson closely until his death in 1960, the documents show.
Major General Lev Sotskov, a former intelligence officer who has written a book based on the new archive material, yesterday described Bogomolets as a "very big fish". The only reason the Russian emigre had not been identified before was that neither the British nor the Soviets had any incentive to unmask him, he said.
"Bogomolets was extremely important. He wrote a 100-page memo detailing all his contacts in British intelligence soon after defecting. He was involved in at least two major secret intelligence operations. What we know about him is the tip of the iceberg," Gen Sotskov said.
The revelation suggests that in an era already famous for its treachery and double dealing, MI6 was even more compromised than previously thought. Bogomolets came from an aristocratic Russian family. He had fought against the communists during Russia's 1917 civil war.
Col Gibson met Bogomolets in Istanbul three years later and immediately hired him to work for MI6. The two men roamed around Europe, with Bogomolets swiftly assembling his own network of Russian agents inside the Soviet Communist party.
According to the archives, the agents were, unbeknown to Bogomolets, fake and supplied British intelligence with misinformation exaggerating the Soviet Union's military and economic power. This hugely successful counter-espionage operation, Tarantella, was designed to impress Britain and win it as an ally against Germany.
Bogomolets stopped working for MI6 in 1934 when Soviet agents tried to lure him back to Moscow. The agents sent meticulous reports home about Bogomolets' lavish lifestyle and his wife's penchant for expensive haircuts and perfumes. He resumed his spying activities again in 1944, in Portugal and then Cairo.
The archives fail to show whether he met Donald Maclean, who was stationed at the British embassy in Cairo in 1948. Maclean together with Guy Burgess, Kim Philby and other members of the so-called Cambridge Five betrayed Britain by spying for Moscow.
Bogomolets, who had a Romanian wife, then disappears from view as far as the records are concerned. He is believed to have died in Paris. Yesterday Sergei Ivanov, a spokesman for the SVR, said it was extremely rare for the agency to reveal details about a double agent whose name was previously hidden. "This doesn't happen very often," he told the Guardian.
Last night a British intelligence source said it was not known whether Bogomolets had simply been an MI6 informant, as opposed to a member of the service.
