Ignace Reiss and the Serbian Who Burned a Soviet Chief
By Constance Bell ·
The Soviet Union's attempt to buy British military secrets from a London Serbian ended in a tabloid scandal that exposed a regional intelligence chief in Amsterdam.
A single mistake in the selection of a target can strip the mask from a regional intelligence chief and collapse a network of secrets. In 1930, the Soviet Union attempted to buy the blueprints of British power, but they chose a mark who preferred the headlines of a tabloid to the silence of a payroll.
This account is reconstructed from the National Archives' catalogue descriptions of the files, rather than the original pages of the reports themselves.
Sava Popovitch was a Serbian living in London and a member of the Russian Old Orthodox Church, a jurisdiction born of a 17th-century schism that refused to accept the authority of the Belokrinitskaya Hierarchy. He was not a professional in the halls of power, but he was the man the Soviets wanted. He was approached to spy for the Soviet Union, an invitation that would eventually lead him into the crosshairs of the British security state and the inner circle of Moscow's foreign intelligence.
A Serbian in London
According to the record in KV 3/233, Popovitch "described how he had been approached to spy for the Soviet Union." The recruiters did not want trivial political gossip; they were hunting for the hard assets of empire. The record establishes that the officer handling the case "wanted information about British military, naval and air matters."
This was not a casual inquiry. The Soviet Union was building a global apparatus to penetrate the defenses of the West, and the targeting of Popovitch suggests a belief that he had access to the technical secrets of the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy. The reach of Moscow in the interwar period was wide and opportunistic, often targeting those on the fringes of society—emigrants, dissidents, and religious outliers—who could be coerced or bought. Popovitch, with his ties to a marginalized Orthodox tradition, fit the profile of a man who might feel overlooked by the British establishment and thus be open to a Soviet purse.
The Amsterdam Recruitment
The operative managing the Popovitch recruitment was not based in London, but in Amsterdam, the capital and largest city of the Netherlands. He operated under the pseudonym 'Staal'. For a time, 'Staal' was a ghost, a mid-level handler moving through the canals of the Dutch capital, coordinating the flow of secrets from the UK back to the center of the Soviet apparatus.
But the mask did not hold. The record states that 'Staal' was later identified as Ignace Reiss, a head of Soviet Intelligence in Western Europe. Reiss was not a mere field agent; he was a senior architect of Soviet operations across the continent. That a man of his rank was personally involved in the recruitment of a Serbian resident in London reveals the priority Moscow placed on British military secrets in 1930. Reiss was playing a high-stakes game of procurement, risking his own identity to secure the specifications of British war-making.
The Tabloid Betrayal
Most recruits who turn on their handlers do so in the shadows of an intelligence service. Popovitch took a different path. In 1930, he published a series of articles in the Daily Mail, a British daily middle-market tabloid founded in 1896. He went public with the recruitment attempt, transforming a clandestine operation into a public spectacle.
The sequence of events is where the record earns its irony. Following the publication of these articles, Popovitch was interviewed by MI5. He provided the service with the details of his contact with 'Staal', allowing the British to map the Soviet effort in real-time. By the time the Security Service had processed the information, the identity of the man in Amsterdam was no longer a secret. The transition from the Daily Mail to the MI5 interview room shows a target who had decided that the only way to ensure his own safety—or perhaps to secure a different kind of payment—was to burn his recruiter in the most public forum available.
This pattern of Soviet failure in Britain was not an isolated incident. The public record shows a recurring struggle to maintain operational security in the UK. Other files in the same archive series, such as KV 2/656, describe the 1927 arrest of Georg Hansen, a German national charged with espionage for the Soviet Union and subsequently deported. The Soviets were consistently overreaching, placing agents in positions where they were easily spotted by the Security Service. The Popovitch case was simply the most loud and public failure of the era.
The Desk's Reading
The public record presents this as a simple case of a target refusing to be turned and then informing the authorities. The desk's reading is that the Daily Mail articles were not a spontaneous act of civic duty, but a coordinated 'burn' operation. In the professional world of counter-intelligence, a target who goes to the press before or during an MI5 interview is usually following a script. If MI5 wanted to use Popovitch as a long-term asset to feed disinformation back to Moscow, they would have suppressed the story. Instead, the story was aired in a tabloid. This suggests the primary goal was not to gather intelligence, but to compromise Ignace Reiss's operational security and signal to the Soviet center that their Western European head was exposed.
The pattern further suggests that Popovitch was transitioned from a witness to a 'dangle'—a controlled asset used to map the Soviet network in Amsterdam. By letting the world know that 'Staal' had been burned, the British could watch how the Soviet apparatus reacted, identifying the subordinates and couriers who rushed to clean up the mess. However, the file KV 3/233 is conspicuously silent on these supporting players. It focuses on the principal, Reiss, while omitting the operational infrastructure that allowed a regional head to conduct field recruitment in the first place. The gap in the record is shaped exactly like a redacted list of couriers and safe-house operators.
Finally, the desk's reading is that the compromise of Reiss was facilitated by a leak from within the Soviet intelligence apparatus itself. A regional chief like Reiss does not typically get exposed by a low-level target unless someone inside the Moscow hierarchy has already flagged him for removal. The high risk-profile of Reiss operating under the pseudonym 'Staal' in Amsterdam makes him a prime target for internal rivals. The Daily Mail articles were likely the finishing blow in an internal Soviet power struggle, weaponized by the British to clear the board. Reiss paid the price for a rivalry he likely didn't see coming, and the British military secrets he sought remained safely in the vault.