TO MY WIFE LOIS

PROLOGUE
For years I had wondered what the last day would be like. In January 1976 after two
decades in the top echelons of the British Security Service, MI5, it was time to rejoin the
real world. I emerged for the final time from Euston Road tube station. The winter sun
shone brightly as I made my way down Gower Street toward Trafalgar Square. Fifty
yards on I turned into the unmarked entrance to an anonymous office block. Tucked
between an art college and a hospital stood the unlikely headquarters of British
Counterespionage. I showed my pass to the policeman standing discreetly in the
reception alcove and took one of the specially programmed lifts which carry senior
officers to the sixth-floor inner sanctum. I walked silently down the corridor to my room
next to the Director-Generals suite. The offices were quiet. Far below I could hear the
rumble of tube trains carrying commuters to the West End. I unlocked my door. In front
of me stood the essential tools of the intelligence officers trade - a desk, two
telephones, one scrambled for outside calls, and to one side a large green metal safe
with an oversized combination lock on the front. I hung up my coat and began
mechanically to arrange my affairs. Having seen too many retired officers at cocktail
parties loitering for scraps of news and gossip, I wanted to make a clean break. I was
determined to make a new life for myself breeding horses out in Australia.
I turned the dials on the lock and swung open the heavy safe door. In front was a mass
of Registry files stamped Top Secret, and behind them a neat stack of small combination
boxes. Files: over the years I had drawn thousands. Now these were the last Routine
agent reports circulated routinely to me, the latest reports of the Computer Working
Party, the latest analyses of Provisional IRA strength. Files always need answers. I had
none to give. The Russian diplomats file had been sent to me by a younger officer. Did I
recognize him? Not really. It was a double-agent case which had been running off and
on for years. Did I have any ideas? Not really. When you join the Service each case looks
different. When you leave they all seem the same. I carefully initialed off the files and
arranged for my secretary to take them to the Registry.
After lunch I set to work on the combination boxes, pulling them out from the back of
the safe one by one. The first contained technical details of microphones and radio
receivers - remnants of my time in the 1950s as MI5s first scientific officer. I arranged
for the contents to be sent over to the Technical Department. An hour later the head of
the Department came over to thank me. He was very much the modern government
scientist: neat, cautious, and constantly in search of money.
They were just odd things I kept, I said. I dont suppose youll have much use for
them. Its all satellites now, isnt it? Oh no, he replied. Ill enjoy reading them. He
looked a little embarrassed. He and I had never really got on. We came from different
worlds. I was a glue, sticks, and rubber-band improviser from the war; he was a defense
contractor. We shook hands and I went back to sorting out my safe.
The remaining boxes held papers gathered after I joined the Counterespionage
Department in 1964, when the search for spies in British Intelligence was at its most
intense. The handwritten notes and typed aides-memoire were packed with the
universal currency of spying - lists of suspects and details of accusations, betrayals, and
verdicts. Here, in the endless paper chase which began so clearly but ended in mystery,
lay the threads of my career.
Eventually my secretary came in and handed me two blue books. Your diaries, she
said, and together we shredded them into the burn bag beside my desk until it was time
for the final ritual. I walked along to the Establishments Office. The duty officer handed
me a file containing a list of my current secret indoctrinations. I began to sign off the
small chits. Access to Signals Intelligence and Satellite Intelligence went first. Then I
worked through the mass of case indoctrinations I held. The acquisition of secrets is
such a personal thing; the loss of them is painfully bureaucratic. Each stroke of the pen
shut the door a little farther. Within half an hour the secret world which had sustained
me for years was closed off forever. Toward dark I took a taxi over to MI5s old
headquarters at Leconfield House in Mayfair. The organization was in the process of
moving to new offices at the top of Curzon Street, but the staff bar, the Pig and Eye
Club, where my farewell party was due to be held, still remained in Leconfield House.
I went into the old building. Here, in the teak-inlaid corridors and corniced offices,
Philby, Burgess, Maclean, and Blunt were hunted down. And here too we had fought
MI5s most secret war over suspicions of an undiscovered mole at the heart of the
Service. Our suspect was the former Director-General of MI5, Sir Roger Hollis, but we
had never been able to prove it. Holliss friends had bitterly resented the accusation and
for ten long years both sides had feuded like medieval theologians, driven by instinct,
passion, and prejudice.
One by one in the 1970s the protagonists had retired, until finally the move to new
offices signaled the end of the war. But walking the corridors of Leconfield House I could
still feel the physical sense of treachery, of pursuit, and the scent of the kill.
My party was a quiet affair. People said nice things. The Director-General, Sir Michael
Hanley, made a pretty speech, and I received the customary cards with their
handwritten farewell messages. Lord Clanmorris, the great MI5 agent runner, wrote
that my departure was a sad, sad, irreplaceable loss. He meant to the office. But the
real loss was mine.
That night I slept in the flat on the top floor of the Gower Street offices, woken
occasionally by the noise of trains arriving at Euston Station. Early the next morning I
dressed, picked up my briefcase, empty for the first time, and walked down to the front
door. I said goodbye to the policeman and stepped outside onto the street. My career
was over. A sad, sad, irreplaceable loss.
1 -
It all began in 1949, on the kind of spring day that reminds you of winter. The rain
drummed against the tin roof of the prefabricated laboratory at Great Baddow in Essex,
where I was working as a Navy scientist attached to the Marconi Company. An
oscilloscope throbbed in front of me like a headache. Scattered across the trestle table
was a mass of scribbled calculations. It was not easy designing a radar system able to
pick out a submarine periscope from amid the endless rolling wave clutter; I had been
trying for years. The telephone rang. It was my father, Maurice Wright, the Marconi
Engineer in Chief.
Freddie Brundrett wants to see us, he said.
That was nothing new. Brundrett had been Chief of the Royal Naval Scientific Service
and was now Chief Scientist of the Ministry of Defense; he had been taking a personal
interest of late in the progress of the project. A decision was needed soon over whether
to fund production of a prototype system. It would be expensive. Postwar defense
research was an endless battle against financial attrition, and I prepared myself for
another ill-tempered skirmish. I welcomed the chance of talking to Brundrett direct. He
was an old family friend; both my father and I had worked for him in Admiralty Research
during the war. Perhaps, I thought, there might be the chance of a new job.
The following day we drove down to London in a steady drizzle and parked the car close
to Brundretts office in Storeys Gate. Whitehall looked gray and tired; the colonnades
and statues seemed ill suited to a rapidly changing world. Clement Attlee was still
promising teeth and spectacles, but the winter had been hard and people grew
restless under rationing. The euphoria of victory in 1945 had long since given way to
sullen resentment.
We introduced ourselves to the neat secretary in Brundretts outer office. The annex
hummed in that subdued Whitehall way. We were not the first to arrive. I greeted a few
familiar faces, scientists from the various Services laboratories. It seemed a large
turnout for a routine meeting, I thought. Two men I had never met detached
themselves from the huddle.
You must be the Wrights, said the shorter of the two abruptly. He spoke with a
clipped military accent. My name is Colonel Malcolm Cumming from the War Office,
and this is my colleague Hugh Winterborn. Another stranger came over. And this is
John Henry, one of our friends from the Foreign Office. Cumming employed the curious
code Whitehall uses to distinguish its secret servants. Whatever the meeting was about,
I thought, it was unlikely to concern antisubmarine warfare, not with a contingent from
MI5 and MI6 present. Brundrett appeared at the door of his office and invited us in.
His office, like his reputation, was vast. Giant sash windows and high ceilings completely
dwarfed his desk. He showed us to the conference table, which had been carefully lined
with ink blotters and decanters Brundrett was a small, energetic man, one of that select
band, along with Lindemann, Tizard, and Cockcroft, responsible for gearing Britain for
the technical and scientific demands of fighting World War II. As Assistant Director of
Scientific Research for the Admiralty, and later Deputy Director of the Royal Naval
Scientific Service, he had been largely responsible for recruiting scientists into
government service during the war. He was not especially gifted as a scientist, but he
understood the vital role scientists could play. His policy was to promote youth
wherever possible and because the Service chiefs trusted him he was able to get the
resources necessary to enable them to perform at their best.
As a weary and diminished Britain girded herself to fight a new war in the late 1940s -
the Cold War - Brundrett was the obvious choice to advise on how best to galvanize the
scientific community once again. He was appointed Deputy Scientific Adviser to the
Minister of Defense and succeeded Sir John Cockcroft as Scientific Adviser and Chairman
of the Defense Research Policy Committee in 1954.
Gentlemen, began Brundrett when we were seated. It is quite clear to all of us, I
think, that we are now in the midst of war and have been since events in Berlin last
year.
Brundrett made it clear that the Russian blockade of Berlin and the Western airlift which
followed had made a profound impact on defense thinking.
This war is going to be fought with spies, not soldiers, at least in the short term, he
went on, and I have been discussing where we stand with Sir Percy Sillitoe, the
Director-General of the Security Service. To be frank, he concluded, the situation is
not good. Brundrett crisply described the problem. It had become virtually impossible
to run agents successfully behind the Iron Curtain, and there was a serious lack of
intelligence about the intentions of the Soviet Union and her allies. Technical and
scientific initiatives were needed to fill the gap.
I have discussed the matter in outline with some of you here, Colonel Cumming from
the Security Service and Peter Dixon representing MI6, and I have formed this
committee to assess the options and initiate work at once. I have also suggested to Sir
Percy that he obtain the services of a young scientist to help on the research side. I
intend to submit the name of Peter Wright, whom some of you may know. He is
currently attached to the Services Electronics Research Laboratory and he will go over
on a part-time basis until we find out how much work needs doing. Brundrett looked
across at me. Youll do that for us, wont you, Peter?
Before I could reply he turned to my father. Well obviously need help from Marconi, G.
M., so I have co-opted you onto this committee as well. (Father was always known in
the Navy by the name that Marconi was known by in the old days. )
It was typical Brundrett, issuing invitations as if they were orders and bending the
Whitehall machine thoroughly out of shape to get his way.
For the rest of the afternoon we discussed ideas. The MI5 and MI6 contingents were
conspicuously silent and I assumed it was the natural reticence of the secret servant in
the presence of outsiders. Each scientist gave an extempore synopsis of any research in
his laboratory which might possibly have an intelligence application. Obviously a full-
scale technical review of intelligence services requirements would take time, but it was
clear that they urgently needed new techniques of eavesdropping which did not require
entry to premises. Soviet security was so tight that the possibility of gaining entry, other
than through party walls or when an embassy was being rebuilt, was remote. By teatime
we had twenty suggestions of possible areas of fruitful research.
Brundrett instructed me to draw up a paper assessing them, and the meeting broke up.
As I was leaving, a man from the Post Office Technical Department, John Taylor, who
had talked at some length during the meeting about post office work on listening
devices, introduced himself. Well be working together on this, he said, as we
exchanged telephone numbers. Ill be in touch next week.
On the drive back to Great Baddow, Father and I discussed the meeting excitedly. It had
been so gloriously unpredictable, in the way that Whitehall often was during the war
and had so seldom been since. I was thrilled at the opportunity to escape from
antisubmarine work; he because it continued the thread of secret intelligence which had
run through the family for four and a half decades.
2 -
My father joined the Marconi Company from university in 1912, and began work as an
engineer on an improved method of detecting radio signals. Together with Captain H. J.
Round, he succeeded in developing a vacuum receiver which made the interception of
long-range communications possible for the first time.
Two days before World War I began, he was working with these receivers in the old
Marconi Laboratory at Hall Street, Chelmsford, when he realized he was picking up
German naval signals. He took the first batch to the Marconi works manager, Andrew
Gray, who was a personal friend of Captain Reggie Hall, the head of the Naval
Intelligence Department.
Hall was the dominant figure in British Intelligence during World War I and was
responsible for attacking German ciphers from the famous Admiralty Room 40. He
arranged for my father to travel up to Liverpool Street Station on the footplate of a
specially chartered locomotive. After studying the material he insisted Marconi release
my father to build intercept and direction-finding stations for the Navy. The central
problem facing Naval Intelligence at the outbreak of World War I was how to detect the
German High Seas Fleet putting to sea in time to enable the British Fleet, based at Scapa
Flow, to intercept them. Naval Intelligence knew that when the German Fleet was
quiescent she lay at the eastern end of the Kiel Canal. Hall believed it might be possible
to detect the German Commander-in-Chiefs wireless communications on board his
flagship as they passed through the Kiel Canal into the North Sea.
My father set to work to design sufficiently sensitive equipment and eventually
developed aperiodic direction-finding. This enabled the bearing of the wanted signal
to be accurately identified among the mass of other interfering signals. It took several
years to become operational but eventually became an important weapon in the war
against the U boats. Even today all direction-finding equipment is aperiodic.
In 1915, before the system was fully operational, my father suggested to Hall that the
best solution was to locate a direction finder in Christiania (now Oslo). Norway at this
time was neutral, but the British Embassy could not be used for fear of alerting the
Germans, so Hall asked my father if he was prepared to go and run the station
clandestinely for MI6. Within days he was on his way to Norway, posing as a commercial
traveler trading in agricultural medicines. He set up in a small hotel in a side street in
Christiania and rented an attic room high enough to rig direction-finding wireless
without being conspicuous.
The MI6 station in the Embassy supplied him with communications and spare parts, but
it was dangerous work. His radio equipment was bound to give him away eventually. He
was not part of the diplomatic staff and would be denied if discovered. At best he faced
internment for the rest of the war, at worst he risked the attentions of German
Intelligence.
The operation ran successfully for six months, giving the Navy invaluable early warning
of German Fleet intentions. Then one morning he came down to breakfast at his usual
table. He looked casually across the street to see a new poster being pasted onto the
wall opposite. It was his photograph with an offer of a reward for information leading to
his arrest.
He had worked out his escape route with MI6 before the operation began. He quickly
finished his breakfast, returned to his room, carefully packed his wireless equipment in
its case and pushed it under the bed. He gathered up his travel documents, passport,
and Naval identity card, leaving a substantial quantity of cash in the hope that it might
encourage the hotelier to forget about him.
Rather than taking the road toward the Swedish coast which the Norwegian authorities
would assume to be his most likely escape route, he set off to the southwest. Ten miles
down the coast he sat down on a rock by the roadside. Sometime later, a British Naval
lieutenant walked up to him and asked him who he was. Father identified himself and
he was taken to a launch and ferried out to a waiting British destroyer. Years later,
when I was coming up for retirement, I tried to find the details of this operation in the
MI6 files. I arranged with Sir Maurice Oldfield, the then Chief of MI6, to spend the day in
their Registry looking for the papers. But I could find nothing; the MI6 weeders had
routinely destroyed all the records years before. I was born in 1916 at my
grandmothers house in Chesterfield, where my mother had gone to stay while my
father was in Norway for MI6. There was a Zeppelin raid on nearby Sheffield that night,
and I arrived very prematurely. There were no hospital beds available because of the
pressure of the war, but my mother kept me alive with an improvised incubator of glass
chemical jars and hot-water bottles. After World War I my father rejoined the Marconi
Company. He became a protege of Marconi himself and was made Head of Research.
We moved to a large house by the sea near Frinton. But this lasted only a few months,
when we moved to a house on the outskirts of Chelmsford. The house often resembled
a disused wireless factory. Radios in various states of disrepair and tin boxes filled with
circuitry were hidden in every corner. My father was an intense, emotional, rather
quick-tempered man - more of an artist than an engineer. As early as I can remember he
used to take me out into the garden or onto the open fields above the Essex beaches to
teach me the mysteries of wireless. He spent hours explaining valves and crystals and
showed me how to delicately turn the dials of a set so that the random static suddenly
became a clear signal. He taught me how to make my own experiments and I can still
remember his pride when I demonstrated my crude skills to visiting guests like Sir Arthur
Eddington and J. J. Thomson. MI6 had close connections with the Marconi Company
after World War I, and my father retained his contact with them. Marconi had a large
marine division responsible for fitting and manning wireless in ships. It provided perfect
cover for MI6, who would arrange with my father to have one of their officers placed as
a wireless operator on a ship visiting an area in which they had an interest.
Admiral Hall was a visitor to the house; he and my father would disappear into the
greenhouse together for hours at a time to discuss in private some new development.
My father also knew Captain Mansfield Cumming, the first Chief of MI6. He admired
Cumming greatly, for both his courage and his technical ability. He knew Captain Vernon
Kell, the founder of MI5, much less well, but did not like him. As with Oxford and
Cambridge, people are usually disposed either to MI5 or to MI6, and my father very
definitely leaned in favor of MI6. The Marconi Company during the 1920s was one of
the most exciting places in the world for a scientist to work. Marconi, known to
everyone by his initials, G.M., was a superb picker of men, and had the courage to
invest in his visions. His greatest success was to create the first shortwave radio beam
system, and he can justly claim to have laid the foundations of modern communications.
As with so many British achievements, it was done against the opposition of the British
Government and the top scientists of the day.
Before World War I Britain decided that a long-wave radio system should be built to
replace the cable system as the principal means of communication with the Empire. The
decision was held in abeyance during the war. But Marconi believed it was possible to
project short wavelength transmissions over vast distances using beams. The use of
shortwave beams promised a greater volume of traffic at much higher speeds. Despite
the advances in wireless made during the war, Marconis vision was derided as
amateur science by a Royal Commission in 1922. One member even concluded that
radio was a finished art. Marconi issued a challenge. He offered to build, free of
charge, any link across the world - provided the government would suspend long-wave
development until the beam system had passed its trials, and provided they would
adopt it if the trials were successful. The government agreed and specified the toughest
contract they could devise. They asked for a link from Grimsby to Sydney, Australia, and
demanded that it operate 250 words a minute over a twelve-hour period during the
trials without using more than twenty kilowatts of power. Finally they demanded that
the circuit be operational within twelve months. These were awesome specifications.
Radio was still in its infancy and little was known about generating power at stable
frequencies. The project would have been impossible without the commitment of the
Marconi technical team, consisting of my father, Captain H J Round, and C S Franklin.
Marconi had a special talent for finding brilliant scientists who were largely self-taught.
He found Franklin, for instance, trimming arc lamps in an Ipswich factory for a few
shillings a week. Within a few years he rose to become the outstanding technical man in
the company.
The proposed Grimsby-to-Sydney link astonished the rest of the radio communications
industry. My father often described in later years walking down Broadway with David
Sarnoff, the then head of RCA, when the project was at its height.
Has Marconi gone mad? asked Sarnoff. This project will finish him.
Itll never work.
Father replied: G.M. and Franklin think it will. Well, you can kick my ass all the way
down Broadway if it does, said Sarnoff.
Three months later the circuit was operational, on contract time. It worked twelve hours
a day for seven days at 350 words a minute and was, in my view, one of the great
technical achievements of this century. My fathers only regret was that he never took
the opportunity to kick Sarnoffs ass all the way down Broadway!
My youth was spent living through this great excitement. I suffered constantly through
ill-health. I developed rickets and wore leg irons until practically into my teens. But
there were compensations. Nearly every day when my father was at home he collected
me from school and drove me to his laboratory. I would spend hours watching him and
his assistants as the great race from Grimsby to Sydney unfolded. It taught me a lesson
which stayed with me for life - that on the big issues the experts are very rarely right.
The 1930s opened hopefully for the Wright family. We scarcely noticed the growing
worldwide financial crisis. I had joined Bishops Stortford College, a small but hardily
independent school, where I began to shine academically and finally threw off the ill-
health which had dogged me since birth. I returned home for the summer holidays of
1931 having passed my school certificate with credits in all subjects. The following term I
was due to join the University Group, with every expectation of a good scholarship to
Oxford or Cambridge. A week later my world disintegrated. One evening my father
came home and broke the news that he and Franklin had both been sacked. It was days
before he could even try to explain, and years before I understood what had happened.
In the late 1920s Marconi had merged with the Cable Companies in the belief that only
by cooperation with them could wireless gain the investment necessary to ensure its
emergence as the principal method of worldwide communications. But as the slump
developed, wireless posed more and more of a threat to the cable interests. They were
dominant in the new company and slashing cuts were made in wireless research and the
installations of new systems. Marconi, old and sick, had retired to Italy, but not even an
intervention from him could secure a change of heart in the new management. Franklin,
my father, and many others were sacked. For the next decade long-distance wireless
communication stagnated and we as a family passed into years of great hardship.
Within a few months my father slipped into the abyss of alcoholism. He could no longer
afford to keep both his sons at school, and as I was older and already had my school
certificate I was the one to leave. The trauma of those events brought back my ill health
and I was afflicted with a chronic stammer which rendered me at times virtually
speechless. In the course of that short summer holiday I changed from a schoolboy with
a secure future to a man with no future at all. The decision to remove me from school
and its effect on my health consumed my father with guilt. He drove himself to further
drinking excesses. My mother coped as best she could, but bereft of status and income
she gradually became isolated until the only visitors were the nurses called to restrain
my father after a dangerously prolonged bout with the Scotch bottle.
Years later, when I began to search out for MI5 the well-born Englishmen who had
become addicted to Communism in the 1930s, this period of my life came to fascinate
me. They had enjoyed to the full the privileged background and education denied to me,
while my family had suffered at the capricious hand of capitalism. I experienced at first
hand the effects of slump and depression, yet it was they who turned to espionage. I
became the hunter, and they the hunted. In one sense the explanation was simple. It
was 1932. I had no qualifications. I was fifteen, I needed a job, and I had little time for
political philosophy. I advertised in the personal columns of THE TIMES for any work.
The first reply was from a woman named Margaret Leigh, who ran a small farm called
Achnadarroch at Plockton near Wester Ross, Scotland. I became her farmhand. There
was no pay, just board and lodgings. But amid the rolling hills and endless skies of
Scotland, I gradually recovered from what had gone before, and in time discovered the
greatest love of my life - agriculture. Margaret Leigh was an idealist. She wanted to run
her farm as a training ground for boys from London slums so that they could obtain
employment as farm managers. In the event, the idea never took off, and she decided
instead to write a novel about life on Achnadarroch; she wrote while I tended the farm.
And at night, when I had finished the chores, she made me read aloud what she had
written until slowly my stutter was mastered. The book was eventually published and
became a great success under the title HIGHLAND HOMESPUN. In spring 1935 we were
evicted from Achnadarroch by a landlord greedy for more rent than we could afford to
pay. We moved to another, cheaper farm in Cornwall and our life went on much as
before. My ambition at this time was to become an agricultural scientist researching
into food production techniques. But with my truncated formal education I could not
hope to qualify for a scholarship. There were no grants in the 1930s. Eventually, with a
little help from Margaret, some astute pig dealing of my own, and a useful family
connection with the Master of St. Peters College, Oxford, I was able to raise enough
money to get a place at the School of Rural Economy. A year after I reached Oxford I
married my wife, Lois. It was 1938. War was in the air. Like most young people we felt
we might not have too long together. By the time I went up to Oxford my father had
begun to repair the damage of the previous six years of alcoholism. At my mothers
instigation he had begun to work again at the Marconi Company as a consultant. And
partly, I think, he was jolted by the realization that war was once more imminent.
Anxious to help as he had in 1915, he approached Sir Frederick Brundrett in the Naval
Scientific Service. Brundrett told him frankly that his reputation for alcoholism made a
senior position impossible. Instead Brundrett offered him a post as an ordinary scientific
officer for a trial period. I always admired my father tremendously for this. He sacrificed
half what he was earning from the Marconi Company as a consultant to come and work
at an experimental bench with scientists who were twenty years younger than he was.
He made no issue of having once been the Marconi head of research. In a sense I think
he was anxious to atone for the past; but he also genuinely believed that war was
coming and that everyone had a duty to contribute.
His long experience scanning the ether ensured that his career soon flourished again. He
was given charge of technical developments of the Y intercepts - the tactical intercepts
of German Communications - and later he became Chief Scientist at the Admiralty
Signals Establishment. Once again he was back in the Great Game, and he rediscovered
his youth. By 1943 he was responsible for drawing up the signal plans for D-Day. It was a
massive task. But after every working day he sat into the small hours with his wireless,
listening to the chatter of Morse, logging and analyzing it ready for the next day. I often
think he was at his happiest hunched over those sets, headphones clamped around his
head, trying to make sense of the mysterious electronic universe. At the outbreak of
war the School of Rural Economy closed and my tutor, Scott Watson, became Chief
Scientist at the Ministry of Agriculture, taking most of the staff with him to begin the
vital task of preparing the countrys food supplies I was now the only member of the
family not in some way involved in the war effort. My brother had joined the Services
Electronics Research Laboratory and my sister was an intercept operator for the Wrens.
(She later worked closely with R. V. Jones on SIGINT, and married Robert Sutton, the
head of SERL.) I wrote to Brundrett in the hope that there might be a space for me
somewhere in the Admiralty. To my surprise I received a telegram inviting me to his
office.
Brundrett had known me for years. He was a keen farmer who successfully bred Friesian
cattle and was much interested in my experiences at Achnadarroch. He asked me what I
thought I could do in the Admiralty and I explained that years spent watching my father
at work had given me as good a grounding in electronics as I could have got at
university. Within ten minutes he had arranged for me to start at the Admiralty
Research Laboratory the following week. My section at the Admiralty Research
Laboratory (ARL) was run superbly by Stephen Butterworth, who for some unknown
reason was always called Sam. He was a tall, gaunt man with a curly mop of dark hair.
He smoked a pipe continuously, worked like a madman, and gathered around him a
team of extraordinarily talented young scientists, including Massey, Gunn,
Wigglesworth, Bates, and Crick. I felt terribly insecure when I arrived at ARL because of
my lack of qualifications. Every night I sat up at the kitchen table in our small flat in
Hampton Wick learning advanced physics from textbooks as German bombs dropped all
around. But Butterworth was a constant source of encouragement. His one failing was
his greatest strength: he did the job silently, leaving self-publicity to others. At the end
of the war the reward for his genius and his quiet industry was a paltry OBE.
The Admiralty Research Laboratorys contribution to winning the war has been much
undervalued. One of the most pressing problems facing Britain at the outbreak of war
was the threat of magnetic mines. ARL began work on developing degaussing systems to
neutralize our ships magnetic fields and thus protect them. Without a really effective
system our ability to fight on in 1940 would have been seriously in question. At Dunkirk,
for instance, thousands of mines littered the shallow waters off the coast. Hitler was
convinced that these would prevent any mass evacuation of British forces. Butterworth
knew that the German mines worked North Pole downward only, and suggested we
magnetize our ships South Pole downward so that the ships repelled the mines. The
Admiralty embarked on a massive program of reversing the magnetism of all the ships
going to Dunkirk. The result was that not a single ship was lost to mines.
In the turmoil of war, there was little choice but to give young people their head. Soon
after Dunkirk I and another young ARL scientist, Ray Gossage, were given the job of
degaussing the battleship PRINCE OF WALES. She lay in dry dock in Rosyth and for her
next voyage was scheduled to carry Winston Churchill to the Atlantic Conference with
Roosevelt. She had been built in Belfast in a yard which had left her magnetic field
running around her rather than from end to end. The original degaussing had been a
failure and she was considered highly unsafe in her present form.
Gossage and I worked out an improvised system of flashing out the athwartships
magnetization by winding a giant coil lengthwise around the ship. We then energized
this by connecting it up to a submarine battery. The whole operation took days to
arrange and involved the whole crew of the ship. As we watched from the dry dock in
Rosyth, hundreds of men worked in unison to our commands, though we were both
barely in our mid-twenties.
Science in wartime is often a case of improvising with the materials to hand, solving a
problem as best you can at the time, rather than planning ten or fifteen years ahead,
when it may be too late. The war shaped my later approach to technical intelligence. It
taught me the value of improvisation and showed me, too, just how effective operations
can be when the men of action listen to young men with a belief in practical, inventive
science. Sadly, by the end of the war this attitude had all but disappeared; the dead
hand of committees began to squeeze the life out of England.
From 1942 onward I worked on the first anti-midget-submarine detection systems. They
were used successfully to protect the harbors during the torch landings in North Africa
and later in Northwest Europe. This work got me involved in the operation to sink the
prize German battleship TIRPITZ. She lay in Altenfjord and posed an ever-present danger
to British shipping. An operation to sink her, using midget submarines, was planned. We
knew that the Germans were protecting Altenfjord with submarine detectors consisting
of rows of coils on the seabed which picked up the magnetic flux of a passing craft.
These were similar to those I had developed at ARL, so I was asked to come up with
ideas for degaussing our X-Craft midget submarines to enable them to pass into the
fjord undetected.
The technical problems of degaussing a submarine are far more complex than those of a
ship, but eventually I found that an electro-magnet placed along the length of the
submarine and energized with the right amount of current would neutralize the loops of
the submarine detectors on the seabed. I also calculated that if the X-Craft went in
during a magnetic storm, this would increase the chances of nondetection by a factor of
between 10 and 100. I traveled up to the Magnetic Observatory at Eskdalemuir and
found that they had a good chance of predicting a storm of sufficient size, so I put my
findings up to the Navy. In 1944 the degaussed British X-Craft went in under cover of a
magnetic storm. With great bravery, the crews managed to place charges against
TIRPITZ and cripple her. Three VCs were won that day. But the bravery would have
counted for nothing without the technical backup of ARL. By the end of the war the
course of my life had changed irrevocably. Although agriculture remained my first love,
I was clearly destined not to return to it. I sat instead for the postwar Scientific Civil
Service competition chaired by C P Snow. It was designed to sort out the best scientists
among the hundreds recruited during the wartime expansion. I passed out joint top with
290 marks out of 300. Butterworth congratulated me warmly. All those nights sitting up
with the textbooks had finally paid off, though the credit was largely his. My father
returned to the Marconi Company as Engineer in Chief in 1946, and I began work as a
Principal Scientific Officer at the Services Electronics Research Laboratory that same
year. For the next four years we worked closely alongside each other, the trials of the
1930s an unspoken bond between us, until that telephone call from Sir Frederick
Brundrett in 1949 brought MI5 into my life.
3 -
A few days after that first meeting in Brundretts office in 1949, I received a telephone
call from John Taylor inviting me down to London. He suggested St. Jamess Park and
we met on the bridge in front of Buckingham Palace. It struck me as an odd way to
conduct the business of national security, strolling among the pelicans and the ducks,
pausing occasionally to ponder our reflections in the pool. Taylor was a small man with
a pencil mustache and a gray, sharpish face. He had been one of Montgomerys
communications officers during the North African campaign, and although now a Post
Office technician, he retained his abrupt military bearing. He ran the technical research,
such as it was, for MI5 and MI6 from his laboratory inside the Special Investigations Unit
of the Post Office at Dollis Hill. Taylor made certain I knew he was in charge. He told me
bluntly that, apart from one brief visit to MI5 headquarters at Leconfield House to meet
Colonel Cumming, I would have to deal through him as an intermediary. Taylor
discouraged discussion about the office; he merely explained that I would be given the
title of external scientific adviser and that I would be unpaid for my duties. For several
years we continued to meet in St. Jamess Park about once a month to talk over the
written reports on technical matters which I filed to C. W. Wright, the secretary of
Brundretts committee. (Wright later became Deputy Secretary at the Ministry of
Defense.)
Taylor and I divided up the technical work. The Post Office pressed ahead with research
into infrared detection. I began using the resources of the Services Electronics Research
Laboratory to develop new microphones and look into ways of getting sound reflections
from office furniture. I was already familiar with the technical principles of resonance
from my antisubmarine work. When sound waves impact with a taut surface such as a
window or a filing cabinet, thousands of harmonics are created. The knack is to detect
the point at which there is minimum distortion so that the sound waves can be picked
up as intelligible speech.
One day in 1951 I received a telephone call from Taylor. He sounded distinctly agitated.
Weve been beaten to it, he said breathlessly. Can we meet this afternoon?
I met him later that day on a park bench opposite the Foreign Office. He described how
one of the diplomats in our Embassy in Moscow had been listening to the WHF receiver
in his office which he used to monitor Russian military aircraft traffic. Suddenly he heard
the British Air Attache coming over his receiver loud and clear. Realizing the. Attache
was being bugged in some way, he promptly reported the matter. Taylor and I discussed
what type of microphone might be involved and he arranged for a Diplomatic Wireless
Service engineer named Don Bailey to investigate. I briefed Bailey before he left for
Moscow on how best to detect the device. For the first time I began to realize just how
bereft British Intelligence was of technical expertise. They did not even possess the
correct instruments, and I had to lend Bailey my own. A thorough search was made of
the Embassy but nothing was ever found.
The Russians had clearly been warned and turned the device off. From questioning
Bailey on his return it was clear to me that this was not a normal radio microphone, as
there were strong radio signals which were plain carriers present when the device was
operating. I speculated that the Russians, like us, were experimenting with some kind of
resonance device. Within six months I was proved right. Taylor summoned me down to
St. Jamess Park for another urgent meeting. He told me that the U. S. State
Department sweepers had been routinely sanitizing the American Ambassadors office
in Moscow in preparation for a visit by the U.S. Secretary of State. They used a standard
tunable signal generator to generate what is known as the howl round effect, similar
to the noise made when a radio station talks to someone on the telephone while his
home radio or television is switched on. The howl round detected a small device
lodged in the Great Seal of the United States on the wall behind the Ambassadors desk.
The howl frequency was 1800 MH, and the Americans had assumed that the operating
frequency for the device must be the same. But tests showed that the device was
unstable and insensitive when operating at this frequency. In desperation the Americans
turned to the British for help in solving the riddle of how the Thing, as it was called,
worked. Brundrett arranged for me to have a new, secure laboratory in a field at Great
Baddow, and the Thing was solemnly brought up by Taylor and two Americans. The
device was wrapped in cotton wool inside a small wooden box that looked as if it had
once held chess pieces. It was about eight inches long, with an aerial on top which fed
into a cavity. Inside the cavity was a metal mushroom with a flat top which could be
adjusted to give it a variable capacity. Behind the mushroom was a thin gossamer
diaphragm, to receive the speech, which appeared to have been pierced. The Americans
sheepishly explained that one of their scientists had accidentally put his finger through
it. The crisis could not have come at a worse time for me. The antisubmarine-detection
system was approaching its crucial trials and demanded long hours of attention. But
every night and each weekend I made my way across the fields at the back of the
Marconi building to my deserted Nissen hut. I worked flat out for ten weeks to solve the
mystery.
First I had to repair the diaphragm. The Thing bore the hallmarks of a piece of
equipment which the Russians had rushed into service, presumably to ensure it was
installed before the Secretary of States visit. They clearly had some kind of microscopic
jig to install the diaphragm, because each time I used tweezers the thin film tore.
Eventually, through trial and error, I managed to lay the diaphragm on first and clamp it
on afterward. It wasnt perfect, but it worked. Next I measured the length of the aerial
to try to gauge the way it resonated. It did appear that 1800 MH was the correct
frequency. But when I set the device up and made noises at it with an audio-signal
generator, it was just as the Americans had described - impossible to tune effectively.
But after four weekends I realized that we had all been thinking about the Thing upside
down. We had all assumed that the metal plate needed to be opened right out to
increase resonance, when in fact the closer the plate was to the mushroom the greater
the sensitivity. I tightened the plate right up and tuned the radiating signal down to 800
megacycles. The Thing began to emit a high-pitched tone. I rang my father up in a state
of great excitement. Ive got the Thing working!
I know, he said, and the howl is breaking my eardrums! I arranged to demonstrate
the Thing to Taylor, and he traveled up with Colonel Cumming, Hugh Winterborn and
the two American sweepers. My father came along too, bringing another self-taught
Marconi scientist named R J Kemp, who was now their Head of Research. I had installed
the device against the far wall of the hut and rigged up another monitor in an adjoining
room so that the sounds of the audio generator could be heard as if operationally.
I tuned the dials to 800 and began to explain the mystery. The Americans looked aghast
at the simplicity of it all. Cumming and Winterborn were smug. This was just after the
calamity of the Burgess and Maclean affair. The defection to the Soviet Union of these
two well born Foreign Office diplomats in 1951 caused outrage in the USA, and any
small way in which British superiority could be demonstrated was, I soon realized, of
crucial importance to them. Kemp was very flattering, rightly judging that it would only
be a matter of time before Marconi got a contract to develop one themselves.
How soon can we use one? asked Cumming.
Kemp and I explained that it would probably take at least a year to produce equipment
which would work reliably. I should think we can provide the premises, Malcolm, said
Kemp to Cumming, and probably one man to work under Peter. That might get you the
prototype, but after that youll have to get funding. Well, its quite impossible for us to
pay, as you know, replied Cumming. The Treasury will never agree to expand the
secret vote. Kemp raised his eyebrows. This was obviously an argument Cumming had
deployed many times before in order to get facilities for nothing. But surely, I
ventured, if the government are serious about developing things technically for MI5
and MI6 they will have to allocate money on an open vote.
Theyre most reluctant to do that, replied Gumming, shaking his head.
As you know, we dont really exist.
He looked at me as if a sudden thought had occurred to him. Now, perhaps if you were
to approach the Admiralty on our behalf to ask for assistance on their open vote...
This was my initiation into the bizarre method of handling Intelligence Services finance.
It was a problem which was to plague me until well into the 1960s. Instead of having
resources adequate for their technical requirements, the Intelligence Services were
forced to spend most of the postwar period begging from the increasingly reluctant
Armed Services. In my view, it was this more than any other factor which contributed to
the amateurism of British Intelligence in the immediate postwar era.
But, as bidden, I set out to persuade the Admiralty to carry the development costs of
the new microphone. I made an urgent appointment to see Brundretts successor as
Chief of the Naval Scientific Service, Sir William Cook. I knew Cook quite well. He was a
wiry, redhaired man with piercing blue eyes and a penchant for grandiose schemes. He
was a brilliant organizer and positively bubbled with ideas. I had first dealt with him
after the war when he asked me to work under him on a prototype Blue Streak project,
which was eventually cancelled when Sir Ben Lockspeiser, then Chief Scientist at the
Ministry of Supply, had a crisis of conscience. Ironically, Cook himself came to share a
suspicion about nuclear weapons, though more for practical and political reasons than
moral ones. He felt that Britain was being hasty in the production of the A-Bomb, and
feared that as modern rocketry developed, the Navy would inevitably lose out. He
realized too, I suspect, that our obsession with the bomb was faintly ludicrous in the
face of growing American and Russian superiority. This, incidentally, was a view which
was quite widely held by scientists working at a lower level in the Services in the 1950s.
I explained to Cook that the new microphone might have as yet unforeseeable
intelligence advantages, from which the Navy would obviously benefit if they agreed to
fund the project. He smiled at this transparent justification but by the end of the
meeting agreed to provide six Navy scientists from his staff and to finance a
purposebuilt laboratory at Marconi to house the work.
Within eighteen months we were ready to demonstrate the first prototype, which was
given the code name SATYR. Kemp and I presented ourselves at the front door of MI5
headquarters at Leconfield House. Hugh Winterborn met us and took us up to a spartan
office on the fifth floor and introduced a tall, hunched man wearing a pin striped suit
and a lopsided smile.
My name is Roger Hollis, he said, standing up from behind his desk and shaking my
hand stiffly. I am afraid the Director-General cannot be with us today for this
demonstration, so I am standing in as his deputy.
Hollis did not encourage small talk. His empty desk betrayed a man who believed in the
swift dispatch of business. I showed him the equipment without delay. It comprised a
suitcase filled with radio equipment for operating SATYR, and two aerials disguised as
ordinary umbrellas which folded out to make a receiver and transmitter dish. We set
SATYR up in an MI5 flat on South Audley Street with the umbrellas in Hollis office. The
test worked perfectly. We heard everything from test speech to the turn of the key in
the door.
Wonderful, Peter, Hollis kept on saying, as we listened to the test.
Its black magic.
Cumming tittered in the background.
I realized then that MI5 officers, cocooned throughout the war in their hermetic
buildings, had rarely experienced the thrill of a technical advance. After the test was
over, Hollis stood behind his desk and made a formal little speech about what a fine day
this was for the Service and how this was just what Brundrett had in mind when he
formed his working party. It was all rather condescending, as if the servants had found
the lost diamond tiara in the rose garden. SATYR did indeed prove to be a great success.
The Americans promptly ordered twelve sets and rather cheekily copied the drawings
and made twenty more. Throughout the 1950s, until it was superseded by new
equipment, SATYR was used by the British, Americans, Canadians, and Australians as
one of the best methods of obtaining covert coverage. But more important to me, the
development of SATYR established my credentials as a scientist with MI5. From then on
I was consulted on a regular basis about an increasing number of their technical
problems. I still dealt exclusively with Cumming but I began to learn a little about the
structure of his Department - A Branch. He controlled four sections. A1 provided
resources for MI5, ranging from microphones to lockpicks. A2 was the technical
department, which contained personnel like Hugh Winterborn who used the resources
of A1. A3 was police liaison with the Special Branch and A4 was the growing empire of
Watchers, responsible for tailing foreign diplomats and others around the streets of
London.
Cumming had one fundamental flaw when it came to technical matters. He felt A Branch
should run science, rather than the other way around. Consequently the Service as a
whole was denied long-overdue modernization. As long as we were discussing specific
technical requirements, our relationship was fruitful. But sooner or later we would
move into an area in which I could not advise MI5 unless he or Winterborn took me fully
into his confidence. For instance, Winterborn often asked if I had any ideas on
telephone interception. I explained that it was impossible to work on the problem
unless I knew what current techniques were employed.
Well, of course, now we are coming onto an area which is highly classified and I rather
feel we should steer away from it, Cumming would say, slapping the table nervously,
much to Winterborns irritation.
The same thing happened with the Watchers. The main problem facing MI5 during the
1950s was how to detect and follow the increasingly large number of Russians through
the streets of London without giving themselves away.
Have you any ideas, Peter? asked Cumming, as if I might have a solution in my top
pocket. I suggested that at the very least I would need to see at first hand the scale of
the watching operation. Cumming said he would see what he could arrange, but I heard
nothing more. But, despite the difficulties, it was clear that MI5 found me useful. By
1954 I was spending two full days a week at Leconfield House. After one lengthy session,
Cumming invited me to lunch at his club. We walked together across St. Jamess Park
and made our way down Pall Mall to the In and Out Club, Cummings swinging the
umbrella he habitually carried. As we sat down at our table I realized that, even though
I had been dealing with Cumming for five years, this was the first time we had ever
socialized. He was a short man, not overly endowed with intellectual skills but intensely
loyal to MIS. Like the policemen in John Buchan novels, he seemed as likely to be
chasing the hero as the villain. He had been a Rifle Brigade Officer and belonged to the
long military tradition inside MI5 which stretched back to the founder, Vernon Kell. He
was related to the first Chief of MI6, Captain Mansfield Cumming, a fact which he made
sure I knew almost as soon as I had met him. He had also been responsible for recruiting
the present Director-General of MI5, Sir Dick Goldsmith White. They had taken a party
of boys on a camping holiday together in the 1930s. White was not happy as a
schoolteacher and Cumming persuaded him to apply to MI5. White proved a brilliant,
intuitive intelligence officer and soon far outstripped his mentor, but the debt he owed
Cumming served the latter well in the 1950s.
Cumming was wealthy in his own right. He owned a large estate in Sussex. In the
country he played the squire, while in town he became the spy. It appealed to the boy
scout in him. In fact most of his career had been spent doing MI5s books and other
routine administration and he had coexisted uneasily with the gifted university elite
who were drafted into Intelligence during the war. But Cumming did have one
astonishing talent. He maintained a legendary number of contacts. These were not just
clubland cronies, of which he had many. He maintained them in all kinds of bizarre
places. If the office wanted a one-legged washerwoman who spoke Chinese, Cumming
could provide her. When the A Branch directorship became vacant, Cumming was the
obvious man to fill it.
Cumming ordered quails eggs and asked a little about my life history. He listened in an
uninterested way over lunch until finally he ordered two brandies and turned to the
purpose of his hospitality. I wanted to ask you, Peter, about how you felt things were
going in the Service, technically speaking?
I had half anticipated his approach and decided it was time to speak my mind.
You wont get anywhere, I told him flatly, until you appoint a problem-solving
scientist and bring him fully into the picture. I paused while brandy was served.
Youve got to let him have access to case officers, and he has to help plan and analyze
operations as they happen.
Cumming cupped his glass and gently rolled its contents. Yes, he agreed, we had
rather come to that conclusion ourselves, but its very difficult to find the right person.
Jones [*] has been making a play for the job, but if we let him in, hell be wanting to run
the place next day.
I agreed.
For a while I had been indicating to Winterborn that I would be interested in joining the
Service full-time if a suitable vacancy arose.
I suppose Hugh has told you that I am interested in joining? I asked. Well, thats just
the problem, Peter, he replied. We have a nopoaching agreement with Whitehall. We
simply cant recruit you from there, even if you volunteer.
Cumming drained his glass with a flick of the wrist. Of course, he went on, if you
were to leave the Navy, things might be different.
It was typical Cumming, he wanted me to make the first move. I raised
the problem of my Admiralty pension. I would lose all fourteen
[*] R.V. Jones worked closely with Churchill on scientific intelligence during the war. His
contributions were brilliant but he was widely distrusted in Whitehall for his
independence. Like so many others he was never allowed to make the impact in
peacetime that he had made in war.
years of it if I left, and unlike Cumming I had no private income to fall back on. Cumming
tapped the side of his brandy glass gently and assumed an expression of surprise that I
should even raise the subject. I am sure youre well aware that this would be a
tremendous opportunity for you, Peter, he said.
He paused and returned to one of his favorite themes.
Were not Civil Service, and you have to be prepared to trust us. There is always the
secret vote. I dont think we could make any written undertakings, but I am sure when
the time comes we will be able to arrange something. We dont like to see our chaps
suffer, you know. After lunch we emerged from the rich leather and brandy of the In
and Out Club to the watery brightness of Piccadilly.
Do let me know if you decide to leave the Admiralty, wont you, Peter, said Cumming,
and Ill take some soundings among the Directors.
We shook hands and he strode off toward Leconfield House, his umbrella tucked under
his arm.
Cummings approach was fortuitous. The antisubmarine project was coming to an end.
The Admiralty were anxious to move me to new work in Portsmouth which I was not
keen to do. The Marconi Company, meanwhile, had a contract to develop the Blue
Streak project in conjunction with English Electric. Eric Eastwood, deputy head of the
Marconi laboratory, offered me the job of engineering the Blue Streak guidance system.
Within a month I had resigned from the Admiralty and joined the Marconi Company as a
Senior Principal Scientist.
I found missile research utterly demoralizing. Partly it was because I was hoping I would
soon be joining MI5. But I was not alone in realizing that the missile system was unlikely
ever to be built. It was a folly, a monument to British self-delusion. In any case this kind
of science was ultimately negative. Why spend a life developing a weapon you hope and
pray will never be used?
I telephoned Cumming and told him. I had left the Admiralty and waited for his next
move. Finally, after six months, I received another invitation to lunch. Hospitality was
noticeably less generous than the last time and Cumming came straight to the point. I
have discussed your proposal with the Board and we would like to have you. But we will
be in difficulties with Whitehall if we take you on as a scientist. We have never had one
before. It might complicate matters. What we suggest is that you come and join us as an
ordinary officer, and well see what you make of it.
I made it clear to Cumming that I was not very happy with his proposal. The only
difference, so far as I could see, was that he would be paying me at the Principal
Scientist (or Ordinary Officer) level, rather than at my current Senior Scientist level - a
difference of five hundred pounds a year. There was also an issue of principle which my
father had raised when I discussed the matter with him.
Dont go unless they appoint you as a scientist, he told me. If you compromise on
that, youll never be able to operate as a scientist. Youll end up being a routine case
officer before you know it. Cumming was surprised by my refusal but made no further
attempt to persuade me. He soon left, claiming a pressing appointment at Leconfield
House.
A month later I was in my laboratory at Great Baddow when I received a summons to
Kemps office. Cumming and Winterborn were sitting there, Winterborn grinning
broadly.
Well, Peter, said Kemp, it looks as if I am finally losing you.
Malcolm wants to take you on as MI5s first scientist. Winterborn later told me that
Cumming had gone to see Kemp to ask what he would have to pay to get me, to which
Kemp, familiar with the extraordinary lengths to which Cumming would go to save a few
pounds of government money, had replied: The same rate I would join for - a fair
wage!
Of course, there will be a Board, Cumming told me, but its just a formality.
I shook hands with everyone and went back to my lab to prepare for a new life in the
shadows.
4 -
Four days later I went to Leconfield House for my selection Board. The frosted-glass
partition in the alcove slid back and a pair of eyes scrutinized me carefully. Although I
was a familiar face, I still had no pass. I waited patiently while the policeman telephoned
Cummings office to arrange for my escort.
In to see the DG today, then, sir? he said as he pushed the lift bell. The iron gates slid
back with a heavy crash. It was an oldfashioned lift, operated by a lever on a brass box.
It clanked and wheezed up the building. I counted the floors crawling past until we got
to the fifth, where the MI5 senior management had their offices. A little way down the
corridor we turned into a large rectangular room which housed the DGs secretariat. It
looked just like any other Whitehall office - secretaries who had seen better days,
tweeds, and clacking typewriters. Only the combination safes opposite the window gave
the place away. In the middle of the far wall of the room was the door to the Director-
Generals office. The length of the outer office was deliberately designed to foil any
intruder. It gave the DG time to operate the automatic lock on his door before anyone
could burst through. When the green light above his door flashed, a secretary
accompanied me across the vast expanse and showed me in. The DGs office was bright
and airy. Antique walnut furniture and leather-backed chairs made it feel more like
Bond Street than Whitehall. Portraits of the three previous Director-Generals stared
austerely across the room from one wall. On the other side the full Board of MI5
Directors sat behind the polished conference table. I recognized Cumming and Hollis,
but the rest were unknown to me. The Director-General, Sir Dick Goldsmith White,
invited me to sit down. I had met him before on one of the many visits to Cummings
office, but I could not pretend to know him well. Ironically, he had also been at Bishops
Stortford College, where he had held the record for the mile, but it was well before my
time. He was tall with lean, healthy features and a sharp eye. There was something of
David Niven about him, the same perfect English manners, easy charm, and immaculate
dress sense. Indeed, compared with his Board, he was positively raffish.
When we were seated he opened the interview on a formal note. I hear you wish to
join us, Mr. Wright. Perhaps you could explain your reasons.
I began by explaining some of the things I had already done for the Service. I stressed, as
I had done earlier to Cumming, that it was impossible for me to do more unless I was
brought inside, and fully trusted.
I think I speak for all my Directors, he replied, when I assure you that we would not
contemplate bringing in a scientist without providing him with the access necessary to
do the job. You will be fully indoctrinated.
Cumming nodded.
However, White went on, I think I should make it clear that the Security Service is not
like other Whitehall departments with which you may be familiar. If you join us, you will
never be eligible for promotion.
He explained that entry to the Service was generally at an older age than to the Civil
Service, and followed a set career pattern involving general officer training in a wide
variety of MI5 branches. Few of these ordinary officers made the next step to the
limited number of Senior Officer posts (later Assistant Director), and fewer still had any
realistic chance of aspiring to one of the six Directorships. By entering at the Senior
Officers grade to do a highly specialized job, I effectively precluded any chance of a
Directorship. I told the Board frankly that, since I was by nature a lone furrower rather
than one of lifes bosses, this did not worry me at all.
We talked briefly about integration with Whitehall, which was something I felt needed
urgent attention in the technical field, and after twenty minutes the questions began to
dry up. Finally Dick White summed up. My view, Mr Wright, is that I am not sure we
need an animal like you in the Security Service. He paused to deliver his punch line:
But if you are prepared to give it a try, so are we.
The stiffness melted away. The other Board members got up from behind the table and
we chatted for a few minutes. As I was leaving, Dick White beckoned me over to his
desk at the far end of the room. Peter, I am going to start you off in A2 with Hugh
Winterborn, and obviously Malcolm will be responsible for tasking, but I have told him I
anticipate that you will be spending most of your time on D Branch matters - the Soviet
problem.
He drummed his fingers lightly on his desk diary and gazed out of the window in the
direction of the Russian Embassy complex in Kensington. Were not winning that battle
yet by any means. He snapped the diary shut and wished me luck.
After lunch I made my way back along the fifth floor for the routine interview with the
Personnel Director, John Marriott. During the war Marriott had served as Secretary to
the Double Cross Committee, the body responsible for MI5s outstanding wartime
success - the recruitment of dozens of double agents inside Nazi intelligence. After the
war he served with Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME) before returning to
Leconfield House. He was a trusted bureaucrat. Just wanted to have a chat - a few
personal details, that sort of thing, he said, giving me a distinctive Masonic handshake.
I realized then why my father, who was also a Mason, had obliquely raised joining the
brotherhood when I first discussed with him working for MI5 fulltime. Need to make
sure youre not a Communist, you understand. He said it as if such a thing were
impossible in MI5. In the weeks before Cummings final approach I was aware that a
retired policeman attached to the DGs secretariat had made a routine inquiry about me
at the Marconi Company. But apart from this interview I was not subject to any other
vetting. Indeed, although this was the period when MI5 were laying down strict vetting
programs throughout Whitehall, it was not until the mid-1960s that any systematic
vetting was brought into MI5 at all.
Marriotts desk was empty, and I assumed the interview was being taped for inclusion in
my Record of Service. Marriott took the session seriously enough, but asked only a few
questions. Expect you were pretty left-wing when you were young? Mildly. I taught
in the Workers Educational Association in the thirties.
Fairly Communist, was it?
Not in Cornwall, I replied.
Voted Labor in 1945, did you?
I thought most people in the services did.
Pretty middle-of-the-road now, though?
I told him I abhorred Nazism and Communism. He seemed pleased at the lengthy
speech I made. We moved onto my personal life. He danced around the subject until
finally he asked:
Ever been queer, by any chance?
Never in my life.
He studied me closely.
Have you ever been approached by anyone to do clandestine work?
Only by you.
He tried to laugh, but it was clearly a line he had heard a thousand times before. He
unlocked his desk drawer and gave me a form to fill in with details of next of kin. I was
vetted. No wonder it was so easy for Philby, Burgess, Maclean, and Blunt.
Before formally joining A2 as the Scientific Officer, I underwent two days training
together with a young officer joining MI5 from university. The training program was the
responsibility of a tough, nononsense officer named John Cuckney. We got on well.
Cuckney could be downright rude, but I soon realized that he was just tired of knocking
into shape young MI5 recruits of generally poor caliber. He was altogether different
from the average MI5 officer. He refused to submit to the monotony of the dark
pinstripe, preferring bolder styles. Cuckney was his own man and had broad horizons
beyond the office. It was no surprise to me when he left MI5 to pursue a successful
career in business, first with Victoria Investments, and later with the Crown Land Agents
and as Chairman of the Port of London Authority. Today, Sir John Cuckney is Chairman
of Westland Helicopters. Cuckney began our training with a routine lecture on the legal
status of MIS.
It hasnt got one, he told us bluntly. The Security Service cannot have the normal
status of a Whitehall Department because its work very often involves transgressing
propriety or the law. Cuckney described various situations, such as entering premises
without a warrant, or invading an individuals privacy, where the dilemma might arise.
He made it clear that MI5 operated on the basis of the 11
th
Commandment - Thou shall
not get caught - and that in the event of apprehension there was very little that the
office could do to protect its staff. He described the way liaison with the police was
handled. They were prepared to help MI5 if something went wrong, particularly if the
right person was approached. But there were very definite tensions between the two
organizations.
Special Branch would like to be us, and we dont want to be them. Cuckney handed us
the current MI5 internal directory and explained how the Service was organized. There
were six Directorates: A Branch handled resources; B Branch was the Personnel
Department; C Branch controlled protective security and vetting throughout all
government installations; D Branch was Counterespionage; E Branch ran British
Intelligence, in the still lengthy list of colonies and was responsible for the
counterinsurgency campaigns in Malaya and Kenya; and finally F Branch was the
domestic surveillance empire, which principally meant keeping tabs on the Communist
Party of Great Britain, and especially its links in the trade union movement.
Cuckney talked a little about the sister Service, MI6, or SIS (Secret Intelligence Service),
as it was more popularly known in Whitehall. He gave us the standard MI6 directory and
discussed the very few departments there with which MI5 maintained regular liaison. In
practice this amounted to MI6s Counterintelligence Section, and a small Research
Section dealing with Communist Affairs, although this latter was wound up not long
after I joined MI5. Cuckney was studiously noncommittal in his comments, and it was
only later, when I began to cultivate my own liaison with MI6s technical people, that I
realized the depth of antipathy between the two Services. At the end of two days we
were photographed and issued with our MI5 passes. Then Cuckney introduced a retired
Special Branch policeman from C Branch, who gave us a lecture on document security.
We were told on no account to remove files from the office, to always ensure our desk
was cleared of all papers and our doors locked before going out, even if only for ten
minutes. I was also issued with my combination safe number and told that a duplicate
number was kept in the Director-Generals safe, so that the management could obtain
any file at any time of the day or night from an officers safe. It was all sensible stuff, but
I could not help contrasting it with the inadequacy of the vetting.
After the first week Cuckney showed me into an office which was empty apart from a
tape recorder on the desk. He took a series of large tape reels from a cupboard.
Here, he said, you might as well get it from the horses mouth! The subject of the
tape was printed on the spool. A Short History of the British Security Service, by Guy
Liddell, Deputy Director-General 1946-1951. Liddell was a towering figure in the story of
MI5. He joined in 1927, from the Special Branch, where he almost single-handedly ran a
Soviet counterespionage program. He controlled MI5 counterespionage throughout the
war with determination and elan, and was the outstanding candidate for the Director-
Generals chair in 1946. But Attlee appointed a policeman, Sir Percy Sillitoe, instead,
almost certainly as a snub to MI5, which he suspected of engineering the Zinoviev letter
in 1924. Liddell soldiered on under Sillitoe, barely able to contain his bitterness, only to
fall foul of the Burgess/Maclean scandal in 1951. He had been friendly with Burgess for
many years, and when Burgess went, so too did whatever chances Liddell still had for
the top job. He retired soon after, heartbroken, to the Atomic Energy Commission. I
carefully threaded the tape and placed the headphones on. A soft, cultivated voice
began to describe part of the secret history of Britain. MI5 was formed under Captain
Vernon Kell in 1909, the War Office finally realizing that the impending European
conflict required at least a modicum of counterintelligence. MI5 soon proved its
usefulness by rounding up almost all German spies operating in Britain soon after the
outbreak of war. Liddell spoke warmly of Kell, who he felt had built a prestigious
organization from inauspicious beginnings through the force of his personality. MI5
budgets were strictly limited in the years after World War I, and MI6 furiously lobbied to
swallow up its competitor. But Kell fought cannily to retain control of MI5 and gradually
extended its influence.
The zenith of its post-World War I prestige came with the successful ARCOS raid in 1927.
The Soviet Trade Delegation, based at their offices at 49 Moorgate along with the All
Russia Cooperative Society Limited (ARCOS), was raided by police acting under the
instructions of MI5, and a vast quantity of espionage activity was uncovered. The ARCOS
raid justified the widespread belief inside MI5 that the newly established Soviet State
was the principal enemy, and that all possible resources should be deployed to fight her.
This view was further confirmed by a succession of other spy cases in the 1930s,
culminating in a major Soviet attempt, in 1938, to penetrate the Woolwich Arsenal using
a veteran Communist engineer employed there, named Percy Glading. MI5s brilliant
agent runner Maxwell Knight succeeded in planting a female agent who betrayed the
plot.
By 1939 Kell had lost his touch. He was old. Liddell offered generous excuses for MI5s
failure to prepare for World War II. When Churchill became Prime Minister, determined
to shake Whitehall until it submitted, it was only a matter of time before Kell went. But
although Liddell lamented the loss of Kell, he heartily welcomed the incoming Director-
General, Sir David Petrie. Petrie oversaw the recruitment of a vast influx of gifted
intellectuals, and under his supervision (and Liddells, though this went unstated) the
famed Double Cross System emerged. Every German spy landing in Britain was either
captured or turned to feed disinformation back to the German High Command. The
operation was an outstanding success and was a major factor in deceiving the Germans
over the location of the D-Day landings. Liddell had a simple verdict on MI5 during the
war. He called it the finest liaison of unlike minds in the history of intelligence. But
Liddells account ended soon after the war. And in truth his lecture made poor history.
Case after case, incident after incident was accurately recorded, but the theme of
continuous MI5 success was misleading. He knew full well the inadequacies of the
postwar period, the roots of which, in fact, lay in the 1930s. There was no mention of
Burgess and Maclean, or what they meant, and no mention either of the vast program
of modernization which both he and Dick White knew in the late 1940s was long
overdue.
In many ways Liddell was a tragic figure. Gifted, universally popular in the Service, he
could justly claim to have been a principal architect of our wartime intelligence mastery.
Yet he had been undone by his unwise friendships. As I listened to the tape it was as if
he were talking to himself in a darkened room, searching history for the justification of a
thwarted career.
I also played a lecture by Dick White on the Russian Intelligence Service. It had obviously
been recorded at one of the seminars held for incoming junior officers, because I could
hear the audience laughing at his jokes. Dick Whites delivery was much more in the
style of the Oxbridge don. He had a wonderful light touch, peppering his talk with puns,
epigrams, and allusions to Russian literature. Dick White was well qualified in Soviet
affairs, having been Director of the old counterespionage B Division before becoming
Director-General. He talked animatedly about the Russian obsession with secrecy, and
how the modern KGB had its roots in the Tsars Secret Police. He was perceptive in his
analysis of the historical importance of the KGB to the Bolshevik Party. The Russian
Intelligence Service was the guarantor of Party control in a vast and often hostile
country. He spoke, too, about why the British and Russian Intelligence Services were
inevitably the main adversaries in the game of spies. Secrecy and intelligence went far
back in both their histories, and both services, he believed, shared a caution and
patience which reflected their national characters. He contrasted this, much to the
amusement of his audience, with the zealous and often overhasty activities of our
American cousins.
But Dick White, for all the elegance of his delivery, was essentially an orthodox man. He
believed in the fashionable idea of containing the Soviet Union, and that MI5 had a
vital role to play in neutralizing Soviet assets in the UK. He talked a good deal about
what motivated a Communist, and referred to documents found in the ARCOS raid
which showed the seriousness with which the Russian Intelligence Service approached
the overthrow of the British Government. He set great store on the new vetting
initiatives currently under way in Whitehall as the best means of defeating Russian
Intelligence Service penetration of government.
He believed that MI5 was in the midst of great reforms, which in a sense, under his
guidance, it was. The clearest impression he gave was of an intense pride in the Service.
This emotion remained strong with him throughout his career, even after he had left
MI5 to join MI6. He was above all a team player, and he believed very much in
preserving the morale of the organizations he ran. This made him a popular and humane
man to work for, even if he always remained a slightly distant, ascetic figure.
Toward the end of my training I began to tour the building, often escorted by Cuckney
or Winterborn. The whole place was ludicrously overcrowded, with officers crammed in
four to a room. I had the luxury of my own office - more like a broom cupboard - next to
Hugh Winterborn on the fifth floor. The space problem was a legacy of the longstanding
antipathy between MI5 and MI6. At the end of the war, plans had been drawn up to
create a joint Headquarters of Intelligence to house both Services. A site for new
premises was even acquired in the Horseferry Road. But for years a working party of
both Services bickered about the precise division of office space, and MI5 muttered
darkly about being unable to trust MI6 because of Kim Philby. The situation remained
unresolved until the 1960s when MI6 were finally banished across the Thames to their
own building, Century House.
In a sense, the indecision over office space was indicative of the lack of clear thinking in
Whitehall about the relative roles of MI5 and MI6. It was not until well into the 1970s
that MI5 finally persuaded the Treasury to fund a move to permanent, purpose-built
headquarters at Curzon House. Until then the constant overspill problem was dealt with
by a succession of short-term leases on buildings. Firstly there was Cork Street, which in
the 1950s housed the booming empire of C Branch. Then in the 1960s
Counterespionage operated from an office building in Marlborough Street, and we all
had to pick our way through the peep shows, flower stalls, and rotting vegetables of
Soho Market to get to our Top Secret files. It may have been appropriate, but it was
hardly practical.
MI5 in the 1950s seemed to be covered with a thick film of dust dating from the
wartime years. The whole organization was rather like Dickens Miss Havisham. Wooed
by the intellectual elite during the war, she had been jilted by them in 1945. They had
gone off to new pursuits in the outside world, leaving MI5 trapped in her darkened
rooms, alone with memories of what might have been, and only rarely coming into
contact with the rest of Whitehall.
The atmosphere reminded me of a minor public school. The Directors were treated with
that mixture of reverence and sycophancy reserved by schoolboys for their
schoolmasters, and section heads were their prefects. But the DG and DDG were the
only people addressed as Sir, and first names were normally used. Within the
atmosphere of MI5 flowered exotic and extravagant personalities, men and women so
drawn to the Great Game of intelligence that they rose above the pettiness of it all, and
made a career there endlessly fascinating. On the face of it, life was a mixture of the
quaint and the archaic. Every year the Office virtually closed to attend the Lords Test
Match, where MI5 had an unofficial patch in the Lords Tavern. And every morning
senior officers, almost without exception, spent the first half hour of the day on THE
TIMES crossword. The scrambled telephones, which normally hummed with the most
highly classified secrets in the Western world, relayed a series of bizarre, coded
questions from office to office.
My left rump is giving me trouble, meaning I cant make head or tail of seven down in
the bottom left-hand corner, or My right breast is vacant, meaning What the hell is
twelve across in the middle? Courtney Young, who ran the Soviet Counterespionage
Section (D1) in the 1950s, was the undisputed Security Service crossword king. He
always claimed that it was too easy to do the crossword with a pencil. He claimed to do
it in his head instead. For a year I watched him do this, until finally I could resist the
temptation no longer. I challenged him, whereupon he immediately wrote in each
answer without hesitation. Every night for a week I had to stand drinks for a gleeful
Courtney in the local pub.
The nerve center of MI5 was the Registry. It spread across the whole ground floor of
Leconfield House. The Registry had been moved to Wormwood Scrubs Prison during
World War II to ensure the files would be safe if their London home were bombed. It
was an unwise move. Within the year the prison was bombed and many files were
destroyed or damaged by fire. Those that could be saved were stored in moisture-
resistant polythene bags. In the 1960s, when we began to study the history of
recruitments in the 1930s, I often examined prewar files. It was a difficult process,
prizing apart the charred pages with tweezers and wooden spatulas.
After the disaster at Wormwood Scrubs MI5 put a lot of thought into designing an
effective Registry. Brigadier Harker, who, as Sir David Petries wartime Deputy, was the
ideal administrative foil, recruited an expert in business systems, Harold Potter, to
reorganize the Registry. Potter was an excellent choice. He had a neat, methodical mind
and the will to impose order even in the chaos of wartime. In 1955 Potter was
approaching retirement, but he took great delight in showing me around. The Registry
was based in a central hall, which housed the main file index and the files themselves.
The rooms leading off from the central concourse held the other specialist card indexes.
Duplicate copies of all files and indexes were routinely made on microfilm, and stored in
a specially protected MI5 warehouse in Cheltenham to prevent the catastrophe of
Wormwood Scrubs occurring again. Potters office, tucked in one corner of the Registry,
was a paragon of neatness.
Make sure you return your files promptly, wont you, Peter? I dont want to have to
start chasing you like I do some of these buggers! He could have been a kindly, small-
town librarian. Sadly for Potter, I became one of the worst abusers of the Registry,
routinely holding scores of files at a time, though never, I suspect, as bad as Millicent
Bagot, the legendary old spinster in F Branch who kept tabs on the International
Communist Party for decades. I have always assumed Millicent to have been the model
for John le Carrys ubiquitous Connie. She was slightly touched, but with an
extraordinary memory for facts and files. Potter and his successors in the Registry
despaired of Millicent. I only hope we get the files back when she retires, he would
mutter to himself after a particularly heavy file request from F Branch.
The Registry always fascinated me. Just being there filled me with anticipation, an
irresistible feeling that inside the mass of dry paper were warm trails waiting to be
followed. Potter explained to me the correct system for signing on and off a file to show
that it had been received and dealt with. He had designed the filing system so that each
file read chronologically, with papers and attachments on the right, and the index and
minutes placed on the left for quick access. The whole system depended on accurate
and disciplined classification. When an officer wished to file something, it had to be
approved by one of Potters staff. Very often file requests were rejected as being too
generalized. When an officer wished to draw a file he filled in a request form. These
trace requests were always recorded, and if a trace was requested on an individual
more than once, a file was automatically opened on him. There were three basic
categories in the Registry. The first category was Personal Files, or PFs, which were buff-
colored files arranged in alphabetical order. There were about two million PFs when I
joined the Service in 1955. That figure remained fairly static and began to rise
dramatically only in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the onset of student and
industrial militancy. Then there were subject files, or organizational files, such as for the
Communist Party of Great Britain, Subject files very often ran into several volumes and
were elaborately cross-referenced with the PFs. The final main category was the duck-
egg-blue List File. This generally comprised material gathered during a particular case
which could not easily be placed within either of the two previous categories. There
were also Y-Boxes. These were a means of separating particularly sensitive files from
general access. For instance, all suspected spies were Y-Boxed, as were most defectors.
An officer could obtain the material from a Y-Box only by obtaining indoctrination into
its contents from the controlling officer or sometimes from the Director-General
himself. The integrity of the file is vital, Potter told me, and warned me that under no
circumstances could papers be removed from a file without the written consent of a
senior officer. The sanctity of files was something which, quite rightly, was drummed
into every officer from the very beginning of his service.
Files were located by using the card indexes. Potter had devised a system of
mechanically searching these indexes. Each card was classified with a series of punched
holes to identify the category of files to which it belonged. To search a category of files,
for instance to find a Russian intelligence officer using several aliases, an officer drew a
master card corresponding to that category. Long needles were placed through the
holes in the master card to locate any other cards which fitted the same constellation.
These could then be searched by hand. It was old-fashioned, but it worked, and it meant
that MI5 resisted the change to computerization long after it should have happened.
The concourse of the Registry was always busy with trolleys transporting files from the
Registry shelves to special lifts. The trolleys ran on tracks so that files could be shifted at
great speed up to the case officers working on the floors above - F Branch on the first
floor, E Branch on the second, D on the third and fourth, and A Branch on the fifth. The
Registry employed enormous numbers of girls to maintain efficient delivery of files
within the building, as well as the massive task of sorting, checking, and filing the
incoming material. In Kells day the Registry Queens, as they were known, were
recruited either from the aristocracy or from the families of MI5 officers. Kell had a
simple belief that this was the best vetting of all. The debutantes were often very pretty,
as well as wealthy, which accounts for the large number of office marriages, to the point
where it became something of a joke that the average career expectancy of a Registry
Queen was nine months - the time it took her to get pregnant. By the early 1970s the
staffing of the Registry had become a major problem for MI5. There were more than
three hundred girls employed and with the surge of file collection at that time the
pressure for more recruits was never-ending. Openly advertising was considered
impossible. Yet it was becoming very difficult to recruit this number of girls, let alone vet
them properly. In at least one case, the Communist Party managed to infiltrate a girl
into the Registry, but she was soon discovered and quietly sacked. This problem, rather
than dissatisfaction with the increasingly antiquated filing system itself, finally pushed
MI5, belatedly, into accepting a computerized Registry. Underneath the Registry were
the Dungeons. They were actually a collection of storerooms and workshops run by
Leslie Jagger, who worked under Hugh Winterborn in A2. Jagger was one of Cummings
famed contacts. He was a huge, broad-shouldered former Sergeant Major who had
served with Cumming in the Rifle Brigade. Jagger always wore a black undertakers suit.
Jagger was the MI5 odd-job technical man, and must have felt slightly apprehensive
when I joined, but he never showed it and we soon became good friends. Jagger had an
extraordinary array of skills, of which the most impressive was his lockpicking. Early on
in training I attended one of the regular classes he ran for MI5 and MI6 in his lockpicking
workshop. The cellar room was dominated by a vast array of keys, literally thousands of
them, numbered and hung in rows on each wall. Jagger explained that as M15 acquired
or made secret imprints of keys of offices, hotels, or private houses, each one was
carefully indexed and numbered. Over, the years they had developed access in this way
to premises all over Britain.
You never know, when you might need a key again, explained Jagger as I stared in
astonishment at his collection.
The first rule if you are entering premises is only pick the lock as the last resort, said
Jagger, beginning his lecture. Its virtually impossible to pick a lock without scratching it
- and thatll almost certainly give the game away to the trained intelligence officer. Hell
know the premises have been entered. What you have to do is get hold of the key -
either by measuring the lock or taking an imprint of the key.
Jagger demonstrated how to attack various locks. Burmah locks, used for diamond safes,
were by far the most difficult. The pins move horizontally through the lock and it is
impossible to pick. The Chubb, on the other hand, although billed as being unpickable,
was fair game for Jagger.
This is the one youll have to deal with most often. He picked up a demonstration Yale
mechanism mounted on a board and explained that the Yale consisted of a series of pins
sitting in various positions inside the barrel of the lock. The bites in the Yale key acted
on the pins to push them up and allow the key to be turned in the barrel. Jagger
produced a small piece of wire with a hook on one end. He inserted it into the keyhole
and began to stroke the inside of the lock in a steady, rhythmical action.
You just stroke the first pin until - Jaggers wrist tensed and suddenly relaxed - it goes
a notch, and then you know youve got one up into line.
His big hands moved like a concert violinists with a bow, tensing as each pin pushed up
in turn.
You keep the pressure on until youve got all the pins up... He turned the piece of wire
and the Yale sprang open. Then youre inside... Course, what you do inside is your
business. We all laughed.
Leslie was always most mysterious about the source of his expert knowledge on
lockpicking, but for years I carried a piece of wire and stroking tool that he made for me.
Make sure you carry your police pass, he told me when he first gave it to me, pointing
out that I was, technically, breaking the law by going about equipped for burglary.
Couldnt be thought of as common or garden burglars, could we?
He laughed heartily and strode back to the Dungeons.
5 -
A few days after the lockpicking class I went on my first operation.
The Third Man business is brewing up again, said Hugh Winterborn. MI6 are
interrogating one of their officers - chap named Philby. They want us to provide the
microphone.
I had met Kim Philby briefly on my first visit to Leconfield House in 1949. I was in
Cummings office discussing the work for Brundrett when Philby popped his head
around the door. He immediately apologized for disturbing us.
No, come in, Kim, said Cumming in his usual gushing way. Theres someone you
ought to meet.
Cumming explained that I had just been appointed the External Scientific Adviser. Philby
shook my hand warmly. He had a lined face, but still looked youthful.
Ah, yes, he said, thats Brundretts committee. The Americans are very keen on that, I
gather.
I took to Philby immediately. He had charm and style, and we both shared the same
affliction - a chronic stutter. He had just been appointed MI6 Head of Station in
Washington, and was saying goodbye to his friends in MI5 and getting various briefings
from them before his departure. Philby had developed close links with MI5 during the
war, one of the few MI6 officers to take the trouble. At the time the visit seemed typical
of Philbys industriousness. Only later did the real reason become clear. Philby quizzed
me on my thinking about science. I explained that the Intelligence Services had to start
treating the Russians as a scientist would treat the subject - as a phenomenon to be
studied by means of experiments.
The more you experiment, the more you learn, even if things go wrong, I said.
But what about resources? asked Philby.
I argued that the war had shown scientists could help solve intelligence problems
without necessarily needing a huge amount of new apparatus. Some was needed,
certainly, but more important was to use the materials already available in modified
ways. Take Operational Research, I said, referring to the first antisubmarine-research
program in the Navy during the war. That made a tremendous difference, but all we
scientists did was to use the gear the Navy had more efficiently.
Philby seemed skeptical, but said that he would bear my thoughts in mind when he
reviewed American thinking on the subject on his arrival in Washington.
Ill look you up when I get back, he said. See how youve got on.
He smiled graciously and was gone.
Two years later, Burgess and Maclean defected. It was a while before Cumming
mentioned the subject, but by 1954 I had gathered enough snippets from him and
Winterborn to realize that Philby was considered the prime suspect for the Third Man
who had tipped off the two defectors. In 1955 he was sacked by a reluctant MI6, even
though he admitted nothing. On September 23, 1955, three weeks after I formally
joined MI5, the long-awaited White Paper on the Burgess and Maclean affair was finally
released. The press savaged it. Philbys name was well known in Fleet Street by this
time, and it was obviously only a matter of time before it was debated publicly.
In October, MI5 and MI6 were informed that the question of the Third Man was likely to
be raised in the House of Commons when it reconvened after the recess, and that the
Foreign Secretary would have to make a statement about Philbys situation. MI6 was
ordered to write a review of the case, and called in Philby for another interrogation.
They, in turn, asked MI5s A2 section to provide recording facilities for the interrogation.
Winterborn and I took a taxi to the MI6 safe house near Sloane Square where Philby was
due to meet his interrogators. The room MI6 had chosen was sparsely furnished - just a
patterned sofa and chairs surrounding a small table. Along one wall was an ancient
sideboard with a telephone on top.
As it was important to get as high a quality of recording as possible, we decided to use a
high-quality BBC microphone. Speech from a telephone microphone is not very good
unless it is high level. We lifted a floorboard alongside the fireplace on the side on which
Philby would sit and inserted the microphone beneath it. We arranged an amplifier to
feed the microphone signal to a telephone pair with which the Post Office had arranged
to feed the signal back to Leconfield House.
The Transcription Center was hidden behind an unmarked door at the other end of the
corridor from the MI5 staff canteen and only selected officers were allowed access. Next
to the door were a bell and a metal grille. Hugh Winterborn identified himself and the
automatic lock clattered open. Directly opposite the entry door was a door giving
entrance to a large square room in which all the recording was done by Post Office
employees. When the material was recorded, the Post Office could hand it over to the
MI5 transcribers, but it was illegal to let MI5 monitor the live Post Office lines (although
on occasion they were monitored, particularly by Winterborn or me, if there was
something causing difficulties or very important). The telephone intercepts were
recorded on dictaphone cylinders and the microphone circuits were recorded on
acetate gramophone disks. This room was MI5s Tower of Babel. The recordings were
handed over to women who transcribed them in small rooms running along a central
corridor.
The Department was run by Evelyn Grist, a formidable woman who had been with MI5
almost from the beginning. She had a fanatic devotion to Vernon Kell, and still talked
darkly of the damage Churchill had done to the Service by sacking him in 1940. In her
eyes, the path of Intelligence had been downhill ever since.
Hugh Winterborn arranged for the link to be relayed into a closed room at the far end.
We sat down and waited for the interrogation to start. In fact, to call it an interrogation
would be a travesty. It was an inhouse MI6 interview. Philby entered and was greeted in
a friendly way by three former colleagues who knew him well. They took him gently
over familiar ground. First his Communist past, then his MI6 career and his friendship
with Guy Burgess. Philby stuttered and stammered, and protested his innocence. But
listening to the disembodied voices, the lies seemed so clear. Whenever Philby
floundered, one or another of his questioners guided him to an acceptable answer.
Well, I suppose such and such could be an explanation. Philby would gratefully agree
and the interview would move on. When the pattern became clear, Winterborn fetched
Cumming, who strode into the office with a face like thunder. He listened for a few
moments, slapping his thigh. The buggers are going to clear him! he muttered.
Cumming promptly sent a minute to Graham Mitchell, the Head of MI5
Counterespionage, giving an uncharacteristically blunt assessment of the MI6
whitewash. But it did no good. Days later, Macmillan got up in the House of Commons
and cleared him. I realized for the first time that I had joined the Looking-Glass world,
where simple but unpalatable truths were wished away. It was a pattern which was to
be repeated time and time again over the next twenty years.
The Philby interview gave me my first experience of the MI5 surveillance empire. The
seventh floor was, in fact, only one part of a network of facilities. The most important
outstation was the headquarters of the Post Office Special Investigations Unit near St.
Pauls. MI5 had a suite of rooms on the first floor run by Major Denman, an old-
fashioned military buffer with a fine sense of humor. Denman handled the physical
interception of mail and installation of telephone taps on the authority of Post Office
warrants. He also housed and ran the laboratory for MI5 technical research into ways of
detecting and sending secret writing. Each major sorting office and exchange in the
country had a Special Investigations Unit Room, under the control of Denman, to place
taps and intercept mail. Later we moved the laboratories up to the Post Office
Laboratory at Martlesham, Suffolk. Then, if a letter which had been opened in St. Pauls
needed further attention, it was sent by motorcycle courier up to Suffolk. Denmans
main office was lined with trestle tables running the length of the room. Each table
carried mail addressed to different destinations: London letters on one side, Europe on
another, and behind the Iron Curtain on a third. Around twenty Post Office technicians
worked at these tables opening pieces of mail. They wore rubber gloves so as not to
leave fingerprints, and each man had a strong lamp and a steaming kettle beside him.
The traditional split-bamboo technique was sometimes used. It was ancient, but still one
of the most effective. The split bamboo is inserted into the corner of the envelope,
which is held up against a strong light. By turning the bamboo inside the envelope, the
letter can be rolled up around the slit and gently pulled out Where a letter had an
ordinary typed address it was sometimes torn open and a new envelope typed in its
place. But to the end of my career we were never able to covertly open a letter which
had been sealed at each edge with Sellotape. In those cases, MI5 took a decision as to
whether to open the letter and destroy it, or send it on in an obviously opened state.
Pedal-operated microfilming cameras copied the opened mail and prints were then
routinely sent by the case officer in charge of the interception to the Registry for filing.
Denmans proudest memento was a framed letter which hung on the far wall. It was
addressed to a prominent Communist Party member whose mail was regularly
intercepted. When the letter was opened the Post Office technicians were amused to
discover that it was addressed to MI5 and contained a typewritten message, which
read: To MI5, if you steam this open you are dirty buggers. Denman classified it as
obscene post, which meant that legally he had no duty to send it on to the cover
address.
In fact, Denman was very particular about warrants. He was prepared to install a tap or
intercept an address without a warrant only on the strict understanding that one was
obtained as soon as possible. MI5 were, however, allowed to request a form of letter
check without a warrant. We could record everything on an envelope, such as its origin
and destination and the date it was sent, as long as we did not actually open it. Denman,
like everyone in the Post Office who knew of the activity, was terrified in case the Post
Office role in telephone and mail intercepts was discovered. They were not so worried
about overseas mail, because that could be held up for days at a time without arousing
suspicion. But they were always anxious to get domestic mail on its way to the receiver
as soon as possible.
Responsibility for warrants lay with the Deputy Director-General of MI5. If an officer
wanted a tap or an interception, he had to write out a short case for the DDG, who then
approached the Home Office Deputy Secretary responsible for MI5. The Deputy
Secretary would advise as to whether the application presented any problem. Once a
month the Home Secretary vetted all applications. Like the Post Office, the Home Office
was always highly sensitive on the issue of interceptions, and they were always strictly
controlled.
As well as St. Pauls, there was also Dollis Hill, the rather ugly Victorian building in North
London where the Post Office had its research headquarters in the 1950s. John Taylor
ran his small experimental laboratory for MI5 and MI6 in the basement behind a door
marked Post Office Special Investigations Unit Research. The rooms were dark and
overcrowded, and thoroughly unsuitable for the work that was being attempted inside.
When I joined MI5, Taylors laboratory was overrun with work for the Berlin Tunnel
Operation. A joint MI6/CIA team had tunneled under the Russian sector of Berlin in
February 1955, and placed taps on the central communications of the Soviet Military
Command. The actual electrical taps were done by Post Office personnel. Both the CIA
and MI6 were reeling under the sheer volume of material being gathered from the
Tunnel. So much raw intelligence was flowing out from the East that it was literally
swamping the resources available to transcribe and analyze it. MI6 had a special
transcription center set up in Earls Court, but they were still transcribing material seven
years later when they discovered that George Blake had betrayed the Tunnel to the
Russians from the outset. There were technical problems too, which Taylor was
desperately trying to resolve, the principal one being the ingress of moisture into the
circuits.
Taylors laboratory was also busy working on a new modification to SF (Special
Facilities), called CABMAN. It was designed to activate a telephone without even
entering the premises by radiating the telephone with a powerful radio beam. It
worked, but only over short distances. They were also in the early stages of developing
a device called a MOP. A MOP made a cable do two jobs at once - transmit captured
sound and receive power. It was in its early stages, but it promised to revolutionize MI6
activity by removing the extra leads which were always likely to betray a covert
microphoning operation. I spent a lot of time in my first years in MI5 ensuring the
correct specifications for MOP, and it was eventually successfully manufactured at the
MI6 factory at Boreham Wood.
Soon after the Philby interview I began to look into ways of improving and modernizing
the seventh floor. The method of processing a tap followed a set pattern. A case officer
responsible for a tap or microphone provided the Transcription Department with a
written brief detailing the sort of intelligence he thought might be obtained from the
interception. The transcription staff then scanned the conversation for passages which
corresponded to the brief. When I first joined, the taps were normally transferred onto
acetate, rather than tape. The acetates were scanned by dabbing into the disc at
various points to sample the conversation. If anything of relevance was found, the
transcribers placed a chalk mark on the appropriate place and worked from the chalk
marks. It was an inefficient and time-consuming operation but more efficient than
standard tape-recording methods. Most of these transcribers had been recruited in
Kells day from the emigre communities who fled to Britain at the end of World War I.
They had turned the seventh floor into a tiny piece of Tsarist Russia. Most of them were
members of the old Russian aristocracy, White Russians who talked with certainty of
returning to the lands which had been expropriated after the Revolution. To them the
KGB was not the KGB, it was the old Bolshevik Cheka. Most were fiercely religious, and
some even installed icons in their rooms. They were famed throughout the office for
their tempers. They considered themselves artists and behaved like prima donnas.
Hardened case officers seeking clarification of a transcription approached the seventh
floor with trepidation in case their request caused offense. The difficult atmosphere was
inevitable. For years these women had listened, day after day, hour after hour, to the
indecipherable mutterings and labyrinthine conspiracies of Russian diplomats. Spending
a lifetime looking for fragments of intelligence among the thousands of hours of
worthless conversation (known in the trade as cabbages and kings) would be enough
to turn any mind.
The first thing I did was to institute hearing tests on the women, many of whom were
becoming too old for the job. I encouraged those with failing hearing to handle material
with a high sound quality, such as the telephone intercepts. I gave the corrupted
microphone transcription to younger officers, of whom undoubtedly the best was Anne
Orr-Ewing, who later joined me as a junior officer in the Counterespionage Department.
Microphone transcription is difficult because you usually have only one microphone
source for a multichannel conversation. I decided to design a piece of equipment to
ease this problem. I went out to an electronics exhibition at Olympia and bought a tape
machine which provided two heads. The second head gave a constant number of
milliseconds (or more) delay on the sound as it went through, making it much fuller-
bodied. In effect it simulated stereo sound, and made even the worst tapes much easier
to understand. I installed the equipment on the seventh floor, and it made me a friend
for life in Mrs. Grist. It was my first small victory for science. But beneath the seventh
floor the great MI5 antique showroom slumbered on, undisturbed. The Department
which required most urgent attention, and yet resisted modernization with the greatest
determination, was A4. Since the war the Watchers had been outnumbered and
outmaneuvered by the increasing numbers of Soviet and Soviet satellite diplomats on
the streets of London. My first priority was to make a full review of the way the
Watchers operated.
I made arrangements to visit one of the MI5 observation posts in an MI5 house opposite
one of the main gates of the Russian Embassy in Kensington Park Gardens. The
observation post was in an upstairs bedroom. Two Watchers sat on either side of the
window. A camera and telephoto lens on a tripod stood permanently trained down onto
the street below. Both men were in shirt-sleeves, binoculars hanging around their necks.
They looked tired. It was the end of their shift; the ashtrays were full to overflowing,
and the table standing between them was scattered with coffee cups.
As each Russian diplomat came out of the gates of Kensington Park Gardens one or the
other of the men scrutinized him through binoculars. As soon as he had been accurately
identified, the observation post radioed his name back to Watcher headquarters in the
form of an enciphered five-figure number. All the numbers of people leaving Kensington
Park Gardens were called out on the radio. Each car or Watcher was tagged with certain
numbers to follow. When one of his numbers came up he would follow the person
involved without replying to the broadcast. The person being followed did not know if
he was a target or not. The radio crackled intermittently as one of the mobile Watcher
units parked in the streets nearby was ordered to pick up the diplomat as he made his
way out of sight of the observation post toward the West End.
The Watchers who manned these static posts had done the job for years. They
developed extraordinary memories for faces, instantly recognizing KGB officers who had
been out of Britain for years. To assist them in identification the post had three bound
volumes containing the photographs and identities of every single Russian intelligence
officer known to have visited the UK. Those currently resident in the Embassy were
flagged in plastic holders for easy reference. If an unknown face was noted entering or
leaving the premises, it was photographed and handed over to MI5s Research Section,
and the endless process of identification would begin from scratch. It was numbing
work, requiring patience and dedication. But none was more vital. If the Registry is
MI5s central nervous system, the Watchers are its fingertips. They must be constantly
outstretched, feeling out the contours of the enemys formations.
The bound volumes of Russian intelligence officer identifications were the product of
decades of careful intelligence gathering from every possible source - visa photos,
defectors, double agents, or whatever. The faces stared mordantly from the pages.
They were mostly KGB or NKVD strong-arm men, interspersed with the occasional
cultured, Europeanlooking resident or uniformed military attache. It soon struck me that
the observation posts were relying mostly on photographs available from the Russians
diplomatic passports. These were always sent to MI5 but were often of poor quality, or
deliberately out of date, and made identification difficult to determine.
I suggested that the Watchers expand their selection of action stills. These are often
much easier to recognize than mug shots. This was graphically illustrated in the Klaus
Fuchs case. When Fuchs had confessed in 1949 to passing details about atomic
weapons, he began to cooperate. MI5 tried to obtain details of his co-conspirators and
showed him a passport photograph of Harry Greenglass, a fellow atom spy. Fuchs
genuinely failed to recognize him until he was provided with a series of action stills.
For many years MI5 had realized that if Watchers operated from Leconfield House they
could be followed from the building and identified by Russian countersurveillance
teams. They were housed in an unmarked four-story Georgian house in an elegant
terrace in Regents Park. The central control room was dominated by a vast street map
of London on one wall which was used to monitor the progress of operations. In the
middle of the room was the radio console which maintained communications with all
observation posts and mobile Watcher teams.
On one floor Jim Skardon, the Head of the Watchers, had his office. Skardon was a
dapper, pipe-smoking former policeman. He had originally been a wartime MI5
interrogator, and in the immediate postwar period had been the chief interrogator in a
number of important cases, particularly that of Klaus Fuchs. Skardon had a high opinion
of his own abilities, but he was an immensely popular man to work for. There was
something of the manner of a trade union shop steward about him. He felt that the
Watchers did arduous and difficult work, and needed protection from exploitation by
hungry case officers back at Leconfield House. In a sense this was true. There were
around a hundred Watchers when I joined the Service, but the demand for their services
was unquenchable in every part of MI5s activity. But I soon came to feel that Skardon
was not facing up to the modern reality of watching on the streets of London. It was
quite clear that the Russians, in particular, operated very extensive countersurveillance
to prevent their agents from being followed. Having watched the system for a few
weeks I doubted that the Watchers, using their current techniques, had any realistic
chance of following anyone without speedy detection. When I first raised the question
with Skardon of extensively remodeling the Watchers, he dismissed it out of hand. MI5
sections were like fiefdoms, and Skardon took it as an affront to his competence and
authority. Eventually he agreed to allow Hugh Winterborn and me to mount an
operation to test the effectiveness of current Watcher techniques. We split a team into
two groups. The first group was given a photograph of an MI5 officer who was unknown
to them and told to follow him. The second group was told the general area in which the
first group was operating. They were instructed to locate them and then identify the
person they were following. We did this exercise three times, and each time the second
group made the identification correctly. We filmed the third experiment and showed it
at Watcher headquarters to the whole Department. It did at least remove any remaining
doubts that Watcher operations, as currently organized, were perilously vulnerable to
countersurveillance.
We suggested to Skardon that as a first step he should employ a number of women. A
great deal of watching involves sitting for hours in pubs, cafes, and parks, waiting or
monitoring meetings. A man and a woman would be far less conspicuous than a single
man or a pair of men. Skardon opposed the plan strongly. He feared it might introduce
extramarital temptations which might adversely affect the morale of his team.
The wives wont like it, he said grimly.
Hugh Winterborn scoffed.
So what if they kiss and cuddle. Its better for the cover! Skardon was not amused. The
other reform we wanted implemented was in the way Watchers were debriefed. It was
never done immediately they came in from a job. Sometimes it was overnight,
sometimes even at the end of the week. I pointed out to Skardon that it had been
proved again and again in wartime that debriefing had to be done immediately to be
accurate. If there is a delay the memory stops recollecting what happened and begins to
rationalize how it happened. My boys have done eight hours slogging the streets. They
dont want to come back and spend hours answering questions when they can write up
a report themselves, he stormed. In the end he did agree to bring them back from each
shift fifteen minutes early, but it was a constant struggle.
The mobile Watchers presented different problems. I went out for the day with them to
get an idea of the work. MI5 cars were inconspicuous models, but they were fitted with
highly tuned engines in the MI5 garages in Battersea. Every three months the cars were
resprayed to disguise their identities, and each car carried a selection of number plates,
which were changed at intervals during the week. It was boyish fun chasing Russian
diplomatic vehicles through the streets of London, up and down one-way streets and
through red traffic lights, secure in the knowledge that each driver carried a Police Pass
to avoid tickets. The driver of my car told with great glee the story of how he had been
following a Russian car down the Mall toward Buckingham Palace on a winter day. The
Russian had slammed on his brakes to go around the roundabout, and the cars had
skidded into each other. Both sides got out and exchanged particulars with poker faces.
The knack of mobile following is to pick the parallel streets wherever possible. But in the
end the success of the operation depends on the radio control at headquarters. They
have to predict the likely path of the Russian car, so that reserve units can be called in to
pick up the chase.
The first problem with mobile watching was quite simple. There were three men in each
car, and since so much of the time was spent parked on street corners, or outside
premises, the cars stood out like sore thumbs. Once again, Winterborn and I made a
field study. We went to an area where we knew the Watchers were operating. Within
half an hour we had logged every car. One was particularly easy. The number plates had
recently been changed. But the driver had forgotten to change them both over! I
suggested to Skardon that he cut down the number of men in the cars, but in true
British Leyland style he gave me a lecture on how it was essential to have three men.
Theres one to drive, one to read the map, and the third to operate the radio, he said
with conviction, seemingly unaware of the absurdity of it all.
But there was one area which decidedly was not a joke, and which gave me more worry
than all the others put together. Communications are any intelligence organizations
weakest link. The Watchers relayed hundreds of messages daily to and from the
observation posts, the cars, and headquarters. The first thing which made them
vulnerable was that they were never acknowledged. The Russians could easily identify
Watcher communications by simply searching the wavebands for unacknowledged call
signs. MI6 were just as bad abroad. For a long time the best way of identifying MI6 staff
in the Embassy was to check which diplomats used outside lines which were not routed
through the main switchboard. Later, MI5 brought in a complicated system of
enciphering Watcher communications. I pointed out that this made no difference, since
their signals would now stand out even more against the Police, Fire and Ambulance
Service communications, all of which were en clair (uncoded). They did not seem to
understand that the Russians were gathering most of the intelligence from the traffic
itself, rather than from the contents of the messages. Traffic analysis would tell them
when and where a following operation was being conducted, and by cross-checking that
with their own records they would learn all they needed to know. I lobbied hard for a
major effort to be mounted to try to find out if the Russians were systematically
monitoring Watcher communications. Theoretically it was a feasible thing to do,
because any receiver will give off a certain radiation which can be detected at short
distances. I raised my plan through the correct channels with GCHQ, which had the
technical apparatus and manpower necessary for such an experiment. I waited for
months before I got what was described as a considered answer. GCHQs verdict was
that it was not technically feasible to conduct such experiments. It was another two
years before GCHQ and MI5 realized how wrong that judgment was.
In the meantime I remained a worried man. If Watcher communications were
vulnerable, and Watcher tradecraft as poor as we had shown it to be, then MI5 had to
assume that a substantial part of its counterespionage effort had been useless over
many years. At least some operations in which Watchers had been used had to have
been detected by the Russians. But which, and how many?
In the trenches of the Cold War, A2 was MI5s front line, Hugh Winterborn and I its
storm troopers. Hugh Winterborn was a fine comrade in arms. He had served with the
Army in China and Japan and in Ceylon and Burma before joining MI5, and spoke
Chinese and Japanese fluently. Winterborn was a Field Marshal manque. His operations
were always beautifully planned right down to the last detail, and although often
complex, were invariably executed with military precision. But he was not a dry man. He
approached each operation with the purpose of gathering intelligence, but also to have
fun. And we did have fun. For five years we bugged and burgled our way across London
at the States behest, while pompous bowler-hatted civil servants in Whitehall
pretended to look the other way.
Winterborn and I were a perfect match, both sharing a fervent belief that modernization
was badly needed at almost every level of the Service, and especially in the technical
field. I tended to concentrate on ideas. He acted as the foil, winnowing out the sensible
from the impractical in my suggestions and planning how to make them operational
reality.
When I first teamed up with Winterborn he was bubbling over with news of the latest
A2 job he had completed, called Operation PARTY PIECE. It had been a typical
Winterborn operation - thoroughness and outrageous good fortune linked harmoniously
together. One of the F4 agent runners learned, from a source inside the Communist
Party of Great Britain, that the entire Party secret membership files were stored in the
flat of a wealthy Party member in Mayfair. A2 were called in to plan an operation to
burgle the flat and copy the files.
The flat was put under intensive visual, telephone, and letter surveillance, and in due
course MI5 had a stroke of unexpected luck. The woman of the house rang her husband
at work to say that she was going out for an hour. She told him she would leave the key
under the mat. Within twenty minutes of the calls being monitored in Leconfield House,
we were around at the flat taking a plasticine imprint of the key.
The burglary was carefully arranged for a time when the occupants were away for a
weekend in the Lake District. Winterborn sent a team of Watchers to monitor the
occupants in case they decided to return home early. Banks of pedal-operated
microfilming machines were set up in Leconfield House ready to copy the files. A team
from A2 entered the flat and picked the locks of the filing cabinets where the
membership files were kept. The contents of each drawer of each cabinet were
photographed with a Polaroid camera. Each file was carefully removed and indexed in
the flat so that it could be replaced in the identical spot. Then they were removed in
bundles and driven over to Leconfield House for copying in sequential order. In all,
55,000 files were copied that weekend, and the result was a priceless haul of
information about the Communist Party.
PARTY PIECE gave MI5 total access to the Party organization. Every file contained a
statement, handwritten by the recruit, explaining why he or she wished to join the
Party, accompanied by full personal details, including detailed descriptions of the
circumstances of recruitment, work done for the Party, and contacts in the Party
organization. More important than this, the PARTY PIECE material also contained the
files of covert members of the CPGB, people who preferred, or whom the Party
preferred, to conceal their identities. Most of these covert members were not of the
same generation as the classical secret Communists of the 1930s, many of whom had
been later recruited for espionage. These were people in the Labor Party, the trade
union movement or the Civil Service, or some other branch of government work, who
had gone underground largely as a result of the new vetting procedures brought in by
the Attlee Government.
In the years after World War II, largely as a result of our alliance with the Soviet Union in
the war, the CPGB retained a significant body of support, most importantly in the trade
union movement. They were increasingly active in industrial disputes, much to the
consternation of Prime Minister Attlee in his later years. In the late 1940s, MI5 began to
devote resources in an effort to monitor and neutralize CPGB activity in the trade union
movement. By 1955, the time of PARTY PIECE, the CPGB was thoroughly penetrated at
almost every level by technical surveillance or informants. Obtaining the PARTY PIECE
material, the very heart of the CPGBs administration, was the final proof of MI5s
postwar mastery. Ironically, within a year the Soviet Union invaded Hungary, and the
Party began its slow decline in popularity. Once MI5 was in possession of the PARTY
PIECE material, the CPGB was never again in a position to seriously threaten the safety
of the realm. From then on, MI5 was able to locate every single active Party member,
particularly the covert ones, and monitor their activities, preventing them from
obtaining access to classified material where the risk arose. The PARTY PIECE material
was Y-Boxed, and remained of enormous assistance right up until the early 1970s,
especially when the CPGB later began to protest that it had renounced secret
membership and was now merely an open party.
I first operated against the CPGB in the late 1950s, when Hugh Winterborn and I
installed yet another microphone into its King Street headquarters. The CPGB knew that
its building was under constant technical surveillance, and regularly switched the
location of important meetings. An agent inside King Street told his F4 controller that
Executive Committee discussions had been moved to a small conference room at the far
end of the building. There were no windows in the room and we knew from the agent
that there was no telephone either, so SF could not solve the problem of providing
coverage. Later, in the 1960s, the reason for the lack of a telephone became clear. One
of the first things Anthony Blunt had betrayed to the Russians was the existence of SF,
immediately after it was first installed in King Street, and they had alerted the Party and
instructed them to remove all telephones from sensitive areas. But the Party did not
really believe it. They took precautions only for very sensitive matters. Winterborn and I
drove down to King Street in my car and sat outside studying the external walls, trying
to decide the best way to attack the target room. Low down on the left-hand side of the
street-facing wall was an old coal chute which had been out of use for many years. It
seemed to present the best possibility. We checked with the agent where this chute
went and were told that it led straight into the conference room. I suggested to
Winterborn that we make a false door identical to the one already in the chute, clipping
it over the top of the old door with a radio microphone between the two feeding into
the keyhole. Hugh immediately began to make the arrangements. First he designed a
new door which could lock against the chute with spring catches. The door obviously
had to be painted the same color as the existing one, which was a heavily weather-
beaten brown. We contacted the Building Research Station in Garston and sent them
sample flecks of the paint which Hugh removed with a screwdriver one night while
casually walking past. They identified the paint for us and acquired some of a similar
vintage. Using a blowtorch and a sink of water we were able to simulate a weathering
process. I handled the installation of the radio microphone on our door. I used a small
plastic audio tube to run from the keyhole in the chute to the microphone, filling the
rest of the space with batteries so that the microphone could run without being
serviced for up to six months. The receiver was hidden in the telephone footway box at
the end of King Street which luckily was just within range of the microphone, and
telephone lines relayed the signal back to the seventh floor of Leconfield House.
The most risky part of the operation was fitting the false door on the pavement of King
Street It had to be done in full view of the CPGB building, and they were constantly alert
to anything suspicious. Hugh Winterborn devised a typically complex plan. He decided
to make the installation late on a Saturday night, as theater revelers thronged the
streets in Covent Garden. He arranged for all available A2 and F4 officers and their wives
to converge on King Street from different directions at a set time. We were all
choreographed carefully by Winterborn to arrive in two groups pretending to be much
the worse for drink. We met on the pavement and exchanged greetings. Behind the
huddle Winterborn dropped down to his knees and began to hand drill four small holes
in the wall of the chute, ready to receive the spring catches of our door, using his pocket
handkerchief to catch the telltale brick dust. Within a minute our noisy socializing began
to wear a little thin, but Winterborn had nerves of steel. He patiently finished the
drilling, slipped the false door out from under his coat and clipped it into place.
The operation, known as TIEPIN, worked perfectly as planned and for some months MI5
had full coverage of every important CPGB meeting. But in the end the microphone was
detected. A CPGB official happened to settle on our frequency when tuning his radio
and a howl round alerted him to the presence of a device. The entire building was
turned upside down in the search for the bug. Fortunately Hugh Winterborn was living
in the flat on the top floor of Leconfield House at the time while his wife was away
visiting relatives in Norway. He was alerted as soon as the microphone was detected
and went around straightaway, undipped the false door, and brought it back to the
office like a trophy of war.
The most extensive microphoning operation Winterborn and I ever undertook was in
Lancaster House, the ornate building which hosted the Colonial Conferences of the
1950s and 1960s. As soon as Macmillan became Prime Minister the pace of change in
Colonial Affairs became more marked. MI5, which was responsible for security and
intelligencegathering in all Crown Territory, including the Empire, came under increasing
pressure to provide intelligence assessments during negotiations toward the various
independence settlements. Lancaster House was almost impossible to cover effectively
in a piecemeal way. We could never be sure which rooms were going to be used, and
this seriously impaired our intelligence-gathering. Winterborn and I proposed that MI5
install a comprehensive microphone system throughout the building which could be
used whenever and wherever it was required. The Colonial Office agreed
enthusiastically to our request, and Lancaster House was closed for renovations for a
fortnight while an A2 team moved in. Hugh and I had already studied the room plans
with great care and drawn up a circuit diagram specifying the locations of each
microphone. We supervised the installation, and throughout the rest of the 1960s and
the 1970s the system was used whenever high-level diplomatic negotiations took place
in London.
But bugging the CPGB headquarters and covering Third World delegations were, in the
end, interruptions of the main task, which was to confront the Soviet Union and her
allies. The first A2 operation I undertook against the Russians was Operation CHOIR. It
actually began some months before I joined MI5, when Hugh Winterborn mounted an
operation to bug the Russian Consulate on the Bayswater Road. The opportunity arose
when the building next door was refurbished in preparation for new occupants. MI5
went in under cover as decorators and Winterborn fitted a new device called the probe
microphone, which had been developed by John Taylor in the Dollis Hill Laboratory.
The probe microphone was a large, high-sensitivity microphone, which was used to gain
covert access through a party wall. The device was lodged inside the wall about
eighteen inches from the target side. The eighteen inches between the probe
microphone and the target room were drilled out by hand at a quarter-inch diameter in
steps of half an inch. Half an inch from the target side the quarter-inch-diameter hole
ended and a small pinhole was drilled, again by hand, using a No 60-size bit, so that the
intrusion into the target side was almost invisible to the naked eye. The eighteen-inch
bore hole was then lined -with a smooth perspex tube which was acoustically matched
into the microphone. The microphone fed out into the street and back along telephone
wires to Leconfield House, where amplifiers boosted the captured sound into intelligible
speech.
Six months after Winterborn installed the CHOIR microphone it suddenly went dead.
MI5 had, at the time, an agent who worked as an occasional decorator and odd-job man
for the Russians. His name was Nutkin, which earned him the inevitable nickname of
Squirrel. Nutkin told us that the target room had been repainted. Although it seemed
most likely that the pinhole had been covered with paint, we were still puzzled. Before
the installation was made, Winterborn had obtained detailed measurements of the
target wall from Nutkin. Using these he had planned the microphone pinhole to emerge
behind a plaster leaf of the elaborate cornicework fourteen feet above the floor. It
seemed unlikely that anyone would paint so carefully as to actually seal the hole. Still,
Winterborn and I decided to drill it out again.
The new operation involved considerable planning. The renovation work in the building
next door to the Consulate had finished. It was now a busy office with a constant stream
of visitors, some of whom we knew to be Russians checking on security. We had to work
at night and in total silence. We needed scaffolding to work fourteen feet up as well as
plaster and paint to repair any damage. Winterborn arranged for a prefabricated
scaffolding system and quick-drying decorating materials, specially developed for MI5 by
the Building Research Station, to be delivered to the office in small packages so as not to
alert the evervigilant Consulate.
A week later Jagger and I took a taxi to the top of Bayswater Road. It was winter and the
streets were dark and crowded with returning commuters. We walked briskly down
toward the Consulate and let ourselves into the building next door using one of Jaggers
famous keys. We unpacked our attache cases, which contained our tools and a small
radio receiver. The observation post opposite the Consulate was under instructions to
monitor the building for any signs of movement. We monitored the broadcasts on our
receiver without acknowledgment, so that we could cease work if anyone came into the
target room. Every microphone MI5 installs is recorded in the A Branch Index, which
logs technical specifications, a history of its operation, and, most important of all, its
precise location. While Jagger erected the scaffolding in total silence, I studied the wall
plan, which we had brought with us from the A Branch Index, and made the triangular
measurements. We began scraping away the plaster. It was tense work. Each piece of
plaster had to be removed by hand before it fell to the floor, and could then be placed
in a bag for removal. After an hour we unearthed the microphone, carefully sealed
inside the wall in a layer of plasticine. I disconnected the cables and slid out the perspex
acoustic tube which led into the target room.
The No. 60 drill bit had a special stop on it ensuring the bit turned so slowly that a flake
of plaster or paint could not be pushed out into the target room. I inserted the drill bit
and held the body steady while Jagger delicately turned the handle. After two turns
there was still resistance. Whatever was blocking the hole, it was obviously not a thin
layer of paint. In the light of passing car headlights we exchanged puzzled glances. The
drill turned again. And again. Still resistance. Then suddenly the bit ran free and almost
immediately encountered another obstacle. I gently pulled the drill back to our side of
the wall and Jagger packed the bit into a small box for examination in Leconfield House.
Listening down the hole with an acoustic tube, I could hear the ticking of a clock in the
target room, so without doubt the drill had entered the target room as originally
designed, behind the rear side of a plaster leaf in the cornice. We swiftly packed the
microphone back into the wall, reconnected the cables, and replastered the hole. We
had three hours to kill, waiting for the plaster to set before we could repaint the
damage. We sat smoking, our receiver crackling intermittently. Even at the dead of night
both sides were still dancing the Cold War waltz, as Watcher cars chased Russian
diplomats through the darkened streets of London. But the Consulate remained silent.
The next day on the seventh floor Winterborn and I listened to the CHOIR microphone.
It was muffled, but clearly working. The only problem was that nobody was saying
anything in the target room. All I could hear was the steady clacking of a solitary
typewriter. We went down to the basement to examine the No. 60 drill bit under a
microscope. It was covered to a depth of three-eighths of an inch with plaster dust.
Whoever the Russian decorator was, he had been mighty conscientious. Thats no
bloody redecoration, said Winterborn, squinting down the microscope. You cant
trowel plaster three-eighths of an inch down a pinhole. Thats been done with a bloody
syringe! A month or so later, Squirrel Nutkin was able to catch a sight of the target
room. It had been completely remodeled with a soundproofed partition across the party
wall. Behind the partition a single secretary worked with a typewriter. The Russians
obviously knew, as we did, that party walls were vulnerable to attack. But, as far as we
could tell, they did not know about the probe microphone. And yet it seemed probable
that they had detected the pinhole and stopped it. In July 1955 I tackled the Soviets
once again, this time in Canada. MI5 received a request for technical assistance in an
operation the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) were planning to install
microphones in the Russian Embassy in Ottawa. The old three-story Embassy building
overlooking the Rideau River had recently burned down. The RCMP planned to install
eavesdropping equipment during the rebuilding work, but needed access to the latest
equipment, so they contacted MI5. I was met at the airport by Terry Guernsey, the
head of the RCMPs Counterespionage Department, B Branch. With him was his
assistant, a Welshman named James Bennett. Guernsey was a lanky Canadian whose
outwardly unflappable manner was constantly betrayed by the nervous, explosive
energy underneath. Guernsey was trained in Britain by both MI5 and MI6 and returned
to Canada in the early 1950s convinced that the RCMP was unsuited, as a uniformed
police force, to the delicate work of counterespionage. Guernsey began to recruit
civilian intelligence officers and single-handedly built up B Branch into one of the most
modern and aggressive counterespionage units in the West. Many of the ideas which
later played a major role in British and American thinking, such as computerized logging
of the movements of Russian diplomats in the West, began as Guernsey initiatives. But
he constantly ran up against the oppressive restrictions of the Mountie tradition, which
believed that the uniformed RCMP officer was inherently superior to his civilian
counterpart. This was a struggle which ran deeply, not just through Canadian
Intelligence, but also in the FBI. Guernsey believed that the British were correct in
drawing a distinction between criminal detective work and the entirely different skills of
intelligence-gathering, and he fought many battles to ensure that B Branch remained
independent of the mainstream of the RCMP. But the effort virtually cost him his career.
The Mountie senior officers never forgave him, and he was eventually banished to the
UK, where he acted as RCMP liaison with MI5 and MI6, before ill-health finally drove
him into retirement.
But in 1956, when I made my first trip to Canada to help plan Operation DEW WORM,
Guernsey was still very much in charge. Over dinner that first night he described where
the operation stood. The RCMP had successfully recruited the contractor who was
rebuilding the Russian Embassy, and had installed RCMP officers under cover as
workmen on the site. With the help of Igor Gouzenko, a Russian who had worked inside
the old Embassy as a cipher clerk until he defected to the Canadians in 1945, Guernsey
had been able to pinpoint the area in the northeast corner of the building where the
KGB and GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) secret sections, and the cipher rooms, were
located. After studying the plans I decided that a SATYR operation, using a cavity
microphone activated from outside by microwaves, was not technically feasible. The
distance from the device to safe ground was too great to be assured of success. It had to
be a wired operation. Wired operations have one major advantage. If they are skillfully
installed, they are almost impossible to detect. The best plan of attack was to conceal
the microphones inside the aluminum sash windows on the target side of the building.
Guernsey obtained a sample frame from the contractor. They were friction windows
with no sash weight, perfect for concealing a device. There was an air path into the sash
where the two pieces locked together, ensuring a good sound quality. The metal
window frames would effectively dampen the electromagnetic field emitted by the
microphones, making them impervious to sweeper detection.
But the main problem was how to conceal the cables leading to the microphones. The
walls of the new Embassy building were planned to be nearly two feet thick, with a
fourteen-inch concrete block inner leaf, a two-inch air gap in the middle, and then four-
inch-thick stone facing on the outside of the wall. I checked with MI6 for details of
Russian electronic sweeper operations. They told me that the Russians never swept the
outsides of their buildings, only the insides. The Russians apparently considered it
demeaning to be seen to be sweeping their premises. I told Guernsey that the best plan
was to lead the cables up through the air gaps, where they would be virtually assured of
nondetection through fourteen inches of concrete, especially as MI5 had developed a
new thin cable which gave off far less electromagnetic emission.
Once the building work got under way we had to find a way of concealing the cables
from the Russian security teams who regularly visited the site to check on the Canadian
contractors. We buried large coils beneath each of the eight-foot concrete footings, and
cut them into the bitumen coverings. Every night, as each course of masonry was
installed, RCMP workmen went onto the site and lifted a length of cable from the coil
into the air gap. There were eight cables. Each was labeled at random from one to
twenty to mislead the Russians in the event they were ever discovered. It was a nice
touch; the sort of joke the Russians would appreciate after they had finished tearing
down the Embassy searching for the phantom cables.
The most difficult part of the whole operation was connecting the wires to the
microphones. The windows in the northeast section of the building had been
successfully fitted, supervised by an RCMP officer to ensure the frames went into the
right places. The cables had been painstakingly raised inside the air gaps over months of
construction work. But connecting the two together was impossible to conceal. It could
be done only by an engineer working outside, four floors up on the scaffolding. The job
was given to one of Guernseys technical men, a young engineer who handled the
operation brilliantly. He was a big man, but he scaled the building in pitch dark in a
temperature approaching minus forty degrees centigrade, carrying his soldering tools in
a shoulder bag. Taking each of the eight microphones in turn, he carefully joined the
cables and ensured the connections were solid. As soon as the connections were made,
RCMP technicians began to dig a twenty-yard tunnel from an RCMP safe house next
door to the Embassy, through to the coils buried under the footings. The coils were led
back ten feet underground to the safe house and the tunnel backfilled with three feet of
concrete. The eight cables connected to head amplifiers concealed in the garage of the
safe house, with power fed to them over output leads from RCMP headquarters. When
the microphones were tested, each one worked perfectly.
But then, just as this almost flawless operation was nearing completion, disaster struck.
A workman was installing a fuel tank on the outside wall near the northeast corner of
the new Embassy, unaware that just at that point all the cables from the windows above
came together to go underground to our safe house. As he drove in metal hasps to
support the ventilation pipe, he pushed one straight through the bundle of cables
buried inside, completely destroying the connections to all the microphones.
There was no choice but to re-enter the building. But this time the operation was even
more risky. The building was more or less complete, and the Russians on the verge of
occupation. There was little chance of the Russians believing the undercover RCMP
team were just innocent workmen if they were discovered. It was another bitterly cold
night when they went back in. They managed to extract six of the eight cables from
behind the hasp, rejointed them, abandoning the other two, and built them back into
the wall with the hasp. Although two microphones were lost, at least one remained
operational in each of the target rooms, so the major disaster was averted.
As soon as the Russians reoccupied their Embassy, we heard sounds from some of our
microphones. GRU officers discussed earnestly where they should put their furniture.
Then, forty-eight hours later, they suddenly vacated their offices, the Ambassador left
for Moscow, and a team of Russian workmen moved in. It was soon clear from the
materials the Russians were taking into the Embassy that they were constructing a new
KGB and GRU sanctum elsewhere in the building, probably supplied by an independent
power generator.
Shortly after this, the microphones, which were being constantly monitored back at
RCMP headquarters, began to pick up the telltale sounds of a sweeper team in
operation. RCMP had tentatively identified their arrival in the building some days
before, but it wasnt until they began work in the northeast corner, tapping at the walls
for signs of hollowness, and running metal detectors across the ceilings, that we were
sure. For twenty days they swept the rooms we had microphoned, as if they knew they
were bugged. But they never found either the cables or the microphones. By Russian
Embassy standards worldwide, the new building was small, but despite what must have
been cramped conditions, the northeast corner remained virtually unused apart from
routine consular work, even after the departure of the sweepers. Eight years later the
microphone sweepers arrived in Ottawa. They went straight to the rooms where the
microphones were and within an hour had found the microphone cables and thus the
microphones. There were forty-two rooms in the Embassy. The sweepers searched only
in the six rooms where the microphones were. They must have known where to look!
Like Operation CHOIR, something about DEW WORM troubled me. Partly, of course, it
was disappointment. The operation had been an outstanding technical success, but the
months of patient preparations had yielded no intelligence whatever. Of course, at the
outset of the operation the biggest gamble had been to assume, as Gouzenko had, that
the Russians would rebuild their secret section in the same place as they had it in the
old Embassy. But based on an analysis of the power supply to the building, it was a
reasonable gamble. The fact that they had decided to resituate the secret section and
screen it off was not in itself unusual. Both the British and the Americans had begun to
realize, as almost certainly had the Russians, that the best way to protect an Embassy
secret section from microphone attack was to construct it deep inside, preferably with
its own power supply. But the certainty with which the Russian sweepers attacked the
northeast corner, as if they were looking for something they knew to be there,
introduced the worm of doubt into my mind.
Within a year the same thing happened, again in Canada. The Polish Government were
given permission to open a consulate in Montreal. They bought an old house and began
renovations. In January 1957 I flew over to Montreal to assist the RCMP install a
microphone. The RCMP knew the identity of the UB (Polish Intelligence) officer and the
location of his room, but the building was being completely gutted, so a wired operation
was out of the question. Only a SATYR cavity microphone would do. The premises were
being rewired using steel conduits for the cables, and as with the DEW WORM window
frames I reckoned that the SATYR devices would be virtually impossible to detect if they
were placed close to the conduits. Within a fortnight of installing the system the Poles
suddenly ordered the contractor to remove the wall containing our SATYR devices and
replace it with another. The RCMP did manage to retrieve one device, but the other was
lost to the Poles. Later the RCMP learned from a source inside the Polish Embassy that
they had been tipped off to the likely presence of microphones by the Russians. They
had been one step ahead of us again. It was not just in Canada that things like this
occurred. There was also Operation MOLE in Australia. It began with a visit to London by
Sir Charles Spry, the head of Australias overseas intelligencegathering organization,
ASIO, in 1959. I received a telephone call saying that he would like to see me. Spry had
once been a good-looking man, with hooded eyes and a full mustache, but responsibility
and a liking for the good things in life had left him florid in appearance. Spry was
appointed head of ASIO on its formation in 1949. He had previously been Director of
Military Intelligence, but along with a group of like-minded officials, dubbed the
gnomes of Melbourne, he lobbied hard for the creation of a proper security
intelligencegathering agency similar to MI5. Spry ran the service with an iron fist for
nineteen years, and became one of the towering figures of postwar intelligence. Only
toward the end of his career, when he began to lose touch with his staff, did his grip on
the organization falter. Spry liked visiting London. He had originally served in the Indian
Army on the Khyber Pass in the 1930s. The common background and shared sense of
what constituted an officer and a gentleman ensured him many friends in the clubbable
world of British Intelligence. But Spry was far from being an old buffer. He came straight
to the point as soon as our meeting began. He told me he had recently been over in
Canada and Terry Guernsey had recommended he talk to me about a microphone
operation ASIO was planning against the Russians. He explained that since the well-
publicized defection of the Petrovs, a husband and wife who worked together inside the
cipher section of the Russian Embassy in Canberra, the Russians had broken off
diplomatic relations and placed their Embassy under the control of the Swiss. But
recently they had been making overtures to return and ASIO wanted to mount an
operation against the Embassy before they occupied the premises. After studying the
plans, I advised Spry to mount a SATYR operation, and demonstrated the device to him.
The best place to install SATYR was in the wooden sash window frames, and I sent my
assistant out to Australia to supervise the details. The device was successfully installed,
and as a further precaution, I instructed ASIO not to activate the device for a year, in
case the Russians monitored the building for microwaves in the first months of
reoccupation. As with DEW WORM, Operation MOLE was a technical success, but not a
single scrap of intelligence was gleaned. Every sound in the KGB residents room, every
shuffle of his papers, every scratch of his pen, was audible. But he never said a word.
Operation MOLE was another failure.
The demands on MI5s slender resources were, in the 1950s, impossible to satisfy.
Consequently, the pressure of work on individual officers, particularly those in A2 who
had of necessity become involved in such a wide range of operations, was at times
practically intolerable. Operations merged one into another. Plans, maps, briefings,
technical reports crossed my desk in a paper whirl. It was often difficult at any fixed
point to be sure which operations had ended and which were still deep in the midst of
gestation. Intelligence-gathering, even at its best, is a thoroughly confused business. But
there is always an empty space in the mind of every professional intelligence officer
worth his salt reserved for scraps and fragments which for one reason or another raise
unanswered questions. Operations CHOIR, DEW WORM, and MOLE were all stashed
away in that compartment, submerged under the welter of current operations, but
never quite forgotten, until years later they suddenly assumed a new significance.
The profession of intelligence is a solitary one. There is camaraderie, of course, but in
the end you are alone with your secrets. You live and work at a feverish pitch of
excitement, dependent always on the help of your colleagues. But you always move on,
whether to a new branch or department, or to a new operation. And when you move
on, you inherit new secrets which subtly divorce you from those you have worked with
before. Contacts, especially with the outside world, are casual, since the largest part of
yourself cannot be shared. For this reason, intelligence services are great users of
people. It is built into the very nature of the profession, and everyone who joins knows
it. But early in my career I encountered a man whose experience at the hands of British
Intelligence suddenly stripped the veneer of national importance away from the whole
business. It arose out of the work I had been doing for Brundretts committee on
resonance. I had spent a lot of time researching ways in which innocuous objects, like
ashtrays or ornaments, could be modified to respond to sound waves when radiated
with microwaves of a certain frequency. If a system could be perfected, it promised
enormous advantages. The object itself would carry no transmitter or receiver, so
detection would be virtually impossible. By 1956 we had successfully developed
prototypes, and decided to attempt an operation against the Russian Embassy in
London. One of MI5s agents at that time was the MP Henry Kirby, who had frequent
dealings with the Russian diplomatic community. The plan was simple. MI5 would
design an ornament modified to reflect sound, and Kirby would give it as a gift to the
Russian Ambassador. The first thing that we needed to know was the kind of present
the Ambassador might be likely to accept and place prominently on his desk or in his
office. Malcolm Cumming suggested that I visit an old MI5 agent runner named Klop
Ustinov, the father of the actor Peter Ustinov. Klop Ustinov was German by descent,
but he had strong connections in the Russian diplomatic community and was a frequent
visitor to the Embassy. Ustinov had the unique distinction of having held commissions in
the Russian, German, and British Armies. He had dabbled in intelligence throughout the
interwar period. He spoke a vast array of languages, and his German/Russian
background made him a useful source of information. When Hitler came to power,
Ustinov began to work strenuously against the Nazis. He approached Robert Vansittart,
a prominently anti-Nazi Foreign Office diplomat, offering to work for British Intelligence.
He claimed to be in contact with Baron Wolfgang zu Putlitz, then a First Secretary at the
German Embassy in London, who he said was secretly working against the Nazis.
Ustinov was recruited by MI5, and began to obtain high-grade intelligence from zu
Putlitz about the true state of German rearmament. It was priceless intelligence,
possibly the most important human-source intelligence Britain received in the prewar
period. After meeting zu Putlitz, Ustinov and he used to dine with Vansittart and
Churchill, then in the wilderness, to brief them on the intelligence they had gained. Zu
Putlitz became something of a second son to the urbane English diplomat. Even after
the outbreak of war Ustinov continued meeting zu Putlitz, by now working in Holland as
an Air Attache. Finally in 1940 zu Putlitz learned that the Gestapo were closing in and he
decided to defect. Once more Ustinov traveled into Holland and, at great personal risk,
led zu Putlitz to safety.
I took a taxi over to Ustinovs flat in Kensington, expecting to meet a hero of the secret
world living in honorable retirement. In fact, Ustinov and his wife were sitting in a dingy
flat surrounded by piles of ancient, leather-bound books. He was making ends meet by
selling off his fast-diminishing library.
Despite the hardship, Ustinov was thrilled by my visit. He remained a player of the Great
Game down to his fingertips. Two small glasses and a bottle of vodka appeared, and he
began to pore over the plans I had brought with me from the office. He was a round old
man with a guttural, polyglot accent, and a sharp eye for the real interests of the Soviet
diplomats in Kensington Park Gardens. The real danger, my friend, is that they will sell
the gift, rather than display it, if it is too valuable, he intoned in a knowing voice.
These are Bolsheviks - men of orthodox tastes. A silver effigy of Lenin, or model of the
Kremlin. These perhaps will be more sacred to them.
A bust of Lenin was unsuitable, I explained, because the smooth contours of Vladimir
Ilyichs skull were too rounded to be sure of reflecting sound waves. But a model
Kremlin offered possibilities. It would be easy to conceal the right type of concave
indentations in the complex architecture of the symbol of Mother Russia. Klop Ustinov
saw the whole operation as a piece of rich theater and offered to pay a visit to the
Ambassador to gather more direct evidence of his tastes. As the vodka took hold we
began to talk of old times. He was an old man, but his memory was still fresh. Tears
began to wet his cheeks as he told me the story of what he and zu Puflitz had done for
the country. Finally his reserve broke.
I do these things, Peter, and they leave me here. My wife and I... penniless.
But what about your pension? I asked.
Pension? I have no pension, he flashed back bitterly. When you work for them you
never think about the future, about old age. You do it for love. And when it comes time
to die, they abandon you. I sat silent. It seemed scarcely credible to me that such a man
could be left in such circumstances, forced almost to beg. I wanted to ask him why
Churchill or Vansittart had forgotten him, but I felt it would only wound him more.
Ustinov drank and composed himself. But it was fun, he said finally. He poured more
vodka with an unsteady hand. There was silence for a moment, and then he spoke
again. My boy. He is an actor. He pointed to a picture of young Peter on the
mantelpiece. Do you have children, Peter? I told him I had three, two girls and a young
boy.
Tell him not to join, then, he said quietly. I would not want my boy to join this game
of ours. The gentlemen run the business, and gentlemen have short memories...
Almost as soon as it arrived, his bitterness melted away. He asked about the office,
about Guy Liddell, Dick White, and Malcolm Cumming, all of whom had been closely
involved with him during the wartime years. Finally, as late-afternoon darkness closed in
on the room, I left. We shook hands and he returned alone to the vodka and his piles of
books.
I was too drunk that night to do anything other than go home. But the next morning I
tackled Cumming on the subject. He looked embarrassed. But Im sure we sorted his
pension out years ago, he barked in a voice louder than usual. Good God, poor Klop.
Ill see Dick straightaway.
Further questioning was pointless. Who precisely had been to blame for forgetting Klop
Ustinov was lost in the chase around the mulberry bush of responsibility, an occupation
much favored by bureaucrats when oversights are discovered. Ustinov did get his
pension, although I never saw him again after that meeting. Not long afterward he died.
But at least his widow had the benefit of it. The silver Kremlin operation soon petered
out, overruled by the Foreign Office. In truth my heart went out of it that afternoon in
Kensington. But I learned a lesson I never forgot: that MI5 expects its officers to remain
loyal unto the grave, without necessarily offering loyalty in return. But in the main, the
1950s were years of fun, and A Branch a place of infectious laughter. As Hugh
Winterborn always said: MI5 is a great life, if you can stand the excitement! Like the
time when we were fitting listening devices in a safe house next door to the Hungarian
Embassy. I climbed onto the roof to install an aerial and was seen by a neighbor, who
reported seeing a burglar on the prowl. Within ten minutes the police were knocking at
the door, accompanied by the neighbor, and pandemonium reigned. Here we were,
surrounded by the latest listening technology, receivers and cables spread across the
floor. Winterborn desperately lifted the floorboards and began to shovel tens of
thousands of pounds worth of equipment underneath. The knocking got louder. Then
burly shoulders began to force the front door. They were clearly convinced by the noise
that a burglary was in progress. Finally, everything was relatively shipshape, and I
opened the door sheepishly and explained that I was doing some authorized late-night
renovations for the owner. I gave the policeman a number to ring to confirm the fact. It
was the local Special Branch number. Even funnier was the time we did a similar job
against the Polish Embassy in Portland Street. The house next door was temporarily
empty, and A2 obtained access to install a series of microphones. Hugh Winterborn and
I led a team of twelve officers from A Branch. Silence was imperative because we knew
that the target premises were permanently manned near the party wall. I made a
tremendous fuss insisting that everyone remove his shoes to avoid making noise on the
bare floorboards. We worked nonstop for four hours in the freezing cold. All the
floorboards on the first floor had been raised and I was patiently threading the cables
along the void between the joists. After a time one of the leads became tangled on a
split joist. Unable to clear the obstruction by hand, I began to ease myself down until
one foot was resting on a masonry nail sticking out from one side of a joist. Just as I was
inching toward the tangled cable, the nail gave way, and I plunged through the ceiling
below. A large section of ceiling crashed fourteen feet to the floor below, reverberating
around Portland Place like a wartime bomb. The noise and dust subsided, leaving me
wedged tightly up to my waist in the hole in the ceiling. For a moment there was total
silence.
Good thing we removed our shoes, quipped Winterborn dryly as laughter began to
echo around the empty building.
Luckily the neighbors must have been asleep, because no policemen arrived. Leslie
Jagger quickly repaired the lath work, replastering and repainting the damage before
morning with his quick-drying materials. Close shave, that one, Peter, he said as he
applied the final lick of paint. If youd come through the ornamental rose wed have
been absolutely buggered.
But accidents like these were rare occurrences. In the main, MI5 technical operations
became, under Hugh and me, highly professional, in sharp contrast to MI6 activities in
the same field. MI6, in the mid 1950s, never settled for a disaster if calamity could be
found instead. The best example I ever heard concerned one of their training
operations. They placed a junior officer in an MI6 flat, and detailed another team of
recruits to find and interrogate him. MI5 were always routinely informed about these
operations in case anything went wrong. One afternoon A2 got a phone call from MI6
pleading for help. The MI6 search party had apparently miscounted the floors of the
apartment block where their target was holed up. They picked the lock of the flat one
floor above, and proceeded to go to work on the man inside. He, of course, protested
his innocence, but believing this to be part of the ruse, the search party consulted the
MI6 textbook marked persuasion, and went to work as only enthusiastic amateurs
can. By the time they had finished, the man was stripped naked and singing like a bird.
He was, in reality, a jewel thief, who had recently pulled off a diamond robbery. He
produced the baubles still in his possession, obviously believing that his captors were
visitors from a vengeful underworld. Hugh Winterborn split his sides laughing as the
unfortunate MI6 officer begged for advice on what to do with the jewel thief, the
diamonds, and a wrecked flat. In the end the thief was given two hours to make for the
Continent and Leslie Jagger went over to the flat and repaired the damage.
After I had been in A2 for two or three years, MI6 began to call on me to help them plan
their technical operations. I never much enjoyed working with MI6. They invariably
planned operations which, frankly, stood little chance of technical success. They were
always looking for a successor to the Berlin Tunnel - something on the epic scale which
would have the Americans thirsting to share in the product. But they never found it, and
in the process failed to build a sensible bedrock of smaller successes. There was, too, a
senseless bravado about the way they behaved which I felt often risked the security of
the operations. In Bonn, for instance, we were planning a DEW WORM-style operation
on the Russian Embassy compound.
Local MI6 station officers wandered onto the site and even, on one occasion, engaged
the KGB security guards in casual conversation. It made for good dining-out stories, but
contributed little to the weekly ministerial intelligence digests. The foolhardiness was
invariably punctuated by flights of absurd pomposity. In Bonn I made the perfectly
sensible suggestion that we should use German cable so that if the operation were
discovered MI6 could disown it and blame it on the local intelligence service.
Good Lord, Peter! We cant do that, gushed the MI6 station chief with his nose in the
air. It wouldnt be ethical.
Ethics, so far as I could ascertain, were displayed by MI6 purely for Whitehall or MI5
consumption. In fact MI6, under its chief, Sir John Sinclair, had become a virtual liability.
It still refused to face up to the appalling consequences of Philbys being a Soviet spy. It
was operating in the modern world with 1930s attitudes and 1930s personnel and
equipment. It was little surprise to me when they stumbled, in April 1956, into their
greatest blunder of all, the Crabbe affair. The Soviet leaders Khrushchev and Bulganin
paid a visit to Britain on the battleship ORDZHONIKIDZE, docking at Portsmouth. The
visit was designed to improve Anglo-Soviet relations at a sensitive time. MI5 decided to
operate against Khrushchev in his rooms at Claridges Hotel. Normally Claridges has
permanent Special Facilities installed on the hotel telephone system, because so many
visitors stay there who are of interest to MI5. But we knew the Russians were sending a
team of sweepers in to check Khrushchevs suite before he arrived, so we decided it was
the right time to use for the first time the specially modified SF which John Taylor had
developed in the Dollis Hill Laboratory. The new SF did not require a washer to be fitted,
so it was virtually undetectable. The telephone could be activated over short distances
using shortwave high-frequency megacycles. We set the SF activation up in an office of
the Grosvenor Estates near Claridges. It worked perfectly. Throughout Khrushchevs
visit his room was permanently covered. In fact, the intelligence gathered was
worthless. Khrushchev was far too canny a bird to discuss anything of value in a hotel
room. I remember sitting up on the seventh floor with a transcriber translating loosely
for me. We listened to Khrushchev for hours at a time, hoping for pearls to drop. But
there were no clues to the last days of Stalin, or to the fate of the KGB henchman Beria.
Instead, there were long monologues from Khrushchev addressed to his valet on the
subject of his attire. He was an extraordinarily vain man. He stood in front of the mirror
preening himself for hours at a time, and fussing with his hair parting. I recall thinking
that in Eden, Khrushchev had found the perfect match. Both were thoroughly
unscrupulous men, whose only interest lay in cutting a dash on the world stage.
But while MI5 were discreetly bugging Khrushchev, MI6 launched a botched operation
against the ORDZHONIKIDZE. The operation was run by the MI6 London Station,
commanded by Nicholas Elliott, the son of the former headmaster of Eton. MI6 wanted
to measure the propeller of the Russian battleship, because there was confusion in the
Admiralty as to why she was able to travel so much faster than had originally been
estimated by Naval Intelligence. Elliott arranged for a frogman, the unfortunate
Commander Buster Crabbe, to take on the assignment. In fact, this was not the first
time MI6 had attempted this operation. A year before, they tried to investigate the hull
of the ORDZHONIKIDZE while she was in port in the Soviet Union. They used one of the
X-Craft midget submarines which MI6 kept down in Stokes Bay. These had dry
compartments to enable a diver to get in and out and were small enough to pass
undetected into inshore waters. A Naval frogman had attempted to enter the harbor,
but security was too tight and the mission was aborted.
The second attempt in Portsmouth ended in disaster. Crabbe was overweight and
overage. He disappeared, although a headless body which was later washed up was
tentatively identified as his. John Henry, MI6 London Stations Technical Officer, had
informed me that MI6 were planning the Crabbe operation, and I told Cumming. He was
doubtful about it from the start. It was a typical piece of MI6 adventurism, ill-conceived
and badly executed. But we all kept our fingers crossed. Two days later a panic-stricken
John Henry arrived in Cummings office telling us that Crabbe had disappeared.
I told Nicholas not to use Buster; he was heading for a heart attack as it was, he kept
saying.
We were highly skeptical of the heart attack theory, but there was no time for
speculation. The secret MI6 parlor game was at risk of becoming embarrassingly public.
Crabbe and his MI6 accomplice had signed into a local hotel under their own names.
Therell be a fearful row if this comes out, snapped Cumming. Well all be for the
pavilion!
Cumming buzzed through to Dick Whites office and asked to see him immediately. We
all trooped upstairs, Dick was sitting at his desk. There was no hint of a welcoming
smile. His charm had all but deserted him, and the years of schoolmaster training came
to the fore. The Russians have just asked the Admiralty about the frogman, and
theyve had to deny any knowledge. Im afraid it looks to me rather as if the lid will
come off before too long, he said tersely. John, how on earth did you get yourself into
this mess? he asked with sudden exasperation.
Henry was chastened, but explained that the Navy had been pressing them for months
for details of the ORDZHONIKIDZES propeller. You know what Eden is like, he said
bitterly, one minute he says you can do something, the next minute not. We thought it
was an acceptable risk to take.
White looked unconvinced. He smoothed his temples. He shuffled his papers. The clock
ticked gently in the corner. Telltale signs of panic oozed from every side of the room.
We must do everything we can to help you, of course, he said, finally breaking the
painful silence. I will go and see the PM this evening, and see if I can head the thing off.
In the meantime, Malcolm will put A2 at your disposal.
A thankful John Henry retreated from the room. Cumming telephoned the CID in
Portsmouth and arranged for the hotel register to be sanitized. Winterborn and Henry
rushed down to Portsmouth to clear up any loose ends. But it was not enough to avert a
scandal. That night Khrushchev made a public complaint about the frogman, and a
humiliated Eden was forced to make a statement in the House of Commons. The
intelligence community in London is like a small village in the Home Counties. Most
people in the senior echelons know each other at least well enough to drink with in their
clubs. For some weeks after the Crabbe affair, the village hummed in anticipation at the
inevitable reckoning which everyone knew to be coming. As one of the few people
inside MI5 who knew about the Crabbe affair before it began, I kept my head down on
John Henrys advice.
Theres blood all over the floor, he confided to me shortly afterward. Weve got
Edward Bridges in here tearing the place apart. Shortly after this, Cumming strode into
my office one morning looking genuinely upset.
Dicks leaving, he muttered. They want him to take over MI6. The decision to
appoint Dick White as Chief of MI6 was, I believe, one of the most important mistakes
made in postwar British Intelligence history. There were few signs of it in the mid-1950s,
but MI5, under his control, was taking the first faltering steps along the path of
modernization. He knew the necessity for change, and yet had the reverence for
tradition which would have enabled him to accomplish his objectives without
disruption. He was, above all, a counterintelligence officer, almost certainly the greatest
of the twentieth century, perfectly trained for the Director-Generals chair. He knew the
people, he knew the problems, and he had a vision of the sort of effective
counterespionage organization he wanted to create. Instead, just as his work was
beginning, he was moved on a politicians whim to an organization he knew little about,
and which was profoundly hostile to his arrival. He was never to be as successful there
as he had been in MI5.
But the loss was not just MI5s. The principal problem in postwar British Intelligence was
the lack of clear thinking about the relative role of the various Intelligence Services. In
the post-imperial era Britain required, above all, an efficient domestic Intelligence
organization. MI6, particularly after the emergence of GCHQ, was quite simply of less
importance. But moving Dick White to MI6 bolstered its position, stunted the
emergence of a rationalized Intelligence community, and condemned the Service he left
to ten years of neglect. Had he stayed, MI5 would have emerged from the traumas of
the 1960s and 1970s far better equipped to tackle the challenges of the 1980s. The
departure was conducted with indecent haste. A collection was swiftly arranged. The
takings were enormous, and he was presented with an Old English Silver set at a party
held in the MI5 canteen. It was an emotional occasion. Those who knew Dick well, and
at that time I was not among them, claimed that he agonized over whether to move
across to MI6, perhaps realizing that he was leaving his lifes work undone. Dick was
nearly crying when he made his speech. He talked of the prewar days, and the bonds of
friendship which he had formed then. He thanked Cumming for encouraging him to join
the Office, and he talked with pride of the triumphs of the war years. He wished us well
and made his final bequest.
I saw the Prime Minister this afternoon, and he assured me that he had the well-being
of our Service very much at heart. I am pleased to announce that he has appointed my
Deputy, Roger Hollis, as my successor as proof of his faith in this organization. I am sure
that you will agree with me that the Service could not be in safer hands. The tall,
slightly stooping figure in the pinstripe suit came forward to shake Dick Whites hand.
The era of elegance and modernization had ended.
7 -
Roger Hollis was never a popular figure in the office. He was a dour, uninspiring man
with an off-putting authoritarian manner. I must confess I never liked him. But even
those who were well disposed doubted his suitability for the top job. Hollis, like
Cumming, had forged a close friendship with Dick White in the prewar days. For all his
brilliance, Dick always had a tendency to surround himself with less able men. I often
felt it was latent insecurity, perhaps wanting the contrast to throw his talents into
sharper relief. But while Hollis was brighter by a good margin than Cumming,
particularly in the bureaucratic arts, I doubt whether even Dick saw him as a man of
vision and intellect.
Hollis believed that MI5 should remain a small security support organization, collecting
files, maintaining efficient vetting and protective security, without straying too far into
areas like counterespionage, where active measures needed to be taken to get results,
and where choices had to be confronted and mistakes could be made. I never heard
Hollis express views on the broad policies he wanted MI5 to pursue, or ever consider
adapting MI5 to meet the increasing tempo of the intelligence war. He was not a man to
think in that kind of way. He had just one simple aim, which he doggedly pursued
throughout his career. He wanted to ingratiate the Service, and himself, with Whitehall.
And that meant ensuring there were no mistakes, even at the cost of having no
successes. Hollis grew up in Somerset, where his father had been the Bishop of
Taunton. After public school (Clifton) and Oxford, he traveled extensively in China
before joining MI5 in the late 1930s. During the war he specialized in Communist affairs,
as Assistant Director of F Branch. Under Sillitoe, Hollis was promoted to Director of C
Branch, which gave him responsibility for all forms of vetting and protective security,
such as document classification and the installation of security systems on all
government buildings. Hollis service in C Branch accounted for the importance he
accorded this work when he later became Director-General.
When Dick White succeeded Sillitoe as DG in 1953, he appointed Hollis as his Deputy.
On the face of it, it was a sensible appointment. While Dick did the thinking and the
planning, Hollis would provide the solid administrative skills which Dick often lacked.
Hollis, during the time I knew him as Deputy, never struck me as an ambitious man. He
had already risen beyond his expectations, and seemed happy to serve out the rest of
his career as Dick Whites hatchet man and confidant. The only notable item of
information commonly known about this excessively secretive man was his long-
standing affair with his secretary, an ambitious girl who, when Dick White suddenly left
for MI6, moved into the Director-Generals office with a good deal more enthusiasm
than Roger Hollis. Hollis, I suspect, always knew his limitations, and, once appointed,
sought to cover them by relying on the rigid exercise of authority. The inevitable result
was a quick sapping of whatever goodwill people held for him in the early days of his
command. Hollis took over at a time of unprecedented collapse in relations between
the various British Intelligence Services. There had always been tensions between MI5
and MI6, dating back to the earliest years. But they had emerged from World War II as
partners for the first time in a coordinated intelligence bureaucracy, along with the
newly formed GCHQ, which was responsible for all forms of communications and signals
intelligence. (For an account of this, see SECRET SERVICE by Christopher Andrew. ) But
within ten years this close and effective relationship had almost entirely disintegrated.
MI6 were deeply hostile to MI5 as a result of what they saw as unjustified attempts by
MI5 to meddle in the Philby affair. Moreover, the entire organization viewed Edens
appointment of Dick White in place of Sinclair as a mortal insult.
The most serious lack of liaison was undoubtedly that between MI5 and GCHQ. During
the war MI5 worked extremely closely with its own signals intelligence organization, the
Radio Security Service (RSS) on the Double Cross System. The RSS intercepted and broke
the ciphers used by the German Intelligence Service, the Abwehr, enabling MI5 to arrest
incoming German spies as they landed in Britain. RSS was run by MI6 for MI5. B Branch
then supervised the screening of these agents. Those who were prepared to cooperate
with the British were turned and began feeding false radio reports back to the Germans.
Those who refused were executed. But the success of any disinformation operation
depends on being able to monitor how far your enemy accepts the disinformation you
are feeding him Through the RSS wireless interceptions and the break into German
Armed Forces ciphers, ENIGMA, the Twenty Committee running the Double Cross
operation knew precisely how much influence their deception ploys were having on
German military policy. In the postwar period MI5, stripped of their wartime
intellectual elite, showed scant interest in maintaining the signals intelligence
connection. They had, in any case, lost formal control of RSS early on in the war to MI6.
But the most powerful impediment was GCHQ, who jealously guarded their monopoly
over all forms of signals and communications intelligence. By the time I joined MI5 full-
time in 1955, liaison at the working level with GCHQ had dwindled to a meeting once
every six months between a single MI5 officer and a higher clerical officer from GCHQ.
In February 1956 I attended one of these meetings for the first time. The experience
was shattering. Neither individual seemed to appreciate that in the Cold War, as in
World War II, GCHQ had a vital role to play in assisting MI5 in its main task of
counterespionage. Nor did they seem to realize that, as MI5 technology advanced, there
might be ways in which MI5 could help GCHQ. I began with a list of suggestions, one of
which was checking whether the Russians were listening to Watcher radios. But Bill
Collins, the GCHQ representative, seemed utterly thrown by this positive approach to
committee work.
I shall have to take a bit of guidance on that one, he would say, or I really dont think
weve got the time to spare for that sort of thing.
I complained to Cumming, but he too seemed uninterested.
Its their turf. Best leave it to them.
The MI5 officer in charge of liaison with GCHQ was Freddie Beith, an energetic agent
runner working for D Branch. His father was Welsh and his mother Spanish, which gave
him a fervent love of rugby and a volatile Latin temperament. He was a fluent German
speaker and during the war he had been involved in the Double Cross System, running
double agents in Portugal and Spain. Berths liaison with GCHQ stemmed from
Operation HALT, which he controlled. HALT began in the early 1950s when GCHQ asked
MI5 if they could help obtain intelligence about diplomatic ciphers being used in
London. Beith ran HALT by asking any agent D Branch recruited inside an embassy to try
to obtain access to the cipher room. GCHQ hoped that one of Beiths agents might be
able to steal some of the waste cipher tape, which they could then use to attack the
cipher.
Beith threw himself enthusiastically into the task, but it was virtually impossible. Cipher
rooms in most embassies, especially Soviet Bloc ones, were by far the most restricted
areas in the compounds, and the chances of infiltrating an agent into them was remote.
Nevertheless, Beith did achieve one outstanding success in Operation HALT, when he
recruited an agent who worked inside the Czech Embassy who had access to the keys to
the main cipher safe. Working to Leslie Jaggers commands, the agent took a plasticine
imprint of the key. It was a high-grade Chubb, but by using high-quality plasticine and a
micrometer to measure the indentations with exceptional accuracy, Jagger was able to
make a copy which fitted the safe. The agent successfully opened the safe and copied
the incoming code pads before they were used to encipher the Czech diplomatic cipher.
For six months GCHQ read the traffic. Then suddenly the codes were changed, and the
agent, inexplicably, was sacked.
Since then Beith had had no success. When I joined, I could see that there were ways
MI5 could help the HALT program using technical devices rather than agents. But Beith
was, by his own admission, not a technical man, and found it difficult to follow my
arguments. But since he was the only officer allowed to liaise with GCHQ, I had to strike
out on my own if my ideas were to get a decent hearing. In the end I took Freddie out
for a drink one night and asked him if he would be offended if I made an appointment to
go down to GCHQ headquarters at Cheltenham and see things for myself.
Not at all, old man, said Freddie cheerfully, you go right ahead. All this radio lark is a
bit over my head. The human vices are more my territory.
I made an appointment to see an old friend of mine from the Navy, Freddie Butler, who
worked on GCHQ senior management. I explained to Butler that I felt the whole system
of MI5/GCHQ liaison needed a complete rethink. Butler arranged for me to bypass Bill
Collins, and meet the top GCHQ cryptanalysts, Hugh Alexander and Hugh Denham.
Alexander ran GCHQs H Division, which handled cryptanalysts, ably assisted by the
quiet, studious Denham, who eventually succeeded him in the 1960s. Alexander joined
Bletchley Park, GCHQs prewar forerunner, at the outbreak of the war and, along with
Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman, was primarily responsible for breaking the Enigma
codes. After the war Turing went to Manchester University to design computers and
tragically died by his own hand after being hounded over his homosexuality. Welchman
went to work on advanced computers in the USA. Alexander, alone of the three, stayed
to pursue a peacetime career in GCHQ. He was a brilliant international chess player, as
well as codebreaker. Despite the intellectual demands of both work and hobby,
Alexander remained on the outside a calm, reassuring tweed-clad figure. Yet I am sure
that the mental contortions in the end told on him. He spent all his life quietly in the
country, he never smoked or drank, and then suddenly died of cancer at a
comparatively early age. I told Alexander and Denham that I had been indoctrinated
into Operation HALT, and felt MI5 could contribute much more to GCHQs work. I
explained that tremendous advances had been made in MI5 technology since the
Brundrett Committee was formed in 1949, especially in the field of new microphones. It
might be possible, I suggested, to obtain HALT intelligence through technical means,
rather than using agents, a method which at the present moment seemed destined for
continual failure.
Im not sure I know myself precisely how we can help until I have had a chance to
experiment, I continued, but I am sure that with the new high-sensitivity microphones
we have, it must be possible to get something out of a cipher machine. They have to be
reset every morning by the cipher clerk. Suppose we could pick up the sound of the new
settings being made. Wouldnt that help?
The two cryptanalysts were supportive as I made my somewhat nervous presentation.
They were clearly curious to see for themselves the first example of an unknown species
in the Intelligence menagerie - an MI5 scientist.
Any help is gratefully received in this department, said Alexander. After all,
compared to your organization, we are the new boys. We havent even finished building
yet.
He gestured to the window. In the distance a team of building workers was installing
another line of Nissen huts behind the main GCHQ complex.
Our problem is that our theories are running beyond our computer capacity, he went
on.
So many ciphers today we could crack - we know how to crack them. We just dont
have sufficiently powerful computers to do the job. Well get them soon, of course, but
in the meantime, any help may give us a shortcut.
I asked Alexander what the prime target was at the moment. He looked a little uneasy
at my direct question.
Well, of course, we have many targets, theyre constantly updated. JIC demands, that
sort of thing.
Yes, I persisted, but if you had to single one out as the most important today, which
would you choose?
Alexander shifted in his seat and exchanged glances with Denham. I should say it was
the Gyppies, said Alexander finally. The Foreign Office have been pushing us for
months to get something on the cipher. Weve got little bits, but its only now and
again, and never current stuff.
It was spring 1956. Tension between Britain and Egypt was fast mounting, as Nasser
began the moves which led to the Suez Crisis later that year.
What machine do they use?
Its a Hagelin, replied Denham, referring to a cipher machine manufactured by the
Swiss firm Crypto AG and much favored in the 1950s by Third World countries.
I arranged to borrow one of GCHQs sample Hagelins, and took it back up to London in
the boot of my car. I set the machine up with Leslie Jagger in an MI5 safe house in
Regents Park and began experiments to see if my theory was practical. This Hagelin was
a keyboard machine, with tape containing the enciphered message leading out from
one side. The principle of the machine was simple. Seven rotating wheels, powered by
switched currents, automatically substituted mechanically produced random figures for
whatever was typed into the machine. Every morning the cipher clerk operating a
Hagelin inside an embassy reset the wheels before beginning transmissions. If any of our
microphones could detect the sounds of these new settings being made, I felt sure that
GCHQ would be able to use them to determine what is known as the core position of
the machine, and from there be in a position to attack the cipher. Alexander and
Denham explained to me that if we could get the settings of three, possibly four, wheels
of the machine, they would have broken the cipher.
I installed a series of high-sensitivity microphones at various distances from the Hagelin,
as well as a probe microphone in the wall behind it. Each microphone was connected in
turn to an oscilloscope, so that the sounds it recorded were translated into visual
readings. Leslie Jagger rigged up a film camera to record the oscilloscope screen. I
opened the lid of the Hagelin and carefully reset the wheels, making a note of the old
and new settings. The machine began to clatter as it enciphered a stream of dummy
traffic. I sent the results down to Denham in Cheltenham for his comments.
As soon as we got the films developed, I could see that the oscilloscope readings were
firm enough to provide some clue to the Hagelin machine settings. They also produced
evidence of the setting of at least three wheels out of seven. I decided to make further
experiments with SATYR equipment, which gave a far less sensitive sound. We did
detect movements on the wheels, but it was highly corrupt. I sent the findings down to
Cheltenham by courier. The next day Denham telephoned on the scrambled line.
Theyre marvelous, Peter, he said. I could tell he was excited. The distortion from the
scramble made him sound positively lunatic. The acoustic microphones are best. We
can get two, maybe even three wheels out using those readings. The radio one isnt so
good, but I think, given time, we might be able to make something of it. The line
fractured under a haze of static.
When can we go into action with it? he shouted down the line.
As soon as youve got the ministerial clearance, I replied. The next day GCHQ sent Ray
Frawley from the planning staff up to London. Frawley was an astute, practical man,
bridging the gap between the intellectual brilliance of Alexander and Denham and the
administrative demands of a huge sprawling organization like GCHQ. Frawley was a
radical atheist who believed that one day mankind would be coupled directly to
computers. Dangerous irrationality would be banished forever. It was rather a childlike
ideal for a man to hold in the grim years of the Cold War, but he and I became close
colleagues even though I remained at heart an irrationalist, believing in the sudden
burst of inspiration or intuition to solve a problem. As soon as Winterborn, Frawley, and
I sat down to plan the operation against the Egyptians we realized that the best way was
the simplest way. I checked with the Post Office Investigations Unit and obtained a
complete list of all telephone installations in the Embassy. There appeared to be one
either inside or very close to the cipher complex, so we decided to install Special
Facilities on the telephone and use the microphone to capture the sounds of the cipher
machine. The Post Office faulted the phone system and we waited for the Egyptians to
call in the Post Office. I arranged to go in myself, disguised as an engineer, with the man
who would install the SF device on the telephone receiver. I wanted the chance to look
over the room in case any waste cipher material was lying around.
The next morning I met the Post Office team over at St. Pauls and we drove over to the
Embassy in their van. The security was tight at the Embassy door and we were escorted
from room to room. The cipher room was in an annex, the Hagelin clattering away
inside. Three cipher clerks were busy operating the telex machines and processing the
diplomatic cables. I looked carefully for any signs of spare tape waste, but the section
seemed well organized and tidy. One of the clerks came out and engaged our escort in
animated conversation. After a while he went back in and turned the machines off.
When he reappeared he came over to me and gesticulated toward the telephone. He
could speak no English, but through sign language I understood that he wanted me to
move the telephone closer to his seat near the machine. Scarcely able to believe our
luck, I began to extend the cable, slowly turning my back on him so that the engineer
could slip the small washer into the receiver to modify it for SF. I placed the telephone
back on top of his desk, not more than two feet from the Hagelin machine. The clerk
tapped it, and grinned at me broadly. I grinned back, but somehow I felt we were not
quite sharing the same joke.
I hurried back from the Egyptian Embassy to the seventh floor to monitor the sounds
from the receiver. It seemed at first to be an electronic haze, but after some fine tuning
the clatter of the Hagelin was clearly audible. MI5 arranged a special link down to
GCHQ, and every morning, as the clerk reset the machine, GCHQs H Division calculated
the new settings and read the cipher straight off, a process known as leading the
machine. The new technique of breaking ciphers by detecting intelligence about the
machines through technical surveillance became known by the code word ENGULF. It
was a vital breakthrough. The combined MI5/GCHQ operation enabled us to read the
Egyptian cipher in the London Embassy throughout the Suez Crisis. The Egyptians used
four different key ciphers worldwide, and by mounting operations against their
embassies abroad using the same ENGULF technique, we were able to break into most
of the other channels. The operation against the Egyptian cipher was a tremendous
success for MI5. It came at a time when MI6 had conspicuously failed in their efforts to
provide intelligence. Virtually their entire network in Egypt was rounded up and
arrested on Nassers instructions at an early stage in the crisis, and their only
contribution was a bungled attempt to assassinate Nasser.
For Hollis, who had stepped into the Director-Generals chair just as the Suez Crisis
reached boiling point, the triumph could not have been better timed. It gave him a solid
achievement in those crucial first few months. In the light of later events, I always
thought it ironic that it was I who had given it to him.
The single most important intelligence which we derived from the cipher break was a
continuous account of Egyptian/Soviet discussions in Moscow, details of which were
relayed into the Egyptian Embassy in London direct from the Egyptian Ambassador in
Moscow. The information from this channel convinced the Joint Intelligence Committee
(JIC) that the Soviet Union were indeed serious in their threat to become involved in the
Suez Crisis on the Egyptian side. One message was particularly influential. It detailed a
meeting between the Soviet Foreign Minister and the Egyptian Ambassador in which the
Russians outlined their intentions to mobilize aircraft in preparation for a confrontation
with Britain. The panic provoked by this cable, which was handed straight to the JIC, did
as much as anything to prompt Eden into withdrawal. Similarly, since all GCHQ product
was shared with its American counterpart, the National Security Agency (NSA), the
intelligence, I am sure, did play an important part in shaping American pressure on
Britain to end the crisis.
Soon after the SF was installed inside the Egyptian Embassy we nearly lost the whole
operation. The Russians, anxious to bestow client status on Egypt as the Suez Crisis
deepened, sent a team of Russian sweepers to sanitize their London Embassy of any
bugs or microphones. It was the sort of friendly gesture the Russians loved to bestow,
enabling them to pick up useful intelligence for themselves at the same time. Our static
observation post overlooking the entrance of the Egyptian Embassy detected the
Russian sweepers as soon as they entered the building. I was called up to the seventh
floor to monitor their progress in the cipher section. I listened helplessly as they entered
the cipher room. They started with the fuse box and then began electronically sweeping
the walls and ceilings with large instruments which looked like metal detectors. The
microphone thumped ominously as a Russian hand picked up the telephone and began
to unscrew the bottom. There was a muffled pause, and then the sound of the
telephone being reassembled. Hugh Winterborn breathed a sigh of relief.
At the time we knew that the Russians had discovered the SF and would remove it if
they found it, but they didnt! If the Russians knew about SF, which they did, and were
so wary of it, for instance in the Russian Embassy, why had they overlooked it in the
Egyptian Embassy? It would suit them not to alert us to the fact that they knew about
SF, so that we would continue to use it. They could, after all, have sent intelligence via
their own cipher circuit, Moscow-London, and handed the message over to the
Egyptians in London. This would have been unbreakable. But I believe that there was
another reason. The Russians wanted us to read the signals of their resolve in the Suez
Crisis correctly. They did not want us to assume they were bluffing. The best way of
ensuring we took their posture seriously would be if we obtained intelligence about it
from an unimpeachable source, for instance from a secret cable. It was my first insight
into the complexities of Soviet disinformation.
After the Suez Crisis had collapsed, I began to pester GCHQ again with suggestions of
future cooperation. But they seemed to want relations to drift back to the languid state
they were in before. And GCHQ, while happy to take the results of ENGULF, were
unwilling to step up their help, in return, for MI5. In short, they did not mind MI5
working for them, so long as the arrangement was not reciprocal. I felt that GCHQ had a
major role to play in helping MI5 confront the Soviet espionage networks in the UK by
tackling Soviet spy communications. The Russian Intelligence Service has always favored
running really sensitive operations illegally, using agents who operate entirely
independently of the legal Embassy Intelligence Officers, communicating with
Moscow Center by using their own radio transmitters. I felt sure that if we devoted
effort to tracing and logging these transmissions we might get a break which could lead
us right into the heart of the Soviet Intelligence apparatus. I wanted GCHQ to provide
MI5 with the service that we had received from RSS during the war, of continuous
monitoring of illegal radio broadcasts to and from the UK. It seemed to me to be
straightforward common sense. But GCHQ were devoting a paltry one and a half radio
positions to taking this traffic. It was a pathetic effort, and no amount of persuasion
could make them devote more.
Shortly after the first ENGULF Operation against the Egyptian cipher I went to Canada to
plan Operation DEW WORM. Toward the end of the trip Terry Guernsey, the head of
RCMP Counterespionage, asked me to study an RCMP case which had recently ended in
mysterious circumstances. During this review I ran across a detail which convinced me
beyond any doubt that GCHQ had to be forced to change their mind. Guernsey showed
me into a private room. Sitting on the table were three volumes of files marked
KEYSTONE. The KEYSTONE case began in 1952, when a Russian entered Canada under a
false name, intent on developing cover as an illegal agent for the KGB. In fact, his
eventual destination was the USA, but the KGB often send their illegals into Canada first
to establish for themselves a secure legend, or false identity, before going across the
border. But soon after the illegal, code-named Gideon by the RCMP, arrived in Canada
he fell in love with a woman. It was strictly against KGB rules, and it wasnt long before
Gideon developed doubts about his mission.
Eventually Gideon was ordered by Moscow Center to make plans for his emigration to
the USA. He managed to persuade them that it was too risky, and the emigration plan
was aborted. Instead he was appointed the KGB illegal resident in Canada, responsible
for running other illegal agents throughout Canada. The new responsibilities were
arduous. Gideon, who was in any case a lazy man, had to spend long hours receiving
messages on his radio, and to make endless journeys throughout Canada to collect
intelligence. Gideon began to fall behind on his schedule, and was bullied by his
controllers. Finally he decided to confess everything to his lover and together they
decided to approach the RCMP.
Terry Guernsey, with his instinctive feel for the importance of the case, immediately
decided to run Gideon on as a double agent, rather than accept him as a defector. The
decision seemed well justified when Gideon was given control of an illegal agent
working for the Russians on the Canadian Avro Arrow Aircraft program. For a year the
RCMP monitored Gideon as if he were a laboratory specimen. The workings of Soviet
illegals were virtually unknown in the West. Guernsey carefully logged the tradecraft the
Russians used for Gideon, the way he was instructed to gather intelligence, the dead
letter drops he used; most important of all, the RCMP monitored all his coded radio
communications.
Everything went well until the summer of 1955, when suddenly Gideon was recalled to
Russia by his controller for extensive debriefing. After initial hesitation, the double agent
decided to make the journey. He never returned. The RCMP waited for months and
years for a sign that Gideon had survived. But they heard nothing. After a while,
transmissions from Moscow to Canada began again on Gideons cipher, suggesting that
a replacement agent had arrived, but months of fruitless searching by the RCMP failed
to uncover him. The case, which had promised so much in its early stages, was finally
closed down by a weary Guernsey. He was convinced that something serious had gone
wrong in the case, but it was impossible to put a finger on what it was, still less
investigate it. Bennett, his assistant, was convinced that Gideon had fallen under
Russian control and that the case was being run on to deceive the RCMP.
Reading the files it was clear to me the case bore all the hallmarks of Russian
interference from an early stage, but beyond that there was little I could suggest. Then I
came across a detail in the case which struck a chord. Although Gideon was an illegal
agent, the Russians still required him to make very occasional meetings with a legal
diplomat from the Russian Embassy, almost certainly the Illegal Support Officer. The
probable reason for these meetings was that the KGB believed Gideon to be such a
difficult and unreliable agent that only face-to-face meetings would ensure he was kept
on the right track. During one of these meetings, which were covered by the RCMP, a
furious row broke out between Gideon and his controller. Gideon had been missing his
broadcasts from Moscow and failing to respond. Gideon claimed that he had been
unable to receive the messages on his radio set because the atmospheric conditions
were too bad. His KGB controller was totally unimpressed. He handed Gideon a detailed
list of the transmissions he had missed, complete with their times and duration, and
made it clear he knew Gideon was lying. Although the Russian never specifically
mentioned the fact, it was obvious to me that he must have been monitoring the
broadcasts sent to Gideon inside the Embassy. I read the report of this meeting again
and again to ensure that I had understood it correctly. As I turned the crisp pages of the
file I began to realize that if the KGB Illegal Support Officer in Canada monitored
transmissions from Moscow, it was at least possible that his counterpart in the London
Embassy would be doing the same thing. If GCHQ could be persuaded to operate flat
out against the Embassy we might be able to identify the transmissions, even perhaps
tentatively identify the Illegal Support Officer by correlating his movements against
those of the transmissions. Once we had done that we would be in a position to put him
under total surveillance in an effort to catch him meeting his agents.
As soon as I got back to London I raised the whole question with GCHQ. They listened
patiently as I pleaded for more effort. But I was operating on my own. There was no
great enthusiasm for the venture inside MI5 either, and although GCHQ did agree to
provide a few more positions to monitor broadcasts, it was nothing like enough. I
suggested GCHQ mount a major effort to locate receivers inside the Russian Embassy,
just as I had earlier done over the Watcher radios. But once again my request was
deemed unpractical and the subject was soon lost in the dense undergrowth of the
intelligence bureaucracy. The situation remained at stalemate until 1958, when a new
case emerged which totally changed the relationship between MI5 and GCHQ. In the
process it pitched Hollis into his first internal crisis and introduced him to a subject
which was to dog him throughout his career. I was sitting in my office poring over the
plans for a microphone installation when I received a summons to Hollis office. He was
sitting in the armchair at one end of the conference table, holding several loose files. He
looked gray and drawn. He motioned me to the chair opposite.
I would like you to help me with a problem, he said, handing me a file. I read the
contents swiftly. They were source reports from an agent named Frantisek Tisler, who
evidently worked as a cipher clerk in the Czech Embassy in Washington. Tisler was being
run by the FBI, and they had handed on to MI5 items of his intelligence which related to
British security. Tisler claimed he had gone back to Czechoslovakia in the summer of
1957 and met by chance an old friend, Colonel Pribyl, who at the time was also on leave
from his posting to London as the Military Attache. They had got drunk and Pribyl told
Tisler that he was running an important spy in Britain, a man named Linney, who was
designing simulators for use in a guided-missile project for the RAF. It had not taken
long for MI5 to locate the spy. Attached to the Tisler source report was a copy of
Linneys Personal File entry in the MI5 Registry. He was a senior engineer working in the
Miles Aircraft Development Laboratory at Shoreham in Sussex, where he had total
access to the operational and performance details of the missiles. I dont see the
problem, sir. Why dont we place him under surveillance, and arrest him when he next
makes a meet with Pribyl? This is the problem, said Hollis grimly, handing me an
additional sheet of paper.
It was a letter to Hollis from J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the FBI, typed on Hoovers
personal italicized typewriter. The letter outlined another, much more serious allegation
made by Tisler. He claimed that Pribyl had also told him that he knew the Russians had a
spy inside MI5 in London. Pribyl had discovered this when he was debriefing an
important agent in a car traveling through the streets of London. He became aware that
he was being followed by a vehicle, which he presumed to be an MI5 Watcher car, and
took evasive action to throw the car off. Anxious to ensure that the identity of his agent
had not been blown, he decided to contact his Russian opposite number, Colonel Rogov,
for help. Rogov told him that it would take a day or two to check, but eventually he was
able to reassure Pribyl that although a Watcher car had followed him, it had given up
the chase, as they believed he was just giving a driving lesson to a colleague. Rogov also
told him that he should be aware of the fact that the MI5 Watcher service had recently
changed tactics, and instead of openly tailing diplomats as soon as they left their
embassies, they were picking them up on the bridges across the Thames, where
countersurveillance was more difficult.
When I read the note, I knew immediately that what Pribyl had learned was genuine.
The change in Watcher operations had indeed taken place, largely at my instigation as
part of the attempted modernization program. The RCMP had been experimenting with
this idea with some success. It was called Operation COVERPOINT. No wonder Hoover
insisted that his letter be delivered by hand via his deputy Al Belmont, who refused to
meet Hollis inside Leconfield House. The letter was handed over at a secret meeting in
an MI5 safe house, and Belmont flew straight back to Washington incognito.
You can see our problem, Peter, said Hollis. If we make a move against Linney we
may blow Tisler, and the FBI are anxious to retain him in place for as long as possible.
And if we try to investigate the case by other means, well be blown by the Russian
source inside the office. Whatever happens, we must get to the bottom of this
penetration.
Hollis told me that for the past three months extensive investigations had been made in
the Watcher and Watcher support services by Malcolm Cumming and Courtney Young,
the head of Russian Counterespionage. It was felt that the leak must emanate from
there, but nothing had been found. Finally, Hugh Winterborn had prevailed on Cumming
to persuade Hollis to indoctrinate me.
Have you got any ideas, Peter?
Only to string up those buggers down at Cheltenham, sir!
Im sorry. I dont think I follow...
I explained to Hollis that I had long held the theory that the Russians might be obtaining
intelligence through intercepting and analyzing our Watcher communications.
My father and I did something similar in 1940 on the Sussex Downs. We tracked
signals, and managed to plot the course of the British Fleet as it went down the Channel.
Im sure thats how Rogov got the information. It would be relatively easy for them to
do it, sir. Just cross-referencing direction-finding of our signals with the records of
where their own people go would tell them a lot. Basically, they must always know
when were following them.
I told him that I had repeatedly pushed GCHQ to conduct thorough tests to check if
receivers were operating inside the Embassy which correlated with our own
communications.
Im afraid, sir, it was never high on their list of priorities.
Hollis groaned.
But can you do it, Peter?
Yes, I think so. What weve got to do is try to trace emissions from the receiver.
The principle was simple. Every radio set contains a local oscillator to beat down the
incoming signal into a fixed frequency which can be much more easily filtered. The local
oscillator always radiates sound waves as it operates, and it is these emissions which
reveal the presence of a receiver.
You realize, of course, that this is SIGINT, sir. Strictly speaking were not allowed to do
that work. GCHQ will take my guts for garters when they find out...
Hollis hunched forward thoughtfully, cupping his hands across his face.
There was a painful silence.
They would need to be told about the Tisler allegation, of course, if we brought them
in, he said finally. It was the kind of Whitehall demarcation dispute Hollis understood
only too well. I could always have a go, I ventured. If you can square my back
upstairs with Cheltenham when they find out, at least well know one way or the other
about Tislers source within a few months. If we go to GCHQ, itll take a year or more to
arrange.
Hollis began to collect the files together into a pile. I think that is the best course of
action, said Hollis, Keep me informed, wont you.
He looked at me squarely.
Of course, Peter, you realize what a terrible thing this would be for the Service, dont
you? If its true. I mean. Quite apart from the effect in Washington. A lot of good work
will have been wasted. Including my own, I thought bitterly, angry at myself for not
pushing GCHQ harder over the Watcher radios.
As soon as I got back to my office I contacted Courtney Young and asked him to send
over any intelligence reports he had detailing the types of electronic equipment the
Russians had either bought in London or imported into the UK since the war. Working
through the files of reports I was able to pull together a reasonably accurate picture of
the range and types of receiver the Russians were using inside the Embassy. I calculated
that the probable range of emissions from their local oscillators was around two
hundred yards. That ruled out operating from our static observation posts. But A Branch
had been busy for some time developing a radio transparent mobile van with plastic
walls. I pressed Winterborn to finish the project as soon as possible. Within a fortnight
the van was rigged with an internal power supply and two receivers, one to detect the
emissions from the Russian local oscillator and the other to confirm the relationship to
the A4 frequency.
One spring day in March 1958, my assistant Tony Sale and I took the van out for the first
time. We obtained permission to drive it up Kensington Park Gardens in front of the
Embassy as if we were making a delivery to a house nearby. Sale and I sat inside with
fingers crossed, earphones clamped over our heads, watching for the faintest flicker out
of the amplifier. We made two passes. Nothing happened. The static hummed. We
drove across to the Consulate on Bayswater Road and made a pass along the front of
the building. As we neared No. 5, the Russian premises, we began to pick up the faint
flutterings of a signal. As I tuned the receiver we heard a whistle as it encountered the
frequency of the local oscillator. We slowed in front of the front door and the signal
gained rapidly in strength, tailing off as we made our way up toward Marble Arch. There
was certainly a receiver operating inside the Embassy. But was it tuned to the Watcher
frequency? For the next few days we made a series of passes at various different times
of the day and night to try to gain some idea of what times the receiver inside the
Embassy was in use, and whether there was a correlation with Watcher radios. It looked
as if it were going to be a long, laborious, imperfect task. Then, by coincidence, as we
were making a pass in front of the Consulate, a Watcher car drove past the other way,
transmitting on the Watcher frequency back to Watcher headquarters. Inside the van
our receiver, which was tuned to the local oscillator inside the Consulate, squawked
loudly. What the hell do you suppose that is? I asked Tony Sale. He looked up with a
quizzical look on his face. Then the truth suddenly dawned on us both. The Watcher car
had just handed us the proof we needed. By transmitting on the Watcher frequency so
close to the Consulate the Watcher car had overloaded the input circuit going into the
Embassy local oscillator. We had picked up the squawk of pain as its frequency distorted
under the overload. In other words, it was proof that the receiver inside the Embassy
was tuned to the Watcher frequency.
The implications of this new discovery, code-named RAFTER, were enormous. Not only
could we prove beyond any doubt that the Russians were listening to our Watcher
frequencies; we could also use the same technique to check the frequencies being
listened to on any receiver we could detect inside the Embassy. All we needed was to
radiate at the Embassy and listen for the local oscillator overload. The ideas I had nursed
since reading the KEYSTONE files were finally in a position to be put into practice. Using
RAFTER we could detect which broadcasts from Moscow to illegal agents in the field
were being monitored inside the Embassy. RAFTER, potentially, offered us a shattering
breakthrough into the hitherto secret world of Soviet illegal communications. But while
RAFTER proved our Watcher communications were a major source of intelligence for
the Russians, there was still the question of the missile spy, Linney. Obviously, the
investigation of Linney had to be done in such a way that our Watcher radios would not
give away the operation. I decided that since radio silence was unrealistic, the best
solution was to drastically change the frequencies of the vehicles assigned to the
operation. I went to see the Ministry of Defense and asked to pirate one of their military
frequencies, seventy megacycles away from the current Watcher frequency, so that the
Linney vehicle transmissions would melt into the mass of other military traffic on nearby
wavebands. But first I had to install new crystals in the Watcher radio sets so that they
could operate on the new frequency. Every communications radio contains a crystal
which controls the frequency at which it can receive or transmit. Rather than risk
handling this through MI5 channels, I paid a private visit to my old colleague R.J. Kemp,
the Marconi Chief of Research, and asked him if he would produce the new crystals for
me in the Great Baddow Laboratory. I gave him a sample crystal so he could build one of
the correct shape, and stressed that the new frequency should be held only by him and
his immediate assistant. As an additional security precaution, we decided to mark the
new crystals with an entirely different frequency from the actual one used. Within three
weeks Kemp had produced enough crystals for a dozen transmitter and receiver units,
and they were installed by the MI5 engineers who normally handled Watcher radios, so
as not to raise suspicions.
The details of this operation, code-named LOVEBIRD, were severely restricted inside
MI5. Only Winterborn and I knew the correct frequency and none of the new radios
were used within range of the Soviet Embassy. The Consulate receiver was continuously
monitored using RAFTER, so that we could record how the Russians behaved during the
operation against Linney. D Branch had already extensively analyzed the movements of
Linney and his controller, Pribyl. By comparing the two, they discovered that their
regular meet was on the South Downs near Brighton. We arranged with Special Branch
to arrest Linney and Pribyl in the act of passing over secret material at their next
rendezvous. Linney was followed to the meeting place by Watchers equipped with the
new frequency. He waited for two hours and then went back home. Pribyl, meanwhile,
remained in London. Subsequently, Linney was interrogated, and unexpectedly
confessed. He was sentenced to fourteen years imprisonment.
On the face of it, the case had been concluded successfully. But one detail troubled
Winterborn, me, and the D Branch officers in charge of the case. Why had Pribyl missed
his meeting? There were many reasons which might explain his failure to show up. He
had not missed any other meets. But if he had learned of the planned arrest, it could not
have been from the Watcher radios. It could only have been as a result of a tip-off from
a human source.
I decided to conduct another experiment to resolve the question of whether or not
there was a two-legged source operating for the Russians in conjunction with the
intelligence they were obtaining from our Watcher radios. I arranged to change all
Watcher radio crystals simultaneously while monitoring, by means of RAFTER, the
Russian receiver, to see precisely what they did. It was impossible to make a change on
this scale without recording the details inside Leconfield House, but I was confident that
none of the Watchers would learn of the plan in advance.
We began RAFTER on the Russian receiver on a Monday morning, and chased Russian
diplomats normally on our usual frequency. On the Tuesday and Wednesday we closed
down all Watcher operations entirely while we switched the crystals. The Watcher force
was told that the frequency was being moved up two megacycles, when in fact it was
being moved down two instead. We opened up again on Thursday, chasing diplomats
normally on our new frequency. We watched the RAFTER readings carefully for any
signs that the Russians were searching for our new frequency in the area where we had
indicated to the Watchers that it was being relocated. They did appear to check their
equipment, as if it was faulty, but remained on the old frequency until the end of the
week. When we opened up again on Monday morning, everything had changed. A
Russian receiver was already listening on the new frequency, but from inside the
Embassy in Kensington Park Gardens, rather than from the Consulate. We were faced
with another riddle. This new receiver had either searched for the new Watcher
frequency the previous week, undetected by us as we concentrated on the Consulate, or
the Russians had been tipped off to the new frequency during the weekend. It is unlikely
that we would have missed the Russians lining up another receiver on the new
frequency the previous week. I discussed the whole investigation at length with
Courtney Young, the head of Russian Counterespionage, and we decided to try one
more experiment. If there was a human leak, we all assumed that it had to be among
the Watcher or peripheral support services. So we decided to feed what is known in the
business as a barium meal, in other words, offer a bait of sufficiently important
intelligence that the two-legged source, if he existed, would have to relay it back to the
Russians. Courtney Young had a double agent case running. The agent, code named
Morrow, was in contact with the Russian Naval Attache, Lieutenant Commander
Lulakov. We decided on a straightforward plan. We briefed the Watchers about the
Morrow case as if he were a genuine spy. They were told that the following day Special
Branch had been instructed to arrest Morrow in the process of handing over secret
documents to Lulakov at a meeting in Hampstead. Full Watcher surveillance of both
Morrow and Lulakov was required. If there was a traitor inside the Watcher service, we
assumed he would alert the Russians, who would either fail to turn up for the meeting
or try to warn Morrow in some way.
In fact, Lulakov turned up for the meeting right on schedule, got into Morrows car in a
quiet street near Hampstead Heath, and swiftly exchanged packages with him. Both
men were promptly arrested. Lulakov established his diplomatic credentials and was
released, and left the country soon afterward. The charges against Morrow were quietly
dropped.
At first sight it seemed as if the Lulakov/Morrow affair proved there was no human
penetration. But as with every previous experiment, there were worrying
inconsistencies. Lulakov was known from previous surveillance to be infinitely patient in
his preparations for meetings. On previous occasions he had taken hours to wend his
way around London, by taxi, by bus, in and out of tubes and shops, before finally making
his rendezvous with Morrow. On this occasion, he simply left his office, hailed a taxi, and
went straight to the meeting. The handover even took place with the cars interior light
on. To anyone with a close knowledge of the Russian Intelligence Service, these were
inexplicable deviations from their normal tradecraft. At the end of 1958 I composed a
long report on the whole investigation into the Tisler allegations and sent it to Hollis. I
went through the items Tisler had learned from his garrulous friend Colonel Pribyl and
gave Hollis my assessment of how the Russians might have learned of them.
I was in no doubt from RAFTER, the technique of which I explained in the report at some
length, that the monitoring of our Watcher communications was a major source of
intelligence for the Russians about MI5, and had been so for a number of years. It
definitely explained the Pribyl driving test story, and almost certainly accounted for
the Russian knowledge of Operation COVERPOINT, although our traffic analysts doubted
that the Russians would have been able to deduce that we were following Russians from
the Thames bridges so quickly from monitoring our transmissions alone. But the failure
of Pribyl to meet Linney, the speed with which the Russians detected the new Watcher
radio frequency when we had it changed, and the Lulakov/Morrow affair were all open
to varying interpretations. The balance of probability was that there was not a two-
legged source in addition to the intelligence derived from monitoring our Watcher
communications, but the possibility could not be ruled out. A day or two after I
submitted my report, Hollis summoned me to his office. He was hunched over a file,
scratching at it with a fountain pen, when I entered the room. He did not look up. I
stood there like an errant schoolboy while he continued to write. The room had not
changed much since Dick White vacated it. There was an additional portrait on the wall
reserved for venerable Directors-General. A single photograph of Hollis son stood on his
desk alongside the three telephones which connected him to the Cabinet Office, the
Ministry of Defense, and MI6. But other than that there was no stamp of personality.
Thank you for your report, Peter, said Hollis without looking up. He sounded a
different man from when he had handed me the Tisler file earlier in the year. The crisis
was clearly over. He was back in charge. He went on writing.
Ive written to Hoover outlining a broad explanation for Tislers material about the MI5
spy, he went on, but I think it would be a good idea if you went over and briefed their
technical staff on the background to the case, RAFTER, that sort of thing. Make it a
useful trip, wont you. Get around and make some friends. He looked up and smiled
suddenly.
Its good to know weve been one step ahead of them this time. Well done.
He went back to his file, signaling that our brief encounter had ended.
I turned to leave the room.
Oh, and Peter... he said as I reached the door, stick to the technical findings, wont
you. I dont think we should give Hoover the impression that anything is... unresolved.
Of course not, sir. I quite understand.
I did not know it then, but the first stone had been cast.
8
The Capitol building was a giant fresco of pink blossom, blue sky, and white marble,
capped by a shining dome. I always loved visiting Washington, especially in the spring.
London was so drab; MI5 so classridden and penny-pinching. Like many of the younger,
postwar recruits to secret intelligence, I felt America was the great hope, the hub of the
Western intelligence wheel. I welcomed her ascendancy with open arms.
Ironically, relations between British and American Intelligence in the late 1950s were at
their lowest postwar ebb. Collaboration between MI6 and the CIA had virtually
collapsed after the Suez Crisis, and they found themselves increasingly in conflict, not
just in the Middle East but in the Far East and Africa as well. Many of the old guard in
MI6 found it hard to accept that their wartime control of the Anglo-American
intelligence relationship had long since given way to junior status.
Relations between MI5 and the CIA were fraught for different reasons. The CIA was a
new organization, flexing its muscles on the world stage for the first time. Its aim was to
collect intelligence, and although it was not supposed to operate in London without
notifying MI5, both Hollis and Dick White believed the CIA flouted this understanding.
Behind all the difficulties lay the simmering distrust created by the defections of Burgess
and Maclean, and the public clearance of Kim Philby. MI6 could never be seen in the
same light again, particularly as so many senior officers had been close friends of Philby,
whereas MI5s failure to apprehend any of the three made it seem, to American eyes,
almost criminally incompetent. Only GCHQ, which had a formal charter of cooperation
with its American counterpart, the National Security Agency (NSA), under the terms of
the 1948 UK USA agreement, remained relatively immune to the turbulent currents
which battered the previously intimate wartime Anglo-American intelligence
relationship. When Hollis became Director-General he tried manfully to improve
relations with the FBI. Hoover was famously anti-British, stemming from the war, when
British Security Coordination (BSC) was set up in New York under Sir William
Stephenson, the so-called Man Called Intrepid. BSC operated against the Germans in
the United States, but Hoover vehemently opposed the idea of any organization, let
alone one which was foreign controlled, having rights to collect intelligence on American
soil. For years he refused to associate with Stephensons staff. The Burgess and Maclean
affair reinforced Hoovers prejudices, and for a while MI6 officers were not even
allowed on FBI premises, and MI5 were prohibited access to any FBI intelligence source
reports. In 1956 Hollis visited Hoover in an attempt to improve relations, and persuade
him to place MI5 on the distribution list again. Oddly enough, Hollis and Hoover got on
rather well. They were both sensitive to any encroachments on their respective empires,
yet Hollis had an essential weakness of character which enabled him to play the earnest
supplicant to Hoovers blustering bully. Hoover, like many self-made Americans, had a
strong streak of snobbery, and his gargantuan conceit was stroked by the sight of an
English upper-class spymaster with his cap outstretched.
I became an important peace offering. Hollis claimed my appointment as MI5s first
scientist was proof of his intention to modernize the Service and step up the fight
against Soviet espionage. Following Holliss visit, Hoover invited me to visit FBI
headquarters to see the range of their technical equipment. I was very keen to make the
trip, as I believed from my first day inside MI5 that the key to long-term success lay in
restoring relations with the Americans, so that we could gain access to their technical
resources. But my views were not popular. Delusions of Empire still ran strongly inside
Leconfield House. Cumming, for instance, although Head of MI5s technical branch,
never visited the United States, and saw no reason to do so. My first impression of the
FBI was the sheer scale of the technical resources at their disposal, far beyond anything
MI5 could ever imagine. But for all their riches, I could not help feeling that they made
poor use of them. They relied almost entirely on commercially available equipment,
rather than developing their own. Their radios were standard Motorola equipment used
in police cars and taxis, although they had an impressive microwave network which
connected the various FBI stations across the USA The one really interesting part of FBI
technical work was the use they made of fingerprints in espionage investigations. There
were no fingerprint records in the MI5 Registry, and I felt it was one area where the
FBIs quasi-police identity gave it an advantage.
Dick Millen was the FBI officer who ran their technical research. Millen was a lawyer
rather than a scientist by training, which limited his effectiveness, but he put on a
splendid show. I was taken down to the firing range in the basement of FBI
headquarters, and given a lesson in pistol-firing techniques. Millen proudly informed me
that even the old man himself, Hoover, regularly practiced his prowess. I was taken
down to the FBI training depot on the Maryland coast, where an old American Indian
taught FBI agents advanced gunslinging. He demonstrated his skills, shooting targets in
mirrors, and firing over his shoulder at a ping pong ball perched on the top of a water
fountain. It was rugged, all-American stuff, and the FBIs roots in the lawlessness of
1930s America were never far from the surface. But I somehow doubted that it had
much to do with modern counterespionage. I did not relish the prospect of briefing the
FBI on the Tisler affair. There was more than a hint, in the way Hoover had handled the
case, that he hoped we would fail to resolve the suspicions about a spy inside MIS, so
that he could use it as a pretext for recommending to the President that the intelligence
exchange with Britain be terminated. I hoped that the previous visits Hollis and I had
made would do something to smooth my path.
I was accompanied by Harry Stone, the MI5 liaison officer in Washington. Harry was as
genial a soul as you could ever meet. He had once been an Irish international rugby
player, and shared with Hollis a love of the golf course and an almost professional
handicap. Everyone liked Harry, primarily because he saw his job as basically a social
one, but he was unsuited in temperament and intellect for the modern age of satellite
and computer intelligence which was dawning in Washington in the late 1950s.
Harry hated meeting Hoover, and took a simple approach when a confrontation could
not be avoided.
Take a tip from me, Peter, old chap, let him do the talking, dont interrupt for Gods
sakes, and remember to say Thank you very much, Mr Hoover when hes finished. Ive
booked us a nice table for lunch. Well need it.
We swept through the archway at the front of the magnificent, triumphalist FBI
mausoleum. We were met by Al Belmont, the head of FBI domestic intelligence, and his
deputy, Bill Sullivan, who handled the Communist desk. (Sullivan was found dead in the
mid-1970s while shooting duck in New England. He is thought to have been murdered. )
Belmont was a tough, old-fashioned G-Man, as FBI men were once known, who had
been with the Bureau from its earliest times. Sullivan was the brains to Belmonts brawn
(but Belmont was no fool); both believed in the virtues of the stiletto rather than the
Magnum. Belmont had many enemies, but I always got along with him. Like me, he had
suffered a difficult childhood. His father was shot in a street brawl, and his mother
worked day and night to save enough to put him through law school. Hard work and
unswerving loyalty to the old man brought him to the top of the FBI.
But for all the outward toughness, and the seniority of their positions, both men were
cowed by Hoover. Such unswerving loyalty was, I felt, positively unnatural. Of course,
they admired Hoover for his achievements in the early years, when he turned a corrupt
and incompetent organization into an efficient and feared crime-fighting force. But
everyone knew Hoover suffered from God disease, and it seemed odd to me that they
never acknowledged the fact, even privately. I discussed the Tisler affair and the
technical implications of RAFTER with both men for most of the day, until it was time to
meet Hoover. We trooped down a maze of corridors, past an endless procession of
Identikit young FBI officers, well scrubbed, very fit, well suited, closely cropped, and
vacant-looking. The FBI offices always reminded me of sanitary clinics. Antiseptic white
tiles shone everywhere. Workmen were always busy, constantly repainting, cleaning,
and polishing. The obsession with hygiene reeked of an unclean mind. Hoovers room
was the last of four interconnecting offices. Belmont knocked, and entered the room.
Hoover stood behind his desk, dressed in a piercing blue suit. He was taller and slimmer
than he appeared in photographs, with wrinkled flesh which hung off his face in small
drapes. He greeted me with a firm and joyless handshake. Belmont began to describe
the reason for my visit, but Hoover cut him off sharply.
Ive read the report, Al. I want to hear Mr. Wright tell me about it. Hoover fixed me
with coal-black eyes, and I began to outline the discovery of RAFTER. Almost at once, he
interrupted me. I gather your Service is now satisfied about the intelligence provided
by our Czech source...?
I began to answer, but he swept me aside.
Your security organizations enjoy many facilities here in Washington, Mr. Wright.
There was more than a hint of a threat in his voice. I have to advise the President of
the United States when those facilities raise questions about our national security. I
have to take a close personal interest in a case like this, particularly in view of the recent
problems the United Kingdom has suffered in this area. I need to know I am on firm
ground. Do I make myself clear? Of course, sir, I understand perfectly...
Harry Stone busily studied his shoelaces. Al Belmont and Bill Sullivan sat to one side of
Hoovers desk, half hidden in shadow. I was on my own.
I think you will find in my report...
My staff have digested your report, Mr. Wright. I am interested in the lessons you have
learned.
Before I could answer, Hoover launched into a passionate diatribe about Western
inadequacy in the face of the Communist onslaught. I agreed with many of the
sentiments; it was just the manner of the telling that was objectionable. Inevitably the
subject of Burgess and Maclean came up, Hoover sounding each syllable of their names
with almost prurient venom.
Now in the Bureau here, Mr. Wright, that sort of thing could not happen. My officers
are thoroughly screened. There are lessons to be learned. Do I make myself clear?
I nodded.
Of course, Mr. Hoover, chimed Harry Stone.
Hoover fixed me with a sudden stare.
Total vigilance, Mr. Wright. Total vigilance. The lights always burn here in Bureau
headquarters.
He stood up abruptly, signaling the end of the meeting. The day after my ordeal with
Hoover, I lunched with James Angleton, the CIA Chief of Counterintelligence. We had
met once before on my first trip to Washington in 1957, and I was struck then by his
intensity. He had a razor-sharp mind and a determination to win the Cold War, not just
to enjoy the fighting of it. Every nuance and complexity of his profession fascinated him,
and he had a prodigious appetite for intrigue I liked him, and he gave enough hints to
encourage me into thinking we could do business together.
Angletons star was fast rising in Washington in the late 1950s, particularly after he
obtained the secret text of Khrushchevs denunciation of Stalin from his contacts in
Israel. He was one of the original wartime OSS recruits, and was trained in the arts of
counterespionage by Kim Philby at the old MI6 office in Ryder Street. The young Yale
intellectual struck up an instant friendship with his pipe-smoking English tutor, and the
relationship deepened when Philby was posted to Washington as Station Chief in 1949.
Ironically it was Philby who first detected the obsession with conspiracy in the fledgling
CIA Chief of Counterintelligence. Angleton quickly acquired a reputation among British
Intelligence officers for his frequent attempts to manipulate to his own advantage the
mutual hostility of MI5 and MI6.
I taxied over to Georgetown. I could see why so many Washington government officials
lived there, with its elegant red brick houses, tree-lined streets, bookshops, and cafes.
When I arrived at Harveys, Angleton was already sitting at his table, a gaunt and
consumptive figure, dressed in a gray suit, clutching a large Jack Daniels in one hand
and a cigarette in the other.
How was Hoover? he asked, as I joined him, with a voice like gravel being tossed onto
a path.
Youre very well informed today, Jim, I responded. His cadaverous features creased
back into a smile, in stark contrast to his funereal clothing. I knew he was fishing. The
CIA knew nothing about Tisler, or his allegation, and we had agreed to brief the FBI on
RAFTER on the understanding that knowledge of it was strictly controlled.
Just routine, you know, making friends with the Bureau. Its the vogue in London at the
moment.
Its a waste of time, he said. Youve been trying to get in with him since as far back as
I can remember. He always tells us he cant stand the Brits.
I bristled slightly, although I knew that was his intention.
Well, I cant say the Agency has been much friendlier. Youve used up a lot of credit
in Washington in the last ten years, said Angleton, pouring himself another drink.
People like Hoover, he went on, they look at Burgess and Maclean, and they look at
the state of MI5, and they say What is the point? He called the waiter over, and we
ordered.
Youre off the mark, Jim, I said finally. Things are changing. Ten years ago they would
never have appointed me as a scientist. But Im there now, and new people are coming
in all the time. I went to an English public school, he said with heavy sarcasm. I know
the score with you guys.
Its no good complaining about Burgess and Maclean all the time. Thats all in the past.
The worlds a smaller place. Weve got to start working together again.
I surprised myself with my sudden passion. Angleton remained motionless, wreathed in
a halo of swirling tobacco smoke. You wont get any help from Hoover, he grunted,
but made no offers of his own.
It was a long lunch. Angleton gave little away, but pumped me with questions with every
drink. What about Philby? I told him straight that I thought he was a spy. Suez was still a
raw nerve, even in 1959, but Angleton wanted to know every detail. He even asked me
if I could get the MI5 file on Armand Hammer, the head of Occidental Petroleum, who
inevitably came to the attention of Western intelligence in view of his extensive
business links in the Soviet Union. But I thought this was just a shade indelicate.
Were friends, Jim, but not quite that close, yet!
Around five I saw Angleton back to his car. It was a smart Mercedes. For all the
gauntness of his persona, I soon learned, he cultivated expensive tastes with his share of
the family National Cash Register Company fortune. Much to Angletons annoyance, he
discovered he had locked his keys inside, but I produced Leslie Jaggers lockpicking wire
from my pocket and within half a minute had the door open. Not bad, Peter, not bad!
said Angleton, smiling broadly. He knew I had savored the moment.
By the way, I said, I am serious. If you wont help me in Washington, Ill find someone
else who will.
Ill see what I can do, he muttered, slipping behind the steering wheel. Without a
sideways glance, he was gone. In fact, despite the skepticism in Washington, important
changes were taking place on the technical side of British Intelligence in the late 1950s.
MI5 devoted a major effort to expanding its new techniques, RAFTER and ENGULF.
As a first step we placed the Soviet Embassy under continuous RAFTER surveillance.
Hollis persuaded a reluctant Treasury to purchase, over and above the MI5 secret
allocation, a house for MI5 in the middle of the cluster of Soviet diplomatic buildings.
We installed RAFTER receivers in the loft and relayed the signals we detected inside the
Embassy along cables laid inside a specially constructed tunnel which MI5 dug between
the new house and one which we already used for visual surveillance in the next street.
We installed a former wartime MI5 officer, Cyril Mills, the famous circus owner, in the
house as a tenant. Mills operated his circus business from the house for many years, and
every time we needed to deliver staff or equipment to the house, or remove debris
from the tunnel, we used a garishly painted Mills Circus van. It was perfect cover, and
the Russians never suspected a thing.
We were careful to use straight receivers for the RAFTER operations, each operating on
a single megacycle frequency, so there were no local oscillators on our side, in case the
Russians had themselves developed a form of RAFTER. The secret of the Mills house
remained intact through the 1960s, until one night the alarm systems detected two
Soviet diplomats climbing onto the roof. They broke a skylight, but before they could
enter the roof space, the housekeeper frightened them off. Cyril Mills made a formal
protest to the Soviet Embassy, but we assumed that the Russians had somehow or other
detected our presence in the house.
Once the house was ready, I was able to put into operation the kind of experiment I had
envisaged while reading the KEYSTONE files in Canada. The Embassy was systematically
searched for signs that receivers inside were monitoring signals beamed out from
Moscow to agents in Britain. These were high-frequency (HF) signals, whereas the
Watcher radio transmissions were VHF. The Russians used large radio frequency
amplifiers with the HF receivers, which made RAFTER much more difficult. But GCHQ
developed more sophisticated equipment, and within six months we had successfully
monitored four signals from Moscow which were being routinely monitored by the
Soviets inside the Embassy. The first signal we found was code-named GRUFF. We
picked it up one Tuesday night at ten-thirty. The Morse signal came in loud and clear,
and our receivers immediately detected the whine of a local oscillator as the Russians
tuned to the same frequency. GCHQ analyzed GRUFF; it came from the Moscow area
and followed a twice-weekly schedule. The cryptanalysts were quite certain the Morse
contained genuine traffic. The Radiations Operations Committee decided to make a
major effort to track the GRUFF signal down.
I approached Courtney Young, then the Dl (head of Russian Counterespionage) and
asked him if he had any intelligence which might help us locate an illegal we believed to
be currently operating in the UK and receiving radio transmissions from Moscow. He
was astonished by my approach. He explained that D Branch had recently run a double-
agent case which had convinced him that an illegal was operating in the London area.
The double agent was a young male nurse who had once been in the CPGB. Some years
later, he was approached and asked to work clandestinely for the Russians. The nurse
was reluctant at first, but eventually his contact convinced him that he was not being
asked to spy. All he had to do was post some letters and store the occasional suitcase.
After a while the nurse became frightened and approached the police, and the case was
routinely referred to MI5 by Special Branch. Courtney Young doubled the agent back
against the Russians, and for a short while they appeared to continue to accept him as
genuine. The nurse lived in the Midlands, but he was asked to lease a flat in the
Clapham area of South London in his own name. Then his controller instructed him to
activate and service a number of dead letter boxes on Clapham Common, near the new
flat. Courtney Young was sure that he was being trained up by the Russians as an illegal
support agent - someone who assists the actual illegal agent by preparing his
communications and accommodation before he moves into the area. But suddenly, all
contact with the agent was cut, and he was given no further instructions. Either the
entire operation had aborted or the illegal was already securely established in the area
through other means. It was a long shot, but it had to be at least a possibility that
Courtney Youngs illegal was the same person who was receiving the GRUFF signal from
Moscow. The Radiations Operations Committee searched the Clapham area intensively
for any further clues. We drove our radiotransparent RAFTER van over to Clapham, and
made a base in the walled forecourt of the old air raid shelter which ran under the south
side of Clapham Common. We took power from inside the shelter, and rigged up an
aerial which I estimated would give us a range of about half a mile. I sat with Tony Sale
in the cold, poorly ventilated van, watching, waiting, listening. The GRUFF broadcast was
due at 10 A.M., so we tuned our first receiver to GRUFF, and searched the nearby
frequencies with our other receiver to see if we could detect any oscillator. In the
second week, we got a hit, a strange, owl-like hoot, modulated with the Morse from
Moscow. Someone was listening to the GRUFF broadcast within half a mile of us. Tony
Sale looked across at me, momentarily, the scent of prey in his nostrils. The tape
recorders began to roll with a subdued click. We switched to battery power supply, and
drove slowly down Clapham High Street toward the tube station, weaving our way
through the traffic. The pubs were full. Daffodils were just appearing in the neat front
gardens of the suburban houses along our route, those inside oblivious of the chase
passing in front of their doors.
Tony Sale was monitoring the local oscillator signal, using its strength as a guide to its
location. We knew GRUFF stayed up in the air for twenty minutes. We had seventeen
left. As we reached the tube station the signal became fainter, so we doubled back
toward Wandsworth, but again the signal dropped away. We went south, toward
Balham, but this time the signal disappeared before we even left the Common.
There were six minutes to go. Barely a word had been spoken inside the van. We only
had one direction left. GRUFF had to be sitting up to the north, somewhere in the
crowded maze of Battersea back streets. Our special van lumbered into Latchmere
Road. Frustration welled up inside me. I wanted to career around the corners, shout out
for help through a loud hailer, set up roadblocks. All we could do was stare at the
flickering dials, willing them to move up, and not down. But by the time we crossed
Wandsworth Road the signal was already trailing away, and shortly after that, Moscow
signed off, GRUFF was gone. Tony Sale thumped the side of the van. I tore my
headphones off, feeling drained and angry. How many more months might we sit in
Clapham before we got as close again?
I lit my thirteenth cigarette of the day and tried to make sense of the previous twenty
minutes. We had traveled in every direction. But the fact that the local oscillator signal
got weaker each time we moved, proved beyond any doubt that we had genuinely
detected another receiver besides our own. But it was located neither to the north nor
south, not to east or west. Slowly the awful truth dawned on me. GRUFF must have
been right on top of us, listening within yards of the air raid shelter. We drove back to
our base, and searched the area. Behind a high wall at the back of us was a large
wasteland car park. GRUFF must have been parked there in a car, or perhaps a van like
ours. Back at Leconfield House I printed out the tape recordings of the local oscillator
on a sonargram. The sound waves modulated with a small mains ripple. But the wave
form was not at mains frequency. It was similar to that produced by battery power
packs used in cars and vans to produce alternating current. The coincidence was almost
too painful to contemplate.
For the next six months the Radiations Operations Committee flooded Clapham with
every spare man at our disposal. We listened in hundreds of locations. Officers
scrutinized every street, searching for signs of a telltale aerial. Discreet inquiries were
made of radio equipment suppliers. But all to no avail. And every Tuesday and Thursday
night the GRUFF signal came through the ether from Moscow, mocking us as we
searched.
As well as mobile RAFTER, we began, through ROC, to arrange airborne RAFTER. An RAF
transport plane equipped with receivers similar to those in the van made regular sweeps
across London. We thought that with the extra height we would be able to get a general
idea of where receivers were operating in London. Then, having located a signal to a
specific area, we could flood it with mobile RAFTER vans. We spent our first flight over
the Soviet Embassy to check our equipment was working, and picked up their receivers
immediately. We got a series of radio hits in the Finsbury Park area, and we flooded the
locality, as we had in Clapham. But, like GRUFF, the agent remained undetected,
comfortably camouflaged in the dense undergrowth of Londons suburbs.
The RAFTER plane flights were a kind of agony. I spent night after night up in the indigo
sky, listening to the signals coming in from Moscow, insulated from the deafening sound
of the planes propellers by headphones. Down below, somewhere amid the endless
blinking lights of London, a spy was up in an attic, or out in a car, listening too. I knew it.
I could hear him. But I had no way of knowing where he was, who he was, whether he
worked alone or as part of a ring, and, most important of all, what Moscow was telling
him. I was caught between knowledge and the unknown, in that special purgatory
inhabited by counterespionage officers.
But although the RAFTER side did not immediately bear fruit, the ENGULF side, using
technical means to break ciphers, soon proved enormously successful. Things really took
off with a meeting in Cheltenham chaired by the GCHQ Assistant Director of Research,
Josh Cooper, in 1957. Cooper realized the need for close coordination between all three
Services if the new breakthrough was going to lead to further cipherbreaking success.
He brought together for the first time the various interested parties - Hugh Alexander
and Hugh Denham from GCHQs H Division (Cryptanalysis); John Storer, the head of
GCHQs Scientific section responsible for Counter Clan in M Division; and Ray Frawley,
me, and my opposite number in MI6, Pat OHanlon. Apart from the Russians, the
Egyptians still remained GCHQs first priority. They used Hagelin machines in all their
embassies, split into four groups, each group containing different cipher wheel settings.
Providing we could get a break into any one machine, every machine in that group
would be vulnerable. If we could obtain samples of any one machine, every machine in
that group would be vulnerable. MI6 and GCHQ drew up a list of the Egyptian embassies
worldwide, along with details of which machine group they belonged to. The committee
then evaluated which embassy in each group presented the best possibility for a
successful ENGULF operation, and I briefed the MI6 teams on how to plan the
operations. Within a year we had broken into every Egyptian cipher group.
Although ENGULF made all classes of Hagelin machines vulnerable, these tended to be
the preserve of Third World countries. Cooper hoped, by calling his meeting, to find
ways of applying the ENGULF principles to more advanced cipher machines, which
GCHQ lacked the computer power to attack. My approach was simple; we had to put
operations into practice even if, on paper, they looked unlikely to yield results. Weve
got to approach the problem scientifically, I said, We dont know how far we can push
these new breakthroughs, so we have to experiment. Even if things go wrong, well still
learn things we didnt know before.
I had the germ of an idea. Any cipher machine, no matter how sophisticated, has to
encipher the clear text of the message into a stream of random letters. In the 1950s,
most advanced ciphers were produced by typing the clear text into a teleprinter, which
connected into a separate cipher machine, and the enciphered text clattered out on the
other side. The security of the whole system depended on thorough screening. If the
cipher machine was not electromagnetically screened from the input machine carrying
the clear text, echoes of the uncoded message might be carried along the output cables
along with the enciphered message. With the right kind of amplifiers it was theoretically
possible to separate the ghosting text out and read it off.
Of course, we had no way of knowing which countries screened their cipher rooms
thoroughly, and which did not, and any operation along the lines I suggested would take
up to two years to reach fruition. There was little point expending vast effort trying to
break the Russian cipher, when we knew it was almost certain to be well protected. It
was a question of picking targets which were important, and against which we stood
some chance of success.
The French cipher stood out from all the rest as the most suitable target for further
ENGULF experiments. Both MI6 and GCHQ were under pressure from the Foreign Office
to provide intelligence about French intentions with regard to the pending British
application to the European Economic Community. Moreover, GCHQ had studied the
French system in London. They used two ciphers - a low-grade one which sent traffic
along a telex line to the Quai dOrsay, and a high-grade cipher for Ambassadorial
communications which was generated independently of the cipher machine for
additional security. Hugh Alexanders view was that the high-grade cipher was
unbreakable, but that the low-grade one might be vulnerable to the type of attack I had
outlined. Cooper gave his approval, and Operation STOCKADE began.
The first task in this joint MI5/GCHQ operation was to make a detailed technical
reconnaissance of the layout of the French Embassy and, in particular, locate the area of
the cipher room. I arranged to have the rating drawings sent over from the local council,
and contacted the Post Office Research Unit. John Taylor had retired by this time, and
had been replaced by H.T. Mitchell. Mitchell was paralyzed down one side as a result of
a stroke, but although his speech was poor, his mind remained crystal clear. Mitchell
gave me full diagrams of all telex and telephone cables going into and out of the
Embassy, and by comparing these with the rating drawings we were able to establish
the likely location of the cipher room.
We asked the Post Office to fault the telephones, and went in to make a visual
inspection of the cipher room area. Unlike the Egyptians, the French security staff
watched our every move, but we got the information we required. There was no
telephone in the cipher room. It was tucked away down a corridor. The cipher and telex
machines were in adjoining rooms, separated only by a plasterboard partition. Using
the Post Office charts, we traced the output cables back to the street, and into the
footway box at the end of Albert Gate entrance to Hyde Park. I arranged with Mitchell
to place a reasonably broad band radio frequency tap on the cable inside the footway
box, and the captured signal was relayed into a special operations room we had taken in
the Hyde Park Hotel. The hotel telephone system was faulted to give us cover while the
cables were laid up through the hotel to the fourthfloor room we had commandeered.
Special blocking condensers were placed on the circuit to ensure it was one-directional,
and nothing could leak back into the Embassy to give away the operation. GCHQ
routinely intercept radio and telex traffic coming in and out of every London embassy,
from their premises in Palmer Street. We arranged for a line containing the French
Embassy traffic to be fed from Palmer Street to our operations room in the Hyde Park
Hotel. Using that line as a guide, we could check whether the signal we were getting on
our radio frequency tap was the correct one.
The first morning we found the low-grade cipher and matched it with the Palmer Street
traffic. The tap was connected to our own teleprinter, and the intercepted French cipher
began to clatter out in front of us. It was clear straightaway that more than one signal
was traveling down the cable we were tapping. It was just a matter of sitting down with
a pencil and marking off the EN CLAIR text from the coded message, and the cipher
could be read straight off.
I began to pick out a translation, and found traces of another signal on the teleprinter. I
checked on the sonargram to make sure I was not mistaken, and called over the GCHQ
technicians. The steady peaks and troughs of the signal blipped across the screen
silently. The line from the low-grade cipher was strong, and its ghost was easily
identifiable. But at each pinnacle there was a murmur as another signal crossed.
Good God, the GCHQ man murmured, thats the high-grade cipher as well. We must
be picking it up through the partition wall. I hastily contacted Palmer Street and got
them to relay the high grade cipher down the line so that we could compare the signals.
The GCHQ technicians reset the amplifiers so that the traffic was sufficiently strong to
print out, and using the Palmer Street feed as a guide, I marked off the EN CLAIR text.
Within ten minutes I had a rough translation of a cable from the French Ambassador in
London to President De Gaulles private office.
For nearly three years, between 1960 and 1963, MI5 and GCHQ read the French high
grade cipher coming in and out of the French Embassy in London. Every move made by
the French during our abortive attempt to enter the Common Market was monitored.
The intelligence was avidly devoured by the Foreign Office, and verbatim copies of De
Gaulles cables were regularly passed to the Foreign Secretary in his red box. In fact,
STOCKADE was a graphic illustration of the limitations of intelligence. De Gaulle was
determined to thwart our application, and no amount of high-grade intelligence could
change that fact. We did pass on to the Americans details of French deliberation over
their independent nuclear FORCE DE FRAPPE. It helped encourage American
suspicions about De Gaulle, but the advantage we gained as a result was slight.
Nevertheless, STOCKADE was considered a major triumph inside the Foreign Office. I
was sent for by the Permanent Secretary, who congratulated me on the ingenuity of the
operation. Priceless material, he said, beaming, simply priceless, leaving me in no
doubt that reading the Frogs traffic was a worthy successor to Agincourt, the burning
of Calais, and other ancient blows against the perfidious French.
9 -
Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, British Intelligence built on the success of
the ENGULF (Egyptian) and STOCKADE (French) operations. GCHQ produced a
mammoth list of all their targets, divided into domestic and overseas priorities. MI5
gathered intelligence about each domestic embassy, including information about the
location of the cipher room, and details of all input and output cables, as well as an
assessment of the feasibility of ENGULF or STOCKADE operations against that particular
target. MI6 did the same thing overseas. They made detailed technical reconnaissance
of GCHQs targets although without the invaluable assistance of the Post Office they
were forced to rely much more on traditional agent running.
After STOCKADE, plans were laid to attack most European ciphers, starting with the
Germans. But after much effort, we aborted the operation, because their machines
were too well screened. But we successfully placed a probe microphone behind the
cipher machine in the Greek Embassy in London. This was a particularly valuable target,
since the Greeks were giving considerable support to Colonel Grivas, the Cypriot
guerrilla leader, during the Cyprus Emergency. We operated in the same way against the
Indonesian Embassy at the time of the Indonesian/Malaysian confrontation, and read
the cipher continuously through the conflict.
For MI6, undoubtedly the sweetest ROC operation was against the Russian cruiser
ORDZHONIKIDZE. Despite the Buster Crabbe fiasco in Portsmouth, MI6 remained
determined to hunt the ship down. In 1959 she was due to dock in Stockholm, and MI6
learned that the Swedish Signals Intelligence Service were planning to operate against
her. The local MI6 Station Chief suggested to the Swedes that Britain might be prepared
to offer advanced technical- assistance. Although nominally neutral, the Swedish SIGINT
organization retained informal secret liaison with GCHQ, and they gratefully accepted
the offer. I went to Stockholm to plan an ENGULF operation against the
ORDZHONIKIDZE cipher machine in 1959. I scuttled along the dockyard in the dead of
night, disguised as a Swedish engineer, accompanied by two burly local SIGINT
technicians. We also had two GCHQ people with us. We ducked into a warehouse
opposite the ORDZHONIKIDZE, and made our way upstairs to the operations room,
where the ENGULF equipment had been delivered. We were cooped up in that small
room for five days. It was high summer, and the temperature outside was in the
nineties. The warehouse had a corrugated-tin roof, and inside we sweltered, finding
solace in the crates of extra-strong lager stacked in the refrigerator. Although we
detected some cipher noises, we were never able to break the cipher, but MI6 and
GCHQ judged the whole operation a success. Just like the Mounties, beamed Pat
OHanlon, the MI6 representative at the next ROC meeting. We always get our man!
The scale of RAFTER and ENGULF operations dramatically escalated, as the results of the
technical reconnaissances flowed in, and operations based on them proliferated. The
Radiations Operations Committee (ROC), comprising the technical staffs of MI5, MI6,
and GCHQ, was formed in 1960 to coordinate the workload. ROC met once a fortnight,
either in Cheltenham or at Leconfield House. I was the first Chairman, although Ray
Frawley, a crisp, self-disciplined GCHQ staff officer, took upon himself the task of
controlling the flow of business, and he came, before long, to dominate ROC. He was an
administrative genius, with none of the hidebound instincts of some of his peers in
Cheltenham. He controlled the paperwork, provided the technical resources and the
GCHQ operators to man each operation, as well as organizing getting the allimportant
ministerial clearances.
ROC was one of the most important committees in postwar British Intelligence. For ten
years, until the new generation of computers came in at the end of the 1960s, ROC was
crucial to much of the success of GCHQs cryptanalytical effort. But of even greater
importance was the way it began to break down the barriers which had previously
separated MI5, MI6, and GCHQ at working level. As in the war, British Intelligence once
again began to function as a coordinated unit, and as a result was much more
successful.
On the research side, too, there were some important improvements in the late 1950s.
When I joined MI5, the principal forum for scientific research was the Colemore
Committee. Once a year MI6 invited a dozen top scientists from outside the secret
world into a safe conference room in Carlton House Terrace. In return for a lavish lunch,
MI6 expected these eminent persons to act as private scientific consultants to the
Secret Services, providing guidance, ideas, and contacts. As soon as I attended my first
Colemore Committee, I could see it was a waste of time. The morning discussion was
desultory and unstructured and after a few pints, gins, and lashings of the best claret,
few members of the Committee were in a fit state to turn their attention to complex
scientific matters. After the days labors, Peter Dixon took us all out on the town for
more feeding and watering. I will always treasure the look on Dick Whites face as,
toward midnight, we ended up in a less than salubrious club in Soho, featuring what
might politely be described as an exotic cabaret. He smiled wanly at the red-faced
gents around the table, but I could see that, like me, he felt it was not the answer to the
deep-seated scientific problems facing MI5. The Colemore Committee had some use as
a sounding board, but I realized from the start that MI5 needed a comprehensive in-
house research program, properly staffed and properly funded. It seemed to me absurd
that the Treasury should expend vast sums on weapons research at the stroke of a pen,
and yet balk at the petty sums required by the Secret Services for modernization.
Shortly after I joined MI5 in 1955, I approached Sir Frederick Brundrett again, and asked
him for help in obtaining the necessary resources. He was sympathetic, and suggested
that my application would stand a better chance if I first made a thorough study of the
current state of KGB scientific and technical advances and wrote a paper outlining the
areas in which MI5 and MI6 were deficient. I approached my opposite number in MI6,
the H Tech 1, but it was soon obvious that they had very little intelligence on the
subject. I decided to make a thorough study of the debriefings of all the German
scientists who, at the end of the war, had been forcibly taken back to the Soviet Union
and made to work for a number of years in Soviet government laboratories as the price
of freedom. These scientists were known as the Dragon Returnees, and their debriefings
had provided much useful intelligence about the state of Soviet rocket, jet engine, and
nuclear research, since this was the area which the Russians had been most anxious to
develop.
I went over to the Defense Scientific Intelligence Unit (DSI), and asked General Strong if I
could study the papers. I was shown into a room in Northumberland Avenue which
contained all the Dragon material, stacked up in dozens and dozens of dusty volumes.
Incredibly, neither MI5 nor MI6 had bothered to process any of this material for its own
use.
It took months for me to sort through the Dragon papers, but it was soon obvious that
considerable numbers of the Dragon scientists had been detailed to work on technical
intelligence research in laboratories on the outskirts of Moscow controlled by the KGB. I
drew up a list of specific Dragon scientists I wanted to interview again. The original
debriefings were mostly conducted by ordinary British or American military staff, who
did not have scientific training or knowledge of the intelligence-collection field, and I
was sure that I could obtain more information from them.
I traveled to Germany in 1957, and was met by MI5s senior German representative,
Peter Domeisen, who had arranged facilities for the interviews at British Military
Intelligence Headquarters in Hanover and Munchen Gladbach. Most intelligence officers
loved Germany in the 1950s. It was the front line, and the action was free and easy. But
Domeisen was depressed by the growing tension in Berlin, and was convinced that it
would not be long before the Russians made another attempt to swallow up the
Western sector.
The interviews were difficult and depressing. Many of the scientists were desperate to
ingratiate themselves with Britain and America. I stuck very closely to technical
questioning, since the opinions they voiced were so obviously shaped to what they felt I
wanted to hear. They had undeniably suffered during their incarceration in Moscow,
and many of their friends had died. But it was impossible not to remember on whose
side they had been working during the war. One of the first scientists I interviewed was
the man who had developed the Thing, which Americans found in 1950 inside the
Great Seal behind the American Ambassadors desk in their Moscow Embassy. It was
gratifying to hear him confirm that the device worked exactly as I had predicted that
Sunday afternoon in my Marconi Nissen hut. But as I questioned him, I felt again the
dismay which ran through MI5 in 1950, when we realized the KGB were already
deploying something which was barely at the research stage in Britain.
I submitted my paper on the Dragon scientists to MI6 in early 1958 for their approval.
Brundrett advised me strongly to do this, because the application for resources would
carry far greater weight if it came from both Services. When it was countersigned, it was
placed before the Defense Research Policy Committee (DRPC), of which Brundrett was
Chairman. The paper caused widespread consternation in the DRPC. Never before had
KGB advances over the West been so clearly documented. I could prove that the KGB
had obtained areas of major technical superiority through the efforts of the Dragon
scientists, especially in the field of electronics and surveillance devices, including the use
of infrared systems, which had put them in a commanding position since the late 1940s.
Largely through Brundretts foresight, technical research was already under way
through his own ad hoc committee, of which I had been a member since 1949. But we
needed to formalize and expand this program of research with more staff and
resources. I submitted a further joint MI5/MI6 paper, which came to be known as the
Technics Document (which is what the KGB called it), describing what progress needed
to be made, and placing much greater emphasis on advanced electronics. As a result of
the Dragon paper and the Technics Document, technical research for the intelligence
services as a whole, but particularly for MI5, was given a much higher priority within
Defense Research Policy. Unfortunately, the DRPC still vetoed the idea of specific
resource allocations for the intelligence services, hoping to fill the gap by fitting our
requirements into existing Defense Research programs. I still had to go cap in hand, but
at least the climate was changing. In 1958, as the Technics Document was being
considered, Hollis introduced me to a man who did more than most to secure the
modernization of MI5, Victor Rothschild. Rothschild worked inside MI5 during the war
(he won the George Medal for opening bombs), and maintained close friendships with
many of the senior officers, but especially with Dick White. At the time I met him,
Rothschild was Head of Research for the Shell Oil Corporation, controlling more than
thirty laboratories worldwide. Hollis told him of my appointment as an MI5 scientist,
and Rothschild expressed an interest in meeting me. He invited me to supper at his
elegant London flat in St Jamess Place. I doubt I have ever met a man who impressed
me as much as Victor Rothschild. He is a brilliant scientist, a Fellow of the Royal Society,
with expertise in botany and zoology, and a fascination for the structure of
spermatozoa. But he has been much, much more than a scientist. His contacts, in
politics, in intelligence, in banking, in the Civil Service, and abroad are legendary. There
are few threads in the seamless robe of the British Establishment which have not passed
at some time or other through the eye of the Rothschild needle. Rothschild was
fascinated by my plans for the scientific modernization of MI5, and offered me many
suggestions of his own. I soon realized that he possessed an enormous appetite for the
gossip and intrigue of the secret world, and we were soon swapping stories about some
of the more bizarre colleagues he remembered from the war. We talked until late into
the night, and I came away feeling for the first time that, with his backing, great
achievements were possible. Rothschild offered to put some of his Shell laboratories at
MI5s disposal, and began work on a variety of technical developments, including a
special grease which would protect equipment if it was buried underground for long
periods. The grease was developed, and both MI5 and MI6 used it extensively.
Rothschild also suggested that I approach Sir William Cook, then the Deputy Head of the
Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE), for resources. I knew Cook well, but
Rothschild was a close friend, and his well-timed lobbying made my visit much easier.
Cook listened attentively as I outlined my requirements. The essence of my approach to
counterespionage was to develop technical ways of attacking Soviet spy
communications. Communications are the only vulnerable point in an agents cover,
because he has to send and receive messages to and from his controller. I explained to
Cook that RAFTER already provided us with the most valuable weapon of all - an entree
into Russian radio communications - but that we urgently needed new techniques to
attack their physical methods of communications as well, such as secret writing,
microdots, and dead letter drops. Progress on these would vastly improve our chances
of counterespionage success.
Lets solve some of these right away, said Cook, picking up his telephone. He spoke to
one of his senior scientists, Dr. Frank Morgan. Frank, Im sending down someone to
work with you on a new project. Hell explain when he arrives. Youll enjoy it - hes a
man after your own heart.
With typical Cook generosity, he provided a team of two principal scientific officers, as
well as junior staff and resources for the sole use of MI5. In all I had thirty people at
AWRE, and for two years AWRE carried the entire cost, after which time the Defense
Research Policy Committee agreed to continue the funding. Frank Morgan was the most
valuable gift of all. He attacked the problems with zest and flair, and within those two
years MI5 obtained results far beyond anything dreamed of in the USA.
The techniques of secret writing are the same the world over. First the spy writes his
cover letter. Then he writes the secret message on top, using a special sheet of carbon
paper treated with a colorless chemical. Tiny particles of the chemical are transferred to
the letter, which can then be developed by the recipient. Most developing agents make
the chemical traces grow, so that the message becomes legible, and unless the correct
agent is known, the message remains undetectable. But Morgan created a universal
developing agent, using radioactivity, which transformed the possibilities of detection.
Microdots are another method of surreptitious communication between an agent in the
field and his controller. Photographs are reduced down to microscopic size, so that they
are practically invisible to the naked eye. Microdots are generally concealed under
stamps, on top of punctuation marks in typewritten letters, or under the lips of
envelopes. Morgan produced a process for detecting microdots using neutron
activation.
A third method of spy communication, and one of the most common, is the dead letter
drop. An agent leaves a package, for instance of exposed film, in an arranged place, and
his controller collects it at a later stage, so that the two are never seen to meet. The KGB
frequently gave their agents hollow containers which were specially treated, so that
they could tell if the container had been surreptitiously opened. Morgan developed a
soft X-ray technique which enabled us to inspect the interiors of suspect containers
without tampering with them or fogging the unexposed film inside.
The last of Morgans four programs was the development of a number of special X-ray
methods for use against advanced combination safes. These were proving more than a
match even for Leslie Jagger, but the use of Morgans X-ray device enabled the
combination to be read off from outside, and gave MI5 potential access to every safe in
Britain. Despite the improvements on the technical and research side, MI5s
counterespionage record remained lamentable in the 1950s. After Dick White became
Director-General in 1953, he recognized the great deficiencies in this area. Most of the
talented wartime Double Cross case officers had either left, retired, or moved, like Dick
White, into senior management positions. Their replacements tended to be secondrate
former colonial policemen with little or no experience of counterespionage, who found
it hard to make the adjustment from the wartime superiority over the German Abwehr
to the new war against a more skilled and more numerous Russian Intelligence Service.
He formed a new counterespionage department, D Branch, and appointed me largely to
provide them with scientific and technical advice. But improvements were slow to
come. For some long time the D Branch staff resented my access to their secrets. They
wallowed in their own technical ignorance. I remember one case officer saving, as I
explained some technicality in terms of the Ohms law:
Thats all right, Peter, old chap, I dont need to know about Ohms law. I read Greats.
Good God, I exploded, every schoolboy learns about Ohms law! The head of D
Branch, Graham Mitchell, was a clever man, but he was weak. His policy was to cravenly
copy the wartime Double Cross techniques, recruiting as many double agents as
possible, and operating extensive networks of agents in the large Russian, Polish, and
Czechoslovakian emigre communities. Every time MI5 were notified of or discovered a
Russian approach to a student, businessman, or scientist, the recipient was encouraged
to accept the approach, so that MI5 could monitor the case. He was convinced that
eventually one of these double agents would be accepted by the Russians and taken
into the heart of the illegal network.
The double-agent cases were a time-consuming charade. A favorite KGB trick was to
give the double agent a parcel of money or hollow object (which at that stage we could
inspect), and ask him to place it in a dead letter drop. D Branch was consumed every
time this happened. Teams of Watchers were sent to stake out the drop for days on
end, believing that the illegal would himself come to clear it. Often no one came to
collect the packages at all or, if it was money, the KGB officer who originally handed it to
the double agent would himself clear the drop. When I raised doubts about the double-
agent policy, I was told solemnly that these were KGB training procedures, used to
check if the agent was trustworthy. Patience would yield results.
The truth was that the Russians used double-agent cases to play with MI5, identify our
case officers, disperse our effort, and decoy us from their real operations. The standard
of MI5 tradecraft was appalling. KGB monitoring of our Watcher radios certainly gave
away our presence on a large number of the double-agent cases. But the D Branch case
officers were just as bad, rarely employing anything other than the most rudimentary
countersurveillance before meeting their agents. An entire department in the Foreign
Office provided MI5 with chicken feed, secret material given to double agents to pass
on to the Russians as proof of their bona fides. The chicken feed consisted of wholly
unbelievable faked secret documents about weapons we did not have, and policies we
had no intention of pursuing. I raised the whole question of the chicken feed with D
Branch, and pointed out that the material was bound to be spotted as suspect, and that
only real secrets would convince the Russians. That, I was told, was quite out of the
question.
The other main area of D Branch activity was in the Emigre communities. The agent
running sections of D Branch ran extensive networks, and used agents in London to
recruit others inside their host countries. This was a particularly attractive option for
MI5. Emigres were easy to recruit, and enabled MI5 to compete directly with MI6 in the
production of Iron Curtain intelligence, much to their irritation. But in reality, by the
early 1950s, these emigre rings were utterly penetrated by the KGB, or their allied
Eastern European services, and as with the doubleagent cases, served only to soak up
our effort, and identify our agent runners.
MI5 were living in the past, copying the techniques of Double Cross, in an intelligence
world which had changed enormously since the war. They lacked not only case officers
with the requisite skills but, much more important, the codebreaking advantages MI5
had enjoyed over the Germans.
Throughout the 1950s, MI5 avoided confronting the most obvious counterespionage
problem facing Britain at that time - the results of the 1930s Soviet infiltrations of the
British Establishment. The extent of the recruitment of Stalins Englishmen became
apparent with the convictions of Alan Nunn May and Klaus Fuchs for nuclear espionage
in the late 1940s, closely followed by the defection of Burgess and Maclean in 1951. It
was obvious to anyone with access to the papers that the Russian Intelligence Services
had capitalized on the widespread intellectual disillusionment among well-born British
intellectuals of the 1930s, and succeeded in recruiting important agents, some of whom,
at least, remained loyal to the Soviet cause after the war.
The defections of Burgess and Maclean traumatized MI5. Philby and Blunt also fell
under suspicion, but faced with their adamant denials, the cases ran quickly into sand.
The only remaining way forward was to launch a major, intensive program of research
and investigation among the network of people who had been friendly with the two
diplomats at Oxford and Cambridge. Such a policy entailed enormous difficulties. Most
of those friendly with Burgess and Maclean were now rising to positions of considerable
eminence, not just in the Intelligence Services but in the Civil Service as well. There was
potential political embarrassment if such inquiries leaked at a time when all concerned
were doing everything to suppress any information about the defections. Moreover,
there was always the ghastly possibility that vigorous investigations might provoke
further departures to Moscow, with incalculable consequences. No one was prepared to
grasp the nettle and from 1954 onward all work virtually ceased, MI5 apparently
believing that the new vetting procedures then being implemented were enough to
protect the national security. It was like locking the chicken house door with the fox
inside.
One man stood out against this policy of neglect. He was Arthur Martin, a former Army
signals officer who joined MI5 soon after the war. Martin quickly proved himself a
brilliant and intuitive case officer, handling in quick succession the Fuchs and Maclean
investigations, ably assisted by Evelyn McBarnet, a young woman research officer,
whose contribution to these cases has never been adequately acknowledged. Martin
had one huge advantage in his approach to counterespionage work: he never attended
a public school. Once it was known that a serious leakage of secrets had occurred at the
British Embassy in Washington, the conventional view was to search for the culprit
among the clerks, cleaners, and secretaries. But Martin realized at an early stage that
the culprit was a senior diplomat. He doggedly pursued the investigation, and was only
foiled when Maclean defected. After the defections, Martin pressed the management
of MI5 to sanction urgent inquiries into the whole complex network of Communist
infiltrations of Cambridge in the 1930s. But his requests for permission to interview the
numerous members of the Philby, Burgess, and Maclean social circles were mostly
refused. For two years he struggled against this woeful policy, until finally he went to
see the Director-General, Dick White, and told him that he intended to resign and take a
job with the new Australian Security Intelligence Organization, ASIO.
White, who had a high regard for Martins abilities, persuaded him to go to Malaya
instead, as MI5s Security Liaison Officer, until the climate in D Branch was better. It
was, at the time, a vital job, and Martin played a leading role in the successful
counterinsurgency campaign in Malaya, but the consequences for counterespionage
were disastrous. For most of the decade MI5s most talented, if temperamental, officer
was missing.
When Hollis became Director-General in 1956, a new head of D Branch, Martin Furnival
Jones, was appointed. Furnival Jones was a lawyer by training, who joined MI5 during
the war. On the surface he seemed an orthodox, taciturn man, lacking flair and vigor.
But Furnival Jones was easy to underestimate. He had an officers gift for leadership,
and a logical, ordered mind which was surprisingly open to new ideas. But most of all,
he possessed a streak of determination, if not ruthlessness, which made him a superb
head of counterespionage. He realized that the main problem facing MI5 was the sheer
scale of Soviet Bloc intelligence activity in Britain. D1, for instance, had the task of
monitoring and working against around 300 Russian intelligence officers. Its total staff
was eleven, of whom four were secretaries. We were swamped, never knowing whether
we were chasing spies or shadows. One of his first decisions was to bring Arthur Martin
back from the wilderness to Leconfield House, first as D2, in charge of Czech and Polish
affairs, and then, in 1959, as D1, responsible for Soviet Counterespionage. Furnival
Jones had great admiration for Arthur Martins skills, and the strength of character to
get the best out of him, despite his sometimes truculent manner. Arthur Martin moved
quickly to restore D1s emphasis on active counterespionage investigation, and he
instinctively grasped the importance of new techniques like RAFTER, having worked in
signals intelligence during the war. For the first time, I found someone with seniority
who listened sympathetically and acted on my ideas for change. We quickly became
close friends. We formed a Resources Index in A Branch, recording anyone and anything
which could be of use to MI5. Forms were sent around the office, asking for entries, and
over a period of months we built up an index so that a case officer who required, for
instance, a nurse, or a plumber, or access to a particular companys files, or a lock-up
garage, could consult the index, rather than having to spend time obtaining the resource
from scratch.
We made radical changes in the order-of-battle approach, bringing in Movements
Analysis, an idea which Terry Guernsey, the RCMP head of counterespionage, first
began. This involved logging all known movements of Soviet Embassy personnel to build
up an overall picture of their activities. Through this, it was possible to gain important
intelligence about the identities of likely KGB officers. But the most radical changes
were made in the Operations section, which was dominated by a brilliant agent runner
and investigator, Michael McCaul. Martin and McCaul put the section on a war footing.
Even though our forces were so much smaller than the Russians, we went on the
offensive, changing our tactics, and aiming to disrupt the KGB, who were accustomed to
the utter predictability of our approach. Some of the schemes were madcap, like the
operation to pickpocket all known KGB officers on the streets of London, in the hope
that scraps of intelligence might be gleaned. It didnt work, but it made the Russians feel
they were under attack for the first time in years. Other changes were much more
significant. The Soviet emigre networks, undoubtedly the most penetrated of all, were
rolled up. The double-agent cases were run much more aggressively. Case officers
accompanied double agents to meetings with their KGB controller, and warned the KGB
man that if he was caught recruiting British nationals again, he would be reported to the
Foreign Office and expelled. McCaul and his men began to make brazen attempts to
recruit KGB men. We never succeeded, but the change of tactic was enough, we hoped,
to sow the seeds of doubt in Kensington Park Gardens.
McCaul implemented these new tactics brilliantly. On one occasion, a technician who
worked in a Royal Ordnance Factory, making a new Bofors shell, told MI5 that he had
been approached by a KGB officer and asked to provide a sample of the new shell.
McCaul arranged for a dummy shell to be made up and filled with sand so that it felt as
if it were full of explosive. As soon as the double agent handed over the shell in a South
London park, McCaul pounced from the bushes. He told the Russian that he was in
serious trouble, and flagrantly in possession of a piece of Top Secret British military
equipment. He would certainly be declared PERSONA NON GRATA. KGB officers feared
expulsion. For one thing they lost the perks of overseas service, but more important, it
represented a failure, and any failure automatically made them suspect in the eyes of
their own counterintelligence officers. The KGB man began to shake uncontrollably, as
McCaul conjured up visions of a burly London policeman carting the hapless Russian off
to some secret dungeon for a spot of torture.
Dont shake the shell, for Christs sake, he shouted, youll trigger the fuse!
The Russian dropped the shell to the ground and sprinted out of the park as if pursued
by the furies. The next day he was on the plane home.
In fact, the Foreign Office was notoriously reluctant to give support. Numerous times
we sent forward recommendations to expel Russians we caught recruiting or running
agents, but the Foreign Office Northern Department, responsible for Anglo-Soviet
relations, more often than not vetoed our case. Occasionally I attended these Northern
Department meetings to give technical briefings on what the particular Russian
diplomat had been doing. They always followed a set pattern. The MI6 contingent
would object to expulsion, fearing a reprisal in Moscow. Then the Foreign Office would
weigh in with a sermon about the importance of not disrupting pending arms control
negotiations, or jeopardizing an imminent trade deal. Courtney Young turned to me on
one occasion as we emerged from the ornate committee room and muttered:
Ive never seen such a hotbed of cold feet!
The lack of Foreign Office support meant we had to rely on less orthodox methods of
warning off the Soviets. Around this time we received a spate of reports from Watchers
detailing approaches to them by Russians. One Watcher described how a KGB officer
came up to him in a pub and handed him an envelope containing a large quantity of
money, and tried to talk him into providing information about his MI5 work. Michael
McCaul decided that direct action was needed. He telephoned the Chief KGB Resident in
his office in the Soviet Embassy, and asked for an appointment, using his cover name
Macauley, which was well known to the Russians. He strode into the Embassy as bold as
brass, and warned the Russians against any further approaches to the Watchers, making
dire threats of diplomatic interventions which, in reality, were unlikely ever to have
been sanctioned. McCaul was highly amused by his trip into the lions den. The Resident
made him lavishly welcome and they took afternoon tea together under a giant
aspidistra. The Russian doubted that any of his staff could be so indelicate as to engage
in espionage on foreign soil, but agreed to look into the matter in case one of the staff
had, perhaps, been a little overzealous. Perhaps the British Security authorities have
made a mistake, he suggested. The business has become so crowded these days. So
many countries, so many embassies, so many diplomats. Sometimes it is difficult to be
sure who is working for whom...
There were no more approaches to the Watchers. In the summer of 1959, just as things
began to improve in D Branch, the Tisler case came alive again, clouding our minds with
doubt and confusion. It began when the young male nurse, whose recruitment led to
the chase for the GRUFF signal in Clapham, was suddenly reactivated. His Russian
controller handed him a suitcase, and asked him to store it at home. Inside the suitcase
was an old World War II radio set, which made us immediately suspect the whole thing
was another game designed to lure us out of London. But we had no definite proof that
the Russians knew we had turned the nurse, so we decided to follow it up. D1 placed
continuous Watcher coverage on the nurses house in the Midlands, and all Watcher
activity closed down in London. I arranged for Watcher headquarters to continue to
transmit notification of Russians and Czechoslovakians leaving Kensington Park Gardens,
so they would think we were still following them.
Thirty-six hours after the Watchers left London, the Russian receiver monitoring their
communications closed down. As soon as Tony Sale told me, I was highly suspicious,
remembering the inconclusiveness of the previous tests after the Tisler affair. Six weeks
later we returned to London convinced the suitcase was bogus, and I mounted a special
RAFTER operation to check when the Russians reactivated their receiver. No Russians
were followed on the first Monday morning, and we opened up at 2:30 in the afternoon
on a Czech diplomat. Within half an hour the Russian receiver was reactivated on the
Watcher frequency. I took the RAFTER printouts to Furnival Jones and Hollis. Here, for
the first time, was a firm indication that a human source existed inside MI5. Hollis and
Furnival Jones were visibly shocked by the information. The recent Russian approaches
to Watchers, which we thought had been terminated following McCauls visit to the
Embassy, confirmed Hollis in his view that, if a leak existed, it must be in the Watcher
service. More barium-meal tests were done to try to locate the source, but nothing was
found. As 1959 drew to a close there was a growing feeling among the few officers who
knew about Tislers allegation that the issue ought to be resolved once and for all, even
if it meant more extensive investigations. In December I was called in by Hollis, who told
me that he intended closing down the Watcher inquiries. I am sure our original Tisler
conclusions were correct, he told me, and I think we should let the matter lie.
He was courteous, but firm. I thought the time had come to bring the worries into the
open.
I do think, sir, we would be advised to widen our inquiries. The leak may be higher up
in the Service.
Hollis made no obvious reaction.
Its a very delicate issue, Peter, he replied smoothly. It would have a terrible effect on
morale in the Service. Not necessarily, sir. I think you would find that most officers
would welcome something being done. After all, if we have a penetration, particularly
one at a relatively high level, most people have been wasting their time.
Its simply not practical, he replied, his tone hardening. I pointed out that there was
already an investigations section of D1, which could quite easily accommodate the work.
Hollis finally bridled. I am not prepared to debate the issue, he snapped, and I simply
cannot accept any course of action which would lead to the establishment of a
privileged Gestapo in the office. He scrawled No further action on the file and
initialed it off, signaling our meeting was over. The cancer was left to grow.
10 - Sniper says the Russians have got two very important spies in Britain:
one in British Intelligence, the other somewhere in the Navy. It was April 1959, and a
CIA officer, Harry Roman, was briefing a group of MI5 and MI6 officers in the fourth-
floor conference room of MI6s Broadway headquarters about a high-grade defector.
Sniper was an anonymous source who earlier in the year began sending letters to the
CIA, written in German, detailing information about Polish and Soviet intelligence
operations.
Hes almost certainly in the UB [the Polish Intelligence Service], said Roman. His
Germans odd, and the Polish stuff is Grade 1 from the inside.
Sniper (who was given the MI5 code name LAVINIA) christened his spies Lambda 1 and
Lambda 2. There was little to go on with Lambda 2, beyond the fact that he served in
Warsaw in 1952 and was blackmailed into espionage after the UB discovered his
activities in the black market. Lambda 1, however, looked more hopeful. Sniper gave
enough details in one of his letters to enable us to identify three MI6 documents he had
seen.
The first was the Watch List for Poland, detailing Polish nationals the Warsaw MI6
station considered possible or desirable targets for recruitment approaches. The second
document was the Polish section of the MI6 R6, an annual report circulated to MI6
stations, summarizing, country by country and region by region, the straight intelligence
received by MI6. The third document was a part of the RB, the annual MI6 report
circulated to stations abroad, detailing the latest MI6 scientific and technical research
and operations. Berlin and Warsaw were the most probable MI6 stations where the
leak of this vital intelligence had taken place, and we drew up a list of the ten people at
these stations who had access to all three documents. The records of all ten were
investigated, and all were exonerated, including one named George Blake, a rising
young MI6 officer who had played a key role in the Berlin Tunnel. Blake, MI5 and MI6
concluded, could not possibly be a spy. The best explanation for the leak, in the absence
of any credible human candidate, was a burglary of an MI6 station safe in Brussels,
which had taken place two years before. Unfortunately, there was no accurate record
of the contents of the safe before the burglary. There was evidence that one, and
possibly two, of the documents seen by Sniper had been in the safe, but no certainty
that all three had been there. In spring 1960, when all ten MI6 officers had been
cleared, MI5 and MI6 officially told the Americans that the burglary was the source of
Snipers Lambda 1. In March 1960, Sniper suddenly sent further information about
Lambda 2. His name was something like Huiton, and Sniper thought he had been taken
over and run illegally by the Russians when he returned to London to work in Naval
Intelligence. Only one man fitted Snipers description: Harry Houghton, who was
working in the Underwater Weapons Establishment at Portland, Dorset, and had served
in Warsaw in 1952 before joining Naval Intelligence. When Houghton was checked in
the MI5 Registry, D Branch found, to their consternation, that he was already listed.
Some years before, Houghtons wife had approached the security officer at Portland and
told him that her husband had deserted her for a girl who worked at the base. She had
claimed that Houghton was meeting with foreigners, went regularly to London to meet
a foreigner whom she could not identify, and had large amounts of money stored in a
tin in the garden shed.
The security officer forwarded the report to the Admiralty Security Division, advising
that it was probably a malicious accusation by a deserted wife. The Admiralty passed it
on to MI5s C Branch, where it landed on the desk of a young officer named Duncum
Wagh. He looked up Houghton in the Registry, found no entry, and concluded that the
original security officers assessment had been right. He decided to dismiss the
allegation. He minuted the file to his C Branch section head, who sent a suitable reply to
Portland, and the matter was put to rest.
Hollis and Furnival Jones (who was head of C Branch at the appropriate time) were
desperately embarrassed by the revelation that Houghton was the likely spy. But there
was little time for recrimination, as the case swiftly gathered momentum. The
investigation was handled by the Polish section, D2, and they soon discovered that
Houghton visited London once a month with his girlfriend, Ethel Gee. The Watchers
were detailed to cover Houghtons July visit, and they saw him meet a man in the
Waterloo Road, hand over a carrier bag, and receive an envelope in return. All attention
immediately focused on the man Houghton had met. He was followed back to his car, a
white Studebaker, and visually identified by the Watchers as a Polish intelligence officer
stationed in London. But checks on the car registration number showed it to belong to a
Canadian named Gordon Arnold Lonsdale, who ran a business leasing jukebox machines.
The Watchers were sent around to the Polish Embassy to recheck on the Polish officer,
and returned sheepishly, saying they had made a mistake.
Lonsdale was put under intensive surveillance. He had an office in Wardour Street, and a
flat in the White House, near Regents Park. Both were bugged, and visual observation
posts established nearby. To all intents and purposes, he lived the life of a London
playboy, traveling abroad frequently and pursuing a succession of glamorous girls
attracted by his easy money and good looks.
Houghton and Gee next visited London at the beginning of August, and again met
Lonsdale, this time in a cafe near the Old Vic theater. The Watchers monitored them
closely, even slipping into a table next to them. Lonsdale told Houghton and Gee that
there would be no meeting in September, as he was visiting the USA on business, but
that he was confident he would return in time to meet them on the first Sunday in
October. If he did not appear, someone else they knew would come in his place.
On August 27 Lonsdale was followed from his flat on the sixth floor of the White House
to the Midland Bank in Great Portland Street, where he deposited a suitcase and a
brown paper parcel. Shortly after, he disappeared. The DG approached the Chairman of
the Midland Bank, and obtained permission to open Lonsdales safety deposit box. On
the evening of Monday, September 5, the suitcase and package were removed from the
bank and taken over to the MI5 laboratory at St. Pauls. The contents were spread out
on a trestle table and carefully examined by Hugh Winterborn and me. After years of
trying, we had stumbled across the real thing - the complete toolbag of the professional
spy. There were a Minox and a Praktina, specialist miniature cameras for document
copying. The Minox contained an exposed film, which we developed and recopied
before replacing in the camera. The photographs seemed innocuous enough: snaps of
Lonsdale and a smiling woman taken in a city which, after considerable analysis, we
concluded was probably Prague. There was also a book on how to learn typewriting,
which I knew at once must be connected with secret writing. By shining a narrow beam
of horizontal light along the edges of each page, I picked out the minute indentations,
where Lonsdale had used the pages as a carbon for his invisible secret messages. The
typewriting book was sent down to Dr. Frank Morgan at AWRE, and became invaluable
in boosting his research program into new methods of detecting secret writing. The
most interesting object was a Ronson cigarette lighter set in a wooden bowl. We X-
rayed the lighter using Morgans method, which showed the base to be hollow,
containing several small items. They were removed with a rubber suction cup and
tweezers, and were found to be two sets of miniature one-time code pads, one of which
was clearly in current use. There was also a list of map references on a folded piece of
paper, based on the London map book used by our Watchers. Ever since RAFTER began,
I had studied everything I could find about Soviet clandestine radio communications,
and as soon as I saw Lonsdales cipher pads, I could identify them as Soviet issue. This
was no Polish intelligence officer - this was a full-blown KGB operation. With Lonsdale
in radio communication with Moscow, we knew that if we could copy his pads and trace
his signals, we would be able to decrypt them as they came in. Unfortunately, there
were in Lonsdales suitcase no signal plans giving a schedule of when and at what
frequency to listen to his broadcasts among the thousands of messages which were
pouring out every week from Moscow. RAFTER gave us the vital breakthrough. We
decided to set up in the flat next door to Lonsdale in the White House, and by using
active RAFTER, we would be able to tell when and at what frequency he was listening to
his receiver. Copying the code pads without arousing Lonsdales suspicions was much
more difficult. Without access to each sheet of the pads we would be unable to
decipher his traffic. I knew from the Radiations Operations Committee that the Swiss
intelligence service had recently found an abandoned KGB one-time pad, so I arranged
for MI6 to ask the Swiss if they would be prepared to allow us to borrow it. They agreed,
and I drove out to London Airport to meet the RAF plane which flew it over specially for
us. The Swiss pad was very similar to Lonsdales; each edge was covered with a thin film
of glue to hold the pages together. We took it apart, and analyzed the glue. It was non-
Western, but the Post Office technicians were confident they could make some up. We
went into the bank again on the evening of Saturday, September 17, removed the
suitcase, and took it to St. Pauls. The pads were delicately taken apart and each page
individually photographed. Then the originals were placed in a specially made jig, which
held them tightly together so we could recoat the edges with our newly made-up glue
solution. In the early hours of Sunday morning, we took the suitcase back to the bank,
and waited for Lonsdale to return. A few days later, I received a call from Tony Sale. He
sounded distinctly agitated.
Theres something you ought to see. Some of the LIONSBEARD recording...
LIONSBEARD was the code name given to the continuous RAFTER operation on the
Russian Embassy. I took a taxi to Kensington Park Gardens, and ducked into our safe
house on the next street. Tony Sale met me in the hall, and handed over a sheet of the
LIONSBEARD needle printout. Any idea what that is? he asked, pointing to two
sudden bursts of receiver activity inside the Embassy in September. What dates are
these?
Seems to be September 6, which was a Tuesday, and the other one is last Sunday -
thats the 18
th
, he replied.
Good God, I gasped, theyre the dates of the bank operations! Watchers had been
used lightly during both operations to remove Lonsdales suitcase from the bank. With a
mixture of panic and despair, I took the printouts back to Leconfield House, and
tabulated the exact times the Russian receiver was operating against A4s records of
Watcher operations. The LIONSBEARD readings matched the A4 records perfectly. The
Russians must have guessed we were onto Lonsdale. I called for all the LIONSBEARD
records, going back two and a half years, and laboriously checked through them all to
see if there were other examples where the Russians had used their receivers in the
middle of a Saturday or a Monday night. There was not a single occasion, other than
these two, where the Russians listened between the hours of midnight to 5 A.M.
I took the material to Furnival Jones, and we went straight up to Hollis office. He took
the news calmly, and agreed the evidence of a leak looked strong. He instructed Furnival
Jones to begin another urgent investigation into the Watcher service, and in view of the
fact that Lonsdale was almost certainly a KGB illegal, transferred control of the case
from D2 (Czechs and Poles) to Arthur Martin in D1 (Soviet Counterespionage).
On the face of it, Lonsdales departure abroad provided the best test as to whether our
suspicions were well founded. We all agreed that if he stayed away, it would prove he
knew we were onto him. If he came back, it would indicate we were in the clear.
Lonsdale had told Houghton he would try to get back for their meeting on October 1.
Tension began to rise inside Leconfield House, as Furnival Jones Watcher investigations
once more drew a blank. Houghton traveled to London, but no one turned up to meet
him. Even Furnival Jones seemed visibly shaken as the days ticked by without any sign of
Lonsdale. Then, on October 17, our observation post opposite Lonsdales office in
Wardour Street identified him entering the building. The doubt and suspicion, which
had been growing in intensity, melted away as we threw our energies into the hunt.
Lonsdale soon picked up his old life, running his jukebox business, meeting Houghton,
and dating a great variety of attractive girls. He was not due to repossess his flat in the
White House until early November, but where he was staying was a mystery. Every night
he left his offices in Wardour Street and headed westward. Arthur and I laid down strict
controls on the Watcher operations after Lonsdales return. We were determined there
would be no more mistakes. Overt watching was prohibited, and strict radio silence was
imposed on all operations. Jim Skardon exploded at this apparent intrusion into his
empire. He was not indoctrinated for RAFTER, and could not understand why radios
were prohibited. He complained to Furnival Jones but was told firmly that there were
good reasons for the new policy.
Arthur and I realized it would be impossible to follow a trained and experienced
intelligence officer like Lonsdale for any distance without alerting him to the fact, so we
devised a new semistatic technique. Every night a team of Watchers picked him up and
followed for a short distance, before peeling off. The next day Lonsdale was picked up
by a new set of Watchers where the previous team had given up the chase, and
followed another short distance, and so on, at successively increasing distances from his
Wardour Street office. The whole operation took two weeks, and we even employed
wives and volunteers from the office to supplement the Watcher staff so we never used
the same faces twice. Eventually we tracked Lonsdale to 45 Cranleigh Gardens, Ruislip,
in West London. Lonsdale was evidently staying with the occupants of the small house,
Peter and Helen Kroger, a New Zealand couple who ran a small bookshop specializing in
Americana antique books. We set up a static observation post in the house opposite,
and waited, confident that none of the occupants knew of our presence. In mid-
November Lonsdale moved back into his flat in the White House, collecting his suitcase
from the Midland Bank shortly beforehand. We immediately arranged for a GCHQ
technician, Arthur Spencer, to move into the flat next door to begin our RAFTER
operations. For the next three months Spencer scarcely set foot outside the tiny flat. We
installed a noncontact tap on the mains supply feeding Lonsdales receiver which was
connected to a silent buzzer. The buzzer was worn as an earpiece by Spencer, so that
even if Lonsdale used his radio set during the night, the buzzer would alert him.
Whenever the buzzer sounded, Spencer tuned the RAFTER receivers, found the
frequency Lonsdale was listening to, and alerted GCHQ Palmer Street. Palmer Street
then relayed the signal down to GCHQ in Cheltenham. There, using our copy of
Lonsdales one-time pad, a GCHQ cryptanalyst named Bill Collins decrypted the
message, and relayed it back up to London to Arthur and me in Leconfield House via an
enciphered telex link. The first time Lonsdale received a message, Bill Collins was
unable to decipher it. There was no indicator group in the traffic. An indicator group is a
group EN CLAIR, in other words a group from the one-time pad with no coded additive.
The recipient uses this to position the message on the pad at the right place, so it can be
deciphered. (After Lonsdale was arrested we discovered that the indicator group was in
fact enciphered, using his real date of birth.)
Arthur and I began to wonder if, perhaps, Lonsdale realized his pads were compromised,
and was using a new set brought back with him from abroad. The only thing we could do
was burgle his flat and check inside the lighter again, to see if the pads had been used.
Winterborn and I went in on a day when Lonsdale went to Suffolk for his jukebox
business. It was a small flat, rather depressingly spartan, with barely space for more
than a bed. We opened the lighter; the pads were still there, and new pages had been
torn away, so they were obviously still in use. When I looked carefully I realized that
Lonsdale had used more lines than were needed to encipher the message he had
received from Moscow. When the message was stepped down the pad by the number
of excess lines, the message read satisfactorily.
For the next two months we successfully monitored Lonsdales biweekly messages from
Moscow. Most of them concerned the Shah, the KGB cryptonym for Houghton.
Lonsdale was given specific instructions on how to handle him, which questions to ask,
and what documents he should attempt to procure from Portland. But other messages
were personal, containing family news about his wife and his children back in Russia.
They wanted him home after five years undercover service. On Monday, January 2,
Hollis chaired a full review of the case. Arthur argued strongly that we should allow the
case to run on. He felt instinctively that Lonsdale was too valuable an illegal to be
running simply the one spy, Houghton. We still knew very little about the Krogers, and
their house at 45 Cranleigh Gardens, beyond the fact that shortly after Lonsdale went to
stay, high-grade Chubbs and window locks were fitted to the house, including the access
to the roof. For all we knew, Lonsdale might be only one part of a much larger network.
Furnival Jones and I supported Arthur, and Hollis agreed to approach the Admiralty
(whose secrets Houghton was betraying) to ask permission to leave Houghton
unmolested for a further three months. The Admiralty agreed, and Arthur decided to
minimize any further risk by running the case on without any form of physical
surveillance, relying simply on our interception of Lonsdales radio traffic to lead us to
further spies.
Two days later our plan was rudely shattered. A sealed message was delivered to Hollis
by Cleeve Cram, the CIA officer assigned to the American Embassy in London for liaison
with MI5 .The message warned MI5 that Sniper had informed the CIA that he intended
defecting to the United States on the following day, January 5. Once again, we convened
in Hollis office. There was really only one course of action. Houghton, Lonsdale, and
presumably also the Krogers would all be blown by the defection. We had to arrest
them before they were withdrawn. Fortunately, Houghton was due for his January
meeting with Lonsdale on the Saturday, January 7, and we also knew that Lonsdale was
due to receive his radio message early that morning, so we would know if Moscow sent
him a warning.
Arranging the arrests was a prodigious feat of logistics, and for the next three days I
barely slept. Charles Elwell, Houghtons case officer, was sent to Portland, ready to
search Houghtons premises as soon as he was given word the arrests were successfully
accomplished. Bill Collins came up from Cheltenham and based himself in Palmer
Street, ready to decrypt Lonsdales message the instant it came through. The Special
Branch were put on standby outside Lonsdales flat, ready to make an immediate arrest
if the Moscow message sent him scurrying for cover.
On the Friday night Arthur and I gathered in the third-floor operations room in
Leconfield House, ready for the all-night vigil. It was a small office, painted a ghastly Civil
Service brown. It could have been a prison cell. A metal-framed bed ran along one wall,
A small table stood in the middle. Cables trailed across the floor in thick, tangled
bunches. Telephones linked us to Special Branch headquarters, to GCHQ, and to the DG,
and a small speaker relayed to us every sound inside Lonsdales flat in the White House.
Arthur sat hunched over the table, chain-smoking. Hugh Winterborn was tense and
excited, and said very little. Furnival Jones was there too, with his shoes off, reclining on
the bed in his braces. Although he was the Director of D Branch, he felt a strong loyalty
to the troops, and was determined to see it through with us. He even went to the pub in
Shepherds Market and brought us back sandwiches. We drank Scotch through the small
hours, as the ashtrays filled up. We listened as Lonsdale returned late from a carefree
evening on the town. He was with a girl. I discreetly muted the volume as the sound of
their passionate lovemaking filtered through to us. When it was all quiet in the flat, I
asked Arthur how long he thought Lonsdale would serve in prison.
Fifteen at least, he replied.
Hugh Winterborn looked troubled. He was a religious man, and found no joy in the
thought of a mans life ruined. I poured myself another drink.
I cant help thinking of his wife and kids... I said lamely. They knew what I meant. They
had seen the intercepts of Lonsdales messages, as I had: the talk of home, and family
hardships, and birthdays, and children who missed their father. Lonsdale, for all his
professionalism, was a very human spy. Like many men away on business, he was
homesick, and sought solace in the company of other women. Its not as if hes a
traitor... not like Houghton. Hes just doing his job like us.
Thats enough! Furnival Jones flashed angrily from the bed. He went into this with his
eyes wide open. He could have come as a diplomat. He knew what the risks were. He
deserves everything he gets! I stayed silent. But the thought was there inside us all. We
had seen almost too much of Lonsdale over the past two months. Toward morning
Lonsdale woke the girl up, and persuaded her to leave.
He said he had urgent business to attend to, which in a way was true. When she left we
heard him pull out his radio set, and prepare his pads to receive the message from
Moscow. The radio crackled for a few minutes, and Lonsdales pencil scratched out the
decrypt. We could tell there was no warning from the way he sauntered into the
bathroom, singing jauntily to himself in Russian. A few minutes later the green
telephone rang, and Bill Collins gave us the text of the message over a scrambled line. It
was a routine report, more talk of the family, more news from home. There was no
warning or alarm. Special Branch were told to prepare to make the arrest as Lonsdale
received his package from Houghton that afternoon. At five the Special Branch line rang.
Last Act is finished said a voice. Last Act was Lonsdales code name.
His prison performance was about to begin.
Hugh Winterborn went straight over to the White House to search Lonsdales flat, while
Arthur and I waited for news of the Krogers arrest. At seven, tired but elated, we drove
out to Ruislip in my car. By the time we reached Cranleigh Gardens, the place was in
chaos. Police were everywhere, searching the house almost at random. I tried to take
control, but it was useless. Arthur vainly protested as a detective took out a plastic bag
containing chemicals. Sorry, sir, I am afraid its evidence, said the policeman. Its a
criminal matter now, and if you boys want to see it, youll have to go through the
channels.
The police operation was led by Detective Superintendent George Smith of the Special
Branch, a man renowned inside MI5 for his powers of self-promotion Before the arrests,
we stressed to Smith that we needed a forty-eight-hour blackout on any news about the
arrests, so that we could monitor the next radio broadcast coming in from Moscow. But
within hours word spread around Fleet Street that a major espionage ring had been
smashed, and Smith began briefing selected reporters on the role he claimed to have
played in the operation. The Moscow broadcast carried no traffic.
Despite the hamfisted search instituted by the police, it was obvious the house was
packed full of espionage equipment. Two sets of different cipher pads were hidden in a
cigarette lighter similar to the one used by Lonsdale. There were signal plans for three
separate types of transmissions from Moscow, secret writing material, and facilities to
make microdots using chromic acid and Sellotape. Mrs Kroger had even tried to destroy
the contents of her handbag, containing details of meetings with spies, by flushing them
down the toilet, but a vigilant woman PC stopped her. The most interesting find of all
was a signal plan for special high-speed transmissions from Moscow. Hidden in a
cookery jar we found a bottle of magnetic iron oxide used to print out the Morse from
the high-speed message onto a tape, so that it could be read without being transferred
onto a sophisticated tape recorder and slowed down. It was a new technique, and
explained why we had failed to detect any transmissions to the Kroger house in the
months before the arrests.
Toward the end of the evening the police began to vacate, leaving us to search among
the debris, under the watchful eyes of a couple of young constables. We searched the
house for nine days. On the last day we located the transmitter. It was hidden in a cavity
under the kitchen floor, along with cameras and other radio equipment. Everything was
carefully concealed in moisture-resistant sealed packages, and the whole system had
obviously been designed to be stored for a considerable length of time.
On the following Wednesday, Hollis called everyone together in his office, and
congratulated them on the triumph. The new D Branch team under Martin Furnival
Jones and Arthur Martin had faced its stiffest test, and completely outplayed the
Russians for the first time since Maxwell Knight smashed the Woolwich Arsenal Ring in
1938. The key to the Lonsdale success, as with the ENGULF and STOCKADE
achievements, lay in the new techniques which I had worked to develop with GCHQ and
AWRE. RAFTER and the X-raying and copying of the code pads enabled MI5 to run the
case from a position of strength. I was intensely proud of the capture of the ring; for the
first time I had played a major role in a counterespionage case, and shown the MI5
management what was possible. As a result, it was acknowledged that the workload
passing through the Radiations Operations Committee was simply too great, and it was
separated into two distinct units. Clan handled all clandestine operations against cipher
targets here and abroad, while Counterclan controlled all the counterespionage side of
ROC, such as RAFTER. Hollis asked me to produce a detailed report, showing the role
played in the Lonsdale case by the new techniques, with a view to encouraging similar
approaches to counterespionage in the future. I began by paying a visit to the Old
Bailey, where Lonsdale, the Krogers, Houghton, and Gee were on trial. The latter pair
looked pasty-faced, flicking glances around the wood-paneled courtroom from the dock.
Lonsdale and the Krogers appeared completely unmoved by the proceedings. The
Krogers occasionally whispered to each other, or passed notes; Lonsdale said nothing
until the end, when he gave a short speech claiming the Krogers knew nothing of his
activities. The Krogers were soon identified by the Americans as Morris and Lona Cohen,
wanted by the FBI in connection with the Rosenberg nuclear espionage case. This was
more than a little embarrassing for me; months before the arrests I saw Al Belmont of
the FBI in Washington and briefed him on the progress of the case. He wondered then if
the Krogers might turn out to be the Cohens. But I had not taken his offhand suggestion
seriously, and failed to make a check. Lonsdales identity proved much more of a
mystery, and it was a year before we positively identified him as Konan Trofimovich
Molodi, the son of a well-known Soviet scientist, and an experienced KGB officer who
assumed the identity of Gordon Lonsdale, a long-deceased Finnish Canadian, in 1955. I
began my analysis of the Lonsdale case by asking GCHQ to provide me with files on any
known Soviet espionage case, like the Lonsdale case, which had involved clandestine
radio broadcasts. They produced leaflets, around a hundred in all, listing first the details
of the agent under consideration - when he started and finished, what his targets were,
which service he worked for, and so forth; they then produced a detailed summary of
the agents signal plans, and finally lists of the traffic that he received from the Soviet
Union, including the numbers of messages, their group counts, details of the cipher
systems used, and dates when they were changed. I organized this mass of material
into KGB and GRU categories, and secondly into types of agent-singletons, sleepers,
illegal spies actively running one or more sources, illegal residents running a group of
other illegals, and so forth. I found, to my astonishment, that changes in the radio traffic
mirrored the different types of agent. For instance, by looking at the operational radio
procedures, such as the types of call signs used, it was possible to tell whether the spy
was of KGB or GRU origin. Similarly, by analyzing the group counts and the lengths of
the messages, it was possible to tell what type of spy was receiving the traffic. For
instance, the singleton sleeper received very little traffic, the GRU singleton not much
more, while the KGB singleton received a quite considerable volume. The KGB illegal
resident, the most important spy of all, always took the greatest amount of traffic -
generally between five hundred and a thousand groups a month.
I soon began to realize that the Lonsdale case was utterly different from any other single
case among the hundreds I had studied. No other case had so many different forms of
communications, some duplicated, and some even triplicated. Yet there was apparently
only one spy Houghton serviced by the whole Lonsdale/Kroger apparatus. He was an
important spy, it was true, with access to vital details about British and American
submarine-detection systems. But why involve the Krogers? Why not just use Lonsdale?
Even at face value, it seemed unlikely that other spies would not have been involved in
the ring. The Krogers were located in Ruislip, close to American Air Force installations,
while Lonsdale, we discovered, had earlier studied at the School of Oriental Studies, on
a course commonly used by British military officers and MI6 trainees. Lonsdale was
certainly the illegal resident in Britain, and I carefully tabulated the communications he
received from Moscow after he returned to Britain in October. He averaged 300-350
groups per month. Yet in each of the other illegal cases I studied, the resident received
500-1000 groups a month, and generally closer to the higher figure. Where was
Lonsdales missing traffic? Lonsdale had a three-character call sign which included a
figure 1 if the broadcast carried traffic, and omitted the figure 1 if it was a dummy
stream. I asked GCHQ whether they could find any messages similar in length to those
we knew Lonsdale received after October, for the period preceding his departure in
August. After considerable search GCHQ found what is called a continuity, which went
back six years, to roughly the time when Lonsdale entered Britain.
The average group count of this continuity was in the correct range of 500-1000 groups
per month, and it ceased suddenly in August 1960, at the same time Lonsdale returned
to Moscow. Of course, without the pads, we could not read any of the messages, but if,
as seemed likely, this was Lonsdales original traffic, the question remained: why did it
suddenly diminish when he came back?
I turned my attention to the Krogers communications. These were the most baffling of
all. Most of them were for their use, yet they appeared not to be running any spies at all
- merely acting as support for Lonsdale. But some of the communications were clearly
being stored by the Krogers for Lonsdale. The pads, for instance, hidden like Lonsdales
in a cigarette lighter, were almost certainly his. I calculated up the group counts on the
pads. The total was equivalent to the groups missing from Lonsdales traffic after his
return in October. The Russians, it seemed, had split Lonsdales traffic when he came
back, leaving the Shah (Houghton) on the channel we could read, and placing his other
communications, perhaps containing his other spies, onto a secure channel with the
Krogers, and using their high-speed transmitter, which we could not detect, to send any
messages he needed. This apparent alteration in radio procedures suggested that
Lonsdale knew, in some way or other, that the messages he was receiving from Moscow
in the White House, using the pads in the cigarette lighter, were compromised. But why,
if he feared that, not just use new pads? And why, if the Russians feared he was
compromised, was he sent back at all?
I began to analyze the sequence of events over the weekend of the arrests. I had
arranged a continuous coverage of the Russian Embassy diplomatic transmitters from
the Friday before the arrests until midday Monday. The last Embassy transmission took
place at 11 A.M. on the Saturday morning, well before the arrests, and the next was not
until 9 A.M. on the Monday morning. So, although a major espionage ring had been
smashed, the Russians apparently made no contact at all with Moscow. This beggared
belief, unless, of course, the Russians already knew we were about to lift them.
I checked what we knew about the movements of known Soviet intelligence officers in
London over that weekend. On the Sunday night, when news of the arrests first broke
on the television bulletins, an illegal KGB resident, Korovin, and Karpekov, the KGB legal
deputy resident, had dinner together. Our probe microphones picked up every part of
their conversation. We heard them listen to the news. They made no comment, and no
move to contact the Embassy.
I then looked at the beginnings of the case, and made a shattering discovery which
convinced me that the case must have been blown to the Russians. In its early stages,
the case was handled by D2 when it was suspected that Lonsdale was Polish. Checking
the records, I discovered that D2 were not indoctrinated into RAFTER. They had no
knowledge of the fact that the Russians were listening to our Watcher radios, and
therefore, prior to the cases being handed over to Arthur, they used Watchers on each
of the seventeen occasions they followed Lonsdale in July and August.
Ever since the beginning of LIONSBEARD, all Watcher communications were recorded by
MI5 and retained, so I organized a test. I gave Evelyn McBarnet, who worked with
Arthur as a research officer, the tape of the Watcher communications during the day
that D2 followed Lonsdale to the bank for the first time. I also gave her a London street
map book, similar to that used by the Watchers, and asked her to mark out the route
she thought the Watchers were following, based solely on listening to their radio
communications. Evelyn McBarnet was not experienced in traffic analysis, and had no
previous access to the case, but within three and a half hours, she reconstructed the
movements flawlessly. If she could do it, the Russians, who had been analyzing our
Watcher communications for years, were certainly capable of it too. They must have
known from the beginning that we were onto Lonsdale.
By the time I was writing my report, Sniper was safely in a CIA safe house near
Washington, where he identified himself as an officer in the Polish Intelligence Service
named Michael Goleniewski. One fragment of his story seemed devastating in the
context of the thread of ambiguity which ran through the Lonsdale case. He told the CIA
that in the last week of July a senior officer in the UB told him the Russians knew there
was a pig (a spy) in the organization. Goleniewski said that initially he was deputed to
assist in the search for the spy, but eventually, by Christmas, realized that he himself
was falling under suspicion, so he defected.
The last week in July. I read the CIA account of Snipers debriefing. It stared out at me
from the page. It seemed so innocuous a phrase. I checked back. Lonsdale was first seen
by MI5 meeting Houghton on July 2. He was positively identified on the 11
th
. We began
following him on the 17
th
. Allow a week for the news to filter through to the Russians. A
day to get across to the UB. That takes you to the last week in July!
The Lonsdale report was the most painful document I have ever written. My triumph
turned to ashes before my eyes. I remember going off sailing in the Blackwater estuary,
near my home in Essex, the weekend before submitting it in May 1961. The clouds
scudded across the flat landscape, the wind filling my lungs and cleansing my mind of
stress and turmoil. But no matter how I turned the boat, no matter how I adjusted the
rigging, I came down to the same conclusion. The Russians knew we were onto Lonsdale
from the beginning; they had withdrawn him, and then sent him back. But why?
There was only one explanation which covered all the inconsistencies of the case: a leak.
If the Russians possessed a source inside MI5, he would alert them to the existence of
Sniper, which would explain why pressure mounted on Goleniewski from the last week
in July, although of course, like us, the Russians could only guess at Snipers real identity.
That would explain why the Russians knew about our bank operations. Once they
realized Lonsdale was blown, the Russians recalled him to Moscow, but once I alerted
the management to the LIONSBEARD information, and Furnival Jones began his
inquiries, the source would contact the Russians in a panic. The Russians were then
faced with a simple choice. Lonsdale, or the MI5 source? The only way of forestalling the
hunt inside MI5 was to send Lonsdale back, hoping that he could extract some last
intelligence from Houghton before we rounded the ring up. But before sending him
back the Russians took the precaution of switching his other spies to alternative secure
communications via the Krogers. If this was the case, the Russians had severely
misjudged the sophistication of the new D Branch team they were facing. Despite their
advantages, we managed to outplay them and capture the Krogers, a significant
additional part of the Soviet team. As for the source, it could only be one of a dozen
people at the top of MI5. This was no Watcher, or peripheral source. The Russians
would never sacrifice anyone as valuable as Lonsdale for a low-level source. The
evidence of continuous interference throughout the Lonsdale case pointed much higher
up - to the very summit of the organization. I submitted my report to Furnival Jones in
May 1961. He passed my report on to the Deputy Director-General, Graham Mitchell,
with a short accompanying minute which read: It should be borne in mind when
reading this analysis, that the Lonsdale case was a personal triumph for Peter Wright.
For months I heard nothing. I sat in on dozens of meetings with Mitchell and Hollis on
other matters, and often hung back, expecting that they would call me in to discuss
what, at the very least, was a disturbing hypothesis. But there was nothing. No minute,
no letter, no threats, no casual conversation. It was as if my report did not exist. Then,
in October, I was finally called into Hollis office late one afternoon. He was sitting at his
desk, with Mitchell to one side. Graham will handle this discussion, Peter, said Hollis
in a distant manner. He fingered my report with evident distaste. I turned to face
Mitchell. He was sweating slightly, and avoided looking me in the eye. I have read your
Lonsdale analysis, he began, and I am bound to say that a lot of it passes over my
head. In my experience espionage has always been a simple business...
I bridled at this.
I will gladly explain any of the anomalies I have detailed in the report, sir, if that will
help. It is often difficult to put technical matters into lay language.
Mitchell went on as if I had made no interruption. The simple fact is, we have arrested
and convicted three professional Russian illegals - these are the first Russian nationals to
be brought before the courts here for generations. We arrest two immensely dangerous
spies inside the countrys most secret underwater research establishment. By any
measure that is success. What on earth is the advantage to the Russians of allowing us
to do that? I began to plod through the sections of my report, pointing up the
ambiguities, and trying hard not to draw any conclusions. But Mitchell attacked every
point. How did I know? How could I be sure? The bank could have been a coincidence.
The Russians might not have known we were following Lonsdale, even if they did listen
to our Watcher radios. Theyre not ten feet tall, you know, Peter!
I went through the change in radio operations. But Mitchell brushed it aside, saying he
was not a statistician.
You say there were more spies, you speculate that the Russians deliberately sent
Lonsdale back. But youve got no proof, Peter, that it went like that.
But youve got no proof, sir, that it went as you think it did. We are both
hypothesizing.
Ah yes, cut in Hollis, but we have them in prison. But for how long, sir? We have
faced this problem persistently since Tisler, and every time we leave it, it reemerges...
The Deputy and I have discussed this whole matter very carefully, and I think you know
my feelings on that point.
So, am I to understand there will be no further investigations? That is correct, and I
would be grateful if you could keep this matter entirely confidential. The Service has
been tremendously boosted, as you have been too, Peter, by this case, and I should not
like to see progress set back by more damaging speculation. Hollis smiled at me oddly,
and began to sharpen a pencil. I stood up abruptly, and left the room.
11 -
Despite the secret doubts expressed inside MI5 about the provenance of the Lonsdale
case, it was hailed as an outstanding triumph in American intelligence circles. Never
before had an illegal network been monitored while it ran, and there was great interest
in Washington in the work of the Radiations Operations Committee, which had
coordinated the new range of techniques.
The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) had already learned about ROCs work from
GCHQ and was envious of the close relationships being forged between GCHQ and her
sister clandestine services, MI5 and MI6. However bad the problems had been in Britain,
they were infinitely worse in Washington. Hoover vehemently opposed the
establishment of the CIA after the war, and maintained open hostility to it throughout
the 1950s. The CIA, its senior ranks mostly comprising Ivy League graduates, treated the
G-men with arrogant disdain. The only policy which united the two organizations was
their shared determination to thwart the NSA wherever possible. They both claimed
NSA was an insecure organization, an accusation given substance in 1959, when two
NSA cryptanalysts defected to the Soviet Union, betraying vital secrets. Louis Tordella
was the deputy head of NSA, and effectively ran the organization for nearly twenty
years. (The head of NSA is a rotating Armed Services appointment. ) He knew full well
that the real reason for FBI and CIA hostility was resentment at NSAs control of SIGINT.
He knew also that both organizations were busy challenging his monopoly. The CIA had
begun its own ultra-secret SIGINT operation, STAFF D, and the FBI were also active in
the same field. In May 1960, just as the Lonsdale case was getting under way, Al
Belmont visited London, and I took him down to Cheltenham to demonstrate the
ENGULF operation against the Egyptian cipher, and the STOCKADE operation against the
French cipher, which was in its early stages. Belmont was much impressed, and
immediately sent over Dick Millen, who spent a fortnight with me learning the technical
details of STOCKADE. Shortly after, the FBI conducted a similar successful operation
against the French Embassy cipher machine in Washington.
Tordella wanted desperately to develop a Radiations Operations Committee of his own
with NSA in control, and in October 1961 he invited Hugh Alexander, Hugh Denham, Ray
Frawley, and me to Washington, along with Christopher Phillpotts, the MI6 Station
Chief, for a special conference to discuss the British cipher breakthroughs. He also
invited the CIA and FBI in the hope that by listening to our descriptions of the work of
ROC, they would appreciate the benefits of closer cooperation.
I realized from the start that this conference was a priceless opportunity for Britains
Secret Services to redeem themselves in the eyes of the entire American intelligence
establishment. The CIA was, by 1961, the dominant intelligence voice in Washington,
and although powerful figures there viewed the Anglo-American intelligence alliance as
a sentimental luxury in an increasingly unsentimental Cold War, I was confident that if
we could demonstrate to them at working level the technical advances made since
1956, we would convince them we were worth cultivating.
Hugh Alexander knew, as I did, that we were taking a gamble. There were no guarantees
that the Americans would tell us anything in return at the conference; indeed, it was
likely they would not. There were obvious security considerations, too. But the potential
gains were enormous. At the very least, we could remove the shadow cast over Anglo-
American intelligence relations since the Philby/Burgess/Maclean affair. More
important than that, Hugh Alexander had plans for developing the cipher-breaking side
of ROC, and I for developing the counterespionage side, which would be possible only
with the resources and backing of the Americans. As with the development of the
atomic bomb in World War II, we needed to persuade the Americans to fund our ideas
into reality. In the long run we would gain the benefits, as the intelligence would flow
back to us through the GCHQ/NSA exchange agreement.
The conference was held in specially swept rooms inside NSA headquarters at Fort
Meade, Maryland - a vast glasshouse surrounded by electric wire fences, and topped
with the tangled arthritic stems of hundreds of aerials and receiver dishes, linking it to
the hundreds of NSA listening posts dotted around the world. Louis Tordella and his top
cryptanalyst, Art Levinson, attended for NSA. The FBI sent Dick Millen and Lish
Whitman; the CIA was represented by Jim Angleton and a bulllike man named Bill
Harvey, who had recently returned to Washington to run Staff D, after running the
Berlin Tunnel operation. Harvey was already a living legend in the CIA for his hard
drinking and his cowboy manners. He began his career handling Soviet
counterespionage for the FBI, until Hoover sacked him for drunkenness. He promptly
took his invaluable FBI knowledge and put it to work for the fledgling CIA, becoming
along with Angleton one of the most influential American operators in the secret war
against the KGB. Through most of the 1950s he served in Berlin, running agents, digging
tunnels, and taking the battle to the Soviets wherever possible. For him, the Cold War
was as real as if it had been hand-to-hand combat. But for all his crude aggression,
Harvey was smart, with a nose for a spy. It was he who first fingered Philby in the USA
after the defection of Burgess and Maclean. Harvey had amazing recall for the details of
defections and cases decades before, and it was he, before anyone else, who put
together the contradictory strands of the MI6 mans career. While others paused for
doubt, Harvey pursued Philby with implacable vengeance, and the incident left him with
a streak of vindictive anti-British sentiment.
The five-day conference began inauspiciously. Tordella was anxious for a free exchange
of ideas, and discussed one or two laboratory experiments NSA was conducting into
possible ways of breaking embassy ciphers in Washington, remarking pointedly that in
view of the FBI charter, they were unable to go beyond the experimental stage. The CIA
and FBI boys were uneasily silent, neither wanting to discuss technical developments in
front of the other, or the NSA, or in the CIAs case, in front of us. Angleton took copious
notes, while Harvey slumped in his chair with ill-concealed hostility, occasionally snoring
loudly, particularly after lunch.
The Company [the CIA] is here in a listening capacity only, he snapped on the first
morning, We do not discuss our secrets in open session!
Things began to improve when I read a long paper describing the success of ENGULF
against the Egyptians, and the advances we had made since then on the radio
illumination of cipher noises and what could be achieved aurally, using our new range of
microphones. I went on to give the details of STOCKADE, and at last discussion began to
flow. Even Harvey shifted in his seat and began to listen.
On the third day Richard Helms, then CIA Director of Plans, took the chair for a
discussion about ways in which these new techniques could be applied to Russian
ciphers. I argued strongly that we had to predict the next generation of cipher machines
the Russians would develop, and begin work immediately trying to crack them. The non-
scientists present were skeptical, but I pointed out that we had done just this during the
war at the Admiralty Research Laboratory, when we predicted the new generation of
German torpedoes and mines, and were able to counter them as soon as they came into
operation. By the end of the discussion, NSA and GCHQ had committed themselves to
begin work against the new Russian Albatross class cipher machine.
Hugh Alexander was much more interested in the implications for cryptanalysis of the
new generation of computers being developed in America. He was obsessed by the
Ergonomic Theory, which held that the production of truly random numbers, even
electronically as in a cipher machine, was a mathematical impossibility. Alexander
believed that if sufficiently powerful computers could be developed, no code, no matter
how well enciphered, would be safe, and for the next decade a vast joint research
program began to investigate the whole area. (According to a 1986 report in the
GUARDIAN newspaper, advances in Ergonomic Theory since 1980 have revolutionized
cryptanalysis in the way Alexander predicted.)
As expected, the CIA told us next to nothing about the state of their technical
intelligence. They gave the impression that we were not to be trusted with their secrets,
but we suspected there were probably other reasons for their reticence. Harveys Staff
D was almost certainly a department designed to bypass the terms of the UK/USA
agreement, which specified the total exchange of SIGINT intelligence between NSA and
GCHQ. If the Americans wanted to mount a cipher attack and did not wish to share the
product with us, or if they wanted to operate against the UK, or a Commonwealth
country, as we were sure they were doing, Staff D was the obvious place from which to
do it.
Nevertheless, the conference was a milestone in Anglo-American intelligence relations.
For the first time in a decade, all six intelligence services sat down and discussed at
length how they could cooperate on a wide variety of problems. Major joint research
programs were launched, particularly in the computer field, and we had taken a first
step in breaking down the walls of mistrust. Before I left London, Arthur Martin had
arranged for me to brief the CIA on the technical side of the Lonsdale case and, in
particular, the development of RAFTER. There was some embarrassment about this in
Leconfield House because, although we had informed the FBI about RAFTER from the
beginning, the CIA knew nothing. Hollis agreed that they should be indoctrinated fully as
soon as the Lonsdale case was concluded, particularly since it had been their
information from Sniper which led us to Lonsdale in the first place. The briefing was
scheduled after the end of Tordellas conference, and it was held in one of the huge
Nissen huts the CIA occupied temporarily next to the reflecting pool in the center of
Washington while their Langley headquarters were under construction. I was taken
through into a large conference room by Jim Angleton, and shown to a podium in front
of at least two hundred CIA officers.
Are you sure all these people are SIGINT indoctrinated? I hissed at Angleton.
Just tell the story, Peter, and let us handle the security, he replied. Theres a lot of
people want to hear this! I stood up nervously and, fighting my stutter by speaking
slowly and deliberately, began to describe the beginnings of the Lonsdale case. After an
hour I turned to the blackboard to explain the complicated technical details of active
RAFTER.
Of course, from our point of view, RAFTER represents a major new counterespionage
weapon. We are now in the position to establish without question when Soviet agents
in the field are receiving clandestine broadcasts from Moscow, and moreover we can
use it to detect the frequency of their transmissions...
RAFTER was not well received. At first it was just a rustle; then I noticed a couple of
people talking to each other in the front row with more than usual animation. I knew
something was wrong when I caught sight of Harvey sitting at one side of the stage. He
was leaning over in front of Angleton, gesticulating angrily in my direction. Are there
any questions? I asked, unsure of what was upsetting my audience.
Yes! yelled someone at the back. When the hell did you say you developed this
RAFTER?
Spring 1958.
And what the hell date is it today...?
I stuttered, momentarily lost for words.
Ill tell you, he shouted again, its 1961!
Hell of a way to run an alliance, yelled someone else. I sat down sharply. People
began to leave. There were no more questions.
Angleton and Harvey came up afterward. There was no disguising Harveys rage.
Look, Peter, said Jim, trying hard to be urbane, this whole subject needs a lot more
discussion, and I really dont feel its appropriate to continue it in such a large forum. Bill
and I would like you to have dinner with us tonight. Well arrange somewhere secure,
where we can talk.
He hustled me away before Harvey could speak. Joe Burk, Angletons technical man,
collected me from my hotel that evening. He had little to say, and it looked to me as if
those were his orders. We crossed the George Washington Bridge, passed Arlington
cemetery, and drove out into the Virginia countryside. The new headquarters, said
Burk, pointing to the right.
There was nothing but trees and gathering darkness. After an hours drive, we arrived
at a detached timber-framed house set well back from the road. At the back was a large
veranda with a table and chairs, completely enclosed with fly netting. It was a warm,
humid, late-summer evening. The scent of pine and the sound of crickets floated down
from the foothills of the Appalachians. Angleton came out on the veranda and greeted
me coolly.
Sorry about this afternoon, he said, but offered no explanation. We sat down at the
table and were joined by the head of the CIAs West European Division. He was polite
but nothing more. After a few minutes another car drew up at the front of the house
with a squeal of brakes. Doors slammed, and I heard the sound of Bill Harveys voice
inside the house asking where we were. He threw back the flimsy metal mosquito door,
and emerged onto the veranda clutching a bottle of Jack Daniels. He had obviously
been drinking.
Now you limey bastard, he roared, smashing the bottle down on the table, lets have
the truth about this case!
I knew immediately it was a setup. Normally Harry Stone would accompany me to any
serious discussion of MI5 business, but he was in the hospital recovering from a heart
attack.
This is most unfair, Jim, I thought this was a dinner party, I said, turning to Angleton.
It is, Peter, he said, pouring me a massive Scotch in a cut-glass tumbler.
Im not going to be browbeaten, I replied flatly. No, no, said Angleton quietly, we
just want to hear it again... from the beginning. Theres a lot of things weve got to get
straight. I went over the Lonsdale story a second time, and by the time I finished
Harvey could contain himself no longer. You untrustworthy motherfuckers! he spat at
me. You come over here and ask for us to pay for your research, and all the time youve
got a thing like RAFTER up your sleeve...
I dont see the problem...
You dont see shit!
Harvey spun open the second bottle of Jack Daniels. The problem, Peter, is our
operations, said Angleton. A hell of a lot of our agents use HF radio receivers, and if
the Soviets have got RAFTER, a lot of them must be blown...
Have the Soviets got it? asked Angleton.
Not at first, but Im sure they have now, I said, quoting a recent case where an MI6
Polish source inside the UB described a joint Polish-Soviet espionage investigation.
Toward the end, when they were closing in on the suspect agent, the KGB brought a van
up to the apartment building where the spy lived. The UB, according to the MI6 source,
were never allowed to see inside the van, but he knew enough to guess that it had
something to do with radio detection.
Jesus Christ, hissed Harvey, thats our whole Polish setup lost...!
But we sent those source reports to your Polish section, I said. Whoever the agent
was, he wasnt one of ours, so we assumed it must have been one of yours. It should at
least have warned you that radio communications to Poland were vulnerable.
Well check it in the morning, said the head of the West European Division, looking
flushed.
Who else knows about RAFTER? asked Harvey. I told him we briefed the FBI and the
Canadian RCMP fully as our development progressed.
The Canadians! exploded Harvey, thumping the table in anger. You might as well tell
the fuckin Papuans as the Canadians! Im afraid we dont see it like that. The
Canadians are trusted members of the Commonwealth.
Well, you should tell them to get another cipher machine, he said, as Angleton, fearful
that Harvey in his rage would spill out the secrets of Staff D, kicked him hard under the
table.
The argument raged on and on; the intimidation was obviously carefully planned. They
wanted to make me feel guilty, to say something indiscreet I might regret later, to tell
them more than I should. We gave you Sniper, they said, and look what you do in
return. We agree to plow millions of dollars into research for you, and how do you repay
us? Harvey cursed and raged about every weakness, every mistake, every piece of
carelessness that the Americans had overlooked since the war:
Philby, Burgess, Maclean, the lack of leadership, the amateurism, the retreat from
Empire, the encroachment of socialism. Angleton lectured me darkly on the need to
respect American superiority in the alliance if we wanted access to their sources.
Just remember, roared Harvey, youre a fuckin beggar in this town. I rolled with the
punches. Yes, we had a poor record on counterespionage, but Arthur was back now, and
Lonsdale was just the beginning. No, we had no obligation to tell you about RAFTER
from the beginning. It was our secret to do with as we judged fit. Ive come over here
and just given you my lifes work - ENGULF, STOCKADE, RAFTER - everything. You sat
opposite me for five days at NSA and told me nothing. Wheres the exchange in that?
The truth is, youre just pissed off because we stole a march on you...! Harvey was all
puffed out and purple like a turkeycock, sweat pouring off his temples, his jacket open
to reveal a polished shoulder holster and pistol, his gross belly heaving with drink. It was
now four oclock in the morning. I had had enough for one night, and left. I told
Angleton that the program for the next day was off. I took a poor view of what had
happened. It was up to them to make the peace. The next day Angleton called on me at
my hotel, unannounced. He was charming, and full of apologies. He blamed the previous
nights scene on Harvey.
He drinks too much, and thinks you have to give a guy a hard time to get the truth. He
believes you now. He sees you as a threat, thats all.
He invited me out for dinner. At first I was wary, but he said he understood my point of
view, and hoped I understood his, and talked enthusiastically about his plans to help
with resources. The tension soon disappeared. He offered to take me to see Louis
Tordella to persuade him to help with the counterespionage side of ROC, and the
following day sent a car to take me down to Fort Meade. Technically, I was not
supposed to visit NSA without being accompanied by someone from GCHQ, so I was
taken into the side entrance, and whisked up to Tordellas office on the top floor. We
had lunch there, and I outlined the Lonsdale case for the third time.
At the end Tordella asked how he could help, and I explained that the main weakness
was that despite the breakthrough offered by my classification of illegal broadcasts from
Moscow, GCHQ had insufficient coverage of the traffic. There had been substantial
improvements since Lonsdale, but we still had only between twelve and fifteen radio
positions intercepting these signals, which meant we were really only sampling them.
We needed at least 90 percent of the take to make real progress on the classifications.
Tordella was much taken with the possibilities, and agreed to guarantee a worldwide
take of 100 percent for at least two years. He was as good as his word, and soon the
intelligence was flooding back to GCHQ, where it was processed by the section
supporting the Counterclan Committee. A young GCHQ cryptanalyst named Peter
Marychurch (now the Director of GCHQ) transformed my laborious handwritten
classifications by processing the thousands of broadcasts on computer and applying
cluster analysis to isolate similarities in the traffic, which made the classifications
infinitely more precise. Within a few years this work had become one of the most
important tools in Western counterespionage.
On the drive back to Washington I was elated. Not only had my visit to Washington
secured American backing for the ENGULF side of ROCs work, but I had their
commitment to run the counterespionage side as well. I had almost forgotten the run-in
with Harvey until Angleton brought the subject up again.
Harvey wants to see you again.
I expressed astonishment.
No, no - he wants to ask your advice. Hes got a problem in Cuba, and I told him you
might be able to help.
But what about the other night? I asked.
Oh, dont worry about that. He just wanted to know whether you could be trusted. You
passed the test.
Angleton was typically elliptical, and refused to explain further, saying that he had
arranged lunch with Harvey in two days time, and I would find out more then.
The year 1961 was the height of the CIAs obsession with Cuba. The Bay of Pigs invasion
had recently failed, and Angleton and I regularly discussed the subject, since I had been
heavily involved in MI5s counterinsurgency campaign against the Greek Cypriot
guerrilla leader, Colonel Grivas, in the 1950s. When I visited Washington in 1959,
Richard Helms and Richard Bissel, in charge of operations in Southeast Asia, asked me to
lecture on my experiences to a group of senior officers concerned with
counterinsurgency. Even then it was obvious the CIA had plans in Cuba, where Fidel
Castro was busy establishing a Communist state. Bissell subsequently took over the
running of the Bay of Pigs operation, but when it failed it was common knowledge in
Washington that his days were numbered, as the Kennedys purged all those responsible
for the Cuban fiasco.
When I arrived at the restaurant two days later, Harvey stood up to greet me and gave
me a firm handshake. He looked well scrubbed and less bloated than usual, and made
no reference to the events of two nights before. He was a hard man, who gave and
expected no quarter. He told me that he was studying the Cuban problem, and wanted
to hear from me about the Cyprus campaign.
I missed your briefing in 1959, he said, without a trace of irony. I first became
involved in Cyprus shortly after I joined MI5, when the Director of E Branch (Colonial
Affairs), Bill Magan, sent me some papers on the escalating conflict. The Greek Cypriot
Archbishop Makarios was leading a vigorous campaign for full independence, supported
by the Greek Government, the AKEL Communist Party, and EOKA, the guerrilla army led
by Colonel Grivas. Britain, anxious to retain Cyprus as a military base, was resisting, and
by 1956 a full-scale military emergency was in force, with 40,000 British troops pinned
down by a few hundred Grivas guerrillas.
British policy in Cyprus was an utter disaster. The Colonial Office was trying to pursue
political negotiations in a deteriorating security situation, relying on the Army to keep
order. Grivas needed to be located, isolated, and neutralized before political
negotiations stood a chance, but although the Army launched massive searches, they
failed to find him. I was convinced, studying the papers, that MI5 could do far better
than the Army, and I told Magan I was confident that, given time, we could locate Grivas
accurately by tracing his communications in the same way I planned our attacks against
the Russians. Magan immediately took me to see Sir Gerald Templer, who led the
successful counter-insurgency campaign in Malaya, and was a great advocate of the use
of intelligence to solve colonial problems. Templer was enthusiastic about my plan and
agreed to lobby the Colonial Office on MI5s behalf. But the Colonial Office remained
adamant; they wanted to pursue their own security policy, and had no wish to involve
MI5. There was no great enthusiasm, either, inside MI5 for becoming embroiled in what
was fast becoming an insoluble, situation. Hollis, in particular, was opposed to becoming
involved in Colonial Affairs without a clear invitation from the Ministry. His attitude was
that MI5 was a domestic organization, and while he would provide a Defense Liaison
Officer to advise the Army, that was all. In 1958, Grivas stepped up his guerrilla
campaign in an effort to thwart the determined efforts to achieve a political solution
being made by the new Governor, Sir Hugh Foot. The Army launched another massive
search for Grivas, this time in the Paphos mountains, but once again he slipped through
the net. Foot continued to press for a political solution, but agreed to call in MI5 as the
situation was rapidly deteriorating. From the start we were in a race: could we find
Grivas before the Colonial Office stitched up a ramshackle deal? Magan was convinced
that sufficient intelligence about Grivas location must exist in the files of the local
Special Branch, and that it had just not been interpreted correctly. The problem was
how to get at it. EOKA had thoroughly penetrated the local Special Branch, and studying
the files would be a dangerous business once an MI5 mans identity became known.
One of our officers had already been shot in the high street of Nicosia.
Magan was a remarkable man who had spent a great deal of time on the North-West
Frontier and in Persia, where he lived by himself with the natives in tents, speaking their
languages and cooking his meals on cow dung fires. He knew at first hand the dangers of
terrorism, and rather than delegate the dangerous mission to a junior officer, he insisted
that he go himself, supported by the local Cyprus liaison officer, Colonel Philip Kirby
Green, a tall soldierly officer of boundless courage and rectitude who was also a
distinguished painter in his spare time. I was to follow shortly afterward to plan and
execute the technical side of the operation, which was given the code name SUNSHINE.
It would be too crude to say that SUNSHINE was an assassination operation. But it
amounted to the same thing. The plan was simple: to locate Grivas, and bring up a
massive concentration of soldiers. We knew he would never surrender, and like two of
his trusted lieutenants who had recently been cornered by the Army, he would die in
the shootout. I arrived in Nicosia on January 17, 1959, and went to Special Branch
headquarters to study Magans analysis of the files. Grivas campaign was clearly well
organized. There were numerous examples of wellcoordinated terrorist strikes and civil
disturbances across the whole island. He had therefore to be in regular communication
with his field officers. It was unlikely that EOKA would use either the telephone or the
postal system for these, even though they had both been thoroughly penetrated.
Communications rested on a system of couriers, and from studying the files it was
obvious these were mainly women, traveling on the public transport system. We plotted
each sighting and interception, and the overall pattern showed Limassol to be the hub
of the EOKA communications network. There were also clusters of sightings in the
Yerasa and Polodhia villages, several miles from Limassol. The best hypothesis was that
Grivas maintained headquarters in each of these villages.
The first step was to place a secure telephone tap on Makarios palace. We were certain
that Makarios, and probably EOKA at certain times, used the line secure in the
knowledge that their post office spies would automatically alert them to the presence of
a tap. We decided to place a concealed tap on one of the overhead cables leading into
the palace, using a radio transmitter which took power from the telephone circuit to
radiate the signal out to our waiting receiver a mile or two away. John Wyke, MI6s best
technical operator, and the man who actually placed the taps inside the Berlin Tunnel,
with the Vopos feet just inches above his head, came out to help me. The whole
operation was fraught with danger. Wyke had to climb a telephone pole in total
darkness, in full view of the road, which was constantly patrolled by Makarios armed
bodyguards and EOKA guerrillas. He bored a hole in the top of the pole to conceal the
electronics, and made a concealed connection to the telephone cable. Down at the
bottom I selected his tools and relayed them up to him. Every five minutes we froze as a
patrol came past, expecting at any moment to hear rifle fire. Two hours later, our nerves
frayed, the tap was successfully installed, and gave us the essential base coverage of
Makarios. But the real purpose of SUNSHINE was to find Grivas. I was sure he must be
using radio receivers to monitor British Army communications, and was aware every
time an effort was mounted to search for him. I decided on a two-pronged attack. Firstly
we would search intensively for the aerial which he used with his receiver. Then,
simultaneously, I planned to plant a radio receiver on him containing a radio beacon,
which would lead us right to him. We knew Grivas obtained a great deal of his military
supplies from the Egyptians, who were selling off British equipment they had
confiscated after the Suez war at knockdown prices. MI6 recruited a Greek Cypriot arms
dealer, who purchased a consignment of receivers in Egypt which I modified to include a
beacon, and we set about trying to feed it into Grivas headquarters. The first part of
Operation SUNSHINE went well. K.G., as Kirby Green was universally known in the
Service, Magan and I made a series of dawn reconnoiters of the Limassol area looking
for the aerial. It was dangerous work, meandering down dusty side streets and across
the sunbaked market squares, pretending to be casual visitors. Old men under wicker
shades looked at us as we passed. Small boys eyed us suspiciously and disappeared
down alleys. I felt the sweat dripping down my back, and the uncanny sensation of an
unseen rifle permanently trained on me from somewhere behind the terra-cotta roofs
and ancient flint walls.
In Yerasa I noticed a spike on the peak of the pyramid-shaped roof of a church. It
appeared, at first sight, to be a lightning conductor, mounted on an insulator going
through the roof. There was also a metallic strip going down into the ground, but when I
scrutinized the conductor carefully through field glasses, I could see that the strip was
disconnected from the spike. It was obviously modified to act as an aerial. Rather
foolishly, we tried to get closer, and, from nowhere, an angry crowd of local children
emerged and began to stone us. We beat a hasty retreat, and made our way over to
Polodhia, where there was a similar setup. I was sure then that we had been right to
pinpoint the two villages as the center of Grivas operations. I began to work feverishly
on the radio beacons. We estimated that SUNSHINE would take six months to complete,
but just as we moved into top gear, in late February 1959, the Colonial Office hurriedly
settled the Cyprus problem at a Constitutional Conference at Lancaster House. The
carpet was roughly pulled from under our feet, and the entire SUNSHINE plan aborted
overnight. Magan was furious, particularly when Grivas emerged from the precise area
we had foreseen and was flown to Greece, ready to continue to exert a baleful influence
on the island. Magan felt the settlement was at best temporary, and that few of the
outstanding problems had been resolved. In his view, Colonial Office short-term
expediency would lead to long-term misery. He has been proved right.
Shortly before we left Cyprus, Magan and I had a strained encounter with the Governor,
Sir Hugh Foot. He was pleased that at last he was extricated, and made it clear that he
had always seen SUNSHINE as a last resort solution, to be implemented only in the
event of the failure of diplomacy. He seemed incapable of understanding that
intelligence, to be effective, has to be built into diplomacy from the start. Looking back, I
am certain that, had we been allowed to implement Operation SUNSHINE when we first
lobbied for it, in 1956, we could have neutralized Grivas at the outset. The Colonial
Office, rather than EOKA, would then have been able to dictate the terms of the peace,
and the history of that tragic but beautiful island might have taken a different course
over the past thirty years. The entire Cyprus episode left a lasting impression on British
colonial policy. Britain decolonized most successfully when we defeated the military
insurgency first, using intelligence rather than force of arms, before negotiating a
political solution based on the political leadership of the defeated insurgency
movement, and with British force of arms to maintain the installed government. This is
basically what happened in Malaya and Kenya, and both these countries have survived
intact.
The fundamental problem was how to remove the colonial power while ensuring that
the local military forces did not fill the vacuum. How, in other words, can you create a
stable local political class? The Colonial Office were well versed in complicated,
academic, democratic models - a constitution here, a parliament there - very few of
which stood the remotest chance of success. After the Cyprus experience I wrote a
paper and submitted it to Hollis, giving my views. I said that we ought to adopt the
Bolshevik model, since it was the only one to have worked successfully. Lenin
understood better than anyone how to gain control of a country and, just as important,
how to keep it. Lenin believed that the political class had to control the men with the
guns, and the intelligence service, and by these means could ensure that neither the
Army nor another political class could challenge for power. Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the
founder of the modern Russian Intelligence Service, specifically set up the CHEKA
(forerunner of the KGB) with these aims in mind. He established three main directorates
- the First Chief Directorate to work against those people abroad who might conspire
against the government; the Second Chief Directorate to work against those inside the
Soviet Union who might conspire; and the Third Chief Directorate, which penetrated the
armed forces, to ensure that no military coup could be plotted.
My paper was greeted with horror by Hollis and the rest of the MI5 Directors. They told
me it was cynical, and it was never even passed to the Colonial Office, but looking
back over the past quarter of a century, it is only where a version of Lenins principles
has been applied in newly created countries that a military dictatorship has been
avoided.
These ideas were also hotly contested by the CIA when I lectured to them in 1959.
Helms told me flatly I was advocating Communism for the Third World. He felt that we
had a decisive intelligence advantage which they lacked. We were the resident colonial
power, whereas in the insurgencies which they faced in the Far East and Cuba, they
were not, and therefore they felt the only policy they could pursue was a military
solution. It was this thinking which ultimately led the USA into the Vietnam War.
More immediately, it led them into the Bay of Pigs, and when, two years later, Harvey
listened to my Cyprus experiences, he was struck by the parallel between the two
problems: both small islands with a guerrilla force led by a charismatic leader. He was
particularly struck by my view that without Grivas, EOKA would have collapsed. What
would the Brits do in Cuba? he asked.
I was a shade anxious about being drawn into the Cuban business. Hollis and I had
discussed it before I came to Washington, and he made no secret of his view that the
CIA were blundering in the Caribbean. It was a subject, he felt, to steer clear of if at all
possible. I was worried that if I made suggestions to Angleton and Harvey, I would soon
find them being quoted around Washington by the CIA as the considered British view of
things. It would not take long for word of that to filter back to Leconfield House, so I
made it clear to them that I was talking off the record.
I said that we would try to develop whatever assets we had down there - alternative
political leaders, that kind of thing.
Weve done all that, said Harvey impatiently, but theyre all in Florida. Since the Bay
of Pigs, weve lost virtually everything we had inside...
Harvey began to fish to see if I knew whether we had anything in the area, in view of the
British colonial presence in the Caribbean. I doubt it, I told him, the word in London
is steer clear of Cuba.
Six might have something, but youd have to check with them.
How would you handle Castro? asked Angleton.
Wed isolate him, turn the people against him...
Would you hit him? interrupted Harvey.
I paused to fold my napkin. Waiters glided silently from table to table. I realized now
why Harvey needed to know I could be trusted. Wed certainly have that capability, I
replied, but I doubt we would use it nowadays.
Why not?
Were not in it anymore, Bill. We got out a couple of years ago, after Suez.
At the beginning of the Suez Crisis, MI6 developed a plan, through the London Station,
to assassinate Nasser using nerve gas. Eden initially gave his approval to the operation,
but later rescinded it when he got agreement from the French and Israelis to engage in
joint military action. When this course failed, and he was forced to withdraw, Eden
reactivated the assassination option a second time. By this time virtually all MI6 assets
in Egypt had been rounded up by Nasser, and a new operation, using renegade Egyptian
officers, was drawn up, but it failed lamentably, principally because the cache of
weapons which had been hidden on the outskirts of Cairo was found to be defective.
Were you involved? Harvey asked.
Only peripherally, I answered truthfully, on the technical side. I explained that I was
consulted about the plan by John Henry and Peter Dixon, the two MI6 Technical Services
officers from the London Station responsible for drawing it up. Dixon, Henry, and I all
attended joint MI5/MI6 meetings to discuss technical research for the intelligence
services at Porton Down, the governments chemical and biological Weapons Research
Establishment. The whole area of chemical research was an active field in the 1950s. I
was cooperating with MI6 in a joint program to investigate how far the hallucinatory
drug lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) could be used in interrogations, and extensive
trials took place at Porton. I even volunteered as guinea pig on one occasion. Both MI5
and MI6 also wanted to know a lot more about the advanced poisons then being
developed at Porton, though for different reasons. I wanted the antidotes, in case the
Russians used a poison on a defector in Britain, while MI6 wanted to use the poisons for
operations abroad.
Henry and Dixon both discussed with me the use of poisons against Nasser, and asked
my advice. Nerve gas obviously presented the best possibility, since it was easily
administered. They told me that the London Station had an agent in Egypt with limited
access to one of Nassers headquarters. Their plan was to place canisters of nerve gas
inside the ventilation system, but I pointed out that this would require large quantities
of the gas, and would result in massive loss of life among Nassers staff. It was the usual
MI6 operation - hopelessly unrealistic - and it did not remotely surprise me when Henry
told me later that Eden had backed away from the operation. The chances of its
remaining undeniable were even slimmer than they had been with Buster Crabbe.
Harvey and Angleton questioned me closely about every part of the Suez Operation.
Were developing a new capability in the Company to handle these kinds of problems,
explained Harvey, and were in the market for the requisite expertise.
Whenever Harvey became serious, his voice dropped to a low monotone, and his
vocabulary lapsed into the kind of strangled bureaucratic syntax beloved of Washington
officials. He explained ponderously that they needed deniable personnel, and improved
technical facilities - in Harvey jargon, delivery mechanisms. They were especially
interested in the SAS. Harvey knew that the SAS operated up on the Soviet border in the
1950s tracking Russian rocket signals with mobile receivers before the satellites took
over, and that they were under orders not to be caught, even if this meant fighting their
way out of trouble. They dont freelance, Bill, I told him. You could try to pick them
up retired, but youd have to see Six about that. Harvey looked irritated, as if I were
being deliberately unhelpful. Have you thought of approaching Stephenson? I asked.
A lot of the old-timers say he ran this kind of thing in New York during the war. Used
some Italian, apparently, when there was no other way of sorting a German shipping
spy. Probably the Mafia, for all I know... Angleton scribbled in his notebook, and looked
up impassively. The French! I said brightly. Have you tried them? Its more their type
of thing, you know, Algiers, and so on.
Another scribble in the notebook.
What about technically - did you have any special equipment? asked Harvey.
I told him that after the gas canisters plan fell through, MI6 looked at some new
weapons. On one occasion I went down to Porton to see a demonstration of a cigarette
packet which had been modified by the Explosives Research and Development
Establishment to fire a dart tipped with poison. We solemnly put on white coats and
were taken out to one of the animal compounds behind Porton by Dr. Ladell, the
scientist there who handled all MI5 and MI6 work. A sheep on a lead was led into the
center of the ring. One flank had been shaved to reveal the coarse pink skin. Ladells
assistant pulled out the cigarette packet and stepped forward. The sheep started, and
was restrained by the lead, and I thought perhaps the device had misfired. But then the
sheeps knees began to buckle, and it started rolling its eyes and frothing at the mouth.
Slowly the animal sank to the ground, life draining away, as the white-coated
professionals discussed the advantages of the modern new toxin around the corpse. It
was the only time in my life when my two passions, for animals and for intelligence,
collided, and I knew at that instant that the first was by far the greater love. I knew also,
then, that assassination was no policy for peacetime. Beyond that, there was little help I
could offer Harvey and Angleton, and I began to feel I had told them more than enough.
The sight of Angletons notebook was beginning to unnerve me. They seemed so
determined, so convinced that this was the way to handle Castro, and slightly put out
that I could not help them more. Speak to John Henry, or Dixon - theyll probably know
more than me, I said when we were out on the street making our farewells. I was due
to fly back to Britain the next day.
Youre not holding out on us over this, are you? asked Harvey suddenly. The shape of
his pistol was visible again under his jacket, I could tell he was thinking about RAFTER.
I hailed a taxi.
Ive told you, Bill: Were out of that game. Were the junior partner in the alliance,
remember? Its your responsibility now. Harvey was not the kind of man to laugh at a
joke. Come to that, neither was Angleton.
12 -
1961. Outside in the streets of London, people were still saying they had never had it
so good, while in Washington a new young President was busy creating a mythical
Camelot of culture and excellence. But in the subterranean world of secret intelligence,
the shape of the turbulent decade was already becoming clear. Throughout the 1950s
American and British services pursued the Cold War with clarity of purpose and single-
minded dedication. It was not a subtle war, and there were precious few complications.
But in the early 1960s a rash of defectors began to arrive in the West from the heart of
the Russian intelligence machine, each carrying tales of the penetration of Western
security. Their stories were often contradictory and confusing, and their effect was to
begin the slow paralysis of British and American intelligence as doubt and suspicion
seeped through the system. The first defector arrived in December 1961. I was in my
office a few weeks after returning from my trip to Washington when Arthur strolled in,
cigarette in one hand, clutching a copy of THE TIMES in the other. He passed the paper
to me neatly folded across the spine. Sounds interesting... he said, pointing to a small
paragraph which referred to a Soviet Major, named Klimov, who had presented himself
to the American Embassy in Helsinki with his wife and child and asked for asylum.
It was not long before we heard on the grapevine that Klimov was, in fact, a KGB Major,
and that he was singing like a bird. In March 1962, a frisson of excitement went around
the D Branch offices. Arthur smoked more energetically than usual, his baby face
flushed with enthusiasm as he strode up and down the corridors. I knew Klimovs
information had finally arrived.
Its the defector, isnt it? I asked him one day. He ushered me into his office, closed
the door, and told me a little of the story. Klimov, he said, was in reality Anatoli
Golitsin, a highranking KGB officer who had worked inside the First Chief Directorate,
responsible for operations against the UK and the USA, and the Information Department
in Moscow, before taking a posting in Helsinki. In fact, Golitsin had been on a previous
CIA watch list during an earlier overseas tour, but he was not recognized under the
cover of his new identity until he presented himself in Helsinki. After the initial
debriefing, the CIA sent to MI5 a list of ten serials, each one itemizing an allegation
Golitsin had made about a penetration of British Security. Arthur initially held the
complete list. Patrick Stewart, the acting head of D3 (Research), conducted a
preliminary analysis of the serials, and drew up a list of suspects to fit each one. Then
individual serials were apportioned to different officers in the D1 (Investigations) section
for detailed investigation, and I was asked to provide technical advice as the
investigations required.
Three of the first ten serials immediately struck a chord. Golitsin said that he knew of a
famous Ring of Five spies, recruited in Britain in the 1930s. They all knew each other,
he said, and all knew the others were spies. But Golitsin could identify none of them,
other than the fact that one had the code name Stanley, and was connected with recent
KGB operations in the Middle East. The lead perfectly fitted Kim Philby, who was
currently working in Beirut for the OBSERVER newspaper. He said that two of the other
five were obviously Burgess and Maclean. We thought that a fourth might be Sir
Anthony Blunt, the Surveyor of the Queens Pictures, and a former wartime MI5 officer
who fell under suspicion after the Burgess and Maclean defections in 1951. But the
identity of the fifth was a complete mystery. As a result of Golitsins three serials
concerning the Ring of Five, the Philby and Blunt cases were exhumed, and a
reassessment ordered. The two most current and precise leads in those first ten serials
were numbers 3 and 8, which referred to Naval spies, indicating, as with Houghton, the
importance the Russians attached to obtaining details of the British and NATO
submarine and antisubmarine capability. Serial 3 was a recruitment allegedly made in
the British Naval Attaches office in the Embassy in Moscow, under the personal
supervision of General Gribanov, Head of the Second Chief Directorate, responsible for
internal intelligence operations in the Soviet Union. A Russian employee of the British
Embassy named Mikhailski had been involved in the operation, and the spy provided
handwritten notes of the secret documents which passed across his desk. Then, in 1956,
said Golitsin, the spy returned to London to work in the Naval Intelligence Department,
and his KGB control passed to the Foreign Operations Department.
The second Naval spy, Serial 8, was a more senior figure, according to Golitsin. Golitsin
claimed to have seen numbered copies of three NATO documents, two of which were
classified Top Secret. He had seen them by accident while working on the NATO desk of
the KGB Information Department, which prepared policy papers for the Politburo on
NATO matters. Golitsin was in the middle of preparing a report on NATO naval strategy,
when three documents came in from London. Normally all material reaching Golitsin
was bowdlerized, in other words rewritten to disguise its source, but because of the
urgency of his report, he was provided with the original document copies. The CIA
tested Golitsin on his story. The three documents in question, detailing plans to expand
the Clyde Polaris submarine base, and the reorganization of NATO naval dispositions in
the Mediterranean, were shown to him, mixed up with a sheaf of other NATO
documents. He immediately identified the correct three, and even explained that the
Clyde document he saw had four sets of numbers and figures for its circulation list,
whereas the copy we showed him had six sets. When the original circulation list was
checked, it was found that such a copy had indeed existed but we were unable to find it.
Patrick Stewart analyzed the circulation of the three documents, and a senior Naval
Commander, now retired, appeared as the only credible candidate. The case was
handed over to D1 (Investigations).
Within months of Golitsins arrival, three further sources in the heart of the Soviet
intelligence machine suddenly, and apparently independently, offered their services to
the West. The first two, a KGB officer and a GRU officer, both working under cover in
the Soviet delegation to the UN, approached the FBI and offered to act as agents in
place. They were given the code names Fedora and Top Hat. The third walk-in occurred
in Geneva in June 1962. A senior KGB officer, Yuri Nossenko, contacted the CIA and
offered his services. Nossenko soon gave a priceless lead in the hunt for the British
Naval spies. He claimed that the Gribanov recruitment had been obtained through
homosexual blackmail, and that the agent had provided the KGB with all NATO secrets
from a Lord of the Navy. The combination of NATO and the Gribanov recruitment led
MI5 to combine the two serials 3 and 8. There was one obvious suspect, a clerk in Lord
Carringtons office, John Vassall. Vassall had originally been placed at the top of Patrick
Stewarts preliminary list of four Serial 3 suspects, but when the case was handed over
to the investigating officer, Ronnie Symonds, Symonds had contested Stewarts
assessment. He felt that Vassalls Catholicism and apparent high moral character made
him a less serious suspect. He was placed at the bottom of the list instead. After
attention focused on him strongly following Nossenkos lead, it was soon established
that Vassall was a practicing homosexual, who was living way beyond his means in a
luxury flat in Dolphin Square. MI5 faced the classic counterespionage problem. Unlike
any other crime, espionage leaves no trace, and proof is virtually impossible unless a spy
either confesses or is caught in the act. I was asked if there was any technical way we
could prove Vassall was removing documents from the Admiralty. I had been
experimenting for some time with Frank Morgan on a scheme to mark classified
documents using minute quantities of radioactive material. The idea was to place a
Geiger counter at the entrance of the building where the suspected spy was operating
so that we could detect if any marked documents were being removed. We tried this
with Vassall, but it was not a success. There were too many exits in the Admiralty for us
to be sure we were covering the one which Vassall used, and the Geiger counter
readings were often distorted by luminous wristwatches and the like. Eventually the
scheme was scrapped when fears about the risks of exposing people to radiation were
raised by the management.
I looked around for another way. It was obvious from the CIA tests that Golitsin had a
near-photographic memory, so I decided to make another test, to see if he could
remember any details about the type of photographic copy of the NATO documents he
had seen. Through this it might be possible to deduce whether he was handing over
originals for them to copy and return to him. I made twenty-five photographs of the first
page of the Clyde Base NATO document, each one corresponding to a method we knew
the Russians had in the past recommended to their agents, or which the Russians
themselves used inside the Embassy, and sent them over to Golitsin via the CIA. As soon
as Golitsin saw the photographs he picked out the one which had been taken with a
Praktina, illuminated at each side by two anglepoise lamps. Armed with this knowledge,
we arranged to burgle Vassalls flat when he was safely at work. Hidden in a drawer at
the bottom of a bureau we found a Praktina document-copying camera, and a Minox as
well. That evening he was arrested, permission for a search warrant having been
obtained, and his apartment was stripped bare. In the base of a corner table a secret
drawer was found which contained a number of exposed 35mm cassettes, which were
developed to reveal 176 classified documents. Vassall swiftly confessed to having been
homosexually compromised in Moscow in 1955, and was convicted and sentenced to
eighteen years in prison. As the intelligence from the throng of new defectors was
being pieced together in London and Washington, I faced a personal crisis of my own
The Lonsdale case reawakened the whole issue of technical resources for MI5 and MI6.
Although the AWRE program which I and Frank Morgan designed in 1958 had been an
outstanding success, little else had changed. The attempt to satisfy Intelligence Service
needs within the context of the overall defense budget had failed, especially in the
advanced electronics field. We were moving rapidly into a new era of satellite and
computer intelligence, and when the Radiations Operations Committee was split into
Clan and Counterclan, it was obvious that the scale and range of their operations would
require a far more intensive degree of technical and scientific research and
development than had hitherto been possible. Everyone realized at last that the old ad
hoc system which I had struggled to change since 1958 would have to be
comprehensively reformed. Both MI5 and MI6 needed their own establishments, their
own budgets, and their own staffs. Shortly after the Lonsdale case I approached Sir
William Cook again with the approval of both Services, and asked him to make a
thorough review of our requirements. We spent several days together visiting the
various defense establishments which were currently servicing us, and he wrote a
detailed report, one of the most important in postwar British Intelligence history.
The essence of Cooks report was that the Hanslope Communications Center, the
wartime headquarters of the Radio Security Service, and since then the MI6
communications center for its overseas agent networks, should be radically expanded to
become a research establishment servicing both MI5 and MI6, with special emphasis on
the kinds of advanced electronics necessary in both the Clan and the Counterclan
committees. Cook recommended that the new staff for Hanslope should be drawn from
the Royal Naval Scientific Service. This was, to me, the most important reform of all
since joining MI5. I had lobbied to remove the artificial barrier which separated the
technical divisions of the Intelligence Services from the rest of the scientific Civil Service.
This barrier was wholly damaging, it deprived the Intelligence Services of the best and
the brightest young scientists, and on a personal level meant that I had to forfeit nearly
twenty years of pension allocation earned in the Admiralty, in order to accept MI5s
offer to work for them. I pressed Cook continually on this point during the time he was
writing his report, and he recognized that my arguments were correct. As a result of his
report fifty scientists were transferred to Hanslope, with their pensions intact, and with
the option of transferring back if they so wished at a future date. Since I was the first
scientist, I was not covered by these new arrangements, although I was not at the time
unduly worried. I believed that when the time came the Service would, as they
promised, make some recompense. Unfortunately, my trust was sadly misplaced.
There was one further Cook recommendation. He wanted MI5 and MI6 to set up a joint
headquarters staff in separate accommodation, controlled by a Chief Scientist, to plan
and oversee the new research and development program for both services. It was a bold
new move, and I confess I wanted the job more than anything in the world. I felt, in
truth, that I had earned it. Most of the technical modernization which had occurred
since 1955 was largely at my instigation, and I had spent long years fighting for budgets
and resources for both Services. But it was not to be. Victor Rothschild lobbied
vigorously on my behalf, but Dick White told him that the animosity inside MI6
stimulated by his own transfer from MI5 was still too great to hope to persuade his
senior technical staff to serve under any appointee from MI5. In the end the situation
was resolved at a meeting of the Colemore Committee. When Cooks conclusions were
discussed, Hector Willis, the head of the Royal Naval Scientific Service, volunteered
there and then to fill the post of Chief of the new Directorate of Science, resigning from
the RNSS to do it, and Hollis and White, aware of the bureaucratic influence Willis would
bring with him, gratefully accepted. I became the joint deputy head of the Directorate,
along with Johnny Hawkes, my opposite number in MI6, who ran Hanslope for MI6, and
developed the MI6 Rockex cipher machine.
Willis and I knew each other well. He was a pleasant North countryman, small, almost
mousy, with white hair and black eyebrows. He always dressed smartly, with pepper-
and-salt suits and stiff collars. I had worked under him during the war on a leader cable
scheme and antisubmarine warfare. He was a good mathematician, far better than I,
with first-rate technical ingenuity. But although we were both essentially engineers,
Willis and I had diametrically opposed views about the way the new Directorate should
be run. I saw the scientist/engineers role in intelligence as being a source of ideas and
experiments which might or might not yield results. Whatever success I had achieved
since 1955 was obtained through experimentation and improvisation. I wanted the
Directorate to be a powerhouse, embracing and expanding the kinds of breakthroughs
which had given us the Radiations Operations Committee. Willis wanted to integrate
scientific intelligence into the Ministry of Defense. He wanted the Directorate to be a
passive organization, a branch of the vast inert defense contracting industry, producing
resources for its end users on request. I tried to explain to Willis that intelligence, unlike
defense contracting, is not peacetime work. It is a constant war, and you face a
constantly shifting target. It is no good planning decades ahead, as the Navy do when
they bring a ship into service, because by the time you get two or three years down the
track, you might find your project leaked to the Russians. I cited the Berlin Tunnel - tens
of millions of dollars poured into a single grandiose project, and later we learned it was
blown to the Russians from the beginning by the Secretary of the Planning Committee,
George Blake. I agreed that we had to develop a stock of simple devices such as
microphones and amplifiers, which worked and which had a fair shelf life, but I opposed
the development of sophisticated devices which more often than not were designed by
committees, and which would probably be redundant by the time they came to fruition,
either because the Russians learned about them or because the war had moved onto
different territory.
Willis never understood what I was driving at. I felt he lacked imagination, and he
certainly did not share my restless passion for the possibilities of scientific intelligence.
He wanted me to settle down, forget the kind of life I had lived thus far, put on a white
coat and supervise the rolling contracts. I was forced to leave Leconfield House and
move into the Directorates headquarters offices at Buckingham Gate. The latter part of
1962, coming so soon after the excitements and achievements of 1961, was
undoubtedly the most unhappy period in my professional life. For seven years I had
enjoyed a rare freedom to roam around MI5 involving myself in all sorts of areas, always
active, always working on current operations. It was like swapping the trenches for a
spell in the Home Guard. As soon as I arrived in the new offices, I knew there was no
future there for me. Cut off from Leconfield House I would soon perish in the airless,
claustrophobic atmosphere. I decided to leave, either to another post in MI5 if the
management agreed, or to GCHQ, where I had been making some soundings, if they did
not.
Arthur was terribly considerate at this time. He knew that I was chafing over at
Buckingham Gate, and he used every excuse he could to involve me in the ongoing work
with Golitsin. During spring 1962 he paid a long visit to Washington and conducted a
massive debriefing of the KGB Major. He returned with a further 153 serials which
merited further investigation. Some of the serials were relatively innocuous, like his
allegation that a then popular musical star had been recruited by the Russians because
of his access to London high society. Others were true but we were able to satisfactorily
account for them, like the baronet whom Golitsin claimed had been the target for
homosexual blackmail, after the KGB photographed him in action in the back of a taxi.
The baronet was interviewed, admitted the incident, and satisfied us that he had
refused to bend to the KGB ploy. But the vast majority of Golitsins material was
tantalizingly imprecise. It often appeared true as far as it went, but then faded into
ambiguity, and part of the problem was Golitsins clear propensity for feeding his
information out in dribs and drabs. He saw it as his livelihood, and consequently those
who had to deal with him never knew when they were pursuing a particularly fruitful-
looking lead, whether the defector had more to tell them.
I was asked to help with one of the strangest Golitsin serials which ran into the dust at
this time, the Sokolov Grant affair. In many ways it was typical of the difficulties we
faced in dealing with his debriefing material. Golitsin said that a Russian agent had been
introduced into Suffolk next to an airfield which had batteries of the latest guided
missiles. He was sure the agent was a sleeper, probably for sabotage in the event of an
international crisis. We contacted the RAF and pinpointed Stretteshall, near Bury St.
Edmunds, as the most likely airfield. We then checked the electoral roll in the area
around Stretteshall to see if we could find anything interesting. After a few days we
came across a Russian name, Sokolov Grant. We cross-checked with the Registry and
found that he had a file. He was a Russian refugee who had arrived in Britain five years
before, married an English girl, and taken up farming on rented land near the airfield.
The case was handed over to Charles Elwell for investigation. Letter and telephone
checks were installed and inquiries made with the local police, which drew a blank. I was
asked to make a search of his house, when Sokolov Grant and his wife went up north for
a holiday, to see if there was any technical evidence which might incriminate him. I
drove up to Bury St. Edmunds with John Storer, a short, gray-haired, smiling man from
GCHQs M Division who worked on Counterclan, arranging the RAFTER plane flights, and
analyzing the RAFTER signals. Sokolov Grant lived in a pretty Queen Anne red-brick
farmhouse which was in a state of some disrepair. From the back garden you could see
the end of the runway stretching across the swaying fields of barley. The scene seemed
so perfect, so idyllic, it was hard to be suspicious. But that was the thing which always
struck me about espionage: it was always played out in such ordinary humdrum English
scenes.
John Storer went off to search the farm buildings for signs of clandestine radio systems,
while I slipped the catch and went inside the house. The house was unbelievably untidy.
All along the corridors and passageways piles of junk lined the walls. Books were stacked
up in mounds in the downstairs rooms. At first I thought perhaps they were moving
house, until I noticed the thick layer of dust on top of everything. In the backroom study
stood two desks side by side. The one on the left was a huge roll-top desk crammed so
full that it could not be closed. The one on the right was a small bureau. I opened the
flap, and it was completely empty. I slid the drawers out. They were empty too, with not
a trace of dust. The whole thing had obviously been emptied recently. I sat for a
moment in a polished Windsor chair staring at the two desks, trying to make sense of
one so full and the other so empty. Had the contents of one been transferred into the
other? Or had one been emptied, and if so why? Was it suspicious, or was it just what it
seemed - an empty desk in a junk-infested house? I made a start on the papers in the
other desk, but they were mostly farm business. John Storer found nothing outside, and
we left. To search the place properly would have taken twenty men a week. In the end
Charles Elwell went up to see Sokolov Grant and asked a few questions in the village. He
came back satisfied that he was in the clear. He was popular locally, and his wife was the
daughter of the local squire. We assumed Golitsin had seen Sokolov Grants name on a
KGB watch list, marked down as someone they contemplated approaching but never in
fact did.
Shortly afterward Sokolov Grant and his wife left the area. Our inquiries had probably
leaked in the village, and he presumably wanted to make a new start. But for all its
apparent meaninglessness the Sokolov Grant story has always had symbolic importance
to me: an ordinary man suddenly falling under suspicion, and just as abruptly cleared
again, his life utterly changed because of something a man he has never met says in a
darkened room on the other side of the world. The quiet rural world of Suffolk colliding
with the secret world of betrayal, where there is no such thing as coincidence, and
where suspicion can be fueled at the sight of an empty desk. The most tightly held of all
Golitsins serials were those which suggested a penetration of MI5. I first learned of
them from Arthur shortly after he returned from Washington. Golitsin said that he had
seen the special safe in KGB headquarters where documents from British Intelligence
were stored. He had seen the index to the documents stored in the safe, and he was
positive that very recent material from MI5 was in there. He also claimed the KGB had
acquired a document from British Intelligence which they called the Technics
Document: a thick document listing technical equipment for British Intelligence. He was
unable to study it closely, as he was only called in to see if he could translate a small
passage from it. But it was obviously an important document, as there was great
urgency in obtaining the translation. He said that security arrangements were different
in the London Embassy. There was no special security officer (known as the SK officer
[Soviet Kolony]). Golitsin assumed none was needed because the penetration of MI5
was so complete. Then there was the Crabbe Affair. He said the KGB got advance
warning of Crabbes mission against the cruiser ORDZHONIKIDZE.
In August 1962, as MI5 were busy digesting the mass of Golitsin material, we had a
major breakthrough with the three original Philby serials. Victor Rothschild met Flora
Solomon, a Russian emigre Zionist, at a party at the Weizmans house in Israel. She told
him that she was very indignant about articles Philby had written in the OBSERVER
which were anti-Israel. She then confided that she knew Philby to have been a secret
agent since the 1930s. With great difficulty, Victor managed to persuade her to meet
Arthur Martin in London, to tell him her story. I was asked to microphone Victors flat,
where the interview was to take place. I decided to install temporary SF, which made
Victor nervous. I dont trust you buggers to take the SF off! he told me, and made me
promise to personally supervise the installation and its removal. Victor was always
convinced that MI5 were clandestinely tapping him to find out details of his intimate
connections with the Israelis, and his furtiveness caused much good-humored hilarity in
the office. But I gave Victor my word and met the Post Office technicians in the
afternoon before the interview, carefully checking as they modified the telephone
receiver. Later, when the interview was finished, I solemnly watched while they
removed the washer again.
I monitored the interview back at Leconfield House on the seventh floor. Flora Solomon
was a strange, rather untrustworthy woman, who never told the truth about her
relations with people like Philby in the 1930s, although she clearly had a grudge against
him. With much persuasion, she told Arthur a version of the truth. She said she had
known Philby very well before the war. She had been fond of him, and when he was
working in Spain as a journalist with THE TIMES he had taken her out for lunch on one of
his trips back to London. During the meal he told her he was doing a very dangerous job
for peace - he wanted help. Would she help him in the task? He was working for the
Comintern and the Russians. It would be a great thing if she would join the cause. She
refused to join the cause, but told him that he could always come to her if he was
desperate.
Arthur held back from quizzing her. This was her story, and it mattered little to us
whether she had, in reality, as we suspected, taken more than the passive role she
described during the 1930s. Every now and then she became agitated.
I will never give public evidence, she said in her grating voice. There is too much risk.
You see what has happened to Tomas since I spoke to Victor, she said, referring to the
fact that one of Philbys friends, Tomas Harris, the art dealer, had recently died in a
mysterious car accident in Spain.
It will leak, I know it will leak, she would screech, and then what will my family do?
But although she professed fear of the Russians, she seemed to have ambivalent
feelings toward Philby himself. She said she still cared for him, and then later rambled
on about the terrible way he treated his women. Although she never admitted it, I
guessed from listening to her that she and Philby must have been lovers in the 1930s.
Years later she was having her revenge for the rejection she felt when he moved into a
new pair of sheets.
Armed with Golitsins and Solomons information, both Dick White for MI6 and Roger
Hollis agreed that Philby should be interrogated again out in Beirut. From August 1962
until the end of the year, Evelyn McBarnet drew up a voluminous brief in preparation
for the confrontation. But at the last minute there was a change of plan. Arthur was
originally scheduled to go to Beirut. He had pursued the Philby case from its beginning
in 1951, and knew more about it than anyone. But he was told that Nicholas Elliott, a
close friend of Philbys, who had just returned from Beirut where he had been Station
Chief, would go instead. Elliott was now convinced of Philbys guilt, and it was felt he
could better play on Philbys sense of decency. The few of us inside MI5 privy to this
decision were appalled. It was not simply a matter of chauvinism, though, not
unnaturally, that played a part. We in MI5 had never doubted Philbys guilt from the
beginning, and now at last we had the evidence we needed to corner him. Philbys
friends in MI6, Elliott chief among them, had continually protested his innocence. Now,
when the proof was inescapable, they wanted to keep it in-house. The choice of Elliott
rankled strongly as well. He was the son of the former headmaster of Eton and had a
languid upper-class manner. But the decision was made, and in January 1963 Elliott flew
out to Beirut, armed with a formal offer of immunity. He returned a week later in
triumph. Philby had confessed. He had admitted spying since 1934. He was thinking of
coming back to Britain. He had even written out a confession. At last the long mystery
was solved.
Many people in the secret world aged the night they heard Philby had confessed. I was
nearly forty-five. It is one thing to suspect the truth; it is another to hear it from a mans
lips. Suddenly there was very little fun in the game anymore; a Rubicon had been
crossed. It was not the same as catching Lonsdale; that was cops and robbers. To find
that a man like Philby, a man you might like, or drink with, or admire, had betrayed
everything; to think of the agents and operations wasted: youth and innocence passed
away, and the dark ages began. A few days later Arthur stopped me in the corridor. He
seemed strangely calm, for such a tense, almost hyperactive man. It was almost as if he
had seen a bad road accident.
Kims gone, he said quietly.
Good God, how...?
Arthur smiled weakly. Its just like 1951, when the boys went... Philbys defection had
a traumatic effect on morale inside the senior echelons of MI5. Until then, theories
about the penetration of MI5 had been nursed secretly; afterward they became openly
expressed fears. It seemed so obvious that Philby, like Maclean before him in 1951, had
been tipped off by someone else, a fifth man, still inside. And of course, the possibility
of a fifth man chimed completely with Golitsins evidence about a Ring of Five. Burgess,
Maclean, Philby, almost certainly Blunt, and a fifth. Someone who survived 1951, who
stayed on undetected, who even now was watching the crisis unfold. Hugh Winterborn
and I often talked about the subject. He was convinced that we were penetrated at a
high level.
I just cant believe we are as apparently incompetent as we appear to be, he used to
say.
Operation CHOIR, where we found the Russians had blocked up the pinhole for our
probe microphone, had a major effect on his thinking, and even eight years later he
used to talk animatedly about it. There were other incidents, too, which made him
suspicious. We installed SF on the Chinese Embassy telephones, and almost immediately
the Russians went around and took it out. Then there was the Falber Affair. After the
PARTY PIECE operation, MI5 went on the hunt for the CPGB files which listed the secret
payments made to the Party by the Soviets. We suspected that perhaps they might be
held in the flat of Reuben Falber, who had recently been made cashier of the Russian
funds. Falber is a prominent CPGB member, so when he advertised for a tenant to live in
the flat on the ground floor of his house, we installed an agent there. Almost
immediately, as we were planning to burgle the flat above, the agent was evicted by
Falber, who gave no reason for the eviction. But as a wave of anxiety passed through
Leconfield House, I was still marooned inside the Directorate of Science. I decided to
make my own freelance inquiries. Over a period of months I slowly drew out files from
the Registry. First I took out the files for the microphoning operations I had been
involved with in the mid-1950s - Operation CHOIR in London, DEW WORM and PIG
ROOT in Canada, all of which went inexplicably wrong, and MOLE in Australia. I
examined the cases carefully. Each had failed, and although complicated hypotheses to
explain each failure could be adduced, the possibility that each had been blown by a spy
inside MI5 was also a serious one. Then there were the cases which preoccupied
Winterborn. Again, alternative explanations could be found. Maybe we had been
clumsy. Maybe Falber just guessed the identity of our agent, but I find it very difficult to
believe. A leak was just as possible. Next I pulled out the files on each of the double-
agent cases I had been involved with during the 1950s. There were more than twenty in
all. Each one was worthless. Of course, our tradecraft and Watcher radios were mainly
to blame, but the Tisler affair had left a nagging doubt in the back of my mind. The
Lulakov-Morrow test did not exclude the possibility of a human source beyond the
monitoring of our Watcher radios. Then there was Lonsdale, and lastly Philby. Again the
same pattern. Not one single operation had succeeded. as planned, and all had some
degree of evidence of Russian interference.
There is a point in any mystery when the shape of the answer becomes suddenly clear.
Over those unhappy months in Buckingham Gate, in the winter of 1962-63 as I pored
through the files, back-checking and cross-checking the complex details of nearly eight
years of frantic work, it all became suddenly very obvious. What until then had been a
hypothesis, became an article of faith. There was a spy; the only question was who?
More weeks were spent laboriously checking the dates when files were signed off and
on, when access began and when it ended. And always it came down to the same five
names: Hollis, Mitchell, Cumming, Winterborn at a stretch, and I myself. I knew it wasnt
me;
Hugh Winterborn never really fitted, and I knew it could not be him;
Cumming I dismissed from the start. He would never have had the subtlety to carry it
off. Which left Hollis and Mitchell. Was it Hollis, the aloof, pedestrian autocrat with
whom I enjoyed a civil but distant relationship? Or Mitchell, his deputy, a man I knew
less well? There was a secretiveness about him, a kind of slyness which made him avoid
eye contact. He was a clever man, clever enough to spy. I knew my choice would be
based on prejudice, but in my mind I plumped for Mitchell.
Early in 1963 I realized that one of the two men knew what I was doing. When I began
my private investigations, I used to place the files in my safe on top of minute pencil
marks, so that I could tell if they were being moved. One morning I came in, and they
had been moved. Only two men had access to my safe: the Director-General and the
Deputy, who retained copies of all combinations. The shadows were gathering;
treachery stalked the corridors.
After Philbys defection Arthur became curiously distant. I could see he was
preoccupied, but he deftly turned aside all attempts by me to find out what he was
doing. I spent several evenings with him at his flat near Euston Station, and although we
discussed Golitsin in general terms, he refused to be drawn out on what further
inquiries he was making. Convinced that I might be sacked at any moment, or at least
removed from access in some way, I began to make excuses to visit Arthurs office after
hours, bringing with me files which I had used in my freelance examination of thirty-
eight cases. Do you think thats significant? I would ask, drawing his attention to a
small ambiguity in the handling of a double-agent case, or an unexplained termination
of a microphoning case. Arthur invariably gazed silently at whatever it was I showed
him, thanked me, and said nothing more. Finally one night Arthur said to me, You know
who it is, dont you, Peter?
I said, Well, its either Roger or Graham.
He said that he was carrying out an investigation of Mitchell. He told me that he thought
there had been a leak which had led to Philbys defection. He too had come to the
conclusion that it was either Roger or Graham but he did not know which, so after
Philby defected he had gone to Dick White and put the whole problem to him. Dick was
his mentor, the man who gave him his head in the late 1940s, and Arthur never forgot
the debt he owed. Dick asked him to come back and see him the next day when he had
had time to think about it. This Arthur did. Dick had been very sensible. He was sure
Roger could not be a spy, but he felt it was possible of Mitchell. He advised Arthur to tell
Hollis of his fears, and as a result Hollis instructed Arthur to begin an investigation of the
Deputy Director-General. He had been doing this for a short time until he and I
exchanged ideas. How long have you been worried about this? he asked Since
Tisler.
Arthur opened his desk drawer and pulled out a small bottle of Scotch.
He poured us both a small measure in his coffee cups.
Have you told Roger?
I told him that I had raised the issue twice before, once after Tisler, and once after
Lonsdale. Both times I had been stifled. He seemed surprised.
I suppose youve guessed what Im doing?
Its Mitchell, isnt it?
Somebody told Kim when to run, he said, hardly answering my question, Im sure of
it. Only someone in Grahams place could have known enough to do it.
Arthur told me to see Hollis myself.
Tell him weve talked, and that I suggested you see him. Its the only way.
I rang up to Hollis office, and to my surprise got an almost immediate appointment. I
took the lift to the fifth floor and waited for the green light to flash above his door. I was
shown in by his secretary. Hollis was sitting upright at his desk under the bay window,
working on a single file, a line of pencils on one side, each one carefully sharpened to a
precise point. I advanced until I was standing a few feet from the other side of the desk.
He did not look up. I waited for almost a minute in silence while Hollis predecessors
gazed balefully out at me from the wall. Still I waited. Still his pen scratched at the file.
How can I help you, Peter? he asked at length.
At first I stuttered badly. The last hour had been a strain.
Ive been talking with Arthur Martin, sir.
Oh? There was no trace of surprise in his voice.
I have let my hair down about my worries...
I see...
Still he worked on.
I have done another analysis, sir, and he said I should come and show it to you.
Take it over to the table, will you...
I retreated back across the room, and sat at the huge polished conference table. Hollis
joined me, and began to read in silence. Occasionally he queried a point in my analysis.
But I could sense that today he was no opposition. It was almost as if he were expecting
me. Did you know hes retiring in six months? he asked when he had finished reading.
Mitchell? I asked, in genuine confusion. As far as I knew, he had at least a couple of
years to go.
He asked for it a while ago, said Hollis. I cant change it now. Ill give you that long to
prove it. You can join Martin, and Ill square it with Willis.
He handed me the file back.
I dont have to tell you that I dont like it. You know that already.
Not one word of this investigation is to leak out, understood?
Yes, sir!
Youll need to know Mitchells background, he said, as he returned to his desk and
pencils. Ill arrange for Arthur to have his Record of Service.
Thank you, sir.
He was already writing again as I went out.
13 -
As soon as I joined the Mitchell case, I was indoctrinated into the greatest
counterintelligence secret in the Western world - the VENONA codebreak. To
understand what VENONA was, and its true significance, you have to understand a little
of the complex world of cryptography. In the 1930s, modern intelligence services like
the Russian and the British adopted the one-time code pad system of communications.
It is the safest form of encipherment known, since only sender and receiver have copies
of the pad. As long as every sheet is used only once and destroyed, the code is
unbreakable. To send a message using a onetime pad, the addresser translates each
word of the message into a fourfigure group of numbers, using a codebook. So if the
first word of the message is defense, this might become 3765. The figure 3765 is then
added to the first group on the one-time pad, say 1196, using the Fibonacci system,
which makes 4851. It is, in effect, a double encipherment. (The Fibonacci system is also
known as Chinese arithmetic, where numbers greater than 9 are not carried forward. All
cipher systems work on the Fibonacci system, because carrying numbers forward
creates nonrandom distribution. )
The VENONA codebreak became possible because during the early years of the war the
Russians ran short of cipher material. Such was the pressure on their communications
system that they made duplicate sets of their one-time pads and issued them to
different embassies in the West. In fact, the chances of compromising their
communications were slim. The number of messages being transmitted worldwide was
vast, and the Russians operated on five channels - one for Ambassadorial
communications, one for the GRU, another for the Naval GRU, a fourth for the KGB, and
lastly a channel for trade traffic connected with the vast program of military equipment
passing from West to East during the war, which on its own comprised about 80 percent
of total Russian messages. A set of pads might be issued to the KGB in Washington for
their communications with Moscow, and its duplicate might be the trade traffic channel
between Mexico and Moscow.
Shortly after the end of the war a brilliant American cryptanalyst named Meredith
Gardner, from the U.S. Armed Forces Security Agency (the forerunner of the NSA),
began work on the charred remains of a Russian codebook found on a battlefield in
Finland. Although it was incomplete, the codebook did have the groups for some of the
most common instructions in radio messages - those for Spell and End-spell. These
are common because any codebook has only a finite vocabulary, and where an
addresser lacks the relevant group in the codebook - always the case, for instance, with
names - he has to spell the word out letter by letter, prefixing with the word Spell, and
ending with the word Endspell to alert his addressee.
Using these common groups Gardner checked back on previous Russian radio traffic,
and realized that there were duplications across some channels, indicating that the
same one-time pads had been used. Slowly he matched the traffic which had been
enciphered using the same pads, and began to try to break it. At first no one would
believe him when he claimed to have broken into the Russian ciphers, and he was taken
seriously only when he got a major breakthrough in the Washington-to-Moscow
Ambassadorial channel. He decrypted the English phrase Defense does not win wars!
which was a Spell/Endspell sequence. Gardner recognized it as a book on defense
strategy published in the USA just before the date the message was sent. At this point,
the Armed Forces Security Agency shared the secret with the British, who at that time
were the world leaders in cryptanalysis, and together they began a joint effort to break
the traffic, which lasted forty years. Operation BRIDE (as it was first known) but later
DRUG and VENONA, as it was known in Britain, made painfully slow progress. Finding
matches among the mass of traffic available took time enough. But even then there was
no certainty the messages on each side of the match could be broken. The codebook
was incomplete, so the codebreakers used collateral intelligence. If, for instance, they
found a match between the Washington-to-Moscow KGB channel and the New York-to-
Moscow trade channel, it was possible to attack the trade channel by using collateral,
information gathered from shipping manifests, cargo records, departure and arrival
times, tide tables, and so forth, for the date of the message. This information enabled
the codebreakers to make estimates of what might be in the trade traffic. Once breaks
were made in one side of a match, it provided more groups for the codebook, and
helped make inroads on the other side.
The British and Americans developed a key device for expanding the VENONA breaks. It
was called a window index. Every time a word or phrase was broken out, it was
indexed to everywhere else it appeared in the matched traffic. The British began to
index these decrypts in a more advanced way. They placed two unsolved groups on each
side of the decrypted word or phrase and after a period of time these window indexes
led to repetitions, where different words which had been broken out were followed by
the same unsolved group. The repetition often gave enough collateral to begin a
successful attack on the group, thus widening the window indexes. Another technique
was dragging. Where a Spell/Endspell sequence or name came up, and the
cryptanalysts did not know what the missing letters of the spelled sequence were, the
groups were dragged, using a computer, across the rest of the channels, and out would
come a list of all the repeats. Then the cryptanalysts would set to work on the reverse
side of the repeat matches, and hope to attack the Spell/Endspell sequence that way.
It was an imperfect art, often moving forward only a word or two a month, and then
suddenly spilling forward, like the time the Americans found the complete text of a
recorded speech in the Washington Ambassadorial channel. Often terrible new
difficulties were encountered: one-time pads were used in unorthodox ways, up and
down, or folded, which made the process of finding matches infinitely more
problematic. There were difficulties, too, with the codebooks. Sometimes they
changed, and whereas the Ambassadorial, GRU, and trade channels used a
straightforward alphabetically listed codebook, rather like a dictionary, so that the
codebreakers could guess from the group where in the codebook it appeared, the KGB
used a special multivolume random codebook which made decrypting matched KGB
channels a mindbending task. The effort involved in VENONA was enormous. For years
both GCHQ and NSA and MI5 employed teams of researchers scouring the world
searching for collateral; but despite the effort less than 1 percent of the 200,000
messages we held were ever broken into, and many of those were broken only to the
extent of a few words. But the effect of the VENONA material on British and American
intelligence was immense, not just in terms of the counterintelligence received, but in
terms of the effect it had on shaping attitudes in the secret world. By the late 1940s
enough progress was made in the New York/Moscow and Washington/Moscow KGB
channels to reveal the extent of massive Russian espionage activity in the USA
throughout and immediately after the war. More than 1200 cryptonyms littered the
traffic, which, because they were frequently part of Spell/Endspell sequences, were
often the easiest things to isolate in the traffic, even if they could not be broken. Of
those 1200, more than 800 were assessed as recruited Soviet agents. It is probable that
the majority of these were the low-level contacts which are the staple currency of all
intelligence networks. But some were of major importance. Fourteen agents appeared
to be operating in or close to the OSS (the wartime forerunner of the CIA), five agents
had access, to one degree or another, to the White House, including one who, according
to the traffic, traveled in Ambassador Averill Harrimans private airplane back from
Moscow to the USA. Most damaging of all, the Russians had a chain of agents inside the
American atomic weapons development program, and another with access to almost
every document of importance which passed between the British and U.S. governments
in 1945, including private telegrams sent by Churchill to Presidents Roosevelt and
Truman. Using leads in the decrypted traffic, some of these cases were solved.
Maclean was identified as one of the sources of the Churchill telegrams, and many
others besides; Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenbergs were unmasked as some of the nuclear
spies; while comparison of geographical clues in the decrypts with the movements of
Alger Hiss, a senior U.S. State Department official, over a lengthy period made him the
best suspect as the agent on Harrimans plane. But despite frenzied counterintelligence
and cryptanalytical effort, most of the cryptonyms remain today unidentified.
In Britain the situation was equally grim, but with one major difference. Whereas the
Americans had all the Soviet radio traffic passing to and from the USA during and after
the war, in Britain Churchill ordered all anti-Soviet intelligence work to cease during the
wartime alliance, and GCHQ did not begin taking the traffic again until the very end of
the war. Consequently there was far less traffic, and only one break was made into it,
for the week September 15 to September 22, 1945, in the Moscow-to-London KGB
channel. There was a series of messages sent to a KGB officer in the London Embassy,
Boris Krotov, who specialized in running high-grade agents. The messages came at a
time of some crisis for the Russian intelligence services in the West. A young GRU cipher
clerk in the Russian Embassy in Canada, Igor Gouzenko, had just defected, taking a mass
of material incriminating spies in Canada and the USA, and in Britain a nuclear spy, Alan
Nunn May. Most of the messages to Krotov from Moscow Center concerned
instructions on how to handle the various agents under his care. Eight cryptonyms were
mentioned in all, three of which were referred to as the valuable ARGENTURA [spy
ring] of Stanley, Hicks, and Johnson, two who were routinely referred to together as
David and Rosa, and three others. By the end of the weeks traffic all contact with the
eight spies had been put on ice, and reduced to meetings, except in special
circumstances, of once a month. When I was indoctrinated into VENONA, I remember
my first sight of the GCHQ copies of the Moscow-to-London KGB channel. Every time
GCHQ broke a few more words in a message, they circulated to the very few users drop
copies of the new decrypt. The copies were stamped TOP SECRET UMBRA VENONA, and
listed the addresser and addressee, the date and time of the message, the channel and
direction (for instance, KGB Moscow/London), and the message priority (whether it was
routine or urgent). Underneath would be something like this:
TEXT OF MESSAGE
YOUR COMMUNICATION OF 74689 AND 02985 47199 67789 88005 61971 CONCERNING
SPELL H I C K S ENDSPELL 55557 81045 10835 68971 71129 EXTREME CAUTION AT
PRESENT TIME 56690 12748 92640 00471 SPELL S T A N L E Y ENDSPELL 37106 72885
MONTHLY UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. SIGNATURE OF MESSAGE (This is not a verbatim
decrypt; merely a very close approximation to the kind of challenge we were faced
with.)
VENONA was the most terrible secret of all, it was incomplete. It was obvious from the
decrypts that each of the eight cryptonyms was an important spy, both from the care
the Russians were taking to protect them all in September 1945, and because we knew
that Krotov specialized in that type of agent. But there was precious little evidence from
the traffic which could help us identify them. GCHQ circulated only translations which
they had verified, and included the verbatim unsolved groups where they occurred, but
they often attached to the copy a separate page of notes giving possible translations of
the odd group, which had not yet been verified. Often a message would be repeated
several times, as more groups were got out, and it was recirculated. Stanley, we were
sure, must be Philby. Golitsin had heard the code name Stanley, and associated it with
KGB operations in the Middle East, but there was no proof of this in the traffic. Hicks,
therefore, was almost certainly Burgess because of the reference to the ARGENTURA,
and because of a veiled reference to Hicks temperament. Johnson was probably Blunt,
although again there was no proof of it in the traffic. But the identity of the five other
spies remained a mystery. Maclean was obviously not one of these, since he was in
Washington in September 1945. The consequences for the Mitchell investigation were
obvious. Any one of the five unidentified cryptonyms could be the spy inside MI5. I
remember wondering, as I read the tantalizing decrypts, how on earth anyone at the top
of MI5 had slept at night in the dozen years since they were first decrypted.
Perhaps the most extraordinary thing in the whole VENONA story was the fact that it
was closed down on both sides of the Atlantic in 1954. After the initial surge of activity
in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the rash of prosecutions which followed,
cryptanalytical progress slowed to a virtual halt. Hand matching had reached the
limitations of the human brain, and computers were not then powerful enough to take
the program much further. There was another reason too; in 1948 the Russians began
to alter their code procedures worldwide, removing all duplicated pads. The last
casualty of this was the Australian VENONA operation, which had been making so much
progress that the British and Americans were virtually reading the Russian ciphers
continuously as the messages were produced. The Australians were never told at the
time but were brought into it some years later, although when the extent of Soviet
espionage penetration, especially of the Department of External Affairs, became
apparent, they were provided with the intelligence in bowdlerized form, and it led to
the establishment of ASIO (Australian Security Intelligence Organization) with MI5s
help. The reason for the change in Soviet codes became apparent in the early 1950s.
The secret of the break had been leaked to the Russians by a young Armed Services
Security Agency clerk, William Weisband. In fact, Weisband did not know the extent of
the Russian mistake and it was only when Philby was indoctrinated in 1949 that they
knew the breadth of their disaster, although other people, such as Roger Hollis, were
indoctrinated in 1948, when the match suddenly ceased in Australia after he returned
from organizing the setting up of ASIO. Although the duplicate one-time pads were
withdrawn, the Russians could do nothing to prevent the continuing work on the traffic
they had already sent up until 1948. But thanks to Philbys posting to Washington in
1949, they were able to monitor the precise progress that was being made. Once the
Russians knew the extent of the VENONA leak, and the technical difficulties of finding
more matches multiplied, it was only a matter of time before priorities moved on. In
1954 most of the work was closed down.
Years later, I arranged for Meredith Gardner to visit Britain to help us on the British
VENONA. He was a quiet, scholarly man, entirely unaware of the awe in which he was
held by other cryptanalysts. He used to tell me how he worked on the matches in his
office, and of how a young pipe-smoking Englishman named Philby used to regularly
visit him and peer over his shoulder and admire the progress he was making. Gardner
was rather a sad figure by the late 1960s. He felt very keenly that the cryptanalytical
break he had made possible was a thing of mathematical beauty, and he was depressed
at the use to which it had been put.
I never wanted it to get anyone into trouble, he used to say. He was appalled at the
fact that his discovery had led, almost inevitably, to the electric chair, and felt (as I did)
that the Rosenbergs, while guilty, ought to have been given clemency. In Gardners
mind, VENONA was almost an art form, and he did not want it sullied by crude
McCarthyism. But the codebreak had a fundamental effect on Cold War attitudes
among those few indoctrinated officers inside the British and American intelligence
services. It became the wellspring for the new emphasis on counterespionage
investigation which increasingly permeated Western intelligence in the decades after
the first break was made. More directly, it showed the worldwide scale of the Soviet
espionage attack, at a time when the Western political leadership was apparently
pursuing a policy of alliance and extending the hand of friendship. In the British traffic,
for instance, most of the KGB channel during that September week was taken up with
messages from Moscow detailing arrangements for the return of Allied prisoners to the
Soviet authorities, groups like the Cossacks and others who had fought against the
Soviet Union. Many of the messages were just long lists of names and instructions that
they should be apprehended as soon as possible. By the time I read the messages they
were all long since dead, but at the time many intelligence officers must have been
struck by the sense that peace had not come in 1945; a German concentration camp
had merely been exchanged for a Soviet Gulag.
In 1959, a new discovery was made which resuscitated VENONA again. GCHQ
discovered that the Swedish Signals Intelligence Service had taken and stored a
considerable amount of new wartime traffic, including some GRU radio messages sent
to and from London during the early years of the war. GCHQ persuaded the Swedes to
relinquish their neutrality, and pass the material over for analysis. The discovery of the
Swedish HASP material was one of the main reasons for Arthurs return to D1. He was
one of the few officers inside MI5 with direct experience of VENONA, having worked
intimately with it during the Fuchs and Maclean investigations.
There were high hopes that HASP would transform VENONA by providing more
intelligence about unknown cryptonyms and, just as important, by providing more
groups for the codebook, which would, in turn, lead to further breaks in VENONA
material already held. Moreover, since powerful new computers were becoming
available, it made sense to reopen the whole program (I was never convinced that the
effort should have been dropped in the 1950s), and the pace gradually increased, with
vigorous encouragement by Arthur, through the early 1960s. In fact, there were no
great immediate discoveries in the HASP material which related to Britain. Most of the
material consisted of routine reports from GRU officers of bomb damage in various
parts of Britain, and estimates of British military capability. There were dozens of
cryptonyms, some of whom were interesting, but long since dead. J.B.S. Haldane, for
instance, who was working in the Admiraltys submarine experimental station at Haslar,
researching into deep diving techniques, was supplying details of the programs to the
CPGB, who were passing it on to the GRU in London. Another spy identified in the traffic
was the Honorable Owen Montagu, the son of Lord Swaythling (not to be confused with
Euan Montagu, who organized the celebrated Man Who Never Was deception
operation during the war). He was a freelance journalist, and from the traffic it was clear
that he was used by the Russians to collect political intelligence in the Labor Party, and
to a lesser degree the CPGB.
The extraordinary thing about the GRU traffic was the comparison with the KGB traffic
of four years later. The GRU officers in 1940 and 1941 were clearly of low caliber,
demoralized and running around like headless chickens in the wake of Stalins purges of
the 1930s. By 1945 they had given way to a new breed of professional Russian
intelligence officers like Krotov. The entire agent-running procedure was clearly highly
skilled, and pragmatic. Great care was being taken to protect agents for their long-term
use. Where there seemed poor discipline in the GRU procedures, by 1945 the traffic
showed that control was exerted from Moscow Center, and comparison between KGB
and Ambassadorial channels demonstrated quite clearly the importance. the KGB had
inside the Russian State. This, in a sense, was the most enduring legacy of the VENONA
break - the glimpse it gave us of the vast KGB machine, with networks all across the
West, ready for the Cold War as the West prepared for peace.
When I finished studying the VENONA material in the special secure office where it was
stored on the fifth floor, I moved into an office with Evelyn McBarnet, Arthurs research
officer, who was already busy on the case. The Mitchell investigation came at an
awkward time for D Branch. Hollis had moved Furnival Jones from his post to become
head of C Branch, in preparation for his appointment as Deputy Director-General on
Mitchells retirement. F.J.s replacement was Malcolm Cumming. It was not a popular
appointment among the bright young men of D Branch, who were laboring to build on
the achievements of the Lonsdale case. Arthur himself had hopes that he might have
been offered the job. He certainly deserved it, in terms of achievement, but he had
never been popular among the Directors for the stand he took in the early 1950s. He
was seen as truculent, temperamental, too unwilling to tolerate fools gladly, which
unfortunately was a prerequisite for advancement in the Service. When the Mitchell
investigation was sanctioned, Hollis decided not to indoctrinate Cumming, who
theoretically was a potential suspect. Oversight of the case was given to F.J., who
supervised things from C Branch headquarters in Cork Street.
Evelyn McBarnet was a strange woman, with a large birthmark running down one side
of her face. Like a hothouse plant, she lived all her life in the enclosed space of the
office, and had no perceptible existence outside.
Are you a Freemason? she asked me almost as soon as I joined her in her office.
No, I replied, and I dont approve of it.
I didnt think you looked like one, but youd better join if you want to be a success in
this place, she told me darkly. Evelyn had always believed there was a penetration of
MI5. She had spent years working in counterespionage as a research officer, far longer
than Arthur or I. She was a walking compendium of office life and a shrewd, if
somewhat morbid, judge of character. I always knew there would have to be an
investigation, she told me, but she had a disturbing conviction that the course of the
investigation was preordained. The worst, she was sure, was yet to come.
Arthur will never last, if he pushes this issue, she told me, and neither will you, if you
associate yourself with him. What on earth do you mean, Evelyn? I asked, in genuine
surprise. She opened her safe and pulled out a small exercise book with a black cover.
Read this, she told me.
I opened the book. It was neatly written in a womans hand. I flicked through the pages
quickly. It listed details of cases from the 1940s and 1950s, some of which I knew about
vaguely, and others I did not, which the author had collated from the MI5 Registry. Each
one contained an explicit allegation about a penetration of MI5 or MI6. Whose is
this? I asked, aghast.
Anne Lasts, a friend of mine. She used to work with me, said Evelyn. She did it after
Burgess and Maclean went, then she left to have a family, you know. She married
Charles Elwell. Before she left she gave me the book, and told me that I would
understand. Does Arthur know...?
Of course.
But have you shown it to anyone else?
And get chopped too...?
I carried on reading. Maxwell Knights name figured frequently in the first few pages.
During the war he was convinced there was a spy inside MI5, and had minuted to that
effect, although no action was taken. There were literally dozens and dozens of
allegations. Many of them were fanciful offhand comments drawn from agent reports;
but others were more concrete, like the testimony of Igor Gouzenko, the young Russian
cipher clerk who defected to the Canadians in 1945, and whose defection triggered such
alarm in the single week of British VENONA KGB traffic. According to Anne Last,
Gouzenko claimed in his debriefing that there was a spy code-named Elli inside MI5. He
had learned about Elli while serving in Moscow in 1942, from a friend of his, Luibimov,
who handled radio messages dealing with Elli. Elli had something Russian in his
background, had access to certain files, was serviced using Duboks, or dead letter boxes,
and his information was often taken straight to Stalin. Gouzenkos allegation had been
filed along with all the rest of his material, but then, inexplicably, left to gather dust.
People didnt believe him, said Evelyn, they said he got it wrong.
There couldnt be a spy inside MIS...
On the last page was what appeared to be a kind of last will and testament. If MI5 is
penetrated, it said, I think it is most likely to be Roger Hollis or Graham Mitchell.
How the hell can we investigate these? I gasped. Well have to turn the whole place
upside down to do it properly. Thats what they said in 1951, said Evelyn bitterly.
Anne Lasts book was only the first of many secrets Evelyn shared with me over the first
weeks we worked together. Gradually she filled in much of the forgotten history of MI5,
the kinds of stories you never heard on the A2 tapes: stories of doubts and suspicions,
unexplained actions, and curious coincidences. I soon learned that I was by no means
the first person to come to suspect the office had been deeply penetrated. The fears
were as old as the office furniture. That evening I joined the commuters thronging
down Curzon Street toward Park Lane, my head humming with what I had learned from
Evelyn. Here was a consistent unbroken pattern of allegations, each suggesting there
was a spy in the office, stretching from 1942 to the present day. For too long they had
gone uninvestigated, unchallenged. This time the chase would be long and hard and
unrelenting. I paused to look back at Leconfield House.
This time, I thought, this time there will be no tip-offs, no defections. This one will
not slip away...
14 -
For all my high hopes, the Mitchell investigation was a wretched affair. It began with a
row, it ended with a row, and little went right in between. It was clear to me that to
stand any chance at all of clinching the case one way or the other before Mitchell
retired, we would have to turn on the taps, and use every technical resource at our
disposal. Hollis vehemently opposed any request for home telephone taps and the full
watching facilities, saying that he was not prepared to indoctrinate any further MI5
officers into the case, and certainly had no intention of approaching the Home Secretary
for permission to bug or burgle his own deputys house.
Arthur reacted badly to the setbacks. His temper by now was on a short fuse, and he
erupted at a meeting in Hollis office when his precise, quiet request for facilities was
refused point-blank by the Director-General. Arthur said it was intolerable to be
restricted when such a grave issue was at stake, and threatened to approach the Prime
Minister himself to alert him to the situation. Hollis always reacted smoothly to any
threats, and merely said he noted Arthurs comment, but that his decision stood.
Under no circumstances will I authorize an extension of this investigation!
Arthur stalked out of the room, obviously fully intending to carry out his threat.
That evening Furnival Jones and I went to my club, the Oxford and Cambridge, to try to
find a way of averting catastrophe. Relations had been swiftly deteriorating between
Hollis and Arthur ever since Cumming had been appointed to the Directorship of D
Branch, and with the Mitchell case poised so perilously, any hint of the turmoil inside
the organization would be disastrous.
Furnival Jones was in a dreadful position. He knew as well as I that he would be Hollis
deputy himself within a few months, yet I could tell that he felt Hollis was indeed being
obstructive. Itll mean the end of the Service, if Arthur does something stupid, said
Furnival Jones gloomily into his glass.
I asked him if he could not approach Dick White privately to see if some pressure could
be exerted on Hollis to relent. Furnival Jones looked at me almost in anguish. He could
see that he was slowly being ground between competing loyalties - to Hollis and to
those who were conducting a very difficult and emotionally fraught inquiry. It was close
to one in the morning before we came to any firm decision. Furnival Jones promised
that he would make an appointment to see Dick White, if I undertook to restrain Arthur
from any rash course of action. I telephoned Arthur from my club; it was late, but I knew
he would be up, brooding over a Scotch bottle. I said I had to see him that night, and
took a taxi around to his flat.
Arthur was in a truculent mood.
I suppose youve come to tell me youve decided to throw your hand in too! he said
acidly.
For the second time that evening I settled down to a long drinking session, trying to talk
Arthur around. He looked desperately strained. He had been seriously overworking
since before the Lonsdale case, and was putting on weight drastically. His flesh was gray,
and he was losing his youthfulness. He railed against the obstructions that were being
put in his way. I could see that the specter of 1951 haunted him, when he had allowed
himself to be shunted out to Malaya. I should have fought then, but I agreed with
them at the time. It seemed best to leave it. But not this time, he said. In the end he
saw the sense of F.J.s approach. An open breach with Hollis would get us nowhere, and
there was at least hope that Dick would talk him around to agreeing to some of our
requests for more facilities.
The following day I got a call from F.J. He said he had spoken to Dick, and we were all to
assemble at his flat in Queen Annes Gate on the following Sunday afternoon.
He wants to see a presentation of the case, then hell decide what to do.
Dick Whites flat backed onto MI6 headquarters in Broadway, and I arrived there
promptly at the appointed time. Dick answered the door; he was dressed casually, with
an open shirt and cravat. He showed us into his study, an elegant book-lined room,
decorated in seventeenthcentury style. Paintings from the National Gallery collection
lined the walls, and an ornamental mirror stood gleaming above the fireplace. Shall we
have some tea? he asked, anxious to break the tension which was apparent on
everyones face.
Now, he said, looking at Arthur, I think you had better make your case...
Arthur explained that I had brought my charts tabulating access to the thirty-eight cases,
and suggested that it might be better if, in the first instance, I made the presentation.
For a moment there was confusion. The charts were too large to spread on the delicate
tea table, but Dick saw the problem.
No, no, he said, thats quite all right - spread them on the floor. Within two minutes
we were sprawling across the carpet, and the elegant Sunday-afternoon reserve was
lost as we began to go through the litany of fears once more. I explained that I had
submitted two previous papers, one on Tisler, the other on Lonsdale, but that these had
both been rejected. Dick looked at me sharply, but made no comment. The whole
point is that we cant look at this problem piecemeal, I told him, and the basis of these
charts is to try to take an overall view, to see if there is any evidence of Russian
interference in the cases...
Sounds like a bad case of induction to me, but go on, said Dick skeptically.
I went through the cases one by one, and explained how it always came down to the
same five names.
Did you at any stage discuss this with Arthur, before you drew this together? he
asked, looking me squarely in the eye. How could I? I was over in the Directorate most
of the time.
Dick turned to Arthur.
You mean to tell me that you both came to this conclusion?
He obviously found it hard to believe.
Arthur took over and explained the problem with facilities. Dick asked F.J., who so far
had remained silent, for his opinion. He paused, and then committed himself
irrevocably.
Roger has refused to extend the investigation. Personally, I think its a mistake. When
you put together the lack of following with the lack of technical aids, there really is little
chance of finding an answer to this case.
Dick was impressed with F.J.s sensible appraisal. There are two factors here, he said
after thinking for a while. We have to do this investigation, and we have to be seen to
do this investigation, and thats almost just as important. He told us that some changes
would certainly have to be made. He thought the investigation should be coordinated
from an unofficial house, rather than a government building, and offered us the use of
an MI6 safe house in Pavilion Road, near Sloane Square. Ill think overnight about what
I am going to say to Roger, and you will hear from him.
The following day F.J. informed us that Hollis had given permission for a team of MI6
Watchers to be used on the case, although they would still not be allowed to trail
Mitchell beyond the London railway station, in case their presence was noticed. We
were allowed to indoctrinate Winterborn, and were given carte blanche to install a
closed circuit television system behind a two-way mirror in Mitchells office. That
afternoon we moved the burgeoning files across London to a tatty unfurnished upstairs
flat in a small mews house in Pavilion Road, which for the rest of the case became our
headquarters. In the early stages of the investigation, we made a complete
reexamination of the circumstances of Philbys defection It yielded one vital discovery. I
asked the CIA to check their computer records of the movement of all known Russian
intelligence officers around the world, and we discovered that Yun Modin, a KGB officer
we strongly suspected had been Philbys controller during the 1940s, and of having
arranged the Burgess/Maclean defections, had visited the Middle East in September
1962, just after Flora Solomons meeting with Arthur in London. A further check showed
Modin made a previous visit in May of the same year, shortly after the three Golitsin
serials relating to the Ring of Five arrived at Leconfield House. Finally the CIA established
that Modin had made no other trips abroad since the early 1950s. Eleanor Philby, Kims
wife, was interviewed at this time, and told us that Philby had cut short a family holiday
in Jordan in September, and from then onward until his disappearance exhibited
increasing signs of alcoholism and stress. It was obvious to us that Modin had gone to
Beirut to alert Philby to the reopening of his case. Once the KGB knew of Golitsins
departure, it was an obvious precaution, but the odd thing was the fact that Philby
seemed apparently unmoved until after Modins second visit in September, which
coincided exactly with the time when the case against him became unassailable. We
turned to the tapes of Philbys so-called confession, which Nicholas Elliott brought
back with him from Beirut. For many weeks it was impossible to listen to the tapes,
because the sound quality was so poor. In typical MI6 style, they had used a single low-
grade microphone in a room with the windows wide open. The traffic noise was
deafening. Using the binaural tape enhancer which I had developed, and the services of
Evelyn McBarnet and a young transcriber named Anne Orr Ewing, who had the best
hearing of all the transcribers, we managed to obtain a transcript which was about 80
percent accurate. Arthur and I listened to the tape one afternoon, following it carefully
on the page. There was no doubt in anyones mind, listening to the tape, that Philby
arrived at the safe house well prepared for Elliotts confrontation. Elliott told him there
was new evidence, that he was now convinced of his guilt, and Philby, who had denied
everything time and again for a decade, swiftly admitted spying since 1934. He never
once asked what the new evidence was.
Arthur found it distressing to listen to the tape, he kept screwing up his eyes, and
pounded his knees with his fists in frustration as Philby reeled off a string of ludicrous
claims. Blunt was in the clear, but Tim Milne, an apparently close friend of Philbys, who
had loyally defended him for years, was not. The whole confession, including Philbys
signed statement, looked carefully prepared to blend fact and fiction in a way which
would mislead us. I thought back to my first meeting with Philby, the boyish charm, the
stutter, how I sympathized with him, and the second time I heard that voice, in 1955, as
he ducked and weaved around his MI6 interrogators, finessing a victory from a steadily
losing hand. And now there was Elliott, trying his manful best to corner a man for whom
deception had been a second skin for thirty years. It was no contest. By the end they
sounded like two rather tipsy radio announcers, their warm, classical public school
accents discussing the greatest treachery of the twentieth century. Its all been terribly
badly handled, moaned Arthur in despair as the tape flicked through the heads. We
should have sent a team out there, and grilled him while we had the chance.
I agreed with him. Roger and Dick had not taken into account that Philby might defect.
On the face of it, the coincidental Modin journeys, the fact that Philby seemed to be
expecting Elliott, and his artful confession all pointed in one direction - the Russians still
had access to a source inside British Intelligence who was monitoring the progress of the
Philby case. Only a handful of officers had such access, chief among them being Hollis
and Mitchell.
I decided to pay a visit to GCHQ to see if there was anything further that could be done
with the VENONA program to assist the Mitchell case. The VENONA work was done
inside a large wooden hut, number H72, which formed a spur off one of the main
avenues in the central GCHQ complex. The work was supervised by a young
cryptanalyst named Geoffrey Sudbury, who sat in a small office at the front of the hut.
Behind him dozens of linguists sat under harsh lamps, toiling for matches, and hoping to
tease out the translations from a thousand anonymous groups of numbers. Sudburys
office was a joyous menagerie of cryptanalytical bric-a-brac. Huge piles of bound
VENONA window indexes piled up in one corner, and tray upon tray of decrypts stood
on his desk, ready for his approval before they were circulated up to MI5 and MI6.
Sudbury and I had a long talk about how the whole program could be pushed forward.
The principal problem was that VENONA, up until then, had been hand matched, and
computers were used only for specific pieces of work, such as dragging for a cryptonym.
Most of the effort had gone into attacking the KGB and GRU channels directly; the trade
traffic channels had been used wherever they formed the back of a match, but
otherwise the bulk of it had been left unprocessed. A comprehensive computer-
matching program was needed, using the new computers which were becoming
available by the early 1960s, in the hope that more matches might be found. It was a
vast undertaking. There were over 150,000 trade traffic messages, and very few were
even in punched form, suitable for processing through a computer. This alone was a
huge task. Each individual group had to be punched up twice by data processors, in
order to verify that the processed traffic was free from errors. Then the first five
groups of each message were computer matched against the whole of the rest of the
traffic, involving something like 10 billion calculations for each message.
When I discussed the project with Willis at the Directorate of Science, he was skeptical
about the whole thing, so I went to see Sir William Cook at the Atomic Weapons
Research Establishment again, with Frank Morgan. I knew that AWRE had the biggest
computer facility in the country, bigger at that time than even GCHQ. I explained what I
wanted to do. We needed at least three months on his computer to find the matches;
once that was done, we could farm them out to NSA and GCHQ for the cryptanalytical
work of trying to break the matches out. Cook, as always, was marvelous. I told him of
Willis skepticism, which he brushed aside.
This is one of the most important contributions AWRE can make, he said, lifting the
telephone. He spoke immediately to the AWRE head of Data Processing.
Theres a vital job I want you to start straightaway. Im sending a chap down with the
details. You dont need to know where he works. Please do as he says...
In two months we had punched up and verified every message, and for the next three
months the AWRE computers worked on the VENONA for six hours a night.
At first it looked as if the AWRE computerization program might transform the British
VENONA. Early on we got a new match for a message just after the existing weeks
traffic in mid-September, which we had already broken. The message, when it was
partially decrypted, concerned Stanley again. He was to carry no documents which
might incriminate him to his next meeting with Krotov. Then, in the midst of a haze of
unbroken groups, there was a fleeting reference to a crisis in KGB affairs in Mexico.
Krotov was told to refer to Stanley for details, since his section dealt with Mexican
matters.
At the time of this message Philby was the head of the Iberian section of MI6, which
controlled a large swath of Hispanic countries, including Mexico. It was a bitter moment.
The categoric proof that Stanley was Philby had come just a matter of months after he
defected. Had we broken it out a few years earlier, we could have arrested Philby on
one of his regular trips back to London to visit the OBSERVER. This merely intensified
fears about the integrity of MI5, since it made the decision in 1954 to close down the
VENONA program look deeply suspect. When we checked, we found that the officer
who ordered the closedown was the then head of Counterespionage, Graham Mitchell.
Sadly, the Philby fragment was the only real assistance the computerization program
gave the British VENONA effort. Matches were made in Mexican KGB traffic and
elsewhere in South America which were of enormous interest to the CIA and the RCMP,
since Mexico was a principal area where the KGB introduced illegals into North America.
But the matches made in British VENONA were almost all trade traffic to trade traffic,
rather than trade traffic to the KGB or GRU, which was what we needed. The
cryptanalytical effort in Hut H72 went on even more intensely than before, but there
was to be no new shortcut. There was little in Mitchells Record of Service to help us
either. Born in 1905, educated at Oxford, he then worked as a journalist and later as a
statistician in Conservative Central Office. This did surprise me, as I recalled that when
arguing with Mitchell about the Lonsdale case, he had claimed that he could not
understand my argument since he was no statistician. He joined MI5 as a result of
contact made through the Tory Party, and worked on the anti-Fascist side during the
war, latterly with some involvement, too, in the CPGB. Thereafter his progress was swift,
he became head of F Branch (Domestic Subversion) in the late 1940s, and Dick Whites
first head of Counterespionage in 1953, before Hollis appointed him his deputy in 1956.
There were only two really striking things about Mitchells career. One was the way it
was intimately bound up with Hollis. They had been contemporaries at Oxford, joined
MI5 at around the same time, and followed each other up the ladder in complementary
positions. The second was the fact that Mitchell seemed to be an underachiever. He was
a clever man, picked by Dick White to transform D Branch. He signally failed to do so in
the three years he held the job, and indeed, when the decision to close VENONA down
was taken into account, it seemed almost as if he had willfully failed.
The intensive surveillance of Mitchell in the office revealed very little. I treated his ink
blotter with secret writing material, and every night it was developed, so that we could
check on everything he wrote. But there was nothing beyond the papers he worked on
normally. The closed circuit television was monitored continuously by the MI6
Watchers. It was an unpleasant task, every morning Mitchell came in and picked his
teeth with a toothpick in front of the two-way mirror, and repeated the meticulous
process again before lunch, after lunch, and then again before he went home. By the
end of the case, I began to feel that the only parts of Mitchell that we knew at all well
were the backs of his tonsils.
I arranged to feed him barium meals. I circulated to him the bound volumes of my
analysis of clandestine Soviet radio communications, with all their classifications and
group count schedules, which I had recently updated for GCHQ. If Mitchell was a spy, it
was the sort of priceless intelligence he could not afford to ignore. I watched on the
monitor as Mitchell looked at the report in a desultory sort of way. Later James
Robertson, an old adversary of mine who had run Soviet Counterespionage for a period
in the 1950s, came into his office, and they began talking about me. Robertson never
forgave me for the changes I made in D Branch when he was there. He thought I was a
jumped-up newcomer, who should have learned to respect my elders and betters
before presuming to offer advice. He and Mitchell discussed my radio analysis. Neither
man understood its purpose.
That bloody man Wright, said Robertson tartly, he thinks he knows it all. Wants his
wings clipped!
Mitchell nodded sagely, and I could not help smiling at the irony of it all.
But the lighter moments were few and far between in what was a grim vigil, watching
and waiting for a man to betray himself on the other side of a mirror. Only once did I
think we had him. One Friday afternoon he began drawing on a scrap of paper. He
concentrated intensely for perhaps twenty minutes, referring to notes on a piece of
paper he took from his wallet, and then suddenly tore the piece of paper up and put it in
his waste bin. Every night, since the beginning of the case, Hollis arranged for me to
search his office, and Hollis secretary was instructed to retain his burn bag, containing
his classified waste, so that it could be checked as well. That evening I retrieved the
scraps of paper from the bin, and reconstructed them. It was a map of Chobham
Common, near where Mitchell lived, with dots and arrows going in various directions. In
the middle of the map were the letters RV and the siting of two cars, one at either end
of the path across the common which passed the rendezvous site. For days Pavilion
Road was deserted, as the entire focus of the case shifted to the isolated spot on the
common indicated by Mitchells map. But Mitchell never went close to the spot, nor did
anyone else. When I first began searching Mitchells office, Hollis was highly nervous.
There are some highly sensitive documents inside, Peter, and I want your word that
they will remain undisclosed.
Hollis was worried in particular about personnel reports, and other embarrassing, rather
than secret, papers which have by necessity to pass across the Deputy Director-
Generals desk. He need not have worried. There was nothing remotely interesting that I
saw in Mitchells office, which only confirmed me in my view that being DDG under a
man as autocratic as Hollis must have been one of the very worst jobs in the world.
Every night for some months Hollis and I met after hours. At first he expressed distaste
at having to pry into a close colleagues affairs, but I never felt the sentiment was
genuine. When I told him about the frequency with which Mitchell picked his teeth on
the closed-circuit television, he laughed like a drain.
Poor bugger should go to a decent dentist, he laughed I, for my part, felt determined,
even ruthless. I had waited for years for the chance to grapple with the penetration
problem, and I felt few scruples.
It was in those evenings that I first came to know Hollis as a man. Although I had
worked for him for close on eight years, we had rarely talked outside the strict confines
of official business. We had moments of tension, but by and large our relationship was
correct. Only once did we have a major confrontation, when I was in A2 with Hugh
Winterborn in the late 1950s. An Argentine delegation came over to negotiate a meat
contract with the British Government. Hollis passed down a request from the Board of
Trade for any intelligence, and instructed us to arrange for microphone coverage of the
Argentines. Winterborn and I were outraged. It was a clear breach of the Findlater-
Stewart memorandum, which defined MI5s purposes as strictly those connected with
national security. The rest of the A2 staff felt exactly as we did, and Hollis instruction
was refused. For a few hours we all anticipated mass dismissals, but then Hollis
withdrew his instruction, and it was never discussed again. The only strike in MI5s
history ended in total victory for the strikers.
Occasionally, during the searches of Mitchells office, Hollis talked about his early years.
He told me about his travels in China during the 1930s, where he worked for British
American Tobacco. Dreadful business out there. Any damn fool could see what the
Japanese were doing in Manchuria. It was perfectly obvious wed lose China if we didnt
act, he used to say.
As with many older MI5 officers, the roots of his dislike of the Americans lay prewar. He
said the Americans could have helped out in the Far East, but refused to because they
were gripped with isolationism. The French in the Far East were, he said, effete, and
would rather have seen the whole place go down than help us. That left only the
Russians.
They watched and waited, he told me, and they got it in the end after the war, when
Mao came.
He rarely mentioned his family life, although many people in the office knew he was
having a long-standing affair. Just occasionally he talked about his son Adrian, who was
a gifted chess player, which evidently was a source of great pride for him. (Adrian used
to go to Russia to play chess. )
On one occasion we were talking about the case when I ventured an opinion that,
whatever the result, it demonstrated a weakness in our protective security. Hollis
became huffy.
What do you mean? he asked.
I told him that procedures for vetting MI5 recruits were clearly less strict than those the
Service laid down throughout other Whitehall departments.
Look at me, I told him, I still havent had a vet since I joined in 1955.
The next day the forms were sent down for me, and the issue was never discussed
again, although shortly after this the vetting procedure changed, and candidates had in
future to provide more referees, one of which could be nominated by the Service.
The most memorable thing about those evenings with Hollis was his extraordinary
supply of the filthiest jokes I had ever heard. It was almost as if they were a defensive
mechanism, an excuse for talking, or else a way of easing the burden when he stepped
down from the Olympian heights of power to mix with the troops. I asked him once
where he had amassed such a fund of stories.
China, he told me. Everyone drank and told jokes. It was the only way to pass the
time.
Early on I decided to search a small desk in the corner of Mitchells office, and I asked
Hollis for the key.
It was Guy Liddells desk, he said. He left it when I took over from him. Its been there
for years...
I asked him for his consent to pick the locks of two of the drawers which were locked.
He agreed and I brought the lockpicking tools the next day, and we inspected the insides
of the two drawers. They were both empty, but one caught my attention. In the dust
were four small marks, as if an object had been very recently dragged out of the drawer.
I called Hollis over, and showed him the marks. He seemed as nonplussed as I, especially
when I inspected the lock mechanism and found scratch marks, as if the drawer had
recently been opened. Hollis went back to his office through the interconnecting door
which ran between Mitchells office and his own. I finished the search alone. Only
Hollis and I knew I was going to open that drawer, I thought to myself, and something
has definitely been moved. Could even be a tape recorder. Why not Mitchell? Because
he didnt know. Only Hollis knew Guy Liddells desk. Hollis took over the Deputys office
from him. No key? A man like Liddell doesnt leave the desk, and take the key. Only
Hollis knew. Only Hollis...
I looked up. Through the door Hollis was staring at me. He said nothing. He just stared,
and then bent over his file again. Throughout the summer months of 1963, as Mitchells
retirement neared, the investigation continued at full pitch. But the whole thing was
hopelessly compromised. It had all been too hasty, and too ill-planned. Battling the
deadline, and lacking the support of Hollis, it was inevitable that the security of the
operation began to crumble at the seams. Mitchell realized that something was wrong.
For a start, he noticed that the circulation of papers through his in-tray became erratic,
as Hollis sought to restrict his access. Then he began to take evasive action against the
Watchers, doubling back on himself, and practicing standard countersurveillance. There
was little doubt that he knew he was being followed. Through the television monitor,
Mitchell exhibited all the signs of a man under terrible stress, as if he were sunk in a
massive depression. He was a tall, thin man at the best of times, but he looked positively
cadaverous toward the end, with dark, sunken eyes. When people were in the room
with him he made an effort to appear normal, but as soon as he was alone, he looked
tortured. Why are they doing this to me? he moaned one day, gazing at Hollis office
door.
In the final month the whole affair became almost a farce. There was no chance of
finding anything under those circumstances, so Arthur and I pressed Hollis to sanction
an interrogation to resolve the case one way or the other. Hollis refused to commit
himself, but a few days later he arrived unannounced at the small house in Pavilion
Road. I have been to see the PM, he said stiffly to the half dozen of us who were in
the room, and I am afraid an interrogation is quite out of the question.
Out of the comer of my eye I could see Arthur brewing for another outburst.
Another defection at this stage would be calamitous, he said. He thanked us all briskly
for our efforts and disappeared down to his waiting car. It was typical Hollis
mismanagement of personnel. Here were experienced officers, working at a pitch of
desperation, and he could barely spare us two minutes. The dirty work was done. Best
leave it to the dirty workers!
It was, as well, a naive approach. The MI6 Watchers, led by a hotheaded and
overimpressionable young officer named Stephen de Mowbray, were appalled by Hollis
decision, and immediately took it to be a crude attempt at in-house suppression, the
very thing MI5 accused MI6 of with the Philby affair. Moreover, no closedown could
remove the fact that the Mitchell case had been done. A full report on the investigation
had been written by Ronnie Symonds, a senior D1 officer assigned to handle the
paperwork in the case. Symonds report outlined the history of allegations of
penetration of MI5 and concluded that there was a strong likelihood that a spy existed
at a high level inside the Service. It raised the obvious question of whether the
Americans should be alerted.
Symonds report was sent to Hollis and Dick White, and after private consultations
between the two chiefs, we were summoned for another Sunday afternoon council-of-
war, this time at Hollis house in Campden Hill Square. The contrast between Dick White
and Roger Hollis was never clearer than in their homes. Hollis was a tatty, bookless
townhouse, and he appeared at the door wearing his dark pinstripe weekday suit. He
showed us into the dingy breakfast room, and launched straight into business. He
wanted to hear our views. He gathered there was some concern about the Americans.
Consultation never came naturally to Hollis, and there was more than a trace of
irritation in his voice now that it had been forced on him.
Arthur acerbically said that we had to find a way of telling them now, in case it became
necessary to tell them later, when the effect, if the case against Mitchell was ever
proved, would be much more traumatic. Hollis was utterly opposed. He said it would
destroy the alliance, especially after Philby.
For all we know, I reminded Hollis, the Americans might have sources or information
which might help resolve the case. But well never get it unless we ask.
For the next hour Hollis debated the issue with the two of us, tempers fraying on all
sides. The others in the room - Ronnie Symonds, Arthurs desk officer for the Mitchell
case, Hugh Winterborn, and F.J. - tried desperately to keep the temperature down.
Symonds said he wanted to keep his options open. Perhaps Mitchell should be
interrogated, but then again, it was always possible to regard the issue as closed. As for
America, he said he did not know the scene out there well enough to have a view.
Winterborn was solid and sensible, supporting Arthurs view that the bigger disaster
would be to say nothing now, only to find the case proved later. F.J. finally burst out in
exasperation. Were not a bloody public school, you know. Theres no obligation for us
all to own up to the Americans. We run our Service as we think fit, and I wish some of
you would remember that! But even F.J. acknowledged that there was a problem
which had to be resolved. He said that on balance he felt it would be quite prudent to
keep the Americans informed, the question was how to do it. Hollis could see he was
outnumbered, and suddenly announced that he would visit Washington himself.
Wouldnt it be better done at working level? asked F.J., but Hollis jaw was set firm,
and although Arthur tried to move him, it was clearly a waste of time.
I have heard the arguments. My decision is made, he snapped, glowering at Arthur
across the table.
Hollis left for the United States almost immediately, where he briefed John McCone, the
new Director of the CIA following the removal of Allan Dulles after the Bay of Pigs, and
Hoover. Shortly afterward Arthur followed on to brief the Bureau and the Agency at
working level. He got a rough reception. The Americans simply failed to understand how
a case could be left in such an inconclusive state. Here, allegedly, was one of the most
dangerous spies of the twentieth century, recently retired from one of the prime
counterespionage posts in the West, and yet he had not even been interrogated. The
whole affair smacked, to them, of the kind of incompetence demonstrated by MI5 in
1951, and in a sense they were absolutely right.
Hollis returned, determined to resolve the case. He ordered a new review to be written
by Ronnie Symonds, and Symonds was specifically instructed not to communicate or
cooperate with either Arthur or me in the research and drafting of the new report.
When the Mitchell case was handed over to Symonds, I returned to the Directorate of
Science, where I was informed that Willis had made a change in procedures. He felt the
Directorate need no longer involve itself in GCHQs affairs, and wanted me to relinquish
all contacts with the organization. I was incensed, I knew that unless MI5 hunted and
chivvied for facilities and cooperation from GCHQ, things would soon slip back to the
desperate state that existed before 1955. Few officers inside MI5 had any real idea of
what could be done for them by GCHQ, and, equally, few GCHQ people bothered to
think what they could do for each other, a job which I felt was vital for the Directorate
to continue. But Willis could not be shifted. He wanted me to leave Counterclan, and
join the bureaucrats. It was the final straw. I went to see Hollis, and told him that I could
no longer continue to work in the Directorate. I told him I wanted to join D Branch if
possible, or else return to A Branch. The Mitchell case gave me a taste of research, and I
knew that the position as head of D3 was still vacant. To my surprise, Hollis offered me a
transfer to D3 immediately. There was just a small caveat. He wanted me to return to
the Directorate to finish one final special project for Willis, before taking up my new
post in January 1964.
Willis special project turned out to be one of the most important, and controversial,
pieces of work I ever did for MI5. He wanted me to conduct a comprehensive review, to
my knowledge the only one that was ever done inside British Intelligence, of every scrap
of intelligence provided by yet another defector to appear in the West in the early 1960s
- Oleg Penkovsky.
Penkovsky was, at the time, the jewel in MI6s crown. He was a senior GRU officer who
spied in place for MI6 and the CIA during 1961 and 1962, providing massive quantities of
intelligence about Soviet military capabilities and intentions. It was hailed on both sides
of the Atlantic as the most successful penetration of Soviet Intelligence since World War
II. Penkovsky alerted the West to the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, and his
information about the Soviet nuclear arsenal shaped the American approach to the
subsequent Cuban missile crisis. He also provided the evidence for the identification of
the Russian missiles in Cuba. But in late 1962 Penkovsky and a British businessman,
Greville Wynne, who was his cutout to MI6, were both arrested by the KGB, and put on
trial. Wynne was given a long prison term (although he was eventually exchanged for
Gordon Lonsdale and the Krogers) and Penkovsky, apparently, was shot.
I had been involved in the Penkovsky case during the time it was running. Penkovsky
visited London on a number of occasions, as a member of a Soviet trade delegation, and
had a series of clandestine debriefings with MI6 and CIA officers in the Mount Royal
Hotel. At the time Hugh Winterborn was absent for a prolonged period through
illhealth, and I was Acting A2, and was asked by MI6 to provide the technical coverage
for the London Penkovsky operations. I arranged for continuous Watcher coverage of
him and for the sophisticated microphoning system needed to capture every drop of
intelligence that spilled out of him during the tense all-night sessions with his
controllers.
The Penkovsky case ran counter to everything which was alleged about the penetration
of MI5. Arthur and I often discussed this during the Mitchell case. If there was a high-
level penetration, then Penkovsky had to be a plant, because news of him was known to
the handful of senior suspects, including Mitchell, from a relatively early stage. When I
was arranging the Mount Royal operation, Hollis asked me for the name of the agent
MI6 were meeting, and I gave it to him. Cumming also asked, but since he was not on
the MI6 indoctrination list, I refused to give it to him. This provoked a furious row, and
Cumming accused me of becoming too big for my boots. He seemed to resent the fact
that I did not consider myself in his debt for the role he played in hiring me into the
Service.
Penkovsky seemed to fit into the most far-reaching of the allegations made by Golitsin.
Golitsin said that in December 1958 Khrushchev transferred the head of the KGB,
General Serov, to run the GRU. His replacement in the KGB was Alexander Shelepin.
Shelepin was a much more subtle, flexible man than Serov, who was an old-style Beria
henchman, a nuts and bolts man. The problem set to Shelepin was that Khrushchev
and the Politburo had come to the conclusion that an all-out war with the West was not
on. Khrushchev wanted to know how Russia could win without doing this. Shelepin took
six months to survey the problem. He then called a large conference in Moscow of all
the senior KGB officers the world over and discussed ways in which KGB methods could
be modernized. Shelepin, according to Golitsin, boasted that the KGB had so many
sources at its disposal in the West that he favored returning to the methods of the
OGPU and the Trust as a means of masking the real nature of Soviet strategic
intentions.
As a result of the Shelepin conference, Department D of the First Chief Directorate of
the KGB (responsible for all overseas operations) was formed, a new department
charged with planning deception or disinformation exercises on a strategic scale.
Department D was put under the control of 1. 1, Agayants, an old, much respected KGB
officer. In 1959, Golitsin said, he approached a friend who worked in this new
Department to see if he could get a job there. The friend confided in him that
Department D was planning a major disinformation operation using the GRU, but that it
could not be implemented for some time because the GRU was penetrated by the CIA
and this must be eliminated first. This penetration was almost certainly Colonel Popov, a
high-ranking GRU official who spied in place for the CIA before being captured, tortured,
and shot in 1959.
In fact, Golitsin never went back, as by then he was planning his defection, so he never
learned any more details about the planned disinformation plan, other than the fact
that it was basically a technical exercise, and involved all resources available to the First
Chief Directorate. When Golitsin reached the West he began to speculate that the Sino-
Soviet split was the Department D plan, and that it was a ploy designed to mislead the
West. Some of Golitsins admirers, like Arthur, believed (and continue to believe) this
analysis, but although I was, during this early period, one of Golitsins fervent supporters
in the Anglo-American intelligence community, it has always seemed to me that the
Penkovsky operation is a far better fit for the type of task Department D was set up for,
than the inherently unlikely Sino-Soviet hypothesis.
Strategic deception has become an unfashionable concept in Western intelligence
circles, largely because of the extremes to which some of its adherents, myself included
in the early days, pushed it. But there is no doubt that it has a long and potent history.
The Trust operations of the GPU and OGPU in the early years of the Bolshevik regime
are a powerful reminder to any KGB recruit of the role these operations can play. At a
time when the Bolshevik regime was threatened by several million White Russian
emigres in the 1920s, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the legendary founder of the modern Russian
Intelligence Services, masterminded the creation of a fake organization inside Russia
dedicated to the overthrow of the Bolshevik regime. The Trust attracted the support of
White Russian emigre groups abroad, and the Intelligence Services of the West,
particularly MI6. In fact, the Trust was totally controlled by the OGPU, and they were
able to neutralize most Emigre and hostile intelligence activity, even kidnapping and
disposing of the two top White leaders, Generals Kutepov and Miller, and the Trust
persuaded the British not to attack the Soviet Government because it would be done by
internal forces.
Strategic deception has also played a major part in the history of Western intelligence,
most notably in the Double Cross operations of the war, which enabled the Allies to
mislead the Germans about our intentions at D-Day.
Looking at the intelligence balance in 1963, there was no doubt that the Soviets had the
necessary conditions to begin a major disinformation exercise. They had large-scale and
high-level penetrations in the West, especially in Britain and the USA, and had
possessed them almost continuously since the war. Hiss, Maclean, the nuclear spies,
Philby, Burgess, Blake, and the many others gave them a very intimate knowledge of the
very organizations which needed to be deceived. Secondly, and often overlooked, the
Soviets had continuous penetrations of the Western Signals Intelligence organizations
since the war, from Philby and Maclean until 1951, but closer to the early 1960s through
the defection of the NSA operatives Martin and Mitchell in 1960, and the suicide in 1963
of Jack Dunlap, a chauffeur at NSA who betrayed details of dozens of the most sensitive
discussions by senior NSA officials in his car.
As I read the files, a number of reasons made me believe that Penkovsky had to be the
deception operation of which Golitsin had learned in 1959. The first thing that struck me
about Penkovsky was the sheer coincidence of his arrival. If ever an organization needed
a triumph it was MI6 in the early 1960s. It was rocked by the twin blows of Philby and
George Blake, its morale desperately low after the Crabbe affair, and the disastrous Suez
operations, and Dick White was trying to rebuild it. He removed the post of Deputy
Director, sacked a number of senior officers most closely associated with the Sinclair
regime, and tried to introduce some line management. He was never entirely successful.
Dick was not a particularly gifted administrator. His achievements in MI5 stemmed from
intimate knowledge of the office and its personnel, and a deep knowledge of
counterespionage, rather than a flair for running organizations.
Deprived of these, his first years in MI6 were, almost inevitably, marked by expediency
rather than clear strategy. This was never so well illustrated as with his decision to
retain Philby as an agent runner in the Middle East, even though he believed him to be a
spy. I asked him about this later, and he said that he simply felt that to sack Philby
would create more problems inside MI6 than it might solve. Looking at MI6 in the early
1960s, I was reminded of Lenins famous remark to Feliks Dzerzhinsky.
The West are wishful thinkers, we will give them what they want to think.
MI6 needed a success, and they needed to believe in a success. In Penkovsky they got it.
There were three specific areas of the Penkovsky case which made me highly suspicious.
The first was the manner of his recruitment. Toward the end of 1960, Penkovsky visited
the American Embassy in Moscow in connection with his ostensible job, which was to
arrange exchange visits with the West on scientific and technical matters. Once inside
the Embassy he offered to provide intelligence to the Americans, and was interviewed
by the CIA in their secure compound. He told them that he was, in fact, a senior GRU
officer, working for the GKNIIR, the joint organization between the KGB and the GRU on
scientific and technical intelligence. The Americans decided Penkovsky was a
provocation, and refused his offer. By the time I read the files, the Americans had
discovered through another defector, Nossenko, that the rooms used for the interview
with Penkovsky had been clandestinely microphoned by the KGB. It was obvious that
even if Penkovsky had been genuine, the Russians must have learned of his offer to spy
for the Americans.
Early in 1961 Penkovsky made another attempt. He approached a Canadian
businessman named Van Vleet in his apartment in Moscow. Van Vleet interviewed
Penkovsky in his bathroom, with the water taps running to shield their conversation
from eavesdropping. There was no proof that Van Vleets apartment was bugged, but
both he and Penkovsky assumed it to be so, because of his connections with the RCMP.
Later, at Penkovskys trial, evidence against him was produced in the form of tape
recordings of conversations between Penkovsky and Wynne which had also taken place
in bathrooms with water taps running. It was clear that the Russians had technical
means of defeating this type of countercoverage.
Penkovskys third approach, to Wynne, was successful, and as a result he was run jointly
by MI6 and the CIA. But the second suspect area in the Penkovsky case was the type of
intelligence which he provided. It was split into two types: ARNIKA, which was straight
intelligence, and RUPEE, which was counterintelligence.
The RUPEE material consisted mostly of identifications of GRU officers around the
world, nearly all of which were accurate and most of which were already known to us.
But beyond that there were no leads at all which identified any Soviet illegals in the
West, or to past or present penetrations of Western security. It made no sense to me;
here was a man in some ways fulfilling a function analogous to my own, who had spent
years at the summit of the GRU, and in regular contact with the KGB, and yet he had
apparently picked up not one trace of intelligence about Soviet intelligence assets in the
West. I compared Penkovskys counterintelligence with that of the last major GRU
source, Colonel Popov, who spied for the CIA inside the GRU during the 1950s. Popov
provided identifications of nearly forty illegals operating in the West, before he was
captured and shot.
ARNIKA was different; Penkovsky handed over literally thousands of documents dealing
with the most sensitive Soviet military systems. But there were two oddities. Firstly, he
sometimes handed over original documents. It seemed to me beyond belief that a spy
would risk passing over actual originals, or that the Russians would not miss them from
the files. Secondly, Penkovskys most important documents, which enabled the
Americans to identify the Russian missiles in Cuba, were shown to him by his uncle, a
senior GRU commander of missile forces. Penkovsky claimed that he copied the
document while his uncle was out of the room. Once again, this seemed to me to smack
more of James Bond than of real life.
The third area which made me suspect Penkovsky was the manner in which he was run.
The tradecraft was appallingly reckless for such a sensitive source. The problem was that
his intelligence was so valuable, and at the time of the Cuban missile crisis so current,
that he was literally bled for everything that could be got, with little attempt made to
protect him or preserve him as a long-term asset. I counted the distribution list for
Penkovskys intelligence. Seventeen hundred people in Britain alone had access to
Penkovskys material during the time he was running in place. MI6, MI5, GCHQ, the
various branches of Military Intelligence, the JIC, the Service chiefs and their staffs, the
Foreign Office, various scientific research establishments - they all had their own lists of
people indoctrinated for various parts of Penkovskys material, although few people saw
the whole range. Of course, like all source reports, there was no hint as to how the
intelligence had been acquired, but by any standards it was an astonishingly large
distribution, and raised the question of whether it would have been detected by the
ever-vigilant Russian Intelligence Services, who at that point in 1963 had demonstrated
a consistent ability to penetrate British security at high levels. Arrangements in Moscow
were even more extraordinary. MI6 arranged for Penkovsky to hand over exposed films
to Mrs. Chisholm, the wife of a local MI6 officer, Rory Chisholm, in a Moscow park. This
procedure was followed more than a dozen times, long after both Penkovsky and Mrs.
Chisholm had detected KGB surveillance of their movements. By the time I read the
Penkovsky files, we also knew from George Blakes prison debriefings that Chisholms
identity as an MI6 officer was well known to the Russians. I was certain of one thing:
even MI5, with our slender resources, and the restrictions placed on us by custom and
the law, could not have failed to detect the Penkovsky operation, had the Russians run it
in London the same way MI6 ran it in Moscow. When I circulated my Penkovsky paper it
was greeted with howls of outrage. The operation was marked with great courage and
daring, and seemed, on the face of it, such a triumph, that people simply became
overemotional when criticisms were voiced. Harry Shergold, Penkovskys case officer,
practically went for me at a meeting in MI6 one day. What the hell do you know about
running agents? he snarled, You come in here and insult a brave mans memory, and
expect us to believe this?
The question remains, of course, why should the Russians have sent Penkovsky as a
disinformation agent, if such he was? The answer, I think, lies in the politics of Cuba, and
the politics of arms control. The Russians had two major strategic ambitions in the early
1960s - to preserve Castro in Cuba, at a time when the Americans were doing all in their
power to remove him, by either coup or assassination, and to enhance and develop the
Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capability without arousing suspicions in
the West. This was the era of the missile gap. The fear that Russia was moving ahead
in the production of nuclear weapons was a major plank in John Kennedys 1960
presidential election campaign, and he committed his administration to closing the gap.
The Soviets were desperate to convince the West that the missile gap was an illusion,
and that, if anything, the Soviets lagged behind the West.
Part of the reason for the fears about Soviet missile capability was the fact that,
intelligence-wise, the West was blind at this time, because the U2 surveillance flights
were cancelled after Gary Powers was shot down in May 1960, and
photoreconnaissance over the Soviet Union did not become available again until the
launch of the first satellite toward the end of 1962. During that time the only
intelligence available to the West was the interception of telemetry signals and radio
communications from the rocket-testing ranges in Soviet Asia, and, of course,
Penkovsky.
The essence of Penkovskys information was that the Soviet rocket program was
nowhere near as well advanced as the West had thus far suspected, and that they had
no ICBM capability, only intermediaterange ballistic missiles, IRBMs. Armed with that
knowledge, Kennedy was able to call the Soviet bluff when the Americans detected
IRBM facilities under construction in Cuba. The fact that the Russians were seen to be
installing what, according to Penkovsky, were their stateof-the-art rockets in Cuba
tended to confirm to the Americans the validity of Penkovskys message that the
Russians had no ICBM capability. Khrushchev was forced to withdraw, but achieved his
major aim - an eventual acceptance from the USA that Cuba would remain unscathed.
Penkovskys message was later confirmed by the two defectors from the Soviet
delegation to the UN who contacted the FBI in the early 1960s, Top Hat and Fedora, the
latter of whom, like Penkovsky, was allegedly a scientific and technical officer. Both
agents, but especially Fedora, gave intelligence which supported Penkovskys message
that Soviet rocketry was markedly inferior to the Wests. Fedora gave immensely
detailed intelligence about weaknesses in Soviet rocket accelerometers. The confidence
which Penkovskys intelligence, and that of Fedora and Top Hat, gave to the Americans
was a crucial factor in creating the climate which gave rise to the SALT I arms control
negotiations, and the era of detente, and that, I believe, was his purpose. He helped to
lull suspicions in the West for more than a decade, and misled us as to the true state of
Soviet missile development.
In the mid-1970s the climate began to change, and doubts began to emerge. Satellite
photoreconnaissance was dramatically improved, and when the accuracy of Soviet
ICBMs was analyzed using sophisticated measurements of the impact craters, the
missiles were found to be much more accurate than had been detected by telemetry
and radio intercepts. The only explanation was that a bias had been introduced into
Russian signals, with the intention of misleading American detection systems. While
Penkovsky retained his status as MI6s finest postwar achievement, Fedora and Top Hat,
for reasons which are too lengthy to detail here, were officially recognized by all
sections of the U.S. intelligence community as provocations. Fedoras information
about the accelerometers was found to be wrong, and there was even some evidence
that the Russians had introduced a fake third gyro on their missiles to make them
appear less accurate than they in fact were. Findings like these cast doubt on the
validity of previous arms control agreements, and fears about the ability of the USA to
accurately assess Soviet missile capabilities in the end sounded the death knell for the
SALT talks in the late 1970s. There was a growing realization in the U.S. defense
community that on-site inspections were vital in any future negotiations, a concession
which the Soviets have resolutely refused to concede. Today a consensus is beginning to
emerge among Western defense strategists that the West was indeed overconfident in
its assessment of Soviet missile strength in the 1960s, and that the Soviet used the era
of detente as the cover for a massive military expansion. The idea that Penkovsky played
some role in that is not now as farfetched as it once sounded.
When I first wrote my Penkovsky analysis Maurice Oldfield (later chief of MI6 in the
1970s), who played a key role in the Penkovsky case as Chief of Station in Washington,
told me:
Youve got a long row to hoe with this one, Peter, theres a lot of Ks and Gongs riding
high on the back of Penkovsky, he said, referring to the honors heaped on those
involved in the Penkovsky operation. Perhaps not such a long row today.
15 -
By the beginning of 1964 both Arthur and I were convinced that Hollis, rather than
Mitchell, was the most likely suspect for the spy we were certain had been active inside
MI5 at a high level. Only this hypothesis could explain the incongruities in the Mitchell
investigation. Hollis long-standing refusal to entertain any possibility of a penetration of
the Service, his unwillingness to authorize technical facilities during the Mitchell case,
his refusal to sanction the interrogation, or brief the Americans until his hand was
forced, all seemed to us to point in one direction. Then suddenly, as we waited for
Symonds second report on Mitchell, an old case fell into our laps. Sir Anthony Blunt,
Surveyor of the Queens Pictures, international art historian, and former wartime senior
officer for MI5, confessed in April 1964 to having spied for Russia throughout the war. It
brewed up in late 1963, when MI5 were informed by the FBI that an American citizen,
Michael Whitney Straight, had told them that Blunt had recruited him for the Soviets
while they were both at Cambridge University in the 1930s. Arthur Martin flew over to
interview Straight, who confirmed the story, and agreed to testify in a British court if
necessary.
The question of how to handle the Blunt case was considered at a series of meetings in
Hollis office. The management saw it as a dreadful embarrassment. In the everlasting
game of inter-Secret Service rivalry, the fact that MI6 had harbored proven traitors, but
thus far MI5 had not, was of enormous importance to the Services prestige in
Whitehall. Hollis, in particular, craved the respect of mandarins in the Cabinet and
Home Office, and feared the effect the Blunt case would have on MI5s status. Beyond
this, there was a terror of scandal. Hollis and many of his senior staff were acutely
aware of the damage any public revelation of Blunts activities might do to themselves,
to MI5, and to the incumbent Conservative Government. Harold Macmillan had finally
resigned after a succession of security scandals, culminating in the Profumo affair. Hollis
made little secret of his hostility to the Labor Party, then riding high in public opinion,
and realized only too well that a scandal on the scale that would be provoked by Blunts
prosecution would surely bring the tottering Government down. Arthur and I had
simple motivations. We wanted to get our hands on Blunt as soon as possible, to see if
he could shed any light on the question of further penetration of MI5. A trial involving
Straight would in any case be unlikely to succeed, and would delay, if not jeopardize
entirely, our chances of ever gaining his cooperation. The decision to offer Blunt
immunity was possibly the only decision of note concerning the penetration of MI5
where all parties agreed, and after the matter had been cleared with the Attorney-
General, Blunt was confronted by Arthur Martin and almost immediately admitted his
role as Soviet talent spotter and spy.
A few days after Blunt confessed, I was buzzed by Hollis secretary early one evening
and told to come to the DGs office at once. Hollis and F.J. were sitting on either side of
his desk, looking solemn;
Victor Rothschild was standing at the window staring out across Green Park.
Hello, Victor, I said, a little surprised that he had not warned me of his visit to the
building.
Thank you for coming, Peter, he replied in a brittle voice, turning to face me. He
looked distraught.
I have just told Victor about Anthony, said Hollis, interrupting quickly.
Little wonder Victor looked devastated. Blunt and he had been close friends for nearly
thirty years, first at Cambridge, and then during the war, when both men served inside
MI5. After the war their careers took them on different paths. They were both men of
extraordinary gifts in an increasingly gray world, and their relationship remained close.
Like Blunt, Victor also fell under suspicion after the Burgess/ Maclean defections. He had
been friendly with Burgess as an undergraduate, and had originally owned the lease on
a house off Welbeck Street, No. 5 Bentinck Street, where Blunt and Burgess both lived
during the war. But while the suspicions against Victor swiftly melted, those against
Blunt remained, particularly after Courtney Young interviewed him in the mid-1950s.
Victors main concern, as soon as he was told the truth, was how to break the news to
his wife, Tess. He knew as well as I did that news of Blunts treachery would, if anything,
have a more traumatic effect on her than on him. I had got to know Tess Rothschild well
since first meeting Victor in 1958. She was a woman of great charm and femininity, and
was closer to Blunt in many ways than Victor had ever been. She understood the
vulnerable side of his character, and shared with him a love for art. In the 1930s she
moved in that same circle of gifted left-wing intellectuals who studied in Cambridge,
partied in London, and holidayed at Cap Ferrat, as the world tottered into World War II.
When war broke out, Tess Mayer, as she then was, joined MI5, where she served with
great bravery and distinction alongside her future husband. During this period, she too
had rooms in No. 5 Bentinck Street along with Blunt and Burgess. Tess other roommate
was Pat Rawdon-Smith, later Lady Llewellen-Davies. Tess was well aware of MI5s
doubts about Blunt after the Burgess/Maclean defections, but she defended him to the
hilt. Both she and her husband, Victor, knew how it felt to be innocent, yet fall under
suspicion through having been friendly with Guy Burgess. To her, Blunt was a vulnerable
and wonderfully gifted man, cruelly exposed to the everlasting burden of suspicion by
providence and the betrayals of Guy Burgess.
Anthony used to come back tight to Bentinck Street, sometimes so tight that I had to
help him into bed, she used to say. I would have known if he was a spy...
Victor realized that we would need to interview Tess now that Blunt had confessed, but
he dreaded telling her the truth. That is why I asked you up to Rogers office, he said
quietly. I think it would be better if the news came from you. I knew that he needed to
get away from Leconfield House, and gather his thoughts alone.
Of course, I said, as gently as I could, suggesting that I bring Evelyn McBarnet as well,
since Tess knew her.
A few days later Evelyn and I took a taxi over to St. Jamess Place. We were shown up to
Victors study, a light, scholarly room overlooking Green Park, and stamped with his
extraordinary character-paintings, scientific diagrams, musical instruments, books
ancient and modern, and on the wall a huge self-designed slide rule. There was also a
piano, on which Victor played jazz with great skill and elan. Victor was ill-atease, and I
could tell that Tess sensed something was wrong. After a few minutes, Victor said I had
some news for her, then slipped out of the room.
Is there anything wrong, Peter? she asked nervously.
Its Anthony, I told her, he has confessed at last.
What to? You are not saying he was a spy?
Yes, I am, Tess.
For a second she raised her hand to her mouth as if in pain; then she let it slip gently
onto her lap. I told her the story as best I could: of how he had admitted being recruited
in 1937, a year or two after Philby, Burgess, and Maclean, and how he had given a long
and detailed account of his espionage activities throughout the war. Tess did not cry;
she just went terribly pale, and sat hunched up and frozen, her eyes staring at me as she
listened. Like Victor, she was a person for whom loyalty in friendship was of surpassing
importance; to have it betrayed shook her, as it had him, to the core.
All those years, she whispered, and I never suspected a thing. I began to understand
for the first time the intensity of feelings which had been forged in the crucible of those
strange, long-ago years in Cambridge in the 1930s.
The Blunt confession had a drastic effect on Arthurs behavior. After years of toil, here
finally was proof that he had been right all along. From the beginning he suspected
Blunt, even though many people in the office, like Dick White, who had been close
friends with Blunt during the war, initially doubted that it was possible. Arthur became
even more driven, even more difficult to handle. He had the look of a man who could
smell red meat, a ravenous, voracious manner as he collected his ancient scalp.
The confession dramatically sharpened attitudes toward penetration. The unthinkable,
that there could be a spy inside MI5, became suddenly much more real. Arthur was
convinced that if only we could keep the momentum up, the new D Branch team could
get to the heart of the 1930s conspiracy. He felt that while things were running our way,
and defectors and confessions were coming thick and fast, he might still resolve the
greatest riddle of all - the identity of the mole inside MI5 today. But as Arthur pressed
for speed and urgency and action, he was faced by the new D Branch Director,
Cumming, who favored a slow and cautious approach.
The relationship between the two men deteriorated in an alarming way during the early
part of 1964. Arthur had little respect for Cumming: he felt his approach was out of
date. Arthur had been largely responsible for rebuilding Soviet Counterespionage since
1959, and because of his reputation, his influence spread way beyond D1. He was an
ambitious man, and understandably so, but he lacked tact. He felt he should have been
D Branch Director rather than Cumming, and made little secret of the fact that he
expected the job very shortly. To him, Cumming was mishandling the whole penetration
issue. Cumming deeply resented Arthurs attitude, which was rarely hidden, as well as
the intrusions on his authority. He was bitter, also, about the way he had been kept out
of the Mitchell inquiry, and suspected that Arthur harbored secret suspicions about
Hollis. A showdown was clearly only a matter of time in coming.
Shortly after Blunt confessed, it occurred. In May 1964 I visited Washington to try to
persuade the CIA to help our fledgling Movements Analysis program. Hal Doyne
Ditmass, who ran the Movements Analysis, and I wanted the CIA to provide computer
effort to process the mass of material which the program was producing (7 million
movements a year) and my request to the CIA had Hollis approval. Angleton was totally
supportive, and Helms agreed to send over not just one or two technicians, but a
twenty-man team and a guarantee of all the computer time in the CIA that the program
required. As soon as I got back, with the CIA computer team due to arrive the following
week, Arthur told me that Hal Doyne Ditmass was being transferred. I exploded. How
the hell can we do any planning if vital staff are transferred just as soon as they
familiarize themselves with an area? I raged. Hal and I have spent four years
developing this work, and just when it really starts to produce results, he gets a
transfer! Arthur was just as upset as I. He had handpicked many of the staff in D1, and
resented any attempt to move them, especially at this time of maximum activity in the
Soviet counterespionage field. Arthur stormed into Cummings office, believing he
should have opposed the move. The row filtered down the corridor, as months of pent-
up resentment poured out. Cumming accused Arthur of riding roughshod over the
Branch, and exceeding his authority. Arthur, for his part, made little secret of his belief
that the Branch was being badly handled. Inevitably, the argument focused on the
recent Mitchell case. Cumming accused Arthur of being obsessed with what was, in his
opinion, a dead case, and, moreover, one which had done enormous damage to the
morale of the Service. Arthur responded by indicating that, so far as he was concerned,
the case still had a very long way to go. Cumming reported the row to Hollis, who
promptly requested a full written report on the matter. The following day Cumming sent
Arthur a draft copy of the report he intended submitting to Hollis.
Arthur was appalled by what he read. Cummings report made no mention of the
implications for the CIA visit of Doyne Ditmass removal from the Movements Analysis
program. It was an explicit attack on Arthur, culminating in the suggestion that Arthur
harbored suspicions about the identity of the spy inside MI5 which he was not willing to
share with his Director.
Arthur was by now at breaking point with Cumming. Not bloody true! he scrawled in
the margin, and continued to deface every line of Cummings report, before sending it
back from whence it came. Cumming, sensing his chance for a decisive victory, promptly
sent the copy as it stood to Hollis, who summarily suspended Arthur for a fortnight for
indiscipline.
I was in a hopeless position: I had twenty CIA technicians arriving at Leconfield House
any day, expecting to enter important negotiations with Hal Doyne Ditmass, me, and
Arthur Martin, and as things stood, there would only be me on the MI5 side of the table.
I went to see Hollis privately and explained, with as little rancor as I could, the nature of
the problem. I reminded Hollis that the approach to the CIA had been done in his name,
and he agreed to reinstate Doyne Ditmass for another year.
But what about Arthur? I asked, hoping that Hollis might change his mind on that too.
I am not prepared to discuss the matter, he retorted. But what about Blunt? I
pleaded. We cant just leave him out in the cold when weve just broken him...
Its about time Arthur learned that hes not the DG yet, said Hollis grimly. When hes
sitting in this chair, he can make the decisions. Until then, I do!
When Arthur returned, we began the debriefing in earnest, systematically identifying his
every controller and recruitment, and checking every item of intelligence that he
handed over to the Russians. Arthur met Blunt regularly and questioned him on the
basis of detailed research briefs which D3 and Evelyn drew up. Each session was taped,
and the transcripts processed by D3 to check for inaccuracies and points which needed
further questioning.
Blunt swiftly named as fellow spies Leo Long, a former officer in British Military
Intelligence, and John Cairncross, who had served in the Treasury in 1940, before joining
the Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley with access to ENIGMA
SIGINT material, and, in 1944, MI6. Long, informed by Arthur that a prosecution was
most unlikely provided he cooperated with MI5, swiftly confessed, as did Cairncross,
who was seen by Arthur in Rome.
But after his initial leads, Blunt ran out of things to say. He sat and listened to Arthurs
questions, helped where he could, but there was nothing like the wealth of detail we
expected. Arthur and I decided to confront him together. The plan was to introduce me
as the officer analyzing Blunts confession. I would then play nasty to Arthurs nice, and
tell Blunt I had serious doubts about the veracity of his confession. It was an old
interrogation trick, but it had worked before. There was one further twist. We set the
meeting up in Maurice Oldfields flat in Chandos Court, Caxton Street, Westminster,
which had a concealed taping system. Usually when Blunt and Arthur met, Arthur
recorded the conversation openly on a hand tape recorder. We decided that we would
turn off the visible tape recorder when I went for Blunt, to give him additional security.
Hollis was extremely reluctant about the plan. From the beginning he instructed that no
pressure was to be applied to Blunt, in case he should defect. But we managed to
persuade him that on this one occasion the risk was worth taking. We met Blunt several
nights later. He was tall and extremely thin, wearing a tweed suit with a large bow tie.
He looked distinguished, if slightly effeminate. He was friendly but guarded, especially
toward Arthur. I could tell there was a tension between them; neither man could forget
that they had sat down together ten years before, and Blunt had lied through his teeth.
They talked in a businesslike fashion for half an hour, mainly about documents which
Blunt removed from the Registry. Every now and then Blunt snatched a look across at
me. I could tell he knew what was coming. Finally, Arthur brought me into the
conversation.
Peter has been doing the analysis, Anthony. I think he has something to say...
I switched off the tape recorder and paused for effect. Its quite clear to me, reading
the transcripts, that you have not been telling us the full truth...
Blunt flinched as if I had struck him. He was sitting in an easy chair with his pencil-thin
legs crossed. His outstretched leg kicked involuntarily.
I have told you everything which you have asked, he replied, looking me straight in the
eye.
Thats nonsense, and you know it is, too. You say you only know about Long and
Cairncross, those were the only ones. I dont believe you! He purpled, and a tic began
to flicker on his right cheek. He poured himself another gin, playing for time.
Weve been very fair with you, I went on. Weve been polite, and weve kept our side
of the bargain like gentlemen. But you have not kept yours...
He listened intently as I made my play. Where was he not telling the truth? he wanted
to know. I pointed out areas where we felt he was holding back. I knew he was trying to
gauge whether I had fresh evidence or information which could put him on the spot, or
whether we were just working from gut feelings. After a few minutes discomfort, he
began to resume his poise. The tic began to settle down. He knew we had nothing to
throw at him.
Ive already told you, Peter, he muttered, there was nobody else!
I switched tack, and began to press his conscience.
Have you ever thought about the people who died?
Blunt feigned ignorance.
There were no deaths, he said smoothly, I never had access to that type of thing...
What about Gibbys spy? I flashed, referring to an agent run inside the Kremlin by an
MI6 officer named Harold Gibson. Gibbys spy provided MI6 with Politburo documents
before the war, until he was betrayed by Blunt and subsequently executed.
He was a spy, said Blunt harshly, momentarily dropping his guard to reveal the KGB
professional. He knew the game; he knew the risks. Blunt knew he had been caught in
a lie, and the tic started up again with a vengeance. We wrestled for an hour, but the
longer it went on, the more he realized the strength of his position. The session broke
up with ill-concealed temper.
The truth is, given the choice, you wouldnt betray anyone you thought was vulnerable,
would you? I asked, as Blunt prepared to leave. Thats true, he said, standing to his
full height, but Ive already told you. There are no more names...
He said it with such intensity that I felt he almost believed it himself.
There had been an incident which was perturbing. The tape recorder which we overtly
had in the room decided to scramble up its tape. I knelt on the floor and proceeded to
straighten the tape out and get it going again. While I was doing this, Blunt said to
Arthur, Isnt it fascinating to watch a technical expert do his stuff? Now, Blunt had not
been told by either Arthur or me that I was a scientist. I had been introduced as the man
processing what he, Blunt, had told us. I looked Blunt straight in the eye and he blushed
purple. Somebody had told him who I really was.
You take him on, snapped Arthur when Blunt had left. Hes played out...
Arthur was keen to strip the bones of his other carcasses, Long and Cairncross.
Long was in the Apostles Society at Cambridge, a self-regarding elite club of
intellectuals, many of whom were left-wing and homosexual. When war broke out he
joined Military Intelligence, where he was posted to MI14, responsible for assessing
Oberkommando Wehrmacht SIGINT and hence military strength. Throughout the war he
met clandestinely with Blunt and handed over any intelligence he could lay his hands on.
After the war he moved to the British Control Commission in Germany, where he
eventually rose to become deputy head of Military Intelligence before leaving in 1952 to
pursue a career in commerce. He left Intelligence because he was getting married and
did not wish to have to tell his wife that he had been a spy.
I met Long several times with Arthur, and disliked him intensely. Unlike the other
members of the Ring, he lacked class, and I often wondered how on earth he was
accepted into the Apostles. He was an officious, fussy man with a face like a motor
mechanics, and seemed still to regard himself as a superior Army officer, despite his
treachery. Far from being helpful in his debriefing, his attitude, when challenged on a
point, was invariably to say that we would just have to take his word for it. He went
through his story with us briskly. No, he knew of no other spies, and claimed that he
gave up all espionage activities in 1945. This failed to tally with what Blunt had told us.
He said that in 1946 he went to Germany to persuade Long to apply for a post inside
MI5. Long agreed, and Blunt, then a trusted and wellrespected recent departure from
the Service, wrote a recommendation for him. Luckily for MI5, Guy Liddell had a marked
prejudice against uniformed military officers, and blackballed him at the Board, even
though Dick White supported him, much to his later embarrassment. But despite this
attempt to join MI5, and Longs continuing secret work in Germany, he denied all
further contact with the Russians, which was clearly rubbish.
Cairncross was a different character entirely. He was a clever, rather frail-looking
Scotsman with a shock of red hair and a broad accent. He came from a humble working-
class background but, possessed of a brilliant intellect, he made his way to Cambridge in
the 1930s, becoming an open Communist before dropping out on the instructions of the
Russians and applying to join the Foreign Office. Cairncross was one of Arthurs original
suspects in 1951, after papers containing Treasury information were found in Burgess
flat after the defection. Evelyn McBarnet recognized the handwriting as that of John
Cairncross. He was placed under continuous surveillance, but although he went to a
rendezvous with his controller, the Russian never turned up. When Arthur confronted
Cairncross in 1952 he denied being a spy, claiming that he had supplied information to
Burgess as a friend, without realizing that he was a spy. Shortly afterward, Cairncross
left Britain and did not return until 1967.
After Cairncross confessed, Arthur and I traveled to Paris to meet him again for a further
debriefing in a neutral venue. He had already told Arthur the details of his recruitment
by the veteran Communist James Klugman, and the intelligence from GCHQ and MI6
which he had passed to the Russians, and we were anxious to find out if he had any
other information which might lead to further spies. Cairncross was an engaging man.
Where Long floated with the tide, Communist when it was fashionable, and anxious to
save his neck thereafter, Cairncross remained a committed Communist. They were his
beliefs, and with characteristic Scottish tenacity, he clung to them. Unlike Long, too,
Cairncross tried his best to help. He was anxious to come home, and thought that
cooperation was the best way to earn his ticket. Cairncross said he had no firm
evidence against anyone, but was able to identify two senior civil servants who had
been fellow Communists with him at Cambridge. One was subsequently required to
resign, while the other was denied access to defense-related secrets. We were
particularly interested in what Cairncross could tell us about GCHQ, which thus far had
apparently escaped the attentions of the Russian intelligence services in a way which
made us distinctly suspicious, especially given the far greater numbers of people
employed there. Cairncross told us about four men from GCHQ who he thought might
repay further investigation. One of these worked with him in the Air Section of GCHQ,
and had talked about the desirability of enabling British SIGINT material to reach the
Soviet Union. Cairncross, although amused by the irony of the mans approach, was in
no position to judge his seriousness, so he kept quiet about his own role. The second
man, according to Cairncross, had been sacked after returning to Oxford and telling his
former tutor full details of his work inside GCHQ. The tutor, appalled by the indiscretion,
reported him to GCHQ, and he was sacked. A third man named by Cairncross, like the
first, had long since left GCHQ for an academic career, so effort was concentrated on the
fourth, a senior GCHQ official in the technical section. After a full investigation he was
completely cleared.
GCHQ became highly agitated by the D Branch inquiries resulting from Cairncross
information, as did C Branch, both protected their respective empires jealously, and
resented what they saw as interference, particularly when I made some caustic
comments about how they could improve their vetting.
As my D3 section pursued these leads, I wrestled with the problem of how to handle
Blunt, now that he was my responsibility. Before I began meeting Blunt I had to attend a
briefing by Michael Adeane, the Queens Private Secretary. We met at his office in the
Palace. He was punctilious and correct, and assured me that the Palace was willing to
cooperate in any inquiries the Service thought fit. He spoke in the detached manner of
someone who wishes not to know very much more about the matter.
The Queen, he said, has been fully informed about Sir Anthony, and is quite content
for him to be dealt with in any way which gets at the truth.
There was only one caveat.
From time to time, said Adeane, you may find Blunt referring to an assignment he
undertook on behalf of the Palace -a visit to Germany at the end of the war. Please do
not pursue this matter. Strictly speaking, it is not relevant to considerations of national
security. Adeane carefully ushered me to the door. I could not help reflecting on the
difference between his delicate touch and the hysterical way MI5 had handled Blunt,
terrified that he might defect, or that somehow the scandal might leak. Although I spent
hundreds of hours with Blunt, I never did learn the secret of his mission to Germany. But
then, the Palace had had several centuries to learn the difficult art of scandal burying.
MI5 have only been in the business since 1909! When I took over Blunt I stopped all
meetings with him while I considered a new policy. Confrontation was clearly never
going to work, firstly because Hollis was vehemently opposed to anything which might
provoke a defection, or a public statement from Blunt, and secondly because Blunt
himself knew that our hand was essentially a weak one, that we were still groping in the
dark and interrogating him from a position of ignorance rather than strength. I decided
that we had to adopt a subtle approach, in an attempt to play on his character. I could
tell that Blunt wanted to be thought helpful, even where it was clear that he was not.
Moreover, he disliked intensely being caught in a lie. We had to extract the intelligence
from him by a slow process of cumulative pressure, advancing on small fronts, rather
than on any large one. To do that we needed a far more profound knowledge of the
1930s than MI5 at the time possessed.
I decided, too, that we had to move the interviews onto his patch. He always came to
Maurice Oldfields flat in a confrontational mood, defensive, on edge, sharpened up,
and aware that he was being recorded. I felt moving to his place would lessen the
tension, and enable us to develop something of a relationship.
Every month or so for the next six years Blunt and I met in his study at the Courtauld
Institute. Blunts study was a large room decorated in magnificent baroque style, with
gold-leaf cornicework painted by his students at the Courtauld. On every wall hung
exquisite paintings, including a Poussin above the fireplace, bought in Paris in the 1930s
with 80 pounds lent to him by Victor Rothschild. (He was supposed to have left this
painting to Victors oldest daughter, Emma, but he failed to do this. The picture was
valued at 500,000 pounds for his estate and went to the nation.) It was the perfect
setting to discuss treachery. For every meeting we sat in the same place: around the
fireplace, underneath the Poussin. Sometimes we took tea, with finely cut sandwiches;
more often we drank, he gin and I Scotch; always we talked, about the 1930s, about the
KGB, about espionage and friendship, love and betrayal. They remain for me among the
most vivid encounters of my life.
Blunt was one of the most elegant, charming, and cultivated men I have met. He could
speak five languages, and the range and depth of his knowledge was profoundly
impressive. It was not limited solely to the arts; in fact, as he was proud of telling me, his
first degree at Cambridge was in mathematics, and he retained a lifelong fascination
with the philosophy of science.
The most striking thing about Blunt was the contradiction between his evident strength
of character and his curious vulnerability. It was this contradiction which caused people
of both sexes to fall in love with him. He was obviously homosexual, but in fact, as I
learned from him, he had had at least two love affairs with women, who remained close
to him throughout his life. Blunt was capable of slipping from art historian and scholar
one minute, to intelligence bureaucrat the next, to spy, to waspish homosexual, to
languid establishmentarian. But the roles took their toll on him as a man. I realized soon
after we began meeting that Blunt, far from being liberated by the immunity offer,
continued to carry a heavy burden. It was not a burden of guilt, for he felt none. He felt
pain for deceiving Tess Rothschild, and other close friends like Dick White and Guy
Liddell (he was in tears at Guys funeral), but it was the pain of what had to be done,
rather than the pain of what might have been avoided. His burden was the weight of
obligation placed on him by those friends, accomplices, and lovers whose secrets he
knew, and which he felt himself bound to keep. As soon as we began our meetings at
the Courtauld I could see Blunt relax. He remained canny, however, and since he knew
all about SF, I soon noticed that the telephone was placed discreetly at the far end of
the hall. On the first afternoon we met there I noticed it as he went out to fetch some
tea.
Bring the tea cozy to put on the telephone, I shouted.
He laughed.
Oh no, Peter, youll never be able to hear us down there with that thing.
At first I took notes in a small notebook, but it became difficult to take everything down,
so I had to plan a way of obtaining clandestine coverage of the meetings. Eventually the
premises next to the Courtauld were modernized, and I arranged for a probe
microphone to be inserted through the wall into Blunts study. It was a ticklish job. The
measurements needed to be perfect to ensure that the probe emerged at the right spot
on Blunts side of the fireplace close to where we sat. A2 arranged for an artist friend of
Blunts to telephone him at a prearranged time when I was visiting him. and while he
was out in the hall talking, I produced my tape measure and made all the necessary
measurements for the microphone, which was successfully installed and working
beautifully until the end. For all I know, it is probably still there now.
For our first sessions I relaxed things. I tried not to press him too hard, content simply to
run through the old memories. He talked of how he had joined the Soviet cause,
recruited by the then youthful, brilliant Guy Burgess. Guy was still a painful subject for
Blunt; he had just died in Moscow, alone, his once virile body broken by years of abuse.
You probably find this impossible to believe, he told me as he poured the tea, but
anyone who knew Guy well, really well, will tell you that he was a great patriot.
Oh, I can believe that, I said. He only wanted Britain to be Communist! Did you hear
from him, before he died? Blunt sipped his tea nervously, the cup and saucer shaking
slightly in his hand. Then he went to his desk and fetched me a letter. This was the last
one, he said. You didnt miss it; it was hand delivered... He left the room.
It was a pathetic letter, rambling and full of flaccid sentimental observations. Burgess
talked of Moscow life, and tried to make it sound as if it was still as good as ever. Now
and again he referred to the old days, and the Reform Club, and people they both knew.
At the end he talked of his feelings for Blunt, and the love they shared thirty years
before. He knew he was dying, but was whistling to the end. Blunt came back into the
room after I finished reading the letter. He was upset, more I suspect because he knew I
could see that Burgess still meant something to him. I had won a crucial first victory. He
had lifted the veil for the first time, and allowed me a glimpse into the secret world
which bound the Ring of Five together.
Blunt joined the Russian Intelligence Service in the heyday of the period now known in
Western counterintelligence circles as the time of the great illegals. After the ARCOS
raid in London in 1928, where MI5 smashed a large part of the Russian espionage
apparatus in a police raid, the Russians concluded that their legal residences, the
embassies, consulates, and the like, were unsafe as centers for agent running. From
then onward their agents were controlled by the great illegals, men like Theodore
Maly, Deutsch, Otto, Richard Sorge, Alexander Rado, Sonia, Leopold Trepper, the
Kecks, the Poretskys, and Krivitsky. They were often not Russians at all, although they
held Russian citizenship. They were Trotskyist Communists who believed in international
Communism and the Comintern, They worked undercover, often at great personal risk,
and traveled throughout the world in search of potential recruits. They were the best
recruiters and controllers the Russian Intelligence Service ever had. They all knew each
other, and between them they recruited and built high-grade spy rings like the Ring of
Five in Britain, Sorges rings in China and Japan, the Rote Drei in Switzerland, and the
Rote Kapelle in Germanoccupied Europe - the finest espionage rings history has ever
known, and which contributed enormously to Russian survival and success in World War
II.
Unlike Philby and Burgess, Blunt never met Theo, their first controller, a former
Hungarian priest named Theodore Maly. Maly understood the idealism of people like
Philby and Burgess, and their desire for political action. He became a captivating tutor in
international politics, and his students worshipped him. In 1936-37 Maly was replaced
by Otto, and it was he who orchestrated Blunts recruitment by Burgess. Like Theo,
Otto was a middle-class East European, probably Czech, who was able to make the
Soviet cause appealing not simply for political reasons but because he shared with his
young recruits the same cultured European background. Blunt admitted to me on many
occasions that he doubted he would ever have joined had the approach come from a
Russian.
For some reason, we were never able to identify Otto. Philby, Blunt, and Cairncross all
claimed they never knew his real name, although Philby in his confession told Nicholas
Elliott that while in Washington he recognized Otto from a photograph in the FBI files
as a Comintern agent named Arnold Deutsch. But when we checked we found that no
picture of Deutsch existed in FBI files during Philbys time in Washington. Moreover,
Deutsch had fair curly hair. I used to bring Blunt volume after volume of the MI5 Russian
intelligence officer files in the hope that he might recognize him. Blunt treated the
books as if they were catalogues from the National Gallery. He would study them
carefully through his half-moon spectacles, pausing to admire a particularly striking face,
or an elegantly captured figure on a street corner. But we never identified Otto or
discovered the reason why the Ring were so desperate to conceal his identity so many
years later. In 1938 Stalin purged all his great illegals. They were Trotskyists and non-
Russians and he was convinced they were plotting against him, along with elements in
the Red Army. One by one they were recalled to Moscow and murdered. Most went
willingly, fully aware of the fate that awaited them, perhaps hoping that they could
persuade the demented tyrant of the great services they had rendered him in the West.
Some, like Krivitsky, decided to defect, although even he was almost certainly eventually
murdered by a Russian assassin in Washington in 1941.
For over a year after Ottos departure, the Ring remained in limbo, out of touch and
apparently abandoned. Then Guy Burgess and Kim Philby reestablished contact with the
Russians through Philbys first wife, Litzi Friedman, a long-time European Comintern
agent. According to Blunt, the Ring was run through a complex chain of couriers: from
Litzi Friedman messages passed to her close friend and fellow Comintern agent, Edith
Tudor Hart, and thence to Bob Stewart, the CPGB official responsible for liaison with the
Russian Embassy, and thence on to Moscow. Until Blunt confessed we were entirely
unaware of this chain, and it had enormous implications. Each member of the chain
almost certainly knew the identities of the Ring, claimed Blunt, and it had always
puzzled him that the Ring was not detected at this point by MI5. We had always
assumed the Ring had been kept entirely separate from the CPGB apparatus, which was
thoroughly penetrated in the 1930s by agents run by Maxwell Knight. But now it
appeared that we had missed the greatest CPGB secret of all. In 1938 MI5 were basking
in the success of the Woolwich Arsenal case, where evidence from Maxwell Knights
best agent, Joan Gray (Miss X), secured the conviction of senior CPGB officials for
espionage in the Woolwich Arsenal Munitions Factory. Had we run the case on longer,
we might well have captured the most damaging spies in British history before they
began. At the end of 1940, the Russians finally reestablished contact with the Ring, and
from this period onward they were directed into the intelligence world. Their controller
during this period was Henry, a Russian intelligence officer named Anatoli Gromov, or
Gorski, who was working under diplomatic cover. Gromov ran all the spies in the Ring,
almost certainly the eight whose cryptonyms appear in the VENONA traffic, until he left
for Washington in 1944 to run Donald Maclean, who was posted to the British Embassy.
Those who were left in London were taken over by Boris Krotov, the KGB officer whose
VENONA messages revealed the existence of the eight spies. Blunt said he had a great
respect for the professionalism of his KGB controllers, but they never really stimulated
him in the way that Otto had. Gromov and Krotov were technocrats of the modern
Russian intelligence machine, whereas to Blunt, the talented European controllers of the
1930s were artists. Was that why you left MI5? I asked.
Oh, that partly, he said. I was tempted to stay. But they didnt need me. Kim would
serve them well. He was rising to the top, I knew that. And I needed my art. After all, if
they had wanted me, they could so easily have blackmailed me to stay.
The onset of the Cold War and the spread of McCarthyism reinforced Blunts conviction
that he had made the right choice in the 1930s, and he continued to be totally loyal to
those who remained in the game. In 1951 he opted to stay and brazen it out, rather
than defect with Burgess and Maclean. He was pressured to defect at this time by
Modin (Peter). He told me a life of exile in Moscow would have been intolerable for
him. He had visited Russia in the 1930s. It was a fine and admirable tragic country, but
the place which appealed to him most was the Hermitage, Leningrads magnificent
gallery. After 1951 Blunt was left alone with Philby. He was much less close to him than
to Burgess. Philby was a strong, dominant personality, yet he needed Blunt desperately.
Blunt still had the ear of his former friends in MI5, and was able to glean scraps for
Philby of how the case against him was developing. They used to meet to discuss their
chances of survival. Philby seemed bereft without his career in MI6, and had little
understanding of the importance of art and scholarship to Blunt, even while the net
closed on them both.
Kim and I had different outlooks on life, Blunt told me. He only ever had one
ambition in life - to be a spy. I had other things in mine...
Blunt admired Philby, but there was a part of him that was frightened by his utter
conviction, his ruthlessly one-dimensional view of life. Blunt needed love and art and, in
the end, the comfort of life in the Establishment. Philby, on the other hand, lived his life
from bed to bed; he had an Arabian attitude to women, needing only the thrill of
espionage to sustain him. Isaiah Berlin once said to me, Anthonys trouble is that he
wants to hunt with societys hounds and run with the Communist hares!
Kim never wavered, he said. He always remained loyal, right to the end.
By late 1964 I was submerged by the weight of material emanating from the Long,
Cairncross, and Blunt confessions, as well as the enormous task of collating and
systematically reexamining all the material which had reached MI5 since 1960 from the
various defectors. It was at this point that Symonds second report on the Mitchell case
finally reached me.
One morning, about a fortnight before the October 1964 general election, Hollis
secretary handed me a thick file, and told me to report to the DGs office that afternoon
to discuss it. There was precious little time to read the report, let alone study it.
Symonds had followed Hollis instructions zealously, and during the eight months it took
him to prepare the document, he never discussed its contents with either Arthur or me.
But its thrust was clear enough. Symonds reassessed the Mitchell case in the light of the
Blunt confession, which, of course, we had not possessed at the time of the first report.
According to Symonds, the case against Mitchell was not strong. Symonds was not
prepared to rule out the possibility of a more recent penetration, but he felt the
likelihood was considerably diminished.
Arthur also received Symonds report that morning; he knew he was being outflanked,
and that the decision to circulate the report at such a late stage was a deliberate device
to prevent any counterattack. He told me that he intended at the meeting to take the
line that he could not comment until he was given adequate time to study it. For the
first part of the meeting he was a silent, smoldering presence at one side of the
conference table.
Hollis opened briskly.
I dont propose to waste too much time, he began. I have read this paper, which
strikes me as most convincing. I would like your views before reaching a decision. As you
know, gentlemen, an election is due very soon, and I feel it is much better for the
Service if we can resolve this case now, so that I do not have to brief any incoming Prime
Minister.
Everyone knew what he meant. He did not want to brief Harold Wilson, the Labor
leader, who looked increasingly likely to beat the Tories at the forthcoming contest.
Hollis attitude was quite simple: Blunt, Long, and Cairncross tied up some useful loose
ends, the Mitchell case fell, and everything was neatly resolved. He wanted to close the
case and minute the file that the question of penetration had been dismissed.
Hollis asked for opinions around the table. There was surprisingly little comment at first.
The Mitchell inquiry had been so badly botched on all sides that few of us felt it a strong
wicket to defend, particularly since Arthur and I both now had strong suspicions that
Hollis was the culprit. I said simply that if Symonds first report was the case for the
prosecution, then this latest was the case for the defense, and that without an
interrogation I could not accept a verdict of not guilty, and wanted my views recorded
in the minutes. Hollis made a small note on the pad in front of him, and turned to
Cumming. Cumming delivered a lecture on the lack of discipline exhibited during the
Mitchell investigation. It was clear to all of us that the decision to exclude him from the
indoctrination had shattered his self-esteem. F.J. said only that the best that could be
said for the Mitchell case was that it was nonproven.
And you, Arthur...? asked Hollis.
Arthur looked up from the report.
Well, he said, there is a third possibility. Someone could be running Mitchell as their
stalking horse.
There was silence around the table. He and Hollis stared at each other for a brief
moment. Everyone in the room knew exactly what Arthur meant.
I should like that remark clarified, said Cumming from the other end of the table.
Symonds flicked anxiously through his report, as if he were looking to see if somehow
Arthurs hypothesis had crept into it undetected.
Hollis merely picked up where he left off, ignoring Arthurs comment as if he had not
heard it.
Well, we have to make a decision, he said, and therefore I propose to close this case
down, and minute the file to that effect... His pen paused above the file. Arthur could
contain himself no longer Intellectually, you simply cannot do this, he burst out in his
most precise manner. Youre neglecting virtually all the Golitsin allegations about
penetration. Theres the question of the leak about the Crabbe operation. Theres the
Technics Document - we dont even know yet which document Golitsin is referring to.
Whatever the status of the Mitchell case, it cannot be right to ignore them. Hollis tried
to deflect the attack, but Arthur pressed forward. He knew Hollis had overreached
himself. Symonds admitted he knew too little about the Golitsin material to present an
authoritative opinion. F.J. was inclined to agree that further work on Golitsin would be
prudent. Hollis could feel the meeting ebb away from him. He threw down his pen in
exasperation and instructed Patrick Stewart to conduct a final review of all Golitsin
serials outstanding. In the meantime, he ordered the Mitchell case was closed.
After the meeting I approached F.J. It was intolerable, I said, for the DG to assign a
research task to an officer without consulting me, the head of Research, when I was
already wrestling with the mass of material pouring in from Blunt, Long, and Cairncross,
as well as from defectors in Washington.
Things are difficult enough as it is, I said, but if we start splitting the work up, there
will be chaos!
F.J. could see the problem. The system was approaching overload, and he agreed with
me that more coordination was needed, not less. I suggested that we try to establish
some kind of inter-Service working party to research the entire range of material
concerning the penetrations of British Intelligence reaching us from confessions or
defectors. F. J. said he would see what he could do.
Shortly afterward he called me into his office and said that he had discussed the whole
matter with Dick White, who agreed that such a committee should be established. Dick
prevailed upon Hollis, who finally gave his reluctant agreement. The committee would
be formed jointly from D Branch staff of MI5, and the Counterintelligence Division of
MI6. It would report to the Director, D Branch, and the head of MI6 Counterintelligence,
and I was to be its working chairman. The committee was given a code name: FLUENCY.
Hollis used the row over the Symonds report as the pretext for clipping Arthurs wings.
He divided the now burgeoning D1 empire into two sections: D1, to handle order of
battle and operations; and a new D1 (Investigations) Section, to handle the
investigations side of counterespionage. Arthur was left in charge of the truncated D1,
and Ronnie Symonds was promoted alongside him as an assistant director in charge of
D1 (Investigations).
It was a cruel blow to Arthur, for whom investigations had been his lifeblood since the
late 1940s and into which most of his effort had gone since his return in 1959. He had
been upset not to be asked to chair the Fluency Committee, although he understood
that this was essentially a D3 research task. But to be supplanted in his own department
by Symonds, his former junior, who for a long time had viewed Arthur as his mentor,
was a bitter pill to swallow. Arthur felt betrayed by the Symonds report. He could not
understand how Symonds could write two reports within such a short space of time
which seemed to contradict each other. He believed that MI5 had made a desperate
mistake.
Arthur became reckless, as if the self-destructive impulse which always ran deep in him
suddenly took over. He was convinced that he was being victimized for his energetic
pursuit of penetration. To make matters worse, Hollis specified that although the two
sections were to be run independently of each other, Arthur was to have some kind of
oversight of both areas, in deference to his vast experience and knowledge. It was an
absurd arrangement, and bound to lead to catastrophe. The two men rowed
continually. Arthur believed that oversight meant control while Symonds wanted to go
his own way. Finally things boiled over when Arthur abruptly ordered Symonds to bring
his case officers to a conference, and Symonds refused. Arthur told him he was making
it impossible for him to do his coordinating job; Symonds retorted that Arthur was
interfering, and placed a written complaint before Cumming. Cumming took the
complaint to Hollis and recommended Arthurs immediate dismissal, to which Hollis
enthusiastically agreed. The matter was discussed at the next Directors meeting.
Arthur had no allies there; too many Directors felt threatened by his forceful,
sometimes intemperate style. The only friend he had among the Directors, Bill Magan,
who staunchly defended Arthur to the end, was conveniently absent when the decision
was taken. I remember Arthur came to my office the day it happened, steely quiet.
Theyve sacked me, he said simply. Rogers given me two days to clear my desk. In
fact, he was taken on straightaway by MI6, at Dick Whites insistence and over Hollis
protests. But although this transfer saved Arthurs pension, his career was cut off in its
prime. I could scarcely believe it. Here was the finest counterespionage officer in the
world, a man at that time with a genuine international reputation for his skill and
experience, sacked for the pettiest piece of bureaucratic bickering. This was the man
who since 1959 had built D1 from an utterly ineffectual section into a modern,
aggressive, and effective counterespionage unit. It was still grossly undermanned, it was
true, but that was no fault of Arthurs.
Arthurs great flaw was naivete. He never understood the extent to which he had made
enemies over the years. His mistake was to assume that advancement would come
commensurately with achievement. He was an ambitious man, as he had every right to
be. But his was not the ambition of petty infighting. He wanted to slay the dragons and
fight the beasts outside, and could never understand why so few of his superiors
supported him in his simple approach. He was temperamental, he was obsessive, and he
was often possessed by peculiar ideas, but the failure of MI5 to harness his
temperament and exploit his great gifts is one of the lasting indictments of the
organization. Its a plus as far as Im concerned, he said the night he was sacked, to
get out of this.
But I knew he did not mean it.
I tried to cheer Arthur up, but he was convinced Hollis had engineered the whole thing
to protect himself, and there was little I could do. The stain of dismissal was a bitter
price to pay after the achievements of the previous twenty years. He knew that his
career had been broken, and that, as in 1951, all he had worked for would be destroyed.
I never saw a sadder man than Arthur the night he left the office. He shook my hand,
and I thanked him for all he had done for me. He took one look around the office. Good
luck, he said and stepped out for the last time.
16 -
By the time Arthur left I was in the midst of a major reconstruction of the D3 Research
section. When I took it over it had no clear sense of purpose in the way I wanted it to
have. I was convinced that it had a central role to play if MI5 were finally to get to the
bottom of the 1930s conspiracy. An intelligence service, particularly a counterespionage
service, depends on its memory and its sense of history; without them it is lost. But in
1964 MI5 was quite simply overloaded with the mass of contradictory information
flowing in from defectors and confessing spies. Loose ends are in the nature of the
profession of intelligence, but we were overwhelmed by the weight of unresolved
allegations and unproven suspicions about the 1930s which were lying in the Registry.
We needed to go back to the period, and in effect positively vet every single
acquaintance of Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt, Long, and Cairncross.
It is difficult today to realize how little was actually known, even as late as 1964, about
the milieu in which the spies moved, despite the defections in 1951. The tendency had
been to regard the spies as rotten apples, aberrations, rather than as part of a wider-
ranging conspiracy born of the special circumstances of the 1930s. The growing gulf in
the office between those who believed the Service was penetrated and those who were
sure it was not was echoed by a similar division between those who felt the extent of
Soviet penetration in the 1930s had been limited, and those who felt its scope had been
very wide indeed, and viewed the eight cryptonyms in VENONA as the best proof of
their case. Throughout the late 1950s tension between the two sides grew, as Hollis
resisted any attempts by those like Arthur and me to grapple with the problem.
The reasons for the failure to confront the conspiracy adequately are complex. On a
simple level, little progress was made with the two best suspects, Philby and Blunt, and
this made it difficult to justify deploying an immense investigative effort. There was, too,
the fear of the Establishment. By the time the defections occurred, most of those
associated with Burgess and Maclean were already significant figures in public life. It is
one thing to ask embarrassing questions of a young undergraduate, quite another to do
the same to a lengthy list of rising civil servants on the fast track to Permanent Under
Secretary chairs. At heart it was a failure of will. Politicians and successive
managements in MI5 were terrified that intensive inquiries might trigger further
defections or uncover unsavory Establishment scandal, and that was considered an
unacceptable risk during the 1950s. Moreover, in order to conduct a no-holds-barred
investigation MI5 inevitably would have to show something of its hand. This ancient
dilemma faces all counterespionage services; in order to investigate, you have to risk
approaching and interviewing people, and thus the risks of leakage or publicity increase
exponentially the more intensive the inquiries you make. This dilemma was particularly
acute when facing the problem of investigating Soviet recruitment at Oxford and
Cambridge in the 1930s. Most of those we wanted to interview were still part of a
closely knit group of Oxbridge intellectuals, with no necessary allegiance to MI5, or to
the continuing secrecy of our operations. News of our activities, it was feared, would
spread like wildfire, and faced with that risk, successive managements in MI5 were
never willing to grasp the nettle. We opted for secret inquiries, where overt ones would
have been far more productive.
Philbys defection and the confessions of Blunt, Long, and Cairncross swept away many
of these reservations, although the fear of Establishment scandal remained just as acute
as ever. Hollis agreed to the drastic expansion of D3, and it was given a simple, yet
massive task - to return to the 1930s, and search the files for clues which might lead us
to spies still active today, to vet a generation, to clear up as many loose ends as
possible, and to provide the Service with an accurate history for the first time. The
guiding principle of my D3 section was a remark Guy Liddell made to me on one of his
frequent visits back to the office after he retired. I bet 50 percent of the spies you
catch over the next ten years have files or leads in the Registry which you could have
followed up... I was sure he was right. I thought back to Houghton, and his wifes report
on him, to Blake, and to Snipers early lead to Blake, to Philby and to Blunt, where
evidence existed but was never pursued relentlessly enough. Perhaps most amazing of
all, I read the Klaus Fuchs file, and discovered that after he was caught MI5 found his
name, his Communist background, and even his Party membership number, all
contained in Gestapo records which MI5 confiscated at the end of the war. Somehow
the information failed to reach the officers responsible for his vetting. But also in 1945-
48 an officer, Michael Sorpell, had researched Fuchs and recorded on the file that Fuchs
must be a spy. There were several obvious places to look in the inert mass of papers
lying in the Registry. First there were the Gestapo records. The Gestapo was an
extremely efficient counterespionage service, and operated extensively against
European Communist parties and the Soviet intelligence services. They had a trove of
information about them, developed at a time when our knowledge of Europe was
virtually nonexistent because of the conditions of war. They had invaluable intelligence
on the most important of all European Soviet rings - the Rote Kapelle, or Red Orchestra.
This was a series of loosely linked self-sustaining illegal rings controlled by the GRU in
German-occupied Europe. The Rote Kapelle was run with great bravery and skill,
relaying by radio vital intelligence to Moscow about German military movements. The
most important of all the Gestapo records for the British were the Robinson papers.
Henry Robinson was a leading member of the Rote Kapelle in Paris, and one of the
Cominterns most trusted agents. In 1943 he was captured by the Gestapo and
executed. Although he refused to talk before dying, papers were found under the
floorboards of his house which revealed some of the Rings activities. The handwritten
notes listed forty or fifty names and addresses in Britain, indicating that Robinson had
also been responsible for liaising with a Rote Kapell ring in Britain. After the war Evelyn
McBarnet did a lot of work on the Robinson papers, but the names were all aliases, and
many of the addresses were either post-boxes or else had been destroyed in the war.
Another MI5 officer, Michael Hanley, did a huge research task in the 1950s, identifying
and listing every known agent of the Rote Kapelle. There were more than five thousand
names in all. But since then the trail had gone dead. Perhaps, I thought, there might be
clues among all this material which might take us somewhere.
Another place to look was among the records of defector debriefings. Work was already
in progress with the recent defectors like Golitsin and Goleniewski, but there were still
many loose ends in the intelligence provided by prewar and wartime defectors. Walter
Krivitsky, the senior NKVD officer who defected in 1937, told MI5, for instance, that
there was a well-born spy who had been educated at Eton and Oxford, and joined the
Foreign Office. For years everyone assumed this to be Donald Maclean, even though
Maclean was educated at Gresham Holts and Cambridge. He just did not fit, but rather
than confront the problem, the allegation had been left to collect dust in the files. Then
there was Konstantin Volkov, a senior NKVD officer who approached the British
Consulate in Istanbul and offered to reveal the names of Soviet spies in Britain in return
for money. He gave an Embassy official a list of the departments where the spies
allegedly worked. Unfortunately for Volkov, his list landed on Kim Philbys desk at MI6
headquarters. Philby was then head of MI6 Soviet Counterintelligence, and against the
wishes of Director C he persuaded him to let him go to Turkey, ostensibly to arrange for
Volkovs defection. He then delayed his arrival by two days. The would-be defector was
never seen again, although the Turks thought that both Volkov and his wife had been
flown out strapped to stretchers. One of Volkovs spies was thought to be Philby
himself, but there were several others who had just never been cleared up - like the spy
Volkov claimed was working for MI6 in Persia. Lastly there was the VENONA material -
by far the most reliable intelligence of all on past penetration of Western security. After
Arthur left I took over the VENONA program, and commissioned yet another full-scale
review of the material to see if new leads could be gathered. This was to lead to the first
D3-generated case, ironically a French rather than a British one. The HASP GRU material,
dating from 1940 and 1941, contained a lot of information about Soviet penetration of
the various emigre and nationalist movements who made their headquarters in London
during the first years of the war. The Russians, for instance, had a prime source in the
heart of the Free Czechoslovakian Intelligence Service, which ran its own networks in
German-occupied Eastern Europe via couriers. The Soviet source had the cryptonym
Baron, and was probably the Czech politician Sedlecek, who later played a prominent
role in the Lucy Ring in Switzerland. The most serious penetration, so far as MI5 were
concerned, was in the Free French Government led by Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle
faced persistent plots in London masterminded by his two Communist deputies, Andre
Labarthe, a former CHEF DU CABINET who was responsible for civilian affairs, and
Admiral Mueselier, who controlled military affairs. MI5 kept a close eye on these plots
during the war at Churchills instigation, and Churchill ordered the arrest of both
Labarthe and Mueselier when de Gaulle had gone to Dakar to free that territory for the
Free French; but in 1964 we broke a decrypt which showed conclusively that Labarthe
had been working as a Soviet spy during this period, moreover at a time when the
Molotov-von Ribbentrop pact was still in existence.
The U.S. VENONA also contained material about Soviet penetration of the Free French.
The CIA had done no work on it, either because they thought it was too old or because
they had no one with sufficient grasp of French history. When I studied it, I found that
another senior French politician, Pierre Cot, the Air Minister in Daladiers prewar
cabinet, was also an active Russian spy.
This discovery came at a time of great tension between the French and British
intelligence services. Anti-French feeling ran strongly inside British Intelligence. Many
officers of both services had served in the war and remembered the supine French
surrender. Courtney Young always claimed that he formed lifelong views on the French
when traveling back from Dunkirk on a boat. Even Blunt, for all his reverence for French
art and style, was vituperative on the subject of French cowardice. Relations were not
helped by the arrival of Anatoli Golitsin. Some of his best intelligence concerned Soviet
penetration of SDECE, the French equivalent to MI6. Golitsin said there was a ring of
highly placed SDECE agents known as the Sapphire Ring. Shortly after Golitsin defected,
the deputy head of SDECE threw himself out of a window. Angleton persuaded the
head of the CIA to get President Kennedy to write to de Gaulle warning him about
Golitsins allegations, but de Gaulle felt the Americans and the British were manipulating
Golitsin to cast aspersions on French integrity. This remained the official French view
even after Golitsin gave the information which led to the arrest and conviction of
Georges Paques, a senior French Government official, in 1965.
To complicate matters still further, the DST (the French counterespionage service) and
MI5 were collaborating on a case involving a double agent, Air Bubble. Air Bubble was
an industrial chemist named Dr. Jean Paul Soupert. Soupert was an agent runner for
East German Intelligence and the KGB, but the Belgian SECURITE DETAT doubled him.
He revealed that two of his agents were employees of the Kodak Company in Britain
who were passing him details of sensitive commercial processes. The Belgians informed
MI5, who began an intensive investigation of both Kodak employees, Alfred Roberts and
Godfrey Conway. Soupert also told the Belgians about an East German illegal named
Herbert Steinbrecher, who was running agents inside the French Concorde assembly
plants, and this information was passed on to the DST to investigate in collaboration
with MI6.
Unfortunately both cases ended in catastrophe. Although Conway and Roberts were
caught, they were acquitted. Far worse for Anglo-French relations, the inquiries into
Steinbrecher revealed that MI6 had recruited a French police chief, whose police district
ran up to the German border. He was a blanche agent, that is to say MI6 had
deliberately concealed him from their hosts, the French, and were using him to spy on
both French and German nationals. The French, for their part, were forced to admit that
Steinbrechers agents had acquired for the Russians every detail of the Anglo-French
Concordes advanced electronic systems. The result, inevitably, was a spectacular row. I
approached Angleton and Louis Tordella of NSA, and got their agreement to provide the
DST with the VENONA intelligence which proved Cot and Labarthe to be Russian spies.
They were old, but still politically active, and it seemed to me a sensible precaution. I
traveled to Paris in early 1965 to DST headquarters, where I was met by Marcel Chalet,
the deputy head of the service. Chalet was a small, dapper Frenchman who joined the
DST after the war, having served with great courage in the Resistance under Jean
Moulin, narrowly escaping arrest by the Gestapo on the day Moulin himself was lifted.
Like all French Resistance veterans, Chalet wore his pink ribbon with conspicuous pride.
He was a militant anti-Communist, and yet he admired Moulin, a dedicated Communist,
more than any other man in his life. Several times he and I discussed the Resistance,
but even in the 1960s he could not discuss his former commander without tears coming
to his eyes.
I explained to Marcel that we had obtained new information which indicated the true
roles of Cot and Labarthe, and showed him the relevant VENONA decrypts. He was
astonished by the material, and immediately pledged a full investigation.
You dont think they are too old, then? I asked. Marcel fixed me with a withering
glance.
Until you see a French politician turning green in his coffin, you cannot say he is too
old!
Unfortunately Labarthe died of a heart attack as Marcel interrogated him, and Cot was
left to die in peace, but the exchange of information did much to ease tension between
the DST and MI5, and made Marcel and me friends for the rest of our careers.
The night before I left Paris he took me out to dinner. The restaurant was discreet, but
the food was excellent. Marcel was an attentive host, providing bottles of the best
claret, and regaling me with a string of waspish anecdotes about the perils of Gallic
intelligence work. We discussed VENONA, and he was fascinated to learn about the
scale of our success.
They had some success with us recently, he told me, and described how in
Washington they had discovered a fuse in the French Embassy cipher room modified to
act as a transmitter.
It was non-Western specification, and the range was perfect for the Russian Military
Attaches house across the road, he said, noisily tucking into his plate of oysters in
typical French style. My ears pricked up. The STOCKADE operation against the French
Embassy ciphers in London and Washington had recently ended precipitately, when
teams of French technicians went into both embassies with sheets of metal and copper
tubes, and began screening the cipher rooms. Obviously the Russians, too, had realized
that radiations could be picked up from poorly screened machines. Still, I thought, at
least the French had not discovered our operation.
Chalet obviously found the whole affair amusing, and even offered to send the fuse over
to Leconfield House, so that we could examine it. Still smiling, he casually dropped a
question below the belt.
And you, my dear Peter, have you had any luck with radiations... ?
I choked momentarily on my claret.
Not much, I replied.
Marcel filled my glass, patently disbelieving my every word. Like true professionals, we
turned to other things, and never discussed the matter again.
But for all the enjoyment of the French interlude, research into the Ring of Five was the
most pressing task facing D3. I asked Hollis for the 8D branch interrogators to be placed
inside D3, so that I could use them for an extensive program of interviews with every
known acquaintance of Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt, Long, and Cairncross. Hollis
agreed, but instructed that I myself had to conduct any interview deemed sensitive,
which normally meant it was with a lord, a knight, a politician, a top civil servant, or a
spy suspect. In all, I saw more than a hundred people. Labor politicians like Christopher
Mayhew and Denis Healey, then Secretary of State for Defense, who refused even to
meet me, were unwilling to discuss their memories of the Communist Party in the
1930s. But others, like historian Isaiah Berlin and writer Arthur Marshall, were
wonderfully helpful, and met me regularly to discuss their contemporaries at Oxford and
Cambridge. Berlin insisted we meet at the Reform Club. He thought it appropriate to
discuss Guy Burgess at the scene of his greatest triumphs. He had a keen eye for
Burgess social circle, particularly those whose views appeared to have changed over the
years. He also gave me sound advice on how to proceed with my inquiries. Dont go to
see Bowra, he told me, referring to Maurice Bowra, the distinguished Professor of
Literature at Oxford University. Bowra was a homosexual as well as a close friend of Guy
Burgess, and was close to the top of my list of those who I thought could help me. Why
not? I asked.
Because hell have it all around every high table in Oxford if you do, he said.
I took Berlins advice and gave Bowra a wide berth. Marshall, or Artie as he was
known to everyone, knew practically everyone in Cambridge in the 1930s, particularly
the secret network of homosexuals at Kings and Trinity. Artie had a prodigious memory
for gossip, intrigue, and scandal, and, most important of all, he knew who was sleeping
with whom in the Burgess and Blunt circles. Blunt, too, loved to discuss the scandalous
side of Cambridge life in the 1930s. He relished gossip, and never tired of telling me of
the time he blackballed Sir Edward Playfair, in later life Permanent Secretary at the
Ministry of Defense, for the Apostles Society. Blunt thought Playfair crushingly dull, and,
having met the man, I could not disagree with his judgment. His funniest story
concerned Guy Burgess and Churchills niece Clarissa Churchill. Apparently Burgess was
asked by his Soviet controllers to wed Clarissa Churchill, to ensure him perfect cover for
his espionage activities. Burgess was appalled by the task. For one thing, he was an
inveterate homosexual; for another, Clarissa Churchill was scarcely better-looking than
her uncle; and lastly, it was known that James Pope-Hennessy, later to become a
distinguished writer, had become infatuated with her.
But Burgess was nothing if not game. Within a month he was pursuing Clarissa Churchill,
causing upset and outrage in equal measure. James Pope-Hennessy was desperately
upset by Burgess attentions to her. One evening he arrived at Burgess flat with a
revolver, threatening to shoot them both before attempting to commit suicide. Blunt
loved the story, and it was made all the better, in his eyes and mine, by the fact that,
shortly afterward, Clarissa Churchill married Anthony Eden and later became Lady Avon.
I soon realized that the Ring of Five stood at the center of a series of other concentric
rings, each pledged to silence, each anxious to protect its secrets from outsiders. There
was the secret ring of homosexuals, where loyalty to their kind overrode all other
obligations; there was the secret world of the Apostles, where ties to fellow Apostles
remained strong throughout life; and then there was the ring of those friends of Blunt
and Burgess who were not themselves spies, but who knew or guessed what was going
on. They shared the secret, and worked to protect them for many years. Each ring
supported the others, and made the task of identifying the inner core that much more
difficult.
It was hard not to dislike many of those I interviewed. Funnily enough, I did not mind
the spies so much; they had made their choice, and followed it to the best of their
abilities. But those on the periphery were different. When I saw them they were clothed
in the respectability of later life. But their arrogance and their cultured voices masked
guilt and fear. It was I who was wrong to raise the issue, not they; it ought to be left
alone, they would tell me. I was being McCarthyite. Things were different then. Of
course, spying was wrong, but there were reasons. They were a Lotus Generation,
following political fashions as if they were a clothes catalogue, still pledged in the 1960s
to vows of silence they made thirty years before. They in turn disliked me. I had seen
into the secret heart of the present Establishment at a time when they had been young
and careless. I knew their scandals and their intrigues. I knew too much, and they knew
it.
One of the first D3 tasks was to reexamine a lead which had lain uninvestigated in the
files since Burgess and Macleans defection in 1951. It was given by Goronwy Rees, a
friend of both Burgess and Blunt. He first met them at Oxford in the 1930s, and during
the war, while serving in Military Intelligence, was a regular visitor to Bentinck Street.
Shortly after the defections he approached Dick White, then the head of
Counterespionage, and told him that he knew Burgess to have been a longtime Soviet
agent. Burgess, he claimed, had tried to recruit him before the war, but Rees,
disillusioned after the Molotov-von Ribbentrop pact, refused to continue any
clandestine relationship. Rees also claimed that Blunt, Guy Liddell, a former MI6 officer
named Robin Zaehner, and Stuart Hampshire, a brilliant RSS officer, were all fellow
accomplices. But whereas Blunt was undoubtedly a Soviet spy, the accusations against
the other three individuals were later proved groundless.
Dick White disliked Rees intensely, and thought he was making malicious accusations in
order to court attention, if not publicity. The four men were all close friends, and it was
for this reason that he found it hard to share Arthur Martins suspicions about Blunt.
Dicks view of Rees seemed confirmed when, in 1956, Rees wrote an anonymous series
of articles for a popular newspaper. Orgies and espionage made as good copy in the
1950s as they do today, and the Rees articles, detailing some of the salacious activities
of Burgess and those close to him, caused a sensation.
But when Blunt confessed, the color of Rees 1951 testimony changed. I thought it at
least prudent to reexamine it, if only to satisfy myself that Rees had not been lying when
he claimed to have given up all thoughts of the Soviet cause before the war. At first he
was reluctant to talk to me, and his wife accused me of Gestapo-style tactics in trying to
resurrect the past after so many years. They had both suffered grievously for the
newspaper articles. Rees authorship became known, and he was sacked from academic
life. Since 1956 they had eked out a miserable existence, shunned by the Establishment.
Eventually Rees agreed to see me, and went through his story again. He had no proof
that any of those he named were fellow conspirators. But all, he said, had been close
friends of Burgess in that crucial prewar period. The accusation against Guy Liddell was
palpably absurd. Everyone who knew him, or of him, inside MI5 was convinced that
Liddell was completely loyal. He had left his diaries, known as Wallflower, when he
left MI5. Reading those, nobody could believe that he was a spy. But the accusation
against Robin Zaehner, who had served for MI6 in the Middle East, cross-checked with
Volkovs spy in the Middle East. I studied Zaehners Personal File. He was responsible
for MI6 counterintelligence in Persia during the war. It was difficult and dangerous
work. The railway lines into Russia, carrying vital military supplies, were key targets for
German sabotage. Zaehner was perfectly equipped for the job, speaking the local
dialects fluently, and much of his time was spent undercover, operating in the murky
and cutthroat world of countersabotage. By the end of the war his task was even more
fraught. The Russians themselves were trying to gain control of the railway, and Zaehner
had to work behind Russian lines, constantly at risk of betrayal and murder by pro-
German or pro-Russian Arabs. On the face of it, the very fact that Zaehner survived gave
a touch of credibility to Rees allegation.
After the war Zaehner left intelligence work, and became Professor of Ancient Persian at
Oxford University. I made an appointment to see him at All Souls. The cords which bind
Oxford and British Intelligence together are strong, and it was the first of many trips I
was to make to that city during the next five years.
Zaehner was a small, wiry-looking man, clothed in the distracted charm of erudition. He
poured me a drink and chatted easily about old colleagues in the secret world. I
wondered, as he chatted, how I could broach the subject of my visit in a tactful way. I
decided there was none.
Im sorry, Robin, I began, a problem has come up. Were following up some old
allegations. Im afraid theres one that points at you... At first he rallied. Pointed at
him? he protested. Of course, I must be mistaken. Had I checked his record? Which
allegation? I told him about Volkov, and the spy in Persia.
He crumpled. I knew then, from his reaction, that Rees had been terribly, vindictively
mistaken.
I spent six years in the desert, he said limply. I stayed behind two years after Yalta,
when everyone else went home. I got no honors, but I thought at least I had earned a
degree of trust. Zaehner spoke quite without rancor; just a kind of sadness. After all
that he had done, all that he had risked, to be accused of this, years later, wounded him
to the quick. He dabbed tears from his eyes. I felt a heel, like a policeman who breaks
bad news to parents in the night. When Zaehner composed himself he was a paragon of
professionalism. Of course, he understood why I had to come see him. He went through
his career at MI6 and searched his memory for a clue as to the identity of Volkovs spy.
We talked for hours as the shadow of the spires of All Souls faded across the lawns.
I cannot think of an Englishman who could be this spy, he said, tapping his foot on the
floor as if to trigger his memory. There werent many of us, and Id vouch for every
one. He thought it was likely to be an agent, rather than an officer. Agents were often
shared between MI6 and the KGB in the latter stages of the war, and the possibility of a
plant was obvious. One name fitted perfectly, a man called Rudi Hamburger. After MI6
recruited him, he was arrested by the Russians, then turned loose, before being
reemployed by MI6 again. The dates tallied perfectly with the time Volkov had access to
files in Moscow, and it seemed obvious that Hamburger had simply been turned in
prison, and tasked to find out whatever he could about his British employers. (Rudi
Hamburger was the first husband of Sonia, who later was an illegal in Switzerland and
England.) Zaehner and I parted friends, but I felt bitter at the ease with which the
accusation had been made, and anger at those who had left such an accusation lying in
the files for so many years before clearing it up. Driving back to London I began to
wonder about the cost of clearing up loose ends. Was it fair, I thought, to drag these
things up? Perhaps, after all, it was better to leave them in the files undisturbed and
unresolved.
That Christmas Zaehner sent me a friendly Christmas card, and not too many years later
he died. I sent a wreath, anxious to make amends; but I could never forget the look on
his face when I asked him if he was a spy. In that moment the civilized cradle of Oxford
disintegrated around him; he was back behind the lines again, surrounded by enemies,
alone and double-crossed.
The last name Rees gave me was that of Sir Stuart Hampshire. Hampshire was a brilliant
wartime codebreaker and analyst for the Radio Security Service, one of the elite team
who broke the ISOS Abwehr codes, and laid the foundations for the Double Cross
System. After the war he pursued a career in the Foreign Office, before leaving for a
distinguished academic career as a philosopher at Oxford and Princeton. Rees had no
evidence whatsoever for the charge he made in 1951; it was based solely on the fact
that Hampshire had been extremely close to Burgess during the 1930s. I knew from my
own interviews that Hampshire was considered by contemporaries to have been
strongly left wing, although non-Communist, and I was amazed to find that no one had
even bothered to interview him on what he knew about Guy Burgess. However, there
was an extraordinary complication with the Hampshire case. Although long since retired
from the secret world, he had been invited by the Cabinet Secretary, Burke Trend, to
conduct a major review of the future of GCHQ. Concern about the escalating cost of
SIGINT had been growing ever since NSA moved into the satellite age. The Americans
were pressing GCHQ to share the costs of spy satellites. The incoming Labor
Government was already faced with annual bills in excess of 100 million pounds, and the
Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, instructed Trend to conduct a review to see if such costs
were justified. Trend consulted Dick White, who suggested Hampshire for the review in
the light of his previous RSS work. When I looked at Hampshires file I was amazed to
find that despite Rees allegation, Hampshire had not been vetted. Dick White, who had
known Hampshire for years, simply wrote Hollis a letter for the file, and that was it.
Hampshires inquiry lasted the best part of a year, during which time he had full access
to GCHQ, as well as a six-week visit to NSA. There were a number of fundamental issues
raised in Hampshires report. The first was whether, in light of the growing costs, Britain
could afford to maintain its share of the UKUSA agreement, which guaranteed us so
much exchanged information from the Americans. The second, more immediate issue
was whether Britain should opt in with the Americans on a new generation of spy
satellites; and the third area was how far GCHQ should support the Counterclan
activities.
The answers in short were Yes, No, and Yes. We could not possibly afford to lose the
UKUSA exchange, but on the other hand, we could remain in without necessarily
funding every technical development pound for dollar. As for Counterclan, Hampshire
endorsed it strongly. The only major change he requested was a termination of airborne
RAFTER on the grounds that it was not cost effective. I opposed this at the time, but
with hindsight it was a sensible economy, and the RAF were, in any case, beginning to
resent the demands we were making on them. Hampshire and I spent a good deal of
time discussing MI5s relationship with GCHQ. I pressed strongly for him to recommend
the creation of a new Radio Security Service, an organization independent of GCHQ,
which would be controlled by MI5, and responsible solely for the detection of domestic
spy radios. I thought Hampshire, given his background, would welcome such an idea,
and I told him that it was the only way that we would ensure the facilities that we
needed. Hampshire disagreed, not, I think, with the principle, but more with the
practicalities. He concluded, probably rightly, that such an initiative would be fought
tooth and nail by both GCHQ and MI6, and would, therefore, be very unlikely to
succeed.
Interviewing Hampshire about the Rees allegation was obviously out of the question
until his review was complete, but in 1967 I obtained permission, and traveled to
Princeton University in the USA, where Hampshire was the Visiting Professor. I knew
Princeton well. I had often visited there in my days as a scientist. Rudi Kompfner, the
man who invented the traveling wave tube (the radio valve used in most microwave
links), gave me the best description of its bizarre architecture. He called it pseudo-
Gothic-Cotswold. I talked to Hampshire for some time about his memories of Guy
Burgess. He told me that he now thought in retrospect that perhaps he himself had
been the target of a recruitment approach by Burgess, though he had not realized it at
the time. He described how in 1935 he and Anthony Blunt had traveled to Paris
together, and one evening they had dinner with James Klugman and the artist Ben
Nicholson. After dinner Klugman took the lead in a lengthy session in which Hampshire
was quizzed as to his political beliefs.
Some months later he was invited to dine alone with Guy Burgess at his flat in Chester
Square. Both men drank heavily, and in the small hours Guy made a pitch at him, asking
him to work for peace. It was dangerous work, he said, but worth it. There was much
talk of the intellectual ferment of the times, the Nazi menace, and the need to take a
much more Marxist line in academic studies. At the time Hampshire thought this was
the prelude to an invitation to join a left-wing debating society, then the vogue among
young Oxbridge intellectuals, but no specific proposition was made. In retrospect, said
Hampshire, perhaps Burgess was trying to recruit me.
When I got back to Britain I checked this story with Blunt. He remembered the Klugman
dinner, which he confirmed was a looking-over operation, but said he knew nothing of
Burgess pitch. Neither could he resolve whether the dinner had occurred in 1935 or
1937. The dates were important; in 1935 Blunt and Burgess were still mere Party
members, but by 1937 both were spies and thus any recruitment would have been for
the Russians. I sent one of my staff to see Ben Nicholson. Luckily he kept complete
diaries for each year of his professional life, and was able to establish beyond any doubt
that the dinner had, in fact, taken place in 1937.
I went to see Dick White and gave him the Hampshire papers to read. I was puzzled as to
why Hampshire had never told MI5 about his dealings with Guy Burgess after Burgess
defected in 1951. Dick confirmed that Hampshire had never mentioned this to him. I
went to see Hampshire again when he returned to London. He seemed slightly
embarrassed. He told me that Burgess approach was so muddled that he could hardly
be sure of its importance. As for Blunt, it never occurred to him to connect Blunts
presence at the dinner with Burgess approach, and since Blunt was on such personal
terms with people like Dick White and Guy Liddell throughout the war, he assumed he
was entirely trustworthy. Anyway, he was not alone in wanting to close the chapter.
Both Dick and Hollis were desperately embarrassed at the revelation that the man
whom they had chosen to conduct the most secret review of Anglo-American
intelligence sharing should himself have been the unwitting target of a Soviet
recruitment approach. They knew that the arrangements for Hampshires vetting would,
at the very least, look seriously inadequate to American eyes, particularly at a time
when they were already up in arms at what they saw as the old school tie approach to
intelligence in Britain. They could hardly own up, and the Hampshire case was carefully
buried forever.
The unsuccessful recruitment of Hampshire was also interesting for the light it cast on
James Klugmans role in Soviet Intelligence recruitment in the 1930s. He had clearly
been instrumental in arranging the looking-over dinner in Paris. Cairncross had also told
us that it was Klugman who had recruited him. Until then, MI5 had tended to assume
Klugman was merely an overt Party activist, rather than a covert agent recruiter or
talent spotter. It was obvious that Klugman could tell us much about the 1930s, if we
could persuade or pressurize him to confess. I knew Klugman would never accept a
direct approach from MI5, so we struck a deal with Cairncross; if he came back to
Britain, confronted Klugman, and persuaded him to meet MI5 and tell all, we would
allow him to come back to the country permanently. Cairncross accepted our offer with
alacrity, and visited Klugman in London. Klugman was an old man, a hard veteran of the
class war, busy writing a history of the Communist Party as a last testament to a
lifetimes work. He laughed when Cairncross asked him to meet MI5, and shrugged him
off when Cairncross threatened to expose him if he did not. The attempt failed
miserably and Cairncross was forced back into exile. Shortly afterward, Klugman took his
secrets to the grave. There were other loyal Party servants who refused our
approaches. Bob Stewart and Edith Tudor Hart, both of whom were involved as couriers
for the Ring of Five in 1939-40, were approached. Neither would talk. They were
disciplined soldiers, and had spent too long in the game to be broken. The public rarely
realizes the weakness of MI5s position with inquiries of this sort. We cannot compel
people to talk to us. Almost everything we do, unless an arrest is imminent, depends on
cooperation. For instance, Blunt told us that he knew of two other spies - one of whom
he had discovered after the man made a recruitment approach to Leo Long, whom Blunt
was already running. The situation was additionally complicated by the fact that Blunt
was having an affair with the potential recruiter, although neither told the other about
his designs on Long. Both of these men, who are still alive and living in Britain today,
were working on the Phantom Program during the war, although they left afterward to
pursue academic careers. Despite many efforts, neither would agree to meet me to
discuss their involvement with Russian Intelligence. The only positive action was to warn
a senior police chief, who was friendly with one of the spies, and their relationship
ceased.
17 -
After I had been meeting Blunt for a year, an obvious pattern emerged. I was able to
tease things out from him - mostly pillow talk he had gathered from Guy Burgess. He
claimed a writer on THE TIMES had been approached. I traced him, and he confirmed
that Burgess had tried to recruit him, but that he turned him down, fearful of the
consequences of being caught. Another contact Blunt identified was Tom Wylie, a War
Office clerk, long since dead. Wylie, said Blunt, used to let Burgess see anything which
came into his hands. But although Blunt, under pressure, expanded his information, it
always pointed at those who were either dead, long since retired, or else comfortably
out of secret access and danger.
I knew that Blunt must know of others who were not retired, who still had access. These
were the people he was protecting. But how could I identify them? I decided to draw up
lists of all those who were mentioned by interviewees as having noted left-wing views
before the war, or who interviewees felt would have been likely to have been the target
for a recruitment approach from Guy Burgess. One name stood out beyond all the
others: Alister Watson. Berlin mentioned him, the writer Arthur Marshall mentioned
him, Tess Rothschild mentioned him. He was, they all said, a fervent Marxist at
Cambridge in the 1930s, an Apostle, and a close friend of both Blunt and Burgess.
Burgess, so far as they recalled, admired him intensely during the 1930s - a sure sign
that he was likely to have been approached.
I began to make inquiries into his background. I knew him quite well from the war. He
worked currently as a scientist in the Admiralty Research Laboratory, and actually lived
for two years with my brother in Bristol. I never cared for Watson at the time. He was
tall and thin, with a pinched, goatlike face and a strange affected tiptoed walk. Watson
considered himself one of the greatest theoretical physicists of his day, yet most of his
colleagues thought his grasp of practical work distinctly ropey and that he had made
serious mistakes in theoretical work. He was, I thought, a bit of a fraud.
Watson was a failure. At Cambridge he was considered a brilliant student, destined for
the highest academic honors, until his thesis was found to contain a massive
fundamental error. He failed to gain a fellowship, and took a job in the Admiralty
instead. After service in the Radar and Signals Establishment of the Navy, he became
head of the Submarine Detection Research Section at ARL. It was one of the most secret
and important jobs in the entire NATO defense establishment, but it was obscure work,
particularly for one who had promised so much in his youth.
At Cambridge, Watson was an ardent Marxist; indeed, many of those I interviewed
described him as the high priest of Marxist theory among the Apostles. Marxism had a
beautiful logic, an all-embracing answer to every question, which captivated him. He
was drawn to DAS KAPITAL as others are drawn to the Bible and, like a preacher
manque, he began to proselytize the creed among his friends, particularly when his
hopes of an academic career began to fade. Blunt later admitted that Watson schooled
him in Marxism.
When I studied his file, his departure from Cambridge struck me as most peculiar - just
at the time of Munich, when radical discontent with the Establishment was at its height.
It bore all the hallmarks of Burgess and Philbys move to the right at the same period.
There was one other item of interest. Victor Rothschild wrote a letter to Dick White in
1951 suggesting that Watson should be investigated in view of his Communist
affiliations in the 1930s. Inexplicably, Victors suggestion had never been pursued, and
since then Watson had been successfully vetted no less than three times, and made no
mention of his political background.
I decided to try Watsons name out on Blunt at our next meeting. I knew it would be a
waste of time to approach the matter directly, so I prepared a list of all known members
of the Apostles including Watson, and asked him to pick out those he had known, or felt
I should take an interest in. He went down the list, but made no mention of Watson.
What about Alister? I asked him finally.
No, said Blunt firmly, hes not relevant.
The time had come to confront Blunt. I told him he was lying again, that he knew as well
as I did that Watson was a close friend and fellow Communist at Cambridge. Blunts tic
started again. Yes, it was true, he admitted. They were friends. They still saw each other
regularly at Apostles dinners and the like, but he had not recruited him, and nor had
Guy so far as he knew.
Alister, he said, was a tragic figure, whose life had gone terribly wrong. He was a man
who promised so much, yet had achieved so little, whereas his undergraduate friends,
like Blunt himself and Turing, had achieved eminence, and in Turings case immortality.
I learned my Marxist theory at Alisters feet, Blunt told me.
I suppose you know where he works? I asked.
The Admiralty, isnt it?
You said there were no more, Anthony. You said you were telling me the truth...
Blunt raked the fire vigorously.
I could never be Whittaker Chambers, he said after a while, referring to the famous
American Communist who renounced his creed in the 1950s and named his former
accomplices, including Alger Hiss, in a series of sensational appearances before
Congressional committees. Its so McCarthyite, he went on, naming names,
informing, witchhunts...
But, Anthony, thats what you are - thats why we gave you immunity. It was your
choice. Its no good putting the hood on, if you wont point the finger...
Blunt fell silent. Years had passed since 1937, but the weight never lifted.
I suppose youll turn the works on him, he said finally. I wrote a lengthy report on
Watson in early 1965, recommending an urgent investigation. I submitted it to Hollis
and F.J. via the head of D Branch, Alec MacDonald, who had replaced Cumming when
the latter retired, aware at last that he would never attain the Deputys chair.
MacDonald was a sensible former Indian policeman, with a taste for cordon bleu
cooking and the other good things in life, and a dislike of excessive administration. He
was good to be with, but could be infuriating to work for.
Nothing happened for five months, and finally, when I attended my D3 annual review
meeting with Hollis and F.J., I raised the subject. Why, I asked, had an investigation not
been sanctioned? At first there was a lot of talk about priorities, and limits on resources.
I reminded them that the whole rationale for D3 was that it should produce leads, which
were then to be taken on by D1 (Investigations) if their strength warranted it. Here was
a strong lead to a suspect currently enjoying prime access to NATO secrets. I said that if
this was to be the procedure, they might just as well close down D3 entirely. F.J. was
very sensible. Hollis was surly and defensive. The mistake had occurred at D Branch
level. Somehow or other, in the confusion of the handover from Cumming to
MacDonald, the case had not been given the priority it needed. Hollis instructed there
and then that the case be activated.
Patrick Stewart, then D1 (Investigations), took it on. He was a great friend as well as a
brilliant officer, with an uncomplicated, clear mind. He was a man of great personal
courage. During the war he was severely crippled, but despite his wheelchair he
continued working at MI5 until ill-health finally drove him into early retirement. Watson
was immediately placed under full surveillance, and we soon discovered that his wife
and daughter were both current Communists, and from the tenor of his conversations,
so was Watson himself, although he had declared none of this during his vettings.
The investigation, however, was limited. Watson was due to visit the USA to be
indoctrinated into the latest American antisubmarinedetection techniques, and the
Admiralty insisted that the case be clarified before his departure. We decided to
interrogate him. Every day for six weeks Watson reported to the Ministry of Defense,
where he was questioned by MI5s top interrogator, and today the Deputy Director-
General of the Service, Cecil Shipp.
Watson began by acting like an affronted senior civil servant. What right had we to
question him? he wanted to know. But this soon disappeared as Shipp probed his story.
Did he know Guy Burgess?
Of course.
Did he ever visit Guy Burgess flat?
On occasions, yes.
Whom did he meet there?
Guy, Anthony...
Anyone else?
Yes, a foreigner. He couldnt remember his name...
Could he describe him?
At first he couldnt. Then he could. He was Central European. He had dark hair, slicked
down, he thought. It sounded very like Otto, the controller of the Ring of Five in the
late 1930s. Does the name Otto mean anything to you? asked Shipp. Yes - that was
the mans name. Thats right, Otto... answered Watson, a shade too enthusiastically.
For a while Shipp pursued other areas of questioning, but then he returned to Otto. Had
Watson ever met him again? At first Watson couldnt remember. Then he thought
perhaps he had met him, but he could recollect no details. Then he remembered that
they used to meet in parks, and under lampposts on street corners, and on tube trains.
Did he give you anything?
No, Im quite sure of that...
Did you give him anything?
No, I dont think so...
Tell me, Mr. Watson, why did you meet him like that? Why not at your flat, or at a
restaurant?
No answer.
A long, long pause.
I was interested in these people, he said lamely. I wanted to find out more about
Russia...
You were interested in these people... reiterated Shipp with crushing sarcasm.
The next day Shipp showed Watson thirty photographs spread out in a neat fan on the
table in front of him. They contained portraits of some of the most important KGB
officers since 1945, who had been in Britain. Do you recognize any of these people?
he was asked. Watson stared at the photographs, fingering one or two hesitantly. He
muttered to himself as he sorted them, resorted them, stacked them in piles, and
unstacked them again, every word captured on the hidden microphones. We were
certain, from his answers about Otto, that Watson feared or suspected that we had
direct evidence against him, perhaps a surveillance photograph of him meeting a KGB
officer, or a confession which implicated him. At night he went home, and we could hear
him mumbling there via the SF we had installed on his telephone. Theyve got
something, he kept whispering. Theyve got something, but I dont know what it is...
After several hours, Watson picked out three photographs. The first was Yuri Modin,
Philbys controller; the second was Sergei Kondrashev, George Blakes controller; and
the third was Nikolai Karpekov, Vassalls controller. Watson admitted meeting all three
regularly, sometimes close to the Admiralty Research Laboratory at Teddington during
his lunch hour, but he denied passing any secrets. Golitsin said that he knew that
Karpekov had two Naval spies, one of whom was a Naval scientist. Also that Kondrashev
had had two spies, one of whom was Blake, the other a Naval spy.
Shipp tore into him. Did he really expect us to believe that he just happened to meet
four top KGB controllers, by chance, for no reason? Did he think we were stupid?
Naive? It was all secret, wasnt it? They were clandestine meetings? He was a spy,
wasnt he? It all fitted, didnt it - friendship with Burgess, Marxism in the 1930s,
concealed Communism and entry into secret work, meeting Russians? It was time to
confess.
Day after day Shipp pursued him. Lets take it from the beginning again, he would say,
and Watson would tell the same incredible story. The mark of a good interrogator is his
memory, and Shipp had one like an elephant. Every variation, every omission in
Watsons narrative was stored and thrown back at him hours, and sometimes days,
later. But Watson stuck doggedly to his story. He had never passed anything over. His
lips quivered, he was red and sweaty, but like a punch-drunk boxer he refused to take
the count.
After six weeks of daily interrogation Watson was visibly wilting. He came into sessions
drugged with tranquilizers, rambling incoherently, barely aware of the questions that
we asked. In desperation almost, Cecil Shipp began to skirt the issue of immunity. At the
time we had not obtained the Attorney-Generals permission, so he phrased his
questions hypothetically.
Would it change your story, Watson was asked, if we were to offer you immunity?
But Watson was too far gone. He seemed unable even to understand the offer that was
made to him, and the interrogation was suspended. No one who listened to the
interrogation or studied the transcripts was in any doubt that Watson had been a spy,
probably since 1938. Given his access to antisubmarine-detection research, he was, in
my view, probably the most damaging of all the Cambridge spies. One detail, in
particular, clinched the case. Watson told a long story about Kondrashev. He had met
him, but did not care for him. He described Kondrashev in great detail. He was too
bourgeois, claimed Watson. He wore flannel trousers and a blue blazer, and walked a
poodle. They had a row and they stopped meeting.
This clicked exactly with one of Golitsins early serials. He said Kondrashev was sent to
Britain to run two very important spies - one in the Navy and one in MI6. The M16 spy
was definitely George Blake, and we always assumed the Naval spy to be Blake too,
since he served in the Navy before joining MI6. Golitsin had one more fragment. He said
Kondrashev fell out with the Naval spy. The spy objected to his bourgeois habits, and
refused to meet him. Golitsin recalled that as a result Korovin, the former London KGB
resident, was forced to return to London to replace Kondrashev as the Naval spys
controller. It was obviously Watson.
At MI5s insistence, Watson was removed from secret access overnight, and transferred
to the Oceanographic Institute, where he worked on until retirement. In the absence of
a confession, we relied for our legal justification on Watsons failure to declare his
Communist background, and those of his wife and daughter, on his vetting forms. He
made no protest.
After Watsons interrogation I decided to have one more try at breaking him. I arranged
for him to meet Blunt at a neutral venue - Browns Hotel in London. There were two
reasons for this, firstly, I was not at all sure that Watson understood the meaning of our
immunity offer, and I wanted Blunt to explain it. Secondly, I wanted to resolve, if
possible, the question of whether or not Watson was a member of the Ring of Five.
Golitsin said the members of the Ring all knew each other, and all knew they were all
spies. As far as Blunt was concerned, he claimed it was only ever a Ring of Four - himself,
Burgess, Philby, and Maclean, with other recruits like Cairncross and Long existing
independently of the central Ring members. Watson seemed by far the best starter for
the fifth.
Blunt was very reluctant at first to go along with the plan.
Alister has suffered enough, he pleaded, when I first raised it. I had arranged
meetings between Blunt and previous conspirators on a number of occasions. The
sessions with Long and Straight were mild encounters, Blunt even told Straight that
exposing him was the best thing he ever did. But when I suggested he contact Baron zu
Putlitz, Klop Ustinovs wartime spy, who had returned to East Germany, he became
distinctly agitated. Zu Putliz and Blunt were lovers during the war, after Klop Ustinov
brought zu Putlitz out of Holland and back to London. In 1945 Blunt accompanied zu
Putlitz back to East Germany, and they had remained in touch ever since. Zu Putlitz had
also been working for the Russians before and after the war, in order to smooth his
return East, and I was interested to see if he could be turned our way again. I asked
Blunt to write him a letter asking him if he would be prepared to meet me in Helsinki or
Berlin.
Thats not fair, Peter, thats dirty. Hes done enough for this country.
But Blunt knew he could not refuse. He wrote the letter, although much to his relief zu
Putlitz turned my offer down.
Watson was like zu Putlitz. There was something about acknowledging the relationship
which caused Blunt deep unease, in a way that did not occur with Long or Straight or
others. It was a deep-seated desire to protect them, to deny us any knowledge of their
activities, and also a desire to hide his confession. He dreaded being seen by them, I
think, as an informer.
I picked Blunt up from the Courtauld one evening and we drove over to Browns Hotel,
where Patrick Stewart had booked a room for us all. He and Watson were waiting. Blunt
was desperately anxious. I hope youve got something to drink, he said when we
arrived at the hotel.
He and Watson greeted each other nervously, afraid to show any warmth in front of
either Patrick or me. Watson was frail, like a man just out of hospital, but eventually we
coaxed him into telling the story of his dealings with the Russians again. It was a
pathetic story in the interrogation room, but it looked even more ridiculous in front of
Blunt.
They both talked about Cambridge most of the time, and Otto, and the move to the left
in the 1930s. It struck me as an odd way for the idealism and activism of the 1930s to
end: in a small hotel suite, with a bottle of Scotch and a bottle of gin. They wanted to
change the world, but ended up changing only themselves. Im through with it now,
Alister, said Blunt. Ive confessed, he kept saying, and Im still here. Youve got
nothing to worry about. But Watson scarcely listened to Blunts entreaties. They were
talking at cross-purposes. Watson was overpoweringly jealous of Blunt and clearly
always had been for thirty years. It came to the surface in a drunken attack on his friend.
Treachery, for him, seemed almost the secondary issue. He was much more interested
in talking, now that his life had failed, about where it went wrong.
Youve been such a success, Anthony, and yet it was I who was the great hope at
Cambridge. Cambridge was my whole life, he said, practically in tears, but I had to go
into secret work, and now it has ruined my life...
Blunt left the table, upset and embarrassed. He walked over to the drinks cabinet on the
other side of the room. He had drunk almost a complete bottle of gin, but still needed
more. I walked over to him. Well...? I asked.
Blunt stood, his shoulders sagging with strain.
I suppose youre right, he said, his eyes gleaming with emotion. I suppose he must be
one of us, but I never recruited him, and Guy never told me he had.
There was no gin left, so Blunt poured himself a tumbler full of sherry and added soda
water. He gulped it down.
Sometimes, he said, I think it would have been easier to go to prison.
Victor and Tess Rothschild were a constant help during the D3 inquiries into the 1930s.
Both knew so much about the personalities and the hidden relationships of the period,
and were often able to prevail upon otherwise reluctant inhabitants of the Ring of Fives
menagerie to meet me. Victor was also able to make a number of vital introductions for
me. For instance, one of the questions which fascinated me after the Watson case was
the degree to which other scientists besides Watson had been targets for recruitment.
Burgess, Blunt, Philby, and Maclean were all classically educated, but I wondered
whether rings had been recruited at, for instance, the world-famous Cambridge
University Cavendish Laboratory.
My suspicions fell on the renowned Soviet scientist Peter Kapitza, father of the Russian
atomic bomb. Kapitza came to Cambridge in the 1920s, financed by the British Royal
Society, where he built the Mond Law temperature laboratory attached to the
Cavendish. Kapitza remained close to the Soviet Government, and on several occasions
was observed receiving Russian intelligence officers in his rooms. In the 1930s the Soviet
Government, alarmed by growing international tension, insisted Kapitza return to work
in Russia, and he was allowed to take all his machinery back with him. But both before
and after the war he remained in touch with British scientists, often receiving those who
visited Russia in his well-appointed dacha outside Moscow. For years it was rumored
inside MI5 that Kapitza had talent-spotted potential recruits inside the Cavendish. But
no one had ever really traced through the story. No one knew who, or how many, or
whether Kapitza was ever successful. It was just another loose end, left in the files,
seeping doubt and suspicion.
The one man who was in a position to know more about Kapitza, who he was friendly
with, who his contacts were during his time at Cambridge, was Lord Adrian, who knew
Kapitza when he was in Britain, and in the 1960s was Chancellor of the University of
Cambridge and President of the Royal Society. Victor promptly arranged a dinner party
at which I was able to meet Adrian, and from there guide him gently onto the subject of
the Russian scientist.
Adrian was entirely cooperative, and could well understand the suspicions we had about
Kapitza, even though he admired his achievements tremendously. He began to reel off
names of those who had been especially close to Kapitza. More names for my black
books. More names to be checked in the Registry. More names to be traced,
interviewed, assessed, cleared, and in one or two cases, removed from access. All to be
sure, finally, that no one had slipped through the net.
The most important help Victor gave was persuading Flora Solomon to meet MI5 again. I
knew from her session with Arthur that she knew far more than she was saying. She had
obviously been in the thick of things in the mid-1930s, part inspiration, part fellow
accomplice, and part courier for the fledgling Ring of Five along with her friends Litzi
Philby and Edith Tudor Hart. After her meeting with Arthur she refused to meet MI5
again. She had a typically Russian paranoia about conspiracy and treachery. She was
convinced we would double-cross her, and put her in prison, or that she would be
assassinated by the Russians, as she believed had happened to Tomas Harris. I asked
Victor if he could intercede on my behalf, and eventually, in mid-1965, she agreed to see
me.
Does the name Dennis Proctor mean anything to you? she growled. It did indeed.
Dennis Proctor was then the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Fuel and Power,
having joined the Civil Service in the 1930s, when he had served as Stanley Baldwins
private secretary. In my travels around Cambridge and Oxford nearly a dozen people
had picked out Proctor as a notable left-winger, although not a Communist, during his
undergraduate days. He had the classic Cambridge Comintern recruits profile - he was a
close friend of Burgess, Blunt, Philby, and Watson and a member of the Apostles.
There was one other odd thing about Proctor which had puzzled me. Shortly before the
1951 defections he suddenly left the Civil Service for no apparent reason to take a job
with a shipping company in Copenhagen. In 1953, just as suddenly, he reappeared in
London and resumed his Civil Service career.
I asked Flora why she mentioned Proctor.
Kim used to bring people to see me, she said. He valued my opinion. I would never
join, but I used to tell him what I thought of his recruits.
And what did you tell him about Proctor...?
Kim brought him around for dinner one night. I didnt like him. I told Kim he was no
good. He had no backbone. How will he stand up to stress? I asked him.
Proctor was another name which Blunt had clearly deliberately avoided giving to me. I
went to Hollis and requested permission to interview Proctor, but he refused. It would
cause too much fuss in Whitehall, he said, and there were enough problems there as it
was. I would have to wait until he retired. After all, said Hollis, its only a few months.
Proctor retired to a delightful rustic French farmhouse in the rolling countryside outside
Avignon with his second wife and children, and in February 1966 I traveled to France to
visit him.
Proctor was a distinguished-looking man, with a hook nose, receding hairline, and just a
touch of the cleric about him. He greeted me with the easy charm and familiarity which
upper-class Englishmen use to set their visitors at a distance. I explained that MI5 were
looking back into the 1930s.
Were just tying up loose ends, you know, that sort of thing... Proctor talked about the
period in crisp civil servants shorthand. He rarely mentioned himself at first. Like the
model civil servant, he was the modest observer of other peoples lives and decisions.
But beneath his reserve, I could detect an enthusiasm, as if he were recalling a better
world.
And how did you feel about things then yourself? I asked. You mean what were my
politics? he countered, smiling at my euphemism. Well, you presumably know I have
been left-wing all my life.
Really?
Oh yes, he went on, but never Communist. I wanted to go into Government service
too much to join the Party, and besides I didnt have the courage of people like Guy
Burgess, who did it openly. I asked him if Guy had ever approached him to work for
peace, or for the Comintern, or anything like that.
He shook his head.
No, I dont think so... No, I dont remember anything like that at all.
But Guy knew what your political views were? Why, yes. We were very close. Guy,
myself, Anthony. The Apostles, you know...
Dont you think its odd he never tried to recruit you?
He paused for thought.
I suppose it is, now you come to mention it. In fact, Im really rather insulted he
didnt...
He laughed. I laughed too, and he suggested we take a walk before dinner. It was still
just winter, but the earth was thawing, as if spring lay just beneath the surface. We
talked about other things - about England, and the Civil Service, and the way things had
changed. Most of us, you know, have spent our lives escaping from the thirties, he
told me, as we looked back down the valley toward his house.
We were all so exquisitely happy then. It was our world. But we lost it in 1939, and
weve been looking to escape ever since. He pointed to the farmhouse, shrouded in
late-afternoon mist.
Thats my escape... he said.
That evening we had a splendid dinner, and afterward retired to his study with the port.
Proctor was drunk, and I could see he was finding my visit a strain. He knew that sooner
or later I would return to Burgess.
For a while he seemed to doze off over his port, and woke up perspiring heavily. He
began to dab his forehead nervously with his handkerchief. Why do you think it was
Guy never bothered to approach you? I asked as I filled his glass again.
Proctor gulped his down, and poured himself another. I admired Guy very much, he
said, after a pause. People forget, you know, just how gifted Guy was. They dont
remember how he was before the war. The looks, the vitality, the intellect. They just
think of him afterward.
I said nothing, waiting for him to fill the silence.
He began again, talking more urgently.
You see, I had no secrets from him. Whenever I had a problem, no matter how secret, I
used to discuss it with him, and his advice was always sound. I think the real truth of the
matter is that Guy had no need to recruit me. He could get to know anything he wanted.
All he had to do was ask.
What about 1951? I asked, anxious to press him while he was talking. No, no, no, he
clucked, youve got that all wrong. I left in 1950 for personal reasons, nothing to do
with this - to do with Varda, my first wife. She committed suicide, you know, in 1951.
Did you see Guy before he went?
No - but my wife did, about six weeks before. She and her father were very close to
him. I was in Copenhagen at the time. And she killed herself afterward?
Not long after, yes...
He sat up and looked at me, suddenly sober.
Id rather not talk about it, if you dont mind. But theres no connection, I promise
you.
He slumped back again in the chair, disheveled like a defrocked priest. They were both
terrible, shocking events, he said quietly. A year or two later, when I recovered,
Edward Bridges invited me back into the Civil Service, and I came back to England.
(Edward Bridges was then Permanent Secretary at the Treasury and Head of the Home
Civil Service.)
I never did discover why Proctors first wife, Varda, committed suicide, or what she and
Guy Burgess discussed. The truth about Proctor was difficult to judge. I was inclined to
believe his claim that he was never formally recruited, while disbelieving his assertion
that Burgess had nothing to do with his departure to Denmark in 1950. But whatever
the case, I am absolutely sure that during the time he was Baldwins private secretary,
and probably right up until 1950, he shared with Guy every secret which crossed his
desk.
The next time I saw Blunt I told him about my discussion with Proctor. You didnt tell
us about him, Anthony, I said, reproachful rather than angry. It always upset Blunt
more if he felt the deceit was a matter between friends.
You kept quiet again - to protect him.
He got up and went to the window, and gazed through it as if he could see back into the
past.
What about Dennis? I asked again.
All I can say is he must have been the best source Guy ever had. But I didnt know what
role he was playing, he said finally. All I knew was that he was still in Government...
But you could have guessed... I sighed with irritation. Blunt pulled the curtains, as if
faintly disappointed with the noise and dust and fashions of the square outside.
Unless you lived through it, Peter, you cannot understand... Oh, I lived through it,
Anthony, I said, suddenly angry. I know more about the thirties probably than you will
ever know. I remember my father driving himself mad with drink, because he couldnt
get a job. I remember losing my education, my world, everything. I know all about the
thirties...
One of the most interesting things to emerge in the D3 researches was the existence of
the Oxford Ring. In the past, Soviet recruitment was associated mainly with Cambridge
University, but once Blunt opened up, it was obvious that Burgess and James Klugman
had targeted Oxford in the same way. The first hard source on the Oxford Ring came
from a colleague of Blunts at the Courtauld Institute, Phoebe Pool. Blunt admitted that
she had been his courier during the 1930s, and I was anxious to interview her. She and
Blunt were close; they had even written a book together on Picasso.
Blunt told me she was a neurotic, and already in the process of a nervous breakdown.
He said that she would clam up, or worse, if I spoke to her directly, so he organized a
cutout for me-another senior figure at the Courtauld, Anita Brookner, to whom I could
relay questions for Pool. A degree of deception was inevitable. Pool was told that new
inquiries were being made into the 1930s, and Anthony wanted to know if there was
anybody else he should warn.
Phoebe Pool told Anita Brookner that she used to run messages for Otto to two
brothers, Peter and Bernard Floud. Peter, the former Director of the Victoria and Albert
Museum, was dead, but his brother Bernard was a senior Labor MP. Pool also said a
young woman, Jennifer Fisher Williams, was involved, and urged Brookner to ensure
that Andy Cohen, the senior diplomat Sir Andrew Cohen, was warned too, as he also
was at risk. All these names were well known to me. All except Andrew Cohen (Cohen
was an Apostle and Cambridge student) were connected with the Clarendon, a left-wing
dining and discussion club in Oxford during the 1930s, but this was the first hard
evidence that the club had been a center for Soviet espionage recruitment.
Ironically, Jennifer Fisher Williams was married to a former war time MI5 officer,
Herbert Hart, by the time her name emerged, so I visited her husband at Oxford, where
he was pursuing a distinguished academic career as Professor of Jurisprudence, and
asked him if he would approach his wife on my behalf. He rang her up there and then,
assured her there was no threat to her position, and she agreed to meet me. Jennifer
Hart was a fussy, middle-class woman, too old, I thought, for the fashionably short skirt
and white net stockings she was wearing. She told her story quite straightforwardly, but
had a condescending, disapproving manner, as if she equated my interest in the left-
wing politics of the 1930s with looking up ladies skirts. To her, it was rather vulgar and
ungentlemanly.
She said she was an open Party member in the 1930s, and was approached by a Russian,
who from her description was definitely Otto. Otto instructed her to go underground,
and she used to meet him clandestinely at Kew Gardens. She told us that she was
merely part of the Party underground, and that she gave up meeting Otto when she
joined the Home Office in 1938, where she worked in a highly sensitive department
which processed applications for telephone intercepts. She told us, too, that she had
never passed on any secret information. She had two other contacts, she said. One was
Bernard Floud, who recruited her, and the other man who controlled her for a short
time she identified from a photograph as Arthur Wynn, a close friend of Edith Tudor
Hart and her husband, who was active in trade union circles before joining the Civil
Service.
There was no doubt in my mind, listening to Jennifer Hart, that this was a separate Ring
based exclusively at Oxford University, but investigating it proved enormously difficult.
Almost at once, Sir Andrew Cohen (who was at Cambridge and became a diplomat) died
from a heart attack, so he was crossed off the list. Peter Floud was already dead, but his
brother looked more hopeful when the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, named him to a
junior ministerial post in the Labor Government. MI5 were asked to provide him with
security clearance. We objected and requested permission to interrogate Floud about
Jennifer Harts allegation. Wilson had, at the time, a standing ban on any inquiries
relating to MPs, but when he read the MI5 brief, he gave clearance for the interview.
Flouds attitude, when I began the interview, was extraordinary. He treated the matter
as of little importance, and when I pressed him on Jennifer Harts story he refused to
either confirm or deny that he had recruited her.
How can I deny it, if I cant remember anything about it? he said repeatedly.
I was tough with him. I knew that his wife, an agoraphobic depressive, had recently
committed suicide, but Floud was eager to conclude the interview, presumably lured by
the scent of office. I explained to him in unmistakable terms that, since it was my
responsibility to advise on his security clearance, I could not possibly clear him until he
gave a satisfactory explanation for the Hart story. Still he fell back lamely on his lack of
memory. The session ended inconclusively, and I asked for him to attend a further
interview the following day. I did not make any progress with him, he maintaining that
he had no recollection of recruiting Jennifer.
The next morning I got a message that Floud had committed suicide, apparently with a
gas poker and a blanket. Not long after, Blunt telephoned me with more bad news.
Phoebes dead, he said.
Good God, how? I gasped.
She threw herself under a tube...
Three deaths, two of which were suicides, in such a small group of people, at a time
when we were actively investigating them, seemed far more than bad luck. MI5 was
terrified that it would be linked publicly with the deaths, and all further work was
suspended. Newspapers were already vigorously pursuing the story of Philbys role as
the Third Man, and had discovered for the first time the seniority of his position in MI6.
Rumors of Blunts involvement were also beginning to surface in Fleet Street. The entire
scandalous tapestry was in danger of unraveling. That still left the problem of Arthur
Wynn, who, by coincidence, was also due for promotion to the Deputy Secretarys job at
the Board of Trade, which also required security clearance. What shall we do? asked
F.J. nervously.
We should tell him well give him his clearance, if he tells the truth about the Ring.
Otherwise no clearance...
But thats blackmail, he said, doing his best to sound shocked. I saw nothing unfair
about my offer, but then, as I told F.J., I was never destined to be a diplomat or a
politician.
All these suicides, he said, theyll ruin our image. Were just not that sort of Service.
The Oxford Ring completed my inquiries into the 1930s conspiracy. By the end of the
1960s the task was virtually complete, those involved nearing or well past retirement.
We had identified every member of the Ring of Five and a number of others and their
controllers. We knew how the Ring worked at various times, we knew what their
communications were, whom they depended on, and where they went for help. We had
also identified one major undiscovered spy, Watson, and another crucial source for the
Russians during the period 1935-51, Proctor, as well as an important new Ring at
Oxford. Altogether we had identified, dead or alive, nearly forty probable spies. Beyond
that we had scrutinized carefully the records of dozens of people in every sphere of
British public life. Most were given a clean bill of health, but some were found to be
secret Communists or associates, and were removed from access or quietly encouraged
to retire.
Of course, there were still loose ends. Klugman took his secrets with him, Otto was
never identified, and the British end of the Rote Kapelle we never found. But we knew
the most important thing of all - we knew how far the conspiracy extended. We knew
our history, and we had no need to be afraid again. The vetting of a generation had
been painful, certainly, more painful probably than it need have been had the inquiries
been conducted at the right time, when the trails were still fresh. But we had exorcised
the past, and we could at last return to the present again, not forgetting that there
might be descendants from the people of the 1930s.
18 -
One other unresolved question remained throughout the 1960s, perhaps the most
important of all - whether or not there was an undiscovered mole inside MI5. The
FLUENCY Working Partys research into the history of penetration of British Intelligence
continued in parallel with the D3 inquiries. Hollis took little interest in FLUENCY,
principally, because it was not due to report until after his scheduled retirement in
December 1965. He still considered the penetration issue closed after the meeting to
discuss the second Symonds report in October 1964, and he ordered that none of those
officers involved in the Mitchell case should discuss it even among themselves. It was a
hopeless request. For one thing, Hollis visit to the USA and Canada in 1963, to brief the
CIA, FBI, and RCMP that Mitchell might possibly have been a spy, caused predictable
fury and alarm. Shortly after Hollis visit, I traveled to Canada myself. The DEW WORM
microphones, which had lain undisturbed in the walls of the Soviet Embassy since 1956,
were suddenly dug out by a team of Russian sweepers. No preliminary searches were
made; the Russians knew exactly where the microphones were, and we heard them take
them out before the lines went dead. The RCMP wondered if Mitchell had perhaps
compromised the operation. Jim Bennett, who by now was head of Counterespionage
in the RCMP, began to sound me out. It was impossible to deflect his interest, and I gave
him a brief resume of the evidence which pointed toward a high-level penetration. In
fact, I had my own theory. I was sure the presence of the DEW WORM microphones was
blown to the Russians in 1956, hence their refusal to use the rooms for anything other
than occasional consular business. But they clearly learned the exact locations of the
system only in 1964. This coincided exactly with the Mitchell investigation, which
considered in great detail the possibility that FLUENCY might have been betrayed by
Mitchell in 1956. Both Mitchell and Hollis also received the detailed file in 1956,
including the details about the way the DEW WORM system worked. The operation was
undoubtedly blown then. Whether it was Mitchell or Hollis who had done it, the
Russians could not afford to take the microphones out unless the sweepers found them
without being told exactly where they were. Despite over twenty days of searching, they
failed to do so, even though they knew the exact area that had been bugged.
F.J. blasted me when he heard that I had talked about the penetration issue in Canada,
but I told him that it was impossible to avoid discussion after Hollis abortive visit. To
ignore the problem only made it worse in the eyes of our allies.
In Washington interest was just as acute. I remember a house party at Michael
McCauls, the man who in 1964 became the SLO in Washington in succession to Harry
Stone. Angleton and I detached ourselves, and he quizzed me hard on the state of
affairs inside MI5. What the hells got into you guys, he kept saying, Hollis comes out
there with some cock-and-bull story about Mitchell. He doesnt seem to know the first
thing about the case. Theres been no interrogation, and now he says theres nothing in
it!...
I tried to talk him through the case. Mitchell, I told him, was in the clear, we thought,
but I stated that as far as Arthur and I were concerned, Hollis was our next suspect. I
asked him if he had any information which might help us break open the case. He said
he would see what he could do. It was a difficult time for the CIA. Kennedy had just
been assassinated and the Warren Commission of inquiry was sitting, and Angleton had
pressing problems of his own. In 1965, British security seemed once again
catastrophically bad to American eyes. In just four years a succession of spy scandals
and disasters had engulfed both M15 and MI6. First Houghton was unmasked, having
betrayed vital parts of NATOs underwater-detection systems. Although the Houghton
case was a triumph for MI5s new counterespionage capability, it caused outrage in the
U.S. Navy, which had long fostered hostility to its British counterpart. The enmity
surfaced at a National Security Council meeting, soon after the Houghton trial, at which
the U.S. Navy had sought a complete break in the British-American intelligence and
secrets exchange. Jim Angleton and Al Belmont from the FBI nipped the Navy ploy in the
bud.
The only difference between us and them, said Belmont dryly, is they catch spies,
and we dont.
But nothing Belmont said could possibly mitigate the string of disasters which followed.
Blake was tried and convicted in 1961, casting doubt on virtually every European CIA
operation including the Berlin Tunnel. Vassall was caught the next year, 1962; once
again, valuable NATO Naval secrets had gone East because of a British spy. In January
1963 Philby defected, with the British authorities apparently mute and impotent. There
were the security implications of the Profumo affair in the same year, with its
suggestions, taken seriously at the time in the FBI, that the Russians were obtaining
nuclear secrets from Profumo via Christine Keeler - Blunt, Long, and Cairncross
confessed in 1964, while other cases simply collapsed humiliatingly in court. The Kodak
case in 1964 was one, but far worse in American eyes was the Martelli case in early
1965.
The Martelli case had started in 1963 with an allegation by Fedora that the KGB had a
foreign ideological source inside an English nuclear research establishment. He had been
operational only in the last one to two years. While this meant that the defector,
Golitsin, did not know about him, it severely limited the field of likely candidates. After a
few false steps, the investigation closed in on Giuseppe Martelli, who had come to the
Culham Laboratory in the autumn of 1962 from Euratom. But Martelli was not cleared
for secret atomic material. Despite this, the investigation went ahead. It was possible
that, like Houghton in the Lonsdale case, when he was at Portland, Martelli got his
secrets from a girlfriend who did have access. When it was found that Martelli HAD a
girlfriend who had access to secrets it became CERTAINLY possible that Martelli also had
access to secrets that he should not have had. Further investigation did not produce
any evidence that Martelli was able to acquire secrets. A search of his office at Culham
produced rendezvous information from a locked drawer in his desk. At this time Martelli
was away in Europe on holiday. When he returned he was picked up at Southend
airport. He was questioned by Special Branch and identified Karpekov as a Russian he
knew. He also had a map in his possession which indicated rendezvous arrangements.
As a result his house at Abingdon was searched and a concealment device was found
which contained miniature one-time pads a la Lonsdale. Part of a page of one pad had
apparently been used. A diary was found which had the details of a grid for transforming
letters, and therefore words, into numbers for the one-time pad to be used to encipher
a message. A long meeting was held by Hollis, with Mitchell present, to decide what to
do. The crucial factor was that no evidence had been found that Martelli had access to
secrets or was passing them to a foreign power. The Official Secrets Act (OSA) did have
a clause which made it a crime to prepare to commit espionage. But it would be very
difficult to prove that Martelli was doing this. There was no proof that he had been in
clandestine communication with a foreign power. GCHQ could attest that the cipher
pads were similar to those used by spies to communicate with their Russian masters
but, unlike in the Lonsdale case, they could not prove that Martelli had done so. It is not
often realized that it was the GCHQ testimony in the Lonsdale case that ensured the
defendants were convicted. Without this evidence Lonsdale and his associates would
have got off either scot-free or with a minor sentence. I, as the MI5 SIGINT expert,
pointed out to the management at the meeting that the evidence MI5 had was not
sufficient to prove even the intention to communicate secrets to a foreign power. The
Legal Branch of MI5 were keen to try to get Martelli on the act preparatory clause of
the OSA to establish it as a valid reason to prosecute under the OSA. To the
astonishment of the professional counterespionage officers present, Hollis and Mitchell
pressed for the prosecution of Martelli to go ahead. The result was that the Attorney-
General did go ahead and MI5 suffered the damage.
Even today I find it very difficult to understand why the Martelli case went ahead, unless
one remembers the date of the trial - July 2, 1963. This was at the height of the Mitchell
case. It is obvious that at this juncture it would have suited the Russians and Hollis for
the CE side of MI5 to be knocked down.
The other case to be considered here is that of Frank Bossard. Early in 1965 Top Hat, the
FBI-GRU agent, produced photocopies of documents from the Ministry of Supply of the
highest security grading in the guided weapons field, involving high-level secrets of the
USA. It was relatively easy to narrow the field of suspects to a few people. The suspects
were put under all kinds of surveillance. It was discovered that Bossard, one of the
suspects, occasionally during his lunch hour would collect a suitcase from the Left
Luggage Office at Waterloo Station. He would go to a hotel in Bloomsbury and book
himself into a room under a false name. He would stay there alone for about half an
hour. On leaving he would take the suitcase back to the Left Luggage Office and return
to work. MI5 in due course removed the case from Waterloo. In it were found
document-copying cameras, cassettes of film, and two gramophone records on which
there were about eight Russian songs. The details of the Russian songs were copied. The
entire contents of the case were photographed and restored to the case, which was
then returned to Waterloo. I rang up GCHQ and gave them the details of the records. It
took GCHQ less than an hour to identify five of the tunes as having been transmitted by
a Russian transmitter, found to be in the Moscow area by direction-finding. This
transmitter was known to be a GRU Russian Intelligence Service transmitter. We
decided to arrest Bossard next time he took his case from Waterloo and went to a hotel
with it. This took place on March 15, 1965. He was caught in the act of photographing
Top Secret documents. When confronted with the fact that MI5 knew all about the
tunes on the records, he admitted that he had been supplying photographs of secret
documents to the Russians for money through dead letter boxes, i.e. secret caches. He
received his money the same way. After his initial recruitment, he had met a Russian
only once in nearly five years. He said that the individual tunes broadcast indicated
which dead letter box to fill, or not to fill any. MI5 had all they wanted for a Section One
prosecution. On May 10, 1965, Bossard was sentenced to twenty-one years in jail.
Since we now know that Top Hat, the source of the information, was a plant, why did
the Russians decide to throw away Bossard? To understand the case, it is necessary to
go into various aspects. First, the Russians had succeeded in damaging MI5 through
Fedora and the Martelli case in 1963. This had resulted in increased suspicion,
particularly in MI5, that Fedora was a plant. In 1964 Top Hat had given MI5 a story
about technical eavesdropping coverage of the British Prime Ministers office, which,
unless the Russians had a much more sophisticated system than we knew of in the
West, was very unlikely. All efforts to find such a system in use had failed. This had led
the British to consider that the story was phony, and both MI5 and the FBI had begun to
question Top Hats bona fides.
Top Hats production of photographs of British documents of the highest classifications
not only made it very difficult to believe that he was a plant (people ask the question:
Would the Russians throw away such a source?); it would also result in the Americans
once again becoming very suspicious of British security and in an outcry in the USA to
cut Britain off from their secrets. Now if one had to choose a spy to risk, Bossard was
ideal. He had practically no physical contact with Russians. His Moscow radio control
was via innocent tunes. If it had not been for GCHQs detailed traffic analysis, we would
have been unaware of the significance of the records and we would not have been able
to prove communication between the Russian Intelligence Service and Bossard. He
would have been prosecuted only on the illegal copying of classified documents, a
technical crime with relatively small penalties. Once again the professional and technical
skill of GCHQ and MI5 had caught the Russians out. This success had two major effects.
It enabled the American Intelligence Services to protect British interests in the American
Government and it increased and did not diminish the doubts about Top Hat.
But the fundamental question has to be asked. Why did the Russians consider that they
had to boost the bona fides of Top Hat? He had been operational since the end of 1962
and without a source at high level in either MI5, the FBI, or the CIA, there would have
been nothing to alert the Russians that he was a suspect. At the end of 1964, MI5 had
become very suspicious. Only Sullivan, the head of Domestic Intelligence in the FBI, had
any fears of Top Hats bona fides and he, Sullivan, was certainly not a Russian spy. In the
CIA only Angleton and one or two close associates were suspicious. But the few people
in MI5 who knew about Top Hat did not believe he was genuine. Hollis knew that these
people had grave doubts about Top Hat.
There were other strains, too, on the alliance. There was deep-seated hostility in the
American intelligence community to the accession to power of Harold Wilson and the
Labor Government in 1964. Partly this was due to anti-Labor bias, partly to the Labor
Governments commitment to abandon Polaris - a pledge they soon reneged on.
Hanging over everything from late 1963 onward, when Hollis made his trip to
Washington, was the Mitchell case, and the fear that MI5 itself was deeply and currently
penetrated at or near the summit, with the Secret Service apparently incapable of
wrestling with the problem. The sacking of Arthur Martin only compounded American
suspicions. They knew he was committed to hunting down Stalins Englishmen wherever
they were hiding, and to American eyes it seemed as if a public-school cabal had seen
him off.
In mid-1965 matters came to a head. President Johnson commissioned a review of
British security from the Presidents Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), a
committee of retired intelligence notables, bankers, industrialists, and politicians,
formed to advise the President on improvements in national security. Two men were
given the task of conducting this Top Secret review - Gordon Gray, a former Secretary of
Defense under President Eisenhower, and Governor of North Carolina, and the,
Secretary the PFIAB, Gerald Coyne, a former senior FBI officer who ran PFIAB for fifteen
years.
Gray and Coyne came to London secretly in the summer of 1965 and began reviewing
the Anglo-American intelligence relationship, and in particular the effectiveness of MI5.
The work was delicate in the extreme. No one in British Intelligence was to be told that
the review was even taking place. In any other country the review would be known by a
cruder name - espionage. Most of Gray and Coynes material was supplied by Cleveland
Cram, the CIA officer in charge of liaison in London with MI5. Cram was a brilliant and
levelheaded CIA officer who had served in London for many years, and knew the
weaknesses of MI5 only too well. Cram brought Gray and Coyne into Leconfield House
and MI6 headquarters on a number of occasions, introducing them merely as
colleagues. At this time CIA officers of Crams stature had open access to all British
Intelligence establishments, and the subterfuge was easy to perform on us.
I first heard about the Gray and Coyne review when I visited Washington in 1965.
Angleton briefed me on the contents of the finished report. I was thunderstruck - Gray
and Coyne had produced a devastating critique of MI5. They cited the inadequate size of
British Counterespionage, and said that many individually talented officers were
betrayed by poor organization and lack of resources. The report was especially critical of
the quality of leadership inside MI5, particularly that provided by Hollis and Cumming,
then the head of Counterespionage. Gray and Coyne concluded that Hollis had evidently
lost the confidence of his senior officers (which was true) as well as that of his peers in
Whitehall, which was also true.
Angleton was thrilled by the report, and told me that it would form the basis of a new
relationship between British and American counterintelligence. He told me that the CIA
intended making a direct approach to Harold Wilson, along with the American
Ambassador in London, David Bruce, to brief him on the findings. Everythingll change
now, he said, were going to have a beefed-up CIA London station, and half those
officers are going to work directly inside MI5. Well have access to everything, and help
you where we can.
Once I had heard about the Gray-Coyne report, I was in an invidious position. Angleton
had briefed me in confidence, but I was duty-bound to report the existence of such a
document, and the planned approach to Wilson. Angletons ambitions were obvious: he
wanted the CIA to swallow MI5 up whole, and use it as an Agency outstation. I returned
to London and told Hollis and F.J. everything I knew. It was one of the few occasions
when Hollis showed any visible sign of shock. He ordered a check of records, and within
a few hours got confirmation that Gray and Coyne had indeed visited virtually every
British Intelligence establishment without ever declaring their true purpose. Later that
afternoon I saw both men sweep out to a waiting car at the front of Leconfield House.
Thank you for your help, Peter, said F.J. grimly. Never can trust the bloody Americans
to play it by the rules! I thought this was a touch sanctimonious, but I judged it better
to keep clear of the flak which was rapidly building. F.J. and Hollis were off to see the
Foreign Secretary to protest at this blatant abuse of the UKUSA agreement, and there
was no telling where the row might end.
Poor Cleve Cram was hauled over the coals. He opposed the approach to Wilson, yet
Helms and Angleton insisted he begin sounding out George Wigg, Wilsons security
adviser. But Hollis was in no mood for excuses. He had been humiliated in front of the
entire intelligence establishment in London and Washington, and Cram was threatened
with expulsion if there were any further transgressions. I saw Cram a few days later
skulking around the fifth floor of Leconfield House. He looked a little sheepish.
You nearly got me PNGd, he said, smiling ruefully. He knew the CIA had been trying it
on, and had been caught fair and square. The Gray-Coyne report was a terrible
indictment of Hollis tenure as Director-General of MI5, and he knew it. But the
Americans, typically, had handled the affair with all the finesse of a bull in a china shop.
The essence of their plan was well-meant - to provide the resources and manpower
which MI5 lacked. Of course they had other motives. They wanted MI5 as a supplicant
client, rather than as a well-disposed but independent ally.
Improvements did flow from the report. For the first time MI5 management conceded
the need to drastically expand D Branch, and the old colonial appendages, like E Branch,
withered on the vine. Henceforth D Branch had first call on all resources. It was
inevitable that new management would be sought for the revamped D Branch. Alec
MacDonald, a former colonial policeman, was brought in, and Malcolm Cumming,
realizing that he would never become Deputy DG, opted for early retirement.
The other important initiative which flowed from the report was the recognition which
followed that a mechanism was needed to secure closer cooperation between Western
counterintelligence services. GCHQ and NSA had a formal exchange under the terms of
the UKUSA agreement. MI6 and the CIA regularly exchanged foreign intelligence
assessments via the Joint Intelligence Committee in London and the National Security
Council in Washington. But counterintelligence was still basically ad hoc. Angleton and I
had often discussed the value of creating a forum for the regular free exchange of
counterintelligence. So much counterintelligence, particularly when it flowed from
defectors, ranged across national borders, and access to each countrys files was
essential if the best progress was to be made. But Angleton was an autocratic man; he
wanted to use the Gray-Coyne report to force a oneway flow. But finally he became
converted to the virtues of a genuinely mutual forum and, at his urging, a conference of
senior counterintelligence officers from the USA, Britain, Australia, Canada, and New
Zealand was organized to take place roughly every eighteen months. The conferences
were called CAZAB, and the first was held in Melbourne, Australia, in November 1967.
The Gray-Coyne report was not the only epitaph to Hollis career. As he approached
retirement, the shape of the FLUENCY conclusions became clear. The Working Party
consisted of Terence Lecky and Geoffrey Hinton from MI6 Counterintelligence, as well
as Arthur Martin when he was transferred over in mid-1965. The MI5 contingent was
Patrick Stewart, Anne Orr-Ewing, and Evelyn McBarnet from D3, with me in the chair.
The papers were circulated direct to the Director D, Alec MacDonald, and the head of
Counterintelligence, Christopher Phillpotts. We met every Thursday in my office or a
fifth-floor conference room at Leconfield House.
The mood was tense to begin with, each member aware of the awesome significance of
the task at hand - to review in detail every single allegation which had ever been made
about the penetration of British Intelligence. The first decision FLUENCY made was to
change the approach to penetration which Arthur and I had adopted in the Mitchell
case. In 1963, when we presented the case for penetration to Dick White, we relied
heavily on analysis of the oddities and discrepancies in technical and double-agent
cases, known in the jargon as manifestations. FLUENCY decided to dispense with all
manifestations. They were felt to be an overlay of specific allegations of penetration
which had been made by defectors. These were the primary evidence, and we
concentrated solely on them.
The first task was to collate the allegations. This was relatively straightforward, as much
of the work had already been done during the Mitchell inquiry, and continued at my
instigation as part of D3s overall program of research.
After six months work we had compiled a large file, which contained the full list of
allegations - over two hundred in all, some dating back to World War I. The allegations
were then apportioned to various officers around the table. Those that came from
Polish sources, like Goleniewski, were given to Terence Lecky. Evelyn McBarnet handled
the old MI5 allegations, Patrick Stewart took the Golitsin material, and I looked at
Krivitsky, Volkov, and VENONA.
Once the allegations were gathered we set about assessing them. We examined each
allegation carefully, and made a decision about its validity - that is to say, whether we
believed it to be true. In some cases, for instance, a defector might have said a spy
existed in MI5 or MI6, but we were able to satisfy ourselves that they were mistaken.
Where we satisfied ourselves that an allegation was true, it was termed, in
counterintelligence jargon, a true bill. Then we checked whether each allegation had
ever been attributed to a known spy, such as Philby, Burgess, or Blunt, and if it had, the
attribution was reexamined to see if it was still valid in view of any intelligence which
might subsequently have come to light.
Assessing allegations depended on the quality of our records, and we faced a major
problem with MI6 archives. They were in a mess. Each of the Geographical Divisions and
the Counterintelligence Department kept their own records. MI6 were producers of
intelligence, not collaters of it, and little thought had been given to an effective system
of recordkeeping. Indeed, this was a principal reason why so many allegations were
simply left unresolved, and one of the by-products of the FLUENCY inquiries was a
general recognition of the need to improve the MI6 Registry. In 1967 Arthur finally left
Counterintelligence to take over the MI6 Registry, where he made one last major
contribution to British Intelligence by totally overhauling the system.
After thorough review, each of the two hundred allegations was placed in one of six
categories: a. the allegation was a true bill, and was definitely attributable to a known
spy; b. the allegation was a true bill, and was almost certainly attributable to a known
spy; c. the allegation was a true bill, but it was not possible to attribute it to a known
spy; d. it was not possible to ascertain whether the allegation was or was not a true bill,
because there was insufficient information; e. the allegation was doubted; f. the
allegation was not a true bill, i.e. rubbish. As Hollis approached retirement, FLUENCY
began to uncover an entirely new picture of the history of the penetration of British
Intelligence. Many allegations which previously had been attributed to known spies like
Philby or Blunt were found on detailed inspection to have been wrongly attributed.
Twenty-eight of the two hundred allegations we examined were in the all-important C
category - they were true bills, but they pointed to as yet undiscovered spies.
Of those twenty-eight, there were ten really important allegations, all of which related
to MI5:
1. Volkovs Acting Head, dated September 1945;
2. Gouzenkos Elli, also dated September 1945;
3. Skripkins betrayal, dated 1946 (information came from Rastvorov in 1954);
4. Goleniewskis middling grade agent, dating from the mid-1950s;
5. Golitsins information about the Skripkin investigation, also dated 1946;
6. Golitsins information about the special safe in KGB headquarters to house material
from British Intelligence;
7. Golitsins information about the index to files in KGB headquarters containing
material from British Intelligence;
8. Golitsins information about
the Technics Document;
9. Golitsins information about the special arrangements for protecting the Soviet colony
in London; and 10. Golitsins information about the betrayal of Crabbes diving mission.
Each of the Golitsin allegations dates from 1962-63. The really startling thing about this
list was the way it followed a clear chronological pattern from 1942 to 1963. The
Golitsin material, although more recent, was not specific enough to point in the
direction of any one officer, beyond the fact that it had clearly to be a highlevel
penetration to account for the allegations. But the first three serials, even though dated,
transformed the FLUENCY work, and pointed in Hollis direction for the first time.
19 -
Konstantin Volkovs list was the first serial which we investigated. This was already the
subject of intensive D3 inquiries to trace the second of the two Foreign Office spies
mentioned in the list. I decided to have the entire document retranslated by Geoffrey
Sudbury, the GCHQ officer who ran the VENONA program. Sudbury was a fluent Russian
speaker, but most important of all, from the VENONA program he was familiar with the
kind of Russian Intelligence Service jargon in use at the time Volkov attempted to
defect, whereas the British Embassy official in Turkey who made the original translation
was not. One entry in Volkovs list puzzled me in particular. In the original translation it
referred to his knowledge of files and documents concerning very important Soviet
agents in important establishments in London. Judging by their cryptonyms, there are
seven such agents, five in British Intelligence and two in the Foreign Office. I know, for
instance, that one of these agents is fulfilling the duties of head of a department of
British Counterintelligence.
When the case against Philby was first compiled in 1951, MI5 assumed that the last spy
referred to by Volkov was Philby, who in 1945 was indeed fulfilling the duties of head of
a department of MI6-Counterintelligence, responsible for Soviet counterintelligence.
But I knew enough Russian from VENONA myself to see that there were two words in
the Russian which did not appear in the original translation - the word OTDEL, which
means section, which was closely followed by the word UPRAVALENIE, meaning
directorate or senior division. In any case, there was no irresistible reason why this
particular entry by Volkov had to be Philby. There were five spies in British Intelligence
in all, and any of those could just as easily have been Philby. A few days after I gave
Sudbury the Volkov list he rang me up excitedly, almost forgetting for a moment to
switch over to his scrambler.
The translations wrong, he said, its all NKVD idiom. The man who wrote it was
obviously quite senior. Hes written it very carefully, with pride in his professional skill
and knowledge. The real translation should read. I know, for instance, that one of these
agents is fulfilling the duties of head of a section of the British Counterintelligence
Directorate.
Actually, I rather think this mans position is temporary. Hes fulfilling the duties,
rather than in the job itself, which suggests to me hes the acting head, or something
very like it... Im sorry, I replied cautiously.
But dont you see, shrieked Geoffrey through the electronic haze, the British
Counterintelligence Directorate is MI5, its not MI6! The meaning was crystal clear. If
Sudbury was right, this was not Philby, and it could not be Blunt either, since he was
never acting head of anything. Only one man had been acting head of a section of the
British Counterintelligence Directorate in 1944-45. His name was Roger Hollis.
The second allegation was Igor Gouzenkos MI5 spy Elli, which I had first seen in Anne
Lasts notebook during the Mitchell investigation. FLUENCY reexamined the case of Elli
in great detail. The extraordinary thing about Gouzenkos Elli was the fact that it came in
September 1945 in exactly the same period that Volkov made his Acting Head
allegation, and also on the same date that we made the crucial break into the VENONA
traffic.
The essence of Gouzenkos story was simple. He said he knew there was a spy in five of
MI. He had learned this from a friend, Luibimov, who had worked alongside him in the
main GRU cipher room in Moscow in 1942. Ellis communications were handled through
dead letter boxes, one of which was a crack in a tombstone. There was something
Russian about Elli, said Gouzenko, either in his background, or because he had visited
Russia, or could speak the language. Elli was an important spy because he could remove
from MI5 the files which dealt with Russians in London.
Luibimov showed him parts of the telegrams from the spy, whose code name was Elli.
Gouzenko said that when Ellis telegrams came in, there was always a woman present in
the cipher room who read the decrypts first and, if necessary, took them straight to
Stalin. I invited Ismail Akhmedov, a senior GRU officer who defected to the West at the
end of the war, to Britain, and asked him who this woman could be. He said her name
was Vera, and she controlled all GRU illegals in the West and worked directly under him,
although security procedures were such that she never disclosed the identities of her
agents to him. Alexander Foote, who worked for the GRU as an illegal in Switzerland
during the war before defecting in the late 1940s, also described Vera (in his book
HANDBOOK FOR SPIES) as the woman who was in charge of him when he visited
Moscow for training in 1945.
The first problem with Gouzenkos story was that over the years since he had first told it
in 1945, he varied the details. Five of MI became MI5. The distinction was vital.
Theoretically, five of MI could be taken as referring to Section V of MI. And, of course,
in 1942 Philby was working in Section V of MI6. The other problem with Gouzenko was
that by the mid-1960s he was an irretrievable alcoholic. His memory was at best
unreliable for events which occurred more than twenty years before. I sent a request to
the Canadian RCMP for permission to interview Gouzenko once more, but we were told
that Gouzenko had been causing problems for the Canadian authorities through his
alcoholism and badgering for money. They feared that further contact with him would
exacerbate the problems, and that there was a high risk Gouzenko might seek to
publicize the purpose of our interview with him. I asked the RCMP if they had the
original notes of the debriefing of Gouzenko, since they were the best evidence for what
precisely he had said about Elli in the first days after defecting. The RCMP officer who
had looked after Gouzenko was long since dead and his notes had not been filed but
almost certainly destroyed.
The evidence in British Intelligence files only complicated the validity of Gouzenkos
story still further. When Gouzenko defected, an MI6 officer, Peter Dwyer, traveled up to
Canada from Washington to attend his debriefing. Dwyer sent back daily telegrams to
MI6 headquarters in London outlining Gouzenkos information. Dwyers cables were
handled by the head of Soviet Counterintelligence in MI6, Kim Philby. Philby, in the
following week, was to have to face the pressing problem of Volkovs almost
simultaneous approach to the British in Turkey. By good luck he asked that his opposite
number in MI5, Roger Hollis, should go to Canada to see Gouzenko instead of him. Was
this coincidence, we wondered, or an arrangement made in the knowledge that Hollis
was a fellow spy and could be trusted to muddy the waters in the Gouzenko case? We
have it from VENONA, however, that the KGB was unaware of the existence of a GRU
spy in MI5 when Hollis traveled to Canada and interviewed Gouzenko. The most specific
and important material Gouzenko possessed related to possible spies in the atomic
weapons development program, and Hollis report dwelt on this aspect at length. The
spy Elli in five of MI was almost a footnote. Hollis judged Gouzenko to be confused
about the structure of British Intelligence. Gouzenko was wrong, and the matter was
buried. This was a mistaken judgment.
Nevertheless, the lead registered in the mind of Guy Liddell, then head of
Counterespionage. In his diaries he speculated about the possible identity of Elli. Oddly,
I learned of this only after Liddells old secretary brought the diaries to me, asking that I
preserve them, as Hollis had ordered that they be destroyed. Once again I paused for
thought. Was this chance, or did Hollis have some other reason for suppressing Liddells
diaries?
In 1965 we managed to break a new message out of the VENONA, which transformed
the FLUENCY assessment as to whether Gouzenkos Elli was a true bill. The one week of
VENONA traffic which we had broken into began on September 15, 1945, with a
message to Krotov discussing, with no sense of panic, the precautions he should take to
protect valuable ARGENTURA in the light of problems faced by the neighbors in
Canada. This was clearly a reference to Gouzenkos defection, which had taken place in
Canada the previous week. The neighbors, we already knew, was the KGB jargon for
the GRU, for whom Gouzenko worked. The KGB had no reason to fear that any of its
agents in Britain had been compromised by Gouzenko. The GRU knew no KGB secrets
and, in any case, Philby was there to monitor any unforeseen developments on a daily
basis.
However, by the end of the weeks traffic, September 22, the tone of the messages is
markedly different. The relaxed tone disappears. Krotov is given elaborate and detailed
instructions on how to proceed with his agents. Brush contact only is to be employed,
and meetings are to be reduced to the absolute minimum, if possible only once a
month. The question we needed to answer was: Why had Moscow Center suddenly
become so worried about the implications of Gouzenkos testimony? Gouzenko had
actually defected on September 5, two weeks previously, and almost immediately the
GRU would be making provisional damage assessments and the requisite precautionary
arrangements for any assets they feared Gouzenko might have betrayed. By September
12 details of what Gouzenko was saying to his debriefers in Canada was flowing from
Peter Dwyer back to Kim Philby in MI6 headquarters in London. Yet it is not until a week
later that the KGB became suddenly worried. The answer lay in the MI6 files for the
relevant period. On September 18-19 a telegram reached Philbys desk which first
detailed Gouzenkos description of the spy code-named Elli. This was the first time
Philby would have been aware of any reference to the spy in five of MI. The actual
copy of the telegram, when we examined it in the 1960s, was folded into four, with
grimy edges, as if it had been placed in an inside pocket, and was initialed off HARP
(Philbys initials) two days after he received it. Clearly he had removed the telegram
during those two days and shown it to his Russian controller in London. No other
telegram in the file dealing with Gouzenko had been treated in this manner. This was
obviously the telegram which had caused such worry at the tail-end of the weeks
VENONA.
I asked GCHQ to conduct a search of all KGB traffic flowing from London to Moscow. We
could read none of this traffic. The only matches in the VENONA we had were coming
the other way, from Moscow into the KGB in London. Sudbury told me that the only
noticeable thing GCHQ could detect in the traffic was a message sent on September 19-
20, which they could tell was a message of the highest priority because it overrode all
others on the same channel. The significance was obvious - it was sent the day after
Philby had received the MI6 telegram containing Gouzenkos description of the spy Elli
in five of MI. Indeed, when GCHQ conducted a group-count analysis of the message,
they were able to conclude that it corresponded to the same length as a verbatim copy
of the MI6 telegram from Canada which Philby removed from the files. Once we
realized London had sent a high-priority message to Moscow, we searched for the reply.
There was only one high-priority message in the line going the other way, from Moscow
to London. So far we had never been able to read this particular message properly. It
was dated at the very end of the weeks traffic, but because it was flashed high priority,
it was received in London somewhat earlier than other messages which we read. In late
1965 Sudbury and I made a determined attack on this message; using as collateral the
guess that it was a reply to a message containing the information in Philbys telegram.
Eventually we succeeded in breaking it out. It read: Consent has been obtained from
the Chiefs to consult with the neighbors about Stanleys material about their affairs in
Canada. Stanleys data is correct. I remember sitting in Sudburys office puzzling over
this translation. It made no sense. I wondered at first if we had made a mistake, but
Sudbury checked the translation against the other side of the VENONA, and the trade
traffic read off perfectly. There was no mistake. Philby, by the time this message was
sent, had been a top-class KGB agent and head of Counterespionage in MI6 for the best
part of ten years, yet it appeared as if they doubted his intelligence. Why did it need
checking? What was it about Stanleys data which had thrown the KGB into such
confusion?
Only one explanation could account for all these oddities. The KGB must have been
ignorant of the spy in five of MI controlled by the GRU. Thus, when Philby relayed to
them news of this spy, and the threat to him by Gouzenko, the KGB had to obtain
permission from the Chiefs, the Politburo, to consult with the neighbors, the GRU,
to ask if they did indeed have such an asset in London. Having received assurance from
the GRU that they did have such a spy, the KGB realized that the heat was likely to come
on in London, so they sent back the message confirming Stanleys data, and followed it
up with urgent orders to increase security.
But who was Elli, and where did he work? He was obviously not Blunt or Philby, since we
knew that they were never controlled at any time by the GRU. I asked every Russian
defector in the West what the phrase five of MI signified. All assured me it meant MI5,
not Section V of MI6 or anything else. Whoever Elli was, he must have had access to files
on Russians, which placed him indisputably in F Branch, where this material was
handled. The senior officer in F Branch was Roger Hollis, the very same suspect defined
by Volkovs Acting Head allegation.
FLUENCY spent years trying to unravel the riddle that lay in the three connected threads
of Volkovs Acting Head; Gouzenkos Elli; and the VENONA with its eight
cryptonyms, each of which came together in that one week in September 1945. Was it
Mitchell or Hollis? Both or neither? The resemblances between these strands was
uncanny. The Acting Head and Elli both pointed to the same two men, but the first
allegation was KGB and the second GRU. The VENONA had eight spies; Volkovs list
talked of seven in London, two in the Foreign Office, and five in British Intelligence.
Maclean had been in Washington for a year, so he could not be one of the Foreign
Office spies. Burgess probably was one of these. He was working in the Foreign Office
Press Department at the relevant time. The best bet for the other seemed to be
Krivitskys Eton and Oxford Foreign Office spy, whom Philby used to decoy MI5 away
from Maclean as the net closed on him in 1951. But what of the five spies in British
Intelligence? One was Philby, another was Blunt, and a third Cairncross. Long might
theoretically have been a fourth Volkov spy, but he was not in London at this time and
he could not possibly be one of the eight VENONA cryptonyms, since he was in Germany
in September 1945. That still left one Volkov spy, the Acting Head, unaccounted for, as
well as four VENONA cryptonyms, of which presumably the Acting Head was one, and
Volkovs second Foreign Office spy another. As for Elli, there was no trace of him
anywhere.
The third FLUENCY allegation was the Skripkin case. This was given to us by Yuri
Rastvorov, a second secretary at the Russian Embassy in Tokyo, who was in fact a
Lieutenant-Colonel in the KGB. British Naval Intelligence made contact with Rastvorov in
autumn 1953, and began negotiations for his defection. Rastvorov eventually agreed to
come, provided only that he was taken straight to a British colony, such as Australia(!),
rather than back to Britain. He said his reluctance to come back to Britain was because
he knew that British Intelligence was penetrated, although he did not elaborate further.
The Naval Intelligence Department (NID) arranged to fly the KGB man by RAF Transport
Command plane from Tokyo to Singapore, where they intended to hand him over to the
joint MI5-MI6 establishment SIFE (Security Intelligence Far East). Rastvorov was not told
of these plans, but unfortunately, as the aircraft taxied to the end of the runway, a
snowstorm hit Tokyo and the plane was unable to take off. While waiting for the storm
to abate, the chatter of the crew revealed to Rastvorov that the plane was going to
Singapore rather than Australia. He panicked and fled the aircraft, went immediately to
the American Embassy, and defected to them instead. Sometime later the CIA reported
that Rastvorov had given further details of his reasons for believing British Intelligence
was penetrated. He said that a friend of his, a Lieutenant Skripkin, had approached the
British in the Far East in 1946, and offered to defect. Skripkin made arrangements to
return to Moscow, fetch his wife, and then defect on his next visit out of the country.
However, back in Moscow, Skripkin was somehow detected by the KGB. He was
approached by two KGB officers who pretended to be MI6 officers. He gave himself
away, was tried and shot.
When we looked Skripkin up in the Registry we found that he did indeed have a file. It
contained copies of two reports from British Naval Intelligence in the Far East dealing
with plans for Skripkins defection, one dated May 1946, and the other July 1946. They
had been stapled together and sent from SIFE for MI5s information, arriving in London
during the first half of August. The file was dealt with by Roger Hollis, the Assistant
Director of F Branch, and a junior officer. Hollis instructed the junior officer to make a
file and place it in the Registry, where it lay until Rastvorov told his story in 1954. When
the file was retrieved it was automatically attributed to Philby by MI5. When FLUENCY
reexamined the case several new facts came to light. Firstly, when Golitsin defected in
1961, he asked us what we knew about the Skripkin case. He said that he had worked on
the case in 1946, when he was a junior officer in the Counterintelligence Branch of the
First Chief Directorate. He remembered that the report came to him from London, and
definitely not from the Far East, at the end of 1946, when the snow was on the ground
in Moscow. Without prompting, Golitsin told the story of how the two KGB men tricked
Skripkin by posing as MI6 officers. Golitsin was also asked to describe the two
documents he had seen. Golitsin was astonishingly accurate. The first, he said, was an
account of Skripkins sounding out, and an assessment of his worth. The second was a
resume of his future plans, including an address in Moscow where he could be
contacted. Golitsin also said he was certain the papers had been stapled together at the
time the agent had photographed them.
The second new fact FLUENCY had was that Philby, when questioned by Nicholas Elliott
in Beirut, was asked if he had betrayed Skripkin. Philby vehemently denied having done
so, not having known about the case even when given more details of it. This was most
odd, because we assumed it would be in Philbys interest to claim credit for the case.
Perhaps Philby was telling the truth on this occasion. I arranged for a complete search
of the entire distribution of both Skripkin reports, to see if it could shed any further light
on the case. The results were extremely revealing. The May report went to Naval
Intelligence (Hong Kong), SIFE at Singapore, and the Naval Intelligence Department in
London. They placed the report in a Naval docket and circulated it within NID, and
passed a copy routinely to the Naval Section of R Division at MI6. They, in turn, passed it
to Section V, who filed it. Extensive searches in the MI6 records showed that Philby was
never on the distribution list.
The July document followed the same distribution trail, except at SIFE in Singapore. It
was at this point that they decided to staple together both reports, and send them
routinely to MI5, where they arrived on August 8. This was the first occasion MI5 knew
anything about the affair, and it was also the only place where both reports were
stapled together, a fact which chimed perfectly with Golitsins recollection. Whoever
betrayed Skripkin must have been inside MI5, not MI6. That ruled out Philby, and Blunt
had already left MI5 the previous year. Once again the finger pointed toward Roger
Hollis, the F Branch Assistant Director who handled the Skripkin file. Once the shape of
the FLUENCY allegations became clear I began the most dangerous task I ever
undertook. Without authorization I began to make my own freelance inquiries into
Hollis background. I had to be cautious, since I knew that the slightest leak back would
inevitably lead to the sack. I traveled down to Oxford, and visited the Bodleian Library.
There I discovered in the university records that Hollis, although he went up to Oxford in
the 1920s, never took a degree. He left inexplicably after five terms. It seemed an odd
thing for so conventional a man to do. I visited Hollis old college, Worcester, and
searched the records there to find out who had lived on the same staircase. In his fourth
term Hollis moved to digs in Wellington Square, and I checked through the Oxford
Calendars, which list the addresses of every student resident at Oxford, to find those
students with whom he shared a house. I even tried the records of the University
Golfing Society in the hope that somewhere there would be a clue to the enigma of
Hollis personality.
Working without Hollis record of service, I was forced to work blind. I knew from
talking to Hollis that he had visited China, so I ran a trace through the Passport Office for
the dates of his arrivals and departures from Britain. I made discreet inquiries at the
Standard Chartered Bank, where Hollis worked before leaving for China, but apart from
an old forwarding address at a bank in Peking, they had no records.
I wanted to find some evidence of a secret life, a careless friend, a sign of overt political
activity. Every man is defined by his friends, and I began to draw up a picture of those to
whom Hollis was close in those vital years in the late 1920s and 1930s. Two men in
particular were of interest at Oxford - Claud Cockburn and Maurice Richardson. Both
were left-wing: in Cockburns case, when I ran a check on his file I noticed that Hollis had
retained the file throughout the war, and never declared his friendship on the file as the
Service customs demand. Did he, I wondered, have a reason to hide his relationship
with Cockburn, a man with extensive Comintern contacts? Out in China there was a
similar pattern. China was a hotbed of political activity in the 1930s, and was an active
recruiting ground for the Comintern. Hugh Winterborn told me that an old retired
colonel he had known in Japan knew Hollis while in China, having shared a flat with him
for a year, and he made an appointment for me to visit him. Tony Stables was a
brusque, old-fashioned military officer, and he remembered Hollis well. He said he
never knew his political opinions, but always assumed they were left-wing because he
mixed with people like Agnes Smedley, a left-wing journalist and Comintern talent
spotter, as well as another man called Arthur Ewert, whom Stables described as an
international socialist.
The other person who was visited (by Arthur Martin) was Jane Sissmore. Jane Sissmore
was responsible for bringing Hollis into MI5 before the war. She eventually transferred
from MI5 to MI6, married an MI6 officer, and became Jane Archer. She was a
formidable, intellectual woman who ran the old MI6 Communist Affairs research
section. I often used to see her on D3 inquiries. She was always helpful, and told me the
inquiries should have been embarked on years before. One afternoon I broached the
subject of Mitchell and Hollis, who had both worked closely with her during the war.
Jane was a wily old bird, and knew exactly why I was tapping her.
Could either be a spy, would you say? I asked her. They were both untrustworthy,
she told me, but if I had to choose the more likely candidate I would pick Roger.
In November 1965 Hollis buzzed down to me and asked me to come up to his office. It
was unlike him to be so informal. I had never before visited his office without being
summoned by his secretary. He greeted me warmly by the door.
Come over and sit down, he said, smiling broadly. He brushed imaginary dust off the
sofa, and sat opposite me in the easy chair. That, too, was odd. Hollis usually sat in a
straight-backed chair. Hollis was anxious to put the meeting on an informal footing. He
made rather clumsy small talk about his imminent retirement. Difficult time, he said,
the pensions not much, and every bit counts...
What are your plans?
Oh, down to the country I think. I have a little place down there. Get right away from it
all. A bit of golf, a few walks... that kind of thing.
He laughed in a gurgling sort of way.
Funny to think my picture will be up there in a few weeks time, he said, looking up at
the portraits which stared down at him. They were all such different-looking men: Kells
stiff military bearing; Petries detached pose; Sillitoe, the hunch-shouldered policeman;
and Dick, with his easy charm and soft charisma.
Hollis turned to face me, hunching forward, with his hands on his knees. He was smiling
again, like a Cheshire cat. Peter, there was just one thing I wanted to ask you before I
go. I wanted to know why you think Im a spy.
I had to think very fast. If I told him a lie and he knew I had, I was out that day. So I told
him the truth.
Hollis made it sound so natural. Ever since he and I discussed Tisler nearly ten years
before, we had been building for this confrontation. But now that it was out in the
open, lying on the table between us like an inanimate object, words seemed so
inadequate in the face of all the secretly nursed suspicions which had gone before. Its
all based on the old allegations, sir, I told him, and the way things have been going
wrong. You know my views on postwar failure. Its just a process of elimination. First it
was Mitchell, and now its you.
Oh yes - but surely youve been looking at new things...?
Yes, the old allegations, sir.
For an hour I went through the Volkov list, the retranslation, Gouzenkos Elli, the
Skripkin report.
Well, Peter, he said, laughing gently, you have got the manacles on me, havent
you...?
I began to interrupt. He held his hands face up to quiet me.
All I can say is that I am not a spy.
But is there anything definite, sir, anything I can put before the FLUENCY meeting,
anything at all...?
I can probably dig out the notes of the Gouzenko interrogation... He sounded unsure.
I dont really recollect Skripkin, to be honest. And Volkov...
He drummed the edge of his seat with his sharpened pencil, and clicked his teeth.
I dont think youve got Volkov right. Why should Kim go all the way out to Turkey?
Hed check first.
He sighed, as if it was all too long ago.
Its useful, is it, the FLUENCY thing...? he asked suddenly.
I think so, yes, sir. I think its long overdue.
Yes, I rather thought you would think that... MacDonald isnt so sure - well, I suppose
you know that.
He receives the reports, sir. I suppose he reads them. Oh, yes, Im sure we all read
them, replied Hollis, They make fascinating reading. All that history. Always good to
blow a few cobwebs off the pipes.
He smiled his Cheshire cat smile again.
Well, thank you for your frankness, Peter, he said, rising from his seat. I must be
getting on. Good to have this chat, though... He strode stiffly back to his work. Like two
actors we exited to different wings, our roles complete.
I never saw Roger Hollis again. Within a few days the new Director-General, Martin
Furnival Jones, was installed in the office. His first decision was to remove the
photographs from the wall and place them in his ante-office.
Dont need an audience for the job, he muttered darkly when I asked why.
F.J. was a man of few words, and he grew into the job. He was a determined man who
believed he faced one major problem - the scale of the Soviet assault, in terms of
numbers of Russian intelligence officers in London, relative to his own pitiful forces. His
tenure as Director-General was marked by his campaign to expand MI5 and reduce
Soviet diplomatic personnel. He had some success with the first, and eventually
triumphed with the second.
F.J.s top priority was Russian counterespionage, and once he took over, the whole
approach to the problem changed. Whereas before I had to be persistent to get
anything approved, with F.J. I could buzz him, go right up to see him, and get a decision
there and then. He supported the D3 inquiries unreservedly, and sanctioned all the
important interviews without question. He never shrank from making value judgments
in cases like Watson and Proctor. If the evidence convinced him, he would act on it. F.J.
was a man of few complexities. He was typical English gentleman on the surface, with a
streak of toughness a mile wide just underneath. It made him few friends in Whitehall,
but it was what the Service needed.
Sadly for me, he appointed Anthony Simkins as his deputy. Simkins was probably the
one man in MI5 whom I actively disliked, and the feeling was reciprocated in full
measure. I knew I would have trouble as soon as he was appointed. Simkins was a
lawyer. He and I had already had a major argument some years before, when he was
Director-General of C Branch, where he had had some modest success. I was asked to
chair an interdepartmental working party consisting of MI5, MI6, the Foreign Office, and
GCHQ to review technical security at the British Embassy in Moscow, following a fire in
the radio room responsible for intercepting local Russian communications. It was clear
from the investigation that not only had the Russians started the fire deliberately, but
that they had had access to the radio room for some time. The Russians had been
reading the radio receiver settings each night, thus they knew what we were
intercepting. The Russians who cleaned the Embassy simply unscrewed the bolts (which
were well oiled) on the security door lock and walked straight in.
During the course of the inquiry I was also able to solve one other riddle from Volkovs
list. Volkov claimed that the Russians could read the Foreign Office ciphers in Moscow.
Maclean certainly betrayed every code he had access to in the Foreign Office, but
Foreign Office records showed that the Moscow Embassy used one-time pads during
and just after the war, so Maclean could not have been responsible. Remembering my
work with the Thing in 1951, I was sure the Russians had been using a concealed
microphone system, and we eventually found two microphones buried in the plaster
above the cipher room. During the war, two clerks routinely handled the Embassy
onetime pad communications, one reading over the clear text message for the other to
encipher. The Russians simply recorded the clear text straight through their
microphones. By the very good work of the Building Research Laboratory we were able
to establish that the probable date of the concrete embedding of the microphone was
about 1942, when the Embassy was in Kuibyshev.
The Working Party Report found an extraordinary and persistent level of appalling
security inside the Embassy, and every member of the committee endorsed a highly
critical conclusion, which demanded the installation of an MI5 officer to work full-time
in the Embassy on security. I circulated the trenchant report to F.J., who was then
Deputy Director-General, and asked for his approval before I sent it to the Foreign
Office. F.J. suggested I show it to Simkins as a courtesy, since he was Director C,
responsible for Protective Security, and technically the Working Party covered his area. I
sent Simkins a copy, and was surprised, a few hours later, to receive an angry summons
to his office.
You cant possibly send anything like this to the Foreign Office, he said, is if I were
suggesting sending inquisition implements as a gift to the Pope.
Why ever not? I asked. Its about time the bastards received a blasting. The whole
place is a shambles!
Well, Im sorry. Its the Foreign Office. Its a most important department of state, and
you simply have no business sending them reports like this. I dont propose to approve
it!
To my amazement, he defaced the report with a blue pencil. I took the report to F.J. and
showed him what Simkins had. done. F.J. grunted, and told me to type it up and send it
unchanged.
Bloody Foreign Office, he growled, Ive had the bloody lot of them...
The report was sent and a young MI5 officer, Tony Motion, was sent out to Moscow, but
from then on I knew Simkins was an enemy for life. Shortly after F.J. took over as
Director-General the FLUENCY Working Party submitted its first report to him and to
Dick White, as chief of MI6. The report was in two sections. The first half listed each of
the twenty-eight allegations which we were sure were true bills and investigatable but
which could not be attributed to any known spy. The second half of the report
contained the allegations written up as a narrative, starting with Gouzenkos Elli in 1942,
and ending with Golitsins information in 1962, to show the more or less continuous
nature of the penetration. This report was submitted to both chiefs. But it was six
months before the report was discussed again. Then we were told to resubmit our
findings, listing only those allegations which we felt could be investigated, and giving the
candidate who, in our judgment, best fitted the allegation.
The FLUENCY Working Party decided that Gouzenkos Elli and Volkovs Acting Head
should both be investigated, and that because of their closeness in time, they should be
considered together. The candidate was typed neatly at the bottom of the page.
Stripped of title, stripped of rank, it was just a name: Roger Hollis.
The third allegation we included in our report was Goleniewskis middling-grade
agent, and it was potentially as damaging as the first two pointing toward Hollis. The
middling-grade agent story began in November 1963. Goleniewski, Sniper as he was
previously known, finally agreed to meet MI5 to clarify some of the details of the
allegations he had made in anonymous letters from Poland. Previously Goleniewski was
unwilling to meet anyone directly from MI5 because of our failure to catch Lambda 1,
George Blake. But with Blake in jail, Goleniewski was seen by the head of the Polish
section, who was himself half Polish by descent.
By the time MI5 saw Goleniewski, the CIA suspected he was going clinically insane. He
began to have delusions that he was descended from the Tsar, but despite that, his
recall of intelligence remained remarkably accurate. One morning during the course of
his interviews, Goleniewski announced that he had a story to tell which he had never
told before. He said that he had not mentioned it before because the British had made
such a mess of detecting Blake, but he knew there was a middling-grade agent inside
MI5.
Goleniewski said he knew about the middling-grade agent because he, a friend, and his
former superior, had a serious discussion in the 1950s about whether to defect to the
West. Deciding between Britain and the USA was difficult. All three agreed that Britain
was the better place to live because of the large Polish emigre community, but MI6 was
obviously impossible to approach because of Lambda 1. Goleniewski suggested to the
other two that they try to contact MI5 through the emigre community in London, which
he knew was monitored extensively by D Branch. Goleniewskis chief said that this plan
was equally dangerous, since he knew the Russians also had a spy inside MI5. This spy
had been recruited by the Third Chief Directorate of the KGB, responsible for the armed
services. The Third Chief Directorate had been allowed to keep the agent because he
was so important to them, and he was not transferred to the First Chief Directorate,
which was the usual practice. The agent had served in the British Army, and held rank as
a British officer when he was recruited. Goleniewski thought the recruitment had taken
place in Eastern Europe, and named the Russian KGB colonel who had carried it out. The
spy had provided the Russians with valuable Polish counterintelligence, probably
because he worked in the Polish section of MI5.
There was one other detail. In the mid-1950s the British successfully exfiltrated the
Polish premier, Hanke, to the West. This had resulted in an inquiry in Warsaw, which
General Serov, then head of the KGB, conducted himself. For some reason the KGB had
failed to gain advance warning of the exfiltration, and Goleniewski learned that this was
because the middling-grade agent was on ice, either because he was under suspicion
or because he was abroad and out of contact, or simply because his nerve was shaky.
The spy was apparently perhaps on ice for two to three years before resuming work in
the Polish section in the late 1950s. Later, when Goleniewski was in Moscow in 1959 he
asked a friend in the Third Chief Directorate who was responsible for recruiting the
agent, and if the operation was still active. His friend expressed surprise that he even
knew of the affair, and advised him to remain quiet.
This is a very dark affair, he said, and I advise you to forget all about it.
Goleniewskis allegation was extraordinarily detailed, but because of the overload in
Counterintelligence from late 1963 onward, and because of the doubts about
Goleniewskis credibility, the allegation was not investigated properly until FLUENCY
began sitting. We divided the allegation up into its seven separate indicators, and
allotted marks to every candidate who fulfilled each of the criteria. Eight people in MI5
partially fitted Goleniewskis middling-grade agent, but one fitted every single part of it
exactly. His name was Michael Hanley, the Director of C Branch, and a man strongly
tipped to become F.J.s successor.
Solely because he was the proverbial perfect fit, FLUENCY unanimously recommended
that Hanley be investigated in connection with Goleniewskis allegation, and he was
given the code name HARRIET. Another six months went by before the second FLUENCY
report was finally discussed. Another meeting was called after hours in F.J.s conference
room, attended by me, Anne Orr-Ewing, Patrick Stewart, Evelyn McBarnet, Anthony
Simkins, and F.J.. It was to be an entirely internal MI5 discussion as each of the three
outstanding FLUENCY cases was an MI5 rather than an MI6 matter.
It was the sort of meeting which began quietly. F.J. had a bottle of Scotch on the table.
The lights cast dramatic shadows across the room. F.J. was striding up and down, his
pipe clenched ferociously between his teeth.
He spun around.
Do you really stand by these candidates? he asked. You realize the implications of
what you are saying?
Certainly I do, I said, shaken nevertheless by the force of his approach.
Its grotesque, he muttered, stabbing at the Hollis pages, you cant expect me to
accept that.
He threw the report down onto the desk.
Wheres this going to end, Peter - youve sent me a paper which says that my
predecessor and most likely my successor are both spies. Have you thought it through?
Have you stopped to think of the damage that will be done if we act on these
recommendations? It will take a decade to recover from this, even if theres nothing at
the end of it. I stand by what we have written, F.J., and whats more, so does every
other member of the FLUENCY Working Party, and I can assure you if there were other
candidates, you would have had them. Simkins was sitting at the other end of the
table. I could feel him chafing at the bit. He wanted to tear into me. But this was F.J.s
interrogation, and he wanted no distractions.
Youve wanted this on the record for years - you and Arthur, havent you? Have you
any idea what this kind of thing did to Roger? I talked with him about it shortly before
he left, I told F.J.. He was quite calm about it.
F.J. was taken aback as I described my last confrontation with Hollis.
He must have been a tough man, he said grimly.
Finally, Simkins saw his chance.
Its simply outrageous, he spat in a shrill voice, his public-school vowels stretching to
breaking point, everyone knows you and Martin had it in for Roger. You go around
criticizing the Foreign Office, this person, that person, and then you let fly with
accusations, spreading rumors, spreading poison. Its so undisciplined. If there is a
criticism of Roger, its that he let you go too far. All I want is the truth, Anthony, I
said, trying with difficulty to maintain civility.
Truth! You dont know the meaning of it. You need a bit of respect! Its scandalous!
The man has scarcely set foot outside the office and you blackguard his name and
reputation, a man with thirty years service in the office, who did more for the place
than you will ever do.
Luckily, Patrick Stewart rallied back on my behalf. Its all very well, Anthony, to sound
off, but youve only just come into this.
He gripped the sides of his wheelchair, his knuckles turning white. Some of us have
been struggling with this problem for years. Its not easy. Its not pleasant, but we all felt
that it had to be done, and the least we expect when we have completed a report as
difficult as this is a little rational debate.
But Simkins was determined to press on.
What about America - you spread the poison out there too. When I was out there all
they wanted to discuss was bloody penetration. Its intolerable. Well be made the
laughingstock of the world. And you dont think we are when Philby goes or Blunt
confesses... I shot back.
F.J. chewed his pipe energetically, occasionally pausing to light it with a match, almost
as if he were not listening to the row ebbing and flowing. Then after half an hour he
suddenly interrupted. Right, heres my decision. I am sure you will agree Peter, that we
have to solve the middling-grade agent as the top priority. Hes still in here if he exists.
I nodded.
Well, I want Hanley looked at. He slapped the page with the back of his hand. Hes
such a perfect fit, and the Americans know all about the allegation. But I want the
others who score highly looked at as well... I want it run down to the ends of the earth,
and then well tell the Americans. As for the other - he was glaring at me now - I wont
change my view, its grotesque...
F.J. dismissed the meeting, and everyone trooped out, leaving him alone with the cares
of office on his shoulders. He was the Pope, trying to reconcile a divided Church.
20 -
Hanley was a huge, florid man, with an outwardly bullying manner, which concealed a
shy man underneath. Ever since his promotion as Director C in 1960, he was seen as a
potential Director-General. He was the right age, mid-forties, with a supple civil
servants mind, which endeared him to Whitehall, and a brusque military exterior which
made him popular with the board at M15. By the time the HARRIET investigation
emerged he was the crown prince - certain to succeed F.J. when he retired in the early
1970s.
It is always distressing to pursue an investigation into a colleague. With Hollis and
Mitchell it was different. They were distant figures, close to retirement by the time the
suspicions against them hardened. But Hanley and I knew each other well. We were
contemporaries, and although by no stretch of the imagination friends, we had served
together amicably on committees for over ten years. His career lay in front of him, and
his future was in my hands.
Patrick Stewart, the D1 (Investigations), and I handled the investigation jointly. The first
task was to provide a complete picture of Hanleys life. We started backtracking through
his family background, his entry into the Service, and his subsequent career. Dozens of
people who knew him were interviewed, all under the guise of a routine positive vet.
The most difficult aspect of all in the HARRIET affair was that the investigation soon
revealed that Hanley had had a most distressing childhood following the breakup of his
parents marriage. He was left with deep-seated feelings of inferiority, which, according
to his record of service, required psychiatric treatment in the 1950s, when he was a
young MI5 officer, a fact which Hanley made known to the office at the time.
That Hanley had visited a psychiatrist was not in itself unusual. Many senior officers in
MI5 had counseling of one form or another during their careers to assist them in
carrying the burdens of secrecy. But inevitably our investigation had to probe Hanleys
old wounds, in case they revealed a motive for espionage. F.J., Patrick Stewart, and I
discussed the problem, and F.J. wrote a personal letter to Hanleys psychiatrist asking
him to lift the oath of confidentiality. I visited the psychiatrist in Harley Street. He knew
Hanleys occupation, and showed no hesitation in pronouncing Hanley a determined,
robust character who had learned to live with his early disabilities. I asked him if he
could ever conceive of him as a spy.
Absolutely not! he replied with total conviction. Neither was there any hint of
espionage in Hanleys early life. At Oxford before the war he was the model of the
sensible, mildly leftwing student. When war came he stayed at Oxford for a year to get
his degree and then joined a searchlight regiment in Home Defense as a subaltern, and
remained there until 1945. It was important work, but not remotely adequate for
someone of Hanleys considerable intellectual gifts. But everyone who knew him at this
time remarked on his nagging sense of inferiority, and the consequent lack of ambition.
The first point in his life which aroused our interest was his decision, in 1945, to enroll
for a crash course in the Russian language at the Joint Services Language School at
Cambridge, which both our own operations and Golitsin had told us was a recruiting
ground for the KGB (but there was not the slightest evidence from our sources that
Hanley had been involved with them). The Russian language course was the first time
Hanley came into contact with Russians, and from then on his career seemed an
uncanny fit for Goleniewskis allegations. After service in Budapest, where he served on
the Joint Allied Intelligence Committee with the KGB officer named by Goleniewski as
having made the recruitment of the middling-grade agent, Hanley returned to London.
He became the War Office liaison officer with the Soviet military attache, and dealt
mainly with returnee problems. During this time he began to have dealings with MI5,
and when he was demobilized in the late 1940s, he applied for a full-time post, and
joined as a research officer on Russian Affairs. His first task was the compilation of the
index of agents of the Rote Kapelle which decades later I was to find so invaluable in my
D3 work.
Within two years Hanley shifted to the Polish desk (D2) and his career took off. First he
went to Hong Kong for two and a half years and then returned to E Branch (Colonial
Affairs) before becoming head of D2, and in 1960 a member of the Board as Director C.
It was a career with everincreasing momentum, yet his background presented a possible
espionage profile. Here was a man from a troubled childhood, with deep-seated feelings
of insecurity, who comes into continuous contact with Russians at a delicate time of his
life, when he is beginning for the first time to emerge from his shell. Perhaps, like Blake,
he had a chip on his shoulder, and the Russians had played skillfully on his concealed
feelings of resentment until they fanned into treachery. The problem was that neither
Patrick nor I believed it, despite the fact that on paper the surface fit with Goleniewskis
allegation was so precise. It was the exact reverse of the case with Hollis, where we
were both instinctively convinced of the case against him, even though on paper the
connections looked far weaker.
As far as Hanley was concerned, too much weighed against the chip on the shoulder
theory. From the start of his career in MI5, Hanley had been marked out as a flyer. He
was valued by both his peers and his superiors, despite his often hectoring manner. He
had married into the office, and enjoyed a close and devoted relationship with his wife.
And lastly there was the evidence of the psychiatrist. Espionage is a crime almost
devoid of evidence, which is why intuition, for better or worse, always has a large part
to play in its successful detection. All a counterespionage officer usually has when he
confronts his suspect is a background, a trail, a set of coincidences which are open to a
variety of interpretations but which, as Dick White used to say, lead to the epiphany -
that moment when all the facts add up to only one conclusion. But with Hanley, the trail
led one way, and intuition another. The only possible way to resolve the case was
through interrogation, and when we submitted the papers to F.J. he agreed.
Mention interrogations, and most people imagine grueling sessions under blazing
lamps: men in shirt-sleeves wearing down a sleep-deprived suspect with aggressive
questioning until finally he collapses sobbing on the floor, admitting the truth. The
reality is much more prosaic. MI5 interrogations are orderly affairs, usually conducted
between 9:30 A.M. and 5 P. M. with a break for lunch.
So why do so many spies confess? The secret is to achieve superiority over the man
sitting across the table. This was the secret of Skardons success as an interrogator.
Although we mocked him years later for his willingness to clear suspects we
subsequently learned to have been spies, he was genuinely feared by Blunt and other
members of the Ring of Five. But his superiority in the interrogation room was not based
on intellect or physique. Mainly, of course, it was the devastating briefs provided for
him by Arthur Martin and Evelyn McBarnet which convinced men like Fuchs that
Skardon knew them better than they knew themselves. It was not only the briefs that
helped Skardon but also the skill of the eavesdroppers. In the Fuchs case, Skardon was
convinced that he was innocent until they pointed out where Fuchs had lied. This
information enabled Skardon to break him. But Skardon himself played an important
role too. He epitomized, in his manner, the world of sensible English middle-class values
- tea in the afternoon and lace curtains - so much so that it was impossible for those he
interrogated to ever see him as the embodiment of capitalist iniquity, and thus they
were thrown off balance from the very start.
But none of this stood a chance against Hanley if he was a spy. He was an insider. He
knew all the tricks too well. Like Philby, he would see the punches coming. The only way
to proceed with a professional is to put him through an extremely thorough vet. A
complete curriculum vitae of the suspects life and career is drawn up, and he is taken
through it in interrogation. If there are any deviations, omissions, or inaccuracies, these
are then probed. If the suspect is guilty the pressure can often lead to further
inaccuracies, until his secret life begins to unravel.
The MI5 technique is an imperfect system. But like trial by jury, it is the best yet devised.
It has the virtue of enabling a man, if he has nothing to hide, and has the resilience to
bear the strain, to clear himself. But its disadvantage is that hidden blemishes on an
innocent mans record can often come to the surface during intensive investigation and
render continued service impossible. It is a little like medieval justice: sometimes
innocence can be proved only at the cost of a career.
F.J. elected to conduct Hanleys interrogation himself. He knew it would be a difficult
encounter and that in the end Hanleys fate would rest in his own hands, and he felt it
unfair to entrust the task to any other officer. But he ensured that Patrick and I
monitored the entire interrogation from the Dl operations room in Leconfield House.
Hanley was summoned into F.J.s office one morning, and informed that an allegation
had been made, and that he was required to submit himself immediately for
interrogation. The interrogation took place in the Director-Generals office, with an
overt microphone on the table. It was recorded in the room where Patrick and I were
monitoring the interrogation. Throughout the first day F.J. took Hanley through his life.
Hanley was scrupulously honest, sometimes painfully so. He ducked no questions, hid
no details of his life or his inner feelings. On the second day he was given the details of
Goleniewskis allegation. He was not shaken in any way. He agreed that he was a perfect
fit, but calmly stated that he was not a spy, had never been, and had never at any stage
been approached by a Russian or anyone else, although at least once a week in
Budapest he had met the Russian officer who was alleged to have made the approach.
Hanleys interrogation proved that while secret service is a profession of deceit and
intrigue, many of its practitioners are men of exceptional character. Here was a proud
man, who cherished his achievements, and those that he felt might be his to come. One
morning he is invited to undergo a trial by ordeal and is stripped apart, year by year,
until his soul is bare. All the while he knows that faceless colleagues have dogged his
every step, listening at home, listening at the office, listening now. The strain must have
been more than most men could bear. No one listening could doubt for one moment
that this was an honest man. Hanley was tough, and he showed the system could work.
He walked through the fire and emerged unscathed. That night F.J., Patrick Stewart,
and I went to my club, the Oxford and Cambridge, to discuss the interrogation. F.J.
settled down into a corner with a large Scotch. His eyes were pinched, as they always
were when he was stressed.
Are you satisfied? he asked dully.
Hes in the clear, I agreed.
Patrick nodded silently.
Youll inform FLUENCY, of course...? said F. J.. At that moment Hanley himself walked
in unexpectedly. He and I shared the same club, and occasionally ran into each other,
but I never expected he would come there so soon after his ordeal. We were in a quiet
corner, and he walked past without noticing us, dragging his feet slightly, as if in shock.
His normally florid face was white as a sheet.
After the HARRIET investigation was closed down, F.J. asked me to visit the CIA and
inform them that MI5 considered Hanley cleared of the Goleniewski allegations. It was a
job of enormous sensitivity. The CIA were already up in arms over the Mitchell and
Hollis cases, and were themselves well aware of Goleniewskis allegations, and the fact
that Hanley was a near-perfect fit. It was essential for the preservation of the alliance
that they be left in no doubt about the veracity of our conclusion.
F.J. did not get on with Americans particularly well, and preferred to leave dealings to
Michael McCaul and me. Partly it was antipathy toward Angleton, and partly it was
residual upper-middle-class anti-Americanism. Dick White had something of the same
prejudice. Neither was a wealthy man, while Helms and Angleton rarely hid the fact that
they were paid handsomely for similar duties.
Both men had reason to distrust the Americans deep down. F.J. never forgave Helms
and Angleton for the Gray and Coyne affair, while Dick had clashed repeatedly with the
American military hierarchy when he controlled Counterintelligence in Europe at the
end of the war, and was never forgiven. In 1953, when Sillitoe retired, the Americans
stupidly tried to block his appointment as Director-General. There was, in the end, a
fundamental difference in approach. Both F.J. and Dick saw themselves as servants of
the Crown, and their services as part of the orderly, timeless configuration of Whitehall.
They were insiders, whereas Helms, Angleton, and Hoover were all outsiders. There was
a streak of ruthlessness and lawlessness about the American intelligence community
which disturbed many in the senior echelons of British Intelligence. They feared a future
calamity, and wanted to keep their distance, so inevitably the weight of liaison often fell
on the shoulders of officers like me.
I traveled to Washington in 1968 to brief Angleton on the results of the HARRIET case.
We had a businesslike meeting. I outlined the course of the investigation, and told him
we were unanimously of the view that Hanley was in the clear. Angleton then took me
to see Dick Helms and explained to him what my mission was. Helms said that he did
not wish to hear anything more, if I said that Hanley was in the clear, he unconditionally
accepted my word. But the clearance of Hanley solved very little.
After we left Helms, Angleton said that he wanted to discuss with me the question of
Goleniewskis being a plant. The HARRIET fit was so perfect that it did not need a
suspicious man to believe the KGB had deliberately planted the allegation to discredit
him. Angleton and Helms already suspected that Goleniewski had fallen back under
Russian control shortly before he defected. Repeated analysis of the intelligence he
provided showed a distinct change in its character from Polish to Russian matters, as if
the Russians were deliberately feeding out barium meals of their own intelligence in
order to isolate the leak. This analysis was shared by MI5, and was the main reason why
Goleniewskis middling-grade agent story was ignored for such a long time. The clearing
of HARRIET raised a major question mark over the validity of the middling-grade agent,
and the validity of Goleniewskis information, particularly after he defected. The
middling-grade agent story did not appear until November 1963. Goleniewski defected
in January 1961. Now for the KGB to concoct the story in the detail they did, they would
need access to Hanleys record of service. With his position, the only person who could
acquire this would be Roger Hollis. But if Goleniewski had been turned, or was the
unwitting vehicle for disinformation, what were the implications for the other assets
MI6 and the CIA held in Poland, which since the war had been the Wests most
consistently fruitful sphere of Eastern Bloc operations? I did some preliminary work on
this subject during the HARRIET investigation. I found, to my horror, that for a long
period all agents run by MI6 were met at a flat rented by a secretary in the Warsaw MI6
station. Over ninety meetings had taken place there. I speculated that perhaps the
reason why the UB and the KGB apparently failed to detect this astonishing series of
meetings was that they were planting false agents on us. MI6 hackles were raised again,
as they had been over the Penkovsky affair.
The belief that defectors were being sent to deceive Western counterintelligence during
the sudden flood of arrivals in the early 1960s obsessed all of us. Golitsins central
contention was that the KGB had embarked on a systematic disinformation campaign,
and that false defectors would be sent to the West to discredit him. Almost immediately
Yuri Nossenko arrived on the CIAs doorstep, appearing to deflect many of the leads
Golitsin gave about Soviet penetration of American and British Intelligence.
Nossenko threw the CIA into turmoil. He told them he had seen the file belonging to Lee
Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of President Kennedy. He claimed the KGB had no
involvement in the assassination, and had made no contact with Oswald in Russia,
despite the fact that he had worked on a Top Secret U2 surveillance base shortly before
defecting. To many officers in the CIA, Nossenkos story was too pat, especially when it
was found that he had lied about his rank and status in the KGB. But why had he been
sent? The CIA set about trying to break Nossenko using methods of imprisonment and
physical pressure which would never have been tolerated in MI5. But even by 1967 they
were no nearer to solving the riddle.
Suspicions were also growing about the FBI sources Top Hat and Fedora, who were
passing information while still in place, but refusing to disclose their provenance. They
provided bona fides for Nossenko, as if to assure the Americans that he was genuine,
even to the extent of supporting Nossenkos claim to a false rank. But if Top Hat and
Fedora were phony, what of the leads they gave to penetrations of British security?
Fedora had given the tip which led to Martelli, albeit that it resulted in the disastrous
prosecution and his acquittal. Top Hat passed copies of documents detailing American
weapons guidance systems to the Americans which, he claimed, the Soviets were
obtaining from a source in Britain. After investigation we were able to catch Frank
Bossard, an officer in the Missile Guidance Branch of the Aviation Ministry. He was
arrested in 1965, and sent to prison for twenty-one years. If Fedora and Top Hat were
plants, then the Russians were prepared to sacrifice huge assets in order to build up
their bona fides. It must be taken into account that had it not been for the skill of GCHQ
we probably would not have obtained the evidence which proved that Bossard was
working for the GRU.
We were in the place Angleton called the wilderness of mirrors, where defectors are
false, lies are truth, truth lies, and the reflections leave you dazzled and confused. The
idea of false defectors is a hard one to accept, unless you read the history books and
learn how MI5 did it with the Double Cross System throughout the war. It is now an
unfashionable theory. But there are very few intelligence officers who lived through
those years of the 1960s who do not believe that during that period we were the victim
of some kind of Soviet ploy involving defectors. Some may dispute whether it was
successful, or debate the limits of its scale, but few would doubt that such a game was
being played. Furthermore, it could be played only if the Russians had good feedback
from MI5 of intelligence about the game. Twenty years later the truth of those years is
still impossible to tie down. Goleniewski, Penkovsky, Nossenko, Fedora, and Top Hat - all
had signs of interference in one way or another. I do not mean that each was a
conscious false defector, although Fedora and Top Hat certainly were, as even the FBI
were forced to conclude in the 1970s, long after I retired. But I do think they were being
used at various times - Penkovsky to influence our perception of Soviet missile
technology;
Nossenko to influence the American attitude to the Kennedy assassination. Goleniewski,
Fedora, and Top Hat, I believe, were part of a systematic attempt to rupture the all-
important Anglo-American intelligence alliance, and also to support the deception about
the performance of the Soviet ICBMs until the mid-1970s. Consider the timing of key
pieces of intelligence from these three defectors. Goleniewski gave his information
about the middling-grade agent in late 1963, nearly three years after his defection. This
was at the time of Hollis visit to Washington to brief the FBI and CIA on the results of
the Mitchell investigation. Nothing could be better designed to precipitate the final
breach in relations between British and American intelligence than another apparently
undetected spy in MI5. Luckily, Angletons doubts about Goleniewski ensured that the
story did not have the drastic impact it might otherwise have had, and in fact only
served to strengthen Anglo-American suspicions of both Goleniewski and Hollis.
Almost immediately Fedora made contact with the Americans, and gave the lead which
led us to Martelli. Discovery of another nuclear spy was guaranteed to create the
maximum possible strain between London and Washington, though the KGB could
never have dreamed that MI5 would botch the prosecution as badly as they did.
Months later, as if part of a coordinated campaign, Top Hat led us to Bossard. Once
again, American weapons technology was involved, which automatically meant that the
American armed forces would take an active role in protesting at British security
weaknesses. When we made the damage assessment for Bossard, we concluded that
virtually the entire advanced American guidance systems had been betrayed. Patrick
Stewart sent an advance copy to Angleton with a one-word memorandum attached. It
read simply: Help!
Luckily for Britain, Angleton was able to protect us from the onslaught. But it was a
close-run thing, and few realize today that the exchange came nearer to breakdown in
the early years of the 1960s than at any time since the war.
The night before I returned to London, Angleton and I went to dinner at a small Chinese
restaurant in Alexandria, where his son ate regularly. It was one of Angletons favorite
haunts when he felt the need to talk. We could be assured of privacy, he told me,
because the Chinese kept the Russians out.
Angleton was at the zenith of his power, although the strain was beginning to tell on
him. For years he had been waging a covert bureaucratic war with the Soviet Division of
the CIA, to ensure the independence and expansion of his counterintelligence empire.
He had been successful beyond all expectations, and achieved virtual veto influence
over all operations and personnel within the Agency. He controlled the Israeli account,
and made the CIA station in Tel Aviv redundant. He ensured that all important
communications with British Intelligence went through him personally, bypassing the
London station. He even succeeded in establishing his own counterintelligence cipher
independent of CIA communications, which he claimed were insecure, although we all
believed that the real reason was empire-building. The CAZAB conferences were his
outstanding achievement. The best, the brightest, and the most senior officers in
Western intelligence came together once every eighteen months to discuss his agenda -
the Soviet threat, the role of counterintelligence - and to conduct doom-laden future
scenarios. In Angletons mind, not unreasonably, the CAZABs were the first decisive step
in creating a unified Western intelligence command capable of challenging the Soviet
Bloc. The CAZAB conferences suited Angletons temperament perfectly, and he always
seemed at his most relaxed in their super-secure, electronically swept environment,
grappling with the endless ambiguities of the wilderness of mirrors. I fully supported
these meetings, which were very important.
Gambling was always a major feature of CAZAB conferences. Each daily session would
usually end with a poker school, a game at which Angleton excelled, although I was
sometimes able to take him to the cleaners. Horse racing was also an occasional
diversion. I remember at the New York CAZAB in the late 1960s-early 1970s, Angleton
became the bookmaker for CAZAB for the Washington International horse race,
featuring horses from all over the world, which was scheduled for the first afternoon.
Before the meeting I asked Angleton to put $100 on the nose of the British horse. Lester
Piggott was riding him and had ridden the winner the previous year. The British horse
was unfancied, but the MI5 and MI6 contingent, anxious to be seen to fly the flag in
even the most secret chambers, soon wagered around $500 between them. That
afternoon, as Angleton delivered a long paper on long-range Soviet disinformation
techniques, most minds, on the British side at least, were down at the racetrack. After
an hour Angletons secretary walked in and nervously handed him a slip of paper. She
handed him two chits; the first said, How much do you want for your house, Jim? and
the second said, The British horse won!
Jesus Christ! cursed Angleton. I forgot to lay the bets off, and that goddamn British
horse has come in at 11 to 1! That night, as we flew back to Washington in a small CIA
propeller plane, Angleton crawled around the belly of the fuselage, paying off his debts
from a huge wad of $100 bills.
The sacrifices I make for the West... he said, as he paid me my whack.
But the humor could not mask the fact that he was making enemies throughout the CIA
- in the Soviet Division, among other directors jealous of his power, and among those
officers whose promotion prospects he had adversely affected. He was safe while Helms
was Director, but the war in Vietnam was rapidly altering the face of the Agency, and
the gathering political fashion for detente was beginning to undermine the foundations
of Cold War suspicion upon which his empire was built.
One Cold War veteran, Bill Harvey, had already gone, driven into retirement by
alcoholism. Angleton, too, was drinking far more than was good for him, and had begun
to look not merely pallid but genuinely ravaged. His mood changed too. He became
increasingly introspective, and the dry humor became less and less visible. He seemed
pent-up and aggressive, trusting fewer and fewer people, who were turning more and
more against him.
Drinking, smoking, and fishing were Angletons main releases. Barry Russell Jones told
me in amazement of accompanying him on a fishing trip to a stretch of river he owned
in Idaho, and finding that Angleton had buried bottles of Jack Daniels under the water
at hundred-yard intervals, so that he could never be caught short. Back in Washington
he found relief in growing exotic orchids (he was a world expert), crafting leatherwork,
gold-beating, or making fishing lures for his friends and admirers.
Angleton and I talked until 4 A.M. We examined every possible scenario of the
defections. Who was true, and who was false? Who defected, and who was sent? The
lines were embedded like poetry in a childs mind. We were both on the rack. So much
depended on making the right assumptions about the defectors - for him, the
assassination of his President; for me, the next move in the hunt for the mole.
Eventually we walked back through Alexandria toward the 44
th
Street bridge. Angleton
had parked his car down behind the Okinawa Memorial, near the National Cemetery.
Angleton was highly patriotic in that unique American way which expresses itself in
reverence for the flag, and symbols of national heritage, like the Okinawa Memorial,
fascinated him. He paused to look across at it. The cars swished past behind us on the
freeway. This is Kims work, he muttered. It was one of the few times I ever heard him
mention his old friend Philby.
If there was a plot to deceive the West using defectors in the early 1960s, we were easy
prey to it. Throughout those years there was a conscious policy in both London and
Washington to do everything possible to attract defectors. They were seen as the secret
weapon which could disrupt the smooth machine in Dzherzhinsky Square. In part this
policy grew up through feelings of guilt. Early defectors like Gouzenko and Von Petrov
had been poorly rewarded for their services, and felt bitter at the treatment they had
received. They were paid a fee, and then pushed back out into the cold, and expected to
make lives for themselves as best they could. Most failed. There was guilt, too, at the
inadequate security arrangements which led to the deaths of Volkov and Krivitsky, and
we feared that unless a conscious effort was made to show the benefits of defection,
word would get back East and inhibit further approaches.
By the time Golitsin came over, the policy had hardened. Any means to secure
defections were authorized, starting with immense payments, but including other
methods also. I remember one particular operation which began in the mid-1960s
involving a senior KGB officer named Sergei Grigovin (a pseudonym) which illustrates
the lengths we were prepared to go to. Grigovin was already known to us, because he
had served in Denmark, and the Danish intelligence service had alerted us routinely to
his identity. They also provided us with a few snippets of intelligence about him - one in
particular was that he had a reputation for enjoying the company of women. The source
report was circulated through to D4, the agent-running section of D Branch, and they
were instructed to keep an eye out for Grigovins indiscretions, since he had left his wife
in Moscow.
Any Russian, and especially a KGB officer, who is caught liaising with women in the West
by the KGB security division, the SK, is in serious trouble, and the case had distinct
possibilities. A year later a D4 agent runner received the first tip. An agent of his, a
senior executive at the DAILY MIRROR newspaper, was in the habit of occasionally
meeting Grigovin at dinner parties. A woman friend of his told him that Grigovin was
having an affair with a friend to whom she had introduced the Russian. D4 raised the
matter at the weekly meeting with D1 (Operations) and it was agreed that a much closer
eye would be kept on the situation. The agent runner was told to encourage his agent
gently to keep an eye on the evolving romance. Eventually Grigovin finished with the
girl, and when he next met the woman who had introduced them, he asked if she knew
any other friends. The D1 realized immediately this was our chance. If we could
introduce our own girl to Grigovin we would be in a perfect position to begin an
entrapment operation. The plan was put up to F.J., who gave his consent, although the
operation was kept secret from the Foreign Office, on the grounds that they would very
likely veto it. D4 were instructed to produce a woman suitable for the job. They had a
number of high-class call-girls they used for entrapments, and eventually one was
successfully introduced to Grigovin at a party. He took the bait perfectly, and was soon
engaged in an affair with her. Events began to move toward their climax. He was placed
under intensive surveillance, and we analyzed the various possibilities. It was obvious
from the surveillance that Grigovin was purely interested in the girl for sex, and there
was thought to be little chance of playing on his heartstrings. It had to be
straightforward entrapment. The plans for a defection are complex, and require weeks
of careful planning. First a room was hired, and a two-way mirror and camera
equipment installed. Then safe houses, and transport arrangements were made to
safeguard Grigovin should he decide to defect. He had a family in Moscow, and checks
were made on them in case he bargained for them to be exfiltrated as well.
Finally the day came. The D1 took charge of the operation himself. Grigovin and the girl
arrived, and we ensured we had a good ten minutes of film of them in bed before the
D1 and two burly MI5 officers opened the door with one of Leslie Jaggers keys.
One of ours, Im afraid... said the D1, as the girl was hustled out of the door.
Grigovin looked momentarily stunned. The D1 pointed to the mirror. For a moment the
KGB man looked straight into the camera. Then he understood.
I am a diplomat, said the Russian. I demand to speak to the Embassy... I have my
pass!
He tried to reach across toward his trousers. One of our boys stood on them.
Hardly diplomatic behavior, said the D1. He bent down and threw the naked Russian
his underpants. Then he got down to business. Lets face it, youre finished, Grigovin.
Theyll send you back if they find out.
He let the thought sink in.
You look as if youre more suited to the West. We know, weve checked. Four years in
America, three years in Denmark. Now London. You dont want to go back anyway, do
you? Why dont you come over? Well look after you. Theres a good pension. Youll be
safe. The Russian brushed the offer aside with a wave of his hand, and again demanded
to speak to his Embassy.
For two hours the D1 tried to reason with him. Think of the future, he told him. He
would be stripped of his privileges and sent back to Moscow in disgrace, to serve his
career out in some dreary Siberian outpost. No more foreign exchange, no more
overseas perks. I am a diplomat, Grigovin kept saying I demand to speak to my
Embassy.
He was like a World War II captured airman, reciting only his name, rank, and serial
number. He was a crack soldier, and eventually we realized there was to be no
defection. His clothes were returned and we dumped him back on the pavement near
Kensington Park Gardens. Months of planning, years of patient waiting were wasted.
The next morning an anonymous brown package was delivered to the Embassy,
addressed to the Ambassador personally. It contained photographs of Grigovin in bed.
That evening Special Branch sighted the KGB man being escorted onto an Aeroflot
plane. We did send a report to the MI6 station in Moscow advising them to keep an eye
out for him in case he had second thoughts and managed to make contact. But we
never heard from Grigovin again.
Defections are always tinged with tragedy, but none was as sad as the case involving a
young man called Nadiensky - the defector who changed his mind. He worked for the
shipping section of the Trade Delegation, and we identified him early on as a KGB
officer. He was a quiet man, and his only claim to fame was that his wife was related to
a senior Soviet official in the Politburo. He first came to our attention when the
Watchers saw him meet a girl in a London park. Initially all effort went into the girl. The
Watchers tracked her home, and she was identified as a secretary in a minor
government agency with no access to classified material. Michael McCaul went to see
the girl, and asked why she was meeting a Soviet official. She convinced him that
Nadiensky had no interest in her for espionage purposes. They were in love, and she had
no idea that he was involve with the KGB. She said he was not at all how she imagined
Russians. He was a romantic and rather frightened man, who talked constantly of
making a new life for himself in the West.
Once again D1 (Operations) and D4 met to consider the best course of action. We
decided to ask the girl to continue the affair normally, while we planned an approach to
Nadiensky. It was obvious that the operation could not be sustained over the long term.
The girl was already under great stress, and it seemed likely that she would soon betray
herself. But the prize was a considerable one. Although Nadiensky himself was a low-
level officer, almost certainly co-opted for the duration of his posting in London, he had
enormous propaganda value. This was the time of Stalins daughter Svetlanas
defection, and we knew the embarrassment it would cause the Russians to have a
relative of one of their senior politicians seek asylum in the West. On the following
Sunday Nadiensky was due to visit Harwich on official business. He was accompanying
some Soviet sailors to their ship, which was due to sail that night, and he applied
routinely for permission from the Foreign Office to leave the 80-kilometer restriction
which is imposed on all Eastern Bloc diplomats. McCaul sat in his car outside Harwich
docks with a team of Watchers and waited for Nadiensky to emerge. As he walked past,
McCaul called him by name. He hesitated momentarily.
We know about the girl... hissed McCaul, we know you want to stay.
Get in the car quickly, and we can talk!
Nadiensky looked up and down the street and then, seizing his moment, ducked into the
back of the car. McCaul drove straight to my house in Essex. We gave him tea, and tried
not to talk too much. We had the bird, but it was important not to panic him.
I hear you want to join us...? I began, when Nadiensky had adjusted to his
surroundings.
He nodded, at first nervously, and then decisively.
We believe youve been co-opted? I queried.
He gulped his tea.
The KGB, you mean? he asked in good English.
We assumed you were, I went on.
You have no choice, he flashed suddenly with some bitterness, if they want you to
work for them, they simply order you. You have no choice.
I ran through the arrangements we could make. There would be safety and protection, a
pension, and later perhaps a job. There would be a short meeting with the girl, but then
he would have to work hard for some months.
For British Security I know, he said. He half smiled. He knew the game, co-opted or
not.
That evening we drove Nadiensky to a safe house near Wimbledon, and armed guards
were posted inside with him. Twelve hours later the Foreign Office received a request
from the Soviet Embassy asking if they had any information concerning the
whereabouts of a certain junior diplomat who had disappeared while returning from a
routine visit to Harwich.
The Foreign Office Northern Department had already been alerted to the defection of
Nadiensky by the Deputy Director-General, then F.J.. The Foreign Office treated the
matter as they treated all matters which were likely to upset the Russians, as something
to be avoided at all costs. They immediately sent an official down to the safe house to
interview Nadiensky. He was asked if he was applying voluntarily, and whether he
wanted to speak to anyone at the Soviet Embassy. He confirmed his decision was
voluntary, and told him he had no wish to speak to any Russians. The Foreign Office
broke the news to the Soviet Embassy.
Immediately Nadienskys wife was seen leaving for Moscow. The following day the
Soviet Embassy demanded that the Foreign Office arrange for Nadienskys wife to be
able to speak to him on the telephone from the Soviet Union. At first Nadiensky did not
wish to speak to her, and we were very unhappy at this blatant attempt to pressure a
man already under great strain. But the Foreign Office insisted on protocol. The call was
only the first of many which the Russians insisted on over the next four days. Mostly it
was Nadienskys wife, but other relations took their turn in tearfully pleading with him
to reconsider his decision.
Think of us, they told him, think of the ruin and scandal that will befall us.
Nadiensky began to wilt visibly. Over in Whitehall the Foreign Office and MI5 practically
came to blows. Why did the Foreign Office allow these calls, we wanted to know, when
the Russians never allowed access to our people, like Greville Wynne, when they were
arrested in Moscow. But the Foreign Office, with little regard for our priorities, and
none for Nadienskys interests, sat on the niceties of the diplomatic trade. We cannot
deny the family humanitarian access, they said. On the fourth day Nadiensky told us
he had decided to go back. It was causing too much trouble for his family. McCaul tried
to point out the dangers, but it was futile. He was like a patient on the operating table,
hovering between life and death, and now we could feel him gently slipping away.
Are you sure you want to go back? I asked Nadiensky when I last saw him, shortly
before he went back.
What I want no longer matters, he said without emotion. I have done my duty by my
family.
Fatalism was Nadienskys only refuge. He was one of the many faceless victims of the
Cold War, his life ground down between the two great secret armies which face each
other West and East. But if it was our own fault that we had stumbled into the maze of
intelligence provided by defectors, we desperately needed a way out. Angleton opted
for blind faith in Golitsin to lead him to safety. In one way it made sense to turn to the
architect of the maze to help us find a way out. But although I began as a fervent
admirer of Golitsin and all his theories, by the end of the 1960s I was beginning to have
my doubts.
The problem was Golitsins obsession with his methodology. He claimed that if he was
given access to the files of Western intelligence services it would trigger associations in
his memory which could lead him to spies. The theory was that since so much of the
intelligence he saw in Dzherzhinsky Square was bowdlerized, in other words,
sourcedisguised to protect the identity of the agent supplying the KGB, if he read the
files he might be able to seize on points of familiarity with the material he had seen in
the KGB Registry.
There were two ways of playing Golitsin. One was to accept his methodology, and allow
him to dictate the entire thrust of counterintelligence policy. The other was to continue
the frustrating task of trying to prize out from him the nuggets of fact, such as the sorts
of information contained in the reports he had seen, the approximate location of an
agent, and so forth, which could then be investigated by orthodox counterintelligence
methods.
Where Western counterespionage services succeeded in obtaining from him these kinds
of factual leads, Golitsin was of enormous help. This was how we finally put the finger
on Vassall, and how Marcel Chalet was able to identify Georges Paques. It was the same
with Golitsins political intelligence. Where he stuck to what he saw and what he heard,
he was impressive and believable. There is no question, for instance, that he attended
Shelepins famous conference at which Directorate D, responsible for Disinformation
Operations, was established. But where Golitsin extrapolated from what he knew to
develop broad theories, such as his forty-year grand disinformation program, or where
he attempted to fit events which occurred after his defection into his theories, as he did
with the Sino-Soviet split, he was disastrous.
Most of the Golitsin acolytes in MI5, of which I was one, soon broke with Golitsins
wilder theories and strict adherence to his methodology. Only Arthur, and more junior
officers like Stephen de Mowbray, who was responsible for Golitsin during a spell of
duty as an MI6 liaison officer in Washington in the early 1960s, remained loyal. But in
Washington the situation was very different. Angleton swallowed the methodology
hook, line, and sinker and allowed Golitsin to range freely across the CIAs files, picking
traitors apparently at random, and often unable to justify his decisions on anything
other than the flimsiest of grounds. The results were disastrous, and led to the worst
excesses of counterintelligence misjudgment. A string of senior CIA officers, most
notably Dave Murphy, the head of the Soviet Division, unfairly fell under suspicion, their
careers ruined. In the end, the situation became so bad, with so many different officers
under suspicion as a result of Golitsins leads, that the CIA decided the only way of
purging the doubt was to disband the Soviet Division, and start again with a completely
new complement of officers. It was obviously a way out of the maze, but it could never
justify the damage to the morale in the Agency as a whole.
Although MI5 avoided the excesses of the CIA, Golitsin was still badly handled. He was
allowed to think himself too important. All defectors should be treated at arms length,
and made to earn their keep, and as little feedback as possible should ever be given to
them, so that they are never able to assess their own significance in relation to the rest
of the Intelligence Services activities. Right from his first visit to Britain in 1963, we
opened up to Goltsin, and I was responsible for that as much as anyone. When the
Mitchell case got under way Arthur and I shared everything with him, with Hollis and
F.J.s agreement. He even chose the code name for the case, SPETERS, after a famous
old Chekhist intelligence officer. He knew from the start that we were hunting a high-
level spy, and inevitably that must have colored the intelligence he gave us. In the tense
and almost hysterical months of 1963, as the scent of treachery lingered in every
corridor, it is easy to see how our fears fed on his theories.
But there is no question that he knew of many penetrations in the West. The record in
Britain, Norway, and France proves it. But in our haste we were never able to get an
uncorrupted version of all his leads, and this, I am sure, is still costing the West dear.
The tide finally turned against Golitsin in 1967. He was invited to address the first CAZAB
conference in Melbourne, Australia. His appearance was eagerly awaited by all those
present, since so much of the previous five years had flowed from him. Golitsin was
cocky as ever, and soon launched into a lengthy oration on the failures of Western
intelligence services to interpret his material correctly. I know of more spies, he
boomed, why are you not willing to cooperate with me?
He laid special emphasis on Britain, and the many penetrations which, he claimed, were
as yet undiscovered, and which only he could locate. F.J. was smiling the smile he
reserved for particularly tiresome people. He always hated his linen to be washed in
public. Finally his patience snapped.
What is it you want? he asked. The files... access to your files, replied Golitsin. All
right, you can have them - anything you want. Well see if youve got anything to give
us.
Golitsin came over in spring 1968. I initially pressed him to come over straightaway, but
it was winter in London, and he told me darkly that he had already seen too much snow
in his life. He was set up in a safe house near Brighton, and Michael McCaul and his wife
lived with him to keep house and provide him with company. Every week I came down
from Leconfield House with a briefcase of files for him to study. When I first gave him
material I warned him that he could not take notes. Both F.J. and I were worried that
part of the motivation behind his methodology was so that he could amass as much
intelligence from each Western service as possible for some unknown future purpose.
But of course, he replied huffily, I am a professional, Peter, I understand these
things.
For four months Golitsin roamed across the most secret files in MI5, and every month
Michael McCaul went to Glyn Mills Bank and drew out 10,000 pounds in cash, placed it
in a small suitcase, and brought it down for Golitsin.
But for all the money, there was little that Golitsin had to give. F.J. had called his bluff.
There were some useful things, of course. He studied the VENONA, and was able to fill
in a few groups using his knowledge of KGB procedure. He spent a long time studying
the files of the Joint Services Language School in Cambridge, looking through the
curriculum vitaes of candidates to see if any caught his attention. We even conducted
voice tests with some of those he was particularly interested in, to see if Golitsin could
detect, from the idioms they used, whether or not they were picking up Russian words
from KGB controllers. It was artful, but it never paid off, and in the end we decided that
the only safe thing to do was to close the school down. But in the crucial area - whether
or not he could shed any light on the penetration problem - he was a complete loss. He
filled in some more details in the Skripkin allegation and he did have one totally bizarre
theory. He spent weeks studying the VENONA traffic to see if he could help us identify
the unknown cryptonyms. There were two in particular which interested him - David
and Rosa - who from the message already broken were obviously working together,
probably as man and wife, or perhaps brother and sister. Golitsin asked for the files of
all MI5 officers who had served during the time the VENONA traffic was taken. One day
he announced he had an answer.
Your spies are here. My methodology has uncovered them, he intoned darkly,
pointing his finger like the witch-finder at two files on the table in front of him. I knew
the files well. They belonged to Victor and Tess Rothschild.
Dont be totally absurd, Anatole, I said. Victor is one of the best friends this Service
has ever had... how on earth did you jump at that conclusion?
They are Jewish. David and Rosa are Jewish names... It sounded like KGB anti-
Semitism to me, and I could not help thinking that if this had been the CIA and I had
been Angleton, Victor and Tess would almost certainly have been listed as spies on
Golitsins groundless interpretation.
The principal problem with Golitsins methodology was that he interpreted the files as if
he were still in the KGB. He looked for operations which went wrong, or mistakes which
were attributable to a single officer.
Where is that man now? he would ask.
Same job, I would reply.
Golitsin would say nothing for a few days, and then announce that he was sure the man
was a traitor.
But why, Anatole?
Because in KGB, failure is a serious offense. You would not be trusted, and that makes
a man unhappy, and maybe then he thinks of turning.
He never understood the culture of the West, and because he himself was driven to
defect because his career was damaged after his abortive visit to Stalin, he assumed
that anyone in the West would act in the same way.
But thats not how it is in the West, I used to tell him. We dont act like that over
here - it only happens in the FBI. Golitsin would look blank. He was a man almost
devoid of humor. Look, Anatole, weve been studying this for twenty years, and we
dont know who the spies are, and your guessing isnt helping us at all. He looked at me
and down at the file, as if to make me guilty for doubting him.
What do you know, Peter, he would growl, you were not there in Dzherzhinsky
Square, as I was.
But for all his vanity and greed, he was a genuine man, with that sudden sadness that all
Russians have. I remember showing him the Volkov file one afternoon. As he read the
story of the attempted defector whose file ended up on Kim Philbys desk, he began to
weep. How could you be so careless, Peter? he asked in anguish, only too well aware
that but for the grace of God Golitsin would have suffered the same fate.
McCaul and I looked sheepish. There was no excuse we could give. By the end of his
stay my sessions with Golitsin had degenerated into tedious diatribes about
disinformation, and recycled information which already existed in our Registry. He was a
shadow of the man who captivated the best minds in Western counterintelligence with
his photographic memory and his unerring eye for detail. Before he left he handed us a
massive typescript which he had labored to produce himself, typing one-fingered on an
old Olivetti portable. He told me it was the definitive study on disinformation theory. I
handed it in to the Registry. The time when I waited on his every word had long gone. I
did not even bother to read it.
I saw Golitsin once more in New York the following winter. We had lunch at an Italian
restaurant near Central Park. It was a sad, furtive occasion. Golitsin still talked of his
plans for an institute for the study of disinformation, and new leads he had discovered.
But he knew he was finished. The Czechoslovakian invasion the previous summer had
brought a flood of new defectors to the West - men like Frolik and August, whose
information was less ambitious but easier to digest. He knew he was yesterdays
newspapers, and I think he could tell I was humoring him.
He had recently suffered tragedy. His daughter, upon whom he doted, had fallen prey to
the ultimate Western depravity - drug addiction - and had committed suicide. It was a
terrible blow, and Golitsin blamed himself.
After lunch we walked across Central Park together in brilliant winter sunshine. He
wanted me to visit his farm in upstate New York, but I told him I had to get back to
London. There was little left to say. Are you thinking of going home? I asked him, as
we came to the parting.
Oh no, he replied, after an unusual pause, they would never forgive me.
Golitsin rarely talked about Russia, but it was clearly on his mind.
Are you homesick?
Sometimes...
We made our farewells, and his feet made a crunching sound as he walked away across
the snow. Like all defectors, Golitsin was feeling the cold.
21 -
With Golitsin unable to advance the penetration issue any further, MI5 were trapped in
the middle of a maze. The search for the high-level spy, for which FLUENCY considered
Sir Roger Hollis the best suspect, had been suspended since 1966, so that all attention
could focus on the hunt for the middling-grade agent. With Hanleys clearance there
was no obvious road forward. Did we abandon the search for the middling-grade agent,
and assume Goleniewskis story was planted, or did we continue to search for other
candidates, of whom there were a number who were almost as good a fit as Hanley had
been? If we assumed that Goleniewskis middling-grade agent story was planted, did we
assume it was a lure to draw our attention away from another middling-grade agent, or
from the high-level spy? Did both exist, or neither? To do nothing was clearly
impossible, and thus, like actors in a Greek tragedy, we had no real choice but to
continue widening our investigations, spreading the poison ever further through the
corridors.
The next best suspect was Gregory Stevens (a pseudonym), an extravert and gifted
officer with a puckish sense of humor. Stevens was about a 60 percent fit for the
Goleniewski allegation. He had an even stronger Polish background than Hanley. He was
half Polish by birth, and had risen to Hanleys old job as head of the Polish Section of
MI5, where his knowledge of the language, culture, and history of his mothers country
made him highly successful. Ironically, or perhaps sinisterly, Stevens was the officer who
interviewed Goleniewski in 1963, and first heard the story of the middling-grade agent.
Was this, like Hollis visit to see Gouzenko, just another coincidence? Like Hanley, too,
Stevens had been in military uniform and there was also a connection with the KGB
officer who Goleniewski alleged had made the recruitment. Both men attended the
Yalta Conference in 1945, Stevens as a military translator assigned to assist Stalin with
his translations into English, until Stalin complained that he spoke Russian with a Polish
accent.
Like Hanley, Stevens had also undergone psychiatric treatment, and once again I paid a
discreet visit to Harley Street. But whereas Hanley had informed his doctor of the nature
of his profession, Stevens had never hinted at his involvement in national security.
I wouldnt have thought he was stable enough to be in that line of work, said the
doctor.
Do you find him trustworthy? I asked casually. Hes very clever. replied the doctor,
but I think his cleverness can sometimes lead him astray.
How do you mean?
Theres a touch of the Walter Mitty about him. I dont think you could always rely on
what he said.
The more I looked at the case, the more I came to doubt whether Stevens should ever
have been recruited in the first place. It seemed a hard thing to say. He was a good
officer, and an asset to the Service, but in the end, if vetting meant anything, this man
ought never to have been allowed in. The psychiatric problems were only a small part of
it. The real worry was his Polish background. According to his record of service, he
visited Poland regularly with office permission for private holidays to see his relations.
His uncle, to whom he was particularly close, was an active member of the Polish
Communist Party, and they occasionally met in London. For an organization that was
routinely rejecting any applicant with even the faintest trace of the British Communist
Party in his family background, the Stevens case presented an obvious problem. And the
fact that he had been linked to the middlinggrade agent investigation made the
situation even more untenable, since in order to clear himself, he had to emerge clean
from an exhaustive vet. With half his family living behind the Iron Curtain, an adequate
vet was impossible.
The investigation was conducted as far as it could possibly go, and then Stevens was
summoned for an interrogation, which I conducted with Jim Patrick, a one-eyed Gurkha
officer who worked as an interrogator for D3.
Stevens had obviously been half expecting the call ever since he had first heard
Goleniewski talk about a middling-grade agent with Polish connections. He was
alternately truculent and defensive. He stared me nervously in the eye, as if to convince
me he was telling the truth. He agreed that he was a good fit for the allegation, and
accepted that someone of his background was an odd recruitment for an organization
like MI5.
I always wondered when everyone would wake up to the Polish side of me, he said. I
suppose Ill fail the vet now, wont I? I dont know, I replied, but if its any
consolation, it wont be me thatll decide. Itll be F.J.
He obviously felt that whichever way the interrogation went, he could not possibly win.
Unlike Hanley, he could not really hope to walk through the fire unscathed.
We had been going three days when he walked coolly into the room one morning and
sat down at the table opposite me. Its time for me to tell you something, he said.
Ive decided to confess...
I flashed a glance over to Jim, who immediately began taking notes. It was only an
additional precaution, since all the sessions were taped. Yes, he went on, Ive been
wanting to tell someone about it for years. Youre right... Im the spy youre looking for.
He seemed to crumple up in front of us, his shoulders heaving, as if he were weeping.
But it only lasted a moment or two, before he held his head up, and looked straight at
me.
Do you really mean this, Greg? I asked.
You have a witness, dont you?
You realize youll have to give a statement to the Branch? He nodded. I leaned over to
Jim and told him to inform the Director-Generals security man, Tom Roberts, and
arrange for Special Branch to come immediately. Stevens and I sat opposite each other,
the files and questions in front of me suddenly redundant.
Its all true, Peter, he said again, in a clear voice.
I told him that he had best not say anything until Tom Roberts arrived. Jim Patrick came
back in. For a few seconds more we sat in silence, and then I noticed Stevens shoulders
going again. For a moment I thought he was weeping, perhaps even about to have a
breakdown. It often happens.
Damn, I thought to myself, I should have had the office doctor stand by.
Then suddenly he began to roar with laughter.
You really believed me, didnt you? he cried.
For a second I felt the hot flush of embarrassment.
Im not sure I understand...?
You wanted a spy, didnt you, he said, reddening suddenly, now that the joke was
over. I thought Id give you one. I was going to get chopped anyway. I know that!
I dont think we should discuss the matter here, I replied. Tom Roberts will be here in
a minute, you can explain it all to F.J. For all I knew, it was a real confession, which he
was trying to retract, although I felt I knew Stevens well enough to believe that he was
only horsing about. But it was a stupid thing to do. Any chance he had of surviving the
investigation had almost certainly gone. F.J. was appalled when he heard what had
happened. He was a lawyer, and had a venerable respect for the niceties of MI5s
processes. What do you think? he asked me when I got back to his office. Was the
confession bogus, or do you think he retracted it? You know my views, I replied. I
am sure he is in the clear because I think the middling-grade agent was a phony
allegation from the start. I just think he had a brainstorm...
F.J. grunted. Tales of false defectors were never very welcome to a man of his solidity.
You dont suppose he made the whole thing up - Goleniewskis story, I mean? he
asked.
I told him we had checked the tapes before the interrogation. I even got Stevens to
verify the translation. Oh, Goleniewski said it all right.
Dont see how we can keep him, he muttered, chewing his pipe. Mans obviously
unstable. Polish thing grotesque as well. Sort of thing that gets into newspapers.
He waved me out.
Within an hour Gregory Stevens career was terminated. He spent ten minutes with F.J.,
and Tom Roberts escorted him to the pavement outside Leconfield House. He didnt
even have a chance to clear his desk. A few days later Arthur came to see me. He and I
had seen little of each other since his departure to MI6. He had aged and seemed less
driven than he was before, though the past still held him. He wanted to know about
Stevens. They were friends in D Branch in the old days, and Arthur, much the older man,
had an almost paternal regard for him. Did you have to do it? he asked.
I told him about the middling-grade agent, and the retracted confession, and the
confusion and doubt which plagued us all. What else could we do? I asked. How can
we tell Whitehall to do their vetting, and then turn a blind eye ourselves? Arthur knew
we had been right, but the cost was becoming progressively higher.
Its poisoning us all, he said quietly.
Gregory Stevens departure caused great bitterness in the office. He was a popular
officer, and inevitably I was blamed. No one, apart from a handful of senior officers,
knew the context which had led up to his investigation - the long history of suspected
high-level penetration of MI5, the Blunt confessions, the terrible secret of the FLUENCY
conclusions which implicated Sir Roger Hollis, and the hunt for the middling-grade
agent.
Word began to spread through the office that D3 was conducting vetting purges in the
office, and that officers like Gregory Stevens were being victimized. There was talk of
the Gestapo. Younger officers began to avoid me in the canteen. Casual conversation
with many of my colleagues became a rarity. Those of us involved in the penetration
issue were set apart, feared and distrusted in equal measure.
It was the same in MI6. After years of neglect, a new head of Counterintelligence,
Christopher Phillpotts, was appointed in the mid-1960s, around the time FLUENCY got
off the ground. Phillpotts looked to all intents and purposes like a figure from the
ANCIEN REGIME of British Intelligence. He was a charismatic war hero with a penchant
for pink gins and cravats and bow ties. But he was a strict disciplinarian, who believed
that in the wake of Philbys defection, the Augean stables needed cleaning. A thorough
review of security procedures and personnel was the precondition for a return to self-
respect for a Service which, despite Dick Whites best efforts, had still to recover from
the wounds of Philby, Suez, and Commander Crabbe. Those who could not satisfactorily
account for their backgrounds would have to go. National security demanded that, at
long last, the benefit of the doubt be given to the state.
Phillpotts supported FLUENCY without reservation, and initiated his own program of
vetting inside Century House. At least eight senior officers were forced to resign in the
wake of Phillpotts new regime. One officer, for instance, was forced to go when it was
discovered that he had a long affair with Litzi Friedman without ever declaring it to the
office. Friedman was Philbys first wife, and almost certainly the person who recruited
him to the Soviet cause. Another senior officer to suffer had been a member of the
Communist Party in the 1930s. Several officers who had been through the Joint Services
Language School were also unable to account for discrepancies in their backgrounds,
and chose to leave. Even Nicholas Elliott, for so long Philbys supporter, until finally
traveling to Beirut to obtain his confession, was investigated, in case Philby had
managed to extract intelligence from him. But after lengthy interrogation Elliott just
convinced his interrogator, Arthur Martin, that he was in the clear. None of this was a
matter of treachery. But for so long the normal rules of vetting had been waived in the
club world of intelligence that when the reckoning came it was abrupt and painful.
Much of the blame for the purges inside MI6 was attributed to MI5, and to people like
Patrick Stewart and me in particular. Many felt that MI5 were taking advantage of
Philbys defection to even up a few old scores. I had been unpopular inside certain
sections of MI6 since my review of the Penkovsky case. But it was the Ellis case which
really earned me the undying enmity of the MI6 old guard, an enmity which I wore as a
mark of achievement.
The Ellis case caused friction between MI5 and MI6 for almost as long as the Philby case.
It began in the aftermath of the Burgess and Maclean defections, when MI5 began to
reanalyze the intelligence provided by the defector Walter Krivitsky. One of Krivitskys
serials concerned a White Russian emigre based in Paris named Vladimir Von Petrov,
who, Krivitsky alleged, had been an important agent for the Fourth Department, the
GRU, during the prewar period, with good sources in Britain as well as Germany, where
he was operating as a double agent for the Germans and the Russians.
MI5 were interested to find out who those sources might be, so they studied Von
Petrovs file and found a series of debriefing reports of Abwehr officers taken at the end
of the war. The Abwehr officers confirmed that Von Petrov was being run by them as
their agent, although, of course, they did not know that he was also working for the
Russians. Several mentioned that Von Petrov had a source in British Intelligence who
could obtain our order of battle, as well as details of vital operations, such as the tap on
the secret telephone link between Hitler and his Ambassador in London, von
Ribbentrop. One Abwehr officer even remembered the name of Von Petrovs source - it
was a Captain Ellis, who was an Australian, a brilliant linguist, and who had a Russian
wife.
Charles Dickie Ellis was then a senior MI6 officer, recently promoted from MI6
controller for Far Eastern Affairs to be in charge of all operations in North and South
America. He joined MI6 in the 1920s, and was based in Paris, where he was responsible
for recruiting agents in the White Russian emigre community. During this period he
recruited an agent with access to Von Petrov.
The prewar Russian emigre community was a cesspool of uncertain loyalties, and when
MI5 raised the query against Ellis, MI6 rejected any possibility that he could be a spy.
They maintained that it was much more likely that Von Petrov was working for Ellis,
than the other way around, and was lying to protect himself. In any case, Ellis had opted
for early retirement, and was planning to return to Australia. Dick White, newly
appointed to MI5, and not wanting to aggravate still further the tensions already
strained to breaking point by the gathering suspicions against Philby, agreed to shelve
the case, where it lay festering in the Registry until I took over as D3. When Phillpotts
took over as head of Counterintelligence, I approached him as chairman of FLUENCY and
asked him if he was prepared to sanction a joint MI5-MI6 investigation into Ellis to
finally resolve the case. He went to Dick White, who gave his agreement, and I began
working with a young MI6 Counterintelligence officer named Bunny Pancheff. The real
difficulty in the Ellis case was trying to determine whether he was working for the
Germans or the Russians, or both. Early on we got confirmation of the Abwehr officers
story, when we traced the records of the prewar operation to tap the Hitler-von
Ribbentrop link. The officer in charge of processing the product was Ellis. The question
was whether he was providing the information to Von Petrov in the knowledge that he
was a Russian spy, or whether he assumed he was working only for the Germans.
The first thing which convinced me Ellis was always a Russian spy was the discovery of
the distribution of the Abwehr officers report in which he claimed Von Petrovs British
source was a Captain Ellis. The report was sent routinely to Kim Philby, in the
Counterintelligence Department. He had scrawled in the margin: Who is this man Ellis?
NFA, meaning No further action, before burying the report in the files. At the time
Ellis office was just a few doors down the corridor, but it seemed to me to be a most
suspicious oversight by the normally eagle-eyed Philby.
That was only the first of a number of interesting connections between Philbys career
and Ellis. Within a year of Philbys falling under suspicion Ellis took early retirement,
pleading ill-health. He traveled to Australia, and took up a job as a consultant to ASIS,
the Australian overseas intelligence-gathering organization. While there he was briefed
by the Australians on the impending defection of Vladimir Petrov, a Beria henchman
who opted to stay in the West rather than take his chances in Moscow. Almost
immediately Ellis returned to Britain and contacted Kim Philby, despite being specifically
warned against doing so by Maurice Oldfield. No one knows what they discussed, but
from that date onward Petrov fell under suspicion in Australia, and when he noticed his
safe had been tampered with in the Soviet Embassy, he defected earlier than
anticipated, eluding by hours two burly KGB officers who had been sent out from
Moscow to bring him back. The reasons for Ellis hasty flight from Australia have never
been clear, but I have always assumed that he thought the Petrov who was about to
defect was the same Von Petrov with whom he had been involved in the 1920s, and
who must have known the secret of his treachery. We looked at his wartime record. He
spent most of the war in the USA working as deputy to Sir William Stephenson, the Man
Called Intrepid, at British Security Coordination. Some of the American VENONA showed
clearly that the Soviets were operating a number of agents inside BSC, but although we
tried exhaustive analysis to link Ellis with each of the cryptonyms, we could never be
certain.
I began to search further back for more definite clues connecting Ellis to the Soviets in
the prewar period. At the time I was studying the prewar period as part of the D3
researches, and was rereading Elizabeth Poretskys autobiography, OUR OWN PEOPLE,
about her life as the wife of Ludwik Poretsky (also known as Ignace Reiss), one of the
great illegals who worked along with Krivitsky as a Fourth Department agent runner
for the Soviet GRU. He was murdered after he refused to return to Moscow and
defected. I first read the book in its English translation, but this time I studied the
original French text, titled LES NOTRES. I seized on an extraordinary statement which
had not appeared in the English edition. Elizabeth Poretsky said that in the late 1920s
Ludwik had an agent high up in British Intelligence. In 1966 I traveled to Paris to see
Mrs Poretsky, a shrew who guarded her husbands memory jealously and remained
suspicious of all agents of Western imperialism. I talked around the subject for a while,
and then reminded her of the passage in the book. Surely, I ventured, she had got her
dates wrong, and presumably this agent was Philby? She became quite indignant,
squawking at me for my ignorance. This was not Philby, she jabbered. Ludwik ran
this agent in Amsterdam in 1928 and 1929. Philby was just a schoolboy then. Do you
think you could recognize the man? I asked, trying hard to conceal my excitement.
She began to hedge. She told me she was still loyal to LES NOTRES. She could never
inform.
Oh no, I told her, its nothing like that - we just need it for our records.
I produced a spread of twenty photographs from my briefcase. Some were dummy
photographs, others were of known colleagues of her husband, and one was of Ellis,
dating from the mid-1920s. She picked out all those she ought to have known, and Ellis
as well.
I do not know this mans name, she told me, but I am sure he is familiar.
From Paris I traveled by bus to Amsterdam to see a woman named Mrs. Pieck, the
widow of a Dutchman, Henri Pieck, who worked as a Soviet illegal and recruited several
spies in Britain during the prewar period, including John Herbert King, a cipher clerk in
the Foreign Office. Elizabeth Poretsky had suggested I visit Mrs. Pieck in case she could
throw any light on the photograph she had picked out. Mrs. Pieck was a woman from
the same mold, and had clearly been warned of my imminent arrival. She too picked out
Ellis photograph, but refused to say why.
There was only one other lead. Elizabeth Poretsky told in her book how Richard Sorge,
the great Soviet illegal who eventually built up one of the most important spy networks
in history in China and Japan during World War II, had traveled to Britain during the late
1920s. His mission had been highly dangerous, but she told me she knew no more
details, and tried too obviously to dissuade me from visiting Sorges widow, Christiane,
who was living in a seminary near New York. I cabled Stephen de Mowbray, then based
in Washington as an MI6 liaison officer, and asked him to visit her.
Christiane Sorge placed the final piece in the jigsaw, but left the picture still infuriatingly
unfocused. She did indeed remember Sorges mission, and said it was to see a very
important agent, although she knew nothing of his identity. She recalled just one
fragment - a meeting on a street corner in London. She and Rickie had gone together to
meet this agent, but he had told her to stand well back and cover him in case there was
trouble. Could she recognize the man? Stephen asked her. She had seen him, but not
well. He showed her the photographs.
This man looks familiar, she said, but I could not be certain, after over forty years.
It was Ellis photograph.
Eventually Ellis was interrogated. He was old, and claimed to be in ill-health, so Bunny
Pancheff and I were instructed to take the sessions extremely gently. Ellis denied
everything for several days. He blustered and blamed the whole thing on jealous
colleagues. But as we produced the evidence, the Abwehr officers report, and the
indoctrination list for the telephone tap, he began to wilt. After lunch on the Friday he
returned to the interrogation room in the basement of the old War Office, known as
Room 055, with a typed sheet of paper. It was a confession of sorts. He claimed that he
had got into trouble during the early years in MI6. He was sent out into the field with no
training and no money, and began providing chicken feed, odd scraps of information
about MI6 plans, to his agent Zilenski (his brother-in-law), who was in touch with Von
Petrov, in order to obtain more intelligence in return. It was a dangerous game, and
soon he was being blackmailed. He claimed that his wife was ill, and he needed money,
so he agreed to supply Zilenski with more information. Ellis confession was carefully
shaded at the edges to hide precisely what intelligence he had given, and where it had
gone, so, under interrogation, we asked him to clarify it. He admitted passing over
detailed order-of-battle plans for British Intelligence, as well as betraying the Hitler-von
Ribbentrop telephone link, even though he knew this material was being passed by Von
Petrov to the Germans. (Part of the Abwehr information came from Stevens and Best,
who were captured by a trick on the Dutch-German border by the Gestapo. We were
able to talk to them after the war, and they said that at their interrogation they were
amazed how much the Abwehr knew about the organization of MI6. We asked Ellis
when he last had contact with the Russian emigres. He admitted that it was in
December 1939, after the outbreak of war. Ellis was a venal, sly man. He sat there,
stripped of his rank, whitefaced and puffy. But never once did I hear an apology. I could
understand how a man might choose the Soviets through ideological conviction. But to
sell colleagues out to the Germans for a few pounds in time of war? I told him that had
he been caught in 1939-40 he would have been hanged.
Ellis clearly thought the interrogation was over. But it had just begun. We wanted to
know about his involvement with the Soviets, we said. For a moment he wavered in
front of us, then he fought back. Never! he shouted, never with the Communists...
The next day we took him through the odd chain of events - his trip to Australia, and his
rapid return to Britain, and the coincidence of Petrovs defection. But he denied
everything, even when he was caught out in repeated lying about his actions until he
retired. Not even an authorized offer of immunity could make him change his mind. But
I have little doubt of Ellis involvement with the Russians. Bunny Pancheff and I wrote
the case up, and concluded that in our opinion Ellis had certainly committed espionage
for the Germans, including during the war, and that we believed him also to have been a
long-term agent of the Russian Intelligence Service until his removal from secret access.
The report was endorsed without reservation by Christopher Phillpotts, and submitted
to Dick White and his deputy, Maurice Oldfield.
Oldfield was a shy and good man, with a wonderful grasp of the principles of
counterintelligence. But he was a poor judge of character. At first he doubted the
veracity of Ellis confession, until eventually Bunny Pancheff played the crucial
exchanges to him. But even though we had uncovered a traitor of major proportions, I
sometimes felt as if it were I who was being blamed. Oldfield despised the climate of
fear engendered by Phillpotts vetting purges, and campaigned hard to change Dicks
mind. The fact that Ellis had confessed seemed to weigh hardly at all on his thinking. As
far as he was concerned, it was all a long time ago, and best forgotten. As the climate
against investigations turned in the late 1960s, I wanted desperately to have some of
the FLUENCY conclusions circulated more widely inside both Services. I felt sure that this
was the only way we could restore some general consent for a continuation of the work.
At the moment, people knew nothing of the cases, and to them our activities seemed
like blind McCarthyism. D3 had become such a massive section, embracing FLUENCY and
the D3 researches into the 1930s. Inevitably, other senior officers resented its priority
call on resources and personnel, and since they had no way of judging the importance of
the work we were conducting, their resentments grew. I was accused of being
suspicious of everybody. F.J. would defend me if the attacks were public. On one
occasion he turned around and said to my attacker, It is Peters job to be suspicious.
Like Angleton, I could sense my enemies multiplying. It was a curious sensation. After
years of being the hunter, I suddenly felt myself hunted. Matters came to a head in
1969 at the annual conference attended by senior MI5 officers at the Sunningdale Civil
Service College in Berkshire. A number of officers launched bitter attacks on me, and
others involved in D1 (Investigations), as well as on the work we were doing. What had
D3 ever achieved? they asked. They talked of the bonds of trust between fellow officers
ruptured by the climate of suspicion. Innocent men suffering, they said.
Which innocent men? I said. Thats a lie. Who? You name them! My hands were tied
- I could not talk in specifics or generalities, and was forced to defend myself by
stressing that every move we made in relation to a case was endorsed by F.J. personally.
But without my explaining to them the long history of the search for penetration, they
could not possibly understand.
Afterward I appealed to F.J. to publish a paper on the FLUENCY assessments. I outlined
the sort of thing we could circulate to the top seventy officers: a resume of the
continuous allegations of penetration since the war, including the attributions to the
known spies wherever possible, and indicating the large number of still unexplained
allegations. F.J. refused even to consider it.
If I do this, Peter, he said, it will break the heart of the Service. We would never
recover.
But these people dont even know Blunt was a spy. How can they possibly sympathize
and support our work, if they arent told something?
In my view, he said, it would be better if no one knew, ever! But how can we go
on? I asked him. Weve got young people coming into the Service every year. They
listen to the tapes, they read the office histories, and they learn nothing about this, and
its the most important subject there is. How can you expect them to live a lie? You
might as well not have done any of this work, unless you face up to it, and show people
we have by explaining to them how it all happened, and say to people, Look, there are
these gaps, and thats why weve got to carry on. F.J. would have none of it. There
were moments, not many it is true, but this was one, when he was immutable.
What about me? I asked finally. How do I go on in the office, facing this level of
hostility?
He suddenly became steely.
That is a price you have to pay for sitting in judgment on people. In 1968, following his
clearance, Michael Hanley was appointed head of Counterespionage. Ever since the
traumatic events of the previous year Hanley and I had barely spoken. He had never said
anything, but I could tell he blamed me for the decision to investigate him. When he
took over he lost no time in trying to clip my wings. At first it was public slap-downs.
Oh, Peter, he would say mockingly, thats just another one of your mad theories.
But then his assault became more serious. He began to remove staff and resources from
D3 wherever possible. At first I fought my corner, and went to F.J. to get them
reinstated, but after a while I began to wonder whether it was worth the fight. The D3
research task was nearing completion. Only the high-level penetration issue remained
unsolved, and that had been shelved for more than three years, with little sign that it
would ever be revived. The constant strain of the work was taking its toll on my health.
My thoughts turned toward retirement and to my first love - farming.
I decided that at least I should confront Hanley personally before giving up. I went to see
him and asked him point-blank why he was trying to drive me out of the Service. He
claimed there was no persecution. It was just that D3 had got too big, and there were
increasing complaints that some of its less glamorous, but no less important tasks, like
security assessments for ministers and the like, were being neglected.
Well, give me an officer to look after the paperwork, then, I countered.
But Hanley refused.
I know Im a poor administrator, I admitted, but are you sure the real reason for this
isnt because you bear a grudge against this type of work?
Hanley became red-faced. He knew what I was driving at, but denied his own experience
was coloring his judgment.
I suppose you know it was me? I said. Have you ever seen the file? The ice was
broken. I went back to my office and pulled out the file on the HARRIET investigation. I
showed Hanley everything - the way the search for the middling-grade agent arose from
the FLUENCY report, the shelving of the hunt for the high-level spy, the D3 inquiries, the
Watson and Proctor cases, the investigations, the visit to his psychiatrist.
I never realized, he said, as he studied the files. Were the people who were asked to
do the dirty work, I told him bitterly, and now when weve done most of the work,
they want to brush it under the carpet and forget us, and forget the things we did.
Indoctrination into the burden of terrible secrets which so few have shouldered had a
profound effect on Hanley. He realized that he had no experience of any of this, and his
only knowledge of D Branch was from his time on the Polish desk in the 1950s. In order
to make a success of D Branch he had to have guidance. One day he called me into his
office and explained his problem. He was quite straightforward, and I respected him for
it. He still wanted to break down D3. Its mammoth task was almost finished, he told me,
and in any case, he wanted me to become his personal consultant on the whole
reorganization of D Branch which he was planning. I was to have sight of every paper,
and access to all cases in the Branch with the brief to guide him with my intimate
knowledge of the previous fifteen years. Unlike any other officer, I had never moved
from D Branch. As Dick White promised at my interview, I received no promotion, but
then I was not forced to play musical chairs, switching from department to department
every second year. D Branch had been my life. I knew every case and file. It was a fair
offer, and I accepted immediately.
But that still left the problem of penetration.
Who is going to continue that work? We cant let the thing slip again, otherwise
another backlog of unresolved cases will build up, I said. I had been convinced for
more than a year that we needed some formal mechanism for looking at the whole
question of internal penetration. The problem of the 1960s was that there was no
department in the Service where allegations of penetration could be investigated.
Everything was ad hoc. FLUENCY had no formal status, it was just a working party. The
work did not sit easily inside D1 (Investigations), because their correct job was to
investigate penetrations that occurred outside the Service. It was precisely this lack of a
mechanism which contributed to the accusations of the Gestapo in the office. We
were seen to be people pursuing investigations outside the normal channels, and in an
organization as conscious of hierarchy as MI5, that was a considerable problem. With a
proper section devoted to the work, the Service would be able to see that the
management had given its full backing. It would, in other words, have legitimacy. There
was one other factor in my mind, I knew that if the issue of high-level penetration was
ever to be solved, it could be done only by giving fresh minds access to the problem.
Over the past ten years the subject had become intimately bound up with personalities -
principally mine and Arthurs. We were seen as men with grudges, or as men with
obsessions, unable to conceive of any interpretation other than Hollis being guilty. I
lobbied Hanley and F J furiously, trying to persuade them to set up such a section, and
staff it with people who had no connection with either Arthur or me, or with the terrible
events of the previous ten years.
Hanley was doubtful, but F.J. seized on the idea immediately, and persuaded Hanley to
incorporate it into his plans. By late 1968 the reorganization was complete. D Branch
became K Branch, which was split into two separate units KX, which handled all
investigative work, and had its own director on the Board, and KY, which was
responsible for order of battle and operations, also with its own director. KX
incorporated D1 (Investigations) and much of the old D3, and comprised three sections
Kl and K2, which were Soviet and satellite investigating sections, K3, which was now a
research section cut out of D3, a section servicing the investigation sections, and a new
unit, K7, charged with sole responsibility for investigating allegations of penetration of
the Intelligence Services. KY comprised K4, order of battle, K5, which was agent running
and operations, and K6, which assumed responsibility for all security assessments and
compiling the specialist records, ministerial briefings, special indexes, and record
collection which previously had been under my control in D3.
Duncum Wagh was the first officer appointed to head K7. He was a good choice - a
sensible, levelheaded officer who was always thorough in his reasoning and, once his
mind was made up, doubly impressive in justifying his proposed course of action. His
career had suffered unduly from his mistake in clearing Houghton after his wifes
complaint ten years previously. But solid hard work, some of it on my Moscow Embassy
Working Party, had earned him a major chance, and K7 was certainly that. He was
supported by a forceful ex-marine officer named John Day. I strongly advised that
nobody involved in the penetration issue to date should work in K7.
I had one meeting with Duncum Wagh, and handed over to him everything in my safe
which related to FLUENCY - all the records from my own freelance inquiries into Hollis
background, my analyzes of the Lonsdale case, some work on the middling-grade agent
It was only when he took them that I realized what a burden those small green
combination boxes had been all those years.
Here, I said, its your problem now, thank God! I had very little to do with K7 in the
early days. Neither Duncum Wagh nor John Day wanted me around, for fear it would
prejudice their own freedom of maneuver and credibility, and I understood that. I did
introduce John Day to Blunt, and talked again through the whole question of why he
had been allowed to leave MI5 by the Russians in 1945. Blunt always thought it was
odd.
I think if they had pressured me, I probably would have stayed on, at least for a bit. I
loved the work, and adored Guy Liddell and Dick White, and I expect I could still have
pursued my art but they never asked me.
Blunt could shed no light on whether there was already a replacement for him in the
office, although he knew that was what concerned us. We showed him the VENONA
message with the eight cryptonyms. But they meant nothing to him. The only fragment
he had was a lunch he attended with Guy Burgess and Graham Mitchell at the Reform
Club. It was clearly another looking-over session, but as to whether Guy had actually
made an approach, Blunt claimed he knew nothing. A little later I was told that John Day
had interrogated Mitchell at long last, and they were quite satisfied he was in the clear.
As I always suspected, it came down to Hollis.
For a long time I heard nothing. Then one day John Day came to see me. He brought
with him the first K7 report on high-level penetration. It concluded categorically that
Hollis was the best candidate, and recommended his immediate investigation and
interrogation. I always thought you saw reds under the beds, said John Day after I had
read the report, but I wanted to tell you that I think you were right all along.
This time there was no escape - not for myself, for F.J., or for the man in the black suit
playing golf in quiet retirement in the Somerset village of Calcott.
22 -
It would have been nice to have crowned my career with a triumph. It would have been
nice to have solved the riddle. Better he was innocent than the continuing uncertainty.
But the secret world is not so simple, and at the end the shadows remained, as dense as
before, shrouding the truth.
One morning in 1969 I made my way up to a small operations room in what had once
been the D3 offices. The desk earphones whispered gently as A2 technicians checked
the microphones in our safe house in South Audley Street. For them it was another day,
another interrogation, but for me it was the final act in a ten-year drama. The brief lay
on the table, as big as a thick telephone directory. On the inside front cover was the
curious single word Drat, Hollis code name. It was issued to me years before, when I
was doing my D3 private inquiries, by the small office in B Branch which allocated cover
names. I laughed at the time. Drat seemed so absurd. I never realized what pain
would be associated with it.
Anne Orr-Ewing was an extremely thorough officer who had risen from the
Transcription Department to D3 as a research officer before joining K7. The K7 case was
substantially the same as my own freelance inquiries of 1965 and 1966. It was more
detailed, of course. They had access to Hollis Record of Service, and had traced and
interviewed his contemporaries at Oxford, searched the Shanghai Special Branch
records, but no crucial proof had been found. In the end, as always, it came down to a
matter of belief.
A small white envelope inviting Hollis back up to the office was sent a few days before
the interrogation. The final plans were laid. There was a row, too, of course. We
assumed that Hollis would be placed under continuous surveillance during the period of
the interrogation, in case, like Blake, he panicked and made a move to contact his
Russian controllers, if he had any. But F.J. would have none of it. He gave no reasons,
but we could tell by his face that he was immovable. Even Hanley protested about this,
pointing out to F.J. that he had not been spared the full works. But F.J. felt he had been
backed into a corner in sanctioning the interrogation, and this was a final indignity he
was not prepared to impose on his predecessor.
John Day was told to conduct the interview. Anne Orr-Ewing and I were to listen in to
provide analysis as the interrogation proceeded. F.J. knew he was too committed on
the subject to be a fair choice, and he realized that, after so many years delay, he had
to be seen to be allowing the troops their chance.
A door opened in South Audley Street. Hollis was shown in. Where do you want me?
he asked, his familiar voice still strong after all the years.
John Day began to explain the procedure of the interview. Yes, Im familiar with the
procedure... but I need pencil and paper, if you please.
I tried to imagine the scene in the room in South Audley Street. I could see Hollis in
there, sitting upright. I rather thought he would miss his desk. Of course the pencils
would be essential. And he would be wearing his Cheshire cat smile. Would he feel
humiliated? I wondered. Or frightened? I somehow doubted it. Emotion was never
something I associated with him. I remembered something he always used to say to me.
Peter, youre too emotional on the subject.
I was doing my best to control my excitement.
John Day began by going through routine details of Hollis career and early life. Hollis
knew the procedure, and began running ahead of the brief.
Well take it a little slower, if you dont mind, said John Day.
Hollis showed faint irritation.
This is a little laborious, if you dont mind me saying so. You must have this information
on my R/S.
But John Day was not to be intimidated.
I think we had best follow procedure in this instance, if you dont mind.
Hollis told a simple story. He said he left home because he realized he was not religious.
But Oxford, he claimed, was no escape. It, too, reminded him of his religious upbringing.
I wanted to get away, do something with my life in the outside world. The only
ambition I had was to play golf, and I realized early on at Oxford that I could never make
a career out of it. So I decided to travel.
The Far East had always attracted him. Originally he thought he might travel with some
friends - Maurice Richardson was one. But the plan fell through. In retrospect, said
Hollis, he was glad. They had far too little in common to make good traveling
companions. China fascinated him. Of course, he met the odd left-wing person out
there, but then that was normal. Everyone knew Agnes Smedley was leftwing. It was
the same at Oxford. He had been friendly with Maurice Richardson and Claud Cockburn,
both of whom were best described as pink.
He said his health was a constant problem. TB afflicted him throughout this period, and
in the end it forced his return to Europe. He traveled back via Moscow.
I wanted to see what it was like. Awful place. Dirty, depressing. Nobody smiled.
Intellectuals were making a tremendous fuss about the place. But I hated it.
Did you meet anybody there? asked John Day. On buses and trains. That sort of
thing. But otherwise no. You dont meet Russians like you do people in other countries,
like China, for instance.
At lunch, Anne Orr-Ewing, John Day, F.J., and I met back at Leconfield House. Hollis
performance had been calm and flawless. Hell clear himself, if he goes on like this,
said Anne Orr-Ewing. After lunch we went on to his return to Britain. Suddenly the crisp
focus disintegrated. The delivery was still resolute, but all the detail disappeared. He
could not remember where he had lived, whom he had met, what plans he had, and yet
we had all the answers in the brief. We knew what he had been doing. For instance, he
had lived virtually next door to an old MI6 officer named Archie Lyall, who had been a
close friend of Guy Burgess. But although they must have seen each other numerous
times, Hollis had no recollection of him at all. For an hour or more Hollis stumbled, until
he reached the point in his career where he joined MI5 before the war. Suddenly, and as
abruptly as it had disappeared, precision returned.
That night the interrogating team met again at the Oxford and Cambridge Club to
debate the days session.
What about this blank year? I asked.
F.J. placed his pipe on the table wearily.
Youve got that all wrong, he said.
He told us that Hollis was in a mess when he came back from China - his health was
shot, he had no career, no prospects. It did not seem to occur to him that this would
have made Hollis much more vulnerable to recruitment. He was drifting, and it was a
period in his life he had long wanted to forget. Little wonder, said F.J., that he cant
remember where he lived.
Well, its a pretty odd state of mind to start applying for a job in MI5 or MI6 for that
matter, I remarked. I meant it seriously, but it sounded sarcastic. F.J. bridled.
For Gods sake Peter! Then he cut himself short. There was still another session to go.
The following day Hollis sat down again.
Are we ready? Hollis asked patronizingly. John Day waited in silence. It was a nice
touch, and reminded Hollis that, for once, he was not in charge.
Day began on a different tack.
I want to ask you again about Claud Cockburns file... This had come up the previous
morning. Hollis volunteered his friendship with Cockburn at Oxford, and was asked why
he had never declared the fact on Cockburns file, as any MI5 officer was supposed to do
if he handled the file of an acquaintance. Hollis brushed the question aside. He said
there was no general requirement at that time to record personal friendships on files.
It was a lie, only a small one, true, but a lie nonetheless. The brief contained a full annex
proving that it was indeed current practice in MI5 prewar to record friendships, and that
Hollis would have known of the regulation.
Day began to challenge Hollis on his answer the previous day. Why had he lied? Hollis
was never a stammerer, or a flusterer. There was a slight pause, and then he
acknowledged his mistake. Yes, he admitted, there was another reason. He knew that
Cockburn was of interest to the Service as a prominent left-winger and Comintern
agent, and since he was a recent arrival, and wanted very much to pursue a career
inside MI5, he chose to ignore the regulation in case his friendship with Cockburn were
seen as a black mark against him. I am sure I wasnt the first or the last officer to break
that particular rule.
What about other friends, pressed Day. What about Philby? Were you friendly with
him?
Not really. He was too much of a drinker. We had good professional relations, but
nothing more.
And Blunt?
More so, particularly during the war. I thought he was very gifted. But I saw him less
after he left the Service. Now and again we would meet at the Travelers. Small talk -
that sort of thing. He loved to gossip.
Gouzenko, Volkov, and Skripkin he dispatched swiftly. Gouzenko was unreliable. He still
doubted that Elli really existed. As for his trip to Canada, there was nothing sinister in
Philbys sending the file on to him.
I was the acknowledged Soviet expert at the time. It would be natural for Philby to
refer it to me, particularly because it was a Commonwealth matter.
And Volkov?
I see no reason to disbelieve Philby. He thought Volkovs spy was himself... Why should
he go all that way to protect someone else? Only once did a trace of the old Director-
General break through, when John Day began to ask him about events in the early
1960s. He was asked about the sacking of Arthur Martin. A harsh tone crept into his
voice. He was being thoroughly undisciplined. I never knew what he was doing. Take
Blunt. We agreed on a formal immunity offer relating to events before 1945. Martin
goes in to see him, and offers him CARTE BLANCHE immunity. The Attorney-General was
incensed, and so was I. There was no controlling him. He and Wright were busy setting
up a privileged Gestapo, and something had to be done to break it up. I dont regret it
for one moment. I think it was absolutely justified in the circumstances and, if anything,
should have happened much earlier. John Day asked him why he had not allowed
Mitchell to be interrogated in 1963.
Its in the files. The Prime Minister would not sanction it.
Did you actually ask him for permission?
Of course I did, replied Hollis testily.
But he has no recollection of the meeting, countered Day. Thats absurd! The
situation was critical. The Profumo business was at its height. The whole question of the
exchange with the Americans had to be considered. Another scandal would have
brought the Government down. Thats why consultation was vital.
It was all shadow-boxing. Day moved and jabbed, but he could never really land a blow.
Somehow he never got close enough to street-fight, to grapple and gouge him, and
make him confess. Time had slipped away. It was all old, too old, to ever find the truth.
By the end of the afternoon only the routine questions for the record were left.
Have you at any stage communicated official information to any unauthorized
person?
No, replied Hollis firmly.
Have you ever been approached by anyone clandestinely to pass information?
Never.
The chairs scraped as Hollis got up. He said goodbye, and meant it. He traveled back to
Somerset, back to his golf, and his cottage. He left the interrogation room as unknown
as when he entered - an enigma, an apparently sober man, with a streak of filthy humor.
The autocrat with crippling insecurity.
F.J. met us again at the Oxford and Cambridge Club that night. There was an air of
resignation around the table. We knew that we had not brought the case home. But
equally we felt adamant that there was enough doubt to keep the case alive. F.J. was
silent. He felt the interrogation vindicated his faith in Hollis.
I hope we can move on to other things, he said. Once again the case was closed. But
nothing, and certainly not Hollis interrogation, could paper over the deep chasm which
divided those who believed penetration had occurred, and those, like F.J., who had
finally come to doubt it. I could not help remembering all the wasted years, the years
when it could have been investigated, the years of neglect and drift, the years when files
gathered dust, when reports went unanswered, the years when fear of the unknown
prevented us from ever knowing the truth. Only a chance breakthrough, a defector or a
cipher break, could help us solve the case now. A desperate sense of failure gripped me
- failure and frustration and a desire to get away and forget. Looking back, my
retirement began that night as I traveled home on the train to Essex. What came after
was mostly going through the motions.
Hollis interrogation signaled the end of one decade, and ushered in the new. The 1970s
were to be the years of reckoning, when the secret armies of the West were finally and
painfully exposed to the searing searchlight of publicity. For thirty years West and East
had fought a nocturnal battle, hidden and protected by custom and necessity. But
within four years the secrets would come pouring out. Ironically, the 1970s opened well
for MI5. We finally got a defector we believed in. His name was Oleg Lyalin. He was
recruited by two of the best officers in MI5, a bluff Yorkshireman named Harry Wharton,
and a former SIS undercover officer of conspicuous courage, Tony Brookes, who with his
wife had operated in France AND survived The operation was managed by the head of
KY, a calm, dependable officer by the name of Christopher Herbert. Lyalin was having an
affair with a girl, and when Wharton and Brookes made contact with him he said he
wanted to defect. They managed to persuade him to stay in place, and for six months
he provided MI5 with a detailed run-down of the KGB order of battle in London. He was
only a relatively low-level KGB officer connected to the Sabotage Department, but any
breach in the KGBs armory is invaluable. As soon as the Lyalin case began we realized
that this was the best possible test as to whether high-level penetration of MI5 still
existed. If Lyalin survived we were in the clear. From 1966 until at least 1976 we had no
evidence of Russian interference with our operations. We had five spy cases, and the
Lyalin case and the expulsion of the 105 Russian diplomats, both of which had been in
existence for at least six months. Yet up to the end of 1965, every case for twenty years
or more was tainted by Russian sticky fingers. We should note that Hollis retired at
the end of 1965. The secret was known to only ten people, and to no one outside the
office apart from Dennis Greenhill, Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office. Greenhill
was a good friend of MI5, and I enjoyed especially warm relations with him. He too had
been to Bishops Stortford College, along with Dick White and me. I first dealt with him
over the French STOCKADE operation, but we began to have much more to do with each
other when I took over D3, and routinely provided security briefings for his senior
diplomats.
Lyalin soon began to exhibit the strain of leading a double life. Brookes and Wharton
arranged safe houses where he could meet his girlfriend for love sessions. The
arrangements for these visits were laborious, and each time one or the other had to sit
outside the room monitoring events inside for telltale signs of stress or betrayal. Lyalin
began to drink too heavily, and when he was posted back to Moscow we decided to
bring his ordeal to an end. Lyalin himself was quite game to return to Russia and
continue to spy in place, but we had already concluded that he would never survive.
Lyalin was attached to the Trade Delegation but had no diplomatic immunity, so we
decided that we would simply arrest him as he walked through customs at Heathrow
Airport, and force his hand.
Almost immediately our plans fell apart. I was living in London during the week, and one
night in February 1970, at 3 A.M., I received a telephone call from the Duty Officer.
Get in quick, he said, we need access to your safe. I dressed and took a taxi to the
office, to find Tony Brookes waiting for me.
We need the antidote kit, he told me. Lyalins blown. He was arrested for drunken
driving a few hours ago, and hes in the clink at Marlborough Street!
I unlocked my safe and produced a small roll like a toolkit which Dr Ladell of Porton
Down had given me ten years previously toward the end of my time as Scientific Officer.
It contained antidotes to all the known poisons used by the KGB. Whenever a defector
came out we had the case near him twenty four hours a day, but otherwise it remained
in my safe. No one else cared to hold it so close.
I quickly described to Brookes the basic symptoms of nerve gas or toxic poisoning, and
told him how to administer the antidote. He rushed off to the prison to guard Lyalin,
while I hoisted the deputy head of Special Branch out of bed, and got him to alert
Marlborough Street to the identity of the drunk in their basement cell. Meanwhile the
MI5 Legal Department applied to the Home Secretary and the Attorney-General for
formal immunity for Lyalin from his drunken charge, explaining that there was serious
risk of assassination if he was brought before an open court.
The successful defection of Lyalin presented MI5 with a unique opportunity. Ever since
F.J. became Director-General he had nursed the dream of decisively changing the
balance of forces ranged against him. He knew that the central problem facing MI5 was
the massive superiority in the numbers of Soviet intelligence officers in London.
Throughout the 1960s he had struggled to get the Treasury to agree to an expansion of
MI5s counterespionage capability, but they were always reluctant. He had been able to
achieve a certain amount by redirecting resources internally in favor of D Branch, but we
were still outnumbered by a factor of more than three to one. With Edward Heath in
power, F.J. put the case for a major reduction of intelligence officers to him, citing the
order-of-battle figures for intelligence officers. This was before Lyalin came on the
scene. Heaths reaction was throw the lot out, The Foreign and Commonwealth Office
(FCO) protested, but we were not keen to do this either since we wanted a number here
to retaliate with if the Russians were vindictive. However, the whole arrangement was
agreed between us and FCO by March 1971. We delayed action until the autumn
because Lyalin had come on the scene and we did not want to disturb things until he
either defected or had gone home. In his debriefing, Lyalin identified dozens of KGB
officers active under diplomatic cover. Most of these identifications were already known
to us through the Movements Analysis program, which I had helped establish in the
early 1960s with Arthur Martin and Hal Doyne Ditmass. Calculating KGB strength has
always been a contentious business, and yet it lies at the heart of a rational assessment
of the threat posed by hostile intelligence. When I ran D3 I made a series of analyses of
Soviet strength in 1945, based on the VENONA material. Although we broke only a small
fraction of the traffic, GCHQ were able to statistically assess the total number of spies
active in Britain at between 150 and 300. (The statistical analysis was conducted using
methodology devised by one of the top cryptographers, I.J. Good.) By the 1960s,
through rough analysis of the VENONA, and through comparing intelligence provided by
defectors, as well as Blunt and Cairncross, with our own passport records, we were
confident that there were between forty-five and fifty Russian intelligence officers in
London in 1945, of whom about twenty-five were agent runners. Dividing this into the
number of spies demonstrated in the VENONA gave a median figure of around eight to
nine spies per agent runner, which dovetailed neatly with the one week of VENONA
traffic which demonstrated that Krotov was running eight spies.
Now the real question is how far those figures can be extrapolated into modern times.
By the late 1960s the Movements Analysis program was indicating between 450 and 550
Russian intelligence officers active in Britain. But what percentage of those were agent
runners? Even if we assumed that the number of agent runners had remained static
over a twenty-year period, at around twenty-five, and that the rest were there to
provide cover, countersurveillance, internal security, and analysis, this still left us facing
a huge problem. It meant that there were upward of 200 spies currently active in
Britain. If we took the figure of agent runners to have expanded commensurately with
the rise in total numbers of intelligence officers, the situation was even more alarming -
more than a thousand spies! Of course, the vast majority of those spies would be low-
level contacts among the Communist Party and various trade unions, but if even 1
percent were penetrations of the level of Houghton or Vassall, the implications were
disastrous. Whenever I placed these analyses forward to the Home Office for inclusion
in the routine threat assessments, there was strife. John Allen, a former lawyer, and fast
rising in K Branch, repeatedly disputed my analysis.
You cant say that, there cant be that many IOs in London, the Home Office will never
believe it!
But Lyalins defection removed all the objections. He confirmed the Movements Analysis
figure of around 450 intelligence officers based in London, and maintained that a large
percentage were active agent runners. He proved beyond any shadow of doubt that the
Movements Analysis program was quite correct and my statistical arguments valid. It
was also apparent that not all the increase was in low-level spies. With greater
determination than I ever saw him pursue anything, F.J. put to the Foreign Office the
case for mass expulsions of a large number of the Russian diplomats. In the end, Ted
Heath and the Foreign Secretary, Alec Douglas-Home, agreed, after a discreet approach
by Home to the Soviet Foreign Minister, Alexei Kosygin, suggesting the Russians remove
some of their intelligence officers without publicity was brushed aside imperiously.
The expulsions were seen as a brilliant coup throughout the Western intelligence world,
and we received telegrams of congratulation from the heads of every Service. It was
F.J.s greatest triumph, made sweeter because the fact that the plan had clearly not
leaked to the Russians proved that, whatever the truth of the past, high-level
penetration of MI5 was definitely at an end.
Angleton supported the expulsions unreservedly, and confessed that he had long
wanted to engineer something similar in Washington. But Henry Kissinger was a firm
opponent. Angleton told me that Kissinger had exploded when he learned of the British
expulsions. He was desperately pursuing detente with the USSR, and minuted the CIA
angrily, telling them that had he known of the proposal he would have used every
power at his command to get it quashed. Luckily, the CIA were able to state truthfully
that they had known nothing of the plan. But Angleton was deeply suspicious of Lyalin.
After the defection Angleton paid a secret visit to London. He looked worse than ever,
consumed by the dark, foreboding role he was committed to playing. He viewed himself
as a kind of Cassandra preaching doom and decline for the West. He thought Lyalin was
a plant, and told us all so at a meeting in Marlborough Street.
Oh come on, Jim, I said, Lyalins just not that big. Hes a KGB thug, what possible
disinformation interest could they have in him? Angleton felt betrayed. We had not
told him about Lyalin while we were running him in place, and he told us stiffly that the
whole purpose of UKUSA was the full exchange of intelligence. Patience with Angleton
was rapidly wearing thin in London in 1970. Maurice Oldfield had an illconcealed
hostility to all his ideas and theories, and even inside MI5 he had begun to make
enemies.
We learned later just how far he was prepared to go to discredit Lyalin. As Lyalin was
debriefed, we routinely sent over our intelligence digests containing his material to the
FBI for circulation through to the CIA, and on to the National Security Council and up to
the President.
Some months later, J. Edgar Hoover took a vacation in Florida, and took the opportunity
to call on President Nixon at his holiday home on Key Biscayne.
How do you like the British reports from their source Lyalin, Mr.
President?
What reports? replied Nixon. He had never received them. When Hoover checked
back with Kissinger, he had not received them either. Kissinger got on to the CIA and
instituted a full search. They were finally found in Angletons safe. He had concluded
Lyalin was a provocation, and simply refused to circulate the documents. Tom
Karamasines, the CIA Director of Plans, issued a stern rebuke, and it was the beginning
of Angletons slide from power. The roots of his demise lay much earlier in the Golitsin-
Nossenko feud. For Angleton it became an article of faith that Nossenko was a plant,
since that ensured Golitsin primacy among all the defectors who arrived in the early
1960s. I remember in 1967, after the first CAZAB conference, telling Angleton that I was
traveling back to Britain via the USA. My daughter was living in Boston, and I thought I
would combine some business with a purely personal visit. As soon as I told Angleton I
was visiting Washington he became quite aggressive. He told me I had no right to visit
Washington unless he was in town. At the time I thought his worry was to do with the
Israelis. The Middle Eastern situation was brewing up, and Angleton always jealously
protected his relations with the Israeli secret service, Mossad. He knew of my close
friendship with Victor Rothschild, and often tried to break it off. On one occasion he
even wrote to F.J. to try to curtail it as an interference in the CIA-Mossad liaison, but F.J.
treated the letter with the contempt it deserved.
But Angletons distress had nothing to do with Israel. I learned the truth. Just before the
CAZAB conference an internal CIA inquiry led by a security officer named Bruce Solie
had concluded that Nossenko was almost certainly a genuine defector, although it could
offer no explanation for the curious contradictions in his story. Angleton had never told
the British this fact, despite its implications for Nossenkos and Golitsins information.
He was obviously frightened that if I visited Washington I might get to hear of Solies
report through another channel.
Incidents like these began to undermine Angletons credibility. The Nossenko and Lyalin
incidents did much to shake the faith of even those who knew him best and defended
him longest. We began to doubt whether, after all, the secret sources to which Angleton
claimed he had access actually existed. Perhaps it was, after all, just a three-card trick.
In 1970 Angleton suffered the greatest blow of all. He lost his administrative officer and
effective number two, Jim Hunt. Hunt was a hard man, who treated Angletons
obsessions with balanced skepticism. He had his feet on the ground, and he made
things happen. Angleton, like myself, was a hopeless administrator, and Hunt ensured
that papers were circulated, requests replied to, and the day-to-day routine, upon which
an efficient intelligence service relies, was maintained. Without him, Angleton became a
ship without anchor, drifting slowly toward the abyss.
Lyalins defection and the expulsion of the 105 Russian diplomats were not the only
signs of a new dawn which seemed to be breaking for British Intelligence in the 1970s.
Following his election as Prime Minister in 1970, Edward Heath appointed Victor
Rothschild as head of the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS) - the Think Tank. Never was
a man more perfectly suited to a job. Victor had the right qualities of inspiration and
radicalism to provide the kind of challenging policy unit Heath wanted. The call came at
just the right time for Victor. I could tell that he was becoming slightly bored toward the
end of the 1960s. He had no regard for Harold Wilson, and there was no role for him in
public life. He maintained his links with British Intelligence, utilizing his friendship with
the Shah of Iran, and running agents personally for Dick White in the Middle East,
particularly Mr. Reporter, who played such a decisive role in MI6 operations in the
1950s. It was exciting, but he hankered after a real challenge, and the Think Tank was
exactly what he needed.
As head of the Think Tank, Victor Rothschild took a close interest in security, and Heath
encouraged him to do so, much to the irritation of the Home Office, and in particular
the powerful Permanent Secretary of the time, Philip Allen (now Lord Allen of
Abbeydale, and a member of the Security Commission). Victor became, in effect, the
Lord Wigg of Heaths Government. Once inside the Cabinet Office Victor teamed up with
Dick White, the newly installed Cabinet Intelligence Coordinator following his retirement
from MI6. Together they combined to give British Intelligence its highest ever postwar
profile. Victors finest achievement for MI5 was securing F.J.s succession. F.J. was
never a popular figure in Whitehall. He was too much his own man, and too secret even
for that bastion of secrecy. Normally the outgoing Director-General has the right to
choose his successor, but as F.J. approached retirement in 1972, the Home Office, and
especially Philip Allen, decided it was time to exert authority. Allen was convinced that
an outsider should be appointed. He had become suspicious of MI5 and feared they had
become a dangerous repository of scandal. He knew only sketchy details of the full
extent of the traumas of the mole hunts, but he knew about Blunt and Long, and he
knew enough to be worried. He was alarmed by what seemed to him to be the cavalier
use of immunities, and the undoubtedly poor caliber of MI5 management. He wanted a
safe pair of hands at the helm of the organization - someone who could tell him what
was going on, someone he could trust. Simkins finally retired, to my great relief, about a
year before F.J.s scheduled retirement, and was replaced by Michael Hanley. As far as
Allen was concerned, Hanley was neither experienced enough nor independent enough
to be entrusted with the top job. Allens preferred candidate was Sir James Waddell, a
deputy secretary at the Home Office, who was responsible for Police and Security
Affairs, and handled all day-to-day liaison between MI5 and the Home Office. Waddell
was a dependable mandarin who had somehow missed out on a permanent secretarys
job. Allen, to whom he had given loyal service, wanted to install him as Director-General
of the Security Service. Waddells prospective appointment was viewed with
considerable concern inside MI5. He was a finicky man who insisted on the last dot and
comma on intercept warrant applications. He lacked the experience as an intelligence
officer to gain the respect of its senior officers. Many of us felt his candidacy was pure
Whitehall expediency, which would set the Service back a decade, in the same way that
Rennies appointment as C just a few years before had caused a massive slump in
morale in MI6. Of course, there was another consideration as well. There were many
secrets which M15 had kept from their political and Civil Service masters, and the last
thing anyone in MI5 wanted at that stage was the explosive story of the mole hunts to
receive an airing around Whitehall.
The first I heard of the problem of succession was when F.J. mentioned it in late 1971.
He told me he was determined to stop Waddell taking over the Service, and said he had
already approached Dick White to ask for assistance. But the situation looked gloomy. A
committee of top permanent secretaries chaired by the Cabinet Secretary and attached
to the Senior Appointments Selection Committee had already recommended Waddell,
and although F.J. had put forward Hanleys name he had received no votes at all. He was
too new, too inexperienced, and the mandarins knew too little about him.
Is there anything you can do with your powerful friend? asked F.J., referring in his
customary manner to Victor.
At the time I used to see Victor informally once a week - sometimes in his room at the
Cabinet Office, more often at his home. On my next visit I raised the question of the
succession. It had all the right elements to fire Victors imagination - a heady brew of
intrigue and secrecy.
He told me he had already been alerted to the situation by Dick White, who had told
him that he supported Hanley for the job. Dick had initially given some thought to
supporting Maurice Oldfield for the job. Sir John Rennie, anxious to remove the man
who effectively ran MI6, even though he himself was the titular head, had put Oldfields
name forward, but Oldfield had made it plain he preferred to sit it out and wait for
another chance as Director C if Rennie retired. (Rennie did retire prematurely after the
disclosure that his son had been convicted of a drugs charge, and Oldfield succeeded
him.) Do the Service want Hanley? asked Victor. He often used me as a sounding
board for Service as opposed to management opinion. Certainly, I replied.
Do you have anything against him?
I told him the story of the HARRIET affair. Although Victor already knew of my suspicions
about penetration, and I had discussed both Hollis and Mitchell with him, the fact that
Hanley had once been a suspect was new to him.
I told him I was quite convinced he was in the clear, and so were the Americans. I told
him the Service were dead set against Waddell, and that there would undoubtedly be
serious trouble if he were appointed. We need all the help we can get, Victor!
Ted wont like it, he told me, for the moment assuming the GRAVITAS of a senior civil
servant. Then he cast the somehow inappropriate mantle aside, and fell into his more
natural conspiratorial manner. Lets see what we can do, he muttered, and asked me
to arrange for him to meet Hanley as soon as possible.
By this time Hanley and I had established a reasonable working relationship. HARRIET
was always a block to any warmth, but he dealt with me in a straightforward manner,
and I tried to be as much help as I could, guiding him around the previous twenty years
of counterintelligence rather like an accomplished chauffeur, pointing out the sights to
admire, and the potholes to avoid. I knew he would bridle when I told him of my
meeting with F.J. and Victor. There was just a trace of socialism about Hanley, which
showed itself in utterances about achieving the job on his merits, not through the old
boy network. But in the end ambition was the better master, and he agreed to go with
me one evening to Victors elegant flat in St. Jamess Place. I had one drink and made a
tactical withdrawal to my club to allow them to talk freely. The next day Victor rang me
up.
Hes a very good choice, he said We must meet tonight and make our plans.
That night, over a particularly fine claret, we drew up our campaign. Dick White had
obviously failed to impress his choice either on his mandarin colleagues or on Ted
Heath. Dick was always diffident when it came to staff matters, and had not been able
to summon up the gumption to bang the table. Of course, that was never his style.
Undoubtedly his one failure in his career was his inability to make good appointments.
Too often he was betrayed by sentiment or orthodoxy. He overpromoted Hollis and
Cumming in MI5, and he failed to order the decisive purge necessary in the Philby
infected MI6 until much too late. It was the same with Hanley. He knew what was best
for the Service, but he seemed unable to grasp the nettle and act.
To be fair, he never enjoyed good relations with Edward Heath. Their styles were so
dissimilar. Dick worshipped Harold Macmillan, and the grand old man had a very high
regard for his Chief of Intelligence. Similarly, he got on well with Harold Wilson. They
shared a suppleness of mind, and Wilson appreciated Dicks reassuring and comforting
manner on vexed issues such as Rhodesia. But Heath was a thrusting, hectoring man,
quite alien to anything Dick had encountered before, and he found himself increasingly
unable to stamp his personality on the Prime Minister.
Victor and I went through all the options, even at one point considering whether we
could run Victor himself as an alternative candidate. I knew he had secretly hankered
after the job for years, but although his appointment would have been a brilliant and
popular one, he knew he was too old, and in any case, the Think Tank was the real
challenge for a man of his intellectual horizons. We discussed casting around for
support in the scientific community, and we decided that Victor would approach people
like Sir William Cook to gain their support for Hanley. Victor also told me he would
contrive a safe meeting with Heath.
Its no good bringing it up formally at No 10, he told me. As soon as Robert
Armstrong sees it, or hears of it, word will get back to the bloody Permanent Under
Secretaries!
Robert Armstrong, Heaths Principal Private Secretary (today Cabinet Secretary and
head of the Home Civil Service), was a key figure in the power struggle, since no one
else had closer or more continuous access to Heath. Any hint of special pleading by
Victor would certainly be reported by him to the Permanent Secretaries Committee.
Victor decided that the best plan was to get to Heath in an unguarded moment when
Armstrong was not there. The best opportunity was the next Think Tank weekend
conference, scheduled for Chequers in a few weeks time. Ill take Ted out for a walk in
the garden, where Robert cant hear, and Ill bend his ear.
As it happened, I was beginning to see a good deal of Robert Armstrong myself. I had
recently been reviewing the American VENONA, and one unidentified cryptonym in
participial had begun to interest me. It appeared in the traffic as Agent Number 19.
Agent 19 was clearly a very important Soviet asset, who passed over details of a
succession of significant wartime discussions between Churchill and Roosevelt during
the Trident Talks in June 1943.
The Americans had assumed the identity of Agent 19 was Eduard Benes, the former
Czechoslovakian President, whose reward for a lifetimes work as a Soviet stooge was to
be toppled from power ignominiously in 1948. Benes attended the Trident Talks, and
was well known as a conduit of intelligence to the Russians. However, when I looked at
the text of the messages themselves, I became distinctly skeptical about this
explanation. The conversations Agent 19 was reporting were clearly informal discussions
between Churchill and Roosevelt about plans for the Second Front, and in particular
naval and shipping dispositions. It struck me as improbable that Benes would have been
permitted into these discussions, especially since Czechoslovakia had no ships at all,
being a landlocked country.
I began to wonder if Agent 19 were perhaps someone closer to home. The first task was
to locate any available British records of the meetings between Roosevelt and Churchill
at the Trident Talks to see if I could find a record of the particular meeting referred to by
Agent 19 and, if possible, a list of who attended it.
The search for the phantom Trident discussion was quite the most bizarre experience of
my career. Victor arranged for me to meet Robert Armstrong. He was keen to help. He
was a fast-rising mandarin, already tipped as a future Cabinet Secretary, and since he
would need the support of the intelligence community to obtain the job, he was anxious
to build up friendly relations. He threw himself boyishly into the task of searching No. 10
Downing Street for any available records. But after several weeks we drew a blank.
Armstrong suggested I call on Lord Ismay, Churchills former Chief of Staff, and Sir John
Colville, his former Private Secretary, but although both men remembered the Trident
Talks, they had not been present at these particular discussions. I tried Mary Churchill,
but she had no records either. Lastly, Armstrong arranged for me to see Martin Gilbert,
Churchills historian. For each day Churchill was Prime Minister, one of his private
secretaries kept a record of his engagements and Gilbert had all the volumes. Perhaps
here there would be a record. I gave Gilbert the relevant date, and he searched through
the indexed diaries.
Good God, he said, the diary for that date is blank! The search for Agent 19 had run
into the sand, and it remains unsolved to this day.
The row over the succession to F.J. fell at the height of my search for Agent 19, so I
suggested to Victor that I, rather than he, sound out Robert Armstrong. It was important
to maintain Victors position of neutrality, but no one could blame me for partisanship
in the matter of the succession. On my next visit to No. 10 I made a light reference to
the fears inside MI5. He smiled.
The cards are stacked against you, he said. I dont think its worth pushing on this
one.
I told him that if the wise men were intent on Waddell, they were making a mistake.
We arent being civil servants, I told him, and Waddell will be out of his depth in the
job... hell play it too much by the rules. Armstrong betrayed little himself, beyond
telling me what I already knew, that the Permanent Secretaries were firmly behind
Waddell. They just want to reward him, and they cant find him a top job in any of the
other ministries! I said bitterly.
Armstrong laughed.
Oh no, Peter, were not that conspiratorial!
A few weeks later I saw Victor again. He had managed to have his talk with Heath in the
sunshine at Chequers, and he told him of the strong resistance inside MI5 to the
appointment of an outsider. Heath was sympathetic, but explained that he would have
to have a very good reason to reject unanimous Civil Service advice. But eventually
Victor managed to persuade him to interview both candidates personally. It was a
major breakthrough. We were all certain that Hanley would impress Heath with the
force of his personality, whereas Waddells diffidence would be sure to tell against him.
When Hanley got the news his demeanor changed. He could see events were moving in
his direction. Rather pompously he came into my office and told me that he was to see
the Prime Minister the following day.
And I dont need a briefing, thank you very much. I thought the announcement would
come quickly, but the days passed and we heard nothing. Throughout the Whitehall
village, antennae were out to catch signs of a result. On every visit I made to the Home
Office I checked on the latest state of play. But there was no news, apart from the
insistent refrain: Philip Allen will not have Hanley at any price.
At the weekend my wife and I traveled to Dolgellau in Wales, to buy cows at an auction
for the farm we had recently purchased in Cornwall for our retirement. Ever since Hollis
interrogation, and my departure from D3, I had begun planning a return to agriculture,
and a less painful future away from the whispering corridors and paper mountains of
MI5. Whitehall was the last thing on my mind as the auctioneer rattled on in an
impenetrable Welsh dialect. Steers and heifers were slapped in and out of the small
crowded ring, their owners croaking and whistling to keep their animals alert.
Suddenly across the loudspeaker I heard a voice. Can Mr. Wright from London please
come to the office for a telephone call...
I struggled to make my way through the crowded terrace, past a hundred tightly pressed
Welsh farmers each craning for a view of the ring. Eventually I reached the tiny office
and picked up the telephone. It was Victor.
Do you know what the buggers have done now? he roared.
What are you talking about, Victor?
Theyve switched horses. They want to appoint some chap called Graham Harrison.
Does the name mean anything to you? They will never accept him, I yelled back. The
man was a friend of Burgess and Maclean.
I suddenly remembered where I was. But I had no need to worry. The auctioneers clerk
continued to work on his figures, oblivious to my conversation. I told Victor I would call
on him as soon as I got back to London.
Francis Graham Harrison was also a deputy secretary at the Home Office. Although
there was no suggestion that he was a spy, he was a close friend of Guy Burgess, and
had moved in the Oxford set which included Jennifer Hart and Arthur Wynn. To appoint
a man with those connections would have been, to borrow F.J.s phrase, grotesque, and
I told Victor that the Service would never wear it.
Early the following week Victor rang again.
An announcement will be made tomorrow, he said. I think you will be pleased...
How did you swing it?
I took Dick by the ear and took him in to see Ted. We both told him there would be a
mutiny unless he appointed Hanley. He soon got the point!
The next day F.J. summoned in a couple of the senior officers to tell us that Hanley had
finally been appointed.
Its been a difficult campaign, he told me gravely, but I have finally won through.
I am very pleased to hear that, sir, I replied with a straight face. Shortly before F.J.
retired he and I had a short meeting to discuss the looming situation in Northern
Ireland. It was clearly going to be the major problem facing his successor. He feared that
it would threaten all that he had done since 1965 to build up MI5s counterespionage
capability. He had lobbied the Treasury to provide more resources, but they had
refused. They wanted F.J. to shift resources away from counter-espionage and into
counterterrorism. As far as they were concerned, the expulsion of the 105 diplomats
had eradicated the KGB threat for a generation. But F.J. believed that complacency was
precisely the way to fritter away the advantage he had achieved. F.J. looked tired, as if
he longed to put the burdens aside. He was a man of few words but I could tell he
wanted to talk. He was glad to be going, he said. The pleasure of the work had all but
disappeared. He was worried, too, about money. Although he cultivated the air of a
gentleman, he was not a wealthy man. He had an attractive house in Hampstead, but he
had a young daughter still to educate, and he talked bitterly of having to sell himself in
the marketplace as a security consultant, when he should be retiring to his beloved bird-
watching. (In fact, he became a consultant to Imperial Chemical Industries [ICI].
)
Well, how do you think Ive done? he asked me as he cleaned his pipe, sucking and
scraping at it almost nervously.
What, you want to know, honestly? I asked.
He nodded.
You got on top of the Russian problem, but I dont think you ever made contact with
the ordinary officer.
He looked surprisingly wounded. You should have told me, he said.
Im sorry. I didnt feel it was my place.
I always liked F.J., and I think most of the senior officers did too. He was never a wag,
but he saw the absurdity of life and his profession. I will always treasure traveling to
Australia with him for the first CAZAB conference in 1967. As we approached the
passport barrier a party of ASIO officials was waiting to meet us on the other side. F.J.
handed in his passport.
Whats this? drawled the passport officer, pointing to the entry in F.J.s passport
under Occupation.
F.J. had entered Gentleman.
That is my occupation, uttered F.J. in his most patrician manner, I have no other. I am
a gentleman. Dont you have them here? The Australian drew himself up to his full
height, but luckily I had managed to attract the attention of the ASIO party, who
hurriedly explained the situation and whisked us both through to the other side. F.J.
beamed for the rest of the day, as if he had won a great team match single-handed.
F.J. ran the office as a democracy of the elect. If you were a trusted senior officer, his
door was always open, his manner always familiar. But he remained a remote figure to
the younger generation of officers, and he was consequently blind to many of the
resentments which were building up below.
Few in Whitehall mourned his passing. At the height of the row over his succession, he
offered to stay on another year to give Hanley extra time to play himself in as deputy.
But the Home Office would have none of it. He told the truth and politicians and civil
servants hated him for it. He also kept the secrets, and that made him an object of fear
and suspicion.
Within a year Dick White had also left, and British Intelligence had lost its two most
important executives. Their contribution is hard to overvalue. They were a perfect
match. Dick was the subtle interpreter of intelligence, smoothing feelings in Whitehall
and Downing Street;
F.J. was the tough man, sounding warnings and bringing bad news. I broke with them
on only one issue in twenty years - high-level penetration. I think history will judge that
they were never prepared to force the issue through. Consequently they allowed
decisions to go unmade and the issue to fester so that it caused more damage than it
ever need have done. But in other ways their contribution was massive. They became a
link between the Old and the New World, and together they made British Intelligence
respected throughout the world.
23 -
Hanley seemed ill at ease when he first moved into the Director-Generals office. He
knew he was a controversial appointment, and this made him move with a greater
degree of caution than ought otherwise to have been the case. He wanted to please and
reassure his political and Whitehall masters, and he made compromises a more secure
man might not have.
Hanley was a bright man, intellectually superior to F.J. But he lacked F.J.s strength of
character. I didnt have faith in him, as I had in F.J., and my separation from the office
began once F.J. left. The Service began to change, and those last four years were an
extended farewell.
At first the changes were slight - silly things, like the fact that Hanley, unlike F.J., never
offered lifts in his chauffeured car. But then they were more pronounced. We moved
offices from Leconfield House, first to Marlborough Street and then to the drab
premises on Gower Street. I suggested to Hanley that we go for a greenfield site,
perhaps in Cheltenham, but he was insistent that we had to stay in London. He began to
promote his own men. They were young and keen, but they were civil servants: men of
safety rather than men of arms. I began to realize that a generation was passing. For all
our differences, those of us involved in the great mole hunts, on whichever side, were
fast disappearing. The age of heroes was being replaced by the age of mediocrity.
Hanley summoned me in soon after taking over to talk about my position. I have faith
in you, Peter, and as long as I am in this job, there will be work for you here, he told
me, referring to the rising resentment which had plagued my last year in D3. He told me
he thought I should leave my job as K Branch consultant, and come and work for him
personally.
I want you as my personal consultant on counterespionage, he told me. Youll have
an office next to mine, and youll see every paper as before. But I want you to look at
some fresh problems for me. I dont want you wrapped up in the current K Branch cases
- I want you to be looking ahead.
We drew up a new agenda, some of it to my liking, other parts not. He wanted me to
continue to control the VENONA program, and agreed that we should finally initiate a
comprehensive worldwide search for any remaining traffic.
He wanted me to look at Northern Ireland.
I need one of your bright ideas, Peter, he told me, see what you can do...
He wanted me to sit on the Computer Working Party, which was planning the transition
of the MI5 Registry into the computer age, a leap into the future due to take place in the
mid-1970s. D3 had given me a special insight into the use of the Registry to trace leads,
and he wanted me to apply these techniques to computerization. At first I thought
Ireland might give me a new lease of life. I made a couple of trips. It reminded me a lot
of Cyprus. A fierce, insoluble conflict made worse by a vacillating British policy. At the
time I first went, the Government were telling the world that the situation was getting
better. I spent a fortnight reviewing the records of all explosions over a twelve-month
period. I drew a graph and proved conclusively that the weight of explosives being
detonated was a steeply ascending curve. So much for an improved security situation!
But, as in Cyprus, the Army and the politicians simply refused to face reality.
The only major recommendation I made was that we should devise a system of tapping
the telephone lines of the Irish Republic. Lines across the border were well covered, but
vital Provisional IRA communications flowed back and forth from the west coast of the
Republic to Dublin. I devised a scheme for intercepting the microwaves from the attic of
the British Embassy in Dublin using a device no larger than a packing case, but although
MI5 endorsed the plan, the Foreign Office vetoed it. This was in the period leading up to
what became the Sunningdale Agreement, and the Foreign Office were terrified that
news of the plan might leak. I pointed out to them that the basic lesson from Cyprus
had been the inherent instability of political solutions negotiated without a decisive
security advantage, but they would not listen. It was no surprise to me when
Sunningdale collapsed.
I lost heart once the Dublin scheme fell through. It seemed to me a measure of how far
the bureaucrats had taken control. Twenty years before, we would have tackled it
without any worries at all. I did suggest examining the possibilities of planting booby-
trapped detonators on the Provisionals. It would have been a feasible operation in
conjunction with MI6, along the same lines as the Cyprus plan to plant fake receivers on
Grivas. But even the MI5 management took fright, and refused to investigate the plan
any further. Thats murder, I was told.
Innocent people are being killed and maimed every day, I said. Which policy do you
think the British people would like us to pursue? The Irish situation was only one part
of a decisive shift inside MI5 toward domestic concerns. The growth of student militancy
in the 1960s gave way to industrial militancy in the early 1970s. The miners strike of
1972, and a succession of stoppages in the motorcar industry, had a profound effect on
the thinking of the Heath Government. Intelligence on domestic subversion became the
overriding priority. This is the most sensitive area a Director-General of MI5 can get
into, and it requires a strong man to maintain his own independence and that of the
Service. Hanley, through the circumstances of his appointment, was ill-equipped to deal
with this pressure. Whereas F.J. was always a champion of MI5s independence, Hanley
resolved to do what his masters wanted, and he set about providing them with as
professional and extensive a source of domestic intelligence as was possible.
Traditionally, K Branch was MI5s prestige department and F Branch its poor relation,
shunned by the brightest officers, and run shambolically by an amiable tippler. But
Hanley began to pour resources and men into F Branch and away from K Branch. A
whole string of brilliant counterespionage officers, including Michael McCaul, was lost
forever. The most significant pointer to this change occurred after I retired, when Sir
John Jones was appointed Director-General in 1981. He was the rising star of F Branch in
Hanleys new reorganization, and when he secured the top job he was the first Director-
General since Hollis to have achieved it without any personal counterespionage
experience. He was an F Branch man through and through, and his appointment
perfectly illustrated the decisive shift in MI5s center of gravity. Early on in his tenure as
Director-General, Hanley called a meeting of senior staff in A Branch and F Branch to
discuss the changing shape of MI5s priorities. The meeting began with a presentation
from Hanley on the climate of subversion in the country, and the growth of what he
termed the far and wide left. The Prime Minister and the Home Office, he said, had
left him in no doubt that they wanted a major increase in effort on this target. He then
handed over to a young and ambitious F Branch officer, David Ransome, who outlined
the activities and structure of a host of left-wing splinter groups, like the Workers
Revolutionary Party (WRP) and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Hanley loved
seminars, and the meeting went on for most of the day. The F Branch people wanted a
relaxation in the restrictions governing the use of telephone taps and letter intercepts,
and a much closer relationship with the Post Office. The enemy was diffuse, and its
communications so widespread, that this was the only way they could get to grips with
the problem. John Jones was a forceful advocate. F Branch needed all the technical
resources currently at the disposal of K Branch, he claimed. Agent running was no longer
viable as the principal means of coverage. For a start, he could not infiltrate his officers
into these left-wing groups since many of them lived promiscuous lives, and there were
some sacrifices even an MI5 officer would not make for his country. If, on the other
hand, he recruited agents, there was obviously a much higher risk of publicity and
scandal. The only answer was to use massive technical resources. I could see from
Hanleys face that he agreed.
I, on the other hand, pushed the value of agents. Use agents if you want to keep an
eye on these groups, I told Hanley later in private. Youll be storing up problems for
the future if you commit all our technical resources against them. The Post Office cant
in the end be trusted as much as our own people. Its bound to go wrong.
It was the same with the Computer Working Party. I soon realized that the main interest
F Branch had in the Computer Working Party was to establish widespread computer
links, principally with the National Insurance computer in Newcastle. In the past, of
course, we had always been able to get material from the National Insurance records if
we really wanted it. We had a couple of undercover officers posted up there who could
be contacted for our files. But establishing a direct computer link was something
completely different. I was not alone among the old guard, anti-Soviet officers in being
disturbed by these new developments. We could see all that we had worked to achieve
frittered away chasing these minor left-wing groupings. But more than that, the move
into the computer generation signaled the relegation of the role of the individual
officer. From now on we were to be data processors, scanning tens of thousands of
names at the press of a button.
The fun has gone was a sentiment I heard more and more in those last few years.
Hanley himself was unable to grasp the difficulties he was getting himself into. It was
easy to believe that we had the publics consent when we broke into a Soviet diplomats
house. But the wholesale surveillance of a large proportion of the population raised
more than a question mark. Big Brother loomed.
Veterans of D Branch viewed groups like the WRP, SWP, and Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament (CND) as largely irrelevant pieces of the jigsaw. Certainly an eye should be
kept on them, but we were quite satisfied they were not the major objects of KGB
attack. These were the Intelligence Services, the Civil Service, and increasingly in the
1960s, the trade unions and the Labor Party.
Since the 1960s a wealth of material about the penetration of the latter two bodies had
been flowing into MI5s files, principally from two Czechoslovakian defectors named
Frolik and August. They named a series of Labor Party politicians and trade union
leaders as Eastern Bloc agents. Some were certainly well founded, like the case of the
MP Will Owen, who admitted being paid thousands of pounds over a ten-year period to
provide information to Czechoslovakian intelligence officers, and yet, when he was
prosecuted in 1970, was acquitted because it was held that he had not had access to
classified information, and because the Czech defector could not produce documentary
evidence of what he had said at the trial.
Tom Driberg was another MP named by the Czech defectors. I went to see Driberg
myself, and he finally admitted that he was providing material to a Czech controller for
money. For a while we ran Driberg on, but apart from picking up a mass of salacious
detail about Labor Party peccadilloes, he had nothing of interest for us.
His only lasting story concerned the time he lent a Cabinet Minister his flat so that the
Minister could try and conduct an affair in strict privacy. Driberg was determined to find
the identity of the woman who was the recipient of the Ministers favors, and one
evening after the Minister had vacated, he searched the flat and found a letter
addressed to a prominent female member of the Labor Party. Driberg claimed to be
horrified by his discovery and raised it with the Minister concerned, suggesting that he
ought to be more careful in case word of his activities ever became public! Since Driberg
was certainly providing the same stories to his Czech friends, his concern for Labor Party
confidentiality seemed hollow, to say the least.
John Stonehouse was another MP who the Czech defectors claimed was working for
them, but after he was interviewed in the presence of Harold Wilson, and denied all the
charges, the MI5 objections against him were withdrawn.
This was the context which shaped the fraught relations between MI5 and the Prime
Minister for much of this period. Much has been written about Harold Wilson and MI5,
some of it wildly inaccurate. But as far as I am concerned, the story started with the
premature death of Hugh Gaitskell in 1963. Gaitskell was Wilsons predecessor as
Leader of the Labor Party. I knew him personally and admired him greatly. I had met him
and his family at the Blackwater Sailing Club, and I recall about a month before he died
he told me that he was going to Russia. After he died his doctor got in touch with MI5
and asked to see somebody from the Service. Arthur Martin, as the head of Russian
Counterespionage, went to see him. The doctor explained that he was disturbed by the
manner of Gaitskells death. He said that Gaitskell had died of a disease called lupus
disseminata, which attacks the bodys organs. He said that it was rare in temperate
climates and that there was no evidence that Gaitskell had been anywhere recently
where he could have contracted the disease.
Arthur Martin suggested that I should go to Porton Down, the chemical and
microbiological laboratory for the Ministry of Defense. I went to see the chief doctor in
the chemical warfare laboratory, Dr. Ladell, and asked his advice. He said that nobody
knew how one contracted lupus. There was some suspicion that it might be a form of
fungus and he did not have the foggiest idea how one would infect somebody with the
disease. I came back and made my report in these terms. The next development was
that Golitsin told us quite independently that during the last few years of his service he
had had some contacts with Department 13, which was known as the Department of
Wet Affairs in the KGB. This department was responsible for organizing assassinations.
He said that just before he left he knew that the KGB were planning a high-level political
assassination in Europe in order to get their man into the top place. He did not know
which country it was planned in but he pointed out that the chief of Department 13 was
a man called General Rodin, who had been in Britain for many years and had just
returned on promotion to take up the job, so he would have had good knowledge of the
political scene in England. We did not know where to go next because Ladell had said
that it wasnt known how the disease was contracted. I consulted Jim Angleton about
the problem. He said that he would get a search made of Russian scientific papers to see
whether there was any hint of what the Russians knew about this disease. A month or
two later he sent us a paper about lupus which he had had translated from a Russian
scientific journal. The paper was several years old and Angleton reported that there
were no other papers in the Russian literature that they could find. This paper described
the use of a special chemical which the Russians had found would induce lupus in
experimental rats. However, it was unlikely that this particular chemical could have
been used to murder Gaitskell because the quantities required to produce lupus were
considerable and had to be given repeatedly. I took the paper to Ladell and, while
surprised by this area of Soviet expertise, he confirmed that it was unlikely that Gaitskell
could have been poisoned by the coffee and biscuits. But he pointed out that the paper
was seven years old and if the Russians had continued to work on it they might have
found a much better form of the chemical which would require much smaller doses and
perhaps work as a one-shot drug. He told me there was no way of proving it without
doing a lot of scientific work and Porton was unable to do the necessary work as it was
already overloaded.
I said I would take the matter home and discuss it with my management. Once again I
wrote an account of what Ladell had said and confirmed its accuracy with him
personally. Back in M15 we discussed the problem at length in the office and it was
agreed that nothing could be done unless we had further evidence of the Russians
using such a drug to assassinate people. Over the next few years I watched out for any
evidence and asked Ladell also to watch out for it. Needless to say we had no further
example of anybody who was in a vulnerable position dying of lupus. However, if there
was a high-level leak in MI5 to the Russians, they would have been informed of our
suspicions and I am sure they would have ensured that no other case came our way.
Harold Wilson meanwhile had become Prime Minister. It was inevitable that Wilson
would come to the attention of MI5. Before he became Prime Minister he worked for an
East-West trading organization and paid many visits to Russia. MI5, well aware that the
KGB will stop at nothing to entrap or frame visitors, were concerned that he should be
well aware of the risk of being compromised by the Russians. When Wilson succeeded
Gaitskell as Leader of the Labor Party, there was a further source of friction between
himself and MI5. He began to surround himself with other East European emigre
businessmen, some of whom had themselves been the subject of MI5s inquiries.
After Harold Wilson became Prime Minister in 1964, Angleton made a special trip to
England to see F.J., who was then director of counterespionage. Angleton came to offer
us some very secret information from a source he would not name. This source alleged,
according to Angleton, that Wilson was a Soviet agent. He said he would give us more
detailed evidence and information if we could guarantee to keep the information inside
MI5 and out of political circles. The accusation was totally incredible, but given the fact
that Angleton was head of the CIAs Counterintelligence Division, we had no choice but
to take it seriously. Not surprisingly the management of MI5 were deeply disturbed by
the manner in which Angleton passed this information over. After consideration, they
refused to accept Angletons restrictions on the use to which we could put the
information, and as a result we were not told anything more. However, Angletons
approach was recorded in the files under the code name Oatsheaf.
After Hollis retired and Furnival Jones became Director-General, I went to F.J. and said I
was paying a visit to the USA and asked whether I should tackle Angleton on the
Oatsheaf information, with a view to getting more details. He said that I could, but again
insisted that we could not give Angleton any guarantee about any information which he
gave us. I tackled Angleton in Washington. He put up a vintage performance. There were
dark mutterings about clandestine meetings with the Russians. But when he was
pushed for details, there were none, and I knew from bitter experience that Angleton
was more than capable of manufacturing evidence when none existed.
But if the Oatsheaf affair was nothing more than a diversion, by the end of the 1960s
information was coming to MI5s attention which suggested that there almost certainly
was Soviet penetration of the Labor Party. First the Czechoslovakian defectors, Frolik
and August, arrived in the West and named a series of Labor MPs and trade unionists as
successful recruits. Then we received the most damaging information of all from Oleg
Lyalin. While Lyalin was still in place, he told MI5 about a friend of his called Vaygaukas.
Vaygaukas was a KGB officer working under cover in the Soviet Trade Delegation in
London. Lyalin told us that Vaygaukas had claimed to him to be in contact with a man
called Joseph Kagan, a Lithuanian emigre who was a close friend of Harold Wilsons.
Kagan had helped finance Wilsons private office, and had even lent him an aircraft
during elections, and Wilson had been much photographed wearing Kagans raincoats,
which he manufactured in a factory near Leeds.
Inevitably MI5 were extremely anxious to discover whether or not Kagan had any
relationship with Vaygaukas. We placed him under intensive surveillance and attempted
to recruit agents inside his factory. Then, following the expulsion of the 105 Soviet
diplomats in 1971, we finally got the opportunity to discuss the matter with both men.
Harold Wilson, by then out of office, approached Sir Arthur Young, head of the City of
London police and a consultant to one of Kagans companies. Wilson asked to be put in
touch with MI5 because he wished to discuss Kagan. Furnival Jones thought this
approach bizarre, but agreed to send Harry Wharton, who was then handling Lyalin.
Wharton briefed Wilson on Lyalins information about Kagans alleged dealings with
Vaygaukas. Wilson told him bluntly that he knew nothing about it and had never
discussed confidential matters with Kagan at any time. Kagan himself later admitted
meeting Vaygaukas for chess games, but strenuously denied that any espionage was
involved.
Wilson interpreted MI5s interest as a crude attempt to smear the Labor Party and him.
But once the Conservative Government came into power they began to take a great
interest in the material as well. Victor often used to complain to me about the quality of
the intelligence reports No. 10 received from F Branch.
They pull their punches all the time, he would say, cant you give us something
better?
In 1972 he told me that Heath had been appalled at a recent Cabinet meeting, which
was addressed by Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon, the two powerful trade union bosses of
the early 1970s. Ted thought they talked like Communists, he said. I asked F Branch
if they had anything, but of course theyve got nothing substantial. He knew from
gossip that the recent Czech defectors were providing material about trade union and
Labor Party subversion, and began pumping me for the details. I told him to minute me
formally with a request and I would see what I could do. Later that day I got Victors
minute.
The Prime Minister is anxious to see... he began, in typical Victor style.
I sent Victors note to F.J. for guidance. He returned it to me with a handwritten
message in the margin: Tell him what he wants to know! I drew the files, and began
patiently to compose a lengthy brief on the intelligence provided by Frolik and August. I
drew no conclusions, but neither did I leave anything out.
The whole of Whitehall came thundering down on my head. I was summoned by Sir
John Hunt, the Cabinet Secretary, who asked what on earth I thought I was doing
passing material about an opposition party into the government partys hands at such a
delicate time. I defended myself as vigorously as I could. It was not a question of
politics. The head of the Central Policy Review Staff had requested a briefing, and I had
given it to him and it had been approved by DOSS. It was not my fault if the material
was unpalatable or embarrassing. If we refused to circulate intelligence because it was
embarrassing, there would be little purpose in our sending anything at all! Both F.J. and
Victor supported me loyally throughout. Victor relished the row and composed a series
of elegant memorandums which winged their way through Whitehall defending the
Security Services right to provide intelligence requested of it by No. 10 Downing Street.
Philip Allen was outraged by this flagrant flouting of Home Office prerogative, and
refused to speak to me for years. To Victor he sent a terse note which he showed me
gleefully. Keep off the grass, thundered Allen ominously.
One afternoon, at the height of the row, I was in Victors room in the Cabinet Office
when Ted Heath put his head around the door. Prime Minister, said Victor, I think
you should meet Peter Wright, he is one of the stranger phenomena in Whitehall...
Heath looked humorlessly over in my direction, and asked me where I worked.
The Security Service, sir, I replied.
He grunted.
Peter is responsible for the briefing on subversion which is currently causing the
problem, said Victor cheerfully.
Heath immediately fixed me with a steely glare. You should not be indulging in
politics, he glowered, there are mechanisms for this sort of material.
He turned on his heel and stalked out.
Christ, Victor, I said.
Dont worry, replied Victor, Teds always like that. Ill talk to him later.
The following day Victor rang up. He told me Heath had devoured the briefing that
night.
Is this true, Victor? he asked in amazement, and when told it was, redoubled his
crusade to remain in power.
But not all the requests for information were legitimate. One evening Victor invited me
around for drinks at St. Jamess Place. Theres a businessman I think you should meet,
he told me. He is a wealthy industrialist.
I had been discussing retirement with Victor at the time. In 1972 I finally learned that
the promise MI5 had made to me in 1955 about my pension was not to be honored. In
order to join the Service I had been forced to give up fifteen years of pension rights with
the Admiralty. At the time Cumming had talked smoothly of ex-gratia payments, and
ways the Service could iron out these problems. But in the new, gray MI5 a gentlemans
agreement was a thing of the past. According to the rules, I had no case for a pension,
even though every scientist who joined the Intelligence Services after me (some fifty in
number) was able to transfer his pension, largely through my pressure to rectify the
inequity.
It was a bitter blow, and did much to sour my last few years in the Service. Inevitably I
thought about the possibility of security work. It did not greatly appeal to me, but it
seemed a stable way of propping up my savagely depleted pension. At first Victor and I
discussed my joining N.M. Rothschild, but Hanley was unhappy about the proposal, so
when Victor heard that this businessman was looking for someone to do security work,
he suggested a meeting.
I took an instant dislike to the man. It was clear to me that he was on the make. Over
drinks he talked loosely about needing advice and guidance from someone in the
know without quite spelling out what he meant, or how much he was prepared to pay
for it. Eventually he suggested I lunch with him and some colleagues at a London hotel
to discuss his proposition in more detail.
His colleagues were a ramshackle bunch. They were retired people from various
branches of intelligence and security organizations whose best years were well behind
them. There were others, too, mainly businessmen who seemed thrilled to be in the
same room as spies, and did not seem to care how out of date they were.
This time my would-be employer came straight to the point. We represent a group of
people who are worried about the future of the country, he intoned.
He had something of the look of Angleton on a bad night about him. He said they were
interested in working to prevent the return of a Labor government to power.
It could spell the end of all the freedoms we know and cherish, he said.
The others nodded.
And how do you suppose I can help? I asked.
Information, he replied, we want information, and I am assured you have it.
What precisely are you after? I inquired.
Anything on Wilson would be helpful. There are many people who would pay
handsomely for material of that sort.
But I am a serving member of the Security Service... I began.
He waved his hand imperiously.
Retire early. We can arrange something...
I played along for the rest of the evening, but gave nothing away. The following day I
went to see Hanley and told him what had happened. I suggested that I continue to
monitor the groups activities as an agent, but Hanley thought discretion was a better
policy. Leave it alone, Peter, he said, its a dirty game, and youre well out of it.
Hanley knew little about the material which had been gathered on Wilson and the Labor
Party during the 1960s, so I encouraged him to study it. Elections were in the offing,
and it could become relevant again, I told him.
Its like FLUENCY, he said when he had read the files, theres lots of smoke, but not a
lot of fire.
Nevertheless, he agreed that it was prudent to re-examine the material. Angleton, in
particular, was beginning to badger us constantly about Wilson, and I told Hanley it
would be politic to be seen to be doing something.
As events moved to their political climax in early 1974, with the election of the minority
Labor Government, MI5 was sitting on information which, if leaked, would undoubtedly
have caused a political scandal of incalculable consequences. The news that the Prime
Minister himself was being investigated would at the least have led to his resignation.
The point was not lost on some MI5 officers. One afternoon I was in my office when
two colleagues came in. They were with three or four other officers. I closed the file I
was working on and asked them how I could help.
We understand youve reopened the Wilson case, said the senior one.
You know I cant talk about that, I told him.
I felt a bit lame, but then I did not much enjoy being cornered in my own office.
Wilsons a bloody menace, said one of the younger officers, and its about time the
public knew the truth.
It was not the first time I had heard that particular sentiment. Feelings had run high
inside MI5 during 1968. There had been an effort to try to stir up trouble for Wilson
then, largely because the DAILY MIRROR tycoon, Cecil King, who was a longtime agent of
ours, made it clear that he would publish anything MI5 might care to leak in his
direction. It was all part of Cecil Kings coup, which he was convinced would bring
down the Labor Government and replace it with a coalition led by Lord Mountbatten.
I told F.J. in 1968 that feelings were running high, but he responded in a low-key
manner.
You can tell anyone who has ideas about leaking classified material that there will be
nothing I can do to save them! He knew the message would get back.
But the approach in 1974 was altogether more serious. The plan was simple. In the run-
up to the election which, given the level of instability in Parliament, must be due within
a matter of months, MI5 would arrange for selective details of the intelligence about
leading Labor Party figures, but especially Wilson, to be leaked to sympathetic
pressmen. Using our contacts in the press and among union officials, word of the
material contained in MI5 files and the fact that Wilson was considered a security risk
would be passed around. Soundings in the office had already been taken, and up to
thirty officers had given their approval to the scheme. Facsimile copies of some files
were to be made and distributed to overseas newspapers, and the matter was to be
raised in Parliament for maximum effect. It was a carbon copy of the Zinoviev letter,
which had done so much to destroy the first Ramsay MacDonald Government in 1924.
Well have him out, said one of them, this time well have him out.
But why do you need me? I asked.
Well, you dont like Wilson any more than we do... besides, youve got access to the
latest files - the Gaitskell business, and all the rest of it.
But theyre kept in the DGs safe!
Yes, but you could copy them.
I need some time to think, I pleaded. Ive got a lot to think about before I take a step
like this. Youll have to give me a couple of days.
At first I was tempted. The devil makes work for idle hands, and I was playing out my
time before retirement. A mad scheme like this was bound to tempt me. I felt an
irresistible urge to lash out. The country seemed on the brink of catastrophe. Why not
give it a little push? In any case, I carried the burden of so many secrets that lightening
the load a little could only make things easier for me. It was Victor who talked me out of
it.
I dont like Wilson any more than you do, he told me, but youll end up getting
chopped if you go in for this.
He was right. I had little more than a year to go. Why destroy everything in a moment of
madness?
A few days later I told the leader of the group that I would not get the files.
Id like to help you, I told him, but I cant risk it. Ive only got half a pension as it is, I
cant afford to lose it all. Some of the operational people became quite aggressive.
They kept saying it was the last chance to fix Wilson.
Once youve retired, they said, well never get the files! But my mind was made up,
and even their taunts of cowardice could not shake me.
Throughout the rest of 1974 and early 1975 I kept out of the country as much as
possible, chasing VENONA traffic throughout the world. Although the full Wilson story
never emerged, it was obvious to me that the boys had been actively pushing their plan
as much as they could. No wonder Wilson was later to claim that he was the victim of a
plot! In the summer of 1975 I dined with Maurice Oldfield at Locketts. We regularly met
for dinner. He was a lonely man, and liked nothing better than a good gossip at the end
of the day. He finally made it to the top of MI6 after two abortive attempts, and I was
happy for him. Maurice was a good man, but inclined to meddle. That night I could tell
something was on his mind.
He turned the conversation to Wilson. How high had feelings been running in there? he
asked. He kept hearing all sorts of rumors. I was noncommittal.
Most of us dont like him. They think hes wrecking the country. Maurice was clearly
preoccupied with the subject, because he returned to it again and again.
Youre not telling me the truth, he said finally.
Im not with you, Maurice...
I was called in by the Prime Minister yesterday, he said, his tone suddenly changing.
He was talking about a plot. Apparently hes heard that your boys have been going
around town stirring things up about him and Marcia Falkender, and Communists at No.
10. He trailed away as if it were all too distasteful for him. Its serious, Peter, he
began again, I need to know everything. Look whats happening in Washington with
Watergate. The same thing will happen here unless were very careful.
I ordered another brandy and decided to tell him everything I knew. When I had
finished describing the plans of the previous summer he asked me if Hanley knew.
No, I replied, I thought it best just to forget the whole thing.
I want you to go back to the office tomorrow and tell him everything.
Maurice tottered up to bed.
Dont worry, he called back over his shoulder.
I wont, I said, Ive only got a few months to go! When I saw Hanley the next
morning, he went white as a sheet. He might have suspected that feelings against
Wilson ran high in the office, but now he was learning that half of his staff were up to
their necks in a plot to get rid of the Prime Minister. It was at times like that I was glad I
never climbed the executive ladder.
Ironically, his first reaction was anger with Maurice.
Bloody Maurice! he raged. Poking his nose into our business!
When he had calmed down he asked me for the names. I gave them. Having come so
far, I could not very well refuse. As I reeled them off, I knew suddenly what Blunt had
felt like. It was never easy to put on the mask and point the finger.
Look after them, wont you? I asked Hanley.
There will have to be an inquiry, of course, he replied. I left before the Wilson story
ended, and Hanley and I never discussed it again. I heard that a member of the Security
Commission was called in to make a private inquiry for the Cabinet Office, and it has
since been reported that Hanley made a number of changes, mainly in the field of
recruitment, with a view to introducing new blood into MI5. This presumably explains
the cryptic letter I received from Michael Hanley shortly after I retired to Australia.
Youll be pleased to note, he wrote, that the firm has passed its recent examinations,
and is doing rather well!
Shortly afterward Wilson resigned. As we always used to say in the office: Politicians
may come and go, but the Security Service goes on forever.
The shambles surrounding Harold Wilson blew up just as the Hollis affair flickered briefly
back into life in 1974. The case had remained buried since his interrogation in 1969.
Originally I was hopeful that Hanley might revive things when he took over, but I could
soon see that he took the view that sleeping dogs should lie. He had a deep desire to
put the traumas of the past behind him, and was anxious to separate me as far as
possible from current investigations and K Branch cases. Ive got an open mind, he
used to tell me whenever I raised the question.
Fear of scandal became the most important consideration affecting everyone with
responsibility for the turmoil of the 1960s, now that there was a growing certainty that
whatever the problem had been, it was at an end. I discussed with Victor whether there
were any ways of reopening the case.
Now is not the time, he would say. We should bide our time, and I will look for a way
of raising the matter with Ted. But not now. Well just end up jeopardizing Hanleys job.
The whole thing is too potent. We must let some time go by.
Fear of scandal reached fever pitch when, in 1975, Blunt was thought to be suffering
from cancer, and likely to die. Victor approached me again, and asked me whether I
thought it likely that Blunt would leave a last will and testament to be published on his
death, blowing the lid off the whole affair. I had often asked Blunt about this, and he
had always denied making any preparations, but there was a streak of vindictiveness in
him which I never quite trusted. Victor knew better than any outsider just what damage
Blunt could do. Both he and Heath were obsessed with the damage the Profumo
scandal had done to the last Conservative Government, and were terrified that Blunt
could bring them down in the same way. It was not just the problem of the immunity;
there was the horrendous possibility that he might name fellow conspirators, both living
and dead, as well as the chance that he might choose to leave a more intimate record of
the halcyon days of the 1930s. More than a handful of reputations stood to suffer if
their sexual peccadilloes from that time were circulated on Fleet Street, not least the
former Prime Minister, Anthony Eden. Victor eventually pressed me to provide him
with a full brief on the damage Blunt could do if he chose to tell all. When I was in D3 I
had written a variety of papers for the Home Office on the Ring of Five, but they were
mostly unsatisfactory. The MI5 Legal Department insisted on removing names like
Proctor and Watson on the grounds that we had no proof.
Thats not the point, I argued. We should be providing the Home Office with
intelligence. Thats our job. If we filter out things we believe to be true just because we
cant prove them, were failing in our duty.
Victor agreed with my approach totally, and stressed that my briefing had to be as full
as possible. I drew together the full history of the Ring of Five, and painstakingly showed
how all the connections were made. Forty names were on the list in all. A few weeks
later I saw Robert Armstrong about Agent 19. He thanked me for the document.
Splendid piece of work, he beamed, real intelligence. Not like the civil servant drafts
we normally get from the Security Service. Around this time word got back that Arthur
and Stephen de Mowbray were themselves lobbying for the case against Hollis to be
reopened. Arthur had retired, and Stephen de Mowbrays career was in steep decline.
He had made himself deeply unpopular inside MI6 during the late 1960s by his
unswerving support for Golitsin and all his theories. His mentor was Christopher
Phillpotts, under whom he had served in Washington. Phillpotts brought him back to
serve in Counterintelligence, but after Phillpotts retired in 1970, de Mowbray was left
exposed. Dick White was determined to get rid of him if at all possible, but Maurice
Oldfield suggested that a spell in Malta was the best compromise. When de Mowbray
returned in 1972 to find that the Hollis case was shelved, he began to agitate for action.
Both Oldfield and Hanley were terrified in case de Mowbray took it into his head to take
his fears about Soviet penetration to an MP. Arthur, too, was developing contacts in
Parliament. After retirement he went off to work there as a clerk as a way of making up
his pension. There were worries in case he decided to brief one of his newfound friends
on the traumas of the past twenty years.
Hollis was not de Mowbrays only concern. He also believed that the whole system for
appointing heads of the Secret Services was nepotic and potentially disastrous. He had a
point, in that once a spy insinuated himself to the summit of an organization, he was in
a perfect position to appoint fellow traitors to follow him. Oldfield raised the question
of de Mowbray at one of our quiet dinners. Cant you rein him in? he asked. He made
it clear that Hanley would view it favorably as well. Oldfield, too, had personal reasons
for wishing to keep the Hollis affair buried. He had been passed over for the top job in
MI6 when Dick White returned but was desperately hoping that he would yet get his
chance as C.
I told him that I doubted whether in the end I could have much influence over him or
Arthur.
Yes, but they dont know what you know; they dont know how delicate things are. Any
hint of scandal now could deal us all a grievous blow. Poor Maurice was so transparent,
you could read ambition in him like a book. Before the evening was out he began to talk
about the future. Of course, he said, if Rennie left, and I got the chance, I wouldnt
want to stay long...
His voice trailed away. I knew he wanted me to pass the message along. A few weeks
later I lunched with Stephen and tried to persuade him that now was not the time to
push.
There are things going on, I said, I know it looks as if its stalled. But there are many
ways of skinning a cat. We just need to give it time.
He was not convinced. He thought I was in Hanleys pocket, and made no secret of it.
In fact, I was still hopeful that the VENONA search authorized by Hanley might yet yield
vital clues to the case. Perhaps some more traffic would be found hidden away in a
dusty cupboard which would give us the matches to unlock the missing cryptonyms.
There had recently been a small breakthrough in the existing traffic which had given
cause for hope. Geoffrey Sudbury was working on part of the HASP material which had
never been broken out. Advanced computer analysis revealed that this particular traffic
was not genuine VENONA. It did not appear to have been enciphered using a one time
pad, and from the non-random distribution of the groups, Sudbury hazarded a guess
that it had been enciphered using some kind of directory. We began the search in the
British Library, and eventually found a book of trade statistics from the 1930s which
fitted. Overnight a huge chunk of HASP traffic was broken. The GRU traffic was similar to
much that we had already broken. But there was one series of messages which was
invaluable. The messages were sent from the GRU resident Simon Kremer to Moscow
Center, and described his meetings with the GRU spy runner Sonia, alias Ruth
Kuzchinski.
The Sonia connection had been dismissed throughout the 1960s as too tenuous to be
relied upon. MI5 tended to believe the story that she came to Britain to escape Nazism
and the war, and that she did not become active for Russian Intelligence until Klaus
Fuchs volunteered his services in 1944. In particular GCHQ denied vehemently that
Sonia could ever have been broadcasting her only radio messages from her home near
Oxford during the period between 1941 and 1943 But Kremers messages utterly
destroyed the established beliefs. They showed that Sonia had indeed been sent to the
Oxford area by Russian Intelligence, and that during 1941 she was already running a
string of agents. The traffic even contained the details of the payments she was making
to these agents, as well as the times and durations of her own radio broadcasts. I
thought bitterly of the way this new information might have influenced Hollis
interrogation had we had the material in 1969.
Once this was known I felt more sure than ever that Elli did exist, and that he was run by
Sonia from Oxford, and that the secret of his identity lay in her transmission, which
inexplicably had been lost all those years before. The only hope was to travel the world
and search for any sign that her traffic had been taken elsewhere. Over the four years
from 1972 to 1976 I traveled 370,000 kilometers searching for new VENONA and Sonias
transmissions. In France, SDECE told me they had no material, even though Marcel told
me he was sure they had taken it. Presumably one of the SAPPHIRE agents had long
since destroyed it. In Germany they professed total ignorance. It was the same in Italy.
Spain refused to entertain the request until we handed back Gibraltar. I spent months
toiling around telegraph offices in Canada searching for traces of the telex links out
there. But there was nothing. In Washington, extensive searches also drew a blank. It
was heart-breaking to know that what I wanted had once existed, had once been filed
and stored, but somehow had slipped through our fingers. In 1974 Hanley and I began
making preparations for the next CAZAB conference, which was due to take place in
London in May. I told him he would likely face pressure from the Americans and the
Canadians for some kind of statement about the Hollis case. We had successfully stalled
any comment since the interrogation, but Angleton for one was determined to have
something on the record.
What shall I say? asked Hanley.
I told him to play things low-key.
Tell them the facts. There was a series of old allegations, and a number of candidates
were possible starters. Hollis was one, and probably the best, but in the end, although
we interrogated him, we were not able to form a firm conclusion.
The 1974 CAZAB conference was a far cry from the high-spirited gatherings of the
1960s. Too many faces around the table had disappeared. Spry had gone; Jim Bennett
from the RCMP had gone, himself a suspect in a paralyzing mole hunt inside the RCMP
with which I was peripherally involved (I believe that, despite Bennetts peculiar
behavior under interrogation, he was not a spy); Helms had gone; and Angleton was
clearly living on borrowed time. In Washington the Watergate scandal was at its height,
and already the cupboard full of CIA skeletons was inching open.
Hanley made his short statement about the Hollis case. It was greeted silently. Most
people had suffered the same traumas themselves, and knew just what pain and
damage a case like that would have done. Hanley ended diplomatically by inviting the
services represented to make whatever damage assessments they felt necessary in the
light of his statement. It was a classic Whitehall ploy. Lay out the difficult ground, but
always let the other man draw the decisive conclusion! I saw Angleton only once more
after the CAZAB conference in Washington at the end of the year. He knew he was being
forced out. A new Director, William Colby, was determined to unseat him. Angleton and
Colby had quarreled about the conduct of counterintelligence in Southeast Asia for
several years. When Colby became Director the opportunity to get rid of Angleton came
when THE NEW YORK TIMES published a story naming Angleton as the mastermind
behind a massive domestic mail surveillance program. Within a few days Angleton and
all his senior men had resigned.
When I saw Angleton he was raging.
Two hundred years of counterintelligence thrown away, he cursed, when he realized
that the whole of his senior staff was departing. It was obvious that THE NEW YORK
TIMES story was only the first shot in the war. Within six months the CIA was submerged
in a welter of Senate hearings, exposes, and mire. The year when the reckoning began
was 1974. In Canada and Australia inquiries began into the past iniquities, alleged or
real, of their intelligence services. We were the modern pariahs - hated, distrusted,
hunted.
Oldfield and Hanley were terrified by the pace of events abroad, fearful above all that
some of the revelations would spill over onto their own services. They realized, too, that
the newly elected Labor Government might just be prepared to encourage such
developments. It was in this context that Stephen de Mowbray finally decided that he
had to act. In mid-1974 he approached a friend of his, Philip de Zuluetta, a former
private secretary to Alec Douglas-Home when he was Prime Minister, and outlined his
fears about the penetration of MI5, and the method of appointing service chiefs.
Zuluetta suggested he approach Sir John Hunt, the new Cabinet Secretary. After telling
Maurice that he could restrain himself no longer, de Mowbray made his appointment
with No. 10 Downing Street.
Whats that bloody de Mowbray doing now? roared Hanley one morning.
It was the first I heard of the news.
Bloody Maurice interfering again. How can he let one of his officers prance around to
Downing Street and wash all our linen without asking me... its intolerable!
I told Hanley that I felt it was inevitable. In the end de Mowbray was always determined
to make an approach over the heads of MI5 and MI6, and we ought to be thankful it was
to No. 10 Downing Street, rather than through a parliamentary question.
The outcome was a review - a classic maneuver. At the time they always seem so
hopeful; it is only afterward you realize they are designed to achieve the answer desired
by those who set the inquiry up. This one was to be conducted by Lord Trend, the
former Cabinet Secretary. He was to have all the papers, and as much time as he
needed, to decide which of the two faiths was believable.
Trend first appeared in Leconfield House in late 1974. He was given an office, a safe, and
a secretary, and left alone on the fifth floor. After a few weeks he telephoned me and
asked me to come to his room. He appeared a typical Oxford don, an aesthetic-looking
man with a wide forehead and fairish gray hair.
I dont want to talk about the case, he began, I simply want to get a picture of how it
was all done. Then I am going to go off and study and see people, and I will see you
again at the end. All ten volumes of the FLUENCY Working Party were stacked neatly on
the desk in front of him, and for the rest of the morning we went through them.
How did it all begin? he wanted to know.
It was a question I had often asked myself as I sat in the evening poring over those same
files. How did it all begin? Did it start in 1945, when Blunt left? Or did it start when
Volkov and Gouzenko made their approaches? Perhaps it was much earlier, when a frail
man with TB stepped off the boat from China and tried to get a job in British
Intelligence. Or later, much later, when Tisler told us about the spy in MI5, or when
Golitsin talked of spies, hundreds of them, thousands of them, everywhere. Or was the
Mitchell case the first decisive moment, the first time we looked, and could not find the
spy in our midst? How do you define the moment when a fear becomes a tangible
presence? It is just there. It was always there, from the beginning to the end.
The FLUENCY files looked curiously distant. They bulged with unseen hours of work.
Minutes from every secret department were carefully recorded, tracing the distribution
of this document and that document. Each allegation was carefully broken down; each
suspect allotted a code name. At the end of the last file was the famous minute signed
in my own hand, giving the names of those who needed urgent investigation. On more
than one occasion Trend asked about the delays in dealing with cases.
Its very difficult, I explained, to be told that the man youve worked with for years,
who gave you your job, or whom you gave his job, is a spy. That was what Dick White
and F.J. found so difficult to come to terms with... and thats why we adopted code
names from the beginning, to depersonalize everything.
Quite so... said Trend.
You do understand that all the FLUENCY decisions were unanimous. This was not just
me on my own. There were six of us, and we all thought exactly the same.
Ah yes, murmured Trend, pausing over an apparently innocuous exchange of
documents in the file.
Trend seemed especially interested in the middling-grade agent. He asked me to explain
how we had broken the allegation down, and the system we had used to allot marks to
each of the thirty-four candidates.
I spent several hours explaining the VENONA. He was fascinated by that infernal
incomplete jigsaw which promised so much and revealed so little.
I described how we arrived at our identifications. Stanley, Hicks, and Johnson were
almost certainly Philby, Burgess, and Blunt, though there was still room for doubt.
Stanley was Philby because of the reference to Mexican affairs being the responsibility
of his Department. Hicks was Burgess because in one message Moscow Center instructs
Krotov to limit Hicks reports to hard facts, and omit the theories. Thats Guy to a tee,
I said with a laugh, surprised by the intimacy with which I referred to a man I had met
only on paper. And Johnson? asked Trend.
That is where the doubt is... There is a reference here - I handed him a sheet of the
VENONA with paper message ribbons embossed on it - and you can see that Johnson is
traveling abroad. That tallies with Blunts movements. He went to Italy at the end of the
week this message was received. But it is slightly odd that Krotov appears not to know
of Johnsons plans. I asked Blunt about this, and he was positive that he told Krotov
about his impending trip at least six weeks before. Could it have been anyone else?
The only officer who made a sudden trip abroad at the end of this week was Drat... Im
sorry, I mean Hollis, when he went to Canada to see Gouzenko.
And...?
I doubt it, I said quietly, I somehow doubt it. I think Johnson was Blunt, and he was
leading us astray on the six weeks business. Johnson is just too closely tied to Hicks and
Stanley to be anyone else but Blunt. Anyway, there are three other cryptonyms still
unidentified. Any of those could be Hollis.
I was impressed by Trend. He had a quick mind, and a very thorough one too. There was
no skating across points. I came away from our first meeting feeling I had been grilled in
a rather quiet, patient way. But what worried me was that he had a civil servants
training, not an intelligence officers background. Would he be able to make the kinds of
judgments required to make sense of a mass of contradictory intelligence material? He
had no frame of reference, no way of judging the strength of the case against Hollis as
against the strength of the case against other spies, like Philby, or Blunt, or Blake. Only
years of experience in the secret world could give a man that kind of intuition.
Trend had a high reputation inside MI5. Most people preferred him to Norman Brooke,
the previous Cabinet Secretary, who was renowned for getting bees in his bonnet.
Norman Brooke and I shared the same club, and after he retired I occasionally used to
talk to him. He was careful never to criticize his successor, but always gave the
impression things were being handled much more badly now than in his day. Trend was
a far more relaxed figure, and he fought the Treasury doughtily on behalf of the Secret
Services throughout the 1960s.
Trend continued to work away in Leconfield House for another year. Occasionally we
would meet in the corridor. He never said much, and it was late 1975 before I was called
in to see him again. By that time we had finally left Leconfield House and moved to the
dismal Gower Street offices.
He wanted to talk about the allegations. He thought they were all very old, when you
stripped them down to the bone. Of course, but what is impressive is the coincidences
of the dates of the allegations. They all come from exactly the same time. Its quite
uncanny.
Golitsin, Trend said, did not seem to lead anywhere - not helpful was the expression
he used. I agreed that for the purposes of the case for high-level penetration Golitsin
had given us nothing we could investigate. He was, at best, I conceded, an indicator that
penetration had occurred.
Trend also discarded the middling-grade agent story. Very difficult case that, he
agreed, impossible not to look at, but I think right to discard today.
Now Volkov, he began again, after turning to a relevant file and adjusting his
spectacles.
Wasnt I being finicky in altering the thrust of the allegation after having the document
retranslated? he asked.
I dont see why, I replied. There are really only two ways to proceed in cases like
these. One way is to make guesses about what an allegation means, and where it leads,
and how seriously to take it. The other way is to adopt a scholastic approach, and
analyze everything very carefully and precisely and build scientifically on that bedrock.
And then theres Elli, said Trend. I see you checked the story with Akhmedov. But
youve got no follow-up, have you? Theres no Elli in the traffic.
But I didnt expect that there would be, I replied, Elli is an illegal, and if thats the
case, his communications would be illegal, not through the Embassy. If we found Sonias
traffic I am sure we would find Elli. But we cant.
And you still think Elli was Hollis?
Most certainly.
And nothing since has caused you to doubt that?
No, if anything my conviction has become stronger.
Trend sighed patiently.
But theres no ideological background... he began.
Theres China.
Ah, yes, he murmured, China... His voice trailed away. Trend was professional to
the end. I never could detect just what his feelings were. He certainly gave me the
impression that he thought the case for penetration was strong, but apart from a
fleeting reference to the fact that he doubted we had the right candidate in Hollis, he
gave nothing away.
Neither did I ever learn from Hanley what Trends conclusions were. The subject was
never discussed, and I assume that Trends report was completed after I left the Service
in January 1976. It was only in 1981 that Mrs. Thatcher filled in that final gap. Lord
Trend, she told the House of Commons, had concluded that Hollis was not an agent of
the Russian Intelligence Service. He had faith in a mans innocence, as I had faith in his
treachery; as another man might have faith in God, or Mammon. One mans view, as I
now realize, is in the end worthless. Only facts will ever clear up the eternal mystery.
As I approached my final months in the office I felt a wave of tiredness. I did not know
whether to stay in England and fight, or cut my losses and run. My health was bad, my
pension derisory. But I had my memories.
One afternoon toward Christmas I drove up to Cambridge with Victor to his country
house for the last time. Conversation was difficult. So much needed to be said. So much
was inside me, bottled up and waiting to spill out.
What are you going to do? he asked.
Oh, I dont know - maybe Australia, I replied.
The wet fenland fields flashed past the car. In the distance I could feel the draw of the
Cambridge spires.
You want to be persuaded to go, dont you? said Victor after a while.
I suppose so.
I was morose. I was on the losing side. The Reformation had taken place in British
Intelligence. Catholicism had given way to Protestantism. My wars were wars of the
past.
You should go, Peter, get out there to the sun, get better, get fit, let someone else take
the strain. Youve done the work of three men, said Victor.
The car engine droned.
Your problem, Peter, he said, is that you know too many secrets.
Glossary
Abwehr - German Intelligence Service.
ARL - Admiralty Research Laboratory (UK).
ASIO - Australian Security and Intelligence Organization.
ASSA - Armed Services Security Agency (USA).
AWRE - Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (UK).
BSC - British Security Coordination.
CIA - Central Intelligence Agency (USA). Its main function is foreign intelligence and
espionage. Known internally as the Company. CPGB - Communist Party of Great
Britain.
D Branch - Counterespionage Branch of MI5 (UK).
D1 - Head of Russian Counterespionage (D Branch) (UK).
DRPC - Defense Research Policy Committee (UK).
DSI - Defense Scientific Intelligence (UK).
DST - French Counterespionage Service (equivalent to MI5).
EN CLAIR - uncoded.
FBI - Federal Bureau of Investigation (USA). Its main function is domestic
counterintelligence.
GC&CS - Government Code and Cipher School (UK).
GCHQ - Government Communications Headquarters (UK). GKNIIR - Joint organization
between the KGB and GRU on scientific and technical intelligence (USSR).
GPU - see OGPU.
GRU - Soviet Military Intelligence.
ISOS - Abwehr hand ciphers broken by British cryptanalysts.
JIC - Joint Intelligence Committee (UK).
KGB - Komitet Gosuderstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee of State Security) (USSR).
MGB - Ministry of State Security (USSR). The forerunner of the KGB. MI5 - British
Security Service. (Formerly Section 5 of Military Intelligence, hence the name, still
commonly used.) Roughly equivalent to the American FBI (internal security) but it does
perform certain counterintelligence functions overseas. Its main charge is to protect
British secrets at home from foreign spies and to prevent domestic sabotage,
subversion, and the theft of state secrets. MI6 - British Secret Intelligence Service.
(Formerly Section 6 of Military Intelligence.) A civilian organization with functions
resembling those of the American CIA. It is charged with gathering information overseas
and other strategic services. Both MI5 and MI6 are controlled by the Joint Intelligence
Committee. NKVD - A forerunner of the KGB (USSR).
NSA - National Security Agency (USA).
OGPU - A forerunner of the KGB (USSR)
OSS - Office of Strategic Services (USA). The wartime forerunner of the CIA.
PF - Personal File (in the MI5 Registry).
RCMP - Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
RNSS - Royal Naval Scientific Service (UK).
ROC - Radiations Operations Committee (UK).
RSS - Radio Security Service (UK).
SDECE - French Secret Intelligence Service (equivalent to MI6).
SERL - Services Electronics Research Laboratory (UK).
SF - Special Facility. A phone-tapping device.
SIME - Security Intelligence Middle East (UK).
SIS - MI6.
Traffic - Morse, telegraph, or radio communications signals containing genuine
messages.
UB - Polish Intelligence Service.
Watchers - Officers of MI5s A Branch charged with visual surveillance and identification
of persons presenting a security risk. Whitehall - A street in London where the principal
government offices are situated. Used to signify the civil service or the bureaucracy.
Index
A1, 23
A2, 2, 23, 30, 31, 39, 43, 54, 55, 57, 58, 66, 70, 71 74, 99, 189, 199,
204, 225, 336
A3, 23
A4, 23, 48, 92, 132 SEE ALSO Watchers
A Branch, 23, 25, 32, 39, 70, 92, 204, 359
A Branch Resources 59-60, 123
Abwehr, 9, 78, 120, 246, 325, 326, 329, 383
Admiralty, the, 15-16, 21, 22, 26, 73, 74, 129, 135, 148, 166, 168,
186, 252-54, 367
Admiralty Research Laboratory
(ARL), 4, 5, 15-17, 26, 27, 93, 251, 252, 256, 383
Agayants, I.I., 205
Agent 19, 352, 353, 373
Air Bubble, SEE Soupert, Dr Jean Paul
Akhmedov, Ismail, 281-82
Alexander, Hugh, 80-83, 108, 110, 146, 148
Allen, John, 345
Allen, Lord Philip, 348-49, 354, 366
All Russia Co-operative Society Limited (ARCOS), 33, 35, 226
American Intelligence, 35, 98, 99, 146, 163, 181, 185, 269, 273, 304,
306
Angleton, James, 102-104, 147, 149-53, 159, 161, 162, 217, 239, 240,
269, 273-276, 303-309, 314, 315, 317, 330, 345-347, 363, 364, 368, 376-
77
antisubmarine research program, 16, 26, 43, 168, 256
Apostles Society, 221, 242, 251-53, 260, 262, 264
Archer, Jane Sissmore, 289
ARCOS raid, 33, 35, 226
Armed Services Security Agency (ASSA), 180, 184, 383
Armstrong, Robert, 351-53, 373
ARNIKA, 208-209
Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE), 118, 131, 138, 167, 195,
196, 383
Attlee, Clement, 4, 33, 55
August, 319, 361, 364, 366
Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO), 65-66, 122, 184,
327, 356, 383
Bagot, Millicent, 37-38
Bailey, Don, 19
Baron, 238
Bay of Pigs invasion, 153-54, 159, 203
B Branch, 32, 34, 78, 336
B Branch, RCMP, 61
Beith, Freddie, 79-80
Belgian SECURITE DETAT, 239, 240
Belmont, Al, 90, 101-102, 139, 145-46, 269, 270
Bennett, James, 61, 88, 268, 376
Berlin, Isaiah, 229, 242
Berlin Tunnel Operation, 46-47, 72, 129, 147, 156, 169, 270
Bissell, Richard, 154
Blake, George (Lambda 1), 47, 129, 169, 207, 209, 236, 256-57, 270,
294, 300, 337, 380
Blue Streak project, 22, 26
Blunt, Sir Anthony (Johnson), 3, 31, 56, 121, 164, 174, 184, 194, 213-
21, 223-230, 232, 235-37, 239, 241-43, 248-54, 257-64, 266, 270, 277,
278, 281, 285-286, 288, 297, 300, 324, 331. 335, 340, 344, 348, 371,
372-73, 378, 379-80
Bossard, Frank, 271-73, 305, 306
Bowra, Maurice, 242
BRIDE, Operation, 180
Bridges, Edward, 75, 263
British Counterintelligence Directorate, 281
British Establishment, 118, 121, 229, 236, 243, 252, 275
British Intelligence, 2, 8, 19, 22, 34-35, 44, 66-68, 75, 9S, 99, 104,
113-15, 128, 163, 167, 172, 181, 185, 204, 232, 239, 245, 268, 269,
274-82, 285, 286, 303-307, 324-29, 347, 348, 356, 378, 382
British Military Intelligence, 65-66, 116, 209, 218, 221, 243
SEE ALSO MI5, MI6
British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), SEE MI6
British Security Coordination (BSC), 99, 327, 381
British Security Service, SEE MI5
Brooke, Norman, 380
Brookes, Tony, 342, 343
Brookner, Anita, 264
Brundren, Sir Frederick, 4-7, 14, 15, 17, 18, 22, 23, 42, 81, 115-17
Brundrett committee, 5, 18, 42, 81, 117-118
Building Research Station, 57, 59, 292
Burgess, Guy (Hick), 3, 21, 31-34, 43, 44, 98, 99, 102-104, 121, 122,
146, 147, 152, 164, 174, 184, 188, 193, 207, 214-216, 222, 226-29, 235,
236, 241-64, 277, 285-86, 325, 335, 338, 354, 379
Burk, Joe, 150
Cabinet Office, 97, 213, 348, 349, 366, 372
CABMAN, 47
Cairncross, John, 218-23, 227, 229, 230, 232, 235, 236, 241, 249, 257,
270, 286, 344
Cambridge University, 213-16, 221, 222, 224, 236, 238, 242, 251-53,
256, 258-260, 264, 265, 299, 317, 381
Canadian Intelligence, 61, 151
Castro, Fidel, 154, 159, 162, 210
CAZAB, 276, 307, 316, 346-47, 355, 376 C Branch, 32, 36, 77-78, 129,
187, 223, 292, 295, 298, 300, 349, 374
Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS), SEE Think Tank
Chalet, Marcel, 240, 241, 314, 375
Chisholm, Rory, 209-10
Chisholm, Mrs Rory, 209
CHOIR, Operation, 58-61, 64, 66-67, 175
Churchill, Clarissa (Lady Avon), 242-43
Churchill, Mary, 352,
Churchill, Winston, 16, 25n, 34, 44, 68, 69, 182, 239, 242, 352
CIA (The Company), 46, 98, 102, 103, 128, 135, 142, 145-50, 153, 154,
159, 161, 164-66, 182, 193, 196, 203-209, 217, 218, 239, 268-70, 273-
76, 286, 294, 302-308, 315, 317, 345-47, 363, 364, 376, 377, 383
ciphers, 79-86, 89, 105, 108-14, 134, 137, 139, 146, 148, 151-52, 179-
84, 281, 374-76
Civil Service, 17, 26, 29, 55, 117, 122, 167, 222, 236, 241, 260-63,
265, 331, 349, 351, 353, 356, 357, 361, 380
Clan, 138, 167
Clyde Polaris submarine base, 165, 166
Cockburn, Claud, 288-89, 338, 339
Cohen, Morris and Lena, SEE Kroger, Peter and Helen
Cohen, Sir Andrew, 264, 265
Colby, William, 376
Cold War, 5, 54, 60, 79, S3, 102, 146, 147, 163, 185, 186, 229, 308,
314
Colemore Committee, 115, 168
Collins, Bill, 79, 80, 134, 135, 137
Colonial Affairs, SEE E Branch
Colonial Office, 58, 154-59 Comintern, 226, 228, 237, 260, 262, 269,
339
Communism, 30, 31, 159, 254, 257, 371
Communist Affairs Research Section (MI6), 289
Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), 32, 38, 39, 46, 54-56, 57, 58,
106, 175, 186, 197, 228, 242, 321, 324, 345, 383
computers, 81-83, 114, 153, 167, 184, 186, 195-96, 217, 358, 360-61,
375
Computer Working Party, 1, 358, 360
Conway, Godfrey, 240
Cook. Sir William, 22, 118, 167, 168, 195, 196, 351
Cooper, Josh, 108-10
Cot, Pierre, 239-41
Counterclan, 138, 153, 167, 171, 204, 247
Counterespionage Department (MI5), 1, 2, 196, 197, 243, 274, 276, 283,
332, 364 SEE ALSO D Branch
Counterespionage Department, RCMP, 61,
86, 268 Counterintelligence Section (MI6), 32, 232, 238, 276, 277, 280,
282. 285, 324, 326, 373
Courtauld Institute, 224, 225, 258, 264
COVERPOINT, Operation, 90, 96
Coyne, Gerald, 274-76, 303
CPGB, SEE Communist Party of Great Britain
Crabbe affair, 72-75, 113, 161, 172, 207, 231, 278, 324
Cram, Cleeve, 135, 274, 275
cryptography, 179-84, 195, 228
Cuckney, Sir John, 31-32, 35
Dimming, Malcolm, 5, 6, 18, 21-30, 39, 42-44, 67, 69, 73-76, 77, 79,
90, 99, 176, 187, 190, 205, 216-18, 231, 233, 253, 254, 274, 276, 351,
367
Cumming, Mansfield, 10, 24
Cyprus campaign, 113, 154-59, 358-59
Dl, 36, 106, 123, 126, 127, 133, 164, 165,
186, 202, 217, 232-34, 383
Dl (Investigations), 232-33, 254, 298, 331,
D1 (Operations) - 232, 301, 309-10, 312
D2 - 123, 130, 133, 141, 294, 299, 300, 320, 333
D3 - 164, 204, 218, 223, 232, 235, 236, 238, 241, 243, 253-54, 259, 264, 268, 276, 277,
280, 289, 291, 299, 321, 324, 327, 330-34, 336.
342, 344, 354, 357, 358, 373
D4 - 309, 309-10, 312
David, 183, 317
Day, John, 334-35, 337-41
D Branch, 30, 32, 36, 39, 44, 48, 79, 80, 94, 106, 120, 125, 129, 136.
138 143, 163, 187, 190, 197, 198, 204, 216, 217, 223, 232, 241, 253,
254, 275, 276, 294, 309, 322, 323, 333, 334, 343-44, 361, 383
Defense, Ministry of (MOD), 4, 18, 93, 97, 155, 169, 242, 254, 362
Defense Research Policy Committee (DRPC), 5, 117-18, 383
Defense Scientific Intelligence Unit (DSI), 115, 383
de Gaulle, Charles, 111, 112, 238, 239
de Mowbray, Stephen, 202, 315, 328-29,
373, 374, 377
Denham, Hugh, 80-83, 108, 146
Denman, Major, 45-46
Deutsch, Arnold, 226, 227
DEWWORM, Operation, 62-67, 72, 86, 175, 268, 269
de Zuluetta, Philip, 377
Directorate of Science, 168-69, 175, 192, 195, 203, 204
Dixon, Peter, 6, 115, 160, 162
Dollis Hill Laboratory, 45, 46, 58, 72, 130, 132
Domeisen, Peter, 116
Double Cross System, 30, 34, 78, 79, 119,
120, 121, 206, 246, 305
Douglas-Home, Alec, 345, 377
Downing Street (No 10), 351-53, 365, 366, 371, 377
Doyne Ditmass, Hal, 217, 218, 344
dragging, 181, 195
Dragon Returnees, 115-17
Driberg, Tom, 361-62
DRUG, Operation, 180
DST, 239, 240, 241, 383
Dunlap, Jack, 207
Dwyer, Peter, 282, 284
Dzerzhinsky, Feliks, 158, 206, 207
E Branch, 32, 39, 154, 155, 275, 300
Eden, Anthony, 73, 74, 76, 78, 85, 160, 161, 243, 373
Elli, 188-89, 278-86, 290, 293, 340, 375, 381
Elliott, Nicholas, 73, 74, 174, 194, 227, 287, 325
Ellis, Charles (Dickie), 325-30
Elwell, Charles, 135, 170, 171, 188
emigre communities, 120, 121, 124, 206, 325, 326, 328, 329, 364, 365
en clair, 53, 134, 383
ENGULF, 84, 86, 104, 108-10, 113-14, 138, 145-47, 152, 153
ENIGMA code, 79, 81, 219
EOKA, 154-56, 158, 159 F4, 54, 56, 57
Falber, Reuben, 175
Falkender, Marcia, 371
FBI, 61, 89, 90, 99-103, 139, 145-51, 165, 203, 213, 227, 268-74, 305,
306, 318, 346, 383
F Branch, 32, 37-39, 77, 197, 285, 287, 288, 359-60, 365
Fedora, 165, 211, 270, 272, 305-306
Fibonacci system (Chinese arithmetic), 179
five of MI, 281-86
Floud, Bernard, 264-66
Floud, Peter, 264, 265
FLUENCY, 232, 268-69, 276-79, 281, 283, 285, 286, 302, 320, 324, 326,
330-335, 368, 378-79
Foot, Sir Hugh, 155, 157-58
Foote, Alexander, 282
Foreign Office, 5, 19, 21, 70, 82, 110-12, 121, 124-25, 209, 222, 238,
246, 280, 285-86, 292, 293, 296, 310, 312-14, 328, 342, 345, 358
Foreign Office Northern Department, 124-
Frawley! Ray, 83, 109, 114, 146
Friedman, Litzi, SEE Philby, Litzi
Frolik, 319, 361, 364, 366
Fuchs, Klaus, 50, 121, 122, 182, 186, 237, 301, 375
Furnival Jones, Martin (F.J.), 123, 126, 129, 132-38, 143, 187, 190-93,
202, 203, 214, 231, 232, 253, 254, 266-67, 269, 275, 291-303, 310, 313,
315-17, 322, 323, 331-50, 353-59, 364, 365, 366, 369, 378
Gaitskell, Hugh, 362-64, 370
Gardner, Meredith, ISO, 185
GCHQ, 53, 75, 78-92, 98, 105, 108-14, 134, 136, 138-40, 145, 146, 148,
153, 170, 171, 181-83, 186, 195-97, 203-204, 209, 222, 223, 246, 247,
271-73, 276, 280, 284, 292, 305, 344, 375, 383
Gee, Ethel, 130, 138-39
German Armed Forces ciphers (ENIGMA), 79, 81
German Intelligence Service, SEE Abwehr
Gestapo, 68, 237, 240, 329
Gibson, Harold, 220
Gideon, 87-88
Gilbert, Martin, 352-53
Glading, Percy, 33
Goleniewski, Michael (Sniper), 142, 237, 277, 278, 293-95, 299, 300,
302-306, 320, 321-23
Golitsin, Anatoli, 164-66, 170-76, 184, 193, 205-207, 231, 237, 239,
256, 257, 270, 277, 278-79, 287, 288, 293, 299, 304, 309, 314-20, 346,
347, 362-63, 373, 378, 380
Good, I.J., 344
Gossage, Ray, 16
Gouzenko, Igor, 62, 65, 183, 188-89, 278, 281-85, 290, 293, 309, 320,
340, 378, 379
Government Code and Cipher School (GC & CS), 219, 383
Grant, Sokolov, 170, 171
Gray, Gordon, 273-76, 303
Gray, Joan (Miss X), 228
great illegal, 226-28, 327, 328
Greenglass, Harry, 50
Greenhill, Dennis, 342
Gribanov, General, 164, 165
Grigovin, Sergei, 309-11
Grist, Evelyn, 44, 48
Grivas, George, 113, 154-59, 359
Gromov, Anatoli (Henry), 228
GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence), 62, 64, 139, 1*5, 179, 181, 182,
186-87, 195, 196, 204, 205, 208-209, 237, 238, 271, 272, 281-83, 285,
305, 325, 327, 375, 383
GRUFF signal, 105-108, 126
Guernsey, Terry, 61-63, 66, 86-88, 123
Hagelin cipher machines, 82-84, 109
Hall, Reggie, S-10
HALT, Operation, 79-81
Hamburger, Rudi, 245-46
Hammer, Armand, 104
Hampshire, Sir Stuart, 244, 246-49
Hanke, 294
Hanley, Sir Michael, 3, 237, 295-304, 320-322, 332-34, 337, 348-61,
367, 368, 372-77, 381
Hanslope Communications Center, 167, 168
Harker, Brigadier, 37
HARP, 284
HARRIET case, 295, 298, 302-304. 332, 350 SEE ALSO Hanley, Sir Michael
Harriman, Averill, 182
Harris, Tomas, 173, 260
Harrison, Francis Graham, 354
Hart, Herbert, 265
Hart, Jennifer Fisher Williams, 264-66, 354
Harvey, Bill, 147-54, 159-62, 308
HASP, 186, 238, 375
Hawkes, Johnny, 168
H Division, 80, 84, 108
Healey, Denis, 242
Heath, Edward (Ted), 344-45, 347-J8, 350-53, 354-55, 359, 360, 365-67,
372
Helms, Richard, 148, 154, 159, 217, 275, 303, 308, 376
Henry, 228
Henry, John, 5, 73-75, 160, 161, 162
Herbert, Christopher, 342
Hicks, 183, 184, 379
Hinton, Geoffrey, 276
Hiss, Alger, 182, 207, 253
Hitler, Adolf, 68, 325, 326, 329
Hollis, Sir Roger, 3, 22-23, 28, 76-78, 85, 89-92, 96-100, 117, 123,
126, 127, 129, 132-33, 135, 138, 143, 144, 149, 155, 158, 159, 168,
173, 176-78, 184, 187, 189-205, 213-15, 217-19, 224, 230-36, 241, 247,
249, 253, 254, 261, 268-71, 273-85, 287-306, 315, 320, 324, 334-42,
350, 351, 354, 359, 364, 372-81
Home Office, 46, 213, 265, 345, 348, 353, 356, 366, 373
Hoover, J Edgar, 89, 90, 97, 99-104, 145, 147, 203, 303, 346
Houghton, Harry, 129-30, 133-39, 140-43, 164, 236, 269, 270, 334, 345
Houghton, Mrs. Harry, 129, 236, 334
Hunt, Jim, 347
Hunt, Sir John, 366, 377
Intelligence Services, British, 21-22, 42, 75, 78, 167, 380
Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), 210-11, 306
Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBMs), 210-11 IRA, 1, 358, 359
ISOS Abwehr codes, 246, 383
Jagger, Leslie, 39-41, 59, 60, 71, 80, 82, 83, 104, 119, 310
Johnson, 183, 184, 379 SEE ALSO Blunt, Sir Anthony
Joint Allied Intelligence Committee, 299
Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), 82, 85, 209, 276, 383
Joint Services Language School, 299, 317, 325
Jones, Jack, 365
Jones, Sir John, 359, 360
Jones, R V., 15, 25, 25
K4 - 334
K7 - 334-36
Kagan. Joseph. 365
Kapitza, Peter, 259-60
Karamasines, Tom, 346
Karpekov, Nikolai, 141, 256, 270
K Branch, 334, 335, 358-60, 372
Keeler, Christine, 270
Kell, Vernon, 10, 24, 33, 34, 39, 44, 47, 290
Kemp, R J., 21, 22, 27, 93-94
Kennedy, John F, 154, 163, 210, 239, 269, 304, 305, 308
KEYSTONE case, 87, 93, 105
KGB, 34-35, 47-49, 62, 64, 66, 72, 73, 87, 88, 116-25, 131, 132, 135,
139, 141, 147, 151, 158, 163-65, 170-72, 179-88, 193, 195, 1%, 204-209,
220, 224, 228, 239, 245, 255-57, 270, 278, 2S3-87, 294, 299, 303-306,
309-14, 317-20, 327, 342-46, 355, 361-64, 383
Khrushchev, Nikita, 72-74, 103, 205, 211
King, Cecil, 369
King, John Herbert, 328
Kirby, Henry, 67
Kirby Green, Philip, 155, 157
Kissinger, Henry, 345-46
Khmov, Major, 163, 164
Klugman, James, 222, 248, 249, 264, 267
Knight, Maxwell, 34, 138, 188, 228
Kompfner, Rudi, 247-48
Kondrashev, Sergei, 255-57
Korovin, 141, 257
Kosygin, Alexei, 345
Kremer, Simon, 375
Krivitsky, Walter, 226, 228, 277, 286, 309, 325, 327 Kroger, Peter and
Helen, 134, 135, 137-41, 143, 204
Krotov, Boris, 182, 183, 186, 196, 228, 283, 344, 379
Kuzchinski, Ruth, 375 SEE Otto Sonia KX, 334 KY, 334, 342
Labarthe, Andre, 238-41
Labor Government, 246-47, 265, 273
Labor Party, 31, 55, 186, 214, 230, 242, 361, 362, 364, 365, 368-69
Ladell, Dr., 161-62, 343, 362, 363
Lambda 1, 128, 129, 294 see ALSO Blake, George
Lambda 2, 128, 129
Last, Anne, 188, 189, 281
LAVINIA case, see Sniper; Goleniewski, Michael
Lecky, Terence, 276, 277
Leconfield House, 2-3, 18, 22-30, 37, 42, 44. 50, 55, 57-60, 90, 94,
99, 107, 114, 123, 132-36, 149, 159, 169, 173, 175, 189, 193, 215, 218,
241, 274-76, 301, 316, 323, 338, 357, 377-78, 380
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 68, 158, 159, 207
Levinson, Art, 147
Liddell, Guy, 33, 34, 69, 200, 201, 221-22, 225, 236, 243-44, 249. 283,
335
Linney, 89, 90, 93, 94, 96
LIONSBEARD, 132, 141, 143
List File, 38
Long, Leo, 218-22, 229, 230, 232, 235, 236, 241, 249-50, 257, 258, 270,
286, 348
Lonsdale, Gordon Arnold, 130-45, 149, 151-53, 167, 174, 176, 177, 187,
191, 192, 197, 204, 270, 271, 334
LOVEBIRD, Operation, 94
Lucy Ring, 238
Luibimov, 188, 281
Lulakov, Lieutenant Commander, 95-96, 175
Lyalin, Oleg, 342-47, 364-65
Lyall, Archie, 338
McBarnet, Evelyn, 122, 141-42, 173, 187-189, 194, 215, 218, 222, 237,
276, 277, 295, 301
McCarthyism, 185, 229, 243, 253, 330
McCaul, Michael (Macauley), 124-26, 269, 303, 311, 314, 316-18, 359
McCone, John, 203
MacDonald, Alec, 253, 254, 276, 291
Maclean, Donald, 3, 21, 31-34, 43, 98, 99, 102-104, 121, 122, 146, 147,
152, 164, 174. 182, 184, 186, 188, 193, 207, 214-216, 229, 235, 236,
238, 241, 243, 248, 257, 259, 285, 292, 325, 354
Macmillan, Harold, 45, 58, 214, 351
Magan, Bill, 154-57, 233
Maly, Theodore (Theo), 226, 227
Marriott, John, 30
Marshall, Arthur, 251
Martelli, Giuseppe, 270-72, 305, 306
Martin, Arthur, 122-24, 133-38, 141, 149, 152, 163, 164, 170-78, 186-
94, 201-207, 213-22, 230-35, 238, 244, 260, 269, 273. 276, 277, 289,
294, 301, 315, 323-25, 334, 340, 344, 362, 373-374
Marxists, 248, 252, 253, 256
Marychurch, Peter, 153
Marshall, Arthur, 242
May, Alan Nunn, 121, 183
Mayer, Tess, see Rothschild, Tess
Mayhew, Christopher, 242
M Division (GCHQ), 109, 171
MI5 -- 1-6, 10, 13, 17-86, 89-106, 110-130, 135-45, 150, 154-61, 166-
69, 174, 175, 181-91, 195-213, 216-48, 254, 259-95, 298-307, 310, 315,
316, 320-326, 331-35, 338-81, 384
MI6 -- 5-10, 18-24, 32-36, 40-47, 52, 61, 62, 71-75, 78, 79, 84-85, 97-
99, 103, 109-21, 125, 128-31, 140, 145-47, 151, 156-61, 167, 168, 173,
174, 188-97, 202-13, 219-22, 229-32, 238-47, 257, 269, 274-95, 304,
307, 311-15, 323-29, 338, 339, 348-51, 359, 370, 373, 374, 377, 384
microdots, 119, 137
Millen, Dick, 100, 146, 147
Mitchell, Graham, 44, 120, 143-44, 176-178, 184, 187, 189, 190, 193-
207, 213, 217, 230, 231, 268-73, 276-81, 285, 289, 290, 298, 302, 306,
315, 335, 340, 350, 378
Mitchell, H T., 110
Modin, Yuri (Peter), 193, 194, 229, 255
MOLE, Operation, 65-67, 175
MOP, 47
Morgan, Dr. Frank, 118, 119, 131, 166, 195
Morrow, 95-96, 175
Moscow Center, 86, 87, 183, 187, 283, 375, 379
Mossad, 347
Movements Analysis program, 123, 217, 218, 344, 345
Mr. Reporter, 348
Mueselier, Admiral, 239
Murphy, Dave, 315
Nadiensky, 311-14
Nadiensky, Mrs., 311, 313
Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 82, 84-85, 160-61
National Security Agency (NSA), U S, 85, 98-99, 145-48, 152, 153, 180,
181, 196, 207, 240, 246, 276, 384
National Security Council, 269, 276
NATO, 164-66, 252, 254, 269, 270, 346
Naval Intelligence Department (NID), 8, 73, 129, 165, 286, 287
Navy, British, 9, 17, 22, 25, 43, 74, 80, 128, 169, 252, 256, 257
Nazism, 30, 31, 68, 248, 375
neighbors, 283-85
Nicholson, Ben, 248
Nixon, Richard M, 346
NKVD, 49, 238, 281, 384
Nossenko, Yuri, 165, 166, 208, 304-305, 346
Nutkin, Squirrel, 59, 61
Oatsheaf, 364
Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 103, 182
OGPU, 205, 206, 384
OHanlon, Pat, 109, 114
Oldfield, Sir Maurice, 9-10, 212, 219, 224, 327, 330, 346, 349, 370-71,
373-74, 377
ORDZHONIKIDZE, 72-74, 113-14, 172
Orr-Ewing, Anne, 48, 194, 276, 295, 336-338
Otto, 226-28, 254-55, 258, 264, 265, 267
Oxbridge intellectuals, 236, 247
Oxford Ring, 264-67
Oxford University, 236, 238, 242-45, 260, 265, 286, 288, 299, 336-39,
354, 375
Pancheff, Bunny, 326, 329, 330
Paques, Georges, 239, 314
PARTY PIECE, Operation, 54-56, 175
Patrick, Jim, 321, 322
Penkovsky, Oleg, 204-12, 304-305, 325
Personal Files (PFs), 38, 384
Petrie, Sir David, 34, 37, 290
Philby, Eleanor, 193
Philby, Kim (Stanley), 3, 31, 42^*7, 72, 78, 98, 103, 104, 121, 122,
146, 147, 152, 164, 172-77, 184, 185, 193-96, 202, 207, 216, 227-29,
235-38, 241, 252-61, 266, 270, 277-86, 287-90, 297, 301, 309, 318, 324-
28, 340, 351, 380
Philby, Litzi, 228, 260, 324
Phillpotts, Christopher, 146, 276, 324, 326, 330, 373
Pieck, Mr. and Mrs Henri, 226, 328
Piggott, Lester, 307
FIG ROOT, Operation, 175
Playfair, Sir Edward, 242
Polish Intelligence Service, SEE UB Politburo, 165, 205, 220, 285, 311
Pool, Phoebe, 264, 266
Pope-Hennessy, James, 242-43
Popov, Colonel, 205-206, 208-209
Poretsky, Elizabeth, 226, 327-28
Poretsky, Ludwik, 226, 327
Porton Down Laboratory, 362, 363
Post Office Special Investigations Unit, 18, 45, 46, 83
Post Office Technical Department, 7, 18, 46, 131, 172
Potter, Harold, 37, 38
Presidents Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), 273-74
Pnbyl. Colonel, 89-90, 94, 96
Proctor, Dennis, 260-63, 267, 291, 332, 373
Proctor, Varda, 263
Profumo affair, 214, 270, 340-J1, 372
Radiations Operations Committee (ROC), 105, 106, 108, 109, 113, 114,
131, 138, 145, 146, 152, 153, 167, 169, 384
Radio Security Service (RSS), 78, 79, 86, 167, 244, 246, 247, 384
Rado, Alexander, 226
RAF, 89, 108, 131, 170, 247, 286 RAFTER, 93-97, 101-106, 108, 114, 118,
123, 126, 131-34, 138, 141, 149, 151, 152, 162, 171, 247
Ransome, David, 360
Rastvorov, Yuri, 278, 286, 287
Rees, Goronwy, 243-47
Registry, 2, 37-39, 45, 49, 100, 129, 170, 175, 188, 219, 235-37, 260,
277, 287, 318, 358
Reiss, Ignace, 327
Rennie, Sir John, 349, 374
Richardson, Maurice, 288, 338
Ring of Five, 164, 174, 193, 221, 226-28, 237, 243, 249, 255, 257-60,
266-67, 301, 373
Roberts, Alfred, 240
Roberts, Tom, 322, 323
Robertson, James, 198
Robinson, Henry, 237
Rodin, General, 363
Rogov, Colonel, 90, 91
Roman, Harry, 128
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 16, 182, 352 Rosa, 183, 317
Rosenberg, Ethel and Julius, 139, 182, 185
Rote Drei, 227
Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra), 227, 237, 267, 299
Rothschild, Emma, 224
Rothschild, N.M., 367-68
Rothschild, Tess, 215-16, 225, 251, 259, 317
Rothschild, Victor, 117-18, 168, 172, 173, 214-16, 224, 252, 259, 260,
317, 347-355, 365-67, 370, 372-73, 381-82
Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), 61-65, 86-88, 90, 123, 151, 196,
208, 268, 282, 376, 384
Royal Navy Scientific- Service (RNSS), 4, 5, 14, 22, 167, 168, 384
RUPEE, 208-209
Russell Jones, Barry, 308
Russian Counterespionage Section, 36 90 95, 106, 120, 123, 158, 217,
362 SEE ALSO Dl
Russian Intelligence Service, 34-35, 86, 96, 120, 121, 158, 165, 182-
83, 226, 227, 237, 250, 272, 273, 280, 330, 381 SEE ALSO Soviet
Intelligence
Sale, Tony, 92, 93, 106-107, 126, 132
SALT I arms control negotiations, 211
Sapphire Ring, 239, 375
Satellite intelligence, 2, 167, 246-47
SATYR, 22-23, 62, 65, 66, 83
Scanlon, Hugh, 365
SDECE, 239, 375, 384
Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), SEE MI6
Section V (MI6), 280-82, 2B5, 287
Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME), 30, 384
Security Service, SEE MI5
Sedlececk, 238
Serial 3, 164-65, 166 Serial 8, 165
Serov, General, 205, 294
Services Electronics Research Laboratory (SERL), 4, 6, 15, 17, 18, 384
SF (Special Facilities), 47, 56, 72, 83, 84, 85-86, 172, 175, 225, 2*5,
384
Shelepin, Alexander, 205, 315
Shergold, Harry, 210 Shipp, Cecil, 254-56
SIFE (Security Intelligence Far East), 286-288
SIGINT, 15, 91, 114, 145, 148, 149, 219, 221, 223, 245, 271
Signals Intelligence, 2, 207
Sillitoe, Sir Percy, 6, 33, 77-78, 290, 303
Simkins, Anthony, 291-93, 295-97, 348
Sinclair, Sir John, 72, 78, 207
SK (KGB security division), 309
Skardon, Jim, 50-52, 133, 300-301
Skripkin, Lieutenant, 278, 286-88, 290, 317, 340
Smedley, Agnes, 289, 338
Sniper (LAVINIA), 128, 129, 135, 142-43, 149, 152, 236
SEE ALSO Goleniewski, Michael
Socialist Workers Party (SWP), 360, 361
Sohe, Bruce, 347
Solomon, Flora, 172, 173, 193, 260-61
Sonia, 226, 246, 375, 381
Sorge, Christiane, 328-29
Sorge, Richard, 226, 227, 328
Sorpell, Michael, 237
Soupert, Dr Jean Paul (Air Bubble), 239, 240
Soviet Division (CIA), 306-308, 315, 364
Soviet Intelligence, 206, 209, 222, 226, 227, 237, 249
Soviet Military Intelligence, SEE GRU
Special Branch, London, 23, 32, 33, 94, 95, 106, 135, 136, 137, 270,
311, 322, 343
Spell/Endspell sequence, 180, 181, 182
Spencer, Arthur, 134
SPETERS 315-16
SEE ALSO Mitchell, Graham
Spry, Sir Charles, 65-66, 376
Stables, Tony, 289
Staff D, 145, 147, 148, 152
Stalin, Joseph V, 103, 186, 188, 227, 273, 281, 318, 321
Stalins Englishmen, 121, 273
Stanley, 164, 183, 184, 196, 284-85, 379
SEE ALSO Philby, Kim
Steinbrecher, Herbert, 240
Stephenson, Sir William, 99, 161, 327
Stevens, Gregory, 320-24, 329
Stewart, Bob, 228, 249
Stewart, Patrick, 164-66, 199, 231, 254, 258, 276, 277, 295-302, 306,
325
STOCKADE, 110-13, 138, 146, 148, 152, 241, 342
Stone, Harry, 100, 102, 150, 269
Stonehouse, John, 362
Storer, John, 108, 170, 171
Straight, Michael Whitney, 213, 214, 257,
Sudbury, Geoffrey, 195, 280-81, 284-85, 374-75
Suez Crisis, 82, 84-86, 98, 104, 157, 160, 161, 207, 324
Sullivan, Bill, 101, 102, 273
Sunningdale Agreement, 358-59
SUNSHINE, Operation, 155-58
Supply, Ministry of, 22, 271
Swedish Signals Intelligence Service, 113, 186
Symonds, Ronnie, 166, 202, 203, 213, 229-233, 268
Taylor, John, 7, 18-20, 46, 47, 58, 72, 110
Technics Document, 117, 231, 278
Templer, Sir Gerald, 154-55
Thatcher, Margaret, 381
Theo, 226, 227
Thing, The, 20, 116, 292
Think Tank, 347-48, 351, 366
Thomson, J J, 10
TIEPIN, Operation, 57
Tisler, Frantisek, 89-90, 103
Tisler affair, 91, 96, 97, 100, 101, 126, 144, 175, 177, 192, 290, 378
Top Hat, 165, 211, 271-73, 305-306
Tordella, Louis, 145-47, 149, 152-53, 240
Tory Party, 197, 230
Trade Delegation, Soviet, 33, 343, 364
trade unions, 361 364, 365, 369
Transcription Department, 44, 47, 336
Treasury, 21, 36, 104, 115, 219, 222, 263, 343. 355, 380
Trend, Lord, 246-47, 377-81
Trepper Leopold, 226
Trident Talks, 352-53
true bills, 277, 278, 283, 293
Trust, the, 205, 206
Tudor Hart, Edith, 228, 249, 260, 265
Turing, Alan, 81, 253
U2 surveillance, 210, 304
UB (Polish Intelligence Service), 65, 128, 142, 151, 304, 384
UK USA agreement, 98-99, 148, 346
Ustinov, Hop, 67-70, 257
Ustinov, Mrs Klop 68-70
Ustinov, Peter, 67, 69
Vansittart, Robert, 68, 69
Van Vleet, 208
Vassall, John, 166-67, 256, 270, 314, 345
Vaygaukas, 364, 365
VENONA 179-88, 195-97, 228, 235, 238-41, 277, 280-86, 317, 327, 335,
344, 351- 352, 358, 370, 374, 375, 379
Vera, 281, 282
VHF (Very High Frequency) signals, 105
Volkov, Konstantin, 238, 244-46, 277-82, 285-86, 290, 292, 293, 309,
318, 340, 378, 380
Von Petrov, Vladimir, 66, 309, 325-27, 329, 330
von Ribbentrop, Joachim, 243, 325, 326, 329
Waddell, Sir James, 348-50, 353
Wagh, Duncum, 129, 334-35
War Office, 5, 33, 251, 299, 329
Watchers (A4), 23, 24, 48-55, 60, 79, 89-96, 105, 120, 125, 126, 130-
33,141-143, 175-76, 193, 197, 201-204, 311, 312, 384
Watson, Alister, 251-60, 267, 291, 332, 373
Weisband, William, 184
Welchman, Gordon, 81
Western intelligence services, 104, 314-16, 318, 345
West European Division (CIA), 150, 151
Wharton, Harry, 342, 365
White, Sir Dick Goldsmith, 24, 28-30, 34, 35, 43, 69, 74-78, 96, 98,
115-19, 122, 168, 173, 177, 191-97, 202, 207, 216, 222, 225, 232, 233,
243-52, 276, 290, 300, 303, 324, 326, 330, 333, 335, 342, 348, 349,
350-51, 354-56, 373, 374, 378
Whitehall, 4-7, 25-36, 25n, 72, 77, 91, 200, 213, 274, 291, 298 303,
313, 324, 348, 349, 353-57, 366, 376, 384
Whitman, Lish, 147
Wigg, George, 275
Willis, Hector, 168-69, 178, 195, 1%, 203, 204
Wilson, Harold, 230, 247, 265-66, 272-74, 348, 351, 362-65, 368-72
Winterborn, Hugh, 5, 21-27, 30, 35, 39, 42-44, 51-61, 70-71, 74, 83,
85, 90-94, 130, 134-37, 175. 176, 193, 199, 202-204, 289
Woolwich Arsenal case, 33, 138, 228
Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP), 360,
World War I, 8, 10, 11, 33, 47, 277
World War II, 5, 13-17, 34, 37, 55, 78, 79, 146, 204, 215, 227, 311,
328, 375
Wright, Lois, 14, 354
Wright, Maurice (G.M.), 4-14, 17, 20, 21, 27, 91
Wright, Mrs Maurice, 10, 13, 14
Wyke, John, 156
Wylie, Tom, 251
Wynn, Arthur, 265, 266, 354
Wynne, Greville, 204, 208, 313
X-Craft midget submarines, 16-17, 73
Y-Boxes, 38, 56
Y intercepts, 14
Young, Sir Arthur, 365
Young, Courtney, 36-37, 90, 92, 95, 106, 125, 214, 239
Zaehner, Robin, 244-46
Zilenski, 329
zu Putlitz, Baron Wolfgang, 68, 69, 257-58