Their Trade Is Treachery

by Pincher Chapman

  While the Queen’s reactions to the Blunt affair caused much public discussion in the autumn of 1979, the private concern in the security and intelligence world centred on the unprecedented official exposure of Blunt by the Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, in Parliament. I asked Sir Harold Wilson whether he would have been so forthcoming, and he replied that not only would he have declined to reveal such details but he believed that all other prime ministers he had known would also have declined.

  I suspect that Sir Harold was right concerning the likely reaction of Clement Attlee, Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, Sir Alec Douglas-Home and, perhaps, Edward Heath. But he was wrong about his successor, James Callaghan.

  In 1978, Merlyn Rees, while Home Secretary during the Callaghan administration, realised that the Blunt story was hound to break one day – probably through the book being prepared by Andrew Boyle – so he decided that a full statement should be prepared in readiness for publication if necessary.

  Because of the royal connection, the Queen was approached then for her view concerning the consequent publicity. The Queen replied that she would take whatever advice was offered on the issue.

  The document that had been prepared in 1972 for possible use in the event of Blunt’s death, outlining his main acts of treachery, was brought up to date by the Cabinet Office at the request of Merlyn Rees. With the agreement of Sam Silkin, the Attorney General, James Callaghan was advised that, if Blunt were exposed, then a full and accurate statement should be given to Parliament and that there was no way of avoiding it. Callaghan agreed ‘with distaste’, and a draft statement was prepared. Though this statement was no doubt re-examined by the Tory administration, it formed the basis of the announcement that Mrs Thatcher eventually made to Parliament.

  While MI5 had been required to cooperate with the Cabinet Office in the preparation of the statement, there was strong feeling among senior officers of that organisation and in the secret service that the government was reneging on the package deal made with Blunt. The immunity had clearly included immunity from official exposure in the eyes of both Blunt and the MI5 case officer who had negotiated the arrangement. While there was no sympathy for Blunt, as such, there was fear that other traitors would be far less inclined to cooperate in return for immunity in future and would still escape prosecution simply by refusing to be interviewed.

  The facts that I have presented show that Mrs Thatcher herself had little option in the matter, as the main decisions had already been taken, including consultation with the Queen. Her statement was regarded as being remarkably full, but from information I have received I doubt that either she or Mr Callaghan were given the details of Blunt’s activities that I have described.

  There are some Conservative MPs, including one junior minister very close to her, who believe that Mrs Thatcher’s statement was designed to trigger off a major inquiry into the state of the security and intelligence services and that she was ‘within a hair’s breadth’ of announcing one. If that was so, there had been a change of heart by the time the issue of such an inquiry was debated in Parliament.

  It is not my purpose in this book to urge that such an inquiry should be made. The conviction that ‘a flue brush’ should be put through the two organisations – held by MPs on both sides of the House – would assuredly have merited support in the fairly recent past, but the information at my disposal suggests that both are now ‘clean’. The only residual doubt lies in the possibility that traitors who are now dead or gone managed to insinuate young successors who may still be there.

  One aspect of the prime ministerial statement on Blunt with which I and most of my informants take issue is the insistence that ‘the director general of the security service followed scrupulously the procedures that had been laid down’. The director general was Sir Roger Hollis, and all that he did scrupulously was to make sure that he did not lay himself open to censure by failing to obey the laid-down rules when it suited him to obey them. His general handling of the case can hardly be described as scrupulous, while his suspension of the case officer for the crucial fortnight after Blunt’s confession was unprecedented. I suspect that Mrs Thatcher was not informed of that event, and I have established that the Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers, had not been told about it before he made his statement in the Blunt debate.

  The same apologia for Hollis was made in the official report on the Profumo case by Lord Denning, when his behaviour had been so patently inept as to appal his own colleagues. I have no doubt that Lord Denning was motivated by sympathy for a man doing what is perhaps the most difficult job in the entire apparatus of government, but in the result the presentation of Hollis as a man of scrupulous integrity, always working within the laid-down procedures, was not justified by his actions. Had the Denning Report criticised Hollis’s handling of the Profumo case, as I and others believe it should have, then the consequent parliamentary debate might have concentrated some of its fire on a more justifiable target instead of directing it all onto Harold Macmillan, who was already the injured party.

  CHAPTER 19

  SPIES IN THE SECRET SERVICE

  EVER SINCE MI5 and the secret service (MI6) were established consequent on the reorganisation of military intelligence in 1905, there have been jealousy and rivalry between them. The secret service, which could claim to date back to the reign of Elizabeth I, considered itself both senior and superior. ‘Empire building’ by both organisations led to wide overlapping of duties in the counterespionage field, exacerbating competition and rivalry, which have been detrimental to both services and to national security as a whole.

  Both have tended to hoard their information instead of sharing it. For many years, MI5 was barred from access to secret service files and had to request information in writing. Quite recently there was a case in which MI5 had hard evidence that a member of the secret service had a communist past, which he had not declared, but failed to notify its sister service of the fact.

  This antipathy expressed itself as burning resentment in the late ’60s after the secret service had been castigated so severely in public for harbouring two Russian spies, in the shape of Philby and George Blake. With the proof of Blunt’s treachery inside MI5 and the immunity deal whereby it was to be concealed forever, it was felt in the secret service that MI5 was ‘getting away with it’. This childish reaction was greatly intensified as the suspicion against MI5’s director general, Sir Roger Hollis, gathered momentum. The secret service knew all about it because it had members on the investigating committee.

  There was no reasonable basis for the secret service pressure that there should be some public exposure of the evidence that the Soviet penetration had been every bit as severe inside MI5. If Philby had accepted immunity to prosecution, the public would not have been told of his guilt and would have presumed him innocent. Nevertheless, this pressure was one of the driving forces that eventually led to the Trend inquiry into the accusations against Hollis and Mitchell.

  The crusading attitude of those secret service officers who applied the pressure was even less justifiable because there were still hidden skeletons in their own cupboard. I have already mentioned John Cairncross and other former members of the secret service whose treachery was discovered following leads from Blunt. In addition there was one major self-confessed spy whose existence has been entirely concealed from the public. During the MI5 investigation into his activities, which amounted to treason in war, he was known by the codename ‘Emerton’. I shall reveal his identity and his acts later in this chapter, but first it is convenient to discuss certain aspects of the Blake case and that of the Russian defector Oleg Penkovsky.

  I have mentioned how the first clue to the existence of the Navy spy ring run by Gordon Lonsdale came from a Polish intelligence officer who sent information to the CIA under the codename ‘Sniper’. The CIA did not know his identity or his nationality until he eventually defected to the United States via Berlin on Christmas Day 1960, taking with h
im files on intelligence agents of the industrial, scientific and technical bureau of the Polish intelligence service, together with a mass of other information concerning Red Army plans and operations, all of extreme interest to Britain and other NATO countries as well as to America. He turned out to be Col. Michal Goleniewski, aged fifty-eight, an important member of the UB, the Polish equivalent of the KGB, with which it had close links.

  Before he defected he had disclosed, in 1959 in his written reports, that the Russians had been regularly receiving copies of British secret service documents. This information was immediately passed to the secret service by the CIA. The secret service chiefs knew that an unknown number of their secret documents had been stolen from a safe in Brussels, and they conveniently assumed that ‘Sniper’ must be referring to them.

  Before defecting, ‘Sniper’ (later known in the United Kingdom as ‘Lavinia’) also warned the secret service that there was an active KGB spy operating inside it known in the KGB as ‘Diamond’. He said that the information that ‘Diamond’ had been supplying was of the greatest value to the Russians. Whatever the secret service did or did not do, it failed to find ‘Diamond’.

  Goleniewski would have continued ‘in place’ in Warsaw for longer but was driven to defect because he found out that someone in the West had warned the KGB that there was a spy in the Polish UB acting for the CIA. He was regarded so highly by Soviet bloc intelligence that he was asked to seek out the American spy. ‘We have evidence that there is a “pig” in your organisation,’ a KGB liaison officer had told him, using the KGB expression for a traitor. Realising that the suspicion must soon fall on himself, ‘Sniper’ decided that it was time to escape, and he reached the United States in January 1961, accompanied by Howard Roman of the CIA and taking with him his German mistress rather than his wife.

  The CIA had reason to believe that the leak to the KGB about the ‘pig’ inside the UB came from someone at a high level in the secret service or in MI5 who had seen the material forwarded to them from Washington.

  A CIA officer visiting London to discuss ‘Sniper’s’ information with MI5 had suggested that the evidence pointed to his being a senior officer in the first department of the UB, as indeed he proved to be, being the head of the technical and scientific department.

  With the agreement of the CIA, a secret service man was sent to the United States to interrogate Goleniewski, who had already been told that the British had failed to find ‘Diamond’. The defector was terrified that the interrogator might be ‘Diamond’ himself, sent to kill him on KGB orders. As Goleniewski knew, the KGB has a sophisticated spray, disguisable as a pen or cigarette lighter, which can simulate the fatal symptoms of a heart attack. So he declined any face-to-face encounter. Instead, he insisted on being in one room with the interrogator in another and an interpreter running between them.

  The defector ridiculed the idea that the secret service documents he had seen were those filched from any safe and was contemptuous of the failure to find ‘Diamond’ and deal with him, as he assured his interrogator the KGB would have done.

  He was able to describe the highly secret documents he had seen. These even included the ‘watch list’ supplied by secret service headquarters in London to its agents in Poland, listing individuals they needed to keep under surveillance.

  When the interrogator returned to London, where Goleniewski always refused to venture, the secret service chiefs were quickly convinced that ‘Diamond’ undoubtedly existed and was still inside the organisation. When a list was examined of those who had had access to the documents the defector had described, an officer called George Blake stood out beyond all others, especially as Goleniewski had said that he had worked in Berlin, but it was decided that he had too many successes to his credit to be a spy. They ignored the fact that all espionage organisations, and the KGB in particular, allow their agents to notch up a few successes to maintain their credibility with their employers.

  It soon became obvious, however, that the haemorrhage of secrets to Russia had suddenly ceased when Blake had been posted in 1960 to attend a course in Arabic at the school, jointly run by the secret service and the Foreign Office, at Shemlan near Beirut. For example, Goleniewski had seen an extremely secret report by the Requirements Division of the secret service for 1959, but nothing had arrived from the London source for 1960.

  The secret service station chief in Beirut, Nicholas Elliott, was given the job of inducing Blake to return to London without arousing his suspicions. He succeeded brilliantly. Blake returned to discuss ‘a new job involving promotion’, but Elliott had sat up all night wondering if he would defect.

  It may be significant that the secret service did not inform MI5 of the impending arrest of Blake and that information did not leak to the KGB, as happened in the case of Philby. Incidentally, Philby, who was close by, in Beirut, had no knowledge that Blake was a KGB agent. Nor, it seems, did Blake have any certain knowledge concerning Philby’s KGB role, as it is routine practice for any well-run espionage agency to keep its spies in separate compartments so that, if caught, they cannot betray others.

  Blake was questioned by an ace interrogator, Terence Lecky. I give his name because he has left the service and his outstanding success has been publicly attributed to someone else. The spy denied everything repeatedly, while encouraging his questioner to talk and so reveal how much he knew. Lecky’s menacing glances at an imposing pile of files, allegedly full of evidence, that he had ostentatiously loaded onto his desk knowing how thin his case was, produced not a flicker of response.

  If Blake had continued to hold out, no case could have been brought against him. But, literally at the interrogator’s last throw, he broke down and confessed to a horrifying string of treacherous acts on behalf of the KGB.

  He described how he had been present at the original planning of Operation Gold, a 1,500-foot-long tunnel to be driven under the East–West demarcation boundary in Berlin to tap Red Army cables carrying coded signals and scrambled telephone conversations. The tunnel, which was equipped with the most sophisticated recording equipment, originated in the basement of a building that appeared to be a warehouse modified as a radar-listening station. Blake confessed that he had given away the secret to the Russians early in 1954, before even a spit of the tunnel had been dug. This Anglo–American enterprise cost at least $25 million to build and operate for the year that the Allies thought that they were tapping Soviet military secrets. Instead, they were listening to a mass of coded misinformation, larded with occasional accurate material to serve as ‘chicken feed’. The effort in decoding the bogus information was so stupendous that Operation Gold should be renamed Operation Dross.

  The Russians allowed the operation, including the construction, to continue for two years before moving in, partly, perhaps, to protect its informant, Blake. They then took maximum propaganda advantage of this ‘imperial duplicity’, opening the tunnel for inspection by journalists. It was but one of many examples of the patience of the KGB in playing disinformation games.

  Much of the know-how for building the Berlin tunnel had come from a previous all-British enterprise called Operation Silver. This was a much shorter – 60-foot-long – tunnel built from under a private house on the outskirts of Vienna to link with cables originating in the headquarters of the Russian occupation forces in the city. British engineers had been able to tap the cables for several years with useful results concerning Soviet intentions. Blake was not then in a position to know of the operation and to betray it.

  Blake confessed that, while working at headquarters in London, he had betrayed everything he could about the secret service, including the ‘battle order’ – the personnel and how and where they were deployed. This was to have serious repercussions later.

  While working in West Berlin, he had met KGB agents lively in the Eastern sector, contacting them regularly in a big department store and handing over a mass of information and copies of documents he had photographed. This had aroused no
suspicion because he had been given permission to contact Russians in pursuit of his undercover duties. He also handed over information that enabled the KGB to kidnap prominent East Germans who had defected to the West and to abduct them back behind the Iron Curtain.

  Blake’s description of how he had operated in his West Berlin headquarters was a terrible indictment of the security there. At lunchtime, when all offices containing secret papers had to be locked, he hid behind his desk to give the security guard the impression that the room was empty. He then had at least an hour and a half to photograph documents without fear of interruption. It has been believed that Blake, whose original name was Behar, was converted to communism while in a prison camp, following his capture during the Korean War when he was operating out of the British embassy in Seoul. It is now thought that he was probably already a communist when he joined the secret service in 1948, after undertaking wartime intelligence work for the navy. He could have been talent-spotted or even recruited while attending a Russian language course at Downing College, Cambridge, in 1947. One of the people there is now known to have been a recruiter for the KGB and, later, an active agent. There is no evidence whatever that he was recruited by Burgess, as has been suggested.

  Why did Blake confess? The answer probably lies in the undoubted resentment that he felt at the way he believed he had been treated by other officers in the secret service. Because he was half Jewish and spoke English with an accent, being Dutch on his mother’s side, he was convinced that they looked down on him. So, perhaps, it gave him satisfaction to show his superiors just how cleverly and to what an incredible extent he had fooled them.

  Steps bordering on the ridiculous were taken by the Foreign Office, acting on behalf of the secret service, to cover up the scandal of Blake’s activities. The secretary of the D-Notice Committee requested the media to suppress any information that they might discover. This was followed by a D-Notice urging the withholding from the public of the fact that Blake had ever worked for the secret service or betrayed any state secrets. There were dark hints that the lives of other agents were still in danger, though those who could be withdrawn already had been. The concern in Whitehall was understandable, but it had nothing to do with security, only with embarrassment. The greatest embarrassment the authorities could have suffered would have been Blake’s retraction of his confession in court. Lord Dilhorne, who, as Sir Reginald Manningham Buller, had been Attorney General at the time, told me that, though Blake had signed his confession statement, a prosecution could still have failed had he claimed that it had been secured under duress and was, in fact, false. There was anxiety right up to the time that he pleaded guilty. This also enabled the authorities to blanket many of the details of his crimes, which became known only because George Brown (now Lord), who had been told of them by the Prime Minister, Macmillan, leaked them to me because he was convinced that the cover-up was pure face saving by Whitehall.