Their Trade Is Treachery

by Pincher Chapman

  In 1980, a Russian transmitting set in a plastic wrapper and a metal box was accidentally found buried in a field on a remote hillside in North Wales. It was equipped with preset frequency plugs, all labelled in English, and a mechanism for rapid transmission of messages pricked onto perforated paper tape. The general instructions – on microfilm – were also in English. Inquiries showed that a party of six Russians had booked into a nearby hotel, describing themselves as part of a trade delegation, and had ventured out only at night. Four of those named in the hotel register were among the 105 Soviet agents expelled from Britain in 1971. As the equipment was in such excellent condition, it must have been dug up at intervals and maintained. The security authorities have little doubt that it was the property of a British-manned Soviet subversion unit, probably based in Liverpool.

  Lyalin confirmed a plan to commit sabotage by flooding the Underground railway system in London, which had previously been brought to the attention of the security authorities by a Czech defector, Maj. Gen. Jan Sejna, who had fled to the United States in 1968.

  He was unable to give the names of the members of the British fifth columnists, who numbered several hundred, because he was not to be given them until forty-eight hours before they were due to go into action. The security authorities have identified some of them, but under British law they cannot move until these people commit an offence. The same applies in West Germany where, according to information given to me by a former NATO commander, there are over 400 known sabotage units ready to assist the Russians.

  Lyalin did give the names of two Cypriots who had been recruited by the KGB and sent to England, where they worked as tailors for cover. They were illegal radio operators and were caught with their headphones on. The Fylingdales danger has since been greatly reduced because the installation there has been relegated to being a backup system. The first warnings of an impending or actual attack will come from reconnaissance satellites. The RAF has also been able to take extra precautions to foil the sabotage squads.

  Through his contacts with KGB officers posing as officials of Aeroflot, the Russian national airline, Lyalin was able to describe how several Aeroflot civil airliners have been modified for mine laying in the hours immediately before the outbreak of war. Pretending to be off course at night, the aeroplanes are intended to mine the Clyde estuary, bottling up any American and British submarines still at Holy Loch or Faslane, where they would be easy targets.

  The availability of the whole Aeroflot fleet to serve military purposes at short notice has to be taken into account by the NATO defence planners. Unlike the airlines of the West, even those nationally owned, it is nothing less than a subsidiary arm of the Soviet forces.

  Lyalin claimed that, in addition to his KGB sabotage network, there was a separate one totally controlled by the GRU – the military side of Soviet intelligence. He could provide no further information, and attempts to uncover it failed. So, if it existed, it is probably still in position.

  When such details were brought to Heath’s attention, he was appalled and asked MI5 for a list of the worst offenders among the Russian officials. He was given 105 names of men against whom there was solid evidence. When MI5 suggested that a high proportion of them should be expelled, he said, ‘We’ll throw them all out.’ Sir Alec Douglas-Home was equally as resolute, but the Foreign Office strongly opposed the move on the grounds that it would prove so damaging to Anglo–Soviet relations ‘as to ruin detente’. They would have been prepared to put up with the KGB’s covert preparations for war on Britain to avoid ‘repercussions’ against their staff in Moscow.

  In fact, the repercussions were negligible because the Kremlin knew that MI5 had the evidence to make a devastating exposure that could be far more damaging than the expulsions. Normally, the Russian ambassador in London demands to know the full reasons why one of his diplomats or trade officials is to be expelled. Expecting this, the Foreign Secretary had been given detailed evidence against every one of the 105, but the ambassador did not ask him to produce it. Furthermore, the ambassador was told that, if tit-for-tat action was taken against any Britons in Moscow, there was an even longer list of Soviet agents who would be expelled. Even after the 105 had gone, there were still some 450 Russian officials left, and many of these were known to be engaged in intelligence operations. Official estimates suggest that only about half of the active spies were expelled.

  As an additional disservice to the KGB, and without the blessing of the Foreign Office, the security authorities made sure that a full list of the 105 expelled agents and their true identities – for many of them were in Britain under false names – was circulated to other friendly nations. This should have made it difficult for any of them to restart their activities elsewhere under diplomatic cover, but the Foreign Offices of other western countries seem to be as ‘wet’ regarding the Kremlin as the British. Several of the expelled agents managed to get into other countries with little delay – two of them, using their proper names, being accepted by Canada.

  Whenever it can, the Foreign Office insists that the names of KGB agents expelled for involvement in espionage and subversion should not be divulged, though publication would tend to make them less usable in other parts of the western world. Efforts, which are usually successful, are made to ensure that during trials neither Russia nor its satellites are mentioned by name, the espionage being for ‘a foreign power’.

  In connection with the Volkov affair, which could have been so valuable to the West if followed up smartly, John Read, the diplomat who was involved, told me that the lack of interest was rooted in ‘the official attitude that we must, at all costs, accommodate the Russians and do nothing to precipitate East–West hostility. Indeed, reference to ultimate Soviet intentions was likely to provoke the accusation of Fascist tendencies.’

  This Foreign Office attitude had already resulted in the rejection of most valuable German information in 1943. A German official, who claimed that he had a suitcase full of German Foreign Ministry documents, called at the British legation in Berne, Switzerland, asking to see the military attaché. The attaché dismissed him without examining the material or referring the matter to London. The German then contacted American intelligence in Berne, led by Allen Dulles, who examined the documents and quickly realised they were genuine. With American encouragement, the German continued to supply excellent material that the British secret service eventually saw only through the good will and courtesy of the United States.

  Michael Straight has told me how he went to see a British Foreign Office official in Washington immediately after the flight of Burgess and Maclean in 1951. He said that he wished to provide information about Burgess, having evidence that he had been a Russian spy for many years. Straight says that the official remarked, ‘You will have to go to the end of the line and the line stretches all the way round the block.’ This stupid remark deterred Straight from giving the information that MI5 was unsuccessfully scratching around to secure.

  On occasion, the Foreign Office has accepted diplomats known to be KGB officers for a second tour of duty. In the ’60s, determined effort was made by a KGB man, Anatoli Strelnikov, to recruit me by bribery, and, after I had reported his efforts to MI5, an attempt was made to have him expelled. Regrettably, this failed because my editor had opened a bureau in Moscow and feared that the Russians would shut it down if he or I played any part in the expulsion of a so-called Soviet diplomat. Nevertheless, the Foreign Office was fully informed by MI5 of Strelnikov’s activities. It made no effort, however, to prevent the return of this dangerous character to London after he had served a few years in Moscow.

  At about the same time, there was a nasty incident involving KGB men who went unpunished, on Foreign Office insistence, though they had been guilty of assaulting the police. Two Russian intelligence officers had been watching a garage near Clapham Common in London where MI5 cars used to be kept. They wanted the numbers and descriptions of the cars, which were used by the MI5 watchers keeping
surveillance on KGB spies. Special Branch policemen were asked to pick the Russians up for questioning, but when approached, the suspects began to fight, and there was a considerable affray in which punches were exchanged with the police, causing injuries on both sides. It was found that the Russians did not have diplomatic immunity and could therefore be charged, but the Foreign Office successfully objected to any prosecution.

  In April 1976, two Hungarian diplomats, who were known to be Soviet bloc intelligence officers using their embassy as cover, were seen in a car parked on the private access road to the Royal Ordnance Factory at Burghfield, near Reading, which is involved in the production and maintenance of nuclear weapons, including Polaris missile warheads. This was the only place where a nuclear-weapons convoy, transporting warheads and bombs to and from Burghfield, could be seen and identified as such. After a car chase, they were held by the police, and cameras were found in their possession, though they had disposed of the films by the time they were caught.

  There was no doubt in the minds of the security authorities that these Hungarians, who claimed to have friends in the area, had in the past been keeping watch on Burghfield with the intention of securing all the information they could about the nuclear convoys, including the size and nature of their armed guards.

  Since the Munich attack on the Israeli Olympic athletes, who were closely guarded yet were overcome by a few determined men prepared to die, the Defence Ministry has taken extreme precautions with the transport of nuclear weapons and explosives. The blackmail problem if terrorists acquired a nuclear weapon would be horrific. Moreover, because of the complexity of modern missile warheads, these often have to be transported by road in a state of near completeness. The details of a nuclear convoy – the size and positions of the armed guard, the nature of the vehicles and so on – could have been of particular interest to the IRA and other terrorists who are supported by the KGB and its satellite agencies. MI5 therefore wanted full publicity about the Burghfield incident so that the Hungarians could be expelled. The Foreign Office chiefs were horrified when told the details and demanded total suppression of the event because of the danger of a ‘diplomatic incident’. Only when I was informed through an intermediary did MI5 secure the publicity warranted by this blatant breach of diplomatic privilege.

  In spite of subsequent questions in Parliament, the offending spies were not expelled, and they were eventually withdrawn only because their cover had been blown by the publicity.

  The Russian reaction to comparable situations inside the Soviet Union can be imagined while some measure of the KGB’s ruthlessness in a foreign capital, like London, can be gauged from the intense fear experienced by Lyalin after his defection. MI5 seriously believed that an attempt might be made to shoot him in court, or on the way there, if he was to be brought to trial on the drunken driving charge that had prematurely precipitated his defection. Not only did he undergo plastic surgery to change his appearance – arranged and paid for by the security authorities – but MI5 went to the trouble of securing antidotes to all the poisons known to be used by KGB assassins. These were supplied by the Chemical Defence Establishment at Porton, so as to be quickly available if an attempt on Lyalin’s life was made.

  The comparison with Philby’s comfortable situation in Beirut, or Blunt’s in London, is instructive.

  • • •

  The Foreign Office seems to be unduly anxious to give the Russians the benefit of all doubts, even in the most serious situations. I have been assured by a former director general of Defence Intelligence that he and his counterpart in the secret service repeatedly warned the Foreign Office that the huge build-up of Russian forces on the border with Czechoslovakia in 1968 was not a military exercise but mobilisation for an invasion. The Foreign Office chiefs declined to believe it.

  More recently, in 1978, intelligence officers based in Hong Kong were able to warn the Foreign Office that Chinese forces were preparing to invade Vietnam in considerable strength ‘to teach the Vietnamese a lesson’. The Foreign Office representatives, both in Hong Kong and in London, refused to believe it. Nor are they prepared to accept intelligence warnings that, in the event of a conflict between Russia and China, the port and airport facilities of Hong Kong would be a top-priority target for destruction by the Soviet Red Air Force and the Red Navy, which keeps a carrier on station nearby. Hong Kong is an obvious reinforcement port for military equipment into China, but the Foreign Office refuses to believe that the Russians would attack it.

  Over the past twenty years, cooperation between the secret service and its Israeli counterpart, the Mossad, has brought incalculable benefit to Britain. The Mossad is arguably the best-informed secret service in the western world, not only about the Middle East but about Russia. I am now informed, reliably, I believe, that, in deference to the ‘Arabists’ in the Foreign Office and to the oil-rich Arabs themselves, the Foreign Office has cut off all official contact between the two secret services.

  The Foreign Office even overrules the intelligence services on matters beyond its technical competence. When the Post Office Tower was being built in London to transmit messages by microwaves, the Foreign Office was warned by the security authorities that the Russians would probably be able to intercept the messages, especially as the tower would be in the direct line of sight from the top of the Soviet embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens. The Foreign Office replied that, after taking technical advice, it was convinced that there would be too many channels for this to be feasible, so when the tower was ready it was used for the transmission of secret telephone messages.

  It was soon found that the Russians were taping all the messages and sending the tapes back to Moscow for analysis there. Of course, most of the messages were ordinary domestic calls, of no consequence to the KGB – what security men call ‘cabbages and kings’ – but their next move showed that they were getting enough valuable material to make the operation worthwhile. They imported a computer analyser into the London embassy via the ‘diplomatic bag’ – a term that includes large crates as well as leather pouches. This ingenious device recorded only those messages emanating from certain telephone numbers in which the KGB was especially interested.

  This was realised at last by the Foreign Office in the ’70s, when the Foreign Secretary sent an important secret message via the Post Office Tower to the secretary of state in Washington. In a stupidly short space of time, the Russian ambassador was round with a complaining document, clearly indicating that the secret message had been intercepted. Only then, when so much had been lost, was it decided to send all such secret messages by undersea cable.

  The reason for this soft treatment of the Russians has never been adequately explained, particularly as they and their satellites are afforded diplomatic privileges withheld from countries that are Britain’s allies. It cannot be fear of trade reprisals that motivates the Foreign Office because the balance of trade with Britain has long been in Russia’s favour, especially since the huge soft-credit facility arranged by Sir Harold Wilson. Some security officers believe that for many years there has been a hard core of pro-Soviet officials in the Foreign Service and at headquarters in London. Some, of course, have turned out to be active spies – the best known case being that of Donald Maclean, though John Cairncross may have been even more damaging.

  The particular aspect of the Maclean case that has rightly generated so much concern is the way that every excuse was made for his dreadful conduct – his drunkenness, his violence and his boorish manner – which was quite inexcusable in a diplomat. The more disreputable he became, the higher he was promoted. It was well known in the Foreign Office that he was an intermittent drunkard with psychiatric instabilities when he was appointed first secretary in the British embassy in Washington in 1944. After incredibly irresponsible behaviour in Cairo, punctuated by acts of senseless violence, he was recalled to London for psychiatric treatment and immediately afterward promoted to be head of the American department in the Foreign Office in Lon
don!

  Like all ministries, the Foreign Office is responsible for its own security and it singularly failed to suspect Maclean, though his behaviour, including his occasional homosexuality, clearly called for scrutiny. The defector Krivitsky had provided proof in 1940 – when Russia was assisting Hitler – that Soviet spies were at work in the Foreign Office, for one of them was caught, as I have described. That man, King, was a lowly cypher clerk, but no notice was taken of Krivitsky’s allegation that there was another spy, an Englishman ‘of good family … an idealist who worked for the Russians without payment’. As in the case of Burgess, there was an inbuilt reluctance even to consider the possibility that a British diplomat could be a Russian spy.

  I have already reported how Maclean was caught only as a result of the American ‘Operation Bride’, the post-war deciphering of KGB radio traffic between Washington and Moscow that had been recorded by US intelligence during the early ’40s. This produced hard evidence that the Russians had enjoyed regular access to top-secret messages passing between Winston Churchill and the US presidents F. D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman. The agent responsible was codenamed ‘Homer’, and to begin with it was not certain if he had been in the British embassy in Washington or in the White House or some other American department.

  It took the security authorities a year to establish that the spy had been in the British embassy and must have been one of the six first secretaries who had been responsible for encoding and decoding the high-level messages. The deciphered traffic suggested that the Russians trusted the spy absolutely, so he had to be ideological. This meant a left-wing background. Arthur Martin travelled thousands of miles to reduce the suspects to two.

  What finally pinpointed Maclean was the deciphering of an administrative memo in a KGB message to Moscow that ‘Homer’ needed to travel to New York because his wife was due to have a baby there. Maclean thus became the final suspect only a few days before a decision was taken to interrogate him.