Their Trade Is Treachery

by Pincher Chapman

  Examination of the vent showed that a series of holes had been drilled to enable each cypher machine to be read. Clearly, the KGB had been particularly keen to read the dispatches that the Prime Minister would be sending back to colleagues and advisers in London.

  The outcome of the episode was the moving of the room nearer to the centre of the building at considerable expense.

  I can find no evidence of any Foreign Office complaints to the Kremlin about this physical invasion of the British embassy, which, by international convention, is British territory. Any official note might have led to publicity that, in the circumstances, would hardly have redounded to the efficiency of Foreign Office security.

  Certainly, after the re-election of the Labour government in 1974, there was even greater effort to placate the Russians in order ‘to make amends’ for the animosity created by the expulsion of the 105 KGB spies and saboteurs three years earlier and to pacify those extremist MPs who believe that Russia can do no wrong.

  While James Callaghan was Foreign Secretary, there was a move by MI5 to secure the expulsion of some more KGB men who were misbehaving with more than usual arrogance. The head of the Foreign Office, then Sir Tom Brimelow (now Lord), supported the recommendation but had to tell the director general of MI5, then Sir Martin Furnival Jones, that the Foreign Secretary had turned it down. The security officers felt so strongly about the situation, especially concerning the activities of one very senior officer of the KGB masquerading as a diplomat, that a delegation led by Sir Martin went to see the Foreign Secretary.

  Callaghan explained that he could not afford to offend the Russians at that particular stage. ‘It would cause a storm,’ he said, when the details were explained to him, including MI5’s suggestion that the KGB men’s behaviour should be made public.

  This was interpreted as meaning that he would be extremely unpopular with a section of the Labour left wing if one or more dangerous Russian spies were thrown out and publicity was given to their offences. The spies and saboteurs were allowed to remain.

  When James Callaghan became Prime Minister, he had even greater need to avoid offence to his left-wingers, who were steadily increasing both in numbers and influence. Because of the unprecedented publicity concerning Harold Wilson’s bad relations with MI5, culminating in suspicions that he himself was under surveillance, Callaghan took steps to amplify and improve his liaison with the heads of MI5 and the secret service, a sensible move for which his Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees, deserves credit. Prime Minister Callaghan was, therefore, well informed of the continuing efforts of the KGB against the United Kingdom and NATO both in furthering the aims of British communists and in preparing for the eventuality of war. If any effort was made to reduce this threat, there was no public evidence of it, the Foreign Office policy of avoiding anything that would ‘damage detente’ continuing unchanged.

  It may reasonably be assumed that Mrs Margaret Thatcher, who established close relations with MI5 and the secret service, with Callaghan’s agreement, while still in opposition, would like to be tough with Russian subversives in accord with her ‘Iron Lady’ image. Again, however, there have been no overt signs of a more rigorous attitude, save for her courageous move in drawing public attention to the activities of the KGB through her statement about the recruitment and manipulation of the spy Anthony Blunt. My information is that the Foreign Office permanent staff still call the tune so far as relations with Russia are concerned. Afghanistan apart, that tune means muted.

  A trend, which the Foreign Office appears to support and even promote, is that the KGB is no longer recruiting ‘establishment’ spies, as it did in the ’30s when the ‘climate’ was peculiarly favourable because of the Spanish Civil War and the excesses of the Nazis. The danger, these days, is supposed to centre on Trotskyites, socialist workers and other left-wing militants, of whom Russia is believed to disapprove because they are outside Moscow’s control.

  The truth is that the KGB is as busy as ever in Britain, exploiting every opportunity not only for espionage but for subversion and sabotage. It will recruit anywhere it can, from ‘establishment’ figures, including politicians, to other rank soldiers and airmen who may, one day, secure access to military information. Its agents even hang about pubs and discos where servicemen from units of interest to them spend spare time.

  Only occasionally does this activity come to light, when a decision has to be taken to prosecute a Briton spying for Russia. The true situation is much more apparent in the United States, where suppression of espionage cases by the government is far more difficult because, under the Freedom of Information Act, newspapers serving the public have a right to know the details.

  Coupled with the theme that the ’30s was a special time not to be repeated is the claim, supported by Whitehall, that the major British spy cases are all ‘very old and best forgotten’ in the interests of better international relations with the Soviet bloc. The KGB and the Kremlin would like nothing more, just as they approved of Harold Wilson’s remark that the invasion of Czechoslovakia would be best forgotten. This idea they will no doubt also promote concerning their rape of Afghanistan, once the western world has become bored with that.

  Apologists for the Kremlin even drew attention to its condemnation of the Iranian invasion of the American embassy in Tehran and the seizure of hostages there as evidence of an improved Soviet attitude to diplomatic niceties. Most of the intelligence officers I know construed the Soviet concern rather differently. The last thing the Kremlin wants is any interference with its practice of using its embassies as centres for espionage and subversion activities in lands on its long-term takeover list. The scandals consequent on the defections of Gouzenko in Canada and Petrov in Australia were damaging enough. The seizure of any one of Russia’s major embassies would expose an apparatus for illicit action of greater complexity and extent than any fiction writer has imagined.

  In view of the intimate connection of the Foreign Office with the gathering and analysis of intelligence and its poor record as regards the use to which that costly information has been put, coupled with its deplorable inefficiency in preventing penetration of its most secret sections by Russian spies, it would be invidious if any inquiry into the efficiency and loyalty of the security services excluded it.

  CHAPTER 21

  LORD OF THE SPIES

  IN HIS PRIVATE evidence to the Franks Committee on the Official Secrets Act, the director general of MI5, then Sir Martin Furnival Jones, stated that 101 Members of Parliament were known to be in contact with Russians or other Iron Curtain nationals known to be Soviet bloc intelligence officers. This figure was withheld from the published report of the committee, to which I gave evidence. It referred to 1971, but I am told that the figure has since increased substantially.

  Many MPs of both major parties are involved in East–West trade – some of them enjoying considerable financial benefit, which does not always seem to be declared in the MPs’ list of outside interests – and so have need to be in touch with Soviet officials and others who could be intelligence officers. Many more MPs are in touch with them for what appear to be social and ‘cultural’ purposes, the latter being a term as much misused by the Russians as the word ‘peace’.

  The danger of contacts of any kind was exposed in 1970 by the arrest, trial and subsequent acquittal of Will Owen, the 68-year-old Labour MP for Morpeth, on Official Secrets charges. Owen, who headed a travel firm specialising in visits to East Germany, was also a member of Parliament’s Estimates Committee, and he was charged with giving Czech intelligence information of a confidential nature. He admitted receiving £2,300 from the Czechs, which he had not declared for tax. He agreed that he had lied to a Special Branch officer and admitted that he knew one of his Czech contacts to be a spy, who had, in fact, threatened him.

  After disagreements among the jury, Owen, whose counsel admitted that he had behaved dishonourably, was acquitted on the grounds that the information he had supplied had not been covered b
y the Official Secrets Act. He was nevertheless ordered to pay £2,000 toward his legal costs and was, presumably, taxed on his illicit earnings.

  Full, frank details about the espionage activities of Owen, who died in April 1981, had been published in 1975 by the Czech defector Josef Frolik, who had not only given them to MI5 but put them on record, on oath, to the US Senate Judiciary Committee. In his book The Frolik Defection, Frolik was restricted to calling Owen by his codename ‘Lee’ because of the British libel laws. Frolik states that Owen handed over secret material of the highest military value and was paid £500 a month as a retainer, spying solely for the money. ‘For nearly fifteen years, the little miser met his handling officer once a week,’ he recorded. MI5 was convinced, from its surveillance of Owen, for which it managed to secure special permission, that Frolik’s information was accurate, but it was limited in the evidence it could take into court for the usual intelligence and legal reasons. The officers who had investigated Owen were appalled when he escaped conviction on a legal technicality, and this inhibited them further from bringing prosecutions against other Members of Parliament.

  A more entertaining example of how the KGB manages to suborn politicians to good purpose is provided by the hitherto secret life of Tom Driberg, Member of Parliament for twenty-eight years, chairman of the Labour Party and, eventually, Labour life-peer.

  I have recorded how Driberg was recruited, while still a schoolboy, as an agent on behalf of MI5 to be infiltrated into the Communist Party and how he was expelled when his duplicity was discovered by the KGB. He continued to serve MI5 in other intelligence capacities until and after he became an Independent MP for Maldon, Essex, in 1942 and Labour MP in 1945.

  As the KGB can never resist the appeal of recruiting an MP whatever his past, Harry Pollitt, the general secretary of the Communist Party, who had summarily expelled Driberg, was asked to try to induce him back. To this end, both were invited to a party at the Soviet embassy where Pollitt apologised profusely to Driberg for the way he had been expelled and claimed that he had been given false information. He urged Driberg to rejoin the party but as a clandestine member so that he could function as a crypto-communist inside Parliament. Pollitt assured him that there were several others already there, though he gave no names.

  Driberg demurred at that stage but made the pretence of being keen enough on the idea to meet secretly with Pollitt later. Meanwhile, he reported the whole episode to MI5, where he was advised to do nothing for the time being but to keep the channels to Pollitt open, which he did.

  The MI5 chiefs were in no doubt that the Russians knew that Driberg was still working for them. But the Centre in Moscow, which had inevitably been consulted, felt that, if he was back in the communist fold, he could be fed a lot of spurious information to mislead British intelligence. There was also the possibility that Driberg, a well-known homosexual, might be blackmailed into working primarily for the KGB.

  After Driberg visited Moscow in 1956 to see Guy Burgess about the possibility of writing a book about him, he reported back to MI5 that the Russians had asked him to provide information to them about the internal proceedings, accords and discords of the Labour Party. He was excellently placed to do this, having been elected to the party’s National Executive in 1949 and remaining there until his retirement from Parliament in 1974. As Labour was not in office, MI5 had no commitment to it, so it was agreed that Driberg could report what he liked about his own party since no official secrets were involved, provided that he used his connection with the KGB in MI5’s interest when this was possible.

  The Russians gave Driberg two identical briefcases. When he handed one containing his reports to the Russians in London, they handed him the other containing his payment in banknotes. Under the agreement with the security authorities, Driberg was supposed to give all the money, as well as copies of his reports, to MI5. Over a period of several years, he handed in wads of notes amounting to many thousands of pounds, but there seems to be little doubt that he began to retain more and more of the money for himself.

  Driberg reported at length on the private lives of his most senior ministerial colleagues, including some close friends, and on other MPs, men and women, of all parties, given to philandering, as well as on political activities. This material went not only to the Russians, who could use it for recruiting purposes, but to MI5 as well. To swell his information, he lent his flat to parliamentary colleagues, including ministers, for lunchtime trysts. He invariably made subsequent searches, in the hope of discovering the identities of ladies who had been taken there. On one occasion, after lending the flat to a senior colleague, he found an envelope in the handwriting of a woman MP, which he recognised. He then had the effrontery to accuse the colleague concerned of risking damage to the party by causing what could easily have become an open scandal. I have to confess that I know the names of the couple involved in that particular incident. (Politicians and other public figures would be horrified by the extent to which MI5 is informed of their sexual peccadillos by ordinary members of the public.)

  Through the Labour Party information that Driberg gave to MI5, the security men were able to extend their knowledge of the crypto-communists in the party machine as well as in Parliament. And the Russians were able to extend their list of those with character weaknesses who might be susceptible to blackmail.

  Former Labour Party colleagues of Driberg have recently claimed that he could never have been a spy because he had no access to official secrets, but the Russians are just as interested in the kind of information about party politics and personalities, which he was ideally placed to supply.

  In the context of Driberg’s double-agent effort for MI5 and the KGB, the circumstances that enabled him to write his book Guy Burgess – Narrative in Dialogue are intriguing in every sense of the word. What has not been appreciated before is that when Driberg travelled to Moscow to see Burgess, with the intention of preparing the book, he did so with the blessing of both MI5 and the KGB! MI5 knew that the book would be a disinformation exercise, controlled and checked both in the preparation and the proof stage by the KGB. MI5 also knew that Driberg would submit the proofs to it for vetting and that, therefore, it would be party to the KGB operation. But it had a worthwhile purpose in mind.

  There had been consternation in MI5 immediately after the weekend of 11–12 February 1956, when Maclean and Burgess had suddenly been produced by the Soviet authorities at a so-called press conference at the National Hotel in Moscow. It was some measure of the paucity of British intelligence behind the Iron Curtain that nothing definite had been heard of them until, in the usual manner, information was provided by a defector. In April 1954, Vladimir Petrov, head of the KGB in Australia, defected and revealed how one of his colleagues, called Kislytsin, had told him about his involvement in transmitting information provided by Burgess and Maclean while he had been serving as a cypher clerk in London, and how he had handled it later when posted to the intelligence archives department in Moscow. Kislytsin had also been concerned with the planning of the escape of the ‘diplomats’ and later of Maclean’s wife.

  The statement, handed out in English and Russian by Burgess at the ‘press conference’, where no questions were permitted, had clearly been drafted in Russian and could hardly have been less honest. It claimed that the runaways had never been Soviet agents but had left Britain only because they believed from their inside knowledge that western policies would lead to war and they thought that they could do more to promote East–West understanding in Moscow.

  There seemed to be a straightforward reason for the event. Bulganin and Khrushchev, then the joint Soviet leaders, were to visit London within two months to talk about ‘friendship’, and at the dinners and other informal sessions questions about the ‘runaway diplomats’ might be asked. But inside MI5 there seemed to be near panic.

  My first intimation of this was a summons through Rear Admiral Thomson, then secretary of the D-Notice Committee, to his office to meet a representa
tive of MI5. This turned out to be Bernard Hill, the chief legal adviser. Later, Thomson told me that Hill had been asked to see me at the request of Roger Hollis, then still deputy director general.

  Hill began by saying, ‘I am now putting you under the Official Secrets Act,’ which was nonsense because he had no such powers but indicated the state of his mind and that of others above him. He then said that he and his colleagues had concluded that the theatrical production of Maclean and Burgess was just the prelude to further statements calculated to sow the maximum distrust between Britain and America. The meeting ended with a request that the Daily Express, for which I was then defence correspondent, should publish a prominent article warning the public that whatever Maclean and Burgess might say in the future would be a KGB exercise and was not to be believed.

  That MI5 was so worried made the matter legitimate news, and we obliged with a splash front-page story headlined ‘Beware the Diplomats’. It contained a statement made to me, on Hollis’s behalf, to the effect that Maclean and Burgess would be likely to reappear at press conferences or on Moscow radio at times when Foreign Office men, whom they could slander as being pro-Russian, were taking part in negotiations involving America. No such thing ever occurred. I am in no doubt that the episode was the start of a continuing MI5 exercise to prevent the embarrassing return of Burgess to Britain and that the dispatch of Driberg to Moscow was the next phase of it.

  The book that Driberg hurriedly compiled from his talks in Moscow enabled Burgess to state again that he and Maclean had not quit Britain because of any deep-laid plot involving the Russians but purely because they both decided that Russia was a better place in which to live and to work for peace. Burgess denied that he had ever been a Comintern or Russian spy, and Driberg ended the book by stating that he believed him. This was a blatant lie by Driberg, but it suited MI5’s purpose.