Their Trade Is Treachery: the Full Unexpurgated Truth About the Russian Penetration of the World's Secret Defences

by Chapman. Pincher

  One communist of historic significance, who was taken into top-secret work during the period when Hollis was responsible for overseeing communist activities in Britain, was Dr Klaus Fuchs. His communist past was known soon after he arrived as a German refugee in 1933, but MI5, which investigated him six times between 1941 and 1948, raised only vague objections, even after his name was seen on a captured copy of the Gestapo wanted list. An MI5 analysis in 1946 suggested that Fuchs might be a Soviet agent, but the report from Hollis’s section rated the risk as slight, and he was cleared for work at the new Harwell atomic station.

  Fuchs was not exposed as the result of any inquiries by MI5 but by a fluke, of which American cypher experts made brilliant use. Normally, the KGB used the safe one-time pad system for transmitting secret messages in code. In that system, the person sending the message and the one receiving it both have a small, identical pad composed of pages each covered with lines of letters chosen at random. The encoder uses the letters from one page to encipher a message, and the decoder, knowing which page was used, can decipher it. Since each page is different, the code is virtually unbreakable provided that any page is used only once. During the war, however, a Russian cypher section, possibly having run short of one-time pads, or through error, used some pages twice. In a superb and arduous operation codenamed ‘Bride’ (later ‘Vanosa’), led by an American cryptanalyst, Meredith Gardner, many of the wartime Russian messages, including much information about Soviet espionage activities by more than 2,000 agents, were deciphered. Among those decoded in 1949 were messages indicating that Fuchs had been a long-term Soviet spy.

  The intercepts first indicated that there had been a major leakage of nuclear bomb secrets from the Los Alamos laboratories involving a scientist there. A later deciphered message revealed that the scientist, whose codename was used in the traffic, had a sister studying at an American university. This made Fuchs the prime suspect.

  That kind of evidence is not admissible in a British court, and, in any case, it could not have been used because at that time the American and British security authorities were most anxious to avoid giving any indication that they had broken the Russian codes, ‘Operation Bride’ being under the highest security classification. So, though MI5 was convinced of Fuchs’s guilt, the only way he could be prosecuted was by inducing him to confess.

  In that operation, MI5 recorded a major success, partly through the skill and patience of the interrogator, Jim Skardon, but partly for another reason, not before disclosed. After Fuchs had repeatedly declined to confess anything, MI5 was about to abandon the task when a woman, who had listened in to Fuchs’s replies to Skardon’s questions and transcribed them, said that she felt ‘in her bones’ that Fuchs was lying on four specific points and not very convincingly. She urged Skardon to try again and concentrate more forcefully on them. He did so, and Fuchs broke down. So, though Jim Skardon deserves all the credit he has been given, his success owed much to a woman’s intuition.

  As FBI records show, the KGB knew that Fuchs was in grave danger because one of the few people fully informed about ‘Operation Bride’ and its findings was Philby, the secret service liaison man with the FBI and the CIA in Washington, whose duty it was to pass the information on to London. Indeed, one of his main functions was to assist in the interpretation of the results of ‘Bride’. No attempt, however, was made to warn Fuchs or to retrieve him by an organised defection.

  By that time, Fuchs had ceased to spy for Russia, so the KGB could ‘burn’ him without much sacrifice, especially as his conviction would be guaranteed to do devastating damage to Anglo–American interchange of atomic secrets. However, the main reason for the KGB’s failure to warn Fuchs was probably to preserve Philby’s position, which was of great value to them. The defection of Fuchs would inevitably lead to a major inquiry into the source of the leak that he was under suspicion, and Philby, who was then above suspicion, might himself be endangered. The Russians knew, moreover, that if Fuchs held out and managed to avoid confessing, there was no way that he could be prosecuted.

  The KGB also deliberately provides an agency that it has penetrated with occasional success in the hope of averting suspicion against itself. In the Fuchs case, the success would appear to accrue to MI5, where there was a high-level KGB agent in need of protection, but it would also keep the spotlight off Philby in the sister service. All intelligence agencies play this game on occasion, but, while MI5 regarded it rather as deliberately losing a piece in checkers, the KGB played chess – with checkmate the objective.

  After Fuchs had been convicted and sentenced to fourteen years’ imprisonment, he was interrogated in jail by both MI5 and the FBI. Aware that his controller, Ursula Beurton, whose name he knew, was safely in East Germany, he identified her from photographs and gave information against her. It was made to appear that other spies, who were eventually arrested, had been identified by Fuchs. Harry Gold, his courier when he was at the Los Alamos bomb laboratory in New Mexico, was picked out by him but only after being shown a film, when he recognised his walk. An American soldier called David Greenglass and the spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg also appeared to have been tracked down by such clever detective work. But the truth is that all had been named repeatedly in the KGB coded traffic, and the secret of its decipherment had to be covered. Had the FBI been able to reveal the extent of this evidence, there would have been less opposition to the execution of the Rosenbergs. The FBI records show that Philby and his Soviet controllers must also have known about the intention to arrest the Rosenbergs, but again elected to avoid warning them.

  ‘Operation Bride’ also provided irrefutable evidence of the existence of a spy network in Australia based on the Soviet embassy in Canberra and involving civil servants and communist union leaders. MI5 was greatly perturbed because of the decision to build rocket and atom-bomb test ranges in the Australian desert. The Americans told the British that the Australians were to be given no secret information until they set up effective security arrangements.

  Sir Percy Sillitoe went out in 1948 to see the Australian Prime Minister, Ben Chifley, and was soon followed by his chief security adviser in the shape of Roger Hollis. After talks with Hollis, Chifley agreed to a proposal by a senior Australian civil servant that a special surveillance and screening operation should be carried out on a big Russian delegation that was due to visit Australia. The operation, which involved scores of watchers and other people, produced no evidence whatever, and it was assumed that there had been a leak to the Russians.

  A further public disaster in the atomic field, resulting in damaging publicity for MI5, occurred in October 1950 when another nuclear physicist from the Harwell atomic research station, Dr Bruno Pontecorvo, a Jewish refugee from Italy, suddenly fled to Moscow with his wife and family. It quickly became known that Pontecorvo and his wife had long been dedicated communists and that, while the former had been screened several times – most rigorously after the unmasking of Fuchs – the security authorities had never detected them.

  Furthermore, inquiries revealed what seemed to be a dreadful misunderstanding between the Canadian security authorities and MI5. The Canadians believed that Pontecorvo had been cleared by MI5 before he reached Canada as a member of the British team in 1943, but MI5 claimed that he was never in Britain before he joined the Canadian project because, previously, he had been living as a refugee in the United States.

  Pontecorvo had retained his house in the United States while he was away working in Canada, and the FBI, being suspicious of him, searched it. They found documentary evidence that both he and his wife were communists and intensely anti-American and sent a warning report to the British embassy. The British liaison man in Washington at the time was Philby, so, once again, luck came to the rescue of those dedicated to the Soviet service. Philby sat on the report, which was found years later in the embassy records. Had it been forwarded to London, as the FBI expected, it is likely that Pontecorvo would have been refused permission to work at
Harwell when he came to Britain after the war. Instead, a Canadian security clearance, which had never taken place, was accepted by MI5.

  Pontecorvo, who was granted British citizenship in 1948 on the basis that he had lived five years in Canada, defected to Russia with his family in October 1950. It is now certain that the journey and its concealment were organised by the KGB, which had induced Pontecorvo to leave Britain on short notice. His expertise was needed in connection with the crash development of the Soviet H-bomb. He was one of the few scientists in the world with knowledge of the type of nuclear reactor required to make the essential component of the H-bomb called lithium deuteride.

  It is not known if Pontecorvo went out of ideological loyalty or the offer of more exciting conditions of work, or was blackmailed. Whatever his motive when he defected, the MI5 department of which Hollis was in charge appeared to have been taken by surprise.

  When Cabinet and departmental papers relating to 1940 were released to the Public Record Office on 1 January 1981, under the thirty-year rule, those concerning Fuchs and Pontecorvo were withheld for a further twenty years, until 2001. I have been assured that there is nothing in those papers of genuine security value, in the sense that they would be of any assistance to a foreign power. It would seem, therefore, that the only purpose in extending their suppression is political. The papers might show that the Attlee administration had been warned by MI5, if belatedly, that Fuchs was a slight security risk, and elected to take no action because he had learned so many American nuclear secrets while working in the United States that his services were essential. Until 1948, the Labour government’s decision to make and to stockpile atomic bombs was an official secret. The arrest and trial of Fuchs would inevitably have revealed it – with loud outcries from the Labour left. Furthermore, it would have nullified the strenuous efforts then being made by the government to regain access to American atomic secrets denied under US legislation.

  CHAPTER 7

  DIPLOMATIC NON-INCIDENTS

  ANOTHER SECURITY DISASTER involving MI5 and Canada occurred in 1954 following the destruction, by fire, of the Russian embassy in Ottawa. During the fire, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had been able to get someone inside the buildings and checked that the KGB setup had been exactly as described by the defector, Igor Gouzenko, nine years previously. When the Russians decided to rebuild it on a larger scale, they had to submit the plans to the Canadian planning authority. The Canadian intelligence chiefs thus realised they had a once-and-for-all opportunity to introduce eavesdropping devices into the sensitive areas of the new embassy. In this project, called ‘Operation Dew-worm’, they asked for and received assistance from MI5.

  Gouzenko was consulted and helped with the decision as to where microphones should be placed. By working at night in the depth of the Canadian winter and using various subterfuges, the intelligence men were able to install the listening devices where, it was believed, they would remain undetected. (When the installation was almost complete and the wires all set deep in concrete, a worker inadvertently went through the main cable with a drill. It seemed certain that Dew-worm was ruined, but by ingenious improvisation six of the eight microphones were made to work.)

  When the Russians moved in, it was clear that the intelligence men had chosen the right locations for the microphones. But the Russian ambassador was suddenly recalled to Moscow, and, during the three months that he was away, a team of electronic ‘sweepers’ from Moscow moved in and searched the area, and the KGB setup was moved to a different part of the building. The sweepers had failed to find the microphones, which continued to transmit useless information for eight years, when they were eventually discovered.

  MI5 was in no doubt that the Centre in Moscow had been told that the building had been ‘bugged’. The leak could have emanated from Canada or from Britain.

  Soon after the Canadian debacle, MI5 took part in a futile attempt to bug another Russian embassy, this time in Canberra. In 1954, the KGB chief in that embassy, Vladimir Petrov, defected to the Australian security authorities, taking with him evidence that the Kremlin was attempting to undermine the Australian government and people with a locally recruited network of spies and saboteurs, as it had done in Canada.

  Reacting in its usual arrogant way when its activities are exposed, the Soviet government broke off diplomatic relations, evacuated the embassy and left it in the care of the Swiss government. The KGB activities were no surprise to MI5 because the deciphered KGB radio traffic had shown that there were three locally recruited Russian agents in the office of Dr Evatt, leader of the Labour opposition in Australia. The Australian security authorities, as well as the people, were shocked, however, by the findings of the Royal Commission inquiry into the affair and decided that they should take some precautionary measures against the day when the Russians might decide to return, probably before the Olympic Games were due to be held in Melbourne in 1960.

  MI5 was called in and recommended the fitting of a device called a cavity microphone, which had been invented by the Russians and improved in Britain. This device, which had been intruded by the Russians into both the British and American embassies in Moscow, needed no battery because it was activated by a microwave beam generated outside the building. It could also be fitted quickly, which was an essential requirement because the Australian and British security men could only gain access to the embassy for two hours, when they could be sure that the caretaker would be missing.

  Consultations with Petrov showed that the best place to install the device was in the room where the KGB chief spent most of his time. This was brilliantly accomplished by the Australians, led by Sir Charles Spry, after the instrument had been built, tested and flown out by MI5. To lull the Russians, it was decided that it would not be activated for a whole year after their return. Meanwhile, the Australian security men secured a convenient building overlooking the embassy, from which the microwaves could be beamed.

  When the device was eventually activated, it worked perfectly. They could hear a man entering the room, pulling up his chair and rustling papers. They could even hear children playing in the embassy garden. But they never heard a single word of conversation. Whenever the occupant of the room wished to speak, he went outside and slammed the door. The operation was continued for a year until it had become clear that the Russians had known about it from the beginning and had refrained from removing the ‘bug’ so that the Australians would go on wasting their time, manpower and money. The leakage could have occurred in Australia, but it was considered more likely that it had originated in London.

  Hollis became deputy director general when his colleague Dick (not short for Richard) White became the top man at the early age of forty-five on the retirement of Sir Percy Sillitoe, who had not pleased Churchill. Though Sillitoe tried hard, intelligence work depends on taking calculated risks in the hope of producing a dividend. If a project fails, the chief must accept the consequences, having agreed to it. Sillitoe tried to apply the police principle that any failure should result in censure or disciplinary action, so that officers became unwilling to take the necessary risks.

  However, as White’s own brief reign in MI5 was to show, success was difficult to come by in an agency heavily penetrated by the opposition.

  It is thought that Hollis may have given crucial assistance to ensure the success of the defection of Maclean and Burgess, as I have indicated. It is certain that he did everything he could to ensure that neither of them would ever return to Britain to undergo interrogations, in which they might reveal information damaging to the KGB and dangerous to those who had assisted it. His strange behaviour in this regard centred on a book about Burgess written by Tom Driberg. I shall reserve my account of this for Chapter 21, which deals with the activities of politicians.

  As Hollis and White, his MI5 chief until 1956, were of similar age and would be due for retirement at about the same time, Hollis seemed to have little hope of ever becoming director general, but, like the members of the
infamous Ring of Five, he had a charmed career. At no time was this better illustrated than by the tragic affair of Commander Crabb, the frogman who lost his life while carrying out a forbidden survey of the hull of a Soviet cruiser tied up in the dock at Portsmouth.

  In April 1956, the joint Russian leaders Bulganin and Khrushchev were due to arrive in Portsmouth aboard the powerful cruiser Ordzonikidze for a good-will visit to Britain. Sir Anthony Eden, then Prime Minister, who had high hopes of establishing better relations and moderating the Cold War, issued a precise directive to all services banning any intelligence operations of any kind against the ship.

  This directive was widely disobeyed. The navy asked the military intelligence authorities to secure a radar image of the cruiser as it sailed through the Channel. This was accomplished by a radar set installed in a cave in the cliffs near Dover so that it could not be seen by the Russians or by anybody likely to report its presence to the Prime Minister. A submarine was dispatched to lie on the sea bed in the cruiser’s path to obtain records of the vibrations of the screws.

  To Crabb, and to certain elements in the Admiralty and in the secret service, the directive was a challenge from a ‘wet’ Prime Minister. Commander Crabb, a freelance frogman of great daring and experience, put up a proposition to a certain branch of the secret service that was separate from headquarters. He gave an assurance that he could measure the pitch of the cruiser’s screws, which was the main Admiralty requirement. The offer was accepted. A letter, of which a copy still exists, was sent to the Admiralty, which wanted no official knowledge of the operation but said that it would be grateful for any results.

  Security for the Soviet visit was known to be extremely light. The KGB chief, Ivan Serov, visited London in March with a team of electronic ‘sweepers’ to check the security arrangements at Claridge’s Hotel where, it was expected, MI5 would have installed hidden microphones. Because of his blood-stained record, Serov received a rough public reception, and it was made clear to him that he would not be welcome if he returned with the leaders in April. In spite of this, before leaving London, he had the brass nerve to ask the Foreign Office for facilities for a KGB ‘listening post’ in Hong Kong to oversee China, and was refused. Furthermore, he did return with the Soviet leaders, remaining aboard the cruiser throughout the visit.