Sadly, the Kremlin’s basic intentions are only too apparent, both from its behaviour and from the information imparted by defectors, military and political: to divide the western allies and then to rule.
In this endeavour, NATO has proved to be a productive hunting ground. Several high-ranking West German officers have been suborned, some of them committing suicide when about to face security interrogation. Copies of contingency plans have been stolen from NATO offices. In one instance, of which I have official knowledge, a copy of NATO’s entire nuclear targeting plans was removed from the office of the NATO supreme commander, then General Norstad. An RAF officer, who discovered the loss, told me that the document gave the places in Russia and the satellite countries that would be attacked with nuclear bombs in the event of a retaliatory raid, together with details of the squadrons involved and their routes. When he broke the news to Norstad, the supreme commander’s reaction was that, while he had little doubt that the document was in Moscow, it was perhaps just as well that the Russians should know what to expect if they ever attacked the West. The only necessary action, apart from a general tightening of office security, was to switch the routes.
The KGB’s most daring and most productive penetration of the NATO alliance was its planting of the Soviet bloc spy Guenther Guillaume as personal assistant to Willi Brandt, the West German Chancellor. When the full extent of his treachery was realised, one of the most senior officials at NATO military headquarters exclaimed, ‘My God, it’s all gone!’
The KGB’s Disinformation Department has been incredibly adept at sowing discord among the NATO allies, its most recent resounding success being the distrust of the American neutron bomb that it has implanted in the minds of West Germans, Dutch and Belgians. The neutron bomb is essentially a counter to an attack by massed tanks, Russia’s main weapon in Europe, but the Russians projected it as the capitalist bomb that kills people but preserves buildings. Though so patently fraudulent, this approach led European leaders to object to the presence of the weapon on their soil and induced former President Jimmy Carter to suspend work on it.
With a view to strengthening the United Kingdom’s capacity to resist the erosive activities of the KGB Jonathan Aitken, Tory MP for Thanet, has suggested that a committee of privy councillors could do a ‘quiet monitoring job’ on the security services, reporting in general terms. As Aitken said in the Blunt debate, this would be preferable to a select committee, which would inevitably include ‘some of the more controversial characters from the back-benches’, but even the privy councillors would have to be chosen with great discrimination. There are some among them who are considered unreliable by the security authorities.
In my opinion and in that of experienced security officers whom I have consulted, any inquiry except by people with personal knowledge of security and intelligence operations would be of little use in evaluating the efficiency and loyalty of the security services. This rules out the kind of judicial inquiry carried out into the Profumo affair by Lord Denning. A judge, used to the rules of evidence and experienced in normal legal cases, is not fitted to give an opinion on counter-espionage or intelligence operations that depend on methods quite different from those used by the police.
A tribunal of inquiry such as that set up to investigate the Vassall case, with officers and others giving evidence under oath and subject to the rules of contempt, would be too similar to the post-Watergate investigation into the activities of the CIA to be acceptable in the national interest. I am not greatly impressed by the argument that an inquiry of any kind would seriously damage the morale of the services, for the loyal officers would support anything designed to reduce the risk of harbouring traitors and prising out any already there. But, of all types of inquiry, a tribunal would be most likely to impair attitudes and morale.
In the Blunt debate, James Callaghan and Merlyn Rees both came out in favour of some kind of limited inquiry, while others, like James Wellbeloved, supported an inquiry wide enough to ‘clear the air of the stench of treason’. Margaret Thatcher won the day with her assurances that an inquiry was unnecessary following improvements in the accountability of MI5 and the secret service to ministers, increases in efficiency through better recruiting methods and intensification of precautions to prevent penetration by traitors. In the last context, Mrs Thatcher has been urged to announce an amnesty for all the old traitors prepared to come forward, confess their treachery in full and assist the security authorities to wrap up their cases in return for immunity from prosecution and, hopefully, from publicity. This has so far met with no positive result if only because the publicity given to the Blunt case as a result of the Prime Minister’s parliamentary disclosure has been off-putting to those who know that no action can be taken against them so long as they decline to cooperate.
I have established to my satisfaction that Mrs Thatcher’s assurances are well founded. There is much closer collaboration between MI5 and the Home Office at the highest official and political levels. When Merlyn Rees was Home Secretary, he instituted meetings with the director general of MI5 which are as regular as those held with the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Meetings between the director general of the secret service and the Foreign Secretary are also frequent. The Prime Minister makes it her business to see both men on occasion, so the days when either chief could deliberately keep himself aloof from political contact, as Hollis did, are gone.
With the able assistance of the Cabinet secretary, Sir John Hunt (now Lord), James Callaghan, when Prime Minister revised the recruitment procedures for MI5, bringing them into line with the improvements instituted in the secret service after the Philby affair. It was decided to broaden the social classes from which recruits were sought because MI5 had in the past been too ‘incestuous’ in this respect and major sources of former recruits were fast disappearing in the shape of the ex-members of the colonial and imperial police forces.
Talent spotters from both security services sit in when the Civil Service Commission interviews candidates for entry to the civil service as a whole, so that any who seem to be specially suited by qualifications and temperament for undercover work can be invited to join. Any candidates approaching the security services on their own initiative, and particularly those who are persistent, are now regarded as suspect until fully cleared by passage through positive vetting hoops, which have been made much more stringent.
Positive vetting means active investigation by trained officers, usually ex-policemen, into the background and activities of recruits. It has failed to weed out people like William Vassall in the past, and I have heard security officers say it would still probably have failed to put suspicion on Philby, had it been available in his day. It is certainly not as thorough as the system used in recruitment for the CIA, which involves the use of the polygraph – the so-called lie detector. While the polygraph, which records blood pressure, heartbeat and surface sweat during questioning, is fallible, I am assured by senior CIA officials that it is a valuable adjunct. It is also undoubtedly a deterrent, as the evidence of the recent trial in which David Barnett, a former CIA officer who was convicted of espionage, clearly shows. His Soviet controller had urged him to seek permanent re-entry to the CIA but Barnett was reluctant to do so ‘feeling that he could not pass the polygraph test’.
It is commonly believed that officers of the British services would object to the introduction of such a test, though when Maurice Oldfield was posted to Washington by the secret service he volunteered to undergo a CIA polygraph test to convince the American authorities that, as a bachelor, he had no homosexuality problem.
A further CIA insurance that could improve precautions against penetration of the British services is the principle of random recall. All officers know that they are subject to the possibility of sudden interrogation by security experts simply because their name has come up in the system. The recall includes another polygraph test. In Britain, positive vetting is supposed to be repeated every five years for each ind
ividual, so, having passed once, there is a five-year turn without further check unless suspicion is aroused.
The initial positive vetting process for the security services now takes several months, and nobody is allowed in until these have been satisfactorily completed. So far, this delay has not caused problems, though it has done so at the equally secret Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston. Some promising recruits there have taken other jobs because the delay in waiting for clearance has been too long. A suggestion that badly needed recruits should be paid during the waiting period has been turned down by the government.
The universities are being used again as recruiting grounds, but in a much less haphazard way than in the ’30s, when they were such an easy avenue of entry for spies. University staff, who are themselves cleared as regards political reliability, are briefed by visiting representatives from MI5 and the secret service on the types of individual required. The kind of establishment background that enabled people like Burgess and Philby to penetrate the security screen so easily is no longer an automatic qualification. The field has been widened to include people of all social origins, including some blacks for special work among non-white communities.
There seems to be a much more pragmatic appreciation of the supreme importance of the security services in peacetime than existed in the recent past, when lip service was paid but little else, and they were left to themselves, often with results regarded as almost derisory. Though Harold Macmillan was deeply concerned with national security, he frequently complained to his Cabinet secretary about the futility and unreliability of many of the intelligence reports reaching him and, in his diary, was driven to refer to ‘our so-called security services’.
Those ministers, including the Prime Minister, who are in closest touch with the security services believe that their effectiveness has substantially improved in coping with the ever-increasing effort being mounted against Britain as a key member of the NATO alliance by the KGB. The appalling situation in which senior officials of both MI5 and the secret service were known, or deeply suspected, to be Russian spies no longer exists. Nevertheless, I find that doubt remains among some politicians and retired members of the services concerning the possibility that those who were traitors in positions of great influence in the past may have introduced successors who are still there. That the KGB would require them to try to do so, there can be no doubt. Care would have been taken to ensure that any senior spies in place within the security services served as talent spotters, providing the names of possible recruits among the more junior staff. The KGB would then do the recruiting, using whatever methods it considered necessary. The spies already in place might also be required to ease the entry of any new recruits spotted independently by the KGB and to ensure their allotment to sections of special interest to Russia.
Lord Trend was told by MI5 witnesses that Hollis might have recruited unidentified Soviet agents into the security service. That some of them may still be there was suggested by James Callaghan in his speech during the Blunt debate. ‘It is probably true to say that because of the effluxion of time those concerned in that penetration of the service have passed, or are passing out of active service.’
As I have said, I can find no evidence of the presence of spies at any high level in the security services, but there may be a case for an inquiry by some group that could reassure the community that ‘moles’ no longer exist at any level. The task of MI5, as publicly stated by Sir Martin Furnival Jones, is worth restating in this context: ‘The defence of the realm as a whole from external and internal dangers arising from attempts at espionage and sabotage or from actions of persons and organisations, whether directed from within or without the country, which may be judged to be subversive of the security of the State.’ In the nuclear age and in the current climate of East–West relations, a traitor in the security services is far more dangerous to many more people than a mass murderer at large. If he happened to be the top man during an attempted coup or a military emergency, such are his powers of command that he could do crucial disservice by ensuring failure to round up the subversion and sabotage units alone.
In my discussion of this situation with Sir Robert Mark, the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, he drew a comparison with his force, and particularly the Criminal Investigation Department, when he joined it. It was well known within the force that corruption, in the sense that policemen were taking bribes to protect criminals, was rife. When Mark announced his intention of taking action to root it out, some of his Scotland Yard associates, honest men of good will, strongly advised against it on the grounds that the corruption had gone on for so long that it was accepted practice and that any prosecutions would do irreparable damage to the image of the police.
Mark went ahead, and many policemen, some at very senior levels, were prosecuted and dismissed. Now the public knows that the police force is at least far less corrupt than it was and that any officer taking bribes in the future risks heavy penalties. Nor is there any evidence that morale inside the police service has been damaged by Mark’s courageous action, a risk always raised when any far-reaching inquiry into the security services is suggested.
Treachery, for money or ideological motives, is a form of corruption and perhaps the public would be easier in its mind with a reassurance that, so far as can possibly be established, the trade of treachery, which has flourished so prolifically in the security services, has been abolished there. It is essential that any inquiry should not become a McCarthy-type inquisitorial witch hunt, as happened with the CIA, with results of inestimable value to the Kremlin both through the weakening of America’s secret defences and the damage to the image of western democracy. Nevertheless, if disquietude is to be allayed and confidence restored, full disclosure of the traitorous activities of the past may be necessary.
POSTSCRIPT
THE TITLE OF the previous chapter was answered by the Prime Minister on the day this book was first published in Britain when she announced that she was to ask the Security Commission ‘to review the security procedures and practices currently followed in the public service and to consider what, if any, changes are required’. This has been described as Mrs Thatcher’s first policy U-turn because, following the Blunt affair, she and her government came out so strongly against any such inquiry.
The Security Commission is a standing body called in from time to time to examine breaches of security and to make recommendations arising out of their investigations. At the time of writing, it is headed by Lord Diplock, a judge in his seventies, and he and two other members are to carry out what will be the first independent inquiry in twenty years into the measures taken to prevent penetration by foreign agents.
The Prime Minister’s statement made it clear that the commission’s inquiry would not be limited to MI5 and the secret service but would cover the Foreign Office, GCHQ, the Defence Ministry and all relevant departments of state, as the previous chapter suggested that any inquiry should. The inquiry is expected to last at least nine months.
Precautions unprecedented in the publishing trade were taken by the author and the publisher to keep secret the existence of this book and its contents until the newspaper serialisation commenced a few days before publication date. No books were sent to booksellers until that day, and none went out to reviewers.
There were two reasons for these measures. First, the book contained so much that was new that its contents could easily have been ‘milked’ by the media. Second, I suspected that, if the Cabinet Office or MI5 secured a copy of the text, steps might be taken to have publication suppressed under the Official Secrets Act. I knew that it would be obvious that much of the material could only have originated from within the security services and that technical breaches of the Official Secrets Act, which can be used – journalists would say misused – to cover material going back before the First World War, must have occurred.
Three days before publication day, the managing director of Sidgwick and Jackson, the
house publishing the book, received a personal request by telephone from Sir Robert Armstrong, the secretary of the Cabinet. He said that the Prime Minister needed a copy of the book so that she could be in a position to make a statement about it with the least possible delay if pressed to do so in Parliament. Sir Robert thought such pressure was likely in view of what had already appeared in the Daily Mail, which had begun serialisation of the book.
In view of our fears concerning possible suppression, I suggested that this request should be granted only if Sir Robert undertook, in writing, not to prevent or to delay publication. I did not think that he would be in a position to give such an undertaking. Nevertheless, he did so in a letter to the publisher dated 23 March. This letter, which was not marked ‘personal’ or ‘confidential’, also contained an assurance that the book would not go outside Sir Robert’s office or the Prime Minister’s. The explanation for this surprising alacrity was soon provided by friends who kept me informed of what was happening in Whitehall. Through its secret resources, MI5 had secured a copy of the text at least a week in advance and probably well before that. I know that a former director general of MI5 and a former Cabinet secretary were shown the script and given time to read it well before publication day and had given their views on it.
I was not unduly surprised by this discovery, for I had surmised that former security and intelligence officers to whom I had written for advice or whom I had approached personally would have reported the events back to their old offices. Scores of people connected with Whitehall and Westminster knew that I was contemplating some publication or other about the Hollis affair and had been for some years. Jonathan Aitken had alerted the Prime Minister and the Cabinet Office to the fact that journalists were actively investigating the suspicions that had arisen in MI5 concerning both Hollis and Mitchell.
Their Trade Is Treachery: the Full Unexpurgated Truth About the Russian Penetration of the World's Secret Defences Page 33
