On arriving in Athens the Gardener can hire a motor car, visit historical sites in the south of the country and some of the islands. Simultaneously, the Gardener is acclimatizing himself and becoming fully accustomed to the situation in the country.
After collecting the Bouquet from the residency via a DLB [dead letterbox], the Gardener travels to Thessaloniki by rail.
The estimated time span for carrying out the Lily and for the Gardener’s activities is as follows:
AFTER ARRIVING IN Athens, the Gardener can hire a motor car the next day, spend one or two days in Athens and its suburbs, then travel the following route by car: Athens-Pátrais-Spártia-Návplion-Epidhauros-Kóinthos-Athens. This route will take the Gardener four or five days. On arriving in Athens, the Gardener books into a hotel. The next day he places a signal indicating he is ready to carry out the DLB operation to receive the Bouquet. The DLB operation takes place next day.
After collecting the Bouquet, the Gardener leaves by the next train to Thessaloniki, having previously booked out from the hotel. A train leaves Athens at 11:42, and arrives at Thessaloniki at 19:29; he travels in a first-class compartment.
At Thessaloniki he does not stay at a hotel. In order to acquaint himself with the situation around the VAZA he walks past the VAZA after checking for surveillance.
As darkness falls, the Gardener goes off on a route of his own choice, but at the final stage goes into the old fort, where he inserts the little flower [detonator] into the Bouquet. From the northern gates of the fort, the Gardener goes down Isail Street which leads to the VAZA and comes out on St. Paul Street. This takes 15-20 minutes.
On coming out on to Isail Street, the Gardener goes from the garage towards St. Paul Street. While moving along the [VAZA] fence, the Gardener causes the Splash [explosion]. The Gardener can throw the Bouquet into the bushes which are close to the VAZA fence or he can drop the Bouquet on the ground inside the VAZA fence. (A diagram of the route and of the location of the installations is attached.)
After completing the Splash, the Gardener goes out on Áyios Dhimitrios Street and moves in the direction of the stadium (20-25 minutes walk). In the stadium area there is some waste ground where the Gardener can bury the TWA or BOAC airline bag used for keeping and transporting the Bouquet. From Thessaloniki, the Gardener can go to Athens by train or air (buying the air ticket 5-10 minutes before takeoff, using any surname).
If the situation does not permit the Gardener to put the Bouquet together, then he can get rid of it… in the area of the stadium where there is some waste ground. If he attracts the attention of the VAZA security guard, he must say that he is a foreign tourist going from the fort to the Delta Hotel, where he intends to spend the night, but that this is his first visit to the town and he is not sure of the way to the hotel.101
TWENTY-FOUR
COLD WAR OPERATIONS AGAINST BRITAIN
Part 1: After the Magnificent Five
Soviet intelligence operations in Britain from the 1930s onward fall into three distinct phases. First, there was a golden age, begun by the Great Illegals, during which the KGB collected better intelligence (even if it did not always understand it) than any other hostile intelligence agency in British history. Next came a silver age during the 1950s and 1960s, which included fewer—though still substantial—intelligence successes. The third phase, in the 1970s and 1980s, qualifies, at best, as a bronze age, successes. The third phase, in the 1970s and 1980s, qualifies, at best, as a bronze age, with few major successes and some spectacular failures.
The golden age of Soviet intelligence operations in Britain came to an end in 1951 with the flight of Burgess and Maclean to Moscow and the recall of Philby from Washington.1 The files noted by Mitrokhin, however, reveal for the first time that one major ideological agent recruited in the mid-1930s, Melita Norwood (HOLA), continued to operate after the demise of the Magnificent Five.2 From March 1945 onward, while working in the research department of the British Non-Ferrous Metals Association, she had been able to provide intelligence on the TUBE ALLOYS project to build Britain’s first atomic bomb.
After the Second World War there was a recurrence of the wartime rivalry between NKGB and GRU for control of Norwood. Her first post-war controller was an NKGB/MGB officer at the London residency, Nikolai Pavlovich Ostrovsky. During the Committee of Information (KI) period in the early Cold War, however, when the MGB and GRU combined their foreign intelligence services, Norwood had two GRU controllers: Galina Konstantinovna Tursevich and Yevgeni Aleksandrovich Oleynik. In April 1950, following the conviction of the atom spy Klaus Fuchs and the MI5 interrogation of SONYA, the wartime GRU controller of both Norwood and Fuchs, Norwood was temporarily put “on ice” for fear that she might have been compromised. Contact, however, was resumed in 1951. Within about a year, following the demise of the Committee of Information, control of Norwood was reclaimed by the Centre from the GRU.3
In October 1952, a few months after Norwood returned to the MGB, the first British atomic bomb was successfully tested on the Monte Bello islands off the north-west coast of Australia, hitherto known chiefly for their pearl divers and shipwrecks. Stalin had been far better briefed on the construction of the bomb than most British ministers. Attlee never allowed discussion of the TUBE ALLOYS project by his whole cabinet, later claiming censoriously that “some of them were not fit to be trusted with secrets of this kind.” Churchill was amazed, after winning the 1951 election, to discover that Attlee had concealed the 100-million-pound cost of the atomic bomb from both Parliament and most of his ministers.4
Over the next twenty years Norwood had seven different controllers: six officers of the KGB London residency (Yevgeni Aleksandrovich Belov, Georgi Leonidovich Trusevich, Nikolai Nikolayevich Asimov, Vitali Yevgenovich Tseyrov, Gennadi Borosovich Myakinkov and Lev Nikolayevich Sherstnev) and one illegal (BEN). For security reasons Norwood actually met her controllers only four or five times a year, usually in the suburbs of south-east London to hand over the documents she had been collecting.5
The rivalry between the Centre and the GRU for control of Norwood during the Second World War and the early Cold War—decided in both cases in the Centre’s favor—gives a clear indication of her importance as an agent. According to her file, some of the ST which she supplied “found practical application in Soviet industry.” (Mitrokhin’s notes, alas, give no further details.) In 1958 HOLA was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. Two years later she was rewarded with a life pension of 20 pounds a month, payable with immediate effect, despite the fact that she was twelve years off from retirement at the Non-Ferrous Metals Association. Norwood, however, was an ideological agent who did not work for money. After her retirement she refused further payment, saying she had enough to live on and did not need it.6
Norwood also acted as agent-recruiter. The only recruit identified in Mitrokhin’s notes, however, is the civil servant HUNT, whose cultivation Norwood began in 1965. In the fourteen years after HUNT’s recruitment in 1967, he provided ST and intelligence on British arms sales (on which no further details are available). In the late 1970s the London residency gave him 9,000 pounds to found a small business, probably in the hope that he could use it to supply embargoed technology.7
SO FAR AS is known, no Soviet agent recruited after the Second World War ever penetrated the British intelligence community quite as successfully as Philby, Blunt and Cairncross. Within a few months of Philby’s dismissal from SIS in June 1951, however, the MGB began the recruitment of another SIS officer, the 29-year-old George Blake, né Behar. Blake had been born in Rotterdam of a naturalized British father (by origin a Sephardic Jew from Constantinople) and a Dutch mother who called their son George in honor of King George V. During the Second World War Blake served successively in the Dutch Resistance and in the Royal Navy, before joining SIS in 1944. There was much that SIS had failed to discover about its new recruit, notably the influence on him of his older cousin, Henri Curiel, co-founder of the Egyptian Communist Party, a man—
according to Blake—with “immense charm and a dazzling smile [which] made him very attractive, not only to women, but to all who met him.” In 1949 Blake was posted by SIS to South Korea, working under diplomatic cover as vice-consul in Seoul. A year later, shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War, he was interned by the invading North Koreans.8
In the autumn of 1951 Blake handed his captors a note, written in Russian and addressed to the Soviet embassy, saying that he had important information to communicate. At a meeting with Vasili Alekseyevich Dozhdalev of the KGB, he identified himself as an SIS officer and volunteered to work as a Soviet agent. Following a favorable assessment by Dozhdalev, the London resident, Nikolai Borisovich Rodin (alias “Korovin”), traveled to Korea to complete Blake’s recruitment as agent DIO-MID, and arranged to meet him in the Netherlands after the end of the Korean War. According to Sergei Aleksandrovich Kondrashev, who became Blake’s controller in Britain in October 1953, the Centre considered him so important that no other member of the London residency was permitted to know either DIOMID’s identity or the fact that he worked for SIS.9
KGB files give Blake the credit for two major successes during the 1950s. First, his intelligence—together with previous information from Philby and that supplied by Heinz Felfe,10 a Soviet agent in the West German BND—is said to have made possible the “elimination of the adversary’s agent network in the GDR in 1953-5.”11 In his memoirs, published in 1990, Blake claimed that he had betrayed almost 400 Western agents in the Soviet Bloc, but insisted that none had come to any harm—an improbable assertion swiftly denied by, among others, Oleg Kalugin. According to Blake, some of those he betrayed “are today taking an active part in the democratic movements of their respective countries in eastern Europe.” Many more, however, were executed in the 1950s.12
Blake’s second major achievement as a Soviet agent was to alert the Centre to one of the most remarkable Western intelligence operations of the Cold War—the secret construction of a 500-meter underground tunnel from West to East Berlin built to intercept landlines running from the Soviet military and intelligence headquarters in Karlshorst. At a meeting with his controller on the top deck of a London bus in January 1954, Blake handed over a carbon copy of the minutes of an SIS—CIA conference on the tunnel project, codenamed operation GOLD. Blake was posted to the SIS Berlin station in April 1955, one month before the tunnel became operational. The Centre, however, dared not interfere either with the tunnel’s construction or with its early operations for fear of compromising Blake, who had established himself as by far its most important British agent.
By the time the KGB staged an “accidental” discovery of the tunnel in April 1956, operation GOLD had yielded over 50,000 reels of magnetic tape recording intercepted Soviet and East German communications. The intelligence yield was so considerable that it took over two years after the end of the operation to process all the intercepts. Though the FCD was able to protect its own communications, it was curiously indifferent to the interception of those of the rival GRU and of Soviet armed forces. There is no evidence to support past claims that the intelligence generated by operation GOLD was muddied by significant amounts of KGB disinformation. CIA and SIS intelligence reports on the operation contained important new information on the improved nuclear capability of the Soviet air force in East Germany; its new fleet of bombers and twin-jet radar-equipped interceptors; the doubling of Soviet bomber strength and the creation of a new fighter division in Poland; over one hundred air force installations in the USSR, GDR and Poland; the organization, bases and personnel of the Soviet Baltic Fleet; and installations and personnel of the Soviet atomic energy program. In the era before spy planes and spy satellites (the first U-2 overflight of the Soviet Union did not occur until July 1956), this intelligence was of particular value to a West still ignorant about much of the capability of the Soviet armed forces.13
One of the messages intercepted in the Berlin tunnel revealed the existence of a Soviet agent working for British intelligence in Berlin, but it was not until 1961 that evidence from the Polish SB defector Michał Goleniewski identified the agent as Blake.14 Blake was sentenced to forty-two years in jail but served only five before escaping from Wormwood Scrubs with the help of three former inmates who had befriended him, the Irish bomber Sean Bourke and the peace protesters Michael Randle and Pat Pottle. On October 22, 1966 Blake knocked a loosened iron bar out of his cell window, slid down the roof outside and dropped to the ground, then climbed over the outer wall with a nylon rope ladder thrown to him by Bourke. Hidden in the Randle family dormobile, Blake was driven to East Berlin, where a fortnight later he was joined by Bourke. Once in Moscow, Blake and Bourke rapidly fell out. Blake writes in his memoirs that, “Arrangements were made for [Bourke] to return to Ireland.”15 He does not mention, and may not have known, that on the instructions of Sakharovsky, the head of the FCD, Bourke was given before his departure a drug designed to cause brain damage and thus limit his potential usefulness if he fell into the hands of British intelligence. Bourke’s premature death in his early forties probably owed as much to KGB drugs as to his own heavy drinking.16
WHILE RUNNING BLAKE as an agent inside SIS during the 1950s, the KGB also had ambitious plans to recruit leading British politicians. Among the targets recorded in the files noted by Mitrokhin was Tom Driberg, Labor MP, journalist, member of Labor’s National Executive from 1949 to 1974 and party chairman in 1957-8.17 In 1956, shortly after Burgess and Maclean gave the first press conference since their flight to Moscow, claiming to have come to Moscow “to work for the aim of better understanding between the Soviet Union and the West,” Driberg provided the opportunity for his own recruitment by requesting an interview with Burgess.18 The two men had become friends during the War—brought together by common interests which included, according to Driberg’s biographer, “contempt for the bourgeoisie” and “healthy appetites for alcohol and young men.”19 With the approval of the KGB, Burgess agreed to the interview, doubtless informing the Centre that Driberg was one of the most promiscuous homosexuals in British public life.
Whenever it saw an opportunity, the Second Chief Directorate (SCD) went to great pains to compromise foreign diplomats and Western politicians visiting Moscow by using female or male “swallows” to seduce them, photographing their sexual liaisons and then blackmailing them into “cooperation.” A year before Driberg visited Moscow, for example, John Vassall, a homosexual clerk in the office of the British naval attaché at the British embassy, had been lured to a party organized by the SCD. Soon afterward, Vassall recalled:
I was shown a box of photographs of myself at the party… After about three photographs I could not stomach any more. They made one feel ill. There I was, caught by the camera, enjoying every sexual activity… having oral, anal or a complicated array of sexual activities with a number of different men.
For the next seven years, while working at the Moscow embassy and at the Admiralty in London, Vassall handed over thousands of highly classified documents on British and NATO weapons development and naval policy.20
As a compulsive “cottager” in public lavatories, Driberg proved even easier to recruit than Vassall. Instead of being compromised by an elaborate SCD sexual entrapment, Driberg obligingly compromised himself. During his visit to Moscow he discovered, to his delight, “a large underground urinal just behind the Metropole Hotel, open all night, frequented by hundreds of questing Slav homosexuals—standing there in rigid exhibitionist rows, motionless save for the hasty grope and the anxious or beckoning glance over the shoulder—and tended only by an old woman cleaner who never seemed to notice what was going on.”21 If the cleaner failed to notice the distinguished British visitor to the urinal, the KGB undoubtedly did not. Among Driberg’s sexual partners on that or subsequent evenings in Moscow was an agent of the Second Chief Directorate. Soon afterward, Driberg was confronted with “compromising material” on his sexual encounters (probably photographs similar to those shown to Vassall) and rec
ruited as agent LEPAGE.22 Somewhat absurdly, in view of the use of blackmail, Driberg’s file alleges that “ideological affinity,” going back to his teenage membership of the Communist Party, played a subsidiary part in his recruitment.
For the next twelve years, Driberg was used both as a source of inside information from the Labor National Executive and to promote active measures.23 The importance of his role within the Labor Party may well have been exaggerated by the Centre, especially after he became party chairman in 1957. “Even before he held this post, whose nature often misleads foreign observers,” writes the political commentator Alan Watkins, “Driberg was assumed by several Russian politicians to be leader of the Labor Party. This was on account partly of his great episcopal manner, and partly of his ability to get on well with Russians.”24 Driberg was, none the less, wonderfully placed to report to his controller on both the evolution of Labor policy and the rivalries within the Party leadership. His mixture of political information and gossip was so highly rated by the KGB that it was passed on to the Politburo.25
Driberg’s first active measure as agent LEPAGE was the publication in 1956 of a disingenuous study of Guy Burgess which concluded that he had never been a Soviet agent. At the time Driberg was temporarily out of the Commons, working as a freelance journalist, seriously short of money and being hounded by his bank manager. The book on Burgess brought him more money than anything else in his writing career, including the then-astounding sum of 5,000 pounds for its serialization in the Daily Mail.26 After his initial meeting with Burgess in Moscow, Driberg went back to London, drafted in about a month a short biography entitled Guy Burgess: A Portrait with Background, then returned to Moscow to go through the proofs. “Presumably,” he wrote later, “Guy had shown each chapter to his colleagues or superiors.”27 The proofs, in other words, had been carefully vetted by the KGB.
The Sword and the Shield Page 69
