MI5 was hampered in its response to the upsurge of KGB and GRU ST operations not merely by its own overstretched resources but also by the difficulty (which it was, understandably, not anxious to advertise) of bringing successful prosecutions. Unless it could obtain confessions or catch agents in the act of handing over material, it was usually impossible to secure convictions. Its difficulties were exemplified by the trial in 1963 of Dr. Giuseppe Martelli, a 39-year-old Italian physicist employed for the previous year at the Culham Laboratories of the Atomic Energy Authority. Arrested as a result of a lead from a KGB defector, Martelli was found in possession of a record of meetings with Nikolai Karpekov and other KGB officers, a set of partly used one-time pads for cipher communications hidden inside an ingeniously constructed cigarette case, and instructions for photographing documents. But possession of espionage paraphernalia (unlike housebreaking equipment) is not in itself a crime and Martelli had no official access to classified information, though he was in contact with people who had. Martelli admitted meeting Karpekov, but claimed he was engaged in an ingenious scheme to turn the tables on a blackmail attempt by the KGB. He was acquitted.112
During the mid- and late 1960s there were only two successful British prosecutions of Soviet spies in Britain. In 1965 Frank Bossard, a 52-year-old projects officer at the Ministry of Aviation was sentenced to twenty-one years in jail for passing top secret details of British guided weapon development to the GRU. An investigation after Bossard’s arrest revealed a criminal record which had never been properly investigated. Twenty years earlier he had served six months’ hard labor for fraud. In 1968 Douglas Britten, an RAF chief technician, was also sentenced to twenty-one years in jail for giving the KGB highly classified information from RAF signals units in Cyprus and Lincolnshire. A Security Commission inquiry after Britten’s conviction disclosed Britten’s history of financial problems and his record as an “accomplished liar.”113
The work of Line X in the London residency was supplemented by KGB officers sent to Britain under cover either as members of trade and scientific delegations or as postgraduate students. Among the KGB postgraduates was A. V. Sharov of Directorate T, who began work for a PhD in engineering at London University in November 1966 and was awarded his doctorate on October 22, 1969. On KGB instructions, Sharov returned to London to take his degree in person in January 1971 and embark on a lecture tour arranged by the Academy of Sciences which was intended by the Centre to enable him to identify possible recruits in the scientific community.114
Probably the most important Line PR postgraduate at a British university in the mid-1960s was Gennadi Fedorovich Titov (codenamed SILIN), who studied at University College, London. Titov went on to become resident in Norway in 1971 at the relatively youthful age of thirty-nine;115 in 1984 he was promoted to the rank of KGB general, and by the time of the 1991 coup ranked third in the KGB hierarchy. KGB officers and agents disguised as students were also used to uncover links between Western church groups and religious minorities in the Soviet Union. In September 1970 ABRAMOV (not identified in Mitrokhin’s notes) enrolled at a Baptist college in England, where he made contacts who revealed plans in Sweden and West Germany to smuggle religious literature into Russia by car, hidden in specially constructed secret compartments.116
Since the demise of the Magnificent Five and the arrest of George Blake, the Centre had seen as the main weakness of its British operations its failure to recruit a new generation of young, ideologically committed high-flyers. The simple truth, which the Centre could not bring itself to accept, was that the Soviet Union had lost most of its former ideological appeal. The aging apparatchiks who ruled Brezhnev’s Soviet Union lacked the luster of both the interwar myth—image of the world’s first worker—peasant state and the far more accurate wartime image of the state which had been chiefly responsible for the defeat of Nazism. Most young Western radicals of the late 1960s were attracted not to ideologically servile Communist Parties but to the libertarian movements of the New Left. Moscow, however, refused to accept that this was more than a passing phase. The Centre sought to use the exploits of Kim Philby to inspire a new generation of radical idealists to follow his example.
On his defection to Moscow in 1963, Philby had been dismayed to discover that he held only agent status in the KGB, did not hold officer rank and was not even to be allowed to set foot inside the Lubyanka. For the first five years of his Moscow exile, however, he was kept occupied by long debriefing sessions, helping to ghostwrite the memoirs of Konon Molody (published under his alias “Gordon Lonsdale”) and writing a sprightly but tendentious memoir of his own career as a Soviet agent inside SIS, published in 1968 under the title of My Silent War.117 Philby made no mention of the disappointments of life in Moscow. Instead, he claimed that, “As I look over Moscow from my study window, I can see the solid foundations of the future I glimpsed at Cambridge.” Philby concluded his preface with words which were intended to inspire others:
It is a sobering thought that, but for the power of the Soviet Union and the Communist idea, the Old World, if not the whole world, would now be ruled by Hitler and Hirohito. It is a matter of great pride to me that I was invited, at so early an age, to play my infinitesimal part in building up that power… When the proposition [to join Soviet intelligence] was made to me, I did not hesitate. One does not look twice at an offer of enrollment in an élite force.118
Scarcely had My Silent War been published than an American high school student, inspired by Philby’s example, arrived in Moscow on a tourist visa and offered his services to the KGB. Though aged only sixteen (the youngest Western recruit recorded in the files seen by Mitrokhin), he was signed up in July 1968, with Andropov’s personal approval, as agent SYNOK (“Sonny”)119—the same codename as that which had been given to Philby on his recruitment in 1934.120 SYNOK’s file notes that he came from a well-to-do family, had an idealistic commitment to the Soviet Union and was imbued with a romantic notion of intelligence work. After a second meeting with SYNOK in Mexico on October 19, it was decided to train him as an illegal agent. Over the next few months, however, either SYNOK or his parents had second thoughts and he failed to show up at the next pre-arranged rendezvous in London.
It may be a sign of how few other bright, ideologically committed young Westerners were inspired to follow Philby’s example (no others are recorded in Mitrokhin’s notes) that the KGB continued intermittently to try to renew contact with SYNOK for more than a decade. In 1978 a KGB officer discovered from SYNOK’s father that he was in Mexico, but failed to track him down. Two years later, his mother was tricked into revealing that he was in San Francisco and giving his address. In December 1980 the operations officer who had met him in Mexico twelve years earlier wrote to SYNOK in San Francisco, inviting him to another meeting in Mexico and giving an East German cover address to which to reply. When no reply was received, the KGB seems, at long last, to have given up.121
Though a new generation of Philbys failed to materialize, memories of the Magnificent Five continued to enhance the prestige of the London residency. Even in the Gorbachev era, operations in Britain during the Second World War and the quarter century afterward were still held up as a model for young intelligence officers at the FCD training school, the Andropov Institute. The three main faculty heads in the institute had all made their reputations in the London residency. Yuri Modin, who was in charge of political intelligence training, was a former controller of the Magnificent Five. Ivan Shishkin, head of counter-intelligence, had run Line KR in London from 1966 to 1970. Vladimir Barkovsky, who ran ST espionage training, had specialized in that field in London from 1941 to 1946.122
If the golden age of KGB operations in London had ended with the demise of the Magnificent Five in 1951, the silver age came to an even more abrupt conclusion twenty years later with the defection of Oleg Lyalin and the mass expulsion of 105 KGB and GRU officers.123 Henceforth MI5 surveillance was no longer swamped by the sheer numbers of Soviet intelligence personne
l. Oleg Gordievsky remembers the British operation FOOT as “a bombshell, an earthquake of an expulsion, without precedent, an event that shocked the Centre profoundly.”124 According to Oleg Kalugin, “our intelligence gathering activities in England suffered a blow from which they never recovered.”125 For the remainder of the Cold War the KGB probably found it more difficult to collect high-grade intelligence in London than in almost any other Western capital.
TWENTY-FIVE
COLD WAR OPERATIONS AGAINST BRITAIN
Part 2: After Operation FOOT
Despite Moscow’s public expressions of righteous indignation after the expulsion of 105 KGB and GRU officers from London in September 1971, the Centre knew that it had suffered a public relations disaster. The centerpiece of its active measures campaign to turn the tables on British intelligence and discredit the British expulsions was the former rising star of SIS, Kim Philby. Philby, however, was in no fit state to be seen in public. Since the publication of his memoirs in 1968, the KGB seemed to have no further use for him and Philby roamed round Russia on a series of almost suicidal drinking bouts which sometimes left him oblivious of where he was, uncertain whether it was night or day. During the early 1970s he was slowly pulled back from alcoholic oblivion by Rufa, “the woman I had been waiting for all my life.”1
Though the Centre judged, no doubt correctly, after operation FOOT that Philby was still in no condition to give a press conference, it used a lengthy interview with him in Izvestia on October 1, 1971 to denounce the “slanderous allegations” in the “right-wing bourgeois British press” that the Soviet officials expelled from London had been engaged in espionage. In striking contrast with the far more sophisticated tone of Philby’s memoirs published three years earlier, the interview regurgitates a series of stereotypical denunciations of British “ruling circles:”
It should be said that spy mania, the fabrication of slanderous inventions in regard to the Soviet Union, is nothing new in the activities of the ruling circles in England. Definite, concrete political aims are always behind such activities.
This time also, the intensive anti-Soviet provocation and the large scale of the false accusations in regard to Soviet officials in London, as well as the timing of this action, reveal the premeditated character of the activities of the Conservatives who now hold power.
These activities are directed at putting the brakes on the process of lessening tension in Europe.
It is no accident that, as was reflected in the English bourgeois press, government circles showed evident displeasure at, and I should say fear of, the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, which is directed towards normalization of the international situation.
Philby can scarcely have composed these turgid platitudes himself. The probability is that they were simply submitted to him by the KGB for signature. Philby added to them some personal memories of the anti-Soviet “psychological warfare” conducted by British intelligence—though there was a certain irony to his claim that “SIS did not interrupt their subversive operations against the Soviet Union even at the time of the war against Hitler’s Germany.”2 In reality, the lack of evidence of anti-Soviet subversion in the wartime SIS reports provided by Philby had led the Centre to suspect him of disinformation.3 The fact that Philby identified SIS officers, real and alleged, who had been stationed in the Middle East since he had defected from Beirut in 1963 is further evidence that much, if not all, of his interview was scripted for him by the Centre.4 Among the British intelligence officers in Beirut identified in his interview was the young David Spedding who, a quarter of a century later, became chief of SIS.5
So, far from limiting the damage done by the London expulsions, Philby’s interview turned into another public relations fiasco. Tass was promptly sued for libel by four prominent Lebanese citizens named in the interview as British agents: Robert Abella, editor-publisher of the Beirut weekly Al Zaman; Dori Chamoun, son of former President Camille Chamoun; Emir Farid Chehab, former Lebanese security chief; and Ahmed Isbir, a deputy in the Lebanese parliament.6 The Soviet ambassador in Beirut sought to distance his government from the law suit by declaring that the whole affair was “purely journalistic” and that “the Soviet Union as a state had no connection with it.” He quickly backtracked, however, when the head of the Tass bureau in Beirut, Nikolai Borisovich Filatov, was included in the law suit, claiming that Tass was “a government news agency” and that Filatov was covered by diplomatic immunity.7 To make matters worse, the Communist lawyer chosen by the embassy to act for Tass was believed by the Centre to be an SIS agent.8 Before the case came to trial the Beirut residency withdrew Filatov and his family to Moscow.9 In May 1972 the Tass Lebanese bureau chief, Raymond Saadeh, who was unable to claim diplomatic immunity, was sentenced to two months’ imprisonment and ordered to pay damages of 40,000 Lebanese pounds to each of the plaintiffs—a sentence later reduced on appeal to a fine of 1,000 and damages of 10,000 Lebanese pounds each (a total of about 6,000 pounds sterling). Tass was further humiliated by being ordered to report the judgment against it. The story appeared in The Times under the headline, “Tass ordered to pay for libel by Mr. Kim Philby.”10
The miserable sequel to Philby’s Izvestia interview did little either to persuade Philby that the KGB any longer had a serious use for his talents or to assist in his rehabilitation. When Oleg Kalugin met him for the first time at the beginning of 1972, a month after Philby’s marriage to Rufa, he found “a wreck of a man:”
The bent figure caromed off the walls as he walked. Reeking of vodka, he mumbled something unintelligible to me in atrocious, slurred Russian.
Over the next few years Kalugin and other Young Turks within the FCD gradually succeeded in rehabilitating Philby, using him to devise active measures and run seminars for young officers about to be posted to Britain, Ireland, Australasia and Scandinavia. Kryuchkov and the FCD old guard, however, remained suspicious of Philby and refused to allow him into Yasenevo.11 Philby’s lack of status continued to rankle with him. He liked to give Western journalists the impression that he was Colonel—or even General—Philby of the KGB. In reality, he remained agent TOM.
IN THE IMMEDIATE aftermath of the mass expulsions of September 1971, most of the London residency’s agents were put on ice. The Centre calculated that the residency would be unlikely to resume normal operations, even on a reduced scale, until mid-1974 at the earliest.12
The much reduced number of KGB and GRU officers in London found themselves under considerably tighter surveillance. On September 17, 1971, Abdoolcader, the KGB agent in the GLC motor licensing department, was arrested after a tip-off from Lyalin, who had been his case officer for the previous two years. In his wallet was a postcard addressed to Lyalin, giving the latest registration numbers of MI5 surveillance vehicles. Abdoolcader was jailed for three years.13
With the previous resident, Voronin, declared persona non grata and known intelligence officers refused British visas, a junior Line KR officer, Yevgeni Ivanovich Lazebny, who had the cover position of security officer at the Soviet trade delegation and had somehow escaped expulsion, was made acting resident. During his fourteen months in charge, Lazebny tried to preserve his cover by keeping his office at the trade delegation and visiting the embassy each day to supervise the work of the residency. 14
Though out of his depth when it came to running intelligence operations, Lazebny insisted on elaborate and time-consuming security precautions which further complicated the life of the residency. No one was allowed to enter the residency wearing an overcoat for fear that it might be used to conceal material being smuggled in or out. Briefcases, bags and packages were also forbidden, and the shoes of operations officers were X-rayed for bugs or any hidden compartments. All mail and furniture bought or repaired locally were also X-rayed. The embassy administrative officer, M. V. Loshkarov, was disciplined for placing a bulk order at a London store for electric lamps which Lazebny feared might be bugged. Oil cans, batteries, even knots in woodwork, were regularly inspec
ted to make sure they contained no bugs or secret compartments.15
At the end of 1972 Lazebny was succeeded as resident by the Latvian Yakov Konstantinovich Lukasevics (alias “Bukashev”),16 who continued to insist on elaborate security procedures. In 1971-2 the residency received agent reports that MI5 had a source either among the officials of the Soviet trade delegation or among the inspectors of industrial equipment. Though a time-consuming hunt for the traitor continued until 1976, it yielded no result. It was eventually concluded that the agent reports might have been planted by MI5 to distract the residency from its operational priorities. The residency’s fears of British penetration had, however, some foundation. An extensive network of bugging devices was discovered at the trade delegation, which contained outposts of both the KGB and GRU residencies.17
Following the 1971 expulsions, Cuban and east European intelligence services were asked by the Centre to help plug the intelligence gap in London.18 The KGB also sought to compensate in some degree for its diminished residency by expanding its agent network among the diplomats and staff of the London embassy. By 1973 nineteen members of the embassy were listed in Centre files as KGB agents, among them the ambassador’s deputy, Ivan Ippolitov.19 Some of the KGB officers who were expelled from, or denied entry to, Britain, were redeployed to Commonwealth capitals with substantial British expatriate communities—notably Delhi, Colombo, Dar-es-Salaam, Lagos and Lusaka.20 The files seen by Mitrokhin record few major recruitments of British agents by the redeployed officers. In 1974, however, three operations officers in an east African residency—S. S. Sarmanov, G. M. Yermolev and N. T. Krestnikov—were given awards for recruiting a British journalist, TOM, and his wife IRENE. TOM and IRENE, however, proved of limited usefulness. Early in 1976 TOM moved to Asia and was briefly used to report on other Western residents. He failed, however, to gain access to any classified information and in April 1976 Kryuchkov decided to break operational contact with him.21
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