The Sword and the Shield

by Christopher Andrew

  Probably the most ambitious scheme devised by the London residency during the 1970s for the recruitment of a prominent agent of influence was targeted on Dr. Mervyn Stockwood, the socialist Bishop of Southwark.61 In October 1975 Stockwood delivered a public protest against a “Call to the Nation,” jointly issued by Archbishop Donald Coggan of Canterbury and Archbishop Stuart Blanch of York, claiming that it put too much emphasis on the need for individual responsibility and too little on the social injustices which caused so much human misery. The most remarkable feature of Stockwood’s protest, however, was that he chose to make it in the pages of the Communist Morning Star, and that he included in it an extraordinary tribute to the Soviet Bloc:

  Those of us who have visited Socialist counties in Europe know that if a Communist government were to be established in Britain the West End would be cleared up overnight, and the ugly features of our permissive society would be changed within a matter of days. And heaven help the porn merchants and all engaged in the making of fortunes through the commercial exploitation of sex.62

  Sixteen Labor MPs signed a motion “marveling at the innocence” of Stockwood’s understanding of Communist regimes. Another fifty backbenchers supported a motion supporting the archbishops against his criticisms. One told the Guardian, “The Marxists seem now to have penetrated the higher echelons of the established Church.”63 The Soviet embassy, possibly on the initiative of the residency, established what a KGB file describes as “close contact” with Stockwood.

  Hopes in the residency of the bishop’s potential for active measures reached their peak when he arranged a dinner party with Gordon McLennan, general secretary of the British Communist Party, as guest of honor, to which, apparently, at least one Soviet official (who, unknown to Stockwood, was a KGB officer) was also invited.64 Though Mitrokhin’s note on the dinner is tantalizingly brief, it seems to have been a boisterous evening. Stockwood frequently drank heavily at dinner parties to the extent that his friend Princess Margaret sometimes feared for the furniture at Kensington Palace.65 Over dinner Stockwood asked McLennan what the Communist Party thought about the Church of England. McLennan replied that the Church was a “moral force in society,” but regretted that, “Unlike before and during the War, we do not see members of the clergy at progressive meetings and demonstrations.” Stockwood retorted, “We also don’t see you at demonstrations at the Soviet embassy!”66 The residency seems to have concluded reluctantly that the Bishop’s tendency to launch into criticisms of the Soviet Union rendered him unsuitable for active measures.

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  THE EXAMPLES OF active measures noted by Mitrokhin suggest that the residency, in its reports to the Centre, sought to inflate a series of mostly modest successes. A characteristic example was its attempt to claim the credit for an article in the Guardian by Richard Gott (codenamed RON) attacking the role of the CIA in the overthrow of the Marxist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, in 1973, and denouncing the military junta of General Augusto Pinochet which had seized power after Allende’s death.67 Gott later denied reports that he had been a KGB agent, but acknowledged that after the Chilean coup he had been contacted by Yuri Mikhailovich Solonitsyn (who he later realized was a KGB officer) and had “quite a sort of interesting session” with him on Chile, as well as a series of subsequent meetings with both Solonitsyn and Igor Victorovich Titov (also a KGB officer).68 While the details of Gott’s articles may sometimes have been influenced by “interesting sessions” with Solonitsyn and Titov, his support for revolutionary movements in Latin America and loathing for American “imperialism” were so well established that he would have required little encouragement from the KGB to denounce either Pinochet or the CIA.69

  The London residency was equally prone to exaggerate its influence in the House of Commons. It tried to take the credit, for example, for the following parliamentary question put by the Labor MP James Lamond to Fred Mulley, Secretary of State for Defense in the Callaghan government, on February 21, 1978:

  Does my right honorable friend agree that to deploy the neutron bomb in western Europe must lower the threshold of nuclear war? Does he accept that President Brezhnev was in earnest when he said in the Kremlin [Conservative shouts of “Were you there?”] that the Soviet Union would develop similar weapons at enormous cost, if the neutron bomb were placed in western Europe? That would be a cost that neither the Warsaw Pact nor NATO could afford and would serve only unnecessarily to increase the enormous arms expenditure of the world.70

  There is absolutely no evidence that James Lamond had any conscious link with the KGB. He was, however, vice-president of the World Peace Council (WPC) and appears not to have realized that this was the leading Soviet front organization, devoted to pinning all the blame for the nuclear arms race on Western warmongering. 71 Lamond’s parliamentary question, which received a noncommittal reply, derived from a much larger WPC campaign against the neutron bomb rather than from a brilliant initiative by the London residency.

  The Centre usually responded relatively uncritically to exaggerated claims by residencies of the success of their active measures. It suited the Centre as much as the London residency to be able to inform the Politburo that it was able to inspire questions in the House of Commons and articles in the Guardian.

  Despite Line PR’s attempts to inflate the importance of its active measures, it also had some undoubted successes. The Observer and the New Statesman were among a number of British print media taken in during the early 1980s by forged anti-American and anti-South African documents fabricated by Service A.72 The Observer printed a bogus memorandum from the Zaire security council under the headline, “US and S. Africa in Angola Plot.”73 The New Statesman published a forged letter from South African military intelligence to Jeane Kirkpatrick, US ambassador to the UN, conveying its “gratitude” and referring to a birthday present sent to her “as a token of appreciation.”74 As late as 1986, the conservative Sunday Express based its main front page story on reports (also concocted by Service A) that the AIDS virus had originally been developed as part of an American biological warfare program.75 Claims that KGB active measures had succeeded in producing significant shifts in British opinion, however, were based on little more than wishful thinking.

  The KGB’s shortage of major agents in the British media helps to explain why it chose a Danish rather than a British journalist, Arne Herløv Petersen (codenamed KHARLEV and PALLE) for its first major active measure against Margaret Thatcher after she became prime minister in 1979. Originally a confidential contact of the Copenhagen residency, Petersen had been invited to Moscow in the mid-1970s to “deepen the relationship.”76 Thereafter he was regularly used as an agent of influence not merely to write articles along lines suggested by his case officers but to publish, also under his own name, articles and pamphlets written in English by Service A. The first of the KGB/Petersen co-productions attacking Thatcher was a 1979 pamphlet, entitled Cold Warriors, which gave her pride of place as Europe’s leading anti-Soviet crusader. The next Petersen pamphlet ghostwritten by Service A, True Blues, published in 1980, was solely devoted to an onslaught on Thatcher. It made the mistake of attempting satire—a weak area of the KGB’s usually heavy-handed active measures—and carried the feeble subtitle “The Thatcher that Couldn’t Mend her own Roof.” The Service A author had an even feebler grasp of English geography, believing Mrs. Thatcher’s birthplace of Grantham in Lincolnshire to be “in the suburbs of London.” Though the Centre appears to have been curiously proud of them, both pamphlets (probably intended chiefly for mailing to British “opinion-formers”) had negligible influence.77

  THOUGH MITROKHIN HAD unrestricted access to FCD files, their sheer volume meant that his notes on them are bound to contain significant gaps. The possibility thus remains that the KGB had important Cold War British sources not identified by him. It is unlikely, however, that there were many of them. Oleg Gordievsky has confirmed that during his posting to the London residency from 1982 to 1985, which inc
luded two years as head of Line PR and a few months as resident-designate, Line PR and, probably, Line KR were running no British agents of major importance.78 There remains the possibility of British agents recruited and run by residencies and illegals outside the United Kingdom79—a list by Mitrokhin of KGB agents, contacts and “developmentals” (targets under cultivation) includes a tantalizing one-line reference to a British agent run from Karlshorst whose operational file in 1981 ran to fifteen volumes.80

  The most remarkable British agent identified by Mitrokhin outside the field of ST to have been recruited after operation FOOT was also run by Line KR outside the United Kingdom. Given the codename SCOT, he was a bent London copper: Detective Sergeant John Symonds of the Metropolitan Police, who became probably the most peripatetic of all the KGB’s British agents.81 The London residency, however, was able to claim no credit for his recruitment.

  On November 29, 1969, the day that The Times published photographs of the footprints on the moon of Apollo 12 astronauts, it also carried a front page story headlined “London Policeman in Bribe Allegations. Tapes Reveal Planted Evidence.” Conversations secretly recorded by two undercover Times reporters were said to prove that Symonds and at least two other detectives were “taking large sums of money in exchange for dropping charges, for being lenient with evidence in court, and for allowing a criminal to work unhindered.” Symonds, then aged thirty-three, admitted to the reporters that he was a member of what he called “a little firm in a firm”—corrupt detectives in the pay of criminals such as south London gang boss Charlie Richardson.82

  While awaiting trial at the Old Bailey in 1972, Symonds went into hiding for several months, then fled abroad. His KGB file reveals that he used a passport obtained in the name of his girlfriend’s mentally handicapped brother, John Frederick Freeman, and had his passport photograph authenticated as that of Freeman by the mistress of a member of the Richardson gang. In his absence, the two other corrupt policemen identified by The Times were sentenced to six and seven years’ imprisonment. In August 1972 Symonds entered the Soviet embassy in Rabat, told his story, said that his money was running out and offered his services to the KGB.83 To be certain that his story attracted the Centre’s attention, he gave the name of a Special Branch officer guarding the defector Oleg Lyalin, and alleged that he was probably corruptible. Symonds also made the dramatic claim that Denis Healey, the Secretary of State for Defense, regularly bribed Chief Superintendent Bill Moody of the Met “to smooth over certain unpleasantness.”84 Though Moody was later convicted of accepting huge bribes from the underworld and sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment, the allegation that Healey was involved in the bribery was wholly fraudulent. The Centre, however, took Symonds’s tall story at its improbable face value.85

  Symonds spent the next eight years as a KGB agent. Noting that he was “of attractive appearance,” the Centre decided to use him as its first British “Romeo spy,” using seduction and romance, rather than the traditional cruder KGB techniques of sexual compromise and blackmail, to recruit or obtain classified information from a series of female officials. In 1973 Symonds was posted to Bulgaria in order to cultivate suitable targets at Black Sea resorts popular with Western tourists. Symonds’s most important sexual conquest was the wife of an official in an FRG government ministry. Over the next few years he paid a number of visits to Bonn to continue the affair. Intelligence from Symonds’s German girlfriend in 1975 was considered so important by the Centre that it was made the subject of a personal report to Andropov.86

  Symonds was used by the KGB to attempt the seduction of female officials, mostly Western embassy staff, on four continents. His next assignment, after beginning his affair with the woman from Bonn, was to target women at American and British missions in Africa during the latter part of 1973. At the end of the year, however, he fell ill in Tanzania with what his KGB file describes as “tropical fever,” and had to travel to Moscow for medical treatment. As soon as he had recovered, Symonds was ordered to cultivate a member of the British embassy staff in Moscow, codenamed VERA, who had been observed going for long solitary walks in her spare time. Posing as Jean-Jacques Baudouin, a Canadian businessman attending the 1974 International Polymer Exhibition in Moscow, Symonds succeeded in staging an apparently chance encounter with VERA and striking up a friendship with her. Though Symonds’s file claims that VERA became “attached” to him and gave him details of her next posting as well as her home address in Britain, there is no indication that she passed on to him any more than unimportant personal gossip about some of her colleagues and superiors in Moscow and London. The Centre, however, considered her a potentially valuable source for identifying other, more vulnerable female targets in the British embassy.87

  In 1976, on KGB instructions, Symonds set out on a long journey which took him from Bulgaria through Africa and India to south-east Asia. In India he cultivated an English woman (codenamed JILL), an Israeli and at least five American women. In 1977, however, while in Singapore pursuing a secretary at a Western diplomatic mission who had been identified as a target for cultivation by the local KGB residency, Symonds believed that he had come under surveillance, took a flight to Athens and returned to Bulgaria. An assessment by Directorate K of Symonds’s work over the previous five years concluded that he had shown no sign of dishonesty in his dealings with the KGB, had obtained material “of significant operational interest” and—but for the fact that his existing travel documents had aroused the suspicion of Western security services—still had considerable potential as a KGB agent. At the request of Kalugin, the head of Directorate K, Kryuchkov instructed the Illegals Directorate to give Symonds a new identity.88

  The identity chosen for Symonds was that of a “dead double,” Raymond Francis Everett (codenamed FORST), an Australian who had died in childhood during the Second World War.89 On July 23, 1978 Symonds flew from Moscow to Tokyo en route to Australasia, carrying a forged British passport in the name of Everett, a genuine birth certificate in the same name and 8,000 US dollars. Once in Australia Symonds was to abandon the British passport and use the birth certificate to obtain an Australian passport in the name of the dead double. Symonds began by spending several months in New Zealand developing his legend so that, once in Australia, he could pose as an Australian who had spent some years in New Zealand.90

  In November 1978 SCOT traveled to Australia with a group of rugby supporters and began to cultivate Margaret, the manageress of a small travel agency, in the hope that she would provide the necessary reference for his passport application. Symonds’s cynical report on Margaret was probably typical of the way he had sized up the previous women he had been instructed to seduce. Margaret, he claimed, was tall, thin, plain, round-shouldered, had hair on her upper lip and was bound to be flattered by his attentions. Symonds pursued her with flowers, chocolates, presents and invitations to dinner. Unfortunately for Symonds, Margaret was honest as well as unattractive. When he asked her to act as a referee, she refused on the grounds that the law required her to have known him for at least a year. By now Symonds’s money had almost run out. Arrangements for him to receive more money via the Canberra residency broke down and his landlord locked him out when he failed to pay the rent. A female schoolteacher whom he persuaded to put him up also threw him out after a fortnight. At one point Symonds was reduced to spending several nights in a Salvation Army hostel. Eventually, with the help of a French bank in Sydney, he was able to withdraw 5,000 US dollars from a bank account he had opened in the name of Freeman (his first alias) in Senegal.91

  Early in 1979, using a reference he had forged himself, Symonds at last succeeded in obtaining an Australian passport in the name of his dead double, Raymond Everett. Soon afterward, he caught a flight to Rome, from where he traveled to Vienna by train to meet his KGB controller. By now, however, Symonds had become seriously confused by the complications of acquiring a new Australian identity. Unwilling to risk using his new Australian passport, he strapped it to his leg benea
th his sock and traveled instead on the bogus British passport he had come to Australia to replace. Once in Vienna, he handed over the new passport to his controller, then returned to Moscow via Belgrade.92

  After his return to Moscow, Andropov, Kryuchkov and Grigori Fyodorovich Grigorenko (head of the Second Chief Directorate) jointly approved a plan for Symonds to cultivate a secretary at the British embassy, posing once again as a Canadian businessman. His target on this occasion was ERICA, a friend of his earlier target VERA, whom he had first met five years earlier. The operation failed—partly, perhaps, because of Symonds’s increasingly run-down appearance. Symonds’s file records that “his physical characteristics did not appeal to ERICA.”93

  The failed cultivation of ERICA appears to have been Symonds’s last operation as a Romeo agent. His file notes that, since his return from Australia, he had become more and more difficult to handle and resentful of what he claimed was the KGB’s lack of trust and interest in him. A medical report on Symonds prepared without his knowledge concluded that he was emotionally unstable, suffering from a psychological disorder and had become hypersensitive and inconsistent in his judgments. In 1980 Symonds left Moscow for Sofia, intending to marry his current girlfriend, “Nellie.” The couple, however, soon fell out and Symonds requested permission to leave for western Europe. Before the Centre had replied to his request, Symonds succeeded in making his own way to Vienna and thence to Britain.94 In April 1980, accompanied by his solicitor, he surrendered himself to the Central Criminal Court, which had issued a warrant for his arrest for corruption eight years earlier.95