Spycatcher

by Peter Wright

  Years later, when I was coming up for retirement, I tried to find the details of this operation in the MI6 files. I arranged with Sir Maurice Oldfield, the then Chief of MI6, to spend the day in their Registry looking for the papers. But I could find nothing; the MI6 weeders had routinely destroyed all the records years before.

  I was born in 1916 at my grandmother's house in Chesterfield, where my mother had gone to stay while my father was in Norway for MI6. There was a Zeppelin raid on nearby Sheffield that night, and I arrived very prematurely. There were no hospital beds available because of the pressure of the war, but my mother kept me alive with an improvised incubator of glass chemical jars and hot-water bottles.

  After World War I my father rejoined the Marconi Company. He became a protege of Marconi himself and was made Head of Research. We moved to a large house by the sea near Frinton. But this lasted only a few months, when we moved to a house on the outskirts of Chelmsford. The house often resembled a disused wireless factory. Radios in various states of disrepair and tin boxes filled with circuitry were hidden in every corner. My father was an intense, emotional, rather quick-tempered man - more of an artist than an engineer. As early as I can remember he used to take me out into the garden or onto the open fields above the Essex beaches to teach me the mysteries of wireless. He spent hours explaining valves and crystals and showed me how to delicately turn the dials of a set so that the random static suddenly became a clear signal. He taught me how to make my own experiments and I can still remember his pride when I demonstrated my crude skills to visiting guests like Sir Arthur Eddington and J. J. Thomson.

  MI6 had close connections with the Marconi Company after World War I, and my father retained his contact with them. Marconi had a large marine division responsible for fitting and manning wireless in ships. It provided perfect cover for MI6, who would arrange with my father to have one of their officers placed as a wireless operator on a ship visiting an area in which they had an interest.

  Admiral Hall was a visitor to the house; he and my father would disappear into the greenhouse together for hours at a time to discuss in private some new development. My father also knew Captain Mansfield Cumming, the first Chief of MI6. He admired Cumming greatly, for both his courage and his technical ability. He knew Captain Vernon Kell, the founder of MI5, much less well, but did not like him. As with Oxford and Cambridge, people are usually disposed either to MI5 or to MI6, and my father very definitely leaned in favor of MI6.

  The Marconi Company during the 1920s was one of the most exciting places in the world for a scientist to work. Marconi, known to everyone by his initials, "G.M.," was a superb picker of men, and had the courage to invest in his visions. His greatest success was to create the first shortwave radio beam system, and he can justly claim to have laid the foundations of modern communications. As with so many British achievements, it was done against the opposition of the British Government and the top scientists of the day.

  Before World War I Britain decided that a long-wave radio system should be built to replace the cable system as the principal means of communication with the Empire. The decision was held in abeyance during the war. But Marconi believed it was possible to project short wavelength transmissions over vast distances using beams. The use of shortwave beams promised a greater volume of traffic at much higher speeds. Despite the advances in wireless made during the war, Marconi's vision was derided as "amateur science" by a Royal Commission in 1922. One member even concluded that radio was "a finished art."

  Marconi issued a challenge. He offered to build, free of charge, any link across the world - provided the government would suspend long-wave development until the beam system had passed its trials, and provided they would adopt it if the trials were successful. The government agreed and specified the toughest contract they could devise. They asked for a link from Grimsby to Sydney, Australia, and demanded that it operate 250 words a minute over a twelve-hour period during the trials without using more than twenty kilowatts of power. Finally they demanded that the circuit be operational within twelve months.

  These were awesome specifications. Radio was still in its infancy and little was known about generating power at stable frequencies. The project would have been impossible without the commitment of the Marconi technical team, consisting of my father, Captain H J Round, and C S Franklin. Marconi had a special talent for finding brilliant scientists who were largely self-taught. He found Franklin, for instance, trimming arc lamps in an Ipswich factory for a few shillings a week. Within a few years he rose to become the outstanding technical man in the company.

  The proposed Grimsby-to-Sydney link astonished the rest of the radio communications industry. My father often described in later years walking down Broadway with David Sarnoff, the then head of RCA, when the project was at its height.

  "Has Marconi gone mad?" asked Sarnoff. "This project will finish him. It'll never work."

  Father replied: "G.M. and Franklin think it will."

  "Well, you can kick my ass all the way down Broadway if it does," said Sarnoff.

  Three months later the circuit was operational, on contract time. It worked twelve hours a day for seven days at 350 words a minute and was, in my view, one of the great technical achievements of this century. My father's only regret was that he never took the opportunity to kick Sarnoffs ass all the way down Broadway!

  My youth was spent living through this great excitement. I suffered constantly through ill-health. I developed rickets and wore leg irons until practically into my teens. But there were compensations. Nearly every day when my father was at home he collected me from school and drove me to his laboratory. I would spend hours watching him and his assistants as the great race from Grimsby to Sydney unfolded. It taught me a lesson which stayed with me for life - that on the big issues the experts are very rarely right.

  The 1930s opened hopefully for the Wright family. We scarcely noticed the growing worldwide financial crisis. I had joined Bishop's Stortford College, a small but hardily independent school, where I began to shine academically and finally threw off the ill-health which had dogged me since birth. I returned home for the summer holidays of 1931 having passed my school certificate with credits in all subjects. The following term I was due to join the University Group, with every expectation of a good scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge.

  A week later my world disintegrated. One evening my father came home and broke the news that he and Franklin had both been sacked. It was days before he could even try to explain, and years before I understood what had happened.

  In the late 1920s Marconi had merged with the Cable Companies in the belief that only by cooperation with them could wireless gain the investment necessary to ensure its emergence as the principal method of worldwide communications. But as the slump developed, wireless posed more and more of a threat to the cable interests. They were dominant in the new company and slashing cuts were made in wireless research and the installations of new systems. Marconi, old and sick, had retired to Italy, but not even an intervention from him could secure a change of heart in the new management. Franklin, my father, and many others were sacked. For the next decade long-distance wireless communication stagnated and we as a family passed into years of great hardship.

  Within a few months my father slipped into the abyss of alcoholism. He could no longer afford to keep both his sons at school, and as I was older and already had my school certificate I was the one to leave. The trauma of those events brought back my ill health and I was afflicted with a chronic stammer which rendered me at times virtually speechless. In the course of that short summer holiday I changed from a schoolboy with a secure future to a man with no future at all.

  The decision to remove me from school and its effect on my health consumed my father with guilt. He drove himself to further drinking excesses. My mother coped as best she could, but bereft of status and income she gradually became isolated until the only visitors were the nurses called to restrain my father after a dan
gerously prolonged bout with the Scotch bottle.

  Years later, when I began to search out for MI5 the well-born Englishmen who had become addicted to Communism in the 1930s, this period of my life came to fascinate me. They had enjoyed to the full the privileged background and education denied to me, while my family had suffered at the capricious hand of capitalism. I experienced at first hand the effects of slump and depression, yet it was they who turned to espionage. I became the hunter, and they the hunted.

  In one sense the explanation was simple. It was 1932. I had no qualifications. I was fifteen, I needed a job, and I had little time for political philosophy. I advertised in the personal columns of THE TIMES for any work. The first reply was from a woman named Margaret Leigh, who ran a small farm called "Achnadarroch" at Plockton near Wester Ross, Scotland. I became her farmhand. There was no pay, just board and lodgings. But amid the rolling hills and endless skies of Scotland, I gradually recovered from what had gone before, and in time discovered the greatest love of my life - agriculture.

  Margaret Leigh was an idealist. She wanted to run her farm as a training ground for boys from London slums so that they could obtain employment as farm managers. In the event, the idea never took off, and she decided instead to write a novel about life on Achnadarroch; she wrote while I tended the farm. And at night, when I had finished the chores, she made me read aloud what she had written until slowly my stutter was mastered. The book was eventually published and became a great success under the title HIGHLAND HOMESPUN.

  In spring 1935 we were evicted from Achnadarroch by a landlord greedy for more rent than we could afford to pay. We moved to another, cheaper farm in Cornwall and our life went on much as before. My ambition at this time was to become an agricultural scientist researching into food production techniques. But with my truncated formal education I could not hope to qualify for a scholarship. There were no grants in the 1930s. Eventually, with a little help from Margaret, some astute pig dealing of my own, and a useful family connection with the Master of St. Peter's College, Oxford, I was able to raise enough money to get a place at the School of Rural Economy. A year after I reached Oxford I married my wife, Lois. It was 1938. War was in the air. Like most young people we felt we might not have too long together.

  By the time I went up to Oxford my father had begun to repair the damage of the previous six years of alcoholism. At my mother's instigation he had begun to work again at the Marconi Company as a consultant. And partly, I think, he was jolted by the realization that war was once more imminent. Anxious to help as he had in 1915, he approached Sir Frederick Brundrett in the Naval Scientific Service. Brundrett told him frankly that his reputation for alcoholism made a senior position impossible. Instead Brundrett offered him a post as an ordinary scientific officer for a trial period. I always admired my father tremendously for this. He sacrificed half what he was earning from the Marconi Company as a consultant to come and work at an experimental bench with scientists who were twenty years younger than he was. He made no issue of having once been the Marconi head of research. In a sense I think he was anxious to atone for the past; but he also genuinely believed that war was coming and that everyone had a duty to contribute.

  His long experience scanning the ether ensured that his career soon flourished again. He was given charge of technical developments of the Y intercepts - the tactical intercepts of German Communications - and later he became Chief Scientist at the Admiralty Signals Establishment. Once again he was back in the Great Game, and he rediscovered his youth. By 1943 he was responsible for drawing up the signal plans for D-Day. It was a massive task. But after every working day he sat into the small hours with his wireless, listening to the chatter of Morse, logging and analyzing it ready for the next day. I often think he was at his happiest hunched over those sets, headphones clamped around his head, trying to make sense of the mysterious electronic universe.

  At the outbreak of war the School of Rural Economy closed and my tutor, Scott Watson, became Chief Scientist at the Ministry of Agriculture, taking most of the staff with him to begin the vital task of preparing the country's food supplies I was now the only member of the family not in some way involved in the war effort. My brother had joined the Services Electronics Research Laboratory and my sister was an intercept operator for the Wrens. (She later worked closely with R. V. Jones on SIGINT, and married Robert Sutton, the head of SERL.) I wrote to Brundrett in the hope that there might be a space for me somewhere in the Admiralty. To my surprise I received a telegram inviting me to his office.

  Brundrett had known me for years. He was a keen farmer who successfully bred Friesian cattle and was much interested in my experiences at Achnadarroch. He asked me what I thought I could do in the Admiralty and I explained that years spent watching my father at work had given me as good a grounding in electronics as I could have got at university. Within ten minutes he had arranged for me to start at the Admiralty Research Laboratory the following week.

  My section at the Admiralty Research Laboratory (ARL) was run superbly by Stephen Butterworth, who for some unknown reason was always called Sam. He was a tall, gaunt man with a curly mop of dark hair. He smoked a pipe continuously, worked like a madman, and gathered around him a team of extraordinarily talented young scientists, including Massey, Gunn, Wigglesworth, Bates, and Crick. I felt terribly insecure when I arrived at ARL because of my lack of qualifications. Every night I sat up at the kitchen table in our small flat in Hampton Wick learning advanced physics from textbooks as German bombs dropped all around. But Butterworth was a constant source of encouragement. His one failing was his greatest strength: he did the job silently, leaving self-publicity to others. At the end of the war the reward for his genius and his quiet industry was a paltry OBE.

  The Admiralty Research Laboratory's contribution to winning the war has been much undervalued. One of the most pressing problems facing Britain at the outbreak of war was the threat of magnetic mines. ARL began work on developing degaussing systems to neutralize our ships' magnetic fields and thus protect them. Without a really effective system our ability to fight on in 1940 would have been seriously in question.

  At Dunkirk, for instance, thousands of mines littered the shallow waters off the coast. Hitler was convinced that these would prevent any mass evacuation of British forces. Butterworth knew that the German mines worked North Pole downward only, and suggested we magnetize our ships South Pole downward so that the ships repelled the mines. The Admiralty embarked on a massive program of reversing the magnetism of all the ships going to Dunkirk. The result was that not a single ship was lost to mines.

  In the turmoil of war, there was little choice but to give young people their head. Soon after Dunkirk I and another young ARL scientist, Ray Gossage, were given the job of degaussing the battleship PRINCE OF WALES. She lay in dry dock in Rosyth and for her next voyage was scheduled to carry Winston Churchill to the Atlantic Conference with Roosevelt. She had been built in Belfast in a yard which had left her magnetic field running around her rather than from end to end. The original degaussing had been a failure and she was considered highly unsafe in her present form.

  Gossage and I worked out an improvised system of flashing out the athwartships magnetization by winding a giant coil lengthwise around the ship. We then energized this by connecting it up to a submarine battery. The whole operation took days to arrange and involved the whole crew of the ship. As we watched from the dry dock in Rosyth, hundreds of men worked in unison to our commands, though we were both barely in our mid-twenties.

  Science in wartime is often a case of improvising with the materials to hand, solving a problem as best you can at the time, rather than planning ten or fifteen years ahead, when it may be too late. The war shaped my later approach to technical intelligence. It taught me the value of improvisation and showed me, too, just how effective operations can be when the men of action listen to young men with a belief in practical, inventive science. Sadly, by the end of the war this attitude had a
ll but disappeared; the dead hand of committees began to squeeze the life out of England.

  From 1942 onward I worked on the first anti-midget-submarine detection systems. They were used successfully to protect the harbors during the torch landings in North Africa and later in Northwest Europe. This work got me involved in the operation to sink the prize German battleship TIRPITZ. She lay in Altenfjord and posed an ever-present danger to British shipping. An operation to sink her, using midget submarines, was planned. We knew that the Germans were protecting Altenfjord with submarine detectors consisting of rows of coils on the seabed which picked up the magnetic flux of a passing craft. These were similar to those I had developed at ARL, so I was asked to come up with ideas for degaussing our X-Craft midget submarines to enable them to pass into the fjord undetected.

  The technical problems of degaussing a submarine are far more complex than those of a ship, but eventually I found that an electro-magnet placed along the length of the submarine and energized with the right amount of current would neutralize the loops of the submarine detectors on the seabed. I also calculated that if the X-Craft went in during a magnetic storm, this would increase the chances of nondetection by a factor of between 10 and 100. I traveled up to the Magnetic Observatory at Eskdalemuir and found that they had a good chance of predicting a storm of sufficient size, so I put my findings up to the Navy.