Spycatcher

by Peter Wright

  In mid-November Lonsdale moved back into his flat in the White House, collecting his suitcase from the Midland Bank shortly beforehand. We immediately arranged for a GCHQ technician, Arthur Spencer, to move into the flat next door to begin our RAFTER operations. For the next three months Spencer scarcely set foot outside the tiny flat. We installed a noncontact tap on the mains supply feeding Lonsdale's receiver which was connected to a silent buzzer. The buzzer was worn as an earpiece by Spencer, so that even if Lonsdale used his radio set during the night, the buzzer would alert him. Whenever the buzzer sounded, Spencer tuned the RAFTER receivers, found the frequency Lonsdale was listening to, and alerted GCHQ Palmer Street. Palmer Street then relayed the signal down to GCHQ in Cheltenham. There, using our copy of Lonsdale's one-time pad, a GCHQ cryptanalyst named Bill Collins decrypted the message, and relayed it back up to London to Arthur and me in Leconfield House via an enciphered telex link.

  The first time Lonsdale received a message, Bill Collins was unable to decipher it. There was no indicator group in the traffic. An indicator group is a group EN CLAIR, in other words a group from the one-time pad with no coded additive. The recipient uses this to position the message on the pad at the right place, so it can be deciphered. (After Lonsdale was arrested we discovered that the indicator group was in fact enciphered, using his real date of birth.)

  Arthur and I began to wonder if, perhaps, Lonsdale realized his pads were compromised, and was using a new set brought back with him from abroad. The only thing we could do was burgle his flat and check inside the lighter again, to see if the pads had been used. Winterborn and I went in on a day when Lonsdale went to Suffolk for his jukebox business. It was a small flat, rather depressingly spartan, with barely space for more than a bed. We opened the lighter; the pads were still there, and new pages had been torn away, so they were obviously still in use. When I looked carefully I realized that Lonsdale had used more lines than were needed to encipher the message he had received from Moscow. When the message was stepped down the pad by the number of excess lines, the message read satisfactorily.

  For the next two months we successfully monitored Lonsdale's biweekly messages from Moscow. Most of them concerned "the Shah," the KGB cryptonym for Houghton. Lonsdale was given specific instructions on how to handle him, which questions to ask, and what documents he should attempt to procure from Portland. But other messages were personal, containing family news about his wife and his children back in Russia. They wanted him home after five years' undercover service.

  On Monday, January 2, Hollis chaired a full review of the case. Arthur argued strongly that we should allow the case to run on. He felt instinctively that Lonsdale was too valuable an illegal to be running simply the one spy, Houghton. We still knew very little about the Krogers, and their house at 45 Cranleigh Gardens, beyond the fact that shortly after Lonsdale went to stay, high-grade Chubbs and window locks were fitted to the house, including the access to the roof. For all we knew, Lonsdale might be only one part of a much larger network. Furnival Jones and I supported Arthur, and Hollis agreed to approach the Admiralty (whose secrets Houghton was betraying) to ask permission to leave Houghton unmolested for a further three months. The Admiralty agreed, and Arthur decided to minimize any further risk by running the case on without any form of physical surveillance, relying simply on our interception of Lonsdale's radio traffic to lead us to further spies.

  Two days later our plan was rudely shattered. A sealed message was delivered to Hollis by Cleeve Cram, the CIA officer assigned to the American Embassy in London for liaison with MI5 .The message warned MI5 that Sniper had informed the CIA that he intended defecting to the United States on the following day, January 5. Once again, we convened in Hollis' office. There was really only one course of action. Houghton, Lonsdale, and presumably also the Krogers would all be blown by the defection. We had to arrest them before they were withdrawn. Fortunately, Houghton was due for his January meeting with Lonsdale on the Saturday, January 7, and we also knew that Lonsdale was due to receive his radio message early that morning, so we would know if Moscow sent him a warning.

  Arranging the arrests was a prodigious feat of logistics, and for the next three days I barely slept. Charles Elwell, Houghton's case officer, was sent to Portland, ready to search Houghton's premises as soon as he was given word the arrests were successfully accomplished. Bill Collins came up from Cheltenham and based himself in Palmer Street, ready to decrypt Lonsdale's message the instant it came through. The Special Branch were put on standby outside Lonsdale's flat, ready to make an immediate arrest if the Moscow message sent him scurrying for cover.

  On the Friday night Arthur and I gathered in the third-floor operations room in Leconfield House, ready for the all-night vigil. It was a small office, painted a ghastly Civil Service brown. It could have been a prison cell. A metal-framed bed ran along one wall, A small table stood in the middle. Cables trailed across the floor in thick, tangled bunches. Telephones linked us to Special Branch headquarters, to GCHQ, and to the DG, and a small speaker relayed to us every sound inside Lonsdale's flat in the White House.

  Arthur sat hunched over the table, chain-smoking. Hugh Winterborn was tense and excited, and said very little. Furnival Jones was there too, with his shoes off, reclining on the bed in his braces. Although he was the Director of D Branch, he felt a strong loyalty to the troops, and was determined to see it through with us. He even went to the pub in Shepherd's Market and brought us back sandwiches. We drank Scotch through the small hours, as the ashtrays filled up.

  We listened as Lonsdale returned late from a carefree evening on the town. He was with a girl. I discreetly muted the volume as the sound of their passionate lovemaking filtered through to us. When it was all quiet in the flat, I asked Arthur how long he thought Lonsdale would serve in prison.

  "Fifteen at least," he replied.

  Hugh Winterborn looked troubled. He was a religious man, and found no joy in the thought of a man's life ruined. I poured myself another drink.

  "I can't help thinking of his wife and kids..." I said lamely. They knew what I meant. They had seen the intercepts of Lonsdale's messages, as I had: the talk of home, and family hardships, and birthdays, and children who missed their father. Lonsdale, for all his professionalism, was a very human spy. Like many men away on business, he was homesick, and sought solace in the company of other women.

  "It's not as if he's a traitor... not like Houghton. He's just doing his job like us."

  "That's enough!" Furnival Jones flashed angrily from the bed. "He went into this with his eyes wide open. He could have come as a diplomat. He knew what the risks were. He deserves everything he gets!"

  I stayed silent. But the thought was there inside us all. We had seen almost too much of Lonsdale over the past two months.

  Toward morning Lonsdale woke the girl up, and persuaded her to leave. He said he had urgent business to attend to, which in a way was true. When she left we heard him pull out his radio set, and prepare his pads to receive the message from Moscow. The radio crackled for a few minutes, and Lonsdale's pencil scratched out the decrypt. We could tell there was no warning from the way he sauntered into the bathroom, singing jauntily to himself in Russian. A few minutes later the green telephone rang, and Bill Collins gave us the text of the message over a scrambled line. It was a routine report, more talk of the family, more news from home. There was no warning or alarm.

  Special Branch were told to prepare to make the arrest as Lonsdale received his package from Houghton that afternoon. At five the Special Branch line rang.

  "Last Act is finished" said a voice. Last Act was Lonsdale's code name. His prison performance was about to begin.

  Hugh Winterborn went straight over to the White House to search Lonsdale's flat, while Arthur and I waited for news of the Krogers' arrest. At seven, tired but elated, we drove out to Ruislip in my car. By the time we reached Cranleigh Gardens, the place was in chaos. Police were everywhere, searching the house almo
st at random. I tried to take control, but it was useless. Arthur vainly protested as a detective took out a plastic bag containing chemicals.

  "Sorry, sir, I am afraid it's evidence," said the policeman. "It's a criminal matter now, and if you boys want to see it, you'll have to go through the channels."

  The police operation was led by Detective Superintendent George Smith of the Special Branch, a man renowned inside MI5 for his powers of self-promotion Before the arrests, we stressed to Smith that we needed a forty-eight-hour blackout on any news about the arrests, so that we could monitor the next radio broadcast coming in from Moscow. But within hours word spread around Fleet Street that a major espionage ring had been smashed, and Smith began briefing selected reporters on the role he claimed to have played in the operation. The Moscow broadcast carried no traffic.

  Despite the hamfisted search instituted by the police, it was obvious the house was packed full of espionage equipment. Two sets of different cipher pads were hidden in a cigarette lighter similar to the one used by Lonsdale. There were signal plans for three separate types of transmissions from Moscow, secret writing material, and facilities to make microdots using chromic acid and Sellotape. Mrs Kroger had even tried to destroy the contents of her handbag, containing details of meetings with spies, by flushing them down the toilet, but a vigilant woman PC stopped her. The most interesting find of all was a signal plan for special high-speed transmissions from Moscow. Hidden in a cookery jar we found a bottle of magnetic iron oxide used to print out the Morse from the high-speed message onto a tape, so that it could be read without being transferred onto a sophisticated tape recorder and slowed down. It was a new technique, and explained why we had failed to detect any transmissions to the Kroger house in the months before the arrests.

  Toward the end of the evening the police began to vacate, leaving us to search among the debris, under the watchful eyes of a couple of young constables. We searched the house for nine days. On the last day we located the transmitter. It was hidden in a cavity under the kitchen floor, along with cameras and other radio equipment. Everything was carefully concealed in moisture-resistant sealed packages, and the whole system had obviously been designed to be stored for a considerable length of time.

  On the following Wednesday, Hollis called everyone together in his office, and congratulated them on the triumph. The new D Branch team under Martin Furnival Jones and Arthur Martin had faced its stiffest test, and completely outplayed the Russians for the first time since Maxwell Knight smashed the Woolwich Arsenal Ring in 1938. The key to the Lonsdale success, as with the ENGULF and STOCKADE achievements, lay in the new techniques which I had worked to develop with GCHQ and AWRE. RAFTER and the X-raying and copying of the code pads enabled MI5 to run the case from a position of strength. I was intensely proud of the capture of the ring; for the first time I had played a major role in a counterespionage case, and shown the MI5 management what was possible. As a result, it was acknowledged that the workload passing through the Radiations Operations Committee was simply too great, and it was separated into two distinct units. Clan handled all clandestine operations against cipher targets here and abroad, while Counterclan controlled all the counterespionage side of ROC, such as RAFTER.

  Hollis asked me to produce a detailed report, showing the role played in the Lonsdale case by the new techniques, with a view to encouraging similar approaches to counterespionage in the future. I began by paying a visit to the Old Bailey, where Lonsdale, the Krogers, Houghton, and Gee were on trial. The latter pair looked pasty-faced, flicking glances around the wood-paneled courtroom from the dock.

  Lonsdale and the Krogers appeared completely unmoved by the proceedings. The Krogers occasionally whispered to each other, or passed notes; Lonsdale said nothing until the end, when he gave a short speech claiming the Krogers knew nothing of his activities. The Krogers were soon identified by the Americans as Morris and Lona Cohen, wanted by the FBI in connection with the Rosenberg nuclear espionage case. This was more than a little embarrassing for me; months before the arrests I saw Al Belmont of the FBI in Washington and briefed him on the progress of the case. He wondered then if the Krogers might turn out to be the Cohens. But I had not taken his offhand suggestion seriously, and failed to make a check. Lonsdale's identity proved much more of a mystery, and it was a year before we positively identified him as Konan Trofimovich Molodi, the son of a well-known Soviet scientist, and an experienced KGB officer who assumed the identity of Gordon Lonsdale, a long-deceased Finnish Canadian, in 1955.

  I began my analysis of the Lonsdale case by asking GCHQ to provide me with files on any known Soviet espionage case, like the Lonsdale case, which had involved clandestine radio broadcasts. They produced leaflets, around a hundred in all, listing first the details of the agent under consideration - when he started and finished, what his targets were, which service he worked for, and so forth; they then produced a detailed summary of the agent's signal plans, and finally lists of the traffic that he received from the Soviet Union, including the numbers of messages, their group counts, details of the cipher systems used, and dates when they were changed.

  I organized this mass of material into KGB and GRU categories, and secondly into types of agent-singletons, sleepers, illegal spies actively running one or more sources, illegal residents running a group of other illegals, and so forth. I found, to my astonishment, that changes in the radio traffic mirrored the different types of agent. For instance, by looking at the operational radio procedures, such as the types of call signs used, it was possible to tell whether the spy was of KGB or GRU origin. Similarly, by analyzing the group counts and the lengths of the messages, it was possible to tell what type of spy was receiving the traffic. For instance, the singleton sleeper received very little traffic, the GRU singleton not much more, while the KGB singleton received a quite considerable volume. The KGB illegal resident, the most important spy of all, always took the greatest amount of traffic - generally between five hundred and a thousand groups a month.

  I soon began to realize that the Lonsdale case was utterly different from any other single case among the hundreds I had studied. No other case had so many different forms of communications, some duplicated, and some even triplicated. Yet there was apparently only one spy Houghton serviced by the whole Lonsdale/Kroger apparatus. He was an important spy, it was true, with access to vital details about British and American submarine-detection systems. But why involve the Krogers? Why not just use Lonsdale?

  Even at face value, it seemed unlikely that other spies would not have been involved in the ring. The Krogers were located in Ruislip, close to American Air Force installations, while Lonsdale, we discovered, had earlier studied at the School of Oriental Studies, on a course commonly used by British military officers and MI6 trainees.

  Lonsdale was certainly the illegal resident in Britain, and I carefully tabulated the communications he received from Moscow after he returned to Britain in October. He averaged 300-350 groups per month. Yet in each of the other illegal cases I studied, the resident received 500-1000 groups a month, and generally closer to the higher figure. Where was Lonsdale's missing traffic? Lonsdale had a three-character call sign which included a figure 1 if the broadcast carried traffic, and omitted the figure 1 if it was a dummy stream. I asked GCHQ whether they could find any messages similar in length to those we knew Lonsdale received after October, for the period preceding his departure in August. After considerable search GCHQ found what is called a "continuity," which went back six years, to roughly the time when Lonsdale entered Britain.

  The average group count of this continuity was in the correct range of 500-1000 groups per month, and it ceased suddenly in August 1960, at the same time Lonsdale returned to Moscow. Of course, without the pads, we could not read any of the messages, but if, as seemed likely, this was Lonsdale's original traffic, the question remained: why did it suddenly diminish when he came back?

  I turned my attention to the Krogers' communications. These wer
e the most baffling of all. Most of them were for their use, yet they appeared not to be running any spies at all - merely acting as support for Lonsdale. But some of the communications were clearly being stored by the Krogers for Lonsdale. The pads, for instance, hidden like Lonsdale's in a cigarette lighter, were almost certainly his. I calculated up the group counts on the pads. The total was equivalent to the groups missing from Lonsdale's traffic after his return in October. The Russians, it seemed, had split Lonsdale's traffic when he came back, leaving the Shah (Houghton) on the channel we could read, and placing his other communications, perhaps containing his other spies, onto a secure channel with the Krogers, and using their high-speed transmitter, which we could not detect, to send any messages he needed.

  This apparent alteration in radio procedures suggested that Lonsdale knew, in some way or other, that the messages he was receiving from Moscow in the White House, using the pads in the cigarette lighter, were compromised. But why, if he feared that, not just use new pads? And why, if the Russians feared he was compromised, was he sent back at all?

  I began to analyze the sequence of events over the weekend of the arrests. I had arranged a continuous coverage of the Russian Embassy diplomatic transmitters from the Friday before the arrests until midday Monday. The last Embassy transmission took place at 11 A.M. on the Saturday morning, well before the arrests, and the next was not until 9 A.M. on the Monday morning. So, although a major espionage ring had been smashed, the Russians apparently made no contact at all with Moscow. This beggared belief, unless, of course, the Russians already knew we were about to lift them.