Spycatcher

by Peter Wright

  "Are you sure all these people are SIGINT indoctrinated?" I hissed at Angleton.

  "Just tell the story, Peter, and let us handle the security," he replied. "There's a lot of people want to hear this!"

  I stood up nervously and, fighting my stutter by speaking slowly and deliberately, began to describe the beginnings of the Lonsdale case. After an hour I turned to the blackboard to explain the complicated technical details of active RAFTER.

  "Of course, from our point of view, RAFTER represents a major new counterespionage weapon. We are now in the position to establish without question when Soviet agents in the field are receiving clandestine broadcasts from Moscow, and moreover we can use it to detect the frequency of their transmissions..."

  RAFTER was not well received. At first it was just a rustle; then I noticed a couple of people talking to each other in the front row with more than usual animation. I knew something was wrong when I caught sight of Harvey sitting at one side of the stage. He was leaning over in front of Angleton, gesticulating angrily in my direction.

  "Are there any questions?" I asked, unsure of what was upsetting my audience.

  "Yes!" yelled someone at the back. "When the hell did you say you developed this RAFTER?"

  "Spring 1958."

  "And what the hell date is it today...?"

  I stuttered, momentarily lost for words.

  "I'll tell you," he shouted again, "it's 1961!"

  "Hell of a way to run an alliance," yelled someone else.

  I sat down sharply. People began to leave. There were no more questions.

  Angleton and Harvey came up afterward. There was no disguising Harvey's rage.

  "Look, Peter," said Jim, trying hard to be urbane, "this whole subject needs a lot more discussion, and I really don't feel it's appropriate to continue it in such a large forum. Bill and I would like you to have dinner with us tonight. We'll arrange somewhere secure, where we can talk."

  He hustled me away before Harvey could speak.

  Joe Burk, Angleton's technical man, collected me from my hotel that evening. He had little to say, and it looked to me as if those were his orders. We crossed the George Washington Bridge, passed Arlington cemetery, and drove out into the Virginia countryside.

  "The new headquarters," said Burk, pointing to the right.

  There was nothing but trees and gathering darkness.

  After an hour's drive, we arrived at a detached timber-framed house set well back from the road. At the back was a large veranda with a table and chairs, completely enclosed with fly netting. It was a warm, humid, late-summer evening. The scent of pine and the sound of crickets floated down from the foothills of the Appalachians. Angleton came out on the veranda and greeted me coolly.

  "Sorry about this afternoon," he said, but offered no explanation. We sat down at the table and were joined by the head of the CIA's West European Division. He was polite but nothing more. After a few minutes another car drew up at the front of the house with a squeal of brakes. Doors slammed, and I heard the sound of Bill Harvey's voice inside the house asking where we were. He threw back the flimsy metal mosquito door, and emerged onto the veranda clutching a bottle of Jack Daniel's. He had obviously been drinking.

  "Now you limey bastard," he roared, smashing the bottle down on the table, "let's have the truth about this case!"

  I knew immediately it was a setup. Normally Harry Stone would accompany me to any serious discussion of MI5 business, but he was in the hospital recovering from a heart attack.

  "This is most unfair, Jim, I thought this was a dinner party," I said, turning to Angleton.

  "It is, Peter," he said, pouring me a massive Scotch in a cut-glass tumbler.

  "I'm not going to be browbeaten," I replied flatly.

  "No, no," said Angleton quietly, "we just want to hear it again... from the beginning. There's a lot of things we've got to get straight."

  I went over the Lonsdale story a second time, and by the time I finished Harvey could contain himself no longer.

  "You untrustworthy motherfuckers!" he spat at me. "You come over here and ask for us to pay for your research, and all the time you've got a thing like RAFTER up your sleeve..."

  "I don't see the problem..."

  "You don't see shit!"

  Harvey spun open the second bottle of Jack Daniel's.

  "The problem, Peter, is our operations," said Angleton. "A hell of a lot of our agents use HF radio receivers, and if the Soviets have got RAFTER, a lot of them must be blown..."

  "Have the Soviets got it?" asked Angleton.

  "Not at first, but I'm sure they have now," I said, quoting a recent case where an MI6 Polish source inside the UB described a joint Polish-Soviet espionage investigation. Toward the end, when they were closing in on the suspect agent, the KGB brought a van up to the apartment building where the spy lived. The UB, according to the MI6 source, were never allowed to see inside the van, but he knew enough to guess that it had something to do with radio detection.

  "Jesus Christ," hissed Harvey, "that's our whole Polish setup lost...!"

  "But we sent those source reports to your Polish section," I said. "Whoever the agent was, he wasn't one of ours, so we assumed it must have been one of yours. It should at least have warned you that radio communications to Poland were vulnerable."

  "We'll check it in the morning," said the head of the West European Division, looking flushed.

  "Who else knows about RAFTER?" asked Harvey.

  I told him we briefed the FBI and the Canadian RCMP fully as our development progressed.

  "The Canadians!" exploded Harvey, thumping the table in anger. "You might as well tell the fuckin' Papuans as the Canadians!"

  "I'm afraid we don't see it like that. The Canadians are trusted members of the Commonwealth."

  "Well, you should tell them to get another cipher machine," he said, as Angleton, fearful that Harvey in his rage would spill out the secrets of Staff D, kicked him hard under the table.

  The argument raged on and on; the intimidation was obviously carefully planned. They wanted to make me feel guilty, to say something indiscreet I might regret later, to tell them more than I should. We gave you Sniper, they said, and look what you do in return. We agree to plow millions of dollars into research for you, and how do you repay us? Harvey cursed and raged about every weakness, every mistake, every piece of carelessness that the Americans had overlooked since the war: Philby, Burgess, Maclean, the lack of leadership, the amateurism, the retreat from Empire, the encroachment of socialism. Angleton lectured me darkly on the need to respect American superiority in the alliance if we wanted access to their sources.

  "Just remember," roared Harvey, "you're a fuckin' beggar in this town."

  I rolled with the punches. Yes, we had a poor record on counterespionage, but Arthur was back now, and Lonsdale was just the beginning. No, we had no obligation to tell you about RAFTER from the beginning. It was our secret to do with as we judged fit.

  "I've come over here and just given you my life's work - ENGULF, STOCKADE, RAFTER - everything. You sat opposite me for five days at NSA and told me nothing. Where's the exchange in that? The truth is, you're just pissed off because we stole a march on you...!"

  Harvey was all puffed out and purple like a turkeycock, sweat pouring off his temples, his jacket open to reveal a polished shoulder holster and pistol, his gross belly heaving with drink. It was now four o'clock in the morning. I had had enough for one night, and left. I told Angleton that the program for the next day was off. I took a poor view of what had happened. It was up to them to make the peace.

  The next day Angleton called on me at my hotel, unannounced. He was charming, and full of apologies. He blamed the previous night's scene on Harvey.

  "He drinks too much, and thinks you have to give a guy a hard time to get the truth. He believes you now. He sees you as a threat, that's all."

  He invited me out for dinner. At first I was wary, but he said he understood my point of vie
w, and hoped I understood his, and talked enthusiastically about his plans to help with resources. The tension soon disappeared. He offered to take me to see Louis Tordella to persuade him to help with the counterespionage side of ROC, and the following day sent a car to take me down to Fort Meade. Technically, I was not supposed to visit NSA without being accompanied by someone from GCHQ, so I was taken into the side entrance, and whisked up to Tordella's office on the top floor. We had lunch there, and I outlined the Lonsdale case for the third time.

  At the end Tordella asked how he could help, and I explained that the main weakness was that despite the breakthrough offered by my classification of illegal broadcasts from Moscow, GCHQ had insufficient coverage of the traffic. There had been substantial improvements since Lonsdale, but we still had only between twelve and fifteen radio positions intercepting these signals, which meant we were really only sampling them. We needed at least 90 percent of the take to make real progress on the classifications. Tordella was much taken with the possibilities, and agreed to guarantee a worldwide take of 100 percent for at least two years. He was as good as his word, and soon the intelligence was flooding back to GCHQ, where it was processed by the section supporting the Counterclan Committee. A young GCHQ cryptanalyst named Peter Marychurch (now the Director of GCHQ) transformed my laborious handwritten classifications by processing the thousands of broadcasts on computer and applying "cluster analysis" to isolate similarities in the traffic, which made the classifications infinitely more precise. Within a few years this work had become one of the most important tools in Western counterespionage.

  On the drive back to Washington I was elated. Not only had my visit to Washington secured American backing for the ENGULF side of ROC's work, but I had their commitment to run the counterespionage side as well. I had almost forgotten the run-in with Harvey until Angleton brought the subject up again.

  "Harvey wants to see you again."

  I expressed astonishment.

  "No, no - he wants to ask your advice. He's got a problem in Cuba, and I told him you might be able to help."

  "But what about the other night?" I asked.

  "Oh, don't worry about that. He just wanted to know whether you could be trusted. You passed the test."

  Angleton was typically elliptical, and refused to explain further, saying that he had arranged lunch with Harvey in two days' time, and I would find out more then.

  The year 1961 was the height of the CIA's obsession with Cuba. The Bay of Pigs invasion had recently failed, and Angleton and I regularly discussed the subject, since I had been heavily involved in MI5's counterinsurgency campaign against the Greek Cypriot guerrilla leader, Colonel Grivas, in the 1950s. When I visited Washington in 1959, Richard Helms and Richard Bissel, in charge of operations in Southeast Asia, asked me to lecture on my experiences to a group of senior officers concerned with counterinsurgency. Even then it was obvious the CIA had plans in Cuba, where Fidel Castro was busy establishing a Communist state. Bissell subsequently took over the running of the Bay of Pigs operation, but when it failed it was common knowledge in Washington that his days were numbered, as the Kennedys purged all those responsible for the Cuban fiasco.

  When I arrived at the restaurant two days later, Harvey stood up to greet me and gave me a firm handshake. He looked well scrubbed and less bloated than usual, and made no reference to the events of two nights before. He was a hard man, who gave and expected no quarter. He told me that he was studying the Cuban problem, and wanted to hear from me about the Cyprus campaign.

  "I missed your briefing in 1959," he said, without a trace of irony.

  I first became involved in Cyprus shortly after I joined MI5, when the Director of E Branch (Colonial Affairs), Bill Magan, sent me some papers on the escalating conflict. The Greek Cypriot Archbishop Makarios was leading a vigorous campaign for full independence, supported by the Greek Government, the AKEL Communist Party, and EOKA, the guerrilla army led by Colonel Grivas. Britain, anxious to retain Cyprus as a military base, was resisting, and by 1956 a full-scale military emergency was in force, with 40,000 British troops pinned down by a few hundred Grivas guerrillas.

  British policy in Cyprus was an utter disaster. The Colonial Office was trying to pursue political negotiations in a deteriorating security situation, relying on the Army to keep order. Grivas needed to be located, isolated, and neutralized before political negotiations stood a chance, but although the Army launched massive searches, they failed to find him. I was convinced, studying the papers, that MI5 could do far better than the Army, and I told Magan I was confident that, given time, we could locate Grivas accurately by tracing his communications in the same way I planned our attacks against the Russians.

  Magan immediately took me to see Sir Gerald Templer, who led the successful counter-insurgency campaign in Malaya, and was a great advocate of the use of intelligence to solve colonial problems. Templer was enthusiastic about my plan and agreed to lobby the Colonial Office on MI5's behalf. But the Colonial Office remained adamant; they wanted to pursue their own security policy, and had no wish to involve MI5. There was no great enthusiasm, either, inside MI5 for becoming embroiled in what was fast becoming an insoluble, situation. Hollis, in particular, was opposed to becoming involved in Colonial Affairs without a clear invitation from the Ministry. His attitude was that MI5 was a domestic organization, and while he would provide a Defense Liaison Officer to advise the Army, that was all.

  In 1958, Grivas stepped up his guerrilla campaign in an effort to thwart the determined efforts to achieve a political solution being made by the new Governor, Sir Hugh Foot. The Army launched another massive search for Grivas, this time in the Paphos mountains, but once again he slipped through the net. Foot continued to press for a political solution, but agreed to call in MI5 as the situation was rapidly deteriorating. From the start we were in a race: could we find Grivas before the Colonial Office stitched up a ramshackle deal?

  Magan was convinced that sufficient intelligence about Grivas' location must exist in the files of the local Special Branch, and that it had just not been interpreted correctly. The problem was how to get at it. EOKA had thoroughly penetrated the local Special Branch, and studying the files would be a dangerous business once an MI5 man's identity became known. One of our officers had already been shot in the high street of Nicosia.

  Magan was a remarkable man who had spent a great deal of time on the North-West Frontier and in Persia, where he lived by himself with the natives in tents, speaking their languages and cooking his meals on cow dung fires. He knew at first hand the dangers of terrorism, and rather than delegate the dangerous mission to a junior officer, he insisted that he go himself, supported by the local Cyprus liaison officer, Colonel Philip Kirby Green, a tall soldierly officer of boundless courage and rectitude who was also a distinguished painter in his spare time. I was to follow shortly afterward to plan and execute the technical side of the operation, which was given the code name SUNSHINE.

  It would be too crude to say that SUNSHINE was an assassination operation. But it amounted to the same thing. The plan was simple: to locate Grivas, and bring up a massive concentration of soldiers. We knew he would never surrender, and like two of his trusted lieutenants who had recently been cornered by the Army, he would die in the shoot-out.

  I arrived in Nicosia on January 17, 1959, and went to Special Branch headquarters to study Magan's analysis of the files. Grivas' campaign was clearly well organized. There were numerous examples of well-coordinated terrorist strikes and civil disturbances across the whole island. He had therefore to be in regular communication with his field officers. It was unlikely that EOKA would use either the telephone or the postal system for these, even though they had both been thoroughly penetrated. Communications rested on a system of couriers, and from studying the files it was obvious these were mainly women, traveling on the public transport system. We plotted each sighting and interception, and the overall pattern showed Limassol to be the hub of the EOKA commun
ications network. There were also clusters of sightings in the Yerasa and Polodhia villages, several miles from Limassol. The best hypothesis was that Grivas maintained headquarters in each of these villages.

  The first step was to place a secure telephone tap on Makarios' palace. We were certain that Makarios, and probably EOKA at certain times, used the line secure in the knowledge that their post office spies would automatically alert them to the presence of a tap.