Spycatcher

by Peter Wright

  We decided to place a concealed tap on one of the overhead cables leading into the palace, using a radio transmitter which took power from the telephone circuit to radiate the signal out to our waiting receiver a mile or two away. John Wyke, MI6's best technical operator, and the man who actually placed the taps inside the Berlin Tunnel, with the Vopos' feet just inches above his head, came out to help me. The whole operation was fraught with danger. Wyke had to climb a telephone pole in total darkness, in full view of the road, which was constantly patrolled by Makarios' armed bodyguards and EOKA guerrillas. He bored a hole in the top of the pole to conceal the electronics, and made a concealed connection to the telephone cable. Down at the bottom I selected his tools and relayed them up to him. Every five minutes we froze as a patrol came past, expecting at any moment to hear rifle fire. Two hours later, our nerves frayed, the tap was successfully installed, and gave us the essential base coverage of Makarios.

  But the real purpose of SUNSHINE was to find Grivas. I was sure he must be using radio receivers to monitor British Army communications, and was aware every time an effort was mounted to search for him. I decided on a two-pronged attack. Firstly we would search intensively for the aerial which he used with his receiver. Then, simultaneously, I planned to plant a radio receiver on him containing a radio beacon, which would lead us right to him. We knew Grivas obtained a great deal of his military supplies from the Egyptians, who were selling off British equipment they had confiscated after the Suez war at knockdown prices. MI6 recruited a Greek Cypriot arms dealer, who purchased a consignment of receivers in Egypt which I modified to include a beacon, and we set about trying to feed it into Grivas' headquarters.

  The first part of Operation SUNSHINE went well. K.G., as Kirby Green was universally known in the Service, Magan and I made a series of dawn reconnoiters of the Limassol area looking for the aerial. It was dangerous work, meandering down dusty side streets and across the sunbaked market squares, pretending to be casual visitors. Old men under wicker shades looked at us as we passed. Small boys eyed us suspiciously and disappeared down alleys. I felt the sweat dripping down my back, and the uncanny sensation of an unseen rifle permanently trained on me from somewhere behind the terra-cotta roofs and ancient flint walls.

  In Yerasa I noticed a spike on the peak of the pyramid-shaped roof of a church. It appeared, at first sight, to be a lightning conductor, mounted on an insulator going through the roof. There was also a metallic strip going down into the ground, but when I scrutinized the conductor carefully through field glasses, I could see that the strip was disconnected from the spike. It was obviously modified to act as an aerial. Rather foolishly, we tried to get closer, and, from nowhere, an angry crowd of local children emerged and began to stone us. We beat a hasty retreat, and made our way over to Polodhia, where there was a similar setup. I was sure then that we had been right to pinpoint the two villages as the center of Grivas' operations.

  I began to work feverishly on the radio beacons. We estimated that SUNSHINE would take six months to complete, but just as we moved into top gear, in late February 1959, the Colonial Office hurriedly settled the Cyprus problem at a Constitutional Conference at Lancaster House. The carpet was roughly pulled from under our feet, and the entire SUNSHINE plan aborted overnight. Magan was furious, particularly when Grivas emerged from the precise area we had foreseen and was flown to Greece, ready to continue to exert a baleful influence on the island. Magan felt the settlement was at best temporary, and that few of the outstanding problems had been resolved. In his view, Colonial Office short-term expediency would lead to long-term misery. He has been proved right.

  Shortly before we left Cyprus, Magan and I had a strained encounter with the Governor, Sir Hugh Foot. He was pleased that at last he was extricated, and made it clear that he had always seen SUNSHINE as a last resort solution, to be implemented only in the event of the failure of diplomacy. He seemed incapable of understanding that intelligence, to be effective, has to be built into diplomacy from the start. Looking back, I am certain that, had we been allowed to implement Operation SUNSHINE when we first lobbied for it, in 1956, we could have neutralized Grivas at the outset. The Colonial Office, rather than EOKA, would then have been able to dictate the terms of the peace, and the history of that tragic but beautiful island might have taken a different course over the past thirty years.

  The entire Cyprus episode left a lasting impression on British colonial policy. Britain decolonized most successfully when we defeated the military insurgency first, using intelligence rather than force of arms, before negotiating a political solution based on the political leadership of the defeated insurgency movement, and with British force of arms to maintain the installed government. This is basically what happened in Malaya and Kenya, and both these countries have survived intact.

  The fundamental problem was how to remove the colonial power while ensuring that the local military forces did not fill the vacuum. How, in other words, can you create a stable local political class? The Colonial Office were well versed in complicated, academic, democratic models - a constitution here, a parliament there - very few of which stood the remotest chance of success. After the Cyprus experience I wrote a paper and submitted it to Hollis, giving my views. I said that we ought to adopt the Bolshevik model, since it was the only one to have worked successfully. Lenin understood better than anyone how to gain control of a country and, just as important, how to keep it. Lenin believed that the political class had to control the men with the guns, and the intelligence service, and by these means could ensure that neither the Army nor another political class could challenge for power.

  Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the modern Russian Intelligence Service, specifically set up the CHEKA (forerunner of the KGB) with these aims in mind. He established three main directorates - the First Chief Directorate to work against those people abroad who might conspire against the government; the Second Chief Directorate to work against those inside the Soviet Union who might conspire; and the Third Chief Directorate, which penetrated the armed forces, to ensure that no military coup could be plotted.

  My paper was greeted with horror by Hollis and the rest of the MI5 Directors. They told me it was "cynical," and it was never even passed to the Colonial Office, but looking back over the past quarter of a century, it is only where a version of Lenin's principles has been applied in newly created countries that a military dictatorship has been avoided.

  These ideas were also hotly contested by the CIA when I lectured to them in 1959. Helms told me flatly I was advocating Communism for the Third World. He felt that we had a decisive intelligence advantage which they lacked. We were the resident colonial power, whereas in the insurgencies which they faced in the Far East and Cuba, they were not, and therefore they felt the only policy they could pursue was a military solution. It was this thinking which ultimately led the USA into the Vietnam War.

  More immediately, it led them into the Bay of Pigs, and when, two years later, Harvey listened to my Cyprus experiences, he was struck by the parallel between the two problems: both small islands with a guerrilla force led by a charismatic leader. He was particularly struck by my view that without Grivas, EOKA would have collapsed.

  "What would the Brits do in Cuba?" he asked.

  I was a shade anxious about being drawn into the Cuban business. Hollis and I had discussed it before I came to Washington, and he made no secret of his view that the CIA were blundering in the Caribbean. It was a subject, he felt, to steer clear of if at all possible. I was worried that if I made suggestions to Angleton and Harvey, I would soon find them being quoted around Washington by the CIA as the considered British view of things. It would not take long for word of that to filter back to Leconfield House, so I made it clear to them that I was talking off the record.

  I said that we would try to develop whatever assets we had down there - alternative political leaders, that kind of thing.

  "We've done all that," said Harvey impatiently, "b
ut they're all in Florida. Since the Bay of Pigs, we've lost virtually everything we had inside..."

  Harvey began to fish to see if I knew whether we had anything in the area, in view of the British colonial presence in the Caribbean.

  "I doubt it," I told him, "the word in London is steer clear of Cuba. Six might have something, but you'd have to check with them."

  "How would you handle Castro?" asked Angleton.

  "We'd isolate him, turn the people against him..."

  "Would you hit him?" interrupted Harvey.

  I paused to fold my napkin. Waiters glided silently from table to table. I realized now why Harvey needed to know I could be trusted.

  "We'd certainly have that capability," I replied, "but I doubt we would use it nowadays."

  "Why not?"

  "We're not in it anymore, Bill. We got out a couple of years ago, after Suez."

  At the beginning of the Suez Crisis, MI6 developed a plan, through the London Station, to assassinate Nasser using nerve gas. Eden initially gave his approval to the operation, but later rescinded it when he got agreement from the French and Israelis to engage in joint military action. When this course failed, and he was forced to withdraw, Eden reactivated the assassination option a second time. By this time virtually all MI6 assets in Egypt had been rounded up by Nasser, and a new operation, using renegade Egyptian officers, was drawn up, but it failed lamentably, principally because the cache of weapons which had been hidden on the outskirts of Cairo was found to be defective.

  "Were you involved?" Harvey asked.

  "Only peripherally," I answered truthfully, "on the technical side."

  I explained that I was consulted about the plan by John Henry and Peter Dixon, the two MI6 Technical Services officers from the London Station responsible for drawing it up. Dixon, Henry, and I all attended joint MI5/MI6 meetings to discuss technical research for the intelligence services at Porton Down, the government's chemical and biological Weapons Research Establishment. The whole area of chemical research was an active field in the 1950s. I was cooperating with MI6 in a joint program to investigate how far the hallucinatory drug lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) could be used in interrogations, and extensive trials took place at Porton. I even volunteered as guinea pig on one occasion. Both MI5 and MI6 also wanted to know a lot more about the advanced poisons then being developed at Porton, though for different reasons. I wanted the antidotes, in case the Russians used a poison on a defector in Britain, while MI6 wanted to use the poisons for operations abroad.

  Henry and Dixon both discussed with me the use of poisons against Nasser, and asked my advice. Nerve gas obviously presented the best possibility, since it was easily administered. They told me that the London Station had an agent in Egypt with limited access to one of Nasser's headquarters. Their plan was to place canisters of nerve gas inside the ventilation system, but I pointed out that this would require large quantities of the gas, and would result in massive loss of life among Nasser's staff. It was the usual MI6 operation - hopelessly unrealistic - and it did not remotely surprise me when Henry told me later that Eden had backed away from the operation. The chances of its remaining undeniable were even slimmer than they had been with Buster Crabbe.

  Harvey and Angleton questioned me closely about every part of the Suez Operation.

  "We're developing a new capability in the Company to handle these kinds of problems," explained Harvey, "and we're in the market for the requisite expertise."

  Whenever Harvey became serious, his voice dropped to a low monotone, and his vocabulary lapsed into the kind of strangled bureaucratic syntax beloved of Washington officials. He explained ponderously that they needed deniable personnel, and improved technical facilities - in Harvey jargon, "delivery mechanisms." They were especially interested in the SAS. Harvey knew that the SAS operated up on the Soviet border in the 1950s tracking Russian rocket signals with mobile receivers before the satellites took over, and that they were under orders not to be caught, even if this meant fighting their way out of trouble.

  "They don't freelance, Bill," I told him. "You could try to pick them up retired, but you'd have to see Six about that."

  Harvey looked irritated, as if I were being deliberately unhelpful.

  "Have you thought of approaching Stephenson?" I asked. "A lot of the old-timers say he ran this kind of thing in New York during the war. Used some Italian, apparently, when there was no other way of sorting a German shipping spy. Probably the Mafia, for all I know..."

  Angleton scribbled in his notebook, and looked up impassively.

  "The French!" I said brightly. "Have you tried them? It's more their type of thing, you know, Algiers, and so on."

  Another scribble in the notebook.

  "What about technically - did you have any special equipment?" asked Harvey.

  I told him that after the gas canisters plan fell through, MI6 looked at some new weapons. On one occasion I went down to Porton to see a demonstration of a cigarette packet which had been modified by the Explosives Research and Development Establishment to fire a dart tipped with poison. We solemnly put on white coats and were taken out to one of the animal compounds behind Porton by Dr. Ladell, the scientist there who handled all MI5 and MI6 work. A sheep on a lead was led into the center of the ring. One flank had been shaved to reveal the coarse pink skin. Ladell's assistant pulled out the cigarette packet and stepped forward. The sheep started, and was restrained by the lead, and I thought perhaps the device had misfired. But then the sheep's knees began to buckle, and it started rolling its eyes and frothing at the mouth. Slowly the animal sank to the ground, life draining away, as the white-coated professionals discussed the advantages of the modern new toxin around the corpse. It was the only time in my life when my two passions, for animals and for intelligence, collided, and I knew at that instant that the first was by far the greater love. I knew also, then, that assassination was no policy for peacetime.

  Beyond that, there was little help I could offer Harvey and Angleton, and I began to feel I had told them more than enough. The sight of Angleton's notebook was beginning to unnerve me. They seemed so determined, so convinced that this was the way to handle Castro, and slightly put out that I could not help them more.

  "Speak to John Henry, or Dixon - they'll probably know more than me," I said when we were out on the street making our farewells. I was due to fly back to Britain the next day.

  "You're not holding out on us over this, are you?" asked Harvey suddenly. The shape of his pistol was visible again under his jacket, I could tell he was thinking about RAFTER.

  I hailed a taxi.

  "I've told you, Bill: We're out of that game. We're the junior partner in the alliance, remember? It's your responsibility now."

  Harvey was not the kind of man to laugh at a joke. Come to that, neither was Angleton.

  - 12 -

  1961. Outside in the streets of London, people were still saying they had "never had it so good," while in Washington a new young President was busy creating a mythical Camelot of culture and excellence. But in the subterranean world of secret intelligence, the shape of the turbulent decade was already becoming clear. Throughout the 1950s American and British services pursued the Cold War with clarity of purpose and single-minded dedication. It was not a subtle war, and there were precious few complications. But in the early 1960s a rash of defectors began to arrive in the West from the heart of the Russian intelligence machine, each carrying tales of the penetration of Western security. Their stories were often contradictory and confusing, and their effect was to begin the slow paralysis of British and American intelligence as doubt and suspicion seeped through the system.

  The first defector arrived in December 1961. I was in my office a few weeks after returning from my trip to Washington when Arthur strolled in, cigarette in one hand, clutching a copy of THE TIMES in the other. He passed the paper to me neatly folded across the spine.

  "Sounds interesting..." he said, pointing to a small paragra
ph which referred to a Soviet Major, named Klimov, who had presented himself to the American Embassy in Helsinki with his wife and child and asked for asylum.

  It was not long before we heard on the grapevine that Klimov was, in fact, a KGB Major, and that he was singing like a bird. In March 1962, a frisson of excitement went around the D Branch offices. Arthur smoked more energetically than usual, his baby face flushed with enthusiasm as he strode up and down the corridors. I knew Klimov's information had finally arrived.

  "It's the defector, isn't it?" I asked him one day.

  He ushered me into his office, closed the door, and told me a little of the story. "Klimov," he said, was in reality Anatoli Golitsin, a high-ranking KGB officer who had worked inside the First Chief Directorate, responsible for operations against the UK and the USA, and the Information Department in Moscow, before taking a posting in Helsinki. In fact, Golitsin had been on a previous CIA watch list during an earlier overseas tour, but he was not recognized under the cover of his new identity until he presented himself in Helsinki.