Spycatcher

by Peter Wright

  After the initial debriefing, the CIA sent to MI5 a list of ten "serials," each one itemizing an allegation Golitsin had made about a penetration of British Security. Arthur initially held the complete list. Patrick Stewart, the acting head of D3 (Research), conducted a preliminary analysis of the serials, and drew up a list of suspects to fit each one. Then individual serials were apportioned to different officers in the D1 (Investigations) section for detailed investigation, and I was asked to provide technical advice as the investigations required.

  Three of the first ten serials immediately struck a chord. Golitsin said that he knew of a famous "Ring of Five" spies, recruited in Britain in the 1930s. They all knew each other, he said, and all knew the others were spies. But Golitsin could identify none of them, other than the fact that one had the code name Stanley, and was connected with recent KGB operations in the Middle East. The lead perfectly fitted Kim Philby, who was currently working in Beirut for the OBSERVER newspaper. He said that two of the other five were obviously Burgess and Maclean. We thought that a fourth might be Sir Anthony Blunt, the Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, and a former wartime MI5 officer who fell under suspicion after the Burgess and Maclean defections in 1951. But the identity of the fifth was a complete mystery. As a result of Golitsin's three serials concerning the Ring of Five, the Philby and Blunt cases were exhumed, and a reassessment ordered.

  The two most current and precise leads in those first ten serials were numbers 3 and 8, which referred to Naval spies, indicating, as with Houghton, the importance the Russians attached to obtaining details of the British and NATO submarine and antisubmarine capability. Serial 3 was a recruitment allegedly made in the British Naval Attache's office in the Embassy in Moscow, under the personal supervision of General Gribanov, Head of the Second Chief Directorate, responsible for internal intelligence operations in the Soviet Union. A Russian employee of the British Embassy named Mikhailski had been involved in the operation, and the spy provided handwritten notes of the secret documents which passed across his desk. Then, in 1956, said Golitsin, the spy returned to London to work in the Naval Intelligence Department, and his KGB control passed to the Foreign Operations Department.

  The second Naval spy, Serial 8, was a more senior figure, according to Golitsin. Golitsin claimed to have seen numbered copies of three NATO documents, two of which were classified Top Secret. He had seen them by accident while working on the NATO desk of the KGB Information Department, which prepared policy papers for the Politburo on NATO matters. Golitsin was in the middle of preparing a report on NATO naval strategy, when three documents came in from London. Normally all material reaching Golitsin was bowdlerized, in other words rewritten to disguise its source, but because of the urgency of his report, he was provided with the original document copies. The CIA tested Golitsin on his story. The three documents in question, detailing plans to expand the Clyde Polaris submarine base, and the reorganization of NATO naval dispositions in the Mediterranean, were shown to him, mixed up with a sheaf of other NATO documents. He immediately identified the correct three, and even explained that the Clyde document he saw had four sets of numbers and figures for its circulation list, whereas the copy we showed him had six sets. When the original circulation list was checked, it was found that such a copy had indeed existed but we were unable to find it. Patrick Stewart analyzed the circulation of the three documents, and a senior Naval Commander, now retired, appeared as the only credible candidate. The case was handed over to D1 (Investigations).

  Within months of Golitsin's arrival, three further sources in the heart of the Soviet intelligence machine suddenly, and apparently independently, offered their services to the West. The first two, a KGB officer and a GRU officer, both working under cover in the Soviet delegation to the UN, approached the FBI and offered to act as agents in place. They were given the code names Fedora and Top Hat. The third walk-in occurred in Geneva in June 1962. A senior KGB officer, Yuri Nossenko, contacted the CIA and offered his services.

  Nossenko soon gave a priceless lead in the hunt for the British Naval spies. He claimed that the Gribanov recruitment had been obtained through homosexual blackmail, and that the agent had provided the KGB with "all NATO" secrets from a "Lord of the Navy." The combination of NATO and the Gribanov recruitment led MI5 to combine the two serials 3 and 8. There was one obvious suspect, a clerk in Lord Carrington's office, John Vassall. Vassall had originally been placed at the top of Patrick Stewart's preliminary list of four Serial 3 suspects, but when the case was handed over to the investigating officer, Ronnie Symonds, Symonds had contested Stewart's assessment. He felt that Vassall's Catholicism and apparent high moral character made him a less serious suspect. He was placed at the bottom of the list instead. After attention focused on him strongly following Nossenko's lead, it was soon established that Vassall was a practicing homosexual, who was living way beyond his means in a luxury flat in Dolphin Square. MI5 faced the classic counterespionage problem. Unlike any other crime, espionage leaves no trace, and proof is virtually impossible unless a spy either confesses or is caught in the act. I was asked if there was any technical way we could prove Vassall was removing documents from the Admiralty. I had been experimenting for some time with Frank Morgan on a scheme to mark classified documents using minute quantities of radioactive material. The idea was to place a Geiger counter at the entrance of the building where the suspected spy was operating so that we could detect if any marked documents were being removed. We tried this with Vassall, but it was not a success. There were too many exits in the Admiralty for us to be sure we were covering the one which Vassall used, and the Geiger counter readings were often distorted by luminous wristwatches and the like. Eventually the scheme was scrapped when fears about the risks of exposing people to radiation were raised by the management.

  I looked around for another way. It was obvious from the CIA tests that Golitsin had a near-photographic memory, so I decided to make another test, to see if he could remember any details about the type of photographic copy of the NATO documents he had seen. Through this it might be possible to deduce whether he was handing over originals for them to copy and return to him. I made twenty-five photographs of the first page of the Clyde Base NATO document, each one corresponding to a method we knew the Russians had in the past recommended to their agents, or which the Russians themselves used inside the Embassy, and sent them over to Golitsin via the CIA. As soon as Golitsin saw the photographs he picked out the one which had been taken with a Praktina, illuminated at each side by two anglepoise lamps. Armed with this knowledge, we arranged to burgle Vassall's flat when he was safely at work. Hidden in a drawer at the bottom of a bureau we found a Praktina document-copying camera, and a Minox as well. That evening he was arrested, permission for a search warrant having been obtained, and his apartment was stripped bare. In the base of a corner table a secret drawer was found which contained a number of exposed 35mm cassettes, which were developed to reveal 176 classified documents. Vassall swiftly confessed to having been homosexually compromised in Moscow in 1955, and was convicted and sentenced to eighteen years in prison.

  As the intelligence from the throng of new defectors was being pieced together in London and Washington, I faced a personal crisis of my own The Lonsdale case reawakened the whole issue of technical resources for MI5 and MI6. Although the AWRE program which I and Frank Morgan designed in 1958 had been an outstanding success, little else had changed. The attempt to satisfy Intelligence Service needs within the context of the overall defense budget had failed, especially in the advanced electronics field. We were moving rapidly into a new era of satellite and computer intelligence, and when the Radiations Operations Committee was split into Clan and Counterclan, it was obvious that the scale and range of their operations would require a far more intensive degree of technical and scientific research and development than had hitherto been possible. Everyone realized at last that the old ad hoc system which I had struggled to change since 1958 would have to be comp
rehensively reformed. Both MI5 and MI6 needed their own establishments, their own budgets, and their own staffs. Shortly after the Lonsdale case I approached Sir William Cook again with the approval of both Services, and asked him to make a thorough review of our requirements. We spent several days together visiting the various defense establishments which were currently servicing us, and he wrote a detailed report, one of the most important in postwar British Intelligence history.

  The essence of Cook's report was that the Hanslope Communications Center, the wartime headquarters of the Radio Security Service, and since then the MI6 communications center for its overseas agent networks, should be radically expanded to become a research establishment servicing both MI5 and MI6, with special emphasis on the kinds of advanced electronics necessary in both the Clan and the Counterclan committees. Cook recommended that the new staff for Hanslope should be drawn from the Royal Naval Scientific Service. This was, to me, the most important reform of all since joining MI5. I had lobbied to remove the artificial barrier which separated the technical divisions of the Intelligence Services from the rest of the scientific Civil Service. This barrier was wholly damaging, it deprived the Intelligence Services of the best and the brightest young scientists, and on a personal level meant that I had to forfeit nearly twenty years of pension allocation earned in the Admiralty, in order to accept MI5's offer to work for them. I pressed Cook continually on this point during the time he was writing his report, and he recognized that my arguments were correct. As a result of his report fifty scientists were transferred to Hanslope, with their pensions intact, and with the option of transferring back if they so wished at a future date. Since I was the first scientist, I was not covered by these new arrangements, although I was not at the time unduly worried. I believed that when the time came the Service would, as they promised, make some recompense. Unfortunately, my trust was sadly misplaced.

  There was one further Cook recommendation. He wanted MI5 and MI6 to set up a joint headquarters staff in separate accommodation, controlled by a Chief Scientist, to plan and oversee the new research and development program for both services. It was a bold new move, and I confess I wanted the job more than anything in the world. I felt, in truth, that I had earned it. Most of the technical modernization which had occurred since 1955 was largely at my instigation, and I had spent long years fighting for budgets and resources for both Services. But it was not to be. Victor Rothschild lobbied vigorously on my behalf, but Dick White told him that the animosity inside MI6 stimulated by his own transfer from MI5 was still too great to hope to persuade his senior technical staff to serve under any appointee from MI5. In the end the situation was resolved at a meeting of the Colemore Committee. When Cook's conclusions were discussed, Hector Willis, the head of the Royal Naval Scientific Service, volunteered there and then to fill the post of Chief of the new Directorate of Science, resigning from the RNSS to do it, and Hollis and White, aware of the bureaucratic influence Willis would bring with him, gratefully accepted. I became the joint deputy head of the Directorate, along with Johnny Hawkes, my opposite number in MI6, who ran Hanslope for MI6, and developed the MI6 Rockex cipher machine.

  Willis and I knew each other well. He was a pleasant North countryman, small, almost mousy, with white hair and black eyebrows. He always dressed smartly, with pepper-and-salt suits and stiff collars. I had worked under him during the war on a leader cable scheme and antisubmarine warfare. He was a good mathematician, far better than I, with first-rate technical ingenuity. But although we were both essentially engineers, Willis and I had diametrically opposed views about the way the new Directorate should be run. I saw the scientist/engineer's role in intelligence as being a source of ideas and experiments which might or might not yield results. Whatever success I had achieved since 1955 was obtained through experimentation and improvisation. I wanted the Directorate to be a powerhouse, embracing and expanding the kinds of breakthroughs which had given us the Radiations Operations Committee. Willis wanted to integrate scientific intelligence into the Ministry of Defense. He wanted the Directorate to be a passive organization, a branch of the vast inert defense contracting industry, producing resources for its end users on request. I tried to explain to Willis that intelligence, unlike defense contracting, is not peacetime work. It is a constant war, and you face a constantly shifting target. It is no good planning decades ahead, as the Navy do when they bring a ship into service, because by the time you get two or three years down the track, you might find your project leaked to the Russians. I cited the Berlin Tunnel - tens of millions of dollars poured into a single grandiose project, and later we learned it was blown to the Russians from the beginning by the Secretary of the Planning Committee, George Blake. I agreed that we had to develop a stock of simple devices such as microphones and amplifiers, which worked and which had a fair shelf life, but I opposed the development of sophisticated devices which more often than not were designed by committees, and which would probably be redundant by the time they came to fruition, either because the Russians learned about them or because the war had moved onto different territory.

  Willis never understood what I was driving at. I felt he lacked imagination, and he certainly did not share my restless passion for the possibilities of scientific intelligence. He wanted me to settle down, forget the kind of life I had lived thus far, put on a white coat and supervise the rolling contracts. I was forced to leave Leconfield House and move into the Directorate's headquarters offices at Buckingham Gate. The latter part of 1962, coming so soon after the excitements and achievements of 1961, was undoubtedly the most unhappy period in my professional life. For seven years I had enjoyed a rare freedom to roam around MI5 involving myself in all sorts of areas, always active, always working on current operations. It was like swapping the trenches for a spell in the Home Guard. As soon as I arrived in the new offices, I knew there was no future there for me. Cut off from Leconfield House I would soon perish in the airless, claustrophobic atmosphere. I decided to leave, either to another post in MI5 if the management agreed, or to GCHQ, where I had been making some soundings, if they did not.

  Arthur was terribly considerate at this time. He knew that I was chafing over at Buckingham Gate, and he used every excuse he could to involve me in the ongoing work with Golitsin. During spring 1962 he paid a long visit to Washington and conducted a massive debriefing of the KGB Major. He returned with a further 153 serials which merited further investigation. Some of the serials were relatively innocuous, like his allegation that a then popular musical star had been recruited by the Russians because of his access to London high society. Others were true but we were able to satisfactorily account for them, like the baronet whom Golitsin claimed had been the target for homosexual blackmail, after the KGB photographed him in action in the back of a taxi. The baronet was interviewed, admitted the incident, and satisfied us that he had refused to bend to the KGB ploy. But the vast majority of Golitsin's material was tantalizingly imprecise. It often appeared true as far as it went, but then faded into ambiguity, and part of the problem was Golitsin's clear propensity for feeding his information out in dribs and drabs. He saw it as his livelihood, and consequently those who had to deal with him never knew when they were pursuing a particularly fruitful-looking lead, whether the defector had more to tell them.

  I was asked to help with one of the strangest Golitsin serials which ran into the dust at this time, the Sokolov Grant affair. In many ways it was typical of the difficulties we faced in dealing with his debriefing material. Golitsin said that a Russian agent had been introduced into Suffolk next to an airfield which had batteries of the latest guided missiles. He was sure the agent was a sleeper, probably for sabotage in the event of an international crisis. We contacted the RAF and pinpointed Stretteshall, near Bury St. Edmunds, as the most likely airfield. We then checked the electoral roll in the area around Stretteshall to see if we could find anything interesting. After a few days we came across a Russian name, Sokolov Grant. We cross-checked wit
h the Registry and found that he had a file. He was a Russian refugee who had arrived in Britain five years before, married an English girl, and taken up farming on rented land near the airfield.

  The case was handed over to Charles Elwell for investigation. Letter and telephone checks were installed and inquiries made with the local police, which drew a blank. I was asked to make a search of his house, when Sokolov Grant and his wife went up north for a holiday, to see if there was any technical evidence which might incriminate him. I drove up to Bury St. Edmunds with John Storer, a short, gray-haired, smiling man from GCHQ's M Division who worked on Counterclan, arranging the RAFTER plane flights, and analyzing the RAFTER signals. Sokolov Grant lived in a pretty Queen Anne red-brick farmhouse which was in a state of some disrepair. From the back garden you could see the end of the runway stretching across the swaying fields of barley. The scene seemed so perfect, so idyllic, it was hard to be suspicious. But that was the thing which always struck me about espionage: it was always played out in such ordinary humdrum English scenes.

  John Storer went off to search the farm buildings for signs of clandestine radio systems, while I slipped the catch and went inside the house. The house was unbelievably untidy. All along the corridors and passageways piles of junk lined the walls. Books were stacked up in mounds in the downstairs rooms. At first I thought perhaps they were moving house, until I noticed the thick layer of dust on top of everything. In the backroom study stood two desks side by side. The one on the left was a huge roll-top desk crammed so full that it could not be closed. The one on the right was a small bureau. I opened the flap, and it was completely empty. I slid the drawers out. They were empty too, with not a trace of dust. The whole thing had obviously been emptied recently. I sat for a moment in a polished Windsor chair staring at the two desks, trying to make sense of one so full and the other so empty. Had the contents of one been transferred into the other? Or had one been emptied, and if so why? Was it suspicious, or was it just what it seemed - an empty desk in a junk-infested house?