by Peter Wright
"But you could have guessed..." I sighed with irritation.
Blunt pulled the curtains, as if faintly disappointed with the noise and dust and fashions of the square outside.
"Unless you lived through it, Peter, you cannot understand..."
"Oh, I lived through it, Anthony," I said, suddenly angry. "I know more about the thirties probably than you will ever know. I remember my father driving himself mad with drink, because he couldn't get a job. I remember losing my education, my world, everything. I know all about the thirties..."
One of the most interesting things to emerge in the D3 researches was the existence of the Oxford Ring. In the past, Soviet recruitment was associated mainly with Cambridge University, but once Blunt opened up, it was obvious that Burgess and James Klugman had targeted Oxford in the same way. The first hard source on the Oxford Ring came from a colleague of Blunt's at the Courtauld Institute, Phoebe Pool. Blunt admitted that she had been his courier during the 1930s, and I was anxious to interview her. She and Blunt were close; they had even written a book together on Picasso.
Blunt told me she was a neurotic, and already in the process of a nervous breakdown. He said that she would clam up, or worse, if I spoke to her directly, so he organized a cutout for me-another senior figure at the Courtauld, Anita Brookner, to whom I could relay questions for Pool. A degree of deception was inevitable. Pool was told that new inquiries were being made into the 1930s, and Anthony wanted to know if there was anybody else he should warn.
Phoebe Pool told Anita Brookner that she used to run messages for Otto to two brothers, Peter and Bernard Floud. Peter, the former Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, was dead, but his brother Bernard was a senior Labor MP. Pool also said a young woman, Jennifer Fisher Williams, was involved, and urged Brookner to ensure that "Andy Cohen," the senior diplomat Sir Andrew Cohen, was warned too, as he also was at risk. All these names were well known to me. All except Andrew Cohen (Cohen was an Apostle and Cambridge student) were connected with the Clarendon, a left-wing dining and discussion club in Oxford during the 1930s, but this was the first hard evidence that the club had been a center for Soviet espionage recruitment.
Ironically, Jennifer Fisher Williams was married to a former war time MI5 officer, Herbert Hart, by the time her name emerged, so I visited her husband at Oxford, where he was pursuing a distinguished academic career as Professor of Jurisprudence, and asked him if he would approach his wife on my behalf. He rang her up there and then, assured her there was no threat to her position, and she agreed to meet me.
Jennifer Hart was a fussy, middle-class woman, too old, I thought, for the fashionably short skirt and white net stockings she was wearing. She told her story quite straightforwardly, but had a condescending, disapproving manner, as if she equated my interest in the left-wing politics of the 1930s with looking up ladies' skirts. To her, it was rather vulgar and ungentlemanly.
She said she was an open Party member in the 1930s, and was approached by a Russian, who from her description was definitely Otto. Otto instructed her to go underground, and she used to meet him clandestinely at Kew Gardens. She told us that she was merely part of the Party underground, and that she gave up meeting Otto when she joined the Home Office in 1938, where she worked in a highly sensitive department which processed applications for telephone intercepts. She told us, too, that she had never passed on any secret information.
She had two other contacts, she said. One was Bernard Floud, who recruited her, and the other man who controlled her for a short time she identified from a photograph as Arthur Wynn, a close friend of Edith Tudor Hart and her husband, who was active in trade union circles before joining the Civil Service.
There was no doubt in my mind, listening to Jennifer Hart, that this was a separate Ring based exclusively at Oxford University, but investigating it proved enormously difficult. Almost at once, Sir Andrew Cohen (who was at Cambridge and became a diplomat) died from a heart attack, so he was crossed off the list. Peter Floud was already dead, but his brother looked more hopeful when the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, named him to a junior ministerial post in the Labor Government. MI5 were asked to provide him with security clearance. We objected and requested permission to interrogate Floud about Jennifer Hart's allegation. Wilson had, at the time, a standing ban on any inquiries relating to MPs, but when he read the MI5 brief, he gave clearance for the interview.
Floud's attitude, when I began the interview, was extraordinary. He treated the matter as of little importance, and when I pressed him on Jennifer Hart's story he refused to either confirm or deny that he had recruited her.
"How can I deny it, if I can't remember anything about it?" he said repeatedly.
I was tough with him. I knew that his wife, an agoraphobic depressive, had recently committed suicide, but Floud was eager to conclude the interview, presumably lured by the scent of office. I explained to him in unmistakable terms that, since it was my responsibility to advise on his security clearance, I could not possibly clear him until he gave a satisfactory explanation for the Hart story. Still he fell back lamely on his lack of memory. The session ended inconclusively, and I asked for him to attend a further interview the following day. I did not make any progress with him, he maintaining that he had no recollection of recruiting Jennifer.
The next morning I got a message that Floud had committed suicide, apparently with a gas poker and a blanket. Not long after, Blunt telephoned me with more bad news.
"Phoebe's dead," he said.
"Good God, how?" I gasped.
"She threw herself under a tube..."
Three deaths, two of which were suicides, in such a small group of people, at a time when we were actively investigating them, seemed far more than bad luck. MI5 was terrified that it would be linked publicly with the deaths, and all further work was suspended. Newspapers were already vigorously pursuing the story of Philby's role as the Third Man, and had discovered for the first time the seniority of his position in MI6. Rumors of Blunt's involvement were also beginning to surface in Fleet Street. The entire scandalous tapestry was in danger of unraveling. That still left the problem of Arthur Wynn, who, by coincidence, was also due for promotion to the Deputy Secretary's job at the Board of Trade, which also required security clearance.
"What shall we do?" asked F.J. nervously.
"We should tell him we'll give him his clearance, if he tells the truth about the Ring. Otherwise no clearance..."
"But that's blackmail," he said, doing his best to sound shocked.
I saw nothing unfair about my offer, but then, as I told F.J., I was never destined to be a diplomat or a politician.
"All these suicides," he said, "they'll ruin our image. We're just not that sort of Service."
The Oxford Ring completed my inquiries into the 1930s conspiracy. By the end of the 1960s the task was virtually complete, those involved nearing or well past retirement. We had identified every member of the Ring of Five and a number of others and their controllers. We knew how the Ring worked at various times, we knew what their communications were, whom they depended on, and where they went for help. We had also identified one major undiscovered spy, Watson, and another crucial source for the Russians during the period 1935-51, Proctor, as well as an important new Ring at Oxford. Altogether we had identified, dead or alive, nearly forty probable spies. Beyond that we had scrutinized carefully the records of dozens of people in every sphere of British public life. Most were given a clean bill of health, but some were found to be secret Communists or associates, and were removed from access or quietly encouraged to retire.
Of course, there were still loose ends. Klugman took his secrets with him, Otto was never identified, and the British end of the Rote Kapelle we never found. But we knew the most important thing of all - we knew how far the conspiracy extended. We knew our history, and we had no need to be afraid again. The vetting of a generation had been painful, certainly, more painful probably than it need have been had the inquiri
es been conducted at the right time, when the trails were still fresh. But we had exorcised the past, and we could at last return to the present again, not forgetting that there might be descendants from the people of the 1930s.
- 18 -
One other unresolved question remained throughout the 1960s, perhaps the most important of all - whether or not there was an undiscovered mole inside MI5. The FLUENCY Working Party's research into the history of penetration of British Intelligence continued in parallel with the D3 inquiries. Hollis took little interest in FLUENCY, principally, because it was not due to report until after his scheduled retirement in December 1965. He still considered the penetration issue closed after the meeting to discuss the second Symonds report in October 1964, and he ordered that none of those officers involved in the Mitchell case should discuss it even among themselves. It was a hopeless request. For one thing, Hollis' visit to the USA and Canada in 1963, to brief the CIA, FBI, and RCMP that Mitchell might possibly have been a spy, caused predictable fury and alarm. Shortly after Hollis' visit, I traveled to Canada myself. The DEW WORM microphones, which had lain undisturbed in the walls of the Soviet Embassy since 1956, were suddenly dug out by a team of Russian sweepers. No preliminary searches were made; the Russians knew exactly where the microphones were, and we heard them take them out before the lines went dead.
The RCMP wondered if Mitchell had perhaps compromised the operation. Jim Bennett, who by now was head of Counterespionage in the RCMP, began to sound me out. It was impossible to deflect his interest, and I gave him a brief resume of the evidence which pointed toward a high-level penetration. In fact, I had my own theory. I was sure the presence of the DEW WORM microphones was blown to the Russians in 1956, hence their refusal to use the rooms for anything other than occasional consular business. But they clearly learned the exact locations of the system only in 1964. This coincided exactly with the Mitchell investigation, which considered in great detail the possibility that FLUENCY might have been betrayed by Mitchell in 1956. Both Mitchell and Hollis also received the detailed file in 1956, including the details about the way the DEW WORM system worked. The operation was undoubtedly blown then. Whether it was Mitchell or Hollis who had done it, the Russians could not afford to take the microphones out unless the sweepers found them without being told exactly where they were. Despite over twenty days of searching, they failed to do so, even though they knew the exact area that had been bugged.
F.J. blasted me when he heard that I had talked about the penetration issue in Canada, but I told him that it was impossible to avoid discussion after Hollis' abortive visit. To ignore the problem only made it worse in the eyes of our allies.
In Washington interest was just as acute. I remember a house party at Michael McCaul's, the man who in 1964 became the SLO in Washington in succession to Harry Stone. Angleton and I detached ourselves, and he quizzed me hard on the state of affairs inside MI5.
"What the hell's got into you guys," he kept saying, "Hollis comes out there with some cock-and-bull story about Mitchell. He doesn't seem to know the first thing about the case. There's been no interrogation, and now he says there's nothing in it!..."
I tried to talk him through the case. Mitchell, I told him, was in the clear, we thought, but I stated that as far as Arthur and I were concerned, Hollis was our next suspect. I asked him if he had any information which might help us break open the case. He said he would see what he could do. It was a difficult time for the CIA. Kennedy had just been assassinated and the Warren Commission of inquiry was sitting, and Angleton had pressing problems of his own.
In 1965, British security seemed once again catastrophically bad to American eyes. In just four years a succession of spy scandals and disasters had engulfed both M15 and MI6. First Houghton was unmasked, having betrayed vital parts of NATO's underwater-detection systems. Although the Houghton case was a triumph for MI5's new counterespionage capability, it caused outrage in the U.S. Navy, which had long fostered hostility to its British counterpart. The enmity surfaced at a National Security Council meeting, soon after the Houghton trial, at which the U.S. Navy had sought a complete break in the British-American intelligence and secrets exchange. Jim Angleton and Al Belmont from the FBI nipped the Navy ploy in the bud.
"The only difference between us and them," said Belmont dryly, "is they catch spies, and we don't."
But nothing Belmont said could possibly mitigate the string of disasters which followed. Blake was tried and convicted in 1961, casting doubt on virtually every European CIA operation including the Berlin Tunnel. Vassall was caught the next year, 1962; once again, valuable NATO Naval secrets had gone East because of a British spy. In January 1963 Philby defected, with the British authorities apparently mute and impotent. There were the security implications of the Profumo affair in the same year, with its suggestions, taken seriously at the time in the FBI, that the Russians were obtaining nuclear secrets from Profumo via Christine Keeler - Blunt, Long, and Cairncross confessed in 1964, while other cases simply collapsed humiliatingly in court. The Kodak case in 1964 was one, but far worse in American eyes was the Martelli case in early 1965.
The Martelli case had started in 1963 with an allegation by Fedora that the KGB had a foreign ideological source inside an English nuclear research establishment. He had been operational only in the last one to two years. While this meant that the defector, Golitsin, did not know about him, it severely limited the field of likely candidates. After a few false steps, the investigation closed in on Giuseppe Martelli, who had come to the Culham Laboratory in the autumn of 1962 from Euratom. But Martelli was not cleared for secret atomic material. Despite this, the investigation went ahead. It was possible that, like Houghton in the Lonsdale case, when he was at Portland, Martelli got his secrets from a girlfriend who did have access. When it was found that Martelli HAD a girlfriend who had access to secrets it became CERTAINLY possible that Martelli also had access to secrets that he should not have had.
Further investigation did not produce any evidence that Martelli was able to acquire secrets. A search of his office at Culham produced rendezvous information from a locked drawer in his desk. At this time Martelli was away in Europe on holiday. When he returned he was picked up at Southend airport. He was questioned by Special Branch and identified Karpekov as a Russian he knew. He also had a map in his possession which indicated rendezvous arrangements. As a result his house at Abingdon was searched and a concealment device was found which contained miniature one-time pads a la Lonsdale. Part of a page of one pad had apparently been used. A diary was found which had the details of a grid for transforming letters, and therefore words, into numbers for the one-time pad to be used to encipher a message.
A long meeting was held by Hollis, with Mitchell present, to decide what to do. The crucial factor was that no evidence had been found that Martelli had access to secrets or was passing them to a foreign power. The Official Secrets Act (OSA) did have a clause which made it a crime to prepare to commit espionage. But it would be very difficult to prove that Martelli was doing this. There was no proof that he had been in clandestine communication with a foreign power. GCHQ could attest that the cipher pads were similar to those used by spies to communicate with their Russian masters but, unlike in the Lonsdale case, they could not prove that Martelli had done so. It is not often realized that it was the GCHQ testimony in the Lonsdale case that ensured the defendants were convicted. Without this evidence Lonsdale and his associates would have got off either scot-free or with a minor sentence.
I, as the MI5 SIGINT expert, pointed out to the management at the meeting that the evidence MI5 had was not sufficient to prove even the intention to communicate secrets to a foreign power. The Legal Branch of MI5 were keen to try to get Martelli on "the act preparatory" clause of the OSA to establish it as a valid reason to prosecute under the OSA. To the astonishment of the professional counterespionage officers present, Hollis and Mitchell pressed for the prosecution of Martelli to go ahead. The result was th
at the Attorney-General did go ahead and MI5 suffered the damage.
Even today I find it very difficult to understand why the Martelli case went ahead, unless one remembers the date of the trial - July 2, 1963. This was at the height of the Mitchell case. It is obvious that at this juncture it would have suited the Russians and Hollis for the CE side of MI5 to be knocked down.
The other case to be considered here is that of Frank Bossard. Early in 1965 Top Hat, the FBI-GRU agent, produced photocopies of documents from the Ministry of Supply of the highest security grading in the guided weapons field, involving high-level secrets of the USA. It was relatively easy to narrow the field of suspects to a few people. The suspects were put under all kinds of surveillance. It was discovered that Bossard, one of the suspects, occasionally during his lunch hour would collect a suitcase from the Left Luggage Office at Waterloo Station. He would go to a hotel in Bloomsbury and book himself into a room under a false name. He would stay there alone for about half an hour. On leaving he would take the suitcase back to the Left Luggage Office and return to work. MI5 in due course removed the case from Waterloo. In it were found document-copying cameras, cassettes of film, and two gramophone records on which there were about eight Russian songs. The details of the Russian songs were copied. The entire contents of the case were photographed and restored to the case, which was then returned to Waterloo. I rang up GCHQ and gave them the details of the records. It took GCHQ less than an hour to identify five of the tunes as having been transmitted by a Russian transmitter, found to be in the Moscow area by direction-finding. This transmitter was known to be a GRU Russian Intelligence Service transmitter.
