Spycatcher

by Peter Wright

  A few days after I gave Sudbury the Volkov list he rang me up excitedly, almost forgetting for a moment to switch over to his scrambler.

  "The translation's wrong," he said, "it's all NKVD idiom. The man who wrote it was obviously quite senior. He's written it very carefully, with pride in his professional skill and knowledge. The real translation should read. 'I know, for instance, that one of these agents is fulfilling the duties of head of a section of the British Counterintelligence Directorate.'

  "Actually, I rather think this man's position is temporary. He's 'fulfilling the duties,' rather than in the job itself, which suggests to me he's the acting head, or something very like it..."

  "I'm sorry," I replied cautiously.

  "But don't you see," shrieked Geoffrey through the electronic haze, "the British Counterintelligence Directorate is MI5, it's not MI6!"

  The meaning was crystal clear. If Sudbury was right, this was not Philby, and it could not be Blunt either, since he was never acting head of anything. Only one man had been acting head of a section of the British Counterintelligence Directorate in 1944-45. His name was Roger Hollis.

  The second allegation was Igor Gouzenko's MI5 spy "Elli," which I had first seen in Anne Last's notebook during the Mitchell investigation. FLUENCY reexamined the case of Elli in great detail. The extraordinary thing about Gouzenko's Elli was the fact that it came in September 1945 in exactly the same period that Volkov made his "Acting Head" allegation, and also on the same date that we made the crucial break into the VENONA traffic.

  The essence of Gouzenko's story was simple. He said he knew there was a spy in "five of MI." He had learned this from a friend, Luibimov, who had worked alongside him in the main GRU cipher room in Moscow in 1942. Elli's communications were handled through dead letter boxes, one of which was a crack in a tombstone. There was something Russian about Elli, said Gouzenko, either in his background, or because he had visited Russia, or could speak the language. Elli was an important spy because he could remove from MI5 the files which dealt with Russians in London.

  Luibimov showed him parts of the telegrams from the spy, whose code name was Elli. Gouzenko said that when Elli's telegrams came in, there was always a woman present in the cipher room who read the decrypts first and, if necessary, took them straight to Stalin. I invited Ismail Akhmedov, a senior GRU officer who defected to the West at the end of the war, to Britain, and asked him who this woman could be. He said her name was Vera, and she controlled all GRU illegals in the West and worked directly under him, although security procedures were such that she never disclosed the identities of her agents to him. Alexander Foote, who worked for the GRU as an illegal in Switzerland during the war before defecting in the late 1940s, also described Vera (in his book HANDBOOK FOR SPIES) as the woman who was in charge of him when he visited Moscow for training in 1945.

  The first problem with Gouzenko's story was that over the years since he had first told it in 1945, he varied the details. "Five of MI" became MI5. The distinction was vital. Theoretically, "five of MI" could be taken as referring to Section V of MI. And, of course, in 1942 Philby was working in Section V of MI6. The other problem with Gouzenko was that by the mid-1960s he was an irretrievable alcoholic. His memory was at best unreliable for events which occurred more than twenty years before. I sent a request to the Canadian RCMP for permission to interview Gouzenko once more, but we were told that Gouzenko had been causing problems for the Canadian authorities through his alcoholism and badgering for money. They feared that further contact with him would exacerbate the problems, and that there was a high risk Gouzenko might seek to publicize the purpose of our interview with him.

  I asked the RCMP if they had the original notes of the debriefing of Gouzenko, since they were the best evidence for what precisely he had said about Elli in the first days after defecting. The RCMP officer who had looked after Gouzenko was long since dead and his notes had not been filed but almost certainly destroyed.

  The evidence in British Intelligence files only complicated the validity of Gouzenko's story still further. When Gouzenko defected, an MI6 officer, Peter Dwyer, traveled up to Canada from Washington to attend his debriefing. Dwyer sent back daily telegrams to MI6 headquarters in London outlining Gouzenko's information. Dwyer's cables were handled by the head of Soviet Counterintelligence in MI6, Kim Philby. Philby, in the following week, was to have to face the pressing problem of Volkov's almost simultaneous approach to the British in Turkey. By good luck he asked that his opposite number in MI5, Roger Hollis, should go to Canada to see Gouzenko instead of him. Was this coincidence, we wondered, or an arrangement made in the knowledge that Hollis was a fellow spy and could be trusted to muddy the waters in the Gouzenko case? We have it from VENONA, however, that the KGB was unaware of the existence of a GRU spy in MI5 when Hollis traveled to Canada and interviewed Gouzenko. The most specific and important material Gouzenko possessed related to possible spies in the atomic weapons development program, and Hollis' report dwelt on this aspect at length. The spy Elli in "five of MI" was almost a footnote. Hollis judged Gouzenko to be confused about the structure of British Intelligence. Gouzenko was wrong, and the matter was buried. This was a mistaken judgment.

  Nevertheless, the lead registered in the mind of Guy Liddell, then head of Counterespionage. In his diaries he speculated about the possible identity of Elli. Oddly, I learned of this only after Liddell's old secretary brought the diaries to me, asking that I preserve them, as Hollis had ordered that they be destroyed. Once again I paused for thought. Was this chance, or did Hollis have some other reason for suppressing Liddell's diaries?

  In 1965 we managed to break a new message out of the VENONA, which transformed the FLUENCY assessment as to whether Gouzenko's Elli was a true bill. The one week of VENONA traffic which we had broken into began on September 15, 1945, with a message to Krotov discussing, with no sense of panic, the precautions he should take to protect valuable ARGENTURA in the light of problems faced by the "neighbors" in Canada. This was clearly a reference to Gouzenko's defection, which had taken place in Canada the previous week. The "neighbors," we already knew, was the KGB jargon for the GRU, for whom Gouzenko worked. The KGB had no reason to fear that any of its agents in Britain had been compromised by Gouzenko. The GRU knew no KGB secrets and, in any case, Philby was there to monitor any unforeseen developments on a daily basis.

  However, by the end of the week's traffic, September 22, the tone of the messages is markedly different. The relaxed tone disappears. Krotov is given elaborate and detailed instructions on how to proceed with his agents. "Brush contact only" is to be employed, and meetings are to be reduced to the absolute minimum, if possible only once a month.

  The question we needed to answer was: Why had Moscow Center suddenly become so worried about the implications of Gouzenko's testimony? Gouzenko had actually defected on September 5, two weeks previously, and almost immediately the GRU would be making provisional damage assessments and the requisite precautionary arrangements for any assets they feared Gouzenko might have betrayed. By September 12 details of what Gouzenko was saying to his debriefers in Canada was flowing from Peter Dwyer back to Kim Philby in MI6 headquarters in London. Yet it is not until a week later that the KGB became suddenly worried.

  The answer lay in the MI6 files for the relevant period. On September 18-19 a telegram reached Philby's desk which first detailed Gouzenko's description of the spy code-named Elli. This was the first time Philby would have been aware of any reference to the spy in "five of MI." The actual copy of the telegram, when we examined it in the 1960s, was folded into four, with grimy edges, as if it had been placed in an inside pocket, and was initialed off HARP (Philby's initials) two days after he received it. Clearly he had removed the telegram during those two days and shown it to his Russian controller in London. No other telegram in the file dealing with Gouzenko had been treated in this manner. This was obviously the telegram which had caused such worry at the tail-end of the week's VENONA.
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br />   I asked GCHQ to conduct a search of all KGB traffic flowing from London to Moscow. We could read none of this traffic. The only matches in the VENONA we had were coming the other way, from Moscow into the KGB in London. Sudbury told me that the only noticeable thing GCHQ could detect in the traffic was a message sent on September 19-20, which they could tell was a message of the highest priority because it overrode all others on the same channel. The significance was obvious - it was sent the day after Philby had received the MI6 telegram containing Gouzenko's description of the spy Elli in "five of MI." Indeed, when GCHQ conducted a group-count analysis of the message, they were able to conclude that it corresponded to the same length as a verbatim copy of the MI6 telegram from Canada which Philby removed from the files.

  Once we realized London had sent a high-priority message to Moscow, we searched for the reply. There was only one high-priority message in the line going the other way, from Moscow to London. So far we had never been able to read this particular message properly. It was dated at the very end of the week's traffic, but because it was flashed high priority, it was received in London somewhat earlier than other messages which we read. In late 1965 Sudbury and I made a determined attack on this message; using as collateral the guess that it was a reply to a message containing the information in Philby's telegram. Eventually we succeeded in breaking it out. It read: "Consent has been obtained from the Chiefs to consult with the neighbors about Stanley's material about their affairs in Canada. Stanley's data is correct."

  I remember sitting in Sudbury's office puzzling over this translation. It made no sense. I wondered at first if we had made a mistake, but Sudbury checked the translation against the other side of the VENONA, and the trade traffic read off perfectly. There was no mistake. Philby, by the time this message was sent, had been a top-class KGB agent and head of Counterespionage in MI6 for the best part of ten years, yet it appeared as if they doubted his intelligence. Why did it need checking? What was it about Stanley's data which had thrown the KGB into such confusion?

  Only one explanation could account for all these oddities. The KGB must have been ignorant of the spy in "five of MI" controlled by the GRU. Thus, when Philby relayed to them news of this spy, and the threat to him by Gouzenko, the KGB had to obtain permission from the "Chiefs," the Politburo, to consult with the "neighbors," the GRU, to ask if they did indeed have such an asset in London. Having received assurance from the GRU that they did have such a spy, the KGB realized that the heat was likely to come on in London, so they sent back the message confirming Stanley's data, and followed it up with urgent orders to increase security.

  But who was Elli, and where did he work? He was obviously not Blunt or Philby, since we knew that they were never controlled at any time by the GRU. I asked every Russian defector in the West what the phrase "five of MI" signified. All assured me it meant MI5, not Section V of MI6 or anything else. Whoever Elli was, he must have had access to files on Russians, which placed him indisputably in F Branch, where this material was handled. The senior officer in F Branch was Roger Hollis, the very same suspect defined by Volkov's "Acting Head" allegation.

  FLUENCY spent years trying to unravel the riddle that lay in the three connected threads of Volkov's "Acting Head"; Gouzenko's "Elli"; and the VENONA with its eight cryptonyms, each of which came together in that one week in September 1945. Was it Mitchell or Hollis? Both or neither? The resemblances between these strands was uncanny. The "Acting Head" and Elli both pointed to the same two men, but the first allegation was KGB and the second GRU. The VENONA had eight spies; Volkov's list talked of seven in London, two in the Foreign Office, and five in British Intelligence. Maclean had been in Washington for a year, so he could not be one of the Foreign Office spies. Burgess probably was one of these. He was working in the Foreign Office Press Department at the relevant time. The best bet for the other seemed to be Krivitsky's "Eton and Oxford" Foreign Office spy, whom Philby used to decoy MI5 away from Maclean as the net closed on him in 1951.

  But what of the five spies in British Intelligence? One was Philby, another was Blunt, and a third Cairncross. Long might theoretically have been a fourth Volkov spy, but he was not in London at this time and he could not possibly be one of the eight VENONA cryptonyms, since he was in Germany in September 1945. That still left one Volkov spy, the "Acting Head," unaccounted for, as well as four VENONA cryptonyms, of which presumably the "Acting Head" was one, and Volkov's second Foreign Office spy another. As for Elli, there was no trace of him anywhere.

  The third FLUENCY allegation was the Skripkin case. This was given to us by Yuri Rastvorov, a second secretary at the Russian Embassy in Tokyo, who was in fact a Lieutenant-Colonel in the KGB. British Naval Intelligence made contact with Rastvorov in autumn 1953, and began negotiations for his defection. Rastvorov eventually agreed to come, provided only that he was taken straight to a British colony, such as Australia(!), rather than back to Britain. He said his reluctance to come back to Britain was because he knew that British Intelligence was penetrated, although he did not elaborate further.

  The Naval Intelligence Department (NID) arranged to fly the KGB man by RAF Transport Command plane from Tokyo to Singapore, where they intended to hand him over to the joint MI5-MI6 establishment SIFE (Security Intelligence Far East). Rastvorov was not told of these plans, but unfortunately, as the aircraft taxied to the end of the runway, a snowstorm hit Tokyo and the plane was unable to take off. While waiting for the storm to abate, the chatter of the crew revealed to Rastvorov that the plane was going to Singapore rather than Australia. He panicked and fled the aircraft, went immediately to the American Embassy, and defected to them instead.

  Sometime later the CIA reported that Rastvorov had given further details of his reasons for believing British Intelligence was penetrated. He said that a friend of his, a Lieutenant Skripkin, had approached the British in the Far East in 1946, and offered to defect. Skripkin made arrangements to return to Moscow, fetch his wife, and then defect on his next visit out of the country. However, back in Moscow, Skripkin was somehow detected by the KGB. He was approached by two KGB officers who pretended to be MI6 officers. He gave himself away, was tried and shot.

  When we looked Skripkin up in the Registry we found that he did indeed have a file. It contained copies of two reports from British Naval Intelligence in the Far East dealing with plans for Skripkin's defection, one dated May 1946, and the other July 1946. They had been stapled together and sent from SIFE for MI5's information, arriving in London during the first half of August. The file was dealt with by Roger Hollis, the Assistant Director of F Branch, and a junior officer. Hollis instructed the junior officer to make a file and place it in the Registry, where it lay until Rastvorov told his story in 1954. When the file was retrieved it was automatically attributed to Philby by MI5.

  When FLUENCY reexamined the case several new facts came to light. Firstly, when Golitsin defected in 1961, he asked us what we knew about the Skripkin case. He said that he had worked on the case in 1946, when he was a junior officer in the Counterintelligence Branch of the First Chief Directorate. He remembered that the report came to him from London, and definitely not from the Far East, at the end of 1946, when the snow was on the ground in Moscow. Without prompting, Golitsin told the story of how the two KGB men tricked Skripkin by posing as MI6 officers. Golitsin was also asked to describe the two documents he had seen. Golitsin was astonishingly accurate. The first, he said, was an account of Skripkin's sounding out, and an assessment of his worth. The second was a resume of his future plans, including an address in Moscow where he could be contacted. Golitsin also said he was certain the papers had been stapled together at the time the agent had photographed them.

  The second new fact FLUENCY had was that Philby, when questioned by Nicholas Elliott in Beirut, was asked if he had betrayed Skripkin. Philby vehemently denied having done so, not having known about the case even when given more details of it. This was most odd, because we assumed it would be in Phil
by's interest to claim credit for the case. Perhaps Philby was telling the truth on this occasion.

  I arranged for a complete search of the entire distribution of both Skripkin reports, to see if it could shed any further light on the case. The results were extremely revealing. The May report went to Naval Intelligence (Hong Kong), SIFE at Singapore, and the Naval Intelligence Department in London. They placed the report in a Naval docket and circulated it within NID, and passed a copy routinely to the Naval Section of R Division at MI6. They, in turn, passed it to Section V, who filed it. Extensive searches in the MI6 records showed that Philby was never on the distribution list.

  The July document followed the same distribution trail, except at SIFE in Singapore. It was at this point that they decided to staple together both reports, and send them routinely to MI5, where they arrived on August 8. This was the first occasion MI5 knew anything about the affair, and it was also the only place where both reports were stapled together, a fact which chimed perfectly with Golitsin's recollection. Whoever betrayed Skripkin must have been inside MI5, not MI6. That ruled out Philby, and Blunt had already left MI5 the previous year. Once again the finger pointed toward Roger Hollis, the F Branch Assistant Director who handled the Skripkin file.