Spycatcher

by Peter Wright

  Within a year Dick White had also left, and British Intelligence had lost its two most important executives. Their contribution is hard to overvalue. They were a perfect match. Dick was the subtle interpreter of intelligence, smoothing feelings in Whitehall and Downing Street; F.J. was the tough man, sounding warnings and bringing bad news.

  I broke with them on only one issue in twenty years - high-level penetration. I think history will judge that they were never prepared to force the issue through. Consequently they allowed decisions to go unmade and the issue to fester so that it caused more damage than it ever need have done. But in other ways their contribution was massive. They became a link between the Old and the New World, and together they made British Intelligence respected throughout the world.

  - 23 -

  Hanley seemed ill at ease when he first moved into the Director-General's office. He knew he was a controversial appointment, and this made him move with a greater degree of caution than ought otherwise to have been the case. He wanted to please and reassure his political and Whitehall masters, and he made compromises a more secure man might not have.

  Hanley was a bright man, intellectually superior to F.J. But he lacked F.J.'s strength of character. I didn't have faith in him, as I had in F.J., and my separation from the office began once F.J. left. The Service began to change, and those last four years were an extended farewell.

  At first the changes were slight - silly things, like the fact that Hanley, unlike F.J., never offered lifts in his chauffeured car. But then they were more pronounced. We moved offices from Leconfield House, first to Marlborough Street and then to the drab premises on Gower Street. I suggested to Hanley that we go for a greenfield site, perhaps in Cheltenham, but he was insistent that we had to stay in London. He began to promote his own men. They were young and keen, but they were civil servants: men of safety rather than men of arms. I began to realize that a generation was passing. For all our differences, those of us involved in the great mole hunts, on whichever side, were fast disappearing. The age of heroes was being replaced by the age of mediocrity.

  Hanley summoned me in soon after taking over to talk about my position.

  "I have faith in you, Peter, and as long as I am in this job, there will be work for you here," he told me, referring to the rising resentment which had plagued my last year in D3.

  He told me he thought I should leave my job as K Branch consultant, and come and work for him personally.

  "I want you as my personal consultant on counterespionage," he told me. "You'll have an office next to mine, and you'll see every paper as before. But I want you to look at some fresh problems for me. I don't want you wrapped up in the current K Branch cases - I want you to be looking ahead."

  We drew up a new agenda, some of it to my liking, other parts not. He wanted me to continue to control the VENONA program, and agreed that we should finally initiate a comprehensive worldwide search for any remaining traffic.

  He wanted me to look at Northern Ireland.

  "I need one of your bright ideas, Peter," he told me, "see what you can do..."

  He wanted me to sit on the Computer Working Party, which was planning the transition of the MI5 Registry into the computer age, a leap into the future due to take place in the mid-1970s. D3 had given me a special insight into the use of the Registry to trace leads, and he wanted me to apply these techniques to computerization.

  At first I thought Ireland might give me a new lease of life. I made a couple of trips. It reminded me a lot of Cyprus. A fierce, insoluble conflict made worse by a vacillating British policy. At the time I first went, the Government were telling the world that the situation was getting better. I spent a fortnight reviewing the records of all explosions over a twelve-month period. I drew a graph and proved conclusively that the weight of explosives being detonated was a steeply ascending curve. So much for an improved security situation! But, as in Cyprus, the Army and the politicians simply refused to face reality.

  The only major recommendation I made was that we should devise a system of tapping the telephone lines of the Irish Republic. Lines across the border were well covered, but vital Provisional IRA communications flowed back and forth from the west coast of the Republic to Dublin. I devised a scheme for intercepting the microwaves from the attic of the British Embassy in Dublin using a device no larger than a packing case, but although MI5 endorsed the plan, the Foreign Office vetoed it. This was in the period leading up to what became the Sunningdale Agreement, and the Foreign Office were terrified that news of the plan might leak. I pointed out to them that the basic lesson from Cyprus had been the inherent instability of political solutions negotiated without a decisive security advantage, but they would not listen. It was no surprise to me when Sunningdale collapsed.

  I lost heart once the Dublin scheme fell through. It seemed to me a measure of how far the bureaucrats had taken control. Twenty years before, we would have tackled it without any worries at all. I did suggest examining the possibilities of planting booby-trapped detonators on the Provisionals. It would have been a feasible operation in conjunction with MI6, along the same lines as the Cyprus plan to plant fake receivers on Grivas. But even the MI5 management took fright, and refused to investigate the plan any further.

  "That's murder," I was told.

  "Innocent people are being killed and maimed every day," I said. "Which policy do you think the British people would like us to pursue?"

  The Irish situation was only one part of a decisive shift inside MI5 toward domestic concerns. The growth of student militancy in the 1960s gave way to industrial militancy in the early 1970s. The miners' strike of 1972, and a succession of stoppages in the motorcar industry, had a profound effect on the thinking of the Heath Government. Intelligence on domestic subversion became the overriding priority.

  This is the most sensitive area a Director-General of MI5 can get into, and it requires a strong man to maintain his own independence and that of the Service. Hanley, through the circumstances of his appointment, was ill-equipped to deal with this pressure. Whereas F.J. was always a champion of MI5's independence, Hanley resolved to do what his masters wanted, and he set about providing them with as professional and extensive a source of domestic intelligence as was possible.

  Traditionally, K Branch was MI5's prestige department and F Branch its poor relation, shunned by the brightest officers, and run shambolically by an amiable tippler. But Hanley began to pour resources and men into F Branch and away from K Branch. A whole string of brilliant counterespionage officers, including Michael McCaul, was lost forever.

  The most significant pointer to this change occurred after I retired, when Sir John Jones was appointed Director-General in 1981. He was the rising star of F Branch in Hanley's new reorganization, and when he secured the top job he was the first Director-General since Hollis to have achieved it without any personal counterespionage experience. He was an F Branch man through and through, and his appointment perfectly illustrated the decisive shift in MI5's center of gravity.

  Early on in his tenure as Director-General, Hanley called a meeting of senior staff in A Branch and F Branch to discuss the changing shape of MI5's priorities. The meeting began with a presentation from Hanley on the climate of subversion in the country, and the growth of what he termed the "far and wide left." The Prime Minister and the Home Office, he said, had left him in no doubt that they wanted a major increase in effort on this target. He then handed over to a young and ambitious F Branch officer, David Ransome, who outlined the activities and structure of a host of left-wing splinter groups, like the Workers' Revolutionary Party (WRP) and the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP).

  Hanley loved seminars, and the meeting went on for most of the day. The F Branch people wanted a relaxation in the restrictions governing the use of telephone taps and letter intercepts, and a much closer relationship with the Post Office. The enemy was diffuse, and its communications so widespread, that this was the only way they could get to grips with th
e problem. John Jones was a forceful advocate. F Branch needed all the technical resources currently at the disposal of K Branch, he claimed. Agent running was no longer viable as the principal means of coverage. For a start, he could not infiltrate his officers into these left-wing groups since many of them lived promiscuous lives, and there were some sacrifices even an MI5 officer would not make for his country. If, on the other hand, he recruited agents, there was obviously a much higher risk of publicity and scandal. The only answer was to use massive technical resources. I could see from Hanley's face that he agreed.

  I, on the other hand, pushed the value of agents.

  "Use agents if you want to keep an eye on these groups," I told Hanley later in private. "You'll be storing up problems for the future if you commit all our technical resources against them. The Post Office can't in the end be trusted as much as our own people. It's bound to go wrong."

  It was the same with the Computer Working Party. I soon realized that the main interest F Branch had in the Computer Working Party was to establish widespread computer links, principally with the National Insurance computer in Newcastle. In the past, of course, we had always been able to get material from the National Insurance records if we really wanted it. We had a couple of undercover officers posted up there who could be contacted for our files. But establishing a direct computer link was something completely different.

  I was not alone among the old guard, anti-Soviet officers in being disturbed by these new developments. We could see all that we had worked to achieve frittered away chasing these minor left-wing groupings. But more than that, the move into the computer generation signaled the relegation of the role of the individual officer. From now on we were to be data processors, scanning tens of thousands of names at the press of a button.

  "The fun has gone" was a sentiment I heard more and more in those last few years.

  Hanley himself was unable to grasp the difficulties he was getting himself into. It was easy to believe that we had the public's consent when we broke into a Soviet diplomat's house. But the wholesale surveillance of a large proportion of the population raised more than a question mark. "Big Brother" loomed.

  Veterans of D Branch viewed groups like the WRP, SWP, and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) as largely irrelevant pieces of the jigsaw. Certainly an eye should be kept on them, but we were quite satisfied they were not the major objects of KGB attack. These were the Intelligence Services, the Civil Service, and increasingly in the 1960s, the trade unions and the Labor Party.

  Since the 1960s a wealth of material about the penetration of the latter two bodies had been flowing into MI5's files, principally from two Czechoslovakian defectors named Frolik and August. They named a series of Labor Party politicians and trade union leaders as Eastern Bloc agents. Some were certainly well founded, like the case of the MP Will Owen, who admitted being paid thousands of pounds over a ten-year period to provide information to Czechoslovakian intelligence officers, and yet, when he was prosecuted in 1970, was acquitted because it was held that he had not had access to classified information, and because the Czech defector could not produce documentary evidence of what he had said at the trial.

  Tom Driberg was another MP named by the Czech defectors. I went to see Driberg myself, and he finally admitted that he was providing material to a Czech controller for money. For a while we ran Driberg on, but apart from picking up a mass of salacious detail about Labor Party peccadilloes, he had nothing of interest for us.

  His only lasting story concerned the time he lent a Cabinet Minister his flat so that the Minister could try and conduct an affair in strict privacy. Driberg was determined to find the identity of the woman who was the recipient of the Minister's favors, and one evening after the Minister had vacated, he searched the flat and found a letter addressed to a prominent female member of the Labor Party. Driberg claimed to be horrified by his discovery and raised it with the Minister concerned, suggesting that he ought to be more careful in case word of his activities ever became public! Since Driberg was certainly providing the same stories to his Czech friends, his concern for Labor Party confidentiality seemed hollow, to say the least.

  John Stonehouse was another MP who the Czech defectors claimed was working for them, but after he was interviewed in the presence of Harold Wilson, and denied all the charges, the MI5 objections against him were withdrawn.

  This was the context which shaped the fraught relations between MI5 and the Prime Minister for much of this period. Much has been written about Harold Wilson and MI5, some of it wildly inaccurate. But as far as I am concerned, the story started with the premature death of Hugh Gaitskell in 1963. Gaitskell was Wilson's predecessor as Leader of the Labor Party. I knew him personally and admired him greatly. I had met him and his family at the Blackwater Sailing Club, and I recall about a month before he died he told me that he was going to Russia.

  After he died his doctor got in touch with MI5 and asked to see somebody from the Service. Arthur Martin, as the head of Russian Counterespionage, went to see him. The doctor explained that he was disturbed by the manner of Gaitskell's death. He said that Gaitskell had died of a disease called lupus disseminata, which attacks the body's organs. He said that it was rare in temperate climates and that there was no evidence that Gaitskell had been anywhere recently where he could have contracted the disease.

  Arthur Martin suggested that I should go to Porton Down, the chemical and microbiological laboratory for the Ministry of Defense. I went to see the chief doctor in the chemical warfare laboratory, Dr. Ladell, and asked his advice. He said that nobody knew how one contracted lupus. There was some suspicion that it might be a form of fungus and he did not have the foggiest idea how one would infect somebody with the disease. I came back and made my report in these terms.

  The next development was that Golitsin told us quite independently that during the last few years of his service he had had some contacts with Department 13, which was known as the Department of Wet Affairs in the KGB. This department was responsible for organizing assassinations. He said that just before he left he knew that the KGB were planning a high-level political assassination in Europe in order to get their man into the top place. He did not know which country it was planned in but he pointed out that the chief of Department 13 was a man called General Rodin, who had been in Britain for many years and had just returned on promotion to take up the job, so he would have had good knowledge of the political scene in England. We did not know where to go next because Ladell had said that it wasn't known how the disease was contracted. I consulted Jim Angleton about the problem. He said that he would get a search made of Russian scientific papers to see whether there was any hint of what the Russians knew about this disease. A month or two later he sent us a paper about lupus which he had had translated from a Russian scientific journal. The paper was several years old and Angleton reported that there were no other papers in the Russian literature that they could find. This paper described the use of a special chemical which the Russians had found would induce lupus in experimental rats. However, it was unlikely that this particular chemical could have been used to murder Gaitskell because the quantities required to produce lupus were considerable and had to be given repeatedly. I took the paper to Ladell and, while surprised by this area of Soviet expertise, he confirmed that it was unlikely that Gaitskell could have been poisoned by the coffee and biscuits. But he pointed out that the paper was seven years old and if the Russians had continued to work on it they might have found a much better form of the chemical which would require much smaller doses and perhaps work as a one-shot drug. He told me there was no way of proving it without doing a lot of scientific work and Porton was unable to do the necessary work as it was already overloaded.

  I said I would take the matter home and discuss it with my management. Once again I wrote an account of what Ladell had said and confirmed its accuracy with him personally. Back in M15 we discussed the problem at length in the office and it was agreed that
nothing could be done unless we had further evidence of the Russians' using such a drug to assassinate people. Over the next few years I watched out for any evidence and asked Ladell also to watch out for it. Needless to say we had no further example of anybody who was in a vulnerable position dying of lupus. However, if there was a high-level leak in MI5 to the Russians, they would have been informed of our suspicions and I am sure they would have ensured that no other case came our way.

  Harold Wilson meanwhile had become Prime Minister. It was inevitable that Wilson would come to the attention of MI5. Before he became Prime Minister he worked for an East-West trading organization and paid many visits to Russia. MI5, well aware that the KGB will stop at nothing to entrap or frame visitors, were concerned that he should be well aware of the risk of being compromised by the Russians. When Wilson succeeded Gaitskell as Leader of the Labor Party, there was a further source of friction between himself and MI5. He began to surround himself with other East European emigre businessmen, some of whom had themselves been the subject of MI5's inquiries.

  After Harold Wilson became Prime Minister in 1964, Angleton made a special trip to England to see F.J., who was then director of counterespionage. Angleton came to offer us some very secret information from a source he would not name. This source alleged, according to Angleton, that Wilson was a Soviet agent. He said he would give us more detailed evidence and information if we could guarantee to keep the information inside MI5 and out of political circles. The accusation was totally incredible, but given the fact that Angleton was head of the CIA's Counterintelligence Division, we had no choice but to take it seriously. Not surprisingly the management of MI5 were deeply disturbed by the manner in which Angleton passed this information over. After consideration, they refused to accept Angleton's restrictions on the use to which we could put the information, and as a result we were not told anything more. However, Angleton's approach was recorded in the files under the code name Oatsheaf.