GCHQ

by Richard Aldrich

  Remarkably, after much debate GCHQ got its money. After 1962, the budgets of most of Britain’s overseas departments went down by 10 per cent, but the sigint budget went up by the same amount. This was an astonishing victory delivered by Clive Loehnis and his deputy Joe Hooper. They were greatly helped by the fact that Burke Trend, a fan of secret service, moved from the Treasury to replace Norman Brook as Cabinet Secretary in 1963. Trend and Hampshire had eventually concluded that asking ‘value for money’ questions about intelligence warning of a future Soviet attack, or indeed about what was now a key element of the Anglo–American relationship, was perhaps wrongheaded. These were core activities that Britain had to continue.87 The Treasury’s biggest worry was airborne sigint, which, as we shall see, remained a perennial problem for decades to come.88

  Hampshire, having finished his labyrinthine task, left his chair at University College London for Princeton University in the autumn of 1963. Indeed, his recent sojourn with NSA in Maryland had allowed a little time for a preliminary visit to Princeton in neighbouring New Jersey.89 Doubtless, he thought this would be the end of his involvement in the shadowy world of intelligence. However, this was not the case. A few years later he was visited by Peter Wright, the famed ‘Spycatcher’ of MI5. Wright had gradually discovered that while many of the more notorious Soviet agents in Britain had been recruited through Cambridge by figures like Anthony Blunt, there was also a more elusive Oxford ring, so he was now looking for further KGB moles. Remarkably, suspicion had fallen upon Hampshire himself.

  The irony was intense. Not only had Hampshire been selected to look at the innermost workings of the super-secret Anglo–American code-breaking partnership, he had also presided over decisions on technical support for Wright’s own spy-catching activities. Hampshire deals with this rather obliquely in his memoir, recalling, ‘Some of my friends who had also worked in secret intelligence during the war were shown to have been secret agents of the Soviet Union.’ He then adds: ‘I was interrogated about them and their motives.’ This is something of an understatement. During his time as an Oxford Fellow, then during his wartime intelligence work, and yet again after the war, Hampshire had continually moved in the circle of ‘Stalin’s Englishmen’. Moreover, he himself had been directly under suspicion.90 Amazingly, as an Oxford Fellow in the 1930s he had known both Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess rather well.91 Indeed, his friendship with Burgess went back to their time together at the elite Lockers Park prep school.92 After the war Hampshire had moved to the Foreign Office for three years before returning to academia. There he worked in the private office of Hector McNeil, the Assistant Under-Secretary of State, and shared an office with his old friend Guy Burgess.93

  The very idea that Hampshire might have been a KGB agent was unthinkable to the authorities. Accordingly, it was only in 1967 that Wright finally secured permission to interview him at Princeton.94 To his obvious discomfiture Hampshire was interviewed a second time in 1970, but eventually Sir Dick White, the distinguished head of SIS, concluded that the accusations against him were false. White was almost certainly correct. Although superficially left-wing, Hampshire was fundamentally conservative and a great believer in British institutions. Indeed, his most famous philosophical work, on Spinoza and the nature of free will, implicitly rejected Marxist determinism. Nevertheless, had his past friendships been known in 1962, it is unlikely that he would have been selected to review GCHQ.95

  Later, when these issues were revealed to the public, Hampshire complained about the ‘hypocritical and slimy McCarthyism of the press’. His wartime MI5 colleague Herbert Hart, also the subject of suspicion, hit out at the popular obsession with ‘spy pornography’. The two men were representative of a wide circle of people, most of them honest toilers in the vineyards of intelligence, who had worked alongside Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess and Kim Philby during the war, and now felt distinctly uncomfortable. The end of the Macmillan era and the arrival of Harold Wilson as Prime Minister in 1964 signalled a change of climate. GCHQ was moving from an era of tight-lipped secrecy towards a period of revelations and further spy scandals. Turbulent waters lay ahead.96

  12

  Harold Wilson – Security Scandals and Spy Revelations

  The result is the worst press any P.M. has had in my day…

  Cecil King, newspaper proprietor, 25 June 19671

  For British intelligence, the 1960s was a decade of cultural transformation. Journalists who had been brought up to respect wartime secrecy were discovering that Cold War espionage was a hot subject. It had already burst onto the front pages with the shooting down of Gary Powers’ U-2 over Russia in May 1960 and the CIA’s ill-fated Bay of Pigs adventure in February 1961, which attempted to unseat Fidel Castro in Cuba. The Profumo affair gripped the British public imagination in the second half of 1963, while the journalist Chapman Pincher broke the news of Britain’s secret access to overseas cables in what became known as the ‘D-Notice affair’ in 1967. The following year was marked by the appearance of Kim Philby’s dishonest, but delicious, autobiography, written after his defection to Moscow.

  Harold Wilson’s first government was beset by security scandals. This was something he had fervently hoped to avoid. In 1963, while still leader of the opposition, Wilson had enjoyed taunting Harold Macmillan over the Profumo scandal, the Vassall spy case which involved a British civil servant passing naval secrets to the Soviets, and Philby’s defection. Macmillan resigned a month after Lord Denning released his report on the Profumo affair, proof, if any were needed, that espionage and security were areas of serious political liability. Having seen Macmillan squirm under investigation in the House of Commons, Wilson made a mental note that, once in office, he would toughen up on security in the hope of avoiding the same fate. He also developed an unhealthy fascination with security, and with MI5 in particular.2 By the summer of 1963 his senior Shadow Ministers had already detected the emerging Wilson hard line on secret matters. Tony Benn noted in his diary:

  Dick Crossman phoned this morning and we had a talk about security. The Party is making a great fuss about this over the Vassall, Profumo and Philby cases…I am afraid it’s giving the impression that we want to institute a police state. Dick, who worked for Intelligence during the war, is a fierce security man and said that, as a Minister, he would think it right that his phones should be tapped and all his letters opened. This is quite mad. I am terrified that George Wigg may be made Minister for Security and given power over all our lives.3

  In October 1964 the general election swept Wilson to power and, much as Benn had predicted, George Wigg was given the post of Paymaster General, but with a modified remit, serving as Wilson’s intelligence scout and security enforcer. Wigg was a close friend of the Prime Minister, and his particular task was to probe the security arrangements of every department of state in the hope of protecting Wilson from Profumo-like incidents.4

  Wigg soon turned his attention to GCHQ, which he examined as part of a review of the Foreign Office, although he noted that it was ‘autonomous to a considerable extent’. The first thing that struck him was the sheer size and complexity of the organisation. British sigint now employed some 11,500 staff, of whom eight thousand were from GCHQ, while the other 3,500 were service personnel. Indeed, the sigint personnel outnumbered the Diplomatic Service. Almost everyone at Cheltenham was now subject to positive vetting except for a small number of ancillary staff. Despite the fact that GCHQ had a team of twenty-one investigating officers who carried this out, there was a backlog of over a thousand staff, resulting in part from a large transfer of Radio Operators who had recently come over from the services under civilianisation.5

  Wigg was satisfied that the ‘comintsums’ and other types of sigint reports that were circulated to decision-makers were well protected because of the tight security procedures laid down by UKUSA. He was also content that overall planning papers produced at GCHQ were fairly secure. However, the specialist branches produced a lot of working material that was not cat
alogued, and the existence of which was indeed only really known to those who generated it. Tracking this was almost impossible. Wigg was impressed by the new Director, Joe Hooper, who had succeeded Loehnis, but less so by the Security Officer, William Carey-Foster, who was approaching retirement. Although Michael Stewart, the Foreign Secretary, commended his review, Wigg had in fact done a poor job. He had taken the security procedures of the military intercept organisations that supported GCHQ at face value, and did not bother to visit any of the overseas listening stations. It was these far-flung stations, as we shall see, that proved to be the weak links.6

  Wigg’s lack of interest in the service-run intercept stations was doubly surprising, since Berlin had seen its first British sigint defection in 1963. Because of the Profumo affair, the newspapers barely noticed the curious case of a Sergeant Brian Patchett, a sigint specialist who was serving with an obscure signals unit on the outskirts of the British Zone of Berlin. Like one third of the servicemen in the Royal Signals, his trade was interception. Patchett had taken the Sigint Traffic Analysts Course in January 1959, and later completed the Russian Linguist Voice Interceptor Course. He had then been attached to GCHQ at Cheltenham before being sent to a listening unit run by 13 Signals Regiment at the Gatow airbase in Berlin. In both locations he was engaged in shift work, like the civilian Radio Operators who were now being transferred to GCHQ’s control.7 However, Berlin was regarded as a difficult posting, and so remained militarised.

  After his defection to the Soviets, Patchett’s case was examined by John Drew with a view to extracting lessons from it. Drew had been an MI5 ‘Double Cross’ officer during the war, helping to mastermind the deception activities that cloaked the D-Day landings of 1944. In his opinion, the vetting arrangements for the ‘sensitive unit’ to which Patchett had been assigned were disastrously weak. Although Patchett was vetted on enlistment, no interviews with his referees were undertaken, and reliance was placed on documents only. His positive vetting status was routinely reviewed in 1963, and he was promoted to the substantive rank of Sergeant on 20 June that year. He defected to the Soviets only two weeks later, on 2 July. For Drew, the whole case turned on one fact: Patchett was known throughout his unit to be a bed-wetter. Drew was astounded that Patchett’s commanding officer had discovered this halfway through his training in interception duties in 1960. Despite being referred to a psychiatrist, Patchett was pronounced emotionally fit for duty. He did not defect to the Soviets because of any enthusiasm for Communism. He was simply miserable and depressed in Berlin, and was considered ‘a lone wolf with no particular friends’. He had made four applications to be posted elsewhere, all of which were denied. As he explained to a German girlfriend of brief duration, when he decided to run away from the Army he simply found it easier to run east than to run west. There was a clear security failure here, since the service personnel who collected sigint were not vetted to the same level as the staff of GCHQ.8

  Sigint specialists in Germany pored over the Patchett case, and rightly identified a system under pressure after the end of National Service. A chronic shortage of security personnel had led to a breakdown in vetting. Interceptors were beginning their sigint training before they had even been negatively vetted, i.e. before MI5 had run a simple background check for negative material recorded in their files. They were even beginning operational service in Germany and Cyprus before they had been positively vetted, and were offered little warning about the fact that they might be approached by the KGB or the GRU. It was clear that they needed full briefings with real-life case studies. Issues like Patchett’s ‘bed-wetting’ were always lurking in the background, and officials demanded a selection process that would eliminate people with emotional disorders from duty in sensitive units.9 However, most of the sensible suggestions were undercut by the extreme shortage of sigint intercept personnel. Sigint managers insisted that the idea of not posting servicemen under the age of twenty-one to places like Berlin was just impossible. They also disliked the idea of some sort of special psychiatric assessment for sigint staff, which they thought would have an adverse effect on recruitment.10 Only the Army Intelligence Corps introduced psychological testing for all personnel on sensitive postings.11

  Even as officials debated the Patchett case, further sigint security disasters were in the making. In 1962 Douglas Britten, a thirty-year-old RAF technician, began a six-year spying career for the Soviets. Britten was no ordinary RAF technician. He had joined the Air Force in May 1949, at the age of seventeen, and had spent twenty years as sigint ‘special operator’ in some of the most important collection stations. After initial training he was sent to Habbaniya in Iraq between 1950 and 1953. He then worked briefly in Egypt, before returning home in 1954. He served with 264 Signals Unit at Ayios Nikolaos in Cyprus between 1956 and 1959, and then again between 1962 and 1966, before being posted to RAF Digby. There was little he did not know about the business of sigint interception. Yet the serious nature of the Britten case was carefully hidden from the public, which was not told about his real duties. The authorities were helped by the fact that he pleaded guilty, ensuring a short trial of which parts were held ‘in camera’ – away from the public gaze.

  Born in Northampton in 1931, Douglas Britten came from a troubled and impoverished background. In 1940 his father joined the RAF and was posted to Bolton for training. There he struck up a relationship with a woman in the house where he was billeted. Britten, aged nine at the time, later recalled violent scenes between his father and his mother, who was a semi-invalid. Eventually she decamped to live with his grandmother. At fourteen, Britten was attending Wellingborough Junior Technical College. However, money was short, so his mother withdrew him from school and he went to work in a series of dull engineering jobs, where he learned little. By the time he was seventeen he had developed an interest in radio, and was attending technical college in the evenings. The Air Force seemed an obvious avenue of escape. After his training he was posted to the RAF station at Hammersley Hayes in Cheadle, which had continued its wartime role as a key sigint collection site, and now focused on the Soviet Air Force.12

  Britten married a member of WRAF in 1953, and by 1956 they had three daughters. However, there were continual problems with accommodation and money. He recalled that by the late 1950s ‘I had begun to get into debt and arguments with my wife became quite common.’ He even tried to get farm work on the weekends around RAF Digby in Lincolnshire. Like Patchett before him, Britten was a rather inadequate individual in difficult personal circumstances who was often working in exposed locations. Exactly how the KGB identified him as a likely recruit is not known.13 However, he was an enthusiastic radio ham, and in late 1962, while visiting the Science Museum in London, he had been approached by a Russian who said he was called ‘Yuri’. Yuri claimed he was also a ham radio operator, and addressed Britten by his radio call-sign, ‘Golf Three Kilo Foxtrot Lima’. They chatted for a little about radios, and Yuri asked Britten if he could obtain for him the operator’s handbook for a Racal 1154 transmitter, as he was from Ukraine and obtaining it there was difficult. This seemed a fairly innocent request, since that radio was fairly out of date, and was commercially available. They agreed to meet about a month later at Southgate tube station.

  At that next meeting, the sinister hallmarks of KGB tradecraft were already visible. Britten recalled that Yuri ‘walked past me and said to follow him at twenty-metre distances’. In a manner very similar to the William Marshall case more than ten years before, they then ‘went all around the houses’, the classic procedure whereby a KGB officer tries to ‘dry clean’ himself and check whether he is under surveillance. After a long time Yuri bent down as if to tie his shoelace. He asked Britten if he had been able to obtain the operator’s handbook, and Britten confessed that he hadn’t. Yuri nevertheless handed him an envelope containing £10. Britten mentioned that he was shortly to be posted to Cyprus, and Yuri responded by making arrangements for ‘a friend’ to meet him when he arrived there.
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br />   In December 1962, Britten duly arrived in Cyprus. His KGB instructions were to wait outside the Trianon Bar in Famagusta at two in the afternoon on the first Saturday of that month. Again, classic tradecraft was in evidence, with prearranged code words. On the appointed day, just as Yuri had explained, his ‘friend’ appeared and offered the agreed phrase:

  ‘Can you tell me the way to Desdemona’s Gardens?’

  Britten replied: ‘Go by taxi to the Land Gate in the old city of Famagusta’

  The KGB officer then responded: ‘Greetings from Alex.’

  Britten was asked to show up outside Barclays Bank at 5 o’clock that afternoon. His new KGB controller, who called himself ‘Vasiley’, turned up in a Ford Taunas with a Russian driver, and they went for a long ride up the Panhandle in eastern Cyprus, before returning to Famagusta. Vasiley took things slowly, asking Britten about his family and his accommodation before giving him an envelope with money and arranging to meet him again two months later, in February 1963.14

  Britten now had second thoughts. Suddenly ‘It really dawned on me exactly what I was getting involved in and the consequences that would follow when and if I was found out.’ He resolved to break off all contact with the KGB. However, he found himself getting into debt once more. His marriage was increasingly troubled, and he had started to drink. He resumed contact, and at the next meeting things turned nasty. Vasiley turned up with a woman who he introduced as his wife. The woman, almost certainly another KGB officer, produced a photograph of Britten receiving money from Yuri in London. They said that if he failed to cooperate, ‘this photo would be sent to the British intelligence services and I could expect some rough treatment at their hands’. With a sinking feeling he realised that he had been trapped. Everything he had been warned about in security lectures came flooding back. He continued to meet his controllers every four months. All the time ‘pressure was being applied’. The KGB had clearly identified him as a weak character, and this was now a coercive relationship.15