There had been countless security reviews during the 1960s and 1970s, yet all had missed the most important chink in GCHQ’s armour: the armed services personnel who worked for the sigint arms of the military. Somehow, because they wore a uniform, these individuals were thought to be more reliable than civilian staff. Yet they were harder to vet because of their itinerant backgrounds, undertook the most repetitive and demoralising work, and were often posted to inhospitable locations. At these far-flung military outstations morale was often low, and operators were vulnerable to KGB recruiters. Berlin and Cyprus were subject to frequent KGB predation, and it is unlikely that all the Soviet recruitment successes have yet come to light. Brian Patchett and Douglas Britten were examples of this, and there were others yet to be uncovered.7
Growing up in Staffordshire, Geoffrey Prime suffered a difficult childhood. His mother and father had an unhappy relationship, and Prime had problems making friends at school. He was sexually assaulted by an adult relative, which probably left lasting effects upon him. After securing good ‘O’ levels, mostly in languages, Prime left St Joseph’s Catholic College, Stoke-on-Trent, and began dull work at a factory as a junior wages clerk. Two years later, in 1956, National Service in the RAF offered him a happy escape from this existence. He nurtured ambitions to train as flight crew, hoping perhaps to serve as a Radio Operator, but due to colour blindness he was relegated to duties as a storesman. Eventually his talent for languages was spotted, and he was sent to RAF Crail in Scotland to begin the Russian Language course. The fact that he was required to sign up for regular service was of no consequence to him, since he hoped to gain professional qualifications. Excelling at Russian, he was soon an acting sergeant. He was then sent to London University on an advanced Russian course, but he did not fit in well and failed the course after three months. His rank and privileges were taken from him, and he returned to a mundane life in the stores.8
Still only twenty-one, Prime secured a posting to Kenya, and was promoted back to corporal. He filled his spare time by learning Swahili, becoming fluent and speaking with the native labour force at his airbase. He was shocked by the poverty and what he saw as the colonial exploitation of Kenya. He also disliked the racist attitudes of the long-term European settlers, and on one occasion reported an officer for treating a Kenyan badly. It was at this point in his life that Prime began to take an interest in Communist radio broadcasts and to read the magazine Soviet Weekly. By the time he returned to Britain in April 1962 he was more mature, and confident enough to apply for training in languages again. He spent a year at the Joint Technical Services Language School at Tangmere in Surrey, and in May 1964 was posted to the large sigint unit at RAF Gatow in Berlin, although he was not vetted until May 1966. He carried out his function as a wireless operator on the monitoring of Russian voice transmissions well enough to resume the rank of sergeant in May 1968.9
West Berlin was in effect a rather small, inhospitable island surrounded by East Germany. Most Allied troops arrived by sealed train, and this was how Prime came to the notice of the Soviets. As his train moved slowly through a checkpoint, he threw a message offering his services as a spy at the feet of a nearby Soviet sentry. The KGB followed it up, and eventually placed a mysterious magnetic cylinder under the handle of the door of Prime’s car. Hidden inside were instructions telling him to travel on the underground train to Friedrichstrasse station in East Berlin. After several meetings he persuaded the KGB that he was sincere in his desire to work for them. Prime insisted that he was ideologically motivated, but the KGB pressed money upon him, a standard gambit designed to entrap a new agent. Knowing that Prime’s enlistment was about to run out after twelve years in the RAF, the Soviets encouraged him to apply for a post with GCHQ at Cheltenham. To his surprise he was successful, and returned to Britain.10
The KGB now began work in earnest. Prime was invited to make a secret visit back to Germany, and was instructed to change planes in Amsterdam to cover his tracks. On arrival in East Berlin he was installed in a flat at Karlshorst, the main KGB centre, where he was given a full training in spycraft. All the time he was watched, and each night he was locked in. The KGB also made clumsy attempts to explore his sexual preferences, and presumed he was gay. Prime was angered by this, protesting continually that he was offering to assist the KGB for ideological reasons. Although this was true, the money he was offered seems to have become more important to him over time.11His KGB case officers went by the cover names ‘Igor’ and ‘Valya’, and instructed him in the exotic paraphernalia of espionage, including invisible inks, one-time pads and microdots. He was supplied with a Minox camera which he later used to photograph sensitive documents, and was also given £400 which he hid, along with the equipment, in a briefcase with a concealed compartment. His handlers told him that all further meetings had to be in either Finland or Austria, and Prime chose Austria.12The last thing they did was tell him his code name, which was ‘Rowlands’.
The meetings abroad were an odd aspect of KGB tradecraft. As we have seen, other KGB agents such as Douglas Britten had local KGB officers assigned to them as handlers wherever they went. Prime’s different arrangements reflect the circumstances of his recruitment. His initial message, thrown from a troop train, had been taken by a Soviet soldier to his security officer. From there it had naturally reached the Third Directorate of the KGB, which looked after military security within Soviet Army units. Running agents in the West was not its main responsibility, but having found Prime by accident, it was not about to let him go.13Just like Western intelligence, the KGB was riven by interdepartmental jealousies. Ideally, Prime should have been run by a KGB officer based in Britain, which would have offered him the support and companionship that is critical to the successful development of a spy. However, these activities were controlled by the First Directorate of the KGB, which undertook espionage. Arguably, had Prime been handled by the First Directorate he might well have lasted longer and done much more damage.14
Once back in England, Prime began his employment with GCHQ. By night he received radio messages, and was told about a dead-letter drop location at Esher in Surrey. There he found a note of congratulations and another payment of £400. Energised, he now went to work with his Minox, copying GCHQ documents at home and initially sending them on to his control in East Berlin in the form of microdots. He communicated with his handlers through a short-wave radio, encyphering his messages using one-time pads. More dead-letter boxes were developed in the Abbey Wood area of south-east London and at Banstead railway station in Surrey. His meetings with controllers were rare and almost always abroad, reflecting Prime’s rather awkward Third Directorate ownership. He seems to have rendezvoused with them in Vienna in 1969, Ireland in 1970, Rome in 1970 and Cyprus in 1972. He preferred these personal meetings, since the dead-letter boxes could not accommodate the large number of films his espionage was producing.15Nevertheless, he made some use of dead-letter boxes in Britain. MI5’s Stella Rimington recalls that he used classic tradecraft, including an empty Coca-Cola can, to convey messages, as well as chalk marks on telegraph poles and trees.16
Although Prime now worked for GCHQ, he was not based in Cheltenham. Instead, he was part of a translator pool called the London Processing Group (LPG), a curious leftover from the MI6 Y Section which had run the Berlin tunnel operation in the 1950s. A large and varied group of translators had been assembled at the LPG offices in Carlton Gardens. Some of them were Baltic émigrés, chosen both for their excellent Russian and their hatred of the Soviet Union; some were former Indian Army officers; some were new graduates. When the Berlin tunnel was uncovered in 1956 there was still an enormous backlog of intelligence material, but by 1958 it was judged to be out of date. SIS handed its translator team on to GCHQ, where it processed the increasing flow of material from telephone intercepts and aggressive bugging by all the secret agencies. Realising that the arrival of dozens of Baltic émigrés in the Cotswolds would raise awkward questions, GCHQ decided to keep this uni
t separate. An office was found at St Dunstan’s Hill in the City of London, where it formed an ‘isolated cell’.17
Starting work there on 9 September 1968, Prime initially spent several months in the Control Unit, where all the various transcripts were checked for quality before being forwarded to Cheltenham. This gave him a wonderful overview of everything being produced at LPG.18He was part of a new wave of staff. The wartime Baltic émigrés were ageing, and could not be replenished. Their replacements were ex-services sigint people like himself, and university Russian graduates. This prompted a culture change at LPG. The work was often tiring, tedious and difficult, but the émigrés had been content to carry it out ‘in a void’, knowing nothing of its context or importance. This was not true of the younger British intake, who were bored and dissatisfied, leading to a high resignation rate. In order to motivate them they were informed about the importance and context of their work, encouraged to ask questions about the whole intelligence framework, and deliberately told more than they needed to know. Prime thrived in this new atmosphere.19
In 1975 he returned to Vienna for one of his periodic meetings with his handlers. He had important news. Most of the Baltic staff had now retired, so LPG was in the process of being moved to Cheltenham.20The KGB officers were very pleased, smelling the possibility of wider espionage within GCHQ. Their delight was expressed in a gift of £800 before Prime’s departure. On 22 March 1976 he arrived at Cheltenham and joined J30,part of J Division ‘Special Sigint’, which handled Soviet traffic. J30 was in a security-compartmentalised spur in B Block. Like many divisions it had its own vault, and Prime was one of the three senior officers in his section with access to it. It was easy for him to remove documents at will, take them home and photograph them, returning them the next day. He was also able to photocopy documents during his lunch break, since the amount of paper being used in the copiers was never checked.
On 30 June 1976, only three months after arriving at Cheltenham, Prime was promoted to Higher Linguist Specialist, and became the leader of a small group of transcribers in J25, a different part of J Division.21In November he was transferred to another unit that was more focused on the intelligence analysis of transcribed material. He also became Personal Security Supervisor for his section. Prime was moving onwards and upwards.22One of his duties in his newly elevated post was delivering occasional lectures. As a nervous and intensely introverted man he loathed this part of his job, and would become agitated about the prospect some days in advance. On 22 September 1977 he failed to show up for a lecture, and resigned shortly afterwards.23GCHQ’s Security Division believed that his decision to leave was partly caused by having to manage office staff, which he was bad at, and the lectures, ‘which terrified him’. However, it also reflected changes in his personal life.24
Back in August 1969, while still working for LPG in London, Prime had met a woman called Helena Organ through a marriage bureau, and they eventually married. The union was not successful, perhaps due to Prime’s introverted nature and peculiar sexual proclivities, which included an interest in young girls. Helena Prime found a large sum of money in their home in April 1973, and it is now thought that Prime confessed to her in outline that he was helping the Soviets, and that this was how he had accrued the money. She panicked, and not knowing where to turn, confided in a close friend, a Mrs Barsby. Remarkably, Mrs Barsby was one of Prime’s referees for his security clearance, and in time a routine positive vetting check became due. However, the security officer who visited Mrs Barsby was so abrupt, and asked her questions of such a personal nature, that she took an instant dislike to him. As a result she did not reveal anything about Helena Prime’s suspicions. Geoffrey and Helena Prime agreed to a divorce the following year.
When Prime moved to Cheltenham in 1976 he found lodgings at Laburnum Cottage in Pittville Crescent Lane, owned by a thirty-three-year-old divorcee, Rhona Ratcliffe. They got on well, and on 18 June 1977 they married. Apart from a wife, Prime also gained three young children. By all accounts he was respected by the children, took an interest in their lives and provided for them well. The changes in his personal life seemed to feed into his decision to resign from GCHQ in September of that year, and after a disastrous attempt at selling quality wines he became a taxi driver. Prime was now at something of a crossroads in his life. He later told his interrogators that at this point he twice resolved to defect to the Soviets, but did not go through with it. He no longer listened to the KGB messages, and ceased to operate as an agent. Because he was run at a distance by the Third Directorate, there was no local KGB case officer to try to dissuade him from this decision. Ken Sly, his manager at Cheltenham, was puzzled by his resignation, recalling, ‘He certainly wasn’t pushed out by the Head of his Branch and there seemed to be no reason why he should leave a very lucrative post at GCHQ.’25
In April 1980, nearly three years after he had left GCHQ, Prime was contacted again by the KGB. He travelled to see them in Vienna, and spent three pleasant days with his handlers on a river cruise to Hungary and back. The Soviets hoped to persuade him to rejoin GCHQ. In fact, some believe that he was still working for GCHQ on a casual basis, since it used taxi drivers to take certain kinds of sigint product to RAF Brize Norton airbase for despatch to the United States, and preferred ex-GCHQ employees with live security clearances to transport especially sensitive material.26Although Prime refused to rejoin GCHQ, he had been canny. Prior to his resignation he had had the foresight to take copies of five hundred secret documents, which he was then able to hand over in segments. On 16 May 1980 he delivered fifteen reels of film to the KGB in Vienna, for which he was paid £600. More than a year later, on 16 November 1981, he travelled to East Berlin, where his stock of espionage equipment was replenished. He still refused to rejoin GCHQ, but now handed over his last haul of stored material. This was top-grade stuff, signified by the fact that he now received £4,000 from the delighted Soviets. The head of GCHQ’s Security Division would later conclude that while all of Prime’s espionage was ‘very grave’, the ‘most damaging of all’ was the material he handed over in Berlin in 1981.27
Britain’s security authorities have always maintained that ‘The damage inflicted by Prime was of a very high order.’28NSA has concurred, concluding that ‘Prime’s case was of major importance for cryptology’29What exactly had he handed over to his KGB masters? When he moved from London to GCHQ Cheltenham he had become a Higher Linguist in J Division, and was given a ‘Byeman’ clearance to work on material from the new American sigint satellites. The key satellites were code-named ‘Ryolite’ and ‘Canyon’, and had first been launched in 1969. They had been designed primarily to pick up Soviet missile launches and collect telemetry from missiles, which the Soviets were not bothering to encrypt. Surprisingly, they also proved capable of collecting huge amounts of communications in the VHF and UHF wavebands that were spilling into space, and microwave telephone traffic. Space was an undiscovered sigint goldmine. By the mid-1970s there were more than a dozen of these satellites in orbit, producing a fantastic amount of intelligence on Russia, China, Vietnam and the Middle East, much of it from telephone calls. Because the ‘take’ was so enormous, NSA had been forced to ask its UKUSA allies to help process it. It was for this reason that Prime was pressed into service on ‘Canyon’ intercepts.30
Prime’s material dovetailed nicely with intelligence provided by John Walker, a US Navy Warrant Officer working on top-secret communications who had been recruited by the KGB at about the same time as him. It was also supplemented by material that the KGB was receiving from yet another spy, called Ed Boyce, who was working for TRW Inc., the American company that made some of the most secret spy satellites, and who told the Soviets about the latest ‘Argus’ and ‘Pyramider’ satellites. Argus formed part of a project that had the capability to listen in on the microwave links used in Russia’s phone network. Together, Prime, Walker and Boyce inflicted horrific damage upon Western sigint and comsec operations. In the late 1970s, after thi
rty years of effort, the Americans had begun to make some headway with high-grade Soviet diplomatic traffic, and this was one of the many secrets that was given away.31Indeed, Prime, Walker and Boyce were so productive that they spurred a major reorganisation within the KGB. Hitherto all sigint and comsec had been handled by the KGB’s Eighth Directorate. In 1969 a new Sixteenth Directorate was established to deal with the increased flow of sigint, leaving the Eighth Directorate to focus exclusively on the defensive challenge posed by Western sigint, about which it now knew a great deal.32
Prime’s most damaging revelation concerned the vast, top-secret and highly expensive Anglo–American effort to track Soviet strategic submarines. The official line was that ballistic-missile-carrying submarines were undetectable, since this reinforced the stability of deterrence for both sides in the Cold War. Secretly, however, the West was enjoying significant success in tracking these submarines. By the early 1970s this involved three technologies. The first was SOSUS, a line of undersea microphones that listened for the engines of Soviet submarines. A joint UK/US project team had identified RAF Brawdy on the coast of Wales as the ideal site for an additional SOSUS centre. Britain had provided the land and the capital costs, while the United States contributed the personnel and the equipment for the intelligence analysis.33The second element was airborne maritime patrol aircraft with sonar. The third and most hidden element, code-named ‘Project Sambo’, was efforts to track the low-frequency radio transmissions of submarines when they rose closer to the surface to communicate with their headquarters in Moscow or with supply ships. This was an integrated UKUSA effort, with NSA running twenty-one listening stations and the allies running a further eight.34Prime revealed this super-secret programme.
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