Witchfinder

by Andrew Williams

  1945 The fall of Berlin in May marks the end of the war in Europe. The wartime alliance crumbles. An ‘Iron Curtain’ divides the Communist Eastern bloc from the countries of the West: the Cold War begins.

  1945, July–August. At the Potsdam Conference, President Harry Truman warns Soviet leader Joseph Stalin that the United States is preparing to use ‘the most powerful explosive’ yet witnessed by man. Stalin pretends he knows nothing of the weapon, even though British, American and Canadian agents working for the Soviet Union have supplied his scientists with technical information on the development of the bomb. On 6 August America drops an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima and, three days later, another on Nagasaki.

  1945 On 5 September IGOR GOUZENKO, a cipher clerk working for Soviet military intelligence in Canada, defects with more than a hundred classified documents. GOUZENKO reveals the presence of Soviet spies inside the atomic bomb project, and a double agent, code name ELLI, in British intelligence.

  1945 On 19 September, a senior Soviet intelligence officer in Istanbul, KONSTANTIN VOLKOV, tries to do the same. VOLKOV warns that one of its most valuable assets is a mole in a British counter-intelligence section in London, but his defection is discovered and he is executed before he can reveal more.

  1948–49 In the first major crisis of the Cold War, the Soviet Union tries to enforce a blockade of West Berlin to starve it into submission. The United States and its allies supply the city from the air.

  1949–51 PHILBY serves as MI6 liaison officer in Washington, a position that offers him remarkable access to CIA intelligence. He supplements official briefings by gathering information at alcoholic lunches with his friend, senior CIA officer JAMES JESUS ANGLETON.

  1950 In March, British physicist and atom spy KLAUS FUCHS is convicted of supplying important technical intelligence on the development of the hydrogen bomb to his Soviet case officer.

  1951 PHILBY warns MACLEAN that the Americans are close to identifying him as the Soviet agent inside the British Foreign Office. In May, MACLEAN and BURGESS escape to Moscow. Senior MI5 officers believe PHILBY tipped them off, and he is recalled to London. It is the end of his career as an MI6 officer, but not the last of his contacts with the Service. His friends in Six and the CIA – NICHOLAS ELLIOTT and JAMES JESUS ANGLETON – refuse to believe he is a Soviet spy.

  1950–54 Fear of Communist spies and ‘enemies within’ reach a new height in the United States with the pursuit and investigation of prominent people in government, the army and the arts by the House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee and Senator JOE MCCARTHY.

  1953 DICK WHITE becomes director general of the Security Service (MI5).

  1954 JAMES JESUS ANGLETON becomes chief of Counter-intelligence at the CIA and PETER WRIGHT joins MI5 as a scientific officer.

  1955 An MI6 investigation exonerates PHILBY of involvement in the defection of BURGESS and MACLEAN. But in America the FBI leaks information to a newspaper, naming PHILBY as a Soviet spy – ‘The Third Man’. The charge is refuted in the British Parliament by Foreign Secretary HAROLD MACMILLAN.

  1956, February. BURGESS and MACLEAN are revealed at a press conference in Moscow. In response, BURGESS’s friend, GORONWY REES, writes a series of sensational and salacious articles about ‘the greatest traitor of all’ for the People. His pieces imply a ring of Communist spies in British society that ‘must be rooted out’. But REES is the first casualty when he is forced to resign as principal of Aberystwyth University.

  1956 DICK WHITE is appointed chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and is replaced as director general of the Security Service (MI5) by his deputy, ROGER HOLLIS.

  1956 In November, Soviet forces crush the Hungarian Rising.

  1961, January. CIA agent and deputy head of Polish military counter-intelligence, MICHAEL GOLENIEWSKI – code name SNIPER – defects to the United States. He brings intelligence that leads to the arrest of five members of a spy ring at a British defence establishment. SNIPER’s intelligence also helps to expose MI6 officer GEORGE BLAKE as a KGB double agent.

  1961, August. Work begins on what will become the Berlin Wall.

  1961, December. KGB Major ANATOLI GOLITSYN defects to the United States with evidence of Soviet penetration of both MI6 and the CIA. In the spring of 1962, MI5 officer ARTHUR MARTIN debriefs GOLITSYN in Washington. The intelligence he provides leads to the exposure of a clerk at the British Admiralty, JOHN VASSALL, as a Soviet spy, and helps to strengthen the case against PHILBY.

  1962, June. KGB Lieutenant Colonel YURI NOSENKO becomes a CIA agent. He remains in place until February 1964.

  1962, October. The deployment of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba leads to a direct confrontation with the United States. The Cuban Missile Crisis comes close to provoking full-scale nuclear war. The crisis ends when the Soviet Union agrees to remove its missiles in return for a guarantee that America will not invade Cuba.

  1963, January. British Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell dies of a mysterious illness and is replaced on 14 February by Harold Wilson.

  1963, January. MI6 officer NICHOLAS ELLIOTT is sent to Beirut to confront PHILBY with the fresh evidence of his guilt. PHILBY admits he was a spy but tries to deny working for the KGB after 1946. He agrees to return to Britain and make a full confession only to ensure he has time to arrange his escape to Moscow.

  Sources

  ‘Your spies are here. My methodology has uncovered them,’ Anatoli Golitsyn intoned darkly, pointing his finger like the witch-finder at two files on the table in front of him.

  From Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer, Peter Wright

  RESEARCHING WITCHFINDER WAS a challenge because British intelligence services files from the sixties are not available to the average Joe. Well-groomed files will be released in due course, no doubt, but I have drawn almost exclusively on published histories and memoirs. They offer only a partial view of the events and characters in my story. The task was made more difficult because Witchfinder is set in Jim Angleton’s ‘wilderness of mirrors’ where – in the words of Peter Wright – ‘defectors are false, lies are truth, truth lies, and the reflections leave you dazzled and confused’.

  I have charted my own course, used my imagination to fill gaps, changed some events and omitted others, and in the interests of the story compressed an eight-year-long investigation into penetration of the British intelligence services into three. The FLUENCY working party was established to examine evidence of penetration of both services; in my story it is responsible for the wider D3 investigation into suspected Communists too. British MP Bernard Floud committed suicide in 1967; Phoebe Pool in 1971. Graham Mitchell was questioned by Martin Furnival Jones in 1970, Roger Hollis in 1971. Sir Dick White resigned as chief of the Secret Intelligence Service in 1968. Hungarian patriot, Béla Bajomi and his network existed, and the survivors were convinced they were betrayed by a double agent in the British Secret Intelligence Service, but their operation was not given the code name SUBALTERN; that belonged to another MI6 agent operation in Vienna after the war.

  For simplicity I refer throughout the book to ‘the Service’ to indicate both the British Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).

  A Soviet intelligence agency was founded just six weeks after the Bolshevik Revolution, and was known by nine different names in the forty years that followed, the last in 1954 when it became the KGB. I use the name KGB throughout the story. The cryptonyms of its agents in Britain changed regularly: Guy Burgess was known as MÄDCHEN and HICKS; Anthony Blunt, TONY and JOHNSON. I take just one name. The term ‘mole’ to indicate a penetration or sleeper agent was popularised in the seventies by John le Carré, and is now so well-known I chose to use it too.

  In Witchfinder, Harry Vaughan believes the mysterious mole in British intelligence, ELLI, is a mistake, and that ELLI and STANLEY are one and the same double agent: Kim Philby. Harry was wrong. It was not until 1982 that MI6 was able to iden
tify one of Anthony Blunt’s recruits, Leo Long, as agent ELLI. The intelligence was supplied by its own greatly prized agent, ex-KGB colonel, Oleg Gordievsky. Not only was Roger Hollis finally cleared of all suspicion, but Gordievsky was also able to confirm that John Cairncross was the Fifth Man.

  Labour politician Tom Driberg’s contacts with MI5 and the KGB are a matter of dispute. KGB senior archivist Vasili Mitrokhin claimed the MP was working for the organisation; Peter Wright, that he gave intelligence to a Czech controller for money. There’s no evidence to suggest he offered more ‘intelligence’ than could be found in a good newspaper.

  Much has been made of the contacts between British left wingers and Eastern Bloc ‘diplomats’ during the Cold War. Driberg is just one of a number of Labour Party politicians and trade unionists who have been accused of acting as Soviet ‘agents’, ‘agents of influence’ or ‘confidential contacts’. Gordievsky reported to his handlers in the early 1980s that there was a file in Moscow Centre on British Labour Party leader Michael Foot, code name BOOT, and that he accepted money for information. The allegations were printed in The Sunday Times in 1995 and Foot sued and won damages for a ‘McCarthyite smear’. Nevertheless, charges against Foot and others have not gone away. Ben Macintyre claims in his excellent book, The Spy and the Traitor, that the KGB made payments to Foot totalling £1500, a sum equivalent to £37,000 today, and that the money was probably used to prop up the left-wing Tribune newspaper.

  Foot believed it was his duty to understand what was happening behind the iron curtain, and, where possible, reach across it with the hand of friendship. The British intelligence services naturally viewed any approach to or from the other side with suspicion, especially if money was changing hands. But Foot did not hide his contacts with Eastern Bloc ‘diplomats’, he was critical of the Kremlin, he did not betray his country, leaked no state secrets, and he did not break the law.

  Macintyre suggests elsewhere in his book that the KGB in London exaggerated its contacts and that much of the information it sent to Moscow in the early 1980s was ‘pure invention’. London was a good posting, and to hold on to a plumb position it was important to point to successes. In fact, Gordievsky reported to his handlers at MI6 that Soviet penetration of the British establishment was ‘pitiful’, and that ‘paper agents’ were kept ‘on the books’ so that KGB officers in London looked busy.

  The Director General of MI5 informed the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, that Michael Foot, the leader of Her Majesty’s opposition, was once a KGB agent. Armstrong considered the evidence and chose very wisely not to take it to Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Spies are often economical with the truth.

  Wright’s account of the hunt for spies and Communists in positions of influence in British society in his book Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer was my most important source. It purports to tell – in the words of its jacket – the ‘devastating story of a government agency (MI5) which operated outside propriety and the law’. Spycatcher is a self-serving, deceitful memoir, yet it offers an extraordinary insight into the motives and actions of counter-intelligence officers on both sides of the Atlantic in the years after Kim Philby’s defection. The British government’s attempt to suppress its publication thirty years ago helped turn it into a bestseller and spread its author’s conspiracy theories around the globe.

  In his authorised history of MI5 – The Defence of the Realm – Christopher Andrew quotes from an internal review of the Hollis and Mitchell investigations conducted after the publication of Spycatcher. The review concluded there was ‘a lack of intellectual rigour in some of the leading investigators,’ and that Peter Wright was ‘dishonest’ and ‘did not scruple to invent evidence where none existed’. Above all, it condemned the baleful influence of Golitsyn who realised in 1963 that ‘he had told all he knew and set about developing his theory of massive and co-ordinated Soviet deception, supported by high-level penetration of all Western intelligence and security services.’

  Wright, Martin and de Mowbray never stopped believing Soviet agents and Communists were at the heart of British intelligence, of British life. As Christopher Andrew observes, ‘conspiracy theory of the kind contracted by all three is an incurable condition’. Angleton remained a sufferer, too. In a briefing to CIA officers in 1974 he spoke of a massive Soviet deception campaign, and of British prime minister Harold Wilson ‘as a servant of the Soviet Union’ – and he continued to peddle the myth that Wilson was helped to power by the murder of his predecessor, Gaitskell.

  Like the witchfinders of previous centuries, Angleton and Wright, and their coterie of counter-intelligence officers, believed they possessed powers of understanding that placed them above senior colleagues, the law and the will of Parliament. ‘I certainly didn’t, and most people in MI5 didn’t have a duty to Parliament,’ Wright observed to an interviewer in 1988. ‘It’s up to us to stop Russians getting control of the British government.’ In the last pages of Spycatcher he laments the retirement of the ‘great mole hunts’ as ‘the passing’ of an ‘age of heroes’. Now we know those ‘great’ mole hunters did as much to undermine efficiency and trust in the intelligence services as Kim Philby.

  I would like to acknowledge my debt to the following authors. Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, and The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB; Tony Benn, Out of the Wilderness, Diaries 1963–67; Roy Berkeley, A Spy’s London; Tom Bower, The Perfect English Spy: Sir Dick White and the Secret War, 1935–90; Andrew Boyle, The Climate of Treason: Five Who Spied for Russia; Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives; Anthony Cavendish, Inside Intelligence; Gordon Corera, MI6: Life and Death in the British Secret Service; John Costello, Mask of Treachery; Richard Crossman, The Crossman Diaries: Selections from the diaries of a Cabinet Minister 1964–70; Nicholas Elliott, Never Judge A Man By his Umbrella; Jenifer Hart, Ask Me No More; Michael Holzman, James Jesus Angleton, the CIA, and the Craft of Counter-intelligence; Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909–1949; John le Carré, The Pigeon Tunnel; David Leigh, The Wilson Plot; Andrew Lownie, Stalin’s Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess; Ben Macintyre, A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, and The Spy and the Traitor; Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s Master Spy Hunter; David Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors; Yuri Modin, My 5 Cambridge Friends, By Their KGB Controller; Martin Pearce, Spy Master: The Life of Britain’s Most Decorated Cold War Spy and Head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield; Kim Philby, My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy; Roland Philipps, A Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean; Ben Pimlott, Harold Wilson; Chapman Pincher, Their Trade is Treachery; Goronwy Rees, Sketches in Autobiography; Jenny Rees, Looking for Mr Nobody: The Secret Life of Goronwy Rees; Stella Rimington, Open Secret: The Autobiography of the Former Director-General of MI5; Nigel West, Mask: MI5’s Penetration of The Communist Party of Great Britain; Francis Wheen, The Soul of Indiscretion: Tom Driberg, Poet, Philanderer, Legislator and Outlaw; Peter Wright, Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer; The US National Security Agency Central Security Service (https://www.nsa/gov); Philip M. Williams, Hugh Gaitskell.

  From Jenny Rees’s moving biography – Looking for Mr Nobody: The Secret Life of Goronwy Rees – I drew, not only the character and colour of her father and his friends, but the quote from W. B. Yeats’s Vacillation that appears at the front of the book. Lines from The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas: The Centenary Edition are quoted with permission of The Dylan Thomas Trust, and from T.S. Eliot’s Collected Poems 1909–1962 with the permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. Let’s Sing Again, words and music by Jimmy McHugh and Gus Kahn © 1936, is reproduced by permission of Cotton Club Publishing/EMI Music Publishing Ltd.

  Finally, I would like to thank the following Party members: agent Julian Alexander, for recruiting and encouraging me; my editor-controller at Hodder, Nick Sayers, for his patience, his advice, his
rigour; and my network of friends and family for everything else – especially Kate, Lachlan and Finn.

  One man. One chance.

  A gripping thriller set in a world of brutal contrasts in which treachery is everywhere and nothing is what it seems.

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