by Vikas Khatri
A report regarding Insat satellite sent by Dr. U.R. Rao, Secretary of the Department of Space to the Principal Secretary was discoverd. The original copy of this report was addressed to the Foreign Secretary, Romesh Bhandari. Copy of the letter dated 15.1.85 written by the Defence Ministry to the Defence Production Secretary regarding radars that could be installed at lower heights as also automatic information gathering devices.
The confidential messages sent by Central Code Language Bureau for Foreign Ministry under telex nos. 0317, 00567, 00580, 00577, 00578 and 00584 were found.
A copy of the programme of the Prime Minister for January 17, 1985 was found. It included details about persons meeting him that day. The details of the wealth of Coomar Narain as well as the assessment of the political situation prevailing in the country which was prepared by the Prime Minister’s Secretariat were also seized.
The government presented a 2100 page chargesheet and a list of 188 witnesses to the court. It contained a sworn affidavits of persons who affirmed that this gang was active since 1972. Mrs. Gandhi had issued direction in 1982 to keep a strict watch on the Prime Minister’s and President’s secretariats. The intelligence department knew about this gang from September 1984. They started tightening the noose round the necks of all these people from that time, but the matter was delayed for some time due to the assassination of
Mrs. Indira Gandhi on 31st October, 1984.
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Traitor on the Queen’s Payroll
Anthony Blunt joined Russia’s ‘Cambridge Circus’ of spies even before Donald Maclean. Guy Burgess, himself enlisted by Kim Philby, recruited his fellow homosexual in 1935. But it was before November, 1979, he was publicly unmasked as a traitor by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Though he had confessed to the espionage authorities 15 years earlier, he went unpunished. For the spy who betrayed His Majesty’s forces during World War II was, by 1964, Sir Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. And in 1946, he had spared royal blushes with a delicate, top-secret mission to Germany.
Blunt preceded his fellow Soviet agents to Trinity College, arriving in 1926. The London vicar’s son proved such a brilliant scholar that he was offered a teaching post, and was a Fellow of the college when Burgess reached Trinity. The two soon became friends, and Blunt readily agreed to Burgess’s suggestion that he work for the Russians to fight the spread of Naziism. When his Soviet spymaster ordered Burgess to London, Blunt took over his task of spotting other talented students likely to join the cause.
By 1939, Blunt too was in London as deputy director of the prestigious Courtauld Institute of Art. When war broke out, he volunteered for military intelligence. He was rejected because of his Marxist past. Astonishingly, he was then accepted by MI5 on the recommendation of an art chum. For the next five years, he undermined the counter-espionage operations of Britain’s secret services just as effectively as Kim Philby was wrecking MI6’s overseas efforts. Blunt, the spy had caught the spycatchers on the hop.
One of his first acts was to tell Moscow that, for seven years, someone in the office of Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan had been feeding information to MI5. The mole’s supply of information stopped immediately. Then Blunt revealed that MI5 had bugged the HQ of the British Communist party. And he kept the Russians informed about the names and duties of every MI5 officer; he was even in charge of the surveillance roster for a time, able to tell Moscow exactly who was watching whom.
Later, Blunt worked closely with Guy Burgess in operations against the neutral embassies in London. Burgess was recruiting Spanish, Portuguese and Scandinavian envoys as agents for MI5. Blunt was involved in the clandestine monitoring of diplomatic pouches and telephone messages. He was thus able to spot likely collaborators for MI5 and the Russians. The two men met regularly in Blunt’s rooms at the Courtauld Institute in Portman Square, preparing reports for their Soviet contact and providing secret documents for him to copy. Later in the war, these included plans for Operation Fortitude, a vital propaganda ploy to persuade the Germans that the D-Day landings would be at Pas-de-Calais, not the real target, Normandy. The Russians had an interest in prolonging the war on the Western Front – they could then grab more of Eastern Europe. Fortunately for thousands of Allied lives, they made no use of Blunt’s information.
Unusually, the Russians let Blunt leave MI5 at the end of the war. Normally a spy infiltrated into such a useful position would be left in place until discovery loomed, and it was later surmised that Blunt was freed only because there was an equally effective mole in MI5 to provide the service the Kremlin required in the cold war years. But Blunt did not leave the service of Moscow. His new job, as Surveyor of Pictures for King George VI, was perfect cover for his activities as a courier. Nobody would suspect him of running messages for Soviet spies, collecting information and leaving money in secret hiding places for other agents, passing on titbits of information gleaned in casual chats with former MI5 colleagues. Blunt now performed all of these tasks. He became an indispensible back-up to Russia’s front line agents. He even saved Philby’s skin when Burgess and Maclean fled.
After the diplomats’ disappearance in 1951, security forces wanted to inspect Burgess’s London flat. Blunt had a key, and let them in. While they searched for incriminating evidence, Blunt noticed three letters implicating both Burgess and Philby in traitorous activities. He quietly pocketed them.
The Russians knew Blunt would be questioned after the disappearance of his former colleague Burgess, and they told him to defect. Blunt, delighted with his new post and prestige as Buckingham Palace adviser, declined, saying he was confident of surviving any interrogation. Again, the Russians let him have his way. And despite 11 MI5 grillings over the next 12 years, he lived up to his promise. He was even able to continue to run messages for the Soviets, helping to reactivate Philby in 1954, and visiting him in Beirut.
Then, in 1963, his luck ran out. A brilliant young American recruited by Moscow at Cambridge in the 1930s was offered an art consultancy job in Washington by President Kennedy. Though he turned it down, he took the opportunity to clear his conscience. He admitted providing the Russians with personal appraisals of American attitudes, and named Blunt as the ‘known Soviet agent’ who had enlisted him and others.
In April, 1964, Blunt was confronted with his information by MI5 interrogator Arthur Martin. Then he was told that the Attorney General Sir John Hobson, had authorised his immunity from prosecution if he confessed.
Without knowing what Blunt had done, and forgetting the Attorney General’s rider – immunity from prosecution only if he had stopped spying in 1945 when Russia was still an ally – MI5 had wiped Blunt’s slate clean. Now he was able to confess, which he did, and name some people he had recruited. He was also able to give misleading information to protect others.
Why was immunity so readily given? It is true MI5 had no hard evidence on which to base a successful prosecution, and could justify allowing one spy off the hook if he led them to more. But no one at that stage knew the enormity of Blunt’s crimes which, if detected in war time, would have sent him to the gallows for treason. The real reason for the unpublished ‘pardon’ was Blunt’s royal connections.
In 1946, Buckingham Palace asked MI5 to nominate a trustworthy volunteer for a delicate mission in Germany. Blunt was no longer on the secret service staff, but agreed to undertake the task. He never revealed what it entailed, but the following year, having accomplished it, he was presented with the Commander of the Royal Victorian Order award. The mission may also have been a factor in his knighthood, awarded in May, 1956. In January 1983, Chapman Pincher reported in the Daily Express that MI5 officers believed the task was to retrieve records of possibly embarrassing conversations between Hitler and the Duke of Windsor – the present Queen’s uncle – during the Duke’s visits to Berlin in 1937. Blunt next day denied the report, claiming, rather implausibly, that he merely collected letters Queen Victoria wrote to her daughter, Empress Frederick of Prussia. He did not expl
ain why it was so vital to collect them so soon after the war, half a century after they were written.
Clearly, dragging the Royal Family into a spy trial in the early 1960s, when there were more than enough spy trials anyway, was not in anyone’s interests. So while less significant Soviet agents like Vassall began 18 year jail sentences, Blunt retained his Palace job, his prestige and his reputation until, in 1978, author Andrew Boyle published his book, The Climate of Treason. Blunt was not named, but his exploits were. And public opinion was so outraged at the new revelations in the Burgess, Maclean, Philby saga that
Mrs. Thatcher was forced to act and Blunt was finally, publicly unmasked. He died in March 1983, aged 76, unloved and unmourned, stripped off his titles and totally disgraced.
Blunt gave interrogators many names of other Russian
agents, mainly minor and no longer operating, but he always denied there was a so-called Fifth Man in the ‘Cambridge Circus’. According to Chapman Pincher, the security authorities know there was – and know who he was. In his book, Their Trade Is Treachery, he reveals that the spy was recruited by Burgess and Philby in Cambridge after Philby returned from Vienna, that he hid his Communist convictions to gain work at a government defence station as a scientific civil servant, and that he knew two top Russian controllers, Yuri Modin and Sergei Kondrashev, who was sent to Britain specifically to handle the scientist and George Blake.
In 1966, when confronted with evidence about his Communist past and offered immunity from prosecution, he declined to confess. As he was near retirement, he was allowed to qualify for his pension on non-secret work. Exactly who he was, and the damage he did, will have to wait, according to Pincher, until death renders the libel laws irrelevant.
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Oil Salesman Extraordinary
American spies monitoring German manoeuvres before the decisive Battle of the Rhine in 1945 stared in astonishment as Hitler’s on-the-run army prepared for its last stand. Horses were pulling ammunition trucks to the front and tanks were being dragged into position by oxen. It was final proof of the success of one of the most dangerous espionage exploits of the war. Businessman Eric Erickson had fooled the Nazi top brass for more than three years. Travelling freely through Germany, once on a pass personally provided by SS supremo Heinrich Himmler, he located and inspected vital oil and synthetic fuel refineries, then told Allied bombers the best way to destroy them. But his triumph was achieved at a tragic price. To maintain his cover, Erickson was forced to watch helplessly as a firing squad slaughtered the girl he loved.
Erickson, born in Brooklyn, New York, had become an international oil dealer and a Swedish citizen by the time war broke out. During his worldwide travels, he was often in Germany and had noticed with concern the rise of the Nazis. Then, over dinner in Stockholm with an old acquaintance, Laurence Steinhardt, the American ambassador to Russia, he was offered a way of hitting back. Steinhardt knew that, sooner or later, America would become embroiled in the fighting. Already its secret services were preparing for the day. But they needed information on the Nazi oil supply lifelines. Erickson, with fluent German, established contacts in the Reich and good reasons for going there on business, could provide it. Would he? Erickson quickly agreed to try.
For eighteen frustrating months, he carefully cultivated a
new image. He alienated all his old friends by angrily denouncing their anti-Nazi opinions, often in public. He hung pictures of Hitler in his office and home. Gradually, he built up contacts at the German Legation. As a final coup de grace, he persuaded Prince Carl Gustav Bernadotte, nephew of King Gustav, to forfeit popularity in neutral Sweden by pretending to sympathise with the Nazis. The Prince, convinced that Erickson’s mission might shorten the war, bravely agreed to dine with local German big-wigs and flatter their snobbish egos. In September 1941, Erickson was at last allowed a visa for a business trip to Germany, having overcome all distrust at his American origins. Only one other Swede knew he was playing a role – his new bride, Ingrid.
The Gestapo were waiting when his plane touched down at Berlin’s Tempelhof airport, and Obersturmbannfuhrer Baron Franz von Nordhoff gave him a severe grilling about his attitudes to Hitler, the Nazis, America and the possibility of a Nazified Sweden. The smooth-tongued spy eased his way out of every tight corner, and was allowed to continue with his tour, ostensibly to buy German oil for his country. He memorised everything that might prove useful to the Allies. He also recruited a network of twelve trusted old friends to provide him with information about the oil plants where they worked. It took time to convince them that he was really working for the Americans, and was not a Nazi agent provocateur. Many demanded a slip of paper, signed by Erickson, to prove to the Allies after the war that they had helped the cause. Erickson knew that each document would be his death warrant if it fell into German hands, but he had no choice but to sign.
Erickson travelled from Berlin to Hamburg, and on to Halle and Hanover. He memorised the exact layout of refineries, production details, nearby landmarks, the site of anti-aircraft batteries and fighter plane airfields. And on his return to Sweden, he poured the detailed data into a Dictaphone tube provided by American agents. Soon the oil Erickson had bought in exchange for iron ore credits began to arrive. Unknown to the Nazis, some of it was used to fuel British patrol boats which were running the German naval blockade of Scandinavia to collect Swedish ball-bearings and other precious parts needed in the war effort.
When the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour brought America into the war officially, Erickson came under more severe pressure. Some of his relations in the US cut all connections with the ‘Nazi-lover’. The Gestapo checked him out again, even taking the trouble to collect his records from Cornell University where he had taken an engineering degree in 1921. Once more he was able to set their minds at rest, and throughout 1942 he made several trips to Germany, sometimes with Prince Carl. He also began visiting countries under Nazi occupation, inspecting refineries commandeered for the Reich war effort. On 12 June, his information was acted on for the first time. American B-24 bombers flew from Egypt to attack the vital oil base at Ploesti, Rumania. Thereafter the businessman-spy spent hours in air raid shelters during his trips to Germany as the US Eighth Air Force accurately blasted refineries in Hamburg, Hanover, Marienburg and Ludwigshafen. During the summer of 1943, 177 heavy bombers attacked Ploesti again. Erickson and his network were able to report that they had knocked out more than 40 per cent of the plant’s refining capacity.
Erickson was living on a knife-edge. Apart from the possibility of being killed by the planes his intelligence was guiding, there was the constant fear of betrayal to the Gestapo, either by one of his agents or by accident. A crisis blew up when Hamburg contact Otto Holtz, one of the men who demanded a potentially lethal slip of paper, died unexpectedly. Erickson had to fly to Germany and retrieve the evidence from the bank vault before the man’s pro-Nazi widow or son found it. It took two nerve-racking days of tact and subterfuge.
There was little escape from the relentless pressure. Erickson dared not let himself relax for a moment. When forced to share rooms at crowded hotels with other travellers, he took pills to stay awake, afraid of giving himself away by talking in his sleep. Then, late in 1942, he met attractive brunette Marianne von Mollendorf, another secret Allied agent. He became a courier to smuggle her secrets out of Germany, and she advised him on oil contacts and political changes. At first they pretended to be lovers to cover the clandestine meetings. Later, they no longer needed to pretend.
In May 1944, waves of Allied bombers began blitzing refineries throughout the Reich. German fighters sent up to fend them off were ruthlessly shot down, 2,500 in one month alone. As the Luftwaffe ran short of planes, Nazi oil production was cut by half and more than 100,000 men diverted to repair work. The damage was a significant factor in the success of the D-Day landings and the long haul to Berlin. But it also gave Erickson a problem. The Germans now had no surplus oil to sell to Sweden. The excuse fo
r his business trips had vanished. Then he came up with a brilliant solution. Instead of buying oil, he would pose as a seller. He offered to build a synthetic fuel refinery in Sweden, safe from the bombers, to supply the creaking Nazi war machine.
German officials in Stockholm were impressed by the carefully forged dossier of plans and bogus pledges of financial backing from influential Swedes. They forwarded them to Berlin, and Erickson followed to wine and dine decision makers. It took time to convince them, and required several trips to the German capital. Late in 1944, he flew into Templehof again – and was whisked off to the worst moment of his life.
Gestapo men, waiting as usual, drove him away, but not to their massive grey HQ at 8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse. This time the destination was Moabat jail. Erickson was convinced that his espionage had been discovered, and he knew, from past the warnings, how the Nazis dealt with those who betrayed their trust. Gloomily, he watched from a cell window as a guard loaded a machine gun in the prison courtyard. Then he was led out into the sunshine. With relief he saw, he was just one of a group of foreign visitors privileged to witness some executions. But when the condemned prisoners were led out, his heart turned to stone. Among them was Marianne van Mollendorf.
Fury and fear fought within him. Did the Nazis know of their liaison? Would Marianne think he had betrayed her? Could he, even at this late stage, do anything to save her? Was this all a charade to trap him into incriminating action? Their eyes met, but Marianne showed no flicker of recognition. Erickson steeled himself, battling for self-control, as she stood proudly in line. He forced himself to watch as the machine gun cut her and the other prisoners to ribbons.
Erickson went through the motions in the days that followed. And before the end of the week, he was granted an interview about the proposed Swedish refinery by SS chief Himmler himself. It was soon clear that the Reichfuhrer was as mentally unstable as rumours suggested, but Erickson cautiously managed to persuade him of the need for a personal inspection of German synthetic fuel plants to establish exactly what would be required in Stockholm. He was given a pass which allowed unrestricted travel.