One instance when there was no official correction of a gross injustice concerns Donald McCormick @ Richard Deacon’s History of the British Secret Service (1969). ‘Very few Secret Service chiefs in modern times have been able to go against the Foreign Office,’ Deacon proclaimed. ‘Even if Menzies had wished to get rid of Philby, all the evidence suggests that the powerful pro-Philby body of opinion in the Foreign Office would still probably have overruled him and insisted on hushing the matter up and allowing Philby to continue in a minor role.’ This is rubbish. Menzies did rid SIS of Philby, as early as July 1951. There was no ‘pro-Philby body of opinion’ in the Foreign Office, powerful or otherwise. Few people knew him in the Office. The official who knew him best was Reilly, who had recently prevented him from being designated a future ‘C’. It is untrue to say that SIS in any generation was domineered or overruled by the FO. It is doubtful that the Office was consulted before Sinclair reattached Philby to SIS in 1956.39
Masterman was full of sympathy for the intelligence services’ predicament after 1967. The public were only interested in espionage ‘when any set-back or scandal crops up’, he told White. ‘Then books and articles proliferate, and all, or nearly all, of these are dangerously slanted against the two Services.’ In consequence the public was misled into believing that ‘the “Secret Service” is and always has been inefficient and out-matched by the Secret Services of other countries’. The partial disclosures of the Philby books had ‘undermine[d] British institutions’, as was their purpose, and this at a time when he was forbidden from publishing his history of the XX System. ‘To control the whole German espionage system throughout the war, as we did, is surely a much greater contribution to the credit side than Philby’s treachery is to the debit.’ Masterman’s book The Double-Cross System in the War of 1939 to 45, when finally published in 1972, proved salutary. He stressed the obstacles to peacetime counter-espionage: ‘it is immensely hard to secure proof; it is impossible to act on suspicion however strong; the whole tenor of life in this country is antagonistic to over-regimentation and to rigid classification; it is better to let many spies “run” rather than to risk one mistake’.40
Oleg Lyalin in London
Defection was not all on one side. The last section of this chapter considers Soviet bloc activities in London, and gives a wider view than that of Philby or journalistic mercenaries. Soviet Russia and the Warsaw Pact countries seemed immutable and unchallengeable in the 1960s. Neither policies nor rhetoric had moderated. The Bratislava Declaration of August 1968, following a conference of the Bulgarian, Czech, East German, Hungarian, Polish and Soviet communist parties, was described by Sir William Barker, the Ambassador in Prague, as ‘a hotch-potch of old-fashioned Soviet hate slogans combined with a re-pledging of socialist solidarity’. Power in the USSR rested less with the Soviet government and more with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, as the Foreign Secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home summarized the position in 1970. The party leadership still regarded ‘the foreign policy of the Soviet Government as only one part, and neither the major nor the determining part, of a world-wide historical and political progress which follows the laws of the class-struggle as formulated by Marxism-Leninism’. The ruling generation of Soviet leaders were, according to the then Ambassador in Moscow, Sir Duncan Wilson, ‘guilty men, guilty towards their own peoples and towards the world outside, who can best maintain their position by positing a Manichean world-struggle between good and evil’.41
To serve the cause of class struggle there was a large concentrated Soviet intelligence attack on Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. Over a hundred agents were at work, but their efforts were often ineffective, not least because the interpretation of the material they remitted to Moscow was poor: the top levels of bureaucracy were given analyses that fitted their presuppositions and did not challenge their expectations. Espionage by Soviet officials was the subject of occasional protests. Vladimir Drozdov, who had trained as a nuclear physicist, was expelled from Britain in 1968 after being caught collecting secret material from a dead drop. In December that year the PUS, Sir Paul Gore-Booth, remonstrated with the Soviet Ambassador, Mikhail Smirnovsky, about two embassy officials, I. A. Kulikov, whose expertise lay in chemical radiation, and Alexander Benyaminov, afterwards head of the Soviet delegation to the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency, both of whom sought to collect confidential information by illicit means: Smirnovsky received this oral communication with half a minute’s gloomy silence. In 1970 Sir Denis Greenhill (Gore-Booth’s successor as PUS, and Burgess’s former departmental chief in the Washington embassy) noted Britain’s unwitting slide into a position where high levels of Soviet intelligence activity were accepted. ‘This’, Greenhill said, ‘was not good enough.’ But the Labour government led by Harold Wilson did not act on Greenhill’s prompt. The parliamentary Labour party’s mistrust of the security services, which had begun with the Zinoviev letter of 1924, was entrenched. Labour leaders had an ambivalent attitude to the Soviet leadership: they behaved, said Greenhill, ‘as if they were nonconformists meeting the Pope’.42
A new phase began in the spring of 1971 when MI5 recruited a member of the London rezidentura, Oleg Lyalin, as an agent-in-place. First he was debriefed at a safe-house, 24 Collingham Gardens, in Earls Court. It was learnt that Lyalin, an expert in marksmanship and unarmed combat, had previously been used to monitor shipping off the Lithuanian coast. Now the KGB had installed him under the cover of the director of a Russian import-export firm based in Regent Street: among other tasks he ran a small spy network in London of Armenian Cypriots. Ostensibly he served a KGB section preparing for the sabotage of foreign public services, transport, communications and ‘nerve centres’ in the event of war or crises short of war. Lyalin wanted to start a new life with his Russian secretary-mistress, and began providing information on Soviet sabotage plans in London, Washington, Paris, Bonn and other European capitals, including the selection and monitoring of key individuals who would be targeted for assassination in a crisis. The flooding of the London Underground system and the destruction of the missile early-warning system were among the sabotage plans provided by Lyalin. Another was for Soviet agents posing as messengers or couriers to drop in Whitehall corridors capsules containing deadly toxins which would kill any official who trod on them.43
Probably as a result of Lyalin’s revelations, an inter-departmental conference was held on 25 May 1971 to discuss how best to counteract Soviet clandestine activities. Julian Bullard was surprised at the number of officials in attendance who seemed oblivious to the threat to national security posed by the relentless intrigues of Soviet representatives in London. Sir Antony Part of the Department of Trade and Industry asked how much actual harm was done by the Russians. Sir Martin Furnival Jones of MI5 replied that there was evidence of continuous penetration of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Ministry of Defence, the army, navy and air force, the Labour party, trade unions and the Board of Trade. ‘It was difficult to say how much damage was being done,’ Furnival Jones said, ‘but it was equally difficult to believe that the Russians maintained such a large establishment for no profit.’ He estimated, and Sir John Rennie of SIS agreed, that thirty or forty Soviet intelligence officers were running agents in government organizations or in technical industries concerned with the Concorde supersonic jet aircraft, the Bristol Olympus 593 aero-engine, nuclear energy and computer electronics. Sir Thomas Brimelow of the FCO confirmed that recent cases differed from those of Philby and Blake, ‘and involved the cultivation of commercial or defence officials’.44
Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Foreign Secretary in the Heath government of 1970–4, ranks with Bevin as one of the great post-war holders of that post. His steady, strong and shrewd approach was indicated by an axiom that he sent to Duncan Wilson in Moscow in 1971: ‘A forthcoming style, accompanied by strict attention to our own self-interest on matters of substance, is a dictate of common sense.’ His excellent manners hid his ruthlessness, which
he had displayed most decisively in 1963 when he encouraged Harold Macmillan to resign as Prime Minister in a fit of morbid hypochondria about a non-existent cancer, hastened to announce the resignation before Macmillan’s entourage could dissuade him and then positioned himself, with the killer determination of a usurping duke in the Wars of the Roses, to snatch Macmillan’s crown. Home as Foreign Secretary took Greenhill’s point that the blatancy of Soviet espionage was too insulting to be tolerated.45
For the previous quarter-century Britain had been the sick man of Europe, rather as Ottoman Turkey had been in the nineteenth century, but in the course of 1971 its institutions began a phase of invigorating renewal and rebounding confidence. In June the negotiations for Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community (EEC) were concluded, and in October the terms were approved by parliament. Eight years earlier, as a dutiful Soviet citizen, Burgess had opposed European unity and regarded the EEC as a conspiratorial power bloc run by France and Germany. ‘Pleased by collapse of menacing Common Market negotiations,’ he wrote a few months before his death. He equated European economic strength with exploitation, poverty and ‘frightful beastliness … for undeveloped countries’. Macmillan, Gladwyn Jebb and other British diplomatists involved in the European negotiations had all ‘lied like an American division of marines’.46
That had been the Moscow line. The Kremlin had watched the dissolution of the British Empire and saw the rump of the United Kingdom as a medium-sized, developed European country possessing special, if diminishing, capabilities in international finance and some useful technology. Russian leaders felt apprehension that a European community including Britain might disrupt their plans. Among the pro-Europeans in Britain there were opposing apprehensions about the country staying out of the EEC. ‘If’, said the economist-businessman Lord Crowther in July 1971, ‘we are left in isolation, then we shall get more and more inbred, and I have no doubt that we shall go on telling ourselves every day how British is best, how good we are, and how the world looks to our leadership, as we wait in the queue for our daily bread ration.’ Three months later, as chairman of the Royal Commission on the Constitution, Crowther told the House of Lords: ‘It is a great mistake to believe that there is only one level upon which sovereignty and decision-making can operate. We would never have slipped into this mistake if we did not live in such a compact island, and if we were not served by such an efficient civil service; we would never have slipped into the delusion that it is possible to take all important decisions in one place, here.’ Old diplomatic prohibitions and political inhibitions were being jettisoned: there was a sense of abundant new possibilities.47
The confidence that came from imminent EEC membership emboldened the British government’s handling of Soviet espionage. On 30 July Douglas-Home and the Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, briefed the Prime Minister, Edward Heath: between 120 and 200 Soviet spies were operating in Britain; altogether 517 Soviet officials had pretexts to operate in the country, including 189 members of the Soviet embassy, 121 members of the Soviet trade delegation, 73 contract inspectors and 134 individuals working for the Soviet press agency TASS, the state airline Aeroflot, the travel agency Intourist or the Moscow Narodny Bank. Although Maudling had treated previous MI5 reports of Soviet espionage as exaggerated, he joined Douglas-Home in convincing Heath that the numbers of Soviet officials were unacceptable. Heath was nervous of any incidents that might distract his government from his primary aim of gaining British admission to the EEC, but he was also rattled by Chapman Pincher’s mischievous pieces in the Daily Express under such headlines as ‘Give our spies cloaks and daggers again’, claiming that SIS had been ‘downgraded below the safe limit’. It was settled that the bulk of the Soviet agents must be booted out in Operation FOOT.48
Only the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Burke Trend, knew the extent to which resources were being diverted – in the paranoia engendered by the defection of three of the Cambridge spies – into internal ‘mole’ hunts for Soviet penetration agents within the Security Service. No Cabinet minister was aware of this consuming obsession indulged by Peter Wright and his fellow inquisitors. In accordance with the zealots’ insistence, MI5 believed that there must be KGB moles within the Service, despite Lyalin’s assurance that the KGB regarded it as impenetrable. The Service therefore welcomed Douglas-Home’s proposal of drastic action because it could not cope with all the Soviet agents in England while it was being undermined by internal mole hunts.49
Neither the Soviet embassy nor the KGB had any inkling of what was afoot. If there were Soviet penetration agents in government departments, they were either junior or in the wrong sections. On 30 August there were two coincidental events. A junior naval officer, David Bingham, admitted supplying material on submarines to the Soviets in order to raise money for his wife’s shopping expeditions. That same day Lyalin was arrested for drunk driving in Tottenham Court Road by a police constable who had no idea of the events he was setting in train. Knowing that he would be repatriated in disgrace by his chiefs, Lyalin defected immediately and was hurried to an MI5 safe-house. Preparations for Operation FOOT were accelerated. On 24 September Greenhill, as PUS, informed the Soviet embassy that ninety named officials must leave the country within a fortnight, and that another fifteen with re-entry visas would not be let back within its borders. A rump of some forty intelligence officers was allowed to remain. ‘Moscow Centre was stunned,’ as Oleg Gordievsky recorded in the major history of the KGB of which he was co-author. ‘In 1971 the golden age of KGB operations [in Britain] came to an end. The London residency never recovered from the expulsions. Contrary to the popular myths generated by the “media” revelations about Soviet moles, during the next fourteen years, up to Gordievsky’s defection, the KGB found it more difficult to collect high-grade intelligence in London than in almost any other western capital.’50
Press analysis of Lyalin’s defection and Operation FOOT was low-grade. Right-wing newspapers banged their hollow nationalist drums. The coverage by Patrick Keatley, diplomatic correspondent of the Guardian, veered into the slipstream of the Soviet embassy’s propaganda counter-offensive. He traduced Lyalin as a ‘playboy spy’, indulging in ‘a steady round of expense-account dinners’, spending up to £100 a night on ‘vodka and caviar’ sessions. Whitehall was embarrassed, ‘with officials silent on orders from 10 Downing Street’, when Lyalin’s drunk driving and statuesque girlfriend were publicized, because – according to Keatley – these infractions were enough to discredit him as a trustworthy source. Keatley predicted that Heath would ‘come under fire’ from MPs ‘for his deliberate technique of a block expulsion of more than a hundred officials – the first time that this has been used by Britain against any Power’. Keatley’s slant was that Lyalin had made the government vulnerable: ‘the sharpest criticism is likely to centre on the character of the KGB defector’, who had been the informant in preparing the expulsion lists and ‘is now seen as a person of considerable instability’. This character assassination was a tried Stalinist technique. As a KGB diversionary tactic during Operation FOOT, Philby in Moscow named SIS officers in the Arab world and accused Britain of espionage and disinformation against the Brandt government in West Germany.51
In view of the resounding success of Operation FOOT, the reaction of some MPs was shocking. The Labour MP Arthur Lewis used an adjournment debate to vilify Lyalin as ‘a traitor’, ‘a member of a murder-squad’, ‘a self-confessed spy and saboteur’, ‘having some liaison with a beautiful Russian blonde’ and soiled by ‘escapades in night-clubs’. Lyalin had not been prosecuted for drunk driving because the security services claimed that a court appearance would endanger his life. ‘The general public do not believe it,’ Lewis protested. If Lyalin’s life was truly at risk, ‘he would not need a driving licence because he cannot travel around’. How unjust that this scandal-ridden foreigner should escape scot-free when ‘many fine British citizens, with fine records in the Services and medals for gallantry, are sometimes pulle
d up after military reunions for driving under the influence of drink’!52
The Soviet bloc had realized that it would be easier to extract confidences from politicians and other informants if they were approached by representatives of supposedly Soviet satellite states such as Czechoslovakia: sources could salve their uneasy consciences by saying that they were not actually helping the Russians. The Czechs in 1971 had four Labour MPs on their payroll, the money-grubbing Will Owen @ LEE (who was nicknamed ‘Greedy Bastard’ by his Czech handlers), the fantasist John Stonehouse (subsequently imprisoned for fraud), the delinquent Tom Driberg @ CROCODILE, and another codenamed GUSTAV, whose identity has not been settled. They also used and paid Ray Mawby, who had made a short-term stir when, as a state-educated electrician, he had been elected in 1955 as Tory MP for the safe seat of Totnes. Mawby was a bovine, inarticulate drudge, who appreciated the low prices in the Commons bars and liked gambling in glitzy casinos. For some ten years he provided the Czechs with information on Commons security, informed on his fellow MPs and leaked documents, at £100 a meeting, but contacts were broken after the expulsions of 1971. Mawby appeared on television in 1967, while he was on the Czech payroll, with the false claim that most British spies who had spied for the communists were homosexual, and urging that homosexual acts should remain illegal for people covered by the Official Secrets Act even if such acts were partially decriminalized for the civilian population of England and Wales. (Men serving in the army, navy, RAF and merchant navy, or living in Scotland and Northern Ireland, were exempt from the Sexual Offences Act of 1967.)
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