The secreting of microphones and other eavesdropping devices unconnected with the telephone system in private homes, offices and hotels used to be a facility freely available to the counter-espionage authorities, but a warrant is now required. (In the case of hotels, ships, aircraft and similar locations, the permission of the owners is invariably sought and is rarely refused.)
In an ideal world, all privacy should be sacrosanct, but, so long as the KGB is so aggressively hostile, the nation’s counter-forces must have some powers of retaliation. But my latest inquiries convince me that there is probably no country in the world where those powers are now so carefully controlled.
Surprisingly, perhaps, there is some degree of self-restrictive practice inside MI5. A device called the probe microphone, enabling an eavesdropper to hear through a party wall, was hailed as a great advance by MI5 surveillance men, but the legal department obstructed its use for a year on the grounds that it constituted trespass!
Much has been made of the fact that facilities have been established so that thousands of telephones can be tapped at the same time. The purpose of this precaution is purely defensive, for use in a war emergency when surveillance of thousands of known suspects would be essential and would be covered, legally, by emergency government powers. I have described how pro-Russian subversion units – of which many members are known, while others would have to be discovered – have been established to sabotage communications and other essential defence services. Nobody in his right mind can doubt the wisdom of setting up counter-measures to defeat them, but the manpower to tap thousands of telephones in peacetime would be prohibitive. The tapping and recording can be automated, but the results have to be analysed by MI5 case officers, of whom there are surprisingly few.
MI5 is the smallest counter-espionage organisation of any major military power. Its precise size is an official secret, but I would be surprised if its numbers exceed 2,000, including typists and doormen. There are some out-stations, but most of the staff are based in the new and imposing headquarters in Curzon Street, where the heart of the operation is the computerised filing system containing quickly accessible details of about a million individuals, plus a further million files on organisations and other matters of security interest.
In his speech in the Blunt debate, Edward Heath suggested that the hand of the security services should be strengthened. I would endorse that because, as Britain’s military inferiority increases, compared with Russia’s, the need for counter-intelligence is intensified if limited forces are to be used effectively. However, I can find no evidence that Heath’s government did anything much to increase the size of MI5.
Successive governments have kept MI5 small by restricting the money made available to it. This normally increases annually, save when the security services have to take their share of government spending cuts but only to keep pace with inflation. Admittedly, the published figure is not the true sum, which is larger and hidden in other votes for purposes of secrecy, but it is still only a tiny fraction of that available to the KGB.
There is a further disadvantage to the small size of MI5. Everybody knows everybody else at the officer level, so what cannot be learned through official channels can often be gleaned on the ‘old boy’ net. This is a situation that can be exploited by a spy who manages to gain entry, as both Blunt and Burgess showed. The same was true of the secret service during the war. Through friendly colleagues, Philby, whose ‘need to know’ was then restricted to matters affecting Spain and Portugal, managed to read the ‘source books’ giving the names of British agents in the Soviet Union, with terrible consequences for them.
Before Sir Percy Sillitoe, the former chief constable, was placed in charge of MI5 in 1946, the organisation was totally independent. Its staff was paid in cash and paid no tax, and salaries could be at the whim of the director general. There was an independent auditor to ensure against embezzlement, but no detailed returns were made to the government and recently retired officers can remember how the directors general of both MI5 and the secret service had hoards of gold sovereigns, which they could hand out for special operations.
That situation ended when Sillitoe demanded that MI5 be expanded. The Treasury agreed but only on condition that it could impose controls. As a result, MI5 now works largely to civil service rules and pay scales. Retirement is enforced at sixty, while in the secret service it is normally required at fifty-five because, by that time, it is virtually certain that an officer’s cover will have been blown, making it impossible to send him abroad on intelligence duties. Only in the case of the senior directors is exception made. The pay scales and career structure are not conducive to attracting top talent, as was shown by the few candidates prepared to take on the director generalship of either MI5 or the secret service when both jobs became vacant recently.
This has not stopped the ‘Permanent Secretaries Club’ – as the chief Whitehall mandarins are collectively called – from trying to grab both jobs for civil servants in need of promotion. When Sir Martin Furnival Jones retired from the director generalship of MI5 in 1974, his natural successor was Michael Hanley, his deputy. The ‘club’ immediately put up its own candidate, a deputy undersecretary at the Home Office, in the hope that it would then have more control over the security service. The Prime Minister, Edward Heath, chose Hanley, but the ‘club’ then came forward with another candidate from the Home Office. They exerted maximum pressure, which was overcome only when Heath was informed that the man being so strongly promoted had been a close friend of both Maclean and Burgess.
I suspect that the ‘club’s’ frustration was being expressed when a senior civil servant slyly told me that on Michael Hanley’s first visit abroad, to Cyprus, he had torn ligaments in both of his legs and would spend several months in a wheelchair. I kept that secret.
Many civil servants would support a proposition, frequently made in the past and likely to be resurrected, that there should be a ministry for security and intelligence – that is, uniting MI5 and the secret service – with a minister responsible to Parliament in control. There is something to be said in theory for such a union. When I telephoned Sir Maurice Oldfield, formerly director general of the secret service, when he was appointed controller of security in Northern Ireland, I asked him if he would also be concerned with intelligence there. ‘The two are inseparable,’ he replied.
Nevertheless, the objections to such a ministry are legion. MI5 and the secret service are already suffering from excessive bureaucracy, and the assumption of responsibility for security by a single ministry would almost certainly make penetration of all the other ministries much easier. Currently, each ministry is responsible for its own security, with a small staff for that purpose. Whitehall and its offshoots are now so vast that a single extra ministry trying to cope with the security problems of all the rest would be unwieldy and almost certainly less effective. Admittedly, the KGB, which is responsible for both security and intelligence, functions like an enormous ministry but succeeds, in spite of that, through its unlimited powers and total immunity from accountability to the Soviet people.
There has been much talk about other ways of making the security and espionage services more accountable to Parliament and to the public, but it is difficult to see how this could be done in view of the degree of secrecy necessary if they are to fulfil their functions. Even those intelligence officers who deplore the way the penetration of MI5 and the secret service by the KGB has been concealed are totally convinced that such organisations cannot operate except in total secrecy. The kind of public inquiry to which the American CIA was subjected following the Watergate scandal did enormous and probably irreparable damage to the defences of the western world, if only by discouraging the assistance given in the past by businessmen and other travellers abroad. No businessman is likely to volunteer valuable intelligence if the name of his commercial organisation operating behind the Iron Curtain is suddenly publicised, enabling the Russians to brand it as a nest of spies,
with the consequent arrest of members of its staff, chosen at random by the KGB.
Presumably, any inquiry would concern itself with the efficiency of the secret organisations, and this would not be possible without some critical examination of their methods. The secret methods employed by MI5 and the secret service are regarded as being so sensitive that even Sir Derek Rayner, a close friend of the Prime Minister cleared for security at every level because of his business-efficiency work in the Defence Ministry and membership of the Security Commission, was barred from access to them. When he was given a free range among the Whitehall departments of state to recommend cost-saving improvements in efficiency, both MI5 and the secret service were excluded.
With the increasing reliance on technological advances, which give one side a valuable superiority until they are detected and countered, secrecy concerning methods of counter-surveillance and espionage is more vital than ever. Not long ago, the ‘sweepers’, employed by the Foreign Office to search for microphones and other concealed listening devices that might be planted by an adversary, asked MI5 for details of the ingenious ways in which it hides such instruments in its counterespionage operations, hoping that such knowledge would assist them in their work, which has the same end in mind. In the interest of security, MI5 declined to reveal its secrets and, when the sweepers induced senior Foreign Office officials to complain on their behalf to the Foreign Secretary, he upheld MI5’s objection. If sweepers, who are cleared for the highest security classifications, cannot safely be told such secrets, how could they be divulged to any lay inquiry board?
As MI5’s Jim Skardon maintains after his long experience, the most productive source of intelligence and of leaks is still the wagging tongue. For this reason, any efficient security service limits the number of people permitted access to its secrets on the principle of absolute need to know. Any inquiry would have to infringe this principle, for it also provides a convenient excuse for officials to cover up their failures and embarrassments.
A director general can all too easily convince himself that, concerning some particular event, neither the Home Secretary nor the Prime Minister really needs to know, a situation that has certainly been exploited in the past. After the navy secrets spy trials, Harold Macmillan was assured that no serious leakages of information to the Russians had taken place. He suspected that he was being bamboozled, and he was right. Later, when Adm. Sir Ray Lygo was vice chief of the naval staff, he told me that the leakages had been very severe and their ravages had taken years to repair. There was serious failure to inform Macmillan about the Profumo affair, while Sir Anthony Eden was kept in the dark about the Crabb naval espionage endeavour and Sir Alec Douglas-Home was not told about Blunt.
James Callaghan, when Prime Minister, was fully briefed on the cases of Hollis and other suspects only after he called in the heads of MI5 and the secret service to discuss another matter – an allegation by myself that Sir Harold Wilson had been under surveillance both while in opposition and while in office.
In their turn, of course, prime ministers and other politicians have convinced themselves that, particularly as regards spy scandals, the public has had no need to know.
There is a further reason, which is political as well as security orientated, why the need-to-know principle would have to be rigidly applied concerning methods. Because of the ever-increasing swing toward technical systems of espionage and counter-espionage, such as radio interception, code breaking and reconnaissance satellites, it would be necessary for any inquiry to include an examination of the work of GCHQ, with its huge headquarters at Cheltenham and numerous out-stations. This would not only involve an infringement of secrets of the highest order but a major difficulty would be created by the fact that the organisation runs in close collaboration with the US National Security Agency, which has stations in Britain.
Only those wishing to assist the KGB and its offshoots would want to impair that collaboration, which provides British intelligence with the results of American satellite reconnaissance beyond the financial means of this nation. In this context, the stupidity – or worse – of those Labour politicians who are agitating for the removal of American military bases from British soil deserves the fullest exposure. Not only would the expulsion of the Americans from Britain make the reinforcement of US troops in Europe almost impossible, but it would inevitably deprive the United Kingdom of satellite intelligence.
There is suspicion inside MI5 concerning the efficiency of the security arrangements at GCHQ. It is of major interest to the KGB, yet there is no evidence of recent efforts to insinuate any new recruits there, the implication being that there is sufficient penetration already.
A former senior officer of MI5, who worked at GCHQ for a couple of years after his retirement, has described the security situation there as ‘a shambles’, with people taking out secret papers and few checks at the gate to prevent espionage or sabotage. GCHQ is the heart of British intelligence work, and, though its costs are secret, they must run into hundreds of millions of pounds annually.
A further political problem would be created by the close links between the British security services and the CIA. Too close an inquiry would be interpreted as an infringement of Anglo–American agreements on security and intelligence, which require that no joint information shall be passed to any third party without joint agreement.
I have no doubt that left-wing MPs would be delighted to probe the CIA’s operations in Britain, which are modest but necessary in view of the huge American investment in bases and other defensive facilities here. In theory, the CIA cannot carry out any counterintelligence operations in Britain without informing MI5, but it is known to have done so.
The KGB’s intense interest in western methods of scientific intelligence gathering, some of which are incredibly ingenious, has been amply demonstrated by the upsurge and success of its espionage effort at establishments, installations and factories in the United States involving the suborning and recruitment of local-born traitors. In 1977, William Kampiles, a junior watch officer at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, stole a technical manual containing performance details of a highly secret reconnaissance satellite called the KH 11, which has since become popularly known as the ‘Keyhole’ satellite because of its close-up espionage capabilities. The satellite, which cost the American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, can take high-resolution photographs and transmit them instantaneously to ground stations, and was believed to be far in advance of anything available to the Soviet Union. The watch officer, then aged twenty-three, sold the manual to a Soviet agent for $3,000! For this, he was sentenced to forty years’ imprisonment.
In the recent spy case centred on another CIA officer, David Barnett, sentenced to eighteen years in jail, the KGB controller had been operating as a third secretary in the Soviet embassy in Washington. From Barnett, who had worked for the CIA for twelve years, the KGB received the names of CIA undercover agents and details of CIA operations abroad in return for about $100,000. His most damaging offence had been to sell the Russians an account of Operation Habrink, by which the CIA had secured valuable technical details about new Soviet weapons after they had been supplied to another country. The KGB pressed Barnett to rejoin the CIA, from which he had resigned, or to secure work with the Senate Intelligence Committee. Fortunately, its efforts in both directions failed.
An even more fertile ground for planting agents under diplomatic cover has been opened up and exploited by the KGB in the shape of the UN organisation in New York. Several defectors from that organisation have listed the spies active there. They include Viktor Lessiovsky, who is now a senior aide to Kurt Waldheim, the secretary general himself. In April 1978, the highest-ranking Soviet officer in the UN, Arkady Shevchenko, sought asylum in the United States and revealed the extent of the Russian conspiracy to manipulate the UN for espionage and subversion. Three months later, the FBI arrested three KGB agents using UN cover to obtain secret plans for American antisubmarine warfar
e. Soon afterward Vladimir Bezun, a GRU officer posing as a diplomat in the Soviet UN mission in Geneva, defected to London and named five KGB officers working under UN cover in Geneva and New York. Shevchenko stated publicly, ‘The UN became one of the best places for KGB intelligence activities. The KGB considers the UN the tallest observation tower in the western world for intelligence activity.’
This KGB concentration on the United States does not mean that its efforts against the United Kingdom have consequently been reduced. It is a canard, perhaps deriving from Soviet supporters, that Britain, having no defence secrets of any consequence, is no longer a target worth close KGB attention. British defence research, which continues to make a rich contribution to western defence, still attracts intense KGB interest. Almost every new defector provides evidence that the Soviet bloc embassies and trade missions are infiltrated with intelligence agents who still continue to recruit British traitors.
Leakages of information about British nuclear weapons have been suspected by both the Defence Ministry and MI5 because of information derived from radio intercepts and defectors. Investigations have so far yielded no names, but the information could only have come from a high-level Defence Ministry or Service source.
KGB interest in Britain has, in fact, been enhanced by its intensified activity in the United States. In the event of the military conflict in Europe, which some Kremlin politicians still believe to be inevitable, Britain would be the main reinforcement base for the American forces, without which NATO would have no hope of defensive success. It is therefore a key area – probably the key area – for sabotage, subversion and quick elimination.
Unquestionably, the Soviet leaders would prefer to remove the American component of NATO without the use of military force, and there are relentless political pressures to this end. Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet Foreign Secretary, is known to have said privately in Moscow that the Soviet government is not much interested in the strategic arms limitation talks (SALT), which are mainly for stringing the Americans along and producing some concessions of value in Russia. For the Kremlin, agreement on a European Security Conference is far more important – as a step toward eliminating US forces from Europe on the spurious grounds that, since Russia means no harm, they are no longer needed.
Their Trade Is Treachery Page 32