When interrogated in prison, Vassall described how, early in 1962, Karpekov had told him to stop spying and had taken his cameras away without giving any reason. To MI5, the explanation was obvious: the KGB had realised that Golitsin knew something about Vassall, so, after he had defected to the CIA, the spy had to be deactivated.
If this situation had continued and Vassall had been strong enough to keep his mouth shut, he could not have been prosecuted because there would have been no legal evidence against him. Instead, as Vassall explained, Karpekov reactivated him a few weeks later, in May, by giving him back his cameras and insisting that he must produce more secret material than ever. This made it certain that Vassall would be caught.
By the time of Vassall’s arrest, the MI5 case officers had come around to believing that he must also have been responsible for the leakage of the NATO documents attributed by Golitsin to ‘No. 2’, the much more high-level source.
A more detailed statement by Nosenko, the later defector, had specified that the homosexual spy had given the KGB many more NATO secrets, so the investigators had assumed that Golitsin must have been mistaken. That was how the situation rested until the end of 1964 when James Angleton, the CIA’s most experienced counter-espionage officer, became convinced that Nosenko, who by that time had physically defected to the United States, was a KGB plant who had been sent over to offset the damage done by Golitsin and, later, for disinformation purposes connected with the assassination of President Kennedy. In that light, Vassall was questioned again in prison. He convinced his questioners that he had never seen two of the top-secret NATO documents, and it was quickly proved that they had never reached the civil lord’s office.
If Nosenko was a disinformation agent still working for the KGB, he could have put the final finger on Vassall in such a way that he could be sacrificed to save the more valuable high-level spy whom Golitsin had described as ‘No. 2’.
Under hostile interrogation in the United States, Nosenko admitted that he had lied about his rank in the KGB and that he had not really been a personal friend of Gribanov. Furthermore, there seemed to be no reason, from the type of KGB posts he had really occupied, why he should know anything about Vassall unless he had been told it for a KGB purpose before ‘defecting’ to America. It therefore seemed odds on that Nosenko had been sent over by the KGB to induce MI5 to put the blame for all the naval espionage on Vassall, whose arrest had then been deliberately assured when Karpekov had ordered him to resume his spying activities.
Though Nosenko was eventually rated as genuine by the CIA after prolonged inquiries, the consensus in MI5 remains that he was a plant.
The MI5 case officers applied again for permission to interrogate the suspect admiral, but Hollis refused and declared the case closed. In the interim he had ordered all the papers on the ‘No. 2’ case to be destroyed, a most unusual procedure.
The case officers were limited to concluding that, following Golitsin’s disclosures, the KGB knew that MI5 had been conducting two separate inquiries. If they were right, that information could have reached the KGB only from a very high-level source because very few people knew of the suspicions concerning ‘No. 2’. It could be significant that the MI5 officer who eventually came under deepest suspicion himself had doubly ensured that ‘No. 2’ could never be arrested.
There can be little doubt that, while Vassall was the most despicable type of traitor, betraying his country through fear and for money, he was convicted of some offences that he had not committed. Perhaps that was what he meant when, in his autobiography, he stated that he had been told that he had been ‘a pawn in the complex game of international strategy’.
Exactly how much about the Vassall case the Prime Minister of the day, Harold Macmillan, was told may never be known but the publicity about it, resulting in a tribunal of inquiry through which two journalists were imprisoned for refusing to reveal their sources, sickened him. As his memoirs At the End of the Day show, he wrote in his diary – no doubt with his Birch Grove pheasant shoot in mind – his view regarding any captured spy: ‘Unhappily, you can’t bury him out of sight, as keepers do with foxes.’
Macmillan seemed to have a premonition that the Vassall case would be a political disaster, according to information given to me by Lord Carrington. When Carrington, then First Lord of the Admiralty, informed his Prime Minister rather triumphantly that the spy had been arrested, Macmillan responded by saying, ‘Oh that’s bad news! Very bad news! You know, you should never catch a spy. Discover him and then control him but never catch him. A spy causes far more trouble when he’s caught.’
• • •
I have already dealt with the defection of Philby so far as it involved MI5 and the suspicions concerning Hollis. In that same month, January 1963, MI5 had become involved in another mystery, with historic political consequences: the unexpected death of Hugh Gaitskell, the leader of the Labour opposition.
It had seemed certain that Gaitskell, who was only fifty-six, would become the next Labour Prime Minister but, in mid-December 1962, he was admitted to hospital with what was diagnosed as virus pneumonia. After little more than a week, he was discharged and pronounced fit enough to go ahead with a visit to Moscow at the personal invitation of Khrushchev. That same evening, however, he had a relapse and early in January was admitted to a different hospital, where he died on the eighteenth. Autopsy showed that his terminal illness had been due to a rare complaint called systemic lupus erythematosus affecting the heart and kidneys, though it was not recorded as such on the death certificate. I am now in a position to add some new information concerning this event.
When the KGB defector Anatoli Golitsin arrived in Britain for thorough debriefing by MI5, one of the first things he volunteered was a statement that, before defecting, he had heard from the chief of the Northern European section of the KGB that the organisation was planning to murder a leader of an opposition party in his area. On being told of Gaitskell’s death, he asked if the Labour leader had been to the Soviet embassy just before his illness. He was told that, in fact, Gaitskell had visited the Russian consulate in search of a visa for his projected trip to Moscow. Though he had gone by appointment, he had been kept waiting half an hour and had been given coffee and biscuits.
One of the doctors who treated Gaitskell was so puzzled by his symptoms that he contacted MI5 to report the fact that the disease that had killed him was very rare in temperate zones, especially in males and particularly so in those over forty. It transpired that Gaitskell himself may have had his suspicions because he had told the doctor about the coffee and biscuits. The police were also sufficiently perturbed to contact MI5.
As a result, a security officer was sent down to the Microbiological Research Establishment – the so-called Germ-warfare Station – and then to the Chemical Defence Establishment at Porton on Salisbury Plain, but experts there could offer no information suggesting that the Russians knew how to induce the disease, which is not an infection but caused by the victim’s own antibodies.
By that time Golitsin had rushed back to the United States following the publicity over ‘Dolnytsin’, as I have described. There he discussed the circumstances of Gaitskell’s death with James Angleton, who appreciated that the elimination of a committed right-wing, genuinely democratic socialist would have been in Russia’s interests, particularly as his likely successor, Harold Wilson, was believed to be of the left.
Angleton therefore commissioned a thorough search of all the published medical literature on the fatal disease and came up with the startling information that Soviet medical researchers had published three academic papers describing how they had produced a drug that, when administered, reproduced the fatal heart and kidney symptoms.
Calculations showed that the dosage required was too large for it to have been administered surreptitiously in coffee and biscuits, but the research was already seven years old, so there could have been developments that had reduced the dosage. And, if the KGB had decided that the
drug was useful for its assassination purposes, no further papers would have been published.
The case officers concluded that Gaitskell might well have been murdered, but, failing the arrival of some new defector who knew all the facts, the truth would never be known in the West. Hollis showed scant interest in the inquiries, but his successor, Sir Martin Furnival Jones, remained concerned about the circumstances of Gaitskell’s death and its long-term consequences. Gaitskell’s widow and most of his colleagues are satisfied that he died a natural death, which may well have been the case, but it is generally conceded that, whatever its cause, the Labour leader’s death was the single most important historic factor in the party’s continuing swing to the left.
CHAPTER 9
HOLLIS AND PROFUMO
WHILE IT WAS Gaitskell’s untimely death that brought Harold Wilson to the leadership of the Labour Party, it was other factors that brought him to the premiership. One of these was the so-called Profumo affair, a minor sex scandal that was expertly exploited by the Labour opposition and even more brilliantly manipulated by the KGB.
History is likely to agree that the Conservative government’s apparent mishandling of the affair hastened, and perhaps occasioned, the premature retirement of Harold Macmillan as Prime Minister in the autumn of 1963. When Macmillan’s much less charismatic successor, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, went to the polls in October 1964, Wilson beat him by only four seats. Without the burden of the Profumo affair, which in the less permissive climate of that time was ill received by many voters, the Tories might have won, especially as Macmillan might still have been at the helm.
In Wilson’s first six years of office, the Labour Party slid progressively to the left, with leaders of trade unions, known at least to have been communists in the past, exerting increasing influence on policy. At the time of writing, this slide has resulted in the election of Michael Foot as Labour leader. Foot’s stated determination to pursue nuclear disarmament and the party’s stated intention of eliminating American defence bases in Britain have the Kremlin’s total support.
But not even the KGB could have organised the Profumo affair, which originated from the chance meeting of the war minister, John Profumo, with a young call girl, Christine Keeler, and the fact, unknown to the minister, that she was also on familiar terms with a senior member of Soviet intelligence, Capt. Eugene Ivanov, officially the assistant naval attaché at the Soviet embassy. But the KGB made the most of it once the intriguing situation had been brought to its attention.
There is even a possibility – some MI5 men would put it higher – that the KGB ‘lit the fuse’ that ensured that the private affair would become a momentous public scandal. On 11 November 1962, George Wigg (now Lord), who interested himself in all matters concerning the army and had recently crossed swords with John Profumo, the War Minister, in Parliament, received a mysterious telephone call at the home of his party agent in his Dudley constituency. In what appeared to be a deliberately muffled voice, the caller said, ‘Forget about the Vassall case. You want to look at Profumo,’ and then hung up.
Wigg was immediately interested but remained baffled not only by the identity of the caller but by how he had discovered where he was. There is evidence in the files of MI5 that the call was organised by the KGB and may have been made by a KGB officer. In the period shortly before the Profumo affair became public, Vitali Lui, better known as Victor Louis, a long-serving KGB officer who still travels widely under the cover of being a journalist, visited London. He was under surveillance and is now known to have been in touch with Tom Driberg, who could have provided the information about the bad blood between Wigg and Profumo. As I shall show later, Driberg was an inveterate peddler of parliamentary gossip and was in the KGB’s pay as a double agent at the time.
Whether Louis made the call himself or not, MI5 officers concerned with the case believed that he set the events in train. Wigg was the mainspring in Labour’s exploitation of the situation, and it was the telephone call that wound him up. (This mysterious call was almost a carbon copy of the event that triggered off the publicity about the defection of Maclean and Burgess in 1951. A Daily Express journalist, sitting in a restaurant in Paris, received a telephone call from someone who knew his name, had a foreign accent, alerted him to the story, then hung up.)
It is not my intention here to rake over the cold ashes of the Profumo case but, as with the other cases I have discussed, to present new aspects, particularly with respect to the handling of the situation by MI5 and the KGB.
Without Ivanov, the socialists could not have pursued the alleged security aspects of the affair and would not have attempted to censure Profumo on moral grounds. Wigg has repeatedly told me that there were too many with similar problems on his own front bench for that to have been practicable. Ivanov, therefore, is central to the whole episode, but the course that it took right through to its tragic finale was conditioned by the behaviour of MI5 and, in particular, of its director general, Sir Roger Hollis. As the reader can judge for himself, if the director of the KGB at the Centre in Moscow had been controlling the case day by day, he could hardly have handled it more effectively to Russia’s advantage than Hollis did.
It is what Hollis repeatedly failed to do rather than what he did that calls for censure. That censure was made at the time inside MI5 but not in public. Instead, the long report on the Profumo affair by Lord Denning, made after it had run its course at the request of Harold Macmillan, went out of its way to make excuses for Hollis, though the facts as reported by Denning do not support those excuses.
The first fact that has not been properly appreciated is that, by the spring of 1961, MI5 had received confirmation of its suspicion that Ivanov was no ordinary sailor but an officer of the GRU, the military arm of the Soviet espionage and a diversion apparatus. This confirmation had come from the defector Oleg Penkovsky, whose debriefing had begun in April, three months before Profumo chanced to meet the call girl Christine Keeler at a party at Cliveden, the home of the late Lord Astor.
For some undisclosed reason, the Denning Report stated categorically that Ivanov never became Keeler’s lover, though on at least one occasion ‘there was, perhaps, some kind of sexual relations’. This was not the view of MI5 officers involved with the case. After Penkovsky’s tip, Ivanov had been placed under surveillance not only in London, where he was known to visit the home of Stephen Ward, with whom Keeler was living, but also when spending weekends at Ward’s cottage on the Cliveden estate, where there were also other prostitutes engaged in general promiscuity.
MI5 also had informers inside this group, including Ward himself. They knew that Ivanov was a ‘ladies’ man’ and a big drinker. They also knew that he was a dedicated communist who would do anything to promote his own career and would have no compunction about going to bed with Keeler or anybody else if it served his professional purposes.
Once Profumo had taken up with Keeler, as happened soon after their meeting at Cliveden, it is inconceivable that Ivanov would have been permitted not to take maximum advantage of the piquant situation, which he knew all about and would be expected to report on daily to the Soviet embassy.
Nor is there any doubt in MI5 that, once the potentialities were appreciated, the KGB took over the operation from the GRU and controlled everything that Ivanov did. There was quick evidence of direct Kremlin interest, including that of Khrushchev himself, who was then the Soviet leader.
One of Ivanov’s first moves was to ask Ward if he could find out ‘from any of his influential friends’ exactly when the United States was going to arm West Germany with atomic weapons. Though this request was played down by the Denning Report, it was of supreme interest to the Kremlin. For emotional as well as strategic reasons, Russia was totally opposed to the deployment of nuclear weapons by the regenerated Luftwaffe. The secret decision to place Russian nuclear missiles in Cuba had already been taken in Moscow and, if this leaked, the American decision to give the Luftwaffe atomic bombs for use on the East–We
st border could be a weighty political counter.
MI5 had almost immediate knowledge of this request by Ivanov because within a few days, on 12 July 1961, Ward telephoned MI5 to say he had some interesting information. He told them of Ivanov’s requirement. He also mentioned that Profumo had been at the Cliveden party on the previous weekend and had met Ivanov and Keeler.
There is confusion as to whether MI5 was told, at this stage or later, that Ward had suggested that Keeler might try to get the information out of Profumo. Ward insisted that he had told MI5 about it either then or at a later meeting. Keeler also said that she had been asked by Ward to sound out Profumo, though she did not do so, as the War Minister ended his relationship with her. Lord Denning seemed to be convinced that for more than a year MI5 had no knowledge of any relationship between Profumo and Keeler that would have made such a request feasible.
There has also been a tendency, even on the part of Harold Macmillan, to ridicule the idea that any professional intelligence officer would dream of trying to get information about atomic weapons from Profumo. ‘What would the War Minister know about atomic weapons?’ Macmillan once asked me rhetorically.
The point is that Ivanov was not after detailed information about atomic weapons but only the date when the Luftwaffe might be getting them. The War Minister could well have had access to this date because the project had important consequences for the British forces in Germany, of which he was political head.
Of course, as Denning pointed out, Profumo was not the type of man to tell anybody anything of a confidential nature, but that difficulty has never deterred the KGB from trying.
As Lord Denning based his report on the evidence of witnesses, one or more of them must have convinced him that Ivanov’s request about the atomic weapons was of little consequence. The chief MI5 witness was Sir Roger Hollis.
Their Trade Is Treachery: the Full Unexpurgated Truth About the Russian Penetration of the World's Secret Defences Page 10