Sir Maurice, who was a personal friend of the author, was profoundly religious, as well as most merciful, and his experiences highlighted the difficulties facing any intelligence chief who believes in the sanctity of human life. While he was deputy director general of the secret service in the late ’60s, the KGB captured one of his overseas agents, who was not known to him personally. The KGB knew that the agent had a great deal of useful information and was determined to use any means, including physical torture, to elicit it. It was made known to Sir Maurice through ingenious means that the agent would be prepared to take a lethal pill if this could be supplied to him. As Sir Maurice had to make the decision as to whether to provide the means of enabling a human being to take his own life, he suffered agonies of doubt before putting duty before his religious code of conduct. The pill was smuggled to the imprisoned agent and duly swallowed.
As I have mentioned, in connection with MI5, the new director general for the secret service is now recommended by a five-man committee to eliminate the danger that one chief, who might have been pro-Soviet, can install another before he leaves. The successor to Sir Maurice, who retired in 1978, later to be appointed coordinator of security for Northern Ireland, happened to be his former deputy and his recommendation. Members of the committee supported this recommendation to the Prime Minister, but they expressed concern that their choice was depressingly limited. Others whom they would have preferred rejected the post, which is inadequately paid for the enormous responsibility involved.
The same concern was voiced about the new director general of MI5, who was appointed at about the same time. The professional deputy, who might have hoped to succeed the retiring chief, Sir Michael Hanley, was considered to be too young. As a result – and again the field was small – a diplomat from the Foreign Office, Sir Howard Smith, was appointed. Since then, a younger man, who was Smith’s deputy and a career security officer, has taken over.
Until recently, the identities of the heads of the secret service and MI5 have been withheld from the public as a result of pressure on newspapers suggesting that it was in the interests of national security to do so. This reason was seen to be hollow following a statement to Parliament by Sir Harold Wilson, when Prime Minister, that national security had never been involved, the implication being that the anonymity had been a matter of personal convenience for those concerned.
Since then, the new dimension of terrorism has provided a more potent reason for anonymity, for the heads of the security services are possible targets. The identity of Sir Howard Smith, however, was disclosed in evidence given to a parliamentary committee on D-Notices and since published. Jonathan Aitken, the Tory MP for Thanet, pointed out that the current director general had been the ambassador to Moscow and, before leaving Russia, had told the Kremlin of the nature of his new post – with the British government’s permission. Sir Howard was appointed in spite of the general convention that nobody who has served in Moscow should be appointed to a senior position in either of the security services. His move was, of course, a triumph for Whitehall, and especially for the Foreign Office, in filling a post that has traditionally gone to MI5 professionals.
During the parliamentary repercussions of the Blake case, the Prime Minister, then Harold Macmillan, was required, by pertinent back-bench questioning, to admit that the secret service was directly responsible to the Foreign Office. I was told by one of Macmillan’s close political friends that Macmillan regarded this admission as one of the most damaging he had ever been forced to make. For such an eminently sensible person, this was a surprising statement, for it has been common knowledge, even among the writers of spy fiction, for many years.
His objection lay in the conclusion, which could obviously be drawn from the association, that the secret service makes use of British embassies abroad to house its agents under diplomatic cover. But this again is not only well known but the common practice of all countries. I suspect that as a Briton of the old school he hated having to admit officially to such a deception.
The old-school American politician Henry Stimson had done disservice to US intelligence by declaring that espionage was ‘ungentlemanly’, especially when applied to those countries that were not unfriendly. The Foreign Office under the Labour Foreign Secretary, Michael Stewart, took a similar view and reduced secret service operations abroad in places like Libya, which at that time was governed by pro-British King Idris. The result was that when Gaddafi overthrew Idris and set up a revolutionary government, which has enabled Russia to establish major bases in Libya, the British forces then stationed there had no advance warning, and, though required to assist Idris under treaty arrangements, failed to do so.
This disinclination to spy on friends did not dissuade the Labour government from instructing the secret service to spy on the white government of Mr Ian Smith in Rhodesia. The eventual result was a most embarrassing situation when Smith discovered that a senior official, operating out of the High Commission in Salisbury, was a British spy and demanded his immediate withdrawal. Under Foreign Office pressure, Smith, who could have made much of the incident, agreed to a cover-up, which was considered to be more important in Britain than in Rhodesia. To account for the spy’s sudden return, it was put about that his father was dangerously ill, a subterfuge in which the father, who was hale, had to be involved.
It is inevitable, in any country, that the close association between the Foreign Office and the secret service will produce some embarrassing situations, when intelligence agents trip over their cloaks and even fall on their daggers. So efforts, often involving the most blatant lies that sometimes have to be swallowed, are made to hide such situations. The Russians are far and away the most inveterate liars in this connection, if only because they pursue the myth – at least for domestic consumption – that the Soviet Union does not indulge in espionage, which is immoral and practised only by capitalist imperialists. Still, perhaps the worst example was President Eisenhower’s denial that the U2 plane shot down by the Russians had been spying. This had to be smartly followed by his abject admission that photographic espionage had been the plane’s purpose after Khrushchev had announced that they had the pilot, alive and able to talk.
The recent public praising in the Russian newspapers of Philby as a Soviet hero is such a rare exception that its purpose has deeply puzzled intelligence chiefs in Britain.
I shall be dealing with some of the strange results of the association between the Foreign Office and intelligence gathering in a later chapter. At this stage, it is convenient to deal briefly with the relationship between the secret service and the Ministry of Defence.
Under international arrangements, the navy, army and air force of each major country have officers serving as service attaches accredited to those foreign embassies with which they have diplomatic reciprocity. These men report directly to the Directorate of Defence Intelligence in the Defence Ministry, which has its own director general, who is always a former service chief. These defence attachés are there to send back all the intelligence they can find about the military situation of the country they are in but are required to avoid any indulgence in espionage. As can be imagined, the line is difficult to draw and is sometimes deliberately overstepped, and service attaches are frequently expelled for exceeding their terms of reference or for being accused of doing so.
There is close cooperation between the Directorate of Defence Intelligence and the secret service, not only on the spot in the various embassies where the officers of both branches meet socially as well as professionally but through the Joint Intelligence Committee and other coordinating arrangements. Occasionally, the secret service feels it necessary to intrude directly into the Defence Ministry, not always with pleasurable results to either, as the following incident demonstrates.
A Red Army officer who had defected to Egypt took with him some drawings of what he claimed were Soviet nuclear weapons designed for use in the battlefield. Egyptian intelligence passed them to the British secret
service to secure a reliable opinion as to whether they were genuine. The secret service was anxious to oblige because it might then be given access to the defector to interrogate him on other matters, so an officer took the drawings to a nuclear department of the Defence Ministry. Experts there examined the drawings with interest and made notes but refused to give any opinion. They explained to the secret service man that any information they gave might enable Egypt to develop nuclear weapons, and it was the stated policy of successive British governments to oppose any proliferation increasing the number of nuclear powers.
The secret service was nevertheless disappointed and argued that the Egyptians would only take the drawings to the Americans, who would then reap the benefits of any collaboration. A check by the Defence Ministry showed that the Americans had already been given the drawings because the Egyptians wanted a cross-check. The drawings could have been genuine, but the technology they showed was old, so the defector could have been a Soviet plant.
The Defence Ministry is frequently asked for some genuine information that the secret service can use as ‘chicken feed’ to establish the credibility of a double agent and in the hope of getting much more in return. Because of nuclear agreements with the United States and the general danger of the subject, such requests are almost invariably refused.
A contretemps of an intriguing kind between the Defence Ministry and the secret service arose, quite recently, over certain essential security arrangements at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire. After the conviction of Klaus Fuchs, the ex-German atomic spy, and the flight of Bruno Pontecorvo, the Italian scientist, Whitehall decreed that access to the most sensitive secrets would have to be restricted to those who were British born of British parents. This ruling now breaches the Race Relations Act, though this implication was not realised when the legislation was introduced. Nevertheless, because of the danger of espionage and sabotage at Aldermaston, it was decided to impose the ruling, which means that most blacks are ruled out of employment there, as are most Southern Irish.
When this local decision was discussed with the then directors general of the secret service and of MI5, they agreed with it but warned the Defence Ministry that they could not support it officially because, on paper, it was illegal.
A further stupidity concerning Aldermaston and secret intelligence arose in 1964 when the new Labour government was determined to reduce work on nuclear weapons and, in particular, the amount of money spent on the nuclear deterrent. To strike at the heart of the deterrent, the government set up a secret inquiry under Lord Kings Norton, aimed at examining the work at Aldermaston with a view to reducing it or even closing the station down.
The committee was told everything about Aldermaston and the British weapons being developed there but, on security grounds, was told nothing about the far greater Russian developments because that information was the result of secret intelligence!
A few members of this committee came out in favour of closure, which would have been tantamount to unilateral nuclear disarmament, but the majority, to Sir Harold Wilson’s eventual relief, strongly recommended leaving Aldermaston to proceed with its work.
As I believe the events described in this book indicate, both MI5 and the secret service are too small for the threat with which they are supposed to deal. The same is now true of Defence Intelligence, which has suffered savage cuts in the succession of defence-spending economies. This weakness and its remedy should be considered by any inquiry into the security services, which would have to include Defence Intelligence.
CHAPTER 20
A HOTBED OF COLD FEET
THE FOREIGN OFFICE has been described to me by a former member of the security services as ‘a hotbed of cold feet’. What was implied by this stricture was the deep-rooted objection by Foreign Office ‘mandarins’ to taking any resolute action against another country, however offensively it may have behaved, for fear of straining ‘diplomatic relations’. During the past thirty years, the country that has behaved with the most consistent disregard for diplomatic privilege and general civilised behaviour toward Britain and her allies has been the Soviet Union, followed closely by the Czechs and some other Russian satellites. Yet it is to Russia that the Foreign Office defers in greater degree and with less sound reason than to any other country.
For purposes that have never been adequately explained in spite of repeated questions in Parliament, Soviet diplomats stationed in Britain enjoy privileges far in excess of those meted out to British diplomats in Moscow. They are allowed greater freedom of movement and employ Russian chauffeurs and Russian domestic staff in the embassy and residences. In Moscow, the British are required to use Russian chauffeurs selected by the KGB and domestic staff heavily penetrated by the KGB, as I shall show.
The foreign offices of other countries, including the United States, Canada and Australia, also appear to be overborne by Moscow, so that there is no genuine diplomatic reciprocity and the Russians enjoy advantages that the KGB continues to exploit.
Over a period of many years, the Russians were allowed to increase the number of diplomatically accredited staff in London to figures out of all proportion to the size of the British embassy staff in Moscow. In addition, their trade delegations and other non-diplomatic services were steadily boosted to a total of several hundred. A succession of espionage cases proved that many of the diplomats and the trade delegates were full-time KGB agents sent over for the precise purposes of espionage, subversion and sabotage. Even the man listed as the doorman at a Soviet establishment abroad can be a commissioned KGB officer, as the Canadian spy trial proved.
It has been repeatedly pointed out to the Foreign Office by security officers that the purpose of these outlandish numbers is to saturate the British defences that can be mounted by MI5 and Special Branch, both small agencies. Immediately before the last war, there were only about forty MI5 officers to cope with some 300 Russian agents operating in and around London, which goes some way to explain why the recruitment of so many British spies then went undetected. As regards the current situation, most defectors report that between 30 and 60 per cent of all Russians in diplomatic missions and their auxiliary organisations, such as trade delegations, the Tass News Agency and Aeroflot, are primarily engaged in intelligence operations for the KGB or GRU.
The bloating of all these agencies for subversive purposes became so obvious in the ’60s that newspapers repeatedly drew attention to it but without the smallest effect until 1971. In the autumn of that year, the Conservative government, then headed by Edward Heath, announced the expulsion of ninety Russian diplomats and other officials for subversive and espionage activities against Britain. A further fifteen who happened to be out of the country, mainly on leave in Russia, were refused return entry, making a total of 105.
Shortly afterward it was revealed that the mass expulsion was linked with the defection in London of a Russian KGB officer, Oleg Lyalin, who had been posing as a member of a Soviet trade mission. It was then widely assumed that Lyalin, who had been an officer of the KGB branch formerly known as SMERSH, had given the names of the 105 and that the security authorities had then recommended their expulsion. The truth is that Lyalin, who was relatively low level, did little more than confirm the names already known to MI5 and provide the diplomatic excuse for getting rid of them.
Through a most ingenious system, which cannot be described because it is still in use, MI5 had proof that more than 300 of the Russian officials based in London were grossly abusing their positions to undermine Britain in various ways. This dangerous situation was brought to the notice of the Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who was so appalled that he took the matter up personally with Andrei Gromyko, his Soviet counterpart. He urged Gromyko to put a stop to the subversion and eventually, when the situation grew even worse, warned him that Britain would have to take action that would result in publicity damaging to Anglo–Soviet relations.
It is possible that Gromyko took
some action inside the Kremlin, but the Soviet Foreign Secretary has no influence over the KGB, contrary to the position prevailing in Britain, where the secret service is firmly under the Foreign Secretary’s control. As I have revealed, Lyalin had been a defector-in-place for six months before he actually quit the KGB. In that time, he had disclosed some of the current plans for his department, which, according to the Attorney General, Sir Peter Rawlinson (now Lord), was responsible for ‘the organisation of sabotage within the United Kingdom and the elimination of individuals judged to be enemies of the USSR’.
These plans included the sabotage, during the twenty-four hours before a surprise Soviet attack on Britain, of radar stations, communication centres and other targets essential to the nation’s defence in war. Lyalin described, in particular, how he was to be responsible for the blowing up of the ballistic missile warning system at Fylingdales on the North Yorkshire moors. He had detailed maps of the site and the areas where Russian commandos would land from the North Sea with the necessary explosives.
He told how teams of British traitors had been recruited to assist in that operation and in the destruction of V-bombers on nuclear alert at certain airfields. These teams had hidden caches of weapons and explosives. The subversion squads had also been equipped with radio receiver transmitters so that they could receive their action signals from Moscow and report back on their results. They used them to send a quick signal to Moscow once a year to ensure that the sets were working.
In 1980, a Russian transmitting set in a plastic wrapper and a metal box was accidentally found buried in a field on a remote hillside in North Wales. It was equipped with preset frequency plugs, all labelled in English, and a mechanism for rapid transmission of messages pricked onto perforated paper tape. The general instructions – on microfilm – were also in English. Inquiries showed that a party of six Russians had booked into a nearby hotel, describing themselves as part of a trade delegation, and had ventured out only at night. Four of those named in the hotel register were among the 105 Soviet agents expelled from Britain in 1971. As the equipment was in such excellent condition, it must have been dug up at intervals and maintained. The security authorities have little doubt that it was the property of a British-manned Soviet subversion unit, probably based in Liverpool.
Their Trade Is Treachery: the Full Unexpurgated Truth About the Russian Penetration of the World's Secret Defences Page 25