by Peter Wright
I carefully threaded the tape and placed the headphones on. A soft, cultivated voice began to describe part of the secret history of Britain. MI5 was formed under Captain Vernon Kell in 1909, the War Office finally realizing that the impending European conflict required at least a modicum of counterintelligence. MI5 soon proved its usefulness by rounding up almost all German spies operating in Britain soon after the outbreak of war. Liddell spoke warmly of Kell, who he felt had built a prestigious organization from inauspicious beginnings through the force of his personality. MI5 budgets were strictly limited in the years after World War I, and MI6 furiously lobbied to swallow up its competitor. But Kell fought cannily to retain control of MI5 and gradually extended its influence.
The zenith of its post-World War I prestige came with the successful ARCOS raid in 1927. The Soviet Trade Delegation, based at their offices at 49 Moorgate along with the All Russia Cooperative Society Limited (ARCOS), was raided by police acting under the instructions of MI5, and a vast quantity of espionage activity was uncovered. The ARCOS raid justified the widespread belief inside MI5 that the newly established Soviet State was the principal enemy, and that all possible resources should be deployed to fight her. This view was further confirmed by a succession of other spy cases in the 1930s, culminating in a major Soviet attempt, in 1938, to penetrate the Woolwich Arsenal using a veteran Communist engineer employed there, named Percy Glading. MI5's brilliant agent runner Maxwell Knight succeeded in planting a female agent who betrayed the plot.
By 1939 Kell had lost his touch. He was old. Liddell offered generous excuses for MI5's failure to prepare for World War II. When Churchill became Prime Minister, determined to shake Whitehall until it submitted, it was only a matter of time before Kell went. But although Liddell lamented the loss of Kell, he heartily welcomed the incoming Director-General, Sir David Petrie. Petrie oversaw the recruitment of a vast influx of gifted intellectuals, and under his supervision (and Liddell's, though this went unstated) the famed Double Cross System emerged. Every German spy landing in Britain was either captured or turned to feed disinformation back to the German High Command. The operation was an outstanding success and was a major factor in deceiving the Germans over the location of the D-Day landings. Liddell had a simple verdict on MI5 during the war. He called it "the finest liaison of unlike minds in the history of intelligence."
But Liddell's account ended soon after the war. And in truth his lecture made poor history. Case after case, incident after incident was accurately recorded, but the theme of continuous MI5 success was misleading. He knew full well the inadequacies of the postwar period, the roots of which, in fact, lay in the 1930s. There was no mention of Burgess and Maclean, or what they meant, and no mention either of the vast program of modernization which both he and Dick White knew in the late 1940s was long overdue.
In many ways Liddell was a tragic figure. Gifted, universally popular in the Service, he could justly claim to have been a principal architect of our wartime intelligence mastery. Yet he had been undone by his unwise friendships. As I listened to the tape it was as if he were talking to himself in a darkened room, searching history for the justification of a thwarted career.
I also played a lecture by Dick White on the Russian Intelligence Service. It had obviously been recorded at one of the seminars held for incoming junior officers, because I could hear the audience laughing at his jokes. Dick White's delivery was much more in the style of the Oxbridge don. He had a wonderful light touch, peppering his talk with puns, epigrams, and allusions to Russian literature. Dick White was well qualified in Soviet affairs, having been Director of the old counterespionage B Division before becoming Director-General.
He talked animatedly about the Russian obsession with secrecy, and how the modern KGB had its roots in the Tsar's Secret Police. He was perceptive in his analysis of the historical importance of the KGB to the Bolshevik Party. The Russian Intelligence Service was the guarantor of Party control in a vast and often hostile country. He spoke, too, about why the British and Russian Intelligence Services were inevitably the main adversaries in the game of spies. Secrecy and intelligence went far back in both their histories, and both services, he believed, shared a caution and patience which reflected their national characters. He contrasted this, much to the amusement of his audience, with the zealous and often overhasty activities of "our American cousins."
But Dick White, for all the elegance of his delivery, was essentially an orthodox man. He believed in the fashionable idea of "containing" the Soviet Union, and that MI5 had a vital role to play in neutralizing Soviet assets in the UK. He talked a good deal about what motivated a Communist, and referred to documents found in the ARCOS raid which showed the seriousness with which the Russian Intelligence Service approached the overthrow of the British Government. He set great store on the new vetting initiatives currently under way in Whitehall as the best means of defeating Russian Intelligence Service penetration of government.
He believed that MI5 was in the midst of great reforms, which in a sense, under his guidance, it was. The clearest impression he gave was of an intense pride in the Service. This emotion remained strong with him throughout his career, even after he had left MI5 to join MI6. He was above all a team player, and he believed very much in preserving the morale of the organizations he ran. This made him a popular and humane man to work for, even if he always remained a slightly distant, ascetic figure.
Toward the end of my training I began to tour the building, often escorted by Cuckney or Winterborn. The whole place was ludicrously overcrowded, with officers crammed in four to a room. I had the luxury of my own office - more like a broom cupboard - next to Hugh Winterborn on the fifth floor. The space problem was a legacy of the longstanding antipathy between MI5 and MI6. At the end of the war, plans had been drawn up to create a joint Headquarters of Intelligence to house both Services. A site for new premises was even acquired in the Horseferry Road. But for years a working party of both Services bickered about the precise division of office space, and MI5 muttered darkly about being unable to trust MI6 because of Kim Philby. The situation remained unresolved until the 1960s when MI6 were finally banished across the Thames to their own building, Century House.
In a sense, the indecision over office space was indicative of the lack of clear thinking in Whitehall about the relative roles of MI5 and MI6. It was not until well into the 1970s that MI5 finally persuaded the Treasury to fund a move to permanent, purpose-built headquarters at Curzon House. Until then the constant overspill problem was dealt with by a succession of short-term leases on buildings. Firstly there was Cork Street, which in the 1950s housed the booming empire of C Branch. Then in the 1960s Counterespionage operated from an office building in Marlborough Street, and we all had to pick our way through the peep shows, flower stalls, and rotting vegetables of Soho Market to get to our Top Secret files. It may have been appropriate, but it was hardly practical.
MI5 in the 1950s seemed to be covered with a thick film of dust dating from the wartime years. The whole organization was rather like Dickens' Miss Havisham. Wooed by the intellectual elite during the war, she had been jilted by them in 1945. They had gone off to new pursuits in the outside world, leaving MI5 trapped in her darkened rooms, alone with memories of what might have been, and only rarely coming into contact with the rest of Whitehall.
The atmosphere reminded me of a minor public school. The Directors were treated with that mixture of reverence and sycophancy reserved by schoolboys for their schoolmasters, and section heads were their prefects. But the DG and DDG were the only people addressed as "Sir," and first names were normally used. Within the atmosphere of MI5 flowered exotic and extravagant personalities, men and women so drawn to the Great Game of intelligence that they rose above the pettiness of it all, and made a career there endlessly fascinating.
On the face of it, life was a mixture of the quaint and the archaic. Every year the Office virtually closed to attend the Lord's Test Match, where MI5
had an unofficial patch in the Lord's Tavern. And every morning senior officers, almost without exception, spent the first half hour of the day on THE TIMES crossword. The scrambled telephones, which normally hummed with the most highly classified secrets in the Western world, relayed a series of bizarre, coded questions from office to office.
"My left rump is giving me trouble," meaning "I can't make head or tail of seven down in the bottom left-hand corner," or "My right breast is vacant," meaning "What the hell is twelve across in the middle?" Courtney Young, who ran the Soviet Counterespionage Section (D1) in the 1950s, was the undisputed Security Service crossword king. He always claimed that it was too easy to do the crossword with a pencil. He claimed to do it in his head instead. For a year I watched him do this, until finally I could resist the temptation no longer. I challenged him, whereupon he immediately wrote in each answer without hesitation. Every night for a week I had to stand drinks for a gleeful Courtney in the local pub.
The nerve center of MI5 was the Registry. It spread across the whole ground floor of Leconfield House. The Registry had been moved to Wormwood Scrubs Prison during World War II to ensure the files would be safe if their London home were bombed. It was an unwise move. Within the year the prison was bombed and many files were destroyed or damaged by fire. Those that could be saved were stored in moisture-resistant polythene bags. In the 1960s, when we began to study the history of recruitments in the 1930s, I often examined prewar files. It was a difficult process, prizing apart the charred pages with tweezers and wooden spatulas.
After the disaster at Wormwood Scrubs MI5 put a lot of thought into designing an effective Registry. Brigadier Harker, who, as Sir David Petrie's wartime Deputy, was the ideal administrative foil, recruited an expert in business systems, Harold Potter, to reorganize the Registry. Potter was an excellent choice. He had a neat, methodical mind and the will to impose order even in the chaos of wartime.
In 1955 Potter was approaching retirement, but he took great delight in showing me around. The Registry was based in a central hall, which housed the main file index and the files themselves. The rooms leading off from the central concourse held the other specialist card indexes. Duplicate copies of all files and indexes were routinely made on microfilm, and stored in a specially protected MI5 warehouse in Cheltenham to prevent the catastrophe of Wormwood Scrubs occurring again. Potter's office, tucked in one corner of the Registry, was a paragon of neatness.
"Make sure you return your files promptly, won't you, Peter? I don't want to have to start chasing you like I do some of these buggers!"
He could have been a kindly, small-town librarian. Sadly for Potter, I became one of the worst abusers of the Registry, routinely holding scores of files at a time, though never, I suspect, as bad as Millicent Bagot, the legendary old spinster in F Branch who kept tabs on the International Communist Party for decades. I have always assumed Millicent to have been the model for John le Carry's ubiquitous Connie. She was slightly touched, but with an extraordinary memory for facts and files. Potter and his successors in the Registry despaired of Millicent. "I only hope we get the files back when she retires," he would mutter to himself after a particularly heavy file request from F Branch.
The Registry always fascinated me. Just being there filled me with anticipation, an irresistible feeling that inside the mass of dry paper were warm trails waiting to be followed. Potter explained to me the correct system for signing on and off a file to show that it had been received and dealt with. He had designed the filing system so that each file read chronologically, with papers and attachments on the right, and the index and minutes placed on the left for quick access.
The whole system depended on accurate and disciplined classification. When an officer wished to file something, it had to be approved by one of Potter's staff. Very often file requests were rejected as being too generalized. When an officer wished to draw a file he filled in a request form. These trace requests were always recorded, and if a trace was requested on an individual more than once, a file was automatically opened on him. There were three basic categories in the Registry. The first category was Personal Files, or PFs, which were buff-colored files arranged in alphabetical order. There were about two million PFs when I joined the Service in 1955. That figure remained fairly static and began to rise dramatically only in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the onset of student and industrial militancy. Then there were subject files, or organizational files, such as for the Communist Party of Great Britain, Subject files very often ran into several volumes and were elaborately cross-referenced with the PFs. The final main category was the duck-egg-blue List File. This generally comprised material gathered during a particular case which could not easily be placed within either of the two previous categories. There were also Y-Boxes. These were a means of separating particularly sensitive files from general access. For instance, all suspected spies were Y-Boxed, as were most defectors. An officer could obtain the material from a Y-Box only by obtaining indoctrination into its contents from the controlling officer or sometimes from the Director-General himself.
"The integrity of the file is vital," Potter told me, and warned me that under no circumstances could papers be removed from a file without the written consent of a senior officer. The sanctity of files was something which, quite rightly, was drummed into every officer from the very beginning of his service.
Files were located by using the card indexes. Potter had devised a system of mechanically searching these indexes. Each card was classified with a series of punched holes to identify the category of files to which it belonged. To search a category of files, for instance to find a Russian intelligence officer using several aliases, an officer drew a master card corresponding to that category. Long needles were placed through the holes in the master card to locate any other cards which fitted the same constellation. These could then be searched by hand. It was old-fashioned, but it worked, and it meant that MI5 resisted the change to computerization long after it should have happened.
The concourse of the Registry was always busy with trolleys transporting files from the Registry shelves to special lifts. The trolleys ran on tracks so that files could be shifted at great speed up to the case officers working on the floors above - F Branch on the first floor, E Branch on the second, D on the third and fourth, and A Branch on the fifth. The Registry employed enormous numbers of girls to maintain efficient delivery of files within the building, as well as the massive task of sorting, checking, and filing the incoming material. In Kell's day the Registry Queens, as they were known, were recruited either from the aristocracy or from the families of MI5 officers. Kell had a simple belief that this was the best vetting of all. The debutantes were often very pretty, as well as wealthy, which accounts for the large number of office marriages, to the point where it became something of a joke that the average career expectancy of a Registry Queen was nine months - the time it took her to get pregnant.
By the early 1970s the staffing of the Registry had become a major problem for MI5. There were more than three hundred girls employed and with the surge of file collection at that time the pressure for more recruits was never-ending. Openly advertising was considered impossible. Yet it was becoming very difficult to recruit this number of girls, let alone vet them properly. In at least one case, the Communist Party managed to infiltrate a girl into the Registry, but she was soon discovered and quietly sacked. This problem, rather than dissatisfaction with the increasingly antiquated filing system itself, finally pushed MI5, belatedly, into accepting a computerized Registry.
Underneath the Registry were the Dungeons. They were actually a collection of storerooms and workshops run by Leslie Jagger, who worked under Hugh Winterborn in A2. Jagger was one of Cumming's famed contacts. He was a huge, broad-shouldered former Sergeant Major who had served with Cumming in the Rifle Brigade. Jagger always wore a black undertaker's suit.
Jagger was the MI5 odd-job technical man, and must have felt slightly apprehensive when I join
ed, but he never showed it and we soon became good friends. Jagger had an extraordinary array of skills, of which the most impressive was his lockpicking. Early on in training I attended one of the regular classes he ran for MI5 and MI6 in his lockpicking workshop. The cellar room was dominated by a vast array of keys, literally thousands of them, numbered and hung in rows on each wall. Jagger explained that as M15 acquired or made secret imprints of keys of offices, hotels, or private houses, each one was carefully indexed and numbered. Over, the years they had developed access in this way to premises all over Britain.
"You never know, when you might need a key again," explained Jagger as I stared in astonishment at his collection.
"The first rule if you are entering premises is only pick the lock as the last resort," said Jagger, beginning his lecture. "It's virtually impossible to pick a lock without scratching it - and that'll almost certainly give the game away to the trained intelligence officer. He'll know the premises have been entered. What you have to do is get hold of the key - either by measuring the lock or taking an imprint of the key."