Spycatcher

by Peter Wright

  Jagger demonstrated how to attack various locks. Burmah locks, used for diamond safes, were by far the most difficult. The pins move horizontally through the lock and it is impossible to pick. The Chubb, on the other hand, although billed as being unpickable, was fair game for Jagger.

  "This is the one you'll have to deal with most often."

  He picked up a demonstration Yale mechanism mounted on a board and explained that the Yale consisted of a series of pins sitting in various positions inside the barrel of the lock. The bites in the Yale key acted on the pins to push them up and allow the key to be turned in the barrel. Jagger produced a small piece of wire with a hook on one end. He inserted it into the keyhole and began to stroke the inside of the lock in a steady, rhythmical action.

  "You just stroke the first pin until" - Jagger's wrist tensed and suddenly relaxed - "it goes a notch, and then you know you've got one up into line."

  His big hands moved like a concert violinist's with a bow, tensing as each pin pushed up in turn.

  "You keep the pressure on until you've got all the pins up..." He turned the piece of wire and the Yale sprang open. "Then you're inside... Course, what you do inside is your business."

  We all laughed.

  Leslie was always most mysterious about the source of his expert knowledge on lockpicking, but for years I carried a piece of wire and stroking tool that he made for me.

  "Make sure you carry your police pass," he told me when he first gave it to me, pointing out that I was, technically, breaking the law by going about equipped for burglary.

  "Couldn't be thought of as common or garden burglars, could we?"

  He laughed heartily and strode back to the Dungeons.

  - 5 -

  A few days after the lockpicking class I went on my first operation.

  "The Third Man business is brewing up again," said Hugh Winterborn. "MI6 are interrogating one of their officers - chap named Philby. They want us to provide the microphone."

  I had met Kim Philby briefly on my first visit to Leconfield House in 1949. I was in Cumming's office discussing the work for Brundrett when Philby popped his head around the door. He immediately apologized for disturbing us.

  "No, come in, Kim," said Cumming in his usual gushing way. "There's someone you ought to meet."

  Cumming explained that I had just been appointed the External Scientific Adviser. Philby shook my hand warmly. He had a lined face, but still looked youthful.

  "Ah, yes," he said, "that's Brundrett's committee. The Americans are very keen on that, I gather."

  I took to Philby immediately. He had charm and style, and we both shared the same affliction - a chronic stutter. He had just been appointed MI6 Head of Station in Washington, and was saying goodbye to his friends in MI5 and getting various briefings from them before his departure. Philby had developed close links with MI5 during the war, one of the few MI6 officers to take the trouble. At the time the visit seemed typical of Philby's industriousness. Only later did the real reason become clear. Philby quizzed me on my thinking about science. I explained that the Intelligence Services had to start treating the Russians as a scientist would treat the subject - as a phenomenon to be studied by means of experiments.

  "The more you experiment, the more you learn, even if things go wrong," I said.

  "But what about resources?" asked Philby.

  I argued that the war had shown scientists could help solve intelligence problems without necessarily needing a huge amount of new apparatus. Some was needed, certainly, but more important was to use the materials already available in modified ways.

  "Take Operational Research," I said, referring to the first antisubmarine-research program in the Navy during the war. "That made a tremendous difference, but all we scientists did was to use the gear the Navy had more efficiently."

  Philby seemed skeptical, but said that he would bear my thoughts in mind when he reviewed American thinking on the subject on his arrival in Washington.

  "I'll look you up when I get back," he said. "See how you've got on." He smiled graciously and was gone.

  Two years later, Burgess and Maclean defected. It was a while before Cumming mentioned the subject, but by 1954 I had gathered enough snippets from him and Winterborn to realize that Philby was considered the prime suspect for the Third Man who had tipped off the two defectors. In 1955 he was sacked by a reluctant MI6, even though he admitted nothing. On September 23, 1955, three weeks after I formally joined MI5, the long-awaited White Paper on the Burgess and Maclean affair was finally released. The press savaged it. Philby's name was well known in Fleet Street by this time, and it was obviously only a matter of time before it was debated publicly.

  In October, MI5 and MI6 were informed that the question of the Third Man was likely to be raised in the House of Commons when it reconvened after the recess, and that the Foreign Secretary would have to make a statement about Philby's situation. MI6 was ordered to write a review of the case, and called in Philby for another interrogation. They, in turn, asked MI5's A2 section to provide recording facilities for the interrogation.

  Winterborn and I took a taxi to the MI6 safe house near Sloane Square where Philby was due to meet his interrogators. The room MI6 had chosen was sparsely furnished - just a patterned sofa and chairs surrounding a small table. Along one wall was an ancient sideboard with a telephone on top.

  As it was important to get as high a quality of recording as possible, we decided to use a high-quality BBC microphone. Speech from a telephone microphone is not very good unless it is high level. We lifted a floorboard alongside the fireplace on the side on which Philby would sit and inserted the microphone beneath it. We arranged an amplifier to feed the microphone signal to a telephone pair with which the Post Office had arranged to feed the signal back to Leconfield House.

  The Transcription Center was hidden behind an unmarked door at the other end of the corridor from the MI5 staff canteen and only selected officers were allowed access. Next to the door were a bell and a metal grille. Hugh Winterborn identified himself and the automatic lock clattered open. Directly opposite the entry door was a door giving entrance to a large square room in which all the recording was done by Post Office employees. When the material was recorded, the Post Office could hand it over to the MI5 transcribers, but it was illegal to let MI5 monitor the live Post Office lines (although on occasion they were monitored, particularly by Winterborn or me, if there was something causing difficulties or very important). The telephone intercepts were recorded on dictaphone cylinders and the microphone circuits were recorded on acetate gramophone disks. This room was MI5's Tower of Babel. The recordings were handed over to women who transcribed them in small rooms running along a central corridor.

  The Department was run by Evelyn Grist, a formidable woman who had been with MI5 almost from the beginning. She had a fanatic devotion to Vernon Kell, and still talked darkly of the damage Churchill had done to the Service by sacking him in 1940. In her eyes, the path of Intelligence had been downhill ever since.

  Hugh Winterborn arranged for the link to be relayed into a closed room at the far end. We sat down and waited for the interrogation to start. In fact, to call it an interrogation would be a travesty. It was an in-house MI6 interview. Philby entered and was greeted in a friendly way by three former colleagues who knew him well. They took him gently over familiar ground. First his Communist past, then his MI6 career and his friendship with Guy Burgess. Philby stuttered and stammered, and protested his innocence. But listening to the disembodied voices, the lies seemed so clear. Whenever Philby floundered, one or another of his questioners guided him to an acceptable answer.

  "Well, I suppose such and such could be an explanation."

  Philby would gratefully agree and the interview would move on. When the pattern became clear, Winterborn fetched Cumming, who strode into the office with a face like thunder. He listened for a few moments, slapping his thigh. "The buggers are going to clear him!" he muttered. Cumming promptly
sent a minute to Graham Mitchell, the Head of MI5 Counterespionage, giving an uncharacteristically blunt assessment of the MI6 whitewash. But it did no good. Days later, Macmillan got up in the House of Commons and cleared him. I realized for the first time that I had joined the Looking-Glass world, where simple but unpalatable truths were wished away. It was a pattern which was to be repeated time and time again over the next twenty years.

  The Philby interview gave me my first experience of the MI5 surveillance empire. The seventh floor was, in fact, only one part of a network of facilities. The most important outstation was the headquarters of the Post Office Special Investigations Unit near St. Paul's. MI5 had a suite of rooms on the first floor run by Major Denman, an old-fashioned military buffer with a fine sense of humor. Denman handled the physical interception of mail and installation of telephone taps on the authority of Post Office warrants. He also housed and ran the laboratory for MI5 technical research into ways of detecting and sending secret writing. Each major sorting office and exchange in the country had a Special Investigations Unit Room, under the control of Denman, to place taps and intercept mail. Later we moved the laboratories up to the Post Office Laboratory at Martlesham, Suffolk. Then, if a letter which had been opened in St. Paul's needed further attention, it was sent by motorcycle courier up to Suffolk.

  Denman's main office was lined with trestle tables running the length of the room. Each table carried mail addressed to different destinations: London letters on one side, Europe on another, and behind the Iron Curtain on a third. Around twenty Post Office technicians worked at these tables opening pieces of mail. They wore rubber gloves so as not to leave fingerprints, and each man had a strong lamp and a steaming kettle beside him. The traditional split-bamboo technique was sometimes used. It was ancient, but still one of the most effective. The split bamboo is inserted into the corner of the envelope, which is held up against a strong light. By turning the bamboo inside the envelope, the letter can be rolled up around the slit and gently pulled out

  Where a letter had an ordinary typed address it was sometimes torn open and a new envelope typed in its place. But to the end of my career we were never able to covertly open a letter which had been sealed at each edge with Sellotape. In those cases, MI5 took a decision as to whether to open the letter and destroy it, or send it on in an obviously opened state. Pedal-operated microfilming cameras copied the opened mail and prints were then routinely sent by the case officer in charge of the interception to the Registry for filing.

  Denman's proudest memento was a framed letter which hung on the far wall. It was addressed to a prominent Communist Party member whose mail was regularly intercepted. When the letter was opened the Post Office technicians were amused to discover that it was addressed to MI5 and contained a typewritten message, which read: "To MI5, if you steam this open you are dirty buggers." Denman classified it as "obscene post," which meant that legally he had no duty to send it on to the cover address.

  In fact, Denman was very particular about warrants. He was prepared to install a tap or intercept an address without a warrant only on the strict understanding that one was obtained as soon as possible. MI5 were, however, allowed to request a form of letter check without a warrant. We could record everything on an envelope, such as its origin and destination and the date it was sent, as long as we did not actually open it. Denman, like everyone in the Post Office who knew of the activity, was terrified in case the Post Office role in telephone and mail intercepts was discovered. They were not so worried about overseas mail, because that could be held up for days at a time without arousing suspicion. But they were always anxious to get domestic mail on its way to the receiver as soon as possible.

  Responsibility for warrants lay with the Deputy Director-General of MI5. If an officer wanted a tap or an interception, he had to write out a short case for the DDG, who then approached the Home Office Deputy Secretary responsible for MI5. The Deputy Secretary would advise as to whether the application presented any problem. Once a month the Home Secretary vetted all applications. Like the Post Office, the Home Office was always highly sensitive on the issue of interceptions, and they were always strictly controlled.

  As well as St. Paul's, there was also Dollis Hill, the rather ugly Victorian building in North London where the Post Office had its research headquarters in the 1950s. John Taylor ran his small experimental laboratory for MI5 and MI6 in the basement behind a door marked "Post Office Special Investigations Unit Research." The rooms were dark and overcrowded, and thoroughly unsuitable for the work that was being attempted inside.

  When I joined MI5, Taylor's laboratory was overrun with work for the Berlin Tunnel Operation. A joint MI6/CIA team had tunneled under the Russian sector of Berlin in February 1955, and placed taps on the central communications of the Soviet Military Command. The actual electrical taps were done by Post Office personnel. Both the CIA and MI6 were reeling under the sheer volume of material being gathered from the Tunnel. So much raw intelligence was flowing out from the East that it was literally swamping the resources available to transcribe and analyze it. MI6 had a special transcription center set up in Earl's Court, but they were still transcribing material seven years later when they discovered that George Blake had betrayed the Tunnel to the Russians from the outset. There were technical problems too, which Taylor was desperately trying to resolve, the principal one being the ingress of moisture into the circuits.

  Taylor's laboratory was also busy working on a new modification to SF (Special Facilities), called CABMAN. It was designed to activate a telephone without even entering the premises by radiating the telephone with a powerful radio beam. It worked, but only over short distances.

  They were also in the early stages of developing a device called a MOP. A MOP made a cable do two jobs at once - transmit captured sound and receive power. It was in its early stages, but it promised to revolutionize MI6 activity by removing the extra leads which were always likely to betray a covert microphoning operation. I spent a lot of time in my first years in MI5 ensuring the correct specifications for MOP, and it was eventually successfully manufactured at the MI6 factory at Boreham Wood.

  Soon after the Philby interview I began to look into ways of improving and modernizing the seventh floor. The method of processing a tap followed a set pattern. A case officer responsible for a tap or microphone provided the Transcription Department with a written brief detailing the sort of intelligence he thought might be obtained from the interception. The transcription staff then scanned the conversation for passages which corresponded to the brief. When I first joined, the taps were normally transferred onto acetate, rather than tape. The acetates were scanned by "dabbing" into the disc at various points to sample the conversation. If anything of relevance was found, the transcribers placed a chalk mark on the appropriate place and worked from the chalk marks. It was an inefficient and time-consuming operation but more efficient than standard tape-recording methods.

  Most of these transcribers had been recruited in Kell's day from the emigre communities who fled to Britain at the end of World War I. They had turned the seventh floor into a tiny piece of Tsarist Russia. Most of them were members of the old Russian aristocracy, White Russians who talked with certainty of returning to the lands which had been expropriated after the Revolution. To them the KGB was not the KGB, it was the old Bolshevik Cheka. Most were fiercely religious, and some even installed icons in their rooms. They were famed throughout the office for their tempers. They considered themselves artists and behaved like prima donnas. Hardened case officers seeking clarification of a transcription approached the seventh floor with trepidation in case their request caused offense. The difficult atmosphere was inevitable. For years these women had listened, day after day, hour after hour, to the indecipherable mutterings and labyrinthine conspiracies of Russian diplomats. Spending a lifetime looking for fragments of intelligence among the thousands of hours of worthless conversation (known in the trade as "cabbages and kings") would be enoug
h to turn any mind.

  The first thing I did was to institute hearing tests on the women, many of whom were becoming too old for the job. I encouraged those with failing hearing to handle material with a high sound quality, such as the telephone intercepts. I gave the corrupted microphone transcription to younger officers, of whom undoubtedly the best was Anne Orr-Ewing, who later joined me as a junior officer in the Counterespionage Department. Microphone transcription is difficult because you usually have only one microphone source for a multichannel conversation. I decided to design a piece of equipment to ease this problem. I went out to an electronics exhibition at Olympia and bought a tape machine which provided two heads. The second head gave a constant number of milliseconds (or more) delay on the sound as it went through, making it much fuller-bodied. In effect it simulated stereo sound, and made even the worst tapes much easier to understand. I installed the equipment on the seventh floor, and it made me a friend for life in Mrs. Grist.

  It was my first small victory for science. But beneath the seventh floor the great MI5 antique showroom slumbered on, undisturbed.

  The Department which required most urgent attention, and yet resisted modernization with the greatest determination, was A4. Since the war the Watchers had been outnumbered and outmaneuvered by the increasing numbers of Soviet and Soviet satellite diplomats on the streets of London. My first priority was to make a full review of the way the Watchers operated.