by Peter Wright
I made arrangements to visit one of the MI5 observation posts in an MI5 house opposite one of the main gates of the Russian Embassy in Kensington Park Gardens. The observation post was in an upstairs bedroom. Two Watchers sat on either side of the window. A camera and telephoto lens on a tripod stood permanently trained down onto the street below. Both men were in shirt-sleeves, binoculars hanging around their necks. They looked tired. It was the end of their shift; the ashtrays were full to overflowing, and the table standing between them was scattered with coffee cups.
As each Russian diplomat came out of the gates of Kensington Park Gardens one or the other of the men scrutinized him through binoculars. As soon as he had been accurately identified, the observation post radioed his name back to Watcher headquarters in the form of an enciphered five-figure number. All the numbers of people leaving Kensington Park Gardens were called out on the radio. Each car or Watcher was tagged with certain numbers to follow. When one of his numbers came up he would follow the person involved without replying to the broadcast. The person being followed did not know if he was a target or not. The radio crackled intermittently as one of the mobile Watcher units parked in the streets nearby was ordered to pick up the diplomat as he made his way out of sight of the observation post toward the West End.
The Watchers who manned these static posts had done the job for years. They developed extraordinary memories for faces, instantly recognizing KGB officers who had been out of Britain for years. To assist them in identification the post had three bound volumes containing the photographs and identities of every single Russian intelligence officer known to have visited the UK. Those currently resident in the Embassy were flagged in plastic holders for easy reference. If an unknown face was noted entering or leaving the premises, it was photographed and handed over to MI5's Research Section, and the endless process of identification would begin from scratch. It was numbing work, requiring patience and dedication. But none was more vital. If the Registry is MI5's central nervous system, the Watchers are its fingertips. They must be constantly outstretched, feeling out the contours of the enemy's formations.
The bound volumes of Russian intelligence officer identifications were the product of decades of careful intelligence gathering from every possible source - visa photos, defectors, double agents, or whatever. The faces stared mordantly from the pages. They were mostly KGB or NKVD strong-arm men, interspersed with the occasional cultured, European-looking resident or uniformed military attache. It soon struck me that the observation posts were relying mostly on photographs available from the Russians' diplomatic passports. These were always sent to MI5 but were often of poor quality, or deliberately out of date, and made identification difficult to determine.
I suggested that the Watchers expand their selection of action stills. These are often much easier to recognize than mug shots. This was graphically illustrated in the Klaus Fuchs case. When Fuchs had confessed in 1949 to passing details about atomic weapons, he began to cooperate. MI5 tried to obtain details of his co-conspirators and showed him a passport photograph of Harry Greenglass, a fellow atom spy. Fuchs genuinely failed to recognize him until he was provided with a series of action stills.
For many years MI5 had realized that if Watchers operated from Leconfield House they could be followed from the building and identified by Russian countersurveillance teams. They were housed in an unmarked four-story Georgian house in an elegant terrace in Regent's Park. The central control room was dominated by a vast street map of London on one wall which was used to monitor the progress of operations. In the middle of the room was the radio console which maintained communications with all observation posts and mobile Watcher teams.
On one floor Jim Skardon, the Head of the Watchers, had his office. Skardon was a dapper, pipe-smoking former policeman. He had originally been a wartime MI5 interrogator, and in the immediate postwar period had been the chief interrogator in a number of important cases, particularly that of Klaus Fuchs. Skardon had a high opinion of his own abilities, but he was an immensely popular man to work for. There was something of the manner of a trade union shop steward about him. He felt that the Watchers did arduous and difficult work, and needed protection from exploitation by hungry case officers back at Leconfield House. In a sense this was true. There were around a hundred Watchers when I joined the Service, but the demand for their services was unquenchable in every part of MI5's activity. But I soon came to feel that Skardon was not facing up to the modern reality of watching on the streets of London. It was quite clear that the Russians, in particular, operated very extensive countersurveillance to prevent their agents from being followed. Having watched the system for a few weeks I doubted that the Watchers, using their current techniques, had any realistic chance of following anyone without speedy detection.
When I first raised the question with Skardon of extensively remodeling the Watchers, he dismissed it out of hand. MI5 sections were like fiefdoms, and Skardon took it as an affront to his competence and authority. Eventually he agreed to allow Hugh Winterborn and me to mount an operation to test the effectiveness of current Watcher techniques. We split a team into two groups. The first group was given a photograph of an MI5 officer who was unknown to them and told to follow him. The second group was told the general area in which the first group was operating. They were instructed to locate them and then identify the person they were following. We did this exercise three times, and each time the second group made the identification correctly. We filmed the third experiment and showed it at Watcher headquarters to the whole Department. It did at least remove any remaining doubts that Watcher operations, as currently organized, were perilously vulnerable to countersurveillance.
We suggested to Skardon that as a first step he should employ a number of women. A great deal of watching involves sitting for hours in pubs, cafes, and parks, waiting or monitoring meetings. A man and a woman would be far less conspicuous than a single man or a pair of men. Skardon opposed the plan strongly. He feared it might introduce extramarital temptations which might adversely affect the morale of his team.
"The wives won't like it," he said grimly.
Hugh Winterborn scoffed.
"So what if they kiss and cuddle. It's better for the cover!"
Skardon was not amused. The other reform we wanted implemented was in the way Watchers were debriefed. It was never done immediately they came in from a job. Sometimes it was overnight, sometimes even at the end of the week. I pointed out to Skardon that it had been proved again and again in wartime that debriefing had to be done immediately to be accurate. If there is a delay the memory stops recollecting what happened and begins to rationalize how it happened.
"My boys have done eight hours slogging the streets. They don't want to come back and spend hours answering questions when they can write up a report themselves," he stormed. In the end he did agree to bring them back from each shift fifteen minutes early, but it was a constant struggle.
The mobile Watchers presented different problems. I went out for the day with them to get an idea of the work. MI5 cars were inconspicuous models, but they were fitted with highly tuned engines in the MI5 garages in Battersea. Every three months the cars were resprayed to disguise their identities, and each car carried a selection of number plates, which were changed at intervals during the week.
It was boyish fun chasing Russian diplomatic vehicles through the streets of London, up and down one-way streets and through red traffic lights, secure in the knowledge that each driver carried a Police Pass to avoid tickets. The driver of my car told with great glee the story of how he had been following a Russian car down the Mall toward Buckingham Palace on a winter day. The Russian had slammed on his brakes to go around the roundabout, and the cars had skidded into each other. Both sides got out and exchanged particulars with poker faces. The knack of mobile following is to pick the parallel streets wherever possible. But in the end the success of the operation depends on the radio control at headquarters. They have
to predict the likely path of the Russian car, so that reserve units can be called in to pick up the chase.
The first problem with mobile watching was quite simple. There were three men in each car, and since so much of the time was spent parked on street corners, or outside premises, the cars stood out like sore thumbs. Once again, Winterborn and I made a field study. We went to an area where we knew the Watchers were operating. Within half an hour we had logged every car. One was particularly easy. The number plates had recently been changed. But the driver had forgotten to change them both over! I suggested to Skardon that he cut down the number of men in the cars, but in true British Leyland style he gave me a lecture on how it was essential to have three men.
"There's one to drive, one to read the map, and the third to operate the radio," he said with conviction, seemingly unaware of the absurdity of it all.
But there was one area which decidedly was not a joke, and which gave me more worry than all the others put together. Communications are any intelligence organization's weakest link. The Watchers relayed hundreds of messages daily to and from the observation posts, the cars, and headquarters. The first thing which made them vulnerable was that they were never acknowledged. The Russians could easily identify Watcher communications by simply searching the wavebands for unacknowledged call signs. MI6 were just as bad abroad. For a long time the best way of identifying MI6 staff in the Embassy was to check which diplomats used outside lines which were not routed through the main switchboard. Later, MI5 brought in a complicated system of enciphering Watcher communications. I pointed out that this made no difference, since their signals would now stand out even more against the Police, Fire and Ambulance Service communications, all of which were en clair (uncoded). They did not seem to understand that the Russians were gathering most of the intelligence from the traffic itself, rather than from the contents of the messages. Traffic analysis would tell them when and where a following operation was being conducted, and by cross-checking that with their own records they would learn all they needed to know.
I lobbied hard for a major effort to be mounted to try to find out if the Russians were systematically monitoring Watcher communications. Theoretically it was a feasible thing to do, because any receiver will give off a certain radiation which can be detected at short distances. I raised my plan through the correct channels with GCHQ, which had the technical apparatus and manpower necessary for such an experiment. I waited for months before I got what was described as a "considered" answer. GCHQ's verdict was that it was not technically feasible to conduct such experiments. It was another two years before GCHQ and MI5 realized how wrong that judgment was.
In the meantime I remained a worried man. If Watcher communications were vulnerable, and Watcher tradecraft as poor as we had shown it to be, then MI5 had to assume that a substantial part of its counterespionage effort had been useless over many years. At least some operations in which Watchers had been used had to have been detected by the Russians. But which, and how many?
In the trenches of the Cold War, A2 was MI5's front line, Hugh Winterborn and I its storm troopers. Hugh Winterborn was a fine comrade in arms. He had served with the Army in China and Japan and in Ceylon and Burma before joining MI5, and spoke Chinese and Japanese fluently. Winterborn was a Field Marshal manque. His operations were always beautifully planned right down to the last detail, and although often complex, were invariably executed with military precision. But he was not a dry man. He approached each operation with the purpose of gathering intelligence, but also to have fun. And we did have fun. For five years we bugged and burgled our way across London at the State's behest, while pompous bowler-hatted civil servants in Whitehall pretended to look the other way.
Winterborn and I were a perfect match, both sharing a fervent belief that modernization was badly needed at almost every level of the Service, and especially in the technical field. I tended to concentrate on ideas. He acted as the foil, winnowing out the sensible from the impractical in my suggestions and planning how to make them operational reality.
When I first teamed up with Winterborn he was bubbling over with news of the latest A2 job he had completed, called Operation PARTY PIECE. It had been a typical Winterborn operation - thoroughness and outrageous good fortune linked harmoniously together. One of the F4 agent runners learned, from a source inside the Communist Party of Great Britain, that the entire Party secret membership files were stored in the flat of a wealthy Party member in Mayfair. A2 were called in to plan an operation to burgle the flat and copy the files.
The flat was put under intensive visual, telephone, and letter surveillance, and in due course MI5 had a stroke of unexpected luck. The woman of the house rang her husband at work to say that she was going out for an hour. She told him she would leave the key under the mat. Within twenty minutes of the call's being monitored in Leconfield House, we were around at the flat taking a plasticine imprint of the key.
The burglary was carefully arranged for a time when the occupants were away for a weekend in the Lake District. Winterborn sent a team of Watchers to monitor the occupants in case they decided to return home early. Banks of pedal-operated microfilming machines were set up in Leconfield House ready to copy the files. A team from A2 entered the flat and picked the locks of the filing cabinets where the membership files were kept. The contents of each drawer of each cabinet were photographed with a Polaroid camera. Each file was carefully removed and indexed in the flat so that it could be replaced in the identical spot. Then they were removed in bundles and driven over to Leconfield House for copying in sequential order. In all, 55,000 files were copied that weekend, and the result was a priceless haul of information about the Communist Party.
PARTY PIECE gave MI5 total access to the Party organization. Every file contained a statement, handwritten by the recruit, explaining why he or she wished to join the Party, accompanied by full personal details, including detailed descriptions of the circumstances of recruitment, work done for the Party, and contacts in the Party organization. More important than this, the PARTY PIECE material also contained the files of covert members of the CPGB, people who preferred, or whom the Party preferred, to conceal their identities. Most of these covert members were not of the same generation as the classical secret Communists of the 1930s, many of whom had been later recruited for espionage. These were people in the Labor Party, the trade union movement or the Civil Service, or some other branch of government work, who had gone underground largely as a result of the new vetting procedures brought in by the Attlee Government.
In the years after World War II, largely as a result of our alliance with the Soviet Union in the war, the CPGB retained a significant body of support, most importantly in the trade union movement. They were increasingly active in industrial disputes, much to the consternation of Prime Minister Attlee in his later years. In the late 1940s, MI5 began to devote resources in an effort to monitor and neutralize CPGB activity in the trade union movement. By 1955, the time of PARTY PIECE, the CPGB was thoroughly penetrated at almost every level by technical surveillance or informants. Obtaining the PARTY PIECE material, the very heart of the CPGB's administration, was the final proof of MI5's postwar mastery. Ironically, within a year the Soviet Union invaded Hungary, and the Party began its slow decline in popularity.
Once MI5 was in possession of the PARTY PIECE material, the CPGB was never again in a position to seriously threaten the safety of the realm. From then on, MI5 was able to locate every single active Party member, particularly the covert ones, and monitor their activities, preventing them from obtaining access to classified material where the risk arose. The PARTY PIECE material was Y-Boxed, and remained of enormous assistance right up until the early 1970s, especially when the CPGB later began to protest that it had renounced secret membership and was now merely an open party.
I first operated against the CPGB in the late 1950s, when Hugh Winterborn and I installed yet another microphone into its King Street headquarters. The CPGB
knew that its building was under constant technical surveillance, and regularly switched the location of important meetings. An agent inside King Street told his F4 controller that Executive Committee discussions had been moved to a small conference room at the far end of the building. There were no windows in the room and we knew from the agent that there was no telephone either, so SF could not solve the problem of providing coverage. Later, in the 1960s, the reason for the lack of a telephone became clear. One of the first things Anthony Blunt had betrayed to the Russians was the existence of SF, immediately after it was first installed in King Street, and they had alerted the Party and instructed them to remove all telephones from sensitive areas. But the Party did not really believe it. They took precautions only for very sensitive matters.
Winterborn and I drove down to King Street in my car and sat outside studying the external walls, trying to decide the best way to attack the target room. Low down on the left-hand side of the street-facing wall was an old coal chute which had been out of use for many years. It seemed to present the best possibility. We checked with the agent where this chute went and were told that it led straight into the conference room. I suggested to Winterborn that we make a false door identical to the one already in the chute, clipping it over the top of the old door with a radio microphone between the two feeding into the keyhole.