Spycatcher

by Peter Wright

  Shortly after this, the microphones, which were being constantly monitored back at RCMP headquarters, began to pick up the telltale sounds of a sweeper team in operation. RCMP had tentatively identified their arrival in the building some days before, but it wasn't until they began work in the northeast corner, tapping at the walls for signs of hollowness, and running metal detectors across the ceilings, that we were sure. For twenty days they swept the rooms we had microphoned, as if they knew they were bugged. But they never found either the cables or the microphones. By Russian Embassy standards worldwide, the new building was small, but despite what must have been cramped conditions, the northeast corner remained virtually unused apart from routine consular work, even after the departure of the sweepers. Eight years later the microphone sweepers arrived in Ottawa. They went straight to the rooms where the microphones were and within an hour had found the microphone cables and thus the microphones. There were forty-two rooms in the Embassy. The sweepers searched only in the six rooms where the microphones were. They must have known where to look!

  Like Operation CHOIR, something about DEW WORM troubled me.

  Partly, of course, it was disappointment. The operation had been an outstanding technical success, but the months of patient preparations had yielded no intelligence whatever. Of course, at the outset of the operation the biggest gamble had been to assume, as Gouzenko had, that the Russians would rebuild their secret section in the same place as they had it in the old Embassy. But based on an analysis of the power supply to the building, it was a reasonable gamble. The fact that they had decided to resituate the secret section and screen it off was not in itself unusual. Both the British and the Americans had begun to realize, as almost certainly had the Russians, that the best way to protect an Embassy secret section from microphone attack was to construct it deep inside, preferably with its own power supply. But the certainty with which the Russian sweepers attacked the northeast corner, as if they were looking for something they knew to be there, introduced the worm of doubt into my mind.

  Within a year the same thing happened, again in Canada. The Polish Government were given permission to open a consulate in Montreal. They bought an old house and began renovations. In January 1957 I flew over to Montreal to assist the RCMP install a microphone. The RCMP knew the identity of the UB (Polish Intelligence) officer and the location of his room, but the building was being completely gutted, so a wired operation was out of the question. Only a SATYR cavity microphone would do. The premises were being rewired using steel conduits for the cables, and as with the DEW WORM window frames I reckoned that the SATYR devices would be virtually impossible to detect if they were placed close to the conduits. Within a fortnight of installing the system the Poles suddenly ordered the contractor to remove the wall containing our SATYR devices and replace it with another. The RCMP did manage to retrieve one device, but the other was lost to the Poles. Later the RCMP learned from a source inside the Polish Embassy that they had been tipped off to the likely presence of microphones by the Russians. They had been one step ahead of us again.

  It was not just in Canada that things like this occurred. There was also Operation MOLE in Australia. It began with a visit to London by Sir Charles Spry, the head of Australia's overseas intelligence-gathering organization, ASIO, in 1959. I received a telephone call saying that he would like to see me. Spry had once been a good-looking man, with hooded eyes and a full mustache, but responsibility and a liking for the good things in life had left him florid in appearance. Spry was appointed head of ASIO on its formation in 1949. He had previously been Director of Military Intelligence, but along with a group of like-minded officials, dubbed the "gnomes of Melbourne," he lobbied hard for the creation of a proper security intelligence-gathering agency similar to MI5. Spry ran the service with an iron fist for nineteen years, and became one of the towering figures of postwar intelligence. Only toward the end of his career, when he began to lose touch with his staff, did his grip on the organization falter.

  Spry liked visiting London. He had originally served in the Indian Army on the Khyber Pass in the 1930s. The common background and shared sense of what constituted an officer and a gentleman ensured him many friends in the clubbable world of British Intelligence. But Spry was far from being an old buffer. He came straight to the point as soon as our meeting began. He told me he had recently been over in Canada and Terry Guernsey had recommended he talk to me about a microphone operation ASIO was planning against the Russians. He explained that since the well-publicized defection of the Petrovs, a husband and wife who worked together inside the cipher section of the Russian Embassy in Canberra, the Russians had broken off diplomatic relations and placed their Embassy under the control of the Swiss. But recently they had been making overtures to return and ASIO wanted to mount an operation against the Embassy before they occupied the premises. After studying the plans, I advised Spry to mount a SATYR operation, and demonstrated the device to him. The best place to install SATYR was in the wooden sash window frames, and I sent my assistant out to Australia to supervise the details. The device was successfully installed, and as a further precaution, I instructed ASIO not to activate the device for a year, in case the Russians monitored the building for microwaves in the first months of reoccupation. As with DEW WORM, Operation MOLE was a technical success, but not a single scrap of intelligence was gleaned. Every sound in the KGB resident's room, every shuffle of his papers, every scratch of his pen, was audible. But he never said a word. Operation MOLE was another failure.

  The demands on MI5's slender resources were, in the 1950s, impossible to satisfy. Consequently, the pressure of work on individual officers, particularly those in A2 who had of necessity become involved in such a wide range of operations, was at times practically intolerable. Operations merged one into another. Plans, maps, briefings, technical reports crossed my desk in a paper whirl. It was often difficult at any fixed point to be sure which operations had ended and which were still deep in the midst of gestation. Intelligence-gathering, even at its best, is a thoroughly confused business. But there is always an empty space in the mind of every professional intelligence officer worth his salt reserved for scraps and fragments which for one reason or another raise unanswered questions. Operations CHOIR, DEW WORM, and MOLE were all stashed away in that compartment, submerged under the welter of current operations, but never quite forgotten, until years later they suddenly assumed a new significance.

  The profession of intelligence is a solitary one. There is camaraderie, of course, but in the end you are alone with your secrets. You live and work at a feverish pitch of excitement, dependent always on the help of your colleagues. But you always move on, whether to a new branch or department, or to a new operation. And when you move on, you inherit new secrets which subtly divorce you from those you have worked with before. Contacts, especially with the outside world, are casual, since the largest part of yourself cannot be shared. For this reason, intelligence services are great users of people. It is built into the very nature of the profession, and everyone who joins knows it. But early in my career I encountered a man whose experience at the hands of British Intelligence suddenly stripped the veneer of national importance away from the whole business. It arose out of the work I had been doing for Brundrett's committee on resonance. I had spent a lot of time researching ways in which innocuous objects, like ashtrays or ornaments, could be modified to respond to sound waves when radiated with microwaves of a certain frequency. If a system could be perfected, it promised enormous advantages. The object itself would carry no transmitter or receiver, so detection would be virtually impossible. By 1956 we had successfully developed prototypes, and decided to attempt an operation against the Russian Embassy in London.

  One of MI5's agents at that time was the MP Henry Kirby, who had frequent dealings with the Russian diplomatic community. The plan was simple. MI5 would design an ornament modified to reflect sound, and Kirby would give it as a gift to the Russian Ambassador. The first
thing that we needed to know was the kind of present the Ambassador might be likely to accept and place prominently on his desk or in his office. Malcolm Cumming suggested that I visit an old MI5 agent runner named Klop Ustinov, the father of the actor Peter Ustinov.

  Klop Ustinov was German by descent, but he had strong connections in the Russian diplomatic community and was a frequent visitor to the Embassy. Ustinov had the unique distinction of having held commissions in the Russian, German, and British Armies. He had dabbled in intelligence throughout the interwar period. He spoke a vast array of languages, and his German/Russian background made him a useful source of information. When Hitler came to power, Ustinov began to work strenuously against the Nazis. He approached Robert Vansittart, a prominently anti-Nazi Foreign Office diplomat, offering to work for British Intelligence. He claimed to be in contact with Baron Wolfgang zu Putlitz, then a First Secretary at the German Embassy in London, who he said was secretly working against the Nazis. Ustinov was recruited by MI5, and began to obtain high-grade intelligence from zu Putlitz about the true state of German rearmament. It was priceless intelligence, possibly the most important human-source intelligence Britain received in the prewar period. After meeting zu Putlitz, Ustinov and he used to dine with Vansittart and Churchill, then in the wilderness, to brief them on the intelligence they had gained. Zu Putlitz became something of a second son to the urbane English diplomat. Even after the outbreak of war Ustinov continued meeting zu Putlitz, by now working in Holland as an Air Attache. Finally in 1940 zu Putlitz learned that the Gestapo were closing in and he decided to defect. Once more Ustinov traveled into Holland and, at great personal risk, led zu Putlitz to safety.

  I took a taxi over to Ustinov's flat in Kensington, expecting to meet a hero of the secret world living in honorable retirement. In fact, Ustinov and his wife were sitting in a dingy flat surrounded by piles of ancient, leather-bound books. He was making ends meet by selling off his fast-diminishing library.

  Despite the hardship, Ustinov was thrilled by my visit. He remained a player of the Great Game down to his fingertips. Two small glasses and a bottle of vodka appeared, and he began to pore over the plans I had brought with me from the office. He was a round old man with a guttural, polyglot accent, and a sharp eye for the real interests of the Soviet diplomats in Kensington Park Gardens.

  "The real danger, my friend, is that they will sell the gift, rather than display it, if it is too valuable," he intoned in a knowing voice. "These are Bolsheviks - men of orthodox tastes. A silver effigy of Lenin, or model of the Kremlin. These perhaps will be more sacred to them."

  A bust of Lenin was unsuitable, I explained, because the smooth contours of Vladimir Ilyich's skull were too rounded to be sure of reflecting sound waves. But a model Kremlin offered possibilities. It would be easy to conceal the right type of concave indentations in the complex architecture of the symbol of Mother Russia. Klop Ustinov saw the whole operation as a piece of rich theater and offered to pay a visit to the Ambassador to gather more direct evidence of his tastes.

  As the vodka took hold we began to talk of old times. He was an old man, but his memory was still fresh. Tears began to wet his cheeks as he told me the story of what he and zu Puflitz had done for the country. Finally his reserve broke.

  "I do these things, Peter, and they leave me here. My wife and I... penniless."

  "But what about your pension?" I asked.

  "Pension? I have no pension," he flashed back bitterly. "When you work for them you never think about the future, about old age. You do it for love. And when it comes time to die, they abandon you."

  I sat silent. It seemed scarcely credible to me that such a man could be left in such circumstances, forced almost to beg. I wanted to ask him why Churchill or Vansittart had forgotten him, but I felt it would only wound him more. Ustinov drank and composed himself.

  "But it was fun," he said finally. He poured more vodka with an unsteady hand. There was silence for a moment, and then he spoke again.

  "My boy. He is an actor." He pointed to a picture of young Peter on the mantelpiece. "Do you have children, Peter?" I told him I had three, two girls and a young boy.

  "Tell him not to join, then," he said quietly. "I would not want my boy to join this game of ours. The gentlemen run the business, and gentlemen have short memories..."

  Almost as soon as it arrived, his bitterness melted away. He asked about the office, about Guy Liddell, Dick White, and Malcolm Cumming, all of whom had been closely involved with him during the wartime years. Finally, as late-afternoon darkness closed in on the room, I left. We shook hands and he returned alone to the vodka and his piles of books.

  I was too drunk that night to do anything other than go home. But the next morning I tackled Cumming on the subject. He looked embarrassed.

  "But I'm sure we sorted his pension out years ago," he barked in a voice louder than usual. "Good God, poor Klop. I'll see Dick straightaway."

  Further questioning was pointless. Who precisely had been to blame for forgetting Klop Ustinov was lost in the chase around the mulberry bush of responsibility, an occupation much favored by bureaucrats when oversights are discovered. Ustinov did get his pension, although I never saw him again after that meeting. Not long afterward he died. But at least his widow had the benefit of it. The silver Kremlin operation soon petered out, overruled by the Foreign Office. In truth my heart went out of it that afternoon in Kensington. But I learned a lesson I never forgot: that MI5 expects its officers to remain loyal unto the grave, without necessarily offering loyalty in return.

  But in the main, the 1950s were years of fun, and A Branch a place of infectious laughter. As Hugh Winterborn always said: "MI5 is a great life, if you can stand the excitement!" Like the time when we were fitting listening devices in a safe house next door to the Hungarian Embassy. I climbed onto the roof to install an aerial and was seen by a neighbor, who reported seeing a burglar on the prowl. Within ten minutes the police were knocking at the door, accompanied by the neighbor, and pandemonium reigned. Here we were, surrounded by the latest listening technology, receivers and cables spread across the floor. Winterborn desperately lifted the floorboards and began to shovel tens of thousands of pounds' worth of equipment underneath. The knocking got louder. Then burly shoulders began to force the front door. They were clearly convinced by the noise that a burglary was in progress. Finally, everything was relatively shipshape, and I opened the door sheepishly and explained that I was doing some authorized late-night renovations for the owner. I gave the policeman a number to ring to confirm the fact. It was the local Special Branch number.

  Even funnier was the time we did a similar job against the Polish Embassy in Portland Street. The house next door was temporarily empty, and A2 obtained access to install a series of microphones. Hugh Winterborn and I led a team of twelve officers from A Branch. Silence was imperative because we knew that the target premises were permanently manned near the party wall. I made a tremendous fuss insisting that everyone remove his shoes to avoid making noise on the bare floorboards. We worked nonstop for four hours in the freezing cold. All the floorboards on the first floor had been raised and I was patiently threading the cables along the void between the joists. After a time one of the leads became tangled on a split joist. Unable to clear the obstruction by hand, I began to ease myself down until one foot was resting on a masonry nail sticking out from one side of a joist. Just as I was inching toward the tangled cable, the nail gave way, and I plunged through the ceiling below. A large section of ceiling crashed fourteen feet to the floor below, reverberating around Portland Place like a wartime bomb. The noise and dust subsided, leaving me wedged tightly up to my waist in the hole in the ceiling. For a moment there was total silence.

  "Good thing we removed our shoes," quipped Winterborn dryly as laughter began to echo around the empty building.

  Luckily the neighbors must have been asleep, because no policemen arrived. Leslie Jagger quickly repaired the lath work, replasterin
g and repainting the damage before morning with his quick-drying materials.

  "Close shave, that one, Peter," he said as he applied the final lick of paint. "If you'd come through the ornamental rose we'd have been absolutely buggered."

  But accidents like these were rare occurrences. In the main, MI5 technical operations became, under Hugh and me, highly professional, in sharp contrast to MI6 activities in the same field. MI6, in the mid 1950s, never settled for a disaster if calamity could be found instead. The best example I ever heard concerned one of their training operations. They placed a junior officer in an MI6 flat, and detailed another team of recruits to find and interrogate him. MI5 were always routinely informed about these operations in case anything went wrong.

  One afternoon A2 got a phone call from MI6 pleading for help. The MI6 search party had apparently miscounted the floors of the apartment block where their target was holed up. They picked the lock of the flat one floor above, and proceeded to go to work on the man inside. He, of course, protested his innocence, but believing this to be part of the ruse, the search party consulted the MI6 textbook marked "persuasion," and went to work as only enthusiastic amateurs can. By the time they had finished, the man was stripped naked and singing like a bird. He was, in reality, a jewel thief, who had recently pulled off a diamond robbery. He produced the baubles still in his possession, obviously believing that his captors were visitors from a vengeful underworld.