Spycatcher

by Peter Wright

  Terry Guernsey, with his instinctive feel for the importance of the case, immediately decided to run Gideon on as a double agent, rather than accept him as a defector. The decision seemed well justified when Gideon was given control of an illegal agent working for the Russians on the Canadian Avro Arrow Aircraft program. For a year the RCMP monitored Gideon as if he were a laboratory specimen. The workings of Soviet illegals were virtually unknown in the West. Guernsey carefully logged the tradecraft the Russians used for Gideon, the way he was instructed to gather intelligence, the dead letter drops he used; most important of all, the RCMP monitored all his coded radio communications.

  Everything went well until the summer of 1955, when suddenly Gideon was recalled to Russia by his controller for extensive debriefing. After initial hesitation, the double agent decided to make the journey. He never returned. The RCMP waited for months and years for a sign that Gideon had survived. But they heard nothing. After a while, transmissions from Moscow to Canada began again on Gideon's cipher, suggesting that a replacement agent had arrived, but months of fruitless searching by the RCMP failed to uncover him. The case, which had promised so much in its early stages, was finally closed down by a weary Guernsey. He was convinced that something serious had gone wrong in the case, but it was impossible to put a finger on what it was, still less investigate it. Bennett, his assistant, was convinced that Gideon had fallen under Russian control and that the case was being run on to deceive the RCMP.

  Reading the files it was clear to me the case bore all the hallmarks of Russian interference from an early stage, but beyond that there was little I could suggest. Then I came across a detail in the case which struck a chord. Although Gideon was an illegal agent, the Russians still required him to make very occasional meetings with a legal diplomat from the Russian Embassy, almost certainly the Illegal Support Officer. The probable reason for these meetings was that the KGB believed Gideon to be such a difficult and unreliable agent that only face-to-face meetings would ensure he was kept on the right track. During one of these meetings, which were covered by the RCMP, a furious row broke out between Gideon and his controller. Gideon had been missing his broadcasts from Moscow and failing to respond. Gideon claimed that he had been unable to receive the messages on his radio set because the atmospheric conditions were too bad. His KGB controller was totally unimpressed. He handed Gideon a detailed list of the transmissions he had missed, complete with their times and duration, and made it clear he knew Gideon was lying. Although the Russian never specifically mentioned the fact, it was obvious to me that he must have been monitoring the broadcasts sent to Gideon inside the Embassy.

  I read the report of this meeting again and again to ensure that I had understood it correctly. As I turned the crisp pages of the file I began to realize that if the KGB Illegal Support Officer in Canada monitored transmissions from Moscow, it was at least possible that his counterpart in the London Embassy would be doing the same thing. If GCHQ could be persuaded to operate flat out against the Embassy we might be able to identify the transmissions, even perhaps tentatively identify the Illegal Support Officer by correlating his movements against those of the transmissions. Once we had done that we would be in a position to put him under total surveillance in an effort to catch him meeting his agents.

  As soon as I got back to London I raised the whole question with GCHQ. They listened patiently as I pleaded for more effort. But I was operating on my own. There was no great enthusiasm for the venture inside MI5 either, and although GCHQ did agree to provide a few more positions to monitor broadcasts, it was nothing like enough. I suggested GCHQ mount a major effort to locate receivers inside the Russian Embassy, just as I had earlier done over the Watcher radios. But once again my request was deemed unpractical and the subject was soon lost in the dense undergrowth of the intelligence bureaucracy.

  The situation remained at stalemate until 1958, when a new case emerged which totally changed the relationship between MI5 and GCHQ. In the process it pitched Hollis into his first internal crisis and introduced him to a subject which was to dog him throughout his career.

  I was sitting in my office poring over the plans for a microphone installation when I received a summons to Hollis' office. He was sitting in the armchair at one end of the conference table, holding several loose files. He looked gray and drawn. He motioned me to the chair opposite.

  "I would like you to help me with a problem," he said, handing me a file. I read the contents swiftly. They were source reports from an agent named Frantisek Tisler, who evidently worked as a cipher clerk in the Czech Embassy in Washington. Tisler was being run by the FBI, and they had handed on to MI5 items of his intelligence which related to British security. Tisler claimed he had gone back to Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1957 and met by chance an old friend, Colonel Pribyl, who at the time was also on leave from his posting to London as the Military Attache. They had got drunk and Pribyl told Tisler that he was running an important spy in Britain, a man named Linney, who was designing simulators for use in a guided-missile project for the RAF. It had not taken long for MI5 to locate the spy. Attached to the Tisler source report was a copy of Linney's Personal File entry in the MI5 Registry. He was a senior engineer working in the Miles Aircraft Development Laboratory at Shoreham in Sussex, where he had total access to the operational and performance details of the missiles.

  "I don't see the problem, sir. Why don't we place him under surveillance, and arrest him when he next makes a meet with Pribyl?"

  "This is the problem," said Hollis grimly, handing me an additional sheet of paper.

  It was a letter to Hollis from J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the FBI, typed on Hoover's personal italicized typewriter. The letter outlined another, much more serious allegation made by Tisler. He claimed that Pribyl had also told him that he knew the Russians had a spy inside MI5 in London. Pribyl had discovered this when he was debriefing an important agent in a car traveling through the streets of London. He became aware that he was being followed by a vehicle, which he presumed to be an MI5 Watcher car, and took evasive action to throw the car off. Anxious to ensure that the identity of his agent had not been blown, he decided to contact his Russian opposite number, Colonel Rogov, for help. Rogov told him that it would take a day or two to check, but eventually he was able to reassure Pribyl that although a Watcher car had followed him, it had given up the chase, as they believed he was just giving a driving lesson to a colleague. Rogov also told him that he should be aware of the fact that the MI5 Watcher service had recently changed tactics, and instead of openly tailing diplomats as soon as they left their embassies, they were picking them up on the bridges across the Thames, where countersurveillance was more difficult.

  When I read the note, I knew immediately that what Pribyl had learned was genuine. The change in Watcher operations had indeed taken place, largely at my instigation as part of the attempted modernization program. The RCMP had been experimenting with this idea with some success. It was called Operation COVERPOINT. No wonder Hoover insisted that his letter be delivered by hand via his deputy Al Belmont, who refused to meet Hollis inside Leconfield House. The letter was handed over at a secret meeting in an MI5 safe house, and Belmont flew straight back to Washington incognito.

  "You can see our problem, Peter," said Hollis. "If we make a move against Linney we may blow Tisler, and the FBI are anxious to retain him in place for as long as possible. And if we try to investigate the case by other means, we'll be blown by the Russian source inside the office. Whatever happens, we must get to the bottom of this penetration."

  Hollis told me that for the past three months extensive investigations had been made in the Watcher and Watcher support services by Malcolm Cumming and Courtney Young, the head of Russian Counterespionage. It was felt that the leak must emanate from there, but nothing had been found. Finally, Hugh Winterborn had prevailed on Cumming to persuade Hollis to indoctrinate me.

  "Have you got any ideas, Peter?"

  "On
ly to string up those buggers down at Cheltenham, sir!"

  "I'm sorry. I don't think I follow..."

  I explained to Hollis that I had long held the theory that the Russians might be obtaining intelligence through intercepting and analyzing our Watcher communications.

  "My father and I did something similar in 1940 on the Sussex Downs. We tracked signals, and managed to plot the course of the British Fleet as it went down the Channel. I'm sure that's how Rogov got the information. It would be relatively easy for them to do it, sir. Just cross-referencing direction-finding of our signals with the records of where their own people go would tell them a lot. Basically, they must always know when we're following them."

  I told him that I had repeatedly pushed GCHQ to conduct thorough tests to check if receivers were operating inside the Embassy which correlated with our own communications.

  "I'm afraid, sir, it was never high on their list of priorities."

  Hollis groaned.

  "But can you do it, Peter?"

  "Yes, I think so. What we've got to do is try to trace emissions from the receiver."

  The principle was simple. Every radio set contains a local oscillator to "beat down" the incoming signal into a fixed frequency which can be much more easily filtered. The local oscillator always radiates sound waves as it operates, and it is these emissions which reveal the presence of a receiver.

  "You realize, of course, that this is SIGINT, sir. Strictly speaking we're not allowed to do that work. GCHQ will take my guts for garters when they find out..."

  Hollis hunched forward thoughtfully, cupping his hands across his face. There was a painful silence.

  "They would need to be told about the Tisler allegation, of course, if we brought them in," he said finally. It was the kind of Whitehall demarcation dispute Hollis understood only too well.

  "I could always have a go," I ventured. "If you can square my back upstairs with Cheltenham when they find out, at least we'll know one way or the other about Tisler's source within a few months. If we go to GCHQ, it'll take a year or more to arrange."

  Hollis began to collect the files together into a pile.

  "I think that is the best course of action," said Hollis, "Keep me informed, won't you."

  He looked at me squarely.

  "Of course, Peter, you realize what a terrible thing this would be for the Service, don't you? If it's true. I mean. Quite apart from the effect in Washington. A lot of good work will have been wasted."

  "Including my own," I thought bitterly, angry at myself for not pushing GCHQ harder over the Watcher radios.

  As soon as I got back to my office I contacted Courtney Young and asked him to send over any intelligence reports he had detailing the types of electronic equipment the Russians had either bought in London or imported into the UK since the war. Working through the files of reports I was able to pull together a reasonably accurate picture of the range and types of receiver the Russians were using inside the Embassy. I calculated that the probable range of emissions from their local oscillators was around two hundred yards. That ruled out operating from our static observation posts. But A Branch had been busy for some time developing a radio transparent mobile van with plastic walls. I pressed Winterborn to finish the project as soon as possible. Within a fortnight the van was rigged with an internal power supply and two receivers, one to detect the emissions from the Russian local oscillator and the other to confirm the relationship to the A4 frequency.

  One spring day in March 1958, my assistant Tony Sale and I took the van out for the first time. We obtained permission to drive it up Kensington Park Gardens in front of the Embassy as if we were making a delivery to a house nearby. Sale and I sat inside with fingers crossed, earphones clamped over our heads, watching for the faintest flicker out of the amplifier. We made two passes. Nothing happened. The static hummed. We drove across to the Consulate on Bayswater Road and made a pass along the front of the building. As we neared No. 5, the Russian premises, we began to pick up the faint flutterings of a signal. As I tuned the receiver we heard a whistle as it encountered the frequency of the local oscillator. We slowed in front of the front door and the signal gained rapidly in strength, tailing off as we made our way up toward Marble Arch. There was certainly a receiver operating inside the Embassy. But was it tuned to the Watcher frequency?

  For the next few days we made a series of passes at various different times of the day and night to try to gain some idea of what times the receiver inside the Embassy was in use, and whether there was a correlation with Watcher radios. It looked as if it were going to be a long, laborious, imperfect task. Then, by coincidence, as we were making a pass in front of the Consulate, a Watcher car drove past the other way, transmitting on the Watcher frequency back to Watcher headquarters. Inside the van our receiver, which was tuned to the local oscillator inside the Consulate, squawked loudly.

  "What the hell do you suppose that is?" I asked Tony Sale.

  He looked up with a quizzical look on his face. Then the truth suddenly dawned on us both. The Watcher car had just handed us the proof we needed. By transmitting on the Watcher frequency so close to the Consulate the Watcher car had overloaded the input circuit going into the Embassy local oscillator. We had picked up the squawk of pain as its frequency distorted under the overload. In other words, it was proof that the receiver inside the Embassy was tuned to the Watcher frequency.

  The implications of this new discovery, code-named RAFTER, were enormous. Not only could we prove beyond any doubt that the Russians were listening to our Watcher frequencies; we could also use the same technique to check the frequencies being listened to on any receiver we could detect inside the Embassy. All we needed was to radiate at the Embassy and listen for the local oscillator overload. The ideas I had nursed since reading the KEYSTONE files were finally in a position to be put into practice. Using RAFTER we could detect which broadcasts from Moscow to illegal agents in the field were being monitored inside the Embassy. RAFTER, potentially, offered us a shattering breakthrough into the hitherto secret world of Soviet illegal communications.

  But while RAFTER proved our Watcher communications were a major source of intelligence for the Russians, there was still the question of the missile spy, Linney. Obviously, the investigation of Linney had to be done in such a way that our Watcher radios would not give away the operation. I decided that since radio silence was unrealistic, the best solution was to drastically change the frequencies of the vehicles assigned to the operation. I went to see the Ministry of Defense and asked to pirate one of their military frequencies, seventy megacycles away from the current Watcher frequency, so that the Linney vehicle transmissions would melt into the mass of other military traffic on nearby wavebands. But first I had to install new crystals in the Watcher radio sets so that they could operate on the new frequency. Every communications radio contains a crystal which controls the frequency at which it can receive or transmit. Rather than risk handling this through MI5 channels, I paid a private visit to my old colleague R.J. Kemp, the Marconi Chief of Research, and asked him if he would produce the new crystals for me in the Great Baddow Laboratory. I gave him a sample crystal so he could build one of the correct shape, and stressed that the new frequency should be held only by him and his immediate assistant. As an additional security precaution, we decided to mark the new crystals with an entirely different frequency from the actual one used. Within three weeks Kemp had produced enough crystals for a dozen transmitter and receiver units, and they were installed by the MI5 engineers who normally handled Watcher radios, so as not to raise suspicions.

  The details of this operation, code-named LOVEBIRD, were severely restricted inside MI5. Only Winterborn and I knew the correct frequency and none of the new radios were used within range of the Soviet Embassy. The Consulate receiver was continuously monitored using RAFTER, so that we could record how the Russians behaved during the operation against Linney. D Branch had already extensively analyzed the movements of Linne
y and his controller, Pribyl. By comparing the two, they discovered that their regular meet was on the South Downs near Brighton. We arranged with Special Branch to arrest Linney and Pribyl in the act of passing over secret material at their next rendezvous.

  Linney was followed to the meeting place by Watchers equipped with the new frequency. He waited for two hours and then went back home. Pribyl, meanwhile, remained in London. Subsequently, Linney was interrogated, and unexpectedly confessed. He was sentenced to fourteen years imprisonment.

  On the face of it, the case had been concluded successfully. But one detail troubled Winterborn, me, and the D Branch officers in charge of the case. Why had Pribyl missed his meeting? There were many reasons which might explain his failure to show up. He had not missed any other meets. But if he had learned of the planned arrest, it could not have been from the Watcher radios. It could only have been as a result of a tip-off from a human source.