Spycatcher

by Peter Wright

  "Total vigilance, Mr. Wright. Total vigilance. The lights always burn here in Bureau headquarters."

  He stood up abruptly, signaling the end of the meeting.

  The day after my ordeal with Hoover, I lunched with James Angleton, the CIA Chief of Counterintelligence. We had met once before on my first trip to Washington in 1957, and I was struck then by his intensity. He had a razor-sharp mind and a determination to win the Cold War, not just to enjoy the fighting of it. Every nuance and complexity of his profession fascinated him, and he had a prodigious appetite for intrigue I liked him, and he gave enough hints to encourage me into thinking we could do business together.

  Angleton's star was fast rising in Washington in the late 1950s, particularly after he obtained the secret text of Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin from his contacts in Israel. He was one of the original wartime OSS recruits, and was trained in the arts of counterespionage by Kim Philby at the old MI6 office in Ryder Street. The young Yale intellectual struck up an instant friendship with his pipe-smoking English tutor, and the relationship deepened when Philby was posted to Washington as Station Chief in 1949. Ironically it was Philby who first detected the obsession with conspiracy in the fledgling CIA Chief of Counterintelligence. Angleton quickly acquired a reputation among British Intelligence officers for his frequent attempts to manipulate to his own advantage the mutual hostility of MI5 and MI6.

  I taxied over to Georgetown. I could see why so many Washington government officials lived there, with its elegant red brick houses, tree-lined streets, bookshops, and cafes. When I arrived at Harvey's, Angleton was already sitting at his table, a gaunt and consumptive figure, dressed in a gray suit, clutching a large Jack Daniel's in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

  "How was Hoover?" he asked, as I joined him, with a voice like gravel being tossed onto a path.

  "You're very well informed today, Jim," I responded.

  His cadaverous features creased back into a smile, in stark contrast to his funereal clothing. I knew he was fishing. The CIA knew nothing about Tisler, or his allegation, and we had agreed to brief the FBI on RAFTER on the understanding that knowledge of it was strictly controlled.

  "Just routine, you know, making friends with the Bureau. It's the vogue in London at the moment."

  "It's a waste of time," he said. "You've been trying to get in with him since as far back as I can remember. He always tells us he can't stand the Brits."

  I bristled slightly, although I knew that was his intention.

  "Well, I can't say the Agency has been much friendlier."

  "You've used up a lot of credit in Washington in the last ten years," said Angleton, pouring himself another drink.

  "People like Hoover," he went on, "they look at Burgess and Maclean, and they look at the state of MI5, and they say 'What is the point?' "

  He called the waiter over, and we ordered.

  "You're off the mark, Jim," I said finally. "Things are changing. Ten years ago they would never have appointed me as a scientist. But I'm there now, and new people are coming in all the time."

  "I went to an English public school," he said with heavy sarcasm. "I know the score with you guys."

  "It's no good complaining about Burgess and Maclean all the time. That's all in the past. The world's a smaller place. We've got to start working together again."

  I surprised myself with my sudden passion. Angleton remained motionless, wreathed in a halo of swirling tobacco smoke.

  "You won't get any help from Hoover," he grunted, but made no offers of his own.

  It was a long lunch. Angleton gave little away, but pumped me with questions with every drink. What about Philby? I told him straight that I thought he was a spy. Suez was still a raw nerve, even in 1959, but Angleton wanted to know every detail. He even asked me if I could get the MI5 file on Armand Hammer, the head of Occidental Petroleum, who inevitably came to the attention of Western intelligence in view of his extensive business links in the Soviet Union. But I thought this was just a shade indelicate.

  "We're friends, Jim, but not quite that close, yet!"

  Around five I saw Angleton back to his car. It was a smart Mercedes. For all the gauntness of his persona, I soon learned, he cultivated expensive tastes with his share of the family National Cash Register Company fortune. Much to Angleton's annoyance, he discovered he had locked his keys inside, but I produced Leslie Jagger's lockpicking wire from my pocket and within half a minute had the door open.

  "Not bad, Peter, not bad!" said Angleton, smiling broadly. He knew I had savored the moment.

  "By the way," I said, "I am serious. If you won't help me in Washington, I'll find someone else who will."

  "I'll see what I can do," he muttered, slipping behind the steering wheel. Without a sideways glance, he was gone.

  In fact, despite the skepticism in Washington, important changes were taking place on the technical side of British Intelligence in the late 1950s. MI5 devoted a major effort to expanding its new techniques, RAFTER and ENGULF.

  As a first step we placed the Soviet Embassy under continuous RAFTER surveillance. Hollis persuaded a reluctant Treasury to purchase, over and above the MI5 secret allocation, a house for MI5 in the middle of the cluster of Soviet diplomatic buildings. We installed RAFTER receivers in the loft and relayed the signals we detected inside the Embassy along cables laid inside a specially constructed tunnel which MI5 dug between the new house and one which we already used for visual surveillance in the next street. We installed a former wartime MI5 officer, Cyril Mills, the famous circus owner, in the house as a tenant. Mills operated his circus business from the house for many years, and every time we needed to deliver staff or equipment to the house, or remove debris from the tunnel, we used a garishly painted Mills Circus van. It was perfect cover, and the Russians never suspected a thing.

  We were careful to use straight receivers for the RAFTER operations, each operating on a single megacycle frequency, so there were no local oscillators on our side, in case the Russians had themselves developed a form of RAFTER. The secret of the Mills house remained intact through the 1960s, until one night the alarm systems detected two Soviet diplomats climbing onto the roof. They broke a skylight, but before they could enter the roof space, the housekeeper frightened them off. Cyril Mills made a formal protest to the Soviet Embassy, but we assumed that the Russians had somehow or other detected our presence in the house.

  Once the house was ready, I was able to put into operation the kind of experiment I had envisaged while reading the KEYSTONE files in Canada. The Embassy was systematically searched for signs that receivers inside were monitoring signals beamed out from Moscow to agents in Britain. These were high-frequency (HF) signals, whereas the Watcher radio transmissions were VHF. The Russians used large radio frequency amplifiers with the HF receivers, which made RAFTER much more difficult. But GCHQ developed more sophisticated equipment, and within six months we had successfully monitored four signals from Moscow which were being routinely monitored by the Soviets inside the Embassy.

  The first signal we found was code-named GRUFF. We picked it up one Tuesday night at ten-thirty. The Morse signal came in loud and clear, and our receivers immediately detected the whine of a local oscillator as the Russians tuned to the same frequency. GCHQ analyzed GRUFF; it came from the Moscow area and followed a twice-weekly schedule. The cryptanalysts were quite certain the Morse contained genuine traffic. The Radiations Operations Committee decided to make a major effort to track the GRUFF signal down.

  I approached Courtney Young, then the Dl (head of Russian Counterespionage) and asked him if he had any intelligence which might help us locate an illegal we believed to be currently operating in the UK and receiving radio transmissions from Moscow. He was astonished by my approach. He explained that D Branch had recently run a double-agent case which had convinced him that an illegal was operating in the London area. The double agent was a young male nurse who had once been in the CPGB. Some years later, he
was approached and asked to work clandestinely for the Russians. The nurse was reluctant at first, but eventually his contact convinced him that he was not being asked to spy. All he had to do was post some letters and store the occasional suitcase. After a while the nurse became frightened and approached the police, and the case was routinely referred to MI5 by Special Branch.

  Courtney Young doubled the agent back against the Russians, and for a short while they appeared to continue to accept him as genuine. The nurse lived in the Midlands, but he was asked to lease a flat in the Clapham area of South London in his own name. Then his controller instructed him to activate and service a number of dead letter boxes on Clapham Common, near the new flat. Courtney Young was sure that he was being trained up by the Russians as an illegal support agent - someone who assists the actual illegal agent by preparing his communications and accommodation before he moves into the area. But suddenly, all contact with the agent was cut, and he was given no further instructions. Either the entire operation had aborted or the illegal was already securely established in the area through other means.

  It was a long shot, but it had to be at least a possibility that Courtney Young's illegal was the same person who was receiving the GRUFF signal from Moscow. The Radiations Operations Committee searched the Clapham area intensively for any further clues. We drove our radio-transparent RAFTER van over to Clapham, and made a base in the walled forecourt of the old air raid shelter which ran under the south side of Clapham Common. We took power from inside the shelter, and rigged up an aerial which I estimated would give us a range of about half a mile.

  I sat with Tony Sale in the cold, poorly ventilated van, watching, waiting, listening. The GRUFF broadcast was due at 10 A.M., so we tuned our first receiver to GRUFF, and searched the nearby frequencies with our other receiver to see if we could detect any oscillator. In the second week, we got a "hit," a strange, owl-like hoot, modulated with the Morse from Moscow. Someone was listening to the GRUFF broadcast within half a mile of us. Tony Sale looked across at me, momentarily, the scent of prey in his nostrils. The tape recorders began to roll with a subdued click. We switched to battery power supply, and drove slowly down Clapham High Street toward the tube station, weaving our way through the traffic. The pubs were full. Daffodils were just appearing in the neat front gardens of the suburban houses along our route, those inside oblivious of the chase passing in front of their doors.

  Tony Sale was monitoring the local oscillator signal, using its strength as a guide to its location. We knew GRUFF stayed up in the air for twenty minutes. We had seventeen left. As we reached the tube station the signal became fainter, so we doubled back toward Wandsworth, but again the signal dropped away. We went south, toward Balham, but this time the signal disappeared before we even left the Common.

  There were six minutes to go. Barely a word had been spoken inside the van. We only had one direction left. GRUFF had to be sitting up to the north, somewhere in the crowded maze of Battersea back streets. Our special van lumbered into Latchmere Road. Frustration welled up inside me. I wanted to career around the corners, shout out for help through a loud hailer, set up roadblocks. All we could do was stare at the flickering dials, willing them to move up, and not down. But by the time we crossed Wandsworth Road the signal was already trailing away, and shortly after that, Moscow signed off, GRUFF was gone. Tony Sale thumped the side of the van. I tore my headphones off, feeling drained and angry. How many more months might we sit in Clapham before we got as close again?

  I lit my thirteenth cigarette of the day and tried to make sense of the previous twenty minutes. We had traveled in every direction. But the fact that the local oscillator signal got weaker each time we moved, proved beyond any doubt that we had genuinely detected another receiver besides our own. But it was located neither to the north nor south, not to east or west. Slowly the awful truth dawned on me. GRUFF must have been right on top of us, listening within yards of the air raid shelter. We drove back to our base, and searched the area. Behind a high wall at the back of us was a large wasteland car park. GRUFF must have been parked there in a car, or perhaps a van like ours.

  Back at Leconfield House I printed out the tape recordings of the local oscillator on a sonargram. The sound waves modulated with a small mains ripple. But the wave form was not at mains frequency. It was similar to that produced by battery power packs used in cars and vans to produce alternating current. The coincidence was almost too painful to contemplate.

  For the next six months the Radiations Operations Committee flooded Clapham with every spare man at our disposal. We listened in hundreds of locations. Officers scrutinized every street, searching for signs of a telltale aerial. Discreet inquiries were made of radio equipment suppliers. But all to no avail. And every Tuesday and Thursday night the GRUFF signal came through the ether from Moscow, mocking us as we searched.

  As well as mobile RAFTER, we began, through ROC, to arrange airborne RAFTER. An RAF transport plane equipped with receivers similar to those in the van made regular sweeps across London. We thought that with the extra height we would be able to get a general idea of where receivers were operating in London. Then, having located a signal to a specific area, we could flood it with mobile RAFTER vans.

  We spent our first flight over the Soviet Embassy to check our equipment was working, and picked up their receivers immediately. We got a series of radio hits in the Finsbury Park area, and we flooded the locality, as we had in Clapham. But, like GRUFF, the agent remained undetected, comfortably camouflaged in the dense undergrowth of London's suburbs.

  The RAFTER plane flights were a kind of agony. I spent night after night up in the indigo sky, listening to the signals coming in from Moscow, insulated from the deafening sound of the plane's propellers by headphones. Down below, somewhere amid the endless blinking lights of London, a spy was up in an attic, or out in a car, listening too. I knew it. I could hear him. But I had no way of knowing where he was, who he was, whether he worked alone or as part of a ring, and, most important of all, what Moscow was telling him. I was caught between knowledge and the unknown, in that special purgatory inhabited by counterespionage officers.

  But although the RAFTER side did not immediately bear fruit, the ENGULF side, using technical means to break ciphers, soon proved enormously successful. Things really took off with a meeting in Cheltenham chaired by the GCHQ Assistant Director of Research, Josh Cooper, in 1957. Cooper realized the need for close coordination between all three Services if the new breakthrough was going to lead to further cipher-breaking success. He brought together for the first time the various interested parties - Hugh Alexander and Hugh Denham from GCHQ's H Division (Cryptanalysis); John Storer, the head of GCHQ's Scientific section responsible for Counter Clan in M Division; and Ray Frawley, me, and my opposite number in MI6, Pat O'Hanlon.

  Apart from the Russians, the Egyptians still remained GCHQ's first priority. They used Hagelin machines in all their embassies, split into four groups, each group containing different cipher wheel settings. Providing we could get a break into any one machine, every machine in that group would be vulnerable. If we could obtain samples of any one machine, every machine in that group would be vulnerable. MI6 and GCHQ drew up a list of the Egyptian embassies worldwide, along with details of which machine group they belonged to. The committee then evaluated which embassy in each group presented the best possibility for a successful ENGULF operation, and I briefed the MI6 teams on how to plan the operations. Within a year we had broken into every Egyptian cipher group.

  Although ENGULF made all classes of Hagelin machines vulnerable, these tended to be the preserve of Third World countries. Cooper hoped, by calling his meeting, to find ways of applying the ENGULF principles to more advanced cipher machines, which GCHQ lacked the computer power to attack. My approach was simple; we had to put operations into practice even if, on paper, they looked unlikely to yield results.

  "We've got to approach the problem scientifically," I said, "We don't
know how far we can push these new breakthroughs, so we have to experiment. Even if things go wrong, we'll still learn things we didn't know before."

  I had the germ of an idea. Any cipher machine, no matter how sophisticated, has to encipher the clear text of the message into a stream of random letters. In the 1950s, most advanced ciphers were produced by typing the clear text into a teleprinter, which connected into a separate cipher machine, and the enciphered text clattered out on the other side. The security of the whole system depended on thorough screening. If the cipher machine was not electromagnetically screened from the input machine carrying the clear text, echoes of the uncoded message might be carried along the output cables along with the enciphered message. With the right kind of amplifiers it was theoretically possible to separate the "ghosting" text out and read it off.

  Of course, we had no way of knowing which countries screened their cipher rooms thoroughly, and which did not, and any operation along the lines I suggested would take up to two years to reach fruition. There was little point expending vast effort trying to break the Russian cipher, when we knew it was almost certain to be well protected. It was a question of picking targets which were important, and against which we stood some chance of success.

  The French cipher stood out from all the rest as the most suitable target for further ENGULF experiments. Both MI6 and GCHQ were under pressure from the Foreign Office to provide intelligence about French intentions with regard to the pending British application to the European Economic Community. Moreover, GCHQ had studied the French system in London. They used two ciphers - a low-grade one which sent traffic along a telex line to the Quai d'Orsay, and a high-grade cipher for Ambassadorial communications which was generated independently of the cipher machine for additional security. Hugh Alexander's view was that the high-grade cipher was unbreakable, but that the low-grade one might be vulnerable to the type of attack I had outlined. Cooper gave his approval, and Operation STOCKADE began.