Spycatcher

by Peter Wright

  The first task in this joint MI5/GCHQ operation was to make a detailed technical reconnaissance of the layout of the French Embassy and, in particular, locate the area of the cipher room. I arranged to have the rating drawings sent over from the local council, and contacted the Post Office Research Unit. John Taylor had retired by this time, and had been replaced by H.T. Mitchell. Mitchell was paralyzed down one side as a result of a stroke, but although his speech was poor, his mind remained crystal clear. Mitchell gave me full diagrams of all telex and telephone cables going into and out of the Embassy, and by comparing these with the rating drawings we were able to establish the likely location of the cipher room.

  We asked the Post Office to fault the telephones, and went in to make a visual inspection of the cipher room area. Unlike the Egyptians, the French security staff watched our every move, but we got the information we required. There was no telephone in the cipher room. It was tucked away down a corridor. The cipher and telex machines were in adjoining rooms, separated only by a plasterboard partition.

  Using the Post Office charts, we traced the output cables back to the street, and into the footway box at the end of Albert Gate entrance to Hyde Park. I arranged with Mitchell to place a reasonably broad band radio frequency tap on the cable inside the footway box, and the captured signal was relayed into a special operations room we had taken in the Hyde Park Hotel. The hotel telephone system was faulted to give us cover while the cables were laid up through the hotel to the fourth-floor room we had commandeered. Special blocking condensers were placed on the circuit to ensure it was one-directional, and nothing could leak back into the Embassy to give away the operation. GCHQ routinely intercept radio and telex traffic coming in and out of every London embassy, from their premises in Palmer Street. We arranged for a line containing the French Embassy traffic to be fed from Palmer Street to our operations room in the Hyde Park Hotel. Using that line as a guide, we could check whether the signal we were getting on our radio frequency tap was the correct one.

  The first morning we found the low-grade cipher and matched it with the Palmer Street traffic. The tap was connected to our own teleprinter, and the intercepted French cipher began to clatter out in front of us. It was clear straightaway that more than one signal was traveling down the cable we were tapping. It was just a matter of sitting down with a pencil and marking off the EN CLAIR text from the coded message, and the cipher could be read straight off.

  I began to pick out a translation, and found traces of another signal on the teleprinter. I checked on the sonargram to make sure I was not mistaken, and called over the GCHQ technicians.

  The steady peaks and troughs of the signal blipped across the screen silently. The line from the low-grade cipher was strong, and its ghost was easily identifiable. But at each pinnacle there was a murmur as another signal crossed.

  "Good God," the GCHQ man murmured, "that's the high-grade cipher as well'. We must be picking it up through the partition wall."

  I hastily contacted Palmer Street and got them to relay the high grade cipher down the line so that we could compare the signals. The GCHQ technicians reset the amplifiers so that the traffic was sufficiently strong to print out, and using the Palmer Street feed as a guide, I marked off the EN CLAIR text. Within ten minutes I had a rough translation of a cable from the French Ambassador in London to President De Gaulle's private office.

  For nearly three years, between 1960 and 1963, MI5 and GCHQ read the French high grade cipher coming in and out of the French Embassy in London. Every move made by the French during our abortive attempt to enter the Common Market was monitored. The intelligence was avidly devoured by the Foreign Office, and verbatim copies of De Gaulle's cables were regularly passed to the Foreign Secretary in his red box.

  In fact, STOCKADE was a graphic illustration of the limitations of intelligence. De Gaulle was determined to thwart our application, and no amount of high-grade intelligence could change that fact. We did pass on to the Americans details of French deliberation over their independent nuclear "FORCE DE FRAPPE." It helped encourage American suspicions about De Gaulle, but the advantage we gained as a result was slight.

  Nevertheless, STOCKADE was considered a major triumph inside the Foreign Office. I was sent for by the Permanent Secretary, who congratulated me on the ingenuity of the operation.

  "Priceless material," he said, beaming, "simply priceless," leaving me in no doubt that "reading the Frog's traffic" was a worthy successor to Agincourt, the burning of Calais, and other ancient blows against the perfidious French.

  - 9 -

  Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, British Intelligence built on the success of the ENGULF (Egyptian) and STOCKADE (French) operations. GCHQ produced a mammoth list of all their targets, divided into domestic and overseas priorities. MI5 gathered intelligence about each domestic embassy, including information about the location of the cipher room, and details of all input and output cables, as well as an assessment of the feasibility of ENGULF or STOCKADE operations against that particular target. MI6 did the same thing overseas. They made detailed technical reconnaissance of GCHQ's targets although without the invaluable assistance of the Post Office they were forced to rely much more on traditional agent running.

  After STOCKADE, plans were laid to attack most European ciphers, starting with the Germans. But after much effort, we aborted the operation, because their machines were too well screened. But we successfully placed a probe microphone behind the cipher machine in the Greek Embassy in London. This was a particularly valuable target, since the Greeks were giving considerable support to Colonel Grivas, the Cypriot guerrilla leader, during the Cyprus Emergency. We operated in the same way against the Indonesian Embassy at the time of the Indonesian/Malaysian confrontation, and read the cipher continuously through the conflict.

  For MI6, undoubtedly the sweetest ROC operation was against the Russian cruiser ORDZHONIKIDZE. Despite the "Buster" Crabbe fiasco in Portsmouth, MI6 remained determined to hunt the ship down. In 1959 she was due to dock in Stockholm, and MI6 learned that the Swedish Signals Intelligence Service were planning to operate against her. The local MI6 Station Chief suggested to the Swedes that Britain might be prepared to offer advanced technical- assistance. Although nominally neutral, the Swedish SIGINT organization retained informal secret liaison with GCHQ, and they gratefully accepted the offer.

  I went to Stockholm to plan an ENGULF operation against the ORDZHONIKIDZE cipher machine in 1959. I scuttled along the dockyard in the dead of night, disguised as a Swedish engineer, accompanied by two burly local SIGINT technicians. We also had two GCHQ people with us. We ducked into a warehouse opposite the ORDZHONIKIDZE, and made our way upstairs to the operations room, where the ENGULF equipment had been delivered. We were cooped up in that small room for five days. It was high summer, and the temperature outside was in the nineties. The warehouse had a corrugated-tin roof, and inside we sweltered, finding solace in the crates of extra-strong lager stacked in the refrigerator. Although we detected some cipher noises, we were never able to break the cipher, but MI6 and GCHQ judged the whole operation a success.

  "Just like the Mounties," beamed Pat O'Hanlon, the MI6 representative at the next ROC meeting. "We always get our man!"

  The scale of RAFTER and ENGULF operations dramatically escalated, as the results of the technical reconnaissances flowed in, and operations based on them proliferated. The Radiations Operations Committee (ROC), comprising the technical staffs of MI5, MI6, and GCHQ, was formed in 1960 to coordinate the workload. ROC met once a fortnight, either in Cheltenham or at Leconfield House. I was the first Chairman, although Ray Frawley, a crisp, self-disciplined GCHQ staff officer, took upon himself the task of controlling the flow of business, and he came, before long, to dominate ROC. He was an administrative genius, with none of the hidebound instincts of some of his peers in Cheltenham. He controlled the paperwork, provided the technical resources and the GCHQ operators to man each operation, as well as organizin
g getting the all-important ministerial clearances.

  ROC was one of the most important committees in postwar British Intelligence. For ten years, until the new generation of computers came in at the end of the 1960s, ROC was crucial to much of the success of GCHQ's cryptanalytical effort. But of even greater importance was the way it began to break down the barriers which had previously separated MI5, MI6, and GCHQ at working level. As in the war, British Intelligence once again began to function as a coordinated unit, and as a result was much more successful.

  On the research side, too, there were some important improvements in the late 1950s. When I joined MI5, the principal forum for scientific research was the Colemore Committee. Once a year MI6 invited a dozen top scientists from outside the secret world into a safe conference room in Carlton House Terrace. In return for a lavish lunch, MI6 expected these eminent persons to act as private scientific consultants to the Secret Services, providing guidance, ideas, and contacts. As soon as I attended my first Colemore Committee, I could see it was a waste of time. The morning discussion was desultory and unstructured and after a few pints, gins, and lashings of the best claret, few members of the Committee were in a fit state to turn their attention to complex scientific matters. After the day's labors, Peter Dixon took us all out on the town for more feeding and watering. I will always treasure the look on Dick White's face as, toward midnight, we ended up in a less than salubrious club in Soho, featuring what might politely be described as "an exotic cabaret." He smiled wanly at the red-faced gents around the table, but I could see that, like me, he felt it was not the answer to the deep-seated scientific problems facing MI5.

  The Colemore Committee had some use as a sounding board, but I realized from the start that MI5 needed a comprehensive in-house research program, properly staffed and properly funded. It seemed to me absurd that the Treasury should expend vast sums on weapons research at the stroke of a pen, and yet balk at the petty sums required by the Secret Services for modernization.

  Shortly after I joined MI5 in 1955, I approached Sir Frederick Brundrett again, and asked him for help in obtaining the necessary resources. He was sympathetic, and suggested that my application would stand a better chance if I first made a thorough study of the current state of KGB scientific and technical advances and wrote a paper outlining the areas in which MI5 and MI6 were deficient.

  I approached my opposite number in MI6, the H Tech 1, but it was soon obvious that they had very little intelligence on the subject. I decided to make a thorough study of the debriefings of all the German scientists who, at the end of the war, had been forcibly taken back to the Soviet Union and made to work for a number of years in Soviet government laboratories as the price of freedom. These scientists were known as the Dragon Returnees, and their debriefings had provided much useful intelligence about the state of Soviet rocket, jet engine, and nuclear research, since this was the area which the Russians had been most anxious to develop.

  I went over to the Defense Scientific Intelligence Unit (DSI), and asked General Strong if I could study the papers. I was shown into a room in Northumberland Avenue which contained all the Dragon material, stacked up in dozens and dozens of dusty volumes. Incredibly, neither MI5 nor MI6 had bothered to process any of this material for its own use.

  It took months for me to sort through the Dragon papers, but it was soon obvious that considerable numbers of the Dragon scientists had been detailed to work on technical intelligence research in laboratories on the outskirts of Moscow controlled by the KGB. I drew up a list of specific Dragon scientists I wanted to interview again. The original debriefings were mostly conducted by ordinary British or American military staff, who did not have scientific training or knowledge of the intelligence-collection field, and I was sure that I could obtain more information from them.

  I traveled to Germany in 1957, and was met by MI5's senior German representative, Peter Domeisen, who had arranged facilities for the interviews at British Military Intelligence Headquarters in Hanover and Munchen Gladbach. Most intelligence officers loved Germany in the 1950s. It was the front line, and the action was free and easy. But Domeisen was depressed by the growing tension in Berlin, and was convinced that it would not be long before the Russians made another attempt to swallow up the Western sector.

  The interviews were difficult and depressing. Many of the scientists were desperate to ingratiate themselves with Britain and America. I stuck very closely to technical questioning, since the opinions they voiced were so obviously shaped to what they felt I wanted to hear. They had undeniably suffered during their incarceration in Moscow, and many of their friends had died. But it was impossible not to remember on whose side they had been working during the war.

  One of the first scientists I interviewed was the man who had developed "the Thing," which Americans found in 1950 inside the Great Seal behind the American Ambassador's desk in their Moscow Embassy. It was gratifying to hear him confirm that the device worked exactly as I had predicted that Sunday afternoon in my Marconi Nissen hut. But as I questioned him, I felt again the dismay which ran through MI5 in 1950, when we realized the KGB were already deploying something which was barely at the research stage in Britain.

  I submitted my paper on the Dragon scientists to MI6 in early 1958 for their approval. Brundrett advised me strongly to do this, because the application for resources would carry far greater weight if it came from both Services. When it was countersigned, it was placed before the Defense Research Policy Committee (DRPC), of which Brundrett was Chairman. The paper caused widespread consternation in the DRPC. Never before had KGB advances over the West been so clearly documented. I could prove that the KGB had obtained areas of major technical superiority through the efforts of the Dragon scientists, especially in the field of electronics and surveillance devices, including the use of infrared systems, which had put them in a commanding position since the late 1940s.

  Largely through Brundrett's foresight, technical research was already under way through his own ad hoc committee, of which I had been a member since 1949. But we needed to formalize and expand this program of research with more staff and resources. I submitted a further joint MI5/MI6 paper, which came to be known as the Technics Document (which is what the KGB called it), describing what progress needed to be made, and placing much greater emphasis on advanced electronics. As a result of the Dragon paper and the Technics Document, technical research for the intelligence services as a whole, but particularly for MI5, was given a much higher priority within Defense Research Policy. Unfortunately, the DRPC still vetoed the idea of specific resource allocations for the intelligence services, hoping to fill the gap by fitting our requirements into existing Defense Research programs. I still had to go cap in hand, but at least the climate was changing.

  In 1958, as the Technics Document was being considered, Hollis introduced me to a man who did more than most to secure the modernization of MI5, Victor Rothschild. Rothschild worked inside MI5 during the war (he won the George Medal for opening bombs), and maintained close friendships with many of the senior officers, but especially with Dick White. At the time I met him, Rothschild was Head of Research for the Shell Oil Corporation, controlling more than thirty laboratories worldwide. Hollis told him of my appointment as an MI5 scientist, and Rothschild expressed an interest in meeting me. He invited me to supper at his elegant London flat in St James's Place.

  I doubt I have ever met a man who impressed me as much as Victor Rothschild. He is a brilliant scientist, a Fellow of the Royal Society, with expertise in botany and zoology, and a fascination for the structure of spermatozoa. But he has been much, much more than a scientist. His contacts, in politics, in intelligence, in banking, in the Civil Service, and abroad are legendary. There are few threads in the seamless robe of the British Establishment which have not passed at some time or other through the eye of the Rothschild needle.

  Rothschild was fascinated by my plans for the scientific modernization of MI5, and offered me many sugge
stions of his own. I soon realized that he possessed an enormous appetite for the gossip and intrigue of the secret world, and we were soon swapping stories about some of the more bizarre colleagues he remembered from the war. We talked until late into the night, and I came away feeling for the first time that, with his backing, great achievements were possible.

  Rothschild offered to put some of his Shell laboratories at MI5's disposal, and began work on a variety of technical developments, including a special grease which would protect equipment if it was buried underground for long periods. The grease was developed, and both MI5 and MI6 used it extensively. Rothschild also suggested that I approach Sir William Cook, then the Deputy Head of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE), for resources. I knew Cook well, but Rothschild was a close friend, and his well-timed lobbying made my visit much easier.