by Peter Wright
Cook listened attentively as I outlined my requirements. The essence of my approach to counterespionage was to develop technical ways of attacking Soviet spy communications. Communications are the only vulnerable point in an agent's cover, because he has to send and receive messages to and from his controller. I explained to Cook that RAFTER already provided us with the most valuable weapon of all - an entree into Russian radio communications - but that we urgently needed new techniques to attack their physical methods of communications as well, such as secret writing, microdots, and dead letter drops. Progress on these would vastly improve our chances of counterespionage success.
"Let's solve some of these right away," said Cook, picking up his telephone. He spoke to one of his senior scientists, Dr. Frank Morgan.
"Frank, I'm sending down someone to work with you on a new project. He'll explain when he arrives. You'll enjoy it - he's a man after your own heart."
With typical Cook generosity, he provided a team of two principal scientific officers, as well as junior staff and resources for the sole use of MI5. In all I had thirty people at AWRE, and for two years AWRE carried the entire cost, after which time the Defense Research Policy Committee agreed to continue the funding. Frank Morgan was the most valuable gift of all. He attacked the problems with zest and flair, and within those two years MI5 obtained results far beyond anything dreamed of in the USA.
The techniques of secret writing are the same the world over. First the spy writes his cover letter. Then he writes the secret message on top, using a special sheet of carbon paper treated with a colorless chemical. Tiny particles of the chemical are transferred to the letter, which can then be developed by the recipient. Most developing agents make the chemical traces grow, so that the message becomes legible, and unless the correct agent is known, the message remains undetectable. But Morgan created a universal developing agent, using radioactivity, which transformed the possibilities of detection.
Microdots are another method of surreptitious communication between an agent in the field and his controller. Photographs are reduced down to microscopic size, so that they are practically invisible to the naked eye. Microdots are generally concealed under stamps, on top of punctuation marks in typewritten letters, or under the lips of envelopes. Morgan produced a process for detecting microdots using neutron activation.
A third method of spy communication, and one of the most common, is the dead letter drop. An agent leaves a package, for instance of exposed film, in an arranged place, and his controller collects it at a later stage, so that the two are never seen to meet. The KGB frequently gave their agents hollow containers which were specially treated, so that they could tell if the container had been surreptitiously opened. Morgan developed a soft X-ray technique which enabled us to inspect the interiors of suspect containers without tampering with them or fogging the unexposed film inside.
The last of Morgan's four programs was the development of a number of special X-ray methods for use against advanced combination safes. These were proving more than a match even for Leslie Jagger, but the use of Morgan's X-ray device enabled the combination to be read off from outside, and gave MI5 potential access to every safe in Britain.
Despite the improvements on the technical and research side, MI5's counterespionage record remained lamentable in the 1950s. After Dick White became Director-General in 1953, he recognized the great deficiencies in this area. Most of the talented wartime Double Cross case officers had either left, retired, or moved, like Dick White, into senior management positions. Their replacements tended to be second-rate former colonial policemen with little or no experience of counterespionage, who found it hard to make the adjustment from the wartime superiority over the German Abwehr to the new war against a more skilled and more numerous Russian Intelligence Service. He formed a new counterespionage department, D Branch, and appointed me largely to provide them with scientific and technical advice. But improvements were slow to come. For some long time the D Branch staff resented my access to their secrets. They wallowed in their own technical ignorance. I remember one case officer saving, as I explained some technicality in terms of the Ohm's law:
"That's all right, Peter, old chap, I don't need to know about Ohm's law. I read Greats."
"Good God," I exploded, "every schoolboy learns about Ohm's law!"
The head of D Branch, Graham Mitchell, was a clever man, but he was weak. His policy was to cravenly copy the wartime Double Cross techniques, recruiting as many double agents as possible, and operating extensive networks of agents in the large Russian, Polish, and Czechoslovakian emigre communities. Every time MI5 were notified of or discovered a Russian approach to a student, businessman, or scientist, the recipient was encouraged to accept the approach, so that MI5 could monitor the case. He was convinced that eventually one of these double agents would be accepted by the Russians and taken into the heart of the illegal network.
The double-agent cases were a time-consuming charade. A favorite KGB trick was to give the double agent a parcel of money or hollow object (which at that stage we could inspect), and ask him to place it in a dead letter drop. D Branch was consumed every time this happened. Teams of Watchers were sent to stake out the drop for days on end, believing that the illegal would himself come to clear it. Often no one came to collect the packages at all or, if it was money, the KGB officer who originally handed it to the double agent would himself clear the drop. When I raised doubts about the double-agent policy, I was told solemnly that these were KGB training procedures, used to check if the agent was trustworthy. Patience would yield results.
The truth was that the Russians used double-agent cases to play with MI5, identify our case officers, disperse our effort, and decoy us from their real operations. The standard of MI5 tradecraft was appalling. KGB monitoring of our Watcher radios certainly gave away our presence on a large number of the double-agent cases. But the D Branch case officers were just as bad, rarely employing anything other than the most rudimentary countersurveillance before meeting their agents. An entire department in the Foreign Office provided MI5 with "chicken feed," secret material given to double agents to pass on to the Russians as proof of their bona fides. The chicken feed consisted of wholly unbelievable faked secret documents about weapons we did not have, and policies we had no intention of pursuing. I raised the whole question of the chicken feed with D Branch, and pointed out that the material was bound to be spotted as suspect, and that only real secrets would convince the Russians. That, I was told, was quite out of the question.
The other main area of D Branch activity was in the Emigre communities. The agent running sections of D Branch ran extensive networks, and used agents in London to recruit others inside their host countries. This was a particularly attractive option for MI5. Emigres were easy to recruit, and enabled MI5 to compete directly with MI6 in the production of Iron Curtain intelligence, much to their irritation. But in reality, by the early 1950s, these emigre rings were utterly penetrated by the KGB, or their allied Eastern European services, and as with the double-agent cases, served only to soak up our effort, and identify our agent runners.
MI5 were living in the past, copying the techniques of Double Cross, in an intelligence world which had changed enormously since the war. They lacked not only case officers with the requisite skills but, much more important, the codebreaking advantages MI5 had enjoyed over the Germans.
Throughout the 1950s, MI5 avoided confronting the most obvious counterespionage problem facing Britain at that time - the results of the 1930s Soviet infiltrations of the British Establishment. The extent of the recruitment of "Stalin's Englishmen" became apparent with the convictions of Alan Nunn May and Klaus Fuchs for nuclear espionage in the late 1940s, closely followed by the defection of Burgess and Maclean in 1951. It was obvious to anyone with access to the papers that the Russian Intelligence Services had capitalized on the widespread intellectual disillusionment among well-born British intellectuals of the 1930s, and succeeded in recrui
ting important agents, some of whom, at least, remained loyal to the Soviet cause after the war.
The defections of Burgess and Maclean traumatized MI5. Philby and Blunt also fell under suspicion, but faced with their adamant denials, the cases ran quickly into sand. The only remaining way forward was to launch a major, intensive program of research and investigation among the network of people who had been friendly with the two diplomats at Oxford and Cambridge. Such a policy entailed enormous difficulties. Most of those friendly with Burgess and Maclean were now rising to positions of considerable eminence, not just in the Intelligence Services but in the Civil Service as well. There was potential political embarrassment if such inquiries leaked at a time when all concerned were doing everything to suppress any information about the defections. Moreover, there was always the ghastly possibility that vigorous investigations might provoke further departures to Moscow, with incalculable consequences. No one was prepared to grasp the nettle and from 1954 onward all work virtually ceased, MI5 apparently believing that the new vetting procedures then being implemented were enough to protect the national security. It was like locking the chicken house door with the fox inside.
One man stood out against this policy of neglect. He was Arthur Martin, a former Army signals officer who joined MI5 soon after the war. Martin quickly proved himself a brilliant and intuitive case officer, handling in quick succession the Fuchs and Maclean investigations, ably assisted by Evelyn McBarnet, a young woman research officer, whose contribution to these cases has never been adequately acknowledged. Martin had one huge advantage in his approach to counterespionage work: he never attended a public school. Once it was known that a serious leakage of secrets had occurred at the British Embassy in Washington, the conventional view was to search for the culprit among the clerks, cleaners, and secretaries. But Martin realized at an early stage that the culprit was a senior diplomat. He doggedly pursued the investigation, and was only foiled when Maclean defected.
After the defections, Martin pressed the management of MI5 to sanction urgent inquiries into the whole complex network of Communist infiltrations of Cambridge in the 1930s. But his requests for permission to interview the numerous members of the Philby, Burgess, and Maclean social circles were mostly refused. For two years he struggled against this woeful policy, until finally he went to see the Director-General, Dick White, and told him that he intended to resign and take a job with the new Australian Security Intelligence Organization, ASIO.
White, who had a high regard for Martin's abilities, persuaded him to go to Malaya instead, as MI5's Security Liaison Officer, until the climate in D Branch was better. It was, at the time, a vital job, and Martin played a leading role in the successful counterinsurgency campaign in Malaya, but the consequences for counterespionage were disastrous. For most of the decade MI5's most talented, if temperamental, officer was missing.
When Hollis became Director-General in 1956, a new head of D Branch, Martin Furnival Jones, was appointed. Furnival Jones was a lawyer by training, who joined MI5 during the war. On the surface he seemed an orthodox, taciturn man, lacking flair and vigor. But Furnival Jones was easy to underestimate. He had an officer's gift for leadership, and a logical, ordered mind which was surprisingly open to new ideas. But most of all, he possessed a streak of determination, if not ruthlessness, which made him a superb head of counterespionage. He realized that the main problem facing MI5 was the sheer scale of Soviet Bloc intelligence activity in Britain. D1, for instance, had the task of monitoring and working against around 300 Russian intelligence officers. Its total staff was eleven, of whom four were secretaries. We were swamped, never knowing whether we were chasing spies or shadows.
One of his first decisions was to bring Arthur Martin back from the wilderness to Leconfield House, first as D2, in charge of Czech and Polish affairs, and then, in 1959, as D1, responsible for Soviet Counterespionage. Furnival Jones had great admiration for Arthur Martin's skills, and the strength of character to get the best out of him, despite his sometimes truculent manner. Arthur Martin moved quickly to restore D1's emphasis on active counterespionage investigation, and he instinctively grasped the importance of new techniques like RAFTER, having worked in signals intelligence during the war. For the first time, I found someone with seniority who listened sympathetically and acted on my ideas for change. We quickly became close friends. We formed a Resources Index in A Branch, recording anyone and anything which could be of use to MI5. Forms were sent around the office, asking for entries, and over a period of months we built up an index so that a case officer who required, for instance, a nurse, or a plumber, or access to a particular company's files, or a lock-up garage, could consult the index, rather than having to spend time obtaining the resource from scratch.
We made radical changes in the order-of-battle approach, bringing in Movements Analysis, an idea which Terry Guernsey, the RCMP head of counterespionage, first began. This involved logging all known movements of Soviet Embassy personnel to build up an overall picture of their activities. Through this, it was possible to gain important intelligence about the identities of likely KGB officers.
But the most radical changes were made in the Operations section, which was dominated by a brilliant agent runner and investigator, Michael McCaul. Martin and McCaul put the section on a war footing. Even though our forces were so much smaller than the Russians', we went on the offensive, changing our tactics, and aiming to disrupt the KGB, who were accustomed to the utter predictability of our approach. Some of the schemes were madcap, like the operation to pickpocket all known KGB officers on the streets of London, in the hope that scraps of intelligence might be gleaned. It didn't work, but it made the Russians feel they were under attack for the first time in years. Other changes were much more significant. The Soviet emigre networks, undoubtedly the most penetrated of all, were rolled up. The double-agent cases were run much more aggressively. Case officers accompanied double agents to meetings with their KGB controller, and warned the KGB man that if he was caught recruiting British nationals again, he would be reported to the Foreign Office and expelled. McCaul and his men began to make brazen attempts to recruit KGB men. We never succeeded, but the change of tactic was enough, we hoped, to sow the seeds of doubt in Kensington Park Gardens.
McCaul implemented these new tactics brilliantly. On one occasion, a technician who worked in a Royal Ordnance Factory, making a new Bofors shell, told MI5 that he had been approached by a KGB officer and asked to provide a sample of the new shell. McCaul arranged for a dummy shell to be made up and filled with sand so that it felt as if it were full of explosive. As soon as the double agent handed over the shell in a South London park, McCaul pounced from the bushes. He told the Russian that he was in serious trouble, and flagrantly in possession of a piece of Top Secret British military equipment. He would certainly be declared PERSONA NON GRATA. KGB officers feared expulsion. For one thing they lost the perks of overseas service, but more important, it represented a failure, and any failure automatically made them suspect in the eyes of their own counterintelligence officers. The KGB man began to shake uncontrollably, as McCaul conjured up visions of a burly London policeman carting the hapless Russian off to some secret dungeon for a spot of torture.
"Don't shake the shell, for Christ's sake," he shouted, "you'll trigger the fuse!"
The Russian dropped the shell to the ground and sprinted out of the park as if pursued by the furies. The next day he was on the plane home.
In fact, the Foreign Office was notoriously reluctant to give support. Numerous times we sent forward recommendations to expel Russians we caught recruiting or running agents, but the Foreign Office Northern Department, responsible for Anglo-Soviet relations, more often than not vetoed our case. Occasionally I attended these Northern Department meetings to give technical briefings on what the particular Russian diplomat had been doing. They always followed a set pattern. The MI6 contingent would object to expulsion, fearing a reprisal in Moscow. Then the Foreign Offi
ce would weigh in with a sermon about the importance of not disrupting pending arms control negotiations, or jeopardizing an imminent trade deal. Courtney Young turned to me on one occasion as we emerged from the ornate committee room and muttered:
"I've never seen such a hotbed of cold feet!"
The lack of Foreign Office support meant we had to rely on less orthodox methods of warning off the Soviets. Around this time we received a spate of reports from Watchers detailing approaches to them by Russians. One Watcher described how a KGB officer came up to him in a pub and handed him an envelope containing a large quantity of money, and tried to talk him into providing information about his MI5 work.
Michael McCaul decided that direct action was needed. He telephoned the Chief KGB Resident in his office in the Soviet Embassy, and asked for an appointment, using his cover name Macauley, which was well known to the Russians. He strode into the Embassy as bold as brass, and warned the Russians against any further approaches to the Watchers, making dire threats of diplomatic interventions which, in reality, were unlikely ever to have been sanctioned. McCaul was highly amused by his trip into the lion's den. The Resident made him lavishly welcome and they took afternoon tea together under a giant aspidistra. The Russian doubted that any of his staff could be so indelicate as to engage in espionage on foreign soil, but agreed to look into the matter in case one of the staff had, perhaps, been a little overzealous.