Spycatcher

by Peter Wright

  The extraordinary thing about the GRU traffic was the comparison with the KGB traffic of four years later. The GRU officers in 1940 and 1941 were clearly of low caliber, demoralized and running around like headless chickens in the wake of Stalin's purges of the 1930s. By 1945 they had given way to a new breed of professional Russian intelligence officers like Krotov. The entire agent-running procedure was clearly highly skilled, and pragmatic. Great care was being taken to protect agents for their long-term use. Where there seemed poor discipline in the GRU procedures, by 1945 the traffic showed that control was exerted from Moscow Center, and comparison between KGB and Ambassadorial channels demonstrated quite clearly the importance. the KGB had inside the Russian State. This, in a sense, was the most enduring legacy of the VENONA break - the glimpse it gave us of the vast KGB machine, with networks all across the West, ready for the Cold War as the West prepared for peace.

  When I finished studying the VENONA material in the special secure office where it was stored on the fifth floor, I moved into an office with Evelyn McBarnet, Arthur's research officer, who was already busy on the case. The Mitchell investigation came at an awkward time for D Branch. Hollis had moved Furnival Jones from his post to become head of C Branch, in preparation for his appointment as Deputy Director-General on Mitchell's retirement. F.J.'s replacement was Malcolm Cumming. It was not a popular appointment among the bright young men of D Branch, who were laboring to build on the achievements of the Lonsdale case. Arthur himself had hopes that he might have been offered the job. He certainly deserved it, in terms of achievement, but he had never been popular among the Directors for the stand he took in the early 1950s. He was seen as truculent, temperamental, too unwilling to tolerate fools gladly, which unfortunately was a prerequisite for advancement in the Service. When the Mitchell investigation was sanctioned, Hollis decided not to indoctrinate Cumming, who theoretically was a potential suspect. Oversight of the case was given to F.J., who supervised things from C Branch headquarters in Cork Street.

  Evelyn McBarnet was a strange woman, with a large birthmark running down one side of her face. Like a hothouse plant, she lived all her life in the enclosed space of the office, and had no perceptible existence outside.

  "Are you a Freemason?" she asked me almost as soon as I joined her in her office.

  "No," I replied, "and I don't approve of it."

  "I didn't think you looked like one, but you'd better join if you want to be a success in this place," she told me darkly.

  Evelyn had always believed there was a penetration of MI5. She had spent years working in counterespionage as a research officer, far longer than Arthur or I. She was a walking compendium of office life and a shrewd, if somewhat morbid, judge of character.

  "I always knew there would have to be an investigation," she told me, but she had a disturbing conviction that the course of the investigation was preordained. The worst, she was sure, was yet to come.

  "Arthur will never last, if he pushes this issue," she told me, "and neither will you, if you associate yourself with him."

  "What on earth do you mean, Evelyn?" I asked, in genuine surprise.

  She opened her safe and pulled out a small exercise book with a black cover.

  "Read this," she told me.

  I opened the book. It was neatly written in a woman's hand. I flicked through the pages quickly. It listed details of cases from the 1940s and 1950s, some of which I knew about vaguely, and others I did not, which the author had collated from the MI5 Registry. Each one contained an explicit allegation about a penetration of MI5 or MI6.

  "Whose is this?" I asked, aghast.

  "Anne Last's, a friend of mine. She used to work with me," said Evelyn. "She did it after Burgess and Maclean went, then she left to have a family, you know. She married Charles Elwell. Before she left she gave me the book, and told me that I would understand."

  "Does Arthur know...?"

  "Of course."

  "But have you shown it to anyone else?"

  "And get chopped too...?"

  I carried on reading. Maxwell Knight's name figured frequently in the first few pages. During the war he was convinced there was a spy inside MI5, and had minuted to that effect, although no action was taken. There were literally dozens and dozens of allegations. Many of them were fanciful offhand comments drawn from agent reports; but others were more concrete, like the testimony of Igor Gouzenko, the young Russian cipher clerk who defected to the Canadians in 1945, and whose defection triggered such alarm in the single week of British VENONA KGB traffic. According to Anne Last, Gouzenko claimed in his debriefing that there was a spy code-named Elli inside MI5. He had learned about Elli while serving in Moscow in 1942, from a friend of his, Luibimov, who handled radio messages dealing with Elli. Elli had something Russian in his background, had access to certain files, was serviced using Duboks, or dead letter boxes, and his information was often taken straight to Stalin. Gouzenko's allegation had been filed along with all the rest of his material, but then, inexplicably, left to gather dust.

  "People didn't believe him," said Evelyn, "they said he got it wrong. There couldn't be a spy inside MI5..."

  On the last page was what appeared to be a kind of "last will and testament." "If MI5 is penetrated," it said, "I think it is most likely to be Roger Hollis or Graham Mitchell."

  "How the hell can we investigate these?" I gasped. "We'll have to turn the whole place upside down to do it properly."

  "That's what they said in 1951," said Evelyn bitterly.

  Anne Last's book was only the first of many secrets Evelyn shared with me over the first weeks we worked together. Gradually she filled in much of the forgotten history of MI5, the kinds of stories you never heard on the A2 tapes: stories of doubts and suspicions, unexplained actions, and curious coincidences. I soon learned that I was by no means the first person to come to suspect the office had been deeply penetrated. The fears were as old as the office furniture.

  That evening I joined the commuters thronging down Curzon Street toward Park Lane, my head humming with what I had learned from Evelyn. Here was a consistent unbroken pattern of allegations, each suggesting there was a spy in the office, stretching from 1942 to the present day. For too long they had gone uninvestigated, unchallenged. This time the chase would be long and hard and unrelenting. I paused to look back at Leconfield House.

  "This time," I thought, "this time there will be no tip-offs, no defections. This one will not slip away..."

  - 14 -

  For all my high hopes, the Mitchell investigation was a wretched affair. It began with a row, it ended with a row, and little went right in between. It was clear to me that to stand any chance at all of clinching the case one way or the other before Mitchell retired, we would have to turn on the taps, and use every technical resource at our disposal. Hollis vehemently opposed any request for home telephone taps and the full watching facilities, saying that he was not prepared to indoctrinate any further MI5 officers into the case, and certainly had no intention of approaching the Home Secretary for permission to bug or burgle his own deputy's house.

  Arthur reacted badly to the setbacks. His temper by now was on a short fuse, and he erupted at a meeting in Hollis' office when his precise, quiet request for facilities was refused point-blank by the Director-General. Arthur said it was intolerable to be restricted when such a grave issue was at stake, and threatened to approach the Prime Minister himself to alert him to the situation. Hollis always reacted smoothly to any threats, and merely said he noted Arthur's comment, but that his decision stood.

  "Under no circumstances will I authorize an extension of this investigation!"

  Arthur stalked out of the room, obviously fully intending to carry out his threat.

  That evening Furnival Jones and I went to my club, the Oxford and Cambridge, to try to find a way of averting catastrophe. Relations had been swiftly deteriorating between Hollis and Arthur ever since Cumming had been appointed to the Directorship of D Branch, and
with the Mitchell case poised so perilously, any hint of the turmoil inside the organization would be disastrous.

  Furnival Jones was in a dreadful position. He knew as well as I that he would be Hollis' deputy himself within a few months, yet I could tell that he felt Hollis was indeed being obstructive.

  "It'll mean the end of the Service, if Arthur does something stupid," said Furnival Jones gloomily into his glass.

  I asked him if he could not approach Dick White privately to see if some pressure could be exerted on Hollis to relent. Furnival Jones looked at me almost in anguish. He could see that he was slowly being ground between competing loyalties - to Hollis and to those who were conducting a very difficult and emotionally fraught inquiry. It was close to one in the morning before we came to any firm decision. Furnival Jones promised that he would make an appointment to see Dick White, if I undertook to restrain Arthur from any rash course of action. I telephoned Arthur from my club; it was late, but I knew he would be up, brooding over a Scotch bottle. I said I had to see him that night, and took a taxi around to his flat.

  Arthur was in a truculent mood.

  "I suppose you've come to tell me you've decided to throw your hand in too!" he said acidly.

  For the second time that evening I settled down to a long drinking session, trying to talk Arthur around. He looked desperately strained. He had been seriously overworking since before the Lonsdale case, and was putting on weight drastically. His flesh was gray, and he was losing his youthfulness. He railed against the obstructions that were being put in his way. I could see that the specter of 1951 haunted him, when he had allowed himself to be shunted out to Malaya.

  "I should have fought then, but I agreed with them at the time. It seemed best to leave it. But not this time," he said.

  In the end he saw the sense of F.J.'s approach. An open breach with Hollis would get us nowhere, and there was at least hope that Dick would talk him around to agreeing to some of our requests for more facilities.

  The following day I got a call from F.J. He said he had spoken to Dick, and we were all to assemble at his flat in Queen Anne's Gate on the following Sunday afternoon.

  "He wants to see a presentation of the case, then he'll decide what to do."

  Dick White's flat backed onto MI6 headquarters in Broadway, and I arrived there promptly at the appointed time. Dick answered the door; he was dressed casually, with an open shirt and cravat. He showed us into his study, an elegant book-lined room, decorated in seventeenth-century style. Paintings from the National Gallery collection lined the walls, and an ornamental mirror stood gleaming above the fireplace.

  "Shall we have some tea?" he asked, anxious to break the tension which was apparent on everyone's face.

  "Now," he said, looking at Arthur, "I think you had better make your case..."

  Arthur explained that I had brought my charts tabulating access to the thirty-eight cases, and suggested that it might be better if, in the first instance, I made the presentation. For a moment there was confusion. The charts were too large to spread on the delicate tea table, but Dick saw the problem.

  "No, no," he said, "that's quite all right - spread them on the floor."

  Within two minutes we were sprawling across the carpet, and the elegant Sunday-afternoon reserve was lost as we began to go through the litany of fears once more. I explained that I had submitted two previous papers, one on Tisler, the other on Lonsdale, but that these had both been rejected. Dick looked at me sharply, but made no comment.

  "The whole point is that we can't look at this problem piecemeal," I told him, "and the basis of these charts is to try to take an overall view, to see if there is any evidence of Russian interference in the cases..."

  "Sounds like a bad case of induction to me, but go on," said Dick skeptically.

  I went through the cases one by one, and explained how it always came down to the same five names.

  "Did you at any stage discuss this with Arthur, before you drew this together?" he asked, looking me squarely in the eye.

  "How could I? I was over in the Directorate most of the time."

  Dick turned to Arthur.

  "You mean to tell me that you both came to this conclusion?"

  He obviously found it hard to believe.

  Arthur took over and explained the problem with facilities. Dick asked F.J., who so far had remained silent, for his opinion. He paused, and then committed himself irrevocably.

  "Roger has refused to extend the investigation. Personally, I think it's a mistake. When you put together the lack of following with the lack of technical aids, there really is little chance of finding an answer to this case."

  Dick was impressed with F.J.'s sensible appraisal.

  "There are two factors here," he said after thinking for a while. "We have to do this investigation, and we have to be seen to do this investigation, and that's almost just as important."

  He told us that some changes would certainly have to be made. He thought the investigation should be coordinated from an unofficial house, rather than a government building, and offered us the use of an MI6 safe house in Pavilion Road, near Sloane Square.

  "I'll think overnight about what I am going to say to Roger, and you will hear from him."

  The following day F.J. informed us that Hollis had given permission for a team of MI6 Watchers to be used on the case, although they would still not be allowed to trail Mitchell beyond the London railway station, in case their presence was noticed. We were allowed to indoctrinate Winterborn, and were given carte blanche to install a closed circuit television system behind a two-way mirror in Mitchell's office. That afternoon we moved the burgeoning files across London to a tatty unfurnished upstairs flat in a small mews house in Pavilion Road, which for the rest of the case became our headquarters.

  In the early stages of the investigation, we made a complete reexamination of the circumstances of Philby's defection It yielded one vital discovery. I asked the CIA to check their computer records of the movement of all known Russian intelligence officers around the world, and we discovered that Yun Modin, a KGB officer we strongly suspected had been Philby's controller during the 1940s, and of having arranged the Burgess/Maclean defections, had visited the Middle East in September 1962, just after Flora Solomon's meeting with Arthur in London. A further check showed Modin made a previous visit in May of the same year, shortly after the three Golitsin serials relating to the Ring of Five arrived at Leconfield House. Finally the CIA established that Modin had made no other trips abroad since the early 1950s. Eleanor Philby, Kim's wife, was interviewed at this time, and told us that Philby had cut short a family holiday in Jordan in September, and from then onward until his disappearance exhibited increasing signs of alcoholism and stress. It was obvious to us that Modin had gone to Beirut to alert Philby to the reopening of his case. Once the KGB knew of Golitsin's departure, it was an obvious precaution, but the odd thing was the fact that Philby seemed apparently unmoved until after Modin's second visit in September, which coincided exactly with the time when the case against him became unassailable.

  We turned to the tapes of Philby's so-called "confession," which Nicholas Elliott brought back with him from Beirut. For many weeks it was impossible to listen to the tapes, because the sound quality was so poor. In typical MI6 style, they had used a single low-grade microphone in a room with the windows wide open. The traffic noise was deafening. Using the binaural tape enhancer which I had developed, and the services of Evelyn McBarnet and a young transcriber named Anne Orr Ewing, who had the best hearing of all the transcribers, we managed to obtain a transcript which was about 80 percent accurate. Arthur and I listened to the tape one afternoon, following it carefully on the page. There was no doubt in anyone's mind, listening to the tape, that Philby arrived at the safe house well prepared for Elliott's confrontation. Elliott told him there was new evidence, that he was now convinced of his guilt, and Philby, who had denied everything time and again for a decade, swiftly admitted spying s
ince 1934. He never once asked what the new evidence was.

  Arthur found it distressing to listen to the tape, he kept screwing up his eyes, and pounded his knees with his fists in frustration as Philby reeled off a string of ludicrous claims. Blunt was in the clear, but Tim Milne, an apparently close friend of Philby's, who had loyally defended him for years, was not. The whole confession, including Philby's signed statement, looked carefully prepared to blend fact and fiction in a way which would mislead us. I thought back to my first meeting with Philby, the boyish charm, the stutter, how I sympathized with him, and the second time I heard that voice, in 1955, as he ducked and weaved around his MI6 interrogators, finessing a victory from a steadily losing hand. And now there was Elliott, trying his manful best to corner a man for whom deception had been a second skin for thirty years. It was no contest. By the end they sounded like two rather tipsy radio announcers, their warm, classical public school accents discussing the greatest treachery of the twentieth century.