Spycatcher

by Peter Wright

  "It's all been terribly badly handled," moaned Arthur in despair as the tape flicked through the heads. "We should have sent a team out there, and grilled him while we had the chance."

  I agreed with him. Roger and Dick had not taken into account that Philby might defect.

  On the face of it, the coincidental Modin journeys, the fact that Philby seemed to be expecting Elliott, and his artful confession all pointed in one direction - the Russians still had access to a source inside British Intelligence who was monitoring the progress of the Philby case. Only a handful of officers had such access, chief among them being Hollis and Mitchell.

  I decided to pay a visit to GCHQ to see if there was anything further that could be done with the VENONA program to assist the Mitchell case. The VENONA work was done inside a large wooden hut, number H72, which formed a spur off one of the main avenues in the central GCHQ complex. The work was supervised by a young cryptanalyst named Geoffrey Sudbury, who sat in a small office at the front of the hut. Behind him dozens of linguists sat under harsh lamps, toiling for matches, and hoping to tease out the translations from a thousand anonymous groups of numbers.

  Sudbury's office was a joyous menagerie of cryptanalytical bric-a-brac. Huge piles of bound VENONA window indexes piled up in one corner, and tray upon tray of decrypts stood on his desk, ready for his approval before they were circulated up to MI5 and MI6. Sudbury and I had a long talk about how the whole program could be pushed forward. The principal problem was that VENONA, up until then, had been hand matched, and computers were used only for specific pieces of work, such as dragging for a cryptonym. Most of the effort had gone into attacking the KGB and GRU channels directly; the trade traffic channels had been used wherever they formed the back of a match, but otherwise the bulk of it had been left unprocessed. A comprehensive computer-matching program was needed, using the new computers which were becoming available by the early 1960s, in the hope that more matches might be found.

  It was a vast undertaking. There were over 150,000 trade traffic messages, and very few were even in "punched" form, suitable for processing through a computer. This alone was a huge task. Each individual group had to be punched up twice by data processors, in order to "verify" that the processed traffic was free from errors. Then the first five groups of each message were computer matched against the whole of the rest of the traffic, involving something like 10 billion calculations for each message.

  When I discussed the project with Willis at the Directorate of Science, he was skeptical about the whole thing, so I went to see Sir William Cook at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment again, with Frank Morgan. I knew that AWRE had the biggest computer facility in the country, bigger at that time than even GCHQ. I explained what I wanted to do. We needed at least three months on his computer to find the matches; once that was done, we could farm them out to NSA and GCHQ for the cryptanalytical work of trying to break the matches out. Cook, as always, was marvelous. I told him of Willis' skepticism, which he brushed aside.

  "This is one of the most important contributions AWRE can make," he said, lifting the telephone. He spoke immediately to the AWRE head of Data Processing.

  "There's a vital job I want you to start straightaway. I'm sending a chap down with the details. You don't need to know where he works. Please do as he says..."

  In two months we had punched up and verified every message, and for the next three months the AWRE computers worked on the VENONA for six hours a night.

  At first it looked as if the AWRE computerization program might transform the British VENONA. Early on we got a new match for a message just after the existing week's traffic in mid-September, which we had already broken. The message, when it was partially decrypted, concerned Stanley again. He was to carry no documents which might incriminate him to his next meeting with Krotov. Then, in the midst of a haze of unbroken groups, there was a fleeting reference to a crisis in KGB affairs in Mexico. Krotov was told to refer to Stanley for details, since his "section" dealt with Mexican matters.

  At the time of this message Philby was the head of the Iberian section of MI6, which controlled a large swath of Hispanic countries, including Mexico. It was a bitter moment. The categoric proof that Stanley was Philby had come just a matter of months after he defected. Had we broken it out a few years earlier, we could have arrested Philby on one of his regular trips back to London to visit the OBSERVER. This merely intensified fears about the integrity of MI5, since it made the decision in 1954 to close down the VENONA program look deeply suspect. When we checked, we found that the officer who ordered the closedown was the then head of Counterespionage, Graham Mitchell.

  Sadly, the Philby fragment was the only real assistance the computerization program gave the British VENONA effort. Matches were made in Mexican KGB traffic and elsewhere in South America which were of enormous interest to the CIA and the RCMP, since Mexico was a principal area where the KGB introduced illegals into North America. But the matches made in British VENONA were almost all trade traffic to trade traffic, rather than trade traffic to the KGB or GRU, which was what we needed. The cryptanalytical effort in Hut H72 went on even more intensely than before, but there was to be no new shortcut.

  There was little in Mitchell's Record of Service to help us either. Born in 1905, educated at Oxford, he then worked as a journalist and later as a statistician in Conservative Central Office. This did surprise me, as I recalled that when arguing with Mitchell about the Lonsdale case, he had claimed that he could not understand my argument since he was "no statistician." He joined MI5 as a result of contact made through the Tory Party, and worked on the anti-Fascist side during the war, latterly with some involvement, too, in the CPGB. Thereafter his progress was swift, he became head of F Branch (Domestic Subversion) in the late 1940s, and Dick White's first head of Counterespionage in 1953, before Hollis appointed him his deputy in 1956. There were only two really striking things about Mitchell's career. One was the way it was intimately bound up with Hollis.' They had been contemporaries at Oxford, joined MI5 at around the same time, and followed each other up the ladder in complementary positions. The second was the fact that Mitchell seemed to be an underachiever. He was a clever man, picked by Dick White to transform D Branch. He signally failed to do so in the three years he held the job, and indeed, when the decision to close VENONA down was taken into account, it seemed almost as if he had willfully failed.

  The intensive surveillance of Mitchell in the office revealed very little. I treated his ink blotter with secret writing material, and every night it was developed, so that we could check on everything he wrote. But there was nothing beyond the papers he worked on normally. The closed circuit television was monitored continuously by the MI6 Watchers. It was an unpleasant task, every morning Mitchell came in and picked his teeth with a toothpick in front of the two-way mirror, and repeated the meticulous process again before lunch, after lunch, and then again before he went home. By the end of the case, I began to feel that the only parts of Mitchell that we knew at all well were the backs of his tonsils.

  I arranged to feed him barium meals. I circulated to him the bound volumes of my analysis of clandestine Soviet radio communications, with all their classifications and group count schedules, which I had recently updated for GCHQ. If Mitchell was a spy, it was the sort of priceless intelligence he could not afford to ignore. I watched on the monitor as Mitchell looked at the report in a desultory sort of way.

  Later James Robertson, an old adversary of mine who had run Soviet Counterespionage for a period in the 1950s, came into his office, and they began talking about me. Robertson never forgave me for the changes I made in D Branch when he was there. He thought I was a jumped-up newcomer, who should have learned to respect my elders and betters before presuming to offer advice. He and Mitchell discussed my radio analysis. Neither man understood its purpose.

  "That bloody man Wright," said Robertson tartly, "he thinks he knows it all. Wants his wings clipped!"

  Mit
chell nodded sagely, and I could not help smiling at the irony of it all.

  But the lighter moments were few and far between in what was a grim vigil, watching and waiting for a man to betray himself on the other side of a mirror. Only once did I think we had him. One Friday afternoon he began drawing on a scrap of paper. He concentrated intensely for perhaps twenty minutes, referring to notes on a piece of paper he took from his wallet, and then suddenly tore the piece of paper up and put it in his waste bin. Every night, since the beginning of the case, Hollis arranged for me to search his office, and Hollis' secretary was instructed to retain his burn bag, containing his classified waste, so that it could be checked as well. That evening I retrieved the scraps of paper from the bin, and reconstructed them. It was a map of Chobham Common, near where Mitchell lived, with dots and arrows going in various directions. In the middle of the map were the letters "RV" and the siting of two cars, one at either end of the path across the common which passed the rendezvous site.

  For days Pavilion Road was deserted, as the entire focus of the case shifted to the isolated spot on the common indicated by Mitchell's map. But Mitchell never went close to the spot, nor did anyone else.

  When I first began searching Mitchell's office, Hollis was highly nervous.

  "There are some highly sensitive documents inside, Peter, and I want your word that they will remain undisclosed."

  Hollis was worried in particular about personnel reports, and other embarrassing, rather than secret, papers which have by necessity to pass across the Deputy Director-General's desk. He need not have worried. There was nothing remotely interesting that I saw in Mitchell's office, which only confirmed me in my view that being DDG under a man as autocratic as Hollis must have been one of the very worst jobs in the world.

  Every night for some months Hollis and I met after hours. At first he expressed distaste at having to pry into a close colleague's affairs, but I never felt the sentiment was genuine. When I told him about the frequency with which Mitchell picked his teeth on the closed-circuit television, he laughed like a drain.

  "Poor bugger should go to a decent dentist," he laughed I, for my part, felt determined, even ruthless. I had waited for years for the chance to grapple with the penetration problem, and I felt few scruples.

  It was in those evenings that I first came to know Hollis as a man. Although I had worked for him for close on eight years, we had rarely talked outside the strict confines of official business. We had moments of tension, but by and large our relationship was correct. Only once did we have a major confrontation, when I was in A2 with Hugh Winterborn in the late 1950s. An Argentine delegation came over to negotiate a meat contract with the British Government. Hollis passed down a request from the Board of Trade for any intelligence, and instructed us to arrange for microphone coverage of the Argentines. Winterborn and I were outraged. It was a clear breach of the Findlater-Stewart memorandum, which defined MI5's purposes as strictly those connected with national security. The rest of the A2 staff felt exactly as we did, and Hollis' instruction was refused. For a few hours we all anticipated mass dismissals, but then Hollis withdrew his instruction, and it was never discussed again. The only strike in MI5's history ended in total victory for the strikers.

  Occasionally, during the searches of Mitchell's office, Hollis talked about his early years. He told me about his travels in China during the 1930s, where he worked for British American Tobacco.

  "Dreadful business out there. Any damn fool could see what the Japanese were doing in Manchuria. It was perfectly obvious we'd lose China if we didn't act," he used to say.

  As with many older MI5 officers, the roots of his dislike of the Americans lay prewar. He said the Americans could have helped out in the Far East, but refused to because they were gripped with isolationism. The French in the Far East were, he said, effete, and would rather have seen the whole place go down than help us. That left only the Russians.

  "They watched and waited," he told me, "and they got it in the end after the war, when Mao came."

  He rarely mentioned his family life, although many people in the office knew he was having a long-standing affair. Just occasionally he talked about his son Adrian, who was a gifted chess player, which evidently was a source of great pride for him. (Adrian used to go to Russia to play chess. )

  On one occasion we were talking about the case when I ventured an opinion that, whatever the result, it demonstrated a weakness in our protective security. Hollis became huffy.

  "What do you mean?" he asked.

  I told him that procedures for vetting MI5 recruits were clearly less strict than those the Service laid down throughout other Whitehall departments.

  "Look at me," I told him, "I still haven't had a vet since I joined in 1955."

  The next day the forms were sent down for me, and the issue was never discussed again, although shortly after this the vetting procedure changed, and candidates had in future to provide more referees, one of which could be nominated by the Service.

  The most memorable thing about those evenings with Hollis was his extraordinary supply of the filthiest jokes I had ever heard. It was almost as if they were a defensive mechanism, an excuse for talking, or else a way of easing the burden when he stepped down from the Olympian heights of power to mix with the troops. I asked him once where he had amassed such a fund of stories.

  "China," he told me. "Everyone drank and told jokes. It was the only way to pass the time."

  Early on I decided to search a small desk in the corner of Mitchell's office, and I asked Hollis for the key.

  "It was Guy Liddell's desk," he said. "He left it when I took over from him. It's been there for years..."

  I asked him for his consent to pick the locks of two of the drawers which were locked. He agreed and I brought the lockpicking tools the next day, and we inspected the insides of the two drawers. They were both empty, but one caught my attention. In the dust were four small marks, as if an object had been very recently dragged out of the drawer. I called Hollis over, and showed him the marks. He seemed as nonplussed as I, especially when I inspected the lock mechanism and found scratch marks, as if the drawer had recently been opened.

  Hollis went back to his office through the interconnecting door which ran between Mitchell's office and his own. I finished the search alone.

  "Only Hollis and I knew I was going to open that drawer," I thought to myself, "and something has definitely been moved. Could even be a tape recorder. Why not Mitchell? Because he didn't know. Only Hollis knew Guy Liddell's desk. Hollis took over the Deputy's office from him. No key? A man like Liddell doesn't leave the desk, and take the key. Only Hollis knew. Only Hollis..."

  I looked up. Through the door Hollis was staring at me. He said nothing. He just stared, and then bent over his file again.

  Throughout the summer months of 1963, as Mitchell's retirement neared, the investigation continued at full pitch. But the whole thing was hopelessly compromised. It had all been too hasty, and too ill-planned. Battling the deadline, and lacking the support of Hollis, it was inevitable that the security of the operation began to crumble at the seams. Mitchell realized that something was wrong. For a start, he noticed that the circulation of papers through his in-tray became erratic, as Hollis sought to restrict his access. Then he began to take evasive action against the Watchers, doubling back on himself, and practicing standard countersurveillance. There was little doubt that he knew he was being followed. Through the television monitor, Mitchell exhibited all the signs of a man under terrible stress, as if he were sunk in a massive depression. He was a tall, thin man at the best of times, but he looked positively cadaverous toward the end, with dark, sunken eyes. When people were in the room with him he made an effort to appear normal, but as soon as he was alone, he looked tortured.

  "Why are they doing this to me?" he moaned one day, gazing at Hollis' office door.

  In the final month the whole affair became almost a farce. There was no chance of finding
anything under those circumstances, so Arthur and I pressed Hollis to sanction an interrogation to resolve the case one way or the other. Hollis refused to commit himself, but a few days later he arrived unannounced at the small house in Pavilion Road.

  "I have been to see the PM," he said stiffly to the half dozen of us who were in the room, "and I am afraid an interrogation is quite out of the question."

  Out of the comer of my eye I could see Arthur brewing for another outburst.

  "Another defection at this stage would be calamitous," he said. He thanked us all briskly for our efforts and disappeared down to his waiting car. It was typical Hollis mismanagement of personnel. Here were experienced officers, working at a pitch of desperation, and he could barely spare us two minutes. The dirty work was done. Best leave it to the dirty workers!

  It was, as well, a naive approach. The MI6 Watchers, led by a hot-headed and overimpressionable young officer named Stephen de Mowbray, were appalled by Hollis' decision, and immediately took it to be a crude attempt at in-house suppression, the very thing MI5 accused MI6 of with the Philby affair. Moreover, no closedown could remove the fact that the Mitchell case had been done. A full report on the investigation had been written by Ronnie Symonds, a senior D1 officer assigned to handle the paperwork in the case. Symonds' report outlined the history of allegations of penetration of MI5 and concluded that there was a strong likelihood that a spy existed at a high level inside the Service. It raised the obvious question of whether the Americans should be alerted.