Spycatcher

by Peter Wright

  Symonds' report was sent to Hollis and Dick White, and after private consultations between the two chiefs, we were summoned for another Sunday afternoon council-of-war, this time at Hollis' house in Campden Hill Square. The contrast between Dick White and Roger Hollis was never clearer than in their homes. Hollis' was a tatty, bookless townhouse, and he appeared at the door wearing his dark pinstripe weekday suit. He showed us into the dingy breakfast room, and launched straight into business. He wanted to hear our views. He gathered there was some concern about the Americans. Consultation never came naturally to Hollis, and there was more than a trace of irritation in his voice now that it had been forced on him.

  Arthur acerbically said that we had to find a way of telling them now, in case it became necessary to tell them later, when the effect, if the case against Mitchell was ever proved, would be much more traumatic. Hollis was utterly opposed. He said it would destroy the alliance, especially after Philby.

  "For all we know," I reminded Hollis, "the Americans might have sources or information which might help resolve the case. But we'll never get it unless we ask."

  For the next hour Hollis debated the issue with the two of us, tempers fraying on all sides. The others in the room - Ronnie Symonds, Arthur's desk officer for the Mitchell case, Hugh Winterborn, and F.J. - tried desperately to keep the temperature down. Symonds said he wanted to keep his options open. Perhaps Mitchell should be interrogated, but then again, it was always possible to regard the issue as closed. As for America, he said he did not know the scene out there well enough to have a view. Winterborn was solid and sensible, supporting Arthur's view that the bigger disaster would be to say nothing now, only to find the case proved later. F.J. finally burst out in exasperation.

  "We're not a bloody public school, you know. There's no obligation for us all to 'own up' to the Americans. We run our Service as we think fit, and I wish some of you would remember that!"

  But even F.J. acknowledged that there was a problem which had to be resolved. He said that on balance he felt it would be quite prudent to keep the Americans informed, the question was how to do it. Hollis could see he was outnumbered, and suddenly announced that he would visit Washington himself.

  "Wouldn't it be better done at working level?" asked F.J., but Hollis' jaw was set firm, and although Arthur tried to move him, it was clearly a waste of time.

  "I have heard the arguments. My decision is made," he snapped, glowering at Arthur across the table.

  Hollis left for the United States almost immediately, where he briefed John McCone, the new Director of the CIA following the removal of Allan Dulles after the Bay of Pigs, and Hoover. Shortly afterward Arthur followed on to brief the Bureau and the Agency at working level. He got a rough reception. The Americans simply failed to understand how a case could be left in such an inconclusive state. Here, allegedly, was one of the most dangerous spies of the twentieth century, recently retired from one of the prime counterespionage posts in the West, and yet he had not even been interrogated. The whole affair smacked, to them, of the kind of incompetence demonstrated by MI5 in 1951, and in a sense they were absolutely right.

  Hollis returned, determined to resolve the case. He ordered a new review to be written by Ronnie Symonds, and Symonds was specifically instructed not to communicate or cooperate with either Arthur or me in the research and drafting of the new report.

  When the Mitchell case was handed over to Symonds, I returned to the Directorate of Science, where I was informed that Willis had made a change in procedures. He felt the Directorate need no longer involve itself in GCHQ's affairs, and wanted me to relinquish all contacts with the organization. I was incensed, I knew that unless MI5 hunted and chivvied for facilities and cooperation from GCHQ, things would soon slip back to the desperate state that existed before 1955. Few officers inside MI5 had any real idea of what could be done for them by GCHQ, and, equally, few GCHQ people bothered to think what they could do for each other, a job which I felt was vital for the Directorate to continue. But Willis could not be shifted. He wanted me to leave Counterclan, and join the bureaucrats. It was the final straw. I went to see Hollis, and told him that I could no longer continue to work in the Directorate. I told him I wanted to join D Branch if possible, or else return to A Branch. The Mitchell case gave me a taste of research, and I knew that the position as head of D3 was still vacant. To my surprise, Hollis offered me a transfer to D3 immediately. There was just a small caveat. He wanted me to return to the Directorate to finish one final special project for Willis, before taking up my new post in January 1964.

  Willis' special project turned out to be one of the most important, and controversial, pieces of work I ever did for MI5. He wanted me to conduct a comprehensive review, to my knowledge the only one that was ever done inside British Intelligence, of every scrap of intelligence provided by yet another defector to appear in the West in the early 1960s - Oleg Penkovsky.

  Penkovsky was, at the time, the jewel in MI6's crown. He was a senior GRU officer who spied in place for MI6 and the CIA during 1961 and 1962, providing massive quantities of intelligence about Soviet military capabilities and intentions. It was hailed on both sides of the Atlantic as the most successful penetration of Soviet Intelligence since World War II. Penkovsky alerted the West to the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, and his information about the Soviet nuclear arsenal shaped the American approach to the subsequent Cuban missile crisis. He also provided the evidence for the identification of the Russian missiles in Cuba. But in late 1962 Penkovsky and a British businessman, Greville Wynne, who was his cutout to MI6, were both arrested by the KGB, and put on trial. Wynne was given a long prison term (although he was eventually exchanged for Gordon Lonsdale and the Krogers) and Penkovsky, apparently, was shot.

  I had been involved in the Penkovsky case during the time it was running. Penkovsky visited London on a number of occasions, as a member of a Soviet trade delegation, and had a series of clandestine debriefings with MI6 and CIA officers in the Mount Royal Hotel. At the time Hugh Winterborn was absent for a prolonged period through ill-health, and I was Acting A2, and was asked by MI6 to provide the technical coverage for the London Penkovsky operations. I arranged for continuous Watcher coverage of him and for the sophisticated microphoning system needed to capture every drop of intelligence that spilled out of him during the tense all-night sessions with his controllers.

  The Penkovsky case ran counter to everything which was alleged about the penetration of MI5. Arthur and I often discussed this during the Mitchell case. If there was a high-level penetration, then Penkovsky had to be a plant, because news of him was known to the handful of senior suspects, including Mitchell, from a relatively early stage. When I was arranging the Mount Royal operation, Hollis asked me for the name of the agent MI6 were meeting, and I gave it to him. Cumming also asked, but since he was not on the MI6 indoctrination list, I refused to give it to him. This provoked a furious row, and Cumming accused me of becoming too big for my boots. He seemed to resent the fact that I did not consider myself in his debt for the role he played in hiring me into the Service.

  Penkovsky seemed to fit into the most far-reaching of the allegations made by Golitsin. Golitsin said that in December 1958 Khrushchev transferred the head of the KGB, General Serov, to run the GRU. His replacement in the KGB was Alexander Shelepin. Shelepin was a much more subtle, flexible man than Serov, who was an old-style Beria henchman, a "nuts and bolts" man. The problem set to Shelepin was that Khrushchev and the Politburo had come to the conclusion that an all-out war with the West was not on. Khrushchev wanted to know how Russia could win without doing this. Shelepin took six months to survey the problem. He then called a large conference in Moscow of all the senior KGB officers the world over and discussed ways in which KGB methods could be modernized. Shelepin, according to Golitsin, boasted that the KGB had so many sources at its disposal in the West that he favored returning to the methods of the OGPU and the "Trust" as a means of masking the real natur
e of Soviet strategic intentions.

  As a result of the Shelepin conference, Department D of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB (responsible for all overseas operations) was formed, a new department charged with planning deception or disinformation exercises on a strategic scale. Department D was put under the control of 1. 1, Agayants, an old, much respected KGB officer. In 1959, Golitsin said, he approached a friend who worked in this new Department to see if he could get a job there. The friend confided in him that Department D was planning a major disinformation operation using the GRU, but that it could not be implemented for some time because the GRU was penetrated by the CIA and this must be eliminated first. This penetration was almost certainly Colonel Popov, a high-ranking GRU official who spied in place for the CIA before being captured, tortured, and shot in 1959.

  In fact, Golitsin never went back, as by then he was planning his defection, so he never learned any more details about the planned disinformation plan, other than the fact that it was basically a technical exercise, and involved all resources available to the First Chief Directorate. When Golitsin reached the West he began to speculate that the Sino-Soviet split was the Department D plan, and that it was a ploy designed to mislead the West. Some of Golitsin's admirers, like Arthur, believed (and continue to believe) this analysis, but although I was, during this early period, one of Golitsin's fervent supporters in the Anglo-American intelligence community, it has always seemed to me that the Penkovsky operation is a far better fit for the type of task Department D was set up for, than the inherently unlikely Sino-Soviet hypothesis.

  Strategic deception has become an unfashionable concept in Western intelligence circles, largely because of the extremes to which some of its adherents, myself included in the early days, pushed it. But there is no doubt that it has a long and potent history. The "Trust" operations of the GPU and OGPU in the early years of the Bolshevik regime are a powerful reminder to any KGB recruit of the role these operations can play. At a time when the Bolshevik regime was threatened by several million White Russian emigre's in the 1920s, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the legendary founder of the modern Russian Intelligence Services, masterminded the creation of a fake organization inside Russia dedicated to the overthrow of the Bolshevik regime. The Trust attracted the support of White Russian emigre groups abroad, and the Intelligence Services of the West, particularly MI6. In fact, the Trust was totally controlled by the OGPU, and they were able to neutralize most Emigre and hostile intelligence activity, even kidnapping and disposing of the two top White leaders, Generals Kutepov and Miller, and the Trust persuaded the British not to attack the Soviet Government because it would be done by internal forces.

  Strategic deception has also played a major part in the history of Western intelligence, most notably in the Double Cross operations of the war, which enabled the Allies to mislead the Germans about our intentions at D-Day.

  Looking at the intelligence balance in 1963, there was no doubt that the Soviets had the necessary conditions to begin a major disinformation exercise. They had large-scale and high-level penetrations in the West, especially in Britain and the USA, and had possessed them almost continuously since the war. Hiss, Maclean, the nuclear spies, Philby, Burgess, Blake, and the many others gave them a very intimate knowledge of the very organizations which needed to be deceived. Secondly, and often overlooked, the Soviets had continuous penetrations of the Western Signals Intelligence organizations since the war, from Philby and Maclean until 1951, but closer to the early 1960s through the defection of the NSA operatives Martin and Mitchell in 1960, and the suicide in 1963 of Jack Dunlap, a chauffeur at NSA who betrayed details of dozens of the most sensitive discussions by senior NSA officials in his car.

  As I read the files, a number of reasons made me believe that Penkovsky had to be the deception operation of which Golitsin had learned in 1959. The first thing that struck me about Penkovsky was the sheer coincidence of his arrival. If ever an organization needed a triumph it was MI6 in the early 1960s. It was rocked by the twin blows of Philby and George Blake, its morale desperately low after the Crabbe affair, and the disastrous Suez operations, and Dick White was trying to rebuild it. He removed the post of Deputy Director, sacked a number of senior officers most closely associated with the Sinclair regime, and tried to introduce some line management. He was never entirely successful. Dick was not a particularly gifted administrator. His achievements in MI5 stemmed from intimate knowledge of the office and its personnel, and a deep knowledge of counterespionage, rather than a flair for running organizations.

  Deprived of these, his first years in MI6 were, almost inevitably, marked by expediency rather than clear strategy. This was never so well illustrated as with his decision to retain Philby as an agent runner in the Middle East, even though he believed him to be a spy. I asked him about this later, and he said that he simply felt that to sack Philby would create more problems inside MI6 than it might solve. Looking at MI6 in the early 1960s, I was reminded of Lenin's famous remark to Feliks Dzerzhinsky.

  "The West are wishful thinkers, we will give them what they want to think."

  MI6 needed a success, and they needed to believe in a success. In Penkovsky they got it.

  There were three specific areas of the Penkovsky case which made me highly suspicious. The first was the manner of his recruitment. Toward the end of 1960, Penkovsky visited the American Embassy in Moscow in connection with his ostensible job, which was to arrange exchange visits with the West on scientific and technical matters. Once inside the Embassy he offered to provide intelligence to the Americans, and was interviewed by the CIA in their secure compound. He told them that he was, in fact, a senior GRU officer, working for the GKNIIR, the joint organization between the KGB and the GRU on scientific and technical intelligence. The Americans decided Penkovsky was a provocation, and refused his offer. By the time I read the files, the Americans had discovered through another defector, Nossenko, that the rooms used for the interview with Penkovsky had been clandestinely microphoned by the KGB. It was obvious that even if Penkovsky had been genuine, the Russians must have learned of his offer to spy for the Americans.

  Early in 1961 Penkovsky made another attempt. He approached a Canadian businessman named Van Vleet in his apartment in Moscow. Van Vleet interviewed Penkovsky in his bathroom, with the water taps running to shield their conversation from eavesdropping. There was no proof that Van Vleet's apartment was bugged, but both he and Penkovsky assumed it to be so, because of his connections with the RCMP. Later, at Penkovsky's trial, evidence against him was produced in the form of tape recordings of conversations between Penkovsky and Wynne which had also taken place in bathrooms with water taps running. It was clear that the Russians had technical means of defeating this type of countercoverage.

  Penkovsky's third approach, to Wynne, was successful, and as a result he was run jointly by MI6 and the CIA. But the second suspect area in the Penkovsky case was the type of intelligence which he provided. It was split into two types: ARNIKA, which was straight intelligence, and RUPEE, which was counterintelligence.

  The RUPEE material consisted mostly of identifications of GRU officers around the world, nearly all of which were accurate and most of which were already known to us. But beyond that there were no leads at all which identified any Soviet illegals in the West, or to past or present penetrations of Western security. It made no sense to me; here was a man in some ways fulfilling a function analogous to my own, who had spent years at the summit of the GRU, and in regular contact with the KGB, and yet he had apparently picked up not one trace of intelligence about Soviet intelligence assets in the West. I compared Penkovsky's counterintelligence with that of the last major GRU source, Colonel Popov, who spied for the CIA inside the GRU during the 1950s. Popov provided identifications of nearly forty illegals operating in the West, before he was captured and shot.

  ARNIKA was different; Penkovsky handed over literally thousands of documents dealing with the most sensitive Soviet military syst
ems. But there were two oddities. Firstly, he sometimes handed over original documents. It seemed to me beyond belief that a spy would risk passing over actual originals, or that the Russians would not miss them from the files. Secondly, Penkovsky's most important documents, which enabled the Americans to identify the Russian missiles in Cuba, were shown to him by his uncle, a senior GRU commander of missile forces. Penkovsky claimed that he copied the document while his uncle was out of the room. Once again, this seemed to me to smack more of James Bond than of real life.

  The third area which made me suspect Penkovsky was the manner in which he was run. The tradecraft was appallingly reckless for such a sensitive source. The problem was that his intelligence was so valuable, and at the time of the Cuban missile crisis so current, that he was literally bled for everything that could be got, with little attempt made to protect him or preserve him as a long-term asset. I counted the distribution list for Penkovsky's intelligence. Seventeen hundred people in Britain alone had access to Penkovsky's material during the time he was running in place. MI6, MI5, GCHQ, the various branches of Military Intelligence, the JIC, the Service chiefs and their staffs, the Foreign Office, various scientific research establishments - they all had their own lists of people indoctrinated for various parts of Penkovsky's material, although few people saw the whole range. Of course, like all source reports, there was no hint as to how the intelligence had been acquired, but by any standards it was an astonishingly large distribution, and raised the question of whether it would have been detected by the ever-vigilant Russian Intelligence Services, who at that point in 1963 had demonstrated a consistent ability to penetrate British security at high levels.