Spycatcher

by Peter Wright

  It was a cruel blow to Arthur, for whom investigations had been his lifeblood since the late 1940s and into which most of his effort had gone since his return in 1959. He had been upset not to be asked to chair the Fluency Committee, although he understood that this was essentially a D3 research task. But to be supplanted in his own department by Symonds, his former junior, who for a long time had viewed Arthur as his mentor, was a bitter pill to swallow. Arthur felt betrayed by the Symonds report. He could not understand how Symonds could write two reports within such a short space of time which seemed to contradict each other. He believed that MI5 had made a desperate mistake.

  Arthur became reckless, as if the self-destructive impulse which always ran deep in him suddenly took over. He was convinced that he was being victimized for his energetic pursuit of penetration. To make matters worse, Hollis specified that although the two sections were to be run independently of each other, Arthur was to have some kind of oversight of both areas, in deference to his vast experience and knowledge. It was an absurd arrangement, and bound to lead to catastrophe. The two men rowed continually. Arthur believed that oversight meant control while Symonds wanted to go his own way. Finally things boiled over when Arthur abruptly ordered Symonds to bring his case officers to a conference, and Symonds refused. Arthur told him he was making it impossible for him to do his coordinating job; Symonds retorted that Arthur was interfering, and placed a written complaint before Cumming. Cumming took the complaint to Hollis and recommended Arthur's immediate dismissal, to which Hollis enthusiastically agreed.

  The matter was discussed at the next Directors' meeting. Arthur had no allies there; too many Directors felt threatened by his forceful, sometimes intemperate style. The only friend he had among the Directors, Bill Magan, who staunchly defended Arthur to the end, was conveniently absent when the decision was taken.

  I remember Arthur came to my office the day it happened, steely quiet.

  "They've sacked me," he said simply. "Roger's given me two days to clear my desk." In fact, he was taken on straightaway by MI6, at Dick White's insistence and over Hollis' protests. But although this transfer saved Arthur's pension, his career was cut off in its prime.

  I could scarcely believe it. Here was the finest counterespionage officer in the world, a man at that time with a genuine international reputation for his skill and experience, sacked for the pettiest piece of bureaucratic bickering. This was the man who since 1959 had built D1 from an utterly ineffectual section into a modern, aggressive, and effective counterespionage unit. It was still grossly undermanned, it was true, but that was no fault of Arthur's.

  Arthur's great flaw was naivete. He never understood the extent to which he had made enemies over the years. His mistake was to assume that advancement would come commensurately with achievement. He was an ambitious man, as he had every right to be. But his was not the ambition of petty infighting. He wanted to slay the dragons and fight the beasts outside, and could never understand why so few of his superiors supported him in his simple approach. He was temperamental, he was obsessive, and he was often possessed by peculiar ideas, but the failure of MI5 to harness his temperament and exploit his great gifts is one of the lasting indictments of the organization.

  "It's a plus as far as I'm concerned," he said the night he was sacked, "to get out of this."

  But I knew he did not mean it.

  I tried to cheer Arthur up, but he was convinced Hollis had engineered the whole thing to protect himself, and there was little I could do. The stain of dismissal was a bitter price to pay after the achievements of the previous twenty years. He knew that his career had been broken, and that, as in 1951, all he had worked for would be destroyed. I never saw a sadder man than Arthur the night he left the office. He shook my hand, and I thanked him for all he had done for me. He took one look around the office. "Good luck," he said and stepped out for the last time.

  - 16 -

  By the time Arthur left I was in the midst of a major reconstruction of the D3 Research section. When I took it over it had no clear sense of purpose in the way I wanted it to have. I was convinced that it had a central role to play if MI5 were finally to get to the bottom of the 1930s conspiracy. An intelligence service, particularly a counterespionage service, depends on its memory and its sense of history; without them it is lost. But in 1964 MI5 was quite simply overloaded with the mass of contradictory information flowing in from defectors and confessing spies. Loose ends are in the nature of the profession of intelligence, but we were overwhelmed by the weight of unresolved allegations and unproven suspicions about the 1930s which were lying in the Registry. We needed to go back to the period, and in effect positively vet every single acquaintance of Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt, Long, and Cairncross.

  It is difficult today to realize how little was actually known, even as late as 1964, about the milieu in which the spies moved, despite the defections in 1951. The tendency had been to regard the spies as "rotten apples," aberrations, rather than as part of a wider-ranging conspiracy born of the special circumstances of the 1930s. The growing gulf in the office between those who believed the Service was penetrated and those who were sure it was not was echoed by a similar division between those who felt the extent of Soviet penetration in the 1930s had been limited, and those who felt its scope had been very wide indeed, and viewed the eight cryptonyms in VENONA as the best proof of their case. Throughout the late 1950s tension between the two sides grew, as Hollis resisted any attempts by those like Arthur and me to grapple with the problem.

  The reasons for the failure to confront the conspiracy adequately are complex. On a simple level, little progress was made with the two best suspects, Philby and Blunt, and this made it difficult to justify deploying an immense investigative effort. There was, too, the fear of the Establishment. By the time the defections occurred, most of those associated with Burgess and Maclean were already significant figures in public life. It is one thing to ask embarrassing questions of a young undergraduate, quite another to do the same to a lengthy list of rising civil servants on the fast track to Permanent Under Secretary chairs.

  At heart it was a failure of will. Politicians and successive managements in MI5 were terrified that intensive inquiries might trigger further defections or uncover unsavory Establishment scandal, and that was considered an unacceptable risk during the 1950s. Moreover, in order to conduct a no-holds-barred investigation MI5 inevitably would have to show something of its hand. This ancient dilemma faces all counterespionage services; in order to investigate, you have to risk approaching and interviewing people, and thus the risks of leakage or publicity increase exponentially the more intensive the inquiries you make. This dilemma was particularly acute when facing the problem of investigating Soviet recruitment at Oxford and Cambridge in the 1930s. Most of those we wanted to interview were still part of a closely knit group of Oxbridge intellectuals, with no necessary allegiance to MI5, or to the continuing secrecy of our operations. News of our activities, it was feared, would spread like wildfire, and faced with that risk, successive managements in MI5 were never willing to grasp the nettle. We opted for secret inquiries, where overt ones would have been far more productive.

  Philby's defection and the confessions of Blunt, Long, and Cairncross swept away many of these reservations, although the fear of Establishment scandal remained just as acute as ever. Hollis agreed to the drastic expansion of D3, and it was given a simple, yet massive task - to return to the 1930s, and search the files for clues which might lead us to spies still active today, to vet a generation, to clear up as many loose ends as possible, and to provide the Service with an accurate history for the first time. The guiding principle of my D3 section was a remark Guy Liddell made to me on one of his frequent visits back to the office after he retired.

  "I bet 50 percent of the spies you catch over the next ten years have files or leads in the Registry which you could have followed up..."

  I was sure he was right. I thought back to Ho
ughton, and his wife's report on him, to Blake, and to Sniper's early lead to Blake, to Philby and to Blunt, where evidence existed but was never pursued relentlessly enough. Perhaps most amazing of all, I read the Klaus Fuchs file, and discovered that after he was caught MI5 found his name, his Communist background, and even his Party membership number, all contained in Gestapo records which MI5 confiscated at the end of the war. Somehow the information failed to reach the officers responsible for his vetting. But also in 1945-48 an officer, Michael Sorpell, had researched Fuchs and recorded on the file that Fuchs must be a spy.

  There were several obvious places to look in the inert mass of papers lying in the Registry. First there were the Gestapo records. The Gestapo was an extremely efficient counterespionage service, and operated extensively against European Communist parties and the Soviet intelligence services. They had a trove of information about them, developed at a time when our knowledge of Europe was virtually nonexistent because of the conditions of war. They had invaluable intelligence on the most important of all European Soviet rings - the Rote Kapelle, or Red Orchestra. This was a series of loosely linked self-sustaining illegal rings controlled by the GRU in German-occupied Europe. The Rote Kapelle was run with great bravery and skill, relaying by radio vital intelligence to Moscow about German military movements.

  The most important of all the Gestapo records for the British were the Robinson papers. Henry Robinson was a leading member of the Rote Kapelle in Paris, and one of the Comintern's most trusted agents. In 1943 he was captured by the Gestapo and executed. Although he refused to talk before dying, papers were found under the floorboards of his house which revealed some of the Ring's activities. The handwritten notes listed forty or fifty names and addresses in Britain, indicating that Robinson had also been responsible for liaising with a Rote Kapell ring in Britain. After the war Evelyn McBarnet did a lot of work on the Robinson papers, but the names were all aliases, and many of the addresses were either post-boxes or else had been destroyed in the war. Another MI5 officer, Michael Hanley, did a huge research task in the 1950s, identifying and listing every known agent of the Rote Kapelle. There were more than five thousand names in all. But since then the trail had gone dead. Perhaps, I thought, there might be clues among all this material which might take us somewhere.

  Another place to look was among the records of defector debriefings. Work was already in progress with the recent defectors like Golitsin and Goleniewski, but there were still many loose ends in the intelligence provided by prewar and wartime defectors. Walter Krivitsky, the senior NKVD officer who defected in 1937, told MI5, for instance, that there was a well-born spy who had been educated at Eton and Oxford, and joined the Foreign Office. For years everyone assumed this to be Donald Maclean, even though Maclean was educated at Gresham Holt's and Cambridge. He just did not fit, but rather than confront the problem, the allegation had been left to collect dust in the files.

  Then there was Konstantin Volkov, a senior NKVD officer who approached the British Consulate in Istanbul and offered to reveal the names of Soviet spies in Britain in return for money. He gave an Embassy official a list of the departments where the spies allegedly worked. Unfortunately for Volkov, his list landed on Kim Philby's desk at MI6 headquarters. Philby was then head of MI6 Soviet Counterintelligence, and against the wishes of Director C he persuaded him to let him go to Turkey, ostensibly to arrange for Volkov's defection. He then delayed his arrival by two days. The would-be defector was never seen again, although the Turks thought that both Volkov and his wife had been flown out strapped to stretchers. One of Volkov's spies was thought to be Philby himself, but there were several others who had just never been cleared up - like the spy Volkov claimed was working for MI6 in Persia.

  Lastly there was the VENONA material - by far the most reliable intelligence of all on past penetration of Western security. After Arthur left I took over the VENONA program, and commissioned yet another full-scale review of the material to see if new leads could be gathered. This was to lead to the first D3-generated case, ironically a French rather than a British one. The HASP GRU material, dating from 1940 and 1941, contained a lot of information about Soviet penetration of the various emigre and nationalist movements who made their headquarters in London during the first years of the war. The Russians, for instance, had a prime source in the heart of the Free Czechoslovakian Intelligence Service, which ran its own networks in German-occupied Eastern Europe via couriers. The Soviet source had the cryptonym Baron, and was probably the Czech politician Sedlecek, who later played a prominent role in the Lucy Ring in Switzerland.

  The most serious penetration, so far as MI5 were concerned, was in the Free French Government led by Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle faced persistent plots in London masterminded by his two Communist deputies, Andre Labarthe, a former CHEF DU CABINET who was responsible for civilian affairs, and Admiral Mueselier, who controlled military affairs. MI5 kept a close eye on these plots during the war at Churchill's instigation, and Churchill ordered the arrest of both Labarthe and Mueselier when de Gaulle had gone to Dakar to free that territory for the Free French; but in 1964 we broke a decrypt which showed conclusively that Labarthe had been working as a Soviet spy during this period, moreover at a time when the Molotov-von Ribbentrop pact was still in existence.

  The U.S. VENONA also contained material about Soviet penetration of the Free French. The CIA had done no work on it, either because they thought it was too old or because they had no one with sufficient grasp of French history. When I studied it, I found that another senior French politician, Pierre Cot, the Air Minister in Daladier's prewar cabinet, was also an active Russian spy.

  This discovery came at a time of great tension between the French and British intelligence services. Anti-French feeling ran strongly inside British Intelligence. Many officers of both services had served in the war and remembered the supine French surrender. Courtney Young always claimed that he formed lifelong views on the French when traveling back from Dunkirk on a boat. Even Blunt, for all his reverence for French art and style, was vituperative on the subject of French cowardice.

  Relations were not helped by the arrival of Anatoli Golitsin. Some of his best intelligence concerned Soviet penetration of SDECE, the French equivalent to MI6. Golitsin said there was a ring of highly placed SDECE agents known as the Sapphire Ring. Shortly after Golitsin defected, the deputy head of SDECE threw himself out of a window. Angleton persuaded the head of the CIA to get President Kennedy to write to de Gaulle warning him about Golitsin's allegations, but de Gaulle felt the Americans and the British were manipulating Golitsin to cast aspersions on French integrity. This remained the official French view even after Golitsin gave the information which led to the arrest and conviction of Georges Paques, a senior French Government official, in 1965.

  To complicate matters still further, the DST (the French counterespionage service) and MI5 were collaborating on a case involving a double agent, Air Bubble. Air Bubble was an industrial chemist named Dr. Jean Paul Soupert. Soupert was an agent runner for East German Intelligence and the KGB, but the Belgian SECURITE D'ETAT doubled him. He revealed that two of his agents were employees of the Kodak Company in Britain who were passing him details of sensitive commercial processes. The Belgians informed MI5, who began an intensive investigation of both Kodak employees, Alfred Roberts and Godfrey Conway. Soupert also told the Belgians about an East German illegal named Herbert Steinbrecher, who was running agents inside the French Concorde assembly plants, and this information was passed on to the DST to investigate in collaboration with MI6.

  Unfortunately both cases ended in catastrophe. Although Conway and Roberts were caught, they were acquitted. Far worse for Anglo-French relations, the inquiries into Steinbrecher revealed that MI6 had recruited a French police chief, whose police district ran up to the German border. He was a "blanche" agent, that is to say MI6 had deliberately concealed him from their hosts, the French, and were using him to spy on both French and German nation
als. The French, for their part, were forced to admit that Steinbrecher's agents had acquired for the Russians every detail of the Anglo-French Concorde's advanced electronic systems. The result, inevitably, was a spectacular row.

  I approached Angleton and Louis Tordella of NSA, and got their agreement to provide the DST with the VENONA intelligence which proved Cot and Labarthe to be Russian spies. They were old, but still politically active, and it seemed to me a sensible precaution. I traveled to Paris in early 1965 to DST headquarters, where I was met by Marcel Chalet, the deputy head of the service. Chalet was a small, dapper Frenchman who joined the DST after the war, having served with great courage in the Resistance under Jean Moulin, narrowly escaping arrest by the Gestapo on the day Moulin himself was lifted. Like all French Resistance veterans, Chalet wore his pink ribbon with conspicuous pride. He was a militant anti-Communist, and yet he admired Moulin, a dedicated Communist, more than any other man in his life. Several times he and I discussed the Resistance, but even in the 1960s he could not discuss his former commander without tears coming to his eyes.