Spycatcher

by Peter Wright

  Golitsin would look blank. He was a man almost devoid of humor.

  "Look, Anatole, we've been studying this for twenty years, and we don't know who the spies are, and your guessing isn't helping us at all."

  He looked at me and down at the file, as if to make me guilty for doubting him.

  "What do you know, Peter," he would growl, "you were not there in Dzherzhinsky Square, as I was."

  But for all his vanity and greed, he was a genuine man, with that sudden sadness that all Russians have. I remember showing him the Volkov file one afternoon. As he read the story of the attempted defector whose file ended up on Kim Philby's desk, he began to weep.

  "How could you be so careless, Peter?" he asked in anguish, only too well aware that but for the grace of God Golitsin would have suffered the same fate.

  McCaul and I looked sheepish. There was no excuse we could give.

  By the end of his stay my sessions with Golitsin had degenerated into tedious diatribes about disinformation, and recycled information which already existed in our Registry. He was a shadow of the man who captivated the best minds in Western counterintelligence with his photographic memory and his unerring eye for detail. Before he left he handed us a massive typescript which he had labored to produce himself, typing one-fingered on an old Olivetti portable. He told me it was the definitive study on disinformation theory. I handed it in to the Registry. The time when I waited on his every word had long gone. I did not even bother to read it.

  I saw Golitsin once more in New York the following winter. We had lunch at an Italian restaurant near Central Park. It was a sad, furtive occasion. Golitsin still talked of his plans for an institute for the study of disinformation, and new leads he had discovered. But he knew he was finished. The Czechoslovakian invasion the previous summer had brought a flood of new defectors to the West - men like Frolik and August, whose information was less ambitious but easier to digest. He knew he was yesterday's newspapers, and I think he could tell I was humoring him.

  He had recently suffered tragedy. His daughter, upon whom he doted, had fallen prey to the ultimate Western depravity - drug addiction - and had committed suicide. It was a terrible blow, and Golitsin blamed himself.

  After lunch we walked across Central Park together in brilliant winter sunshine. He wanted me to visit his farm in upstate New York, but I told him I had to get back to London. There was little left to say.

  "Are you thinking of going home?" I asked him, as we came to the parting.

  "Oh no," he replied, after an unusual pause, "they would never forgive me."

  Golitsin rarely talked about Russia, but it was clearly on his mind.

  "Are you homesick?"

  "Sometimes..."

  We made our farewells, and his feet made a crunching sound as he walked away across the snow. Like all defectors, Golitsin was feeling the cold.

  - 21 -

  With Golitsin unable to advance the penetration issue any further, MI5 were trapped in the middle of a maze. The search for the high-level spy, for which FLUENCY considered Sir Roger Hollis the best suspect, had been suspended since 1966, so that all attention could focus on the hunt for the middling-grade agent. With Hanley's clearance there was no obvious road forward. Did we abandon the search for the middling-grade agent, and assume Goleniewski's story was planted, or did we continue to search for other candidates, of whom there were a number who were almost as good a fit as Hanley had been? If we assumed that Goleniewski's middling-grade agent story was planted, did we assume it was a lure to draw our attention away from another middling-grade agent, or from the high-level spy? Did both exist, or neither? To do nothing was clearly impossible, and thus, like actors in a Greek tragedy, we had no real choice but to continue widening our investigations, spreading the poison ever further through the corridors.

  The next best suspect was Gregory Stevens (a pseudonym), an extravert and gifted officer with a puckish sense of humor. Stevens was about a 60 percent fit for the Goleniewski allegation. He had an even stronger Polish background than Hanley. He was half Polish by birth, and had risen to Hanley's old job as head of the Polish Section of MI5, where his knowledge of the language, culture, and history of his mother's country made him highly successful. Ironically, or perhaps sinisterly, Stevens was the officer who interviewed Goleniewski in 1963, and first heard the story of the middling-grade agent. Was this, like Hollis' visit to see Gouzenko, just another coincidence?

  Like Hanley, too, Stevens had been in military uniform and there was also a connection with the KGB officer who Goleniewski alleged had made the recruitment. Both men attended the Yalta Conference in 1945, Stevens as a military translator assigned to assist Stalin with his translations into English, until Stalin complained that he spoke Russian with a Polish accent.

  Like Hanley, Stevens had also undergone psychiatric treatment, and once again I paid a discreet visit to Harley Street. But whereas Hanley had informed his doctor of the nature of his profession, Stevens had never hinted at his involvement in national security.

  "I wouldn't have thought he was stable enough to be in that line of work," said the doctor.

  "Do you find him trustworthy?" I asked casually.

  "He's very clever." replied the doctor, "but I think his cleverness can sometimes lead him astray."

  "How do you mean?"

  "There's a touch of the Walter Mitty about him. I don't think you could always rely on what he said."

  The more I looked at the case, the more I came to doubt whether Stevens should ever have been recruited in the first place. It seemed a hard thing to say. He was a good officer, and an asset to the Service, but in the end, if vetting meant anything, this man ought never to have been allowed in. The psychiatric problems were only a small part of it. The real worry was his Polish background. According to his record of service, he visited Poland regularly with office permission for private holidays to see his relations. His uncle, to whom he was particularly close, was an active member of the Polish Communist Party, and they occasionally met in London. For an organization that was routinely rejecting any applicant with even the faintest trace of the British Communist Party in his family background, the Stevens case presented an obvious problem. And the fact that he had been linked to the middling-grade agent investigation made the situation even more untenable, since in order to clear himself, he had to emerge clean from an exhaustive vet. With half his family living behind the Iron Curtain, an adequate vet was impossible.

  The investigation was conducted as far as it could possibly go, and then Stevens was summoned for an interrogation, which I conducted with Jim Patrick, a one-eyed Gurkha officer who worked as an interrogator for D3.

  Stevens had obviously been half expecting the call ever since he had first heard Goleniewski talk about a middling-grade agent with Polish connections. He was alternately truculent and defensive. He stared me nervously in the eye, as if to convince me he was telling the truth. He agreed that he was a good fit for the allegation, and accepted that someone of his background was an odd recruitment for an organization like MI5.

  "I always wondered when everyone would wake up to the Polish side of me," he said. "I suppose I'll fail the vet now, won't I?"

  "I don't know," I replied, "but if it's any consolation, it won't be me that'll decide. It'll be F.J."

  He obviously felt that whichever way the interrogation went, he could not possibly win. Unlike Hanley, he could not really hope to walk through the fire unscathed.

  We had been going three days when he walked coolly into the room one morning and sat down at the table opposite me.

  "It's time for me to tell you something," he said. "I've decided to confess..."

  I flashed a glance over to Jim, who immediately began taking notes. It was only an additional precaution, since all the sessions were taped.

  "Yes," he went on, "I've been wanting to tell someone about it for years. You're right... I'm the spy you're looking for."

  He seemed to crumple up in front
of us, his shoulders heaving, as if he were weeping. But it only lasted a moment or two, before he held his head up, and looked straight at me.

  "Do you really mean this, Greg?" I asked.

  "You have a witness, don't you?"

  "You realize you'll have to give a statement to the Branch?"

  He nodded. I leaned over to Jim and told him to inform the Director-General's security man, Tom Roberts, and arrange for Special Branch to come immediately. Stevens and I sat opposite each other, the files and questions in front of me suddenly redundant.

  "It's all true, Peter," he said again, in a clear voice.

  I told him that he had best not say anything until Tom Roberts arrived. Jim Patrick came back in. For a few seconds more we sat in silence, and then I noticed Stevens' shoulders going again. For a moment I thought he was weeping, perhaps even about to have a breakdown. It often happens.

  "Damn," I thought to myself, "I should have had the office doctor stand by."

  Then suddenly he began to roar with laughter.

  "You really believed me, didn't you?" he cried.

  For a second I felt the hot flush of embarrassment.

  "I'm not sure I understand...?"

  "You wanted a spy, didn't you," he said, reddening suddenly, now that the joke was over. "I thought I'd give you one. I was going to get chopped anyway. I know that!"

  "I don't think we should discuss the matter here," I replied. "Tom Roberts will be here in a minute, you can explain it all to F.J."

  For all I knew, it was a real confession, which he was trying to retract, although I felt I knew Stevens well enough to believe that he was only horsing about. But it was a stupid thing to do. Any chance he had of surviving the investigation had almost certainly gone.

  F.J. was appalled when he heard what had happened. He was a lawyer, and had a venerable respect for the niceties of MI5's processes.

  "What do you think?" he asked me when I got back to his office. "Was the confession bogus, or do you think he retracted it?"

  "You know my views," I replied. "I am sure he is in the clear because I think the middling-grade agent was a phony allegation from the start. I just think he had a brainstorm..."

  F.J. grunted. Tales of false defectors were never very welcome to a man of his solidity.

  'You don't suppose he made the whole thing up - Goleniewski's story, I mean?" he asked.

  I told him we had checked the tapes before the interrogation.

  "I even got Stevens to verify the translation. Oh, Goleniewski said it all right."

  "Don't see how we can keep him," he muttered, chewing his pipe. "Man's obviously unstable. Polish thing grotesque as well. Sort of thing that gets into newspapers."

  He waved me out.

  Within an hour Gregory Stevens' career was terminated. He spent ten minutes with F.J., and Tom Roberts escorted him to the pavement outside Leconfield House. He didn't even have a chance to clear his desk.

  A few days later Arthur came to see me. He and I had seen little of each other since his departure to MI6. He had aged and seemed less driven than he was before, though the past still held him. He wanted to know about Stevens. They were friends in D Branch in the old days, and Arthur, much the older man, had an almost paternal regard for him.

  "Did you have to do it?" he asked.

  I told him about the middling-grade agent, and the retracted confession, and the confusion and doubt which plagued us all.

  "What else could we do?" I asked. "How can we tell Whitehall to do their vetting, and then turn a blind eye ourselves?"

  Arthur knew we had been right, but the cost was becoming progressively higher.

  "It's poisoning us all," he said quietly.

  Gregory Stevens' departure caused great bitterness in the office. He was a popular officer, and inevitably I was blamed. No one, apart from a handful of senior officers, knew the context which had led up to his investigation - the long history of suspected high-level penetration of MI5, the Blunt confessions, the terrible secret of the FLUENCY conclusions which implicated Sir Roger Hollis, and the hunt for the middling-grade agent.

  Word began to spread through the office that D3 was conducting vetting purges in the office, and that officers like Gregory Stevens were being victimized. There was talk of the Gestapo. Younger officers began to avoid me in the canteen. Casual conversation with many of my colleagues became a rarity. Those of us involved in the penetration issue were set apart, feared and distrusted in equal measure.

  It was the same in MI6. After years of neglect, a new head of Counterintelligence, Christopher Phillpotts, was appointed in the mid-1960s, around the time FLUENCY got off the ground. Phillpotts looked to all intents and purposes like a figure from the ANCIEN REGIME of British Intelligence. He was a charismatic war hero with a penchant for pink gins and cravats and bow ties. But he was a strict disciplinarian, who believed that in the wake of Philby's defection, the Augean stables needed cleaning. A thorough review of security procedures and personnel was the precondition for a return to self-respect for a Service which, despite Dick White's best efforts, had still to recover from the wounds of Philby, Suez, and Commander Crabbe. Those who could not satisfactorily account for their backgrounds would have to go. National security demanded that, at long last, the benefit of the doubt be given to the state.

  Phillpotts supported FLUENCY without reservation, and initiated his own program of vetting inside Century House. At least eight senior officers were forced to resign in the wake of Phillpotts' new regime. One officer, for instance, was forced to go when it was discovered that he had a long affair with Litzi Friedman without ever declaring it to the office. Friedman was Philby's first wife, and almost certainly the person who recruited him to the Soviet cause. Another senior officer to suffer had been a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s.

  Several officers who had been through the Joint Services Language School were also unable to account for discrepancies in their backgrounds, and chose to leave. Even Nicholas Elliott, for so long Philby's supporter, until finally traveling to Beirut to obtain his confession, was investigated, in case Philby had managed to extract intelligence from him. But after lengthy interrogation Elliott just convinced his interrogator, Arthur Martin, that he was in the clear.

  None of this was a matter of treachery. But for so long the normal rules of vetting had been waived in the club world of intelligence that when the reckoning came it was abrupt and painful. Much of the blame for the purges inside MI6 was attributed to MI5, and to people like Patrick Stewart and me in particular. Many felt that MI5 were taking advantage of Philby's defection to even up a few old scores.

  I had been unpopular inside certain sections of MI6 since my review of the Penkovsky case. But it was the Ellis case which really earned me the undying enmity of the MI6 old guard, an enmity which I wore as a mark of achievement.

  The Ellis case caused friction between MI5 and MI6 for almost as long as the Philby case. It began in the aftermath of the Burgess and Maclean defections, when MI5 began to reanalyze the intelligence provided by the defector Walter Krivitsky. One of Krivitsky's serials concerned a White Russian emigre based in Paris named Vladimir Von Petrov, who, Krivitsky alleged, had been an important agent for the Fourth Department, the GRU, during the prewar period, with good sources in Britain as well as Germany, where he was operating as a double agent for the Germans and the Russians.

  MI5 were interested to find out who those sources might be, so they studied Von Petrov's file and found a series of debriefing reports of Abwehr officers taken at the end of the war. The Abwehr officers confirmed that Von Petrov was being run by them as their agent, although, of course, they did not know that he was also working for the Russians. Several mentioned that Von Petrov had a source in British Intelligence who could obtain our order of battle, as well as details of vital operations, such as the tap on the secret telephone link between Hitler and his Ambassador in London, von Ribbentrop. One Abwehr officer even remembered the name of Von Petrov's sou
rce - it was a Captain Ellis, who was an Australian, a brilliant linguist, and who had a Russian wife.

  Charles "Dickie" Ellis was then a senior MI6 officer, recently promoted from MI6 controller for Far Eastern Affairs to be in charge of all operations in North and South America. He joined MI6 in the 1920s, and was based in Paris, where he was responsible for recruiting agents in the White Russian emigre community. During this period he recruited an agent with access to Von Petrov.

  The prewar Russian emigre community was a cesspool of uncertain loyalties, and when MI5 raised the query against Ellis, MI6 rejected any possibility that he could be a spy. They maintained that it was much more likely that Von Petrov was working for Ellis, than the other way around, and was lying to protect himself. In any case, Ellis had opted for early retirement, and was planning to return to Australia. Dick White, newly appointed to MI5, and not wanting to aggravate still further the tensions already strained to breaking point by the gathering suspicions against Philby, agreed to shelve the case, where it lay festering in the Registry until I took over as D3.