The New Spymasters

by Stephen Grey

    5 Phillip Knightley, The Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the Twentieth Century (London, Pimlico, 2003), p. 3.

    6 See, for instance, Michael Durey, ‘William Wickham, the Christ Church Connection and the Rise and Fall of the Security Service in Britain, 1793–1801’, English Historical Review, Vol. 121, No. 492, June 2006, pp. 714–45.

    7 Thomas Erskine May, Constitutional History of England: Vol. II, 1760–1860 (London, Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts and Green, 1863), Kindle location 5539.

    8 From a history of ‘British Military Intelligence in France during the latter part of the war’ by Colonel Reginald Drake, quoted in Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909–1949 (London, Bloomsbury, 2010), p. 73.

    9 Ibid., p. 87.

  10 The Cheka (1917–29) became the NKVD (1934–46), then the MGB (1946–53) and KGB (1954–91). Since 1991, the old KGB has been split into the FSB (internal intelligence service) and the SVR (external intelligence service).

  11 Spencer Tucker, The Great War, 1914–1918 (New York, Routledge, 1997), p. 157.

  12 Cromie telegram to the Admiralty, 24 June 1918, National Archives file FO 371/3286.

  13 Report from Major Scale, 19 November 1918, National Archives file ADM 223/637, document 83.

  14 Figures from www.westernfrontassociation.com and the National Army Museum’s Western Front online exhibition at www.nam.ac.uk.

  15 The London Times correspondent in Petrograd, George Dobson, quoted in ‘Imprisoned in Russia. Barbarous Treatment. Englishman’s Experiences’, New Zealand Herald, Vol. LV, issue 17061, 17 January 1919, p. 8.

  16 Report from Major Scale, 19 November 1918, National Archives file ADM 223/637, document 83.

  17 The London Times correspondent in Petrograd, George Dobson, quoted in ‘Imprisoned in Russia. Barbarous Treatment. Englishman’s Experiences’, New Zealand Herald, Vol. LV, issue 17061, 17 January 1919, p. 8.

  18 Jonathan D. Smele, The Russian Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921: An Annotated Bibliography (London/New York: Continuum, 2006), p. 276.

  19 Jeffery, MI6, pp. 134–8.

  20 Andrew Cook, Ace of Spies: The True Story of Sidney Reilly (Stroud, The History Press, 2011), Kindle locations 1718–19.

  21 Author telephone interview with Andrew Cook, 2013.

  22 Cook, Ace of Spies, Kindle location 2302.

  23 Ibid., Kindle location 2329.

  24 National Archives file KV2 827. Referring to an ‘Original enquiry from “C”’, the response received by MI5 from ‘H.Q. Irish Command’ on 2 April 1918 states, ‘No record of the birth of REILLY, Sydney T. in the Register in Clonmel’.

  25 Cook, Ace of Spies, Kindle location 2363.

  26 Ibid., Kindle location 2418, citing telegram CX 027753 of 16 April 1918 in Reilly’s SIS file CX 2616.

  27 Reilly telegram reports to London of his meetings with Bonch-Bruevich, May and June 1918, National Archives file WO 32/5669.

  28 Lockhart’s report to Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, dated 5 November 1918, National Archives file FO 371/3348.

  29 R. H. Bruce Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent (London, Putnam, 1932), p. 316.

  30 Cook, Ace of Spies, Kindle location 3817.

  31 Lockhart’s report to Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, dated 5 November 1918, National Archives file FO 371/3348.

  32 Captain Hill’s report to the Director of Military Intelligence, dated 26 November 1918, National Archives file FO 371/3350.

  33 Lockhart’s report to Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, dated 5 November 1918, National Archives file FO 371/3348.

  34 Captain Hill’s report to the Director of Military Intelligence, dated 26 November 1918, National Archives file FO 371/3350.

  35 Ibid.

  36 See scanned pamphlet at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1919-04-20/ed-1/seq-85.pdf.

  37 Lockhart’s report to Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, dated 5 November 1918, National Archives file FO 371/3348.

  38 There are no exact figures, but estimated executions of between 50,000 and 200,000 are given at necrometrics.com. The source is Norman Lowe, Mastering Twentieth Century Russian History (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), though many more tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, may have died in revolts and prison camps.

  39 Winston Churchill, The World Crisis: The Aftermath (London, Macmillan, 1929), p. 235.

  40 Cook, Ace of Spies, Kindle location 3296, citing Reilly’s SIS file CX 2616.

  41 Ibid., File No. 302330, Vol. 37, p. 241, Central Archives of the Federal Security Service in Moscow.

  42 Captain Hill’s report to the Director of Military Intelligence, dated 26 November 1918, National Archives file FO 371/3350.

  43 Hill, Go Spy the Land, p. 3.

  44 Details on the foundation of the Passport Control Office and its profits are given in Jeffery, MI6, pp. 153–4. The lack of immunity in such cover emerged in the public debate over the status of Frank Foley, SIS chief of station in the 1920s and 1930s, who saved many Jews by issuing them with visas to come to Britain.

  45 The late John Hart, former CIA officer, in his testimony to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, 15 September 1978.

  46 Howard Hart in a talk given to the Miller Center for Public Affairs, University of Virginia, on 3 December 2004. Hart was Islamabad chief of station during the CIA’s efforts to arm and support the mujahideen in Afghanistan.

  47 CIA FAQs at www.cia.gov.

  48 Ian Fleming quoted in Ben Macintyre, ‘Was Ian Fleming the Real 007?’, The Times, 5 April 2008.

  49 Leonard Moseley’s recollections of his conversation with Ian Fleming are in a jacket review for Edward Van Der Rhoer’s Master Spy: A True Story of Allied Espionage in Bolshevik Russia (New York, Scribner, 1981).

  50 Cook, Ace of Spies, Kindle locations 136–9.

  51 ‘Remarks by Deputy Director for Operations James L. Pavitt at the Foreign Policy Association’, 21 June 2004: available at cia.gov (the extract is from Kim, Chapter 9).

  Chapter 2: The Best-Ever Liars

    1 Author interview with Milton Bearden, 2009.

    2 Bickham Sweet-Escott, Baker Street Irregular (London, Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1965), p. 19. As described by Sweet-Escott, himself a recruit to Section D, the chief would take a new recruit up to the fourth floor of St Ermin’s hotel and say to the officer guarding the entrance, ‘This is X. Take a good look at him because he is now going to be one of us.’

    3 Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, updated edition (London, Penguin, 2010), p. 168. Philby was recruited in June 1934.

    4 Jeffrey T. Richelson, A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century (New York/Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 136.

    5 Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, p. 420.

    6 Although operating under many different names, the Soviet and Russian secret services have been headquartered at the Lubyanka from 1920 to this day.

    7 She worked in the Information Service of the Intelligence Directorate of the GUGB – the Main Directorate of State Security – which was part of the NKVD structure.

    8 Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, p. 272.

    9 Genrikh Borovik, The Philby Files: The Secret Life of the Master Spy – KGB Archives Revealed (London, Time Warner Paperbacks, 1995), p. xiv.

  10 Ibid., p. 212.

  11 Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, p. 272.

  12 Borovik, The Philby Files, Introduction by Phillip Knightley, p. xiv.

  13 Ibid., p. 216.

  14 Ibid., p. 217.

  15 Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, p. 342.

  16 Telegram from Sorge to GRU, as detailed in Robert Whymant, Stalin’s Spy: Richard Sorge and the Tokyo Espionage Ring (London, I. B. Tauris, 2006), p. 167.

 
17 Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred (London, Penguin, 2009), pp. 432–3.

  18 Both quotes from Whymant, Stalin’s Spy, p. 184.

  19 John le Carré, ‘The Spy to End Spies: On Richard Sorge’, Encounter, November 1966.

  20 Borovik, The Philby Files, pp. x–xi.

  21 The CIA officer involved requested anonymity.

  22 Phillip Knightley, The Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the Twentieth Century (London, Pimlico, 2003), p. 433.

  23 Ibid., p. 431, and John Prados, Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 270: ‘As Colby believed the primary task of counterintelligence was to place the CIA’s own spies within the Russian intelligence apparatus, he asked Angleton what his staff had done to fulfill this goal. He learned that the CIA had no such agents.’

  24 Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, p. 364.

  25 Ibid., p. 385.

  26 Hans Bethe to journalist, author and historian Richard Rhodes, quoted in Race for the Superbomb, PBS, January 1999.

  27 Neil Tweedie, ‘Kim Philby: Father, Husband, Traitor, Spy’, Telegraph, 23 January 2013.

  28 Ben Macintyre, A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (London, Bloomsbury, 2014), Kindle location 2302. See also Yuri Modin, My Five Cambridge Friends (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), p. 201.

  29 Albert Lulushi, ‘Interview with Voice of America about Operation Valuable Fiend’, 14 June 2014: available at www.albertlulushi.com.

  30 Remarks by Deputy Director for Operations James L. Pavitt at the Foreign Policy Association, 21 June 2004: available at www.cia.gov.

  31 Interview with Sandy Grimes, episode 21, ‘Spies’, Cold War, George Washington University’s National Security Archive, 30 January 1998: available at www2.gwu.edu/∼nsarchiv/.

  32 Among the coups was the acquisition by the CIA in the 1970s of an intact MiG-23 fighter jet with its documentation from Egypt. According to a person briefed, as a result of getting the MiG to the US, the Pentagon was able to scrap $8 billion it had set aside for research into its capabilities. The US Air Force could actually fly the plane to discover its qualities and faults.

  33 Various sources, including Markus Wolf (with Anne McElvoy), Man Without a Face: The Autobiography of Communism’s Greatest Spymaster (New York, PublicAffairs, 1997) and Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York, Basic Books, 2000).

  34 ‘Even though they had Mr. Guillaume under investigation, they did not warn Mr. Brandt against taking him that summer, as his sole aide, on a vacation trip to Norway. Mr. Guillaume later said that he filled an entire briefcase with secret documents, including letters to the Chancellor from President Richard M. Nixon about the NATO alliance’s nuclear strategy’: Craig R. Whitney, ‘Gunter Guillaume, 68, is Dead: Spy Caused Willy Brandt’s Fall’, New York Times, 12 April 1995.

  35 Wolf, Man Without a Face, p. xii.

  36 Klaus Wiegrefe, ‘Ostpolitik: How East Germany Tried to Undermine Willy Brandt’, Spiegel Online International, 8 July 2010. Günter and Christel Guillaume were found guilty of espionage and sentenced to thirteen and eight years respectively. They were eventually freed in a ‘spy swap’ and returned as heroes.

  37 Imre Karacs, ‘US Keeps Its Stasi Secrets Locked Up’, Independent, 6 March 1999.

  38 James Adams, New Spies: Exploring the Frontiers of Espionage (London, Pimlico, 1995), p. vii.

  39 Barry G. Royden, ‘Tolkachev, a Worthy Successor to Penkovsky’, Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 47, No. 3, 2003: available at www.cia.gov.

  40 Widely reported, with specific reference to David Wise, Nightmover: How Aldrich Ames Sold the CIA to the KGB for $4.6 Million (New York, HarperCollins, 1995). Also Rupert Cornwell, ‘Jeanne Vertefeuille: CIA Officer Who Unmasked the Spy Aldrich Ames’, Independent, 16 January 2013.

  41 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, ‘An Assessment of the Aldrich H. Ames Espionage Case and Its Implications for U.S. Intelligence’, 1 November 1994: available at www.fas.org/irp/congress/1994_rpt/ssci_ames.htm.

  42 CIA statement on ‘Legacy of Ashes’, 6 August 2007: available at www.cia.gov.

  43 Tony Rennell, ‘September 26th, 1983: The Day the World Almost Died’, Daily Mail, 29 December 2007.

  Chapter 3: Friendship

    1 ‘IRA Questions Bemuse McGuinness’, Irish Times, 29 September 2011.

    2 Matt Born, ‘What is the Truth behind the Story of Stakeknife’, Daily Telegraph, 16 May 2003; ‘Alleged Agent Statements in Full’, BBC News website, 14 May 2003.

    3 Talk at Reuters security seminar, 2011.

    4 Owen Bowcott, ‘Gerry Adams Reveals Family’s Abuse by His Father’, Guardian, 20 December 2009.

    5 Henry McDonald, ‘Gerry Adams Faces Investigation for Failing to Report Sexual Abuse by Brother’, Guardian, 7 October 2013.

    6 Stephen Grey and John Goetz, ‘Target Britain’, Sunday Times, 26 November 2000.

    7 From FRU sources, plus Henry McDonald, ‘Spy Says McGuinness Did Not Fire on Bloody Sunday’, Observer, 6 May 2001.

    8 Martin Ingram and Greg Harkin, Stakeknife: Britain’s Secret Agents in Ireland (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), p. 59.

    9 Neil Mackay, ‘Exclusive: Confessions of a Secret Agent Turned Terrorist’, Sunday Herald, 23 June 2002.

  10 Ibid.

  11 ‘Report of the Tribunal of Inquiry into Suggestions That Members of An Garda Síochána or Other Employees of the State Colluded in the Fatal Shootings of RUC Chief Superintendent Harry Breen and RUC Superintendent Robert Buchanan on the 20th March 1989’, by His Honour Judge Peter Smithwick, 21 November 2013, p. 278, para 15.11.10.

  12 Martin McGartland, Fifty Dead Men Walking (London, John Blake, 2009), pp. 164–5.

  13 Ibid., pp. 251–2.

  14 Stevens Inquiry 3, Overview and Recommendations, 17 April 2003, p. 16, pt 4.9.

  15 Cory Collusion Inquiry Report: Patrick Finucane, 1 April 2004, p. 62, pt 1.178.

  16 Prime Minister David Cameron statement on Patrick Finucane, 12 December 2012: available at www.gov.uk.

  17 Hansard, House of Commons Debate on Facilities of the House, 18 December 2001, Vol. 377, cc. 151–262: available at http://hansard.millbanksystems.com.

  18 William Scholes, ‘Informer “Murdered on Orders of SF Man”’, Irish News, 27 May 1986.

  19 ‘IRA Questions Bemuse McGuinness’, Irish Times, 29 September 2011.

  20 All quotes from tape and Scappaticci response from Ulster Television Insight programme, ‘Scappaticci’, aired 15 March 2004.

  21 Transcript of the Ulster TV programme.

  22 Transcript of oral evidence from Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington and Andy Hayman, House of Commons, Joint Committee on the Draft Detention of Terrorist Suspects (Temporary Extension) Bills, 3 May 2011, p. 13.

  23 Liam Clarke, ‘Dark World of Agents is Not Black and White’, Belfast Telegraph, 23 December 2011.

  24 R. James Woolsey, testimony before the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 2 February 1993, quoted, inter alia, in Douglas F. Garthoff, Directors of Central Intelligence as Leaders of the U.S. Intelligence Community 1946–2005 (Washington, DC, Potomac Books, 2007), p. 221.

  Chapter 4: Thunderbolt

    1 Quoted in Stephen Dorril, MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service (New York, Touchstone, 2000), p. 774.

    2 Taken from Zanina Hollowday’s diary, courtesy of her daughter-in-law (hereafter Hollowday diary).

    3 Hollowday diary.

    4 Author interviews with Antoniades, 2011–14, and his former commander, Renos Kyriakides, 2013.

    5 Intelligence Services Act 1994, s 1.2c.

    6 Hollowday diary.

   
 7 Lionel Savery obituary, Daily Telegraph, 10 April 2012.

    8 ‘Officer’s Tribute to Accused Men’, The Times, 5 November 1959.

    9 HM Customs & Excise (HMCE) was merged with the Inland Revenue in 2005, becoming HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC).

  10 Denise Lavoie, ‘James “Whitey” Bulger’s Capture Could Cause Trouble inside the FBI’, Washington Post, 25 June 2011.

  11 Author interview with Collins in ‘The Heroin Connection’, File on 4, BBC Radio 4, 6 March 2007.

  12 ‘Thai Drug Trafficking Suspect Loses Diplomatic Immunity’, Bangkok Post, 26 August 1991.

  13 Specialist lawyer Simon McKay, explained in a letter: ‘There is no legislative basis to authorise participation in criminality. There is an ability to authorise the use and conduct of informers and undercover officers (there is no distinction between intelligence agencies and police). Where they may engage in criminality this can be “approved” in advance. This is not strictly speaking authorising criminality but its effect is that it is unlikely a prosecution will follow assuming of course the level of criminality is confined to that approved.’

  14 He died on 7 June 1967 in Cascais, Portugal.

  Chapter 5: Jihad

    1 Michael Scheuer, ‘Inside Out’, Atlantic, 1 April 2005.

    2 Interview by Gordon Corera, Newsnight, BBC Two, 16 November 2006.

    3 Author interview with Nasiri, May 2013.

    4 Interview by Gordon Corera, Newsnight, BBC Two, 16 November 2006.

    5 Ibid.

    6 Omar Nasiri, Inside the Global Jihad: How I Infiltrated Al Qaeda and Was Abandoned by Western Intelligence (London, Hurst & Co., 2006), p. 59.

    7 Author interview with Nasiri, May 2013.

    8 ‘The Rise of the Islamist Terrorist Threat’, www.mi5.gov.uk.

    9 Author interview with Jack Devine, 2009.

  10 ‘Menaces Terroristes’, www.risques.gouv.fr.

  11 Article 421-2-1 of the Penal Code, added in 22 July 1996: ‘The participation in any group formed or association established with a view to the preparation, marked by one or more material actions, of any of the acts of terrorism provided for under the previous articles shall in addition be an act of terrorism.’