The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  On 26 August 1960 Lonsdale was seen by A4 taking packages to a safety deposit box at a bank, then observed soon afterwards leaving the country, probably en route for Russia and a rare visit to his family. While Lonsdale was abroad, the DDG, Graham Mitchell, gained permission to open his safety deposit box. Charles Elwell, the Security Service case officer, was present as the contents of the box were investigated by Peter Wright and Hugh Winterborn. Among them was a briefcase containing a Ronson table-lighter, in which X-ray examination revealed a secret compartment with one-time cipher pads, a list of London locations and map references.11 Also in the briefcase, to Elwell’s surprise, was a photograph of him talking to a ‘rather pretty girl’, which he reported to Furnival Jones, then Director D. When Elwell arrived at the office next day, he was told to report immediately to FJ, who demanded, ‘How do you account for the fact that there is a photograph of you in Lonsdale’s briefcase?’ His wife was collected from home by office car and interviewed separately. There was a curious but innocent explanation for the photograph. The Elwells had let their flat to a Canadian diplomat studying at SOAS who had invited them to a party with some of his lecturers and fellow students. One of the students was Lonsdale, who went round taking photos of the other guests. It was, Elwell believed, ‘unique in the annals of counter-espionage’ that an intelligence officer investigating an illegal should unwittingly have been photographed by his target.12

  By the time Lonsdale returned to London from Russia in October 1960, A Branch had installed listening devices in his flat in Albany Street. A search of the flat revealed that some of the one-time pads in the Ronson table-lighter had been used, showing that he had been in contact with Moscow.13 After a meeting with Houghton in November, Lonsdale was tailed by A4 and seen entering a bungalow in Cranley Drive, Ruislip, belonging to an antiquarian bookseller and his wife, Peter and Helen Kroger. An observation post (OP) was set up in a house opposite. Not until the Krogers’ fingerprints were taken after their arrest two months later was it discovered that they were in reality the veteran American KGB illegal agents Morris and Lona Cohen, who had been acting as Lonsdale’s radio operators and technical support team.14 Like Lonsdale, the ‘Krogers’ were extroverts with an active social life which strengthened their cover. One of their friends in the London book trade later recalled many convivial evenings and ‘the most wonderful hospitality’ at their house in Ruislip.15

  On 4 January 1961 Goleniewski defected to the CIA in Berlin. The Security Service feared that, if the Russians realized that he had known about Houghton’s espionage, they would withdraw Lonsdale and the Krogers, and decided to wind up the case quickly. On 7 January Houghton, Gee and Lonsdale were arrested by the Special Branch in Waterloo Road shortly after Gee had handed over classified documents. The Krogers were arrested in their Ruislip home. In their possession was a cigarette lighter with a secret compartment similar to Lonsdale’s, containing one-time pads. When Mrs Kroger asked to stoke the boiler, a vigilant female police officer searched her handbag and found incriminating evidence of espionage – letters from Lonsdale. Five days after the Krogers’ arrest, their radio transmitter was discovered in a cavity under their floor.16 During a six-day trial at the Old Bailey in March 1961, an unprecedented number of Security Service officers, both A4 surveillance and technical experts, none of them publicly identified, gave evidence in court. All five of the ‘Portland spies’ were convicted. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Parker, sentenced Lonsdale to twenty-five years’ imprisonment, the Krogers to twenty years each, Houghton and Gee to fifteen. The Attorney General, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller (father of a future DG), who had led the prosecution, sent congratulations to the Service’s Legal Adviser, Bernard Hill, on ‘the wonderful work done by the Security Service’.17 The intelligence from Portland passed by Lonsdale to Moscow was believed by the Admiralty to have helped in the manufacture of a new and more silent generation of Soviet submarines.18

  Once in jail, Lonsdale agreed to be interviewed by Elwell, who began by producing the photograph taken of them at the party in his rented flat. Instead of revealing that the photo was the result of an extraordinary coincidence, Elwell used it to give Lonsdale the impression that the Security Service had long been on his trail.19 Lonsdale jumped to the conclusion that Houghton must have been a Security Service agent whom the Service had ended by double-crossing. Elwell did not disabuse him.20 Remembering his own wartime imprisonment as a POW in Colditz, Elwell was deeply affected by the length of Lonsdale’s sentence. He believed that he could have ‘turned’ Lonsdale but for ‘the hopelessness of the Home Office’, who made ‘no effort whatever to collaborate with us’. Elwell’s hopes were finally dashed when Lonsdale was freed in a spy exchange in 1964.21 By contrast, Elwell never had any hope of turning the Krogers. He later remembered Kroger as a ‘horrid man’ and his wife as ‘even more horrid’.22

  Just as the trial of the Portland spy-ring was reaching its conclusion in March 1961, the Security Service received news of an even more serious Soviet penetration. In November 1959 Goleniewski had told his CIA case officer that the KGB had an agent in SIS, but there were doubts about the reliability of his intelligence until his lead to Houghton was confirmed in the summer of 1960.23 The investigation of his warning of a penetration of SIS, though henceforth taken seriously, initially led to misplaced suspicions that the agent was in the SIS Brussels station.24 Following Goleniewski’s defection early in 1961, however, he provided further leads which pointed to the thirty-nine-year-old SIS officer George Blake. Né Behar, Blake had been born in Rotterdam of a naturalized British father (by origin a Sephardic Jew from Istanbul) and a Dutch mother who called their son George in honour of King George V. During the Second World War, Blake served successively in the Dutch Resistance and in the Royal Navy, before joining SIS in 1944. There was much that SIS had failed to discover about its new recruit, notably the influence on him of his older cousin Henri Curiel, co-founder of the Egyptian Communist Party. In 1948 Blake was posted by SIS to South Korea, working under diplomatic cover as vice consul in Seoul. A year later, shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War, he was interned by the invading North Koreans.25

  In the autumn of 1951 Blake handed his captors a note written in Russian and addressed to the Soviet embassy, saying that he had important information to communicate. At a meeting with Vasili Alekseyevich Dozhdalev of the KGB, he identified himself as an SIS officer and volunteered to work as a Soviet agent, codenamed DIOMID. According to Sergei Aleksandrovich Kondrashev, who became Blake’s controller in Britain after the end of the Korean War in 1953, the Centre considered him so important that no other member of the London residency was permitted to know either DIOMID’s identity or the fact that he was an SIS officer.26 How Blake had been recruited by the KGB was still unknown to SIS investigators when they came to seek the advice of Director D (Furnival Jones) on 20 March 1961. FJ noted afterwards:

  In order to resolve their suspicions they intended to bring Blake back [from a language course in Lebanon] to the UK on an administrative pretext at the end of the Easter weekend, when they would subject him to interrogation. Their first question was whether it would be in order for them at an appropriate stage in the interrogation to tell Blake, as an inducement, that he would not be prosecuted if he confessed. I gave them advice on the handling of the interrogation and said that no doubt the DG [Sir Roger Hollis] would wish to discuss the matter with ‘C’ [Sir Dick White].27

  To the combined relief of both SIS and MI5, late on the afternoon of 5 April Blake confessed to his SIS interrogators without being offered immunity from prosecution. He admitted that he had offered his services to the KGB while interned in North Korea in October 1951 and had spied ‘for purely ideological motives, although he was on many occasions offered large sums of money’.28 Once he resumed his career with SIS in April 1953, he used a Minox camera to take about 200 exposures a month of classified documents which he passed on to his controller. In order not to arouse suspicion, he was careful to limit
himself to documents to which he would be expected to have access.29

  Both White and Hollis must have groaned inwardly at the thought of having to tell their American allies that for the previous ten years an SIS officer had been working as a KGB agent. Hollis agreed that the SLO in Washington would personally deliver a letter from White on the STARFISH (Blake) case to J. Edgar Hoover.30 The fact that the Security Service had just achieved a major success in uncovering the Portland spy-ring and securing the evidence to convict three KGB illegals (two of them Americans) may have made Hoover’s response to the news of Soviet penetration less irascible than usual. The SLO was surprised to find the FBI director in a ‘genuinely sympathetic and understanding’ mood. The Blake case, Hoover told him, was ‘a further illustration of how constantly alert we had to be to the dangers which beset us. After all, he said, Christ Himself found a traitor in His small team of twelve . . .’31

  Harold Macmillan’s usual irritation as prime minister at having to deal with spy scandals was compounded by the need in the Blake case to inform personally the new President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, with whom he was attempting to establish a personal Special Relationship.32 Whatever critical views the President may have formed about the Blake case, however, were swiftly submerged by the farcical failure of the CIAbacked landing of the anti-Castro ‘Cuban Brigade’ at the Bay of Pigs on 17 April. There followed what Kennedy called ‘two full days of hell . . . the most excruciating period of my life’. He despairingly asked his special counsel, Theodore Sorensen, ‘How could I have been so stupid, to let them go ahead?’33

  KGB files give Blake the credit for two major successes as a Soviet agent. First, his intelligence, together with that supplied by Heinz Felfe, a KGB agent in the West German intelligence service BND, and previous information from Philby, is said to have made possible the ‘elimination of the adversary’s agent network in the G[erman] D[emocratic] R[epublic] in 1953–55’.34 SIS calculated that at least forty agents identified by Blake were executed.35 Blake’s second major achievement as a Soviet agent was to alert the Centre to one of the most remarkable Western intelligence operations of the Cold War – the secret construction of a 500-metre underground tunnel from West to East Berlin to intercept landlines running from the Soviet military and intelligence headquarters at Karlshorst in the East Berlin suburbs. At a meeting with his controller on the top of a London double-decker bus in January 1954, Blake handed over the minutes of a conference on the tunnel project, codenamed Operation GOLD.36 Blake was posted to Berlin station on 14 April 1955,37 one month before the tunnel became operational. The Centre, however, dared not interfere either with the tunnel’s construction or with its early operations for fear of compromising Blake, who had established himself as by far its most important British agent. By the time the KGB staged an ‘accidental’ discovery of the tunnel in April 1956, Operation GOLD had yielded over 50,000 reels of magnetic tape recording intercepted Soviet and East German communications. The intelligence yield was so considerable that it took more than two years after the end of the operation to process all the intercepts. Though the KGB was able to protect the security of its own communications, it was curiously indifferent to the interception of those of the rival GRU and of Soviet forces.38

  The Security Service Legal Adviser, Bernard Hill, represented SIS as well as the Service at meetings with the Director of Public Prosecutions and the law officers of the Crown before Blake was put on trial at the Old Bailey on 3 May 1961.39 To general astonishment, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Parker, sentenced Blake to forty-two years’ imprisonment, the longest sentence ever imposed by a British court. Blake appeared stunned. Sir Dick White later said that he too had been shocked by the severity of the sentence.40 J. Edgar Hoover, by contrast, was delighted, telling the Washington SLO approvingly: ‘Anyway, the British have guts!’41 Macmillan, however, found the spy scandals of the early 1960s even more distasteful than the furore which had surrounded his clearing of Philby in 1955. Instead of congratulating MI5 for its part in tracking down a series of Soviet spies, he blamed the Service for causing him public embarrassment. The Prime Minister complained in his diary after Blake’s conviction that the public, already shocked by media reports, ‘do not know and cannot be told that he belonged to MI6, an organisation which does not theoretically exist. So I had a rather rough passage in the House of Commons . . .’42 Though the British press did not reveal that Blake was an SIS officer when reporting the verdict, the foreign press had no such inhibitions and the secret soon leaked out. The Security Service got little more credit from the British media than from the Prime Minister. The Washington Post reported from London:

  The outfit which is likely to catch it in the neck as a result of this and other recent cases is MI5, the counter-intelligence organization charged with tracking down enemy agents in this country. They already are under fire following the discovery that a group of agents, including two Admiralty employees, had been busy peddling British naval secrets to the Russians for an extended period.43

  The steady growth in the size of the KGB and GRU London residencies during the 1960s44 made counter-espionage progressively more difficult. The Security Service was handicapped not merely by its own overstretched resources but also by the difficulty (which it was, understandably, not anxious to advertise) of bringing successful prosecutions. Unless it could obtain confessions or catch agents in the act of handing over material, it was usually impossible to secure convictions. Its difficulties were exemplified by the trial in 1963 of Dr Giuseppe Martelli, a thirty-nine-year-old Italian physicist employed for the previous year at the Culham Laboratories of the Atomic Energy Authority. Arrested as a result of a lead from a KGB defector, Martelli was found in possession of a record of meetings with Nikolai Karpekov and other KGB officers, a set of partly used one-time pads for cipher communications hidden inside an ingeniously constructed cigarette case, and instructions for photographing documents. But possession of espionage paraphernalia (unlike housebreaking equipment) is not in itself a crime, and Martelli had no official access to classified information, though he was in contact with people who had. Martelli admitted meeting Karpekov, but claimed he was engaged in an ingenious scheme to turn the tables on a blackmail attempt by the KGB. He was acquitted.45

  Just as the discovery of the atom spies had prompted the early Cold War transformation of protective security, so the spy cases of the early 1960s led to its further development. The conviction of George Blake and the Portland spy-ring in 1961 prompted the appointment of the Radcliffe Committee, which carried out a comprehensive review of the protectivesecurity system. The Security Service was to be responsible for advice on security training and technical education in the public service and step up security education in industry. C Branch’s lead role in protective security thus received official recognition.

  In the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, Macmillan’s major cabinet reshuffle of July 1962, Rab Butler was promoted to the post of deputy prime minister and first secretary of state, and was succeeded as home secretary by the accident-prone Henry Brooke. Though more supportive of the Service than Macmillan, Brooke caused some anxiety by requesting a list of the names and addresses of those individuals and organizations in his Hampstead constituency which had HOWs authorizing the monitoring of their post and telephones. The Security Service reluctantly provided the details but remonstrated with Brooke’s PUS, Sir Philip Allen, over the Home Secretary’s request. According to a note by the DDG, Graham Mitchell: ‘Allen said that the Home Secretary felt that he needed it because he meets a lot of people in his constituency and would be fortified in knowing if he had any one of them on check. I said I thought this was a rotten reason.’46

  The arrest of another Soviet spy, John Vassall, an Admiralty clerk,47 only a few months after the convictions of the Portland spy-ring and George Blake, was greeted with further irritation by Macmillan. The initial lead in the investigation was one of the few provided by the troublesome KGB defector Anatoli Golitsyn, l
ater supplemented by further intelligence from another Soviet intelligence source. The case officer, as in the Portland spy case, was initially Charles Elwell. An eavesdropping operation against Vassall’s Dolphin Square flat, A4 surveillance of his journeys to and from work on the Number 24 bus and searches of his desk at the Admiralty uncovered no evidence of espionage. However, a search of his flat in September 1962 revealed two cameras and exposed film concealed in a hidden compartment. Vassall was arrested later the same day. An A4 veteran, who accompanied the Special Branch officer making the arrest, recalls during the car journey to Scotland Yard that Vassall was ‘panting with fear’ and confessed his guilt. Since his recruitment in Moscow in 1955, he had operated continuously as a Soviet agent, save in the aftermath of the Portland case, when he had been told to lie low. He was later sentenced to eighteen years’ imprisonment.48