The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  Despite the London residency’s success in identifying A4 mobile surveillance, however, Lyalin had apparently reassuring news about its lack of success in penetrating the Security Service. Discussions with the KGB resident, Yuri Nikolayevich Voronin, and other residency officers convinced him that there had been no Soviet penetration of the British intelligence community since the Douglas Britten case in 1968.26 K7, which was responsible for investigating Soviet penetration, urged caution. It noted that Lyalin knew little about either past penetrations or the structure of the British intelligence community. If there were a current penetration, he ‘would hardly be on the indoctrination list’. It was none the less ironic that, at a time when Peter Wright and other conspiracy theorists were pursuing their hunt for imaginary KGB moles within the Security Service, Lyalin should be insisting that penetration of the Service was regarded by the Centre as ‘virtually impossible’. 27

  Operation FOOT had been planned for October 1971 but was brought forward by a few weeks following Lyalin’s defection on 3 September. The Centre was caught completely off-guard both by the defection and by the implementation of Operation FOOT. On 24 September 1971 the PUS at the FCO, Sir Denis Greenhill, who a few years earlier had told the Service he expected the KGB’s influence to go into steady decline, summoned the Soviet chargé d’affaires, Ivan Ivanovich Ippolitov (a KGB co-optee), and informed him that ninety KGB and GRU officers stationed in Britain under official cover were to be expelled. Another fifteen then on leave in the Soviet Union would not be allowed to return, making a grand total of 105 expulsions.28 That evening there was a celebration party at Security Service headquarters. Among the guests was the head of the FCO Russian desk, George Walden, whose previous dealings with MI5 officers had given him the impression of a rather depressed group of introverts. This time, however, he found them in high spirits. Initially he was concerned by the lack of drink at the party. ‘Then one of them opened a vast imposing safe. It was chock-a-bloc with bottles.’29

  A satirical comment by Bernard Cookson on the espionage debris supposedly left in London parks after the mass expulsion of Soviet intelligence officers (Evening News, 1 October 1971)

  Almost immediately after Ippolitov’s return from his meeting with Greenhill at the FCO on 24 September, A4 reported that a Soviet intelligence officer had been seen in Kensington Palace Gardens sprinting across the road to the embassy from the GRU residency opposite, no doubt summoned by telephone for an urgent briefing on the mass expulsion.30 On the day after the expulsions, Sir Alec Douglas-Home flew to New York for a meeting at the United Nations where he was confronted by an angry Gromyko, who warned him that it was very dangerous for Britain to threaten the Soviet Union. According to a diplomat who witnessed the encounter, the Foreign Secretary burst out laughing. ‘Do you really think’, he asked, ‘that Britain can “threaten” your country? I am flattered to think that this is the case.’ Douglas-Home added that the KGB had plainly not told Gromyko what it was up to and hoped it had been helpful for him to be informed how many Soviet officials in Britain were actually intelligence officers. Gromyko appeared deflated by the put-down.31

  Identified hostile intelligence personnel in London, 1967–1988

  The increase in non-Soviet intelligence personnel after the 1971 expulsions was due largely to appeals by the KGB for assistance by its Soviet Bloc allies.

  In the short term Lyalin’s defection probably caused the KGB even greater concern than Operation FOOT. The Centre informed the Soviet leadership that Lyalin was likely to compromise Department V operations in other countries as well as Britain. Though the British government released few details about Lyalin after his defection, the Attorney General told the Commons that he was responsible for ‘the organisation of sabotage within the United Kingdom’ and ‘the elimination of individuals judged to be enemies of the USSR’. According to a later KGB defector, Vladimir Kuzichkin, on 27 September the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, cut short a tour of Eastern Europe for an emergency meeting of the Politburo in the VIP lounge at Moscow airport. Shortly afterwards most Line F officers were recalled from Western capitals, leaving Department V effectively crippled and unable to fulfil its task of co-ordinating sabotage operations abroad in time of crisis.32 Department V found itself in limbo pending a reorganization which took three and a half years to complete. The files on operations in Britain seen by the KGB archivist (and later defector) Vasili Mitrokhin record no new sabotage plans during the few years after Lyalin’s ‘treachery’. 33

  Following traditional KGB practice, the Centre’s investigation into the London débâcle denounced Lyalin, like previous defectors, as depraved, claiming that he had seduced the wives of a number of his Soviet colleagues in London. The Centre chose as chief scapegoat Voronin, the former London resident in London, who was accused of having covered up Lyalin’s misdeeds in order to avoid a scandal in the residency.34 Despite the fact that only a few months earlier Voronin had been promoted to head the Third Department of the First Chief Directorate (foreign intelligence), he was dismissed from the KGB – a certain indication of its fury at the damage done by Lyalin’s defection.35 ‘In all,’ as one well-informed commentator later observed, ‘Lyalin’s revelations caused quite the most satisfactory panic that had occurred in KGB/GRU ranks for years.’36

  Operation FOOT had an extraordinary international impact on Western as well as Soviet Bloc intelligence services, enhancing the Service’s prestige with its foreign friends and allies. On 5 October 1971 FJ reported to Sir Philip Allen, PUS at the Home Office, that reactions from Commonwealth and foreign liaison services had been enthusiastic. At the FBI the autocratic seventy-six-year-old J. Edgar Hoover had ‘received the news with delight’ and intended to propose to President Nixon that he take similar action.37 The SLO in Washington, Cecil Shipp, who was due to return to London in October, had his last meeting with Hoover in the wake of the expulsions and was rewarded with a two-hour audience. Even more remarkably, he reported that – unlike previous occasions – this meeting ‘was not a monologue’. 38 The DCI, Richard Helms, sent ‘hearty congratulations’: ‘It is not often we receive such good news!’ Helms, however, failed to persuade the State Department to follow the British example. The Canadian liaison in London said that the information he had received on FOOT ‘would, he hoped, lead to those Ministers (not Trudeau [the Prime Minister, possibly considered a hopeless case]) who were still starry-eyed about the Russians being finally disillusioned’. The Belgian liaison officer sent ‘very warm and heartfelt congratulations’ and hoped that his own government would be stimulated to take similar action. The French DST (security service) expressed its own delight and forwarded the personal congratulations of the Interior Minister; a ‘delighted’ SDECE (French foreign intelligence) intended to propose a similar expulsion to President Pompidou. The German BfV (security service) was reported to be ‘electrified’ as well as delighted but pessimistic that the Willy Brandt government would follow suit; the BND (German foreign intelligence), whose first reaction was one of astonishment, described FOOT as both ‘courageous and revolutionary’. The Dutch also intended to use FOOT to press their government to take a tougher line against Soviet intelligence and declared themselves ‘thunderstruck at the toughness and courage of H.M.G.’: ‘This was a real and damaging blow at the structure of the K.G.B. in the West.’39

  After Operation FOOT, the security case which most concerned the Heath government during the remainder of its period in office was the threat of a new Profumo affair. On 29 April 1973 the News of the World reported that (unnamed) peers were involved with prostitutes and drugs. The Met informed the Security Service that they were investigating claims by a prostitute, Norma Levy, and her husband Colin that the Parliamentary Under Secretary for the RAF, Lord Lambton, had been using drugs ‘and had needle marks on his arms’. 40 Colin Levy alerted the News of the World, which concealed a microphone in a teddy bear on Norma Levy’s bed and placed a cameraman in her bedroom cupboard. The photographs and recording,
which in the end the News of the World decided not to use, ended up in the hands of the police.41 The DG, Sir Michael Hanley, saw the risk of a major security scandal.42 Colin Levy also made allegations against Lord Jellicoe, Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Lords, and another Conservative minister (later judged to be innocent). On 2 May the DDG was summoned to the Home Office and told that the Prime Minister wished to know if the Security Service had ‘any security doubts about the three Ministers’. 43 Next day the Legal Adviser, Bernard Sheldon, informed the Home Office that there was ‘no adverse information’ in Service records against any of the three but, unusually for an MI5 officer, expressed concern about the likely political embarrassment for the Prime Minister.44

  On 7 May, at the direction of the Home Office (and, no doubt, with the approval of Heath), Sheldon was provided by the police with a longer list of public figures named by Colin Levy. Once again, ‘no adverse information’ against any of them on security grounds was discovered in Service records. The fear of another Profumo affair, however, remained. On 14 May the government Chief Whip, Francis Pym, received an alarmist report from an assistant whip that Rupert Murdoch, owner of Britain’s best-selling tabloids, the Sun and the News of the World, ‘has a “Profumo” type story on the stocks with photographs about a junior minister who is involved in sexual orgies with back benchers. The official car is involved. The story is about to break.’45

  A meeting of senior ministers and officials chaired by the Prime Minister on 18 May was informed that the police intended to interview Lambton on the 21st, and agreed that ‘a decision on further action by the Security Service’ should wait until after the interview.46 After being questioned by the police, Lambton told the Chief Whip that ‘He had agreed that a photograph showing a man on a bed with two women was of him and that the cigarette which he was smoking in the photograph was of cannabis.’ Since the ‘small amount of cannabis’ in his possession might lead to criminal charges, Lambton announced his immediate resignation from the government.47 K2 (Charles Elwell) noted after interviewing him on 13 June:

  Lambton immediately assured me that absolutely nothing of security significance had taken place during the course of his association with tarts, that [there was] no attempt to blackmail him and that he had never discussed his work with any of the tarts . . . Asked about the official briefcase he said he had never taken any of his papers out of the office. Indeed he had no need to since he had so little work to do. He rather implied that the futility of the job was one of the reasons that he had got up to mischief (‘idle hands’ etc).48

  Lambton was possibly more frank about the ‘mischief’ during a television interview. When asked by the well-known television presenter Robin Day why he had ‘to go to whores for sex’, Lambton replied, ‘I think that people sometimes like variety. Don’t you?’49

  Anxious not to allow the sex-in-high-places scandals to develop into another Profumo affair, Heath also took a tough line with Lord Jellicoe, who admitted paying for prostitutes from the Mayfair Escort Agency. Though a report to the Prime Minister concluded that ‘There is nothing in his conduct to suggest that the risk of indiscretions on these occasions was other than negligible,’ Jellicoe resigned from the government on 24 May.50 The DDG emphasized at a meeting with Heath that, as he was no doubt well aware, because of the risk of blackmail, ministers’ involvement with prostitutes always involved a potential security threat.51

  For several years after Operation FOOT the mass expulsions threw Soviet intelligence operations in Britain into disarray. Most Soviet agents were put on ice.52 The Centre asked Soviet Bloc and Cuban intelligence services to help plug the intelligence gap in London. The KGB also sought to strengthen the residency by co-opting diplomats and staff of the London embassy. By 1973 nineteen members of the embassy were listed in Centre files as KGB agents and co-optees, among them the ambassador’s deputy, Ivan Ippolitov.53 Security Service eavesdropping at the CPGB’s King Street headquarters revealed that the KGB was also using senior Party officials, in particular the industrial organizer Bert Ramelson, to obtain confidential TUC documents. During a month’s all-expenses-paid holiday in the Soviet Union in July 1973, Ramelson was approached by Igor Klimov, one of the KGB officers expelled during FOOT, and agreed to supply him with copies of the minutes of the TUC General Council’s International Committee (to which Ramelson had gained unauthorized access) via Valeri Rogov, the London correspondent of the Soviet trade union paper Trud. On 6 August, soon after his return to London, Ramelson met Rogov and handed over several previous sets of minutes. Thereafter they met regularly for the same purpose. As with previous cases of leaked TUC documents, the Department of Employment, when informed by the Security Service, took ‘a relaxed view of this since they have long recognised that any information given to the TUC is likely to leak – one has only to consider the composition of the General Council.’54

  Since Ramelson was willing to pass TUC documents to the KGB, it seems likely (though proof is lacking) that he also provided confidential information from the Labour Party National Executive Committee (NEC). In the autumn of 1971 he began receiving reports of the proceedings soon after every NEC meeting from one of its trade union members, Alexander Kitson, executive officer of the Transport and General Workers’ Union and Treasurer of the Scottish TUC. The DG informed the Home Office that Kitson had collaborated closely on industrial matters with the CPGB since about 1960: ‘His political aims and views appear to be substantially in line with those of the Communist Party though he has never formally joined it. He has also for many years enjoyed close friendships with officials of Communist embassies in London.’ One of Kitson’s closest contacts was Igor Klimov of the KGB. After Klimov’s expulsion, he intervened unsuccessfully with the Foreign Office in an attempt to have the ban overturned. Klimov’s other regular contacts in the Labour Party had included Joan Maynard MP,55 nicknamed ‘Stalin’s Granny’ for what one Labour historian calls ‘her devotion to the Soviet cause’. 56 When Maynard was elected to the NEC in 1972, she too began supplying Ramelson with regular accounts of its meetings.57

  The DG told the Home Office:

  Ramelson’s activities in obtaining for the CPGB documentary and other information, presumably confidential to the TUC and Labour Party, and his readiness to pass at least some of this information to the Russians and other Communist Parties, are not illegal in that Government secrets are not at risk. Nevertheless, the fact that Russian intelligence officers are involved with Ramelson, and with members of trade unions and of the Labour Party, in obtaining information about the TUC (and probably about Labour Party policies) carries with it some danger for the future and, in particular, if and when a Labour Administration is returned to power.58

  In March 1974, a month after Labour’s election victory, Hanley found Roy Jenkins, then beginning his second term as home secretary, ‘exceedingly interested’ in intelligence on Communist attempts to penetrate the NEC and TUC. When Hanley revealed that Ramelson had the minutes of a meeting between the new Employment Secretary, Michael Foot, and the TUC, Jenkins announced that he intended to inform the Prime Minister.59 Wilson’s reaction is not recorded.

  Probably the KGB’s most important British agent for much of the 1970s, Geoffrey Prime, was run exclusively outside the UK and was therefore unaffected by the expulsions of Operation FOOT. Prime was a sexual and social misfit who blamed many of his personal problems on the capitalist system and, as he later acknowledged, had ‘a misplaced idealistic view of Russian Communism’. In 1968, while an RAF corporal at the Gatow SIGINT station in West Berlin, he left a message at a Soviet checkpoint asking Soviet intelligence to make contact with him. Prime’s note was passed not to the KGB First Chief [foreign intelligence] Directorate (FCD) but, though he did not realize it, to the Third Directorate, which was responsible for the surveillance and security of Soviet armed forces and sometimes succeeded in recruiting (usually low-level) agents among Western troops stationed in Germany. Anxious to steal a march over the more p
restigious FCD, the Third Directorate recruited Prime as one of its own agents. In agreement with his case officers, he successfully applied for a job at GCHQ after leaving the RAF and was trained at the KGB compound at Karlshorst in the East Berlin suburbs in radio transmission, cipher communications, microdots, photography with a Minox camera and the use of dead letter-boxes. He served for almost nine years as a Soviet agent at GCHQ in Cheltenham and elsewhere, spending much of that period transcribing and translating intercepts. A later Security Service assessment summed up the Third Directorate’s handling of the case as ‘incompetent and inept; had it been run more effectively the damage done by Prime (which was anyway very considerable) would have been even worse.’ Since he was given no tasking by his case officers, who showed little understanding of GCHQ, he simply set out to pass on ‘all information that seemed to him significant’. By 1975 Prime had access to what was officially described as ‘intelligence from a very sensitive source’,60 which included details of British successes and failures in decrypting Soviet traffic.61 His KGB case officers, however, failed to pay attention to the stress on Prime caused by his double life and remarriage. In the summer of 1977, having come close to breaking point, he made plans to defect and bought an air ticket to Helsinki but turned back on his way to the airport.62 Though GCHQ colleagues were struck by his morose appearance, they put it down to his problems at home and career frustrations. In September 1977 Prime resigned from GCHQ, broke contact with the KGB and began work as a Cheltenham taxi driver. The London residency seems to have been unaware of his existence – as was the Security Service until his arrest for sexually abusing small girls in 1982.63