his personal appreciation not only of the extremely valuable professional contribution which the Service had made throughout the operation involving the Libyan People’s Bureau, but the quality of the advice on the handling of the situation as a whole offered by the Security Service representatives at the meetings which he had chaired in COBR.119
Whitehall’s anxiety about the increased threat from international terrorism in the mid-1980s produced a major change in Security Service culture. Patrick Walker recalls that, during his years as Director FX from 1984 to 1986, the Service:
moved from being an introvert organisation with few Officers (and certainly not the more junior) in touch with Whitehall Departments to a Service at ease in Whitehall and confident in its expertise. The interdepartmental arrangements following the Libyan People’s Bureau siege helped to bring us closer to other departments.120
In the aftermath of the killing of WPC Fletcher and the siege of the People’s Bureau, the Prime Minister was chiefly concerned not with PIRA but with the increasing threat from non-Irish terrorism. At a meeting with the DG on 18 May, Mrs Thatcher inquired about the Service’s need for increased surveillance resources to assist in combating terrorism. In response, the Service requested four more staff in the international terrorism section of FX Branch; eight additional linguist/transcriber posts to ‘enable us to operate effectively in any of the likely languages on a 24 hour basis and at the same time to improve our normal coverage of terrorist or potential terrorist targets; and an increase of twelve in the mobile surveillance teams’. The DDG, Cecil Shipp, informed the cabinet secretary that ‘Our use of mobile surveillance against terrorist targets has more than doubled proportionally over the last few years.’121 A review by the Intelligence Co-ordinator, Sir Tony Duff (soon to succeed Jones as DG), approved the proposed increase in staff. The Security Service became at last an operational service capable of operating around the clock.122
For Qaddafi the assassination campaign against ‘stray dogs’ in Britain had a humiliating sequel. Ali Al Jahour, a corrupt Libyan businessman who had been involved in organizing the London bombing campaign and was arrested shortly afterwards, broke down in court when initially denied bail and burst into tears.123 The fact that he was later allowed bail seems to have aroused suspicions in the Qaddafi regime that he was co-operating with the British authorities. On 20 August he was found dead in a flat which he had rented. Forensic evidence showed that he had been forced to his knees and shot at close range in the back of the head.124 A note in Arabic left by his body declared: ‘This is the punishment for the one who is employed to do a job and does not succeed in doing it.’ It was signed ‘Al Fatih Forever and the Committees Everywhere’. Al Fatih (‘The Conqueror’) was a title sometimes used to flatter Qaddafi; the People’s Committees were the democratic figleaf used by Qaddafi to conceal his dictatorship.125 ‘We and the Police know a great deal about Jahour,’ wrote F3/4. ‘He appears to have tried unsuccessfully to keep in touch with both the pro and anti [Q]addafi factions.’126 Further Special Branch inquiries revealed that Jahour was also ‘well known at the Hilton Hotel as a resident with a penchant for drinking sessions and entertaining prostitutes’.127 In October another Libyan bomber, Salhen Ramdan Salem El Tarhuni, was arrested and charged with causing explosions in London in March. Though El Tarhuni denied having been in London at the time of the bombing, he had left his fingerprints on bomb-parts and batteries. He was later sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment.128
In November 1984 Tripoli Radio announced a major success in the campaign to liquidate émigré dissidents which Qaddafi probably felt outweighed the setbacks in London. It reported that the former Libyan Prime Minister Abdul-Hamid Bakoush, leader of the anti-Qaddafi Libyan Liberation Organization, had been ‘executed’ in Egypt for ‘selling his conscience to the enemies of the Arab nation’. Dramatic pictures were sent to Libya of what appeared to be Bakoush’s blood-stained corpse. Qaddafi, however, was the victim of a particularly humiliating sting. No sooner had Tripoli celebrated the assassination of Bakoush than he appeared alive and well on Egyptian television to reveal that the team sent to assassinate him by Qaddafi had been caught and had made a full confession.129
Qaddafi took his revenge for the humiliations of 1984 by publicly announcing, and dramatically increasing, his support for PIRA: ‘We do not consider the IRA a terrorist army; they have a just cause, the independence of their country . . . We are not ashamed of supporting it with all the means we have.’130 Qaddafi’s emergence in the mid-1980s as the main arms supplier to PIRA posed a far greater threat to national security than his homicidal campaign against Libyan dissidents in Britain. The weapons and explosives which he secretly supplied to the Provisionals over the next three years greatly enhanced their capacity to continue the ‘armed struggle’. Failure to detect and prevent these arms shipments until 1987 was a major weakness in British counter-terrorist strategy.131
Arms supplies from Libya were all the more important to the Provisionals as a result of disruption in the arms flow from the United States, due in large part to intelligence co-operation. On 29 September 1984 a major PIRA arms shipment was seized by the Irish navy off the coast of County Kerry on board the Irish trawler Marita Ann. The Marita Ann operation, originally codenamed CARDOON, had begun in the early summer when the Garda learned that Martin Ferris, then OC Kerry PIRA (promoted shortly afterwards to OC Southern Command), was planning to use the trawler to bring arms from the United States. In the early hours of 28 September, however, an RAF Nimrod observed arms being transferred to the Marita Ann from an American trawler which had crossed the Atlantic with its port of registration painted out. The Nimrod also detected some signs of panic as the two trawlers attempted to keep their distance in heavy seas by facing into the wind with a hawser between them. The whole operation was followed in real time by senior FX officers both at the RAF Northwood Command Centre and in Curzon Street, who informed the Garda that the Marita Ann had been seized even before the news was received from the Irish navy.132 When the Marita Ann was intercepted by the Irish naval vessel Emer, its crew initially believed they had been boarded by a fisheries protection vessel and shouted, ‘We have no salmon on board!’ The hold was found to be packed with weapons and ammunition. Martin Ferris, John Crawley, a former US marine and PIRA member who had arranged the arms deal, and Michael Browne, the trawler skipper, were later each sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment at the Special Criminal Court in Dublin, sitting without a jury.133
Less than three weeks after the capture of the Marita Ann, PIRA’s England Department, after several ineffective years, achieved its most spectacular success so far. The Northern Ireland Office had correctly identified a trend for PIRA attacks in Britain, following a series of setbacks, to ‘become less frequent but more sophisticated’.134 For several years, the Security Service had been reporting intelligence that PIRA intended to bomb one of the annual Tory conferences – though the fact that no attempt was made until 1984 may have damaged the credibility of these warnings.135 In the early hours of 16 October a 20-pound bomb with a long-delay timer (the first to be used on the mainland) exploded at the Grand Hotel at Brighton, where Mrs Thatcher and most of her cabinet were staying during the Conservative Party conference.136 The ‘Brighton bomber’, Patrick Magee, had been wanted for the past five years for his part in the bombings in the London area in the winter of 1978–9. In September 1980 he had been arrested in the Netherlands but in January 1981 a Dutch court rejected an application for his extradition to stand trial in England.137 Two years later he had another narrow escape. In April 1983 he was discovered at an address in Lancashire and secretly photographed in the company of a suspected PIRA associate. While driving towards Preston on the motorway at over 90 mph, however, the two men realized they were being tailed, abandoned their car at Preston railway station with the key still in the ignition, and disappeared.138 The bomb planted by Magee in the Grand Hotel in 1984 killed five Conservative Party members and injured more th
an thirty, some seriously. Though Thatcher survived unscathed, PIRA issued a statement afterwards, directed chiefly at the Prime Minister: ‘Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.’
9
Counter-Espionage in the Last Decade of the Cold War
During Mrs Thatcher’s first term as prime minister, the longest-drawn-out investigation in Security Service history – the hunt for the Ring of Five – was finally laid to rest. In November 1979, fifteen years after Blunt’s secret confession and the promise of immunity from prosecution, he was exposed as the Fourth Man in a Commons statement by Mrs Thatcher issued after strong hints to his identity had appeared in the press. Blunt was almost everything the media then hoped for in a Soviet mole: a traitor from a good public school and Trinity College, Cambridge, with a record of sexual deviance (by the standards of the times) and connections with the Royal Family as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. ‘TRAITOR AT THE QUEEN’S RIGHT HAND’, thundered the headline in the Daily Mail. ‘Treacherous Communist poof’, declared John Junor in the Daily Express.1
The public exposure of Blunt occurred some years later than either the Security Service or Number Ten had expected. Under the Heath government, when he had been seriously ill with cancer and thought unlikely to survive, preparations had been made to deal with the media furore which was expected to follow the revelation after his death of his role as a Soviet agent. In March 1973 Heath had asked for the Queen to be given a detailed report, only to discover that Her Majesty had been informed of Blunt’s treachery in more general terms about a decade earlier.2 At a press conference after his 1979 exposure, Blunt’s penitence was qualified. Though accepting that he had been ‘totally wrong’, he several times insisted that he had ‘acted according to my conscience’. Over the next few years some of the enormity of his betrayal gradually sank in. Blunt told a confidant before his death in 1983, ‘I made a terrible intellectual mistake, and should have been shot for what I did.’3
In the wake of Blunt’s sensational unmasking in 1979 there was a world-wide media demand for more British traitors. Imaginary moles, identified as the result of mistaken leads, began to multiply rapidly in print: among them Donald Beves,4 Frank Birch, Andrew Gow, Sir Roger Hollis, Guy Liddell, Graham Mitchell and Arthur Pigou (all dead), Sir Rudolf Peierls (who denied claims that he too was dead and sued successfully for libel), Lord Rothschild (the victim during his lifetime of innuendo rather than open allegation in case he also sued) and Wilfred Mann (who did not sue but wrote a book to prove his innocence). Though the Service knew that all were innocent, it was not until August 1982 that, thanks to intelligence from Oleg Gordievsky, it finally identified John Cairncross as the Fifth Man in the Ring of Five.5 Though Cairncross had secretly confessed to espionage in 1964, the Service had failed to realize just how highly the KGB rated him. Gordievsky’s public identification of Cairncross as the Fifth Man during the closing months of the Thatcher government in 1990 (later confirmed by extracts from his KGB file released by the SVR, the post-Soviet Russian foreign intelligence service), while attracting substantial media attention, also caused some disappointment. Cairncross was a Trinity graduate who had published a scholarly study of polygamy, but his background as the son of a Scottish shopkeeper was disappointingly modest and contained no connection with the Royal Family. Though he was an even more important spy than Blunt, his media profile has consequently remained much lower.6
In 1980 evidence from a Czech StB defector identified the only British politician (so far as is known) to have acted as a foreign agent while holding ministerial office: John Stonehouse, who had served in the Wilson governments of 1964–70 (without cabinet rank). Though an earlier StB defector, Josef Frolik, had reported his suspicions about Stonehouse in 1969, the Security Service had informed Wilson after interviewing both Frolik and Stonehouse that there was ‘no evidence that Mr Stonehouse gave the Czechs any information he should not have given them, much less that he consciously acted as an agent’.7 The Service repeated that conclusion to Edward Heath.8 Stonehouse’s subsequent behaviour, however, undermined the credibility of his previously persuasive protestations of innocence. In 1974, faced with serious business problems, he abandoned his wife, faked his own suicide, adopted a new identity and disappeared with his mistress to Australia. Having been successfully tracked down and brought back to England, he was sentenced in 1976 to seven years’ imprisonment on eighteen charges of theft and fraud. Once out of jail he published a somewhat absurd spy novel, Ralph, which, if it is at all autobiographical, tends to support the claims in Frolik’s memoirs that Stonehouse had been recruited by the StB after falling victim to a honey trap during a visit to Czechoslovakia in the late 1950s. The novel (which would later have been a strong contender for the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award) describes the entrapment of a senior British civil servant in the European Commission, Ralph Edmonds, by the seductive Lotte of East German intelligence. (‘One of our best operators,’ Ralph’s controller later tells him. ‘What she did was strictly in the line of duty.’) Ralph spends an enjoyable evening with Lotte, who (strictly in the line of duty) ‘sent sensations of joy to every crevice of his brain’. After one last ‘magnificent thrust’, ‘Ralph noticed their reflections in a huge, oval ceiling mirror.’ He is later handed souvenir photographs of the evening taken through the one-way mirror in the ceiling, and agrees to cooperate. Inept though Stone house’s storytelling was, the account of Ralph’s entrapment may have drawn on his own experience at the hands of the StB.9
In 1980 evidence from an StB defector codenamed AFFIRM persuaded both the Security Service and the Thatcher government that Stonehouse had been a Czech agent. Since, however, it was decided that the defector’s evidence could not be used in court, Mrs Thatcher agreed that Stonehouse should not be prosecuted.10 AFFIRM’s evidence was largely corroborated a quarter of a century later when some of the contents of Stonehouse’s lengthy StB file were revealed in the Czech Republic. As AFFIRM had claimed,11 his original codename had been KOLON (‘Colonist’, a reference to two years he had spent in Uganda). Stonehouse had been recruited while an Opposition backbencher to provide ‘information from Parliament and Parliamentary committees’, using the money he received to fund his social life. The StB, however, were disappointed by the amount of intelligence Stonehouse provided once he became a minister.12
Counter-espionage in the Thatcher era was distinguished by closer collaboration with SIS than ever before. K3, the section which recruited and ran Soviet agents, was staffed by both male and female agent-runners from both Services. The KGB London residency had no experience of being targeted by front-line female intelligence officers and seems to have taken several years to realize this was happening. K3 operations enabled both Services to learn from and about each other. According to Stella Rimington: ‘We learned from MI6 the skills of agent-running and agent recruitment, in which they then had more experience than we did. They learned from us how to behave when they were up against a sophisticated security service of – great value when working undercover in a foreign posting.’13 A case which strikingly exemplified MI5–SIS collaboration was that of the most important British agent of the later Cold War, Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB officer recruited by SIS in 1974. To the delight of the minority of indoctrinated members in K Branch as well as SIS, in January 1982 the FCO received a visa application from the Soviet embassy on behalf of Gordievsky following his appointment as counsellor (in reality as a senior KGB political intelligence officer) in London.14 Soon after his arrival in London on 28 June 1982, Oleg Gordievsky renewed contact with SIS.
The KGB documents which he smuggled out of the residency to meetings with his case officer stunned the small circle of intelligence officers who had access to them. They revealed that for the past year, jointly with the GRU, the KGB had been engaged in the largest peacetime operation in its history. In a secret speech to a major KGB conference in May 1981, the visibly ailing Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev denounced
the policies of the US President Ronald Reagan, who had taken office at the beginning of the year, as a serious threat to world peace. He was followed by the long-serving Chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, who was to succeed him as Soviet leader eighteen months later. To the astonishment of most of the audience, Andropov announced that, by decision of the Politburo, for the first time in their history the KGB and GRU were to collaborate in a global operation codenamed RYAN (a newly devised acronym for Raketno-Yadernoye Napadenie, ‘Nuclear Missile Attack’). Its purpose was to collect intelligence on the plans by the United States and NATO for a surprise nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. In reality, no such plans existed. RYAN derived from the paranoid tendencies of the Soviet and KGB leadership at a tense period in the Cold War, fuelled by the anti-Soviet rhetoric of President Ronald Reagan, who had denounced the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire’. Gordievsky reported that his colleagues in the Line PR (political intelligence) in London were considerably less alarmist than the Centre about the threat of nuclear war and viewed Operation RYAN with some scepticism. None, however, was willing to put his career at risk by challenging the Centre’s assessment of the aggressive designs of the Reagan administration and its NATO allies. RYAN thus created a vicious circle of intelligence collection and assessment. Residencies felt, in effect, obliged to report alarming information even if they themselves were sceptical of it. The Centre was duly alarmed by what they reported and demanded more.15 Gordievsky’s intelligence had a considerable impact on Margaret Thatcher, who was indoctrinated into the Gordievsky case on 23 December 1982.16 Sir Geoffrey Howe, who was also informed about the case on becoming foreign secretary six months later, recalls:
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