The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  At the end of the Cold War, the overall threat to national security from foreign espionage appeared to be low. Since Operation FOOT in 1971, the United Kingdom had been a hard target for the intelligence services of the Soviet Bloc. One of the most effective weapons in MI5’s armoury had proved to be the policy of refusing a visa to any known hostile intelligence officer applying to work in or visit the UK. A counter-espionage officer, who became Director K in 1992, recalls:

  Over the years this policy kept hundreds of experienced I[ntelligence] O[fficer]s from entering the country . . . The result of this policy was that the opposition was increasingly forced to post inexperienced intelligence officers to the UK – officers who had never served in the West before, or who had never drawn attention to themselves through operational activity, the espionage equivalent of ‘clean skins’ – who were more likely to make mistakes or who would be reluctant to risk being caught and expelled ignominiously.136

  The KGB’s difficulty in appointing competent, experienced residents in London probably explains its choice of the inadequate Arkadi Guk in 1980. A more competent resident might well have accepted Bettaney’s offer to work as a Soviet agent and have succeeded in bringing about the only major Cold War penetration of the Security Service. There were of course some able KGB officers who succeeded in slipping through the net. Possibly the ablest was Viktor Oshchenko of Line X, who was responsible for the recruitment of Michael John Smith, probably the most important espionage case in Britain still unresolved at the end of the Cold War.137 There were fewer restrictions on the GRU. In order to facilitate the posting of British military attachés in Moscow, there was a policy of giving visas to Soviet military attachés posted to London – all of them GRU officers – provided that they had not previously been identified acting operationally (including, but not limited to, running agents) against the UK or a close ally.

  In tandem with the visa-refusal policy, the ceiling on the numbers of Soviet officials allowed in the UK prevented the unchecked expansion of the London residencies, forcing the KGB and the GRU to compete with other departments for slots in the embassy, Soviet Trade Delegation and other Soviet offices. A retrospective analysis of Service counter-espionage in the later Cold War concluded:

  When a hostile IO arrived in this country, he faced an intimidating array of countermeasures, ranging from a sophisticated protective security programme to intensive surveillance and double-agent operations or ‘stings’. We watched, analysed, made deductions, followed up every lead, interviewed their contacts, even put officers alongside them under cover. This was the bread and butter of our work against the so-called ‘legal’ Residencies – those IOs who operated under diplomatic or trade cover in the embassies, trade delegations, international organisations etc. At the outset, of course, we did not know whether a particular individual was an IO or not, so the first priority was to confirm his status. Once identified as an IO, he would become the focus of more intensive study to determine the nature of his duties and contacts. Finally we would decide whether and how to disrupt his espionage activity. The defensive system that we developed over the years put enormous pressure on hostile IOs, most of whom felt apprehensive and intimidated even before they arrived here, such was our reputation.

  Perhaps the clearest evidence that the KGB found it hard to operate in Britain was the fact that in the latter years of the Cold War, it diverted a significant amount of its operations against UK targets to third countries, where British personnel were more exposed and vulnerable and where the local security service might not be as effective. The Security Service sought to counter this by briefing likely targets. Soviet Bloc intelligence agencies also moved many meetings with British agents to other countries, which made them more difficult to detect. To some extent, one Director K believes, ‘the Service may thus over time have become the victim of its own success.’138

  1 The main Lines (departments) in KGB residencies during the later Cold War were: KR (counter-intelligence and security), N (illegals support), PR (political intelligence), SK (Soviet colony) and X (S&T). Line F (‘special actions’) had been wound up in its existing form following the scandal which resulted from Lyalin’s defection. For further details, see Andrew and Mitrokhin, Mitrokhin Archive, appendix E.

  10

  Counter-Terrorism and Protective Security in the Later 1980s

  Stella Rimington later argued that the aftermath of the Brighton bombing would have been the moment for the Security Service to claim from the MPSB the lead intelligence role in combating Irish Republican terrorism in Britain. The opportunity, if it existed, was missed. Rimington blamed senior management, who, she claimed, ‘had not wanted to take on the responsibility, because they were afraid of criticism if they failed’.1 Though the claim that Sir John Jones and the Service leadership did not possess the courage to make the change may be unjust, they lacked the confidence to argue their case within Whitehall in a way which would have given it any real prospect of success. The ineffectiveness of PIRA mainland operations after the Brighton bombing also lessened what pressure there was for a radical reorganization of counter-terrorism. Neither the Security Service nor the MPSB could have foreseen that the attack on the Grand Hotel was to be the last major success by a mainland ASU for the next four years.

  From the mid-1980s onwards, the decline in the Cold War and in the perceived threat from domestic subversion was matched by increasing awareness of the terrorist menace. FX Branch’s work was evenly divided between Irish and international terrorism. Director FX, Patrick Walker, told the Home Secretary and his PUS in July 1985: ‘The threat posed by international terrorism was less intense and sustained, but it was, on the other hand, more diffuse and, in intelligence terms, tougher to crack. The threat posed by Irish terrorism was more sustained, but in this area the Security Service shared responsibility with MPSB . . .’2 The Service found it particularly difficult to assess the threat from the most active and brutal international terrorist group of the time, the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO), then based in Libya,3 which was committed to the destruction of the State of Israel and to an international Arab revolution. In an unsuccessful attempt to secure the release of the jailed hitmen responsible for the attempted assassination in 1982 of the Israeli ambassador in London, Shlomo Argov, the ANO threatened a series of attacks on British interests.4 The Service, however, had no means of knowing whether the increasingly mentally unstable and unpredictable Abu Nidal was planning operations in Britain as horrendous as his murderous attacks in the mid-1980s on Rome and Vienna airports, and on Istanbul’s largest synagogue. F3/8 told an intelligence conference in September 1984:

  It has always been extremely difficult to achieve a sound estimate of the size of AN[O] either as a whole or in a particular country such as the UK. The group has been very effective in securing the anonymity of its members in European countries and it has been exceptionally difficult to penetrate. Although we are constantly in receipt of lists which purport to name Abu Nidhalists, they are usually worthless. We have received over twelve such lists in 1984 alone, some of them being repeated from one security service to another, the names being increasingly garbled in transmission. Few of the names ever prove to be of men who can be positively identified.5

  ‘I am the evil spirit of the secret services,’ boasted Abu Nidal in an interview with Der Spiegel in 1985. ‘I am the evil spirit which moves at night causing nightmares.’ The greatest nightmare for the Security Service was his threat to the Prime Minister: ‘We are working with all our forces against Thatcher, for example with the IRA. She escaped with her life from the last assassination attempt in Brighton, but I can assure you that she will not be able to avoid the next attacks.’6 Improbable though the threat to Mrs Thatcher might appear, Abu Nidal’s terrorist track-record was such that it could not be ignored. In the event, instead of mounting further attacks in Britain, he chose softer British targets abroad. In 1984 ANO assassins killed Kenneth Whitty, the British cultural attaché in Athens, and Percy Norris,
the British deputy high commissioner to India in Bombay. Abu Nidal’s most ambitious operation against a British target, probably prompted by his Libyan hosts, seems to have been the attack on Sunday 3 August 1986 by three small groups identified by the Security Service as ANO terrorists on the living quarters and recreational area of RAF Akrotiri in the British Sovereign Base Area of Cyprus. The attackers claimed to be retaliating against the US air-raid on Libya a few months earlier, which Qaddafi wrongly believed had been launched from Akrotiri. Though the terrorists used a rocket launcher and mortars, damage to the RAF base was slight. The only injuries were minor shrapnel wounds suffered by two wives of service personnel.7 The Security Service continued to investigate the possibility that ANO had established a network in Britain capable of mounting a major terrorist attack.8 Though the Service found no evidence of any, it could not be certain that – as now seems highly probable – none existed. During the later 1980s, Abu Nidal increasingly dissipated his homicidal energies in a feud with the leader of the PLO, Yasir Arafat, whom he bizarrely called ‘the Jewess’s son’, and in a paranoid hunt for mostly imaginary Arab traitors. He subjected his mostly innocent victims to sadistic torture and execution.9

  The newly introduced Security Service Annual Report to the Home Secretary for 1985–6 noted that counter-terrorist staff were ‘under great pressure’ and ‘fully extended’:

  The main thing to be said about our work in the counter-terrorist field is that it increases monthly . . . One welcome result of the diminution of activity by the Russians since [the] September [1985 expulsions of KGB and GRU personnel]10 has been the greater availability of the [A4] mobile surveillance teams for action against terrorist targets. [Director FX, Patrick Walker, wrote on his copy of the report: ‘But still not enough’]11

  The main features of the year have been –

  i. the increase in violent attacks against Western targets, both in the Middle East and Europe;

  ii. the increasing danger of Sikh (and other sub-continental) terrorism in the UK;

  iii. the intense political pressure, mainly from the US, for more active retaliation against terrorist groups and governments sponsoring terrorism;

  iv. the continuing and increasing need to take part in inter-departmental [counterterrorist] work in Whitehall and in a variety of international meetings;

  v. a further increase in the quality of our links with liaison services, especially on the European continent. These embrace not only the exchange and assessment of intelligence but a number of cases of fruitful, though sometimes unsuccessful, operational cooperation.12

  Sikh extremism, which the DG, Sir Tony Duff, put at the top of the list of current terrorist threats in mainland Britain in the 1985–6 Annual Report, illustrated once again the often unpredictable rise and fall of the threat from international terrorist groups. In the early 1980s terrorism by Armenian extremists, who attempted to assassinate the Turkish ambassador in 1982, had been a serious problem. Within a few years, however, the problem had virtually disappeared.13 By contrast, terrorism by Sikh extremists in the UK, which scarcely existed at the beginning of the decade, suddenly emerged as a major threat during the summer and autumn of 1984. In early June the Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, sent troops into the Punjab where they stormed the Sikh holy of holies, the Golden Temple of Amritsar. On 31 October two of her Sikh guards took their revenge by shooting her dead in the garden of her house. While Mrs Gandhi’s body lay in state, with Indian television cameras broadcasting live pictures of her decomposing remains, Hindu mobs looted and torched Sikh neighbourhoods and businesses, hacking or burning to death Sikh men in front of their wives and children. The Indian police, save for a minority who joined in the massacre, were nowhere to be seen.14 In Britain the invasion of the Golden Temple and the massacres produced an upsurge of support within the Sikh community for the creation of an independent Sikh state of Khalistan on the Indian sub-continent. The Service reported ‘a wave of support among Sikhs in UK for the Khalistan National Organisation’, led by Dr Jagjit Singh Chauhan, who formed the Khalistan ‘Government in Exile’.

  Before the state visit to Britain in October 1985 of Indira Gandhi’s son and successor as prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, a year later, the Service reported to the Home Office: ‘Since June 1984 there have been a number of relatively minor attacks in the UK by Sikh extremists against Indian official targets and moderate Sikhs. The level of support for the extremists has diminished considerably but this is making the hard core increasingly frustrated and could lead to further violence.’15 Good intelligence, combined with the arrests of Sikh and Kashmiri extremists, was believed to have frustrated plots to attack Rajiv Gandhi during his state visit.16 In April 1986 the DG, Sir Tony Duff, warned the Home Office that the minority of ‘violence-prone extremists’ within the Indian Sikh Youth Federation and the fundamentalist Dam Dami Taksal ‘form a small intensely security-conscious group who, because of the nature of the Sikh community, are a difficult target’:

  We cannot at present increase our technical coverage . . . because we do not have enough transcribers. This is chiefly a question of finding suitably qualified linguists. I would also like to see our agent running effort improved but again it takes time to find the right staff for the difficult task of recruiting and running this kind of agent.17

  By 1987, despite its lack of success on the British mainland since 1984, PIRA was far better armed than it had been at the time of the Brighton bombing. Between August 1985 and October 1986, four large arms and explosives shipments from Libya were secretly landed on the coast of County Wicklow, south of Dublin.18 However, a fifth and even larger shipment (including SAM-7 missiles capable of downing British army helicopters), loaded on board the rickety fifty-year-old Panamanianregistered Eksund at Tripoli on 13 and 14 October 1987, was successfully intercepted off Ushant. On 27 October the Eksund’s steering failed and it began drifting closer and closer to the French coast. Next day, after attempts to repair the steering had failed, the senior Provisional on board, Gabriel Cleary, took the decision to sink the ship and its cargo before it ran aground, go ashore with the crew on an inflatable dinghy and catch a ferry back to Ireland. Shortly after leaving Tripoli, Cleary had fitted a timing power unit (TPU) to twelve explosive charges below the Eksund’s waterline to enable him to scuttle the ship if it was intercepted before it reached its destination. When Cleary was unable to activate the TPU, he concluded that it had been sabotaged and that there must be a traitor on board. At various stages during the voyage he had noticed what seemed to be spotter aircraft. At Gibraltar one had swooped so low that he been able to see the pilot. As the Eksund ran into difficulties off Ushant, another spotter plane monitored its movements. The ship was surrounded by motor launches and boarded by armed French customs officials, who arrested the crew.19 During questioning, the crew revealed that over the previous two years they had brought 120 tons of arms from Libya to the Irish Republic – including many tons of Semtex, about twenty SAM-7s and other sophisticated weaponry.20 Despite the loss of the Eksund arms shipment, PIRA already had a total arsenal of about 150 tons of weaponry – enough, it believed, ‘to prosecute its “Long War” almost indefinitely’.21 A gloomy Security Service assessment concluded that ‘PIRA has acquired from Libya more weapons etc than it can use.’22 Only one of the SAMs, however, was ever fired. It missed.23

  The Security Service retained the lead intelligence role in monitoring the mainland activities of Loyalist paramilitaries as well as PIRA overseas operations and funding. UDA members in Britain increased from about 200 to 800 from 1985 to 1988 and those of the UVF from 70 to 200 during the same period. The Service reported that in London the UDA had ‘attracted members of the skinhead movement of the extreme right’. But it believed the UDA had no formal links with right-wing extremists of either the National Front or the British National Party: ‘Indeed, at leadership level, there is mutual suspicion.’ The Service reported to the Prime Minister in 1988: ‘A hard core of activists within the UDA
and UVF will continue to attempt to obtain arms and explosives for shipment to Northern Ireland.’ As in the past, the Service remained cautiously optimistic about its ability, in co-operation with local police forces, to disrupt the shipments. Arms seizures in 1987 led to the conviction and imprisonment of a number of UDA and UVF activists on firearms charges.24

  Within Northern Ireland the Security Service was usually successful in keeping a low profile for its operations, which included increasing (and still classified) technical assistance by A1 to the RUC. One instance of this assistance, whose details cannot be revealed, led to considerable soul-searching and a fraught internal inquiry which found that several Service officers had been at fault. It is reasonable to conclude with the gift of hindsight, though the inquiry did not reach that conclusion at the time, that the errors of individuals reflected a larger management failure. Sir Patrick Walker remembers the whole affair as ‘a gruesome business’ which kept him awake at nights.25 The most controversial aspect of Northern Irish counter-terrorist operations in the 1980s concerned the RUC’s alleged preference for shooting, rather than arresting, suspected Republican terrorists. In May 1984 John Stalker, Deputy Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, was appointed to investigate three specific allegations that the RUC was conducting a shoot-to-kill policy. In June 1986 Stalker was replaced as head of the inquiry by the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire, Colin Sampson. Though the official explanation for Stalker’s replacement were charges (later dismissed) that he had associated with ‘known criminals’, it was widely alleged that the real reason for his dismissal was that he was close to discovering illegal acts which the authorities wished to conceal. The fact that Stalker had already concluded that the RUC had no shoot-to-kill policy was generally lost sight of amid a spate of ill-founded conspiracy theories.26