As the 1960s progressed, Daphne Park moved across to the next hot spot of the Cold War as consul general in Hanoi, North Vietnam, during the country’s struggle against the United States. Her movements were highly restricted (when told she could not even have a bicycle she offered to ride a tandem with a Vietnamese officer), but the intelligence she supplied on her trips out of the country was almost the only source that the US and UK had on what was happening in the North and her work brought her many friends in Washington.116 Asia was becoming another crucial zone of conflict in the intelligence war. Maurice Oldfield had become Controller for Asia and had taken MI6 into Indonesia and Indo-China in the 1950s to fight Communism, working closely with the Americans. Graham Greene paid the occasional visit to Indo-China during Oldfield’s time, still it seems doing the odd bit of intelligence work while writing. His Europe of The Third Man was now giving way to the Asia of The Quiet American, charting the flow of the Cold War east and with it Greene’s, and Britain’s, unease with American power. Not everyone was convinced by the quality of MI6 work in Asia. A new recruit to cover the region was Gerry Warner. Fresh from St Peter’s College, Oxford, he had been invited to see an admiral at Buckingham Gate who recruited for MI6. He found the service a disappointing place. He had learnt Mandarin and so was able to compare the reports coming in from the service’s top agent in Hong Kong with those available in the local newspapers. The correlation was obvious but the revelation that Our Man in Hong Kong was a fabricator was not well received by the office. Posted to Burma, Warner found an ineffective station chief (with a taste for skinny-dipping parties) who was fighting the last war by burying radio sets in villages and not recruiting agents or collecting intelligence. He decided he wanted to return home and quit.
Daphne Park eventually rose to become a controller at MI6. If it had not been for the sexism that pervaded the organisation, some say, she would have risen to the next level up, to become a director, or perhaps even have reached the summit as Chief or C. It would not be until the next century that a woman would rise to director level. Park retired from MI6 in 1979 but not from public life, as she became principal of Somerville, one of the last all-women colleges at Oxford University, and a member of the House of Lords where she retained the habit of speaking her mind irrespective of what she was supposed to say. She never married. ‘I had four or five love affairs,’ she recalled. ‘But only one that really mattered, and that ended in death, unfortunately.’117 There was a loneliness to Park that her colleagues understood and which was sublimated in her work and in her professional friendships. She remained close to Larry Devlin, talking frequently with him on the phone until they both died within a year of each other.
The Congo crisis also played its part in the ongoing debate within the service over covert action versus intelligence gathering. Chief Dick White disliked the type of political action which involved removing governments and wanted to focus on recruiting agents and collecting information. But one section of officers – particularly those who worked in Africa and the Middle East (the so-called Camel Corps) – argued that the two had to go together. For Daphne Park and those like her, intelligence was about building relationships with people, including top politicians, not spending countless months looking for a disaffected fourth secretary or cipher clerk with a drink problem in an embassy. The former kind of work, which many officers relished, offered a chance to understand the wider strategic direction of a country and to sway or even manipulate it. This in turn, they argued, provided intelligence. Only by supporting activists in their political goals would you learn about a country and what might happen. ‘Unless we show we’re prepared to help influence events, we won’t get intelligence and it is questionable if it is worth operating,’ the first Controller for Africa argued.118 Others in the Secret Service, especially those targeting the Soviet Union and its allies, favoured a more purist approach to intelligence gathering, focusing on the collection of information rather than the influencing of events. Back in London, only three months after Lumumba had been killed, a Russian was to offer the service the opportunity to begin rebuilding its capacity and its confidence for recruiting agents against the hardest target and its main enemy. He would pay with his life.
4
MOSCOW RULES
It was just before ten in the evening when the door to Room 360 swung open. A taut, straight-backed man with deep-set eyes and red hair flecked with grey walked in and sat down across a coffee table from two Britons and two Americans. They introduced themselves with false names.1 Apprehension and expectation hung in the air at the Mount Royal Hotel in London’s Marble Arch as the Russian guest lit a cigarette to calm his nerves. It was 20 April 1961 and the Cold War threatened to flare hot.
The man had many identities. His first was as a Soviet official leading a trade delegation to London. His second was an intelligence officer, there to collect technical secrets for the Soviet Union. But as he sat down he embarked on a third, brief and fateful life as a reckless and driven spy, betraying his country. The five men around the coffee table would go on to spend 140 hours in each others’ company. The intense and forceful Russian would become the most important spy for the West in the early Cold War and would help the British Secret Service kick the worst habits of its past.
‘Would you prefer to speak Russian or English?’ George Kisevalter asked. Kisevalter, the bearish CIA officer who had handled Popov in Vienna, had the easy-going manner and fluent Russian which ensured that he would take the lead in the conversation out of the four. ‘I would much rather speak Russian because I can express myself much better in Russian,’ replied the well-dressed Soviet official, explaining that his English was rusty. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ the visitor continued, trying to wrestle back control, ‘let’s get to work. We have a great deal of important work to do.’ He was hungry for betrayal and there was not a moment to waste in disgorging his secrets. ‘I have thought about this for a long time.’
Desperation had driven the Russian to undertake ever greater risks to reach this point. He had watched and waited for the right moment, experiencing many false starts. Nearly nine months earlier in Moscow, two American students had been walking on a bridge leading away from Red Square when a man approached them. ‘I have tried to get in touch with other Americans but so few of them speak Russian,’ he told them cautiously. ‘I have some information I wish to give directly to the American Embassy.’ They walked on with him. ‘Do not open it or keep it overnight in your hotel. Go immediately to the American Embassy with the letter.’ The man explained how an American U2 spy plane, piloted by Gary Powers, had been brought down a few weeks earlier after surface-to-air missiles exploded around it. A few streets from their hotel, he entrusted a white envelope to the students. One of the students went to the Embassy with it, fearful every step of the way of a hand on his shoulder.
The letter made its way back to the CIA. It included the first details of how the U2 had been downed. There was also a photograph of a Soviet and an American colonel at a party with the Soviet’s head cut out and the words ‘I am’ written in its place. Tracking down the American was easy, and he explained that the Soviet colonel was a man who had served in Turkey in the mid-1950s called Oleg Penkovsky.
More secrets could be left in a dead drop, Penkovsky explained in the students’ letter. The act of physically passing secret information is the most dangerous because it is the most vulnerable. If caught in the act, both agent and officer are finished, the agent as good as dead. A dead drop is one solution. Material is deposited in an agreed hiding place and later picked up, the two parties never having to meet in person. Penkovsky wrote that he would look for a chalk mark in a particular phone booth before loading the drop. Everyone knew that the KGB’s home turf was the hardest place to operate, requiring the most rigorous methods. The phrase ‘Moscow Rules’ would come to be used as shorthand to refer to the type of procedures or tradecraft an intelligence officer would have to employ to carry out his trade in the city’s streets.
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This might be a provocation, the Americans thought as they looked at the letter – the old Soviet trick of dangling a fake agent to tempt the other side. Whoever took the bait would be identified as an intelligence officer and could be expelled, watched or perhaps targeted to be turned. But the chance of this being a real offer – the chance to run the first top-level spy inside the Soviet Union – was too good to pass by. However, the CIA had a problem. It had no operational presence in Moscow. An officer had been posted to Moscow a few years back to try and work with Popov, but the American had been seduced by his maid, who worked for the KGB. When they tried to blackmail him using pictures taken from a camera in her handbag, he had approached the Ambassador, who had been furious to find that the CIA were operating in his Embassy without his knowledge.2 Since then, the State Department, which controlled the cover slots that CIA officers would use, had resisted further deployments to avoid upsets. So how could the CIA contact Penkovsky?
A young, inexperienced officer was their first and utterly disastrous answer. Codenamed ‘Compass’, he arrived in Moscow in October 1960 with cover as a cleaner.3 The city was a grey, unforgiving place to foreigners. Days would go by without seeing a smile on the streets. The traffic was light because almost all cars were official, but a vehicle belonging to a foreigner would be followed and surveillance would continue on foot on the streets, often in a manner designed to be obvious and enough to put someone on edge. Any conversation with an ordinary Russian would be quickly interrupted. There were few restaurants for foreigners, tickets for the Bolshoi were hard to come by and formal meetings would be stilted and unwelcoming. The only fresh vegetables for American diplomats were those flown in from the US once a week. They said you could tell how long someone had been in Moscow because newcomers headed for the caviar at diplomatic receptions while veterans quickly snaffled fresh lettuce or celery. Life was isolating and Compass could not cope. He became depressed by the cold, dark winters and turned to drink. Like many who served in Moscow, the ever-present surveillance began to play with his head. He became paranoid and came up with increasingly ludicrous schemes to establish contact with Penkovsky. Perhaps, he suggested to headquarters, Penkovsky could practise throwing snowballs and then hurl his material over the wall into the house where Compass lived, pretending he was getting rid of dirty pictures. Not exactly Moscow Rules.
As Christmas approached, Penkovsky had become frustrated that he had heard nothing. He decided to try another route. On 21 December, an American businessman who lived in London reported to the CIA what he thought had been a provocation in Moscow during a recent visit organised by the State Scientific and Technical Commission.4 A friendly Russian from the Commission had gone back with him to his hotel and asked for cigarettes. He spoke English with a heavy accent but was jovial company. Once they were in his room, the Russian locked all the doors, turned up the radio as loud as he could and produced a folded pack of paper from his coat pocket. These were secret documents, he explained, and needed to go to the American Embassy. The businessman refused. At the end of the trip, the Russian approached him again at the airport and asked him to contact American officials on his return. The Russian gave his phone number and said he would be waiting every Sunday at 10 a.m. for a call.
Penkovsky had picked the wrong member of the delegation to approach. But there would still be time for his path to cross with that of an unusual British businessman who had been on the same trip. Suggesting to a businessman, over a good lunch at a club, that he might like to do his bit for Queen and country has always been par for the course for MI6. Businessmen could move behind the Iron Curtain in a way spies found hard. And surely if they saw something interesting, overheard something interesting or – best of all – met someone interesting, then it would not hurt to report back, would it? MI6 ran a large team out of an office in Queen Anne’s Gate, milking the salesmen and industrialists for every drop of intelligence, and the plush Ivy Restaurant in Covent Garden was the venue where MI6 officer Dickie Franks, a future chief, had made just such a suggestion to Greville Wynne, a consultant for British companies. In November 1960, Franks suggested it might be worth getting in touch with a particular committee in Moscow.5
The well-groomed moustache, well-cut suits and well-oiled hair gave Greville Wynne the appearance of a well-bred, public-school-educated businessman. But it was a façade he had carefully constructed. Wynne had endured an unhappy childhood in a small Welsh village. When he was a young boy, his mother, who liked to dress him up to impress the neighbours, had taught him how to pretend to be something else, a trick accentuated by his dyslexia which he worked hard to hide. His father, by taking him down the mines to see where most local boys ended up, gave him the urge to escape.6 When he was eleven his mother died. The overwhelming emotion from father and son was relief, Wynne would later say. As a young man he scrimped and saved to pay for evening studies in electrical engineering and eventually made his way into business, deliberately adopting the clipped tones of the upper class to acquire some social polish, marrying Sheila and stretching to pay for a house in Chelsea. In the stratified world of the English class system his origins could not be entirely hidden, however. ‘He was a dapper little figure in his dark suits, what a lower-middle-class Englishman thinks of wearing to put himself up a class,’ observed an English journalist who met Wynne.7 Wynne was a bon vivant, but there was also something fragile about him. When he arrived in Moscow, the Commercial Counsellor at the Embassy thought his trade promotion visit ‘ludicrously worthless’ and the man ‘a silly ignoramus’.8 But he did not know about the secret life in which Wynne was revelling. The world of spying offered the chance to join a club even more exclusive than those notionally offered by the British class system and with it the opportunity to escape, to be different and to have a secret from others. Exposure to the margins of this world would eventually plunge Wynne into a fantastical Bond-like landscape of the mind.
During the December visit when Penkovsky had approached the American, Wynne had visited the Russian’s office. His first observation, true to form, was about the women. ‘Buxom healthy girls, but with bad complexions and no make-up. Brassieres and deodorants are unknown to them,’ he noted.9 One of the men at his meeting struck him as different. ‘He had a very straight back and did not wriggle or slouch. He sat quite still, his pale firm hands resting on the cloth. His nails were manicured. He wore a soft silk shirt and a plain black tie. His suit was immaculate.’ Penkovsky had circled round Wynne during the December visit but never made his pitch, opting instead for the American. At the ballet on the last evening, Penkovsky did suggest to Wynne that perhaps he might like to ask for a Soviet delegation to come to London.
Wynne returned to Moscow in April, just a few weeks before the Marble Arch meeting, to discuss the proposed London trip which he would host. As late snow fell around them, Wynne and Penkovsky walked across Red Square to a hotel. The Russian revealed a hidden pocket in his trouser which he cut with a razor blade to produce documents that he insisted on handing over to a wary Wynne. The Briton was non-committal. At the airport at the last minute Penkovsky offered Wynne an envelope for the American Embassy in London. ‘Look, Penkovsky, you are a likeable guy, but I want to go to London, not Vladimir or some damn jail place,’ the businessman said. ‘I want nothing like that on me when I go through your customs.’10 Wynne eventually relented and took a letter back, but handed it to MI6. He had become a courier.
The letter was addressed to Queen Elizabeth and President Kennedy among others. ‘I ask you to consider me as your soldier. Henceforth the ranks of your armed forces are increased by one man,’ it read. American and British intelligence realised that they had both been contacted by the same man and, after edging around what the other side knew, agreed to work jointly. Penkovsky had wanted to talk to the Americans, but the British had the contact in the form of Wynne as well as more people in Moscow. From Wynne they had learnt that Penkovsky was coming to their home turf within days. Neither side had kno
wn if he was for real or not. Soon afterwards Penkovsky had arrived in London with his delegation in tow. He greeted Wynne formally at the airport. Later, once the two men were at the Mount Royal Hotel, he gripped Wynne’s shoulders. ‘I can’t believe it, Greville, I just can’t believe it.’11 That evening, Penkovsky had waited until after dinner before making his excuses and heading first for his room and then for Room 360 to begin his betrayal in earnest and deliver to the CIA and MI6 a rich seam of intelligence at a critical moment in international affairs.
The relationship between agent and officer is normally conducted one on one. But Penkovsky was unusual. He was assigned no fewer than four officers, partly because of his importance, partly because meetings could take place in the controlled environment of London and partly because this was a joint operation. This created an unstable mix which would eventually combust.
Art of Betrayal Page 17