For its practitioners, counter-intelligence was a complex, intricate art which involved navigating supple confusions and ambiguities, reconstructing events from tiny fragments like an historian of the dark ages. Perhaps then it was no coincidence that medieval history was the pastime of the drily sceptical Maurice Oldfield who would become MI6’s counter-intelligence chief. When he was in Washington, the CIA had thought the portly, taciturn Oldfield, with his large glasses, had been invented precisely to deflate the caricature of British secret agents being like James Bond. Oldfield disliked the aggressive special operations crowd because of their impact on his carefully hatched plans to collect intelligence.6 He was not, as some thought, the model for John le Carré’s fictional, and scholarly, counter-intelligence chief George Smiley, but there were similarities (medieval history was also the passion of the Oxford academic who was the real inspiration for Smiley).7 In the subtle world of counter-intelligence, like medieval history, the truth was often inaccessible and so arguments, occasionally vicious, would rage over what each fragment meant since entire interpretations would be built upon those tiny shards. Counter-intelligence required a suspicious mind and you could always trump your colleagues by showing that you were intellectually capable of suspecting something even more devious than they could manage. You should not work in counter-intelligence for too long, a few noted. It did something to your brain. You would see shadows everywhere.
Kim Philby’s ghost haunted the corridors of the CIA and MI6. Angleton had been indelibly scarred by the experience of having a man he trusted so completely betray him. ‘I think that it had a devastating effect on Angleton,’ argues one former CIA colleague, ‘that just drove him over the edge.’8 Years later Angleton would always maintain that he, the man who saw everything, had suspected Philby. But this was a lie to cover the fact that the man who was supposed to watch for KGB penetration had been suckered by the greatest KGB penetration of all. If he could be fooled, then the KGB had to be really clever and devious, he concluded.
Word of an important new defector had quickly reached London. The Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was briefed about Golitsyn at Chequers on 18 April 1962 by the Cabinet Secretary ahead of a meeting with the Americans. ‘His revulsion against the Communist regime in the Soviet Union appears to be genuine and deeply felt,’ the briefing note read. ‘His desire to use his knowledge to help Western countermeasures shows every sign of being sincere and unemotional. His interrogators rate him as a reliable and an accurate reporter.’ But the note remarked of his knowledge: ‘nowhere has it any great depth’. Golitsyn had warned that the Foreign Office, Admiralty and ‘British intelligence’ were all penetrated and that five unnamed MPs accepted tasks from the Russians. ‘Enquiries are being made by the Security Service in collaboration with the departments concerned,’ the Prime Minister was told.9
Two British officers were sent out to talk to Golitsyn in March and September of 1962. One was Arthur Martin, the dogged MI5 investigator and Philby’s pursuer-in-chief, whose unassuming face masked a quiet ferocity. Since Golitsyn seemed to have information about penetrations in Britain and his relationship with his original case officers was breaking down, he agreed to relocate with his wife and daughter to work with British intelligence, sailing over on the Queen Elizabeth.10 His nerves were never far from the surface. On the boat he thought someone was looking for him. On arrival he was taken to a safe house but as he stepped out of the door he was convinced he was being followed. He could not settle easily anywhere. The next stop was Stratford-upon-Avon, where again he became convinced he had been spotted, and he sent his family back to America. His fear was not irrational – he was indeed high up the KGB target list for execution.11 He tried remote Truro in Cornwall, where Arthur Martin would visit on a Sunday.
Those who worked with him talk of ‘vintage Golitsyn’ – the information he passed in the first few months which was accurate and contributed to the arrest of spies in Britain, France, Norway, Canada and NATO. But as the debriefings continued even some of his onetime supporters acknowledge he was mishandled.12 ‘Defectors are like grapes – the first pressings are the best,’ Oldfield would say.13 That first pressing produced information before a defector began to feel the pressure of what others wanted to hear and before the worries that he had nothing left to give preyed on his mind
Golitsyn received so much attention partly because sources such as himself were so rare at the time. This also meant there was little scope for cross-referencing his information. In London, there were more insecurities for Golitsyn to work on than there were in Washington. Spy mania was gripping the country courtesy of a cast including George Blake, and the intelligence services were fearful of what else might be placed on public display.
One of Golitsyn’s British leads centred on a naval attaché which guided MI5 to John Vassall (see Chapter 6). But the information which really captivated Martin was the talk Golitsyn had heard in Moscow of a ‘ring of five’ British spies who had all become acquainted at university and who had all been providing valuable intelligence.14 The reference to a ‘ring’ indicated that they all knew each other. Burgess and Maclean were long gone. Philby had long been suspected. But who else made up the five?
Soon after Philby was exposed in 1963, Arthur Martin arrived at the Courtauld Institute to interrogate Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. Blunt had been a young Cambridge don in the 1930s and a close friend of Guy Burgess. Burgess had helped recruit the tall, languid academic to the Communist cause, which he had faithfully served as a wartime MI5 officer providing reams of purloined documents to his controllers. Martin was now armed with the testimony of an American student the former Cambridge don had tried to recruit. ‘I saw Mr Straight the other day and he told me about his relations with you and the Russians.’ Blunt’s hangdog face gave nothing away.15 Martin offered immunity in return for a confession. Blunt walked to the grand window, looked out, poured a drink and said, ‘It is true.’ So began eight years of interviews for Blunt, which he dealt with through copious amounts of booze. Martin and others came to him again and again, trawling through every friendship and meeting from Cambridge and after, looking for anything that could point to more spies.
Where Philby decided to run, Blunt stayed, taking the offer of immunity. Although he had passed vast quantities of crucial information, Blunt was never a hardened, dedicated spy like Philby nor truly ever dedicated to the idea of Communism. ‘I realised that I would take any risk in this country, rather than go to Russia,’ he wrote later.16 As a fellow academic said of him, Blunt liked to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, to be part of the establishment and attack it. When his treachery was finally exposed publicly in 1979, he would choose to defend himself in literary style by citing E. M. Forster’s dictum: ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’ By confessing, he had betrayed both. But the establishment thought at the time that at least it had managed to sweep this case under the carpet without a public fuss. The same year as Blunt confessed, John Cairncross, another immensely clever intelligence officer and civil servant, was identified as a Soviet spy. But it was only much, much later and after much anguish that MI5 would conclude that Blunt and Cairncross completed the ring of five. Because they had not been recruited at Cambridge at the same time as Philby, there had been a belief that the remaining members were still at large.17 There were indeed more spies than the Cambridge Five operating during the Second World War and after. Their KGB controller just after the war boasted that the KGB had a total of thirty agents in 1944, providing so much information that it had to prioritise by picking the best five to work with. Much of the intelligence produced by the rest was simply left to pile up untranslated (what would those who provided the intelligence have made of their work being ignored if they had known?).18 Martin and other molehunters were now determined to find every one of the traitors that had operated then and their successors.
Golitsyn’s initial debriefings by Arthur Martin provided a haul of over 150 leads relating to Britain and the Commonwealth. A few of these required the involvement of MI6 because of overseas connections. The MI6 counter-intelligence branch was tiny, effectively just one officer, so another, named Stephen de Mowbray, was called in to work on the Golitsyn leads. De Mowbray divided his colleagues into two camps – ‘thinkers’ and ‘doers’ – and he was the former. After serving in the Fleet Air Arm in the Second World War, he had made his way to New College, Oxford.19 There he had been taught by one of the century’s great thinkers, the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin. The young Berlin had witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia before coming to England. During the war, he was one of those dons brought into government service and, rather curiously, his irascible friend Guy Burgess had tried to get Berlin posted first to Washington and then to Moscow.20 After the war he returned to Oxford and one day found de Mowbray visiting his study. The student had set his heart on the life of an academic but before his final exams decided he might not make it. ‘I think you’d better be a spy,’ the laconic Berlin told him. Another tutor, a former SOE man, passed on his details and, at a house on Kensington High Street, George Kennedy Young swiftly took de Mowbray through the formalities of an interview, most of their conversation revolving around a shared interest in classical music.
Fresh from a posting to South America, de Mowbray was assigned to support MI5’s investigations into two Britons whom Golitsyn said had been targeted by the KGB in Vienna for their homosexuality. After a few months, his boss came into his office and told him he had something ‘special’ for him to work on with two MI5 officers. He was told to head over to a safe house the following day. There he was met by the two central figures of the spy-hunt. Alongside Arthur Martin was Peter Wright. The latter was the Security Service’s master technician and authority on bugging. The Security Service operated outside the law during this period. It was overseen, but only in the loosest sense, by politicians and civil servants but was not governed by any statute. ‘We bugged and burgled our way across London at the state’s behest, while pompous bowler-hatted civil servants in Whitehall pretended to look the other way,’ Wright said with relish of his work.21 But some of Wright’s beloved bugging operations had mysteriously come to nothing, he explained to de Mowbray. He and Arthur Martin had independently come to the same conclusion: ‘We believe MI5 is penetrated.’
Sometimes when two people come together, the sum is greater than the parts. With Martin and Wright, their individual beliefs in a conspiracy were confirmed and compounded over long evenings spent in the pub agonising over the problem. They alone, they thought, could see the darkness at the heart of British intelligence and they would have to struggle to shine a light on it. But there was something more to their bitter struggle, a sub-text that neither man might have openly acknowledged but which lurked behind so much of British life. It was class.
Wright and Martin were not cut from the same cloth as their prey. They were not ‘officer class’. Wright’s father had been a radio engineer but had lost his job in the Great Depression. It had plunged Wright senior into alcoholism and forced him to take young Peter out of private school since he could not afford to educate both his sons. The trauma left Peter with a chronic stammer, just like Philby. Arthur Martin too was no public-school boy and had a chip on his shoulder about it. As the two men began to investigate the lives of the gilded elite who had walked through the manicured courts of Trinity Cambridge, they burned with resentment of those who had been given everything and yet had still betrayed their country. As they visited country piles in Britain and farmhouses in France bought with family money, they struggled to grasp what had driven these people to betray. ‘They had enjoyed to the full the privileged background and education denied to me, while my family had suffered at the capricious hand of capitalism,’ Wright said later. ‘I experienced at first hand the effects of slump and depression, yet it was they who turned to espionage. I became the hunter, and they the hunted.’22 The two men rooted through the dirty laundry of the British establishment, and how the establishment despised them for it. ‘I had seen into the secret heart of the present Establishment at a time when they had been young and careless. I knew their scandals and their intrigues. I knew too much, and they knew it.’23 At one meeting, Anthony Blunt lectured Wright on the atmosphere of the thirties. ‘Unless you lived through it, Peter, you can’t understand.’ Wright lost his temper. ‘Oh I lived through it, Anthony. I know more about the thirties probably than you will ever know. I remember my father driving himself mad with drink, because he couldn’t get a job. I remember losing my education, my world, everything. I know all about the thirties.24 As they investigated an Oxford ring of spies, one MP whom they confronted killed himself. Even Graham Greene was called in for questioning about his former boss. He knew more than he was letting on, it was thought, but was cleared of any involvement.25 But it was the thought of a traitor within their own ranks that really drove the two men.
Martin had already gone to C, Dick White, with his concerns. White, a former head of MI5, had high regard for Martin from their time working together. Like Angleton, he had been involved in the Double-Cross System in the Second World War and so was fascinated by the possibilities of deception, and for a while bought into the idea of a high-level penetration. White had also always had a fixation with Philby. It was Martin’s theory that his old foe had been tipped off that most intrigued the MI6 chief. There was one piece of evidence which was puzzled over endlessly. When he had been invited to see Peter Lunn in Beirut and found his old friend Nicholas Elliott waiting, what had Philby meant when he said, ‘I rather thought it would be you’?26 This remark sent shivers down the spine of Martin and White. Had Philby been tipped off that he was blown and known that someone was coming out for him? There were other explanations for Philby’s curious phrase, but Martin was convinced it signposted a tip-off, and White agreed. If true, it would suggest a mole at the highest levels. Only five men in MI5 had known of the plan to tackle Philby in Beirut. Only two of them had been around long enough to fit the profile of a long-term penetration agent. The problem was that the two men were the head of MI5, Roger Hollis, and his deputy, Graham Mitchell.
The certainty of Wright and Martin grew out of a number of events which they felt brooked no other explanation. Both had seen their operations go awry. Wright had been planting bugs in buildings due to be occupied by the KGB who then suddenly appeared to change their plans and move elsewhere. Wright also said there had been a rise in radio transmissions when a Soviet spy, Gordon Lonsdale, had been arrested, suggesting that a warning was being passed back to Moscow. The fact that Lonsdale had not been warned himself was a sign that he must have been sacrificed for an even more important spy. When Soviets were not caught it meant there was a spy; when they were found, it also meant there was a spy but he was being protected. This logic was hard to disprove. A Soviet defector at the start of the Cold War in Canada had talked of two agents called Elli. One had been identified, but who was the second?
And now there was Golitsyn. ‘In the tense and almost hysterical months of 1963, as the scent of treachery lingered in every corridor, it is easy to see how our fears fed on his theories,’ recalled Wright. Golitsyn’s talk of penetrations and the fact that he appeared to have seen recent material from the Security Service, including one of Wright’s technical papers, reinforced the growing convictions of Martin and Wright. Golitsyn had nothing on Hollis or Mitchell specifically. ‘The vast majority of Golitsyn’s material was tantalizingly imprecise,’ Wright wrote in retrospect. ‘It often appeared true as far as it went, but then faded into ambiguity, and part of the problem was Golitsyn’s clear propensity for feeding his information out in dribs and drabs. He saw it as his livelihood.’27
Dick White had told Martin to go and see Hollis and explain his doubts about Mitchell, but not about the MI5 chief himself. Martin spent half an hour explaining his theory. Hollis, the son of a
bishop and a dour and dry man, had listened quietly, barely saying a word. Martin described how ‘his face drained of colour and with a strange half-smile playing on his lips’.28 Hollis did not demur but said he would think it over. He knew he had little choice but to countenance an investigation. His former boss Dick White, the senior figure in British intelligence, had already called him.29 Why did the two chiefs go along with it? For White and Hollis, the fear of penetration was real but so was the fear of missing it and, even more important, of being accused of having missed it deliberately. A few days later Martin had been summoned to see Hollis again and told to begin. Soon afterwards he had met Wright and they began to compare notes.
Who watches the watchers? How could MI5 investigate its own top men? It could not, since Graham Mitchell had oversight over all operations. So Wright and Martin explained to de Mowbray that it had been agreed with Dick White that MI6 would instead undertake the surveillance and that he was to be in charge. Thus began one of the stranger episodes in the history of British intelligence which occasionally edged into farce. In all, forty members of MI6 staff were engaged in spying on the number two of their sister organisation. These were not trained ‘watchers’ of the type MI5 employed to carry out surveillance on the streets of Britain. These were officers, technicians and mainly secretaries who had either not been tutored in the arts of surveillance at all or had only the most rudimentary education. They were run out of an MI6 safe house near Sloane Square. Time was short since Mitchell was due to retire in six months. He would be tracked from MI5 headquarters to Waterloo station, where two women would follow him on to his train. One summer’s evening the women followed him in the hope that he was leaving something incriminating in a dead drop. There was nothing. De Mowbray frequently did the tailing himself as the two men had never met. One evening, de Mowbray was remaining close behind for fear of losing his man in the rush-hour mêlée. Mitchell suddenly stopped, turned and faced de Mowbray. He stared directly at him. Seconds ticked by. Then he turned again and walked off. He knew what was going on. Mitchell was old-school establishment, Winchester and Oxford, and his hobbies included yachting and chess. On one occasion, de Mowbray raced down to the south coast in a fast car driven by an MI6 colleague to where Mitchell was taking part in a chess tournament also attended by some Russians. All of the surveillance drew a blank. A hole was drilled in Mitchell’s office wall to allow a small camera to capture him at work. Three women from MI6 took it in turns to watch him. It was a surreal experience, as Mitchell often sat in front of the camera picking his teeth. The strain of knowing that he was under suspicion began to take its toll on him. He would mumble in a way which made it hard to make out his words.30 The women watched as his eyes became dark and sunken. When people were in the room he carried on as usual, but when he was alone a tortured look came over his face. His phone was tapped and de Mowbray would listen in to the calls of senior MI5 officers and despair of what he saw as the poor quality of those leading the organisation. ‘Are we on the right man?’ the team wondered.
Art of Betrayal Page 24