The Russians’ prime target remains government and military secrets but also energy, bio-tech and high-tech industries. Their intelligence officers continue to look for individuals with access and some frailty or vulnerability. None will share Philby’s motivation. ‘Ideology doesn’t wash any more. It’s the far more human motivations,’ a present-day spy-hunter explains – usually money, sometimes ego, occasionally blackmail. Targets will be patiently cultivated and first asked to pass something innocuous like a trade magazine before the pressure is increased. Meetings will be arranged in person and not by phone, all straight off the pages of the 1960s warning booklet ‘Their Trade is Treachery’. Sensitive agents will not be run by diplomats but met abroad or by visiting officers using the old le Carré era techniques of brush contacts and dead-letter drops. The illegals still ply their trade, travelling the world on a stack of false passports with no diplomatic cover to protect them. In 2010, a large network of illegals run by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, was rolled up in the United States including one member, Anna Chapman, who had previously lived in London. MI5’s concentration on its new core mission of counter-terrorism meant it had fewer resources than it used to have to find out what exactly she had been doing. By 2008, it was spending only a paltry 3.5 per cent of its budget on trying to catch all the Russian (and other) spies running around Britain, many of whom target dissidents who have made London their home.127 The murder, using polonium-210, of a former officer of the FSB (Russia’s domestic security service) Alexander Litvinenko, who had been on the MI6 payroll at one point, was a reminder of old methods, but the investigation into his death also revealed how far the KGB’s successor had become intertwined with business and criminality, making it hard to know who exactly it was working for at times.
The ‘compromising situations’ of old were still in play, with some new twists. In the summer of 2009, the US Ambassador in Moscow lodged a formal protest about a covertly filmed video showing one of his diplomats on a darkened Moscow street, then alone in his underwear in a hotel room. The video then cuts to the same room with the lights dimmed and with two people apparently having sex in the near-dark. The individual concerned was adamant it was a fake and experts in Washington agreed. A month earlier, another video had surfaced showing a British diplomat caught in flagrante with two blonde women while drinking champagne. That diplomat failed to deny anything and promptly resigned. The speculation was that he had turned down an approach from the Russians.
It would be naive to think the traffic was all one way. The Russians cite the 2006 discovery of an MI6 ‘spy rock’ in a Moscow park containing a secret transmitter. An agent would walk past and press a button on a hand-held electronic device to transfer information. A British intelligence officer could later walk past with his own device and upload data. The Russians said that this was a sign that the old enemy had not lost its appetite. And so, alongside all the talk about collective security and globalisation, the old national games of power politics and spying persist. ‘The Cold War is long over,’ Scarlett said in 2009 with a hint of exasperation. ‘And it is important for everybody to take a realistic view of what the other side is doing.’128 In Moscow, George Blake, living in his four-bedroom flat, still lectured to new recruits of Russia’s intelligence services. He had finally developed a taste for vodka but conceded that life in the Soviet Union had ‘little to do with the idealised Communist society that I had dreamed of’. There were no regrets though. ‘I am 87 years old and to tell you the truth, it is no longer of particular importance to me whether my motivations are generally understood or not,’ he said defiantly when asked to reflect on how it had all begun.129
At the end of 2009, Scarlett passed his green-inked pen to John Sawers. Sawers had joined MI6 at the start of his career but opted early to switch to the regular Foreign Office; he rose fast through senior positions there and in Number 10 and as ambassador to the United Nations. In MI6 terms he was an outsider. For decades, one of the prime responsibilities of a chief during his tenure was ‘succession planning’ to prevent an outsider being brought in to take over the club. Past chiefs had even delayed retirement in order to make sure a crown prince could be groomed. MI6 has a strong sense of its own culture and traditions and of being somehow different. It was felt that outsiders did not understand the rules and that their appointment sent the wrong signal. But Sawers’s arrival was a sign that the rest of government wanted to continue to draw MI6 into the mainstream. Sawers is smooth, in the Foreign Office manner, and is skilled in the ways of Whitehall and relaxed in the public eye. Given the choice between being a Moscow Man and a Camel Driver, he may opt for the latter description, perhaps reflecting a career spent in part in the Middle East, including Cairo and Baghdad, but also exhibiting a desire to do things rather than just to collect intelligence quietly and build up the files.
Sawers’s vision, befitting his background, was for a service more closely aligned with Whitehall. In the old days, it is said, the spies were like labradors dropping their bones of intelligence at the master’s feet and asking what they should do next. Now ‘customers’ in Whitehall want more than just intelligence and to be informed of a problem. They want to know what can be done to deal with it. It is about having impact, not just offering intelligence. It is not just about saying ‘Yemen is a risk’ but offering help to build up the capacity of the Yemeni government to deal with the problem. It is not just about saying ‘Iran is this close to a nuclear weapon’ but offering a way of slowing it down, perhaps by sabotaging some of its centrifuges which spin to enrich uranium (strangely, about half of them were breaking down in 2009, although a number of intelligence agencies might privately like to take the credit). Secret intelligence, Sawers explained, is ‘information that gives us new opportunities for action’.130
Sawers also believed that restoring reputation and public confidence as well as internal morale was a first-order priority. He found a climate of doubt among the public, unsure of the service’s efficacy and ethics, which in turn risked putting a brake on its work. Inside, he found staff still nursing their wounds. ‘Put two officers in a room together and the conversation quickly turns to Iraq,’ says one of his officers, although those two people will rarely agree on exactly what went wrong. An undercurrent of anger still flowed beneath the calm surface.
‘The most draining aspect of my job is reading, every day, intelligence reports describing the plotting of terrorists who are bent on maiming and murdering people in this country,’ Sawers said in his debut speech (and the first by a chief to be televised).131 Terrorism and proliferation may top the agenda but the notion of national security has now moved beyond the old ideas of preserving and protecting the state to encompass broader notions of cyber security and human security. Should an intelligence service be looking at banking crises or whether another country is trying secretly to evade its responsibilities under some future treaty to prevent climate change? In an era in which the post-9/11 year-on-year budget increases were becoming a memory, showing that intelligence had concrete value became a priority again, as it had done in the early 1990s. The threats were unpredictable and corrosive, Sawers warned. Economic intelligence returned to the agenda. If the taxpayer could be shown to have saved money through the service providing intelligence on threats to the financial system, then that would keep Treasury wolves at bay.
Afghanistan had also become a dominant focus for MI6, one which some feared risked tilting the balance of its culture too far. MI6 was criticised in some quarters for giving insufficient warning of what lay in store for the pitifully small force Britain sent to Helmand in 2006. The province had been quiet only because there had been no foreigners there before and it was quickly evident that narcotics, corruption and the insurgency offered a potent witches’ brew. In the 1980s, the covert war that Gerry Warner had initiated in Peshawar had been a sideshow to the bigger war against the Soviet Union; by Sawers’s time, support for military operations had become a dominant strain of work in
which enormous resources were invested. This was not the world of long-term, patient agent handling but of quickly providing real-time tactical intelligence to the troops out in the muddy fields and dirt compounds. Human sources still needed to be recruited, but the security situation was so tight that different forms of tradecraft had to be used. There were also clandestine, back-channel talks with Taliban commanders to try and bribe or persuade those considered vulnerable to leave the fight, a move exposed when President Karzai angrily expelled two European officials for working with MI6 on a deal that he disliked and when it was claimed that MI6 had managed to facilitate the travel to Kabul for talks of a top Taliban leader who turned out to be a grocer from Quetta. There would be worry in some quarters that it would be harder later to switch away from such a large, static target and focus on new, emerging threats which could suddenly crop up elsewhere, as well as on more traditional targets like Russia and China which would require less rough-and-ready fieldwork and more of the old Moscow Rules.
There are still people doing dangerous things and taking risks, but when Sawers goes overseas to visit officers one of the first questions his staff ask is ‘How do I know in dealing with terrorism I won’t one day be hauled before the courts back home?’ This is a question that would have been unimaginable in the days of Anthony Cavendish and Daphne Park. The answer to the question is that everything with the slightest element of risk is now signed off by the Foreign Secretary or other officials. A typical authorisation begins by noting the specific JIC requirement for intelligence that will be served by an operation before going into the details of how that operation will be undertaken and ends with a description of the consequences if it all goes wrong. The threshold for those authorisations has lowered so much that now there are about 500 authorisations a year compared to fifty in the 1990s. This would have been a shock to George Kennedy Young and his Robber Barons who would have laughed the idea out of the Broadway bar. The primary reason is the legacy of the years after 9/11 and the accusations of complicity in torture. ‘Torture is illegal and abhorrent under any circumstances, and we have nothing whatsoever to do with it,’ Sawers said. ‘If we know or believe action by us will lead to torture taking place, we’re required by UK and international law to avoid that action. And we do, even though that allows the terrorist activity to go ahead.’ It was a message designed not just to draw a line publicly under the past but also to signal to ministers that they had to understand what their decisions would mean in practice.
There are those who say that what the service has lost in recent years is that air of mystique, the élan and sense of being different and perhaps even a touch dangerous. Without this, ‘it will look just like a sub-committee of the Department of Work and Pensions’, fears one former officer with a wistful look in his eyes. There are those who wish to see exactly this outcome. ‘I don’t believe in intelligence any more than I believe in little green men,’ Rodric Braithwaite, former Ambassador and JIC Chair, argues. ‘It is much better to look at intelligence as if it were another branch of government like the Inland Revenue doing a job which has to be done and is necessary but not particularly glamorous and which goes wrong from time to time – just like the Inland Revenue.’132 Old-time spies shiver at such thoughts.
Sawers inherited a service operating in more than a hundred countries and still aspiring, despite the years of Empire being long gone, to have a global reach. That was becoming harder, the focus on terrorism having made coverage patchy even in areas like Daphne Park’s old hunting ground of Africa.133 But there are only a handful of secret services which aggressively practise the recruitment and running of human sources around the world – the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese, the Israelis, the French and the British. Others make do with analysing what they get from liaison partners and dealing with the odd defector and the like. But the game is also changing. The dividing line between technical collection and human collection is increasingly blurred thanks to cyber-techniques and complex eavesdropping. MI6 has evolved into a modern, professional bureaucracy integrated with other departments and closer to policy-making, focused on ‘knowledge management’. But beneath the shiny new exterior, the world of Daphne Park and Vienna, of Wynne and Penkovsky, of Philby and Shergy is still there if you look hard enough. Somewhere there is the agent and his handler alone in the room wondering if each can trust the other.
EPILOGUE
The crowd gathering at St Margaret’s Church in Westminster Abbey hoisted their umbrellas and turned up their collars as autumn rain fell from grey skies on to the streets around. They had come to bid farewell to one of their own. Some had come, in spirit, from Broadway, barely a hundred yards to the north where Daphne Park had begun her career in her beloved Secret Service; others from Century House just over the river where she had risen through the ranks; a few came to remember her from Vauxhall Cross further west down the river where her successors continued their work for the country she had served. Eliza Manningham-Buller was there towards the front while the chiefs of MI6 sat separately – Scarlett close to her, McColl a few rows behind him, Sawers over the aisle, his security detail discreetly, and perhaps unnecessarily, eyeing the assembled marquises, field marshals, foreign secretaries and assorted great and good of a fading British establishment. At one side, immobile and weathered, sat Anthony Cavendish who, like Daphne Park, had walked the streets of Vienna after the war. Addressing them was the man who had sat in a tent with Gadaffi a few years before. In the pews listening was the man who had helped deliver Gordievsky from Moscow. Old habits dying hard, others preferred the dimmer recesses of the church, their stories still unspoken.
Shergy’s ghost hung over them, his name invoked in the address as the guiding mentor of the young Daphne Park and of many others who had gathered and still others absent. The smiles were instinctive, but also perhaps wistful, as the story was told of the search in her flat a few months earlier for the gun she had somehow mislaid and the surprise when it turned out to be a pearl-handled revolver personally built by the armourer of the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War. There was a colourful account of the African upbringing of a child of Empire and the story of her passing secret messages to her Ambassador in Moscow in the 1950s on the dance-floor – the safest place if one wished not to be overheard and the only time he could not get away, Park had explained. There was a reference to her fascination with the riddle of power but also with the most ordinary of people. A stillness of remembrance, coloured by loss, settled over the congregation and eyes gazed into the middle distance as the final words of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s epic poem ‘Ulysses’ were read, calling forth one last adventure:
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book has grown out of a decade of reporting on intelligence and security issues and, in particular, from a number of programmes made for BBC Radio looking at British and American intelligence agencies. It owes much to the willingness of individuals to share their knowledge and experience, many of whom have understandably requested anonymity but they have my gratitude. Among those who I can thank for advice and assistance over the years are Abdullah Anas, Christopher Andrew, Elizabeth Bancroft, Rodric Braithwaite, Anthony Cavendish, Rod Barton, Peter Earnest, Michael Goodman, Oleg Gordievsky, Franek Grabowski, Paul Greengrass, Muslem Hayat, Peter Hennessy, Alan Judd, Mikhail Lyubimov, Eliza Manningham-Buller, Stephen de Mowbray, the late Daphne Park, Bob Steers, Prokop Tomek, Nigel West and William Hood. I would also like to thank the trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King’s College, London, for permission to quote from the papers of Anthony Courtney and the Imperial War Museum for access to its sound library. My tha
nks also to Svetlana Golitsyn for permission to cite her late husband’s as yet unpublished manuscript. Particular thanks to my Radio 4 producer Mark Savage for his guidance over the years, to Peter James for his insightful comments on the manuscript, to my editor Bea Hemming for her faith and guidance and to George Capel for her support and enthusiasm. Last but not least, my thanks to Jane, Joseph and Samuel for their patience and support.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1 Interview with former Chief Sir Colin McColl for BBC Radio 4, 2009
2 ‘A Century in the Shadows’, BBC Radio 4, August 2009
3 John Scarlett, Channel 4 News, 21 September 2010
CHAPTER 1: INTO THE SHADOWS
1 On the Cold War Front – Czechoslovakia 1948–1956 exhibition catalogue, Prague, 2009, http://www.ustrcr.cz/data/pdf/vystavy/ katalog-na-fronte-en.pdf
2 Bob Steers, ‘Jan Mašek’, Intelligence Corps Journal, 2005; interview with Bob Steers. Further information from Prokop Tomek, Military History Institute, Prague
3 National Archives FO 1007/309, British Field Security Reports for Vienna
4 Information from Prokop Tomek and On the Cold War Front. The ten years were 1950–60. Additional private information on the penetration of Measure
5 Confirmation of Jan Mašek’s name on the list comes from Prokop Tomek, Military History Institute, Prague
6 National Archives DEFE 21/33: a 1950 report by Philip Vickery reflects the British view of the importance of Vienna. The American view can be found in ‘The Current Situation in Austria, CIA’, 31 August 1949, declassified and available at www.cia.gov
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