The Berlin tunnel is perhaps the most controversial intelligence operation of the 1950s. Much of the controversy stems from the fact that on 22 October 1953, even before its construction began, George Blake, an SIS officer working for the KGB as a double agent, was part of a team briefed about the planned tunnel. Blake had been captured by the North Koreans in 1950, and was recruited during his incarceration. On his release he had returned to duty and had been sent to work for Section Y, which was undertaking the tunnel operation. In early 1954 he handed over the complete plans of the tunnel to his KGB controller during a rendezvous on the top deck of a London bus. Yet, incredibly, despite this leak, the tunnel was still a success, and gathered good intelligence. The KGB had to allow the operation to continue uninterrupted in order to protect Blake’s cover as a top ‘agent in place’.21 For the same reason, the KGB did not warn Eastern Bloc officials who were routing communications through Berlin. This included the GRU, which was responsible for Soviet Army intelligence operations. It decided that the tap would be endured for a year, and then ‘accidentally’ discovered in April 1956. In the meantime it passed out general security warnings to bureaucrats about using telephones, but to the KGB’s dismay, most officials ignored them.22 On the night of 21–22 April 1956, engineers in the East pretended to bump into the tunnel while repairing damage caused by heavy rain. Clearly there were other tunnels of this sort: recently declassified CIA documents reveal that in September 1953 ‘similar operations’ (in the plural) were being ‘conducted elsewhere’. Eventually, audacious operations of this kind were carried out by the West underneath Moscow itself.23
The KGB’s selfish behaviour towards the GRU during the Berlin tunnel episode mirrored the attitude of the CIA towards NSA. Protection of its own security and its own sources was paramount. Unusually, in the Berlin tunnel episode, both sides could claim victory. The KGB successfully protected Blake until he was exposed by a Polish intelligence officer working for the Americans in 1959, while the West gained enormous quantities of data about its Eastern Bloc military opponents. Both sides were offered some reassurance against the possibility that its enemies were planning a surprise attack. In that sense at least, Cold War intelligence was neither fruitless nor necessarily a cause of increased tensions. Collectively, these operations calmed everyone’s fears, and their most substantial benefits might be measured through greater stability and the perpetuation of an uneasy peace.24
Oddly, the Blake case seems to have helped, not harmed, Anglo–American intelligence relations, owing to the sensitive way it was handled by the Director of the CIA, Allen Dulles. On his retirement in September 1961, Dick White, the Chief of SIS, thanked Dulles for his generous attitude, saying: ‘This was never more manifest than in your recent handling of the Blake case. I only hope that you yourself realise what a splendid impression you made upon us all by your magnanimity and understanding of our difficulties.’ There were, White noted, many other incidents in which Dulles’ intervention had ‘restored trust and confidence between us’.25 In fact, by this time the horrors of the Blake case had been overshadowed by the defection of William H. Martin and Bernon F. Mitchell, two American NSA civilians who turned up in the Soviet Union in August 1960. Mitchell was a distinctly odd person who had once admitted to sexually experimenting with dogs and chickens, but had still been allowed to pass his NSA vetting. After their defection, GCHQ was informed and the usual damage assessments were set in train. Although Martin and Mitchell blew a number of GCHQ’s operations, and talked about them publicly at a Moscow press conference, the British reaction was muted. There was general relief that, for once, the defectors were not British-employed.26
The Berlin tunnel was part of a general explosion of bugging and telephone tapping in the 1950s. Both SIS and the KGB saw this as a way to get around the problem of highly secure encryption and listen in to the enemy. The Soviets led the way on bugging because of their long history of listening in on Western diplomatic premises in Moscow.27 In July 1950 the Air Attaché at the British Embassy in Moscow was testing a wireless receiver when he heard the voice of the Naval Attaché, who was in a nearby room, broadcasting loud and clear. Despite a painstaking search, no bug could be found. The general opinion was that Russian employees within the Embassy had quickly removed it. Now the hunt was on, and the ‘sweepers’ who searched for bugs were busy all over Moscow. In January 1952 a microphone was found in the American Embassy. Then in September of the same year an American sweeper heard the voice of George Kennan, the American Ambassador, being transmitted, but no one could find the offending bug. Painstaking work with a British detector eventually located it.28 Its sophistication stunned Western observers: it was a resonating device that required no external power supply, and so could remain in operation indefinitely. Consisting of a metal chamber about ten inches long, it transmitted when bombarded with microwaves from a nearby building and was hidden in a wooden model of the Great Seal of the United States which was on display in Kennan’s office and which had been given to him by the Soviets as a present. In order to persuade the Soviets to activate the device, Kennan pretended to dictate a telegram, which enabled the sweepers to home in on it. Kennan recalls that he felt ‘acutely conscious of the unseen presence’.29
The discovery of this microwave bug triggered alarm in London. On 9 October 1952 Churchill urged MI5 and SIS to ‘take all necessary action’, and told A.V. Alexander, his Defence Secretary, that the episode was ‘most important’ as it showed ‘how far the Soviets have got in this complex sphere’. He ordered an active programme of research into both defensive security measures and offensive bugging techniques for Britain’s own use. In the short term, MI5 busied itself protecting certain key rooms in Whitehall. Meanwhile, Sir Frederick Brundrett, the Chief Scientific Adviser at the Ministry of Defence, was asked to coordinate technical investigations into bugging possibilities for SIS, particularly with new transistor-based devices. Since the original find of an advanced Soviet bug in Britain’s Moscow Embassy in 1950, three different scientists in Britain had already ‘developed miniature devices which would transmit voices in the room in which they are. All the devices are different in principle from that discovered in Moscow.’ It was now necessary to move from laboratory prototypes into the field, for Ministers in London called for ‘devices suitable for offensive action by ourselves’.30 By July 1954, Brundrett’s group had four prototype bugs ready for field trials by SIS operatives.31
Why were the new audio bugs being rushed ahead, when the familiar and reliable techniques of telephone tapping had been around for years? One of the reasons is that Soviet telephone security discipline was good. George Blake illustrates this well with his recollections of the efforts of the SIS Y Section to tap Soviet and Chinese telephones during the Geneva Peace Conference of May 1954. This important conference sought a settlement to the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and set up the International Control Commission on Vietnam, consisting of observers from India, Poland and Canada. SIS sent a team to Geneva headed by Blake, with two translators, who worked with the enthusiastic support of the Swiss security service. They were set up in the suburbs of Geneva with two recording machines and a few desks. However, it was soon clear that no hot tips were going to reach Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, and his negotiating team: ‘The Staff of the Communist delegations observed strict telephone security. They never discussed anything with even a remote bearing on their position and tactics at the negotiating table, or gave any inkling of what concessions they were prepared to make.’ If such information was going to be scooped it was only going to happen when diplomats thought they were at a safe distance from a phone, which they had been trained to look upon as akin to a venomous serpent.32
The Y Section excursion to Geneva was far from valueless. SIS was amazed to see how the Soviet and Chinese Communist delegations dealt with each other on the basis of complete equality. No less interesting were the family conversations of the famously stern and unbending Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyaches
lav Molotov. To the surprise of the secret listeners, Molotov enjoyed long and patient chats with his six-year-old grandson, who recounted his daily school activities. One evening Mrs Molotov complained that her best friend’s son was having difficulty getting a place at Moscow University. ‘Could he ring the rector and arrange it? Rather grudgingly, Molotov consented.’33 One wonders if, at this point, Blake ever paused to reflect that the Soviet Communist system that he admired and the British system were really not so very different. SIS gathered plenty of such ‘social intelligence’, since Blake recalls that during the mid-1950s his unit also bugged Polish diplomatic premises in Brussels, the Soviet Embassy in Copenhagen, the Bulgarian Embassy in London and numerous locations in Cairo.34
The Soviets got some of their own back in late February 1959, when Prime Minister Harold Macmillan made an official visit to Moscow. He recorded his main impressions in his diary, noting for example that ‘Mr Khrushchev is the absolute ruler of Russia and completely controls the situation.’ He then added:
The second impression – dominating everything else – was the strange experience of being surrounded by friends and advisers…and yet being practically unable to communicate with them at all, by word or writing, except in one room in the Embassy in conditions of great discomfort, inside a plastic tent with a gramophone record playing continuously. This is because you cannot speak in the residences, town or country, put at our disposal. Every room is ‘wired’. You cannot speak in a car, or train, or even outside the house if it be a small compound or garden. There is a danger of the apparatus picking up what you say.
Even in the British Embassy, Macmillan continued, the Soviet methods were so good and so unobtrusive that there could be ‘no security’. He observed that diplomats who remained in Moscow a long time either gradually came to disregard the problem or became ‘very irritable and nervy’. He concluded that no British Ambassador should endure this post for more than three years.35
Bugs and telephone taps were also being found by the Americans with increasing frequency. In early 1956, regular sweeping picked up bugs in the offices of the US Ambassadors in Tel Aviv and Belgrade. Something more troubling was found in the conference room at the headquarters of US Europe Command, the main forum where American plans for the defence of Europe were discussed. Sweepers were picking up sound emanations that suggested the room was compromised, but could not find any bugs. Then they checked the telephones in the headquarters. To their dismay, the first fourteen they examined ‘were found to be equipped with jumper circuits which kept the telephones alive when the receivers remained in their cradles’. In other words, even when the telephones were not in use, they operated as active microphones, hoovering up all the sounds in their vicinity.36 By 1960 more than a hundred devices had been found in American diplomatic premises in the Eastern Bloc. The response was to construct ‘clean rooms’, often containing an inner room made of Perspex, which was supposedly bug-proof.37
When Jackie Kennedy, the wife of the American President, met the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev during the Vienna Summit of 1961, they chatted amiably about the recent Soviet space programme and the emerging ‘space race’. At this early stage, animals rather than humans were being sent into orbit. Khrushchev revealed that Strelka, a dog the Soviets had recently sent into space and returned safely to earth, had just produced puppies. Half-jokingly, Mrs Kennedy asked if she might have one of the puppies for her daughter Caroline. Some weeks later a puppy, called Pushinka (Fluffy), duly arrived at the White House, together with a photograph album of Moscow and a gold tea-set. The security men insisted on checking the puppy very thoroughly indeed, for fear that it had been implanted with miniature listening devices.38 This seeming paranoia was not entirely without foundation. In May 1964, sensitive new equipment enabled the Americans to find bugs in almost every room in their Moscow Embassy, except for the specially constructed ‘clean room’.39
Improbably, the sharp end of British bugging technology was the sleepy suburb of Borehamwood. Tucked away amongst the mock-Tudor dwellings of north London was a most peculiar Foreign Office factory employing four hundred people. The location was the small Chester Road Industrial Estate. Few of the local residents knew what happened here; they were only conscious of a twelve-foot-high barbed wire fence patrolled by aggressive Alsatian dogs.40 In the mid-1950s the site was run by Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hornby, who had been chief engineer for a commercial radio company, Philco, before the war, and then head of the technical side of SIS’s wartime Section VIII radio unit at Whaddon Hall.41 The secret factory had been acquired on a lease taken out privately by Brigadier Gambier-Parry, who had transformed SIS’s Section VIII into the Diplomatic Wireless Service, and was financed through private bank accounts.42 Even Edward Bridges, one of the denizens of the British secret state, regarded this as ‘a pretty queer sort of set-up’.43 Although it was formally known as ‘Department B’, the intelligence officers who frequented the discreet factory at 4 Chester Road knew it simply as the ‘bug shop’. Their work tended to reflect world events. The build-up to the Suez Crisis had resulted in a high demand for bugs, and in October 1956 officials noted, ‘This year the Factory has been kept fully occupied because in addition to the forecast programme of production it has had many short term demands on it arising out of the political crisis in the Middle East.’ To keep a steady flow of work they had also put in bids for outside work, such as development contracts for specialist comsec equipment required by the London Communications Security Agency.44
British eavesdropping received a boost in June 1957, when Dick White successfully pressed the Chiefs of Staff to assist with an accelerated programme of bugging Soviet premises. ‘Orthodox methods of obtaining intelligence were particularly ineffective against totalitarian states,’ he explained, because it was so hard to run human agents in these countries, ‘and consequently some new method of “breaking through” was essential.’ On the defensive side there was also the danger of falling behind the Soviets. Roger Hollis, the Director General of MI5, was enthusiastic to make progress in this area, and noted that the costs would be modest compared to the possible gain. Much of the staff for this new effort would come from the Royal Naval Scientific Service, which worked closely with GCHQ.45 By the summer of 1958, as a result of all this activity, the ‘bug shop’ at Borehamwood was undergoing further expansion.46
Offensive bugging brought SIS many scoops during the 1950s. However, bugging also presented a huge defensive problem, and by the late 1950s Britain was overwhelmed. The main defence force was the Foreign Office Technical Maintenance Service at Hanslope Park just outside Milton Keynes. This was the headquarters of a unit of sweepers who prowled around Britain’s embassies searching for bugs, using electronic scanners that looked like brooms connected to a suitcase. However, the Soviets were ‘devoting considerable scientific resources to developing new devices’, and these could only be found with increased effort. Hitherto, only high-risk locations had been swept, but after the Suez Crisis it was felt that embassies in the Middle East and Africa needed more attention. By January 1957, bugs were turning up everywhere. ‘Listening devices have been found in our Embassy in Spain, and there is evidence,’ it was noted, ‘that devices may have been planted on us in Sweden.’ Moreover, Britain was receiving increasing requests to help allied governments with whom it was sharing sensitive material.47
SIS’s knowledge of Soviet bugs came not only from physical examples, but also from the interrogation of German scientists who had been employed on bugging projects in Russia, and had excellent knowledge of the most advanced methods of electronic surveillance.48 Embassies were the new front line in a bizarre battle that involved every conceivable kind of technical device. Here SIS and GCHQ were now working alongside other covert British groups whose activities still remain mysterious.49
10
Embassy Wars
This file shows the covert activities of the DWS [Diplomatic Wireless Service] which must not be revealed…
; D.H. Jones, Treasury, weeder’s note on file1
In early April 1952 an off-duty MI5 ‘watcher’ was alighting from a bus not far from London’s Oxford Street when he spotted a regular surveillance target. This was Pavel Kuznetsov, notionally a ‘Second Secretary’ at the Soviet Embassy in Kensington, but in fact well known to be an intelligence officer. Whether he was KGB or GRU, MI5 was not sure. It had mounted routine surveillance on him, but his tradecraft was good and he often gave the watchers the slip. Today, confident he was not being tailed, he was in animated conversation with an unknown British person. The MI5 watcher duly followed discreetly and reported all he had seen. Soon a major surveillance operation on Kuznetsov was launched. The British were about to receive a very direct warning of how keen Moscow was to penetrate their cyphers.
MI5 employed over a hundred ‘watchers’, who mostly supported its counter-espionage branch – known as B Division. Their task was to follow Soviet intelligence officers as they moved around London in what was often an elaborate game of cat and mouse. A key objective was to identify the British people the KGB contacted, in the certain knowledge that some of them would be engaged in espionage. Accordingly, on 25 April 1952, a team of MI5 watchers were waiting for Pavel Kuznetsov as he left his house. A lengthy pursuit developed. Kuznetsov was obviously going to great lengths to ‘dry-clean’ himself of any surveillance. His greatest ally was the familiar red Routemaster bus: his preferred technique was to stand on the open platform at the back of the bus, allowing him to jump on and off unexpectedly, putting the MI5 team through their paces. The watchers noted that it would have been ‘sheer folly’ to board the same buses as Kuznetsov, so they followed standard MI5 procedure and tried to use taxis, but on this day there were none to be found. Nevertheless, they followed Kuznetsov as he traced a circuitous journey through the West End, using four different buses and eventually heading out through Hammersmith towards Kew Gardens.
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