GCHQ
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All morning, Kuznetsov was ahead of them. MI5 took the bus after his to Mortlake, but the experienced KGB field officer had outwitted them. Dispirited after frantically searching the streets, they moved on, again by bus, with little hope of finding their elusive target. To their amazement, as they passed through Richmond, Kuznetsov boarded their bus. The jubilant watchers recounted: ‘He came aboard and sat not very far away panting and breathing heavily…shaking off his pursuers was indeed most strenuous work.’ He got off at Marble Hill Park in Twickenham. After a period of calculated inactivity reading the newspaper on a park bench to watch out for pursuers, he made various ‘excursions into back streets’ before boarding yet another bus to Kingston-upon-Thames in Surrey. Here he finally met with a nervous-looking figure outside the Century-Elite cinema in Kingston High Street. The British man was in his twenties, with a pinched face, dressed in a mackintosh and distinctive yellow socks. The pair went for a meal in the café of Bentalls department store. Afterwards they walked to a secluded part of Canbury Gardens, where they would be able to see anyone who approached, and so felt safe enough to exchange information. The unknown man produced a large sheet of paper from his inside pocket, and Kutznetsov took detailed notes for an hour and a half. Whenever a passer-by approached they put their papers away. Kuznetsov’s MI5 followers were still watching.2
When the clandestine meeting in Kingston finished, MI5’s task had only just begun. The crucial part of the operation was to follow Kuznetsov’s unknown British contact, to identify who was passing information to the KGB. The man had no street-craft, and was easily tailed to an address in Elborough Street at Earlsfield in Wandsworth. MI5 kept watch, and also engaged in letter interception. The contact was soon revealed to be William Marshall, a Radio Operator for the Diplomatic Wireless Service (DWS), the radio network at Hanslope Park that the Foreign Office had inherited from SIS at the end of the war.3 Although Marshall had only joined the DWS in November 1948, he had undertaken some interesting work. Having been trained in the Royal Signals immediately after the war, he did eight months of duty at Hanslope and was then sent to the British Embassy in Cairo. SIS had just moved its offices, including its transmitters, from the Cairo Embassy to the military headquarters at Ismailia. Because SIS was short of Radio Operators, DWS lent it three of its people, including Marshall. His next posting was the British Embassy in Moscow, where he spent a year between December 1950 and December 1951.4
Marshall had almost certainly been recruited by the KGB during his sojourn in Moscow. The Security Department of the Foreign Office, run by William Carey-Foster, began to make background enquiries. Carey-Foster asked British diplomats in Moscow for information, asking whether there was anything odd about Marshall. One of the diplomats there offered a frank and revealing reply:
Marshall was a perfect example of the type who should not be sent here. He was an introvert, anti-social to a degree I have never seen before. At staff cocktail parties he would be found in a corner behind a screen, if he turned up at all, or in some other obscure spot. He was most difficult to draw into conversation, and he had a meanness which it would be difficult to surpass. If asked to give a cigarette to a colleague, he would ask for a cigarette back the following day.
His main interests were embroidery and documentary films. Although there were doubts about his mental state, his managers did not have security concerns about him until his very last day in Moscow, when, having completed the DWS Radio Operator’s standard tour of twelve months, he was being sent home by the evening train via Leningrad. He was relieved of his duties in order to pack, but went missing for most of the day. It transpired that he spent the entire day in Moscow. When challenged about what he had been doing, he answered evasively.5
One of MI5’s worries was that Marshall might have gleaned sensitive information about intelligence and security activities that were under way at Britain’s Moscow Embassy. However, Lambert Titchner, one of the diplomats there, thought it unlikely that he had picked up anything about the recent KGB bugging of the British Naval Attaché’s office. Most importantly, the diplomats did not think he knew anything about the offensive sigint work DWS conducted from the Moscow Embassy on behalf of GCHQ, which was referred to coyly as ‘the watch on high-frequency wave-lengths’. This was partly because they had judged him to be of low intelligence, and uninformed about secret matters generally. This proved to be a miscalculation.6
It turned out that Marshall was in London on leave visiting his parents in Southwell. Having returned from his tour in Moscow, he was working on a routine radio watch at Hanslope. Like most operators he was living in a DWS hostel at Bletchley Park which housed about seventy staff. The canteen and the hostel were used by both normal DWS Radio Operators and SIS operators.
MI5 met Brigadier Richard Gambier-Parry, the head of DWS, and made arrangements to search Marshall’s room at the hostel and to receive notification of when he had enough time off to meet his KGB contacts. On 19 May 1952, MI5 tried to watch a further rendezvous between him and Kuznetsov when they met for lunch in a pub called the Dog and Fox in Wimbledon village. Kuznetsov was ‘very much on the alert’ for watchers, engaging in his usual counter-surveillance antics of running hard for buses and scrambling aboard, making him hard to tail.7 There were other attempted meetings around south-west London at which MI5 thought Kuznetsov was even more aware of surveillance. Marshall was also developing his fieldcraft, and on one occasion he artfully evaded his MI5 tail by boarding an underground train at Euston, then jumping off just as the doors closed.8 MI5 had to accept that the pair had probably managed several meetings they were unaware of, and wondered what secrets Marshall was handing over.
On 10 June it was decided to arrest the pair at their next meeting, in the hope that they would be in possession of comprom ising documents, which would make a prosecution easier.9 The next day, Anthony Simkin from MI5 spoke with Colonel Ted Maltby, the deputy head of DWS at Hanslope Park. They knew Marshall was about to go on a few days’ leave in London, and Simkin asked if the DWS could ‘put out a document that would appeal to Marshall’. As bait, they chose a booklet giving new DWS frequencies and call signs.10 On 13 June Marshall and Kuznetsov were arrested by Chief Inspector Hughes of the Special Branch as they met in a park in Wandsworth. They were taken to Wandsworth Police Station, and there was delight all round as they proved to be carrying a wealth of incriminating material, including the deliberately proffered frequencies booklet. Kuznetsov was supposed to enjoy diplomatic immunity, but in their excitement the police did not listen to his protests and put him in a cell to cool off.
On 15 June, Dick White went in person to Chartwell, Winston Churchill’s private residence, to brief him about the case. The Prime Minister was recovering from illness, and received White in his pyjamas, sitting up in bed. White emphasised that this was not an isolated case, and that MI5 knew the Soviets had been ‘very active in regard to British personnel in our Mission in Moscow’. He explained that when Kuznetsov was arrested he was found to be carrying a notebook ‘in which were entered the index numbers of the cars used by our shadowing organisation’, which the MI5 watchers believed showed his status as a ‘professional espionage agent’.11
The incriminating paperwork was vital. Although Marshall was grilled by William Skardon, MI5’s best interrogator, he did not give much away. He was certainly not going to confess. Proving that he had had meetings with Soviet agents was one thing, but producing hard evidence of espionage was the key. When MI5 shared their information with the Americans, they immediately asked the right question: namely, what evidence did the British have that could be produced in court? MI5 was pretty confident that the cypher material Marshall had been caught with would be enough, but it was busy hunting for more. The results of its enquiries were suggesting that Marshall was attracted to Communism even before he went to Moscow. A search of his room at Bletchley Park had produced Communist literature, including a copy of From Trotsky to Tito by James Klugman, a leading Cambridge Marxist an
d friend of Anthony Blunt.12 The head of the Foreign Office Security Department, William Carey-Foster, had been casually strolling around Bletchley asking questions. Remarkably, he had discovered that when Marshall was first working at Hanslope Park in 1948 he used to buy the Daily Worker, the newspaper of the British Communist Party, every day from Turner’s newsagents in the village, which was close to his lodgings at Bletchley Park. Apparently he confidentially arranged with the staff in the newsagents for the paper ‘to be handed to him in such a way that his colleagues would not become aware of his interest’.13
Further surprises awaited MI5. On 20 June it held a meeting with Brigadier Gambier-Parry of DWS at Leconfield House, the MI5 headquarters in London, to discuss protecting sensitive information during the coming court case. Some of the papers found in Marshall’s possession at the time of his arrest referred to especially secret SIS radio links used to contact its Moscow station. The assembled company were amazed by this, since Marshall should not have been able to come across such things in the course of his duties. Gambier-Parry was accompanied by Army sigint officers who explained that they were liaising closely with Eric Jones, the new Director of GCHQ. They were very concerned that Marshall’s defence material in court might make ‘reference to techniques such as those used by G.C.H.Q.’, and explained that during his time in the Royal Signals between 1946 and 1948 he was ‘engaged in the Middle East on “intercept duties” ’. Jones urged that every effort be made to prevent this coming out in court. Remarkably, up until this point GCHQ had chosen to tell MI5 absolutely nothing about Marshall’s earlier work on sigint.14 A few days later, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden tried to assure Churchill that Marshall was not important, omitting any mention of the fact that he had been a sigint operator.15
Security officials now began to probe Britain’s Moscow Embassy. Clearly already sympathetic towards Communism when he arrived in Moscow in 1950, it seems Marshall had become enamoured of Nina Michailovna Gredjeva, a Russian domestic who waited tables in the Junior Mess in the Moscow Embassy, where he ate. MI5 already knew of this woman, who was considered attractive and had been instrumental in an attempt made by the Soviets to subvert another member of the DWS in Moscow, Leonard Douglas Ker, who eventually blew the whistle and notified his superiors.16 It was widely assumed that she was a KGB ‘swallow’, an agent who specialised in using her personal charms to recruit foreign diplomatic officials. In any case, MI5 concluded that Soviet intelligence would have had ‘numerous opportunities to earmark, approach and recruit Marshall during his tour in Moscow’.17 Contrary to the assertions of senior diplomats that Marshall was a loner, in fact he appeared to have had a close circle of like-minded friends in Moscow, including Jack Howarth, the Chancery Messenger, and Anthony Hibberson, another Radio Operator.18 Hibberson later told MI5 that he was aware that Marshall ‘had an unusually large number of books on sex matters in his possession’; indeed he had been grateful to borrow some himself. However, he felt obliged to make the firm assertion that he ‘did not consider that Marshall was a practising pervert of any kind’, and did not feel that this had any bearing on the case.19
In June 1952 Marshall was tried at the Old Bailey. His plea of guilty ensured that there was no exposure of embarrassing sigint secrets, and the grateful authorities sentenced him to a lenient five years’ imprisonment.20
The Marshall case underlines the fact that the Soviets were almost certainly aware of the British practice of using DWS operators as an extended arm of GCHQ to undertake short-range monitoring of communications from embassies.21 Unsurprisingly, the KGB was busy doing the same thing in London. Remarkably, one of Moscow’s most valuable sigint assets in post-war Europe was not small or hidden, but was clear for all to see. During the Second World War, permission had been given for the Soviet TASS News Agency to construct a ‘radio monitoring station’ on the northern fringes of London. This occupied 13 Oakleigh Park North, Whetstone, only a stone’s throw away from the Foreign Office ‘bug shop’ in nearby Borehamwood. The station, with its substantial aerial farm, was still in operation in July 1951. Moreover, as a TASS Agency site it enjoyed full diplomatic immunity.22 Incredibly, Britain had provided the Soviets with a large sigint site from which they could conduct, with complete immunity, the illicit study of radio systems, including those connected with the air defence of London. From Whetstone they could capture far more traffic than from the Soviet Embassy in the centre of London.
John Slessor, the Chief of the Air Staff, was especially agitated, and declared that Britain was ‘gratuitously presenting our potential enemy with…information which he could not obtain from any number of spies’. Slessor wanted the station closed down, but the Foreign Office and MI5 could not agree on how much evidence of illicit activity they had, or what legal action could be taken. Elint and radio warfare units from RAF Watton had been used to jam the station during a major RAF air exercise in the summer of 1951. ‘It is absolutely fantastic,’ Slessor fulminated, that ‘we should continue to present the Soviets on a plate with the opportunity of learning such vital defence secrets.’23 Remarkably, Sir Percy Sillitoe, the Director of MI5, had discovered that some of the twenty-nine staff labouring away at the monitoring station were British nationals employed by the Soviets.24
In early August 1951 the Cabinet Defence Committee bit the bullet and decided that the station had to go. The Soviets resisted, arguing that they had been given a special dispensation to run it by none other than King George VI in 1941. Diplomats found it more than a little amusing that Russian Communists should fall back on arguments derived from royal prerogative. The Permanent Under-Secretary’s department that superintended intelligence affairs in the Foreign Office finally decided that protocol and law were no longer an impediment, and that the important thing was to shut the station down.25 Firm orders to depart were issued to the Soviets at the end of August, but they dragged their heels, only winding up their operations in September when threatened with ‘forcible action’.26 However, they also had a residence in Ealing, and worries about ‘forward interception’ by the KGB from this site continued into the late 1950s.27
West London was also the site of a new organisation created to protect British cyphers. When GCHQ moved to Cheltenham in late 1952, much of the technical business of cypher security remained at Eastcote. Fearsome rows developed with the armed services, which complained about delays in the production of cypher equipment and scrambler phones, as well as their poor quality. T.R.W. Burton-Miller, who was in charge of communications security, had done his best to achieve good relations with the military. However, in 1953 many felt it was better to make a fresh start by creating a completely new service, the London Communications Security Agency (LCSA). This decision to separate communications security and sigint was controversial, but it was backed by the new GCHQ Director, Eric Jones, and one of his key subordinates, Joe Hooper.28
LCSA was effectively Britain’s fourth secret service, the technical security equivalent of MI5. Its main task was to develop new and very secure cypher machines to produce better codes in the hope of thwarting the Soviet sigint services. Although it existed for nearly two decades, almost nothing is known about it. Its first chief was Major General William Penney, who had been Mountbatten’s Director of Intelligence in South-East Asia. Penney was familiar with sigint, but was definitely an outsider. While the technical staff for communications security remained at Eastcote and nearby Northwood Hills, Penney and his senior officers moved into new premises at 8 Palmer Street, which doubled as GCHQ’s London office. Palmer Street was close to one of the oldest underground stations in London, St James’s Park, and to many of the embassies. Indeed, the warren of tunnels from the ancient station that ran under the LCSA building soon gave rise to stories of secret passages and hidden basement facilities.29
At obscure locations such as Palmer Street and Hanslope Park, communications security experts were at the forefront of secret battles between the embassies. DWS was both an offensive and a defensive organisation,
and was admired for what officials called its ‘buccaneering’ spirit.30 As the Marshall case had revealed, many of its operators acted as forward collectors for GCHQ, and one of its larger post-war stations, in Stockholm, was often referred to as a GCHQ site.31 In fact, DWS combined a multitude of curious tasks that were at the gritty interface of technical and human espionage or counter-espionage. By 1952 they shared accommodation with the sweepers at Hanslope Park. The old manor house was now surrounded by an unsightly penumbra consisting of forty nissen huts and concrete bunkers on each side of the drive leading up to the main building. There were acres of wireless masts, serving both SIS and the radio nets for the mainstream Foreign Office. All sorts of interesting things went on there. A visiting MI5 officer noted that the outlying huts and bunkers were a research and development centre for many secret devices. ‘Those near the manor and to one side of it are used for research into offensive and defensive microphone techniques. Several near the end of the drive are used for the construction, testing and development of M.I.6 agent sets.’32