GCHQ
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The KGB demanded that Britten provide details of sigint activities, together with ‘telecommunications information’ on Britain’s signals networks. He was given a Minox camera, a type much favoured by professional spies, and asked to take photos of the inside of his monitoring building, where the operators sat in serried ranks in headphones, but this proved difficult, since he was never alone there. Pressure was put on him to identify other vulnerable individuals. ‘I was asked to note and report the bad people in my unit,’ he recalled, ‘including officers with mistresses.’ Vasiley also wanted to know whether ‘any of my colleagues indulged in wife-swapping parties or any of the wives prostituted themselves to English or local males’. Such individuals would be ideal victims for future KGB efforts at blackmail. Britten said it would take him a while to discover these things, but Vasiley seemed content, and replied: ‘Time is on our side, and we are in no hurry.’ Britten was clear in his own mind that he was being used as ‘a spotter for potential talent’. Eventually, he recalled, ‘I passed my contacts the names of three airmen on my unit who could be recruited by them.’ He also supplied general military intelligence, and spent much time driving around the island collecting order of battle information at bases like Dhekelia.16 The transport he used was a brand-new white Volvo, purchased with the proceeds of his undercover activities – he also sported one of the latest cameras. Quizzed by his RAF colleagues about his newfound affluence, he passed it off as a bequest from a recently deceased relative.17
Heavy drinking and adventurous sexual behaviour by signals personnel on Cyprus were not unusual, and presented abiding security problems for the authorities. Working long boring shifts and then returning to unbearably hot billets, operators had little to divert them during their spare time. In the 1960s Major Teddy Thomas spent a long tour as a senior signals officer on Cyprus, and was a regular visitor to most of the communications units on the island, including the sigint units at Episkopi and Ayios Nikolaos. He recalls that a serious security incident occurred early in 1963 involving some WRAC operators: ‘It had long been suspected that some of them were practising lesbianism, but that was a matter for their own officers until it came to light that they had involved a young Greek girl in their orgies.’ The Greeks on the island were ‘jealous of the chastity of their women’, and if the affair came to the knowledge of their menfolk, retribution was sure to follow. Thomas considered that the lives of the WRAC operators involved were at risk. Accordingly, they were given an hour to pack their kit and driven straight to Nicosia Airport to board an aircraft for home. Other staff became addicted to alcohol, which was cheap and plentiful on Cyprus. These activities offered opportunities for the KGB, and Teddy Thomas was very much aware of the constant attentions of Soviet intelligence on the island. One of his other duties was ensuring the safe destruction of sensitive cypher equipment once it had worn out. He achieved this by taking it out to sea and dumping it in six hundred fathoms of water.18
Douglas Britten recalled that in 1964 Vasiley suddenly announced that the KGB ‘wanted to train me properly’. He was given a bag containing four items with designated hiding places. These consisted of two empty Tennent’s beer cans with false bottoms, marked ‘One’ and ‘Two’, a piece of piping screwed at one end, and a magnetic box container. These were used for passing documents and money. The beer cans were marked ‘NAAFI Stores from HM Forces’, and were to be left in a telephone box near the Municipal Stadium in Famagusta. The piping was to be discarded casually near a ticket booth at the stadium, while the magnetic box was to be placed beneath a bench on the road from the docks to the Army married quarters at Famagusta. In each case the containers were to be left for thirty minutes. Britten was then to look for a piece of crushed chalk on the road. This was the sign that the device had been collected by the KGB.19
During his last year in Cyprus, Britten’s relationship with the KGB fluctuated wildly. At times his controllers told him that ‘everybody was pleased’, and brought him ‘greetings from Moscow’. On one occasion they seemed to be offering him sex with a Russian woman he had not met before. At other times they made unpleasant threats. He recalled a meeting on a park bench at which he was warned that if his work did not improve they would ‘arrange for me to disappear and something would happen to my family’. On another occasion he was ‘pushed against a wall and punched several times in the head and body’. He was told to improve his performance, since he had been given ‘an awful lot of money’. The KGB wanted him to opt for a sigint site in Germany as his next posting, but he told them that the choice was not his. Throughout this time his objective was ‘to get as much money as I could to buy a house when I got back home’. His posting in Cyprus would finish in October 1966, and from the spring of that year the KGB began to prepare for his return to Britain. There were elaborate procedures for making contact with his new KGB controller. On a particular Saturday in January 1967 he was to go to Brookdale Road in Arnos Grove at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, carrying a copy of Autocar magazine. The KGB officer would enquire how to get to Edmonton cemetery, and Britten was to reply, ‘You can catch a 219 bus.’ The Russian would then reply with the familiar phrase ‘Greetings from Alex’.
But back in England, things started to go wrong. The KGB still wanted sigint material, but they also wanted intelligence about the most improbable things. They hoped that Britten could provide information on the experimental TSR2 strike aircraft, and asked for detailed information about police radio frequencies in Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire. They also continued their love affair with elaborate espionage tradecraft. Britten was given a camera disguised as a cigarette case and three film cartridges, for photographing documents. Although he had one-time pads and coding material, he was also assigned a dead-letter box, spy parlance for an innocent-looking place where material could be deposited for collection by the KGB. This was a hollow tree-stump near a signpost for Gypsy Lane in Harlow. Foolishly, Britten resisted the use of dead-letter boxes, and insisted on personal contact with his handler, which was more risky. He recalls that his controller did not like this, but eventually he reluctantly agreed.20 His controller was called ‘Yuri’, but was not the same Yuri he had met in London in 1962. He was in fact Alexsandr Ivanovich Borisenko, whose cover was First Secretary at the Soviet Embassy.21 Yuri would signal his desire for a meeting by sending Britten a copy of Autocar magazine via his mother’s address. Sometimes his mother was slow forwarding the magazine, and he missed several meetings. He also missed some of his radio signals, to Yuri’s annoyance. Britten was warned that the ‘arm of the Soviet Secret Service was very long and they had agents all over the UK’, and that they would ‘only be too pleased’ to act against him and his family. He later recalled that he was ‘very frightened’ by this.22
Everything went wrong on 3 February 1968. Britten went to meet his contact, but Yuri was not there. Britten recalled: ‘My contact did not turn up at our meeting for the first Saturday of the month and so I went to the Bayswater Road and phoned the Soviet Consulate. Later I went to a café and wrote a letter to my contact, saying I was desperate for money.’ He hand-delivered this letter to the Consulate, where he was photographed from a covert MI5 observation post. Furthermore, his telephone call to the Soviet Consulate had almost certainly been intercepted. Thereafter, his angry KGB contact gave him more money and instructions on how to arrange an emergency meeting. This involved placing an innocuous notice in the personal column of the Daily Telegraph. But Britten had already compromised himself.23
MI5 was working frantically to identify the mysterious visitor to the Soviet Consulate. By August 1968 it had located Britten, and was working with RAF security teams to catch him ‘red-handed in the act of handing over classified information to his spy master’. When it failed to achieve this, GCHQ urged that Britten be arrested quickly, having decided that it was no longer reasonable to risk current sigint operations ‘in the hope of getting a clear-cut conviction’. MI5 arrested him at 9 o’clock in the morning of Wednesday, 11
September 1968 at RAF Digby. His house, office and car were vigorously searched in the hope that incriminating evidence would be found, as MI5 knew that without it, it would be hard to make the charge of espionage stick.24 It was not disappointed. A cache of espionage apparatus was recovered, including one-time pads and a timetable of Soviet radio broadcasts with call-sign frequencies. There were directions for meeting with his KGB controller. There was also the camera disguised as a cigarette case.25
On 4 November Britten pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey. Ever since he had been recruited he had felt out of his depth. ‘I feel a great sense of relief at finally being caught,’ he said, adding, ‘It is indeed a great relief to be able to talk about these activities.’ One of his motivations was clearly money. Although he claimed that over the period of his espionage he received only about £800, both MI5 and the prosecution believed that the true figure was far more. He collaborated superficially with MI5, but they concluded that he was telling less than the whole truth about his activities, and he received a sentence of twenty-one years’ imprisonment. Alexsandr Borisenko left London for Moscow six days after Britten’s first appearance in court.26
The British public had been oblivious to Brian Patchett, and were not very interested in Douglas Britten. The extremely secret nature of Patchett’s activities was never revealed, and Britten’s decision to plead guilty ensured that his trial was not in the public eye for long. Much more attention was paid to the sensational escape of George Blake from Wormwood Scrubs Prison in October 1966. The authorities thought Blake had been sprung by the KGB; in fact he had been assisted by two peace campaigners and an Irish Republican who thought his record sentence of forty-two years was inhumane. They provided Blake with a rope ladder made from oversized knitting needles, and then one of his friends smuggled him to East Berlin. The cover was a family holiday: Blake was hidden in a VW camper van complete with children.27
The British public knew he was an SIS officer, but were still unaware of his highly secret work with sigint. The Blake case certainly reverberated for the Americans. In the White House, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s security advisers noted that British security was ‘disastrously porous’, adding: ‘We have had the Fuchs, Burgess, Maclean, Lonsdale, Vassall and Philby parade to remind us.’ They argued that had Blake been subjected to a polygraph test when he returned from Korea, the problem might well have been avoided. This was not the last time the Americans would express a wish to see the polygraph adopted in Britain.28
On 21 February 1967, to the dismay of GCHQ, sigint finally hit the headlines in Britain as a result of what became known as the ‘D-Notice affair’. The Daily Express carried a sensational story by Chapman Pincher, its Defence Correspondent, about the government interception of international telegrams and telexes, a process known as ‘cable vetting’. It described how all international telegrams and telexes were taken by the carrying companies to government offices for copying, before being sent on their way. Although this traffic included telegrams sent by foreign embassies, the majority of it originated with private companies and ordinary members of the public. GCHQ was the recipient of this material, although it was not directly mentioned in the story, which incorrectly implied that the interested party was MI5.
This affair rapidly became entangled in a heated political debate over the mechanisms by which security-sensitive material was kept out of the British press. This was the ‘D-Notice’ system, a voluntary arrangement whereby a committee issued the press with warning notices on stories that might damage British national security.29 Harold Wilson, whose relationship with the press was already experiencing the classic downturn of mid-administration, reacted badly. He later observed that his clumsy handling of the D-Notice affair was ‘one of my costliest mistakes of our near six years in office’.30 The Daily Express contended that cable vetting was an instance of ‘Big Brother’ intrusion into private matters, ‘which ranks with telephone tapping and the opening of letters’.31 Wilson denounced the story in the House of Commons as ‘sensationalised and inaccurate’, and attacked the Express for publishing it in open defiance of the D-Notice system.32
Wilson was quite wrong on the facts. In reality, the Permanent Under-Secretary’s Department, the section of the Foreign Office that managed intelligence, had got wind of the story on 19 February, two days before it was published, and had quickly decided that it should be suppressed. Colonel Sammy Lohan, the Secretary of the D-Notice Committee, was told to meet Pincher and effect this. The next day, he and Pincher enjoyed a long lunch during which Lohan explained that although he was not keen on the piece being published, it would not actually be in breach of the D-Notice system. In other words, Lohan muffed it. On the night before the article appeared, the Foreign Secretary was contacted in a panic by Denis Greenhill, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, and told about the impending publication. Greenhill insisted that it would be ‘very bad for the national interest’, but he was far too late.33
Under pressure from Edward Heath, the leader of the opposition, Harold Wilson agreed to set up a committee of Privy Councillors chaired by Lord Radcliffe, one of the Law Lords, to inquire into the matter. Quite rightly, this cleared the Daily Express of everything except a minor breach of etiquette. Wilson, however, egged on by George Wigg, denounced the Radcliffe inquiry which he himself had set up. Acting against the advice of his Cabinet Secretary, Burke Trend, he issued his own White Paper, criticising Radcliffe and insisting that the Daily Express had deliberately published in defiance of the D-Notice system. His Cabinet colleagues were appalled. ‘He is going off his rocker,’ remarked Barbara Castle, blaming Wigg for giving poor advice. Many other senior Ministers agreed.34 The whole affair was made more poignant by the fact that, only months before, Chapman Pincher had been given a major award as ‘Journalist of the Decade’, presented to him personally by Harold Wilson.35
One historian has described Pincher’s report in the Daily Express as ‘trivial’.36 In fact it was anything but. Pincher had stumbled on a very secret story indeed. It was not only about interception, something which had been hidden from the public for decades, but also about a secret relationship between GCHQ and private companies like Western Union and Cable & Wireless. Although the British government holding in Cable & Wireless was comparatively small, it effectively operated like a nationalised industry. The tradition of handing over all its cable traffic to GCHQ and its antecedents went back to the First World War, and had continued undisturbed for half a century. As early as 1944, when Cable & Wireless was thinking of sending more of its material by wireless, officials were quick to ask how this would impact on ‘monitoring’. The use of wireless, they noted, might upset ‘the present system in which the company “plays ball” with the authorities concerned’.37
The other murky element of the D-Notice affair was the linkage between the secret state and national economic interests. Cable vetting included the interception of a large number of commercial telegrams. One of the main customers for this sort of intelligence was Britain’s Director of Economic Intelligence, Michael Kaiser, and his staff, which was located in the Ministry of Defence. Kaiser was described by his superiors as ‘a man of enormous personal charm’, but also ‘a law unto himself’. They went on to outline his duties:
A sizeable proportion of the work of his Directorate was devoted to meeting the demands for information from the Confederation of British Industry. A further element went towards producing a publication of such excruciating secrecy that they were rarely if ever read by those many who might best profit from them.38
This publication was based on intercepts and, as was so often the case with sigint, its very high value militated against its widespread use. Security was especially tight with economic sigint, since this was almost never shared with Britain’s UKUSA allies, especially the United States – Britain’s military allies were her commercial rivals.
At precisely this moment, Burke Trend was busy revising Britain’s central intelligence machinery to take mo
re account of economic and scientific subjects, and indeed commercial rivalry. Clearly this was also meant to translate into stronger economic intelligence targeted to support ‘British interest and investments’ at a time when Britain’s economy was struggling. A second Joint Intelligence Committee was now created to focus on economic, technological and scientific subjects. The Permanent Secretaries Committee on the Intelligence Services was also expanded to include representatives from the Treasury, the Department of Economic Affairs and the Board of Trade.39 The Bank of England was not represented, but did have regular access to material from GCHQ.40 Trend’s changes to the central machinery also included creating a new part-time post of Cabinet Office Intelligence Coordinator, for which the illustrious Dick White, Chief of SIS, was selected as the first incumbent.41
White influenced the merger of Britain’s independent comsec unit with GCHQ. It had recently been renamed the Communications-Electronics Security Department after taking over some smaller technical outfits owned by the Post Office.42
GCHQ thought a merger would appeal to the sigint planners at NSA. All the other UKUSA countries had combined comsec/ sigint agencies, and it was hoped that a merger would ensure ‘continued harmonious Comsec relations’ with the allies.43 Moreover, the controversial matter of ‘free licensing’ of cypher equipment for NATO countries cast a long shadow, and GCHQ feared that in the future ‘a conflict of interest might arise between Comsec and Sigint’ over this issue. At all costs it wished to avoid arousing the suspicions of NSA, and a merger would reassure it.44 Another major factor was the shortage of skilled scientists.45 Dick White believed that a merger would allow a better exchange of ideas, and would create a scientific research unit with critical mass. By 1973 GCHQ’s Chief Scientist was serving as senior scientist for the whole British intelligence community.46 The merger also strengthened the cover story that everyone at Cheltenham was busy doing defensive communications research.47 The only opponent was the long-serving head of comsec, Fred Stannard, who departed in dismay and was replaced by Arthur Foden.48