GCHQ
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Prime was not caught as a result of his spying, but because of his criminal paedophile activities. He had a long history of making obscene phone calls, and during 1981 he became more dangerous, and began to indulge his desire to perform sexual acts in front of young girls, carrying out attacks on two occasions and escaping undiscovered. However, later in the year he attacked a third girl, a fourteen-year-old gymnast, in her own home. When the girl screamed, Prime was frightened and ran off. He fled the scene in his car, which he had parked in a lane near a farm. One of the nearby farm workers knew a lot about cars, and was able to give a detailed description of the vehicle to the police, stating with certainty that it was an ‘S’ reg brown two-tone Mark IV Ford Cortina. Although there were 426 ‘S’ reg Cortinas in the immediate surrounding area, only a dozen were coloured ‘Roman Bronze’.
The next day Geoffrey Prime opened the front door of his home to two detectives from Hereford CID. Detective Sergeant Wilkes and Detective Constable Miriam Rhodes asked him about the two-tone ‘S’ reg Cortina parked in the drive outside. Wilkes noticed that Prime bore an uncanny resemblance to the identikit photo of the suspect, and was wearing the same style of checked shirt. Prime must have realised that he was a prominent suspect, and became very agitated when Wilkes asked him for his fingerprints. Although he was not yet arrested, Prime knew it was only a matter of time. That evening, he took his wife Rhona out to Cleeve Hill, a local beauty spot, and after a heavy silence blurted out, ‘It’s me they want.’ He then told her the truth about his sexual activities. Only that evening, over a glass of brandy, did he finally confess that he had also been a KGB spy for over a decade. In fact Rhona already suspected the espionage, and initially decided to stand by her husband. The next day Prime was arrested, and his car and house were searched. Apart from 2,287 record cards, bearing notes about and photographs of young girls, which were bagged and taken away as evidence, a black leather briefcase was also seized. This was later opened by Prime, in the presence of police officers, to reveal the secret compartment filled with KGB equipment, including a camera and one-time pads. For now, the police remained quite unaware of his espionage activities.35
Rhona Prime was now having doubts. On 23 May 1982 she contacted the police and informed them about Prime’s work for the KGB.36 The trigger for this was her discovery of a mass of espionage equipment in the house, including many envelopes addressed to places in East Germany, two one-time pads with columns of five-figure numbers, and some manuals on microdot production. She also gave the police a wallet with a schedule of radio frequencies. Later a team of specialists combed Laburnum Cottage with minute thoroughness:
For two days they searched, leaving nothing to chance: wall cavities explored with cameras controlled by flexible cables; insulating material removed from the loft; chimney, drains and sewers examined; fitted furniture dismantled; soft furnishings X-rayed; carpets and floorboards lifted…The house gradually surrendered its secrets.
The police eventually uncovered a tape recorder and another list of radio frequencies and schedules, together with documents from GCHQ. On 25 June, Detective Inspector David Cole interviewed Prime and switched on the tape recorder. Coded messages in German filled the room – the unmistakable sound of espionage. Prime offered the reply that it was merely his hobby, listening to the radio and twiddling the tuning knob. However, the game was clearly up, and at 4.30 p.m. the next day he made a complete confession.37 On Wednesday, 10 November 1982, Geoffrey Arthur Prime, then aged forty-four, pleaded guilty to seven counts of espionage and three further sexual offences at the Old Bailey. For spying, he received a sentence of thirty-five years, plus a further three years for the sexual offences. The total of thirty-eight years meant that he would be eighty-two on his release in 2020 if he served the full term. He was paroled after serving half his sentence, and was released to a secret address in 2001.38
The Gloucestershire police who investigated Prime had worked tirelessly on the case. They travelled the length and breadth of the country, combing RAF personnel archives and persuading travel agents to hunt through mountains of past receipts for evidence of Prime’s visits to meet his KGB controllers. Yet, to their surprise, the senior management of GCHQ were less than helpful. When Detective Inspector Cole, who led the case, visited GCHQ to confirm that items found in Prime’s possession had been unlawfully taken from its premises, he and a colleague received a ‘less than welcoming’ reception. He asked senior figures for formal evidential statements, but was met with a ‘point-blank refusal’ on the grounds that the material was ‘far too sensitive to be discussed’. Cole recalled that in twenty-five years of police investigations he had ‘rarely encountered such a distasteful reaction’. GCHQ gave him the impression that he was ‘a thorough bloody nuisance’ and that it believed these matters to be ‘way above his head’. Cole also detected the grade-consciousness and even class-consciousness that marked GCHQ at this time. The policemen were blanked by the code-breakers and sent on their way. As they left by Oakley’s main gate, they realised that GCHQ would have preferred to see the whole embarrassing matter buried, and had not even wanted Prime prosecuted.39
Geoffrey Prime was caught by accident, not by GCHQ’s standard security defences, and this posed some awkward questions for the authorities.40 General Sir Hugh Beach led the subsequent inquiry by the Security Commission. Both the Commission and GCHQ concluded that the security procedures had worked as well as they could. Some things could be tightened up, but nothing that was in place at the time would have stopped Prime for certain. Even random searches at the gates of GCHQ could have been evaded by a concealed camera in a bag. In any case, the most damaging information Prime had passed on concerned what streams of intelligence GCHQ had access to, and he could easily have committed this to memory, even though agent runners love to have documents to send their controllers. What the Security Commission was looking for were new kinds of procedures that would greatly improve security.41 Basic issues, such as access to photocopiers, were tightened up, not only at GCHQ but right across the UKUSA system, including at CSE in Ottawa, but ideally it wanted a new security system.42
In February 1983 Beach took his Commission on a visit to Washington, which they found to be ‘most valuable’. All the Americans and ‘particularly the NSA and CIA made no secret of their belief that their personnel security procedures are more effective than our own’.43 What impressed them most was the routine use of the polygraph. They noted that in 1962 a secret and unpublished section of the Radcliffe Inquiry into security procedures in the Civil Service had recommended its use. The Security Commission thought it significant that during his interrogation Prime had conceded that if he had faced a polygraph test prior to joining GCHQ in 1968, he would not have applied to the organisation. Their strongest recommendation was a pilot scheme for the introduction of the polygraph at Cheltenham. They accepted that it would take time to build up expertise in its use, and that the political obstacles to its introduction would be ‘formidable’.44 Benson Buffham, a former Deputy Director of NSA who had recently served as the American Liaison Officer to GCHQ, or ‘SUSLO’, visited London to confer on security, and made it very clear that the Americans were keen to see the polygraph arrive at GCHQ.45 The Security Commission also recommended that vetting teams should be granted access to medical records in order to check for problems such as depression. However, this was shot down immediately by the BMA’s Civil Service Medical Officers Group as ‘neither necessary nor justified’.46
The Prime case left some loose ends. The Security Commission accepted that Prime might not have been the Soviets’ only source within GCHQ, and in May 1983, more than a year after Prime’s arrest, a team from MI5 was probing the possibility of sub-agents. The Security Commission noted that the press had claimed that Prime had been blackmailing some of his colleagues, but it had no evidence either to substantiate this or to safely discount it.47 The biggest question that has lingered over Prime is whether he assisted the KGB in recruiting others by simply
identifying unhappy or vulnerable colleagues. Arguably, one of the most valuable things that a spy in Prime’s position could offer the Soviets was not access to information, but tips on which colleagues had problems with drink or debt, or had patterns of sexual behaviour that might leave them open to blackmail. This was precisely the sort of information that the KGB had sought from Douglas Britten on Cyprus a decade before.
In the wake of the Prime case there was extensive press speculation seeking to link a contemporaneous spate of suicides with possible KGB recruitment at Cheltenham and the ongoing inquiries by the security services. Interest was initially sparked by the death of George Franks, a Radio Operator who worked at the GCHQ’s Empress building near Earl’s Court, which monitored diplomatic and commercial traffic out of London. Franks died of a heart attack after drinking a large quantity of whisky, but had reportedly also tried to hang himself. However, colleagues insisted that his death was most likely to be due to stress. Drink had always been an issue amongst the Radio Operators, not least because many spent time at remote service bases such as Cyprus where the consumption of duty-free alcohol was considerable. The long shifts were also stressful, and down the years quite a few were treated at the Cooney Hill psychiatric hospital in Gloucester.
A further spate of three deaths looked more suspicious. The first was Captain Timothy Fetherstone-Haugh, a twenty-nine-year-old officer who worked at the sigint station at Gatow in Berlin. In February 1982 he was found at the wheel of his car inside a garage filled with exhaust fumes. The second was Jack Wolfenden, a senior radio officer at GCHQ who died when his glider crashed into a Cotswold hillside in July 1982. Wolfenden’s girlfriend, Judith Pither, told the inquest that he had ‘acted oddly after returning from a trip abroad’. The third was Ernst Brockway, a GCHQ radio officer who was found dead at his home in October 1982. However, in reality many of the suicides that aroused the interest of the press were by people who worked at other scientific establishments, and the number of GCHQ staff who committed suicide in this period was not statistically significant. Moreover, given that Prime was handled by the Third Directorate of the KGB, it would have been hard for them to employ the information he supplied to recruit more agents.48
Nevertheless, further KGB recruitment efforts against British sigint were already under way. While the Security Commission was flying off to America to look at polygraph machines, and the British newspapers were worrying about people mysteriously crashing their gliders, Soviet intelligence officers had simply returned to their tried and trusted source: vulnerable young men employed on sigint duties in the armed services who were based far from home. In 1984 eight servicemen serving with 9 Signals Regiment at the Ayios Nikolaos sigint base on Cyprus were charged with espionage for the KGB under Section One of the Official Secrets Act. This ‘Army unit’ was in fact a mixed outfit of soldiers, airmen and civilians working for GCHQ. All those arrested had confessed, however they later retracted their confessions, citing the grim circumstances of their interrogation. On this basis all eight were acquitted. The prosecution had alleged that a vast amount of highly classified information had been passed to the Soviets when one of the accused was blackmailed by an Arab called ‘John’ after becoming involved in homosexual acts. The government claimed that a KGB officer code-named ‘Alex’ had then worked with ‘John’ and one of the defendants to exert pressure on the other defendants. Much of the material was reportedly handed over at the Chiquito nightclub at Larnaca on Cyprus, and several exotic cabaret singers were flown to London to give evidence. However, the prosecution failed due to the incompetent and coercive interrogations.49
The Security Commission was rolled out yet again. This time it could not miss the elementary clues. In October 1986 it reported that it had discovered that there were security difficulties with the employment of young and fairly immature people on top-secret activities in obscure locations. Officers had taken little interest in their off-duty activities, and document security at 9 Signals Regiment at Ayios Nikolaos had been poor.50 The Commission reported this as if it was a revelation, but in fact it had been obvious since the Patchett and Britten cases in the 1960s. There were further parallels in the British clerical and support staff who the Soviets had managed to recruit at Britain’s Moscow Embassy, most of whom have not yet been publicly named.51
Meanwhile, GCHQ rejoiced at the uncovering of American spies like Edward Howard in the CIA and Ronald Pelton in NSA. They joined a growing throng of KGB spies inside the United States, including John Walker and his family, that helpfully put the Geoffrey Prime case in the shade. Ronald Pelton was especially damaging. He had pursued a career path almost identical to that of Prime, learning Russian while serving in a front-line Air Force sigint unit doing voice intercept at Peshawar in Pakistan in the mid-1960s. He then transferred to NSA, and worked there until 1980. In 1984 he ran into financial difficulty, and decided to travel to Austria, where he sold his knowledge of NSA activities to the KGB. One important programme he compromised was ‘Ivy Bells’, a joint NSA–US Navy operation which tapped Soviet undersea communication cables using submarines. Pelton confessed under interrogation in 1986, and was given three consecutive life sentences.52 In 1985 William Odom, Director of NSA, worried that there might be other agents. He was also concerned that some of the defending lawyers were ‘radical’, and would deliberately try to use the trials to expose more sigint secrets, especially NSA’s very successful programmes of covert comint collection from embassies in the Middle East.53
In the 1980s the American intelligence community uncovered many KGB spies within its ranks, and was entering a period of mole-mania, not dissimilar to the one previously endured by the British. The American equivalent of Kim Philby, a senior CIA officer named Aldrich Ames, was yet to be unmasked. By contrast, the British were at last winning the spy war against the Soviets. SIS had recruited a senior KGB officer, Oleg Gordievsky, a prolific source who bravely stayed in place and provided vital intelligence during the last decade of the Cold War. It is widely thought that his information led to the ‘Cyprus Eight’ prosecution in 1984.54 More importantly, by 1985 GCHQ had managed to decode some of the messages of the agents working for the East German intelligence service in Britain, which led to charges being made against them. For the first time, after anxious deliberation, GCHQ presented intercepts as evidence during closed court sessions.55
MI5 continued to debrief Geoffrey Prime regularly, long after he reached Wormwood Scrubs Prison. ‘They come up once or twice a week,’ said Prime, ‘and ask an awful lot of questions.’ Prime was the first KGB agent to be held in a British prison for some years. Dave Wait, one of his fellow inmates at Wormwood Scrubs, explains that the authorities still remembered the spectacular escape of George Blake, who in 1966 had leapt to freedom from a window in D Wing of the same prison. As a result, Prime was accompanied everywhere by two warders, and had his own specially designed, escape-proof exercise area: ‘Two sides are brick walls, the other two are honeycombed concrete and thick unbreakable glass, a box twenty feet high for Prime to walk around on his own.’ At this time Wait, who was serving a life sentence for murder, was passing his time serving as the prison librarian. He recalls Prime’s first visit to the library. Prime asked how many books he was allowed to borrow at one time, and Wait replied with a grin that officially he could have six, but he would stretch the allowance a bit, as long as he didn’t ‘run off with them’ to Russia. Prime chose six books including a volume of advanced mathematics, Plato’s The Republic and Chapman Pincher’s recent book about the KGB penetration of the West, Their Trade is Treachery.56
20
A Surprise Attack – The Falklands War
…a series of intercepted signals…left little doubt that an invasion was planned for the morning of Friday 2 April.
John Nott, Secretary of State for Defence1
GCHQ’s intelligence about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the last days of 1979 was excellent, but other recent surprise attacks and military interventions
had taken the British completely unawares.2 Over the previous decade or so there had been quite a few. In 1968, as we have seen, the Joint Intelligence Committee had spectacularly failed to predict the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia and the subsequent crushing of the Prague Spring. Over the next ten years there had been other nasty surprises, including the Arab-Israeli War of 1973 and the Chinese attack on Vietnam in 1979. The invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979 and early 1980 was quickly followed by Soviet intervention in Poland.
The overall performance of British intelligence in spotting these surprise attacks and military crises was at best mediocre. Brooks Richards, the Cabinet Intelligence Coordinator, decided to probe what has been called ‘the dog that didn’t bark’.3 In other words, he wanted to know why the record of Britain’s JIC was poor when it came to warning of military aggression.4 The person he chose to investigate was Douglas Nicoll, a veteran of Bletchley Park’s Hut Six.5 Working alongside Gordon Welchman and Stuart Milner-Barry, he had spent the Second World War puzzling over the intricate code-breaking problems of Enigma. After the war he was one of a minority who had stayed on at GCHQ, and by the early 1970s he had been in charge of Z Division, which passed finished intelligence to the customers in Whitehall. Now, after half a lifetime of work at GCHQ, he had been given a rather different puzzle.6
By late 1981 Nicoll had finished what had become a massive study of surprise attack. His findings were important. He concluded that although ‘provision of warning of aggression’ was a core duty of the JIC, it was actually ill-suited to the task, since it was really a body that had been set up to produce strategic estimates. In short, the problems it thought about were large and complex, and the time cycles were long. By contrast, warning was really all about tactical intelligence, since aggression was often long in the planning but short in the execution. Moreover, Nicoll argued that Britain’s intelligence analysts tended to suffer from two psychological neuroses. First, they found it difficult to believe that an aggressor would ever find the use of force politically acceptable. They tended to think about what the British would do if they were in the shoes of their enemies. In fact, the political regimes they were looking at were often unstable, and therefore much more inclined to commit acts of violent aggression. Nicoll also identified something that he called ‘perseveration’. This was the tendency of intelligence analysts to come up with a view about a problem early on, and then to refuse to change it. Given that intelligence officers were often asked to look at the same problem repeatedly, this was a serious failing.7