A Brief History of the Spy (14 page)

Once he had retired from MI5, Wright wrote his autobiography,
Spycatcher
, in which he made his allegations about Hollis public. Wright claimed that when Hollis was sent to interrogate Igor Gouzenko in 1945, he had stayed in disguise in case Gouzenko recognized him as a Soviet agent, and Hollis had then tried to persuade Gouzenko not to make further allegations. Based on this shaky evidence, he declared Hollis a traitor.

Now, with access to the KGB records, courtesy of defector Oleg Gordievsky, we know that George Blake was the last key agent that Moscow Centre had within either MI5 or MI6, but at the time what may well have been incompetency was seen as something much worse. The Trend Committee, headed by Lord Trend, investigated Hollis and the Soviet penetration of MI5 in the seventies, and reported that the allegations against Hollis were inconclusive. An internal MI5 report from
1988 noted that the belief in a traitor had persisted for so long because of ‘a lack of intellectual rigour in some of the leading investigators . . . dishonesty on the part of Wright, who did not scruple to invent evidence where none existed . . . [and] the baleful influence of Golitsyn who realised in 1963 that he had told all he knew and set about developing his theory of massive and coordinated Soviet deception (‘‘disinformation’’) supported by high-level penetration of all western intelligence and security services.’ Couple that with an overwhelming belief that Moscow Centre was a lot more efficient than it really was, and the stage was set for the witch-hunts. As Allen Dulles wrote in 1963: ‘Soviet intelligence is over-confident, over-complicated, and over-estimated.’

The 2003 invasion of Iraq wasn’t the first time that the United States has gone to war based on inaccurate information supplied to the administration by the intelligence agencies. Sometimes intelligence agencies will choose not to send the White House information that they know will anger the president. The Gulf of Tonkin incident did not play out in the way in which it was initially presented to President Johnson, upon which he based the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 7 August 1964.

Between 1960 and July 1962, the CIA had tried sending teams of trained South Vietnamese agents into North Vietnam; these had been unsuccessful. Thereafter, responsibility for actions against the North Vietnamese was transferred to the Defence Department, which began OPLAN34-63, a series of offensives against the North Vietnamese coastline in autumn 1963, and then refined them as OPLAN34A that December (although it seems no one thought to inform the NSA’s Asian desk of the operation.)

The USS
Maddox
was equipped for SIGINT work and sent into the Gulf of Tonkin on 28 July 1964, reassured by the commander of the SIGINT group in Taiwan that their ship would be in no danger. However, an OPLAN34A raid which took place on 31 July seriously annoyed the North Vietnamese – and they responded by sending three torpedo boats after the
Maddox
. The
Maddox
was warned of the impending engagement by NSA intercepts of North Vietnamese orders; when the boats approached, the US ship fired warning shots before the Vietnamese fired. At the end of combat, one of the torpedo boats had been sunk, and the other two damaged.

President Johnson was briefed on the attack the next day, and decided to keep his cool: he ordered the
Maddox
to resume its mission, albeit guarded by a destroyer, the
Turner Joy
, and air support. Further OPLAN34A attacks took place the following day, and SIGINT suggested that the North Vietnamese would respond again.

On 4 August, everything seemed to indicate that the
Maddox
was about to be attacked again. North Vietnamese patrol boats had shadowed them for part of the time, and in the evening, they believed they were being followed by two surface and three air contacts. The
Turner Joy
and the
Maddox
opened fire on a radar contact at 9.30 that night, and it seemed as if they engaged in a pitched battle with around six patrol boats.

But while that news electrified Washington, and preparations for airstrikes were made, in the Gulf the captains on the
Turner Joy
and the
Maddox
were reviewing the action, and realized that, as Captain Herrick said, ‘Certain that original ambush [on 2 August] was bonafide. Details of action following present a confusing picture.’ In Washington, Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defence, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff decided that an attack had taken place – based on two NSA intercepts, one stating that a North Vietnamese boat had shot at American aircraft; the other that two planes had been
shot down, and two Vietnamese ships had been lost. As the NSA’s own history explained, ‘The reliance on SIGINT even went to the extent of overruling the commander on the scene. It was obvious to the president and his advisers that there really had been an attack – they had the North Vietnamese messages to prove it.’ There was one serious problem though. The messages were timed during the ‘battle’ itself – yet referred to the reaction of the North Vietnamese to its conclusion. It was enough to start the conflict. (With the benefit of hindsight, McNamara accepted that the evidence wasn’t strong enough, and that the attack didn’t happen; based on a number of comments he made, President Johnson had doubts from the start.)

However, much as this may have been a misuse of the spies’ work, it is clear that Johnson’s administration was looking for a trigger to begin the war, and as the NSA themselves pointed out, ‘Had the 4 August incident not occurred, something else would have.’

The latter half of the sixties was, to a large degree, a time when spies engaged in the Cold War got on with their business. There weren’t many events that caused major changes to the way espionage was carried out – to the extent that many histories of the period touch on the Vietnam War, and the continuing hunts within the security services for KGB moles as revealed by Golitsyn, but mention little else.

This is slightly ironic, given that this is the era when spies were at the forefront of popular culture: the James Bond movies, based increasingly loosely on the novels by Ian Fleming, were released virtually annually in the sixties. They gave rise to many imitators, including the Matt Helm film thrillers featuring Dean Martin as the sort of self-promoting agent that no self-respecting agency would want near them (but whose weaknesses they would be more than happy to take advantage of to blackmail him), and the TV series
The
Man From U.N.C.L.E.
, which predated glasnost with its partnership of American agent Napoleon Solo (a pre-
Hustle
Robert Vaughn) and Russian Illya Kuryakin (
NCIS
’ David McCallum). (The CIA even includes memorabilia from the series in its museum at Langley, Virginia, USA.) The backlash to these over-the-top adventures gave rise to the more realistic novels of John le Carré, such as
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
, and Adam Hall (the
Quiller
series). Le Carré had served in the British security services in the post-Second World War period, although he acknowledged that he was one of those whose covers would have been blown by Kim Philby before the defection of Burgess and Maclean removed him from office.

The KGB assisted in the removal of Nikita Khruschev from office in 1964 and the rise to power of Leonid Brehznev. Shelyepin found himself sidelined, with Yuri Andropov promoted to Chairman of the KGB in 1967. For them, the sixties were a period of re-entrenchment, to make up for the loss of the spy rings thanks to the various defectors.

Although they weren’t able to infiltrate an agent into either MI5 or MI6, the KGB were active in Britain during the decade. One of their most useful men was Sirioj Husein Abdoolcader, who worked as a clerk at the Greater London Council motor licensing department. Recruited in 1967, Abdoolcader had access to the number plates of the cars of all the MI5 and Special Branch vehicles, so any surveillance carried out by the security services on the London residency personnel was immediately compromised.

Following on from their success in penetrating the Manhattan Project two decades earlier, Moscow Centre targeted scientific and technological personnel, creating a new ‘Directorate T’ specifically to deal with the new intelligence field. Some agents may have had lucky escapes, thanks to the difficulties that the security services faced in proving their case. Dr Guiseppe Martelli, who had worked at the Atomic
Energy Authority, was arrested in 1963 but, even though he was found with one-time pads and other spy tools, MI5 were unable to gain a conviction, since they couldn’t provide evidence that he had been in contact with those who had access to classified information. Two workers at the Kodak factory accused of selling film-process material to the East German intelligence agency, the HVA, were similarly acquitted in 1965. It seems probable that a number of similar cases didn’t get to court – according to Oleg Gordievsky, the Directorate T records indicate those that ended in conviction were only ‘the tip of the iceberg’.

Two cases were successfully prosecuted during this decade in Britain. Frank Bossard, a project manager at the Ministry of Aviation, was recruited by the GRU around the time that he was transferred to working on guided weapons in 1960. Until he was betrayed by the testimony of GRU officer and CIA asset Dimitri Polyakov in 1965, he was regularly leaving film of classified documents in dead letter boxes in return for cash.

Douglas Britten, described as ‘a good actor and an accomplished liar’ by a Security Commission following his conviction, also betrayed secrets for cash. Recruited in 1962, he tried to break off contact during his posting to the listening stations on Cyprus in 1966, but was then blackmailed by his KGB controller with a photo showing him receiving payments from the Soviets. He was transferred back to RAF Digby in Lancashire, where the KGB pressured him to provide more information. Britten was photographed visiting the Soviet consulate, arrested, and although he cooperated with MI5, he was sentenced to twenty-one years’ imprisonment.

Nicholas Praeger also worked assiduously for the Eastern bloc during the sixties, although he was turned and handled by the Czech intelligence agency, the Státní Bezpeènost (StB). A committed Communist, Praeger was a top radar technician with access to secret material by the time he was recruited by the StB in 1959. His value to the StB increased after he left the
RAF, and joined the English Electric Company, which was working on radar-jamming equipment aboard British nuclear strike bombers. Moscow described his information as ‘the best intelligence yet provided by the StB’. When StB officer Josef Frolik defected to the West in 1969 following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia the previous year (leaving from a secret holiday camp for secret agents in Bulgaria!), he gave his interrogators sufficient information to help identify Praeger, who was eventually arrested and convicted in 1971.

The StB were instrumental in turning important people in other professions too: they found that British politicians and trade unionists were more susceptible to a friendly approach from a Czechoslovak than a Russian, usually maintaining that the mistrust between London and Prague was unjustified. Once they received payment for their time writing about promoting new links, they belonged to the StB.

One key agent was Labour politician Will Owen, about whom his fellow MP Leo Abse said later, ‘Owen certainly did his best to rape his motherland.’ Recruited in 1954, he was known as ‘Greedy bastard’ by his StB controllers, interested solely in the fees and free holidays in Czechoslovakia he could get. Owen passed over highly secret material on the British Army of the Rhine and the British portion of NATO until he too was betrayed by Frolik.

John Stonehouse, the Labour MP who infamously faked his own suicide in 1974, worked for the StB for an extended period of time, although he denied that he was an agent when accused by MI5, following Frolik’s defection. Frolik claimed that Stonehouse ‘put [the StB] in a position to know a great deal about certain British military and counter-intelligence operations’, but at the time that was the only real evidence against him. A later defector, code-named Affirm, confirmed in 1980 that Stonehouse had been working for the Czechs, but the StB had been disappointed by the amount of intelligence he was able to provide once he became a minister.

The StB had their hands full with Tom Driberg, who was a double or triple agent, also working for MI5 and the KGB. An MP since 1945, and even chairman of the Labour party for a year, Driberg was able to provide his various masters with information about the habits of MPs, which could be used to blackmail them. Known as ‘Lord of the Spies’ when elevated to the peerage in 1975, he claimed to MI5 that he only ever passed harmless stuff to his Communist contacts.

A fourth MP, code-named Gustav by the StB, has never been properly identified; some claim that Frolik’s description matched Sir Barnett Stross, who died in 1967, but it has been pointed out that any information he was in a position to pass on could as easily have been obtained openly from the Transport & General Workers’ Union headquarters at Transport House in London.

In June 2012, as this book was being written, Conservative minister Raymond Mawby’s career working for the StB through the sixties was uncovered: code name Laval was first contacted in 1960 at a cocktail party at the Czechoslovakian embassy. His weakness was money: ‘His leisure time he spends in bars . . . and also loves gambling,’ one Czech agent noted. ‘While playing roulette and other games he is willing to accept a monetary ‘‘loan’’ which was exploited twice.’ Mawby was the only Conservative MP known to work for the Eastern bloc, passing over details of key members of the party as well as official and handwritten floor plans of offices at the House of Commons. The relationship only ended in 1971 after a number of Eastern bloc agents were thrown out of the UK: ‘Considering the worsening operational conditions in Great Britain and after evaluating dangerous signals . . . we are forbidding all contacts with him,’ states a note in his file.

The StB didn’t confine its operations to the United Kingdom. In October 1968, a rash of apparent suicides in West Germany could be linked to the discovery of a spy ring run by the Czech security service. On 8 October, Major-General
Horst Wendland, the deputy chief of the BND, shot himself in his office; it was later confirmed that he had been working for the StB. The same day, his friend Rear-Admiral Hermann Lüdke, the deputy head of NATO’s logistics division, was found dead on a private hunting estate, shortly after the discovery of photographs of top-secret documents taken by him with a Minox camera of the sort used by the Eastern bloc services. Incredibly, they had been found by a darkroom assistant alongside holiday snaps that Lüdke was having developed. Within a few days, Colonel Johannes Grimm, who worked in the German Defence Ministry, was found fatally shot; Gerald Bohm, also in the Defence Ministry, was found drowned in the Rhine river; Edeltraud Grapentin, a liaison with the Information Ministry, died from an overdose of sleeping pills; and Hans-Heinrich Schenk, a researcher at the Economics Ministry, was found hanged in an apartment in Cologne.