Spycatcher (12 page)

"My boy. He is an actor." He pointed to a picture of young Peter on the mantelpiece. "Do you have children, Peter?" I told him I had three, two girls and a young boy.

"Tell him not to join, then," he said quietly. "I would not want my boy to join this game of ours. The gentlemen run the business, and gentlemen have short memories..."

Almost as soon as it arrived, his bitterness melted away. He asked about the office, about Guy Liddell, Dick White, and Malcolm Cumming, all of whom had been closely involved with him during the wartime years. Finally, as late-afternoon darkness closed in on the room, I left. We shook hands and he returned alone to the vodka and his piles of books.

I was too drunk that night to do anything other than go home. But the next morning I tackled Cumming on the subject. He looked embarrassed.

"But I'm sure we sorted his pension out years ago," he barked in a voice louder than usual. "Good God, poor Klop. I'll see Dick straightaway."

Further questioning was pointless. Who precisely had been to blame for forgetting Klop Ustinov was lost in the chase around the mulberry bush of responsibility, an occupation much favored by bureaucrats when oversights are discovered. Ustinov did get his pension, although I never saw him again after that meeting. Not long afterward he died. But at least his widow had the benefit of it. The silver Kremlin operation soon petered out, overruled by the Foreign Office. In truth my heart went out of it that afternoon in Kensington. But I learned a lesson I never forgot: that MI5 expects its officers to remain loyal unto the grave, without necessarily offering loyalty in return.

But in the main, the 1950s were years of fun, and A Branch a place of infectious laughter. As Hugh Winterborn always said: "MI5 is a great life, if you can stand the excitement!" Like the time when we were fitting listening devices in a safe house next door to the Hungarian Embassy. I climbed onto the roof to install an aerial and was seen by a neighbor, who reported seeing a burglar on the prowl. Within ten minutes the police were knocking at the door, accompanied by the neighbor, and pandemonium reigned. Here we were, surrounded by the latest listening technology, receivers and cables spread across the floor. Winterborn desperately lifted the floorboards and began to shovel tens of thousands of pounds' worth of equipment underneath. The knocking got louder. Then burly shoulders began to force the front door. They were clearly convinced by the noise that a burglary was in progress. Finally, everything was relatively shipshape, and I opened the door sheepishly and explained that I was doing some authorized late-night renovations for the owner. I gave the policeman a number to ring to confirm the fact. It was the local Special Branch number.

Even funnier was the time we did a similar job against the Polish Embassy in Portland Street. The house next door was temporarily empty, and A2 obtained access to install a series of microphones. Hugh Winterborn and I led a team of twelve officers from A Branch. Silence was imperative because we knew that the target premises were permanently manned near the party wall. I made a tremendous fuss insisting that everyone remove his shoes to avoid making noise on the bare floorboards. We worked nonstop for four hours in the freezing cold. All the floorboards on the first floor had been raised and I was patiently threading the cables along the void between the joists. After a time one of the leads became tangled on a split joist. Unable to clear the obstruction by hand, I began to ease myself down until one foot was resting on a masonry nail sticking out from one side of a joist. Just as I was inching toward the tangled cable, the nail gave way, and I plunged through the ceiling below. A large section of ceiling crashed fourteen feet to the floor below, reverberating around Portland Place like a wartime bomb. The noise and dust subsided, leaving me wedged tightly up to my waist in the hole in the ceiling.

For a moment there was total silence.

"Good thing we removed our shoes," quipped Winterborn dryly as laughter began to echo around the empty building.

Luckily the neighbors must have been asleep, because no policemen arrived. Leslie Jagger quickly repaired the lath work, replastering and repainting the damage before morning with his quick-drying materials.

"Close shave, that one, Peter," he said as he applied the final lick of paint. "If you'd come through the ornamental rose we'd have been absolutely buggered."

But accidents like these were rare occurrences. In the main, MI5 technical operations became, under Hugh and me, highly professional, in sharp contrast to MI6 activities in the same field. MI6, in the mid 1950s, never settled for a disaster if calamity could be found instead. The best example I ever heard concerned one of their training operations. They placed a junior officer in an MI6 flat, and detailed another team of recruits to find and interrogate him. MI5 were always routinely informed about these operations in case anything went wrong.

One afternoon A2 got a phone call from MI6 pleading for help. The MI6 search party had apparently miscounted the floors of the apartment block where their target was holed up. They picked the lock of the flat one floor above, and proceeded to go to work on the man inside. He, of course, protested his innocence, but believing this to be part of the ruse, the search party consulted the MI6 textbook marked "persuasion," and went to work as only enthusiastic amateurs can. By the time they had finished, the man was stripped naked and singing like a bird. He was, in reality, a jewel thief, who had recently pulled off a diamond robbery. He produced the baubles still in his possession, obviously believing that his captors were visitors from a vengeful underworld.

Hugh Winterborn split his sides laughing as the unfortunate MI6 officer begged for advice on what to do with the jewel thief, the diamonds, and a wrecked flat. In the end the thief was given two hours to make for the Continent and Leslie Jagger went over to the flat and repaired the damage.

After I had been in A2 for two or three years, MI6 began to call on me to help them plan their technical operations. I never much enjoyed working with MI6. They invariably planned operations which, frankly, stood little chance of technical success. They were always looking for a successor to the Berlin Tunnel - something on the epic scale which would have the Americans thirsting to share in the product. But they never found it, and in the process failed to build a sensible bedrock of smaller successes. There was, too, a senseless bravado about the way they behaved which I felt often risked the security of the operations. In Bonn, for instance, we were planning a DEW WORM-style operation on the Russian Embassy compound.

Local MI6 station officers wandered onto the site and even, on one occasion, engaged the KGB security guards in casual conversation. It made for good dining-out stories, but contributed little to the weekly ministerial intelligence digests. The foolhardiness was invariably punctuated by flights of absurd pomposity. In Bonn I made the perfectly sensible suggestion that we should use German cable so that if the operation were discovered MI6 could disown it and blame it on the local intelligence service.

"Good Lord, Peter! We can't do that," gushed the MI6 station chief with his nose in the air. "It wouldn't be ethical."

Ethics, so far as I could ascertain, were displayed by MI6 purely for Whitehall or MI5 consumption. In fact MI6, under its chief, Sir John Sinclair, had become a virtual liability. It still refused to face up to the appalling consequences of Philby's being a Soviet spy. It was operating in the modern world with 1930s attitudes and 1930s personnel and equipment. It was little surprise to me when they stumbled, in April 1956, into their greatest blunder of all, the Crabbe affair.

The Soviet leaders Khrushchev and Bulganin paid a visit to Britain on the battleship ORDZHONIKIDZE, docking at Portsmouth. The visit was designed to improve Anglo-Soviet relations at a sensitive time. MI5 decided to operate against Khrushchev in his rooms at Claridge's Hotel. Normally Claridge's has permanent Special Facilities installed on the hotel telephone system, because so many visitors stay there who are of interest to MI5. But we knew the Russians were sending a team of sweepers in to check Khrushchev's suite before he arrived, so we decided it was the right time to use for the first time the specially modified SF which John Taylor had developed in the Dollis Hill Laboratory. The new SF did not require a washer to be fitted, so it was virtually undetectable. The telephone could be activated over short distances using shortwave high-frequency megacycles. We set the SF activation up in an office of the Grosvenor Estates near Claridge's. It worked perfectly. Throughout Khrushchev's visit his room was permanently covered. In fact, the intelligence gathered was worthless. Khrushchev was far too canny a bird to discuss anything of value in a hotel room. I remember sitting up on the seventh floor with a transcriber translating loosely for me. We listened to Khrushchev for hours at a time, hoping for pearls to drop. But there were no clues to the last days of Stalin, or to the fate of the KGB henchman Beria.

Instead, there were long monologues from Khrushchev addressed to his valet on the subject of his attire. He was an extraordinarily vain man. He stood in front of the mirror preening himself for hours at a time, and fussing with his hair parting. I recall thinking that in Eden, Khrushchev had found the perfect match. Both were thoroughly unscrupulous men, whose only interest lay in cutting a dash on the world stage.

But while MI5 were discreetly bugging Khrushchev, MI6 launched a botched operation against the ORDZHONIKIDZE. The operation was run by the MI6 London Station, commanded by Nicholas Elliott, the son of the former headmaster of Eton. MI6 wanted to measure the propeller of the Russian battleship, because there was confusion in the Admiralty as to why she was able to travel so much faster than had originally been estimated by Naval Intelligence. Elliott arranged for a frogman, the unfortunate Commander "Buster" Crabbe, to take on the assignment.

In fact, this was not the first time MI6 had attempted this operation. A year before, they tried to investigate the hull of the ORDZHONIKIDZE while she was in port in the Soviet Union. They used one of the X-Craft midget submarines which MI6 kept down in Stokes Bay. These had dry compartments to enable a diver to get in and out and were small enough to pass undetected into inshore waters. A Naval frogman had attempted to enter the harbor, but security was too tight and the mission was aborted.

The second attempt in Portsmouth ended in disaster. Crabbe was overweight and overage. He disappeared, although a headless body which was later washed up was tentatively identified as his. John Henry, MI6 London Station's Technical Officer, had informed me that MI6 were planning the Crabbe operation, and I told Cumming. He was doubtful about it from the start. It was a typical piece of MI6 adventurism, ill-conceived and badly executed. But we all kept our fingers crossed. Two days later a panic-stricken John Henry arrived in Cumming's office telling us that Crabbe had disappeared.

"I told Nicholas not to use Buster; he was heading for a heart attack as it was," he kept saying.

We were highly skeptical of the heart attack theory, but there was no time for speculation. The secret MI6 parlor game was at risk of becoming embarrassingly public. Crabbe and his MI6 accomplice had signed into a local hotel under their own names.

"There'll be a fearful row if this comes out," snapped Cumming. "We'll all be for the pavilion!"

Cumming buzzed through to Dick White's office and asked to see him immediately. We all trooped upstairs, Dick was sitting at his desk. There was no hint of a welcoming smile. His charm had all but deserted him, and the years of schoolmaster training came to the fore.

"The Russians have just asked the Admiralty about the frogman, and they've had to deny any knowledge. I'm afraid it looks to me rather as if the lid will come off before too long," he said tersely.

"John, how on earth did you get yourself into this mess?" he asked with sudden exasperation.

Henry was chastened, but explained that the Navy had been pressing them for months for details of the ORDZHONIKIDZE'S propeller.

"You know what Eden is like," he said bitterly, "one minute he says you can do something, the next minute not. We thought it was an acceptable risk to take."

White looked unconvinced. He smoothed his temples. He shuffled his papers. The clock ticked gently in the corner. Telltale signs of panic oozed from every side of the room.

"We must do everything we can to help you, of course," he said, finally breaking the painful silence. "I will go and see the PM this evening, and see if I can head the thing off. In the meantime, Malcolm will put A2 at your disposal."

A thankful John Henry retreated from the room. Cumming telephoned the CID in Portsmouth and arranged for the hotel register to be sanitized. Winterborn and Henry rushed down to Portsmouth to clear up any loose ends. But it was not enough to avert a scandal. That night Khrushchev made a public complaint about the frogman, and a humiliated Eden was forced to make a statement in the House of Commons.

The intelligence community in London is like a small village in the Home Counties. Most people in the senior echelons know each other at least well enough to drink with in their clubs. For some weeks after the Crabbe affair, the village hummed in anticipation at the inevitable reckoning which everyone knew to be coming. As one of the few people inside MI5 who knew about the Crabbe affair before it began, I kept my head down on John Henry's advice.

"There's blood all over the floor,'' he confided to me shortly afterward. "We've got Edward Bridges in here tearing the place apart."

Shortly after this, Cumming strode into my office one morning looking genuinely upset.

"Dick's leaving," he muttered. "They want him to take over MI6."

The decision to appoint Dick White as Chief of MI6 was, I believe, one of the most important mistakes made in postwar British Intelligence history. There were few signs of it in the mid-1950s, but MI5, under his control, was taking the first faltering steps along the path of modernization. He knew the necessity for change, and yet had the reverence for tradition which would have enabled him to accomplish his objectives without disruption. He was, above all, a counterintelligence officer, almost certainly the greatest of the twentieth century, perfectly trained for the Director-General's chair. He knew the people, he knew the problems, and he had a vision of the sort of effective counterespionage organization he wanted to create. Instead, just as his work was beginning, he was moved on a politician's whim to an organization he knew little about, and which was profoundly hostile to his arrival. He was never to be as successful there as he had been in MI5.