Spycatcher (2 page)

Brundrett instructed me to draw up a paper assessing them, and the meeting broke up.

As I was leaving, a man from the Post Office Technical Department, John Taylor, who had talked at some length during the meeting about post office work on listening devices, introduced himself. "We'll be working together on this," he said, as we exchanged telephone numbers. "I'll be in touch next week."

On the drive back to Great Baddow, Father and I discussed the meeting excitedly. It had been so gloriously unpredictable, in the way that

Whitehall often was during the war and had so seldom been since. I was thrilled at the opportunity to escape from antisubmarine work; he because it continued the thread of secret intelligence which had run through the family for four and a half decades.

- 2 -

My father joined the Marconi Company from university in 1912, and began work as an engineer on an improved method of detecting radio signals.

Together with Captain H. J. Round, he succeeded in developing a vacuum receiver which made the interception of long-range communications possible for the first time.

Two days before World War I began, he was working with these receivers in the old Marconi Laboratory at Hall Street, Chelmsford, when he realized he was picking up German naval signals. He took the first batch to the Marconi works manager, Andrew Gray, who was a personal friend of Captain Reggie Hall, the head of the Naval Intelligence Department.

Hall was the dominant figure in British Intelligence during World War I and was responsible for attacking German ciphers from the famous Admiralty Room 40. He arranged for my father to travel up to Liverpool Street Station on the footplate of a specially chartered locomotive.

After studying the material he insisted Marconi release my father to build intercept and direction-finding stations for the Navy.

The central problem facing Naval Intelligence at the outbreak of World War I was how to detect the German High Seas Fleet putting to sea in time to enable the British Fleet, based at Scapa Flow, to intercept them. Naval Intelligence knew that when the German Fleet was quiescent she lay at the eastern end of the Kiel Canal. Hall believed it might be possible to detect the German Commander-in-Chief's wireless communications on board his flagship as they passed through the Kiel Canal into the North Sea.

My father set to work to design sufficiently sensitive equipment and eventually developed "aperiodic" direction-finding. This enabled the bearing of the wanted signal to be accurately identified among the mass of other interfering signals. It took several years to become operational but eventually became an important weapon in the war against the U boats. Even today all direction-finding equipment is "aperiodic."

In 1915, before the system was fully operational, my father suggested to Hall that the best solution was to locate a direction finder in Christiania (now Oslo). Norway at this time was neutral, but the British Embassy could not be used for fear of alerting the Germans, so Hall asked my father if he was prepared to go and run the station clandestinely for MI6. Within days he was on his way to Norway, posing as a commercial traveler trading in agricultural medicines. He set up in a small hotel in a side street in Christiania and rented an attic room high enough to rig direction-finding wireless without being conspicuous.

The MI6 station in the Embassy supplied him with communications and spare parts, but it was dangerous work. His radio equipment was bound to give him away eventually. He was not part of the diplomatic staff and would be denied if discovered. At best he faced internment for the rest of the war, at worst he risked the attentions of German Intelligence.

The operation ran successfully for six months, giving the Navy invaluable early warning of German Fleet intentions. Then one morning he came down to breakfast at his usual table. He looked casually across the street to see a new poster being pasted onto the wall opposite. It was his photograph with an offer of a reward for information leading to his arrest.

He had worked out his escape route with MI6 before the operation began. He quickly finished his breakfast, returned to his room, carefully packed his wireless equipment in its case and pushed it under the bed. He gathered up his travel documents, passport, and Naval identity card, leaving a substantial quantity of cash in the hope that it might encourage the hotelier to forget about him.

Rather than taking the road toward the Swedish coast which the Norwegian authorities would assume to be his most likely escape route, he set off to the southwest. Ten miles down the coast he sat down on a rock by the roadside. Sometime later, a British Naval lieutenant walked up to him and asked him who he was. Father identified himself and he was taken to a launch and ferried out to a waiting British destroyer.

Years later, when I was coming up for retirement, I tried to find the details of this operation in the MI6 files. I arranged with Sir Maurice Oldfield, the then Chief of MI6, to spend the day in their Registry looking for the papers. But I could find nothing; the MI6 weeders had routinely destroyed all the records years before.

I was born in 1916 at my grandmother's house in Chesterfield, where my mother had gone to stay while my father was in Norway for MI6. There was a Zeppelin raid on nearby Sheffield that night, and I arrived very prematurely. There were no hospital beds available because of the pressure of the war, but my mother kept me alive with an improvised incubator of glass chemical jars and hot-water bottles.

After World War I my father rejoined the Marconi Company. He became a protege of Marconi himself and was made Head of Research. We moved to a large house by the sea near Frinton. But this lasted only a few months, when we moved to a house on the outskirts of Chelmsford. The house often resembled a disused wireless factory. Radios in various states of disrepair and tin boxes filled with circuitry were hidden in every corner. My father was an intense, emotional, rather quick-tempered man - more of an artist than an engineer. As early as I can remember he used to take me out into the garden or onto the open fields above the Essex beaches to teach me the mysteries of wireless. He spent hours explaining valves and crystals and showed me how to delicately turn the dials of a set so that the random static suddenly became a clear signal. He taught me how to make my own experiments and I can still remember his pride when I demonstrated my crude skills to visiting guests like Sir Arthur Eddington and J. J. Thomson.

MI6 had close connections with the Marconi Company after World War I, and my father retained his contact with them. Marconi had a large marine division responsible for fitting and manning wireless in ships. It provided perfect cover for MI6, who would arrange with my father to have one of their officers placed as a wireless operator on a ship visiting an area in which they had an interest.

Admiral Hall was a visitor to the house; he and my father would disappear into the greenhouse together for hours at a time to discuss in private some new development. My father also knew Captain Mansfield Cumming, the first Chief of MI6. He admired Cumming greatly, for both his courage and his technical ability. He knew Captain Vernon Kell, the founder of MI5, much less well, but did not like him. As with Oxford and Cambridge, people are usually disposed either to MI5 or to MI6, and my father very definitely leaned in favor of MI6.

The Marconi Company during the 1920s was one of the most exciting places in the world for a scientist to work. Marconi, known to everyone by his initials, "G.M.," was a superb picker of men, and had the courage to invest in his visions. His greatest success was to create the first shortwave radio beam system, and he can justly claim to have laid the foundations of modern communications. As with so many British achievements, it was done against the opposition of the British Government and the top scientists of the day.

Before World War I Britain decided that a long-wave radio system should be built to replace the cable system as the principal means of communication with the Empire. The decision was held in abeyance during the war. But Marconi believed it was possible to project short wavelength transmissions over vast distances using beams. The use of shortwave beams promised a greater volume of traffic at much higher speeds. Despite the advances in wireless made during the war, Marconi's vision was derided as "amateur science" by a Royal Commission in 1922. One member even concluded that radio was "a finished art."

Marconi issued a challenge. He offered to build, free of charge, any link across the world - provided the government would suspend long-wave development until the beam system had passed its trials, and provided they would adopt it if the trials were successful. The government agreed and specified the toughest contract they could devise. They asked for a link from Grimsby to Sydney, Australia, and demanded that it operate 250 words a minute over a twelve-hour period during the trials without using more than twenty kilowatts of power. Finally they demanded that the circuit be operational within twelve months.

These were awesome specifications. Radio was still in its infancy and little was known about generating power at stable frequencies. The project would have been impossible without the commitment of the Marconi technical team, consisting of my father, Captain H J Round, and C S Franklin. Marconi had a special talent for finding brilliant scientists who were largely self-taught. He found Franklin, for instance, trimming arc lamps in an Ipswich factory for a few shillings a week. Within a few years he rose to become the outstanding technical man in the company.

The proposed Grimsby-to-Sydney link astonished the rest of the radio communications industry. My father often described in later years

walking down Broadway with David Sarnoff, the then head of RCA, when the project was at its height.

"Has Marconi gone mad?" asked Sarnoff. "This project will finish him. It'll never work."

Father replied: "G.M. and Franklin think it will."

"Well, you can kick my ass all the way down Broadway if it does," said Sarnoff.

Three months later the circuit was operational, on contract time. It worked twelve hours a day for seven days at 350 words a minute and was, in my view, one of the great technical achievements of this century. My father's only regret was that he never took the opportunity to kick Sarnoffs ass all the way down Broadway!

My youth was spent living through this great excitement. I suffered constantly through ill-health. I developed rickets and wore leg irons until practically into my teens. But there were compensations. Nearly every day when my father was at home he collected me from school and drove me to his laboratory. I would spend hours watching him and his assistants as the great race from Grimsby to Sydney unfolded. It taught me a lesson which stayed with me for life - that on the big issues the experts are very rarely right.

The 1930s opened hopefully for the Wright family. We scarcely noticed the growing worldwide financial crisis. I had joined Bishop's Stortford College, a small but hardily independent school, where I began to shine academically and finally threw off the ill-health which had dogged me since birth. I returned home for the summer holidays of 1931 having passed my school certificate with credits in all subjects. The following term I was due to join the University Group, with every expectation of a good scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge.

A week later my world disintegrated. One evening my father came home and broke the news that he and Franklin had both been sacked. It was days before he could even try to explain, and years before I understood what had happened.

In the late 1920s Marconi had merged with the Cable Companies in the belief that only by cooperation with them could wireless gain the investment necessary to ensure its emergence as the principal method of worldwide communications. But as the slump developed, wireless posed more and more of a threat to the cable interests. They were dominant in the new company and slashing cuts were made in wireless research and the installations of new systems. Marconi, old and sick, had retired to Italy, but not even an intervention from him could secure a change of heart in the new management. Franklin, my father, and many others were sacked. For the next decade long-distance wireless communication stagnated and we as a family passed into years of great hardship.

Within a few months my father slipped into the abyss of alcoholism. He could no longer afford to keep both his sons at school, and as I was older and already had my school certificate I was the one to leave. The trauma of those events brought back my ill health and I was afflicted with a chronic stammer which rendered me at times virtually speechless.

In the course of that short summer holiday I changed from a schoolboy with a secure future to a man with no future at all.

The decision to remove me from school and its effect on my health consumed my father with guilt. He drove himself to further drinking excesses. My mother coped as best she could, but bereft of status and income she gradually became isolated until the only visitors were the nurses called to restrain my father after a dangerously prolonged bout with the Scotch bottle.

Years later, when I began to search out for MI5 the well-born Englishmen who had become addicted to Communism in the 1930s, this period of my life came to fascinate me. They had enjoyed to the full the privileged background and education denied to me, while my family had suffered at the capricious hand of capitalism. I experienced at first hand the effects of slump and depression, yet it was they who turned to espionage. I became the hunter, and they the hunted.

In one sense the explanation was simple. It was 1932. I had no qualifications. I was fifteen, I needed a job, and I had little time for political philosophy. I advertised in the personal columns of THE TIMES for any work. The first reply was from a woman named Margaret Leigh, who ran a small farm called "Achnadarroch" at Plockton near Wester Ross, Scotland. I became her farmhand. There was no pay, just board and lodgings. But amid the rolling hills and endless skies of Scotland, I gradually recovered from what had gone before, and in time discovered the greatest love of my life - agriculture.