Spycatcher (22 page)

Copying the code pads without arousing Lonsdale's suspicions was much more difficult. Without access to each sheet of the pads we would be unable to decipher his traffic. I knew from the Radiations Operations Committee that the Swiss intelligence service had recently found an abandoned KGB onetime pad, so I arranged for MI6 to ask the Swiss if they would be prepared to allow us to borrow it. They agreed, and I drove out to London Airport to meet the RAF plane which flew it over specially for us. The Swiss pad was very similar to Lonsdale's; each edge was covered with a thin film of glue to hold the pages together. We took it apart, and analyzed the glue. It was non-Western, but the Post Office technicians were confident they could make some up.

We went into the bank again on the evening of Saturday, September 17, removed the suitcase, and took it to St. Paul's. The pads were

delicately taken apart and each page individually photographed. Then the originals were placed in a specially made jig, which held them tightly together so we could recoat the edges with our newly made-up glue solution. In the early hours of Sunday morning, we took the suitcase back to the bank, and waited for Lonsdale to return.

A few days later, I received a call from Tony Sale. He sounded distinctly agitated.

"There's something you ought to see. Some of the LIONSBEARD recording..."

LIONSBEARD was the code name given to the continuous RAFTER operation on the Russian Embassy. I took a taxi to Kensington Park Gardens, and ducked into our safe house on the next street. Tony Sale met me in the hall, and handed over a sheet of the LIONSBEARD needle printout.

"Any idea what that is?" he asked, pointing to two sudden bursts of receiver activity inside the Embassy in September.

"What dates are these?"

"Seems to be September 6, which was a Tuesday, and the other one is last Sunday - that's the 18th," he replied.

"Good God," I gasped, "they're the dates of the bank operations!"

Watchers had been used lightly during both operations to remove Lonsdale's suitcase from the bank. With a mixture of panic and despair, I took the printouts back to Leconfield House, and tabulated the exact times the Russian receiver was operating against A4's records of Watcher operations. The LIONSBEARD readings matched the A4 records perfectly. The Russians must have guessed we were onto Lonsdale.

I called for all the LIONSBEARD records, going back two and a half years, and laboriously checked through them all to see if there were other examples where the Russians had used their receivers in the middle of a Saturday or a Monday night. There was not a single occasion, other than these two, where the Russians listened between the hours of midnight to 5 A.M.

I took the material to Furnival Jones, and we went straight up to Hollis' office. He took the news calmly, and agreed the evidence of a leak looked strong. He instructed Furnival Jones to begin another urgent investigation into the Watcher service, and in view of the fact that Lonsdale was almost certainly a KGB illegal, transferred control of the case from D2 (Czechs and Poles) to Arthur Martin in D1 (Soviet Counterespionage).

On the face of it, Lonsdale's departure abroad provided the best test as to whether our suspicions were well founded. We all agreed that if he stayed away, it would prove he knew we were onto him. If he came back, it would indicate we were in the clear. Lonsdale had told Houghton he would try to get back for their meeting on October 1.

Tension began to rise inside Leconfield House, as Furnival Jones' Watcher investigations once more drew a blank. Houghton traveled to London, but no one turned up to meet him. Even Furnival Jones seemed

visibly shaken as the days ticked by without any sign of Lonsdale. Then, on October 17, our observation post opposite Lonsdale's office in Wardour Street identified him entering the building. The doubt and suspicion, which had been growing in intensity, melted away as we threw our energies into the hunt.

Lonsdale soon picked up his old life, running his jukebox business, meeting Houghton, and dating a great variety of attractive girls. He was not due to repossess his flat in the White House until early November, but where he was staying was a mystery. Every night he left his offices in Wardour Street and headed westward. Arthur and I laid down strict controls on the Watcher operations after Lonsdale's return. We were determined there would be no more mistakes. Overt watching was prohibited, and strict radio silence was imposed on all operations. Jim Skardon exploded at this apparent intrusion into his empire. He was not indoctrinated for RAFTER, and could not understand why radios were prohibited. He complained to Furnival Jones but was told firmly that there were good reasons for the new policy.

Arthur and I realized it would be impossible to follow a trained and experienced intelligence officer like Lonsdale for any distance without alerting him to the fact, so we devised a new semistatic technique.

Every night a team of Watchers picked him up and followed for a short distance, before peeling off. The next day Lonsdale was picked up by a new set of Watchers where the previous team had given up the chase, and followed another short distance, and so on, at successively increasing distances from his Wardour Street office. The whole operation took two weeks, and we even employed wives and volunteers from the office to supplement the Watcher staff so we never used the same faces twice.

Eventually we tracked Lonsdale to 45 Cranleigh Gardens, Ruislip, in West London. Lonsdale was evidently staying with the occupants of the small house, Peter and Helen Kroger, a New Zealand couple who ran a small bookshop specializing in Americana antique books. We set up a static observation post in the house opposite, and waited, confident that none of the occupants knew of our presence.

In mid-November Lonsdale moved back into his flat in the White House, collecting his suitcase from the Midland Bank shortly beforehand. We immediately arranged for a GCHQ technician, Arthur Spencer, to move into the flat next door to begin our RAFTER operations. For the next three months Spencer scarcely set foot outside the tiny flat. We installed a noncontact tap on the mains supply feeding Lonsdale's receiver which was connected to a silent buzzer. The buzzer was worn as an earpiece by Spencer, so that even if Lonsdale used his radio set during the night, the buzzer would alert him. Whenever the buzzer sounded, Spencer tuned the RAFTER receivers, found the frequency Lonsdale was listening to, and alerted GCHQ Palmer Street. Palmer Street then relayed the signal down to GCHQ in Cheltenham. There, using our copy of Lonsdale's onetime pad, a GCHQ cryptanalyst named Bill Collins decrypted the message, and relayed it back up to London to Arthur and me in Leconfield House via an enciphered telex link.

The first time Lonsdale received a message, Bill Collins was unable to decipher it. There was no indicator group in the traffic. An indicator group is a group EN CLAIR, in other words a group from the onetime pad with no coded additive. The recipient uses this to position the message on the pad at the right place, so it can be deciphered. (After Lonsdale was arrested we discovered that the indicator group was in fact enciphered, using his real date of birth.)

Arthur and I began to wonder if, perhaps, Lonsdale realized his pads were compromised, and was using a new set brought back with him from abroad. The only thing we could do was burgle his flat and check inside the lighter again, to see if the pads had been used. Winterborn and I went in on a day when Lonsdale went to Suffolk for his jukebox business. It was a small flat, rather depressingly spartan, with barely space for more than a bed. We opened the lighter; the pads were still there, and new pages had been torn away, so they were obviously still in use. When I looked carefully I realized that Lonsdale had used more lines than were needed to encipher the message he had received from Moscow. When the message was stepped down the pad by the number of excess lines, the message read satisfactorily.

For the next two months we successfully monitored Lonsdale's biweekly messages from Moscow. Most of them concerned "the Shah," the KGB cryptonym for Houghton. Lonsdale was given specific instructions on how to handle him, which questions to ask, and what documents he should attempt to procure from Portland. But other messages were personal, containing family news about his wife and his children back in Russia. They wanted him home after five years' undercover service.

On Monday, January 2, Hollis chaired a full review of the case. Arthur argued strongly that we should allow the case to run on. He felt instinctively that Lonsdale was too valuable an illegal to be running simply the one spy, Houghton. We still knew very little about the Krogers, and their house at 45 Cranleigh Gardens, beyond the fact that shortly after Lonsdale went to stay, high-grade Chubbs and window locks were fitted to the house, including the access to the roof. For all we knew, Lonsdale might be only one part of a much larger network.

Furnival Jones and I supported Arthur, and Hollis agreed to approach the Admiralty (whose secrets Houghton was betraying) to ask permission to leave Houghton unmolested for a further three months. The Admiralty agreed, and Arthur decided to minimize any further risk by running the case on without any form of physical surveillance, relying simply on our interception of Lonsdale's radio traffic to lead us to further spies.

Two days later our plan was rudely shattered. A sealed message was delivered to Hollis by Cleeve Cram, the CIA officer assigned to the American Embassy in London for liaison with MI5 .The message warned MI5 that Sniper had informed the CIA that he intended defecting to the United States on the following day, January 5. Once again, we convened in Hollis' office. There was really only one course of action.

Houghton, Lonsdale, and presumably also the Krogers would all be blown by the defection. We had to arrest them before they were withdrawn.

Fortunately, Houghton was due for his January meeting with Lonsdale on the Saturday, January 7, and we also knew that Lonsdale was due to receive his radio message early that morning, so we would know if Moscow sent him a warning.

Arranging the arrests was a prodigious feat of logistics, and for the next three days I barely slept. Charles Elwell, Houghton's case officer, was sent to Portland, ready to search Houghton's premises as soon as he was given word the arrests were successfully accomplished.

Bill Collins came up from Cheltenham and based himself in Palmer Street, ready to decrypt Lonsdale's message the instant it came through. The Special Branch were put on standby outside Lonsdale's flat, ready to make an immediate arrest if the Moscow message sent him scurrying for cover.

On the Friday night Arthur and I gathered in the third-floor operations room in Leconfield House, ready for the all-night vigil. It was a small office, painted a ghastly Civil Service brown. It could have been a prison cell. A metal-framed bed ran along one wall, A small table stood in the middle. Cables trailed across the floor in thick, tangled bunches. Telephones linked us to Special Branch headquarters, to GCHQ, and to the DG, and a small speaker relayed to us every sound inside Lonsdale's flat in the White House.

Arthur sat hunched over the table, chain-smoking. Hugh Winterborn was tense and excited, and said very little. Furnival Jones was there too, with his shoes off, reclining on the bed in his braces. Although he was the Director of D Branch, he felt a strong loyalty to the troops, and was determined to see it through with us. He even went to the pub in Shepherd's Market and brought us back sandwiches. We drank Scotch through the small hours, as the ashtrays filled up.

We listened as Lonsdale returned late from a carefree evening on the town. He was with a girl. I discreetly muted the volume as the sound of their passionate lovemaking filtered through to us. When it was all quiet in the flat, I asked Arthur how long he thought Lonsdale would serve in prison.

"Fifteen at least," he replied.

Hugh Winterborn looked troubled. He was a religious man, and found no joy in the thought of a man's life ruined. I poured myself another drink.

"I can't help thinking of his wife and kids..." I said lamely. They knew what I meant. They had seen the intercepts of Lonsdale's messages, as I had: the talk of home, and family hardships, and birthdays, and children who missed their father. Lonsdale, for all his professionalism, was a very human spy. Like many men away on business, he was homesick, and sought solace in the company of other women.

"It's not as if he's a traitor... not like Houghton. He's just doing his job like us."

"That's enough!" Furnival Jones flashed angrily from the bed. "He went into this with his eyes wide open. He could have come as a diplomat. He knew what the risks were. He deserves everything he gets!"

I stayed silent. But the thought was there inside us all. We had seen almost too much of Lonsdale over the past two months.

Toward morning Lonsdale woke the girl up, and persuaded her to leave. He said he had urgent business to attend to, which in a way was true. When she left we heard him pull out his radio set, and prepare his pads to receive the message from Moscow. The radio crackled for a few minutes, and Lonsdale's pencil scratched out the decrypt. We could tell there was no warning from the way he sauntered into the bathroom, singing jauntily to himself in Russian. A few minutes later the green telephone rang, and Bill Collins gave us the text of the message over a scrambled line. It was a routine report, more talk of the family, more news from home. There was no warning or alarm.

Special Branch were told to prepare to make the arrest as Lonsdale received his package from Houghton that afternoon. At five the Special Branch line rang.

"Last Act is finished" said a voice. Last Act was Lonsdale's code name. His prison performance was about to begin.

Hugh Winterborn went straight over to the White House to search Lonsdale's flat, while Arthur and I waited for news of the Krogers' arrest. At seven, tired but elated, we drove out to Ruislip in my car. By the time we reached Cranleigh Gardens, the place was in chaos.

Police were everywhere, searching the house almost at random. I tried to take control, but it was useless. Arthur vainly protested as a detective took out a plastic bag containing chemicals.