Spycatcher (3 page)
Margaret Leigh was an idealist. She wanted to run her farm as a training ground for boys from London slums so that they could obtain employment as farm managers. In the event, the idea never took off, and she decided instead to write a novel about life on Achnadarroch; she wrote while I tended the farm. And at night, when I had finished the chores, she made me read aloud what she had written until slowly my stutter was mastered. The book was eventually published and became a great success under the title HIGHLAND HOMESPUN.
In spring 1935 we were evicted from Achnadarroch by a landlord greedy for more rent than we could afford to pay. We moved to another, cheaper farm in Cornwall and our life went on much as before. My ambition at this time was to become an agricultural scientist researching into food production techniques. But with my truncated formal education I could not hope to qualify for a scholarship. There were no grants in the 1930s. Eventually, with a little help from Margaret, some astute pig dealing of my own, and a useful family connection with the Master of St. Peter's College, Oxford, I was able to raise enough money to get a place at the School of Rural Economy. A year after I reached Oxford I married my wife, Lois. It was 1938. War was in the air. Like most young people we felt we might not have too long together.
By the time I went up to Oxford my father had begun to repair the damage of the previous six years of alcoholism. At my mother's instigation he had begun to work again at the Marconi Company as a consultant. And partly, I think, he was jolted by the realization that war was once more imminent. Anxious to help as he had in 1915, he approached Sir Frederick Brundrett in the Naval Scientific Service.
Brundrett told him frankly that his reputation for alcoholism made a
senior position impossible. Instead Brundrett offered him a post as an ordinary scientific officer for a trial period. I always admired my father tremendously for this. He sacrificed half what he was earning from the Marconi Company as a consultant to come and work at an experimental bench with scientists who were twenty years younger than he was. He made no issue of having once been the Marconi head of research. In a sense I think he was anxious to atone for the past; but he also genuinely believed that war was coming and that everyone had a duty to contribute.
His long experience scanning the ether ensured that his career soon flourished again. He was given charge of technical developments of the Y intercepts - the tactical intercepts of German Communications - and later he became Chief Scientist at the Admiralty Signals Establishment. Once again he was back in the Great Game, and he rediscovered his youth. By 1943 he was responsible for drawing up the signal plans for D-Day. It was a massive task. But after every working day he sat into the small hours with his wireless, listening to the chatter of Morse, logging and analyzing it ready for the next day. I often think he was at his happiest hunched over those sets, headphones clamped around his head, trying to make sense of the mysterious electronic universe.
At the outbreak of war the School of Rural Economy closed and my tutor, Scott Watson, became Chief Scientist at the Ministry of Agriculture, taking most of the staff with him to begin the vital task of preparing the country's food supplies I was now the only member of the family not in some way involved in the war effort. My brother had joined the Services Electronics Research Laboratory and my sister was an intercept operator for the Wrens. (She later worked closely with R. V. Jones on SIGINT, and married Robert Sutton, the head of SERL.) I wrote to Brundrett in the hope that there might be a space for me somewhere in the Admiralty. To my surprise I received a telegram inviting me to his office.
Brundrett had known me for years. He was a keen farmer who successfully bred Friesian cattle and was much interested in my experiences at Achnadarroch. He asked me what I thought I could do in the Admiralty and I explained that years spent watching my father at work had given me as good a grounding in electronics as I could have got at university. Within ten minutes he had arranged for me to start at the Admiralty Research Laboratory the following week.
My section at the Admiralty Research Laboratory (ARL) was run superbly by Stephen Butterworth, who for some unknown reason was always called Sam. He was a tall, gaunt man with a curly mop of dark hair. He smoked a pipe continuously, worked like a madman, and gathered around him a team of extraordinarily talented young scientists, including Massey, Gunn, Wigglesworth, Bates, and Crick. I felt terribly insecure when I arrived at ARL because of my lack of qualifications. Every night I sat up at the kitchen table in our small flat in Hampton Wick learning advanced physics from textbooks as German bombs dropped all around. But Butterworth was a constant source of encouragement. His one failing was his greatest strength: he did the job silently, leaving self-publicity to others. At the end of the war the reward for his genius and his quiet industry was a paltry OBE.
The Admiralty Research Laboratory's contribution to winning the war has been much undervalued. One of the most pressing problems facing Britain at the outbreak of war was the threat of magnetic mines. ARL began work on developing degaussing systems to neutralize our ships' magnetic fields and thus protect them. Without a really effective system our ability to fight on in 1940 would have been seriously in question.
At Dunkirk, for instance, thousands of mines littered the shallow waters off the coast. Hitler was convinced that these would prevent any mass evacuation of British forces. Butterworth knew that the German mines worked North Pole downward only, and suggested we magnetize our ships South Pole downward so that the ships repelled the mines. The Admiralty embarked on a massive program of reversing the magnetism of all the ships going to Dunkirk. The result was that not a single ship was lost to mines.
In the turmoil of war, there was little choice but to give young people their head. Soon after Dunkirk I and another young ARL scientist, Ray Gossage, were given the job of degaussing the battleship PRINCE OF WALES. She lay in dry dock in Rosyth and for her next voyage was scheduled to carry Winston Churchill to the Atlantic Conference with Roosevelt. She had been built in Belfast in a yard which had left her magnetic field running around her rather than from end to end. The original degaussing had been a failure and she was considered highly unsafe in her present form.
Gossage and I worked out an improvised system of flashing out the athwartships magnetization by winding a giant coil lengthwise around the ship. We then energized this by connecting it up to a submarine battery. The whole operation took days to arrange and involved the whole crew of the ship. As we watched from the dry dock in Rosyth, hundreds of men worked in unison to our commands, though we were both barely in our mid-twenties.
Science in wartime is often a case of improvising with the materials to hand, solving a problem as best you can at the time, rather than planning ten or fifteen years ahead, when it may be too late. The war shaped my later approach to technical intelligence. It taught me the value of improvisation and showed me, too, just how effective operations can be when the men of action listen to young men with a belief in practical, inventive science. Sadly, by the end of the war this attitude had all but disappeared; the dead hand of committees began to squeeze the life out of England.
From 1942 onward I worked on the first anti-midget-submarine detection systems. They were used successfully to protect the harbors during the torch landings in North Africa and later in Northwest Europe. This work got me involved in the operation to sink the prize German battleship TIRPITZ. She lay in Altenfjord and posed an ever-present danger to British shipping. An operation to sink her, using midget submarines, was planned. We knew that the Germans were protecting Altenfjord with submarine detectors consisting of rows of coils on the seabed which picked up the magnetic flux of a passing craft. These were similar to those I had developed at ARL, so I was asked to come up with ideas for degaussing our X-Craft midget submarines to enable them to pass into the fjord undetected.
The technical problems of degaussing a submarine are far more complex than those of a ship, but eventually I found that an electromagnet placed along the length of the submarine and energized with the right amount of current would neutralize the loops of the submarine detectors on the seabed. I also calculated that if the X-Craft went in during a magnetic storm, this would increase the chances of nondetection by a factor of between 10 and 100. I traveled up to the Magnetic Observatory at Eskdalemuir and found that they had a good chance of predicting a storm of sufficient size, so I put my findings up to the Navy.
In 1944 the degaussed British X-Craft went in under cover of a magnetic storm. With great bravery, the crews managed to place charges against TIRPITZ and cripple her. Three VCs were won that day. But the bravery would have counted for nothing without the technical backup of ARL.
By the end of the war the course of my life had changed irrevocably. Although agriculture remained my first love, I was clearly destined not to return to it. I sat instead for the postwar Scientific Civil Service competition chaired by C P Snow. It was designed to sort out the best scientists among the hundreds recruited during the wartime expansion. I passed out joint top with 290 marks out of 300. Butterworth congratulated me warmly. All those nights sitting up with the textbooks had finally paid off, though the credit was largely his.
My father returned to the Marconi Company as Engineer in Chief in 1946, and I began work as a Principal Scientific Officer at the Services Electronics Research Laboratory that same year. For the next four years we worked closely alongside each other, the trials of the 1930s an unspoken bond between us, until that telephone call from Sir Frederick Brundrett in 1949 brought MI5 into my life.
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A few days after that first meeting in Brundrett's office in 1949, I received a telephone call from John Taylor inviting me down to London. He suggested St. James's Park and we met on the bridge in front of Buckingham Palace. It struck me as an odd way to conduct the business of national security, strolling among the pelicans and the ducks, pausing occasionally to ponder our reflections in the pool.
Taylor was a small man with a pencil mustache and a gray, sharpish face. He had been one of Montgomery's communications officers during the North African campaign, and although now a Post Office technician, he retained his abrupt military bearing. He ran the technical research, such as it was, for MI5 and MI6 from his laboratory inside the Special Investigations Unit of the Post Office at Dollis Hill. Taylor made certain I knew he was in charge. He told me bluntly that, apart from one brief visit to MI5 headquarters at Leconfield House to meet Colonel Cumming, I would have to deal through him as an intermediary. Taylor discouraged discussion about "the office"; he merely explained that I would be given the title of "external scientific adviser" and that I would be unpaid for my duties. For several years we continued to meet in St. James's Park about once a month to talk over the written reports on technical matters which I filed to C. W. Wright, the secretary of Brundrett's committee. (Wright later became Deputy Secretary at the Ministry of Defense.)
Taylor and I divided up the technical work. The Post Office pressed ahead with research into infrared detection. I began using the resources of the Services Electronics Research Laboratory to develop new microphones and look into ways of getting sound reflections from office furniture. I was already familiar with the technical principles of resonance from my antisubmarine work. When sound waves impact with a taut surface such as a window or a filing cabinet, thousands of harmonics are created. The knack is to detect the point at which there is minimum distortion so that the sound waves can be picked up as intelligible speech.
One day in 1951 I received a telephone call from Taylor. He sounded distinctly agitated.
"We've been beaten to it," he said breathlessly. "Can we meet this afternoon?"
I met him later that day on a park bench opposite the Foreign Office. He described how one of the diplomats in our Embassy in Moscow had been listening to the WHF receiver in his office which he used to monitor Russian military aircraft traffic. Suddenly he heard the British Air Attache coming over his receiver loud and clear. Realizing the. Attache was being bugged in some way, he promptly reported the matter. Taylor and I discussed what type of microphone might be involved and he arranged for a Diplomatic Wireless Service engineer named Don Bailey to investigate. I briefed Bailey before he left for Moscow on how best to detect the device. For the first time I began to realize just how bereft British Intelligence was of technical expertise. They did not even possess the correct instruments, and I had to lend Bailey my own. A thorough search was made of the Embassy but nothing was ever found.
The Russians had clearly been warned and turned the device off.
From questioning Bailey on his return it was clear to me that this was not a normal radio microphone, as there were strong radio signals which were plain carriers present when the device was operating. I speculated that the Russians, like us, were experimenting with some kind of resonance device. Within six months I was proved right. Taylor summoned me down to St. James's Park for another urgent meeting.
He told me that the U. S. State Department sweepers had been routinely "sanitizing" the American Ambassador's office in Moscow in preparation for a visit by the U.S. Secretary of State. They used a standard tunable signal generator to generate what is known as the "howl round effect,'' similar to the noise made when a radio station talks to someone on the telephone while his home radio or television is switched on. The "howl round" detected a small device lodged in the Great Seal of the United States on the wall behind the Ambassador's desk.
The howl frequency was 1800 MH, and the Americans had assumed that the operating frequency for the device must be the same. But tests showed that the device was unstable and insensitive when operating at this frequency. In desperation the Americans turned to the British for help in solving the riddle of how "the Thing," as it was called, worked.