Spycatcher (32 page)

"Roger has refused to extend the investigation. Personally, I think it's a mistake. When you put together the lack of following with the lack of technical aids, there really is little chance of finding an answer to this case."

Dick was impressed with F.J.'s sensible appraisal.

"There are two factors here," he said after thinking for a while. "We have to do this investigation, and we have to be seen to do this investigation, and that's almost just as important."

He told us that some changes would certainly have to be made. He thought the investigation should be coordinated from an unofficial house, rather than a government building, and offered us the use of an MI6 safe house in Pavilion Road, near Sloane Square.

"I'll think overnight about what I am going to say to Roger, and you will hear from him."

The following day F.J. informed us that Hollis had given permission for a team of MI6 Watchers to be used on the case, although they would still not be allowed to trail Mitchell beyond the London railway station, in case their presence was noticed. We were allowed to indoctrinate Winterborn, and were given carte blanche to install a closed circuit television system behind a two-way mirror in Mitchell's office. That afternoon we moved the burgeoning files across London to a tatty unfurnished upstairs flat in a small mews house in Pavilion Road, which for the rest of the case became our headquarters.

In the early stages of the investigation, we made a complete reexamination of the circumstances of Philby's defection It yielded one vital discovery. I asked the CIA to check their computer records of the movement of all known Russian intelligence officers around the world, and we discovered that Yun Modin, a KGB officer we strongly suspected had been Philby's controller during the 1940s, and of having arranged the Burgess/Maclean defections, had visited the Middle East in September 1962, just after Flora Solomon's meeting with Arthur in London. A further check showed Modin made a previous visit in May of the same year, shortly after the three Golitsin serials relating to the Ring of Five arrived at Leconfield House. Finally the CIA established that Modin had made no other trips abroad since the early 1950s.

Eleanor Philby, Kim's wife, was interviewed at this time, and told us that Philby had cut short a family holiday in Jordan in September, and from then onward until his disappearance exhibited increasing signs of alcoholism and stress. It was obvious to us that Modin had gone to Beirut to alert Philby to the reopening of his case. Once the KGB knew of Golitsin's departure, it was an obvious precaution, but the odd thing was the fact that Philby seemed apparently unmoved until after Modin's second visit in September, which coincided exactly with the time when the case against him became unassailable.

We turned to the tapes of Philby's so-called "confession," which Nicholas Elliott brought back with him from Beirut. For many weeks it was impossible to listen to the tapes, because the sound quality was so poor. In typical MI6 style, they had used a single low-grade microphone in a room with the windows wide open. The traffic noise was deafening. Using the binaural tape enhancer which I had developed, and the services of Evelyn McBarnet and a young transcriber named Anne Orr Ewing, who had the best hearing of all the transcribers, we managed to obtain a transcript which was about 80 percent accurate. Arthur and I listened to the tape one afternoon, following it carefully on the page. There was no doubt in anyone's mind, listening to the tape, that Philby arrived at the safe house well prepared for Elliott's confrontation.

Elliott told him there was new evidence, that he was now convinced of his guilt, and Philby, who had denied everything time and again for a decade, swiftly admitted spying since 1934. He never once asked what the new evidence was.

Arthur found it distressing to listen to the tape, he kept screwing up his eyes, and pounded his knees with his fists in frustration as Philby reeled off a string of ludicrous claims. Blunt was in the clear, but Tim Milne, an apparently close friend of Philby's, who had loyally defended him for years, was not. The whole confession, including Philby's signed statement, looked carefully prepared to blend fact and fiction in a way which would mislead us. I thought back to my first meeting with Philby, the boyish charm, the stutter, how I sympathized with him, and the second time I heard that voice, in 1955, as he ducked and weaved around his MI6 interrogators, finessing a victory from a steadily losing hand. And now there was Elliott, trying his manful best to corner a man for whom deception had been a second skin for thirty years. It was no contest. By the end they sounded like two rather tipsy radio announcers, their warm, classical public school accents discussing the greatest treachery of the twentieth century.

"It's all been terribly badly handled," moaned Arthur in despair as the tape flicked through the heads. "We should have sent a team out there, and grilled him while we had the chance."

I agreed with him. Roger and Dick had not taken into account that Philby might defect.

On the face of it, the coincidental Modin journeys, the fact that Philby seemed to be expecting Elliott, and his artful confession all pointed in one direction - the Russians still had access to a source inside British Intelligence who was monitoring the progress of the Philby case. Only a handful of officers had such access, chief among them being Hollis and Mitchell.

I decided to pay a visit to GCHQ to see if there was anything further that could be done with the VENONA program to assist the Mitchell case. The VENONA work was done inside a large wooden hut, number H72, which formed a spur off one of the main avenues in the central GCHQ complex. The work was supervised by a young cryptanalyst named Geoffrey Sudbury, who sat in a small office at the front of the hut. Behind him dozens of linguists sat under harsh lamps, toiling for matches, and hoping to tease out the translations from a thousand anonymous groups of numbers.

Sudbury's office was a joyous menagerie of cryptanalytical bric-a-brac. Huge piles of bound VENONA window indexes piled up in one corner, and tray upon tray of decrypts stood on his desk, ready for his approval before they were circulated up to MI5 and MI6. Sudbury and I had a long talk about how the whole program could be pushed forward. The principal problem was that VENONA, up until then, had been hand matched, and computers were used only for specific pieces of work, such as dragging for a cryptonym. Most of the effort had gone into attacking the KGB and GRU channels directly; the trade traffic channels had been used wherever they formed the back of a match, but otherwise the bulk of it had been left unprocessed. A comprehensive computer-matching program was needed, using the new computers which were becoming available by the early 1960s, in the hope that more matches might be found.

It was a vast undertaking. There were over 150,000 trade traffic messages, and very few were even in "punched" form, suitable for processing through a computer. This alone was a huge task. Each individual group had to be punched up twice by data processors, in order to "verify" that the processed traffic was free from errors. Then the first five groups of each message were computer matched against the whole of the rest of the traffic, involving something like 10 billion calculations for each message.

When I discussed the project with Willis at the Directorate of Science, he was skeptical about the whole thing, so I went to see Sir William Cook at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment again, with Frank Morgan. I knew that AWRE had the biggest computer facility in the country, bigger at that time than even GCHQ. I explained what I wanted to do. We needed at least three months on his computer to find the matches; once that was done, we could farm them out to NSA and GCHQ for the cryptanalytical work of trying to break the matches out. Cook, as always, was marvelous. I told him of Willis' skepticism, which he brushed aside.

"This is one of the most important contributions AWRE can make," he said, lifting the telephone. He spoke immediately to the AWRE head of Data Processing.

"There's a vital job I want you to start straightaway. I'm sending a chap down with the details. You don't need to know where he works.

Please do as he says..."

In two months we had punched up and verified every message, and for the next three months the AWRE computers worked on the VENONA for six hours a night.

At first it looked as if the AWRE computerization program might transform the British VENONA. Early on we got a new match for a message just after the existing week's traffic in mid-September, which we had already broken. The message, when it was partially decrypted, concerned Stanley again. He was to carry no documents which might incriminate him to his next meeting with Krotov. Then, in the midst of a haze of unbroken groups, there was a fleeting reference to a crisis in KGB affairs in Mexico. Krotov was told to refer to Stanley for details, since his "section" dealt with Mexican matters.

At the time of this message Philby was the head of the Iberian section of MI6, which controlled a large swath of Hispanic countries, including Mexico. It was a bitter moment. The categoric proof that Stanley was Philby had come just a matter of months after he defected. Had we broken it out a few years earlier, we could have arrested Philby on one of his regular trips back to London to visit the OBSERVER. This merely intensified fears about the integrity of MI5, since it made the decision in 1954 to close down the VENONA program look deeply suspect. When we checked, we found that the officer who ordered the closedown was the then head of Counterespionage, Graham Mitchell.

Sadly, the Philby fragment was the only real assistance the computerization program gave the British VENONA effort. Matches were made in Mexican KGB traffic and elsewhere in South America which were of enormous interest to the CIA and the RCMP, since Mexico was a principal area where the KGB introduced illegals into North America. But the matches made in British VENONA were almost all trade traffic to trade traffic, rather than trade traffic to the KGB or GRU, which was what we needed. The cryptanalytical effort in Hut H72 went on even more intensely than before, but there was to be no new shortcut.

There was little in Mitchell's Record of Service to help us either. Born in 1905, educated at Oxford, he then worked as a journalist and later as a statistician in Conservative Central Office. This did

surprise me, as I recalled that when arguing with Mitchell about the Lonsdale case, he had claimed that he could not understand my argument since he was "no statistician." He joined MI5 as a result of contact made through the Tory Party, and worked on the anti-Fascist side during the war, latterly with some involvement, too, in the CPGB. Thereafter his progress was swift, he became head of F Branch (Domestic Subversion) in the late 1940s, and Dick White's first head of Counterespionage in 1953, before Hollis appointed him his deputy in 1956. There were only two really striking things about Mitchell's career. One was the way it was intimately bound up with Hollis.' They had been contemporaries at Oxford, joined MI5 at around the same time, and followed each other up the ladder in complementary positions. The second was the fact that Mitchell seemed to be an underachiever. He was a clever man, picked by Dick White to transform D Branch. He signally failed to do so in the three years he held the job, and indeed, when the decision to close VENONA down was taken into account, it seemed almost as if he had willfully failed.

The intensive surveillance of Mitchell in the office revealed very little. I treated his ink blotter with secret writing material, and every night it was developed, so that we could check on everything he wrote. But there was nothing beyond the papers he worked on normally. The closed circuit television was monitored continuously by the MI6 Watchers. It was an unpleasant task, every morning Mitchell came in and picked his teeth with a toothpick in front of the two-way mirror, and repeated the meticulous process again before lunch, after lunch, and then again before he went home. By the end of the case, I began to feel that the only parts of Mitchell that we knew at all well were the backs of his tonsils.

I arranged to feed him barium meals. I circulated to him the bound volumes of my analysis of clandestine Soviet radio communications, with all their classifications and group count schedules, which I had recently updated for GCHQ. If Mitchell was a spy, it was the sort of priceless intelligence he could not afford to ignore. I watched on the monitor as Mitchell looked at the report in a desultory sort of way.

Later James Robertson, an old adversary of mine who had run Soviet Counterespionage for a period in the 1950s, came into his office, and they began talking about me. Robertson never forgave me for the changes I made in D Branch when he was there. He thought I was a jumped-up newcomer, who should have learned to respect my elders and betters before presuming to offer advice. He and Mitchell discussed my radio analysis. Neither man understood its purpose.

"That bloody man Wright," said Robertson tartly, "he thinks he knows it all. Wants his wings clipped!"

Mitchell nodded sagely, and I could not help smiling at the irony of it all.

But the lighter moments were few and far between in what was a grim vigil, watching and waiting for a man to betray himself on the other side of a mirror. Only once did I think we had him. One Friday afternoon he began drawing on a scrap of paper. He concentrated intensely for perhaps twenty minutes, referring to notes on a piece of paper he took from his wallet, and then suddenly tore the piece of paper up and put it in his waste bin. Every night, since the beginning of the case, Hollis arranged for me to search his office, and Hollis' secretary was instructed to retain his burn bag, containing his classified waste, so that it could be checked as well. That evening I retrieved the scraps of paper from the bin, and reconstructed them. It was a map of Chobham Common, near where Mitchell lived, with dots and arrows going in various directions. In the middle of the map were the letters "RV" and the siting of two cars, one at either end of the path across the common which passed the rendezvous site.