Spycatcher (39 page)
Philby's defection and the confessions of Blunt, Long, and Cairncross swept away many of these reservations, although the fear of Establishment scandal remained just as acute as ever. Hollis agreed to the drastic expansion of D3, and it was given a simple, yet massive task - to return to the 1930s, and search the files for clues which might lead us to spies still active today, to vet a generation, to clear up as many loose ends as possible, and to provide the Service with an accurate history for the first time. The guiding principle of my D3 section was a remark Guy Liddell made to me on one of his frequent visits back to the office after he retired.
"I bet 50 percent of the spies you catch over the next ten years have files or leads in the Registry which you could have followed up..."
I was sure he was right. I thought back to Houghton, and his wife's report on him, to Blake, and to Sniper's early lead to Blake, to Philby and to Blunt, where evidence existed but was never pursued relentlessly enough. Perhaps most amazing of all, I read the Klaus Fuchs file, and discovered that after he was caught MI5 found his name, his Communist background, and even his Party membership number, all contained in Gestapo records which MI5 confiscated at the end of the war. Somehow the information failed to reach the officers responsible for his vetting. But also in 1945-48 an officer, Michael Sorpell, had researched Fuchs and recorded on the file that Fuchs must be a spy.
There were several obvious places to look in the inert mass of papers lying in the Registry. First there were the Gestapo records. The Gestapo was an extremely efficient counterespionage service, and operated extensively against European Communist parties and the Soviet intelligence services. They had a trove of information about them, developed at a time when our knowledge of Europe was virtually nonexistent because of the conditions of war. They had invaluable intelligence on the most important of all European Soviet rings - the Rote Kapelle, or Red Orchestra. This was a series of loosely linked self-sustaining illegal rings controlled by the GRU in German-occupied Europe. The Rote Kapelle was run with great bravery and skill, relaying by radio vital intelligence to Moscow about German military movements.
The most important of all the Gestapo records for the British were the Robinson papers. Henry Robinson was a leading member of the Rote Kapelle in Paris, and one of the Comintern's most trusted agents. In 1943 he was captured by the Gestapo and executed. Although he refused to talk before dying, papers were found under the floorboards of his house which revealed some of the Ring's activities. The handwritten notes listed forty or fifty names and addresses in Britain, indicating that Robinson had also been responsible for liaising with a Rote Kapell ring in Britain. After the war Evelyn McBarnet did a lot of work on the Robinson papers, but the names were all aliases, and many of the addresses were either post-boxes or else had been destroyed in the war. Another MI5 officer, Michael Hanley, did a huge research task in the 1950s, identifying and listing every known agent of the Rote Kapelle.
There were more than five thousand names in all. But since then the trail had gone dead. Perhaps, I thought, there might be clues among all this material which might take us somewhere.
Another place to look was among the records of defector debriefings. Work was already in progress with the recent defectors like Golitsin and Goleniewski, but there were still many loose ends in the intelligence provided by prewar and wartime defectors. Walter Krivitsky, the senior NKVD officer who defected in 1937, told MI5, for instance, that there was a well-born spy who had been educated at Eton and Oxford, and joined the Foreign Office. For years everyone assumed this to be Donald Maclean, even though Maclean was educated at Gresham Holt's and Cambridge. He just did not fit, but rather than confront the problem, the allegation had been left to collect dust in the files.
Then there was Konstantin Volkov, a senior NKVD officer who approached the British Consulate in Istanbul and offered to reveal the names of Soviet spies in Britain in return for money. He gave an Embassy official a list of the departments where the spies allegedly worked.
Unfortunately for Volkov, his list landed on Kim Philby's desk at MI6 headquarters. Philby was then head of MI6 Soviet Counterintelligence, and against the wishes of Director C he persuaded him to let him go to Turkey, ostensibly to arrange for Volkov's defection. He then delayed his arrival by two days. The would-be defector was never seen again, although the Turks thought that both Volkov and his wife had been flown out strapped to stretchers. One of Volkov's spies was thought to be Philby himself, but there were several others who had just never been cleared up - like the spy Volkov claimed was working for MI6 in Persia.
Lastly there was the VENONA material - by far the most reliable intelligence of all on past penetration of Western security. After Arthur left I took over the VENONA program, and commissioned yet another full-scale review of the material to see if new leads could be gathered. This was to lead to the first D3-generated case, ironically a French rather than a British one. The HASP GRU material, dating from 1940 and 1941, contained a lot of information about Soviet penetration of the various emigre and nationalist movements who made their headquarters in London during the first years of the war. The Russians, for instance, had a prime source in the heart of the Free Czechoslovakian Intelligence Service, which ran its own networks in German-occupied Eastern Europe via couriers. The Soviet source had the cryptonym Baron, and was probably the Czech politician Sedlecek, who later played a prominent role in the Lucy Ring in Switzerland.
The most serious penetration, so far as MI5 were concerned, was in the Free French Government led by Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle faced persistent plots in London masterminded by his two Communist deputies, Andre Labarthe, a former CHEF DU CABINET who was responsible for civilian affairs, and Admiral Mueselier, who controlled military affairs. MI5 kept a close eye on these plots during the war at Churchill's instigation, and Churchill ordered the arrest of both Labarthe and Mueselier when de Gaulle had gone to Dakar to free that territory for the Free French; but in 1964 we broke a decrypt which showed conclusively that Labarthe had been working as a Soviet spy during this period, moreover at a time when the Molotov-von Ribbentrop pact was still in existence.
The U.S. VENONA also contained material about Soviet penetration of the Free French. The CIA had done no work on it, either because they thought it was too old or because they had no one with sufficient grasp of French history. When I studied it, I found that another senior French politician, Pierre Cot, the Air Minister in Daladier's prewar cabinet, was also an active Russian spy.
This discovery came at a time of great tension between the French and British intelligence services. Anti-French feeling ran strongly inside British Intelligence. Many officers of both services had served in the war and remembered the supine French surrender. Courtney Young always claimed that he formed lifelong views on the French when traveling back from Dunkirk on a boat. Even Blunt, for all his reverence for French art and style, was vituperative on the subject of French cowardice.
Relations were not helped by the arrival of Anatoli Golitsin. Some of his best intelligence concerned Soviet penetration of SDECE, the French equivalent to MI6. Golitsin said there was a ring of highly placed SDECE agents known as the Sapphire Ring. Shortly after Golitsin defected, the deputy head of SDECE threw himself out of a window.
Angleton persuaded the head of the CIA to get President Kennedy to write to de Gaulle warning him about Golitsin's allegations, but de Gaulle felt the Americans and the British were manipulating Golitsin to cast aspersions on French integrity. This remained the official French view even after Golitsin gave the information which led to the arrest and conviction of Georges Paques, a senior French Government official, in 1965.
To complicate matters still further, the DST (the French counterespionage service) and MI5 were collaborating on a case involving a double agent, Air Bubble. Air Bubble was an industrial chemist named Dr. Jean Paul Soupert. Soupert was an agent runner for East German Intelligence and the KGB, but the Belgian SECURITE D'ETAT doubled him. He revealed that two of his agents were employees of the Kodak Company in Britain who were passing him details of sensitive commercial processes. The Belgians informed MI5, who began an intensive investigation of both Kodak employees, Alfred Roberts and Godfrey Conway. Soupert also told the Belgians about an East German illegal named Herbert Steinbrecher, who was running agents inside the French Concorde assembly plants, and this information was passed on to the DST to investigate in collaboration with MI6.
Unfortunately both cases ended in catastrophe. Although Conway and Roberts were caught, they were acquitted. Far worse for Anglo-French relations, the inquiries into Steinbrecher revealed that MI6 had recruited a French police chief, whose police district ran up to the German border. He was a "blanche" agent, that is to say MI6 had deliberately concealed him from their hosts, the French, and were using him to spy on both French and German nationals. The French, for their part, were forced to admit that Steinbrecher's agents had acquired for the Russians every detail of the Anglo-French Concorde's advanced electronic systems. The result, inevitably, was a spectacular row.
I approached Angleton and Louis Tordella of NSA, and got their agreement to provide the DST with the VENONA intelligence which proved Cot and Labarthe to be Russian spies. They were old, but still politically active, and it seemed to me a sensible precaution. I traveled to Paris in early 1965 to DST headquarters, where I was met by Marcel Chalet, the deputy head of the service. Chalet was a small, dapper Frenchman who joined the DST after the war, having served with great courage in the Resistance under Jean Moulin, narrowly escaping arrest by the Gestapo on the day Moulin himself was lifted. Like all French Resistance veterans, Chalet wore his pink ribbon with conspicuous pride. He was a militant anti-Communist, and yet he admired Moulin, a dedicated Communist, more than any other man in his life.
Several times he and I discussed the Resistance, but even in the 1960s he could not discuss his former commander without tears coming to his eyes.
I explained to Marcel that we had obtained new information which indicated the true roles of Cot and Labarthe, and showed him the relevant VENONA decrypts. He was astonished by the material, and immediately pledged a full investigation.
"You don't think they are too old, then?" I asked. Marcel fixed me with a withering glance.
"Until you see a French politician turning green in his coffin, you cannot say he is too old!"
Unfortunately Labarthe died of a heart attack as Marcel interrogated him, and Cot was left to die in peace, but the exchange of information did much to ease tension between the DST and MI5, and made Marcel and me friends for the rest of our careers.
The night before I left Paris he took me out to dinner. The restaurant was discreet, but the food was excellent. Marcel was an attentive host, providing bottles of the best claret, and regaling me with a string of waspish anecdotes about the perils of Gallic intelligence work. We discussed VENONA, and he was fascinated to learn about the scale of our success.
"They had some success with us recently," he told me, and described how in Washington they had discovered a fuse in the French Embassy cipher room modified to act as a transmitter.
"It was non-Western specification, and the range was perfect for the Russian Military Attache's house across the road," he said, noisily tucking into his plate of oysters in typical French style. My ears pricked up. The STOCKADE operation against the French Embassy ciphers in London and Washington had recently ended precipitately, when teams of French technicians went into both embassies with sheets of metal and copper tubes, and began screening the cipher rooms. Obviously the Russians, too, had realized that radiations could be picked up from poorly screened machines. Still, I thought, at least the French had not discovered our operation.
Chalet obviously found the whole affair amusing, and even offered to send the fuse over to Leconfield House, so that we could examine it. Still smiling, he casually dropped a question below the belt.
"And you, my dear Peter, have you had any luck with radiations... ?" I choked momentarily on my claret.
"Not much," I replied.
Marcel filled my glass, patently disbelieving my every word. Like true professionals, we turned to other things, and never discussed the matter again.
But for all the enjoyment of the French interlude, research into the Ring of Five was the most pressing task facing D3. I asked Hollis for the 8D branch interrogators to be placed inside D3, so that I could use them for an extensive program of interviews with every known acquaintance of Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt, Long, and Cairncross. Hollis agreed, but instructed that I myself had to conduct any interview deemed sensitive, which normally meant it was with a lord, a knight, a politician, a top civil servant, or a spy suspect.
In all, I saw more than a hundred people. Labor politicians like Christopher Mayhew and Denis Healey, then Secretary of State for Defense, who refused even to meet me, were unwilling to discuss their memories of the Communist Party in the 1930s. But others, like historian Isaiah Berlin and writer Arthur Marshall, were wonderfully helpful, and met me regularly to discuss their contemporaries at Oxford and Cambridge. Berlin insisted we meet at the Reform Club. He thought it appropriate to discuss Guy Burgess at the scene of his greatest triumphs. He had a keen eye for Burgess' social circle, particularly those whose views appeared to have changed over the years. He also gave me sound advice on how to proceed with my inquiries.
"Don't go to see Bowra," he told me, referring to Maurice Bowra, the distinguished Professor of Literature at Oxford University. Bowra was a homosexual as well as a close friend of Guy Burgess, and was close to the top of my list of those who I thought could help me. "Why not?" I asked.