Spycatcher (44 page)

Of course, there were still loose ends. Klugman took his secrets with him, Otto was never identified, and the British end of the Rote Kapelle we never found. But we knew the most important thing of all - we knew how far the conspiracy extended. We knew our history, and we had no need to be afraid again. The vetting of a generation had been painful, certainly, more painful probably than it need have been had the inquiries been conducted at the right time, when the trails were still fresh. But we had exorcised the past, and we could at last return to the present again, not forgetting that there might be descendants from the people of the 1930s.

- 18 -

One other unresolved question remained throughout the 1960s, perhaps the most important of all - whether or not there was an undiscovered mole inside MI5. The FLUENCY Working Party's research into the history of penetration of British Intelligence continued in parallel with the D3 inquiries. Hollis took little interest in FLUENCY, principally, because it was not due to report until after his scheduled retirement in December 1965. He still considered the penetration issue closed after the meeting to discuss the second Symonds report in October 1964, and he ordered that none of those officers involved in the Mitchell case should discuss it even among themselves. It was a hopeless request. For one thing, Hollis' visit to the USA and Canada in 1963, to brief the CIA, FBI, and RCMP that Mitchell might possibly have been a spy, caused predictable fury and alarm. Shortly after Hollis' visit, I traveled to Canada myself. The DEW WORM microphones, which had lain undisturbed in the walls of the Soviet Embassy since 1956, were suddenly dug out by a team of Russian sweepers. No preliminary searches were made; the Russians knew exactly where the microphones were, and we heard them take them out before the lines went dead.

The RCMP wondered if Mitchell had perhaps compromised the operation. Jim Bennett, who by now was head of Counterespionage in the RCMP, began to sound me out. It was impossible to deflect his interest, and I gave him a brief resume of the evidence which pointed toward a high-level penetration. In fact, I had my own theory. I was sure the presence of the DEW WORM microphones was blown to the Russians in 1956, hence their refusal to use the rooms for anything other than occasional consular business. But they clearly learned the exact locations of the system only in 1964. This coincided exactly with the Mitchell investigation, which considered in great detail the possibility that FLUENCY might have been betrayed by Mitchell in 1956. Both Mitchell and Hollis also received the detailed file in 1956, including the details about the way the DEW WORM system worked. The operation was undoubtedly blown then. Whether it was Mitchell or Hollis who had done it, the Russians could not afford to take the microphones out unless the sweepers found them without being told exactly where they were. Despite over twenty days of searching, they failed to do so, even though they knew the exact area that had been bugged.

F.J. blasted me when he heard that I had talked about the penetration issue in Canada, but I told him that it was impossible to avoid discussion after Hollis' abortive visit. To ignore the problem only made it worse in the eyes of our allies.

In Washington interest was just as acute. I remember a house party at Michael McCaul's, the man who in 1964 became the SLO in Washington in succession to Harry Stone. Angleton and I detached ourselves, and he quizzed me hard on the state of affairs inside MI5.

"What the hell's got into you guys," he kept saying, "Hollis comes out there with some cock-and-bull story about Mitchell. He doesn't seem to know the first thing about the case. There's been no interrogation, and now he says there's nothing in it!..."

I tried to talk him through the case. Mitchell, I told him, was in the clear, we thought, but I stated that as far as Arthur and I were concerned, Hollis was our next suspect. I asked him if he had any information which might help us break open the case. He said he would see what he could do. It was a difficult time for the CIA. Kennedy had just been assassinated and the Warren Commission of inquiry was sitting, and Angleton had pressing problems of his own.

In 1965, British security seemed once again catastrophically bad to American eyes. In just four years a succession of spy scandals and disasters had engulfed both M15 and MI6. First Houghton was unmasked, having betrayed vital parts of NATO's underwater-detection systems.

Although the Houghton case was a triumph for MI5's new counterespionage capability, it caused outrage in the U.S. Navy, which had long fostered hostility to its British counterpart. The enmity surfaced at a National Security Council meeting, soon after the Houghton trial, at which the U.S. Navy had sought a complete break in the British-American intelligence and secrets exchange. Jim Angleton and Al Belmont from the FBI nipped the Navy ploy in the bud.

"The only difference between us and them," said Belmont dryly, "is they catch spies, and we don't."

But nothing Belmont said could possibly mitigate the string of disasters which followed. Blake was tried and convicted in 1961, casting doubt on virtually every European CIA operation including the Berlin Tunnel. Vassall was caught the next year, 1962; once again, valuable NATO Naval secrets had gone East because of a British spy. In January 1963 Philby defected, with the British authorities apparently mute and impotent. There were the security implications of the Profumo affair in the same year, with its suggestions, taken seriously at the time in the FBI, that the Russians were obtaining nuclear secrets from Profumo via Christine Keeler - Blunt, Long, and Cairncross confessed in 1964, while other cases simply collapsed humiliatingly in court. The Kodak case in 1964 was one, but far worse in American eyes was the Martelli case in early 1965.

The Martelli case had started in 1963 with an allegation by Fedora that the KGB had a foreign ideological source inside an English nuclear research establishment. He had been operational only in the last one to two years. While this meant that the defector, Golitsin, did not know about him, it severely limited the field of likely candidates. After a few false steps, the investigation closed in on Giuseppe Martelli, who had come to the Culham Laboratory in the autumn of 1962 from Euratom.

But Martelli was not cleared for secret atomic material. Despite this, the investigation went ahead. It was possible that, like Houghton in the Lonsdale case, when he was at Portland, Martelli got his secrets from a girlfriend who did have access. When it was found that Martelli HAD a girlfriend who had access to secrets it became CERTAINLY possible that Martelli also had access to secrets that he should not have had.

Further investigation did not produce any evidence that Martelli was able to acquire secrets. A search of his office at Culham produced rendezvous information from a locked drawer in his desk. At this time Martelli was away in Europe on holiday. When he returned he was picked up at Southend airport. He was questioned by Special Branch and identified Karpekov as a Russian he knew. He also had a map in his possession which indicated rendezvous arrangements. As a result his house at Abingdon was searched and a concealment device was found which contained miniature onetime pads a la Lonsdale. Part of a page of one pad had apparently been used. A diary was found which had the details of a grid for transforming letters, and therefore words, into numbers for the onetime pad to be used to encipher a message.

A long meeting was held by Hollis, with Mitchell present, to decide what to do. The crucial factor was that no evidence had been found that Martelli had access to secrets or was passing them to a foreign power. The Official Secrets Act (OSA) did have a clause which made it a crime to prepare to commit espionage. But it would be very difficult to prove that Martelli was doing this. There was no proof that he had been in clandestine communication with a foreign power. GCHQ could attest that the cipher pads were similar to those used by spies to communicate with their Russian masters but, unlike in the Lonsdale case, they could not prove that Martelli had done so. It is not often realized that it was the GCHQ testimony in the Lonsdale case that ensured the defendants were convicted. Without this evidence Lonsdale and his associates would have got off either scot-free or with a minor sentence.

I, as the MI5 SIGINT expert, pointed out to the management at the meeting that the evidence MI5 had was not sufficient to prove even the intention to communicate secrets to a foreign power. The Legal Branch of MI5 were keen to try to get Martelli on "the act preparatory" clause of the OSA to establish it as a valid reason to prosecute under the OSA. To the astonishment of the professional counterespionage officers present, Hollis and Mitchell pressed for the prosecution of Martelli to go ahead. The result was that the Attorney-General did go ahead and MI5 suffered the damage.

Even today I find it very difficult to understand why the Martelli case went ahead, unless one remembers the date of the trial - July 2, 1963. This was at the height of the Mitchell case. It is obvious that at this juncture it would have suited the Russians and Hollis for the CE side of MI5 to be knocked down.

The other case to be considered here is that of Frank Bossard. Early in 1965 Top Hat, the FBI-GRU agent, produced photocopies of documents from the Ministry of Supply of the highest security grading in the guided weapons field, involving high-level secrets of the USA. It was relatively easy to narrow the field of suspects to a few people. The suspects were put under all kinds of surveillance. It was discovered that Bossard, one of the suspects, occasionally during his lunch hour would collect a suitcase from the Left Luggage Office at Waterloo Station. He would go to a hotel in Bloomsbury and book himself into a room under a false name. He would stay there alone for about half an hour. On leaving he would take the suitcase back to the Left Luggage Office and return to work. MI5 in due course removed the case from Waterloo. In it were found document-copying cameras, cassettes of film, and two gramophone records on which there were about eight Russian songs. The details of the Russian songs were copied. The entire contents of the case were photographed and restored to the case, which was then returned to Waterloo. I rang up GCHQ and gave them the details of the records. It took GCHQ less than an hour to identify five of the tunes as having been transmitted by a Russian transmitter, found to be in the Moscow area by direction-finding. This transmitter was known to be a GRU Russian Intelligence Service transmitter.

We decided to arrest Bossard next time he took his case from Waterloo and went to a hotel with it. This took place on March 15, 1965. He was caught in the act of photographing Top Secret documents. When confronted with the fact that MI5 knew all about the tunes on the records, he admitted that he had been supplying photographs of secret documents to the Russians for money through dead letter boxes,
i.e.
secret caches. He received his money the same way. After his initial recruitment, he had met a Russian only once in nearly five years. He said that the individual tunes broadcast indicated which dead letter box to fill, or not to fill any. MI5 had all they wanted for a Section One prosecution. On May 10, 1965, Bossard was sentenced to twenty-one years in jail.

Since we now know that Top Hat, the source of the information, was a plant, why did the Russians decide to throw away Bossard? To understand the case, it is necessary to go into various aspects. First, the Russians had succeeded in damaging MI5 through Fedora and the Martelli case in 1963. This had resulted in increased suspicion, particularly in MI5, that Fedora was a plant. In 1964 Top Hat had given MI5 a story about technical eavesdropping coverage of the British Prime Minister's office, which, unless the Russians had a much more sophisticated system than we knew of in the West, was very unlikely. All efforts to find such a system in use had failed. This had led the British to consider that the story was phony, and both MI5 and the FBI had begun to question Top Hat's bona fides.

Top Hat's production of photographs of British documents of the highest classifications not only made it very difficult to believe that he was a plant (people ask the question: Would the Russians throw away such a source?); it would also result in the Americans once again becoming very suspicious of British security and in an outcry in the USA to cut Britain off from their secrets. Now if one had to choose a spy to risk, Bossard was ideal. He had practically no physical contact with Russians. His Moscow radio control was via innocent tunes. If it had not been for GCHQ's detailed traffic analysis, we would have been unaware of the significance of the records and we would not have been able to prove communication between the Russian Intelligence Service and Bossard. He would have been prosecuted only on the illegal copying of classified documents, a technical crime with relatively small penalties. Once again the professional and technical skill of GCHQ and MI5 had caught the Russians out. This success had two major effects. It enabled the American Intelligence Services to protect British interests in the American Government and it increased and did not diminish the doubts about Top Hat.

But the fundamental question has to be asked. Why did the Russians consider that they had to boost the bona fides of Top Hat? He had been operational since the end of 1962 and without a source at high level in either MI5, the FBI, or the CIA, there would have been nothing to alert the Russians that he was a suspect. At the end of 1964, MI5 had become very suspicious. Only Sullivan, the head of Domestic Intelligence in the FBI, had any fears of Top Hat's bona fides and he, Sullivan, was certainly not a Russian spy. In the CIA only Angleton and one or two close associates were suspicious. But the few people in MI5 who knew about Top Hat did not believe he was genuine. Hollis knew that these people had grave doubts about Top Hat.

There were other strains, too, on the alliance. There was deep-seated hostility in the American intelligence community to the accession to power of Harold Wilson and the Labor Government in 1964. Partly this was due to anti-Labor bias, partly to the Labor Government's commitment to abandon Polaris - a pledge they soon reneged on.