Spycatcher (7 page)

"The integrity of the file is vital," Potter told me, and warned me that under no circumstances could papers be removed from a file without the written consent of a senior officer. The sanctity of files was something which, quite rightly, was drummed into every officer from the very beginning of his service.

Files were located by using the card indexes. Potter had devised a system of mechanically searching these indexes. Each card was classified with a series of punched holes to identify the category of files to which it belonged. To search a category of files, for instance to find a Russian intelligence officer using several aliases, an officer drew a master card corresponding to that category. Long needles were placed through the holes in the master card to locate any other cards which fitted the same constellation. These could then be searched by hand. It was old-fashioned, but it worked, and it meant that MI5 resisted the change to computerization long after it should have happened.

The concourse of the Registry was always busy with trolleys transporting files from the Registry shelves to special lifts. The trolleys ran on tracks so that files could be shifted at great speed up to the case officers working on the floors above - F Branch on the first floor, E Branch on the second, D on the third and fourth, and A Branch on the fifth. The Registry employed enormous numbers of girls to maintain efficient delivery of files within the building, as well as the massive task of sorting, checking, and filing the incoming material. In Kell's day the Registry Queens, as they were known, were recruited either from the aristocracy or from the families of MI5 officers. Kell had a simple belief that this was the best vetting of all. The debutantes were often very pretty, as well as wealthy, which accounts for the large number of office marriages, to the point where it became something of a joke that the average career expectancy of a Registry Queen was nine months - the time it took her to get pregnant.

By the early 1970s the staffing of the Registry had become a major problem for MI5. There were more than three hundred girls employed and with the surge of file collection at that time the pressure for more recruits was never-ending. Openly advertising was considered impossible. Yet it was becoming very difficult to recruit this number of girls, let alone vet them properly. In at least one case, the Communist Party managed to infiltrate a girl into the Registry, but she was soon discovered and quietly sacked. This problem, rather than dissatisfaction with the increasingly antiquated filing system itself, finally pushed MI5, belatedly, into accepting a computerized Registry.

Underneath the Registry were the Dungeons. They were actually a collection of storerooms and workshops run by Leslie Jagger, who worked under Hugh Winterborn in A2. Jagger was one of Cumming's famed contacts. He was a huge, broad-shouldered former Sergeant Major who had served with Cumming in the Rifle Brigade. Jagger always wore a black undertaker's suit.

Jagger was the MI5 odd-job technical man, and must have felt slightly apprehensive when I joined, but he never showed it and we soon became good friends. Jagger had an extraordinary array of skills, of which the most impressive was his lockpicking. Early on in training I attended one of the regular classes he ran for MI5 and MI6 in his lockpicking workshop. The cellar room was dominated by a vast array of keys, literally thousands of them, numbered and hung in rows on each wall.

Jagger explained that as M15 acquired or made secret imprints of keys of offices, hotels, or private houses, each one was carefully indexed and numbered. Over, the years they had developed access in this way to premises all over Britain.

"You never know, when you might need a key again," explained Jagger as I stared in astonishment at his collection.

"The first rule if you are entering premises is only pick the lock as the last resort," said Jagger, beginning his lecture. "It's virtually impossible to pick a lock without scratching it - and that'll almost certainly give the game away to the trained intelligence officer. He'll know the premises have been entered. What you have to do is get hold of the key - either by measuring the lock or taking an imprint of the key."

Jagger demonstrated how to attack various locks. Burmah locks, used for diamond safes, were by far the most difficult. The pins move horizontally through the lock and it is impossible to pick. The Chubb, on the other hand, although billed as being unpickable, was fair game for Jagger.

"This is the one you'll have to deal with most often."

He picked up a demonstration Yale mechanism mounted on a board and explained that the Yale consisted of a series of pins sitting in various positions inside the barrel of the lock. The bites in the Yale key acted on the pins to push them up and allow the key to be turned in the barrel. Jagger produced a small piece of wire with a hook on one end. He inserted it into the keyhole and began to stroke the inside of the lock in a steady, rhythmical action.

"You just stroke the first pin until" - Jagger's wrist tensed and suddenly relaxed - "it goes a notch, and then you know you've got one up into line."

His big hands moved like a concert violinist's with a bow, tensing as each pin pushed up in turn.

"You keep the pressure on until you've got all the pins up..." He turned the piece of wire and the Yale sprang open. "Then you're inside... Course, what you do inside is your business."

We all laughed.

Leslie was always most mysterious about the source of his expert knowledge on lockpicking, but for years I carried a piece of wire and stroking tool that he made for me.

"Make sure you carry your police pass," he told me when he first gave it to me, pointing out that I was, technically, breaking the law by going about equipped for burglary.

"Couldn't be thought of as common or garden burglars, could we?" He laughed heartily and strode back to the Dungeons.

- 5 -

A few days after the lockpicking class I went on my first operation.

"The Third Man business is brewing up again," said Hugh Winterborn. "MI6 are interrogating one of their officers - chap named Philby. They want us to provide the microphone."

I had met Kim Philby briefly on my first visit to Leconfield House in 1949. I was in Cumming's office discussing the work for Brundrett when Philby popped his head around the door. He immediately apologized for disturbing us.

"No, come in, Kim," said Cumming in his usual gushing way. "There's someone you ought to meet."

Cumming explained that I had just been appointed the External Scientific Adviser. Philby shook my hand warmly. He had a lined face, but still looked youthful.

"Ah, yes," he said, "that's Brundrett's committee. The Americans are very keen on that, I gather."

I took to Philby immediately. He had charm and style, and we both shared the same affliction - a chronic stutter. He had just been appointed MI6 Head of Station in Washington, and was saying goodbye to his friends in MI5 and getting various briefings from them before his departure. Philby had developed close links with MI5 during the war, one of the few MI6 officers to take the trouble. At the time the visit seemed typical of Philby's industriousness. Only later did the real reason become clear. Philby quizzed me on my thinking about science. I explained that the Intelligence Services had to start treating the Russians as a scientist would treat the subject - as a phenomenon to be studied by means of experiments.

"The more you experiment, the more you learn, even if things go wrong," I said.

"But what about resources?" asked Philby.

I argued that the war had shown scientists could help solve intelligence problems without necessarily needing a huge amount of new apparatus. Some was needed, certainly, but more important was to use the materials already available in modified ways.

"Take Operational Research," I said, referring to the first antisubmarine-research program in the Navy during the war. "That made a tremendous difference, but all we scientists did was to use the gear the Navy had more efficiently."

Philby seemed skeptical, but said that he would bear my thoughts in mind when he reviewed American thinking on the subject on his arrival in Washington.

"I'll look you up when I get back," he said. "See how you've got on." He smiled graciously and was gone.

Two years later, Burgess and Maclean defected. It was a while before Cumming mentioned the subject, but by 1954 I had gathered enough snippets from him and Winterborn to realize that Philby was considered the prime suspect for the Third Man who had tipped off the two defectors. In 1955 he was sacked by a reluctant MI6, even though he admitted nothing. On September 23, 1955, three weeks after I formally joined MI5, the long-awaited White Paper on the Burgess and Maclean affair was finally released. The press savaged it. Philby's name was well known in Fleet Street by this time, and it was obviously only a matter of time before it was debated publicly.

In October, MI5 and MI6 were informed that the question of the Third Man was likely to be raised in the House of Commons when it reconvened after the recess, and that the Foreign Secretary would have to make a statement about Philby's situation. MI6 was ordered to write a review of the case, and called in Philby for another interrogation. They, in turn, asked MI5's A2 section to provide recording facilities for the interrogation.

Winterborn and I took a taxi to the MI6 safe house near Sloane Square where Philby was due to meet his interrogators. The room MI6 had chosen was sparsely furnished - just a patterned sofa and chairs surrounding a small table. Along one wall was an ancient sideboard with a telephone on top.

As it was important to get as high a quality of recording as possible, we decided to use a high-quality BBC microphone. Speech from a telephone microphone is not very good unless it is high level. We lifted a floorboard alongside the fireplace on the side on which Philby would sit and inserted the microphone beneath it. We arranged an amplifier to feed the microphone signal to a telephone pair with which the Post Office had arranged to feed the signal back to Leconfield House.

The Transcription Center was hidden behind an unmarked door at the other end of the corridor from the MI5 staff canteen and only selected officers were allowed access. Next to the door were a bell and a metal grille. Hugh Winterborn identified himself and the automatic lock clattered open. Directly opposite the entry door was a door giving entrance to a large square room in which all the recording was done by Post Office employees. When the material was recorded, the Post Office could hand it over to the MI5 transcribers, but it was illegal to let MI5 monitor the live Post Office lines (although on occasion they were monitored, particularly by Winterborn or me, if there was something causing difficulties or very important). The telephone intercepts were recorded on dictaphone cylinders and the microphone circuits were recorded on acetate gramophone disks. This room was MI5's Tower of Babel. The recordings were handed over to women who transcribed them in small rooms running along a central corridor.

The Department was run by Evelyn Grist, a formidable woman who had been with MI5 almost from the beginning. She had a fanatic devotion to Vernon Kell, and still talked darkly of the damage Churchill had done to the Service by sacking him in 1940. In her eyes, the path of Intelligence had been downhill ever since.

Hugh Winterborn arranged for the link to be relayed into a closed room at the far end. We sat down and waited for the interrogation to start. In fact, to call it an interrogation would be a travesty. It was an in-house MI6 interview. Philby entered and was greeted in a friendly way by three former colleagues who knew him well. They took him gently over familiar ground. First his Communist past, then his MI6 career and his friendship with Guy Burgess. Philby stuttered and stammered, and protested his innocence. But listening to the disembodied voices, the lies seemed so clear. Whenever Philby floundered, one or another of his questioners guided him to an acceptable answer.

"Well, I suppose such and such could be an explanation."

Philby would gratefully agree and the interview would move on. When the pattern became clear, Winterborn fetched Cumming, who strode into the office with a face like thunder. He listened for a few moments, slapping his thigh. "The buggers are going to clear him!" he muttered. Cumming promptly sent a minute to Graham Mitchell, the Head of MI5 Counterespionage, giving an uncharacteristically blunt assessment of the MI6 whitewash. But it did no good. Days later, Macmillan got up in the House of Commons and cleared him. I realized for the first time that I had joined the Looking-Glass world, where simple but unpalatable truths were wished away. It was a pattern which was to be repeated time and time again over the next twenty years.

The Philby interview gave me my first experience of the MI5 surveillance empire. The seventh floor was, in fact, only one part of a network of facilities. The most important outstation was the headquarters of the Post Office Special Investigations Unit near St.

Paul's. MI5 had a suite of rooms on the first floor run by Major Denman, an old-fashioned military buffer with a fine sense of humor. Denman handled the physical interception of mail and installation of telephone taps on the authority of Post Office warrants. He also housed and ran the laboratory for MI5 technical research into ways of detecting and sending secret writing. Each major sorting office and exchange in the country had a Special Investigations Unit Room, under the control of Denman, to place taps and intercept mail. Later we moved the laboratories up to the Post Office Laboratory at Martlesham, Suffolk. Then, if a letter which had been opened in St. Paul's needed further attention, it was sent by motorcycle courier up to Suffolk.

Denman's main office was lined with trestle tables running the length of the room. Each table carried mail addressed to different destinations: London letters on one side, Europe on another, and behind the Iron Curtain on a third. Around twenty Post Office technicians worked at these tables opening pieces of mail. They wore rubber gloves so as not to leave fingerprints, and each man had a strong lamp and a steaming kettle beside him. The traditional split-bamboo technique was sometimes used. It was ancient, but still one of the most effective.