The Defence of the Realm (107 page)

Since Ramelson was willing to pass TUC documents to the KGB, it seems likely (though proof is lacking) that he also provided confidential information from the Labour Party National Executive Committee (NEC). In the autumn of 1971 he began receiving reports of the proceedings soon after every NEC meeting from one of its trade union members, Alexander Kitson, executive officer of the Transport and General Workers' Union and Treasurer of the Scottish TUC. The DG informed the Home Office that Kitson had collaborated closely on industrial matters with the CPGB since about 1960: ‘His political aims and views appear to be substantially in line with those of the Communist Party though he has never formally joined it. He has also for many years enjoyed close friendships with officials of Communist embassies in London.' One of Kitson's closest contacts was Igor Klimov of the KGB. After Klimov's expulsion, he intervened unsuccessfully with the Foreign Office in an attempt to have the ban overturned. Klimov's other regular contacts in the Labour Party had included Joan Maynard MP,
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nicknamed ‘Stalin's Granny' for what one Labour historian calls ‘her devotion to the Soviet cause'.
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When Maynard was elected to the NEC in 1972, she too began supplying Ramelson with regular accounts of its meetings.
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The DG told the Home Office:

Ramelson's activities in obtaining for the CPGB documentary and other information, presumably confidential to the TUC and Labour Party, and his readiness to pass at least some of this information to the Russians and other Communist Parties, are not illegal in that Government secrets are not at risk. Nevertheless, the fact that Russian intelligence officers are involved with Ramelson, and with members of trade unions and of the Labour Party, in obtaining information about the TUC (and probably about Labour Party policies) carries with it some danger for the future and, in particular, if and when a Labour Administration is returned to power.
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In March 1974, a month after Labour's election victory, Hanley found Roy Jenkins, then beginning his second term as home secretary, ‘exceedingly interested' in intelligence on Communist attempts to penetrate the NEC and TUC. When Hanley revealed that Ramelson had the minutes of a meeting between the new Employment Secretary, Michael Foot, and the TUC, Jenkins announced that he intended to inform the Prime Minister.
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Wilson's reaction is not recorded.

Probably the KGB's most important British agent for much of the 1970s, Geoffrey Prime, was run exclusively outside the UK and was therefore unaffected by the expulsions of Operation FOOT. Prime was a sexual and social misfit who blamed many of his personal problems on the capitalist system and, as he later acknowledged, had ‘a misplaced idealistic view of Russian Communism'. In 1968, while an RAF corporal at the Gatow SIGINT station in West Berlin, he left a message at a Soviet checkpoint asking Soviet intelligence to make contact with him. Prime's note was passed not to the KGB First Chief [foreign intelligence] Directorate (FCD) but, though he did not realize it, to the Third Directorate, which was responsible for the surveillance and security of Soviet armed forces and sometimes succeeded in recruiting (usually low-level) agents among Western troops stationed in Germany. Anxious to steal a march over the more prestigious FCD, the Third Directorate recruited Prime as one of its own agents. In agreement with his case officers, he successfully applied for a job at GCHQ after leaving the RAF and was trained at the KGB compound at Karlshorst in the East Berlin suburbs in radio transmission, cipher communications, microdots, photography with a Minox camera and the use of dead letter-boxes. He served for almost nine years as a Soviet agent at GCHQ in Cheltenham and elsewhere, spending much of that period transcribing and translating intercepts. A later Security Service assessment summed up the Third Directorate's handling of the case as ‘incompetent and inept; had it been run more effectively the damage done by Prime (which was anyway very considerable) would have been even
worse.' Since he was given no tasking by his case officers, who showed little understanding of GCHQ, he simply set out to pass on ‘all information that seemed to him significant'. By 1975 Prime had access to what was officially described as ‘intelligence from a very sensitive source',
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which included details of British successes and failures in decrypting Soviet traffic.
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His KGB case officers, however, failed to pay attention to the stress on Prime caused by his double life and remarriage. In the summer of 1977, having come close to breaking point, he made plans to defect and bought an air ticket to Helsinki but turned back on his way to the airport.
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Though GCHQ colleagues were struck by his morose appearance, they put it down to his problems at home and career frustrations. In September 1977 Prime resigned from GCHQ, broke contact with the KGB and began work as a Cheltenham taxi driver. The London residency seems to have been unaware of his existence – as was the Security Service until his arrest for sexually abusing small girls in 1982.
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The first section of the KGB London residency to resume something like normal operations after the expulsions, albeit slowly and on a reduced scale, was Line X (scientific and technological intelligence, or S&T). During 1972 plans were made to renew contact with six of its most highly rated agents: the veteran HOLA (Melita Norwood), a secretary in the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association (BNFMRA) recruited in 1937;
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HUNT, a civil servant recruited by Norwood in 1967; ACE, an aeronautical engineer; NAGIN, a chemical engineer; STEP, a laboratory assistant; and YUNG, an aeronautics and computer engineer. Evidence from KGB files later provided by the defector Vasili Mitrokhin suggests that the reactivation of the six agents was a lengthy business, probably preceded by prolonged investigation to ensure that none was under Security Service surveillance. By 1974 Line X at the London residency had nine operations officers, seven fewer than before Operation FOOT.
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The peak of Mrs Melita ‘Letty' Norwood's career as a Soviet agent was long past. In March 1945, when the BNFMRA won a contract on the TUBE ALLOYS (atomic bomb) project, Norwood was working as personal assistant to its director and gained vetting clearance.
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Though the Security Service had received earlier, unconfirmed reports that she had been a pre-war Communist, her 1945 vetting ‘interview did not substantiate those concerns and raised the possibility that some of the information held by the Service about Melita might have referred to her sister Gertrude',
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who had joined the CPGB in 1931 and been an active student Communist at the London School of Economics at a time when Melita was a member of the Independent Labour Party.
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After Norwood was
publicly exposed as a former Soviet agent in 1999, a Security Service assessment of the intelligence she had provided on TUBE ALLOYS concluded that ‘its significance to the Soviet atomic bomb programme would have been marginal'.
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Though that was a reasonable interpretation of the evidence in Service files, BNFMRA records at the National Archives and other British sources, the Centre had arrived at a different conclusion in 1945. Norwood's atomic intelligence, it told the London residency, was ‘of great interest and a valuable contribution to the development of work in this field'.
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A review of Norwood's case in 1951, which re-examined pre-war reports that she was an active Communist engaged in ‘especially important' secret work led Director B (John Marriott) to conclude ‘that the [1945] vetting of this lady was unsatisfactory'.
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Her security clearance was revoked, though her access to atomic intelligence had been effectively terminated in 1949 when BNFMRA's classified contract came to an end.
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Letty Norwood, however, remained an active Soviet agent, even though her access was reduced to commercially sensitive but unclassified information. According to Vasili Mitrokhin's notes on her KGB file, some of the S&T which she supplied ‘found practical application in Soviet industry'. (His notes give no further details.) In 1958 Norwood was awarded the Order of the Red Banner by the KGB. Two years later she was rewarded with a life pension of £20 a month, payable with immediate effect. HOLA, however, was an ideological agent who did not work for money.
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By 1965 the Security Service had strong grounds for suspecting her past involvement in espionage. It was now known that there had been a wartime Soviet spy in the BNFMRA and it had also been discovered that Mrs Norwood was related to a BNFMRA metallurgist connected to the atom spy Klaus Fuchs. (Not until Mitrokhin's defection, however, did the Security Service discover that in the middle of the Second World War Norwood and Fuchs had the same female Soviet case officer, Ursula Beurton, née Kuczinski.)
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In 1965 letter and telephone checks on Norwood authorized by an HOW revealed no evidence of espionage and were discontinued after a year. D1/Inv noted in April 1966: ‘The investigation has proved unrewarding. Such information as we have gleaned seems to suggest that Norwood is a harmless and somewhat uninteresting character.'
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A4 surveillance revealed that she left home at 8.30 every morning to catch the train to the BNFMRA HQ in Euston Street and spent the whole day in the office (including the lunch break) except for about ten minutes' hurried shopping before returning home to Bexleyheath between 6.30 and 7 p.m.
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Letty Norwood seemed to have few friends. By contrast, her husband
Hilary, a science master at Bexley Grammar School, had many friends (most of them Communist) and, unlike Letty, was an active Party member. Mrs Norwood's only identified Communist contact, apart from her immediate family, was an elderly doctor whom she had known since both were members of the pre-war Independent Labour Party: ‘Her contact with him seems to be only out of kindness of her heart for old times' sake.'
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Unaware that Mrs Norwood remained a disciplined and dedicated Soviet agent, active Security Service investigation of her ceased in April 1966,
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a year before she recruited HUNT to the KGB. In order to detect her contacts with the KGB it would have required intensive long-term physical surveillance on a scale which would have scarcely been practicable in the pre-FOOT era when A4 resources were seriously overstretched. For security reasons, Norwood tended to meet her Soviet controller only four or five times a year, usually in the south-east London suburbs, to hand over Minox photographs of BNFMRA documents.
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The Service had no proof of her career as a KGB agent until the defection of Vasili Mitrokhin in 1992.
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Even then, since Mitrokhin's notes from KGB files included no original documents, the evidence would have been insufficient for a successful prosecution.

When the London residency renewed contact with Letty Norwood in 1974, her case officer discovered that she had retired from the BNFMRA two years earlier. Since she no longer had access to S&T material, contact was discontinued. Norwood, however, retained a high reputation in the Centre as probably its longest-serving British agent with a very productive record which had included intelligence on the British nuclear programme. According to a report which reached the Security Service a quarter of a century later, HOLA's file had been used in the FCD as a ‘study/training aid to show how a productive case could be developed from inauspicious beginnings'.
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Letty Norwood remained throughout her career a dedicated Communist and true believer in the Soviet Union. After ceasing to be an active agent, no longer needing to conceal her political beliefs, she became an open Communist and joined the Party. A number of reports of her CPGB activities were entered on her Security Service file.
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During her first visit to Moscow with her husband in 1979, forty-two years after her recruitment as a Soviet agent, Mrs Norwood was formally presented with the Order of the Red Banner awarded to her over twenty years earlier.
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She was also offered but refused a further financial reward, saying she had all she needed to live on.
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Even when publicly exposed as a KGB agent in 1999, she told an interviewer that she had no regrets: ‘I would do everything again.'
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The intelligence supplied by HUNT, whom Norwood had recruited as an agent while he was working for the Department of Trade and Industry in 1967, which was most highly rated by the KGB, seems to have been on British arms sales (though Mitrokhin's brief notes on his FCD file give no details). After he was put on ice following Operation FOOT, KGB contact with him was not re-established until 1975, and even then it thought it safer to do so via a French agent, MAIRE, rather than an operations officer from the London residency. In the late 1970s the London residency gave him £9,900 to found a small business, probably in the hope that he could use it to supply embargoed technology. By 1981, however, the Centre was dissatisfied with the quality of HUNT's intelligence and apparently fearful (wrongly) that he was under Security Service surveillance.
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He died soon afterwards from a heart attack. The Service did not discover HUNT's existence until Mitrokhin's defection eleven years later. Another source in the 1990s claimed that, at one stage in his career, HUNT had produced ‘very valuable copies of departmental classified telegrams'. A Security Service investigation concluded, however, that ‘It is unlikely that [HUNT]'s activities caused any significant damage to the UK.'
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Nor, in the Service's view, did STEP,
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NAGIN
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and YUNG.
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