The Defence of the Realm (63 page)

Since the Second World War the Service had had an outstation, in a Post Office building in St Martin's Le Grand near St Paul's, headed in the 1950s by Major Albert Denman (remembered by Peter Wright as ‘an old-fashioned military buffer with a fine sense of humour'), which was responsible for postal interception and the installation of telephone taps under Home Office Warrants. Technicians, wearing rubber gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints, sat at long trestle tables, equipped with powerful lamps and large kettles, steaming open mail and producing photostats of their contents with pedal-operated cameras. During the early 1960s the outstation moved across the road to Union House, another Post Office building, and replaced the photostat machines with less cumbersome 35mm film and Kodak cameras. The number of postal items opened in London and at other units around the country increased from 135,000 in 1961 to 221,000 in 1969. In 1966 a letter to the Ministry of Public Building and Works condemned the working conditions in Union House as ‘so far below the Shops and Railway Premises Act that it is little short of disgraceful'; after heavy rain the sinks were said to overflow and the parquet flooring began to lift. There was no major improvement until 1969, when the unit joined a refurbished laboratory in Union House.
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The recording and transcription of telephone calls intercepted under HOWs and the product of eavesdropping devices was carried out on the sixth floor of Leconfield House in A2A, a section closed to most members of the Service. In the 1950s Dictaphone cylinders were used to record telephone intercepts and acetate gramophone disks for microphone circuits.
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The work of the mainly female transcribers in A2A was supervised during this period by a redoubtable assistant officer, Mrs Evelyn Grist, noted for her powerful personality and fondness for hats, necklaces and
shawls.
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A2A was known in her honour as ‘The Gristery'.
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There was some alarm in 1950, before the introduction of shredders, when fragments of secret waste from the Gristery which had been placed in a malfunctioning incinerator blew up the chimney and scattered in the street outside.
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After Mrs Grist's retirement, A2A was put under the control of an officer. By 1964 it had ninety-four members: fifty-three English-language transcribers, thirty linguists, eleven managerial and office staff. With the intensification of operations against Soviet Bloc targets and counter-subversion in the mid-1960s, its total staff jumped by half in only two years to reach 140 in 1966.
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The Russian transcribers came mainly from White Russian émigré families. To Peter Wright they seemed to have turned their sixth-floor hideaway into ‘a tiny piece of Tsarist Russia . . . Some even installed icons in their rooms.'
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Until 1970 the threat from Arab terrorism seemed so remote that A2A contained only one Arabic linguist.
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A Branch's lack of funds and state-of-the-art technology for its early Cold War operations was partly compensated for by the technical virtuosity of some of its members. A1 acquired a ‘burglar' of genius, a former sergeant major, who set up a locksmith's workshop in the ‘Dungeons' (basement) at Leconfield House with neatly arranged rows of numbered keys acquired or duplicated in the course of operations against offices, hotels and private homes.
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He was passionate about his work, spending many evenings and nights of unpaid overtime on operations. Christopher Herbert (A1) wrote of him in 1968:

One is asked to avoid superlatives. I find it difficult to do so in writing about the work of this officer. For over a year he has been engaged in a series of difficult operations involving a high degree of engineering skills, apart altogether from running his workshop and participating in what one might call more routine operations. I can only pay tribute to his determination, professional ability and qualities of leadership. He refuses to be beaten by technical difficulties and has inspired his subordinates to work as they have never worked before. He is one of the greatest operational assets possessed by the Service.
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His admirers included Peter Wright who, after some years' part-time work, was recruited in 1955 as the Service's first scientist to advise A Branch on the operational use of electronic and other scientific equipment. Wright appears to have had considerable success in improving the performance and deployment of eavesdropping technology. Cleve Cram, who as deputy head of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) station in London had regular contact with Wright, subsequently said that he would give him a mark of 8½ out of 10 for his work in A2 – despite his distaste for
Wright's later conspiracy theories of Soviet penetration.
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Shorn of selfdramatization, Wright's celebrated claim in his disaffected memoirs to have ‘bugged and burgled our way across London at the state's behest' is broadly true.
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There was no HOW system for the installation of eavesdropping devices, which usually required burglary (though the Service did not use the word), mostly against Communist and Soviet Bloc targets. Approval was given instead by the Home Office PUS.
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The belief at the time that ‘bugging and burgling' in defence of the realm was covered by the royal prerogative was probably mistaken. Following publication of Peter Wright's memoirs in New York in 1987, according to Stella Rimington, the DG, Sir Antony Duff, argued – in the end successfully – that new legislation was needed to give the Security Service authority for operations which required ‘entry on or interference with property'.
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During the early Cold War the integration of science and technology into Security Service culture and operations proceeded slowly. In 1962, after a series of discussions with SIS, a former senior government scientist was appointed joint director of science for the two Services.
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Wright quickly fell out with him, claiming that he ‘wanted to integrate scientific intelligence into the Ministry of Defence. He wanted the Directorate to be a passive organization, a branch of the vast inert defence-contracting industry, producing resources for its end users on request.'
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In 1963 Wright and two SIS scientists formed a joint scientific directorate which in the following year was based in the new SIS headquarters at Century House in Lambeth. In 1966 the joint directorate broke up and the Service established a new scientific R&D section as A5.
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In 1970 A5 had only six members, one of them a non-scientist, but its services were rapidly in heavy demand. Director A reported in August of that year that A5 officers were ‘run off their feet'.
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The largest section of the Security Service, the Registry, was an exclusively female preserve. The first men did not join until 1976. In the immediate post-war years the daughters of former officers and debutantes were a major source of recruits. The Director of Establishments claimed in 1948 that ‘the general atmosphere . . . is that in which ex-officers would like to find their daughters working.' According to Service folklore, ‘a job in the Registry was as much a step in a debutante's progress as Queen Charlotte's Ball.' Though the folklore exaggerates the proportion of debs, there was no shortage of individuals who fitted the stereotype. One young woman in the Registry in the 1950s lived in the Curzon House Club (which then had no casino but was widely used by ladies from county families on shopping trips to Harrods), conveniently situated for the Service's then HQ at Leconfield
House. Another Registry deb is said to have arrived each morning accompanied by her boyfriend in the Household Cavalry, with whom she had just been riding in the Park. Partly because of what were then termed the ‘hazards of marriage' (normally followed by resignation) among its young and eligible female employees, turnover was always heavier in the Registry than anywhere else in the Service.
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In 1960 the DG, Sir Roger Hollis, was asked informally by Burke Trend of the Treasury (later cabinet secretary) if he would consider the possibility of a building south of the river in the Elephant and Castle area. He replied that it was a rather ‘slummy' district. Hollis wrote subsequently that ‘since most of our girls come from the Kensington and Bayswater area', a move to the Elephant and Castle would have an adverse effect on recruiting.
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Some of the working-and middle-class girls in Registry were initially rather intimidated by the novel experience of working with debs.
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By the later 1960s the younger generation of women graduates and professionals felt less content with life in the Service than most previous female recruits. Their discontents were increased by John Marriott's successor as Director B, who told at least one group of new entrants at the end of the 1960s: ‘Women are happier in subordinate positions.'
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Women were not included in the agent-running sections of the Service for another decade. When Stella Rimington became junior assistant officer in 1969:

The nearest women got to the sharp end of things in those days was as support officers to the men who were running the agents. They would be asked to go and service the safe-house where the agent was met – making sure there was milk and coffee there and the place was clean and tidy, and very occasionally they might be allowed to go with their officer to meet a very reliable, long-standing agent on his birthday or on some other special occasion.
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The first area where women played operational roles was in surveillance. By 1955 there were three female members of A4. At first none was allowed to drive. Their role was essentially to act as camouflage, accompanying male officers when it was necessary to strengthen their cover.
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Until 1975, when sex discrimination legislation made the restriction unlawful, no woman was allowed to remain in A4 for more than five years because, as Director B wrote in 1967, ‘Once we allow a woman to stay for over five years we should find it very difficult in practice to get rid of her at all.'
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One of the victims of the five-year rule later recalled:

. . . I was dreadfully upset when my time came to leave. Looking back I remember all the good times – riding my motor-bike, map reading from helicopters, exhausting
days and very amusing evenings. Of course there were boring times but they soon passed . . .
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Male and female surveillance staff in the early Cold War tended to come from different class backgrounds, with the A4 women coming from much higher up the social scale. Veterans believe that the class difference (a far bigger social barrier half a century ago than it has since become) was ‘a deliberate ploy' devised by the management so that, despite being cooped up in cars together for hours on end, the single women would not break up the marriages of their male colleagues. One female member of A4 recalls that collecting the surveillance cars from Clapham (where they were parked overnight in the basement of Arding and Hobbs department store) took for ever ‘because we lived in Kensington, you know . . . We were always meeting our friends if you were rushing through Harrods.'
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Throughout the early Cold War the Security Service continued to see itself as standing apart from Whitehall and needing to keep its distance to avoid unwelcome interference. The contrasting managerial mindsets of Whitehall and the Service were epitomized by their very different responses to the 1968 Fulton Report on the Civil Service.
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There was much in the report which was relevant to the Security Service as well as to Whitehall: the need for more skilled and professional managers, career planning, training and accountability. Whitehall responded by setting up a new Civil Service Department, founding the Civil Service College and increasing management training by 80 per cent in a year. The Security Service simply filed the Report away.
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When Sir Burke Trend suggested in 1966 that the Civil Service Commission might be able to help the Service fill staff shortages in ancillary grades, FJ's frosty reply was one that Kell might well have given a generation earlier – ‘that we were not Civil Servants and that technically speaking, the staff were in his personal employment'.
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New recruits were told they were Crown servants – not civil servants. Though operationally effective with mostly good morale, the Service had a management which, largely because of its isolation from Whitehall, was behind the times.

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Within MI5 ‘branch' and ‘division' were often used interchangeably. In internal administrative documents ‘branch' predominated until 1943 to 1950. From 1953 onwards the accepted was ‘branch'. On changes in division/branch nomenlature and responsibilities, see Appendix 3, p.000.

1

Counter-Espionage and Soviet Penetration: Igor Gouzenko and Kim Philby

The transition from war to Cold War brought with it a transition from intelligence feast to intelligence famine. During the Second World War, British intelligence had discovered more about its enemies than any state had ever known before about a wartime opponent. The Soviet Union, though less successful at penetrating the secrets of its enemies, discovered more of its wartime allies' secrets than any power had done before. When the war ended, four of what were later called the ‘Magnificent Five' – the most successful group of foreign agents in Soviet history – were still in place in Britain. Kim Philby in SIS, some believed, had the potential to become a future ‘C'. Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess were both supplying large quantities of classified Foreign Office documents. John Cairncross, though the peak of his career as a Soviet agent was past, was well positioned in the Treasury to provide intelligence on British defence expenditure. Anthony Blunt left the Security Service and returned to academic life as director of the Courtauld Institute, but continued to carry out occasional part-time missions for Soviet intelligence.
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