Too Secret Too Long, page 27
The C.I.A. made its own analysis of MI5’s handling of the case and concluded that it had been appallingly bungled. C.I.A. officers maintain that once it was known beyond doubt that Maclean was ‘Homer’ he should have been under constant surveillance to catch him with a Soviet controller or with a cut-out like Burgess.[69] Then, once it had been decided to interrogate him, it would have been normal practice to inform him of his coming ordeal to panic him into some damning reaction, which round-the-clock surveillance could have detected. According to C.I.A. standards the way the Maclean case was handled in its terminal stages was the least likely to succeed.[70] Curiosity therefore persists as to why the MI5 management was convinced that Soviet Intelligence officers and cut-outs would never attempt to contact Maclean outside central London. Was there some special reason for the lack of surveillance at Maclean’s home and on his journeys there?
There remains the possibility that the defection of Maclean was deliberately made easy because it was the best available solution to official anxieties. This continues to be roundly denied by the security authorities but it is doubtful that the question will ever be answered satisfactorily as the documents concerning the case have been listed as MI5 papers which may not only be withheld indefinitely but will probably be ‘weeded’ or even destroyed ‘in the public interest’.
Four months after Maclean’s defection his wife told MI5 that she wanted to leave Britain to start a new life in Switzerland, away from prying newspapermen. There was no power to stop her going and she went to live in Geneva. Two years later, on 11 September 1953, in another K.G.B. operation, she left surreptitiously with her three children for Moscow where she lived for almost thirty years before returning to the United States. During that time she left her husband to cohabit with Philby, which must have been a bitter experience for Maclean.
MI5 appears to have taken no interest in her while she was in Switzerland. Shortly before she disappeared it had been intended to send two officers to see her but the story was put about in MI5 that one of them had been unable to find his passport and that as a result Mrs Maclean had flown before they could have arrived.[71]
MI5 interest was not aroused again until the defector, Vladimir Petrov, revealed that the K.G.B. had arranged her departure from Switzerland.[72] Plans to take her to Moscow had existed in 1952, and perhaps before that. Again it was ‘embarrassing’ for the MI5 management to admit, internally and in Whitehall, that for such a woman to take three young children to the U.S.S.R., where they would become Soviet citizens with no certainty that she or they would ever be able to leave, implied that she was a dedicated communist and probably had been so at the time of her husband’s defection.
The justified fear of an incensed American reaction to the defection of Maclean and Burgess forced the Government and Whitehall officials to go through rapid motions aimed at locking stable doors to prevent the bolting of further rogue horses and the entry of new ones. It was an exercise which was to be repeated with depressing regularity over the years.
Following the Gouzenko revelations and the conviction of Nunn May in 1946 there had been a reluctant realization in Whitehall that it had been too trusting regarding the loyalty of defence scientists and other civil servants with access to highly secret information. The Attlee Government set up the Cabinet Committee on Subversive Activities and in the spring of 1948 a loyalty programme was introduced to prevent known communists and others who might be security risks from working in posts where important secrets might be learned. It became known as the ‘purge procedure’ and was devised by Treasury officials working in liaison with MI5. As Director of Security, Hollis was the MI5 officer responsible, being assisted by Graham Mitchell, who was in charge of overseeing communists and fascists.[73] The procedure was negative in the sense that it depended for its application on the existence, in MI5 or police records, of evidence of communist connections and this was usually not available. As an indication of how half-baked the system devised by Hollis and the Treasury was, it was not to be applied to new recruits to secret posts until Attlee queried it.[74]
The weakness of the system became publicly evident by the conviction of Fuchs and the flight of Pontecorvo, who had been cleared for access to secrets several times. Privately it had ruined the Attlee Government’s chance of renewing the interchange of atomic information with the U.S., a situation of benefit to the Soviet Union. With repeated British pleas for restoration of the interchange there was pressure from Washington for the introduction of a system of ‘positive vetting’, under which all people with access to information classified Top Secret would have to be questioned and their background and previous activities investigated. This was being resisted in Whitehall and, it seems, in certain quarters of MI5, as being an unwarranted invasion of civil liberty, though the country and the system against which the new measure was directed were intent on depriving the whole nation of its civil liberties.
When the guilt felt about the defection of Maclean and Burgess forced some action, the Labour Cabinet agreed to introduce positive vetting, but it lost the ensuing general election and it fell to the incoming Churchill administration to announce its introduction early in 1952. Hollis was, again, the main architect, and while the various departments were to be responsible for carrying out the positive vetting procedures and for supplying the necessary investigating officers, MI5 was to provide general advice and assist with difficult cases.[75]
Each person requiring access to Top Secret information for his work would have to agree to fill in a questionnaire which included questions about past or present communist connections. He would have to supply the names of two referees who could be consulted about his character, and investigating officers would be empowered to make limited inquiries about his background and activities. MI5 would be consulted if any suggestion of subversive activity by the candidate or his close relatives came to light.
As an official adviser to the House of Commons Defence Committee in its inquiry into positive vetting in 1983 I had access to full information about the system and how it worked. It became clear that the system had been introduced in a ‘softly softly’, piecemeal manner which could almost be guaranteed to be ineffective. The field investigations into individuals were either not carried out at all or were in the hands of people unqualified to make them. Character defects were not regarded as a bar to access to secrets until 1956, and the system has had to be patched up repeatedly after every major spy case. As a result, spies can still defeat it.
Incredibly, both MI5 and MI6 opted out of the general positive vetting system, maintaining that their circumstances were so special that they would have to make their own secret arrangements which they would run themselves.[76] The Government deferred to their view and left it to them to sort out their security problems. As Director of Security, Hollis must have been particularly influential in MI5’s decision to exempt itself from positive vetting.
MI6 did not introduce positive vetting in full measure for its own staff until Maurice Oldfield, as MI6 Head of Security, did so in late 1963 and early 1964. Hollis did little concerning MI5, even when he became Director-General, claiming that his staff were above suspicion, though one former member and friend of his, Blunt, was deeply suspect by then. Positive vetting was not introduced in MI5 until immediately before Hollis’s retirement late in 1965, even though Blunt had confessed to being a Soviet agent by that time.[77] Even then its introduction seems to have occurred only because an MI5 officer investigating Soviet penetrations had complained to Hollis that he was preventing the use of even elementary precautions. After some indignant argument, Hollis introduced positive vetting in the following week and the officer was among the first to be processed. Like all the officers in MI5 and MI6 he was vetted by one of his own colleagues. An MI6 officer has described to me how he was vetted by one of his closest friends, a performance which smacked of pantomime.
Hollis himself was never positively vetted before he retired, a matter of considerable regret for the team that was eventually to investigate him.
The Potential Value of Oversight
In May 1981 thirty years had elapsed since the great defection and documents concerning it should have become available to scholars and other interested parties under the usual rules. Instead, the Government decided that the papers should remain withheld and arrangements were made with the U.S. Government for the relevant Washington papers to be held back too – a requirement to which the American Administration had to agree under standing bilateral convention. Thus did the cover-up continue and is likely to continue, essentially to save face, not only for individuals but for Government departments.
This situation alone would justify the need for oversight into comparable cases. An independent group could assure Parliament and the public that information was being withheld in the genuine interests of the nation, if that were the case. If it were not, it could apply pressure for the release of the information.
In more urgent need of official consideration is the deterrent effect which the existence of an oversight body, independent of the Government and Whitehall, could have exerted on those in the Foreign Office and MI5 who were responsible for the succession of misjudgements which led to the fiasco. To what extent did these people take action, or avoid taking it because they were certain that their errors, however gross, could never be the subject of serious censure? Would they still have taken the decision to avoid watching Maclean once he had left London? And could they have continued to conceal the true extent of the catastrophe through misleading statements which an oversight body would have known to be fraudulent? I think not. If there was any deliberate desire to facilitate the defection, would that have been considered practicable if subject to oversight? Assuredly not.
More importantly, would not an independent oversight body have demanded a more thorough investigation into the circumstances that had enabled Maclean to receive the final warning which touched off his flight? The convenient excuse that it was all due to Philby, which continues to be upheld in the Cabinet Office and which is almost certainly untrue, could well have enabled another and even more successful Soviet spy to remain in place and reach the pinnacle of office. Examination of the facts by independent minds untrammelled by prejudice and Fifth Estate tradition might have suggested, at some stage, that the final Philby tip-off was a legend that the K.G.B. could foster, as it eventually did through Philby’s book and other media.
My experience as an adviser to the House of Commons Defence Committee strongly suggests that the positive vetting and other precautions taken to prevent penetration following the defections would have been more stringent and more rigorously applied had oversight existed. It would seem most unlikely that the Fifth Estate would have been allowed to regard itself as exempt from positive vetting had an oversight body known what was happening, or not happening, in those overly autonomous organizations.
Many officers of MI5 and MI6 oppose any form of oversight on the grounds that intelligence and counter-intelligence are risk-taking activities and that reasonable risks may not be taken if those responsible are subject to censure when operations fail. I can find no evidence to suggest that a properly constituted oversight body would fail to appreciate the necessity for some risk-taking. What remains in doubt is whether an oversight body would have considered the failure to keep Maclean under surveillance outside London and the failure of MI5 and MI6 to introduce positive vetting without undue delay to have been reasonable risks.
The outstanding virtue of an oversight body would be its capacity to ensure that lessons learned from previous security failures are applied. Had such a body learned about the peculiarities of the surveillance of Fuchs it might well have raised queries about the surveillance of Maclean. The major lesson provided by the Fuchs case was the need to avoid offending the American security authorities and Administration further when the British Government was laying such stress on improving relations. Yet, left to their own secret devices – as they still are – both MI5 and the Foreign Office took the narrow departmental view and withheld their information about Maclean to preserve secrecy and avoid embarrassment. They might not have done so had an oversight body existed and it seems most unlikely that they would have compounded their sins of omission by deliberately lying to the F.B.I. As Robert Lamphere’s testimony shows, the results were damaging to the nation’s interests.
In sum, I submit that the Maclean and Burgess cases offer fair evidence of the need for independent oversight of the secret departments of state.
chapter twenty-one
Chief Liaison Officer –
for the K.G.B.
The defection of Burgess along with Maclean cast immediate suspicion on Philby who was still in Washington, serving as chief liaison officer between MI6 and the C.I.A. and F.B.I. Though he was safer than if Maclean had been interrogated, both he and his Soviet controller realized that his position was under considerable threat and contingency plans were made for his escape. It was felt, however, that there was no immediate need for action. In the Soviet Union a person in Philby’s position would have been interrogated until he broke but, with Philby’s guidance, the K.G.B. assumed that, provided he kept his nerve, he stood a strong chance of avoiding exposure and, with the help of influential friends, of even continuing in post. C.I.A. officers who realized that there were too many anomalies in Philby’s career to be explained by coincidence persuaded their chief, General Bedell Smith, that he was most probably a Soviet agent. Though the evidence was circumstantial it was enough for the U.S. authorities to insist on Philby’s immediate recall and swift action on his return to London.
In the meantime, certain officers in MI5 had come to the same conclusion. Arthur Martin, anxious to achieve something positive from the Burgess/Maclean fiasco, had back-checked on Philby’s record which, by that time, showed his sudden conversion from communist leanings to membership of the Anglo-German Fellowship, his previous marriage to a known Soviet agent, a peculiar letter he had written to MI6 headquarters which seemed phrased to protect Maclean, another expressing uncharacteristic second thoughts about Burgess, and what looked like the deliberate fouling-up of what has become known as the Volkov Affair.[1]
On a beautiful summer day in August 1945 a Soviet citizen called Konstantin Volkov had walked into the British Consulate-General building in Istanbul, which housed the Turkish branch of MI6, and asked to see an official called John Read. Mr Read, who spoke Russian, having served in Moscow, has given me a first-hand account of the incident and its consequences.[2]
Believing that Read was in charge of what he called ‘the anti-Soviet bureau’, which did not exist, Volkov introduced himself as the local Soviet Consul-General and said that he and his wife wished to defect to Britain. As the conversation developed, Volkov said that he was involved in intelligence work but did not say whether it was for the K.G.B. or the G.R.U. and Read did not ask him, not then being aware of the separate identities of the two organizations. He offered to supply impressions of keys to filing cabinets in Moscow and the numbers of the cars used by Soviet Intelligence officers. He claimed to have been employed for several years in the ‘British Department’ of his intelligence agency and was, therefore, of particular interest to British counter-espionage. He said that he had deposited documents in a suitcase in a flat in Moscow and offered to provide the address and a key if the British authorities could let him have £27,000 – probably a round sum in roubles – and arrange for his safe defection.
A couple of days later, Volkov returned with a typewritten document in Russian, which was later to become known as his ‘shopping list’, and gave the British three weeks to decide whether his services would be needed.
Read sat up most of the night translating the document. It warned that there were two Soviet agents in the Foreign Office who were providing copies of telegrams. For this and other reasons the Russians were able to read the British diplomatic codes, so Volkov urged that his offer should not be sent by telegram but only in the diplomatic pouch. He also made other security stipulations which were observed. Volkov offered to provide information concerning the identities of hundreds of Soviet Intelligence officers serving overseas, and their agents, plus details of the organization of the Soviet Intelligence Service.[3]
As translated by Read, who was not a Russian scholar, the crucial passage in the typescript read, ‘…files and documents concerning very important Soviet agents in important establishments in London. Judging by the cryptonyms [the code-names in secret cables between London and Moscow] there are, at present, seven such agents, five in British Intelligence and two in the Foreign Office. I know, for instance, that one of these agents is fulfilling the duties of Head of a Department of British Counter-Intelligence.’[4]
Read reported this most interesting development to the Ambassador in Turkey, the late Sir Maurice Peterson, who, along with many other career diplomats, had a rooted objection to the Secret Intelligence Service and disliked the thought of having to house any of its officers under diplomatic cover. He seized on Volkov’s reference to the ‘anti-Soviet bureau’ and declared that the rest of his information must be equally unreliable. He was the type of man, common enough in the Foreign Service then, who could not bring himself to entertain the possibility that any colleague could be a traitor. As a result, the report went to London without the Ambassador’s backing, receiving little attention in the Foreign Office before being passed to MI6.[5] There it reached the desk of Philby who was gripped with fear as he identified the ‘Head of a Department of British Counter-Intelligence’ as himself.
