Too Secret Too Long, page 34
When MI5 was told of Goleniewski’s defection it was argued that the K.G.B. would assume that he would blow Houghton and that the rest of the ring would then be at risk. It was therefore decided that Lonsdale and the Krogers must be arrested without further delay. The diminution of the radio messages from Moscow to Lonsdale had also convinced the investigators that any other agents in the ring had already been switched to some unknown Soviet controller.
An ingenious last-minute ruse to detect some of these agents was devised and involved an agreement with the police that the arrest of the five known spies should be kept secret for forty-eight hours. For some unknown reason the news leaked from Bow Street police station, to the fury of the Attorney-General. Lord Wigg, who was later to have close links with MI5, has described this misfortune: ‘Information about Lonsdale’s arrest was leaked and heaven knows how many members of the Soviet spy gang took the tip and got out of England.’[4]
In some way MI5 was able to discover that the K.G.B. ‘resident’ in London and his chief assistant knew of the arrest of the spies before it was made public. They were both watching television when the first news of the arrests was flashed on the screen and seemed quite unsurprised and unperturbed. They made no effort to contact the Embassy or anybody else, indicating that those who needed to know already did.
The investigating team was congratulated by Hollis, but when they reported their reservations and suspicions that the operation had been blown by a leak from inside MI5, soon after it had begun, he ridiculed the idea as totally absurd. Later evidence from the defector Golitsin was to support the belief that after MI5 had photographed Lonsdale’s one-time pads, other spies under his control were transferred to another ‘illegal’ controller who has never been identified.[5]
In the biography which Lonsdale helped to write after his return to the Soviet Union and which was, apparently, ghosted by Philby on behalf of the K.G.B., it is claimed that he had immediately detected that the attaché case which he had left at the bank had been searched because he had ‘laid a fairly simple trap for would-be snoopers’.[6] I suspect that this is K.G.B. disinformation to make what had been a leak from a most valuable source appear as MI5 incompetence. When the book was published in 1965 the leak-source was believed to be either Mitchell or Hollis, the latter being still in command. I know the precautions taken by the expert MI5 technicians who opened the attaché case and I find it hard to believe that they would have been deceived by any simple trap. The biography also claims that Lonsdale had agents in the Microbiological Research Establishment – the so-called Germ Warfare Station – at Porton on Salisbury Plain. This, too, may be disinformation to cause wasteful inquiries there and thereby help to protect real agents somewhere else. What is certain is that Houghton, who returned to Britain in 1952, following his recruitment in Warsaw, was handled by a previous controller, who passed him on to Lonsdale in 1956 and remains unknown.
MI5 might have learned more about the other spies involved with Lonsdale if they had paid more attention to claims made by Houghton, who stated in his own autobiography that ‘they let the big fish get away’.[7] While his book was sensationalized to increase its sales, Houghton did have accurate information about his previous controller, whose code-name was ‘Nikki’, and about another, known to him as ‘John’. He probably told MI5 some lies, after his offer to turn Queen’s Evidence had been rejected, but all his information seems to have been dismissed far too readily suggesting, perhaps, that somebody in MI5 was not all that keen to expose the other Soviet controllers and any agents they might have been running.
The two Americans, Morris and Lona Cohen, who had disappeared from New York in 1950 and were wanted by the F.B.I. for questioning as communist associates of the Rosenbergs, had used false passports supplied in Paris by a New Zealand diplomat to enter Britain as the Krogers. They established a deep-cover legend as booksellers. The New Zealander, a Soviet agent called Paddy Costello, had also moved to Britain and became Professor of Russian at Manchester University. He was put under surveillance and was seen in contact with other Soviet agents, but firm evidence against him did not accrue until after the confession of Anthony Blunt, by which time Costello had died. The discovery of his complicity with the Krogers, however, led to inquiries in New Zealand where it was found that the K.G.B. had built up a network of informers after it had suspended operations in Australia following the Petrov defection, and two Soviet ‘diplomats’ were expelled.[8]
Lonsdale’s biography contains one true statement, inserted to expose the falseness of a ‘legend’ leaked to the Press suggesting that MI5 had been alerted to Houghton’s treachery by the discovery that he was spending more than he earned: ‘The truth is quite different. MI5 were given the tip by a traitor who handed it over on a plate. Without that they would never have got me.’ The traitor, of course, was Goleniewski.
The K.G.B. made great efforts to secure the release of Lonsdale, the first Soviet national to be convicted in Britain. They succeeded in April 1964 when he was exchanged for the Soviet-held British courier, Greville Wynne. The recent inclusion of Lonsdale’s name in a Soviet publication about ‘hero spies’, along with those of Sorge, Rudolf Abel and Philby, suggests that he gave far more effective service than merely controlling Houghton and Gee.[9]
An analysis of how Goleniewski’s espionage for the C.I.A. had leaked to the K.G.B. prior to his defection – the tip about the existence of a ‘pig’ ‘- was conducted separately by the C.I.A. and MI5. The MI5 analysis concluded that while there is strong evidence that Goleniewski eventually came under strong K.G.B. pressure in the U.S. and may have been forced into acting as a disinformation agent from 1963 onwards, he was genuine before the time of his defection and for some time afterwards, His main haul of information, in the form of hundreds of Minox camera films of secret Polish documents, had been hidden by him in a hollow tree which he had passed on his way home from his office in Warsaw. The C.I.A. was told of the tree’s location as soon as Goleniewski reached the West and its man in Warsaw emptied it and sent the cache via the diplomatic bag to Washington, where it was seen to contain far more secrets than Soviet bloc intelligence would have been prepared to sacrifice to establish a false defector. It seemed that the Soviets had been made aware that there was a spy inside the Polish U.B. in the latter part of 1959 and were feeding doctored information into the U.B. as ‘barium meals’ to pinpoint the leaker. Some of this information was of a detailed kind, which could only have originated from a Western source inside an intelligence organization and under continuous K.G.B. control. Such a source could also have been responsible for the original warning to the K.G.B. of the existence of the ‘pig’. The date of this warning coincided with the time when the C.I.A. had told MI5 the information which led to the detection of Houghton. Conforming with the usual requirements of security, the C.I.A. had not told MI5 anything about Goleniewski himself which, perhaps, saved him from arrest and execution. His flight may well have saved his life but it also put an end to his work in the most valuable of all espionage roles – that of an agent in place.
In anticipation of the inevitable onslaught from the Labour Opposition about the inadequacies of the security precautions which had enabled the Portland Ring to spy for so long, Macmillan set up an inquiry into all the circumstances, headed by Sir Charles Romer, a former appeal judge.[10] It discovered that Houghton had broken almost every rule in the spy’s self-preservation code yet had operated for seven years under the noses of security men without being caught. He had been loud-mouthed and boastful and lived blatantly above his income, flashing wads of notes in pubs. He dropped enough hints to his wife to arouse her suspicions and she reported him to his superiors, who took no action. Four independent reports questioning his reliability had to be made before any effective action was taken. The circumstances revealed such appalling slackness that the Prime Minister declined to publish even an expurgated edition of the Romer report and restricted Parliament and the public to a brief summary.[11] This put the main blame on the Admiralty, but MI5 was criticized for failing to ‘press an inquiry to a positive conclusion’. Hollis, who gave evidence to the Romer Committee, had taken over command of MI5 when the information casting doubt on Houghton’s reliability had first reached it in 1956. He was held responsible by Macmillan for the slipshod lack of follow-up which had enabled Houghton to do so much damage over the ensuing years, as the Prime Minister indicated when he told Parliament that ‘action had been taken to reduce to a minimum the chance of such a failure occurring again’.
Apart from that admission, Macmillan took the customary ministerial line of protecting his departments, and MI5 in particular, from admonishment in the House of Commons. He was also guilty of making a statement which he did not really believe. He told Parliament that there was no evidence to suggest that the information betrayed by the Portland spies had ‘compromised more than a relatively limited sector of the whole field of British naval weapons’.[12] He said that he had every confidence that what the experts had told him was correct, but in his diary he wrote, ‘Although I was assured by experts that no serious leakage had taken place…I had an uneasy feeling that either the Underwater Weapons Establishment served no very useful purpose or there were secrets of the highest possible importance.’[13] The latter hunch was correct. Years later Admiral Sir Ray Lygo, then Vice-Chief of the Naval Staff, told me that the leakages had been very severe and had taken years to rectify. Macmillan’s statement was another example of the way ministers can be misled by officials over secret matters.
The Potential Value of Oversight
While the Romer Committee, an ad hoc body, produced a useful report which led to security improvements, it is reasonable to suppose that a standing oversight body with regular access to complex security and intelligence issues would have been more searching in its inquiries. From the Romer Committee’s terms of reference it is unlikely that it concerned itself with the possibility that parts of the Lonsdale-Kroger network appeared to have escaped detection. An oversight body with on-going responsibilities, however, should have been active in that regard. The questioning of MI5 officers involved with the case would have revealed deep suspicion that it had been ‘blown’ and inquiries to discover the cause might have been productive at that stage.
The cavalier treatment of Houghton as a source might also have been thought worthy of examination, as might the circumstances of the leak from the police, which probably allowed other members of the K.G.B. network to escape.
G.C.H.Q.’s failure to detect and then locate the transmissions which the Krogers had been making for months, and possibly years, was, perhaps, worthy of deeper inquiry than it received, though the equipment they had used was of an advanced rapidaction type.
chapter twenty-seven
A ‘Real Outsider’
Before Goleniewski defected to America at Christmas 1959 he claimed that there was an active K.G.B. spy inside the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). The K.G.B. had told him that this spy had provided details of several agents being run by MI6 in Poland so that they could be neutralized. The spy had clearly worked for some time in MI6 headquarters because he had also provided the K.GB. with MI6’s ‘watch-list’ for Poland, naming the known Polish Intelligence agents who should be kept under surveillance, in MI6’s interests, if possible. The later defector, Golitsin, was to reveal that the spy’s K.G.B. code-name was ‘Diamond’ but, as with Philby, MI6 could not bring itself to believe there was such a spy in its ranks and did nothing effective about the warning.
After Goleniewski had defected an MI6 officer was sent to interview him. The encounter was hilarious. The defector was so terrified that his interrogator might be ‘Diamond’ himself, sent to kill him on K.G.B. orders, that he insisted on being in one room while the MI6 man was in another, with an interpreter running between them. Goleniewski was contemptuous of the British failure to find ‘Diamond’ and ridiculed the suggestion that the MI6 documents he had seen and described had simply been filched from a safe in Brussels, as had been too readily and conveniently assumed. He then gave a further crucial clue to ‘Diamond’s’ identity: he had operated for MI6 in Berlin.[1]
The evidence now pointed strongly to George Blake, an officer of Dutch-Egyptian origin who had joined the Secret Service in 1947, had taken a Russian-language course at Downing College, Cambridge, and had then been posted to Korea, where he had been captured and interned until April 1953. After recovery leave he had worked in the MI6 station in Berlin for four years, returning to London in 1959 to spend eighteen months at MI6 headquarters. At the time of his exposure he was attending an Arabic languages course at a Foreign Office school near Beirut.
At first the MI6 interrogators, still loath to accept that any of their colleagues could be a spy, believed that Blake had notched up too many apparent successes, ignoring the principle that the K.G.B. allows its agents to achieve some successes to maintain their credibility with their employers, but they could not escape the telling fact that the leakage of secrets had suddenly ceased when Blake had been posted to Beirut.
Blake was brought back to London on some pretext in April 1961 and after interrogation confessed to major acts of treachery, including the betrayal of more than forty MI6 agents and subagents, many of whom had probably been executed.[2]
He described how, as a Russian speaker, he had been involved in the planning of an Anglo-American operation, code-named ‘Gold’ by the Americans and ‘Prince’ by the British, to drive a 1,500-foot tunnel under the East-West boundary in Berlin to tap Red Army cables carrying signals and scrambled telephone conversations. The tunnel originated in the basement of a warehouse serving as a radar station and was fitted with highly sophisticated equipment to tape-record the communications so that they could be translated by a team in London. Blake confessed that he had warned the Soviets that the tunnel was to be built, at huge cost, before even a spit of soil had been dug. The enterprise cost about $25 million and produced nothing but a mass of carefully prepared misinformation, interspersed with some occasional accurate ‘chickenfeed’ to keep the operation going.
The Soviets permitted Operation Gold to continue for a year, partly to protect Blake, and then broke into the tunnel on 21 April 1956, making maximum propaganda use of this example of ‘Western duplicity’ just when the Soviet leaders, Bulganin and Khrushchev, were in London on their goodwill mission.
Blake admitted that he had betrayed everything he could about MI6, handing over documents to his controllers in the Soviet sector of Berlin, where he had permission to go in pursuit of his duties. He enabled the K.G.B. to kidnap prominent East Germans who had defected to the West. These included General Robert Bialek, a former East German security chief. His contempt for British security precautions in Berlin was demonstrated by his account of how he had photographed scores of secret documents. At lunchtime, when all offices containing secret papers had to be locked, he hid behind his desk to give the security guard the impression that the room was empty. He then had an hour and a half to do his photography without fear of interruption.
The internal inquiries following Blake’s confession showed that he had damaged MI5’s interests as well as those of MI6. For several months during his service in London he had acted as liaison man with MI5. One MI5 officer has told me how he was ordered by a senior man to tell Blake about a case he was running. He did so with great reluctance, and a most valuable incipient defector called Yudin, who had been a cipher clerk to the Soviet Military Attaché, was ‘blown’ with disastrous results, especially for Yudin. Blake was also able to give the Soviets the addresses of some of the ‘safe houses’ used by MI5 for operational and training purposes.
If there was a spy at high level in MI5 why did he fail to warn his Soviet controller that Blake had been detected and was to be arrested on his return to England? It would have been easy for the K.G.B. to have whisked Blake away from Beirut, as it was to do with Philby later. I asked the question and the answer given by MI5 officers was revealing, if only in a negative sense. The MI5 management was not told anything about the Blake case until shortly before his arrival in London, when it had to be involved to provide surveillance.[3] There had, therefore, been no time to warn the Soviets of Blake’s position before he left Beirut.
Philby, who was working in Beirut, had no knowledge that Blake was a K.G.B. agent, nor did Blake betray Philby, as has been suggested, because the two spies had been recruited and operated by quite separate K.G.B. networks.
It was presumed that Blake would have consulted his Soviet contact in the Lebanon as a matter of routine before agreeing to return to London. If so, the Moscow Centre had no suspicions, or if they had they regarded it as safe for Blake to return in the belief that, provided he admitted nothing, he would be safe from prosecution, as was indeed the case. The Attorney-General at the time, Sir Reginald Manningham Buller, was to tell me later that there were fears that the prosecution of Blake might collapse if he suddenly withdrew his confession, claiming that it had been made under duress, because there were no effective witnesses who could have been brought to court.
Why Blake confessed remains a mystery. At first he denied the charges, and the menacing glances of his interrogator, Terence Lecky, at an imposing pile of files, seemingly full of evidence, had no effect. Then, at Lecky’s last throw, he broke and admissions poured out of him. The case showed, as had that of Fuchs, that persistence can break down even the most unlikely suspect – a lesson which could and should have been applied to later cases, like those of Blunt and Long, had there ever been any real desire to prosecute them. No steps had been taken to secure the Attorney-General’s agreement to offer Blake immunity in order to persuade him to retract his denials. Officers of both MI5 and MI6, who were his contemporaries, have told me that he was ‘a real outsider, greatly disliked by his colleagues’ and that this was the reason why there were no internal moves to save him from prosecution.
