Too Secret Too Long, page 61
chapter forty-seven
Presents from Prague
Lord Wigg was to claim that his active personal oversight of the security situation ‘built up the status and quality of MI5’ and halted the serious run of security failures.[1] He may have had some effect, though MI5 officers resented what they called his ‘interference’, but he ignored what may have been a major factor in the sudden improvement – the fact that Hollis had retired. Such spy cases as did arise after he had left were almost all the result of treachery that had occurred, without impediment from the counter-espionage efforts of MI5, during Hollis’s reign.
The first case to come to public notice under Furnival Jones’s leadership was in 1968 when an R.A.F. chief technician called Douglas Britten was seen by routine watchers delivering a message to the Soviet Consulate in London. He had been recruited by a Soviet Intelligence officer in London six years previously through his interest in ‘ham’ radio and had done most of his spying in Cyprus, where the damage he inflicted earned him a prison sentence of twenty-one years. Apart from being an important R.A.F. base, Cyprus housed one of Britain’s main intercept and listening stations. Britten was a purely mercenary spy and when he tried to extricate himself he was blackmailed into continuing his treachery by being shown a photograph of himself receiving money from a recognizable Russian.
The severity of the sentence testified to the seriousness of the military damage caused by six years of continuous espionage without incurring suspicion. While Britten co-operated to the extent of revealing his Soviet sources and their methods, there was no opportunity to use him to feed disinformation to the Russians.
The Security Commission, which investigated Britten’s case, called him an accomplished liar and raised doubts about the date of his recruitment, which might have been earlier.[2] Its report made no recommendations and no indictments. While the Security Commission is a standing body, it remains passive until required to act following a security breach. An on-going oversight body, with accumulating expertise, might have paid more attention to the situation in the Soviet Embassy where, in 1968, the number of alleged career diplomats had risen to an all-time high of eighty, compared with thirty-seven accredited British diplomats in Moscow. One of these ‘diplomats’ who returned to Moscow a few days after Britten was arrested, was Alexander Borisenko. He had been listed as ‘First Secretary in the Cultural Department’ and had been the spy’s controller after his return from Cyprus in 1966, though it is unlikely that Britten was his only source. Nothing was to be done about this blatant abuse of the diplomatic privilege for a further three years.
While it had long been known that several Members of Parliament had been recruited to the Soviet service, at least as agents of influence, none had been prosecuted, usually for lack of evidence which could be brought into court but mainly because of the reluctance of governments to tarnish the reputation of Parliament. The capability of M.P.s to serve as Soviet agents had been greatly enhanced in 1964 when, shortly after becoming Prime Minister, Harold Wilson introduced measures which made it almost impossible for the security authorities to produce any evidence against them. According to information supplied to me by the late Lord Wigg, both he and Wilson were convinced that Tories, who were enraged about their part in the Profumo case, would do all they could to exact revenge, preferably by finding a security case involving a Labour minister or M.P. Wigg was appointed Paymaster-General, a sinecure post, and was given the special task of liaising with MI5 and other security departments, ostensibly to strengthen security measures. He was, in fact, a one-man oversight body, but only for the Prime Minister, and his main function was to give Wilson the earliest possible warning of any imminent security scandals so that they could be eliminated, if possible. Failing that, the Prime Minister would be able to assure Parliament that he had not been ignorant of the position, as Macmillan had been with Profumo.
As an additional safeguard, Wilson, who had been shocked by MI5’s treatment of the War Minister, called Hollis in to see him and told him that he must seek his personal approval before making any investigations involving any member of either the Commons or the Lords. Hollis was told that this meant that MI5 was forbidden to carry out any form of surveillance of any M.P. or peer without his permission. This included telephone tapping, the opening of letters, examination of bank accounts and the other routine procedures applied to suspects. Wilson also told Hollis that he would be unlikely to accept the evidence of defectors as a basis for any investigations of M.P.s and peers. These restrictions, which were partly conditioned by Wilson’s belief that MI5 was anti-Labour and over-zealous to identify any left-wing Labour Parliamentarian as pro-communist, were confirmed to Hollis in writing and made known to the MI5 staff. Parliament, however, was not told about them until 1966 when Labour M.P.s who suspected that their telephones were being tapped were told, by the Prime Minister, about their immunity to such surveillance. Tory M.P.s objected on the grounds that no citizen who might become suspect should enjoy such protection, but the situation remains unchanged.[3]
There was considerable surprise, therefore, in April 1970 when a long-serving Labour M.P. called Will Owen was charged under the Official Secrets Act of betraying defence secrets to Soviet bloc intelligence, especially when it became known that the information about him had come from yet another chance defector to the U.S.[4]
Owen, then aged sixty-nine, had been Labour M.P. for Morpeth since 1954 and had been recruited by Czech Intelligence in 1957, being given the code-name ‘Lee’. He was a mercenary spy, being paid £500 a month as a retainer with additional payments for special information and free holidays in Czechoslovakia, which he justified through his position as secretary of an East-West trade committee. According to Josef Frolik, a senior Czech Intelligence officer who defected to the C.I.A. in July 1969, Owen had met his Czech controller in London parks almost weekly for thirteen years without detection. It was MI5’s responsibility to counter Soviet bloc agents, such as Owen’s controllers, and it had failed before M.P.s were given special protection. During that time Hollis had been Director-General but his successors also failed to detect Owen’s treachery until alerted to it by Frolik, who had served on the British desk at Czech Intelligence headquarters in Prague from 1960 to 1964 and then in London itself until 1966.
Frolik alleged that Owen had provided secret information especially after February 1960 when he had become a member of the House of Commons Defence Estimates Committee. The Prime Minister therefore gave permission for Owen to be questioned. He denied having received any money from the Czechs. When examination of his bank accounts showed that he had received large sums which he had never declared for tax he admitted lying and resigned from Parliament. At his trial, however, it could not be proved that he had transmitted actual defence secrets, especially as Frolik’s evidence was hearsay and therefore inadmissible, the files to which he referred being in Prague. Owen was therefore acquitted, to his great surprise and to the anger of the MI5 management who had been involved in yet another failed prosecution.
The MI5 investigators found that Owen had received much more money than he had admitted and were anxious to interrogate him further. He agreed to help them provided the Labour M.P., Leo Abse, could be present to safeguard him from further prosecution. Abse has since recorded how MI5 assured him of Owen’s further immunity and how he listened while the former M.P. confessed to treachery for which he should have been imprisoned. As Abse, a psychologist, put it, ‘Owen certainly did his best to rape his motherland.’[5]
Because of the acquittal M.P.s have since been required to withdraw Parliamentary statements that Owen was a spy, which he undoubtedly was.
Owen died, in only marginal dishonour, in 1980, aged eighty.
The Owen case was another scandalous instance of a spy who had operated unchecked for many years and was eventually detected only because of a chance defection to the U.S. His admissions, following his acquittal, established that he had inflicted considerable damage on the defence interests of Britain and N.A.T.O. and had talent-spotted other M.P.s with possible character weaknesses. His prosecution further blunted MI5’s defences because it made them even more reluctant to press charges against any M.P. and it strengthened Wilson’s claim that defector evidence was unreliable. In fact, Frolik’s evidence proved to be entirely true, and the court’s rejection of it, while proper under British law, infuriated him. He had been brought over from the U.S. for debriefing by MI5 prior to the case and when this collapsed he declined to be of further assistance for some time. He had told his debriefer that MI5 had almost certainly been penetrated in the 1960s and he undertook to say more about it later but changed his mind after the Owen débâcle.[6]
In the eyes of Soviet bloc intelligence the Owen case encouraged the view that Britain was soft on spies and that retribution need not follow exposure, as cases like those of Blunt and Long had already shown. Whether Owen would have been prosecuted had he been a minister remains a matter for wonder.
Oversight of the Owen case might have led to constructive inquiries about MI5’s facilities and resources for keeping watch on Soviet bloc controllers who, in the Owen case, had as usual been professional intelligence officers posing as ‘diplomats’ in the Czech Embassy. MI5’s likely excuse that its resources were overstretched could then have led to an effective examination of the numbers of Soviet bloc intelligence officers in London, which were already too high under the Tories and had reached grotesque proportions under the six years of Labour Government.
Owen’s behaviour should certainly have led to some examination of the fitness of backbench M.P.s to serve on Parliamentary committees with access to classified information but I can find no evidence that it did so.[7] The tendency was to regard Owen as a solitary rogue, but Frolik named several other M.P.s as Czech sources. They included Sir Barnet Stross, the former Labour M.P. for Stoke-on-Trent, code-named ‘Gustav’, who provided information about Labour Party policies while it was in opposition and about defence matters when it was in power. Others were Tom Driberg and John Stonehouse, a minister.
Inquiry by an oversight body into the circumstances which caused Wilson to agree to the investigation of Owen would have focused attention on the immunities to surveillance enjoyed by M.P.s and could, possibly, have led to their suspension on the grounds that they are inequitable and unsafe. Such immunities still exist being, to use a Whitehall phrase, ‘set in concrete’.
MI5 had more success with the next spy exposed by Frolik, though again the circumstances were to cast further doubt on the efficiency of the counter-spy agency during Hollis’s direction of it. In 1959 Czech Intelligence had recruited a thirty-year-old R.A.F. technician called Nicholas Prager during a visit he had made to Prague, where he had been born in 1928. He was the son of a Czech clerk who, after working for many years in the British Consulate there, had managed to acquire British citizenship and retired to Britain in 1948. According to Frolik’s evidence, the father had worked for Czech Intelligence inside the Consulate and his son was also prepared to betray the country of his adoption, for he claimed British nationality through his father, joining him in England in 1949 and entering the R.A.F. Nicholas Prager, who was a committed communist but also spied for money, was highly productive because he was knowledgeable about the V-bomber force, which was Britain’s main nuclear deterrent, and in particular had access to highly secret research on radar-jamming devices, which he passed to the Czechs, inflicting serious and expensive damage on Britain’s defences. Since British defence chiefs were unaware that the Russians knew the technicalities of the V-bomber force’s anti-jamming devices, Britain’s power to deter a Soviet attack was correspondingly reduced at critical times, such as the Cuban missile crisis, when the V-force was readied for action. After leaving the R.A.F. in 1961 Prager joined English Electric, which was working on secret defence projects.[8]
For more than ten years Prager worked for the Czechs, meeting controllers regularly in London at Underground stations and elsewhere. He was never detected, even when he visited the Czech Embassy itself with a briefcase full of photographs of two secret devices known as Blue Diver and Red Steer, which he had taken with a polaroid camera provided by the Czechs. It is unlikely that he would ever have been exposed but for information provided by Frolik and another Czech defector, Frantisek August, who had been one of his London controllers, posing as the ‘visa officer’ at the Embassy from 1961 to 1963.[9]
When Prager’s home was searched early in 1971 one-time cipher pads were discovered but all the charges related to the late 1950s and early 1960s. He was sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment and died in 1981 when attention was drawn to the disparity of his treatment and that accorded to Blunt and Long who had committed far graver offences. After serving his sentence, Prager was under continuous threat of deportation.[10]
The Prager case provided further evidence that, at least during Hollis’s reign as Director-General, MI5 had been ineffective in curbing the activities of Soviet bloc controllers and recruiters, who operated freely in London. As already pointed out, MI5’s watcher operations were being continuously thwarted in circumstances strongly suggesting that Soviet bloc intelligence in London was being informed of their programme from some traitorous source. An oversight body could have satisified itself that enough was being done inside MI5 to rectify these serious problems.
The details of the case revealed appalling inadequacies in the vetting process. Prager had lied on his application form to join the R.A.F., claiming that he had been born in Britain and that his father was also British-born. These lies had been transcribed without check onto his positive vetting form. No inquiries were made into his Czech-born wife, who in fact was an ardent communist.[11]
An oversight body would surely have added the case to its list of those in which traitors had been detected only because of information provided to MI5 by a defector to the U.S., underlining the lack of such defectors to MI5, which could have been a matter for constructive concern. As stated, Frolik claimed that he believed MI5 to be penetrated, but little seems to have been done to follow up that most serious suggestion.
Frolik also gave a lead to a Labour M.P. who had been working for Czech Intelligence and was known to him only by the code-name ‘Crocodile’. He turned out to be Tom Driberg, the former MI5 agent inside the Communist Party who had moved increasingly to the left and become a double agent. When shown a spread of photographs by MI5, Frolik picked out Driberg and recalled that the Czech Intelligence mission in London had been censured by the K.G.B. for dealing with him because he was ‘their man’. When questioned, Driberg admitted that he had sold the Czechs information about internal Labour Party matters, including details of the private lives of M.P.s who might be suborned. He said that he had known his Czech controller only as ‘Vaclav’.[12]
Driberg had been dropped as an MI5 agent some time previously but was taken up again following Frolik’s information in the hope of using him to supply disinformation to the Czechs.[13]
Driberg’s triple act in spying for MI5, the K.G.B. and Czech Intelligence is so complex, with much of it still secret, that it is difficult to know which side had the advantage. He was undoubtedly valuable in his pre-war and wartime activities as ‘M8’ but appears to have moved towards the K.G.B. after his visit to Moscow in 1956 to see Burgess. He reported then to MI5 that the Russians had offered to pay him well for information about the Labour Party’s internal proceedings and plans and, with Labour in opposition, the MI5 management, then led by Hollis, had no objection, provided he showed all his gleanings to them first. The K.G.B. provided him with two identical briefcases, bought in Britain, and when he handed one with his reports to his Soviet controller he was given the other containing his payment. MI5 had stipulated that the Soviet money should all be handed in but Driberg is believed to have kept a lot of it.[14]
An assessment made after the death of Driberg (then Lord Bradwell) in 1976 convinced MI5 that, since the war, the balance of advantage concerning his services almost certainly lay with the Soviet bloc.
It can reasonably be assumed that an oversight body, and particularly one with any Parliamentary representation, would have been astonished, and probably perturbed, to discover that an M.P. was being used as an active agent to spy on his own party and, with MI5 connivance, to pass information about it to the K.G.B., especially when it might be used to suborn other M.P.s. It might also be assumed that such a body would have required action to put an end to the situation, action which, surely, would have been in the public interest. The judgement of a Director-General who permitted such an arrangement might also have been called into question.
If and when an oversight body is established, some consideration might be given to an arrangement whereby the committee which scrutinizes candidates being proposed for honours could have access to it. The award of a peerage to Driberg, a half-traitor and haunter of public lavatories, was a mockery of the honours system and an affront to the Lords.[15] Others who were later ennobled might also have been vetoed on security grounds.
The most provocative name of an alleged Czech agent among British M.P.s supplied by the two Czech defectors, Frolik and August, was that of John Stonehouse, a former Labour minister in the Aviation and Technology Ministries and, later, Postmaster-General and Minister of Posts and Telecommunications. It was claimed that Stonehouse had been recruited by sexual entrapment and subsequent blackmail threats while visiting Czechoslovakia. In return he was alleged to have supplied Soviet bloc intelligence not only with aviation secrets but counter-intelligence material.[16]
No suspicion whatever had attached to Stonehouse, who entered Parliament in 1957, until the debriefing of the defectors, of whom August claimed to be the most important witness. MI5 had been reading G.C.H.Q. intercepts of Czech Intelligence messages and the presence of code-names indicated the existence of British agents working for it but efforts to link Stonehouse with any of them failed and neither Frolik nor August was able to supply hard evidence which, they claimed, existed in documents in the Czech secret service archives in Prague. No further action could be taken against Stonehouse, who was still Minister of Posts and Telecommunications, because of the Wilson ban on surveillance of M.P.s. Wilson was horrified when told of the suspicions, and being sceptical of statements by defectors, who might manufacture material to improve their value, MI5 was forbidden to carry out a hostile interrogation of the suspect. Instead, Wilson called Stonehouse to Number 10 Downing Street and in his presence the suspect was questioned by an MI5 officer. Stonehouse vigorously denied the allegations. In the absence of hard evidence from MI5, Wilson accepted Stonehouse’s word and the matter was kept secret until 1974. By that time Stonehouse had faked his death by suicide to escape from serious business problems and Frolik’s evidence against him was published in American newspapers as being, possibly, behind the disappearance. Wilson therefore decided to make a statement to Parliament.[17] On 17 December 1974 he announced that MI5 had advised him that there was no evidence to support the defectors’ allegations.
