The New Spies, page 18
The second problem for the Service was to find a suitable building, within walking distance of Whitehall and near shops and other facilities. Finally Thames House, an old Ministry of Energy building, became available and ministers were persuaded to put up the money. Until her elevation to director-general, Stella Rimington was in charge of what became the largest office refurbishment in Europe, running a team of nine people to ensure total site security. The move has been an opportunity to upgrade the computer systems used by MI5, and Rimington has told friends there is enough wiring in the building to run ‘from Trafalgar Square to Red Square’. In December 1993, the building was handed over by Mowlem, the main contractors, to MI5 for the final batch of secure systems to be installed in time for complete occupation at the end of 1994.
In 1994, SIS will move from Century House in Westminster Bridge Road. Their old headquarters, a twenty-storey skyscraper constructed in the 1950s and now falling apart, is universally hated by all who work there. With a move anticipated for years, little money has been spent on maintenance with the result that doors don’t shut, paint is peeling and the central heating works intermittently. The building is known within SIS as Gloom Hall.
From such miserable surroundings, SIS is moving to the most magnificent spying HQ in the world. Designed by controversial post-modern architect Terry Farrell, the building is on the south side of the Thames over Vauxhall Bridge. Known as Vauxhall Cross, it rises in four tiers from the riverside, presenting a sheer wall to the traffic artery behind. From the river side, the building is clad in honey-coloured concrete panels with cascades of sea-green floors in the lower depths, easily visible from the river and the northern bank of the Thames. Several large atria — the big open conservatories to be found in the middle of most new office blocks — offer staff the chance to overlook each other. But Farrell, more than most contemporary architects, likes to design little nooks and crannies into his buildings as well as big standard office floors. He eventually incorporated 12,000 square metres of glass and aluminium to cover the six perimeter cores and the atria inside the building. The first stage of the development included a sports hall, computer rooms, library, restaurant, covered parking and archive stores.
The fifth floor even has a line of yew trees facing the river which were grown in Italy and acclimatized in Scotland before being shipped to London. Four tons of earth were used to plant them in containers with water, feeding and drainage systems built in. At ground level, plane trees, box hedges, wisteria and lavender have been planted with a gazebo, fountains and a kiosk designed to humanize the view from the river.
The more complex and secure offices were fitted out by SIS in consultation with the government’s Property Services Agency. Air-conditioning vents and sprinkler systems were removed and replaced with secure ducts. Walls were made more resistant to bomb damage and some windows and verandahs have been sealed. The total cost of the move will be around £230 million, a cost that has infuriated some Foreign Office officials who have to carry the SIS budget on their books. In the 1993 public expenditure round, where the government sought large cuts from every department, the spending on what some Foreign Office civil servants see as an exceptionally lavish headquarters so annoyed them that the cost of the building was leaked to MPs and journalists. It was pointed out that the £45 million set aside for fitting out the building in 1993-4 was almost as much as Britain planned to spend on overseas emergency aid and refugee relief aid in the same period.[79]
The leaks infuriated SIS who embarked on their own burst of counterleaking, pointing out what good value for money the building represents and how wise an investment in the nation’s future security it is. This silly row has had the effect of forcing both SIS and the Foreign Office to focus on the ancient convention of burying the SIS budget within the budgets of the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence (the Security Service budget is hidden by the Home Office and the Department of Environment). To everyone’s relief, that practice will now stop and, beginning in 1994, the budgets for all the intelligence services will be published.
Today, the 1,800 SIS employees basically work on two floors inside the building, a transformation from Gloom Hall, which was a rabbit warren with departments split between floors and a great deal of difficulty communicating between departments. Even with the obvious security restrictions of ‘need to know’, Vauxhall Cross allows for open plan offices and a culture change that reflects the new management style.
MI6 indirectly has Michael Heseltine to thank for its new riverside premises. The site, behind which is one of the bleakest and most depressing traffic interchanges in London, had been derelict for twenty years when it was earmarked in the 1970s for the notorious ‘green giant’ office tower, halted by public outrage. In 1982 Heseltine, then Environment Secretary for the first time, held an architectural competition for buildings on the site. Farrell was in the top three but was rejected by the developer, which promptly went bankrupt. In 1987 another developer, Regalian, bought the site and signed up Farrell to build a complex of riverside apartments and shops. Farrell revamped his earlier designs. Then came the housing slump and Regalian asked Farrell to make it offices instead. He went back to the drawing board. Then, in February 1989, the Government offered to buy the whole lot from Regalian for £130 million, before a brick had been laid, and Farrell submitted yet another design.
SIS retain a small outstation in south London which is used by some of their clandestine operators. They have also held on to the Fort, their training establishment near Portsmouth on the south coast of England. In addition, they share a research and development facility in London with the Security Service. There, government scientists develop all the tools of clandestine warfare. By bringing both Services under one roof, the government ensures that for every new scientific breakthrough there is also a counter so that both MI5 and MI6 can, in theory, remain on the cutting edge of espionage and counter-espionage techniques.
In the rivalry that exists between the Security Service and SIS, there is some satisfaction within MI6 that they have such an elegant and visionary office building while MI5 are confined to drab and unimaginative new headquarters. To some both inside and outside the intelligence world, the new buildings are an accurate reflection of the men and women who work in them.
The new relations with the media, legislation, more public headquarters and a new generation of senior officials should do a great deal to help reestablish the intelligence community as both credible and trustworthy. But there remains a strong residual distrust between the public and the politicians on the one hand and the intelligence community on the other that will take more than just shadowy deals with the media and well-meaning legislation to overcome. Two recent illustrations demonstrate how wide the gulf remains.
In April 1993, Alan Clark, the former Tory minister of trade and minister of state at the Ministry of Defence published his memoirs. This autobiography, one of the frankest of political memoirs, detailed a meeting Clark had with Robert Armstrong, the secretary of the cabinet, to discuss his recent appointment as a junior minister at the Department of Employment. Armstrong produced two files, one red, the other orange, and pointed out that Clark had had contact with the right-wing National Front (which Clark denied). He added that matters of ‘personal conduct’ (numerous affairs) might leave him open to blackmail.
‘I thought about it for a little while,’ Clark wrote. ‘They must have been bugging my phone. There was no other explanation. And for ages.’[80]
That a senior government minister with top secret clearance should seriously believe that the Security Service has the time or the authority to listen to his telephone calls almost beggars belief. But the apparent revelation caused a sensation and produced an exchange between the home secretary and Stella Rimington when the head of MI5 dismissed the allegations. In fact, Clark had been subjected to the normal vetting process and as a noted philanderer and gossip it had not been difficult for the vetters to gather details about his private life, a standard procedure in such cases. Normally private philandering is of little concern to MI5 but in Clark’s case there was one incident where he had had an affair with a mother and her daughter. This was considered potential blackmail material and so became part of his file.
Of more substance were the two conversations between members of the royal family that were recorded and then released to the press. The first, revealed in August 1992, was a conversation between James Gilbey and the Princess of Wales where he referred to her by the nickname Squidgy. This tape gave the clear impression that the two were lovers. Cyril Reenan, a retired bank manager, claimed to have recorded the conversation on his ham radio before passing it on to a tabloid newspaper.
The second tape recorded a conversation between Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles, a friend of the royal family. It was clear from that tape that Charles and the woman were lovers. Both tapes had allegedly been recorded around the end of 1989 or the beginning of 1990, at a time when Charles and Diana were supposed to be a happily married couple.
A third series of allegations were made by James Whitaker, the royal correspondent of the Daily Mirror, in his book Diana v Charles which was published in May 1993. He claimed to have tapes of other conversations between Charles and Diana and that ‘hundreds of hours of transcripts’ were available.
‘The reality is that conversations of the Prince of Wales, the Duke of York and their separated wives — as well as other key royals — have been closely monitored for some years,’ Whitaker wrote. ‘MI5, which is split up into small cells called IGUs (intelligence gathering units), has a specific group that concentrates on monitoring the royal family. Its existence was confirmed by former MI6 officer James Rusbridger in 1993, and other sources suggest that it is made up of six men who mount a round-the-clock surveillance of calls passing through all royal switchboards.’[81]
The Whitaker tape turned out to have been faked by a well-known British hoaxer. But it should have been clear that Whitaker appeared to have little knowledge of his subject. First, no one believes that James Rusbridger, who has claimed knowledge of British intelligence for many years to gullible journalists, has ever been a member of MI6 or any other part of British intelligence. That being so, he would have no access to any inside knowledge about the current, or even recent past workings of the intelligence community. Second, to carry out round-the-clock surveillance on the royal family would require far more than six men. In fact, it would require more resources than MI5 have available for all that kind of surveillance.
There is no routine surveillance of the royal family. There is no special unit that has been set up for that purpose and none could be established without a warrant from the home secretary. It would be a brave home secretary indeed who authorized such a warrant and it would be a foolhardy politician who believed that such a matter could remain secret for long.
Of more serious concern was the source of the two other tapes, both of which appeared genuine. There was widespread speculation in the press that both tapes originated with the Security Service or with GCHQ, with some newspapers speculating that their leaking was part of a complicated plot to undermine the monarchy which was considered too liberal for the conservative diehards in the intelligence services. The Prime Minister questioned both Patrick Walker and Stella Rimington about the matter and was satisfied that MI5 was not involved.
However, the Queen requested that MI5 conduct an investigation to discover the source of the leaks which had embarrassed the Palace and undermined the monarchy. The investigation revealed that the first tape, allegedly recorded by the bank manager, was genuine in that it was indeed Diana speaking to James Gilbey. But it had been edited using very sophisticated equipment and then rebroadcast a number of times, clearly in the expectation that someone, somewhere, would eventually pick up the recording.
When the story surfaced, different versions of the same recording were circulating among news organizations. MI5 believed that whoever had done the original recording used the bank manager as cover and then distributed other versions of the same conversation in the hope that the minor differences would not be noticed.
The second tape of the conversation between Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles was also genuine, although that, too, had been heavily edited. The Diana-Gilbey conversation had taken place with Diana using a mobile phone. While one end of such a conversation can be easily intercepted, recording both sides is more difficult. The Charles-Camilla call had also been taken over a mobile phone, and MI5 decided that it was likely the same person had intercepted the different calls.
This conclusion, which was hardly startling, led them no closer to the identity of the person who had carried out the tap and the editing. The idea that an amateur would have had the equipment, which is not available in Britain, to carry out the bugging was considered unlikely. Also, the investigation could find no hard evidence that any individual had received money for the recordings. If the motive was not financial, then it would have to be political, and MI5 turned towards GCHQ for their answers.
The Thatcher government had banned all trade union activity at GCHQ, and the recordings had been made shortly after that affair, which had provoked great bitterness inside the communications centre. The equipment in GCHQ is perfectly capable of routinely picking up mobile telephone conversations, editing and rebroadcasting them. Indeed, all mobile telephone calls in the UK are routinely plucked out of the air by GCHQ with some numbers specifically being targeted for monitoring at the request of the police or intelligence services. The MI5 investigation was inconclusive. Suspicion fell on a disgruntled GCHQ employee but there was not enough evidence for a prosecution.
As a result of the inquiry, the royal family have been advised that in future they should not use mobile telephones for sensitive calls.
The ‘Squidgygate’ and ‘Camillagate’ tapes were interesting in part because of their dramatic content and in part because of the assumption, which was widely accepted, that the whole affair was part of some dark plot, probably organized by the ‘buggers and burglars* at MI5. The allegations infuriated MI5, who were powerless to deny even the most fanciful conspiracy theories as they still have no public voice. To the reformers inside the intelligence services, that is the most powerful argument for the changes that have taken place in the past three years.
CHAPTER EIGHT - SAME OLD STUFF
The nondescript obituary in Red Star, the Russian army newspaper, might have gone unnoticed by most readers, had it not been placed next to the popular chess puzzle on page four of the July 1992 issue. It was a different story in the West — the five short paragraphs sent a shiver down the collective spine of Western intelligence. The obituary paid glowing tribute to the work of Mikhail Yevhenyevich Orlov, 32, a major in the KGB who had died suddenly. He had enjoyed ‘a short but brilliant life which was totally dedicated to the struggle of removing the threat of nuclear war hanging over mankind. Over a long period, he performed special missions and made a major contribution to ensure the state security of the Soviet Union.’
The Communist Party newspaper, Pravda, followed this up with a fulsome obituary which identified Orlov as Souther, an American defector, and claimed that he had access to ‘the most valuable documents [and had] disclosed the plans for the use of the US Navy in a nuclear war against the Soviet Union and other socialist countries’.
‘Souther did everything to help the forces of peace,’ Pravda said. ‘He occupies a place in that line of KGB intelligence agents to which such outstanding soldiers of the “invisible front” as Kim Philby and George Blake belonged.’
This was followed by the appearance at an extraordinary press conference of Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head of the KGB, who came to add his voice to the chorus. He confirmed the identity of the dead man, who had a ‘very sensitive personality’. He claimed to have met him on several occasions and considered his suicide ‘a real tragedy … and a personal loss’.[82]
Not since the death of Kim Philby, an acknowledged master spy, in May 1988 had such a fulsome tribute appeared to a Russian agent. What worried Western intelligence about this identification of Orlov as Glenn Michael Souther, an American sailor who had defected to the Soviet Union in 1986, was that he had been dismissed previously as a low-grade agent. His only previous appearance since his defection had been on Soviet television where he claimed to have evidence that America had specifically targeted the French embassy in Tripoli during the 1986 bombing raid. That allegation was untrue and a weak attempt to sow divisions between the French and Americans.
The obituary and his stated rank in the KGB established Souther as a much more significant figure, perhaps even an ‘illegal’, who had been planted in America as a child, with a much wider brief to betray the West. Immediately the news came over the wires, the damage assessment teams in the FBI, the CIA and the US Navy dusted off their files to begin again the exhaustive examination of Souther’s past that had earlier been abandoned after it had revealed little of significance.
Would the investigation reveal the Russian James Bond everyone at first feared, or a sad, lonely man and a largely unsuccessful spy who committed suicide in a Moscow flat?
The middle-class parents of Glenn Michael Souther proudly paid for an advertisement announcing his birth in the Times of Hammond, Indiana, a Chicago suburb, on January 30, 1957. According to the school records of Munster, Indiana, Souther enrolled in kindergarten in 1962 and remained in the school system until 1974. Aside from two years in the athletics team, he had an unremarkable school career. But, like many students of his age, he did fall in love with a fellow student, who shared his interest in God, Jimi Hendrix and the pop group Chicago.
