Art of Betrayal (36 page)

Shergy was worried. The core of professionalism he had built up in Sov Bloc operations was under threat from the hunt. Success was the key to winning the argument, but he also knew that he had to tread carefully. Just after he returned from Warsaw, Gerry Warner was asked by Shergy to speak at the Fort, the service's training establishment. What would you like to speak on? Shergy asked. How about the desirability of officers working on Eastern Europe in London
visiting the region so they could understand the conditions better? ‘You can't have that,' Shergy told him. ‘But it is terribly important,' protested Warner. ‘If you insist on this, I'll have to send you back to London straight away.' Shergy understood that the molehunters believed that anyone who spent time behind the Iron Curtain would be subverted and if they discovered he had allowed such a talk to be given, it would not just be Warner who would pay the price.

Out in the field, officers learnt to fear the dread hand of suspicion reaching out to them. Following Poland, Gerry Warner was based in Geneva. His wife was a mathematician who had worked on a doctorate during their time in Warsaw and had to go back to defend it. The week before she went, one of the molehunters came out to see the station chief who was frequently heading down to a neighbouring European capital to carry out surveillance on the MI6 head of station, whom Philpotts suspected. Warner and the visiting officer had dinner one night out on the shores of the lake and Warner mentioned that his wife was going to Warsaw. After dinner was over, the officer raced to see the station chief to tell him. A few months later, Shergy appeared in Geneva. ‘You won't be pleased to see me when I tell you that you have to leave Geneva in a fortnight,' he told Warner. They went for a walk out on the streets, unwilling to talk openly in the office. ‘You've got to know too many Russians.' But that was the job, Warner protested. Shergy explained that the real problem had begun months earlier when the hunters had learnt that Warner's wife was planning to visit Warsaw. Since then they had been trying to have him removed, and Shergy had held them off by saying he would have to see Warner in person and had only been able to do that now. Warner was given a few extra months' leeway, but moved out of Sov Bloc work. The sudden shift had damaged his personal life though not his career. He was moved off into the Far East controllerate where he began to rise.

De Mowbray returned to London just after Philpotts to work with him and join the Fluency Committee, the joint MI5–MI6 team set up to review the issue of penetration. Its 1967 report concluded there were twenty-eight anomalies that could not be attributed to any spy who had yet been identified.
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Golitsyn returned to Britain, again fearing that the KGB was on his tail as he headed for the south coast. He visited four times, on each occasion for a month. De Mowbray
was one of those assigned to look after him. Golitsyn was now given the freedom to range over the MI5 files on individuals. Whatever he asked for he received so long as it predated his defection. He was paid £10,000 a month for his work (having asked for more).

Even de Mowbray's former tutor came into the sights. Golitsyn thought Isaiah Berlin's familial links to Russia were suspicious and constituted a vulnerability. This was too much for de Mowbray who argued it out with Golitsyn. Hollis was brought back from retirement for interrogation (he had found a strange refuge by occasionally sitting in John le Carré's house).
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He admitted nothing and there was no hard evidence, just belief. ‘Dear old Roger; to do this successfully would have required intelligence and skill of a very high order,' one colleague later said of the idea that Hollis could have been a spy.
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Rumours swirled through the secret world and began to filter out. The investigations provided plenty of ammunition for reputations to be smeared (and not always deliberately – in one case Judith Hart, a Labour minister, was deemed a security risk because MI5 had muddled her up with Edith Tudor-Hart who had recruited Philby).
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Golitsyn said that a KGB chief of operations in Northern Europe had talked of killing an opposition leader in the West. The leader of the Labour Party Hugh Gaitskell had died in January 1963. Was he the victim of an assassination plot designed by the KGB to get ‘their man' into Downing Street? Arthur Martin spoke to Gaitskell's doctor, who said it was mysterious how the Labour leader could have contracted the unusual disease which killed him. Harold Wilson had taken over as leader. Perhaps he was a KGB man? they speculated. After all, he had conducted some business dealings in the Soviet Union and had some friends with suspicious connections. From 1964 when Wilson won the general election, some in Washington, and even a few in London, believed that the Prime Minister worked for the KGB. Golitsyn never said he was definitely a spy but trusted that the bits and pieces he had seen ‘fitted' with Wilson. Angleton once even flew over to London saying he had new information to back up the claim but could not pass on the details.
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In fact, the KGB had once opened a file on Wilson in order to target him but had never had any success. For Wright and one or two others, a sense had grown up that they were the ultimate guardians of the sanctity of the state against some terrible plot which everyone else was blind to. The idea
that the spies were manning the ‘last watchtower' while the citizens slept blissfully unaware of the dangers is a notion that occasionally arises within secret services, particularly when there is a deep-seated belief in subversion from within, and it could occasionally edge into something dangerous and itself subversive.
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Wright dwelt on the idea of plotting to remove the government. He would later admit that almost no one else within the secret world was ready to follow him in that direction, although there were some of its former members who were also thinking along the same lines, not least George Kennedy Young, the former MI6 deputy chief who created an ‘action' committee called Unison dedicated to the ‘security of the realm', which, he claimed, even had police chief constables on its books. These murmurings (including one discussion in the late 1960s in which Lord Mountbatten was invited and declined to take part in a prospective coup) never really came close to actually toppling the government but they helped heighten an increasingly febrile atmosphere.
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The American molehunt had been nearly as savage as the British. Officers whose name began with a K had their careers wrecked. Then it spread wider as Golitsyn scoured the personnel files. In all, around fifty officers came under suspicion at one time or another, a dozen and a half investigated heavily. After he retired Richard Helms had a conversation with the editor of the
Washington Post
. ‘Do you know what I worried about most as Director of CIA?' he asked rhetorically. ‘The CIA is the only intelligence service in the Western world that has never been penetrated by the KGB.'
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The pursuit paralysed operations against the Soviet Union. It was simply too dangerous to recruit anyone in case they were either betrayed or had been planted as part of the master plot. Perhaps the only thing worse than having a mole is the fear of having a mole. The CIA was left emasculated, governed by a fear that the enemy was inside its walls, watching its every move and pulling the strings behind its every move. ‘Angleton devastated us,' explained one official from the Soviet division. ‘He took us out of the Soviet business.'
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One defector was sent back to the Soviet Union on the basis that he was a plant. He was almost certainly not and was most likely killed.

By the 1970s the CIA had entered into a dark place. When one CIA officer was posted to Paris as station chief, Angleton actually
warned the French that his colleague might be a Soviet agent.
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Angleton became an insomniac. When Peter Wright visited he would stay up drinking and comparing notes with the MI5 officer until 4 a.m. At one point, he turned to Wright and said, ‘This is Kim's work.'
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Perhaps he meant that Philby was behind the plots. He was certainly behind Angleton's fear. It was Angleton who was to become lost in his wilderness of mirrors, watching Philby's disjointed reflection darting around his own angular self.

Eventually, and with a grim inevitability, the revolution began to devour its children. Someone asked who had damaged CIA activity most. That old friend of Philby, James Jesus Angleton. One officer said there was an 80 to 85 per cent chance that Angleton was himself the spy, the attachment of a percentage to such an issue, a sign of the absurdity to which it had all descended.
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Or perhaps Golitsyn, not Nosenko, was the plant, sent by a cunning KGB to manipulate the growing paranoia of Philby's old friend and lead him down the garden path? (He was not, as was evidenced by the KGB's reaction to his defection and its plans to assassinate him.)
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Angleton was not a spy, but his time had passed. A new CIA director began to break up the sprawling Angleton empire, removing his power of veto over operations. One officer was tasked with investigating his work. He went down to Angleton's private vault at the end of his office. Past a combination-locked door was a private library of files, inaccessible to the rest of the CIA. In all there were 40,000 files on individuals in ten racks eight feet high, kept in brown envelopes.
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There were forty-nine volumes on Kim Philby alone. One safe had the Hollis and Mitchell files, as well as those on Harold Wilson, Henry Kissinger and other top Western officials. Inside this vast storehouse was another smaller vault beyond push-button locks where even more secret material was housed. It took the officer six years to complete his study, which ran to 4,000 pages.
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The sum was far less than the parts, a collection of leads which went down winding paths but never quite reached a destination. Sasha was eventually agreed to be not a CIA officer but a head agent in Germany called Orlov.

In 1975 Angleton was finally forced out on the pretext of his involvement in domestic surveillance in which he had been opening American citizens' mail. At the same time, the Watergate scandal had damaged the CIA, as had the exposure before Congress of the role
of Larry Devlin and other officers in proposed assassinations abroad. In the tussle between believers and critics of deception and molehunts, the pendulum swung the other way. The revulsion against Angleton was so strong that counter-intelligence became a dirty word, the last division any aspiring young officer would want to serve in. The memories of the hunt were so piercing that for years no one wanted to revisit its dark hallway.
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The CIA began aggressively to recruit agents in the Soviet bloc. These efforts would later be met with catastrophe because, after Angleton had left, the KGB really did manage to get inside the castle walls just when everyone had stopped looking.

The struggle within MI6 ebbed and flowed. The rising star of the service was Maurice Oldfield. He played a complex, ambiguous role in the molehunt. When he was the liaison in Washington before Philpotts, he had been close to Angleton and, as an instinctively cautious, counter-intelligence expert, had at least in part backed the theories. When Oldfield came back to London as head of counter-intelligence just before Philpotts took the job, he walked a more ambivalent line, ever mindful of the politics. He voiced the need for care and for a more passive stance rather than for an aggressive recruitment of Soviets. Another scandal had to be avoided. When Rennie was appointed chief, Oldfield was angry about being passed over for an outsider. He became number two, controlling as much as he could and repositioning himself as the voice of reason against the molehunters. Philpotts, once a contender for the throne, was outmanoeuvred and gave up the fight in 1970, a stellar career lost in the contrived corridors of suspicion. Oldfield then had de Mowbray moved away from the molehunting team. Against his protests de Mowbray was sent to work on the Southern Mediterranean. De Mowbray was indignant about his treatment but made sure he kept in touch with his fellow believers in MI5. Their numbers began to dwindle, but de Mowbray had decided he would not give up. ‘I could not reconcile myself to doing nothing: I had made so many commitments to myself and to others to pursue the problem to the end that I could not wash my hands and forget about it.'

In the early 1970s, de Mowbray heard from his friends at MI5 that the CIA Director had been over to London and had been told that the
case against Hollis had been closed. De Mowbray went to complain to Rennie. ‘You know if I were to do something and make a fuss, one or other of us [meaning himself or the head of MI5] would have to go,' Rennie said. De Mowbray realised he would no longer get any support from within MI6. He used the connection of having gone to New College, Oxford, to approach a former private secretary to the Prime Minister now working in the City. He asked him whether he would have accepted a closed envelope to pass directly to the Prime Minister. The ex-official said he would have done. A few days later, in June 1974, de Mowbray approached a serving official at 10 Downing Street where Harold Wilson had just returned as prime minister. He was taken to one of the grand upstairs rooms, but he was told that no private message could be passed to the Prime Minister without an official reading it first. A day later, he received a message summoning him to see the Cabinet Secretary, Sir John Hunt. De Mowbray took Hunt through the investigation and said he believed that MI5 was incapable and unwilling to investigate itself. He thought Hunt had listened intently. But Hunt told a colleague, ‘As de Mowbray's eyes glazed over, I had the feeling of a dangerous obsession.'
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Hunt told the Prime Minister who then said to his secretary and confidante, ‘Now I've heard everything. I've just been told that the head of MI5 itself may have been a double agent!'
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Hunt also called Sir Dick White in from retirement.