Art of Betrayal (39 page)

Courtney's refusal to work for the KGB may explain his increasingly vociferous parliamentary outbursts against its work in London. Why had 200 British Foreign Service personnel serving in the Communist world since 1949 left their posts early, seventy-eight of them on grounds of misconduct or unsuitability? When will the government stop behaving ‘like a lot of hypnotised rabbits in the face of an efficient Soviet espionage organisation?' he asked.
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The first sign of trouble came early in 1965 when anonymous letters concerning his private life were sent to him and to his stepson – who happened to be Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the then leader of the Conservative Party. Courtney continued to press his case, calling on the new Prime Minister Harold Wilson in June that year to complain about Soviet actions in London. The confidential briefing note for the Prime Minister said that Courtney's ‘suggestions have generally been impracticable and unhelpful'.
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In July he tabled an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons on security.
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Within weeks came the bombshell. Courtney received a phone call from a fellow MP telling him to come to the House. In the rarefied confines of Westminster
Hall with MPs scurrying about preparing for the summer break, he was handed a buff-coloured envelope. Inside was a letter and six photos, five of him with two featuring a woman. He could be seen seated on a bed unbuttoning a woman's blouse. It certainly looked like Zina. Another photograph was more compromising but showed some signs of having been touched up. They were, he conceded, ‘dynamite'. To round things off was the line ‘to be continued …'. Other copies were sent to the Labour and Conservative chief whips and worst of all to his prudish Constituency Association. When he got home another buff-coloured envelope came through the letterbox. Two more copies went to his wife. The KGB called this Operation Proba and it was rather pleased with the outcome.
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Courtney went to see Roger Hollis, an old friend, with a copy of the letter to ask for advice. An MI5 officer was sent to see him. Courtney was slightly alarmed to find that the man did not speak Russian and did not know as much about the Russian Secret Service as he did. Courtney became irritable and could not sleep at night. Shortly after receiving copies, his wife informed him that she would be filing for divorce. Courtney moved out of their house and into a London flat, becoming increasingly lonely and isolated. The rot exposed by Philby, Burgess and Maclean had gone deep, he believed, and a taint of treachery remained, perhaps at a high level in the Foreign Office. It was clear, though, that the Conservative Party leadership were determined to avoid ‘another' scandal and would not be willing to offer him much support. He kept a loaded .38 revolver at his bedside. One day he would think of suicide, another of shooting a Russian.

Slowly, word got round Fleet Street. Reporters turned up on his doorstep.
Private Eye
magazine published the story followed by what Courtney described as ‘a short piece of cheap nastiness on BBC Television'. His constituency party, unable to believe that they had been caught up in another scandal, tried to deselect him. Courtney did his best to rally support among the ladies of Stanmore but at the general election in March 1966 he lost his seat by 378 votes. Ten weeks later, his divorce came through. Courtney remained a campaigner on the issue of Russian intelligence for years afterwards, recounting stories of a young acquaintance who awoke from being drugged to find himself in a homosexual embrace, with pictures being taken by
old-fashioned photographers, ‘black velvet hoods and all', and of a commercial counsellor in Moscow who later became a Conservative MP who had been compromised by a girl but who, to Courtney's annoyance, had never paid for it with his career.
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More than a decade after being ejected from parliament he offered his own advice to British businessmen travelling to Moscow. Beware Russian women knocking at your hotel door ‘who will be only too anxious … to give you a real socialist “good time'”, he would tell them. ‘I have spoken on many occasions round the country on these matters of which I have had some experience and perhaps inevitably I have been accused of seeing “Reds under the Bed”. Well, I had one
in
mine, and the repercussions ever since have taught me that it simply isn't worth it. I hope you will agree.'
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A compromising situation was most easily engineered on the KGB's home turf, as happened with Courtney. An official UK government study warned of the dangers:

The Embassy in Moscow and our other Embassies behind the Iron Curtain can only be seen therefore as, in some sort, beleaguered forces under a constant and insidious attack, carried out not only by the skilful development of seemingly innocent contacts with Russian citizens but also by the insertion within the Embassy premises of the most ingenious listening and, sometimes, photographic devices and the conscription as regular informers and reporters of the locally engaged staff working for the Embassy – for example, cooks, housemaids and chauffeurs.
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One British Ambassador to Moscow had an affair with his Russian maid. She was a KGB agent and photos were taken of them, forcing his departure. Another British diplomat got his maid pregnant and she asked for help with an abortion, obliging him to identify the MI6 station chief.
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A Greek ambassador, confronted with pictures of himself
in flagrante
with his housekeeper, grabbed the pictures and gleefully showed them around the diplomatic circuit as a sign of his virility until other diplomats became rather bored. Honey traps were a speciality of the KGB, while the East German Stasi specialised in using men (known as ‘Romeos') to target single female secretaries working for officials who would have plenty of access to classified
material. The latter tactic, which involved manipulating someone's emotions, was often far more productive than blackmailing an unwilling individual.

Working in Moscow as a diplomat was guaranteed to put even the steeliest soul on edge. The British and American embassies were wired for sound. The US Embassy had a series of microphones placed within the Great Seal of the United States in the Ambassador's office. Around fifty bugs were secreted elsewhere in the walls (the KGB even managed to bug Peter Lunn's office in Beirut when he was MI6 station chief, a particularly ironic achievement given that Lunn and Elliott had failed to record their own meeting with Kim Philby in decent quality).
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Knowing that you were always being listened to played with some people's heads. Some cracked.

The Russians' most spectacular success in engineering a compromising situation came with an Admiralty clerk at the British Embassy in Moscow named John Vassall. The son of a clergyman, Vassall was a loner whom acquaintances thought a bit of a snob. Most of the Britons in Moscow avoided contact with Russians, finding the atmosphere in the city menacing, and chose instead to socialise among themselves. As a junior official in Moscow Vassall felt locked out of the whirlwind of Embassy parties enjoyed by the top diplomats. The well-dressed young man still managed his own busy diary of bridge games, drinks and theatre amid his official duties but also showed an openness towards Russians. One or two colleagues would later say they considered him ‘a bit of a pansy' and even called him ‘Vera' behind his back. But they also claimed that they had never dreamed he was what was known at the time as an
active
homosexual engaged in acts which were still illegal. Only years later would an official tribunal explain that Vassall had been ‘addicted to homosexual practice from youth', language which illustrated why so many like him chose a clandestine life which in turn made them vulnerable. But in Moscow, while Vassall's colleagues may have professed not to notice his preferences, this secret could not be kept from the watching eyes of the KGB. They had their own man inside the Embassy whose job was to seek out the vulnerable.
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The handsome Russian interpreter had joined the Embassy before Vassall and proved all too adept at securing theatre and travel tickets and the best food from the markets which, in turn, helped ensure
that he was invited to staff parties. He had already attempted to lure a member of another Embassy into a homosexual relationship and tried to involve a member of the British Embassy in the black market to open up a vulnerability.
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He carefully cultivated Vassall, who had his ‘vanity flattered' as he was taken out to restaurants and introduced to other Russians who would eventually do the dirty work. After three months, the trap was set. Vassall was invited to dinner at a restaurant near the Bolshoi Theatre. ‘We were taken to the first floor where I first thought was a dining room, but they invited me into a private room,' he later confessed.

We had drinks, a large dinner and I was plied with very strong brandy and after half an hour I remember everybody taking off their jackets and somebody assisted me to take off mine. I remember the lighting was very strong and gradually most of my clothes were removed. There was a divan in the corner. I remember two or three people getting on the bed with me, all in a state of undress. There certain compromising sexual actions took place. I remember someone in the party taking photographs.
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Soon afterwards, he went with another Russian to a flat in central Moscow. The man disappeared and two officials in plain clothes confronted him. One of the officials produced photographs from the party. ‘After about three photographs, I could not stomach any more. They made one feel ill,' he later recalled. ‘They asked me if this was myself and I replied that it was.' They told him he could be jailed in Russia for that kind of activity and then threatened to show the photos to senior Embassy staff including, rather strangely, the Ambassador's wife, who perhaps was not the type to approve. If he did not do as he was told, he would not be allowed to leave Russia. He was then driven back to his flat. That evening, the KGB man in the Embassy told him he should meet some Russian officials in a hotel. One of the men threw the photos in his face and told him he risked an international incident. Slowly, over weeks, the Russians turned up the heat until he agreed to hand over documents. Vassall was not their only target at that time. Soon after he had begun his work, a woman employee of the Embassy was compromised and she was sent back home immediately.
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For seven long and damaging years, first in Moscow and then in London after his return, Vassall passed reams of secret documents – first hidden in the folds of a newspaper, later camera film of reports he had photographed in the office. Back in London, where he had access to atomic secrets, he even sailed through newly introduced ‘Positive Vetting' security checks, instituted after Burgess and Maclean to look for potential spies. The KGB made him dependent on it by slowly increasing payments, allowing him to move out of his parents' house and into a flat in the exclusive Dolphin Square apartment block near Westminster inhabited by members of parliament and of the establishment (Vassall would later claim that two Conservative MPs had slept with him at his flat).
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He lived a lavish lifestyle thanks to the pay he received from the Russians of between £500 and £700 a year, usually delivered in bundles of five-pound notes. About half the money went on clothes, partying and holidays; the other half went into savings accounts and to buy Premium Bonds (the KGB managing to support the British Treasury). His treachery went undiscovered until Anatoly Golitsyn and then Yuri Nosenko provided enough clues to identify him. But evidence was still needed that could stand up in court. MI5 began eavesdropping on his Dolphin Square flat and members of its A4 surveillance team followed him to and from work on the Number 24 bus. MI5's technical wizard Peter Wright said he tried marking some documents with minute amounts of radioactive material which would be picked up by a Geiger counter at exits to the Admiralty, but the plan never worked as wristwatches seemed to set off the detector and management raised concerns about exposing staff to radiation.
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MI5 then secretly burgled his flat while he was at work. Once it knew there were documents there the Security Service told the police to arrest him and ‘find' the documents themselves.

Vassall was approached on a London street by two policemen. ‘I think I know what you are after,' he told them. During the car journey to Scotland Yard, one of the Special Branch officers recalled Vassall ‘panting with fear'. He began to confess. When they asked if he had any cameras in his flat at Dolphin Square, he said he had two and one of them had a film inside. ‘I think you will find what you are looking for on it.' Once he had been taken to New Scotland Yard, the secrets tumbled out. ‘By the way, Superintendent,' he told one of
the policemen. ‘You will find standing in the wardrobe in the bedroom a small corner piece. This has a concealed aperture at its base.' He explained that a secret key was hidden in an oblong box which had to be inserted into the bottom shelf to release a hidden catch, causing a shelf to emerge in which more films were stored. In 1962, Vassall, who over seven years had done enormous damage, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to eighteen years in prison. The case, more than almost any other, damaged the government by creating a widespread public belief that it had failed to get a grip on the issue of security.
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Blackmail had always been part of Soviet espionage, but by the late 1960s it had become even more important. The great Soviet agents of the 1930s like the Cambridge spies had been willing recruits, driven by a fear of fascism at that time and still able to see hope in Communism. Three decades later, the idealistic were harder to find, much to the KGB's frustration. And so blackmail and the offer of money were employed more regularly. Many intelligence officers feel uncomfortable anyway with ideological recruits since they are less likely to do what they are told. Once someone has received money, they will also find it harder to walk away.