Spycatcher (17 page)

I was accompanied by Harry Stone, the MI5 liaison officer in Washington. Harry was as genial a soul as you could ever meet. He had once been an Irish international rugby player, and shared with Hollis a love of the golf course and an almost professional handicap. Everyone liked Harry, primarily because he saw his job as basically a social one, but he was unsuited in temperament and intellect for the modern age of satellite and computer intelligence which was dawning in Washington in the late 1950s.

Harry hated meeting Hoover, and took a simple approach when a confrontation could not be avoided.

"Take a tip from me, Peter, old chap, let him do the talking, don't interrupt for God's sakes, and remember to say 'Thank you very much, Mr Hoover' when he's finished. I've booked us a nice table for lunch.

We'll need it."

We swept through the archway at the front of the magnificent, triumphalist FBI mausoleum. We were met by Al Belmont, the head of FBI domestic intelligence, and his deputy, Bill Sullivan, who handled the Communist desk. (Sullivan was found dead in the mid-1970s while shooting duck in New England. He is thought to have been murdered. ) Belmont was a tough, old-fashioned "G-Man," as FBI men were once known, who had been with the Bureau from its earliest times. Sullivan was the brains to Belmont's brawn (but Belmont was no fool); both believed in the virtues of the stiletto rather than the Magnum. Belmont had many enemies, but I always got along with him. Like me, he had suffered a difficult childhood. His father was shot in a street brawl, and his mother worked day and night to save enough to put him through law school. Hard work and unswerving loyalty to "the old man" brought him to the top of the FBI.

But for all the outward toughness, and the seniority of their positions, both men were cowed by Hoover. Such unswerving loyalty was, I felt, positively unnatural. Of course, they admired Hoover for his achievements in the early years, when he turned a corrupt and incompetent organization into an efficient and feared crime-fighting force. But everyone knew Hoover suffered from God disease, and it seemed odd to me that they never acknowledged the fact, even privately.

I discussed the Tisler affair and the technical implications of RAFTER with both men for most of the day, until it was time to meet Hoover. We trooped down a maze of corridors, past an endless procession of Identikit young FBI officers, well scrubbed, very fit, well suited, closely cropped, and vacant-looking. The FBI offices always reminded me of sanitary clinics. Antiseptic white tiles shone everywhere. Workmen were always busy, constantly repainting, cleaning, and polishing. The obsession with hygiene reeked of an unclean mind.

Hoover's room was the last of four interconnecting offices. Belmont knocked, and entered the room. Hoover stood behind his desk, dressed in a piercing blue suit. He was taller and slimmer than he appeared in photographs, with wrinkled flesh which hung off his face in small drapes. He greeted me with a firm and joyless handshake.

Belmont began to describe the reason for my visit, but Hoover cut him off sharply.

"I've read the report, Al. I want to hear Mr. Wright tell me about it."

Hoover fixed me with coal-black eyes, and I began to outline the discovery of RAFTER. Almost at once, he interrupted me.

"I gather your Service is now satisfied about the intelligence provided by our Czech source...?"

I began to answer, but he swept me aside.

"Your security organizations enjoy many facilities here in Washington, Mr. Wright."

There was more than a hint of a threat in his voice.

"I have to advise the President of the United States when those facilities raise questions about our national security. I have to take a close personal interest in a case like this, particularly in view of the recent problems the United Kingdom has suffered in this area. I need to know I am on firm ground. Do I make myself clear?"

"Of course, sir, I understand perfectly..."

Harry Stone busily studied his shoelaces. Al Belmont and Bill Sullivan sat to one side of Hoover's desk, half hidden in shadow. I was on my own.

"I think you will find in my report..."

"My staff have digested your report, Mr. Wright. I am interested in the lessons you have learned."

Before I could answer, Hoover launched into a passionate diatribe about Western inadequacy in the face of the Communist onslaught. I agreed with many of the sentiments; it was just the manner of the telling that was objectionable. Inevitably the subject of Burgess and Maclean came up, Hoover sounding each syllable of their names with almost prurient venom.

"Now in the Bureau here, Mr. Wright, that sort of thing could not happen. My officers are thoroughly screened. There are lessons to be learned. Do I make myself clear?"

I nodded.

"Of course, Mr. Hoover," chimed Harry Stone. Hoover fixed me with a sudden stare.

"Total vigilance, Mr. Wright. Total vigilance. The lights always burn here in Bureau headquarters."

He stood up abruptly, signaling the end of the meeting.

The day after my ordeal with Hoover, I lunched with James Angleton, the CIA Chief of Counterintelligence. We had met once before on my first trip to Washington in 1957, and I was struck then by his intensity. He had a razor-sharp mind and a determination to win the Cold War, not just to enjoy the fighting of it. Every nuance and complexity of his profession fascinated him, and he had a prodigious appetite for intrigue I liked him, and he gave enough hints to encourage me into thinking we could do business together.

Angleton's star was fast rising in Washington in the late 1950s, particularly after he obtained the secret text of Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin from his contacts in Israel. He was one of the original wartime OSS recruits, and was trained in the arts of counterespionage by Kim Philby at the old MI6 office in Ryder Street. The young Yale intellectual struck up an instant friendship with his pipe-smoking English tutor, and the relationship deepened when Philby was posted to Washington as Station Chief in 1949. Ironically it was Philby who first detected the obsession with conspiracy in the fledgling CIA Chief of Counterintelligence. Angleton quickly acquired a reputation among British Intelligence officers for his frequent attempts to manipulate to his own advantage the mutual hostility of MI5 and MI6.

I taxied over to Georgetown. I could see why so many Washington government officials lived there, with its elegant red brick houses, tree-lined streets, bookshops, and cafes. When I arrived at Harvey's, Angleton was already sitting at his table, a gaunt and consumptive figure, dressed in a gray suit, clutching a large Jack Daniel's in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

"How was Hoover?" he asked, as I joined him, with a voice like gravel being tossed onto a path.

"You're very well informed today, Jim," I responded.

His cadaverous features creased back into a smile, in stark contrast to his funereal clothing. I knew he was fishing. The CIA knew nothing about Tisler, or his allegation, and we had agreed to brief the FBI on RAFTER on the understanding that knowledge of it was strictly controlled.

"Just routine, you know, making friends with the Bureau. It's the vogue in London at the moment."

"It's a waste of time," he said. "You've been trying to get in with him since as far back as I can remember. He always tells us he can't stand the Brits."

I bristled slightly, although I knew that was his intention. "Well, I can't say the Agency has been much friendlier."

"You've used up a lot of credit in Washington in the last ten years," said Angleton, pouring himself another drink.

"People like Hoover," he went on, "they look at Burgess and Maclean, and they look at the state of MI5, and they say 'What is the point?' "

He called the waiter over, and we ordered.

"You're off the mark, Jim," I said finally. "Things are changing. Ten years ago they would never have appointed me as a scientist. But I'm there now, and new people are coming in all the time."

"I went to an English public school," he said with heavy sarcasm. "I know the score with you guys."

"It's no good complaining about Burgess and Maclean all the time. That's all in the past. The world's a smaller place. We've got to start working together again."

I surprised myself with my sudden passion. Angleton remained motionless, wreathed in a halo of swirling tobacco smoke.

"You won't get any help from Hoover," he grunted, but made no offers of his own.

It was a long lunch. Angleton gave little away, but pumped me with questions with every drink. What about Philby? I told him straight that I thought he was a spy. Suez was still a raw nerve, even in 1959, but Angleton wanted to know every detail. He even asked me if I could get the MI5 file on Armand Hammer, the head of Occidental Petroleum, who inevitably came to the attention of Western intelligence in view of his extensive business links in the Soviet Union. But I thought this was just a shade indelicate.

"We're friends, Jim, but not quite that close, yet!"

Around five I saw Angleton back to his car. It was a smart Mercedes. For all the gauntness of his persona, I soon learned, he cultivated expensive tastes with his share of the family National Cash Register Company fortune. Much to Angleton's annoyance, he discovered he had locked his keys inside, but I produced Leslie Jagger's lockpicking wire from my pocket and within half a minute had the door open.

"Not bad, Peter, not bad!" said Angleton, smiling broadly. He knew I had savored the moment.

"By the way," I said, "I am serious. If you won't help me in Washington, I'll find someone else who will."

"I'll see what I can do," he muttered, slipping behind the steering wheel. Without a sideways glance, he was gone.

In fact, despite the skepticism in Washington, important changes were taking place on the technical side of British Intelligence in the late 1950s. MI5 devoted a major effort to expanding its new techniques,

RAFTER and ENGULF.

As a first step we placed the Soviet Embassy under continuous RAFTER surveillance. Hollis persuaded a reluctant Treasury to purchase, over and above the MI5 secret allocation, a house for MI5 in the middle of the cluster of Soviet diplomatic buildings. We installed RAFTER receivers in the loft and relayed the signals we detected inside the Embassy along cables laid inside a specially constructed tunnel which MI5 dug between the new house and one which we already used for visual surveillance in the next street. We installed a former wartime MI5 officer, Cyril Mills, the famous circus owner, in the house as a tenant. Mills operated his circus business from the house for many years, and every time we needed to deliver staff or equipment to the house, or remove debris from the tunnel, we used a garishly painted Mills Circus van. It was perfect cover, and the Russians never suspected a thing.

We were careful to use straight receivers for the RAFTER operations, each operating on a single megacycle frequency, so there were no local oscillators on our side, in case the Russians had themselves developed a form of RAFTER. The secret of the Mills house remained intact through the 1960s, until one night the alarm systems detected two Soviet diplomats climbing onto the roof. They broke a skylight, but before they could enter the roof space, the housekeeper frightened them off.

Cyril Mills made a formal protest to the Soviet Embassy, but we assumed that the Russians had somehow or other detected our presence in the house.

Once the house was ready, I was able to put into operation the kind of experiment I had envisaged while reading the KEYSTONE files in Canada. The Embassy was systematically searched for signs that receivers inside were monitoring signals beamed out from Moscow to agents in Britain.

These were high-frequency (HF) signals, whereas the Watcher radio transmissions were VHF. The Russians used large radio frequency amplifiers with the HF receivers, which made RAFTER much more difficult. But GCHQ developed more sophisticated equipment, and within six months we had successfully monitored four signals from Moscow which were being routinely monitored by the Soviets inside the Embassy.

The first signal we found was code-named GRUFF. We picked it up one Tuesday night at ten-thirty. The Morse signal came in loud and clear, and our receivers immediately detected the whine of a local oscillator as the Russians tuned to the same frequency. GCHQ analyzed GRUFF; it came from the Moscow area and followed a twice-weekly schedule. The cryptanalysts were quite certain the Morse contained genuine traffic. The Radiations Operations Committee decided to make a major effort to track the GRUFF signal down.

I approached Courtney Young, then the Dl (head of Russian Counterespionage) and asked him if he had any intelligence which might help us locate an illegal we believed to be currently operating in the UK and receiving radio transmissions from Moscow. He was astonished by my approach. He explained that D Branch had recently run a double-agent case which had convinced him that an illegal was operating in the London area. The double agent was a young male nurse who had once been in the CPGB. Some years later, he was approached and asked to work clandestinely for the Russians. The nurse was reluctant at first, but eventually his contact convinced him that he was not being asked to spy. All he had to do was post some letters and store the occasional suitcase. After a while the nurse became frightened and approached the police, and the case was routinely referred to MI5 by Special Branch.

Courtney Young doubled the agent back against the Russians, and for a short while they appeared to continue to accept him as genuine. The nurse lived in the Midlands, but he was asked to lease a flat in the Clapham area of South London in his own name. Then his controller instructed him to activate and service a number of dead letter boxes on Clapham Common, near the new flat. Courtney Young was sure that he was being trained up by the Russians as an illegal support agent - someone who assists the actual illegal agent by preparing his communications and accommodation before he moves into the area. But suddenly, all contact with the agent was cut, and he was given no further instructions. Either the entire operation had aborted or the illegal was already securely established in the area through other means.