Spycatcher (18 page)
It was a long shot, but it had to be at least a possibility that Courtney Young's illegal was the same person who was receiving the GRUFF signal from Moscow. The Radiations Operations Committee searched the Clapham area intensively for any further clues. We drove our radio-transparent RAFTER van over to Clapham, and made a base in the walled forecourt of the old air raid shelter which ran under the south side of Clapham Common. We took power from inside the shelter, and rigged up an aerial which I estimated would give us a range of about half a mile.
I sat with Tony Sale in the cold, poorly ventilated van, watching, waiting, listening. The GRUFF broadcast was due at 10 A.M., so we tuned our first receiver to GRUFF, and searched the nearby frequencies with our other receiver to see if we could detect any oscillator. In the second week, we got a "hit," a strange, owl-like hoot, modulated with the Morse from Moscow. Someone was listening to the GRUFF broadcast within half a mile of us. Tony Sale looked across at me, momentarily, the scent of prey in his nostrils. The tape recorders began to roll with a subdued click. We switched to battery power supply, and drove slowly down Clapham High Street toward the tube station, weaving our way through the traffic. The pubs were full. Daffodils were just appearing in the neat front gardens of the suburban houses along our route, those inside oblivious of the chase passing in front of their doors.
Tony Sale was monitoring the local oscillator signal, using its strength as a guide to its location. We knew GRUFF stayed up in the air for twenty minutes. We had seventeen left. As we reached the tube station the signal became fainter, so we doubled back toward Wandsworth, but again the signal dropped away. We went south, toward Balham, but this time the signal disappeared before we even left the Common.
There were six minutes to go. Barely a word had been spoken inside the van. We only had one direction left. GRUFF had to be sitting up to the north, somewhere in the crowded maze of Battersea back streets. Our special van lumbered into Latchmere Road. Frustration welled up inside me. I wanted to career around the corners, shout out for help through a loud hailer, set up roadblocks. All we could do was stare at the flickering dials, willing them to move up, and not down. But by the time we crossed Wandsworth Road the signal was already trailing away, and shortly after that, Moscow signed off, GRUFF was gone. Tony Sale thumped the side of the van. I tore my headphones off, feeling drained and angry. How many more months might we sit in Clapham before we got as close again?
I lit my thirteenth cigarette of the day and tried to make sense of the previous twenty minutes. We had traveled in every direction. But the fact that the local oscillator signal got weaker each time we moved, proved beyond any doubt that we had genuinely detected another receiver besides our own. But it was located neither to the north nor south, not to east or west. Slowly the awful truth dawned on me. GRUFF must have been right on top of us, listening within yards of the air raid shelter. We drove back to our base, and searched the area. Behind a high wall at the back of us was a large wasteland car park. GRUFF must have been parked there in a car, or perhaps a van like ours.
Back at Leconfield House I printed out the tape recordings of the local oscillator on a sonargram. The sound waves modulated with a small mains ripple. But the wave form was not at mains frequency. It was similar to that produced by battery power packs used in cars and vans to produce alternating current. The coincidence was almost too painful to contemplate.
For the next six months the Radiations Operations Committee flooded Clapham with every spare man at our disposal. We listened in hundreds of locations. Officers scrutinized every street, searching for signs of a telltale aerial. Discreet inquiries were made of radio equipment suppliers. But all to no avail. And every Tuesday and Thursday night the GRUFF signal came through the ether from Moscow, mocking us as we searched.
As well as mobile RAFTER, we began, through ROC, to arrange airborne RAFTER. An RAF transport plane equipped with receivers similar to those in the van made regular sweeps across London. We thought that with the extra height we would be able to get a general idea of where receivers were operating in London. Then, having located a signal to a specific area, we could flood it with mobile RAFTER vans.
We spent our first flight over the Soviet Embassy to check our equipment was working, and picked up their receivers immediately. We got a series of radio hits in the Finsbury Park area, and we flooded the locality, as we had in Clapham. But, like GRUFF, the agent remained undetected, comfortably camouflaged in the dense undergrowth of London's suburbs.
The RAFTER plane flights were a kind of agony. I spent night after night up in the indigo sky, listening to the signals coming in from Moscow, insulated from the deafening sound of the plane's propellers by headphones. Down below, somewhere amid the endless blinking lights of London, a spy was up in an attic, or out in a car, listening too. I knew it. I could hear him. But I had no way of knowing where he was, who he was, whether he worked alone or as part of a ring, and, most important of all, what Moscow was telling him. I was caught between knowledge and the unknown, in that special purgatory inhabited by counterespionage officers.
But although the RAFTER side did not immediately bear fruit, the ENGULF side, using technical means to break ciphers, soon proved enormously successful. Things really took off with a meeting in Cheltenham chaired by the GCHQ Assistant Director of Research, Josh Cooper, in 1957.
Cooper realized the need for close coordination between all three Services if the new breakthrough was going to lead to further cipher-breaking success. He brought together for the first time the various interested parties - Hugh Alexander and Hugh Denham from GCHQ's H Division (Cryptanalysis); John Storer, the head of GCHQ's Scientific section responsible for Counter Clan in M Division; and Ray Frawley, me, and my opposite number in MI6, Pat O'Hanlon.
Apart from the Russians, the Egyptians still remained GCHQ's first priority. They used Hagelin machines in all their embassies, split into four groups, each group containing different cipher wheel settings.
Providing we could get a break into any one machine, every machine in that group would be vulnerable. If we could obtain samples of any one machine, every machine in that group would be vulnerable. MI6 and GCHQ drew up a list of the Egyptian embassies worldwide, along with details of which machine group they belonged to. The committee then evaluated which embassy in each group presented the best possibility for a successful ENGULF operation, and I briefed the MI6 teams on how to plan the operations. Within a year we had broken into every Egyptian cipher group.
Although ENGULF made all classes of Hagelin machines vulnerable, these tended to be the preserve of Third World countries. Cooper hoped, by calling his meeting, to find ways of applying the ENGULF principles to more advanced cipher machines, which GCHQ lacked the computer power to attack. My approach was simple; we had to put operations into practice even if, on paper, they looked unlikely to yield results.
"We've got to approach the problem scientifically," I said, "We don't know how far we can push these new breakthroughs, so we have to experiment. Even if things go wrong, we'll still learn things we didn't know before."
I had the germ of an idea. Any cipher machine, no matter how sophisticated, has to encipher the clear text of the message into a stream of random letters. In the 1950s, most advanced ciphers were produced by typing the clear text into a teleprinter, which connected into a separate cipher machine, and the enciphered text clattered out on the other side. The security of the whole system depended on thorough screening. If the cipher machine was not electromagnetically screened from the input machine carrying the clear text, echoes of the uncoded message might be carried along the output cables along with the enciphered message. With the right kind of amplifiers it was theoretically possible to separate the "ghosting" text out and read it off.
Of course, we had no way of knowing which countries screened their cipher rooms thoroughly, and which did not, and any operation along the lines I suggested would take up to two years to reach fruition. There was little point expending vast effort trying to break the Russian cipher, when we knew it was almost certain to be well protected. It was a question of picking targets which were important, and against which we stood some chance of success.
The French cipher stood out from all the rest as the most suitable target for further ENGULF experiments. Both MI6 and GCHQ were under pressure from the Foreign Office to provide intelligence about French intentions with regard to the pending British application to the European Economic Community. Moreover, GCHQ had studied the French system in London. They used two ciphers - a low-grade one which sent traffic along a telex line to the Quai d'Orsay, and a high-grade cipher for Ambassadorial communications which was generated independently of the cipher machine for additional security. Hugh Alexander's view was that the high-grade cipher was unbreakable, but that the low-grade one might be vulnerable to the type of attack I had outlined. Cooper gave his approval, and Operation STOCKADE began.
The first task in this joint MI5/GCHQ operation was to make a detailed technical reconnaissance of the layout of the French Embassy and, in particular, locate the area of the cipher room. I arranged to have the rating drawings sent over from the local council, and contacted the Post Office Research Unit. John Taylor had retired by this time, and had been replaced by H.T. Mitchell. Mitchell was paralyzed down one side as a result of a stroke, but although his speech was poor, his mind remained crystal clear. Mitchell gave me full diagrams of all telex and telephone cables going into and out of the Embassy, and by comparing these with the rating drawings we were able to establish the likely location of the cipher room.
We asked the Post Office to fault the telephones, and went in to make a visual inspection of the cipher room area. Unlike the Egyptians, the French security staff watched our every move, but we got the information we required. There was no telephone in the cipher room. It was tucked away down a corridor. The cipher and telex machines were in adjoining rooms, separated only by a plasterboard partition.
Using the Post Office charts, we traced the output cables back to the street, and into the footway box at the end of Albert Gate entrance to Hyde Park. I arranged with Mitchell to place a reasonably broad band radio frequency tap on the cable inside the footway box, and the captured signal was relayed into a special operations room we had taken in the Hyde Park Hotel. The hotel telephone system was faulted to give us cover while the cables were laid up through the hotel to the fourth-floor room we had commandeered. Special blocking condensers were placed on the circuit to ensure it was one-directional, and nothing could leak back into the Embassy to give away the operation. GCHQ routinely intercept radio and telex traffic coming in and out of every London embassy, from their premises in Palmer Street. We arranged for a line containing the French Embassy traffic to be fed from Palmer Street to our operations room in the Hyde Park Hotel. Using that line as a guide, we could check whether the signal we were getting on our radio frequency tap was the correct one.
The first morning we found the low-grade cipher and matched it with the Palmer Street traffic. The tap was connected to our own teleprinter, and the intercepted French cipher began to clatter out in front of us. It was clear straightaway that more than one signal was traveling down the cable we were tapping. It was just a matter of sitting down with a pencil and marking off the EN CLAIR text from the coded message, and the cipher could be read straight off.
I began to pick out a translation, and found traces of another signal on the teleprinter. I checked on the sonargram to make sure I was not mistaken, and called over the GCHQ technicians.
The steady peaks and troughs of the signal blipped across the screen silently. The line from the low-grade cipher was strong, and its ghost was easily identifiable. But at each pinnacle there was a murmur as another signal crossed.
"Good God," the GCHQ man murmured, "that's the high-grade cipher as well'. We must be picking it up through the partition wall."
I hastily contacted Palmer Street and got them to relay the high grade cipher down the line so that we could compare the signals. The GCHQ technicians reset the amplifiers so that the traffic was sufficiently strong to print out, and using the Palmer Street feed as a guide, I marked off the EN CLAIR text. Within ten minutes I had a rough translation of a cable from the French Ambassador in London to President De Gaulle's private office.
For nearly three years, between 1960 and 1963, MI5 and GCHQ read the French high grade cipher coming in and out of the French Embassy in London. Every move made by the French during our abortive attempt to enter the Common Market was monitored. The intelligence was avidly devoured by the Foreign Office, and verbatim copies of De Gaulle's cables were regularly passed to the Foreign Secretary in his red box.
In fact, STOCKADE was a graphic illustration of the limitations of intelligence. De Gaulle was determined to thwart our application, and no amount of high-grade intelligence could change that fact. We did pass on to the Americans details of French deliberation over their independent nuclear "FORCE DE FRAPPE." It helped encourage American suspicions about De Gaulle, but the advantage we gained as a result was slight.
Nevertheless, STOCKADE was considered a major triumph inside the Foreign Office. I was sent for by the Permanent Secretary, who congratulated me on the ingenuity of the operation.
"Priceless material," he said, beaming, "simply priceless," leaving me in no doubt that "reading the Frog's traffic" was a worthy successor to Agincourt, the burning of Calais, and other ancient blows against the perfidious French.
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Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, British Intelligence built on the success of the ENGULF (Egyptian) and STOCKADE (French) operations. GCHQ produced a mammoth list of all their targets, divided into domestic and overseas priorities. MI5 gathered intelligence about each domestic embassy, including information about the location of the cipher room, and details of all input and output cables, as well as an assessment of the feasibility of ENGULF or STOCKADE operations against that particular target. MI6 did the same thing overseas. They made detailed technical reconnaissance of GCHQ's targets although without the invaluable assistance of the Post Office they were forced to rely much more on traditional agent running.
