Spycatcher (28 page)

Unfortunately, my trust was sadly misplaced.

There was one further Cook recommendation. He wanted MI5 and MI6 to set up a joint headquarters staff in separate accommodation, controlled by a Chief Scientist, to plan and oversee the new research and development program for both services. It was a bold new move, and I confess I wanted the job more than anything in the world. I felt, in truth, that I had earned it. Most of the technical modernization which had occurred since 1955 was largely at my instigation, and I had spent long years fighting for budgets and resources for both Services. But it was not to be. Victor Rothschild lobbied vigorously on my behalf, but Dick White told him that the animosity inside MI6 stimulated by his own transfer from MI5 was still too great to hope to persuade his senior technical staff to serve under any appointee from MI5. In the end the situation was resolved at a meeting of the Colemore Committee. When Cook's conclusions were discussed, Hector Willis, the head of the Royal Naval Scientific Service, volunteered there and then to fill the post of Chief of the new Directorate of Science, resigning from the RNSS to do it, and Hollis and White, aware of the bureaucratic influence Willis would bring with him, gratefully accepted. I became the joint deputy head of the Directorate, along with Johnny Hawkes, my opposite number in MI6, who ran Hanslope for MI6, and developed the MI6 Rockex cipher machine.

Willis and I knew each other well. He was a pleasant North countryman, small, almost mousy, with white hair and black eyebrows. He always dressed smartly, with pepper-and-salt suits and stiff collars. I had worked under him during the war on a leader cable scheme and antisubmarine warfare. He was a good mathematician, far better than I, with first-rate technical ingenuity. But although we were both essentially engineers, Willis and I had diametrically opposed views about the way the new Directorate should be run. I saw the scientist/engineer's role in intelligence as being a source of ideas and experiments which might or might not yield results. Whatever success I had achieved since 1955 was obtained through experimentation and improvisation. I wanted the Directorate to be a powerhouse, embracing and expanding the kinds of breakthroughs which had given us the Radiations Operations Committee. Willis wanted to integrate scientific intelligence into the Ministry of Defense. He wanted the Directorate to be a passive organization, a branch of the vast inert defense contracting industry, producing resources for its end users on request. I tried to explain to Willis that intelligence, unlike defense contracting, is not peacetime work. It is a constant war, and you face a constantly shifting target. It is no good planning decades ahead, as the Navy do when they bring a ship into service, because by the time you get two or three years down the track, you might find your project leaked to the Russians. I cited the Berlin Tunnel - tens of millions of dollars poured into a single grandiose project, and later we learned it was blown to the Russians from the beginning by the Secretary of the Planning Committee, George Blake. I agreed that we had to develop a stock of simple devices such as microphones and amplifiers, which worked and which had a fair shelf life, but I opposed the development of sophisticated devices which more often than not were designed by committees, and which would probably be redundant by the time they came to fruition, either because the Russians learned about them or because the war had moved onto different territory.

Willis never understood what I was driving at. I felt he lacked imagination, and he certainly did not share my restless passion for the possibilities of scientific intelligence. He wanted me to settle down, forget the kind of life I had lived thus far, put on a white coat and supervise the rolling contracts. I was forced to leave Leconfield House and move into the Directorate's headquarters offices at Buckingham Gate. The latter part of 1962, coming so soon after the excitements and achievements of 1961, was undoubtedly the most unhappy period in my professional life. For seven years I had enjoyed a rare freedom to roam around MI5 involving myself in all sorts of areas, always active, always working on current operations. It was like swapping the trenches for a spell in the Home Guard. As soon as I arrived in the new offices, I knew there was no future there for me. Cut off from Leconfield House I would soon perish in the airless, claustrophobic atmosphere. I decided to leave, either to another post in MI5 if the management agreed, or to GCHQ, where I had been making some soundings, if they did not.

Arthur was terribly considerate at this time. He knew that I was chafing over at Buckingham Gate, and he used every excuse he could to involve me in the ongoing work with Golitsin. During spring 1962 he paid a long visit to Washington and conducted a massive debriefing of the KGB Major. He returned with a further 153 serials which merited further investigation. Some of the serials were relatively innocuous, like his allegation that a then popular musical star had been recruited by the Russians because of his access to London high society. Others were true but we were able to satisfactorily account for them, like the baronet whom Golitsin claimed had been the target for homosexual blackmail, after the KGB photographed him in action in the back of a taxi. The baronet was interviewed, admitted the incident, and satisfied us that he had refused to bend to the KGB ploy. But the vast majority of Golitsin's material was tantalizingly imprecise. It often appeared true as far as it went, but then faded into ambiguity, and part of the problem was Golitsin's clear propensity for feeding his information out in dribs and drabs. He saw it as his livelihood, and consequently those who had to deal with him never knew when they were pursuing a particularly fruitful-looking lead, whether the defector had more to tell them.

I was asked to help with one of the strangest Golitsin serials which ran into the dust at this time, the Sokolov Grant affair. In many ways it was typical of the difficulties we faced in dealing with his debriefing material. Golitsin said that a Russian agent had been introduced into Suffolk next to an airfield which had batteries of the latest guided missiles. He was sure the agent was a sleeper, probably for sabotage in the event of an international crisis. We contacted the RAF and pinpointed Stretteshall, near Bury St. Edmunds, as the most likely airfield. We then checked the electoral roll in the area around Stretteshall to see if we could find anything interesting. After a few days we came across a Russian name, Sokolov Grant. We cross-checked with the Registry and found that he had a file. He was a Russian refugee who had arrived in Britain five years before, married an English girl, and taken up farming on rented land near the airfield.

The case was handed over to Charles Elwell for investigation. Letter and telephone checks were installed and inquiries made with the local police, which drew a blank. I was asked to make a search of his house, when Sokolov Grant and his wife went up north for a holiday, to see if there was any technical evidence which might incriminate him. I drove up to Bury St. Edmunds with John Storer, a short, gray-haired, smiling man from GCHQ's M Division who worked on Counterclan, arranging the RAFTER plane flights, and analyzing the RAFTER signals. Sokolov Grant lived in a pretty Queen Anne red-brick farmhouse which was in a state of some disrepair. From the back garden you could see the end of the runway stretching across the swaying fields of barley. The scene seemed so perfect, so idyllic, it was hard to be suspicious. But that was the thing which always struck me about espionage: it was always played out in such ordinary humdrum English scenes.

John Storer went off to search the farm buildings for signs of clandestine radio systems, while I slipped the catch and went inside the house. The house was unbelievably untidy. All along the corridors and passageways piles of junk lined the walls. Books were stacked up in mounds in the downstairs rooms. At first I thought perhaps they were moving house, until I noticed the thick layer of dust on top of everything. In the backroom study stood two desks side by side. The one on the left was a huge roll-top desk crammed so full that it could not be closed. The one on the right was a small bureau. I opened the flap, and it was completely empty. I slid the drawers out. They were empty too, with not a trace of dust. The whole thing had obviously been emptied recently. I sat for a moment in a polished Windsor chair staring at the two desks, trying to make sense of one so full and the other so empty. Had the contents of one been transferred into the other? Or had one been emptied, and if so why? Was it suspicious, or was it just what it seemed - an empty desk in a junk-infested house?

I made a start on the papers in the other desk, but they were mostly farm business. John Storer found nothing outside, and we left. To search the place properly would have taken twenty men a week. In the end Charles Elwell went up to see Sokolov Grant and asked a few questions in the village. He came back satisfied that he was in the clear. He was popular locally, and his wife was the daughter of the local squire. We assumed Golitsin had seen Sokolov Grant's name on a KGB watch list, marked down as someone they contemplated approaching but never in fact did.

Shortly afterward Sokolov Grant and his wife left the area. Our inquiries had probably leaked in the village, and he presumably wanted to make a new start. But for all its apparent meaninglessness the Sokolov Grant story has always had symbolic importance to me: an ordinary man suddenly falling under suspicion, and just as abruptly cleared again, his life utterly changed because of something a man he has never met says in a darkened room on the other side of the world. The quiet rural world of Suffolk colliding with the secret world of betrayal, where there is no such thing as coincidence, and where suspicion can be fueled at the sight of an empty desk.

The most tightly held of all Golitsin's serials were those which suggested a penetration of MI5. I first learned of them from Arthur shortly after he returned from Washington. Golitsin said that he had seen the special safe in KGB headquarters where documents from British Intelligence were stored. He had seen the index to the documents stored in the safe, and he was positive that very recent material from MI5 was in there. He also claimed the KGB had acquired a document from British Intelligence which they called the "Technics" Document: a thick document listing technical equipment for British Intelligence. He was unable to study it closely, as he was only called in to see if he could translate a small passage from it. But it was obviously an important document, as there was great urgency in obtaining the translation. He said that security arrangements were different in the London Embassy.

There was no special security officer (known as the "SK" officer [Soviet Kolony]). Golitsin assumed none was needed because the penetration of MI5 was so complete. Then there was the Crabbe Affair. He said the KGB got advance warning of Crabbe's mission against the cruiser ORDZHONIKIDZE.

In August 1962, as MI5 were busy digesting the mass of Golitsin material, we had a major breakthrough with the three original Philby serials. Victor Rothschild met Flora Solomon, a Russian emigre Zionist, at a party at the Weizmans' house in Israel. She told him that she was very indignant about articles Philby had written in the OBSERVER which were anti-Israel. She then confided that she knew Philby to have been a secret agent since the 1930s. With great difficulty, Victor managed to persuade her to meet Arthur Martin in London, to tell him her story. I was asked to microphone Victor's flat, where the interview was to take place. I decided to install temporary SF, which made Victor nervous.

"I don't trust you buggers to take the SF off!" he told me, and made me promise to personally supervise the installation and its removal.

Victor was always convinced that MI5 were clandestinely tapping him to find out details of his intimate connections with the Israelis, and his furtiveness caused much good-humored hilarity in the office. But I gave Victor my word and met the Post Office technicians in the afternoon before the interview, carefully checking as they modified the telephone receiver. Later, when the interview was finished, I solemnly watched while they removed the washer again.

I monitored the interview back at Leconfield House on the seventh floor. Flora Solomon was a strange, rather untrustworthy woman, who never told the truth about her relations with people like Philby in the 1930s, although she clearly had a grudge against him. With much persuasion, she told Arthur a version of the truth. She said she had known Philby very well before the war. She had been fond of him, and when he was working in Spain as a journalist with THE TIMES he had taken her out for lunch on one of his trips back to London. During the meal he told her he was doing a very dangerous job for peace - he wanted help. Would she help him in the task? He was working for the Comintern and the Russians. It would be a great thing if she would join the cause. She refused to join the cause, but told him that he could always come to her if he was desperate.

Arthur held back from quizzing her. This was her story, and it mattered little to us whether she had, in reality, as we suspected, taken more than the passive role she described during the 1930s. Every now and then she became agitated.

"I will never give public evidence," she said in her grating voice. "There is too much risk. You see what has happened to Tomas since I spoke to Victor," she said, referring to the fact that one of Philby's friends, Tomas Harris, the art dealer, had recently died in a mysterious car accident in Spain.

"It will leak, I know it will leak," she would screech," and then what will my family do?"

But although she professed fear of the Russians, she seemed to have ambivalent feelings toward Philby himself. She said she still cared for him, and then later rambled on about the terrible way he treated his women. Although she never admitted it, I guessed from listening to her that she and Philby must have been lovers in the 1930s. Years later she was having her revenge for the rejection she felt when he moved into a new pair of sheets.

Armed with Golitsin's and Solomon's information, both Dick White for MI6 and Roger Hollis agreed that Philby should be interrogated again out in Beirut. From August 1962 until the end of the year, Evelyn McBarnet drew up a voluminous brief in preparation for the confrontation. But at the last minute there was a change of plan.