Art of Betrayal (2 page)

As the Cold War entered its final decade both faces of the service's Janus-like personality were still evident. There was the cautious, careful intelligence gathering involved in running the enormously valuable agent Oleg Gordievsky, culminating in his daring but carefully planned escape from Moscow from under the watching eyes of the KGB. And then there was the more vigorous campaign, reminiscent of the Great Game of Kipling's day, in which teams infiltrated Afghanistan under cover to support the mujahedeen in their battle with the Soviets through the 1980s. Another way of describing the dichotomy in the service's personality was explained by one former officer who says that many of his colleagues could be divided into ‘Moscow Men' – those who inhabited the shadows, glancing over their shoulder as they ran agents behind the Iron Curtain and carefully pieced together fragments of precious intelligence – and the ‘Camel Drivers' – those whose preferred habitat was a tent out in the desert discussing with a sheikh, over tea, how stirring up the tribes and helping him in some small war might be of mutual benefit (an earthier description of this latter type was often deployed by in-house cynics which revolved around the officers doing something other than driving the camels). Like most stereotypes, it is truer in the abstract than in reality but still captures something of the two different sub-cultures within the service.

Critics would say there are good reasons why spies prefer to operate out of sight and feed off the reputation created by thrillers. A mystique has surrounded MI6. But is it justified? Beyond all the tales of derring-do and disguise, did it actually make any difference? Does dealing in deceit corrupt, and did it fuel mistrust during the Cold War? Or were the spies the final guarantor of peace during dangerous times? In some cases, an individual spy has been crucial. Oleg Penkovsky's intelligence contributed to defusing the Cuban Missile Crisis and Oleg Gordievsky helped London and Washington manage the end of the Cold War. But not everyone is convinced the reality matches the myth, and the end of the long struggle against Communism raised uncomfortable questions about whether the spies were really needed any more.

The early 1990s saw a period of fundamental questioning of the need for the Secret Service of the past. And within its walls, those who favoured cautious intelligence gathering were challenged by modernisers who wanted a service which had impact and could show the rest of government its worth. After 11 September 2001, they would get their chance, but with results they could not have predicted. The attack on the Twin Towers ended the debate about who the new enemy was and what intelligence was for, but it also thrust intelligence services on to difficult ethical terrain. Running agents inside terrorist networks involves all kinds of moral hazards, and so did working with allies, including one – the CIA – whose thirst for revenge led to it playing by different rules.

Protecting the public against terrorist attack made the work of intelligence agencies public in a manner never witnessed in the past, but what really opened up MI6 to controversy was the use of its intelligence to justify a war of choice. Iraq was the lowest moment for MI6 since the betrayal of Kim Philby. Its intelligence turned out to be wrong and the aftermath of the war a disaster. The myth came crashing against reality as MI6's intelligence, on which a case for war was built, was shown to be dud.

A social compact of sorts once existed in which people accepted that it was best not to ask exactly what spies really got up to so long as it was understood they did not cross certain, largely unwritten lines. But a willingness to accept that they might do bad or difficult things so that the rest of us purer souls could sleep easy in our beds at night has lost its hold. Modern notions of transparency and accountability now apply to spies, and revelations of past failures, whether in the early Cold War in the form of the traitors like Philby, or more recently with questions over intelligence on Iraq and allegations of complicity in torture, have eroded the willingness of the public to give spies a free pass. Trust between the public and its spies is hard to earn but easy to lose at a time when the appetite for intelligence – whether on terrorist threats, nuclear proliferation or the actions of unpredictable states – remains as large as ever, as does the public's fascination with the work of spies who produce it.

The stories of individuals – rather than institutions or the evolution of policy – lie at the heart of this book. The intention is to paint a picture of the realities of espionage by drawing on the
first-hand accounts of those who have spied, lied and in some cases nearly died in service of the state, from the spymasters to the agents they ran and to their enemies. By focusing on the interlocking narratives of a small number of individuals, the aim is to tease out the wider changes in British intelligence and also to explore the unique and personal relationships that lie behind human espionage – what Graham Greene called ‘the human factor' – the motivations and loyalties that go to make up a spy or a traitor and the relationships that are coloured by their actions. And the truth is often more remarkable than the fiction. The story begins as our cast assembles among the ruins of Vienna after the war.

1

INTO THE SHADOWS – LIFE AND DEATH IN VIENNA

F
or those seeking to cross it, the Iron Curtain was much more than a political concept or rhetorical device. It was something tangible and often deadly. In the first decade of the Cold War, it was rising mile by mile. Thick wooden posts supported three walls of barbed wire, taller than a man, on the Czechoslovakian border with Austria. A wide clearing lay on one side to make footprints easy to spot, with landmines casually littered around. A touch of one piece of stretched wire might launch a signal flare; at another place it would offer a 6,000-volt shock, the short circuit alerting guards with guns and dogs. Three hundred people were killed trying to cross the Czechoslovak border, some shot by guards, others electrocuted, leaving their bodies caught on the wire hanging at an obtuse angle; one man shot himself after his foot was blown off at the ankle by a mine.
¹

Jan Ma
Å¡
ek had somehow made it across. But he had not found safety. These were the dangerous days of the early Cold War, as he was about to discover. A lance corporal in the Czechoslovak army, he was slight of frame, not too tall, with dark hair. His rough-skinned tan came from the twenty-odd years he had spent growing up in a country village, brought up alone by his mother.
²
She had fallen ill and he had asked for compassionate leave from the army. His commanding officer had refused, so he simply left to see her. But as he headed back to his unit, he was warned that he faced a court martial. He decided to flee over the border into divided Austria.

There he had found his way into the welcoming arms of British Field Security in Vienna. These were the men, most just out of their teens, who performed the grunt work for Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. Among their tasks was the interrogation of the
illegal frontier crossers who had come over from Hungary or Czechoslovakia. Once any suspicion that they had been sent by the other side to cause trouble was removed, they were sucked dry of every ounce of usable information. Britain was blind about what was happening on the other side of the Iron Curtain. A claustrophobic fear of imminent war haunted every debriefing. Field Security was under orders to extract every nugget, however trivial, so it could be laid alongside a thousand other nuggets in the hope of revealing something useful and perhaps giving early warning of the Red Army beginning its march. What type of shoulder-boards did the Soviet troops wear in a small village in Hungary? What was a particular factory in Czechoslovakia producing? Even a grandmother might know whether a relative in the army had been moved from one place to another. The purpose was to divine where the enemy was and whether he was on the move.
³

Ma
Å¡
ek was quietly spoken and sensitive. He was questioned for five days at Field Security's Vienna office, a grand five-storey building at Sebastianplatz near the city centre. Bob Steers asked the questions, trying to separate fact from fiction in a small, bare room with only two chairs and a table. He ‘fronted' for the Secret Service by advertising himself as a contact in the Viennese underworld, allowing the MI6 men to remain out of sight. He produced a synopsis of Ma
Å¡
ek's information, which went up to MI6 at its grand hiding place in the Schönbrunn barracks. Two of their people came over. Ma
Å¡
ek had some interesting details on how the Czechoslovak army was being integrated with the Soviets. He was a touch simple minded, and extracting more detail was painfully slow. But after two and a half weeks his life had yielded up forty-five pages of double-spaced typed notes.

Just as his reward of a one-way ticket to Australia was being prepared, one of the MI6 men intervened. A radio set had to be taken urgently to near where Ma
Å¡
ek had come from in Czechoslovakia. Ma
Å¡
ek was the only person around at that moment to do it. This would normally be a job for a professionally trained courier. But the border was being tightened and a network of ‘resistance' couriers had just been rolled up. More than sixty had been arrested. One betrayed his friends by agreeing to work for the other side. MI6 had a training centre for its couriers in Austria and an office back in
London (under the name Kenneth Proud Translation Services, code-named ‘Measure') to help organise Czech agents. But these operations were penetrated by the Czechoslovak security service, the StB. Over ten years, the StB would record details of more than a thousand individuals linked to British intelligence.
⁴

Adventurous, foolhardy methods were sometimes employed to smuggle couriers across the border as it was tightened. Aqualungs and inflatable rubber suits were used to traverse rivers. Hot-air balloons with canvas folding baskets were another trick – although the discovery of two bodies on a Czech hill bearing the marks of having fallen from a great height bore witness to the dangers. Another method was using the defectors and frontier crossers who had found some way out and who showed some potential. They would be offered a choice: take a message or a radio back and we will get you out of your squalid refugee camp now and give you a ticket to a new life when – or if – you make it out again. Sometimes a radio came with the offer of a gun, one captured from the other side so it could not be traced. One man who appeared tough as nails cried himself to sleep the night before he went back. When he was cornered on the frontier, he shot himself rather than face the secret police.

Ma
Å¡
ek did not have potential. ‘He's too soft,' Steers protested. He had spent days in a room with him and had promised him he was as good as on the boat. ‘If he came out, he can go in the same way,' the MI6 man insisted. It took a few hours to persuade Ma
Å¡
ek. His orders were clear. Having buried the radio at the agreed spot, he had to – had to – come back immediately. Under no circumstances should he visit his mother as it would be noticed by the informers who worked in the village on behalf of the secret police.

He got across the border and successfully buried the radio. But then he went home to see his mother. Another agent radioed a message to Vienna. The local press were reporting that a British courier had been caught. Jan Ma
Å¡
ek's name was added to the list of those executed for acting as couriers for Western intelligence, joining at least forty others. Many of these were motivated by a commitment to fight Communism. Jan Ma
Å¡
ek was just a simple man who wanted to see his mother.
⁵

Lives were held in the balance in Vienna after the war. They dangled
precariously between life and death and East and West like the city itself. The Iron Curtain that Winston Churchill warned of in 1946 was descending from Stettin in the Baltic in Europe's north to Trieste in the Adriatic to the south. And yet Vienna lay almost a hundred miles behind a straight line connecting those two places, east even of Prague. Austria was the easternmost area of Western influence and Vienna lay in its far corner, making it a crossroads – a route out from those escaping the Iron Curtain and a route in for those seeking to penetrate it.
⁶
For a decade from the end of the Second World War until Austria gained its independence in 1955 Vienna's narrow, winding, cobbled streets were a stage on which the drama of the unstable, early Cold War was played out and in which the British Secret Service struggled to adapt to a new enemy and a new war. It was a world of bravery and betrayal, of black and white and every shade in between. East and West were colliding and Vienna lay on the fault line.

The words ‘cleared of enemy' could still be found stencilled in Russian on the corner of Viennese buildings long after April 1945. They were a reminder of the five days when the Red Army had fought its way from house to house to drive out the Nazis. American and British bombers had done their work from the skies above, burning the roof of St Stephen's Cathedral and gutting the Opera House in the city's medieval centre.

The months following the capture of the city were in many ways more traumatic than the brief but intense fighting that preceded it, leaving deep emotional scars of fear and suspicion. ‘People in dark overcoats hurried along with hunched shoulders and blank, shutdown faces,' recalled a British official who visited in those first few months. ‘Furtiveness, fear and suspicion were everywhere.'
⁷
People were constantly on the move, looking for food, trading their treasured possessions on the black market for dried peas and bread.
⁸
The phones and electricity were down and at night an air of sinister malevolence hung over the deserted roads.