Art of Betrayal (55 page)

Sir John Scarlett, who earlier in his career ran Gordiersky as an agent, was Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee in the run up to the Iraq War and Chief of MI6 from 2004 to 2009. (Andrew Crowley)

9

OUT OF THE SHADOWS

T
he latest man to be known by the letter C would occasionally cross the river from MI6's drab headquarters in Lambeth to wander through the corridors of Whitehall where other government departments were still beavering away. The civil servants Colin McColl met would sometimes be surprised to see him. It was almost as if he was a largely forgotten uncle discovered in the corner at a family get-together. ‘I'd meet people – intelligent, knowledgeable people in Whitehall – they'd see me and they'd say things like “Are you still here?”' McColl later recalled.
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As it entered the 1990s, the Secret Service appeared a little lost without the comfort blanket of the Cold War. Spying on the Soviet Union had never taken up more than half of its effort, but nevertheless the work of MI6 had been defined in the public mind – and to some extent in its own – by the world of Moscow Rules, Smiley and Karla and doubling, tripling agents.

In a grand, high-ceilinged room near Downing Street, the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee had offered a celebratory glass of champagne to toast the end of the Soviet Union in August 1991. And with that, the war was over. McColl, a Sov Bloc veteran whose youthful sense of humour masked a sharp mind, had presided over victory. From his office high up in the building with a view across London, he would tell new recruits that they had joined at a fascinating time in which MI6 could not take its eye off the old threats but also had to look out for new dangers while maintaining Britain's place in the world. The position of the service in government was also changing, he would explain. But he did not always succeed in reassuring all his staff that the service had a role in the new world. One of his younger officers remembers an encounter with the Chief at a reception in headquarters. McColl turned to him and said, ‘Well,
what do
you
think we should do?'
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The question did not necessarily inspire confidence. With its old adversary seemingly out of action, those on the inside wondered what MI6 would find to do next. Those on the outside wondered whether it was even needed any more. An air of gloomy insecurity hung around the corridors of the British Secret Service.

The rabbit warren of Century House, with its peeling lino and Formica tables, had a forlorn air and the Treasury, like a lion circling a wounded beast, was on the prowl. There was distressing talk of even merging with ‘the other lot' at MI5 (who were also looking for work and trying to wrestle responsibility for fighting the IRA away from the Metropolitan Police). The peace dividend, shaped as an axe, fell. The first compulsory redundancies were painfully served and poorly handled within MI6. Overall staff numbers of around 2,000 were to drop by 25 per cent, senior staff numbers by more.
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Stations were closed in Africa and the Far East; more emphasis was placed on inserting officers into countries rather than having them based there permanently. Every piece of turf had to be fought for using every ounce of Smiley-like cunning. The Foreign Office decided to claw back some money from MI6 by estimating how much desk space was used by spies operating out of embassies abroad and then insisting it be paid for. MI6 retaliated by calculating how much work its staff did to maintain their cover as Foreign Office diplomats. This, of course, came to more than the desk space and a truce was called. In perhaps the most telling sign that the service was being dragged out of the past, that creature very much in vogue in the 1990s, the management consultant, was even brought in to sniff around. These consultants were all carefully vetted, but even so their arrival was watched with utter bemusement by many old-timers. The free-booting era of the 1920s, when the Chief could pull an armful of gold coins out of his desk and hand them over to fund an operation, was being replaced by one of audits and value for money. A small attempt at privatisation proved disastrous when a group of long-serving office cleaners were sacked. This was blamed on pressure from the Treasury to outsource their work to a private company but more likely resulted from a failure to realise that, with the Cold War gone, the willingness of people (whether cleaners or the press) to accept the traditional constraints of secrecy was eroding rapidly. To much
embarrassment, the cleaners took the spies to the cleaners by winning an employment tribunal and a healthy pay-out (along with plenty of publicity). The insecurity surrounding all the intelligence agencies occasionally manifested itself even within the stately confines of meetings of the Joint Intelligence Committee as representatives of each intelligence agency competed to try and knock out references in reports to the other agencies' work and put in their own.
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Gerry Warner had risen to be deputy chief of MI6 and then the security and intelligence co-ordinator in the Cabinet Office, responsible for overseeing the community as a whole and its health. He found he needed to traipse round departments, even the Bank of England, and ask what they actually wanted. A performance-monitoring system was instituted in which policy-makers would tick a box if they found intelligence useful. Intelligence was becoming less precautionary than it had been in the Cold War when the focus was on looking for signs of conflict or having the tactical knowledge of how to fight the war if it started. In the old days an analyst could spend his whole career watching a Soviet tank division before receiving his pension. Intelligence was now drawing closer to day-to-day decision-making. ‘In many ways the intelligence we were providing was of more immediate use to politicians than the intelligence we had provided during the Cold War, because most of the intelligence provided during the Cold War was mostly of background interest – very important, very interesting – but there wasn't anything we could do about it,' argues Warner.
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And even when it came to the Russians, things were a little odd.

The British Ambassador in Moscow, Rodric Braithwaite, nearly choked on his breakfast when one morning he opened up a local newspaper to find an interview, carried on two successive days, with his chauffeur. For seventeen years Konstantin had driven the Ambassador's Rolls-Royce in and out of the grand, menacing prerevolutionary mansion on the Moscow River with its view over to the Kremlin. He was now admitting that he had spied on Braithwaite and his predecessors for the KGB. ‘You might have warned me because this could cause me serious trouble back home,' Braithwaite told Konstantin. ‘You know, questions in the House about the limpwristed Ambassador who failed to notice his driver works for the KGB. That sort of stuff.'

‘I couldn't,' replied Konstantin. ‘I'm a Russian patriot.'
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Times were changing. For a while in 1991 the old KGB was in disarray and appeared out of business. Braithwaite hosted a delegation of spy-hunters from MI5 who had come to meet their former adversaries. The group were greeted at Moscow's airport by a KGB officer bearing roses, before enjoying a meeting at the Lubyanka in which both sides felt ‘like wild animals being presented with their prey in circumstances where they couldn't eat it'. The British asked politely if the surveillance and harassment of members of Embassy staff in Moscow could be reduced and asked if the level of Russian espionage within Britain might be limited. They received the distinct impression that these ideas were ridiculous.
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Braithwaite also had a new MI6 head of station working in the secure bubble room in the cavernous Embassy-cum-Residence. It had not been the obvious choice for an ambitious officer but Moscow was embedded deep in John Scarlett's psyche and the chance to be the first station chief to be ‘avowed' or declared to the Russians at such an interesting time was simply too good an opportunity to miss. The idea was that the two countries would normalise their intelligence relations and act like other countries where the head of station did not do any spying per se but acted as a liaison with the local services for the passing of agreed information. Scarlett's past running of Oleg Gordievsky, a traitor reviled deeply by KGB types, was either unknown to the Russians or conveniently overlooked. But the old world had not entirely passed.

Dressed in shabby clothes the Russian had knocked on the door of an American embassy in one of the Baltic States. He was turned away disappointed. Defectors whom Western intelligence would have fought tooth and nail for in the past were now appearing hopefully at their doors bearing armfuls of documents and expecting dollars and visas in return. They seemed ten a penny and most got nowhere. Next stop for this man was the local British Embassy where he explained to a female diplomat that he had top-secret KGB material. The British diplomat had been trained to deal with walk-ins and glanced at the material, which had lain among bread, sausages and clothes in his bag. Vasili Mitrokhin would be one of the select few considered valuable enough to warrant assistance. He was a former archivist for the KGB who had secretly copied out and then buried
large chunks of the organisation's secret operational history in the garden of his dacha. Understanding its potential, the British diplomat told him to return again soon at an agreed date, when he would meet an MI6 officer who would come over from London. At that meeting Mitrokhin produced 2,000 pages of his notes which included details of KGB illegals. This was enough to swing the argument in London. Displaying the kind of cheek which the old Robber Barons would have enjoyed, MI6 organised for the clandestine exfiltration of Mitrokhin and his family on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Scarlett was kept out of the operation, but a young MI6 officer dug up Mitrokhin's voluminous files and carried them to the British Embassy where they were taken to Britain in six large trunks.
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The Russians talked about ‘no spy' deals, but there was little trust on either side. A few of the old Cold Warriors at MI6 could not quite let go and continued to want to use the defectors to turn the SVR, the renamed foreign intelligence wing of KGB, inside out and to extract every last drop of blood in revenge for Philby. MI6 even recruited one junior Russian diplomat who appeared to be mentally ill. This was a result of ambitious officers hoping to hit their ‘performance targets' and exaggerating their successes, one disaffected colleague thought.
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As early as 1992, there were the first signs that the SVR was also up to its old tricks with a couple discovered at Helsinki airport travelling under false identity papers, claiming they had been born in Croydon and Wembley in London. They looked a lot like old-fashioned Russian illegals.
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Scarlett's time in Moscow did not end happily. The Russians nominated one of their senior officers to take up the counterpart position as declared head of station in London. MI5, still not quite able to come to terms with the new world, kicked up a fuss. He is a spy, they said. Of course he is a spy, the Foreign Office and MI6 replied, that is the whole point. But he has had shady dealings with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, MI5 responded. It would be more of a surprise if someone who had worked for the KGB did not have a shady past, came the reply. The Russian intelligence officer was suffering from cancer and Moscow was keen for him to get to London for medical treatment, but his visa was blocked thanks to MI5. Moscow was understandably furious and decided on revenge. Scarlett was expelled under the public pretext of having recruited an agent in a
military metallurgical firm. The expulsion was carried out not quietly but in a blaze of publicity, a photographer capturing an image of the publicity-shy spy in a car at the airport.

In Eastern Europe events were in some ways even stranger as MI6 officers would walk gingerly into the office of former foes and politely ask exactly what they had got up to in the past. MI6 and MI5 began a low-key role in reorganising intelligence services across what had been the Eastern bloc. This involved civilianising their services and teaching them ‘how to collect intelligence in a different environment without threatening to put someone against a wall', as one Briton involved puts it.
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One issue was what to do with the twenty-odd illegal sleepers that the Czechs had secreted around the world. This included one or two who had been sent to Britain and now did not want to go home. It was agreed between London and Prague to leave them alone as they had never done any damage.
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As far as anyone knows, they continue to live somewhere in suburban Britain, their neighbours none the wiser about their training in servicing dead drops and sending burst transmissions.

There were old debts to be repaid as well. Agents who had been spying in place had been paid by means of escrow accounts with an understanding that one day they would be able to draw on the funds (this was always preferred by MI6 to giving them money which they could flash around, drawing attention to themselves). One agent had read the
Financial Times
voraciously and insisted on telling his case officer exactly how he wanted his portfolio invested. Some came out of the Cold War with a million pounds for having betrayed secrets. The valuable agent codenamed Freed had died in Czechoslovakia of a heart attack in the mid-1970s. With warm relations now established with the Czech service, MI6 approached Václav Havel, the former dissident intellectual now running the country, and explained that there was a bank account with the money the agent had accumulated in his lengthy career spying for Her Majesty. Havel agreed to help find any remaining family. A daughter was eventually located and carefully approached. She had never guessed her father had been a spy for MI6. But, according to a British official present at a meeting, she did remember him once saying an odd thing to her: ‘I hope you marry a British officer.' Now she understood why, and she was given details of the bank account.
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