Art of Betrayal (69 page)

There are still people doing dangerous things and taking risks, but when Sawers goes overseas to visit officers one of the first questions his staff ask is ‘How do I know in dealing with terrorism I won't one day be hauled before the courts back home?' This is a question that
would have been unimaginable in the days of Anthony Cavendish and Daphne Park. The answer to the question is that everything with the slightest element of risk is now signed off by the Foreign Secretary or other officials. A typical authorisation begins by noting the specific JIC requirement for intelligence that will be served by an operation before going into the details of how that operation will be undertaken and ends with a description of the consequences if it all goes wrong. The threshold for those authorisations has lowered so much that now there are about 500 authorisations a year compared to fifty in the 1990s. This would have been a shock to George Kennedy Young and his Robber Barons who would have laughed the idea out of the Broadway bar. The primary reason is the legacy of the years after 9/11 and the accusations of complicity in torture. ‘Torture is illegal and abhorrent under any circumstances, and we have nothing whatsoever to do with it,' Sawers said. ‘If we know or believe action by us will lead to torture taking place, we're required by UK and international law to avoid that action. And we do, even though that allows the terrorist activity to go ahead.' It was a message designed not just to draw a line publicly under the past but also to signal to ministers that they had to understand what their decisions would mean in practice.

There are those who say that what the service has lost in recent years is that air of mystique, the élan and sense of being different and perhaps even a touch dangerous. Without this, ‘it will look just like a sub-committee of the Department of Work and Pensions', fears one former officer with a wistful look in his eyes. There are those who wish to see exactly this outcome. ‘I don't believe in intelligence any more than I believe in little green men,' Rodric Braithwaite, former Ambassador and JIC Chair, argues. ‘It is much better to look at intelligence as if it were another branch of government like the Inland Revenue doing a job which has to be done and is necessary but not particularly glamorous and which goes wrong from time to time – just like the Inland Revenue.'
¹³²
Old-time spies shiver at such thoughts.

Sawers inherited a service operating in more than a hundred countries and still aspiring, despite the years of Empire being long gone, to have a global reach. That was becoming harder, the focus on terrorism having made coverage patchy even in areas like Daphne Park's old hunting ground of Africa.
¹³³
But there are only a handful
of secret services which aggressively practise the recruitment and running of human sources around the world – the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese, the Israelis, the French and the British. Others make do with analysing what they get from liaison partners and dealing with the odd defector and the like. But the game is also changing. The dividing line between technical collection and human collection is increasingly blurred thanks to cyber-techniques and complex eavesdropping. MI6 has evolved into a modern, professional bureaucracy integrated with other departments and closer to policy-making, focused on ‘knowledge management'. But beneath the shiny new exterior, the world of Daphne Park and Vienna, of Wynne and Penkovsky, of Philby and Shergy is still there if you look hard enough. Somewhere there is the agent and his handler alone in the room wondering if each can trust the other.

EPILOGUE

T
he crowd gathering at St Margaret's Church in Westminster Abbey hoisted their umbrellas and turned up their collars as autumn rain fell from grey skies on to the streets around. They had come to bid farewell to one of their own. Some had come, in spirit, from Broadway, barely a hundred yards to the north where Daphne Park had begun her career in her beloved Secret Service; others from Century House just over the river where she had risen through the ranks; a few came to remember her from Vauxhall Cross further west down the river where her successors continued their work for the country she had served. Eliza Manningham-Buller was there towards the front while the chiefs of MI6 sat separately – Scarlett close to her, McColl a few rows behind him, Sawers over the aisle, his security detail discreetly, and perhaps unnecessarily, eyeing the assembled marquises, field marshals, foreign secretaries and assorted great and good of a fading British establishment. At one side, immobile and weathered, sat Anthony Cavendish who, like Daphne Park, had walked the streets of Vienna after the war. Addressing them was the man who had sat in a tent with Gadaffi a few years before. In the pews listening was the man who had helped deliver Gordievsky from Moscow. Old habits dying hard, others preferred the dimmer recesses of the church, their stories still unspoken.

Shergy's ghost hung over them, his name invoked in the address as the guiding mentor of the young Daphne Park and of many others who had gathered and still others absent. The smiles were instinctive, but also perhaps wistful, as the story was told of the search in her flat a few months earlier for the gun she had somehow mislaid and the surprise when it turned out to be a pearl-handled revolver personally built by the armourer of the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War. There was a colourful account of the African
upbringing of a child of Empire and the story of her passing secret messages to her Ambassador in Moscow in the 1950s on the dance-floor – the safest place if one wished not to be overheard and the only time he could not get away, Park had explained. There was a reference to her fascination with the riddle of power but also with the most ordinary of people. A stillness of remembrance, coloured by loss, settled over the congregation and eyes gazed into the middle distance as the final words of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's epic poem ‘Ulysses' were read, calling forth one last adventure:

Though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has grown out of a decade of reporting on intelligence and security issues and, in particular, from a number of programmes made for BBC Radio looking at British and American intelligence agencies. It owes much to the willingness of individuals to share their knowledge and experience, many of whom have understandably requested anonymity but they have my gratitude. Among those who I can thank for advice and assistance over the years are Abdullah Anas, Christopher Andrew, Elizabeth Bancroft, Rodric Braithwaite, Anthony Cavendish, Rod Barton, Peter Earnest, Michael Goodman, Oleg Gordievsky, Franek Grabowski, Paul Greengrass, Muslem Hayat, Peter Hennessy, Alan Judd, Mikhail Lyubimov, Eliza Manningham-Buller, Stephen de Mowbray, the late Daphne Park, Bob Steers, Prokop Tomek, Nigel West and William Hood. I would also like to thank the trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King's College, London, for permission to quote from the papers of Anthony Courtney and the Imperial War Museum for access to its sound library. My thanks also to Svetlana Golitsyn for permission to cite her late husband's as yet unpublished manuscript. Particular thanks to my Radio 4 producer Mark Savage for his guidance over the years, to Peter James for his insightful comments on the manuscript, to my editor Bea Hemming for her faith and guidance and to George Capel for her support and enthusiasm. Last but not least, my thanks to Jane, Joseph and Samuel for their patience and support.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1
 Interview with former Chief Sir Colin McColl for BBC Radio 4, 2009

2
 ‘A Century in the Shadows', BBC Radio 4, August 2009

3
 John Scarlett, Channel 4 News, 21 September 2010

CHAPTER 1: INTO THE SHADOWS

1
 
On the Cold War Front – Czechoslovakia 1948–1956
exhibition catalogue, Prague, 2009,
http://www.ustrcr.cz/data/pdf/vystavy/ katalog-na-fronte-en.pdf

2
  Bob Steers, ‘Jan Ma
Å¡
ek',
Intelligence Corps Journal
, 2005; interview with Bob Steers. Further information from Prokop Tomek, Military History Institute, Prague

3
  National Archives FO 1007/309, British Field Security Reports for Vienna

4
  Information from Prokop Tomek and
On the Cold War Front.
The ten years were 1950–60. Additional private information on the penetration of Measure

5
  Confirmation of Jan Ma
Å¡
ek's name on the list comes from Prokop Tomek, Military History Institute, Prague

6
  National Archives DEFE 21/33: a 1950 report by Philip Vickery reflects the British view of the importance of Vienna. The American view can be found in ‘The Current Situation in Austria, CIA', 31 August 1949, declassified and available at
www.cia.gov

7
  Suzanne St Albans,
Mango and Mimosa
, Virago, London, 2001, p. 318

8
Martin Herz,
Understanding Austria
, Wolfgang Neugebauer,
Salzburg, 1984, p. 42

9
  John Dos Passos,
Tour of Duty
, Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1946, p. 291

10
  MI6 officers had called for caution before taking the side of the locals straight away, reminding others that the Russians had been allies and had made great sacrifices. National Archives FO 1020/1272, Note from H. B. Hitchens

11
  National Archives FO 1007/306, Secret Field Security Report for 17–23 August 1945

12
  National Archives FO 1007/309, Field Security Reports for Vienna for the first months of 1948

13
  Ian Fleming,
Thrilling Cities
, Jonathan Cape, London, 1963

14
  Norman Sherry,
The Life of Graham Greene
, vol. 2, Jonathan Cape, London, 1994, p. 252

15
  Ibid., p. 250

16
  Ibid., p. 84

17
  Graham Greene,
Ways of Escape
, Penguin, Middlesex, 1982, p. 227; Sherry,
Life of Graham Greene
, vol. 2, p. 127

18
  Smollett may have been the source for this part of the story as well as others, but his full role may have been masked by Greene and the film-makers in a deal

19
  Reference to Philby's visit is made in passing on a tape by John Bruce Lockhart who was very briefly based in Vienna after the war. The tape has since been withdrawn from the Imperial War Museum

20
  Barbara Honigmann,
Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben
, Hanser, Munich, 2004, p. 59

21
  E. H. Cookridge,
The Third Man
, Arthur Barker, London, 1968, p. 21

22
  Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville,
Philby: The Long Road to Moscow
, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1973, p. 64; Cookridge,
Third Man
, p. 28

23
  National Archives KV 2/1012–4, Edith Tudor-Hart's MI5 file; KV2/1604–5, Alex Tudor-Hart's file

24
  John Bruce Lockhart in Nigel West (ed.),
The Faber Book of Espionage
, Faber & Faber, London, 1993, p. 238

25
  Quoted in Miranda Carter,
Anthony Blunt: His Lives
, Macmillan, London, 2001, p. 153

26
 
Genrikh Borovik,
The Philby Files
, Little, Brown, London, 1994, pp. 55 and 38–9

27
  Honigmann,
Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben
, p. 62

28
  Borovik,
Philby Files
, pp. 55 and 137

29
  Borovik in ibid., p. 251, claims that Philby saw Litzi in Vienna. Other accounts talk of Paris or say the end of the marriage was agreed through letters. Litzi at the time was living in Berlin

30
  Honigmann,
Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben

31
  Marie-Françoise Allain,
The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene
, The Bodley Head, London, 1983, pp. 18–19

32
  Rufina Philby, Mikhail Lyubimov and Hayden Peake,
The Private Life of Kim Philby
, St Ermin's Press, London, 1999, p. 174

33
  The similarities have been commented on, for instance, in Michael Shelden,
Graham Greene: The Man Within
, Heinemann, London, 1994, pp. 322–3; Siegfried Beer, ‘The Third Man',
History Today
, 1 May 2001, vol. 51, p. 45

34
  John H. Richardson,
My Father the Spy
, Harper Perennial, New York, 2005, p. 92

35
  John le Carré, ‘We still need spies',
Guardian
, 2 March 1999

36
  John le Carré,
A Perfect Spy
, Coronet, London, 1987, p. 447

37
  John le Carré, ‘The Madness of Spies',
New Yorker
, 29 September 2008; John le Carré, ‘A service known only by its failures',
Toronto Star
, 3 May 1986

38
  Le Carré, ‘Madness of Spies'

39
  Le Carré, ‘A service known only by its failures'; Graham Greene,
Our Man in Havana
, Vintage, London, 2001, p. 79

40
  Peer de Silva,
Sub Rosa
, Times Books, New York, 1978, pp. 42–52

41
  Anthony Cavendish,
Inside Intelligence
, HarperCollins, London, 1997, p. 64. This may also be the incident referred to in Tom Bower,
The Perfect English Spy
, Heinemann, London, 1995, p. 206

42
  Interview with Anthony Cavendish

43
  National Archives FO 1007/309

44
  National Archives FO 1020/1272, Secret Field Security Report