Spycatcher (13 page)

But the loss was not just MI5's. The principal problem in postwar British Intelligence was the lack of clear thinking about the relative role of the various Intelligence Services. In the post-imperial era Britain required, above all, an efficient domestic Intelligence organization. MI6, particularly after the emergence of GCHQ, was quite simply of less importance. But moving Dick White to MI6 bolstered its position, stunted the emergence of a rationalized Intelligence community, and condemned the Service he left to ten years of neglect. Had he stayed, MI5 would have emerged from the traumas of the 1960s and 1970s far better equipped to tackle the challenges of the 1980s.

The departure was conducted with indecent haste. A collection was swiftly arranged. The takings were enormous, and he was presented with an Old English Silver set at a party held in the MI5 canteen. It was an emotional occasion. Those who knew Dick well, and at that time I was not among them, claimed that he agonized over whether to move across to MI6, perhaps realizing that he was leaving his life's work undone. Dick was nearly crying when he made his speech. He talked of the prewar days, and the bonds of friendship which he had formed then. He thanked Cumming for encouraging him to join the Office, and he talked with pride of the triumphs of the war years. He wished us well and made his final bequest.

"I saw the Prime Minister this afternoon, and he assured me that he had the well-being of our Service very much at heart. I am pleased to announce that he has appointed my Deputy, Roger Hollis, as my successor as proof of his faith in this organization. I am sure that you will agree with me that the Service could not be in safer hands."

The tall, slightly stooping figure in the pinstripe suit came forward to shake Dick White's hand. The era of elegance and modernization had ended.

- 7 -

Roger Hollis was never a popular figure in the office. He was a dour, uninspiring man with an off-putting authoritarian manner. I must confess I never liked him. But even those who were well disposed doubted his suitability for the top job. Hollis, like Cumming, had forged a close friendship with Dick White in the prewar days. For all his brilliance, Dick always had a tendency to surround himself with less able men. I often felt it was latent insecurity, perhaps wanting the contrast to throw his talents into sharper relief. But while Hollis was brighter by a good margin than Cumming, particularly in the bureaucratic arts, I doubt whether even Dick saw him as a man of vision and intellect.

Hollis believed that MI5 should remain a small security support organization, collecting files, maintaining efficient vetting and protective security, without straying too far into areas like counterespionage, where active measures needed to be taken to get results, and where choices had to be confronted and mistakes could be made. I never heard Hollis express views on the broad policies he wanted MI5 to pursue, or ever consider adapting MI5 to meet the increasing tempo of the intelligence war. He was not a man to think in that kind of way. He had just one simple aim, which he doggedly pursued throughout his career. He wanted to ingratiate the Service, and himself, with Whitehall. And that meant ensuring there were no mistakes, even at the cost of having no successes.

Hollis grew up in Somerset, where his father had been the Bishop of Taunton. After public school (Clifton) and Oxford, he traveled extensively in China before joining MI5 in the late 1930s. During the war he specialized in Communist affairs, as Assistant Director of F Branch. Under Sillitoe, Hollis was promoted to Director of C Branch, which gave him responsibility for all forms of vetting and protective security, such as document classification and the installation of security systems on all government buildings. Hollis' service in C Branch accounted for the importance he accorded this work when he later became Director-General.

When Dick White succeeded Sillitoe as DG in 1953, he appointed Hollis as his Deputy. On the face of it, it was a sensible appointment. While Dick did the thinking and the planning, Hollis would provide the solid administrative skills which Dick often lacked. Hollis, during the time I knew him as Deputy, never struck me as an ambitious man. He had already risen beyond his expectations, and seemed happy to serve out the rest of his career as Dick White's hatchet man and confidant. The only notable item of information commonly known about this excessively secretive man was his longstanding affair with his secretary, an ambitious girl who, when Dick White suddenly left for MI6, moved into the Director-General's office with a good deal more enthusiasm than Roger Hollis. Hollis, I suspect, always knew his limitations, and, once appointed, sought to cover them by relying on the rigid exercise of authority. The inevitable result was a quick sapping of whatever goodwill people held for him in the early days of his command.

Hollis took over at a time of unprecedented collapse in relations between the various British Intelligence Services. There had always been tensions between MI5 and MI6, dating back to the earliest years. But they had emerged from World War II as partners for the first time in a coordinated intelligence bureaucracy, along with the newly formed GCHQ, which was responsible for all forms of communications and signals intelligence. (For an account of this, see SECRET SERVICE by Christopher Andrew. ) But within ten years this close and effective relationship had almost entirely disintegrated. MI6 were deeply hostile to MI5 as a result of what they saw as unjustified attempts by MI5 to meddle in the Philby affair. Moreover, the entire organization viewed Eden's appointment of Dick White in place of Sinclair as a mortal insult.

The most serious lack of liaison was undoubtedly that between MI5 and GCHQ. During the war MI5 worked extremely closely with its own signals intelligence organization, the Radio Security Service (RSS) on the Double Cross System. The RSS intercepted and broke the ciphers used by the German Intelligence Service, the Abwehr, enabling MI5 to arrest incoming German spies as they landed in Britain. RSS was run by MI6 for MI5. B Branch then supervised the screening of these agents. Those who were prepared to cooperate with the British were turned and began feeding false radio reports back to the Germans. Those who refused were executed. But the success of any disinformation operation depends on being able to monitor how far your enemy accepts the disinformation you are feeding him Through the RSS wireless interceptions and the break into German Armed Forces ciphers, ENIGMA, the Twenty Committee running the Double Cross operation knew precisely how much influence their deception ploys were having on German military policy.

In the postwar period MI5, stripped of their wartime intellectual elite, showed scant interest in maintaining the signals intelligence connection. They had, in any case, lost formal control of RSS early on in the war to MI6. But the most powerful impediment was GCHQ, who jealously guarded their monopoly over all forms of signals and communications intelligence. By the time I joined MI5 full-time in 1955, liaison at the working level with GCHQ had dwindled to a meeting once every six months between a single MI5 officer and a higher clerical officer from GCHQ. In February 1956 I attended one of these meetings for the first time. The experience was shattering. Neither individual seemed to appreciate that in the Cold War, as in World War II, GCHQ had a vital role to play in assisting MI5 in its main task of counterespionage. Nor did they seem to realize that, as MI5 technology advanced, there might be ways in which MI5 could help GCHQ. I began with a list of suggestions, one of which was checking whether the Russians were listening to Watcher radios. But Bill Collins, the GCHQ representative, seemed utterly thrown by this positive approach to committee work.

"I shall have to take a bit of guidance on that one," he would say, or "I really don't think we've got the time to spare for that sort of thing."

I complained to Cumming, but he too seemed uninterested. "It's their turf. Best leave it to them."

The MI5 officer in charge of liaison with GCHQ was Freddie Beith, an energetic agent runner working for D Branch. His father was Welsh and his mother Spanish, which gave him a fervent love of rugby and a volatile Latin temperament. He was a fluent German speaker and during the war he had been involved in the Double Cross System, running double agents in Portugal and Spain. Berth's liaison with GCHQ stemmed from Operation HALT, which he controlled. HALT began in the early 1950s when GCHQ asked MI5 if they could help obtain intelligence about diplomatic ciphers being used in London. Beith ran HALT by asking any agent D Branch recruited inside an embassy to try to obtain access to the cipher room. GCHQ hoped that one of Beith's agents might be able to steal some of the waste cipher tape, which they could then use to attack the cipher.

Beith threw himself enthusiastically into the task, but it was virtually impossible. Cipher rooms in most embassies, especially Soviet Bloc ones, were by far the most restricted areas in the compounds, and the chances of infiltrating an agent into them was remote.

Nevertheless, Beith did achieve one outstanding success in Operation HALT, when he recruited an agent who worked inside the Czech Embassy who had access to the keys to the main cipher safe. Working to Leslie Jagger's commands, the agent took a plasticine imprint of the key. It was a high-grade Chubb, but by using high-quality plasticine and a micrometer to measure the indentations with exceptional accuracy, Jagger was able to make a copy which fitted the safe. The agent successfully opened the safe and copied the incoming code pads before they were used to encipher the Czech diplomatic cipher. For six months GCHQ read the traffic. Then suddenly the codes were changed, and the agent, inexplicably, was sacked.

Since then Beith had had no success. When I joined, I could see that there were ways MI5 could help the HALT program using technical devices rather than agents. But Beith was, by his own admission, not a technical man, and found it difficult to follow my arguments. But since he was the only officer allowed to liaise with GCHQ, I had to strike out on my own if my ideas were to get a decent hearing. In the end I took Freddie out for a drink one night and asked him if he would be offended if I made an appointment to go down to GCHQ headquarters at Cheltenham and see things for myself.

"Not at all, old man," said Freddie cheerfully, "you go right ahead. All this radio lark is a bit over my head. The human vices are more my territory."

I made an appointment to see an old friend of mine from the Navy, Freddie Butler, who worked on GCHQ senior management. I explained to Butler that I felt the whole system of MI5/GCHQ liaison needed a

complete rethink. Butler arranged for me to bypass Bill Collins, and meet the top GCHQ cryptanalysts, Hugh Alexander and Hugh Denham.

Alexander ran GCHQ's H Division, which handled cryptanalysts, ably assisted by the quiet, studious Denham, who eventually succeeded him in the 1960s. Alexander joined Bletchley Park, GCHQ's prewar forerunner, at the outbreak of the war and, along with Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman, was primarily responsible for breaking the Enigma codes.

After the war Turing went to Manchester University to design computers and tragically died by his own hand after being hounded over his homosexuality. Welchman went to work on advanced computers in the USA. Alexander, alone of the three, stayed to pursue a peacetime career in GCHQ. He was a brilliant international chess player, as well as codebreaker. Despite the intellectual demands of both work and hobby, Alexander remained on the outside a calm, reassuring tweed-clad figure. Yet I am sure that the mental contortions in the end told on him. He spent all his life quietly in the country, he never smoked or drank, and then suddenly died of cancer at a comparatively early age.

I told Alexander and Denham that I had been indoctrinated into Operation HALT, and felt MI5 could contribute much more to GCHQ's work. I explained that tremendous advances had been made in MI5 technology since the Brundrett Committee was formed in 1949, especially in the field of new microphones. It might be possible, I suggested, to obtain HALT intelligence through technical means, rather than using agents, a method which at the present moment seemed destined for continual failure.

"I'm not sure I know myself precisely how we can help until I have had a chance to experiment," I continued, "but I am sure that with the new high-sensitivity microphones we have, it must be possible to get something out of a cipher machine. They have to be reset every morning by the cipher clerk. Suppose we could pick up the sound of the new settings being made. Wouldn't that help?"

The two cryptanalysts were supportive as I made my somewhat nervous presentation. They were clearly curious to see for themselves the first example of an unknown species in the Intelligence menagerie - an MI5 scientist.

"Any help is gratefully received in this department," said Alexander. "After all, compared to your organization, we are the new boys. We haven't even finished building yet."

He gestured to the window. In the distance a team of building workers was installing another line of Nissen huts behind the main GCHQ complex.

"Our problem is that our theories are running beyond our computer capacity," he went on.

"So many ciphers today we could crack - we know how to crack them. We just don't have sufficiently powerful computers to do the job. We'll get them soon, of course, but in the meantime, any help may give us a shortcut."

I asked Alexander what the prime target was at the moment. He looked a little uneasy at my direct question.

"Well, of course, we have many targets, they're constantly updated. JIC demands, that sort of thing."

"Yes," I persisted, "but if you had to single one out as the most important today, which would you choose?"

Alexander shifted in his seat and exchanged glances with Denham.

"I should say it was the Gyppies," said Alexander finally. "The Foreign Office have been pushing us for months to get something on the cipher. We've got little bits, but it's only now and again, and never current stuff."

It was spring 1956. Tension between Britain and Egypt was fast mounting, as Nasser began the moves which led to the Suez Crisis later that year.