Spycatcher (31 page)

There were high hopes that HASP would transform VENONA by providing more intelligence about unknown cryptonyms and, just as important, by providing more groups for the codebook, which would, in turn, lead to further breaks in VENONA material already held. Moreover, since powerful new computers were becoming available, it made sense to reopen the whole program (I was never convinced that the effort should have been dropped in the 1950s), and the pace gradually increased, with vigorous encouragement by Arthur, through the early 1960s.

In fact, there were no great immediate discoveries in the HASP material which related to Britain. Most of the material consisted of routine reports from GRU officers of bomb damage in various parts of Britain, and estimates of British military capability. There were dozens of cryptonyms, some of whom were interesting, but long since dead. J.B.S. Haldane, for instance, who was working in the Admiralty's submarine experimental station at Haslar, researching into deep diving techniques, was supplying details of the programs to the CPGB, who were passing it on to the GRU in London. Another spy identified in the traffic was the Honorable Owen Montagu, the son of Lord Swaythling (not to be confused with Euan Montagu, who organized the celebrated "Man Who Never Was" deception operation during the war). He was a freelance journalist, and from the traffic it was clear that he was used by the Russians to collect political intelligence in the Labor Party, and to a lesser degree the CPGB.

The extraordinary thing about the GRU traffic was the comparison with the KGB traffic of four years later. The GRU officers in 1940 and 1941 were clearly of low caliber, demoralized and running around like headless chickens in the wake of Stalin's purges of the 1930s. By 1945 they had given way to a new breed of professional Russian intelligence officers like Krotov. The entire agent-running procedure was clearly highly skilled, and pragmatic. Great care was being taken to protect agents for their long-term use. Where there seemed poor discipline in the GRU procedures, by 1945 the traffic showed that control was exerted from Moscow Center, and comparison between KGB and Ambassadorial channels demonstrated quite clearly the importance. the KGB had inside the Russian State. This, in a sense, was the most enduring legacy of the VENONA break - the glimpse it gave us of the vast KGB machine, with networks all across the West, ready for the Cold War as the West prepared for peace.

When I finished studying the VENONA material in the special secure office where it was stored on the fifth floor, I moved into an office with Evelyn McBarnet, Arthur's research officer, who was already busy on the case. The Mitchell investigation came at an awkward time for D Branch. Hollis had moved Furnival Jones from his post to become head of C Branch, in preparation for his appointment as Deputy Director-General on Mitchell's retirement. F.J.'s replacement was Malcolm Cumming. It was not a popular appointment among the bright young men of D Branch, who were laboring to build on the achievements of the Lonsdale case.

Arthur himself had hopes that he might have been offered the job. He certainly deserved it, in terms of achievement, but he had never been popular among the Directors for the stand he took in the early 1950s. He was seen as truculent, temperamental, too unwilling to tolerate fools gladly, which unfortunately was a prerequisite for advancement in the Service. When the Mitchell investigation was sanctioned, Hollis decided not to indoctrinate Cumming, who theoretically was a potential suspect. Oversight of the case was given to F.J., who supervised things from C Branch headquarters in Cork Street.

Evelyn McBarnet was a strange woman, with a large birthmark running down one side of her face. Like a hothouse plant, she lived all her life in the enclosed space of the office, and had no perceptible existence outside.

"Are you a Freemason?" she asked me almost as soon as I joined her in her office.

"No," I replied, "and I don't approve of it."

"I didn't think you looked like one, but you'd better join if you want to be a success in this place," she told me darkly.

Evelyn had always believed there was a penetration of MI5. She had spent years working in counterespionage as a research officer, far longer than Arthur or I. She was a walking compendium of office life and a shrewd, if somewhat morbid, judge of character.

"I always knew there would have to be an investigation," she told me, but she had a disturbing conviction that the course of the investigation was preordained. The worst, she was sure, was yet to come.

"Arthur will never last, if he pushes this issue," she told me, "and neither will you, if you associate yourself with him."

"What on earth do you mean, Evelyn?" I asked, in genuine surprise.

She opened her safe and pulled out a small exercise book with a black cover.

"Read this," she told me.

I opened the book. It was neatly written in a woman's hand. I flicked through the pages quickly. It listed details of cases from the 1940s and 1950s, some of which I knew about vaguely, and others I did not, which the author had collated from the MI5 Registry. Each one contained an explicit allegation about a penetration of MI5 or MI6.

"Whose is this?" I asked, aghast.

"Anne Last's, a friend of mine. She used to work with me," said Evelyn. "She did it after Burgess and Maclean went, then she left to have a family, you know. She married Charles Elwell. Before she left she gave me the book, and told me that I would understand."

"Does Arthur know...?" "Of course."

"But have you shown it to anyone else?" "And get chopped too...?"

I carried on reading. Maxwell Knight's name figured frequently in the first few pages. During the war he was convinced there was a spy inside MI5, and had minuted to that effect, although no action was taken.

There were literally dozens and dozens of allegations. Many of them were fanciful offhand comments drawn from agent reports; but others were more concrete, like the testimony of Igor Gouzenko, the young Russian cipher clerk who defected to the Canadians in 1945, and whose defection triggered such alarm in the single week of British VENONA KGB traffic. According to Anne Last, Gouzenko claimed in his debriefing that there was a spy code-named Elli inside MI5. He had learned about Elli while serving in Moscow in 1942, from a friend of his, Luibimov, who handled radio messages dealing with Elli. Elli had something Russian in his background, had access to certain files, was serviced using Duboks, or dead letter boxes, and his information was often taken straight to Stalin. Gouzenko's allegation had been filed along with all the rest of his material, but then, inexplicably, left to gather dust.

"People didn't believe him," said Evelyn, "they said he got it wrong. There couldn't be a spy inside MIS..."

On the last page was what appeared to be a kind of "last will and testament." "If MI5 is penetrated," it said, "I think it is most likely to be Roger Hollis or Graham Mitchell."

"How the hell can we investigate these?" I gasped. "We'll have to turn the whole place upside down to do it properly."

"That's what they said in 1951," said Evelyn bitterly.

Anne Last's book was only the first of many secrets Evelyn shared with me over the first weeks we worked together. Gradually she filled in much of the forgotten history of MI5, the kinds of stories you never heard on the A2 tapes: stories of doubts and suspicions, unexplained actions, and curious coincidences. I soon learned that I was by no means the first person to come to suspect the office had been deeply penetrated. The fears were as old as the office furniture.

That evening I joined the commuters thronging down Curzon Street toward Park Lane, my head humming with what I had learned from Evelyn. Here was a consistent unbroken pattern of allegations, each suggesting there was a spy in the office, stretching from 1942 to the present day. For too long they had gone uninvestigated, unchallenged. This time the chase would be long and hard and unrelenting. I paused to look back at Leconfield House.

"This time," I thought, "this time there will be no tip-offs, no defections. This one will not slip away..."

- 14 -

For all my high hopes, the Mitchell investigation was a wretched affair. It began with a row, it ended with a row, and little went right in between. It was clear to me that to stand any chance at all of clinching the case one way or the other before Mitchell retired, we would have to turn on the taps, and use every technical resource at our disposal. Hollis vehemently opposed any request for home telephone taps and the full watching facilities, saying that he was not prepared to indoctrinate any further MI5 officers into the case, and certainly had no intention of approaching the Home Secretary for permission to bug or burgle his own deputy's house.

Arthur reacted badly to the setbacks. His temper by now was on a short fuse, and he erupted at a meeting in Hollis' office when his precise, quiet request for facilities was refused point-blank by the Director-General. Arthur said it was intolerable to be restricted when such a grave issue was at stake, and threatened to approach the Prime Minister himself to alert him to the situation. Hollis always reacted smoothly to any threats, and merely said he noted Arthur's comment, but that his decision stood.

"Under no circumstances will I authorize an extension of this investigation!"

Arthur stalked out of the room, obviously fully intending to carry out his threat.

That evening Furnival Jones and I went to my club, the Oxford and Cambridge, to try to find a way of averting catastrophe. Relations had been swiftly deteriorating between Hollis and Arthur ever since Cumming had been appointed to the Directorship of D Branch, and with the Mitchell case poised so perilously, any hint of the turmoil inside the organization would be disastrous.

Furnival Jones was in a dreadful position. He knew as well as I that he would be Hollis' deputy himself within a few months, yet I could tell that he felt Hollis was indeed being obstructive.

"It'll mean the end of the Service, if Arthur does something stupid," said Furnival Jones gloomily into his glass.

I asked him if he could not approach Dick White privately to see if some pressure could be exerted on Hollis to relent. Furnival Jones looked at me almost in anguish. He could see that he was slowly being ground between competing loyalties - to Hollis and to those who were conducting a very difficult and emotionally fraught inquiry. It was close to one in the morning before we came to any firm decision.

Furnival Jones promised that he would make an appointment to see Dick White, if I undertook to restrain Arthur from any rash course of action. I telephoned Arthur from my club; it was late, but I knew he would be up, brooding over a Scotch bottle. I said I had to see him that night, and took a taxi around to his flat.

Arthur was in a truculent mood.

"I suppose you've come to tell me you've decided to throw your hand in too!" he said acidly.

For the second time that evening I settled down to a long drinking session, trying to talk Arthur around. He looked desperately strained. He had been seriously overworking since before the Lonsdale case, and was putting on weight drastically. His flesh was gray, and he was losing his youthfulness. He railed against the obstructions that were being put in his way. I could see that the specter of 1951 haunted him, when he had allowed himself to be shunted out to Malaya.

"I should have fought then, but I agreed with them at the time. It seemed best to leave it. But not this time," he said.

In the end he saw the sense of F.J.'s approach. An open breach with Hollis would get us nowhere, and there was at least hope that Dick would talk him around to agreeing to some of our requests for more facilities.

The following day I got a call from F.J. He said he had spoken to Dick, and we were all to assemble at his flat in Queen Anne's Gate on the following Sunday afternoon.

"He wants to see a presentation of the case, then he'll decide what to do."

Dick White's flat backed onto MI6 headquarters in Broadway, and I arrived there promptly at the appointed time. Dick answered the door; he was dressed casually, with an open shirt and cravat. He showed us into his study, an elegant book-lined room, decorated in seventeenth-century style. Paintings from the National Gallery collection lined the walls, and an ornamental mirror stood gleaming above the fireplace.

"Shall we have some tea?" he asked, anxious to break the tension which was apparent on everyone's face.

"Now," he said, looking at Arthur, "I think you had better make your case..."

Arthur explained that I had brought my charts tabulating access to the thirty-eight cases, and suggested that it might be better if, in the first instance, I made the presentation. For a moment there was confusion. The charts were too large to spread on the delicate tea table, but Dick saw the problem.

"No, no," he said, "that's quite all right - spread them on the floor."

Within two minutes we were sprawling across the carpet, and the elegant Sunday-afternoon reserve was lost as we began to go through the litany of fears once more. I explained that I had submitted two previous papers, one on Tisler, the other on Lonsdale, but that these had both been rejected. Dick looked at me sharply, but made no comment.

"The whole point is that we can't look at this problem piecemeal," I told him, "and the basis of these charts is to try to take an overall view, to see if there is any evidence of Russian interference in the cases..."

"Sounds like a bad case of induction to me, but go on," said Dick skeptically.

I went through the cases one by one, and explained how it always came down to the same five names.

"Did you at any stage discuss this with Arthur, before you drew this together?" he asked, looking me squarely in the eye.

"How could I? I was over in the Directorate most of the time." Dick turned to Arthur.

"You mean to tell me that you both came to this conclusion?" He obviously found it hard to believe.

Arthur took over and explained the problem with facilities. Dick asked F.J., who so far had remained silent, for his opinion. He paused, and then committed himself irrevocably.