Spycatcher (52 page)

For four months Golitsin roamed across the most secret files in MI5, and every month Michael McCaul went to Glyn Mills Bank and drew out 10,000 pounds in cash, placed it in a small suitcase, and brought it down for Golitsin.

But for all the money, there was little that Golitsin had to give. F.J. had called his bluff. There were some useful things, of course. He studied the VENONA, and was able to fill in a few groups using his knowledge of KGB procedure. He spent a long time studying the files of the Joint Services Language School in Cambridge, looking through the curriculum vitaes of candidates to see if any caught his attention. We even conducted voice tests with some of those he was particularly interested in, to see if Golitsin could detect, from the idioms they used, whether or not they were picking up Russian words from KGB controllers. It was artful, but it never paid off, and in the end we decided that the only safe thing to do was to close the school down.

But in the crucial area - whether or not he could shed any light on the penetration problem - he was a complete loss. He filled in some more details in the Skripkin allegation and he did have one totally bizarre theory. He spent weeks studying the VENONA traffic to see if he could help us identify the unknown cryptonyms. There were two in particular which interested him - David and Rosa - who from the message already broken were obviously working together, probably as man and wife, or perhaps brother and sister. Golitsin asked for the files of all MI5 officers who had served during the time the VENONA traffic was taken.

One day he announced he had an answer.

"Your spies are here. My methodology has uncovered them," he intoned darkly, pointing his finger like the witch-finder at two files on the table in front of him. I knew the files well. They belonged to Victor and Tess Rothschild.

"Don't be totally absurd, Anatole," I said. "Victor is one of the best friends this Service has ever had... how on earth did you jump at that conclusion?"

"They are Jewish. David and Rosa are Jewish names..."

It sounded like KGB anti-Semitism to me, and I could not help thinking that if this had been the CIA and I had been Angleton, Victor and Tess would almost certainly have been listed as spies on Golitsin's groundless interpretation.

The principal problem with Golitsin's methodology was that he interpreted the files as if he were still in the KGB. He looked for operations which went wrong, or mistakes which were attributable to a single officer.

"Where is that man now?" he would ask. "Same job," I would reply.

Golitsin would say nothing for a few days, and then announce that he was sure the man was a traitor.

"But why, Anatole?"

"Because in KGB, failure is a serious offense. You would not be trusted, and that makes a man unhappy, and maybe then he thinks of turning."

He never understood the culture of the West, and because he himself was driven to defect because his career was damaged after his abortive visit to Stalin, he assumed that anyone in the West would act in the same way.

"But that's not how it is in the West," I used to tell him. "We don't act like that over here - it only happens in the FBI."

Golitsin would look blank. He was a man almost devoid of humor.

"Look, Anatole, we've been studying this for twenty years, and we don't know who the spies are, and your guessing isn't helping us at all."

He looked at me and down at the file, as if to make me guilty for doubting him.

"What do you know, Peter," he would growl, "you were not there in Dzherzhinsky Square, as I was."

But for all his vanity and greed, he was a genuine man, with that sudden sadness that all Russians have. I remember showing him the Volkov file one afternoon. As he read the story of the attempted defector whose file ended up on Kim Philby's desk, he began to weep.

"How could you be so careless, Peter?" he asked in anguish, only too well aware that but for the grace of God Golitsin would have suffered the same fate.

McCaul and I looked sheepish. There was no excuse we could give.

By the end of his stay my sessions with Golitsin had degenerated into tedious diatribes about disinformation, and recycled information which already existed in our Registry. He was a shadow of the man who captivated the best minds in Western counterintelligence with his photographic memory and his unerring eye for detail. Before he left he handed us a massive typescript which he had labored to produce himself, typing one-fingered on an old Olivetti portable. He told me it was the definitive study on disinformation theory. I handed it in to the Registry. The time when I waited on his every word had long gone. I did not even bother to read it.

I saw Golitsin once more in New York the following winter. We had lunch at an Italian restaurant near Central Park. It was a sad, furtive occasion. Golitsin still talked of his plans for an institute for the study of disinformation, and new leads he had discovered. But he knew he was finished. The Czechoslovakian invasion the previous summer had brought a flood of new defectors to the West - men like Frolik and August, whose information was less ambitious but easier to digest. He knew he was yesterday's newspapers, and I think he could tell I was humoring him.

He had recently suffered tragedy. His daughter, upon whom he doted, had fallen prey to the ultimate Western depravity - drug addiction - and had committed suicide. It was a terrible blow, and Golitsin blamed himself.

After lunch we walked across Central Park together in brilliant winter sunshine. He wanted me to visit his farm in upstate New York, but I told him I had to get back to London. There was little left to say.

"Are you thinking of going home?" I asked him, as we came to the parting.

"Oh no," he replied, after an unusual pause, "they would never forgive me."

Golitsin rarely talked about Russia, but it was clearly on his mind. "Are you homesick?"

"Sometimes..."

We made our farewells, and his feet made a crunching sound as he walked away across the snow. Like all defectors, Golitsin was feeling the cold.

- 21 -

With Golitsin unable to advance the penetration issue any further, MI5 were trapped in the middle of a maze. The search for the high-level spy, for which FLUENCY considered Sir Roger Hollis the best suspect, had been suspended since 1966, so that all attention could focus on the hunt for the middling-grade agent. With Hanley's clearance there was no obvious road forward. Did we abandon the search for the middling-grade agent, and assume Goleniewski's story was planted, or did we continue to search for other candidates, of whom there were a number who were almost as good a fit as Hanley had been? If we assumed that Goleniewski's middling-grade agent story was planted, did we assume it was a lure to draw our attention away from another middling-grade agent, or from the high-level spy? Did both exist, or neither? To do nothing was clearly impossible, and thus, like actors in a Greek tragedy, we had no real choice but to continue widening our investigations, spreading the poison ever further through the corridors.

The next best suspect was Gregory Stevens (a pseudonym), an extravert and gifted officer with a puckish sense of humor. Stevens was about a

60 percent fit for the Goleniewski allegation. He had an even stronger Polish background than Hanley. He was half Polish by birth, and had risen to Hanley's old job as head of the Polish Section of MI5, where his knowledge of the language, culture, and history of his mother's country made him highly successful. Ironically, or perhaps sinisterly, Stevens was the officer who interviewed Goleniewski in 1963, and first heard the story of the middling-grade agent. Was this, like Hollis' visit to see Gouzenko, just another coincidence?

Like Hanley, too, Stevens had been in military uniform and there was also a connection with the KGB officer who Goleniewski alleged had made the recruitment. Both men attended the Yalta Conference in 1945, Stevens as a military translator assigned to assist Stalin with his translations into English, until Stalin complained that he spoke Russian with a Polish accent.

Like Hanley, Stevens had also undergone psychiatric treatment, and once again I paid a discreet visit to Harley Street. But whereas Hanley had informed his doctor of the nature of his profession, Stevens had never hinted at his involvement in national security.

"I wouldn't have thought he was stable enough to be in that line of work," said the doctor.

"Do you find him trustworthy?" I asked casually.

"He's very clever." replied the doctor, "but I think his cleverness can sometimes lead him astray."

"How do you mean?"

"There's a touch of the Walter Mitty about him. I don't think you could always rely on what he said."

The more I looked at the case, the more I came to doubt whether Stevens should ever have been recruited in the first place. It seemed a hard thing to say. He was a good officer, and an asset to the Service, but in the end, if vetting meant anything, this man ought never to have been allowed in. The psychiatric problems were only a small part of it. The real worry was his Polish background. According to his record of service, he visited Poland regularly with office permission for private holidays to see his relations. His uncle, to whom he was particularly close, was an active member of the Polish Communist Party, and they occasionally met in London. For an organization that was routinely rejecting any applicant with even the faintest trace of the British Communist Party in his family background, the Stevens case presented an obvious problem. And the fact that he had been linked to the middling-grade agent investigation made the situation even more untenable, since in order to clear himself, he had to emerge clean from an exhaustive vet. With half his family living behind the Iron Curtain, an adequate vet was impossible.

The investigation was conducted as far as it could possibly go, and then Stevens was summoned for an interrogation, which I conducted with Jim Patrick, a one-eyed Gurkha officer who worked as an interrogator for D3.

Stevens had obviously been half expecting the call ever since he had first heard Goleniewski talk about a middling-grade agent with Polish connections. He was alternately truculent and defensive. He stared me nervously in the eye, as if to convince me he was telling the truth. He agreed that he was a good fit for the allegation, and accepted that someone of his background was an odd recruitment for an organization like MI5.

"I always wondered when everyone would wake up to the Polish side of me," he said. "I suppose I'll fail the vet now, won't I?"

"I don't know," I replied, "but if it's any consolation, it won't be me that'll decide. It'll be F.J."

He obviously felt that whichever way the interrogation went, he could not possibly win. Unlike Hanley, he could not really hope to walk through the fire unscathed.

We had been going three days when he walked coolly into the room one morning and sat down at the table opposite me.

"It's time for me to tell you something," he said. "I've decided to confess..."

I flashed a glance over to Jim, who immediately began taking notes. It was only an additional precaution, since all the sessions were taped.

"Yes," he went on, "I've been wanting to tell someone about it for years. You're right... I'm the spy you're looking for."

He seemed to crumple up in front of us, his shoulders heaving, as if he were weeping. But it only lasted a moment or two, before he held his head up, and looked straight at me.

"Do you really mean this, Greg?" I asked. "You have a witness, don't you?"

"You realize you'll have to give a statement to the Branch?"

He nodded. I leaned over to Jim and told him to inform the Director-General's security man, Tom Roberts, and arrange for Special Branch to come immediately. Stevens and I sat opposite each other, the files and questions in front of me suddenly redundant.

"It's all true, Peter," he said again, in a clear voice.

I told him that he had best not say anything until Tom Roberts arrived. Jim Patrick came back in. For a few seconds more we sat in silence, and then I noticed Stevens' shoulders going again. For a moment I thought he was weeping, perhaps even about to have a breakdown. It often happens.

"Damn," I thought to myself, "I should have had the office doctor stand by."

Then suddenly he began to roar with laughter. "You really believed me, didn't you?" he cried.

For a second I felt the hot flush of embarrassment. "I'm not sure I understand...?"

"You wanted a spy, didn't you," he said, reddening suddenly, now that the joke was over. "I thought I'd give you one. I was going to get chopped anyway. I know that!"

"I don't think we should discuss the matter here," I replied. "Tom Roberts will be here in a minute, you can explain it all to F.J."

For all I knew, it was a real confession, which he was trying to retract, although I felt I knew Stevens well enough to believe that he was only horsing about. But it was a stupid thing to do. Any chance he had of surviving the investigation had almost certainly gone.

F.J. was appalled when he heard what had happened. He was a lawyer, and had a venerable respect for the niceties of MI5's processes.

"What do you think?" he asked me when I got back to his office. "Was the confession bogus, or do you think he retracted it?"

"You know my views," I replied. "I am sure he is in the clear because I think the middling-grade agent was a phony allegation from the start. I just think he had a brainstorm..."

F.J. grunted. Tales of false defectors were never very welcome to a man of his solidity.

'You don't suppose he made the whole thing up - Goleniewski's story, I mean?" he asked.

I told him we had checked the tapes before the interrogation.

"I even got Stevens to verify the translation. Oh, Goleniewski said it all right."

"Don't see how we can keep him," he muttered, chewing his pipe. "Man's obviously unstable. Polish thing grotesque as well. Sort of thing that gets into newspapers."

He waved me out.

Within an hour Gregory Stevens' career was terminated. He spent ten minutes with F.J., and Tom Roberts escorted him to the pavement outside Leconfield House. He didn't even have a chance to clear his desk.